Making Canada New: Editing, Modernism, and New Media 9781487511357

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MAKING CANADA NEW Editing, Modernism, and New Media

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Making Canada New Editing, Modernism, and New Media

EDITED BY DEAN IRVINE, VANESSA LENT, AND BART VAUTOUR

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

©  University of Toronto Press 2017 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-1-4875-0059-7 Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks. ________________________________________________________________ Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Making Canada new : editing, modernism, and new media / edited by Dean Irvine, Vanessa Lent, and Bart Vautour. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4875-0059-7 (cloth) 1. Editing − Social aspects − Canada. 2. Modernism (Literature) − Canada. 3. Mass media − Canada. I. Irvine, Dean, 1971−, editor II. Lent, Vanessa, 1979−, editor III. Vautour, Bart, 1981−, editor PN162.M34 2017     808.02'70971     C2016-904893-4 ________________________________________________________________ This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

    Funded by the Financé par le Government gouvernement du Canada of Canada

an Ontario government agency un organisme du gouvernement de l’Ontario

Contents

Acknowledgments  vii Introduction 3 dean irvine, vanessa lent, and bart vautour Part One: Libraries, Archives, Databases, Editions 1 Unpacking My Digital Library: Programs, Modernisms, Magazines 31 sean latham 2 Archival Problems, Future Possibilities: Reconceptualizing the Digital Database in Canada  61 marc andré fortin 3 Editing Modules, Collecting Editions: The Present and Future of Small-Scale Digital Critical Editions  85 melissa dalgleish 4 The HyperRoy Project: New Perspectives on Gabrielle Roy’s Manuscripts and Unpublished Texts  107 sophie marcotte 5 Reading the Personal Library, Rereading F.R. Scott  120 j.a. weingarten

Part Two: Collaborations  6 BaronessElsa: An Autobiographical Manifesto  139 tanya e. clement   7 Editing the Wilfred Watson and Sheila Watson Archives: Scholarly Editions ⇔ Digital Projects  161 paul hjartarson, harvey quamen, kristin fast, and emic ua   8 Annotating Malcolm Lowry’s In Ballast to the White Sea 186 patrick a. mccarthy and chris ackerley   9 Editing a Legend: George Whalley  204 michael john disanto 10 Canadian Manifestos: Between Poetics and Polemics  225 andrea hasenbank and emic ua Part Three: Selective Traditions and Alternative Modernisms 11 Selecting Modernist Poetry in Canada: Readers’ Editions and Editorial Practice  249 peter webb 12 When Out in Front Gets Left Behind: Sol Allen’s They Have Bodies and Canada’s Archived Avant-Garde  265 gregory betts 13 Bringing the Text to Life: Editing The God of Gods 285 kailin wright 14 Landscapes of Reception: Historicizing the Travails of the New Brunswick Literary Modernists  307 tony tremblay 15 Modernism, Antimodernism, and Hugh MacLennan’s Novels of the 1930s  327 colin hill Works Cited  351 Contributors  381 Index  387

Acknowledgments

What appears in these pages would never have been possible without the collective generosity of the scholars and administrators who have given so much of themselves and their careers to Editing Modernism in Canada/Édition du modernisme au Canada (EMiC/ÉmaC). The publication of this collection has taken many years of collaborative effort, so, above all, the editors would like to thank all of the contributors for their perseverance. We are grateful to Siobhan McMenemy, our acquisitions editor at the University of Toronto Press, for her patient and careful shepherding of the manuscript through the peer-review and in-house review processes. Many of the contributors to this collection originally answered a call for papers to present at the 2010 Conference on Editorial Problems, which was hosted by EMiC/ÉmaC at the Jackman Institute for the Humanities, University of Toronto. For the opportunity to organize this instalment of the conference series, we are grateful to Fred Unwalla of the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies for inviting EMiC/ÉmaC to stage the event. Logistics for the conference were expertly handled by Colin Hill of the Department of English, who was assisted by former graduate students Kailin Wright and Brendan McFarlane. The Department of English at the University of Toronto generously offered financial support for the conference. We are thankful for the support of all conference participants, so many of whom have carried on to develop extraordinary editorial projects in print and digital media. Special thanks are owed to two project administrators at Dalhousie University, Vanessa Lent and Emily Ballantyne, who co-ordinated EMiC/ÉmaC’s financial and logistical contributions to the Toronto conference and this edited collection. Meagan Timney, who worked with

viii Acknowledgments

EMiC/ÉmaC as a postdoctoral fellow from 2009 to 2011, delivered web support for the conference and collaborated on the planning stages for the collection. Matt Huculak, who was an EMiC/ÉmaC postdoctoral fellow from 2010 to 2012, offered editorial input on the collection at its preliminary stages. Yale University’s Macmillan Center and Department of English provided Dean Irvine with institutional support through their sponsorship of the Bicentennial Canadian Studies Visiting Professor program. EMiC/ ÉmaC’s research initiatives have been made possible through a Strategic Knowledge Cluster grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Additional support for EMiC/ÉmaC and its cluster director has been provided by the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and the provost and vice-president academic at Dalhousie. Permission to reproduce Chris Ackerley’s annotations of In Ballast to the White Sea, originally published in a critical edition edited by Patrick A. McCarthy, has been granted by the University of Ottawa Press, © 2014. An excerpt from their edition has been reproduced by permission of SLL/Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc., © 2014 by the Estate of Malcolm Lowry. Kailin Wright’s chapter on Carroll Aikins includes sections that appear in the introduction to her critical edition of The God of Gods, which are reproduced by permission of the University of Ottawa Press, © 2016. The Estate of George Whalley has generously granted permission to reproduce quotations from manuscripts in the author’s archives. Reproduction of original correspondence and manuscripts has been made by permission from the Elsa von Freytag-­Loringhoven Papers, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Maryland Libraries. Permission to reproduce correspondence and artwork from the Wilfrid Watson Archives at the University of Alberta has been granted by Shirley Neuman, the literary executor of the Estate of Wilfrid Watson.

MAKING CANADA NEW Editing, Modernism, and New Media

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Introduction dean irvine, vanessa lent, and bart vautour

Renouvelle-toi complétement chaque jour; fais-le de nouveau, encore de ­nouveau, et toujours de nouveau Guilluame Pauthier, Confucius et Menicus: Les quatres livres de philosophie morale et politique de la Chine (44) Renew thyself daily, utterly, make it new, and again new, make it new Ezra Pound, Ta Hio: The Great Learning (12)

Renovating the New The act of making is the core of critical editing and textual scholarship. So, too, is making one of the leading tropes of literary modernism. “MAKE IT NEW” (Cantos 264), Ezra Pound’s most-famous exhortation and modernism’s most-quoted slogan, is an axiom whose transmission and translation across multiple languages, cultures, and millennia has invited perennial interpretation. Although commonly attributed to Pound, the catch phrase isn’t his own. While its genealogy is already well known to Pound scholars, its lineage is even more remarkable for its relevance to the formative meeting of editing and modernism. Even though his interest in Confucian texts began as early as 1913, the earliest source of the phrase is his 1928 translation of the Da Xue, first of the four books of Confucian moral philosophy. Readers of The Cantos will recognize the correct attribution to Tseng Tze, the commentator on and annotator of Da Xue, who relates an anecdote about Ch’eng T’ang, the emperor who reportedly had the original inscribed on his washbasin (North, Novelty 164). Tseng’s editorial function is reproduced by Pound in his earliest translation, in which he glosses his i­diomatic

4  Dean Irvine, Vanessa Lent, and Bart Vautour

Americanized translation (“Renovate, dod gast you, renovate!” ­ [Ta Hio 12]) from Guillaume Pauthier’s French version with still another ­English translation (“Renew thyself daily, utterly, make it new, and again new, make it new” [Ta Hio 12]). That modernism sprouted its most recognizable motto from an editorial footnote, a commentary on a translation, is not only apposite to Pound’s legendary pursuits as one of the period’s most influential literary editors but also pertinent to the fact that so many of the modernists engaged in editorial activities – from avant-garde and commercial magazines to small literary presses and trade publishing houses (Bornstein, “Introduction” 1). For many, modernism’s imperative to “make it new” may have become a mantra to innovate, but its editorial origins resound with the call to renovate. With its emphasis on the conjuncture of editing and modernism, Making Canada New foregrounds this calling towards renovation as a mode of scholarly practice. Pound’s injunction saw its currency inflated retroactively, not at the moment of Anglo-American modernism’s ascendancy in the 1920s, but during the second half of the twentieth century (North, Novelty 10). The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada (1967), Louis Dudek and Michael Gnarowski’s influential edited collection, and The Pound Era (1971), Hugh Kenner’s landmark study of the “men of 1914,” are signposts of this dominant, masculinist, high modernist, Poundian critical tradition. This period started off with the consolidation of canonical authors and movements and shifted towards the interrogation of exclusionary processes in academia and scholarly publishing that fashioned the mid-century contours of modernist studies. With the recent renovatory drive in modernist scholarship, one that continues to act upon the Poundian imperative, the discipline has reconstituted itself since the turn of the century under the mantle of “new modernisms” (see Mao and Walkowitz, Bad and “New”; Irvine, “Spectres”). This global reconceptualization of modernist studies under the sign of the new extends from its aesthetic preoccupations with and trafficking in tropes of innovation, novelty, invention, and experimentation. Among the results of these disciplinary renovations have been the expansion of spatial and temporal boundaries and the recognition of plural modernisms, a reconfiguration that acknowledges the uneven geographic and chronological distributions of cultural modernity and, consequently, accommodates Canada’s mid-century modernists. Instead of periodizations predicated upon notions of cultural belatedness, or narrativizations that identify emergent, marginal, or peripheral modernisms in relation

Introduction 5 

to a dominant, originary centre, the push towards new modernisms has not only opened up the field of transnational modernisms to embrace Canada’s early to mid-century cohort but also coincided with the resurgence in Canadian modernist studies over the past two decades. Part of that renovatory activity comprises the restorative labour performed since the millennial turn by new histories of literary modernism and modernist print cultures in Canada; these revisionary studies call attention to the omissions and distortions endemic to editorial mediation, which begin with the modernists themselves working as editors of magazines, anthologies, chapbooks, and books and extend to their publication of retrospective collections and revised versions of early texts towards the end of their careers or, in some cases, posthumously. In the absence of critical editions, the responsibility to sort through these editorial acts and the cultural narratives to which they contribute has often fallen, at least initially, to the historians, biographers, and bibliographers of Canadian modernism. These modes of commemoration and documentation may be subsumed later on by editors preparing scholarly editions; each stage represents the multiple and overlapping ways in which the renovation of modernism takes place. Revisionary criticism such as Brian Trehearne’s The Montreal Forties: Modernist Poetry in Transition (1999) and Glenn Willmott’s Unreal Country: Modernity in the Canadian Novel in English (2002) inaugurated a transformative decade, which also saw major conferences that generated provocative edited collections. The Canadian Modernists Meet (2005), edited by Dean Irvine, and Wider Boundaries of Daring: The Modernist Impulse in ­Canadian Women’s Poetry (2009), edited by Di Brandt and Barbara Godard, each contributed to making new modernisms a critical and historical practice. Alternative narratives of modernism in Canada inform the bulk of contemporary scholarship, including Dean Irvine’s Editing Modernity: Women and Little-Magazine Cultures in Canada, 1916–1956 (2008), Candida Rifkind’s Comrades and Critics: Women, Literature, and the Left in 1930s Canada (2009), Colin Hill’s Modern Realism in English-Canadian Fiction (2012), Gregory Betts’s Avant-garde Canadian Literature: The Early Manifestations (2013), and Bart Vautour and Emily Robins Sharpe’s virtual research environment Canada and the Spanish Civil War. The correlation of these studies of modernism’s alternative formations with the contemporaneous preparation of critical editions is all the more apparent in Making Canada New, where the mobile and multiply superimposed positions of historian, critic, bibliographer, archivist, librarian, and editor shift and shuffle from chapter to chapter

6  Dean Irvine, Vanessa Lent, and Bart Vautour

in dynamic configurations that attest to the complexity of constructing new modernisms. Although all of the contributors to this collection have engaged in editing modernist literary texts, their respective chapters place different emphases on the various modes of scholarly practice that contribute to editing and that intersect in designing, building, navigating, and deciphering the aggregate forms of new and old media – editions, collections, archives, libraries, repositories, and databases. While the common ground that they share is their editorial work – whether it is central or peripheral to a given chapter depends upon their variable self-positionings – their contributions move well beyond reports on and prospectuses for editing initiatives either recently completed, in progress, or projected. All of the contributors to Making Canada New are affiliated directly or indirectly with Editing Modernism in Canada / L’Édition du modernisme au Canada (EMiC/ÉmaC) and its network of institutions and partners. Launched in 2008 as an international initiative whose mandate includes the production of print and digital editions of Canadian modernist texts, EMiC/ÉmaC has been predicated on a double and reciprocal act of renovation: the remaking of modernism in Canada through contemporary editorial practice and the reinvention of editing as a mode of scholarly practice. Making modernism new may be premised here on the renovatory activity of editing, but the practice of editing itself and the role of the editor are made subject to reconstruction. Among the ways in which EMiC/ÉmaC has approached this task has been to remodel the relationship between editors and the institutions and infrastructure that mediate the production, circulation, and reception of Canadian modernism. Consequently, there are no centralized standards, presses, or platforms for the publication of EMiC/ÉmaC print or digital editions; this decentralized publishing network has encouraged strategies of renewal, including the generation of new series of editions and the integration of established series, the implementation of agreements with publishers to produce print-digital hybrids, and the formation of partnerships with open-source software developers to create new modes and means of editing and publication. Editing, Computing, Modernism Around the same time as the poets finished assembling their retrospective collections and the publishers started to issue paperback editions of novels, short stories, and plays, Canada’s modernists encountered

Introduction 7 

a new generation of scholars interested in the production of critically edited texts. By the early 1970s, enough scholars had initiated projects to invite calls for general editorial principles that might serve as guidelines for prospective editors. At this time W.H. New proposed “a scholarly series of edited texts,” which worked against “setting up a canon of ‘accepted’ important works,” and suggested a series that “ought to provoke a constant redefinition of the aims and methods of literary and critical endeavour” (14, 15). New’s preoccupation with the process of selection rather than the practice of editing is indicative of the prevailing concern at the time for canon formation rather than an articulation of principles for the editing of Canadian texts, whether canonical or not. What he offers is “more a series of questions than an organized editorial policy, a suggestion of possibly useful lines of research rather than the considered judgments of research already done” (15). Although he is typical of his time in concerning himself primarily with early Canadiana, he points towards the emergent attentions of scholarly editors working on the “complete bodies of work” of Canadian modernists such as Malcolm Lowry, Frederick Philip Grove, Abraham Klein, and Raymond Knister (24). As evidenced by the scholarship in the present collection, the massive undertaking of editing the “complete” works of these and other Canadian modernists may have been initiated in the early 1970s, but it remains unfinished and continues to the present day in both print and digital media. Most intriguing in New’s propositions is his anticipation of the need for “constant redefinition,” a built-in procedure for the renovation of editorial method and theory. Even more conspicuous in his account, however, is the complete absence of reference to any of the major editors, textual critics, and bibliographers who conducted their debates on an international stage; either no one working in Canadian literature had ever heard of W.W. Greg or Fredson Bowers, or perhaps they felt – in keeping with the cultural-nationalist moment of the early 1970s – that these debates in Anglo-American textual scholarship were somehow irrelevant to the circumstances of editing Canadian literature. Given that the standard vocabulary of variants, authorial intention, and copy texts entered so rarely into textual scholarship on Canadian literature at this time, this period can be characterized only by the presentiments of a critical engagement with theories and practices of scholarly editing. With Canadian modernist studies still in its nascency, and with the practice of editing modernist literary texts limited to paperback and trade reprints and the compilation of anthologies, it would take

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another decade before critical and editorial practice converged to ­foster the publication of scholarly editions such as The Collected Works of A.M. Klein and The Collected Works of E.J. Pratt (see Irvine, “Editing Canadian Modernism”). By the late 1980s, editors of Canadian literary texts not only adopted the vocabularies of European and Anglo-American textual scholarship but also put these concepts into practice in an array of editions. Francophone and anglophone editors in the 1980s exhibited a sophisticated set of theoretical approaches to editing Canadian literary texts. Intentionalist, social-text, and genetic modes entered into the critical conversation, and representatives from groups that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s to produce scholarly editions of French and English literary texts produced reports on the progress of their respective projects (see Lennox and Paterson). To a certain extent theoretical alignments fell along linguistic lines, with the francophone editors appealing to the methods of textual genetics enunciated by French theorists and the anglophone editors calling upon the English-language theorists of social-text and intentionalist editing. The notable exception to this linguistic divide is Zailig Pollock’s bilateral approach to geneticist and social-text theory, which draws in equal measure upon French- and English-language textual critics and editorial theorists (see Pollock, “Editor”). At a time when literary scholars could draw upon theoretical positions developed by thinkers writing across a spectrum of languages and from an array of national and transnational traditions, it follows that their editorial counterparts embraced the same open invitation to range across linguistic and geopolitical borders in the construction of their rationales. Among the reasons for this diversification was the accelerated uptake of computational methods, text-encoding practices, and digital platforms for scholarly editing. This is not to suggest that every digital editing project has embraced a catholic body of editorial principles and procedures, but to say more modestly that standards adopted by scholarly editors for software programming, computer-assisted and automated text processing, and text encoding have been developed collaboratively by an increasingly transnational and multilingual community. Since the emergence of web-based editions in the 1990s, theories and practices of editing Canadian literary texts have become increasingly integrated with digital technologies. The institutional formations that have facilitated this integration have generated greater visibility and accessibility to infrastructure for editorial projects developed under rubrics of humanities computing and the digital humanities.

Introduction 9 

As much as the past decades furthered the diversification of theoretical positions, they simultaneously witnessed an unexpected convergence towards the social-text theory that Jerome McGann originally advanced in the 1980s and 1990s and subsequently transposed to his theorization of editing hypermedia archives in the early 2000s. Although the combination of genetic editing and digital technologies has not yet exercised a comparable rate of influence on editors of anglophone editions of Canadian literature, Zailig Pollock’s recent work to bring together geneticist and social-text editing in The Digital Page project serves as a cogent reminder of the permutations available (see Pollock and Ballantyne). Far less recognized is the earlier generation of textual scholars, editors, and programmers who worked on computer-assisted editions of modernist texts prior to the popularization of web-based technologies. George R. Petty and William M. Gibson began in 1964 to develop Ordered Computer Collation of Unprepared Literary Text (OCCULT), a computer program that could collate variant texts more flexibly, rapidly, and accurately than what could be done by either the Hinman Collating Machine – which compares impressions taken from the same standing type or from the same plates – or by human collators. Petty and Gibson’s collaboration with the programmers Andrew Singer and Larry W. English started in the mid-1960s with an experiment to collate the London and New York editions of Henry James’s Daisy Miller (Petty and Gibson 279–80). Although he was by no means the first editor to employ computers to assist with the transcription and collation of texts, Hans Walter Gabler and his 1984 edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses were by far the first to gain widespread public attention for the use of computational methods. According to Gabler, the edition “was computerassisted through the entire range of textual, critical, and presentational preparation” (115). He records working with the Tübingen System of Text Processing (TUSTEP) program for manual transcription, followed by automatic collation, gathering and tagging genetic stages or “levels” of composition, merging of levels “synoptically into one integral, critically established text,” preparing apparatus, extracting and compiling synoptic and reading texts with apparatus, and typesetting (116). Under the direction of Wilhelm Ott from 1970 to 2003, the Division for Literary and Documentary Data Processing at the University of Tübingen has been responsible for the creation of TUSTEP. Although its origins date back to 1966, TUSTEP remains in active development, recently partnering in 2009 with the TextGrid Virtual Research Environment in

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the Humanities, which provides an open-source platform and bilingual (English and German) interface for users of the Tübingen system. At the same time as Gabler pored over TUSTEP printouts through the 1970s and early 1980s to assemble his computer-assisted synoptic edition of Ulysses, Mary Jane Edwards embarked with a team of editorial and computer-science collaborators in 1979 on the production of an ambitious series of computer-assisted critical editions of early anglophone Canadian literary texts.1 The Centre for Editing Early Canadian Texts (CEECT) at Carleton University was the first of its kind in Canada, not in issuing critical editions of early Canadian literary texts, but in its integration of computers into the complete process of editorial production – from keyboarding to typesetting. The centralized, projectspecific, in-house model for computing and programming employed by CEECT never left the campus; its communications circuit circled back on itself. Unlike the programs written for TUSTEP and now incorporated into the TextGrid initiative, none of the programs written for CEECT has been implemented anywhere other than at Carleton. Consequently, none of the major Canadian modernist scholarly editorial projects that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s – such as the Pratt and Klein collected works – took advantage of the technological advances in the production of computer-assisted editions made by CEECT. This is not to say that early humanities computing and modernism in Canada never crossed disciplinary paths. Just as the international ­digital-humanities community typically traces its origins to Father Roberto Busa’s machine- and computer-generated concordances that were initiated in 1949 and made use of IBM devices, so Sandra Djwa’s largely forgotten 1968 doctoral thesis, “Metaphor, World View and Continuity: A Study of the Major English Canadian Poets with a Computer Concordance to Metaphor,” marks mile zero in computer-assisted criticism in Canadian literature; she followed up with two articles, “Canadian Poetry and the Computer” (1970) and “Litterae ex Machina” (1974). Compiled between 1965 and 1970, Djwa’s computer-assisted concordances included the collected poetry of Canadian modernists Margaret Avison, Earle Birney, A.M. Klein, Irving Layton, P.K. Page, E.J. Pratt, and A.J.M. Smith. On the basis of research conducted during the same period, Robert Cluett included a selection of early and mid-twentieth century Canadian authors in his 1976 book Prose Style and Critical Reading; he expanded his analysis of these and other authors in a later book, Canadian Literary Prose: A Preliminary Stylistic Analysis (1990), including a chapter comparing the statistical proximity of Morley Callaghan’s

Introduction 11 

prose to the “plain” style of Ernest Hemingway (77–91). Like Djwa’s concordances, Cluett’s foundational work in computational text analysis and stylistics has gone virtually unnoticed in Canadian literary studies; both, however, represent key precursors to the computer-assisted compilative work involved in the production of scholarly editions of modernist literary texts. In particular, the procedures that Djwa devised for compiling and reading textual variants in her computerassisted ­concordances not only contributed to her earliest criticism – most n ­ otably her 1974 book, E.J. Pratt: The Evolutionary Vision – but also ­prefigured her participation in scholarly editorial projects on Canadian ­modernists from the 1980s through the 2010s, such as The Collected Works of E.J. Pratt, The Complete Poems and Letters of E.J. Pratt: A Hypertext Edition, The Collected Works of P.K. Page, and The Digital Page. Digital Modernisms As much as tropes of innovation and experiment were commonplace for the ways in which modernist authors and artists imagined themselves and their aesthetic practices, they have now become synonymous with digital technologies employed in new-media and newmodernist studies. One of the common tropes in new-media theory, at least since the publication of Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s Remediation in 1999, constructs analogies between contemporary digital media and the early twentieth-century avant-garde. An example of Bolter and Grusin’s collocation of modernism and digital media comes from their comparison of “the rhetoric of cyberspace” to the manifestos of the futurists and suggestion that “cyberspace enthusiasts have a similar relationship to technologies of representation that Marinetti and the futurists had to technologies of motive power” (54). One of their main premises is that digital objects call attention to their remediated materiality in a manner analogous to the aesthetics of modernist selfreferentiality with its insistence on foregrounding its own mediations. This premise is not theirs alone either: it is a recurrent claim in the work of new-media theorists, including Lev Manovich, Michael North, Mark Goble, and Jessica Pressman.2 Where North and Goble are principally interested in the examination of historical technologies of new media (photography, cinema, radio, telegraphy, and so on) simultaneous with the production of works of literary modernism, Manovich and Pressman are concerned with the trans-historical links between modernist aesthetics in the early twentieth

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century and contemporary avant-garde work in digital media. For Manovich, new media is a trans-historical category, its newness at once an aesthetic formation continuous with montage effects and editing techniques innovated in avant-garde cinema of the 1920s and a technological formation congruent with software design and practice in the late twentieth century. “One general effect of the digital revolution,” he writes, “is that avant-garde aesthetic strategies came to be embedded in the commands and interface metaphors of computer software. In short, the avant-garde became materialized in a computer” (Language 306–7; original italics). Even as she acknowledges Manovich’s influence, Pressman makes plain the differentiation between their projects by distancing her critical practice of “digital modernism” from the technological determinism that permits him to speak of the “new modernism of data visualizations, vector nets, pixel-thin grids and arrows: Bauhaus design in the service of information design” (“Generation Flash” para. 1). For Manovich, “new modernism” is new media. But for Pressman, digital modernism “remakes the avant garde in new media” (10). One key difference, then, is Pressman’s recognition that “making it new” is “an act of recovery and renovation, not an assertion of novelty” (4). This, too, is the operative definition that informs Making Canada New. There is nothing categorically new about digital modernisms. Or, to put it another way, the perpetually renovated category of the new is a sign of the making and remaking of both media and modernisms. While the history of modernism’s relationship to new media extends over more than a century, its digital chapter is not so new either. In the Canadian context, the creative practice of digital modernisms begins with the 1964 publication of Jean A. Baudot’s La machine à écrire, a booklength collection of free verse permutation poems produced by a text generator program, published by Les Éditions du Jour in Montreal; these poems were printed together with commentaries by mid-­century francophone authors and artists. Coincident with the inception of humanities computing as a scholarly practice in Canada, the alignment of computer-generated poetry with modernist poetics is made explicit in the findings of literary critics Robert Ian Scott and Peter Stevens, who collaborated with programmer-analyst Charles Stock at the University of Saskatchewan in the mid- to late 1960s to “mass-produce” parodies of modernist poetry (Scott 12). Inspired by the results of text-­generator poems published by R.M. Worthy in the journal Horizon in 1962, Scott and Stevens revisited the modernist origins of Worthy’s digital reproduction of the cut-up technique – using a program dubbed “Auto

Introduction 13 

Beatnik, or A.B.” (Worthy 98) – popularized by Beat authors William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin. Turning their attention to the imagist technique of simultaneity and superposition theorized by T.E. Hulme and Ezra Pound, Scott and Stevens tested their hypothesis that “a computer should be able to produce not just original poetry, but also parodies of existing poems by rescrambling their characteristic words and patterns” (Scott 11). Contemporary late-1960s experiments with computer text-generator poetry by Earle Birney (“Space Conquest: Computer Poem”) and Stephen Scobie (“Computer Poem 3”) are similarly rooted in modernist poetics, with the former recycling his own mid-century mashup of Anglo-Saxon kennings and stream-of-consciousness and the latter using “the computer as a modern equivalent to chopping up newspaper articles” in the fashion of “random generation of texts in Dada, especially [Tristan] Tzara” (Scobie, “Computer Poem”). The coeval formation of this late-modernist computational and permutational poetic practice and the emergence of humanities computing is indicative of the innovatory and renovatory dialectic of digital modernisms. For these practitioners of “mainframe experimentalism” (Higgins and Kahn 1), modernism’s adaptation to new media provided resources for aesthetic renewal and models for technological development. In recognition of this long history of creative and scholarly practice that precedes the recent emergence of web-based digital modernisms, Making Canada New is alert to the fact that computer technologies are not the definitive makers of the new and that these tools, too, are subject to continual regeneration. After all, digital modernisms in Canada have already undergone a series of transformations from the mainframe computing of early practitioners in the 1960s and 1970s to webbased editions in the 1990s. This most recent phase, whose scholarly iterations can be found in web-based editorial projects on Canadian modernists – The Earle Birney Web Site (1996) and The Complete Poems and Letters of E.J. Pratt: A Hypertext Edition (1997) – may have rekindled scholarship initiated by the mainframe generation, but these early web editions lacked the necessary inter-institutional collaboration and infrastructural support to make them sustainable. Such instances of digital modernism in Canada were prototypes that made use of standard coding protocols (HTML and CSS) of the nascent World Wide Web, and though they still can be accessed online, they are no longer updated and have long been orphaned. If this first web-based generation of digital modernists can be characterized in part by its institutional and international isolation, the present generation can be defined by its

14  Dean Irvine, Vanessa Lent, and Bart Vautour

insistence upon the necessity of collaboration and partnership with the institutions, projects, and practitioners who sustain the development of international and transnational formations of digital modernisms.3 Instead of declaring themselves new-media originators and declaiming new-modernist manifestos, the contributors to Making Canada New have designed proofs of concept, tested prototypes, coded tools, wireframed interfaces, and designed infrastructure alongside (and, at times, in communication and collaboration with) an array of international and transnational projects: the Modernist Journals Project, the Modernist Versions Project, the Modernist Magazines Project, the Modernism Lab, Modernist Networks, Open Modernisms, and Linked Modernisms. The Modernist Commons is one of EMiC/ÉmaC’s interventions into the field of digital modernisms. This online platform is the project’s editorial workbench and its repository of digitized source materials and critically edited texts. Given that the impetus towards the production of EMiC/ÉmaC’s digital editions has come largely from emerging scholars, it has become a priority for its community to design and adapt open-source editing tools in collaboration with institutional and industry partners and to integrate these tools into the project’s training initiatives.4 Not unlike its decentralized publishing network, the modular design of EMiC/ÉmaC’s editorial platform accommodates the possibility of project-specific customizations and extensions. These principles of modularity are built into Melissa Dalgleish’s chapter on editing small-scale editions, where the practices of prototyping and iterative development – both drawn from the methodologies of agile and extreme programming – are theorized at the level of an individual project embedded in EMiC/ÉmaC’s collaborative network of training, research, and infrastructure. Among the precursors to the Modernist Commons is the Modernist Journals Project (MJP), which is based and jointly operated at Brown University and the University of Tulsa, founded in 1995 as “a website of digital editions of periodicals connected to the rise of modernism in the English-speaking world” (“About the MJP”). One of the MJP’s founders and directors, Sean Latham, opens this collection by calling attention to the nonlinear and spatialized navigation of magazines, specifically the ways in which periodicals can be read as “ergodic” texts – that is, texts in which every constituent part is equally representative of the whole and which invite non-sequential and i­ nteractive modes of reading. His ­provocative suggestion that the magazine is structured like a database and that its table of contents functions as

Introduction 15 

a “paper-based program” to sort its data foregrounds one of the recurrent issues addressed throughout Making Canada New: the reciprocal relationship between old and new media. Like Pressman’s theorization of digital modernism, Latham’s chapter reflects upon the process of remediation, which necessitates unpacking the materiality of print and digital objects, ­parsing both bibliographic and computational codes. Beyond its remediation and recirculation of modernist magazines, the MJP has become an i­nstitution of digital modernisms, one that exhibits the rhetoric of the new and tropes of innovation. Where the MJP editions are oriented towards Latham’s ergodic reading strategies, the MJP Lab is o ­ rganized around the v ­ isualization of the project’s data sets “generated over the course of digitizing magazines from the early 20th century” (“MJP Lab”). Entering the MJP Lab, we are welcomed into a space that at once announces itself as innovative and professes to ­facilitate ­cutting-edge research. “The site is experimental,” it cautions, “but it’s also dedicated to experimentation – playing with the MJP data, and drawing new patterns and knowledge out of its journal files” (“MJP Lab”). Another way to visit the MJP site is to view its editions and lab as nodes in a network of digital modernisms. Their correlation articulates an interchange of old and new media, remediates a modernist dialectic of renovation and innovation. This dialectic comes into play across the chapters collected in Making Canada New that speak to the ­historicization of modernism’s textual, visual, and theatrical mediations and their remediation in digital editions. Just as Tanya E. Clement’s chapter on editing B ­ ­ aronessElsa as an “autobiographical manifesto” aligns m ­ odernist experimentation with language and representation with the design of “new textual conditions” using computational methods and t­ echnologies, so Sophie Marcotte’s account of the HyperRoy project p ­ osits that editorial work in electronic formats leads to “innovative reading and interpretive strategies” and that critical editing p ­ ractices foster “renewal” and “­aesthetic reflection.” Like Latham’s ergodic reading of the magazine, Marc André Fortin’s attention to the hierarchical ordering of Marius Barbeau’s archives proposes a reorganization of digital access to his ethnography and fiction files, a d ­ ismantling of institutional and generic hierarchies that gestures towards a “new model of the database” whose construction is predicated upon collaborative, intercultural, and interdisciplinary processes. Similarly, Paul H ­ jartarson, Harvey Q ­ uamen, and Kristin Fast look to the relational ­ database as a way of articulating the m ­ anifold relations between objects and

16  Dean Irvine, Vanessa Lent, and Bart Vautour

activities generated by the dialectical and remediating operations of digital archiving and electronic editing. “New ways of knowing,” they argue, “emerge not just out of the development of new technologies – in this case, digital technologies – but out of the dynamic created between old and new: the one repositioning itself in relation to the other.” With a project that pays homage to such dynamics in the recovery of the ground-breaking computer-based research of its late-modernist subject, Michael John DiSanto’s collaboration with Robin Isard on the iterative development of an interface and database for their George Whalley website (georgewhalley.ca) extends the poet-scholar’s prescient work in the 1960s on “literary computing,” which he “wanted to see developed [into] a comprehensive and versatile system for literary-critical and editorial purposes” that could be paired with “the systematic accumulation of literary texts in machine-readable form” (Whalley, “Literary” 11). Whalley’s prospectus for literary computing bears an uncanny resemblance to EMiC/ÉmaC’s Modernist Commons, a testament to a mind whose vision of the future is still – nearly a half-century later – in the process of being invented. Emergent Modernisms, Collaborative Scholarship One of the issues of concern that runs throughout this collection is ­collaboration. Collaborative processes occur both in the ­historical production of modernist texts and in the development of e­ ditorial p ­ rojects that recirculate these texts in scholarly editions. The c­ onnection between modernist collaborative networks and the need for ­ collaboration within and across scholarly editorial projects – both print and d ­ igital – is not inconsequential. Emergent modernisms and their signature publishing practices – little magazines, small presses – are built upon alternative economies sustained by collaborative labour. When literary histories of the modernists commemorate the singular acts of individual authors, they do so without recognition of the collaborative labour involved in the production of emergent print ­cultures. While often having to forge new networks outside established modes of production and ­distribution, many emergent modernist ­cultural ­producers found that they met and superseded that pace through collaborative effort directed at emerging technologies. Much scholarship on the canonical formations of ­modernism focuses on individual agents of aesthetic innovation and elides the collaborative processes that enabled those figures to stand out against their predecessors and acquire the cultural

Introduction 17 

distinction that highlights their singularity. After all, these same ­figures at once enabled and were enabled by collaborative engagements with technological innovations – in media, communication, and transportation – that fostered rapid aesthetic transformations and generated the profusion of modernism’s modes, styles, and techniques. Given that all of our contributors are employed in collaborative projects – whether under their own direction, or by way of affiliations with EMiC/ÉmaC – it is ­logical that their reassessments of modernism should not reinscribe authorial myths of individual genius and that their editorial recirculation of modernist texts should foreground the sociality of the technologies that facilitate their transdisciplinary, ­collaborative s­ cholarship. Recognition has long been a problem in recording the collaborative histories of the modernist period. Issues of race, gender, and sexuality have notoriously been elided by masculinist, white narratives of Anglo-American modernism, the corollary of which has been the omission of histories that attend to the conditions of subaltern labour and cultural production. So, too, when we undertake large-scale scholarly editorial projects – whether print, digital, or hybrid – we need to acknowledge that more often than not they depend upon collaborations involving the labour of emergent scholars (untenured professors, sessional instructors, and postdoctoral fellows, as well as graduate and undergraduate students), the growing demographic of the academic precariat; too often these scholars receive inadequate recognition for their contributions, typically relegated to a group given perfunctory thanks instead of proper credit for collaborative editing. Given that a significant proportion of contributors to Making Canada New (Tanya E. Clement, Melissa Dalgleish, Kristin Fast, Marc André Fortin, Andrea Hasenbank, Peter Webb, J.A. Weingarten, and Kailin Wright) and two of its editors (Vanessa Lent and Bart Vautour) are emerging scholars, it follows that their scholarship collected here should take into account the implications of disciplinary shifts towards collaboration in the humanities and digital humanities. What connections can we draw between the collaborative networks of the modernists and the cross-disciplinary collaborations among contemporary scholars of modernism? Certainly both historical moments experience rapid changes in technology and both witness various cross-disciplinary collaborations, but in what sense might the correlation of technological changes faced by emergent modernisms and their modes of collaboration be relevant to digital modernisms? Both modernists and digital modernists who engage in literary and scholarly

18  Dean Irvine, Vanessa Lent, and Bart Vautour

collaboration typically operate on the basis of “affective economies,” which are structured far less – if at all – by monetary exchange than by the ­valuation of emotional attachments that “work to bind subjects together” (Ahmed 119). Such economic systems that trade in affect are particularly relevant to editorial labour. As Heather Milne and Kate Eichhorn contend, “Affective economies of editing” bring “into relief how people, works, and practices become attached to each other, how things get entrenched and even stuck, and how people, works, and practices sometimes come apart” (191). Given their analogous positions of financial precarity, publishing ventures backed by modernist authors and digital projects led by emerging editors rely frequently on affective economies. This is not to collapse the distance between modernism and digital modernisms, nor to conflate the editorial practices of emergent modernists and emerging scholars, but instead to ­identify what Raymond Williams calls a “structure of feeling” (Marxism 133) – that is, in this instance, the affective economies of collaborative ­editorial labour and the production and reproduction of cultural goods. The correlation of modernism and digital modernisms and their mobilization of affective economies of editing are especially relevant to the experiences of new authors and scholars as well as their engagement with new modes of cultural labour; these agents and activities are signature “pre-emergent” formations (Marxism 127), to borrow Williams’s coinage, which not only take place at times of socio-cultural transition and complementary transformations of literary, artistic, and scholarly practices but also find expression in probative forms of communication such as manifestos or prospectuses. Many of the chapters collected here are typical of the pre-emergent character of modernist and digitalmodernist editorial scholarship, especially that of early-career scholars, not least because their longer-term projects are of necessity described here at early to intermediate stages of development, still in progress and subject to change. Both Tanya E. Clement’s and Andrea Hasenbank’s contributions fully embody these forms of pre-emergence, not only for their snapshots of editorial projects in motion but also for their repurposing of the manifesto as a mode of scholarly communication. Another striking example of this practice is the “Manifesto of Modernist Digital Humanities,” which was drafted by a group of earlycareer scholars – Alex Christie, Andrew Pilsch, Shawna Ross, and Katie ­Tanagawa – during the 2014 Modernist Studies Association conference in Pittsburgh and launched online immediately afterwards. This collaborative manifesto, whose asymmetrical and dynamic typography

Introduction 19 

imitates early twentieth-century avant-garde design, makes plain the ways in which digital modernisms seek to renovate signature modernist genres and media; their signatory collectivity is equally symptomatic of avant-garde literary, artistic, and political manifestos of commitment and solidarity. The inchoate proliferation of collaboration in the digital humanities often finds itself at odds with the long-standing institutional conventions of the traditional humanities, principally because standard metrics of scholarship fail to account for ways to assign credit for collaborative products and projects in a way that adequately recognizes scholarly contributions. As Kathleen Fitzpatrick writes in Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy, these are matters of particular concern to emerging scholars in the humanities, including those members of EMiC/ÉmaC whose scholarship participates in the conversation about the risks and rewards of collaborative modes of scholarly production. Single authorship and individual scholarship “has evolved in conjunction with our publishing and employment practices,” Fitzpatrick argues, and each of these positions “may benefit from certain kinds of change: some of our publishing practices are economically unsustainable, some of our employment practices are out of step with our actual intellectual values, and some of our writing practices are more productive of anxiety than they are of good work” (53). ­Digital technologies that transform scholarly editing – where “economically unsustainable” projects are now becoming more sustainable – favour (or even necessitate) modes of collaboration that move across disciplines and dismantle hierarchies of authorship. Instead of e­ ditorial projects produced exclusively by tenured academics, the publishing models adopted by EMiC/ÉmaC and many of its partners feature emerging and alt-ac scholars. The multitude of skill sets required for many collaborative digital projects has opened up practices of scholarly editing to encourage mentorship and training across disciplines, which promotes transdisciplinary research methodologies that transform perceptions of the humanities and, in doing so, diversify the potential career paths of early-career scholars. Such challenges to traditional methods of scholarly research and production require new modes of humanities pedagogy and new methods of recognizing academic labour, especially that of emerging and alt-ac scholars. How can we ensure that these new methods are in fact benefiting these scholars and not simply reproducing old power structures? Further, how can we promote collaborative mentorship and training models in a way that brings energy to the humanities

20  Dean Irvine, Vanessa Lent, and Bart Vautour

and offsets anxieties over the uneven distribution of resources across university campuses, often at the expense of humanities? One possible solution is to shift pedagogical expectations to include the teaching of collaborative methods as best practices for scholarly editing, not only in undergraduate and graduate classrooms but also at unconferences, workshops, summer schools, and training institutes. Working and reflecting collaboratively upon editorial pedagogy in these settings implements the collegial dynamics and affective commitments of editing as a scholarly practice. In Retooling the Humanities: The Culture of Research in Canadian Universities, Daniel Coleman and Smaro Kamboureli assert that the current “culture of research” in Canadian universities promotes a “rhetoric of commercialization” and “ethos of managerialism” at the expense of pedagogy (xiv). “Teaching and learning,” they add, “are increasingly seen as tangential spinoffs from discovery or applied research” (xvi). Even more precarious, scholarly editing is regularly devalued as a research activity and categorized instead as academic service, absorbed into the bureaucratic functions of academia. Editing is rarely, if ever, factored into standard undergraduate and graduate curriculum development, except in the context of rhetoric and composition programs or writing centres in which the function of editing is instrumental to course work (or student employment) rather than research-oriented. There are, however, specialized intensive-learning institutes and workshops at which researchers acquire training in editorial fundamentals (descriptive and analytical bibliography, palaeography, codicology, and book history); these parainstitutional training environments are equally common to the digital humanities. While these training programs may briefly educate editors about best practices in collaborative project management, the actual implementation of such practices and their regulation through project charters and memoranda of agreement that govern the distribution of labour and allocation of resources among participants and partners in editorial initiatives are essential to the sustainability of collaboration. Collaboration across disciplines highlights the need to create research networks both at and around home institutions – that is, geographically focused networks – and among the distributed and dispersed ­networks facilitated by web-based communication. Indeed, as Coleman and ­Kamboureli point out, the old adage “publish or perish” is now reformulated as “fundraise or perish” to reflect the need to p ­ roduce larger-scale projects. This change requires the scholar to be adept at networking and collaborative work, because “grant applications for

Introduction 21 

collaborative projects that involve researchers and other partners from different universities and sectors are elaborate and time-consuming and, once awarded, they require an equally elaborate management and public accountability process” (xviii). Many established scholars in the humanities have not been taught how to collaborate in productive and equitable ways, and many emerging scholars lack access to mentorship by researchers experienced in collaborative research. With the arrival of a new generation of scholars who are increasingly aware of the contemporary restructuring of the academy, we have arrived at a moment when we must also recognize and promote cross-generational education that goes beyond the one-way mentorship of traditional humanities research pedagogy. Given the need for strong partnerships within and among ­institutions, it seems apt to extend the reformulation of academic survival to include “collaborate or perish.” Indeed, as Susan Brown p ­ osits, both collaboration and interdisciplinarity are “virtually inevitable” in digital-humanities scholarship. She challenges those who work in ­traditional humanities modes to embrace this “science or social science model” that may include “a lab, multiple graduate students, and post-docs,” because the rewards of the work for strengthening the future of the humanities is invaluable “­ insofar as it involves graduate students in research beyond activities associated with preliminary or wrap up phases of projects, ­integrating them into the research and dissemination activities themselves and ­providing them with a broader experience” (226–7). Brown’s provocation to contemporary humanities researchers to consider the laboratory model and its collaborative methodologies is by no means disconnected from the institutional histories of modernism and the emergence of digital modernisms. From Gertrude Stein’s training and research at Hugo Münsterburg’s psychology lab at Harvard in the 1890s to the creation of European and North American art and design labs in the 1920s and 1930s, the modernist period witnessed the emergence of institutional formations that traversed disciplinary boundaries and fostered new modes of collaboration. With the opening of studiolaboratories in the 1960s and 1970s, the late twentieth century saw a new generation of collaboration among artists, scientists, engineers, and industry that modelled itself on avant-garde labs of the early twentieth century. The creative and critical practice of “mainframe experimentalism” in the 1960s and 1970s all took place in computer laboratories. When, in 1985, the director of MIT’s Media Laboratory claimed it to be “as much like the Bauhaus as a research lab” (qtd in Bass), Nicholas

22  Dean Irvine, Vanessa Lent, and Bart Vautour

Negroponte not only gestured towards the formation of digital-media laboratories and collaboratories but also recalled the avant-garde labs of the modernist period. The MJP Lab and EMiC/ÉmaC’s Modernist Commons constitute and are constituted by this genealogy of modernist laboratories;5 these institutions of digital modernism are inheritors, conservators, and renovators of this more-than-century-long history of collaborative literary, artistic, and scholarly practice. Unmaking Modernism The editorial decision to pursue print publication for this collection of long-form academic writing on editing, remediating, and recovering modernist literatures from Canada and beyond is by no means anachronistic: it is, rather, a recognition of the persistence of print genres in a digital age. It is, in addition, an invocation of the cultural transformations and contradictions that new media brought to print cultures and practices of the modernist period. Divided into three sections – “Libraries, Archives, Databases, Editions,” “Collaborations,” and “Selective Traditions and Alternative Modernisms” – Making Canada New is ­structurally bound by the conventions of the edited collection and technologies of the book. One alternative might have been to leave the collection minimally structured, arranged in a meaningful sequence without ­sections, perhaps to invite fluid navigation among chapters, but more likely to cast the reader adrift without a compass. Like the majority of our contributors, we found ourselves gravitating to section headings, as a way to map the potential reader’s route through the book – even if, in all likelihood, we assumed that few would choose to read an edited ­collection ­sequentially from beginning to end. More likely, we expect, is the experience of Sean Latham’s “ergodic” reader, whose navigation of the ­collection as a kind of database converges on and diverges from the table of contents, or the “paper-based program.” We supplement that non-sequential mode of reading by appending a standard nametitle-subject index – that is, a selective instrument to facilitate more efficient and complex searches of the book. There is, of course, nothing new about a book with a table of contents or an index, except to recognize that such standard print devices have already been remediated, modified by ­digital search and information retrieval ­techniques in “the late age of print” (Bolter 3). Immersed in a culture of digital reading ­technologies, Making Canada New is not just a textual artefact – whether accessed as bound volume or ebook – but a h ­ ybridized media

Introduction 23 

i­nstrument, a r­emediated remix of traditional and emergent modes of literary scholarship that narrate new modernisms. We have already traversed alternative pathways through the collection, which move back and forth across the sections to draw links among new media, collaborative labour, emergent scholars, and digital modernisms. If these routes have so far tracked the editorial renovation of modernism as a predominantly digital phenomenon, there are others that lead to the production of print editions, some with auxiliary apparatuses hosted online. Instead of succumbing to a fallacy of ­compulsory innovation, one frequently propagated by modernists themselves, the scholarship represented in this collection is equally committed to the rehabilitation of traditional methodologies. Making new modernisms need not depend on the continuous fabrication of completely new modes of scholarship; it may, rather, repurpose practices and combine them with others – whether old or new, print or digital – as a strategy to defamiliarize established methods and, in doing so, instigate the rebuilding of critical and historical narratives. Fundamental to this ­process of renovating modernisms is the intermixture of print and digital research methods and the coordination of more popular modes of literary scholarship – theory, criticism, history, biography – with less ­frequented modes – bibliography, textual studies, and editing. For this reason, we have arranged Making Canada New so that the institutional and disciplinary partitions erected between these modes are not replicated by our principles of selection or organization. As much as this collection commemorates recent efforts to restore Canada’s modernist cultural heritage, it also points to gaps, silences, and losses in the maintenance of literary histories and archives. J.A. Weingarten’s bibliographic tour of Canadian modernists’ personal libraries, which stems from research commissioned for the preparation of a scholarly edition of F.R. Scott’s complete poems and translations (see Irvine and May), takes particular note of the impediments presented by collections whose contents get lost, scattered, withheld, damaged, or destroyed; this is a record of findings already recognizable to most visitors to literary archives, except that author libraries are much more rarely kept together, if preserved at all, and even those that survive in some state among the holdings of public institutions often remain uncatalogued, unpacked, and inaccessible. With kindred attention to problems of accessibility and circulation, several other contributors offer perspectives on the extent to which authors, families, and estates have controlled and mediated access to alternative histories

24  Dean Irvine, Vanessa Lent, and Bart Vautour

of modernism in Canada. Such chapters include Gregory Betts’s investigation into prohibitions against early avant-garde authors that led to the repression of their works and disposal of their archives, Patrick McCarthy and Chris Ackerley’s post-mortem on the recovery, annotation, and publication of the long-presumed lost Malcolm Lowry manuscript of In Ballast to the White Sea, and Colin Hill’s rediscovery of the early unpublished, experimental novels of Hugh MacLennan that he disavowed once he became a nationally celebrated realist and ardent antimodernist. These reflections on the lacunae of literary history and archives call attention to the contingent and iterative formation of modernisms, repeatedly made and remade new. Crucial to this ongoing process of making modernisms are editorial acts of selection. Among the most visible instances of this practice are selected editions and anthologies. Even so, as Peter Webb demonstrates in his chapter on selected editions of Canadian modernist poets, despite their regular use and availability, there is a theoretical and methodological vacuum in critical, editorial, and pedagogical discourse around these kinds of “readers’ editions.” With a similar focus on editorial and cultural selectivity, Andrea Hasenbank’s chapter foregrounds the rationale at work in her projected anthology of Canadian political and literary manifestoes, which allows her to exhibit the operation of what Raymond Williams calls the “machinery of selective tradition” that confers or denies cultural authority and, instead, posit an “alternative tradition” (Williams, “When” 49, 52) in which modernism and proletarianism enter into dialogue through the manifesto. Even as editorial selections operate at a practical level, most basic of which are principles of inclusion for a given collection, they are always conditioned by cultural-ideological apparatuses that structure the historical production and reproduction of modernisms. Granted that editors have actively participated in the construction and revision of modernisms, their selections are an integral part of this recursive process of cultural formation, for they are the legible traces of tradition-making “machinery” at work. Reinforcing the r­eparative ­ work initiated by his own digital editions of New Brunswick’s mid-­ ­ century modernists, Tony Tremblay’s chapter addresses how the “selective tradition” of Canadian modernism has authorized an “urban, westward-moving” narrative of progress that regards Atlantic Canadian authors as b ­ ackward and anti-modern. Such regional modernisms – whether ­maritime, prairie, western, or northern – have been given short shrift. Canada’s regional modernisms have been shunted

Introduction 25 

aside by Eurocentric, metropolitan assumptions about the conditions necessary for cultural modernity; such conditions are written into versions of Anglo-American modernisms premised on the rejection of Victorian and late-Romantic t­raditions. While a select group of Canada’s imitators of this dominant Anglo-American tradition rose to canonical prominence – say, for instance, the Montreal modernists of the 1920s – the practitioners of regional modernisms often either suffered derision or disappeared altogether. Among the regional modernists are those authors who lived in or visited western Canada and who produced works of literary and theatrical modernism that engage with the art and oral literatures of the First Nations. These regional practitioners, whether conscious or unconscious of the primitivist aesthetics of the European avant-garde, attempted to translate traditional indigenous artistic practice into a locally situated modernist aesthetic. Some of these primitivist texts derive from the activities of ethnographers and their collaborations with local indigenous interpreters, informants, translators, and collectors of First Nations cultural heritage. Marc André Fortin’s chapter on ethnographer and novelist Marius Barbeau pieces together an archival record of this modernist-primitivist phenomenon, revisiting Barbeau’s fieldwork among the Gitxan and Ts’msyan of the Skeena River and his composition of a novel, The Downfall of Temlaham (1928), that freely interprets and adapts his ethnographic notes and audio recordings. Alongside this mode of ethnographic modernism, there are plentiful modernist imitations of indigenous cultural heritage by non-­ indigenous poets, novelists, playwrights, musicians, and librettists who took imaginative licence with their source material, whether gathered through exposure to First Nations communities, culled and reworked at a distance from ethnographic publications, or invented from Eurocentric stereotypes of the “Imaginary Indian” (Francis 3). This mode of modernist mimicry of indigenous culture is taken up in Kailin Wright’s chapter, which documents her recovery of stage-production and t­ extual histories for a critical edition of The God of Gods, a 1918 play by Carroll Aikins that depicts an indigenous community loosely based on the Okanagan First Nation ­living near the playwright’s home in Naramata, British Columbia – a play whose local roots and transatlantic productions signal its ­simultaneous engagement with regional and international ­ modernisms. Such alignments of regional and ­ international modernisms speak to their local permutations and global exchanges, for the ­operations and institutions of imperialist modernity that propelled

26  Dean Irvine, Vanessa Lent, and Bart Vautour

cultural modernism to the remote outposts of empire effected the mass colonization of indigenous stories and songs by non-indigenous authors and ethnographers; these imperialist agents and colonial subjects displaced traditional indigenous oral literatures and replaced them with modernist-­primitivist interpretations, imitations, and adaptations. So, to say, as Glenn Willmott does, that the “‘make it new’ of modernism” in Canada takes place in the “unreal country of a new world” (65) is to declare that this double articulation of the new coordinates cultural renovation with the socio-political innovations of imperial modernity, whose full extension across the continent heralds the unmaking of indigenous traditions and the making of modernist primitivism. Conversely, the postcolonial and decolonizing strategies of contemporary critical and editorial practice have sought to disarticulate this doubled narrative of the new and, instead, renovate the nationalist-imperialist literary-historical formations of modernism that failed to accommodate the alternative traditions of indigenous oral and print cultures. Canada is no longer the new world, nor is modernism new. At the historical conjuncture of imperial and cultural modernities in the early to mid-twentieth century, the correlation of Canada as an emergent nation with its nascent national literature was everywhere encoded by metaphors of the new. Making new modernisms proceeds from an archaeology of these figurations, an inventory of cultural innovations and renovations. To make Canada’s modernisms new, however, is not to restore the conditions of their emergence but to defamiliarize ­conventionalized versions of their genealogies. One of the most crucial ways in which this collection revises the perception of Canadian modernism is by resituating its editorial, critical, and literary-historical scholarship in relation to international and transnational modernisms. This is the basic methodology of ­“geomodernisms,” Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel’s “locational approach to modernisms’ engagement with cultural and political discourses of global modernity.” Rather than p ­ ositioning Canadian literature on the outside of “canonical white Anglo modernism” – which is essentially the prevailing critical narrative that has depreciated Canada’s allegedly belated and derivative modernism – a g ­ eomodernist repositioning reverses the inside-outside configuration of dominant and alternative traditions, so that we can “begin to see all kinds of modernisms as they make themselves and are made from the outside in” (Doyle and Winkiel 3; emphasis in the original). Instead of retracing the one-way direction of Anglo-­American modernism’s influence on Canadian literature, Making Canada New accounts for the multidirectional dynamics that editors,

Introduction 27 

critics, and historians have mobilized over the past decade or so to reconstitute and resituate alternative modernisms at once locally and globally. By inserting international scholars and transnational projects into EMiC/ÉmaC’s locally articulated networks, and conversely, by situating these local nodes as conduits to the globally articulated, collaborative n ­ etworks of new modernisms, this edited collection initiates procedures to unmake Canadian modernism as a cultural formation bound by the nation and, in doing so, make it new. NOTES 1 For more information on CEECT and its computer-assisted editions, see Edwards, “CEECT and Cyberspace”; Edwards, ed. Centre and Public Workshop; and Laird. 2 See Manovich, Language, “New Media,” “Avant-Garde,” “Generation Flash”; Goble; North, Camera; Pressman. 3 At the same time, EMiC/ÉmaC has not circumscribed its institutional and project affiliations to exclude non-modernists, since the Modernist Commons is designed around the adaptation of open-source repositories and toolkits that may have been originally architected for period- or disciplinary-specific purposes but whose modularity allows for abstraction to content-agnostic environments. 4 For an account of the Modernist Commons and its theoretical principles, see Irvine, “A Modernist Commons in Canada] Un Commun moderniste au Canada.” 5 On the contemporary digital-humanities laboratory and its relationship to modernist laboratories, see Irvine, “ModLabs.”

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1  Unpacking My Digital Library: Programs, Modernisms, Magazines sean latham

At the Library’s Fringes Let me begin with a confession: I don’t really know what a magazine is or how it works or even what it means to call these things texts. For someone who co-founded a journal on periodical studies and a key digital collection of modernist magazines, this is a kind of embarrassing, even damn-near existential kind of problem to have. More troubling is the fact that this problem seems to be getting worse: the more magazines I read, teach, and snatch off eBay, the more uncertain about them I become. At the Modernist Journals Project1 we serve up thousands of digital issues of these things and my own office is increasingly filled with paper copies that seem to taunt me with their troublingly alien qualities. Part of the problem is that they try to pass themselves off as codex books complete with columns of texts printed verso and recto as well as half-tone images all glued or stitched between paper covers. This shell, however, is a clever deception – a bit of camouflage that is all the more effective in library stacks, where they are not even given away by their fragile paper covers and thin bindings. Instead, they rank themselves down the shelf in hardened cloth and resin, their titles and call numbers stamped on the spine like all the other codex books in the shelves around them. If I look a little more closely at these things, however, I begin to see part of what makes them so bothersome: they posses a certain uniformity that seems out of place, as if they are trying too hard to fit in. I don’t, after all, have several nearly identical copies of Ulysses running down my shelf, but I do have a long row of Scribner’s issues that, at least on the shelf, bear an uncanny resemblance to one another – the feverish hoardings, perhaps, of some Borgesian librarian.

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When I pull these volumes down and begin to examine them, things go even further awry. Almost all contain advertising ranging from just a few pages to over a hundred and there’s a textual variability quite distinct from the books: poems, multi-columned prose, images, letters, short-titled notes, and even clip-out coupons jostle against one another in a disordered way quite out of keeping with the dependable regularity of my books. Even finding a way into the magazines proves nettlesome. When I open my care-worn copy of Ulysses, there is a title page with the book’s name and author, some copyright information, and a few lines about the company that has printed and sold it. My 1931 copy of Scribner’s Magazine, however, opens first onto an advertisement for Tiffany and Company, followed by a bewildering array of other pages marketing everything from decorative sconces to dictionaries amid some jeering comments about Sinclair Lewis winning the Nobel Prize. It takes a considerable bit of poking about to find the table of contents actually twenty-five pages in, and even then it proves incomplete and a little confusing. The pages, after all, are numbered using two different schemes. The opening and closing advertisements run from 1 to 25, then from 25 to 48, broken in half by the bulk of the editorial content that has its own serial numbering sequence running from 1 to 114. Confusingly enough, however, some of the editorial matter actually runs into the advertising, including the letters to the editor and, given that this is 1931, a somewhat urgent article, “Business Recovery in the Machine Age.” Put bluntly, despite masquerading in a codex form, magazines are not books. If, as Jerome McGann argues in Radiant Textuality, “even now we hardly understand the complexity of that great social artifice we call ‘the book,’” then how much less we must know about magazines (165). Editorial theorists and historians of print culture like McGann, Peter Shillingsburg, N. Katherine Hayles, and Joanna Drucker have been instrumental in defamiliarizing the book as a social object, a material thing, a mode of data storage, and a medium of transmission. Friedrich Kittler traces this process of estrangement to the early twentieth century, to the moment when the rise of phonography and photography interrupted the book’s claim to being the sole medium “responsible for all serial data flows” (10). Other critics tie our growing awareness of the book’s historical and technological specificity to the advent of the personal computer and the diffusion of digital textuality across a growing array of information devices. This process is happening so quickly, as Matthew Kirschenbaum has urgently argued, that we have not yet

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even begun to develop the editorial and archival strategies necessary to preserve these “first generation electronic objects,” treating them like books even as they work to reveal the limits of this older medium (“Editing” 7).2 The emergence of these other media has indeed begun to reveal just how little we know about the book, and this is one reason why once-quiescent fields like digital humanities (a magical rebranding of the once-arcane discipline of computational linguistics) and editorial theory have become increasingly central, not just to literary and cultural studies but to the humanities more generally. There is, in a sense, no better way to understand the material and historical specificity of the book than to figure out how to translate it from the codex to the screen. Even so, in our rush to historicize the book, we must not forget that magazines are not books; confusing the two means engaging in a basic category mistake. Indeed, this same kind of confusion bedevilled even that most iconic of media theorists, Walter Benjamin, who, when reflecting on the process of unpacking his library, grew wary of the strange things that had crept onto his shelves: “There is no living library that does not harbor a number of booklike creations from fringe areas,” he writes. “Some people become attached to leaflets and prospectuses, others to handwriting facsimiles or typewritten copies of unobtainable books; and certainly periodicals can form the prismatic fringes of a library” (66). There’s something unsettling here about magazines, and he moves them to the uncertain edges of his shelves as ancillary shards of texts rather than the central objects to which, he concludes, the collector can form an intimate, living relationship. Benjamin’s problem is thus my own: what to with these things as codex objects that try to pass themselves off at books. To addresses this challenge, I will borrow heavily from the work of textual critics and historians who have sought to defamiliarize the book by setting it within and against its remediation as a digital object. When this same thing is done for magazines, as is the case at the Modernist Journals Project, some surprising affinities between periodicals and digital textuality emerge – strange attractors that help us more clearly distinguish between the magazine and the book while also suggesting how modern periodicals might offer a bridge between print and digital media. My central claim is this: magazines, and more specifically the modern, illustrated magazines that emerged in the late nineteenth century, function as ergodic and recursive texts.3 They share, in other words, two key typological structures of what we now think of as

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digital textuality. As a result, rather than defamiliarizing the magazine, a critical engagement with digital theory actually helps us to refamiliarize ourselves with these objects that editors, critics, and historians so often exile to the fringes of their libraries. Put another way, digital appliances have enabled us to rethink the interdependence of material objects and sematic codes – the multifarious ways in which media as physical objects of storage and distribution shape the dynamic acts of reading, processing, and consuming texts. In advancing this argument, I do not mean at all to slight the often striking work of those who have approached magazines exclusively from the vantage of book history. Laurel Brake has done important work in formulating a rigorous and deeply historicized approach to nineteenthcentury periodicals as one node in the diverse network of print culture.4 Similarly, Margaret Beetham, in “Towards a Theory of the Periodical as a Publishing Genre,” has set out perhaps the most cogent typological definition of a periodical now available, one that tries hard to see the magazine as a distinct material object.5 Robert Scholes and Cliff Wulfman have offered concise yet compelling strategies for how to read, study, and teach the magazine as a central rather than peripheral form of modernist cultural production. My own arguments draw heavily on such work in ways both subtle and overt, but instead of seeking primarily to historicize the form by locating it in the moment of its production and circulation, I instead want to look back at it through the filters of its own remediation as well as through our own deep engagement with digital technology. Doing this requires the unpacking of my own digital library of magazines in order to arrange them not on Benjamin’s bookshelves but in the circuits and loops of computer programming. Magazines as Ergodic Texts Among the most daunting obstacles those of us who study and teach magazines face is the difficulty of producing a uniform reading experience about which we can generalize. Consider, for example, an issue of Scribner’s Magazine from 1910.6 How does one assign such a thing to a group of students? It is not like teaching Ulysses, Mrs Dalloway, or The Waste Land. With these more familiar texts, teachers can be certain that although students might interpret such major works differently, they have nevertheless all read the same words in the same order – that they share, in other words, a common text. The same is true, furthermore, of film, the twentieth century’s other major narrative medium. Like the

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book, it too is a serial form that requires a reader or viewer to begin at the beginning and take everything in order. There are, of course, avantgardist exceptions to this, such as the Burroughs cut-up or Oulipo experiments like Queneau’s codex-mangling “100,000,000,000,000 Poems.”7 Significantly, these works that seek to interrupt the seeming natural serial flows of the codex now figure prominently as part of a pre-history for digital texts – particularly the interactive fictions that emerged from the Storyspace platform in the 1980s and 1990s. At the moment of their initial conception, however, they seemed merely to confirm the serial nature of the codex form and its insistence on a pattern of reading so routinized that it had become almost invisible. Magazines, however, do not insist on a serial mode of reading, as an 1890 passage from the trade journal Art in Advertising suggests: “Did you ever notice … how a woman in the cars will read a magazine? She will take it up, look at it all over carefully to see she has the real thing, read the baking-powder advertisement on the back, start in from the end, look all through the advertising pages – stopping now and then to read some announcement of special allurement – until she strikes the text. She then gives a sigh, reaches toward her back hair for a superfluous pin, and begins to mutilate the pages in a languid quest for the month’s poetry” (qtd in Garvey 173).8 Had this imagined woman been holding a novel or some other book, this might seem like an Oulipo experiment of its own, a kind of 1890s performance art. But since this is a magazine, there is nothing exceptional about such an unorthodox mode of reading. This synchronic way of moving through a magazine took hold most deeply in the late nineteenth century when the advent of half-tone printing led to an explosion of visual content in magazines in a culture still unaccustomed to the mass saturation of images. These pictures were concentrated in advertising pages bound separately before and after the editorial content. It is easy to imagine even the most serious and diligent of readers taking a moment to wander chaotically through these ads, flipping back and forth, the eye not even travelling serially across the page. As the page in figure 1.1 suggests, there is no obvious or correct way even to read text that is grouped in different chunks, moves in different directions across the page, and is confused with images of all kinds. Nor is this even unique to the advertising pages, since the articles too are often illustrated and thus invite synchronic, discontinuous readings of images, captions, and subheads all designed, in part, to arrest the eye and invite multiple points of entry into the text.

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1.1.  Scribner’s January 1910

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These distinctive modes of reading a magazine contribute to the difficulty of trying to teach it as part of a course or even write about it analytically. Only the most diligent (or compulsive) students, seeing an assignment like “Read Scribner’s Jan 1910” on a syllabus, would sit down and read the thing straight through, beginning with the ad for “fresh meats,” following Roosevelt through Africa, and finishing up with ­“Postum … instead of coffee.” Instead, they will dip in and out of the magazine, reading what appeals, skimming what does not, and doing so in no particular set or correct order. The teacher’s problems with these things are shared by scholars. It can be quite easy to read and analyse the individual pieces of a magazine; more difficult, however, is figuring out how these pieces might relate to one another or to the dozen or so other things in the table of contents. Later I will pay more particular attention to this problem of connection or coherence, but for now want simply to emphasize that the pedagogical and interpretive habits of serial reading routinized by the book are of little use when we encounter a magazine. In “The Virtual Codex,” Johanna Drucker draws on theories from architectural design and cognitive science to argue that in defining the book, we should seek to ask “how” a book “does” its particular actions, rather than what a book is. She continues, “Instead of reading a book as a formal structure, then, we should understand it in terms of what is known in the architecture profession as a ‘program’ constituted by the activities that arise from a response to the formal structures.” This functionalist approach to the medium offers Drucker a way to denaturalize the codex book and thereby better describe its unique technological and structural features. Like Benjamin, however, Drucker too moves magazines to the fringes of her library, making the book and codex essentially interchangeable with one another. We might profitably use her approach, however, to ask how a magazine does its own particular actions and how its formal structures produce a distinctive array of reading activities. The answers to these questions have already been suggested, in part, by those scholars and critics engaged with digital works ranging from early hypertext fictions such as Michael Joyce’s afternoon: A Love Story to more recent forms of electronic textuality including video games and digital archives. Espen Aarseth in Cybertext coined the term ergodic literature to describe those works that require “a nontrivial effort … to traverse the text” (1). This term itself is subject to extensive debate and refinement, but it singles out for my purposes an important aspect of the modern magazine: namely, its resistance to serial modes of reading and its consequent dependence upon the idiosyncratic actions of individual readers to

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produce meaning. Not only is the effort required to traverse a magazine “nontrivial,” but it is also tied to the physical act of manipulation and consumption – the turning of pages in a particular direction; the movement of the eye from image to text; and even assembling the often contingent echoes of themes, images, and ideas that sound across its component parts. Only in the most extraordinary of circumstances will two readers ever share the same experience of a magazine, will they read it, in other words, in the same way. Again, this does not mean that they interpret it differently – but that they encounter the words, the articles, the ads, and even the paper in unique, disjunctive, and not easily anticipated ways.9 Magazines exhibit a wide variety of ergodic qualities, many of which expose their similarity to digital texts. First, like early hypertext stacks or databases, they are made up of discrete, bounded, generically defined elements: articles, illustrations, advertisements, poems, and so on. The database metaphor, in fact, is particularly powerful since, as Scholes and Wulfman note, the word magazine itself originally described a “storehouse,” a place where miscellaneous things could be efficiently stored alongside one another (29).10 Figure 1.2 is the table of contents for the January 1910 issue of Scribner’s and it holds a number of miscellaneous things: a colour illustration of “The Flights at Rheims”; the first three chapters of a book called Rest Harrow, published by Charles Scribner’s Sons; a heavily illustrated travel article, “The Midwinter Gardens of New Orleans”; an adventure story that mixes airplane flight with romance; a sonnet about the experience of rushing through the countryside in a car; art as well as drama reviews; and over one hundred pages of ads. Like cells on a spreadsheet, each of these items is discretely named. The table of contents for the issue further emphasizes this database-like quality of the magazine, acting essentially as a parser, or a paper-based program for sorting the data. Using it, I can find a unique identifier for each element (its title) as well as contextual information that groups it with other items in the database. This includes the author’s name as well things like illustrations and a story. It also provides links to other databases as well with terms like to be continued and Part IV. Like all good databases, it provides links to unique identifiers for each item in the form of page numbers. As with machine-readable text, because the data exist in discrete packets, they can be easily, rapidly, and randomly accessed. The structures of this paper-based program emerge elsewhere in the magazine as well, marking up the textual data in other useful ways. Each page, for example, has a header that describes the text in generic terms, further aiding the process of browsing – of what we might now

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1.2.  Scribner’s Table of Contents, January 1910

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call random access searches. The term Scribner’s Magazine Advertiser, for example, runs across the top of each advertising page, as do page numbers that are distinct from those used to identify the editorial content. Similarly, many of the pages in the editorial section have running headers that contain the title of the article (or a fragment of it) appearing on them. These are missing, however, on those pages where illustrations appear, so that the images essentially constitute a unique header that marks them off as discrete items related to but nevertheless separable from the text. This programming structure works in non-semantic ways as well, engaging the tactile and visual abilities of the body to create small feedback loops. In the August 1931 issue of Scribner’s, for example, the advertisements appear on a different quality of paper: it is thinner, more susceptible to bleed through, and less evenly printed than the interior pages. The fonts and layout, of course, are different as well, so someone familiar with this particular bit of code can tell at a glance the difference between the stately columns of an article and the smudged, chaotic, often minuscule print of the advertisements. And in that 1910 issue, the colour frontispiece of the airplanes at Rheims is printed on heavy, glossy stock that simultaneously calls it out as a unique entry from the database while also delimiting the boundary between advertisements and editorial matter (see figure 1.3). What I am describing here using the terms program and database, of course, are what critics like George Bornstein, Jerome McGann, and D.F. McKenzie call the “bibliographic code” of a text: “the semantic features of its material instantiations” (Bornstein, Material Modernism 6). The idea of a paper program, however, offers both a way to describe how a magazine works and to differentiate it from other kinds of codex forms. This paper-based apparatus emphasizes the discrete boundaries between the individual items in the magazine while also enabling individual readers to access and manipulate the data. This, in turn, leads to the second ergodic aspect of the magazine: the ability of readers to transform the text itself in original and often unpredictable ways. The magazine, in other words, is a discontinuous, spatial object, what Margaret Beetham calls “not so much a form in its own right as an enabling space for readers traversing the items they encounter” (25). In any given issue of a magazine, there are a large but finite number of discrete items, though we might choose to parse these in different ways, ranging from the level of the article or poem (as the table of contents program does) to the level of the page, the line, or the grapheme. As is the case in a database or hypercard stack, there are a limited number of objects available, but

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1.3.  Scribner’s Frontispiece, January 1910

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they can be combined in a very large number of ways. I might choose, for example, to follow an interest in travel on a path that leads first to the frontispiece on the airplanes at Rheims in figure 1.3 (and the programming structures of the magazine makes it hard not to begin here), then to the story “Her Compelling Eyes” that features illustrations of a plane outpacing a train (in the process, saving the marriage of a lovely couple), and then in a complicated path through advertisements for cars, for an illustrated calendar of “The American Girl Abroad,” and maybe even to a mini-narrative about Kodak cameras at the North Pole. The paper-based program of the magazine returns these and other results in response to a search for “travel,” and I am generally free to make my way through them as I please. Indeed, part of the pleasure of using this object resides precisely in this process of assemblage, pulling out individual pieces in order to construct a magazine that, although distributed to tens of thousands of others, is nevertheless uniquely my own. Magazines and Emergence In describing this recombinant aspect of the magazine, it will be useful to turn once again to Aarseth in order to borrow two other key terms. In Cybertext, he defines information as “a string of signs,” and then seeks to differentiate “between strings as they appear to readers and strings as they exist in the text” (62). The strings themselves he calls textons, their idiosyncratic assemblage by the reader scriptons. The ergodic capacity of a given text is thus defined by its relative ability to produce a diverse array of scriptons – to allow the reader, in other words, to generate often highly contingent textual configurations from otherwise bounded and discrete pieces of information. The codex book generally works to suppress the difference between textons and scriptons, so that readers who pick up the material object in widely divergent times and places all produce the same scripton – the same strings of information organized in the same basic order. Magazines, however, rely on the underlying technology of the codex to create paper-based programs capable of generating multiple scriptons. Thus they function a good deal more like computer games, databases, interactive fictions, and other increasingly familiar forms of digital textuality. This means that the critics, editors, and historians interested in these things also need to be interested in the work of digital humanists and theorists as well. With that in mind, I want to borrow one more term, this one from N. Katherine Hayles, who herself imports it from the computing sciences

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and information theory. In My Mother Was a Computer, she describes the concept of emergence – a particular kind of complexity that arises not from the individual elements of a system, but only from their interaction. These interactions pose a particular challenge, because they cannot be predicted or quantified and thus cannot be described or computed. Instead, they reside in a series of feedback loops within a system, each changing and shifting the others. For the scientists, this kind of complexity has all kinds of implications, ranging from the nature of consciousness to the patterns of human evolution.11 For scholars of magazines, however, emergence provides a powerful way of thinking about how all those textons that we can mark and measure in a text manage to produce something more than the sum of their parts: an ergodic, interstitial, contingent array of meanings. Such moments of emergence are exciting, but also provisional, unstable, and sometimes even difficult to capture using our current theoretical and historical frames. This is why magazines have for so long been generally treated essentially as a collection of autonomous textons, their capacity for interactive emergence disciplined by framing them as mere stopping points on the way to a book. For textual editors, emergence poses an even more serious set of problems to which I will return in a moment. To illustrate how emergence works and its potential critical implications, I will draw on two issues of Scribner’s Magazine. The first of these is the one I have already been using from January 1910. Among its various textons is a poem, a sonnet actually, written by the now forgotten Percy MacKaye. Titled “From an Automobile,” it describes a trip in a car through the countryside distinguished by an experience of speed so intense that the world becomes “fluid” and threatens to drown the passengers: Fluid the world flowed under us: the hills, Billow on billow of umbrageous green, Heaved us, aghast, to fresh horizons, seen One rapturous instant, blind with flash of rills And silver rising storms and dewy stills Of dripping boulders, then the dim ravine Drowned us again in leafage, whose serene Coverts grew loud with our tumultuous wills. Then all of nature’s old amazement seemed Sudden to ask us: “Is this also Man? This plunging, volant land-amphibian –

44  Sean Latham What Plato mused and Paracelsus dreamed? Reply!” And piercing us with ancient scan, The shrill primeval hawk gazed down and screamed.

This process of dissolution shifts in the second stanza from the passing world to the human body itself, so that “Man” becomes a hybrid, even a cyborg, a “volant land-amphibian.” The final two lines then abruptly abandon the human and the machine both – the “us” of the first stanza and the narrator of the second – to take up a third view, this one of a hawk who looks down on this new creature and screams. Read simply as a texton, this is not a great modernist poem – though it’s not bad either. It captures a futurist fascination with the human and the machine, but lines like “Billow on billow of umbrageous green” lack the precision of imagism. It is not a poem, in other words, that one might want to lift from the magazine and set aside Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” (a roughly contemporaneous piece dealing with a similar theme). But when reconfigured as part of a larger scripton, something more interesting begins to happen. Consider, for example, the advertisement in figure 1.4 for Diamond Tires from the same issue, which itself looks like a possible illustration for the poem. Here we have the same country road MacKaye invokes, with a similar set of blurring effects. The road signs indicating the company’s milestones lead quickly from the dirt track at the left to the paved road on the right. As in the poem, technology appears as an unexpected hybrid of the natural and the built, the angelic muse of automotive production leaning from the heavens like a latter-day Prometheus to bestow not fire, but a comfortable ride upon the viewer – a viewer drawn by the image down the road of the future. There is no ambiguous hawk’s scream; instead the cold eye from the heavens seems to bless the “volant landamphibian.” The ad and the poem conspire to produce an emergent question about the relationship between humanity and technology, one that takes even clearer shape when our hypothetical scripton leads to an advertisement for the Howard Watch that shows a station master as an unexpectedly cybernetic being enmeshed in wires, watches, and signals – technologies enabling the “exacting service” necessary to avoid disaster. “The American Railway employe [sic] is a high-grade man,” but he is defined here as much by his human “pride” as by his “fine watch.” The ­interpenetration of biology and technology appears as well in a cartoon (a rarity in S ­ cribner’s) titled “In the Mechanical Age” (figure 1.6). The young boy, out “driving (for the first time)” sees the

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1.4.  Scribner’s Diamond Tires Advertisement, January 1910

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1.5.  Scribner’s Howard Watch Advertisement, January 1910

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1.6.  Scribner’s Cartoon, “In the Mechanical Age,” January 1910

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world as in a vision from the Diamond Tires ad, the horse’s exhalations as natural and organic as the steam escaping from an engine. This particular scripton depends on a discontinuous reading of the text, since none of these textons are immediately juxtaposed with one another. Such a thread, however, reveals a deep debate unfolding in the magazine itself about how to imagine the first glimmerings of the post-human. MacKaye’s sonnet and the cartoon both suggest a deep sense of fear or ambivalence, albeit one mingled with pleasure. The car and watch advertisements, on the other hand, seek to naturalize the intermingling of human and machine. This same debate, furthermore, plays out through the editorial content of the magazine. Look again, for example, at the frontispiece illustration of the planes at Rheims ­(figure 1.3). Hoffbauer’s painting employs the techniques and settings of impressionism to blur the boundaries between the technological and the natural so that the planes become bird-like. The pilots fuse with their machines, each fading into the other in a process that evokes the description of speed in MacKaye’s poem. Even the point of view in this painting engages the issues at play in this scripton, since we seem to hover in the air as we look out over the landscape – occupying a position uncannily similar to that of the screaming hawk in its attempt to process a new kind of hybrid being. This scripton leads us deeper into the editorial content as well. There is a story, for example, of a young boy who secretly builds a wireless set in the attic of his house then uses his unique access to the flow of information to convince his parents that he has the magical power to see the future. Titled “William’s Psychic Disturbances,” the story takes a deliberate swipe at modernist spiritualism to suggest that mystical powers and a heightened sense of inter-subjective connection can already take place through technological means. Taken individually, most of these articles, ads, and images might be of little interest. The stories depend upon stereotype and sentimentality; the sonnet’s language is overstuffed with Victorian diction; the frontispiece is nice, but hardly arresting; and the advertisements and cartoons blend in easily with the hundreds of others around them. When assembled in a particular scripton, however, they become more interesting because they are more dynamic objects, each in dialogue with the ­others about the rapidly changing relationship between biology and ­technology. As in emergence theory, there is a complexity at work in this text – a kind of difficulty I would call modernist – but it becomes visible only when we stop looking at the magazine as a reservoir of texts

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and instead see it instead as an interactive database, a ­“technotext” that requires more than just “nontrival effort” to be traversed. Such a mode of reading might seem tenuous or idiosyncratic, my use of technological metaphors to produce a reading of the magazine as a meditation on technology at once circular and anachronistic. So let me turn now to another issue of Scribner’s and to a different, more canonical kind of reading that can be developed from the redescription of the magazine as a paper-based program. The January 1931 issue contains “Dry September,” one of William Faulkner’s most famous and widely anthologized stories. The piece was originally written in 1930 and titled “Drouth.” On 8 February of that year Faulkner mailed it to Menken and Nathan’s American Mercury, only to have it rejected. Editors first at Forum and then at Scribner’s reached similar decisions. Possibly after further discussion with the editors at Scribner’s, Faulkner sent a significantly revised version that the magazine accepted; it then appeared essentially unchanged, first in his 1931 collection These 13 and later in the Collected Stories (Skei 83). Textual scholars here find themselves on more familiar ground, one defined less by textons and scriptons than by variants, manuscript histories, and genetic schemas. Such work has been very productive indeed, revealing not only that the story’s title changed, but that the first two sections were initially reversed. The tale originally opened with a description of the neurotic Minnie Cooper: a misogynist portrait of a single, middle-aged woman who enjoys the attention of a town bent on lynching an innocent young black man who may or may not have touched her. Only after this portrait of a woman who “was the last to realize she was losing ground” and thus willing to lash out in desperation do we then get a description of the community and its racist bloodlust (51). Following a long tradition of textual criticism that almost always finds the final version of a text mysteriously the best, critics have analysed in detail the ways in which the transposition of these two sections strengthened the story. Hans Skei, for example, argues that these revisions “improved the short story immensely” and provide “a superb example of Faulkner’s growing awareness of the importance of structure” (85). James Ferguson and several others have noted, in particular, the ways in which this change shifts the focus of the story away from Minnie and towards the community and its shared responsibility for the horrors of lynching (128–9).12 Such a reading, of course, helps us sustain an image of Faulkner as a genius while also brushing aside the story’s misogyny and aligning it with a comfortably liberal view of the author’s rather complicated racial politics.

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This particular textual history of the story, however, which focuses exclusively on Faulkner himself, leaves out crucial details about its original publication. “Dry September” did not appear in a vacuum, and returning it to that January 1931 number of Scribner’s creates the kinds of recursive, contingent feedback loops essential to the idea of emergence. Reading it as part of the magazine makes its history more complex, its modernist difficulty extending beyond literary form to its physical substrate. The pieces surrounding the story create a number of feedback loops that can, in turn, shape a new reading of the story. The first and perhaps most striking of these emerges when we read across the ending of “Dry September” to the article that immediately follows it. Entitled “The American Inquisition,” it describes in often chilling detail abusive police practices used to coerce confessions during interrogations. Its opening lines almost read like a continuation of Faulkner’s story – a fervid vision of the lynching scene that is famously omitted from the fiction: A flash of lightning revealed their destination to the Negro. He glimpsed a mass of swaying trees with their branches lashing and relashing against the massed clouds. Beneath stood row upon row of white stones, wet and gleaming in the darkness. It was the cemetery … “Now, nigger! You’re going to tell us who killed George Mauer. (Lunt 57)

The article continues with a number of similarly vivid anecdotes about the police in both the north and south essentially torturing information out of often-innocent black suspects. Here the man is locked in the tomb with the body of the victim until he admits his crime, though that image of the lashing tree branches unquestionably invokes the threat of lynching. In fact, this article seems almost like a critical reading of Faulkner’s story, arguing that “the employment of force is like a contagious disease” that infects American democracy (Lunt 62). As is the case in “Dry September,” guilt in this article attaches not to individual bad actors, but to the communities that tolerate and even encourage such practices, which themselves become subject to an intensifying cycle of violence. A similarly complex intertext precedes Faulkner’s story as well: a memoir entitled “On Leaving the South,” by Howard Mumford Jones. A Midwesterner by birth, Jones taught at the Universities of Texas and North Carolina for fourteen years before moving first to Ann Arbor and then to Cambridge, where he became one of the country’s

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foremost historians. The essay acts as a kind of apologia for the South aimed at Scribner’s largely Northern audience and casts itself as a gentle ethnography of the region’s culture. Yet it also contains some sharp moments of criticism that intersect with Faulkner’s story in surprising and revealing ways. After providing a generally warm portrait of the region, for example, Jones acknowledges, “Mobs form quickly, homicide comes more casually, and hysteria for a time is king” (25). “Dry September,” of course, details precisely this cultural “hysteria,” so that the story serves as a vivid illustration of Jones’s measured ethnographic analysis. Jones even goes on to call the South a “feminine creation,” setting up a recursive loop that draws in Minnie Cooper: “For the South,” he argues “is feminine in its contradictions, its allure, its sudden furies and inexplicable cruelties” (26). Like Faulkner, in other words, Jones interleaves violence and gender, so that we later encounter Minnie in the story as a prime example of what he calls this “contradiction” that emerges from a rigid policing of gendered and racial bodies. This connection, in fact, is even more brightly drawn in the short poem “This Drought” that appears near the end of the issue. Directly invoking the title of Faulkner’s story, it describes the withering power of desire and the danger it poses to the subject, figured here as “shadowy groves and gardens” that “shall be made as / Sere as the desert when this day is done” (89). This otherwise forgettable piece of verse, similar in many ways to MacKaye’s “From an Automobile,” snaps abruptly into focus as a commentary on Minnie Cooper. In the January 1931 issue of Scribner’s, then, “Dry September” is surrounded by textons that generate a complex series of recursions ­embedded within the magazine’s programming. The always contingent scriptons they produce offer a rich, compelling way of reading both the magazine’s own mediation on race, region, and violence as well as the individual pieces. There’s potentially more at stake here, however, than just this emergent complexity. Given the limited information we have about Faulkner’s composition process for this story, this critical return to the magazine also suggests a new way of constructing its genealogy. We know, for example, that Faulkner often talked with editors at S ­ cribner’s about the titles of his stories, and it is possible, even likely, that these exchanges led to the change from “Drouth” to “Dry ­September” as well as the reversal of the story’s first two sections. As we have seen, critics have generally treated this as part of Faulkner’s process of maturation as a writer – a sign of his evolving genius. Yet we can now also see that these revisions opened up a

52  Sean Latham

number of intertextual connections with the rest of the issue. The shift away from local colour effects invoked by the original title and the consequent emphasis on the community’s responsibility for racial violence link the story to the issue’s larger concerns with extrajudicial torture and murder. Similarly, the transformation of Minnie from the framing device for the story into a character embedded in that violence links her, in turn, to the gendered metaphors Jones uses in his ethnography as well as to the poem “This Drought.” As a result, Minnie – like the poem’s lyric speaker and like the South invoked by Jones – becomes more clearly subordinate to national and even natural forces that then frame her complicity in the town’s mad rush to violence. Faulkner’s revisions may indeed have made this a better story, but they also clearly suggest another set of operators at work, since they allowed the piece to fit more tightly into the January 1931 issue of Scribner’s. They contribute, that is, to the recursive emergence of a highly complex textual system that can be grasped only by looking beyond the horizons of authorship to the connections made possible by the magazine’s ergodic programming. Editing Magazines What I have attempted to outline so far is a theory about how magazines work, in order to relocate them from the fringes of Benjamin’s library to the centre of our critical attention. Doing so requires freeing these complex textual objects from the constraints of the codex books to which they have been both literally and figuratively bound. By reconceiving them as paper-based programs replete with the discrete structure of a database and the recursive capacity of ergodic cybertexts, new and more compelling interpretive possibilities emerge. These offer not only new readings of familiar texts like “Dry September,” but also provide us a way of finding modernist complexity in places we do not expect. This theory of the periodical, however, also has serious implications for the ways in which we set about editing such texts, so this chapter will conclude by examining some of the difficulties the Modernist Journals Project (MJP) has encountered in trying to edit magazines – as well as the solutions we continue to develop. One such difficulty is conceptual: there is just something odd about creating a scholarly edition of a magazine. For textual editors – and this still includes those creating digital as well as print works – periodicals remain often sorry, aggravating things, full of what some r­egretfully

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call “variants” and others reject as “errors.” Both of these terms, of course, imply the existence of a final, ideal, or perfected text, one that inevitably takes shape in a book. How an editor treats the Little Review publication of the “Calypso” episode from Joyce’s Ulysses or the Blackwood’s publication of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray has been the subject of extensive debate, the former even leading to the sensationally titled “Joyce wars” over the Hans Walter Gabler edition. But seen from another vantage, all this matters less than the general agreement that the magazines themselves are merely fodder for the book, not different really from drafts and fair-copy manuscripts that must be collated, described, and carefully weighed for inclusion in a final text. The ergodic magazine text is thus disciplined – made to give way to the codex book, and the editor’s job is to see that this happens in a rigorous, efficient way. So what then does it mean that the MJP seeks to produce editions of a magazine? Herein lies the problem, since we cannot simply adopt the practices and standards of those who edit books and thus only ever see the magazine as a kind of input. As Hayles has argued in the context of digital media, we must first “posit a notion of ‘text’ that is not dematerialized and that does depend on the substrate in which it is instantiated” (My Mother Was a Computer 102). This means that the act of editing requires us to treat a text as “embodied,” its meaning produced in “the interaction of its physical characteristics with its signifying strategies” (103). This deep connection between text and its physical substrate constitutes the ergodic quality of the magazine; editing such things thus requires methods that can describe, encode, and simulate this structure. Preparing a digital text means learning how to think about an object’s discrete parts (its textons) and how those parts might then be assembled for end users (scriptons). The initial problem is thus how to identify the basic units of a magazine. As I have already suggested, the print object includes its own paper-based program in the form of a table of contents and thus offers one way to proceed. A digital editor might then create a basic metadata file that essentially reproduces the table of contents with pointers to the items it lists. Such an approach has the advantage of retaining the original document’s structure and provides a relatively easy way to parse the discrete units of a text that can then be called up for processing. The MJP editions do this, so that users can look at the original table of contents in a PDF file and click on an item, taking them directly to the page where it appears. Such a process, however, presents difficulties of its own. First, the tables of contents themselves are

54  Sean Latham

often wrong or incomplete: page numbers are out of place, articles are not listed, and items such as advertisements, cartoons, and other “ephemera” are not included. The second difficulty with our facsimile approach is that the textons themselves do not adequately align with the basic units of the magazine as a whole. More than just omitting some items, this use of a virtual table of contents fails to provide adequate access to the materials in the text. The ergodic movement through a magazine depends heavily on visual and not just textual stimuli, on the pictures, illustrations, offset letterpress, subheads, and other such items that arrest our attention and direct our reading. The textons – the basic units of the magazine itself – thus cannot be reduced to the table of contents but are instead a good deal more compact; a digital edition needs to preserve this lest the object become nothing more than a mere container of items. This suggests, then, the third difficulty with a facsimile edition: it simply cannot reproduce the material process of actually reading and handling a magazine – the ability to form contingent yet provocative scriptons of the kind I identified in a few sample issues of Scribner’s. Editing a magazine is thus neither about producing an ideal text nor about simply reproducing its contents. Instead, it poses serious challenges about how to represent in a digital environment the interdependence of text and its material substrate. It is, in short, hard and serious work. The MJP has approached these three problems – incomplete tables of contents, the definition of textons, and the simulation of reading – in a variety of ways. Since we process the text underlying our scans of the original pages using optical character-recognition software and then correct it by hand to a high level of accuracy, we have theoretical access to everything in the magazine – including those things that have been left out of the original table of contents. We then create metadata files (MODS – an acronym for “metadata object description schema”) that include detailed information about titles and authors as well as basic genres (among them “articles,” “fiction,” “graphics” and “letters”). These can then be rendered on a splash screen for each issue and also made available for detailed text searches. This editorial step thus hews closely to the original paper-based program for the journal itself, essentially extending its capabilities while leaving intact its unique segmentation of the textual data. The table of contents is now accurate, and the metadata record now essentially reproduces the volume indexes that were often included with magazines like Scribner’s and the New Age. We have thus addressed the problem of incompletion by essentially

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improving rather than rethinking the apparatus of the original object – a process that itself retains the familiar if deeply erroneous understanding of a magazine as a collection of discrete, discontinuous objects. Our metadata files, however, do more than simply break down the magazine into its parts. Each entry can itself contain numerous constituent elements, which means that these records also provide a way to describe some basic magazine textons, those units of meaning that extend beyond the titles of articles. Consider, for example, part of an XML file for the story “Her Compelling Eyes” in the January 1910 issue of Scribner’s. In it we provide an entry not just for the author and the title, but also for the illustrations in this piece and the artist who created them. This information does not appear in the table of contents for the issue at the moment, though it would be possible for us now to create a new editorial shell for the magazine: a description not just of the contents as described by the paper-based object, but of some additional semantic units as well. And because our metadata are searchable, users can also create meta-textual documents like this on the fly, locating, for example, all the issues in 1910 that include an illustration by F.C. Yohn. This is only one way of breaking down the textons, trying to discover and identify the core constituent parts of a magazine. Another way arises not from our metadata encoding, but from our visual presentation of individual magazines. If users choose to navigate the MJP’s image files, rather than downloading the PDF file, then the individual page emerges as a the core unit of meaning. In one sense, a single page might be the most effective unit of analysis, the basic texton for a magazine. Unlike the division of the text by article, it allows for the simultaneous play of multiple elements across a single, perceptual space. Texts and illustrations can here be integrated with one another, and items like poems and advertisements retain their material interdependence. Even here, however, key editorial problems remain. Should the page itself be the basic unit of measurement, for example, or should it be the matched facing pages of a magazine? Relocating the texton to a page or pair of facing pages also risks becoming increasingly imprecise, particularly in cases where our MODS records might record multiple distinct entries on a single page or pair of pages. So the problem remains: what are the basic units of a magazine text? And how do we both define and provide access to them within digital editorial systems generally designed to accommodate books, manuscripts, and other serial media? One solution to the problem might seem to reside in the actual transcription and markup of the magazine itself in TEI. Surely a schema

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might be employed that could tag multiple kinds of textons such as article titles, authors, single as well as facing pages, and even individual advertisements. This may be true, but the current TEI guidelines make an important omission from their basic document definitions. There are entries for verse, dictionaries, performance texts, language corpora, and transcriptions of speech – but nothing for magazines. They presumably fall under the heading of prose, and here again we can see the pernicious conflation of the modern magazine with the codex once more at work. The TEI knows quite well that not all codex forms are books – that is why there are separate entries for things like dictionaries that might be bound between covers but that are not meant to be read in a linear way. Magazines, however, still have not been fully or adequately described, and perhaps one of the most pressing problems for those of us interested in these things is the need to design TEI standards for them. This will not, however, be an easy task, since TEI itself is rooted in a very particular material substrate, XML, that is strictly hierarchical and thus struggles to accommodate the overlapping textons (such as page and article) that are so essential to the ergodic nature of magazines.13 As the most recent TEI guidelines put it, “No current solution combines all the desirable attributes of formal simplicity, capacity to represent all occurring or imaginable kinds of structures, suitability for formal or mechanical validation. The representation of non-hierarchical information is thus necessarily a matter of trade-offs among various sets of advantages and disadvantages.” Translating the paper-based mechanisms of the magazine to the digital mechanisms of the machine thus constitutes serious intellectual, critical, and editorial work now to be done. If our experimental solutions to the problem of defining the basic units of the magazine remain still tentative and in some aspects even unsatisfactory, so too does the final problem I have identified: the attempt to reproduce in digital form an object that still enables contemporary users to traverse the same paths open to its original readers. This challenge is hardly unique to the MJP, though the contingent, ergodic nature of these texts makes it even more pressing than for codex books. As the success of things like Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iPad makes clear, the experience of the codex book has so far been generally (if  not entirely) translated to digital devices. Digital books look like their print counterparts, complete with facing pages and clever animations for the page turns. More importantly, readers can basically read the book itself as they would the print copy, moving from page to

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page to follow the story. Magazines, however, require the ability to do more than move linearly through the text. Remediating that text held by the woman with a hairpin requires the ability to move asynchronously, flipping and shuffling between its overlapping units. The MJP has struggled with this difficulty almost from the beginning. Our first PDF versions of the New Age were, of course, searchable, but we also touted their ability to retain “the look and feel of the original pages.” One obtained this experience, however, only by printing out the document and thus essentially creating a facsimile copy of the original magazine. Although we now offer multiple different ways to access the items in the MJP archive, this same problem still remains: the images and PDF files are still essentially linear objects, and shuffling through them to create the same scriptons available in the originals is essentially impossible. This is not simply a matter of interface design; or perhaps I should say that the interface design is itself now a basic aspect of editorial theory.14 If at least tentative solutions to this dilemma have been worked out for the book, we need now to resolve them for magazines. The MJP is on the cusp of beginning some experiments in this area, but the larger challenge of how to reproduce the asynchronous, contingent, nonlinear encounter with the text remains. Modernism, my colleagues and I have been arguing now for over a decade, took place in the magazines. Understanding the ­complexities of this still vital aesthetic, cultural, intellectual, and ­technological movement requires that we engage directly with these material objects – a need made even more urgent by their mistreatment at the hands of past archivists and their distressingly rapid decay. The building interest in modern periodical studies – evident in an array of books, ­journals, and conferences – suggests not only the value of these objects to scholars and teachers, but their heretofore largely unrecognized ­vitality as living texts. In the course of unpacking a few items from my own library – some digital, some in print – I have tried to explore how these things work by offering a still tentative theory of the modern periodical. Fundamental aspects of their mechanism and their striking anticipation of digital textuality suggest that they remain even now only just within our interpretive reach and that, far from dying, they offer potentially striking connections to our own data-driven modernity. They are indeed troublesome things for scholars as well as for editors, but for modernist critics difficulty is nothing new. Devising a theory of the modern magazine means simultaneously imagining an editorial apparatus for the object itself, a process beset by problems as

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well as pleasures. Like those intrepid experimentalists who set modernism in motion by building the magazines, we now inherit the same charge bellowed by Ezra Pound – to take this old thing called a magazine and “make it new.” NOTES 1 The Modernist Journals Project (modjourn.org) is a jointly operated venture based at Brown University and the University of Tulsa. With the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities and its host institutions, it makes available digital editions of early twentieth-century magazines, providing searchable text and high-resolution facsimile images alongside a robust collection of metadata and other scholarly resources. 2 Kirschenbaum expands powerfully on this argument in Mechanisms, where he writes that “effective preservation must rest in large measure on the cultivation of new social practices to attend our new media” (21). Strategies for doing this work appear in the 2011 report he co-authored with Richard Ovenden and Gabriela Redwine entitled Digital Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections. 3 The magazine has a long history within print culture and it is beyond the scope of this chapter to trace its genealogy. As a material form, cultural commodity, and aesthetic artefact, however, it undergoes a fundamental transformation in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, morphing into the kind of object we recognize today. Put briefly, it becomes (1) more diverse in its contents (mixing fiction, poetry, political commentary, and other genres), (2) heavily dependent upon rich visual images made possible by the invention of half-tone printing, (3) increasingly dependent on advertising to subsidize subscription costs, and (4) oriented toward precisely defined market segments that recursively help shape the content and advertising of the magazine itself. For more information on the modernization of the magazine, see studies by Ohmann, Reed, and Garvey. 4 See, for example, Print in Transition, as well as her study of the Victorian media ecology, Subjugated Knowledges. 5 Although Beetham’s definition is multifaceted, she argues that the magazine is difficult to describe, precisely because “it always presents itself as part of a system of meaning” that “always points beyond itself” (26). My chapter seeks to explore some of the consequences of this broad theoretical claim. 6 This issue of Scribner’s Magazine is available at the Modernist Journals Project: http://www.modjourn.org.

Unpacking My Digital Library  59  7 Such experiments trace their origins to the Dadaists and Tristan Tzara’s “dada manifesto on feeble love and bitter love,” in which he offers these instructions on how “to make a dadaist poem”: Take a newspaper. Take some scissors. Choose from this paper an article of the length you want to make your poem. Cut out the article. Next carefully cut out each of the words that makes up this article and put them all in a bag. Shake gently. Next take out each cutting one after the other. Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag. Them poem will resemble you. (Tzara, “dada” 39) Significantly, this manifesto appeared in a magazine, 391, and looks to another periodical, the newspaper, for its source material. Burroughs too used magazines in some of his experiments, while Qu took his shears to a book. 8 As this passage suggests, magazines deliberately encouraged this kind of reading. The Ladies’ Home Journal, for example, pioneered the technique of mailing out subscription copies with the advertising pages already opened, the editorial ones still uncut and thus in need of that pin (Ohmann 105). 9 Such contingencies are particularly evident in magazines drawn from archives or collectors, since they almost always retain the signs of their use: covers are torn off, frontispieces are removed, coupons are clipped, pages are bent, and markings of all kinds move across the margins or in the text. Contemporary magazine publishers, of course, also know how to manipulate points of entry into such texts. Ads might be printed on different kinds of paper stock, for example, and subscription cards can be stapled or tipped into the pages in order to make it more likely to open at a particular location. 10 As Scholes and Wulfman later note, magazine and museum both derive from the same linguistic origin and “both denoted institutions where things were stored, though magazine connoted goods and museum connoted objects of knowledge” (46). 11 For a useful overview of emergence aimed at a general audience, see Mitchell.

60  Sean Latham 12 Faulkner’s story was written just seven years after Southern Democrats filibustered the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill. 13 It might be more accurate to say that a hierarchical structure like XML doesn’t permit one to do this with ease, requiring editors to develop complex and often ungainly workarounds in order to force unstable text into strict root and branch patterns. 14 Matthew Kirschenbaum makes a similar point when he argues in Mechanisms that platform studies is itself identical with editorial studies – that both are engaged precisely with the material substrates through which a text takes shape and acquires meaning.

2  Archival Problems, Future Possibilities: Reconceptualizing the Digital Database in Canada marc andré fortin

Marius Barbeau and the Canadian Museum of History Anyone who has used a digital database as a finding aid or research tool for archival research will understand both the benefits and frustrations that arise in attempting to determine the whereabouts of specific material documents or for discovering documents that one did not know existed. Despite the greater possibilities offered in both range and scope of searchable material in a digital database, lacunae typically abound in both the documents in a database and in the bibliographic data and the content descriptions of the documents. My experience while doing research with the Marius Barbeau Fonds at the Canadian Museum of History (CMH), formerly known as the Canadian Museum of Civilization, in Gatineau, Quebec, has enabled me to consider some of the issues pertinent to the editing process in relation to archival research, and to think about some of the theoretical and practical issues and possibilities in regard to digital databases as they are produced today. Although I am basing my argument upon a specific database, I am not singling out the CMH’s database and its connection to the archival holdings as a particular problem in itself, but rather I consider its database an example from which to put forward a larger interpretation of possible social database structures across multiple archival holdings, or even across multiple archives. The sheer amount of information held in the Marius Barbeau Fonds alone would take many years to digitize and document fully with surrounding bibliographic metadata, and thus the CMH’s database is a perfect example of problems and issues that can arise in the early stages of database production and what might be implemented in order to produce a more interdisciplinary working model. I will point

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out the difference between what I call a content-­specific database and a context-shared database, and what can be done to bridge such disparate knowledge-based tools for researchers, students, archivists, librarians, and any individual working with digital archival databases. Barbeau’s massive collection of material documents, and the digital database that accompanies them, also offers a unique perspective on the connection between the archive and the editorial process because of the divided role that Barbeau plays as a little-known writer of fiction and a well-known and highly influential ethnographer, whose work was conducted under the financing and auspices of a national governmental organization. As such, my goal is to show how the structure of Barbeau’s archives can tell us something about the social, collaborative construction of a text as a whole, and the possibilities that arise from archival problems in dealing with Barbeau as a creative writer, especially in regard to a need for a digital apparatus that can reconstruct the textual history of his 1928 novel The Downfall of Temlaham in a collaborative format. Since Barbeau’s death in 1969, both his archives and the digital database that catalogues its holdings have been arranged to complete or conform with such conceptions as chronological or alphabetical order, thematic consistency, as well as provenance or respect des fonds. Such a system inevitably would lead to a structured hierarchy between Barbeau’s dual role as a scientist and creative writer. In working with Barbeau’s creative work, and its place in the canon of Canadian modernism, it has become apparent that his status as a writer of fiction clearly takes second place to the hagiography of Barbeau as a preeminent Canadian ethnographer. As such, there are problems that arise from attempting to reconstruct Barbeau’s fictional text from an archive that could be considered resistant to viewing its author as a writer of fiction. At the same time, the story and documentation behind the creation of the novel requires the refiguration of those who helped produce what is actually a highly collaborative text, one that goes beyond the individual creator as its “author,” and in doing so there are possibilities that stretch beyond single-discipline literary textual analysis for this novel. Mario Cesareo aptly discusses the problems that exist for the anthropologist and the writer of fiction concerning the use of “anthropological tools to examine literature” (159), and poignantly elucidates the issues that arise from the conflict of transdisciplinary readings of texts: In performing an “anthropological reading,” analysis has to go beyond the application of ethnographic notions on to a text. In other words, there

Archival Problems, Future Possibilities  63  is no ethnographic reading without an ethnographic writing – without a complex reading of the multiplicity of objects and practices that constitute the semiotic and material universe of the text studied, of its production, consumption, and interrelationships, as well as of the institutional structures within which that multiplicity of objects and practices is produced, circulated, and apprehended. And more: to fully “anthropologize” a text into a material practice means going beyond a semiotic or hermeneutic of signs: it necessitates retaining the material excess that escapes the semiotic circuit: all its textually non-sensical, non-signifying elements – an omission already, and symptomatically performed by the volume with respect to anthropology itself: the textual indifference to the full range of practices and problematics that constitute physical anthropology, with the ensuing rendering of cultural anthropology into an anthropology tout court. (159)

I consider this to be a valid perspective on the textual reproduction of all texts, one that is absolutely essential when looking at a text such as Barbeau’s The Downfall of Temlaham, which is a modernist reconstruction of ethnographic notes and recordings taken during his research among the Gitxsan and Ts’msyan of the Skeena River. The fragmented documentation in the Barbeau papers, as well as the novel’s placement in different sections of library classification systems,1 suggest that the novel has been viewed as an ethnographic account of the Ts’msyan communities, and thus something outside of Barbeau’s role as creative writer, and more in line with the mandate of Barbeau’s position as an Oxford-trained scientist. However, the national and political construction of modernist aesthetics and scientific understanding of Canadian identity repositions Barbeau’s text in a web of connections among artists, authors, scientists, politicians, bureaucrats, informants, reviewers, and readers. This is where Cesareo’s critique of textual remediation comes to play a significant role in discovering the “production, consumption, and interrelationships” of Barbeau’s text with the “nonsignifying elements” that reside behind the “semiotic and material universe of the text” (159). An example, or metaphor, of the text’s interconnectedness may be found in the physical placement of the archives themselves. From the rooftop esplanade of the CMH one can look across the river and see the Royal Canadian Mint, the National Gallery of Canada, the Canadian Parliament buildings, the Supreme Court of Canada, and Library and Archives Canada, all of which create a literal ring of Canadian institutional architecture, and a virtual circle around the idea of Canadian

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history and the documentation so necessary to the exploration and pedagogical sharing of a historical national ethos of artistic, political, economic, and colonial cultural experiences. This circle is metaphorically important to my understanding of the novel in question, because it is situated where Barbeau himself had to navigate the powers and influences that shaped his work to conform to nationalistic ideologies of native presence (or perceived absence) in Canada, artistic expression, and ethnographic appropriation of the material, spiritual, and linguistic artefacts of the communities he studied. As well, it suggests the cyclical nature of his text’s narrative, a representation that should also be extended to the question of memory, archiving, and contextualization of documents. Barbeau was, of course, a government employee who began work for the Anthropological Division of Canada, an offshoot of the Geological Survey of Canada, in 1911. As Laurence Nowry articulates throughout his highly documented biography of Barbeau, Marius was often faced with the bureaucratic power structure that forced him to have to continually confront the legislative and financial clerks in Ottawa, and beyond that he relied on for funding and approval to undertake his work. Yet despite red tape and financial shortcomings from government sources, Barbeau still managed to receive funding for his various projects from some of Canada’s more influential individuals and corporations. The Canadian National Railways helped fund a number of his publications, and, more importantly, offered him complimentary train passes for his family and the artists he brought with him to numerous locations across Canada, including A.Y. Jackson and Langdon Kihn. Canadian Pacific helped fund his vibrant folk festivals. Vincent Massey helped Barbeau with the 1928 Exhibition of Canadian West Coast Art. These are just a few examples that tell us something about how Barbeau’s work begins to be shaped by the political, industrial, and social life of Canadian society, and it also tells us something about his carefully crafted image: an image based on his role as a folklorist and ethnographer, working alongside and within the artistic community, always arguing for the preservation and dissemination of the arts, but never fully moving into the role of the artist in order to maintain a position within the established hierarchy between the figures of scientist and creative writer. As a scientist working for the government he could canvass for outside help for the project of producing an anthropological framework of Canadian national identity without compromising his role as both a patron of, and participant in, the arts. Nowry summarizes

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Barbeau’s contradictory relationship between civil service and his own perspective on science and art by stating, “A way of earning a living thus becomes a way of life. Barbeau on the contrary, twisted a Civil Service sinecure to fit his purposes. He worked the system without surrendering to it” (371; emphasis in original). Nowry suggests that Barbeau was able to maintain a certain position that allowed him to work creatively on the ideas that interested him by using resources within the hierarchical governmental organization without succumbing to its bitter and frustrating pitfalls (371). But in not surrendering, Barbeau was forced to play two different roles throughout his career – two roles that do not always fit comfortably together, as can be witnessed when they are documented in a database of a vast archival holding that is based on a particular reading of Barbeau’s role as ethnographer. So Barbeau was considered primarily a scientist in his working life. His numerous field trips across Canada and the United States, where he recorded the songs, stories, and languages of various communities, have left us with an amazing amount of information that would most likely have been otherwise “lost.” When he died in Ottawa in 1969, Barbeau left behind over one thousand published articles, books, and papers, thousands of letters between hundreds of individuals, and a similar number of salvaged artefacts, recordings, transcriptions, and notes. Barbeau’s death left not only a massive number of documents, however; it also left someone with the chore of piecing together such documentation to conform to a certain understanding of his ideas and his voluminous output. Trying to categorize individual papers would have been a tremendous undertaking – it is still ongoing – and one in which certain methodologies would have to be put in place in order to shape the archive in a certain way. It seems appropriate that Barbeau’s papers should be shaped according to his status of one of Canada’s first “Canadian” ethnographers, and his work placed within an understanding of scientific rationality and nationalistic pride, because in many ways, this is how Barbeau projected himself to the world. However, in doing so we lose out on one element of Barbeau’s life that does not match up so neatly with the scientific aspect of his life, that being his creative, fictional work. The Downfall of Temlaham was Barbeau’s first of three published novels (the second is a French translation of The Downfall of Temlaham in a highly altered form entitled Le rêve de Kamalmouk [1948], and the third Mountain Cloud [1944]). The Downfall of Temlaham won the Prix David in 1929 and was reviewed favourably by critics in Canada, the United

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States, and Europe. Yet in researching the novel at the archives of the CMH, I have discovered that although it is an important and very specific part of both Barbeau’s creative and scientific life, it is impossible to try to place it within any one section of his archives. The numerous files that make up the documentation of the text’s creation are simply not (and perhaps cannot be) presented as a uniform material textual file. The placement of the novel within a certain section of the Barbeau papers entitled the “Barbeau Northwest Coast Files” suggests the novel is related to his research into the Ts’msyan and Gitxsan communities of the British Columbia coastal region, but there are other sections of the text that have been moved elsewhere for various reasons. This fragmentation of the text could be said to be a common attribute of an individual’s fonds, and one that is not overly problematic to the reconstruction of a text. However, if I go to the CMH website and search for the name Barbeau in the database, I am presented with access to 32,146 items. Yet if I do a search for the word downfall, the database will show absolutely no items that match my search, although I am offered a list of words that may be closely associated to the one I have searched, such as dumbbell and doubtful. A search for the name Temlaham gives me a small number of photographs of the Skeena River. So where exactly is Marius Barbeau’s award-winning novel, The Downfall of Temlaham, in the thousands of documents that are related to this text and that are available in the physical archive, with file and folder titles that directly state the title of the novel? Why is there a gap in Barbeau’s publically searchable files, a lacuna that displaces his creative work ­outside the margins of his ethnographic role as a national symbol of science, culture, and folklore? The answer is related to both the historical p ­ erception of the author as ethnographer, and in the construction of a database that must privilege such a reading of the author in keeping with theories of physical archives being incorporated into digital models of database management. John J. Cove’s 1985 A Detailed Inventory of the Barbeau Northwest Coast Files is one of the more comprehensive print-format lists of the material in the Barbeau archives, yet even Cove recognized problems with the work he produced for the museum. He states in the introduction, “In producing this inventory, certain biases were recognized, and compromises made. It was felt that the inventory should be as close to Barbeau’s organization of The Files as possible, yet anticipate the nature of and range of questions that might be addressed to them by future scholars. Consequently, they are presented in the sequence in which they occur,

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with no reorganization of the contents” (3). Employing the provenance model with the physical archives assures that Barbeau’s files were left in the order that he placed them at a particular moment, which does not mean that they are contextually accurate, and maintains the hierarchy of the archives’ reflection of Barbeau as ethnographer. Luciana Duranti explains the importance of provenance for a physical archive in the American Archivist: “The usefulness of records is directly dependent on the preservation of their archival nature and of their structure through the application of the principle of provenance, which guarantees the respect of the external and internal integrity of each archival group” (39). However, under such a model Barbeau’s work as a writer of fiction is clearly disconnected from his work as an ethnographer, and in many cases, the archival arrangement actually suggests that Barbeau’s fictional work resides outside of his official position as government employee. In choosing not to reorganize the files, the full typescript of The Downfall of Temlaham is currently separated between two different folders in two very different sections of the archives, because Barbeau most likely used the typescript of the three Gitxsan stories that occur at the end of his novel for possible publications later in his career. Thus, although some documents are clearly meant to go together in relation to the publication of the novel, they remain in separate folders according to the archival model of provenance, marking a distinct difference between the archive as a place in which textual documentation offers a contextual account of the sources, or simply one account of the sources. This is a “problem” that opens up some interesting possibilities with respect to the model of the digital database. I use this one example of what the archives look like from my perspective to show how my research has involved stepping outside traditional ways of thinking about Barbeau’s work as a creative writer of fiction. Because the archive does not conform to chronological order, there is little thematic consistency, and the identities of many individuals with whom Barbeau corresponded are incomplete, the archives are not ordered for consistency of research in looking at him as a creative writer. The fragmented archive does not naturally produce an understanding of Barbeau and his work from different disciplinary rationales. In using the database at the CMH, I am forced to navigate around the idea of Barbeau as ethnographer in order to reconstruct his career as an author of fiction. It leaves me with the possibility to choose the focus of any textual analysis of The Downfall of Temlaham. Should the text be considered one of the earliest Canadian studies of Gitxsan culture? Or

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is the novel a nationalistic and ethnocentric attempt to erase the Gitxsan from the cultural and political landscape in order to move into a new period of colonial modernity? Is it a document of colonial barbarism, or does it actually prove the existence and validity of Gitxsan land claims? Such analyses simply cannot be performed within a mono-disciplinary approach to Barbeau’s work. Barbeau’s novel does not conform to a simple definition of fiction or ethnography, so it is difficult for libraries to classify it without making a claim about the text’s construction, in much the same way that his archival material produces a certain understanding of his work. This is not so much a problem of library classification systems or archival arrangement per se, so much as it is an example of the text’s ability to cross boundaries that need to be approached from a multidisciplinary perspective. The order of the files at the Barbeau archives are evidence of one position Barbeau held on his creative work in order to continue his anthropological studies with the financial and political aid of his patrons and superiors. The text could also be considered anthropological and fictional as a zone of connection between the scientific and the literary in Canada, as well as the commercial, political, and artistic elements that cross real and imagined borders around it. The complexities of these connections make it impossible for one person to trace them, making this text a social text par excellence. I have been fortunate in my research to have met a number of people doing research at the CMH in completely different sections of the Barbeau archives, areas that would seem to be dislocated from the focus of my own research, yet have discovered documents related to the novel, including an entire draft of The Downfall of Temlaham in an area of the archives that I would never have considered searching. Articles discussing the novel can be found in anthropology, art history, law, literary studies, and native studies, and it has been used as evidence in a legal case for Gitxsan land claims. By making connections with scholars undertaking research at the archives in Gatineau, I have found that a full understanding of the possible connections that arise out of this novel will require a multidisciplinary approach that does not privilege the text as one object that exists on its own, but a text that needs to be pieced back together in an ever evolving understanding of Canadian history, politics, and culture. We could say that the text is anthropological and historical and fictional and political. Like Barbeau’s fragmented archives in Gatineau, and the fragmented narrative of the novel itself, a complete edition of this text will require

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multiple perspectives from scholars working in different fields. Any editorial decisions about what to include in a textual apparatus around the actual novel will have to be based on differing if not conflicting views of its importance as an object of Canadian history and culture. This is not a problem, but a possibility for opening the text up for further discussion and analysis in a truly interdisciplinary way. One way in which this can happen is in an online digital edition supported by a collaborative and multidisciplinary apparatus. However, a database must incorporate the tools and resources of existing online databases, as well as a collaborative environment, in order to produce a digital apparatus that could include the numerous interpretations of texts like The Downfall of Temlaham. This is true of any work in which multiple perspectives could produce a more informed reading of such texts and a far more accessible environment for scholars and researchers to mine data, as well as to add data to existing scholarship. Content-Specific and Context-Shared Databases What are context-shared and content-specific databases? A contextshared database is built upon a model of interdisciplinary and intercultural contribution and collaboration. Such a database is produced in order to construct and disseminate information; that is, it comprises encyclopedia-style entries that contextualize a specific concept, event, idea, or biography. They are produced through and by the biases of independent researchers and social groups, and often constrained by private, institutional, or government funding, space, time, and workload. Wikipedia is an example of a context-shared database. Entries are not focused on direct source material (archival documents), but are produced out of a socially constructed network of language, history, and often questionably documented evidence, with the result that some entries are obviously more scholarly than others. On the other hand, a content-specific database is built upon a model of containment. In it there is no editorial control over the context of a document or the bibliographic metadata that surround it. Physical archives typically maintain a content-specific database produced from the biases of archivists and cataloguers. A content-specific database may allow users to visualize digitized copies of original material in order to produce an external reading based on the source text, but one is typically not able to interact with the material in any other way. Nevertheless, the foundation and purpose of the content-specific database

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is to represent the documentation of the physical archive in a digital space, with each item accompanied by bibliographic metadata so that researchers can make connections between and among items even if they are unaware of an item’s existence prior to beginning research. The problem quickly becomes clear if we consider the single-focus bias in the construction of the bibliographic data that is used to describe objects and documents in such an archive. The content-specific database model of containment is premised on material archival practices being extended into digital database structures, and those such as Duranti would like to see the model of provenance recreated in digital archives: It is therefore the responsibility of archivists, as part of the moral defense of archives, to intervene in the design of the new information architecture and require that the ability to capture provenance be built into it. Moreover, archivists must ensure that the new information architecture has built into it the ability to distinguish between the organic and unique evidence of action and the myriad of other types of information in the same database, so that the integrity and authenticity of archival material can be guaranteed by protecting it from all the manipulation to which the other types of information in the system are subject. (38)

Duranti’s resistance to a digital environment in which users have more control over the information is predicated on a fear of de-­ contextualization of the original documents, which would separate the researcher from the knowledge of how the archive is “intertwined with the legal, political, social, and economic system, with the relationships between the government and the governed” (40). The traditional model of thinking of material archives requires, according to Duranti, that “their documentary content cannot just be left to disseminate freely in electronic ubiquity without proper controls and guarantees” (40). But, to return to the example of Barbeau, the principle of provenance in maintaining Barbeau’s fonds already retains a de-contextualized interpretation of his biography and his work. It has already removed the social, political, legal, and economic intersections between Barbeau’s novel and the culture from which it was produced, and it maintains an interpretation of how his work was constructed. There have been recent attempts to redefine the actual concept of the database, which I see as an effort to mark a temporal shift from analogue to digital databases. One such attempt has been proposed by Lev Manovich in The Language of New Media. Manovich’s interpretive

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strategy is clear: the database has become a predominant part of cultural production in that societies able to use digital technology employ the database as a structural component of their productivity.2 He explains his strategy by making a comparison between narratives and databases: “After the novel, and subsequently cinema, privileged narrative as the key form of cultural expression of the modern age, the computer age introduces its correlate – the database. Many new media objects do not tell stories; they do not have a beginning or end; in fact, they do not have any development, thematically, formally or otherwise that would organize their elements into a sequence. Instead, they are collections of individual items, with every item possessing the same significance as any other” (218). Manovich’s argument is sound, in that the database has become a useful tool for organizing cultural objects without hierarchical structure, and without a beginning, middle, or end. But it is not clear why the binary Manovich constructs is premised on a literary analysis of narrative versus database. Such a construction creates only a confused interpretation of the role of the database, even within his own argument when he states that a “database becomes the center of the creative process in the computer age” (227). The supposed end of narrative is premised on the growth of the database as the most important element in cultural production. One reason this may be so, and one that is unfortunate for Manovich’s argument, is that he does an acceptable job of defining what “new media” is and is not. In his definition, new media cross boundaries (14). But in crossing boundaries new media are finally theorized by vague terms, leaving the final definition unbounded by the principles of “numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and cultural transcoding” (20). Manovich also lists what new media are not, but at this point it may be clear that the malleable nature of such terms is really just a convenient way in which to rhetorically argue for a version of possible future states in the digital age.3 In the end, Manovich’s use of genre as an analogue for the database comes undone if we consider the ahistorical nature of such a notion. If the database is a genre, what kind of databases are we discussing? Only digital databases? And if so, during what period of time? Using which technology? And programmed by whom? As Lisa Gitelman has pointed out, quoting James Lastra, “It is as much of a mistake to write broadly of ‘the t­ elephone,’ ‘the camera,’ or ‘the computer’ as it is ‘the media,’ and of – now, somehow, ‘the Internet’ and ‘the Web’ – ­naturalizing or essentializing technologies as if they were unchanging,

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‘immutable objects with given, self-defining properties’ around which changes swirl, and to or from which history proceeds” (8). To claim that the database is a genre is to place an essentializing metaphor around the ever-changing objects that are produced from the practice of collecting documents and artefacts in a physical archive. N. Katherine Hayles has already called this genre metaphor into question, but I renew the debate in order to point out the i­ nterconnectivity of the database with other forms of knowledge production. In ­“Narrative and Database: Natural Symbionts,” Hayles argues, “Rather than ­natural enemies, narrative and database are more appropriately seen as natural symbionts” which, according to her, are “organisms of different species that have a mutually beneficial relation” (1603). If a database is a genre, then it comprises many genres within other genres that have come before and will come after this present moment. In other words, the idea of the database as a genre seems to collapse an ever-evolving cultural practice into a token literary trope, or a database as cliché. If we are to take seriously the issue of database as genre, then we need a definition of what “new media” are in relation to n ­ arrative. Marsha Kinder has produced an interpretation that signals the importance of framing the borders around such an amorphous c­oncept: “By 'new' digital media, I am referring loosely to several forms ­without ­making any attempt to address their significant differences (which would require another essay): the Internet, electronic games, CD-ROMs, DVDs, DVD-ROMs, VR environments, and interactive installations. All of these media can function as vehicles for transmitting narratives, but they are also capable of serving other nonnarrative functions” (4; emphasis in original). Kinder’s definition demonstrates the flaw in Manovich’s binary division between narrative and database by showing how the foundation of the database as a “new media” object is itself inherently part of a narrative tradition, and thus could be called a genre within such a tradition. But then one would be denying the fact that it is also non-narrative, and thus produced from multiple genres, creating a feedback loop that cycles back into itself by making claims between narrative and database that continually define each other.4 In Manovich’s terms, if it is a narrative then it is also a database, and if it is a database then it is part of a narrative; but if we look at the CMH database, the narrative that defines in which genre Barbeau is placed is highly decontextualized by the borders of the “new media” object that is the provenance-based digital database. A further issue regarding Manovich’s attempt to create a connection between

Archival Problems, Future Possibilities  73 

narrative and database is not that the critical distinctions between databases, narratives, time periods, users, and creators are inexact, but that the metaphor extends itself to further troubling metaphors. As Ed Folsom points out in “Database as Genre,” there is a connection between Manovich’s interpretation of the database as a literary genre and Wai Chee Dimock’s creative metaphor of the database as a fractal (1573). Microscopy and narrative theory become defining analogues of an information structure that is simply being layered on top of a supposed ahistorical database structure in interdisciplinary attempts at redefinition. Is it actually helpful to consider the database a ­fractal? Such counterintuitive reinterpretation strategies can be further read in statements such as: “What we used to call the canon wars were a­ ctually the first stirrings of the attack of database on narrative” (1574). Folsom has most likely moved in this direction on the basis of similar statements that Manovich has made: “Database and narrative are natural enemies. Competing for the same territory of human culture, each claims an exclusive right to make meaning out of the world” ­(Language 225). There is not much one can take away from this particular metaphorical construction. A database and a narrative are very much nonnatural, human-constructed objects that do not speak for culture, but are used by humans to create meaning. The metaphorical militarization of the database suggests erroneously that narrative is now dead, and all we are left with is a chaotic postmodern melange of data. This is perhaps not very helpful in actually defining a much-needed reconceptualization of the database. A new model of the database requires both praxis and active engagement by individuals and organizations, not simply theoretical models based on language play. Folsom does, however, produce a more nuanced interpretation of the database when he makes the distinction between the database and the physical archive: “Archive and database do share a desire for completeness (though that desire can be and often is subverted by those who want to control national or institutional memories), but the physicality of archive makes it essentially different from database. There will always be more physical information in an archive than in a database, just as there will always be more malleable and portable information in a database than in an archive” (1575). This is a far more intuitive comparison to make than that between narrative and database; the database is directly connected with the archive and is not in competition with an imagined binary other such as narrative, but is part of and in dialogue with the physical archive. It is a helpful conceptualization that can lead

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us towards a new model of the database. Gitelman argues, ­“Specificity is key. Rather than static, blunt, and unchanging technology, every medium involves a ‘sequence of displacements and obsolescences, part of the delirious operations of modernization’” (8). My interpretation of the database foregrounds specificity and sharing because the ­specific elements taken from material archives will eventually produce the more fluid, collaborative large-scale database capable of connecting numerous temporal, historical, social, cultural, and political perspectives within its framework. In a response to Folsom’s theory of the database Peter Stallybrass argues, “Databases are neither universal nor neutral, and they participate in the production of a monolingual, if not monocultural, global network” (1583). Working with Stallybrass’s view of the database, I contend that the typical digital database, that is, an online database for a physical, material archive, usually contains a selection of specifically chosen documents to promote physical archival research without offering access to the full files or folders within the scope of a larger digital environment. These databases base their metadata on the provenance model of physical archives and thus maintain the “proper controls and guarantees” (40) required by Duranti. While such a tool can be helpful as a finding aid for scholars and researchers interested in the holdings of an archive, and it may offer one particular way of knowing the possible holdings of an archive and its historical context, it does not promote research based on context-shared aspects of the archive, nor does it express the full range of holdings that scholars and non-scholars alike may wish to access. Moving away from a provenance-based model of archival material in a digital environment, a digital commons model, which involves collaborative, accessible, and non-hierarchical models of item description, opens up possibilities for producing interdisciplinary frameworks among archivists, scholars, teachers, and the general public in order to produce viable pedagogical tools founded on the need and desire for access to information that is premised not on preexisting biases, but rather on the very social and political connections that are bound to interconnect with an archival collection. To produce a fully accessible digital database for a physical archive would require massive amounts of time, money, space, and resources, and there are further issues of copyright and access. Yet, in producing a collaborative framework from which scholars in the digital humanities can work with archives to produce context-shared databases related to and alongside content-specific databases, the process may begin to create larger,

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connected digital spaces from which archival communities will grow online. By integrating research models with archival holdings, it is possible to produce archival databases that go beyond simple explanatory models of research. William Arms and Ronald Larsen have pointed out how information hierarchies produced by knowledge gatekeeping strategies leads to a situation in which only the elite have access to information: “The shortcomings of the current environment for scholarly communication are well known and evident. Journal articles include too little ­information to replicate an experiment. Restrictions justified by copyright, patents, trade secrets, and security, and the high costs of access, add up to a situation that is far from optimal. Yet this suboptimal system has vigorous supporters, many of whom benefit from its ­idiosyncrasies. For example, the high cost of access benefits people who belong to the wealthy organizations that can afford that access. Journal profits subsidize academic societies. Universities use publication patterns as an approximate measure of excellence” (6). While scholars and students working at established institutions or those independent researchers who can afford often exorbitant fees may have access to larger, accessible, well-documented databases, most databases from archives and institutions in Canada are incomplete. One cause is the resistance to open-ended user models that allow multiple researchers to shape the digital database in order to produce a more complete understanding of the holdings therein. As Stephen Ramsay argues, “Prudence would suggest that only a few privileged users should possess the ability to create and destroy databases, and that a broader (but not unlimited) set of users be able to add data to existing databases.” Both individual and partnered institutions, with the help and work of students, researchers, programmers, and archivists, have undertaken the digitization of archives in Canada, but more importantly, the digitization of archives in Canada is almost always funded by governmental agencies such as Heritage Canada or Canada’s Digital Collections Initiative through Industry Canada. Specific archives are chosen and funded through the grant model to produce online archival databases of varying degrees of academic focus, from elementary-school-level pedagogy, to university-level databases, to public websites that are more edu-entertainment-oriented than scholarly. Although this model allows for individual holders of archival material to produce websites designed mostly to promote their material archival holdings, as is

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almost always the case, a certain bias must occur because of time, cost, and editorial constraints. In other words, government funding for archival databases in Canada has produced a plethora of mostly contentspecific databases with no connective device other than an outdated linking system, which can be accessed at Library and Archives Canada, and the Canada’s Digital Collections webpage. Creators of these websites and databases choose what to put in, what to leave out, and what descriptive relevance the documents hold for researchers. The Canadian Council of Archives has produced a more recent multi-linked version of this system, bringing together 800 archives across Canada on their online Canadian Archival Information Network. The mandate of the council is both broad and forward-looking, but the system still relies on a top-down hierarchical control of documentation and description by the archives and archivists that participate in the network. Despite their goal to “communicate archival needs and concerns to decision-­ makers, researchers and the general public” (CCA), there is no mention of how this is being done, and whether researchers and the general public respond to the CCA with their own needs and concerns. Two key points need to be understood from my example of the CMH’s digital database. First, the data in the database of the Barbeau archives at the CMH are based upon the theoretical understanding of Barbeau’s material archival holdings and privilege his ethnographic work. As a museum devoted to anthropological work on Canadian cultures and the accumulation of cultural artefacts that are displayed in the museum proper, the digital database of the CMH, if it is based on the theory of the provenance of the physical archives, will obviously be biased towards a certain understanding of the documents and objects it contains. In other words, the museum has produced a content-specific database that privileges Barbeau’s ethnographic work over and above his creative fiction, because the ethnographic files have been separated from the text of The Downfall of Temlaham. The second and more important point is that this lacuna is produced despite the content of the archives, not because of its holdings. There are thousands of documents related to Barbeau’s novel in the archives, and although not all will contain the word downfall in the title, they are excluded from a digital search because the context of the database is biased towards the ethnographic work Barbeau undertook. Such a gap between content and context is what I believe needs to be filled through a more engaged view of what digital databases are capable of doing for researchers, archivists, historians, and scholars. In other words, what is needed now

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is a database that is both content-specific in that it allows users to access (images of) original documents, and contextually framed by a multiuser community of individuals who understand the material from different and perhaps conflicting perspectives. What would be required to actually produce a digital space that is both context-shared and content-specific across multiple archival and library holdings? Arms and Larsen have pointed out some of the issues that must be taken into consideration when doing so: In developing the cyberinfrastructure for content, there are two extremes to be avoided. The first is to assume that a single approach will fit all categories of content. There is too much variety in types of data for this to be possible. Consider, for example, the differences among digitized books, astronomy data, Web pages, the genome database, census data, educational courseware, and weather observations. The forms of the information differ along almost every technical dimension: scale, structure, complexity, and so on. They also have different challenges in terms of privacy, copyright, standardization, and commercial value. Most importantly, they support very different scholarly communities. The uses that are made of them vary greatly, and they need fundamentally different data structures and computational tools. (6)

As my earlier examples demonstrate, most of the problems that Arms and Larsen list can be solved by creating a collaborative database that uses interdisciplinary models. It is not so much that the data are incompatible, as different categories of data need interpretive structures that allow for the blending of disciplines and scholarly communities. In producing such interdisciplinary, user-based databases, the potential for new ways of knowing will arise. Google has attempted a cross-disciplinary project by scanning immense numbers of texts in a searchable book repository, which is valuable in its own right, but really ends up being a content-specific database. Scanned images of texts in a digital repository constitute a digitally accessible library, not a space in which argument, criticism, connections, and new ideas can take shape by taking advantage of the possibilities of a digital space in which users can contextualize the material. This is not to discount the importance of digital libraries by any means, but, as I hope to have shown, my argument is premised on the idea that digital databases do not have to be beholden to older models of information dissemination. Behind the issue of institutional control of information lie structural problems that need to considered in relation to open models of

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collaborative contextualization. In 2003, Industry Canada published an evaluation of the Canada’s Digital Collection Program, which includes a statement of the goals of the program: • To provide young Canadians in all parts of Canada with initial work experience in the multimedia sector; AND promote the development of the Canadian multimedia industry and, in particular, position new youth-run enterprises for success in the marketplace • To provide wider access to Canadian material of public interest via the Information Highway; and demonstrate the productivity enhancement benefits of digitization (Canada. Industry Canada) One result of the evaluation of the program states, “More than half of custodians indicated that as a result of the CDC program, they had either established or are considering establishing new opportunities or alliances with cultural institutions (74%), new networks at the local level (60%), and joint ventures with other content providers (62%)” (Canada. Industry Canada). Yet, at the same time, the evaluation lists problems that arose from the program itself: • Payment structure and contribution agreements are irritants. • Bureaucracy when modifications to project contract terms are required. • The focus is too narrow; it should fund a wider range of collections. • Funding is delayed or inconveniently timed. • Salary and funding levels are too low, especially for smaller organizations, as additional support is required to supervise the project; for many, current staffing levels are insufficient for this task, thus reducing participation by these groups. • Contractors exploit the program for their own benefit. (Canada. Industry Canada) Although this report goes back to a study that took place in 2002, the weaknesses of the program may yet tell us something about the nature of collaborative work produced under institutional funding models. It seems that Barbeau’s reaction to civil service bureaucracy persists for others in the age of digital scholarship. Low levels of funding, exploitation of resources for personal or political benefit, and narrowness of focus are all part of the institutionalized attempt to create culture-­ sharing environments that allow for partisanship and bias. Other

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f­ actors to consider are technological ability, copyright, and the possibility of open-ended user-friendly databases being compromised by individuals, but the root of the issue seems based on the inability to expand on the potential to create a database structure that allows individuals to work with the material to create a wider understanding of the collections and materials because of institutional desire to maintain control over the material. Yet user bias can also be a possible site for cooperation if the tools and materials allow for open-ended user manipulation of contextual analysis of the documents in a physical archive. By a­ llowing users to add context to the content of a digital archive, researchers will be better able to map out the connections and links between individual archival holdings and potentially the hundreds of archives across ­Canada that have begun digitizing their collections. John Unsworth argued in 1997 that digital tools would aid the shift towards cooperative and collaborative work in the humanities, and perhaps the door is beginning to open thanks to the growth of an interest in the digital humanities. Unsworth’s particular focus is on the ability of collaborative work to create a larger contextual apparatus using original source material: Computers make it possible to pose questions, to frame research problems, that would otherwise be impossible to imagine. The computer provides us with the ability to keep track of enormous amounts of information, to sort and select that information rapidly and in many different ways, and to uncover in reams of mute data the aesthetically and intellectually apprehensible patterns on which understanding depends. But in order to take advantage of these capabilities, we first have to gather and structure the data: this requires collaboration of two sorts. First, because of the sheer size of the undertaking, it requires collaboration with colleagues in one’s discipline: it takes many hands to assemble the enormous quantities of raw data on which this kind of research depends. Second, it requires collaboration with professionals of another sort, namely computer ­professionals.

Today we can add other categories to Unsworth’s list, such as col­ laboration with people who work in different fields, the directors and archivists of material archives, and the members of government agencies responsible for protecting the holdings of national archives for ­copyright reasons. Interdisciplinary work within collaborative digital projects can only enhance “apprehensible patterns on which understanding depends” (Unsworth). By expanding the content-­ specific

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databases to create a database that employs content and context through collaboration, it will become possible to create radically new links between documents and disciplines. Stephen Ramsay, whose work is focused on the humanities, but whose ideas could be extrapolated to other disciplines as well, argues that collaborative work in database production could only expand on the resources and possibilities for future knowledge construction: “The successful employment of such systems in humanistic contexts … would expand the possibilities of knowledge representation considerably. Since the data would enter into the system from a number of different sources, the logical statements that would flow from that ontology would necessarily exceed the knowledge of any one individual. The power of relational databases to enable the serendipitous apprehension of relationships would be that much more increased.” It is ironic that Ramsay writes about the relationality of such a database, for although relations between documents are the foundation of good research, different and opposing contextual analysis is beneficial to a productive, lively, knowledge-generating system. In organizing a database built upon interdisciplinary models of community collaboration that are not simply ideological, but practical, because they are open to numerous users to work with the material, then, and possibly only then, can the much-touted but rarely seen products of interdisciplinarity begin to appear. If archives are to maintain control over their material in a digital database as well as in the material archive, we will always have to rely on archives to suggest to us what is important in a digital environment. We will lose out on possibilities for new ways of seeing and thinking, despite the expanding technological possibilities that arise from digital databases. A Return to the Past or Forward into the Future? Barbeau translated into the French, revised, and published a version of The Downfall of Temlaham in 1948 entitled Le rêve de Kamalmouk. In the 1950s he wrote to the editors of Oxford University Press to ask them if they would be interested in publishing an English version of the French translation that would be titled “Gitwinkul Jim.” This return to the past, the act of translating and re-translating the same object with a new critical eye, is in effect what is needed for a future-thinking database. While the provenance of material archival holdings makes sense in order to maintain the integrity of the historical conditions of the

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material d ­ ocuments in the order in which they are ultimately left, it is not always clear whether or not the archives themselves are in a form that follows from such an idea. On the other hand, a digital database of a physical archive does not need to function in the same way as that archive, and an interdisciplinary approach to texts could actually help to reproduce the social and political conditions that are supposed to be maintained within the archive, but that often collapse into a singular moment in time: the time of provenance. What is needed is an approach to the database along the lines of the ethnocritical approach to cultural documents of Arnold Krupat, who states, “We will need to become more sophisticated in understanding how the cultural concerns of Others, formerly marginalized, inform a proliferating number of new texts, and, additionally, how these concerns bear upon and can illuminate the canonical texts we now have to reread in a new light” (81). Krupat speaks here of the literary canon in conversation with ethnography, but the message is the same for archives and databases. Marginalized interpretations of specific archives due to a hierarchy of power over the context of the contents do not allow for the “cultural concerns of Others” (81). For an archive such as Barbeau’s, in which the cultural Other is, for the most part, the narrative content of the archives, one can see the sensitive nature of maintaining control over interpretations of its holdings. But this only preserves the past without moving into a future where possibilities for new and forward-thinking interpretations may arise. The digital database as a digital commons must avoid fear of the lack of provenance. The digital database needs to become a database for all, and one that allows for a rereading of past interpretations of the material within the archives itself. If provenance means that “records of different origins … be kept separate to preserve their context” (Pearce-Moses), then in many ways the procedure is fallible in regard to actual contextual analysis of the content of material archives. The preservation of a certain archive as it was given, found, or shelved at a particular time can be contextual only to the very moment at which such an event occurred, and cannot contextualize the archive from its movement between origin and completion as a static collection of documents. The study of ethnography is the study of culture, and because ethnography is part of Western culture’s perspective on the Other, it has often been a self-reflexive exercise. James Clifford marked such a turn when he took a postmodern position on the production of ethnographic perspectives, making a connection between the variances between truth

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and fiction, origins and history, writing and science. In his introduction to Writing Culture, Clifford states, To call ethnographies fictions may raise empiricist hackles. But the word as commonly used in recent textual theory has lost its connotation of falsehood, of something merely opposed to truth. It suggests the partiality of cultural and historical truths, the ways they are systematic and exclusive. Ethnographic writings can properly be called fictions in the sense of “something made or fashioned,” the principal burden of the word’s Latin root, fingere. But it is important to preserve the meaning not merely of making, but also of making up, of inventing things not actually real … Ethnographic truths are thus inherently partial – committed and incomplete. (6; emphasis in original)

This is where I see the dual role Barbeau played throughout his life coming together to explain the dual role of the material archive and digital database. His ethnographic accounts and his fictional accounts are two “partial” aspects of the same narrative of indigenous cultures he expressed in his work. Yet the context of the digital database that surrounds the material archive – built upon the provenance of the materials within the archive – suggests that Barbeau’s fictional life is secondary to his scientific life. In many ways this does preserve the historical context of the archives, as Clifford has pointed out how ethnographers and fiction writers “[Edward] Sapir and [Ruth] Benedict had, after all, to hide their poetry from the scientific gaze of Franz Boas” (4), who was also Barbeau’s peer. This scientific gaze, the ethnographic gaze that decodes the artefact, culture, document, or object of study has shifted now, and the same shift needs to occur in regard to the digital database. The self-reflexive turn of ethnography needs to occur in archival studies as well, in order to re-examine the historical construct that is embedded in the framework of provenance. Clifford, in discussing the role of ethnographers such as Barbeau, states, “Ethnography … once looked out at clearly defined others, defined as primitive, or tribal, or non-Western, or pre-literate, or non-historical – the list, if extended soon becomes incoherent. Now ethnography encounters others in relation to itself, while seeing itself as other” (23). This same condition can occur in the digital database, in that a non-hierarchical authorial interpretation will only sustain the historical moment of completion of the archive, while, as Clifford mentions in regard to the changing perspective of language use in ethnography, the world moves on and new

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interpretations are necessary (18). It would be impossible to understand the context of Barbeau’s archive if one were to see it as it stands today. It is fragmented, displaced, shifted, one area overlapping another, one document taken from one place and put into another; it is physically and temporally decentred. What is needed for such an archive, and for all archives, is context: a digital database that is interdisciplinary and cross-cultural. Then maybe we will be able to reconstruct some form of digital provenance that reimagines the social, political, and cultural forces from which an archive is produced. John W. East concludes, It is mainly the large Web search companies and publishers who are driving the massive digitization projects currently in progress. As librarians, we have no input to this process, and our role can only be to observe, to evaluate, to develop techniques for using these resources as effectively as possible, and to teach those techniques to our clients. When the dust settles and euphoria turns to frustration, we may see a “second phase” of digitization, in which the “quick and dirty” digital libraries of today will be enriched and enhanced to become resources that can effectively meet the information needs of scholars. (239)

For many archives, the digital foundation has been laid for a more information-rich database system that will enable a more interdisciplinary approach. At the same time, allowing more people to aid in the process will ensure a multi-vocal interpretation of documents that are built upon shared social and political structures. Barbeau’s narrator states in a concluding passage of the historical narrative in The Downfall of Temlaham, speaking about the main character in the drama, that “Kamalmuk is dead. His bones are decaying under the sod. The memory of his misfortunes is quickly fading. The frail wooden monument erected over his grave at Kitwanga will soon crumble to bits. But his relations have not ceased to mourn his loss” (162). The memory of the past and the possibility for the future that are expressed in Barbeau’s fictional interpretation of the “Skeena River Rebellion” speaks to the reality that material documentation is fragile, decaying, and de-­contextualized outside the community that understands the implications of historical events from multiple perspectives. Hayles says essentially the same thing, in a general sense of the meaning, when she claims, “Exploring and understanding the full implications of what the transition from page to screen entails must necessarily be a community

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effort, a momentous task that calls for enlightened thinking, visionary planning, and deep critical consideration” (Electronic Literature 42). It is time for such a reconceptualization of history through the contextshared digital database. NOTES 1 I have discovered the text in both the Canadian-literature section and in the ethnography section of various libraries across Canada. 2 Manovich does not point out the inequality between technologically advanced and less developed countries, but such a reading of the text is important if we do not want to confuse “the modern age” with “the world.” 3 I, of course, mean to point out that Manovich himself argues that predicting the future of digital media is a difficult project to undertake (Language of New Media 6–7). His work is valuable for its history of digital culture in the early 2000s, but the theoretical underpinnings of his argument may already need to be updated, based on new “new media” possibilities. 4 Of course Manovich does discuss the issue of video games as narratives, but these narratives are reduced to algorithms in Manovich’s terms, redacting any legitimate interaction between players and narratives.

3  Editing Modules, Collecting Editions: The Present and Future of Small-Scale Digital Critical Editions melissa dalgleish

Digital editions are widely regarded by editorial theorists, scholarly editors, and literary digital humanities community as the best hope for producing truly useful, user-friendly, and widely accessible critical editions of literary texts. The problems that plague print editions and drive the search for solutions in the digital realm are widely recognized: critical editions are often bulky, prohibitively expensive, and unpleasant to read. Print critical apparatuses are often difficult to navigate, read, and use. Their structure, which subordinates textual variants to the cleanreading text, tends to decontextualize and de-historicize the text by privileging the reading of a single, static version. As Peter Shillingsburg argues, critics and students “will learn how to use scholarly editions when they stop mistaking the clear-reading text of a scholarly edition for the work itself and when they stop regarding the textual apparatus as a repository of discarded and superseded variants preserved by pompous pedants” (90). Instead, readers must start regarding the scholarly edition as a place where they can fully engage with a text’s history and social significance. In a similar vein, John Bryant argues that “critics, even scholars, will read a single version of the text as the text because invariably that version will appear in book form as the text, and they will ignore the appended apparatus (if it survives) because the clearness of the clear reading text urges them to do so” (Fluid 143; emphasis in original). Readers privilege the text that is immediate and easy, and in consequence fail to foreground their reading in the understanding that the clear-reading text is only one of multiple versions, and that these versions are themselves only manifestations of the many relationships and energies that go into the production, revision, transmission, and reception of a text. When the apparatus is compressed, left

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out, or so complex as to be unusable by any but the most determined readers, its failings fundamentally alter our understanding of the text. I am with Dean Irvine when he argues that “the apparatus is not an optional component of the edition; it is an integral contextual and interpretive frame of every edited text” (“Editing” 198). This attachment to the apparatus may seem pedantic, even misguided in an age when both publishing and the humanities are in crisis, but becomes intelligible when we consider that the repercussions of removing this interpretive frame extend beyond the realm of the purely literary. As Bryant argues, privileging the single reading text “reduces our ability to historicize our reading and, in turn, disempowers the citizen reader from gaining a fuller experience of the necessary elements of change that drive a democratic culture” (Fluid 112). We cannot be good readers, good students, or good citizens without understanding textual history and its productive intersections with issues of gender, culture, race, and economics, among others. Likewise, we cannot be truly responsible editors without finding effective ways to represent that history. Current market conditions can only increase the challenges that responsible print scholarly editing currently faces. Editors cannot help but respond to the emphasis by publishers on marketability, saleability, and teachability, and these aspects of the text increasingly take precedence, often counter to the desires of scholars and editors, over thoroughness, comprehensiveness, and responsible editing. These pressures result in the increased production of single-text classroom editions or so-called critical editions with extremely limited apparatuses, rather than responsibly and rigorously edited critical editions that foreground textual history and acknowledge that texts are always multiply constituted and in flux. While presenting distinct challenges and disadvantages of their own, digital editions can, in theory, present an alternative method of editing and publication that can overcome many of the obstacles that print editions present to allowing readers to fully engage with texts as works in genesis. In reality, the transition of editorial practice from print-based to web-based is still in its early stages, but responsible editors cannot ignore the huge potential that digital editing represents for the creation of useful and user-friendly scholarly editions. Large digital collections, on the scale of a collected works, are currently the most prominent and successful projects in the field of literary digital humanities; however, the feasibility of undertaking the digital equivalent of a critical edition of a novel or collection of poems is still limited. The infrastructure to support digital editing – the equivalent to what supports the proliferation

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of print scholarly editions, including funding, education in editorial theory and practice, and the means of publication – is still nascent, and many editors must assemble these resources and networks largely themselves. Until small-scale digital editions can be efficiently edited and produced, the full potential of digital editing to exceed the limits of print scholarly editions cannot be realized. To theorize the modular edition, a flexible small-scale digital edition that allows editors to respond to developments in editorial best practices, digital humanities best practices, and new digital editing tools and techniques during this time of major transition, I use the creation and publication of a digital edition and collection in progress – a digital edition of Canadian modernist poet Anne Wilkinson’s second collection, The Hangman Ties the Holly, and the larger collection within which it will be contained, The Collected Poems of Anne Wilkinson. I also suggest ways in which the modular edition can be effectively networked within a collection of editions, allowing small-scale digital editions to be imagined as part of, and combined into, larger and more comprehensive digital projects that work together to foreground the reading experience in the socially constituted nature of texts. I use the example of Wilkinson’s poem “Letter to My Children,” which has a complex textual history, to explore ways that this approach can lead to better-historicized and contextualized readings than are currently possible. Finally, I examine the role that collaborative editorial networks are playing in creating the infrastructure that makes feasible the proliferations of small-scale critical digital editions and in enabling the establishment of what is an emergent genre – one that has the potential to transform the field of critical editing. Digital Editions after McGann: Ideals and Realities Jerome McGann’s “The Rationale of HyperText” is unquestionably among the earliest and most influential articulations of the now-­ common assertion that digital editions, in their ability to exceed the limits that make print critical editions flawed and problematic, are the future of effective scholarly editing. As early as the 1990s, McGann foresees a sea change in the way that texts can be edited and published; he believes that “the change from paper-based text to electronic text is one of those elementary shifts – like the change from manuscript to print – that is so revolutionary we can only glimpse at this point what it entails” and that the hypertext edition is the wave of the future because it “can store vastly greater quantities of documentary materials, and it

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can be built to organize, access, and analyze those materials not only more quickly and easily, but at depths no paper-based edition could hope to achieve” (“Rationale” 28). The capaciousness and multimedia capability of the digital can also remedy the limited ways in which print editions can represent textual variation and genesis; since these limits “inhere in the codex form itself, which constrain[s] the user of the critical edition to manipulate difficult systems of abbreviation, and to read texts that have (typically) transformed the original documents in radical ways” (26), the digital edition has the potential to present textual genesis in easily understood ways. It can also present original documents, and all of the bibliographic data that inhere in them in the less-mediated form of high-quality digital facsimiles, rather than lowerquality print facsimiles, and as manipulable and analysable coded transcriptions and images, rather than as static clean-reading texts. McGann has consistently looked to his own Rossetti Archive as a project that has the potential transform the field of scholarly editing, as indeed it has – although, as McGann acknowledges in Radiant Textuality and elsewhere, has done so in significantly more limited ways that his vision of the 1990s suggested was possible. While the Rossetti Archive and the digital collections1 like it that currently dominate the field – Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price’s Walt Whitman archive; Morris Eaves, Robert Essick, and Joseph Viscomi’s William Blake archive – have succeeded at “making hard-to-access documentary materials available and searchable” (McGann, “From” 39) in less-radically transformed ways than they can be represented in print, they have largely failed to present a real alternative to print critical editions. McGann argues in “The Rationale of HyperText” that the difference between a digital edition and a digital archive is that “when a book is produced it literally closes its covers on itself,” whereas the archive “has been built so that its ­contents … can be indefinitely expanded and developed” (“Rationale” 27). But this is not the fundamental difference between a digital archive and a digital edition. The process of gathering material to include in each, and the decisions made about what to include and how to organize it, are similar when creating a digital collection and an edited text. But the primary differences between the digital collection and the edition are the ­latter’s provision of an apparatus as a contextual and framing device, and the higher level of editorial intervention into the text that the edition privileges. The Rossetti Archive and the collections like it contain little of either and thus are archive-like repositories and not editions; as such, they require readers to piece together their own narratives of

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textual genesis from the unedited material the collections contain. For social-text editors like McGann, who wish to avoid what they see as the excessive editorial interventions of the past, the digital collection is attractive because it seems to allow the editor to give readers access to primary texts that are free of the mediating and corrupting influence of editors. However, as Shillingsburg argues, “A ‘mere’ archive of source materials will strike most new readers … as an undigested chaos of material in which everyone must become an editor before proceeding. The electronic archive can (some would say must) provide more than access to source materials” (165). Readers who are unable or unwilling to navigate and narrativize the material for themselves (and all of the large digital collections do suffer from a lack of editorial guidance) will simply abandon attempts to engage with the material, or engage with it in limited ways. Either way, the collection will fail in its goal of providing readers with enhanced understanding of the socio-historical contexts that inform the production of the text. As McGann acknowledges, the failure of the Rossetti Archive to edit the material it contains is a major way in which the project fails to fulfil the potential that he sees in hypertext: “The Rossetti Archive largely appears as a website of accessible resources … [S]cholars using [it] ought to be given,” but are not, “an apparatus of tools that facilitate critical reorganizations and reconceptions of the underlying data” (“From” 39), tools that can allow hypertext to exceed the limitations of print representations of textual history and genesis. This issue is especially significant for social-text and genetic editors. Readers need more than just access to documents. They also need to be shown textual history, in ways that are useful, user-friendly, and aesthetically appealing, in order for a text to be fully socialized. The large scale of these projects has wider repercussions than just overwhelming users with an undigested mass of facsimiles and transcriptions; most were designed as complete projects some time ago, and their final forms often fail to take advantage of the advances in digital humanities tools, technologies, theories, and design that occur between conception and completion. As well, their scale limits the ways in which they can serve as practical alternatives to critical editions; the funding, infrastructure, and staff required to put them together is of an overwhelmingly large scale, and very few editors are willing to take on the massive labour and organizational challenges they present. Small-scale digital editions – while still very much an emergent genre – are the current best hope for presenting a real digital alternative to print critical editions. They also represent a real attempt to

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fulfil the potential that McGann sees in hypertext: to solve some of the thornier textual problems of print critical editions and allow readers an enhanced engagement with an author’s text(s) within the full range of its socio-historical contexts. Unlike large-scale collections, small-scale editions present rigorously edited texts and are manageably small, less expensive to produce, and agile enough to respond to rapidly changing technology and best practices. If large-scale digital collections represent the emergence of the digital humanities as a viable alternative to print scholarly publishing, smallscale digital editions represent the potential for it to flourish. While the literary digital humanities have spent much of the last twenty years producing digital collections rather than digital editions, and thus remediating only some of the limitations of print critical editions, the technology now allows editors to create digital editions that can, with various levels of effectiveness, represent the text’s history of composition, transmission, and reception while firmly situating that history within the text’s socio-historical contexts. The best current examples of small-scale editions, each of which has made an attempt to better represent textual history than is possible in print, and are much closer to achieving the goals McGann set out for hypertext editions nearly two decades ago, are Pamela L. Caughie, Nick Hayward, Mark Hussey, Peter Shillingsburg, and George K. Thiruvathukal’s Woolf Online: An Electronic Edition and Commentary on Virginia Woolf’s “Time Passes”; Bryant’s Herman Melville’s Typee: A Fluid-Text Edition; and Clement’s In Transition: Selected Poems by the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. A brief survey of these editions illuminates the current state of small-scale digital editions, the ways in which they attempt to redress the limitations of their print counterparts, and the room for improvement that their limitations leave for present and future editors. Caughie et al.’s project is a small-scale digital genetic edition that presents seven versions of the “Time Passes” section of Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse with the aim of bringing “together the different stages of writing that went into the making of ‘Time Passes’ to create a record of its development” (“About”) and thus contextualizing and historicizing “how her work came to be written” (“About”). Woolf Online is the least technologically sophisticated of these three small-scale editions; the variant versions are presented as HTML transcriptions that attempt to visually represent the revisions contained in each, and a link to the digital facsimile of each transcribed page is provided at the bottom. The transcriptions are presented separately from one another and cannot

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easily be compared (unless one has more than one browser window open side-by-side), thus minimizing opportunities to allow readers to visualize the text’s full genesis. Like many large-scale digital collections, Woolf Online facilitates access to the documents that witness the text’s genesis, but largely fails to allow readers to effectively engage with that material, and fails to present readers with an easily navigable and transparently organized interface. Like Shillingsburg, Bryant argues that digital editions allow readers to engage with texts as works-in-process; his fluid-text theory proposes that the literary work is “equivalent to the processes of genesis that create it” (Fluid 71) and should be thought of as a flow of energy rather than as a concept, material item, or set of events. Each documentary witness is simply a manifestation of that energy (61), and the single and static clear-reading text privileged by most print editions limits the reader’s ability to see this energy in flow. His alternative is the fluidtext edition, which, instead of foregrounding the reading experience in a static clear-reading text, presents “a base version of the literary work upon which one may map revision sites (the hot spots of revision) that in turn are associated with an enumerated revision sequence and an explanatory revision narrative that relates the causes of that sequencing” (151; emphases in original). While demonstrating the totality of the text’s revision narrative, the base version can also be compared to facsimiles and transcriptions of each individual variant. Bryant enacts some of the principles of the fluid-text to his edition of Herman Melville’s Typee, which uses a frame-based interface to allow readers to simultaneously view multiple versions of Melville’s manuscript in facsimile and in transcription. Using this frame-based interface is arguably easier and more pleasurable than flipping back and forth between a clear-reading text and a textual apparatus and decoding textual notes, and unlike print editions, it does not privilege a clear-reading text. However, it allows readers to compare only two versions at once (rather than allowing them to see the text’s full genesis across multiple versions), still requires readers to interpret Bryant’s fairly complex representation of revision sites in the base version, and presents his revision narrative only while viewing one of the specific revision site versions, rather than foregrounding it in all reading views. As well, Bryant’s socialtext/genetic editorial orientation seems at odds with his privileging of transcriptions over digital facsimiles as the best way to foreground textual fluidity as energy and labour. As McGann argues, foregrounding the reading experience in facsimiles allows readers to see the text

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as “an interactive locus of complex feed-back operations” between the various agents of its production and allows editors to “demonstrate the semiotics of the text that has been the subject of attention of bibliographers, sociologists, economists, and tradespersons of various kinds” (“Rationale” 13), which is a significant aspect of the text’s reception history. Bryant’s frames-based interface does present the facsimile first when the edition is first “opened” online and can be adjusted to present only manuscript images, but readers can access information about revision sites and narratives only while viewing transcribed versions of the text, thus eliding the important social and historical information contained in the facsimile’s representation of the text’s bibliographic codes. This criticism also applies to Shillingsburg’s edition, and to Clement’s, which builds upon Bryant’s theories. Clement’s In Transition, which uses an adapted version of the opensource Versioning Machine, is the most technologically advanced of the three small-scale editions and solves some of the problems that Shillingsburg and Bryant attempt but fail to redress. Informed by Bryant’s fluid-text theory, “the VM provid[es] a frame to compare diplomatic versions of witnesses side by side, allowing for images of the witness to be viewed alongside the diplomatic edition” (Vetter et al.), and allows users to compare, in any order, as many witnesses as the computer screen has room to display. While this is an improvement over Bentley’s two-text limit on comparisons, it becomes a significant limitation when trying to view poems with many variants, as readers cannot keep them all in view or must significantly reduce their size to fit them all onscreen. Clement uses the first two frames of each poem’s representation in the VM (which can be dismissed once read to provide space for more versions) to provide bibliographical data and a critical introduction to the poem. Her adaptation of the VM also allows for embedded explanatory notes that she occasionally uses to represent sites where multiple readings are possible. Like Bryant, Clement argues that the meaning-making event of the text can be understood fully only when its socio-historical contexts and genesis are considered together (“Knowledge” 2.1); to this end, Clement foregrounds the social aspects of the poems’ production, transmission, and reception, all of which are unpublished, in the critical introduction. However, also like Bryant, Clement fails to take full advantage of the contextualizing information that inheres in the digital facsimile; the edition represents only textual genesis in transcription, and facsimiles are included only as thumbnails, although they can be expanded and viewed in detail.

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While Shillingsburg, Bryant, and Clement each take significant steps towards creating digital editions that attempt to exceed the capabilities of print editions – particularly their potential to present textual genesis and foreground the reading experience in the text-in-process – none has fully succeeded: the tools they use allow only for limited representations of textual genesis, and none foreground the reading experience in textual documents, thus eliding the crucial bibliographic element of the text’s socio-historical contexts. As well, while the small scale of these editions is a positive in terms of their feasibility, none of them provides a model for ways that effectively edited small-scale editions can function as a component of a large-scale digital collection, thus allowing large-scale projects like the Rossetti Archive to do the necessary work of making important bodies of work accessible, but in useful, userfriendly, and editorially sound ways. I suggest that the next phase in the development of small-scale digital editions, one that has the potential to solve more of the problems that plague print critical editions than current digital editions can, lies in the idea of the modular edition. Editing Modules, Collecting Editions What I am calling a theory of the modular edition is informed by McGann’s statements about digital editing best practice, Bryant’s fluidtext theory, and Irvine’s idea of the “archive of editions” (“Editing” 199). This theory underlies the structure and production process of my digital edition of Wilkinson’s Hangman Ties the Holly. The idea of editing modularly is not new or innovative, but I argue that foregrounding small-scale edition design, production, and networking in the idea of the module can lead to the creation of more flexible, more useful, and more editorially responsible digital editions. McGann sees the necessity of thinking modularly from the beginning. In “The Rationale of HyperText,” he argues that digital editing best-practice would see editions “structured in the most modular and flexible way, so that inevitable and fast-breaking changes in hardware and software will have a minimal effect on the work as it is being built” (6). However, as his work evidences, large-scale projects have the tendency to become monolithic and inflexible; their scale suggests that they are less responsive than small editions can be to the rapid developments in tools and technology that characterize this time of transition. A truly flexible and responsive small-scale edition is modular on two levels. First, it is composed of multiple flexible and interconnected modules that in combination

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make up a discrete digital edition. Second, the individual edition is designed to be networked with other modular editions into a largerscale digital collection, thus providing a model for the creation of largescale collections that provide access not only to a wide array of textual materials, but also to these materials in effectively edited and organized forms. On the first level, the modular edition is created in a number of discrete stages that are themselves modular. One module may be a full set of digital facsimiles; the next may involve adding transcriptions, then encoding the poems for search and analysis. When material is released in stages, readers can access useful documents and information – not in their ultimate form, but useful nonetheless – long before the edition’s completion, when all of the modules are complete and interconnected in order to create a fully integrated edition. While number and kinds of modular stages are different for each edition, based on the modes of representation and editorial orientation privileged by each editor, Hangman is made up of four modules, each of which is designed to foreground the reading experience in the materiality and sociality of the text in increasingly sophisticated and interactive ways. To this purpose, unlike most extant small-scale editions, Hangman is image-based (as opposed to transcription-based) in order to avoid the privileging of a clear-reading text and to retain the bibliographic information present in the textual documents. First, an unedited collection of quality digital facsimiles of all of the versions of the poems – in manuscript, typescript, and print – contained in the 1955 edition of Hangman is released. Second, TEI-encoded transcriptions are included to accompany the facsimiles. Third, the facsimiles are annotated using an image-markup tool that allows for embedded explanatory notes, revision narratives, and information about significant revision sites. Fourth, the data encoded in the images and transcriptions are incorporated into a visualization interface that allows effective presentation of textual history and the complete genesis of the text up to the present. The edition will not be complete (to the extent that infinitely expansible and alterable digital editions can ever be considered complete) until all four modules are integrated, but because each module is available as it is complete, Wilkinson’s poetry is made freely and openly available much sooner than it would be if held in reserve until the edition as a whole was completed. As well, the edition provides opportunity for user input at every stage, and the development of each module can take into account user input about previous modules. This level of modularity allows for the

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flexibility of design and thinking that McGann argues constitutes digital editing best practice. By not attempting to complete all four modules at once – which would involve doing the work of scanning, transcribing, encoding, and visualizing poem-by-poem – but rather completing modules in stages and culminating with the application of visualization tools, the Hangman edition will be able to adapt to developments in technology, editorial techniques, and best practice while in process. In particular, this level of modularity ensures that the edition can make use of the most advanced textual-genesis visualization tools and interfaces available when the image-markup and encoding is complete. These tools, as the extant small-scale editions evidence, are still limited and rudimentary, but Clement’s current involvement in the Modernist Versions Project – an initiative that is working to develop more effective and advanced ways of representing textual history – suggests that better ones are on the near horizon. While modular editions can be organized and structured in any number of ways, a fully socialized modular edition foregrounds the notion of the digital edition as edition: the modular edition as a digital-­facsimile version of an extant edition that preserves its bibliographic codes and socio-historical contexts and uses the structure of the extant edition to organize the representation of the genesis of the texts contained in it. As Bryant argues, “A literary work is … the combined energies of individual and social forces which through the processes of authorial, editorial and cultural revision evolve from one version to the next and emerge from time to time as documents to be read by readers” (Fluid 112). If one of the main goals of critical editing is to foreground the reading experience in an understanding of these social forces and energies, preserving the edition as a fundamental unit of organization in digital projects is crucial, for the edition, more than any other version, is the site where the energies of the author, editor, publisher, and reader are most closely focused and bound up with each other. Although, as Irvine argues, the digital edition can escape the print-bound need to privilege a specific version of the text and can represent the multiplicity of authorial intentions as “a decentred, non-hierarchically ordered archive of manuscript, typescript, and print versions” (“Editing” 201), the reader does have to enter the digital edition and begin reading somewhere. The editor’s intention to forego a hierarchical structure must be accompanied by a carefully considered site design that counters the user’s expectation that the first edition presented is the “most” authoritative and authorial. Finding and creating such a structure is challenging and

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requires not only creativity by the editor, but a careful consideration of how readers tend to, and will actually, approach the digital edition. But in theory, the modular edition privileges a first engagement with texts as contained in their original edition. It thus requires readers to engage with the bibliographic codes present in the edition-as-object, the ways that the texts within the edition are organized in collaboration between the author and editor, the way the texts interact within that organization, and the way that the edition as a unit was received by readers, reviewers, and critics. Upon entering the digital edition of Hangman, readers first encounter the edition largely as it was published in 1955 – it is represented as high-quality digital facsimiles of the collection from cover to cover – and have the opportunity to, and are encouraged to, interact with the edition as it was produced in collaboration between Wilkinson and her editor, Kildare Dobbs, and as encountered by readers and reviewers at mid-century and after. However, this is only the first of many possible readings. At every encounter with a poem, readers are also presented with (and strongly encouraged to take) the opportunity to expand the reading view so that the poem as contained in the edition is displayed as one of multiple, non-hierarchically ordered versions, to look to (and hopefully question and challenge) a revision narrative contained in annotations embedded in the facsimile, and to interact with visualizations of textual genesis that foreground an understanding of the text as fluid and multiply constituted. Even when a single edition stands alone, situating the modular edition as a digital representation of a print edition effectively promotes an understanding of the digital edition and the texts it contains as socially constructed and received. However, the modular edition promotes this understanding among its users even more effectively on the second level of modularity: when multiple modular editions, each designed to represent an extant edition of an author’s text, are networked in a larger collection. When we consider the edition as a discrete unit of organization and as a manifestation of the energy that constitutes a literary work, it is a significant source of information about the socio-historical contexts of a piece of literature. Networking modular editions, which brings together many of these manifestations, has the potential to best allow editors to foreground the ways that a body of work has been produced, received, and reproduced in both authorial and non-authorial forms. Moreover, it allows the editor to foreground her work as another contribution to the ongoing relationships that have produced the text. As McGann argues, “The scholar’s text is a positive construction in its

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own right, a new stage of collaboration with the … author … and his or her earlier collaborators” (Textual 65). The inclusion of non-authorial documents is significant here. As Bryant emphasizes, if “analysis of genesis and revision allows us to gain a sharper sense of the energies of literary work as the locus of interaction of individual and society, then the idea of an ‘edition’ must be expanded to include nonauthorial materials as well” (Fluid 145). The networking of modular editions, editions that have the capacity to include a wide array of authorial and nonauthorial primary and secondary documents that make up the text and evidence its social construction, allows readers to engage with the full range of editions as discrete socially constituted works, and as part of a narrative of textual history. Within this network, readers can engage with a single text within the context of its original edition and view the ways that it transforms across editions. As Irvine argues, hypertext is well suited to networking editions in order to demonstrate effectively the full range of social relationships and energies that constitute textual history. The limitations of print editions require editors to exclude material, to attempt to supersede rather than encompass previous editions. Indeed, Irvine’s edition of Wilkinson’s poems largely excludes non-authorial editions as variant versions and explicitly claims to supersede previous editions (Heresies 209). In his critique of the tendency of Canadian literature editions to do the same, he suggests an alternative: harness the potential of “hypertext [to] potentially enfold any number of critical and non-critical editions into an indexed network in which each edition is experienced as a socialized text” (“Editing” 202), thus allowing the social-text editor not to supersede, but to contain, present, and analyse the ways in which a text has been produced and re-produced. Irvine terms this indexed network an “archive of editions” (199), which I reframe as collection of editions to acknowledge the distinction between digital collections and archives proper. In the collection of editions, discrete modular digital editions of all authorial and non-authorial editions are harnessed into a network by the interface they are placed in, by hyperlinking between them to allow readers to see and explore their interconnectedness, and by linking the texts they contain in narratives and visualizations of textual history that consider all variant versions up to the present. The collection of editions as a mode of organization is generally useful for editing work that appears in multiple editions, but is particularly appropriate for reediting Wilkinson’s work. The Collected Poems of Anne Wilkinson is designed as modular editions of the collections

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she published during her lifetime (Counterpoint to Sleep in 1951 and The Hangman Ties the Holly in 1955) and the three non-authorial editions edited and published posthumously (the collected editions edited by A.J.M. Smith and Joan Coldwell and the complete edition edited by Dean Irvine). Structuring the digital Wilkinson as a collection of editions reflects and repeats the choices made by her previous editors: Irvine chooses to retain the grouping of Wilkinson’s poems by edition in Heresies because it “maintain[s] the integrity of [her] two published volumes” (205) as socialized texts, but Smith’s and Coldwell’s editions also maintain this grouping. As the example of her poem “Letter to My Children” will show, the non-authorial editions have made significant interventions into the transmission and reception history of Wilkinson’s work that must be considered. Placing this poem within a modular edition and the edition within a collection of editions effectively illuminates these interventions, the social nature of her work’s production, and issues of gender and economics that have, sometimes radically, altered the shape of her work. “peeled / of twenty paper layers of years”: The History of “Letter to My Children” Wilkinson’s short career as a professional writer lasted only from 1946 until her death of cancer in 1961, and although she wrote seriously only for the last two decades of her life, she published a significant body of work in multiple genres. While her writing was acclaimed by critics such as Fred Cogswell, Desmond Pacey, and Northrop Frye, her profile and reputation have significantly waned since her death. If only for its sharp humour, ludic wit, sensual identification with the natural world, and playful traversing of genres from ballad to letter, Wilkinson’s work would be worth recuperating. Its value, however, is more than aesthetic; it also provides crucial insights into the writing, editing, and relationships that constitute Canadian modernism, especially the critically neglected modernism of mid-century Toronto. It is this history, along with Wilkinson’s texts, that the digital Wilkinson attempts to recuperate. Using the example of Wilkinson’s poem “Letter to My Children,” I suggest ways that its publication within a modular edition and collection of editions can effectively represent this socio-historical context, as well as the poem’s complex and fascinating genesis. Wilkinson’s poetry has been re-edited three times since her death, first by the poet and editor A.J.M. Smith, with whom she had long-term

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poetic and romantic relationship. He collected most of her poems in The Collected Poems of Anne Wilkinson and a Prose Memoir (1968), and his edition was reprinted with a new introduction by Joan Coldwell as The Poetry of Anne Wilkinson and a Prose Memoir (1990). The most recent and most comprehensive edition of Wilkinson’s poems is Irvine’s Heresies: The Complete Poems of Anne Wilkinson, 1924–1961 (2003), which includes forty-six poems that the two earlier editions excluded as incomplete or inferior, along with a detailed textual apparatus presenting each poem’s genesis, although only in authorial versions. His apparatus is intended to “clear a space at [Wilkinson’s] writing table so we can take a closer look at the idiosyncratic practices that shape her signature style” (20), and, like his choice to retain the original organization of Wilkinson’s poems within the volumes in which they were collected, is intended to present Wilkinson’s work as a socialized text. As a textual edition, however, Irvine’s edition suffers from many of the common issues with print critical editions that the digital Wilkinson attempts to remedy – variants are relegated to the back of the book as highly encoded abbreviations, the clear-reading text is privileged over text-in-genesis, and the materiality and particularity of the documents that evidence the energies of composition, revision, and transmission that went into the production of her work are completely obscured. As with all print critical editions, these issues stem largely from the conflict between ideal editorial practice and the demands of publishers and readers, rather than from the editor’s carelessness. Space constraints also limit the scope and utility of Irvine’s edition, which represents the genesis of Wilkinson’s work only as contained in her manuscripts, typescripts, first two editions, and periodical publications. There is rather more that could be included, or more fully integrated. Irvine’s edition relegates Smith’s and Coldwell’s editions to the appendix and excludes as variants recordings, artistic adaptations, and poems reprinted in anthologies, all of which are legitimate variant forms that represent the multiplicity of ways that readers have engaged with and reimagined Wilkinson’s work. If Irvine’s edition of Wilkinson’s poems clears space at her writing table for us to look over her shoulder at her poetic practice, the Wilkinson collection of editions has the potential to allow us an even broader view of the many tables at which Wilkinson collaborated: with her fellow poets and editors, with anthologists who selected her poems, with composers who set her poems to music, with artists who sewed her words into quilts and engraved them into leaves, and with editors who made choices about how to represent her work after her death.

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“Letter to My Children,” which exists under that title in multiple versions and also as “Letter to My Children: Postscript” (in Smith’s edition) and as “P.S.” (in typescripts and copybooks), has one of the more complex textual histories of any of Wilkinson’s poems. She originally published it as a version with twenty stanzas in the fall-winter 1952 issue of Contemporary Verse under the title “Letter to My Children,” and upon submitting an early Hangman typescript to Contact Press, wrote to the publisher, Louis Dudek, that Contemporary Verse editor Alan Crawley considered it one of her best (qtd in Irvine, Heresies 32). Dudek did not agree, and in their negotiations about which poems would appear in her second collection (which came out in 1955, not with Contact but with Macmillan, under the title The Hangman Ties the Holly) wrote Wilkinson to persuade her to make radical cuts: “The entire poem stands on page one (… I wd persuade you to cut it that way; keep the rest, 6 pp. for exhibition as a separate poem.) What you do with the rest is evoke the life of the senses. But (1) this is not your forte, (2) and not your poem” (32). Although Dudek likely meant that the six pages of “Letter to My Children” that followed his preferred first page were dissimilar enough to be considered a separate poem, his statement that “this is … not your poem” suggests the extent to which Dudek felt and exerted a sense of ownership and control, one that radically altered the ultimate shape of the poem. Wilkinson’s ambivalence about Dudek’s request is evidenced in her reply. While she noted that Crawley thought the poem one of her best, she conceded to Dudek that she agreed with both of them, and with hesitation cut the poem down to a three-stanza form, which she included in the next version of the typescript, titled “A Unicorn Runs.” Wilkinson’s ambivalence is also evidenced by the fact that she considered taking Dudek’s suggestion to keep the six remaining pages as a separate poem. She included these pages as a separate poem under the subtitle “P.S.” in an early and discarded Hangman typescript, and also continued to revise the longer, non-excised version that appeared in Contemporary Verse in her copybooks. Dudek’s editorial interventions into the early Hangman typescript radically altered the form of “Letter to My Children” in ways that Wilkinson clearly had some reservations about. However, she did not return the poem to its original form as she gave The Hangman Ties the Holly its final shape in collaboration with its ultimate editor, Kildare Dobbs of Macmillan of Canada. The amount of control that Dobbs exerted over the shape of the collection – and indeed, the control that she allowed him – suggests that she may have been generally reluctant

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to assert authorial authority, not just with Dudek, and thus was reticent to reinstate the excised section of “Letter to My Children.” Although Dobbs assured her in his first editor’s report that nothing he wrote “ha[d] any bearing on, or is any indication of, the possible reaction of my firm” (Irvine, Heresies 35) to the collection, Wilkinson, alone and with Dobbs, revised and re-revised Hangman in response to his two editor’s reports and comments on individual poems. As with Dudek, Wilkinson also accepted, seemingly without protest, significant revisions made by Dobbs to the contents of Hangman just prior to publication. While Dudek’s excisions seem to have been made in reaction to highly gendered material, Dobbs maintains Dudek’s changes and additionally denudes Hangman of much of its political significance by omitting two poems, “Notes on Suburbia” and “The Land of the Brave.” As Irvine notes, “Like her choice to publish the shortened version of ‘Letter to My Children’ in Hangman, her decision to omit” these poems on the basis of Dobbs’s judgment is “loaded with implications” (35) for how readers have assessed the social significance of Wilkinson’s poetry. This decision is also loaded with implications for how subsequent editors have represented and republished “Letter to My Children.” How this textual history has been preserved or represented in subsequent editions of Wilkinson’s work reveals some of the limitations of print critical editions and some of the problems with each editorial approach, as well as the ways in which the modular digital edition and collection of editions can remediate them. In the textual notes to his edition, Smith argues that Wilkinson’s inclusion of the final six pages under “P.S.” suggests that she viewed the poem as two parts, and thus he is “justified in placing the fine major portion of the poem at the head of the uncollected pieces under the title ‘Letter to My Children: Postscript’” (211). The poem appears twice in Smith’s edition – the first three stanzas under “The Hangman Ties the Holly,” and the rest as a “postscript” under “Poems from the Notebooks.” There are a number of issues with this approach, the retitling of the later stanzas one of the major ones. Aside from the excessive editorial intervention that this retitling evidences, Smith’s choice of title directly links “Letter to My Children” and “P.S.” in a way that contradicts the divide he sees between the two parts of the poem. For another, Wilkinson’s continued revision of the full version in her copybooks suggests that she continued to think of the poem as a whole only in its full, uncut form. Smith’s choice to preserve the divide that Dudek forced on the poem repeats Dudek’s masculinist exertion of control over a highly gendered text. As Joan Coldwell notes,

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Wilkinson did not “live beyond the point at which women were still almost entirely dependent on men for a place in the literary world. Men were the ‘gatekeepers,’ the ones who edited magazines and anthologies, who read manuscripts for publishing houses and decided the academic canon” (“Walking” 5). Any reading of the poem must consider the possibility that Dudek felt licensed to insist on this large-scale excision – perhaps considering motherhood too trivial a subject to justify the poem’s original length – that Dobbs felt licensed to maintain it because of the highly gendered subject of the poem, and that Smith felt justified in upholding this change because he believed that his fellow editors’ professional opinion was more valid than Wilkinson’s poetic one. It may also have been because Smith preferred to remember Wilkinson as a lover, rather than a mother. In her edition of Wilkinson’s poems, Coldwell criticizes Smith for his tendency to allow his personal relationship with Wilkinson to colour his editorial choices – he is guilty of “emphasizing [her poems’] sensuousness, so evocative of the woman he had known” (“Introduction” xii) and is one of the lover-editors “who selected poems for anthologies” and privileged the inclusion of “extremely sensuous love poem[s]” (“Walking” 8). But despite her criticisms, Coldwell’s edition reprints Smith’s text, minus his introduction, in its entirety. Her avowed gyno-critical project of recuperating Wilkinson’s work as a feminist act, and her astute biographical introduction, sit uneasily alongside Smith’s text and the issues of gender that colour the editing of “Letter to My Children” and numerous other poems. Since it foregrounds the text in the context of the edition, the collection of editions allows readers to more fully consider the ways that these relationships – between Wilkinson and Dudek, Dobbs, and Smith, and between Coldwell and Wilkinson’s previous editors – have altered both the production and reception of Wilkinson’s work. While it is certainly limited in significant ways, largely by the constraints of print editing, publishing, and markets, Irvine’s Heresies is much closer to the ideal social-text edition that the modular edition aspires to be. In an attempt to remedy some of the issues with Smith’s and Coldwell’s choices in representing “Letter to My Children,” Irvine explicitly attempts to redress the excision and marginalization of a significant portion of the poem. As he notes in the introduction to Heresies, while “Letter to my Children” “appears in the present edition as it was published in The Hangman Ties the Holly, I have also included the latest revision of the entire longer version in the ‘Poems from the CopyBooks’ section; this complete longer version postdates the version in the

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earliest Hangman typescript … Rather than publish the ‘P.S.’ section on its own … I have presented the complete poem in its latest version” (33). Irvine’s choice respects both the integrity of The Hangman Ties the Holly as a text that was constructed in relationship between Dobbs and Wilkinson, and Wilkinson’s continued insistence on the poem’s completeness as a whole, not as a letter and postscript; he also rectifies the problems created by Smith’s retitling of the poem. However, while these redresses are necessary and well done, Heresies as a print edition still falls short in that it does not adequately communicate to readers the textual history of this poem. While Irvine does explicitly address the full publication and revision history of “Letter to My Children” in the introduction, readers who move straight to the poems without reading the lengthy introduction are highly unlikely to notice that “Letter to My Children” appears twice in the table of contents: the three-stanza version appears under “The Hangman Ties the Holly (1955)” and the complete version appears, under the same title, in the “Poems From the Copy-Books” section. They are therefore also unlikely to recognize that these two entries are two variant versions of the same poem, or to recognize that there is a significant and important textual history associated with this poem. Irvine could have, but does not, remedy this in the textual appendix of the edition; he treats the geneses of each version separately, does not represent the version contained in the copybooks as a variant of the Hangman version or vice versa, and does not point readers to the other version in the notes to either poem. The appendix, rather than allowing readers to fully engage with the work as text-in-genesis, further distorts and disguises the poem’s complex textual history. Irvine’s choice to represent the poem’s genesis only up to the time of her death, and not include the versions contained in Smith’s and Coldwell’s editions, also elides the significance of non-authorial editorial interventions into the poem’s textual history. The modular edition and the networked collection of editions is designed to remedy the ways in which print critical editions, or rather their editors, are forced by publishers, readers, and markets to elide or distort textual history and genesis. In this case, it is intended to remediate the ways that Smith’s, Coldwell’s, and Irvine’s editions represent “Letter to My Children” as a poem and its accompanying textual history. In doing so, The Collected Poems of Anne Wilkinson aims to provide readers with access to the fascinating ways in which various editorial positions and strategies – Dudek’s, Dobbs’s, and Smith’s exertion of control, Coldwell’s feminist project of recovery, and Irvine’s commitment to

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textual history and the socialization of texts – have significantly altered the representations of “Letter to My Children” and the ways in which readers from 1952 to the present have engaged with the poem. The modular edition, when facsimile-based and organized around the edition as social construct, immediately provides the reader with an enhanced understanding of the poem’s context within each edition: readers can see how the overall structure of the edition affects a reading of “Letter to My Children” and how the bibliographic codes represented by the facsimile evidence the socio-historical and cultural conditions of the poem’s production and reception within the edition. Using an imagemarkup tool in combination with the facsimile allows information about the production and revision narrative of “Letter to My Children” to be embedded and foregrounded directly in the image of each version, rather than requiring readers to find (or ignore) the information in an introduction or set of textual notes. Unlike Irvine’s edition, the textual genesis of “Letter to My Children” in the digital Wilkinson includes both the threestanza Hangman and twenty-stanza Contemporary Verse/copybook versions of the poem as variants in a single revision narrative, rather than splitting them. Simple hyperlinking has a significant role to play; within each non-authorial edition, the short and long versions of “Letter to My Children” that appear separately in each table of contents can be linked to each other, making it immediately apparent to readers that the poem appears twice in each edition, the reasons for which the embedded revision narrative will make clear. Hyperlinks also point readers to the contextualizing information contained in Smith’s and Irvine’s introductions and textual notes, and to link readers to additional contextualizing documents: this could include Wilkinson’s, Dudek’s, and Dobbs’s correspondence about the production of The Hangman Ties the Holly; Coldwell’s essay about editing Wilkinson’s autobiographical writings; reviews, ads, and marketing materials for each edition; and links to mentions of the poem and its publication in Wilkinson’s journals. The use of visualization tools has perhaps the most profound effect on the readerly understanding of the genesis of “Letter to My Children.” Although readers first encounter the poem as contained in one of the four editions it appears in, they are then guided to expand the reading view to see that version within its place in the revision narrative, and to see the poem’s genesis from first periodical publication to final representation in the digital Wilkinson. The potential contained in the networked collection of editions for ­allowing readers to engage with textual history and genesis both horizontally – across variants, and across editions – and vertically – drilling down

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from the chronological representation of textual history to the poem as it appears in the context of the edition – allows for a much richer reading experience, one foregrounded in a crucial understanding of texts as socially constructed and received, than any of the Wilkinson editions, or indeed any small-scale digital edition. Networking Editors Just as modular editions function most effectively within a socialized network of editions, the editor of modular editions likewise functions most effectively within a social network of editors. As social-text editing continually tries to make apparent, all works exist within and are produced by an ever-changing network of authors, editors, publishers, printers, and readers. For print editions, the production part of these networks – editors, proofreaders, publishers, and printers – exist in highly structured and codified forms. While they can be difficult to gain access to – consensus suggests that scholarly publishing is a shrinking field, and that the digital humanities is part of the major shift in knowledge dissemination occurring during its decline – current editors generally know where to find them and how to access them in order to get their print edition published. The scarcity and newness of equivalent networks for digital editors is one of the reasons that small-scale print editions are only now emerging as feasible alternatives to their print counterparts. Until quite recently, editors of small-scale digital editions had no choice but to gather together their own networks of tool developers, code writers, graphic and book designers, server-space providers, IT troubleshooters, and user interface-testers. More often than not, given budget restrictions, they also had to learn how to fill some or many of these roles themselves, in addition to performing the scholarly editorial work required of preparing an edition. This necessity made undertaking a digital edition unfeasible for scholars at institutions without these resources and a high level of digital humanities support, and even less possible for the large number of adjunct p ­ rofessors and graduate students involved in digital humanities whose tenure at a single institution is often too short to complete an edition, and who many not qualify for governmental or institutional support. H ­ owever, digital humanities equivalents to the networks that support print ­publishing are becoming more and more common, and they represent the best hope for the proliferation of small-scale digital editions as the future of responsible textual editing. In Canada, editorial networks like

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Editing Modernism in Canada and the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory have begun gathering together the technical expertise, tools, education, and publication platforms that digital editors require, and to make these resources widely available and highly user-friendly. Like the web of social relations that the networked collection of e­ ditions traces between texts, these collectives network together editors, libraries and archives, institutions involved in tool-building and project hosting, and training programs like the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, Humanities Intensive Learning and Teaching, THATCamps, and Trent University and UBC Okanagan’s textual editing courses. As these editorial networks become more common and better established, digital editors will seek them out in order to complete and publish their scholarly editions as instinctively as print editors seek out scholarly publishers. In the proliferation of modularly, flexibly, and responsibly edited small-scale digital critical editions, one that is enabled by these editorial networks, lies the potential for the revolution in critical editing that McGann foresaw nearly twenty years ago. NOTES 1 There are a number of names for digital editorial projects in use, but most are seen as problematic; the debate about terminology in the digital humanities is both lively and ongoing (see Price). Digital archive is perhaps the most attractive and commonly used term, but as Zailig Pollock argues in relationship to his own work, the narrativization, annotation, and reorganization of an author’s archival materials in a digital medium should preclude the digital version from being referred to as an archive, even in a metaphorical sense (Pollock and Ballantyne 191). The remediation of this material – we are only ever engaging with the digital, and not the physical, object – also strongly differentiates the digital collection from the archive proper. Like Pollock, I choose to respect the distinctions between physical and digital collections, and between edited and unedited documents; to that end, I use the term digital edition for a digital publication that emulates a scholarly edition and digital collection (not digital archive) for a comprehensive grouping of documents related to one author.

4 The HyperRoy Project: New Perspectives on Gabrielle Roy’s Manuscripts and Unpublished Texts sophie marcotte 1

Over the past few years, with certain large-scale French-language projects such as the virtual presentation of the manuscripts for Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Balzac’s La Comédie humaine, electronic editing has become a recommended means for editing and publishing genetic files and unpublished texts. However, as Nathalie Mauriac Dyer explains, publishing manuscripts and unpublished texts is not the publication of an author’s works but rather of some of the evidence of his or her creative process. It is, at least in part, different from editing texts, a process that has evolved through centuries of tradition (157). Thus, even if electronic editing borrows some of its methods from traditional critical editing – the choice of a basic document, the addition of critical and explanatory notes, the identification of variants as well as intra- and inter-textual references, for example, specific editorial protocols still need to be defined and developed (157). In other words, while critical editing and electronic editing of literary texts may entail similar ethical and aesthetic choices, the result – the design and publication in electronic format – is likely to lead to innovative reading and interpretation strategies. What will be discussed here is the specific case of manuscripts and unpublished texts of Gabrielle Roy, the Franco-Manitoban author (1909–83) for whom an electronic edition is being prepared. This project is part of a larger undertaking that involves the creation and development of a virtual community of researchers and readers interested in the author and in her writings, called the HyperRoy project.2 We will see that even if electronic editing is not governed by a long tradition, as is the case for critical editing, it is not neutral, nor is it objective or devoid of any interpretive activity. From this perspective, critical editions of

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Roy’s Le Temps qui m’a manqué and La Détresse et l’Enchantement will be examined, with particular attention given to technical problems and editorial choices stemming from them within the electronic editing process. In the end, this should explain how the potential benefits of such a project are essential to the dissemination and the study not only of Roy’s body of work but also of Quebec’s and Canada’s literatures of the second half of the twentieth century. Critical Editing and Electronic Editing: Two Complementary Approaches The critical editing of a text, whether in unpublished form or published in paper format, must always be prepared with a great deal of care. In the editing process, which for W.P. Williams and C.S. Abbott corresponds to the historical reconstruction of a text that reflects the intention of its creator, one must indeed reflect the intention of the author in posthumous publication. One must honour what we may term the author’s “literary memory,” while keeping in mind his or her right to privacy, especially for personal texts such as journals, autobiographies, or letters. All these rules are replicated in electronic editing and must bring about the creation and follow-up of an editing process that will highlight the singularity of those texts from a material and aesthetic standpoint as well as their literary value. Since the end of the 1990s, the Groupe de recherche sur Gabrielle Roy (G2R2) has been working on the critical editing of Roy’s unpublished texts (autobiographical texts, letters, short stories, etcetera).3 Researchers in the group have created their own editing protocols, which take into account both the material particularities and the contents of the collection (Ricard, Protocole), and which is inspired by methods developed by the main textology proponents of the last several decades for editing literary texts (Contat; Laufer; Varloot). Roy’s novels, stories, and collections, which were published in Quebec and in France, were also translated and published in English Canada and in the United States. They were also published in approximately twenty languages around the world, including German, Italian, and Japanese.4 Her body of work, which comprises over a dozen titles published while she was alive, is probably one of the most studied in universities and colleges throughout Quebec and Canada. She has also been studied in hundreds of academic journals, books, and doctoral and master’s theses in the past few decades.5

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The critical editing work undertaken has contributed to the renewal of reading perspectives of Roy’s oeuvre and to an aesthetic reflection on her body of work (see Roy, Le temps; Roy, Ma chère; Roy, Mon cher; Roy, Femmes; Roy, Gabrielle Roy–Joyce Marshall; Roy, Heureux). Subsequently, this work was also the genesis of a reflection on the dissemination of unpublished texts and archives. We examined the possibility of complementing the publication in paper format, essentially aimed at the greater public, with the development of an electronic editing protocol taking into consideration the material particularities of those manuscripts, typescripts, and other archival items remaining unpublished by Roy, and the specific ethical problems inherent in the electronic processing of the novelist’s archives. In the case of Roy, it became clear that between the two approaches of critical editing and electronic editing there was no conflict per se, but rather a complementarity and an interdependence. In fact, the electronic dissemination of Roy’s manuscripts and unpublished texts allows for a clear separation between the author’s major works (Bonheur d’occasion [1945], La petite poule d’eau [1950], Alexandre Chenevert [1954], La Rivière sans repos [1970], and Ces enfants de ma vie [1977]) and the manuscripts and unpublished texts left in her archives, which were not published during the author’s lifetime. This “immersed” (Ricard and Everett 7) portion of her opus includes approximately fifty brief narratives and short stories, two unpublished novels, and an extensive correspondence of over two thousand letters that the author did not want to have published posthumously, as well as other loose-leaf documents, including a scrapbook of newspaper and magazine clippings. In fact, apart from La Détresse et l’Enchantement, Roy had expressed her desire to have only two parts of her correspondence published posthumously: her letters to her older sister Bernadette (Roy, Ma chère), a member of the Congrégations religieuse des Saints noms de Jésus et Marie, a Quebec religious order founded in Longueuil in 1843, and the letters she exchanged with her husband, Doctor Marcel Carbotte (Roy, Mon cher).6 These are kept in the Fonds Gabrielle Roy,7 at Library and Archives Canada (LAC), which contains twenty metres of textual records and other materials.8 Other than the fact that it helps readers separate those texts that Roy “wanted” to have published from those that many proponents of textual genetics call the “hidden facet” of the author’s work, the electronic editing of Roy’s manuscripts and archives – which constitute a fairly voluminous archival collection – will allow free and open access to this first-hand documentation, which will improve the development, on a

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national and international scale, of a fundamental part of Quebec’s and Canada’s literary heritage. It is undoubtedly through the large-scale dissemination of those archives that this new mode of editing will find its main raison d’être. Thanks to the technical functionalities inherent in the digital platform, electronic editing allows us to present all the documents that are a part of the genetic file, prepare a diplomatic transcription (which renders the exact contents of the original),9 as well as a complete list of variants, to which there is the possibility of adding a much larger critical apparatus than in traditional critical editions (introduction, inter-textual references, with the possibility of reading the entire text as opposed to just the annotations and bibliographic information, and related documents such as correspondence and newspaper clippings), since the electronic platform does not place the same material limits as do publications in print. In fact, book publishing required a reduction to the smallest possible volume of critical notes and list of variants. In other words, the idea was to present a “streamlined” version from which spelling mistakes and the few inconsistencies that the original may contain had been removed, accompanied by the most significant variants. This is the context for the critical editions of letters to Bernadette (1988) and Marcel Carbotte (2001), both included in the Cahiers Gabrielle Roy. Le Temps qui m’a manqué Ces enfants de ma vie was published at the end of the 1970s. This novel, which contains autobiographical dimensions, completed what Carol J. Harvey calls the “cycle manitobain,”10 and won Roy the Governor General’s Award. Around this time, Roy started writing her autobiography, which was originally going to be divided into four parts. She completed two of them, “Le Bal chez le Gouverneur” and “Un oiseau tombé sur le seuil,” which make up La Détresse et l’Enchantement, published posthumously in 1984. The third part, unfinished, was published in 1997 by Éditions du Boréal under the title Le temps qui m’a manqué as part of the Cahiers Gabrielle Roy. The genetic file of this short text – consisting of three successive drafts of respectively sixty-two pages, thirty-two pages, and eightyfive pages – which the author wrote by hand in blue and black ink as well as in pencil in Hilroy spiral notebooks, has been available online since January 2007.11 The text’s three drafts show so many deletions,

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over-writings, additions in the margins, and footnotes that it becomes difficult to know exactly where these revisions should be integrated in the text. So much so that it would have been impossible, despite all the transcription codes that might be established under a critical editing protocol, to reproduce faithfully the contents of the manuscript pages in a print edition. The electronic edition, which was prepared and for which text tags were defined under the protocols of the Text Encoding Initiative,12 allows readers to consult the three manuscript drafts and their diplomatic transcription. It is possible to access them separately or to see all three on screen simultaneously. In fact, for Le Temps qui m’a manqué, no problem was identified when reconstituting the writing sequence, which made programming the visualization modules fairly easy. As designed, this edition also allows for instantaneous surfing among versions, which recreates the evolution during the creation of this third part of the author’s autobiography, which remained unfinished. It is also possible to see a “cleaned-up” transcription of each draft, meaning a text in which all transcription codes and all correction and editing interventions have been removed from the manuscript. The third manuscript draft, which was the one used to establish the published text, was the last version edited by the author. She introduced numerous formal and syntactic changes such as adding new paragraphs and displacing some text segments. This third draft, cleaned of all transcription coding and from which all spelling and grammatical errors were removed, also includes an apparatus with critical and explanatory notes, which mostly provide details on people, places, Roy’s works, and the inter-textual references included in the narrative. In these notes, we also reproduced long extracts of works by Gabrielle Roy or some of her stories in their integral version to clarify allusions about them in Le Temps qui m’a manqué, passages that explicitly or implicitly refer to them (namely stories in Rue Deschambault), features originally published in Le Bulletin des agriculteurs and entire chapters from La Détresse et l’Enchantement. Finally, an exhaustive report of variants (over 1,500) was drawn up, allowing the reader to simultaneously consult all three versions of a selected passage of the text. We also added a research tool in which we have indexed the names of people and places, references to Gabrielle Roy’s works, and the themes visited in the text. A search function by keyword is also provided, allowing for separate searches within one version or in all three simultaneously. As was clarified in the

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presentation text accompanying the electronic edition of Le Temps qui m’a manqué, the search tool had to be as simple as possible in order to leave the author every possible freedom, the aim here being not to impose a certain interpretation of the text through the tagging operation but rather to present to the reader a method for easy identification of the most significant passages.13 But the aesthetic dimension of such an editing project should not be forgotten, since we must ensure that the presentation of the various iterations contributes to bringing forth the text, somewhat in the manner that Gabrielle Roy herself preferred, while she was alive, when she edited her novels. After having herself gone through a thorough editing process on the proof sets, she required that her editors made sure that the physical presentation of her books would remain meticulous and clean. The electronic edition also had to adopt the same outlook, which meant giving the text the attention it deserved while fostering a clean and airy presentation. One key challenge for us was to reach the right balance between efficiency (user-friendliness of the site, ease of reading for all versions of the text, and rapid extraction of text passages through search engines) and respecting the intuitive dimension, which is part of any literary analysis (staying away from anticipating any possible analysis of the text or texts through excessive tagging). La Détresse et l’Enchantement The electronic edition of Roy’s autobiography, La Détresse et l’Enchantement, is the second phase of the research project whose aim is to present an electronic edition of her manuscripts and unpublished texts. The genetic file of La Détresse et l’Enchantement is stored in two archival collections. Two manuscript drafts of “Bal chez le Gouverneur,” written in blue and black ink in spiral notebooks, and one manuscript of “Un oiseau tombé sur le seuil,” also written in blue and black ink in spiral notebooks, a photocopy of the original typescript of both parts, and a photocopy annotated by Roy and François Ricard of that same typescript (2,267 sheets) are in the Fonds Gabrielle Roy. While the manuscripts, whose presentation is similar to the three drafts of Le Temps qui m’a manqué, show numerous deletions as well as many additions in the margins and between and above the lines, the typescripts corresponding to the manuscript contain corrections to grammar, style, and syntax, as well as punctuation changes.

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Another section of the genetic file of La Détresse et l’Enchantement belongs to the private collection of François Ricard, who helped Roy with the editing of the text and who prepared the edition published by Éditions du Boréal in 1984. This is the typescript used for publication, which includes handwritten interventions by Roy, Ricard, and a third person, whom we cannot identify (annotations in the same handwriting also appear on the copy kept at LAC) but who, we may presume, may have circulated in Roy’s entourage. It could also be an employee of the publishing house who oversaw the revision before publication in 1984. This file, consisting of 678 pages, also contains a few letters addressed to Ricard in which the author lists more or less substantial corrections that she wanted applied to her text. The bulk of the correction and rewriting performed by Roy and Ricard was carried out in 1980–1. This work helped to finalize the published text. At first glance, there does not seem to be any problem in the sequence of the work, which we might recreate14 as follows: (1) in the late 1970s, Roy writes out by hand two successive drafts of “Bal chez le Gouverneur” and one for “Un oiseau tombé sur le seuil”; (2) she has the second draft typed out by a typist; (3) Roy herself makes a photocopy of the typescript and places it in a file destined for the LAC; (4) corrections are then made on the original typescript, first by Roy, then by Ricard, and a few comments are later added by a third person; (5) following these corrections, some pages are retyped and substituted in the typescript; and (6) a photocopy of the annotated typescript is filed in the Fonds Gabrielle Roy, while the original remains with Ricard, who uses it to prepare the posthumous edition of 1984 (see figure 4.1).15 However, after a thorough examination of all items in the file, there are indications that Roy and her collaborators may have been simultaneously working on the two typescripts (the one filed at the LAC and the one kept in the private collection of François Ricard), since it has been noted that the two corrected typescripts do not bear identical annotations. Some of the pages found in the Fonds Gabrielle Roy contain corrections and comments from the author that do not appear in Ricard’s typescript, and some of the pages from Ricard’s typescript contain revisions that are not in the typescript Roy gave to the LAC. Similarly, as was previously mentioned, other annotations, from a person we cannot identify, are written on the typescript filed in Ottawa and on the one in the Ricard collection. Reconstituting the correction/ revision process thus becomes much more complex than what had been expected up to that point.

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MS 1

MS 2

TS 1

TS 1 corr

Published text

FR

LAC

4.1.  Inventory of Genetic File for La Détresse et l’Enchantement

Figure 4.2 shows another problematic element in that there are two sets of pages (identified above as “loose-leaf sheets”), which have been typed anew and were replaced in the typescripts – one series at the LAC, another in the Ricard collection. The modified pages are not the same in either set, and in both cases the originals are in folders labelled “modified pages.” TS 1 corr

MS 1

MS 2

Looseleaf sheets

TS 1

LAC

Published text

TS 1 corr

Looseleaf sheets

FR

4.2.  Reconstituted Genetic File for La Détresse et l’Enchantement

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These two distinct layers of corrections, one of which was presumably not taken into account in establishing the final text (the ones from the typescript at the LAC), make it problematic to reconstruct the writing sequence and to design the visualization modules of the text’s drafts. How can we illustrate all of these interventions (consecutive and simultaneous) when we are uncertain of their place in the chronological sequence of writing and editing? Two possible solutions emerge. The first would be to consider the typescript from Ricard as the base text16 and establish the final text from that version, as was the case for the edition published in 1984. Since Roy had assigned the revision of La Détresse et l’Enchantement to Ricard and asked him to publish it after her death, one can assume that this is the most finalized version and hence the one most in line with the novelist’s literary wishes and memory. If this approach is chosen, then the annotated typescript from the fonds at the LAC cannot be integrated in the visualization sequence, but it remains possible to consider it when establishing the list of variants and to include some of the most important corrections on this draft in the critical apparatus. The other possibility would be to treat both typescripts as accompanying documents and consider the second draft of the manuscript as the base text. This would greatly simplify the design of the visualization modules, since only the typescripts would be included in the report on variants. However, we would offer researchers and readers a less aesthetically “perfected” final text, which would be slightly counter to the manner in which Roy herself imagined the publication of her writings. From Electronic Editing to Virtual Community: The HyperRoy Project The electronic edition of La Détresse et l’Enchantement is part of the larger HyperRoy project, a virtual community active since 2009, which is dedicated entirely to a wider dissemination of the knowledge about Gabrielle Roy and to the dialogue between researchers and readers of the novelist’s body of work. The HyperRoy site includes biographical and bibliographical information on Roy’s works as well as a scholarly edition of her manuscripts and unpublished texts. It also provides access to academic publications by members of the research team, a critical bibliography (including over 600 bibliographic records with an analytical summary), an index of Roy’s correspondence (with a s­ ummary

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record for each of the approximately 2,000 extant letters by Roy), and a forum for researchers and readers outside academic circles. The site was designed according to an open-access philosophy, borrowed from pure and applied sciences and adapted to the needs of research in the social sciences and humanities. Working with openaccess means, on the one hand, that anyone is free to consult digital versions of objects of study (book, manuscript, image, sound, and so on). On the other hand, it presupposes free and open access to academic research results about those objects of study. Finally, it entails access to the website’s open-source code17 so that other researchers could create a virtual community based on the same code. That way, sharing the knowledge involves not only the object of study – namely the works of Gabrielle Roy – but also the way of designing the virtual space where readers and researchers meet. The interactive possibilities of the web make it the most effective distribution platform to guarantee access to what belongs both to cultural and literary heritage (for our purposes: the manuscripts and archives) and to research results. Thus the site is designed as a dynamic space, capable of illustrating the changes that characterize the perception of the novelist’s work as critical discourse progresses and as new textual approaches appear.18 Indeed, the general hypothesis on which the project is based is that the development of systems that facilitate access to knowledge will lead to the emergence of new forms of research. Our findings indicate that improving access to the primary object – Roy’s texts – for researchers as well as for the reading public, regardless of where and when they consult the site, seems to promote, in the short and long term, the development of innovative reading strategies and to encourage the creation of virtual communities of researchers and readers around the works of other authors. To the essential dimension that is the electronic edition, one must add the idea of the creation and operation of a virtual community, “a cyberspace supported by computer-based information technology, centered upon communication and interaction of participants to generate ­member-driven contents, resulting in a relationship being built up” (Lee, Vogel, and Limayem 47). Such a community allows for regularly updating research results, every time new elements relevant to the analysis or editing of texts come to light. Thus, in this context, the research on Gabrielle Roy is no longer presented as “completed,” as it would be through publications in books or articles in academic journals. A virtual community founded on the principles of sharing and exchanging

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knowledge allows for the constant evolution of research and the ability to update it with the arrival of new discoveries and analyses of the author’s works (see Marcotte, “La communauté”). In the end, one may suppose that the editing and analytic work on Roy’s manuscripts and unpublished texts, for which electronic resources are used as the main means of distribution, will ensure a wider dissemination of the novelist’s work. But first and foremost, it also will lead to a better knowledge of her writings, of her thinking, and of her writing process, and by extension, of twentieth-century Quebec and Canadian literatures. Moreover, this will pave the way for an interpretive and critical analysis of Roy’s major works and unpublished writings, especially through the genetic study of manuscripts and other avant-textes, whose size and scope can vary greatly according to the works in question, but which have almost never been looked at systematically for critical examination. For each of Roy’s books, a series of genetic documents exist of varying abundance and completeness, some of which are rich and comprehensive, allowing an interested party to follow the creation of the final text practically step by step. Though there appear to be relatively few documents linked to Roy’s first five books (Bonheur d’occasion [1945], La petite poule d’eau [1950], Alexandre ­Chenevert [1954], Rue ­Deschambault [1955], and La Montagne secrète [1961]), the manuscripts and other avant-textes related to subsequent works are numerous, especially for La Route d’Altamont (1966), La Rivière sans repos (1970), Cet été qui chantait (1972), Un jardin au bout du monde (1975) and Ces enfants de ma vie (1977), whose genetic files in the Fonds Gabrielle Roy add to the manuscripts, typescripts, and other documents related to La Détresse et l’Enchantement and to Le Temps qui m’a manqué. These genetic documents can be divided in two categories. On the one hand, there are documents related to the original versions in French, including Roy’s handwritten manuscripts, sometimes in more than one version, one or more successive typescripts produced by a typist and annotated by hand by the author (sometimes by the editor), one or more proofs annotated by Roy, and copies of her books (in either one or two editions) corrected by the author. On the other hand, there are documents related to the English translations of her books, which were very important to Roy and which she considered almost equal to the French originals. These translations are mainly typescripts, produced by the translator or by a typist, which were often annotated by Roy, as well as proofs corrected in her own hand. The electronic dissemination

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of these items from the archival collections accessible to us should help to extend the already active field of research dedicated to the work of this Franco-Manitoban novelist in Canada and elsewhere in the world. NOTES 1 This chapter is translated from French by Johanne Durocher Norchet. 2 Gabrielle Roy: du manuscrit au virtuel. 3 The research group was created by François Ricard and Jane Everett, professors in McGill University’s Department of French Language and Literature. Sophie Marcotte became co-director in 2001. Approximately twenty research assistants worked within the group between 1996 and 2008. Since 1997, the group’s research has been funded by Fonds pour la formation des chercheurs et l’aide à la recherche (FCAR) / Fonds Québécois de la Recherche sur la Société et la Culture (FQRSC) and by Conseil de recherches en sciences humaines / Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (CRSH/SSHRC). It has received a grant from CRSH/SSHRC’s “Savoir/Insight” program (2012–16), under the direction of Sophie Marcotte (Concordia University), with François Ricard (McGill University), Jane Everett (McGill University) and Jacinthe Martel (UQAM) as co-investigators. 4 For a list of editions in French and English, please see Ricard, Gabrielle Roy, une vie (593–5). 5 See “Bibliographie critique” on the HyperRoy site: http://www.hyperroy. nt2.uqam.ca/biblio_critique. See also Saint-Martin; Chadbourne; Socken. 6 Some people believe that the simple fact of depositing manuscripts and archives in a public institution constitutes an act, or at least an implicit desire to have them published or broadcasted, whether it be a conscious decision or not. In other words, this would mean that Gabrielle Roy, when carefully filing the manuscripts and archives she wanted to give the National Library of Canada, knew very well, even wished, that her unpublished texts and the genetic files of her major works would be disseminated after her death. 7 Roy deposited her literary and personal archives at the National Library of Canada (Library and Archives Canada since 2005) at the beginning of the 1980s. See “Roy Gabrielle, 1909–1983/LMS-0173,” acquisition numbers, MSS 1982-11 and MSS 1986-11. 8 “The Gabrielle Roy and Marcel Carbotte fonds contains biographical information on Gabrielle Roy, her personal and business correspondence

The HyperRoy Project  119  and a collection of over 2 000 postcards; also included are manuscripts and proofs of her published works, records pertaining to the death of Gabrielle Roy, her family files, memorabilia, photographic records (nearly 2 000 photographic proofs, negatives and slides) and audio-visual records.” See Roy, Gabrielle, 1909–1983. 9 The diplomatic edition reproduces the text as it is available at a set time in its history. This type of edition is not a “critical edition” since it proposes no correction or modification to the original text, even if it does not exactly reproduce the author’s words or is not exactly consistent with her last wishes. The author’s spelling and punctuation are faithfully recreated. See Williams and Abbott. 10 For Harvey, the “cycle manitobain” is made up of Rue Deschambault, La Route d’Altamont, and Ces enfants de ma vie, three novels inspired by Roy’s childhood and adolescence in Manitoba, and by the years during which she worked as a schoolteacher. 11 See Marcotte, Robert, and Thompson. 12 See TEI. 13 See http://hyperroy.nt2.uqam.ca/le-temps-qui-m-a-manqu. 14 This information is in the documents and working notes deposited with the file in the François Ricard archives. 15 See Marcotte, “L’édition électronique” for the first notes published on this subject. 16 This solution follows criteria established by Bernard Beugnot: “État du texte qui jouit de la plus grande autorité – souvent le dernier état vu par l’auteur – et par rapport auquel est établi le relevé des variantes” (97). 17 The HyperRoy site was designed using the Drupal content-management system. 18 See Marcotte, “Communautés,” where we established the bases of the HyperRoy site, which did not exist at that time, and where we first discussed the notion of open source inherent to our project.

5  Reading the Personal Library, Rereading F.R. Scott j.a. weingarten

Discussing his personal library, Walter Benjamin notes that books contain “spirits, or at least little genii, which have seen to it that for a collector … ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them” (67). His statement should resonate with anyone who has wandered through an author’s library (or his or her own) and found ways in which to read texts and their collector simultaneously. Yet there is little commentary on the personal library as an archive and in a Canadian context: few have attempted to characterize this “ambiguous” (Nicholson 106) resource. F.R. Scott’s library at McGill University is a useful entry point for such discussions, partly because it exemplifies the frustrations and fruits of library labours. The frustrations can be many: idiosyncratic organization, lost or damaged books, incomplete collections, inaccessible libraries, and ambiguous marginalia are just a few factors that can hinder or altogether prevent scholarly epiphanies. Regardless, if it can be made accessible, an author’s library illuminates aspects of his or her career, even if these are not always the illuminations we expect to encounter. Approaching the personal library as an archive, this chapter offers some preliminary thoughts on this understudied resource and the applicability of archive theory to its conditions. The personal library is an unconventional archive. It can clarify the diverse and divided building blocks of an author’s entire oeuvre: his or her literary, philosophical, and political tastes. The library paints the broadest picture of what and (sometimes) when ideas were being read, internalized, and absorbed into their work. But each author’s library is unique and invites a specific approach; in order to assess a broader perspective on this research tool, scholars need a significant collection of

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individual cases. The books one owns are distinctive and densely “layered sites of production, use, and archiving that bear the traces of ongoing change and slow time” (Stauffer, “Poetry” 1). If we are to use these texts to enhance our ability to study the literary-historical past, then we need to adopt what Andrew Stauffer calls “a calibration of practices” that takes into account “the many stages between the moment of the book’s production and the multiple moments of its ongoing reception, including our own” (2). Part of this process means giving close attention to the particular conditions of each case study. Keeping these issues in mind, I have divided my discussion into two parts: one section on libraries broadly and another more focused on Scott’s collection. The first section ruminates on general issues one encounters when studying personal libraries. Through brief allusions to several cases (those of Louis Dudek, Pat Lowther, John Newlove, Al Purdy, Mordecai Richler, and Sinclair Ross), the section demonstrates a range of issues that test researchers in ways that Scott’s library does not. The second section focuses on Scott’s library as an example of a library that has been misread and that can enrich critics’ understanding of his life and work. Taken together, these discussions evidence the case for the preservation of personal libraries, a complex but immensely valuable research tool that will prove advantageous in the future of academic scholarship facilitated by the digital age. In order to understand the research potential of the personal library, one needs to theorize the challenges it poses for researchers. Here, theories of the literary archive offer useful points of comparison. Brien Brothman figures the archive as a symbol of order: “Archives are continually challenged to impose order on the space they inhabit. This order can be physical space in which place must be found for computer tapes, films, maps, photographs and textual files. Or it can refer to an underlying intellectual order in which records are arranged in accordance with certain methodological principles of the profession” (“Orders of Value” 32). Brothman goes on to express his doubt about these ideals: an orderly space and methodology are desirable, but, as Brothman sees it, not always achievable. Brothman’s idea of and scepticism about “order” bear notable relation to Jacques Derrida’s seminal Archive Fever (1996), which interrogates the “unity” of the archive more abstractly (3). Derrida sees the archive as the site in which “order is no longer assured” (5). For several interrelated reasons, Derrida encourages his readers to doubt the possibility of and deconstruct any claim to order in the archive:

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1. There is an inevitable disconnect between historical truth as it was in the past and as it is interpreted in the present. Derrida frequently reiterates the impossibility of finding what he terms the “origin” of historical meaning without imposing a contemporary subjectivity on that origin. 2. Authority, variously conceived and interpreted, affects research. Those who determine the structure of and the allowable degree of access to research materials control what can be found. Likewise, the physical space of the archive – the arrangement and availability of materials – affects one’s ability to make use of it. 3. The conflictual urge to both preserve and destroy archival material is what allows the archive to exist and gives researchers reason to fear its loss. Derrida’s articulation of “destruction” opens itself to many readings, but in the following discussion I want to consider destruction in a purely physical sense. For Derrida, these are problems that trouble an individual’s “painful desire for a return to the authentic and singular origin” of historical truth via the archive (85). Brothman’s idea of order is primarily spatial and methodological; Derrida extends “order” to apply to any attempt to resolve multiple problems related to one’s ability to “translate” a past “at once offered and unavailable for translation, open to and shielded from technical iteration and reproduction” (90). To put it another way, one wants the archive, via its contents (ideally, but seldom, arranged in an orderly way), to substantiate and make coherent a scholarly hypothesis about a person and/or a past. Yet, as both Brothman and Derrida observe, the archive constantly threatens to keep secret and disordered whatever “origin” or historical truth it conceals. These threats and challenges, built into the space and experience of archives, are particularly acute in personal libraries. In what ways does a private book collection risk encouraging a false image of “secrecy” (Derrida, Archive Fever 101) resemble the paradoxically transparent and concealed archive, or succumb to threats of physical destruction? Many of the challenges specific to the personal library exemplify Derrida’s concerns, and, plentiful as these challenges are, they demand unpacking and provisional solutions. One concern when using personal libraries, especially in Canada, is a lack of scholarship that elucidates the rich complexity of this resource and cautions bibliophiles of its inherent complications. Today, the Canadian discourse on archival practice focuses on correspondence and on what Dean Irvine describes as the “composition and revision”

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(“Editing Archives” 186) of archived manuscripts, which Catherine Hobbs more playfully refers to as “the detritus” (110) of writing processes. Scholars discuss private libraries far less often. There have been, however, some noteworthy beginnings to this conversation. Yvan Lamonde and Andrea Rotundo offer brief comments on the library as an exciting research tool (often with greater emphasis on the public library than on the personal collection). But because both Lamonde and Rotundo decline to discuss prospective methodologies for studying or thorough case studies of personal libraries, these assessments achieve little in comparison to international studies. Perhaps the best-known example of such scholarship, H.J. Jackson’s Marginalia (2001) – as well as her work on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s private library and Romantic readers (see Romantic Readers [2005]) – theorizes the relationship between an author’s reading habits (such as annotations, underlining, and so on) and his or her literary production. Jackson “endeavors to establish the value of readers’ notes – their value to the annotator in the first instance, and potentially also to the work and to the critic or cultural historian later on” (Marginalia 259). Furthermore, she pleads with critics to “bring more marginalia to light” (259) and with booksellers and librarians “to be alert to the potential of annotated books” (260) – and Andrew Stauffer makes similar pleas in “The Nineteenth-Century Archive in the Digital Age” (2012) and “Poetry, Romanticism, and the Practice of Nineteenth-Century Books” (2012). In “Private Libraries of American Authors: Dispersal, Custody, and Description” (1986), Alan Gribben likewise encourages librarians and any who inherit writers’ books to meditate more seriously on the value of the personal library as a research tool that must be preserved. Gribben also explicates the various arguments that early pioneers of library studies (such as Walter Harding, for instance, who catalogued Thoreau’s library) put forth and offers reflections on his own struggles to preserve dispersed and fragmented libraries, such as that of Mark Twain. Taking a more empirical approach, Joseph R. Nicholson draws on data from surveys about the storage and cataloguing of personal libraries in order to describe “what special collections departments are doing now to make such libraries available to their patrons in catalogues and on Web sites” (107). Alternatives to such theoretical studies are catalogues of personal collections: Richard J. Kelly’s John Berryman’s Personal Library: A Catalogue (1999), G.S. Eddy’s “Dr Benjamin Franklin’s Library” (1924), E.M. Sowerby’s Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson in five volumes (1952–9), and Kenneth Walter Cameron’s Ralph Waldo Emerson’s

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Reading (1941; rpt 1962).1 The above list is encouraging, but actual analyses of authors’ libraries are generally rare. Scholars’ strong dependence on an intact collection might explain this critical scarcity; even in the above-mentioned scholarship, researchers often sombrely question the comprehensiveness, condition, and authenticity (due to forgeries) of the collections they assess (see Gribben 302–4). Personal libraries, so often dismembered or missing, embody Derrida’s cautionary reading of the “death drive” (Archive Fever 19) as an impulse that both sustains (i.e., the threat of loss leads one to preserve) and threatens (i.e., individuals are naturally compelled to destroy) archives. The fates of some libraries are more disquieting than others. Pat Lowther’s library is entirely lost. After her death, Roy Lowther (who was later convicted of her murder) purged their house of the writer’s belongings. According to Christine Wiesenthal, “No one in Pat’s family can remember exactly where the hundreds of books that comprised the Lowthers’ private library went” (33). Lowther’s case is an extreme and, in light of its context, especially disturbing example of a personal library made inaccessible. More often, collections end up widely scattered. As Benjamin says, books are intimate objects; it is therefore understandable that beneficiaries tend to disperse books as keepsakes for friends and relatives after an author’s death. When Sinclair Ross died in 1996, his books were boxed and divided among his family and friends. Even before his death, he had already given away many of his books: he discarded much of his library before he moved to Athens in 1968 and continued to discard or disperse them every time he relocated; he moved from Athens to Barcelona to Málaga to Montreal and finally to Vancouver. The distribution or destruction of libraries continually inhibits access to them. Other libraries end up divided among several institutions and booksellers. Some collections are surprisingly comprehensive: Trent University, for instance, owns A.J.M. Smith’s personal library, which includes a massive collection (over 1,200 books) of poetry, fiction, art history, and other materials. Concordia University is home to Mordecai Richler’s library, which has been fully catalogued and put on display in the Richler Reading Rooms. The collection contains not just books, but also ephemera and realia: newspapers, magazines, photographs, audio recordings, passports, a typewriter, and even some of Richler’s unused cigars. Richler’s library is unique because it, like the conventional archive, contains a material record of a cultural figure and historical era that is, unlike most archives, on public display. To find collections

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so intact and accessible is unusual: the University of Toronto houses many of Al Purdy’s books (which are on display in the Laidlaw Library at University College), but his complete collection has been distributed among various universities and booksellers.2 Similarly, some of John Newlove’s collection still floats around Ottawa bookshops. At best, bookstores provide precarious access to these texts: books can be sold at any moment, and some booksellers’ hesitation to permit photography and general loitering makes it difficult to catalogue materials of interest. Most convenient are those personal libraries that end up in universities or, more rarely, online. Tyler Malone, who runs Reading Markson Reading, is one of few researchers to digitize an author’s (specifically, David Markson’s) library and annotations. His approach is ideal for a scholar, because after a library is digitized, its dissemination or loss has little affect on research. The opportunities afforded by the digital humanities to independent scholars and university researchers are lessening the severity of the limits imposed on “open” archives that are, as Derrida notes, often concealed in various ways and by various authorities. Until more researchers adopt Malone’s approach, universities will remain the ideal setting for studies of personal libraries; it is difficult, however, to make use of these collections when institutions leave these materials uncatalogued and disordered. Too little time and money is dedicated to unpacking the collections libraries receive. Without a complete catalogue, some of F.R. Scott’s books have been lost. Furthermore, Scott’s uncatalogued books are in very rough alphabetical order. Subjected to such storage practices, his books sometimes get misplaced: months after I first viewed it, his copy of Joseph Stalin’s The Theory and Practice of Leninism (1925) was impossible to locate. His collection is therefore comprehensive, but neither complete nor totally accessible. Three decades ago, Gribben lamented such treatment of personal collections; the problem evidently still persists. More dismal still is Louis Dudek’s library at McGill University, which remains largely unavailable to researchers and has apparently been affected by water damage to the storage area. These conditions have made it tough to gain access to Dudek’s books, which is unfortunate (though, librarians occasionally allow scholars to examine select materials). There is fascinating material in his collection. Most intriguing is Dudek’s copy of The Cantos, which he read and annotated so thoroughly that he had to rebind it with hockey tape. An entire article on Dudek’s fervent annotations and checkmarks in The Cantos and his surreptitious smuggling of Pound’s passages into Atlantis (1967) is

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waiting to be written. In Dudek’s long poem, his regular ruminations on “making” and “creating” traditions (the words appear throughout Atlantis) echo Pound’s own desire to “gather from the air a live tradition” (Cantos 522). Dudek emphatically marked Pound’s phrase repeatedly with at least two different pencil shades, suggesting he came back to the passage more than once. If one could readily gain access to these resources, an article on such findings would be easier to produce. Certainly Dudek’s texts contain the kind of material that could sustain a thorough re-evaluation of his work. Without easy access to these documents, however, such research cannot happen just yet. John Newlove’s library offers an equally compelling case. Suffering through financial struggles in the 1990s, the poet sold off much of his library. He wrote to Joe Rosenblatt, “I’m selling books by the hundred – you can imagine how that feels to me.”3 Newlove did, however, catalogue many of his books; he even submitted the list, and hundreds of pages of notes about these books, to the University of Manitoba.4 Even without his physical texts, these resources prove useful to researchers. The case of Newlove’s “The Pride” (1965) is instructive.5 Since 1968, critics have continued to emphasize eighteenth-century explorer David Thompson’s impact on Newlove’s poem, but they base this observation solely on Newlove’s direct mention of Thompson in the fifth section of the poem. To think that Newlove’s 1897 edition of Thompson’s journals is listed in his catalogue but absent from his fonds is disheartening. The material text is desirable. Regardless, his catalogues and notebooks provide enough important information: the editions he read, page numbers and phrases that caught his eye, lines he self-admittedly stole from books and inserted into poems without quotation marks, and full records of texts that inspired poems such as “The Pride.” As Newlove openly acknowledges (in his private papers, that is) his source texts for dozens of poems, studies of his personal library could aid a radical reassessment of his poetry. Researchers may not be able to recover specific books Newlove personally owned, but his meticulous recordkeeping allows them to locate elsewhere the relevant editions of the books he read. Whereas the cases of Dudek and Newlove concern rich material hindered by poor or convoluted accessibility, Scott’s library is reasonably accessible, but the bulk of what is in and retrievable from his collection contains a paucity of notes and annotation. Nowhere is the remoteness between meaning in the past and in the present that Derrida articulates in Archive Fever more palpable than on the pages through which

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a reader once flipped and annotated. A text, esoterically marked, is the library owner’s dialogue with an absent author: signs and symbols understood in full only by the owner himself or herself and impressed on pages over which later researchers puzzle. If the specific annotations seem ambiguous, their abundance still says something. Scott’s minimalist approach to annotations can actually be quite revealing. His oldest books, particularly those discussing leftism in the 1920s and 1930s, are exceptional because they contain plentiful notes, scribbles, underlines, and enigmatic numerical markers. It seems that after 1939, if he wrote at all, he used only vertical lines, removed from the text itself, to mark passages of interest. Perhaps Scott gradually felt less comfortable sullying texts with pens and pencils; the behaviour might indicate his deepened respect for the words on and writers of the page, also explaining his later tendency to take notes on slips inserted into texts. Take the analogous case of Newlove, who (according to Susan Newlove) never annotated books because he considered texts sacred. Alternatively, it is equally possible that the period in which Scott annotated books most heavily was one of education; the comparable absence of annotations thereafter would thus denote his move beyond this period of pupillage. Regardless, the likelihood of either interpretation should encourage scholars to think more creatively about what they find in a text: trends manifest in the physical appearance of, not just in the thoughts expressed by, marginalia. As long as researchers are forthcoming about the multiple interpretations of these signs, symbols, dialogues, and other traces, they limit the risk of creating false claims to a singular truth or to a hegemonic translation of these markings – they sensibly curb, but do not repress, what Derrida calls the researcher’s “passion” to peruse “the archive right where it slips away” (Archive Fever 91). That brings me to a final conundrum related to the slipperiness of meaning and origin in the personal library: size matters. Scott’s library is enormous, and his numerous literary, political, and ideological curiosities ask researchers to consider multiple points of entry when assessing the library’s value. Paraphrasing Yves Peyré, Nicholson similarly observes that most libraries are far from “monolithic”: they are “a complex bibliographic galaxy made up of constellations of distinctive small sublibraries, each of which serve a particular purpose in a writer’s life and work” (109; see also, Peyré, “L’écrivain et sa bibliothèque”). In Scott’s specific case, deciphering the meaning of his library without reducing its complexity is a productive struggle. In this regard, I want to consider Scott’s collection as a case from which we can extrapolate

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methods of approaching such a struggle and of reading the personal library generally. In 1989, one year after Marian Scott donated the remainder of her late husband’s library to McGill, Bruce Whiteman suggested that Scott’s volumes of poetry and fiction provide the most profitable entry point into a discussion of the collection.6 Whiteman’s assessment of Scott’s library is an excellent example of the ease with which the presumptions of a researcher can lead him or her to oversimplify the structure and meaning of a personal library. Although Whiteman’s claim that Scott’s library is “made up primarily of literature” (“F.R. Scott Library” 97) is inarguable, his insistence that this portion represents the “heart of the Scott library” is overstated (98). In the first place, what does Whiteman mean by “heart”? Does he determine significance by volume or by research value? With regard to Scott’s intellectual development and reading habits, his copies of poetry and fiction have little to offer, even if such books constitute the majority of his library. Perhaps the most obvious value of these books is that they supplement McGill’s library holdings and, at the same time, shed light on Scott’s relationships with other writers. Much of what Scott owned is out of print or particularly rare; for instance, finding Purdy’s The Enchanted Echo (1944) anywhere in Quebec except in Scott’s library is a thorough test of patience. In addition, the inscriptions in Scott’s books clarify other writers’ perceptions of him. Some are comical, like Peter Dale Scott’s in Rumors of No Law (1981): “For Frank & Marian. The begetters.” Others are more sombre; inside The Collected Poems of Anne Wilkinson (1968), A.J.M. Smith wrote, “In memory of A[nne] W[ilkinson].” Some inscriptions reveal critics’ and authors’ indebtedness to Scott. Michiel Horn inscribed The League for Social Reconstruction (1980), “For Frank Scott, who has given me so much of his time and so many of his books.” Similarly warm gestures come from Leonard Cohen, Ralph Gustafson, Leo Kennedy, Michael Ondaatje, and many others. Whiteman rightly concludes that such inscriptions “testif[y] to Scott’s assistance to other poets” and writers (“F.R. Scott Library” 98). These texts, however, evidence more than just Scott’s assistance. Inscriptions in his books verify his stature among writers of the post1960 era. Nicholson is particularly sensitive to this function of the personal library: inscriptions, he says, help “trace the tangled network of writers’ relationships with other writers and help identify their place in the larger literary culture in which they lived and wrote” (108). Purdy’s wonderful note in North of Summer (1967) is a case in point: “Best to you

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Frank – I hope you won’t be too badly disappointed in this – Best also to Marian, Al Purdy, July 8, 1967.”7 On the surface, Purdy’s inscription obviously conveys gratitude; Scott helped writers like Purdy a great deal with advice and recommendation letters – in fact, he was so concerned about becoming a reputed referee that he consciously wrote fewer recommendations over time.8 More interesting is Purdy’s selfdeprecation. It reveals anxiety, a half-mocking worry that Scott might disapprove of his work. Admittedly, such self-deprecation is typical Purdy. Many poets writing to Scott, however, adopt comparable tones. William Hawkins signs The Gift of Space (1971), “For F.R. Scott, doubt that you will like these as much as I like some of yours.” Newlove, too, felt such apprehension. He said in interview, “[Scott] intimidates me, but I admire him … I just admire him very much … but I don’t dare call him Frank. Once I complained in a letter, ‘Should I still be calling you Dear Mr Scott?’ He wrote back and said, ‘Just call me by my initials’ … which I do now. But F.R.S. means Fellow of the Royal Society [of Canada], so it’s still intimidating” (Bartley and Newlove, “Interview” 138). Newlove, while working at McClelland and Stewart in the early 1970s, also frequently sent Scott gratis books, “with the compliments of John Newlove” inscribed on the slips inside (see, for instance, Scott’s copy of No Other Country by Al Purdy); similar inserts from various editors in numerous books suggest that publishers and young writers alike vied for Scott’s attention and approval. Unsurprisingly, these observations testify to Sandra Djwa’s insistence on Scott’s importance to younger writers. His influence might be observed in their poetry, as Djwa demonstrates with Atwood (“Where of Here” 26–8), but inscriptions and dedications in his library corroborate such claims.9 Whiteman and other scholars may find these notes charming or, to a degree, revelatory, but the books themselves say little about Scott’s own interests and reading habits. Whiteman’s claim that “the library attests to a poet who bought and read with some assiduity the poetry of his own time and place” (“F.R. Scott Library” 98) is, frankly, unfounded. Scott owned the poetry of his “own time and place,” but it is impossible to know how much of it he read. Whiteman also overestimates how much Scott “bought”: scores of his fiction and poetry were, as noted earlier, gifts. There is no proof that he looked at these texts: they are void of annotations. Most appear completely untouched. Even some of his purchased books still have original receipts inside (from famous bookstores such as The Double Hook in Montreal). Scott’s decision to purchase these books at least signals his interest in their content, but

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their immaculate condition might mean he never opened them. Of course he read “the poetry of his own time and place,” but which and how many of the pristine books he read “with some assiduity,” based on material evidence, is unknowable: the number may be fewer than Whiteman thinks, it may be more. Either way, scholars today are more likely interested in influence rather than reading habits. In that case, Scott’s interview with Michael Heenan in Canadian Poetry (1986) or Sandra Djwa’s Politics of the Imagination: A Life of F.R. Scott (1987) would be better resources than the library itself. In short, it may be fascinating to peruse Scott’s literary holdings, to touch a first-edition Eliot – especially one in which Scott kept a picture of the author – or a first edition of A.M. Klein’s The Hitleriad (1944) – in which “Abe Klein” alliteratively regards Scott as a “colleague, confrere, comrade” – but these texts tell researchers virtually nothing about influence, reading processes, or Scott’s Benjaminian genii. What is interesting is often peripheral (inscriptions, receipts, or even just the physical presence of the text) to the primary investigation that Whiteman undertakes. If researchers want to find Scott on the page, to undertake the passionate act of translation and exploration that Derrida says we are compelled to pursue in the archive, then Scott’s books on politics and history are helpful paths to follow. Whereas Scott’s collection of creative literature gives voice to his contemporaries, his own voice manifests more noticeably in these texts. For instance, Scott’s notes on a newspaper clipping folded inside of J.L. Granatstein and Peter Stevens’s Forum: Canadian Life and Letters 1920–70 suggest the book infuriated him: “Mike Gnarowski’s student writing a thesis on the Can. Forum told me (June 6) she had met two graduate students at Queen’s who had been hired by Stevens & Granatstein to select material from the Forum files. They did no original research at all. FRS 5-6-73.” Scott’s copy of Kennedy’s The McGill Movement: A.J.M. Smith, F.R. Scott and Leo Kennedy (1969) also suggests his distaste for Stevens’s work. Lamenting A.M. Klein’s absence from the book, Scott scribbled on the first page, “A four-legged animal. Where’s the Klein leg?” In these books, readers see glimpses of Scott on the material page. Scott’s leftist texts are even more revealing. Relatively speaking, these books contain abundant annotations and notes. Curiously, Whiteman never once acknowledges the leftist materials in this library. He declines even to use the words socialism, Marxism, or communism. As his article was published during the Cold War’s denouement, perhaps Whiteman’s evasiveness is rooted in the lingering apprehensions of

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his era. His decision is nonetheless regrettable, because the leftist texts point to some of Scott’s various political fascinations. As I noted earlier, most of these books were published in the 1920s and 1930s, and for that reason, they might also augment critics’ understanding of Scott’s own writing during those decades. Although it is impossible to know when Scott read books (except in the rare instances where he signed and dated his annotations), researchers can make some educated guesses. In this regard, Scott’s critics and their meticulous scholarship prove helpful. Many confirm changes in his thinking and reading around 1932. Michiel Horn’s “F.R. Scott, The Great Depression, and the League for Social Reconstruction” (1983), for example, charts Scott’s strengthened interest in politics during the thirties with reference to his role in drafting the Regina Manifesto (1933). More recently, Robert May’s “F.R. Scott and Social Justice in the 1930s” (2003) expertly traces Scott’s development of socialist ideologies during the 1930s. Given that “events of the 1930s enabled Scott to expand and develop his ideas about the constitution and civil rights,” it is likely that the “hundreds of pages of books, pamphlets, articles, and letters he wrote during the 1930s” (May 48) have some root in his reading. The 1930s indeed proved pivotal to Scott’s intellectual development: it was, as Bart Vautour notes, the period in which he “laid the foundations for what would become an increasingly articulated and integrated social and poetic programme with national consequence” (77). Scott’s numerous essays on the left, many of which appeared in the Canadian Forum (Scott’s “primary venue of publication” [Vautour 77]) and Queen’s Quarterly, herald departures from his earlier essays on literary modernism – the typical examples are “New Poems for Old: The Decline of Poesy” and “New Poems for Old: The Revival of Poetry,” both of which appeared in the Canadian Forum in 1931. His poetry underwent parallel changes. Until this period, Scott published mostly imagistic poems in the Canadian Forum, after A.J.M. Smith “directed” him to such styles around the mid-1920s (Djwa, “F.R. Scott” 176). As early as 1931, though, he describes imagism as a “spent” movement (“New Poems for Old: The Revival” 339). By 1932, he was producing more verbose political poems, such as “Social Notes 1” (1932) and “Social Notes 2” (1935). With regard to diction, the socialist poems resemble some of Scott’s polemical leftist essays in the Forum, such as “Communists, Senators, and All That” (1932). These political poems are noticeably more aphoristic, and though they retain the short and direct lines of an imagist’s poem, they lack the imagist’s precision of content: they are prolix manifestos, much

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more like Marx’s occasionally terse writing than Pound’s “direct treatment of the thing.” One could therefore assume Scott’s leftist reading to be concomitant with shifts in his political and poetic thought, as well as with attitudes engendered by his 1934 tour of the USSR. The case of V.M. Molotov’s Tasks of the Second Five-Year Plan (1934) further evidences the corroborative potential of Scott’s library. Scott seems to have obtained this text soon after its publication because echoes of it appear in his own political writing. Molotov outlines the benefits of collectivization: “At the present time … we are entitled to say that the cause of collectivization in our country has completely triumphed, that the remnants of kulaks are doomed to early and complete extinction, and that the remaining individual peasant farms are faced with one alternative, namely, gradually to adopt collectivization” (Molotov 11-12). Note the similarities to Scott’s essay, “Impressions of a Tour in the U.S.S.R.” (1935): “I come away believing that the objectives of the [Soviet] revolution will eventually be achieved. The planned economic system is working. Both friends and enemies of the regime admitted that conditions are steadily improving. The basic necessities of life are being provided in ever increasing numbers … The elimination of the Kulak was a form of deliberately planned civil war, and it brought the country to actual starvation … It is impossible to believe that the method employed to collectivise the farms was the quickest, safest, or only way to introduce agricultural reform” (“Impressions” 382-4). Both proclaim, “Success is in the air” (“Impressions” 384), and Scott shares Molotov’s generally optimistic tone. But the comparable tone is only a surface similarity; Scott’s decision to underline Molotov’s passage hardly means he agreed with everything that was written. Molotov, for instance, celebrates the “extinction” of the kulaks, but Scott is far more critical and sombre. This contrast points to another issue for researchers to consider: although some annotations are explicit, an underline does not necessarily suggest endorsement. His optimism, however, remains noteworthy, given that it typifies Scott’s articles on socialism during 1934 and 1935. In “The Efficiency of Socialism” (1935), for example, he insisted, “Socialism instead of being a likely cause of economic inefficiency and political corruption, holds the promise of being the cure for these evils” (225). Such optimism defines this era of Scott’s thought, a period during which he “became convinced [during the 1930s] that only an intelligently implemented programme of public ownership could restore Canada’s economic equilibrium” (May 44). Critics such as Robert May attribute Scott’s attitude to political climates of the

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1930s, but the personal library provides a complementary argument: that Scott’s thought is equally responsive to concepts and ideas that he derived from texts such as Molotov’s report. Scott’s library, however, is more than just a corroborative tool; his holdings also augment scholars’ knowledge of his political curiosities. Certainly the breadth of Scott’s thought reaches further than some critics acknowledge. Kenneth McNaught, for instance, frames Scott as a tame socialist, one who objected to “the efficacy of violence” and who championed “legislative influence” (93). He posits that Scott appeared uninterested in the “sharp polarization of society and radicalization of the working class, followed by an indefinite dictatorship” (93) that defined Marxist models of revolution. Peggy Kelly, too, notes that “Scott was politically motivated to avoid any alliance with [Dorothy] Livesay … As a professional with a young family, Scott may have felt that he could not risk association with a radical like Livesay, especially in print” (60). Kelly’s qualification, “in print,” is an important one, because, McNaught’s argument notwithstanding, Scott still read a surprising amount of radical Communist propaganda. In fact, the most worn and closely read texts in Scott’s library relate to Lenin, Stalin, and dialectical materialism. He owned Lenin’s Collected Works (1927), according to his annotations, as of 14 November 1935. The summative notes that he appended to certain sections suggest Scott was extremely interested in Lenin’s career; indeed, Joseph Stalin’s The Theory and Practice of Leninism (1925), Lenin’s The State and Revolution (1917), and Lenin’s Religion (n.d.) are among the most heavily annotated texts in the library. Generally, the most significant markings in such texts gesture to dialectical materialism. The concept appears to have fascinated Scott. Unsurprisingly, V.V. Adoratsky’s Dialectical Materialism: The Theoretical Foundations of Marxism-Leninism (1934) reveals a comparable abundance of notations: Scott marks passages that focus on socialism’s attempt to “seek the dialectic foundations of the contradictions” in the world and the “active” participation in “the mass struggle of the proletariat” (34). L. Rudas’s Dialectical Materialism & Communism (1933) likewise has minor underlining throughout. Buharin and Preobrazhensky’s The ABC of Communism (1922; the book details Communists’ need to destroy the state) also contains plentiful annotations, which are unfortunately vague: in The ABC of Communism, when Scott underlines passages about “the complete and definitive victory of the proletariat,” which necessarily entails dictatorship (Buharin and Preobrazhensky 75), is he agreeing with, opposing,

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or disinterestedly underlining a key argument? Similarly, why would Scott underline “All power to the soviets!” (171) in the same text? In these instances, the significance of underlines remains insurmountably enigmatic. Some sections are more revealing because of their relation to Scott’s own political thought: “The imperialist bourgeoisie which has seized its colonial possessions and has annexed them by force has good reason to fear the secession of the colonies … The Communist Party, therefore, wishing to put an end for ever to all forms of national oppression and national inequality, voices the demand for the national right of self-determination” (207). Strong, if ideologically curbed, echoes of this passage, which Scott underlined once and vertically lined twice, appear in the poet’s essay, “Goodbye Dominion Status” (1937). His eagerness to disburden Canada of colonial influence is manifest: “The national sovereignty of Canada in the international field has been destroyed … So long as we were little Colonials, all was well” (6–7). While such sentiments may not stem directly from The ABC of Communism, the authors’ clear dedication to socialist “self-determination” appears quite potent in Scott’s own writing throughout the 1930s and beyond. In the above instances, the poet’s library permits researchers to imbricate radical Communist thought and Scott’s less radical socialism. The above case study suggests that Scott’s collection has the potential to validate and augment scholars’ understandings of notable shifts in his careers, writing, and personal thought during the 1930s. Understandably, H.J. Jackson values any “unmistakable indicat[ion]” of interest and attentive reading (Marginalia 115); the frequent marks in Scott’s leftist texts definitively prove that he read these texts “with some assiduity” (to use Whiteman’s phrase) and that the extent of his political thought goes beyond the pacifist and utopian ideals McNaught outlines. Certainly, these findings are more significant to discussions of Scott’s intellectual development than anything Whiteman extracts from the poetry and fiction. This case study shows that the personal library can help researchers add depth to longstanding assumptions about Scott’s reading habits and political leanings. In a broader discussion, Scott’s case also proves that researchers need adaptable methodologies and expectations when they investigate the personal library. The value of Peyré’s concept of “sublibraries” cannot be overstated: researchers must resist the temptation to value or perceive personal collections monolithically. To do otherwise obscures the relevance of certain texts to certain eras of an author’s life and work: inscriptions say a great deal about Scott’s iconicity during the 1960s

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and 1970s, but his leftist texts shed light on his intellectual growth during the 1930s. Scholars should also be wary of Whiteman’s misleading assumption: that a poet’s most revealing literature is their collection of poetry and fiction. Although Scott’s inscribed texts demonstrate research potential, Whiteman’s a priori methodology and assumptions about Scott show that an overzealous scholar might actually mask the “heart” of a creative writer’s library. Dudek’s library might validate Whiteman’s supposition (the roots of Dudek’s writing and thought would be best elucidated via studies of the modernist literature he owned and annotated), but Newlove’s history collection points readers, more than his collection of poetry and fiction does, to an abundance of source material for phrases, ideas, and images in his writing. The more rigid our procedures and expectations, the more likely we unwittingly sabotage the search for meaning in the archive and thus obscure the real potential of the personal library to enrich our grasp of a writer’s intellectual development. That being said, the personal library is, like any other archive, a passionate search for a historical truth that can be apprehended only in part. However fascinating a private book collection, however versatile, unusual, and useful its holdings, it still epitomizes many of Derrida’s principal concerns in Archive Fever: the researcher, as he or she does in the archive, encounters problems of translation (Scott’s ambiguous marginalia), the shaping of the archive by authorities, institutions, circumstances, or spaces (the uncatalogued, misplaced, or widely disseminated books in the libraries of Dudek, Scott, Newlove, and others), the risk of endorsing or encountering distorted interpretations of history (Whiteman’s reticence to mention Scott’s sizeable collection of leftist texts), and the destruction of texts in institutions (Dudek’s waterdamaged books) or outside of institutions (the loss of Lowther’s books under the tragic circumstances of her death). No less than the archive, the personal library is susceptible to conditions that challenge researchers. But these challenges are merely cautions, not deterrents. Indeed, these challenges suggest that personal libraries are dynamic spaces that require equally dynamic methodologies for cautious yet productive scholarship and that better studies and theorizing of this resource begin with better preservation of it. Each individual book is irreplaceable. Once items are lost, scattered, withheld, or destroyed, the personal library becomes less useful in specific cases and less perceptibly valuable generally; the idea of historical meaning, already so far removed from the researcher, becomes increasingly unintelligible as

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resources fall into disrepair or obscurity. We are, as Derrida says, “in need of archives” (Archive Fever 91); as scholars continue to develop methods of studying the personal library, it will be imperative to address that need by undertaking digital recovery or other preservation projects to secure open access to intact, or at least comprehensive, collections. That vital recovery work will ensure that this important resource has a place in the future of the humanities. NOTES 1 Nicholson’s article provides a long list of additional studies of personal libraries, most of which are American (106–10). 2 For those interested in Purdy’s library, Sam Solecki has privately catalogued a great deal of it, but his findings are so far unpublished. 3 Letter to Joe Rosenblatt, 22 September 1998, box 20, folder 2, MSS 70, A98–68 John Newlove Fonds, Elizabeth Dafoe Library. 4 Additionally, Robert McTavish privately catalogued the majority of Newlove’s literature about Aboriginal history and culture. 5 Newlove’s poem was drafted in 1964, published in the Tamarack Review (1965), and subsequently reprinted in Black Night Window (1968). 6 While discussing Scott’s library, Whiteman laments the absence of little magazines. Queen’s University purchased Scott’s little magazines in 1969. The collection is stored at the W.D. Jordan Library. 7 I should note that some of F.R. Scott’s books are still for sale at The Word Bookstore in Montreal. Purdy’s North of Summer was one such book, which I was able to purchase. 8 Evidence of Scott’s concern surfaces in letters he wrote to John Newlove. These letters are in Newlove’s archives at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, Toronto. 9 Specifically, Djwa notes parallels between Atwood’s “Migration: C.P.R.” and Scott’s “Laurentian Shield” (26). She also notes that the “informing myth and poetic metaphors [in ‘A Descent Through the Carpet’] are clearly drawn from F.R. Scott’s ‘Lakeshore’” (27–8).

6  BaronessElsa: An Autobiographical Manifesto tanya e. clement

Much like avant-garde modernists of the early twentieth century who experimented with language and representation in the age of print,1 twenty-first-century editors are also attempting the unprecedented: we design new textual conditions with computational representations and environments that ultimately affect how we understand the technologies of language. Editing difficulties represent the norm for editors who are attempting to create editions of cosmopolitan, modernist authors who were often self-consciously gendered, multicultural, and multilingual collaborators. To be sure, modernist archives of literary giants such as Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf are slowly moving into the public domain, making it necessary for editors to re-evaluate the extent to which their editing theories and practices engage the digital technologies that best illuminate the textual conditions these archives embody. Happily, in light of this rapidly changing textual and technological environment for editing, we can reconceive modernist textual conditions: we can consider these difficulties modernist authors represent not as editorial problems but as sites of possibility for building new theoretical perspectives. In particular, this piece will discuss the theoretical implications of creating BaronessElsa, a collaborative, digital scholarly edition focused on the Dadaist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven’s autobiographical papers. I am editing BaronessElsa (both content and structure) as an autobiographical manifesto by encouraging versioning across multilingual, cross-repository, and electronic collaborations. In this chapter I lay out the general editorial difficulties or problems that arise as a result of this vision for editing these papers. I show that the digital technologies I employ reflect feminist and literary modernist theories concerning the

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autobiographical manifesto as well as what I am calling “social text network theory.” Ultimately, this chapter shows that digital technologies such as metadata standards, interactive interfaces, open-source repositories, relational databases, and social computing fundamentally affect how I interpret and edit the writings of this modernist poet. The Modernist Textual Condition: A History of Editing the Baroness’s Autobiographical Writings The Baroness wrote the major part of her autobiographical papers in the last years of her life, probably in Germany between 1923 and 1925.2 These writings focus mainly on the years before her move to New York in the nineteen-teens and afford a fascinating perspective on a female artist who not only crosses the Atlantic (multiple times) but also crosses perceived boundaries of gender, ethnicity, class, and artistic genre. She was born Else Hildegard Ploetz on 12 July 1874, in Swinemunde on the Baltic Sea and ran away to Berlin and its bohemian theatre circles in 1892. After following her lover Felix Paul Greve to Kentucky, Else Ploetz moved to New York City in 1913 and met and married Leo von FreytagLoringhoven, a poor baron. The baron returned to war-torn Germany and subsequently committed suicide, and Freytag-­Loringhoven became known in the Greenwich Village artist movement as “the Baroness.” The Baroness wrote in German, in English, and in pictograms;3 she was a poet, a performer, a painter, a sculptor, and a critic. Described by the Little Review editor Margaret Anderson as “perhaps the only figure of our generation who deserves the epithet extraordinary,” the Baroness published, between 1918 and 1929, approximately forty of her poems in little magazines such as Broom, Liberator, the Little Review, transatlantic review, transition, and the single issue of New York Dada (Anderson 177). Finally, after her declining success in New York and her return to post-war Germany in the early 1920s, the down-and-out Baroness began sending her autobiographical writings in letters to her good friend Djuna Barnes. The main difficulty in editing the Baroness’s autobiographical papers is representing the multiplicity of voices engendered in the text’s ­history.4 For example, there is the voice of Djuna Barnes. In the last years of her life, the Baroness had become accustomed to sending her poetry and biographical sketches in letters to Barnes so that Barnes would write an introduction to an edition of her poetry. Indeed, the extant holograph of the autobiographical papers and all of the

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6.1.  Undated letter from Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven to Djuna Barnes

associated manuscript materials were discovered in Barnes’s papers as they were being processed at the University of Maryland Special Collections in the 1970s. Many of the manuscript pages include notes to Barnes both in the text itself and in the marginalia. As well, some of the material is seemingly written explicitly for Barnes. That is, in order to ensure that Barnes would get the edition published, the Baroness had given her friend full reign over her words: “i send you all that happens to my hand – and you may select,” she writes in a letter to Barnes. “you may use every word of any letter whatsoever!” (UMD 2.233).5 While Barnes’s hand appears on some of the pages, her major contribution in the manuscript pages is her absent presence as audience. As editor, Barnes took the Baroness’s permissions to “select” to heart: she changed the Baroness’s writings specifically to garner sympathy from a possible reading audience. For example, when the Baroness died in 1927 after living alone in Paris, Djuna Barnes published “Selections from the Letters of Elsa Baroness Von Freytag-Loringhoven” in the ­little magazine transition. Barnes states in her introduction to “Selections” that her transcriptions are verbatim and that they represent the Baroness’s “own” words, but the differences between the letters the Baroness wrote and the words Barnes “selected” are many. In Barnes’s version of a key passage she reorganizes erratic clauses and elides pointed references in order to present a more sympathetic portrait of the Baroness. In transition, the letter reads and looks as follows: “I fight brave as I am and always was, but brave ones fall in war. I am not truly deranged even, but scattered – muted by fear, picking bits of heart flesh with its relentless beak, day and night, minute by minute, I must succumb soon. There are those who must be soiled to create, I must be clean” (FreytagLoringhoven, “Selections” 27–8). For Barnes’s version, the Baroness’s original letter has been pared down, rewritten, and smoothed. The original reads and looks like this:

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6.2.  Undated Letter from Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven to Djuna Barnes i am not truly deranged even – but scattered – muted by fear! picking bits of heart flesh with its relentless beak day and night – minute by minute – unless by necessity of preservation in self defense i try artificially to render myself aloof to it – i­ nsensible. but – i am not – never a beat. it is artifice – i must succumb soon. i fight brave – as i am – always was – but brave ones fall dead in war! and world is at war. mental nausea + permanent – for proud pure exultant me – how in sense can i last? you see that. i am not “w.c. williams” he thrives on it. it is his output – his soil must be soiled to create! i must be clean – (UMD 2.265)

In Barnes’s lower-case version of the passage, the agent or cause of the Baroness’s derangement – her poverty and her bitterness – is elided. “and world is at war,” the Baroness writes in her version. What she means is more figurative than literal, the figurative aspect of which is amplified by her other vehement responses in the letter to “w.c. williams,” an intentionally bawdy reference to William Carlos Williams.

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In other writings, the Baroness had argued that Williams was an inauthentic, bourgeois professional (a “wobbly-legged business satchel-­ carrying little louse”) who “attacks art” because “W.C. does not care about words” (Freytag-Loringhoven, “Thee” 110, 109). In supporting Williams, the Baroness implies in her letter, the world is at war with her, to whom “truth” and “authenticity” means “art.” This confrontational tone was not one that Barnes considered appropriate for garnering empathy or arousing interest in the Baroness’s poetry – especially not from the transition audience who had shown considerable favour towards Williams. A further testament to Barnes’s quest for sympathy is the choice to include both an obituary and – many pages later – the image of the Baroness’s death mask to accompany the letters in transition. By selecting these objects, Barnes underscores why she selected her words – in order to arouse pathos. Likewise, her editorial changes seem to point less to a desire to replicate the Baroness’s “own words” and more to the goal of garnering some interest and empathy in a potential audience for an edition of the Baroness’s poetry. Other voices that contribute to how we read the Baroness’s autobiographical papers signal more recent editorial projects. Baroness Elsa (1992), edited by Paul I. Hjartarson and Douglas O. Spettigue, includes the Baroness’s autobiographical papers as well as parts of letters the Baroness wrote to Barnes. The editors contend that the letters provide more information since, especially in terms of her interactions with Greve (a.k.a. Frederick Philip Grove), what the autobiography “omits is frustrating; what it provides is tantalizingly brief” (“Introduction” 20). After declaring that “few of Grove’s alleged facts … have proved accurate,” the editors contrast this point with the notion that the Baroness’s reckoning has “conviction” and “integrity”: “Everything Elsa writes bears on it the stamp of conviction,” they write. The editors continue, “She presents herself as honest to the point of self-destruction; she cannot dissemble to save her life. She has an integrity that may have been what both attracted people like Djuna Barnes to her and ultimately repelled most of them. She could not and would not flatter” (14). The muse has an important role in feminist and poetic study. ­Arguably, the interest that many took in the Baroness stemmed from a perspective similar to the one in which Hjartarson and Spettigue positioned themselves: her role as a “muse” of authenticity and truth seems more significant than her role as artist. Rachel Duplessis maintains that the life of the “muse” is an essential point of study for feminist critical work in literature since muse figures “draw on specific gender relations that

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are sustained, remixed, and activated in historical time by individuals seeking to establish their creative agency” (124). “Knowing” the real woman through accessing her autobiographical writings, Duplessis suggests, readers are forced to do the work of reading how the muse is being used (or misused) by her readers to construct “maleness.” By creating access to her unedited autobiographical papers, I am arguing that we create access to many alternative narratives. For example, even the format and punctuation that Barnes, Hjartarson, and Spettigue omit is essential to the story that the manuscript papers tell. Interested in conveying “truth,” Hjartarson and Spettigue claim that they have “resisted the temptation to make extensive alterations to the text as the Baroness wrote it,” but these editors admit, “nevertheless, some changes were necessary” including using lower case even though the Baroness always wrote in upper case, silently correcting the spelling, and reducing the number of dashes “sometimes replacing them with other punctuation or simply omitting a few where the sense did not require them” (“Introduction” 37). These omissions of punctuation change how we read the papers. The Baroness believed that punctuation (what she calls “interpunction”) should be as varied and expressive as words. This sentiment is reflected in a note to Barnes in which she invents the “scorn mark” and the “joy mark”: “why does no/scorn-mark mark of contempt – exist? i often missed it. see? that is one of thing’s [sic] i will invent … maybe? I will even be able … to invent happiness – joy mark! not only exclamation mark. djuna – as i just see now – our interpunction – system is puny! one should be able to express almost as much in interpunction as words … in this new strange thing – to express absolute in it! as i did in sounds – like music! yes! wordnotes!” In this brief example, the Baroness acknowledges that her poetic work belongs to a system or network of textual relationships that reflect how we read but also how we write poetry.6 Further, in contrast to these editors’ perspective, the Baroness saw her decreasing ability to write poetry as an important signifier. In this sense, it is just as important to keep the “errors in diction” in the Baroness’s autobiographical writings as it is for the editors to keep what they have determined are “poetic” mishaps. Hjartarson and Spettigue “corrected an apparent error in diction which is explicable as a mistranslated Germanism” but have kept “unusual idioms and her occasional poetic flights” (“Introduction” 38). She writes on the back of a sheet of her autobiography she has sent to Barnes from Germany that she

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6.3.  Undated Letter from Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven to Djuna Barnes

deeply regrets these changes: “djuna – i know especially in the first part – it is written like half mad in syntax – later it becomes a little better. there are 3 reasons for it: 1: i am halfmad – as is only sensible. 2: i cannot tell events but be carried by emotion into a fancy world of spiritual reality – as you know. 3: i begin to be clumsy with english expressions not coming readily any more – doing damage to my sentences – so i must leave all work to you – picking out and presenting” (UMD 1.319). The Baroness calls her writing “half mad in syntax” and cites the “damage” this state does to her expressions and her sentences. As such, she indicates the important story these errors can tell about her cross-cultural, ­multilingual ­experience. By cleaning these errors, the editors erase that aspect of her “spiritual reality.” Within the reception history of the Baroness’s autobiographical papers, we also discover the impact of the scholarly voice. Much of the scholarly attention paid to the Baroness’s autobiographical papers has focused on their relationship to the writings of the well-known Canadian author and translator Frederick Philip Grove, whom the Baroness had known in Germany as Felix Paul Greve. In order to escape debt in Europe, Greve faked a suicide, moved to Kentucky and then to Canada, where he changed his name. As the result of the scandal surrounding

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6.4.  A Note on the Back of a Page of the Autobiography Elsa von FreytagLoringhoven Sent to Djuna Barnes, Undated

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Grove’s revealed hidden identity and the Baroness’s association with Grove’s secret background as Greve, scholars have read the Baroness’s story though Grove’s. For example, a handful of critical studies have been written about the extent to which he drew from the Baroness’s life to write his own German and Canadian life writings, which include two novels, both published under the name Greve: Fanny Essler (1906) and Maurermeister Ihles Haus (1909). The Baroness argues that these novels are based on her life: “it was my life and persons out of my life –,” she writes (BaronessElsa). Gaby Divay and Irene Gammel have argued that Grove also modelled his speaking voice on the Baroness’s in the 1904–5 poems he composed in Germany under the pseudonym “Fanny Essler” (Divay 165; Gammel, “Breaking” 162). Others such as Hjartarson seek to disambiguate the relationship between the Baroness’s and Grove’s writings by adamantly shifting attention away from Grove: “I do not care,” Hjartarson writes, “to search the Baroness’s text for signs of Frederick Philip Grove”; instead, Hjartarson “focus[es] away from autobiography conceived as product, as content, to autobiography understood as process, as an act of narration in which the ‘I’ defines him/herself in relation to the ‘other’” (“Self” 128). Even so, given either perspective, it is important to realize that these critics are reading the Baroness’s writings in terms of Grove’s. Beyond the editorial and scholarly voices, many contributing artists’ voices also contribute to the possibility of narratives that the Baroness’s autobiography tells. Versions of the same central and peripheral stories are told by the many artists, writers, and editors who knew and were influenced by the ­Baroness. In her cultural biography Baroness Elsa, Gammel includes a myriad number of stories of contemporary ­artists and writers who have crafted fantastic anecdotes about the ­Baroness.7 Djuna Barnes, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Hart Crane, and many others who knew the Baroness and read her work assert that an ­appreciation of the Baroness’s lived life was c­ entral to any ­appreciation of her poetry. In particular, it was the co-dependence of “life” and “art” in the Baroness’s oeuvre that ultimately influenced other ­writers, even as it frightened and repulsed them. As Williams describes the Baroness’s influence, “You wonder why I admired Elsa von Loringhoven [sic], that river with a dead horse in it, because of her purity. What kind of purity? Because she was on it, on reality. She is not least Eliot in a cocoon of Latin all day long – shitty, shitty, shitty. Ezra is more than that, slippery as he is and literary shieber that he is” (qtd in Driscoll 55).

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For Williams, the idea of the Baroness’s “pureness” signified less the chastity of her poetic form than the chastity of her poetic ideal. She influenced Williams by being in his estimate an “authentic” poet, one who was neither interested in impressing her audience with difficulty for difficulty’s sake (like Eliot using Latin) or for catering to the current, popular trends just to be published (as a “literary shieber”). The multiple accounts by her contemporaries about the relationship between her extraordinary persona and her creative works (poetry, sculpture, street performances) attest to the extent to which the Baroness’s art and life were in dialogue. This dialogue is clearly evidenced in the kinds of responses she elicited from the poetry she published in little magazines.8 For instance, under the title “The Poems of Abel Sanders,” Pound wrote a poem that parodies the “battle” that was ensuing between the Baroness and Williams in the pages of the Little Review. The battle ensued with the Baroness’s scathing two-part review of Williams’s “Kora in Hell” called “Thee I Call ‘Hamlet of Wedding-Ring’” (published in the January– February and Autumn 1921 issues). The review is a piece called by one scholar “arguably the most outrageous item the Little Review published in all its years of existence” (Kuenzli 454) and by Margaret Anderson as “one of the most intelligent pieces of criticism that has ever come to [the Little Review]” (59). The respect that the community expressed for the Baroness’s piece is reflected in Pound’s poems, which appear just at the end of Part 2 of the Baroness’s critical review. His poems, written under the pseudonym Abel Sanders and dedicated “To Bill Williams and Else von Johann Wolfgang Loringhoven y Fulano,” parody the Baroness’s Dada techniques such as using nonsense words to play with sound (“Elseharf Suntag, Billsharf Freitag”) or stringing words together (“Chinesemandarinorlaundryman”) (Pound, “Poems” 111). While Pound parodies the Baroness primarily for her style (“Else ditto on the verb”), he likewise roasts Williams for his subject position as bourgeois doctor in “Kora” (“Bill dago resisting U.S.Ago /… youwillsee he is not BookerTWashington”) (111). In light of his almost tender appointment in Canto XCV of the Baroness as a “gal” who suffered at the “immense cowardice of advertised literati” and who “sd/several true things,” however, and considering the role performance, parody, and laughter play in Dada art, it seems in the context of the Abel Sanders poems that Pound is creating a kind of tribute to the work that the Baroness accomplished with her two-part review and the conversations it elicited.

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Finally, more recent twenty-first-century voices contribute to the voices that affect how we read the Baroness’s autobiographical papers. For instance, at the time of this writing, the Baroness has more than 600 “friends” that comprise a live and interactive community and audience in MySpace. In the Baroness’s network, fakesters (or online enthusiasts who assume “real-world” identities) include people with whom she was friends, such as Djuna Barnes and Man Ray, but also contemporaries she very likely did not know at all, such as Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dalí, and Charles Darwin, among others. Other friends of the Baroness include profiles that represent real-life identities (participants’ own names) or online identities (names created for online use). These profiles – whether representing real or imagined identities – are enacted within the bounded network of the MySpace system and represent the textual embodiment of a live performance of identity – “an extension of the corporeal, as well as the physical refiguration or perhaps an incarnation of the textual” (Sunden 109). This is to say that this MySpace environment is not meant to represent or reproduce offline identities or social networks – the Baroness never knew Dalí or Darwin – instead, this environment is performative, constructed to perform, and therefore to form and to embody social networks through textual practices. Indeed, the term fakester was proposed by a group of users in the early social-network site Friendster who sought to use these assumed identities within the profile system to signal “not the individuals behind the profile but communities, cultural icons, or collective interests” that these individuals represented (boyd). Accordingly, the Baroness’s MySpace page enacts the social dimension on which t­ extual networks depend – a network that is arguably similar to the social dimension of the Dada culture, since online communities like MySpace have the capacity to engage the live, collaborative audience that the Baroness enjoyed in her lifetime. Further, these voices become entangled with how we read the Baroness’s multivalent autobiographical identity through text (much like the early-twentieth-century enthusiasts writing in the Little Review) but also through music and video. Like the Baroness’s self-representation, the voices represented in the history of the Baroness’s autobiographical writings are multiple and multivalent. The greatest difficulty that arises in editing her voices and the voices that represent her editors, her peers, the scholars who read her work, and the audiences that respond to her, however, is that current literary and editorial theory fails to consider how these voices are part of how we make meaning with literary texts. For example, Marjorie

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Perloff writes, “If greatness is measured by sheer outrageousness, then Elsa Plötz [the Baroness] was undoubtedly great: her escapades on the New York streets are now legendary. But if we focus on the work rather than the life, I find the Baroness’s productions, even her so called protoperformance art, both derivative and negligible” (211). In contrast to Perloff’s reading in which “the work” is separated from “the life,” we must learn to read the Baroness’s “escapades” as a deeply engaged part of the meaning-making network of people and texts that includes her poetry and her autobiographical writings. From the perspective of social text network theory, BaronessElsa is a project that seeks to position the Baroness’s autobiographical papers within this multivalent, multivoiced, meaning-making network. BaronessElsa: An Autobiographical Manifesto The editorial difficulties that emerge within the context of modernist literary archives inspire rethinking and potential collaborations that in turn create technological and scholarly breakthroughs. Historically, the failure to adequately provide a space for the coexistence of the ­Baroness’s life and her art in theoretical conversations has led to l­ imited representations of her autobiographical writings. By juxtaposing a ­variety of versions of her art as well as historical and current responses to her work alongside the Baroness’s writings in a digital edition, I seek to allow readers and editors to reconsider these assumptions. In order to avoid superimposing another super-narrative, however, it is equally important to clarify the theoretical underpinnings of this proposed edition and to consider how the digital context forwards these theories. In particular, I use versioning and social-computing technologies in BaronessElsa9 to respond to editorial “problems” by creating a space in which the modernist textual difficulties surrounding versioning, which are foregrounded in the Baroness’s autobiographical writings, are foregrounded instead of erased. This theory for editing is based on the existence of social text networks. Social-text network theory insists that reading both textual and social networks of meaning in dialogue is crucial for reading the modernist textual condition. In accordance with more traditional editing practices (posed by geneticists such as Jean Bellemin-Noël and the “fluid text” scholar John Bryant), social-text network theory relies on the idea that textual variants present a narrative about the creative process. As such, textual networks can be understood to represent layers of relationships

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that exist across text versions (witnesses) over time. At the same time, social-text network theory incorporates salient features identified in social-text theory. That is, within social-text theory, I am concerned with the impact of multiple authors, editors, publishers, and readers in the editing of a text. With a social network theory of editing, I seek to represent the textual layers of versions within the Baroness’s autobiographical papers as they correspond to versions of her life story as told by others – in ­textual and non-textual formats. To this end, I am calling these writings “I-witnesses.” Reading ­"witnesses" (or her manuscript pages) in conversation with “I-witnesses” is crucial for reading the Baroness’s textual c­ ondition. Ultimately, creating a scholarly edition of her autobiographical papers using social-text network theory is similar to “editing” multiple versions within the Baroness’s poetry manuscript archive: it entails shaping a scholarly argument from these multiple witnesses. However, an environment that engages social-text network theory relies on a particularly digital form of practice, since a major difficulty in editing the Baroness’s autobiography is the problem of representing, accessing, and navigating multiple I-witnesses, especially as they ­correspond to the live text or text in performance that social computing affords. I have described a “text in performance” in this kind of environment elsewhere: “[A] text in performance comprises multiple v ­ ersions in manuscript and print, various notes and letters and comments of contemporaries or current readers, plus the element of performance, which entails time, space, and a collaborative audience” (Clement, “Knowledge”). Creating an environment built on a database in which readers have the ability to pull from, compare, and annotate multiple witnesses’ and I-witnesses’ versions in performance represents the first key advantage to a digital project such as BaronessElsa. Identifying how social-­computing technologies allows users to resituate their readings illuminates how a digital edition can facilitate our transitioning modernist editing practices into new theoretical positions. BaronessElsa is built on an Omeka platform that relies on an underlying database structure that serves the texts dynamically online. The promise of using these technologies is to make these texts available to the general public in an interface that allows for multiple user accounts and user contributions that afford multiple readings and translations as well as the ability to annotate images and geolocate texts. In addition, there is an administrative interface for vetting by multiple ­editors. Further, the platform is free and open-source, which allows for

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cross-repository project building. At the same time, because Omeka is open source and adheres to Dublin Core Standards, it can be compatible with library and archival repository and digital collections systems such as Fedora, Dspace, Greenstone, and CONTENTdm, as well as museum collections management and online exhibition systems such as TMS, KE Emu, PastPerfect, and Pachyderm (“Omeka”). Through these c­ apabilities, parts of the Baroness’s autobiographical writings can be associated with Grove’s papers in Canada, with parts of a project such as the Modernist Journals Project at Brown University, or the ­Little Review archives at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee archives. Finally, the robust Omeka user community has built tools such as TEIDisplay and Image Annotation that are not only useful in BaronessElsa for marking up digital surrogates and displaying that markup but the possibilities of these tools also force us to consider how editors need to make ­apparent yet another layer of “voices” in social-text network theory: those voices represented by ­technical editors who contribute to the underlying technologies. By using technologies that foreground the presence of multiple voices and multiple versions (and therefore multiple witnesses and I-witnesses), I seek to create an edition that positions the Baroness’s autobiographical papers as a manifesto. The term manifesto is derived from the Latin word manifest. In particular, the manifesto is a declaration of a platform and an announcement for change or a break from any historically steady state of affairs (Winkiel 12). Many feminist and ­critical race theorists have noted that the manifesto is a significant genre in the progressive politics and changing aesthetics of the early twentieth century. BaronessElsa positions the Baroness’s autobiographical papers as a manifesto for change for two reasons. First, the edition poises these papers as contestations to the notion of the universal subject. Leigh Gilmore notes that the autobiography, which is “the closest textual version of the political ideology of individualism,” often reflects the male-gendered “universal subject” (1). Reading Mina Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto,” Janet Lyon considers the fact that Loy rejects collectivism and advocates individualism as she “grapples with the incompatibility between modernist individualism and the universalism to which feminism tends” (42). Lyon identifies two groups at the turn of the twentieth century that were highly visible in their m ­ anifesto-making activities: “modern women” and those she calls “the ‘anti-modern’ modernists … who were self-proclaimed enemies of bourgeois rationalism” (40). The “modern women” and

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the “anti-modernists” that Lyon identifies (Loy and Tristan Tzara in particular) are authors who published in little magazines alongside the Baroness and helped shape the discourse of her literary world. For example, the Baroness considers lifeart as a term that necessarily expresses the authentic and essential elements of art as individual physical embodiment and experience but also as the result of culture or the collective experience. That is, she believed that to engage art as an underlying mode of life meant to assume art as an individual identity: “i do duty to myself … right way writing is my only movement – expression – i can only act – as i am made” (BaronessElsa). At the same time, she realized that art also reflects a community’s culture or way of life. In an undated letter to Barnes from Germany, the Baroness admires the German Jews for their lifestyle: “they are movable – they had to be – adaptable –they have made an art of it – lifeart” (BaronessElsa). She believed creating art meant expressing being in terms of the individual and as the result of one’s culture. In turn, read as manifesto, the Baroness’s autobiographical writings and BaronessElsa are positioned within the history of feminism, polemics, arts, collectivity, and change that the term invokes. Second, BaronessElsa is a manifesto for changes in editing theory and practice. Laura Winkiel, who is interested in the role that manifestos play in the history of race relations, works to “draw attention to how the manifesto as an event can alert us to the ways in which other modernist texts … advance an undoing of conventional representation” that “opens up a space for other accounts of modernity to emerge” (14). BaronessElsa is a manifesto for change because it uses technologies that foreground a social-text network theory for textual editing and new readings of the Baroness’s autobiographical readings result. This notion of social network theory includes witnesses and I-witnesses, and the virtual experience of real-time art performance for users who can comment on the edition and upload multimedia responses. New readings result because BaronessElsa supports the unconventional practice of foregrounding the complex dialogue of coexisting individual and collective voices in autobiographical narratives that social-text network theory insists I-witnesses must present. With BaronessElsa, I seek to both shed light on the autobiographical manifesto that is the writings of the Baroness and to create a manifesto for changing how we edit and how we read modernist writings as they become increasingly available in the public domain and increasingly digital and networked.

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Reading the Autobiographical Manifesto Investigating Sidonie Smith’s seven constituent aspects of the autobiographical manifesto in relation to the Baroness’s autobiographical papers helps to articulate the kinds of readings encouraged by socialtext network theories and technologies, I am seeking to engage in BaronessElsa. Below are excerpts from the Baroness’s autobiographical papers that respond to a corresponding manifestary aspect.

1. To Appropriate / To Contest Sovereignty The Baroness writes in her papers about her right to her own subjectivity and her own sense of identity, which she places in contrast to Greve’s rendition: “he had written 2 own novels. they were each dictated by me as far as material was concerned. it was my life and persons out of my life – he did everything a conventional shape and dress.” Later she expands and opposes this definition of conventionality: “also – i was not willfully ‘unconventional.’ i should have preferred to be untarnished ‘proper’ – if my temperament would have permitted me to be so” (BaronessElsa). Adhering to traditional notions of feminine propriety, the sexually adventurous Fanny Essler dies of an unknown disease at the end of Grove’s nineteenth-century romance. By reading her autobiographical writings in concert with the Grove texts, we see the Baroness asserting her right to claim a more complex life story.

2. To Bring to Light, to Make Manifest (Literally “Struck with the Hand”) In Smith’s work the autobiographical manifesto is written by women for whom the announcement for change comes in the form of “self-­ consciously political autobiographical acts” that “issue calls for new subjects” (157). In her autobiographical papers, the Baroness critiques the bourgeois culture in which she was entrenched. Her account of meeting Grove for the first time reflects this criticism of “conventional” people: “meanwhile – without noticing it i had already begun to talk – the little talk i did anyway at dinner with the very disagreable [sic] conventional hysterical commonplace poeple [sic] – considerably of ‘mr. felix’ as we will name this resplendent young many of my stirring desire here” (BaronessElsa).

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The Baroness is equally frank about critiquing Grove’s formulaic Fanny Essler novels, calling them “fearfull [sic] books – as far as ‘art’ is concerned.” She writes, “i remember i disliked the ‘style already than [sic]! despite my adoration for his whole person – and belief in his genius – and told him so – as i am ever always truthfull [sic]” (BaronessElsa). In the Baroness’s writings about art, she includes critiques of William Carlos Williams, George Bernard Shaw, T.S. Eliot, and others. Identifying this work in the context of the autobiographical readings, we see her range of experience as a critic of bourgeois art culture.

3. To Announce Publicly Smith writes that this aspect entails “asserting both the politicization of the private and the personalization of the public” (160). What is at stake in making versions of her autobiographical writings public is represented in the letters the Baroness includes when she sends her poem “Hell’s Wisdom” to Barnes. Here, she understands that her private life (her autobiographical writings) could bring an audience to her public writings (her poetry): “together with your preface – trying to arouse interest for me – help – sympathy (and i need it! heaven help – how i do – in order to be saved to do my art – for i cannot be saved otherwise otherwise is blankness – that means necessary death! with your generous preface – my own djuna – would

6.5.  Undated Letter from Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven to Djuna Barnes

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it not be wonderful together? i wonder – you did not think of it” (UMD 2.262) That a “politicization of the private” corresponds to an appreciation of the Baroness’s poetry was also not lost on Peter Whigham, an American literary scholar who wrote many letters from England in the 1950s to Barnes, Margaret Anderson, and Peggy Guggenheim in order to secure any personal information he might use in an introduction to his proposed edition of the Baroness’s collected works. While his project came to naught (in part, because Barnes made it difficult for him to see the Baroness’s papers), Whigham’s articulation of the relationship between the Baroness’s poetry and her autobiographical writings affords yet another look at the symbiotic relationship between what Perloff polarizes as “the work” and “the life.” In response to a letter from Barnes dated 27 March 1953 in which she asks Whigham, “Did you know the Baroness? (Almost essential in her case),” Whigham writes about the tension that existed at the time between biographical and literary study. It is useful, in terms of this discussion, to quote his response at some length: “The successful artist is a contradiction in terms – so often materially – and always at the deeper, spiritual level. There are, I expect you will agree, few instances where a knowledge of the artist himself, his conditions of life etc., can (if he be in the first or second flight) essentially affect an understanding of his work. With the lesser men such knowledge is nearly always an important aid. The Baroness is, I believe, an exception to this rule.” Responding to the New Critical stance that mandates the separation of life and art, Whigham and other artists like Williams and Pound resist this stance in their writings about the Baroness, insisting that her life and her art must be considered together.

4. To Perform Publicly Smith writes that the autobiographical manifesto “historicizes identity implicitly, if not explicitly, insists on the temporalities and spatialities of identity and, in doing so, brings the everyday practices of identity directly into the floodlights of conscious display” (160). The Baroness’s material presence is emphasized in the notes she writes to Barnes in the margins of her autobiographical writings. They give the reader a sense of the text’s materiality and how that materiality, in effect, performs a unique time and place in the writer’s life. In a letter to Barnes the Baroness notes, “i am lost – i feel it. look at line of my writing

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6.6.  Letter from Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven to Djuna Barnes, Undated

tilting down? it before always went up such things are significantly telling! i shudder to look at it” (UMD 2.043). It is as if her mental state is realized within and through the action of making text. The materiality of the text tells a story about the social text networks that are inherent in the relationship between the reading and the making of art. Live contributors such as those who create music, video, and poetry in response to the Baroness contribute this embodied element of space and time to a reading of the text within BaronessElsa.

5. To Speak as One of a Group, to Speak for a Group In the letters, the Baroness clearly sees her story as one that maps to multiple possible stories. She is what Smith calls “an auto/ethnographer.” “you desire dates and facts out of my life to place before the public to secure their simpathy [sic]”: “in a few words” the Baroness affirms in an undated letter to Barnes, “how that is to be done – with my life – that is about half a dozen lifes [sic] in one – … it will be a heroic deed by me – should i succeed” (UMD 2.0144). In speaking to the unconventional nature of her life, the Baroness speaks to the unconventionality of every woman’s life. With multivalent voices representing the messiness inherent to autobiography and “truth,” her collective voice speaks to and for the non-universal subject.

6. To Speak to the Future The autobiographical manifesto works under the aegis of hope, Smith writes, by “actively position[ing] the subject in a potentially liberated future distanced from the constraining and oppressive identifications inherent in the every day practices of the ancien regime” (162). The Baroness writes about her future as a return to the United States where she sees a space beyond the traditions that she believes hampers her art and her

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6.7.  Letter from Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven to Djuna Barnes, Undated

spirit. Almost twenty years after she and Grove first moved to Kentucky, she writes of the United States after she returns to Germany from this position of hope: “and if i ever could set foot on it again – that i so hated through all my long enforced stay fight battle – developing from flesh devotion to its truth spirit devotion – i will embrace its spacious good natured deep moving sumptious chest – that i felt coarse and vulgar by my adherent european tradtion appendix – of that i am cured now since i am returned to my original birth country that has become a heap of rotten traditionmess [sic] without sense and power because it is turned senile sterile stagnant and grows nothing new” (BaronessElsa). The Baroness’s autobiographical papers and the historical and current audiences to which they speak encourage the revolution of text and art from stagnant and closed artefacts to live and engendering performances of art. In terms of the Baroness’s view of the future, I use Smith’s d ­ escription of the technologies of subjectivity to also describe how BaronessElsa employs technologies to set into play social-text network theories and engender new readings or experiences in the future of editing ­modernist texts: Technologies of subjectivity play through autobiographical subjects with differential effects and perceived potentials. Autobiographical subjects play with them in different and deferring ways, proceeding through the entanglements of the web, choosing some directions, choosing against others. And they carry with them through these negotiations the specificities of their material circumstances, their degrees of self-consciousness about cultural determination, the temporalities of their bodies. Heteronomous subjects, they each participate actively as “agents,” since, as Paul Smith argues, “a person is not simply the actor who follows ideological

BaronessElsa 159  scripts, but is also an agent who reads them in order to insert him/herself into them – or not.” (qtd in S. Smith 22)

As an autobiographical manifesto, therefore, I seek to use BaronessElsa to make apparent the extent to which the Baroness’s identity has been marked and transformed by readers historically but, as a social tool marked by visitors’ contributions in the here-and-now, it also makes transparent the difficulties inherent to editing in the context of digital and modernist textual conditions. Conclusion From the perspective of the autobiographical manifesto and with tools that engage social-text network theory, we can reconsider the idea that the Baroness’s autobiography is an act of truth-telling and, instead, we can learn to value it as a messy performance of truth-telling – as “lifeart” rather than “life.” As discussed above, this viewpoint complicates those reflected by Hjartarson and Spettigue’s “cleaned” version of the Baroness’s autobiographical writings (Baroness Elsa) as well the kind of story Barnes’s “cleaned” version of the Baroness in “Selected Letters” might tell. It is also resituates the notion that Greve’s Fanny Essler work is a fictionalized account of the Baroness’s “true story” and the idea that the individual named “the Baroness” is “truthful.” Ultimately, we learn in the context of editing the autobiographical manifesto that the identity the Baroness has created cannot be considered without also considering her audience and the collective construction of that identity. The notion that the BaronessElsa site is moving towards an autobiographical manifesto encourages readers to reconsider the Baroness’s modes of expression as acts for change, acts that allowed her to foreground her marginalized identity in order that she might resituate herself in the fringes of modernism. In turn, the sense of agency encouraged by the idea of the autobiographical manifesto pushes us to think about how her outrageous “story” has been consistently rendered without consideration for how this identity was constructed, for what reason, and by whom. Positioning her papers and this edition as autobiographical manifesto is a political act. Richard Poirier writes that modernist texts enact “a mode of experience, a way of reading, a way of being with great difficulty conscious of structures, techniques, codes and stylizations” (114). I am arguing that to enact this modernist mode of experience in

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which we learn to be conscious (and conscientious or critical) of structures, techniques, codes, and stylizations in a primarily digital editing project means learning to complicate the specific editorial possibilities and “problems” that are enacted when we bring these two technologies – the digital and modernist texts – to reflect on each other. NOTES 1 For example, see Bornstein, Material; and Bornstein, Representing, among other texts. 2 The Papers of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven are in the Special Collections at the University of Maryland Libraries, College Park, MD. 3 For an example of the Baroness using pictograms, please see her poem “Cosmic Arithmetic.” 4 The Baroness’s papers are in the public domain, so copyright does not represent a difficulty for editing her writings. 5 This number represents a reel and frame number from the microfilm of “The Papers of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven” in Special Collections at the University of Maryland Libraries in College Park, MD. All subsequent references are noted as UMD. 6 For more on this topic, please see Clement, “Knowledge.” 7 See Gammel, Baroness Elsa, specifically the section titled “Sources Focusing on Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven” (49–507). 8 For a longer discussion on this topic, please see Clement, “Baroness.” 9 The title indicates its relationship to its predecessors. Specifically, Barnes used “Baroness Elsa” for her typed version of the text, a title that Hjartarson and Spettigue also adopted for their edited autobiography. I concatenated it (a standard practice in digital file naming and URL creation) to refer to its uniquely digital instantiation.

7 Editing the Wilfred Watson and Sheila Watson Archives: Scholarly Editions ⇔ Digital Projects paul hjartarson, harvey quamen, kristin fast, and emic ua

This chapter examines the use of databases for digital archiving and electronic editing. As the subtitle indicates, its primary focus is the relation between scholarly editing and digital projects, specifically between scholarly editing and the creation of digital archives of literary papers. The chapter is thus concerned, in part, with the scholarly edition as digital project; it focuses on some of the many issues that members of the Editing Modernism in Canada collaboratory at the University of Alberta (EMiC UA) have confronted as we develop plans to digitize and edit papers in the archives of Canadian modernist writers Wilfred Watson and Sheila Watson.1 Databases operate at the level of relationships, and in working with these two archival collections we have realized that the Wilfred Watson and Sheila Watson digital archives need to ground themselves at that level. As Kenneth M. Price observes, digitization is transforming the work of archivists and editors, and with it, the understanding of both archives and editions. In the past, an archive has referred to a collection of material objects rather than digital surrogates. This type of archive may be described in finding aids but its materials are rarely edited and annotated as a whole. In a digital environment, archive has gradually come to mean a purposeful collection of surrogates. As we know, meanings change over time, and archive in a digital context has come to suggest something that blends features of editing and archiving. To meld features of both – to have the care of treatment and annotation of an edition and the inclusiveness of an archive – is one of the tendencies of recent work in electronic editing. (par. 22)

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As Price argues, the creation of a digital archive itself demands a form of scholarly editing. “To meld features of both” editing and archiving, he observes, “– to have the care of treatment and annotation of an edition and the inclusiveness of an archive – is one of the tendencies of recent work in electronic editing.” That transformation, we contend, itself necessitates a focus on relationships; our primary concern here, consequently, is ultimately neither scholarly editing nor digital archiving but the relation between these activities. We focus that concern on a series of complex relationships: the relation between documents in the archives of Wilfred Watson and Sheila Watson, relations grounded in the decadeslong marriage between these two writers; the relation between material object and what Price terms its digital surrogate; the relation between texts and the artwork that appears in letters, notebooks, and journals held in these collections or that either writer purchased or received as a gift; the relation, too, between print and digital publication. Since the EMiC UA collaboratory is in the early stages of both digitization and editing, this study in relationships is necessarily a report from the field. The chapter is divided into two parts. In the first part we outline the rationale for this digital and editorial initiative. Why digitize these two collections of literary papers? Why now? Why have we chosen to develop two distinct digitization and editing projects, Editing the ­Wilfred Watson Archive and Editing the Sheila Watson Archive? We also articulate some of the assumptions on which these projects are based and detail our planning – both short and long term – for each project. While the first part of the chapter is concerned primarily with our approach to the archival papers themselves, the second part addresses some of the many technical issues such projects must confront in digitizing the collections. As Price’s comments suggest, and our own work has taught us, digital and editorial issues are frequently inseparable – and the digital issues are many. Why have we opted for a relational database structure rather than for a Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)–based system? Given the scale of the projects, the relevant material awaiting digitization, and the limitations of time and money, how much markup can we hope to accomplish? Since we have strong desire for interoperability, what metadata schema should we adopt? Should we edit Wilfred and Sheila’s archival documents for print or digital publication, or for a combination of the two? At this point, most of these issues focus on the development of a workflow for the projects. Since that work is ongoing, what we offer in the second half of the chapter is necessarily provisional.

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Editing ↻ Archive?

As Fred Flahiff observes in Always Someone to Kill the Doves, “1959 was something of an annus mirabilus for Canadian literature” (202). Certainly for Sheila Watson, a graduate student in English at the University of Toronto, 1959 was a year of miracles, marking the publication not only of her late modernist novel The Double Hook, but also of “Antigone,” a short story she had been working on, under several titles, since at least 1953 (202). For Sheila’s partner, the British Council and Governor-­General’s Award–winning poet Wilfred Watson, 1959 also proved extraordinary. While Sheila was in Toronto studying for her doctorate, Wilfred, a recently appointed professor of English at the University of Alberta, was in Edmonton seeking to build on his reputation as an internationally recognized poet and to realize his ambitions as a playwright. As Paul Tiessen notes, in 1959 Wilfred began the decade-long dialogue with Marshall McLuhan that would not only result in publication of their jointly authored From Cliché to Archetype but also transform the playwright’s work for the stage.2 Wilfred began the dialogue with Marshall while revising Cockcrow and the Gulls, a play he had been writing and rewriting for almost a decade. Revisions Wilfred began in 1958–9 would lead, more or less directly, to Studio Theatre’s production of the play in the spring of 1962. That production launched Wilfred’s career as a playwright. Such years, however, frequently appear miraculous only in retrospect. On 5 February 1959, a day that marked the return of cold weather to Edmonton after a brief winter thaw, Wilfred received not one but two letters from Sheila. “I read them with tea,” he writes her later that evening, “before going out to my graduate seminar.” From them Wilfred learns, among other things, about Sheila’s unhappiness with the wording of the publisher’s note McClelland and Stewart had developed for The Double Hook.3 “I am sorry about the publisher’s blurb,” he writes. Several sentences into a discussion of the problem, Wilfred declares flatly, “There are, in my mind, three things wrong with Canadian literature – the publisher, the editor, and the professor.” Still, he reasons, “what matters a blurb to the D[ouble] H[ook], nice it’s in print.” He does not leave the matter there, however; circling back to the subject still later in the letter, Wilfred adds, I am afraid you’ll have to steel yourself with respect to the D.H. I c[oul] d envision a day when serious writers everywhere, like the desk drawer Russians, such as Pasternak, will only circulate their writings in MS. It

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7.1.  Poster for Premiere of Cockcrow and the Gulls

Editing the Wilfred Watson and Sheila Watson Archives  165  will be like a return to the Middle Ages. In print will appear all the Statesupported and Business-subsidized TRASH. No serious critic will pay attention to this. We have, after all, our typewriters. We have paper. What more really do we want? (Letter to Sheila Watson)

This is Wilfred’s view, not Sheila’s, and Wilfred’s view as he reflects on the issue that Sheila’s unhappiness has brought to mind. Given a typewriter and paper, he asks, “What more … do we want?” Both writers wanted more, though Wilfred seems to have been more deeply conflicted about publication than Sheila – and she had her own issues. It is worth noting, however, that both Sheila and Wilfred, different writers in so many ways, circulated copies of their manuscripts among fellow writers and friends and that neither was averse to rethinking and substantially rewriting their work. It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that many of their texts have long, complicated histories of composition; indeed, the long and complex genesis of the published and unpublished works is arguably the distinguishing characteristic of both archives. The decades-long genesis of The Double Hook is well known.4 Less well-known is Wilfred’s work on Cockcrow and the Gulls: surviving documents indicate that he began the play while he and Sheila were teaching at the University of British Columbia, that is, sometime between 1949 and 1951; that he took a more-or-less complete draft of Cockcrow with him to Paris in 1955 to rethink the play in light of his experience of theatre there; and that he reworked it several times following his return from Paris prior to its production by Studio Theatre – under the direction of Gordon Peacock – in March 1962. Cockcrow and the Gulls was first published in 1989 as part of Plays at the Iron Bridge, or, the Autobiography of Tom Horror, a selection edited by Shirley Neuman.5 For several years now, the Editing Modernism in Canada group at the University of Alberta has been developing plans to digitize and edit papers in the Wilfred Watson and Sheila Watson Fonds. We did not start there: we started with plans to edit Wilfred’s writing and soon found ourselves reading through his papers, first in the University of Alberta Archives and then in Special Collections at the John M. Kelly Library. Reading and discussing these papers led us to three realizations. First, if our goal was to produce scholarly editions of Wilfred’s writing, we faced one inescapable problem: our knowledge of the genesis of the texts was far too limited. We needed to know much more about the relation of notebooks and journals to extant manuscripts, the relation

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7.2.  Wifred Watson, Letter to Sheila Watson, 7 February 1959

Editing the Wilfred Watson and Sheila Watson Archives  167 

of references in Wilfred’s correspondence to particular drafts, and, of course, the relation of one manuscript to another. Our second realization was that it made little sense to study the composition history of Wilfred’s texts in isolation from Sheila’s – or Sheila’s in isolation from Wilfred’s. Editing archived literary papers is a study in complex relations. At the heart of the complex relations among the documents is the lifelong relationship between the writers themselves. Wilfred and Sheila’s papers, like the lives themselves, are inextricably entwined: they read one another’s writing from one draft to the next; they recorded their responses in letters to one another, in notebooks, and in journals; what is more, ideas, images, phrases that appear in one writer’s text can sometimes surface in the work of the other. As Flahiff notes, “Each became so immersed in the interests of the other that it is sometimes difficult to determine where an interest which has become associated with one or the other had its origins” (Always 179). Why not, we began asking ourselves, study the genesis of Wilfred and Sheila’s manuscripts in relation to one another? And, finally, if we were going to work through the documents in the Wilfred Watson and Sheila Watson Fonds, why not begin planning the digitization of both archives? This, we soon realized, would foreground another significant relationship: the relation between the material objects held in the respective archives and their digital surrogates. Given our interest in editing archival documents, why not partner with the archives in digitizing both fonds? Why not develop two distinct digitization and editorial projects, an Editing the Wilfred Watson Archive project and an Editing the Sheila Watson Archive project, grounded in a common administrative and technical base while building two separate digital archives? There was no denying the many problems such an initiative would confront, but there was also no denying the need for such projects. As both Jerome McGann and Johanna Drucker argue, humanities scholars must urgently address “the methods and implications of the migration of our cultural legacy into digital form” (Drucker, SpecLab xii; cf. McGann, “Electronic” 41). Susan Brown echoes Drucker’s characterization of humanities computing as “the most important humanistic project of our time”: “The tools developed for archiving, teaching, research, communication and dissemination,” Brown argues, “will transform the humanities beyond anything we can imagine” (204, 203). To edit the archival documents of Canadian modernist writers in the early twentyfirst century is necessarily to struggle with the methods and implications of this process.

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Given the many challenges digital-humanities projects confront, the risks might well seem to outweigh the rewards, however urgent the task. While there is no denying these challenges, the Wilfred Watson and Sheila Watson projects have certainly not been developed in isolation. They were in fact conceived within the Editing Modernism in Canada project, the initiative developed and led by Dean Irvine; that is, we imagined the Watsons projects within the strategic knowledge network that EMiC creates; we developed them knowing the resources – not just the funding but the interdisciplinary community, the collaborative opportunities, the training – that EMiC makes available; and we planned with an eye on the seven-year time frame it makes possible. Within EMiC, too, there is the example of The Collected Works of P.K. Page and The Digital Page projects, led by Zailig Pollock, with a twofold objective: to edit the collected works of Page and, in partnership with Library and Archives Canada, to develop P.K. Page digital editions. Could we have imagined the Watson projects outside the framework of EMiC? Probably not. While the existence of EMiC made it possible to imagine and plan the Editing the Wilfred Watson Archive and Editing the Sheila Watson Archive projects, we could not have acted on those plans without the support of many individuals and institutions. We certainly could not have proceeded without agreement and support from the literary executors of both the Wilfred Watson and Sheila Watson estates: the work of both writers is still under copyright and will remain so for many years to come. We are grateful for the literary executors’ willingness to entertain our proposals and to work with us on a pilot project. Crucial, too, has been the support of the University of Alberta Libraries (UAL). In agreeing to partner with the Watsons projects, UAL offered us support of various kinds: it provided space for us in a digitization centre being developed in Cameron Library; it brought our projects into that space; it welcomed us into a community of people working on similar projects and thinking through similar issues; it moved the Wilfred Watson papers into that space; and it purchased a Book2Net Kiosk scanner and workstations for our use. The John M. Kelly Library has been equally supportive: on our many research trips to Toronto, the library has facilitated our access to the Sheila Watson Fonds; it has fully ­supported our work on the pilot project; and it is working with us and with UAL in developing the joint University of Alberta–St Michael’s digital initiative. Through EMiC, the Watsons projects are also partnered with the ­ Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC), a Canada

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Foundation for Innovation–funded initiative led by Susan Brown. According to its website, CWRC is developing “a database [CWRC Commons] to house born-digital scholarly materials, digitized texts, and metadata (indices, annotations, cross-references)” and “a toolkit for empowering new collaborative modes of scholarly writing online” (“About CWRC/CSÉC”). Susan Brown adopted from the sciences the term ­collaboratory – a combination, in this instance, of the digital humanities’ concern with collaboration and its orientation to “labs” – to signify the project’s commitment to creating both the space and the digital infrastructure necessary for collaborative work. The EMiC group at the University of Alberta is developing the Watsons projects in partnership with both UAL and CWRC: we are working with UAL and CWRC teams to design a workflow for these projects; we are collaborating with CWRC in developing digital tools; and we are looking to CWRC Commons for long-term storage. We are also working with CWRC to articulate ­principles that should inform the collaborative work of scholars at all levels – from research assistants and postdoctoral fellows to new and established scholars – not just for the Watson projects but for other interested projects within the collaboratory as well. Given such organizational complexity, why two Watson projects and not one – a single Wilfred and Sheila Watson project? Why make an already challenging task that much more difficult? Alternatively, why not focus on either Wilfred or Sheila alone? Why edit the writing of Wilfred and Sheila side-by-side? In the preceding pages we have already begun framing our first reason: the two archives are themselves ­inextricably entwined.6 In his preface to Always Someone to Kill the Doves, Flahiff writes, “What follows is as much the story of a marriage as it is the story of an artist. That both Sheila and … Wilfred … were writers is simply the first fact in the history of a long, sometimes tortured and always tortuous, relationship” (x). A life of either writer is, in large measure, necessarily a story of that relationship, a marriage in its fifty-seventh year when Sheila and Wilfred died within months of one another in 1998. Wilfred’s and Sheila’s archives document writing lives that began prior to the Second World War and extended into the 1990s. For most of that time, Sheila and Wilfred lived together, exchanging ideas and reading one another’s writing. Why two projects and not one? Although they lived and wrote side-by-side, they were two individuals: two different writers each developing a unique artistic vision. We have chosen to develop two distinct projects and two separate archives to honour those differences. Editing the texts of the two

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writers side-by-side, we believe, reveals the significant differences in character, intellect, artistic vision, and writing practice between them. In addition, their papers are housed – by their choice – at two separate institutions. Not only do we want to respect their initial choice to separate the two sets of papers, we want our digital archives to reflect the material archives as nearly as possible. A third reason to edit Sheila and Wilfred’s writing side-by-side is that the archival papers reference a common community of writers, artists, friends, and relatives who in turn need to be researched and, if possible, interviewed. There are, of course, significant differences in the composition of that community from Sheila to Wilfred, but the overlap is large and significant. Finally, in working on these papers we have realized there is a bigger picture here, a larger object of study than either Wilfred or Sheila, and that is the cultural communities of which each was a part: Wilfred’s participation in the community centred on Edmonton’s Studio Theatre and, for a time, on the Yardbird Suite, a jazz club in the city; Sheila’s involvement in White Pelican (1971–6), a quarterly review of the arts, as well as her engagement with the community of graduate students and writers who increasingly looked to her as mentor. We need to understand Sheila and Wilfred not only in relation to one another but also in relation to these overlapping communities. We have already articulated three organizing principles in the development of our projects: the long and complex genesis of key texts by both Sheila and Wilfred; the inextricable relation of the two archives; and our decision to develop two distinct editing projects grounded in a common administrative and technical base. These are necessarily longterm, open-ended projects that can be completed only in stages. What other key decisions have we made in developing these projects? Given the “relational” nature of the material in the two archives – not just the between the archives but among the documents in each, and between material object and digital surrogate – we have conceived the digital archives as a number of relational databases rather than as a collection of TEI-encoded files. In the next section of the chapter, “Database ≠ Archive,” we explain our thinking on that issue. Finally, although we have focused our work on the entire oeuvre of each writer, we have resisted the temptation to be comprehensive in our approach, that is, to plan for something approaching a “collected works” of each writer. We think such planning would be premature; we are opting, instead, to focus on a key period in each writer’s life. For Wilfred, we think the best “Phase One” period is from 1951, the

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year he was hired by the University of Alberta and assigned to the Calgary campus, to 1962, the year in which Cockcrow and the Gulls was produced by Studio Theatre. In these eleven years, Wilfred settled into life as a professor, gained international recognition as a poet with the publication of Friday’s Child in 1955, and launched his career as a playwright with Studio Theatre’s production of Cockcrow and the Gulls in March 1962. In this period, too, Wilfred begins his dialogue with Marshall McLuhan. For Sheila, the key period, we believe, is from 1949 to 1961. Perhaps because scholarship on Sheila Watson’s life and writing is at a more advanced stage, we are actually projecting three periods within these dates. Working backward from 1961, these phases are the “Toronto years,” that is, 1956–61; the year in Paris, 1955–6; and an earlier period from 1949 to 1955. You see our problem: whereas the latter two stages are easily defined by geography, the first phase is not. Although we are still debating this first phase, we like 1949 as the start date, because we believe that when Sheila left Toronto for Vancouver – and resigned from her teaching position at Moulton College and, arguably, from her role as breadwinner – her writing entered a new phase: she began studying Greek and writing the Oedipus short stories. During this period, too, she published The Double Hook.7 In the first stage of both projects, we have decided to focus on producing scholarly editions of the material published during these years, with the goal of using those editions as “building blocks” in developing a separate digital archive for each writer. To develop a better understanding of the composition history of the texts of each writer, we intend to combine study of published texts such as Sheila’s “Antigone” and Wilfred’s Friday’s Child with research on the unpublished letters, journals, and notebooks. Digitizing and transcribing the letters, journals, and notebooks will, we believe, help us date manuscripts and typescripts and enable us to develop scholarly editions that emerge from, and point to, the richness of the archives. The digitized archival documents, however, will be available only to scholars working on the projects and to non-project scholars who obtain permission from the literary executors, given the current copyright constraints. In planning scholarly editions for phase 1 of the Editing the Wilfred Watson Archive project, the EMiC collaboratory at the University of Alberta has acted on a number of assumptions. With the help of Shirley Neuman, Fred Flahiff is preparing an edition of Sheila Watson’s journals; this work, which predates the Watsons projects that they are pursuing independently, follows on his inclusion of entries from the Paris

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journals in Always Someone to Kill the Doves. Our planning is predicated on their publication of Sheila’s journals. As a complement to that work, we plan to publish the letters Wilfred and Sheila wrote one another between the fall of 1956, when she started graduate school in Toronto, and spring 1961, when Sheila moved back to Edmonton. That volume of letters will serve as the pilot project in developing a joint UAL/John M. Kelly digital initiative; Paul Hjartarson and Shirley Neuman are coediting the letters. Database ≠ Archive The digitization of archives, as of libraries, is well underway. Although the Wilfred Watson project is the first instance of the digitization of a literary archive at the University of Alberta, our initiative is only one of several archival digitization projects within UAL and only one of many across campus (“Digital Initiatives”). Will these online archives replace the material archives? That seems unlikely. It is more probable that online archives will increase interest in, and visits to, the material archive. Why? In a discussion of The Walt Whitman Archive, a digital archive structured as several databases, Ed Folsom suggests one of the reasons: “Often we hear archive and database conflated, as if the two terms signified the same imagined or idealized fullness of evidence. Archive and database do share a desire for completeness (though that desire can be and often is subverted by those who want to control national or institutional memories), but the physicality of archive makes it essentially different from database. There will always be more physical information in an archive than in a database, just as there will always be more malleable and portable information in a database than in an archive” (1575–6). As Folsom argues, “Archives are all about physicality, and such is their charm for researchers” (1577). Online archives facilitate searching massive numbers of documents; they increase accessibility and immediacy; and they make it possible to compare texts or images within archives or even, as Folsom notes, to reassemble a notebook or manuscript from leaves held in widely dispersed archives. While online archives can make art objects and audiotapes as well as text-based documents available, they cannot provide access to the objects themselves. Access to the material objects is not always key – researchers are sometimes content simply with text, image, or sound bite – but seldom is the materiality of such artefacts irrelevant.

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Both the Wilfred Watson and Sheila Watson Fonds are large and relatively comprehensive: in addition to drafts of published and unpublished manuscripts, the collections include diaries, journals, and notebooks, personal and professional correspondence, personal and professional records, and photographs of family and friends.8 Wilfred’s archive is more extensive than Sheila’s: she destroyed some of the letters she wrote to Wilfred and censored a few of the documents she did include. (There are also missing pages in some of Wilfred’s journals; when those pages were excised is unknown.) The gaps, however, are relatively few and more than offset by the wealth of detailed observation and careful thought in what remains. In both collections the notebook and journal holdings are extensive. What is more, as ­Flahiff’s decision to include sections of Sheila’s Paris journal in his life of the writer demonstrates, not only do her journals contain a wealth of information, but the writing itself seldom fails to interest. The surviving letters between Wilfred and Sheila, particularly those written between 1956 and 1961, are also remarkable, not only for what they tell us about Wilfred and Sheila’s personal and professional lives in these years but also for what those letters reveal about the strength of the intellectual bond between them. (Wilfred and Sheila wrote one another several times each week, sometimes two or three times a day.) Concerning the letters Wilfred and Sheila wrote one another between 1956 and 1961, Flahiff observes, ­“Letters made possible the continuation of what in their relationship survived separation, their intense intellectual compatibility. Each became so immersed in the interests of the other that it is sometimes difficult to determine where an interest which has become associated with one or the other had its origins … Even when relations between them were most strained, they did not lose interest in each other’s interests. This was the stuff of their letters during these years, the glue that sealed them” (Always 179). If the 1950s is a decisive ­decade in each writer’s creative life – and in their life together as a ­couple – these letters are perhaps the key documents for anyone s­eeking to understand their writing or their lives. Both collections include audio-visual material; that material, moreover, is integral to our understanding of their life and work. Wilfred and Sheila shared a strong interest in the visual arts, theatre, and music. For both Wilfred and Sheila, writing frequently involved drawing. Sheila’s Paris journals, for example, are rich in drawings of people. Both writers include drawings in their letters, either as part of the text or a separate sheet. Wilfred often uses drawings or diagrams to think through ideas,

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particularly in his notebooks or journals. Wilfred himself painted, and some of his work is included in both collections. Work by others artists is also to be found within both Wilfred’s and Sheila’s archives; both collections open out to the artistic circle in which the writers lived and worked, a circle that (as noted earlier) included painters, musicians, dramatists, set designers, and actors, in addition to other writers. (Wilfred’s collection contains set designs, theatre posters, and recordings of various kinds, including scenes from his plays and readings of number grid verse.) In the early years of their marriage, they began purchasing paintings and watercolours by such artists as Michael Ayerton, David Blackwood, Molly Lamb Bobak, Emily Carr, A.Y. Jackson, Wyndham Lewis, Henry Moore, Jack Shadbolt, and Norman Yates, artwork they integrated into their creative lives, that occasioned comments in journals and letters and that sometimes entered into their published writing. The art collection is arguably as important as the books they purchased, read, and shared; and like the book collection, it is one sign among many of their personal and creative connection with other artists. The artwork was separated from the papers and bequeathed to the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia. In the summer of 2000 the Belkin Gallery held an exhibition of artwork from the Wilfred and Sheila Watson Collection to mark that bequest.9 As this brief description of the archival holdings suggests, the Watson projects are ambitious, to say the least: the projects seek to digitize the accumulated work of two lifetimes. Once all texts, images, and sound bites are incorporated into the repository being developed by CWRC, UAL, and EMiC, Wilfred’s archive will consist of an estimated 85,000 scans; Sheila’s, of 75,000 scans or more. These numbers are certainly not astronomical; according to Dan Cohen, “Several million books have been digitized by Google and the Open Content Alliance in the last two years, with millions more on the way shortly” (Cohen et al. 455). As of October 2015, Google Books has digitized over 25 million books (Heyman). But for a boutique project, 160,000 digital records is challenge enough. As indicated, EMiC UA’s partnership with UAL has given us access to a scanner and workstations. EMiC’s partnership with CWRC gives the Watson projects access to large amounts of server space on WestGrid, the western regional division of Compute Canada, a national high-performance computing platform for research. Because the projects will need an estimated thirty terabytes to store the collection as a series of scanned documents – each of which will be represented

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as several TIFFs, a plain text file, and a TEI-encoded XML document, along with the associated metadata – that space is essential. In addition to the quantity of material, the Watson projects are digitizing and editing two archives that have yet to be studied in depth. While Sheila Watson’s writing has been influential in the development of subsequent generations of Canadian writers, and the body of scholarly work on her texts is not small, her archive at the John M. Kelly Library was officially opened only in October 2009. (Prior to that time, her papers were either in the possession of Flahiff, who used them in writing his life of Sheila and made them available to other scholars upon request, or being accessioned by the Kelly Library.) Studies of her work focus largely on The Double Hook. Sheila’s letters have never appeared in print, and the only journals to see publication are the parts of her Paris journals Flahiff made the heart of his life of the writer. Wilfred Watson’s work has received even less attention. Although Wilfred was an award-winning poet and an avant-garde playwright, and although his archive has been open to researchers for over a decade, the study of those papers, and of Wilfred’s work generally, is in its early stages.10 The Watson projects thus confront not only a large body of work – the 160,000 scans – but fonds that have only recently been made available for study and that have certainly not been studied in detail. These realities have shaped not only our conception of the projects themselves but our editorial and technological decisions. In designing the initial delivery of this material, then, we have decided that what the Watson projects need, above all else, is a structure that will enable us to process a large amount of material and make it readily available for research in a short time. Because so many of these materials are interdependent, making sense only in connection with other documents in the two archives (or with material in still other, related archives), we need to make as much of it searchable as quickly as possible. Given these research needs, and the “relational” nature of virtually everything in the archives – from the relation between Wilfred and Sheila to the chronological and thematic relation of documents, artwork, and sound bites in each archive – we have chosen to build the digital archive on a relational database rather than to think of it as a collection of TEI-encoded files. Whereas TEI enables focus at the level of the document – the document is its basic building block – databases operate at the level of relationships, and the Watson projects very much need to ground themselves at that level. As Stephen Ramsay has written, relational databases do not oversimplify the complexities of our scholarship; rather, they enhance the

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interconnectedness of the things we deem important. “Where the business professional might seek to capture airline ticket sales or employee data,” he writes, “the humanist scholar seeks to capture historical events, meetings between characters, examples of dialectical formations, or editions of novels; where the accountant might express relations in terms like ‘has insurance’ or ‘is the supervisor of,’ the humanist interposes the suggestive uncertainties of ‘was influenced by,’ ‘is simultaneous with,’ ‘resembles,’ ‘is derived from’” (178). Building the digital archive on a relational database enables us to query and study the interconnectedness of the documents in the two archives. Both databases and TEI markup require considerable organization up front. For TEI, a thorough, well-defined list of tags (and their corresponding attributes) is required, along with a schema for governing the various elements so that they can be both organized and displayed effectively. For a project such as ours, which involves many different types of writing and media, creating a Document Type Definition (DTD) that encompasses all our requirements but has a sound schema tight enough to limit tagging errors will be a time-consuming task. Then there is the tagging itself. While good tags can make context-focused searches highly productive, to mark up all the instances and variations of the number of tags we think necessary to allow effective tag searches would take hundreds of hours. This task is made all the more daunting by the fact that if we want or need to alter our DTD down the road, we will face countless hours of reworking, because updating tags is difficult to automate; it normally requires human judgment on a case-by-case basis. Given the foundational research still to be done in both archives, reworking the DTD will almost certainly happen. While databases, like a DTD for TEI, must also be carefully designed, they are much easier to alter on a larger scale. Up front, their tables need to be based on logical division, the attributes in each table need to be both useful and flexible, and tables need to be carefully thought out to reflect the relationships among the various materials. However, changing the overall structure once the project is underway, while difficult, can largely be automated. Scripts can adapt the structure of the database, which means that restructuring is less time-consuming. (This proves advantageous in terms of digital sustainability as well: extracting information from one database and moving it to another can also be automated.) In addition, databases make their information visible and responsive to a wide variety of queries, meaning that searching a database is more fluid and yields more expansive results than searching through a series

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of tagged documents.11 Finally, databases can handle a wide variety of media more easily than markup – which was designed for text-based documents – can do. Given the multimedia nature of both Wilfred and Sheila’s archives, this is not a small consideration. While TEI and XML are excellent for organizing certain types of information within documents, if not within multimedia, their strict hierarchies are of limited use in literary projects, as Jerome McGann has made clear: The history of the development of TEI … should never be forgotten. Conceived as an implementation of the OHCO [Ordered Hierarchy of Content Objects] thesis about the character of texts and textuality, TEI’s emergence exposed the deep flaw in the TEI representation of texts. A text is not an Ordered Hierarchy of Content Objects; it is a manifold of an indeterminate number of possible ordered hierarchies. Every text, every element of every text, is n-dimensional, depending on what you choose to regard as contextually relevant. This basic truth about representational media of all kinds, not just “texts,” did not become so graphically apparent to scholars until the TEI consortium set out to implement its alternative conceptual design. (“Electronic” 41)

Because encoding a document requires structuring it in an ordered hierarchy, and in so doing, fixing a particular interpretation of its words, TEI and XML necessarily produce a “particular theory of what the text is” (Renear).12 While this can be an excellent editorial tool – it highlights certain aspects or readings of a text – it also means that alternative interpretations of words or phrases are limited by the tag structures into which they are placed. But when the document itself is new, or the context of known documents is significantly altered through the availability of new material (as is currently the case with both Watson archives), structuring documents in a way that forces a given meaning seems premature. Before we weigh the possible meanings of texts, we first need to establish the text itself, which means scanning the original document, transcribing manually or via optical character recognition software, and proofreading for accuracy. Databases help us to establish this text by collecting and compiling information about each document – more on this below in the metadata discussion – such as enabling us to establish a timeline for various materials. The letters between Wilfred and Sheila, for example, are frequently undated, that is, dated only as “Monday” or “Thursday evening.” Sometimes we can date letters from the postmark

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on the accompanying envelopes, but only if the envelope survives. Since in the letters Wilfred and Sheila discuss many things, including local and national events, we are sometimes able to date the letters from this contextual evidence or by cross-referencing the letters with other dated material in the archives. Even something as simple as accurately dating the Sheila–Wilfred correspondence will assist us in establishing a genealogy of manuscripts for the editions we are developing from the tangle of archival materials. Databases simultaneously allow us to make that genealogy accessible to searches and queries before we force a particular reading of any particular text through a TEI schema. By organizing the Wilfred and Sheila Watson documents, artwork, and sound bites in a relational database, we do not preclude the subsequent use of markup. If initially we put large quantities of information into a database structure to enable access and searchability, and if in the early stages we work at the level of relationships rather than on individual documents, we can shift focus at a later stage and mark up individual documents, laying the tags over the proofed text transcriptions. By making markup a secondary, rather than primary process, we limit the labour required to launch the Watson projects, leave open the possibility of multiple interpretations of a text by enabling multiple tag sets, and allow subsequent scholars, who will have a stronger overall sense of the content and organization of each archive, to determine the editorial direction of the collections. In short, we open up the material to process and interpretation by placing it in a secure, easily searchable structure without compromising quality in the short term. We also leave open the possibility that we can automate much of our markup as these technologies develop, and we could facilitate that process by using the keys developed for our database tables. For the Watson projects, metadata is a significant issue; we would like to conclude this section of the chapter by touching on it briefly. Given our many partnerships, particularly with the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory and the University of Alberta Libraries, the Watson projects will need to meet certain baseline metadata standards to interface with these external systems. In some ways this is a blessing: CWRC and UAL assume responsibility for establishing minimum metadata requirements across a wide range of projects. Even with minimal requirements established, however, the Watson projects still have a great many decisions to make concerning how to integrate the metadata structures with the bibliographic and archival data we will be drawing on to build our database.

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The Wilfred Watson archive has a finding aid that was created by Shirley Neuman when the archive was being accessioned. Our team archivist, Raymond Frogner, has more recently encoded that document in XML using the Encoded Archival Description (EAD) schema. The finding aid provides a particularly useful overview of the archive’s contents, but it must be supplemented in important ways: we need, for example, to have more precise information about how many items each folder contains and how many pages each item has; we need to associate one or more scanned files with each individual page; and we need to log data about our own workflow, which include noting the condition of the archival materials and communicating to the rest of the team any problems we encounter that need to be solved. Having access to finer-grained data about the archive means that we can also begin to date manuscripts, notebooks, and letters more accurately. Our metadata strategy has been to import the information from the EAD-encoded finding aid into a database, and we have provided access to that database through a very traditional-looking (but secure) website. The website allows the team not only to add and to edit data (correcting any mistakes we might find), it also allows us to assign scanned images to individual pages and automatically assign canonical filenames according to archival standards. And in the end we can use the accumulated data to output a new and improved finding aid that contains much more detail than the original. Maintaining our metadata through a database-driven website helps us to accomplish certain goals: we can accumulate more (and more accurate) data about the archive gradually as we work our way through its contents; we avoid the headache of keeping a “master” XML document that needs constant revision; and we increase accessibility to the data. Team members will typically access the metadata website while they have archival materials in front of them, but multiple members can work on the website at the same time, and they can work from distributed locations or even from their own laptops. Moreover, maintaining a “schema-agnostic” version of our metadata will give us more flexibility to output our data in a variety of formats. And as we begin our close collaboration with the Kelly Library, we will be able to incorporate the Sheila Watson finding aid into our database, thereby giving teams from Toronto and Edmonton access to the same aggregate data. The metadata website will be much more than just an archival tracking tool – it will increasingly become one of our most important means of collaboration as well as a repository that helps us more clearly understand the relationships that the

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Watsons had with each other and with the academic, literary, and artistic circles that surrounded them. Conclusion The Watson projects are structured on a series of complex relations. At the heart of our undertaking is the decades-long relationship between Wilfred and Sheila. The complexity of the Wilfred–Sheila marriage is mirrored in the myriad relationships of documents in the two fonds. The interdependence of text and image further enriches our study of Wilfred and Sheila’s creative work. Digitization adds its own layers of complexity; the relation between the digital and material archives itself is anything but simple. Kenneth M. Price uses the term surrogate to describe the relation between material document and digital copy; his choice of term suggests something of the complexity of the materialdigital relation. Adding to this, the two digital archives we are building will themselves eventually be hybrids, a complex integration of database structure and TEI-encoded documents. At least one other relationship demands attention here: the relation between digital archives and print, print-on-demand (POD), and ebook publication. If, as McGann and Drucker argue, cultural legacies are migrating into digital form, why plan to publish such “editions”? With the many possibilities that digital remediation enables, why “cling” to traditional publication? Is the desire for print, POD, and ebook publication not another manifestation of this nostalgia? The short answer: at this point, no one knows. Our group is not only developing digital archives and editing previously published and unpublished texts but also seeking to n ­ egotiate the changing relations between print and digital publication.13 A key partner in this work is the University of Alberta Press (UAP). We brought UAP on board early in our work because the press confronts this issue daily and has considerable experience in this area.14 We are collaborating with the press to work through these issues and to position both UAP and the Watson projects themselves to produce the editions needed in the rapidly changing scholarly marketplace. Our partnership with the press is grounded in the belief that just as the digital archive does not make the material archive redundant, so digital archives, which as Price notes, meld “the care of treatment and annotation of an edition and the inclusiveness of an archive” (para. 22), do not invariably destroy the market for print, POD, and ebook editions of scholarly texts. Each medium has its strengths. Here again the relationship is complicated: not one medium or the other but the various media in dynamic

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relation. New media need the cultural capital of old media; and old media survive – if survive they do – by adapting to new technologies. How will the book adapt? How will the scholarly market change? As Price observes concerning his work on The Walt Whitman Archive, the digital remediation of past scholarly editing produces “competing impulses”: “We want to benefit from and respond to past work, but we also want to avoid constraints on thought and action that were a result of print-based limitations. As editors, we acknowledge the ways of knowing that are enabled by our predecessors – they are the cultural history we inherit – but our job is also to extend their efforts and to produce new ways of knowing that are responsive to cultural, critical, and technological changes (as well as the discovery of documents and the development of new biographical insights) that have happened in the interim” (para. 4). New ways of knowing, we believe, emerge not just out of the development of new technologies – in this case, digital technologies – but out of the dynamic created between old and new: the one repositioning itself in relation to the other. Just as we can learn from editing Wilfred’s writing side-by-side with Sheila’s, so can we learn by editing Wilfred’s and Sheila’s texts for print, POD, and ebook publication while at the same time building separate digital archives for each writer. The effort required to build forks in the workflow, we believe, is more than offset by the knowledge gained through negotiating these complex series of relationships. Appendix A: The Rationale for Phase 1 of Each Watson Archive Project Phase

Years

Phase 1

1951–62 1951: Appointed to University of Alberta 1955: Friday’s Child publication (Governor General’s Award) 1959: Meets Marshall McLuhan 1962: First stage production of a play (Cockcrow and the Gulls) 1962–80 1960s: WW produces five (?) plays in Edmonton 1970: From Cliché to Archetype published (co-authored with McLuhan) 1980: WW and SW move to Nanaimo, BC 1980–98 1980: McLuhan’s death 1998: WW’s death 1911–51 The early years

Phase 2

Phase 3 Phase 4

Reason

Key texts Cockcrow and the Gulls Friday’s Child Correspondence with Sheila Let’s Murder Clytemnestra Sorrowful Canadians I begin with counting Gramsci x3 Mass on Cowback 1946 copywritten play Poetry in the archives

182  Paul Hjartarson, Harvey Quamen, Kristin Fast, and EMiC UA

For phase 1 of the Editing the Wilfred Watson Archive project, we will focus on the period from 1951, the year Wilfred Watson was hired by the University of Alberta and assigned to the Calgary campus, to 1962, the year in which Cockcrow and the Gulls was produced by Studio Theatre. In these eleven years, Wilfred settled into life as a p ­ rofessor, gained international recognition as a poet with the publication of F ­ riday’s Child in 1955, and launched his career as a playwright. In phase 1 Wilfred also begins his dialogue with Marshall McLuhan. Our choice of dates may appear arbitrary. After all, Wilfred seems to have begun Cockcrow in 1949 or 1950, if not earlier; our intent, however, is not to bracket off all stages in the composition of the texts in question but to define an arguable phase of writing. This period will focus our work; we shall, nevertheless, pull in earlier or later material as necessary. For the Editing Sheila Watson Archive project, we think the best “phase 1” is the period from 1949 to 1961. Perhaps because work on Sheila Watson’s life and writing is more advanced, we are actually breaking phase 1 into three periods within these dates. Working backward from 1961, these periods are the “Toronto years,” 1956–61; the year in Paris, 1955–6; and an earlier period from 1949 to 1955. Organizing phase 1 in this way poses a problem: whereas the latter two periods are easily defined by geography, the first phase is not. Although the EMiC group at the University of Alberta is still debating the start date for phase 1 of the Editing Sheila Watson project, we like 1949 because when Sheila left Toronto for Vancouver – resigning from her teaching position at Moulton Ladies College and, arguably, from her role as breadwinner – her writing seems to have entered a new phase: she began studying Greek and writing the Oedipus short stories. Since Sheila published one short story in each of these three periods, beginning phase 1 in 1949 seems to make sense. Here, as in the phase 1 we demarcated for Wilfred, there is relevant material that predates or postdates these years: that material we can pull in. Appendix B: Further Projected Phases Given the large scale of our project – the complete digitization of two archives – we have projected several phases that will see the entire archive digitized and edited. Though we chose to begin by focusing on (what we perceive as) the formative years for both writers, we have sketched out a roadmap for digitizing the remainder of the archival materials. For Wilfred Watson, our projected second phase is the period from 1962, when Wilfred launched his career as a playwright, through 1980, when he and

Editing the Wilfred Watson and Sheila Watson Archives  183  WW Phase 1a

Years

Reason

1949–55 1949: Retires role of breadwinner 1949: Begins studying Greek 1951: “Brother Oedipus” published Phase 1b 1955–6 Wilfred and Sheila spend a year in Paris 1956: “Black Farm” published Phase 1c 1956–61 1956: SW begins her PhD in Toronto 1959: “Antigone” 1959: The Double Hook Phase 2 1961–80 1961: SW hired by the University of Alberta (temporary appointment made tenure track in 1962) 1964?: “The Rumble Seat” 1970s: White Pelican Phase 3 1980–98 1980: McLuhan’s death (bookends) 1909–49 1998: SW’s death 1909: SW’s birth (Allows us to unite writing of Deep Hollow Creek in the 1930s and 1940s with its publication in 1991)

Key texts “Brother Oedipus” “The Black Farm” “Antigone” Correspondence with WW “The Rumble Seat” White Pelican

“And the Four Animals” Deep Hollow Creek

Sheila left Edmonton for Nanaimo. In addition to the move to Nanaimo, 1980 is the year Marshall McLuhan dies. In several ways, then, 1980 suggests itself as a landmark year and we look to it as a closing point for phase 2. Phase Three could be the period from 1980 to Wilfred’s death in 1998; phase 4, the early years, that is, 1911–51. Alternatively, we might opt for a “framing” third phase in which we combine the 1911–51 period with the 1980–98 period. Our assumption is that subsequent Editing Wilfred Watson project phases will be rethought as work on phase 1 draws to a close. With Sheila Watson’s archive, our projected phase 2 stretches from 1961, when Sheila teaches English as a sessional lecturer at the University of Alberta – a temporary appointment made tenure-track the following year – to 1980, when Sheila and Wilfred leave Edmonton for the coast (our rationale here is similar to that for Wilfred, above). For phase 3, we would like to “frame” phases 1 and 2 by filling in both the early years, 1909–49, and the late years, 1981–98; this enables us, among other things, to combine work on the composition of Deep Hollow Creek with its publication in 1992. Here again, while we felt the need to suggest subsequent phases, our assumption is that ensuing editing Sheila Watson project phases will be rethought as work on phase 1 draws to a close.

184  Paul Hjartarson, Harvey Quamen, Kristin Fast, and EMiC UA NOTES We could not have undertaken these projects without the support of Shirley Neuman, literary executor of the Wilfred Watson estate, and Fred Flahiff, literary executor of the Sheila Watson estate. Thank you. Heartfelt thanks are also due to Ernie Ingles, Mary-Jo Romaniuk, and Geoffrey Harder at the University of Alberta Libraries, and to Raymond Frogner, formerly of the University of Alberta Archives, now working in the ­British Columbia Archives; to Jonathan Bengtson and Gabrielle Earnshaw at the John M. Kelly Library; to Susan Brown, Mariana Paredes-Olea, and Jeff Antoniuk at CWRC; and to Dean Irvine, Matt Huculak, Meagan Timney, and Vanessa Lent at EMiC. Although we have taken the lead in writing this article, we are building on the work of other members of the EMiC UA collaboratory, including Rebecca Blakey, Matt Bouchard, Raymond Frogner, Andrea Hasenbank, Hannah McGregor, Joseph MacKinnon, Charlotte Nobles, Kristine Smitka, and Nick van Orden. 1 Wilfred Watson’s papers are held by the University of Alberta Archives; Sheila Watson’s, by Special Collections in the John M. Kelly Library at St Michael’s College, University of Toronto. 2 The most detailed study of Wilfred Watson’s relation to, and collaboration with, Marshall McLuhan is Tiessen’s “Shall I Say.” Tiessen dates Watson’s sustained engagement with McLuhan’s work from 1959, the year he began adapting The Mechanical Bride for the stage (116). 3 Sheila Watson’s letter concerning the “publisher’s blurb” appears not to be in either archive. Further research is needed. The “publisher’s blurb” in question may be “A Note from the Publisher,” which appears in the first edition and quotes F.M. Salter’s appreciation of the novel. On “A Note from the Publisher,” see the Flahiff biography (Always Someone 196–7). 4 An account of the genesis of The Double Hook appears in Flahiff’s Always Someone to Kill the Doves. See also his afterword to the New Canadian Library edition of the novel and Morriss (54–70). 5 Dating the composition of Cockcrow and the Gulls is still very much a work in progress. The start date derives from Wilfred’s comments in a letter to Sheila. In a discussion of his changing vision of a writer –prompted by T.S. Eliot’s response to poems Wilfred sent him – Watson writes, “As you know, from the first conception of Cockcrow, in the hut at UBC – where I made the first draft – a new vision was in conception or motion. F.C. [Friday’s Child] didn’t really express that vision, hence the cry about influences.” The letter is undated – the heading is simply “10417 Sask Dr./ Friday.” – but appears to have been written in 1959. Wilfred and Sheila

Editing the Wilfred Watson and Sheila Watson Archives  185  taught at UBC from 1949 to 1951, hence the tentative start date. That Wilfred took a draft of the script with him to Paris and worked on the play there is confirmed by entries in his journals. 6 The letters between Wilfred and Sheila represent one measure of the entanglement of the two collections. One might expect to find Sheila’s letters to Wilfred in his archive; his letters to Sheila, in her archive. While most of Wilfred’s letters to Sheila are held in his archive, some are to be found in hers. Sheila’s letters to Wilfred – many of which she destroyed – are held in both archives. This is just one measure – at an obvious and superficial level – of an inextricable relation that exists at many levels. 7 For more specifics on phase one for each writer, please see appendix A; for further phases of the project, please see appendix B). 8 The Wilfred Watson Fonds consists of 10.6 metres of textual records and related material. The finding aid is available online (see Pomahac). The Sheila Watson Fonds consists of 8.4 metres of textual records and related material. The finding aid is available online (see St Onge). 9 See Wilfred and Sheila Watson Collection. 10 Significant work is just beginning to appear. Gregory Betts’s Avant-Garde Canadian Literature analyzes the influence of Vorticism on Canadian writers such as Wilfred Watson. In addition to the article on Watson’s relation to Marshall McLuhan cited at the outset of this chapter, Paul Tiessen is at work on a book-length study of McLuhan and modernism in Canada that focuses in part on Wilfred’s writing. 11 This is not to say that all data in a database are made available to every user. Different users will have different levels of permission based on archival restrictions: documents will be made visible only to those people who have permission to access them. 12 Compare McGann, Radiant Textuality, particularly the chapter titled “Rethinking Textuality”; and Drucker, SpecLab, beginning with “From Digital Humanities to Speculative Computing.” 13 For a recent analysis of the changing relation between print and digital publication in trade publishing, see Thompson’s Merchants of Culture, chapter 9, “The Digital Revolution” (312–68). That analysis builds on his earlier Books in the Digital Age. 14 In 2005 the University of Alberta Press partnered with Text Analysis Portal for Research to produce the Atlas of Alberta Railways as a born digital publication. The press is also partnered with the SSHRC-funded Implementing New Knowledge Environments project, which likes to describe itself as “the future of the history of the book.”

8 Annotating Malcolm Lowry’s In Ballast to the White Sea patrick a. mccarthy and chris ackerley

1 Recently we collaborated on a scholarly edition of In Ballast to the White Sea, a previously unpublished novel by Malcolm Lowry (1909–57): Pat McCarthy (University of Miami) assumed responsibility for the text and introduction, Chris Ackerley (University of Otago) for the annotations. As we discovered, however, our roles as editor and annotator often overlapped – most obviously, perhaps, whenever annotations led to textual emendations. Moreover, compiling the annotations showed us how important Lowry’s reading was to the direction he took in this novel, even as the novel itself depicts his struggles with questions of influence and originality. Our work on In Ballast to the White Sea points to ways in which textual editing and annotation involve different but related forms of interpretation, this in turn leading to a consideration of how these activities influence subsequent acts of interpretation. In this chapter we will describe the nature of Lowry’s novel and the unusual editorial and interpretive challenges it poses.1 Lowry is best known as the author of Under the Volcano (1947), the only novel he published during his lifetime apart from an apprentice work, Ultramarine (1933). When he died, however, he left behind thousands of pages of notes and manuscripts for other works, including the unfinished novels Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid, La Mordida, and October Ferry to Gabriola; a collection of short stories, Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place; a novella originally entitled The Last Address, subsequently redrafted as Swinging the Maelstrom, and eventually published in an unsatisfactory composite edition as Lunar Caustic (1963); a filmscript based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender

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Is the Night; and many poems. In one form or another, virtually all of these works have now been published, in editions that have made crucial contributions to our understanding of Lowry’s achievement. Yet before we undertook this project no edition of In Ballast to the White Sea had been published, because for decades it was thought to have been lost. Lowry might have begun thinking about In Ballast around 1931, but he started working on it in earnest in 1933, after the publication of Ultramarine. His most concentrated phase of work on the manuscript began in 1934, the year when he married his first wife, Jan Gabrial, in Paris and followed her to New York. By fall 1936, when he and Jan embarked on a trip to Mexico that they hoped would salvage their marriage, Lowry had drafted seventeen of a projected twenty chapters of In Ballast and had taken extensive notes for the last three. Crucially for our project, Jan left a carbon copy of the typescript with her mother when they departed for Mexico, where Lowry’s drinking worsened and the marriage fell apart. During the trip, Lowry began to write Under the Volcano, on which he would focus for the next decade – first in Mexico, then in Los Angeles, and finally in British Columbia, where he married his second wife, Margerie Bonner, and eventually settled into a shack near Dollarton, across Burrard Inlet from Vancouver. On 7 June 1944 the shack caught fire and burned to the ground. Although most of Lowry’s papers, including the manuscript of Under the Volcano, were rescued, only a few pages of In Ballast survived the fire. Lowry, who had been divorced from Jan several years earlier and had broken off all contact with her, either forgot about the carbon copy they had left in New York in 1936 or, more likely, preferred to abandon the project and embrace the romantic tale of his tragically lost novel. In the latter case, one probable reason for dropping the project would have been that the political events of the 1930s, which were very much at the heart of the draft, had been impossibly complicated by the Second World War, so that the novel as conceived in the 1930s would already have been out of date. At any rate, for the rest of his life Lowry always maintained that In Ballast had been almost totally destroyed, and for over forty years after his death there was no evidence to the contrary. In 2000, however, in her memoir Inside the Volcano, Jan Gabrial revealed that a 1936 draft of the manuscript still existed (Gabrial 80, 196). A year later she died, leaving her papers, including typescripts for In Ballast to the White Sea and some relevant notes, to the Division of Manuscripts and Archives at the New York Public Library.2

188  Patrick A. McCarthy and Chris Ackerley

Our annotated edition of In Ballast is one of three related EMiC projects now completed by a team of Lowry scholars that also includes Vik Doyen (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven), Miguel Mota (University of British Columbia), and Paul Tiessen (Wilfrid Laurier University). The other projects are Doyen’s edition of Swinging the Maelstrom (along with the distinct earlier version, The Last Address), which appeared in 2013, and Mota and Tiessen’s edition of the first (1940) complete manuscript of Under the Volcano (2015). Each edition is annotated by Ackerley, the most recent in collaboration with David Large (University of Otago). Together, the three editions provide detailed evidence of Lowry’s intentions and achievement during the period 1936–44, a time of transition for Lowry when he worked simultaneously on three books that he imagined as a Dantean trilogy: Under the Volcano as the Inferno, Swinging the Maelstrom as the Purgatorio, and In Ballast to the White Sea as the Paradiso. It was one of the many ironies of his life that while Lowry’s Inferno led to widespread acclaim he was unable to publish his Purgatorio, and his Paradiso went up in flames.3 2 Oscar Wilde famously quipped that the Irish novelist George Moore never repeated the mistakes in his novels, since “the next time Moore will get it right. He conducts his education in public” (Hone 214). In a different sense, Lowry might also be said to have conducted his education in public – or would have done so had more of his works been published – for apart from his own experiences, the primary source for his writing was the multitude of books, stories, plays, poems, and articles that he read and referred to in his fiction. Lowry’s reliance on the printed words of others meant that his fiction tended to be allusive, much like, though to a greater degree than, that of many other modernist writers; unfortunately, however, his extensive use of allusions left him open to the charge that he was a derivative writer, even a plagiarist. The problem surfaced in the writing of Ultramarine, where the many literary allusions in the mind of the protagonist, Dana Hilliott, reflect not only Dana’s reading but Lowry’s as well. The most important of Lowry’s sources for Ultramarine were two then-recent novels, Conrad Aiken’s Blue Voyage (1927) and Nordahl Grieg’s Skibet gaar videre (1924), translated in 1927 as The Ship Sails On. Whereas the influence of Blue Voyage is evident principally in Lowry’s adoption of modernist techniques in Ultramarine, Grieg’s novel was such a strong influence on the

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structure, themes, and images of Ultramarine that Lowry came to imagine that not only his novel but also his life, including his experience at sea, had been already “written” by Grieg. One way Lowry dealt with his indebtedness to Grieg was to turn this experience into material for a second novel, In Ballast to the White Sea, whose autobiographical protagonist, Sigbjørn Tarnmoor, plans to write a novel based on his own experiences before discovering in his turn a similar novel, Skibets reise fra Kristiania [The ship’s voyage from Kristiania], by a Norwegian writer, William Erikson. By summer 1935 Lowry had written enough of In Ballast to have his agent, Harold Matson, send the manuscript to Burton Rascoe, an editor at Doubleday, along with a copy of Ultramarine that he hoped would generate interest in the new novel. Instead, Rascoe denounced Lowry as a plagiarist, claiming that “whole paragraphs” of Ultramarine were lifted from one of his own stories, “What Is Love?” The charge was false, as was Rascoe’s later claim that In Ballast was a plagiarism of Charles Morgan’s novel The Fountain: in reality, In Ballast and The Fountain are dissimilar in virtually every way, and so are Ultramarine and “What Is Love?,” apart from the fact that they make use of a stream-of-consciousness style somewhat like Virginia Woolf’s in Mrs Dalloway.4 Even so, as he revised In Ballast, Lowry tried (with mixed success) to make his allusions recognizable as such, and he continued to believe in the importance of this project. Once he began writing Under the Volcano, however, Lowry seems to have worked only sporadically on the earlier novel, and in any case there is no way now of gauging how much he revised the manuscript of In Ballast between 1936 and 1944. While the loss of any later changes is regrettable, the survival of the 1936 typescript, in whatever form, provides Lowry scholars with reason to celebrate, for it offers a clearer picture of Lowry’s mind at work in the pivotal year when he also wrote the first full draft of The Last Address and would soon begin writing Under the Volcano.5 3 Like Eliot’s The Waste Land, Joyce’s Ulysses, Pound’s Cantos, and many other canonical examples of literary modernism, Lowry’s writings invariably contain such a wide range of literary, historical, and cultural allusions that readers need annotations in order to follow their meanings (or, in some cases, even to recognize that they are allusions). The fact that Lowry scholarship calls for a book such as Ackerley and ­Clipper’s

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Companion is testimony to the densely allusive texture of Under the Volcano, and Lowry’s other works require equal attention to the sources and meanings of their details. Our experience has been that this is true of In Ballast to the White Sea to an extent that is probably unparalleled in modern literature, for the annotations have made a crucial difference to our understanding of the novel itself. Chapters of what might seem at first glance to be meandering and perhaps irrelevant political discussion, when read with an awareness of the contemporary political issues (the forthcoming Nazi threat to Norway, for instance), or with the details of psychology and sociology lifted from the little magazines that Lowry was reading quite literally as he wrote, invest the text of In Ballast with a sense of intellectual urgency most obviously to be found in Hermann Broch’s The Sleepwalkers and the political writings of Thomas Mann – a tradition of philosophical debate to which Lowry was attracted and to which this novel is indebted. Such a book has its own fascination when (through the agency of the annotations) it is more perfectly understood. In Ballast requires annotation for a number of reasons. Lowry’s text is firmly grounded in its time, the mid-1930s, and in specific locations, opening with scenes in Cambridge, England, and including detailed references to such places as the ninth hole of the Caldy Golf Course, known as “The Donga.” Having had some experience as a sailor, Lowry often introduced nautical terms into his dialogue and narration: “Forward, the carpenter was at the windlass; wire runners and hawsers were taken in; for some minutes there was confusion. Then the bight of the last hawser was thrown into the water by an unwilling shore gang and the Unsgaard backed away” (217). An example of the importance of precise nautical terms to the narrative arises in a scene set firmly on land when Sigbjørn and his father, Captain Tarnmoor, are driving through a dense fog. Suddenly, Captain Tarnmoor sees a bus coming at them and says, “Port your helm quick,” thereby nearly causing an accident, since Sigbjørn turns the wrong way – to the left, or port – whereas his father meant to turn right (164). The captain knows the difference between port and starboard, but under pressure he has reverted to an older convention, in use until not long before the novel’s action, under which “Port your helm” actually meant “Turn right.” Lowry prepares for this scene in chapter III when Sigbjørn’s brother, Tor, who is trying to understand the cause of a recent shipwreck, asks, “Doesn’t it seem to you, as a sailor, surprising that the bridge should say port and that the engineer should go starboard?” (25). As Chris Ackerley observes in his annotation to this passage, “Historically, orders were given in terms of

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the tiller, which, turned to port, moved the ship to starboard. Recent steering mechanisms were geared to turn the wheel as the ship; but ‘starboard your helm’ … still required the helmsman to turn the wheel to port” (268). Both at sea and on land, a command is misunderstood because the person who gives it and the one who acts on it are using different, and opposing, conventions. Further, the captain’s belated recognition of his error is dramatically complex, as it brings home to him, perhaps for the first time, his culpability as the owner of the ship that recently foundered, after a similar misunderstanding, for not having clarified to those working for him the ambiguity of the revised regulations. As the passage of time renders this scenario increasingly oblique, the annotations become more and more essential. The large number of Lowry’s borrowings from other books, including literary, philosophical, and historical references, greatly expands the number of annotations needed for an edition of In Ballast. Sometimes these borrowings are simply worked into the narration of the novel, as when Lowry took a passage from Hjalmar Bergman’s novel God’s Orchid – “In the morning light the streets appeared spotless and empty and the silence was complete. Only from the never slumbering railway station could be heard the furious snorting of the engines as they pushed the drowsy carriages along the rails” (Bergman 9) – and adapted it to his own purposes: “In the afternoon light of winter the streets appeared spotless and empty, but sun-haze swam on sun-haze among the walls and towers and terraces far beneath. A brawling wind carried from the railway station, which never slumbered, the racket of the acceleration of engines, shunting the drowsy carriages” (3). ­Nothing in Lowry’s passage signals that it is adapted from Bergman, and indeed we would not have known this either had Lowry not written ­“Hjalmar Bergman” next to the passage in one of his notebooks for In Ballast to the White Sea. Elsewhere, however, Lowry often works quotations into dialogue and includes signs that his character is q ­ uoting, as when ­Sigbjørn’s father signals his reference to Isaac D’Israeli’s Curiosities of Literature by saying, “Now: As D’Israeli remarks, nothing is so capable of disordering the intellect as an intense application to any one of these things: the quadrature of the circle; the multiplication of the cube; perpetual motion; the philosophical stone” (144). For the most part these quotations have been presented in the edition as they are in the typescript, apart from errors that seem to be unintended. Thus a character’s misquotation of the opening of Dante’s Inferno as Nel mezzo del cammin di nuestra vita, with Spanish nuestra instead of Italian nostra,

192  Patrick A. McCarthy and Chris Ackerley

will stand as (presumably) an intentional error, whereas what appear to be simply mistakes or typographical errors have been corrected. The choice of whether or not to emend is often a judgment call, but the decision arrived at derives not from a mechanical procedure but rather from a complex theory of editorial and annotative practice on which we will comment later. Like the quotations within the dialogue of the narrative itself, the chapter epigraphs provide keys to the reading that shaped Lowry’s novel. Only two chapters (VII, XVII) appear in the typescript without epigraphs, whereas the sixteen remaining chapters have a total of eighteen epigraphs, including quotations from canonical authors: Rilke (I), Auden (II, III), Kafka (X), Melville (XV), and Hawthorne (XVI). Other epigraphs come from the writings of W.H. Hudson (V, IX), Charles Fort (VI), Arthur Schnitzler (XI), P.D. Ouspensky (XII, XIII, XVIII), Johannes Jensen (XIV), Waldo Frank (XIV), and the yet-to-be-identified E.T. Brown (VIII). Oddly, while the authors of other quotations are listed in the typescript, the Ouspensky epigraphs are unattributed. Moreover, two other epigraphs are attributed to the wrong person(s): Ben Jonson gets credit for “Why this is hell, nor am I out of it,” Mephistopheles’s famous declaration in Marlowe’s Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (XVI), and in chapter IV a passage in which the English psychologist F.G. Crookshank said he would explain a phenomenon by using “the terminology of Messrs Ogden and Richards (in The Meaning of Meaning)” (Crookshank 16) is attributed to Ogden and Richards themselves. The proliferation of epigraphs in this unfinished novel indicates Lowry’s reliance on them as a means of setting up important narrative and thematic elements in the text and framing his novel within broader intellectual and cultural conversations of his time. Lowry’s citation of esoteric writers like Fort and Ouspensky might seem odd, and even when he quotes from more “mainstream” authors his sources are sometimes unexpected: for example, the Rilke quotation comes from The Tale of the Love and Death of Cornet Christopher Rilke rather than Duino Elegies or The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, and the source of the Auden quotations is unlikely to be recognized by most readers because they both derive from an early poem, “Get there if you can,” that Auden found unsatisfactory and withheld from all editions of his poems after 1933. Still, Lowry’s choices are always related to his own interests, which are at the same time spiritual (Ouspensky, Rilke), anti-scientific (Fort), and political. Auden’s “Get there if you can” is not his best poem of the 1930s, but its call for political action and rejection of those who sit on the sideline is

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clearly related to the discussions in chapters II and III of what Sigbjørn and his brother Tor call Dante’s “trimmers”: the people (and angels) in canto III of the Inferno who, having been neither good nor evil, can no more be admitted to hell proper than to purgatory or heaven. One of the underlying editorial principles followed in this edition is expressed concisely by G. Thomas Tanselle’s warning that, although even unpublished literary works normally should be edited as if they were intended for publication, “there are borderline cases: deciding, for instance, whether the manuscript of an unpublished novel is finished enough to serve as the basis for a critical edition or whether it is so rough and fragmentary that it must be regarded as a private paper” (Tanselle 17). Given that the basis of this edition is, ultimately, a revision of a manuscript that Lowry submitted to Doubleday – albeit with disastrous results – it would seem to fall into the first category, but the typescript is also clearly that of a work in progress, so a scholarly edition of the novel should avoid regularizing its features so extensively that it appears far more “finished” than it actually is. Lowry clearly changed his mind about how to represent dialogue, and in fact changed it more than once while working on In Ballast: in early chapters he introduces dialogue with dashes, but in later chapters he uses either British or American-style quotation marks, sometimes changing conventions in mid-chapter. This inconsistency is generally retained in the edition, except for obvious errors, for example, beginning a quotation with a double and concluding it with a single quotation mark. Likewise, for reasons of editorial principle, the erroneous attributions of epigraphs to Jonson and to Ogden and Richards have been retained in the text of the edition, with appropriate commentary in the textual notes, in recognition of the impossibility of producing a “definitive” edition of this work in progress. For the same reason, changes of phrasing in the epigraphs are normally recorded in textual notes rather than being corrected in the text itself.6 However, exceptions have been made when errors are clearly unintended and might lead to a misunderstanding of the text. An example is the Melville quotation used as epigraph for chapter XV, which in the typescript reads “Forehead to forehead I meet thee this time, Moby Dick!” The line in Moby Dick, however, is slightly different: “Forehead to forehead I meet thee, this third time, Moby Dick!” (ch. CXXXV). Since Lowry almost certainly chose this particular passage because of its emphasis on return or repetition, in order to set up the opening lines of the chapter that follow – “Once more a young face paused on the quays looking up at the ship. Once

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more Sigbjørn wondered: Is this your place on earth?” – the restoration of “third” adds a crucial element to the text. Earlier passages in the novel have implied a connection between Ahab’s obsessive search for the white whale and Sigbjørn’s travel to the White Sea; now, the emphasis on repetition in Ahab’s “this third time” and in Lowry’s own reiteration of “once more” underscores, and perhaps satirizes, that connection. Here and elsewhere, the decision to emend has been made on the basis of a wider consideration of the novel’s themes. 4 The example of the Melville epigraph illustrates the fact that scholarly editing is a form of (or a practice akin to) literary interpretation that requires attention to individual problems. A.E. Housman made the same point more colourfully when he compared textual critics to dogs hunting for fleas, on the grounds that fleas “require to be treated as individuals; and every problem which presents itself to the textual critic must be regarded as possibly unique” (Housman 1058–9). An emphasis on the individual problem is equally important in annotation, which in our understanding is based on a sense of validity, as articulated by E.D. Hirsch in his influential Validity in Interpretation (1967). While there are obvious problems with Hirsch’s “sensible belief” (Hirsch 1) that a text means what an author intends it to mean, his working assumption that “each interpretive problem requires its own distinct context of relevant knowledge” (vii) is the foundation of our approach. Broadly, this entails acceptance of Hirsch’s definition of the goal of interpretation as “consensus – the winning of firmly grounded agreement that one set of conclusions is more probable than others” (ix). This, crucially, is not to claim “truth” or “certainty” for any such affirmation, but rather probability, as any hypothesis (annotation) is at best provisional, to be replaced when another of greater explanatory power or elegance is advanced. The annotator’s aim, therefore, is twofold: first, to define the “interpretive problem,” and then to determine the “context of relevant knowledge” pertinent to that problem. Much more could be said about the hermeneutics and the phenomenology of this process,7 but reduced to pragmatic terms, the art (and science) of annotation offers a mode of procedure whereby a total understanding of text and context comes into play to define a context of knowledge relevant to the problem under consideration, one that will in turn initiate for the reader an act of interpretation.

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An example might prove instructive. Earlier in this chapter we noted the dramatic structure of the scene in which Captain Tarnmoor tells Sigbjørn, who is driving his car, to “port your helm quick”; Sigbjørn, working with a different understanding of what this instruction means, reacts instinctively and almost creates a greater disaster. The incident is crucial, because it brings home to the captain the similar ambiguity of an order that caused a ship to founder, and thus of his culpability in the incident. This afforded us with a splendid and essential commentary, one that clarifies the meaning of what to most readers would be otherwise an opaque scenario. And yet … there is a further complication, which we as editor and annotator cannot resolve: the instructions, as uttered by the captain, make better sense with respect to North America (driving on the right) than to England (driving on the left). Has the bus veered so far to its right that Sigbjørn must in turn swerve to his right and into the opposite lane; or was Lowry rewriting the U.K. Road Code for his presumed U.S. audience; or was he simply careless (this seems unlikely, given the precision of the instructions); or (perhaps) did Jan adjust matters to her understanding when she retyped the scene (the original typescript, for this episode, no longer exists)? If one trusts the text, the first explanation should be valid, offering greater visual and dramatic urgency; but (as other annotations reveal) Lowry, for all his fastidious attention to some details, could (and often did) overlook the more obvious contradictions of others; and there is evidence, at other points of the text, that Jan later made some changes on her own initiative. Our point is simply that, however valuable the annotation and however much it clarifies the textual meaning, any interpretation (however good) must of necessity be provisional and offered with appropriate humility. In a work in progress whose textual status is itself to some extent indeterminate, the importance and the limitations of interpretive annotations are especially apparent. What textual criticism and annotation can offer, however, is relevant information that might help the reader form the best interpretation currently possible in the light of such inevitable nescience. Several such acts of interpretation in our edition are provided by the introduction and especially by the explanatory annotations. As a small example of what we mean by arguing for the importance of the annotations to In Ballast we have selected an excerpt from the novel – the end of chapter I – for quotation and commentary. It is not a particularly dense section, and thus it requires fewer annotations than many other parts of the novel, but the relationship of these annotations to the text itself is typical of the book as a whole.

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In Ballast opens with the two brothers, Sigbjørn and Tor, on Castle Hill in Cambridge, England, opposite a prison and allegedly on the spot where “the last hanging on the mound” had taken place. In the course of the chapter there are several ominous references to hanging (Tor later commits suicide) and to other disasters, including one that has brought the brothers together: the sinking of a ship, the Thorstein, owned by their father’s company. Sigbjørn, who has been a sailor, now wants to be a writer and would like to begin with a novel about his experiences. Unfortunately, as he tells Tor, a Norwegian writer named Erikson “took the sea away from me.” Tor, who knows what he means – this has apparently been a subject of their conversations before – advises his brother to “get in touch with Erikson.” Sigbjørn has thought of making a voyage to Norway (where he and Tor were born, although they were raised in England) to meet Erikson and secure permission to adapt his novel as a play. The rest of the chapter, printed below with phrases to be annotated in boldface,8 occurs as the sun is setting. Earlier annotations will have discussed the significance of Castle Hill (once the site of a prison and gallows), the time of year (November, when a friend of Lowry at Cambridge committed suicide, an incident in which Lowry was, or believed himself to be, complicit), and such historic details as the “last hanged man” that might seem to require a note. The cumulative effect of these details and the specific references noted below is to “shadow” the immediate action and setting with intimations of the terrifying events to come. In the last light Sigbjørn said pointing: – Look, Tor, the way must have seemed easy and straight. Do you think that last hanged man saw the path stretched out before him, that although he knew his body would soon be swinging in the air … – His soul went marching,61 Tor began to laugh. – Yes, his soul still crept on, huddled, bent over his endless walks like the wandering Jew …62 – Perhaps like the man in the Tarot63 pack he was hanged upside down. An old-time penalty. He saw truth. – Or perhaps, he saw himself. – The singing slayer64 remained mirthful to the end, said Tor, it’s a fact. I read about him only yesterday in an American paper65 in London. You know if I went anywhere I’d go to America! – But what do you mean, singing slayer? Tor passed his hand over his hair.

Annotating Lowry’s In Ballast to the White Sea  197  – Nattily attired, his black hair glowing, meticulous in his preparations for death, etcetera … – Don’t be a damned fool! – As he sang, then prayed, he paid strict attention to details until he dropped through the trap; and as he stepped upon it – – Come along, we ought to go, Sigbjørn said impatiently. – And as he stepped upon it, Tor went on, and Tor executed a dance, he tested it with half a dozen light dancing steps … Tor was dancing gloomily, a kind of death jig,66 on the mound, slowly revolving, clods of dirt flying from his feet. – Tap-dance of death, he remarked. He stopped his dancing and with his stick freed the newspaper wrapped round the stake:67 now it floated away. For a moment, like a lost soul, the poor paper hovered uncertainly in the air, then it drifted away down the cold coast of the houses. Sigbjørn gathered his gown around him but still they both lingered waiting as the ship-boy on the masthead for the sun to sink. – Since the Thorstein went down, Sigbjørn said, I’ve had terrible dreams. I dream of a figure being hanged in the snow, the executioner’s fingers trembling, the death mask blowing away, it blows far away into the snow and the executioner stumbles after it. – Like a man looking for his soul, said Tor, and put on his black gown.68 – And the other night I dreamt of the sisters of Le Mans;69 one of them was hanged in an apple tree; her limbs were broken and the limbs of the apple tree were breaking. – Then there was Pink the poet, Tor said. I’m dead as I ever will be, he said, to Dr Styx70 on being cut down. – The murderer, who said, on Monday, on being led to the gallows: this week is beginning well.71 Now it was night. They laughed; what on earth gave rise to all this? Tor shuffled down the grass hill, laughing, digging his heels in the earth.72 Sigbjørn ran after him. (In Ballast 9–10)

What follow are Chris Ackerley’s annotations as they appear in the edition (251–3), beginning with the sixty-first note for the first chapter. In the typescript of the edition the overall extent of the annotations (roughly 1,700 annotations in 150 pages) led to compressed phrasing throughout, and to a system of cross-references used to avoid r­ epetition. Because so much of the material needed to be attributed, and for the sake of clarity, a distinction was made between single quotation marks

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for citations and double for quotations. The effect, in this brief selection, might occasionally seem to be cryptic, but with reference to the annotated whole, this difficulty should not be apparent. In this chapter we have adopted the following abbreviations and ­conventions: OF refers to Lowry’s novel, October Ferry to Gabriola. Citations of archival materials are preceded by either NYPL (for the Jan Gabrial Archive, New York Public Library) or UBC (for the Malcolm Lowry Archive, University of British Columbia). In the edition, annotations are numbered by chapter (in roman ­numerals) followed by note number (in arabic numerals). Cross-references to other annotations use the same system, with the annotation number p ­ receded by a number sign (#). I.61 His soul went marching: ‘John Brown’s Body’ lies “a-moldering in the grave,” but his soul goes “marching on.” I.62 wandering Jew: Ahaseurus, “Striker of Christ,” who for impiety (taunting the cross-bearing Christ) wanders the earth till Judgment Day. He appears in Maelstrom [10], and repeatedly in October Ferry (chapter XX is ‘The Wandering Jew’). I.63 Tarot: early drafts depict the last hanged man, his pathway North stretched before him. Ouspensky’s Symbolism of the Tarot (1913) describes Card XII: “a man in terrible suffering, hung from one leg, head downward … a man who saw Truth … In his own soul appears the gallows on which he hangs” [62]. Invoked later [#XVIII.65], and in Maelstrom [11]. I.64 singing slayer: Louis Kenneth Neu, hanged (1 Feb. 1935) in New Orleans for murdering Lawrence Shead (bludgeoned with an electric iron), a wealthy New Yorker, and Sheffield Clarke, a Nashville businessman. A last plea for commutation (syphilitic insanity) was denied. Neu wanted to be a singer, despite a history of mental illness. He sang during his incarceration, and composed a threnody: “I’m fit as a fiddle and ready to hang,” he chortled, dancing as the noose was slipped about his neck. His last words were, “Don’t muss my hair.” His appearance in the first draft dates its composition as 1935. I.65 American paper: Tor’s “London” source is probably the New York Times (2 Feb. 1935): “Nattily attired, his black hair almost glowing, the ‘singing slayer’ remained mirthful until the end. Meticulous in his preparations for death as he sang, then prayed, he paid strict attention to the details until he dropped through the trap. As he stepped upon the steel trap door, he tested it with half a dozen light dancing steps.”

Annotating Lowry’s In Ballast to the White Sea  199  I.66 death jig: a rigadoon, a Provençal dance, or battement de tambour marching culprits to punishment. Zola’s L’Assommoir (1877) depicts Coupeau’s death, dancing deliriously until he collapses after four days, his feet continuing a spastic rhythm. For Lowry, Drunkard’s Rigadoon denoted Charles Jackson’s The Lost Weekend (1944). I.67 wrapped round the stake: in Ultramarine [73], and ‘Goya the Obscure’ [278], a page from the Liverpool Express blows along the road: “It clings finally to a lamppost, like some ugly, cringing wraith.” I.68 black gown: of an executioner; in a first draft, Sigbjørn tells Tor: “you were the boy hanged in the snow.” Undergraduates in town had to wear gowns after dark [#II.13]. I.69 sisters of Le Mans: Christine and Lea Papin, reticent French maids, who murdered the wife and daughter of M. René Lancelin, a retired solicitor (2 Feb. 1933). Christine’s capital sentence was commuted to life; Lea received ten years [#III.153]. The case was argued as symbolizing the class struggle; it provoked Genet’s The Maids (1947). I.70 Pink the poet … Dr Styx: dream figures in E.A. Robinson’s long poem, Amaranth (1934). Pink is one who, lacking talent, wastes his life in art. When Amaranth gives this verdict, he accepts it lightly: “Excuse me,” he says, “while I go and hang myself” [21]. Dr Styx, of the Tavern of the Vanquished, accepts mediocrity yet lives contentedly in the wrong world. After Pink hangs himself from a rafter, his eyes open and lips move; when asked is he alive or dead, he replies: “I am as dead as I shall ever be, / … and that’s as near as a physician / Requires to know” [33]. Styx asks again [99], but Pink is not cut down. The interlude is fatidic: Tor goes but S ­ igbjørn remains, in the “wrong world.” Compare Julian Grant [#I.2]. I.71 beginning well: from Freud’s Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious (1922), exemplifying Galgenhumor [OF 49], “gallows humour.” I.72 digging his heels in the earth: as in a draft of ‘Sumptuous Armour’ [UBC 11:12 28], revised for ‘The Voyage that Never Ends’. Events would be retrospective (“All this takes place in memory at sea”), with the hockey match framed by “the hanging hill.” Cambridge events observed from Castle Hill [#I.2] might include this game.

These annotations, relatively few but highly significant, are indicative of Lowry’s wider method. Many details are echoed in his other writings, some (#I.62, #I.72) looking back to his first novel, Ultramarine, or to short stories published in literary magazines, others (#I.62, #I.63, #I.66) anticipating work to come. Particularly satisfying are the references (#I.62, #I.63) to Swinging the Maelstrom, which permit us to

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integrate our work on In Ballast with another volume in the Canadian Literature Collection, published by the University of Ottawa Press. These allusions to the “wandering Jew” and “Tarot pack” are typical of the esoteric interests always present in Lowry; others such as “the singing slayer” and the “sisters of Le Mans” show how the text was shaped by events that were occurring even as it was being written. The mention of “Julian Grant,” in this isolated context somewhat cryptic, is to Claude Houghton’s Julian Grant Loses His Way (1933), a novel that influenced Lowry deeply, and whose influence is explained in a previous annotation. References to “Pink the Poet” and “Dr Styx” (#I.70) are characteristic of Lowry’s allusive method (with secondary nuances that go far beyond mere citation), his wide reading, and his desire to work within and be part of the contemporary American writing scene. And the final note, looking back to an earlier echo and forward to a revision that did not eventuate, testifies to the way in which all the pieces of Lowry’s crazy quilt were meant to be woven into a seamless garment, or (to change the metaphor) to form part of a literary voyage that, in both poetical and literal terms, never ended. This small set of allusions illustrates an important quality of Lowry’s writing: his uncanny ability to invest the everyday and the ordinary (a newspaper blowing in the wind, an undergraduate’s black gown) with hints of the esoteric and the macabre (the stake, execution). Lowry’s fear of plagiarism and his traumatic experience with Burton Rascoe led him to go to extraordinary lengths to protect himself against charges of plagiarism, either by acknowledging or by concealing the sources of his borrowings. Fortunately for his annotators, as with the “London” version of the “American paper” that turns out to be the New York Times, Lowry often raised clouds of dust even as he tried to cover his tracks. The effects are sometimes uneven, and this early version of In Ballast lacks the years of constant revising and polishing that were needed to turn the not altogether dissimilar 1940 Under the Volcano into the poetical masterpiece published in 1947; but even in its rough state this 1936 typescript intimates the novel that might have been and suggests how, through echo and allusion, its poetry would have arisen.9 NOTES 1 The editorial problems posed by In Ballast are explored in greater detail in the introduction and textual notes for In Ballast to the White Sea: A Scholarly

Annotating Lowry’s In Ballast to the White Sea  201  Edition. The major problem is that only a small part of the 1936 typescript (or rather a photocopy thereof) is held at the New York Public Library, so most of the edition has been constructed from a typescript that Jan prepared in 1991, when she planned to publish the novel herself. What happened to the rest of the 1936 typescript is unknown. 2 The Jan Gabrial Papers (Division of Manuscripts and Archives, New York Public Library) includes four large boxes with letters, notebooks, photographs, and manuscripts from the time when Jan knew Lowry. Among the manuscripts are four chapters (I, II, IV, XII) from the 1936 typescript of In Ballast to the White Sea and two copies of a retyped version (with Jan’s revisions) from 1991, probably intended for publication. Among other items, there are also two letters by Lowry, one to Nordahl Grieg and the other to Julien Green, that apparently were never posted and have not been published, as well as a 1947 postcard that Jan wrote to Lowry but never sent, congratulating him on the publication of Under the Volcano and expressing hope that The Last Address and In Ballast to the White Sea would soon be published. The Malcolm Lowry Archive at the Department of Special Collections, University of British Columbia Main Library, includes two files (UBC 12:14 and 12:15) with material related to In Ballast. 12:14 has two composition notebooks with notes for In Ballast and an envelope with charred fragments rescued from the 1944 fire that consumed most of Lowry’s manuscript of the novel; 12:15 has pages 1–2 from the 1936 typescript (identical with those pages in the NYPL Jan Gabrial Papers except for minor changes in pencil) and, in a notebook, fifteen pages in Lowry’s hand of a 1935 draft of the first two chapters. Other holdings that are especially relevant to In Ballast include Lowry’s manuscripts for Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid, which include several fictionalized discussions of In Ballast (see especially UBC 9:5, 328–62) that are not included in the published text of the novel, and Lowry’s notes for revision of Lunar Caustic (UBC 15:12), from which we learn that his main character, a jazz musician now named the Earl of Thurstaston (adopted from a town on the Wirral in honour of Duke Ellington and Count Basie), would have shared Sigbjørn Tarnmoor’s fixation on a Scandinavian writer and his protagonist as well as his guilt over the suicide of another Cambridge student who, like Sigbjørn’s brother Tor, was based on Paul Fitte, a friend of Lowry’s at Cambridge. Fitte’s suicide is also recalled in October Ferry, where he is named Peter Cordwainer, and in Lowry’s manuscript for another unpublished work, “The Ordeal of Sigbjørn Wilderness” (UBC 22:19), where, as in Dark as the Grave, he is named Wensleydale.

202  Patrick A. McCarthy and Chris Ackerley 3 Lowry noted the irony in a 1951 letter to Clemens ten Holder, the German translator of Under the Volcano, when he wrote, “Unfortunately, or fortunately, for the bewhiskered notion, in its primary conception at least, the ‘Paradiso’ went up in flames with our house seven years ago.” He also noted that in 1944 he “hadn’t finished The Last Address save in a short version, though the ill-starred Paradiso was a Gargantuan meal for the flames indeed” (Sursum Corda! 2:356). (Here, Lowry refers to his Bellevue story “Swinging the Maelstrom” by its original title, “The Last Address,” whereas in other letters of the time he spoke of “Lunar Caustic.” He calls it a “a short version” because he was already dreaming of expanding it to book length.) To make the 1936 typescript version of In Ballast work as a Paradiso Lowry would have needed to develop considerably his proposed three final chapters, which nevertheless intimate the theme of redemption by love that would characterize much of the writing of his later Dollarton period. Some of those changes were outlined in two long letters of August 1951 to his friend and disciple David Markson (Sursum Corda! 2:411–32). Until recently, those letters have been our major source of information about the novel. 4 The Rascoe episode was discovered and thoroughly discussed by Vik Doyen in his doctoral thesis four decades ago (Doyen 46–7, 213–17). For other commentaries, see Bowker 192–4; Gabrial 79–80; and P. McCarthy 28–9, 220–1nn11, 12). The “whole paragraphs” that Rascoe claimed Lowry borrowed from “What Is Love?” consisted of two Latin quotations and an English passage that plays on lines from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Friendship” and Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. However, a further irony that has surfaced through the process of annotating In Ballast is that Rascoe might well have overlooked a passage that Lowry did in fact lift from one of his books, Titans of Literature. In chapter III of In Ballast, Sigbjørn quotes some lines from Dante’s Inferno in what his brother Tor calls “a terrible, lousy translation.” The lines in question derive from Jefferson Butler Fletcher’s translation of The Divine Comedy (Fletcher 13), which Rascoe chose for his quotations from Dante in Titans, including the one Sigbjørn recites (Rascoe, Titans 130). Rascoe might not have read far enough into the manuscript of In Ballast to notice the difference between his assessment of the translation and Tor’s; had he done so, however, the scene would have reinforced his negative opinion of Lowry. 5 One curiosity of this period, given Lowry’s consistent impulse to reuse material from one work to another, is how different In Ballast is from these other two works. There are occasional echoes of detail and phrasing, to be sure, yet In Ballast is in many respects a farewell to Lowry’s Old World, even as he was beginning to explore the New.

Annotating Lowry’s In Ballast to the White Sea  203  6 An example is the epigraph to chapter 1: “Perhaps we always nocturnally retrace the stretch we have won wearily in the summer sun,” which differs from its source (Rilke 11) in two respects: Lowry changes Rilke’s “foreign sun” to “summer sun” and does not end the sentence with a question mark. If Lowry worked directly with the translation, the first change might be attributed to eyeskip (“summer” appears twice in the next two lines of the translation) and the second to negligence. However, Lowry copied the same passage correctly into his notebook (UBC 12:14, Varsity Composition Book) but did not record the following sentences, with their references to summer. If he worked from his notebook (as seems most likely) when he wrote In Ballast, rather than from a book, then the substitution of “summer” for “foreign” cannot be attributed to eyeskip and must have been deliberate. In the edition, “summer sun” appears in the epigraph and the reason for retaining this variation on the Rilke passage is explained in the introduction and in a textual note. 7 For further detailed consideration of these matters, see Ackerley, “‘Distinct Context,’” which addresses a simple question: when one annotates something, one is presumably annotating some thing – but what is that “thing”? And how does the understanding of that “thing” as a virtual or phenomenological object translate itself into a pragmatic mode of inquiry? The problems explored and the principles articulated in this chapter not only express a complex theory of annotation but also underline at every point the annotations in this edition of In Ballast. 8 In Ballast 9–10. The text is presented here as edited from manuscripts in the Jan Gabrial Papers (NYPL 3:1, ch. 1). 9 For their advice and assistance, both on this chapter and on the edition, we are grateful to our EMiC associates Vik Doyen, Miguel Mota, and Paul Tiessen.

9  Editing a Legend: George Whalley michael john disanto

I do not know these men Who swim stricken in the broken sea They are not my shipmates Yet they call out to me and I cannot deny them. George Whalley, unpublished MS

There is a legend of George Whalley. It began when a Halifax newspaper, in early June 1941, published the headline “HALIFAX WAR HERO Rescues Three When Destroyer Sinks” above a striking photo of Whalley in his naval uniform and a very brief article summarizing his ­bravery at sea.1 As with any story told many times over, ­different ­versions have evolved. To the best of my knowledge, this is the basic truth of what happened. On 27 May 1941, Whalley was serving on a Royal Navy destroyer, the HMS Tartar, during the pursuit and s­ inking of the German battleship Bismarck. The next day, the Tartar and a sister ship, the HMS Mashona, both low on fuel, were sailing back to port when they came under heavy and repeated German air attacks. The Mashona was bombed and sinking, leaving many survivors in the water. Whalley saved one man by diving into the water, without a life jacket but with a line, and pulling him back to the Tartar.2 There were two other seamen he could not save: one was already dead when he arrived, and the other died before Whalley could pull him back to the ship. For saving a life at sea, Whalley was awarded a Royal Humane Society Bronze Medal.3 Less known is that, following these events, Whalley was transferred to the Admiralty in London and served as a secret intelligence agent in the Naval Intelligence Division, where he planned and implemented

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clandestine operations to Belgium, France, Holland, and Norway. He tested and designed surfboats used to land Allied agents in Europe and, at the same period, designed an acoustic beacon – the FH 830 – used for pinpoint navigation of the Allied ships during the Sicily landing in 1943 and the Normandy landing in 1944 (Smyth 91). Though the truth of these matters is now coming into better focus, glimpses into his life at war are in the details of his poems in No Man an Island (1948). “Gunboat Sortie” tells of one of his missions for the Deputy Director Operations Division (irregular), landing and retrieving other agents on the coast of France. “Counterpart” recalls evenings playing music in a ballroom with others with whom he lived in Cheyne Walk, sometimes while the bombs fell on London. “World’s End” recounts an occasion when he rescued survivors from buildings damaged by German bomber attacks. “Initial Assault – Sicily” names some of the places he visited in 1943 while he served on the staff of Admiral Bertram Ramsey in the Middle East.4 These experiences are also inscribed in his war and post-war writings as he reflects on the terrors of the sea, the harrowing experience of solitude, and an intimacy with death. They maintain a more or less shadowy presence in the writings of later years. The legend grew when Whalley returned to Canada towards the end of the war. During the final months, he served as the first lieutenant on two Royal Canadian Navy destroyers, the HMCS Chaudière and the HMCS Saskatchewan, and then joined the faculty at Bishop’s University in 1945 and stayed until 1948. In 1950, after completing his doctorate at King’s College, London, he joined the faculty at Queen’s University, remaining there until his retirement in 1980. During his life in Kingston, Whalley gained prominence in the city and nationally. On campus he earned a reputation for his lectures and the famous silences with which they were punctuated. In the city his work commanding the HMCS Cataraqui, until 1956, and his talents as an accomplished amateur musician and as the president of the Kingston Symphony, from 1963 to 1970, were widely recognized. His CBC broadcasts and radio dramas were heard by many across the nation. His Coleridge scholarship made him a significant figure in his field, and his eloquence in writing and speaking about the value of the humanities made him important in the academy and beyond it. Trying to attain a comprehensive understanding of Whalley’s extraordinary life and gain a sure grasp on his extensive works are demanding tasks. An additional consideration is how best to make his story and his works available to others by using technology new and old. In print

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there will be new collections of his poems and essays and the edition of unpublished wartime letters, all of which I will edit, as well as a biography I will write. These can do much to bring renewed attention to Whalley, but there are other materials, including audio recordings, that are an important part of his legacy and ought to be published. The George Whalley website, which Robin Isard (systems librarian at Algoma University) has built, is an important counterpart to the books. Published in 2012 and refreshed in 2014, with many small steps in iterative development taking place in the background, the site is an attempt to grapple with two interrelated problems: how to organize the overwhelming amount of material stored in archives and held privately that I am collecting in the form of digital images and recordings; and how to present some of that material to the public over the next several years. The site is Janus-faced: one side is open to the world and the other is accessible only to those working with me. The public side already has a sampling of Whalley’s writings, recordings, and photographs of him, along with a comprehensive bibliography and a concise timeline of his life. On the obverse side is a database, which Robin Isard originally built for the Algoma University Archives and the Shingwauk Residential School Centre and then modified for my use. He reconfigured the data structures of the Drupal content-management system and tailored them to the Rules for Archival Description (the Canadian national standard for archival description) and its flexible metadata framework. This allows for the description of the wide range of objects (such as rings, medals, books, record albums, newspaper clippings, letters, et cetera) encompassed by my study.5 The present intention is for the website to develop in several specific ways. An interface, described later in this chapter, will be introduced to draw on and present the contents of the database.6 They are the foundation for a digital edition that will initially be built around a selection of manuscripts and typescripts and then expanded gradually. The range of Whalley’s works, both previously published and unpublished, will be expanded. A critical commentary, in the form of editorial notes and longer essays, will illuminate different aspects of his life and works. And the timeline will eventually become a central organizing structure: letters, manuscripts, documents, newspaper articles, et cetera, will have entries in the timeline, and a link from the database record will summon the image it describes. When the biography is published, readers who wish to see the evidence will see much of it through the site. And those who wish to make their own inquiries will have a central location to search.

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My study of Whalley is biographical and critical, and the purpose of the website is to bring more recognition to his legacy, embodied largely in his writings, but also, for example, in his radio recordings. Like his contemporaries, Whalley saw the written word has having a life of its own apart from the writer, and yet he also argued that persons rather than words mean, and that writers disclose themselves in their works. It is important to see Whalley’s works and his life are mutually illuminating. Consider for a moment the recordings of Whalley reading poems by John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and W.B. Yeats.7 The voice for which Whalley was famous – according to those who knew him it was central to who he was, to his presence in their lives – can be heard by those of us who did not meet the man. The readings are profoundly effective, and once heard inspire insights into the poems. But the meaningfulness of Whalley choosing to read poems by those writers, and the personal attachment he had to the individual pieces, cannot be understood until the recordings are considered in the light of other parts of his life. At least for Donne and Hopkins, some of why they mattered to Whalley will become clear in what follows. With the hope of catching something of the quality of the man, I intend to follow his understanding of inquiry as a “heuristic process that finds as it goes not only what it thinks it is looking for but also the way of looking” (“Introduction” 2). This heuristic process encompasses the writing of the biography, the editing of the texts, and the making of the website. In the future, perhaps after several iterations, the site will be shaped differently in light of finding a way of looking, which will inform a way of showing, revealing, and publishing Whalley. What might appear to some as two discreet tasks – building the database and an interface to show the materials in it, and telling Whalley’s story – are for me different aspects of one pursuit. In it there are (at least) three simultaneous movements in time: the number of digital objects in the database is growing; my knowledge of his person is expanding as his otherness is illuminated; and a story is shaping itself and giving shape to the significance of the digital objects. In the following pages, the brief glimpses into Whalley’s life, seen through his published and unpublished writings, distill some inferences I have made from materials informing the making of the print and digital editions of Whalley's poems, which have been the centre of my work. Focusing on what Whalley wrote between 1940 and 1950, from the time he went to war to when he arrived at Queen’s University, one can begin to discern threads that extend back to his childhood and

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forward into his later life. A wealth of documents in Queen’s University Archives, Victoria University Archives (Toronto), McMaster University Archives, and held by the Whalley family is extant from this period, and much of that material – letters, poetry manuscripts and typescripts, essays, diaries, and more – has already been digitized and put into the database. The largest part of his poems, over two-thirds, was written in these years. His reading, writing, and living, when seen together as a whole, make a foundation upon which to build our knowledge of the man and his thought. Though always a voluminous correspondent, in this decade Whalley launched into a life of writing that continued almost uninterrupted until his death in 1983. The works he produced in the 1940s offer one way to understand his place in Canadian modernism.8 Some care is necessary when trying to tackle Whalley’s relationship to the literary and intellectual atmosphere of the middle of the century in Canada. That Whalley spent the better part of nearly fifteen years, from 1936 to 1950, in England – as a Rhodes scholar, a naval officer, and a PhD student – is an important fact in understanding his life and thought. But leaving this aside, one important reason for caution is Whalley’s profound distrust of the categories into which literature is compartmentalized. For him, literary inquiries were a “question whether it was in fact possible to investigate another mind without simply finding there the patterns of what one wanted to find” (“On Editing” 91). In his master’s thesis from Bishop’s University, entitled “A Critique of Criticism” and completed in 1948, his doubts about categories led him to argue that “from certain points of view those distinctions merge and disappear” (24). In an article published the same year he said, “It is never safe to generalize about literary periods or even about individual poets” (“Metaphysical” 434). “To classify” is both insufficient and dangerous, because it “does not go deep enough, it establishes external distinctions that conceal the larger issue of judging poems at their roots” (435). Instead of taxonomies he focuses on quality, thinking “that the superlative romantic poem would be indistinguishable from the superlative classical poem” because “what matters is not the category into which a poem falls but the excellence of the poem in terms of poetry” (“Literary Romanticism” 240).9 Confronting the question of categories, Whalley’s resistance is strong and his distrust is deep. T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and W.B. Yeats mattered to many Canadian writers, and they were influential in the early development of Whalley’s thought. He read them throughout the war, and Yeats remained a touchstone for him in later years. Another writer who figured prominently in the modernist endeavour was also very important to

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Whalley: John Donne. In “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921) Eliot links the sensibility of modern poetry with Donne and his contemporaries. Following Eliot’s lead, Whalley explores prominent trends in early twentieth-­century poetry in an essay that echoes his predecessor’s title: “The Metaphysical Revival” (1948). Contemplating both the reasons for and the dangers of choosing Donne as a source for modernist writers, Whalley counters Eliot’s dictum – “the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates” (“Tradition” 41) – to establish a different understanding of the relationship between poets and their art. Whalley argues that “the end of poetry is pleasure, but its beginning is suffering. There is human significance in the force that changes the person who suffers into the person who creates” (“Metaphysical” 443). As someone “who took death seriously,” Donne was important to Whalley because he shared this quality (“Address” 69). Donne’s poem “No Man Is an Island” inspired the title of Whalley’s collection No Man an Island and provided the epigraph for the volume, which closes with the words “any man’s death diminishes me, / because I am involved in mankind” (No Man ii). The epigraph of the preface to Poetic Process (1953) is a passage from Donne’s letter to Henry Goodyer in September 1608: “When I must shipwreck, I would do it in a Sea, where mine impotencie might have some excuse; not in a sullen weedy lake, where I could not have so much as exercise for my swimming” (quoted from Poetic Process ix). The two sentences in Donne’s letter leading up to this passage help to illuminate the significance of it for Whalley: “I would not that death should take me asleep. I would not have him merely seize me, and only declare me to be dead, but win me, and overcome me” (Donne 35). When Whalley sat for Elizabeth Harrison’s portrait of him in 1955, which now hangs in the George Whalley room in Watson Hall at Queen’s University, he held in his hand a copy of Donne’s poems.10 From Donne, Coleridge, and others, Whalley inherited an instinct to confront and explore the harrowing experience of solitude in narratives about memory and the failure of making meaningful contact with others in telling and listening to stories. Suffering, along with solitude and death, shadow Whalley’s thinking. The contribution to Canadian modernism made by Whalley is centred here: his writings of this important period pivot on this point. Later publications, The Legend of John Hornby (1962), Death in the Barren Ground: The Diary of Edgar Christian (1980), and Aristotle’s Poetics (1997), are all connected with his profound interest in tragedy and his keen awareness of the proximity of death.11

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Two autobiographical fragments, one published, that pertain to death give shape to important and lasting memories. The contents of a file in Whalley’s private papers show that he had formed an intention to write an autobiography.12 On some of the pages he listed names of people and significant events, as if he were noting persons and times that must be included in the book. While there is no general outline, it appears he made starts at writing his life, though when he did this is not yet clear.13 Reflecting on the presence of death in his life more or less episodically, he identifies his earliest memory in a childhood moment of seeing a dead animal while walking through a field with his mother. Another example, taken from among many, is a passage in the essay “Horses and Kings,” in which Whalley writes of an early memory involving his father: “One Sunday evening as we came back towards Brockville, we passed near a rowing boat with two men at the oars, and I could see that in the stern of the boat was the body of a drowned man under a tarpaulin” (19).14 That his early or earliest memories of his parents both involve death is surely meaningful, indicating something about the things that remained strongly marked in his remembrances. What place and significance Whalley might have given his heroic leap into the Atlantic in telling the story of his life is a question that cannot now be answered. According to Elizabeth Whalley, George did not speak about the rescue, not while they courted, after their marriage, or when they returned to Canada. In his two eyewitness accounts of the Bismarck action, one the magnificent seven-part poem “Battle Pattern” published in No Man an Island, the other a striking letter-essay written in 1941 and published as “The Sinking of the Bismarck” in the Atlantic Monthly in July 1960, Whalley mentions the bombing of the Mashona, with a very compressed representation in the poem and more detail in the letter-essay, but he does not say anything of his experience of jumping into the ocean and saving a life. In a letter to Major General Christopher Tyler in 2000, Elizabeth Whalley wrote, “[George] could never speak about this time and he felt he had failed in not saving all the seamen” (1). Whalley’s reticence can be only partly explained by his refusal to discuss details of his military service on the grounds that the information remained classified (Pulver 5). Elizabeth Whalley’s comment indicates that the experience remained with Whalley for the rest of his life and reinforces the truth of Michael Moore’s identification of Whalley as a “sufferer in secret” (8). The secrecy and the silence were not absolute, though a preference towards forgetting or remaining silent about some things is seen in the poems.

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In telling the life of a person, “the only things that matter,” according to Whalley, “cannot be fully known or categorically stated; they can only be allowed to come before our attention in their full complexity and in their just simplicity” (“Notes” 616–17). Reading Whalley’s poems in this spirit allows one to avoid making the mistake of thinking that his “poems are clearly adjunctive to his life, not central to it” (McCarthy 79). When published, the print edition of The Complete Poems of George ­Whalley and a digital edition of manuscripts and typescripts, letters, and other documents will be opportunities to discern the “things that matter” to Whalley. His life will emerge, not in its “full complexity” and “just simplicity,” but at least in some of its meaningful rhythms and quotidian habits. While Whalley didn’t write his story in an organized narrative, he did write fragments of his life over many years, revealing glimpses of himself in letters, poems, essays, radio scripts, and elsewhere. These writings are so many windows and apertures, if one can adapt Henry James’s ideas about the work of the artist to the task of the biographer, into and out of Whalley’s being.15 Important biographical inferences can be made in looking over Whalley’s shoulder, via the digital images, as we see how he composes and how he corresponds with readers, editors, and others about his work. One insight that emerges is that the reflections on memory and the memories themselves that abound in his works of the 1940s are written out of Whalley’s living and reveal an aspect of his being. Lines here and there in No Man an Island insist on the play between remembering and forgetting as central preoccupations during and immediately after the war. A stranger’s imminent death, during a search for survivors following one of the bombings of London, prompts the remark “And all will be forgotten / because we never can bring ourselves to say / exactly what passed there” (“World’s” 96–8). Elsewhere he writes, “We see and hear. And we remember. / But there is no atonement” (“Normandy” 28–9), and insists, “It would do you little good / to know what I think and feel” (48–9). One hears an echo of Nietzsche’s numerous warnings that some things are better not known and Coleridge’s cautions in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” that imply the listener may be forever marked by the story inflicted on him by the teller. The silence was broken, if only momentarily, more than once. In 1980, when David Pulver, a reporter for the Kingston Whig-Standard newspaper, asked about the Royal Humane Society Bronze Medal, Whalley’s reply was brief and an attempt to minimize the importance of his action in concluding, “It was a matter of trying to get them on board before

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the bombing resumed” (5). We find a much different perspective on the event in “Behind the Victory,” a poem Whalley drafted in Chelsea eighteen months after the event on 21 November 1942 and revised in Granville on 29 March 1945.16 It brings us closer to his thoughts at the time and reveals what John Baxter characterizes as “the reality of a desire for death” (497). In the second stanza Whalley recalls fighting the strong desire to slip, like the other two, into the gentle warmth and voluptuous emptiness of everlasting sleep. (12–16)

and in the third stanza he thinks “of men who preferred to die, / of wounds revealed in the sea, / and brown wide sightless eyes” (22–4).17 This was one of the eight poems in Poems 1939–1944 (1946) not reprinted in No Man an Island two years later. Of the group of excluded poems, Baxter questions why Whalley “decided to leave them out … since they have several affinities in both style and theme” (497). At least in relation to “Behind the Victory,” John Ferns is right to suggest that it was excluded because it is “too personal” in revealing “the temptation to death in the cold water.” Evidence in the private papers corroborates Ferns’s speculation and also leads to new insights into Whalley’s life and thought during the war. One of the most important items in the private papers is a small black naval logbook Whalley used as a diary. On 28 May 1941, one day after his act of heroism, he wrote, “Swam for 3 – 1 dead when arrived – of other 2, 1 managed to clutch rope only to die a few moments later. Eyes open & fixed yellow-brown, salt-water bubbling from mouth, head often under water. Had to abandon 1 – reached ship side but great difficulty getting man up – exhausted. Left dead man – floated away – his arm badly wounded several deep gashes.”18 Both the poem and the log book do not focus on the man Whalley saved, but on the two he could not save, on the failure rather than the success. The language of “Behind the Victory” draws on the journal entry: the phrase “other two” is repeated, and the line “brown wide sightless eyes” is a variation of the earlier phrasing in the logbook. Some other poems also give a glimpse into the way in which death was a marked preoccupation in Whalley’s thoughts at the time. The use of Lazarus in two poems can be read in light of Whalley’s leap into the sea and the close encounter with death. How close

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Whalley came to death will never be known, but the “aloneness” (23) that results as a consequence of a near-death experience after a return to life is signalled in the last stanza of “Wheat” – drafted in Alexandria on 11 May 1943 – where Whalley writes of Lazarus “as he moved among his fellows, / alien and unfamiliar” (25–6). The return to Lazarus in a poem years later, after seeing Jacob Epstein’s sculpture named Lazarus, which is in New College Chapel, Oxford, suggests that the figure, and the thought associated with it, had long-time significance for Whalley. The language of the opening stanza of “Lazarus” draws together the resurrected man and the sea: Lazarus’s neck is “arched back / Like a frozen wave” (7–8), and the women who find him, Mary and Martha, are “rocking to and fro / Like bladderwrack in an indolent undertow” (9–10). The resurrection resembles a struggle to escape the sea: “Out of this undertow he claws his way / To a bitter breach of consciousness” (30–1). Whalley returns to the subject repeatedly. He revised “A Smile and a Nod” – first drafted in Freiburg im Breisgau in 1937 – in Sydney from 27 May to 1 June 1945. This is the same time he was working on “Battle Pattern” and making meaning of the Bismarck action: Death, at our first casual meeting, smiled at me and turned away. He had a very pleasing grace. I was not glad to see him go. Now, when we meet, we nod and take our several ways without imposing upon our chance acquaintanceship. I am content it should be so. (1–8)

In its “poised attitude of resignation in which death, while recognized, is neither repelled nor desired,” the poem might be read as an oblique reflection on Whalley’s brush with death (Baxter 497). Whatever meaning the poem had for Whalley when he wrote it before the war, it was surely different when he revised it afterwards. The first drafts of “Battle Pattern” were written on the Tartar on 4 June 1941 – within a week of Whalley’s heroic action – and in Sydney, Nova Scotia, on 26 May 1945 and in Quebec on 20 June 1945.19 Letters to and from E.J. Pratt between 1 July and 6 August 1945 regarding “Battle ­Pattern” reveal that Whalley sought advice from a writer whose poems

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about the sea he admired. Though in a 27 July 1945 letter Pratt told ­Whalley to expand the role of the sub-lieutenant – Whalley’s rank while serving on the Tartar – in the poem, Whalley decided to do the opposite by replacing the last section, the longest in which the figure is present. In the published “Finale” – the typescript copy is dated 25–30 June 1946 – Whalley focuses on the ocean floor where the ships and seamen share their final resting place. The earlier version of the final section could hardly be more different, replacing the impersonal view of the scattered remains of the war with a concentrated scene of the sub-lieutenant alone “sitting in his cabin” (Battle Pattern 282) while “the June sunlight streams through the two open scuttles” (283). He hears the sounds of singing and of a dance band playing; and he remembers that all his shipmates are busily holding at arms’ length what is better not thought upon. (289–92)

He “closes the cabin door / and puts a record on the gramophone” (293–4) and while listening to “a Bach chorale” (295), which “floods through the cabin, drowning / all but the sunlight” (298–9), “slowly his head drops forward into his hands / And his shoulders shake with sobbing” (311–12). This fragment, mixing autobiography and fiction, records something of Whalley’s feelings after the Bismarck action and his plunge into the ocean. Evidence throughout his manuscripts and typescripts reinforces the impression that Whalley thought much about death and the “affair of drowning,” to use a phrase found in the first line of an untitled poem dated 9 February 1952. In “Five Years,” a poem last revised on 25 June 1945, he writes of “the whole pitiful sordor and indignity of violent death” (4). The 15 April 1946 manuscript entitled “Death by Drowning” tells a story of the reckless play of the speaker and a friend in crashing waves while spectators watch in horror from the shore. No one dies, though one is nearly drowned. Death and the sea remain living presences for him in a way that echoes and resonates with the inheritance he received from the previous generations of writers he read and contemplated. One learns this looking over Whalley’s shoulder as he writes, and then one’s way of looking changes, both colouring and being coloured by the process of discovery. According to his friend Kathleen Coburn, the general editor of the collected writings of Coleridge to which Whalley contributed volumes

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of Coleridge’s marginalia, Whalley “spent many hours on the bridges of destroyers thinking about poems, and the poets that made them” (Pursuit 88). He kept a substantial record of the authors and books he had with him. Among the private papers is a red leather-bound hardcover notebook, with Whalley’s name followed by “College Oriel Oxford 1938” written on the first page. The dates in the book show that Whalley used it during the war to record passages from authors he was reading, including Fyodor Dostoevsky, Roger Fry, Eric Gill, Thomas Hardy, Herbert Read, George Santayana, Edith Sitwell, Leo Tolstoy, W.B. Yeats, and many others. Most relevant here are the several passages transcribed from Joseph Conrad’s autobiographical work Mirror of the Sea, his stories “End of the Tether” and “Youth,” and the novella Heart of Darkness. It is meaningful that they arrested Whalley’s attention, and they can be read as if they reflect or express aspects of his feelings at the time. Of the eight passages from Heart of Darkness, all of them are directly relevant, but only one will be reproduced here. Given what has already been said, the meaningfulness of the following passage he transcribed at length requires no comment: “I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest that you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid skepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary” (178). That Whalley was reading and transcribing Conrad at this important time in his life suggests that he found much to ponder in relation to his experience of the sea, death, and solitude – the feeling of being “alien and unfamiliar.” Judging by what he recorded, Whalley was drawn to passages that connected with his experience, finding in them a language in which to think and reflect. Whalley’s style is not like Conrad’s – each has a different mastery of prose – but the writers share a strong sense of the importance of the spoken word, and both of them transfigure troubling experiences and rework memories in the act of shaping their meanings in writing.20 Conrad remained important to Whalley to the end of his life, though one could not arrive at this conclusion by reading Whalley’s list of publications.21 When I mentioned to Emily Whalley that her father had recorded passages from Heart of Darkness in the logbook, she told me that he asked her to read Conrad’s story to him when he was dying.

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A short story – a fragment of fictionalized autobiography – entitled “We Are for the Dark: Fragments of a Biographical Reverie” (1946) recalls Marlow’s alienating encounter with a bureaucracy (but does not reproduce the structure or style of Conrad’s narrative). Acting SubLieutenant Julian Penworthy feels alienated in London and isolated in the intelligence office. At the end of the tale Penworthy is in a park and watches a cormorant, a seabird, with which he identifies. They are both “solitary unhappy figures” and “seafaring” types (7). It is clear throughout that Penworthy regrets his assignment to the Naval Intelligence Division and wishes to return to sea. Letters from that period corroborate this was true for Whalley. Writing to his sister Cecilia on 21 July 1941, shortly after learning of his transfer to naval intelligence, he was “disgusted with being put on the beach with an office job” (1). When the intelligence work ended, he wrote to his mother, Dorothy Whalley, on 10 May 1944, declaring, “I feel like a new person now that I have got back to ship again,” and “there is a feeling of honesty that makes the other work seem now pretentious and superficial” (1). Drawing attention to this story is necessary because of its connection with Whalley’s essay “The Mariner and the Albatross” (1947). A comment from the essay linking the writer to his character can be used as a gloss on the story: “Not only are the Mariner’s spiritual and emotional experiences similar to, if not identical with, those we know Coleridge to have suffered, but there is rather more than a hint that the drawing of the Mariner is a self-portrait” (23–4). The essay was published one year after the story, and they were composed at about the same time as the writing and revising of at least some of the poems for No Man an Island. They both focus on what Whalley calls “aloneness” (18), and it is surely important that he thought of the Mariner as one who “returned from the dead, Lazarus-fashion” (23). In the essay, Whalley identifies himself as one of the “sympathetic reader[s]” who are “totally possessed with [the poem]” after reading it (15). The argument Whalley makes is that Coleridge’s “inner life” is revealed in the poem and that the Albatross has “profound personal significance for the poet,” much like the significance of the cormorant for Penworthy (16). Verbal echoes indicate a triple identification of Penworthy, the cormorant, and Coleridge. The connection of the cormorant with Coleridge is clear when Whalley says that the poet was “reading ‘like a cormorant’” before writing the “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (24).22 In the story, “Penworthy is by instinct a symbolist” (7), and in the Mariner essay “Coleridge was a confirmed symbolist” (29).

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Whalley’s reading of the poem, which emphasizes the poet’s identification with the character in a shared sense of loneliness and guilt, makes the poem a “personal allegory,” because “it is an unconscious projection of Coleridge’s early sufferings” (33). Along the same lines, one can use a passage from the essay that comments on Coleridge’s identification with the Mariner to suggest that the essay itself “is a projection of [Whalley’s] own suffering, of his sense of personal danger … his perplexity,” and he “projected himself unconsciously into the poem by the intensity with which he imaginatively experienced the Mariner’s situation” (27). Viewing the published and unpublished and writings together illuminates an important place where different threads intersect. Arguably, Whalley’s interest in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and Heart of Darkness can be located in the preoccupation with telling that he shares with Coleridge and Conrad. The Mariner and Marlow, and the writers who made them, have a need to tell their stories and to find audiences to hear them. This connects back to the passages in which Whalley thinks that “we never can bring ourselves to say / exactly what passed here” (“World’s” 97–8). Painful remembrances recur and demand to be told, but neither the Mariner nor Marlow finds relief in the telling. The failure to get the story right, to make themselves understood, to connect with another person, to quiet the pain of knowing – all of these together ensure the act is repeated and the long-sought release is perpetually postponed. To say what passed is to relive the remembrance, but, as Whalley predicted, “there is no atonement” (“Normandy” 29). The sense of these failures, in combination with Whalley’s selfimposed guilt in not saving all of the seaman, is connected with his profound response to the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Received as modern rather than Victorian when published in 1918, Hopkins inscribes in his poems, especially the so-called terrible sonnets, a frightful knowledge of a “tormented mind tormenting yet” (“My own” 4). One of the four epigraphs for Poetic Process is from Hopkins: “O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap / May who ne’er hung there” (qtd in Poetic Process, vii).23 To hear Whalley reading one of his favourite poems, Hopkins’s “Wreck of the Deutschland,” is to understand his intimate feeling for the dangers of the sea and to sense the immediacy of his knowledge.24 Whatever else the poem meant to Whalley, the sixteenth stanza surely had great significance for him: Hopkins writes of a man who “stirred from the rigging to save / The wild woman-kind below”

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(121–2) but “was pitched to his death at a blow, / For all his dreadnought breast and braids of thew” (124–5). Unlike the man with the “dreadnought breast,” Whalley returned from his leap into the sea to live with his memory of the event and in a state of solitude. One may well imagine he also came back with a living understanding of what it means to be suspended between life and death. In Hopkins’s phrase, it is to be “dandled the to and fro” (126). To make sense of this in Whalley’s thought is an important task and leads to questions about The Legend of John Hornby and Death in the Barren Ground: The Diary of Edgar Christian. Repeatedly he told stories of grim encounters with death and, though they were not his own, it is impossible to think that his memories were silent while he wrote them. To understand Whalley’s place in Canadian modernism, one must begin with this recognition. The E.J. Pratt Memorial Lecture Whalley gave in 1977, published as “Birthright to the Sea: Some Poems of E.J. Pratt,” reinforces these claims and demonstrates that these memories and feelings remained with Whalley later in life. The essay reflects on the sea as a commanding presence that symbolizes life and death for Pratt (187). In one passage, Whalley writes of Pratt’s experience of the sea in relation to Donne, Conrad, Coleridge, and Hopkins (178). When Whalley says that Pratt “knew what it was like for the sea to be an inescapable dimension of life,” it sounds as if he is speaking of himself (179). He quotes two poems in which Pratt writes of a drowned man, “Lantern Light” and “The Drag Irons,” and comments on “the horrifying tactile sense of the fact of death” in the verse (187). A remark about the “little communities whose life was the sea” that appear in Pratt’s poems (177) revisits and extends a thought found close to the end of the letter-essay “The Sinking of the Bismarck” in which Whalley remembers how “the bodies of drowned men eventually lie face down in the sea, humped up in a posture of uniform and poignant ungainliness” (87–8). In the Pratt essay, Whalley hopes no one will share his experience of the sight: “And like a groundswell living unseen in the dark, there was in any village one probability to be lived with: that one night, one dawn, it would be known for certain that some man – husband, son, brother – would never come again to lift the latch of the door; and perhaps, by grace, those who loved him would never see what indignity the sea can work upon the body of a drowned man” (178). Another passage reveals something of Whalley’s memories: “Yet always in the darkness of memory, uncalled, the exact feel of salt water kept coming back to haunt him, ‘as life returns upon the drowned’ – in

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a sudden stillness perhaps, or in an iron savour under the tongue” (181).25 When Whalley writes about poets whose works evoke the sea, his attention changes. One way to recognize this is to see how the Coleridge and Pratt essays stand apart from the other nine essays included in Studies in Literature and the Humanities. Editing Whalley’s works, substantial in volume and extensive in range, and writing his life, are both complex matters.26 The foregoing remarks reveal some of the reasons for this, but above all of them is the necessity of making sense of the extraordinarily accomplished life of a scholar, critic, poet, biographer, broadcaster, naval officer, secret intelligence agent, talented amateur musician, husband, and father. In the draft introduction for a collection of essays entitled The Old Crane of Gort that Whalley planned to publish in the 1970s, he wrote, “I think of these [essays] as searching out some connections between critical thinking (in the usual sense) and the expository biographical writing that wants to catch the specific quality of a person or of certain ­experiences” ­(“Introduction” 3). It is from Whalley’s sense of the integration in the very nature of the imagination – a view he took from Coleridge27 – that my work editing his poems, essays, and letters has taken its bearings. All of that work is building towards writing a biography, one that is supplemented by a rich store of digital materials on the website, aimed at a wide audience of general readers and scholars. It has been more than twenty years since John Baxter called for “a good critical ­biography, clarifying the connections of the work and the life, the poetry and the prose” (510). The first two publications arising from this long-term endeavour is the critical edition The Complete Poems of George ­Whalley, and a counterpart digital edition, with the website as the point of contact between them. Though George Johnston thought of his friend as “first and last a poet” (Collected Poems 1), Whalley is better known as a Coleridge scholar and as a “prominent and persuasive spokesman for the humanities” (Rae 312). And yet he published poetry for over thirty years, beginning with the comedic “Ode to a College Sausage” in the Mitre in 1933 and ending with another humorous piece, “Pig,” in Quarry in 1967. Soon after returning from the war, Whalley published his two books of poetry, Poems 1939–1944, comprising seventeen pieces, and No Man an Island, a forty-one poem collection that included all but eight of the pieces from the first book. In his lifetime, he published seventy-six poems, and another nineteen were published posthumously (though one of them, “Now that the Dark,” is an alternate version of “English Winter”).

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The one previous collection of Whalley’s poems, The Collected Poems of George Whalley (1986), was edited by Johnston and published by Quarry Press. It reprints the poems of No Man an Island in the same sequence and three-section arrangement, followed by a section containing the eight pieces from the chapbook excluded from the larger collection.28 Johnston’s edition also includes twenty-seven previously uncollected poems in the last section. Some of these date from the 1940s and are previously unpublished, others appeared in magazines including Quarry, Panic, and Yes, and some few more – like the two poems written in the hospital when Whalley was battling cancer – are late writings. The edition of Whalley’s complete poems brings together the published poems with the whole extant collection of manuscripts and typescripts, as well as his diaries. For the first time over 150 pieces are brought together with those collected in Johnston’s edition, including 17 previously published in Profile, Canadian Poetry Magazine, Queen’s Quarterly, and the Mitre.29 Whalley habitually dated drafts and revisions of poems, so a large number can be dated accurately.30 The 250 poems are arranged chronologically from 1933 to 1982, with fewer than 10 placed according to circa dates established after some careful detective work. The counterpart digital edition of poetry manuscripts and typescripts, and other pertinent materials – letters to Ryerson Press, Clark, Irwin & Company, some of the early readers of Whalley’s poems, and his family – is a collaboration I’ve undertaken with Alana Fletcher and Robin Isard. There is a wealth of material to draw from, almost all of which has been digitized, some with the help of the Internet Archive site at University of Toronto. There are nearly six hundred pages of poetry manuscripts and typescripts in Whalley’s private papers. A little more than four hundred additional pages of drafts and revisions are in Queen’s University Archives: one-quarter of them are an assortment gathered in one folder, and three-quarters of them are in five bound typescripts prepared between 1944 and 1947. For the edition’s first iteration, we have selected a number of poems for which the history of composition is richly embodied in the extant documents. One of them, “Night Flight,” is the focus of an essay entitled “Stitching and Unstitching,” in which Whalley reflects on the stages of his poetic process, and refers to the versions leading up to the published text. Though Whalley attempted to publish the essay in 1958, it is as if he wrote it for our digital edition. Presenting his poems-in-process is fitting because

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Whalley thought much about the making of poetry, the poem as something made, and the poet as a maker. A purpose-built interface Robin Isard is making will be used to draw upon the records in the database to display images, corresponding transcriptions, metadata, et cetera. The interface will open out of and sit above the regular site. Through the use of radio buttons located vertically in the left margin and tabs located horizontally across the top, two adjacent reading panes can be configured in several ways to show an image of a page alongside a transcription of it, two images side-by-side, two transcriptions side-by-side, et cetera. Published works, including the whole of Poems 1939–1944 and No Man an Island, manuscripts and typescripts, letters, drafts of essays, and other documents will be viewed through it. The edition will allow readers to study the images and the transcriptions of them (especially when Whalley’s writing is difficult to decipher) in making their own heuristic inquiries. Detailed editorial notes will be at hand, for those who choose to read them. One source of pleasure in making the edition is that the use of digital technology resonates with Whalley’s own pursuits: he was a pioneer in the use of computers for literary studies.31 Looking to the work ahead, what looms large is the task of writing the life of an accomplished biographer who has a clear idea that “biography, like any art, is a matter of selection and arrangement” and who makes a claim for a kind of biography that “pays tribute to the miraculous accident of life and the terrible fragility of hope and the merciless erosion that time can work and the curious integrity that each person holds at the centre of life” (“Notes” 616, 619). Writing according to Whalley’s standards for the genre is fraught with difficulty, especially in his notion of “piecing together of a world that threatens to slip away into nothingness – the swift rehearsal of a lifetime in the instant of drowning” (618). The meaningfulness of the choice of drowning as the manner of death at that moment will, I anticipate, continue to be an important thread in the inquiry into the shape of his life. For Whalley, “the only things that matter” in telling the life of a person “cannot be fully known or categorically stated; they can only be allowed to come before our attention in their full complexity and in their just simplicity” (616–17). This aim sounds akin to Wittgenstein’s idea that “we have only to put together in the right way what we know, without adding anything” (2e). This sounds easier to say than to do.

222  Michael John DiSanto NOTES 1 The newspaper article can be seen on the homepage of the Whalley website, http://georgewhalley.ca. In a letter of 20 July 1941 addressed to his mother, Dorothy Whalley, George mentions he is aware the story was published. 2 In the obituary for Whalley that originally appeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Canada (1984), Kathleen Coburn wrote, “During the pursuit of the Bismarck, serving in a destroyer he jumped overboard without a line to pull out two sailors, survivors from a sunken destroyer” (Obituary 11). 3 Some glimpses into the legend can be seen in the Pulver article and the Coburn obituary. Whalley’s courage was repeated: later in the war he saved Nigel Warington Smyth and Ted Davies from drowning in the surf at Praa Sands (Smyth 91). 4 Ramsey was responsible for the Dunkirk evacuation and later in the war was the naval commander for the Allied invasion of North Africa and the invasions of Sicily and Normandy. A recording of Whalley reading “Initial Assault – Sicily (1975)” can be heard at http://georgewhalley.ca/gwp/ node/85. 5 The database is Open Archives Initiative and Dublin Core compliant, meaning the materials collected there can be moved to almost any library or archival database. 6 Using interface gives me pause because the metaphor is central to Whalley’s argument in chapter 3, “Reality and the Artist,” of Poetic Process. 7 The recordings are published at http://georgewhalley.ca/gwp/node/76. 8 Though outside the scope of this chapter, to understand Whalley’s place in Canadian modernism, one might consider his role in the conference committee for the Canadian Writers’ Conference held at Queen’s University, 28–31 July 1955, the proceedings of which he edited and published the next year. (The other members of the committee were J.A. Corry, Henry Alexander, Frank Scott, Malcolm Ross, and Kathleen Healey.) Some sense of the time he spent in organizing things emerges from the extant correspondence, but his contributions to the discussions during the conference are lost to time, with one exception: as recorded in one of the summaries of the discussion groups, by Dorothy Livesay, “Mr Whalley said that the sole means for improving taste was to write well; to write better than we are doing at present” (“Group C” 133). The remark is an oblique but pithy distillation of the longer polemical arguments he made at times in two essays – “The Poet and His Reader” and “The Metaphysical Revival” – that emphasize “the problem of writing poetry today is not different from the problem of writing poetry in any period” and that the

Editing a Legend: George Whalley  223  “greatness of contemporary poetry” is in the “insistence upon integrity and the desire for integration of experience” (“Metaphysical” 444, 445). 9 Whalley’s review of Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism is a clear refutation of attempts to anatomize literature and reveals the dangers of thinking that the methods of science have any bearing on literature as literature. 10 A detail of the portrait can be seen at http://georgewhalley.ca/gwp/ node/3656. 11 Whalley’s interest in Edgar Christian’s diary began when it was first published in 1937 with the title Unflinching, and he read it. 12 These papers are not organized and, at this time, cannot be cited properly. The summary here is taken from my notes when I saw the file in 2010 in Southwold, England. 13 I believe Whalley was prompted to consider this at the time when Kathleen Coburn was writing her autobiography, which was published as In Pursuit of Coleridge in 1977. 14 Besides Whalley’s accounts, others write of his encounters with death. For instance, in his essay in George Whalley, Jeffery Jefferis tells of the drowning of Dr McGreer, the principal of Bishop’s University, just after the war (94). Whalley was serving on the faculty at the time and was asked to identify the body. 15 See the preface to The Portrait of a Lady (485). 16 The dates come from the manuscripts and typescripts and two lists Whalley kept that record the places and dates where he wrote and revised his poems. The first list has 52 separate entries. The second list of poems is a reorganized version of the first. The most significant differences between the two are the number of entries and the end dates. The second list has 115 entries. 17 A comment Whalley makes elsewhere might be read as a gloss on the second stanza: “At the height of [his] suffering and loneliness, sleep and dreams become central ideas” (“Mariner” 25). 18 The page number cannot be cited at this time. The passage is transcribed from a digital photo I have taken in 2010 in Southwold, England. 19 “Battle Pattern” appeared in No Man an Island in 1948. The revision dates are 14 July 1945 on the HMCS Saskatchewan and 3 September 1945 at Bishop’s University. The dates and locations for the individual parts are not specified. A typescript page for section 4: Meditation, has a revision date of 12–13 July 1946. On the typescript in Queen’s University Archives, the revision dates and locations are 30 May 1945 in Sydney and 20 June 1945 in Quebec. 20 In the draft introduction to The Old Crane of Gort, Whalley suggests that readers will not be able to tell his spoken lectures from his written essays, mixed together as they are in the collection.

224  Michael John DiSanto 21 And whether or not Whalley was aware of this is unknown, but they shared a life-long love of geography and explorers. See Conrad’s “Geography and Some Explorers” (1924). Going to Africa was the realization of a childhood dream for Conrad. Whalley intended to join an Antarctic expedition before going to war (“Notes” 613–14). The two writers were, in their different ways, great readers of books by explorers and geographers and wished to participate in the adventures of discovery. 22 Whalley repeatedly used this analogy, entitling his PhD thesis “S.T. Coleridge: Library Cormorant” and returning to it in later essays. 23 This is from Hopkins’s untitled sonnet “No worse, there is none” that ends with “all / Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.” 24 The recording is available at http://georgewhalley.ca/gwp/node/106. 25 The quotation “as life returns upon the drowned” is taken from line 63 of Coleridge’s “To William Wordsworth.” 26 The bibliographic record found at http://georgewhalley.ca/gwp/node/61 reveals the extent of Whalley’s writings. 27 In “Literary Romanticism” (1965), Whalley declares, “I hold, with Coleridge, that poetry is one and not many, that ‘all men are poets, though most of them are damned bad ones,’ and that imagination is the state or act in which ‘the whole soul of man’ is brought into activity” (240). 28 These are printed in reverse order from the chapbook. John Baxter points this out in “Fugitive Reality” (497). 29 See publication details for the poems in periodicals at http:// georgewhalley.ca/gwp/node/93. 30 For instance, there are thirty-four extant pages – nineteen manuscript and fifteen typescripts – for the poem “Lazarus,” which was published in Queen’s Quarterly in 1956 after he worked on this poem from at least 6 September 1952 to 8 August 1954. Some of the pages are titled “Resurrection Stone,” and it appears he vacillated between the two titles. Some sense of when and how often Whalley worked on the poem may be seen in the dates he marked on the pages: on the manuscripts 11 and 12 June, 6 September, 8 October, 28 and 29 November, and 16 December 1953; on the typescripts 16 December 1953 and 8 August 1954. 31 See his paper entitled “Literary Computing.” A specialist in the field who read the essay told me that Whalley articulates important problems that remain relevant to what is called the digital humanities today.

10  Canadian Manifestos: Between Poetics and Polemics andrea hasenbank and emic ua

“Between Poetics and Polemics: Canadian Manifestos 1910–1960” collects a body of Canadian manifestos in a critical print edition, setting political manifestos against literary and artistic declarations to explore the impact of this wide-raging form of writing on Canadian thought and culture. In this juxtaposition, I am interested in portraying an incendiary side of Canadian culture and history that is often overlooked, a side that I hope will be bolstered by the inclusion of unknown and out-ofprint material. I am further interested in exploring the intertextuality of work hitherto defined categorically as “political” or “literary/artistic” to expose the common institutions, authorship, movements, and ideologies of Canadian manifesto production. By examining the praxis of the manifesto as well as its highly specific stylistic elements, I am becoming increasingly aware of the need to put modernism and variants of proletarianism into conversation with each other. Beyond the convenience of period, my engagement with the texts in this collection has made clear that the social practice of political speech and the creative practice of literary writing collapse in the manifesto; it is in this form that the revolutionary character of modernism and the revolutionary potential of labour find material fixity and enter into the same open-ended moment. The Manifesto In assembling a collection such as this, the difficulty lies not just in selecting the best or most interesting examples of text, but also in determining what a manifesto is, in part on the basis of what it does. I have found Raymond Williams’s dissection of genre and form/formation instructive for breaking down the elements of the manifesto as a

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l­iterary object constituted by a nexus of highly political social relationships. Genre, for Williams, is a literary institution that has grown out of particular social formations and must be understood not as a class of object but as the product of those formations. Formation in this sense plays an active role as an intellectual grouping or artistic movement, often contrasted directly with formal institutions. In critical language, genre is somewhat interchangeable with form – that is, form being a displacement of genre as a type onto the shape of a text. I have taken genre to mean the disposition of a text – whether it is tragic, comedic, satirical, et cetera – and form to mean the manifestation of the text – whether it is an essay, a poem, a letter, et cetera. In this, I am attempting to account for material form as well – how a text appears, the venue of its presentation, the method of its circulation, et cetera – but the distinction remains slippery. To a certain extent, genre has a practical determination: the manifesto says what it is, or it plays off what it claims to be. Form, however, is a “common property,” dependent on its perception by readers as well as its conscious creation (Williams, Marxism 187). The problem of form, for Williams, is one of the relationship between “social (collective) modes and individual projects” (187); this too is a problem for understanding manifestos as a body of disparate texts. The connection of form to formation is made through style and convention. These act as shared practices, through which the limits of a formation can be demarcated, as well as the beginnings of institutionalization. The manifesto has come to be characterized by its use of highly dramatic language and emblematic figuration as modes for conveying the subtextual conflict of its writing. Its unadorned syntax, frequent exclamations, and martial metaphors reflect the text’s emulation of and ongoing response to other texts labelled “manifesto.” Genre, in this case, marks out classification by literary form, subject matter, and intended readership as the material traces of a specific ­history; as per Williams, “There are clear social and historical relations between particular literary forms and the societies and periods in which they were originated or practiced … there are undoubted continuities of literary forms through and beyond the societies and periods to which they have such relations” (Marxism 183). Style represents the coherence, over time, of elements that derive from readers’ basic recognition within the text, around which response can be concentrated, reproduced, and shared. These elements become the mobile aspects of a genre, its closest links to social experience and the first sites of its transformation over time.

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The most thorough consideration of the manifesto as a self-conscious and literary genre is Janet Lyon’s Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern, which reads the manifesto as a recalibration of value by which the excluded “speak back” to the false universalism of bourgeois citizenship. In her analysis, the manifesto is a “liberatory genre” (2) narrating this struggle; it is also shorthand for a polemical style and tone. Lyon offers a set of stylistic features by way of definition, which are worth considering against this project’s selection of texts. Structurally, the manifesto is built around a reworking of history into a “selective and impassioned chronicle” of injustice and oppression, which builds into a “forceful enumeration of grievances” and fulfils the turn of its “epigrammatic style” in a call for action at its end (3). Rhetorically, the manifesto is structured on “rigid hierarchical binaries” and the “rhetoric of exclusivity” (3). This narrative fuses writer with audience by the use of the “historical present tense” (9), spoken in the manifesto’s “signature pronoun, ‘we’” (11). Lyon envisions the manifesto as a participatory genre, through which the writer’s alignment with previous (and simultaneous) struggles is signified by reiteration of these stylistic conventions. Echoing Williams’s assessment of formations, for Lyon the text of the manifesto enacts particular social and historical relationships: “The manifesto’s formal contours actually produce and intensify the urgency of its particular imperatives. They do so in part by activating the symbolic force of the form’s role in earlier political confrontations: to write a manifesto is to announce one’s participation, however discursive, in a history of struggle against oppressive forces” (10). In this light, we may expect the manifesto as a genre to have a particular resonance in populist politics, tracing back through Marx and Engels to the sans-culottes of the French Revolution, and foundationally to the Diggers of the seventeenth century. As it traces the history of such movements, this generational line tends more to the left than to the right, on the side of collectivity as opposed to authoritarianism. The most significant feature of the manifesto is in the rhetorical power of “we.” It instantiates a group identity in the moment of speaking, but performs as if that group has always already existed: the manifesto invokes a “we,” and then acts as that “we” it has set up. Lyon argues that the manifesto is built on the performative aspect of language, in both J.L. Austin’s sense of doing things with words, and in Judith Butler’s sense of producing and inhabiting social constructs. As it invokes a group, so too does the “we” evoke an audience. This move is accomplished in the binary mode: if “you,” the reader, are not among “we,”

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then the only other position is that of the villainous “them.” The manifesto establishes inclusion by demarcation, rather than by fixed definition. However, Lyon fails to fully address this paradox of alignment: although she acknowledges that “the ‘we’ of the manifesto is highly unstable, inflectable, expansive, and mobile” (36), she equally asserts that “the manifesto’s revolutionary speaking position constructs political certainty” (60) by assuming control of the narrative in the voice of “we.” It is perhaps more accurate to read the manifesto not as action in itself, but as a promise masquerading as a threat. The “we” it invokes offers a moment of recognition as the basis for a call to future action; the reader participates in the formal fiction that the time is now. Lyon’s assessment of the manifesto always takes classical (bourgeois) liberalism as its reference point: the genre represents a constant process of reinscribing the presumption of universality and pushing out the boundaries of inclusion. In this line, the manifesto is part of a fight to get inside, not a declaration of rupture. By instead taking the manifesto as a manifestation of social praxis, we can begin to draw a line between the text’s perpetual present and future possibility. Such a relationship remains generative, even if the text itself remains unrealized. Modernism and Manifestos The period this project takes up, 1910 to 1960, is loosely contemporaneous with Anglo-American and Canadian literary modernism. Lyon’s explication of the manifesto is preoccupied with questions of the modern; in her analysis, the “we” of the text traces its origins to the emergence of political modernity in the creation of the public sphere and continues to reflect upon the experience of the modern subject. The modernist period is characterized by the proliferation of manifestos, many of which “simultaneously challenge and instantiate the premises of the modernity with which they are linked” (Lyon 40). Lyon regards the manifesto as a chronicle of exclusion and the deferred promises of modernity; however, such a definition of the manifesto also invokes the same discourses it critiques. In its partial address to the dominant order, she argues that it must make itself intelligible in the same language of rights and equality, or of literary value (3). Breaking with this liberal view, Williams connects modernist aesthetics to radical social theory; crises of technique, resulting in modernist experimentation and the eruption of such forms as the artistic manifesto, are linked to crisis in the relationship of art to society (Marxism 163). The process by

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which modernist formations become aspects of the dominant culture is not a result of manifestos being made intelligible to an outmoded idiom; rather, the dominant culture absorbs the language of the manifesto because it is radical and then defuses the potential challenge it provokes. In his essay “When Was Modernism?” Williams defines modernism in literature and art as based less on time period or location than on this process of absorption. As he identifies it, the moment of modernism is heavily constructed, assembled by the “machinery of selective tradition” (49). The process of selection retroactively confers cultural authority on the chosen works and producers, but limits critical consideration of other dynamic examples of modernist experimentation. In and around this circumscribed field, modernist texts give play to a range of forms that emphasize the “non-natural status of language” (50); literature is reconfigured as a product of linguistic strangeness, boundary divides, and crossings between physical and semantic spaces. This selfreflexive modernist text stands as a repudiation of bourgeois forms and “settled cultural authority” (49); like the radical manifesto, it does not seek inclusion. In opposition to the rigid canonical confines that stand in for “modernism,” the texts enact highly divisive movements and formations as they reach towards a promised future. Ideologically, the problem with treating modernism as a settled moment is that it “stops history dead” (51) without accounting for material circumstances and influences on literary production. Absent of context, the innovations of modernist experimentation become the fixed points of our contemporary, postmodern moment. Williams challenges critics to search out an “alternative tradition” (52) of neglected works and writers to imagine a modern future with renewed vigour. This modern future for literature and criticism is one in which history moves, driven by the conflict of division and alienation, rather than freezing at their intrusion. Taking modernism as a relational process rather than a static school, the manifesto is an emblem for a succession of possible “alternative traditions.” I read in the manifesto a cacophony of influences: pamphleteering traditions, religious “pulpit” speech, legal strictures, public debate and oratory, newspaper journalism, artistic collectives, narrative fables, poetic defence, and classical economics. Here we might draw a connection between modernist play with convention in language and a politically revolutionary stance: both are indicative of shifts in the social process and the instability of convention. These voices cannot be narrowly confined to one sphere of textual production or another; they

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exceed absorption by the dominant culture and offer continued generative potential for the work of modernism. The Manifesto and Canadian Literature Between Poetics and Polemics presents specific examples of manifestos in the context of Canadian literature. In assembling this collection of instances of radical writing in Canada, I have strived to emphasize historically specific networks, conventions, and rhetorical strategies. Although recuperating a tradition of Canadian manifesto-writing may serve as a response to the selective, and often apolitical, tradition of Canadian literature, this collection is not a petition for increasing the inclusiveness of the canon. Rather, it is a limit test, whereby the points of convergence between the general sweep of Canadian culture and its challengers can be plotted. Questions of canon formation and defence are at the heart of editorial discussions of the anthology. Indeed, the period covered by the present collection brackets the post–First World War era, from 1918 to the 1940s, during which Carole Gerson asserts that “the canon of Englishlanguage Canadian literature was particularly arbitrary and malleable, governed less by cultural consensus than by the whims and agendas of certain individuals in power” (47). This history of cultural control has relegated the texts of those without power – non-Anglos, immigrants, women, racial minorities, working classes – to the margins, as discussed in the Canadian context at length by Gerson, Peggy Kelly, Roy Miki, and many others. As such, any responsible editor must clearly explain the process of selecting texts, the context of chosen texts, as well as the arrangement of texts within the collection, and must account for the possible audiences and uses of the text. Such an editorial approach cannot be anything but sociological, treating the world of the text expansively. However, as Anne Ferry notes in her discussion of poetic anthologies, anthologies are equally marked by self-consciousness (2). At its solipsistic centre, the anthology is guided by a critical awareness that the editor-anthologist selects and arranges texts using principles and materials in ways that are different from those used by the individual authors within the anthology’s covers. This, of course, may be particularly contentious when using explicitly political and positional texts. The constitutive acts of anthologization, selection, and arrangement broadly signal the presence of the editor-anthologist, whereas in a single-authored collection, “there is no other person whose controlling

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presence is acknowledged and whose decisions mediate between the poems [or other forms of text] and the reader” (Ferry 31). This distinction further shows a slippage between the terms anthology and collection, into which I hope to wedge my own editorial position. The generic anthology and its connotative flowering of texts carries also the seeds of the canon within its covers; by contrast, a collection is only one modest act, or “the end result of an act, of gathering together related things” (Ferry 15). Collection prefigures the acts of the collector-editor rather than the intrinsic worth of the texts themselves; it does much to locate the editor as one labourer among many in the sociological life of the text. In Between Poetics and Polemics I am looking not necessarily for the flowering of the period but for texts aimed for effect – texts that raze monuments rather than build them. Anthologized or otherwise, the manifesto has had only limited critical attention from textual scholars in Canada, perhaps because many works are no longer in print. In their 1984 collection, Towards a Canadian Literature: Essays, Editorials and Manifestos, Douglas Daymond and Leslie Monkman are particularly focused on questions of national identity and national literature. Their selections engage the debates surrounding the “creation and publication of an indigenous1 literature in Canada” (1). The editors have drawn from the “journals of greatest interest in each period” as well as “independently published introductions, manifestos, essays, and addresses” (1). They are not explicit about each of these categories, forms, or genres, or how they are distinct from each other. Daymond and Monkman seem to be interested in capturing a particular public discourse about Canadian literature as one moving towards increasing independence, ranging from the earliest colonial publishing to contemporary (in the collection’s time) texts. The selections are arranged chronologically, grouped into five separate periods, and then subgrouped by publication, giving primacy to institutions rather than texts. The key limitation of Towards a Canadian Literature is that it deals exclusively with published materials in a self-consciously literary vein; the editors’ selections do not include political statements, graphic media, writing about the visual or plastic arts, or party materials. The strength of the present collection is in its mix of orientations, as well as its inclusion of archival and previously unpublished texts. Colin Hill offers a more recent treatment of Canadian manifesto writing connected to little magazine publishing in the modernist period. Hill applies Lyon’s definition of the manifesto to a series of articles published in the Canadian Bookman through the 1920s to argue for its

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self-consciously formative role in the Canadian modernist movement (as apart from its disparagement among modernist writers and critics as being merely a mouthpiece for the Canadian Authors Association, or a commercial platform for book sales). Hill portrays these articles, starting with the unsigned editorial “The New Era,” as a “series of manifestos for a modern realism” (88). As he applies it, “the language of the manifesto” (87), in this working definition, is one that is urgent and definitive, establishes a “‘historical present’” (qtd in 88), and “‘declares a position’” (qtd in 89) that is antagonistic to all previous forms. Hill’s assessment is particularly attuned to the creative potential signified in the manifesto’s summons, contiguous with shifting social relationships. He considers Canadian modern realism as a manifestation of modernism in its attempt to represent and interrogate lived social experience; in this, it shares the stance if not the rhetoric of the manifesto. Hill’s primary concern is with the networks of publication and influence marked out by little magazines such as the Bookman; however, his discussion has usefully marked out “The New Era” for inclusion in this project. Candida Rifkind’s study of Canadian leftist literature in the 1930s, Comrades and Critics, leads a movement in Canadian scholarship looking at the intersections between socialist politics and modernist writing. Her analysis reveals the shifting relationships between the two as a key component of the national conversation in the period. The nebulous connections of modernism shape an imaginative understanding of the world through “paradoxes and parataxis” (13), propelling the reader through a series of elements one after another into a kind of meaning both subjective and uncertain. Canadian socialism at the outset of the 1930s was oriented towards an evolutionary progression influenced by Herbert Spencer as well as a material Marxist dialectics emerging out of the historical narrative of class (see McKay). The tenuous synthesis of opposing terms plays out through Rifkind’s analysis. Crucially, her work points to the construction of a self-identifying public rather than a total one, a readership variously aligned along the poles of socialism and modernism, but never fixed. Among these audiences, manifestary language “performs the limits of belonging” (42) in its rhetoric and structures, calling on Canadians to identify themselves within the texts. Rifkind does not identify a single defining manifesto for 1930s Canada. Instead, she traces a pattern of speech deriving from the “manifestary rhetoric of address” that winds through the creative work of the period and infuses the organizing power of political and social movements with an urgency and a readiness to radically break with previous forms (43).

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Rifkind connects the manifesto to d ­ ocumentary – as exemplified in the long-form documentary poems of Dorothy Livesay – as the dominant forms of the period. I would characterize the manifesto in Williams’s terms as an emergent form, dialectically enacting the tension between imaginative ideals and real conditions without resolving the conflict between the two. Although documenting a particular history of exclusion is a significant function of the manifesto, I suggest that this narrative is used more for mythical foundation than for representative accuracy. Rifkind emphasizes the political engagements of the 1930s Canadian literary left behind its experimentation with new forms and engagements; arguably, the rhetoric of the manifesto offers an originating force and a way of codifying the politics of many movements, even in excess of the rallying power of the texts themselves. Canadian manifestos have fared a little better in studies of political and labour history, including political and labour print. Peter Weinrich in his bibliography, Social Protest from the Left in Canada, 1870–1970, lists eighty-three titles that include the word manifesto, dating between 1896 (“Manifesto of the Canadian Republican Committee to the People of Canada” by the Canadian Republican Committee) and 1969 (“Manifesto: Serve the People! Oppose US Imperialism!” by the Canadian Student Movement). Most are concentrated in the years 1926–43, which is also the densest period for texts selected for Between Poetics and Polemics. However, in this context, the genre of the “manifesto” is also under-­ theorized and encompasses everything from election platforms to radical protest. As well, in political and historical criticism, the content of the text and the identity of the groups it references are given primacy over structures of language, figuration, and rhetoric. I have sought to unite historiography with literary analysis when selecting manifestos for the present collection and developing its editorial apparatus. The collection is structured as an annotated sourcebook, with a critical essay addressing genre, formation, and language. One model for the print volume of “Between Poetics and Polemics” is the collection of British Pamphleteers assembled in two volumes by George Orwell and Reginald Reynolds, with some conscious iteration of their editorial practices. The texts are arranged chronologically, with a brief introduction to each manifesto, followed by the manifesto itself, fully annotated. The project is conceived as a two-stage process, producing first the present print volume, with a digital edition to follow. Part of the work of this project is to collapse the distinction between “political” and “artistic”; accordingly, the selected manifestos will not be subdivided.

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The list of some twenty-five manifesto texts (in some cases pending copyright permission) includes the “Manifesto of the Socialist Party of Canada” (1910); “The New Era” (1919); Lionel Stevenson’s “Manifesto for a Canadian Literature” (1924); Bertram Brooker’s “Decay of Art” and “When We Awake!” (1927–8); A.J.M. Smith’s “Wanted: Canadian Criticism” (1928); Tim Buck’s Indictment of Capitalism (1932); the “Regina Manifesto” of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (1933); statements of purpose from the Third Period Workers’ Theatre (1933); the “Official Statement” issued by the Relief Camp Strikers’ Committee (1935); the Automatistes’ “Refus Global” (1948); “Unite and Act to Save peace!” by the Canadian Slav Congress (1950); Louis Dudek’s “Ou sont les jeunes?” (1952); and Wilfred Watson’s “Manifesto for Canadian Drama” (1960). In the sections that follow, I will highlight three selections – Watson’s “Manifesto for Canadian Drama,” the “Official Statement” of the Relief Camp Strikers’ Committee, and Buck’s Indictment of Capitalism – in order to discuss some of the editorial problems and engagements present in the project overall. I have chosen these particular examples as they show the range of textual types – archival and non-circulating, self-produced and privately circulated, and published with wide circulation – within the collection. The texts themselves do not present any major challenges in terms of preferred copy-text; in all cases, the text is the only variant, and in the case of the Watson and Strikers’ Committee manifestos, the only known documentary evidence for the text. Analytically, the example texts all show a preoccupation with interlocutors, formations, and self-positioning in ways that echo the concerns I have raised regarding the genre of manifesto and the practices of politicized editing. These texts, though remote from one another in many ways, forge an intertextuality that I find compelling when trying to grasp at the intertwined relations of work and communication in the socialized text. Wilfred Watson, “A Manifesto for Canadian Drama” Watson’s manifesto is a fairly typical example of the literary/artistic texts included in this project. It is easily attributable to a single, known author. It is brief, less than eight pages in manuscript. The only copy is archival; the text was unpublished and has no variants. It is a fairly clean copy, with only a few strikethroughs and emendations in section V. The text was discovered2 among Watson’s notebooks, which are held as part of his fonds at the University of Alberta. Issues of copyright

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and permission are more pressing in the artistic context, given more individual conditions of authorship. In this case, copyright rests with Watson’s literary executor, who has shown support for the broader project of digitizing Wilfred Watson’s papers being carried out by Editing Modernism in Canada collaborators at the University of Alberta.3 The manifesto dates from 1960. At this time, Watson was living and working in Edmonton as professor of English at the University of Alberta. This period marks the beginning of Watson’s correspondence and collaboration with Marshall McLuhan on Cliché to Archetype (see Tiessen) as well as his move towards highly experimental theatre and absurdist dramatic technique. The 1960s was Watson’s most prolific period as a playwright and for the production of his plays. As Diane Bessai, Watson’s biographer and literary executor, comments, “During the 1960s his controversial satiric verse plays alternately astonished, perplexed, and delighted Edmonton audiences; with more than a dozen such dramas, Watson ushered in an avant-garde in Canadian theatre years before the rear guard had fully emerged” (n. pag.). The context for the “Manifesto for Canadian Drama” overlaps with that of Watson’s audience; accordingly, it must be considered alongside his involvement with a range of theatrical organizations and production sites in Edmonton, including the University of Alberta’s Studio Theatre, the Yardbird Suite, and the Walterdale Playhouse. “A Manifesto for Canadian Drama” is written in six parts, each of which opens with the statement “We believe.” In this, Watson is faithful to the form’s signature pronoun; however, the membership of the “we” is not made explicit. Watson distinguishes the manifesto’s speaking position from that of theatrical audiences, asserting, “We believe that audiences are ready for this sort of drama” (III). This “we” does not invoke the participation of an audience of spectators, but one of fellow playwrights, directors, and actors, each of which is referenced in the manifesto. The manifesto seems to issue a demand for support for playwrights and commissioning works; it does not indicate by whom, but given the relationship of Canadian cultural production to institutional structures at the time, this is likely to be the Canada Council for the Arts.4 Watson shows a particular concern for literary genre and form; the manifesto calls for clear definition of drama “(in [cultural] distinction to [mime] – ballet – opera – etc.) as a presented dialogue and action” (V). In fact, he champions “verse as the natural medium for drama” (VI) and rejects prose. This is not mere stylistic preference; Watson links the formal element of drama to a particular national and

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formational position. Beginning with an appeal to nationalism that employs the manifesto’s strongest invective, Watson describes “present Canadian Theatre [as] parasitic upon English and American theatre” (I). He champions poetic drama as the best (and only) mode to distinguish Canadian theatre from Anglo-American works, as well as to carve out creative space that is “neither academic nor commercial” (II). On its own, “A Manifesto for Canadian Drama” feels somewhat incomplete; it lacks a final rallying cry calling upon the movement of Canadian dramatists to action. A more complete vision is offered in Watson’s poem “A Manifesto for Beast Poetry,” which also dates from 1960. In this text, Watson engages with modernist poetics directly, denouncing the “failures of the sects of poets / We see in these debased ages” (III: 1–2). By name, he dismisses the efforts of poets such as Archibald MacLeish, Marianne Moore, and T.S. Eliot as “all this verbal antic, the desperate endeavour to speak” (XII: 10) that is “quite foreign to beastpoetry” (XII: 11). Moving from mystical tones to strident demarcation, in the closing segments of the poetic suite, Watson targets Canadian writers: “But in my secret heart / I pretend to myself alone that the great beast-poet / Will cleave from our substance” (XIII: 4–6). As a whole, the manifesto “sketches in a programmatic fashion the outlines of a new art that would redefine the relationship between artist and audience,” as Stefan Haag suggests (30–1); significantly, it is an art-to-be rather than the outcropping of any already existing “we.” In the final segment, the speaker issues the call that is absent from the “Manifesto for Canadian Drama.” It is, without metaphoric inflection on my part, an invocation to the poetic beast: Therefore I call out aloud to the future I summon the age about to be Not to debase itself in any petty way to the sub-human, But to cut itself off boldly from all its ancestors; To descend impudently down to the shameless depths Of beast-poetry. I am weary Of this shabby-parrot, this figurative lingerie, And of the free & easy verse opinions. I await the terrible new beast-poetry (Watson, “Manifesto for Beast ­Poetry” XIV: 1–9)

The poem is the inverse of the dramatic manifesto, calling for a performative poetry, where the latter calls for poetic performance. ­Moreover,

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the poem pushes to fulfilment what the statement on drama only begins to issue as a credo. The archival “Manifesto” stands as an incompletely socialized text; so, from a sociological orientation that takes distribution as the point of completion, what does it mean to publish an archival text in an edited collection? In creating an alternate network of reception and response, in which the historical text never participated, is the editor engaging in an act of recuperation, or merely speculating? I haven’t yet come to an answer. In the absence of a clear context for the archival manifesto, I posit that an effective editorial selection should include both texts, not just for the sake of comparing different creative reworkings of the manifesto form, but also as a way of completing the manifesto’s call. As an example of the creative manifesto, Watson self-consciously engages with the language of the manifesto in ways that push the limits of the form. It is my intention to highlight the linguistic play in all of the selected texts by including extreme forms such as Watson’s poem or the essays of Bertram Brooker. Such texts must be included in this project’s collection to demonstrate the capacity for experimentation, not just in social organization or formation, but also in the substance of language itself among Canadian manifestos. Relief Camp Strikers’ Committee, “Official Statement” The “Official Statement” of the Relief Camp Strikers’ Committee exemplifies the violent and impassioned form of the political manifesto. It is unusual among Canadian manifestos, in that it is not tied to a party or a platform, but rather to an event and circumstance. It has a spontaneous character that renders its language especially compelling and that is reinforced by its hasty typesetting and mimeographed production. It is also brief, comprising just two pages of text on a single legalsized sheet of paper. I happened across this document in the Robert S. Kenny fonds at the University of Toronto, where it is located among a set of print materials relating to the On-to-Ottawa Trek. The text bears a header dating it to Regina, 1 July 1935: the explosive date of the Regina Riot, which effectively destroyed the eastward movement of the trek. It is also marked by a note handwritten in pencil by Kenny indicating that the text is of a moment “Before the battle.” It is unclear whether the statement was issued to representatives of the provincial or dominion governments, or whether it ever circulated publicly. Weinrich notes a particular difficulty in determining what constitutes “publication”

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with regard to mimeographed documents such as this one, as well as other ephemeral print (x). The Kenny document is almost certainly the only copy of the text – it is virtually unknown in Canadian histories of the period. Weinrich lists an entry for the “Strike Bulletin” of the Relief Camp Strikers Committee, a newsletter in typescript, dating to June 1935 and located in the Kenny collection. His record includes a note regarding “one further bulletin “official statement’” (420: 5446). With limited provenance, the process of reconstructing the networks underlying a text such as this one demands a more oblique approach than the one enabled by the writing of more well-known writers and groups. A hostile political environment and restrictive legal apparatus are certainly responsible for the destruction of many similar radical texts and manuscripts; however, the same regime of surveillance has also left us detailed information about the networks of communication and the paper’s production that would otherwise be lost. Throughout the decade, the RCMP documented “suspicious” organizations and persons, as well as conditions of labour, strikes, foreign influence, and agitation with the potential for subversion or unrest. Though the RCMP reports and analyses retain a strong state-and-security bias and should not be treated as wholly reliable, “it can be asserted, however, that no other Canadian observers spent as much time and money on intensive surveillance of every aspect of the Canadian left” (Kealey and Whitaker pt 1: 17). The erasure of these issues from legal or “legitimate” realms of discourse during this period has ironically left the approved records of the security apparatus itself as the best possible route into a historical underground. Indeed, Gregory S. Kealey and Reg Whitaker’s selection of RCMP bulletins through the 1930s contains references to a number of manifestos and radical publications, including the full text of the “Manifesto of the Communist Parties of the British Empire” (including Canada’s), which I have not been able to trace elsewhere (Kealey and Whitaker pt. 2: 643–6). This process of tracing radical documents back through their underground networks suggests to me a new role for textual scholars: the editor as surveiller. The “Official Statement” does not identify itself as a manifesto; however, even the most cursory examination of the text shows a forceful engagement with the rhetorical and stylistic strategies of the form. It is in many ways a more straightforward text; this does not make it any less interesting or invigorating to read. Here, the “we” of the text is clear, as it references the Relief Camp Strikers’ Committee; however, this identification is extensible, as “we” grows to include the On-to-Ottawa

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trekkers, their supporters, and finally the whole of the Canadian working class as the manifesto progresses. The language of the text sets up a stark binary between the workers/strikers and the state, which is first emblematized in the person of Prime Minister R.B. Bennett, and then vilified as “lying, deceptive” (1) and outright “FASCIST” (2). This opposition deepens as the text consolidates a position: the diction quickly shifts from a fairly restrained statement of “our grievances before the authorities and open negotiations on our demands” (1) to a denunciation of the dominion government’s perceived “campaign of slander and vilification” (1) to violent terms. The Strikers’ Committee characterizes its interaction with Bennett’s representatives as a threat “TO SMASH our trek IN A WELTER OF BLOOD” (1), redirecting trekkers to relief camps for “THE PURPOSE OF BEHEADING OUR STRUGGLE” (2). This move is accomplished typographically as well as rhetorically. Despite the limited expressive powers of mimeograph, the manifesto uses underlining, spacing, and increasingly heavy capitalization – culminating in a combination of all three – to replicate the urgency and rising volume of an impassioned oral address as it moves towards declaring the strikers’ “STAND AGAINST THE LUMSDEN INTERNMENT CAMP” (2). To capture the feel of the manifesto, such a text demands close attention to the material aspects of print, layout, and style for effective editorial representation. The key editorial issue for texts such as the Relief Camp Strikers’ Committee’s “Official Statement” is survival. Passing from politics into history, the work of the unions and temporary, inflammatory workingclass organizations in their attempts to harness the potential force of proletarian identity in Canadian culture is now often traceable only by the chance survival of texts such as this one in the archive. Weinrich, who has assembled perhaps the most comprehensive listing of this kind of material – manifestos, pamphlets, party and union papers, bulletins, newsletters, et cetera – in Canada, is clear that its survival is rare, based partly on the separations between private collectors, academic institutions, and publicly accessible libraries, as well as material concerns. It is also disappearing at a rapid rate, especially from this period: “Much of it remains uncatalogued and hard to find. Public libraries did not collect it when it first appeared, it was seldom available through booksellers, it is often printed on poor paper, fragile and ephemeral in nature. But it remains a prime source of information” (Weinrich ix). Furthermore, survival has direct bearing on the critical attention paid to the role of particular groups, organizations, and institutions, not just

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as formations but as textual producers and interlocutors in the political and cultural debates of the 1930s. Arguably, the difficult connection of proletarianism to modernism is derived in part from this underestimation of the amount of textual material produced by the working-class movement. Part of the work of this collection is to extend the possibilities for intersecting analyses in this area. Tim Buck, An Indictment of Capitalism An Indictment of Capitalism, the published address of Communist Party leader Tim Buck before the Supreme Court of Ontario during the trial of eight Communist leaders under section 98 of the Criminal Code, is in many ways a hybrid of the political and literary manifesto. The text was issued as an eighty-eight-page pamphlet by the Canadian Labor Defence League in 1932 following the trial of November 1931, and featured an explanatory introduction by Buck and an additional preface by A.E. Smith as well as the text of Buck’s address to the jury. The pamphlet can be situated within a particular contextual network, built around particular organizations (the Communist Party, the Canadian Labor Defence League), institutions (the criminal court), figures (Buck, Smith, Bennett, the other leaders on trial), and documents (the Criminal Code, exhibits entered into the court record, various accounts and narratives of the trial, the platform of the Communist Party of Canada, and the Communist Manifesto, which is cited extensively in the text of the address). As a published text, the pamphlet offers more scope for inclusion and annotation, including paratextual material (covers, advertisements, lists of other publications, photographs). Much of this is difficult to include in a print collection; however, the possibility of expanding this project to include digital apparatus would enable the edited text to be linked to images of the original paratext, to documents referenced in the text, as well as to contextual material. Of the two core texts in the pamphlet, the “Introduction” fits more comfortably in the genre of manifesto, for reasons that will be explained by working backward from the “Address to the Jury.” The “Address” purports to be Buck’s closing statements (he conducted his own defence), recorded verbatim by the court reporter. It must be read as rhetorical performance as well as an attempt to force an analysis of Marxist ideology into the public record. Buck works through two key texts, the “Program of the Communist Party” and the Communist Manifesto, both of which have been entered as evidence, as exhibit 68 and

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exhibit 56, respectively. The judge notes that the jury will have all of the programs and literature entered as exhibits with them (78); much like the networks of surveillance discussed above, the courtroom scene creates a set of unexpected readers in an unforeseen path of textual circulation, however narrow it may be. An analytical tone predominates Buck’s treatment of the texts – in many ways, the “Address” operates as a close reading of passages of the Communist Manifesto and a programmatic analysis of that text’s realization in the Communist Party of Canada’s platform. In this practice, Buck adopts a terminology borrowed from literary studies: “When one is compelled to read a paragraph and be unable to explain it by analogy or by concrete example, there is a danger that from the very fact the language is so condensed” (44). However, Buck’s textual discussion is not sustainable through the “Address”; he is frequently interrupted by the judge in moments that resemble the dialogue of a play5 when they are set out in the publication: Are we the people who introduce violence into strikes? Once again, I am at a disadvantage because I am not able to quote examples. I would ask anybody who is interested to read the History of the American Trade Union movement, by Professor Commons, or to read Professor Logan’s History of the Canadian Trade Union Movement. justice wright: – No, no. You cannot use this opportunity for ­propaganda. tim buck: – The point is the fact that there is more violence in strikes in Canada today than there has been in strikes in Canada for thirty or forty years past, is the result of the sharpening suppressive measures of the capitalist state and the rising struggle of the workers. justice wright: – That is not in the record. tim buck: – I am sorry, your lordship. justice wright: – No, no. We are not trying that case. (70)

The “Address” is built around two very distinct speaking positions, that of Buck and that of Justice Wright. The relationship between these positions is revealed in the terms of address: Buck always refers to the judge as “my lord” or “your lordship,” explicitly reinscribing the class and power structures central to the trial, as well as subtly delineating between Canadian formations and British institutions. However, both Buck and the judge remain distinct individuals; despite the clear antagonism between them, the language of the court prevents the “Address”

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from emblematizing the two positions or consolidating Buck’s defence into a collective demand. The “Introduction,” preceding the “Address” upon which it reflects, both synthesizes and redirects the court speech. It is in this document that Buck takes control of the “agenda of history” (11), crafting an alternate Canadian historical narrative, as well as a narrative of class struggle, in the mode of the manifesto. After a short reflection on the trial as a “class trial” (10), the text shifts into the present tense, which it employs until the final page of the “Introduction,” when it moves into a call in the future tense. The polarized speaking positions of the “Address” vanish and are replaced by a collective univocality issuing from the “revolutionary, working class movement” (38). In this text, the narrative of history begins to coalesce around a particular “we” – the Canadian working class whom Buck can invoke only partially in his trial. The relationship between the two texts makes clear the manifesto character of the “Introduction” as it transforms a self-consciously performative document into a demand for mutual action. As the texts both reflect on a specific event and experience, their juxtaposition lays bare the work of language in constructing identity and purpose within the manifesto form; the manifesto does what mere address cannot. Towards a Method of Recomposition In Between Poetics and Polemics, I am interested in working towards a editorial method of recomposition, based primarily upon questions of print, representation, and labour. As I have worked through these three examples of Canadian writing, I have come to an understanding of the manifesto as a highly material form of text. It can be defined not only by its formations, but also by forms of print. It moves through an attenuated set of rhetorical networks, as well as more prosaic networks of circulation and exchange. The rhetorical formation of the manifesto text is the starting point for my editorial approach to this collection. As the figure of the author is elided by the “we” of the manifesto, the recomposition of the text demands focus on the relationships among the many other intervenors who transform a manuscript into a published, public form. It is a means of tracing the “socially generated” universe of text radiating in the criticism of Jerome McGann (Textual Condition 75). The manifesto is collective; by definition it is a social form of communication, spoken to the many, and in its production it is marked by the labour of many hands. These interventions, this work matters to a text

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and should not be erased by the editor excavating for some kind of originating point. In recomposition I seek both to present a social text and to continue its socialization in a politically attuned way through the editorial collection. A discussion of the intersection between the politics of the manifesto and the politics of editing would be incomplete without reflecting on the work of editing as labour in itself, inscribed in a particular set of class relationships. In his examination of the class boundaries of editing and criticism, Gerald MacLean comments on class distinctions among the work of authors, literary critics, and editors based on the division of labour separating these practices. He argues that an implicit class hierarchy reinforces the position of author and scribe over those of printers, compositors, and other trade labourers, thereby influencing the choice of particular copy texts. Accordingly, he connects decisions made on specific textual readings with the professional self-positioning of the text’s editors. In this interrogation, not of readings or selections but of readers and selectors, MacLean forces us to consider, “what are the class ‘interests and positions’ of textual editors?” (32). Whereas critical editors are more likely to define their work in relation to an ideology of authorial production, modernizing – or even anthologizing – editors are more likely to define production in relation to historically specific reading publics (33). I regard my major task in editing the present collection as composing a narrative linking the “we” of a particular manifesto – a “we” that comprises the voices of writers, speakers, and readers – with readers in multiple contexts today. McGann’s work on the socialization of text and the potential of its multiple, overlapping uses imagined the possibility of a textual universe that is material, rather than purely ideal: “Textual and editorial theory has heretofore concerned itself almost exclusively with the linguistic codes. The time has come, however, when we have to take greater theoretical account of the other coding network which operates at the documentary and bibliographical level of literary works” (Textual Condition 78). MacLean is more specific (and Marxist) in his position that “scholarly editing necessarily involves understanding the cultural conditions of the original production of the texts we edit,” and that as editors it is “important that we recognize the extent to which those cultural conditions are crosshatched by the complex articulation of class, gender, sexuality, and national or racial identity” (35). The challenge, as I strive to meet it, is to recompose the networks of a text’s material life to incorporate our critical knowledge of these bibliographical codes

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into a theory of text in action, and not merely as additional descriptors of dead artefacts. Supporting an approach to textuality based on labour and social interactions, Robert Darnton’s communications circuit offers the most thorough model for recovering the movement of a text through its various stages of socialization: production, circulation, and reception. It is highly descriptive, connecting the stages in the life of a text by uncovering as much factual information as he can about the figures, techniques, materials, objects, and places involved with each stage of production and circulation, giving preference to human relations rather than technical processes. The fluidity of Darnton’s model enables the roles of various actors to be considered as part of one continuous process, rather than constraining them by imposing artificial divisions: rather than roles and processes, it is important to consider the network of communications as one of people and work. Darnton further emphasizes the historicity of the text object by inscribing within the circuit of a print object a particular social, political, and legal context that influences the relationship of human actors with a given text as it passes through various stages. This model works well when considering relationships of production and the various forms of textual “work” beneath a print object. Thomas R. Adams and Nicolas Barker’s bio-bibliographical approach extends the circuit further by considering the influence and survival of a text as additional key events in the “life of a book” (15). Survival of the text is the issue that has resonated most strongly as this project progresses. A.J.P. Taylor’s comments regarding pamphleteering could be as easily spoken of manifestos: “Nowhere in the world is there a complete collection of the stuff; no one anywhere will ever read it through. Something has survived! the best of it is reprinted here. It has survived, by virtue of its literary excellence; preserved, as it were, from destruction by the strong spirits of individualism which soak through these pages” (7). I would argue, however, that “literary excellence” contributes little to the prospect of its survival. Survival seems to have more to do with patching and maintaining textual networks than polished claims of linguistic value; literary immortality exists not in the work itself, but in “the continuous socialization of the texts” (McGann, Textual Condition 83). My attempt to reconstruct the “life” of any particular text has grappled with the influence of all points of the communications circuit on its survival, and the possibility of its disappearance at any one of those points. However, each point on the cycle is a potential “way in” – through a person, place, institution, or organization, each

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of which can often be traced back through multiple, intersecting networks. My hope is that by foregrounding the process of selection, haphazard and contentious as it is, the collection can be seen not as definitive, but one of many possible collections. The reader has more to speculate about when considering what didn’t survive, what wasn’t archived, what remains protected, and what might connect in unexpected ways. In this way, absent texts remain a part of the conversation, rather than become silenced by effacement. How, and out of what, the manifesto is composed is absolutely vital to understanding why it was composed and the form its message takes. The editor should not be separated from these material considerations: there is much to be gained by foregrounding the labour of print production as it intersects with the labour of reclaiming, editing, reproducing a text. A politically astute editing process should be as revealing of the editor’s own efforts and positions, as those of others labouring to produce the critical text as both a representation of its original and something new entirely. We must strive to manifest both the unrecognized labour of textual production and the “invisible” labours of republication and digitization in our works. We, readers and critics all, must shake off the limits of familiar forms as we march now to the edge of the page and into a textual battlefield. NOTES I would like to acknowledge the support of Editing Modernism in Canada in funding this project through a PhD stipend, as well as inviting and arranging for my participation in the Conference on Editorial Problems. Thank you also to my past and present EMiC colleagues at the University of Alberta, Paul Hjartarson, Hannah McGregor, Kristin Fast, Kristine Smitka, Harvey Quamen, and Raymond Frogner, for their ongoing discussion and suggestions as the project continues to develop. 1 Explicitly Canadian, that is – not as related to First Nations culture. 2 Thank you to Kristine Smitka for bringing the text to my attention and suggesting its inclusion in this collection. 3 This project is detailed by Paul Hjartarson, Harvey Quamen, and Kristin Fast in their chapter in this volume. 4 Indeed, an adjacent file in the archive contains a manuscript draft of response to article in Weekend magazine on the Canada Council dating from

246  Andrea Hasenbank and EMiC UA the same period, suggesting that the reach of the council was very much on Watson’s mind (Journals and Notebooks, 91-17, box 3, folder 33, Wilfred Watson Fonds, University of Alberta Archives, Edmonton). 5 And of course become the subject of a play, Eight Men Speak, which in its seizure of the court narrative can itself be read as a form of creative-political manifesto (see Ryan et al.).

11  Selecting Modernist Poetry in Canada: Readers’ Editions and Editorial Practice peter webb

Books declare themselves through their titles, their authors, their places in a catalogue or on a bookshelf, the illustrations on their jackets; books also declare themselves through their size. Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading (125)

If, as Alberto Manguel argues, size matters in how a book “declares” itself, books of a relatively small size – reader’s editions of selected poems – have declared themselves far too modestly in the discourse of Canadian modernist poetry and editorial practice. Current conditions in the publishing industry, especially the demand that books minimize cost while maximizing saleability, have made selected editions far more plentiful than critical editions.1 However, there is as yet no coherent critical discourse addressing the ways in which selected editions are produced or what their impact is on the preservation and recovery of modernist Canadian poetry. Part of the problem may be that selected editions, because they often lack extensive notes and other para-textual material, are perceived as unscholarly in approach and purpose. Another issue may be the recent shift in interest to digital or hypermedia editions, which has tended to make the contemporary codex less exciting as a basis for scholarship. Nevertheless, selected editions are widely used in a number of scholarly realms, including the classroom, and can have a crucial impact in cases where no critical edition of a poet’s work exists. Moreover, the proliferation of digital reading devices such as Kindles and iPads has made many print and digital editions identical in content, if not in form. Canadian books originally edited for print have already begun appearing in digital facsimiles – and the trend is liable to continue. Another

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recent development is the hypermedia supplement to the print edition of selected poems, where the digitized accompaniment provides extensive notes of the kind more commonly found in a critical edition. The importance of sound methodology in selecting and editing poems from a larger corpus is not diminished in any of these processes. This chapter analyses a number of selected editions of modern Canadian poetry in light of current editorial practice and academic scholarship. It outlines some of the advantages and disadvantages of selected editions over critical ones and offers observations on some of the particular issues and problems facing editors of shorter volumes. Given the near total absence of scholarship on the subject, I decided to query other editors by email about their experiences in editing selected volumes of Canadian modernist poetry. Several responded, including Laura Moss (selected F.R. Scott for the Laurier Poetry Series), Zailig Pollock (selected A.M. Klein, P.K. Page, and E.J. Pratt), Sam Solecki (selected Earle Birney, Al Purdy, and a revised edition of Irving Layton), and Martin Ware and Stephanie McKenzie (selected Al Pittman). Their comments, along with my own observations on editing From Room to Room: The Poetry of Eli Mandel (2011) for the Laurier Poetry Series, provide examples and insight throughout this chapter. Practically all scholars of contemporary editorial practice rely on fully annotated critical editions of complete or collected poems as their models for discussion. Recent publications by George Bornstein, Dean Irvine, Jerome McGann, and Zailig Pollock all reflect this trend. This bias towards critical editions is understandable, as they remain the standard medium for serious scholarship and present the greatest complexity in establishing reliable texts for scholarly use. The editorial problems facing editors of critical and selected editions are often similar: choosing optimal copy texts, dealing with accidentals and variations in particular poems, and weighing authorial intention against what Bornstein calls “historical situation and contingency” (“Introduction” 8). Selected editions, even though more limited in scope, present additional and distinct editorial problems: choosing representative poems from a much larger corpus, deciding whether to exclude or excerpt longer poems, making the book accessible to a non-scholarly audience, limiting notes and other para-textual elements, and working within templates established by publishers. Theorists of editorial practice have done little to address these specific concerns, leaving editors of selected editions of Canadian modernist poetry to work through these problems on an ad hoc basis.

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Major critical editions of the works of A.M. Klein, E.J. Pratt, Anne Wilkinson, Eli Mandel, Al Purdy, A.J.M. Smith, and others have done much to reinvigorate discussion of these poets’ works and ensure their preservation in Canadian and international libraries. But because these editions are costly to produce (both in time and budget), require the long-term dedication of a finite number of experts, and have limited commercial prospects for publishers, they focus on only a few canonical authors whose legacy attracts advanced scholars under fortunate conditions. Since Canadian modernism often has been elided in favour of a superficially distinct postmodernism, it has become increasingly rare for a major modernist poet – let alone an important secondary one – to garner recovery through an extensive critical edition. Hypermedia editions may improve the situation in the future, but as Irvine points out, “innovations in digital media have [so far] done little to remedy l­iterary-historical amnesia about Canada’s modernists, since our hypertext editorial projects have been exclusively devoted to canonical authors” (“Editing Canadian Modernism” 79). The medium most responsible for picking up the slack has been brief, selected readers’ editions of individual poets’ works. Since the mid1990s, editions numbering in the dozens have focused on Earle Birney, A.M. Klein, Irving Layton, Eli Mandel, Al Pittman, E.J. Pratt, Margaret Avison, Louis Dudek, Ralph Gustafson, George Johnson, Dorothy Livesay, Alden Nowlan, Frank Prewett, James Reaney, and others. Three selections of Page’s work have recently appeared – Planet Earth: Poems Selected and New (2002), The Essential P.K. Page (2008), and Kaleidoscope: Selected Poems (2010). Two volumes of Purdy are in print: Rooms for Rent in the Outer Planets (1996) and The Most Easily Kept Illusions: The Poetry of Al Purdy (2006). While many of these poets are the same canonical ones given treatment in critical editions, many, including Gustafson, Johnston, Pittman, and Prewett, are lesser-known figures whose more marginal status makes them less likely to garner the extensive treatment of a critical edition. Most selected editions use familiar formats to provide accessible overviews of poets’ work. Selections of a few dozen to a few hundred poems cover the best-known and most critically significant aspects of the poet’s career. Long poems and lengthy sequences, if not excluded, are commonly excerpted to present a few hundred key lines. A scholarly introduction of a few thousand words contextualizes the poetry for uninitiated readers while providing a few additional insights for readers familiar with the poet’s work. Explanatory and textual notes

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are usually minimal, presenting at most the original publication dates of poems, sources of copy texts, and maybe a few glosses on arcane words or allusions. In some cases, even these notations are absent, placing greater weight on the introduction or acknowledgments to provide whatever bibliographic details the editor or publisher deems essential. Trade paperback editions often include an evocative cover image to attract browsers of bookshelves and websites. Some editions alter or augment one or more of these elements. Irvine’s edition of Livesay’s work, Archive for Our Times: Previously Uncollected and Unpublished Poems of Dorothy Livesay (1998), focuses mainly on lesser-known works rather than those most widely associated with the poet’s legacy. Djwa, Keith, and Pollock’s E.J. Pratt: Selected Poems (2000) reproduces several of the poet’s key long poems (The Witches’ Brew, The Iron Door, The Titanic, Brébeuf and His Brethren, and Towards the Last Spike) in their entirety. For Pollock this decision was motivated by Pratt’s particular achievement in the long form: “Since many of Pratt’s poems are long narratives, and we preferred to avoid selections from works, we were limited in what we could include” (“Selected Poems”). Limitations on space are not easily overcome in selected volumes, hence the rarity of editions devoted to poets whose main achievements are in long forms. Pollock is also an innovator of the hypertext supplement to the selected edition, a practice he followed with the online accompaniment to the Pratt Selected and is developing more extensively in relation to Page’s Kaleidoscope: Selected Poems, the first print volume in a major Page republication project. As yet seldom used by other poetry editors, online supplements may eventually offer a common solution to the space restrictions in print editions. Such a shift can take place, however, only if funding and production strategies in book publishing grow to accommodate such hybrid initiatives. If selected editions are so often limited in scope, what makes them so important? One answer lies in their capacity to enhance appreciation of Canadian modernist poetry among students, general readers, and non-specialist scholars. Anyone who has taught an introductory survey course in Canadian literature or modern poetry knows that students typically have little prior familiarity with Canadian modernist poets. Critical neglect of particular poets, sidelining of literary pedagogy in public education, and a persistent yet unjustified stereotype of Canadian poetry as “second rate” have conspired to deprive many students of even a basic familiarity with Klein, Layton, Page, Pratt, and other

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key figures. Scholastic textbooks like Donna Bennett and Russell Brown’s Anthology of Canadian Literature in English and Robert Lecker’s Open Country: Canadian Literature in English go some way to filling the gaps in students’ knowledge. But these books are highly selective in the poets they present, limited to a handful of poems by each, and often inadequate for more in-depth study and appreciation of a given poet’s oeuvre. Novice students are unlikely to jump straight into a lengthy critical edition. So the selected edition serves an ideal middle function as a medium through which students can read and study modernist poets on their own or as assigned readings. The pedagogical benefits of selected editions are emphasized in Neil Besner’s generalized foreword to the Laurier Poetry Series: “The usual practice of teaching a poet through eight or twelve poems from an anthology is much improved upon; and readers in and out of classrooms will have more useful, engaging, and comprehensive introductions to a poet’s work” (vii). As for general readers outside the academy, selected editions are unquestionably the form in which they are most likely to revisit or discover Canadian modernist poetry. Bookstores rarely stock complete works unless they appear in trade paperback editions (although Oberon Press has come up with an effective hybrid in its multi-volume paperbacks of Elizabeth Brewster’s and Raymond Souster’s collected works). Trade paperbacks of 100–300 pages are the standard unit of the commercial book trade – parameters that publishers of selected poetry editions understand when they market their books. In Manguel’s terms, volumes such as Layton’s Wild Peculiar Joy: The Selected Poems (2004), Birney’s One Muddy Hand: Selected Poems (2006), and Lane and Crozier’s edition of Nowlan’s Selected Poems (1996) all “declare” themselves through their appearances and sizes to be the kind of books readers and booksellers most commonly buy. Attractive covers and relatively modest prices contribute to the optics conducive to online sales on sites such as Amazon and Chapters-Indigo. Visual appearance and marketability are not the first things editors normally consider in the creation of editions. But in a era where Canadian modernist poetry is in a chronic state of neglect – far different from a time when poets like Layton and Leonard Cohen were national celebrities – it helps to have poetry appear in ways that stand a chance of attracting new readers to underrated works. How effective selected editions have been in boosting the notoriously small trade market for Canadian poetry is open to question. But the number of editions that continue to appear from small presses like Oberon and Harbour and

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larger players like Anansi and McClelland and Stewart show a market healthy enough to sustain itself, especially with governmental subventions. Whether or not print editions in codex form continue to flourish or are eventually superseded by downloadable texts for Kindles and iPads (or other devices yet to appear) is less crucial from an editing standpoint, since both print and digital editions require knowledgeable and dedicated editors. The relationship between selected editions and advanced academic scholarship is more complicated and takes us deeper into considerations of editorial methodology. On one level, selected editions, to the ­serious scholar, are merely an amateur’s substitute for the kind of thorough research that can be done only with reference to heavily annotated editions or manuscripts. Laura Moss, editor of F.R. Scott’s selected poems, maintains that there is no solid basis for comparison between a selected and critical edition: “You are asking me to compare apples and oranges … Heavy annotation is absolutely vital in editorial scholarship. It is a different level of scholarship and it is intended for a more scholarly reader” (“F.R. Scott”). While Moss’s comment certainly holds true at the level of para-textual elements (especially extensive annotation) and access to a poet’s wider corpus, one wonders whether a selected edition is necessarily less “vital” than a critical one at the level of individual poems. One can envision cases where, having gained comprehensive knowledge of a poet’s work, a critic wants to focus on one or a few key poems in an article or conference paper. A selected edition by a trustworthy editor may offer up reliable versions of these poems; moreover, they may even prove more accurate than versions in critical editions. One example is the versions of Pratt’s poems in Selected Poems, a volume for which Pollock maintains “the main advantage is better texts” (“Selected Poems”). Noting “serious problems in editorial procedures in the Collected Poems” after which “all of the poems had to be re-edited,” Pollock describes an opportunity to correct these problems in Selected Poems. The supplementary website annotates the specifics of these decisions. In my recent edition of Eli Mandel’s selected poems, I was able to correct an error in the otherwise more authoritative The Other Harmony: Collected Poems (edited by Andrew Stubbs and Judy Chapman in 2000) by restoring one poem, “signs,” to its proper form. A printing omission of the title “signs” in the first edition of Mandel’s Out of Place (1977), duplicated later in The Other Harmony, made the poem appear as if it were the second half of a preceding (and similarly styled) poem entitled “the return.” Manuscripts and galleys of Out of

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Place backed up my correction, as did a reprint of “signs,” title intact, in the Mandel-approved collection Dreaming Backwards, 1954–1981. These specific cases are more exceptions than norms in comparing the texts of selected and critical editions. Selected editions are not immune to their own gaffes in textual accuracy, and the inconsistency with which long poems and poetic sequences are often excerpted (typically by appending “from” to the title) nullifies their value to scholarly criticism. All the same, the above examples show that what ultimately matters most is the reliability of the text of a given poem, not the particular scope of the book in which it appears. From a scholarly standpoint the biggest problem with selected editions, especially those with limited notes, is the fact that the editorial methodology so often goes undocumented. Moss rightly asserts, “Heavy annotation is absolutely vital in editorial scholarship.” When corrections are made silently or only briefly explained, it hampers the process of letting readers know how a particular version of a text was established. This may not matter much to the undergraduate student, but the more advanced scholar needs to know that the text she is working with is reliable. Unless limitations on notes and other editorial apparatus can be overcome, no selected edition can completely substitute for the full-blown critical edition. A recent advent (or, rather, a return to an older practice) has been the establishment of uniform series of poetry editions. One prominent example is the aforementioned Laurier Poetry Series; another is Porcupine’s Quill’s Essential series. Both are contemporary equivalents of long-defunct initiatives such as the Ryerson Chapbook Series with a canonizing function akin to that of the mainly prose-oriented New Canadian Library. While such series have the advantage of enhanced marketability and cheaper production costs from the use of templates, they also present special challenges to the editor forced to work within strict guidelines. Typically it is the press, not the editor, who decides on the number of poems to be included and the formatting of para-text. The editor, to some degree, subordinates his decisions to the production process. However, the process of selecting poems remains independent and, for new editors especially, the volumes provide an excellent training ground. The Laurier Poetry Series (LPS) includes thirty-five poems per volume, each of which surveys the career of a prominent or neglected poet. Para-text includes a one-page biography, a scholarly introduction of approximately 2,800 words, and a literary afterword by the poet or,

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if the poet is deceased, a recognized scholar. Notes are minimal, consisting mainly of a list of acknowledgments at the end of the volume, naming original sources for the poems (generally first-edition collections), as well as the occasional parenthesis or asterisk to highlight a few crucial textual or explanatory details. Such limited parameters do not provide much room for editorial commentary, so the introductions and afterwords are generally where any editorial matters crucial to the readers’ appreciation of the poems can be discussed. The Porcupine’s Quill recently began its Essential series (as in The Essential Margaret Avison), which so far includes volumes of selected poems by Avison, Page, Don Coles, George Johnston, Kenneth Leslie, and James Reaney. Each volume features approximately sixty pages of poetry, along with a brief editor’s preface, a brief biography, and a bibliography of related works. Like the LPS, the Essential series aims to “provide a short and carefully considered selection of a single poet’s work, inviting deeper reading and rereading to foster an intimate acquaintance and ongoing engagement with the poems” (Johnston, Essential back cover). The volumes are not definitive, nor do they pretend to be, but they do provide one of the few places where contemporary readers can discover a number of modernist poets (notably Johnston, Leslie, and Reaney) otherwise marginalized in the canon of Canadian literature. No poetry collection, however well-intended, can provide a transparent account of a poet’s legacy. Pollock’s notion of editing “as a narrative process, as an act of storytelling” (“Editor” 55) seems particularly relevant to short editions like those of the LPS and Essential series. Limitations on scope can easily reveal the editor’s preference for certain kinds of poems in a larger oeuvre, and the exclusions of experimental and longer material are inevitably drastic. Yet the materiality of the book and its selected contents can also create a unique “story” about a poet’s work that earlier or larger editions may never have envisioned. Not everyone would necessarily agree that brief selected editions are critically valuable. Neil Fraistat, an advocate of reading “poems in their place” – that is, poems within the context of their original published volumes – calls attention to the ways in which the book sets the conditions for readers’ interpretation of the poetry within: “It is a simple fact of our reading experience that poems take place, in the words of Albert Thibaudet, ‘as a function of the Book.’ That is to say that the book – with all of its informing contexts – is the meeting ground for poet and reader, the ‘situation’ in which its constituent texts occur. As such, the

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book is constantly conditioning the reader’s responses, activating various sets of what semioticians call ‘interpretive codes’” (3). Fraistat goes a step further in arguing that to divorce individual poems – which he sees as intertextual increments within “the ‘poem’ that is the book itself” (3) – from their original volumes is to upset the interpretive conditions resulting from the careful arrangement of poems in a particular sequence: “Because reading is a process of patterning, to read an individual poem in isolation or outside of its original volume is not only to lose the large retroactive sweep of the book as a whole – with its attendant dynamics and significance – but also to risk losing the meanings within the poem itself that are foregrounded or activated by the context of the book” (8). Fraistat’s argument recognizes the role of the book in setting the stage for the interpretive process and enabling codes of correspondence and contrast between different poems. But there are problems with his notion that to disassociate a poem from its original volume is necessarily “to lose” something of its meaning, a notion he iterates twice in the second of the above quotations. Potentially there is much to be gained in reading poems in new contexts and sequences, including those one finds in an anthology or selected works. For example, reading Atwood’s “Death a Young Son by Drowning” within or without the thematic cycle of The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970) alters the interpretive possibilities of the poem in ways that are not reducible to “loss” or “gain.” Reading the poem in the original volume reveals it to be an incremental step in Moodie’s hard-won resolution to build a life in Canada. Reading it in isolation conceals the identity of both the unnamed speaker and the unnamed land referenced in the text, making it less specific and potentially more universal of a lament. Some readers will know that the speaker is Moodie (as imagined by Atwood) and the setting is Canada, but others may not. There is no particular reason to privilege a more “informed” interpretation over a less informed one as long as each makes sense on the terms presented by the text. Both offer up interpretive codes that depend on different contexts – one context being The Journals of Susanna Moodie, another being any medium that reproduces “Death of a Young Son by Drowning” as a stand-alone poem. In the teaching of poetry, a certain amount of glossing and background is often needed to help students understand the context of individual poems. If on a syllabus one assigns The Journals of Susanna Moodie in book form instead of drawing excerpts from an anthology, it does not follow that one will teach every poem in the book in equal detail. Neither is every student in the class likely to read the poems with the same

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level of attention. Some students may read the entire monograph and take careful notes on each poem; others may opt to read just the poems highlighted by the instructor; others may forego the assigned volume and read whatever poems they can find online. The occasional student may not read the poems at all but rely solely on hearing them recited during lectures. Whatever the particulars, Fraistat’s notion of reading “poems in their place” is always already disrupted by the fact that different readers will tend to read (or hear) the same set of poems under different conditions. The interpretive act is a fluid, not static, process that can be as meaningful in a book of selected poems as it can in a monograph. Even a relatively small selection of poems from a large corpus can produce intriguing juxtapositions and interpretive codes that were never part of the original volumes in which the poems appeared. Take, for example, the 2001 edition of Ralph Gustafson’s Selected Poems, published by Véhicule Press. According to Bruce Whiteman, Gustafson selected the contents, preparing the manuscript shortly before his death in 1995 on the basis of “want[ing] to make a final accounting of what he thought best among his many books” (“Introduction” 11). The result is a remarkably slim volume – just sixty-eight pages of poetry – from a career spanning sixty years that produced numerous monographs, a three-volume collected works, and three previous selected works (each different from the next). In a brief epigraph Gustafson writes, “I hardly know, or want to know, what I have selected.” Yet the selection and its sequence reveal intricate connections that could not have come from mere random arrangement. Early in the book one finds a group of five existentially themed poems (“Much is required for an adequate answer …” through “The Arrival of Wisdom”), followed by a pair alluding to Agamemnon (“Agamemnon’s Mask” and “In Dispraise of Great Happenings”). Later, a cycle of six poems describing the seasons in Quebec’s Eastern Townships forms a centrepiece to the book (“Heritage” through “Hearing the Woodthrush in the Evening”). All of these poems are drawn from different periods in Gustafson’s career, producing what Whiteman terms “connections drawn at levels beyond the order of composition: connections of theme, of music, and of private circumstance” (“Introduction” 11). Gustafson’s Selected Poems thus produces new interpretive possibilities by not keeping poems “in their place.” In his final reckoning with his own work, Gustafson makes intriguing interpretive codes out of nonlinear fragments arranged in ways he could have discovered only once the entirely of his life’s work was available for assessment.

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Are the new interpretative possibilities created out of poems selected by an editor any less rich than those created by an author? Not necessarily, provided the editor knows the author’s oeuvre intimately and has a clear vision of how her volume will frame the poems within it. Since selected volumes can fulfil any number of functions – a sampling of a poet’s best-known poems, a compilation of early- or late-period work, emphasis on poems in a particular form or on a particular theme, recovery of unpublished or uncollected works, and so on – there is no methodological consensus on how selected poems should be chosen. Each editor chooses her own methodology and follows the plan towards the final book. As new editions appear over time, as has been the case with Page, Purdy, and a few others, they offer new sequences and frames in which to read an author’s work without one necessarily taking priority. The situation resembles one that Francisco Rico, echoing Bornstein, McGann, and other anti-intentionalists, articulates: “A text is, to a great extent, a social product, by a collective author: it is born, grows, and reproduces itself under conditions which are not merely individual ones (from language and literary influences to ideological and pragmatic factors). Thus, the shapes a text may take, once separated from the individual author, are all ‘authentic’ and deserve equal importance” (6). The editor of a selected edition “shapes a text” first and foremost by choosing particular poems from a much larger corpus to be arranged and sequenced in particular ways. This is probably the factor that distinguishes the editing of a selected edition the most from the creation of a complete or collected works, where the inclusions are more comprehensive and the exclusions less drastic. Selecting poems can be an anxious process, since whatever is chosen or left out can severely affect readers’ impressions of a poet’s work. Too many exclusions of long poems by a poet known for writing them can distort a well-rounded sense of form, while including too many long works eats up pages that may be better devoted to diversity. Emphasizing one theme or mode in a poet’s work can downplay another, and in cases where poets have had long careers and written on a great many subjects, it can be difficult to present more than a smattering of each. At the same time, too much diversity – one poem wildly different in form or subject from the next – can inhibit the flow of a volume so that one loses any impression of a poet working out a coherent vision. The sequencing of poems within the volume is equally crucial to the impression created. The most common arrangement of selections is a

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chronological one, allowing readers to see the poet’s development and changes over time; but this can be problematic when a poet, Al Purdy for example, is known to have come into maturity after a long apprenticeship of writing poems ultimately uncharacteristic of his vision. The Gustafson volume exemplifies how a non-chronological approach can be more effective in evoking particular themes and recurring interests in an author’s work. But it can be less effective in creating a teachable text that lends itself to the chronological model on which many literature courses are designed. Often an editor feels a sense of responsibility towards a poet’s preferences within his or her own work. Moss’s archival research for the F.R. Scott volume uncovered “a list of what he considered his best poems to be” which she compared with her own “marking [of] the ones that struck me as beautiful, important, or unusual” (“F.R. Scott”). Sam Solecki, in the process of selecting Birney, also “wanted the selection to reflect to a large degree B[irney]’s own preferences” (“One Muddy Hand”). Birney had selected an earlier selected volume for McClelland and Stewart, giving Solecki a record of the poet’s own list of favourites. Seldom, however, can or should an editor rely solely on a poet’s own preferences. Indeed neither Moss or Solecki lets the preferences of the poet inhibit her or his own sense of what Moss calls Scott’s “most significant work” and Solecki calls Birney’s “best and most representative work.” A poet’s own sense of himself is always contingent and rarely fixed, and editing grounded in notions of authorial intention has been rightly challenged by Bornstein, McGann, and Rico. Even if preferences over titles can be established, it does not follow that preferences over texts can as well. In the case of Mandel, the texts of two poems central to his oeuvre, “Minotaur Poems” and “The Meaning of the I CHING,” changed drastically between first edition monographs and later republications. Mandel approved two selected editions of his own work, Crusoe: Poems Selected and New (1973) and Dreaming Backwards (1981), both of which alter the text of “The Meaning of the I CHING” in different ways. Changes made at the behest of Dennis Lee (Mandel’s editor at Anansi) for Crusoe – particularly the elimination of the line “I am crazed by poetry,” repeated twice in the monograph version – were reverted in Dreaming Backwards; others remained. “Minotaur Poems,” a poetic sequence first published in Trio (1954), went through various later alterations through the subtraction and substitution of different parts. Mandel clearly preferred certain of his poems by approving their republication during his lifetime. But for the posthumous editor, the question remains: What, exactly, is “the poem”?

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Editors are often conscious of their role in establishing or recovering a poet’s legacy, and some deliberately select particular poems to highlight certain concerns. Stephanie McKenzie and Martin Ware, editors of Al Pittman’s Island in the Sky: Selected Poetry (2003), were aware of how Pittman’s vision developed from “an early indebtedness to Dylan Thomas” towards a greater reliance “on the rhythms and narratives of Newfoundland lives in his mature verse” (“Al Pittman”). Working “with half an eye on those [poems] that best reflected his as a Newfoundland voice,” McKenzie and Ware assembled a selected volume that contains a metanarrative about Pittman’s development towards a particular cultural vision. Pollock’s concept of “the editor as storyteller” would apply here; but in some respects the editors’ choices are simply an enhancement of a narrative already implicit in the poet’s career-long development. At an even simpler level, the editing of selected editions is often driven by anxiety about a poet’s lack of posthumous recognition. The relatively privileged position an editor enjoys as an informed reader with scholarly and publishing connections often provokes a sense of duty to save poetry from impending obscurity. Aware that Birney’s work “had fallen out of fashion and was not being taught as often as … it deserved,” Solecki emphasized “the consideration of the audience” in his efforts to restore Birney to public and critical prominence (“One Muddy Hand”). Although no selected edition is likely to revolutionize appreciation of a poet’s work, each has the potential to mitigate cultural and artistic loss. Every editor is, in some small way, a crusader against neglect. Solecki’s concern over posterity is one that I shared in editing From Room to Room: The Poetry of Eli Mandel for the Laurier Poetry Series. Mandel was a celebrated and influential figure during his lifetime – especially during the 1960s and 1970s when he won a number of accolades, including the 1967 Governor General’s Award for the monograph An Idiot Joy. After his death in 1992, his work began to fade from view, especially in Eastern Canada, where his Saskatchewan roots were less appreciated than in the West. After a special double-issue of Essays on Canadian Writing in 1991–2 and a critical monograph by Andrew Stubbs, academic attention to his work died out almost completely. In 2000, Stubbs and Judy Chapman edited The Other Harmony: The Collected Poems of Eli Mandel, but this volume attracted little attention beyond scholars and by the end of the decade had become difficult to find. A selected works seemed the obvious

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way to reinvigorate Mandel’s legacy in a way best suited to general readership and course adoptions. My selection process for the volume involved tracing Mandel’s uncommonly complex allusions while accommodating his multifaceted thematic concerns: prairie life, Jewish culture and religion, the socio-political upheavals of the Depression, the Second World War, and the Vietnam War, and other matters. I also felt it important to include the poems, such as “Minotaur Poems” and “The Meaning of the I CHING,” that those familiar with Mandel’s work would expect. In making such selections one is conscious of one’s role in affecting a poet’s legacy for a newer, perhaps uninitiated, generation. The poet that Mandel “becomes” in my edition is to some degree my own interpretation, and there is always a risk of misconstruing and misrepresenting whatever vision the poet may have had of himself. In the end, however, the best that one can do is highlight what seem to be the most significant works – both from an aesthetic and thematic standpoint – and present them in a sequence that shows a coherent development in the poet’s career. The strictures of the LPS’s thirty-five-poem template were most apparent as I chose which parts of Out of Place, Mandel’s book-length poetic cycle from 1977, to include. Breaking the sequence of the original volume inevitably breaks some of the thematic threads to be found there; yet in taking poems out this sequence, new possibilities arise for reading the poems as individual lyrics. Ultimately, the book I edit is a new kind of cycle that suppresses some of the interpretive possibilities to be found in older monographs while mobilizing other new possibilities that may not have already been apparent. The book, in effect, becomes its own integrated text in which a hermeneutic potential is unleashed. The proliferation of badly edited and indifferently presented poems in informal websites without scholarly oversight (PoemHunter.com, Project Gutenberg, amateur blogs, and so on) has reinforced the need for scholarly attention in the preservation and recovery of poetry. At the same time, the shift towards selected volumes aimed at minimizing cost has pushed the editor into the shadows in terms of having an active and thoroughly documented role in establishing the text. The muting of the editorial process through the elision of extensive notes and other para-textual apparatuses forces texts, more than ever, to speak for themselves. In an age where publishers such as Kessinger, Tutis, and BiblioLife can simply bind up facsimiles of old books or text-scanned

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Word documents in generic covers and market them as “editions,” it is incumbent on scholarly editors of selected poems to maintain a standard of integrity that allows their editions (whether published in print or digital form) to stand out from the corrupted ones that compete for equal attention in the marketplace. Modernist Canadian poetry has thankfully so far been spared the worst of these corruptions (although the post-Confederation poets have not), because a majority of works by major poets remain in copyright and are thus protected from all but the most brazen piracy. But as decades pass and the work of Canadian modernists starts falling into the public domain (as has already happened with a few seminal figures such as Raymond Knister and Marjorie Pickthall), it will be the editions established by scholarly editors that set the standard for the preservation and textual integrity of modern Canadian poetry. Unless something drastic changes in the academic humanities and publishing world, not every poet worth preserving will be given the full treatment he or she deserves in a full-blown, heavily annotated edition of complete works. There are not enough scholars, not enough funding for the scholars, not enough publishers prepared to commit to major editions, and far too many poets worthy of them. The selected edition, inexpensive to produce, relatively easy to market, adaptable to both print and digital forms, and critically reliable if it is done right, will become increasingly important as the medium through which students, general readers, and emerging scholars will come to know the poetry of the Canadian modernists. As yet no critical consensus and no secure methodology exist for how these editions are to be produced. Perhaps the variety of such editions precludes the possibility – or even the desirability – of having such a consensus. But these are questions that should be considered further as we move towards a time when selected editions, and their editors, come out of the shadows and “declare themselves” to new generations of readers. NOTES The author wishes to thank Stephanie McKenzie, Laura Moss, Zailig Pollock, Sam Solecki, and Martin Ware for responding to an emailed questionnaire with their detailed and insightful comments on the editing of recent volumes of Canadian modernist poetry.

264  Peter Webb 1 For the purposes of this discussion, a “selected edition” is a relatively short volume that contains a representative and professionally edited selection of a given poet’s work but lacks an exhaustive scholarly paratext; a “critical edition” is comprehensive, heavily annotated, and substantial in length – the kind of volume whose title might include the terms collected or complete.

12  When Out in Front Gets Left Behind: Sol Allen’s They Have Bodies and Canada’s Archived Avant-Garde gregory betts

Nobody has yet discovered the language that could express instantaneously what we perceive at a glance. Nathalie Sarraute, The Planetarium (29)

“There must be at least 749,327 dots,” decried the Toronto Daily Star’s literary reviewer of Sol Allen’s 1929 novel They Have Bodies. “Reading aloud a page would sound like the Morse code at a railway station” (9). The aberrant formal features of Allen’s novel shocked the reviewer, but it was the content of the “strangulated” sentences that disgusted him. Despite the fact that the full title of Allen’s novel, They Have Bodies: A Realistic Novel in Eleven Chapters and Three Acts, draws explicit attention to at least four formal properties of the book, thus signalling its self-conscious construction as a work of art, and the fact that multiple sections in the novel are typeset in the manner of a stage play, the strategy or significance of its representation of disgust, its literariness, and its artifice, failed to justify for the reviewer the ugly people and events in its pages. There is something a touch nefarious about one of the reviewer’s petulant questions of the book: “Some of us who have no time for bridge don’t happen to have met ‘those kind of people.’ Where are they? Streets and numbers please.” Such a basic misunderstanding of the nature of the subject and of literary artifice becomes rather ominous when we connect its sentiment to the Toronto Police Department’s subsequent decision to censor the book.1 Despite the visually striking innovations, including perhaps the most dynamic use of ellipses in Canadian literature, the book has since all but completely disappeared from public (including academic) consideration. In J.L. Charlesworth’s review of literature for 1928–9, the fact of the censorship is all that

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remains of the book: “A third first novel, They Have Bodies, by Barney Allen of Toronto, achieved the distinction of being banned by the police censorship of that City” (571). The fact that the police were involved in the marginalization of this book raises the significance of the text’s engagement with and representation of Toronto class politics. As Kirwan Cox has reported, Sol Allen was the youngest surviving son of a family of pioneers in the cinema industry who immigrated to Canada from Russia via the United States in 1905. By the 1920s, the family had built up “one of the finest and largest theatre circuits in the world … The elegant Allen movie palaces set the world standard for their day and made the movies respectable in Canada” (44). The Allen empire spread across Canada, down through the United States, and into England (as well as an aborted attempt to expand into Russia). In 1919 they had “the largest theatre chain in the world” (61), but the success of the business attracted withering attacks from competing theatre magnates, including Lord Beaverbrook, who attempted to purchase the Allen company outright in 1920. By 1923, the company had been significantly reduced, which prompted the mavens of the Canadian financial industry to intervene, dismantle, and then sell off the pieces of the company at drastically reduced valuations. The Allens, however, managed to hold onto and continue to operate a small number of theatre houses and would over time rebuild the company (a diminished version of which continues to operate by family members today). In the mid-1920s, however, the family had been outmanoeuvred by Canadian industrialists, which cost the family its fortune, and more significantly in this context, their place in the country’s upper class. Ironically, while the Allen family’s business model “attracted the wellto-do into motion picture theatres” for the first time (44), it was this exposure to the Canadian aristocracy that ultimately led to Sol Allen’s satiric depiction in They Have Bodies. While it is possible that the small number of reviewers of Allen’s novel were aware of the backstory to his circumstance, none make the connection between the book and the author’s biography or his employment with the Allen-owned Canadian Paramount Pictures Corporation Limited. They all, however, identify a cynicism in the book’s representation of Toronto society from which they all recoil. B.K. Sandwell, writing in Saturday Night, more generously admits the connection between Allen’s “modern ‘pointillist’ style” and a cinematic impression, noting that Allen’s “new method may have been worked out with a view to the new subject-matter.” Still, Sandwell’s generosity is coupled with a

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darkly prophetic warning: “The book is probably harmless, and certainly shows a great deal of skill. The censor, who is not interested in its skill, may possibly not agree with me about its harmlessness” (9). It is in Sandwell’s oracular remarks, and the subsequent marginalization and containment of this outré Canadian author, that we confront the unique significance of the role and function of avant-garde archival research and editing in Canada. In contrast to more familiar examples of modernist censorship that were eventually overcome by the diligent work of devotees,2 the reaction against Allen’s book effectively nullified its potential cultural impact, erased it from public memory, and denied it the opportunity to influence the course of Canadian letters. This fact is suggestive of an important difference between the task of scholars of Canadian avant-gardism, especially its early period, and scholars of international avant-gardism: in the Canadian context, the reaction against avant-garde texts was so effective as to almost completely erase the foundational texts, such as They Have Bodies, from public consideration and recognition. Consequently, while international avant-­gardists competed with more traditional textual modes for social position, Canadian avant-gardists were dismissed as incomprehensible, and even socially and/or morally dangerous, and hence unjustifiable. Even William Arthur Deacon, a strong anti-censorship advocate (see Lennox and Thomas 68–9, 174), declared Allen’s novel “entirely failed as a radical gesture” because its plot could only “be faintly discerned beneath the gibberish of his ‘stream of consciousness’ technique, the limitations of which he illustrated with unconscious humour, instead of delivering his story” (“Literature” 33). Deacon never paused to consider that the technique, the artifice, was interconnected with the narrative’s events and social criticism and was therefore at least as important to the work as the story itself, nor did he decry the novel’s subsequent censorship. Ironically, despite his disapproval of Allen’s radical experimentation and ribald subject matter, Deacon in the same review lamented the limitations placed on Canadian novelists by prudish audiences: these authors had been “effectively barred by social disapproval from the serious, faithful treatment of love, especially in its carnal aspect, or from social or political studies of a liberal nature” (33). For Deacon, one of the most permissive voices in the Canadian literary landscape at the time, seriousness was synonymous with faithfulness, which was explicitly determined by the fidelity of the text’s realism – not by its artfulness. Eighty years and more of experience with aesthetic theorization and avant-garde experiments has made it possible for contemporary

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readers to understand the aesthetic and even ideological limitations of Deacon’s hermeneutics. The epigraph to this chapter by French avantgarde novelist Nathalie Sarraute, for instance, highlights an essential linguistic limitation of literary realism and its inevitable difference from lived experience. Editors today have the opportunity to revisit marginalized texts such as They Have Bodies without the presumption of the inevitability, naturalness, and even desirability of a strictly enforced literary realism. At the very least, we can understand realism as a conventionalized mode of narration – a fact attended to and critiqued in Allen’s novel. Scholars of such forgotten Canadian avant-garde writings, unlike scholars of widely celebrated international avant-gardisms, must begin by first finding such marginalized works and then theorize the cause and the impact of their marginalization on the individual authors as on the very social position of the avant-garde in Canada. The criticism and censorship of Allen’s text had an immediate and palpable impact on the future of Canada’s avant-garde by the direct impact on this singular pioneering author. Instead of developing the ground-breaking formalist inventions in this first book, and thereby opening new literary ground for future authors, Allen retreated: his literary ambitions had been severely tempered by the book’s social failure (interview with Gillian Allen). Consequently, his second novel, The Woman’s Doctor (1933), was published anonymously in the United States and begins with an extended seven-page apology for its biological and therefore predictably offensive content. This second novel softens its potentially repulsive content by safely couching details of bodily functions in the discourse of medical biology (the main character in this and all of Allen’s subsequent novels was a gynaecologist). As he explains in the apology, the book does nothing salacious by addressing “the vital facts” of “prolapse of the uterus, neurosis, having a baby, having a Caesarean, puerperium, menopause, cancer, benign tumors, pseudocyesis, gonorrhoea, syphilis and other allied events and experiences” (ix). Allen argues that such knowledge contained in his book “should not be restricted to the few who wear white gowns and rubber gloves” (viii, ix).3 The need for such an apology in a book published anonymously and outside of the country, while rather disheartening, highlights the special opportunity of Canadian modernist editors to rediscover and re-present lost avant-garde books and to examine the ideological and editorial implications of their disappearance. To do so, however, inevitably involves recalibrating accepted international theoretical paradigms and editorial practices to the Canadian context.

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In this case, representing Allen’s radically experimental book requires revisiting what both editing and avant-gardism mean in the Canadian context. Given Deacon’s and other misguided evaluations of this particular text, which stands far afield from the habitual literary ambitions and practices of Canada’s modernists, it is worth clarifying what I mean by the category of avant-garde work before addressing the potential differences that arise in studying marginal, experimental publications in relation to editorial theory and practice in Canada. From the wide range of available avant-garde theories, the model proposed by American poet and critic Richard Kostelanetz, though not the most scholarly or rigorously conceived, is particularly instructive in Allen’s case and worth exploring to highlight some of the contiguities and divergences between international theories of avant-gardism and the complications that arise when we import those theories into the Canadian context. Kostelanetz’s theory does not engage with the economically, politically, or ontologically radical implications of the historical avant-garde’s confrontation with modernity that other critics such as Peter Bürger, Matei Călinescu, Hal Foster, and John Weightman argue are the foundational characteristics of avant-gardism. Instead, Kostelanetz proposes three simple but useful criteria as the primary characteristics of literary avant-gardism: first, the avant-garde work must evidence quantifiable aesthetic innovation; second, the work must be so new as to be initially unacceptable because of its difference; and, third, the work must have its maximum audience in the future (see “ABC” 6). Unlike other critics who focus on the ideological agenda or literary history of avant-garde art movements, or that make anti-realism synonymous with avant-gardism, the first precept of Kostelanetz’s theory proposes avant-gardeness as an identifiable property embedded in the textual object. This is particularly useful in discussions of Canadian authors where one cannot often make use of the automatic presumption of avant-gardeness by the fact of their association with iconic movements (such as with Dadaism or surrealism) or by the author’s renowned reputation alone. Indeed, the problem for scholars of Canadian avant-gardism begins with the fact that the category of the avantgarde itself was not defined or shaped in response to Canadian work, but is instead a foreign theoretical model that must be imported into the context of Canadian literary history in order to identify and make sense of the continuities between the avant-garde communities in Canada and abroad. Canadian avant-gardists thereby encounter the habitual

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colonial disadvantage of having their work interpreted in relation to standards defined elsewhere, rather than in relation to new categories of literary production more directly responsive to Canadian circumstances. But despite this immediate problem and disadvantage, Kostelanetz’s model is useful for starting the identification by looking first at the formal characteristics of a work rather than its social history; to call a text avant-garde requires at least that the writing be produced with demonstrably original formal and aesthetic features. This model allows scholars the opportunity to recognize Canadian innovations in textual form. The comparison of Canadian writing with a foreign model and standard, furthermore, as Brian Trehearne once suggested in Aestheticism and the Canadian Modernists (9), can have the advantage of allowing contemporary critics to bypass the opinions and ideological biases of a particular author’s readership and thus enable a re-evaluation of the work more by the aesthetic models it aspired to fulfil. This accords with Bertram Brooker’s instruction that the role of the critic is “to clarify for the public the artist’s aims and show to what extent he has succeeded in realizing them” (“When” 196). To fulfil this charge requires first understanding those aims, which in Allen’s case requires recontextualizing his project out of the veiled margins of Canadian literature and into relation with European avant-garde literatures. Kostelanetz reasserts the importance of audience reaction, however, with his second and third points, thereby shifting the frame for identifying avant-gardeness from the self-contained features and ambitions of the text to the more social and subjective performance of the text in the world. There are a number of early Canadian writers who evidence aesthetic innovation, even when held to the highest international standards, but it is through Kostelanetz’s second criterion and his insistence on reading texts socially that editors might confront the general problem of editing the Canadian avant-garde when the most experimental, the most radical texts have languished or continue to do so in public and private archives away from the public eye, and away from any system of influence or public reception. As a result, our avant-garde tradition appears broken, discontinuous, and too easily overlooked. The scholarship of early Canadian avant-gardism, then, must confront a categorical difference from the scholarship of other national avantgardes for being, in part, constructed after the fact through archival research and the subsequent evaluation of Canadian texts for how they meet, reflect, and fulfil the standard of a foreign precedent pointedly alien to the local literary tastes of the time. But considering avant-garde

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work as both imitative and at odds with local culture presents a tangled contradiction of terms, for avant-gardism, as a concept, defies the kind of colonial mimicry that such a model implies. Contemporary theorizations of the international avant-garde, however, offer one means of reconciling the oxymoron as a paradox by acknowledging that though avant-gardism aspires to an ahistorical subject position outside of the system it emerges from, and thus free from the ideological contaminants of the present, it never quite achieves this breach. Peter Bürger instead asks us to reconsider the entire category of the avant-garde as a social and historical response to ideological norms where texts resist those norms by drawing attention to them (17). The avant-garde revolutionary impulse is ultimately circumscribed by its historical embeddedness in social dynamics that truncate any potential breach of the established order. Bürger’s call for “the unfolding of object and the elaboration of categories” of aesthetic theory (16) has been largely taken up by international scholars of the avant-garde. Thus, with this importance nuance, it is not actually surprising that the avant-garde that emerged from within the context of Canada’s largely colonial culture in the first half of the twentieth century was also, itself, somewhat colonial in nature and spirit. Poignantly, the blurb on the dust jacket of Allen’s They Have Bodies makes use of this uniquely Canadian paradox by presenting the book as a narrative of “hard-drinking, fast-living colonials”: a poignant phrase that simultaneously articulates both rebellion and containment in a manner consistent with Bürger’s theory of the avantgarde as a whole. But in the context of scholarship on Canadian literature, such questions of the limitations of avant-gardism as a model and subject position here are almost completely obscured by the more common and familiar narrative that the writing of this period was overwhelmingly shaped by a conservative aesthetic well behind the curve of international writing. Without imagining the possibility of there having been an early Canadian avant-garde, whether in archived material or not – let alone exploring the complexities of the avant-garde social subject position – scholars of Canadian literature have even begun developing unique theorizations to account for the absence of an avant-garde in Canada. Frank Davey, for instance, encourages critics to accept and interrogate the behind-the-curve nature of early Canadian literature, for “a colonial, imitative modernist movement is not to be deplored or rationalized into something other. It is itself an intrinsically interesting literary phenomenon” (8). Canadian authors from the modern period have also used

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the narrative of their belatedness as a trope in the historicization of their own writing:4 as A.J.M. Smith confessed in 1938, “We were of course only following in the path of the more significant poets in England and the United States” (“Rejected Preface” 40). More than a decade later, Louis Dudek added, “We are capable of writing modern poetry of a rudimentary kind in various forms and schools. / But in Canada we have not written the perfectly original thing, nor even the perfectly finished imitation in any one kind” (“Où sont les jeunes?” 142–3). Archival research, however, always provokes the premise of the contingency of closed literary historical narratives – given the possibility of new texts appearing, reappearing, or being recontextualized. With Allen’s unapologetically experimental novel They Have Bodies, we have, in fact, a convincing example of just such a “perfectly original thing.” This does not mean to imply that the book is in any way a perfect thing, but it does suggest that the models used to evaluate and marginalize this work fail to account for its originality. The possibility of re-contextualizing this book through a critical edition demonstrates the problems and the theoretical shifts that archival research and editorial work on early avant-garde Canadian writing can precipitate in the literary history of Canada. For instance, by populating the category of an early Canadian literary avant-garde, we can begin to address not the lack of avant-garde activity here but the intrinsically interesting literary phenomenon of its exclusion. Let us turn, now, to the narrative in question and begin the interrogation of the particularity of its avant-gardism. Allen’s work, as his title suggests, presents a startlingly realistic tableau of bad behaviour in Canadian high society, permitting no sense of abstraction or euphemism in confronting scandalous sexual deviance. Despite Deacon’s claim that the radically experimental technique obscures the narrative events, Allen’s use of experimental typography and an advanced form of stream-of-consciousness serves to heighten the immediacy of the textual encounter with abjection, which as the title announces is addressed through the socialized bodies of its characters. The novel appropriately foreshadows its own erasure by beginning with a depiction of an upper-class family debating whether or not they should fire a parlourmaid because of her physical ugliness. Betty Gilbert, the daughter of the wealthy patriarch, the novel’s protagonist, describes this particular parlourmaid as a “most monstrous creature. And I can’t bear the sight of her” (13). For her physical monstrosity, the parlourmaid becomes the focal point of projected lascivious desires and must defend herself from various sexual advances. These advances are, in fact, aggressive

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manifestations of previously repressed desires – the appearance of which in society provokes a movement to hypocritically suppress and ostracize the parlourmaid, deemed the cause, rather than the sexually repressed man who attacks her, deemed the effect. It follows that her attacker is Horace Gilbert, the wealthy patriarch burdened with a surfeit of power that he cannot contain. The novel repeatedly insists upon a connection between Horace’s unstable power, particularly his economic power, and his unbridled sexual libido, by offering recurring scenes in which his mind bounces between economic work and sexual desire: “Canada’s Progress … Sir Allan Featherstonehaugh says … per capita wealth … per capita foreign trade … scarcely equal … By Jove what a pretty girl! … With her legs crossed … on the site of King and York streets … now in the process of construction” (161; ellipses in original). His perennial distraction threatens the very foundation of a society (including “Canada’s progress”) dependent on sexual repression. When it comes to it, those who would punish the parlourmaid do so not for any vague sense of justice but in order to protect themselves from the disastrous consequences of his disgrace. Similarly, the leaders of society complain about the appearance of “a greasy foreigner … right next door” who threatens to diminish the value of their property (15). Such intrusions into the established order – carefully defined as white, capitalist, patriarchal, Christian, and prudish – inspire conspiracies to return the society to its imagined normal mode. It is an intriguing coincidence of the novel’s publishing history that these fictionalized conspiring agents of censorship also happen to be the same sort of power brokers in Toronto’s society who suppressed Allen’s book. Indeed, Allen’s book seems to anticipate its own ostracism in its complex thematic exploration of disgust, repression, and socially explosive desires triggered by repression. Olive, the Gilberts’ parlourmaid, for instance, generates a special breed of disgust and desire that directly reveals the sexual and social hypocrisies of Toronto society. The narrator describes her as “the ogreish maid” (17), and access to her thoughts reveals a lusty focus on the hairy chest of her employer Horace (18). Olive’s desires are wanton, unbounded, and even monstrous as she compares Horace’s physical merits to his son Lal and contemplates seducing them both (19). The deviation inherent in this kind of characterization can be measured by the verbal contortions and euphemisms in Sandwell’s review. Sandwell, at least, admits to the gender-­normative inadequacy of his critical language: “I am employing the technical terms of the Victorian novel, but it must be understood that the verb ‘to

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seduce’ no longer connotes the entirely one-sided and unaided activity of one party and the complete passivity of the other” (9). In the hands of another more populist author’s text from the period, this unblemished female agency and sexuality might justify moral condemnation or be sign of moral degradation. For Allen, however, it is the simplicity and even the integrity of the character and not her depravity that leads to the forthrightness by which she acknowledges her own libido. I call this “integrity” because it implies a connection between mind and body that the other characters lack. Despite the sheen of outward difference of their behaviour, similar thoughts and desires circulate in all of the characters’ minds that our narrator gives us access to, evidenced, for instance, by John Blute’s drunken advances on the serving staff (22), eighteen-year-old Mona Gilbert’s sexual fantasies (25), and young Wemyss’s brazen and disastrous seduction of Gladys Ritchie at the office (that results in her, not him, getting fired) (191), to pick a handful of salacious details from an abundance covered by the book. In other words, though the maid comes to embody destructive and antisocial sexual desires because she cannot repress them, these desires exist a priori of her. They are a condition, the narrative implies, a necessary condition, of having a body. Olive’s simplicity, which amounts to being less able to suppress her natural instincts, threatens a social order that is dependent on calculation and duplicity and repression. Consequently, the repressive mechanisms of the social order rush in to censor what Jacques Lacan, developing from Sigmund Freud, would describe as her function as a thing-presentation in how she manifests a forbidden network of behaviours and libidinal pressures.5 The text’s obsessive – indeed, fetishistic – detailing of things, of objects in the world, includes the repressed and repressing human body in its litany of things both desired and observed. The disgust generated by this body-vision thing-presentation is consistent with what the contemporary literary theorist Sianne Ngai explains is a means by which authors signify elements of society that exist outside of cultural semiotics. Building from Julia Kristeva’s work on the abject, Ngai highlights a psychological conflict between desire and repression that produces the feeling of disgust that authors use to expose and even challenge the margins of ideology. Disgust, which recurs throughout the book, especially in response to sexual acts, appears when Allen’s characters suffer embarrassment, not for their bad behaviour but for realizing their lack of self-control over their bodies (37). Intriguingly, one character forgives another for sexually assaulting

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her because she recognizes that there are limits to the repression of bodily instincts and drives (198). Assault is, for her, an inevitable burden to be borne (especially by women) in a society that does not acknowledge, let alone provide healthy outlets for, the demands of the body. Male characters also accept sexual outbursts as inevitable: when he confronts Horace about having seduced his wife, Fred Polton, though stung by the insult to his honour, ends up shrugging off the indiscretion: “Oh, well, what’s the diff? Well, so long old man. I shouldn’t want this to interfere with our friendship in any way” (279). To be clear, the book does not portray the body – or even sex – itself as a legitimate cause of disgust or danger. Rather, as the abuse of sympathetic female characters makes clear, the book’s primary target is the social factors that mismanage the body and thereby indirectly cause the abuse, namely the unhealthy and hypocritical detachment of mind and body. The plot is rather explicit on this point, pushing far into the realm of polemic to attribute this debilitating Cartesian divide to Christian teachings. It follows that the worst offender of social mores in the book is a priest who, despite attempting to contain his sexuality through vows of celibacy, rapes a child. We learn of this transgression through a transcript of the priest’s “blasphemy” trial – for, in Toronto at the time, his offence is deemed a greater affront to God than to the girl he violated. Allen’s book, grounded as it is in Freudian discourse, draws attention to the predictability of repressed drives manifesting in such aggressive and messy behaviours. Disgust and antisocial desire, in this context, and as Ngai explains, become a means by which to highlight and ­critique a general cultural failure to come to terms with itself. This network of competing bodily desires and disgusts focalizes Allen’s satire of prudish Canadian arts culture more specifically, as characters debate how best to protect Canadian art from the “pagan” influence of Ezra Pound and James Joyce (They Have Bodies 180), while hosts ­re-arrange dinner table seating plans to prevent the spread of ­“Dadaism and the revolt of the younger poets” (173). As the humour implies, Allen’s book participates in this revolt and shares a common spirit with the intense artistic interrogation of the body vis-à-vis its relationship to subjectivity and otherness that dominated experimental writing throughout the twentieth century. Allen’s body is encoded with psychoanalytic tropes of the subconscious libido sabotaging the illusory self-image created by the ego. Poignantly, characters directly connect this subconscious battle and damaging repression to the broader ideological dilemma precipitated by the arrival of

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modernity in Canada. As Horace’s socialist daughter explains to her father, in attempting to reconcile their differences, “It’s not your fault that life has placed you at one of the levers of an economic machine that grinds out misery at one end and money at the other” (75). Indeed, the stream-of-consciousness technique deployed by the text is singularly effective in rendering the helplessness of the characters as their minds are overrun with libidinal projections and eruptions, despite their best efforts to contain themselves: Seated in smoking room, smoking, thinking; groaning every now and then; thinking; a red-headed, red-headed … with broad shoulders and tapering waist, a golden-blonde wife stretched out voluptuously on a bed … a switchboard girl, a secretary, a golden-haired sprite of a daughter shaking herself into a frock … a frock … a street … a street jammed with cashiers, waitresses, stenographers, shop-girls, walkers … terrific, terrific walkers … a drink, a drink, a dashed, devil of a deucedly welcome drink … A drink, drinking … gulpingly, grunting, groaning … ghastly … nasty … nasty … nasty-nasty … leaning back deeply in deep leather chair, with one hand still holding whiskey-glass on oak table, and the other hand aimless, aimlessly extended … dozing, dozing (176–7; author’s ellipses)

The alcohol, rather than working to loosen socio-sexual inhibitions, allows Horace to temporarily escape the pressures of his sexual drives (that seem to spill in this instance into incestuous thoughts). His mind is filled to the point of distraction with antisocial sexual thoughts until he drinks himself into aimlessness and then unconsciousness. Allen’s narrative method, in tracking the unfolding attention of his characters and their psychological struggle to gain self-control of their unconscious mind, including by disabling their uncontrolled attention, seems to anticipate Sarraute’s call for a more perception-oriented literature. It might not capture all of what can be perceived at a glance, but Allen’s technique offers a remarkable insight into how object perception relates to attention and uncontrolled, unconscious drives. The psychosocial drama ultimately exposes the particular oppressions of women – who are routinely fired, harassed, and harangued by sexual predators – that connect the novel to the broadly conceived interests and pursuits of various canonical twentieth-century avantgardists. For instance, They Have Bodies anticipates Simone de Beauvoir’s fictional and critical exploration of the experience of the female body as mitigated by a socially constructed (rather than objective or

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non-ideological) reality. De Beauvoir was particularly interested in how Western consensual approaches to the body relegated women to the permanent role of object and other. She proposed an escape from this subjugation through “risk,” that risking the body – particularly through erotic encounter – enabled the mind to transcend the body and become fully human. The imagined body becomes a site and source of subject identification. This is precisely the destabilizing risk that the parlourmaid, with her sexual and psychological integrity, brings into the Toronto community. A revealing parallel between Allen’s work (especially his second and third novels) and de Beauvoir’s occurs in the excessive detailing of the procreative functions of the body as a means of exposing the mythical and fallacious interpretations of the body. The data of biology instigate the battle of psychological forces that are closer to the heart of both their projects. In The Woman’s Doctor, he describes this network of forces as “a whole complex of wish-factors and repressions, all built up together that makes the mental engine – [the] unconscious mental engine” (213). Through the discourse of psychoanalysis, both authors look to the illuminated body as a means of dispelling the particular mythologies and repressions of gender and sexuality that society has developed in order to sustain itself. De Beauvoir uses the factuality of the body to challenge “what humanity has made of the human female” (41) and thereby erase the purportedly “fixed and inevitable destiny” of women (36). For her, “the body is not a thing, it is a situation” (38). For Allen, too, the body as a libidinally infused thing-presentation in a stream-of-consciousness text becomes less a blunt object to be controlled (and wielded) by a detached mind than a complex narrative event that helps to expose the prudish hypocrisies of Canadian society. This prudishness, as another early Canadian avant-gardist, Bertram Brooker, has also theorized, tacitly limits Canadian art and literature (see “Nudes and Prudes”). Allen arrived at his provocative and avant-garde synthesis of form and content through an independent study of Freud and modernists such as Joyce, Pound, and T.S. Eliot – all of whom are alluded to in his book. In spite of the oft-repeated narrative of habitual Canadian belatedness, the best parallel that I have found for such a synthesis of these influences comes decades later with the French avant-garde novel known as the nouveau roman. Contemporary avant-garde theorist Craig Dworkin heralds these nouveaux romanciers for pioneering an anti-realistic literary mode that achieves a radical abstraction through the over-abundance of rather mundane information (xxvii). Such

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excessive detailing of the things in the world does not work towards a mimetic realism but in fact towards an impressionistic depiction of how the mind organizes the material world. A passage from Allen captures a similar kind of psychological detailing: Office … desk … telephone … glass surface of desk … his own image … broad face with a neat but thick mustache … and little, haggard, little lines about the corners of the mouth … desk … telephone … scratch-pad … scratching … scratch-pad … telephone … “Hello, is that you Corliss … How are you, Corliss old man … What’s the good word, Corliss old fellow … What’s that … you’ll let me know … Oh, all right … nothing in particular … surprised? … You should cultivate a little sang-froid … Am I hard up? No, of course not … a place on Jarvis street? … Well, I may as well take the number … yes, four hundred and umpty-ump Jarvis … Yes, thanks old man, Good-bye … four hundred and umpty-ump … out of the question …” turning up his nose … out of the … “… Consignment … consignment … siding … f.o.b … f.o.b … f.o.b … ” … Miss Nelson … Miss Nelson … a pretty nose, had Miss Nelson … a patrician nose, had Miss Nelson … consignment … consignment … siding … how she went in at the waist … how Miss Nelson went in at the waist … consignment … consignment … consignment … catalogue … office appliances … (192–3)

Again, the character is depicted as struggling to concentrate on work through the distraction of his sexuality. He coyly negotiates access to alcohol to ensure a release (while not wanting to appear too desperate or “hard up”) from his sexual energy. Allen’s extreme detailing of the objects in the world through the psychological lens of his characters presents a striking parallel to work by Alain Robbe-Grillet, the foremost proponent of the nouveau roman, with his focus on things, on objects, at the expense of other narrative features. Consider the jagged jumps of perspective in the following passage from Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy (1957): It is only at a distance of less than a yard that the elements of a discontinuous landscape appear in the successive intervals, parallel chinks separated by the wider slats of grey wood: the turned wood balusters, the empty chair, the low table where a full glass is standing beside the tray holding the two bottles, and then the top part of the head of black hair, which at this moment turns towards the right, where above the table shows a bare

When Out in Front Gets Left Behind  279  forearm, dark brown in colour, and its paler hand holding the ice bucket. A…’s voice thanks the boy. The brown hand disappears. The shiny metal bucket, immediately frosted over, remains where it has been set on the tray beside the two bottles. (191)

The details seem to map out a relatively conventional single-point perspective but deviate from that model by the conscious attention to the human body in the landscape. As attention passes over the hand to the ice bucket to the boy, we assume a psychological connection only ever implied by the text. Even more significantly, Allen’s work anticipates Sarraute’s fluid movement of narration between subjective observations, or as John Calder and John Fletcher describe her writing, the “mingling [of] conversations and thoughts of the people around a table at a dinner party to give a multi-faceted picture of their relationship to each other, but leaving it to the reader to identify who is who” (35). Appearing twenty years after Allen’s book, Sarraute’s 1959 novel The Planetarium blurs the borders of the voice behind the spoken words in dialogue: Why not go there? Why not go look at the apartment? Right away, Alain, I should like to go now, I’m so crazy to see it … Do Alain, I beg of you … Of course not, we shan’t go up … Aunt Berthe won’t see us, she takes her afternoon nap at this time. It’s just to see it from the outside … We’ll hide, it will be amusing … it’s just to see something, a small detail …” She feels so warmed up after all these wonderful plans, she would like to continue just a little bit longer, it’s like a craving for sweets, for cakes, after a heavy meal. “Do, Alain, let’s go … Let’s not go home now, I just want to see something … the layout … the way it’s oriented …” just a little peep, a greedy little lick, a nibble, the cake won’t be at all spoiled … it’s just to get a foretaste … it’s a little tryout, a timidly outlined movement before the grand ensemble, the great exciting leaps … “Well, shall we go? right away … Oh, what a dear you are. (102)

The somewhat haphazard uses of quotation marks in the middle of this passage distinguish the turn of the mind of Alain’s anonymous wife from the subject of her discourse with her husband to desired objects that are absent. Poignantly, Sarraute also developed her characteristic technique, which is visually akin to Allen’s, from her interest in Freud and Joyce (Jefferson 60–1). The language of the text becomes the site where things and thoughts coexist, thereby disrupting the sovereignty

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of either and allowing latent desires to burble forth. Where is this language then? It is both in the world and tangible but yet, as the ellipses insist, also entirely imagined and outside the world. It is in this oscillating function of the language of Sarraute’s and Allen’s writing that the object world becomes intrinsically marked by psychological principles. It is a process familiar and common to avant-garde movements that share an interest in, as Canadian avant-gardist Steve McCaffery explains, “that pivotal point, where language is simultaneously composed and dissolved, made and unmade, consumed and regurgitated, [where] language connects with the unconscious and its drives” (153). The formalist and thematic links between Allen’s early novels and the French avant-garde presents the unusual predicament of a Canadian book that was written decades prior to the avant-garde model it most resembles. This would make him literally a member of the before-guard – were it not for the awkward fact that Allen’s book had no discernible impact or influence on any later movement, even within Canada (let alone in France). Allen thus fulfils Kostelanetz’s first point regarding aesthetic innovation, but so successfully satisfied the second criterion that his initial unacceptability prevented the achievement of the third criterion, the work finding or creating an audience in the future. The obvious solution to this riddle, that editors of Canada’s archived avant-gardes become the future audience of these texts, demonstrates a significant Canadian deviation from international editorial practice. Indeed, the general field of editorial theory is not particularly helpful when it comes to navigating such issues as a critical imagination shaped by cultural and colonial belatedness and the consequent marginalization of originality in colonial spaces. The foundational works of editorial practice and theory – such as Fredson Bowers’s work on John Dryden, W.W. Greg’s work on Thomas Nashe and Christopher Marlowe, Ian Small’s on Oscar Wilde, or Hans Walter Gabler’s and Wim van Mierlo’s on Joyce – are concerned almost exclusively with the editing and representation of canonical authors and texts. Even Jerome McGann’s ground-breaking theorizations of new modes and means of editorial practice emerged out of his work on Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Swinburne, and Lord Byron. These studies into editorial practice begin with a confident presumption of the significance of the figures they address. They explore the shift of significations caused by a range of editorial decisions on texts that have orthodox (and counterorthodox, and so on) interpretations. They say very little about the possibility or implications of extending or inventing literary significance

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through editorial work of overlooked avant-garde works or authors. It follows that, while they offer practical methods for producing effective critical editions of those texts, they offer little insight into the significant changes in editorial prerogative and intervention precipitated by editing Canadian avant-garde texts in a critical environment that does not acknowledge the existence of such a category of literary production. Instead, it makes sense to turn to a less practically and canonically oriented theorist such as Jacques Derrida, who draws attention to the ideological implications of the archive as a socialized space already and inevitably encoded and interacting with the values of the surrounding culture. Derrida’s theories of the archive were presented at the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna, in Freud’s former home and current archives, and consequently make explicit connections between Freudian theories of the disrupting body and its unconscious, despite socialization and the disrupting materiality of objects in the archives, despite the ideological mandate of those institutions. The archive is a space where the cultural values of a society achieve expression; indeed, the archive functions as a kind of mirror of whom and what gets valued by a society. The archive achieves its cultural authority, however, while suppressing and concealing the mark of its cultural authority. Derrida frames this paradox as “le mal d’archive, archive fever” (“Archive Fever” 12) to indicate the simultaneously conservative and revolutionary death drive of the archive. That is, the illusion of ideological stability that an archive helps to produce is contradicted by the instability and shifting significance of the material objects that it collects. The archives help to produce and conserve an ideological context but also contain evidence of its destruction. Beyond the destabilizing significance of the material objects that are archived, the archive can also be understood as itself an ideological event: “Archivization produces as much as it records the event. This is also our political experience of the so-called news media” (17). The reference to news media is significant for thinking about how the archive participates in the creation of an imagined community and how preservation codifies the values and reflects those values back as if they were neutral, minimizing contact with material that contradicts the society’s self-image. However, like Allen’s reminder of the bodies of Torontonians as sites of social and ideological disruption, the material trace of the past can erupt into repressed, countervailing content. It follows that while archives in Canada have sought to secure the ideal self-image of the country, Canadian perennial cultural insecurity has also been encoded into its archives, for which fact Allen again

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serves as a poignant example: though various libraries have purchased and stored Allen’s books across Canada (including five with his censored book), his family recently destroyed his papers (including all manuscripts, journals, correspondence, et cetera) when they came to the conclusion that, after more than half a century of neglect, “no one was interested” (Bruce Allen, interview). This is a poignant reversal of Derrida’s archival death-drive: the textual thing that might have countered Canadian literature’s colonial hesitancy, a “perfectly original thing” or avant-garde text, was destroyed by the archive’s inability to transcend its own imagination of itself. The colonized imagination could not recognize value in a vital originality when it appeared in its midst. In this way, the Canadian archives are marked not by the intended or imagined self-image, but in the telling mark of the absence and destruction of the material trace, the reversal of that self-image. Editorial work in Canada offers precisely the kind of interest that can extend the productivity of the archive to kinds of literature beyond the imaginative capacity of editors and scholars who are themselves marked and bounded by the ideological parameters of this culture. Thus, editorial and archival research, especially of avant-garde or otherwise abject texts and authors in Canada, can function analogously to the avant-garde itself as a means of resisting ideological norms in order to draw attention to them. It is here that the unique task of scholars of the early Canadian avant-garde reconnect with scholarship on the international avant-garde. Dean Irvine’s call for less concern with nationalist canon-formation and “greater scrutiny” of the editorial practices of Canadian texts (“Editing Archives” 184) opens up contemporary editorial work in Canada to such broader cultural and ideological questions, far beyond the purview of canonically oriented works of editorial theory. Editors and scholars of Canada’s modernisms have the opportunity to intervene and bear the responsibility of intervening in this occlusion of alternative traditions from Canadian literary history – which, as the Allen case makes clear, threaten to disappear and be forever lost without our intervention. We, of course, end up becoming the future audience for passed-over works such as They Have Bodies, but an audience with the unique opportunity to recontextualize experimental modernist books within a network of competing ideologies, simultaneously reading and rereading works in relation to multiple audiences and ideological shifts. McGann’s theory of the social text and editorial practice is one tool by which Canadian modernist editors can open the narrow

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national myth of our cultural belatedness to explain the forces working against Canadian authors who were not, in fact, belated. We lost Allen’s book for over eighty years because it disgusted the prudish status quo between the wars – a fact that ought to have made him an important precedent for subsequent generations of Canadian experimentalists. This imaginative lag from our authors, editors, critics, and readers cost us the development of Allen’s originality as well as his archive permanently. The possibility of a forgotten or repressed Canadian avant-garde highlights the importance of a socialized theory of editorial practice – of recognizing that Canada did have authors working on the same cutting edge as or even before the canonical avant-garde, but that the cultural conditions here were so restrictive as to prevent these early experimentalists from achieving influence or notoriety or, more poignantly, proper development and encouragement. We are far enough removed from the forces that insisted on the suppression or marginalization of these transgressive texts that we can reclaim and revisit these beautiful losers of Canada’s own culture war. As McGann offers invitingly, “Producing editions is one of the ways we produce literary meanings” (Radiant Textuality 33). NOTES 1 The full censorship of the book happened despite the recall of the first edition of the book, whereby two pages (191 and 192) were “expunged, and new pages substituted.” This information was taken from a note announcing the change found in an edition owned by Bill Matthews of Victoria, British Columbia. 2 Two of the most prominent examples of modernist texts that suffered a censorship that was overturned include James Joyce’s Ulysses, banned in the United States from 1921 until 1933, and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, banned in the United Kingdom (and Canada) from publication until 1960. Loren Glass highlights the personal risks taken by anti-censorship activists on behalf of these works, including the case of Barney Rosset, owner of Grove Press, who took great risks by himself publishing censored “obscene” literature such as Lawrence’s novel, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, and William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch and fighting the obscenity charges in court (341–2). 3 While this second book is marked by an over-compensating defensiveness, being painfully burdened with dogmatic justifications for its intense

284  Gregory Betts analysis of the human body, that same defence becomes rather aggressive and even radical in his endeavour to breach “that barrier of secrecy and mysticism [in the medical profession] which for so many centuries has endured to insure the economic welfare and social prestige of [its] members … at the expense of the lucidity, health and solvency of the men who father and women who mother the race” (Allen, Woman’s Doctor v). 4 Beyond these few examples, it is worth highlighting the very active debates in Canadian media around the problem posed by Canadian colonialism in the production of art. Many artistic initiatives, including the Group of Seven painters (see Lawren Harris’s “Revelation of an Art in Canada”) and experiments with free-verse poetry and other modernist forms (see Bertram Brooker’s essay “When We Awake!” and Raymond Knister’s essay “The Poetic Muse in Canada” as examples) were articulated as a response to, perhaps correction of, Canadian colonialism. Contemporary scholars Colin Hill and Glenn Willmott have returned to the publications and periodicals of the period and documented the emergence of a conscious resistance to the colonial mentality (see Hill’s essay “Canadian Bookman and the Origins of Modern Realism in English-Canadian Fiction” and Willmott’s book Unreal Country: Modernity in the Canadian Novel in English, particularly chapter 1 in which he connects the emergence of the Bildungsroman to postcolonial hankerings). I argue in my essay “Before Our Time: Radical English-Canadian Poetries across the Post/Modern Divide” that it was these early, earnest strivings that led to the concrete postcolonial policies that developed out of the 1951 report of the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences (commonly known as the “Massey Report”), including the creation of the Canada Council for the Arts in 1957. To be clear, Sol Allen played no role in any of these debates or policy initiatives, nor did his texts figure in any of the discussion of what a postcolonial Canadian literary imagination might one day be able to produce. He operated on a separate but clearly parallel track. 5 See Martin Thom’s discussion of Lacan’s use of thing-presentation (41–2).

13  Bringing the Text to Life: Editing The God of Gods kailin wright

Written by an avid promoter of Canadian theatre in Naramata, BC, Carroll Aikins’s The God of Gods (1918) has been performed in the United Kingdom more often than in Canada. This Canadian play adapts Nietzschean philosophy, critiques Canadian war efforts, and reproduces modernist primitivism. Aikins ultimately uses a highly expressionistic landscape as a metonym for a new social system founded on egalitarianism. With its textual emphasis on spatial location and its international performance history, The God of Gods not only offers a rich resource for current studies of Canadian modernism but also raises many editorial questions about its national categorization and the selection among its multiple versions for a critical edition. My commentary on the play is informed by my research towards the production of a critical edition (Wright), which will appear as a print edition in the Canadian Literature Collection published by the University of Ottawa Press, together with an expanded digital apparatus hosted on the Modernist Commons, the digital repository developed by Editing Modernism in Canada. The God of Gods found its first success at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre when reviewers praised it as a “rare artistic delicacy” after its premiere in 1919 (“The God of Gods”). As a result of its popularity, the play returned to Birmingham for a second run in 1920. The God of Gods was then performed in Canada at Toronto’s Hart House Theatre in 1922 and later in the United Kingdom at London’s Everyman Theatre in 1931.1 The performance history of The God of Gods magnifies the difficulty of discerning not only a stable copy text but also a singular author and nationality when editing the play. How do you classify a play like The God of Gods, which premiered in the United Kingdom and has been

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performed there more often than in Canada? Should scholars consider and privilege the Toronto production merely because the playwright is Canadian? If an edition frames the play as Canadian, should it consider The God of Gods to be exclusively what was performed in the Canadian theatre and in front of the Canadian audience? I follow an editorial methodology that integrates the play’s production history and theatrical elements with the source text by using a production’s script as the copy text, foregrounding the performance history in the introduction, annotating production differences in the explanatory notes, and including production photographs and programs in the dossier section. Privileging a theatrical production as a copy text illuminates the issues associated with editing a dramatic work. Unlike books, which are usually read privately by people in disparate places and times, plays are viewed by a collective audience at a specific and often documented place, time, and date. Theatre playbills, archives, and reviews all help document the cultural context and reception of a production. This method can best be described as a materially historicist approach to the study of a script text, together with a production’s participants (actors, directors, lighting technicians, costumiers, audience), geographical location, political environment, and historical contexts. While context informs all interpretation – whether literary, dramatic, or cinematic – a materially historicist approach is especially valuable and pertinent to dramatic studies, because it takes into account the actors’ live bodies on the stage as well as the political and geographical contexts of the audience’s reception of any given performance. It is possible to take account of the entire performance history of The God of Gods, in contrast with one of Shakespeare’s plays, for instance, because Aikins’s play is limited in frequency (four productions) and in its time frame (the production history spans only twelve years). I have chosen the Hart House production as the copy text because it is the only performance with a surviving script. The God of Gods has been out of print since its first and only edition in 1927 when Vincent Massey included it in the second volume of his anthology, Canadian Plays from Hart House Theatre. While the anthology makes a significant contribution to the preservation of Canadian drama, Massey’s edition does not include an introduction or textual notes and offers no details regarding the play’s musical score. Although I do have Aikins’s original manuscript, the Hart House script serves as the copy text because it is the best existing documented representation of what audiences saw and of how the work was disseminated (both in print and in performance).

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The differences between the manuscript and script versions are very minimal, and in most cases indicate production details (such as the staging or actions) or line delivery (there are punctuation variants, including the addition of exclamation points in the script). For instance, the original manuscript indicates that “KOTWI bends her head and clasps her hands behind her” and the Hart House version specifies that Kotwi “clasps her hands behind it,” making the physical position of her hands much clearer. Aikins was always disappointed that he could not attend the Birmingham premiere; likely he attended the Toronto production and he would have approved the Hart House script before its publication. My edition includes textual notes that record any changes that the Hart House script made to the original manuscript so that readers of the edition will have information on all surviving versions of the play. In taking a historicist approach to editing Aikins’s play, this edition not only layers texts (of the original manuscript and the Massey edition) but also performances (Birmingham, Hart House, Everyman) by accounting for variations in the musical score, costumes, lighting, set design, theatre space, and treatment of the Aboriginal characters. By comparing production photos, programs, and theatre reviews, the critical apparatus examines the play’s variant stagings. Further complementing the introduction’s discussion of the production choices and reception, the dossier section collects theatre reviews, programs, and images of the four productions as well as articles on Aikins’s related theatre work. The Modernist Commons extends the critical apparatus by offering a web-based repository for additional digitized resources such as facsimiles of theatre programs, unpublished photographs, and links to related archives, museums, and articles. Aikins was devoted to creating Canadian theatre, but theatre historians often overlook his life and work. He was connected to two prominent Little Theatres: he created the Home Theatre in 1920, which was built on the second floor of a fruit-packing and storage building in rural BC, and he was artistic director at Toronto’s Hart House Theatre from 1927 to 1929. Mrs Aikins reports that Prime Minister Arthur Meighen attended the opening of the Home Theatre on 3 November 1920 (Clough 119). In 1921 and 1922, the Home Theatre was credited as “the first national theatre” and “the first Canadian Little Theatre,” and for producing the “first Passion play ever given in Canada” (qtd in Hoffman 51). The Home Theatre, as Aikins explains in the company’s first program, was built for “the giving of Canadian plays by Canadian actors” and “for a true expression of the Canadian spirit” (qtd in Hoffman 56).

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Until recently, however, his contribution to Canadian theatre history has gone relatively unacknowledged. James Hoffman’s “Carroll Aikins and the Home Theatre” (1986) headed the movement to include Aikins in the Canadian theatre canon because, as Patrick O’Neill observed, “theatre historians had concurred in assigning Carroll Aikins’s contributions to Canadian theatre a lesser rank than did his contemporaries” (65). O’Neill adds to Hoffman’s pivotal scholarship, offering a comprehensive overview of Aikins’s previously ignored plays, including the manuscripts of The God of Gods, The Destroyers: A Drama in Three Acts, The Fullness of Life: A Play in Three Acts, and Real Estate: A Comedy in Three Acts. My edition of the play aims to contribute to Hoffman’s work on the Home Theatre and O’Neill’s study of Aikins’s oeuvre by investigating the details of The God of Gods’s productions and reception. The God of Gods and Textual Variants A number of elements – besides Aikins’s involvement in two prominent Little Theatres – make The God of Gods an interesting subject of study: its modernist influences, Nietzschean inter-texts, anti-war politics, anticapitalist thematic, adaptation of Shakespeare, and use of Aboriginal motifs, to name a few. Set in a mountain range in Naramata, BC, Aikins’s play uses Aboriginal motifs to warn against corrupt power and capitalist greed. The play concentrates on two lovers: Suiva and her rebel suitor, Yellow Snake. The chief’s son, Mablo, plots to divide the couple by making Suiva the priestess of the community’s religious system, which he controls for profit. Mablo, as Suiva discovers, animates the God – represented with an onstage stone idol – by combining sulphur and wine on its face. Yellow Snake, however, rejects this new religion and instead creates his own belief system based on equality and anti-capitalist values. As Waning Moon (the retired priestess) explains, Yellow Snake “has wild ways and does not fear the God” (7). As a result, when Mablo sees Yellow Snake lurking around Suiva (the new priestess) he immediately orders his men to kill the outsider. Yellow Snake is subsequently shot in the back while innocently climbing a tree. After Mablo’s men deliver Yellow Snake’s body to the sacrificial altar, Suiva discovers her lover’s death, realizes that the religious system is fully corrupt, and, echoing Friedrich Nietzsche, announces, “God is dead” (66): suiva: This is not God. God is dead. You killed him. He walked among you but you did not know him. He was God.

Bringing the Text to Life  289  worshippers: Profane! Profane! suiva: He was the singer of the joy of life. His name was love. You killed him. He was God. (66)

Suiva not only suggests that the worshippers’ idol “is not God,” she also names Yellow Snake “the singer of the joy of life,” the figure of love, and the true God (66). In this scene, there is a double meaning to the famous Nietzschean contention that “God is dead”: the Christian God is figuratively dead and the new artist-God (Yellow Snake) is literally dead. In this way, The God of Gods erects the artist figure as the true God and arbiter of life. In the final moments of the play, Suiva throws herself into an onstage pool as the surrounding worshippers crouch in horror of her disobedience and “prostrate themselves” (67) in devotion to the falsified idol. In the wake of the First World War, Aikins’s application of Nietzsche and elevation of the pacifist Yellow Snake to a God-like hero would have been quite radical. Suiva’s ceremonial speech to commemorate Yellow Snake’s death reads, as Gordon Lester suggests, “like a memorial to a fallen soldier”: “You were a fighter but you’ll fight no more.” (63). During its post-war productions, Suiva’s speech would have echoed the funeral ceremonies for the many fallen soldiers, which is the very type of resonance that a historicist edition explores. As a fighter, Yellow Snake stands in for the many casualties of the First World War, but he is a “fighter” only in a pacifist sense. He “fought” against capitalism and armed powers, such as the chief and his men, most effectively by not engaging in armed combat. The post-war context is especially significant to modernist works in Canada that were responding to the nation’s military involvement and war propaganda that romanticized Canadian soldiers’ patriotism. Aikins’s earliest surviving play script, The Destroyers (1915), overtly critiques war propaganda and describes patriotic duty as a form of slavery. O’Neill goes so far to suggest that The Destroyers “may be the only Canadian play written during either of the world wars or the Korean conflict to espouse such anti-war sentiment during the actual warfare” (70). Aikins’s unique and radical attack on Canada’s involvement in wars overseas may explain why The Destroyers was never produced. This earlier play script supports a reading of Yellow Snake as an alternative hero figure that replaces combat with art; Suiva honours him not as a soldier but as a “singer” and “dancer” (63). The differences between the Hart House text and the manuscript reveal the original version’s emphasis on Yellow Snake’s role as artist

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over his role as either fighter or lover. In the Hart House version, Suiva’s funeral rites begin with a reference to Yellow Snake as a “fighter” but culminate with his role as a “lover”: suiva: You were a singer but you’ll sing no more. You were a dancer but you’ll dance no more. You were a lover but you’ll love no more. You’ll toss no more your dark hair to the sky! (63)

The manuscript demonstrates a similar crescendo that begins with his role as a lover, but Aikins pointedly ends the speech with the loss of Yellow Snake the “dancer”: suiva: You were a singer but you’ll sing no more. You were a lover but you’ll love no more. You were a dancer but you’ll dance no more! You’ll toss no more your dark hair to the sky! (48)

In the earlier version, Yellow Snake’s role as the tragic lover is overwhelmed by his role as a singer-dancer, which reinforces the play’s theorization of the artist as the true hero and God. Authorship versus Collaborative Execution To build on issues of copy-text selection and textual variants, the play’s production variants in the Canadian and British theatres help to chart the exposure of transatlantic audiences to actors in redface from 1919 to 1931. The theatre reviews of the four different productions suggest a growing scepticism of Aikins’s ethnography and of the play’s cultural authenticity. While all four productions are discussed in the introduction and represented through supplementary materials in the dossier section, I have chosen here to concentrate on the differences between the Birmingham and Hart House productions because of their wealth of archival material and their potential collaboration. Filed under the 1921–2 season, the Hart House Theatre archives contain five photos from Birmingham’s 1919 production and only one from its own. These photos not only suggest that Hart House was in dialogue with Birmingham but also gesture towards the differences between the two productions. Birmingham’s set and costumes are quite ethereal and romantic in comparison with Hart House’s photo of Waning Moon with her missing teeth and dishevelled hair. A comparative approach highlights the two theatres’ differing conceptions of Aboriginal culture at the time

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and invites consideration of the ways in which these production choices altered the play’s reception and perceived meanings. In examining the change in a work’s meaning over time and with different readers, D.F. McKenzie questions the implied meanings in a printed edition of a dramatic work: “But as a dramatic text, it was originally written to be spoken, and so other questions arise. Can we hear the voice of the actor … conveying orally the ironies we now read visually? … Whose concept of the reader do these forms of the text imply: the author’s, the actor’s, the printer’s, or the publisher’s?” (26). McKenzie’s line of questioning broaches issues of genre (“it was originally written to be spoken”) and authorship (“whose concept of the reader” is implied) in asking whose vision and voice of the dramatic text emerges from the edition. I am considering this question, in part, because I would like to refute the premise that an edition of a dramatic work expresses one concept or authorial vision. Instead of choosing one perspective from McKenzie’s list – the author’s, the actor’s, the printer’s, or the publisher’s – I aim to target multiple types of readers, namely scholars, students, and theatre practitioners. McKenzie does much more than question authorship or authoritative voice; he also raises issues of medium. In calling attention to all that can be lost in the shift from oral (performance) to visual (text) modes, McKenzie invites an editorial approach that represents the play through multiple modes, including visual texts and images as well as audio. Recent and ongoing digital sound archives, such as Spoken Word, UbuWeb, and PennSound, offer audio recordings of poetry readings as a way of doing exactly what McKenzie calls for – they archive the performed word. Studies of The God of Gods, either by scholars or students, would certainly benefit from an audio or video recording of the play or its key monologues and scenes; digital repositories such as the Modernist Commons, along with its editorial workbench and multimedia critical edition viewer, and tools like Audacity lend themselves to this type of audiovisual editing. There are, however, no recordings of the four productions, and we are left only with the possibility of creating new sound or video recordings. The play’s reductive portrayal of red-faced Indians raises an ethical issue about how to cast any new recordings: should one use white actors with broken dialect and redface as in the original productions? Would a new production condone these stereotypes through the act of recreation? As I continue to grapple with this ethical dilemma, I plan to use the Modernist Commons to

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enhance the print edition with an expanded digital apparatus, which may eventually include footage of new productions. Headed by Katherine Cullen, Aikins’s extended family and their friends recently staged a reading of Aikins’s play The Destroyers in Naramata (Henderson). This type of event could offer an audio component to the edition’s supplemental online material. Craig Henderson, of the Naramata Heritage Museum, plans to stage and record a performance of Aikins’s Real Estate play in Penticton, BC, as a fundraiser event, which offers additional material for the edition’s audiovisual apparatus that would complement the print edition with further contextualization of Aikins’s dramatic works. To return to the collaborative authorship of the play, the theatrical significance of The God of Gods reaches beyond Naramata and Aikins himself. Drama demands collaboration of playwright, director, actors, set designers, and lighting and sound technicians, among others. One director of The God of Gods has received as much attention as the playwright, if not more: the Birmingham Repertory Theatre archives record its production of The God of Gods as a work by Sir Barry Jackson, who founded the theatre and directed the play’s second run. When editing a play with a performance history, the playwright is only one in a long line of co-creators. Because I investigate the performance history of The God of Gods and place value on the productions as versions of the dramatic text, I do not think that the question should be which singular vision or authorship to privilege. Instead, my editorial process for The God of Gods accounts for the collaborative execution of the play by adding production details from Hart House, Birmingham Repertory Theatre, and Everyman Theatre to the script’s notes (textual and explanatory) as well as to the edition’s scholarly apparatus (introduction and dossier). This dual focus on script text and production history enables me to explore how the text produces meaning in early twentieth-century Canada and the United Kingdom and how the play’s production affects the meaning and reception of the dramatic text. The edition’s critical apparatus will not only supplement Massey’s pivotal edition but will also facilitate classroom study of the play in transnational contexts through a comparative analysis of the productions. For instance, Birmingham’s 1919 theatre program of The God of Gods contains a list of the performed songs. The musical numbers, from the first production under the direction of A.E. Filmer, were conducted by Harold Mills and include the following:

Bringing the Text to Life  293  “Pawnee War Song and Dance” “Canadian Indian Airs” “Cherokee Cradle Song” “Chiquito Indian Tune” “Dakota Scalp Dance” “Omaha Tribal Melodies” “Dakota Serenade”

Collected by Theodore Baker From Crotch’s Specimens Collected by Theodore Baker Collected by Theodore Baker Collected by A.C. Fletcher Arranged by C.W. Cadman Collected by Theodore Baker

Although these orchestral accompaniments to The God of Gods elevate the play’s melodrama, as O’Neill argues, theatre reviews suggest that the play was generally received as a fairly authentic illustration of Aboriginal rituals. After seeing the 1919 show, a reviewer for the Birmingham Post and Journal states, “There is nothing in The God of Gods which cannot be believed – it might have happened, and if it happened it must have happened in this way” (qtd in Brigg 33). This historical material indicates popular attitudes about Aboriginal culture at the time and also raises the question of the play’s perceived national origin. While the 1919 and 1920 Birmingham reviewers believed that the play was an authentic representation of North America and its Aboriginals, the 1922 Canadian reviewers did not. Potentially responding to the play’s poeticism of natural environment, Hart House director Bertram Forsyth sought the “assistance of archaeological experts like Prof. [Charles Trick] Currelly,” who was director of the Royal Ontario Museum (Charlesworth).2 Despite this effort at geographical specificity, reviewers critiqued the Hart House production for its nondescript mountainous background and universality. In his 1922 review of the Toronto production, J.L. Charlesworth remarked, “It would perhaps be stretching a point to claim that this play is essentially Canadian in atmosphere” (“Music”). Comparing the Birmingham and Hart House productions’ differing subtitles helps to explain the variants in set design and the theatre reviews. First, the absence of a mountain-clad set from the Birmingham production reflects their billing of The God of Gods as an “American-Indian” play, while Hart House’s set exemplifies the designer’s attempt to depict what the subtitle advertised as “A Canadian Play.” Second, it is understandable that British audiences had an easier time believing the authenticity of an “American-Indian play,” given the exoticism of this distant place, than Canadian audiences had in accepting a representation of their own nation in a “Canadian Play.”

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Although I have been approaching the productions as lived events, these distinct subtitles demonstrate how performances can also alter the script: all four productions change Aikins’s original subtitle “A Play in Three Acts.” Everyman Theatre’s playbill cites the play as both The God of Gods: A Drama in Three Acts and The God of Gods: A Drama (1931), and some of the theatre’s promotional material advertises The God of Gods as “A New Play.” Everyman Theatre’s subtitles and the musical accompaniment, with songs like “God Save the Queen” and “A Chorus of Woodland Birds,” suggest that the final production stripped Aikins’s play of its “Canadian” or “American-Indian” resonances and invested in a more European tradition. My critical introduction to the edition uses the subtitles to anchor an extended comparison of the four productions’ reception and reviews. In general, theatre reviewers received Birmingham’s production as an exotic “Indian” play, Hart House’s performance as an attempt at Canadian authenticity, and London’s staging as an unusual drama with too much comedy. The Context Is the Message Further complicating the question of the play’s national classification, The God of Gods exemplifies how cultural context and production elements can alter the meaning of the script and underscores the significance of the geographical setting. An edition that considers the theatre’s geographical setting is especially germane to a modernist work because, as Eric Aronoff argues, “in the modernist period, anthropologists like Edward Sapir counter definitions of culture as universal, diachronic narrative of progressive refinement or technological improvement with conceptions of culture as synchronic or spatial wholes, whose unit is the geographic region” (94). In other words, the modernist movement in literature and theatre coincided with a shift in anthropology that redefined culture in terms of specific geographic contexts. As if dramatizing this modernist anthropological theory, Aikins’s God of Gods treats geographical location, art, and culture as at once mutually constitutive and synonymous: for Aikins’s hero, Yellow Snake, the place Hidden Waters is at once poetry unto itself and a cultural unit. In presenting spatial form or locus – in this case the imagined landscape of Hidden Waters – as culture and art, The God of Gods participates in the larger modernist treatment of form as message. It seems only fitting, then, that an edition of The God of Gods also considers the productions’ spatial

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elements, including the set designs, theatre spaces, and geographical locations. Using the character of Yellow Snake as a mouthpiece, Aikins presents a new culture in terms of a highly aestheticized space. Yellow Snake, as a rebellious outsider, refuses to obey a singular humanized “God” and instead presents a communal religious system rooted in the natural landscape of Hidden Waters. Aronoff suggests that modernist literature “participates in a raging interdisciplinary debate … over the idea of culture itself” and whether culture could be conceived as “relative” to its geographical region (93). Aikins participates in this debate by not only relating culture to region or space but also identifying a new culture as the place Hidden Waters. While Aronoff describes the modernist trend of theorizing culture as “an aesthetic object that is spatially conceived” (96), Aikins inverts this theory by portraying culture as a spatial area that is aesthetically conceived. Yellow Snake, for instance, describes the world of Hidden Waters with nature imagery and highly poeticized language: “The birds look like these birds but they are really dreams that choose the trees they love and nest in them. They mate like thrushes but their young are not like birds at all. Some are of stone and have carved limbs and faces, rubbed and smoothed with sand, and some are pictures made with blood on birch-bark, and some are only voices. But when they sing it is like quick water under the white moon. And you must never hurt those birds or rob their nests” (13). With this speech, Yellow Snake’s use of rhetoric – such as alliteration (“blood on birch-bark”), imagery (“thrushes,” “carved limbs and faces,” “white moon”), simile (“when they sing it is like quick water”), and metaphor (Hidden Waters as a metaphor for an alternate society) – distinguishes him from the other characters’ especially stilted English. Yellow Snake’s lingual aestheticism reinforces Hidden Waters’ spatial aestheticism: form mirrors content. Yellow Snake’s poetic monologue also presents nature and humanity as mutually constitutive: neither serves solely as a poetic vehicle nor a larger tenor. When Yellow Snake describes Suiva, he uses nature as a vehicle to highlight her beauty: “your hair is like thunder-clouds! (12); “your breath is like crushed lilies!” (12); “your eyes are like stars” (14); “your hair is waving grass” (14); “your legs are like polished stones” (14). Just as he compares her to nature, he also, in turn, likens nature to people: “There is grass – like this grass, and flowers, and berry-bushes; but they have juices red as your own blood. And when they are hurt they cry as children do. And when the wind runs through them and

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they’re glad, you hear their laughter rippling up the hills” (14). The poetic form replicates the content by giving equal treatment to nature and people. In this way, he connects nature and people as complementary components of a holistic and highly aestheticized space – Hidden Waters. The natural setting and people engage in a dialogue that further represents their interconnection: “The bees and birds come to you, the shy deer, the trees, the flowers, even the stones and fishes. You talk to them and they to you” (14). This unification of spatial environment and its inhabitants embodies Aikins’s albeit sentimental egalitarianism. The set and poeticized environment are thus integral to the play’s larger political message, which further emphasizes the significance of performance contexts such as the theatre’s location and set designs. The productions’ sets, despite the text’s emphasis on locality, leave something to be desired. While I have found no photos from the London production, the Birmingham and Hart House production photos reveal flat, painted backdrops of mountains and trees: Birmingham’s set design shows forests in the background, and Hart House’s backdrop includes generic images of mountains.3 Commenting on the first Birmingham production, Canadian scholar O’Neill asserts that the first act “failed to suggest British Columbian scenery” (85). Birmingham reviewers at the time, however, praised the 1919 and 1920 productions as realistic portrayals of “a Red Indian tribe” (Birmingham Evening Despatch). These are the type of performance details that enrich consideration of the play’s perceived nationality and ethnography. Nietzschean Contexts While Lester is certainly correct to suggest that this play is a “loose adaptation” of Romeo and Juliet and a relatively rare example of an early twentieth-century Canadian adaptation of Shakespeare, I argue that the play more extensively adapts Nietzschean philosophy.4 The Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project cites The God of Gods in large part because of Aikins’s family involvement in Shakespeare studies, but the play itself shares only basic narrative elements with Romeo and Juliet – that is, a narrative that culminates in the death of two separated lovers. The play, however, dramatizes Nietzschean philosophy in detail by reifying art as a new religion and model for society. The God of Gods engages with Nietzsche’s concept of art in The Birth of T ­ ragedy and his discussion

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of God in The Gay Science. As with Nietzsche’s ­“essential being” who takes “eternal pleasure as the creator and spectator of that comedy of art” (Birth 33), Aikins’s Yellow Snake is the voice of a religion modelled on art. Yellow Snake is, in Nietzsche’s words, the “original artist of the world” (Birth 33). Like other contemporary modernists – such as George Bernard Shaw who used Nietzschean philosophy for a socialist agenda in Man and Superman (1903) – Aikins adapts Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy in order to promote anti-capitalist values, though this inter-text has yet to be explored in any detail. Given these international influences, the play cannot be fully understood in a Canadian context alone. Owing to Nietzsche’s reputation as an originator of expressionism, it may come as no surprise that the play’s idealized expressionist artist is also the voice of Nietzschean philosophy. What is surprising, however, is that Aikins adapts Nietzschean philosophy – which outwardly rejects socialism, promotes hierarchy, and was popular among the Fascist regime – for a socialist agenda. “Nietzsche,” as Steven E. Aschheim explains, “was the anti-egalitarian ‘philosopher of advanced capitalism’” who had an “elitist contempt for levelling and despotic socialism” (164). Despite Nietzsche’s anti-socialist elitism, his works have been used to support both the left and the right.5 The God of Gods, which could have just as aptly been titled “God is Dead,” adapts Nietzsche’s concept of art and God to promote egalitarianism. The play’s use of The Birth of Tragedy and The Gay Science not only places it in a field of modernist literature but also complicates the play’s controversial racist depiction of Aboriginal peoples and their stereotypical alignment with nature, art, and spirituality. Both The Gay Science and The Birth of Tragedy value an idealized past culture as a redemptive escape from the modern world. For Nietzsche, the ancient Greek tragedies best represent communal art that unites its spectators through the common identification with archetypal figures. Whereas Nietzsche uses the ancient Greeks, Aikins uses an Aboriginal character (the artist figure Yellow Snake) to represent a synthesis of the arts that can replace religion. Yellow Snake is at once poet, singer, actor, and audience. In dramatizing many different genres (music, poetry, sculpture, theatre) and in elevating art to divine status, The God of Gods functions as a manifesto for the unique ability of theatre to present a collaborative synthesis of the arts – or, in other words, the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art). For Aikins, theatre is a synthesizing art form, and the play uses Aboriginal culture to promote a European theatrical tradition. He builds on Nietzsche’s theorization of art, which was itself

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inspired by Richard Wagner, by emphasizing a particularly Wagnerian use of theatre that can provide spiritual and political redemption. In fact, Wagner, like Aikins, used a theatre building – the Festspielhaus – to model egalitarianism: “As in an ancient theatre, there are just plain rows of identical benches with each member of the audience the equal of each other, just as (ideally) among the citizens of ancient democracies” (Geuss xvi). While the Wagnerian notion of Gesamtkunstwerk is in keeping with Nietzsche’s idealization of collaborative arts, Wagner’s vision for an egalitarian society contradicts Nietzsche’s ideas of Rangordnung (rank ordering). In this way, Aikins revises Nietzschean philosophy for a more socialist message that was in large part leading the innovative arts in Canada during the early twentieth century. Aikins does not use poetic language merely to portray the relationship between nature and people: he presents an idealized art – a total work of art that includes multiple media – as a new form of religion. The highly aestheticized representation of nature, wherein the birds are at once birds and sculptures of birds with “carved limbs and faces” (13), affords a supplementary religious system. Yellow Snake works to overthrow the vengeful hierarchical God through art and/as nature, thereby echoing Nietzsche’s contention that “the terrible is tamed by artistic means” (Birth 40). The imagined realm of Hidden Waters involves many different forms of art: poetry, music (“some are only voices”), sculpture (“some are made of stone”), and painting (“some are pictures made with blood”) (God 13). Hidden Waters thus realizes Nietzsche’s Wagnerian ideal of a total work of art by incorporating poetry, music, sculpture, painting, and drama. Yellow Snake himself is also an artist of many forms. Though his role as “the singer” and poet are more overt, the first time we see the character he is an onstage audience member. He “climbs a nearby tree and hides in the foliage” (3) for the duration of the first scene. While watching Kotwi and Waning Moon, Yellow Snake “follows the various turns of their conversation with interested but restrained pantomime” (7). In this way, Aikins immediately presents Yellow Snake in the role of spectator (he watches from the trees) and as actor (he enacts “pantomime”). Aikins, then, includes the audience in this ideal artistic realm, synthesizing artist and audience. Nietzsche’s, and in turn Aikins’s, idealization of Gesamtkunstwerk not only presents a highly collaborative vision of the arts (one that involves multiple arts as well as the audience), but, more specifically, endows a multidisciplinary artist with the God-like properties of the “original artist of the world” (Birth 33). For Nietzsche, we can

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be “one and identical with the essential being” if we are “one and the same time subject and object, simultaneously poet, actor, and spectator” (Birth 33). The God of Gods adheres to this definition of God and/ as art: Yellow Snake is at once an artistic subject (poet, singer, actor), object (character onstage to be viewed by the real audience), as well as a spectator. For Nietzsche, only a God-like figure or the “essential being” (Birth 33) can hold this complex artistic role, which explains why Suiva names Yellow Snake the true “God” (66). The God of Gods ultimately enacts a manifesto for the theatre. Most notably, the dramatic genre integrates multiple art forms and enables the representation of the “essential creator” who is at once “poet, actor, and spectator.” Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy uses the Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus as representatives of two fundamental artistic drives. The God of Gods, in turn, exemplifies this Nietzschean dichotomy of the Apollonian (structure, order, epitomized by sculpture) and the Dionysian (chaos, intoxication, epitomized by structureless music). The play’s main dramatic tension, between the capitalist worshippers and the poet-singer Yellow Snake, can be described in Nietzschean terms as a tension between Apolline and Dionysiac forces. According to Nietzsche, “[The Greeks’] two deities of art, Apollo and Dionysos, provide the starting-point for our recognition that there exists in the world of the Greeks an enormous opposition, both in origin and goals, between the Apolline art of the image-maker or sculptor (Bildner) and the imageless art of music, which is that of Dionysos. These two very different drives (Triebe) exist side by side, mostly in open conflict, stimulating and provoking (reizen) one another to give birth to … ‘art’” (Birth 14). Much like Nietzsche’s division of the two artistic forms, an Apollonian rock sculpture represents the play’s God, whereas the Dionysian “art of music” characterizes Yellow Snake. Aikins also demonstrates art’s potential deceptiveness: the worshippers fail to perceive the sculpture of God as an artistic rendering and instead mistake it for the real thing. With Apolline art, as Nietzsche warns, “in the worst case, the semblance would deceive us as if it were crude reality” (16). In spite of the religious leaders (Mablo, Waning Moon), who enforce strict rules characteristic of Apolline structure, Yellow Snake engages in a world of, in Nietzsche’s terms, Dionysiac “oneness” (Birth 19), where nature and people are interconnected. Nietzsche even characterizes the “reconciliation” of “nature … with her lost son, humankind” as a product of “the magic of the Dionysiac” (Birth 18). By incorporating both “artistic powers” (Birth 18) – the Apolline and

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Dionysiac – Aikins participates in “the continuous evolution of art” by Nietzsche’s standards (Birth 14). In this way, Aikins celebrates theatre as a multidisciplinary art form. The performance history of The God of Gods illustrates the mutually constitutive relationship between production and text. By adopting an editorial practice that integrates performance history with the performed script, rather than with the original manuscript alone, my critical edition responds to the play’s celebration of and self-reflexive commentary on the theatre arts. Performing Primitivism Aikins participates in what James Clifford calls “ethnographic modernity” by using Yellow Snake to lament a sense of lost authenticity and to critique the community’s worship of a falsified idol (3). Yellow Snake’s death, together with Mablo’s capitalist corruption of the community’s religion, illustrates the “feeling of lost authenticity, of ‘modernity’ ruining some essence or source,” which Clifford argues is a trend among early ­twentieth-century literature (4). Defining the predicament of “ethnographic modernity” in reference to a William Carlos Williams’s poem about a female Indian servant, Clifford explains that it is “ethnographic because Williams finds himself off center among scattered traditions,” and it is “modernity since the condition of root-lessness and mobility he confronts is an increasingly common fate” (3). The God of Gods script and productions illustrate ethnographic modernity by demonstrating intercultural translation issues that take place when a theatrical event represents an Aboriginal reserve through scattered traditions of ­American-Indian rituals. While Aikins’s script highlights a crisis of religious authenticity, Toronto’s and Birmingham’s productions exemplify an inability to attain cultural authenticity through their reductive portrayals of the Canadian and American “Indians,” respectively. An investigation of The God of Gods productions ultimately fulfils Clifford’s call for an ethnographic analysis of the dissemination or “specific paths” of individual stories (5). For instance, the 1920 Birmingham production uses an Aztec statue to represent an Aboriginal religious idol from British Columbia, thereby presenting an artificial account of Aboriginal rituals. My edition takes account of both Aikins’s treatment of marginalized cultures as well as the theatres’ exacerbation of this marginalization through their reductive portrayals of toothless Indians. After all, the Birmingham and Hart House dramatizations of the Aboriginal characters contribute to and reflect the respective

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audiences’ limited understanding of Aboriginal peoples. Reviewers of the Birmingham productions even described the performances as authentic illustrations of “barbaric … Indian faith” (Bendell qtd in O’Neill 76). Birmingham’s and Hart House’s variants in production design – such as costumes, stage make-up, set – resulted in two different conceptions of the “savage”: while Birmingham’s serene forest and beautified Suiva produced a more romantic version of a primitive culture, Hart House’s toothless Indians and mountainous backdrop worked to present a savage vision of an Aboriginal reserve in Naramata, BC. Aikins’s script does suggest an attempt at authenticity in the Aboriginal characters’ garb and religious ceremonies, but Birmingham’s first production was unable to fully execute all of Aikins’s costume and prop notes. “Since the war had caused shortages of cloth and since Jackson’s costume shop would not open until 1920,” O’Neill explains, Birmingham’s “costumes for the first production were standard off-the-rack Indian dress supplied by J. Burkenshaw and Sons of Liverpool, which made the minor characters ‘comic in appearance’ and defied the authenticity of Aikins’s detailed descriptions” (82). Aikins’s descriptions of the religious idol were also quite different from some of its staged realizations. Commenting on Birmingham’s production photos, O’Neill explains, “The God of Gods statue does appear to have been pulled from stock scenery and is more reminiscent of an Aztec or African idol than of something created in British Columbia” (82). The idol, then, has three layers of meaning: Aikins’s description of a stone-like statue (script), Jackson’s use of an Aztec or African idol (stage), and the viewers’ interpretation of the “cotton-wool” stuffed statue as religious idol (audience) (Birmingham Post and Journal). An edition that integrates the copy text (Aikins’s manuscript) along with the theatre productions and audience reception in post-war Birmingham and Toronto exposes these three levels – scripted setting, staged setting, audience – of interpretations. The theatres’ varying treatment of Aboriginal culture is especially significant because The God of Gods uses Aboriginal culture and primitivist tropes for political intervention. The play’s vague descriptions and reductive portrayal of Aboriginal culture has been the subject of deserved critical scrutiny. As Lester asks, “How, then, do we reconcile the progressive social commentary with the play’s racist language (Kotwi, Suiva’s mother is described as a ‘fat squaw’ [3]) … and bizarre faux-native dialogue (“How should we eat if the fire died?” [5])? In The God of Gods, Aikins’s characters hold up to Mark Shackleton’s definition of “Indianness” as merely “the image of Native people held by nonNatives” (257–8).6 Though Aikins’s depiction of Aboriginal peoples

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is no doubt reductive and stereotypical, there is a marked attempt at authenticity with the descriptions of the characters’ costumes: Yellow Snake wears a “cougar skin tunic” (3), the old chief “is dressed in black otter skins and carries an ornamental hatchet in his girdle” (20), and the Aboriginal characters function as a critique of the audience. The villagers, who act as inset audience members, offer a mirror for the audience and thereby warn against blind obedience to a corrupt authority figure. The Mablo character, in turn, is a public leader who deceives the people for his own gain, and, as a result, symbolizes capitalism and greed. By the play’s end, the audience learns that the God of Gods statue is merely propaganda orchestrated by Mablo and his men. The artificiality of the play’s formal features – the broken dialogue, painted background flats, stereotypical costumes – potentially points to the artificiality and theatricality of the audience’s own culture, which is played out by Indian stock figures. The villagers, Mablo, and the religious idol satirize and represent the masses, political leaders, and propaganda, respectively. While readers today may struggle to overlook the play’s glaring stereotypes of a primitive and exotic Aboriginal culture, Aikins’s main satirical target was not Aboriginal peoples but modern society. Yellow Snake is a virtuous artist figure who cannot survive in corrupt society, and Aikins extends this “vanishing savage” stereotype to the audience. Colonial literature, as Paula Gunn Allen explains, typically presents the vanishing savage as an inevitable phenomenon due to the Indian’s alleged inability to participate in a modern commodity-driven culture. According to this narrative, the Indian is destined for elimination and is unfit for survival in modern society. For Aikins, however, it is ­commodity-driven culture and not the wild savage that must be eliminated. In the final death scene, for instance, Suiva aligns herself with Yellow Snake, casting the fearful and commodified culture as the antagonist. In this way, the play’s political arguments complicate the reductive portrayal of an Aboriginal community in Naramata that, though beautiful, deserves elimination. Aikins applies the vanishing savage narrative to modern culture and in doing so partakes in another popular tradition of using Aboriginal peoples to critique commercial society’s inability to thrive or survive. As Daniel Francis explains, when non-Natives share narratives about the imaginary Indian, it is really a story of themselves and their own culture. Though the play’s criticism of modern society warrants attention, The God of Gods also helps to distance the audience from the history of colonial conquest with its pacifist ideology and celebratory exoticism of

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primitive culture. In prompting the audience to identify with a savage, Shari H. Huhndorf explains that authors enable viewers “to distance themselves from the conquest of Native America” (3). For instance, Yellow Snake’s vision of the alternative world Hidden Waters repeatedly warns against violence and colonial possessiveness. Although violence is not entirely absent from this alternate world, Yellow Snake’s directive that “you must never hurt those birds” (13) warns against it; he also inserts a lesson against capitalist and perhaps even colonial conquest: “You must never … rob their nests” (13). Yellow Snake’s religious system denies an individualistic sense of ownership and conquest. Everyone, according to Yellow Snake, owns – and is thus responsible for – nature. As Suiva exclaims, “It’s no more yours than mine or any other’s” (15). There is a levelling of ownership as opposed to a mere cultural reversal (that the land belongs to Aboriginal peoples and not to colonialists, to Yellow Snake and not to Mablo). In this egalitarian world, “you hate no man and none hates you” (14). Yellow Snake and Suiva’s notion of equal possessiveness is so encompassing that it reveals the very notion of possession to be an illusion: because everyone owns, no one owns. When Yellow Snake speaks of “my house” (15) he does not, as Suiva at first believes, refer to a physical structure but rather to the “songs and plumage of all birds that nest and all the colours of all fish that swim” (15). In presenting the “songs and plumage” as “my house” (15), he further does away with conventional notions of personal property, instead accepting nature as his home. When faced with Mablo’s marriage proposal, however, Suiva gives Yellow Snake an ultimatum that challenges his disavowal of personal property: suiva: When Mablo asks me, I’ll say this to him: If Yellow Snake has not made me a house by the young moon, then I will mate with you. yellow snake (wildly): How can I make a house by the young moon? suiva: By working hard, you will make it. yellow snake: The moon is half way here! suiva: Get Shiny Bird and Blue Fox to help you. yellow snake: Yes! Yes, and while they work I’ll sing to them. suiva: You must work, too. yellow snake (cunningly): I know a place in the thick cedar woods where the close branches are like sloping walls. The ground’s so thick with moss it springs like a muskeg. There’s a place to sleep! Why must we have a house? suiva (gently): When the birds mate, why do they build them nests?

304  Kailin Wright yellow snake (after a pause): That’s so. suiva (drawing him down): Sit down beside me and we’ll make the plan. (17–18)

While Yellow Snake is the voice of artistry and anti-materialism, Suiva is a mediating voice that at once appreciates nature as artistry (as articulated through her analogy of birds’ nests) and advocates practical artistry. Suiva encourages Yellow Snake to build a house by “working hard.” She wants him to be a productive partner who is part of the workforce. The artist, then, is not exempt from physical labour and quantifiable productivity. Yellow Snake must create a house; it can be made out of the landscape (like the nest) but he can’t live solely in nature itself. In addition to challenging materialism, Yellow Snake’s imagined alternative “house” pointedly embraces “all birds,” “all fish,” and “all the colours,” suggesting a particularly intercultural society (15). Despite the play’s “faux-native” dialogue and reductive character portrayals (Lester), Yellow Snake’s egalitarianism rejects racial hierarchies of “colours” as well as capitalist possession. The play’s international production history, then, extends the text’s nod to inter-culturalism and further illustrates the poeticized importance of spatial setting. Different Readers The production history and performance elements problematize the textual editing of a play in three significant ways. First, the playwright is no longer the sole authoritative creator. Drama necessitates a collaborative conception of artistic creation – one that accounts for directorial and performance variations. Second, the printed edition of the play involves a generic shift, which does not occur with the edition of a poem or novel, from page to stage, and in this case, back to the page again, making it difficult to ascertain a stable and singular copy text. Finally, the performance history can pose classification issues by raising the question of who defines the nationality of a play: the playwright, the director, the actors who embody the roles, and the audience each imprint their own national perspective onto the script. McKenzie contends that “different readers [bring] the text to life in different ways” (26). As the contrasting productions of The God of Gods demonstrate, this statement is particularly true for dramatic texts. McKenzie’s emphasis of “the human motives and interactions which texts involve at every stage of their production, transmission, and

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consumption” lends itself to the medium of drama (15). With each performance, the actors – who, after all, read the dramatic work – quite literally bring the script to life in different ways. Interpreting McKenzie’s statement in a more metaphorical way, as he intended it, the many behind-the-scenes collaborators on a theatrical production also help to bring “the text to life” onstage. When applied to play scripts, then, the notion of “different readers” expands from a reference to readers or audience members to include directors, actors, set designers, lighting technicians, and costumiers who read the dramatic text and collaborate on its theatrical execution. Even the definition of a reader changes when considering a dramatic text. During a production of a play, these readers are connected spatially (they are all in the same theatre house), temporally (they all read or follow the script in unison) and creatively (they all contribute to the same production). But if each production and each cocreator transforms the play script, what is the authorized dramatic text? Is it the playwright’s script or what was actually performed onstage? And if it is the performance, then which performance should be used as the authoritative version? The collective performance process, as we have seen, constantly changes the “original” textual script. My critical edition of Aikins’s dramatic work, which considers the play’s many textual and performance versions, creates yet another version in the collaborative process. By considering the performance history and the multiple “collaborative executions” the editor can indeed help “bring the text to life,” and, as a result, join the ranks of co-collaborators. NOTES Thank you to the Aikins family and the Sir Barry Jackson estate for their help with securing copyright permissions for the edition. My research and editorial project was generously funded by Editing Modernism in Canada (EMiC), St Francis Xavier’s University Council Research Grant, St Francis Xavier’s Start-up Grant, a SSHRC doctoral fellowship, and the University of Toronto’s Department of English. For their insightful commentary on various drafts of this paper, I am grateful to Laura Estill, Tony Fong, Colin Hill, and Dean Irvine, as well as to the participants of the Conference on Editorial Problems (hosted by EMiC). 1 See O’Neill’s “Carroll Aikins’s Experiments in Playwriting” for further discussion of the play’s reception in the United Kingdom.

306  Kailin Wright 2 The Royal Ontario Museum was part of the University of Toronto from 1914 to 1946. 3 Kenneth Noxon, “a young university student,” created Hart House Theatre’s set and backdrop for The God of Gods (Charlesworth, “Music”). 4 My examination of Aikins’s use of Nietzsche’s philosophy is by no means exhaustive, and is intended, rather, to prompt further discussion of Aikins’s work within the field of Canadian modernism. 5 See Aschheim’s The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890–1990 for an examination of “Nietzsche-socialism.” 6 See Robert Berkhofer’s The White Man’s Indian (1978) and Francis’s The Imaginary Indian (1993) for a contextualization of the noble savage stereotype as the product of European prejudices in popular literature and culture.

14  Landscapes of Reception: Historicizing the Travails of the New Brunswick Literary Modernists tony tremblay

Constructing Backwardness: Maritime Space in the Canadian Federation In the essay “Literary Sites and Cultural Properties in Canadian Poetry,” D.M.R. Bentley performs the much-needed task of marrying Henri Lefebvre’s work in cultural geography with the now-naturalized assumption that early Canadian (i.e., Maritime) literature in English “reveals a persistent yearning on the part of Canadian writers to connect themselves and their landscapes with the British literary tradition, particularly with the second generation of Romantic poets” (90). Using Lefebvre’s work on the “frontal” performance of space in social practices (Lefebvre 33), Bentley illustrates how this association was first mapped onto a presumably vacant Canadian landscape and how our subsequent desire for that cartography is now accompanied by a ready-made psychology – an “anxiety of severance” (97) – that maintains nearorganic connections with a past that is “simultaneously ‘present’” (90) in cultural topologies. He cites the Tantramar, for example, as always being the Tantramar of Charles G.D. Roberts: that space of gossiping grasses hermetically sealed against both forgetting and alteration. We not only imagine but also normalize that space on the basis of its previous symbolic construction. And, like any hegemony, freedom and ease are found in acceptance. As Maritime poet Douglas Lochhead writes in High Marsh Road, a long meditation on the Tantramar that recalls many of the cultural memories that Roberts created a century earlier, “it is / good to have such footsteps” (n. pag.). Regardless of the fact that Bentley’s observation is directed at the study of a sub-genre of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writing

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(the literary site piece or commemorative ode), the impulse to “associationism” that he identifies – that is, assigning particular character and features to a cultural space on the basis of a previous literary celebrity, presence, or representation – has much wider application in a landscape as culturally negotiated and uneven as Canada’s.1 In eastern Canada, historians have identified patterns of construction similar to Bentley’s in the manufacture of Maritime space. E.R. Forbes, for example, observed that “if the frontier encouraged progressive, egalitarian and democratic attitudes, then that part of the country furthest removed from the frontier stage [the Maritimes] must be conservative, socially stratified and unprogressive” (“In Search” 51). The literary evidence for this view begins to appear in the 1920s when writers such as Madge Macbeth start to take a pan-Canadian survey of the national landscape from an east-west perspective. Her main character in the 1924 novel The Land of Afternoon, a westerner, asserts that when he thought of the West he thought “of a rugged people who were still alive to the practical advancement of idealism, divorced from stultifying subservience to convention” (351; emphasis added). Writing three generations later, Maritime historian Margaret Conrad observes the same presumptions, citing as her favourite example of the maintenance of this frontier thesis Barry Cooper’s “western” argument that “[the Maritimes’] stagnation and decadence remain the most prominent features of pre-modern communal life to have survived into the present” (3). Even astute and sensitive readers of contemporary literary criticism in Canada should therefore be forgiven for concluding that Canadian literary modernism was largely an urban and westward-moving phenomenon – and if not exactly urban or frontier then proximate to new technologies of print and communication that tended to develop in rather populous growth centres where radio, film, and small-press publishing, not to mention a nominally paying readership, were viable market options. Glenn Willmott, one of those astute readers, can legitimately write, then, “The rural regions of the Maritimes (like those of Quebec) modernized much later than those of Ontario or the Prairie provinces” (153). And David Creelman, in a one-line summation of the literature of the east coast, can write of the consequences of a westwardmoving mean that, in its wake, “realism arrived comparatively late to the Maritime provinces” (5). This view is again corroborated, and the discussion seemingly closed, by Nick Mount, whose book about Canadian literature in New York is premised on the notion that the American turn-of-the-century anti-modernism that Jackson Lears identified

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was embraced most enthusiastically by New Brunswick expatriates, among their number the Confederation poets Charles G.D. Roberts and Bliss Carman, and Roberts’s younger brother William, managing editor of the New York-based and anti-modernist Literary Digest for over thirty years (47). The evidence assembled by our leading critics is thus clear: of the loci normally thought of as critical to the incubation of Canadian literary modernism, New Brunswick and the Maritimes are well down the list, if they are on the list at all. The provincial, antiquated culture of the region is more likely, as Willmott invites us to infer from his use of Neil Smith,2 an anti-space of underdevelopment where myths of pastoral and monoculture, innocence and authenticity, serve as functional antitheses against which more progressive movements defined themselves. As Ian McKay puts it, the Maritime region is a space “essentially innocent of the complications and anxieties of twentieth-century modernity” (30), and thus a place ideally suited to the assignment of the near-occult Romantic presence theorized by Bentley. For urban, westward-moving modernism to proceed apace, then, sites of underdevelopment had to be cultivated, and what better place to assign backwardness to than New Brunswick, the home of many of North America’s foremost antimodernist poets and cultural workers of the nineteenth century. In this chapter I would like to examine that premise, not with a mind to refuting it, for the view of the province’s backwardness is discursively incontrovertible if not always historically accurate, but with the intention of exploring how that label of underdevelopment impeded the practice and reception of literary modernism in New Brunswick. The relevance of that investigation in the wider Canadian context hearkens back to Robert Kroetsch’s still-nagging riddle that “Canadian literature evolved directly from Victorian into Postmodern” (1). If that is the case, and if rural, eastern spaces such as New Brunswick became an important, albeit negative, ground against which urban Canadian intellectual workers produced modernism elsewhere, then examining New Brunswick’s late-Victorian ground for its purported resistance to modernism can tell us much about modernism as a uniquely Canadian phenomenon, one differently nuanced in the different regions of the federation. Not only, after all, are editorial problems environmental – problems of practice and reception long before they are problems of textual criticism – but, as Leon Surette rightly observes, “Our understanding of modernism now recognizes that it is more continuous with late nineteenth century

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aesthetic practice than the modernists themselves pretended, and than the New Critics permitted” (66). Surette’s observation is key to this discussion, because it prepares us for an important discrepancy in the literary record: the discrepancy between the modernist experiments of nineteenth-century New Brunswick writers and the anti-modernist tendencies assigned to those writers by twentieth-century critics. Bliss Carman and First-Generation Modernism in New Brunswick To begin, an overview of the provenance of literary modernism in New Brunswick is warranted, and that overview, ironically, must start with the New Brunswick writer most often credited with anti-modernist leanings: the dreamy vagabond Bliss Carman. Though registering what Mount calls “the earliest sustained expression of an antimodernist poetic” (71), Carman’s verse nevertheless caught the attention of Decadent poet Arthur Symons, the popularizer of the French symbolists and the favourite London radical of modernist publisher Elkin Mathews (who published Carman’s poetry in England and later released James Joyce’s Chamber Music). Symons would take Carman to visit W.B. Yeats in 1896, three years after Low Tide on Grand Pré had brought Carman considerable renown among the aesthetes associated with Mathews’s pre-modernist quarterly, the Yellow Book. Symons believed that both poets were the leading mythologizers of their time, perhaps unaware that Carman had dismissed Yeats four years earlier for being “redolent of Blake” (Letters 43), thus a poor model for aspiring modernists.3 A few months later, in a review in the Athenaeum on 27 March 1897, Symons praised Carman for reaching for “fresh, new, and unspoilt [forms],” and “trying to express more than he at present knows how to express.” For Symons, that desire for freshness represented “a step forward, if into the darkness,” for Carman was but a nervous pioneer on modernism’s early stage (qtd in Ware 101). That positive view of Carman was still in place and echoed thirteen years later when a brash young Ezra Pound arrived in New York from London in 1910. After consorting with leading American poets for most of the summer and fall at Laurence Gomme’s bookshop on 29th Street – that bookshop chosen because it matched the fin-de-siècle energies of Mathews’s Piccadilly Circus enterprise – Pound concluded that “among contemporary North American poets Bliss Carman was ‘about the only one of the lot that wouldn’t improve by drowning’” (qtd in Carpenter 150). The remark was certainly not idle. In the essay “What I Feel About Whitman,” Pound had written a year earlier that

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Whitman was the “only Poet before the artists of the Carmen-Hovey [sic] period … who is worth reading” (145). Seeming to corroborate the point, biographer Noel Stock recounts that Pound’s early avant-garde reading included not only Symons and Browning, but also Carman’s Songs from Vagabondia (18), an echo of which appears in Pound’s “A Rouse” from A Lume Spento (McGillivray 11).4 Not inconsequential in Pound’s assessment of Carman’s contemporariness was the uncanny similarity of their intellectual journeys. Pound recognized in Carman’s Songs of the Sea Children (1903) and Rough Rider (1909) a near-identical exposure to theories of sexual love, which were again at the forefront of American intellectual discussions with the release of Paul Delior’s Remy de Gourmont et son oeuvre (1909), a book that F.S. Flint brought to Pound’s attention and which became the basis of Pound’s 1912 lecture “Psychology and Troubadours.”5 Of special interest to both poets was Gourmont’s Physique de l’amour: essai sur l’instinct sexuel (1903), which equates human sexuality with animalism, celebrating the naturalness of sex, and condemning the various bourgeois moralities (Christianity foremost among them) intent on censoring sexual instinct. Gourmont argues that the cults of virginity and fidelity, the perversion of abstinence, and the taboos of adultery, homosexuality, and promiscuity are a corruption of pagan appetite, and that humankind would be well served by a sexual liberation. Pound’s “Translator’s Postscript” to the book picks up Gourmont’s suggestions of the relationship between sexual freedom and cerebral function, advancing the more esoteric conclusion that the brain is a repository of seminal fluid, and thus the source of generative impulse, whether sexual or creative. Already having covered this ground in the early 1890s when exposed to Richard Hovey’s similar theories of sexual love and spiritual health (MacDonald 147), Carman advanced Pound’s thinking by pushing Hovey’s studies towards Neoplatonism, specifically towards the notion that sexual union was a conjoining of souls split by man’s fall into the quotidian. As Carman wrote in September 1911 to H.D.C. Lee about Songs of the Sea Children, “The love passion is sublimated by imagination and meditation until it transcends the physical and becomes mystic. Raw physical passion (if it could exist without spirit or mind) could not create, it could only procreate. Yet spiritual rapture, love with all its divine attributes, and intellectual elation, cannot divorce themselves wholly from the physical … And physicality must reach up like a mounting wave into the realm of mind and spirit before it can become beautiful” (Letters 190).

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This view captures a Freudian speculation of the period regarding the possible union between material and immaterial realms, and, as John Robert Sorfleet shows, provides Carman with an entry into François Delsarte’s theory of Trinitarian expression (“the organic harmonizing of body, mind and spirit”) and George Santayana’s rational idealism (Sorfleet 208). Humphrey Carpenter traces the same arc of these ideas in Pound, moving from the mysticism of early figures like Josiah Royce through the Neoplatonists to Santayana (575–7).6 Of particular relevance is the fact that at exactly this time Pound had just finished the last chapter of The Spirit of Romance (1910), his study of the cults of Provence and Tuscany as harmonies of emotion and the mind (116). Pound was thus in a position to make the most use of Carman’s unusual ideas. His admiration for Carman, then, came from recognizing familiar ground: in the 1908–10 period, Carman was exploring many of the same intellectual questions as he was and putting the results of that exploration into verse. In that vein, it is highly likely that Pound read Carman’s book of essays, The Making of Personality (1908), which espoused the Carman/Mary Perry King theories of mysticism’s path to recovering the organic unity of the physical, mental, and spiritual.7 Pound extended the compliment of Carman’s intellectual seriousness twenty years later in a 1930 letter to poet Louis Zukofsky, saying, “Your problem coming after T.S.E[liot]. me an’ Bill [Williams] is very dif. from what ours was coming after Yeats and Bliss Carman” (Pound/Zukofsky 85). The reference suggests two things: first, that Carman’s work warranted address and response by a new generation of writers, and, second, that Pound, like Symons and Mathews before him, considered Carman as being at or near the scene of the birth of modernism, a fact picked up by Surette, who found evidence that Carman’s verse was some of the last cut from Pound’s anthology Confucius to Cummings (50). That anthology charted landscape-changing innovations in form and style, showcasing practitioners who were at the forefront of literary movements. (Not surprisingly, Pound also left out the early work of Yeats, to which Carman’s verse had been compared, and the entire poetic oeuvre of Joyce, which is rhythmically and imaginatively similar to Carman’s, employing the same moods of spent love and ennui.8) That Carman appeared in the June 1915 issue of Harriet Monroe’s Poetry with T.S. Eliot, published in a modernist journal for the first time, suggests the importance of his work. In that number, Carman’s poems got higher billing than “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Regardless of what later criticism has decreed, then, some of the leading British and American figures in early

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modernism considered Carman to be an innovator, his style and intellectual attentions an affront to the neo-Georgian revival to which Pound especially would take such vehement opposition. This view of Carman’s topicality was also held closer to home, at least until the 1930s. Fellow New Brunswick luminary Charles G.D. Roberts approved of Pound’s endorsement of his cousin’s verse, even if he had no use for the self-referential in Pound. Admitting that he “thoroughly dislike[d] [Pound] as a man, & still more thoroughly as a poet” (Collected Letters 590), Roberts nevertheless understood the impetus for formal and aesthetic change, writing, “The more healthy and vigorous the reaction, the more inevitably does it froth up into excess … But the freshness of thought or of technique that supplied the urge to the reaction remains and is clarified, ultimately to be worked into the tissue of permanent art” (“Prefatory Note” viii). A better definition of modernism would be hard to find. In fact, Pound’s own definition of modernism in the essay “Hell” relies on the same metaphors of violence and overthrow: “A younger generation … has been brought up on a list of acid tests, invented to get rid of the boiled oatmeal consistency of the bad verse of 1900” (206). In that same “Prefatory Note” to his Selected Poems (1936), Roberts admitted to his own modernist development, citing the distance between the Ovidian metres and imagery of “The Pipes of Pan” (1887) and his more contemporary verse, such as “The Squatter” (1935). And despite the suspicions of a poet coming to his own defence, Roberts’s argument is valid. Later poems such as “The Iceberg” and “The Squatter” do employ a freer verse structure, dispel with neoclassical imagery, and recall poets that Canadian critics are more willing to call “modernist,” such as E.J. Pratt and F.R. Scott. The first few lines of “The Squatter” will illustrate: Round the lone clearing Clearly the whitethroats call Across the marge of dusk and the dewfall’s coolness. Far up the empty Amber and apple-green sky A night-hawk swoops, and twangs her silver chord. No wind’s astir, But the poplar boughs breathe softly And the smoke of a dying brush-fire strings the air. (221)

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While those lines could never be mistaken for A.J.M. Smith’s, they do suggest a formal austerity (if not emotional restraint) different from the earlier Roberts, whose impulse was often to inflate. The distance from “The Pipes of Pan” is noticeable: Ringed with the flocking hills, within shepherding watch of Olympus, Tempe, vale of the gods, lies in green quiet withdrawn; Tempe, vale of the gods, deep-couched amid woodland and woodland Threaded with amber of brooks, mirrored in azure of pools, All day drowsed with the sun. (44)

Despite a clearly evolving poetics and the relevance they enjoyed in their time, however, the New Brunswick poets would not be allowed to move from the nativism that Pound admired in Carman’s bohemian ­lyricism – that sense of a vagabond democratic individualism freed from the strictures of convention – to a formal apparatus more in keeping with the times and therefore more sustained. And so, feeling disenfranchised from innovations he was denied, Roberts would end up writing about modernism as the old write about the young: “Modernism … [is] a reaction of the younger creators against the too long dominance of their older predecessors” (“Note” 296), and therein “genius, and near genius, and loud mediocrity, and thinly veiled insanity, jostle for recognition and are sometimes hardly to be distinguished from each other” (297).9 The transitional or “aesthetic modernism” of the Confederation poets, to use Brian Trehearne’s term for its hybrid of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century form, thus becomes a footnote to the twentieth century; and to Smith and the consciously histrionic urban modernists of the 1930s, the father of Canadian literature becomes Charles “God Damn,” the symbol of cultural fatigue and the “hyper-sensitive … victim of his feelings and fancies” (Smith, “Rejected” 7). E.K. Brown would seal the deal in his influential On Canadian Poetry by placing Roberts “in the very rear of the modern movement” (53), in effect condemning him to Matthew Arnold’s century of exuberant, and thus by inference callow, idealism. Brown did the same with Carman, labelling his verse “jaunty,” “cloying,” and “soporific” (55, 56, 57). But especially curious – and relevant to the biases of the frontier thesis identified above – is the different treatment afforded to the Ottawabased Confederation poets, namely Archibald Lampman and Duncan

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Campbell Scott, “the two most powerful and satisfying poets of the period” (Brown 58). In the interregnum that Trehearne identifies, they are retained as models of their generation, not Carman or Roberts, writers whose exposure to the currents of modernist thought were much more pronounced and significant. W.E. Collin had been the first to pass this judgment when his ground-breaking The White Savannahs (1936) fixed a canon of Canadian modernist poetry that included Lampman to the exclusion of Roberts and Carman (Roberts is not mentioned in the book, and Carman receives one footnote). Roberts’s outrage must have been palpable, especially with regard to how Collin placed Lampman on a periphery that in no way had impeded Carman or himself: “Lampman and his associates [presumably Roberts and Carman], who complained of the prevailing drought, kept themselves informed of the flow of ideas in the outer world by reading the great English and American monthlies and quarterlies” (3).10 As the above illustrates, Roberts and Carman did much more than read from isolated outposts; they worked for those monthlies and quarterlies, published in them, consorted with their editors, and, at least in Carman’s case, had some influence on the intellectual development of leading modernist thinkers (Pound, Frost, and Stevens). Nevertheless, those involvements were erased by the first generation of Canadian modernist critics to assess the wider landscape. Reducing their “cosmic consciousness” to “sympathy with trees and flowers” (39) and “the smell of the Canadian soil” (14) becomes the basis of Collin’s dismissal, and of the new critical consensus that provincialism was the métier of the New Brunswick poets. Leo Kennedy would echo that dismissal almost exactly, writing a few weeks later, “The domestic muse became paramour to a company of poets hailing from the east coast provinces, whose work was burdened with a prim Nordic consciousness and a second-hand Imperialism” (14; emphasis added). By 1944 this view of the Fredericton poets was firmly entrenched, the influential Canadian modernist editor John Sutherland writing that “since the appearance of Ralph Gustafson’s Penguin Anthology [of Canadian Poetry] in 1942 modern poetry in Canada has been having a field-day” (32). Smith’s The Book of Canadian Poetry (1943) had also just come out, and the canon had shifted noticeably to exclude the New Brunswick poets, whose eulogy Sutherland delivered with cool detachment: “The firm of Roberts and Carman” can no longer maintain “that decayed faith, that shoddy and outworn morality, which blends in Canada with the colonial’s desire to preserve the status quo” (49). Two

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influential critics (Collin and Brown) coupled with a new generation of poets-cum-editors (Smith, Sutherland, and Kennedy) made straw men of the Fredericton school, Smith famously writing in the introduction to the Book of Canadian Poetry that only the “isolated masters [of] Heavysege, Crawford, Cameron, Duncan Campbell Scott, and Lampman” approximated what modernist poets offer to an understanding of the Canadian imagination (42). Roberts and Carman were not only out of fashion and demoted, but made absent among a peer group that came to the fore largely because of their efforts (Lampman’s poetic initiation in the pages of Roberts’s Orion is well known in Canadian literary history). The ideological process of demotion corresponded exactly to the frontier thesis that Maritime historians E.R. Forbes and Margaret Conrad identified. “Stagnation and decadence” were thereafter assumed, even by New Brunswick critics who accepted the pronouncement of others without question. In 1950, Desmond Pacey thus regards Carman as others have regarded him: “vague in thought and sometimes even in description … the great mass of his work lacks depth, originality, and distinction” (“Bliss Carman” 10). A.G. Bailey and Second-Generation Modernism in New Brunswick It would not be until the emergence of Alfred G. Bailey in New Brunswick that what Trehearne identified as a post-Aesthetic, “class-­ conscious” modernism (Aestheticism 313) would assert itself in the east, a modernism more amenable to the proletarianism that Sutherland advocated (52, 72–4). And because Bailey straddled both worlds of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries without being fixed in the former, he could more legitimately lay claim to a lasting modernism than could his Confederation-era predecessors, even though those Fredericton poets were the models for his first two books of poetry. Bailey’s father’s family had known Roberts and Carman in Fredericton, and, as importantly in this context, his grandfather, Loring Woart Bailey, had studied at Harvard under Louis Agassiz, the Swiss naturalist whom Pound revered as one of the great “modern” models of close observation and clear expression. It was Agassiz whom Pound had in mind when he wrote in the ABC of Reading, “The proper METHOD for studying poetry and good letters is the method of contemporary biologists, that is careful first-hand examination of the matter, and continual COMPARISON of one ‘slide’ or specimen with another” (17). Agassiz’s

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structuralist principle of interconnected diversification became the method of Pound’s Cantos, and of the ethno-history that A.G. Bailey pioneered in Canada. Bailey was especially indebted to Agassiz’s notion of the interdependence of natural forms, bringing that view to his work on aboriginal cultures. Essentially, both thinkers believed in a deep order that inhered in all natural and social systems, an order akin to the conserving tradition that the high-modernists found in the ruins of post-war fragmentation. Bailey studied at the University of Toronto in the late 1920s and early 1930s, befriending Roy Daniells, Robert Finch, Dorothy Livesay, and Earle Birney. Daniells and Finch were important influences, Daniells introducing him to Eliot’s free-form technique of proceeding without “narrative or ‘logical’ argument” (qtd in Lane n. pag.), and Finch introducing him to Pratt and the poets of the landmark New Provinces anthology of modernist Canadian poems (1936).11 According to Pacey, Eliot and Finch precipitated a complete turn in Bailey’s poetics: a turn away from the aesthetic modernism of Roberts and Carman, his early models, and towards the view that “‘the old symbols and intonations and meanings had become completely dead, [and] that a great spiritual void had been created’” (qtd in Pacey, “Bailey” 51). Remaking himself into a modernist chronicler of the tensions and vacuities of his own time, Bailey became a zealous advocate of the new style. He visited a convalescing John Sutherland in Saint John in 1937, reading him The Waste Land and thereby orienting him to modernism five years before he launched First Statement in 1942. Bailey fraternized with the avantgarde artists and writers at Ted Campbell’s studio in Saint John (among their number P.K. Page and Kay Smith), later duplicating that effort in Fredericton, where he organized the Bliss Carman Society in 1940, forerunner to the Fiddlehead. Bailey also introduced Louis Dudek to J.B. Brebner, the Canadian-born historian with whom Dudek would eventually work at Columbia University while acting as a foot soldier for an incarcerated Ezra Pound at St Elizabeth’s Hospital in New York. This all suggests that Bailey, like Carman for an earlier generation, was an elder of second-generation modernism in Canada – even if Sutherland and Dudek never fully acknowledged his role in their modernist apprenticeship. At the very least, he and the Fredericton-based Confederation poets (especially through their efforts to bridge aestheticism and modernism) were the conduits through which tentative and then tangible forms of literary modernism came to New Brunswick. Those modernisms were certainly not urban or socialist in the manner

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of the Unit of Five poets, but they shared with the urban socialists similar moods of post-industrial angst, which in the Maritimes of the 1920s and 1930s were reactions to increasing social and economic disparities wrought by federalist policies. A reluctant partner in Confederation, New Brunswick had been a key site of the rise of the populist Maritime Rights Movement in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Meant to counter the “rise of the West and the growing metropolitan dominance of Central Canada” (Forbes, “Origins” 101), the movement was born of grievance stemming, on the surface, from inflated freight rates, but caused more fundamentally by New Brunswick’s increasingly weakened position in the federation. By the 1920s it was clear that New Brunswick had not benefited from Confederation, but rather had been reduced, in economist Donald Savoie’s words, to that of “a supplicant” (36). The Maritime Rights Movement offered the possibility of self-rule and the prospect of escape from a top-down federalism that had turned once-prosperous New Brunswick into a beggar state. Bailey’s poem “Here in the East” captures the mood of dispiritedness that attended the Maritime witness to decay: Here in the east the barns are empty of grass and commerce has moved to the focal canals and freight yards of the smoking west. From the muddy rims of the tidal estuaries the wrecks of tugs stick out, a tourist’s emblem, grafts of decay and a kind of awakening … Last week a class of grade-eight pupils were told by their teacher of Champlain, La Tour, Chandler and Mitchell, and the tribe of the Glasiers. When they grow up they will forget all that and go to live in Toronto. (121)

Because much of the province’s grievance was aimed at central ­Canada, the distance that had developed between the Maritimes and urban Canada in literary discourse became much more than symbolic, further exacerbating the frontier attitudes that increasingly assigned vacuity to the region, and therefore requiring the kind of literary recovery that a pan-Canadian digital modernist project like Editing Modernism in Canada allows.12 As one commentator from Montreal put it,

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“The Maritime provinces were like a housewife who having married for money which failed to materialize ‘neglected her housework, went down to the seashore … watched the ships go by and pouted’” (qtd in Forbes, “In Search” 59). Given what we now know about the language assigned to modernism in Canada, the comparison of the region to a housewife is especially poignant, for modernism was thought of and described with “male” metaphors of virility, strength, dispassion, and decisiveness. Its dominant form was social realism, and its aims were political and reformist. Comparing the Maritimes to a housewife was perpetuating the flip side of the modernist myth of virility – it was saying, in effect, that the region’s romances of the soil were both womanish and anti-modern, thus outside of the new progressivist energy sweeping the nation. In assigning a generic stereotype to the region (romance over realism), it was also normalizing the way that central Canadian readers would come to think about the Maritimes: as moody, irrational, and given to hysterics, each quality that of the stereotyped hormonal woman. Not only, then, was New Brunswick mired hopelessly in the nineteenth century, but, like a spurned woman, it had the temerity to accuse urban Canada of that fact. The economic conditions that prompted Bailey to think of his New Brunswick as a damaged state – thus, by inference, in need of alternate imagining and symbolic representation – also contributed to cementing the perception of the province as primitive, womanish, and unfit, therefore without the resources to participate in a progressive liberal order that central Canada and the west had turned to their benefit. So for all the advantages that a strong nineteenth-century tradition and a pioneering advocate in a small province should have been able to provide, the ground on which modernism fed in New Brunswick was arid indeed. And it was precisely that aridity that led critics to the conclusion that modernism was a late arrival to New Brunswick, prompting them to think of the province as the cultural backwater against which other Canadian modernisms could be perceived as more vital and progressive. Normalizing the Inhospitable to Deflect Modernism Back to the Centre As a concluding gesture, it is worth focusing on how that aridity became the organizing symptom for how the province would be perceived both at home and from outside – and how, like all such s­ymptoms in a

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­ acanian textual universe, the symptom itself, as metonymy, became L stand-in for the disease (the disease, of course, being the pathological inability of New Brunswickers to pull up their bootstraps and partake of all the promises that a presumably egalitarian liberal order had to offer). Defined by classical theorists as any deviation from health, the symptom has special meaning for linguistic psychoanalysts like Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. For them, symptoms are like dreamworks, their appearance signalling both repression and desire. And because symptoms, like language and dreamwork, “are legible and interpretable” in discourse (Bowie 56), they must be understood within the symbolic liberal orders in which they reside. As metonymy for disease, they stand for what the dominant symbolic order desires: in this case, underdevelopment. Where little existed, more had to be created to establish the east as antithetical to the centre. In New Brunswick, the switch from symptom to contagion was effortless: not only was the symptom of aridity a compelling focus of attention – certainly more compelling than the tepid modernism pioneered by the Fredericton poets, which had already been discounted by urban intellectual workers – but the persistent socio-economic struggles of the province seemed to warrant such metonymic equivalency. After 1784, New Brunswick was dominated by the conservative ethos of the Loyalist emigrants, those gentlemen farmers13 whose fear of “the liberal,” specifically American republicanism, hastened the bureaucratic formation of the province. New Brunswick’s first secretary, the poet Jonathan Odell, famously called that republicanism “democratic Tyranny” (3). From that time forward, the province was decidedly (and symbolically) royalist, Protestant, and non-egalitarian, a fact that led political scientist P.J. Fitzpatrick to observe that the provincial character is “sustained by … hereditary loyalties kept intact by ancient ethnic and religious antagonisms” (116). “To a British Protestant New Brunswicker of United Empire Loyalist stock,” he continued, “the idea of voting Liberal might well be unthinkable, an act of cultural treachery equivalent to conversion to Roman Catholicism” (119). Those loyalties and antagonisms kept Acadian, aboriginal, and Irish populations silent and contained for almost two hundred years; created artificial urban/rural, north/south, and English/French divisions that mitigated against equal citizenship and “produced differences of outlook which hardened … into mutually exclusive parochialisms” (Thorburn 3); and cultivated a sense of timidity that, when mixed with the evangelical Puritanism of the province’s large Baptist, Planter, and Pentecostal populations, was deeply intolerant of

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change and the trifle of creative expression. New Brunswickers therefore did not have to be convinced of the rightness of the symbolic associations that placed their leading writers “in the very rear of … movement[s],” as E.K. Brown put it (53). Their role was to accept the clinicians’ logic: the sum of symptoms as leading irrefutably to the disease. Only a fool would contest such powerful evidence. When Sutherland’s First Statement Press published Kay Smith’s inaugural collection of modernist poems in 1951, a note on the back cover warned readers of “her serious limitations, her crudities of music and structure.” Suitably pathologized, she took copies to the Needle and Anchor, the largest bookstore in her hometown of Saint John, New Brunswick. “‘We don’t have much call for [that kind of] poetry,’” the bookseller told her, at which point she “smiled quietly and took her books back” (Joyce, “Tribute” 31), not wishing to assert herself further. Having been called to the profession of poetry by hearing Carman read many years earlier – and having just read Northrop Frye’s opinion “that Eliot does this kind of thing much better” (97), and Livesay’s that she “has not the technical virtuosity of [Anne] Wilkinson” (“Review” 25) – Smith simply accepted the conditions with which she was presented, and the logic of those conditions everywhere around her (the Needle and Anchor was still a top Canadian seller of H.A. Cody’s novels, his social romances on full display in the store around her). She had no business, in other words, reaching for poetic forms and expressions that were the province of elsewhere. The reception that awaited Bailey’s modernist collection a year later was similar. When Border River appeared in 1952, it was termed “difficult, obscure, and sometimes grotesque” (Lane n. pag.), its affront to what was considered conventional in New Brunswick literature the chief concern of readers. A reviewer in Saturday Night magazine commented that Bailey’s verse “does not appeal now as poetry,” by which was meant it lacked “lyric worth” (T.J.A. 27). The implication was that his lines lacked the fluidity of Roberts’s: lacked, that is, the clarity of thought and beautiful expression that readers had come to expect from provincial literature. Despite A.J.M. Smith putting “[Bailey] in the forefront of the intellectual tradition in our poetry” (qtd in Pacey, “Bailey” 49), many reviewers felt the need to qualify his swerve from the conventional Romantic overtones of New Brunswick writing. Alan Crawley cautioned readers that “Bailey’s writing is impersonal” and that “he rarely tosses off a rapture” – no doubt a reference to the transcendental in Carman – while also readying readers for “peculiar exhileration [sic] in [his] unusualness” (25). Anne

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Marriott did the same, warning, “Bailey’s poetry is not for the uninitiated into modern verse” (287). And neither could Frye remove his usually discerning eye from Bailey’s larger context. Refuting comparisons made by Malcolm Ross with Eliot and Dylan Thomas, Frye disagreed that Bailey was a “highly sensuous poet” (275). Instead, like Crawley, he readied readers for the unusual with the counsel that “reading Mr Bailey is at first like walking over cinders” (275). Perhaps not surprisingly, the most sustained efforts to untie Bailey’s verse from that of his predecessors was made in New Brunswick, which, by 1952, had been thoroughly implicated in the performance of commemorative romance that Bentley identified. Alec Lucas, then a colleague of Bailey’s at the University of New Brunswick, wrote in the Fiddlehead that “Border River suffers from obscurity,” that its “images are esoteric,” and the “gaps between them” are either “too wide” or “forced and puzzling” (11). Lucas even felt it necessary to inform a wider local audience, writing an unusually long review of Bailey’s book in the Daily Gleaner, Fredericton’s daily newspaper. He prefaced that review with what now is a familiar refrain: “Border River is a book of ‘modern’ poetry. It is not the poetry of strongly marked rhythm, of long velvet lines that touch the heart, and of a multiplicity of images often merely decorative … Precise, compressed and firm, it is indirect, cerebral and symbolic rather than direct, romantic and descriptive. It invests nature, when it does describe it, not with a transcendental but a private or a social significance. Border River is not a book for a moment’s diversion. It is not ‘easy’ poetry based on stock emotional responses” (4). In short, every single reviewer of Bailey’s collection – the pre-­eminent modernist collection of poems in New Brunswick literary history – felt it necessary to read his work through the accepted, though debased, stigmas of Romantic association. As a result, his poetry had to answer for its deviation from a standard that not only “the consensual community of Canadian letters” (Bentley 100) had prescribed and belittled, but also that New Brunswickers felt the need to uphold, humiliating as that might be. Even Bailey’s closest followers were not immune from mistaking the symptom for the disease, Fred Cogswell provisionally accepting his teacher’s “difficult poems” on the basis of a “conceptual” rather than rational understanding (“Canadian Essence” 120). Like his modernist contemporaries in the province, then, Bailey worked in an environment that had been constructed to reject what he was attempting. His landscape of reception was thus a minefield of old munitions from a previous generation.

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The modernist innovators of Bailey’s peer group were similarly chastised by professional readers: Fred Cogswell’s modernist poems in The Haloed Tree (1956) made one reviewer wish “that he would risk a long desultory pleasant narrative, or, better still, a long contemplative piece of the order of The Deserted Village” (MacLure 31). Just as Lochhead found it comforting “to have [the echo of] such footsteps” (n. pag.), so was Gustafson comforted by finding in Cogswell’s verse an extension “from the earlier work of Charles G.D. Roberts down to Frank Oliver Call’s ‘Blue Homespun’ (rather than to A.M. Klein’s ‘The Rocking Chair’)” (21). For Gustafson, New Brunswick had retained the ultramontane traditions that had become a historical footnote in Klein’s urban Quebec. Gustafson’s comfort, however, was James Reaney’s surprise: “I thought New Brunswick poetry would be dryer than this and really more of a whiz at rhyming” (288). Standard in these dismissals was a perceived lack of that “high degree of moral and social orthodoxy” that central Canadian urban readers had come to expect from east coast literature – but which E.K. Brown and others had convincingly debunked as the dominant symptom of Puritanical frontier cultures (Brown 22). This departure from orthodoxy, curiously, had also fuelled Charles G.D. Roberts’s criticism that “some younger persons have, figuratively speaking, danced in the streets without their trousers, and thereby achieved a reputation for originality” (“A Note on Modernism” 298). Roberts and other commentators did not oppose New Brunswick modernists, per se, but objected to how modernism countermanded the prevailing view of the province as primitive, rustic, and unspoiled (McKay 30), a natural geography for the Confederationera writers and their themes but unsuited to what Bailey later called the “inchoate … syncopated, galloping, and offbeat” forms that modernism demanded (qtd in Pacey, “Bailey” 52). In vehemently opposing the new style, commentators inside and outside New Brunswick therefore played a sustaining role in maintaining a discursive trope that had assigned spatial relevance to urban sites of modernism at the expense of rural loci like New Brunswick. Even a critic as astute as Louis Dudek took umbrage at Cogswell’s modernist experiments, assigning them more nineteenth- than twentieth-century relevance: “Only in Fredericton,” wrote Dudek in a review of Cogswell’s Descent from Eden, [a place “lovingly attached to Carman, Roberts and Sherman”], “could such poetry have been written” (“Two Ancients” 79). The inference is clear: clotted as it was with yearnings for still-insistent colonial topologies, New Brunswick of the 1950s was no place for modernism.

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The particular kind of editorial problem that New Brunswick’s pioneering modernists encountered, then, was not a problem of the mechanics of production, nor even of spatial conditions, though that was how it was manifest. Rather, the problem was more deeply ideological, related to how Canada, as a federation built on uneven regional division, was and continues to be configured as a cultural geography of radiating margins, the more distant the region from the centre, the less licence it is granted to develop the innovations that are thought to be the preserve of the urban centres. The travails of the New Brunswick literary modernists thus point to important questions that all critics must ask about cultural systems: namely, what happens when literary ideas countermand prevailing cultural values and attitudes, and how do practitioners in environments that are assigned those attitudes work to compensate for (and also to accommodate) the particularities of the social environments within which they work to institute innovation and change? NOTES 1 The fixing of “The Tantramar” in the Canadian imagination is not only the work of creative writers but also of critics. Tracy Ware, for example, has contributed to our understanding of Canadian space with his study of “The Tantramar Revisited” as a Romantic “return poem,” though one quite different from Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey.” In Wordsworth’s poem, the protagonist is humbled but reconciled to the powers of time and mutability, and is therefore able to return. In Roberts’s poem, however, the protagonist is stunted by change, realizing that his desire for permanence – for memory (“the darling illusion”) over perception – is a childhood indulgence that must be put away, lest it disrupt the raptures of the healthy imagination. Accompanying this realization is the larger inference of the spoilt Maritime idyll, the exact fixation with anti-modernism that Bentley also identifies. See Ware’s “Remembering It All Well: ‘The Tantramar Revisited.’” 2 See Willmott on Neil Smith’s notion of “dependency theory” and “uneven development” in Unreal Country, 148–53. And, indeed, Smith’s work does seem relevant to the dominant social construction, particularly in mapping the larger sociology: specifically, that “surplus is necessarily accompanied by the development of the state [centre] and slavery [margin], and the solidification of this division between producers and consumers … into a division of social classes” (Uneven Development 58).

Landscapes of Reception  325  3 Like Pound, Carman considered Browning a better master than the early Yeats, thus a more relevant study for young writers grappling with new ways to structure a post-Romantic, increasingly secular perspective. Carman’s cousin Charles G.D. Roberts corroborates this view in his essay on modernism (see “A Note on Modernism” 299). 4 Published in 1908, Pound’s poem begins “Save ye, Merry gentlemen! Vagabonds and Rovers / Hell take the hin’most / We’re for the clovers!” McGillivray also shows the indebtedness of Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens to Carman (10, 11). 5 “Psychology and Troubadours” also drew on Gourmont’s Le Latin mystique (1892), and Pound’s essays of the period show an awareness of the older poet’s Le Problème du style (1902), the work that enabled Pound to move beyond the symbolist abstractions of Yeats and Symons to a poetics rooted in the concrete and particular. In 1913, Pound began translating Gourmont’s work for the Egoist, and, after editing a special Gourmont number of the Little Review (Feb./ Mar. 1919), he translated Physique de l’amour: essai sur l’instinct sexuel (1903) in 1921 as part of a contract with the small New York publisher Boni & Liveright. The Natural Philosophy of Love was published in 1922, along with Pound’s “Translator’s Postscript.” Like Les Chevaux de Diomède (1897), Physique de l’amour is tepid soft porn, so effete that Pound referred to it as pornography for pastors (“pink sensuality” was Yeats’s phrase). Nevertheless, its content was controversial enough that the organization thought best suited to release the first English edition (1926) was the Casanova Society. 6 While at Harvard, Carman attended lectures by Royce and Santayana. 7 Pound would have also been interested in Carman’s views on the poet as public intellectual, a new direction in Carman’s thought that corresponded with his association with just-retired American President Theodore Roosevelt in 1909 (see Miller 217). 8 Comparing the first two stanzas of Joyce’s opening poem in Chamber Music with the first stanza of Carman’s “Low Tide on Grand Pré” makes the point clearly. Joyce’s stanzas read, “Strings in the earth and air / Make music sweet; / Strings by the river where / The willows meet. // There’s music along the river / For Love wanders there, / Pale flowers on his mantle, / Dark leaves on his hair” (9). Carman’s reads, “The sun goes down, and over all / These barren reaches by the tide / Such unelusive glories fall, / I almost dream they yet will bide / Until the coming of the tide” (33). Both examples could easily be termed modern, with Carman’s the easier case to make. Hence Pound’s admiration for his verse.

326  Tony Tremblay 9 Careful and unbiased consideration of the nineteenth-century tradition would come only by recuperation, when, said Terry Whalen, “the inhibitions of modernism recede” (44–5). That recuperation project was aptly undertaken by Whalen himself in Bliss Carman and His Works (1983), by Gerald Lynch (ed.) in Bliss Carman: A Reappraisal (1990), and by the careful scholarship of D.M.R. Bentley. It continues today in the spirit of regional, textual, and canonical revisioning, forms of recuperation that are the mandate of the Editing Modernism in Canada project. 10 Patricia Morley’s assessment of a similar ignorance of earlier poets by the Montreal modernists is both germane to this discussion and likely the most sensible conclusion one can reach. Morley writes, “The blunt truth of the matter is this: the young men at McGill knew next to nothing of Canada’s late nineteenth-century poets or of the Canadian literary tradition they dubbed ‘Victorian.’ The dregs of that tradition, read in contemporary anthologies, convinced the group that change was long overdue” (43). 11 Bailey would later enrol in Pratt’s graduate seminar in Modern Poetry (Pacey, “Bailey” 51). 12 Two tiers of that project are Fred Cogswell: The Many Dimensioned Self (2012) (see Tremblay) and The Selected Letters of the New Brunswick Modernists (in press). Both use the Agassiz method of evidence-based presentation that Pound identified as key to unseating conjecture, thus correcting a critical record that has long ignored the facts about Canadian modernism for repetition of common assumptions. 13 See A.G. Bailey’s poem “Reflections on a Hill Behind a Town.” In that poem, Bailey writes that these gentlemen farmers came “to make a gentle converse in the / timbered wastes, / how they toiled that it might be so, / not always with good intent, / not always in peace the one with another” (185). Fred Cogswell was much more critical of this narrowness in his poem “Valley Folk,” where he writes, O narrow is the house where we are born, And narrow are the fields in which we labour, Fenced in by rails and woods that low hills neighbour Lest they should spill their crops of hay and corn. O narrow are the hates with which we thorn Each other’s flesh by gossip of the Grundies, And narrow are our roads to church on Sundays, And narrow too the vows of love we’ve sworn. (5)

15  Modernism, Antimodernism, and Hugh MacLennan’s Novels of the 1930s colin hill

Hugh MacLennan and Canadian literature were almost synonymous in the optimistic and unapologetically nationalistic years that preceded Canada’s centennial. Although MacLennan’s literary reputation has since fallen into precipitous decline, his published novels of the 1940s and 1950s remain widely read and celebrated as foundational works of modern Canadian fiction. MacLennan’s pioneering and expansive socio-political exploration of Canada may be valued by critics past and present, but those same critics have often disparaged his literary technique and style. Writing near the zenith of MacLennan’s career in 1969, Peter Buitenhuis articulated this ambivalence in striking terms that, more than four decades later, still concisely summarize a prevailing view of his significance: “MacLennan has been the great trail-blazer; he has journeyed into the unknown territory of the Canadian mind. We should honour him for this”; nevertheless, “in all of his published comments about his own work, he has shown a singular lack of concern with matters that have preoccupied many leading twentieth-century novelists: the question of how one’s work is to be rendered” (19, 16–17). This ambivalence has probably been compounded over the past decade by a resurgence of interest in Canadian modernism: as Canada’s modernists increasingly receive scholarly and editorial attention, MacLennan’s position as a central figure in modern Canadian fiction becomes increasingly uncomfortable, and the aesthetic questions alluded to by Buitenhuis seem more problematical than ever.1 In other words, the traditional, almost Victorian realism of MacLennan’s best-known novels makes them difficult to situate within a dynamic Canadian modernism that is undergoing rapid reconfiguration and consolidation.

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Most of the competing definitions of Anglo-American modernisms, with their emphasis upon technical innovation and antagonism towards antecedent realisms, similarly tend to exclude the type of fiction that MacLennan wrote.2 His first four published novels – Barometer Rising (1941), Two Solitudes (1945), The Precipice (1948), and Each Man’s Son (1951) – are technically more reminiscent of nineteenth-­century realisms than akin to the experimental modernisms that peaked in the years before MacLennan’s first novel was published. Instead of high-modernist formal innovation – extreme fragmentation, dissonant multivocality, highly subjectivist renderings of human consciousness, overt and sustained impressionism, surrealism, and expressionism – MacLennan’s novels offer omniscient narrators, didactic authorial presences and intrusions, verbose language and rhetoric, and sweeping moral, social, cultural, and political theses. Given how vividly such writing contrasts with contemporaneous and canonical modernist examples, and with the vibrant Canadian postmodernism that it precedes, MacLennan’s role in inaugurating a tradition of contemporary Canadian writing probably needs reconsideration. While such a reappraisal began some time ago,3 little has been written in the past two decades on the relation of MacLennan’s work to the modernisms of his contemporaries. Francis Zichy’s “MacLennan and Modernism,” published in 1994, offers the most recent sustained discussion of MacLennan’s modernism and antimodernism through a detailed analysis of The Watch That Ends the Night (1959), and his conclusions validate those of many critics who came before: “MacLennan is a writer of didactic romance, whose practice cannot be squared … with the modernist aesthetic that succeeded realism and reacted against it” (174). I would like to contribute to the reappraisal of MacLennan’s aesthetics by exploring the nearly forgotten but crucially important and formative phase in his career that preceded the publication of Barometer Rising in 1941. During the politically charged 1930s, MacLennan travelled widely in Europe and America – spending time in both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany – and wrote two almost unknown experimental novels: So All Their Praises (1933) and Man Should Rejoice (1937). These novels, together with the abundant archival sources that contextualize them, reveal that, prior to adopting his traditional realism in Barometer Rising, MacLennan wrote consciously as an experimentalist and fashioned his work after celebrated European and American modernists, most notably Joyce and Hemingway. More importantly, they suggest that the traditional realism of Barometer Rising was neither accidental nor the

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default product of writerly indifference: it was a deliberate aesthetic choice made by MacLennan as he abruptly and unequivocally rejected his early experiments because he found technical virtuosity incompatible with his newly discovered commitment to a romantic Canadian nationalism. This chapter offers brief introductions to MacLennan’s unpublished novels of the thirties and explores the reasons behind his sudden and uncompromising rejection of modernist experimentalism. A consideration of MacLennan’s early “modernist period” sheds light on the conflicted aesthetics of his well-known Canadian novels and provides a basis for a few speculations about MacLennan’s place in the development of Canadian fiction, and the nature of Canadian modernist fiction more generally. Given MacLennan’s prominence and the considerable body of critical writing on his oeuvre, the critical disregard of his 1930s novels is surprising. A cluster of books published on MacLennan in the decade following the centennial did much to solidify his critical reputation but very little to acknowledge his early modernist affinities. George Woodcock, in Hugh MacLennan, quickly labels the first of MacLennan’s 1930s novels a “literary failure” and the second an “apprentice work” before concluding that his decision to set a novel in Canada marked the beginning of his career (14–15). Buitenhuis’s book, cited earlier, tells us that MacLennan “had read very few novels and had to grope his way,” writing two unspecified novels before he realized “his next book had to have a Canadian setting” (12). Robert H. Cockburn’s The Novels of Hugh MacLennan mentions that the first novel “has a European setting, inspired perhaps by interests picked up along the way,” while the second, “like his first attempt … went unpublished” (16–17). MacLennan, for his part, did almost nothing to inspire his critics to delve into the McGill archives, where the typescripts of So All Their Praises and Man Should Rejoice have been housed since 1967. One of their author’s most often-cited passages on his early modernist period appears in “The Dictionary Says …,” an essay published in Thirty and Three, a collection that won MacLennan his fourth Governor General’s Award in 1954. Here, an older MacLennan, having vociferously rejected his Depression-era work, downplays the significance of So All Their Praises and disregards his early interest in international modernisms: “During those Princeton years … I was determined to learn how to be a professional writer and if I had told them [English friends at university] I was writing … they would have tried to force me to accept their own lofty standards. They would have made me ashamed of pedestrian methods

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of learning composition and structure which I knew must be mastered before I could escape into the open waters of individual style. They believed sincerely that Hemingway had sold out when he shook free from Gertrude Stein’s little coterie in Paris” (165). David Staines, in 1978, ignored MacLennan’s dismissals of his early experimentation and became the first scholar to bring sustained attention to the 1930s novels. In “Mapping the Terrain,” Staines reads these novels with an emphasis upon their anticipation of his later works set in Canada. He concludes that they are apprentice novels that afforded MacLennan an opportunity to work through foreign influences before he could write with a credible sense of Canadian place, and that this process is typical of many Canadian authors: “The journey of MacLennan’s fiction is the journey of many Canadian writers … who must confront their own society and not utilize foreign or conventional literary worlds developed and promoted elsewhere” (138). In Hugh MacLennan (1983), T.D. MacLulich presents focused summaries of both unpublished novels alongside a discussion of MacLennan’s 1935 doctoral dissertation, Oxyrhynchus: An Economic and Social Study, which offered a Marxist reading of events affecting an ancient Roman town. MacLulich identifies central political and psychological themes in the novels and rightly notes the influence of both Joyce and Hemingway on MacLennan’s fiction. The most expansive analysis of these two novels appears in Elspeth Cameron’s Hugh MacLennan: A Writer’s Life (1981) which, appropriately, reads the novels with emphasis upon what they reveal about MacLennan’s life story. Cameron, like MacLulich, notes the modernist affinities that are evident in these novels and concludes that they are apprentice works that anticipate MacLennan’s later, more significant achievements. My brief discussion of So All Their Praises and Man Should Rejoice in this chapter builds upon the work of these critics and focuses upon the experimental techniques and devices that were central to MacLennan’s aesthetic until the late thirties, when he made a dramatic about-face, rejected modernist experimentalism and his early novels, embraced a form of nineteenth-century realism, and began to write the Canadian novels that would finally win him recognition. In 1933, a twenty-six-year-old MacLennan had recently returned from Oxford, which he attended as a Rhodes scholar, and was neglecting his doctoral studies at Princeton so that he could find time to complete work on his first novel. In sharp contrast to MacLennan’s novels of the 1940s, So All Their Praises is highly experimental in form and is set, not in a romanticized Canada, but primarily in Germany during the rise of

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Nazism, although sections are set in the United States and Nova Scotia. In many ways, So All Their Praises is MacLennan’s most thematically modern novel: it explores tensions between modern and Victorian values through a generational conflict between an English expatriate and his father. But in contrast to works such as Two Solitudes, this work does not endorse a romantic notion of national progress. Instead, So All Their Praises expresses a modern anxiety about the decline of traditional and unifying cultural values: as Cameron remarks, “MacLennan emphasizes that the whole age is caught, like his three main characters, in tremendous upheaval” (84). The range of modern issues raised by the novel is adventurous for its time and nationality: alcoholism, psychological disturbance, the unconscious mind, prostitution, crime, spiritualism, and the decline of traditional religious values and influence. Sexuality is depicted with frankness unmatched in MacLennan’s later efforts. The plot of the novel centres on three characters: Michael Carmichael, a writer, Adolf Fabricius, a German student, and Sarah Macrae, a Canadian musician. While the story often unfolds in an awkward manner, constructed around the melodramatic intrigues that arise from the love triangle that links the three central characters, the twentieth-century world that the novel evokes is arresting and vivid, infused simultaneously with a sense of psychological intensity and ominous foreboding: “It was a clear autumn night and the streets of Freiburg were whitened by the moon … . Roof-tops were sharp as knives against the sky and shadows cut the street into clean-edged rhomboids and slanting triangles … Freiburg was silent except for the occasional scream of a ­street-car wheel; so it was very silent, for the noise of the river enhanced the tranquillity, being like the noise blood makes in one’s head when there is nothing else to hear” (MacLennan, So All Their Praises, n. pag.). MacLennan contextualizes such passages of psychological realism with sections of omniscient narrative that strive to set a contemporary historical stage for his action: “Nearly eight million people in Germany unemployed, over three million English unemployed … and everyone talking at the top of his voice” (n. pag.). The most conspicuous characteristics of So All Their Praises, however, are formal rather than thematic and reveal MacLennan’s familiarity with the techniques and devices that were appearing in works by many Anglo-American modernists even as he wrote. MacLennan’s narrative is multivocal, incorporating a wide range of perspectives, both subjective and objective. So All Their Praises achieves this by modulating, sometimes in short passages, among third-person omniscient narrative,

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free indirect discourse, mimetic dialogue, and Joycean stream-of-consciousness narrative: Adolf’s eyes were still trying to avoid his father’s. “You may go if you wish, of course. I shall help you all I can. There is a hundred marks you may have.” Adolf saw that his father’s eyes were moist. The old man still wanted success in the world. His eyes were moist for my sake. Does he still think I am a fluid in his loins? I am getting morbid, I am choking in the closeness of this room, in the obscurity of another century. (n. pag.)

Even more ambitiously, So All Their Praises includes long, sustained, unmediated, stream-of-consciousness passages that explore the 1930s zeitgeist, as this dream sequence, in which the menacing political events in Germany impinge upon Michael’s semi-consciousness, ­demonstrates: I am sitting up in bed and the bed is enormous and the room about it is like the whole world it is so large. Outside in the street there is tramping. There is steady tramping, I hear the sound of it coming through the window. Tramp – tramp – tramp – tramp – always tramping, for four years that sound. I am looking out the window at the grey houses across the street, at the column that undulates down the street. It bends and sways, but keeps moving on, flowing on like a river flowing between banked stone houses, every drop identical, head bent forward under forage cap, steel helmet slung and the packs behind and the rifles slung, faces all the same, grey and army-masked, no word for them, but only the sound of their feet – tramp – tramp – tramp – dear Jesus stop them from going like that! (n. pag.)

The numerous passages such as this one found in So All Their Praises, reminiscent in technique (if not stylistic virtuosity) of the final chapter of Ulysses, are among the most sustained examples of stream-ofconsciousness writing found in Canadian literature of the period, and they reveal that MacLennan, who would later achieve unprecedented success by becoming the most technically conservative major novelist of his generation, did not simply begin his career by importing a wholly intact, traditional realist method. In fact, his earliest models were among the most experimental novelists of the period.

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Given that MacLennan began writing serious fiction in an era of pronounced ideological conflict, it is not surprising that So All Their Praises is a social-realist exploration of the lives of modern individuals in dangerous and important times. In spite of his reworking of Joyce’s epistemological techniques, MacLennan’s ultimate concern is with large social forces, not with the individual human mind. Like other prominent Canadian novelists of the Depression years – Frederick Philip Grove, Irene Baird, and Morley Callaghan – MacLennan is obviously influenced by European and American naturalism, and he explores the possibilities of social and environmental determinism. Revealingly, the young MacLennan’s naturalistic influence leads him to other forms of technical innovation. In order to depict the large social and historical forces that influence and shape the lives of his characters, MacLennan developed what he called “kaleidoscopic passages,” which incorporate numerous and often competing voices and fragments and provide a socio-historical collage before which the main action of the novel unfolds (MacLennan to Frances MacLennan, 19 March 1933). More specifically, these “kaleidoscopic passages,” which are interspersed throughout the novel, take the form of dramatic dialogues “spoken” by historical and symbolic individuals: Adolph Hitler said: “Deutschland von Marxismus frei! Jobs for all the middle class can be had if we revenge ourselves on Jews and other traitors.” Herr Brüning said: “We must be careful” … Mr. Baldwin said: “I believe in the innate decency of the English. I am also a born optimist.” The Pope said: “Birth control is murder.” Mr. MacDonald said: “Great steps forward have been taken towards the solidarity of international understanding throughout the whole world” … An old man said: “I envy the youth today. They will see great things. No one is bored any longer.” (n. pag.)

So All Their Praises is a first novel, and its aesthetic achievements may not rank with those of the canonical high-modernist works from which it draws inspiration. Still, the novel and its experimental technique contrast sharply, not only with MacLennan’s entire published oeuvre, but also with nearly all Canadian fiction published in the 1930s. In other words, So All Their Praises offers a remarkably rare and early example of a Canadian novelist writing consciously and in a sustained manner in tutelage of what would later become canonical high modernism.

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Despite its timely experimentalism, Robert Ballou of New York was the single publisher to express interest in So All Their Praises, but the economy of the 1930s brought down the company before plans could advance (Cameron 87). In 1935, a desperate MacLennan, unemployed and dependent upon his overbearing father for financial support, reluctantly accepted a teaching position at Lower Canada College, a boy’s school in Montreal (105–7). In spite of the long and tedious hours demanded by the new position he loathed, MacLennan set to work on a second novel, Man Should Rejoice, which he completed in 1937. This novel is no less exemplary of his early penchant for modernist experiment, although its technique is generally subtler and more accomplished. The most immediately striking characteristic of Man Should Rejoice is its first-person narrative voice; this narrative mode was remarkably rare in Depression-era Canada, where the few novels that Canadian authors managed to publish offered, almost without exception, omniscient, third-person, social-realist narratives: Baird’s Waste Heritage, Grove’s Fruits of the Earth, Callaghan’s Such Is My Beloved, They Shall Inherit the Earth, and More Joy in Heaven are probably the bestknown examples. MacLennan’s narrator is an American painter and writer named David Culver, who begins his story in Nova Scotia: “I came here to live because I could think of no other place to go … and there was a job I had to finish”; the “job” is writing the dramatic and unreliable story of his life (n. pag.). The son of a wealthy Pittsburgh businessman, David studies at Princeton University, rejects his social background largely because of his artistic temperament, and travels to Paris to become a painter. In Europe, he falls under the influence of socialist friends before returning to America, where he becomes an employee in one of his father’s mills. Disaffected by the lives of the working poor and the alienating conditions of factory life, he grows to detest the capitalist system that his father represents, becomes a communist, and returns to Europe to take part in an armed socialist revolution that kills his wife and leaves him a broken man. Man Should Rejoice may sound like a textbook example of the Canadian social-realist novel of the 1930s (apart from its first-person narration and foreign setting), but it is far more technically innovative than other examples. While So All Their Praises tended to polarize the psychological and the socio-historical by juxtaposing stream-of-consciousness passages and detached, objectivist passages, Man Should Rejoice attempts to fuse the two by making David an archetypal, representative figure that embodies the zeitgeist of the modern age itself:

Modernism, Antimodernism, and MacLennan’s Novels  335  Being a painter, I see the form and rhythm of things before I see anything else. Now I want to create, in a book, something of the form and rhythm of the most rapid transition from one era to another that mankind has ever known. Whether this is possible, whether I can freeze a durable form out of a state of flux, I don’t know. If I succeed I may rid myself of the past, not by burying but by recreating it and giving it a separate life of its own. At least it should not be too difficult to set down what happened to my friends and myself as though it had happened to other people, for I see all vividly, as though I were a stranger looking back from a long distance. (n. pag.)

The first-person form proves challenging for MacLennan: in spite of its obvious subjectivist possibilities, MacLennan is less concerned with epistemology in this novel than he was in So All Their Praises. As a result, MacLennan’s first-person speaker often sounds like a thirdperson narrator, and he tells his tale in a manner that is at times too limited to suit the broad historical emphasis of the novel, and at other times too omniscient to be credible: “How long was it before Arina realized the type of life she had chosen I do not know. They left for Moscow immediately, travelled without a break to London … then sailed for New York … The crowds of the cities astonished her; coming from a land of peasants she was half-stunned by the modern world, and in childish obstinacy rebelled against it … as the ship neared Halifax harbour she was strangely comforted” (n. pag.). Tensions between objective and subjective modes are most acute when MacLennan represents human consciousness, not to explore the complexities and anxieties of the modern human mind, but rather to make a particular social or political comment about the modern world, much as a social realist would do more directly in a third person mode: as David tells us of his factory experience, “It was like walking in a bad dream to be in this maze of figures and lathes and bolts and engines … I was tired and they revolved smoothly through my brain like ball-bearings relative to the turning rod until I seem to revolve myself and the slag-illumined sky to revolve too” (n. pag.). While So All Their Praises and Man Should Rejoice are the works of a young writer still finding his way, they demonstrate that MacLennan explored the possibilities of experimental modernist fiction as ambitiously as any Canadian writer of the 1930s. His numerous early statements on the art of fiction emphasize this fact. In the 1933 letter to his sister Frances, cited earlier, MacLennan wrote that he was working

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self-reflexively in the innovative modernist mode and was deliberately experimenting with the form of the novel relative to other writers he admired. This zealous letter also reveals that the balance of subjective and objective modes, a problem he wrestles with in all of his novels, was one catalyst to his experimentalism: “I have big ideas of what to do with the writing game. It seems that I have made a start with my kaleidoscopic passages … James Joyce has brought up the stream of consciousness and I don’t think anyone can improve on what he has done there. But my idea is to work up the kaleidoscope into a much completer form than I have done already, making it in part subjective and in part objective” (MacLennan to Frances MacLennan, 19 March 1933). MacLennan’s experiments were not simple exercises in imitation. They certainly involved some precocious posturing relative to famous influences, but more importantly they demonstrate MacLennan’s early willingness to experiment with literary technique. In 1938, MacLennan showed the recently completed Man Should Rejoice to twenty-eight publishers (Cameron 119). While deeply troubled economic times again made the search for an interested editor difficult, Longmans, Green and Company agreed to move forward with the novel provided revisions were undertaken, but eventually withdrew because Man Should Rejoice “too closely resembled two others they had published” (119). As disappointed as MacLennan must have been, he remained committed to achieving success as a novelist, and he now stood poised to build upon what he had learned in his first two sustained experiments with modernist technique and voice. He might have carried his experiments forward and produced a third, more accomplished experimental novel. But something monumental happened to MacLennan’s ideas about writing in short order, and, instead, he set to work on Barometer Rising. Writing in his later years, MacLennan had become a vociferous antimodernist,4 and he articulately and incisively voiced his specific objections to the writing he had once championed. One need only contrast a passage from MacLennan’s “The Future of the Novel as an Art Form,” an article published in Scotchman’s Return and Other Essays in 1960, to his earlier letter to his sister to find evidence of a dramatic shift in writerly disposition: In my early days I was under the spell of some brilliant friends who believed that if anyone refused to recognize that Ulysses was the masternovel of the twentieth century, he was unfit to make a literary judgment in a kindergarten. I got so much fun out of thinking myself a member of the

Modernism, Antimodernism, and MacLennan’s Novels  337  avant-garde, it was so delightful to spend long hours in smoke-filled rooms ridiculing every author admired by the bourgeoisie, that for two years I cramped my style by trying to write like James Joyce. But I never honestly liked Ulysses well enough to read all of it. (“Future of the Novel” 143)

This pointed comment raises an obvious question: why did MacLennan shift suddenly from his position as experimental modernist to become the most conservative major Canadian realist of the mid-twentieth century? Cameron suggests that MacLennan came to a key realization in the years between Man Should Rejoice and Barometer Rising: “The failure of his second novel had shown him that to be successful one cannot simply ape the themes and method of those that are,” and that the decision to write about Canada, made at the urging of his wife, author Dorothy Duncan, marked a considerable “breakthrough” (128, 131). MacLennan’s “breakthrough,” however, entailed a crucial philosophical and aesthetic shift that made it impossible for him to continue writing as an experimentalist. A similar problem faced by Paul Tallard in Two Solitudes may reflect MacLennan’s own evolving ideas during this crucial period in his career. The second half of the novel, which might be read as a Künstlerroman, sees Paul, a young, aspiring Canadian novelist, reject his earlier writing. The description of Paul’s writing in Two Solitudes is suggestive of So All Their Praises – its themes and difficulty reconciling subjective and objectivist narrative – and Paul’s response to the creative predicament seems to echo MacLennan’s own: as Paul’s beloved, Heather, muses, “The book was too ambitious for him … The young man of 1933, intended to type a world in disintegration, had seemed so important that she had not questioned the validity of his plan. Now she saw that the trouble lay in the fact that Paul’s emotions and mental analysis had not coalesced” (452–3). Paul’s dissatisfaction with his early writing propels him towards an epiphany not unlike that experienced by Stephen Dedalus in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: MacLennan’s alter-ego realizes that his goal is to write about his own country and milieu. But unlike Stephen, who presumably embraces the infamous archetype of the impersonal modernist artist in pursuit of his new aim, Paul conflates writing about Canada with an outmoded realism: “A book about Canada – it would be like writing of the past century!” … Must he write out of his own background, even if that background were Canada? Canada was imitative in everything … Proust wrote only of France,

338  Colin Hill Dickens laid nearly all his scenes in London, Tolstoi was pure Russian … As Paul considered the matter, he realized that his readers’ ignorance of the essential Canadian clashes and values presented him with a unique problem. The background would have to be created from scratch if his story was to become intelligible … He would have to build the stage and props for his play, and then write the play himself. (453–4)

While we never read Paul’s novel and discover if he responds to this “unique problem” with modernist experiment (unless, of course, he is the implied author of Two Solitudes, in which case the answer is a resounding “no”), MacLennan himself certainly did not. “Build[ing] the stage and props for his play” meant embracing the expansive and referential aesthetic of nineteenth-century realism: as David Lodge writes, the antimodernist “regards literature as the communication of a reality that exists prior to and independent of the act of communication” (4). In Paul’s case, this realization leads him to destroy the early writing that does not accord with his new nationalistic and referential vision: “Then casually … he picked up the manuscript and dropped it into the fire … ‘that’s finished. Burn the mistakes. Otherwise they’ll haunt you permanently’” (455). In the years after his Canadian novels won him acclaim, MacLennan explained his abandonment of his early modernist affinities more directly and in terms that accord with Lodge’s assertion that “antimodernist writing … gives priority to content, and is apt to be impatient with formal experiment, which obscures and hinders communication” (4). In “The Challenge to Prose,” a little-known article published in 1955, MacLennan lashed out at the excessive experimentalism, subjectivism, and virtuosic self-indulgence that he considered to be typical of the modernist form: “So many of the novelists of the twentieth century have indulged in experiments in form, in symbolism and obscurities of language, in the kind of eccentric subtleties to which so many painters have been driven since the time of Manet … one can almost state categorically that the path chosen by Joyce has led his imitators into a desert in which they have died of thirst” (53). This same article reveals that MacLennan also objected to the psychological and epistemological emphasis of many writers, including Faulkner, whose interest in the workings of the human mind rendered him “incapable of writing about anyone who is sane” (53). These are by no means isolated examples of such attitudes. Again and again, in numerous places, MacLennan offered a scathing critique of Anglo-American modernists, the

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same ones he had championed as a young man, on the basis of what he believed was their excessive and self-indulgent experimentalism. Some of the most concise examples of this attitude are found in his unpublished lecture notes. When even the unprecedented success that MacLennan achieved with his first Canadian novels was insufficiently remunerative, he began, in 1951, teaching English courses at McGill University. The lectures he gave to undergraduates offer a repository of his opinions on numerous prominent twentieth-century novelists, including Joyce, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Lawrence, Faulkner, Conrad, Waugh, Fitzgerald, Flaubert, and Huxley, among many others. In the course of discussing various elements of fiction with his students, including “Dialogue,” “Plot,” “Characterization,” and “Time in the Novel,” MacLennan presents some unconventional definitions that are highly revealing of his own antimodernist thinking. Of the same authors he praised while writing So All Their Praises he told the lecture hall, “[Joyce] refused to acknowledge that writing must be a communication”; “Hemingway, however indifferent he may have been as a novelist, was a unique artist, and ‘unique’ is here the mot juste” (Lecture Notes n. pag.). He concluded, in contrast, that Evelyn Waugh’s technically conservative Brideshead Revisited was “as good an example of modern fiction technique as one can find,” even though “it avoids all experimentation for its own sake” (n. pag.). He also offered muted praise of other early twentieth-century writers whose styles were not essentially experimental. Many of these evaluations were offered in his Montreal Star column of the early 1960s called “A Writer’s Diary.” In 1963, he wrote that D.H. Lawrence “was a profound artist, certainly, but the intensity of his feelings, together with his neurotic petulance, spoils the symmetry of most of what he wrote” (“Most Alive” 4). In a 1962 piece, he favourably contrasted Arthur Koestler with Joyce and Proust: “Koestler is almost never studied in literature courses although his work ranks with the best of our age. ‘Poor Koestler,’ a professor said to me. ‘His language is adequate, but it cannot compare with Joyce’s and Proust’s in quality’” (“New Phenomenon” 4). In “The Challenge to Prose,” mentioned earlier, MacLennan articulated his alternative to the experimental modernism of his forerunners and contemporaries concisely: “The most revolutionary course any artist can take now … is to be conservative” (47). As one might expect, MacLennan’s “revolutionary” step forward, or beyond modernism, was really an enormous step backward to the realism of the previous century. The objectivist framework MacLennan sought to tell the

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story of Canada in his novels of the 1940s did not involve an appeal to impersonality as similarly national or regional projects did for Joyce, Faulkner, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Baird, Callaghan, and Grove, but rather to an absolute personality, a higher “truth,” an all-knowing authority: the author himself. MacLennan sought not the effacement of the author-persona, but a means to disguise the author’s opinions and ideals in fictional form. Correspondingly, the multiple subjectivities he incorporates into his narratives do not emphasize a modern relativism or stand as mimetic reflections of states of consciousness; they are particular manifestations of the larger “absolute truth” offered by MacLennan himself. This confusing ideal accounts for two of the peculiarities of his early novels that stand in contrast to most other contemporaneous modernist works. MacLennan’s “kaleidoscopic” technique in So All Their Praises, despite its fragmented multivocality, does not undermine a notion of absolute authority as Faulkner’s dissonant perspectivism does in The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936). Instead, it serves the purposes of the nineteenth-century realist: it attempts to provide a broad, historical context, a sweeping, inclusive, authoritative view of the times. MacLennan’s attempts to bring together the individual perspective and “world consciousness” in Man Should Rejoice also serve a larger didactic aim. He is seeking not to explore human consciousness in an epistemological fashion, but rather to show his characters thinking about the larger social and historical issues of importance to the novel. David Culver, despite his unreliability and psychological characterization, is really no less a representative character than Athanase Tallard; as MacLennan would say on the first day of his modern novel courses at McGill University, “The point of view from which the lectures will be given is best stated in this single sentence of D. H. Lawrence: the novel treats the point where the soul meets history” (Lecture Notes n. pag.). MacLennan’s modernist novels are different in technique but not in intention from his later works that strive to offer sweeping interpretations of historical forces, and to create characters that embody them. MacLennan abandoned experimental modernism because eventually he realized that he had different goals from Joyce, Hemingway, and a host of other modernists. MacLennan wanted to discuss and affirm larger socio-historical truths and offer philosophical interpretation of the world as he saw it. The canonical modernists, at least in their epistemological phases, were not interested primarily in interpretation but mimesis. Accordingly, for MacLennan, subjective perspectives were

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extraneous, needless, and only served at best to affirm indirectly the authorial view; at worst, through their emphasis upon multiple interpretation and individual experience, they mitigated his larger effort. He began with them as a young writer because they were used by illustrious modernists who had cosmopolitan cachet, but he discarded them quickly when he realized that they did not suit his purposes. While MacLennan critiqued modernist writers who sacrificed coherent historical narrative in order to represent subjective states, he was less willing to condemn the experiments of modernist writers who, like he, sought broad, sweeping, socio-historical commentary. The portrait of Joseph Conrad he presented to his McGill undergraduates is almost autobiographical: “He tackled head-on what Arnold Toynbee was to call the most important social development of our century – the impact of European and American colonialism … he became a romantic realist total realist” (Lecture Notes n. pag.). Although critical of William Faulkner’s epistemological techniques, MacLennan praised his historical emphasis: “faulkner never even thought of abandoning one of the basic roles of good fiction – the rooting of the story in a meticulously understood social and physical background. This is something that the post-war age likes to overlook under the illusion that history has become irrelevant in an age of cybernetics” (Lecture Notes n. pag.). Dos Passos, whose “camera eye” passages may have provided a model for MacLennan’s “kaleidoscopic” narrative, also intrigued him: “What made him interesting was the method he adopted, his own vision of a new kind of Universal novel in the naturalist vein, together with a specific and original technique – he is the most technological novelist we have in the century – and this was necessary for a man who tried to write a novel in which Society itself is the hero, and the individual characters are regarded as mere human examples of Society” (Lecture Notes n. pag.). Despite MacLennan’s affinity with the socio-historical modernists, he wanted to be the kind of writer that Tolstoy was in War and Peace and to explore, not the psychological terrain of interest to the modern writer, but a grand-scale society in an exhaustive and philosophical manner. To achieve this objective required, for MacLennan, more than a rejection of the boldest modernist experiments with form: it necessitated, to a large degree, a rejection of the art of fiction itself. As MacLennan wrote in “The Future of the Novel as an Art Form,” “I believe that future ages will recognize that the chief contribution made to literary form in this century has not been made by T.S. Eliot and James Joyce,

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but by writers of non-fiction” (149). More specifically, MacLennan advocated a different kind of novel that was, essentially, a fusion of fiction with non-fiction. This is precisely the quality that he admired in the nineteenth-century novelists, especially Tolstoy, and it is what appears to have precipitated the shift in his aesthetic from experimental modernism to traditional realism. As he wrote in “Back to Tolstoy,” a telling and unpublished article written in 1956, What gives War and Peace such enormous scope, what makes the reader who returns to it feel how much the modern novel has lost in its passion for neatness and technical perfection, are those very scenes which the modern critic would condemn as extraneous … [including] the long paragraphs on the philosophy of history itself … Why, Tolstoy asks specifically, did the Russian army panic at Austerlitz but stand firm at Borodino? A modern novelist seeking to answer this question in a novel would try to do so through the mouths of the characters themselves, or through some obscure symbolic contrivance. And of course he would fail. For the characters who panicked at Austerlitz and stood at Borodino did not know, and could not accurately explain, why they behaved in one way before Moscow and in another in Bohemia. Nor could this mystery be explained through symbolism, for these events really happened, and in themselves they were far more gigantic affairs than any symbols could encompass. (5–6)

Fundamentally, MacLennan’s rejection of the modernist novel, and his lack of faith in its experimental techniques, derives from an anxiety, expressed in this passage, that experiment mitigates the novelist’s authority, capacity to editorialize, and ability to draw large philosophical and historical conclusions about sweeping, socio-historical concerns. If MacLennan’s stance seems conservative and theoretically naive, it is nevertheless in keeping with his antimodernist leanings. As Lodge argues, “Antimodernist writers invariably put up a poor show as theorists and aestheticians … in order to distinguish themselves from the modernists they tend to be forced into naïve, fallacious or philistine attitudes to the creative process” (5). MacLennan’s desire to “include long passages on the philosophy of history itself” explains the didacticism that nearly all of his major critics have noted in his work. Each Man’s Son (1951), his novel least concerned with grand-scale, sweeping, historical commentary, is a case in point. This work, set in Cape Breton, tells the story of a Calvinist doctor who for ambiguous psychological reasons wants to adopt the son

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of a local woman who does not want to give him up. But even in this most psychologically intense of his novels, MacLennan structures his story largely around a moral and theological debate. While Each Man’s Son does not purport to offer a large-scale social or political message, MacLennan still prefaces his narrative with an “Author’s Note” that draws attention to the Tolstoyian authorial presence: “Continents are much alike, and a man can no more love a continent than he can love a hundred million people. But all the islands of the world are different. They are small enough to be known, they are vulnerable, and men come to feel about them as they do about women … Many men have loved the island of Cape Breton and a few may have hated her” (vii). As Each Man’s Son demonstrates, MacLennan is unwilling to let his stories stand alone, and he persistently sets them in a non-fictional framework that indicates bluntly the philosophical, intellectual, and “documentary” purpose that justifies his writing. As he wrote in “Back to Tolstoy,” What makes War and Peace such a stupendous experience is not the huge list of characters, who were so numerous that Tolstoy himself forgot a great many of them. It is that the stories of these characters, in the most natural way, are given their place in the historical events of their time. And they are given this place effectively because Tolstoy constantly commits what today’s critics insist is a fictional crime. He himself, whenever he feels like it, comes right out on the novel’s stage and begins to talk. If the situation calls for it, he talks like a moralist, like an essayist, or like a professional historian. Whenever the situation is right, he instantly disregards the narrow convention that the author should not intrude physically into the stories he is telling. Hence it comes about that the greatest of all the characters in War and Peace is Tolstoy himself. (4)

MacLennan is identifying a didactic presence in Tolstoy’s novel, and not only justifying it, but advocating it. The modern novel, with its experimentalism, ambiguity, relativism, and impersonality, draws attention from this “greatest of all the characters,” and this limits, in MacLennan’s view, the philosophical impact and scope of fiction. Accordingly, all of MacLennan’s novels freely borrow this “technique” of authorial intrusion from Tolstoy, and MacLennan himself enters into the narrative of his stories unabashedly whenever he has something important to say. In The Precipice (1948), MacLennan uses a love story between an old-fashioned Canadian woman, Lucy Cameron, and a morally unscrupulous, dynamic, energetic, American

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businessman as an allegory for the relationship between Canada and the United States. Most of the authorial intrusions in this novel take the form of philosophical musings by a vaguely defined authorial presence, as a tender moment shared by Lucy and her daughter, and Lucy’s contemplation of a failing marriage, reveals: “It was the spring for which more than a billion people had been waiting for over six years. Any hour now American and British armies would make contact with the Russians in Germany. The nightmare created by a generation of technicians in temporary collusion with a madman was nearly over, and for this little while the world seemed to be wide awake, like a fever patient between dreams” (259). Other times, however, MacLennan himself appears almost as a character in the novel. Although the action in The Precipice takes place primarily in Ontario and New Jersey, it opens with an internal monologue – with no obvious connection to the action or setting of the story – delivered by the author himself, who, like David Culver in Man Should Rejoice, is a repository for the zeitgeist of the modern age: “Sometimes we wake in the night and know why we have become what we are. Walking alone in the night, listening to the cars rumbling under the pavement of Park Avenue … we see in a flash against the eyeballs a fragment of what has happened to us all, and lacking the brave illusion of daylight, it is easy to wish we had been born in another century, or had inherited some other time than now” (5). To be sure, MacLennan’s critics have frequently complained about his didacticism. Cockburn sums up the critical reaction to MacLennan’s didactic impulse concisely: “Virtually every critic of MacLennan has blamed him for the preponderance, and/or unsuitability, of sociological and historical data in his novels. I shall do the same” (25). But his critics have not generally acknowledged that such a didactic and conservative impulse in his writing is intentional, not merely a by-product of an indifference to technique and style. MacLennan’s authorial intrusions are a deliberate attempt to compensate for what he felt were the limitations of the impersonal modern novel by appealing to a higher authority, a broader scope, a larger “truth,” through the philosophical and intellectual musings of the authorpersona himself. In this sense, and in spite of his deeply rooted conservative ideals about art and life, MacLennan is more like the socialist realists of the 1930s than the modernists they tirelessly and uncompromisingly critiqued.5 As he wrote in “The Writer Engagé” (1976),

Modernism, Antimodernism, and MacLennan’s Novels  345  Opposite to the engagé is the writer in the ivory tower, and what separates the two is simply temperament. In our century the most celebrated examples have been Marcel Proust and James Joyce – Proust writing A la Recherche du Temps Perdu in Paris in his cork-lined room while France was bleeding nearly to death in the 1914 War; Joyce in those same years living in Switzerland writing Ulysses. So far as their reputations are concerned … these two men seem to have made the best bargain with posterity, at least between 1950 and the present. I doubt if they have with the future. (271)

MacLennan rejects modernist aesthetics because he believes that fiction should have an idealistic and romantic social function: the remaking of reality. In “The Future Trend in the Novel,” MacLennan predicted that an impulse towards defining, illuminating, and effectively remaking society would characterize new Canadian fiction: “I think, therefore, that the significant writing of the next decade will be … more interested in illumination and definitions than writing has been since the Eighteenth Century. Its chief function will be a re-statement in the light of recent knowledge – of history, science, and psychology – of the position of individual man in the world, and of his society in terms of historical and scientific evolution … For the Canadian writer, this change of emphasis seems to me favourable” (5). This same article would also state that this remaking was essentially a conservative enterprise, both on the levels of literary technique and intellectual values, and that it required the intrusion of authorial presence into the text to supplant the moral relativism of the modern world with a host of traditional, and essentially romantic, ideals and beliefs: “Evelyn Waugh is wise when he says, ‘The artist’s only function in the disintegrated society of today is to create independent systems of order of his own’ … To me it looks like a long overdue return to the principle which should guide all artists, which is to seek for value and beauty, pity and terror, humour and love in the scenes around him and in the thoughts and images which emerge naturally out of his own personality” (4–5). This passage, then, brings together several of the apparent contradictions in MacLennan’s writing by revealing how he perceives his literary project to be at once revolutionary and conservative, personal and universal, aware of the modern human condition and determined to ameliorate it. In light of this reading of MacLennan’s antimodernist aesthetic, it is easy to see why impulses towards realism on the one hand, and romanticism on the other, appear to be competing in his writing. Many of his critics have noted this tension in his work and have concluded that

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MacLennan’s romantic impulse is an unintentional force that intrudes and mitigates his writing: as Laurel Boone writes, “Each Man’s Son is an awkward book … MacLennan intended Each Man’s Son to be a realistic novel, but an examination of its romance features, of which the author was apparently unaware, helps to explain the contradictions … the tension between romance and realism finally fractures the book” (155). Boone’s assertion that romance and realism make uncomfortable bedfellows in MacLennan’s novels is convincing, but it is quite clear that MacLennan’s romantic gestures are intentional. The romantic elements of even his most conservative realist novels tie in with his larger philosophical aims and social theses. In Barometer Rising, the coincidences, plot twists, and deus ex machina that bring Neil and Penny together in the final scene are liable to strain the credulity of even the most forgiving reader. Yet the fact that Neil is one of the very few young men in all of fiction to emerge from the Great War with a sense of optimism is tied in with MacLennan’s nationalistic social thesis that Canada is a new nation that emerges out of the wreckage of an old civilization: “For better or worse he was entering the future, he was identifying himself with the still-hidden forces which were doomed to shape humanity just as the tiny states of Europe had shaped the past. Canada was still hesitant … But if there were enough Canadians like himself, half-American and half-English, the day was inevitable when the halves would join and his country would become the central arch which united the new order” (218). Tellingly, a full-blown romantic idealism does not characterize MacLennan’s writing until after he rejects his modernist experiment and begins writing conservative, realist novels about Canada. Unlike the essentially romantic theses of Barometer Rising and Two Solitudes, So All Their Praises and Man Should Rejoice offer pessimistic conclusions and betray an almost Eliotonian sense of nostalgia for a lost age. As Cameron summarizes, in the first “Michael … is left at the end of the novel in painful isolation searching for spiritual meaning aboard a ship bound for England,” and the second “novel ends … with the hero alone, attempting to make some sense out of his isolation” (84, 110). MacLennan’s antimodernist stance justified his conservative values and ideals, his preference for outmoded literary forms, his anxiety about the decline of the artist’s exalted position, and his rejection of moral relativism through the social function of art. MacLennan’s antimodernism, then, entails not just the rejection of the techniques of the modernist novel, but also of the very cultural conditions of modernity,

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and seeks, through romantic elements including myth, to restore a connection with a pre-modern past: as Lynda Jessup writes, antimodernism “was in effect a critique of the modern, [of] a perceived lack in the present manifesting itself not only in a sense of alienation, but also in a longing for the types of spiritual experience embodied in utopian futures and imagined pasts” (3). It is ironic that MacLennan, who probably did more than any other writer to establish and enable a modern fiction in Canada, also contributed more than any of his contemporaries to the decades-long “suppression” of a Canadian modernism that resembles its international counterparts. MacLennan’s abandonment of modernist forms and values in pursuit of a romantic nationalism has accordingly been reflected in the work of many cultural-nationalistic critics who have tended to emphasize at least two partly incompatible elements in their thematic readings: the realistic, socio-cultural representation of Canada and the existence of broad, totalizing, romantic, and idealistic national symbols and motifs. Such a focus almost inevitably avoids discussion of aesthetics, modernist or otherwise, and makes it easy to suggest that Canada lacks a modern fiction akin to foreign examples and defined in part by technical innovation and virtuosity. As recent scholarship increasingly explores surprisingly diverse and discordant Canadian modernisms, MacLennan’s writing appears increasingly atypical of the main lines of modernist Canadian literary development. An acknowledgment of the early experiments he undertook in So All Their Praises and Man Should Rejoice, regardless of the vigour with which he eventually discarded them, might itself do little to re-establish his place near the centre of modern Canadian fiction. But it does reveal the degree to which modernist movements and influences, sometimes presumed to have barely resonated in Canada, may have engaged and motivated even some of those writers who opposed them most vehemently. Indeed, MacLennan’s example suggests that the most canonical strain of modern Canadian fiction may have developed in resistance to, rather than in ignorance of, international modernisms. More broadly, MacLennan’s example suggests that modernist expression, at least in its canonical Anglo-American phases, may be fundamentally incompatible with a romantic nationalism. Perhaps the sort of modernism that MacLennan embraced and abandoned is possible only in a mature, even decadent culture that has moved beyond a point in its literary development where mimetic representation and idealization of national ideals are captivating to writers, critics, and readers.

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The reconsideration of MacLennan’s place in Canada’s literary history that an acknowledgment of his unpublished novels invites highlights the crucial significance of recent editorial projects that are broadening understanding of Canadian modernisms. New critical editions in print and digital formats of numerous neglected and previously unpublished works of the period, many affiliated with and supported by Editing Modernism in Canada, demand that readers and scholars recognize a Canadian modernism that is surprisingly varied, complex, and international. Numerous authors of the period apart from MacLennan wrote much unpublished or forgotten fiction that remains unread in archives and stacks, much of it neglected presumably because of its non-­ conformity to entrenched literary-historical narratives. The canonical texts that have traditionally been considered representative of modern writing in Canada – including most of those published in McClelland and Stewart’s New Canadian Library series – gained cultural currency during a period of heightened nationalism and accordingly tend to reinforce limiting geographical and national theses and embody characteristics that have proven pedagogically useful in university, college, and high-school classrooms. Texts such as So All Their Praises and Man Should Rejoice – with their international influences, references, interests, and settings that resist established critical narratives – deserve to be in print6 and demand exploration of Canadian modernisms within various international contexts. Such a diversification and internationalization of Canadian modernism, in turn, invites deeper consideration of the period’s foundational importance to Canada’s indisputably diverse and international writing of the contemporary period, something literary histories to date have not always acknowledged: as Robert Kroetsch infamously remarked, “Canadian literature evolved directly from Victorian into Postmodern” (1). It will be interesting in a few years to see what place conservative realists such as MacLennan maintain in a Canadian literature that has more fully come to terms with its modernisms. I suspect that much of the work carried out by scholars who pursue this larger project will necessarily address the profound struggle between modernist and antimodernist ideals that went on behind the scenes more commonly and pervasively than most literary histories currently suggest. MacLennan may not emerge from this reconfiguration as a central and foundational figure, but his embodiment and magnification of a crucial tension in the development of Canada’s modern writing suggest that the modernism he grew to despise and dismiss may hold his surest claim to enduring relevance.

Modernism, Antimodernism, and MacLennan’s Novels  349  NOTES 1 Two signs of a resurgent interest in Canadian modernism are the SSHRCfunded Editing Modernism in Canada project, directed by Dean Irvine of Dalhousie University, and University of Ottawa Press’s Canadian Literature Collection. 2 The terms modernism and realism are of course contested and complex. Both signify numerous competing and often contradictory aesthetics, genealogies, tendencies, techniques, groupings, and formations. This chapter generally uses the term modernism to refer to the canonical, early twentieth-century “high modernisms” of authors such as Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Pound, Woolf, Faulkner, Hemingway, Barnes, Proust, et cetera. When my usage of the term is intended to signify a modernism that does not accord with such established and canonical definitions, I strive to make the distinction clear. When referring to the realism of MacLennan’s novels in this chapter, I generally intend to signify the influence of traditional, canonical, nineteenth-century realisms of European traditions: works by George Eliot, Tolstoy, Hardy, Dickens, Balzac, and many others. 3 Although relatively little has been published on MacLennan since, Frank M. Tierney’s 1994 contribution to the Reappraisals: Canadian Writers series collected more than a dozen essays that respond to “recent studies [that] raise questions about the Canadian literary tradition and suggest the need for a reappraisal of MacLennan’s status” (Tierney 1). 4 Lynda Jessup, in Antimodernism and Artistic Experience: Policing the Boundaries of Modernity, initially defines antimodernism in broad cultural terms: it is a “broad, international reaction to the onslaught of the modern world that swept industrialized Western Europe, North America, and Japan in the decades around the turn of the century” (3). David Lodge, in Modernism, Antimodernism and Postmodernism, offers a more literary definition and uses the term to denote “writing that continues the tradition modernism reacted against” (4). Both definitions are generally applicable to MacLennan’s writing after the 1930s. I engage these notions of antimodernism and their applicability to MacLennan in a little more detail later in this chapter. 5 Some of the most pointed and vitriolic of these critiques can be found in two of the leftist Canadian little magazines of the 1930s, Masses and New Frontier. 6 University of Ottawa Press’s Canadian Literature Collection has, after a long period of negotiation, reached an agreement with McGill University, the executor of MacLennan’s literary estate, and University of Ottawa Press to publish MacLennan’s Man Should Rejoice in a scholarly critical edition.

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370  Works Cited Morley, Patricia. As Though Life Mattered: Leo Kennedy’s Story. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1994. Print. Morriss, Margaret. “‘No Short Cuts’: The Evolution of The Double Hook.” Canadian Literature 173 (2002): 54–70. Print. Moss, Laura. “F.R. Scott: Laurier Poetry Series Questionnaire.” Message to Peter Webb 31 Jan. 2011. Email. Mount, Nick. When Canadian Literature Moved to New York. Toronto: U of ­Toronto P, 2005. Print. New, W.H. “Some Comments on the Editing of Canadian Texts.” Halpenny 13–31. Newlove, John. Black Night Window. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1968. Print. – “The Pride.” Tamarack Review (Summer 1965): 37–44. Print. Nicholson, Joseph R. “Making Personal Libraries More Public: A Study of the Technical Processing of Personal Libraries in ARL Institutions.” RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage 11.2 (Sept. 2010): 106–33. Print. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy. Ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs. Trans. Ronald Speirs. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. Print. – The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House, 1974. Print. North, Michael. Camera Works: Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word. New York: Oxford UP, 2005. Print. – Novelty: A History of the New. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2013. Print. Nowry, Laurence. Man of Mana: Marius Barbeau. Toronto: NC, 1995. Print. Odell, Jonathan. “Our Thirty-Ninth Wedding Day.” Stubborn Strength: A New Brunswick Anthology. Ed. Michael O. Nowlan. Don Mills, ON: Academic Press Canada, 1983. 3–4. Print. Ohmann, Richard. Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century. New York: Verso, 1996. Print. “Omeka: Serious Web Publishing.” Web. O’Neill, Patrick. “Carroll Aikins’s Experiments in Playwriting.” BC Studies 137 (Spring 2003): 65–91. Print. Orwell, George, and Reginald Reynold, eds. British Pamphleteers. 2 vols. London: Wingate, 1948. Print. Ouspensky, Peter. The Symbolism of the Tarot. Trans. A.L. Pogossky. St Petersburg: Trood, 1913. Print. Pacey, Desmond. “A.G. Bailey.” Canadian Literature 68–9 (1976): 49–60. Print. – “Bliss Carman: A Reappraisal.” Northern Review 3.3 (Feb./Mar. 1950): 2–10. Print.

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372  Works Cited – The Spirit of Romance. 1910. New York: New Directions, 1968. Print. – Ta Hio: The Great Learning Newly Rendered into the American Language by Ezra Pound. Seattle: U of Washington Bookstore, 1928. – “What I Feel About Walt Whitman.” Selected Prose, 1909–1965. Ed. William Cookson. New York: New Directions, 1973. 145–6. Print. Pratt, E.J. Letter to George Whalley. 27 July 1945. Collection of Elizabeth Whalley, Southwold, UK. – Selected Poems. Ed. Sandra Djwa, W.J. Keith, and Zailig Pollock. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2000. Print. Pressman, Jessica. Digital Modernism: Making It New in New Media.” New York: Oxford UP, 2014. Print. Price, Kenneth M. “Edition, Project, Database, Archive, Thematic Research ­Collection: What’s in a Name?” Digital Humanities Quarterly 3.3 (2009). Web. Pulver, David. “The Renaissance Man: Portrait of a Classical Scholar.” WhigStandard Magazine 4 Oct. 1980. 4–7. Print. Purdy, Al. The Enchanted Echo. Vancouver: Clarke and Stuart, 1944. Print. – No Other Country. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1977. Print. – North of Summer. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1967. Print. Queneau, Raymond. “100,000,000,000,000 Poems.” Ed. Harry Mathews and Alastair Brotchie. Oulipo Compendium. London: Atlas, 2005. 15–33. Print. Rae, Patricia. Rev. of Studies in Literature and the Humanities: Innocence of Intent, ed. Brian Crick and John Ferns. Dalhousie Review 65 (1985): 312–14. Print. Ramsay, Stephen. “Databases.” A Companion to the Digital Humanities. Ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Web. Rascoe, Burton. Titans of Literature: From Homer to the Present. New York: Putnam’s, 1928. Print. – “What Is Love?” The Second American Caravan: A Yearbook of American Literature. Ed. Alfred Kreymborg, Lewis Mumford, and Paul Rosenfeld. New York: Macaulay, 1928. 716–25. Print. Reaney, James. Rev. of The Stunted Strong, by Fred Cogswell. Canadian Forum 34 (Mar. 1955): 288. Print. Reed, David. The Popular Magazine in Britain and the United States, 1880–1960. London: British Library, 1997. Print. Relief Camp Strikers Committee. “Official Statement.” Relief Camp Strike, BC, 1935. 179. Box 50, folder 1, Robert S. Kenny Collection, Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, U of Toronto. Typescript. Renear, Allen H. “Text Encoding.” A Companion to the Digital Humanities. Ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Web. Ricard, François. Gabrielle Roy, une vie. Montreal: Boréal, 1996. Print.

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374  Works Cited – La Montagne secrèt. Montreal: Beauchemin, 1961. Print. – La petite poule d’eau. Montreal: Beauchemin, 1950. Print. – La Rivière sans repos. Montreal, 1970. Print. – La Route d’Altamont. Montreal: HMH, 1966. Print. – Rue Deschambault. Montreal: Beauchemin, 1955. Print. – Le temps qui m’a manqué. Ed. F. Ricard, D. Fortier, and J. Everett. Cahiers Gabrielle Roy. Montreal: Boréal, 1997. Print. Roy, Gabrielle, 1909–1983. Library and Archives Canada. Web. Rudas, L. Dialectical Materialism & Communism. London: Labour Monthly, 1933. Print. Ryan, Oscar, E. Cecil-Smith, Frank Love, and Mildred Goldberg. “Eight Men Speak: A Political Play in Six Acts.” Eight Men Speak and Other Plays from the Canadian Workers’ Theatre. Ed. Richard Wright and Robin Endres. Toronto: New Hogtown, 1974. 21–89. Print. Saint-Martin, Lori. Lectures contemporaines de Gabrielle Roy: Bibliographie analytique des études critiques, 1978–1997. “Cahiers Gabrielle Roy.” Montreal: Boréal, 1998. Print. Sandwell, B.K. “Teasing Toronto?” Saturday Night 23 Mar 1929: 9. Print. Sarraute, Nathalie. The Planetarium: A Novel. 1959. Trans. Maria Jolas. London: Dalkey Archive, 2005. Print. Savoie, Donald. Visiting Grandchildren: Economic Development in the Maritimes. Toronto: U Toronto P, 2006. Print. Scholes, Robert, and Clifford Wulfman. Modernism in the Magazines: An Introduction. New Haven: Yale UP, 2010. Print. Scobie, Stephen. “Computer Poem.” Message to Dean Irvine. 24 Mar. 2014. Email. – “Computer Poem 3.” Concrete Poetry. Vancouver: O’Brien, 1969. Exhibition catalogue. Scott, F.R. The Collected Poems of F.R. Scott. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1981. Print. – “Communists, Senators, and All That.” Canadian Forum Jan. 1932: 127–9. Print. – “The Efficiency of Socialism.” Queen’s Quarterly 42 (Summer 1935): 215–25. Print. – “Goodbye Dominion Status.” Canadian Forum Mar. 1937: 6–7. Print. – “Impressions of a Tour in the U.S.S.R.” Canadian Forum Dec. 1935: 382–5. Print. – Leaving the Shade of the Middle Ground. Ed. Laura Moss. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2011. Print. – “New Poems for Old: The Decline of Poesy.” Canadian Forum May 1931: 296–8. Print.

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376  Works Cited Sorfleet, John Robert. “Transcendentalist, Mystic, Evolutionary Idealist: Bliss Carman, 1886–1894.” Colony and Confederation: Early Canadian Poets and Their Backgrounds. Ed. George Woodcock. Vancouver: UBC P, 1974. 189–210. Print. Sowerby, E.M. Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson. 5 vols. Washington: Library of Congress, 1952–59. Print. Staines, David. “Mapping the Terrain.” Mosiac: A Journal for the Comparative Study of Literature and Ideas 11.3 (1978): 137–51. Print. Stalin, Iosif. The Theory and Practice of Leninism. London: Communist Party of Great Britain, 1925. Print. Stallybrass, Peter. “Against Thinking.” PMLA 122.5 (2007): 1580–7. Print. Stauffer, Andrew. “The Nineteenth-Century Archive in the Digital Age.” ­European Romantic Review 23.3 (2012): 335–41. Print. – “Poetry, Romanticism, and the Practice of Nineteenth-Century Books.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 34.5 (2012): 1–17. Print. Stevens, Peter, ed. The McGill Movement: A.J.M. Smith, F.R. Scott, and Leo ­Kennedy. Toronto: Ryerson, 1969. Print. Stock, Noel. The Life of Ezra Pound. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1974. Print. St Onge, Anna. “Sheila Watson Finding Guide.” John M. Kelly Library: Special Collections and Archives. St Michael’s College, University of Toronto. June 2007. Web. Sundén, Jenny. Material Virtualities: Approaching Online Textual Embodiment. New York: Lang, 2003. Print. Surette, Leon. “Ezra Pound, Bliss Carman, and Richard Hovey.” Canadian Poetry 43 (Fall/Winter 1998): 44–69. Print. Sutherland, John. Essays, Controversies and Poems. Ed. Miriam Waddington. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1972. Print. T.J.A. “Books in Review.” Rev. of Border River, by A.G. Bailey. Saturday Night 68 (Jan. 1953): 27. Print. Tanselle, G. Thomas. “Texts of Documents and Texts of Works.” Textual Criticism and Scholarly Editing. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1990. 3–23. Print. Taylor, A.J.P. Introduction. British Pamphleteers. Vol. 2. Ed. Reginald Reynolds. London: Wingate, 1951. 7–15. Print. TEI. TEI: Text Encoding Initiative. Web. Thom, Martin. “The Unconscious Structured as Language.” Jacques Lacan: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory. Ed. Slavoj Zizek. Vol. 1. London: Routledge, 2003. 33–70. Print. Thompson, John B. Books in the Digital Age: The Transformation of Academic and Higher Education Publishing in Britain and the United States. Cambridge: ­Polity, 2005. Print. – Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century. ­Cambridge: Polity, 2010. Print.

Works Cited  377  Thorburn, Hugh. Politics in New Brunswick. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1961. Print. Tierney, Frank M., ed. Hugh MacLennan. Reappraisals: Canadian Writers 19. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 1994. Print. Tiessen, Paul. “‘Shall I Say, It Is Necessary to Restore the Dialogue’: Wilfred Watson’s Encounter with Marshall McLuhan, 1957–1988.” At the Speed of Light There Is Only Illumination: A Reappraisal of Marshall McLuhan. Ed. John Moss and Linda M. Morra. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 2004. 95–146. Print. Trehearne, Brian. Aestheticism and the Canadian Modernists: Aspects of a Poetic Influence. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's UP, 1989. Print. –, ed. Canadian Poetry: 1920 to 1960. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2010. Print. – The Montreal Forties: Modernist Poetry in Transition. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1999. Print. Tremblay, Tony, ed. Fred Cogswell: The Many-Dimensioned Self. Fredericton: Electronic Text Centre, 2012. Web. “20 Non-Hierarchical Structures – TEI P5: Guidelines for Electronic Text ­Encoding and Interchange.” Web. Tzara, Tristan. “dada manifesto on feeble love and bitter love.” 391. 1920. n. pag. Print. – Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries. London: Calder, 1981. Print. Unsworth, John. “Creating Digital Resources: The Work of Many Hands.” Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, 1997. Web. Varloot, Jean. “Les conventions dans l’édition des textes.” Cahiers de l’Association internationale des études françaises 33 (1988): 101–10. Print. Vautour, Bart. “F.R. Scott and the Emergence of a Poetics of Institutional Critique.” Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews 66 (2010): 68–86. Print. Vautour, Bart, and Emily Robins Sharpe, eds. Canada and the Spanish Civil War: A Virtual Research Environment. Web. Vetter, Lara, Jarom McDonald, Sean Daugherty, Tanya Clement, Roman Bleier, Joshua D. Savage, and An Foras Feasa. 2015. “Documentation.” Versioning Machine 5.0. 17 Mar. 2016. Web. Ware, Tracy. “Arthur Symons’ Reviews of Bliss Carman.” Canadian Poetry 37 (Fall/Winter 1995): 100–13. Print. Watson, Sheila. “Antigone.” Tamarack Review 11 (Spring 1959): 5–13. Print. – The Double Hook. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1959. Print. Watson, Wilfred. Friday’s Child. London: Faber and Faber, 1955. Print. – Letter to Sheila Watson, Thursday, [5 Feb.,] 1959, Correspondence, box 11, folder 203, accession no. 95-131, Wilfred Watson Fonds, U of Alberta Archives. Manuscript. – “A Manifesto for Beast Poetry.” Canadian Literature 3 (1960): 40–6. Print.

378  Works Cited – “A Manifesto for Canadian Drama.” Journals and Notebooks, 91–17, box 2, folder 35. Wilfred Watson Fonds, U of Alberta Archives, Edmonton. Manuscript. – Plays at the Iron Bridge, or, The Autobiography of Tom Horror. Ed. Shirley Neuman. Introd. by Gordon Peacock. Edmonton: Longspoon, 1989. Print. Watts, Cedric, ed. Heart of Darkness and Other Tales. Joseph Conrad. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Print. Weinrich, Peter. Social Protest from the Left in Canada 1870–1970: A Bibliography. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1982. Print. Whalen, Terry. Bliss Carman and His Works. Downsview, ON: ECW, 1983. Print. Whalley, Elizabeth. Letter to Major General Christopher Tyler. 11 March 2000. MS. Collection of Elizabeth Whalley, Southwold. Manuscript. Whalley, George. “Address to the Graduating Class.” Moore 64–71. Print. –, trans. Aristotle’s Poetics. Ed. John Baxter and Patrick Atherton. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1997. Print. – “Battle Pattern.” Johnston 51–60. Print. – Battle Pattern. George Whalley Fonds. 1032c, box 16, file 27. Queen’s ­University Archives, Kingston. Typescript. – “Behind the Victory.” Johnston 88. Print. – “Birthright to the Sea: Some Poems of E.J. Pratt.” Crick and Ferns 175–96. Print. – Black naval logbook. N.d. Collection of Elizabeth Whalley, Southwold, UK. Manuscript. – “A Critique of Criticism.” MA thesis, Bishop’s University, 1948. Print. – “Death by Drowning.” 15 April 1946. Collection of Elizabeth Whalley, ­Sothwold, UK. Typescript. –, ed. Death in the Barren Ground: The Diary of Edgar Christian. Ottawa: Oberon, 1980. Print. – Diary calendar. 1945. Collection of Elizabeth Whalley. Southwold, UK. Manuscript. – “Five Years.” 25 June 1945. Collection of Elizabeth Whalley, Southwold, UK. Typescript. – “Frye's Anatomy of Criticism.” Rev of Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism. Crick and Ferns 35–43. Print. – “Horses and Kings.” Moore 16–22. Print. – “I do not know these men.” N.d. Collection of Elizabeth Whalley, Southwold, UK. Manuscript. – “If it must be an affair of drowning.” 9 February 1952. Collection of ­Elizabeth Whalley, Southwold, UK. Manuscript. – “Introduction for The Old Crane of Gort.” N.d. 5043, box 1, file 2, George Whalley Fonds. Queen’s University Archives, Kingston. Typescript. – “Lazarus.” Johnston 104–5. Print.

Works Cited  379  – The Legend of John Hornby. London: Murray, 1962. Print. – Letter to Cecilia Whalley. 21 July 1941. George Whalley Fonds. 2350.3, box 1, file 5. Queen’s University Archives, Kingston. Manuscript. – Letter to Dorothy Whalley. 20 July 1941. George Whalley Fonds. 5043, box 2, file 41. Queen’s University Archives, Kingston. Manuscript. – Letter to Dorothy Whalley. 10 May 1944. George Whalley Fonds. 5043, box 2, file 44. Queen’s University Archives, Kingston. Manuscript. – “Literary Computing.” Quarterly Bulletin of the Computer Society of Canada 7 (1967): 9–13. Print. – “Literary Romanticism.” Queen's Quarterly 72 (1965): 232–52. Print. – “The Mariner and the Albatross.” Crick and Ferns 15–34. Print. – “The Metaphysical Revival.” Yale Review 37 (1948): 434–46. Print. – No Man an Island. Toronto: Clarke and Irwin, 1948. Print. – “Normandy Landing.” Johnston 65–8. Print. – “Notes on a Legend.” Queen's Quarterly 76 (1969): 613–34. Print. – “Ode to a College Sausage.” Mitre 40.4 (April 1933): 25. Print. – “On Editing Coleridge’s Marginalia.” Editing Texts of the Romantic Period: Papers Given at the Conference on Editorial Problems, University of Toronto, ­November 1971. Ed. John D. Baird. Toronto: Hakkert, 1972. 89–116. Print. – “Pig.” Quarry 16.2 (January 1967): 10–11. Print. – Poems 1939–1944. Toronto: Ryerson, 1946. Print. – “The Poet and His Reader.” Queen's Quarterly 54 (1947): 202–13. Print. – Poetic Process. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953. Print. – Poetry Lists One and Two. N.d. Collection of Elizabeth Whalley, Southwold, UK. Manuscript. – Red leather-bound notebook. 1938. Collection of Elizabeth Whalley, Southwold, UK. Manuscript. – “The Sinking of the Bismarck.” Moore 78–88. Print. – “A Smile and a Nod.” Johnston 87. Print. – “S.T. Coleridge: Library Cormorant.” 2 vols. PhD thesis. King’s College, U of London, 1950. Print. – “We Are for the Dark: Fragments of a Biographical Reverie.” Mitre April (1946): 5–7. Print. – “Wheat.” Johnston 19. Print. – “World’s End.” Johnston 43–5. Print. –, ed. Writing in Canada: Proceedings of the Canadian Writers’ Conference, Queen’s University, 28–31 July, 1955. Toronto: Macmillan, 1956. Print. Whigahm, Peter. Letter to Djuna Barnes. n.d. Bride Scratton/Peter Whigham Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale U, New Haven, CT. Manuscript.

380  Works Cited Whiteman, Bruce. “The F.R. Scott Library.” Fontanus 2 (1989): 97–101. Print. – Introduction. Selected Poems. By Ralph Gustafson. Montreal: Véhicule, 2001. 11–13. Print. Wiesenthal, Christina. “The Archives of Pat (and Roy) Lowther.” Journal of Canadian Studies 40.2 (2006): 29–41. “Wilfred and Sheila Watson Collection.” Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery. U of British Columbia, n.d. Web. Wilkinson, Anne. The Collected Poems of Anne Wilkinson and a Prose Memoir. Ed. A.J.M. Smith. New York: St Martin’s, 1968. Print. – Counterpoint to Sleep: Poems. Montreal: First Statement, 1951. Print. – The Hangman Ties the Holly. Toronto: Macmillan, 1955. Print. – Heresies: The Complete Poems of Anne Wilkinson, 1924–1961. Ed. Dean Irvine. Montreal: Véhicule, 2003. Print. – The Tightrope Walker: Autobiographical Writings of Anne Wilkinson. Ed. Joan Coldwell. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1992. Print. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 1977. Print. – “When Was Modernism?” New Left Review 175 (May/June 1989): 48–52. Print. Williams, William Proctor, and Craig S. Abbott. An Introduction to Bibliographical and Textual Studies. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1989. Print. Willmott, Glenn. Unreal Country: Modernity in the Canadian Novel. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2002. Print. Winkiel, Laura A. Modernism, Race and Manifestos. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008. Print. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough. Ed. Rush Rhees. Trans. A.C. Miles and Rush Rhees. Bishopstone: Brynmill, 1979. Print. Woodcock, George. Hugh MacLennan. Toronto: Copp Clarke, 1969. Print. Worthy, R.M. “A New American Poet Speaks: The Works of A.B.” Horizon 4.5 (May 1962): 96–9. Print. Wright, Kailin, ed. The God of Gods: A Canadian Play. By Carroll Aikins. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 2016. Print. Zichy, Francis. “MacLennan and Modernism.” Hugh MacLennan. Ed. Frank M. Tierney. Reappraisals: Canadian Writers 19. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 1994. 171–9. Print.

Contributors

Chris Ackerley is professor emeritus of English at the University of Otago, New Zealand. His research focus is modernism, and his specialty is annotation, especially of the writings of Malcolm Lowry and Samuel Beckett. He is the annotator of the Lowry trilogy of critical editions published in the Canadian Literature Collection of the University of Ottawa Press: Swinging the Maelstrom (2013), In Ballast to the White Sea (2014), and The 1940 Under the Volcano (2015). Gregory Betts is the Chancellor’s Chair for Research Excellence at Brock University, where he is director of the Centre for Canadian Studies and an associate professor in the Department of English Language and Literature. He is the author of Avant-Garde Canadian Literature: The Early Manifestations (2013) and editor of five books of experimental Canadian writing. He has published six books of poetry, including Boycott (2014) and The Others Raisd in Me (2009). Tanya E. Clement is an assistant professor in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. She has published in American Literary History, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Digital Studies/Le champ numérique, Jacket2, the Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative, Library Quarterly, Literary and Linguistic Computing, and Texas Studies in Literature and Language. Some of her digital projects include High Performance Sound Technologies for Access and Scholarship and two electronic editions of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven’s poetry, In Transition and, with Gaby Divay, “The Firstling/Erstling/He Complex” in Scholarly Editing.

382 Contributors

Melissa Dalgleish is the program coordinator for the Research Training Centre at the Hospital for Sick Children Research Institute and a doctoral candidate in English at York University. With Daniel Powell, she teaches about professional development and identity at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute and co-edits the MediaCommons #AltAcademy project Graduate Training in the 21st Century. Melissa is also a regular writer for the feminist academic blog Hook & Eye. Her research is focused primarily on the myth-obsessed poets and theorists whose work dominated Canadian literature in the 1950s and 1960s. Michael John DiSanto is an associate professor of English at ­Algoma University. He is the author of Under Conrad’s Eyes: The Novel as ­Criticism (2012). With Brian Crick, he is the co-editor of D.H. Lawrence: Selected Criticism (2009) and Literary Criticism of Matthew Arnold (2004). He is the editor of the critical edition The Complete Poems of George ­Whalley (2016). The Whalley website (georgewhalley.ca) and a counterpart ­archival data­base are a collaboration with Robin Isard, systems ­librarian at ­Algoma University. With Robin and Alana Fletcher, he is editing S ­ elected Poems of George Whalley: A Digital Edition. Kristin Fast is a former member of the Editing Modernism in Canada research group at the University of Alberta, where she worked on the Editing the Sheila Watson Archives and the Editing the Wilfred Watson Archives projects. Marc André Fortin is assistant professor of English and comparative Canadian literature at l’Université de Sherbrooke. His research focuses on representations of science in Canadian and international literatures, and the connections between scientific epistemology and practice, faith, and poststructuralist and postmodern theory. This work includes research on early ethnography in Canada, modernism, and ethical issues pertaining to indigenous representation in colonial archives and museums. He is also working on a “repatriated” edition of Marius Barbeau’s Downfall of Temlaham, and he is co-editor of the journal Mémoires du livre/Studies in Book Culture. Andrea Hasenbank is a PhD candidate at the University of Alberta, where she is a Killam Memorial Scholar and a past doctoral fellow of Editing Modernism in Canada, as well as project coordinator for Proletarian Literature and Arts. As part of EMiC, she is e­ diting

Contributors 383 

a volume of Canadian manifestos, while her dissertation work, ­“Proletarian P ­ ublics: Leftist and Labour Print in Canada, 1930–1939,” examines r­ adical pamphlets circulating in Western Canada during the ­Depression years. Colin Hill is an associate professor in the Graduate Department of English at the University of Toronto, and in the Department of English and Drama at the University of Toronto Mississauga, where he is also director of the Canadian Studies program. His research explores twentieth-century Canadian fiction and its intersections with international modernist writing. He is the author of Modern Realism in EnglishCanadian Fiction (2012) and editor of a critical edition of Irene Baird’s Waste Heritage (2007). He editing critical editions of the early novels of Hugh MacLennan and Raymond Knister and at work on a book about modernism and Canadian cities. Paul Hjartarson is professor emeritus in English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, where he leads the Editing Modernism in Canada research group (EMiC UA). His most recent book, co-authored with S.C. Neuman and EMiC UA, is The Thinking Heart: The Literary Archive of Wilfred Watson (2014). With Gregory Betts and Kristine Smitka, he has co-edited Counterblasting Canada: Marshall McLuhan, Wyndham Lewis, Sheila Watson, and Wilfred Watson (2016). Dean Irvine is an associate professor at Dalhousie University. He is director of Editing Modernism in Canada and the software-services and web-design company Agile Humanities Agency. His publications include Editing Modernity: Women and Little Magazine Cultures in Canada, 1916–1956 (2008) as well as the edited collections The Canadian Modernist Meet (2005), Editing as Cultural Practice in Canada (2016), co-edited with Smaro Kamboureli, and Translocated Modernisms: Paris and Other Lost Generations (2016), co-edited with Emily Ballantyne and Marta Dvorak. He is the director and general editor of the Canadian Literature Collection published by the University of Ottawa Press. Sean Latham is the Pauline McFarlin Walter Endowed Chair of English at the University of Tulsa, where he serves as director of the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities and editor of the James Joyce Quarterly. He co-founded the Modernist Journals Project and is a past president of the Modernist Studies Association. Among his published works are

384 Contributors

The Little Review Ulysses (2015) and The Art of Scandal: Modernism, Libel Law, and the Roman à Clef (2009). Vanessa Lent holds a PhD from Dalhousie University, where she worked for several years as the project administrator for Editing M ­ odernism in Canada. She is a former EMiC postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alberta, where she collaborated on the Editing the Wilfred Watson Archives project. Sophie Marcotte is a professor of Quebec literature in the Département d’études françaises at Concordia University. She directs HyperRoy: ­manuscrits et inédits dans les archives de Gabrielle Roy, a website dedicated to editing Roy’s manuscripts and unpublished texts. Her editorial work also includes a volume of Roy’s correspondence, co-edited with Marcel Carbotte, Cahiers Gabrielle Roy (2001) and a digital edition, Le temps qui m’a manqué (2007). She is director of NT2-Concordia (Laboratoire de recherche sur les œuvres hypermédiatiques). In 2015, she co-edited (with Samuel Archibald) an anthology on literature and new media, Imaginaire littéraire du numérique, and (with Sylvain David) a special issue of @nalyses, « Littérature et résonances médiatiques: partages, transferts, réappropriations ». Patrick A. McCarthy is a professor of English at the University of ­Miami and editor of the James Joyce Literary Supplement. His major ­publications on Malcolm Lowry are Forests of Symbols: World, Text, and Self in M ­ alcolm Lowry’s Fiction (1994), Joyce/Lowry: Critical Perspectives, co-­edited with Paul Tiessen (1997), and scholarly editions of Lowry’s novels La ­Mordida (1996) and In Ballast to the White Sea (2014), the latter with annotations by Chris Ackerley. Harvey Quamen is an associate professor of English and humanities computing. He specializes in digital humanities and is a member of many research teams, including Editing Modernism in Canada, Implementing New Knowledge Environments, and the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory. He has served as the electronics and design editor for English Studies in Canada and is an editorial board member for the Map of Early Modern London research project. Tony Tremblay is a professor of English at St Thomas University and Canada Research Chair in New Brunswick Studies. He is ­founding

Contributors 385 

e­ditor of the Journal of New Brunswick Studies/Revue d’études sur le ­Nouveau-Brunswick and general editor of the New Brunswick Literary Encyclopedia. His recent work includes the critical edition, Fred Cogswell: The Many-Dimensioned Self (2012), the documentary film Last Shift: The Story of a Mill Town (2011), and the critical biography David Adams Richards of the Miramichi (2010). His research examines New Brunswick's modernist cultural workers – A.G. Bailey, Elizabeth Brewster, and Desmond Pacey – and he is working on an edition of The Selected Letters of New Brunswick’s Pioneering Modernists. Bart Vautour is assistant professor of English at Dalhousie University. He is the editor of a critical edition of Ted Allan’s novel This Time a ­Better Earth (2014) and a co-editor, with Erin Wunker, Travis V. Mason, and Christl Verduyn, of Public Poetics: Critical Issues in Canadian Poetry and Poetics (2014). With Emily Robins Sharpe, he is director of Canada and the Spanish Civil War (spanishcivilwar.ca). Peter Webb teaches Canadian literature and popular culture at Bishop’s University. His recent publications include articles on Canadian war literature, prairie literature, and modernist poetry, along with an edited collection, From Room to Room: The Poetry of Eli Mandel (2011). J.A. Weingarten is a professor of English and communications at Fanshawe College in London, Ontario. In addition to his work on an edition of John Newlove’s letters and a book project on Canadian poets writing about history, he has recently published reviews, articles, and interviews in Canadian Poetry, Canadian Literature, and Studies in Canadian Literature. He is also the co-managing editor and co-founder of The Bull Calf: Reviews of Fiction, Poetry, and Literary Criticism. Kailin Wright is an assistant professor in the English Department at St Francis Xavier University. Her research examines Canadian drama and she has published articles in Studies in Canadian Literature and Theatre Research in Canada. Her critical edition of Carroll Aikins’s play The God of Gods appears in the Canadian Literature Collection from the ­University of Ottawa Press.

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Index

Aarseth, Espen J., 37, 42 Abbott, Craig S., 108, 119n9 Absalom, Absalom! (Faulkner), 3 Ackerley, Chris, 24 Adams, Thomas R., 244 Adoratsky, V.V., 133 advertising, 32, 35, 38, 40, 42, 44–8, 54–6, 58n3, 59n8, 240, 294 Aestheticism and the Canadian Modernists (Trehearne), 270 afternoon: A Love Story (Joyce), 37 Ahmed, Sara, 18 Aiken, Conrad, 188 Aikins, Carroll, 25, 285–306 Aitken, Max. See Lord Beaverbrook À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (Proust), 345 Alexandre Chenevert (Roy), 109, 117 Algoma University, 206 Allen, Barney Solomon. See Sol Allen Allen, Paula Gunn, 302 Allen, Sol [Barney Allen], 265–84 allusions, 111, 121, 188–200, 252, 262 Amaranth (Robinson), 199 American Mercury, 49 Anderson, Margaret, 140, 148, 156

An Island in the Sky (Pittman), 261 annotation, 3, 24, 94, 96, 106, 110, 112–17, 123–35, 151–2, 161–2, 169, 180, 186–203, 233, 240, 250, 254–5, 263–4, 286, 381 Anthology of Canadian Literature in English (Bennett and Brown), 253 antimodernism, 24, 152–3, 308–10, 317–26, 326n1, 336, 338, 342, 345–8, 349n4 Antoniuk, Jeff, 184 archives, 6, 15, 23, 24, 25, 59n9, 61, 62, 63, 65, 66, 67, 68, 70, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 79, 80, 81, 83, 106, 109, 110, 116, 118n6, 118n7, 120, 121–2, 124, 125, 127, 130, 135, 136, 139, 150, 152, 162, 165, 167, 169, 170, 171, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178; and databases, 61, 62, 65, 66, 70, 73, 74, 75, 76, 80, 81, 82, 161, 172, 275, 176, 180; digital, 16, 33, 37, 57, 70, 75, 79, 88–9, 95, 97, 106n1, 151, 152, 161, 162, 167, 170, 171, 172, 175, 176; and digital collections, 86, 88–91, 93–4, 97, 106n1, 152; and editions, 88–9, 95, 106n1, 161–2, 172, 180, 181; of editions, 93, 97;

388 Index hypermedia, 9; material, 70, 74, 79, 80, 81, 82, 170, 172; physical, 66, 67, 69, 70, 72, 73, 74, 76, 79, 81 Arms, William Y., 75, 77 Aronoff, Eric, 294, 295 Aschheim, Steven E., 297, 306 As I Lay Dying (Faulkner), 340 Athens, 124 Atlantic Monthly, 210 Atlantis (Dudek), 125–6 Atwood, Margaret, 129, 136n9, 257–8 Auden, W.H., 192 Austerlitz, 342 Austin, J.L., 227 avant-garde, 4, 5, 11, 12, 19, 21, 22, 24, 25, 27n2, 35, 139, 175, 185n10, 235, 265–83, 311, 337 Avant-garde Canadian Literature: The Early Manifestations (Betts), 5, 185n10 Avison, Margaret, 10, 251, 256 Ayerton, Michael, 174 backwardness, 24, 307–10, 339 Bailey, Alfred G., 316–23, 326n11, 326n13 Baird, Irene, 333–4, 340 Ballantyne, Emily, 9, 106 Ballou, Robert, 334 Balzac, Honoré de, 107, 349n2 Barbeau, Marius, 15, 25, 61–84 Barcelona, 124 Barker, Nicolas, 244 Barnes, Djuna, 140–9, 153, 155–60, 349n2 Barometer Rising (MacLennan), 328, 336–7, 346 Baudot, Jean A., 12 Baxter, John, 212, 219, 224n28 Beauvoir, Simone de, 276–7

Beaverbrook, Lord [Max Aitken], 266 Beckett, Samuel, 139 Beetham, Margaret, 34, 40, 58n5 Belkin Art Gallery, 174 Bellemin-Noël, Jean, 150 Benedict, Ruth, 82 Bengtson, Jonathan, 184 Benjamin, Walter, 33–4, 37, 52, 120, 124, 130 Bennett, Donna, 253 Bennett, R.B., 239, 240 Bentley, D.M.R., 92, 307–8, 309, 322, 324n1, 326n9 Bergman, Hjalmar, 191 Berkhofer, Robert F., Jr, 306n6 Besner, Neil, 253 Bessai, Diane, 235 Betts, Gregory, 5, 24, 185n10 Beugnot, Bernard, 119n16 bibliographic code, 40, 92, 95, 96, 104 Birmingham Repertory Theatre, 285, 287, 290, 292–4, 296, 300–1 Birney, Earle, 10, 13, 250, 251, 253, 260, 261, 317 Bishop’s University, 205, 208, 223 Blackwood, David, 174 Blake, William, 88, 310 Blakey, Rebecca, 184 Blue Voyage (Aiken), 188 Boas, Franz, 82 Bobak, Molly Lamb, 174 bohemia, 140, 314, 342 Bolter, Jay David, 11 Bonheur d’occasion (Roy), 109, 117 Bonner, Margerie. See Margerie Lowry. Boone, Laurel, 346 Border River (Bailey), 321–2 Bornstein, George, 40, 160n1, 250, 259, 260

Index 389  Borodino, Russia, 342 Bouchard, Matt, 184 Bowers, Fredson, 7, 280 Bowker, Gordon, 202n4 Brake, Laurel, 34 Brandt, Di, 5 Brideshead Revisited (Waugh), 339 British Columbia, 25, 66, 165, 187, 283n1, 296, 300, 301 Broch, Hermann, 190 Brooker, Bertram, 234, 237, 270, 277, 284n4 Broom, 140 Brothman, Brien, 121–2 Brown, E.K., 314, 316, 321, 323 Brown, E.T., 192 Brown, Russell, 253 Brown, Susan, 21, 167, 169, 184 Brown University, 14, 58, 152 Bryant, John L., 85–6, 90–3, 95, 97, 150 Buck, Tim, 234, 240–2 Buharin, N., 133 Buitenhuis, Peter, 327, 329 Bulletin des agriculteurs, 111 Bürger, Peter, 269, 271 Burrard Inlet, BC, 187 Burroughs, William S., 13, 35, 59n7, 283n2 Busa, Roberto, Father, 10 Butler, Judith, 227 Calder, John, 279 Călinescu, Matei, 269 Callaghan, Morley, 10–11, 333, 334, 340 Cambridge, UK, 190, 196, 199, 201n2 Cameron, Kenneth Walter, 123–4 Cameron Library, 168 Campbell, Ted, 317 Canada and the Spanish Civil War, 5

Canada Council for the Arts, 235, 245n4, 284n4 Canada’s Digital Collections, 75, 76, 78 Canadian Bookman, 231, 284n4 Canadian Council of Archives (CCA), 76 Canadian Forum, 130, 131 Canadian Labor Defence League, 240 The Canadian Modernists Meet (Irvine), 5 Canadian Museum of History (CMH), 61, 63, 66–8, 70, 72, 76 Canadian Poetry Magazine, 220 Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC), 168–9, 174, 178, 184 canon formation, 4, 7, 16, 25, 26, 49, 62, 73, 81, 102, 189, 192, 229, 230, 231, 251, 255, 256, 276, 280, 282, 283, 288, 315, 326n9, 328, 333, 340, 347, 348, 349n2 The Cantos (Pound), 3, 125–6, 189, 317 Cape Breton, NS, 342, 343 Carbotte, Bernadette, 110 Carbotte, Marcel, 109, 110, 118n8 Carman, Bliss, 309, 310–17, 321, 323, 325n3–9 Carpenter, Humphrey, 312 Carr, Emily, 174 Caughie, Pamela L., 90–1 Centre for Editing Early Canadian Texts (CEECT), 10, 27 Cesareo, Mario, 62, 63 Ces enfants de ma vie (Roy), 109, 110, 117, 119n10 Cet été qui chantait (Roy), 117 Chadbourne, Richard, 118n5 Chapman, Judy, 254, 261 Charlesworth, J.L., 265, 293

390 Index Christie, Alex, 18 Clement, Tanya, 15, 17, 18, 90, 92–3, 95 Clifford, James, 81–2, 300 Clipper, Lawrence J., 189–90 Cluett, Robert, 10–11 Coburn, Kathleen, 214, 222n2–3, 223n13 Cockburn, Robert H., 329, 344 Cockcrow and the Gulls (Watson), 163–5, 171, 181–2, 184n5 Cocteau, Jean, 149 codex, 31, 32, 33, 35, 37, 40, 42, 52, 53, 56, 88, 249, 254 Cogswell, Fred, 98, 322–3, 326nn12–13 Cohen, Dan, 174 Cohen, Leonard, 128, 253 Coldwell, Joan, 98–9, 101–4 Coleman, Daniel, 20 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 123, 205, 209, 211, 214–19, 223n13, 224n22, 224n25, 224n27 collaboration, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13–14, 15–22, 23, 25, 27, 62, 69, 74, 77, 78, 79–80, 87, 96–7, 99, 100, 113, 139, 149, 150, 151, 168, 169, 179, 180, 184n2, 186, 188, 220, 235, 290, 292, 297, 298, 304, 305 collaboratory, 106, 161, 162, 168–9, 171, 178, 184 The Collected Poems of Anne Wilkinson and a Prose Memoir (Wilkinson), 99, 128 collections, 24, 55, 62, 71, 79, 81, 206, 209, 219, 220, 225, 230, 231, 233, 234, 240, 242, 243, 245, 256; archival, 74, 109, 112, 118, 161, 173, 174; and archives, 97; digital, 75, 76, 78, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 93, 94, 96, 152; edited, 4, 22, 27, 237;

of editions, 87, 97–9, 101–4, 106; library, 120; retrospective, 5 Collin, W.E., 315, 316 communications circuit, 10, 244 communism, 130, 133–4, 225–46, 334, 354, 374 Communist Party, 134, 240–1, 354, 376 community, 83–4, 148, 149, 153, 168, 170, 218, 277; Aboriginal, 302; artistic, 64; avant-garde, 269; common, 170; consensual, 322; cultural, 170; digital humanities, 10, 85; Editing Modernism in Canada (EMiC), 14; imagined, 281; indigenous, 25, 288, 300; interactive, 149; interdisciplinary, 168; multilingual, 8; multi-user, 77; online, 149; transnational, 8; user, 152; virtual, 107, 115–17 Compute Canada, 174 Comrades and Critics: Women, Literature, and the Left in 1930s Canada (Rifkind), 5, 232–3 Concordia University, 118n3, 124 Confederation poets, 263, 309, 314, 316–18, 323 Conrad, Joseph, 215–16, 217, 218, 224n21, 339, 341 Conrad, Margaret, 308, 316 Contemporary Verse, 100, 104 Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), 234 copyright, 74, 75, 77, 79, 160n4, 168, 171, 234–5, 263, 305 copy text, 7, 234, 243, 250, 252, 285, 286, 290, 301, 304 Counterpoint to Sleep (Wilkinson), 98 Cove, John, 66 Cox, Kirwan, 266 Crane, Hart, 147

Index 391  Crawley, Alan, 100, 321–2 Creelman, David, 308 Crick, Brian, 357, 372 Crookshank, F.G., 192 Crusoe: Poems Selected and New (Mandel), 260 Curiosities of Literature (D’Israeli), 191 Dada, 13, 59n7, 139, 140, 148, 149, 269, 275 Dalgleish, Melissa, 14, 17 Dalí, Salvador, 149 Daniells, Roy, 317 Dante, 188, 191, 193, 202n4 Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid (Lowry), 186, 201n2 Darnton, Robert, 244 Darwin, Charles, 149 databases, 6, 14, 15, 16, 22, 38, 40, 42, 49, 52, 61, 62, 65, 66, 67, 69, 70–84, 151, 161, 176–7, 178, 179, 180, 185n11, 206, 207, 208, 221, 222n5; content-specific, 62, 69–70, 77; context-shared: 62, 69, 74–5, 77, 79–80, 84; and genre, 71–3; and narrative, 71, 72–3; relational, 15, 80, 140, 162, 169, 170, 172, 175–6, 178 Davey, Frank, 271 Daymond, Douglas M., 231 Deacon, William Arthur, 267–8, 269, 272 Deep Hollow Creek (Watson), 183 Derrida, Jacques, 121–2, 124, 125, 126, 127, 130, 135, 136, 281, 282 The Destroyers (Aikins), 288 determinism, 12, 333 Détresse et Enchantement (Roy), 108, 109, 110, 111, 112–15, 117 Dickens, Charles, 338, 349n2

digital humanities, 8, 12–13, 17–21, 27n5, 33, 74, 79, 85, 86, 87, 89, 90, 105–6, 125, 167, 168, 169, 185n12, 224n31 Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI), 106 The Digital Page (Pollock), 9, 11 Dimock, Wai Chee, 73 DiSanto, Michael John, 16 D’Israeli, Isaac, 191 Divay, Gaby, 147 The Divine Comedy (Dante), 202n4 Djwa, Sandra, 10–11, 129, 130, 131, 136n9, 252 Dobbs, Kildare, 96, 100–1, 102, 103, 104 Document Type Definition (DTD), 176 Dollarton, BC, 187, 202n3 Donne, John, 207, 209, 218 Dos Passos, John, 339, 340, 341 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 215 The Double Hook (Watson), 163, 165, 171, 175, 183, 184n4 The Downfall of Temlaham (Barbeau), 25, 62, 63, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 76, 80, 83 Doyen, Victor (Vik), 188, 202n4, 203n9 Doyle, Laura, 26 Dreaming Backwards, 1954–1981 (Mandel), 255, 260 Drucker, Johanna, 37, 167, 180, 185n12 Drupal, 119n17, 206 Dublin Core Standards, 152, 222 Dudek, Louis, 4, 100–1, 102, 103, 104, 121, 125–6, 135, 234, 251, 272, 317, 323 Duncan, Dorothy, 337

392 Index DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, 143–4 Duranti, Luciana, 67, 70, 74 Dworkin, Craig, 277 Each Man’s Son (MacLennan), 328, 342–3, 346 Earnshaw, Gabrielle, 184 East, John W., 83 Eaves, Morris, 88 Eddy, G.S., 123 editing, audiovisual, 291; collaborative, 17; critical/ scholarly, 1, 8, 15, 19, 20, 86, 87, 88, 95, 106, 107–10, 161, 162, 181, 194, 243; digital, 8, 86, 87, 93, 95, 160; economies of, 18; electronic, 16, 107–10, 161, 162; genetic, 8, 9, 49, 89, 91, 107, 109, 110, 112, 113, 114, 117, 118n6, 150; hypermedia, 9; intentionalist, 8; politicized, 234, 243, 245; as renovation, 6; as scholarly practice, 6; as storytelling, 256; social-text, 8, 9, 150, 151; textual, 105, 106, 153, 186, 304; tools, 14 Editing Modernism in Canada/ Édition du modernisme au Canada (EMiC/ÉmaC), vii, viii, 6, 14, 16, 17, 19, 22, 27, 27n3, 168, 174, 184, 188, 203n9, 245, 285, 305, 326n9, 348, 349n1 Editing Modernism in Canada, University of Alberta (EMiC UA), 161, 162, 169, 171, 174, 182, 184, 235, 245 Editing Modernity: Women and Little-Magazine Cultures in Canada, 1916–1956 (Irvine), 5 editions, 262–3, 283; anglophone, 9; annotated, 188, 263; archive of,

93, 97; authorial, 97; classroom, 86; collected, 98; collection of, 87, 97, 98, 101, 102, 103, 104; complete, 68, 98, 220; composite, 186; computer-assisted, 9, 10, 27n1; critical/scholarly, 5, 8, 9, 10, 11, 16, 23, 25, 52, 85, 86, 87, 88, 90, 97, 99, 101, 103, 105, 106, 107, 110, 115, 119n9, 139, 151, 161, 165, 171, 186, 193, 225, 249, 250, 251, 253, 254, 255, 264n1, 272, 281, 285, 291, 292, 300, 305, 348; digital, 6, 14, 15, 24, 54, 58n1, 69, 85–91, 93–6, 101, 105, 106n1, 139, 150, 151, 168, 206, 207, 211, 219, 220, 221, 233, 249, 292, 348, 349n6; definitive, 193; diplomatic, 92, 119n9; ebook, 180; electronic, 15, 90, 107, 111, 112, 115, 116; facsimile, 54, 92, 95, 104; fluid-text, 90, 91, 92; genetic, 90; historicist, 289; hypertext, 13, 87, 89, 97; hypermedia, 249; of magazines, 53; as manifesto, 152, 159; modular, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105; network of, 97, 104, 105; non-authorial, 97, 98, 104; non-critical, 97; paperback, 6, 252, 253; print, 6, 23, 85, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 93, 96, 99, 101, 103, 105, 111, 207, 211, 225, 233, 249, 250, 252, 254, 291, 292, 348; readers’, 24, 249, 251; selected, 24, 249–63, 264n1; series of, 6; small-scale, 14, 87, 89, 90, 92, 93, 94, 104, 105, 106; socialtext, 102, 104; socialized, 105; synoptic, 10; web-based, 8, 13 Edmonton, AB, 163, 170, 172, 179, 181, 183, 235 Edwards, Mary Jane, 10, 27n1 Eichhorn, Kate, 18

Index 393  Eight Men Speak (Ryan et al.), 246n5 E.J. Pratt: Selected Poems (Pratt), 252, 254 Eliot, George, 349n2 Eliot, T.S., 130, 147, 148, 155, 184n5, 189, 208, 209, 236, 277, 312, 317, 321, 322, 341, 346, 349 emergence, 13, 16, 21, 23, 26, 33, 43, 48, 50, 52, 59n11, 90, 116, 181, 233, 284n4, 346. See also pre-emergence. emergent/emerging scholars, 14, 17, 18, 19, 21, 23, 263 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 123, 202n4 The Enchanted Echo (Purdy), 128 Encoded Archival Description (EAD), 179 Engels, Friedrich, 227 English, Larry W., 9 epistemology, 335, 338, 340, 341 Epstein, Jacob, 213 ergodic programming, 52; reading, 15, 22, 40, 54; texts, 14, 33, 34, 37, 38, 42, 43, 52, 53, 56 Erikson, William, 189, 196 Essick, Robert, 88 Everett, Jane, 118n3 Everyman Theatre, 285, 287, 292, 294 expressionism, 297, 328 Extensible Markup Language (XML), 55, 56, 60n13, 175, 177, 179 Fanny Essler (Grove), 147, 154, 155, 159 Fast, Kristin, 15, 17, 245, 245n3 Faulkner, William, 49–52, 60, 338, 339, 340, 341, 349n2 Ferguson, James, 49 Ferns, John, 212 Ferry, Anne, 230–1 The Fiddlehead, 317, 322

First World War, 230, 289 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 186–7, 339 Fitzpatrick, Kathleen, 19 Fitzpatrick, P.J., 320 Flahiff, F.T., 163, 167, 169, 171, 173, 175, 184, 184nn3–4 Flaubert, Gustav, 107, 339 Fletcher, Alana, 220 Fletcher, Jefferson Butler, 202n4 Fletcher, John, 279 Folsom, Ed, 73–4, 88, 172 Fonds Gabrielle Roy, 109, 112, 113, 117, 118–19n8 Fonds Québécois de la Recherche sur la Société et la Culture (FQRSC), 118n3 Forbes, E.R., 308, 316, 318 Forsyth, Bertram, 293 Fort, Charles, 192 Fortin, Marc André, 15, 17, 25 Forum, 49 Foster, Hal, 269 The Fountain (Morgan), 189 Fraistat, Neil, 256–7, 258 Francis, Daniel, 302, 306n6 Frank, Waldo, 192 Fredericton, NB, 315–16, 317, 322 Freiburg, Germany, 213, 331 Freud, Sigmund, 199, 272, 275, 277, 279, 281, 312, 320 Freytag-Loringhoven, Elsa von [Elsa Plötz, Else Ploetz], 90, 139–60 Freytag-Loringhoven, Leo von, 140 Friday’s Child (Watson), 171, 181, 182, 184n5 Frogner, Raymond, 179, 184, 245 From Cliché to Archetype (McLuhan and Watson), 163, 181, 235 From Room to Room (Mandel), 250, 261

394 Index Fry, Roger, 215 Frye, Northrop, 98, 223n9, 321, 322 The Fullness of Life (Aikins), 288 Gabler, Hans Walter, 9, 10, 53, 280 Gabrial, Jan, 187 galleys, 254 Gammel, Irene, 147, 160n7 Garvey, Ellen Gruber, 58n3 Genet, Jean, 199 Germany, 140, 145, 147, 153, 158, 328, 330–1, 332, 344 Gerson, Carole, 230 Gesamtkunstwerk, 298 Gibson, William M., 9 The Gift of Space (Hawkins), 129 Gill, Eric, 215 Gilmore, Leigh, 152 Gitelman, Lisa, 71, 74 Gitxan, 25 Glass, Loren, 283n2 Gnarowski, Michael, 4, 130 Goble, Mark, 11, 27n2 Godard, Barbara, 5 The God of Gods (Aikins), 25, 285–305, 306n3 God’s Orchid (Bergman), 191 Google, 77, 174 Governor General’s Award, 110, 163, 181, 261, 329 Gramsci x3 (Watson), 181 Granatstein, J.L., 130 Great Depression, 131, 262, 329, 333, 334 Green, Julien, 201n2 Greenwich Village, 140 Greg, W.W., 7 Greve, Felix Paul. See Frederick Philip Grove Gribben, Alan, 123, 125

Grove, Frederick Philip [Felix Paul Greve], 140, 143, 145, 152, 154, 155, 158, 159, 333, 334, 340 Grove Press, 283n2 Grusin, Richard, 11 Guggenheim, Peggy, 156 Gustafson, Ralph, 128, 251, 258, 260, 315, 323 Gysin, Brion, 13 Haag, Stefan, 236 half-tone printing, 35, 58n3 Halifax, NS, 204, 335 The Hangman Ties the Holly (Wilkinson), 87, 93–8, 100–4 Harbour Publishing, 253 Harder, Geoffrey, 184 Harding, Walter, 123 Hardy, Thomas, 215, 349 Harris, Lawren, 284n4 Harrison, Elizabeth, 209 Hart House Theatre, 285, 286, 287, 289, 290, 292, 293, 294, 296, 300, 301, 306n3 Harvard University, 21, 316, 325 Harvey, Carol J., 110, 119n10 Hasenbank, Andrea, 17, 24, 184 Hawkins, William, 129 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 192 Hayles, N. Katherine, 32, 42, 53, 72, 83 Hayward, Nick, 90 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 215, 217 Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place (Lowry), 186 Heenan, Michael, 130 Hemingway, Ernest, 11, 328, 330, 339, 340, 349 Henderson, Craig, 292 Heresies (Wilkinson), 98, 99, 102, 103 Heritage Canada, 75

Index 395  Herman Melville's Typee (Bryant), 90, 91 Hill, Colin, 5, 24, 231–2, 284n4, 305 Hinman Collating Machine, 9 Hirsch, E.D., Jr, 194 The Hitleriad (Klein), 130 Hjartarson, Paul, 15, 143, 144, 147, 159, 160n9, 245, 245n3 Hobbs, Catherine, 123 Hoffman, James, 288 Home Theatre, 287, 288 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 207, 217, 218, 224n23 Horn, Michiel, 128, 131 Houghton, Claude, 200 House of Anansi Press, 254, 260 Housman, A.E., 194 Hudson, W.H., 192 Huhndorf, Shari M., 303 Hulme, T.E., 13 humanities computing. See digital humanities Huxley, Aldous, 339 HyperRoy, 15, 107–18, 118n5 I Begin with Counting (Watson), 181 impressionism, 48, 328 In Ballast to the White Sea (Lowry), 24, 186–200, 200nn1–2, 201n2, 203nn6–8 Industry Canada, 75 infrastructure, 6, 8, 14, 87, 88, 89; cyberinfrastructure, 77; digital, 169 Ingles, Ernie, 184 intertextuality, 50, 52, 225, 257 In Transition (Freytag-Loringhoven), 90, 92 Irvine, Dean, 5, 27nn4–5, 86, 93, 95, 97–9, 101, 102–4, 122–3, 168, 184, 250, 251, 252, 282, 305, 349n1 Isard, Robin, 16, 206, 220, 221

Jackson, A.Y., 64, 174 Jackson, Barry, Sir, 292, 301, 305 Jackson, Charles, 199 Jackson, H.J., 123, 134 James, Henry, 9, 211 Jealousy (Robbe-Grillet), 278–9 Jefferis, Jeffery, 223n14 Jensen, Johannes, 192 Jessup, Lynda, 347, 349n4 John M. Kelly Library, 165, 168, 172, 175, 179, 184, 184n1 Johnston, George, 219, 220, 251, 256 Jones, Howard Mumford, 50, 51, 52 Jonson, Ben, 193 The Journals of Susanna Moodie (Atwood), 257–8 Joyce, James, 9, 53, 139, 189, 275, 277, 279, 280, 283n2, 310, 312, 325n8, 328, 330, 332–3, 336–7, 338–9, 340, 341, 345, 349n2 Joyce, Michael, 37 Julian Grant Loses His Way (Houghton), 200 Kafka, Franz, 192 Kaleidoscope (Page), 251, 252 Kamboureli, Smaro, 20 Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, 188 Kealey, Gregory S., 238 Kelly, Peggy, 133 Kelly, Richard J., 123 Kennedy, Leo, 130, 315, 316 Kenner, Hugh, 4 Kenny, Robert S., 237, 238 Kentucky, 140, 145, 158 Kihn, Langdon, 64 Kinder, Marsha, 72 King’s College, London, 205 Kingston, ON, 205, 211

396 Index Kirschenbaum, Matthew, 32, 58n2, 60n14 Kittler, Friedrich, 32 Klein, A.M., 7, 8, 10, 130, 250, 251, 252, 323 Knister, Raymond, 7, 263, 284n4 Koestler, Arthur, 339 Kostelanetz, Richard, 269–70, 280 Kristeva, Julia, 274 Kroestch, Robert, 309, 348 Krupat, Arnold, 81 Künstlerroman, 337 laboratories, 15, 21–2, 27n5, 169 labour, 178, 225, 242; academic, 19; collaborative, 16, 18, 23; conditions of, 238; cultural, 18; and digitization, 245; distribution of, 20; editorial, 18, 89, 231, 243; and emergent scholars, 17, 19; history, 233; library, 120; of print, 245; physical, 304; print culture, 233; restorative, 5; subaltern, 17; as textual fluidity, 91; and textuality, 244, 245 Lacan, Jacques, 274, 284n5, 320 Ladies’ Home Journal, 59n8 Laird, R.G., 27n1 Lamonde, Yvan, 123 Large, David, 188 Larsen, Ronald L., 75, 77 The Last Address (Lowry), 186, 188, 189, 201n2, 202n3 Lastra, James, 71 Latham, Sean, 14, 15, 22 Laurier Poetry Series, 250, 253, 255–6, 261 Lawrence, D.H., 283n2, 339, 340 Layton, Irving, 10, 250, 251, 252, 253 Lecker, Robert, 253

Lefebvre, Henri, 307 Lenin, V.I., 125, 133 Lennox, John, 267 Lent, Vanessa, 17, 184 Lester, Gordon, 289, 296, 301 Let’s Murder Clytemnestra (Watson), 181 Lewis, Sinclair, 32 Lewis, Wyndham, 174 Liberator, 140 libraries, 6, 31, 33, 34, 37, 52, 57, 106, 282; author, 23, 120; Canadian, 251; classification systems, 63, 68; database, 222n5; digital, 31, 34, 57, 77, 83, 172; digital collection systems, 152; dispersed, 123; inaccessible, 120; international, 251; personal, 23, 120–36, 136n1; private, 123, 124; public, 123, 239; sublibraries, 127, 134 Library and Archives Canada (LAC), 63, 76, 109, 118n7, 168 Linked Modernisms, 14 The Little Review, 53, 140, 148, 149, 325n6 Livesay, Dorothy, 133, 222n8, 233, 252 , 317, 321 Lochhead, Douglas, 307, 323 Lodge, David, 338, 342, 349 London, UK, 196, 198, 200, 204, 205, 211, 216, 285, 294, 310, 335, 338 Longmans, Green, 336 Los Angeles, 187 The Lost Weekend (Jackson), 199 Lower Canada College, 334 Lowry, Malcolm, 7, 24, 186–200, 200–3nn1–6 Lowry, Margerie, 187 Lowther, Pat, 121, 124, 135 Lowther, Roy, 124

Index 397  Loy, Mina, 152, 153 Lucas, Alec, 322 Lunar Caustic (Lowry), 186, 201n2, 202n3 Lyon, Janet, 152–3, 227–8, 231 Macbeth, Madge [pseud. Gilbert Knox], 308 MacKaye, Percy, 43–4, 48, 51 MacKinnon, Joseph, 184 MacLean, Gerald, 243 MacLeish, Archibald, 236 MacLennan, Frances, 335–6 MacLennan, Hugh, 24, 327–49 MacLulich, T.D., 330 MacLure, Miller, 323 Macmillan of Canada, 100 The Maids (Genet), 199 The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada (Dudek and Gnarowski), 4 Málaga, Spain, 124 Malone, Tyler, 125 Mandel, Eli, 251, 254–5, 260–2 Manet, Edouard, 338 Manguel, Alberto, 249, 253 Manifesto of Modernist Digital Humanities (Christie, Pilsch, Ross, and Tanagawa), 18 Mann, Thomas, 190 Manovich, Lev, 11, 12, 27n2, 70–3, 84 Man Should Rejoice (MacLennan), 328–30, 334–7, 340, 344, 346–9 manuscripts, 49, 53, 55, 87, 91, 92, 94, 95, 99, 102, 107, 109, 111, 112, 115, 116, 117, 118, 118n6, 118–19n8, 123, 140–1, 144, 165, 167, 171, 173, 178, 179, 186, 187, 188, 189, 193, 201n2, 202n4, 203n8, 206, 208, 211, 214, 220, 221, 223n6, 224n30, 234, 238, 242, 245n4, 254, 258, 282, 287,

288, 289–90, 300, 301, 338. See also typescripts Marcotte, Sophie, 15 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 11 Maritime Rights Movement, 318 Maritimes, 308, 309, 316, 318–19, 324n1 Markson, David, 202n3 Marlowe, Christopher, 192, 280 Marriott, Anne, 321–2 Marx, Karl, 132, 227 Marxism, 130, 133, 330, 232, 240, 243, 330, 333 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 21 Masses, 349n5 Massey, Vincent, 64, 286, 287, 292 Mass on Cowback (Watson), 181 Matson, Harold, 189 Mau, Douglas, 4 Maurermeister Ihles Haus (Grove), 147 Mauriac Dyer, Nathalie, 107 May, Robert G., 131, 132 McCaffery, Steve, 280 McCarthy, Patrick A., 24, 186 McClelland and Stewart, 129, 163, 254, 260, 348 McGann, Jerome, 9, 32, 40, 87–91, 93, 95, 96, 106, 167, 177, 180, 185n2, 242, 243, 250, 259, 260, 280, 282, 283 McGillivray, Mary B., 325n4 The McGill Movement (Stevens), 130 McGill University, 118n3, 120, 125, 128, 326n10, 329, 339, 340, 341, 349n6 McGregor, Hannah, 184, 245 McKay, Ian, 309 McKenzie, D.F., 40, 291, 304–5 McKenzie, Stephanie, 250, 261, 263 McLuhan, Marshall, 163, 171, 181, 182, 183, 184n2, 185n10, 235

398 Index McNaught, Kenneth, 133, 134 media, 12, 17, 19, 33, 34, 176, 177, 180, 284n4; digital, 7, 11, 12, 22, 33, 53, 72, 84n3, 251; ecology, 58n4; graphic, 231; hybridized, 22; hypermedia, 9, 249, 250, 251; multimedia, 78, 88, 153, 177, 291, 298; new, 6, 11–12, 13, 14, 15, 22, 23, 58n2, 70–2, 84n3, 181; news, 281; old, 6, 15, 181; print, 7, 33; serial, 55 Media Laboratory (MIT), 21 mediation, 6, 11, 15, 23, 51, 88, 231; editorial, 5, 89 Meighen, Arthur, 287 Melville, Herman, 90, 91, 192, 193, 194 memory, 64, 83, 115, 128, 199, 209, 210, 211, 215, 218, 324n1; commemoration, 5, 16, 23, 289, 308, 322; cultural, 307; institutional, 73, 172; literary, 108; public, 267 metadata, 53, 54–5, 58n1, 61, 69, 70, 74, 140, 162, 169, 175, 177, 178, 179, 206, 221 Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS), 54 Mexico, 187 Miki, Roy, 230 Miller, Henry, 283 Milne, Heather, 18 Mitchell, Melanie, 59n11 Mitre, 219, 220 Moby Dick (Melville), 193 modernism(s), 34, 44, 48, 50, 52, 57, 58, 63, 135, 159, 188, 208–9, 236, 277, 288, 294, 297, 308–9, 312, 313, 314, 315, 316, 317, 321, 322, 323, 325n3, 326n9, 328, 329, 330, 340,

341, 342, 344, 345, 347; aesthetic, 314, 317; and aestheticism, 317; alternative, 5, 27; American, 328; Anglo, 26; Anglo-American, 4, 17, 25, 26, 328, 331, 338–9; and anthropology, 294–5; avantgarde, 139; Canadian, 4–5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 13, 22, 23–4, 26–7, 62, 87, 98, 161, 167, 185n10, 208, 209, 218, 222n8, 232, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 256, 263, 268, 269, 271–2, 282, 284n4, 285, 289, 306n4, 309, 315, 317, 319, 326n12, 327, 329, 347–­8, 349n1, 349n2; canonical, 26, 328, 340, 347–8; and censorship, 267, 283n2; classconscious, 316; and computing, 8–11; cosmopolitan, 139; cultural, 26; digital, 11–16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 23, 159, 160, 318; dominant, 4; early, 312–13; editing and, 3–4, 6–11, 23, 24, 151, 153, 158–9, 160, 268, 282; emergent, 4, 16, 17, 18; ethnographic, 25; European, 328; experimental, 282, 328, 329, 330, 334, 335, 336, 337, 338, 338–9, 340, 341, 342, 346; feminist, 139, 152; geomodernisms, 26; global, 4; high, 4, 317, 328, 333, 349n2; impersonal, 337, 344; international, 25, 26, 329; late, 13, 16, 163; literary, 3, 5, 11, 26, 131, 139, 150, 189, 308, 309, 310, 317, 324; and magazines, 31–58, 58n3, 231–2; and manifestos, 228–30; marginal, 4; masculinist, 4, 319; mid-century, 4–5, 24, 98; nationalist-imperialist, 26; new, 4, 5, 6, 11, 12, 14, 23, 26, 27; and new media, 11–16; peripheral, 4;

Index 399  plural, 4; primitivist, 25–6, 285; and proletarianism, 24, 225, 316; regional, 24–5; rural, 323; socialist, 232; socio-historical, 341; theatrical, 25; transnational, 5, 26; urban, 314, 323; white, 26 Modernism Lab, 14 Modernist Commons, 14–15, 16, 22, 27nn3–4, 285, 287, 291 Modernist Journals Project (MJP), 14, 15–16, 31, 33, 52, 53–7, 58n1, 152 Modernist Journals Project Lab (MJP Lab), 15, 22 Modernist Magazines Project, 14 Modernist Networks, 14 Modernist Studies Association, 18 Modernist Versions Project, 14, 95 modernity, 269, 276, 309; colonial, 68; cultural, 4, 25, 26; data-driven, 57; ethnographic, 300; global, 26; imperialist, 25–6 modernization, 74 modern realism, 5, 232, 284n4 Modern Realism in English-Canadian Fiction (Hill), 5 Molotov, V.M., 132–3 Monkman, Leslie G., 231 La Montagne secrete (Roy), 117 Montreal, 12, 124, 129, 136n7, 318, 334 The Montreal Forties: Modernist Poetry in Transition (Trehearne), 5 Montreal modernists, 5, 25, 326n10 Montreal Star, 339 Moore, George, 188 Moore, Henry, 174 Moore, Marianne, 236 Moore, Michael, 210 La Mordida (Lowry), 186 More Joy in Heaven (Callaghan), 334 Morgan, Charles, 189

Morley, Patricia, 326n10 Morriss, Margaret, 184n4 Moscow, 335, 342 Moss, Laura, 250, 254, 255, 260, 263 Mota, Miguel, 188, 203n9 Moulton College, 171, 182 Mount, Nick, 308–9, 310 Mrs Dalloway (Woolf), 34, 189 Münsterburg, Hugo, 21 Nanaimo, BC, 181, 183 Naramata, BC, 25, 285, 288, 292, 301, 302 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), 58n1 naturalism, 316, 333, 341 Nazi Germany, 190, 328, 331 Negroponte, Nicholas, 21–2 Neuman, Shirley, 165, 171, 172, 179, 184 New, W.H., 7 The New Age, 54, 57 New Brunswick, 307, 309, 310, 313–24 New Canadian Library, 184n34, 255, 348 New Frontier, 349n5 Newlove, John, 121, 125, 126, 127, 129, 135, 136n4, 136n5, 136n8 Newlove, Susan, 127 New York City, 9, 140, 150, 187, 308–9, 310, 317, 325n5, 334, 335 New York Dada, 140 New York Public Library, 187, 198, 200–1n1, 201n2 Ngai, Sianne, 274, 275 Nicholson, Joseph R., 123, 127, 128, 136n1 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 211, 285, 288–9, 296–300, 306n4, 306n5

400 Index The 1940 Under the Volcano (Lowry), 200 Nobles, Charlotte, 184 No Man an Island (Whalley), 205, 209, 210, 211, 212, 216, 219, 220, 221, 223n19 No Other Country (Purdy), 129 North, Michael, 11, 27n2 North of Summer (Purdy), 128, 136n7 Norway, 189, 190, 196, 205 Nova Scotia, 213, 331, 334 Nowlan, Alden, 251, 253 Nowry, Laurence, 64–5 Oberon Press, 253 October Ferry to Gabriola (Lowry), 186, 198, 201n2 Odell, Jonathan, 320 Ogden, C.K., 192, 193 Ohmann, Richard, 58n3 Okanagan First Nation, 25 Omeka, 151–2 Ondaatje, Michael, 128 O’Neill, Patrick, 288, 289, 293, 296, 301, 305n1 One Muddy Hand (Birney), 253, 260, 261 On-to-Ottawa Trek, 237, 238–9 Open Content Alliance, 174 Open Country (Lecker), 253 Open Modernisms, 14 Ordered Computer Collation of Unprepared Literary Text (OCCULT), 9 Ordered Hierarchy of Content Objects (OHCO), 177 Orwell, George, 233 The Other Harmony (Mandel), 254, 261 Ott, Wilhelm, 9

Ottawa, 64, 65, 113, 125, 314 Ouspensky, Peter, 192, 198 Out of Place (Mandel), 254, 262 Ovenden, Richard, 58n2 Oxford University, 330 Oxford University Press, 80 Oxyrhynchus (MacLennan), 330 Pacey, Desmond, 98, 316, 317 Page, P.K., 10, 11, 168, 250, 251, 252, 256, 259, 317 Panic, 220 Paramount Pictures, 266 Paredes-Olea, Mariana, 184 Paris, 141, 165, 171, 173, 175, 182, 183, 184–5n5, 187, 330, 334, 345 Paterson, Janet, 8 Pauthier, Guilluame, 3, 4 Peacock, Gordon, 165 PennSound, 291 Perloff, Marjorie, 150, 156 Petite poule d’eau (Roy), 109, 117 Petty, George R., 9 Peyré, Yves, 127, 134 The Picture of Dorian Gray (Wilde), 53 Pilsch, Andrew, 18 Pittman, Al, 250, 251, 261 Pittsburgh, PA, 18, 334 plagiarism, 188, 189, 200 The Planetarium (Sarraute), 265, 279 Plays at the Iron Bridge, or, the Autobiography of Tom Horror (Neuman), 165 Ploetz, Else. See Elsa von FreytagLoringhoven Plötz, Elsa. See Elsa von FreytagLoringhoven Poems 1939–1944 (Whalley), 212, 219, 221 Poirier, Richard, 159

Index 401  Pollock, Zailig, 8, 9, 106n1, 168, 250, 252, 254, 256, 261, 263 Pomahac, Gertrude C., 185n8 Porcupine’s Quill, 255, 256 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce), 337, 364 post-human, 48 postmodernism, 73, 81, 229, 251, 309, 328, 348 Pound, Ezra, 3–4, 13, 44, 58, 125–6, 132, 147, 148, 156, 189, 208, 275, 277, 310–11, 312–13, 314, 315, 316–17, 325nn3–5, 325nn7–8, 326n12, 349n2 The Pound Era (Kenner), 4 Pratt, E.J., 8, 10, 11, 13, 213–14, 218, 250, 251, 252, 254, 313, 317, 326n11 The Precipice (MacLennan), 328, 343–4 pre-emergence, 18 pre-modern, 308, 310, 347 Preobrazhensky, E., 133 Pressman, Jessica, 11–12, 15, 27n2 Prewett, Frank, 251 Price, Kenneth M., 88, 106n1, 161–2, 180, 181 Princeton University, 329–30, 334 print-on-demand (POD), 180, 181 Profile, 220 program, 9, 10, 12, 15, 22, 37, 38, 40, 42, 49, 52, 53, 54 programming, 8, 9, 10, 12, 14, 34, 40, 42, 51, 52, 71, 75, 111 proofreading, 105, 177 proofs, 112, 117, 118–9n8 Proust, Marcel, 337, 339, 345, 349n2 Pulver, David, 211 Purdy, Al, 121, 125, 128–9, 136n2, 136n7, 250, 251, 259, 260

Quamen, Harvey, 15, 245, 245n3 Quarry, 219, 220 Quarry Press, 220 Quebec, 61, 108, 109, 110, 117, 128, 213, 223n19, 258, 308, 323 Queen’s Quarterly, 131, 220, 224n30 Queen’s University, 130, 136n6, 205, 207, 209, 222n8 Queen’s University Archives, 208, 220, 223n19 Queneau, Raymond, 35, 59n7 race, 17, 51, 86, 153, 284n3; racial bodies, 51; racial hierarchies, 304; racial identity, 243; racial minorities, 230; racial politics, 49; racial violence, 52; theory, 152 Ralph Gustafson: Selected Poems (Gustafson), 258, 260 Ramsay, Stephen, 75, 80, 175 Rascoe, Burton, 189, 200, 202n4 Ray, Man, 149 Read, Herbert, 215 Real Estate (Aikins), 288 realism, 24, 267, 308, 319, 328, 332, 337–8, 339, 341, 342, 345–6, 348, 349n2; anti-realism, 269, 277; literary, 268; mimetic, 278; modern, 232, 284n4; nineteenth-century, 328, 330, 340; psychological, 331; romantic, 341; social, 319, 333, 334, 335, 344; socialist, 244; Victorian, 327 Reaney, James, 251, 256, 323 redface, 290, 291 Redwine, Gabriela, 58n2 Reed, David, 58n3 Regina, SK, 237 Relief Camp Strikers’ Committee, 234, 237–40

402 Index remediation, 11, 15–16, 22–3, 33, 34, 57, 63, 90, 101, 103, 106n1, 180, 181 Reynolds, Reginald, 233 Ricard, François, 112–15, 118nn3–4 Richards, I.A., 192, 193 Richler, Mordecai, 121, 124 Rico, Francisco, 259, 260 Rifkind, Candida, 5, 232–3 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 192, 203n6 Rivière sans repos (Roy), 109, 117 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 278 Roberts, Charles G.D., 307, 309, 313–16, 317, 321, 323, 324n1, 325n3 Robinson, Edwin Arlington, 199 Robins Sharpe, Emily, 5 Romaniuk, Mary-Jo, 184 Rosenblatt, Joe, 126 Ross, Malcolm, 222n8, 322 Ross, Shawna, 18 Ross, Sinclair, 121, 124, Rossetti Archive, 88–9, 93 Rotundo, Andrea, 123 Route d’Altamont (Roy), 117, 119n10 Roy, Gabrielle, 107–18 Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), 238 Rudas, L., 133 Rue Deschambault (Roy), 111, 117, 119n10 Ryan, Oscar, 246n5 Ryerson Chapbook Series, 255 Ryerson Press, 220 Saint-Martin, Lori, 118n5 Sanders, Abel. See Ezra Pound Sandwell, B.K., 266–7, 273 Santayana, George, 215, 312, 325n6 Sapir, Edward, 82, 294 Sarraute, Nathalie, 265, 268, 276, 279–80

Saturday Night, 266, 321 Savoie, Donald, 318 Schnitzler, Arthur, 192 Scholes, Robert, 34, 38, 59n10 Scobie, Stephen, 13 Scotchman’s Return and Other Essays (MacLennan), 336 Scott, F.R., 23, 120, 121, 125, 126–35, 136nn6–9, 222n8, 250, 254, 260, 313 Scott, Marian, 128 Scott, Peter Dale, 128 Scott, Robert Ian, 12–13 Scribner’s Magazine, 31, 32, 34–52, 54–5, 58n6 scripton, 42, 44, 48, 49, 51, 53, 54, 57 Second World War, 169, 187, 262 Section 98 of the Criminal Code of Canada, 240 Selected Poems of Alden Nowlan (Nowlan), 253 Shackleton, Mark, 301 Shadbolt, Jack, 174 Shakespeare, William, 286, 288, 296 Shaw, George Bernard, 155, 297 Shillingsburg, Peter L., 32, 85, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93 The Ship Sails On (Grieg), 188 The ship’s voyage from Kristiania (Erikson), 189 Singer, Andrew, 9 Sitwell, Edith, 215 Skei, Hans H., 49 Skibet gaar videre. See The Ship Sails On (Grieg) Skibets reise fra Kristiania. See The ship’s voyage from Kristiania (Erikson) The Sleepwalkers (Broch), 190 Smith, A.E., 240

Index 403  Smith, A.J.M., 10, 98–9, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 124, 128, 130, 131, 234, 251, 272, 314, 315, 316, 321 Smith, Kay, 317, 321 Smith, Neil, 309, 324n2 Smith, Paul, 158 Smith, Sidonie, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158–9 Smitka, Kristine, 184, 245 Smyth, Nigel Warington, 222n3 So All Their Praises (MacLennan), 328–35, 337, 339–40, 346–8 socialism, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 232, 276, 297, 298, 317–18, 334 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), viii, 118n3, 185n4, 305, 349n1 Socken, Paul, 118n5 software, 12, 93; design, 12; open source, 6; optical character recognition, 54, 177; programming, 8 Solecki, Sam, 136n2, 250, 260, 261, 263 Sorfleet, John Robert, 312 The Sorrowful Canadians and Other Poems/Les Malheureux (Watson), 181 The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner), 340 Soviet Union (USSR), 132, 328 Sowerby, E.M., 123 Spettigue, Douglas O., 143, 144, 159, 160n9 Staines, David, 330 Stalin, Joseph, 125, 133 Stallybrass, Peter, 74 Stauffer, Andrew, 121, 123 Stein, Gertrude, 21, 330 Stevens, Peter, 12–13, 130 Stevens, Wallace, 315, 325n4

Stevenson, Lionel, 234 Stock, Charles, 12 Stock, Noel, 311 St Onge, Anna, 185n8 Stubbs, Andrew, 254, 261 Studio Theatre, 163, 165, 170, 171, 182, 235 Such Is My Beloved (Callaghan), 334 Surette, Leon, 309–10, 312 surrealism, 269, 328 Sutherland, John, 315–16, 317, 321 Swinging the Maelstrom (Lowry), 186, 188, 199, 202n3 symbolism, 216, 310, 325n5, 338, 342 Symons, Arthur, 310, 311, 312, 325n5 The Tale of the Love and Death of Cornet Christopher Rilke (Rilke), 192 Tanagawa, Katie, 19 Tanselle, G. Thomas, 193 Taylor, A.J.P., 244 Temps qui m’a manqué (Roy), 108, 110–12, 117 Tender Is the Night (Fitzgerald), 186–7 Tender Is the Night, filmscript (Lowry), 186–7 ten Holder, Clemens, 202n3 Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), 55–6, 94, 111, 119n12, 152, 162, 170, 175, 176, 177, 178, 180 TextGrid Virtual Research Environment in the Humanities, 9–10 texton, 42, 43, 44, 48, 49, 51, 53, 54, 55–6 textual scholarship, 3, 7–8 They Have Bodies: A Realistic Novel in Eleven Chapters and Three Acts (Allen), 265–83

404 Index They Shall Inherit the Earth (Callaghan), 334 Thirty and Three (MacLennan), 329 Thiruvathukal, George K., 90 Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto, 136n8 Thompson, David, 126 Thompson, John B., 185n13 Through the Looking-Glass (Carroll), 202n4 Tierney, Frank M., 349n3 Tiessen, Paul, 163, 184n2, 185n10, 188, 203n9, 235 Timney, Meagan, 184 Titans of Literature (Rascoe), 202n4 Tolstoy, Leo, 215, 338, 341, 342, 343, 349n2 Toronto, 98, 163, 168, 171, 172, 179, 182, 183, 208, 265, 266, 273, 275, 277, 281, 285, 287, 293, 300, 301, 318 Toronto Daily Star, 265 To the Lighthouse (Woolf), 90 Toynbee, Arnold, 341 The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (Marlowe), 192 transatlantic review, 140 transition, 140, 141, 143 Trehearne, Brian, 5, 270, 314, 316 Tremblay, Tony, 24 Trent University, 106, 124 Ts’msyan, 25, 63, 66 Tübingen System of Text Processing (TUSTEP), 9–10 Twain, Mark, 123 Two Solitudes (MacLennan), 328, 331, 337–8, 346 Tyler, Christopher, Major General, 210 typescripts, 67, 94, 95, 99, 100, 103, 109, 112, 113–15, 117, 171,

187, 189, 191, 192, 193, 195, 197, 200, 200–1n1, 201n2, 202n3, 206, 208, 211, 214, 220, 221, 223n16, 223n19, 224n30, 238, 329. See also manuscripts Tzara, Tristan, 13, 59n7, 153 UbuWeb, 291 Ultramarine (Lowry), 186, 187, 188–9, 199 Ulysses (Joyce), 9, 10, 31, 32, 34, 53, 189, 283n2, 332, 336–7, 345 Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), 118n3 Universities of Texas, 50 University of Alberta, 161, 163, 165, 169, 171, 172, 181, 182, 183, 234, 235, 245 University of Alberta Libraries (UAL), 168, 186, 169, 172, 174, 178, 184 University of Alberta Press (UAP), 180, 185n14 University of British Columbia, 165, 174, 188, 198, 201n2 University of Manitoba, 126 University of Maryland, 141, 160n2, 160n5 University of Miami, 186 University of North Carolina, 50 University of Otago, 186, 188 University of Ottawa Press, 200, 285, 349n1 University of Saskatchewan, 12 University of Toronto, 125, 163, 220, 237, 305, 306n2, 317 University of Tübingen, 9 University of Tulsa, 14, 58n1 University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, 152

Index 405  Un jardin au bout du monde (Roy), 117 Unreal Country: Modernity in the Canadian Novel in English (Willmott), 5, 284n4, 324n2 Unsworth, John, 79 Validity in Interpretation (Hirsch), 194 Vancouver, 124, 171, 182, 187 van Orden, Nick, 184 variant(s), 7, 49, 53, 91, 92, 99, 104, 107, 110, 111, 115, 119n16, 234, 287, 293; production, 290, 301; stagings, 287; textual, 9, 11, 85, 150, 288–90; variant versions, 90, 97, 103. See also versions versioning, 139, 150 Versioning Machine, 92 versions, 90, 95–6, 111, 141–2, 150, 155, 160n9, 254, 255, 260; alternate, 219; authorial, 99; authoritative, 305; base, 91, 115; cleaned, 159; digital, 106n1, 116; digital facsimile, 94, 95; diplomatic, 92; early, 188, 200, 214; final, 49; finalized, 115; integral, 111; I-witness, 151; manuscript, 287; multiple, 85, 91, 100–4, 111–12, 117, 151, 152, 220, 285, 287, 289–90; original, 117; performance, 305; productions as, 292; reliable, 254; revised, 49; revision site, 91; retyped, 201n2; schema-agnostic, 170; script, 297; short, 202n3; static, 85; streamlined, 110, 152; textual, 151; transcribed, 92; variant. See variant(s) Victoria University Archives (Toronto), 208 Viscomi, Joseph, 88

Walkowitz, Rebecca, 4 Walt Whitman Archive, 88, 172, 181 War and Peace (Tolstoy), 341, 342, 343 Ware, Martin, 250, 261, 263 Ware, Tracy, 324n1 Waste Heritage (Baird), 334 The Waste Land (Eliot), 34, 189, 317 The Watch That Ends the Night (MacLennan), 328 Watson, Sheila, 161–83 Watson, Wilfred, 161–83, 234–7, 245–6n4 Waugh, Evelyn, 339, 345 Webb, Peter, 17, 24 Weingarten, J.A., 17, 23 Weinrich, Peter, 233, 237–8, 239 WestGrid, 174 Whalen, Terry, 326n9 Whalley, Elizabeth, 210 Whalley, George, 16, 221 Whitaker, Reg, 238 Whiteman, Bruce, 128, 129–30, 134, 135, 136n6, 258 White Pelican, 170, 183 Wider Boundaries of Daring: The Modernist Impulse in Canadian Women’s Poetry (Brandt and Godard), 5 Wiesenthal, Christina, 124 Wilde, Oscar, 53, 188, 280 A Wild Peculiar Joy (Layton), 253 Wilfrid Laurier University, 188 Wilkinson, Anne, 87, 93–4, 96–105, 128, 251, 321 Williams, Raymond, 18, 24, 225–6, 227, 228, 229, 233 Williams, William Carlos, 142–3, 147–8, 155, 156, 300, 312 Williams, William Proctor, 108, 119n9

406 Index Willmott, Glenn, 5, 26, 284n4, 308, 309, 324n2 Winkiel, Laura, 26, 151, 152, 153 Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious (Freud), 199 witnesses, 92, 151, 153; documentary, 91; I-witnesses, 151, 152, 153. See also versions Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 221 The Woman’s Doctor (Allen), 268, 277, 283–4n3 Woodcock, George, 329 Woolf, Virginia, 90, 139, 189, 349n2 Woolf Online, 90–1

Worthy, R.M., 12 Wright, Kailin, 17, 25 Wulfman, Clifford, 34, 38, 59n10 XML. See Extensible Markup Language Yardbird Suite (Edmonton), 170, 235 Yates, Norman, 174 Yes, 220 Zichy, Francis, 328 Zola, Émile, 199