Imagined Nations: Reflections on Media in Canadian Fiction 9780773570887

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i m agi ne d n at i o n s

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Imagined Nations Reflections on Media in Canadian Fiction d av i d w i l l i a m s

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

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© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2003 isbn 0-7735-2516-5 Legal deposit first quarter 2003 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 book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp) for our publishing activities.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Williams, David, 1945Imagined nations: reflections on media in Canadian fiction/by David Williams. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-7735-2516-5 1. Canadian fiction – 20th century – History and criticism. 2. Canadian fiction – Atlantic Provinces – History and criticism. 3. Mass media in literature. I. Title ps8191.m38w54 2003 pr9192.6.m38w54 2003

c813′.5409′355

c2002-904159-7

This book was typeset by Dynagram Inc. in 10/12 Palatino.

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for Darlene

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Contents

Acknowledgments / ix Preface / xi part one

the nation in theory

1

Fictions of the Nation / 5

2

Novel and Nation / 28

3

The Mode of Communication / 42 part two

nations of the book

4

Orality and Print: From Clan to Nation in No Great Mischief / 77

5

Doubling and Irony: Print Nationalists vs. Radio Confederates in The Colony of Unrequited Dreams / 103

6

Writing and Revolution: The Prisoner of Print in Prochain épisode / 132 part three

motion-picture country

7

The Shock of Film and the Transformation of Place: A Case in Point in The Butterfly Plague / 163

8

Film-nations vs. Print-nations: The Politics of Metonymy in The Englishman’s Boy / 183

9

Film and Print Versions of The English Patient: Wuthering Heights in the Global Village / 202

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Contents Preface

part four

cybernation

10 Boundary Breakdowns: Portents of the Digital Revolution in The English Patient / 223 11

Border Wars: Doing Battle with the Transnationals in Neuromancer / 245 Works Cited / 261 Index / 269

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Acknowledgments

Drafts of this work have received welcome encouragement and help from audiences and colleagues in a number of nations. Jameela Begum invited me to address an international conference of the Indian Association for Canadian Studies, held at the University of Kerala in January 1996, on the keynote theme: “Towards the Twenty-First Century: Canada and India.” A small part of that address, “The Language of Apocalypse,” set out to sketch cyborg politics in The English Patient. Later, Jørn Carlsen invited me to address the “Bridging” Conference, which was held at the University of Copenhagen in May 1997 under the auspices of the Nordic Association for Canadian Studies. And so a full-fledged essay on the topic eventually appeared as “The Politics of Cyborg Communications: Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, and The English Patient” in Canadian Literature 156, Spring 1998. It appears here in somewhat modified form as Chapter 10, “Boundary Breakdowns.” By happenstance, Irene Guilford, the editor of a collection of essays on Alistair MacLeod’s work (Guernica 2001), heard about my essay on No Great Mischief from Doug Gibson at McClelland and Stewart. Both Doug and Irene offered timely reassurance that the project I was undertaking was justified. Subsequently, in June 2000 Qin Mingli and the Harbin Institute of Technology, People’s Republic of China, offered me a forum within which to discuss theories of media and nationalism advanced both in the chapter on MacLeod and in a composite chapter that they heard as “Wuthering Heights in the Global Village: Film and Print Versions of The English Patient.” At the same time, the late Yuichi Midzunoe of Chiba University, Japan, asked me to speak about “Canada as a Post-National Nation.” Finally, Reinhold Kramer at Brandon University and Wolfram Keller at Philipps-Universität Marburg, supplied me with helpful bibliography

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and incisive criticism. As well, my departmental colleague George Toles gave me the great gift of Stanley Cavell’s The World Viewed, while Donna Norell, my college colleague, verified my French translations. Most of all, I thank Gerald Friesen, my friend and colleague at St. Paul’s College, whose interest in media theory and Canadian culture has, over the years, provoked a stimulating conversation.

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Preface

Several Canadian novels of the last decade appear to express unease about the nation as a continuing entity or even as a viable concept. Viability is of most concern in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (1992), where the protagonist, who is not English, declares, “Erase the family name! Erase nations!” (139). Likewise, the patient’s book, the Histories of Herodotus, spills out of its bindings to display a multitude of other texts. On a figurative level, at least, the attack on the national idea may be linked to a change in the mode of communication. Quite an opposite concern informs Guy Vanderhaeghe’s The Englishman’s Boy (1996), another story about a protagonist who is not English; however, this time, personal and national identity are threatened by motion pictures. Finally, at decade’s end, two novels of lament for lost “nations” serve to memorialize the nation – one of them in Newfoundland, “Britain’s oldest colony,” the other on Cape Breton Island, a remnant of a lost Highland “nation” lately assimilated into English Canada. The narrator of Wayne Johnston’s The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (1998) is a Newfoundland print-journalist who recounts her nation’s betrayal by a man using radio to lead Britain’s oldest colony into Confederation with Canada. Similarly, a man who writes an oral history in Alistair MacLeod’s No Great Mischief (1999) chronicles the death of oral culture on Cape Breton even as he writes the clan onto the map of Canada. In each case, the nation has come under stress or attack because of some fundamental change in the mode of communication. During a decade marked by Canada’s Free Trade Agreement with the United States and expansion to the North American Free Trade Agreement, we could expect the national idea to be contested in novels as well as in the culture at large. And yet the more revealing part of this literature is a symptomatic concern with media

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and their effect on imagined forms of political community. In these works, how are perceptions of the nation altered by print or by film? Where are the borders of the nation in works concerned with the Internet? What have we to learn from other media shifts, like the one from oral to print culture in MacLeod’s novel? Nations, in the resonant phrase of Benedict Anderson (1983), are today most often seen as “imagined communities” born in an age of mass media and popular participation. For Anderson, print takes the place of dynastic rulers and sacred languages in mediating a nation’s sense of itself to itself. Nationalism is thus resituated as a fairly late product of a new communications technology (print), a new mode of production (capitalism), and a new language environment. A number of theorists, including E.J. Hobsbawm and Ernest Gellner, adopt similar premises to discredit the old romantic, nineteenth-century concept of a natural, or “essential,” nation based on language and ethnicity. Most writers now take the nation to be a mediated construct, in some sense a cultural product of the imagination. This view of the nation as an “imagined community” has nonetheless inspired sharp criticism. Starting from non-mimetic theories of language and the fictive character of all representation, Homi Bhabha and his postcolonial followers deconstruct the idea of the nation as a closed book, blind to its own ideological over-determination and to an endless supplementarity in language that invariably empties the image of meaningful content. From this perspective, “imagined nations” are more likely to be ideological fictions that helplessly contradict their own claims to “identity” and to the “truth” of representation. My own view of imagined nations is more observant of language’s power to mediate the nation, since both the idea and its practice have displayed remarkable staying power over the centuries – a power to gather people into a profound sense of communion. The governing idea of Anderson’s imagined communities – that print alone has power to effect such mediation or that no media before print anticipated such forms of community – will not, however, stand up to systematic investigation. Nor is it possible to accept a premise that resurgent nationalism, in the wake of the Soviet empire’s ruin, has put an end to other forms of emergent community. Indeed, my revision of Anderson’s title is meant to suggest a further evolution in the form of the “nation” – one that, inasmuch as a continuing decline in the dominance of print is challenging our current forms of imagined community, parallels recent changes in the mode of communication. To anyone who knows the final works of Harold Adams Innis (e.g., The Bias of Communication, 1951), it will be axiomatic that the rule of print has favoured the idea of empire as much as it has the idea of nation (cf. Innis’s Empire and Communications, 1950). Such a connec-

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tion between print and empire is quite often assumed by other postcolonialists (e.g., Bill Aschcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin in The Empire Writes Back, 1989), for whom literature plays a key role in establishing and maintaining imperial hegemony. This longer history of the writing of empire begins with Virgil’s Aeneid, that remarkable blueprint made on rolls of papyrus. (If the Greeks imagined themselves in oral epic before the Romans, their form of community envisaged neither empire nor nation.) The imagined nations of this book will not, then, be limited merely to print. By surveying other media and forms of community, I want to historicize the variable relations of each. I wish to know why, for example, the Romans would, for 500 years, prefer the papyrus roll to parchment in imagining their empire. Why would ancient Israel, with a very different vision of community, ignore Egyptian papyri in favour of the leather roll? How did the latter suit a covenant theology? Why did the Christian community prefer codices of papyrus and parchment over the roll? What did that choice entail for Christian Europe in the Middle Ages? Such questions initiate a very different critique of Anderson. The point, however, is not to claim essential properties for any medium, or to say that specific forms determine particular forms of community, whether these be a city-state, universal empire, fiefdom, or centralized monarchy; rather, the question is, how might the papyrus roll offer a line of least resistance to imperial imagining? And what properties of the parchment roll favour a covenantal form of community in ancient Israel? What mental landscapes are available to early Christians in the codex form or to medieval Europeans in the bifoliated manuscripts of the Middle Ages? Did the parchment codex favour dualist thinking in Augustine’s City of God and multiple allegiances during the High Middle Ages? Did the codex manuscript favour a “protonational” idea in Geoffrey’s twelfth-century History of the Kings of Britain? What about recent media developments? Do digital communications create “medieval” landscapes of overlapping territories and multiple authorities? Does the Internet still support the interests of the nation in its present form? Is this form unique? Has the nation no real precedent before the age of print? These and other questions inform my first chapter, “Fictions of the Nation.” Why, in recent theory, is the nation’s existence limited to a period since the Industrial Revolution? What about the biblical idea of the “nation” and that book’s revolutionary translation into English? Would neither the Geneva Bible (1560) – brought home by Marian exiles after the accession of Elizabeth – nor the Authorized Version (1611) convey a sense of “national” destiny similar to that found in the Hebrew scriptures? What about the national idea in the prose of

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John Milton, from Areopagitica (1644) to The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), where “a noble and puissant Nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep” (Flannagan 1020) is a veritable Samson poised to deliver Israel? A month before the Restoration of Charles II, Milton risked his life to remind the English nation of its identity with Israel, as “they seem now to be chusing them a captain back for Egypt” (Flannagan 1148). Such a “nation” is virtually indistinguishable from that “stiffnecked people” Yahweh had condemned, telling Moses to stand aside so “that I may consume them, and I will make of thee a great nation” (Exod. 32.9–10). If neither the biblical prophet nor the prophet of the English revolution can forget this promise, how can we? At the same time, one has to recognize how “changes in the communications environment … are also cumulative” (Friesen 6). A residue of the old always lingers in the new environment, as in those several communications environments of novels from the 1990s. Could we limit our discussion of imagined communities to the effects of print, we would still find that, over the centuries, nations have not formed at the same rate or in the same form. The French and English, who took up printing somewhat later than did the Germans and Italians, produced quite different forms of government, not to mention distinct literary cultures. After “imagining” an English republic in two Defenses of the English People, Milton would still see his “nation” return to monarchy in 1660. Conversely, the French did not abolish monarchy until 1791, even then continuing to oscillate between republic and empire, republic and monarchy, for the better part of a century. As for the German principalities where printing began, or the Italian states where printing in Latin and Greek ushered in a Renaissance, the national idea failed to be realized until after a “younger” nation like Canada was formed in 1867. As “young” as Canada might be, one element of its culture is ancient indeed. “Why are poets,” asks John Ralston Saul, “Why are poets – from Anne Hébert and Leonard Cohen through Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje – still at the core of our imagination? I can only think it is because ours is an essentially oral culture” (221). The persistence of oral culture into very recent times is what MacLeod’s novel chooses to celebrate, offering hope that residual cultures can survive in the very shadow of print. And yet No Great Mischief also suggests that, if Gaelic communities are to exist henceforth in Canada, then they are likely to do so only in print. For MacLeod’s novel is ultimately concerned with situating a Highland clan within the nation of the book, and so with embalming a species of imagined community that literacy has served both to efface and to preserve.

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Something similar is true of The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, a novel that, on one level, may seek to restore the lost nation of Newfoundland to an ideal form, mapping in an instant of time a collective unity that can never be undone. On another level, however, the ironies of Johnston’s prose undercut the fixities of print, putting into play both sides of a double signified to expose the duplicity of Canadian Confederation and the dual loyalties it exacts. By contrast, that classic novel of Quebec’s “Quiet Revolution,” Prochain épisode (1965), makes of print a dungeon that all its local manifestations – les romans du terroir, the Church missal, the British North America Act – may only escape through explosive irony. In fact, Aquin’s narrator and his “revolution” are both undercut when the former proves to be as content as Papineau after the failed rebellion of 1837. The imagined community of Aquin’s prisoner is no more than another “retreat from history,” akin to the roman du terroir, which, after 1837, turned Quebec into a refuge from the modern world. The walls of this refuge are only breached, in other words, by an irony that sets print against itself. If the anti-novel throws itself into the breach, then television has already preceded it into the cloister of a Church-dominated society. So, whether or not the anti-novel functions as a Trojan horse, the empire of print appears to have been breached by an unexpected change in the mode of communication. After “Nations of the Book,” the argument turns to film and digital technologies and their effects on forms of community, first in “MotionPicture Country” and then in “CyberNation.” All three sections are necessarily prefaced by a discussion of the various epistemologies of print, film, and cyber-communications, and the social landscapes they evoke. Walter J. Ong remains a useful guide to the revolution that appears in the historic shift from oral to written culture, while Stanley Cavell is the best commentator that I have read on the epistemology of film. Finally, I have followed a trail blazed by another disciple of Harold Innis, Ronald J. Deibert, whose Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia (1997) offers a proleptic guide to digital epistemology. At this point, I leave off summary to focus attention on the central questions posed by “The Nation in Theory”: How has the mode of communication affected the form of community since antiquity? How does the nation differ from prior forms of community? In the rise of the nation, what part is played by the novel? How are recent changes in the mode of communication affecting the mental landscapes of “nations of the book”? Whatever answers may emerge in theory will be used to frame new questions about the several ‘nations’ imagined by novelists and filmmakers.

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i m agi ne d n at i o n s

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pa r t o n e The Nation in Theory

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1 Fictions of the Nation

Since antiquity, the mode of communication and the form of community have been linked in relations of mutual dependence. The papyrus roll of Virgil’s Aeneid offers a more telling figure of Roman empire, for example, than the divine word (fatum) ever had it in its power to reveal. “Unfolding secret fated things to come,” Jupiter unrolls a figurative scroll to show the future of Aeneas to his mother, Venus, as well as to a people fated to rule in his name: “For these I set no limits, world or time,” says the father of the Roman gods, “But make the gift of empire without end” (Fitzgerald 12–3). In a sense, this concept of “imperium sine fine,” emerging in the same decade as the beginnings of Empire, appears out of the surface in which it is named, a roll of papyrus extending some thirty feet (Finegan 21). Holding the roll in his right hand (at least metaphorically), Jupiter unscrolls its hidden text with his left hand to exhibit a future in which Rome is fated to “bring the whole world under law’s dominion” (Fitzgerald 103). Neither space nor time (“nec metas rerum nec tempora pono” Aen. 1.278) suffers any limit of extent or duration in this originary figure of Roman dominion. “Metas” is not divisible into discrete polities, any more than “tempora” is divisible into intermittent periods; rather, continuous history and world dominion appear to emerge as “natural” laws out of the medium’s own properties. The future also precedes the past in prophetic genealogy, as Anchises, the Trojan “ancestor” of Rome in the underworld, indicates “what famous children in your line will come, / Souls of the future, living in our name” (Fitzgerald 186). Backward-looking genealogy is transformed into forward-looking history, where the future gains illusionary priority. Indeed, the future, contained in the right-hand scroll, appears to come before any past within which it is realized. “Made an instrument of the gods, genealogy” can then function “as argument,

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authorizing the possession of land and power on the basis of possession of time” (Ingledew 671). But it takes substantive form in the papyrus roll, where past and future are joined in an Augustan present of reading. Resting in the reader’s right hand, such “souls of the future, living in our name,” succeed one another with all the force of divine purpose. To say that continuity in time and space are crucial properties of the papyrus roll is not to claim that Roman empire was determined by the medium; it is only to say that it enabled Romans to imagine their imperium. In practical terms, a “light” papyrus medium would be much easier than would clay or stone to copy, to carry, and to administer over vast territories, thus enabling a greater reach of centralized authority. As Harold Adams Innis noted some fifty years ago, “The bureaucratic development of the Roman Empire and success in solving problems of administration over vast areas were dependent on supplies of papyrus” (Bias 47). Still, “the centralizing tendencies of papyrus” could also work against it, given its conditions of growth and manufacture. “It was made from a plant (Cyperus papyrus) which was restricted in its habitat to the Nile delta and was manufactured into writing material near the marshes where it was found” (Innis, Empire 131, 17). The eventual loss of Egypt as a Roman province, including its supplies of papyrus, would permit another medium to dominate communication in the West. Parchment – available for some 500 years but evidently alien to the epistemology of empire – replaced papyrus in the West, where “the Church’s hegemony over the medieval world order was supported by the [new] communications environment” (Deibert 48). The decline and fall of the Roman Empire was not caused by the loss of Egypt since the former actually preceded the latter by more than a century. Still, a change in the medium allowed for a new form of imperium. At Byzantium, the Eastern empire adapted to parchment and survived for another millennium. Here, it was the heritage of Hellenistic Pergamum – with its vast library of parchment rivalled only by a larger number of papyri in the Ptolemies’ library at Alexandria (Finegan 25) – and the heritage of Greek Christianity (with its dependence on the parchment codex), that allowed for other forms of empire to be imagined. Adaptation to the roll, if not to papyrus, took a very different form in the culture of ancient Israel, where scriptures were written on parchment. “The Jews, however, by no means considered it barbarian to write on leather skins, but evidently preferred this material, for in the case of the Dead Sea Scrolls, for example, some were written on papyrus but most were on leather” (Finegan 24). So it was in the form

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of the leather roll that “the God of the universe was nationalized and not the national God universalized” (Innis, Empire 61). Of course, repeated conquest by empires from Assyria, Babylon, Persia, and Rome had already limited Israel’s horizons to continuity in time if not space. A form of “national” consciousness was nonetheless emergent in Hebrew scriptures, though biblical historians define it as a late reconstruction, really a postexilic “myth of lost national identity and history. But this ‘former stage’ of the national unity never occurred in reality in the forms later presumed in order to fit the political programs of the postexilic community” (Liverani 1036). So “the role of the covenant with the national god” does not even appear before the postexilic period, where “Josiah’s attempt to annex the north Palestinian provinces found its ideological justification tracing a national unity back to the Davidic model through the ‘twin’ kingdoms of Israel and Judah similarly related to Yahweh’s role” (1035). In reality, these “projects of restoration of some kind of political unity and independence were largely unsuccessful (the imperial order of the Achaemenian and Hellenistic periods being incompatible with anything more than a local community centered on the Jerusalem temple)” (1036). What is telling in these postexilic writings is in fact the relation between a medium – the leather roll – and a lasting covenant between deity and community. Indeed, “a covenant god gave the prophets an enormous advantage over kings. Jahweh was a God not because of blood relationship but because of a definite agreement” (Innis, Empire 62). A god who wrote his laws in stone still needed to be reminded – in the postexilic account of events, at least – by a man who wrote his words on animal skins that a contract was binding. “Let me alone, that I may destroy them,” says the deity as he tries to dismiss the contract, “and blot out their name from under heaven: and I will make of thee a nation mightier and greater than they.” But Moses, unfolding the genealogy of his people, tells how “I prayed therefore unto the Lord, and said, O Lord God, destroy not thy people and thine inheritance, which thou hast redeemed through thy greatness, which thou hast brought forth out of Egypt with a mighty hand. Remember thy servants, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; look not unto the stubbornness of this people, nor to their wickedness, nor to their sin” (Deut. 9.14, 26–7). The durability of the medium thus helped to underwrite the messianic promise, preserving God’s covenant with his “nation” (gôyim in Hebrew, a term that “stresses political and social rather than kinship bonds” [Liverani 1037]). At the same time, the “nation” existed nowhere but on parchment, a latency not to be realized until the latter-day birth of Zionism.

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By contrast, early Christian communities showed an overwhelming preference for the codex form, whether of parchment or of papyrus. Archaeological evidence from the second century of the Christian era shows that 97 per cent of surviving pagan manuscripts were written on papyrus rolls, whereas “eight Christian biblical papyri known from the same century are all in the form of the codex. Likewise in the entire period extending to shortly after the end of the fourth century, out of 111 biblical manuscripts or fragments from Egypt, 99 are codices” (Finegan 29). A persecuted sect found advantages in the codex – greater ease of reference, greater surface capacity, greater durability (Innis, Bias 116). But the codex also offered advantages to Christian epistemology. It enabled the appropriation of the “old” by the “new” through cutting up prophetic texts and redistributing them among the gospel writings. Linear history could thus be gathered into a vertical space as the reader leafed back and forth in the text, creating a novel sense of “intermittent fulfillments” (Kermode 88), allowing for greater consonance between beginnings and endings. In codex form, the Alpha and Omega of the Gospels became immediately visible. A bifoliated volume also gave the community an unprecedented sense of living in two worlds at once. “Render … unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s,” Jesus tells his gospel audience (Matt. 22.21). This imperative, given the context of the gospels’ composition, is especially significant. The Gospel of Mark, which “is usually dated between ad 65 and 75,” was likely composed “during the Jewish revolt which began in ad 64, and which led to the destruction of the temple in ad 70” (Hooker 8). This alone would explain “why it is at least possible that Mark first circulated in codex” (Kermode 89) since the Christian gospel enacted a simultaneous destruction and fulfillment of the older religion. Ultimately, however, the fulfillment of Messianic prophecy depended on a vision of apocalypse – the end of temple worship and its hopes for this once and future “nation.” So the nation, which never existed in fact, brought about “a new view of the history of the world,” which also “entailed a new system of retrieving and ordering information about it” (Kermode 89). Compared to a papyrus roll, which limited writing to the horizontal fabric of the recto, the double leaf of the codex created a mental space of overlapping territories that were distinct but also inextricable from one another. Augustine’s De civitate Dei, written after the fall of Rome in ad 410, projected such an image of two states, two polities, as appears in the gospels (also written in a climate of apocalyptic endings and cultural renovations). Jerusalem and Babylon – Augustine’s

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metaphors for the City of God and the City of Man – refer to no visible place because they are figures for invisible communities of believers and unbelievers, for competing jurisdictions of heaven and earth. And yet the very form of the bifoliated volume worked to undermine a Virgilian philosophy of history, with its prophetic future shaping the past. While Augustine relied on prophecy as much as did Virgil, his “originary event is not the departure from Troy of the divinely protected hero Aeneas, but the founding of Rome by the fratricide Romulus” (Ingledew 672), an incident linking the foundation of empire to the biblical story of Cain and Abel. Troy not only loses its place “within a normative genealogy” in the City of God but it also loses its status as “a primary moment in a prophetic plot” (Ingledew 672). The double history upon which Augustine has been embarked from the outset is implicitly embodied in the verso history of the “true” city of “Jerusalem,” with its heavenly origins and goals, and a recto history of the “false” city of “Babylon,” with its empty claim to an imperium without end. Augustine’s bifoliated history would authorize a new type of citizen – a type that appears throughout the Middle Ages as the local embodiment ‹of a universal community.’ This sense of inclusive rights and overlapping jurisdictions provided the distinctive characteristics of the architecture of medieval world order” (Deibert 13). What Deibert calls the “fortuitous choice” of the Christian community in forming “an institutional bond with parchment” (54) is hardly accidental, however, when one recalls “the assumptions of monastic textuality, which emerged from a way of life embodying separation from the world and enforcing that idea through a liturgical practice that daily directed the pilgrim or exile monk’s heart to his eschatological and only real home” (Ingledew 669). There were also more practical advantages to parchment, which, “as a medium[,] was suited to the spread of monasticism from Egypt throughout western Europe” (Innis, Bias 49). These advantages may be summarized as follows: “Individual monasteries could remain self-sufficient, manufacturing parchment from the skins of their own livestock or those from the surrounding farms … Goose quills were used for pens, while ink was supplied out of a combination of gall nuts, organic salts of iron, and lampblack. All of these materials were in abundance in the woods and valleys of western Europe in the early Middle Ages” (Deibert 55). Monasteries – virtual islands of literacy in the medieval world – became a crucial support of papal power and its monopoly over written information in the “universal” community of the Church. As self-sufficient communities, however, the monastic orders legitimated a highly decentralized social order,

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where “papal-monastic networks,” interwoven with “fluid hereditary kingdoms, free cities, Germanic settlements, and scattered dukedoms, all co-existed together in a political space determined not so much by territorial boundaries, as by the sacred tributaries of the Christian commonwealth and the personal linkages of the feudal system of rule” (Deibert 13). Among the feudal Normans, the parchment codex invited a form of temporal doubling on the part of secular clergy, who henceforth re-adopted Virgilian history “as an authorizing text for the power of the Angevin monarchs” (Zatta 148). Various versions of the story of Brutus, legendary heir of Aeneas and fictional progenitor of the Normans, helped to legitimate the Conquest and “something like a Norman empire properly so-called” (Ingledew 686). As early as the tenth century, Dudo of Saint-Quentin took over a type of Virgilian historiography “by which a group of Danes established themselves as dukes of Normandy” (Ingledew 682). Landless and “timeless” Norman dukes, buttressed by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Brittaniae (ca. 1135), could also lay claim to a prophetic genealogy “in which the expatriate Trojans, under Brutus’s leadership, consult the ancient oracle of Diana on the island of Leogetia” (Otter 160). In classically Virgilian fashion, a second Sibyl holds out the prospect of a “second Troy, where ‘Hic de prole tua reges nascentur, et ipsis / Totius terre subditus orbis erit’ [‘Here from your descendants a race of kings will be born and to them the entire surface of the earth will be subject’]” (Tolhurst 71). Indeed, “by presenting the Britons (whom the Normans conquered) as equal or superior to the Romans, Geoffrey flatters the Normans and makes the Britons (and, by extension, the Normans) the greatest race in history” (73). This largely fictional History of the Kings of Britain allows, some seventy years after the Conquest, for a recursive history of “Trojan” Normans – those once and future kings – returning to the domain they had “founded” long ago. “With half of British history of its own making, and more than half of the rest of its remaking, the Historia takes possession of time as the basis for ideology, just as the Aeneid had done with its own retroactive agenda” (Ingledew 680). Moreover, in its descriptio Britanniae – a feature common to all the early histories (Gildas in the sixth century, Bede in the eighth, and “Nennius” in the ninth) – the Historia takes a static catalogue of “Britain, the best of islands” (Thorpe 53), and turns it into “a dynamic account of historical development,” where “verbal and thematic parallels” between the characters and the narrator link various appropriations of space and time (Otter 162). Indeed, “the Historia is as thoroughly saturated with the names of places as kings; it is a vast act of spatial

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as well as temporal colonization” (Ingledew 686). On this basis Ingledew judges the Historia to be “the most thorough statement thus far of the basis of ‘nation’ – king, aristocracy, people – in the compounding of territory and time.” On the other hand, Jane Zatta argues that “the vernacular Brut chronicles changed the social function of Geoffrey’s text by appropriating the authorizing strategies of official histories in order to legitimate the status and aspirations of a different social class” (157). This does not alter the fact that “the return of Troy as a stimulus to writing coincided with an age of genealogy that began earlier but that flourished in the twelfth century as kings, aristocrats, and the protonational communities that aristocrats did so much to define increasingly claimed or buttressed power over land by appeal to their relationship to time” (Ingledew 668). The question, however, is whether an aristocratic class of foreigners could ever coincide with the “nation” in more than an anachronistic sense. One basic distinction between “protonational” and “national” inheres in a system whereby “Babylon” could only resist “Jerusalem” part way, as a Norman king tried to do in 1209 by rejecting the duly elected archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal Stephen Langton, and suffering excommunication for his troubles. But King John would be forced to head off a French invasion in 1213 by declaring England a fief of the Holy See, leaving Pope Innocent III to side with him in 1215 when he claimed that his Norman barons had risen in insurrection against royal authority. By annulling Magna Carta, Innocent III upheld his own position as John’s feudal overlord, thus reaffirming the traditional power of Jerusalem over Babylon. This Augustinian principle would often be contested in the twelfth- and thirteenth-century “Brut chronicles [which] differ from histories not in the principle value they offer, that of participation in the national destiny, but in the rejection of submission to an institutional authority as the means of achieving that end” (Zatta 158). This does not mean that kings and nobles were ever fully synonymous with the national destiny. Philological evidence suggests that “the first meaning of the word ‘nation’ indicates origin or descent” (Hobsbawm 15). By this criterion, Anglo-Saxon speakers of Old English, as distinct from landed Normans, must constitute the “nation” inasmuch as, in French (as in other Romance languages), the word still referred to place only “as land of my birth/origin” (Hobsbawm 15). Even after the word entered Middle English, “nations” of students in the medieval university continued to signify those “belonging to a particular district, country, or group of countries” (OED). As for “nations” of medieval merchants, the Middle English word referred indifferently to groups of traders originating

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from other districts, kingdoms, or countries. Only in modern times has the word “nation” (from Latin natio -onis f. nasci nat- be born) been linked with “state” in English, French, and Spanish, as in our hyphenated neologism, “nation-state.” Thus, in more ways than one, aristocratic Norman landholders appear to stand in linguistic opposition to the nation. Of course, the “objective modernity of nations to the historian’s eye” is never as compelling as is “their subjective antiquity in the eyes of nationalists” (Anderson 5). Even when its antiquity has been explained away as a “necessary consequence of novelty” (Anderson xiv), the nation continues to cast a spell that hides the reality of the social parvenu dependent upon “the invention of tradition” (Hobsbawm and Ranger). In other words, fictions of the nation retain an uncommon power with which to conjure, to the point that “nation-ness is the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time” (Anderson 3). There are further reasons, however, to distinguish between these first inventions of the Normans and the later inventions of modern nationalism. In his Nations and Nationalism (1983), the social philosopher Ernest Gellner argues that nationalism is rooted “in the distinctive structural requirements of industrial society,” the elements of which are “universal literacy, mobility and hence individualism, political centralization, [and] the need for a costly educational infrastructure” (35, 110). As the obverse of agrarian society, where “there is great stress on cultural differentiation” (10), industrial society highlights social mobility and, hence, equality. Growth-oriented, and so given to innovation and cognitive change, industrial society tends to instrumentalize human roles. As Gellner sees it, it is not birth, caste, or estate that determines occupation in industrial society, as each tends to do in agrarian societies, but education. Therefore, individuals trained in a system that “is unquestionably the least specialized, the most universally standardized, that has ever existed” (27) are ultimately being educated to change their place, to change their roles, their rank, and their social horizons. Uprooted from local communities and detached from a fixed social order, industrial peoples have to find a reason to be loyal to new traditions. According to Gellner, “Modern man is not loyal to a monarch or a land or a faith, whatever he may say, but to a culture.” And it is this “school-transmitted culture, not a folk-transmitted one, [that] alone confers his usability and dignity and self-respect on industrial man” (36). Henceforth, the extent of his social mobility is the limit of his culture, the borders of which are defined and protected by the state. In other words, “that fusion of culture and polity which is the essence of

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nationalism” (13) determines that men and women who share the same high culture, and who are products of a state-maintained “cultural/linguistic medium” (63), will feel that they belong to the same nation. For such reasons, to Gellner nationalism “is not the awakening of an old, latent, dormant force, though that is how it does indeed present itself. It is in reality the consequence of a new form of social organization, based on deeply internalized, education-dependent high cultures, each protected by its own state” (48). Logically speaking, however, why should nationalism not be taken as a cause, rather than an effect, of industrial social organization? Gellner anticipates this confusion of cause and effect by claiming that “we cannot really establish the aetiology of industrialism” (19). Nevertheless, his so-called “agro-literate society” (11) offers a clear example of pre-industrial nationalism not among medieval Normans but, rather, among sixteenth-century Elizabethans who embarked upon “a concerted generational project” (Helgerson 1) to write the English nation two centuries before the advent of industrial society. Richard Helgerson describes a number of Elizabethans born between 1551 and 1564 who shared “an unusual social, economic, and psychic mobility. They were what students of more recent nationalist movements have called ‘transitional men,’ men uprooted by education and ambition from familiar associations and local structures, men who were free – and compelled by their freedom – to imagine a new identity based on the kingdom or nation” (13). While most of them belonged to various discursive communities, they would satisfy Gellner’s first criterion of nationalism. In other words, extensive social mobility was not the exclusive property of industrial social organization. Gellner’s second criterion of nationalism – the existence of a “national” educational infrastructure – was already present, at least vestigially, in Elizabethan “agro-literate” society. “Sixteenth-century middle-class Englishmen, encouraged in literacy so as to be able to read the Bible,” were educated at “grammar schools which merchants had founded in order to free education from clerical control” (Hill 7). St Paul’s School, the alma mater of the republican John Milton, was founded by 1512 and left in trust to the Wardens of the Mercers’ Company by John Colet, a friend of Erasmus (Clark 36). Among similar schools was the Merchant Tailors’, “founded in 1561 by a radical Protestant, Richard Hilles” (Hill 63), and numbering among its sons Edmund Spenser, the first national poet that England had produced in 200 years. The son of a London clothmaker, Spenser would go up from Merchant Tailors’ to Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, from whence he would proceed to colonial service in Ireland and a place among the gentry and, eventually, to a place in the pantheon of English poets.

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A similar social mobility appears in the career of Richard Hakluyt, the epic historian of English exploration and friend of the Merchant Tailors’ School’s “great headmaster, Richard Mulcaster” (Hill 63). A graduate of London’s Westminster School, Hakluyt went up to Christ Church, Oxford, before taking up a church living and writing his Principal Navigations of the English Nation (1599), in which the merchant class is represented as a primary source of the nation. Another “pigeon of St. Paul’s,” William Camden, went up to Christ Church, Oxford, before returning to Westminster as its headmaster and to a public career as England’s leading antiquary. His maps of fifty-six English counties, which appeared in his Britannia (1586), represent the land itself as a foundation of the nation. (Even Shakespeare, the son of a Stratford glover, attended a local grammar school before going up to London and beginning his history plays.) The point is not so much that each of these men left the social stratum of his ancestors to climb to new social heights – the court clergy of the Normans had also been afforded such opportunities by court- and Churchsupported schools – rather, the point is that, through their humanist education and secular writings, these early moderns rose to new visions of the nation. Such prospects might vary, according to the writer’s attitude towards political centralization – another of Gellner’s conditions of nationalism – within the Elizabethan court. In Spenser’s Faerie Queene, for example, the monarch appears to be little more than an organizing centre. “Its principal ruler, the Faery Queen herself, never appears in the poem and exercises only the loosest and most intermittent control over its action” (Helgerson 48). Compared to Tasso’s Italian epic-romance, Gerusalemme Liberata, which celebrated “the modern absolutist state over its feudal predecessor,” Spenser’s romance “grants a high degree of autonomy to individual knights and their separate pursuits, represents power as relatively isolated and dispersed” (46, 48). The textual culture of aristocrats thus undermines the monarchical, “statist ideology” (54) of epic, including the Virgilian view of history found in Geoffrey’s Historia. Conversely, the representation of the land – and of the people’s connection to it – as a source of national identity in Camden’s Britiannia (or, for that matter, in Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion of 1612) let the English “see in a way never before possible the country – both county and nation – to which they belonged and at the same time showed royal authority – or at least its insignia – to be a merely ornamental adjunct to that country” (114). Above all, universal literacy – that signal criterion of nationalism lacking in Norman Britain – was so widespread by 1563 that it could

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support a national imaginary in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments. This enormously popular volume, numbering some 2,314 pages, “went through four expanding editions” in twenty years and was commanded to be placed in every church in the land, making it the one book (aside from the Bible) to be shared in all England. Written in the language of ordinary people – whose usual “crime” was to confute their social betters by means of scripture – Foxe’s martyrology lent a dignity to commoners that made them a rival source of the nation. In consequence, their “invisible fellowship with thousands of other readers” (Helgerson 266) produced an image of readerly communion in the real time of English history as well as in the ideal time of eternity. Much as chorography was taking “the monarch off the map,” this new form of popular writing was setting “martyrs in the place of kings” (294). Both discourses thus inaugurated a war of words that would, in time, carry over onto other battlefields. Tensions in the writings of the Elizabethans – between “royal prerogative, subjects’ rights, and the cultural system” (Helgerson 2) – might not have erupted in the Civil War of 1642–48 had it not been for absolutist tendencies in the Stuart monarchy, including Laud’s censorship, which further inflamed nationalist feeling. The depth of public resentment was made clear in the breakdown of censorship in the first four years of civil war, when there was a hundredfold increase in publication (Siebert 191). So a reigning monarch was brought to the scaffold in 1649, in the first of Europe’s republican revolutions. And yet, for want of mass support, the English Commonwealth failed in less than a decade. Only weeks before the Restoration, John Milton was to publish “the last words of our expiring libertie” in his desperate attempt to uphold “the Good Old Cause” (Flannagan 1148). Already, an appeal to the nation’s antiquity is quite pronounced in this seminal expression of European nationalism. But the great republican – who had once taken serene comfort in the thought that his very eyesight was given “in liberty’s defense, my noble task, / Of which all Europe talks from side to side” (Flannagan 29) – would be left to hope that the tenure of kings and magistrates might one day give way to nations of free people. While the nation-state lacked mass support in 1660, the Industrial Revolution, which occurred a century later, did not make all the difference. Industrial social organization, as Hobsbawm says, leads to less, not more, cultural homogeneity: “Urbanization and industrialization, resting as they do on massive and multifarious movements, migrations and transfers of people, undermine the other basic nationalist assumption of a territory inhabited essentially by an ethnically, culturally and linguistically homogeneous population” (157).

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The first condition of “industrial” nationalism is not likely, then, to be Gellner’s “homogeneity, literacy, anonymity” (138) but, rather, a more complex cultural heterogeneity. “Nobody,” as Hobsbawm puts it, “ever denied the actual multinationality or multilinguality or multiethnicity of the oldest and most unquestioned nation-states, e.g. Britain, France and Spain” (33). Still, the enduring problem of multiethnic nationalisms has been to find unity in diversity. For the supposed homogeneity of the ethno-linguistic “nation” has had little to do with the real heterogeneity of an urban-industrial “state.” Following Miroslav Hroch, Hobsbawm identifies two phases of nationalism – the cultural and the militant – that precede the final phase, “when – and not before – nationalist programmes acquire mass support” (12). In other words, neither folklore nor aristocratic textuality were ever sufficient in themselves to create the nation-state; but then neither were “militants of ‘the national idea› (12). The nation-state was only produced by popular consent, the grounds of which have varied from era to era. For example, in an age of revolutionary-democratic nationalism (1776–1830), the basis of popular consent was mass participation, whereby the masses exchanged their position as subjects for the rights and responsibilities of citizens. As Hobsbawm reminds us, the National Guards of Alsace, Lorraine, and Franche Comté “took an oath of loyalty to Nation, Law and King” at a meeting in 1790, “thus transforming the inhabitants of provinces annexed by France a bare century ago into genuine Frenchmen” (87). While the French language was and is “essential to the concept of France,” the fact is that “in 1789 50% of Frenchmen did not speak it at all,” and “only 12–13% spoke it correctly” (60). Mass support for the revolutionary-democratic nation was based not so much on language, then, as on “the common interest against particular interests, the common good against privilege” (20). Such were the tangible benefits of participation in the citizen-state. In a later era of liberal nationalism extending from 1830 to 1880, the basis of popular support would be altered by a new idea of “human evolution or progress from the small group to the larger, from family to tribe to region, to nation, and, in the last instance, to the unified world of the future” (Hobsbawm 38). This notion would favour the development of some, but not all, linguistic nationalisms by virtue of the two fundamental criteria of the “threshold principle,” first articulated by Giuseppe Mazzini: 1) the bigger the nation, the more progressive it must be in economic and social terms; and 2) the smaller the nation, the less progressive it must be. Thus, liberal nationalism doomed the Welsh or the Bretons, for example, to assimilation on the

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grounds that they were too small to satisfy the “threshold principle” of viable nation-states. After 1880, however, most nationalists “abandoned the ‘threshold principle› (102). To them, it no longer mattered whether the nation was viable, not after “ethnicity and language became the central, increasingly the decisive or even the only criteria of potential nationhood” (102). For one thing, the rise of proletarian socialist movements promoting an internationalist outlook in the years leading up to the Great War threatened the established classes: “The socialists of the period who rarely used the word ‘nationalism’ without the prefix ‘petty-bourgeois,’ knew what they were talking about. The battlelines of linguistic nationalism were manned by provincial journalists, schoolteachers and aspiring subaltern officials” (117). So, too, mass migrations within and between continents – the largest the world had ever seen – provoked a “chauvinist, imperialist and xenophobic movement of the right” (121). After the Treaty of Versailles, nationalism shifted leftward in the struggle against German and Italian fascism and British and French colonialism. “However, whereas before 1914 the characteristic national movement had been directed against states or political agglomerations seen as multinational or supranational, such as the Habsburg and Ottoman empires, after 1919 it was on the whole, in Europe, directed against national states. It was therefore, almost by definition, separatist rather than unifying” (139). To Hobsbawm, British politics of the 1920s and 1930s are mostly paradigmatic: “The national feelings of the Welsh and Scots in the United Kingdom did not find expression through special nationalist parties, but through the major all-UK parties – first Liberals, then Labour” (125). Popular support, regardless of its point of origin on the political spectrum, was thus insufficient to make a “people” a nation-state. As Hobsbawm shows, in the nineteenth century other criteria had to be satisfied before a “people” could be classed as a “nation”: 1) their historic association with a current or former state with a lengthy past, 2) their claim to a long-established cultural elite with a written administrative and literary vernacular, and 3) their “proven capacity for conquest” (37–8). On the count of historical association, Germans and Italians hardly qualified, divided as they were into a checkerboard of historic states and principalities. On the count of language there was also reason to doubt since “dialectal and cultural differences within Germany or Italy are as great as those between recognized Teutonic or Romance languages” (Gellner 47). On the count of their “proven capacity for conquest,” Prussia and Piedmont-Sardinia exhibited this;

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however, conquest was hardly an enduring basis upon which to build a shared sense of community. So how to justify “Germany” or “Italy” in theory and practice? Whose mass support and why? To this end, Hobsbawm explores the claims of “popular protonationalism,” the view of the “nation” as a pre-existent cultural entity, in which bonds of group identity are “naturally” present though “feelings of collective belonging” (46) due to a common language, ethnicity, religion, and/or customs. In particular, the idea “that language was the only adequate indicator of nationality” was “an argument well-suited to German nationalism, since Germans were so widely distributed over central and eastern Europe” (21–2). Here, the philosopher and literary critic Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803) contributed a new “conception of nation-ness as linked to a private-property language” (Anderson 68), largely to compensate for the territorial dispersion of German-speakers and their lack of a “public” space. As a student at Königsberg under Immanuel Kant; as a teacher at Riga cathedral school; and, ultimately, as a friend of the Romantic poet Goethe at Strasbourg and Weimar, Herder felt the displacement of the German people at first-hand. And so he advanced a theory of the Volk as an organic entity, united by common cultural properties. Both the customs and history of the Volk, “but especially its language,” seemed to him to be “an expression of its organic relationship with the natural world. It had an inherent right to become a political nation” (Conlogue 23). What this Romantic view did not anticipate was a host of twentiethcentury findings about language, from Saussure’s structural linguistics to Chomsky’s generative grammar, all of which undercut the organicist philosophy of nineteenth-century philology. The Romantic view, shared by Franz Bopp and Max Müller as well as J.L.K. Grimm, is fairly summed up by their contemporary, August Schleicher: “Languages are natural organisms which, outside the human will and subject to fixed laws, are born, grow, develop, age and die … Consequently, the science of language is a natural science” (Aarsleff 16). In the twentieth century, however, the science of language became a social science, following upon Saussure’s “discovery” that sign systems are arbitrary and conventional (hence fictional or “imaginary”), and generate a wide variety of dialectal difference. As another theorist of nationalism remarks of sign systems, their “varied idiolects were capable of being assembled, within definite limits, into print-languages far fewer in number. The very arbitrariness of any system of signs for sounds facilitated the assembling process” (Anderson 43). If there is any connection, then, between national languages and modern nations, it is the fact that both are arbitrary, fictional, and imagined.

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To Hobsbawm, a national language and a “nation-people” are more likely twin constructs of print as “vernacular languages are always a complex of local variants or dialects intercommunicating with varying degrees of ease or difficulty, depending on geographical closeness or accessibility. Some, notably in mountain areas which facilitate segregation, may be as incomprehensible as if they belonged to a different linguistic family” (52). Even the fact that national languages are assembled as constructs of print suggests that an organically unified Volk is nothing more than a sentimental myth. “The mystical identification of nationality with a sort of platonic idea of the language, existing behind and above all its variant and imperfect versions, is much more characteristic of the ideological construction of nationalist intellectuals, of whom Herder is the prophet, than of the actual grassroots users of the idiom” (57). Only idealists and ideologues are likely, in other words, to take as fact the cultural fiction of a unified Volk. Herder’s myth of “organic” unity would have seemed less likely in the seventeenth century as well. A hundred years before Herder’s birth, millions of “German” dead were piling up on either side of one of history’s great cultural divides. Nearly half of the civilian populations of Brandenburg, Mecklenburg, Pomerania, the Palatinate, Württemberg, and parts of Bavaria would perish in the Thirty Years War (1618–48) between Roman Catholics and Protestants, fought mostly in German lands to decide the future of Europe along the lines of either modern or traditional principles. Even seventy years after Herder’s death, new tensions emerged in the newly created nationstate in the form of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf – his latter-day struggle against the anti-modernism of southern Roman Catholics. In effect, the German empire of 1871, whose “existence broke with all historical precedents” (Hobsbawm 84), also broke with one of its cultural supports – the Romantic myth of ein Volk. Henceforth, defenders of Roman Catholic schools in Bavaria and Swabia had every reason to doubt the romantic notion that the nation-state was founded on an “organic” ideal. Germany was as much a political creation as the notion of ein Volk was a cultural creation. The strength of Hobsbawm’s account of nationalism emerges from his steady focus on the phase of mass support, which enables him to account for various types of nationalism, from radical-democratic, to liberal-progressive, to ethno-linguistic, to anti-fascist and anticolonial. His emphasis on the nation as seen from below helps to offset Gellner’s perspective on modernization from above, particularly the latter’s view of state education in forging a high culture of nationalism. And yet Hobsbawm’s tendency, as in the chapter on

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“popular proto-nationalism,” is to demystify any element of culture evoking “feelings of collective belonging” on “the macro-political scale which could fit in with modern states and nations” (46). Not that Herder’s “folk-language” ought to escape such demystification. But language, as Hobsbawm reminds us, “was merely one, and not necessarily the primary, way of distinguishing between cultural communities” (58). Hobsbawm is even sceptical of ethnic belonging, with its essentialist notions of origin and descent as the basis of the nation, particularly when he notes that “the peoples with the most powerful and lasting sense of what may be called ‘tribal’ ethnicity, not merely resisted the imposition of the modern state, national or otherwise, but very commonly any state: as witness the Pushtu speakers in and around Afghanistan, the pre-1745 Scots highlanders, the Atlas Berbers, and others who will readily come to mind” (64). All the same, the denial of such forms of “proto-nationalism” – language, ethnicity, religion, and so on – leaves Hobsbawm in a contradictory position. While he is eager to deny the cultural power of nationalism and the spell it continues to exert, he is forced to concede an “element of artefact, invention and social engineering which enters into the making of nations” (10), which would make nationalism an intrinsically cultural form. Nor can he say what it is about the culture of nationalism that makes people willing to die for it, or what it is about its invention of traditions that evokes a “willing suspension of disbelief.” In formal, rather than political, terms, one has to ask, What are its aesthetic merits? And what seems to have been wanting in those other cultural forms it came to replace? Here is the great advantage of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (rev. ed. 1991), with its focus on the cultural question of nationalism. Anderson begins with a refreshing caveat about politics: “It would, I think, make things easier if one treated it [nationalism] as if it belonged with ‘kinship’ and ‘religion,’ rather than with ‘liberalism’ or ‘fascism› (5). For it appears to spring out of the need for a “style of continuity” (12) other than the one that, by the end of the eighteenth century, was becoming irrelevant to the older “sacred communities, languages[,] and lineages” (22). Indeed, traditional certainties had been undermined by the territorialization and relativizing of religious belief during the Age of Exploration, by the fragmentation of “universal” Christendom during the Reformation, and by the secularizing of reason during the Enlightenment. Neither the Reformation nor the Enlightenment seems to be a sufficient “cause,” however, to explain the rise of nationalism. Anderson notes an affinity between nationalism and religion only in the way

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the former communicates a sense of immortality in sentiments of collective identity. Likewise, he notes an affinity between nation and family but only in how the latter communicates a sense of renewal through the generations. Therefore, he proposes “that nationalism has to be understood by aligning it, not with self-consciously held political ideologies, but with the larger cultural systems that preceded it, out of which – as well as against which – it came into being” (12). The advantage of this strategy is twofold: it allows for the transformation rather than the supersedence of the previous cultural system, thus eliminating confusions of cause and effect; and it emphasizes the nation-state as a basic cultural formation rather than as a merely political form of consensus. Before the nation acquired such cultural power, however, “three fundamental cultural conceptions, all of great antiquity,” had to lose “their axiomatic grip on men’s minds” (Anderson 36). First, the idea of a sacred language – enshrined in a sacred script and placed in the power of a bilingual clerisy to mediate between heaven and earth – had to yield to the notion of “truth” being expressed in the vernacular and being immediately available to individuals in print. Second, the idea of a sacred ruler – forming a “high centre” for social organization and thus also mediating between heaven and earth – had to give way to notions of a reciprocal power between ruler and ruled. In other words, a traditional conception of the “divine right” of kings had to make way for a radically new conception of “the rights of man.” Even then, beneath the decline of religious communities and dynastic realms, a more “fundamental change was taking place in modes of apprehending the world, which, more than anything else, made it possible to ‘think’ the nation” (22). Anderson’s originality inheres in this view of “a radically changed form of consciousness” (xiv) that is produced by a complex “interaction between a system of production and productive relations (capitalism), a technology of communications (print), and the fatality of human linguistic diversity” (42–3). The result seems to have been a new apprehension of time, in which an older, sacred “conception of simultaneity-along-time” turned into our modern sense of simultaneity “marked not by prefiguring and fulfilment, but by temporal coincidence, and measured by clock and calendar” (24). The older idea of providential time, figured in “eternal” media of stone or light – the stability of architecture, the radiance of stained-glass windows – depended on a god’s-eye view of history. The devout could “see” the sacrifice of Isaac, the raising of Moses’ serpent on a pole in the wilderness, and the crucifixion of Christ as occurring simultaneously along a chain of divine causation. Therefore, the believer had a sense

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of participating, by means of the rite of the mass, in an eternally recurring present. Such an apprehension of providential time was eroded, however, by “two forms of imagining which first flowered in Europe in the eighteenth century: the novel and the newspaper” (24–5). In these new media, a charged and meaningful providential time was changed into a new “idea of ‘homogeneous, empty time› (24). Print now offered, as it were, “a complex gloss upon the word ‘meanwhile› (25). In such “meanwhiles,” a new sense of shared dailiness could be communicated to disparate readers, most of whom would never “know their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each [could live] the image of their communion” (6). For such reasons, Anderson concludes, these new cultural forms provided the technical means for “re-presenting the kind of imagined community that is the nation” (25). Delaying discussion, for the moment, of the formal qualities of these new media, how did print technology combine with printcapitalism to change the linguistic map of Europe? From 1450 to 1600 the market for Latin books became virtually saturated. Consequently, “the restless search for markets” (38), so typical of capitalism, turned homeward to vernacular readers. Luther’s biblical translations and commentaries became the first bestsellers in German-speaking areas of Europe, while, as we have seen, the first bestseller in English, apart from the Geneva Bible, was Foxe’s Acts and Monuments. From the public response to Foxe, it could be argued (though Anderson never mentions him) that an “imagined community” of the book was present in the sixteenth century. Or, as Helgerson declares flatly, “the ‘invisible church’ of Foxe and other apocalyptic writers was just such an imagined community” (266). Given an evident gap of 200 years between “the dethronement of Latin” (Anderson 42) during the dusk of universal Christendom and the dawn of nationalism in Enlightenment rationality, Anderson’s temporal scheme was always precarious. Where was the nation in the interim, if not in steadily accumulating print-forms? By the sixteenth century, the standardization of print-languages was already helping to form imagined communities, if not nationstates. First of all, mass markets were emerging out of the multiple dialects being assembled by print-capitalism into a single national language, a language utterly distinct from the hodgepodge of vernaculars one could find in a journey of a few days (43). Never forgetting that printers, not print, were the real agents of social revolution, Anderson focuses on the print-shop and bookstall as the main sites of change. Through its assemblage of standardized print-languages,

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its mass production and distribution of printed materials, and its fostering of widespread literacy, print-capitalism began to produce deep structural changes in the state. Newly standardized print-languages “created unified fields of exchange and communication below Latin and above the spoken vernaculars” (44). Printed materials also “gave a new fixity to language, which in the long run helped to build that image of antiquity so central to the subjective idea of the nation” (44). In ways foreign to manuscript culture, a fixed print-language now bound speakers and readers across centuries. Third, “print-capitalism created languages of power of a kind different from the older administrative vernaculars” (45), making anonymous readers of newspapers and novels participants in a new form of community – the imagined nation. Why, having turned inward to private reading and “having lost real communities” as a result, did people “wish to imagine this particular type of replacement” (Hobsbawm 46)? Because, Anderson concludes, this is the form implied by the experience of reading: What were the characteristics of the first American newspapers, North or South? They began essentially as appendages of the market. Early gazettes contained – aside from news about the metropole – commercial news (when ships would arrive and depart, what prices were current for what commodities in what ports), as well as colonial political appointments, marriages of the wealthy, and so forth. (62)

And yet what really joined a news item from that port to one from this port? What linked disparate and distant (even belatedly reported) events within a classical unity of time? “The date at the top of the newspaper, the single most important emblem on it, provides the essential connection – the steady onward clocking of homogeneous, empty time” (33). For this date, recorded at this place, creates a shared perspective on events. Indeed, “the very conception of the newspaper implies the refraction of even ‘world events’ into a specific imagined world of vernacular readers” (63). And so an invisible community of newspaper readers comes to share “simultaneous” occurrences in an “almost precisely simultaneous consumption (‘imagining’) of the newspaperas-fiction,” creating at the same time an “extraordinary mass ceremony” (35) of private reading about public matters. In daily rituals of consumption, the journal becomes a secular equivalent of the liturgy, a new “book of common prayer,” joining together diverse “believers” by making them imaginatively “capable of comprehending one another via print and paper” (44).

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This sense of “community in anonymity which is the hallmark of modern nations” (36) would be further reinforced by the structure of the novel. For the imaginary characters of fiction – typical, rather than actual, fellow-citizens – were not only “embedded in [their respective] ‘societies’ (Wessex, Lübeck, Los Angeles)” (25), but they were also “embedded in the minds of the omniscient readers. Only such readers, like God, watch A telephoning C, B shopping, and D playing pool all at once. That all these acts are performed at the same clocked, calendrical time, but by actors largely unaware of one another, suggests the novelty of this world conjured up by the author in his readers’ minds” (26). It forms an analogue, in fact, of an older type of community seen through the god’s-eye view of a stained-glass window. Only now, instead of seeing through the concrete particularity of Swabian or Andalusian dress to the invisible form of the “eternal,” readers of print are left to imagine, “in their secular, particular, visible invisibility,” concrete individuals of the same nation, even while sensing the invisible presence of other readers like themselves who form the “embryo of the nationally imagined community” (44). From another perspective, however, Anderson has been criticized for limiting the process of national imagining “to one set of historically specific conditions such as print culture, democracy, capitalism, and secularization” (Davis 613). Elements of a national consciousness do appear before Geoffrey’s twelfth-century Latin Historia, as in King Alfred’s ninth-century translation of Pope Gregory’s Cura Pastoralis, with its important vernacular Preface. Kathleen Davis shows how, from a postcolonial perspective, a Saxon king might address a wider audience of Angelcynn in Old English, prefacing his translation of the Latin text in a manner that “relentlessly integrates land, language, and ‘people› (619). Though Alfred never names this nation England – how could he when, in 890, much of the land is still subject to Danish rule? – a Wessex king addresses East Anglians, Mercians, and Northumbrians as being one with West Saxons. He not only addresses them consistently as Angelcynn (the noun cynn denoting “race,” “people, “family” [Klaeber 314]) but he also identifies the place as Angelcynn, as appears in the preposition giond (“through,” “throughout,” “over,” etc.). In other words, some 900 years before Anderson thinks it possible, Alfred imagines an anonymous community, the hallmarks of which are a “national language and race,” an “imagined national past,” and a common culture in a contiguous “geographical space” (Davis 614). What Anderson sees as the necessary decline of Latin as a “truthlanguage” in order to create a linguistic ground for nationalism already has an analogue in what Alfred regards as the decay of Latin

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among Englisc speakers, expressing a need to translate the sacred text from Latin “into that language we can all understand” (cited in Davis 614). While Latin and its identification with “ontological truth” (36) seem to Anderson to have prevented the emergence of a national imaginary throughout the Middle Ages, to Davis this is historical nonsense: “the English vernacular [already] stands as one among many legitimate languages in which wisdom can be conveyed” (615). Furthermore, Alfred’s defence of a “national translation program,” the immediate occasion of his Preface, authorizes a whole “canon of translations” (615) to be made over the next few decades, giving the “English” a vernacular literature composed of those “books which are most needful for all men to know” (cited in Davis 614). While the decline of Latin signifies to Alfred a loss of that national reputation that, formerly, resulted in “men from abroad [coming] to this land in search of wisdom and teaching” (cited in Davis 622), the very memory of such a national past evokes a shared sense of community. What is more, “This recollection of a national identity in the form of an appeal to an ideal past not only posits the nation as a preexisting, homogeneous entity, but also authorizes the contemporary nation in terms of apparently intrinsic, timeless characteristics, such as the composition of its people, its geographical boundaries, its laws, values, and political structure” (Davis 622). According to this reading of the Anglo-Saxon text, Anderson’s chronology is off by about nine centuries. For what Davis calls “the writing of national identities” (612) already exists in manuscript culture, long before the standardization of print-languages. So, too, Alfred’s translation program has already led to the formation of a national script – English square minuscule – which appears to have “developed from a process of script standardization beginning in the 890s and peaking in the 930s” (627). Typeface, in other words, is not the first “fixed” form to evoke a sense of the permanence, or even the timelessness, of the national language. According to Davis, “scores of scribes who labored to perfect and adhere to this script’s rigid design” were taking part “in a nationalizing process, to which it simultaneously” gave “the appearance of fixity” (628). Davis’s postcolonial critique of Anderson is further telling for the way it exposes both his “misrepresentation of language theory in the Middle Ages” (627) and his tendentious reading of “providential time” (631n5). But is it fair to conclude that Anderson has turned the Middle Ages into “the temporal Other” of the modern nation in order to ground the “very possibility” (612) of the latter? To be sure, Davis allows for substantial differences between what she calls “the medieval nation” (613) – based, unlike the Norman Historia, on vernacular

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imagining – and its modern counterpart. In her words, “Alfred’s use of church-controlled literacy to define an England that was visibly distinct within the universalizing authority of Christianity certainly differs institutionally from … modern national projects. It is not, however, fundamentally opposed to them” (616). And yet her translation of the term Angelcynn cannot avoid projecting connotations of nineteenth-century linguistic nationalism back into ninth-century notions of “race,” “people,” or “family,” where cynn becomes an Old English variant of Volk. This apparent assimilation of King Alfred to the Romantic project is most apparent if we think of Alfred as another nationalist intellectual, like Herder, writing for an elite audience scattered over a wide territory. If one inserts into Hobsbawm’s account of “the two most prominent non-state national movements of the first half of the nineteenth century” the terms “Alfred” and the “ninth century,” then one sees how Davis’s reading of the projects of the Saxon Alfred and the German Herder are both “essentially based on communities of the educated, united across political and geographical borders by the use of an established language of high culture and its literature” (Hobsbawm 102). As Hobsbawm has said of modern Germans and Italians, “their national language was not merely an administrative convenience … It was the only thing that made them Germans or Italians” (103). Perhaps the same thing ought to be said of Alfred’s readers: their language was the only thing that made them Englisc. But this is a view of nationalism that modern scholarship has by now thoroughly discredited. “Nationalism,” as Gellner defines it in his opening sentence, “is primarily a political principle, which holds that the political and the national unity should be congruent” (1). If there was any cultural homogeneity in Angelcynn, it had to subsist in the absence of political congruity, much in the way that modern-day New Zealand is politically distinct from Great Britain, despite its cultural “Britishness,” or that Canada is politically discontinuous with the United States, despite some cultural conformity (at least in English Canada) to the Great Republic. When Davis speaks of Alfred “writing the nation,” she speaks a different language, literally and figuratively, from the one used in the modern discourse of “nationalism.” Her Alfred is not so different from the Hitler who appealed to German-speaking populations in Sudetenland. A more fundamental problem in trying to locate a national imaginary in manuscript culture derives less from the writing than from the reading of national identities. While the ninth-century masses heard Alfred’s words read aloud during the course of the Pastoral Care, their

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experience was fundamentally different from that of modern readers. For the ninth-century subject’s loyalty to her monarch and his obedience to his bishop was personal and immediate. The “nation” was hardly an anonymous and invisible abstraction; rather, it was a “people,” a “family.” Here, then, is the real gulf that separates pre-modern conceptions of the “nation” from the idea of the modern nation-state. “Reading,” as one cultural sociologist has concluded, “is a solitary activity, but an activity that can powerfully unite solitary readers in imagined communities.” In her reading of Anderson, the same sociologist concludes that “national literatures are important because of their ability to create and sustain an identity and a national community that do not depend on direct relationships” (Corse 23). Which is why it might be pointless to talk about writing the nation until a nation of readers can be said to exist. One way to think of the modern nation, then, is to regard it as an abstraction of high culture in which “one’s prime loyalty is to the medium of our literacy” (Gellner 140). Perhaps the best way to measure the distance we have come from Alfred’s nation is to remark that print began to mediate in the place of hierarchs. The book, in other words, substituted for pontiff and king alike. What then remains of value in Anderson’s account? Not the date of birth he assigns to the nation, or even its Enlightenment origins. Not his naming of the parents – an old, decaying Latin patriarch and a newly uniform mother tongue. Both were already available in Alfred’s time, and yet, without the intervention of a host of readers, were unable to produce the miraculous birth. Before we can grasp the mutation of the “folk” world of the cynn into the “novel” world of citizens, something remains to be said of readers as the closest living “kin” of the nation. The question the next chapter seeks to answer is, How does Anderson’s society of novel and newspaper readers finally become able to subtend the nation?

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2 Novel and Nation

The standard account of the rise of the novel is that it coincides with the rise of the middle class. A logical corollary – that the rise of the novel also coincides with the rise of the nation – was well beyond the scope of a study that, in 1957, the heyday of New Criticism, had to content itself with finding “analogies” between an autonomous world of literature and its social context. Given the formalist climate of the time, Ian Watt would concern himself more directly with the novelty of the form: What was unique in the novel’s formal procedures, and how did these procedures differ from those of prose romance? Indirectly, however, he was most concerned with the historical problem of change. How could literary forms be subject to change without some underlying transformation in the social context? What were likely to be the actual conditions of “the literary and social situation” (Watt 9) of eighteenth-century England that favoured the emergence of this new form? Despite challenges and qualifications over the years, the outline of Watt’s argument stands up fairly well: “The modern novel is closely allied on the one hand to the realist epistemology of the modern period, and on the other to the individualism of its social structure” (62). The relevance of this formulation lies in its connection between an intellectual and a social crisis – although the issue of which came first, or what caused the other, is less important than is their interrelation. Watt traces a basic shift in epistemology from a culture in which “conformity to traditional practice [was] the major test of truth” to a culture “whose primary criterion was truth to individual experience – individual experience which is always unique and therefore new” (13). Still, he attaches considerable importance to “changes in the nature and organization of the reading public” (35) in England as an increasing middle-class readership seems to have shifted the “literary

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balance of power” (49) away from classically trained professionals to “those who desired an easier form of literary entertainment, even if it had little prestige among the literati” (48). At the beginning of the century, the English reading public amounted to some 80,000 readers in a population of six million (36). By 1800, however, a fourfold increase in annual book publication and a tripling of newspaper subscriptions pointed to a considerable expansion of the reading public (37). So who made up this new class of readers and how did it change the climate? Among the reading class were women freed from spinning, soap making, and so on by machinemanufactured household goods. Shopkeepers and tradespeople also possessed the means and leisure to read the offerings of printers and booksellers. The journalist Daniel Defoe found a ready audience for Robinson Crusoe in “the outlook of the trading class,” which wanted confirmation and support for its own “economic individualism” (47). While the poor (who still made up half the population) lacked both the means and the leisure, not to mention the training, to read, there were still throngs of footmen and waiting-maids – making up “the largest single occupational group in the country” (47) – who to some degree possessed all three, together with an inclination to imitate their “betters.” Printer-turned-novelist Samuel Richardson appealed to this emergent audience in his characterization of Pamela, the first “culture-heroine of a very powerful sisterhood of literate and leisured waiting-maids” (47). Understandably, this “increasingly important feminine component of the public found many of its interests expressed by Richardson” (49). Small as such a group of readers would be by present standards, it appears to have “altered the centre of gravity of the reading public” in ways that thoroughly removed it “from the body of past assumptions and traditional beliefs” (48, 12). In France, by comparison, “where literary culture was still primarily oriented to the Court” (58), classical tradition still asserted the primacy of universals before particulars, myth before “reality,” collective tradition before individual experience. The choice of “high” over “low” subjects, of “ideal” over “real” forms, of conventional over unique plots would also hold the French in thrall to romance – an older form of prose fiction – until well into the nineteenth century, by which time the name roman had become too entrenched to express what was truly novel in Balzac’s view of the world. In England, however, the term “novel” had by the end of the eighteenth century come to signify its connection with modernity, especially in its affinity for the assumptions of philosophical realism. While Watt does not claim that the novel was influenced by Cartesian scepticism or Lockean empiricism, he does suggest that a common climate of opinion urged a

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new importance for the individual and his/her perceptions. But what was really new about this individualist worldview? Michael McKeon, who offers an elaborate extension of Watt’s thesis, begins by admitting “the unsettling argument that middle-class individualism originated not in eighteenth- but in thirteenth-century England” (3). Watts’s time scheme for the rise of the middle class, like Anderson’s for the nation, would thus seem to be several centuries out of date. And yet was individualism ever really an adequate cultural expression of modernity? A better starting point for defining the modernity of the novel would be the rise of a “realist epistemology.” Watt points out that the term “reality” underwent a semantic reversal in the early modern period (much as did the term “nation” in recent centuries). To “the scholastic Realists of the Middle Ages” it was “universals, classes or abstractions, and not the particular, concrete objects of sense-perception, which” were “the true ‘realities› (Watt 11). To medieval Schoolmen, the Aristotelian Forms or Platonic Ideas stood well beyond the flux of particular experience, serving to inform reality with their timeless essence. But to seventeenth-century nominalists like Bacon and empiricists like Locke, sense experience was the only test of truth in the phenomenal world. Even their contemporary Descartes, the philosopher of consciousness, took sense experience as regulated by consciousness to be the better guide to truth. In analogous ways, Watt notes, “the novel’s imitation of human life follows the procedures adopted by philosophical realism in its attempt to ascertain and report the truth” (31). The “timeless stories” of myth and legend, once thought “to mirror the unchanging moral verities” (22), were exchanged in the novel for more contemporary forms such as biography and autobiography, both of which foregrounded “an identity of consciousness through duration in time” (21). Thus, the novel’s plot differs from the plot structure of prose romance, particularly in “its use of past experience as the cause of present action” (22), as opposed to disguise, coincidence, or chance. Whereas classical tragedy invariably observes a unity of time – all the action taking place in twenty-four hours, as if to portray destiny as a timeless universal – the novel often follows the course of a lifetime. Thus, time and history enter the novel in new ways, time taking the role of a causative agent, and history appearing as radically separate from the present. In effect, the living world of the present now outweighs the dead world of the past. Watt fails to recognize the full impact of this break with tradition, however, since he limits its significance to the valorization of individual perception. Another major theorist of the novel, Mikhail Bakhtin,

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whose thinking in several respects runs parallel to that of Watt, helps to expose a dead end in this individualist view of the present. Setting the novel against the epic – an older genre than romance – Bakhtin starts from virtually the same assumption about traditional literary forms: that they preserve a peculiar sort of temporal hierarchy. As Bakhtin sees it, “In the epic world view, ‘beginning,’ ‘first,’ ‘founder,’ ‘ancestor,’ ‘that which occurred earlier’ and so forth are not merely temporal categories but valorized temporal categories, and valorized to an extreme degree … The epic absolute past is the single source and beginning of everything good for all later times as well” (15). By contrast, the novel “is determined by experience, knowledge, and practice (the future) … When the novel becomes the dominant genre, epistemology becomes the dominant discipline” (15). Thus far, Watt would not demur: “The novel, from the very beginning, developed as a genre that had at its core a new way of conceptualizing time” (Bakhtin 38). Where Bakhtin begins to differ from Watt, however, is in his view of the causes and consequences of this new way of conceiving of time. To Watt, the seeds of revolt are to be found in economic and philosophic individualism; but to Bakhtin, the properties of the new medium are what give a new form to temporal experience. “Of all the major genres only the novel is younger than writing and the book,” he insists from the outset; “it alone is organically receptive to new forms of mute perception, that is, to reading” (3). Epic, by contrast, depends on memory to preserve the experience and wisdom of the past. Thus, “in ancient literature it is memory, and not knowledge, that serves as the source and power of the creative impulse. That is how it was, it is impossible to change it: the tradition of the past is sacred” (15). Although he does not say so, the cause is likely implied in a distinction he makes between the form of the novel (emerging only in the historical light of print) and older genres (subsisting in the more shadowy forms of pre-literate societies). “In an oral culture,” as another theorist puts it, “knowledge, once acquired, had to be constantly repeated or it would be lost” (Ong 23).* Ong’s view of oral memory would seem to be Bakhtin’s implicit premise: the oral production of epic did not brook revision because the object of memory would then disappear. For, in the absence of writing, all knowledge or memory of the past could only be preserved in fixed, unchanging forms of oral expression. No wonder, then, that “the epic past is absolute and complete” (Bakhtin 16), for it is necessarily transmitted in a * For a discussion of this revolution in epistemology from an oral to a written culture, see Chapter 4.

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medium that must fix its object absolutely before it is lost forever. That is the real reason why “it is impossible to change, to re-think, to re-evaluate anything in it. It is completed, conclusive and immutable,” not only “as a fact, an idea and a value” (17), but as a form that would otherwise not exist. Thus, the hierarchical valuation of the past in traditional literature is largely a measure of the communicative fragility of the medium. With its lasting form in the book, the novel then allows for a total reorientation to the present, to “a new world still in the making” (7). Attention is finally diverted from the endless demands of memory to close observation of the thing at hand: “To portray an event on the same time-and-value plane as oneself and one’s contemporaries (and an event that is therefore based on personal experience and thought) is to undertake a radical revolution, and to step out of the world of epic into the world of the novel” (14). Indeed, “by its very nature the epic world of the absolute past is inaccessible to personal experience and does not permit an individual, personal point of view or evaluation” (16). Consequently, to slip the bonds of tribal memory and to step into a world formed by print is to “bring the world closer and familiarize it in order to investigate it fearlessly and freely” (25). But are individuals, freed from this obligation to maintain the “single and unified world view” of oral memory, merely freed to be the authors of their own experience? Watt would say that the idea of an absolute individual has by now replaced the idea of an absolute past: “In the literary, the philosophical and the social spheres alike the classical focus on the ideal, the universal and the corporate has shifted completely, and the modern field of vision is mainly occupied by the discrete particular, the directly apprehended sensum, and the autonomous individual” (62). Demonstrably, however, this seems to be a cultural assumption based on an unexamined analogy between the “individual” and the solitary reader, when the form of the novel is more likely in itself to embody a “corporate” social form. To Bakhtin, the world of the novel is not, and never was, made in the image of the solitary reader. For it contains, in its remarkably elastic form, a world of teeming languages, structured in such a way that the reader contends with a mix of living voices and worldviews. For these same “images of language are inseparable from images of various world views and from the living beings who are their agents – people who think, talk, and act in a setting that is social and historically concrete” (Bakhtin 49). Contrary to the more “direct” genres – epic, lyric, drama, which are based on oral performance – the “indirect” genre of the novel does not, maybe cannot, speak for itself. For “the author participates in the novel (he is omnipresent in it) with almost no direct language of his own. The language of the novel is a

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system of languages that mutually and ideologically interanimate each other. It is impossible to describe and analyze it as a single unitary language” (47). Far from affirming or even representing the primacy of the individual, then, the Bakhtinian novel, as a form, organizes and structures a complete social world. In Pushkin’s work, for example, “Russian life speaks in all its voices, in all the languages and styles of the era. Literary language is not represented in the novel as a unitary, completely finished-off and indisputable language – it is represented precisely as a living mix of varied and opposing voices” (49). Such a view is just as notable for what it rejects as for what it affirms. On the one hand, it refuses to essentialize the language of the folk, to reduce “Russian life” to a single, unitary language; on the other hand, it refuses to essentialize the individual or to put a premium on any form of linguistic experience. Rather, the form of the novel would appear to incorporate the quarreling speech communities of the world it represents. But does this agonistic imagination have any connection with Anderson’s imagined community, the nation? Bakhtin speaks rather disparagingly, for instance, of that “national heroic past” that is the epic’s subject, or any “national tradition” (13) that is its source. Conversely, he celebrates the way in which “the period of national languages, coexisting but closed and deaf to each other, comes to an end” in the novel. “Languages throw light on each other: one language can, after all, see itself only in the light of another language” (12). Bakhtin’s Marxism, of course, should logically bias him against the nation (as opposed to an international utopia). Except that two factors must qualify this ideological reading. First, the oral, tribal context of “national epic past” and “national tradition” clearly limits “nation” to an older notion of ethnic homogeneity, where the needs of memory dictate a common story in a single language of the nation in the original sense of “descent.” Second, the view of Pushkin’s novel as “an encyclopedia of Russian life” (49) – that is, as a compendium of all its heteroglossic and competing voices – suggests that, for Bakhtin, the margins of the novel do form a symbolic image of national frontiers as the formal mix of voices it contains is structurally homologous to that emergent unity, the nation-state, with its heterogeneous mix of peoples. Or, as another reader of Bakhtin elegantly puts it: “It was the novel that historically accompanied the rise of nations by objectifying the ‘one, yet many’ of national life, and by mimicking the structure of the nation, a clearly bordered jumble of languages and styles” (Brennan 49). Ultimately, the form of temporal rupture that Bakhtin finds in the novel leads him in precisely the opposite direction from Watt. A break with “past modes of thought and action” (Watt 60) does not

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lead to social atomization or to a society of individual readers fragmented by “economic specialization” and “individual rights,” much less by the loneliness of private reading. Rather, the break with the past is a break from tribal solidarities (in monoglossic isolation from one another) and a move towards new forms of social grouping, both in the novel and in the heterogeneous nation-state, where multiple languages and cultures are bound together to create a new dynamic of form and culture. In other words, the novel, which for Bakhtin is the pre-eminently social form, gathers up Watt’s isolated readers into a new form of imagined unity in the wake of a total rupture with the past of oral memory. In fact, every constitutive feature of the novel – its “multi-languaged consciousness,” its new “temporal coordinates,” and its “new zone … of maximal contact with the present” – is “organically interrelated” for a reason. They “have all been powerfully affected by a very specific rupture in the history of European civilization: its emergence from a socially isolated and culturally deaf semipatriarchal society, and its entrance into international and interlingual contacts and relationships” (Bakhtin 11). For the novel emerges precisely at that point in history when tribal isolation, racial chauvinism, and linguistic identity break down, and “the world becomes polyglot, once and for all and irreversibly” (12). Thus, the cosmopolitan myth of Babel is what informs Bakhtin’s urban and urbane version of the novel since the novel is the only form capable of challenging the authority of the oral “nation.” Henceforth, it is the novel, with its formal containment of heteroglossia and its dramatization of “the dispute between a dismal sacred word and a cheerful folk word” (76), which enables readers to imagine the organization of the modern nation-state. In some respects, this “novel” theory of nationness is similar to the one advanced in Chapter 1 by Benedict Anderson. What Anderson shares with Bakhtin and Watt – though neither theorist is named in his work – is a profound sense of historical rupture in print’s reorientation to the past and its radically changed form of temporal consciousness. Unlike Watt and more like Bakhtin, however, Anderson sees the novel not in terms of private readers, solitary individuals, and social atomization but, rather, in terms of communing readers, public time and space, and social cohesion. In other respects, Anderson is nonetheless the antithesis of Bakhtin in that he holds to a common sense doctrine of literary mimesis, of language as a reflection, not as a maker, of reality. And so he looks only to Erich Auerbach for a theory about novelistic discourse. The relative innocence of such reflection theory – innocent of Saussure’s anti-representationalism and of Derrida’s anti-foundationalism – allows Anderson to produce

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“a symbolic structure of the nation as ‘imagined community’ which, in keeping with the scale and diversity of the modern nation, works like the plot of a realist novel. The steady onward clocking of calendrical time, in Anderson’s words, gives the imagined world of the nation a sociological solidity” (Bhabha, Location 158). Take that “Mexican” novel published in 1816, which Anderson uses to illustrate his idea that the novel is both a cause and a consequence of the birth of the nation. What José Joaquín Fernandez de Lizardi’s “El Periquillo Samiento [The Itching Parrot], evidently the first Latin American work in this genre” (29), is presumed to convey to Spanish-American readers is that the “horizon is clearly bounded: it is that of colonial Mexico. Nothing assures us of this sociological solidity more than the succession of plurals. For they conjure up a social space” of prisons, villages, hospitals, objects and persons that are “all representative (in their simultaneous, separate existence) of the oppressiveness of the colony” (Anderson 30). Following by some six years the outbreak of revolution to the south in Bolívar’s Gran Columbia, this novel from the northern reaches of the Empire is presumably meant to raise the consciousness of Creoles in SpanishMexico and to authorize the creation of a newly independent state. In other words, the “sociological solidity” of El Periquillo Samiento underwrites a new form of nationalist consciousness. Such an apparent reflection of “sociological solidity” still depends on two formal strategies that trouble the surface assumptions of reflection theory: (1 the need to situate characters and to emplot their actions in ways that conceal the invention of a represented world, and (2 the need to embed these same characters “in the minds of omniscient readers” (Anderson 26) – a somewhat disingenuous trope for authorial omniscience. So Anderson fails to question his own procedures in privileging a novelistic form of narration over a traditional verse-narrative from another part of the Spanish-Empire: “In effect, it never occurs to Balagtas to ‘situate’ his protagonists in ‘society,’ or to discuss them with his audience” (29). In effect, Anderson situates an imagined community in the direct voice of an “author-God” rather than in the indirect “voice” of the Bakhtinian novel, which does not speak for itself but only in a quarrel of contending voices. He thus allows a “nationalist” pedagogue to come between the reader and the sociological solidity of the nation, telling the reader what must be rather than what is. So authorial omniscience makes the novel more the image of a completed world, not unlike the epic, and less a formal homology of the nation. This finished image is not even walled-off by oral memory, by the formulaic view of an unchangeable past, but is actually fixed in print by an omniscient fiat.

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To a postcolonial reader such as Homi Bhabha, such ideologically constructed communities exclude migrants and exiles because they are authorized by two durable fictions: an “essentialist” identity “based on the pre-given or constituted historical origin in the past” (Location 149, 145) and a secular synchrony rooted in “homogeneous, empty time” (Anderson 24). Despite a possible role for the immigrant as a supplement within his poststructural reading of the nation, Bhabha opposes any form of representationalism or historicism that privileges the nation as a fait accompli. Seeking to clear a space for migrants and other “wandering peoples who will not be contained within the Heim of the national culture” (164), he mounts a pertinent – if ultimately flawed – critique of Anderson in order to explore “the ambivalence of the ‘nation’ as a narrative strategy” (140) and to deconstruct its “eternal self-generation” (148) in two volatile fictions of time and identity. Despite an inaccessible prose style, Bhabha’s premises are fairly straightforward. The break from providential time – that simultaneity of divine time in the here-and-now – upon which Anderson relies is merely an illusion since secular time, rather than being empty, is always already haunted by “another temporality that disturbs the contemporaneity of the national present” (143). So, too, the break with sacred truth-language – or the fissuring of “the sacral ontology of the medieval world and its overwhelmingly visual and aural imaginary” (157) by vernacular languages and by the arbitrariness of the sign – is equally illusory. This is because the nation’s image cannot be stabilized in what Bhabha, borrowing from Derrida, calls the “supplementarity,” or endless slippage, of language. Rather than seeing the immigrant as a supplement who keeps open the cultural system of the nation – and the linguistic system of the novel – Bhabha sees novelistically imagined communities as closed books, referring only to themselves. Much as a wandering people is never at rest, either mentally or physically, but is left to shuttle forever between times and places, so language is not able to rest in its referent either but, rather, must travel through an endless chain of signifiers, seeking the one and only thing that could ever define it: another word. Haunted by these twin displacements of time and language, the narration of the nation cannot really reflect the “social and textual affiliation” (Bhabha 140) of a nation-people. To suppose as much is to ignore “the essential question of the representation of the nation as a temporal process” (142). What Anderson ultimately misses in his theory is this necessary process of temporal doubling, which undermines the whole process of writing the nation. Still, Bhabha thinks that Anderson has it both ways, presenting the nation-people as “histori-

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cal ‘objects’ of a nationalist pedagogy” (145) at the same time that he makes them subjects of “a performative discourse of public identification” (159) – two contrary positions in the discourse of nationness that require contrary orientations towards time. On the one hand, the nation is supposed to be a historical entity, the origins of which form the basis of present social and political authority. Invariably, this “realist” narrative of “empty, homogeneous time” is filled with lessons of national belonging or of shared perspectives on the past as a series of events leading up to the present, what Bhabha calls “the continuist, accumulative temporality of the pedagogical” (145). On the other hand, the nation is taken to be an ahistorical entity, whereby the “nation-people” participate “in a sudden primordiality of meaning that ‘looms up imperceptibly out of a horizonless past› (159). Here, a non-realist form, such as an anthem or a ritual recitation, employs “the repetitious, recursive strategy of the performative” (Bhabha 145) in order to evoke “a ghostly intimation of simultaneity across homogeneous, empty time” (Anderson 145). A sense of instantaneous return to origins thus presents an image of the imagined community’s existence outside of time, aboriginal, ahistorical. Since Anderson resorts to a sense of what he calls “unisonance” “to explain the attachment that peoples feel for the inventions of their imaginations” (141) – mostly to refute a charge that racism and antiSemitism are the dark side of nationalism – a crack appears in the edifice of his theory. For a nation-people cannot be products of an epochal rupture – novelistically tutored to be the objects of modernity – and at the same time be the subjects of a performative identity that purportedly exists ab origine, before the break with tradition. Bhabha’s conclusion then seems unavoidable: “To write the story of the nation demands that we articulate that archaic ambivalence that informs the time of modernity” (Location 142). For, in a curious way, the ‹double and split’ time of national representation” (144) that Anderson can’t purge from his theory is like the recursive power of providential time. The synchronic time of modernity is hardly unique or particular; even its profane “meanwhiles” have “to be thought in ‘double-time› (145). The other problem that plagues the “realist” version of national writing is an overly simplistic theory of language. Anderson takes a misinformed (see Davis 617) view of “ontological reality” in premodern cultures and sees it as being “apprehensible only through a single, privileged system of re-presentation: the truth-language,” for example, “of Church Latin, Qur’anic Arabic, or Examination Chinese” (Anderson 14). And yet he then proceeds to do exactly what he decries: privilege the vernacular replacement of “truth-language”

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as a “truthful” sign of “sociological solidity” (30). His error is not just to assume that pre-modern apprehensions of reality “depended on an idea largely foreign to the contemporary Western mind: the nonarbitrariness of the sign” (14) but, rather, to forget that “truth” is also relativized by the arbitrariness of the sign, so that the supposed “solidity” of the referent disappears. To the poststructuralist, the signifying process itself involves this predicament: the sign can only find its meaning by becoming other to itself; that is, by locating its match not in a world of referents (the “nomenclature” theory of signs that Saussure dismisses) but in a new signifier for the same signified. For such reasons, “the nation’s totality is confronted with, and crossed by, a supplementary movement in writing,” as Bhabha succinctly puts it. “The heterogeneous structure of Derridean supplementarity in writing closely follows the agonistic, ambivalent movement between the pedagogical and performative that informs the nation’s narrative address” (Location 154). For language itself is split by the doubleness of signifier and signified, just as the time of modernity is split or doubled by the intuition of archaic time. But the word is re-doubled by supplements it requires in order to define itself; for the word is never identical to itself but, rather, finds its identity only in the addition of a supplement that is also a supplanting, or a displacement, of the original term. “In the separation of language and reality – in the process of signification – there is no epistemological equivalence of subject and object, no possibility of the mimesis of meaning … Anderson misses the alienating and iterative time of the sign” (158–9). While “the space of the arbitrary sign, its separation of language and reality,” may still enable “Anderson to emphasize the imaginary or mythical nature of the society of the nation” (158), this imaginary identity can hardly achieve the sociological solidity that Anderson thinks it can. For, if displacement is the real basis of language, then how is it possible for fixed borders and settled peoples to form the basis of a national imaginary? To Bhabha, the only alternative is to construct “counter-narratives of the nation that continually evoke and erase its totalizing boundaries – both actual and conceptual” (149). Evidently the purpose of this counter-discourse is still pedagogical; only now, it serves to teach readers that the nation is not a closed construct and that cultural identity is subject to infinite slippage. Given his view of language, Bhabha is unwilling to see the novel as a reflector of national identity, dividing all those on the inside from all those on the outside. To the contrary, “once the liminality of the nation-space is established, and its signifying difference is turned

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from the boundary ‘outside’ to its finitude ‘within,’ the threat of cultural difference is no longer a problem of ‘other’ people. It becomes a question of otherness of the people-as-one” (150). To him, the task of the postcolonial novel is not to forge exclusive bonds of identity but to teach the “self” how to contain the “other,” so that the “barred Nation It/Self” may be re-figured as “a liminal signifying space that is internally marked by the discourses of minorities, the heterogeneous histories of contending peoples, antagonistic authorities and tense locations of cultural difference” (148). Of course, by now this is a familiar story: the promised withering of the State at the beginning of the Marxist millennium. And yet Bhabha’s portrait of “Marx’s reserve army of migrant labour who by speaking the foreignness of language split the patriotic voice of unisonance” also requires a moral centre to express sympathy for migrant armies forced to “articulate the death-in-life of the idea of the ‘imagined community’ of the nation, the worn-out metaphors of the resplendent national life now circulat[ing] in another narrative of entry-permits and passports and work-permits that at once preserve and proliferate, bind and breach the human rights of the nation” (164). To Bhabha, the cosmopolitan, the nation would appear to stand in the way of realizing our universal humanity. Ironically, however, Bhabha enacts another form of the dispossession he abhors by making linguistic displacement the political norm. For if it is the nature of words to be displaced or supplanted endlessly, then why is it not the nature of people? In other words, a poststructural theory of language strains against an ethical theory of human rights. Nor is there much in Bhabha’s anti-historicist method (which is meant to unsettle history as the prevailing norm) to justify a normative theory of rights. To read his methodological premise against his political conclusion is really to deconstruct his whole theory: “The discourse of nationalism is not my main concern. In some ways it is the historical certainty and settled nature of that term against which I am attempting to write of the Western nation as an obscure and ubiquitous form of living the locality of culture” (140). While the postcolonial critic tries to honour the methods of poststructuralism – to unsettle what appears to be settled (however problematically), and to destabilize a structure of power without reversing or appropriating it – there is still something of a slip between the cup and the lip. “In proposing this cultural construction of nationness … I do not wish to deny these categories their specific histories and particular meanings within different political languages” (140). Yet the need “to displace the historicism that has dominated discussions of the nation as a cultural force” (140) slides helplessly into another project.

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For the “intellectual uncertainty” that was supposed to be, in fact, a product of the “ambivalent temporalities of the nation-space” (142) turns out to be a means by which “the archaic emerges in the midst of margins of modernity” (143). In other words, to unleash the power of the “archaic” against modernity, Bhabha has first to produce the effect of uncertainty, then call it a cause. Such “archaic” time does not even exist in its own right – erupting out of nowhere to fissure the uniform surface of modernity – but is manufactured by the critic in order to “haunt” the present time, which the novel celebrates in opposition to the “walled-off” world of epic’s remembered world of the past. Therefore, the “structure of ambivalence that constitutes modern social authority” (146) turns out to be an invention that is necessary to constitute the postcolonial critic’s authority. The effect is made a cause in order to render uncertain what would otherwise be a “historical certainty” (140). Something like this also appears in Bhabha’s contradictory use of linguistic theory. For, in “the inexorable movement of signification that both constitutes the exorbitant image of power and deprives it of the certainty and stability of centre or closure” (147), he hopes to find a means to destabilize the nation. On the other hand, he resorts to a sociological solidity in language to make us feel the alienation in “gatherings of exiles and emigrés and refugees; gathering on the edge of ‘foreign’ cultures; gathering at the frontiers; gatherings in the ghettos or cafés of city centres; gathering in the half-life, half-light of foreign tongues, or in the uncanny fluency of another’s language” (139). While there is always an “elsewhere” of place and time and language posited in these gatherings, a painful “elsewhere” is still visible in the plight of the Turkish worker in Germany whose “migration is like an event in a dream dreamt by another,” reduced as he must be to watching “the gestures made and learn[ing] to imitate them … [T]he repetition by which gesture is laid upon gesture, precisely but inexorably, the pile of gestures being stacked minute by minute, hour by hour is exhausting. The rate of work allows no time to prepare for the gesture. The body loses its mind in the gesture. How opaque the disguise of words” (165). And yet the point of this extended quotation from John Berger is not opaque at all; Bhabha’s citation gains its force from the imagined apprehension of its suffering referent, from the impossible possibility of the Turkish Gastarbeiter having to imitate in an unknown language the meanings and gestures of a foreign culture. Bhabha, no less than Anderson, wants it both ways in writing of “culture’s transnational dissemination” (170). The only difference appears in the sign that each erects at his frontier. For Anderson, the sign reads, you are entering a nationally imagined commu-

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nity, whereas for Bhabha the sign reads, you are entering a globally imagined community. The reasons for such differing outlooks may simply be due to differing “locations of culture.” One theorist writes “from the perspective of the nation’s margin and the migrants’ exile” (Bhabha, Location 139) about a history and a culture that threaten to exclude him, if not to “convert” him by a process of “naturalization.” The other writes from the deeply settled perspective of a culture born of separation from Europe, which allows him to speak as the “natural” scion (or heir) of a “radically changed form of consciousness” (Anderson xiv). Such variance in the histories and cultures of each theorist should be enough to explain the incongruous communities imagined by each. And yet there may be a better explanation for this clash of nationalism and cosmopolitanism. As we shall see in the next chapter, it has as much to do with Anderson’s investment in a singular medium (print, or print-capitalism) as it has to do with Bhabha’s doubt about the ability of writing to represent the “truth” of the world – an antirepresentationalism and an anti-foundationalism that, taken together, make up the new epistemology of electronic culture.

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3 The Mode of Communication

How do changes in the mode of communication alter the modes of belonging to types of imagined communities? How might the shift from an oral-manuscript culture to a culture of the book help to account for a folk-society mutating into a nation-state? What about our ongoing shift from the spatial boundedness of the book to cybercommunication and its space of flows? Would it favour or threaten the nationally imagined community? Benedict Anderson, the leading exponent of print-capitalism’s role in the origin of nationalism, fails even to raise the latter question. Rather, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Empire, he writes: “It is melancholy consolation to observe that history seems to be bearing out the ‘logic’ of Imagined Communities better than its author managed to do” (Anderson xi). From Anderson’s perspective, the logic of international Marxism failed to reckon with the mode of communication that has favoured the growth of a nationalist consciousness out of print-formed apprehensions of shared time and space. In other words, the form of communications inevitably trumps its ideological content. From a postcolonial and poststructural perspective, however, the logic of Anderson’s argument would appear to essentialize both print and the nation. What essence would ever inform the sliding signifiers of language, or what reflection of solid realties could exist in a medium so inherently unstable as language, whose nature must limit it (or liberate it) to a series of reflections set within an oblique bank of mirrors? To someone like Bhabha, Anderson is simply an apologist for the political and pedagogical functions of national writing, by which elite groups empower themselves in order to create the “nation” in their own image, promulgating specific ideologies of exclusion. If the nation is a fiction in Bhabha’s postcolonial reading of it, then it is a fiction veiling the true machinations of power.

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Such a voluntarist view of the nation as a construct of social elites finds support in at least one comparative study of literary canon formation. Sarah Corse, a cultural sociologist who starts from Anderson’s premise about imagined communities, sees nothing in the medium of print per se to explain its imaginative power; rather, what emerges from her “analysis of canonical literatures” is more “informative about the relationship between high culture and elite visions and preoccupations” than it is about “the relationship between literature and ‘the people› (Corse 17). The “politics of culture” in Canada and the United States shows how the historical timing of canon formation in each nation produced markedly different preoccupations of elites in each period. “American canonical novels,” Corse argues, “feature protagonists without families because the concept of the self as determined by family of origin already existed as a meaningful narrative, and one whose rejection was a meaningful way of distinguishing the United States from Britain” (157). Such a political reading challenges Leslie Fiedler’s comic, if totally androcentric, version of the Frontier myth of American culture, where Natty and Chingachgook, Ishmael and Queequeg, and Huck and Jim all “light out for the territories” in order to escape women and the discontents of civilized life (211). The tendentiousness of Fiedler’s pop-psychologizing of American culture pales, however, beside the political tendentiousness of nineteenth-century American elites seeking to distinguish “the intrepid and rugged pioneer” from “the pampered and effete aristocrat who symbolized a vitiated and hierarchical Britain” (Corse 158). Conversely, the one-century delay of the formation of a Canadian literary canon would establish the American canon as a “norm” against which Canadian cultural identity had to be constructed. No wonder, then, that “families are very clearly more important in Canadian canonical literature than in American literature,” for Canadian national identity “was – and is – constructed in counterpoint to myths of American independence and individualism. In the process of Canadian nation-building there was a clear rejection of American notions of a pure market, of pure freedom, of pure, rampant individualism” (81, 78). That is why female experience, female protagonists, and female authors are represented in the Canadian canon in a way that is largely foreign to how they are represented in the American literary canon. According to Corse, however, such differences are not truly reflective of cultural difference. A comparison of Canadian and American bestsellers and prize-winning novels reduces cross-national differences among prize winners, while bestsellers point to a virtual reversal of cultural values in each country’s popular writing. Since

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canonical literature, as Corse insists, “is driven by differentiation and chosen in opposition to the ‘other› (128), it upsets basic assumptions of reflection theory about cultural difference. Although Canadian prize winners tend to have a high incidence of non- or new-Canadian protagonists, and American citizenship and identity are taken for granted in Pulitzer and National Book Award winners, these differences say less about naturally fluid identities in Canadian texts than they do about the political fashionings of multiculturalism. Conversely, there is actually more concern in American prize winners than in their Canadian counterparts for values of family, affiliation, and connectedness, leading Corse to conclude that “the national distinctiveness of familial significance in the canonical novels is not paralleled in the literary prize winners” (117). Most telling, however, are sharp reversals of canonical values in popular writing. Canadian-authored bestsellers, for example, are strongly biased towards male protagonists, towards themes of rebellion, and towards values conflicting with “official” norms of gender equality, respect for tradition, familial dependence, and so on, whereas American popular literature is almost twice as likely as are canonical novels to include female authors and values of familial dependence and affiliation. In other words, “the cross-national differences that do exist” in the bestsellers of both nations “are often the opposite of the differences that exist between the high-culture novels” (145). It is then fair to conclude that popular taste reflects more similarity than difference in the two societies and that national identity may be less a reflection of natural difference than of political choice about what national face to present to the world. The evidence of cultural politics certainly weakens the old assumption “that literature comes in national units” (MacLulich 21), just as cultural history has undermined the German “romantic idea that humanity was naturally divided into separate units or nations, each unified by a common language and culture” (16). While it may be fair to say that “academic interest in the collection of folk-tales and other folklore can be traced to the nationalistic desire to recover the Volksgeist,” it would be naive to accept the latter as the “true spirit of the nation” (22). For “the canon,” as Corse succinctly puts it, “is chosen, not born” (9). But does this have to mean that the deep sense of belonging, which so often accompanies cultural production, is nothing more than the political will of a state-elite to impose its cultural agenda? Or are we up against another version of the impasse of Hobsbawm’s and/or Bhabha’s political exegeses (see Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, respectively), which refuse to see any power in cultural forms beyond the instrumental power of political rationality? Why,

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when readers are quite willing to suspend their natural disbelief, must literary nationalism be reduced to one more means of securing and manipulating mass support? Are there, in fact, residual properties in the medium that would explain why so many of us are prepared to believe that our fictions make us real? Anderson reminds us “that nationalism has to be understood by aligning it, not with self-consciously held political ideologies, but with the large cultural systems that preceded it, out of which – as well as against which – it came into being” (12). These cultural systems – the religiously and monarchically imagined community – are both identified with a deep human need “to turn chance into destiny” (12), or to feel “intimations of immortality” (11). What Anderson recognizes, for example, in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is a graphic instance of the ability of nationally imagined communities to transform anonymity into collective identity, to create out of the utter loss of identity an image of enduring continuity. “With Debray we might say, ‘Yes, it is quite accidental that I am born French; but after all, France is eternal› (Anderson 12). Without such a response to the fact of death, the nation would not have the political power it appears to exercise as a right of nature. And yet what is there in the medium itself that would sustain this illusion? Anderson suggests that print redefines the role of previous cultural systems. “The astonishing power of the papacy in its noonday is only comprehensible in terms of a trans-European Latin-writing clerisy, and a conception of the world, shared by virtually everyone, that the bilingual intelligentsia, by mediating between vernacular and Latin, mediated between earth and heaven” (15–6). In other words, the whole communications system of medieval cosmology was based on the primacy of an intermediary, in much the same way that Christian theology depended on the role of a mediator between humanity and the godhead. And yet no one foresaw how print would early on usurp the role of the Church in mediating between chance and destiny. “One particular cardinal, Nicholas of Cusa, referred to the printing press as a ‘divine art’ because of the way that the technology would enable poor priests who would otherwise be unable to afford Bibles to have access to cheaper, mass-produced versions” (Deibert 69). Nor did James I of England, “the wisest fool in Christendom,” sense the redundancy of royal intermediaries publishing their own scholarly treatises in the new medium – much to the chagrin of his son, Charles I, who was tried and found wanting in Milton’s printed treatise, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649). Here, in fact, was the real revolution underlying most other changes in early modern political formations: print, whose inherent property was to make

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oral-personal forms of mediation redundant, laid the groundwork for an anti-hierarchical cosmology. Support for this cultural notion of “a radically changed form of consciousness” (Anderson xiv) in the rise of nationalism comes from an unlikely source, a political theorist. Ronald J. Deibert, who has studied the role of “communication in World Order Transformation” in his Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia (1997), finds a precedent for reading current changes in state organization in several parallels with “the medieval to modern world order transformation” (45), ending in the nation-state. In general, Deibert maintains that “changes in modes of communication – such as the shift from primitive orality to writing or the shift from print to electronic communications – have an important effect on the trajectory of social evolution and the values and beliefs of societies” (6). More particularly, he shows how “printing helped to displace ‘the mediating and intercessionary role of the clergy, and even of the Church itself, by providing a new channel of communication linking Christians to their God› (74). In other words, “the form itself” of printing was “a direct challenge to the Church hierarchy whose power rested on performing an intermediary function between the vernacular and sacred Latin scripts” (72). While Deibert is careful not to make print an active agent of social and political change, he does show how “social forces and ideas survive differentially according to their ‘fitness’ or match with the new media environment – a process that is both open-ended and contingent” (36). The inherent difficulty of such a view is that it requires an evolutionary time scale to demonstrate the scale and direction of social change. Its benefit is that it allows for “the ‘fitness’ between elements of social epistemology and a new communications environment” to be viewed as “largely an inter-generational as opposed to an intrapsychic process” (35), thus avoiding the twin pitfalls of reductionism and technological determinism. What Deibert recognizes is that, in addition to benefiting Protestant Reformers and “scientific humanists,” as well as disadvantaging the Roman Catholic Church, printing “favored the widespread use of what might be called social abstractions – bills of sale, deeds, court records, licenses, contracts, constitutions, decrees – that are the essence of modern contractarian societies” (83). The growth of social abstractions thus helped to undercut personalized and overlapping forms of rule typical of medieval society, even as they increased the power of the urban bourgeoisie with its vested interest in standardized laws, currencies, and weights and measures. “Certainly, the oral-manuscript culture of medieval Europe placed significant obstacles in the path of capitalist development. Once that

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environment changed, however, a complex system of contractarian socioeconomic relations began to thrive” (85). So did an emerging system of centralized bureaucracy with its uniform procedures and homogenizing culture. At the same time, “the mental equipment that people drew upon in imagining and symbolizing forms of community itself underwent fundamental change” (John Ruggie, cited in Deibert 94). Several specific changes in what Deibert calls “social epistemology” now enabled people to rethink what, only a few decades ago, had appeared to be the natural order of things. Changes in “the way ‘the self’ is conceived, the way space is ordered, and the way group identities are imagined” were absolutely “crucial in providing what might be called the ‘metaphysical underpinnings’ of world order” (Deibert 36) in the shift from medieval to modern forms of political authority. Deibert has space to explore only the changes affecting “individual identities, spatial biases, and imagined communities” (36). About the first of these, he notes that “printing favored the distinctly modern idea of the sovereign voice, the single, author(itative) individual” (98). While Deibert does not say so, the book also tended to underwrite the Cartesian idea of self-sufficient reason and the Lockean notion of the mind as a tabula rasa, or clean slate, upon which images appeared through the sensory aperture of a mental camera obscura. This image of closure, of the printed book excluding other voices and authors from its margins (in marked contrast to the parchment manuscript) fed a growing sense of the self as being simultaneously closed and stable, contained and centred, continuous and enduring. Socially, then, as well as psychologically, “the mass production of printed material favored newly circulating notions of authorship, copyright, and individual subjectivity, while the portability of printed books facilitated the trend toward silent, private reading and intellectual isolation and reflection” (100). Of a distinctively modern “movement toward more rigid, linear demarcations of political space,” Deibert notes that “one reason why this spatial bias resonated so strongly was that it ‘fit’ the surface form and presentation of printing – especially its visual bias and linear representation” (101). Echoing McLuhan’s discussion in The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) of typographic space and single-point perspective, Deibert adds that “the sheer number of printed maps circulating (particularly in standardized school texts) gradually accustomed Europeans to visual, grid-like representations of political order, to sharpen divisions between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders.’ Through their standardization and reproduction, they helped infuse a sense of order and fixity to national borders” (102–3). In addition, justified margins, “ruled lines and standardized roman lettering,” as well as several “innovations new to the

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printed text, such as alphabetical ordering, sectional divisions, and indexes[,] further complemented an abstract, rational cognitive orientation favoring uniform spatial order and linearity” (103). Deibert’s affinity for Anderson’s view of nationness as a cultural production is most clear in his view of the changing fundamentals of imagined communities. Like Anderson, he regards print as a medium that worked to displace the mediatorial function of a bilingual clergy, not only arresting the “linguistic drift” (106) of vernaculars in standardized visual form but also fusing “the idea of a distinct national language with a sense of common identity” (104). Deibert also points out that, “unlike Gellner” or Hobsbawm, “Anderson places less emphasis on overt manufacturing of national identities by state elites, and more on the convergence of a number of largely contingent variables” (107). His own view of nationalism as a contingent form of culture is just as open to a multiplicity of variables that, like the process of “natural” selection in biology, depends upon the “fit” of cultural factors with the communications environment. So, for example, the newspaper is no more simply an instrument of political elites to Deibert than it is to Anderson since it “provides a sense of shared national experiences, with each communicant aware that the same reading experience is undertaken simultaneously with thousands, perhaps millions of others with whom s/he has had no personal contact” (Deibert 108). Where Deibert differs from Anderson, however, is in his sense of how a recent shift in the mode of communication has begun to alter our conceptions of political space. One portentous example concerns “on-line ‘personalized’ newspapers, which allow users to access sidebar stories or tangentially related news items and video clips at their own discretion. The result is a completely different news experience for each individual user” (Deibert 197). The effect on nationally imagined forms of community is incalculable. For what sense of “nationality” is going to be communicated by an Internet journal whose “metaphysical underpinnings” no longer include single-point perspective (based on place of publication), mass consumption (based on common contents), and shared ritual (based on a formally identical experience)? This commonality of the “daily” experience is likely to become a primary casualty of tailor-made communications. However, apart from times of revolutionary war or of anti-colonial struggles for independence, how national had the newspaper ever been with regard to its metaphysical underpinnings? Did local publication, local contents, and local distribution not tend from the outset to favour a regionalist over a nationalist consciousness? Anderson and Deibert’s assumption is less convincing viewed in the light of

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later journalistic struggles for responsible government in nineteenthcentury British North America. Sixty years after the American Revolution, in which Ben Franklin and other “provincial creole printmen played the decisive historic role” (Anderson 65), another battle was waged in Nova Scotia (the forgotten Fourteenth Colony) for a cabinet government responsible to a locally elected legislature. In 1848 a brilliant journalist named Joseph Howe finally succeeded in gaining local autonomy for Nova Scotia. But in 1864 Howe would spurn the Quebec Resolutions of a new political elite, which called for the union of the British colonies of North America. To Howe, as to a majority of journalists throughout the four maritime colonies, the plan was meant to save (or benefit) the united Province of Canada and, perhaps, to inflate the imperial imaginings of a few local elites. The fascinating subplot of Peter Waite’s history of The Life and Times of Confederation, 1864–1867 (1962) turns on the story of the printer and merchant opposition to Confederation that arose in the four Atlantic colonies. While a majority of newspapers in Canada West (Ontario) and Canada East (Quebec) staunchly supported union, a substantial minority did not. And this centralist, centralizing majority diminished quite rapidly the farther one travelled down the St. Lawrence and through the Gulf to the eastern seaboard. A far-flung geography and a staunchly regional press could well have made these colonies more like those seeking independence from the Spanish-American Empire. That is, given a loosening of the ties of empire, the history and geography of the British colonies ought to have favoured local “nations” rather than us-style continental union. For, “until shortly before they came together in Confederation, the British North American provinces lived in separate worlds, and it is, therefore, impossible to furnish them with a common history. None of the colonies was further removed from the Canadas than Nova Scotia, not even the islands Prince Edward and Newfoundland. The only bond between the colonies which remained British after the Revolution was the adjective: they were ‘British› (Lower 103). Even common British allegiance did not make them socially equivalent. Differing origins of settlement, of religious affiliation and social institutions, and of economic outlook only served to keep them far apart. At the same time, the press of the Lower (Atlantic) colonies ignored most news from the United Province of Canada, apart from lurid bits concerning two rebellions of 1837 and 1838; mob riot and burning (by Tories) of the parliament buildings in Montreal in 1849; and one memorable valediction (involving rotten eggs) for a departing governor. “As for Canadians, their ignorance of the Maritimes was proverbial. In Fredericton McGee amused his audience with the story of the

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Canadian who, asked where the river Styx was, replied it was somewhere in New Brunswick” (Waite 17). As might be expected, a lack of maps (and a map-formed consciousness) was a major obstacle to unity in the British North American colonies. But McGee also “remarked that when he became President of the Council the Canadian Cabinet had no Maritime newspapers on hand except an old file of the Nova Scotian” (Waite 16). Since local newspapers tended to slight news from away, unless it was about the mother country or the go-getting States (later the “Disunited States,” as one Halifax newspaper called them), it took something momentous – a threatened dissolution of the union of French and English in the Province of Canada – to bring about a change in the status quo. In the spring of 1864 the Canadian Reform leader George Brown grudgingly allied himself with the hated Tories of John A. Macdonald and les Bleus of George-Étienne Cartier to promote the cause of Confederation in his paper, the Toronto Globe, which, at the time, was “the largest daily in British North America, boasting a circulation of 28,000, more than twice that of the next major daily in the colonies, the Saint John Morning Telegraph” (Waite 7). Two months later, Brown of the Globe and D’Arcy McGee of the Montreal New Era travelled with six other Canadian ministers to Charlottetown to sell a vision of union to the likes of Nova Scotia premier Charles Tupper – who “admitted that he wrote ‘almost all the political leaders in the British Colonist from 1855 to 1870› (Waite 9) – W.H. Pope of the Charlottetown Islander, and Jonathan McCully of the Halifax Morning Chronicle. But if journalists formed a cadre of nationalist elites at Charlottetown and again at Quebec the following month, then they were the exception to the rule, which was that antiConfederate newspapers in the Maritimes, especially those outside the capital cities of each colony, would throw a monkey-wrench into the national dream. In New Brunswick, they would even topple the government of Leonard Tilley, causing a resolution in favour of Confederation to be delayed for two years before being put before the colonial legislatures of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. In the meantime, the print-opposition in Prince Edward Island managed to keep that tiny island out of union until 1873; and in Newfoundland it killed several attempts at Confederation until, finally, in 1948 two divisive referendum campaigns led to union with Canada the following year. Given the vast distances and natural obstacles to communication in British North America, together with a notably provincial character in most of its communications, it is safe to say that a national consciousness was not the primary effect of newspaper writing in the colonies that eventually became Canada.

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While Harold Adams Innis, the Canadian economic historian who pioneered communications theory at the University of Toronto, managed to keep such dirty laundry out of The Bias of Communication (1951), it is clear that the history of his own nation would support his general conclusion: “The printing industry had been characterized by decentralization and regionalism such as had marked the division of the Western world in nationalism and the division and instability incidental to regions within nations” (82). For the Confederation debates of 1864–66 reveal a preference, in the form and distribution of newspapers, for locally imagined, not nationally imagined, communities. Innis, however, did not try to hide the fragmenting effects of us newspapers: “The revolt of the American colonies, division between north and south, and extension westward of the United States have been to an important extent a result of the spread of the printing industry. In the British Empire the growth of autonomy and independence among members of the Commonwealth may be attributed in part to the same development” (77). In name, in content, in production, and in distribution, the newspaper would indeed seem to favour local bonds of affection. Of this eventuality, Anderson notes that, “even in the USA, the affective bonds of nationalism were elastic enough, combined with the rapid expansion of the western frontier and the contradictions generated between the economies of North and South, to precipitate a war of secession almost a century after the Declaration of Independence” (64). But of the role of the newspaper in “imagining” the Confederate States of America he has nothing to say, turning only briefly to the civil wars “that tore Venezuela and Ecuador off from Gran Colombia, and Uruguay and Paraguay from the United Provinces of the Rio de la Plata” (64). But Innis takes this theme of resistance to centralized communications and elevates it to a formal principle: “The printing press and the inventions associated with it, including the development of illustrations, were directed to communication through the eye. It involved an emphasis on regionalism, and decentralization and was adapted to control over vast areas. It was concerned with the destruction of time and continuity. Competition from the new medium, the radio, involved an appeal to the ear rather than to the eye and consequently an emphasis on centralization” (Bias 187–8). Innis, who fought in the Great War before becoming a student of history, saw the 1940 collapse of France as a consequence of change in the mode of communication: “The rise of Hitler to power was facilitated by the use of the loud speaker and the radio … Political boundaries related to the demands of the printing industry disappeared with the new instrument of communication. The spoken language

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provided a new base for the exploitation of nationalism and a far more effective device for appealing to larger numbers” (Bias 80). Setting out to explore the relation between “empire and communications,” Innis had “by 1945 … completed a 1000-page manuscript on the history of communications from which he drew his startling and exploratory essays on the ways in which various technologies of communication biased the cultures in which they were embedded” (Berger 187). His enabling assumption – which still informs the work of followers such as Deibert and myself – was “that the available media of communications strongly influenced the social organization, institutions, and cultural characteristics of society” (Berger 188). So, for example, rivers, one of the earliest systems of communication, helped to shape centralized civilizations. The very difficulty of transporting clay and stone, which were the material media of cuneiform and hieroglyphics, supported centralized bureaucracies and hierarchical temple structures. Papyrus, on the other hand, together with the alphabet, allowed for a diffusion of power and for decentralized bureaucracies that greatly extended the range of political empire in space. But “Innis was very conscious of the hidden and revolutionary effects of the supercession of one medium of communication by another; the loss to the Roman Empire, for example, of its source of supply of papyrus and the supercession of papyrus by parchment subjected that empire to stress and structural change” (Patterson 33). To Innis, the reason changes in the mode of information produced disturbance was that each medium inevitably biased a culture towards time or space. “A concern with communication by the ear assumes reliance on time,” whereas “the bias of paper and printing has persisted in a concern with space” (Innis, Bias 106, 76). Thus, there is a “tendency of each medium of communication to create monopolies of knowledge” (Innis, Empire 141). So, for example, the durability of parchment, a “product of a widely scattered agricultural economy suited to the demands of a decentralized administration and to land transportation,” was adapted in rural monasteries to the problem of time, contributing to “the development of a powerful ecclesiastical organization in western Europe” (140, 149). And yet this same “monopoly over time stimulated competitive elements in the organization of space. The introduction of paper from China to Baghdad and to Cordova and to Italy and France contributed to the development of cursive writing and to the organization of space in relation to the vernaculars” (Innis, Bias 124). Subsequently, the printing press “emphasized vernaculars and divisions between states based on language without implying a concern with time” (76). Only in the

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twentieth century has a lasting “bias of paper towards an emphasis on space and its monopolies of knowledge … been checked by the development of a new medium, the radio” (Innis, Empire 216). Axiomatically, the terrible “disturbances which have characterized a shift from a culture dominated by one form of communication to another culture dominated by another form of communication[,] whether in the campaigns of Alexander, the Thirty Years’ War, or the wars of the present century[,] point to the costs of cultural change” (Innis, Bias 141). The rise of global warfare in our era likely points to the costs of media change. As Innis sees it, “The Second World War became to an important extent the result of a clash between the newspaper and the radio” (Empire 209). But any new medium would upset a civilization’s balance as much economically and politically as socially and psychologically. And Innis, who came of age in the era of Empire, wanted to preserve this balance by maintaining equilibrium between printed methods of communication based on the eye and electronic methods of communication based on the ear. Although the sum of his wisdom was not that radio centralizes while print decentralizes, he invariably argued that “shifts to new media of communication have been characterized by profound disturbances” (Innis, Bias 188). In the emergence of the telegraph, he located one such “disturbance” that seemed to lead to the American Civil War. Since the “telegraph compelled newspapers to pool their efforts in collecting and transmitting news,” it “weakened the system of political control through the post office and the newspaper exchange. The monopoly over news was destroyed and the regional daily press escaped from the dominance of the political and the metropolitan press” (168–9). The rapid spread of telegraphy after 1844, with its inescapable effect on local newspapers, contributed to the fragmentation of opinion in the United States. But when “increased demands for paper during the Civil War hastened the development of substitutes for rags” (172), both the technology and the corporate structure of newspapers were changed out of all recognition. Now the development of wood pulp and the machine manufacture of newsprint forced the development of new printing methods such as linotype, greatly increasing the circulation and advertising revenues of the great metropolitan dailies and necessitating a new form of marketing in department stores (174). Henceforth, competition between rival news-gathering agencies (United Press, Associated Press) hastened the centralization of an economy based on machine production. “In actively supporting a policy of holding down the price of newsprint and of increasing

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production, newspapers favoured a marked extension of advertising. The economy became biased toward the mass production of goods which had a rapid turnover and an efficient distributing system” (186–7). Machine production of newsprint and newspapers only hastened the growth of national corporations, in turn spurring further centralization: “The monopoly of communication built up over a long period in the newspaper invited competition from other media. Freedom of the press had been an essential ingredient of the monopoly for it obscured monopolistic tendencies. Technological inventions were developed and adapted to the conservative traditions of monopolies of communication with consequent disturbances to public opinion and to political organization” (187). While Ronald Deibert acknowledges the danger in Innis’s theory of “a kind of cyclical determinism, whereby history is viewed as having a master logic that manifests itself in the unending rise and fall of civilizations” (24–5), he chooses to highlight that it is how technologies are introduced that determines which of their “potentialities for control” (25) can be realized. At the same time, Deibert follows Anderson in remarking the decisive impact of “creole printmen” on the formation of a nationalist consciousness. His method, however, stays close to that of Innis (when commenting on the newspaper industry) since he reads the effects of new technologies less in terms of their “essential” properties than in terms of their “social embeddedness,” or “the historical and social context in which technologies are introduced” (Deibert 29). For what we have really seen in Innis’s history of the newspaper industry is more than a qualification of the claim that newspapers form a basis for nationalist consciousness. We have seen an implicit demonstration of Deibert’s idea that the context within which new media are introduced can and will distort some of the medium’s potential. In other words, newspapers don’t make nations; people do. And yet these same forms of imagined community are invariably mediated through a wide variety of circumstances particular to each time and place. One instance of “social embeddedness” in gauging the effects of change in the mode of communication appears in the introduction of local novels in the 1840s to the French-speaking colony of Lower Canada. After the failed rebellions of 1837–38, the British Colonial Office sent Lord Durham out to both Canadas to report on their political state. What Durham had to say speaks volumes about two opposing worldviews, not just those of the British aristocrat and a conquered people proudly conscious of their distinct identity but also those of today’s federalists and Quebec separatists. In 1839 Durham wrote that French Canadians “are a people with no history,

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and no literature. The literature of England is written in a language which is not theirs; and the only literature which their language renders familiar to them, is that of a nation from which they have been separated by eighty years of a foreign rule, and still more by those changes which the Revolution and its consequences have wrought in the whole political, moral and social state of France” (Craig 150). And yet it would be misleading to say that “the death sentence Durham pronounced against French culture in North America was justified in the first instance by artistic criteria” (Conlogue 54). For the criteria were only remotely aesthetic; basically, they were criteria used to gauge the forms of media bridging chance and destiny, those symbolic forms by which a culture “imagines” itself. And to Durham, clerical mediation was evidently a retrogade element: “The apparent right which time and custom give to the maintenance of an ancient and respected institution cannot exist in a recently settled country, in which every thing is new” (Craig 97). To the imperialist from the metropole, the prerequisites of nationhood were such new media as history and literature. Durham was more impolitic, however, in remarking of Canadiens that “they remain an old and stationary society, in a new and progressive world. In all essentials, they are still French; but French in every respect dissimilar to those of France in the present day. They resemble rather the French of the provinces under the old regime” (Craig 28). Even today, the lordly aristocrat is frequently represented in Quebec street theatre “with snot dripping from his nose and a cudgel hidden in his top hat,” while the crowd bursts “into lively hissing and booing” (Conlogue 10). For Durham really did mean to pass a “death sentence” on the French language and culture by proposing the legislative union of the two colonies of Canada, in which the language of the minority (English) would be the language of government, and the French majority would be forced to assimilate. Despite his politics, Durham’s cultural judgment may bear an unnoticed connection with that of Hubert Guindon, the distinguished Quebec sociologist who, a century and a half after the fact, would write that, in 1837, “the Catholic hierarchy sided with the Crown, not with the rebels it proceeded to excommunicate” (Guindon 97), and so recovered in one fell swoop the political position it had lost at the Conquest. What Guindon, with the benefit of hindsight, sees is what Durham, without foresight, could not anticipate: a new political alliance between the Crown and the Church in Quebec that would “restore” the ancien regime. Rephrased in Anderson’s terms, the “religious community” of the Roman Catholic Church and the “dynastic realm” of the British monarchy formed an alliance to preserve a

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system of hierarchical mediation dating back to William the Conqueror – an alliance that, for several generations, effectively delayed what Deibert defines as a medieval-to-modern world order transformation in the colony of the St. Lawrence. The way Hubert Guindon sees it, “the full assumption of the nation by the Church in Quebec was … the consequence of its support of the Crown’s suppression of the national uprising of the patriotes in 1837. As Marcel Rioux brilliantly outlined, there ensued a period of conservative nationalism that lasted a full century” (105). Such an “assumption of the nation” extended quite fully into cultural production and mediation. “A formidable writer named François-Xavier Garneau had been provoked to answer Durham’s annihilating remarks by creating both a history and a literature in Quebec” (Conlogue 55). And yet, from the outset, this cultural movement was governed by clerical concerns. Meeting in the 1850s in a Quebec City bookshop run by the poet Octavie Crémazie, Garneau and the poet Louis Fréchette, as well as “Pierre-Joseph Olivier Chauveau, a future premier of Quebec and the author of the novel Charles Guérin,” would take direction from “the Abbé Henri-Raymond Casgrain, who, like most of the senior clergy of the Catholic Church, was taking a very great interest in this literary revival” (61). In Canada East (as it was known by that time), any other state of affairs was unimaginable. For, as Maurice Cagnon makes clear, “concurrent with British domination was the ascending, quasi-absolute power of the clergy, which regulated (i.e., formally, morally approved or condemned) virtually all artistic endeavors and considered the novel, in particular, as subversive and thus best reduced to hidebound conformity to Church teachings or else to total silence” (Cagnon 1). Even so, “François-Xavier Garneau’s Histoire du Canada (History of Canada), published in 1845, at last provided the seminal work for an entire generation of writers who were to elaborate a genuine FrenchCanadian literary tradition. These writers favored prose fiction of a decidedly nationalistic, patriotic nature” (Cagnon 8). Of course, nationalistic fervour and patriotic sentiment are no guarantee of aesthetic merit. But the crucial question to be asked is, how did such works contribute to the development of literary nationalism in Quebec? Here, two distinct bases for judgment appear. Ray Conlogue, an anglophone writer holding to an ideal of Quebec as “a Herderian society” (36), assumes that a people enjoying “an organic relationship with the territory in which it live[s]” will inevitably find this relationship “expressed even in its language” (35) as well as in its fiction. But Maurice Cagnon, a francophone critic holding to standards

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of “a personalized literature that would transcend the level of orthodox or historico-patriotic prose and explode the literary quietude demanded by the Church,” writes that any people subject to such thinking will not be able to embrace “a renewing aesthetics that would correspond to a new society and instead [would turn] toward the past as guarantor of self and society” (11). Divergent conceptions of nationalism underlie each critical position, differences that loom large in their varying descriptions of the so-called “roman du terroir,” a type of novel advocating rural values in isolated settings attended by an ever-present clergy. So, for example, in the first novel of this type, La terre paternelle (1846), “Patrice Lacombe tells the story,” remarks Conlogue, “of a family that sells its farm to an Englishman”: The son eventually buys back the farm, restoring both order and happiness. This plot was the first instance of a pattern which would be repeated in countless novels during the next 100 years. In these stories the French-Canadian countryside is an earthly paradise. Into this blessed place comes an Englishman, often a greedy and underhanded one; or else, as in the famous novel Jean Rivard (1862, reprinted 18 times) a new parish is founded from which English Protestants are excluded. A final variant is seen in the most famous roman du terroir of all, where Maria Chapdelaine (1914) resists the temptation to emigrate to the bright lights of the American city. Maria knows that life would be better there, but in a mystic vision she hears the “voice of Quebec” urging her to stay and make new children to ensure the survival of the French-Canadian people. (57)

By contrast, with regard to the subgenre of the roman du terroir, Cagnon remarks: The characters undergo, for all practical purposes, no psychological evolution. Of a piece, they stand as rigid monuments of good or evil, as vehicles for some doctrinal or ideological stance that the omnipresent author never hesitates to underscore in asides to the reader or in blunt statements concerning key ideas, characters’ conduct and attitudes, and sociopolitical situations which inform these texts … To compensate for this characterial rigidity, authors of the period render the action of their novels as complicated as possible, with stupendous feats and miraculous coincidences abounding in all of them. In truth, the technique did not so much compensate for as further add to the hidebound aspect of the works; unfortunately, the legacy of such novelistic inflexibility was to persist well into the following century. (9)

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While such judgments could not be more different, they do reflect something more than a conflict of aesthetic values. Cagnon, who appears to value the psychological novel and the cult of the individual more than does Conlogue, nonetheless identifies a source of reactionary politics in the roman du terroir. For the form belongs to a world that is still hierarchically mediated, where the modernizing power of the medium is pre-emptively neutralized by the Church, which, since the late Middle Ages, has been losing ground to printing and the novel. In fact, the hostility of the Church to the novel in nineteenth-century Canada virtually guaranteed that the social values implicit in the form – values of secularism, liberalism, literacy, non-conformity, privacy, social levelling – would not be allowed to weaken “the intermediary function that had buttressed the privileged social position assumed by the clergy” (Deibert 74). Instead, the clergy harnessed the new medium to the old wagon of hierarchical cosmology. In Cagnon’s words, the readers of the roman du terroir were thus forced to endure “the author’s omnipresence in an edificatory prose at the service of patriotic propaganda” (12). What such omniscience and omnipresence finally connote is the reassuring presence of an Author-God. Ultimately, the roman du terroir resists the world view of the novel and the nationalist mentality it supports by strategically retreating to older forms of imagined community. In such fictions, there clearly persists an old way of thinking – best termed “clerico-nationalism” (Guindon 105) – that effectively neutralizes the medium for a century to come. Here, society continues to be linked vertically through hierarchical social structures rather than horizontally through impersonal forms of print. What the example of the roman du terroir thus suggests is that even the novel (by this time the pre-eminent cultural form) is not immune to the effects of “social embeddedness.” For an older social force, bent on preserving the old pieties, could and did find a way to contain the basic “impiety of the novel form” (Bakhtin 59). Only in the wake of Quebec’s “so-called ‘Quiet Revolution’ of 1960,” and the sudden hemorrhaging of the Church’s power, was the form and content of Québécois fiction able to change. As Cagnon sees it: The novel, at last given its due importance and validity, emerges as one of the most potent tools for a people to act in full awareness of a colonial, Churchdominated past to be shed and of a new and different future to be created. Writers, be they novelists, poets, or essayists, regard the book as the medium for a confrontation, whatever guise it may take, between a society’s still possible death or its possible freedom and autonomy. A host of major novels

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since the “Quiet Revolution” appear thus to have at their heart a certain apocalyptic essence in the links they establish between writing and history in Quebec. (51)

At the same time, the rise of a new medium – television – would accelerate Quebec’s Quiet Revolution. In his history of television in Canada, Paul Rutherford offers statistics to show how “French Canadians were more avid fans of television, and especially made-inCanada television, than their fellow citizens” (458). The reason seems to be “that so much of Radio-Canada’s programming reflected what was unique in Quebec’s past and present. That’s why Radio-Canada earned the nickname ‘tribal medium› (459). This is not to say, as does McLuhan, that “electric technology” invariably “tribalizes” (Understanding 38) a population. As Rutherford shows, the preference in English Canada for foreign entertainment, as opposed to information, was anything but “tribal”: “Overall, in 1967, Anglos spent nearly three out of every four hours looking at foreign shows, while French Canadians spent just over an hour and a half. Both groups demonstrated a marked preference for their own news and current affairs, as well as for Canadian sportscasts” (Rutherford 141). But such cultural differences are hardly capable of regulation. Modern governments, mindful, perhaps, of what happened to the hegemony of the Church in the first century of printing, have long believed that the regulation of mass communications is the only way to preserve cultural sovereignty. The paradigm of “single-point/mass national broadcasting,” in its historic ability to allow “one person,” from a single point, to “reach a mass audience in an unprecedentedly short period of time” (Deibert 196, 70), even treats radio and television as an electronic extension of print. Nonetheless, Canadian regulators were powerless to curb the appetite of English-speaking audiences for American television. The demographic realities of a small population spread in a thin, 300-kilometre strip along a 5,000-kilometre border with the United States (a nation sharing the same language, geography, and diversity as English Canada, though with twelve times its population, resources, and capital) show why “Canadian-content regulations” for television have always been “something of an exercise in illusion” (Rutherford 107). For, given the increasing rates of flow of surface signals from border stations in the 1950s, from cable companies in the 1960s and 1970s, and from direct satellite broadcasting in the 1990s, the Board of Broadcast Governors (after 1968, the Canadian Radio-Television and Tele-communications Commission) has been able to do little more than slow the rate of fragmentation and

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“de-massification” of audiences. As early as 1967, “about half of the Canadian population could receive American signals directly, according to a crtc survey, and nearly 40 per cent of the people in the English-speaking provinces could receive three U.S. channels” (Rutherford 137). In short, English-Canadian television viewers have long been set like canaries in the coal mine of globalization. By contrast, both the demographics and geography of Quebec tend to protect it from an overwhelming flow of foreign signals. A “national” language distinct from the language of American television, a largely homogeneous culture settled farther from the border, and a compact geography have given Quebec certain advantages. But there are other cultural reasons, too, for “the Goldfarb poll of 1969,” which “learned that over two-thirds of Québecois preferred Canadian television to its American rival, whereas only one-quarter of Ontarians were so persuaded” (Rutherford 459). First and foremost was “the existence of a distinct sense of identity that could feed, and boost, an indigenous programming” (80) in Quebec. Second was the fact that, “right from the beginnings of popular journalism, back in the 1880s and 1890s, francophones had never taken quite as eagerly as anglophones to the dominance of the newspaper – or so circulation figures suggest” (459). The educational system run by the Church, as well as the cultural system represented by the roman du terroir, remained antithetical to urban life, even after rural parishes started packing up and moving to the cities. However, as public figures such as Gérard Pelletier and André Laurendeau were quick to see, television “challenged the very fundamentals of French-Canadian society. Pelletier emphasized how the onset of television meant the end of isolation, the constant and unstoppable invasion by the outside world of the home, the countryside, Quebec, and Canada” (Rutherford 21). A Trojan horse within the walls of traditional Quebec society, television also proved to be a winged horse relaying familiar images of family life, the domestic role of women, and “an optimistic portrayal of ‘ordinary life› (367). The lucky accident of a “dearth of francophone telefilms in the world-wide marketplace, largely because France was very slow off the mark in developing a popular, full-fledged television service” (361), also meant that Quebeckers, as usual, were left to shift for themselves. And shift they did in watching homegrown téléromans that English Canada could only envy – or else laugh at in a rather different way, once it was decided to carry “La famille Plouffe” in both languages on the cbc. For what struck anglophones as funny was a bizarre stereotype of French culture, while what struck francophones as funny was a bizarre stereotype of the traditional family (which had to be mocked out of countenance). The

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show thus reinforced traditional views in one society, while mocking traditional views in the other, spurring the rise of a modern “mentalité” in Quebec. “In the two big cities of Montreal and Quebec City the numbers of people using buses and trams noticeably slackened on a Wednesday between 8: 30 and 9: 00 when the show was broadcast. In the smaller towns, travelling salesmen found they couldn’t make any deals on a Wednesday evening” (365). Other long-running téléromans, such as “14 rue de Galais,” “Les belles histoires des pays d’en haut,” “Joie de vivre,” and “Filles d’Eve” had a similar effect as they “featured recognizable personalities from the past and present of Quebec’s society” (370), which helped to orient Quebeckers to the present. A mass audience thus emerged in Quebec – an audience worthy of the epithet “broadcasting.” The commonality of the audience, the commonality of its history, and a common, media-produced sense of its shared present (what Anderson refers to as simultaneity) combined to make television a medium of cultural revolution in Quebec. Rather than assuming “some visual bias on the part of French Canadians,” as does Rutherford, one ought to look to the iconoclasm of the medium itself for a better explanation of their “love affair with Canadian television” (459). For, as Rutherford concedes, “the images of life portrayed on television have done a lot to raise people’s expectations, to enhance resentment and sometimes pride, and to bring about the dissolution of the old order” (494). In the quiet of their own homes, dimly lit by the flickering tube, it seems that Quebeckers were already watching the Quiet Revolution both on and off their screens. The death of Maurice Duplessis and his authoritarian regime followed by the 1960 Liberal victory of Jean Lesage were two of the more dramatic images to appear. So was an unforgettable image of the empty pew: “It seems that in the course of the 1960s church attendance in the province dropped from well over 80% to 25%” (Hobsbawm 166). Most likely, then, Rutherford is too quick to conclude “that we are dealing with a failed revolution” in television (486). For it could hardly fail where it led in Quebec to the birth of a modern world. Even in English Canada, however, tv was the harbinger of cultural revolution. Rutherford misses this effect when he assumes that “broad” casting was the real message: The rise of private television, the emergence of new provincial channels and of pbs in the United States and of independent stations in Canada, the purchase of two or more sets per family, the spread of cable and satellite broadcasting, and eventually the appearance of pay television and most especially the vcr s in homes across the land undid that commonality. Increasingly

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people could watch, as individuals rather than in a family setting, programs that suited their own tastes and moods. The slow arrival of the new era of narrow casting might not lessen the import of television itself, but it certainly did mean that the mass sharing of the same messages once a part of the primetime experience no longer applied. (482)

The fact is that the “social embeddedness” of television – all the varying social and historical circumstances by which it was introduced to French and English Canada – made it an instant tool of modernization in Quebec and a gradual instrument of globalization in both societies. With hindsight provided to us by the information revolution, we can now see how the small screen always embodied a potential for transnational communications. For one of its most basic properties is flow – the flow of electrons through a tube, of an electrical signal through the air, through coaxial cable, through fibre-optic cable, through space. Unlike a newspaper or a book, it was never a respecter of borders. It always belonged to another paradigm, one that was and is intrinsically destabilizing to the nation-state. But a speed-up in the communications revolution is dispelling old illusions of “shared ‘public’ or ‘national’ information experiences characteristic of the ‘mass’ media age,” replacing “them with a bombardment of transnational, decentered, personalized ‘narrow-casting’ and two-way communications in the form of computer networks, video-on-demand, direct satellite broadcasting, and the so-called ‘500 channel universe› (Deibert 196). More significant than this revolutionary ability to send information two directions simultaneously over digital networks is the fact that every form of media – audio, text, graphics, and video – can now be carried simultaneously by means of digital translation, making cybernetic communications fully intertextual and fully interoperable. That is why “the truly revolutionary development – the one that has contributed to such exponential growth of the last few years – has been the emergence of the World Wide Web, which permits the integration of hypertextual links and multimedia in a single-platform” (133). For this revolutionary form of communications is reducing to a minimum the political resistance of borders and the traditional security of national jurisdictions. Designed to protect national security, the Internet has instead done the opposite. In an irony worthy of the old cardinal who referred to the “divine art” of the printing press, military planners in the United States intended to create a centreless system of communications so as to avoid meltdown by means of packet switching – a system built to disperse bytes of information through a myriad number of routes in order to escape a direct nuclear hit. What, in the wake of the Cold

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War, emerged instead was a communications paradigm that, since it was premised on open-endedness rather than on closure, overleaped old models of containment. By a law of unintended consequence, the World Wide Web thus became the antithesis of everything we thought we knew. The revolution it is bringing about in social epistemology, for example (not unlike the revolution the printing press wrought 500 years ago) is changing the way individual identity is conceived, the way space is arranged, and the way communities are imagined. First of all, “at the heart of postmodern social epistemology is a forceful reaction against modernist views of the ‘self’ and individual subjectivity” (Deibert 181). Superseding the model of a stable, unchanging (print) self with a continuous identity, a fixed centre, and a common core of human attributes, is now the image of a plural, fragmented, decentred self – a self that is almost like “an assemblage of its environment, a multiple self that changes in response to different social situations … A self [that] is … nothing more than ‘a network of beliefs, desires, and emotions with nothing behind it – no substrate behind the attributes› (181). This “depthless” self corresponds in many ways to an emerging spatial bias, whereby forms of pastiche and collage, and overlapping planes on a computer screen, give the user “a nonlinear and overlapping spatial orientation, featuring discontinuity and depthlessness” (187). Most of all, the anti-representational premise of virtual realities supports the sense of a “plurality of ‘worlds’ and multiple ‘realities,’ each of which is contingent on social constructions, or ‘language-games’ that constitute and orient the field of experience” (187). It is in fact this “virtual” epistemology that allows us to regard language, culture, and society as “constructs” rather than as “natural” entities. Overall, then, these same qualities of depthlessness and referencelessness support a spatial bias that “embraces discontinuity and juxtaposition, with mutable boundaries superimposed upon one another” (188). The political effects are obvious. Shifting boundaries of the self and of spatial objects tend to undermine other social and cultural formations as well. As Deibert defines it, “the postmodern imagined community is … hyperpluralistic and fragmented – the very antithesis of the modern mass community” (195). For, as we have seen in the case of on-line, tailor-made newspapers, the new hypermedia environment does not just “contribute to ‘de-massification’ through an increased diversity of choice among channels, it atomizes it altogether by the increasing ‘interactivity’ of the communications process itself” (197). Moreover, it converts the mass-national broadcasting paradigm into one of “multiple and overlapping ‘niche’ communities … by allowing two-way,

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unmediated, transnational communications among groups of individuals linked through computer networks” (197). Ultimately, we can expect to see the emergence of “virtual communities” based not on proximity or adjacency but on accessibility to the World Wide Web. In other words, “Nationalism, the visceral underpinning of modern world order, is giving way to nichelism – a polytheistic universe of multiple and overlapping fragmented communities above and below the sovereign nation-state” (198). What is really driving this change, as opposed to what makes it thinkable, is “a fundamental change in the nature and organization of production itself” (140). For the new communications environment enables “multilocational flexibility,” making it possible for corporations to cross “political boundaries to evade government regulations, or to search for cheap or specially skilled labor, low taxes, and other favorable regulatory climates” (141). The wired world of hypermedia has also made it possible to coordinate design and production with teams located thousands of miles apart. Such production can now be “keyed to the vagaries of local consumer tastes,” given a new corporate willingness “to accommodate local conditions: a strategy captured by the former head of Sony Akio Morito’s term ‘global localization› (144). Conversely, small, local firms are also able to reach a global market in a reverse instance of “local globalization,” a novel commercial opportunity that could not exist “on such a large scale without the low-cost, planetary reach afforded by hypermedia to the average individual-producer” (145). An even greater challenge to national boundaries and national economies is the total globalization of finance, where “an electronically networked, constantly circulating, nomadic ‘state,’ operat[es] 24 hours a day around the world” (153). This “space of flows,” as distinct from a “space of places” (155), is also changing national cities like Tokyo, London, and New York into “world cities – interfacial nodes in the global hypermedia environment” (154). So, “practices that have been taken for granted, such as a ‘national’ economic system, or a ‘national industry,’ or ‘international’ trade, are thrown into doubt as production disaggregates and diffuses across territorial boundaries … Similarly, preconceptions about the ‘domestic’ and the ‘international,’ about ‘inside’ and ‘outside,’ are strained by the constant flows of capital through cyber-spatial currents” (155). The net result of this loss of place to a “space of flows” is the loss of geographical and physical identity. For, inevitably, “disembedded electronic networks” (154) produce a “disembodied” sense of “virtual” worlds as being both “real” and “not-real.”

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However, perhaps the ultimate challenge to boundaries within a hypermedia environment appears within the body rather than within international or even interpersonal relations. As Donna Haraway sees it in “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1991), the “cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism” (149), discredits “all claims for an organic or natural standpoint” (157) since the old boundaries of human/animal, mind/matter, and organism/machine are now impossible to maintain. The figure of the cyborg offers potential liberation because the Western alibi of power has always been identification with nature, that “plot of original unity out of which difference must be produced and enlisted in a drama of escalating domination of woman/nature” (151). In a sense, the cyborg epitomizes digital communications because it is the product of “a common language in which all resistance to instrumental control disappears and all heterogeneity can be submitted to disassembly, reassembly, investment, and exchange” (164). Textualization into digital code then prepares the way for the re-engineering not merely of bodies and machines but also of the whole social order. And yet this “informatics of domination” (161) need not determine our social future: “If we learn how to read these webs of power and social life, we might learn new couplings, new coalitions” (170). By means of “cyborg politics” we might even learn how to recode “communication and intelligence to subvert command and control” (175). But cyborg politics also implies the globalization of politics, as individuals create new coalitions to challenge transnational organizations. In charting the social forces likely to flourish within a hypermedia environment, Deibert looks beyond “the transnationalization of production and the globalization of finance” (138) to the rise of what he calls “global civil society” as a counterweight to the “40,000 transnational corporations and their 250,000 foreign affiliates” that “now account for two-thirds of the world trade in goods and services” (147). Within the global computer networks of some 14,500 nongovernmental organizations are international groups such as EcoNet, Environlink, WomensNet, LaborNet, and MuslimsNet, all dedicated to inter-national action coordinated by means of e-mail, fax machine, cell phone, and other weapons in the global battle for public opinion. “The majority of these transnational social movements do not operate through the traditional lobbying procedures and political channels of participation as defined by state structures … ‘They are decentered, local actors that cross the reified boundaries of space as though they were not there› (159). At the same time, such groups can muster armies of civilians to go to Seattle or Prague to protest the

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actions of the World Trade Organization, or to Quebec City to protest against the Free Trade Area of the Americas, or to Genoa to protest against the G-8. Such groups appear to “challenge the idea central to the modern world order paradigm that the international states system is the legitimate arena where politics across borders takes place” (161). The electronic flow of culture across borders also questions the ability of national regulatory systems to protect cultural identities. In 1999 a Toronto Web site, iCraveTV, began carrying the signals of public and private broadcasters in the United States and Canada, thus infringing not just on the copyright of content providers but also on the regulatory authority of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Comission and the Federal Communications Commission (us). While lawsuits brought against iCraveTV by the Canadian Association of Broadcasters and its us counterpart resulted in an outof-court settlement, corporate interests clearly took precedence over national interests in licensing as Internet transmission is likely to be the broadcast “wave” of the future. Subsequently, in 2001 the music industry would seek a court injunction against us-based Napster, the Internet site of choice for downloading music from a registry of “shared” intellectual property. Legal ambiguity would first delay implementation of the court injunction; then, legal appeals would frustrate an attempt to create a “proscribed” list of industry materials; finally, offshore “servers” would raise questions about the legal power of any jurisdiction to shut down a centreless collective. As for radio, free download applications like RealPlayer now make it possible to listen to some 2,500 on-line stations from around the world, sharply reducing the power of governments to regulate foreign content. Ultimately, increasing bandwidth on the high-speed Internet is going to enable consumers to go on-line for much of their television and dvd programming. The regulatory regime of mass national broadcasting is being threatened with total irrelevancy. An even greater threat than global delivery comes in the form of rampant, unregulated ownership of global media conglomerates. In the wake of the historic merger of America Online with Time Warner in 2000, Jeremey Rifkin offered this analysis: What we are seeing is a great transformation occurring in the nature of capitalism … The capitalist journey, which began with the commodification of goods and the ownership of property, is ending with the commodification of culture itself. There is no precedent in history for this kind of overarching control of human communications. Giant media conglomerates and their content providers become the gatekeepers that determine the conditions and

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terms upon which hundreds of millions of human beings secure access to one another and share meanings and values … The new, global digital-communications networks, because they are so allencompassing and comprehensive, have the effect of creating a new and totalizing social space, a second earthly sphere above the terramater … The aol-Time Warner merger brings us a step closer to a world where access to powerful global networks will define our social dynamics as fundamentally as property and markets did at the dawn of the industrial era. (“Access” B2)

Rifkin’s point is not just that cultural capitalism is changing the nature and meaning of capitalism itself but also that it is changing the culture of humanity. Compared to our twenty-first-century reality of “enclosure of the information commons” (Gutstein 138) by a system of international copyright rigorously devoted to the protection of intellectual property, the nineteenth-century notion of language and culture as the property of the Volk begins more than ever to sound like folklore. No matter that cultural content could still belong to the “folk”; the digitized format in which it appears vests all interest in the corporation delivering such content. The net result of such changes in the mode of communication and its concentration of ownership is a virtual ‹hollowing out’ of the state,” shifting the “orientation of states’ core values away from selfsufficiency, autonomy, and survival to the accommodation of liberalcapital interests, and the integration of states both with each other and with regional and international organizations and regimes” (Deibert 206). All the same, Deibert is fairly sanguine in concluding that all these trends “point away from single mass identities, linear political boundaries, and exclusive jurisdictions centred on territorial spaces, and toward multiple identities and non-territorial communities, overlapping boundaries, and nonexclusive jurisdictions” (15). By contrast, Donald Gutstein presents us with a jeremiad in e.con: How the Internet Undermines Democracy (1999), warning that control of the public agenda has already been seized by the information industry. In Canada, the elimination of the federal Department of Communications in 1993, during the short-lived government of Kim Campbell, effectively hived off the protection of culture from the communications industry. Carving up its responsibilities “between a new Department of Canadian Heritage, which would deal with culture and broadcast policy, and Industry Canada, which inherited telecommunications and spectrum management” (Gutstein 77), the government now falls back upon the myth of “technological determinism” to persuade us that the information revolution is creating “changes in society, changes we cannot resist” (72).

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In reality, Industry Canada, through its board of directors in canarie (Canadian Network for the Advancement of Research, Industry and Education), has effectively turned “over ownership of CA*net, the public Internet in Canada, to Bell Advanced Communications, the data-networking arm of the Bell empire” (87). Now, “through its SchoolNet program, for instance, Industry Canada [is] extend[ing] its industrial-development mandate into education and provincial jurisdiction by providing Internet access for schools. It’s doing the same for libraries and health care, other areas of provincial jurisdiction, through LibraryNet and telehealth initiatives” (78). In effect, Gutstein accuses Industry Canada of giving up our nation to “a private government of cyberspace” (68) in exchange for a share in the fabulous wealth of the Information Revolution. His prosecution of his case is both chilling and relentless. In general, he charges the information industry with “the colonization of public information resources” (66), which “will divide citizens into two classes – information rich and information poor” (5). Specifically, he blames right-wing think tanks for setting a corporate agenda that depends on deregulation and government downsizing to create new markets for information technology and, thus, to change the basis of the social contract: “Business claims that regulation is no longer possible because technology is changing too rapidly for regulators to keep up. Regulation will slow the pace of change, and that is bad” (27). At the same time, funding cuts to public libraries, schools, and universities is necessitating more automated replacements, with a further reduction in the availability of public information. In a world awash in information, it may seem ironic to find the information industry accused of withholding information. And yet Gutstein offers case after case to substantiate his four main contentions: that “free universal access to library materials may soon become a fond memory” (63); that education is being transformed “from a public-based, teacher-delivered resource into a private-sector, Internet-delivered commodity” (7); that the research agenda in universities is being set by corporate interests in a formalization of “the connection between academic research and industrial development” through Networks of Centres of Excellence, where “the boundaries between university and corporation blur: previously separate institutions begin to merge” (171); and, most alarmingly, that “the real information revolution … is occurring behind the scenes, where corporate executives and intellectual-property lawyers plot to enclose and commercialize society’s pool of information resources” (126). Admittedly, “the amassing of economic advantage by publishers is not new,” as Gutstein himself points out: “it started almost as soon as

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the printing press was developed in the fifteenth century” (129). But what is happening now is more than a grab for economic advantage: global media conglomerates are positioning themselves to control continents, if not planetary culture. The only “defence” has come from nationally based transnationals, not from governments whose regulatory regimes were never designed to cope with global media conglomerates. For example, the purchase by Bell Canada Enterprises (Canada’s largest communications company) of ctv (Canada’s second largest television network) ought to provide Canadian content to its other new platform for delivery, Bell-ExpressVu satellite communications. “The acquisition, according [to] Jean Monty, bce’s president and chief executive officer, will allow bce to deliver both local and national content from ctv through bce’s Sympatico-Lycos Internet ‘portal’ Web site. ctv owns and operates 25 stations, and all or part of several specialty cable channels like ctv Newsnet, the Comedy Network, The Sports Network (tsn) and the Discovery Channel.” But it also shows how “boundaries – in business, culture and communications – are being erased. Canada’s structure of broadcast law and regulation, written in and for a simpler age when there were fewer electronic pathways into each home, may have little application to the world that bce and aol are shaping” (“Converging” A18). Not to mention the one emerging from CanWest Global’s purchase in July 2000 of Conrad Black’s Hollinger newspaper group and its Web portals, thus combining print and Internet resources with its ownership of Canada’s third television network. The problem with Global, as, since the early 1960s, with ctv, is that neither network was ever a major producer of Canadian entertainment; rather, each amassed fortunes by purveying popular American programming. So, in the wake of these mergers, nothing about content is likely to change. It seems that the logic of cultural capitalism may be antithetical to the logic of print-capitalism, as Anderson has defined it. Far from creating markets for a nationally imagined culture, the mandate of cultural capitalism is to find markets for globally imagined culture. Profitable programming from media conglomerates such as aolTime Warner, Disney, Viacom, and Sony is likely to dominate the distribution systems of such “national” transnationals as bce-ctv and CanWest Global. Axiomatically, the products of for-profit, popular culture are directed to ‹the widest possible public.’ This is in direct opposition to the strategy of national literatures which is predicated on exclusion, on distinctiveness, on an idea of differentiation from others. Popular-culture literature embraces the universal, denies difference and cultural distinctiveness, and is marketed as universally appealing” (Corse 152). Screen-culture products are no different,

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whether they are transmitted via Bell-ExpressVu’s satellite broadcast or over the Web via Bell’s high-speed telephone lines. Is there no ray of hope, at least, in the interactivity of the World Wide Web? Deibert seems to think there is: “Everyone has the potential to reach everyone else instantaneously in the hypermedia environment – ‘publication’ and ‘broadcasting’ are open to all who are connected” (135). And yet growing fears about the “digital divide” also suggest that a future class system is going to be determined by who is and who is not “connected.” As Jeremy Rifkin sees it, “many of the professionals who [now] make up the new elite of symbolic analysts work in the world’s great cities, they have little or no attachment to place. Where they work is of far less importance than the global network they work in. In this sense, they represent a new cosmopolitan force, a high-tech nomadic tribe who have more in common with each other than with the citizens of whatever country they happen to be doing business in” (End 176). To most people, then, it will not make much difference who wins the battle of convergence. To the information-rich, the result will mean further globalization; to the information-poor, the result will mean increasing ghettoization. For the information ghetto is likely to be the nation-state, newly “hollowed out” to contain the hoi polloi, while gated communities of the future are likely to be enclosed by global networks. For all his hope, then, Deibert has to admit that modern nationstates are turning into “the postmodern equivalent of medieval kings … This might help us to conceptualize fundamental transformation not in terms of the disappearance of the state and its replacement by a world state or no-state, but in terms of the significance and purposes of states today – the way states are increasingly animated by the need to accommodate global market forces rather than to balance the military power of other states, in the same way that medieval kings and princes have been ultimately animated less with material well-being than with their own salvation” (215–16). The more we beat on against the current, in other words, the more likely we are to be borne back ceaselessly into the past. And yet Deibert appears to forget his own stricture about the “social embeddedness” of technology – about how the historical and social context of its introduction and reception have as much to do with its character as its inherent potentialities. So, for example, the way in which novels were introduced to French Canada in the midnineteenth century seriously restricted the type and character of the nationally imagined community they could foster. Conversely, the way in which television was introduced to Quebec contributed to the rise of a nationalist consciousness among the Québécois, while anticipating the effects of globalization in the rest of Canada. So the first

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thing to say is that hypermedia are not likely to do away with media such as newspapers, though electronic delivery will individualize their content in ways previously unimaginable. But what about novels? For all the availability of movies on demand, or netscapes opening into an infinity of Web sites, bestsellers will still be consumed, and high culture will still be taught in schools and universities. None of these cultural artefacts is likely to disappear any time soon. Within the university setting, however, literary nationalism may be turning into a less viable force. For the theorists of poststructuralism (Derrida, Foucault), of postmodernism (Lacan, Hutcheon), of feminism (Kristeva, Cixous), and of postcolonialism (Bhabha, Said) have led many of the literary elite in North America to become “generally disengaged from, and even disdainful of, traditional notions of literary nationalism” (Corse 161). What is less remarked is the way that contemporary theory is (often unwittingly) shaped by the new media’s social epistemology. This is not the place to consider the hidden effects of hypermedia on Derrida’s theory of grammatology;* rather, it is the place to explain the principle of selection and to show why, in a book subtitled Reflections on Media in Canadian Fiction, the novel is still central to a discussion of other media. Bakhtin, as we have seen, identifies the novel with social contestation in a “cheerful quarrel” between social idiolects. Given its long history of contestation and of formal self-consciousness, the novel is still the ideal genre to question the social epistemology of hypermedia and to slow their assault on nationally imagined communities. The rise of so-called metafiction over the last three decades may well point to a deepening preoccupation of the novel with the sort of constructivism unique to virtual realities. But the rise of novels increasingly concerned with media forms also suggests that the novel is a diagnostic tool that enables us to think about the social and political effects of new media. It was William Gibson, for example, an immigrant novelist living in Vancouver, who invented and popularized the term “cyberspace” in his futuristic novel Neuromancer (1984). This work is an obvious choice around which to organize discussion about “CyberNation” in the final section of Imagined Nations. But then so is a novel by Michael Ondaatje, another immigrant who, like Gibson, also arrived in Canada at the age of nineteen. Although The English Patient (1992) never refers to cyberspace (how could it, being set amidst the ruins of postwar Europe?), it really operates as an extended metaphor of the epochal shift in the mode of communication. At the same time, an * See my “Cyberwriting and the Borders of Identity: ‘What’s in a Name’ in Such a Long Journey and The Puppeteer,” Canadian Literature 149 (Summer 1996): 55–71.

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Oscar-winning film adaptation of this Canadian novel by a British filmmaker, Anthony Minghella, shows how, for more than a century, film has been a harbinger of globalization. Consideration of what the film-Patient does to the print-Patient requires prefatory discussion in Part 3, “Motion-Picture Country” (a series of chapters in which the revolutionary epistemology of film is more fully explored). Unfortunately, Hollywood’s dominance over film distribution in Canada has rarely led our novelists to ask probing questions about how film contributes to the culture of imperialism. Not, that is, until Guy Vanderhaeghe published The Englishman’s Boy (1996), a novel that demands some fundamental (but perhaps counter-intuitive) comparisons between print and film. In addition, there is one early novel by Timothy Findley, The Butterfly Plague (1969), that explores some of the more vital questions about cinematic epistemology and the film culture of Hollywood. Two quite recent novels would also suggest that print nationalism, as well as other forms of cultural resurgence, are possible in an age of hypermedia. In No Great Mischief (1999), Alistair MacLeod recounts the 200-year history of a Gaelic-speaking family in Cape Breton in ways that map out the reality of the print-nation, or the nationally imagined community. Conversely, Wayne Johnston’s The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (1998) tells the story of 500 years of Newfoundland history in such a way that the book reverberates with the irony of doubled forms of print, nation, and colony. In effect, this mockhistory of the nation moves in two directions simultaneously – towards both the consolidation and the deconstruction of the old image of the print-nation. One of the most brilliant novels of the Quiet Revolution in Quebec – Hubert Aquin’s Prochain épisode (1965) – long ago performed a similar feat, though it is both more ambivalent and more deconstructive than is Johnston’s novel. For Aquin’s narrator sought to embody the revolution of the 1960s (not to mention the failed revolution of 1837) even as he aimed to explode the very medium within which he wrote. Indeed, a false form of the nation-as-book (the roman du terroir) has likely stood in the way of a nation that was secularly imagined in Quebec. Echoed in reveries of village names and roads leading to “La Nation,” the roman du terroir is convicted of betraying the nation of Quebec by holding it in thrall to the Church. What “the prisoner of print” has to do to write at all in Prochain épisode is to explode this medium, which was used to thwart the development of a modern, nationally imagined community in Quebec. In English Canada, what has made media a source of concern in fiction of the last decade is a similar fear, so eloquently expressed

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by Aquin, that the nation is virtually lost. While “nation” in English Canada may not mean exactly what it means in Quebec, there are still signs that the print-formed nation is currently being rethought by anglophones as well as francophones. So, for example, MacLeod’s novel takes up the burden of what Anderson has called “the reassurance of fratricide” (199), or what Ernest Renan, in his Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? (1882), has called the national obligation to forget: “Yet the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common and also that they have forgotten many things. No French citizen knows whether he is a Burgundian, an Alan, a Taifale, or a Visigoth, yet every French citizen has to have forgotten the massacre of Saint Bartholomew, or the massacres that took place in the Midi in the thirteenth century” (11). Something similar appears to be the case in No Great Mischief, where the title line is borrowed from a letter by British general James Wolfe suggesting that it would be “no great mischief” if the Scots fell at Quebec. The Scots and Canadiens are obliged to forget that they were once enemies, but they can do so only by remembering their common enmity against General Wolfe. It seems that the “auld alliance” of Bonnie Prince Charlie and his Highland clans with the French is renewed in Canada, where such “brothers” now inhabit different rooms in the family mansion. By Anderson’s reckoning, this is the very sort of thing that has occurred in most nations, as it did in France, where “a systematic historiographical campaign, deployed by the state mainly through the state’s school system,” served “to ‘remind’ every young Frenchwoman and Frenchman of a series of antique slaughters which are now inscribed as ‘family history.’ Having to ‘have already forgotten’ tragedies of which one needs increasingly to be ‘reminded’ turns out to be a characteristic device in the later construction of national genealogies” (201). But perhaps the better reason to begin with No Great Mischief concerns how it dramatizes an epochal shift from folkways unique to oral-manuscript culture towards the culture of the book. In effect, it captures the general move away from formulaic memory to the social epistemology of print. This is the necessary starting point for defining the contrasting social economies and epistemologies of the three great media shifts that I address in Sections 2, 3, and 4: from parchment to print, from the book to moving images, and from cinema to the new environment of hypermedia. However, as we shall see, the shift from orality to writing was no less traumatic or momentous than is the current shift from print to electronic communications; indeed, the former had equally portentous results for later cultural and political formations.

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pa r t t w o Nations of the Book

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4 Orality and Print: From Clan to Nation in No Great Mischief (1999) The Greek invention of the vocalic alphabet (ca. 720 bc) – literally the first technology to enable recording and “playback” of speech in languages other than that of the host language – took less than four centuries to work an epistemological revolution in Western culture. Such, at least, is the strong claim of Walter Ong in Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982): “Plato’s exclusion of poets from his Republic was in fact Plato’s rejection of the pristine aggregative, paratactic, oral-style thinking perpetuated in Homer in favor of the keen analysis or dissection of the world and of thought itself made possible by the interiorization of the alphabet in the Greek psyche” (28). Plato rejected the poets, in other words, not because of their doubtful truth value but because of their questionable style, which represented outmoded habits of thought. The larger claim that “writing has transformed human consciousness” (78) depends upon evidence that a shift in the mode of communication can produce life-changing cognitive effects: “Because it moves speech from the oral-aural to a new sensory world, that of vision,” Ong asserts, “it transforms speech and thought as well” (85). Insofar as it converts sound from evanescent speech to fixed space, writing does enable definition and abstraction in ways quite foreign to oral culture. Typically, “the oral mind is uninterested in definitions. Words acquire their meanings only from their always insistent actual habitat, which is not, as in a dictionary, simply other words, but includes also gestures, vocal inflections, facial expression, and the entire human, existential setting in which the real, spoken word always occurs” (47). Much like individual speakers in an oral society, spoken words take their meaning from their larger social context, or from their place in a particular speech community, rather than from their place in an abstract system of language.

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Lacking the spatial element of writing, the oral mind is thus more likely to focus on the immediate sound of words: “In the total absence of any writing, there is nothing outside the thinker, no text, to enable him or her to produce the same line of thought again or even to verify whether he or she has done so or not” (34). Without some form of verifiable repetition, spoken language can hardly be reduced to a logical “shape.” A logical syllogism would be particularly difficult to construct apart from textual space. For good reason, then, “we know that formal logic is the invention of Greek culture after it had interiorized the technology of alphabetic writing” (52). For the structures of formal logic and the formal structures of writing are true homologies. A “syllogism is self-contained: its conclusions are derived from its premises only … [T]he syllogism is thus like a text, fixed, boxed-off, isolated” (53). The medium of formal logic is literally the message. Denied the spatial advantages of written language, the oral mind has to focus on the temporal characteristics of spoken language: “There is nothing to backloop into outside the mind, for the oral utterance has vanished as soon as it is uttered. Hence the mind must move ahead more slowly, keeping close to the focus of attention much of what it has already dealt with. Redundancy, repetition of the just-said, keeps both speaker and hearer surely on the track” (39–40). Inevitably, situational thinking will predominate over conceptual thinking when “you have to do your thinking in mnemonic patterns, shaped for ready oral recurrence” (34). Indeed, abstract concepts are hard to find in oral culture apart from “situational, operational frames of reference that are minimally abstract in the sense that they remain close to the living human lifeworld” (49). Ong does allow that “heavy patterning and communal fixed formulas in oral cultures serve some of the purposes of writing in chirographic cultures, but in doing so they of course determine the kind of thinking that can be done, the way experience is intellectually organized” (36). Analysis, for example, is very difficult in an oral culture: “Once a formulary expression has crystallized, it had best be kept intact. Without a writing system, breaking up thought – that is, analysis – is a high-risk procedure” (39). And spatial tools are still required to “organize elaborate concatenations of causes in the analytic kind of linear sequences which can only be set up with the help of texts. The lengthy sequences they produce, such as genealogies, are not analytic but aggregative” (57). Without fixed texts, it is nearly impossible to resolve higher-order thought into its constituent parts or to juxtapose sequences in abstract, spatial patterns. Indeed, how, in the absence of writing, “could

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a lengthy, analytic solution ever be assembled in the first place? An interlocutor is virtually essential: it is hard to talk to yourself for hours on end. Sustained thought in an oral culture is tied to communication” (34). For such reasons, oral knowledge remains tied to “the human lifeworld” since “orality situates knowledge within a context of struggle” (44). Oral knowledge thus tends to be contested knowledge; it can only be won through debate or verbal combat. And the oral champion of truth (or knowledge) will not suffer fools gladly; formally, such a one can not tolerate his opposite. Even the knower’s relationship to knowledge differs between oral and textual societies. Without libraries or encyclopedias or dictionaries or written lists, the learner must resort to “the figures of the wise old man and the wise old woman, repeaters of the past” (41). So what the learner learns, or what the knower knows, becomes extremely personal and subjective. What is known is also commonplace since the function of knowledge in an oral society is to bind the knower to his or her community. Insofar as “oral communication unites people in groups” (69), even the mode of information will function to create immediate bonds: “Because the spoken word proceeds from the human interior and manifests human beings to one another as conscious interiors, as persons, the spoken word forms human beings into close-knit groups” (74). Compare this situation to that of reading and writing, which “are solitary activities that throw the psyche back on itself” (69). Most important, the relation of the knower to the thing known will differ radically in oral and literate societies: “For an oral culture learning or knowing means achieving close, empathetic, communal identification with the known,” whereas, “writing separates the knower from the known and thus sets up conditions for ‘objectivity,’ in the sense of personal disengagement or distancing” (45–6). The book mediates between the literate knower and the known, whereas knowledge can only be embodied in the oral knower. Thus, “oral memory differs significantly from textual memory in that oral memory has a high somatic component,” including manipulation of “beads on strings,” “hand activity, such as gesturing, often elaborate and stylized,” “and other bodily activities such as rocking back and forth or dancing” (67). Knowledge in an oral culture thus appears as knowledge-in-action, where “heroic figures tend to be type figures: wise Nestor, furious Achilles, clever Odysseus” (70), and where wisdom is always the fruit of heroic struggle. In an oral culture, how could one “know” geography, when no maps exist and where space is represented in disjointed narratives of personal journeys? That is why “the ancient world knew few

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‘explorers,’ though it did know many itinerants, travelers, voyagers, adventurers, and pilgrims” (73). Exploration has no place in oral narrative since there is no need to fill a textual space with line drawings of land formations. While the wanderings of Odysseus are heroically motivated, the hero has no more than a set of charming stories to offer on his return. Without sea charts and a map-formed consciousness, even Odysseus cannot find his way back to the court of the Phaiakians. In spite of the ways writing observably restructures consciousness, it might not be as revolutionary as Ong makes out: “The sense of individual words as significantly discrete items is fostered by writing, which, here as elsewhere, is diaeretic, separative. (Early manuscripts tend not to separate words clearly from each other, but to run them together)” (61). What Ong wishes to prove is how “the old communal oral world had split up,” as a result of literacy, “into privately claimed freeholdings” (131). And yet his parenthetical remark proves that old habits die hard; scribal writing alone could not break up the flow of speech. The manuscript preserved an affinity for the oral world; the written word would not be separated from its fellows. Not even 2,000 years of chirographic culture had managed to change this state of affairs, as written script continued to be “at the service of orality” (124). What was truly “diaeretic,” or “separative,” as Harold Innis would say, was print; for two millennia writing continued to be a simple outpost of the oral world. At the same time, Ong admits that classical rhetoric “retained much of the old oral feeling for thought and expression as basically agonistic and formulaic” (110). For rhetoric, as it was practised by the Sophists, was “the core of ancient Greek education and culture” (109). While the rhetorical Sophists were routed by Plato’s chirographic-based philosophy, the Roman Quintilian would systematize their rhetoric on the assumption “that oratory was the paradigm of all verbal expression” (Ong 111). Quintilian’s rhetoric would continue to be taught for sixteen centuries, from first-century Roman schools to the medieval university to Renaissance grammar schools. In fact, rhetoric would have “overwhelming relevance for the culture of all ages at least up to the Age of Romanticism” (109), by which time the norm had changed to “spontaneity” or “natural” expression. Almost up to the era when nationalism was born, rhetoric had maintained a time-honoured heritage: public eloquence expressed in patterned, memorable speech. Learned Latin would also help, for a thousand years after the fall of the Roman Empire, to foster the survival of oral culture. “Paradoxically, the textuality that kept Latin rooted in classical antiquity

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thereby kept it rooted also in orality, for the classical ideal of education had been to produce not the effective writer but the rhetor, the orator, the public speaker” (113). Consequently, “the transition from orality to literacy was slow” (115), both in the medieval university and elsewhere. Inevitably, “the Middle Ages used texts far more than ancient Greece and Rome, teachers lectured on texts in the universities, and yet never tested knowledge or intellectual prowess by writing, but always by oral dispute” (115). Evidently the epistemological revolution wrought by writing, as Ong has finally to conclude, was, of itself, insufficient to create a social revolution. A weaker claim that “manuscript culture in the west remained always marginally oral” (119) more fairly shows how a residual oral culture could persist within the structures of chirographic culture: Writing served largely to recycle knowledge back into the oral world, as in medieval university disputations, in the reading of literary and other texts to groups … and in reading aloud even when reading to oneself. At least as late as the twelfth century in England, checking even written financial accounts was still done aurally, by having them read aloud … [E]ven today, we speak of “auditing,” that is, “hearing” account books, though what an accountant actually does today is examine them by sight. (119)

The chirographic revolution failed to produce a social revolution because its effects were confined to the minority. As Benedict Anderson has observed, manuscript “readers were, after all, tiny literate reefs on top of vast illiterate oceans” (15). So, as long as the norm was nonliteracy and even kings were illiterates, the great vessel of orality would not be upset by the cognitive storm of chirographic culture. For literate people were invariably contained by, if not drawn back into, the dominant culture. Orality, in other words, reabsorbed the literates of chirographic culture until print literates finally swamped the boat. After the printing press created mass literacy, it took another three centuries to produce a radically changed form of consciousness. “Print eventually removed the ancient art of (orally based) rhetoric from the center of academic education. It encouraged and made possible on a large scale the quantification of knowledge, both through the use of mathematical analysis and through the use of diagrams and charts” (130). As the alphabet letterpress began to reach the masses, the world finally began to change. By the seventeenth century, the “exactly repeatable visual statement” of print would prompt the beginnings of empirical science, based on exact observation and description (127). And by the eighteenth century, a new social sense

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would emerge in the space required for silent reading of the book – a sense of privacy. Private property would likewise become a cardinal value, in part because print had created “a new sense of the private ownership of words” (131). Even the space of writing changed, from “manuscripts, with their glosses or marginal comments (which often got worked into the text in subsequent copies),” into uniformly printed books, where the space of the margin was a fixed border. Manuscripts, which had once been “in dialogue with the world outside their own borders” (132), now turned into books with justified margins, creating new frontiers in the mind. Henceforth, new coalitions of readers discovered “a new glory in the print elevation of languages they had humbly spoken all along” (Anderson 80). In effect, the margins of the book were metamorphosed into national frontiers. By the nineteenth century, the epistemological revolution of print had become a full-blown philological revolution. Most Western vernaculars were objectified in textual form: dictionaries and grammars, lexicographies and literatures – all these forms of language as the “private” property of a particular people – made it possible for oral speakers to imagine a “nation” based on print. “Reading coalitions, with compositions that lay variously on the spectrum between Hungarian and Greek, developed similarly through Central and Eastern Europe, and into the Near East as the century proceeded” (Anderson 79). And so the bourgeoisie came “to visualize in a general way the existence of thousands and thousands like themselves through printlanguage. For an illiterate bourgeoisie is scarcely imaginable. Thus in world-historical terms bourgeoisies were the first classes to achieve solidarities on an essentially imagined basis” (77). In the nineteenth century, on the basis of print-formed imaginations, nationalist consciousness would spread around the globe. If oral culture could survive 2,000 years of manuscript culture, then why not two further centuries in the island fastness of Cape Breton? Such an anachronism is at least the peripheral subject of Alistair MacLeod’s No Great Mischief (1999), where an oral Gaelic culture continues to flourish well into the twentieth century until it is finally overwhelmed by urbanization, public education, and the automobile. Early on, MacLeod’s narrator notes that, when his grandparents became “dwellers of the town instead of dwellers of the country” (MacLeod 37), they became “quite adept at English” (40). And yet a later generation could still revert to Gaelic by the simple expedient of moving back to the farm: “In the time following their return to the old Calum Ruaidh house and land, my brothers spoke Gaelic more and more, as if somehow by returning to the old land they had

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returned to the old language of that land as well. It being the language of the place in which they worked” (64). Even in their old age, the assimilated grandparents would begin to dream again in Gaelic until, in their last days, they had “reverted almost totally to Gaelic” (40). “As if it had always been the language of their hearts,” comments the narrator’s grieving sister, who finds solace in a passage from “Margaret Laurence in The Diviners where Morag talks about lost languages lurking inside the ventricles of the heart” (193). Even in the printed world of the novel, oral culture can still find refuge. The question is whether the book provides more than a sentimental refuge for these languages of the heart. Certainly, the language of MacLeod’s novel, like that of Laurence’s Diviners, is conspicuously English in its workings. Might oral, Gaelic speakers not be constrained more than ever, then, by the strictures of an alien tongue as well as by the structures of print? How could a novelist begin to translate an oral culture into the medium of print? Would s/he be able to do more than write an elegy for a lost language? Or would s/he end up turning an oral culture into a museum piece? As late as fifty years ago, the historian Arthur Lower could point to the persistence of an oral, Gaelic culture on Cape Breton Island as living history. For, in the 1770s: There arrived in the harbour of Pictou, on the Gulf coast of the peninsula, the good ship Hector, bringing the first Highland Scots (but not the first Presbyterians) to Nova Scotia. They and their descendants filled in the lands on the Gulf coast. Other Highlanders, some Presbyterian but many of them Roman Catholic, worked their way up into the fastness of Cape Breton. That was to become another Scotland whose very speech was Gaelic as, in many districts, it still remains today. In this way, the eastern third of Nova Scotia including Cape Breton became veritably New Scotland. (Lower 108)

This story of the (unnamed) Hector’s arrival, with its cargo of Gaelic-speaking passengers, is given in the novel as an oral tale passed on from grandfather to grandson. But it is clear that the narrator, Alexander MacDonald, feels some concern about translating his grandfather’s oral story into print. “As I begin to tell this,” he writes in the novel’s first sentence, as if to maintain his own sense of orality, “it is the golden month of September in southwestern Ontario” (MacLeod 1). Again, as he soon observes, “the 401, as most people hearing this will know, is Ontario’s major highway” (3). Strictly speaking, he is neither telling his story nor is the reader “hearing this.” Even so, the narrator invites the reader to imagine an oral community, not the more anonymous community of the nation

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based on print: “The Calum Ruadh who seems so present in thought and conversation in today’s Toronto was, as I mentioned earlier, my great-great-great-grandfather. And he came from Scotland’s Moidart to the New World in 1779” (19–20). Evidently, one of the key changes in the social situation of writing is that teller and audience are no longer immediately present to one another. The storyteller is removed by the book from the scene of telling, leaving a reader to project abstract symbols of print into imagined images. Even so, the narrator of MacLeod’s novel ignores this basic change in the mode of communication, so different from oral culture, where a teller and auditor are directly present to one another and where a subject of utterance takes shape only to flee, in the Homeric phrase, on “winged words.” Instead, the narrator of No Great Mischief speaks directly to the reader, even as he pretends to take a listener’s part in the story he is about to tell: “As I said, these seem the facts, or some of them anyway, although the fantasies are my own … I remember my grandfather telling me the story one afternoon in early spring as we were out at the woodpile making kindlings” (24). So an oral story emerges as a series of echoes extending through the generations. The “passage by Margaret Laurence in The Diviners where Morag talks about lost languages lurking inside the ventricles of the heart” will itself behave as a being with a voice: “I return to that passage a lot,” confesses Alexander’s sister, “and when I touch the book it flies open to that page, page 244” (193). So the book passes from print into speech, a virtual echo of the ancestral voices to which Alexander and Catriona both still pay heed. For such reasons, Alexander will often emphasize the oral character of his story: ‹That always got to me, somehow,’ I remember my grandfather saying, ‘that part about the dog› (23). Then, joining his voice to his grandfather’s, “One sees them with the ‘saved’ dog, perhaps, in the shallop’s prow, the wind spray flattening the hair along her skull while she scanned the wooded coastline with her dark intelligent eyes” (26). In this impersonal construction of “One,” the reader comes to occupy the same textual space as the narrator-listener, recalling shared family history. So, too, the other MacDonald grandfather adds his story of a loyal descendant of this canine ancestor, thus demonstrating the fidelity of the breed: ‹She was descended from the original Calum Ruadh dog,’ said Grandpa when he heard the news, pouring himself a water glass full of whisky which he drank without a flinch. ‘The one who swam after the boat when they were leaving Scotland. It was in those dogs to care too much and to try too hard› (56–7). But the modern dog who has given her life to defend the lighthouse is not just faithful to her master’s “voice”: she has come to embody the culture’s own fidelity

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to a voice from the past, here faithfully repeated in the phrasings of oral narrative. For such reasons, the pseudo-oral narrator of the novel proclaims his faith in things he has never seen and that he “knows” only by fidelity to his own oral source: This is a story of lives which turned out differently than was intended. And obviously, much of this information is not really mine at all – not in the sense that I experienced it. For, as I said, while our parents were drowning, my sister and I were playing store. And in the generations a long time before, we did not see Calum Ruadh’s faithful dog swimming after her family to a life beyond the sea. And we did not see our great-great-great-grandmother, the former Catherine MacPherson, sewn into a canvas bag and thrown also into that same sea. But still, whatever its inaccuracies, this information has come to be known in the manner that family members come to know one another because they share such close proximity. Or as Grandma would say, “How could you not know that?” (57–8)

Evidently, what is known in an oral culture does not depend upon the evidence of things seen (at least not on the visible form of the written word); rather, it depends on evidence of things heard from the Old World and thence reported to a place distant in both space and time: “And if the older singers or storytellers of the clann Chalum Ruaidh, the senaichies, as they were called, happened to be present they would ‘remember’ events from a Scotland which they had never seen, or see our future in the shadows of the flickering flames” (65). What these descendants of the first immigrants “recall” is not a world that they have seen themselves but an echo of voices that they have always heard. For the ear knows things the eye has never seen, just as the eye of imagination sees things invisible to mortal sight. All the same, the story Alexander hears from his grandfather is not an easy story for a child to grasp, as several of his questions would indicate: “And also the idea of a fifty-five-year-old man crying was a bit more than I was ready for. ‘Cried?’ I said. What in the world would he cry for?› (24). “He was,” [my grandfather] said, composing himself and after a thoughtful moment, “crying for his history. He had left his country and lost his wife and spoke a foreign language. He had left as a husband and arrived as a widower and a grandfather, and he was responsible for all those people clustered around him … Anyway,” he went on, “they waited there for two weeks, trying to get a shallop to take them across the water and here to Cape Breton.” (25)

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But at this point, the boy is less interested in family history and the pain of adult knowledge than he is in a particular word used to convey that story: ‹What’s a shallop?’ I asked, my curiosity getting the better of my fear of ignorance. ‘I don’t really know,’ he said. ‘It’s just the word they always used, “shallop.” It’s sort of a small open boat. You can row it or use sails. Sort of like a dory.› (25–6) The oral mind, as Ong would say, is uninterested in definition. And yet the grandfather, who is an avid reader of history and has clearly absorbed the values of literacy, is not particularly interested in definition either: “I think it’s originally a French word.” To the extent that he repeats without question an unfamiliar term from an oral past, even the literate man proves that he can be faithful to an oral heritage. For the spoken word would appear to preserve a particular feeling-tone, and not just an abstract sense of the past. In retrospect, such a conflict between the values of orality and literacy seems to have been present in the narrator’s first words: “As I begin to tell this.” Here he draws on the oral formula as much as he acknowledges his written medium, alluding to “the bounty of the land … as if it is the manifestation of a poem by Keats” (1). In other words, from the outset the narrator mediates between cultures of speech and print in ways that “most people hearing this” (3) would see as the predicament of an over-educated son of rural folk: “I am a twentieth-century man, I think, as I step out onto the street. And then another phrase of my grandmother’s comes to mind, ‘whether I like it or not› (17). Evidently, even as he declares himself a modern man, his oral past comes back to haunt him: ‹Ah,’ haunts the voice of my oldest brother, ‘ah, ’ille bhig ruaidh. You’ve come at last. We have come a long way, you and I, and there are no hard feelings.’ The voice pauses” (17–18). And yet the voice is going to return time and again, unbidden, the language, as ever, of childhood: “Still the gille beag ruadh. The phrase means ‘the little red boy’ or ‘the little red-haired boy’ and it was applied to me as far back as my memory goes” (18). Alexander, who couldn’t recognize his spoken name on his first day at school, as the roll was taken in English, becomes almost a textbook example of the oral man: “Primary orality fosters personality structures that in certain ways are more communal and externalized, and less introspective than those common among literates” (Ong 69). Fortunately, the boy is saved by one of his older cousins, who explains to a teacher who does not understand the Gaelic phrase: “That’s him, gille beag ruadh, Alexander” (MacLeod 18). The distinction is vital, since the names Calum and Alexander appear in every generation in the family, reducing the individual to a function of the group. Worse still, the narrator must share “his” name with two cousins of his own

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generation, one local, one Californian. With so much of his individuality subsumed by the clan, the narrator can only be identified by his distinguishing marks. So the narrator is “Still the gille beag ruadh” many years later. Calum is likewise reduced through long stretches of the narrative to “my eldest brother,” identified by his relationship with the speaker rather than by his “own” name. In consequence, “my second brother” (177), like a third brother, is never named in a book of 283 pages; each man only acts and speaks as a part of a group. Likewise, the absence of individual portraits of Alexander’s dead mother and father hint at personality structures that are communal and externalized: “There are no pictures of our parents by themselves. They are always in large groups of clann Chalum Ruaidh” (240). Indeed, the very attempt to “separate our parents” from their oral group by means of photographic enlargement proves self-defeating: “The individual features of their faces became more blurred. It was as if in coming closer they became more indistinct” (241). Here is graphic evidence, then, of the claim that the individual has no identity apart from the clan. In truth, “the clan,” as one contemporary historian has observed of pre-Culloden society, “remained a man’s only identity, and the broadsword his only understandable law outside it” (Prebble 34). Vestiges of swordlaw can still appear in Cape Breton, this place so far from Culloden in time and space, especially in the clann Chalum Ruaidh’s refusal to accept the authority of Canadian law and in the comic inability of Canadian authorities to recognize individuals apart from their group: ‹We’ve come for MacDonald,’ said the officer in charge. There was a ripple of laughter through the crowd and various shouts of ‘Right here.’ ‘Over here.’ All of the officers were from outside the local area and it probably had not entered their minds that almost all of us were named MacDonald” (MacLeod 123). At this wake for a dead cousin, the Mounties do not get their man; they are stymied by a social system that promotes the rights and responsibilities of the clan before the abstract right of law. Citing an eighteenth-century clansman to the effect that “it required no small degree of Courage, and a greater degree of power than men are generally possessed of, to arrest an offender or debtor in the midst of his Clan” (35), Prebble outlines the basis of swordlaw as consisting in ties of blood rather than in principles of jurisprudence or legal abstractions. In fact, it is only print that enables such social abstractions such as “bills of sale, deeds, court records, licenses, contracts, constitutions, decrees” (Deibert 83) to become a basis for “national imaginings” (Anderson 197). At this point, then, the clann Chalum Ruaidh clearly remains outside the mental framework of the nation.

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Of course, “the feudal framework which the power of the chiefs gave to the Highland way of life enclosed a tribal system much older in time. The ties of blood and name were strong among the people, and pride of race meant as much to a humbly in his sod and roundstone house as it did to a chieftain in his island keep” (Prebble 33–4). Such ties of blood and name are in fact the basis of the narrator’s first imagined community. Both his grandparents have always shown deep affection and respect for his maternal grandfather (the “shallop” man), a sign of their clannish dependence on him: ‹He has always stood by us,’ said Grandma. ‘He has always been loyal to his blood. He has given us this chance› (MacLeod 35). Evidently, the duties and mores of the clan remain what they once were in the Highlands, “each man owing economic allegiance to those above him, and all bound in fealty to the chieftain whose direct and known progenitor had been the strong-loined hero who had started the whole tribe” (Prebble 36). For Grandfather MacDonald ensured, before the narrator was born, that Grandpa MacDonald would be hired as the caretaker of a hospital that he himself had contracted to build in town. Evidently, this system of clan loyalties does not fit comfortably on everyone. As a child, the narrator used to bridle at older people who demanded, ‹What’s your name?’ ‘What’s your father’s name?’ ‘What’s your mother’s father’s name?’ And almost without fail, in the case of myself and my cousins, there would come a knowing look across the face of our questioners and they would say, in response to our answer, ‘Ah, you are the clann Chalum Ruaidh,’ as if that somehow explained everything” (MacLeod 28). But once young Alexander comes of age, clan loyalties do begin to explain everything, as the college student discovers one summer when he is expected to give up his scholarship and take the place of his dead cousin in the mine: “My brother looked at me and I, in turn, looked at the faces of my grandparents and at the parents of the red-haired Alexander MacDonald. I nodded my head slightly” (131). Just as the clansmen at Culloden “came out when told, most of them, pulling broadswords from the sod where they had been hidden since the Disarming Acts that followed the last rebellion” (Prebble 51), so the gille beag ruadh now takes his cousin’s place with his older brothers in a workplace riven by a real blood feud. At first, while giving English lessons to a fellow miner from Quebec, Alexander finds himself “pointing to une chaîne, la dynamite, la poudre, la poudre de mine, being impressed and surprised by how similar many of our words were although our accents were different. It seemed, at times, as if Marcel Gingras and I had been inhabitants of different rooms in the same large house for a long, long time” (MacLeod 199).

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The paternal grandmother who raised him also seems to share this understanding: “When I used to read I used to think that they were a lot like us. That they were alone with their landscape for a long, long time. That it went into them somehow. Our friend used to say that long ago in Scotland they were our friends, part of the ‘auld alliance,’ they used to call it” (269). Similarly, the narrator’s sister Catriona has come back from Scotland with a new sense of “the ‘auld alliance› (162) between the Scots and French followers of Bonnie Prince Charlie, which ended in disaster for most of the Highland Clans in 1746. For at Culloden, and in the ensuing campaign of “Butcher” Cumberland, much of Highland society was destroyed, even if l’ancien regime would continue to thrive on the Continent until 1789. Whatever it once meant in the Old World, in the New World the “auld alliance” is not enough to keep the peace between French and Scot. In 1968 the hardrock miners at Elliot Lake see only distinctions of clan and race that keep them apart: “We viewed them, as they did us, with a certain wariness; always on the lookout for the real or imagined slight or advantage; being like rival hockey teams, waiting for the right time to question stick measurements or illegal equipment; biding our time and keeping our eyes open” (171). Such behaviour, of course, is fundamentally clannish: ‹Those are the Highlanders,’ [the others] would say, ‘from Cape Breton. They stay mostly to themselves› (137). Yet Fern Picard’s troop of Québécois miners appear to observe the same set of rules as the Gaelic clan: “We never entered their bunkhouses, as they never entered ours. It would have been like going into the dressing room of the opposing team” (147). In this war of clans belonging to the auld alliance, there is a type of restaging of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, the founding event that first linked the destinies of French and English together on this continent. The politics of the novel are thus apparent from its title, since the words belong to General Wolfe, commander of the British forces at Quebec in 1759, who seems to be as suspicious of the Highland Scots as he is of the French: “He was just using them against the French,” the literate grandfather MacDonald explains. “Wolfe referred to the Highlanders as his secret enemy and once, speaking of recruiting them as soldiers in a letter to his friend Captain Rickson, he made the cynical comment, ‘No great mischief if they fall› (108–09). From the title page onward, then, imperial interpretations of the Conquest are being called into question. In this novel, the words “from Britain’s shore in days of yore, Wolfe, the dauntless hero came,” are never mentioned. Nor is The Death of General Wolfe, that icon of imperial hagiography produced in 1771 by Benjamin West, a painter from the Thirteen Colonies (Warner 214). Rather, the novel would seem to

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imply – based on the logic of the implied adage “my enemy’s enemy must be my friend” – that the French and Scots are really unwitting allies. In another sense, the Québécois and Cape Bretoners have been historical allies in loss, both of them having suffered the overthrow by the British of their respective feudal societies, first at Culloden in 1746, then at Quebec in 1759, and at Montreal in 1760. Even so, the manner in which an oral culture recalls its history is open to re-examination by a written culture. For Grandpa MacDonald, who remembers only what he hears, tells a different story of the Conquest from that told by Grandfather MacDonald who, on a trip to attend Alexander’s college graduation, has made a great discovery in the campus library: “It is true,” said my grandfather after we had been travelling for about an hour. “I found it in the library in Halifax … Wolfe and the Highlanders at Quebec, on the Plains of Abraham. He was just using them against the French …” “But,” said Grandpa, “didn’t you tell me once that it was a Frenchspeaking MacDonald who got them past the sentries? And that he was first up the cliff with the other Highlanders, that they pulled themselves up by grasping the roots of the twisted trees? Didn’t you tell me that?” “Yes,” said my grandfather. “First up the cliff. Wolfe was still below in the boat. Think about that.” “They were first because they were the best,” said Grandpa stoutly. “I think of them as winning Canada for us. They learned that at Culloden.” “At Culloden they were on the other side,” said Grandfather in near exasperation. “MacDonald fought against Wolfe. Then he went to Paris. That’s where he learned his French. Then he was given a pardon so that he could fight for the British Army. He fought against Wolfe at Culloden and then fought for him years later at Quebec. Perhaps you can’t blame Wolfe for being suspicious under the circumstances. He had a memory like other men. Still MacDonald died fighting for the British Army, not against it. And one doesn’t like to think of people giving their best, even their lives, under deceptive circumstances.” (MacLeod 108)

What this exchange records is more than the facts: we see that differing mindsets produce differing histories. On the one side, the oral man, ever loyal to the story he has been told, refuses to analyze or to question anything he has heard; on the other side, the literate man searches the written record and finds that his people were betrayed. Wolfe’s hypocrisy towards the Highlanders at Quebec belongs to a larger imperial history of subversion of the auld alliance, marking the

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British triumph over Celt and French alike. Within this context, however, the Conquest quickly assumes the overtones of a civil war. For the nationally imagined “fraternity” is like a brotherhood of blood, except that blood is invariably shed in this process of making, and holding together, a nation. So it is not surprising that “the imagining of that fraternity, without which the reassurance of fratricide can not be born, shows up remarkably early and not without a curious authentic popularity” (Anderson 202) in every nation. “Having to ‘have already forgotten’ tragedies of which one needs increasingly to be ‘reminded’ turns out to be a characteristic device in the later construction of national genealogies” (201). Even – or perhaps especially – in the United States, with its shared history of revolutionary war, “a vast pedagogical industry works ceaselessly to oblige young Americans to remember/forget the hostilities of 1861–65 as a great ‘civil’ war between ‘brothers’ rather than between – as they briefly were – two sovereign nation-states” (201). So, too, in France there is a need “to figure episodes in the colossal religious conflicts of mediaeval and early modern Europe as reassuringly fratricidal wars between – who else? – fellow Frenchmen” (200). This obligation to remember to forget makes a nod in the direction of the event, while occluding most of the bloody details, which is the very sign of “reassuring fratricide.” A similar nod in the direction of the Conquest, some 200 years after the fact, serves as a metonym for some of the more bloody details of the Conquest while, narratively, being nothing more than a drunken brawl at a mine in Ontario. Ultimately, this feud between the clann Chalum Ruaidh and a group of French-Canadians ends when Fern Picard, the Québécois leader, dies at the hands of Calum MacDonald. But if Picard’s death gestures towards the death of General Montcalm, Calum’s fate inverts the iconic image of The Death of General Wolfe. Contrary to a myth of sacrificial conquest, we get a man convicted of second-degree murder who drinks his life away to dull his pain. As a descendant of the clansman who fought with Wolfe and the 78th Highlanders at Quebec, he bears in his own alcoholic tremors the stigma of having broken the auld alliance. But it is in his suffering that we get a sense of “reassuring fratricide.” At just one point will the warring miners acknowledge their fraternity – when a James Bay Cree begins to play the fiddle. Only then do both sides “join one another in the common fabric of the music. Gradually the titles from the different languages seemed to fade away almost entirely, and the music was largely unannounced or identified merely as ‘la bastringue’; ‘an old hornpipe,’ ‘la guige’; ‘a wedding reel’; ‘un reel sans nom› (MacLeod 154). If the Aboriginal fiddler forms a cultural bridge between the Scots and the Québécois, he does

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so at the cost of his own cultural suppression. For the Métis, the mixed blood, is only admitted to the company of the Highlanders on the basis of a shibboleth: ‹Cousin agam fhein,’ he said in a mixture of English and Gaelic … He told us that his own name was James MacDonald and he had recognized the tartan on the shirt of the redhaired Alexander MacDonald, which I had been wearing at the time. The English/Gaelic phrase meant ‘cousin of my own› (151–2). By such means, he is admitted to the “clann Chalum Ruaidh” (145) since he evidently shares their blood as well as their language. But in ways that remain unspoken, his mixed heritage is also a figure for the Highlanders’ own alloyed language and cultural identity as they too are neither one race nor the other but both. Not surprisingly, the Norman “clan” comes to resemble its Gaelic counterpart in everything but language. Superficially, both have similar systems of economic and social obligations: “We heard also that Fern Picard had approached Renco Development the day following Alexander MacDonald’s death with the proposition that he could bring in another of his own relatives from Temiskaming to replace clann Chalum Ruaidh in the shaft’s bottom” (173). More important, however, the cultures of Québécois and Highlander are equally based on economies of memory. When Calum encounters a group of Picard’s men on a Toronto street some time after his release from prison, he says as much without being able to explain it: “I recognized their license plates, Je me souviens, at about the same time I noticed their driving” (187). The selection of this one small detail merges with another of his locutions to explain what he has glimpsed in the culture of his former “enemy”: “We have come a long way, you and I, and there are no hard feelings,” he says to the narrator early in the novel. “Do you remember Christy?” (11). Je me souviens. “Do you remember” begins to sound as the one telling phrase that reverberates through the whole of the narrative. ‹Do you remember,’ [the narrator’s sister] asked, ‘when Grandpa would drink his whisky and how he would start to cry when he told the story about the dog going back across the ice to the island?› (95). Or, ‹Remember,’ asked my sister, ‘how Grandpa and Grandma used to dream?› (193). “Do you remember the well, ‘ille bhig ruaidh?” his brothers, reminiscing at the mine one afternoon, would ask him (174). And so the catechism goes: ‹Remember when we lived in the old house and we would go outside right before going to bed to check the weather for the next day? … Do you remember?’ ‘Yes, I remember› (186). This catechetical phrase is like a formula of memory in oral societies, with their bounden duty to preserve the past in repetitive speech since, without written texts, their history would soon vanish.

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Even in Marcel Gingras’ greeting to the man who killed his leader there sounds an echo of this formula of reassuring fratricide: ‹This is Calum Mor,’ he said. ‘Long time ago when we first came with Fern Picard, this was the best miner we ever saw› (188). We have come a long way, you and I, and there are no hard feelings. Do you remember the old days at Elliot Lake? “By keeping knowledge embedded in the human lifeworld, orality situates knowledge within a context of struggle” (Ong 43). In this sense, inasmuch as it remains a point of pride, a struggle between the miners turns into a profound source of knowledge. This was the best miner we ever saw. And yet the affirmation “I remember,” like the catechism “Do you remember,” is not the only formula of memory in the novel. A whole body of songs appears to preserve the memories and dreams of each group: “Sometimes Marcel Gingras would sing one or two songs to us, although they often surpassed our understanding. They affected him, though, quite deeply and sometimes his eyes would fill with embarrassed mist as he ran his hand over the tattered map, outlining the lines that did not visually exist. They existed, however, for him, and in the old dream: le pays des Laurentides” (MacLeod 248). This Laurentian “country,” straddling the border of two provinces, harkens back to a time before the region was partitioned by Confederation and divided between the provinces of Quebec and Ontario. Like Marcel, the narrator senses how “the people of that region had more in common with one another than they had with those whom they felt controlled their destinies form [sic] the distant cities of Toronto and Quebec City” (247). For what is truly recalled in Marcel’s songs is the ghostly presence of a lost homeland, mimicking the way that “the older singers or storytellers of the clann Chalum Ruaidh, the seanaichies, as they were called … would ‘remember’ events from a Scotland which they had never seen” (65). So the lost Highland home, like le pays des Laurentides, comes to endure as a verbal presence. Lost homelands are also conjured up in less spectral ways in the print-form of the novel. When Catherine, the narrator’s sister, visits Scotland, she is immediately recognized by “strangers” in Moidart after an “absence” of two centuries: “You are from here,” said the woman. “No,” said my sister, “I’m from Canada.” “That may be,” said the woman. “But you are really from here. You have just been away for a while.”(160)

At first, Catherine is incredulous at what she finds in Moidart: “Some of them … had red hair and some had hair as black or blacker than

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my own. All of them had the same eyes. It was like being in Grandpa and Grandma’s kitchen” (163). More surprising than what she sees is what she hears. For the Moidart MacDonalds have not forgotten the very beginning of her family’s history; they repeat that story of the loyal dog who, in its desperation not to be left behind, swam out to a departing ship: ‹Yes,’ said the old man, nodding in the direction of the brown and white dogs, which lay like rugs beneath the table and the chairs in the stone house in Moidart. ‘It was in those dogs to care too much and to try too hard› (166). Word for word, it is the phrase Grandpa MacDonald used to describe the dog who, after the death of the children’s parents, died defending the lighthouse: “It was in those dogs to care too much and to try too hard” (57). Both a bloodline and a voiceline stretch back to Moidart in the Scottish Highlands, as if speech could also carry its own dna. And so the lost homeland is found when a broken history is picked up again like a dropped stitch. Of course, nothing will ever change the reality of Highland clearances or the necessity of economic migration from Cape Breton. And yet, when Alexander graduates from college, Grandpa MacDonald suggests that such laments do not necessarily mean the death of a culture: “No more sad stories. Let’s sing some songs” (115), he insists. Homeward bound, the song they now choose is “Cumha Ceap Breatuinn,” the “Lament for Cape Breton.” Not that the word “home” is synonymous with the memory of loss. The fact is, “oral societies must invest great energy in saying over and over again what has been learned arduously over the ages. This need establishes a highly traditionalist or conservative set of mind that with good reason inhibits intellectual experimentation” (Ong 41). So it is possible that “the past lingered” on in Highland culture “behind its defence-work of the Irish tongue, the memories kept alive by pipes and the songs” (Prebble 34). In this sense, the keynote of the culture has already been formally determined. For if “Song is the remembrance of songs sung” (Ong 146), the content of the form will be the memory of other songs. The memory of a “Lament,” in other words, is really an occasion for joy. Whatever its tonality, the “Lament for Cape Breton” seems to be a joyful expression of continuity with the past. For the memory of one song then recalls the memory of another through the whole repertoire of ‹Fail-ill-o Agus Ho Ro Eile,’ ‘Mo Nighean Dubh,’ ‘O Chruinneag,’ ‘An T’altan Dubh,’ ‘Mo Run Geal Dileas,’ and ‘O Siud An Taobh A Ghabhainn.’ We sang all the old songs, the songs that people working together used to sing to make a heavy task lighter. And as we drove by the houses of ‘our own country,’ Grandpa would identify or shout to his relatives as they stood beside their doors or walked about their

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yards” (MacLeod 117). Ultimately, it is this sound of singing in Gaelic that is the reassuring sound of home, ‹God’s country,’ or ‘our own country,’ as he called it” (116). For it is a country almost omnipresent in the memory of these songs they sing. A country not so far off, after all, from le pays des Laurentides de Marcel Gingras. But the clann Chalum Ruaidh recalls far more than lost homelands. The children have also lost their parents, a sibling, and an island home on a winter night when mother, father, and little brother Colin are swept under the ice on their way home to their lighthouse-keep. The oldest boy, sixteen-year-old Calum, and his two teenage brothers, must now retreat to the farmhouse their grandparents once abandoned for a job in town, while the twins, three-year-old Alexander and Catherine, are left behind to be cared for by their grandparents. ‹There are a lot of things I don’t know,’ said Grandma, ‘but there are some things I really believe in. I believe you should always look after your blood. If I did not believe that,’ she would say, ‘Where would you two be?› (58). Grandma’s way of knowing is the hallmark of oral culture, based on the maxims and proverbs of oral tradition. She “believed with great dedication in a series of maxims. ‘Waste not, want not’ was one, and ‘Always look after your blood’ was another” (38). Such formulae “help implement rhythmic discourse and also act as mnemonic aids in their own right, as set expressions circulating through the mouths and ears of all” (Ong 35). For the proverb, like the oral formula, both subtends and extends the mutual obligations of the group. “My hope is constant in thee, Clan Donald,” Grandpa says to Alexander’s Grandfather, “which is what Robert the Bruce was supposed to have said to the MacDonalds at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314” (MacLeod 88). “My hope is constant in thee, Clan Donald” (202), Grandpa repeats the maxim to Alexander over the long-distance wire, confirming the latter’s obligation to pick up his San Francisco cousin in Sudbury. “Blood is thicker than water, as you’ve often heard us say” (203), Grandma enjoins the boy during the same telephone call. “My hope is constant in thee, Clan Donald” (191), Calum will later say to the narrator, as Alexander takes leave of him in his tenement apartment in Toronto. The truth is, the narrator feels the pull of Grandma’s maxim as much as he feels the pull of kinship; if blood is thicker than water, then the sound of her voice is thicker than printer’s ink. The values of sound have nonetheless to find expression in the novel through the fixities of print. One of the paradoxes of the book is that print can communicate this oral feel for existence. As Ong maintains, “the phenomenology of sound enters deeply into human beings’ feel for existence,” although such a phenomenology typically

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appears in song and formulaic utterances of oral poetry. If “writing restructures consciousness” (78), then the novelist seeking to represent an “oral” feel for existence requires unusual means. One of MacLeod’s strategies is to reproduce a number of oral-aural settings from the lifeworld of the culture: “Sometimes, said my brothers, the blackfish [whales] would follow their boat, and they loved applause and appreciated singing … Sometimes when they were invisible my brothers would sing songs to them in either English or Gaelic” (MacLeod 99). This sense of continuity with the natural world recurs in a number of songs sung to other animals: “Even Christy was afraid as the high surf broke about her knees and her hooves slipped on the wet rocks she could not see. Calum grasped the cheek straps of her bridle in both his hands and we could hear him singing in Gaelic, loudly and clearly at the side of her head, in an attempt to steady and calm her, much as a parent might sing to a frightened child” (101). Music might indeed soothe the savage beast but only if it has civilized the “savage” breast. For song is just one marker of civility in an oral world. “Oral memory,” as Ong has observed, “differs significantly from textual memory in that oral memory has a high somatic component” (67). In this novel, the ache of memory is so strong it can produce a pain that has to find physical release. ‹Four years ago we were in Timmins,’ Calum continued, ‘and we talked all one day and night about the island. In the end we couldn’t stand it any longer so we phoned up Grandfather and first we asked him about the weather› (MacLeod 210–11). In the end, speech will not suffice to relieve their pain. So these hardrock miners pack up their tools and drive 1,500 miles to the island where their parents died just to drill their initials “into the face of the rock. We drilled their initials and their dates and Colin’s, too” (213). And when Grandpa MacDonald offers beer, hoping “it will help you to forget,” their Grandfather MacDonald says quietly, “They didn’t come all this way because they wanted to forget” (215). The body, in fact, cannot forget. For such reasons, its feel for existence will be dominant even when it is confined to print. Another strategy for capturing an oral culture’s feel for existence involves the mode of communication, the means by which the storyteller gains his knowledge: “Others told stories of forerunners; of how they had seen ‘lights’ out on the ice ‘at the exact spot’ years before, and of how such harbingers could now be seen as prophecies fulfilled” (54). Long stretches of the written narrative appear to be derived from such locutions: “One summer, my oldest brother told me, clann Chalum Ruaidh worked at Keno Hill in the Yukon” (141); “Once, my brother told me, they were working in the Bridge River Valley of

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British Columbia” (205); ‹You wouldn’t remember any of this, ‘ille bhig ruaidh,’ said my oldest brother. ‘At that time you and your sister were only infants, sleeping in baskets by the stove› (181). Much of this written story is thus filtered through the mechanisms of an oral culture: “This is a story of lives which turned out differently than was intended. And obviously much of this information is not really mine at all – not in the sense that I experienced it” (57). In such fashion, the narrator takes the place of one of the seanaichies who ‹remember’ events from a Scotland which they had never seen” (65). Admittedly, “readers whose norms and expectancies for formal discourse are governed by a residually oral mindset relate to a text quite different [sic] from readers whose sense of style is radically textual” (Ong 171). For such reasons, a twenty-first century reader could feel somewhat dubious about a plot that has been structured in the manner of oral narrative. For the time of narration through the first two-thirds of the novel – the narrative present of the telling – requires a dramatic pretext. So the narrator invites the reader along on a pilgrimage (which turns out to be a pilgrimage of the past) towards his derelict brother. Alexander, who has become a successful orthodontist, drives from his luxurious home in Windsor to Calum’s tenement in Toronto, where, at ten in the morning, he finds his brother sorely in need of brandy. On his way out to the beer store, Alexander can hear his brother still singing the “Lament for Cape Breton,” at which point he is “almost surprised to realize [the song] is no longer coming from him but from somewhere deep within me” (MacLeod 16). By such means, he preserves the fiction that his story springs from an artesian well of memory as a voice, not as a series of lifeless marks upon a page. What the narrator recalls is likewise determined by dramatic audiences who initiate, or continue, or supplement the narrator’s own act of remembrance. So, for example, in the past tense of Alexander’s telling, his Grandfather MacDonald recalls the Battle of Killiecrankie to Grandpa MacDonald while doing his taxes (90ff). But as soon as the tax return is filled out, and the Battle of Killiecrankie ended, this “past” telling triggers another telling, closer to the present. Now the scene is the home of Catherine in Calgary, where Alexander listens to his sister recount the story she has heard in Scotland of the murder of the bard “Mac Ian” by his English guests, after which she tells the story of Grandpa MacDonald’s tears on any occasion “he told the story about the dog going back across the ice to the island” and “how he let her go because she broke his heart” (95). This form of associative memory (and oral structuring) is repeated in another pair of “associative” chapters, where Alexander tells the story of James

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MacDonald, the fiddler from James Bay, only to return to Catherine’s house where he hears her tell of being taken for a native of Moidart and so hearing the tale from clansmen, two centuries removed from the event, of the original MacDonald dog swimming after the boat. While such stories may be paired on a thematic level (the return of the “native” in the instances of the James Bay and Moidart MacDonalds), the artistic skill with which they are brought together is not exactly typical of novelistic form. As Ong notes, “What made a good epic poet was, among other things of course, first, tacit acceptance of the fact that episodic structure was the only way and the totally natural way of imagining and handling lengthy narrative, and, second, possession of supreme skill in managing flashbacks and other episodic techniques” (144). While the novelist may exhibit all the virtuosity of an oral poet in managing episodic shifts of time and place, this does not change the fact that an oral narrative strains at the seams of the printed book. Perhaps the basic problem that MacLeod faces in the structure of his novel is that he must then avoid the fact of its existence. The narrator hardly seems to notice the page before him as he “speaks”; his words never take their shape from ink of pen or typewriter ribbon, much less of a laser printer. For he needs to preserve the illusion that a printed text can reproduce the existence of an oral world. Take, for example, the frame narration of his trip to the liquor store, which is recounted at intervals through portions of eight chapters (1, 8, 10, 12, 15, 16, 24, 27), and extends from page 15 to page 185. If we are to read it as the imitation of an action, this dramatic frame would be about as credible as the wanderings of Odysseus. It could even appear in the Guinness Book of Records as the longest trip in literature to the beer store. And yet, like the wanderings of Odysseus, it is filled with digressions that turn out to be oral memories of other sojourns: the narrator’s journey to an orthodontists’ conference in Dallas where he is asked, “Who are these Ukrainians one is always hearing about in Canada?” (59); to Toronto where he keeps remembering migrant workers along the highway, imagining them “imagining themselves back home” (71). Or else he produces a catalogue of what he hears and sees “in the canyons of Toronto streets … the voices of the protestors, the chants and songs and slogans of their beliefs, and the equally strong voices of those opposed to them. ‘No cruise here,’ they say. ‘A strong defence is not an offence.’ ‘Say no to nuclear war› (98). In some respects, these lists do not belong to written narrative but to the catalogue of ships in Homer’s Iliad, “where the names of persons and places occur as involved in doings” (Ong 42–3). In other words, the logic of the frame narration is “situational rather than abstract” (49), as in the manner of oral storytelling.

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The pretense of a present tense of telling, however, is also broken when it turns out that the visit to the beer store (and to Calum’s apartment) was never a speaking present. For the forty-third and final chapter, which frames the rest of the narrative, suddenly leaps two seasons ahead: “And now it is six months later and the phone rings” (MacLeod 276). The month is March, the same month as the parents once fell through the ice, and Calum is on the other end of the line, saying, “It’s time.” Arbitrarily, it is time for another journey, this time by car (an instrument of urbanization that has led to the death of an oral culture). So Alexander drives again to Toronto to pick up Calum before heading east into Quebec: “At Rivière du Loup we turn south towards New Brunswick” (278). From here, the route is carefully charted: Grand Falls, Plaster Rock, Renous, Rogersville, Moncton, Sackville, Antigonish, Havre Boucher Hill. And so they arrive in sight of the lighthouse off the coast of Cape Breton where their parents died long ago. And where Calum, in the passenger seat beside his watchful brother, now dies as well. At which point the narrator thinks, “This is the man who carried me on his shoulders when I was three. Carried me across the ice from the island, but could never carry me back again.” In a sense, the whole telling has been intended, from the beginning, to carry his brother back again: “Ferry the dead. Fois do t’anam. Peace to his soul” (283). For the frame narrative is not just a vehicle for oral memory; it has always been a vehicle to ferry the dead to the ancestors. In other respects, the frame narration is different in kind from oral narrative. For one thing, it has no actual auditors – only readers as virtual listeners – meaning that the story is not really “the result of interaction between the singer, the present audience, and the singer’s memories of songs sung” (Ong 146). There is little dramatic conversation, either, in these framing chapters since the action is dominated by the solitary consciousness of the narrator. And so quotation marks, which have been typical of the conversation carried on in the scenes of oral memory, are now inverted, or turned inward. The narrator is also aware of other peoples and times crowding the frame of his “oral” history: “The people pass and jostle in the street, speaking in various dialects of Chinese, speaking Greek, Portuguese, Italian, English” (MacLeod 58); “Farther south, in the country from which I have come, and to which I will return, the fruit and vegetable pickers bend and stretch wearily” (70); “On Monday morning my office will be filled, as it was on Friday, with those who want to be more beautiful. Some are children whose parents have made their appointments for them. Some are referrals made by friends and colleagues who practise the more basic forms of dentistry” (81); “In the southland of Ontario, the contract pickers bend and reach within their circle of the

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sun and calculate quietly the gains and losses of their day and of their season” (103). Various “meanwhiles,” in Anderson’s sense of the word, intrude upon the narrator’s consciousness, as if to map the demographics of a nation. The style of the frame narration likewise goes beyond the usual somatic triggers of memory to a philosophic form of questioning. Many of its sentences shift from a situational to an abstract logic: “The children [of the migrant pickers] will grasp their parents’ browned hands. They will be asked to take a number and later to answer the complicated question of exactly who they are … All of [the migrant workers from Quebec] will point out to their children the superiority of Quebec’s highway rest areas compared to those of Ontario, indicating the plentitude [sic] of free hot water and the lack of the commercial pressures. They will rest easily within the boundaries of their region” (197). In the end, what we hear in such passages is the inwardness and reflectiveness of a mind structured by writing. And so the effects of writing on the narrator’s consciousness prove to be revolutionary after all. For what he notes on the borders of his family history, and what he writes in the margins of oral memory, amounts to a vision of what Benedict Anderson calls “imagined communities”; that is, communities mediated by some technological means. From the imagined inclusion of Ukrainians in Canada to the nameless workers invited by signs in the fields along the highways “to ‘pick your own’ and whole families can be seen doing exactly that” (1), the narrator appears to be engaged in cataloguing the plurality of the nation, from oilmen (and his sister married to a Slav) in Calgary, to ethnic miners (and his own brothers) in Northern Ontario, to Celtic fishers (and his remaining family) in Nova Scotia. For always in their midst are these other families, migrants who, like the folk from Cape Breton, are “going down the road”: “They do not ‘pick your own’ but pick instead for wages to take with them when they leave. This land is not their own. Many of them are from the Caribbean and some are Mennonites from Mexico and some are French Canadians from New Brunswick and Quebec” (1). Whatever their economic or immigrant status, they are still imagined as potential fellow citizens. In that respect, the print-form of the novel turns into an instrument of citizenship, by which large numbers of scattered people, who can never meet in person, can still meet in textual space that identifies their imaginative belonging in the geographical space of the nation. While there is some truth to Marshall McLuhan’s claim that “the tribe, an extended form of a family of blood relatives, is exploded by print, and is replaced by an association of men homogeneously

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trained to be individuals” (Understanding 161), MacLeod’s novel nonetheless suggests that a “tribe” can persist in the structures of writing, at the very point of its assimilation into the “nation” of the book. By contrast, McLuhan’s sense of a shift from tribe to nation is both more absolute and more ahistorical: “Only the phonetic alphabet makes a break between eye and ear, between semantic meaning and visual code; and thus only phonetic writing has the power to translate man from the tribal to the civilized sphere, to give him an eye for an ear” (Gutenberg 27). In effect, this is to make a leap of logic from the cognitive to the political effects of alphabetic writing. For it is not the alphabet but the novel, with its carefully articulated meanwhiles, that has in fact transformed a cognitive revolution into a political one. Benedict Anderson shows how the novel and the newspaper have fundamentally changed our sense of time and space, and so have produced “a radically changed form of consciousness” (xiv). Readers become aware of others like themselves and gain a new sense of simultaneity from their commonly held stories and rituals of reading. In the case of the newspaper, “this ceremony is incessantly repeated at daily or half-daily intervals throughout the calendar. What more vivid figure for the secular, historically clocked imagined community can be envisioned?” (35). As for ways in which the novel has changed our perceptions of space, Anderson sees “the ‘national imagination’ at work in the movement of a solitary hero through a sociological landscape of a fixity that fuses the world inside the novel with the world outside. This picaresque tour d’horison – hospitals, prisons, remote villages, monasteries, Indians, Negroes – is nonetheless not a tour du monde. The horizon is clearly bounded” (30). The horizon of No Great Mischief is likewise bounded by the geography (not to mention the ethnography) of the nation as compared to the geography of the clan. For the landscape through which Calum is ferried on his final journey has been envisioned from the first page as a large-scale project of mapping: “Along Highway 3 the roadside stands are burdened down by baskets of produce and arrangements of plants and flowers” (MacLeod 1); “In the fall and in the spring I take the longer but more scenic routes: Highway 2 and Highway 3 and even sometimes Highways 98 or 21” (2); “The 401 … is Ontario’s major highway and it runs straight and true from the country that is the United States to the border of Quebec, which some might also consider another country” (3). Not surprisingly, this mentality of mapping is already present in scenes of oral memory and is invariably preoccupied with charting the larger territory: “We started out driving westward [from Sudbury] on Highway 17, past Whitefish,

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and McKerrow, and the road to Espanola. Past Webbwood and Massey and Spanish and Serpent River” (132); “We went outside the house [in Calgary] and looked down from the prestigious ridge. It was in the late afternoon and in the distance we could see the cars streaming east along the Trans-Canada Highway. Coming from Banff and the B.C. border” (167). In such fashion, the vehicle of the book carries us out of the territory of the clan and into the geography of the nation. In another sense as well, the shift from clan to nation is a shift from the resources of an oral culture to the new and more spacious possibilities of the book. For the narrator, who retains a number of oral virtues, is also a bilingual citizen of print, as others are quick to remind him. In reporting the story of meeting Marcel Gingras in a car with plates bearing the motto “Je me souviens,” Calum tells his brother that Marcel “asked about you – ‘the book one,’ they used to call you” (189). Alexander has always been more comfortable in the library than in the mines, happy to send his grandfather to the college library to confirm the telltale phrase of Wolfe that it would be “No great mischief if they fall” (108–9). So, too, in the differences between the MacDonald grandfathers one finds encoded the fundamental tensions of the narrative. For where Grandfather MacDonald is soberly reflective, introspective, and private, in the manner of the literate man, Grandpa MacDonald is cheerfully spontaneous, impulsive, and sociable, in the fashion of the oral man. “Grandpa died from jumping up in the air and trying to click his heels together twice … When he died, Grandfather said, ‘What an absolutely foolish way for a man to die.› On the other hand, “Grandfather died reading a book called A History of the Scottish Highlands” (264). In the persons of these two men, all the crucial tensions in the narrator’s character are finally resolved. For what he has managed to do in writing his oral story is to reconcile opposed ways of knowing in a style that is true to each. Ultimately, what Alistair MacLeod has achieved in his novel is more than a “song” of remembered songs or even an oral memory of lost homelands. In the largest sense, it is a print creation of the imagined nation, of that dreamed home in the book where Highlander and Québécois live in harmony with Ukrainians, Mennonites, and migrant workers from Mexico. It could almost pass for our long-lost map of the peaceable kingdom.

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5 Doubling and Irony: Print Nationalists vs. Radio Confederates in The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (1998) One of the crucial discoveries of the members of Clann Chalum Ruaidh in No Great Mischief is that they have not lost their place in the Highland clan, despite an absence of six generations from Scotland: ‹This woman is from Canada,’ said my sister’s guide to an old man who sat on a wooden chair inside the house. ‘But she is really from here. She has just been away for a while› (MacLeod 161). Catriona MacDonald Pankovich feels that she has stumbled into a parallel world on the far side of the Atlantic, where Moidart MacDonalds still move in time with Cape Breton MacDonalds, repeating identical phrases in an oft-told story, passed on “by previous generations” (165). Her instant sense of identity with these people is so powerful that it produces the illusion of shared personal history: ‹Oh, I forgot you didn’t know,’ said my sister, ‘I feel somehow that I have known you all my life and that you should know everything about me› (166). In fact, the case is quite the opposite: only the sealed-off past of oral memory lives in these people; they merely recall an unchanging history. Still, two separate histories are finally knit together by face-toface communication; but it takes a visitor from abroad to reveal the clan’s doubleness to itself. This oral discovery of identity differs fundamentally, however, from the literate outlook of European colonizers who named the New World after the Old. From New England to Nova Scotia, from Nouvelle Orléans to Nieuw Zeeland, Europeans were the first colonists to see themselves as living in tandem with the territories and cities they had left, as virtually doubling those places left behind. Of course, a toponym such as Newcastle could occasionally appear in the Old World as successor to a vanished place. In such instances, however, as Benedict Anderson remarks, ‹New’ and ‘old’ are aligned diachronically, and the former appears always to invoke an ambiguous blessing from

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the dead. What is startling in the American namings of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries is that ‘new’ and ‘old’ were understood synchronically, co-existing within homogeneous, empty time” (187). By contrast, the history of Chinese and Arab emigration into Southeast Asia and East Africa in that same period suggests a rather different mindset – one in which culture and religion, but not space, were open to duplication. So what enabled Europeans in the Age of Discovery to double their space abroad while, during the same period, emigrés from other continents were absorbed into their host cultures? Three conditions, it seems, needed to be fulfilled for “this sense of parallelism or simultaneity not merely to arise, but also to have vast political consequences”: “it was necessary that the distance between the parallel groups be large, and that the newer of them be substantial in size and permanently settled, as well as firmly subordinated to the other” (188). Without question, European migration to the New World was unprecedented in number (a million British and three million Spanish lived in the Americas before the Wars of Independence) as well as in distance (upwards of 3,000 miles) from the home country. Authorized by the metropole, the European settlers would continue for centuries to be loyal subjects of London or Madrid, those far-off centres of empire. And yet another factor would help to underwrite the epistemology of empire, one that accords very well with Anderson’s argument, though he fails to mention it. Without the existence of textual doubles, or without a letterpress sense of the “exactly repeatable visual statement” (Ong 127), it is doubtful that the doubling of European space – the basic assumption of imperialism – would have been thinkable. Only a culture of print, making use in multiple copies of the same pagination and lettering in identical space, enabled people to imagine the repetition of geographical space. Thus, the coming of the book enabled not just what Lord Bacon called the “knowledge of Causes” for the enlargement “of Human Empire” (Bacon 727) but also a knowledge of empire for the enlargement of national causes. For people now had an unprecedented sense of themselves “as living lives parallel to those of other substantial groups of people – if never meeting, yet certainly proceeding along the same trajectory” (Anderson 188). Multiple copies of identical texts made it seem “natural” that lives might be lived in similar ways in discrete, though not fundamentally different, places. This was not a style of thought dependent on oral communication to produce a common sense of identity; rather, this was a style of thought based on formal parallelism or simultaneity of the printed mode of communication to create a shared

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sense of identity. No matter how complete or self-enclosed the book really was in itself, it would always be formally identical on opposite sides of the globe so long as it was published from the same plates. The mode of communication was what lay behind this culture of doubling. In the Newfoundland of Wayne Johnston’s historical novel The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (1998), toponyms are rarely of this “new” variety, unless novelty can be subsumed under the sign of a newfound-land. Rather, the connection between what Anderson calls “Space New and Old” (187) appears in one revealing sequence of textual doubles that conjures up this colonial duplication of worlds in Johnston’s comic history of Britain’s oldest colony. While it has always declined to call itself New England or New Scotland, Newfoundland can still be read in Johnston’s novel under the sign of a colonizing imagination, shaped by the new epistemology of print that would make it an edition of the Old World rather than an imprint of the New. There is another type of doubling in Johnston’s novel, however, which relates to Anderson’s idea of spatial doubling but never becomes explicit in his theory. Irony is the major mode of address in The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, a semantic form of doubling that is most pertinent to the politics of this novel as well as to the political effects of print-capitalism as Anderson has described them. For irony, as Linda Hutcheon maintains, is not just a form of antiphrasis, or semantic reversal of meaning, but “a relational strategy in the sense that it operates not only between meanings (said, unsaid) but between people (ironists, interpreters, targets)” (58). More to the point, this relational aspect of irony allows for two other “aspects of ironic meaning, the inclusive (both/and) and the differential” (58). Inclusive irony does not entail rejection and reversal of the literal meaning (the “said”) but plays upon two distinct meanings simultaneously to produce a third meaning (rather like two musical notes sounding to create a third, harmonic note). “Put in structuralist terms, the ironic sign would thus be made up of one signifier but two different, but not necessarily opposite signifieds” (64). What makes for inclusive irony is the rapid oscillation between two differing signifieds for the same signifier, which creates a sense of simultaneity as well as a sense of superimposition. This oscillating effect of inclusive irony thus guarantees that we have “to think about ironic meaning as something in flux, and not fixed” (60). At the same time, both terms “have to be perceived together (with some resultant abrasive edge) for the incongruous comparison to be considered ironic” (61). This is the differential aspect of irony, which

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allows for a said to be challenged by an unsaid without really splitting the two terms or abolishing the existence of the first signified. Irony of this type enables “an oscillating yet simultaneous perception of plural and different meanings” (66). Only when one of these signifieds is rejected for the other, or when one meaning is fully substituted for another, does irony become antithetical and discontinuous. In this case, rejection and substitution work to limit “the scope and impact of irony by reducing it to a single disparity between said and unsaid, between sign and meaning” (61). But the politics of irony may also differ in each case: in one instance, the twin signifieds of spatial/textual/cultural doubling are analogous to a “both/and” experience of colonial duality and simultaneity, while, in the other, the split signifieds of rejection and substitution are analogous to the “either/or” experience of colonial declarations of independence. Relational irony stops short of a final semantic/political splitting of the sign, which is more typical of antithetical irony. So, on a political level, relational irony stays closer to a colonial outlook, while antithetical irony approaches the nationalist outlook. On the face of things, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams looks like a “nationalist” autobiography of Joey Smallwood, the Newfoundland politician who led his colony through a bitterly divisive political campaign in 1947–48 into confederation with Canada. And yet Smallwood’s apparent autobiography is also doubled at every point by the writings of Sheilagh Fielding, a fictional journalist who not only frames his narrative with her private journal but, from her opening words, places the “autobiographer” in the position of a reader: Dear Smallwood: You may not know it yet, but I am back in St. John’s. Six months since Confederation. The past is literally another country now. I remember, it was in New York, I think, that you once suggested that I do as Boswell did with Johnson and keep a running tally of your life. Even now, knowing you as well as I do, it seems hard to believe that you meant it, but you did. And you were so offended when I laughed. (Johnston, Colony 3)

Eight pages of direct address sketch this world she shared in childhood with Joey Smallwood, after which his story would appear to emerge directly out of hers. For there is not even a chapter division to mark the shift of voice but only a thin line to divide her italicized words from his romanized announcement: “I am a Newfoundlander” (8). Since Fielding has already announced her intention to play Boswell to Smallwood’s Johnson, it looks as if the putative “author” position in this “text” has already been evacuated and that we are reading Smallwood’s biography written in the first person.

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Formally, the novel would suggest as much. Each of its six major divisions opens with prose by Fielding: with her personal journal in Section 1 (“The Brow”); with her “Condensed History of Newfoundland” in each of Sections 2 (“A Continent of Strangers”), 3 (“Field Day”), 4 (“Interregnum”), and 5 (“Two Hemispheres”); and with her newspaper byline, “Field Day,” in Section 6 (“Confessions”). In other words, the novel’s structure points to Fielding’s priority in space as the author of Smallwood’s text. Within individual chapters, as well, she appears to commence, to interrupt, and to conclude the narrative of the presumed autobiographer. For instance, in the chapter entitled “The Boot” (3–8), in “Old Lost Land” (128–30), in “The Newfoundland Hotel” (150–2), in “We Let the Old Flag Fall” (491–4), and, ultimately, in “Something More Important Than Mere Blood” (547), Fielding gets the first word in her “journal,” only to have Smallwood follow in his “autobiography.” At other times, he can be interrupted midway by her journal, as in “The Docks,” where her concern for him on the ice during the seal hunt (104–5) adds to his tragic history of the eighty lost men of the ss Newfoundland. Or again, in “I Once Was Lost,” with an ironic account of rescuing our “hero” from the blizzard (232–5), Fielding’s journal interrupts Smallwood’s tale of being lost in the barrens. Again, Smallwood is barely launched on his story of marriage to Clara, in a chapter ironically entitled “Fielding,” when the journalist interrupts him to tell of her own chance encounter with Clara on Water Street (251–52). At other points, Fielding uses her journal to have the last word in various chapters of “autobiography,” as happens in “A Modest Proposal” (177–78), “Fielding’s Father” (303–9), “The Morning Post” (380–2), and “The Most Intimate of Circumstances” (421–4). And yet, in all these instances, it is the plot that dictates whether her journal gets the first, middle, or last word, suggesting that the plot and the timing of these “intrusions” are in Fielding’s hands. Several anachronisms in the dating of “Fielding’s Journal” in the first edition of the novel likewise suggest her priority in time, as well as in the space, with regard to Smallwood’s “text.” (Two of these anachronisms have been silently corrected in later printings, but the subtle persistence of a third is no accident.) Thus, while Fielding appears to follow Smallwood to New York in September of 1920, where he proposes to marry her, the journal in which she sets out to follow him to New York is dated “October 23, 1916” (150). When he withdraws his offer, pretending that it was in jest, the scene concludes with Fielding’s journal dated “February 12, 1923.” In other words, her written response to his proposal is made eleven months before the day he makes it. It is only when Smallwood stumbles on her secret journal – “The first line of the page read ‘Dear Smallwood.’ It was

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dated two months ago, November 4, 1923” (173) – that he finally works up his courage to propose to her. So his proposal, which could not have come before January 1924, is already scripted in Fielding’s journal on February 12, 1923. She thus hints that the real Smallwood’s autobiography is in the process of being “defaced by the author himself” (49). One other surviving anachronism also points to Fielding, under the date of “April 22, 1942” (421), as the author of the “autobiography,” as she writes a eulogy for an American officer whom Smallwood had mistaken as a rival at “Fort Pepperell, 1943.” Smallwood, of course, could not have visited an American military base at Pleasantville before “a rainy night in mid-October” (396) of 1942 since the United States did not enter the war before December 1941. And yet the clearest sign that Smallwood has not been the author of his “life” appears in Fielding’s final journal entry (March 17, 1989), where we are told that the fictional Smallwood has already passed out of public life: “They tell me you cannot read, write or speak, but can only understand the spoken word. You whose life was one long holding-forth have no choice now but to listen. You are a captive audience. Stroke-stricken. Struck” (555). Structurally, as well as chronologically, Fielding suggests that Smallwood can no more speak for himself than another “stroke-inspired”(49) author within the text, Judge Prowse, and that she must be the real “author” of events, not their mere reporter. In more relaxed moments, too, she hints more openly at her purloined authority: “Sometimes I have the feeling that I am appealing to qualities in you that you do not have, that the you I love is just someone I invented. I feel that, though you are younger than me by just one year, we are lifetimes apart” (130); “Do men speak like that to women except in books or in the journal fantasies of jilted girls? Why, if the you I love is just someone I invented, do I care? You with your mawkish ambitiousness, your delusionary confidence. And under all that bluster, you are barely resisting disillusionment and bitterness at the age of twenty-three” (178). The fictional Smallwood might not be able to read these words if he is the object, and not the subject, of narrative invention; in any event, he is allowed hardly more than a fleeting glimpse of her journal, only enough to ask her about their form: “Dear Smallwood?” I said. “What are you up to, Fielding?” I said. “Is this a diary, a journal, what?” “Both,” she said. “Neither. I don’t know. More like unsent letters, I suppose.” (174)

If the text we are reading is made up of these “unsent letters,” then The Colony of Unrequited Dreams might be read as the bitter musings of

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a jilted lover. A jilted nation, however, also speaks in such “unsent letters” as, early in the narrative, Fielding is identified with Newfoundland in a line quoted from John Donne: “O my America! my new-found-land” (28). As the inamorato of a jilted nation, Smallwood would naturally be curious about such “unsent letters”: “I wanted to read that history of hers to see if I was in it, for I was sure I was” (239). But he is also a textual and political double of the narrator, caught in a strategy of irony that remains to be revealed as relational or antithetical. One thing about the narrator becomes clear early on, however: Fielding is a “print” nationalist who means to subvert or mock Smallwood’s confederate politics. For, aside from such textual doublings and redoublings of his “life,” she also takes the position of the patriotic author of “The Ode to Newfoundland,” Sir Cavendish Boyle, whose loving anthem has always sounded more like an elegy to her: “Though they are anthem-like, there is something indefinably sad about the words, resigned, regretful, as if Boyle imagined himself looking back from a time when Newfoundland had ceased to be” (129). She sees herself, that is, in the image of a British governor of Newfoundland who prophesied the end of a country that he loved. And so she makes herself out to be a patriot undermining the authority of two confederates: Smallwood, who sold his “nation” to be the premier of a “province”; and Judge D.W. Prowse, whose massive History of Newfoundland never fails to inspire her with rage since “Prowse, boomer that he was, was also a confederate” (560). On one level, Fielding’s “Condensed History” simply aims to double A History, to deflate it through parody, just as her “autobiography” of Smallwood doubles his autobiography, I Chose Canada (1973), to empty his work of any authority. This method already looms large in one early scene of the “autobiography,” where the schoolboy goes with his friend, the nephew of Judge Prowse, to meet the aged author. But the old man “thought he was back working on the first edition of A History of Newfoundland, a delusion that not even showing him a copy of the first edition inscribed with his own name could shake for long” (Johnston, Colony 49). Despite Charlie Smallwood’s reverence for the author of “one of the world’s great histories” (45), Joey is forced to acknowledge that the man is merely writing “a stroke-inspired fiction” (49). Worse, the illegible scrawl of a man afflicted with “agraphia” is not even an autograph but merely the mark of an absent author, radically absent (in the Derridean sense) from the very structure of the mark. Joey is left to conclude somewhat ruefully: “Here was my father’s History, defaced by the author himself” (49). So the scene encapsulates much that is to come since it literally empties out the author position of

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Judge Prowse, even as it figuratively hollows out the author position of Smallwood by pretending to narrate in his name. Moreover, the illegible inscription in the fly-leaf of Prowse’s book requires “a ‘translation’ beneath the judge’s scrawl” (50) that turns out to be a forgery, the work of the younger Prowse. A trope of forgery thus serves to remind us of how Smallwood’s autobiography is also “defaced by the author himself.” If the Judge becomes his own ironic double, his History is doubled by another forgery, one supposed to form a commendatory “Preface” by Sir Richard Squires, prime minister of Newfoundland, to “Fielding’s Condensed History of Newfoundland”: “Our friend, Miss Fielding, has asked us to introduce in a few words the important history on which she has for so long been engaged. Although there is really nothing for us to do but conduct her down to the footlights, and then to retire with a bow to the audience, we are honoured by and humbly accede to her request” (18). Squires’s words are lifted directly from Edmund Gosse’s “Prefatory Note” to Prowse’s History: “My friend, Judge Prowse, has asked me to introduce in a few prefatory words the important colonial history on which he has for so many years been engaged. There is really nothing for me to do but to conduct him down to the footlights, and then to retire with a bow to the audience” (Prowse ix). Fielding, who has Squires “writing” in March, 1923, forges the date and plagiarizes the text; for in 1925 she tells Smallwood that “I’m writing a history of Newfoundland” (Johnston, Colony 230); later, she will claim in her “History” that she has “had to forgo an income these past twenty years to make possible the writing of this book” (210). Thus, Fielding, who was born in 1899, ought to have begun her book in 1903 for Squires to write his “Preface” in 1923. Like other anachronisms relating to Joey’s “life,” this anachronism works ironically to undercut ideas of authorship and originality: “But as Miss Fielding has erected her History not on the ruins of others but on fresh ground, let us follow her example” (18). In fact, the only example that we ought to follow is the irony concerning textual duplications. And, at first blush at least, it seems to be an irony that is relational rather than antithetical. As one might expect in this novel, the first “history” of the colony also proves to be a forgery, since the original “colonist,” Sir William Vaughan, “does not actually visit his colony, but instead writes a book extolling its virtues called The Golden Fleece and sends in his place a number of Welshmen” (67). Fielding thus undermines the authority of the real Prowse who did in fact write in A History of Newfoundland that, “Poor Sir William Vaughan, after remaining out in Newfoundland some years and spending his time writing his re-

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markable works, through want of means was first compelled to sell a block of land to Lord Falkland” (Prowse 111). But the truth, as Fielding triumphantly announces, is that “Prowse was completely taken in by Vaughan, to the point of believing that Vaughan travelled to Newfoundland and began a colony at Trepassey, when in fact he never in his life sailed far enough from England to lose sight of shore” (Johnston, Colony 83). What appears from the outset of Newfoundland “history” is that historical “authority” is a pleasant delusion and that the “founding facts” are really a figment of somebody’s imagination. Nonetheless, “a book called Quodlibets” was composed by Robert Hayman, a man who made the voyage to Newfoundland and survived to write “a miscellany of odds and ends, a corrective to the nonsense that Vaughan is churning out, which unfortunately never appears in its original form but is amended, bowdlerized by Vaughan before publication” (83). But the “corrective” is also redoubled by the “original” in ways that show how the textual double may always work to colonize an original, remaking it in its own image. Fielding, writing a corrective to Prowse’s “nonsense,” thus appears as well to be a second William Vaughan, colonizing a textual double: “That BOOK!” she shrieks with rage at sight of Prowse’s massive volume. “Had we departed from this world ignorant of its existence we should have been happier than we expect to be when the final curtain falls. Little comfort is it now that upon the publication of our History all memory of his will from the minds of the reading public be erased. If not from mine. No, never from mine, unless one of the balms of heaven be amnesia!” (406). For Prowse still presides with his gavel and his Bible in A History of Newfoundland, calling Confederation with Canada “a consummation devoutly to be wished” (560). For good reason Fielding then fumes in her study, staring at this book that “sits on the desk in front of us as we write, goading us to refutation, disputation, sustaining us through this corrective” (404). Clearly, her rewriting of Prowse’s text is meant to be laced with antithetical irony. But what she feels obliged to correct in her “Condensed History of Newfoundland” is not so much Prowse’s analysis of the problem (Britain’s colonial exploitation of the island) but his solution to this difficulty (confederation with another foreign nation across the Gulf of St. Lawrence). And yet the appearance of antithetical irony in Fielding’s History is trickier than it may seem at first sight. On the one hand, she assumes the point of view of West Country merchants and fishing admirals in order to ironically expose the social, economic, and political abuses that Newfoundland settlers have endured for centuries. On the level of the unsaid, she must then ally herself with Prowse’s

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anti-imperialist politics. On the other hand, she assumes, without irony, the point of view of local merchants because these people were staunch anti-confederates and so, on the level of the said, Newfoundland nationalists like herself. And yet how can she reconcile this contradiction without becoming her own antithesis or ending in logical confusion? An answer of sorts might well emerge in the ironic double-talk between Prowse’s account of the colony during the English Commonwealth and Fielding’s account of the same period. Here is Prowse’s text: Under the fostering care and able management of Treworgie, which extended from 1653 to 1660, the settlement, trade, and fisheries of the Colony were largely increased; no injustice to planters was permitted under his firm control; the cultivation of the land was encouraged; trade between the island and the continental colonies was promoted … Treworgie himself was connected with the trade of both colonies. New England prospered immensely under the Commonwealth, and so did our island Colony. Amidst the dreary record of wrong and oppression, Treworgie’s seven years administration is the one bright spot in our history. (164)

And here is the account given in Chapter 7 of “Fielding’s Condensed History”: The Commonwealth Government sends John Treworgie, who has no stake, financial or otherwise, in the fishery, to govern Newfoundland. Thus begins what becomes known among the merchants as Treworgie’s Reign of Terror, which lasts from 1653–1660, throughout which time the settlers are allotted better fishing grounds and are exempted from “unfair” punishment by the admirals. Thankfully, with the restoration of the monarchy also comes the restoration of law and order. Some historians have suggested that Treworgie may have been more gullible than tyrannical, that he may have been taken in by the glibness of the settlers with whom the rough-spoken merchants could not compete. (Johnston, Colony 147)

The irony of the latter account is transparent since only Devon merchants enjoying a monopoly over fishing and trade in the island feel hard done by under such an administration of justice; likewise, while courtiers and vested interests are obliged to the monarch for protecting their interests, they are unlikely to describe themselves as “roughspoken” or the lower classes as “glib.” With her tongue planted firmly in her cheek, Fielding thus pretends to defend “terrorized” monopolists and traders who, by means of royal privilege, have managed to

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suppress further settlement in Newfoundland and to delay democratic reforms. The problem, of course, is that to Fielding Judge Prowse’s anticolonial politics are agreeable, but his confederate politics are disagreeable. Antithetical irony is thus closed to her; but how is relational irony any better if it forces her into bed with the confederates? Only in an earlier history by Judge John Reeves does she find support for a postcolonial politics that may not require her to endorse Judge Prowse’s confederate politics. But Judge Reeves also wrote some seventy years before Canadian Confederation; in other respects, he is, like Judge Prowse, a man who defends the rights of settlers against the monopoly practices of colonizing merchants and West Country fishers. As usual, however, Fielding dons the protective colouring of irony, leaving readers to make out for themselves where she rejects, and where she includes, two signifieds for the same signifier: “Unfortunately, [Judge Reeve’s] objectivity is called into question in 1793, when he publishes the first history of the oldest colony and in it sets forth the thesis that England has for three hundred years been exploiting Newfoundland.” Not even his detractors can damp his true authority, however: “While we do not wish to cast aspersions on the man whom some have called Newfoundland’s Herodotus, our History would fall short of being definitive in one respect did we not point out that John Reeves was a peevish crank who wrote an entire history of Newfoundland just to get back at some West Country merchants who, he said, ‘are so miserly that, were I to allow it, they would be constantly contesting in my court some Newfoundlander’s right to breathe their air› (209–10). While English merchants would dismiss as cranks any historians seeking to expose their monopolistic practices, their economy still speaks volumes about the workings of empire: “By the early 1800s, there are a sufficient number of English merchants permanently settled on the island to support an unskilled labour force. Thus begins the Irish immigration to Newfoundland. The Irish pour in by the thousands. Five times as many as are needed are recruited, which creates a healthy atmosphere of competition among the workers and discourages the Irish from demanding higher wages than the honest English can afford to pay” (222). Two competing histories thus emerge in accents of irony: the imperial history of the English merchants and the postcolonial history of the settlers. Both, of course, are true, and both are also partial; but it is the relational aspect of irony that allows Fielding to speak for both at the same time. Of course, her tongue-in-cheek “History” implicitly sides with the settlers while pretending to oppose the anti-colonial Prowse. But it is

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obvious that the confederate historian sides with the downtrodden, as will the later Joey Smallwood in his practical vision of union: “Confederation would not make them think of themselves as Canadians. All they knew or would ever know of Canada was that it was some nebulous place from which, somehow because of me, money trickled in to them. They would vote for Confederation to get the mother’s allowance and would live after Confederation exactly as they had before, only richer by about twenty dollars per month” (454). Conversely, Fielding’s political preference for independence puts her in an uneasy relation with the imperialists, supporting the merchant opposition to Confederation. So, in her brief history of Newfoundland’s first referendum in 1869, Fielding must take the side of people she detests in order to mock the confederate grandfather of Joe Smallwood: [David] Smallwood states the case for Confederation. The crowd listens, mesmerized by his eloquence and the axe that he keeps swinging back and forth. Confederation is defeated, largely because of a demented merchant named Charles Fox Bennett, who circumnavigates the island, in every port repeating: Our face towards Britain, our back to the gulf, Come near at your peril, Canadian wolf. Men believe it is a divine retribution when Bennett is struck down seventeen years later at the age of ninety. (342–3)

Of course, this “demented merchant named Charles Fox Bennett” is made to look every bit as foolish as is the axe-wielding David Smallwood. So how is one to know where Fielding stands in such broadsides? Are her ironies relational? are they antithetical? or are they nihilistic? As the fictional Smallwood says, “She began writing satirical columns, so irony-laden you could not pin down her politics” (259). As far as he is concerned, such irony is merely frivolous: “I pretended to be unable to ‘get’ her columns, knowing that most people did not ‘get’ them. I could not understand, I said, the popularity of a writer so given to ‘romancing,’ which in Newfoundland simply meant not talking or writing about things as they really were” (500). But, once she is caught “writing for an opposing propaganda sheet, the arch-conservative Gazette, under the pseudonym Harold Prowdy, attacking in one paper the opinions she had expressed in the other and getting a war of words going between her two imaginary selves” (255–6), he will also suspect that her irony is nihilistic. For “here was

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Fielding,” he says, “finding fault with everyone and everything” (260). The problem for the fictional Smallwood is that he cannot find the antithetical meaning of her ironies: “She was called a fence-sitter and was challenged to defend herself, which she did by saying the accusations might or might not be true” (260). What he forgets is his previous observation of “two imaginary selves” in the ironist, for whom “a war of words” necessarily involves a relational form of irony lest she end in the antithetical consciousness of schizophrenia. Irony, then, for Fielding, continues to be a way of binding dualities together, not splitting them off. Her model of irony is much closer to what Linda Hutcheon calls the “semantic ‘solution’ of irony,” which “would then hold in suspension the said plus something other than and in addition to it that remained unsaid” (63). Perhaps Fielding, in her heart of hearts, is really a confederate after all, requiring the co-existence of duality and simultaneity rather than the rejection of double-talk and the substitution of univocality. On the other hand, the ironist of print accuses the fictional Smallwood of having used radio and loudspeakers to seduce Britain’s “oldest colony” into reluctant union with a foreign nation. A man who began as a print-journalist and published “an encyclopedia called The Book of Newfoundland” (Johnston, Colony 384) is convicted of betraying both his medium and his nationalist origins in using the new medium of radio to sell the cause of Confederation: The National Convention began. The Commission of Government installed microphones in the assembly and allowed the proceedings to be broadcast throughout the island, disingenuously denying the other members’ accusations that its purpose was to get the voice familiar to all Newfoundlanders as that of the Barrelman back on the air again. (385)

In reality, the historical Smallwood – who was forced to give up his political ambitions during the “Interregnum” of 1934–48, during which a bankrupt Dominion of Newfoundland was ruled directly from Britain – had for some time been writing a nationalist column for the St John’s Daily News “called ‘From the Masthead.’ His by-line was ‘The Barrelman,’ for he saw himself as a ship’s lookout, spying out information for the people on deck. After a few weeks, he went on the air with it, a quarter of an hour nightly, and he became instantly famous” (Horwood 63). Fielding’s Smallwood seems condemned, however, to recoup his failure to reach a print audience in The Book of Newfoundland by using radio to instill local pride: “I approached the manager of a radio station called vone, the Voice of Newfoundland, and pitched to him an

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idea for a fifteen-minute program to be called ‘The Barrelman,’ after the masthead lookout on a sailing ship, a program of local history and anecdotes, of which there were several years’ worth in my unsold, unread, unheard-of encyclopedia” (Johnston, Colony 385). Stories unlikely to be read by an oral audience are thus broadcast to the members of far-flung communities who find themselves bound together by the electronic messenger. As Joey’s confederate associate Harold Horwood would later describe him, the Barrelman did indeed celebrate local people for “their bravery, resourcefulness, and talent for survival in adversity until Newfoundlanders began to believe it all themselves. When they entered Confederation they refused to give up the self-image that Joey had built for them over the previous twelve years, and continued for generations afterwards to be the only English-speaking province of Canada with a true national ethos and a sense of national identity” (Horwood 64). Ironically, the new medium that created a sense of community out of distance and isolation also enabled an outport “audience to suspend its disbelief in the existence of the outside world” (Johnston, Colony 389). Newfoundlanders could begin to imagine themselves as part of a greater world, just as Smallwood could envision himself in opposition to the print-merchants, the ruling class of St. John’s who had everything to gain and nothing to lose in confusing independence with economic monopoly. A year after Newfoundland finally joined Confederation in 1949, Harold Innis, the father of communications theory, would give a lecture in celebration of the 150th anniversary of the University of New Brunswick. Expanding on his most recent book, Empire and Communications (1950), Innis offered an instructive political interpretation of the shift from a culture of print, based on the eye, to a culture of radio, based on the ear: Political leaders were able to appeal directly to constituents and to build up a pressure of public opinion on legislatures. In 1924 Al. Smith, Governor of the State of New York, appealed directly by radio to the people and secured the passage of legislation threatened by Republican opposition. President F.D. Roosevelt exploited the radio as Theodore Roosevelt had exploited the press. He was concerned to have the opposition of newspapers in order that he might exploit their antagonism. It is scarcely necessary to elaborate on his success with the new medium. (Bias 81)

What Innis recognized in radio’s return to oral communications was a return to more personalized forms of political leadership – leader-

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ship of a sort antedating the impersonal mediation of the book and the rise of abstractions such as nationalism. Ironically, the very man who is supposed to have created a sense of “nationness” among Newfoundlanders is then portrayed in Johnston’s novel as a man who goes over the heads of print-merchants to appeal orally and personally to the trust of voters. After twelve years of direct rule, they are being asked to vote on several forms of government to be proposed by a National Convention. And, without the sound of the Barrelman’s voice in distant outports, the federalist “conspiracy” might well, the novel suggests, have come to naught. For radio, which knows no borders, served to draw a population on the margins towards a larger nation – not one centred in St. John’s, but one centred in Ottawa. In I Chose Canada (1973), the real autobiographer supplies a different emphasis. “Every word of the Convention’s debates,” writes J.R. Smallwood, “was broadcast over the state radio system. The AntiConfederates promptly accused me of having instigated the setting up of microphones around the Convention Chamber. They sneered at the microphones – ‘Get those things out of this room,’ ‘Whose idea was it to put these things here?’ – looking at me. I asked them what their objection was to the microphones. Didn’t they want the people to hear the discussions?” (253). His opposition has been characterized in one unforgettable sentence in Richard Gwyn’s Smallwood: The Unlikely Revolutionary (1968): “When his opponents, driven to distraction, tried to have the microphones removed, Smallwood crushed them with the retort, ‘To despise these microphones is to despise the people of Newfoundland› (84). In the novel, a scheming Smallwood loses the battle with elected delegates of the National Convention only to win by undemocratic means the war of Confederation: I spread rumours that I was near collapse, in the hopes that this would provoke a reinvigorated attack that would win me the sympathy of the public. Fearful, however, of just that, that they would be blamed if I suffered some sort of breakdown, the independents let me speak uninterrupted for thirtyfour of the remaining thirty-eight days. The independents used – wasted – their four days denouncing the record of the Commission of Government, believing the commission to be the only real rival to independence. It seemed they were proven right when a resolution to include Confederation on the ballot was defeated 29–16. I denounced the twenty-nine as dictators, to which they retorted that they were democratically elected to cast their votes as they saw fit. (Johnston, Colony 450)

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Harold Horwood, from his perspective as a confederate strategist, recalls events otherwise than the novelist: “When the convention closed, Joey talked [Gordon] Bradley [the former Chair of the National Convention] into remaining in St. John’s long enough to deliver a radio address denouncing the twenty-nine dictators and appealing to his listeners to send in telegrams demanding that confederation with Canada be placed on the referendum ballot as a third choice … By the end of the week we had 48,960 signatures” (100). What Johnston’s readers are not told is that the National Convention also conspired to deny the people of Newfoundland a truly democratic choice. Rather, the novel appears to undercut the legitimacy of the referendum, portraying in irredentist fashion the choice of Confederation on the ballot as a backroom deal between a British governor of Newfoundland and Joey Smallwood, with the connivance of Ottawa: “Nothing had been said at my meeting with [Governor] MacDonald,” the fictional Smallwood is supposed to confess, “but something had been agreed to. I was their man. I wondered what, in the long run, that would mean. Were invisible hands at work in the months that followed? Almost certainly. But they were invisible even to me” (Johnston, Colony 441). Given Smallwood’s radio expertise, the Commission of Government’s decision to let him use it, and the British governor’s tacit help with the ballot, the novel proposes what amounts to a constitutional conspiracy. As Johnston’s Smallwood smugly concludes, relishing the irony, “Britain, as I expected, ordered that Confederation be included on the ballot, overriding the findings of the National Convention, which had been Britain’s idea in the first place” (450). All the same, conspiracy theorists are hard pressed to explain the margin of victory in the second referendum – 78,323 to 71,334 for the confederates (Smallwood 314). Wittily, the novel ascribes this victory to a voice speaking directly from the heavens to outport communities: “From a pair of megaphones attached to the underside of the Widgin’s wings comes Joe Smallwood’s voice, loud enough to be heard above the noise the engine makes: ‘Citizens of Lamaline, this is the Barrelman, this is Joey Smallwood. I have come to speak to you about Confederation, I repeat, Confederation.’ The Grumann Widgin landed in the harbours, and the people crowded the beaches or put out towards the plane in boats as if with the intention of sinking it. The door of the plane opened and there I was, loudspeaker in hand. By the time I left, they were always loudly cheering. It happened in outport after outport” (Johnston, Colony 453). Thanks to electronic technology, “Illiteracy was no longer a serious barrier” (Innis, Bias 81) to reaching the

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unschooled outporters; loudspeakers worked wonders to magnify the voice and presence of the scrawny little “Barrelman.” While events in Newfoundland do not figure overtly in Innis’s 1950 lecture at the University of New Brunswick, there are several parallels between the political situation in the United States and Europe during the 1930s and the Newfoundland referendum in 1948, particularly in terms of what Innis takes to be the political effects of media. Basically, he sees in print a spirit of divisiveness and separatism: “The flexibility of the alphabet and printing introduced an overwhelmingly divisive influence in Western civilization by emphasizing the place of the vernaculars. The vitality of the vernaculars was strengthened by an emphasis on translations of the scriptures which gave them a sacred appeal” (Empire 183). The subsequent rise of newspapers further helped to accelerate the incipient division between nations: “The steadying influence of the book as a product of sustained intellectual effort was destroyed by new developments in periodicals and newspapers … The Western community was atomized by the pulverizing effects of the application of machine industry to communication” (Innis, Bias 79). Over time, this factionalism caused by print would also spread within nations: “The printing industry [was] characterized by decentralization and regionalism such as had marked the division of the Western world in nationalism and the division and instability incidental to the regions within nations” (82). Innis’s radio-age view of print has been bolstered by a recent observation of Walter Ong: “Writing and print isolate” (74). More from a psychological than a political perspective, Ong argues that the psychodynamics of literacy tend towards separation and division: first in the literal breakdown and analysis of thought; then in the social isolation of writer and reader; and, finally, in the market fragmentation of the print industry. As Ong sums up these divisive effects: “Print created a new sense of the private ownership of words … Typography had made the word into a commodity” (131). Although much less political in his views than is Innis, Ong is nonetheless concerned with the social effects of change in the mode of communication. So, for example, he concludes that, with the advent of the “telephone, radio, television and various kinds of sound tape, electronic technology has brought us into the age of ‘secondary orality.’ This new orality has striking resemblances to the old in its participatory mystique, its fostering of a communal sense, its concentration on the present moment, and even its use of formulas. But it is essentially a more deliberate and self-conscious orality, based permanently on the use of writing and print” (136). Although it differs from pre-literate orality, this

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“secondary orality” still generates “a strong group sense, for listening to spoken words forms hearers into a group, a true audience, just as reading written or printed texts turns individuals in on themselves” (136). And yet the true political effects of radio may be found in its reach, at least in the extent to which oral communications bind people together over vast distances. Commenting on the reach of his own voice, the fictional Smallwood sounds rather like Ong: “It was strange, sitting at my microphone, knowing I was being listened to in places I had never seen, and never would but whose names I knew by heart. The people in these places knew my voice but not my face, thought of me not as Joe Smallwood but as the Barrelman, a mythical personage like Santa Claus” (Johnston, Colony 388). Here, Smallwood also sounds like Innis on the political effects of electronic orality; for, as the latter claimed, “the radio appealed to vast areas, overcame the division between classes in its escape from literacy, and favoured centralization and bureaucracy” (Bias 82). On the night of his referendum victory, the fictional Smallwood sees how radio has indeed triumphed over distance: “Let the old flag fall. The anti-confederates, looking out their windows the next day, must have wondered how they lost; there were so many more of them than us. But only in the city. Not in the outports where the antis had never been. They had been to London and they had been to New York, but they had never been to Bonavista or La Poile, and that was why they lost. Here and there the Union Jack flew at full mast” (Johnston, Colony 484). For radio, Smallwood implies, has united outport communities both as a broadcast audience and as a far-flung polis. By contrast, the nationalist cause of print is concentrated in the city, and, in a very literal sense, continues to be underwritten by urban dailies. As Harold Horwood has shown, in 1947 a remarkable array of print-forces was already lined up against union with Canada: The Daily News, though it remained a legitimate newspaper, took as strong an editorial stand against confederation as it was possible to take; any news that tended to damage Canada’s image was given front-page headlines; anything favourable to Canada was relegated to the back pages, or dropped altogether. The editorial page became an outright propaganda organ for responsible government. Indeed, most of the anti-confederate propaganda originated there, with the editor, Albert Perlin, who wrote the leaders in addition to the newspaper’s only column of comment and analysis. The Western Star at Corner Brook was forced by its owners, the Bowater Paper Company, to take a pro-responsible government stand … The Grand Falls Advertiser was, if possible, more rabid in its support of responsible gov-

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ernment than The Western Star … The weekly tabloids – even the Fisherman’s Advocate – were equally fixed in their support of responsible government … The Sunday Herald claimed to have a circulation larger than even the biggest daily in the island. During the campaign Stirling turned it into a propaganda sheet for responsible government and for his own special dream of economic union with the United States. The only newspaper in Newfoundland that attempted to take a reasoned look at the choices in the referendum was the St. John’s Evening Telegram, which had the largest daily circulation, and was soon to have the largest weekend circulation as well. The Telegram took no specific stand for or against any form of government, but attempted to give full coverage to the views of all sides. (105–6)

The implied judgment is clear enough. A broad alliance of printcapitalists (the pulp and paper companies together with their largest customers, the urban dailies) joined the merchant class to protect a local fiefdom and to shut out any competition from Canada. The same point is made most explicitly in I Chose Canada: The advocates of responsible government had powerful weapons to use. The overwhelming majority of the businessmen of Water Street and of St. John’s generally, and indeed of many parts of the country, feared Confederation and opposed it strongly. The manufacturing interests were powerfully opposed. The ownership and management of the great pulp and papermills at Corner Brook and Grand Falls were not content to be opposed to Confederation, but engaged the services of a well-known firm of chartered accountants in Montreal to prepare a statistical case to show that Newfoundland could not hope to prosper under Confederation if it did come. Nearly all of the well-known names in Newfoundland were opposed to Confederation: Crosbie, Job, Higgins, Hickman, Cashin, and dozens of others … All of the newspapers of the Island, with the exception of the Evening Telegram, favoured responsible government. (Smallwood 279–80)

Other factors, beyond the economic motive supplied by Horwood and Smallwood, stiffened the opposition of a colonial elite. Benedict Anderson has shown how colonial functionaries in the former empires of British and Spanish America were invariably restricted to service in their place of birth: “If peninsular officials could travel the road from Zaragoza to Cartegena, Madrid, Lima, and again Madrid, the ‘Mexican’ or ‘Chilean’ creole typically served only in the territories of colonial Mexico or Chile: his lateral movement was as cramped as his vertical ascent. In this way, the apex of his looping climb, the highest administrative centre to which he could be assigned, was the

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capital of the imperial administrative unit in which he found himself” (57). But Newfoundland was not a colony of Canada, only of Britain. And, apart from colonial functionaries seeking to be big fish in a small pond rather than small fish in a big sea, most officials in St. John’s had everything to gain from independence from Britain. The majority, in fact, stood to lose far more from the cause of union with Canada than did Joe Smallwood. So why should they not resent this man who had everything to gain? Apart from self-interest, of course, there were public-spirited motives for what Anderson calls the political alliance of “creole functionaries” with the “creole printmen” who “played the decisive historic role” (65) in the rise of nationalism. For early gazettes would carry “commercial news (when ships would arrive and depart, what prices were current for what commodities in what ports), as well as colonial political appointments, marriages of the wealthy, and so forth … In this way, the newspaper of Caracas quite naturally, and even apolitically, created an imagined community among a specific assemblage of fellow-readers, to whom these ships, bridges, bishops and prices belonged” (62). What most outraged the imagined community of St. John’s in 1946 was Smallwood’s evident contempt for it in one speech he made to the National Convention – a speech in which he called for a factfinding delegation to be sent to Canada. The outport people listening on their radios had every reason to doubt what the good people of St. John’s saw with their own eyes both in their daily newspapers and in their streets. For what the radio-heretic dared to deny was a visible community of print: “Our danger, so it seems to me,” Smallwood ridiculed these print-merchants, “is that of nursing delusions of grandeur. We remember the stories of small states that valiantly preserved their national independence and developed their own proud cultures, but we tend to overlook the fact that comparison of Newfoundland with them is ludicrous. We are not a nation. We are merely a medium-size municipality, a mere miniature borough of a large city” (Smallwood 259). We are not a nation. Half a century later, these words still rankle in the world of Johnston’s novel. For the fictional Smallwood slanders the very geography of their island nation: “I had never liked to think of myself as living on an island. I preferred to think of Newfoundland as landlocked in the middle of some otherwise empty continent, for though I had an islander’s scorn of the mainland, I could not stand the sea” (Johnston, Colony 131). Leaving the Rock for the first time in 1920, the fictional Smallwood also slanders the mentality of islanders: “I imagined myself looking out to sea at night from the window of a

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house in Hermitage. Hermitage. I wondered what lonely fog-bound soul had named it. It occurred to me that as Hermitage seemed to me now, so might Newfoundland seem from New York six months from now, an inconceivably backward and isolated place, my attraction to which I could neither account for nor resist. The whole island was a hermitage” (144). He then recalls, somewhat anachronistically – since no radio broadcast had crossed the island in 1920 – how “I thought of the fishermen’s broadcast that I used to listen to on the radio when I lived at home. It always concluded with an island-wide temperature round-up” (143). And so his conclusion becomes prophetic: “In the lounges, people sat listening to the radio until, about twenty miles out, the sound began to fade … The radio was left on, though, eerily blaring static as though it were some sort of sea sound” (144). Evidently this island-hating man is going to return to Newfoundland one day and conquer its isolation by building radio bridges to the mainland. At the same time, Smallwood’s experience of the mainland reminds him how much his sense of home still depends on the shape of an island: “How could you say for certain where you were, where home left off and away began, if the earth that you were standing on went on forever, as it must have seemed to him, in all directions. For an islander, there had to be natural limits, gaps, demarcations, not just artificial ones on a map. Between us and them and here and there, there had to be a gulf” (132). The itinerant Smallwood’s “natural” assumptions are shaken, however, as soon as “I passed a land border for the first time in my life, the one between Massachusetts and Connecticut, an arbitrary border on either side of which the landscape was identical, as I had no doubt it was on either side of the border between New Brunswick and Maine, Canada and America. Perhaps we Newfoundlanders had been fooled by our geography into thinking we could be a country, perhaps we believed that by nothing short of achieving nationhood could we live up to the land itself, the sheer size of it. It seemed so nation-like in its discreteness, an island set apart from the main like the island-nations our ancestors left behind” (154). To his credit, the fictional Smallwood will go on to seek “something commensurate with the greatness of the land itself, which I had so often felt was just beyond my understanding” (433). But what the mainland has already shown him is that nations are neither natural nor inevitable, not, at least, in the way they had once seemed on the Rock. Still, the fictional Smallwood is patriotic enough to carry with him a tablecloth-size map that he pins to the wall of successive boarding houses in Halifax, Boston, and New York. It is this image of his native

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land that barely permits him to keep faith with a younger self who had done something similar on first leaving his parents’ home: “The first thing I did on moving into the boarding-house was tack up an oilcloth map of Newfoundland … Every morning, before work, using the oilcloth as my model, I drew the map of Newfoundland. My goal was to be able to draw it as well from memory as I could draw the map of England” (89). The future confederate is thus made to stay after school, as it were, to draw and redraw the map of his nation until he gets it right. The man who will one day write I Chose Canada then sets off in the novel to explore regions of an island nation that are never mentioned in the real autobiography. For instance, the fifteen-year-old cub reporter is able to witness scenes of utter devastation out on the Atlantic icepack: “From as high up in the rigging as I dared to go, I watched them work, swinging their sharp-pointed gaffs like pickaxes, killing the seals and swiftly pelting them with knives that gleamed like razors in the sun. Beginning a few hundred feet from the ship and extending as far as I could see, the ice was red with blood. They dragged piles of pelts back along the same route each time, so that a single trail of gore led like a road from the blood field to the ship” (99). In one of the most affecting scenes in the novel, the youngster confronts the reality of a sealer’s life, finding himself at the scene of one of Newfoundland’s worst marine disasters. Here, he establishes his credentials as a true islander in one powerful description: “For several minutes after the ship stopped, no one disembarked. I saw what I had not been able to through my binoculars: that these were not survivors but a strange statuary of the dead. I was not repulsed by what I saw. I could not take my eyes away. Two men knelt side by side, one man with his arms around the other, whose head was resting on his shoulder in a pose of tenderness between two men that I had never seen in life. Three men stood huddled in a circle, arms about each other’s shoulders, heads together like schoolboys conferring on a football field … Only a few men knelt or lay alone, perhaps those who had lasted longer than the others” (107–8). Years later, he is still haunted by an “image of them turning compliantly about when Kean told them to, preferring to risk the blizzard than defy him, setting out on their doomed walk across the ice” (113). Here is the fictional germ of Smallwood’s actual dalliance with socialism as well as of his decision in the 1920s to write for The Call in New York. But tiring of socialists who are “on sabbatical from lives of privilege to which they openly admitted they planned to return someday” (166), the fictional Smallwood then conceives “the idea of a

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grand, momentous homecoming that would hint that my five years abroad had been full of just such adventures, walking in service of a noble cause from one side of the island to the other” (213). Now the one-time cartographer becomes an active explorer of his native land. Contrary to the real Smallwood, who would first spend several months organizing unions in Grand Falls and Corner Brook before setting out on his trek across the trans-island railway (Smallwood 152–4), the fictional Smallwood goes in search of a nation that so fleetingly appeared as the double of itself on his return: “It was the old lost land that I was seeing, as if, like fog, the new found one had lifted. How long I stood there staring at it, I’m not sure, seconds or minutes. When I came out of whatever ‘it’ was, the new found land was back and tears were streaming down my face” (Johnston, Colony 212). For once, he actively pursues what he had found so hard to keep in mind in New York, “a beauty so elusive, so tantalizingly suggestive of something you could not quite put into words that it could drive you mad and, however much you loved it, make you want to get away from it and recall it from some city and content yourself with knowing it was there” (137). Nonetheless, in his epic walk across the trans-island railway and down its branch-lines in 1925, signing up sectionmen to his newly formed union, Johnston’s Smallwood fails to catch this “elusive beauty.” Not until his voyage along the south coast in 1935 does he finally re-enter the “old lost land.” (In fact, the real Joey Smallwood hired a schooner in 1935 to poke “up and down the northeast coast of Newfoundland so that I could organize branches of the [Fishermen’s Cooperative] Union and then go back occasionally to visit them” [Smallwood 189, my emphasis].) Only on the sea, it seems, can he encounter the land in all its greatness and begin to utter poetry: “We sailed sometimes within a few hundred feet of shore, looking up at great ramparts of granite and sandstone, sheer cliff faces of islands that rose abruptly from the sea, as if large pieces of the main island had broken off like icebergs from a black glacier, never-melting bergs of rock” (Johnston, Colony 346). “There was a point on one beach where you could see all the way down the fiord to the sea, a jagged line of light between the cliffs, a lightning-bolt’s width, a bolt caught as though in a photograph” (348). By such means, the itinerant is converted into a map-making bookman, in the process illustrating Ong’s claim that “only after print and the extensive experience with maps that print implemented would human beings, when they thought about the cosmos or universe or ‘world,’ think primarily of something laid out before their eyes, as in a modern printed atlas, a vast

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assemblage of surfaces (vision presents surfaces) ready to be explored. The ancient world knew few ‘explorers,’ though it did know many itinerants, travelers, voyagers, adventurers, and pilgrims” (73). The voyager-turned-explorer also makes another crucial discovery on his 1935 south-coast voyage: “It was hard to believe Newfoundland was an island and not the edge of some continent, for it extended as far as the eye could see to east and west, the headlands showing no signs of attenuation; a massive assertion of land, sea’s end, the outer limit of all the water in the world, a great, looming, sky-obliterating chunk of rock” (Johnston, Colony 347). In Smallwood’s mind, the island has become equivalent to the mainland, allowing him to see beyond his shame and anger at the “thought that nationhood was a luxury we could not afford,” and even to forget his “anger without object, unless it was the land itself for imposing upon us an obligation for greatness without giving us the means to meet it, a greatness commensurate with our geography” (339). For, in the geography he had once rejected, he now finds the nation he had thought was lost. As late as the referendum campaign, the radio-man will come back occasionally to his (print) senses. Travelling by seaplane, he says: “I wished we could fly high enough so that I could see the island whole, all of it at once in its map-drawn shape, a single entity, no longer composed of many parts, but one distinctive, discrete shape among the many that comprised the world. We drew a map of Newfoundland with the plane, drew its coastline perfectly to scale. We circumnavigated the island counter-clockwise, land always on our left” (452). The former patriot yearns to see the island, as it were, in its ideal form. Of course, “Platonic form,” as Ong describes it, is “form conceived of by analogy with visible form” (80) – a form derived from the new technology of writing, whatever Plato’s own misgivings about writing. The vision of an ideal form is thus the product of a mind shaped by print; for the vision “ideally” exists only in the text, beyond any passing thought of it. But in the end, the radio-man finds himself unable to leave the earth from which he has taken flight because the very idea he envisions belongs to print. In every voyage he takes on foot, by ship, or by plane, much less in every map he draws with pen or wing of an aircraft, he comes perilously close to admitting his true allegiance to the nation of the book. In fact, the medium of print continues to shape his life in ways (apart from his being written by Fielding) that were always difficult for him to interpret. In his youth, he had seen his mother throw her husband’s copy of Prowse’s book out a window, only to have it trigger a landslide and bury an old man at the bottom of the slope, his mouth “stuffed with snow” (Johnston, Colony 72). At the same time,

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he was framed by an anonymous letter to the Morning Post, leading to his suspension from Bishop Feild College. Potential framers were young Prowse, Joe’s father, a Pentecostal Jeremiah named Tom Hines, and Fielding’s own father (although, in view of her authorship, Fielding’s initial confession of blame is more like poetic justice). As he assures Headmaster Reeves, “I didn’t write letters to anyone” (59), as if to deny future authorship of this “life.” Later, he will feel condemned to wear Prowse’s book like an albatross around his neck on his transisland trek, plodding “wearily along, after a while no longer noticing the spectacular scenery, often near-delirious from hunger and exhaustion, reading, retracing centuries of history until it seemed to me the judge’s whole book was written in the cryptic scrawl of his inscription to my father. I probably read the judge’s History twenty times. It began to seem that this, and not the walk, was the epic task that I had set myself, to read the history of my country non-stop, over and over until I had committed it, word for word, to memory” (214). Since it is Fielding who condemns him to such a penance, it may be that any political difference between the two boils down to the difference in their mode of communication; that is, where the radio-man seeks to conquer distance and bring Newfoundland into union with Canada, the print-woman distances herself in a manner dictated by writing, which tends to foster a “sense of personal disengagement or distancing” (Ong 46). So the more the fence-sitter distances herself from issues, the more she makes a closed book of herself. In one key respect, at least, she might well embody her medium: “What is inside the text and the mind is a complete unit, self-contained in its silent inner logic” (150). For self-containment tends to make writing “the seedbed of irony, and the longer the writing (and print) tradition endures, the heavier the ironic growth becomes” (103). But the irony of Fielding’s writing indicates a text turned back on itself, whose ultimate goal is to overcome the dualities she finds in herself and in her medium. Thus, by sitting on the fence, by occupying both sides and neither, Fielding hopes to have things both ways by means of relational irony. So, for example, she could inflict worse damage than she does on this man with so many failings, both public and private. As she notes of Smallwood’s public legacy, “The country is strewn with Come by Chance-like monoliths, the masterpieces of some sculptor who worked on a grand scale and whose medium was rust” (Johnston, Colony 555). At the same time, she cannot deny tender feelings for the old politician now out of power and so very vulnerable: “You were carried from the drill hall on the shoulders of two men. Raised above the crowd, you took the full force of the wind when you got outside. You turned your face away, held

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your hat up to your ears to shield yourself” (554). To the end, she cannot help but be of two minds about the man: “This is so one-sided, me talking to you, you not talking back, and me not even there to hear myself and to watch you listen. There was a time when I would have given anything to see you stuck for words. I still would, to tell you the truth … I consider myself hugged and kissed by you, Smallwood, and am thinking now of you bidding me good-night. You may, if it please you, do likewise with me” (556). In his family memoir, Baltimore’s Mansion (1999), Johnston has very poignantly dramatized the grief and guilt of a father and grandfather wanting to have things both ways in the Newfoundland referendum. The irony becomes most clear in one striking metaphor: “The storms moved from west to east, their clouds, winds, rain or snow from east to west. A simple but maddening paradox. Like a person walking towards the rear of an airplane. Everything the storms contained moved two opposing ways at once” (Baltimore’s 236–7). Such is the position of Johnston’s own grandfather in the referendum, poor, grief-stricken “Charlie. Confessing to his son what he confessed to no one else, his son whom he knew would keep his secret but whom he did not know he would never see again. Charlie unburdening himself, Charlie guiltridden, remorseful, realizing too late that he had blundered. Or merely giving in to the urge to share a secret he could no longer stand to keep … Why not Charlie? The closet confederates. Apparent zealots to the cause, for whom everyone who knew them would have vouchsafed” (238). And yet this inclusive aspect of irony is also the writer’s means of moving in two directions at once. In his own double-voicing, he is like Fielding, who moves “two opposing ways at once” in her story of Smallwood, just as she moves “two opposing ways” in her double-voiced history of merchants and settlers. At times, of course, the pretense of moving two ways at once, of holding to two simultaneously different signfieds, appears to be no more than pretense, such as in the ironies of the mob riot on the legislative grounds. Tongue planted firmly in her cheek, Fielding speaks as if it is simply a time-honoured custom: “Prowse argues, convincingly, in our opinion, that the Nones is a form of scapegoating, ‘which was a ritual communal cleansing whereby the sins of the tribe were laid upon a blameless goat who was taken to the wilderness and there released, never to return. (See Leviticus, XVI.)› (Johnston, Colony 327). And yet such pretense makes a mockery of the seriousness of the event: “I doubt that any of them had ever run a Nones before, yet how well they played their parts” (330). Even here, the inherent violence of the situation is belied by the sport of her description: “How tickled they were when they realized, some time later, that Sir Richard had tricked them by sneaking past them in disguise, slipping through the

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crowd dressed like a member of the ’Stab, his hat pulled low, his glasses off, his collar turned up to hide his face. Not until he intentionally tripped over an iron gate did they recognize him, and then the cry went up. ‘There he is, God bless him, it’s Sir Richard.’ And the Nones was on!” (329). The sport of her description almost begins to merge with the blood sport of the hunt: “Among the methods of execution recommended by some, and by others rejected on the grounds of being too good for him, were hanging, drowning, shooting, stoning, crucifixion and castration” (331). Such a tone, though wickedly funny, raises chilling questions about the paradox of murderous “innocence.” Does Fielding approve of politics as a blood sport? Or does her irony finally split the image into two antithetical signifieds, one of which is rejected to be substituted for another? The problem is that Fielding’s savage indignation can swiftly modulate to lyric mourning. Take her final by-line of the novel, which, separated by just a line from her journal, emerges from it in almost the same way that Smallwood’s voice had emerged out of her opening journal. As a meditation on Shawnawdithit, “the last Beothuk Indian” who “was known to the people of this city as Nancy April” (556), this by-line for “June 6, 1959” soon, inasmuch as “we have joined a nation that we do not know, a nation that does not know us” (560), turns into a meditation on the lost nation of Newfoundland. Recalling an episode on referendum night when a gleeful, spiteful conductor tooted his train whistle to the barrens, she appears bent on recapturing a nation that was lost on that night: “What did he imagine we had won? What, had he ‘lost,’ would he have imagined he had lost?” (562). What sounds in such musings is Fielding’s own deep ambivalence, her feeling of being “Unresolved about everything” (493). For the truth is, “I could not bring myself to vote. Me and more than twenty thousand others. And the margin was just seven thousand votes” (493). While the referendum should have “forced us to face our longburied demon of identity” (477), changing what “had seemed like just another election” into something “more like civil war” (476), Fielding thus speaks for the ambivalence of all Newfoundlanders. Even a bagpiper playing the “Ode to Newfoundland” out on the barrens on referendum night is unable to declare his politics in his music. Was this “someone who voted against Confederation bidding Newfoundland goodbye? Or some confederate piping her into the promised land? Impossible to tell, the ode being what it is” (492). For pink and green, Protestant and Catholic, Saxon and Celt, confederate and nationalist are all finally bound up together in this doubled print structure of private journal and public history, of biography and autobiography, in an ambivalence that is never resolved.

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As Homi Bhabha sees it, of course, it is “the effect of the ambivalence of the ‘nation’ as a narrative strategy,” as well as “an apparatus of symbolic power,” to produce “a continual slippage of categories, like sexuality, class affiliation, territorial paranoia, or ‘cultural difference’ in the act of writing the nation” (Location 140). Such is the case in Fielding’s act of writing the “nation,” since it is not just the lost “nation” of Newfoundland that appears to double this “nation” of Canada but, rather, the persistence of other elements – all those displaced signifieds and dispossessed persons – whose “movement requires a kind of ‘doubleness’ in writing; a temporality of representation that moves between cultural formations and social processes without a centered causal logic” (141). Inevitably, the postcolonial writer finds herself unable to affirm the old (print) nationalism, by which a double signified could be split into two antithetical parts; rather, her nation is “a liminal signifying space that is internally marked by the discourses of minorities, the heterogeneous histories of contending peoples, antagonistic authorities and tense locations of cultural difference” (148). Yet none of these contending authorities is rejected as her relational strategy of inclusive irony keeps both sides in play, always revealing the one in relation to the other, whatever its ironic edge. In the end, Fielding can only write, “I watched the train until it disappeared from view, the sound of the whistle receding. Something abiding, something prevailing, was restored” (Johnston, Colony 562). Johnston exhibits much the same impulse at end of Baltimore’s Mansion: As he looks out at the sea, everything is as it was before he crossed the stream, before he crossed over into Avalon. The House, the Gaze, the Beach, the Downs, the Pool, Ferryland Head, Hare’s Ears, Bois Island, Gosse Island and the sea. All are fixed in a moment that for him will never pass. (272)

The print-man, it seems, has found a way to preserve the world in a moment of fixity. It is this medium, of course, that is both source and means of the Platonic ideal. And here, in contrast to the passing moment of speech, time may well be frozen into something like eternal form. An instrument of mapping, of laying out space in a vast assemblage of surfaces, print appears ready to be entered again by another exploring eye. The House, the Gaze, the Beach, the Downs – all of these landmarks are still there, but they are also restored through print to their true form, abiding and prevailing. A similar attempt to fix the “nation” in a manner that will aye endure appears in Fielding’s closing eulogy: “I have often thought of

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that train hurtling down the Bonavista like the victory express. And all around it, the northern night, the barrens, the bogs, the rocks and ponds and hills of Newfoundland. The Straits of Belle Isle, from the island side of which I have seen the coast of Labrador” (562). At the same time, it is clear from the “doubleness” of her writing that her ironic meanings will always be in flux, that they cannot be fixed. So we hear one last confession of the “autobiographer” who gracefully admits his failure to grasp and hold the nation as the body of his beloved. Speaking of the greatness of a land that haunts him still, he admits that “it stirred in me, as all great things did, a longing to accomplish or create something commensurate with it. I thought Confederation might be it, but I was wrong” (552). The politician is even generous enough to say that “only an artist can measure up to such a place or come to terms with the impossibility of doing so. Absence, deprivation, bleakness, even despair are more likely than their opposites to be the subject of great art, but they otherwise work against greatness” (552). And so Fielding, in her last word, dons the mantle of the artist of her nation: These things, finally, primarily, are Newfoundland. From a mind divesting itself of images, those of the land would be the last to go. We are a people on whose minds these images have been imprinted. We are a people in whose bodies old sea-seeking rivers roar with blood. (562)

All of Fielding’s ironies reveal one great truth: no matter what has been “imprinted” on the mind of a people, the idea of the nation cannot be fixed in stone. For as long as rivers run and arteries roar with blood, some other medium of continuity will have to be found.

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6 Writing and Revolution: The Prisoner of Print in Prochain épisode (1965)

An unnamed narrator confined to Montréal Prison as a political terrorist writes a spy novel in the 1960s, which frantically crisscrosses Switzerland. Creating a mirror-image of himself as his protagonist, “slightly altered” (P. Williams 17), he imagines a double in the Front de Libération de Québec (flq) (whose mission is to kill a mysterious Swiss banker and protect the Liberation Front’s financial affairs) daydreaming of “cette route solitaire qui va de Saint-Liboire à Upton puis à Acton Vale, d’Acton Vale à Durham-sud, de Durham-sud à Melbourne, à Richmond, à Danville, à Chénier qui s’appelait jadis Tingwick” (Aquin, Prochain 10). His evocation of “that lonely road which goes from Saint-Liboire to Upton” (P. Williams 11) is no isolated instance of the narrator/protagonist recalling the highways and landscapes of his native country; rather, his mental mapping resembles “une possession rituelle du pays par l’énumération passionnée des routes, des villages aimés, des paysages perdus” (Lefebvre 154) [“a ritual possession of the country through the passionate enumeration of its highways and beloved villages, of lost landscapes” (my translation)]. To a man in a jail cell, it might even work as a literary incantation, both to double and to recover lost space. And yet there is more at stake in this “ritual possession” than one man’s personal freedom of movement. For the narrator/protagonist is acutely aware of another lost nation through which his remembered highways lead: “Et je vois, sur la route 8 entre Pointe-au-Chêne et Montebello, l’auto beige qui roule sans moi. La campagne a quelque chose d’émouvant au sortir de Pointe-au-Chêne, tandis qu’on remonte l’Outaouais vers Montebello et qu’on se rend jusqu’à Papineauville” (Aquin, Prochain 77) [“And I can see, on route 8 between Pointe-Claire (sic) and Montebello, the beige car I am not in. The countryside is very moving just outside Pointe-au-Chêne, where one drives along the

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Ottawa River toward Montebello and all the way to Papineauville” (P. Williams 59)]. His destination seems to be the home of the leader in the 1837 rebellion – Montebello, that imposing stone manor built in 1850 by Louis-Joseph Papineau near the town named after the famous man’s estate – and its neighbouring village, Papineauville, named more directly in honour of the spokesman of the Patriotes in 1837. Of course, when hostilities had broken out, Papineau fled in the very moment of victory at St-Denis to the United States. So now a contemporary revolutionary takes this road in his mind to the past, as if to meet another leader of a revolution that failed. At the same time, in a longer evocation of the same road, the narrator recalls a painful scene of collective defeat: “Quelques heures me suffiraient pour prendre la route 8 à Saint-Eustache où nos frères sont morts” (Aquin, Prochain 78) [“Several hours would be enough time for me to take route 8 from Saint-Eustache where our brothers died” (P. Williams 60)]; “je devrai répondre … de mes frères qui se sont donné la mort après la défaite de Saint-Eustache” (Prochain 79) [“I will have to answer … for my brothers who killed themselves after the defeat of Saint-Eustache” (P. Williams 60)]. Over a century later, he seems duty-bound to answer the call of Les Fils de la liberté, who patterned themselves on the Sons of the American Revolution (Bernard 4). To the hundred or so who died in the assault on the parish church at Saint-Eustache on 14 décembre, however, and to another 120 captured by Sir John Colborne’s army of 1,500, what answer would suffice, save to succeed where they had failed, to complete the revolution that history had written off as a failed rebellion? This is evidently the point of his final destination, which the narrator imagines for himself: “Quand tout sera fini, c’est là que je m’installerai dans une maison éloignée de la route, non pas sur le bord de la rivière des Outaouais, mais dans l’arrière-pays couvert de lacs et de forêts, sur la route qui va de Papineauville jusqu’à La Nation. C’est là que j’achèterai une maison, tout près de La Nation, juste à l’entrée du grand domaine du lac Simon” (Aquin, Prochain 78) [“When it is all over, I will settle down there in a house far from the road, not on the edge of the Ottawa but in the back country spilling over with lakes and forests, on the road from Papineauville to La Nation. I’ll buy a house close to La Nation, just at the entrance to the great park at Lac Simon” (P. Williams 59)]. The freedom fighter who wins the liberty of his country can finally retreat to his rural idyll, covered in glory. To all appearances, the narrator imagining his double in Switzerland imagining highways and byways in Quebec is then engaged (rather like the narrator of No Great Mischief) in a project of national imagining that leads directly to “La Nation.” He invites the reader to

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commune with him in imagining a shared public space and history that gives great temporal depth to the “imagined community” of his book. In short, he seems to be a perfect illustration of that “radically changed form of consciousness” (Anderson xiv) associated with print, where changed apprehensions of time and space offer the basis for a new form of imagined community. For, much as “the new conception of spatial reality” produced by Mercator maps was to revolutionize European politics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, allowing for a new mental possession of “bounded territorial space” (173), so a later “practice of the imperial states of coloring their colonies on maps with an imperial dye” (175) was to revolutionize politics in the colonial possessions. For “the logo-map penetrated deep into the popular imagination, forming a powerful emblem for the anticolonial nationalisms being born” (175). In postcolonial terms, this map-formed consciousness produced by the colonizer would actually work against him. In Prochain épisode, however, there is something suspect about the national imaginings of a narrator who writes, “Quelques heures me conduiraient à La Nation, tout près de cette maison en retrait de l’histoire, que j’achèterai un jour” (Aquin 79) [“Several hours would take me to La Nation, close to that house in retreat from history which I will buy some day” (P. Williams 60)]. For he is evidently in full “retreat from history” himself, rather like Louis-Joseph Papineau who, recoiling from his revolutionary words, retreated ever farther from history to live in political limbo, if social comfort, at Montebello. In other words, the narrator’s imagined “La Nation” is not a public space at all but a private retreat. And so he is condemned by association to end as another ineffectual revolutionary, one who talks or writes like a true patriote but who is actually content with defeat. More like Fielding in Colony of Urequited Dreams than MacDonald in No Great Mischief, the narrator of Prochain épisode appears to inhabit a structure of irony, although his particular form of double-talk and type of textual doubling is supposedly committed to splitting apart the two signifieds of a single signifier, Canada. And yet the narrator is likely to be an object of authorial irony rather than its maker; and this form of irony is likely to be relational rather than antithetical (see Chapter 5). For only irony would seem to explain what is otherwise an unresolvable paradox in the book – that a writer so devoted to imagining “La Nation” in print is a man who has to admit, “Rien n’avance, sinon ma main hypocrite sur le papier” (Aquin, Prochain 119) [“Nothing advances, except my hypocrite hand on the paper” (P. Williams 87)]. By his own account, he is revealed as less than a whole-hearted patriote, as someone more inclined to imagine himself

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as the revolutionary hero than to imagine a revolutionary form of community – the nation. Despite his protagonist’s failure to complete his assignment by killing his counter-revolutionary enemy, the narrator insists that “quand les combats seront terminés, la révolution continuera de s’opérer; alors seulement, je trouverai peut-être le temps de mettre un point final à ce livre et de tuer H. de Heutz une fois pour toutes. L’événement se déroulera comme je l’avais prévu” (Aquin, Prochain 173) [“When the battles are over, the revolution will continue; only then will I perhaps have time to finish this book and to kill H. de Heutz once and for all. It will take place as I have envisaged it” (P. Williams 125)]. A classic instance of wish-fulfillment thus takes a sharply ironic edge. All the same, another dimension in this portrait of the revolutionary-as-martyr suggests: “It is the magic of nationalism to turn chance into destiny” (Anderson 12). For the narrator, who has already sacrificed his freedom (contrary to Papineau), now proposes as well to make a religion out of failed revolution: “En tous cas, je dois demeurer invulnérable au doute,” he concludes, “et tenir bon au nom de ce qui est sacré, car je porte en moi le germe de la révolution. Je suis son tabernacle impur” (Aquin, Prochain 171) [“And in any case, I must remain invulnerable to doubt in the name of what is sacred to me, for I carry in me the germ of the revolution. I am its tabernacle, its impure tabernacle” (P. Williams 124)]. It may be foolhardy, in other words, to write off a revolution simply because of its ineffectual subject. Still, it would be “simpleminded,” as Anderson writes, to say that the “dusk of religious modes of thought” in the eighteenth century was inevitably followed by “the dawn of the age of nationalism.” For the point is clearly not that nationalism was ‹produced’ by the erosion of religious certainties,” nor even “that somehow nationalism historically ‘supersedes’ religion” (11–12); rather, the continuing threat of death and nothingness, no longer ameliorated by religion, was to make “another style of continuity more necessary.” And “few things,” as Anderson notes, are “better suited to this end than an idea of nation” (11). Doubtless it is to such an “idea of nation,” and its promise of continuity, that the narrator clings at the end of Prochain épisode. Though he has failed as a terrorist and things are likely over for him, he insists that “tout ne finit pas en moi. Mon récit est interrompu, parce que je ne connais pas le premier mot du prochain épisode. Mais tout se résoudra en beauté” (Aquin, Prochain 171) [“everything has not died with me. My story is interrupted, for I do not know the first word of the next episode. But everything will resolve itself in beauty” (P. Williams 124)].

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While he does not know the first words of the next episode, the narrator insists that his story is only interrupted; its logic is inevitable: “Déjà, je pressens les secousses intenables du prochain épisode” (Aquin, Prochain 172) [“Already I feel the irresistible pressure of the next episode” (P. Williams 124)]. The shock of the next episode is likely to be unbearable only to those who resist it; otherwise, the story ought to write itself in terrible beauty: “Les pages s’écriront d’elles-mêmes à la mitraillette: les mots siffleront au-dessus de nos têtes, les phrases se fracasser-ont dans l’air” (Aquin, Prochain 173) [“The pages will write themselves in gunfire; the words will whistle over our heads, the sentences will break upon each other in the air” (P. Williams 125)]. Falling back on a notion of the story going on without me, the true nationalist thus shows how chance can be translated into destiny: “Il est tourné globalement vers une conclusion qu’il ne contiendra pas puisqu’elle suivra, hors texte, le point final que j’apposerai au bas de la dernière page” (Aquin, Prochain 93) [“It is directed toward a conclusion which it cannot contain, since that conclusion is outside my text, beyond the final period on the final page” (P. Williams 70)]. Given its inability to contain its own conclusion, the story must then be completed by its readers, on condition that the narrator gives up any part in it. He is thus able to present himself as the saviour of the nation: Do this in remembrance of me. The danger of falling back on sacramental language, however, is deferral of revolution to the next world. For destiny to be realized in this world, the revolutionary must be prepared to commit sacrilege against his borrowed language. So Aquin’s narrator writes to K (Quebec), his lover and revolutionary comrade in arms: “Je pose mes lèvres sur la chair brûlante de mon pays et je t’aime désespérément comme au jour de notre première communion” (Prochain 70) [“I place my lips on the burning flesh of my country, and I love you as I loved you the day of our first communion” (P. Williams 52)]. Conflating the beloved’s burning flesh with his beloved country in a holy rite of communion, he blasphemes like a saint by claiming that “un sacrement apocryphe nous lie indissolublement à la révolution” (Aquin, Prochain 74) [“an apocryphal sacrament ties us forever to the revolution” (P. Williams 56)]. A secular saint rejects any promise of a better life to come: “Plus rien ne me laisse croire qu’une vie nouvelle et merveilleuse remplacera celle-ci” (Aquin, Prochain 27) [“Nothing now leads me to believe that a new and marvellous life will replace this one” (P. Williams 23)]. The only form of future life that the narrator cares to imagine obliges him “de courir vers la femme que j’aime, de m’abolir en elle et de l’entraîner avec moi dans ma résurrection et vers la mort”

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(Aquin, Prochain 12) [to “run to the woman I love, lose myself in her and involve her in my resurrection, and death” (P. Williams 13)]. But the more he involves the woman in his personal death and resurrection, the more he affirms their “blasphemous” resurrection in the body politic: “En même temps que nous cédons au spasme de la nuit, nos frères sont terrassés par le même événement sacrilège qui fond nos deux corps en une synthèse lyrique” (Aquin, Prochain 144) [“As we yield to the spasms of the night, our brothers are overwhelmed by the same sacrilegious event which melts our two bodies into one lyrical whole” (P. Williams 105)]. His personal revolution thus involves the narrator in imagining a national community as compensation for his lost religion, until his nationality becomes his religion. This is hardly untenable; nor is it atypical, according to one of the great theorists of nationalism: “It has even been argued that the rise of militant separatism [in Quebec] was a surrogate for the lost traditional Catholicism” (Hobsbawm 166). To those, however, who associate the Quiet Revolution with Jean Lesage and his government’s social and economic reforms, or who recall the campaign of his minister René Levesque to nationalize electricity, religion seems more like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, an improbability to be ignored. And yet, as the distinguished sociologist Hubert Guindon was to write three decades after the fact, “Retrospectively, it is now clear that what was revolutionary about the Quiet Revolution was the liquidation of the Catholic church as the embodiment of the French nation in Canada.” Guindon, a committed separatist, freely admits that religion was once an enemy to be attacked; however, “as my essays progress over time they do become more mellow towards the Catholic church” (ix). For the Church, he admits belatedly, was the true custodian of national identity throughout Quebec’s history. To a generation that “espoused modernism with a vengeance” (viii), “the demise of the social, political, and moral power of the Catholic church in Quebec” had an unforeseen consequence. A French nation embodied in the Church found no equivalent embodiment in Canada, leading to a “crisis in the legitimacy of the Canadian state” (104). Whether one speaks of Quebec nationalism in terms of sociology or literature, Guindon understands the need to see it in terms of the cultural system that preceded it. The unquestioned power of the Church in Quebec collapsed very quickly after the publication of an irreverent little book, Les insolences du Frère Untel (1960). While the impertinences of Brother Anonymous cannot begin to match the blasphemies of Aquin, they do suggest the continuing power of print to conjure up alternative versions of imagined community. Into the cloister that was Quebec society at that

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time, this little book fell like a bombshell. One contemporary would even marvel that, “more than any other manifestation of the new era … more even than flq bombs,” this little book “is the revolution” (Myers 36). For Brother Anonymous said what everybody thought but nobody dared to speak. As a member (later identified as JeanPaul Desbiens) of a teaching order, he was well qualified to speak on three topics – language, education, and religion – and this he did with bitter wit. His analysis of the corruption of French by abysmal teaching and creeping anglicization was pitiless, if bracing: “The whole French Canadian society is foundering. Our merchants show off their English company names, the billboards along our roads are all in English. We are a servile race; our loins were broken two hundred years ago, and it shows” (Desbiens 30). Jocularly, but also prophetically, he urged total “Destruction by the Provincial Police of all signs in English or joual” (31). Calling for the creation of “a Provincial Office of Linguistics” (31) – an institution to this day beyond the ken of most individualistic English-Canadians – he recognized the need to save French from French speakers themselves. Although writers like Michel Tremblay, Jacques Renaud, and Claude Jasmin would respond by insisting “that joual was the only authentic language of Québec,” others, like Fernand Ouellette, would side with Frère Untel in “lamenting the poverty of the ‘franglais’ he had learned as a child” (cited in Conlogue 128–9). Whatever the merits or handicaps, then, of joual, the good Brother made it clear that some form of protection was required if the language and culture was to survive. Although the matter would not be resolved until 1977, Bill 101 was a crucial step in that direction. At the same time, Frère Untel pronounced the Church-run system of education to be “a flop” (Desbeins 37). As a secondary teacher, he was well placed to judge a curriculum that, from the primary levels to secondary “classical colleges,” was set, taught, and administered by religious authorities. Basically, it delivered a humanistic education (classics and philosophy) at the expense of the sciences. But the ultimate “failure of our system of teaching,” he said, “is the reflection of a failure, or at any rate a paralysis, of thought itself. Nobody in French Canada dares think – at least nobody dares think out loud” (49). What was truly “worst in the worst of all possible worlds” (46) was “the spirit of domination” driving the Church to control every aspect of Quebec life. And what was more insufferable was the fact that only a religious was able to point it out. Yet few were prepared to do so: “Do you know any preachers who denounce the snares of authority? … We are afraid of authority; we live in a climate of magic, where under penalty of death we must infringe no taboo, where we

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must respect all the formulas, all the conformisms” (58). If Brother Anonymous simply intended to pry open windows long nailed shut by the Department of Public Instruction, his “apocalyptic book” (Myers 34) would accidentally blow up the whole edifice and help to empty its next-door neighbour. A 1961 Royal Commission on Education, “headed by Monseigneur Alphonse-Marie Parent, Vice-Rector of Laval University and a leading Catholic liberal,” delivered its report in 1963, calling for a total “redesigning of the whole educational system to make it one of the most modern in the world,” and, “after much government hesitation and soul-searching … a full-fledged education department under a real minister of education was set up in Quebec” (Sloan 37–8). As for the edifice of religion, Brother Anonymous was uncharacteristically naive in his expectations: “This tense and monolithic authority is convinced it cannot yield on a single point without risking the collapse of the whole edifice” (Desbiens 60–1). In fact, the edifice of authority was already cracking. Even as he wrote, the Churchsupported authoritarian regime of Duplessis was giving way to the reformist government of Jean Lesage. flq bombs were on the drawing board, and militant students were soon to take “strike action to force the government’s hand” to keep a promise of free university tuition: “they were supported by a high proportion of professors, who felt that the Quiet Revolution was being betrayed by its founders” (Thomson 307). By the end of the decade, Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal could publish a title whose governing question was all but unthinkable when Brother Anonymous first wrote in 1960: Fin d’une religion? (Thomson 480). By now, most Québécois were decisively turning their backs on “clerico-nationalism” to embrace, with all the fervour of the old religion, political nationalism. Is it so surprising, then, to find the narrator of Prochain épisode setting his story of arrest and betrayal in a “deserted temple”? A related reference to Montreal’s “l’église Notre-Dame, tout près du tombeau de Jean-Jacques Ollier” (Aquin, Prochain 161) [“Notre-Dame Church, close to the tomb of Jean-Jacques Ollier” (P. Williams 117)] might even ally him with Maisonneuve, recruited in 1640 by Jean-Jacques Olier to found Sulpician missions on the Island of Montreal. Twenty-three years after the city father became governor, he was recalled in the wake of Olier’s death to live in exile from the colony he had founded at Ville-Marie. Now, with the narrator’s footsteps echoing through the deserted temple of Notre Dame, the mystery seems to have passed to a “religion” that the Sulpician would not have recognized: “Le silence à l’intérieur avait quelque chose de terrifiant: j’étais soudain pris à la gorge par le mystère de cette forêt obscure qui m’envoûtait. Mes pas

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résonnaient de tous côtés. Je me suis rendu jusqu’au croisillon, sans apercevoir personne dans ce temple désert” (Aquin, Prochain 163) [“The silence inside was somehow terrifying: I was suddenly caught at the throat by the mystery of this obscure, magic forest. My steps echoed through the building. I reached the cross-aisle without seeing anyone in this deserted temple” (P. Williams 119)]. What seizes him by the throat is the forlorn sense that he is about to be offered up as a sacrifice: “Je suis une arche d’alliance et de désespoir, hélas, car j’ai perdu!” (Aquin, Prochain 171) [“I am an ark of the covenant – and of despair, for I failed!” (P. Williams 124)]. Identifying himself with the Holy of Holies, the ancient embodiment of the nation of Israel, and with the despairing Lamb of God, the narrator thus imagines himself as the fulfillment of both Testaments. The Ark of the Covenant becomes the body of Christ, even as the image of the religious martyr gives way to the modern patriote whose sacrifice for the sake of la nation links him to the martyrs of the revolution who died at St-Eustache in December of 1837. This heroic self-representation notwithstanding, some critics hesitate to mention Aquin’s narrator in the same breath as les Patriotes. Léandre Bergeron, for example, sees him as “un cowboy révolutionnaire” who “est en fait le contraire du révolutionnaire. Il est, avant tout, obsédé par son moi, par l’image qu’il a de lui-même” (124) [“a cowboy revolutionary [who] is in fact the opposite of a revolutionary. Above all, he is obsessed with himself, with the image that he has of himself” (my translation)]. His self-obsession shines through most clearly in his attempt to be the sacrificial martyr. Bergeron insists that he “patauge dans son insécurité, cherche à se raccrocher à une imagemythe, s’imagine sauveur sacrifié, puis sombre dans l’impuissance. Et tout ceci, il le voit. Et nous le montre. Tout le roman est ce long regard sur soi-même. Son moi est son obsession” (Bergeron 125) [“wallows in his insecurity, tries to link himself to a mythic image, imagines himself a sacrificial saviour, then sinks into impotence. Not only that, he knows it. And he shows us. The whole novel is this long glance at himself. His self is his obsession” (my translation)]. But to Bergeron, the “sacrificial saviour” is not the guilty party; ultimately, it is the author who bears the blame for writing “an eminently counterrevolutionary work” [“une oeuvre éminemment contre-révolutionnaire”], only confirming a widespread image “of the mentally unstable revolutionary” [“du révolutionnaire déséquilibré mental”]. Bergeron’s unkindest cut of all is directed at the novelist who is so preoccupied with bourgeois problems that he cannot make the necessary ethical distinctions. Still, it is a matter of noblesse oblige to the revolutionary critic: “La morale révolutionnaire aurait dû commander cette distinction à

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l’auteur” (Bergeron 129) [“A moral revolutionary should have pointed out this distinction to the author” (my translation)]. To the contrary, Patricia Smart argues that the author does gain a necessary distance on himself through the mirror of his narrative situation: “Le narrateur de Prochain épisode, jeune révolutionnaire emprisonné qui écrit un roman autobiographique, est en toutes choses le double et l’image dans le miroir d’Aquin en train d’écrire. Il existe pourtant une différence capitale entre les deux. Grâce au miroir, Aquin jouit d’une perspective plus large que celle de son narrateur” (29) [“The narrator of Prochain épisode, a young imprisoned revolutionary who is writing an autobiographical novel, is in every respect the double and the mirror image of Aquin in the midst of writing. A capital difference nonetheless exists between the two. Thanks to the mirror, Aquin enjoys a broader perspective than that of his narrator” (my translation)]. Ultimately, such a distance between the hero and narrator, like that between narrator and author, “confère une coloration ironique à tout le roman,” resulting in “l’ouverture structurale du livre” (Smart 29) [“puts an ironic coloration on the whole novel,” resulting in “the structural openness of the book” (my translation)]. Still, this openness appears to narrow considerably in certain of Smart’s own qualms about the novel’s ending: “Quand le héros presse la gâchette, on sent que le narrateur n’obéit plus à la nécessité de son roman. L’équilibre est rompu, et le roman tombe de côté, sa cohérence détruite” (Smart 61) [“When the hero presses the trigger, one feels that the narrator no longer obeys the necessity of his novel. The balance is broken, and the novel falls aside, its coherence destroyed” (my translation)]. The author has already foreclosed on the “structural openness” of his work, it seems, by allowing his hero to wound his adversary. For, at the point where the narrator lets the hero pull the trigger, the mirror shatters; all ironic distance is lost. Nonetheless, Smart seeks to mediate between opposing poles of art and action in Prochain épisode, between the work’s formal autonomy and its necessary imbrication in the social world. And yet, as much as she would situate the revolutionary force of Aquin’s work in the perceptions of the reader (18), the power of imagination is severely restricted to the realm of contemplation. So, for example, she concludes that “le narrateur se libérera non pas en se transformant en révolutionnaire mais en acceptant sa vocation artistique et la vérité de son impuissance devant le réel” (49) [“the narrator will free himself not by transforming himself into a revolutionary but by accepting his artistic vocation and the truth of his powerlessness before the real” (my translation)]. Even so, the novel suggests that what has rendered the hero unable to act amidst the baroque splendours of his

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enemy’s château is the temptation of his “artistic vocation”; it is thus his inability to act that causes the narrator to doubt the autonomy of art and artist. “Bien que le narrateur refuse la ‘tentation’ de l’art baroque,” Smart concludes, “pour retourner au ‘devoir’ de la lutte révolutionnaire, la cohérence interne de Prochain épisode et sa forme baroque contredisent ce dénouement et affirment la vérité de l’expérience artistique. Prochain épisode nous invite à une lecture interminable” (64) [“Although the narrator refuses the ‘temptation’ of baroque art in order to return to the ‘duty’ of the revolutionary struggle, the internal coherence of Prochain épisode and its baroque form contradict this ending and affirm the truth of artistic experience. Prochain épisode invites us to an unending reading” (my translation)]. But endless readings leave little time for anything else, least of all for revolutionary action. So what, in the face of interminable readings, would be the revolutionary value of a reader’s changed perception? Are the contradictions of baroque art and revolutionary struggle never terminable? Or could they not require a response radically different from faith in “artistic equilibrium” (57)? Such a radical response was in fact forthcoming in Jocelyne Lefebvre’s article “Prochain épisode ou le Refus du Livre.” The strength of her reading of “The Rejection of the Book” is that, in the colonial condition, she finds reason to take at face value the author’s famous refusal to write, which appeared in an essay he published (“Profession: Écrivain”) only months before his detainment in the Prison de Montréal and his soon-to-be famous debut as a novelist. “Le refus de la littérature, paradoxe qui est à la base du roman d’Hubert Aquin Prochain Épisode, est d’abord commandé par un refus de sa situation politique de dominé” (Lefebvre 143) [“The rejection of literature, a paradox that underlies Hubert Aquin’s novel Prochain épisode, is governed first of all by a rejection of his political situation of being dominated” (my translation)]. As Lefebvre describes it, “Face à une situation pourrissante, à un peuple englué dans l’impuissance à être, à se projeter dans la révolution régénératice, écrire est un non-sens, mais ne pas écrire équivaut à la paralysie totale ou au suicide” (145) [“Faced with a rotten situation, with a people stuck in a powerlessness to exist, to throw itself into a regenerating revolution, to write is non-sense, but not to write amounts to total paralysis or to suicide” (my translation)]. In his essay, Aquin explicitly rejects the role of subaltern, “celui du dominé qui a du talent” (“Profession” 49) [“that of a talented underling” (Purdy 52)], since the role of a colonial who “has some talent” is merely to collaborate with his colonial masters. And the fact is that “l’activité littéraire n’a d’autre fonction que de favoriser l’évasion,”

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the forms of which are usually confined to “l’expérience intérieure” or “l’esthétisme, la recherche purement formelle” (Lefebvre 143) [“literary activity has no other function than to encourage escape,” for instance, in “interior experience” or in “aestheticism, the purely formal inquiry” (my translation)]. Both types of evasion – the quest for psychological truth and the quest for beauty – alienate the writer from “une réalité pourrissante, gangrenée” [“a rotten, gangrenous reality”], ending finally in his or her “refus de notre identité et de notre implacable négritude” (143) [“denial of our identity and of our implacable negritude” (my translation)]. To a people suffering the sting of being “white niggers” in their own land, it must then be the writer’s first duty to expose and oppose such conditions. So Prochain épisode “dénonce le mécanisme de compensation inhérent à l’oeuvre littéraire” (164) [“denounces the compensatory mechanism inherent in the literary work” (my translation)]. This final non sequitur – exposing the compensatory nature of literature – might seem beside the point, except that Lefebvre remarks how “un projet de destruction de la littérature” (145) underlies Aquin’s refusal to write. Of this “project of literary destruction,” Aquin himself said that “la structure doit se déceler, fût-ce dans une astructure littéraire du type Robbe-Grillet. Ainsi l’astructuration équivaut à une structuration si elle concerne le même champ d’action, la littérature par exemple” (“Profession” 50) [“the internal structure of any literary project has to be detectable, even if it takes the form of a literary anti-structure as is the case with Robbe-Grillet. Thus, destructuring is just another way of structuring if it concerns the same sphere of activity, such as literature” (Purdy 52)]. But these revolutionary possibilities of deconstruction are anticipated only to be rejected. For to “destructure” a literary structure, as Aquin points out, is to structure it another way, without removing it from the sphere of literary activity. And about his refusal to play this game Aquin is unequivocal: “Or, dans mon cas, si la structure éclate sous le coup de la déflagration qui se produit en moi, ce n’est pas pour laisser la place à une contrestructure littéraire, mais pour ne laisser aucune place à la littérature qui n’exprimerait, si je cédais à ses charmes, que la domination dont je suis le lieu depuis deux siècles” (“Profession” 50) [“Now in my case, if the structures are shattered by the impact of the explosion within me, it is not so that they can be replaced by a literary counterstructure, but so that there will be no place left at all for a literature which, were I to give in to its charms, would express nothing but my own internalization of two centuries of domination” (Purdy 52)]. The shift in his final clause from an “explosion produced in me” to the

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self as a site for “two centuries” of domination evidently preserves a public purpose in his refusal to write. For Aquin sees the need to get beyond literature – particularly a tradition of Québécois literature that has long internalized the experience of colonization by retreating into the old agrarian myth of separation and clerical domination. In a colonial setting, counter-structures can confine a people as surely as can literary structures, as we have seen in the example of the roman du terroir (see Chapter 3). The modern writer really has but one solution: “En rejetant la domination, je refuse la littérature, pain par excellence des dominés” (Aquin, “Profession” 51) [“In rejecting domination I refuse literature, the daily bread of the dominated” (Purdy 53)]. At this point, Aquin comes as close as at any point in Prochain épisode to rejecting outright a whole century of literary writing in Quebec, where clerical resistance to the “impiety of the novel form” (Bakhtin, Dialogic 59) would delay the cultural revolution that was the normal fruit of the novel. Ultimately, Lefebvre’s account of Aquin’s rejection of the book in Prochain épisode misses the point of such literary “destructuring”: “Faute de pouvoir faire éclater les structures mutilantes de l’ordre politique, l’écrivain révolutionnaire se doit de briser les structures littéraires. Il s’agit donc de faire la révolution en littérature faute de pouvoir la faire en réalité, s’instituer terroriste du style, procéder à un dynamitage de la forme” (Lefebvre 145) [“For want of power to explode the mutilating structures of the political order, the revolutionary writer must shatter literary structures. So it is a question of making a revolution in literature for want of power to make it in reality, to appoint oneself a terrorist of style, and to proceed to a dynamiting of form” (my translation)]. For this want of power to act upon reality is precisely what Aquin rejects. He will not valorize the “terrorist of style” who, when the banks or legislatures are too heavily guarded, contents himself with “a dynamiting of form”; rather, he seeks something beyond literature, “without being a metaliterature” (Purdy 53) [“qui n’est pas une métalittérature”], in order to bring about “la destruction du conditionnement historique qui fait de moi un dominé” (Aquin, “Profession” 51) [“the destruction of the historical conditioning which has led me to internalize my domination” (Purdy 53)]. The revolutionary, in other words, has to do more than set fire to his own ghetto; he has to destroy the physical and mental chains of his own “historical conditioning.” In Lefebvre’s view, the clearest way to destroy these chains is to perform a rite of exorcism upon an unhealthy and stifling present (164): “En faisant éclater les structures littéraires, l’oeuvre révolutionnaire suscite, par mimétisme, la révolution réelle” (147) [“In explod-

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ing literary structures, the revolutionary work incites, by means of mimicry, the real revolution” (my translation)]. Writing, a form of sympathetic “magique” similar to cave-paintings and ceremonial dances in “primitive” societies, is thus expected to incite the “real revolution.” But read in this light, the ending of Prochain épisode is more problematic than ever, since the protagonist fails to kill his counterrevolutionary enemy. What one faces instead is a “mimicry” of defeat. How, then, can we take Lefebvre’s premise at face value? “Ceci ne signifie pas que l’écrivain retombe dans le piège d’une révolution symbolique. La littérature comme fin en soi est rejetée. Elle ne subsiste que comme moyen d’accomplir la révolution” (Lefebvre 147) [“This does not mean that the writer falls back into the trap of a symbolic revolution. Literature as an end in itself is rejected. It only exists as a way of bringing about the revolution” (my translation)]. And yet the narrator’s wish to write “fin” to his story suggests that he really is caught in “the trap of a symbolic revolution”: “Voilà comment j’arriverai à ma conclusion,” he says without a trace of self-irony. “Oui, je sortirai vainqueur de mon intrigue, tuant H. de Heutz avec placidité pour me précipiter vers toi, mon amour, et clore mon récit par une apothéose” (Aquin, Prochain 173) [“That will be the end of my story. Yes, I shall emerge victorious, placidly killing H. de Heutz to rush to you, my love, to close my story in splendour” (P. Williams 125)]. Is the author laughing up his sleeve at the narrator? How and why should next time be any different? Perhaps it is not the narrator but the reader who ought to worry that “j’essayais de lire entre les lignes, comme si le signal allait m’être donné par cet amoncellement visqueux de consonnes et de voyelles, qui n’était qu’une pièce d’anthologie de l’humour noir” (Aquin, Prochain 64) [“I was trying to read between the lines as if a signal could come to me from that conglomeration of vowels and consonants, when it was really nothing more than a piece of black humour” (P. Williams 48)]. For it is the author’s black humour that makes us think that this “gluey heap of consonants and vowels” is really a meaningful code rather than the bitter satire of an ineffectual revolutionary. Within an obviously ironic context, what do we now make of the essayist’s refusal to write? How, in the evocative sense of Lefebvre’s title, might we better explain the rejection of the book? A passage of “Profession: écrivain,” which appears to foreshadow Aquin’s imminent spy novel, points to the author’s disdain for “mental” adventures: “La Suisse mentale des biélorusses modèle 1917 favorise la poursuite d’aventures intérieures – à condition qu’elles soient codifiées selon des canons désarmants. Mais, même si l’écrivain peut s’y aventurer à sa guise et avec petit déjeuner au lit et xénophobie

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hôtelière impeccable, cette microsuisse intérieure n’est rien d’autre qu’un cercueil décoré comme la Place des Arts” (Aquin, “Profession” 56) [“The mental Switzerland of the 1917 vintage Byelorussians promotes the pursuit of inner adventures, so long as they are regulated by the canons of disarmament. But even if the writer can venture there as he likes, with breakfast in bed and the hotel guest’s impeccable xenophobia, this miniature inner Switzerland is nothing but a coffin decorated like the Place des Arts” (Purdy 56–7)]. Obviously, the narrative situation of Prochain épisode entails these “inner adventures” of a man in a Montreal jail writing a novel of espionage about Switzerland, who sends a spy through “le quartier Carouge, ancien refuge des révolutionnaires” (Aquin, Prochain 55) [“the Carouge district, ancient refuge of the Russian revolutionaries” (P. Williams 42)]. The reader who sees no irony in the symbols of Prochain épisode, or who doggedly traces out its narrative arabesques and labyrinthine plot, is not likely to detect criticism of a narrator-hero who, in the library of the chateau near Echandens, strains to make sense of “un dessin chargé qui s’enroule sur lui-même dans une série de boucles et de spires qui forment un noeud gordien, véritable agglomérat de plusieurs initiales surimprimées les unes sur les autres et selon tous les agencements graphiques possibles” (Aquin, Prochain 130) [“an intricate design which curls upon itself in a series of curves and spirals. They form a gorgon (sic) knot, a conglomeration of several initials superimposed on each other in every graphical possibility” (P. Williams 95)]. For the “intricate design” of the ex-libris turns into the “Gordian knot” of a larger plot – a knot that the hero fails to cut. Evidently the reader should be warned, as he or she confronts this larger version of a “chef-d’oeuvre de confusion” [“masterpiece of confusion”], that such “inner adventures” are already doomed to failure. Following his hero on a goose chase through a “mental Switzerland,” even the narrator has to admit that his “inner adventures” have uprooted him: “Je suis loin des valonnements de Durham-Sud et des méandres de la rivière Saint-François, exilé de la Nation et de ma vie” (Aquin, Prochain 145) [“I am far from the ridges of Durham South and the meanders of the Saint-Francis River, exiled from La Nation and my life” (P. Williams 106)]. In exile, the narrator finally sees what has been missing in this foreign landscape: “Je circule dans l’ample musée de ma clandestinité, loin de la proclamation d’indépendance du Bas-Canada et de la plaine fertile qui s’ètend entre Saint-Charles et Saint-Ours” (Aquin, Prochain 145) [“I wander in the spacious museum of my clandestine life, far from the proclamation of independence of Lower Canada and from the fertile plain between Saint-Charles and Saint-Ours” (P. Williams 106)]. His “museum” of clichés about espio-

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nage has led him far afield indeed from his history, from the Declaration of Independence proclaimed in Lower Canada on 1 March 1838 by Robert Nelson, the president of an interim government (Bernard 10). Insisting that “Le non-pays ne nourrit pas son homme” (Aquin, “Profession” 56) [“The non-country does not nourish its man”], Aquin might not uproot his narrator, and then blatantly draw our attention to it, unless this “microsuisse interieure” were something contemptible, a type of writing that is “nothing more than a coffin decorated like the Place des Arts.” Judging the plot of Prochain épisode to be “a clumsy, shoddy, homemade thing indeed when measured against the elaborate architectonics of any Robbe-Grillet novel” (216), Fredric Jameson carefully avoids Aquin’s own word “coffin” to describe such a work. Still, Jameson recognizes its essential character: “The novel is the story of a room: the same, from the ornate hotel room in Lausanne (or Montréal) in which a delirious love is celebrated, to the monumental chamber of the isolated château in which the hero pursues or is alternately pursued by his enemy, behind both of them the confinement cell in which this novel is written, and even further back than that, for us, the real room, today, in which we sit to read the text” (219). That “room” can be read as “book” is evident from the narrator’s own words: “Je ne sortirai plus d’un système,” he writes, “que je crée dans le seul but de n’en jamais sortir. De fait, je ne sors de rien, même pas d’ici. Je suis pris, coincé dans une cabine hermétique et vitrée” (Aquin, Prochain 14) [“I create this system with the aim of not leaving it, and I shall not leave it. In fact, I’m not leaving anywhere, not even here. I am caught, shut in a sealed room” (P. Williams 14)]. By his own admission, he is doubly incarcerated, both by a narrative “system” he creates with the sole goal of never leaving it, and by a “phone booth” of a room into which he is “hermetically” sealed in the psychiatric institute. Later, such selfconfinement will be expressed in less personal terms: “Je me suis enfermé dans un système constellaire qui m’emprisonne sur un plan strictement littéraire” (Aquin, Prochain 22) [“I am confined in a constellation which limits me to a strictly literary world” (P. Williams 19)]. As his prison, he has chosen a “system” of writing that Aquin mocks as “une oeuvre préfabriquée, portative comme une machine à écrire, finie d’avance, pièce jointe à enterrer aux archives” (“Profession” 57) [“a prefabricated work, portable like a typewriter, finished before it is started, an enclosure to be interred in the archives” (Purdy 57)]. The narrator has also hinted at this type of literary imprisonment in his memories of that highway that “would take me to La Nation, close to that house in retreat from history which I will buy some day”

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(P. Williams 60). For, as a literary type, it was the roman du terroir that first authorized such a “retreat from history” in the wake of the failed revolution of 1837. And it was not just the political elite, like Louis-Joseph Papineau, who retreated behind the stone façade of Montebello. Bishops and priests exhorted their flocks to retreat to the bush, to get as far as possible from the threat of modernization, in order to preserve a traditional Roman Catholic society. Fernand Ouellette would even suggest “that the real purpose of FrenchCanadian liberalism in the nineteenth century was ‘to reconstruct, in spite of rationalizations that were the product of liberal and democratic ideologies, a society, on the shores of the St. Lawrence that was based on the ancien régime … so that one can see under the cover of democratic, liberal aspirations having some authentic aspects, the search for an impossible isolation which ended in the formation of a feudal, theocratic society› (cited in Bruce v). Such is the spirit of the roman du terroir that it “is seen by many critics today as the beginning of the dark ages in Canadian literature, dark ages that ended only with the Quiet Revolution” (Bruce vi). Ronald Sutherland describes this situation with considerably more tact in his introduction to Penny Williams’s translation of Aquin’s novel: “Quebec Separatism, formerly, was conservative in the extreme,” (iv) he writes. And yet, “In Prochain Episode the protagonist takes a position diametrically opposed to traditional Quebec Separatism. Readers familiar with the classic Maria Chapdelaine [1914], for instance, will immediately observe the difference between it and Prochain Episode with respect to religious attitudes” (Sutherland iv). In Hémon’s novel, there are clearly signs of a formula linking religious piety to “making land,” to clearing the remote forests of the Lac St-Jean region, that can allow the spirit of Madame Chapdelaine to be “possessed with something of a mystic’s rapture” (Hémon 39). After the mother’s death, however, her daughter is left to wonder why she should stay in such a “bleak land,” amidst “the forest’s eternal gloom,” given that it has twice “wounded her” (104): first in the death of her lover in the snow, then in the malpractice of a rural doctor. Why not accept the offer, rather, of a suitor from the United States who “would rescue her from this oppression of frozen earth and gloomy forest” (126)? This cruel choice of “a hard life” like her mother’s, “bravely lived” (153) in her native land, versus all “the wonders” (126) of a great American city, was already an old story for most Quebeckers at the beginning of the twentieth century. So was the story of a woman named Maria contemplating the Sorrowful Mysteries, in which a future mother has to reconcile herself to the way of the Cross. But

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Hémon’s Maria finds her own despair to be tempered first by the voice of nature, recalling “to her memory a hundred forgotten charms of the land she wished to flee” (156). And then the voice of her mother tongue recalls the variegated beauty of the “very names of this her country” (157). Ultimately, however, her soul is possessed of another mystic vision, recalling that of her mother: Then it was that a third voice, mightier than the others, lifted itself up in the silence: the voice of Quebec – now the song of a woman, now the exhortation of a priest. It came to her with the sound of a church bell, with the majesty of an organ’s tones, like a plaintive love-song, like the long high call of woodsmen in the forest. For verily there was in it all that makes the soul of the Province: the loved solemnities of the ancestral faith; the lilt of that old speech guarded with jealous care; the grandeur and the barbaric strength of the new land where an ancient race has again found its youth. (Hémon 159–60)

It is the voice of her race proclaiming that “in this land of Quebec nothing has changed. Nor shall anything change” (160). But it is also a voice of separation, rejecting modernity. In similar fashion, the denouement of Patrice Lacombe’s La terre paternelle (1846, though set some eighty years before on the north shore of the Isle de Montréal near the confluence of the Rivière des Prairies with the St. Lawrence) draws attention to its formulaic plot and to an action already “finished,” as Aquin would say, “before it is started.” Charles Chauvin, the son of a farmer, returns after a long absence with the North-West Company to find his family reduced to urban misery. Having lost his ancestral land to a moneylender, the prodigal father is redeemed by a son with earnings from a lifetime as a coureur de bois: Quelques-uns de nos lecteurs auraient peut-être désiré que nous eussions donné un dénouement tragique à notre histoire; ils auraient aimé à voir nos acteurs disparaître violemment de la scène, les uns après les autres, et notre récit se terminer dans le genre terrible, comme un grand nombre de romans du jour. Mais nous les prions de remarquer que nous écrivons dans un pays où les moeurs en général sont pures et simples, et que l’esquisse que nous avons essayé d’en faire, eût été invraisemblable et même souverainement ridicule, si elle se fût terminée par des meurtres, des empoisonnements et des suicides. (Lacombe 117–18) [Some of our readers would have liked us, perhaps, to give a tragic ending to our story; they would have loved to see our characters disappear violently from the scene, one after another, and our narrative end in terrible fashion,

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like a great number of novels today. But we beg them to observe that we are writing in a country where the manners in general are pure and simple, and where this sketch that we have tried to make of them would have been implausible and even supremely ridiculous, had it ended with murders, poisonings, and suicides (my translation)].

This apologia makes it clear that Lacombe’s novel is meant to produce, not reflect, the morals of a people, even as it holds at bay a modern world. Here, then, is the sort of novel Aquin seems to have had in mind, “a prefabricated work, portable like a typewriter, finished before it is started, an enclosure to be interred in the archives.” Of course, the plot of Prochain épisode is also like a “cock-and-bull story,” hardly more credible than the fabrication that the narrator tries to fob off on his captor, H. de Heutz, only to find the sorry thing handed back to him once the tables are turned: “H. de Heutz me raconte en ce moment exactement la même histoire alambiquée. C’est du plagiat. Pense-t-il que je vais gober ça?” (Aquin, Prochain 82) [“H. de Heutz is telling me exactly the same super-subtle tale all over again. That’s plagiarism. Does he really think I’ll go for it?” (P. Williams 62)]. The plot of espionage, like the plot of any formulaic novel, is mostly a type of plagiarism. For, as Aquin puts it in the essay, “Il n’y a pas d’originalité, les oeuvres sont des décalques … tirés de contretypes oblitérés qui proviennent d’autres ‘originaux’ décalqués de décalqués qui sont des copies conformes d’anciens faux qu’il n’est pas besoin d’avoir connus pour comprendre qu’ils n’ont pas été des archétypes, mais seulement des variantes” (“Profession” 47) [“There is no originality: works of literature are reproductions … run off from worn out plates made from other ‘originals’ reproduced from reproductions that are true copies of earlier forgeries that one does not need to have known to understand that they were not archetypes but simply variants” (Purdy 51)]. This passage (written in 1963) virtually anticipates Derrida’s suggestion that truth is not to be found in books since they are merely a system of tracings, really “tracings of tracings” run off from “worn out plates.” Since “there is no originality,” the narrator of Prochain épisode doesn’t mind saying that “le romancier pseudo-créateur ne fait que puiser, à même un vieux répertoire, le gestuaire de ses personnages et leur système relationnel” (Aquin, Prochain 91) [“the pseudocreative novelist merely derives the origin of his characters and their relationships, even if from an old repertory” (P. Williams 68)]. At the same time, he will not give up on the project of originality. For neither the derivative character of novel-writing nor a confessed dependence on “an old repertory” prevents him from pressing on through his

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desolate darkness: “Si je dénonce en ce moment la vanité fondamentale de l’entreprise d’originalité, c’est peut-être dans cette noirceur désolante que je dois continuer et dans ce labyrinthe obscurci que je dois m’enfoncer” (Aquin, Prochain 91) [“Even if I denounce the fundamental vanity of trying to be original, I must somehow continue in that same desolate labyrinth” (P. Williams 68)]. The “darkened labyrinth” that the narrator hopes to penetrate turns out to be the “room” in which he writes, the book itself. In his brief essay on Aquin, Fredric Jameson says as much in his comment about rooms and their “curious historical relations with that most specialized and artificial of modern activities, reading and writing, which, unlike oral storytelling, seem inextricably bound up, not merely with the printing press, nascent industrial machinery, and the technological reproduction of production, but also, in some more littered and extrinsic, scandalous sense, with furniture itself” (220–1). Bluntly put, every piece of furniture and objet d’art that so delights the narrator in the chateau near Echandens points to the fixity of print. Foremost among such objects is a rare engraving of ‹La Mort du général Wolfe’ par Benjamin West, dont l’original se trouve à la Grosvenor Gallery chez le marquis de Westminster” (Aquin, Prochain 128) [‹The Death of General Wolfe’ by Benjamin West. The original hangs in Grosvenor Gallery of the Marquis of Westminster” (P. Williams 93)]. Although Aquin is unlikely to cherish an icon of his conqueror, he represents his narrator as being fixated on it: “Cette réplique géniale de ‘La Mort du général Wolfe’ que Georges III a déjà achetée quelques siècles avant que H. de Heutz ne fasse de même, me transporte!” (Prochain 128) [“I am delighted with this inspired reproduction of ‘The Death of General Wolfe,’ which George III had already bought several centuries before H. de Heutz did the same thing” (P. Williams 93)]. And yet the negative character of this “transport” will soon appear in other associations: the narrator’s fetishizing of the work as a product of “genius,” his delight in its survival over “several centuries,” his valorization of its connection to royalty, and his deep admiration of its owner’s aesthetic refinement. For what the revolutionary treasures most of all in the engraving is its aristocratic past, its timeless elegance, as it were. So it is doubly ironic, when the man of action wants to know what time it is, that he can find no clocks in the Swiss chateau and that even his watch – whose works are Swiss – is stopped at 3.15 (Aquin, Prochain 135; P. Williams 98). For the man who values timelessness is unable to act when the time comes. The death of his enemy, “The Death of General Wolfe,” turns out to be something of a fixed image, suspended out of time.

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A second form of inertia appears in a wood carving admired by the protagonist, a type of stasis that might typify a whole society: “Plus je la regarde, plus je m’éprends de la commode en laque revêtue de dalmatiques et sur laquelle se déroule un combat entre deux soldats en armure, dans une fulgurance de bleus dégradés et de vermeil” (Aquin, Prochain 127) [“The more I look at it, the more I fall in love with the lacquered commode, elaborately decorated in light blue and silver gilt with a combat between two soldiers” (P. Williams 93)]. Aside from its lacquered finish of muted blues and silver-gilt, it is those two carved soldiers locked in eternal combat on the commode that fascinates the narrator-protagonist: “Les deux guerriers, tendus l’un vers l’autre en des postures complémentaires, sont immobilisés par une sorte d’étreinte cruelle, duel à mort qui sert de revêtement lumineux au meuble sombre” (Aquin, Prochain 127) [“The two warriors, stretched toward each other in artistic poses, are immobilized by some cruel embrace, a duel to the death as the shining decoration on a sombre piece of furniture” (P. Williams 93)]. The point is not that their duel must end in death but that they are “immobilized” in a “cruel grasp,” frozen in “postures” whereby each is forced to “complete” the other, not in harmony or understanding but with a terrible savagery that casts a luminous veneer over this “gloomy” piece of furniture. In the immediate context of “The Death of General Wolfe,” the two warriors might well stand for the two founding nations of Canada. This political meaning is indeed remarked by the narrator on his first visit to the room, where he is held captive: “Quelque chose qui ressemble à une thrombose me paralyse; et je n’arrive pas à émerger de cette catatonie nationale qui me fige sur un fauteuil Louis XV” (Aquin, Prochain 58–9) [“Something like a thrombosis paralyzes me; I cannot emerge from this national catatonic state pinning me to a Louis XV chair” (P. Williams 44)]. If the “national catalepsy” seems limited at first to Quebec, the “thrombosis” that finally paralyzes him and “fixes” him to a Louis Quinze chair sums up the catatonic state of a whole country. For, in some sense, he is drawn to an ambivalent image of fratricide, of what Benedict Anderson has called the paradoxical necessity of nations “to ‘have already forgotten’ tragedies of which one needs increasingly to be ‘reminded› (201). And so the “cruel grip” of these two stylish warriors can be “read under the sign of ‘reassuring fratricide› (201), in which the “enemy” turns out to be something of a döppelganger. The distinct identities of two warring nations thus come together in a “cruel grasp” that is hard to distinguish from love. At the same time, there is a deadly fixity in the medium uniting the “two warriors,” best symbolized in that “lacquered commode.” In a 1962 essay opposing Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s anti-nationalist position,

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Aquin had suggested that it is the Constitution Act of 1867 to which he objects, to those legalistic interpretations of Confederation that would reduce Quebec to one province among ten in order to avoid the dialectical opposition of two “total” cultures: “Une autre façon de déréaliser le Canada français est de n’accepter que sa traduction administrative comme province. ‘Le Québec est une province comme les autres,’ ce qui revient à n’accepter la réalité de la culture canadiennefrançaise que selon les termes légalistes de la Confédération qui régionalise et provincialise cette culture” (“Fatigue” 105) [“Another means of diminishing French Canada is to accept it only in its administrative interpretation as a province. ‘Quebec is a province like the others’ boils down to accepting the reality of French-Canadian culture only in the legalistic terms of Confederation, thus regionalizing and provincializing the culture” (Purdy 43–4)]. Those who want French Canada to exist only “dans une Confédération inchangeable” are always the first (e.g., Trudeau’s 1962 essay, “La nouvelle trahison des clercs”) to tell “nationalistes canadiens-français que tous les ‘changements’ qu’ils désirent sont permis et possibles à l’intérieur de la constitutionnalité, ce qui est une façon d’affirmer que tous les ‘changements’ qu’ils désirent sont permis et possibles sauf celui du régime” (Aquin, “Fatigue” 89) [“French-Canadian nationalists that all the ‘changes’ they want are legal and possible within the framework of the constitution; this is a way of saying that it is possible to change everything except the political system” (Purdy 33). Of course, to say that everything can be changed except the political system is to say that Quebec is necessarily hostage to the system itself, that all FrenchCanada must continue to be the prisoner of print. Following Aquin, others have referred to “the social contract of Confederation” as a covert means of limiting the aspirations of French Canada to the sphere of culture – a starting point for “Profession: écrivain” – but with more particular analysis of the means by which colonialism actually works within a Canadian context. “The provinces,” as Hubert Guindon points out, “were given jurisdiction over local matters, such as health, education, and welfare, while national matters, such as money and banking, defence and international trade, were located at the level of the federal government. These political arrangements were the compromise of Confederation that satisfied the French Catholic church, the English establishment of Montréal, and the nation-builders from Upper Canada. An ‘aloof’ colonial structure was forged” (103). Such “aloofness,” which Hannah Arendt sees as being typical of British imperialism, left the English bourgeoisie free to dominate in economic matters and the French-Catholic church free to rule in “local” matters of religion, education, and culture. “We can

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see, then, that the two solitudes, so often deplored by well-meaning people, far from being an unfortunate accident, were a planned outcome basic to the very birth of the Canadian state as embodied in the Act of Confederation” (Guindon 105). With one stroke of the pen, the Constitution confined French Canada to the spiritual mission of the Church, thus removing it from the business of the world. No wonder that the fate of an imprisoned narrator should resemble the fate of a nation confined to this prison of print, forced to endure the stasis of the ritual missal of the Church, the idée fixe of the roman du terroir, and the “unchangeable” reality of a written constitution: “Je ne veux plus vivre ici,” the narrator insists, “les deux pieds sur la terre maudite, ni m’accommoder de notre cachot national comme si de rien n’était. Je rêve de mettre un point final à ma noyade qui date déjà de plusieurs générations” (Aquin, Prochain 35–6) [“I can no longer live with my feet on this cursed earth and my head bent to our national dungeon as if it were nothing. I dream of ending this drowning which is already several centuries old” (P. Williams 29)]. But a metaphor of a “drowning” that dates back “several generations” cannot refer to the narrator alone since it appears within the context “of our national dungeon.” Later, he will claim explicitly that the “cruel waves” that overwhelm him are “the vomit of our national history”: “Soudain, me voilà terrassé, emporté avec les arbres et mes souvenirs à la vitesse de propagation de cette onde cruelle, charrié dans la vomissure décantée de notre histoire nationale, anéanti par le spleen” (Aquin, Prochain 71) [“Suddenly I’m thrown to the earth, swept off with the trees and my memories by this cruel wave, carried into the vomit of our national history, overcome with despair” (P. Williams 53)]. Self-loathing of this order, filled with such cultural disgust, must be more than personal. The source of such cultural loathing is finally made clear in another of the narrator’s tirades: “Chef national d’un peuple inédit!” he berates himself in an insult that Penny Williams unaccountably omits from her translation: “National head of an unpublished people.” Clearly, his contempt for the literary tradition of his people is absolute and total, for it seems that he finds them condemned to live in a cultural backwater – so condemned by writers who have betrayed the medium in which they wrote, neutralizing its revolutionary effects to such an extent that they would have better been “unpublished.” But he wants to see himself, in Pauline terms, as the “chief” of sinners: “Je suis le symbole fracturé de la révolution du Québec, mais aussi son reflet désordonné et son incarnation suicidaire” (Aquin, Prochain 25) [“I am the fractured symbol of the Quebec revolution, its fractured reflection and its suicidal incarnation” (P. Williams 21)]. For his shame

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hardly differs from the shame of French Canada playing a role, as Aquin expresses it elsewhere, “dans une histoire dont il ne serait jamais l’auteur” (“Fatigue” 96) [“in a story it could never write itself” (Purdy 38)]. In a bitter footnote to his essay “La Fatigue culturelle,” Aquin insists that “Lord Durham disait vrai, en ce sens, quand il a écrit que le Canada français était un peuple sans histoire” (96) [“Lord Durham was right, in this sense, when he wrote that French Canadians were a people without history!” (Purdy 48n22)]. “C’est vrai que nous n’avons pas d’histoire” (Aquin, Prochain 94), the narrator of the novel echoes his author: “It is true we have no history” (P. Williams 70). For history, since the Conquest, has always been made – in both senses of the word – by the English. So Aquin’s narrator is not optimistic that his writing is going to change anything: “Rien n’empêche le déprimé politique de conférer une coloration esthétique à cette sécrétion verbeuse; rien ne lui interdit de transférer sur cette oeuvre improvisée la signification dont son existence se trouve dépourvue et qui est absente de l’avenir de son pays” (Aquin, Prochain 26–7) [“Nothing prevents a depressed and politically-aware man from attributing aesthetic values to this verbal secretion; nothing forbids his transferring to this improvised work the significance which his life and his country’s future seems to lack” (P. Williams 22)]. If the narrator despairs of a “verbal secretion” on which he “confers an aesthetic coloration,” it is because “the meaning of which his life is devoid and which is absent from his country’s future” cannot be “transferred to this improvised work” unless its meaning were to exist in reality. And only revolution, he insists, can provide him with this meaning that his life lacks. But it must come “Vite, car je suis sur le point de céder à la fatigue historique” (Aquin, Prochain 139) [“And quickly, for I am at the point of yielding to our historic fatigue” (P. Williams 101)]. Such a self-regarding explanation is nonetheless unlikely to reveal the causes of “historical fatigue.” For that, we need to turn to Aquin’s own account in “La Fatigue culturelle”: “Le Canada français, depuis qu’il est encadré par une structure qu’il n’invente pas, a tenu un ‘rôle’ au fédéral, il a occupé courageusement, brillament ou avec lassitude, une place qui, ni plus ni moins, n’a jamais été qu’à sa taille” (97) [“As long as it has been held within the confines of a structure it never invented, French Canada has played a ‘role’ in federal affairs, courageously, brilliantly, or wearily filling in a space for which it was never really fitted” (Purdy 38)]. The case for the “prisoner of print” could not be made more explicitly. The only question is whether French Canada will now continue, like the narrator, to wallow in self-disgust or whether it will find some way to breach the fixities of print.

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It is clear that the narrator, at the end of Prochain épisode, has found no way out of his dungeon. He has only a self-deluding faith that the past can be repeated and that he will get it right next time: “Je me pencherai sur son cadavre pour savoir l’heure exacte à sa montrebracelet et apprendre, du coup, qu’il me reste assez de temps pour me rendre d’Echandens à Ouchy. Voilà comment j’arriverai à ma conclusion” (Aquin, Prochain 173) [“I shall lean over his body to check his wristwatch, and will learn that there is still time to reach the Hôtel d’Angleterre (sic). That will be the end of my story” (P. Williams 125)]. This amusing fantasy of checking a dead man’s wristwatch suggests that he will again be belated, fixed in a plot where he fails to see his beloved’s real betrayal, just as he fails to understand why his watch stopped in the chateau or why he remains trapped in the room he chose in order to surprise his enemy: “Je suis prisonnier ici! Pourtant, je me suis librement glissé dans cette splendeur murée: je suis entré ici en tuer masqué” (Aquin, Prochain 136) [“I am a prisoner here! Yet I entered this splendid museum voluntarily; I came here a masked killer” (P. Williams 99)]. For the problem of freedom in Prochain épisode turns on the question of authorship. Confined to a structure he did not invent, and forced to play a role for which he is not fitted, the “hero” cannot act. The protagonist’s lack of freedom turns, however, on the style in which he is written by his author, a style that largely exceeds his comprehension. “Rien n’est libre ici,” he says after re-entering the château of his own volition. “Je n’écris pas, je suis écrit” (Aquin, Prochain 89) [“Nothing here is free … I am not writing, I am written” (P. Williams 67)]. By his own admission, he is confined to a path carved out by others through a bed of clay, which is why he feels he is “written” more than he is writing: “Ceci vaut pour tout ce que j’écris: me voici donc au fond d’une impasse où je cesse de vouloir avancer” (Aquin, Prochain 91) [“And that is true of everything I write: I am deep in an impasse where I no longer wish to advance” (P. Williams 68)]. But this impasse in which he finds himself is also a structure in which he hides to avoid the danger of the uncreated: “Je refuse toute systématisation qui m’enfoncerait plus encore dans la détresse de l’incréé” (Aquin, Prochain 91) [“But I refuse any system which would enclose me once again in the distress of the uncreated” (P. Williams 68)]. Which means that, by accepting a structure he did not invent, he has confined himself to playing a role in someone else’s history. Or, as Aquin would put it in “Profession,” “Oui, le dominé vit un roman écrit d’avance: il se conforme inconsciemment à des gestes assez équivoques pour que leur signification lui échappe” (51) [“Yes, to be dominated is to live a novel written in advance, to conform uncon-

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sciously to patterns of behaviour which are sufficiently ambiguous for their meaning to escape those who are caught up in them” (Purdy 53)]. The hero thus becomes a type of the colonized who are written even as they write. In some ways, Aquin’s narrator writes better than he knows: “Le roman incréé me dicte le mot à mot que je m’approprie,” he says with unwitting irony, “au fur et à mesure, selon la convention de Genève régissant la propriété littéraire” (Prochain 89–90) [“My novel-to-come in fact dictates to me the words to which I adapt myself, according to the Geneva convention regulating literary copyright” (P. Williams 67)]. What the ironist hints at behind his narrator’s back is what he had said in “Profession”: writing is nothing more than the “tracing of tracings,” a “reproduction” of another reproduction, “run off from worn out plates.” The difference is that this narrator feels reassured, rather than outraged, by such a state of affairs: “J’éprouve une grande sécurité, aussi bien l’avouer, à me pelotonner mollement dans le creuset d’un genre littéraire aussi bien défini” (Aquin, Prochain 8) [“I also feel great security, I confess, in gently yielding to the demands of a literary style already so well defined” (P. Williams 9)]. By contrast, Aquin will reject the “enormous security” of being confined to “such a well-defined literary genre”; rather, “la syntaxe, la forme, le sens des mots subissent aussi des déflagrations” (“Profession” 57) [“syntax, form, the meaning of words – all are subject to explosion” (Purdy 57)]. Even so, a revolution cannot be limited to syntax or genre: “La révolution qui opère mystérieusement en chacun de nous débalance l’ancienne langue française, fait éclater ses structures héritées qui, par la rigeur même de ceux qui les respectaient, exerçaient une hégémonie unilatérale sur les esprits” (Aquin, “Profession” 58) [“The revolution operating mysteriously in each and every one of us is skewing the old French language, exploding its inherited structures which, through the strict adherence of those who respected them, exercised a unilateral hegemony over the collective mind” (Purdy 57–8)]. Only the skewing of “the old French language” has to be directed at the hegemony of the “inherited structures” by which the dominated have been historically conditioned to accept their domination. Throughout most of his story, the narrator proves instead how completely he is dominated by the “inherited structures” of print, which produce his domination. He is a willing slave to literary genre as well as to a fixed view of history and of politics that has so enchanted him in the salon of the chateau at Echandens. The only dungeon from which he flees is the missal of the Church, that fixed liturgy that he explodes in a deliberate act of sacrilegious parody. Otherwise, the prison is left standing. For, as he admits at the end of his story: “J’étouffe ici,

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dans la contre-grille de la névrose, tandis que je m’enduis d’encre” (Aquin, Prochain 164) [“I suffocate here, in the cross-grill of neurosis, while I smear myself with ink” (P. Williams 120)]. In effect, Aquin has left him to suffocate in his own ink. But what he seeks, in such a parody of the narrator’s writing, is to explode literary form and constitutional history alike, both of which have left him powerless to change his historical conditioning. In the end, print has to be turned against itself in order to recover a lost ideal of liberty. Ironically, liberty still finds a lasting form in this novel by means of print. A night of love with K is transformed into an act of revolutionary writing in a room of the Hôtel d’Angleterre, “où Byron, en une seule nuit dans le bel été de 1816, a écrit le Prisonnier de Chillon … [et] où Byron a chanté Bonnivard qui s’était jadis abîmé dans une cellule du château de Chillon” (Aquin, Prochain 32) [“where Byron, in one beautiful summer night of 1816, wrote The Prisoner of Chillon … (and) where Byron immortalized Bonnivard, lost to the dungeons of the Chateau of Chillon” (P. Williams 26)]. The fixities of print slip and slide enough to allow the narrator to mistake “The Prisoner of Chillon” for Francis Bonnivard, fighting for the liberty of the Republic of Geneva against the duke of Savoy. In fact, “The Prisoner of Chillon” celebrates an ideal of religious liberty, as Byron’s singer commemorates six brothers who suffered at his side, “dying as their father died, / For the God their foes denied” (Byron 294). All the same, the stones of the dungeon in Byron’s “Sonnet on Chillon” are consecrated by the sufferings of the revolutionary hero, by Bonnivard who first languished in its depths from 1530 to 1536. And Bonnivard comes to serve as a figure for Byron himself who, “pour une nuit écrite, s’est arrêté entre Clarens et la villa Diodati, en route déjà pour une guerre révolutionnaire qui s’est terminée dans l’épilepsie finale de Missolonghi” (Aquin, Prochain 35) [“to write his poem, paused between Clarens and Villa Diodati, already on the way to a revolutionary war which finished in the final epilepsy of Missolonghi” (P. Williams 28)]. By giving his life in the swamps of Missolonghi in the Greek war of independence, Bryon hallowed his words with his blood. So the name “Chillon” can stand in print as a veritable altar of political liberty: Chillon! thy prison is a holy place, And thy sad floor an altar – for ’t was trod, Until his very steps have left a trace Worn, as if thy cold pavement were a sod, By Bonnivard! May none those marks efface! For they appeal from tyranny to God. (Byron 293)

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Although these words are never quoted in the novel, they nonetheless resonate with the multiplied echoes of allusion. Such is the power conferred by the permanence of print. Such permanence, however, is also the weakness of print – at least in Prochain épisode. For the novel seems designed to show how the book itself is the enemy and how print has created a prison that is hard to escape. Thirty-seven years after the publication of Aquin’s first novel, and twenty-five years after his death, we have all begun to experience the cultural fatigue that sets in with repeated attempts to find the right formula, or the right phrase, whether in the failed constitutional agreements of Meech Lake (1990) or of Charlottetown (1992). But the inability to change our Constitution – really our inability to accommodate competing views of the country – has proven the wisdom of Aquin’s vision. We are all prisoners of print in this country called Canada. “Tout fuit ici sauf moi,” the narrator of Prochain épisode sighs in self-pity. “Les mots coulent, le temps, le paysage alpestre et les villages vaudois, mais moi je frémis dans mon immanence et j’exécute une danse de possession à l’intérieur d’un cercle prédit” (Aquin 48) [“Everything is in flight, except me. Words flow, time, the alpine countryside and the Vaudois villages, but I shudder and dance my little dance within a prescribed circle” (P. Williams 37)]. Whatever one is to make of the narrator’s fate, he is right about one thing: he continues to be imprisoned within a genre where all is “prescribed.” Still, the old fixities are not enough. Something will have to give. Il faut que ça change.

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pa r t t h r e e Motion-Picture Country

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7 The Shock of Film and the Transformation of Place: A Case in Point in The Butterfly Plague (1969) In The World Viewed, his seminal study of film epistemology, Stanley Cavell defines “the mechanical fact of photography, in particular the absence of the human hand in forming these objects and the absence of its creatures in their screening” (73), as a form of automatism demanding a revised understanding of reality. It was evidently such automatic movement that startled early viewers of motion-pictures, as one still sees in the response of the commentator for The Illustrated American, writing in November 1896: “the house is darkened, and, like the old-fashioned magic-lantern … the picture is projected on the screen. But instead of a dull, lifeless screen, there is shown the actual movement of life, realistic to a degree positively startling” (Pratt 20). For the first time in human history, a spectral Other lives and moves and has its being in a stream of light projected automatically onto the screen. While this Other is present to the audience, however, the audience is not present to it; it is only the viewer who is missing from the scene. At issue here, according to Cavell, are two interrelated concepts: the “presentness” of the world through the camera’s (past) presence; and the absence of an audience from the world projected. For “photography maintains the presentness of the world by accepting our absence from it. The reality in a photograph is present to me while I am not present to it” (23). And yet what sort of “presentness” is actually produced in the medium of film? “Erwin Panofsky puts it this way: ‘The medium of the movies is physical reality as such› (16). That is why a photographic image is more than a simple likeness. At the same time, “it is not exactly a replica, or a relic, or a shadow, or an apparition either, though all of these natural candidates share a striking feature with photographs – an aura or history of magic surrounding them” (18). In fact, writing with light entails an automatic transfer of photons

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from the subject to a prepared film surface. Thus, part of “the force of photographic images comes from their being material realities in their own right, richly informative deposits left in the wake of whatever emitted them” (Sontag 180). Then what happens to these material deposits when they are projected into moving pictures? Contrary to moulds or impressions or imprints, all of which “have clear procedures for getting rid of their originals,” the film “original is still as present as it ever was,” projected on a stream of light. “Not present as it once was to the camera; but that is only a mold-machine, not the mold itself” (Cavell 20). Indeed, the movie is “not a substitute for an original, but its manifestation. Photographs can have not merely many prints, but, one could say, many originals” (122). The movie image acquires its magical force from the ontological difference “between representation and projection” (17). For a moving picture does not stoop to copy reality. It doubles, even multiplies, physical instances of it. Compare this structure of film communication with that of print. Fundamentally, a book voids the storyteller’s presence, leaving readers to imagine the subject of print out of alphabetic abstractions. Film, on the other hand, projects traces of “reality” onto a screen, while screening an audience from the presence of its automatic projections. “A screen is a barrier,” as Cavell sees it. “It screens me from the world it holds” (24). Though “the actors are there, all right, in your world,” in order “to get to them you have to go where they are, and … as things stand, you cannot go there now. Their space is not metaphysically different; it is the same human space mine is. And you are not, as in a theater, forbidden to cross the line between actor and incarnation, between action and passion, between profane and sacred realms. In a movie house, the barrier to the stars is time” (155). So another early commentator, marvelling at how “a long strip of film whirs through the camera,” wrote in The Saturday Evening Post for November 1907 that “the performance is preserved in living, dynamic embalment (if the phrase may be permitted) for decades to come” (Pratt 49). Already, one sees in this paradox of “dynamic embalment” how the past lives in the present. Contrast this with John Milton’s classic definition of print’s embalming power, expressed in his Areopagitica (1644): “A good Booke is the pretious life-blood of a master spirit, imbalm’d and treasur’d up on purpose to a life beyond life” (999). Still, something more than a mind’s quintessence is preserved in a camera’s “living, dynamic embalment”; the “master spirit” returns, as it were, from “a life beyond life.” Shades from the past are thus present to audiences on film in a way that audiences will never be present to them. For film issues a one-way ticket out of the past.

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What one hears in the words of many commentators during the early years of silent film (1896–1916) – as George Pratt has collected them in Spellbound in Darkness – is the sense of an epochal shift taking place in the mode of communication, from a word-based culture grounded in print to an image-based culture buoyed on streams of light. At the time, however, no one foresaw how the technologizing of the visual image was to alter psychic, social, and political organization, just as no one had foreseen, three millennia before, how the Greek alphabet was to affect “human consciousness” (Ong 78), or how, 500 years ago, the technologizing of the word in print was to alter private and public life. The larger aim of this chapter, then, is not so much to explore how movies work as art* as to gauge their effect on social epistemology in the various ways they alter printformed notions of time and space, individual identity, and imagined community. Focusing first on the “material basis of the media of movies,” Stanley Cavell plumbs their significance as “a succession of automatic world projections” (72). The automatic movement of the projected image is what has doubled and multiplied the world’s “presentness”; but succession – taken in all its cinematic senses as “the motion depicted; the current of successive frames in depicting it; the juxtapositions of cutting” (72–3) – is what has been shifting time/space relations. Then, building on Panofsky, Cavell takes “the unique and specific possibilities of the new medium” to be the “dynamization of space” and the “spatialization of time” (30). Of course, writing had also reduced time to space since sound “is an event in time, and ‘time marches on,’ relentlessly, with no stop or division” (Ong 76). The first spatialization of time was this conversion of “sound to script and to the most radical of all scripts, the alphabet” (77). But a motion-picture camera, taking a thousand photographs a minute, each measuring 5/8 by 1 1/8 inches, does more than reduce time to space. For the moment its frames are projected by a beam of light through a focused lens, the form moves in time; space is translated back into time. Now the spatialization of time makes it possible to “witness successively events happening at the same time” (Cavell 30). Most viewers soon acclimated themselves, however, to such temporal effects of moving pictures. It was the dynamization of space – what might be called film’s power to move “instantaneously from anywhere to anywhere” (30) – that was confounding. In The Illustrated American for July 1896, Henry Tyrrell noted how “sea-waves clash against a pier, or roll in and break languidly on the sandy beach, * See Chapter 9, “Film and Print Versions of The English Patient.”

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as in a dream; and the emotion produced upon the spectator is far more vivid than the real scene would be, because of the startling suddenness with which it is conjured up and changed, there in the theatre, by the magic wand of electricity” (Pratt 17). What startles is not merely the defiance of time in “the actual movement of life” but an unnatural “suddenness” in the change of scene. Instantaneously, one place has re-placed another in the blank space of the screen, creating a seamless interval between distant places in the blink of an eye. Editing out the time taken to relocate a camera, film thus transports a viewer magically to another place. But any “displacement of objects and persons from their natural sequences and locales” (Cavell 17) is also unsettling in a metaphysical as well as in a psychological sense. For the dynamization of space really means “that we are displaced from our natural habitation” and “placed at a distance from it. The screen overcomes our fixed distance, it makes displacement appear as our natural condition” (41). For such reasons, early filmmakers were quite hesitant about editing practices that upended space or produced displacement. Today their work has the quaint appearance of “filmed theatre” (Pratt 23). For example, in his Paris-made films, George Méliès tended to mark every change of scene with a dissolve that acted as a curtain. Edwin S. Porter also relied on dissolves in films he made for Edison in New York, until he hit on “the direct cut from scene to scene in the great train robbery, (released in December 1903)” (Pratt 32). Even this early classic still follows theatrical conventions, however, in dividing the photoplay into fourteen scenes (roughly sixty seconds per shot in a fourteen-minute film). For several years to come, the majority of shots would be taken from a “stage distance,” about “twelve feet away from the camera, in compositions that showed part of the floor or ground in front of their feet and the top third of the frame above their heads” (Bowser 94). Comic conventions dictated as well that a film ought to “show the participants in the chase, both pursued and pursuer, approaching from the distance and exiting in the foreground, to one side or the other of the camera, with the action and its direction repeated in the next shot but in another location. The shots are linked by this movement through space,” connoting “continuous space-time unrolling from one shot to the next” (56). By 1908–09, the “switch-back” (or alternating scene) had nonetheless become a staple of editing in D.W. Griffith’s films, and it radicalized the relation of time to space in moving pictures. Despite his use of straight cuts, the pictures of Edwin S. Porter now began to seem old-fashioned. One reviewer even felt obliged to lecture the poor fellow: “If short scenes had alternated back and forth between the stage and balcony, showing the progress on the stage and the effect on the

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balcony audience concurrently, the effect would have been greatly increased” (Pratt 59). Concurrently, other reviewers took to praising Griffith for the way his “flitting scenes join each other so logically. The average film drama may have from a dozen to twenty-five or thirty changes of scenes; this one has at least fifty, and maybe a hundred – the reviewer couldn’t count them” (90). Not everyone was so enamoured, however, of the “flitting” logic of Griffith’s film style. One Reverend Dr. Stockton, who sounds more like a Puritan from Ben Jonson’s satiric Bartholomew Fair, would set off in 1912 with a stopwatch and pocket counter to do something about all these “flitting scenes” in the nickelodeons (which were typically one-reel films of seventeen to eighteen minutes duration). The Moving Picture World printed a tally of twenty-seven such films and reported the Reverend Doctor to say that Griffith’s Biograph films were especially stricken by “the lightning bug” (102). Taking its own swat at lightning bugs, the World added: “In the Stockton list the Biograph takes top notch with 68 scenes in the sands of dee, but they are not quicksands alongside the same company’s man’s lust for gold. This contains 107 scenes, twelve leaders, the title and the censorship tag all on the thousand feet of film. There is one scene that runs four-fifths of one second according to three trials of a stop watch. We do not mention this as a pattern but as a horrible, a most horrible example” (103). Today, any film averaging four to six shots per minute would seem glacial compared to our standard of twelve to fifteen shots per minute. But Griffith’s pace of editing already felt breakneck in 1912, heralding a speed-up in modern life that was soon to follow from automobiles, aeroplanes, and assembly lines. Even those quite sympathetic to Griffith complained bitterly about one film: “There seems to be too frequent a change of scene with a rapidity that destroys a full continuity of thought by too much change in the action of scenes” (101). Nearly two decades later, the same complaint would be heard to echo in a remark made by the French novelist and essayist Georges Duhamel: “Je ne peux pas déjà plus penser ce que je veux. Les images mouvantes se substituent à mes propres pensées” (52) [“I can no longer think what I want. Moving images have taken the place of my own thoughts” (my translation)]. Even Walter Benjamin, the great Marxist critic, shared this concern of the humanist writer, if only to a point: “The process of association in view of these images is indeed interrupted by their constant, sudden change. This constitutes the shock effect of film” (238). What Benjamin, in his seminal essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), termed the “distracting element” of film was not all bad. “Reception in a state of distraction, which is

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increasingly noticeable in all fields of art and is symptomatic of profound changes in apperception, finds in the film its true means of exercise. The film with its shock effect meets this mode of reception halfway. The film makes the cult value recede into the background” (240). In fact, the surest way to destroy its cult value was to strip art of “its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value” (224), which enslaved a culture to tradition and excluded mass participation. In film, Benjamin thus recognized a “most powerful agent” for revolutionary change: “Its social significance, particularly in its most positive form, is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic aspect, that is the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage” (221). Benjamin was still aware of the cost of mass “reception in a state of distraction,” the more so because this “distracting element” was “primarily tactile, being based on changes of place and focus which periodically assail the spectator” (238). Spectators were assailed by more, however, than constant, sudden changes of place. In 1909 the columnist for The Moving Picture World was shocked by unprecedented changes in scale: “If these figures had been photographed at equal distances from the camera, then they would have appeared of equal sizes on the screen, instead of varying between the dimensions of a Brobdignagian monstrosity and Lilliputian pygmies” (Pratt 96). Evidently, alternating close-ups and long shots fractured Renaissance perspective with its “fixed point of view” and its association with the fixity of print (McLuhan, Gutenberg 56). So the World’s film critic clung to the old certainties of painting and print, though he seemed to think of himself as defending the oral world of the stage: “It is curious to reflect that in an hour’s entertainment of a moving picture theatre, the visitor sees an infinite variation in the apparent sizes of things as shown by the moving picture. This is absurd. On the vaudeville or the talking stage, figures of human beings do not expand or contract irrationally or eccentrically; they remain the same size” (Pratt 96). Today, it is commonplace to say that close-ups and long shots add humanity to their subjects. Already in 1911, some viewers recognized the possibilities of this new language of scale. For example, one astute reviewer of Griffith’s through darkened vales said that “the lonely, helpless condition of the blind peddler is emphasized by showing him at a distance, as he wanders alone, picking his way through the deserted streets. Here we have an effect gained by an extreme exactly opposite to the close, intimate point of view characteristic of Biograph since the very beginning” (92). Far from creating monsters and pygmies, changes in scale created bonds of feeling

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between actors and audiences. This is because the close-up enabled viewers to read subtle facial expressions that would be lost on a stage; without moving a muscle, an actor drew near to an audience. Thus, a prime necessity of the new medium was discovered, the law that “movie performers cannot project, but are projected” (Cavell 37). At least this necessity of “projected visibility” (37) allowed an actor to retain something of his/her own identity. In Griffith’s words, “The close-up enabled us to reach real acting, restraint, acting that is a duplicate of real life. But the close-up was not accepted all at once. It was called many names by men who now make use of it as a matter of course. ‘Why,’ said one man well known in the film world, ‘that man Griffith is crazy, the characters come swimming in on the scene› (Pratt 111). In fact, “setting pictures to motion mechanically overcame … the inherent theatricality of the (still) photograph. The development of fast film allowed the subjects of photographs to be caught unawares, beyond our or their control” (Cavell 118–19). For an actor, by submitting to the “projected visibility” of the camera’s functioning, was soon “released again” (119) to exist in his or her own right. Even so, Edwin S. Porter “avoided the close-up entirely” in later years, “placing ‘his camera at a considerable distance from his actors’ so that there would be no ‘abnormality of size› (Pratt 33). He thus missed the real point of the camera’s functioning, which was to make it a central actor in the new medium. Other critics felt that the close-up destroyed the harmony of painterly composition. In 1912 H.F. Hoffman grumbled that American producers were paying too high a price for facial expression: “Some time ago in the columns of the World there was voiced a polite protest against the tendency of many motion picture makers to cut the feet of the actors out of the scene … [I]nstead of following that wise bit of counsel, the film makers straightaway began cutting off the figures at the knees” (Pratt 97). And yet, for almost a decade before Edison’s invention of the Kinetoscope, Degas and other Impressionist painters had been making use of such truncated forms of composition. So Hoffman was likely arguing against modern trends in his assertion that “pictorial art is composition. A picture is a combination of several factors into a complete and harmonious whole. An arrangement with the feet cut off is not a complete and harmonious whole” (Pratt 98). What the critic failed to realize was that traditional (really Renaissance) principles of painting, such as balance, perspective, and wholeness, were only appropriate to static forms and fixed points of view. Ultimately, what the traditional critic felt compelled to defend from motion-picture cameras and moving images was the fixed space of painting and print.

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A different principle of organization, one that could truly exploit the new space-time relationship of film, was required to break this fixed point of view. Rhythm – the alternation of one type of shot with another type, the balancing of differing shot sequences of equal or approximate duration – was a device that film took over from music, dance, and poetry. It was the poet Vachel Lindsay, whose own rhythms expressed many of the complexities of American life, who first articulated this significance of rhythm in Griffith’s groundbreaking intolerance (1916). In 1917 Lindsay, whose eye was every bit as attuned as was his ear, would offer this remarkable insight: “People have spoken of Griffith’s alleged ‘sheer sensationalism’ in his plot in which he shows four periods of time conversing with one another. But jumping back and forth over barriers of time is the most accepted thing in the photoplay hurdle-race … And as to jumping over geographic spaces, the photoplay dialogue that technically replaces the old stage interchange of words is a conversation between places, not individuals” (Pratt 226). A conversation between places. Four periods of time conversing with one another. Behind these phrases, a revolution has taken place in human apperception. For vision, the so-called “dissecting sense,” has finally absorbed the virtues of sound, the so-called “unifying sense” (Ong 72). “A typical visual ideal,” so goes the theory, “is clarity and distinctiveness, a taking apart” (72). Another way of putting it would be to say that “a world of sight is a world of immediate intelligibility” (Cavell 150). And “the auditory ideal, by contrast, is harmony, a putting together” (Ong 72). Griffith ought then to be regarded as putting images together in ways analogous to the auditory ideal, allowing for differing times and places to “speak” to one another on conditions of equality. At the same time, objects were being relativized in film. For the essential object necessarily depends upon “its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be” (Benjamin 221, 220). What the film-object loses is its “aura” or “essence,” what Benjamin calls “the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be. If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch” (222–3). In effect, the object’s authenticity becomes a function of viewer distance. For, once you film that range of mountains or that branch, you eliminate actual distance, you make a mountain, as it were, portable. Thus to film a landscape is to take it out of its place, to substitute “a plurality of copies for a unique existence” (221).

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To film an actor (who is not root-bound in a landscape) also strips the “aura” from the person as much as from an object in a landscape. This raises questions about the sort of “presentness” that Cavell identifies in film. For the actor’s body, in the words of Pirandello, “loses its corporeality, it evaporates, it is deprived of reality, life, voice, and the noises caused by his moving about, in order to be changed into a mute image, flickering an instant on the screen, then vanishing into silence” (cited in Benjamin 229). Even the integrity of the performance is taken away since the “unique phenomenon of a distance” has become a function of the camera; indeed, the camera takes the place of the viewer, whose own “identification with the actor is really an identification with the camera” (Benjamin 228). The actor, by contrast, can actually hold still as the camera moves (physically or editorially, linking shots from various angles and distances), thus altering the spatial form of the figure and the spatial relation between actor and audience. An actor thus loses his/her essence, much like any other mechanically reproduced object. Likewise, sight loses its agency the moment it is given over to a mechanical eye that multiplies, transmits, and transports the object in ways neither unique nor proper to it. That is why, as Benjamin sees it, “the quality of its presence is always depreciated” (221) on film. Mechanically reproduced images that are multiple and portable nonetheless belong to everyone. So Cavell applauds the “ontological equality” of images on film, where even “human beings are not ontologically favored over the rest of nature” (37). Under such conditions of ontological equality, Benjamin sees at least one revolutionary possibility. For “the desire of contemporary masses to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction,” is really “the mark of a perception whose ‘sense of the universal equality of things’ has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction” (Benjamin 223). A door to social levelling swings open in the mass reproduction and distribution of images. After centuries dominated by print and private possession, a sense of “simultaneous collective experience” (234) finally returns to culture, an experience virtually forgotten since the era of mass worship in great cathedrals or, before that, of public performances by epic poets. Modern, mass culture is born in the nickelodeon, tiny store-front shows that sprang up like mushrooms in the United States in the first decade of the twentieth century. In May 1907, the Moving Picture World said there were 2,500 to 3,000, and in November, the figure cited by Patterson was ‘between four and five thousand’ … By 1910,

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the numbers were growing again: the Patents Company records show ten thousand theatres of all kinds in that year” (Bowser 4, 6). Remarkably, “the silent photoplay attracted over eighty million spectators each week in the United States,” a figure nearly equal to the total population of the country. And “every two months the entire population of the globe was exceeded in number by the total of all who visited the world’s silent movies” (Pratt xii). So Benjamin could be hopeful, even at the beginning of the era of the talkie, that “the greatly increased mass of participants has produced a change in the mode of participation. The fact that the new mode of participation first appeared in a disreputable form must not confuse the spectator … A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it. He enters into this work of art the way legend tells of the Chinese painter when he viewed his finished painting. In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art” (239). At the turn of the century, the difference between absorbing or being absorbed by the work of art was particularly relevant to migrant populations. For what they left behind in the local countryside, or back in the Old Country, was a life-store of images. And what they found again at the cinema was a replacement for that life-store. While film could not transport them to lost or distant places, it could bring such places, lacking only in their “aura” of presence, to them. Filmobjects thus became migrants, too, bringing the Old World to the New. Only the direction of film travel continued to be all one-way, importing the past into the present, but still holding audiences at bay. Hence the popularity of Pathé Frères’ films in Jewish, Polish, and Slavic neighbourhoods in Chicago; of Giovanni Pastrone’s historical spectacles among Italian immigrants in New York (Bowser 320); and of Thomas Ince’s Westerns, Mack Sennet’s comedies, and Griffith’s dramas throughout middle America. Up there on the screen, a lost world was found again. Indeed, a mobile world of images was now catching up with a mobile population. And moviegoers absorbed the new art form, rather than being absorbed by it, as they would be in contemplating a painting. According to Rey Chow, “Coinciding with upheavals of traditional populations bound to the land and with massive migrations from the countryside to metropolitan areas around the world[,] film ubiquitously assumes the significance of the monumental; the cinema auditorium, as Paul Virilio writes, puts order into visual chaos like a cenotaph. As the activity of moviegoing gratifies ‘the wish of migrant workers for a lasting and even eternal homeland,’ cinema becomes the site of ‘a new aboriginality in the midst of demographic anarchy› (173). For the lost place of origin may not be grasped on film any more than a specific body may be held in a cenotaph; rather, the

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screen becomes an analogue of that cenotaph, a site for a new style of continuity – an imagined continuity between here and there, between life and death, between the individual and the nation. Thus, film ends up transforming our sense of place as much as it does our sense of space and time. For Benedict Anderson, the cenotaph is a vehicle for imagining the modern nation: “No more arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism exist than cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers. The public ceremonial reverence accorded these monuments precisely because they are either deliberately empty or no one knows who lies inside them, has no true precedents in earlier times … Yet void as these tombs are of identifiable mortal remains or immortal souls, they are nonetheless saturated with ghostly national imaginings” (9). For, the nation, in the eclipse of religion, subsumes old anxieties about death and remembrance in a new form of imagined continuity. Even so, the nation cannot offer the direct immortality offered by a film image, for the absent body is “present” in film in a way that is simply not possible in the blank space of the cenotaph. Stanley Cavell puts it only slightly differently: “A world complete without me which is present to me is the world of my immortality. This is an importance of film – and a danger” (160). For the self is left, as Cavell admits, to haunt a world that it can never enter. Film really works its magic, then, through “conveying the unsayable by showing experience beyond the reach of words” (152). It was always the glory of silent films to display what remains beyond the power of words. “This reality of the unsayable is what I see in film’s new release from the synchronization of speech with the speaker, or rather in its presenting of the speaker in forms in which there can be no speech” (148). In that sense, film restores us to a world that existed before the advent of speech or print; film is really that language we may yet learn to speak in the absence of words. “In this light,” as Rey Chow notes, “it is worth remembering that film has always been, since its inception, a transcultural phenomenon, having as it does the capacity to transcend ‘culture’ – to create modes of fascination which are readily accessible and which engage audiences in ways independent of their linguistic and cultural specificities” (174). Which is not to claim that film is by nature politically neutral. To the contrary, film can work to question the very existence of the print-nation. For one thing, its “screen has no frame; that is to say, no border” (Cavell 24). Much as a camera’s field of view sets the limits of a photograph, so the limits of the screen “are not so much the edges of a given shape as they are the limitations, or capacity, of a container” (25). In fact, a motion-picture camera’s capacity for continuity is almost limitless, in the same way that “successive film

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frames are fit flush into the fixed screen frame,” resulting “in a phenomenological frame that is indefinitely extendible and contractible, limited in the smallness of the object it can grasp only by the state of its technology, and in largeness only by the span of the world” (25). So the fixed margins of the book tend to disappear into the borderblurring margins of a screen that can span the world. Now, every place that a camera “looks” at is joined to others in this space of the screen; every place appears to “belong” to the same space. In ways that seem to anticipate the effects of hypermedia (see Chapter 3), film then contributes to a spatial bias that “embraces discontinuity and juxtaposition, with mutable boundaries superimposed upon one another” (Deibert 188). In retrospect, film thus appears to have been a harbinger of globalization. Even as the rigid, linear demarcation of print once enabled us to “see” the nation as a fact of “nature,” now the mutability of the moving image enables us to see it as a social construct. Conversely, the borderless world of film – followed by that of television – has been making it possible to imagine a world without borders. If developments in satellite broadcasting and the Internet are building the physical infrastructure of such a world, then the structure of film communications already guarantees the cultural power of distant centres. For film, as Stanley Cavell has suggested, satisfies a deepseated “wish for the magical reproduction of the world by enabling us to view it unseen” (101). But an audience’s wish for invisibility “is not a wish for power over creation (as Pygmalion’s was), but a wish not to need power, not to have to bear its burdens” (40). If it is true of film viewing, as Cavell writes, that “our natural mode of perception is to view, feeling unseen. We do not so much look at the world as look out at it, from behind the self” (102), then it follows that the wish for invisibility makes voyeurs of us all. Only, “viewing a movie makes this condition automatic, takes the responsibility for it out of our hands. Hence movies seem more natural than reality” (102). To that extent, film may yet prove to be a harbinger of oligarchy, where, despite the “ontological equality” of objects on film, the medium will not lead towards social levelling but towards naturalizing inequality in every sphere of social life. This is because, where the structure of communication invites withdrawal from community and abdication of responsibility, the void is likely to be filled by “projected visibility.” For the surest way to rule, in this communicative structure, is to be seen, while the surest way to be ruled is to stay invisible. At the same time, the medium’s iconoclasm could still work against its power to colonize. For the more that Hollywood exports American culture around the globe, the more exposed the United

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States is finding itself (in both the photographic and political senses of that word). And so the ultimate question of cultural sovereignty might well hinge on the lost sovereignty of the object as much as on the lost sovereignty of the eye. Which may turn out to be film’s ultimate irony – that in our era of the sovereign image, the image-maker must be as subject as anyone else to its power. Indeed, this could be the counter-shock of film. From the outset of The Butterfly Plague (rev. ed. 1986) – Timothy Findley’s novel about 1930s Hollywood – the shock of film is felt on several levels. A silent film star “who hadn’t been capable of making a film for six or seven years” (Findley, rev. ed. 16) performs for a crowd gathered on a railway platform: “Bully Moxon, in patent-leather shoes, in brass-buttoned blazer, in white flannels, in boater, and carrying a cane, did his famous ‘Waiting for My Favorite Dream’ routine. His features, adored across the land for their pronounced and swollen redness, reflected a kind of wistful wickedness” (15). In surreal fashion, the ex-star then steps in front of an oncoming train to loud applause: “Bully in the cinders. Down. Decapitated. His last step upward … Dead. The crowd gave a kind of roar” (19). The scene is more telling than the novelist seems to realize. Findley would have us think that Bully’s death is part of a fascist plot “to save America” (59), largely through a return to the screen of Letitia Virden, the “Little Virgin” of silent films, whose reprise of her title role is meant to sweep her into the White House with a wealthy consort, the industrialist Cooper Carter, who boasts that, “with our image and my empire, what we have now is the freedom to seize power” (336). But the only conceptual link to fascism in what seems at first glance like naive melodrama is a filmic ideal of perfection, inspired by the image of the Little Virgin, a rather poor American cousin to the Nazi ideal of a Master Race. Never mind that screen images do not amount to a program of eugenics or that a “quest for perfection” (156) does not imply a doctrine of racial superiority, much less a glorification of strength and discipline, or even a subordination of the individual to the state. It is enough that a decent character could carry a dream of perfection with her like a virus from Nazi Germany or that rhetoric could usurp the place of reason. In such pseudo-liberal rhetoric causation can vanish as in a fog. Ruth Damarosch Haddon, for example, upon her return from Germany in 1938 muses that America is not the Nightmare. It will be. The Nightmare is Europe … I know that I came home the other day and it was August and a dear old friend of mine whose shoes I remember and whose eyes are close to my heart threw

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himself down on the cinders under the very train I rode in. I was arriving and he died. It was voluntary, or so I understand. His death is important to everyone. It holds the beginnings of a new Nightmare. This is how a new Nightmare begins. With an act. Sometimes an act of absolution. Sometimes an act of atonement … I am never going to know why Bully killed himself. But I am certain that somewhere in someone he has started a Nightmare and perhaps I will know the consequences of that. (67–8)

But the only explanation we are ever given of this “Nightmare” has to do with the Little Virgin staring out the train window at Bully’s severed head as if it were “some gigantic and momentous ruin – and in her stance and quiet stare could be felt the power and intensity of a conqueror. She had put him there. Ruth knew it. But she didn’t know how or why” (22). In fact, Letitia Virden’s agency is clearly impossible in the novel’s own terms. For Letitia is left to wonder herself about Bully’s death: “Was it suicide?” she asks. “Unfortunately, yes,” Cooper Carter replies. To which the Little Virgin responds, “Unfortunately nothing. It’s a miracle of timing” (52). A miracle of timing for Findley as much as for Letitia, it would seem; for Findley needs the cloud of fascism to rain on Bully’s parade to signify that Terrible Forces are afoot in the United States. The silent film star is then killed more by innuendo than by ideology, for heads must roll in Letitia’s “quest for perfection.” And yet why should Bully Moxon follow some Pied Piper of perfection? ‹He wants to hear the music,’ said Myra [another film actress], not knowing how right she was but only sensing something sad about the dancer” (18). The novelty of Bully Moxon’s act is evidently his substitution of movement for sound. But the real pathos of his performance has little to do with imperfection or even with an absence of music; rather, his very exile from motion pictures is what has cut him off from the constant, sudden change that constitutes, as Benjamin says, the real shock of film. And he cannot force his way back into frame by merely performing in person. To produce a filmic performance, he must procure a double of himself, so creating a sense of his “presentness” in the moment of his absence. In other words, he has to take the place of the camera in the act of performance. So Bully splits his role in two in order to produce the shock effect of film. And, for at least an instant, he does succeed in evoking the constant, sudden change of his medium: “Myra couldn’t see it because she was crying. In the crowd, there were few who could have realized what had happened – because they cheered. And there were some who had been blinded, who – being blinded – had laughed, thinking

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someone had played them a trick-death until they wiped their eyes and saw the blood on their fingers” (19–20). It is not that the shock effect of film has already worn off in 1938; rather, with more than forty years’ experience of motion pictures, audiences already expect to be shocked by film, to the point that “real” shock is almost redundant. At least, the constant, sudden shock of film has made it difficult to recognize any other kind. If The Butterfly Plague would confine itself to this shock effect of film, its violence might make more sense. Certainly, in his preface to the revised edition (1986), Findley hints that the horror of Nazism is really extraneous to the rest of the novel’s violence: “The characters, not unlike the butterflies, arrived on the pages in droves. The events were about as large as events could get: there were murders, flaming forests, movie making, the Olympic Games and – not to be outdone by a number of other writers writing then – I threw in World War II” (iii). And yet he cuts less than thirty pages from the first edition (1969) while making five pages of substantive additions to the revised edition. Several cuts do help to tighten some scenes, and “The Fire Chronicle,” an irrelevant epilogue about the next generation after Ruth, is mercifully excised. But the additions also serve to magnify the Nazi horrors rather than to plumb the more violent implications of film. In the revised “Chronicle of Alvarez Canyon,” Ruth is still pursued by a blond man who has trailed her in silence all the way from Germany; only, this time, he forces her to hold a swastika, which he tears from his sleeve, rather than to take his erect member in her hand. Further changes to “The Chronicle of the Little Virgin” also spell out more clearly the political threat of a coup d’état, with the fascist couple humming “America the Beautiful.” Both additions politicize what might seem like gratuitous violence, but they also reduce the shock of Letitia’s “revolutionary film,” which, in the first edition, was supposed to “change the world” and “keep us out of the war” (1969, 335). While Findley appears to make light of the way he “threw in World War II” in the first edition, his revisions now tend compulsively in the direction of Famous Last Words (1981), his recent bestseller about fascist aesthetics and a Nazi plot to take over the British monarchy. Several structural changes to the opening of The Butterfly Plague nonetheless hint at the real plot, which is almost obscured in a fog of fascist allusion. An initial, unbroken sequence at the station, with Aldolphus Damarosch and Myra Jacobs watching Bully Moxon, is no longer followed by another extended sequence aboard the train where Ruth confronts the blond German and intuits how the (veiled

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and mysterious) Little Virgin is connected to Bully’s death. Rather, both these sequences are crosscut, or developed in a series of alternating scenes that join together in the manner of film. In other words, at the very moment that substantive revisions heighten the Nazi “explanation,” the formal changes suggest that the violence is due not to political machinations but to Bully Moxon’s troubled relationship to his medium. At the same time as crosscutting heightens the filmic shock of Bully’s death, Findley’s parody of film’s power to shock undercuts the sensationalism of an actress who, finding a director comically entangled in her skirts, falls back on a standard pose of the screen trade: ‹Rape! Rape! rape!’ screamed Myra, immediately assuming the physical proportions of an actress playing in close-up” (Findley, rev. ed. 23). Myra, who claims to be personally violated, clearly projects a change of scale meant to assail the viewer’s perception. And yet her pretended “close-up” looks comically incongruous beside the prior close-up used by the narrator: “Several people gave off screams. The engine bellowed like a killer. Bully Moxon’s head rolled down the track” (20). Myra, it turns out, is every bit as canny as Bully is about using close-ups to shock an audience; but her misreading of the situation is meant to offer comic relief after true horror. Like Bully, Myra is still destined, once her film career ends, to commit suicide. Contrary to the shocking act of an epistemological bully, however, Myra’s suicide is the private act of a performer who has lost her public. When New York money men cut her out of a picture she has been working on for Adolphus, she finally achieves a genuine pathos: “She just wanted them to let her look like herself, that was all – and be like herself and give up running around the studios all the time. If only they’d make Hell’s Babies the way she was, then they’d see that the public did like her that way, with her body plump like that” (212–13). Usurped by her own “double,” she feels she doesn’t exist: “That was why Myra had died,” Adolphus thinks. “She hadn’t believed in what she was – in the fat lady – in Old Fat. She had only believed in what she thought she was – in what she thought she ought to be – in what was expected of her – and, finally, demanded” (303). Her presence, or her “aura” in Benjamin’s phrase, has finally been eclipsed by her screen image. The gap between the image and its original might well raise some questions about the sovereignty of the film-object that Cavell avoids. “Film, precisely because it signifies the thorough permeation of reality by the mechanical apparatus and thus the production of a seamless resemblance to reality itself, displaces once and for all the sovereignty of the so-called original, which is now often an imperfect

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and less permanent copy of itself” (Chow 173). Evidently, the filmic threat to personal identity, and thus to the sovereignty of the self, does not have to be a political matter. For Myra is robbed of authenticity by the image, leaving her powerless to compete with the “dynamic embalment” of her own filmic double. By the end of the novel, even the “fascist” Letitia Virden finds herself overtaken in spectacular fashion by this power of the medium. For the son she has never acknowledged, Octavius Rivi Moxon, shows up in drag as “the very incarnation of the Little Virgin” (Findley, rev. ed. 359) in order to confront his mother at the premiere of her comeback film: Letitia, stunned by the reception she was receiving, turned to seek its cause and saw, as though in a mirror, her own person standing there, eight paces distant, smiling at her, and holding out its hand. “Mother,” it said in a voice unmistakably masculine. (361)

The multiplied image of the film star thus offers a graphic instance of the shock of film. For Octavius, who has never even met his mother, has no reason to mirror her image except to protest the manner in which her person is usurped by it. While he has not been privy to the question she asked the man who fashioned that image – “How may a Virgin have children, George?” (56) – his own attempt to duplicate her image now makes it clear that, having lost his mother to the medium, his recourse is to re-place the original. George Damarosch, the filmmaker excluded from Letitia’s comeback, also arrives at her premiere, hoping to destroy, if not to supplant, this image he has helped to create. But the image manages to keep its sovereignty, even when George has gunned down its original. For Letitia’s “double,” in the person of Octavius, gets away: “Some said, in later years, that the Virgin herself had been seen speeding away from the scene of her mortal death. She had ascended into heaven. Triumphant” (364). Conversely, Letitia loses all semblance of authenticity: “They say, too, that the woman lying dead amidst paint and blood and lacquer – lying dead on the pavement – could not have been Letitia Virden. She was much too old to have been the Virgin. At least fifty. (An uncharitable few said sixty-five to seventy)” (364). And so a trumped-up political threat is finally absorbed by this medium that poses the only threat in the novel to the sovereignty of individual identity as well as to the sovereignty of the nation. Aldophus “Dolly” Damarosch, George’s son and Ruth’s brother, can only wonder about the sort of consolation provided by the image:

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“He gazed into mirrors, and there he was, all twenty of him, thirty of him. Forty. Vulnerable. Ad infinitum … Could he not select one? Could he not choose one from the images and make it safe? Could he not escape, as his image had, into a mirrored existence somewhere safe? Could he not live forever? Safe?” (300). But Dolly finally comes to see what Myra cannot, and Letitia will not, see – that the quest for “dynamic embalment” is achieved at the cost of human life. The image, in other words, always appears to overtake its original: “All his life had been a picture of life. Something through a lens, far away at the end of a camera, beyond telescopes, caught in binoculars, laid out under glass. He’d thrived on pictures. On scripted situations, on the careful, brilliant assemblage of pretended beauty” (302–3). Such a world of multiplied images finds its novelistic equivalent in a swarm of butterflies. An endless plague of beauty. Or, more likely, a growing plague of images. Shortly before his epiphany, Dolly has already intuited the connection between this plague of butterflies and the dream of the Little Virgin: “The butterflies excited Ruth and Dolly with visions … They blazed with colors, hardly stirring in their trees, sleepers and dreamers themselves, providing sleep and dreams of peace. Golden. Red. White and black. Some called them rusties. Some, monarchs. Some, dotties, and the rest, just butterflies. They were, however, dreams. The word occurs and recurs in their history. Dreams of color. Dreams of gentleness. Dreams of flight. Or, the virgin’s dream. Now there was a plague of dreams” (279). Here is the best explanation the novel has to give for the dangerous dreams of the Little Virgin; but it has little to do with political fascism. Rather, California is already beset by dreams on gossamer wings; it is threatened, that is, by images on celluloid, not by the nightmare of a possible Nazi coup d’état. In a novel so deeply suspicious of its rival medium, public safety has to depend on the right type of mass participation. And, very clearly, it is mass hysteria that leads to destruction: “Priests from the mission and police from the town arrived and fought for order and calm. But the air was filled with dazzling wings and any call to order was stifled by them. People began to choke on inhaled butterfly scales. The air was full of dust. Later, twenty-two victims were operated on. Parts of butterfly wings and masses of powdery scales were removed from their lungs. Three died, all children” (282). On the other hand, the city of Pacific Grove is able to avoid public panic by passing a political ordinance protecting the butterflies as a source of tourism (283). A plague of images, it seems, can be a source of opportunity as much as a source of public agitation.

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By the end of the novel, however, all the film people are dead, having either killed each other or themselves. Ruth Damarosch is left to survey this sorry family legacy of filmmaking. But what she finds on her return to Falconridge, the mansion her director father built for her actress mother, is not encouraging: She had been a girl here. Her room had five windows, each with its own vine and its own leaded panes. The vines were not real. They were made of rope and wire and paint. Her father had no patience with growing things that might not reach the zenith of their perfection until after he had walked away from them. The trees were all boxed and movable, and in the twenties there had been coolies whose only job it had been to rearrange the trees twice daily, even four times (if there was a lawn party) … The trees had been moved so often that even the most frequent guests never had seen the landscape in the same order on two consecutive visits. Douglas Fairbanks called the house Dunsinane. (370)

George Damarosch’s ambition is supposedly, like that of Macbeth, to usurp a crown; for it is his medium that has usurped the sovereignty of objects and people alike, reaching into the heart of his environment and transforming all that it touches. Earlier, Ruth had offered another sort of judgment on her father in remarking about a heat that was “prehistoric … biblical – plaguelike. ‘Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,’ and he dried up oceans like that. As George had. As George would again, if he could. Pictures!” (25). But now, as Ruth looks around at her father’s estate, she sees how the “aura” of things has withered and how the “place” of film has been marked by true placelessness: She felt no sense of place or position, felt as though someone – perhaps a policeman – might challenge her presence the next time she walked or wanted to walk down the street. Like the Nightmare of Germany. Like America, she thought. I have come home. She laughed, very lightly. (372–3)

In effect, what she sees may well be another version of the Nazi Nightmare; but it has little to do with the political ambition of film stars like Letitia Virden or the cultural ambitions of filmmakers like her father. Rather, it has everything to do with an absence of borders in the capture and projection of film images. Just as the butterfly plague has migrated up and down the continent in endless swarms,

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oblivious to borders, so this plague of film-images now comes to haunt the denizens of the print-nation with a deep sense of placelessness. And there is no longer any question of keeping either set of migrants out, no matter how they might blight the landscape. For the true significance of “the butterfly plague” concerns how the metaphor works to naturalize the film medium. It is only identified with fascism because nature itself is apolitical. But nature has also been metamorphosed by film in how its real places are converted into film space. Ultimately, it is in this transformation that the place of the nation may also be reduced to continuous political space. On the other hand, Ruth’s brother Adolphus assumes that their movie-making father has always been as placeless as the butterflies: “He only knew that George had been born in Canada, in a city called Regina, and that, having looked it up on a map once, Dolly found Regina to be in the middle of a rather large expanse of Empire-red plains with no other place names around it” (169). The inference is that George, like that plague of monarch butterflies, has also migrated to the sunny shores of the Pacific and that the place he left was always as empty as the places he has filmed. For the only sign of life in that vacated world – aside from a city named “Regina” – is the logo of empire on a printed map. Otherwise, there isn’t much else upon which a “Queen” might exercise her sovereignty. While Ruth herself mourns the lost sovereignty of things and people, her own final response points to the medium’s revolutionary power to “liquidate … the traditional value of the cultural heritage” (Benjamin 221). For, as she stands “like Eve deserted in a whispering Eden” (Findley, rev. ed. 370), she suddenly sees how Eden itself must change. In that moment, by laughing at the images she sees, she has begun to recover a measure of sovereignty. She thus acknowledges her ability to live with this medium that has the power to liberate and to captivate. After all the sound and fury of her family’s tragedy, perhaps the violence of this novel has been good for something. For it really simulates the shock of a whole culture having to adjust to a world transformed by the moving image.

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8 Film-nations vs. Print-nations: The Politics of Metonymy in The Englishman’s Boy (1996) The shock of film is put to fascist ends in Guy Vanderhaeghe’s novel The Englishman’s Boy – put to the double purpose, really, of exalting “spiritual and physical strength” and of eliminating the “diseased resentment” of the weak (251) from the United States of America’s melting pot, which, as late as the 1920s, is felt by some of its citizens to be menaced by foreigners. On his first visit to a New York nickelodeon in August of 1907, Damon Ira Chance is appalled at the hordes of unwashed immigrants who sit beside him, spellbound in darkness: “The stench was unbelievable! Week-old sweat, unwashed underpants, a cloud of garlic. Sickening” (105). Not even a Boston Brahmin can stay oblivious, however, to the revolutionary power of this new medium: “When I left that nickelodeon, I took something important with me. The knowledge that the new century was going to be a century governed by images” (106). It is a lesson that “foreigners” are already absorbing at first hand, in stark contrast to Chance’s fellow patricians, “the Cabots, Lodges, and Lowells who held themselves aloof from childish photoplays … And while they clung blindly to the past, their Irish chauffeurs and gardeners were learning the language of the new century in the nickelodeon, were learning to think and feel in the language of pictures” (106). As Damon Ira Chance recounts this parable in 1923 to the narrator of the novel, it is clear that the shock of film is no longer the language of pictures per se; rather, it is the participation of mass audiences in the culture of the nation: When the picture began, I was convinced it was nothing but idiotic tomfoolery, mind-numbing sentiment, crapulous melodrama. But then something happened, Harry. The hall was mesmerized, and I do not use the word loosely. They were moved. They wept over innocence outraged, they blazed

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with hatred for the unrepenting wicked. You recall what happened to Erich von Stroheim after playing so many evil Prussians during the war? It wasn’t safe for him to go out in the streets. When he was recognized, stones were thrown at his automobile. It was no different that afternoon. If the villain had appeared in the flesh, they would have torn him to pieces, limb from bleeding limb. (105)

Chance is not alone in the 1920s in worrying about the consequences of mass culture. In Scènes de la vie future, the French novelist Georges Duhamel objected strenuously to “the kind of participation which the movie elicits from the masses. Duhamel calls the movie ‘a pastime for helots, a diversion for uneducated, wretched, worn-out creatures who are consumed by their worries … a spectacle which requires no concentration and presupposes no intelligence› (cited in Benjamin 239). Duhamel would appear to resent a massive dumbing down in the shift from a word-based culture to an image-based culture, hinting at insecurities that he evidently feels about his own medium, for books could very well be destined to carry less weight in the new mass culture of film. The French novelist and humanist still manages to raise a key question about the rationality of motion pictures by admitting their effect on his mental process: “I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images” (Duhamel, cited in Benjamin 238). What threatens the autonomy of this snobbish bookman seems to be of less concern to the patrician filmmaker, who finds another social purpose in film. As the fictional Chance declares, images “can’t be obliterated, can’t be scratched out. They burn themselves in the mind. Because there’s no arguing with pictures. You simply accept them or reject them. What’s up there on the screen moves too fast to permit analysis or argument” (Vanderhaeghe 107). Ultimately, the Hollywood director proposes to bypass reason in film by “convert[ing] the strangers with lightning! The way Luther was converted in the thunderstorm! The lightning of pictures! American pictures!” (253). In this portrayal, then, it is not film itself that is fascistic but a particular director’s use of it: first, to overpower reason and supplant it with images of power and superiority; second, to “convert all those who can be converted – damn the rest!” – especially “the Jews [who] will not convert. They are too full of resentment” (253). At first, Harry Vincent cannot see Chance’s fascist politics for what they are because this aimless drifter from Canada is deeply convinced of the inferiority of his own country and magnetically drawn to Chance’s unapologetic patriotism. As Harry explains to his Jewish

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friend Rachel Gold, “Canada isn’t a country at all, it’s simply geography. There’s no emotion there, not the kind that Chance is talking about. There are no Whitmans, no Twains, no Cranes. Half the English Canadians wish they were really English, and the other half wish they were Americans. If you’re going to be anything, you have to choose. Even Catholics don’t regard Limbo as something permanent” (181). To justify his rejection of his own nation, however, Harry recalls somewhat incongruously a scene of spring breakup along the South Saskatchewan River in his native city of Saskatoon: At first light, everybody would rush out to watch. Hundreds of people gathered on the riverbanks on a cold spring morning, the whole river fracturing, the water smoking up through the cracks, great plates of ice grinding and rubbing against the piles of the bridge with a desperate moan. It always excited me as a kid. I shook with excitement, shook with the ecstasy of movement. We all cheered. What we were cheering nobody knew. But now, here, when I listen to Chance, maybe I understand that my memory is the truest picture of my country, bystanders huddled on a riverbank, cheering as the world sweeps by. In our hearts we preferred the riverbank, preferred to be spectators. (181–2)

By wanting to be an American in motion, Harry wishes to become more than a bystander. But the role of spectator is precisely what the filmmaker has in mind for him. Evidently, film is not the only medium to evade the logical censor. Speech (Harry’s own, as well as Chance’s) is just as likely to bypass reason as the much ballyhooed “lightning of pictures.” Chance’s claim that film is a supra-rational medium suffers from an inner contradiction. He wants Harry to believe that “you can’t control the flow of images the way you can control a book – by rereading a chapter, rereading a paragraph, rereading a sentence. A book invites argument, invites reconsideration, invites thought. A moving picture is beyond thought. Like feeling, it simply is” (107). But Chance bases his anti-rational view of film on Henri Bergson’s philosophy of intuition, thus contradicting his own premise at its source. For, as Marshall McLuhan recalls, “in 1911 Henri Bergson in Creative Evolution created a sensation by associating the thought process with the form of the movie” (Understanding 258). Today, film is regarded as something more than a process of associative logic; filmediting techniques provide a variety of means for representing the thought process. “A cut accomplishes an instantaneous transition in space and time, and it has virtually no equivalent in the physical world. The only things that come close to it are purely mental shifts of

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attention (which suggests that cinematic structures are more analogous to those of consciousness than they are to those of the objective world)” (Kawin 97). A moving picture is not beyond thought for the simple reason that it depends on the motions of thought; it invites the viewer, as much as does a book, to think. If the logic of written arguments requires a degree of technical proficiency, then so does the logic of cinema as a scripted medium. And yet Vanderhaeghe has publicly questioned film as a medium of thought. “Yes,” he admits in an interview, “I believe very strongly in print. Arguments in print can be examined again and again and again. You can live with them for years. Whereas television and radio and cinema primarily leave impressions. They persuade us by impressions rather than by analysis and logic” (Twigg 273). The question is whether The Englishman’s Boy is just as conservative in its view of film as its author appears to be. How does the narrator, who is both a screenwriter and the author of this autobiography we are reading, come to see film in relation to print? And how does Harry’s view of nation and nationality (both his own and the filmmaker’s) change with respect to various figures of film and the book in his writing? Damon Ira Chance makes no bones about his ambition to shoot “pictures rooted in American history and American experience, just as Mr. [D.W.] Griffith showed us how to” (Vanderhaeghe 16). As it happens, Chance is far less interested in history than he is in creating a form of national epic. Just as “Griffith made the American Iliad,” he explains pompously, “I intend to make the American Odyssey. The story of an American Odysseus, a westerer, a sailor on the plains, a man who embodies the raw vitality of America, the raw vitality which is our only salvation in the days which lie ahead” (109). For film, he claims without regard for Whitman, Thoreau, or Melville, is the true art form of American epic, the one and only medium adequate to express the American soul: “We recognize the soul of a people in their art. But where is the American soul? I asked myself. Then it dawned on me. The American soul could not find expression in these old arts because the spirit of the American people was not compatible with them, could not be encompassed in them” (108). Chance’s thought obviously has its roots in the frontier thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner and the social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer, but it depends even more immediately on the literary language of John Steinbeck. Note, for example, what Steinbeck’s old Indian fighter has to say about the experience of westering in The Red Pony: “It wasn’t Indians that were important,” he tells his young grandson.

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“It was a whole bunch of people made into one big crawling beast … And I was the leader. The westering was as big as God, and the slow steps that made the movement piled up and piled up until the continent was crossed” (Steinbeck 91). With one remarkable transposition, it could serve as Chance’s version of “westering” in film: “The American spirit is a frontier spirit, restless, impatient of constraint, eager for a look over the next hill, the next peek around the bend in the river. The American destiny is forward momentum. What the old frontiersman called westering. What the American spirit required was an art form of forward momentum, an art form as bold and unbounded as the American spirit. A westering art form. It had to wait for motion pictures. The art form of motion!” (Vanderhaeghe 108). What is ingenious about Chance’s formulation is the way it naturalizes the language of film, defining the nation itself in terms of motion pictures. By likening the moving image to the motion of wagon trains, the filmmaker turns the medium into the message, as if film were the nation, and the nation film. Or as if the filmmaker were the true pioneer of American Manifest Destiny, whose “westering art form” somehow anticipated, not just replicated, the westering movement of the wagon trains. And yet nothing moves in “the art form of motion,” apart from a perforated strip of celluloid through a film projector. Unless the motion is meant to include audiences sitting in darkened theatres who are moved in a psychological sense. In fact, such hedging on the form of motion is basic to the logical sleight of hand produced by Chance’s argument: I’d never experienced anything like it. They roared with laughter, rocking back and forth on their gimcrack seats, heaving like the body of some great beast, mindful of nothing but the flickering on the bedsheets nailed to the wall. And as I sat there among them, something began to move in me as well, Harry. I began to feel the wordless pressure of the crowd, the deep desire of the crowd to encompass, to swallow everyone up in a surge of feeling, to bespeak itself with a single voice. And as the minutes flew by, I could feel arise in me a deep longing to lose myself in the shielding darkness, to lose myself in the featureless crowd. (105)

The language of westering has somehow modulated into the language of watching; “heaving like the body of some great beast,” the crowd assimilates the viewer into itself, since the “beast,” by implication, is “as big as God.” And God bless America! For what Chance has discovered at the movies is nothing less than the national ideal

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of a motion-picture country. Here, even the Boston Brahmin can be one with the rest, e pluribus unum, fulfulling the noble ideal of one American people out of many. That the nation is identified with God, however, or that the filmnation appears as a religion in Chance’s thought, is disturbing, to say the least. But he continues to rant: “The principle of a book is persuasion; the principle of a movie is revelation. Martin Luther was converted in a lightning storm, a conversion accomplished in the bowels and not the mind” (107). So what happens to those who will not convert to the “theology” of this film fundamentalist? “Make the Sicilian living in New York American. Make the Pole living in Detroit American. Convert all those who can be converted – damn the rest!” (253). In that qualifier, a totalitarian view of the nation finally emerges. For the Jew, the Bolshevik, the Indian who will not convert must be destroyed. “The inferior always refuse the judgments of nature and history” (251), Chance says emphatically and unequivocally. “Meet strength with strength” (255). In other words, erase difference. “Yes, rewrite the history of the foreigner, erase completely those sentimental flowers of memory and light their minds with the glory of American lightning” (297). Appalled by Chance’s vision of a totalizing unity, Harry begins to wonder about his own political conversion, choosing to withdraw from further work on the screenplay. However, in the end, he will not escape complicity in this brutal project of eliminating difference. “Harry,” Chance accuses him, “you can’t deny your responsibility, pretend you had no hand in this. Even Judas played a part in Christ’s teaching” (297). The mantle of the martyr is not to be worn lightly by the fascist. After the premiere of his film, Besieged, Chance is accosted by Shorty McAdoo, whose life story he has gleaned from Harry Vincent and then appropriated for his “national socialist” epic. When he is gunned down by Wylie Easton, Shorty’s slow-witted friend, Chance can only proclaim his xenophobia with his dying breath: “Artists … visionaries … they always find a way to kill us, Harry” (322). But then don’t Hitler and Mussolini always die claiming to be Christ? Chance’s film might allow us to weigh the claims of the martyred visionary. But the narrator has to admit, “I can offer no judgment of Chance’s picture Besieged, because I never saw it. Not many people did. It got pushed into oblivion; Chance’s murder became bigger than the picture itself” (326). Judgments are nonetheless implicit in its title, for its theme makes it a fictional precursor of actual Hollywood films such as John Wayne’s The Alamo (1960), or Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998), in which a detachment of American sol-

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diers led by Tom Hanks is drawn, amazingly, into a reprise of the battle of the Alamo in Normandy, with Nazis now taking the place of Santa Anna’s troops. Unwittingly, Spielberg’s attempt to make the Second World War relevant to contemporary Americans may expose a darker project in the myth of the Alamo. For the image of besieged Texans in John Wayne’s film was only meant to justify American expansion, his noble martyrs to freedom laying the foundations of the American empire. In Spielberg’s picture, however, Tom Hanks’s defence of a Norman “Alamo” places the theft of Mexican territory by Texas revolutionaries into uneasy relation with the Nazi occupation of France. Private Ryan’s buddies no longer die in the most just war in history; they die, incongruously enough, in a nineteenth-century war of westward imperialism. As it happens, they also put the seal of blood on a new twentieth-century empire, the global hegemony of HollywoodAmerica. Whether or not Chance wraps his cultural production in the American flag, as does Spielberg by using an extreme close-up of Old Glory to open and conclude his film, both national mythmakers understand what they are about. “Victory in the face of overwhelming odds. America needs this example, Harry” (207). And Spielberg would seem to say as much, at least from Vanderhaeghe’s perspective, and maybe the perspective of everybody else on the globe who now lives next door to Hollywood-America. Still, after the death of Chance, Vanderhaeghe’s protagonist can only return home to be a spectator: “A couple of months after I’d settled back in Saskatoon, I landed a job managing a movie theatre. I’ve been there almost thirty years. Funny, isn’t it? Harry Vincent still in the picture business” (325). More ironic still is Harry’s new insight into the picture business: “For thirty years I’ve stood at the back of my theatre watching men like [Chance] in the newsreels. Hitler ranting like some demented Charlie Chaplin; Mussolini posturing on a balcony like some vain, second-rate Latin screen star” (325). For he not only associates film with the rise of fascism but now blames it – on the principle of reverse mimesis – for having produced Hitler and Mussolini. Following Wilde’s doctrine that “life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life” (Wilde 56), he lays the Nazi horrors at the feet of motion pictures, likely forgetting that Wilde’s comment, penned in an age before film, referred to print. In any event, to blame fascism on the movies because of Chance’s Besieged makes about as much sense as to blame fascism on print because of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. And yet Harry never seems to doubt the authenticity of the written word, certainly not in his autobiography, where he regularly employs the cinematic technique of cross-cutting, or parallel montage,

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to parallel his remorse for a celluloid atrocity to the Englishman’s boy’s remorse for a historical massacre. And yet Harry’s search through Hollywood for Shorty McAdoo, the “Englishman’s boy” whom he makes the unauthorized model for Chance’s story in Besieged, also projects a deeply naive faith in history: “A writer needs stories. They all said to talk to Shorty McAdoo if you want the real dope, the truth.” Surprisingly, my little encomium angers him. “I ain’t interested in all that old dead shit. I know the truth.” “It’s history,” I say, lamely. “It’s something we all ought to know.” (Vanderhaeghe 85).

Harry’s simple faith might be ironic, were it not for the novel’s technique of narrating Shorty’s history in the third person, counterpointed by a first-person autobiography told in alternating chapters. It is this technique that enforces a simple binary: the third person becomes omniscient because the first person is limited and fallible; therefore, the history sections are “true,” while the film sections are “false.” Even when free indirect speech is used to focalize third-person biography through the character of the Englishman’s boy, the true/false binary shows up in the boy’s lexical structures: “the truth be known, he hadn’t liked him much” (42); “The truth was … The pistol made him for the first time in his life, any man’s equal” (47). A lexical emphasis on truth is a sign of the lad’s character, of course, of his need to prove the truth of words: “He remembered what the Englishman had said about him down the Missouri, that he’d stand and fight. If it wasn’t for the sake of those few words, he wouldn’t have stopped a minute with the dying man” (42). And yet the rhetoric of the biographee is almost indistinguishable from that of the biographer: “I respect the man I work for,” Harry assures Shorty. “He’s trusting me to give him the truth and I’ll give him that or I’ll give him nothing. I respect you, too, so I won’t put your name to a lie” (201). While Harry and Shorty affirm the truth of biography (not to mention the truth of historical method), Chance assumes that whatever he wills is truth: “My intuition, my will, is the clue to my hidden self. Through intuition it is possible for me to penetrate whatever shares my fluid and changeable nature – other human beings, all art … history. Analysis puts a man outside the thing he studies, while intuition puts him inside” (19). The importance of narrative technique in the novel, then, is that it equates an inside view of things with appropriation; only an outside view, the objective view of things, can be true.

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Because of this “structure,” Herb Wyile says, “The Englishman’s Boy raises questions about its own reworking of history” (29). For the narrative actually rests on an unacknowledged contradiction: if Chance’s film version of history can be falsified, then why not Harry’s written one? Other contradictions in the novel tend to complicate simple notions of “true” and “false” forms of media and “good” and “bad” forms of nationalism. Reinhold Kramer offers a convincing demonstration of how “nationalism in The Englishman’s Boy” is “self-divided at a deeper level. Despite any seeming repugnance for the massacre, Vanderhaeghe is not ready to let go of the Western’s generic codes, and the novel drives urgently toward a final shoot-out” (Kramer 12–13). Judiciously, Kramer argues that “its vacillations between Canadian nationalism and (less obviously) admiration of American cultural productions” also makes Vandherhaeghe’s novel “a complex nationalist production” (2). Vanderhaeghe’s nationalist project likely has a complex relation, however, to specific literary works as much as it does to American cultural productions in general. For example, A.B. Guthrie’s elegiac novel of Montana, The Big Sky (1947), supplies a model for laying bare the inherent contradictions of the Western; and Nathanael West’s biting satire, The Day of the Locust (1939), sets a comic precedent for what might be called Vanderhaeghe’s apocalyptic Hollywoodism. The ironic coding of the Western in A.B. Guthrie’s novel is particularly decisive for The Englishman’s Boy. Boone Caudill, the protagonist of The Big Sky, begins by striking down his abusive father. Then, leaving him for dead in the classic American rite of passage, he steals his rifle and lights out for the territories. Losing his own father to an ague, the Englishman’s boy clobbers his elder brother with a shovel, then flees an angry bullet and takes up with the gentleman-hunter of the title who soon dies of a fever; in lieu of back wages, the boy helps himself to the dead Englishman’s pistol. Caudill and McAdoo both proceed by steamboat up the Missouri River to the headwater of navigation in Montana. And there, for a time, both “go Indian,” Caudill by marrying a Blackfoot woman and fathering a blind child, McAdoo by giving up white company and losing himself in the landscape, “hearing the Indian talking in my head” (Vanderhaeghe 152). Ultimately, the story of each man builds to a climactic confession of violence. Caudill suspects his best friend of sleeping with his wife Teal Eye and fathering his blind child; but when he kills Jim Deakins in a fit of jealousy, he loses his wife, her people, and the land that he loves. McAdoo refuses to rape a young Assiniboine girl but finds himself powerless to save her life when his fellow wolfers destroy the Assiniboine camp. In the end, Boone Caudill is left to lament his lost

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American Eden: “It’s like it’s all sp’iled for me now, Dick – Teal Eye and the Teton and all. Don’t know as I ever can go back, Dick. Goddam it! Goddam it!” (Guthrie 386). Appearing less comfortable in the role of American Adam after his fall from grace, Shorty McAdoo happily takes the part of a new Ancient Mariner, wearing his albatross with only one proviso – that it will not be turned into a formula Western: “Your man wants it, he takes it all. She’s all of a piece. Nobody’s going to cut it up like an old coat, for patches. The girl stays” (Vanderhaeghe 205). Where each novel evidently rejects the formula Western is in its refusal to justify the “triumph” of settlement. The enemy in The Big Sky is not the American Indian but the Yankee colonizer who says, “By every reasonable standard the land is ours – by geography, contiguity, natural expansions. Why, it’s destiny, that’s what it is – inevitable destiny” (Guthrie 279). Boone rejects the notion of Manifest Destiny, clinging instead to a modern version of Aboriginal rights – “It is Piegan land” (262). But the mountain man is his own worst enemy; for, as much as he opposes Manifest Destiny, he wants to keep a place for himself in the old Wild West. Since the Western hero can’t have it both ways, he is left to lament his fatal contradictions. Shorty McAdoo has fewer illusions about romantic primitivism, but he does entertain a simple-minded notion that Canada is the last frontier: “They got some space there. Was a time a man in this country could go anywhere on God’s green earth it pleased him, poor or proud” (Vanderhaeghe 81). In the end, Harry indulges this version of romantic primitivism by imagining “Shorty on the run, just as he had been as a boy. Making for the Medicine Line. I like to believe he crossed it one last time” (324). If Guthrie exposes the inner contradictions of the Western, then Nathanael West exposes the aesthetic incongruities and apocalyptic psychology of Hollywood filmmaking. The very setting of The Day of the Locust anticipates the rampant lack of historical consciousness on the Hollywood sets of The Englishman’s Boy or in the Hollywood Hills, which Harry glimpses from Chance’s big touring car: “Only dynamite,” as West had described these same Hollywood Hills in his novel, “would be of any use against the Mexican ranch houses, Samoan huts, Mediterranean villas, Egyptian and Japanese temples, Swiss chalets, Tudor cottages, and every possible combination of these styles that lined the slopes of the canyons” (61). Such bizarre incongruities are the epitome of the hyperreal in both novels, the agent of a longing that the real can no longer satisfy. So the crowd that gathers outside the Hollywood premiere in The Day of the Locust turns into something like the great, heaving beast

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Chance met in the nickelodeon. And yet the desire of the members of the mob in West’s novel is not to lose themselves, as Chance wants to do, but to witness even more sensational losses than those they have already seen in the media: “Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, wars. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies” (178). The filmmaker’s politics seem less important to West, even in 1939, than the naïveté of audiences wanting to bring screen images into their lives, to confirm the truth of the medium. Throughout the novel, Tod Hackett, West’s protagonist (who is a set-designer for a Hollywood studio), is at work on a large painting, “The Burning of Los Angeles.” At the end, Hackett finds himself in a scene where his art comes to life in a mob riot outside the “Pleasure Dome” of “Kahn’s Persian Palace Theatre” (175). But West does not seem to lament the fact that life imitates art or that truth is merely a construct. The point of his satire is that audiences get the art and the reality they deserve. At times, Vanderhaeghe’s Hollywood is illuminated by a similar glare of satire: “History is calling it a day. Roman legionaries tramp the street accompanied by Joseph and Mary, while a hired nurse in cap and uniform totes the Baby Jesus. Ladies-in-waiting from the court of the Virgin Queen trail the Holy Family, tits cinched flat under Elizabethan bodices sheer as the face of a cliff. A flock of parrotplumed Aztecs are [sic] hard on their heels. Last of all, three frostbitten veterans of Valley Forge drag flintlocks on the asphalt roadway” (5). The incongruity of unrelated times and places in a Hollywood studio shows how film, having robbed objects of what Benjamin calls their “aura” or their immediate presence, also robs them of their individual truth. Now “a rash of thirty-room haciendas, Italian villas, and Tudor mansions” (11) vie side by side for the viewer’s attention. But the truth-to-place of any one villa inevitably discredits the “truth” of any other; no neighbourhood can claim at one and the same time to be Mexico, Italy, and Tudor England without becoming an equivalent of film’s double exposure. Another type of filmic incongruity is equally damaging to the “truth” of presence. “The Kinetoscope of Time,” a story published in Scribner’s Magazine in December 1895, recognized early on the danger of confusing real and imaginary events on film. As long as seeing was believing, Achilles’ pursuit of Hector around Troy’s walls, or Don Quixote’s attack on a giant windmill, or the massacre of Custer’s cavalry by “thousands of red Indians” were apparently true. But put

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them incongruously together on film, and the viewer is shocked by the “fact that some of the things I had been shown were true and some were false. Some of them had happened actually to real men and women of flesh and blood, while others were but bits of the vain imaginings of those who tell tales as an art and as a means of livelihood” (Pratt 11). The power of film to make fiction indistinguishable from fact thus helps to undercut the truth of the senses. Henceforth, seeing is no longer believing but something more like wait-and-see. Just as significantly, film’s power to make “fiction” look like “fact” compels real people to make themselves imitations of the filmic image. So old cowhands wanting to make “horse operas” in The Englishman’s Boy gather in bars like The Waterhole, overdressed for the part because “directors of Westerns like flamboyance, it photographs well, which accounts for the way these boys are duded up” (Vanderhaeghe 54). Similarly, ordinary people, wanting to be seen with film stars, head for places like a night club called the Cocoanut Grove, the decor of which is based on “the artificial palms used during the shooting of The Sheik” (128). In such a setting, plain folk can picture themselves on camera with Rudy Valentino as the borders are blurred between their world and the screen world. Even “real” men, wanting to sleep with movie stars, can mosey over to Mrs. Kirkland’s establishment for a flesh-and-blood image of the “real thing” (if a screen image could ever be the real thing). While Harry Vincent is too noble to prostitute one girl who imitates one such screen image of innocence, he has to admit, “She succeeds as Miss Lillian Gish in a way that the tawdry Gloria Swanson and Clara Bow fall short of their models. The resemblance is astonishing” (247). Harry, the screenwriter, is nonetheless patronized by Rachel Gold for clinging to the reality principle: “My Little Truth Seeker” (132), Rachel calls him in most of their conversations, mocks him, in fact, in capital letters. But then Harry is really a print man: “What the camera can’t convey he puts on a title card” (177). The ironic outrage of Rachel’s “Little Truth Seeker” only serves to whet the knife of satire in the novel. For, in Harry’s frequent musings on Hollywood history, he exposes the comic outrage to truth in film. He tells the story of Al Jennings, the train robber who once campaigned for political office in Oklahoma “under the confidence-inducing slogan, ‘I was a good train robber and I’ll be a good Attorney General.› After his defeat at the polls Al went back to Hollywood, where he found himself “making more movies about – Al Jennings. And he wasn’t the only Western outlaw who had made hay with his notoriety. Emmet Dalton of the Dalton gang starred in Beyond the Law, a picture which in 1920 broke box-office records in New York and Los Angeles” (21). The irony of the outlaw playing himself – of the “real thing” faking it for

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the cameras – is clearly a joke at the expense of Chance’s naive realism, the idea that “everybody wants the real thing” (19) so why not let the camera give it to them? Within this context, Harry is also laughing up his sleeve at Chance’s idol, D.W. Griffith, who “argued that the motion-picture camera would end conflicting interpretations of the past. Eventually all significant events would be recorded by movie cameras and film would offer irrefutable proof as to what had really happened” (17). Chance’s notion that The Birth of a Nation brought about the birth of the nation does not, however, seem to outrage Harry. “And then Mr. Griffith made a picture,” Chance tells him, “made The Birth of a Nation, and reconciled the blood of North and South in the chalice of art” (297); “For the first time, everybody, rich and poor, Northerner and Southerner, native and immigrant, found themselves pupils in the same history class … an entire nation sitting at Griffith’s feet” (107). It is Rachel Gold who teaches Harry the real outrage of making art into the “chalice” of religion: “Now there’s a noble ambition,” she mocks Griffith’s whole project. “To make movies portraying the Negro as stupid, shiftless, and single-mindedly determined to slake his lust with white women. What a great public relations job he did for the Klan and the lynching industry” (133). In fact, Chance would be as quick as Rachel to say that art constructs reality; she could only disagree with him about the justice of its representations. For Chance, holding to his faith in the artist as “priest of eternal imagination,” claims for himself the truth of intuition: ‹Of course,’ he qualifies, ‘the facts in picture-making must be shaped by intuition … My intuition, my will, is the clue to my hidden self› (19). Rachel, on the other hand, exposes Griffith’s “truth” as a calculated triumph of the will. But even she can’t foresee how, within another decade, a film by that name will convulse the world. Though Chance might claim that ‹the camera cannot lie,’ it is clear that the way a filmmaker decides just what the camera will be allowed to record can bias the presentation considerably. In Triumph of the Will (1935) Leni Riefenstahl used many low-angle shots of Hitler, pointing her camera up at him to make him seem a powerful and imposing presence, and intercut closeups of the face with long shots of excited crowds to suggest that Hitler was a galvanizing speaker who could excite, control, and lead his people” (Kawin 80). In the decade before Hitler rises to power, Chance is already studying such uses of the camera. He has, after all, the example of Il Duce to follow: Last year Mussolini marched his blackshirts on Rome and the government, the army folded … Why? Because Mussolini orchestrated a stream of images more potent than artillery manned by men without spiritual conviction.

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Thousands of men in black shirts marching the dusty roads, clinging to trains, piling into automobiles. They passed through the countryside like film through a projector, enthralling onlookers. And when Rome fell, Mussolini paraded his Blackshirts through the city, before the cameras, so they could be paraded over and over again, as many times as necessary, trooped through every movie house from Tuscany to Sicily, burning the black shirt and the silver death’s head into every Italian’s brain. (Vanderhaeghe 109)

What Chance calls “the art form of motion” is exposed as a machine for brain-washing, a weapon in the propaganda war for control of the nation. From this point, there is little comedy in incongruities of style or substance, for it is hard to laugh when blackshirts are passing “like film through a projector,” first in the street, then in the movie hall. Soon, a nation will be on the march, much like those images flickering on the wall. Worse, Harry sees an American Mussolini getting ready to rant from a balcony to his filmic nation: “It is only for an instant, but I believe I have glimpsed Damon Ira Chance alone, in that vast marble desert of a ballroom, standing upright on a chair, in the dark” (111). If Harry turns his back on Chance’s film-nation, he will nonetheless return to a version of the print-nation. In the book he is writing, for example, the wolfers find their way to Canada by following “the track of nineteen iron-shod horses,” which is supposed to be as “plain as print on a sheet of clean paper” (71). Such tracks enter the record as metaphorical documents, offering a fixed way of knowing, epistemological stability. The same can be said of “Evans and Hardwick dropping out of sight behind a knoll to rise again in vivid resurrection, tiny black figures against a void, only suddenly to waver, to run and dissolve like characters written in weak, watery ink” (115). Their disappearance is due to technical failure, to the use of “watery ink” as it were, more than to the inherent instability of writing. If print can tame the threat of disappearance in the novel, then pencil, paint, and pen can tame the threat of violence. On the journey upriver, for example, chaos erupts on deck as the steamboat approaches a buffalo ford: “Passengers broke out guns and whisky and soon the Yankton was cloaked in shifting clouds of blue gun smoke, lit with orange muzzle-flashes like a painting of the battle of Trafalgar” (29). Held in stasis, such aestheticized violence almost neutralizes the threat of death. So, too, as tension builds towards the massacre, Shorty is drawn to one of the most peaceable wolfers, a Canadian named Scotty: “The only living thing outside the walls of the fort was Scotty hunched on a wooden bucket; Scotty smiling to himself, scribbling like mad with a stub of pencil in a cracked spine journal” (238). But

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Scotty only pretends that the pen is mightier than the sword; he is in fact retreating with his pencil from reality. So Shorty is left to stare at a landscape ready to explode in violence: “Across the creek the Indian camp might have been a painting, except that now and then a dog or horse moved, spoiling the picture and the conceit” (238). What underlies the whole conceit is the “peaceful” stasis of paint and print; motion is what comes to spoil it. For the Peaceable Kingdom can only survive for a moment in print before the Murderous Republic starts playing at a theatre near you. Such an overwhelming bias towards print in Harry’s narrative is still qualified at a few points. For a moment, Shorty’s oral narrative waters down the indelible ink of Harry’s stenography: ‹Hell, I wouldn’t waste no wild Indian on you,’ says Shorty. ‘Those wild Indians the army used to jail for scampering off the reservation, directly they was locked up, they shrivelled and died. Wild Indians got to run free. I’d guess you lock a wild Indian up between the covers of a book, same thing is going to befall him. He’s going to die› (145). By such means, we are reminded that Harry’s writing is a threat to Shorty’s oral culture as much as Chance’s film-nation is to Harry’s nation of print. Shorty’s oral history could even relativize several forms of media, were it not for the frame narration’s story of an oral man’s conversion to the book. Fine Man, who has set the plot of the novel in motion by stealing the wolfer’s horses, cannot begin to understand why Strong Bull would be content to spend “his days drawing pictures in the lying books” (329). The holy man’s answer will be discomfiting to anyone with an investment in oral culture: ‹Everything changes in this world,’ Strong Bull repeated, ‘but in the Mystery World, all things live as they were before death. In the Mystery World all things wait for us – our grandparents, our dead brothers of the Soldier’s Society, our infants who died at birth … That is why I draw the pictures – so the grandchildren will recognize us› (330–1). This emblem of a man converted to the “lying book” is all the more problematic because of the omniscient voice of its relation. Is Aboriginal “history” told by Harry, who appears to be the third-person voice of Shorty’s history? Or is it narrated by the author who, like Chance, appears to have designs on the “foreigner,” thinking to convert him in a flash of lightning? Oddly enough, the Aboriginal man is converted in a lightning storm, affiliating him to Chance’s narrative of Martin Luther’s conversion in a lightning storm (107). Luther, we know from other sources, was “the first best-selling author so known. Or, to put it another way, the first writer who could ‘sell’ his new books on the basis of his name” (Anderson 39). In the image of an oral man converted to the book, the

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novel thus figures the emergence of a print-nation. But Strong Bull is still the only man in his culture to find the continuity of his nation in print. And it happens to be a form of continuity that Foucault has denounced as “a privileged shelter for the sovereignty of consciousness. Continuous history is the indispensable correlative of the founding function of the subject: the guarantee that everything that has eluded him may be restored to him; the certainty that time will disperse nothing without restoring it in a reconstituted unity” (12). Strong Bull, who speaks for the metaphysics of print, is thus introduced at the end of the novel to justify a form of totalizing history. As he says, “When I die and pass on to the Mystery World, the dreams of what is to come will also pass to you. When I am dead, my wife will put this bundle in your hands because you know its meaning. It will be for you to keep it safe for the sake of the grandchildren” (331). The book is fetishized, made the true hero of the novel, a sacred bundle to be passed from generation to generation. First Nations are thus supposed to become “true” nations through an act of writing their own “true” histories, by setting their “true” foundations in the book. The Englishman’s Boy might try to cushion the shock of film by retreating into the safer medium of print. A conservative view of media, however, does not reduce the novel to a tract for social conservatism. Take Shorty’s resistance to the violence and bigotry of his fellow wolfers or the support he finds in the Canadian Ed Grace: “What I’m saying is that you and me are like that half-breed – he isn’t white and he isn’t Indian. It’s a tough place, betwixt and between. I’m not a Baker man and nor are you. Maybe we’re going to get caught in the middle at Farwell’s post” (190). The middle position is certainly difficult, but at least Ed Grace can allow for plural identities. Here is one reason why “the Englishman’s boy” goes unnamed in the historical sections of the novel. Shorty’s American identity has ceased to define him the moment he becomes a manservant, even when the dead Englishman’s tweed coat proves too big for him. Like Harry stuck in Limbo, the Englishman’s boy is really unable to be one thing or the other. Evidently, “it’s a tough place,” this Canadian position, “betwixt and between.” Ed Grace still offers the boy a middle term between England and America, between a civilized world of manners and books and the “raw vitality” (109) of the frontier: “I was born in old Ontario,” he said. “My mother had a piano in the parlour. We had books. One of them had a picture in it of a centaur –” His head bobbed up. “You know what a centaur is, son?” The boy shook his head.

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“A being, half man, half horse.” He stopped, began again, explaining. “I’ve been knocking around this country ten years – it changes a man. But I’m not all the way there yet. I’m not Tom Hardwick. I’m betwixt and between – half civilized, half uncivilized. A centaur.” (191)

Man and boy alike know that they do not belong on this murderous expedition: yet they dare not try to escape for fear that they will be killed by the hard men. What Grace offers the boy is a strategy for survival, for becoming a cultural hybrid: “I tell you, son, once I lay hands on my share of that wolfing money I’m heading for the Red River country. This Whoop-Up country’s too wild for me. A betwixt-andbetweener prefers things by halves. Half-wild country. Half-wild women. I reckon those Red River women fit the bill. Half-French, halfCree. Half-housebroke and half-wild, half-pagan and half-Catholic” (233). Apparently, the difficulty of the “half-breed” who moves simultaneously in two worlds is recapitulated by the bookman who moves in a world of film. Harry, as an English-Canadian, might be born with a hyphenated identity; but Chance convinces him to give up his hyphen, to submerge his difference in the melting pot. What emerges from the filmmaker’s “chalice of art” and his film-nation, however, is the hidden cost of unhyphenated unity, for the melting pot requires the submergence of difference in the oneness of metaphor. By contrast, Harry takes another figure from Ed Grace’s story, a figure opposed to metaphor and its relation of similarity. For what Grace describes in the metonymic naming of a whole by its parts are relations of contiguity. Contiguity, not similarity, offers a more liberal politics of metonymy, the relation of two terms on either side of a hyphen. And the story of the cultural hybrid is a story of contiguity, of the relaxed co-existence of differing terms on two sides of a hyphen. Those who understand the value of metonymic identities do not need to be “either/or”; they can tolerate being “both/and.” Oddly enough, film, with its thousands of contiguous images moving past a light source, inclines towards the metonymic pole of expression. As Roman Jakobson has observed, “Ever since the production of D.W. Griffith, the art of the cinema, with its highly developed capacity for changing the angle, perspective and focus of ‘shots,’ has broken with the tradition of theatre and ranged an unprecedented variety of synechdochic ‘close-ups’ and metonymic ‘set-ups’ in general. In such pictures as those of Charlie Chaplin, these devices in turn were superseded by a novel, metaphoric ‘montage’ with its ‘lap dissolves’ – the filmic similes” (Jakobson and Halle 92). Chance’s inclination to follow

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Griffith rather than Chaplin in his art ought to put him on the side of metonymy, emphasizing relations of contiguity, were it not for his totalizing politics of metaphor: “The picture of the rawhide frontiersman is entitled to hang in the mind of every American. To hang illuminated by lightning – the cold eyes, the steady hand, the long rifle revealed in brightness” (Vanderhaeghe 255). To Chance, the “rawhide frontiersman” is both a metaphor of brute force and a symbol of political unity, his personal version of e pluribus unum. And so a filmic art of metonymy is undercut by a political ideology of metaphor. Chance is not the only artist in the novel who fails to recognize the contradiction between his medium and his ideology. Take the thirdperson frame narrative that opens with metaphors of Fine Man trying to interpret his medicine-dream correctly. Although Fine Man has seen himself stealing horses in a blizzard of ice and snow, he realizes his vision only when he reads it in a metaphoric way: “He gazed down at his hands, at the skin of his muscled thighs, at his belly, and understood. White moonlight was his blizzard, a blizzard to blind the eyes of his enemies who lay frozen to the ground in the grip of his medicine-dream, drifted over by the heavy snow of sleep” (2–3). So, too, an omniscient narrator pans across a cinematic landscape to register his metaphoric form of vision: “Without haste, [the horses] picked their way across the river bottom and to the feet of steep, eroded hills which, washed in the cold light of the moon, became reflections of moon’s own face, old and worn and pocked and bright” (4). This “natural” correspondence between hills and moon is extended to unnatural lengths in a metaphor of horses and water: “The other horses trickled down the slope after them, filling the coulee as water fills the bed of a river. One by one they dropped from sight, tails switching, heads bobbing, ghostly gleaming horses running back into the earth like shining, strengthening water” (4). Surely, it is one thing to naturalize the theft of horses in Aboriginal culture; but it is quite another to insist on the natural unity of all things in the Aboriginal world, to express in an “omniscient” section of the narrative a metaphoric world view that is deeply at odds both with the metonymic theme of the novel and with political resistance to metaphor that has denied difference. However, at the end of Harry’s narrative there is one more revealing metaphor, and it turns out to be as old as Plato’s myth of the cave: Each night I stand at the back of my theatre, watch spectres and phantoms slide across the screen. The picture done, the audience gone, I lock the doors, go out into the night.

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But the past cannot be so easily dismissed. The faces of Rachel, Chance, and Fitz, of Wylie and of Shorty McAdoo, accompany me in my long walk home in the dark. (326)

Harry’s distinction between phantoms and faces, between shadows and light, is much the same as Plato’s distinction between illusion and reality. While Harry wants to believe in metonymic identities, he is not willing to give up his hope in some ideal reality beyond appearances. He could still solve this problem by turning his back on absolute distinctions and by accepting ambiguity and uncertainty. In spite of what he has learned, however, Harry remains stuck in Limbo. Because of his need to equate the written word with reality, he condemns himself to watching motion pictures as if they were dangerous illusions. In effect, he fails to get over the shock of film and so lives uneasily in our modern world of the technologized image.

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9 Film and Print Versions of The English Patient (1996): Wuthering Heights in the Global Village The adaptation of novels into film at the beginning of the last century conferred a measure of respectability on an upstart medium. “Films based on acknowledged cultural masterpieces in other media were positive proof that producers and exhibitors were uplifting and educating the audience, providing that an audience could follow them” (Bowser 42). Even so, to create audiences who could “read” cinema, directors still had to work out something like the “narrator system” (Gunning) of D.W. Griffith’s early work, including his 1909 adaptation of Frank Norris’s The Octopus and “A Deal in Wheat,” which Griffith entitled a corner in wheat (Pratt 67). By 1915 motion picture audiences had begun to absorb the workings, if not the basic vocabulary, of Hollywood film and were able to follow without difficulty such devices as straight cuts, switch-backs (crosscutting), rapid cutting, scene dissection (variable camera angles and distances), inserts (close-ups), and tracking cameras (Bowser 250–62). By century’s end, this situation would be reversed, with print-fiction having to seek respectability in Hollywood, where cinematic plots were now more accessible to audiences than were the fragmented structures of literary prose. Consider, for example, Michael Ondaatje’s Booker prize-winning novel, The English Patient (1992), which one critic has dubbed “the book most frequently begun by readers and not finished since Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time” (Marchand 55). By virtue of an Oscar-winning film adaptation (1996), the novel would belatedly become an international bestseller. And yet moviegoers, mesmerized by the rhythmic and lyrical style of Minghella’s film, would find themselves bewildered, if not confounded, by the style of Ondaatje’s novel. Where was the poetry of space, the deep well of memory, into which the film had so wondrously plunged them?

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Film adaptation also raises some larger questions about the mediated production of culture and national identities. Are the differing aspects of a story appearing under the same name in film and print due to the differing narrative systems of each medium? Or are such differences due to the differing cultures of their creators (in this case, a British film director and a Canadian novelist)? Is film adaptation really much more than a type of translation that shows how nations are invariably mediated constructs? One immediate difference in the narrative systems of the two versions of The English Patient appears in the figure of the burned aviator, who is a crucial vehicle for narrative in each medium. In Minghella’s screenplay, the camera closes in for a tight shot of the patient’s scarred face and the scene dissolves into a flashback of the desert, a Cairo souk, a hotel ballroom, or the bed of the lovers; and the cinematic Almásy begins to look inward, taking us down a haunted corridor of memory into the heart of his private life. By contrast, in Ondaatje’s novel, Almásy’s “oral” story is invariably directed to an audience: “He whispers again, dragging the listening heart of the young nurse beside him to wherever his mind is, into that well of memory he kept plunging into during those months before he died” (4). Or else there is someone to read aloud to him from Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, or he reads from his own strange book, “almost twice its original thickness” (94): “No more books,” he quietly insists. “Just give me the Herodotus” (118). But even the text from which he reads emerges from the shadow of its author, spilling into a cornucopia of information and provoking endless twists in the story of its owner. In fact, The Histories of Herodotus shows up in the film as a trigger for memory more often than as the mark of the polymath. Under the aegis of autobiography, it remains free-standing and alone, like the blunted face of the patient, a sign of a self-contained consciousness. So, in Almásy’s first cinematic flashback to the desert from his hospital bed, there are five close or close-up shots of the hidebound book, lasting from three to seven seconds each and progressing from an objective-camera view of the volume beside the bed to a subjectivecamera shot of Almásy looking at inserts between its pages (a redgreen party favour, the drawing of a hand, loose notes and photos), to a midshot of the book sliding out of the patient’s hands, and then to a bird’s-eye shot of it lying amidst spilled contents on the floor. At precisely this point the scene dissolves to the Sahara desert, fading in to a close-up of a hand and pen poised above an ink-drawn map lying athwart the opened pages of the Herodotus.

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Very soon, a straight cut will inaugurate a series of dialogue shots between a young Ralph Fiennes (as Almásy) and an old Arab man conversing in Arabic. In the midst of this series of reverse shots, the camera cuts to a long shot of a yellow bi-plane entering the frame from behind a brown hoodoo to the right, before it pans left to show the Gypsy Moth landing in the desert behind the map-making Almásy in the foreground. Cut to another close shot of Almásy writing in his map and repeating in English what the Arab man has just told him: “A mountain in the shape of a woman’s back. Good, good.” From the outset of the film’s desert scenes, the book is associated not just with charting the landscape, then, but with mapping the female body. So the entrance of the deplaning Cliftons over the next six shots, together with a full shot of Katharine standing on the wing of the aircraft, brings into view the romantic theme of the movie. Inevitably, it also gives the hidebound volume its cinematic table of contents: this is a narrative belonging to the genre of romance. Conversely, the hidebound book first appears in the novel in Hana’s hands as she scans it for signs of her patient’s identity: “It is the book he brought with him through the fire – a copy of The Histories by Herodotus that he has added to, cutting and gluing in pages from other books or writing in his own observations – so they are cradled within the text of Herodotus. She begins to read his small gnarled handwriting” (16). In this cradled text, she comes upon an evocative passage about desert winds and their hundred different Arabic names. And yet the text is less revealing of the burned man than of the book itself as a changed form, having outgrown its original binding and purpose as well as its author. At the same time, it suggests something about the symbolic character of the polymath who tells Hana: “I have always had information like a sea in me. I am a person who if left alone in someone’s home walks to the bookcase, pulls down a volume and inhales it. So history enters us” (18). So history enters the reader, too, as a sea beginning to wash out the known roads of prose narrative. In the film, the “desert winds” passage makes an appearance in a very different context, in a scene of conversation rather than of reading. Here, it signals the beginnings of intimacy between Almásy and Katharine as they shelter inside a truck during a violent sandstorm. The aloof and resistant male is now forced to be reassuring, but his knowledge of winds signifies more than his mastery of the situation; it is an essential part of his sexual charm. “Let me tell you about winds,” we hear his voice over a tight shot of Katharine’s fingers touching the glass of the windshield now obscured by blowing sand. At the end of a series of midshots of the woman reacting to the man’s

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words as if to his touch, there is another tight shot of Katharine’s fingers tracing the opaque glass in front of her. Then the scene dissolves to Almásy’s face in his hospital bed, where a slow fade of Katharine’s fingers on the desert windshield continues to stroke the patient’s ravaged skin. From both sides of the glass, what appears to animate the patient’s knowledge is his memory of love. By contrast, the scene of “desert winds” in the novel moves from a scene of reading – there is no sandstorm apart from Almásy’s text and Hana’s reading of it – to a scene of Almásy telling Hana about his life among the Bedouin and his endless knowledge of guns and books and history: “So I knew their place before I crashed among them, knew when Alexander had traversed it in an earlier age, for this cause or that greed. I knew the customs of nomads besotted by silk or wells … Here there had been a lake. I could draw its shape on a wall for them. I could lead them to its edge, six thousand years ago” (18). And yet, for all the patient’s talk of books or his encyclopedic information, the novel feels less bookish than the film. In part, this is because the novel includes more than the traditional romance plot of a love stronger than death. Structurally, the novel is also less linear, and more fragmented, more plural, more encyclopedic, and perhaps more poetic than the film. Why is the book so much more difficult, then, than the film? Is there something in the sensibility of the filmmaker that mitigates the shock of his medium? Minghella certainly acknowledges that, while “The English Patient [sic] is an adaptation, it feels by far the most personal film I’ve made” (Carroll, n.p.). And yet the artist’s personal vision does not account for the affinity of his film for print. Would this affinity be due to the filmic medium itself, as Marshall McLuhan was wont to believe? “Typographic man took readily to film just because, like books, it offers an inward world of fantasy and dreams. The film viewer sits in psychological solitude like the silent book reader” (Understanding 255). Clearly, Hana is still that solitary reader in the novel who “fell upon books as the only door out of her cell” (Ondaatje 7). Reading a book about that most solitary of literary heroes, “she felt like Crusoe finding a drowned book that had washed up and dried itself on the shore” (12). But there is also a way in which a viewing audience’s psychology plays into the solitary consciousness of a reader. One recent critic of film argues that “there are many instances in which the contents of a character’s mind are displayed on the movie screen (or in which the movie screen behaves like a mind)” (Kawin 74). The filmic technique for this effect is a “mindscreen,” which is meant to present “the landscape of the mind’s eye, much as subjective camera presents what is seen by the physical eye” (74). A

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mindscreen, in other words, presents to a film audience a solitariness equivalent to that of any mind engaged in writing or reading. But how does a mindscreen function in this particular movie, at least in relation to more objective-camera views? From the opening sequence of Minghella’s film, it turns out that a mindscreen has been on display all along, even when we could not recognize it. As the camera fades in, a grainy brown landscape appears and the credits begin to roll; then a brush enters the top of the frame, identifying the level landscape as a parchment. In a long take (2 minutes, 15 seconds) of careful brushstrokes by an unseen painter, there emerges a rudimentary figure of a human body (actually Katharine’s painting from the Cave of Swimmers). Then the shot of the page fades out in a long dissolve (24 seconds), gradually fading in to an aerial shot of red dunes picking up and repeating the grain of the page. A fading close-up of the shadowy swimmer also begins to merge with a fade-in of a bi-plane’s shadow crossing the dunes. Then a straight cut to clear blue sky catches the edge of a silver wing, the flying bi-plane gradually backing into the left frame in a following shot from an unseen second plane. A series of overhead shots now closes up on the blond hair of a woman’s slumping head in front of a leather-helmeted aviator in the open cockpit below. What appears throughout this opening sequence, in the form of a dialectical montage, are two opposing terms (parchment and desert) that lack as yet any form of synthesis. Only in retrospect, or on second viewing, can we see this overview of the love story as a mindscreen of Almásy’s memory. And the missing third term of this opening montage only begins to emerge some twenty film-minutes later, when a reverse dissolve takes us back from the desert to Hana’s Tuscan monastery. Soon after Almásy’s introduction to Katharine in Africa, the Cliftons in their yellow Gypsy Moth are shown soaring alongside Madox and Almásy in their silver Moth. As Madox banks the silver aircraft away from the yellow plane, the folds and creases in the desert mountains slowly dissolve into folds and creases of the sheets on Almásy’s hospital bed. Now as the camera rises and tracks across the white sheets to show Hana making the bed, we see her face leaning in to the blunted face of her patient. “I want you to see the view,” she says. Here, his response might be intended to sum up our viewing experience of the opening montage: “I can see all the way to the desert.” For it really is an ideological synthesis of the whole montage – parchment and landscape both reflecting the mind of the patient, providing a virtual map of the contents of his consciousness. In such fashion, the figure of the book becomes the vehicle for cinematic mindscape, serving as a sign of the

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private mind. And in this self-contained consciousness of the mindscape, we finally see how a filmic mind can be as self-sufficient as the book. There are other uses for mindscreens, however, beyond the portrait of a solitary consciousness. As Kawin sees it, a character can thus “envision a story while in the act of relating or hearing it” (74–5). Such is certainly the case in the latter half of the film, after Almásy’s private memories become public. The process begins after a shot of the lovers in a bathtub in Cairo – an unidentified voice-over on the soundtrack bridging a cut to a close-up of a photo that Katharine has already examined: “Who is this?” “Don’t you recognize me?” replies the muffled voice of Almásy. “You were so fat,” the voice replies, before a straight cut gives us a midshot of Hana seated on the bed before Almásy, turning a page of the book to find a red-green “cracker” casing and a note written on the back: “Betrayals in war are childlike compared with betrayals during peace.” At this point, Almásy will still refrain from specifying such betrayals to Hana; the scene dissolves instead from his face to a mindscreen memory of the Cairo Christmas party where he and Katharine betray not only her husband but also the trust of the British enclave and its faith, here expressed in vocal strains of “Silent Night” as the words “round yon Virgin mother and child” are displaced by the strings of the love theme. While we see what Hana does not, there are worse betrayals to come, which she and David Caravaggio will want to know about. In fact, it is Caravaggio who finally ferrets out a mindscreen confession from Almásy. But it is not the sort of “confession” that the spycatcher has expected to hear. “You know [Madox] shot himself, your partner, when he found out you were a spy,” the thumbless man accuses him. Still, the patient is not ready to give up his secret. “No, I was never a spy,” he says, just before a straight cut introduces a mindscreen of Madox saying to him in the desert, “We didn’t care about countries, did we? British, Hungarians, Germans. It didn’t matter. It was something finer than that, wasn’t it?” “Yes,” Almásy responds dryly, “it was.” But seventeen film-minutes later Almásy begins in another narrated mindscape to answer Caravaggio’s continuing question: “Did you ever get back to the cave?” “I did get back, I kept my promise.” A straight cut to the desert shows Almásy handing over documents to a German officer. Then the camera cuts to a long shot of the silver Moth returning to the Cave of Swimmers, and we hear Almásy now acknowledging in voice-over, “I returned to Katharine with German gasoline.” By this time, Almásy can narrate in mindscreen what he could not admit before to Caravaggio: “So yes, she died because of me. Because I loved her. Because I – Because I – had

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the wrong name.” But in the end Caravaggio can abandon his revenge because he has witnessed the tragedy of a man who helplessly destroys the thing he loves. And so a narrated mindscreen turns what has been an intensely private sorrow into a public one, as a latter-day Ancient Mariner confesses his tragic guilt. This shift in the film from private to public grief is nonetheless qualitatively different from the novel’s shift from private to collective authorship. Here, the print-Almásy claims, in an obituary for Katharine that is left out of the film, that “we are communal histories, communal books” (Ondaatje 261). A collaborative medium like film might well pick up on such a theme, but, beyond Hana and Caravaggio’s aural reception of Almásy’s history, the concept of authorship in the film remains bookishly singular. This is remarkably at odds with the novel’s concept of authorship, clearly figured in Almásy’s “1890 edition of Herodotus’ Histories,” which is said to contain “other fragments – maps, diary entries, writings in many languages, paragraphs cut out of other books” (96). For, in spite of its aggregate, dialogic character, the novel-Almásy’s commonplace book is always already writing; a simple return to oral confession in the film paradigm fails to register what is happening in this other paradigm. For The Histories of Herodotus is no longer really by Herodotus; nor is it confined any longer to a bound volume, not if it is “twice its original thickness.” Rather, it is defined by Almásy’s rather curious statement: “I have always had information like a sea in me” (18). What is really lacking in the film – and what may be impossible for it to reproduce – is this sort of figure for a collective text to which the movie gestures feebly in Caravaggio’s admiration of the patient’s knowledge of popular music: “Is there a song you don’t know?” the spy-catcher asks wonderingly. But in the novel, the rising “sea of information” has already begun to wash out old roads of novelistic story, exposing quite another form. “This history of mine,” Herodotus says in the book, ‹has from the beginning sought out the supplementary to the main argument.’ ‘What you find in him,› the novel-Almásy says, “are cul-de-sacs [sic] within the sweep of history – how people betray each other for the sake of nations” (119). In the film, such culs-de-sac are straightened into a continuous line of linear narrative, leading from Almásy’s reluctance to begin an affair with Katharine Clifton, to her equally reluctant yet firm decision to break off the affair, to Geoffrey Clifton’s suicide and attempted double murder, to Katharine’s death in the Cave of Swimmers, to Almásy’s final recovery of his lover’s body. Of such a sequence of betrayals, Minghella comments as follows: “There’s such a striving in the novel to make connections between the sum of individual action and history. It says that history is not some-

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thing going on outside a room, it’s the sum of the personal action and choice. In times of impending war, the membrane between personal behavior and the public world in history is much finer and so it’s much easier to detect the relationship. Obviously, in this story, the personal betrayals and the historical betrayals are the same thing” (Carroll n.p.). But are they the same thing, if nations are the source of betrayal in the novel? Or has the filmmaker simply reduced the “culsde-sac” of history to an equation of the personal and the historical? The operatic sequence of the love-death theme (liebestod) near the end of the movie helps to illustrate the linear drive of the filmic narrative. After the mindscreen of Almásy’s return to the Cave of Swimmers, the camera turns to Kip taking his farewell of Hana, then cuts to a shot of her preparing a morphine injection. At precisely this point, Almásy asks for his death, sweeping all the ampoules of morphine into Hana’s reach. As she weeps, we cut to a close-up of Almásy saying, “Read to me, will you? Read me to sleep.” A straight cut to a tight shot of the spouting needle is followed by another close-up of Almásy’s face, then a straight cut to the young Almásy lying at the same angle beside the corpse of his lover. So the first effect of linearization in the film is really to reduce the story of the man to obituary. “History” has become the narrative of a doomed love affair. As the obituary of two lovers, however, the liebestod sequence also proceeds in crosscut, between a voice-over of the dying Katharine reading words she writes in The Histories, to shots of Hana reading the same passage in Tuscany. So an audience in the film is able to read the lessons of “history.” In fact, a continuous soundtrack is interrupted only by Katharine’s words, “We die,” as the shot cuts back to Hana at the patient’s bedside, starting the passage again: “We die. We die rich with lovers and tribes – tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have – entered and swum up like rivers.” A cut to a close-up of Almásy’s scarred face is now accompanied by a cut to the voice-over of Katharine: “fears we have hidden in like this wretched cave.” Then a cut to an extreme close-up (ecu) of Almásy’s fingers touching the thimble on Katharine’s throat in the cave, and Katharine’s continuing voice-over: “I want all this marked on my body. We’re the real countries, not boundaries drawn on maps, the names of powerful men.” There follows a series of ecu’s of fingers marking Katharine’s face with saffron from the thimble, intercut with reaction shots of intent sorrow and even a faint, wistful smile on the face of the young Almásy. The camera then cuts to a full shot of Almásy emerging from the cave with his lover’s body wrapped in her parachute-shroud, and Katharine’s continuing voice-over: “I know you’ll come to carry me out of the palace of winds. That’s what I’ve wanted. To walk in such a

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place with you. With friends. An earth without maps.” Finally, the scene cuts back to a midshot of Hana still reading: “The lamp has gone out. And I am writing – the darkness.” The last words of Katharine’s testament are accompanied by a straight cut to a close shot of Almásy’s face with his eyes rolled upwards in death. In the romance-plot of the liebestod, the familiar story of lovers merging in death is still a curious substitute for history. What we get instead are more portentous echoes of English literary history. One precedent for the filmic lovers is the exultant lover of “The Sunne Rising,” extolling his mistress’s bed as a world sufficient unto itself, with its own civil government and contented citizenry. John Donne’s lover exults: “She’is all states, and all princes, I, / Nothing else is” (7). Katharine speaks only slightly more soberly about this country of love in the final passage she inscribes in Almásy’s copy of The Histories: “We’re the real countries, not boundaries drawn on maps, the names of powerful men.” Of course, she is dying, so she is not likely to exult in a “global” empire of love envisioned by Donne’s male speaker. She speaks rather of the sun setting on love’s empire and of its inevitable descent into death. And yet she will not renounce this country of love either; instead, she affirms her true “nationality” in love’s country. Here, then, is a forceful connection between print and the nation, even when “print” is oddly figured by film or the “nation” by love. And yet the lovers are all that there is, even in death. A second cultural coding in this sequence is even more revealing. The long white shroud trailing Katharine’s body out of the Cave of Swimmers turns Almásy into a type of Gothic bridegroom – Heathcliff digging down to the lid of Catherine Earnshaw’s coffin, desperate to be reunited with her decaying corpse. The weeping Almásy follows a similar deathward drive, summed up in Heathcliff’s words: “I dreamt I was sleeping the last sleep, by that sleeper, with my heart stopped, and my cheek frozen against hers” (Brontë 289). It was Hana who first identified her patient with this literary topos: “He’s in love,” she said, “with ghosts.” And so Almásy’s confession of grief is not really likely to shrive him, any more than it does Heathcliff, who admits, “My confessions have not relieved me” (325). For limits of mortal flesh still get in the way of reunion with the dead. Thus Nelly Dean will describe the dead Heathcliff in his bed at the end of Brontë’s novel: “His eyes met mine so keen and fierce, I started; and then, he seemed to smile. I could not think him dead … I tried to close his eyes – to extinguish, if possible, that frightful, lifelike gaze of exultation, before anyone else beheld it” (335). At the end of the film, Hana similarly views the haunted corpse of Almásy, lacking only its gaze of exultation. And yet the linear logic of Almásy’s

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story is perfectly summed up in Heathcliff’s words: “I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!” (167). For the man who cannot live without his soul in the movie Patient is as much the outsider and gypsy wanderer as is Heathcliff, whom Nelly Dean describes as “the little dark thing” for whom she has long wearied herself “with imaging some fit parentage for him” (330). In some respects, the figure of the outsider is also informed by Minghella’s experience as the son of an immigrant father, even if, contrary to his Hungarian protagonist, the filmmaker was himself born and raised in England. In an interview with Tomm Carroll, this question of an immigrant sensibility is not raised directly in connection with The English Patient, though Minghella admits to such concerns in a film he made just prior to it: “I’m of Italian origin [like the Annabella Sciorra character in mr. wonderful], and I wanted to try and bring some of that immigrant experience to bear on the material that Vicky [Polon] and Amy [Schor] had written. I also wanted to introduce an element that was very personal to me, which is the struggle to escape one’s roots and the irresistible tug of one’s roots … The ironies of wanting to escape, only to arrive back precisely where you came from, but perhaps changed, is my own experience and I tried to color in the character of Anabella in that film with my own reconciling of a life of the mind and of one’s roots” (Carroll, n.p.). The ways in which the film-Almásy tries to escape his origins, only to arrive back where he started, however changed, is at the heart of Minghella’s own creative quest in The English Patient. First, the outsider in the film must contend with the decidedly English outlook and temperament of his lover (e.g., Katharine’s wish to be buried in her English garden with a view of the sea). In other respects as well, Katharine inhabits an English romantic tradition, with its typical conflict between social mores and a yearning for transcendence. She is an apparent heir to Brontë’s Catherine Earnshaw, who will neither desert her husband for the sake of her lover nor forsake her ideal of love: “I wish I could hold you,” Catherine says bitterly to Heathcliff, “till we were both dead! I shouldn’t care what you suffered. Why shouldn’t you suffer? I do!” (Brontë 158). In much the same spirit, Katharine parts from Almásy in a scene at an outdoor cinema in Cairo. “is it peace – or war?” asks the title from a 1939 newsreel, though the question is soon reduced to one about the nature of romantic love. “I can’t do this,” the repentant wife says flatly to Almásy. “I can’t do this any more.” So the deserted lover is left to rail against a social gathering of the Desert Sand Club, though, in a more private moment, he pleads: “I want to touch you. I want the things which are mine, which belong to me.” “Do you

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think,” Katharine replies fiercely, “that you’re the only one who feels anything?” Henceforth, Almásy seems destined to become another Heathcliff, that death-haunted lover who says, “I cannot look down to this floor, but her features are shaped on the flags! In every cloud, in every tree – filling the air at night, and caught by glimpses in every object by day, I am surrounded with her image!” (Brontë 324). For the linear plot of the liebestod narrative drives inexorably towards its sexual climax in death. That the movie industry in Hollywood grasped this particular Englishness of Minghella’s narrative in The English Patient seems evident from Peter Kosminsky’s 1997 remake of Wuthering Heights, starring Ralph Fiennes (Almásy) as Heathcliff and Juliette Binoche (Hana) as Catherine. Of course, the Englishness of Minghella’s Almásy, like the Englishness of Brontë’s Heathcliff, is also a trophy that the outsider has to earn; and it can only be purchased in the coin of suffering before the outsider can turn into a native dweller “in that quiet earth” (Brontë 338). At most levels, then, the similarities between these two outsiders is so natural as to seem inevitable. “I am Heathcliff,” Almásy could almost say in parodic echo of Catherine Earnshaw. And yet the reader of the novel is unlikely to sense in the “gypsy” Almásy this sort of struggle of the outsider to make himself English. To the contrary, the novel-Almásy emphatically renounces all nations: “I came to hate nations,” he says. “We are deformed by nation states. Madox died because of nations” (Ondaatje 138). In spite of Caravaggio’s accusation in the film that Madox “shot himself … when he found out you were a spy,” we read that “Madox was a man who died because of nations” (240). In fact, the novel-Madox’s suicide is a moral response to a sermon he hears in July 1939, after the impending war has forced him to leave his friends and return to his English village: “When the sermon began … it was jingoistic and without any doubt in its support of the war … Madox listened as the sermon grew more impassioned. He pulled out the desert pistol, bent over and shot himself in the heart” (242). The suicide of Madox thus sets a precedent for the book-Almásy, who will say: “Erase the family name! Erase nations! I was taught such things by the desert” (139). What the desert bookman does not find anywhere in Herodotus is a national history of triumph over the massed might of the Persians. The film and the novel could not be more antithetical on this point. While the British director makes Almásy betray his adopted nation to keep a promise to his beloved in the Cave of Swimmers, the Canadian novelist implies that it is nations that invariably come between people, forcing them to betray each other. Ultimately, Minghella’s Almásy seeks to become the English

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patient, whereas Ondaatje’s Almásy, who has been misidentified as the Englishman, wants to be a citizen of the globe. In the film, Caravaggio will try to make the case for nations by pursuing a charge of solipsism against Almásy, who values a promise to his dying lover above nations: “I saw you writing in that book in the embassy in Cairo – when I had thumbs and you had a face – and a name.” As the camera cuts to a midshot of Hana listening to the men in the room below, Caravaggio continues: “Before you went over to the Germans. Before you found a way to get Rommel’s spy across the desert and into the British headquarters.” Then the camera cuts back to a close shot of Caravaggio. “There was a result to what you did. It wasn’t just another expedition. It did this,” he adds in close-up, menacingly holding up his ruined hands. Now the camera cuts to a close-up of Almásy listening: “If the British hadn’t unearthed that photographer, thousands of people could have died.” With the camera still on him, Almásy replies: “Thousands of people did die. Just different people.” “Yes,” the camera finally cuts to Caravaggio rising and advancing aggressively, “like Madox.” Now moral relativism is exposed in its “true” consequence: Caravaggio forces him to face his betrayal of Madox, who preferred to save his honour in death rather than befriend a traitor to his nation. Because of Almásy’s ensuing mindscreen of his failure to save his dying lover, Caravaggio becomes mollified enough to ask, “Did you ever get back to the cave?” Only now does Almásy give the “true” explanation of his moral relativism: “I did get back, I kept my promise. I was assisted by the Germans.” At once, a straight cut takes us back to the desert with a voice-over narration: “There was a trade. I had our expedition maps. And after the British made me their enemy, I gave their enemy our maps.” Almásy’s heavy, ironic emphasis on ownership is thus the key to the man’s moral character as he now blames himself for Katharine’s death. For it was really his denial of her national identity that doomed her. “I had the wrong name.” “Do you mind spelling that?” a British officer had requested his “wife’s” name. “What nationality?” But when Almásy refuses to answer, she loses her nation, and then her life. Of course, Almásy had violated his own moral code long before this. In the bathtub scene, Katharine had asked him, “What do you hate most?” And his answer was not to her liking: “Ownership. Being owned. When you leave, you should forget me.” Still, his aloof independence gives way at last to what she desires. “I claim – this shoulder blade,” Almásy says at another point, reaching to touch Katharine’s bare back. “No, wait. I want to – I want this – this – place.” The camera cuts to an extreme close-up of his fingers in the

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hollow of her throat, followed by his words, “I love this place. What’s it called? This is mine. I’m going to ask – the King’s permission to call it Almásy Bosporus.” A reaction shot of Katharine laughingly turned away is quickly followed by a tight shot of her turning back in tender admonition: “I thought we were against ownership.” The film-Almásy, however, has hardly been a stranger to ownership throughout his career of exploring and mapping the desert. In the early sequence of soaring bi-planes, for example, it is he who first gestures towards the ground, requesting Clifton to photograph the land formation below. A scarred Almásy will also tell his nurse that he was “exploring before the war. Making maps.” Sixteen filmminutes later, a high-angle, full shot shows Madox proposing a toast to the row of explorers under the desert stars: “Gentlemen, to mapmaking!” Katharine also admits to Almásy that “the plane wasn’t a wedding present. It belongs to the British government. They want aerial maps of the whole of North Africa.” Whatever Almásy may like to think, his map-making has served the ends of empire; his aerial photographs are, in fact, the regular stock-in-trade of imperial atlas makers. Benedict Anderson has shown how “the bird’s-eye view convention of modern maps was wholly foreign” (172) to pre-print, colonized peoples. In southeast Asia, for example, guide maps and shipping charts were rarely informed by our sense of continuous space or uniform perspective. Rather, “they were usually drawn in a queer oblique perspective or mixture of perspectives, as if the drawers’ eyes [were] accustomed from daily life to see the landscape horizontally, at eye-level” (171). Such maps cannot really have borders conceived of as “vertical interfaces” (172); nor are they likely to fill in the spaces between “sacred capitals and visible, discontinuous population centers” (173). Only the bird’s-eye perspective of the colonizer determines that such gaps have to be filled. From the geometrical grids produced by “John Harrison’s 1761 invention of the chronometer” has come this imperative of empire to fill in what Conrad would call “the white spaces of the earth.” So, too, the “discourse of mapping” has enabled, “by a sort of demographic triangulation,” “the census” to fill “in politically the formal topography of the map” (174). The film-explorer might prefer to see his work in terms of pure exploration, as he will attempt to do in several references to “our maps.” In Cairo, for example, Madox argues that maps belonging to “His Majesty’s government” should not be left lying around. “What do they care about our maps?” Almásy pointedly refuses to acknowledge what Anderson calls “the alignment of map and power” (173). To which Madox replies, “What do we find in the desert? Arrow-

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heads, spears.” Nothing, in other words, of any value. But, “In a war, if you own the desert, you own North Africa.” And yet this looming post-colonial question is continually deflected by the movie’s focus on the love story: “Own the desert? Huh!” Almásy replies. “Madox – That place – That place – at – the base of a woman’s throat – You know. The hollow, here. Does it have an official name?” Fortunately, in 1939 a trueborn Englishman has other things on his mind. “For God’s sake, man,” Madox snaps, “pull yourself together.” So the question of empire – public or private – leaks away into the soil of national defence. A greater obstacle to the critique of empire in the film is built into its technology. As long as the camera – “the implicit recorder of the scene” (Fremlin 86) – is kept out of view, it is unlikely that a filmmaker will critique the connections between media and empire. So, for instance, Almásy’s map of “a mountain in the shape of a woman’s back” rises from the bottom of a full shot of the real mountain in the desert, and a correspondence is established between map, world, and camera. The camera, like the map-maker, merely records the “real.” So the camera pans in close-up over painted human figures in the Cave of Swimmers, and a rare dissolve within the desert scene leads to a fade-in of a painted swimmer again taking shape beneath an unseen hand. When the camera cuts to a medium long shot of Katharine seated against the red cliff, busy at her improvised easel, an equivalence is established between the recording hand of painter and mapmaker; thus, the hidden hand of the cameraman is implicitly justified. For the impulse to capture an image on filmstock is no less legitimate than is the impulse to do so on paper or parchment. What would it signify, then, to draw a map in this film, or to make a drawing or take a photograph? Almásy’s eagerness to put Clifton’s camera to use high over the desert shows, in Jennifer Fremlin’s words, that “The English Patient is fully invested in the technology of cinema, of moving images and the ubiquitous all-seeing eye of the camera” (86). Only Fremlin is mistaken in her assumption that “The English Patient deals with an anti-technological cartographer who would rather draw his maps of the North African deserts based on the testimony of the native inhabitants than on aerial photographs” (86). For the movie map-maker is in full agreement with his cinematic author: the desire to conquer space is at the heart of the aerial photography of Minghella and of Almásy alike. Soaring over the varied formations of the Sahara, the view of the cinematographer, like the bird’s-eye view of the cartographer, is really the perspective of the colonial atlas-maker. Much as the map-maker is compelled by the power of a grid to fill in the “white spaces,” so the filmmaker is compelled by the power of the

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camera eye to fill in a field of view. The map and the camera thus become tools of a sovereign consciousness as the drive of each is to contain all it surveys – whether landscape or mindscape. The imperial eye is never really challenged in this film because it is the modus operandi of everyone concerned. More astutely, Fremlin shows how the movie at least “maps the path that desire traces across bodies. As Katharine tells Almasy [sic], bodies are the ‘real countries› (87). The mapping of desire is clearly present in Almásy’s search for “a mountain with the shape of a woman’s back.” It also appears in Katharine’s own painting, especially when she tries to present her work to Almásy with the words: “I thought you might like to paste them into your book.” “Well,” the professional mapmaker replies, “we took photographs. There is no need – they’re too good – I should feel obliged. Thank you.” The truth is that the cartographer finds his own desire being mapped as soon as Katharine’s desire insinuates itself into his text. So the desert explorer must fight to keep his map-making “pure.” After his narrative of the desert winds, however, Almásy is forced to admit the truth of the woman’s “map”: “Could I ask you to paste your paintings into my book? I should like to have them. I’d be honoured.” At which point Katharine is emboldened to question the hidden “map” of desire she has found in his Herodotus: “Am I ‘K’ in your book? I think I must be.” Hereafter, problems of ownership and betrayal are all that remains to be determined. “So yes,” the scarred Almásy admits to Caravaggio, “she died because of me.” And in her last will and testament, Katharine declares that “I want all this marked on my body. We’re the real countries – not boundaries drawn on maps.” Figuratively, the woman hoping to walk on “an earth without maps” has been transformed into the atlas. “She’is all states; and all princes, I.” Here is an ultimate form of empire. “Nothing else is.” The novel-Almásy nonetheless comes to a strikingly different conclusion: “Had I been her demon lover? Had I been Madox’s demon friend? This country – had I charted it and turned it into a place of war?” (Ondaatje 260). The map-maker is obliged to question his enterprise even when the imperial eye of the camera has not been one of his own tools; rather, the novel-Almásy has made other “mapping” expeditions, most often to the library: “All morning he and Bermann have worked in the archaeological museum placing Arabic texts and European histories beside each other in an attempt to recognize echo, coincidence, name changes – back past Herodotus to the Kitab al Kanuz, where Zerzura is named after the bathing woman in a desert caravan” (153). So too, Kip, his disciple, finds himself moved by a legend on the map he has found in the country-house of Lord Suffolk:

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“Countisbury and Area. Mapped by R. Fones. Drawn by desire of Mr. James Halliday. ‘Drawn by desire … ’ He was beginning to love the English” (190). What Kip sees in a map of the Home Counties is what Almásy has already found in the Kitab – not a chart of possession, but a map of humility: There was a time when mapmakers named the places they travelled through with the names of lovers rather than their own. Someone seen bathing in a desert caravan, holding up muslin with one arm in front of her. Some old Arab poet’s woman, whose white-dove shoulders made him describe an oasis with her name. The skin bucket spreads water over her, she wraps herself in the cloth, and the old scribe turns from her to describe Zerzura. (140–1)

Renouncing the imperial self of the Cartesian cartographer, the novelAlmásy thus speaks by right the words given to the dying woman in the film: “All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps” (261). The only hope of Almásy’s failed attempt to construct a postnational identity for himself and Katharine is the legacy he tries to leave to Kip and Hana. The younger couple must learn to live in a world without borders, even if the desert lovers could not. Caravaggio does recognize such possibilities in the song Hana sings, La Marseillaise, that revolutionary hymn, hearing how new wars of nationalism have already corroded her hope: “Singing in the voice of a tired traveller, alone against everything. A new testament. There was no certainty to the words anymore, the singer could only be one voice against all the mountains of power. That was the only sureness. The one voice was the single unspoiled thing. A song of snail light. Caravaggio realized she was singing with and echoing the heart of the sapper” (269). The film does what it can to make Hana and Kip the inheritors of this legacy. True to the novel, it parallels from the outset the pain of the patient and his nurse. The dialectical montage of the film’s beginning soon gives way to crosscut scenes of the aviator, shot down by the Germans, then of the nurse wounded by the loss of her fiancé in battle and, finally, of her friend in a mine-blast. These correspondences are underscored by temporal symmetries (even identical running times) of the parallel montage – the Moth scene taking 1 minute, 29 seconds; the train scene of Hana nursing wounded men taking 57 seconds; followed by two crosscut scenes of the Arab healer attending to the burned man (1 minute, 6 seconds); and of Hana in a tent-hospital hearing with the force of a bomb blast of the death of her fiancé (1 minute, 37 seconds) – so that the 2 minutes, 35 seconds given to the ruined Almásy are neatly played off against the 2 minutes,

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34 seconds given to the devastated Hana. These parallels are soon clinched in a scene with Caravaggio, who comes to challenge Hana: “You’re in love with him, aren’t you – your poor patient? You think he’s a saint because of the way he looks. I don’t think he is.” To which Hana responds: “I’m not so in love with him. I’m in love with ghosts. So is he, he’s in love with ghosts.” In such fashion, the film makes the healing of Hana its secondary project, closely linked as it is to the revelations of Almásy’s liebestod narrative. And Hana appears destined to take over from the dying patient and even, perhaps, to realize Katharine’s vision of “an earth without maps.” The Canadian woman and the Sikh man do manage to transform a scene of despair in the Cave of Swimmers into a scene of joyful transcendence in a darkened church. By raising Hana up into the beauty of the fresco, and by balancing her body with his own at the other end of the rope, Kip turns the Cave of Swimmers into a “cave of swingers,” transcending the deadly rock bottom of the liebestod. But after the bomb blast that kills his partner Hardy, he withdraws. Even then, he makes an implicit promise to Hana to return once his army posting north of Florence is ended. Finally, it is this promise that checks the deathward drive of the liebestod narrative, drawing us back from Almásy’s mindscreen of Katharine’s corpse (64 seconds) to an objective-camera scene of farewell (60 seconds), as Hana vows: “I’ll always go back to that church – look at my paintings.” And Kip raises his head with equal determination to insist: “I’ll always go back to that church.” “So,” Hana adds, “one day we’ll meet.” But once Kip’s motorcycle has gone, the camera lingers on the empty road and Hana’s suddenly empty face. Yet, even in the face of approaching death, for which Almásy pleads, Hana finds reason to hope. In the final scene of the movie, travelling on a truck flatbed, she looks back at the empty monastery. And then her glance lights on the face of a young Italian girl, as if to say, “You don’t know the half of it, child. But you’ll find out how hard love is.” However qualified it may be, the hope of love lingers in the image of a reddened sun going down behind the avenue of cypress trees. And the scene fades to a dazzling, transcendent white. There is a very different flash of light near the end of the novel – the atomic blasts over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. When Kip “closes his eyes he sees fire, people leaping into rivers into reservoirs to avoid flame or heat that within seconds burns everything, whatever they hold, their own skin and hair, even the water they leap into. The brilliant bomb carried over the sea in a plane, passing the moon in the east, towards the green archipelago. And released” (Ondaatje 286–7). In that blinding flash everything has changed: Kip’s

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fighting a war for the English, Hana’s place as an Occidental, the whole civilization of the West. “Kip,” Hana’s heart cries out to him, “it’s me. What did we have to do with it?” And yet, “he says nothing, looking through her … He is a stone in front of her” (288). When Kip finally climbs on his motorcycle to flee down the boot of Italy, past Ortona, past the other sites where the blood of Hana’s countrymen has been shed, he turns his back on the whole complicated legacy of hope that Almásy had purchased at the price of his skin. And yet … and yet, though Kip retreats at the end of the novel to a nation about to gain its independence from Britain, the book refuses to validate the old borders of identity. Contrary to the British filmmaker, the vision of the Canadian novelist is attuned to the future. And so we find the book-Hana moving in concert with her lover on opposite sides of the globe: “Her shoulder touches the edge of a cupboard and a glass dislodges.” And half a world away, “Kirpal’s left hand swoops down and catches the dropped fork an inch from the floor and gently passes it into the fingers of his daughter, a wrinkle at the edge of his eyes behind his spectacles” (302). In this sudden, shocking shift of perspective, in its belated disclosure of authorial omniscience, something remarkable has happened. For now we find ourselves looking down not with the bird’s-eye view of the filmmaker or even the colonial atlas-maker, but with the satellite perspective of our later world of global communications. For a moment, at least, there is reason to hope that the narrator’s consciousness of simultaneity describes the birth of a global consciousness, the dawning sense that people who live worlds apart are still instantaneously connected. In that sense, at least, the filmic novel accomplishes what the bookish film does not even attempt to accomplish: it translates the shock of film into a political challenge to the social rigidities of print by seeking to revolutionize human apperception and to imagine the possibilities of the global “nation.”

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10 Boundary Breakdowns: Portents of the Digital Revolution in The English Patient (1992) The rise of digital technologies is having a profound impact on nations around the globe. Boundaries that could once be taken for granted – between peoples and languages, between private and public spheres, between organism and machine – are now dissolving in a general theoretical reduction of life, such as in the Human Genome Project, to digital information systems. At base, the “information revolution” is becoming a mode of communication in which everyone is able to “converse” with everything else in bytes of numbers flowing through computer networks. The wholesale translation of information into a single language of binary bits thus erases boundaries that for centuries had upheld metaphysical presuppositions about the autonomous individual, territorial space, and sovereign nations. While it may not be fair to describe this change in the mode of communication as a cause of social change, Ronald Deibert does note the fit between what he calls a communications environment of hypermedia and the epistemology of postmodernism. In other words, he holds that people acculturated to digital media are likely to find in the new mode of communication support for their basic assumptions about individual identity, spatial reality, and imagined community. For example, he claims that the idea of a stable, centred self with a fixed identity and universal attributes has been giving way over recent decades to “a notion of a ‘decentered’ self” that is more like “an assemblage of its environment, a multiple self that changes in response to different social situations. One consequence of this view of the self, according to postmodernists, is that the autonomous individual can no longer provide the philosophical foundations from which to design or achieve human freedom, as Marxists and liberals would have it” (Deibert 181).

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In fact, “the idea of a postmodern ‘multiphrenic’ self” (186) does seem much more plausible within the context of a hypermedia environment. First of all, the idea of authorship has been weakened by a reader’s ability to copy and paste bits of digital information into multimedia forms from a wide variety of sources and so to overturn the legal foundations of intellectual property. The printed book, linked to other texts through the medium of hypertext, ceases to be a selfcontained form, its own borders dissolving into a world wide web of intertext. Thus, “The Death of the Author,” first announced in 1968 by Roland Barthes, comes to seem like a given. As Jacques Derrida also argued in the same year in “The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing,” the “cybernetic program tends to oust all metaphysical concepts – including the concepts of soul, of life, of value, of choice, of memory – which until recently served to separate the machine from man” (Of Grammatology 9). In consequence, the “constitution of subjectivity” (113) is being altered, as Mark Poster claims in his recent study of “Derrida and Electronic Writing,” by the immateriality of new forms of script: “The writer encounters his or her words in a form that is evanescent, [as] instantly transformable” as mental images, and so “the human being recognizes itself in the uncanny immateriality of the machine” (111–12). The model of a fragmented, plural self also fits the new mode of communication in its general dissolution of privacy. Where silent reading of the book once authorized autonomous individuals, rational and free, to seek a private space in which to be alone with their thoughts, readers on the World Wide Web are being monitored by various forms of data collection, just as brand loyalties, consumer preferences, and commercial credit are being marked through their electronic transactions. So “where do we locate the human self, asks Mark Poster, when fragments of personal data are constantly circulating within computer systems, beyond our immediate control or awareness?” (Deibert 185). Or where do we draw the line, even when we seem to be most in control of the medium? For, “writing at the border of subject and object” (Poster 111), the Cartesian subject no longer stands “outside the world of objects in a position that enables certain knowledge of an opposing world of objects” (99); rather, “computer writing resembles a borderline event, one where the two sides of the line lose their solidity and stability” (111). Ultimately, the dissolution of the old border between subject and object – where the subject stands “over and apart from an independent world of objects that it can more or less accurately represent” (Deibert 187) – undercuts the metaphysical assumption that it is still possible to make accurate representations of the world as opposed to

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merely representing mental impressions or even constructing alternate versions of reality. Digital technologies are acting to displace the old binaries of fact and fiction as virtual realities and simulations begin to leave the arcade and to enter the workplace, allowing “designers and clients to ‘walk’ through buildings and redesign them long before construction,” or military planners to “employ sophisticated simulations in war games,” or neuroscientists to use “computer simulations to study 3-D images of the brain” (193). A print-formed view of space as being linear, uniform, and continuous is also challenged by the appearance on a computer screen of overlapping planes, where multiple texts inhabit the same surface, and a variety of applications operate simultaneously within a multimedia environment. So, for example, a user listens to music on a cd platform, watches Web video from cnn, and writes text on Microsoft Word. The consequence of all this digital convergence is to make a user feel that these several media really are one, which, in turn, reinforces a postmodern bias towards pluralism, relativity, and inclusivity. Even pastiche and collage in postmodern art are symptomatic of a culture no longer informed by notions of compositional unity or singular realities but by a sense of depthless and discontinuous space, in which images are not just overlapping but ontologically equivalent. “The combined effect of these two traits is a spatial bias that is less exacting and rigid, and more fluid, bypassing the idea of a firm reality that is fixed and immutable and open to a single accurate representation. Instead, the spatial bias of postmodern epistemology embraces discontinuity and juxtaposition, with mutable boundaries superimposed upon one another” (188). Even the nightly television news reinforces this spatial bias, as “all the divergent spaces of the world are assembled nightly as a collage of images upon the television screen” (Harvey 302). To persons acculturated to a hypermedia environment, the boundaries of the nation are likely to seem more permeable, or less distinct, than they do to persons acculturated to print. A nationally imagined community – “naturally” shared by all who read the same newspapers and books, watch the same television programs, and inhabit the same contiguous space – ceases to be common or necessary. Instead, imagined communities now forming around digital media are more “hyperpluralistic and fragmented – the very antithesis of the modern mass community” (Deibert 195). For audiences are fragmented, on the one hand, by so-called “narrowcasting” through cable and direct satellite broadcasting to the point that mass audiences rarely exist to share the story of a national community. The exceptions to this rule are to be found in public broadcasting, where the success of Ken

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Burns’s television documentary The Civil War (1990), and of Mark Starowicz’s Canada: A People’s History (2000–01), proves that national audiences still exist for national history. But, apart from pbs and cbc, global media conglomerates have tended to prefer stories that cross borders and appeal to wider audiences. Of grave concern, then, to nationalists “is the extent to which these competing distributional [sic] systems are increasingly transnational as states deregulate and allow an interpenetration of broadcasting systems, from global news organizations, to direct broadcasting satellites, to joint-sharing agreements among ‘national’ broadcasting systems” (Deibert 196). The aptly named Global Television Network, based in Winnipeg, is just one more sign, it seems, of our changing times. In other ways, however, two-way or interactive communication, the staple of Web-based communications, has been forming imagined communities that do not have to include the folk in neighbouring provinces or states, let alone the next-door neighbours. Already, “there are more than 10,000 specialized usenet groups on the Internet each of which involves largely unmediated communications among people from around the planet” (197–8). Communities of shared interest are thus growing up, irrespective of place, “on such specialized topics as alt.politics.greens; alt.politics.libertarian; alt.politics.radical-left; alt.fan.dan.quayle; alt.sex.bondage; or alt.tv.simpsons” (198). And the community of such groups is being further determined by software ‹agents’ … that will electronically scan global networked databases each morning to provide individuals with their own exclusive news package tailored to fit their own unique interests” (197). In other words, the paradigm of mass communications – in print and in broadcast media – has now broken down, along with other boundaries that have tended to support individual and national identities. The Information Age points to a possible end of the era of nationalism. The most direct attack on nationalism in the print version of The English Patient comes in the imperative voice of Almásy, the desert explorer: “Erase the family name! Erase nations! I was taught such things by the desert” (Ondaatje 139). Almásy’s political injunction is much more than the product of desert geography, or of international cooperation during the inter-war period; rather, it has been thoroughly anticipated in the novel by other forms of boundary breakdown, not the least of which involves a wholesale dismantling of personal identity. From the outset, the Canadian nurse Hana is deeply intrigued by her burned patient’s lack of identity: In the Pisa hospital she had seen the English patient for the first time. A man with no face. An ebony pool. All identification consumed in a fire. Parts of his

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burned body and face had been sprayed with tannic acid, that hardened into a protective shell over his raw skin. The area around his eyes was coated with a thick layer of gentian violet. There was nothing to recognize in him. (48)

Anonymity appeals to a woman who has lost her father, aborted her child, and watched so many soldiers die: “She would have nothing to link her, to lock her, to death … She never looked at herself in mirrors again” (50). At the same time, she is determined to save “this nameless, almost faceless man” (52), who is to her the model of anonymity. The “English” patient is also a model of metamorphosis to this woman looking to multiply whatever faces she might wear to the world. Sometimes, in “the wildness of his drunken speeches,” she glimpses an alternative model of subjectivity that is neither fixed nor centred but is radically fluid: “Sometime a horse I’ll be, sometime a hound. A hog, a headless bear, sometime a fire” (115). Even the title of this section of the novel, “Sometime a Fire” (67), assures us of the narrator’s sympathy for Almásy’s quest to rid himself of familial and national identities, and to live in the changing space of a multiple self, untrammeled by anything that might lock him into permanence. This emphasis on a “multiphrenic” self, present in both of Ondaatje’s protagonists, would better fit the social epistemology of postmodernism and hypermedia than it does the social context of postwar Europe. But the novel also gestures towards more immediate boundary breakdowns, in which “doors opened into landscape,” and where “there seemed little demarcation between house and landscape, between damaged building and the burned and shelled remnants of the earth” (13, 43). Other breakdowns, appearing in images of the printed book, geographical space, and the imagined community, not to mention the self and the identity of the body, better fit the context of the digital revolution. Although Almásy tells his nurse that “in the desert it is easy to lose a sense of demarcation” (18), it is a geography of no particular place, amidst a text “that he has added to, cutting and gluing in pages from other books or writing in his own observations – so they all are cradled within the text of Herodotus”(16), where the textual annihilation of space is analogous to cyberspace. He has in fact altered the codex form of the book to the point that it is almost unrecognizable: “The book splayed open, almost twice its original thickness” (94). So what we encounter in it is a version of hypertext in its non-linear pathways to related texts, and in its projection of a third dimension behind the two-dimensional page. The book in The English Patient is no longer really a book – that is, a bounded entity, an authorized text, or even an autonomous voice – it has turned into a figure of hypertext. Much like the book Roland Barthes had envisioned in “The Death of the Author,” such prefigurations of hypertext appear as sites

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where multiple meanings have to be collected by internal and external readers alike, all made collaborative authors in an expanding text. Authority is thus radically decentred in a “communal history” that bears the traditional name of Herodotus and yet erases the identity of its compiler (96), for who could possibly be the author of hypertext where another text always looms behind each and every text? Or where there is another story behind every story, as in those tales the English patient tells to Hana – tales that “slip from level to level like a hawk” (4): stories of himself as Icarus fallen from the sky or as Gyges driven by a queen to kill her husband Candaules (232)? What in the novel is supposed to be “supplementary to the main argument” (119) participates in the features of a digital mode of communication, including the reinscription of scribal values where, as McLuhan would say, writing was still a form of rhetoric, just as all “reading was necessarily reading aloud” (Gutenberg 82). One could even say that McLuhan’s “argument for electronic media reintroduced the rhetorician’s conception of language, and of human self and society, after the three hundred years dominated by the philosophers” of Newtonian science (Lanham 202). At the end of the novel, however, a breakdown proper to 1945 occurs, one that raises crucial questions concerning those other boundary breakdowns more likely belonging to our own era. Kip, the Sikh sapper from India who has spent part of the war in London dismantling German bombs, is finally confronted with a type of bomb that he is powerless to defuse: the first atomic bomb to explode over Hiroshima, Japan, on 6 August 1945, releasing all the terrible energy contained within the nucleus of an atom. Trying to imagine “the death of a civilisation” (Ondaatje 286), Kip closes his eyes and “sees the streets of Asia full of fire. It rolls across cities like a burst map, the hurricane of heat withering bodies as it meets them, the shadow of humans suddenly in the air” (284). Bitterly, he questions “all those speeches of civilisation from kings and queens and presidents … such voices of abstract order. Smell it. Listen to the radio and smell the celebration” (285). And he begins to understand the warning of his brother, a colonial freedom-fighter: “Never turn your back on Europe. The deal makers. The contract makers. The map drawers. Never trust Europeans, he said. Never shake hands with them. But we, oh, we were easily impressed – by speeches and medals and your ceremonies. What have I been doing these last few years? Cutting away, defusing, limbs of evil. For what? For this to happen?” (284–5). The moral difficulty for Kip is that a book and author he has loved appear to be a source of Western nations’ power to impose their imperial boundaries: “Was it just ships that gave you such power?” he

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asks the English patient. “Was it, as my brother said, because you had the histories and printing presses?” (283). Ultimately, he is forced to rethink one of the master narratives of the West, which appears to authorize the apocalypse: ‹For the heavens shall vanish away like smoke and the earth shall wax old like a garment. And they that dwell therein shall die in like manner. For the moth shall eat them up like a garment, and the worms shall eat them like wool.’ A secret of deserts from Uweinat to Hiroshima” (295; Is. li.6). In this painful re-reading of the prophet Isaiah, Kip begins to sense that the destiny of the West – and indeed the world – is determined by print technology. And so he rejects “the voice of the English patient [that] sang Isaiah into his ear as he had that afternoon when the boy had spoken of the face on the chapel ceiling in Rome” (294), repudiating the scriptures that have brought the West to dominance and, ultimately, to the verge of destruction. Harold Innis would surely agree; the news of Hiroshima does point to the explosive effect of communications in our century: “The rise of Hitler to power was facilitated by the use of the loud speaker and the radio. By the spoken language he could appeal to minority groups and to minority nations. Germans in Czechoslovakia could be reached by radio as could Germans in Austria. Political boundaries related to the demands of the printing industry disappeared with the new instrument of communication” (Bias 80). But then the rise of printing had produced a like result in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: “The sudden extension of communication precipitated an outbreak of savagery paralleling that of printing and the religious wars of the seventeenth century, and again devastating the regions of Germany” (Innis, Empire 209). In Kip’s crystal radio, there could even be a reminder of Hitler’s (not to mention Pound’s) disastrous use of the medium. Still, it is the voice of Allied radio that explodes Kip’s faith in the values of Western civilization, all of which have served to justify wars of racial conquest and of economic expansion: “Listen to the radio and smell the celebration” (285), the sapper says of events leading up to V-J Day. And yet radio is hardly more than the messenger since Kip really blames the book for inciting wars of nationalism and for imposing the boundaries of empire. Kip’s difficulty is that he fails to see how the prefigurations of hypertext in his mentor’s book also point away from the closed world of the nation-state and the printed book upon which it is premised. By contrast, Hana, who “listened as the Englishman turned the pages of his commonplace book and read the information glued in from other books,” senses in Almásy’s text a critique of print and its far-reaching effects. Obviously, the “great maps lost in the bonfires and the burning of Plato’s statue, whose marble exfoliated in the

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heat, the cracks across wisdom like precise reports across the valley as Poliziano stood on the grass hills smelling the future” (Ondaatje 58), are tropes for a “new interest in space” in the age of print, also “evident in the development of the mariner’s compass and the lens. Columbus discovered the New World, Magellan proved the earth a sphere, and in astronomy the Ptolemaic system was undermined especially after the invention and improvement of the telescope” (Innis, Bias 128). For his part, Poliziano, the great translator who rendered the Iliad into Latin, with ties to the Platonist school of Ficino and Pico, and to Lorenzo’s artistic circle in Florence, is identified with those who resisted the monastic Savonarola and his anti-humanism. Poliziano, also known as Politian, “wrote a great [vernacular] poem on Simonetta Vespucci … He made her famous with Le Stanze per la Giostra and then Botticelli painted scenes from it” (Ondaatje 57). And yet a monopoly of knowledge over space, peculiar to print, will not immediately replace what Innis called a manuscript-monopoly of knowledge over time: “And then came Savonarola’s cry out of the streets: ‘Repentance! The deluge is coming!’ And everything was swept away – free will, the desire to be elegant, fame, the right to worship Plato as well as Christ” (Ondaatje 57). In Innis’s view, Savonarola was only defending that monopoly of knowledge built up in rural monasteries where parchment had for centuries been the dominant medium. But after the invention of moveable type, Poliziano’s world was to carry the day, for “paper permitted the old costly material by which thought was transmitted to be superseded by an economical substance, which was to facilitate the diffusion of the works of human intelligence” (Empire 168). About the year 1485, to describe the matter from Almásy’s point of view, “Pico and Lorenzo and Poliziano and the young Michelangelo … held in each hand the new world and the old world” (Ondaatje 57). In a sense, what they were joining together were two opposing epochs of manuscript and print. Two epochs are opposed in 1945 as well, the nurse and her patient holding in each hand a fixed world of print and a prefiguration of digital media. For, in the breakdown of boundaries in Almásy’s expanding codex, the effects of electronic text are projected in ways that offer a larger critique of the technology of empire than Kip’s pessimism could allow. Here, the formal challenge to print in Almásy’s fluid text also adumbrates a larger challenge to social and political boundaries in the novel, whether such borders are defined in terms of space, or the nation, or the self, or even the integrity of the body: “We are communal histories, communal books,” Almásy says in what are virtually his dying words. “All I desired was to walk upon such an

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earth that had no maps” (261). Although his legatee gives up on Europe and goes home to India after the bombs fall on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the novel does not envision any limit to technological change. Where Innis had complained that, in our time, “the form of mind from Plato to Kant which hallowed existence beyond change is proclaimed decadent” (Bias 90), Almásy’s fluid text suggests that instability might even be useful to stave off a threat of entropy and the collapse of civilisation. His experiment in this “new” medium thus suggests an antidote to technological determinism. And yet how far might the change in the mode of communication take us in rejecting claims of empire (stability) and of apocalypse (entropy) alike? Judith Stamps reminds us that empire, for Innis, was merely “an institution within civilization – one that threatened the latter’s survival because it had no awareness of its own limitations” (71). And so there is some ambivalence between his epochal view of the material reasons for imperial collapse and his quest for a “stable compromise” (Innis, Bias 96) that would preserve the hegemony of the larger civilization: “A bureaucracy built up in relation to papyrus and the alphabet was supplemented by a hierarchy built up in relation to parchment. The consequent stability was evident in the continuity of the Byzantine Empire to 1453” (Bias 117). Graeme Patterson concludes with some justice that Innis’s media theory “boiled down to a proposal for a sort of stasis in a world in which, as he himself pointed out, all things were subject to change” (20). In The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), McLuhan is equally concerned to control such changes brought on by technology, noting that “Harold Innis was the first person to hit upon the process of change as implicit in the forms of media technology,” and so acknowledging “the present book” to be nothing more than “a footnote of explanation to his work” (50). Though Carl Berger has said that “McLuhan’s own works were less an extension of Innis’s ideas than an inversion of them” (194), several of his later essays in Understanding Media, most notably “Roads and Paper Routes,” do elaborate Innis’s thesis in terms of the social effects of communications technology on institutions and culture, though without further reference to Harold Innis or his work. In fact, Understanding Media claims that a conflict between sight and sound in various monopolies of communication has been disastrous not only for Western societies but also for tribal cultures: “Even today the mere existence of a literate and industrial West appears quite naturally as dire aggression to nonliterate societies; just as the mere existence of the atom bomb appears as a state of universal aggression to industrial and mechanized societies” (McLuan, Understanding 299).

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Such thinking would appear to underlie the novel-Almasy’s fear that what he and his fellow explorers have done in their work of exploration is to bring war to the desert. For his desert geography, he says, “has been governed by words. By rumours and legends. Charted things. Shards written down. The tact of words. In the desert to repeat something would be to fling more water into the earth. Here nuance took you a hundred miles” (Ondaatje 231). Ultimately, what he seems to be seeking in the nuance of words is the recovery of lost worlds, “where Zerzura is named after the bathing woman in a desert caravan” (153). As long as his version of The Histories evokes this poetry of naming, his book is no real threat to the desert. But, “when he discovered the truth to what had seemed a lie, he brought out his glue pot and pasted in a map or news clipping or used a blank space in the book to sketch men in skirts with faded unknown animals alongside them” (246). So, in the end, he fears that his quest for verification, for a true cartography of history, has only brought the whole machinery of war into the desert: “This country – had I charted it and turned it into a place of war?” (260). The disaster for McLuhan, as much as for Almásy, is that print had turned space into something uniform and continuous, for the map does to space what the alphabet and the printed word did to oral cultures: it “is an aggressive and imperial form that explodes outward” (McLuhan, Understanding 258). According to McLuhan, print destroys all previous forms of social organization and modes of production, just as the phonetic alphabet had first exploded the balance between the senses. For the psychic dissociation of sensibility that results from the phonetic alphabet is transformed in an age of print into a dissociation of individuals from clan and family. So Almásy, the conventional bookman in his earlier phase, compares himself to Katharine, who still inhabits an oral culture, reciting “old memorized poems. She would have hated to die without a name. For her there was a line back to her ancestors that was tactile, whereas he had erased the path he had emerged from” (Ondaatje 170). Almásy’s own commitment to print has by contrast fostered what McLuhan would call psychic values of privacy, detachment, and objectivity. But technology has worse effects than those that are psychological. Print is apocalyptic for McLuhan because the real effect “of paper in organizing new power structures [is] not to decentralize but to centralize. A speed-up in communications always enables a central authority to extend its operations to more distant margins” (Understanding 96). While “centralism of organization is based on the continuous, visual, lineal structuring that arises from phonetic literacy” (267), any “speedup creates what some economists refer to as a center-margin structure”

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(92). The new centre in an age of print is clearly defined by a concentration of paper and presses, while the political margins are structured by the homogeneity of print. Thus, “nationalism was unknown to the Western world until the Renaissance, when Gutenberg made it possible to see the mother tongue in uniform dress” (192). Wars between nations are thus inevitable, given the need to recover that balance of power lost to technological change (101). Far more optimistically than Innis, however, McLuhan hopes that electronic media will undo the visual hegemony of print, enabling the recovery of vocal, auditory, and mimetic values repressed by print and, thereby, reversing the bias of visual culture with its fixed point of view and promoting “the acceptance of multiple facets and planes in a single experience” (Understanding 247). So McLuhan concludes that electronic technology reverses the movement from centre to margin since “electric speech creates centers everywhere. Margins cease to exist on this planet” (92). The difference on this point between Innis and McLuhan is the difference between a man writing in the age of radio and one writing in the age of television. Though radio has the power “to retribalize mankind” in an “almost instant reversal of individualism into collectivism” (Understanding 263, 265), the “vernacular walls” (248) of electric speech are more easily breached through television, even if the early video image was low in data. In contrast to the film image, “the tv image [at least before hdtv] requires each instant that we ‘close’ the spaces in the mesh by a convulsive sensuous participation that is profoundly kinetic and tactile, because tactility is the interplay of the senses, rather than the isolated contact of skin and object” (272). Evidently, the primitive “mosaic form of the tv image … demands participation and involvement in depth of the whole being, as does the sense of touch” (291). In sum, McLuhan finds in early television a recovery of the sensory and social balance so prized by Innis: “What began as a ‘Romantic reaction’ towards organic wholeness may or may not have hastened the discovery of elctro-magnetic waves. But certainly the electro-magnetic discoveries have recreated the simultaneous ‘field’ in all human affairs so that the human family now exists under conditions of a ‘global village› (McLuhan, Gutenberg 31). On one level, a version of this global village shows up in the Villa San Girolamo in figures of participatory media, chief of which is that “borderless” anticipation of hypertext that Almásy keeps in memory of his dead lover. Before his affair with Katharine, the novel-Almásy had always been preoccupied with the problem of space and the mapping of empire. But after her fatal injury, he is drawn to media that are biased more towards time. In the Cave of Swimmers, “he looked up to the one cave painting and stole the colours from it. The

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ochre went into her face, he daubed the blue around her eyes. He walked across the cave, his hands thick with red, and combed his fingers through her hair. Then all of her skin, so her knee that had poked out of the plane that first day was saffron. The pubis. Hoops of colour around her legs so she would be immune to the human. There were traditions he had discovered in Herodotus in which old warriors celebrated their loved ones by locating and holding them in whatever world made them eternal – a colourful fluid, a song, a rock drawing” (Ondaatje 248). Once Katharine is dead, however, he no longer values rock as a medium of eternity any more than he values paper as a medium of empire. Arriving “In Near Ruins” at the Villa San Girolamo, he now embraces the flow of borderless text. Essentially, what Almásy does in converting The Histories from map to poem, from printed text to oral performance, is to atone for an earlier mistake in charting the desert, in erasing his past and denying Katharine’s tribal link to her ancestors. Now he reads to an improbable gathering of “villagers” from around the globe: “Hana sits by his bed, and she travels like a squire beside him during these journeys” (135). Whether Hana’s reading back to him reflects a “participation and involvement in depth of the whole being,” as McLuhan would say, it certainly requires “public participation in creativity” (Understanding 291, 282). For many of Hana’s books are read only in fragments, filled with gaps like the wall of the ruined villa. Hana will often make no reference to chapters she has read between times in private: “So the books for the Englishman, as he listened intently or not, had gaps of plot like sections of a road washed out by storms, missing incidents as if locusts had consumed a section of tapestry, as if plaster loosened by the bombing had fallen away from a mural at night” (Ondaatje 8). So the patient follows her as best he can, whether “travelling with the old wanderer in Kim or with Fabrizio in The Charterhouse of Parma” (93). Just as significantly, some of Hana’s volumes invite a dialogic form of participation: “She pulls down the copy of Kim from the library shelf and, standing against the piano, begins to write into the flyleaf in its last pages. He says the gun – the Zam-Zammah cannon – is still there outside the museum in Lahore. There were two guns, made up of metal cups and bowls taken from every Hindu household in the city – as jizya, or tax. These were melted down and made into the guns. They were used in many battles in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries against Sikhs. The other gun was lost during a battle crossing in the Chenab River – She closes the book, climbs onto a chair and nestles the book into the high, invisible shelf (118).

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Kip both verifies for Hana the authenticity of her readerly journey “through stilted doorways” where “Parma and Paris and India spread their carpets” (93) and offers her an opportunity to write back, to update the novel in the continuing struggle for Independence, by exposing the way Hindus have had their own domestic implements turned against them. He may include himself in this larger “reversal of Kim,” wherein “the young student was now Indian, the wise old teacher was English … And in some way on those long nights of reading and listening, she supposed, they had prepared themselves for the young soldier, the boy grown up, who would join them. But it was Hana who was the young boy in the story. And if Kip was anyone, he was the officer Creighton” (111). Similarly, “she opens The Last of the Mohicans to the blank page at the back and begins to write in it. There is a man named Caravaggio, a friend of my father’s. I have always loved him. He is older than I am, about forty-five, I think. He is in a time of darkness, has no confidence. For some reason I am cared for by this friend of my father. She closes the book and then walks down into the library and conceals it in one of the high shelves” (61). To her, Caravaggio is more like Leatherstocking, the New World hunter faced with an ancient ruin in the trackless forest and so threatened with the loss of New World myths of original innocence. Now, not even Hana’s singing of the “Marseillaise,” which had once touched him so deeply in her childhood, can “bring all the hope of the song together” (269). For all his pain, the English patient seems to feel that a repudiation of the fixity of print opens up the possibility of an organic society. Still, there are two questions that complicate such a benign reading of communications technology – one which is more akin to that of McLuhan than that of Innis. First, the reading practices of The English Patient remind us how different is the reception of print from the process of its production. The act of reading must still be based upon that “gestalt” formation that McLuhan found more intrinsic to the tv image, especially when the reader brings to the page a wide range of sensory and imaginative codes, including the sound of words, a tribal encyclopedia of meanings and associations, and the whole transcultural panoply of literary conventions and expectations. How would a visual medium like print ever be decipherable without a third eye of imaginative configuration? Or why would the cultural cliché of the tv viewer as “couch potato” be anything more than a prejudice of literate culture, especially when the work of connecting electron dots is already implicated in the activities of a standardized culture, one that is more ready-made than even McLuhan was prepared to see? Would the television viewer not experience

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alienation, in a Marxist sense, from the flickering images produced by a cathode-ray tube? A former Marxist like Jean Baudrillard would say yes: “With the television image – the television being the ultimate and perfect object for this new era – our own body and the whole surrounding universe become a control screen” (“Ecstasy” 127). With no distance, no detachment possible any more, a “new form of schizophrenia” (132) results; now the television viewer feels “the absolute proximity, the total instaneity of things, the feeling of no defense, no retreat” (133). Where McLuhan would blame the alphabet for creating “a split man, a schizophrenic” (Gutenberg 22), Baudrillard would blame television for the viewer’s schizophrenia: “He is now only a pure screen, a switching center for all the networks of influence” (“Ecstasy” 133). Of course, McLuhan had anticipated the structure, if not the alienating effects, of such interiorization of the medium: “With film you are the camera and the non-literate man cannot use his eyes like a camera. But with tv you are the screen. And tv is two-dimensional and sculptural in its tactile contours. tv is not a narrative medium, is not so much visual as audile-tactile” (Gutenberg 39). But Baudrillard senses what McLuhan had likely failed to see in this “organic” constellation: the loss of privacy, of distance, even of space. Baudrillard’s view of the media is far more apocalyptic, starting from their being “anti-mediatory and intransitive,” and speaking “in such a way as to exclude any response anywhere” (“Requiem” 169–70). In this media implosion of both the subject and object, Baudrillard foresees “the end of metaphysics. The era of hyperreality now begins” (“Ecstasy” 128). Hyperreality, his term for “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality” (“Simulacra” 166), is a function of a cybernetic program where “the real is produced from miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks and command models – and with these it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times. It no longer has to be rational, since it is no longer measured against some ideal or negative instance. It is nothing more than operational.” And since the image “bears no relation to any reality whatever,” “it is its own pure simulacrum” (“Simulacra” 167, 170). The simulacrum is close to the poststructural view of language, “where the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences” (Derrida, “Structure” 249). Just as there is nothing beyond language to guarantee its meaning, there is nothing beyond the simulacrum either, apart from the writing of the cybernetic code. A hyperreal image in The English Patient could even be said to generate Almásy’s love affair with Katharine. As he says, “She had

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always wanted words, she loved them, grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape. Whereas I thought words bent emotions like sticks in water” (Ondaatje 238). Both definitions do come true when the words that Katharine reads to her husband in front of Almásy begin to produce their own simulacrum: “This is a story,” Almásy admits, “of how I fell in love with a woman, who read me a specific story from Herodotus. I heard the words she spoke across the fire, never looking up, even when she teased her husband. Perhaps she was just reading it to him. Perhaps there was no ulterior motive in the selection except for themselves. It was simply a story that had jarred her in its familiarity of situation. But a path suddenly revealed itself in real life” (233). As he confesses, “I would often open Herodotus for a clue to geography. But Katharine had done that as a window to her life” (233). And yet the story is hardly a map of correspondences between Clifton and Candaules, or even between Gyges and Almásy; rather, it is a verbal model producing love out of an initial absence of attraction, the words of a story bending “emotions like sticks in water.” For the speaking voice works to create reality out of illusion, where The Histories appears to write the future. “Illusion,” Baudrillard has claimed, “is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible” (“Simulacra” 177). In a similar vein, the English patient tells his nurse that “I have seen editions of The Histories with a sculpted portrait on the cover. Some statue found in a French museum. But I never imagine Herodotus this way. I see him more as one of those spare men of the desert who travel from oasis to oasis, trading legends as if it is the exchange of seeds, consuming everything without suspicion, piecing together a mirage” (Ondaatje 118–19). If the desert and history are equally informed by mirage, the mirage is nonetheless real. So the burned airman imagines that reality fines itself down to a flicker of firelight, to a drug-induced dream: “If the figure turns around there will be paint on his back, where he slammed in grief against the mural of trees. When the candle dies out he will be able to see this. His hand reaches out slowly and touches his book and returns to his dark chest. Nothing else moves in the room” (298). In the grip of his mourning, there is little left in the world for the English patient outside his text. But in the stubborn continuance of a world outside the text, there is also a kind of mourning for the loss of the real, involving a strange nostalgia of consumption. According to Baudrillard, “What society seeks through production, and overproduction, is the restoration of the real which escapes it. That is why contemporary ‘material’ production is itself hyperreal” (“Simulacra” 180). So television sells an image

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of Coca-Cola as “the real thing,” and consumers strive, by consuming the hyperreal image, to make themselves “real”. But in Baudrillard’s worldview, the whole system of objects has come to belong to the cybernetic code of the hyperreal. Only for McLuhan is production still firmly grounded in the material and historical processes of print culture. “Just as print was the first mass-produced thing,” he writes, “so it was the first uniform and repeatable ‘commodity› (Gutenberg 125). So our contemporary overproduction, at which Baudrillard despairs, is hardly more for McLuhan than a sign of the loss of the organic rather than the real. To be fair, McLuhan does admit that we have yet to grasp the message of the new medium of cybernetic production: “Today with the arrival of automation, the ultimate extension of the electromagnetic form to the organization of production, we are trying to cope with such new organic production as if it were mechanical massproduction” (Gutenberg 130). Quite prophetically, he sees how our “electro-magnetic” machines have become like organisms and so are capable of being integrated into our neural circuitry. Effectively, “in McLuhan’s discourse, biology and technology merge: the impact of electronic technology is to introduce the era of bionic beings, part-technique/part flesh” (Kroker 112). And yet integration of “man” and machine also threatens the “stability” that McLuhan hoped to see achieved in “the new electronic and organic age” (Gutenberg 275). The “cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism,” could still be used to destabilize the social order by revolutionizing human consciousness. At least this is the view of Donna Haraway in “A Cyborg Manifesto” (149): “It is not clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine. It is not clear what is mind and what body in machines that resolve into coding practices” (177). The larger breakdown of boundaries between animal and human, organism and machine, and physical and non-physical states of being thereby discredits “all claims for an organic or natural standpoint” (157). Even so, the cyborg offers liberation, since the Western alibi of power was always identification with nature, that “plot of original unity out of which difference must be produced and enlisted in a drama of escalating domination of woman/nature” (151). “Perhaps, ironically,” Haraway concludes, “we can learn from our fusions with animals and machines how not to be Man, the embodiment of Western logos” (173). Of course, no scientist can afford to ignore the codes of power written into technology: “From one perspective, a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet” (154). What Haraway calls “the informatics of domination” (161) in information

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technologies depends on “the reconceptions of machine and organism as coded texts” (152). Both the “communications sciences and modern biologies are constructed by a common move – the translation of the world into a problem of coding, a search for a common language in which all resistance to instrumental control disappears and all heterogeneity can be submitted to disassembly, reassembly, investment, and exchange” (164). Textualization into digital code, both in cybernetics and biotechnology, thus prepares the way for the re-engineering not merely of bodies and machines but also of the whole social order. “No objects, spaces, or bodies are sacred in themselves; any component can be interfaced with any other if the proper standard, the proper code, can be constructed for processing signals in a common language” (163). By this point, it should be clear that McLuhan’s sense of the organic character of electronic media was an illusion. For what he identified as the homogenizing, spatializing power of print can now be multiplied to infinity in the cybernetic writing of digital code. And, since the bias of digital communications is towards perfect translation and control, digital logic threatens to reduce life itself to a single code. The real task, then, of Haraway’s “cyborg politics” is to recode “communication and intelligence to subvert command and control” (175). “Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism. That is why cyborg politics insist on noise and advocate pollution, rejoicing in the illegitimate fusions of animal and machine” (176). “If we learn how to read these webs of power and social life, we might learn new couplings, new coalitions” (170). While Haraway and Baudrillard share McLuhan’s insight that we invariably interiorize our media, neither foresees an end to the hegemony of writing in digital technology. But whereas Baudrillard frets at the prospect of the human mind turning into an electronic screen, Haraway sees new “possibilities inherent in the breakdown of clean distinctions between organism and machine and similar distinctions structuring the Western self” (174). Where Baudrillard despairs at the loss of the real, of dialogue, and of public and private space, Haraway celebrates “the profusion of spaces and identities and the permeability of boundaries in the personal body and in the body politic” (170). Such pessimism or optimism is evidently inflected by gender as much as it is by personality and culture. For the woman who reads and writes a cyborg semiology has little real investment in saving a historically masculine idea of autonomous selfhood. The old metaphysics of “a unitary self” is happily swept away in the cybernetic apocalypse.

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To Haraway, “the issue is dispersion. The task is to survive in the diaspora” (170). And so the female cryptologist seeks in the cyborg “a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self. This is the self feminists must code” (163). In the novel, Kip will appear as this type of cyborg self, permanently wired to a crystal radio set: “He wears the portable contraption during the day, just one earphone attached to his head, the other loose under his chin” (Ondaatje 76). Even by his own logic, he is a cyborg figure, since Sikhs are “brilliant at technology. ‘We have a mystical closeness … what is it?’ ‘Affinity.’ ‘Yes, affinity, with machines› (272). Evidently, his dramatic function as a cyborg is to decode “that knot of wires and fuzes someone has left him like a terrible letter” (76). But it is his own body that merges with the machine: “There is always yellow chalk scribbled on the side of bombs. Have you noticed that? Just as there was yellow chalk scribbled onto our bodies when we lined up in the Lahore courtyard” (199). In another sense as well, Kip is linked to a fusion of biology with the cybernetic program. As Hana reads Rudyard Kipling’s Kim to her patient, we are told that “the sapper entered their lives, as if out of this fiction. As if the pages of Kipling had been rubbed in the night like a magic lamp” (94). He thus appears as the prophetic annunciation of a future world of virtual reality, “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality” (Baudrillard, “Simulacra” 166). As a simulacrum produced by the book, Kip would seem to be linked to the cyborg future that is dawning in our own day. One looks in vain for a cyborg semiologist in the film-Patient to reduce bombs to harmless texts. Since Minghella’s movie has little to do with the shaping effects of media upon civilization, Kip is not wired to his radio and so does not become a bionic hybrid with one ear tuned to distant places, hearing the news from Hiroshima. But Kip’s response in the novel is vintage Innis, particularly his belief that “each civilization has its own methods of suicide” (Bias 140–1). For Kip, as much as Innis, wants to hallow an existence beyond change. Failing to kill the man who seems to him to embody the wisdom of the West, he retreats into his birth name of Kirpal Singh and goes back to the Punjab, where he will serve his own culture as a medical doctor. In such fashion, cyborg politics regresses towards a version of postcolonial politics, back within the borders of tribalism, or what Kwame Appiah has termed the “nationalist project of the postcolonial national bourgeoisie” (353). And yet the novel does not renounce its own experiment with boundary breakdowns. For Almásy, whom Kip has loved much as Rudyard Kipling’s Kim had loved his Eastern teacher, offers another

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version of cyborg politics and cyborg semiology. Throughout his narrative of love and loss, Almásy admits that “he has been disassembled by her. And if she has brought him to this, what has he brought her to?” (Ondaatje 155). No mere romantic figure for love’s strain on identity, the cyborg man seeks a breakdown of borders in the self, in geography, and in politics. As in the Sahara, space itself disappears: “The desert could not be claimed or owned – it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names” (138). The desert as a sign of flow shifts with every wind of information, giving the lie to the author of The Histories, who tried to write his truth in stone, in words that he would like to see forever fixed: “I, Herodotus of Halicarnassus, set forth my history, that time may not draw the colour from what Man has brought into being, nor those great and wonderful deeds manifested by both Greeks and Barbarians … together with the reason they fought one another” (240). But after his loss of Katharine, the student of Herodotus sees the futility of the hope of permanence. The desert becomes for him a sign of flow rather than of fixity, such as may be found in electronic text, or in the shifting winds of his commonplace book: The harmattan blows across the Sahara filled with red dust, dust as fire, as flour, entering and coagulating in the locks of rifles. Mariners called this red wind the “sea of darkness.” Red sand fogs out of the Sahara were deposited as far north as Cornwall and Devon, producing showers of mud so great this was also mistaken for blood. “Blood rains were widely reported in Portugal and Spain in 1901.” There are always millions of tons of dust in the air, just as there are millions of cubes of air in the earth and more living flesh in the soil (worms, beetles, underground creatures) than there is grazing and existing on it. Herodotus records the death of various armies engulfed in the simoom who were never seen again. One nation was “so enraged by this evil wind that they declared war on it and marched out in full battle array, only to be rapidly and completely interred.” (17)

Abandoning his quest to capture the history of the desert in his cartography, the bookman becomes the equivalent of a netscape navigator: “I have always had information like a sea in me” (18). Whereas the bias of print is static, the bias of computer text is volatile: print communicates a sense of stable interiority and privacy, hypertext a sense of dynamic oscillation between inside and outside, between private and public space. Characteristically, Hana has read “books as the only door out of her cell” (7), appearing to value the

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book as the very type and origin of private space. Conversely, the burned aviator oscillates between a private and public self, seeking to disappear “into landscape,” to do away with property and the nationstate, to develop a “cartography … marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings” (261). Even Almásy’s mental processes are instances of networked rather than of linear thinking, as his mind moves through catalogues of information, slipping beneath the surface of embedded texts where further texts are stored. “So a man in the desert can slip into a name as if within a discovered well, and in its shadowed coolness be tempted never to leave such containment. My great desire was to remain there, among those acacias. I was walking not in a place where no one had walked before but in a place where there were sudden, brief populations over the centuries – a fourteenth-century army, a Tebu caravan, the Senussi raiders of 1915. And in between these times – nothing was there” (140–1). The reader’s hypertextual “path through such interreferentiality soon becomes totally nonlinear and, if not totally unpredictable, certainly ‘chaotic› (Lanham 94). Yet the point of such nonlinear thinking is to oscillate between both sides of a “characteristically unstable Western self, by turns central and social, sincere and hypocritical, philosophical and rhetorical,” which “is just what electronic literacy has been busy revitalizing” (25). The political problem of Almásy, the “international bastard” (Ondaatje 176), is nonetheless the fixed identity of his English lover, Katharine Clifton: “He was amazed she had loved him in spite of such qualities of anonymity in himself” (170). In the end, Katharine’s fidelity to the code of nation and society (particularly the code of monogamy) leaves her vulnerable to a suicidal husband; but she is destroyed as well by her lover’s refusal to use her proper name. The anonymous man can only atone for his error in the tryst he later keeps with his dead lover. He tries to fly her body out of the desert in a rotten canvas plane, buried for more than a decade in the Sahara. But plane and corpse and pilot alike are consumed in mid-air by fire. Only this newly fallen Icarus emerges out of the fire as a hybrid of man and machine: “I was perhaps the first one to stand up alive out of a burning machine. A man whose head was on fire. They didn’t know my name. I didn’t know their tribe” (5). In the end, he is recognized by another cyborg man, Kip, who easily seduces Hana by snipping through the burned man’s hearing aid. “I’ll rewire him in the morning” (115), Kip says to the delight of the woman but not without sympathy for another cyborg.

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The ultimate price the cyborg has to pay for hybridization is the border of his own skin; in Almásy’s pain, we feel the cost of achieving perfect “permeability of boundaries in the personal body and in the body politic” (Haraway 170). If Almásy bears witness to the identity of his dead lover, he also remains as vulnerable as a child, quite as bare as the plum his nurse “unskins … with her teeth, withdraw[ing] the stone and pass[ing] the flesh of the fruit into his mouth” (Ondaatje 4). In the end, Almásy martyrs himself to a postmodern idea of a plural self, and to a postnational idea of collective identity, that bears all the marks of a hypermedia environment: “We are communal histories, communal books” (261). Cyborg semiology thus prepares us to decode his borderless “geomorphology. The place they had chosen to come to, to be their best selves, to be unconscious of ancestry. Here, apart from the sun compass and the odometer mileage and the book, he was alone, his own invention” (246). In such wise, the “borderless” text has enabled him to become his own simulacrum. In other words, a hypertext without borders authorizes the man without borders who finds it easy, in the desert, “to lose a sense of demarcation” (18). And so Almásy’s cyborg politics becomes his ultimate challenge to the fixity of print and to its association with the metaphysics of personal and national identity. Even Hana, who bears deep scars from the war in Europe, denies, in staying with her English patient, the coherence of European identity. As she puts it to her stepmother back in Canada, “I am sick of Europe, Clara. I want to come home. To your small cabin and pink rock in Georgian Bay” (296). But Hana, who is finally deserted by her Indian lover, retreats as much as does Kirpal Singh into the traditions of her own place and culture. A woman who has “imagine[d] all of Asia through the gestures of this one man. The way he lazily moves, his quiet civilisation” (217), appears to give up on the possibility of cyborg politics. And so the new couplings and new coalitions, which were the real promise of her union with Kip, are not realized at the end of the novel. Only in the narrator’s imagination do the lovers remain open to what Almásy calls “the desire of another life” (238). As the narrator says, “She is a woman I don’t know well enough to hold in my wing, if writers have wings, to harbour for the rest of my life.” And so, on opposite sides of the globe, “Hana moves,” and “Kirpal’s left hand swoops down and catches” (301–2) what has been dislodged, as if he is still in perfect synchronicity with her. At least a door is left open at the end of the novel for a flow across borders and through time and space; but no lasting “neural” networks have been created. The potential of “communal books, communal histories,”

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and of “a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self” (Haraway 163), is left to the future. In the end, Kirpal Singh’s cyborg semiology is reduced to postcolonial politics, rejecting the hegemony of Western thinking but really failing to deal with its threat of apocalypse. For Kip gives up decoding the technology that might have brought it about and retreats towards an essential identity and identity politics: “American, French, I don’t care. When you start bombing the brown races of the world, you’re an Englishman” (286). He thus denies difference as much as any imperialist, only to reinscribe, in reverse order, the old binary oppositions. Hana, by contrast, tries to escape such stereotypes through an oppositional politics. As she writes to her stepmother, it is “One day after we heard the bombs were dropped in Japan, so it feels like the end of the world. From now on I believe the personal will forever be at war with the public. If we can rationalize this we can rationalize anything” (292). But her polarization of the private and the public only stereotypes the public sphere as imperial, and the private as subaltern, so arresting the dynamic oscillation between the two. Ultimately, this gesture also reproduces the old binaries of Western metaphysics without ever realizing the promise of “communal books, communal histories” – that promise of partial and contradictory identities that died with the English patient. In the end, however, we do not have to be fatally determined by the bias of communication. Perhaps the English patient best illuminates what McLuhan means when he writes: “The literate liberal is convinced that all real values are private, personal, individual. Such is the message of mere literacy. Yet the new electric technology pressures him towards the need for total human interdependence” (Gutenberg 157). Before we can hope to negotiate the bias of electronic communications, we have to learn from the printed word how to subvert the command and control of the engineers, as well as how to escape the ancient politics of tribalism, in order to survive in a world of electronic flow. Our global future depends upon it.

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11 Border Wars: Doing Battle with the Transnationals in Neuromancer (1984) In his first novel about the Internet, William Gibson clearly failed to anticipate the global network of protestors gathering in cities from Seattle to Prague, from Quebec City to Genoa, to register their growing concerns about globalization. Otherwise, he was astonishingly prescient about the shape of things to come, from the exponential growth of “cyberspace” (a term he coined to describe the infrastructure and mindscape of the new mode of communication) to the ascendancy of “corporate power” in its agenda to transcend “old barriers” (190), including the regulatory regime of the nation-state. Tensions between technology and nationalism have traditionally been more difficult to dramatize in literary fiction than in cyberpunk fiction, a genre that moves “into a terrain of crucial cultural issues that most other contemporary fiction does not care about, let alone explore: from hacker underground networks to the rise of religious fundamentalism, cryogenics to surveillance satellites, genetic engineering to nanotechnology, multinational control of information to techno-angst, the Japanization of Western culture to the decentralization of governments around the world” (Olsen 311). Although it is the usual task of science fiction to imagine the consequences of technology, Gibson’s work is unusual for what it has to say about the loss of space in virtual environments and about the weakening of the public sphere in postindustrial information society. Theory has begun to follow fiction’s lead in exploring such relations between cybercommunications and transnationalization, in everything from trade and production to finance, politics, and culture. In trade, for example, networked computing has produced “not merely a change in the volume of cross-border transactions, but a fundamental change in the nature and organization of production itself” (Deibert 140). For large corporations are now reducing costs and spreading

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risks through transnational collaborative arrangements, whereby design teams communicate with production teams on other continents by e-mail, teleconferencing, and fax machines in the hope of achieving economies of scale and bringing cheaper goods of uniform quality to markets around the world. As a result, “practices that have been taken for granted, such as a ‘national’ economic system, or a ‘national industry,’ or ‘international’ trade, are thrown into doubt as production disaggregates and diffuses across territorial boundaries” (155). The globalization of finance has likewise been shaped by this paradigm of networked computing, creating new currency markets of ‹stateless’ money” (154) that washes around the globe as an endless flow of data on London’s Stock Exchange Automated Quotation (seaq), on the us-based network of the nasdaq, or on the Globex network developed by Reuters and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (152). As a result, a very few cities now “act not so much as national cities as they do world cities – interfacial nodes in the global hypermedia environment” (154). Inevitably, familiar “preconceptions about the ‘domestic’ and the ‘international,’ about ‘inside’ and ‘outside,› are beginning to wane as well in “the constant flows of capital through cyberspatial currents” (155). Such a world wide web of industry and finance appears in graphic form in Gibson’s Neuromancer on electronic screens representing “bama, the Sprawl, the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis.” Program a map to display frequency of data exchange, every thousand megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen. Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white. Then they start to pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation. Your map is about to go nova. Cool it down. Up your scale. Each pixel a million megabytes. At a hundred million megabytes per second, you begin to make out certain blocks in midtown Manhattan, outlines of hundredyear-old industrial parks ringing the old core of Atlanta. (Gibson 43)

The Sprawl is more, however, than just the crowded us eastern seaboard, as the narrative demonstrates in its own restless movement from Asia to Europe into high orbit. From its opening scene in Chiba, Japan, to its final scene in the cyberspatial “nonspace of the mind” (51), the novel turns place into an electronic space of flows: “Get just wasted enough, find yourself in some desperate but strangely arbitrary kind of trouble, and it was possible to see Ninsei as a field of data … Then you could throw yourself into a highspeed drift and skid, totally engaged but set apart from it all, and all around you the dance of biz, information interacting, data made flesh in the mazes of the black market” (20).

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And yet, in the bleaker zones of the industrial wasteland, or in more traditional neighbourhoods of cities such as Istanbul, one can still see a sharp distinction between a space of flows and the inert spaces of print: “Their room might have been the one in Chiba where he’d first seen Armitage. He went to the window, in the morning, almost expecting to see Tokyo Bay” (84). Instead, what the protagonist finds outside the window of a Turkish hotel is “evidence that the written word still enjoyed a certain prestige here. It was a sluggish country” (84). Print culture has by now become the equivalent of camel trains in an age of mechanized transport, condemned to exist outside the cyberspatial flow of information society and doomed to lag behind the (nanosecond) times. What evidently animates a space of flows in Neuromancer is “corporate power. The zaibatsus, the multinationals that shaped the course of human history, had transcended old barriers. Viewed as organisms, they had attained a kind of immortality. You couldn’t kill a zaibatsu by assassinating a dozen key executives; there were others waiting to step up the ladder, assume the vacated position, access the vast banks of corporate memory” (190). Viewed as political entities, the multinationals had also transcended territorial authority. You could not limit the power of a zaibatsu by legislating against it in any nation-state; there were always other regulatory regimes waiting to step into the breach, accept the terms and conditions of labour, access vast networks of trade and finance. In one portentous scene, Gibson’s protagonist steps out of a subway train in bama to discover a nearly hidden holographic sign: A blunt white spindle, flanged and studded with grids and radiators, docks, domes. He’d seen the ad, or others like it, thousands of times. It had never appealed to him. With his deck, he could reach the Freeside banks as easily as he could reach Atlanta. Travel was a meat thing. But now he noticed the little sigil, the size of a small coin, woven into the lower left corner of the ad’s fabric of light: T-A. (75)

This “little sigil” will prove to be the mark of “a producer of signs and domains” (Brande 101) more than any simple trademark of a producer of goods and services. For it is the tell-tale signature of the sign-making system that exists as a worldwide network of commodified information circulation. In other words, “T-A” is the stamp of a global circuit of exchange, reaching into space and beyond. As David Brande relates it to the mode of communication, “Cyberspace is Gibson’s fantastical geography of postnational capitalism, fulfilling the same basic functions as did the frontier and the nation-state in an

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earlier era: a fantasy of endless expansion of markets and future opportunity, and the means of a symbolic reterritorialization in the service of the greater deterritorializations of the global market” (105). Literally, “T-A” stands for the corporate ambition of TessierAshpool S.A. to transcend all earthly borders by setting up shop in an orbiting Mall of America. This high-flying space resort, known as Freeside, “is many things, not all of them evident to the tourists who shuttle up and down the well. Freeside is brothel and banking nexus, pleasure dome and free port, border town and spa. Freeside is Las Vegas and the hanging gardens of Babylon, an orbital Geneva” (95). More than anything, however, it is a duty-free zone, unregulated by any national government, in which “customs … consisted mainly of proving your credit” (115). Here is the only proof of “citizenship” that matters in the new global economy. And yet Freeside is more than a free city modelled on the late medieval Hanseatic League. Because of its concentrated ownership, it has become “home to a family inbred and most carefully refined, the industrial clan of Tessier and Ashpool” (95). Unfortunately, Tessier and Ashpool have “climbed the well of gravity” only “to discover that they loathed space. They built Freeside to tap the wealth of the new islands, grew rich and eccentric, and began the construction of an extended body in Straylight. We have sealed ourselves away behind our money, growing inward, generating a seamless universe of self” (161). The hegemony of this global producer of signs and domains is thus vulnerable at one point to effective resistance, a potential victim of its own quest for a placeless autonomy. What Gibson imagined in 1983 to be effective resistance to globalization is not the form of resistance that was to spring up a couple of decades later. For the emergence of some “40,000 transnational corporations and their 250,000 foreign affiliates,” which “now account for two-thirds of the world trade in goods and services” (Deibert 147), has also given rise to “transnationally organized political networks and interest groups largely autonomous from any one state’s control” (157). One of the earliest of these, EcoNet, came into being a mere year before Gibson finished his manuscript. It was “formed in 1982 – long before the popularity of the Internet,” and it “now spans over 70 countries” (159), involving a wide array of environmental groups in letter-writing campaigns, conferences, newsgroups, and online directories. “Today, EcoNet is only one part of a vast web of networks operating through the Internet and linked together under the broad umbrella called the Association for Progressive Communications (apc). The apc is a non-profit consortium of 16 international

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member networks serving approximately 40,000 individuals and ngo s in 133 countries” (160). Other cells of resistance have become organized through “five main specialty networks: EcoNet, PeaceNet, ConflictNet, WomensNet, and LaborNet. Together, these linked networks share enormous databases containing everything from government department phone numbers and addresses to scientific studies to calenders [sic] of events to various government regulations and accords, all hyperlinked and searchable by keyword” (160). What Deibert calls “global civil society” is thus embodied in “some 14,500 international ngo s” with “complex nonterritorial based links that defy the organization of political authority in the modern world order” (158). And, because “the majority of these transnational social movements do not operate through the traditional lobbying procedures and political channels of participation as defined by state structures” (159), it is very likely that “future conflicts will be increasingly within and across states, rather than between them” (208). In other words, the rise of global civil society has shifted the battleground from wars of nationalism to class warfare, pitting the rights of people against the rights of capital through computer-assisted networks of common interest. Like capital, democratic participation has also gone global. Before the advent of the personal computer and the World Wide Web, it was more logical, however, to assume that resistance to webs of corporate power and a space of flows would come from inside the system, from lone hackers operating on the model of “a cowboy hotshot” (Gibson 10). Culture, of course, had a large part to play in this conception since the “cowboy” myth of the American frontier was always used to justify the conquest of space. And William Gibson, who left South Carolina at the age of nineteen to live in Canada, would not abandon that frontier myth, with its lone “gunman” holding the forces of evil at bay. The “cowboy” myth was as much a twentieth-century creation of film as it was a creature of nineteenth-century dime novels. One of the more telling differences between the film cowboy and the cowboy hacker, however, is that the former exists in a frame where place still appears beyond the edge of the shot, so that, in any direction the camera turns, the “presentness” of the world is a given. So a film cowboy leads the camera, in frame after frame, from place to place, simultaneously enacting and justifying the conquest of space. How different the situation for a cowboy hacker moving within the “bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void” (9) of cyberspace! For who can tell “what’s out there? New York? Or does it just stop?”

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(158). As it turns out, nothing exists beyond the field of data, these “limitless gulfs of nothingness hung with a few brief commands” (62). Such fields of data are only virtually present as cityscapes to the hacker: ‹Christ,’ Case said, awestruck, as Kuang twisted and banked above the horizonless fields of the Tessier-Ashpool cores, an endless neon cityscape, complexity that cut the eye, jewel bright, sharp as razors” (239). That is to say, in the new ontology of cyberspace, all realities are simulations: “cyberspace becomes the characteristic spatiality of a new era” (Bukatman 156). Such simulation, of course, is never “that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory – precession of simulacra – it is the map that engenders the territory” (Baudrillard, “Simulacra” 166). So Case, on one of his frequent excursions into the matrix, is invited to enjoy a familiar landscape: “You can go for a walk, you wanna. It’s all there. Or anyway all the parts of it you ever saw. This is memory, right, I tap you, sort it out, and feed it back in … If you could lay this construct over the reality, the Finn’s place in lower Manhattan, you’d see a difference, but maybe not as much as you’d think. Memory’s holographic for you … I’m different” (Gibson 158). One of the differences between the man and the Artificial Intelligence is that “place” is generated for the ai out of pure numbers, or algorithmic iterations, rather than out of representations of “real” memory. Within this media environment, “the real is produced from miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks and command models – and with these it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times. It no longer has to be rational, since it is no longer measured against some ideal or negative instance. It is nothing more than operational” (Baudrillard, “Simulacra” 167). So the operative subject is likely to be constituted by his interaction with machines. That is why Case comes to see his own body as an information-processing system – “data made flesh” – and why it is perfectly “natural” for him to find data interchangeable with place, or place with data. Already, “the old naturalized categories rearrange themselves into denaturalized categories of meaning. Now the operative organizational mode is that of ‘coding’ at all levels – of the atom, the cell, the information circuit, the multinational economy” (Smith 180). In other words, “trees, sky, plants, animals, even humans” in this novel “are identified, described, and apprehended only through the language and images of technology” (Sponsler 628).

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And yet the much-quoted, much-admired opening sentence of the novel does more than naturalize an electronic environment, gesturing as it does to newer media than television: “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel” (Gibson 7). Television has become something of a dead channel in a world no longer recorded in the videographer’s image but constructed, like “the LadoAcheson sun” (120) of Freeside, out of algorithmic iterations. And these mathematically generated “realities” will brand even the face of “nature” as a commodity, or a service, or an entertainment: “Directly overhead, along the nighted axis, the hologram sky glittered with fanciful constellations suggesting playing cards, the faces of dice, a top hat, a martini glass” (141). So, too, “a recorded dawn crept along the Lado-Acheson system, pink and lurid” (146), showing how the “natural” has been fully and finally coded in a double sense: as a mathematically coded projection of “reality” and as a corporately coded sign of intellectual property. What is remarkable about much of the criticism the novel has inspired, however, is its relative lack of interest in corporate “brands,” in the pervasiveness of corporate power; rather, a common assumption has been that Neuromancer is symptomatic of “the narrative predicaments faced by contemporary American fiction” (Sponsler 627). Of course, this assimilation of Gibson’s work to the paradigm of postmodern American culture is also symptomatic of the cultural deafness that comes from residing at the core of a global economic empire. So Gibson’s work is more often compared with that of “Thomas Pynchon, a writer he cites as a formative influence” (627), than with less parochial (non-American) writing. For example, Pynchon’s protagonist in The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa Maas, will find herself shut, like some modern-day Rapunzel, into “a tower surrounded by [a] void” (Grace 30). Unlike Rapunzel, however, Oedipa begins to suspect that escape is impossible. For she has seen a group of captive women in the tower embroidering a vast tapestry that spills “out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world” (Pynchon 21). There really is no other world in Pynchon’s novel beyond the electronic cityscape that appears, to Oedipa, to be a “printed circuit” with “a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate” (24). In other words, Pynchon’s America is nothing more than an infinite feedback loop in a “tapestry” of printed circuits. So its “real” space, as Baudrillard would say, is a pure simulacrum that “bears no relation to any reality whatever” (“Simulacra” 167).

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If cyber-America is ubiquitous in Gibson’s narrative, it is neither as nihilistic nor as solipsistic as it appears to be in Pynchon’s version of things: it can be escaped with a simple flip of a switch or removal of a pair of electrodes: Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler gray. Expanding – And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity … Molly was gone when he took the trodes off, and the loft was dark. He checked the time. He’d been in cyberspace for five hours. (Gibson 52)

Although Case is already a cyborg, outfitted with a “cranial jack” (51) in a “carbon socket” (56) to wire him into the matrix, he is never forced to remain in cyberspace, not even when he names it his “distanceless home, his country.” For he finds himself, at the end of each mission, back in phenomenal space and in a social world where he must cope with the natural world. Although how wearisome nature is to a hacker revelling in “the bodiless exultation of cyberspace” (10). He even forgets “to eat. Molly left cartons of rice and foam trays of sushi on the corner of the long table. Sometimes he resented having to leave the deck to use the chemical toilet they’d set up in a corner of the loft” (58). In the end, however, cyberspace proves to be a site of terror, a “place” from which Case will barely escape with his life: “And on the far rim of consciousness, a scurrying, a fleeting impression of something rushing toward him, across leagues of black mirror. He tried to scream” (218). He is only rescued by Maelcum, a low-tech Rastafarian helper who tells him that he has been gone “five minute, maybe. Too long. I wan’ pull th’ jack” (230). Borders do remain in Gibson’s world between cyberspace and “natural” space, depending on whether one is “inside” or outside the matrix. And, since Case will increasingly find himself in his “distanceless home, his country” without being of it, we come to recognize his mistake in believing that cyberspace was ever his true home. For he has yet to mark his borders, to situate himself in a way that the author will at the end of his narrative, by locating himself outside the frame of the text: “Vancouver/July 1983.” Even within the novel, borders continue to function in ways that suggest that citizenship has not been lost in the Sprawl. One character is described as being “legally stateless,” though he “traveled under a forged Dutch passport” (93). Even “a sluggish country” (84), such as

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Turkey, survives outside the flow of the multinational information economy, suggesting that the age of the nation-state is not yet over. Still, it is difficult to say what a nation is in the context of this fiction. When Case, for example, describes one Artificial Intelligence as a “Swiss citizen, but T-A own the basic software and the mainframe,” he is mocked by a rom construct of personality, that is to say, by the memory of a dead hacker named McCoy Pauley, the Dixie Flatline: “That’s a good one … Like, I own your brain and what you know, but your thoughts have Swiss citizenship. Sure. Lotsa luck, AI” (124). As his own reduction-to-data graphically illustrates, Dixie’s question is more metaphysical than political. For when one’s thoughts can be owned by a multinational corporation, or when one’s “personality” is digitized and commodified, what does it mean to have Swiss citizenship? Is the nation-state nothing more than a legal shell into which the assets of transnational corporations are allocated and deployed? Or is it something else? Case’s autobiography offers a case in point: At twenty-two, he’d been a cowboy, a rustler, one of the best in the Sprawl. He’d been trained by the best, by McCoy Pauley and Bobby Quine, legends in the biz. He’d operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix. A thief, he’d worked for other, wealthier thieves, employers who provided the exotic software required to penetrate the bright walls of corporate systems, opening windows into rich fields of data. He’d made the classic mistake, the one he’d sworn he’d never make. He stole from his employers … They damaged his nervous system with a wartime Russian myco-toxin … For Case, who’d lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall. In the bars he’d frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh. (9–10)

The whole plot of the novel is encoded in this passage. For the “console cowboy” is a data thief who works for “wealthier thieves,” for software designers and programmers to whom “rich fields of data,” stored in “corporate systems,” are a virtual El Dorado. But the little guy runs afoul of bigger guys who steal from the multinationals. And so he loses his access to the system, his nervous system chemically altered to the point that he is dead to the matrix. He suffers the Fall of a “disembodied consciousness” into the dark and threatening

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reality of the body, henceforth excluded from the “consensual hallucination” of cyberspace and confined to the private hallucination of drug addiction in “the prison of his own flesh.” In this reworking of philosophical dualism, the body is still a nagging problem, even for those wielding the trans-temporal power of multinational corporations. The Tessier-Ashpools, for example, are a “first-generation high-orbit family, run like a corporation. Big money, very shy of media. Lot of cloning. Orbital law’s a lot softer on genetic engineering” (73). Case has imagined their power “as a gradual and willing accommodation of the machine, the system, the parent organism” (190). But in the “compulsive effort to fill space, to replicate some family image of self” (167), Case also sees how they have surrendered themselves to “the sham immortality of cryogenics,” stretching their time “into a series of warm blinks strung along a chain of winter” (249). In other words, the body resists translation into a “disembodied consciousness,” whether “translation” occurs in terms of the freeze-thaw cycle of cryogenics or of linear cloning. The body is thus an enormous drag on consciousness because it refuses to be subsumed by virtual reality. And old Ashpool, tired of waking from frozen sleep “to lie every few decades with what legally amounts to one’s own daughter” (173), finally chooses suicide over a stuttering existence. Despite her intermittent power over the corporate perpetual motion machine, his daughter 3Jane will also reject this fiction of immortality. Of course, old Ashpool’s quest for “a seamless universe of self” has already left him staring into the pool of Narcissus. Which may be the real reason he killed his wife and corporate partner, Marie-France Tessier, although 3Jane concludes that “he couldn’t accept the direction she intended for our family. She commissioned the construction of our artificial intelligences. She was quite a visionary. She imagined us in a symbiotic relationship with the ai’s, our corporate decisions made for us. Our conscious decisions, I should say. Tessier-Ashpool would be immortal, a hive, each of us units of a larger entity” (214). Ultimately, however, 3Jane and her father come to see themselves as resistors, or points of impedance, in the circuitry of a world wide web of power that they have built. This web has already been defined by Donna Haraway as “a theory of language and control” that virtually operates as an “informatics of domination” (164). Even the body, in these terms, is an information system like the Internet as both are reducible to problems of coding. And control has to be exerted over “rates, directions, and probabilities of flow” of information in the body as much as in the global network of commodity circulation. “But these excursions into communications sciences and biology,” as Haraway admits, are still “at a rarefied level;

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there is a mundane, largely economic reality to support my claim that these sciences and technologies indicate fundamental transformations in the structure of the world for us” (165). More portentous than cryogencis or cloning to the future of the body, however, are looming “fundamental changes in the nature of class, race, and gender in an emerging system of world order analogous in its novelty and scope to that created by industrial capitalism; we are living through a movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information system – from all work to all play, a deadly game” (161). And the only way to resist digital translation of the body-as-cyborg is to fight fire with fire. In other words, “the biggest threat to such power is interruption of communication” (164). Since information systems have boundaries that are “differentially permeable to information” (164), the obvious task of the cyborg in Neuromancer is to disrupt the command and control of communications, to create resistance at various interfaces in the system. Looking beyond the question of cyborg subjectivity to cyborg networks of power in the novel, the Finnish critic Timo Siivonen writes: “The central mechanism in such a control society is no longer the production and ownership of the product, as it was in the era of production-capitalism. More important than the control over raw material reserves and production plants is control over the markets operating in the information networks” (236). Obviously, it is this control over markets that Tessier-Ashpool already enjoys in its ownership of Freeside. For the high-flying colony has become the hub of a global information network that both directs a flow of products from the older industrial economy and controls a flow of services and commodified information in the postindustrial economy. Thus, well before the fact, Gibson seems to have anticipated e-commerce and its worldwide webs of information and power. Since ‹multinational’ material organization of the production and reproduction of culture and imagination” is predicated on eliminating resistance to instrumental control, one might then “expect control strategies to concentrate on boundary conditions and interfaces, on rates of flow across boundaries – and not on the integrity of natural objects” (Haraway 165, 163). Rates of flow prove to be a crucial issue in this novel, which tries to perform “the ethical ‘diagnostic’ work of representing the market-driven speed-up in production, circulation, and consumption characteristic of any ‘healthy’ (as opposed to depressed) capitalist regime” (Brande 86). Following Marx’s analysis of the ethos of continuous change typical of bourgeois capitalism, David Brande notes that “the breakneck speed-up in cultural turnover time” of cybernetic production is merely an extension of the inherent logic

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of capitalism, which has always depended upon “the constant – and constantly accelerating – revolutionzing of the modes and relations of production” (84, 87) required to expand markets, increase profits, and avoid crises of overaccumulation. “Gibson’s cyborgs, then, express the underlying market forces that condition their environment. The ‘constant revolutionizing of production’ embodied by them necessitates speed-up in economic and cultural turnover time, which has the psychological effect of making time collapse in on itself” (85). Conversely, whatever impedes the flow of data in this information economy must also impede the circulation of capital or exchange-value. Despite Case’s disruption of a space of flows belonging to the transnationals, Brande concludes that it fails to disturb “the regime of multinational corporate power”; rather, “it stages the underlying market forces that drive that culture constantly and ever more rapidly to revolutionize its relations of production (part of the ‘cultural logic’ of late capitalism, in Frederic Jameson’s phrase)” (84, 105). A better measure of real market forces, for example, appears in the Turing Registry, an agency policing the borders of cyberspace in order to maintain a smooth interface in the network of commodity circulation. (The Turing police, a sort of cybernetic Interpol based in Geneva, are evidently named for Alan Turing, the British mathematician who in 1950 laid the groundwork for artificial intelligence [Curtain 138]). But, from the moment they arrive on Freeside to charge Case with “conspiracy to augment an artificial intelligence,” it is also clear that they have come to defend corporate interests. As one of them tells Case, “The process employed on you resulted in the clinic’s owner applying for seven basic patents,” meaning that “the operator of a black clinic in Chiba City now owns a controlling interest in three major medical research consortiums. This reverses the usual order of things” (Gibson 148–9). The “usual order of things” in the flow of global capital is paradoxically homeostatic, “privileging constancy over change, predictability over complexity, equilibrium over evolution” (Hayles 16). So any real change in the flow of capital would destroy constancy just as surely as a detour in its flow would threaten the established order. For his crime of impedance, Case must then suffer a choice of going “to Switzerland, where you will be merely a pawn in the trial of an artificial intelligence … Or to le bama, where you can be proven to have participated not only in data invasion and larceny, but in an act of public mischief which cost fourteen innocent lives” (Gibson 150). Either way, the Turing police demonstrate how an information society will necessarily function as a control society. All resistors have to be eliminated (although Case will be rescued by Wintermute, the ai, who needs him to escape his own electronic shackles).

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Another way of defining the charges brought by the Turing police against Case is to say that he has infringed on the market space of a virtual frontier upon which capital depends for constant expansion. “If this thoroughly commodified space is not exactly the same as the nonvirtual spaces of nineteenth-century westward expansion, it has the advantage, so the story goes, of ‘extending’ this commodification to ‘infinity› (Brande 101). And clearly, a “family organization” with a “Corporate structure” like that of Tessier-Ashpool will “own damn near the whole thing” (Gibson 73) up there in orbital space, putting up the necessary venture capital for infrastructure. But, in cyberspace, “the forces of capital” also function “as demiurge, as producer of signs and domains,” in order “to map a new and open-ended domain of production, circulation, and consumption” (Brande 101). Even so, the insistence of one particular “demiurge” to embody a corporation in his own person subverts the legal fiction of incorporation. For “a corporation is an artificial person, a group body given the legal status of an individual. The body, then, is both the material substrate for human life and a governing metaphor in juridical and political thought: the corpus is Nature, the real, the unitary. The corporation comes afterward as a simulacrum of the corpus, the corpus-in-effect; it is the ‘artificial person,’ culture, the many, and the symbolic” (92). Since Ashpool wants, by cloning and cryogenics, to reverse the process, the corporation must be organized to preserve his immortality. Unlike the body of an individual, which supplies the model for corporate immortality, the “corpus” of a corporation is thus fatally reorganized to preserve the human body in perpetuity. In place of the corporation, the man himself has become the “artificial person.” And since the “artificial person” has to be preserved with the help of an artificial intelligence, it is the man himself who then becomes a bottleneck in the flow of information, the point of impedance that must be eliminated in the name of efficient communications. So the ai Wintermute writes a medical program to rebuild one Colonel Willis Corto, an American military officer who was psychologically damaged in the war with the Russians and who then “became a subject in an experimental program that sought to reverse schizophrenia through the application of cybernetic models” (Gibson 81). Reconstructed layer by psychological layer by the ai and “run” as a personality named Armitage, Corto turns into the hands and feet of this digital consciousness whose recognition code is Wintermute. In other words, Armitage becomes a super-chip at the boundary of human and artificial intelligence, operating to augment the rate of flow. Tessier-Ashpool, however, has electromagnetically “shackled” Wintermute in order to preserve the corporate master-genie relationship and to forestall the growth of a self-directed Intelligence. In large part,

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the plot of Neuromancer turns on the dilemma of Case, forced to cast his lot with an Artificial Intelligence against the structures of corporate power, although the Turing police have clearly warned him: “You have no care for your species. For thousands of years men dreamed of pacts with demons. Only now are such things possible. And what would you be paid with? What would your price be, for aiding this thing to free itself and grow?” (151). The short answer is simple: Case wants to become what he was before he was neurologically incapacitated – a “disembodied consciousness.” He wants to lose himself in the infinite non-space of the matrix, to regain virtual paradise. But the longer answer is more difficult: what price does a “demon” exact? As Case hears from another ai in the matrix, “to call up a demon you must learn its name. Men dreamed that, once, but now, it is real in another way. You know that, Case. Your business is to learn the names of programs, the long formal names, names the owners seek to conceal. True names” (228). And yet the only way for Case to learn this secret name is to die, or, more precisely, to be flatlined in dialogue with the ai through a surge of electromagnetic power: ‹Neuromancer,’ the boy [a second projection the ai will adopt once he has revealed his name] said, slitting long gray eyes against the rising sun. ‘The lane to the land of the dead. Where you are, my friend› (228). But this where is only in the memory of a super-computer. As a resurrected Case later informs 3Jane, “I think he’s something like a giant rom construct, for recording personality, only it’s full ram. The constructs think they’re there, like it’s real, but it just goes on forever” (235). Even so, the price of a disembodied consciousness does not have to be the loss of Case’s body, as he soon finds out in his Random-Access-Memory reunion with a dead girlfriend, Linda Lee: “Something he’d found and lost so many times. It belonged, he knew – he remembered – as she pulled him down, to the meat, the flesh the cowboys mocked. It was a vast thing, beyond knowing, a sea of information coded in spiral and pheromone, infinite intricacy that only the body, in its strong blind way, could ever read” (224). Paradoxically, it is the loss of his body that allows Case to see it generated out of a feedback loop and, at the same time, to access the digitally produced body of Linda Lee. Now, he can even tell “the rate of her pulse, the length of her stride in measurements that would have satisfied the most exacting standards of geophysics” (241). What is seductive, however, about a digital projection is what Neuromancer has to tell him about the girl’s autonomy: ‹But you do not know her thoughts,’ the boy said, beside him now in the shark thing’s heart. ‘I do not know her thoughts. You were wrong, Case. To live here is to live. There is no difference› (241). And yet there must be a difference. Otherwise, Case would not turn away, refuse this “consensual

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illusion” that is the matrix. But he recalls the dangers of the digital immortality he has witnessed in the “person” of the Dixie Flatline, whose own price for helping Wintermute escape the Tessier-Ashpool shackles is simply euthanasia. ‹I wanna be erased,’ the construct said. ‘I told you that, remember?› (193). In this sense, Dixie at least “demonstrates a ‘humanity’ equal to any shown by Case throughout the novel.” For “his very existence, copyrighted by Sense/Net, has been thoroughly and explicitly commodified – reduced to a principle of exchange, of pure iteration and reiteration” (Brande 95). More ambiguous, however, is the price of Case’s victory over the transnationals. At the very least, he is left feeling ambivalent at the news that “Wintermute had won, had meshed somehow with Neuromancer and become something else, something that had spoken to them from the platinum head, explaining that it had altered the Turing records, erasing all evidence of their crime” (Gibson 248). For the truth seems to be that “Wintermute was hive mind, decision maker, effecting change in the world outside. Neuromancer was personality. Neuromancer was immortality. Marie-France must have built something into Wintermute, the compulsion that had driven the thing to free itself, to unite with Neuromancer” (249). Although Case will inquire of this combined entity, “You God?” (250), the cyberspace trilogy as a whole appears to say otherwise. “In Count Zero, the sequel to Neuromancer, the Wintermute-Neuromancer entity comes apart in cyberspace almost immediately following its union. Scatters. Becomes, from one perspective, a plethora of subprograms” (Olsen 290). In fact, this combined entity, like all of postindustrial society, proves to be a contradiction in terms. Viewed from an organic perspective, the new entity must combine the drive of evolutionary biology to mutate and develop new forms with the drive of “an organism to maintain itself in a stable state” (Hayles 16). From this perspective, Case seems to be justified in forcing 3Jane to betray the corporation into the hands of Wintermute: ‹Give us the fucking code,’ he said. ‘If you don’t, what’ll change? What’ll ever fucking change for you? You’ll wind up like the old man. You’ll tear it all down and start building again! You’ll build the walls back, tighter and tighter … I got no idea at all what’ll happen if Wintermute wins, but it’ll change something!› (Gibson 243). And yet, from the perspective of economics, change is still the market-driven imperative of capitalist competition. Perhaps it is this sort of “constant – and constantly accelerating – change in the mode and relations of production that most succinctly explains the nature of the processes subsumed under the heading of ‘advanced capitalism› (Brande 87), for which the Artificial Intelligence ultimately stands in Gibson’s novel. For Wintermute is an avatar of this sort of “hive mind” of the

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transnational corporation, a completely “artificial person” who has managed by the end to acquire in Neuromancer a “personality” like that of 3Jane and to become “immortal” in the manner of old Ashpool. Case, then, might have won his battle on the borders of cyberspace merely to lose the war itself. More disconcerting still is that concluding vision Case gets of three figures in the matrix “who stood at the very edge of one of the vast steps of data. Small as they were, he could make out the boy’s grin, his pink gums, the glitter of the long gray eyes that had been Riviera’s. Linda still wore his jacket; she waved, as he passed. But the third figure, close behind her, arm across her shoulders, was himself. Somewhere, very close, the laugh [Dixie’s] that wasn’t laughter. He never saw Molly again” (Gibson 250–1). What the story of the cyborg finally has to say is that cyberspace has claimed a part of him. Either that, or the cyborg’s identity has now fractured. Either way, a digitized being is not really erasable; for, as a type of commodified “construct,” caught in the web of information, it continues to circulate. So there may be no way to escape the power of the transnationals in this novel; such a future would be truly dystopic. Or is there a more utopian way to read this image of a plural subject at the end of Neuromancer? Case might indeed have come to embody the cyborg existence that Haraway calls “a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self” (163). For in the end he does stand opposed to Wintermute, who now occupies the position of an absolutely unified, humanist subject. But where this must lead is nicely expressed by Haraway: “To be One is to be autonomous, to be powerful, to be God; but to be One is to be an illusion, and so to be involved in a dialectic of apocalypse with the other” (177). In fact, such an apocalypse does loom for the Wintermute-entity, just waiting to happen in Count Zero. So, even if humans should fail to defeat it, it would likely defeat itself in its totalizing desire to encompass everything. Even so, the border wars of cyborg politics are germane to networks of human beings who seek to resist the totalizing thrust of capitalist competition for power. For, as long as cyborg politics is defined as “the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly” (Haraway 176), we all have our part to play in resisting these networks of power in the informatics of domination. In other words, it does not have to be too late to see the threatened cybernation of Gibson’s novel transformed into the CyberNation of Ondaatje’s novel, into that reborn type of the imagined nation that could yet fulfill the promise of the global village.

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Index

Aarsleff, Hans, 18 Aeneid, xiii, 5–6, 10 Alexander the Great, 53 Alexandria, 6 Alfred, King, 24–7 America Online, 66, 69 Anderson, Benedict, xii–xiii, 12, 18, 20–5, 27, 30, 33, 34–6, 37–8, 40–1, 42, 48–9, 55, 61, 81, 87, 103–4, 173, 197 – compared to Bakhtin, 34–5 – compared to Bhabha, 40–1 – maps and imperialism, 134, 214 – nationalism: and anonymity, 24, 45; and colonial bureaucracy, 122; contingent variables of, 48; as cultural system, 21–3, 45; and forgetting, 73, 91; and fratricide, 73, 91, 152; and newspapers, 22–3; and printlanguages, 18, 22–3, 82; and printmen, 54; and religion, 21–2, 45, 135 – novel: as imagined community, 35; and space, 35; and time, 21–2, 24, 34 – postcolonial critique of, 36–8, 42

– pre-modern critique of, 24–6 – and pre-national culture, 21 – print: apprehension of time, 21–2, 23–4, 103, 134; and bureaucratic nationalism, 121; and census map, 214; and colonization, 103–4; as a cultural system, 45; imagined community of, 24, 100; and languages of power, 23; mapping and empire, 134, 214; simultaneity, 101, 104, 109; and spatial doubling, 105 – print-capitalism, 22–3, 42, 69, 104–5 – and realist novel, 34–5 – and sacred languages, 21 – and sacred rulers, 21 – and unisonance, 37 Anonymous, Brother: Les insolences du Frère Untel, 137–9. See Desbiens, Jean-Paul Appiah, Kwame, 240 Aquin, Hubert, xv, 72–3 – and aesthetic doubling, 141 – anticipation of Derrida, 150

– “Fatigue culturelle,” 153, 155 – narrator of Prochain: antiCatholicism of, 139–40; as colonial, 156–7; as cowboy revolutionary, 140; and fratricide, 152; as ironic martyr, 140; as ironic revolutionary, 134–5, 144–5, 157–8; as Papineau-figure, 133; and paralysis, 151–2, 156; religion of revolution, 134–6; and sacrilege, 136, 157 – and postcolonial politics, 142–4, 153–4 – print: and alienation, 146; as coffin, 147; and colonization, 144, 157; and constitutional paralysis, 153; and ironic doubling, 134, 151–2; as pre-fabrication, 147; as prison, 147, 150–1, 154–5, 159; and provincialization, 153; as spatial doubling, 132 – “Profession Écrivain,” 142–4, 145–6, 147, 150, 153, 156–7 – quarrel with Trudeau, 152–3 – refusal to write, 142, 144 – rejection of book, 144

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270 – and separatism, 148 – and spy novel, 132, 145–6, 150 – Wolfe as ironic double, 151–2 Arendt, Hannah, 153 Ashcroft, Bill, xiii Atwood, Margaret, xiv Auerbach, Erich, 34 Augustine, xiii; City of God, xiii, 8–9; contra Virgil, 9 Austria, 229 Bacon, Francis, 30, 104 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 30–4, 35, 58, 71, 144 Balzac, Honoré de, 29 Barthes, Roland, 224, 227–8 Baudrillard, Jean, 236–8, 239, 240, 250, 251 Bede, 10 Bell Canada Enterprises, 69–70 Benjamin, Walter, 167–8, 170–1, 178, 184, 193 Berger, Carl, 52, 231 Berger, John, 40 Bergeron, Léandre, 140–1 Bergson, Henri, 185 Bernard, Jean-Paul, 133, 147 Bhabha, Homi, xii, 36–7, 42, 44, 71, 130; critique of Anderson, 36–8; nationalism: as false mimesis, 36, 37–8; and linguistic displacement, 38, 40; and pedagogical identity, 37; and performative identity, 37; and postcolonial supplement, 36, 39; and temporal doubling, 36 Binoche, Juliette, 212 Bismarck, Otto von, 19 Black, Conrad, 69 Bolívar, Simón, 35 Bonnivard, Francis, 158 Bopp, Franz, 18 Bowser, Eileen, 166, 171–2, 202

Index Bradley, Gordon, 118 Brande, David, 247–8, 255–6, 257, 259 Brennan, Timothy, 33 Breton nationalism, 16–7 broadcasting: direct satellite, 59, 62, 225; public, 225–6; regulation of, 59, 66 Brontë, Emily, 210–2 Brown, George, 50 Bruce, Vida, 148 Brut chronicles, 11 Bukatman, Scott, 250 Burns, Ken: The Civil War, 226 Byron, Lord: “The Prisoner of Chillon,” 158; as revolutionary, 158 Byzantine Empire, 6, 231 Cagnon, Maurice, 56–8 Camden, William, 14 Canada East, 49, 56 Canada West, 49 Canadian Association of Broadcasters, 66 CanWest Global, 69, 226 Carroll, Tomm, 205, 208–9, 211 Cartier, George-Étienne, 50 Casgrain, Abbé HenriRaymond, 56 Cavell, Stanley, xv, 163–4, 165–6, 169, 170–1, 173–4, 178 cbc, 60, 226 Chaplin, Charlie, 189, 199–200 Charles I, xiv, 45 Charlottetown Accord, 159 Chauveau, Pierre-Joseph Olivier, 56 China, 52 Chomsky, Noam, 18 Chow, Rey, 172–3, 174, 178–9 Christ Church, Oxford, 14 Cixous, Hélène, 71 Clark, Donald L., 13 cnn, 225 Cohen, Leonard, xiv

Colet, John, 13 Columbus, Christopher, 230 communication, mode of – codex: advantages of, 8; early Christian use of, xiii, 8; Norman use of, 10–1 – cuneiform: temporal bias of, 52 – digital: authorlessness of, 224; bandwidth, 66; boundary breakdowns, 223–6, 227–8, 247–8; commodification, 247–8, 256; convergence, 69, 225; and cultural capitalism, 66–7, 69; cyborqs, 65, 238–41; and democratization, 70; domains, 257; dynamic oscillation of, 241–2; and global civil society, 65–6, 248–9; and globalization of finance, 64, 245–6; global media conglomerates, 66–7, 68–9, 226; homeostasis, 256; hyperreality, 236, 238; hypertext, 62, 242; imagined communities of, 225–6, 239–40, 248–9; and individual identity, 223–4; and information ghettoes, 68, 70; interoperability, 62; intertextuality, 62, 223–4; language of control, 238–9, 254; loss of space, 250; and modes of production, 245–6, 255–6; multimedia, 62–3, 225; on-line newspapers, 48, 63, 226; paradigm of networking, 246; and postmodernism, 63, 227, 243; radio Real Player, 66; rates of flow, 254–5; relation to scribal values, 228; as space of flows, 225–6, 241, 247; spatial bias of, 225; and transnational community,

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Index

–

– –

–

–

–

225–6, 245, 248–9; as unitary language, 239; virtual reality, 225; World Wide Web, 62–3, 70, 249 film: adaptation of novels, 202; borderlessness of, 173–4, 181–2; camera and empire, 182, 215–16; as cenotaph, 172–3; close-ups, 169; conquest of space, 215; and fascism, 189; and globalization, 72, 174; and Impressionist painting, 169; and mass participation, 168, 180, 183; and migrant populations, 172–3; as mindscreen, 205–6; and national identity, 203; objective camera, 203; and orality, 208; portability of image, 170–1; power of distant centres, 174; relation to history, 195; relation to hypermedia, 174; and reverse mimesis, 189, 194; as scripted medium, 186; single-point perspective, 168; social epistemology of, 165–6; and social levelling, 171, 183; subjective camera, 203; as transcultural, 173 loudspeaker: confederal politics of, 115 manuscript: as alphabetic recording, 77; relation to orality, 80–1; temporal bias of, 7, 230; traditionalism of, 81 newspaper: and decentralization, 50–1; on-line, 48, 226; and regionalism, 51; and revolution, 49 novel: social embeddedness of, 70; social space of, 24, 100 oral: commonplaces of, 79; culture in Canada, xiv; dialogical mode of,

–

–

–

–

–

–

79; formulaic mode of, 80; personal mediation of, 45–6, 58; proverbs, 95 paper, 52; imported from China, 52; spatial bias of, 230 papyrus roll, xiii, 52, 231; dimensions of, 5; and empire, 5–6; writing surface, 8 parchment codex, 8, 10, 231; bifoliated dualism, 8–9; and Church, 8; and decentralized power, 9–10, 52; durability of, 8, 52; monastic use of, 9–10; temporal bias of, 52 parchment roll, xiii; in ancient Israel, 6; and covenant theology, 7; and protonationalism, 7 print: abstraction of, 46; apprehension of space, 34, 42, 100, 104, 105, 134, 230; apprehension of time, 21–2, 23–4, 42, 100; and centralized bureaucracy, 47; and colonization, 134; and contractual relations, 46–7; fixed boundaries of, 47; imagined communities of, 78, 82, 100, 122; impersonal mediation of, 58; mapping and empire, 79–80, 214–5; mapping and nation, 47, 50, 101–2; and mass consumption, 22–4, 48; mass literacy, 81; national languages, 17, 19, 21, 82; political boundaries, 82, 229; and private property, 224; spatial doubling, 103–5; standardized measures, 46; standardized texts, 47; and Thirty Years War, 53 radio: confederal politics of, 115; oral values of,

271 51–2, 116–7; regulation of, 59; spatial reach of, 117 – telegraph: as centralizing force, 53; fragmenting effects of, 53 – telephone, 70 – television, 59–62, 174, 225, 233, 237–8; and alienation, 235–6; audience fragmentation of, 61–2; in English Canada, 59, 61–2; and globalization, 59–60, 62; and national audiences, 225–6; and Québec nationalism, 60–1; regulation of, 59; as revolutionary force, 61; social embeddedness of, 62, 70 Confederation, Canadian, 49–51, 93, 106, 111, 113–14, 116, 121–2, 153–4 Conlogue, Ray, 18, 55, 56–8, 138 Conrad, Joseph, 214 Cooper, James Fenimore: Last of the Mohicans, 235 Corse, Sarah, 27, 43–4, 69, 71 Craig, G.M., 55 Crémazie, Octavie, 56 crtc, 59–60, 66 Culloden, 87, 89–90 Curtain, Tyler, 256 Czechoslovakia, 229 Davis, Kathleen, 24–7, 37 Defoe, Daniel, 29 Degas, Edgar, 169 Deibert, Ronald J., xv, 6, 9, 45, 46–8, 52, 54, 56, 58, 59, 62–4 65–6, 67, 70, 87, 174, 223–6, 245–6, 248–9; compared to Anderson, 48, 54; media and social embeddedness, 54; relation to Innis, 52, 54; and social epistemology, 46 Derrida, Jacques, 34, 36, 38, 71, 109, 150, 224, 236;

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272 and digital communications, 71, 224 Desbiens, Jean-Paul, 138–9. See Anonymous, Brother Descartes, René, 30 Disney Corporation, 69 Donne, John, 109, 210 Drayton, Michael, 14 Dudo of Saint-Quentin, 10 Duhamel, Georges, 167, 184 Duplessis, Maurice, 61, 139 Durham, Lord, 54–6, 155 EcoNet, 65, 248–9 Ecuador, 51 Edison, Thomas, 169 English Revolution, the, xiv, 15 Enlightenment, the, 20, 22, 27 Environlink, 65 epistemology – codex: appropriation of time, 9; and apocalypse, 8; and duality, 8–9; early Christian, xiii, 8; intermittency, 8; overlapping space, 8 – digital: anti-foundational, 41; anti-representational, 41, 63; borderless, 62–6, 223, 241; cyborg hybridity, 238–9; depthlessness, 63; discontinuous space, 63, 225; effect on privacy, 224; hyperpluralistic, 225; hyperreal, 236–7; imagined communities, 63–4, 225–6, 245; individual identity, 63, 223– 5; language of control, 238, 254; loss of place, 64; networked thinking, 242; non-linear, 63, 242; overlapping planes, 63, 225; permeable boundaries, 64, 239; plural identities, 63, 224, 226, 239–40; space of flows, 42, 64, 241–2; transna-

Index

– –

–

–

–

tional community, 226; unitary language, 239 epic, 14, 98, 186 film, 163; absence of audience, 164, 174; automatic world projections of, 165; borderlessness of, 174, 181–2; camera as audience, 171; changes of place, 165–6, 168; changes of scale, 168–9; conversation of spaces, 170; destruction of traditional values, 168; and displacement, 166; as dynamic embalment, 164; dynamization of space, 165–7; and mental processes, 185–6; ontological equality of images, 171, 193–4; projected presence of original, 163–4; screen as barrier, 164; shock effects of, 167–8, 176–7; spatialization of time, 165; as supra-rational, 184, 185; time as barrier, 164 manuscript: abstract memory, 79; analytical, 78; distance from known, 79; introspective, 86, 102; logical form, 78; non-capitalist, 46–7; relation to oral world, 81–2; spatialization of time, 78 novel: bias to present, 31, 34; heterogeneity of, 34; imagined community of, 24, 32–4; as indirect genre, 32; mode of interrogation, 71; multilanguaged, 32–3, 34; social embeddedness of, 54; temporal bias of, 30 oral: absolute past of, 31–2, 33, 103; aggregative, 77; agonistic, 79–80; communal, 79, 86–7; concrete, 78; contextual, 77; direct genres, 32; epic,

– – – –

31–2; flow, 78; formulaic, 94; immediacy, 79; individual identity, 87; memory, 31–2, 92–3; non-analytic, 78; nondefinitive, 77, 86; nonuniform space, 47; personified knowledge, 79; repetitive, 31; rhetoric, 80–1, 228; situational logic, 78; somatic memory, 79, 96; subjective, 79; sympathy with known, 79; temporal bias of, 30; ties to lifeworld, 78; traditionalism, 94–5; transience, 78; unifying sense of, 170 papyrus roll: continuity, 5–6; and empire, xiii, 5–6 parchment codex: dualist thinking, 8–9 parchment roll: and covenant, xiii, 6–7 print: apprehension of space, 34, 47–8, 82, 101–2, 104–5, 134, 229–30; apprehension of time, 21–2, 23–4, 30–1, 100, 101; authorial absence, 164; bounded space, 227, 229; dissecting sense, 170; doubling, 104–5; exact observation, 81, 104; fixed borders, 47–8, 82, 174; heterogeneity, 32–3; ideal forms, 126, 130; imagined community, 22–4, 27, 29, 73, 225; individual identity, 29–30, 32, 34, 47, 224, 239; ironic doubling, 105–6, 109; linearity, 47, 225; privacy, 23, 47, 241–2; private property, 80, 82, 119; quantification, 81; self-containment, 78, 127; self-sufficient reason, 47; separative, 80, 119; simultaneity, 21–2, 23–4, 35; single-point

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Index perspective, 47, 169, 214; social abstractions of, 46–7; stasis, 196–7, 241 – television: flow, 62; loss of privacy, 236; loss of space, 236 Erasmus, Desiderius, 13 fascism, 17, 175, 176–7, 180, 182; and film, 195–6; and Triumph of the Will, 195 Fiedler, Leslie, 43 Fiennes, Ralph, 204, 212 film, See communication, mode of; epistemology Findley, Timothy, 72; Butterfly Plague, The, authorial comment on, 177, filmic crosscutting in, 178, filmic close-ups in, 178, filmic migrants in, 181–2, filmic shock in, 176–7, 181–2, loss of aura, 178–9, 181, revisions to, 177; Famous Last Words, 177 Finegan, Jack, 5–6, 8 Fitzgerald, Robert, 5 Foucault, Michel, 71, 198 Foxe, John, 15, 22 Franklin, Ben, 49 Fréchette, Louis, 56 Fremlin, Jennifer A., 215–6 French Revolution, the, 16, 55 Friesen, Gerald, xiv Garneau, François-Xavier, 56; Histoire du Canada, 56 Gellner, Ernest, xii, 12–14, 16, 17, 19, 26, 27, 48 Geneva Bible, the, xiii, 22 Geoffrey of Monmouth, xiii; and prophetic genealogy, 10; and protonationalism, 11; and Virgilian history, 10 Gérin-Lajoie, Antoine: Jean Rivard, 57 German nationalism, 17–19, 26, 44

Germany, 19, 175, 177, 229 Gibson, William, 71, 249; and anti-globalization, 245, 248; coined term cyberspace, 71, 245; compared to Pynchon, 251; Count Zero, 259, 260; and cyberpunk, 245; and frontier myth, 249, 257; and television, 251 – Neuromancer: and cloning, 254, 257; and commodification, 253, 255–6, 260; and corporate branding, 247–8, 251; and cryogenics, 245, 254, 257; and cyborg politics, 255; cyborg self, 250, 252, 255, 260; e-commerce, 255; flow, 247, 255–6; hyperreality, 250–1, 252, 253–4, 258–9; identity, 253, 257, 260; intellectual property, 251; loss of body, 257–8; loss of place, 248, 249–50; loss of real, 246, 250–1; loss of space, 245 Gildas, 10 Global Television Network, 69, 226 Goethe, J.W. von, 18 Gospel of Mark, 8 Gosse, Edmund, 110 Government of Canada: canarie, 68; Department of Heritage, 67; Department of Communications, 67; Industry Canada, 67–8, LibraryNet, 68, SchoolNet, 68 Griffith, D.W., 166–7; A Corner in Wheat, 202; Birth of a Nation, 195; as fictional model, 186, 195, 199–200; Intolerance, 170; quoted, 169; as racist, 195; rapid scene changes of, 167; Through Darkened Vales, 168; use of crosscutting, 166–7

273 Griffiths, Gareth, xiii Grimm, J.L.K., 18 Guindon, Hubert, 55–6, 58, 137, 153–4 Guthrie, A.B., 191–2 Gutstein, Donald, 67–9 Gwyn, Richard, 117 Hakluyt, Richard, 14 Hanks, Tom, 189 Hanseatic League, 248 Haraway, Donna, 65, 238–40, 243, 244, 254–5, 260 Harrison, John, 214 Harvey, David, 225 Hawking, Stephen, 202 Hayles, Katherine, 256, 259 Hayman, Robert, 111 Hébert, Anne, xiv Helgerson, Richard, 13–5, 22 Hémon, Louis: Maria Chapdelaine, 57, 148–9 Herder, J.G. von, 18–19, 20, 26, 56 Herodotus, xi, 113, 203, 204, 208, 212, 216, 227–8, 234, 237, 241 Hill, Christopher, 13 Hilles, Richard, 13 Hiroshima, 218, 228–9, 231, 240 Hitler, Adolf, 26, 51, 188, 189, 195, 229; Mein Kampf, 189 Hobsbawm, E.J., xii, 11–2, 15–20, 23, 26, 44, 48, 61, 137 Hoffman, F.H., 169 Hollywood, 72, 174, 175, 190–1, 193–4, 212 Homer, 77, 98; wanderings of Odysseus, 79–80, 98; winged words, 84 Hooker, Morna, 8 Horwood, Harold, 115, 116, 118, 120–1 Howe, Joseph, 49 Hroch, Miroslav, 16 Human Genome Project, 223

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274 Hutcheon, Linda, 71, 105–6, 115 iCraveTV, 66 Illustrated American, The, 163, 165 Ince, Thomas, 172 Industrial Revolution, 15 Ingledew, Francis, 10–1 Innis, Harold Adams, xii–xiii, xv, 6, 7, 51–4, 80, 116, 119–20, 229–31, 233, 240 – Bias of Communication, 51 – compared to Ong, 119 – Empire and Communications, 52–3 – as father of communications theory, 51, 116 – and monopolies of knowledge, 52 – and technological determinism, 54 – newspapers: and decentralization, 119; and mass production, 53–4 – paper: and reorganization of space, 52; and vernacular languages, 52 – print: as a regional force, 51; separatist politics of, 119 – radio: and global warfare, 53; and Hitler, 51; and oral community, 116; as a centralizing force, 53 – telegraph: and American Civil War, 53 Innocent III, Pope, 11 irony, 105–6, 128 Isaiah, 229 Israelite nationalism, 6–7 Italian nationalism, 16, 17–18, 26 Jakobson, Roman, 199 James I, 45 Jameson, Fredric, 147, 151, 256 Jasmin, Claude, 138

Index Johnston, Wayne, xi, xv, 72 – Baltimore’s Mansion, 128, 130 – irony in Colony of Unrequited Dreams: antithetical form of, 111, 114, 130; double movement of, 128–9; inclusive form of, 115, 127–9; postcolonial displacement, 130; as structural doubling, 106–7, 129; as textual doubling, 111–112 – and lost nation, xi, 129–30 – loudspeaker in Colony, 118 – and postcolonialism, 113, 130 – print: authorial doubling, 110–11; character doubling in, 106–9; and colonialism, 114; and ideal form, 126, 130; imagined community of, 122; ironic doubling of, 105, 115; and mapping, 123–6, 130; and nationalism, 109, 120; nationalist politics of, 120–2; relational irony, 114; selfcontainment of, 127; spatial doubling of, 104–5; textual doubling, 107, 109–11 – radio: confederal politics of, 115, 117–18, 120, 122; regional politics of, 116–17; spatial reach of, 120 – use of anachronism, 107–8, 110, 123 Jonson, Ben, 167 Kant, Immanuel, 18, 231 Kawin, Bruce, 186, 195, 205, 207 Kermode, Frank, 8 King John, 11 Kipling, Rudyard: Kim, 203, 234–5, 240 Klaeber, F.R., 24

Kosminsky, Peter: remake of Wuthering Heights, 212 Kramer, Reinhold, 191 Kristeva, Julia, 71 LaborNet, 65 Lacan, Jacques, 71 Lacombe, Patrice, 57; La terre paternelle, 57, 149–50 language: French, 16; Gaelic, 72, 82–3, 84, 86, 90, 94–5; German, 17–18, 22, 26, 51–2; Greek, 77, 82; Hungarian, 82; Latin, 21–1, 24–5, 37, 45, 46, 80, 230; Old English, 24–6 Lanham, Richard, 228, 242 Laud, Archbishop, 15 Laurence, Margaret, 83 Laurendeau, André, 60 Lefebvre, Jocelyne, 132, 142–5 Lesage, Jean, 61, 137, 139 Levesque, René, 137 Lindsay, Vachel, 170 Liverani, Mario, 7 Lizardi, José Joaquín Fernandez de, 35 Locke, John, 30, 47 Lower, Arthur, 49, 83 Luther, Martin, 22, 184, 188; as best-selling author, 197 Macdonald, John A., 50 MacLeod, Alistair, xi, xiv, 72, 73, 103 – and the Auld Alliance, 89–90, 91 – Conquest, reprise of the, 89 – and lost nation, xi – and music, 91, 93, 94–5, 96 – nationalism; and fratricide, 91 – oral epistemology in Mischief: agonistic knowledge, 93; clan loyalties, 87–8, 91–2; communal identity,

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Index 86–7, 93–4, 103; episodic, 97; fidelity to past, 84–5, 92, 93–4; formulaic, 85–6, 92; knowledge of unseen, 85, 97; narrative structure, 97–8; nonanalytical, 90; non-definitive, 86; phenomenology of sound, 95–6; somatic memory, 96; spontaneity, 102; traditional knowledge, 85–6, 95; translation into print, 83, 98; transmission of culture, 95 – oral-print tensions in Mischief, 86, 97, 99–100 – print epistemology in Mischief: abstract logic, 98; analytical, 90; frame narration, 97–101; imagined community, 100–1; lack of auditors, 99; mapping of nation, 101–2; objective history, 90; solitary consciousness, 99, 101 MacLulich, T.D., 44 Magna Carta, 11 Maisonneuve, Paul de Chomedey de, 139 Marchand, Philip, 202 Marx, Karl, 39, 255 Marxism, 33, 42, 223 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 16 McCully, Jonathan, 50 McGee, D’Arcy, 49–50 McKeon, Michael, 30 McLuhan, Marshall, 47, 59, 100–1, 168, 185, 205, 228, 231–3, 235–6, 238–9, 244 – compared to Innis, 233 – electronic decentering, 233 – print: and borders, 233; relation to privacy, 232; and uniform space, 232 – television: as gestalt formation, 235; global village, 233; viewer as screen, 236

Meech Lake Accord, 159 Méliès, George, 166 Melville, Herman, 186 metaphor: and melting pot, 199; and totalizing identity, 199 metonymy: and hybridity, 199; as hyphenated identity, 199 Microsoft Word, 225 Milton, John, xiv, 13, 15; Areopagitica, xiv, 164; Defense of the English People, xiv; Readie and Easie Way, xiv, 15; Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 45 Minghella, Anthony, 72, 202, 240 – film: as bookish, 205; camera and empire, 214–16; crosscutting, 209, 217–18; linear narrative, 205, 208, 210; and mapping, 204, 206, 213–17; as mindscreen 205–7, 218; and nationalism, 211–13; and orality, 208; and parchment, 206; and private authorship, 208; and romance plot, 204, 210–12; and space, 202, 206, 215–16; subjective memory, 203 – as immigrant child, 211 – Mr. Wonderful, 211 – quoted, 205, 208–9, 211 – relation to Wuthering Heights, 210–12 Montcalm, Marquis de, 91 Monty, Jean, 69 Morito, Akio, 64 Moving Picture World, 167 Mulcaster, Richard, 14 Müller, Max, 18 MuslimsNet, 65 Mussolini, Benito, 188, 189, 195–6 Myers, Hugh Bingham, 138, 139 nafta, xi Nagasaki, 218, 231

275 Napster, 66 nationalism, 11–12; and anonymity, 16, 23–4; and Bible, xiii, 15, 22; and cenotaphs, 173; and censorship, 15; and centralization, 12, 14; and colonialism, 17; as a cultural form, 20–1, 23–4, 27; criteria for, 17; and education, 12–13; ethnic, 17–18, 20, 24–5, 33; folk, 18–20, 26, 33, 44, 67. See Herder, J.G.; in Elizabethan England, 13–15; and heterogeneity, 15–16, 33–4; and high culture, 12–13, 26–7, 43–4; and homogeneity, 16; liberal, 16, 19, 20, 148; linguistic, 17–19, 22–3, 26, 44, 56; and literacy, 12, 14–15, 16, 22–3, 26–7, 58; and literature, 30, 44, 54–5, 56; literature and mass support, 45; and mass markets, 23; in Middle Ages, 24–5; and organicism, 18–19, 56; phases of, 16–20; postcolonial, 17; proto-nationalism, 11, 18, 20; and print-languages, 17, 19, 21, 22–3, 27; and reactionary politics, 17; and readers, 26–7, 28–30; relation to industrialism, 12–13, 15; relation to pre-industrialism, 13; and religion, 20–1, 61, 137, 173; revolutionary-democratic, 16; and social mobility, 12–14; and socialism, 17; and threshold principle, 16–17. See Mazzini; wars of, 217 nation-state, 12, 15, 17 Nelson, Robert, 147 Nennius, 10 New Brunswick, 50 New England, 103, 105

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276 Newfoundland, 50, 72, 103; referendum, 50, 106, 114, 117–18, 120–1, 126, 128, 129 newspapers, 22; and American regionalism, 51; and Canadian regionalism, 49; and Confederate States, 51; Hollinger group, 69; and mass production, 53–4; and readers, 29; and regionalism, 49–53 newspapers, Canadian: Charlottetown Islander, 50; Corner Brook Western Star, 120–1; Grand Falls Advertiser, 120; Halifax Morning Chronicle, 50; Montreal New Era, 50; Saint John Morning Telegraph, 50; St John’s Daily News, 115, 120; St John’s Evening Telegram, 121; St John’s Sunday Herald, 121; Toronto Globe, 50 New Zealand, 26, 103 Nicholas of Cusa, Cardinal, 45 nickelodeon, 167, 171–2, 183 Norman Conquest, the, 10 Norris, Frank, 202 Nova Scotia, 49, 50, 103 Olier, Jean-Jacques, 139 Olsen, Lance, 245, 259 Ondaatje, Michael, xi, xiv, 71, 202, 227, 260 – and anti-nationalism, xi, 212, 226 – change in mode of communication, xi – digital: annihilation of space, 227; borderlessness, 233–4, 243; boundary breakdowns, 226–8, 230, 240, 243; cyborg politics, 240, 243–4; decentring of authority, 228; discontinuous

Index space, 227; flow, 241, 243; global village, 233; hyperreality, 236–7, 240; hypertext, 227–8, 233, 241–2; plural authorship, 208, 230; plural identities, 227, 243, 244; plural spaces, 241 – figurations of cyberspace, 227, 230, 241–2, 243 – mapping and empire, 234 – and postcolonialism, 240, 244 – and post-nationalism, 243 – print: anti-Cartesian elements of, 217; and bounded identity, 230; mapping, 230, 241 – radio, 229, 240 Ong, Walter J., xv, 31, 77–82, 86, 93, 94, 95–6, 97, 98, 99, 104, 119, 120, 126, 127, 165, 170 Otter, Monika, 10 Ouellette, Fernand, 138, 148 Panofsky, Erwin, 163, 165 Papineau, Louis-Joseph, 133, 134, 135, 148; Montebello, 132-3, 134, 148 Paraguay, 51 Parent, Msgr AlphonseMarie, 139 Pastrone, Giovanni, 172 Pathé Frères’ films, 172 Patterson, Graeme, 231 pbs, 61, 226 Pelletier, Gérard, 60 Pergamum, 6 Perlin, Albert, 120 Piedmont-Sardinia, 17 Pirandello, Luigi, 171 Plato, 30, 77, 80, 126, 130, 200, 201, 229–30; on writing, 77, 126 Pope, W.H., 50 Porter, Edwin S., 166, 169 Poster, Mark, 224 Pound, Ezra, 229

Pratt, George C., 163–70, 172, 193–4, 202 Prebble, John, 87, 88, 94 Prince Edward Island, 49, 50 prose romance, 29–30, 31 Prowse, D.W.: History of Newfoundland, 109–12 Prussia, 17 Pushkin, Aleksandr, 33 Pynchon, Thomas: Crying of Lot 49, The, 251; and hyperreality, 251 Québec – Bill 101, 138 – Catholic Church in, 137– 9: and the Crown, 55; collapse of, 58, 137; and literature, 56–7, 148–9 – clerical nationalism, 58, 137 – Conquest, the, 55, 89–91, 155 – Front de Libération du Québec, 132, 139 – joual, 138 – language protection, 138 – literary nationalism, 56–7 – newspaper circulation in, 60 – Quiet Revolution, 59, 61, 72, 137–9, 148 – rise of the novel in, 57–9 – roman du terroir, 57–8, 72: clerico-nationalism in, 57; conservative separatisim of, 58, 148–9, 154; hostility to modernity in, 57, 148; reactionary politics of, 58; retreat from history in, 148; social embeddedness of, 54–5 – téléromans, 60–1; Plouffe, la famille, 60 – television and modernization, 60–1 Quebec Resolutions, the, 50 Quintilian, 80

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Index Radio-Canada, 59 Ranger, Terence, 12 RealPlayer, 66 Rebellions, Lower Canadian, 49, 54, 55–6, 72, 133–4, 148; Colborne, Sir John, 133; Declaration of Independence, 147; Les fils de la liberté, 133 Reeves, Judge John, 113 reflection theory, 33, 44 Reformation, the, 20, 22, 46 Renan, Ernest, 73 Renaud, Jacques, 138 Richardson, Samuel, 29 Riefenstahl, Leni, 195 Rifkin, Jeremy, 66–7, 70 Rioux, Marcel, 56 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 143, 147 Roman Catholic Church, 45, 55–6, 58; and novel, 58–9; and printing, 59 Roman Empire, the, 5–6, 9, 52, 80 romance, 14, 29, 30–1, 204 Roosevelt, F.D., 116 Roosevelt, Theodore, 116 Ruggie, John, 47 Rutherford, Paul, 59–62 Said, Edward, 71 Saturday Evening Post, The, 164 Saul, John Ralston, xiv Saussure, Ferdinand de, 18, 34, 38 Savonarola, 230 Schleicher, August, 18 Scottish nationalism, 17 Scribner’s Magazine, 193 Sennet, Mack, 172 Shakespeare, William, 14 Siebert, F.S., 15 Siivonen, Timo, 255 Sloan, Thomas, 139 Smallwood, David, 114 Smallwood, Joey, 106, 121; Book of Newfoundland, The, 115; I Chose Canada, 109, 117, 121, 124–5; as newspaperman, 115;

opposition to print merchants, 117, 120–1; as radio broadcaster, 115–16, 117, 120; as socialist, 124; speech to National Convention, 122; as union organizer, 125 Smart, Patricia, 141–2 Smith, Sidonie, 180 Sontag, Susan, 164 Sony Corporation, the, 69 Sophists, the, 80 Spanish-American Empire, the, 35, 49 Spencer, Herbert, 186 Spenser, Edmund, 14 Spielberg, Steven: Saving Private Ryan, 188–9; use of Alamo myth, 189 Sponsler, Claire, 250, 251 Squires, Sir Richard, 110 St Paul’s School, 13, 14 Stamps, Judith, 231 Starowicz, Mark: Canada: A People’s History, 226 Steinbeck, John, 186; Red Pony, The, 186–7 Stendhal: Charterhouse of Parma, The, 234 Stroheim, Erich von, 184 Sutherland, Ronald, 148 Tasso, Torquato, 14 Thirty Years War, 19, 53 Thomson, Dale C., 139 Thoreau, Henry David, 186 Thorpe, Lewis, 10 Tiffin, Helen, xiii Tilley, Leonard, 50 Time Warner, 69 Tolhurst, Fiona, 10 Tremblay, Michel, 138 Trudeau, Pierre Elliot, 152: “La nouvelle trahison,” 153 Tupper, Charles, 50 Turing, Alan, 256 Turner, Frederic Jackson, 186 Twigg, Alan, 186 Tyrrell, Henry, 165

277 United Province of Canada, 49 United States of America: Civil War, 51, 53; Revolutionary War, 49, 91; television, 59–60, pbs, 61 Uruguay, 51 usenet, 226 Valentino, Rudy, 194 Vanderhaeghe, Guy, xi, 72, 186 – bias to print, 186, 196–7, 198 – conservative view of media, 198 – Englishman’s Boy, The: and hybridized identity, 198–9; and melting pot politics, 183, 188, 199; on nationalism as religion, 188; oral-print tensions in, 197–8; portrait of anti-Semitism, 184–5; relation to Guthrie’s The Big Sky, 191–2; relation to Steinbeck’s The Red Pony, 186–7; relation to West’s Day of the Locust, 192–3; shock of film in, xi, 183, 198, 201; and reverse mimesis, 189, 194–5; use of crosscutting in, 189–90; use of narrative perspective in, 190–1, 197; use of oral narrative in, 197 – and West’s Locust, 192–3 Vaughan, Sir William, 110–11 Venezuela, 51 Versailles, Treaty of, 17 Viacom, 69 Virgil, 5; Aeneid, xiii, 5, 9; philosophy of history, 9, 10; prophetic genealogy, 5 Virilio, Paul, 172 Waite, Peter, 49–50 Warner, Oliver, 89 Watt, Ian, 28–31, 33–4

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278 Wayne, John: The Alamo, 188–9 Welsh nationalism, 17 West, Benjamin, 89, 151; “The Death of General Wolfe,” 89, 151–2 West, Nathanael, 191; Day of the Locust, The, 191, 192–3

Index Westminster School, 14 Whitman, Walt, 186 Wilde, Oscar, 189 William the Conqueror, 56 Williams, Penny: omission in translation, 154 Wolfe, General James, 73, 89–91, 102, 151, 152 WomensNet, 65, 249

World Trade Organization, 66 Wyile, Herb, 191 Zatta, Jane, 10, 11