Downtown Canada: Writing Canadian Cities 9781442674059

Citation preview

DOWNTOWN CANADA: WRITING CANADIAN CITIES

The vast majority of Canadians live in cities yet, for the most part, discussions of Canadian literature have failed to engage actively with the country’s urban experience. Canada’s prevalent myths continue to be about nordicity and the wilderness, and, stereotypically, its literature is often perceived as being about small towns, rural areas, and ‘roughing it in the bush.’ Downtown Canada is a collection of essays that addresses Canada as an urban place. The contributors focus their attention on the writing of Canada’s cities – including Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, and Halifax – and call attention to the centrality of the city in Canadian literature. They examine how characters are affected by the urban experience in works by authors as diverse as the country itself: Hugh MacLennan, Jovette Marchessault, Michael Ondaatje, Austin Clarke, and Gerald Lynch, to name just a few. Editors Justin D. Edwards and Douglas Ivison have brought together an esteemed group of international Canadian literary scholars. Together they have created a book that is timely and unique, questioning conventional assumptions about Canadian literature, and Canadian culture more generally. justin d. edwards is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Copenhagen. douglas ivison is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Lakehead University.

This page intentionally left blank

Downtown Canada Writing Canadian Cities

Edited by Justin D. Edwards and Douglas Ivison

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com © University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2005 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-8720-5 (cloth) ISBN 0-8020-8668-3 (paper)

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Downtown Canada : writing Canadian cities / edited by Justin D. Edwards and Douglas Ivison. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-8020-8720-5 (bound) ISBN 0-8020-8668-3 (pbk.) 1. Canadian fiction – 20th century – History and criticism. 2. City and town life in literature. 3. Canadian literature – 20th century – History and criticism. 4. Literature and society – Canada. I. Edwards, Justin D., 1970– II. Ivison, Douglas, 1968– PS8101.C55D69 2005

C8139.5409321732

C2005-901385-0

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction: Writing Canadian Cities 3 douglas ivison and justin d. edwards ‘An Ordered Absence’: Defeatured Topologies in Canadian Literature 14 richard cavell ‘Orient Dreams’: Urbanity and the Post-Confederation Literary Culture of Ottawa 32 steven artelle Post-colonial Historicity: Halifax, Region, and Empire in Barometer Rising and The Nymph and the Lamp 50 christopher j. armstrong La ville en vol/City in Flight: Tracing Lesbian E-Motion through Jovette Marchessault’s Comme un enfant de la terre 65 barbara godard Cities and Classrooms, Bodies and Texts: Notes towards a Resident Reading (and Teaching) of Vancouver Writing 78 peter dickinson

vi

Contents

Lost in the City: The Montreal Novels of Régine Robin and Robert Majzels 104 domenic beneventi Building and Living the Immigrant City: Michael Ondaatje’s and Austin Clarke’s Toronto 122 batia boe stolar Divided Cities, Divided Selves: Portraits of the Artist as Ambivalent Urban Hipster 142 lisa salem-wiseman Rewriting White Flight: Suburbia in Gerald Lynch’s Troutstream and Joan Barfoot’s Dancing in the Dark 166 paul milton Duelling and Dwelling in Toronto and London: Transnational Urbanism in Catherine Bush’s The Rules of Engagement 183 john clement ball Epilogue 197 justin d. edwards and douglas ivison

Works Cited

209

Contributors

225

Acknowledgments

This collection had its genesis in a panel organized by Douglas Ivison for the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English at the 2001 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences in Quebec City. Our thanks go out to the panel participants – John Clement Ball, Ann Martin, Paul Milton, and Andrew Richardson – and the audience; without the enthusiasm of both participants and audience members, this project would have gone no further. The idea for Downtown Canada originated in a discussion at the ACCUTE wine and cheese reception during that same conference. Downtown Canada has been long in the making. Thus, we would like to begin by thanking everyone involved for their patience and commitment to the project. The anonymous readers for the University of Toronto Press provided invaluable criticism and suggestions, including the reference to Sesame Park. Siobhan McMenemy of the press was all that anyone could ask an editor to be – committed, helpful, and patient. We also wish to thank the Danish Association of Canadian Studies for providing a grant toward the publication of this book. As well, we would like to thank the English departments at the University of Copenhagen, University of Western Ontario, Memorial University of Newfoundland, and Lakehead University for the intellectual support and encouragement they have provided for this project and our other work. Douglas Ivison was the recipient of a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada when much of the initial work on this project was done. For their diligence and persistence, and especially for the clarity and intelligence

viii

Acknowledgments

of their insights, we are most grateful to the authors of the essays contained herein; finally, this volume is theirs. A version of John Clement Ball’s chapter appears in his book Imagining London: Postcolonial Fiction and the Transnational Metropolis (Toronto, 2004).

DOWNTOWN CANADA

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction: Writing Canadian Cities douglas ivison and justin d. edwards

I recall novels and poems fed to us in high school which involved lonely settlers and their wives, the difficulties in building a log cabin, and the eventual freezing to death of the protagonist. This, I believed throughout my schoolboy career, was the single plot and full extent of Canadian Literature. Andrew Pyper, Lost Girls

Canada is an urban country. Indeed, by some measures Canada is one of the most urban countries on earth, with the vast majority of its population concentrated in a handful of cities. This fact has finally come to be recognized over the past few years. In fact, it has become commonplace to assert (however uncritically) that 80 per cent of Canadians live in cities, as Maclean’s did on its 3 June 2002 cover in describing its story ‘Saving Our Cities.’ That such a claim has recently become a truism tells us much about the still unsettled place of the city in Canadian culture and society. Although it does recognize that Canada is largely urban, and increasingly so, the sense of discovery, and loss, that accompanies such claims (falsely) suggests that this is a new and radical shift in Canadian demographic patterns. Moreover, the imprecision with which terms such as ‘urban’ and ‘city’ are used reflects a failure to truly comprehend and engage with the urban. In other words, the looseness with which these terms are used betrays an ignorance about the nature of cities and urbanism as a way of life. The creation of the City of Kawartha Lakes, an agglomeration of semi-rural towns and villages, for instance, is in fact, it might be argued, a denigration of the urban, reflective of the disdain and indifference with which the city and

4 Douglas Ivison and Justin D. Edwards

the urban continue to be treated in the Canadian political system and cultural imaginary. Rather than acknowledging Canada’s status as an urban society, then, the repetition of the 80 per cent truism reveals, in fact, that the city is not yet truly accepted as Canadian. One of the primary goals of this collection, then, is to assert the centrality of the city and the urban within the Canadian spatial and cultural imaginaries, to help us see the city as a place of Canadian society and culture, including its literature. Critics of Canadian literature and culture have long been obsessed with representations of a Canadian ‘sense of place.’ Ever since Northrop Frye posed his metaphysical question ‘where is here?’ in his conclusion to the Literary History of Canada, Canadian cultural critics have tried to map out Canada’s terrain and chart a stable ground upon which we, as Canadians, can articulate a fixed identity. One source for developing this cartography has, of course, been Canadian writing; after all, Margaret Atwood famously wrote in Survival that ‘Canada is an unknown territory for the people who live in it,’ and ‘to know ourselves, we must know our own literature’ (17–18). Recent work, though, has shown that using Canadian literature to connect a ‘sense of place’ to a ‘sense of self’ is not an easy project. W.H. New’s Land Sliding: Imagining Space, Presence, and Power in Canadian Writing, for instance, resists the notion that a core Canadian identity can be found by reading the textual landscape. His critical shift highlights the fragmentations of subjectivity and, instead, reads the borders of power that define marginality and centrality within the nation. Likewise, Graham Huggan’s Territorial Disputes: Maps and Mapping Strategies in Contemporary Canadian and Australian Fiction constructs a comparative framework through which we can view representations of space as part of the contested territories found in invadersettler colonies. He sees the map ‘as the uncertain representation of two post-colonial societies [Canada and Australia] in a state of flux, transition, dispute.’ The resultant provisionality, he argues, ‘renders maps, and the territories they claim to represent, incomplete, indeterminate, and insecure’ (xvi). This spatial insecurity, Huggan suggests, has been claimed and made productive by contemporary Canadian writers, who ‘seem less interested in evoking a sense of place than in expressing a kind of placelessness through which the notion of a fixed location, and the corresponding possibility of a fixed identity, are resisted’ (56). Stephen Henighan, however, has suggested in When Words Deny the World: The Reshaping of Canadian Writing that this placelessness, what he calls ‘noname self-effacement,’ in fact inhibits Canadian writing, arguing that

Introduction

5

‘the crucial obstacle to the extension of a significant novelistic tradition in Canada today lies in our inability to pull our own society into focus. In the absence of a firm engagement with our history, language, realities and myths, we cannot set sail on the tides of the globalized planet’ (207). Contrary to what Henighan might imply, though, the spatial theory informing the work of New and Huggan allows us to escape the dead end of the place-based criticism often associated with the cultural nationalist critics of the 1960s and 1970s while insisting upon the specificities of Canadian spatial experiences. As Warley, Ball, and Viau suggest in their introduction to a special issue of Studies in Canadian Literature entitled Writing Canadian Space, such work allows us to focus on ‘the complexities of Canadian representations of spaces and our different relations to them’ (4). They note that recent developments in spatial theory, gender studies, postcolonial theory, and cultural geography have opened up new spaces from which the intersections of language and space can be approached. Indeed, the work of Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault, Doreen Massey, Paul Carter, Edward W. Soja, Engin Isin, and Rob Shields, among others, has engendered new ways of seeing spatialization and the textual practices that contribute to an understanding of positionality and the locatedness of subjectivity. In particular, Lefebvre’s The Production of Space asserts the centrality of spatiality and persuasively argues that space is produced, that it is the product of a particular series of social and economic relations. As he writes, ‘every society ... produces a space, its own space’ (31). Lefebvre emphasizes that every society is simultaneously productive of and produced by a particular space and series of spatial practices, and vice versa. The result is that, as Soja points out in Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions, ‘we are becoming consciously aware of ourselves as intrinsically spatial beings, continuously engaged in the collective activity of producing spaces and places, territories and regions, environments and habitats ... On the one hand, our actions and thoughts shape the spaces around us, but at the same time the larger collectively or socially produced spaces and places within which we live also shape our actions and thoughts in ways that we are only beginning to understand’ (6). Space, then, at least for those of us living in early-twenty-first century Canada, is not simply a natural environment against which we struggle or onto which we impose ourselves, but is rather something that we play an active role in producing and shaping. Thus, many Canadian writers, suggests Huggan, demonstrate ‘an acceptance not merely of

6 Douglas Ivison and Justin D. Edwards

the immensity, but also of the malleability of space, of its potential for abstract reorganization’ (Territorial 57). Such an awareness, brought to the study of Canadian writing, has inspired some of us to think differently about Canadian literature and representations of Canadian space. No longer are we content to engage in thematic studies which privilege the wilderness, rural areas, or the small town as the place upon which Canadian identity is constructed. Instead we seek to bridge the gap that exists between the lived experiences of most Canadians, who overwhelmingly live in urban environments, and the public mythology of Canada and critical production on Canadian literature and culture, which has, until recently, largely focused on rural and wilderness spaces and small towns. We seek to shift the focus to that most placeless of places, the city. In doing so, contradictorily, we can partially reclaim a sense of the placeness of Canadian writing, which has been in part negated as a result of our disavowal of thematic criticism, through an engagement with the material reality of Canada’s urban spatiality and its incorporation in what Manuel Castells describes in The Informational City as the global ‘space of flows.’ In fact, our attention to cities and the urban can be read, in part, as a means of reasserting the local in an increasingly globalized Canadian literature. For, as Castells argues, unless we can ‘reconstruct the social meaning of localities within the space of flows, our societies will fracture into non-communicative segments whose reciprocal alienation will lead to destructive violence and to a process of historical decline’ (353). The city is simultaneously the product of regional, national, and global factors, as Anthony D. King suggests in Global Cities (153), and as such provides us with the grounds for a literature and a criticism that can engage with the global without losing sight of the local. Canada is an urban country, yet this fact has often been elided from our public discourse, our national mythologies, and critical discussions about Canadian literature and culture. In his essay ‘No Name Is My Name,’ for instance, Robert Kroetsch argues that the ‘rural or smalltown setting somehow remains the basic place of Canadian fiction’ (46). More recently, in the introduction to a series of articles on Canadian small towns in the Globe and Mail, John Gray suggests that ‘something lingers in the national consciousness; something that suggests we are reluctant and unwilling prisoners in the dominions of asphalt and brick that are urban life. In some measure, the land of our dreams are the villages and towns that defined the limits of living for our parents or grandparents or even great-grandparents.’ Despite the mass migration

Introduction

7

of Canadians from the countryside to the city in the last century, Gray argues, ‘the myth of the small town and its virtues remains’ (F2). Similarly, critics such as John Ralston Saul and Ian Angus continue to identify the wilderness and Canada’s ultimate site of wilderness, the North, as being at the heart of the Canadian cultural imaginary, and thus as being a crucial determinant in the production of Canadian identity. As Angus writes in A Border Within: National Identity, Cultural Plurality, and Wilderness, ‘in English Canada our primal is the wilderness’ (125). For his part, Saul insists in Reflections of a Siamese Twin: Canada at the End of the Twentieth Century that Canada is defined by its nordicity (41–2). Even Andrew Pyper, vocal in his denunciations of Canadian literature’s obsession with the wilderness, as is suggested by his narrator’s comment quoted above in the epigraph, reinscribes the wilderness and the ‘north’ as being central to Canadian identity, for his narrator in his novel Lost Girls, a self-absorbed, venal ‘city slicker,’ is only able to come to terms with his past and his self in a small town in the ‘wilderness’ to the north of Toronto. This privileging of the wilderness and nordicity as defining characteristics of Canadian identity not only fails to recognize the lived experiences of the vast majority of Canadians, but also distances Canadian readers from their literature. In a December 2002 Globe and Mail column, ‘Dear [Non-]Reader, It Might Not Be Your Fault,’ Russell Smith attempts to explain why ‘we’ don’t read fiction any more, arguing that it is due to Canadian writers’ failure to fully engage with the urban lives of Canadians such as him. After describing the events surrounding the bombing of a neighbourhood restaurant, Smith notes that the scene and the events surrounding it are ‘totally Canadian’ and then asks, ‘State, quickly, which Canadian novelist would be most likely to take on this milieu? Quick, now. Name a name. I cannot think of one who would be even interested in weaving fiction out of this event-filled environment,’ adding parenthetically, with typical modesty, ‘Except me, of course.’ Smith goes on to claim that more readers would want to read about this milieu than ‘the brilliant but somewhat turgid ruminations on family, loss and memory that crowd our bestseller lists.’ He continues: ‘The lag, this disconnect, between the real and the fictitious baffles me. I can’t explain it – except perhaps by accusing Canadian writers of being so lofty-minded that they are unwilling to sully their hands with contact with the corrupt and superficial City. There is research here that would take us away from our long walks and our melancholic folk music.’ ‘I think this disconnect,’ he adds, ‘explains why we don’t read much any

8 Douglas Ivison and Justin D. Edwards

more’ (R2). This is clearly hyperbole, and we might question any number of Smith’s suppositions and generalizations, but his claim that there is a disconnect between Canadian writing and Canadian lives is frequently expressed and is suggestive of the consequences of failing to engage with the urban in Canadian writing. If Canadians become alienated from their literature, then where are we to turn for stories that reflect our increasingly urbanized engagement with each other and with the world? As Henighan suggests, ‘the new Canada is being forged in our multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic cities. But where are these big, synthesizing cities’ big, synthesizing fictions? We have an immigrant novel, a minority novel, but, as yet, little in the way of Montreal, Toronto, or Vancouver novels’ (208). According to critics like Henighan and Smith, the ‘debilitation of the urban novel’ (Henighan 208) will lead to the debilitation of Canadian literature itself, and to Canadian readers’ engagement with that literature. But, as we hope Downtown Canada illustrates, the situation is not as dire as some would suggest. There is a tradition of urban writing within Canadian literature, a tradition that requires more attention if the perception of Canadian literature is to change, if Canadian literature is to seem more relevant to those of us living and reading in cities. A focus on Canadian literature’s engagement with the urban is now all the more important, for in recent years there has been an increasingly visible ‘turn to the city’ in public and critical discourse in and about Canada. Like Hal Niedzviecki, in his introduction to the anthology Concrete Forest: The New Fiction of Urban Canada, many Canadians have come to ‘see the new Canada, country of cities’ (xi). While such a claim ignores the fact that Canada has long been a primarily urban society, it does articulate the increasing awareness of the centrality of the city and the urban experience in Canadian life. As Mary Janigan put it in a June 2002 Maclean’s cover story, ‘Cities are suddenly hot. After three decades of neglect and decline, Canadians are belatedly realizing that their wealth hinges on the health of their urban centres’ (22). In fact, in the Liberal leadership machinations of the summer of 2002, government policy towards cities became a prime battleground, with much talk of a ‘new deal for cities’ by then-leadership candidate Paul Martin and others. During this period both the Globe and Mail and the National Post published an extensive number of editorials and opinion pieces on the state of Canada’s cities, and figures such as Anne Golden, head of the Conference Board of Canada, cited the importance of Canada’s cities as breeding grounds for the innovation necessary to allow Canada

Introduction

9

to compete in the global marketplace (FP9). Rather than dissipating, such talk has continued to increase, with politicians – municipal, provincial, and federal – competing to offer plans for how to improve the lot of Canada’s cities. In fact, the place of cities within Canada and its political and economic structures has increasingly become identified as one of the most crucial political issues facing Canadian society, as the Economist, for one, has suggested (13). The increased prominence of Canada’s cities within the political sphere, which seems likely to become a more pressing concern as Canada’s population further consolidates into a small number of fast-growing urban areas (Norris and Bryant 11), is placing an increasing strain on Canada’s constitutional and fiscal structures. As Jon Caulfield suggests, as a result the Canadian ‘urban system [is] on the verge of crisis’ (10). Canadian literature, and critical writing on that literature, can and should be a space in which the implications of the perceived changes resulting from this ‘turn to the city’ are worked through and Canada’s urban crises can be contextualized, examined, and even resolved. Moreover, we need to foreground the role that the city has long played in the production of Canadian literature, a role that is usually elided in Canadian criticism. In his wide-ranging study The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History, Richard Lehan argues for the centrality of the city in the Western cultural tradition. ‘Urbanism,’ he claims, ‘is at the very heart of Western culture’ (3). Moreover, Lehan’s book illustrates the deep and enduring series of interactions between the city and literature in European and American literatures, demonstrating that ‘as literature gave imaginative reality to the city, urban changes in turn helped transform the literary text’ (xv). Literature, then, has contributed to and shaped the production of the city, just as the city has contributed to and shaped the production of literature. In fact, throughout its history the city has been not only a place of capital production and accumulation, but, as Soja and others have shown, a place of technological, societal, cultural, and artistic innovation. For Soja, what he describes as the city’s ‘synekism,’ or ‘the stimulus of urban agglomeration’ (3), is its defining feature, and is the basis for the city’s contributions to societal development, and the city’s dynamism and expansionism. In Soja’s account, the city has been, and continues to be, a synekistic breeding ground for many of the economic, technological, and cultural practices that have defined, transformed, and produced the societies of the ‘developed’ world, and, in fact, have been instrumental in determining the development of most, if not all, of the

10 Douglas Ivison and Justin D. Edwards

world. As Soja and others have argued, the ascendancy of the city and urbanism as a way of life has led and is leading to the incorporation of ever-vaster swathes of land, and ever-larger populations, into urban spatiality. Guy Debord, for instance, long ago argued in Society of the Spectacle that through urbanism ‘capitalism can and must now remake the totality of space into its own setting’ (169; italics his). The effects of the city are felt far beyond its borders, for the city’s economic and cultural power incorporates much that might be understood as rural or wilderness. ‘Cityspace,’ Soja insists in Postmetropolis, is ‘a specific geography that ... tends to be dynamic and expansive in its territorial domain. It will always contain inhabited or, for that matter, uninhabited or wilderness areas that do not look urban in any conventional way, but nonetheless are urbanized, part of a regional cityspace and thereby deeply affected by urbanism as a way of life’ (16; italics his). Through a complex series of economic and social relations many of these putatively non-urban spaces and populations are incorporated into the spatial economy of cityspace. Most Canadians, then, live within cityspace, even those who consciously situate themselves as being outside of it. As Glenn Willmott puts it in his discussion of Ernest Buckler’s The Mountain and the Valley, inhabitants of the Canadian countryside ‘are already living in an invisible city, with its modern modes of production and class-social structure’ (307). Like most, if not all, capitalist, ‘developed’ societies, then, Canada has long been fundamentally urban (see Soja 69). And, given the emphasis that Soja places upon the ubiquity of the urban in contemporary society, and the synekistic forces unleashed by cities across historical periods, along with Lehan’s identification of the deeply symbiotic relationship between cities and literary production, it is clear that any understanding of Canadian literature must pay attention to Canadian cities. In fact, as Walter Pache shows, the Canadian city has of course long been the site and subject of literary production, however ‘invisible’ it may have been rendered by the dominant tropes of Canadian literary criticism. As he writes, ‘Urban writing in Canada is ubiquitous but elusive. As a powerful but submerged subtext it provides a counterdiscourse to the discourse of land and landscape that largely dominates Canadian critical mythmaking’ (1156). This counter-discourse would include works such as J.G. Sime’s novel of urban women, Our Little Life (1921); the early Toronto fiction of Morley Callaghan, such as his first novel, Strange Fugitive (1928); Irene Baird’s portrayal of labour in De-

Introduction

11

pression-era Vancouver, Waste Heritage (1939); the Halifax and Montreal of Hugh MacLennan’s novels; Gwethalyn Graham’s urban romance of religious/ethnic conflict, Earth and High Heaven (1944); Hugh Garner’s Cabbagetown (1950; 1968); Adele Wiseman’s story of Jewish Winnipeg in The Sacrifice (1956); the Montreal of Gabrielle Roy’s Bonheur d’occasion (1945), Mordecai Richler’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959), Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers (1966), Hugh Hood’s Around the Mountain (1967), Scott Symons’s Place d’Armes (1967), and many other texts; Austin Clarke’s portrait of West Indian immigrants in Toronto, beginning with The Meeting Point (1967); and the list could go on. In poetry, poets as diverse as A.M. Klein, Earle Birney, Dennis Lee, and Daphne Marlatt have focused their attentions on the specific urban spaces in which they lived. Even Margaret Atwood, who played a central role in making nature and the wilderness privileged terms in Canadian criticism, has, in her poetry and fiction, including Cat’s Eye (1988), considered the urban spaces of Toronto in some detail. Similarly, canonical writers such as Timothy Findley, in Headhunter (1993) and some of his short fiction, and Michael Ondaatje, in In the Skin of a Lion (1987), have written in insightful ways about Toronto and its production as an urban space. The examples of urban (and suburban) writing by more recent writers are many, including Catherine Bush’s Minus Time (1993), Kevin Chong’s Baroque-a-Nova (2001), Douglas Coupland’s Girlfriend in a Coma (1998) and other works, Beth Follett’s Tell it Slant (2001), SKY Lee’s Disappearing Moon Café (1990), Mark Macdonald’s Flat (2000), Daniel David Moses’ integration of Native mythology and urban space in plays such as Coyote City (1990), Gail Scott’s Main Brides (1993), Russell Smith’s How Insensitive (1994) and other books, Cordelia Strube’s Alex & Zee (1994), Michael Turner’s The Pornographer’s Poem (1999), and many others. Moreover, the Canadian city is increasingly featured in so-called genre fiction, whether in the Montreal-set police thrillers of John Farrow, beginning with City of Ice (1999); the urban fantasies of Charles de Lint, including Moonheart (1984); and the many works of speculative fiction set in Toronto, including Terence M. Green’s A Witness to Life (1999), Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring (1998), Robert J. Sawyer’s The Terminal Experiment (1995), and Robert Charles Wilson’s The Perseids and Other Stories (2000). In addition, it should be noted that one of the late twentieth century’s most influential visions of urban space is that contained in the early ‘cyberpunk’ science fiction of Vancouver writer William Gibson, including Neuromancer (1984) and Burning Chrome (1986).

12 Douglas Ivison and Justin D. Edwards

The point is that Canadian writers are producing fiction, poetry, and drama that engage with the urban reality of Canadian life, and have been doing so for a long time. Moreover, even within the dominant myths of Canadian culture and literature, the city has long served an important function, for as W.H. New suggests, a ‘city/non-city binary’ epitomizes the national political dynamic and is at the heart of understandings of Canadian culture (156). Of course, within this binary dynamic the city is frequently assigned a negative value, is seen as inauthentically Canadian rather than as a ‘crucible of national identity,’ as Sharon Zukin describes the American city (262). As a result, critics have, for the most part, failed to address the materiality and specificities of Canadian cities outside of that limiting binary, have failed to respond to the Canadian city as a specific space. The literature of the Canadian city, of which the list in the previous paragraph provides only a small sample, has long been ignored and is just now beginning to be recovered. This tradition of engagement with the Canadian city may have historically been obscured by the dominant myths of Canadian literary criticism, but it is, paradoxically, now continuing to be elided by those critics and writers, such as Smith, who claim that there is a new urban writing in Canada, that Canada is now an urban nation, and that Canadian writers have only recently begun grappling with this fact. Rather than reversing the terms of the binary, and associating the city with exciting new writing and the non-city with tired old myths, Canadian writers and critics need to abandon such binaries altogether, and focus on the materiality and specificity of our cities and the experience of urbanism as a way of life in Canada. This is the project engaged in by the critics assembled in Downtown Canada. Why have the city and urbanism so often been absent from critical discussions about Canadian literature and culture? What is unique, or not, about Canadian cities? How has the city been represented in Canada? Downtown Canada addresses these questions, and many more, by bringing together contributions from a diverse group of international academics working in the field of Canadian literary and cultural studies. The papers in this book actively engage with Canada as an urban experience from a variety of perspectives. In doing so, we focus our attention on the wide range of writing about Canada’s cities and call attention to the centrality of the city and urban experiences in Canadian writing. We thus seek to challenge the stereotypes and prevalent myths which associate Canadian culture and identity with small towns, vast

Introduction

13

woodlands, and unruly terrains, in short, with the non-urban – myths which persist despite the fact that recent critiques have exposed gaps and elisions in such metanarratives. Moreover, the papers collected in Downtown Canada complement the work of Canadian critical urban studies scholars such as Jon Caulfield and others. Like those critical urban researchers collected in City Lives and City Forms, we are, as Caulfield wrote in his introduction to that collection, concerned with ‘denaturalizing the urban realm as it is’ and revealing the city to be a ‘willed human construction’ (4). Such an understanding of the city, as Caulfield writes, suggests that ‘any given city is one of innumerable possible cities that might have been produced and as having innumerable possible futures’ (4). As this collection shows, Canadian writers have an important role to play in such a project, as do critics of Canadian literature and culture. What brings all of the essays in this volume together is an insistence upon the urban as a central figure of the Canadian landscape. While representations of Canadian space have long been part of critical debates, the city remains an overlooked site of examination. The cityscape and its citizens, whether they be in Michael Ondaatje’s portrayal of a Macedonian community in Toronto or in the linguistic diversity of Robert Majzels’s Montreal, are important elements in the complex relationship between nation and identity in the Canadian scene. By focusing on the Canadian city, we identify previously unnoticed or ignored (but nonetheless important) dimensions of Canadian writing. Taken as a whole, Downtown Canada will demonstrate that, whether or not it was ever possible to do so, it is no longer possible to claim, as Northrop Frye once did, that ‘everything that is central in Canadian writing seems to be marked by the imminence of the natural world’ (Bush Garden 247).

14 Richard Cavell

‘An Ordered Absence’: Defeatured Topologies in Canadian Literature richard cavell

I The notion that Canadian literature has a deep and abiding relationship with the land has governed criticism of Canadian literature (generally thematic, but also more avowedly theoretical) for the last half century, largely to the exclusion of critiques relating to literary systems as urban institutions (and, more broadly, to critiques of Canadian society and culture as products of the Enlightenment project).1 The tension between country and city is of course as old as pastoral poetry, in which the urban poet sings the praises of rural life. In Canadian literature, however, the landscape theory became especially entrenched through the imprimatur given it by Northrop Frye in his conclusion to the Literary History of Canada (1965). Frye’s notion of the ‘garrison mentality’ (831) – that the fundamental experience of Canadian literature was of a hostile and intractable land and of the physical and intellectual garrisons built to keep it at bay – was at once paradoxical and highly flexible. The notion of the garrison mentality was paradoxical in that it was Canada’s relationship to the land that prevented it from having a literature; in Frye’s colonialist (and theoretically structuralist) view, literature could take its form only from other works of literature (the European classics), not from contextual values, and in this way Frye was able to assert the superiority of European cultural modes and forms at the expense of local ones. And the notion of the garrison mentality was flexible enough that Frye could argue that it now applied inversely, the wilderness/ landscape having become urbanized, the garrison taking the form of a tamed nature within the increasingly uninhabitable city – a ‘control[led] ... environment ... within a metropolitan society’ (834). This defeaturing of the landscape, be it as archetype or urban wilder-

Defeatured Topologies in Canadian Literature 15

ness, is ultimately a repudiation, in both the critical and literary traditions, of the materiality of cultural production. It is not simply that the urban experience has been the source and centre of Canadian literary experience; it is, rather, that the experience of the land has consistently been negated in the service of colonialist abstraction, and especially in the ‘realist’ modalities of authors as diverse as Charles G.D. Roberts (‘When Twilight Falls on the Stump Lots’ [1902]), F.P. Grove (‘Snow’ [1922]), Sinclair Ross (‘A Field of Wheat’ [1935]); and Ethel Wilson (‘The Window’ [1961]). The notion of a defeatured landscape is not without precedent in literary production. In addition to the pastoral, where the urban seat of the poet is elided in the service of praising life in the country, the practice of allegory (to which pastoral is intimately related, as in Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue) is founded on the premise that the visible world signifies beyond itself. Thus, Dante’s dark wood is read less as the description of a physical landscape than as a moral and anagogical one. The hortus conclusus, similarly, is not so much a garden as an amorous state of mind. The phenomenon I am proposing to examine, however, moves in another direction; it is constituted not by a process of accretion (as in the fourfold model of allegory proposed by Dante) but through a process of the evacuation of meaning – a vertiginous precession of signification that renders the landscape nugatory. The notion that there is an ‘urban semiotic’ of a landscape rendered as ‘typology and abstraction’ has been developed by Scott Watson in the context of Canadian art, and particularly in photo-conceptualism as practised by Iain Baxter, Ian Wallace, Jeff Wall, Arni Haraldsson, et al. (247). Watson notes that urban space became the subject of much artistic practice in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s in Vancouver, at a time when the city was experiencing considerable growth and immense changes in its physical infrastructure characterized by ‘generic curtain-walled skyscrapers, underground malls and vast kitschy suburban tract developments’ (248). The art that was produced in this context veered from ‘bright colours, new plastics and shiny surfaces ... abstracted from the explosion of consumer commodities’ into a ‘new nothingness’ (248) that ‘mingled with the last stand of patriarchal notions of male-active, female-passive sexuality,’ to minimalist works which argued that ‘only art that meditated on its own emptiness and the qualities of form had the possibility of a truth value’ (249). The tendency of such art was to ‘[push] the object towards disappearance’ (251). It was at this point that these artists turned to photography as ‘the recording device most appropriate to the construction of an index or

16 Richard Cavell

semiotic of the urban environment’ (251). As precisely the medium through which we commonly obtain our sense of the world around us, the photograph testified most powerfully to the absence of that world as lived experience. These works thus exposed the nature/culture binary as a sham; here, nature had collapsed into culture, such that the photo of suburban housing which Baxter (in the guise of N.E. Thing Co.) characterized as Ruins (1968) is less a testimony to the ruin of nature than a refusal of ‘the culture/nature dichotomy of Enlightened capitalist discourse’ (253). Wall’s major work of this early period was his 1969 Landscape Manual, a livre d’artiste (of sorts) in which the ‘natural’ element consists of the arbitrariness with which its photos of the urban landscape have been taken. Here is Frye’s inverted garrison: ‘wilderness and order collapsed into each other so that the narrative of entrepreneurial capitalism would reveal itself in the way the urban space was built’ (Watson 256), producing a defeatured landscape ‘as abstract and generic as capital’ (257). By understanding these artworks within the larger context of the Enlightenment project, Watson’s critique invites an extension of its insights from the visual arts to literature. What remains constant is the application of a rationalist ideology to the goal of dominating the natural environment in order to achieve material gain. As Watson’s analysis makes clear, the work of art occupies an agonistic position in this context, at once critical of the Enlightenment project and a product of it. II These complexities and agonisms are powerfully brought out in a poem written by Margaret Atwood within a year of N.E. Thing’s Ruins. Titled ‘Progressive Insanities of a Pioneer’ (1968), the poem ostensibly critiques the Enlightenment project as embodied in the phenomenon of settler culture by representing an encounter between a pioneer who seeks to impose order on the land and the land’s resistance to these attempts. The poem is made problematical, however, by Atwood’s need to personify and in effect humanize the land in order to represent it as actively countering the pioneer’s incursions upon it. The hinge point of the tensions in the poem occurs when the pioneer erupts in rage (thus demonstrating the irrationality underpinning the Enlightenment project, and hence the title, with its pun on ‘progress’) at the land’s resistance to his attempts to modernize it through cultivation (with a glance, here, at the pastoral tradition): ‘This is not order / but the absence / of order’ he

Defeatured Topologies in Canadian Literature 17

shouts. ‘He was wrong, the unanswering / forest implied: / It was / an ordered absence.’ The poem acknowledges two orders: the rationalist one subtending the colonial project that was inseparable from the Enlightenment project, and another which cannot be named (‘Things / refused to name themselves; refused / to let him name them’) within those terms. However, by personifying the land, the poem undermines its own purposes, making the land subject to the binary system that has governed it from the outset. If, at the end of the poem, ‘the tension / between subject and object’ is annihilated as the pioneer is overwhelmed by the landscape he sought to tame, this disappearance of the ‘human’ can also be read as the collapse of nature into culture, a paradox inherent in contemporary notions of the ‘environment’ as an entity that can be adjusted at will. Atwood takes up these themes again in ‘The Planters’ (from The Journals of Susanna Moodie), where they are gendered. The poem enacts a tension between the ‘jagged[ness]’ of nature and the rows imposed upon it by men; as Frye puts it in his conclusion to the Literary History of Canada, ‘Civilization in Canada, as elsewhere, has advanced geometrically across the country, throwing down the long parallel lines of the railways, dividing up the farm lands into chessboards of square-mile sections and concession-line roads. There is little adaptation to nature: in both architecture and arrangement, Canadian cities and villages express rather an arrogant abstraction, the conquest of nature by an intelligence that does not love it’ (829). In Atwood’s poem, this tendency towards abstraction is specifically identified with the patriarchy – ‘my husband, a neighbour, another man’ are ‘weeding the few rows / of string beans and dusty potatoes’ while the Moodie figure, who narrates the poem, looks on, commenting that ‘They deny the ground they stand on, / pretend this dirt is the future.’ She, however, acknowledges the jaggedness of nature, and identifies with it: If they let go of that illusion solid to them as a shovel, open their eyes even for a moment to these trees, to this particular sun they would be surrounded, stormed, broken in upon by branches, roots, tendrils, the dark side of light as I am.

18 Richard Cavell

Here, the ‘I’ of the poem is ambiguously located, her shape-shifting facilitated by the fluidity of her gender, at once inside and outside a landscape hostile to the self yet intrinsic to her self as Other; one of the ironies of the poem is that the coming into being of that self is as apocalyptic as the construction of the garrison. III The implicit (or explicit) critique of the Enlightenment project in Atwood’s poems has a long, if little-noticed, tradition in Canadian literature (and artistic production generally, as Watson’s article makes clear); the focus of the present article is on literature written in the first six decades of the twentieth century – that is, in the period preceding the era in which Watson’s study begins. My intention is to demonstrate continuities across a broad range of artistic production in the ways in which defeatured landscapes have been represented. As Glenn Willmott reminds us in Unreal Country, English Canada was never rural in the sense that one might use this term to describe an English town and its pre-market interrelations; rather, it was part of a resource-based economy serving commodity exchange (as opposed to having a subsistence function) that developed – explosively – into an agricultural and industrial one during the first decades of the twentieth century. The major cities increased in size exponentially during this period, doubling over and over again until the Depression (whose effects Ross details so vividly in the story discussed below) put an abrupt end to this metastasization. It is this sense of the urban dominant that Willmott terms the ‘invisible city’ in Canadian literature; as he states, ‘[i]f there is truth to the general recognition of modernism as an “art of cities,” then a tradition of rural Canadian writing has established its continuity with this urban truth, rather than in nostalgic or pastoral alternatives’ (148). In this scenario, the country is not the pastoral alternative to the city because it is, in a very real sense, the product of the city. ‘Modern capitalism,’ writes Willmott (drawing on Neil Smith’s Uneven Development), ‘requires the production of nature, and of the country, as “underdeveloped” regions, as external and internal frontiers in its imperialist expansion’ (149). In these terms, ‘Cities are not one pole of a dichotomy between developing regions; cities organize the relational structure itself, so that “urbanization” is a meta-regional phenomenon, belonging as much to relative space everywhere as to absolute space in cities themselves’ (151).

Defeatured Topologies in Canadian Literature 19

These tensions can be read through the landscape represented in Charles G.D. Roberts’s ‘When Twilight Falls on the Stump Lots’ (1902), a landscape that has literally been defeatured, as the title indicates, though it is part of the brilliant economy of this story – three-and-a-half pages long – that the coming-into-being of the stump lots is never described. Rather, the lots remain the unspoken point on which the drama of the story turns – they are absent from the story while at the same time they prefigure and symbolize a material absence. Roberts is credited as being one of the inventors (along with Ernest Thompson Seton) of the modern animal story, a ‘counter pastoral’2 in which ‘violence and destruction are the operative principles.’3 In this story, however, the violence of the animal world is the pale shadow of a much greater violence which is only hinted at in what is, nevertheless, a stunningly powerful concluding paragraph. ‘When Twilight Falls on the Stump Lots’ stands at the other extreme from Roberts’s poems such as ‘Tantramar Revisited,’ in which the poet revisits the marshes of his boyhood but cannot bring himself to inspect them too closely, lest they reveal to him the changes they have inevitably suffered (preferring, thus, the illusions of his poetic sensibility to the materialities of change). The story, however, is immersed in material detail; it may begin with the classic Romantic moment of ‘twilight,’ but any such glossings are quickly dispelled by the remainder of the title, and this procédé of undercutting characterizes the story at the macro and micro levels. Thus the first paragraph is composed of a series of antitheses: the ‘chill’ is ‘made tender’; the ‘juniper and bay’ are ‘sparse’; the ‘hillocks’ are ‘rough-mossed’; the ‘grass’ is ‘coarse,’ and so on. If the ‘lilac wash’ of the twilight hour seems to anoint this landscape ‘to an ecstasy of peace by the chrism of that paradisal colour,’ it is a peace marked by ‘five or six soaring ram-pikes,’ which ‘aspired like violet flames.’ Into this troubled setting emerges a cow – yet another odd juxtaposition in this ‘wilderness’ setting.4 The cow has just calved, and the calf is just having its first pull at its mother’s teats as the glow of the sunset washes over it. But the black and white of the mother stand out, especially on these stump lots, and she is espied by ‘a lank she-bear, whose gaunt flanks and rusty coat proclaimed a season of famine in the wilderness.’ The bear is gaunt for the same reason that the cow stands out so starkly on the stump lots: their natural world has been deeply disrupted – defeatured – by the incursion of yet another animal, thus far invisible in the story: ‘worst of all, a long stretch of intervale meadow by the neighbouring river, which had once been rich in ground-nuts,

20 Richard Cavell

had been ploughed up the previous spring and subjected to the producing of oats and corn.’ And ‘there were no more bee trees left in the neighbourhood.’ With two cubs to feed, the she-bear is desperate for food, and so she moves closer to the settlement and begins killing lambs. It is at this point that she sights the cow. ‘It is altogether unusual for the black bear of the eastern woods to attack any quarry so large as a cow’ we are told in the matter-of-fact tones of the narrator, who also notes that the bear had ‘observed that cows, accustomed to the protection of man’ – the first mention in the story – ‘would at times leave their calves asleep and stray off some distance.’ It is this lapsus for which the bear waits, but the cow detects her first, and charges. A violent battle ensues, though by this point it is clear that its origin is not in ‘the conflicting forces for survival in nature’ (Parker 1008) – this is anything but nature. The shebear dies before she can return to her den and her cubs. Her story ends with the ironic note that ‘the doom of the ancient wood was less harsh than its wont, and spared them [the cubs] some days of starving anguish; for about noon a pair of foxes discovered the dead mother, astutely estimated the situation, and then, with the boldness of good appetite, made their way into the unguarded den.’ But this is not the end of the story, which has a final paragraph detailing the fortune of the cow and her calf, who are discovered by a farm hand and taken back ‘to the safety of the settlement.’ There, the calf ‘was tended and fattened, and within a few weeks found its way to the cool marble slabs of a city market.’ The conclusion is brilliant in its powerful undermining of the Romantic overtones with which it began, and in the way it brings out the urban theme that has governed it from the outset (as well as alluding, perhaps, to Hegel’s comment that history is a slaughter bench). The entire spectacle of the ‘natural’ struggle of the animals has been a drama staged by capital. It also suggests a rereading of Roberts’s assertion that ‘animals are not governed by instinct alone but by “something directly akin to reason”’ (qtd. in Parker 1008). Here, the element of ‘reason’ appears to be an ironic recognition of the impossibility of rendering ‘nature’ except from the position of ‘culture,’ an irony as familiar to us from the pastoral tradition as it is from deconstruction.5 IV If Roberts subtly explores ironic dimensions of the pastoral, F.P. Grove turns to allegory in his story ‘Snow’ (1922). Recounting (or so Grove

Defeatured Topologies in Canadian Literature 21

makes it appear at the outset) his thirty-four-mile weekend trip from the schoolhouse where he taught to the house where his wife and daughter awaited him, it begins by recording, matter of factly, ‘that rather common’ fact of prairie existence, the winter snowstorm, and his determination to drive through it to reach his home. Anyone familiar with the tangled biography of Grove (who began life as Felix Paul Greve but was forced to abandon an increasingly complicated life among the literati of Europe by faking his suicide and taking passage to America)6 realizes that this scenario is already highly complicated, given that ‘home’ was for FPG a deeply ambivalent term, identifying at once the place towards which he is heading and the place which he has irrevocably left behind (an irony beautifully captured by Robert Kroetsch in his poem ‘F.P. Grove: The Finding’). In this story, Greve the cosmopolitan – at home in Berlin, London, Rome, and Paris – brushes up repeatedly against Grove the prairie schoolteacher. In the opening encounter with the cockney school janitor, ‘who was dissatisfied with all things Canadian because “in the old country we do things differently”’ (187), we hear both of these voices, which are intertwined throughout the story. This half-literate janitor doesn’t simply tell Grove that he won’t make it home this weekend, he does so ‘apodeictically,’ and thus language is already made to testify against the realist genre of the story (and a Western, at that): ‘It was one of those orgies in which Titan Wind indulges ever so often in our western prairies’ (187; emphasis added). One of the chief areas of interest in the story is, in fact, how it works formally against the realist genre by problematizing the regime of the visual (in a way that has something in common with the postmodernist art discussed at the opening of this chapter). Thus Grove begins by noting that the blizzard makes it almost impossible to see: ‘Not even in broad daylight could you see the opposite houses or trees’ (187); Atwood employs a similar device through the many puns on ‘eye’ and ‘I’ in her Journals of Susanna Moodie, where it is precisely the regime of the visual that enables the construction of the individual identity.7 Grove repeats that even from the third story of his schoolhouse ‘I could not see very far,’ given that the storm had ‘blotted out whatever was more than two or three hundred yards away’ (188; ‘blotted’ gestures toward the status of this description as écriture). The street had only ‘a fleeting appearance of life’; the ‘store windows had something artificial about them, as if they were merely painted on the canvas-wings of a stage-setting’ (188); the horses ‘knew the road’ but ‘there was none now’ (189). This overwhelming sense of absence is punctuated, as it were, by Grove’s use of

22 Richard Cavell

ellipses throughout the story: ‘I stopped to read a thermometer which I had found halfways reliable the year before. It read minus thirty-two degrees ...’ Grove sets out at dawn and immediately we enter into the unreality of the landscape: ‘The wind plays strange pranks with snow; snow is the most plastic medium it has to mould into images and symbols of its moods’ (191). Yet the landscape it covers is not ‘nature’ but a human construct marked by the ‘correction line’ (191), testifying both to the rationalist program of cultivation that has shaped it and to the violence of imposing that rationalist grid on a sphere that resists it at every point. In this increasingly vertiginous flux, Grove continues to pile image on image, symbol on symbol, as the landscape (itself a simulacrum) is blotted out by the snow in an artistic manoeuvre that has much in common with Robert Rauschenberg’s famous ‘Erased De Kooning Drawing’ – here the artistic activity is precisely that of the evacuation of meaning achieved through a process which Grove identifies with ‘exfoliation’ (192), the process whereby the snow ‘is laid down in layers’ of ‘paperlike sheets’ by ‘the waves of the wind’ (192; I have quoted these phrases out of order). Because these waves run in wavy lines, the snow looks like ‘“moire” silk.’ This is the first of a myriad of metaphors and similes Grove uses to describe the snow, a process he takes to absurdity: the snow is compared to ‘cones or pyramids of butters’ (194) that appear like ‘so many fresh graves’ (195; note the pun on Greve, the plural, and the fact that these ‘graves’/‘Greves’ are involved in an endless process of making new identities and of burying them); ‘a fortress of snow’ (195); ‘a seemingly impregnable bulwark’ (195) resembling ‘underground bombproofs around Belgian strongholds’ (195) or ‘a miniature Gibraltar’ (199); ‘an inverted bowl’ (196); ‘a mammiferous waste’ (196); ‘a very stiff or viscid treacle’ (197); the ‘rough waters’ of a ‘troubled sea’ (197); ‘a wonderful book’ (198); ‘glittering marble’ (198); like ‘the flap of a tam’ made of ‘very thick cloth’ (199); ‘cooling glue ... in a veneering press’ (199); ‘thick porridge’ (199); ‘like a pup trying to catch its tail’ (200); ‘like a boa constrictor’ (200); ‘more like a gorilla than anything else’ (200). And Grove is conscious of the absurdity of his descriptions: ‘To make this illusion complete, or to break it by the very absurdity and exaggeration of a comparison drawn out too far – I do not know which – there would, every now and then, from the crest of one of these waves, jut out something which closely resembled the wide back of a large fish diving down into the concave side [of the drift] toward the trough. This looked very much like porpoises or dolphins jumping in a heaving sea’ (199).

Defeatured Topologies in Canadian Literature 23

The sea is in fact the major metaphor here; Grove imagines himself as Odysseus, journeying through the ‘wine dark sea’ towards his Penelope, and hence the story’s entry to allegory: ‘Unaccountably two Greek words formed on my lips: Homer’s Pontos atrygetos – the barren sea’ (195).8 The effect of the snow is thus to create a new landscape that is ‘millennial-old ... antediluvian and pre-adamic’ (194; ellipses added); the new world has become the old, as, indeed, it must, if Grove is to go home. And thus not only must time coordinates be sundered in this landscape; so must those of space: I shall never forget the weird kind of astonishment when the fact came home to me that what snapped and crackled in the snow under the horses’ hoofs, were the tops of trees. Nor shall the feeling of estrangement, as it were – as if I were not myself, but looking on from the outside at the adventure of somebody who yet was I – the feeling of other-worldliness, if you will pardon the word, ever fade from my memory – a feeling of having been carried beyond my depth where I could not swim – which came over me when with two quick glances to right and left I took in the fact that there were no longer any trees to either side, that I was above the forest world which had so often engulfed me. (202)

At once above the trees and beyond his depth, in the snow and in the sea,9 himself and someone else, in the midst of the action and observing it from outside, Grove erases the prairie landscape he is ostensibly describing in order to put another in its place, in order that he may go home by coming home: ‘I felt somewhat as I had felt coming home from my first big trip overseas. It seemed a lifetime since I had started out. I seemed to be a different man’ (204). This is precisely the manoeuvre of Frye in his conclusion to the Literary History of Canada, where his central argument is that ‘the forms of literature are autonomous: they exist within literature itself, and cannot be derived from any experience outside literature. What the Canadian writer finds in his experience and environment may be new, but it will be new only as content: the form of his expression of it can take shape only from what he has read, not from what he has experienced’ (835). In both cases, the Canadian experience (however defined) must be denied in order for Canadian literature to exist. V Sinclair Ross’s ‘A Field of Wheat’ (1935) appears to be what Grove’s ‘Snow’ pretends to be but decidedly is not: a classic example of prairie

24 Richard Cavell

realism. The circumstances of the story appear definitive: the nuclear family, back-breaking work on the wheat fields, a life of poverty, the promise of a full harvest, a storm, dashed hopes, all topped off by the Depression. The story begins with Martha’s observation (rendered obliquely, as in his masterpiece of narration, As For Me and My House [1941]) that this was ‘the best crop of wheat that John had ever grown’ (301). Into this description, however, Ross introduces adjectives and metaphors that disturb the realism of the scene; the wheat is ‘sturdy, higher than the knee, the heads long and filling well’ (301), and Martha finds herself ‘stroking the blades of grain that pressed close against her skirts’ (302). The sexual allusions very quickly acquire a context in Martha’s comment that ‘It was John who gave such allure to the wheat ... Her fingers touched the stalks of grain again and tightened on a supple blade until they made it squeak like a mouse’ (302). John has in fact given over his whole life to the wheat in an immense act of displacement: ‘John was gone, love was gone; there was only wheat.’ John has quite literally become the wheat for Martha; only through the wheat do they interact, have a relationship, and so it is not only all of their financial hopes that are pinned on a successful crop, but their libidinality as well – ‘She plucked a blade; her eyes travelled hungrily up and down the field. Serene, now, all its sting and torment sheathed ... Three hundred acres ready to give perhaps a little of what it had taken from her – John, his love, his lips unclenched’ (302). Martha creates a scenario for herself (and hence the painterly reference to ‘crushed horizon blue’ [301]) in which a successful harvest would ‘make him [John] young again, lift his head, give him spirit. Maybe he would shave twice a week as he used to when they were first married, buy new clothes, believe in himself again’ (302). And ‘if she could get some new clothes, maybe some of the creams and things that other women had ...’ (303; ellipses in original). More money would also allow Martha to give their children, Joe and Annabelle, a better education than she and John had had. She is especially concerned that Annabelle take music lessons, since she was ‘bright, a real little lady for manners; among town people she would learn a lot. The farm was no place to bring her up’ (303), where the sun makes her look ‘burned and countrified’ (304). The sexual, thus, is deeply intertwined with capital, with gender politics, and with the urban. The interrelatedness of these motifs is subtly brought together in the fact that it was Martha who had urged John to buy crop insurance, advice he disregarded (304, 307). Martha’s reveries are interrupted by a sudden darkening of the sky,

Defeatured Topologies in Canadian Literature 25

followed by thunder and lightning: ‘To the west there was no sky, only a gulf of blackness, so black that the landscape seemed slipping down the neck of a funnel’ (304); the lightning is ‘abrupt, unforked ... as if angry hands had snatched to seal the rent’ of the ‘shaggy’ ‘funnel’ (304; I have reversed these terms). The vulgar sexual references (neck; snatch; shag) inaugurate a vast extended metaphor of the storm as sexual encounter, Martha’s earlier reveries becoming literalized in a profoundly ironic way. The description begins with Martha trying to determine whether John is ‘coming’; seeing that this is not the case, she pushes the children into the house and bars the door. From this point on, Martha is in control, inaugurating the reversal of gender roles with which the story concludes. She sends Annabelle to the bedroom to get pillows, which Joe, standing on a table (the spatial dynamics become significant in the subsequent establishment of the sort of point of view of which Ross is a master), is to hold to the window when the hail comes. Through that window, Martha sees John’s horses galloping to the stable, and then, ‘through Joe’s legs’ (305), she sees John. At the same moment there is a sound ‘like a weapon that has sunk deep into flesh ... Again the blow came; then swiftly a stuttered dozen of them,’ at which point ‘John burst in’: With their eyes screwed up against the pommelling roar of the hail they stared at each other. They were deafened, pinioned, crushed. His face was a livid blank ... Taut with fear, her throat aching, she turned away and looked through Joe’s legs again. It was like a furious fountain, the stones bouncing high and clashing with those behind them. They had buried the earth, blotted out the horizon; there was nothing but their crazy spew of whiteness. (305)

The sexual metaphors emanating from the initial pun on ‘screwed’ inscribe an ejaculatory extravaganza on the fury of the storm, the effect of which (as in the one described by Grove) is to completely defeature the landscape: ‘There’s nothing anyway to see’ remarks Martha, ‘Nothing but the glitter of sun on hailstones. Nothing but their wheat crushed into little rags of muddy slime’ (305). Ironically, the displaced sexuality of the storm does bring John and Martha together, though in circumstances far from those Martha had imagined: ‘He laid his big hands on her shoulders. They looked at each other for a few seconds, then she dropped her head weakly against his greasy smock ... It was more of him than she had had for years.’ It is

26 Richard Cavell

noteworthy that the phallic term ‘head,’ which appears in the story’s first sentence with reference to the swelling blades of wheat, has now been transferred to Martha. Indeed, she feels herself ‘[s]wung far upwards by the rush and swell of recaptured life’ (307). In this wildly swinging mood, she rushes out to the stable to find John (who had gone to check on the horses), noting ‘the lazy rub of [the horses’] flanks and hips’ in their ‘stall partitions.’ She looks past the horses’ ‘rumps’ for John (and again, the point of view is crucial), where she is shocked to find him ‘pressed against one of the horses, his head pushed into the big deep hollow of its neck and shoulder.’ He is ‘shaking’ and ‘sobbing.’ She retreats silently back to the house with a new resolve, realizing that John ‘might never be able to get a grip of himself again’ (308), the metaphor she first used with reference to the wheat now actualized in this description of a John who has been raped by the storm, the manhood that he had displaced onto the wheatfields now broken. The homoerotics of the scene are complicated, but it is possible to argue, as Peter Dickinson does with reference to As For Me and My House,10 that the obliquities of this story open up ‘a cross-gender space of liminal minority gay identification’ (18) whereby the narrative displays itself ‘not as realism, but as homosexual fantasy’ (19) which ‘betrays a disease with heterosexuality as a compulsory institution’ (20). In this analysis, heterosexuality as an institution is intimately bound up with capital, and, as such, with the patriarchal enterprises of settlement and colonization, though the ‘feminization’ of John at the story’s end raises further issues about gender binaries and their inscription in the ‘natural.’ VI The contemporary resonances of colonization are at the heart of Ethel Wilson’s story ‘The Window’ (1961), which is set in a sort of country-inthe-city, the Point Grey area of Vancouver at the beginning of the 1960s. Here we have reached the reversal point of Frye’s paradigm: ‘As the centre of Canadian life moves from the fortress to the metropolis, the garrison mentality changes correspondingly’ as the settler culture becomes ‘more in control of its environment’ (834); in this paradigm, the hostile Other is inside, rather than outside. In Wilson’s story, the protagonist, Mr Willy, a businessman, has abandoned his bridge-playing wife in Britain and escaped to Vancouver, where he has installed a ‘great big window’ (262) in his house, through which he observes the world around him. But like the infinitely reversible garrison paradigm,

Defeatured Topologies in Canadian Literature 27

he finds that by emigrating he has simply entered into a precession of simulacra. Not only has he ‘escaped’ to British Columbia, but the society he discovers there is involved in an unwitting exercise in colonial mimicry,11 and he soon finds himself being sought out as a fourth in bridge and ‘invited to the kind of evening parties to which he had been accustomed and which he had left behind’ (265). This theme of infinite repetition is metaphorized in the window of the title, which both ‘held the fine view as in a frame’ (265), thus turning it into an artefact, and ‘became a mirror [at night] which reflected against the blackness every detail of the shallow living-room’ (265), endlessly duplicating the scene inside. And the great expense of the window reminds us that what it frames is the realm of capital, with its infinite extension and its infinite production of value – when Mr Willy has his first party, the men wish to go outside ‘to see how far his property ran’ (268). Like Ross, Wilson adopts, though much more subtly, a psychosexual motif, as heralded by the protagonist’s surname, and by the fact that Mr Willy – suffering perhaps from ‘male menopause’ (267) – gazes longingly at the ‘broad shaft’ (264) of the BC Electric building (a classic of modernist architecture, then as now, on the Vancouver skyline, and then the symbol of the alchemy of capital, whereby water is metamorphosed into electricity). Indeed, Mr Willy regrets that he can no longer get up the mountains that he sees through his window, mountains illuminated at night by countless electric lights and appearing to him then like ‘necklaces’ and ‘bracelets’ (263) – not signs of nature or promises of a romantic encounter (‘he did not want another woman in his life’ [266]) but amulets of commercial exchange. Indeed, the economy of the simulacrum is such that the ‘natural’ has ceased to exist; the ‘shores of [the] mountains’ are ‘far more beautiful as seen through this window than if Mr Willy had driven his car across Lions’ Gate Bridge and westwards among those constellations which would have disclosed only a shopping centre, people walking in the streets, street lights, innumerable cars and car lights like anywhere else and, up the slopes, peoples’ houses’ (263). Here the night-time lights mask not the daytime reality of nature, but simply another simulacrum of capital. Thus Mr Willy looks through his window and sees ‘the small ducks lying on the water, one behind the other, like beads on a string’ (263); he observes that the Northern Lights illuminate the sky with ‘a synthetic cyclamen colour’ (263), and so on. Mr Willy has a simulacrum as well, a watcher who lies in the tall grasses outside his window and observes him and who is in turn

28 Richard Cavell

doubled by Mr Willy as he sees himself reflected at night in his window: ‘Mr Willy saw himself entering the room like a stranger, looking at first debonair with such a gleaming shirt front and then – as he approached himself – a little shabby, his hair perhaps’ (266). This doubling is paralleled on the narrative level by Wilson’s use of free indirect discourse, whereby she is able to slip in and out of the watcher’s distinctive argot: The man outside the window had crept up through the grasses and was now watching Mr Willy from a point rather behind him. He was a morose man and strong. He had served two terms for robbery with violence. When he worked, he worked up the coast. Then he came to town and if he did not get into trouble it was through no fault of his own. Last summer he had lain there and, rolling over, had looked up through the grasses and into – only just into – the room where this guy was who seemed to live alone. He seemed to be a rich guy because he wore good clothes and hadn’t he got this great big window and – later, he discovered – a highprice car. He had lain in the grasses and because his thoughts always turned that way, he tried to figger out how he could get in there. Money was the only thing that was any good to him and maybe the old guy didn’t keep money or even carry it but he likely did. The man thought quite a bit about Mr Willy and then went up the coast and when he came down again he remembered the great big window and one or two nights he went around and about the place and figgered how he’d work it. (267)

The use of free indirect discourse not only doubles the narrative voice, it also powerfully associates the watcher’s voice with that of Mr Willy; like Mr Willy, the watcher is a ‘business’ man (264). The watcher’s interest in Mr Willy coincides with a spiritual crisis the latter is experiencing. He feels that he has built up a ‘high and solid almost visible wall of concrete or granite’ (266) between himself and any possibility of a spiritual life, and while he is not convinced about the benefits of religion, he does acknowledge that he is suffering from loneliness and decides to have a party. Throughout this party, the watcher lies outside in the grasses, watching the ‘meaningless ... scene ... of these well-dressed persons talking and talking, like some kind of show where nothing happened’ (269). With the last guest gone, the watcher enters the house (through the glass door left unlocked by Mr. Willy after he had shown the men his ‘property’), sneaks behind Mr. Willy’s chair, and raises his arm to hit him with a blunt weapon. At that moment he sees his action doubled in the window and is spooked. He draws in his

Defeatured Topologies in Canadian Literature 29

breath: ‘It was an irrational and stupid fear lest his action, reproduced visibly beside him in the mirror, was being faithfully registered in some impossible way that filled the intruder with fright’ (270), as if he were somehow being photographed in the very act of committing his crime. The sound he makes releases Mr Willy from his reveries, the intruder flees, and Mr Willy is left to contemplate ‘the hardest work of his life ... He must in some way and very soon break the great wall that shut him off from whatever light there might be. Not for fear of death oh God not for fear of death but for fear of something else’ (270). Yet the irony is that Mr Willy cannot get outside capital; there is no realm of escape, as his earlier act of emigration has so powerfully demonstrated to him. Here we must return to Wilson’s mode of narration and note that the phrase ‘the great big window,’ with which the intruder is repeatedly identified (twice in the long passage quoted above), is the one with which the story opens, when, ostensibly, we are within the narrator’s consciousness. However, the use of the phrase ab initio suggests that, in fact, we are (always) already within the consciousness of the intruder, which is to say of the undisplaced realm of capital – that even nature, its mountains, its streams, is already an integer in the colonialist regime of abstraction. In this sense, Mr Willy is the intruder’s ‘other.’ VII Frye’s articulation of a critical position that undermines the materiality of Canadian writing is paralleled by a literature that consistently adopts modes of abstraction as ways of eliding the effects of colonization within the domains of social and cultural production. ‘If no Canadian author pulls us away from the Canadian context toward the centre of literary experience itself, then at every point we remain aware of his social and historical setting’ (conclusion to the Literary History of Canada, 822). Yet the centre of literary experience is ‘a pastoral myth’ (840) of ‘spontaneous response to ... nature,’ and Frye finds this pastoral myth to be ‘particularly strong in Canada.’ Frye’s elision of the urban persists even in the second, ‘reversed’ phase of his garrison theory, where the urban has become a wilderness. In this phase, ‘man’s real humanity [is] part of the nature that he continually violates but is still inviolate’ (846). It is inviolate because it has been dematerialized through abstraction.12 The refusal to acknowledge the urban in Canadian criticism is the refusal to acknowledge this long history of abstraction, of colonization, of expansionism, of environmental carnage. ‘When we go into the

30 Richard Cavell

Rockies,’ writes George Parkin Grant, ‘we may have the sense that gods are there. But if so, they cannot manifest themselves to us as ours. They are the gods of another race, and we cannot know them because of what we are, and what we did. There can be nothing immemorial for us except the environment as object. Even our cities have been encampments on the road to economic mastery’ (34). Perhaps it is time to go down into the cities and rethink ‘the status of the natural, to affirm it and to grant it the openness to account for the very inception of culture itself,’ as Elizabeth Grosz puts it in Architecture from the Outside (98). ‘Rather than seeing it as either fixed origin, given limit, or predetermined goal, nature, the natural, must be seen as the site and locus of impetus and force, the ground of a malleable materiality, whose plasticity and openness account for the rich variability of cultural life, and the various subversions of cultural life that continue to enrich it’ (98). We may not find gods in the city, but we may discover who we are, and, more importantly, we may discover what we have done.

NOTES 1 ‘Canada had no enlightenment’ writes Frye in the conclusion to the second edition of the Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English (323). On the contrary, Canada was the product of the Enlightenment, as George Parkin Grant so profoundly understood. 2 I take the term ‘counter pastoral’ from Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City (23–48). 3 I am following, here, the entry on Roberts written by George L. Parker for the second edition of the Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature. Parker’s comment that Roberts ‘never abandoned his vision of the oneness of man and nature’ (1009) is seriously placed in question by this story. 4 The Concise OED defines ‘cow’ as the ‘female of any bovine animal, esp. of the domestic species.’ 5 See my ‘“Visibile parlare”: Verga, Derrida, and the Poetics of Voice.’ 6 On the Greve/Grove mystery see Klaus Martens’ F.P. Grove in Europe and Canada: Translated Lives and Richard Cavell, ‘Felix Paul Greve, the Eulenberg Scandal, and Frederick Philip Grove.’ 7 McLuhan famously suggested in The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man that the connection between the ‘I’ and the ‘eye’ was the book, which validated individuality through its emphasis on seeing over the other senses. 8 Grove goes on: ‘This was indeed like nothing so much as like being out on

Defeatured Topologies in Canadian Literature 31

9 10 11

12

rough waters and in a troubled sea, with nothing to brace the storm with but a wind-tossed nutshell of a one-man sailing craft’ (197). But soon this craft has itself morphed into a ‘liner’ with Grove on a ‘deck chair’ watching the waves ‘just as the hunter in India will enjoy the battle of wits when he is pitted against a yellow-backed tiger’ (198). Greve faked suicide by drowning. See also Dickinson’s chapter in the present volume. I explore the architectural context of this notion of colonial mimicry in ‘The Race of Space.’ On colonialism as mimicry, see the masterful Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire by David Cannadine. I discuss this aspect of dematerialization in ‘Material Querelle: The Case of Frye and McLuhan,’ and more extensively in the last chapter of McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography.

32

Steven Artelle

‘Orient Dreams’: Urbanity and the Post-Confederation Literary Culture of Ottawa steven artelle

I ‘It is the consecration of an error,’ explained the poet and historian Benjamin Sulte to the audience gathered at Ottawa’s St James Hall on 19 November 1897: ‘The Capital of Canada stands before us under a foreign name’ (23). In this way, Sulte closed his address on ‘The Meaning of Ottawa,’ having demonstrated conclusively that the word ‘Ottawa’ and its host of variants – including Ondataoua, Outaouak, and Outaouais – properly designated an aboriginal population whose territorial origin on the American shores of the Great Lakes was obscured by their dominant commercial presence on what mistakenly became known as the Ottawa River.1 More than one misconception about the capital’s identity was at issue at this particular gathering of the Ottawa Literary and Scientific Society, which also featured readings by local littérateurs William John Sykes and Archibald Lampman. When a Toronto Globe correspondent visited Ottawa in 1894, she had lamented the city’s ‘intellectual anaemia,’ an illness manifested as ‘a most barbarous idea of precedence in society; an emulation not to excel in the humanities but in the distinction of a “visiting list,” not a striving to lift the intellectual tone of the capital, but to multiply the fribbles and affectations of an artificial society’ (Pharos 6). Thus, like the resourceful aboriginal community that served as the city’s namesake, the capital’s remarkably healthy Confederation-era literary community fell prey to what John H. Taylor has dubbed ‘the Ottawa disease,’ or the ironic fact that entities established ‘for the most part at Ottawa,’ somehow are ‘not of [the city]’ (55; emphasis added). In a more recent affirmation of Taylor’s theory, W.J. Keith would neglect the greater part of the capital’s literary enterprise, coming to the errone-

Urbanity and the Literary Culture of Ottawa 33

ous conclusion in Literary Images of Ontario that while the ‘ambiguous quality of the city’ is conspicuous in literary representations of the capital, Ottawa remains among ‘the smaller Ontarian cities [that] have not for the most part attracted the sustained interest of literary artists’ (183, 173). On the contrary, the canonical Canadian poets Archibald Lampman, William Wilfred Campbell, and Duncan Campbell Scott, who came to define Ottawa’s literary character in the 1890s, are prominent representatives of a conspicuous and, at the time, unparalleled literary community that was sustained at Ottawa for several decades following Confederation. Moreover, many of the authors who were attracted to the nascent capital were very much interested in developing and exploiting the auspicious local literary environment, in particular as a way of expressing the city’s distinctive claim – as well as implicit personal and communal claims – to ‘urbanity’ in its manifold forms. After 1857, the year Queen Victoria selected Ottawa as the permanent seat of the Canadian government, citizens of the rugged new capital disclosed their commercial and cosmopolitan ambitions by rehearsing a series of suggestive ‘foreign names’ intended to accelerate their city’s urban entitlements, or to highlight the lack thereof; these included ‘a Second Minneapolis,’ ‘Pittsburgh of the North,’ and ‘Westminster of the Wilderness’ (Taylor 79, 119). In an early incarnation of his address on the name of Ottawa, Sulte described this process of motivating a group identity as a form of ‘agglomeration’ (‘How’ 3),2 thereby providing a linguistic analogue of Edward Soja’s theory of ‘synekism,’ or the cultural stimulus ensuing from the agglomeration of urban space. Apart from the myriad variants of ‘Ottawa,’ the textual traces of the Odawa peoples during the period of contact includes such designations as ‘People of the Wood’ and ‘Cheveaux Relevés’ or ‘Standing Hairs,’ an agglomeration that Sulte cites to support his theory that ‘[a]t the beginning of societies, no one thought of giving his own people or group a name in particular ... By and by, the other folks invented nicknames to designate them and that practice became general, so much so that every group was known by as many names as there was number of other groups surrounding it. The Ottawas seem to be known by such nicknames only’ (‘How’ 3). Seeking to ‘know’ their cultural status through literary agglomeration, the ‘beginning society’ of Ottawa’s post-Confederation literary community would advance a sublime urban provenance that posited the Canadian capital as the successor of enlightened civilization via the world’s ancient centres of urban-cultural achievement – those metropolitan archetypes that symbolically ‘surrounded’ their as yet vaguely

34

Steven Artelle

defined city. The poem ‘Ottawa’ by Susan Frances Harrison (a resident of the capital in the 1880s who would become familiar to Canadian readers as ‘Seranus’) exemplifies this conception of an immediate urban-cultural ‘birthright.’ In Harrison’s poem the claim to imminence is traced to seven-hilled Rome and is bolstered through the use of what the poet notes is the ‘Original Indian,’ ‘Outaouai’ – thus, an agglomerate evocation of local antiquity and cultural persistence: A city set on a hill may not be hidden, Her summit towers from afar transcend the green; Three are her hills, as an Old World town’s were seven, And from all three her spires ascend to heaven, Like nests in the cliff her homes in the rock are seen. .................... Outaouai! Whatever else betide her, Beauty is hers for a birthright sure and sweet, And old Romance, could he see her rocks and ridges, Could he stand but once on her spray-swept stormy bridges, Would grow young again as he cast himself at her feet. (31–2)

Ultimately, as a site naturally conceived and purposefully built to inspire, the capital provides a unique venue for cultural expression, where the creative energies of ‘old Romance’ – at once a suggestive personification of literary tradition and Roman urbanity – might be restored. Such elaborate models of the capital’s potential were compelled by the very towers that enabled the city to ‘transcend’ the wilderness environment closely associated with Ottawa’s abiding identity as an unrefined centre for the timber and lumber industries. Even while the literary community concentrated in and around the towers of Parliament Hill sought to confirm the national attainments proclaimed in that built environment, the perceived disjunction between the urbane and the unsophisticated at Ottawa was expressed decisively by Goldwin Smith, who labelled the capital ‘a sub-Arctic lumber-village converted by royal mandate into a political cock-pit’ (qtd. in Eggleston 131). Indeed, as Taylor has noted, while the city experienced this awkward transition from a regional centre for the logging industry to the national centre of political administration, its fragmented ‘urban complex’ worked to foster ‘[a] literary consciousness, as much as a class consciousness, or a social consciousness’ (21). Richard Lehan has suggested that the complexity and fragmentation

Urbanity and the Literary Culture of Ottawa 35

of the urban centre has been expressed in literature as a Dionysian figure of the Other, ‘usually a minority, deemed “outside” the community’ (8). While decidedly lacking this figure’s disruptive quality, it is notable that Ottawa’s first city clerk, William Pittman Lett, designated ‘Ottawa’s poet’ by his contemporaries, was moved to assume his role as the literary custodian of the city’s vanishing pre-Confederation character (a character that was civic rather than federal) by his increasing apprehensiveness of Ottawa’s developing urban identity in the mid1860s. Lett’s formative years were spent at Bytown; founded in 1826 when Lieutenant Colonel John By and the Royal Corps of Engineers began construction of the Rideau Canal, the settlement would serve as the nucleus of the incorporated city of Ottawa in 1855. The versecatalogue poems Lett gathered in Recollections of Bytown and Its Old Inhabitants (1874) preserve the names of the locality’s early citizens and institutions with (as Edwin Welch appropriately suggests) ‘all the immediacy of oral history’ (n.p.) and, in Lett’s own words, for the general purpose of establishing that ‘old Bytonians did not badly fare’ even in the absence of such rudimentary signs of urban development as the ‘gas-flame ... / Turning nocturnal darkness into day’ (‘Lines’ 92, 93). Within his rendition of a self-determining, proto-urban culture, Lett establishes the corresponding proto-urban literary figure, the Other who, in the absence of ‘institutions based on mental light’ (91), still manages to perform a vital (if unrecognized) public service. Like the traditional oral historian whose dual role is that of cultural architect and cultural archivist, the poet in Lett’s city claims an unparalleled status, charged as he is with an instrumental range of urban (and technically ‘urbane’) maintenance. Sappers’ Bridge, constructed over the Rideau Canal at Bytown in 1827, serves as Lett’s point of reference as he simultaneously registers the built environment’s grand urbancultural precedent and defends the poet’s utility as a comprehensive citizen whose acts of mnemonic reconstruction transcend ‘pedestrian’ experience: The passing wayfarer sees nought But a stone bridge by labor wrought, The Poet’s retrospective eye Searching the depths of memory, A monument to Colonel By, Beholds, enduring as each pile Which stands beside the Ancient Nile. (7)

36

Steven Artelle

Surveying the Rideau Canal to the east of Parliament Hill, even the sceptical Globe correspondent would participate in this brand of archetypal association in 1894, for she ‘look[ed] upon ... the Rideau locks with the same incredulity that one looks upon the pyramids. It seems impossible that the forces of nature should have been thus successfully over-ridden by man’ (Pharos 6).3 The point of reference in epic cities and urban-cultural monuments is informed by the nineteenth-century understanding of the westward progress of civilization, from its conjectural cradle in the ancient ‘eastern’ civilizations of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) and Egypt, through the Greek, Roman, and modern European empires. Napoleon’s imperial designs in Egypt, for example, represented a ‘dream of an oriental empire’ that was fundamentally shaped by the prevailing theories on the origin of – and immediate access to – enlightened civilization; thus ‘when he sailed to Egypt with his army in May 1798, he took with him 175 men of learning and the arts – astronomers, chemists, minerologists, orientalists, painters and poets’ (Saggs 2). The Montreal writer Alfred Sandham also noted modern architecture’s potential to serve in Confederation-era Canada as an expression of the nation’s cultural identity and integrity, through its ability to evoke the enduring urban-cultural achievements of ancient civilizations: ‘The remains of gigantic public works in connection with the cities of the East are the standing theme of wonder with travellers and historians. Great moles, breakwaters, aqueducts, canals, pyramids and immense edifices, strikingly evince the enterprise, skill and wealth of those people, whose very names are lost in the obscurity of ages’ (qtd. in Withrow 228). A close reader of Sandham, W.H. Withrow would assert that Ottawa’s Gothic revival Parliament Buildings expressed a like degree of permanence, as they ‘illustrate the remarkable flexibility and adaptation to modern purposes of that grand style. Like Cleopatra’s beauty, “Age cannot wither nor custom stale its infinite variety”’ (245). Such equations – the cultural legacy in this case further enhanced by Withrow’s paraphrase from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (2.2.233–4) – had been accounted for by the travel writer Emily Catherine Bates, who conceded ‘the charm of association’ when antiquity on an Egyptian scale was invoked by Canadian cities (2:7). Like Pharos, Bates too had ‘first realized the strange incongruities of Canada’ during her stay at Ottawa, the city where she confronted a jarring ‘mixture of advanced civilization with provincial incompleteness, as shown by these rough unfinished Canadian roads lighted up by brilliant electric light’ (2:18). Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari witness the survival of this imagi-

Urbanity and the Literary Culture of Ottawa 37

native cultural ‘orientation’ in their suggestion that ‘America ... put its Orient in the West, as if it were precisely in America that the earth came full circle; its West is the edge of the East’ (A Thousand Plateaus 19). Prior to his election to Parliament as a representative for the western riding of Assiniboia, Nicholas Flood Davin drew on this deep-seated cultural paradigm in Eos: – A Prairie Dream and Other Poems (1884), ‘a collection ... composed [and published] in Ottawa’ and intended ‘to strike a true and high note in Canadian politics and literature’ (Preface 6, 5). The volume’s centrepiece, the long poem Eos: – A Prairie Dream, is modelled overtly after Keats’s unfinished epics Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion, in which the titular sun god embodies the residual glory of a supplanted culture. The solar paradigm in Davin’s poem serves to describe the westward progress of civilization, as the poem’s dreaming protagonist, asleep on the Canadian prairie, is visited by Eos, the goddess of the dawn. After spending the night in her ‘stately towers unique / In architecture and in ornament’ (8), the dreamer accompanies Eos on a westward journey that begins over the classical centres of urban grandeur, Athens and Rome. The implied urban-cultural continuum reaches a point of transition with a view of Quebec City, the superseded capital where ‘glories and traditions old’ still produce ‘Poets and thinkers, [and] statesmen eloquent’ (16–17). Still further west, Ottawa is discovered conducting the youthful impetus of civilization, its hilltop position – a topographical feature it has in common with Athens, Rome, and Quebec City – confirming the site as a worthy ‘seat of a / Young people destin’d to be great and free’ (18, 20).4 After travelling beyond the continent’s malleable western environment, ‘Mirroring many a shape’ (28), the energized dreamer wakes in the poem’s final lines to witness the advent of urban development on the prairies, as civilization continues its inexorable westward progress, giving form ‘Each hour [to] the “city” of a few weeks old’ (29). II In May 1895, when Davin participated in the Royal Society of Canada’s public ‘Evening with Canadian Poets’ at Ottawa, he characteristically assured his audience ‘that a man could be a politician and a poet, too’ (‘Poet and His Poem’ 6). While other prominent contributors at the reading included the visiting Pauline Johnson and Frederick George Scott, local talent with federal ties was represented amply by the civil servants Lampman, Campbell, and Scott, and by Davin’s fellow poet-

38

Steven Artelle

MP James David Edgar.5 One year earlier, the Globe correspondent’s diagnosis of a local ‘intellectual anaemia’ evidently stemmed from the fact that those at Ottawa who ‘excel[led] in the humanities’ often were lodged in the professional, social, and physical architecture of government. The inevitable difficulty in accommodating Ottawa’s formal, federal complexion and its casual, local character is a persistent challenge both Lett and the Globe correspondent register in their impressions of the city. Yet the very elements to which they responded – that abiding tension at Ottawa between cultural ambition and administrative imperatives, between local affinities and the cosmopolitan outlook, each with their corresponding processes of centripetal attraction and centrifugal influence6 – in fact locate the nexus of urban determinism that sustained the city’s literary culture throughout the post-Confederation period. Not only did the arrival of the federal government at Ottawa serve to accelerate urban development by stimulating population growth and diversifying the city’s function, but its primary function as national capital also necessitated the residence of a literate administrative class, and encouraged the ideals of cultural centrality and continuity that were expressed by Ottawa’s writers and politicians alike. Effectively, Ottawa’s particular function as an urban site determined that the city would serve as a site of literary concentration, exchange, transmission, and transition, in spite of the absence of the ‘institutions based on mental light’ – including a viable publishing infrastructure – that were in evidence in Canada’s larger urban centres during the late nineteenth century. The construction of the Parliament Buildings between 1859 and 1866 was the decisive event in the history of Ottawa as a dualistic urban site – that is, a city where the built environment communicates national attainments that are paradoxically differentiated, or conceived of as exclusive, from the local actuality.7 Gothic revival and neoclassical entries dominated the competition for the design of these federal monuments. As Geoffrey Simmins notes, ‘Gothic Revival entries may well have enjoyed an advantage’ given the British parliamentary precedent, while ‘Classical entries were considered by some to have resonances with Republicanism, in that they were inappropriately similar to American architecture’ (59–60). Famously, Wilfrid Laurier would envision an incongruous ‘Washington of the North’ as part of his unfulfilled promise of grand renovations in the capital in 1893 (see John Taylor 148), a neoclassical concept that was incited by the City Beautiful movement, itself popularized by yet another set of urban-cultural references consti-

Urbanity and the Literary Culture of Ottawa 39

tuted in the faux-classical monuments on display at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition at Chicago. Notwithstanding their overt national significance, Ottawa’s towering parliamentary landmarks and their multiplication in departmental buildings between 1870 and 1900 were decisive in registering the capital’s local urban presence (see Bellamy 436–40). ‘For 100 years,’ writes Taylor, ‘the Parliament Building[s] ... would dominate the Upper and Lower Town ... Nothing – except perhaps the railways – would, for three generations, challenge their presence in the urban landscape’ (64). Sir John George Bourinot was somewhat more emphatic: ‘Get rid of the [Parliament] Buildings and we shall get rid of Ottawa, and leave it to lumber and dullness.’ Simultaneously, he conceded that Ottawa was a ‘highly intellectual retreat’ where literary gatherings in particular ‘appear[ed] to flourish’ (qtd. in Banks 71). Just as the federal capital’s built environment was intended to display the nation’s archetypal political and cosmopolitan ambitions following Confederation, so too did the city’s literary products act as outward signs of a self-conscious cultural enterprise. Not only was an accomplished community of writers convened at Ottawa in the mid-1860s with the arrival of the civil service from Quebec City (recently a site of ferment among young literary nationalists), but once installed in their newly built accommodations at Ottawa, that community sought to exemplify the Parliament Buildings’ declaration of resident urbanity, thereby suggestively confirming Rem Koolhaas’s observation that the tower is ‘an architectural device that provokes self-consciousness, offering that bird’s-eye inspection of a common domain which can trigger a sudden spurt of collective energy and ambition’ (25). Lampman, too, noted the inspirational effect of occupying ‘a lofty hill,’ which ‘cannot fail to exercise a permanent influence over the character’ as ‘vision passes to the utmost visible limit and projects itself into the immensity beyond’ (Barrie Davies 62–3). The migration of federal ministries from Quebec City to Ottawa in 1865 brought with it a veritable ‘pléiade de littérateurs’ (Tétu 202) who were caught up in Quebec’s literary movement, including Sulte, the novelist Antoine Gérin-Lajoie, and the poet Alfred Garneau (all civil servants), as well as the esteemed poet Louis-Honoré Fréchette, who would serve as a member of Parliament in Alexander Mackenzie’s government. Of course, Ottawa’s modest urban-cultural progress did not compare favourably to the conditions in francophone centres like Quebec City and Montreal, particularly in matters of printing and in the population of literary consumers. The popular francophone novelist

40

Steven Artelle

and civil servant Joseph Marmette would go so far as to christen the capital ‘Barbarapolis’ (qtd. in Lamoureux 251). In part as a means of countering that perception of Ottawa, the creative attainments of the civil service were actively fostered by the federal government, which regarded a capital literary community both as a prerequisite of cultural matriculation and as a politically expedient project. In 1872 Sir John A. Macdonald would boast that ‘because of his position he had much to do with the appointment or promotion of most of the gentlemen of the Civil Service ... Therefore he was proud to say [it was] composed of gentlemen of honor and intelligence. In the range of the Civil Service were to be found men of high literary culture, poets, men of science, of song and of music’ (‘Gowan’s Hall’ 3). While this casual literary-cultural patronage was an unambiguous dimension of the Macdonald government’s efforts to refine the capital city – the appointment of the poet Charles Sangster to the Post Office Department in 1868 was an overt example of federal patronage extended to a writer – the hiring of these accomplished individuals also served as ‘political perfumery’ that tempered partisan hiring practices during this ‘inglorious period’ of legislated patronage, when nomination by a cabinet minister was an official requirement for all civil service appointments (R.M. Dawson 24, 28). The accumulation of literary talent at Ottawa was endorsed as a deliberate feature of Macdonald’s local agenda as early as 4 February 1868, at a gathering of the Ottawa Mechanics’ Institute chaired by the prime minister. At this gathering Lett read the consequential ‘Lines’ he subsequently published in Recollections of Bytown and Its Old Inhabitants.8 Moreover, with lasting significance for Ottawa’s literary culture, Macdonald’s secretary of state for the provinces, Adams George Archibald, expounded on the physical and political ‘accident of position’ that served to determine the capital’s ‘peculiar degree [of] duty’: ‘Of a sudden, you have been placed in a proud position. You have become the centre of a population of four millions. The eyes of this people are on you. The tastes you cultivate, the habits you cherish, the extent of intellectual life which breathes and glows among you, will show whether you deserve this glorious elevation’ (‘Hon. Mr. Archibald’s Speech’ 2). Archibald’s successor as secretary of state for the provinces, Joseph Howe, would advance the same project of literary-cultural centralization in his address to the Young Men’s Christian Association of Ottawa in 1872, when he instructed citizens of Ottawa to be ‘refined, accomplished, and intellectual – ambitious to make the political Capital of the country the home of the Arts, the literary centre of the Confed-

Urbanity and the Literary Culture of Ottawa 41

eracy, the fountain-head of elevated thought and laudable ambition’ (319). This vision persisted even in the planning report prepared by the Ottawa Improvement Commission in 1903, which once again anticipated the capital’s situation as an urban-cultural ‘index’: ‘Not only is Ottawa sure to become the centre of a large and populous district, but the fact that it is the Capital of an immense country whose future greatness is beginning to unfold, renders it necessary that it shall also be the centre of all those things which are an index of man’s highest intellectual attainments, and that it be a city which will reflect the character of the nation, and the dignity, stability, and good taste of its citizens’ (qtd. in Eggleston 161). Thomas D’Arcy McGee, a Montreal MP and the federal government’s most influential literary spokesman, hesitated to endorse the capital as the ideal ‘ruling city,’ where ‘a recognized literary class will bye and bye be felt as a state and social necessity’ (76, 85). In McGee’s view, the top contenders for the distinction of presiding as Canada’s literary-cultural capital – Ottawa and Montreal – were both in danger of being diverted from the development of the nation’s intangible monuments by the tangible products of urban construction, a predicament he examined in ‘The Mental Outfit of the New Dominion,’ the pivotal address he delivered in Montreal on 4 November 1867. ‘I cordially concur in the honest pride of every inhabitant, in the strong masonry and line style of our new edifices,’ stated McGee; ‘but if “stone walls do not a prison make,” still less do they make a capital – a ruling city – a seat of light and guidance, and authority, to a nation or a generation’ (76). In keeping with the design of his address – that is, a synthesis of names and numbers that represent an organized taxonomy of a distinctively ‘Canadian’ ‘mental outfit,’ but one that allows for indefinite future expansion – McGee initially determines the character of the ‘ruling city’ according to a formula of intellectual concentration: ‘power must be wherever true intelligence is, and where most intelligence, most power’ (75). Yet, with Ottawa in mind, and in order to advance the nation’s literary endeavours as a complement to its urban projects, McGee suggests that this concentrated ‘power’ should not be mistaken for, nor circumscribed by, political jurisdiction, whether federal or municipal. III These assertions did compel members of Ottawa’s resolute literary community to consider their wider cultural burden as citizens of a

42

Steven Artelle

‘ruling city.’ Lett, who certainly tested the equation between urban and cultural progress after Confederation, owned a copy of the address, and in an elegy written upon McGee’s assassination at Ottawa in April 1868, he recorded his admiration for the ‘noble comprehensiveness of thought, / [and] intellectual royalty’ that characterized this ‘Statesman, Poet, Orator.’9 Ottawa’s ambition to form a ‘literary centre’ found emblematic expression in the texts of McGee’s national-minded adherents, who employed literary accumulation as a kind of cultural fusion designed to radiate cultural energy. This was Bourinot’s method throughout his career, and he is explicit in his debt to McGee in such inventories as his presidential address to the Royal Society of Canada in 1893, ‘Our Intellectual Strength and Weakness: A Short Review of Literature, Education and Art in Canada.’ Henry J. Morgan’s comprehensive Bibliotheca Canadensis or, A Manual of Canadian Literature was completed and published at Ottawa in 1867 with the assistance of advisers including McGee and Aeneas McDonell Dawson, a writer whose literary contributions to the city included ‘the honor of writing the first book ever issued from the press [at Ottawa]’ (Morgan, Recollections 9).10 When Dawson experienced a period of renewed literary productivity in the 1880s following his induction as a charter member of the Royal Society of Canada (itself a body convened at Ottawa to concentrate and stimulate cultural endeavours), he brought the tenets of McGee’s ‘ruling city’ to bear in his long poems dealing with antecedent capital cities, including The Last Defender of Jerusalem (1882) and Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra (1883). In the latter, Dawson furnishes a portrait of Palmyra as a comprehensive literary, legislative, and spiritual centre, where ‘the Arts with Liberty [were] combined’ in an explicit precedent for Ottawa’s own cultural aspirations: Amid the wilderness her glorious fate To build a City and erect a State In beauty, power and wealth that lustrous shone, Brighter than e’er in Eastern lands was known. (2)

The diverse urban-cultural associations of the Dominion’s precursory empires and the westward progress of civilization also serve as recurring paradigms in Dreamland and Other Poems (1868) by Charles Mair, a collection that underwent the final stages of publication at Ottawa. A native of the Ottawa Valley, Mair was among a group of

Urbanity and the Literary Culture of Ottawa 43

young men at Ottawa in 1868 whose admiration for McGee’s political ideals inspired them to found and propagate the Canada First movement. Like McGee, the original members of Canada First (including Morgan) generally proposed to cement the Dominion’s political union by stimulating an emotional and intellectual engagement with the new nation’s latent character, especially through a study of the nation’s history and by encouraging a native literature. In accordance with this generative aim, a number of Mair’s poems deal with the theme of cultural advent, with Canada naturally rendered as the prevailing form in a taxonomy of enlightened civilizations. Just as ‘orient dreams assemble manifold’ (27) in the visionary state of the titular poem, ‘Dreamland,’ Mair suggestively ‘orients’ the newly assembled Canadian state as he explores the paradigm of cultural decay and imminence at length in ‘Night and Morn.’ The poem describes the deified sun’s western transit as it sets on a succession of eastern nations, including India, China, Abyssinia, and Egypt, arriving finally at ‘our songless shores’ (a condition Mair’s poem implicitly seeks to counter), where a paradoxical image of a western sunrise (the ‘lifting mists of morn’ are located ‘Westward, on far-stretching prairies damp’ [40]) serves as a sign of cultural imminence, if not culmination. Even Mair’s imaginative engagement with his Ottawa Valley environment in ‘The Voice of the Pines’ (the monologue that culminates in ‘The Pines’) exhibits monumental ‘orientation’ as the poet assumes the manifold ‘voice’ of his inspirational milieu: Deep down in the crevice our roots were hid, And our limbs were thick and green Ere Cheops had builded his pyramid, Or the Sphinx’s form was seen. Whole forests have risen within our ken, Which withered upon the plain; And cities, and race after race of men Have arisen and sunk again. (13)

Mair’s primal forest, the region’s enduring ‘race,’ articulates its intrinsic character by appropriating the sublime temporal and spatial dimensions of urban monuments – by claiming a parallel ‘urbanity’ that is an assertion of power derived from cultural self-possession and the sublimity of the monumental array.

44

Steven Artelle

Indicative of the thematic and professional opportunities pursued by writers in the capital after Confederation, Mair’s literary purposes at Ottawa earned him the patronage of the Macdonald government.11 Norah Story has suggested, moreover, that the literary legacy of Mair and Canada First is witnessed in the so-called Confederation Group of the 1880s and 1890s (146). Indeed, the local continuity of literary nationalism and federal literary patronage at Ottawa – the site of a veritable ‘factory’ of writers according to an 1895 editorial in Toronto’s Saturday Night magazine (see Hurst 26–9) – suggests degrees of urban determinism that are still underestimated in assessments of the capital’s ‘Confederation Poets,’ Lampman, Campbell, and Scott. Long before they were assigned this familiar designation together with their traditional colleagues Charles G.D. Roberts and Bliss Carman, the trio had been identified in 1893 with more precision as ‘The Ottawa Group,’ along with fiction writer and fellow civil servant John Macdonald Oxley (Bok 17). Even Roberts, writing to Carman from Ottawa in 1884, where he was ‘a guest of Mr. Oxley’ (‘Personal’ 3), had considered establishing himself in the civil service, for at that time he regarded the capital’s literary compensations as second only to the lucrative sustenance of the United States (see Collected Letters 44). When Lampman arrived at Ottawa in 1883, construction was under way on a new departmental building, the Langevin Block, to accommodate the capital’s growing civil service staff, including the first wave of new residents – Lampman among them – who had gained federal employment following the Civil Service Reform Act of 1882. (Emblematic of the intersection between urban and vocational developments at Ottawa, both the Langevin Block and Lampman’s first collection of poetry, Among the Millet and Other Poems, were completed in 1888.) Entrance examinations for prospective civil service employees were inaugurated with the reforms of 1882, ostensibly as a means of attracting a superior class of clerks through open competition, as well as a means of excusing – if not circumventing – the vice of patronage. However, the reforms of 1882 did little to curb patronage, and as Robert MacGregor Dawson points out, even Sir Hector Langevin, the minister of public works who oversaw the construction of his namesake departmental building, freely ‘intimated that the Government still intended to use the power of appointment as a reward for party services’ (52), not to mention as ‘political perfumery.’ Thus Campbell was drawn to Ottawa by the federal government’s overtures of literary patronage in 1891. One month after his arrival in the capital, the lucrative post he had anticipated

Urbanity and the Literary Culture of Ottawa 45

was withheld following Macdonald’s death, and the debate over literary patronage that ensued marked the beginning of a more restrained attitude towards federal literary sponsorship (see Klinck 75–9). Scott, on the other hand, joined the civil service while still in his teens, and cultivated his literary talent under Lampman’s influence in the 1880s. Consequently, his first book, The Magic House and Other Poems (1893), is steeped in local and personal allusions (unlike Campbell’s productions at Ottawa, which record the city’s influence mainly in the form of recurring Dionysian Others epitomized in his Poetical Tragedies [1908], who articulate Campbell’s sense of marginalization following his disappointment at the hands of federal patrons). Scott’s most telling representation of the capital is the sonnet ‘Ottawa,’ a poem that depicts a city whose ancient ‘name’ is coupled with ‘maiden’ vitality, and whose physical environment (both natural and built) assures that it will progress from its present condition as a ‘Lamia city’ – an allusion to Keats’ composite, shape-shifting and profoundly attractive creature – towards the fixed ‘calm’ and ‘power sublime’ of urbanity: City about whose brow the north winds blow, Girdled with woods and shod with river foam, Called by a name as old as Troy or Rome, Be great as they, but pure as thine own snow; Rather flash up amid the auroral glow, The Lamia city of the northern star, Than be so hard with craft or wild with war, Peopled with deeds remembered for their woe. Thou art too bright for guile, too young for tears, And thou wilt live to be too strong for Time; For he may mock thee with his furrowed frowns, But thou wilt grow in calm throughout the years, Cinctured with peace and crowned with power sublime, The maiden queen of all the towered towns. (78)

Recalling Harrison’s poem of the same name, Scott’s sonnet clearly engages the cultural paradigms that inform literary renditions of the Canadian capital in the nineteenth century. The poem is distinctive, however, in its note of anxiety, which is rooted in the writer’s apprehension of the culturally detrimental effects of political ‘craft.’ That anxiety is distilled in Scott’s compelling description of Ottawa as a ‘Lamia

46

Steven Artelle

city’ – a fluctuating archetypal form that certainly understands the chief characteristic of the mythical lamia, which was believed to drain the vital energies of its beguiled victim. By comparison, Lampman’s ‘Ottawa,’ an imitation of Scott’s poem written in 1894, describes ‘A city set like a star / Of stone on a soft grey hill,’ but downgrades the lamia’s serpentine associations to depict ‘A river that shineth afar, / A serpent silver still,’ and confidently discovers ‘language large and sweet’ through an excursion from the city (Long Sault 20). Given Lampman’s persistent identification with ‘nature poetry,’ it is not altogether surprising that his relationship with the capital has been burdened by the pejorative context intimated by Scott’s ‘Lamia city.’ While such poems as ‘The City of the End of Things’ have been read narrowly as Lampman’s symbolic indictment of his oppressive urban venue,12 the city in Lampman’s verse also is notable for its idealized western orientation; significantly, the first and last poems he wrote at Ottawa – ‘Winter Evening’ (1883) and ‘Winter Uplands’ (1899) – both feature western cityscapes. Lampman provided an unambiguous assessment of the capital in ‘At the Mermaid Inn,’ the column he wrote with Scott and Campbell for the Toronto Globe from 1892 to 1893. Asserting that he had ‘often been tempted to sing the praises of Ottawa – this city from which I write – not as a commercial city or as the seat of government, but as a site, as a most picturesque and wholesome foundation for the dwelling of men,’ Lampman discovers ‘an intellectual elixir, an oxygenic essence’ invested in the capital’s topographical and meteorological position, and ‘[i]n this air the mind becomes conscious of a vital energy and buoyant swiftness of movement rarely experienced in a like degree elsewhere’ (Barrie Davies 255).13 The city that occurs to Lampman as the precedent for this site-specific ‘intellectual elixir’ is Florence, the Renaissance model of ‘magical potency in exciting intellectual and imaginative energy,’ and he ‘venture[s] to say that Ottawa will become in the course of ages the Florence of Canada, if not of America’ (255). Reflecting on the early character of the civil service, Henry Morgan would recall that ‘if Ottawa was not then the Florence or Athens Mr. Lampman would now paint it, with its Val d’Arno and the magical potency of its many influences, it was on the whole not an unpleasant or undesirable locale even for civil servants, and so we found it as the years rolled on’ (‘Ottawa Society’ 1). Having in large part realized the benefits of literary leisure himself, Lampman envisioned a New World Florentine cultural centre that would be significant not only for its

Urbanity and the Literary Culture of Ottawa 47

invocation of the Renaissance centre of innovation in the arts, but also for the fact that Florence’s cultural achievements were largely fuelled by the magisterial patronage of the city’s governing class. By the time Lampman made his analogy, both he and Campbell had been the objects of public calls for official literary patronage, and therefore it is probable that he was tactfully advocating an official policy of artistic and literary patronage. It was a vision of cultural sustenance determined by the city’s form and function, and it provided him with the confidence to speculate that ‘[Ottawa] is so placed that it can never be anything but beautiful, and as the years go on, bringing with them the spread of a finer architecture and a richer culture of the surrounding country, its beauty will be vastly greater than it is even now. It will become an ideal city for the artist’ (Barrie Davies 256). Campbell, on the other hand, was disillusioned by this ‘ideal city’; he observed that ‘a growing contempt is rising in respect to the so-called literary centres,’ where ‘the literary man needs to be a politician in a sense, and try to get in with these cliques, which are the vermin of our literature’ (Barrie Davies 157). In light of the revival of this particular cultural antipathy in 2002, when Stephen Henighan directed a salvo against Toronto’s perceived literary dominance (see, for example, 164– 7), and in light of J.M.S. Careless’s observations on the far-reaching effect of ‘metropolitan dynamism’ in the shaping of Canadian culture (10), sites and episodes of urban ‘dynamism’ – and, in Ottawa’s case, urban idealism – warrant sustained attention as determining factors in the history and development of Canadian literature.

NOTES 1 With more precision, Jennifer David locates the tribe in question, the Odawa, in the Georgian Bay area (31). Fittingly, the title of Sulte’s address is variously identified in the Transactions of the Ottawa Literary and Scientific Society as ‘The Meaning of Ottawa’ and ‘The Name of Ottawa.’ 2 Sulte uses the term in his essay, ‘How The Name Was Obtained,’ published in the Ottawa Daily Citizen on 18 December 1893. Sulte revisited the theme a week later with ‘Origin of Ottawa’s Name.’ 3 Ironically, the correspondent’s pseudonym is derived from the lighthouse erected by Ptolemy II on the island of Pharos at the mouth of Alexandria’s eastern harbour, deemed one of the Seven Wonders of the World. 4 The recurring emphasis on Ottawa’s topographical heights recalls Benedict Anderson’s theories of nationalism and the accompanying modes

48

5 6

7

8

9

10

11

Steven Artelle of engineering the ‘imagined community’ – in this case, any mode of rule that imaginatively ‘organizes everything around a high centre’ (25). In Canada and Its Capital, Edgar would devote two chapters to the local literary culture, ‘Literature of the Capital’ and ‘Some Ottawa Poets.’ For example, the process of ‘gather[ing]’ and ‘spreading’ cultural energy was given expression at the seminal Mechanics’ Institute meeting of 4 February 1868 (see above), when the Institute’s president, Ottawa mayor Henry J. Friel, ‘indulged hopes that in this central part of the country, away from the great cities of Toronto and Montreal, they would be able to build up an institution that would be of great service in spreading knowledge among the people, and to serve as a nucleus around which would gather all kindred institutions in this part of the country’ (‘Mechanics’ Festival’ 2). In their study of Washington’s nineteenth-century arts community, Andrew J. Cosentino and Henry H. Glassie discovered that ‘almost nothing is said about local artists or the art life and artistic heritage of the local city’ due to the same ‘emphasis ... invariably placed on “national”’ (8). The date attributed to the last poem in Lett’s collection, ‘Lines Recited by the Author in “Her Majesty’s Theatre,” at a Festival of the Mechanics’ Institute in March, 1868,’ suggests an ironic lapse in the author’s ‘recollection.’ Though he may have been prevailed upon to deliver the poem at the March 1868 Mechanics’ Institute meeting, Lett first ‘recited his original poem amidst torrents of applause’ at the meeting of 4 February 1868. See ‘Mechanics’ Festival.’ The poem was subsequently printed in the Ottawa Times on 6 Feb. 1868 under the heading ‘Poem. By W.P. Lett, Esq. Recited by the Author at the Late Festival of the Ottawa Mechanics’ Institute.’ The lines are from the poem ‘Thomas D’Arcy McGee,’ in the City of Ottawa Archives Lett Family Fonds, MG 37-4-31. Lett’s copy of ‘The Mental Outfit of the New Dominion’ is a pamphlet reprinted from the Montreal Gazette, 5 November 1867, MG 37-6-6. The address was also printed in two parts in the Ottawa Times on 7 Nov. 1867: 2 and 8 Nov. 1867: 2. Henry J. Morgan’s concept of ‘book’ disqualifies earlier pamphlet literature published at Ottawa. Certainly, Dawson can lay claim to having issued the city’s first substantial volume, a 227-page lecture entitled The Temporal Sovereignty of the Pope, with Relation to the State of Italy (1860). Dreamland and Other Poems is dedicated to the wife of William McDougall; as Macdonald’s minister of public works, McDougall employed Mair as a government agent in Red River, where he was witness to the first Riel Rebellion. For Mair’s experience with federal patronage, see Shrive 28–31.

Urbanity and the Literary Culture of Ottawa 49 12 W.E. Collin advances this reading of ‘The City of the End of Things’ in ‘Archibald Lampman,’ an essay that epitomizes the pejorative rendering of Ottawa’s literary-cultural environment. See, for example, 134–7. 13 In late 1882, while he was teaching at Orangeville following his graduation from Trinity College, Toronto, Lampman had noted his inability to write in the absence of urban stimulation: ‘It was weeks since I heard the thunder of trains in the Union Station, the din of many feet on the stone pavements of King Street and, above all, the joyous voices of mine own old acquaintances and never forgotten friends’ (qtd. in Connor 63).

50

Christopher J. Armstrong

Post-colonial Historicity: Halifax, Region, and Empire in Barometer Rising and The Nymph and the Lamp christopher j. armstrong

In the minds of many today, Maritime Canada is a producer of regional writing, upon which the stamp of rural setting, character, and theme is indelibly impressed. The fiction of the region’s major writers seems to bear this out: L.M. Montgomery, Ernest Buckler, Alden Nowlan, Alistair MacLeod, Donna E. Smyth, and David Adams Richards all privilege stories of everyday life in the countryside and in small towns. It is not surprising, then, that when Maritime writers and critics search for urban contrasts to this rural image, they go outside the region, to Central Canada, especially Toronto, whose metropolitan influence is often bemoaned as a cultural imperialism. Barometer Rising (1941) by Hugh MacLennan and The Nymph and the Lamp (1950) by Thomas H. Raddall recall another time and image of the Maritimes, and different relations of power. In these novels of early-twentieth-century Halifax an urban milieu is described that bears comparison with those analysed by city researchers Georg Simmel, Louis Wirth, Robert E. Park, Walter Benjamin, and Lewis Mumford, and that embodies themes much like those engaging literary modernists E.M. Forster, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. In particular, the novels chart the formative influence of the city on mental life, the interaction of people rooted in a particular material urban history, and the city’s exploitation of its own regional hinterland. Reference outside the region, moreover, looks across the Atlantic, to Britain and the storms of war and Empire. Established by imperial fiat in 1749, Halifax challenged the fortified centre of French trade and fishery at Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island, harassed French Acadian settlers and Mi’kmaq people on the peninsula, and served as a colonial entrepôt for hinterland resources and British armaments. During the major conflicts of empire, the city pros-

Halifax, Region, and Empire 51

pered, extending its trade links while maintaining access to imperial coffers, its impressive fortifications placing it second only to Gibraltar in military might. The city retained its imperial garrison even after the withdrawal of British troops from Canada following Confederation. However, in 1906, in response to growing instability in Europe, the garrison departed. Halifax passed from imperial stewardship to Canadian control. By the 1940s, as Canada pursued an increasingly independent path against the backdrop of what John M. MacKenzie has called a slow sixty-year ‘implosion of empire’ (21), Halifax, approaching the two hundredth anniversary of its founding, was an ideal locus for the Nova Scotian writers to examine the post-colonial fate of the city and the region. MacLennan and Raddall share what D.A. Sutherland has called the ‘garrison identity thesis’ of Halifax, articulated by contemporary historians and commentators Archibald MacMechan (1928; in Metson), William Coates Borrett (1948), and Phyllis R. Blakeley and D.C. Harvey (1949): that is, of a city inextricably and tragically linked to the British Empire, energized by its wars, somnolent during peacetime. Yet there the writers part company. In Barometer Rising, the garrison identity thesis is reiterated in historical commentaries that serve largely antiwar, if not also anti-imperialistic, ends. Such passages have supplemented arguments for MacLennan’s novel as national allegory: with its identity-less wandering hero Neil Macrae and his antagonist, the ruthless profiteer Colonel Geoffrey Wain, the novel represents Canada’s struggle to throw off the imperial yoke and initiate a post-colonial search for identity.1 Yet the novel’s representation and critique of urban modernity has remained peripheral to this theme. I will argue that it is integral to the post-colonial historicity of city, region, and nation as MacLennan imagines it: Neil’s literal loss of identity comes as a result of war, a human activity of inhuman barbarism that lies on a continuum of destructive processes in modernity’s mechanized order, and which he sees as a threat to the realization of national destiny. While MacLennan’s novel is a searchingly nationalist and antiimperialist work in which personal dramas are subordinated in an impersonal narrative structure, Raddall’s is an alienated view of a modern city, largely nostalgic of its past, filtered through the memories and longings of its characters Matthew Carney and Isabel Jardine. In this sense, the writer’s move from historical romances of Nova Scotia’s eighteenth century imperial apogee, such as His Majesty’s Yankees (1942) and Roger Sudden (1944), to a contemporary setting in The Nymph and

52

Christopher J. Armstrong

the Lamp is less an artistic departure than might be imagined. For Raddall’s twentieth-century city, like that of Archibald MacMechan in his 1928 essay ‘Storied Halifax,’ conceals an ancient city of ‘empirebuilders,’ who sometimes ‘seem to the historic sense more real and living than those who tread the pavements to-day’ (32). Indeed, it is Raddall’s intent to map a twentieth-century urban space in and against which romance and nostalgia become compelling frames of historical meaning and personal identity. It should be pointed out that Raddall himself held an intimate, and finally nostalgic, connection to this imperial past. Born in 1903 in Hythe, England, the son of an British Army training officer who perished in the First World War, Raddall arrived in the city in 1913, ‘the last of a long procession of imperial soldiers and their families who had settled in Halifax all the way back to 1749’ (Warden vii). That quotation opens his 1948 history, Halifax, Warden of the North, whose title is taken from Kipling’s ‘Song of the Cities’ (231).2 Advancing the garrison identity thesis and accentuating the city’s imperial links, Raddall is at times to be found pleading for Canadian recognition of its unique historical role. Yet the account of modern Halifax and the transfer of its fortifications from Empire to Dominion contained therein leaves no doubt about the writer’s allegiances. As imperial disengagement gains momentum in the late nineteenth century, Raddall praises the resolve of ‘Britannia’ to ‘hand [the fortress] over in first-class condition’ (230), while describing the departure of the garrison in 1906 as ‘a shock to Halifax business and to Halifax sentiment, for with the last departing Tommy went the life and color of the fortress’ (231). Recalling Kipling’s ‘Recessional’ and reworking the Halifax verses of ‘Song of the Cities,’ Raddall expresses a sense of loss and bitterness: Into the west Canadian brows look forth, Not to the east. My virgin ramparts lie Green-rotten like the Honour of the North – Naked, imperilled, I. (231)

This expression of loss accords well with recent explorations of Maritime nostalgia by David Creelman (Setting in the East) and Glenn Willmott (Unreal Country), whether arising out of the disappearance of traditional community structures or the post-colonial severing of the region’s imperial ties (Willmott 184–7). For Raddall, the sense of loss is acute: not only has fortress Halifax been displaced from its guardian role, but

Halifax, Region, and Empire 53

the east has been shut out of the latest phase of British North American imperialism, namely, the development and exploitation of the western agricultural hinterland, suggested most tellingly by the ironic echo of ‘imperial’ in ‘imperilled.’ In The Culture of Cities (1938), Lewis Mumford writes of a new urban structure consequential on European mercantile capitalism, which engendered a new political order (‘centralized despotism or oligarchy’) and a new ideological form (‘mechanism’). The essential urban symbol and embodiment of this transformation is the fortification, which, Mumford argues, ‘shifted [city-building] from architecture to engineering, from esthetic design to material calculations of weight, number, and position: prelude to the wider technics of the machine’ (86). Unlike medieval walled towns, such cities, dominated by military elites and bureaucracy, existed to exploit hinterland populations and resources, and wage wars over long distances. At the same time, the garrisons of professional soldiers exerted a pervasive influence on urban demographics, economy, and mental life. ‘[P]ure consumers’ requiring housing, food and drink, and clothes, the garrison soldiers and sailors drew ‘a second standing army of shopkeepers, tailors, publicans, and whores’ while instituting ‘other forms of political coercion’: ‘people got into the habit of accepting the aggressive bark of the drill sergeant and the arrogant brutal manners of the upper classes: they were copied by the new industrialists, who governed their factories like absolute despots’ (89). General as they are, these insights apply to Halifax, its founding, and its role, explaining how the modestly populated naval station and garrison town,3 with its permanent troops, sudden influxes of soldiers, its culture of discipline, and its military infrastructure, might become an image of urban modernity equally compelling as the metropolis of modernist fiction. They also frame the particular experience and trajectory MacLennan sees for post-colonial Halifax: oligarchic and authoritarian, mechanized and alienating – and with the explosion, a near duplication of the scene of European imperial war. MacLennan’s Halifax typifies the city of war outlined by Mumford in its quest to conquer distances, exploiting – under the oligarchy of Colonel Geoffrey Wain – the rural Cape Breton hinterland, dominating those who make their way to the city, and joining the larger imperial scramble. Cape Breton’s fishermen have experienced a disastrous drop in prices for their produce and the decline of their livelihood (69). Responding to adversity, the rural population has migrated to the city,

54

Christopher J. Armstrong

only to be exploited for their labour and their sex. Wain’s relationship with his secretary-mistress Evelyn, a Cape Breton migrant whose family has experienced these economic disruptions, plays out this theme, Wain’s silent, manipulative love-making suggestive of both sexual and economic domination (68). Largely disdaining those foreign to his imperial lineage – Neil and his father John, Alec Mackenzie, and Angus Murray, all Cape Bretoners – Wain holds all city dwellers in contempt and sees postwar opportunities for totalitarian rule. The exploited Evelyn is also made to stand for the vulgarity of the urban masses (70, 126), creatures of fear who take refuge in the military (29–30) and are therefore ready for fascistic control (101, 126). Beyond the regional hinterland, the power of Wain’s circle converges with that of Empire in Jim Fraser’s stint as a mining engineer in South Africa (71); and the West Indian trade – from which Wain enthusiastically profits (94) – is signified by a map of Jamaica suggestively hanging ‘crooked’ in his home (18). Military infrastructure, institutions, and the war itself create distinctive rhythms in the city, disciplining and routinizing the behaviour of its inhabitants. Halifax, Neil observes, ‘sleeps between great wars’ (4). Awakened, it experiences martial influences with regularity: ‘Battalions passed through from the West, cargoes multiplied, convoys left every week and new ships took over their anchorages’ (6). Field guns from the Citadel sound noon and night, the city dwellers checking their watches ‘automatically’ (6). Even the idle crowds on Barrington Street seem to move with the rhythm of war (6), Neil thinks, indicting them at the same time for their blasé attitudes (7). Yet, wearily perambulating the streets, Neil himself is prone to automatic response: seeing an oncoming group of soldiers, he readies his hand for their salute (45). Such rhythms of war ultimately destabilize traditional morality and community. With the sudden influx of soldiers or the imminence of their departure, men roam the streets in hurried search of drink and sexual partners (42, 43), a longing Neil too feels (44). The ‘forms of men and girls’ are visible in the grasses of Citadel Hill as night descends, ‘sailors with only a night on shore and local girls with no better place to be’ (5). The juxtaposition of pious hymns from a nearby church and the glimpse of a soldier picking up ‘a girl in front of the iron gate of the Crimean monument’ (8–9) exemplifies this moral breakdown. The anonymity and nihilism of the ‘great cities’ comes to the garrison town. Neil harbours such nihilism (7), having seen the full extent of European war in his Odyssean wanderings: ‘the dreary army routine had given place

Halifax, Region, and Empire 55

to a phantasmal existence of hospitals and cities away from the front but still a part of the war, an experience in which nothing had been real but loneliness and nothing knowledge but statistics and newsprint’ (93). At the same time, Neil shows signs of his exile from class and community, resembling ‘a gentleman who has lost caste’ (3) and ‘a symbol of something ominous’ (42). Shorn of communal moorings, he broods on his eventual transformation into ‘a ghastly, groping automaton who would ultimately accept an invalid psychosis as a substitute for real life’; for whom ‘Another two years of it would finish even the courage necessary for suicide’ (93). To Neil’s despair, Angus Murray adds his observation of life-destroying processes at work in the city and in war: ‘death in a great city seemed to him much like the death in the war, an atomic life extinguished finally by an enormous process which had always been its enemy’ (207). If Murray sees a common destructive drive in war and in the city, Neil’s shell-shocked state serves to underscore the mental and physical effects of an industrialized order that encompasses city streets and the battlefields of modern war. Even after two years of convalescence, the sudden noise and haste of the city’s streets aggravate Neil’s nerves, producing the ‘aftermath of shell shock’ (47), while also placing him psychically back in the battlefield. A tram’s screeching deceleration reduces Neil to ‘an animal bunched for a spring’ (2). A near miss from a horse-drawn sloven aggravates his wound and recalls vividly the experience of the bombardment in which he lost his memory (6–7): ‘A motor horn sounded and he leaped convulsively again. Every time a sudden noise struck his ears his jangled nerves set his limbs jumping and trembling in automatic convulsion’ (7). Penny recognizes his condition in his sudden convulsions, blankness, and distraction (110). In the figure of shock, or mental over-stimulation, Walter Benjamin and Georg Simmel located the essence of the urban experience. Certainly, Neil’s experience of urban traffic corresponds to that which Benjamin glimpses in Baudelaire’s Paris – the individual navigating ‘a series of shocks and collisions’: ‘At dangerous intersections, nervous impulses flow through him in rapid succession, like the energy from a battery’ (‘Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ 171). Alongside such ‘abrupt movements’ Benjamin sets a whole range of trip-switches and mechanical processes characteristic of urban life – the striking of a match, the lifting of a telephone receiver, the snapping of a picture, the shifting images of a motion picture, and the rhythm of a factory conveyor belt (171). Simmel, for his part, sees

56

Christopher J. Armstrong

the outward pace and intensity of such stimuli managed in an economy of consciousness, a metropolitan psychology ‘consisting in the intensification of nervous stimulation’ (author’s emphasis; ‘Metropolis’ 410). In the affliction identified as ‘shell-shock, or war-shock’ medical professionals of the Great War saw continuities with urban experience. For wartime therapist Charles S. Myers, the neuroses issuing from war or the city differed only in intensity; such afflictions, writes Myers, ‘have, for the most part, been previously recognized in civil life as occurring in industrial and railway accidents’ (37). Unsurprisingly, the engineer, that consummate figure of modernity, assumes importance in the novel. While Neil and Penny are characterized ambivalently, the novel elsewhere vilifies the ethos of the technocrat. At the launching of the troopship Olympic, Angus Murray rebukes the captain of engineers for likening the soldiers on deck to targets, showing his contempt for experts and their war (49) and reiterating his thesis that ‘this war is the product of the big city’ (50). The engineer’s ‘attitude to war’ recalls that of ‘a well-brought-up and precocious child playing with a set of meccano’ (54). The appearance of Roddie Wain, Penny’s young brother, playing hooky from school in order to catch the launch, underscores the comparison and suggests how the engineer’s lack of human response is entwined with war and the sentiments of Halifax’s citizens. Roddie, whose school scribblers are covered with imperial propaganda (128), is obsessed with war (17), imagines its heroism (54), and fetishizes its hardware (55, 128). Such attitudes correspond to the civilian war-hatred that MacMechan found rampant in the city (Roper 85). Meanwhile, Penny, whose mind has ‘the efficient precision of an adding machine,’ questions the cavalier manner in which expert knowledge proceeds (51). A glimpse of American massedproduction elicits recognition of a logic that wagers human lives, and presages ‘the manipulating of men, and ever-increasing dexterities ... to fit masses of men into the molds produced by the designers’ (52). The built environment of Halifax also bears signs of the designer’s cold hand, especially in the triumph of efficiency over civic beauty (5), Wain’s home manifesting a building style that is ‘solid British colonial,’ ‘neither gracious nor beautiful’ but, like the engineer’s singleness of purpose, somehow ‘forbidding’ (8). More generally, the novel narratively enacts the engineer’s distanced point of view, showing how such a perspective is inscribed in the city and its strategic occupation of the landscape. Neil’s panoramic view of the city from Citadel Hill blends the discourses of geographical description and imperial his-

Halifax, Region, and Empire 57

tory, eliciting his sudden recognition of the city’s real ‘meaning’ as strategic site (3–5). In The Nymph and the Lamp, Raddall has nothing to do with the ‘garrison identity thesis’ of Halifax. Oddly, neither the war nor its memory gets much mention in the city. While rubble and broken glass in residential courtyards are reminders of the explosion (44), the novel’s heroine, Isabel Jardine, views the tragedy ‘as a natural result of a great war’ (247). Yet peacetime Halifax hardly sleeps. Post-war decadence – not a brutal, anonymous mechanistic order – is afoot, creeping out of the city and into the countryside and threatening to sweep away cherished values of decency, discipline, and commitment. Embodying or in quest of these values, Raddall’s hero and heroine move perplexed and alone through Halifax and its provincial hinterlands, the region beset by labour unrest, burgeoning commercial amusements, shifting gender ideals, and disillusionment with country and Empire. One would expect, then, in such an anti-modern romance, that Raddall would give short shrift to the city, imagining it as a cauldron of modern iniquities to be escaped. Yet Raddall articulates romance and the city differently. A literary genre of the exceptional and the exotic, romance is also revealed to be a powerful mode of everyday intelligibility and ‘going on’ amidst modern banality and boredom. Again and again, Matthew Carney and Isabel Jardine construct identities for themselves or have identities imposed on them from the urbane culture of art, literature, and mythology, their apotheosis as Ran and her Norse hero at novel’s end being but one among many: Robinson Crusoe, Rip Van Winkle; the Lady of Shalott, Eve, Clélie, and Monna Pomona. At the same time, the city’s popular amusements and spectacles provide opportunities for improvising a range of transitory but seductive identities: vaudeville girl, adventurous sailor, cowboy. Accordingly, Raddall’s third-person narration makes full use of the ambiguities consequent on character focalization, with its tendency to ‘colour’ narrative discourse, verbalizing intimate desires and strategies of self-presentation, giving voice and meaning to circulating urban discourses, but also signifying the confusions of identity that urban culture historically worked on gender and class. This is a new valence that Glenn Willmott assigns romance in modernity: ‘a disorganized, global flow of deterritorialized fantasies and heterogeneous imaginations,’ embodying ‘the imagination of life possibilities’ set within the largely ironic realist framework of modern Canadian fiction (5). Indeed, simultaneously, romance is ‘all bosh’ – a phrase

58

Christopher J. Armstrong

Matthew Carney uses to describe his enthusiasm for Norse legend (327) – as well as compensatory and ideologically instrumental. Romance provides the vehicle for transmission of departed histories and ideals into the present – MacMechan’s ‘storied Halifax’ mentioned earlier – and the values of the present into the past – Raddall’s historical romances, which nonetheless encode modern tensions (Creelman, ‘Conservative’). Raddall has no interest in a documentary narrative of Halifax, although he has, of course, written its history, inflecting it with his own nostalgia. Rather, he writes of the historical play of imagination and desire in which historical ‘wisdom’ is preserved and transmitted to another post-war generation, that is, he fears, also on the verge of becoming lost. Most critics of The Nymph and the Lamp note that Isabel, not Carney, is the novel’s centre. Carney glimpses the modern order, experiences its shock – Simmel’s urban overstimulation – and is blinded. Rather, Carney exists to be seen, understood, and loved for the values he unconsciously embodies. Isabel is constructed as a character eminently suited to do this. Historically, she occupies the contradictory location of lower-middleclass white-collar urbanites of the period. As David Nasaw points out in his history of urban amusements in America, ‘The explosive growth of white-collar employment in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries played havoc with class identities’ (44). White-collar clerks did not identify with their labouring compatriots. In fact, there was considerable fluidity of identity for these clerks and typists, improvising roles to suit the occasions in which they found themselves. Flocking to the theatres and amusement halls in greater numbers than any other urban group, white-collar men and women may have been seeking temporary resolutions of their class confusions. The entertainment that they consumed varied greatly, encompassing the high and low (Rip Van Winkle, with whom Carney identifies, was also a figure of vaudeville entertainment), and the polite and vulgar. With her interest in art and self-improvement, Isabel stands apart from her fellow office workers and the other residents of the boarding house where she lives. Yet she also indulges fantasies fed by popular entertainments, vicariously crossing boundaries of gender and class within circumscribed masculine worlds of adventure. The back courtyard of the boarding house in which she lives presents a kind of peep show and stage show with its ‘variety of portraits and tableaux’ (44), and its ‘scene’ of sailors’ antics that ‘was always the same’ but whose ‘actors changed from week to week’ (45). Evenings find her improvising fantasies that are the stuff of

Halifax, Region, and Empire 59

adventure fiction – and militaristic iconography, namely, the famous 1917 U.S. Navy recruiting poster by Howard Chandler Christy in which a young woman sporting a navy uniform gushes ‘Gee! I wish I were a man’: ‘There were times when she longed to be a man like one of these, with their reckless faces, their hard bodies, their unconscious attitudes of utter fearlessness’ (45). For Isabel and others, Carney is this figure evocative of manly adventure. His reputation among radio operators on the East Coast as a technical wizard, an industry pioneer, and ‘a latter-day Robinson Crusoe’ (12); his mythologization as a Norse warrior-king; and the romantic image of adventurer which Isabel constructs of him – all work to suggest the masculinist, and I will argue, imperialist image. I say ‘evoke’ and ‘suggest,’ because it is true to their perceptions. A more historically concrete location is provided by Carney’s association with the Boer War, which as Carl Berger and Mike O’Brien demonstrate, marked a high point of imperial enthusiasm in Canada. The historical moment also helps to distinguish Canadian and British soldiery, and their respective views on war and Empire. As Carney waits for Isabel to appear on their first night out, he muses on the Boer War monument across from the Hollis Street post office and recalls his intention to enlist in the war, noting also with disapproval the incongruity of the representation of the soldier: ‘The chap on the monument seemed to him a fool, standing on a boulder and holding a rifle above his head, a signal that meant “Enemy in sight.” A silly thing to do in the sight of the Boers, who shot so very straight’ (48). As O’Brien points out, ‘Boer War enthusiasm ... marked the culmination of a general late 19th-century trend toward the glorification of irregular “frontier” soldiers’ (117). Journalists painted romantic portraits of imperial adventurers who embodied ‘individual strength of character and perseverance against both external and internal challenges’ (117–18). Thinking of the war as ‘a romantic affair below the Equator’ and ‘the chief excitement of his youth’ (14), Carney, with his pragmatic knowledge of the Boers’ martial skills, resembles the figure of the militia man, the frontier irregular soldier of Canadian military tradition, who had recently earned fame in Canada’s own imperialistic ‘small wars’ in the west (O’Brien 118). Indeed, with his jack-of-all-trades profile and simple nature, Carney conforms to the image of the Canadian soldier Raddall presents in his memoir In My Time (1976); such soldiers his father greatly admired for their remarkable camaraderie and disdain ‘for stiff and blind discipline’: ‘Efficiency was their ideal in war as it was in peacetime at home, whether building

60

Christopher J. Armstrong

a railway, or running a farm or a logging operation ... they would work or fight their best only for an officer who knew his job thoroughly, and as they said, shaped up as a man’ (24–5). If official memory embodied in the statue is revealed to be comically inaccurate, personal memory gives the imperial past its due. Musing on the crumbling Victorian fortress just opposite Point Pleasant Park where he sits with Isabel, Carney remembers ‘seeing soldiers there, smart young Tommies in striped trousers and tight red jackets and pillbox caps, back in the days of the Imperial garrison’ (34). Crucially, though, Carney imagines the Great War in terms of the ‘romantic’ Boer War, leaving him untainted by the disillusionment of the returning soldiers, whom Isabel will meet in the countryside and who pose such problems for post-war stability. Berger and O’Brien make clear that the Boer War reinforced Canadian myths about war and patriotism: Canadians were essentially unmilitary people; militia men were ‘exemplars of patriotic devotion to duty,’ not ‘bar room loafers’ like their professional counterparts; and war itself was ‘a struggle against nature rather than massive slaughter’ (O’Brien 115–20; Berger 236). Isabel, for her part, romanticizes Carney’s masculinity – as she does the boarding-house sailors. In the course of a casual conversation, she imagines him in an exotic locale: ‘The sun she surmised beating up from the sea and those bare sands at Marina. She pictured him on a lonely beach, squinting against the glare’ (30). Her lightning-illuminated glimpse of the Boer War monument later in the novel registers associations of heroism – an ‘imperturbable soldier holding his rifle above his head as if to ward off a further blow from the sky’ – and brings Carney to mind (61). Carney’s memories of pre-war Halifax recall a disappearing male world of adventure, with its opportunities for demonstrating strength and character. Isabel’s return to the countryside, another sphere of masculine virtues, registers the same. Eight years’ absence from her rural roots induces the same shock that Carney feels after ten years away from Halifax (247). Interestingly, the countryside, not the city, appears the more hotly contested terrain. War and the ensuing economic boom have changed the Annapolis Valley and the ‘overgrown village’ of Kingsbridge (242): ‘It was as if some mighty hand had seized the land and given it a shake, so that all the human contents changed places, trades, amusements, and ambitions’ (247). Prices soar and material prosperity is everywhere to be seen. And like the city with its gender and class confusions, traditional patterns of work and family have been altered. Whereas becoming a shop girl was once the pathway

Halifax, Region, and Empire 61

to marriage and family, soon-to-be-married clerks, Isabel learns, are keeping their jobs to support their unemployed husbands recently returned from the war (246). Isabel consequently wonders about the stability of the economy when such a large proportion of men are out of work (247). The antagonisms of post-war capital and labour also take shape, as Isabel enters the firm of the regional entrepreneur Mr Markham and glimpses the world of the dissident Brockhurst. Markham, owner of the local hardware store, is a portrait of masculine individualism, local innovation, and self-reliance, much like Matthew Carney. The principal of the Kingsbridge school, Brockhurst, a wounded veteran of the Canadian infantry, is a socialist and president of the local veterans’ association who holds Markham responsible for wartime profiteering (263). Brockhurst claims to represent the views of the war veteran, ‘the chap who made it possible for every Markham in the country to hang on to his money and add a lot more to it’ (263). Isabel defends Markham, while seeing the ease of getting Brockhurst fired from his post ‘as a menace to the children of Kingsbridge’; she chooses not to denounce him (263), dismissing his politics as ‘Progressive-Impossible’ (264). However, Raddall’s historicizing narrator remarks on how typical these views are among veterans, and Brockhurst’s analysis of the coming decline in the regional economy – rooted in inflated prices and shrinking overseas markets – proves accurate. Yet Isabel’s role is not limited to debate or denunciation, for she too is an agent of urban influence, more precisely a conspirator with her rural capitalist in exploiting the countryside. Along with an accountant from the bank, she brings her modern management skills, including ‘city business jargon’ (259) and centralized accounting, to the otherwise growing operation. Her shorthand skills are useful on Markham’s property-buying forays into the countryside, Isabel jotting verbal ‘agreements’ in order to ‘turn them into indisputable type for signature before the matter had a chance to grow cold’ (260). Brockhurst sees her value to Markham. Brockhurst and the narrator’s historicizing voice are central not only to Raddall’s account of the city’s influence on the country, but also to the emerging ideology of the modern age, especially the post-war consensus surrounding the welfare state. Brockhurst tells Isabel of veteran working men’s agitation for government intervention: The active membership consists of Kingsbridge lads and the more restless types from the farms, the How-ya-gonna-keep-’em boys. They attend the

62

Christopher J. Armstrong business meetings in the clubroom and I’m continually trying to talk them out of crackpot resolutions addressed to the government – demands for more gratuities, which they’d only spend on bootleg liquor; and demands for public works which presumably would provide ’em all with well-paid jobs. (262–3)4

The image of dissatisfied veterans, like their city-dwelling counterparts, characterized as undisciplined, restless youth, is shared by Markham, who has nothing but hatred for post-war ‘loafers’ and their thirst for amusements (257). Isabel finally spurns Brockhurst, characterizing both him and her former lover Skane in similar terms, as part of a whining, adolescent ‘lost generation’: ‘The man who got hurt in the war and feels he owes the world a grudge ... There seem to be a good many others – all this talk about a “lost generation!” And you’re all alike, the lot of you. All you’ve lost is your sense of decency’ (275). While Markham faces the economic downturn of 1920 with courage and resolve, the urbanization of the countryside finds completion in the introduction of cheap amusements into the otherwise traditional County Exhibition, a decision taken by the event’s organizers in response to the desires of the restless veterans (282–3). MacLennan and Raddall inscribe their uncertainties about city, region, and nation in the destinies of their characters. Whereas at the end of Barometer Rising Angus Murray characterizes Neil and Penny as ‘two people who could seem at home almost anywhere,’ and whose skills hold promise for the future (208), Raddall’s Captain O’Dell describes Matthew and Isabel as being bound to a place that is itself lost to time. Unlike the urbane humanist Murray, O’Dell embodies a simple code of duty, discipline, and honour, and is therefore an apt mythologizer of Matthew and Isabel. Together, the three characters reject that which passes for ‘civilization’ in modern times; and the retreat of Matthew and Isabel to Marina suggests the recession and containment of Empire, one that began for Raddall in Halifax at the turn of the century. If so, there is nonetheless an inscription of the values lost to urban modernity. Isabel’s rejection of Skane and Brockhurst, her loyalty to the individualist entrepreneur Markham, and her commitment to Matthew affirm domesticity, self-reliance, traditional masculinity, and capitalism, crucial in Raddall’s eyes to post-war readjustment. MacLennan’s novel, on the other hand, contains a future for its characters, a destiny to be worked out in a historical time that mirrors the struggles, and perhaps tragedies, of the past. All the novel’s characters are flawed, and now,

Halifax, Region, and Empire 63

scarred by the war. Moreover, if Neil and Penelope contribute in some way to the emergence of a humane modern order, it will occur in spite of the forces outlined in the novel. Social struggles in Halifax and across the Maritimes gained momentum in the decades to follow. The opening of the 1920s, where Raddall concludes his tale, began what historian John G. Reid has called the Maritimes’ long depression (Reid 161), from which the Second World War’s economic boom was another brief and bitter respite. A different kind of expert planner descended on the city in a period of urban ‘renewal’ that saw confrontations of gender, class, and race, and struggles to save Halifax’s historic buildings (Fingard et al. 169–78). Canada’s role in NATO and the Cold War raised the city’s war profile once again, to Raddall’s satisfaction. Conservation must have also pleased him, given his own active part in preserving Nova Scotia’s material history, not to mention his literary inscription of its values. Yet the Maritime city in general remains on the periphery of the region’s fiction, even in those stories that document its social struggles. The isolated community, the farm, or the natural world itself are preferred settings, whether suffering the city’s economic and ideological forces, as in the novels of David Adams Richards, or sustaining those combating its political and corporate emanations, as in Donna E. Smyth’s Subversive Elements (1986), Lesley Choyce’s Republic of Nothing (1994), and Sheldon Currie’s The Glace Bay Miners’ Museum (1995). Meanwhile, the late 1980s saw Haligonians forge a postmodern compromise with urban development as a ‘New Old City’ took shape in the imaginations of commentators and planners (Fingard et al.; Sandalack and Nicolai); and while the visits of the Tall Ships in the 1980s recalled romantic images of one empire, the departure of Canada’s modern naval vessels in 1991 and 2003 signalled its entanglements in the wars of another.

NOTES I wish to thank Mike Moosberger and Kathryn Harvey (Dalhousie University Library Archives), David Creelman (University of New Brunswick, Saint John), Madeleine J. Lefebvre (St Mary’s University Library), and Dan and Danielle Surette-Davis of Halifax for their help and support. This essay is for my father, Donald H. Armstrong, 1925–2003. 1 See, for example, Arnason, Bonanno, Mathews, and O’Donnell. 2 Kipling’s verses, also quoted in MacMechan’s Halifax essay, read as follows: ‘Into the mist my guardian prows put forth, / Behind the mist my

64

Christopher J. Armstrong

virgin ramparts lie; / The Warden of the Honour of the North, / Sleepless and veiled am I.’ 3 According to Johnson (64), Joyce’s Dublin had a population of almost 400,000 in 1921, Woolf’s London about 7.5 million. Halifax Metro, by contrast, could boast a mere 67,726 for the same year. During the First World War, however, 284,455 military personnel passed through the city (Fingard et al., 7, 130). 4 Brockhurst’s characterization of the Great War Veterans’ Association may not be representative. See Ian McKay’s account in Forbes and Muise 225.

Tracing Lesbian E-Motion through Jovette Marchessault 65

La ville en vol/City in Flight: Tracing Lesbian E-Motion through Jovette Marchessault’s Comme un enfant de la terre barbara godard

The city, la ville, configured in terms of the modernist topoi of isolation, threshold, ontological break, and nothingness, is exposed as an object for the male gaze limiting women’s action in Jovette Marchessault’s trilogy Comme un enfant de la terre. Refiguring masculinist mythemes, Marchessault transmutes the flâneuse, or streetwalker of ill repute, synecdoche of the excessive commercialism of the city, guardian of the void, into a voleuse, an amazon angel who soars in the realm of the ‘night cow’ (La mère), covering the crepuscular city with ‘énergie stellaire’ (Comme un enfant 210) in a promise of plenitude, so bringing into being a different economy of desire within the body politic. E-motion as transformation. The ground-level point of view of the flâneur is confounded with the visionary scope of the flyer’s panoramic view to the point of contradiction. The city as ‘les abstractions aériennes, ce qui peut se construire en hauteur’ coexists with its geometrization ‘pour accéder à une vision objective de sa réalité’ (Comme un enfant 200, 201): ‘car ce qui se dresse souverainement, impérieusement vers le ciel sur sa tige doit aussi se maintenir en contact avec la terre’ (Comme un enfant 199). Here Babylon is Jerusalem the Golden as the title of the first volume, Le crachat solaire, announces. The vomit (‘crachat’) of the topos of urban misery and rejection is simultaneously solar spit (rays), sign of cosmic transcendence. Marchessault plays thus on the double semiotic axes of the city novel, exploring the constraints and tensions of the bitterness of daily life in specific closely observed neighbourhoods (the detail of the worn linoleum floor in the lodging on the ‘rue Workman,’ Comme un enfant 238) from the whirlwind energy generated by a global perspective, contemplating the city as a site of loss and death (tragedy) yet para-

66 Barbara Godard

digm of reterritorialization, simultaneously a site of sacrifice and transcendence. Personal memory – Marchessault’s first art exhibit at Maison des Arts de la Sauvegarde (Comme un enfant 181) – is conjugated with and against ‘national’ history – the founding of Montreal in the month of Mary, 17/18 May 1642 (Comme un enfant 180) – in a double exposition of the past telescoped through the present. The tragedy of the everyday is traversed by myths of origin in a double movement (dialectic) between near/far as paradigms of order (Lefebvre, Le droit). This produces ‘un univers de plénitude’ in the ‘dynamisme des contraires’ (Comme un enfant 206). ‘Through’ is the operative word in my title. Montréal is, as Marchessault writes, ‘une ville médiumnique’ (Comme un enfant 202). Metaphors of voyage and threshold are prominent in her work, as she acknowledges (Potvin 228). For her doubled narration works not to compound the effect of dissociation and fragmentation in images of the city but to read one image through another in a fluid interconnection, an enfolding of one within another by means of apostrophe, litany, parataxis (Godard, ‘En mémoire’), that plays out to excess the trope of the city as place of passage, exchange, and transformation. Le crachat solaire marks the arrival of women in the city and their working through (and over) its signs. This is Jovette Marchessault’s ‘aerial letter,’ her fiction in the future perfect that posits a/n[other], virtual(?) ‘reality.’ Cette ville est mercurienne le matin avec ce que cela implique de jeunesse, d’envol, de présent immédiat ... Elle est mercurienne avec ce que cela implique de facilité d’adaptation, de mobilité d’esprit. Elle se déplace dans l’air avec toutes ses formes, ses mutations nerveuses, rapides, ses familles, ses cousins, ses sacs de sable pour les petits voyages sur les routes gelées, glissantes. Elle correspond avec chacun de nous, nous éduque, nous examine, nous tâte les pouls, vagabonde en surabondance d’église, d’électricité, toujours souple, toujours assez jeune pour goûter l’ivresse de l’air d’en haut au centre vivant de ses origines, au-delà de son commencement. (Marchessault, Comme un enfant 195–6)

In this vertiginous flux is born Montreal, which Jovette Marchessault calls ‘ma ville,’ ‘universelle comme le ventre de la baleine, cosmopolite comme la tour de Babel, voix presque consolante en terre amérindienne’ (Comme un enfant 190). ‘À Montréal, je me sens parfaitement chez moi et je rime à quelque chose’ (Comme un enfant 195). With these phrases begins a paean to the city of Montreal by a narrator of celestial origins,

Tracing Lesbian E-Motion through Jovette Marchessault 67

born of the Great Bear as solar spittle, coming to earth in this Montreal/ Ville-Marie/Hochelaga on Native sacred territory. Evident here is Marchessault’s narrative strategy of enfolding and telescoping. There is no separation between the ‘je’ and the ‘nous’: personal and national fuse in the urban corps, rewriting, and so displacing, the myth of urban anomie. The dispersion of the fall into Babel and the proliferation of incomprehensible languages is paradoxically a reterritorialization on Native soil in a different language and culture with different orderings of space, time, and gender. This dispersion, which is also a return, is figured in the telescoped history of Montreal as a figure of regress through its Christian founding as Ville-Marie, in dedication to the Virgin, back to an earlier founding as the generally forgotten, mysterious Native city of Hochelaga. In Marchessault’s toponymy, the three names are hyphenated as a composite entity, the trace of the past activating the present. A cryptic formulation of the many and divergent origin myths of the body politic, this is also a recontextualization within a pagan, goddess-centred order. A parallax, this shift in angle of vision produces difference within the urban corps. This aerial vision of Montreal, the city Marchessault flies over and makes fly, is a vanishing point, at once ground and limit in the present tense of writing, in the fulgurant rhythms of her sentences, writing which is ‘la machine à traverser le temps’ (Comme un enfant 89). ‘Le temps a passé avec le vertige à la lisière des bois,’ she writes, beginning a paragraph that meditates on the Mount Royal cross open to the four winds, a paragraph that functions as a transition between a section describing the founding of Montréal as recorded by its two ‘visionary’ fathers, Jérôme [le Royer de la Dauversière] and Jacques [Olier] (Comme un enfant 191), and the narrator’s descent from the Greyhound bus at the Dorchester terminus which marks her arrival in the city (Comme un enfant 194). A repetition of foundation narratives with a difference of gender and race. The city is refounded symbolically in this return to origins ever displaced towards the ab-original. Before she sets out on her flânerie along Ste-Catherine, there is yet another abrupt shift in perspective to describe the origins of Hochelaga in the work of clearing and planting of five Iroquois tribes. This narrative process involves superimposing past and future, oscillating between memory and hallucinatory vision, to imag(in)e a wor(l)d city, in this palimpsest producing a becoming-woman (advenir femme). For writing and reading produce effects of the real having real effects on bodies, biological and political. Fiction is a mode of intervening to realign the real.

68 Barbara Godard

Reading and writing are the principal modes of locomotion in the city. As Marchessault writes: ‘[J]e n’étais qu’un lieu de passage pour ces livres qui circulent dans l’éther comme des comètes’ (Comme un enfant 58). The public library is the nodal point of urban networks, the narrator’s preferred place. It is a magic site, where she reads, ‘levitates,’ and initiates metamorphoses, re-citing knowledge of the past (La mère 178– 9). Three connected networks may be discerned here – text, body, and city – through which the narrator traces a trajectory of desire. Certain arteries or trajectories are blocked in the city as ‘paved solitude’ (Pike 24) that tries to ‘snuff out’ the creatures born of the dreams of those who have and who will inhabit the place, this city which is nonetheless ‘née d’une vision’ (Comme un enfant 197, 196). The trope of ‘circulation,’ figured here in the moving ray of heavenly light and the leaping greyhound, proper to extra-urban movement (through cosmic space and the American continent respectively), and the walking woman moving through the city, posits the conditions for movement in signification produced by an economy in excess of the dominant economy of desire, that is, an economy in which a woman is simultaneously both subject and object of desire, no longer constrained to be the object of the masculine gaze. This rereading/rewriting transports the female subject to a different space, to a world parallel to and critical of contemporary sociality. A utopian world?1 However, this is also a lost or forgotten world that is (re)constituted in/as narration when ‘je me souviens avec une précision hallucinatoire,’ participating thus in the ‘immense force créatrice de la mémoire’ (Des cailloux 71). Marchessault’s texts effect ‘la traversée des apparences’ (Potvin 225) or a ‘traversée des signes’ in a process where the narrator is initiated into the memory of time and the secrets of creation. In particular, her texts affirm ancient and forgotten knowledges of Native peoples that respect the energies of all living things and the power of the feminine. Central to this is the fable of the hens, which takes up much of the ninth ‘canto’ and introduces the important figure of the grandmother as culture hero, initiating the young narrator to drawing and music that transform the world: J’avais neuf ans. Je franchissais une ligne de démarcation. J’apprenais que rien n’est plat, banal; qu’un rapport intense, fait d’affection, d’émotion, de passion peut nous relier à tout ce qui nous entoure ... Dans cette cuisine glaciale sordide, j’arrivais presque à saisir le sens de ma naissance. Il me semblait que mon père et ma mère m’avaient à peine choisie, que c’était peut-être moi qui au contraire les avait choisis. (Comme un enfant 253)

Tracing Lesbian E-Motion through Jovette Marchessault 69

This lesson of the power of imagination and love transcends the white snow (synecdoche of the void) descending on the urban squalor of the working-class district in which she is living, ‘un quartier sinistre’ with dark, deserted streets and a house that is a veritable ‘cercueil’ (Comme un enfant 240, 241). In the very midst of this topos of the city as negativity, ‘crépuscule, enterrés’ (Comme un enfant 239), there emerges creation, joy, and transcendence. This comes through the power of the pen. The narrator remembers herself as a child struggling to draw animals at the kitchen table. Her grandmother, encouraging her, can no longer resist the attraction of pen and paint and starts to draw hens with an elan of heart and spirit, eccentric hens of every imaginable sort, ‘des poules du commencement du monde, de fin du monde face à un paysage de casseroles’ (Comme un enfant 250). Her enthusiasm communicates itself to the child, who, with renewed confidence, takes up her pencil to draw birds. So commences her life as an artist. ‘J’entrais dans le monde, dans les pores du papier’ (Comme un enfant 252). Her grandmother culminates this eventful evening by playing the piano, ‘la musique telle qu’elle la pratiquait était d’origine céleste,’ so that as she plays, all the urban negativity, especially metaphors of sickness, are banished: ‘elle libérait des vapeurs, des gaz toxiques, des bactéries, des pneumocoques’ (Comme un enfant 255). Artistic creation will disrupt the existing order, initiating an ontological break that brings animation and mobility in the place of stagnation and stasis. In the cosmology of Marchessault, the process of creation is carried out through sound, through speech, through the word. The sentence of Creation is long, interminable, ever recommencing: Marchessault blends her narrative voice with the cosmic song to produce her text in ‘Cantos’ rather than ‘chapters,’ in invocations, litanies of the names of the country, rather than in exposition or description of places (Godard, ‘En mémoire’). If in Le crachat solaire Marchessault tells the voyage of the narrator prior to her birth and aligns Montreal with the elemental forces, with cosmic space-time, in La mère des herbes she repeats this autobiographical narrative of the narrating subject to situate it within a female genealogy, a knowledge specific to women transmitted orally from grandmother to granddaughter, a knowledge figured here by Grandmother Louisa, plant goddess, ‘la mère des herbes’ (235). In Des cailloux blancs pour les forêts obscures the action removes to the cosmic dimensions to recount a tale of aviators and the angelic figure of the Lion of Bangor. Significantly, only here does Marchessault develop amorous relations between women as explicitly sexual. Paradoxically, Marchessault’s trilogy shows that the only way to fully inhabit the city

70 Barbara Godard

is to leave it, to move through it on the way to somewhere else. This is necessary, she suggests, because the modern city has obliterated its Native origin as Hochelaga and along with it all the vitalizing herbal lore and the political savvy of the ‘Grandmothers,’ or wise women of the tribe who cared for its body politic. In this trilogy, Marchessault celebrates the coming out from the woods of a hybridized culture whose origins are to be found by digging in the soil. For Native cultures are already (t)here, underground, and so invisible to the dominant culture: ‘La terre amérindienne nous a assimilés et nous sommes blancs et nous sommes rouges’ (Comme un enfant 184).2 Through the grandmother, the narrator asserts her own Métis heritage, the trope of métissage combining with that of metamorphosis to form Marchessault’s vision of the imaginary city as a site of flux, tangled complexity, and transformation. On a formal level, this translates into the unexpected juxtaposition of family narratives and extracts from written histories of the founding of Montreal, telescoped and recontextualized as ‘paroles prophétiques ... cueillies quelque part dans le seizième siècle, entre des récits forestiers, de voyageurs’ (Comme un enfant 146) to form an indictment of colonialism by first French and then English settlers: ‘notre histoire, les massacres, les répressions, le déclin de la race et sa descente circulaire, sanglante dans ce charnier que recouvre à peine quelques arpents de neige’ (Comme un enfant 146). The quotation from Voltaire’s celebrated dismissal of Quebec underlines Marchessault’s poetics of citation, a form of collage or rewriting that recirculates, recontextualizes the self-evident ‘truths’ about the ‘essence’ of Quebec culture to call them into question, to make them speak against themselves of the repression of Native cultures. Part of this archaeological digging and reclaiming of forgotten history is Marchessault’s toponymy, her definitions of the crucial names ‘Kébec’ and ‘Kanada’ in Montagnais words for welcome (Comme un enfant 152, 153), which signify an openness to the Other that the present culture has suppressed in its development of repressive regimes through measures such as general police acts for order and good government and landholding rights, the suppression of public meetings, in this case the monopoly of the ‘Grandes Compagnies’ (Comme un enfant 208, 182, 209), which have produced a general paralysis of body and voice, silence, the great malady of colonialism (Comme un enfant 158) in Marchessault’s troping. John-marchait-terre (also called John-marchaitair), the narrator’s grandfather, a Native from the United States and a member of a circus, testifies to the oppression of Natives on the prairie,

Tracing Lesbian E-Motion through Jovette Marchessault 71

the wiping out of buffalo herds that preceded the decimation of Native peoples and their spirit world, so that ‘les choses volantes de l’air ne se manifestent plus’ (Comme un enfant 269). To revivify Quebec society, this suppressed history must come out from the woods and invade the public spaces with its energetic music and dancing, with a carnival spirit that has retained the sense of ‘potlach’ welcome and openness, the economy of expenditure and excess of ancient Hochelaga, as Marchessault imag(in)es it. This reanimating of the voices of America that preceded the French regime and extend beyond the borders of Quebec is carried out through books, through reading and quoting against the grain. The narrator locates within the pages of books ‘embryon d’or,’ ‘gerbe d’étincelles’ (Comme un enfant 126), fragments that stimulate the imagination, point towards different ways of thinking and acting that enable her to carry out her project of changing the world, outside the frames of ‘Politics’ with its inevitable violence, specifically of recuperating a culture that values the feminine. One example illustrates the oblique way in which Marchessault’s poetics of citation and hybridity operates. This is her allusive use of the mytheme of parturition, the act which serves as a narrative frame for Le crachat solaire bringing the narrator to earth, cast out of the heavens to transform the world as a female messiah, as a daughter of the Great Bear. Marchessault does not untangle the complex history of this archetype through legends of Saint Ursula and the eleven thousand virgins or through ancient myths of Artemesia as a she-bear, which would confound Christian and pagan versions of female power in a contradiction focused in virgin birth. Nor does she cite the many Native stories of metamorphosis in which a Bear-woman figures. Marchessault’s text enacts this palimpsest in its narrative, which circles impossibly around the process of gestation by which a sky-child chooses an earthly family to be born into,3 her entire history with them prophetically foreseen before her birth. What Marchessault’s narrative develops in this recombining of fragments is a crucial metaphor in the narrative of the founding of Montreal written by the priest Jacques Olier, one of the founding ‘fathers’ of Montreal to whom Marchessault alludes. The metaphor of birth has a long history in the epics of urban projects, most notably in its parallel to the Roman she-wolf, mother of Romulus and Remus. Montreal has her she-bear, an animal common in Quebec, in Olier’s version of the founding of Ville-Marie, Les Véritables Motifs de Messieurs et Dames de la Société de Notre-Dame de Montréal pour la conversion des Sauvages de la Nouvelle-France (written ostensibly in 1643 for the

72 Barbara Godard

purpose of raising funds from the supporters of the Société de NotreDame): La première fois qu’il plut à Dieu me donner la pensée de considérer à fond le sujet de Montréal, il se présentera à mon esprit comme le partus d’une ourse délivrée de ses petits. Au commencement, ils ne paraissent qu’une masse de chair, informe, confuse et qui fait peur à voir de près; mais sitôt que la mère les a léchés et polis, on est tout étonné de voir peu à peu ces petits animaux parfaits de leur membres et capables de réjouir leur mère. Ainsi en est-il du partus de Montréal. (Olier 45, qtd. in Michaud 92)

Here a bear is the mother of the city, her offspring subsequently abandoned to uncertainty, a fate Olier wishes to prevent for the first Montrealers. The classical allusion is perhaps more active in Olier’s metaphor, but it anticipates also the force of such origin myths of a founding mother and totemic animal in Native cultures, the explicit frame in which Marchessault rewrites the metaphor.4 In Olier’s narrative, the instantiating parturition of ‘notre Ourse céleste’ produces a compulsion to repeat in a series of tales of decline and fall. As Marchessault rewrites the various narratives of Celestial Bear Mothers, in the narrative of the artist-in-the-making-as-ray-of-sunlight, the emphasis is on the ever upward movement of the creative power of the imagination giving birth to metaphors and narratives, through which the limitations of the terrestrial may be overcome, again and again. This metaphor both acknowledges the history of Montreal as the record of the creative work of Native peoples and strong women and prophesies the extension of this work into the future. Unlike Anne Hébert and Nicole Brossard, who have returned to the texts and words of these pioneer saints and heroines in their recontextualization and questioning of the official history of the cities of Quebec and Montreal, Marchessault has recycled a metaphor, reworked a mytheme.5 She does so to the same end, however, to expose the metaphorization of the urban corps as a gendered discourse, and to denounce the legendary feminization of the city (underlined in the extensive eulogies to the city addressed as ‘Elle’) as illusory, a facade that in (f)act excludes women. Though the city is gendered feminine, la ville, it is not a site for women’s political action. This is the lesson the narrator learns when she sets out to walk through the city streets to take her place in its carnival. What she comes to understand is that street life at the heart of the body politic is an affair

Tracing Lesbian E-Motion through Jovette Marchessault 73

of masquerade and travesty where the feminine figures only as fake and as object of desire. As flâneuse, with her vagabond gaze of a woman subject wandering through the city streets, entering the symbolic marketplace, she finds only ‘tapettes’ in the city centre, only men playing out the possibilities of the imagination for hybridization and masquerade in relations between men. Only men are entitled to expose and deontologize the work of gender. The exchange of glances between desiring women cannot take place in the public sphere. There is no ‘lesbianisme au grand jour ... Apparaît à tout et chacun comme inconcevable’: it’s a ‘crime politique et [un] péché mortel’ (La mère 203). The narrator walks along ‘La Catherine toute rutilante, toute pâmée, toute diamants et rubis, diadèmes et hochets, aisselles et pubis’ with those who are ‘en maître du maquillage’ (Comme un enfant 194, 196). On rue Saint-Laurent she plunges into the carnival of an ‘abondance de temps et de lieux’ (Comme un enfant 206) within an economy of excess. She passes through the city like the ‘colporteurs’ following ‘la Catherine’ to the port, towards the ‘saturnales’ on rue des Voltigeurs at the tavern of Jos Beef (who died in 1889), returning in this movement through space backward in time to the nineteenth century to repeat, and re(s)cite, the tales of the nightly torture of the menagerie of animals that constitutes the underside of city life, the dark primitivism of its unconscious. Jos Beef is hailed with Sigmund Freud as the expert in this aspect of the Montreal imaginary, with Hitler as the epitome of repressive evil for exterminating animal life (Comme un enfant 228, 229). Here Marchessault continues to blend the legends of oral tradition with the written history of the early days of Ville-Marie/Montreal, recirculating them in new combinations that are neither fiction nor legend but a different kind of hybrid, ‘un festin, un banquet inépuisable ... qui outrepasse ... le désir de combler un vide’ (Comme un enfant 337). Marchessault situates this new literary mode under the heading of the carnivalesque, foregrounding thus her effort at political subversion of the dominant narratives regulating Montreal sociality. The activity of remembering is also framed in terms of ‘performance’ animated by ‘[le] recoulement du grand désir’ (Comme un enfant 327). To transform desire, to establish new circuits of relations, is Marchessault’s aim in this trilogy. According to the conventional toponymical syntax of Montreal, those who desire stability cling to the mountain, taking refuge under its cross, while those who seek change head towards the river, where the waters from north and west of the continent converge and flow to the sea (Thompson). Marchessault trans-

74 Barbara Godard

forms this network of signs to align the river and the mountain, whose cross ‘unit les quatre vents, les quatre forces de l’Oiseau-Tonnerre’ (Comme un enfant 194), extending their vibrations to eternity, towards the cosmic forces against the limitations of terrestrial life in the cramped city. Marchessault attributes the life in death of a ‘taupe souvent démentielle’ of the city (Comme un enfant 96) to the subjection of the continent to colonialism, which she calls ‘cannibalisme européen’ (Comme un enfant 155); she seeks to liberate the city from this subjection by reappropriating ‘la terre amérindienne dans un frénésie des traces’ (Comme un enfant 60). To this end, she sets out to align the city with its natural environment, its American geography and Native traditions. Montreal space and time are intermingled with other American places and times through the travels of the narrator across the continent, to Mexico with Malcolm Lowry, to California with Jack Kerouac, towards the Rockies with the explorers and voyageurs, to Latin America to learn the treasures of the Mayans recorded in the Popul Vuh, and to listen to the voices of the heroines and saints of New France, ‘des amazones à la poursuite d’un fugitif céleste’ (Comme un enfant 105), all caught in the web of the present tense of narration recirculating in the fragmentation and recombination of the narratives of these other continental and cosmic travellers. Defamiliarized and transformed in this way, they produce a different morphology for the textual and, by synecdoche, the urban corps. Returning from these wanderings through books and foreign places in the eighth ‘canto,’ the narrator steps out of the Greyhound bus at the Dorchester terminus with the eyes of the strangers she has encountered, the eyes of the outsider, of those on the margin, where the author situates herself sexually, textually, and geographically – ‘le territoire des femmes en général’ (Potvin 222). It is on the margins, literally, of Montreal – at ‘le Bout-de-l’Ile,’ also known as ‘le Bas-de-l’Ile’ – that Marchessault locates a possible territory for the feminine. This tip of the island is the space of childhood, the domain of the narrator’s grandmother, the place where she gathers her herbs and practices her traditional knowledge as healer and midwife, and where the waters gather and flow onward. For though Montreal holds the promise of new modalities of exchange for signs and bodies, it has suffered from the great malady of silence emanating from the ‘plus bel édifice de la ville de Montréal,’ as Marchessault with irony describes the Bishop’s Palace at the corner of Saint-Denis and Saint-Catherine, ‘pavoisé’ at Confederation, this conjunction of spiritual and temporal authority figuring as her metaphor for patriarchal power. Under the

Tracing Lesbian E-Motion through Jovette Marchessault 75

direction of these institutions with their joined repressive forces, the city becomes static, stagnant, under the authoritarian rule of law that banishes all spontaneity, all celebration. This is the sinister, deathly city of the nineteenth-century literary imagination. Like the European midnight and underground spaces, ‘Mort-réal’ has its lugubrious streets and squalid neighbourhoods lined with houses infested with rats who gnaw on the electric wires and plunge the shivering occupants into obscurity (Comme un enfant 244). The vividness of Marchessault’s metaphor demonstrates the way she takes up the conventional tropes of the urban imaginary and reworks them, turning an image of death and stasis into one of active animation through the will to live of the animals, trace of the earlier wilderness still working through the urban networks. This is the company kept by working-class families, people who work in factories processing furs, textiles, bombs, or who act as delivery people circulating these goods through the city, like the family of the narrator, who move from one ‘trou’ to another – inching up the mountain from Workman, Coursol, Quesnel, Parthenais, and Beaudry – ‘dérivons de déménagement,’ climbing finally to the Plateau MontRoyal, rue Boyer (Comme un enfant 241). Movement here is constrained within the circles of routine, going around and around on itself, no longer wandering freely over the continent. From this impasse, where she can neither advance nor retreat, the narrator is extricated by Grandmother Louisa, Métis and nomad, artist and herbalist, the mother goddess in her form as plant mother or fertility goddess, a ‘grande baleine’ who has beached herself at ‘le Bout-de-l’Ile,’ or Pointe-aux-Trembles, at the end of Soixantième Avenue in a house a few feet from the river. Here city merges into country, the houses surrounded by fields of oats, cows, trees. At this in-between site the narrator chooses to live when she is cast out by the stars, falling into a family she calls a ‘tribu’ of nomads living in harmony on aboriginal territory (Comme un enfant 347). This election of the chosen land, the birth of this child-goddess from the Celestial Bear and Louisa, is the beginning/end of the narrative towards which Le crachat solaire spirals. Repeating the inaugurating parturition of Montreal from Bear Mother, this gestus constitutes the narrator as culture hero inaugurating a new age, a new ordering of the city in the feminine, one marked by the confluence rather than disjunction of animal and human realms. At this liminal point, between city and wilderness, at the end of the rue Notre-Dame bus route where land, sea, and sky converge, the narrator of La mère des herbes comes to seek regeneration from her

76 Barbara Godard

grandmother Louisa, a sort of angel, or ‘telluric woman,’ who transmits ‘les paroles de femme’ through which the narrator is led towards ‘le grand courant océanique’ (La mère 34). The narrator takes up and perpetuates the nomadic lifestyle of her grandmother, whose wanderings through the forest on traplines and across the continent with the circus are a revitalizing model, a mediator to the realm of plants and animals. ‘Regarder le fleuve ou regarder grand’mère, c’était presque la même chose’ (La mère 237). Grandmother is all flowing mat(t)er: ‘du grande fleuve de matière qui l’alimente’ (Comme un enfant 256). Through her, the narrator is connected metonymically to desiring women and to the feminine principle. For, as Marchessault claims, ‘ces femmes telluriques se rejoignent toutes’ (Potvin 222). Through them, too, Marchessault’s writing connects to her sculptures of telluric women crafted in a moment of contact with the dance of the life force, ‘un monde cosmique spirituel, psychique, cellulaire et moléculaire’ (Potvin 219). Such ardent life is possible only on the elevated level of global panorama, as the aviators in Des cailloux blancs signify. Marchessault’s writing retells the drama of loss and recovery of a universe of limitless plenitude in artistic creation and desire among women, in contrast to the limitations of a terrestrial and patriarchal order configured by the city, space of exploited bodies and blocked signs. It is a city to be moved through by generating an/other world. Grandmother leads the way, driving across Canada with her infant son, rejecting constraint as she shouts out ‘Dèfi à ceux qui ne pensent qu’à tisser, qu’à resserrer, qu’à couper, qu’à nouer!’ (Comme un enfant 286–7). She refuses the submission to institutions demanded of Native peoples, following the way of her Native mother and husband Johnmarchait-terre, that of ‘les errances, les partances’ (Comme un enfant 271), postponing narrative closure. Rejecting the city’s immobilizing unidimensionality for dynamic interactions, Marchessault mobilizes the signifying system along the trajectory of desiring women to intervene in the production of meaning, to reconfigure the body politic. ‘J’amorce des dialogues, j’inaugure plus d’une métamorphose et je danse une danse créatrice avec des mots fraîchement débarqués en Amérique’ (La mère 179). As a woman, she is speaking in the city, but against it, speaking the city other/wise. Woman in flight, she plays out this metonymy of the city beyond the city. In this, the ambiguity and paradox of the city-sign is performed, displacing its propensity for closure and stasis, opening different possibilities, configuring possible worlds, fictions to change the real. Such fictions will transform the

Tracing Lesbian E-Motion through Jovette Marchessault 77

relations of centre and margins, city and surroundings, both spatial and temporal. In this liminal site of potentiality may be imag(in)ed a dynamic territory of women.

NOTES This paper was first written en français for Les Bâtisseuses de la Cité – 350 ans de vie des femmes à Montréal and was substantially revised for a conference on Montreal and Vancouver at Simon Fraser University in March 1993. The text was further revised for publication here. 1 ‘Utopian’ I write as a question. Marchessault’s writing in the future perfect is a type of utopian writing developed from the overlapping of different historical moments rather than the juxtaposition of two spatial worlds. It is a dynamic concept of utopia, one that plays on the heterotopia of liminal spaces, mixed or border zones. I have discussed this at greater length elsewhere (Godard, ‘En mémoire’). 2 This vision of a Métis culture in Quebec might be seen in light of present debates over imperialism as an instance of ‘cultural appropriation’ or ‘totem transfer’ in which the white settler population nativizes itself as Canadian through a process of symbolic indigenization. In this case, however, it should be read as an instance of ‘strategic essentialism,’ Jovette Marchessault claiming her own Native heritage that has been invisible in her perceived Quebec identity. 3 In this, Marchessault reworks the telluric myth central to Quebec agriculturalist ideology, the culture hero born of a sky mother and earth grandmother in her version, not from the sky father and earth mother in the dominant version as in Louis Hémon’s Maria Chapdelaine, for example. 4 In Mohawk mythology, for example, the mother of the people comes down to float on a turtle’s back. The earth is consequently called by Natives ‘Turtle Island.’ The Clan Mother of the Turtle Clan is the pre-eminent political and spiritual personage of the community. 5 Anne Hébert reworks quotations from Mère Marie de l’Incarnation in Le premier jardin, a narrative of a search for origins that re-members Quebec City. Nicole Brossard quotes a passage from the work of Marie Morin, ‘des prairies émaillées de fleurs de toutes couleurs,’ in French Kiss (50). This text is also concerned with the relations between book/body/city and desire between women, as Lianne Moyes notes.

78

Peter Dickinson

Cities and Classrooms, Bodies and Texts: Notes towards a Resident Reading (and Teaching) of Vancouver Writing peter dickinson

Considered together, the works we have studied this term seem to suggest that the city of Vancouver is itself a text to be read, deciphered, and critically interpreted. The red-painted lampposts of Chinatown, the storefront windows and graffiti along Kingsway, the burnished sands of Jericho and Wreck Beaches, the leafy streetscapes of Shaughnessy and Kerrisdale, even an alley that no longer exists: all of these ‘signs’ tell us something about the social, cultural, geographical, historical, and, yes, literary evolution of our city. They also tell us something about the multiple communities that overlap, jostle, and abut each other in these spaces. Using your maps to orient yourselves, compose a brief essay in which you position yourself as both resident and reader of Vancouver. How have some of the texts we’ve studied this term taught you to see the city in new ways? How might your own ‘occupation’ of the city have changed since learning a bit more about the history and struggles of some of its inhabitants? How do you see yourself and your own community/communities fitting into the literary landscape we have been mapping this term? Do you think it’s possible for communities to reach across past or present differences and forge alliances for the future? Is there a way in which paying closer attention to our local surroundings also makes us more responsible and responsive global citizens? This is a chance for you to respond, in a more creative manner, to some of the concerns about individual identity and community affiliation, history and place, the mixing of cultures and the mixing of genres, raised by the course, both inside and outside the classroom. Final exam question, ENGL 202/003, University of British Columbia, 19 April 2001

Notes towards a Resident Reading of Vancouver Writing

79

In the 2000/2001 academic year I taught an Introduction to Canadian Literature course at the University of British Columbia. A second-year survey course that, until recently, ran the entire year and served as a course requirement for several programs of study both inside and outside the Faculty of Arts, it was routinely oversubscribed, and only occasionally with intending English majors. During the first term, my choice of texts dutifully reflected a pedagogy of periodistic and generic coverage, and while I did my best to be as catholic as possible in terms of regional representation, the landscapes of Southern Ontario and the prairies nevertheless loomed large in our discussions. Despite my genuine fondness for them, I found myself, by the end of term, longing to be rid of the long shadows cast by Mrs Moodie and Mrs Bentley. Fortunately, I had already planned a completely different experiment for the second term. Knowing that the majority of my students would be residents of the Lower Mainland, guessing that they would respond more enthusiastically to a selection of texts that had as their geographical and historical backdrop the place where they lived (however recent or temporary), and wanting to showcase the work of a talented group of local writers, I decided to concentrate on representations of contemporary literary Vancouver. In shifting the focus of the course in this manner, I did not want the class to abandon altogether some of the themes and issues we had dealt with during the first term. I did, however, want us to reframe somewhat their conceptual parameters, particularly when it came to issues of identity and difference. In most of the works we had read during the first term, we were looking at selfportraits of individuals who were isolated in or alienated from their rural environments, with the physical landscape frequently serving as a metaphor for this process of psychological distancing (think Mrs Moodie’s wilderness or Mrs Bentley’s endless prairie horizon). In the works we would be examining during the second term, we would in part be looking at portraits of the collective self, of how the individual gradually comes to terms with – and by no means always happily or easily – his or her affiliation with and participation in a larger community (be that community structured around ethnicity, race, gender, family, work/artistry, sexuality, etc.). More importantly, I wanted my students to think about how this process of community affiliation is facilitated by the specifically urban environment of Vancouver, whose overlapping spatial configurations

80

Peter Dickinson

(geographical, historical, architectural) insist on proximity rather than distance and compel an interrelationship rather than a disconnection between the bodies that inhabit the city. Here, I am drawing – albeit somewhat retrospectively, given the more immediate context of finding an appropriate theoretical framework for this paper – on an important article by Elizabeth Grosz. In ‘Bodies-Cities’ she writes that ‘The city provides the order and organization that automatically links otherwise unrelated bodies: it is the condition and milieu in which corporeality is socially, sexually, and discursively produced’ (104). Elaborating further, Grosz notes that ‘The body ... is not distinct from the city for they are mutually defining. Like the representational model, there may be an isomorphism between the body and the city. But it is not a mirroring of nature in artifice; rather there is a two-way linkage that could be defined as an interface. What I am suggesting is a model of the relations between bodies and cities that sees them, not as megalithic total entities, but as assemblages or collections of parts’ (108). Pedagogically, by structuring the second term around contemporary Vancouver writing, I was hoping for a similar sort of isomorphism or interface between city and classroom, body and text. I wanted my students to think of what it means to be both resident and reader of a particular place, to make connections between the spit of land on West Point Grey occupied by UBC (which, technically speaking, is not part of the City of Vancouver) and other areas about which they were perhaps reading for the first time, or were told never to visit, or were heading back to after their classes had ended. The texts under consideration thus became the means of this interface, corporeally realigning class members’ relationships with the city and with each other by helping to orient us sensorily and perceptually within the built environment and by unpacking the complex social, political, and cultural relations between the overlapping groups and communities that occupy this environment.1 To this end, I handed out at the beginning of term a photocopied map of Vancouver on which I asked my students to note various geographical, historical, architectural, and cultural references alluded to in the texts we would be reading, and to note in particular the physical and relational proximity between many of these points of interest. I also attempted to collapse the classroom into the city (and vice versa) by arranging several out-of-class field trips. Several of the bodies behind the texts we were reading were also invited to the classroom in the form of author visits. With these added components, I was hoping to dynamize

Notes towards a Resident Reading of Vancouver Writing

81

for my students the learning process, to reconfigure the spatial or figure/ground indices between bodies, texts, cities, and classrooms not as a set of opposing or isolated practices (i.e., texts belong in classrooms and bodies reside in cities) but as a metonymic – or, to use Grosz’s term, ‘isomorphic’ – chain of linkages that together map out new spaces of inquiry, exchange, and contestation. Here, my guide is the great Canadian theorist of interficiality, Marshall McLuhan. Writing with Kathryn Hutchon and Eric McLuhan in City as Classroom, McLuhan notes that the title of their book could just as easily have been ‘inverted to read “The Classroom as City”’: ‘in an age when answers are being discovered outside the classroom, questions belong inside the classroom; similarly, when an “information explosion” is occurring outside the classroom, the study of structures of information or “pattern recognition” can go on inside the classroom’ (165). We began this process of ‘pattern recognition,’ or resident reading of Vancouver, by looking at Lee Maracle’s ‘Yin Chin.’ The story is a deliberately didactic lesson in undoing, to paraphrase its final line, the ignorance the world has schooled us in, especially in terms of how we consciously and unconsciously ‘other’ people. In part, Maracle seems to be suggesting, this requires the relearning of new methods of selfidentification and community affiliation, that is, learning to identify across differences, rather than because of them. The schooling metaphor employed by Maracle extends to the explicit figuration of the city of Vancouver as a classroom, one that teaches the most visceral and valuable lessons of identity and difference: from the opening poem’s reference to the Pacific Centre Mall serving as an icon of imperialism and revisionist cartography (‘do North Americans never tire / of claiming the centre’ [290]) to the specific location of the nexus of the story at the intersection of Powell and Gore Streets, where at least three different inter-urban communities – the drug-riddled Downtown East Side, Chinatown, and what has historically been referred to as Strathcona – abut each other. At the centre of Maracle’s story is a double episode of cross-cultural shaming. The narrator, a contemporary First Nations woman, is ‘circling the block at Gore and Powell trying to find a parking space’ one Tuesday afternoon when she sees an old Chinese-Canadian woman being harassed by a First Nations man (292). The narrator comes to the old woman’s rescue, chasing off the First Nations man and attempting to ‘quell [the woman’s] fear’:

82

Peter Dickinson She wasn’t afraid. She was ashamed of her own people, men who had passed her by, walking around her or crossing the street to avoid trying to rescue her from the taunts of one of my people. The world raged around inside me while she copiously described every Chinese man who had seen her and kept walking. I listened to her in silence and thought of me and old Sam again. (292)

This last remark is a reference to a shameful event from the narrator’s own past that took place in the same part of the city when she was a child, specifically the hurt she inflicted upon the local greengrocer, Mad Sam, and the embarrassment she caused her mother when she shrieked in fear at an old ‘chinaman’ who unflinchingly returned her anthropological gaze through the window of Mad Sam’s store. The child narrator, while unable to comprehend the ‘total picture,’ recognizes that her actions have somehow caused offence, in part because she can read how that offence physically registers on the bodies of her mother and Mad Sam: ‘Mama’s eyes yelled “for pete’s sake” and her cheeks shone red with shame ... Sam’s face was clear. Definably hurt. Not the kind of hurt that shows when adults burn themselves or something but the kind of hurt you can sometimes see in the eyes of people who have been cheated’ (294). By contrast, the adult narrator, in coming to the aid of the old Chinese woman, ironically highlights some of the consequences of the misreading of bodies, what we might call presumptive identification on the one hand and attributive differentiation on the other. That is, the old Chinese woman wrongly assumes that ‘her own people,’ Chinese men whom she is able to ‘copiously describe,’ should have helped her, simply based on their common ethnicity. For his part, the Native man attacking the Chinese woman initially misidentifies the narrator as an East Indian man rather than a Native Indian woman, mistaking the hood of her Cowichan sweater for a turban and calling her a ‘f’ck’n’ rag-head’ before amending the epithet to the no less offensive ‘squaw’ (292). The critical crossings of race and gender enacted in Maracle’s story play out continuously across Vancouver, but perhaps nowhere more resonantly than at an intersection such as the one at Gore and Powell Streets, whose adjoining neighbourhoods are among the poorest, the oldest, and the most ethnically diverse in the city. Is it any wonder, then, that this was the area on my students’ maps that was the most crowded with Xs and dots by the end of term, or that it is a place which I will inevitably revisit at the end of this paper?

Notes towards a Resident Reading of Vancouver Writing

83

While I could happily rehearse, in what follows, the discussions that developed around some of the other Vancouver texts read by my class (including SKY Lee’s Disappearing Moon Café, Wayde Compton’s 49th Parallel Psalm, Linda Svendsen’s Marine Life, and Michael Turner’s Kingsway), I want instead to use the isomorphic relations between bodies and cities, classrooms and texts, that framed those discussions (and that I have sketched above) in order to analyse two novels – Jane Rule’s Contract with the World and Michael Turner’s The Pornographer’s Poem – that didn’t make it onto the course syllabus at all, and one – Caroline Adderson’s A History of Forgetting – that did, but that due to time constraints we did not get a chance to examine thoroughly. At first glance, these texts would appear to be linked only in terms of their shared Vancouver setting; indeed, the novels are very different in content and form. And yet the uses to which that setting is put, not merely as a bit of local colour, but as a space that is both representationally familiar and culturally estranging, and that enforces social conformity at the same time as it makes room for marginal subject positions, reveals a similar preoccupation among these writers with the city as ‘the most immediate locus for the production and circulation of power’ (Grosz, ‘Bodies-Cities’ 109). In a Foucauldian sense, the subject-bodies represented in the texts by Rule, Turner, and Adderson are disciplined and regulated by the city as it functions as an instrument of ‘bio-power’ (i.e., a system by which ‘the administration of bodies’ is facilitated through, for example, demographic ‘management’ and containment), and simultaneously resist such administration through their occupation, reinvention, and transformation of the city (Foucault, History 140– 1; see, as well, Grosz 109). In this regard, all three texts reveal themselves to be at once morally instructive and uncannily prescient, particularly in terms of recent social events and debates that have unfolded in Vancouver and its environs, and that have been replayed (at times inexhaustibly) in the media. As part of my own resident-reading of Vancouver writing in this paper, I have chosen to replay some of these events one more time, specifically, in the form of reported text that I have positioned in ‘isomorphic’ relation to each of the three main sections that follow. I have done so because, in constructing a general theory about the need to make explicit connections between the city as a representational artefact and the city as a social body that routinely registers the ‘exercise of bio-power in its many forms and modes of application’ (Foucault, History 141), I believe it is incumbent upon me to provide my own

84

Peter Dickinson

readers with both the inter- and extratextual means to do so. Connecting the city with the classroom is not an easy task, just as moving from a close reading of texts to a broader analysis of the social regulation of sexed bodies can be disorienting. It takes a lot of work, I admit. But it is work I believe to be pedagogically important. Which is why, in the coda to this paper, I return briefly not only to the vexed question of Vancouver’s Downtown East Side, but also to the subject of teaching, and especially how much I have yet to learn about my city. The City and the State: Jane Rule’s Body Politics The Young in One Another’s Arms and Contract with the World, published in 1977 and 1980, respectively, are often linked by critics as Jane Rule’s ‘Vancouver novels.’ They also happen to be among the most political of her fictions. Perhaps as a consequence of this, the two texts have also come to be linked in another way: both, despite having sold continuously in Canadian bookstores for more than a decade, were suddenly seized and detained by Canada Customs on the grounds that they might be obscene, The Young in One Another’s Arms in 1990 during Freedom to Read Week, and Contract with the World in 1993. Ironically, Rule only learned about the latter seizure in preparing to deliver her expert testimony at Little Sister’s BC Supreme Court trial in 1994, the first stage in the Vancouver gay and lesbian bookstore’s long battle with Canada Customs over just this kind of arbitrary detention of queerthemed material. Asked, during the course of her testimony, to comment on the censoring of her work, Rule responded as follows: I bitterly resent the attempt to marginalize, trivialize and even criminalize what I have to say because I happen to be a lesbian, I happen to be a novelist, I happen to have bookstores and publishers who are dedicated to producing my work. The assumption ... that there must be something pornographic [in my writing] because of my sexual orientation is a shocking way to deal with my community. Of course we have writers who are writing erotica, and so we should. I celebrate that. But we are not a community churning out sex tracts. We are a community speaking with our passion and our humanity in a world that is so homophobic that it sees us as nothing but sexual creatures instead of good Canadian citizens, fine artists, and brave people trying to make Canada a better place for everybody to speak freely and honestly about who they are. (Detained at Customs 18–19)

Notes towards a Resident Reading of Vancouver Writing

85

In Contract with the World, a similar set of battle lines is drawn between state regulation and community resistance, and in ways that for Vancouver remain particularly resonant. The novel tells the story of six friends in their thirties whose ‘corporeal alignments’ (Grosz’s phrase) with each other and with their city reflect their attempts to negotiate a place for themselves as artists and sexual citizens in an environment that is often actively hostile towards both enterprises. Joseph Rabinowitz is a self-effacing industrial arts teacher, second husband and stepfather, and amateur typesetter who keeps almost all of these roles hidden from others, and who walks the city endlessly in a desperate attempt to stave off a mania-induced glossolalia. Joseph’s old schoolmate, Mike Trasco, is a sculptor who welds together large pieces of found metal in a warehouse down by the docks, and whose bluff heterosexual swagger and pronouncements on the necessary ‘uselessness’ of art belie deep anxieties about the state of his own marriage and career. Mike’s wife, Alma, is a budding writer whose blossoming romance with Roxanne and quest to invent, like Gertrude Stein, ‘a new language for lovemaking’ (131) between women comes in conflict with her bourgeois West Side upbringing. As for Roxanne, a musician whose childhood spent in foster care makes her especially attuned to the dissonance of urban displacement, her ‘sound maps’ of Alma’s house and of Vancouver both end up falling on deaf ears. Allen Dent is the most successful artist of the group, a nationally respected photographer who, despite his jet-setting lifestyle and youthful Montreal boyfriend, still thinks of himself as ‘nothing more than poor white trash from Surrey’ (281). Finally, Carlotta is a painter and occasional sex-trade worker whose reconciliation with her body and her community is effected only when she moves from painful self-portraiture to painting the portraits of others. We follow the lives of these six characters, and others connected to them (including Joseph’s wife, Ann, Allen’s boyfriend, Pierre, and Alma and Mike’s children), as they age from approximately thirty to thirtyfive (birthdays are an important structural motif throughout the novel). What emerges is a deliberately fractured and partial view of both a particular generation and a particular time and place, Vancouver in the mid-to-late 1970s. The novel’s formal composition contributes materially to this effect. Each of its six sections (all but Alma’s written in the third person) focuses on one of the main characters at a specific moment in his or her personal and professional life, and while the narrative progresses forward in a more or less chronological manner, events overlap and relationships between characters are formed, broken, and

86

Peter Dickinson

reformed in such a way as to produce the novelistic ‘equivalent of a cubist painting,’ ‘[allowing] for juxtapositions of point of view within a single optic’ (Cavell, ‘Jane Rule’ 161). And yet, despite the visual metaphor employed here, and despite the fact that the novel ends with Allen’s and then Carlotta’s sections, it is the sound artist Roxanne and the reluctant flâneur Joseph who provide a more tangible link between Rule’s narrative technique and her views about the artist’s role (even if that role is unwanted) in society. For Joseph, the Wandering Jew who wishes only ‘[t]o be an insignificant man in an insignificant place’ and who has ‘no desire to be claimed for a heroic or melodramatic death in service of his country or his own imagination’ (26), his Benjaminian peregrinations become an artistic statement in spite of his best intentions, the circuitry that links his friends’ radically different temperaments and practices, that harnesses and disperses back onto the city their excess ‘energy, agitation’ (290), or so his wife puts it to Carlotta (who thinks it ‘a marvellous definition of art’ [290]). Roxanne has never been ‘sure there was an audience to be found’ for her work (227); what she does know is that in her attempts to record and acoustically map ‘the whole city and time’ it is imperative to measure and carefully project ‘the distances between messages, their volumes, for it was very important for them not to seem to compete’ (226). That Rule, who has always struggled to find an audience for her own writing, and whose multiple messages are often misinterpreted by queer and straight readers alike, is talking as much about her own compositional aesthetic here as she is about Roxanne’s is clear. As Marilyn Schuster has recently put it, ‘Rule, like Roxanne, takes carefully and precisely observed details from the world around her and arranges them in a composition that forces the readers to reconsider themselves and their relation to the world ... She invents a suggestive social and sexual landscape; she doesn’t make an argument’ (235). Not that Rule is above taking moral stands in her novel. Indeed, what begins as a gentle and affectionate satire of Vancouver’s clumsy and uneasy transition from a conservative provincial backwater to a globalized postmodern metropolis newly receptive to all things avant-garde (‘McLuhan’s global village theory’ and its concomitant effect on the internationalizing of art is brought up at one point in the novel [316]) gradually turns into an examination of how the city, as an instrument of the state, functions to regulate both artistic practices and bodily desires. In this respect, the characters face an escalating series of personal and professional crises that test their relationships with the local commu-

Notes towards a Resident Reading of Vancouver Writing

87

nity, and with each other. Thus, while Roxanne is nonplussed at being described as a ‘romantic primitive’ by the critic from the Vancouver Sun who reviews the concert that Allen helps to arrange for her (227), she is ‘suddenly indignant’ when, before this, ‘The Canada Council turned [her] project down on the grounds that she hadn’t yet done anything to prove herself capable, no public concert or production of any kind’ (224). Roxanne ultimately ends up leaving Vancouver for California’s more receptive cultural climate, returning for the exhibition of Carlotta’s paintings that serves as the novel’s ironic denouement a convert to a new ‘foreign mythology,’ American corporatism. ‘“It’s a different world,” she gushes breathlessly to Allen and Carlotta. “Everyone there is doing things, and there’s money – not government money, private money, because people really are interested, really believe in the importance of what we’re doing”’ (332–3). As an American expatriate living in Canada, Rule is savvy enough not to let such sentiments go completely unchallenged and, in a nod to the cultural crossings attendant upon Vancouver’s proximity not only to the United States but also to other nations along the Pacific Rim, has Carlotta wonder if ‘Canadians always [had] to go south of the border or across the ocean to learn how to talk?’ (316). At the outset of the novel, Allen’s commercial success as an artist, not to mention the cultural patrimony that attaches itself to his gender (and which his careful negotiation of the closet is designed not to test too severely), allows him to be somewhat more cavalier. ‘He called himself vanity’s pimp, a political window dresser, a voyeur, a camera for hire’ (8). And yet, precisely because of his public reputation, the stakes for Allen are that much higher. And sure enough, when, on a trip to Toronto, Allen finds himself arrested in a surprise police raid of a homosexual party and labelled a ‘pederast’ in the newspapers, the reverberations back home are swift and devastating. His lover, Pierre, kills himself; Alma, fearing public exposure of her own secret desires, shuns him; and clients and galleries begin to drop him. With this episode, Rule has in mind a real-life intertext, namely, the December 1977 ‘raid on the Body Politic [Toronto’s pioneering gay and lesbian liberation monthly], when the police seized even the newspaper’s subscription list’ (Contract 251). And just as the Body Politic’s troubles prompted Rule to take up her pen in protest, writing a monthly column, ‘So’s Your Grandmother,’ for the paper during the course of its five-year legal fight against indecency charges, so does Allen’s arrest and his lover’s suicide newly politicize him. He plans a retrospective of his work, in which all of the photos, both of ordinary friends and the rich and

88

Peter Dickinson

famous, are of people he knows to be homosexual, with Pierre serving as the ‘refrain’: ‘There would be portrait after portrait of Pierre. This would be Pierre’s memorial as well as Allen’s revenge’ (272). However, when Alma learns that a photo of herself is to be included in the show, she has her father shut down the Vancouver gallery at which it is to open; Allen is forced to move the opening to that urban bastion of Canadian progressivism, Edmonton, where he becomes ‘an artist at last, without the grace to be amazed that he could have been driven to it’ (283). Rule’s statist representation of the city as a construct that ‘relies on a fundamental opposition between nature and culture,’ and which presumes an exact morphological correspondence between the (male) bodies which inhabit it and its metaphorization as the body politic (Grosz 106), reaches its apotheosis in the final pages of the novel, when all six characters, dispersed geographically and by no means reconciled with each other personally, reunite at an art gallery in the Vancouver suburb of Surrey for the first public exhibition of Carlotta’s portraits of them. Nervously anticipating the reactions of the friends who sat for her, Carlotta is instead stunned by the angry response of the crowd. Led by a remorseful trick that Carlotta, needing money, had turned the week before at a downtown hotel, and egged on by others who have come merely to condemn Allen for shaming his hometown, the patrons in the gallery suddenly turn into ‘one great beast’ (336), hurl red paint all over the paintings, and begin to attack Carlotta and her sitters. It’s a climactic moment that is singularly instructive, one that encapsulates a fundamental paradox in the artist’s corporeal relationship with her community, and one that, Rule suggests (again, somewhat prophetically), is perhaps unique to Vancouver. Thus, while Carlotta ‘can’t imagine’ (339) reproducing again for public display what she so painstakingly created in the private space of her studio and that represents a particular configuration of subjectivity and space no longer in the same alignment, Allen is galvanized, in ways he has rarely been about reaction to his own work, by the context of her art’s reception, even if that reception reflects a disturbing co-option of intent and values: “I’m so damned proud of them all ... The people of Surrey care enough about art to start a riot! Things like that don’t happen in Toronto’ (338). On 10 April 1997 trustees of the Surrey School Board passed a resolution stating that resources for gay and lesbian youth would not be approved for distribution in their school district. Two weeks later they passed another resolu-

Notes towards a Resident Reading of Vancouver Writing

89

tion banning three books – Asha’s Mums, Belinda’s Bouquet, and One Dad, Two Dads, Brown Dads, Blue Dads – about children with same-sex parents aimed at kindergarten and Grade One students, citing parents’ potential religious concerns about discussing homosexuality with their children. James Chamberlain and a coalition of other petitioners challenged the latter resolution in court, and in December 1998 BC Supreme Court Justice Mary Saunders ruled that Surrey trustees had violated the expressly secular nature of BC’s School Act. A year later, the BC Court of Appeal unanimously overturned Saunders’s decision, ruling in favour of the school board. With legal costs approaching the $1 million mark, Chamberlain’s lawyers launched an appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada, arguing that the board’s refusal to approve the books as learning resources infringed on equality rights, as guaranteed under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In December 2002 Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin delivered a majority decision upholding Justice Saunders’s original ruling, noting that the board had to assess the banned books using the same curriculum-based criteria it applied to all other teaching materials. On 12 June 2003 trustees of the Surrey School Board met once again to decide on the admissibility of the three banned books; all three were rejected for ‘reasons other than their descriptions of homosexual characters’ (Reevely B6).

The Found City: Michael Turner’s Sexual Anthropology Michael Turner’s identity as a writer is intimately connected to Vancouver, the city of his birth, and his ties to the local arts scene run long and deep. For many years in the early 1980s, he was a fixture of the local indie rock scene, putting out three albums with the punk-rockabilly band Hard Rock Miners. As literary impresario of the Malcolm Lowry Room, in the North Burnaby Inn (now infamous as the place disgraced former premier Glen Clark may or may not have helped secure a gambling licence), he introduced the city to bold new writing and performing talent on a weekly basis. He also sits on the board of Artspeak Gallery and is friendly with many of the city’s leading conceptual artists, including Stan Douglas (with whom he has collaborated on two recent video installations), Judy Radul (with whom he lives), Ken Lum (on whom he has published), Geoffrey Farmer, Brian Jungen, and Shannon Oksanen. Finally, with the money he received from Doubleday for The Pornographer’s Poem, he set up the aptly named Advance Editions as an imprint of Arsenal Pulp Press, with whom he published his first four books. Advance’s mandate is to publish formally inventive and genre-mixing work that specifically addresses the

90

Peter Dickinson

literary, historical, and cultural landscape of Vancouver and BC’s Lower Mainland. Published titles include Wayde Compton’s 49th Parallel Psalm, Neil Wedmen’s Burlesck, and Marina Roy’s Sign After the X. Turner has stated that his early writing – Company Town, Hard Core Logo, and Kingsway – constitutes ‘experiments in crossbreeding the ethnography with the poetry collection’ (‘Interview’ 419 ). The author’s undergraduate training in anthropology would seem to have been a formidable influence, as his two novels – American Whiskey Bar and The Pornographer’s Poem – can also be read as experiments in mixing ethnography and the screenplay. What emerges throughout Turner’s work is a portrait of Vancouver’s urban environment as a midden, a vast archaeological site where the detritus of culture (graffiti, garbage, stray bits of noise and conversation, used condoms, incriminating photographs, the occasional corpse) reveals much about the social and sexual stratification of the city. Moreover, in The Pornographer’s Poem he seems to be suggesting, like Rule, that it is the artist who is best situated to create out of this detritus a counter-environment (an important heuristic for McLuhan as well),2 where regulation of the habitus is revealed to be a direct consequence of bodily repression. The ‘Bullshit Detector’ that the narrator comes up with and refines throughout the novel as ‘a way to negotiate [his] way through the world,’ as ‘a way to read people’ (167), thus functions as a kind of moral compass (and, indeed, the four questions that serve as its axes – ‘Where do you want to go?’ ‘What will you do to get there?’ ‘Where are you coming from?’ and ‘What have you done to get where you are?’ – are all spatially configured), pointing him in the direction of certain important discoveries about himself and his city. The novel is a complex stylistic experiment in narrative reliability, omniscience, and authorial intention, in which an unnamed narrator is forced to recount before an equally unnamed group of interlocutors the genesis of his career as a pornographer, as well as the dissolution of his relationship with Nettie Smart, his childhood best friend, adolescent lover, and artistic and moral conscience. What results is a narrative that is both deliberately banal and oddly compelling, sort of like porn itself, a postmodern Kunstlerroman, a ‘failed urban artist-novel’ of the sort discussed by Lisa Salem-Wiseman in her contribution to this volume, where Turner’s Joycean teenage artist is not permitted to remain invisible behind his handiwork and where the members of the god-like tribunal to whom he is defending that handiwork are too busy asking questions even to contemplate paring their fingernails. More so than

Notes towards a Resident Reading of Vancouver Writing

91

any of his other works, The Pornographer’s Poem seems to be Turner’s attempt to elaborate in print some of his key aesthetic and political principles. These principles, as far as I can tell, have something to do with the combination of high and low forms of cultural expression (pornography as poetry), the denial or undermining of narrative sentimentality and pleasure (sexual/textual coitus is constantly being interrupted throughout), the need to remain, in the face of authority and hypocrisy, scrupulously honest in the way one lives one’s life and creates one’s art (like Travis Bickle and Holden Caulfield, Turner’s narrator is always on the lookout for both spilled spunk and piping hot shit), and the link between all of these things and larger issues related to both local and global movements of economic and cultural capital. In this regard, it is important to keep in mind that the novel takes place, like Rule’s, in the mid-to-late 1970s, just as British Columbia, and Vancouver in particular, was beginning to make the transformation from a resource-based to a tourism- or service-based economy, a process that Turner (and many others in the city) believes culminated in Expo 86. (Nettie, away at art school in London, where, unbeknownst to the narrator, she is slowly dying from a congenital heart condition, hazards a similar sort of argument in a letter to the narrator, noting as well that in a recent speech Margaret Thatcher ‘mentioned British Columbia’s Social Credit government as a shining example of freemarket capitalism’ [296].) Indeed, one of the novel’s more subtle ironies is that the narrator’s neighbour, Kai Ragnarsson, whose wife Dottie (based on minor Vancouver media personality Pia Shandel) and dog Bengt Jr provide the narrator with the footage for his first pornographic film, The Family Dog, and who turns out to be the silent partner in the production company set up by the charming Svengali Marty Flynn to capitalize on the narrator’s talents, is heir to a teak-logging fortune who ditches the family furniture business for the more lucrative drug trade. By the end of the novel, with Nettie no longer around to guide him, and his Bullshit Detector suddenly failing him, the narrator finds himself caught in his own feedback loop of market forces, trading his youthful ideals about the political and artistic merits of porn’s production for Flynn’s more brutal lessons about the economics of its distribution. An important intertext throughout The Pornographer’s Poem is Angela Carter’s The Sadeian Woman, excerpts of which are woven throughout Nettie’s letters and journal entries. Like Carter, Turner would argue that porn’s efficacy as a transformative tool of social critique is blunted once

92

Peter Dickinson

it is divorced from the context in which it is produced and received. Thus, the fact that the narrator’s accidental beginnings as a pornographer take place in his own backyard (quite literally), the leafy uppercrust neighbourhoods of Shaughnessy and Kerrisdale, is significant. Here, in an adult world where sexuality is depicted as prohibition or taboo (Nettie stumbles on pictures seized from a child pornography ring in her judge father’s study; Nettie and the narrator witness their neighbour Mr Billington furtively dumping his stash of gay porn in the fields by the train tracks; their Grade 7 teacher, Mr Gingell, is dismissed over child-molestation charges, leading to their introduction to Ms Singleton, who first thrusts a film camera in their hands), the narrator and Nettie take charge of their own erotic initiation. In this regard, the descriptions of the basement parties and sexual games that take place between them and their classmates become just as important as their fumbling experiments on film, particularly in terms of how they construct a subtle taxonomy of class difference specific to Vancouver’s West Side. The narrator’s preference is for parties in the more uniformly middle-class enclave of Kitsilano ‘because the people who went there didn’t give a shit about the material things that hung up my school ... No judgement, no cliques, no pretence ... Kits people had their own way of doing things, with none of the bullshit you’d find at the south end of Arbutus ... Kits, for me, was the beginning of the real world’ (150). By contrast, the narrator’s bucolic uptown apprenticeship in blue movie-making differs sharply from the gritty downtown exploitation of his directorial skills by the Cerberus-like Flynn (he has more than one head, but not where you’d think). At first, the narrator feels a great deal of affinity for the socially marginal types he meets here. He admires the ease with which they inhabit their sexuality, the casualness with which Robin, for example, displays his Garçons de Maroc calendars on his coffee table, or the ‘naturalness’ that Tanya brings to her role in the narrator’s second film, Rich Kid Gang Bang. Soon, however, he discovers that what he sees as their bodily liberation is part of his own construction, and that they are in fact enslaved by other social forces at work in the city, including poverty and drug addiction. But the operations of porn, as both Carter and Turner well know, are not limited to the vision of the auteur/author; much of its subversive potential has to do with the various ways in which it can be viewed, read, and received. This is a lesson quickly learned by Turner’s narrator as he begins to screen The Family Dog at private gigs around the city: at a fetish club in False Creek, the narrator finds the audience ‘surprisingly

Notes towards a Resident Reading of Vancouver Writing

93

civil,’ ‘extremely normal,’ and is disappointed by their ‘polite,’ slightly diffident response to the film (203); at a dinner party in West Vancouver’s British Properties, the film is merely the prelude to a whole other performance, a post-screening debate at which the art collector host and his female friend (an incognito Carolee Schneemann) induce their guests ‘to say the wildest things’ (209) and give voice to their innermost fears and desires; at the apartments of various ‘artsy types’ in the West End, the narrator prefaces each screening with a speech ‘to orient the audience’ (212), a purloined artist’s statement that is just part of his ‘schtick’ but that inevitably prompts lots of comments about the ‘gaze and subjectivity’ (214); and, finally, at the ‘stags and frats’ where the narrator makes most of his money, the response is ‘purely visceral,’ teaching him ‘a lot about the male species’ (215). The radicalness of porn, which focuses less on penetration than on withdrawal, stems from its very episodic structure, its lack of narrative cohesion: it is up to the viewer to supply a context, a meaning. So too with Turner’s novel, which, significantly, opens with the money shot and unspools backwards from there, jump-cutting and cross-cutting between frames in a kind of narrative interruptus. It’s a technique that, like Grosz’s comments about bodies and cities’ mutually sustaining claims to representation through habitation (and vice versa), requires the active participation of the resident-reader. So it should come as no surprise, then, that in his acknowledgments page at the end of the book, Turner leaves a blank space for us to insert our own names in the list of credits, to take up residence, as it were, in our own reading of his writing. However, in so doing, we are forced to ask some difficult questions, one of which must be how ‘children construct [their] sexuality (or how ... children have had [their] sexuality constructed for [them]’ (Turner, ‘Interview’ 419). It’s a question that, in Vancouver, only a few have been willing to pose, recognizing that all too often the social debates that ensue are the result not of moral enquiry but of moral panic. In April 1995, sixty-something Vancouver resident John Robin Sharpe was detained by Canada Customs officials at the border while attempting to cross back into Canada from the United States. He had in his possession several gay pornographic stories he had written, as well as a number of photographs of nude boys. He was promptly charged with possession of child pornography. As Sharpe’s case made its way through the court system, he took on his own defence, arguing that the charges against him infringed on his constitutional right to freedom of expression. In January 1998, BC Supreme Court Justice

94

Peter Dickinson

Duncan Smith agreed, handing down a ruling that deemed Canada’s child pornography law unconstitutional. Shaw’s ruling sparked nationwide outrage and death threats, but it was nevertheless upheld by BC’s Court of Appeal in June of the same year. The BC government, with the backing of the federal Liberals, launched an immediate appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada, which eventually ruled on the matter in January 2001, upholding the ban on the possession of child pornography, but directing Parliament to redraft the Criminal Code to protect material created privately and for private use. As for Sharpe, in early 2002 he found himself back in a BC Superior Courtroom, once again in front of Justice Smith, once again charged with possession of child pornography, both textual and visual. Smith’s March 2002 ruling dismissed the charges pertaining to Sharpe’s writing but found him guilty of possessing photographs of children in sexual situations, for which Sharpe was later sentenced to four months’ house arrest. Police subsequently used the twenty-fiveyear-old photos seized from Sharpe to trace the then thirteen-year-old boy depicted in them, from whom they extracted charges of gross indecency and sexual assault against Sharpe. That trial, at which the seventy-one-year-old defended himself, ended with Sharpe’s conviction in May 2004, and two months later he was sentenced to two years in jail. Sharpe launched yet another appeal from his jail cell in August 2004.3

The City in Ruins: Caroline Adderson’s History of the Present Caroline Adderson begins and ends her novel A History of Forgetting with two italicized sections, written in the second person, that are set in the train station of the Polish town of O×wi«cim and involve an unnamed character trying frantically to get back to Krakow. The use of the second-person pronoun in these passages, and elsewhere in the novel, is significant. As a generic, editorial reference, the singular ‘you’ renders anonymous and indistinct, and therefore in some ways unaccountable, the mounting panic growing in the character searching for the right train that will lead him or her away from this place – much like the silent screams of the masses of men, women, and children who were herded off the trains that arrived here fifty years earlier, when the station stop was better known as Auschwitz. At the same time, as a plural method of direct address, ‘you’ implicates Adderson’s readers, locating us firmly within the scene, and its past and present horrors. How precisely we get there – what precisely are the spatial, historical, and ideological links between Vancouver circa 1994 and Auschwitz circa 1944 – occupies the bulk of Adderson’s novel.

Notes towards a Resident Reading of Vancouver Writing

95

A History of Forgetting tells the interlocking stories of Malcolm Firth, an aging gay hairdresser who caters to an eccentric clientele of octogenarian Kerrisdale matrons (playing with stereotypes is only one of many aesthetic strategies employed by Adderson), and Alison, an apprentice at Vitae, the funky new salon that has taken over the place where Malcolm used to work. As Malcolm attempts to cope with his partner Denis’s descent into Alzheimer’s-induced madness and antiSemitism, the innocent Alison unexpectedly starts to receive, as part of her training, lessons in hate. These lessons reach their apotheosis when the flamboyant Christian, one of their co-workers, is brutally bashed. In an attempt to overcome her trauma and to make sense of the connection between Christian’s death at the hands of neo-Nazis in contemporary Vancouver and the Nazis’ mass murder of the Jews in Europe during the Second World War (about which she had hitherto been shockingly ignorant), Alison sets off on what she hopes will be a redemptive journey to Auschwitz, dragging with her a reluctant Malcolm, who alone seems to share her despair. Part of how I and my UBC Can Lit class of resident-readers began to make sense of this connection between Vancouver in the here and now, and what happened in Poland and elsewhere in Europe during the Second World War, emerged from our unpacking of the paradox implicit in Adderson’s title. In this regard, I asked them to start by considering historiography’s own implicit ahistoricism. As Petar Ramadanovic has noted, drawing from Nietzsche, historians have taught us that ‘to know means to know historically’ and, moreover, that to know historically means to see an event ‘not as it happened but when it happened,’ a moment in time that is part of a larger sequential ordering of before and after, past and present (para. 19). And yet, while we are all marked by our historical contexts, to be sure, we don’t often experience the totality of our lives in such a linear and coherent fashion; nor do we remember with any such degree of chronological precision. This points to the further paradox that historical events can, in a very real sense, be ‘untimely’(cf. Ramadanovic on Nietzsche, para. 20); they can happen when and where they are not supposed to happen. Thus, Christian’s gay bashing and, in particular, the Nazi salute given by Vorst, one of Christian’s skinhead-murderers, at his bail hearing remain largely unfathomable to Alison because logically they belong to another time and place. Similarly, doctors are at a loss to explain to Malcolm, even neurologically speaking, where Denis’s sudden and vituperative anti-Semitism has come from. That the effect of these untimely acts is to transport both

96

Peter Dickinson

Alison and Malcolm to Auschwitz is another linking of past and present that occurs, quite literally, outside of temporal sequentiality. Another way of looking at this is that history, while ostensibly a temporal record of events, can also be experienced spatially. And here, as in the work of Rule and Turner, the city of Vancouver (even when it is not always playing itself) functions as an important mnemonic device, its architecture a vertical mosaic through which bodies move horizontally, a topography they experience palimpsestically. Thus, when, early on in the novel, a worried Malcolm finally tracks down a lost Denis, who thinks he’s back in Paris, he notices that Denis, now a child-like Hansel who has managed to wander only four blocks, has broken off pieces of bread ‘to mark a trail’ (53). As for Alison, ‘The first thing she learned working at Vitae was about history: that the present rests upon layers of the past, but is a stratum so unstable, so shot with fault lines, that now and then the then rears up and knocks down the now. Platform shoes, for example, disco, the shag – in 1994 they were all back. Vitae, antiquity itself, was built on the ruins of Faye’s of Kerrisdale, its sole archeological trace the still-unrenovated back room’ (111). (Working at Vitae also teaches her that not just places but ‘people had a past’ [128], something she discovers, to her eternal shame, when she naively queries a client of Malcolm’s, Mrs Soloff, about the numbers tattooed on her arm.) Domenic Beneventi makes a similar sort of argument, in his contribution to this volume, about the ‘spatial confusion, refraction, and doubling’ experienced by the female protagonists of Régine Robin’s La Québécoite and Robert Majzels’s appropriately titled City of Forgetting, where ‘The city [of Montreal] becomes a palimpsest of mediated images, conflicting languages, variable histories, and the narrator’s own fragmented memories, desires, and affects’ (114). That the past (even the very recent past) can be experienced spatially is brought out powerfully in the novel when Alison realizes that she can only truly serve as a witness to Christian’s murder by visiting the site where it took place. With the aid of a map, and with her boyfriend Billy as reluctant driver, she is surprised to learn that the park on the eastern edge of the city that served as the crime scene is not far from the mission where she and her mother used to serve Christmas dinner to the homeless. Entering the park through a tunnel that runs under a railway track, Alison spies a familiar sign among ‘the other more cryptic graffiti – a sinister windmill, an evil insect’ (251), one that she recognizes from a similar pattern etched by a razor into Vorst’s shaven skull. It is this sight, more so than the time she spends in the public toilets where

Notes towards a Resident Reading of Vancouver Writing

97

Christian’s body was found, that provides for Alison both the metonymic and mnemonic link between present-day Vancouver and a larger history of hate of which she is becoming increasingly aware: ‘All she had seen of any significance was spray-painted in the tunnel, but swastikas she saw everywhere now – on stop signs and garage doors, carved into trees, on newspaper boxes, in the dirt on parked cars, on bus seats’ (252). The vagaries of history are thrown further into relief if we look more closely at how the word ‘forgetting’ operates in the title of Adderson’s novel, especially in terms of its link to its absent cognate, ‘remembering.’ Presumably, we write and study history in part as an aid to memory, to help us remember, and to ensure that, in the present, we do not forget the past, lest we repeat its mistakes. But this somewhat naively holistic and ameliorative view of historical memory as a collective cultural repository from which humanity progresses forward is, it seems to me, undercut in at least two ways by Adderson, both related to how bodies occupy space, be it the space of a city or the space of history. First of all, she seems to suggest that recovering a narrative of collective memory does not account for all of the individual bodies and personal stories lost or subsumed within it. Thus, just as Alison clings to her memories of Christian, and to the eccentric composition of his face and body in particular, lest what happened to him fade into a roll-call of anonymous statistics about violence against lesbians and gays, so is the ‘you’-narrator from the novel’s frame suddenly confronted with a traumatic negation of individual identities in the face of mass horror when he/she stumbles upon a case full of shoes at the Auschwitz Muzeum: ‘Gradually, they have blended together into a mass, indistinguishable and, again, impersonal. They are becoming, once again, abstract. The shoes are fading as memory is fading, melding as they disintegrate ... How to put yourself into these shoes, when these shoes no longer exist?’ (336–7). Secondly, Adderson seems to suggest that an added irony is that we can only remember something that we have forgotten. Moreover, can we even forget something we don’t know? Again, Alison’s extreme naivety throws this paradox into corporeal relief: she is humiliated by her ignorance of what the tattoo on Mrs Soloff’s arm means, but when she comes across her brother being bullied by a classmate in his bedroom, she somehow intuits that this is part of a linked history of oppression and violence. Of course, at a physiological level, the cognitive condition of forgetting must in some sense always precede, even prompt,

98

Peter Dickinson

the cognitive condition of remembering. We see, for instance, what happens to Denis when this biophysical process breaks down as a result of Alzheimer’s. He cannot remember anything, including Malcolm, because his brain is telling him he has nothing to forget; his mind is a blank slate and he lives solely in the present, encountering everything for the first time. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow are all one for Denis, which is why he cooks the same complicated eel stew over and over again. Except that, as with space’s deformation of temporal history, so is the mind’s ‘passive’ forgetting here contrasted by Adderson with the body’s attempts at ‘active’ remembering.4 Denis may not know where he is, or recognize Malcolm any longer, but just as he knows instinctively to leave a trail of breadcrumbs in order to navigate his way around the city, so does his body still, at some level, register that a chair in a room is for sitting: He saw his own hands feeling all around the chair, desperate to recall the act of sitting. All that came to him was that his body had to be somehow on this object which he no longer remembered the name of. Nor did he understand why he was hurling himself over the back of it, or why he was now lying on the floor. And who was this man staring down at him? How did he get in the room? (285)

Similarly, the psychological condition of trauma is often registered by the body as a physical condition of not being able to forget. And here, at the end of the novel, the naive and cipher-like Alison, in her corporeal capacity to feel more profoundly, has something to teach Malcolm in their journey from New World city to Old World town. Malcolm, who prefers to remember the way Denis was in Paris rather than the way he is in Vancouver, wrongly assumes that, in accompanying Alison to Auschwitz, he will serve as Virgil to her Dante (291), a recondite guide as together they explore the inner depths of hell. Instead, it is the more empathic Alison who becomes a kind of Beatrice, absolving and absorbing Malcolm’s pain through expert hands that know how to cradle a heavy head, massage away the hurt: He was being lifted up, he felt. The terrible weight of all that had happened was being taken from him, if only for this moment. ‘Ssh,’ said Alison. In the mirror, she saw herself rocking him. (350)

Notes towards a Resident Reading of Vancouver Writing

99

One senses, with this scene, that even back in Vancouver Alison’s vigil – for the Christians and against the Vorsts of this world – will never entirely be over for her, that it is incumbent upon her to remain a witness to the present. At 2:30 am on Saturday, 17 November 2001, the naked body of forty-one-yearold Vancouverite Aaron Webster was found battered and bleeding in a parking lot near Second Beach in Stanley Park. He died a few minutes later, the victim of a vicious gay bashing. The next day, at an impromptu rally at the corner of Denman and Davie Streets, members of the gay community listened as police and politicians labelled the death a hate crime and vowed to act swiftly to apprehend the perpetrators. In February 2003 a nineteen-year-old male suspect was finally arrested in connection with the crime. Seventeen at the time of the attack, he could not be identified; he pleaded guilty to manslaughter in juvenile court in July. On 18 December 2003 he was sentenced to two years in custody and one year under house arrest, the maximum penalty that could be issued by Judge Valmond Romilly, who explicitly labelled Webster’s murder a hate crime and berated Crown prosecutors for not trying the case within this context. Another juvenile who also pleaded guilty to manslaughter received a similar sentence in the spring of 2004. Ryan Cran, an adult also charged in connection with the case, was sentenced to six years in jail for manslaughter in January 2005. On 1 May 2002, having been convicted in absentia in November 2000 by a military court in Verona, Italy, for torturing and murdering eleven persons in a Nazi transit camp in Bolzano, Italy, seventy-eight-year-old Vancouver resident Michael Seifert was arrested by RCMP officers in the parking lot of his East Vancouver church, the Canadian government having finally decided to act on an extradition request from the Italian government. Initially denied bail by BC Supreme Court Justice Linda Loo, this decision was overturned three weeks later by the BC Court of Appeal, which determined that Seifert’s release would not offend the public because he was an elderly man in frail health who had lived an ‘exemplary life’ in Canada for more than fifty years. After a lengthy delay to determine Seifert’s mental and physical fitness, Justice Selwyn Romilly ruled in August 2003 that there was enough evidence to extradite on seven charges in connection with nine murders, and ordered Seifert into custody (he was subsequently released on bail). With Seifert’s extradition order before Justice Minister Irwin Cotler, a commission headed by Federal Court Justice James O’Reilly was created to determine if Seifert should be stripped of his citizenship. That commission was scheduled to relocate to Italy in December 2004 to hear testimony from a dozen survivors of the Bolzano camp.

100 Peter Dickinson

Coda: ‘Dead Girls’ and ‘Unnatural Women’ Coincidentally, as I was putting the finishing touches on the first draft of this essay, I was also preparing to decamp UBC in order to take up a new position at Simon Fraser University. One of my most immediate concerns was figuring out how best to get to my new office. Like UBC, SFU’s main campus is spectacularly sited (on Burnaby Mountain), but somewhat difficult to access if, like me, you rely on public transportation. One of two possible bus routes (the #135) takes me from in front of SFU’s Harbour Centre, along Hastings Street, into Burnaby Heights, and eventually up the mountain. Along the way, the bus travels through the heart of the Downtown East Side (DES), whence this paper began via the reading of Maracle’s story. Home to the poorest postal code in Canada, a neighbourhood with the highest rates of injection drug use and HIV infection in the country (which is the subject of two recent acclaimed documentaries about the area and which proved to be a decisive issue for voters in the city’s recent civic elections),5 the DES has for decades (and especially since the closing of Woodward’s Department Store in the early 1990s) been considered a blight upon Vancouver’s otherwise photogenic landscape, a stretch of urban detritus whose population is mostly disposable, as evidenced by the fact that routinely offered up from its ranks are ‘dead girls, everywhere’ (Nancy Lee 99). This last quotation is taken from the title story to Nancy Lee’s Dead Girls, as assured a literary debut as I’ve read in recent memory, and a text that, should I ever get a chance to teach a version of my Vancouver writing course again, would definitely find its way onto the syllabus. Each of the book’s eight stories, which focus for the most part on vulnerable or alienated Vancouver-area women at odds with either their families, their lovers, their city, or their own bodies, takes place against the hunt for, arrest, and trial of a serial killer named Coombs, who has been abducting and murdering prostitutes, burying their bodies in the backyard of his suburban house. An added isomorphism, within the context of the argument outlined in this paper, is that Lee’s collection began appearing in local bookstores at the height of the media frenzy surrounding the February 2002 arrest of Robert ‘Willie’ Pickton, a fifty-three-year-old pig farmer from Port Coquitlam facing fifteen charges of first-degree murder in connection with a sixty-nine– person list of missing female sex-trade workers who began disappearing from Vancouver’s DES at a statistical rate of approximately two per

Notes towards a Resident Reading of Vancouver Writing 101

year in the early 1980s (see Joyce; Hall and Bolan). A similar conjunction of simulations – dead women, a male serial killer eluding custody for years, a police force and city oblivious to its own forensics – occurred when Métis playwright Marie Clements’s The Unnatural and Accidental Women opened at Vancouver’s Firehall Arts Centre. A dramatic recreation of the events surrounding the case of Gilbert Paul Jordan, a man convicted of manslaughter in the alcohol poisoning death of a First Nations woman from the DES and suspected in the deaths of at least seven others, the play premiered on the same day that an extended interview with Jordan, then out of jail but facing new criminal charges, appeared in the Vancouver Sun (see Ratsoy and Hoffman 473). It would be a naive reading of Vancouver writing, indeed, to fall back onto a mimetic approach at this stage. I don’t mean to suggest, at the end of this essay, that in the work of the writers discussed in this paper art is merely imitating life (or vice versa). Rather, to harken back to Grosz, I am arguing that there is an isomorphic relationship between the city of Vancouver and these writers’ texts. To quote again a passage from Grosz, cited above, this relationship ‘is not a mirroring of nature in artifice; rather, there is a two-way linkage that could be defined as an interface’ (‘Bodies-Cities’ 108). For these resident-writers, Vancouver thus becomes the site to re-explore representationally some of the ‘corporeal alignments’ between the subjects who occupy that space materially. The texts that result in turn become field maps, reorienting readers spatially, pointing us in the direction of new (and often unpleasant) discoveries about the city we only thought we knew. As a resident-reader of Vancouver, I am seeking a similar sort of isomorphism or interface between my critical interpretation of the city as a literary locus and my social and political participation in it as a cultural habitus. Moreover, as a teacher I am seeking to dynamize that interrelationship for my students. This pedagogical imperative, and some of the pitfalls that potentially accrue with it, are brought back to me whenever I ride the #135 to SFU. Such sights have I seen through the window while the bus idles at the intersection of Hastings and Main – the bodies, the mass of biopower on this one corner, effluent to the rest of the city’s post-Expo/pre-Olympic efflorescence. Like the child narrator in Maracle’s story, my gaze is clinical, anthropological. Despite my best intentions, this part of the city is a text I’ll never be able to finish reading; it’s a classroom that will teach me only what I want to learn.

102 Peter Dickinson NOTES This essay is dedicated to the students who took my Winter 2000 Canadian literature course at the University of British Columbia, all of whom proved themselves to be excellent resident-readers of Vancouver. 1 Here I am adapting slightly what Grosz identifies as two of the ‘general effects induced by cityscapes’ (‘Bodies-Cities’ 109). 2 In his ‘Address at Vision 65,’ McLuhan states that ‘the role of art in the past has been not so much the making of environments as making of counterenvironments, or antienvironments ... The artist, instead of expressing himself in various patterns and packages of message, turned his senses and the work of art to the business of probing environment ... One related consideration is that antienvironments, or counterenvironments created by the artist, are indispensable means of becoming aware of the environment in which we live and of the environments we create for ourselves technically’ (224–5). On how McLuhan applied these notions to contemporary pop and Fluxus artists like Andy Warhol and John Cage, see Cavell, McLuhan in Space 174–5. 3 For a detailed analysis of the legal and ideological implications of the original case against Sharpe, see Stan Persky and John Dixon’s On Kiddie Porn. 4 On ‘active’ versus ‘passive’ forgetting, in the Nietzschean sense, see Ramadanovic. 5 Through a Blue Lens, a co-production between the Vancouver Police Department’s Odd Squad Productions, the National Film Board of Canada, and the CBC, followed several police officers armed with hand-held video cameras on their daily beats through the DES, and was broadcast on the CBC in December 1999. Acclaimed documentary filmmaker Nettie Wild completed her own take on the DES, called Fix: The Story of an Addicted City, in time for Vancouver’s 2002 civic elections. Its focus on the gradual conversion of the conservative outgoing Mayor Philip Owen to the merits of a European-styled ‘four pillar’ approach to harm reduction (as opposed to criminal prosecution) with respect to the drug problem in the DES was made into the single most important platform issue of the election when former BC Chief Coroner Larry Campbell (and the man upon whom the lead role in Chris Haddock’s Vancouver-shot Da Vinci’s Inquest is based) announced that he would be running for mayor as part of the left-leaning COPE slate. Campbell has long been a passionate advocate for safe injection sites and needle exchanges in the DES, and his street credibility on the issue necessarily compelled his NPA rival, Jennifer Clarke, to take a stand.

Notes towards a Resident Reading of Vancouver Writing 103 Clarke, who won her party’s nomination for the mayor’s chair after a bitter putsch of Owen, responded by calling the DES ‘a ghetto,’ likening the area to a war zone that she vowed to ‘take back one block at a time’ (with condominium developments rather than needle exchanges). In the end, voters elected Campbell and members of COPE in a landslide victory, and in September 2003 Vancouver opened North America’s first legally sanctioned safe injection site.

104

Domenic Beneventi

Lost in the City: The Montreal Novels of Régine Robin and Robert Majzels domenic beneventi

Solo dopo aver conosciuto la superficie delle cose che si puÆ spingere quel che c’è sotto. Ma la superficie delle cose è inesauribile. (Only after having experienced the surface of things may we discover what lies beneath. But the surface of things is inexhaustible.) Italo Calvino

The city has always been imbued with a complex symbolic imaginary that has conflated its physical spaces with specific social practices, cultural meanings, and individual and collective identities. Writing the city in the modern context coincided with the industrialization of Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, and the urban novels of Dickens, Balzac, Hugo, and Dostoevsky, for example, presented scenes of social isolation, economic despair, and spiritual confusion in the detritus of the industrial city. In the movement of populations from rural to urban spaces, the city was figured as a point of arrival, as a disorienting hive of human activity which the protagonist adapted to and conquered, or otherwise failed and perished in. The urban sketch form was taken up in the United States by writers such as Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, Henry James, and W.D. Howells, among others, who provided a ‘realist’ interpretation of the city in which individual characters came to symbolize different social classes adjusting to the consequences of rapid industrialization and urbanization. From Whitman’s ‘Mannahatta’ to Auster’s City of Glass, New York City is figured as the expression of America’s rapid entrance into modernity, a metropolis rife with opportunities for social and economic advancement, but also one where destitution, alienation, and urban decay are all too common.

Montreal Novels of Régine Robin and Robert Majzels 105

Representations of the city increasingly moved from the external space of social-realist tableaus to the psychological inner space of the modernist urban dweller. The city increasingly reflected the protagonist’s psyche – a mirror of the hopes, fears, and anxieties that structure perceptions of the world. Walter Benjamin argued that Baudelaire’s melancholic flâneur is the first such modernist urban dweller, one for whom the subjective experience of the city is an integral aspect of the self: ‘The street becomes a dwelling for the flâneur; he is as much at home among the facades of houses as a citizen is in his four walls. To him the shiny, enamelled signs of businesses are at least as good a wall ornament as an oil painting is to the bourgeois in his salon. The walls are the desk against which he presses his notebooks; news-stands are his libraries and the terraces of cafés are the balconies from which he looks down on his household after his work is done’ (Charles Baudelaire 48). As the urban dandy experiences and interprets urban spaces, he (for Benjamin’s flâneur was always a male figure) engages in a discourse about his identity in relation to that place. Thus, while the spectacle of the city provides ‘aesthetic meaning and an individual kind of existential security’ (Tester 2), flânerie may also be understood as ‘the activity of the sovereign spectator going about the city in order to find the things which will occupy his gaze and thus complete his otherwise incomplete identity; satisfy his otherwise dissatisfied existence’ (Tester 7). For Baudelaire, as for Benjamin, chance encounters and accidental occurrences in the city result in the perpetual effacement and reformulation of identity, and the heterogeneous sensory impressions of city life must be attenuated by the projection of an ordered urban narrative onto otherwise random events. The city thus becomes the site par excellence of the modernist subject, as its streets, cafés, and open squares represent a mental map of his itineraries, a trajectory in which observations, memories, and social interactions sediment into a peripatetic sense of self. The modernist urban novel may thus be seen as an attempt to master the unruly energies of the city through narrative, a form of urban representation that assumes an unproblematic correspondence between material aspects of the city and the symbolic, psychological, political, and ideological discourses which shape it. Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, for instance, reflects the positivistic view of the city that emerged from the work of Robert Park and the Chicago School of Urban Sociology; the city is seen as an intricate economic system regulated by the laws of production, distribution, and consumption. Urban dwellers are inseparable from these various processes, and their lives are invariably en-

106

Domenic Beneventi

meshed within the materialistic determinism of the urban machine. Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer also presents a mechanistic urban environment in which the individual is alienated; the mind is ‘at one with the workings of the modern city’ (Lehan 239) and the metropolis in turn becomes ‘a phantasmagoric back-drop for frustrations and defeats’ (McLuhan, ‘Dos Passos’ 154). While Joyce’s Dublin and Dos Passos’s New York manifest the physical and historical particularities of those cities, their symbolic landscapes are increasingly structured and modified by the narrator’s gaze. The city becomes a microcosm of the world, and its sights, sounds, and physical structures are intermingled with the perceptions, memories, and desires of its inhabitants. As Marilyn Fries points out in relation to Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, ‘the city and the individual cannot be regarded as separate entities with their own consistent and constant significance; rather they must be seen as interplaying and interchanging aspects of an even greater metaphysical whole’ (43). While a specifically urban tradition in Canadian writing has only recently become the object of critical inquiry,1 it seems impossible to speak of Canadian identity and culture without speaking of its geography. Margaret Atwood suggests that Canada is ‘an unknown territory for the people who live in it ... I’m talking about Canada as a state of mind, as the space you inhabit not just with your body but with your head. It’s that kind of space in which we find ourselves lost’ (Survival 18). The need to make one’s way in a vast, largely unknown Canadian landscape serves, ironically, as a unifying symbol of Canada, which Atwood formulates as the thematic of survival. The need for survival produces ‘an almost intolerable anxiety’ (33) in the Canadian psyche, which manifests itself as an ambiguous love-hate relationship to the country. This need for survival, Atwood concludes, often leads to symbolic failure or even death in the face of an inhospitable natural landscape. Indeed, in figures as diverse as Susanna Moodie’s colonial settlers and Leonard Cohen’s ‘beautiful losers,’ Canadian literature seems to be inhabited by individuals lost in their spatial environments. John Moss has similarly argued that an undercurrent present in much early Canadian writing is a ‘geophysical imagination,’ a concern with the country’s physical landscape and its effects on senses of national identity.2 The immensity of Canada’s territory, the difficulties of adaptation to its environment, and the proximity of villages and cities to the ‘state of nature,’ Moss argues, render space and spatial metaphors a central theme of Canadian literature. The figuration of the sublime

Montreal Novels of Régine Robin and Robert Majzels 107

beauty of Canadian territory and the idealization of its social, political, and economic potential answered to the expectations of the colonial enterprise, one in which the ‘empty’ space of nature is ‘filled’ and therefore ‘civilized’ through social, political, and economic institutions of British or French origin: ‘Our farms, cities, towns, and villages were re-creations of European space and time. Our language itself imposed forms and structures upon this new place, an architecture of sound whose echoes were of England and France’ (Lane 64). While the spatial imaginaries of settler societies are ‘deeply spatialized stories’ (Razack 3), the discourses of colonization and nation building provide ‘no place’ for its marginalized subjects. The relegation of immigrant populations to racialized ghetto spaces and aboriginal populations to reserves effectively evacuates their ‘otherness’ to a peripheral location, ‘condemn[ing] them to anachronistic space and time’ (Razack 2). The fact that such ‘foreign bodies’ have occupied Canadian territory since its early history is denied or put under erasure in the creation of Canada as an ostensibly homogeneous colonial (and white) space. Canadian space is thus ‘defeatured,’ as Richard Cavell puts it in his contribution to this collection, for such a strategy enables the domination of an ‘abstracted’ natural landscape while assuring material exploitation and the maintenance of ‘the superiority of European cultural modes and forms’ (14). The ‘failure’ of spatial representation is due to the fact that ‘space has traditionally been articulated as a totalizing notion which seeks to express universals’ (Cavell, ‘Theorizing’ 75). Canadian spaces have not escaped reductionist abstraction, be it in terms of a vast natural landscape that ostensibly inscribes the nation, various regionalisms that elide specific communities, or in the figuration of our cities as a ‘colonial mimicry’ that has only recently attained a patchwork of multicultural ghettos. Graham Huggan has suggested that later Canadian writing resists the ‘colonialist’ construction of Canadian landscape and national identity by questioning the equation between landscape and a monolithic idea of culture. He identifies several rhetorical and literary strategies in contemporary Canadian literature which render problematic the notion of territorial integrity and homogeneity in post-colonial settler societies. Huggan argues that the parodic use of maps in Canadian writing highlights their incommensurability to the official discourses of colonial space, resisting the enclosure and ‘containment’ of nationalist discourses. He further argues that this resignification of colonial/postcolonial Canadian space not only contests the framing of settler societ-

108

Domenic Beneventi

ies by the colonial power, but in fact that the internal inconsistencies of place, that is, the writing of or about other places and cultures within settler societies, also presents problems for reductionist discourses about national boundaries, spaces, and territory: ‘In the cases of the contemporary Canadian and Australian literatures, these [post-colonial] territories correspond to a series of new or revised rhetorical spaces occupied by feminism, regionalism, and ethnicity, where each of these items is understood primarily as a set of counter-discursive strategies which challenge the claims of or avoid the circumscription within one or other form of cultural centrism’ (‘Decolonizing the Map’ 410). Thus, the pervading model of a vast Canadian landscape that must be subjected to colonial rationalization shifts, not only by virtue of regional writing, but also because of the heterotopic spaces introduced by ethnic and women writers. Arnold Itwaru identifies a similar ‘displacement’ of the meanings attached to Canadian space in his study of immigrant fiction. Already marked as ‘other,’ these new arrivals to the country must in turn ‘invent’ a sense of self that involves the integration of ethnic difference into the Canadian physical and cultural totality. Central to the construction of the ethnic self is a recognition of the dual symbolic spaces occupied by the immigrant – the territory of origin and Canadian space. In this sense, immigrant identities are elaborated not only in relation to the changing social circumstances of a new country, but also in relation to the new spaces of sociality that the immigrant faces and symbolically reconstructs. As Nicholas Harney writes, ‘space is central to the construction of identity and culture in the postcolonial world. The presence, in polyethnic states, of diverse immigrant communities that maintain ties across state borders requires that we rethink the connections between how spatial arrangements influence the imagining of complex forms of identity and culture’ (8). In its fictionalization of the ethnic ghettos embedded within the Canadian metropolis, immigrant/ethnic writing effectively points to the inadequacies of applying reductionist spatial discourses to Canadian territory. The ethnic ghetto provides possibilities for reading place as resistance, disjunction, slippage – as a ‘heterotopic’ space which generates meanings beyond itself, one which paradoxically refers to other, absent spaces:3 The Little Italies or the Chinatowns of North America are forward-moving (they are not Italy or China), but they are distinct from their surroundings because they are also past-oriented, refer to an elsewhere, and because of

Montreal Novels of Régine Robin and Robert Majzels 109 the effort that goes into retaining, into re-presenting that past or that elsewhere ... Little Italies can be studied as instances of the precarious pluridimensionality of the nation in the twentieth century. If they move beyond the origin, immigrant enclaves also resist the location, the structure hosting them. (Loriggio 10)

Marginalization and exclusion in urban spaces occur not only in the context of ethnic ‘others’ relegated to the overtly racialized boundaries of the ghetto, but also in terms of gender, where male and female bodies occupy different sites within the urban landscape, and the activities, social interactions, types of communication, and modes of bodily display allowed to each gender are also different. The encounter between bodies in the city ‘maps the subject into discursively-constituted, embodied identities’ (Pile and Thrift 41). Just as immigrants are interpellated by the regulatory gaze of the majority and made to conform to spatial practices that do not overtly challenge racialized hierarchical mappings of the city, women are subjected to various gendered spatial rules aimed at maintaining the spatial privileges of males. As Doreen Massey has argued, ‘particular ways of thinking about space and place are tied up with, both directly and indirectly, particular social constructions of gender relations’ (Space 2). Therefore, in the construction of the city-as-metaphor (of the modernist male subject, of the nation, of essentialized collective identities), many marginal spatial practices, bodies, and histories that circulate in the city are effaced from public discourse. The symbolic meanings attached to the urban spaces have for the most part come under the purview of the privileged; the male flâneur who consumes the spectacles offered by arcades, galleries, and shop windows does not encounter the same spatial constraints as women, visible minorities, or the poor. Those individuals or groups who are constructed as ‘other’ are pushed beyond the spatial and symbolic boundaries that define the (collective) self and into an ‘abject’ space beyond, for in the need to differentiate between those who ‘belong’ in a given space and those who do not, ‘boundaries are drawn discretely between dominant and subordinate groups’ (Sibley xiv). Such boundaries not only differentiate between privileged and abject spaces, but maintain the social, economic, and symbolic hierarchies that operate in those spaces. If we agree with Sibley’s assertion that ‘the human landscape can be read as a landscape of exclusion’ (ix), then the task that remains before

110

Domenic Beneventi

us is to uncover some of the ways in which marginalized groups symbolically reconstruct those spaces of exclusion. Ethnic Flânerie in the City: Régine Robin’s La Québécoite The immigrant’s search for the social, historical, and cultural meanings attached to specific spaces in the city reflects an urban epistemology that conflates diverse languages and cultural significations in a single site of display, transaction, and displacement. Régine Robin’s La Québécoite engages in this sort of heterotopic spatialization of identity, one in which the immigrant’s experience of deterritorialization provides alternative and complex readings of the city. This involves an ethnic marking of the urban landscape not only in terms of bodily and linguistic display, but in terms of the physical display of the ethnic ghetto (the commercial signs, folk festivals, architecture, and sociality particular to the ethnic neighbourhood). For the immigrant, the city is at the same moment a site of desire for integration into the culture of the majority and a site of resistance to its dominant codes. Spatial indecision is the central image of La Québécoite, a postmodern narrative in which Montreal and Paris create a palimpsest of memories, languages, and media images that projects an ambiguous sense of cultural identity: ‘Perdue sur la Main, sur St. Urbain ou sur la rue Roy, elle s’obstinait encore à demander la rue Novolipie, la rue Gésia, la rue Leszno, la rue Franciskana. Elle confondait les lieux, les époques, les langues et les gens’ (Québécoite 68). Through these urban wanderings, the postmodern flâneuse attempts to come to terms with cultural alienation and deterritorialization. Each of the novel’s three chapters corresponds to different parts of Montreal’s urban topography, and each neighbourhood that is explored offers not only possible narrative trajectories for the would-be author, but vivid fantasies of the lives she might live in each of them. Her identitary ruminations are thus intimately tied to the urban landscape itself, to the physical layout of its neighbourhoods, but also to the various social, cultural, and political practices specific to each section of the city. In the first section, entitled ‘Snowdon,’ for instance, she imagines herself living with her aunt Mime Yente in this primarily immigrant, working-class neighbourhood: ‘Quartiers d’immigrants à l’anglais malhabile oÝ subsiste encore l’accent d’Europe centrale, oÝ l’on entend parler yiddish’ (Québécoite 23). It is an urban landscape that is both alien and familiar, for while the Jewish shops and cafés she frequents provide

Montreal Novels of Régine Robin and Robert Majzels 111

‘urban comfort’4 by projecting her cultural heritage, the visual language of the ghetto is often a simulation, a trace which remains elusive, ambiguous, and at times folkloric: ‘Ville schizophrène/patchwork linguistique/bouillie ethnique, plein de grumeaux/purée de cultures disloquées/folklorisées/figées/pizza/souvlaki/paella’ (Québécoite 82). Her personal history and the larger collective one of the Jewish diaspora can only be reconstructed in fragments which sediment into the ethnic performances of the ghetto. Her ‘travellings urbains’ thus rejoin the personal and the collective, as the memories of the past and the urban desires of the present meld into a fragmented, peripatetic sense of self. As Sherry Simon writes, ‘L’histoire collective et publique, la mémoire individuelle et privée: ces répertoires de signes circulent selon des logiques parfois difficiles à cerner’ (44). In the second part of the novel, a walk through Outremont represents another narrative possibility – integration into the francophone elite of the city: ‘Une autre vie, un autre quartier, d’autres réseaux sociaux, une nouvelle aventure, au sein de la bourgeoisie québécoise dans les hauts d’Outremont, dans une belle maison cette fois’ (Québécoite 97). Finally, her walks ‘autour du marché Jean-Talon’ sees her integrating into the other immigrant cultures of Montreal, where she meets and marries a man from Latin America: ‘Autant la rendre aux ethniques, aux métèques avec lesquels elle est si bien’ (Québécoite 173). The fragmented novel includes lists of streets, signs, department stores, metro stations, restaurant menus, and television schedules – a dizzying spectacle that provides the authorial impetus to record and tame the urban landscape, give it narrative coherence. Slowly the Québécité of her surroundings sediment into a tentative sense of place and of her own ambiguous position within that space: ‘Il fallait fixer tous les signes de la différence; la différence des odeurs, de la couleur du ciel, la différence de paysage. Il fallait faire un inventaire, un catalogue, une nomenclature’ (Québécoite 18). Robin’s would-be writer attempts to create an epistemological map of this unfamiliar landscape, a catalogue that would ostensibly order the heterogeneous elements operating in the city. But this proves futile, as Montreal becomes a modern-day Babel of floating languages, histories, and memories: ‘Montréal permet la création d’une mémoire du hors-lieu. Il s’agit d’une ville désémantiseé dont la narratrice doit désespérément tracer l’inventaire’ (Harel, ‘La parole orpheline’ 416). The flâneuse thus occupies an interstitial space that conflates her memories of Paris with a fetishistic cataloguing of the linguistic hetero-

112

Domenic Beneventi

geneity of Montreal, a futile attempt to pin down the floating signifiers of the city. The ‘inquiétante étrangeté d’ici’ (Québécoite 183) demands a reappraisal of her own cultural assumptions and puts into question modernist notions of coherent, stable national and individual identities: Tout consigner pour donner plus de corps à cette existence ... tes itinéraires – les consonances bizarres des grands magasins: simpson eaton la baie ogilvy holt renfrew marks & spencer woolworth kresge dominion steinberg Tout cela finira par avoir l’épaisseur d’une vie, d’un quotidien. Serait-il possible de trouver une position dans le langage, un point d’appui, un repère fixe, un point stable. (Québécoite 18)

The semantic and symbolic porosity of the city allows for a variety of cultural, historical, and personal narratives that are themselves subject to modification, reinscription, and play, despite the flâneuse’s desire to construct a situated ‘parcours’ that would make meaningful her heterogeneous sensory experiences of the urban landscape. Her wanderings are haphazard, driven by a desire to partake in the city’s linguistic and cultural incongruities. Should she choose Outremont or Snowdon? Integrate into the francophone elite of the city or disappear into its Jewish ghetto? Each of these choices suggests the randomness operating in the urban landscape, and the city becomes an open space of possible itineraries which translate into the ‘micro-narratives’ of personal history. As Barbara Godard argues in her study of Marchessault’s writing in this collection, ‘apostrophe, litany, parataxis ... plays out to excess the trope of the city as place of passage, exchange, and transformation’ (66). The heterogeneous images, signs, and languages experienced in the city are therefore irreducible to any positivistic notions of ‘History’ or ‘Culture,’ but are reflective, rather, of the random accidental occurrences, disrup-

Montreal Novels of Régine Robin and Robert Majzels 113

tions, and adjacencies which operate in the urban landscape. The movement of the flâneuse in the city proceeds through random itineraries, similar to the multiplicity and reversibility of the Deleuzian rhizome: Principes de connexion et d’hétérogénéité: n’importe quel point d’un rhizome peut £tre connecté avec n’importe quel autre, et doit l’être. C’est très différent de l’arbre ou de la racine qui fixent un point, un ordre ... un rhizome peut ètre rompu, brisé en un endroit quelconque, il reprend suivant telle ou telle de ses lignes et suivant d’autres lignes ... un rhizome n’est justiciable d’aucun modèle structural ou génératif. Il est étranger à toute idée d’axe génétique, comme de structure profonde. (Deleuze and Guattari, Capitalism et Schizophrénie 13)

Deleuze and Guattari argue that traditional Western metaphysics may be modelled as a tree whose roots are the foundational binary opposites (self-other, inside-outside, etc.) upon which other principles are built. The rhizome bypasses these hierarchical operations by virtue of its flexibility, its generative properties, and its randomness. The rhizome may thus be figured as a map or itinerary that is always reversible or modifiable, one in which each point suggests a limitless possibility for other tangents. Thus in La Québécoite, the metro lines of Paris and Montreal resemble rhizomes spreading under the city’s surface, extending across the urban terrain in a criss-cross of paths, nodes, and points of exchange. These correspond to the narrator’s urban wanderings, which proceed in an unsystematic way, guided only by her desire to know the city and invent its possible narratives: ‘bribes d’itinéraires le long des lignes de métro’ (Québécoite 17). Similarly, the streets of the city viewed from the seat of an airplane at night are an incandescent network of passages, crossings, tangents – a rhizome whose contours represent the itineraries not yet explored, the narratives yet to be written: ‘Tu avais aimé toutes les villes, la respiration hallucinée des villes américaines vues d’avion le soir comme un tableau de bord, un écran électronique de lignes de lumières entrecroisées, des réseaux lumineux dans la nuit’ (Québécoite 17). Through its physical complexity, its ambiguities and reversals, its ability to generate an endless series of possible trajectories, Montreal is presented as a pulsating rhizome that is constantly shifting and moving, offering no structured narrative, only a series of passages: ‘Ne plus rencontrer Montréal que par traces, signes, symboles, fragments sans signification, morceaux, débris, tessons hors d’usage’ (Québécoite 203).5

114

Domenic Beneventi

The city becomes a palimpsest of mediated images, conflicting languages, variable histories, and the narrator’s own fragmented memories, desires, and affects. The flâneuse’s awareness of her ambiguous position constitutes an important aspect of her identity, her sense of being ‘in between,’ of being exiled, or of occupying an ethnospace that she herself creates.6 This produces an effect of spatial confusion, refraction, and doubling, as she seeks to make sense of and integrate into the Canadian city. The modernist urban tableau thus melds into postindustrial noise, a city of fragmented narratives and identities. Ghosts and Urban Remains: Robert Majzels’s City of Forgetting In Robert Majzels’s City of Forgetting, Montreal is presented as a dystopic urban landscape littered with the broken metanarratives of modernism. Scientific progress, historical objectivity, and utopian technological advancement are dissected by an unlikely band of historical and literary figures who become homeless scavengers wandering through the postmodern city. These include Clytemnestra, Lady Macbeth, Le Corbusier, Che Guevara, Karl Marx, Rudy Valentino, and Paul de Chomedey de Maisonneuve, Jesuit founder and governor of Montreal. Suzy Creamcheez, an ambiguously gendered, streetwise urban punk, seems to float between the characters and between categories of identity, and her presence among these ghostly figures calls attention to notions of difference, marginality, and exclusion in the city. Her ambiguities of age, gender, and sexuality provide a counterpoint to those characters who seek to control the heterogeneous meanings of the city, be it through science (Le Corbusier), religion (de Maisonneuve), political force (Guevara). As a cross-dressing lesbian flâneuse whose echolalia turns various ideologies on their heads, Suzy functions as ‘a borderline case, an example of roving signifier, a transient wild-card of potential, indeterminate sexuality, trapped in transliteration, caught in desire’ (Munt 117). In her decidedly aggressive reappropriation of those urban spaces which have traditionally been denied to women, Suzy’s queer form of urban flânerie is similar to that which Barbara Godard, in this collection, identifies in the work of Marchessault, a ‘rereading/rewriting [that] transports the female subject to a different space, to a world parallel to and critical of contemporary sociality’ (68). Suzy Creamcheez’s incongruities are suggested not only by her ambiguous physical display and speech acts, but by the manner in which she straddles gender and sexual identities:

Montreal Novels of Régine Robin and Robert Majzels 115 This is Suzy Creamcheez. Difficult to tell her age because she conforms to none of the ready-made female models. Young, yes, a great deal younger than Clytæmnestra, whom she has followed here. But not a girl. Hasn’t been a girl for some time now. Torn jungle-green shorts over black tights, standard worn-down black-and-white hightops, and sleeveless greyish T-shirt under a paisley waistcoat straight from Sally Ann, bare arms and shoulders, muscular and tanned and thickened by the sting of mosquitoes and the slash of underbrush. You’d expect the shaved head and the three rings dangling from her pierced nose to complete the tough look she’s obviously going for; instead, they evoke a kind of fragility. (Majzels, City 11)

As opposed to the nineteenth-century Parisian dandy whose ‘ostentatious inaction offers evidence of superior social status’ (Ferguson 26), Suzy’s form of homeless flânerie reveals the necessities of adaptation and resourcefulness in contemporary urban survival. This means that not only must she resort to scavenging among garbage (Majzels, City 11 25), stealing wallets along subway platforms (29), and killing squirrels for food (109), she must also content herself with the various forms of male ‘logorrhea’ that attempt to control women’s voices, bodies, and mobility in the city. She is in this sense more urban warrior than idle stroller, answering to male aggression in kind: ‘She lunges, not thinking about the knife tucked in her boot, kicking instead for the balls ... It’s the screaming that puts him off more than the pummelling. Freezes him, freezes everyone in the street – the whores, the pimp, the passing students, Rudy. All frozen. By the immensity of her rage’ (Majzels, City 86). While the free movement of women in the city may suggest their sexual availability to the male gaze, an object to be ‘“consumed” and “enjoyed” along with the rest of the sights that the city affords’ (Ferguson 28), it may also signal a transgression of gender-specific spatial practices and the patriarchal and heteronormative orders that subtend them. The presence of women in places traditionally coded as male (the streets, alleyways, and outskirts of the city) is disturbing to the male gaze, which arises out of ‘the masculine desire to fix the woman in a stable and stabilizing identity’ (Elizabeth Wilson 157). Those women who are present and visible on the street are seen as morally suspect, as fallen victims, or as prostitutes: ‘women have fared especially badly in western visions of the metropolis because they have seemed to represent disorder. There is fear of the city as a realm of uncontrolled and chaotic sexual licence, and the rigid control of women in cities has been felt necessary to avert this danger’ (Elizabeth Wilson 157).

116

Domenic Beneventi

Suzy’s presence on the streets of Old Montreal elicits anxiety in Le Corbusier, who sees in her gender and outward street-punk appearance a threat to his utopian urban vision, which relegates to each body and space a utilitarian function: ‘some sort of punker horning in on his territory ... my God ... it’s a woman. His rising panic evaporates and is replaced by a kind of outrage. Who does she think she is?’ (Majzels, City 25). But Suzy refuses to tread lightly, instead walking the city ‘slowly and with an exaggerated air of nonchalance ... stretching her arms like some morning jogger casually surveying the city’ (Majzels, City 11). Stationed atop Mount Royal, she wages war on the power centres of the city, ‘spray(ing) the scene with the simulated rat-tat-tat of a machine gun and the whistle and crash of rockets’ (Majzels, City 11). Suzy’s transitory, strategic appropriation of the city as a homeless transient is contrasted to the institutionalization of space occupied by the office towers of the ‘financial and industrial conglomerates’ (Majzels, City 59), Place d’Armes with its statues of the European founders of the city, or the Basilique Notre-Dame and its gallery of apostles ‘radiating all the power of Christ’s love down upon his city’ (Majzels, City 74). These sites interpellate urban bodies and implicate them as subjects in their ideological frames. The built environment consequently becomes a form of control that ‘assumes symbolic importance, reinforcing a desire for order and conformity ... in this way, space is implicated in the construction of deviancy’ (Sibley 86). Suzy’s homeless flânerie is seen as an unacceptable form of vagrancy, for not only does she refuse to be caught by the male scopic regime, which attempts to render the female body immobile, invisible, and therefore unthreatening, but also because she does not participate in the capitalist modes of production and consumption symbolized by the towers of the business district and the ‘bovine stares’ (Majzels, City 13) of its office workers. The ‘recycling’ of urban refuse, garbage, and debris renders the homeless residual, abject, and marginal. Consequently, their vagrancy is equated with crime, disease, political unrest, and the unruly frenzy of the crowd. The ensuing urban panic can only be assuaged by the policing of those forms of public display and interaction that unsettle the hegemonic order, such as women holding hands in the city (147), male public cruising atop Mount Royal (132), or the funeral procession for Rudy Valentino, which turns into a swarming crowd of political demonstrators (149). Each of Majzels’s urban ghosts embodies a particular ideological

Montreal Novels of Régine Robin and Robert Majzels 117

position in relation to the urban terrain, and the way in which their various discourses are fragmented, interrupted, or simply forgotten in the haze of history suggests that the ‘totalizing notions’ that they embody have themselves become broken in a city of consumer culture. Majzels’s novel may be read in the context of postmodernism’s challenge to modernism’s central assumptions: ‘the existence of a single coherent narrative of a causal structure to which everything can be related ... the notion of a single universal subject, constructed – usually with blithe unintentionality – in the shape of a white western male heterosexual’ (Massey, Space 223). In an interview, Majzels points out that Montreal opens up the possibility of reading the exhaustion of grand narratives. Another way is the conflict of cultures. You have all these cultures and each has struggled for many years to make up its own story of Montreal. If you listen, you can hear these stories clashing. That makes it easy not to believe in any of them and to think about the contrasts, the differences, without being above them all or washing your hands of them. You’re more wary of the grand narratives which would explain the situation of Quebec one way or another. (Majzels, ‘Interview’ 129)

Majzels’s urban ghosts abandon the city and take refuge in the ‘natural’ setting of Mount Royal. The city below them is on the verge of collapse, a ‘dirty dishrag’ stretching across the landscape from its symbolically charged epicentre at the cross atop Mount Royal to the farthest reaches of the undifferentiated suburbs below. It is ‘the city of daily life, war in a briefcase’ (Majzels, City 11). The war being waged is an economic one that opposes the forces of capitalist consumption, represented in the figures of Le Corbusier and Rockefeller, to those of communist revolution, symbolized by Guevara and Marx. It is also an ideological war staged between Le Corbusier’s modernist desire to control the city through science and technology, and the postmodern heterogeneity of meanings and identities personified in the figures of Suzy Creamcheez and Rudy Valentino. Le Corbusier represents the epitome of modernist ideas of progress and rational urban planning – the colonizing gesture of attributing specific utilitarian meanings and functions to urban spaces. The geometrically planned city is, for him, a reflection of the ultimately rational nature of humanity:

118

Domenic Beneventi

Culture, after all, is an orthogonal state of mind. Man is a geometrical animal! Triangles, rectangles, the perfect circle, the pyramid, the prism: these are the pure, clean shapes of progress, the product of natural selection. Whereas nature is an imperfect artist, disorderly ... visual deceits, eclectic styles are to be found in socially degenerate situations such as the Turkish bazaar, filthy and noisy, based on theft, lying, and systemic, stylistic fakery. Decoration is disease and crime. (Majzels, City 24)

Le Corbusier’s city is the objectively knowable one in which urban forms correspond unproblematically to specific signs, social practices, and identities. His project of an urban utopia contrasts the ‘uncertainty of fate with the certainty of vision’ (Majzels, City 59), and he proposes a new system that would rationalize urban spaces through the ‘Modular,’ a universal standard of measurement based on the height of an average man. The Modular represents the utopian desire for objectivity, the ‘unambiguous’ conceptual tool with which Le Corbusier wishes to ‘eliminate the arbitrary, the chaotic spontaneity of your cities’ (Majzels, City 60). But it soon becomes obvious that using the height of the average European male as a standard of measurement is inadequate, that it has been, in fact, one of the great failures of modernism. Indeed, Le Corbusier’s unwavering faith in the Modular and in the geometric city is undermined by a scene in which he becomes disoriented in Montreal’s underground maze of shopping malls and commercial displays; the great architect of international modernism becomes a prisoner in the urban labyrinth. While Le Corbusier represents the modernist desire to impose a scientific discourse on the heterogeneity of the city, Paul de Chomedey, sieur de Maisonneuve, represents the religious fervour with which Montréal was founded, a discourse that remains discernible across its topography to this day. De Maisonneuve maintains a foothold at the site of the present-day Point-à-Callière museum, a richly layered symbolic space that has effectively effaced the Native settlement of Hochelaga beneath it and reproduced it for tourist consumption. It is in the forgotten, historical belly of the city that its founder takes refuge, clinging to the historical remnants of Montreal like a ghost from its past: ‘“Faith,” he reminds the monstrous city behind him. “Faith is our only weapon”’ (Majzels, City 22). De Maisonneuve’s religious zeal, instrumental in the founding of the city, is centred on the project of colonizing a ‘savage’ space and convert-

Montreal Novels of Régine Robin and Robert Majzels 119

ing its Natives to Christian doctrine. Moving towards the geographical centre of the city, he attempts to re-enact the founding of Montreal by planting a crucifix atop Mount Royal, only this time he has to journey through a modern jungle of honking cars, busy pedestrians, and urban debris. He becomes overwhelmed by the masses of indifferent shoppers and office workers who seem oblivious to the spectacle unfolding before them, and is haunted by the voices of the Iroquois who pursued him when the city was but a settlement: ‘A whispering prayer, almost inaudible, but somehow drowning out his prayers to the Virgin. Kontírio, Osti’tén:’a, Ohonte’hshon:’a’ (Majzels, City 74). The Native voices remain embedded as a silent trace in the urban landscape, a language that has been effaced from the gleaming towers and facades of the city’s capitalist towers. Majzels here stages, as Godard puts it in her essay in this collection, ‘A repetition of foundation narratives’ in which ‘[t]he city is refounded symbolically in this return to origins ever displaced towards the ab-original’ (67). The Berri metro station is described as ‘a great steel cruciform’ that lies beneath the city, ‘as though a stake had been thrust straight through the hard paved surface of the street and deep into Montreal’s soft clay heart’ (Majzels, City 29). The religious past as colonizing gesture is marked upon the physical form of the city, be it in the image of the cross atop the mountain that watches over the city, or the crucifix forms of Berri metro station and Place Ville-Marie, symbols of Quebec’s entrance into modernity. Religious discourse manifests itself materially on the city, governing its architecture, its spatial logic, and its intricate symbolic language. At the end of the novel, a cataclysmic earthquake and street riots shatter the city and Suzy Creamcheez takes refuge in the remains of a university library in the hope of escaping the riot police. Library card in hand, she enters the abandoned building littered with books, plaster, and dust: The random collapse of walls and shelves has transformed the already arcane system of the library into an unreadable maze. Still, she feels safe here. The stillness among the toppled corridors of old books ... the musty smell, the smell of time .... What is she looking for? A clue? Something to fill the gaps in her memory?... For the first time since she entered the building, it occurs to her that these are actual books around her and she might look more closely at them. (Majzels, City 158)

120

Domenic Beneventi

The novel closes on this scene of ruination in which the systems of knowledge have become an unreadable maze. Suzy Creamcheez, the figure who most personifies the marginal, the ambiguous, and the excluded, becomes the lone inheritor of the cultural ruins of modernism. Both City of Forgetting and La Québécoite highlight the desire but also the inability to find a totalizing narrative of the city, be it Robin’s contemporary flâneuse, who seeks an anchor in the various languages and communities in which she has immersed herself, or Majzel’s Le Corbusier, who wants to rationalize the disorder of the metropolis under the aegis of a modernist architectural utopia. In each case, the attempt to impose reductionist spatial paradigms prove inadequate, for they are undermined by the ‘unruly’ structures of the city and its inhabitants. By foregrounding differences of ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality in the city, Robin and Majzels question not only the modernist tradition in urban writing, but also undermine some of the ‘totalizing notions’ applied to Canadian space. As Doreen Massey points out, ‘if it is now recognized that people have multiple identities, then the same point can be made in relation to places’ (‘Global’ 238).

NOTES 1 See, for instance, Montréal imaginaire: ville et littérature, edited by Pierre Nepveu and Gilles Marcotte; Vancouver: Representing the Postmodern City, edited by Paul Delaney; and Culture of Cities: Under Construction, edited by Paul Moore and Meredith Risk. See also ‘Writing Canadian Space/Écrire l’éspace canadien,’ a special issue of Studies in Canadian Literature, edited by Linda Warley, John Clement Ball, and Robert Viau, which includes numerous articles on representations of contemporary Canadian urban space. 2 Here Moss comments upon and develops Northrop Frye’s discussion of the ‘garrison mentality’ of Canada’s colonial past, which has marked its culture and sense of collective identity. 3 Michel Foucault writes that ‘the heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real space several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible. Thus it is that the theatre brings onto the rectangle of the stage, one after the other, a whole series of places that are foreign to one another; thus it is that the cinema is a very odd rectangular room, at the end of which, on a two-dimensional screen, one sees the projection of a three-dimensional space’ (‘Of Other Spaces’ 25). I would argue that the ethnic ghetto works in a similar fashion by juxtaposing dissimilar social and cultural contexts in a single geographic space.

Montreal Novels of Régine Robin and Robert Majzels 121 4 Martha Radice uses the term ‘urban comfort’ in her sociological study of the spatial appropriation at work in the anglophone community of post–Quiet Revolution Montreal. She suggests that ‘urban comfort’ plays a crucial role in the ways in which this minority group constructs itself in relation to a predominantly francophone urban environment: ‘A good part of their sense of the city must come ... from their subjective, sensory, emotional, and symbolic experience of urban places, evoked by such phrases as “feeling at home” or “feeling out of place”’ (7). I would suggest that ‘urban comfort’ also functions in relation to other minority groups, since the urban literature of immigrant writers is as much about coming to terms with deterritorialization from the homeland as it is about reterritorialization within the Canadian metropolis. 5 The image of the rhizome is one that seems particularly relevant today, at a moment when the Internet’s nexus of electronic nodes, passages, and connections has decentralized information, knowledge, and communication. Robin has extended her rhizomatic urban writings to the Web, constructing a decentred narrative through hypertext, which she defines as ‘une expérimentation autobiographique éclatée sur le web’ (‘Présentation’ 6). It is accessible at 6 Arjun Appadurai uses the term ‘ethnospace’ in a sociological study of media, migration, and identity politics in the era of globalization. He writes, ‘By ethnoscape, I mean the landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest workers, and other moving groups and individuals which constitute an essential feature of the world ... There is an urgent need to focus on the cultural dynamics of what is now called deterritorialization. This term applies not only to obvious examples such as transnational corporations and money markets but also to ethnic groups, sectarian movements, and political formations, which increasingly operate in ways that transcend specific territorial boundaries and identities’ (49).

122

Batia Boe Stolar

Building and Living the Immigrant City: Michael Ondaatje’s and Austin Clarke’s Toronto batia boe stolar

Literary representations of the city, like historical photographs, tend by their very nature to capture an aspect of the city and freeze it in a particular moment in time. The literary city mythologizes the city it represents, at times unwittingly, as it eulogizes a bygone era, romanticizes its inhabitants, history, and architecture, and reinforces and sometimes critiques its spatial and political structures. Although literary representations of the city generally paint it in static terms, the city is continuously changing. The arrival of immigrants, for example, has transformed ‘metropolises’ into ‘cosmopolises’ (Isin, Being 231), and the immigrant’s space in the city has become a contested cultural and political site. As Edward Soja, emphasizing the ‘heterogeneity of the postmetropolitan cityspace’ (196), explains, ‘cityspace is coming more and more to resemble global geographies, incorporating within its encompassing reach a cosmopolitan condensation of all the world’s cultures and zones of international tension. The postmetropolis thus becomes a replicative hub of fusion and diffusion, implosive and explosive growth, a First-Second-Third World city wrapped into one’ (153). The postmetropolitan city is defined by its heterogeneity, by the presence of a diverse range of old and new ethnic groups; in fact, it could be argued that the presence of a large and varied immigrant population is its defining feature. The postmetropolis is the product of immigration. Michael Ondaatje’s and Austin Clarke’s literary representations of immigrant life in Toronto investigate the complex relationship between the immigrant and the city, in doing so charting Toronto’s difficult transformation into a postmetropolitan city. Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion (1987) and Clarke’s collection of short stories, Nine Men Who Laughed (1986), reinforce Toronto’s revamped image as the ‘the

Michael Ondaatje’s and Austin Clarke’s Toronto

123

world’s most multicultural city’ (Doucet), thereby challenging Toronto’s traditional image as ‘the dullest city on earth’ (Garreau D1) as well as previous literary representations that depict Toronto as ‘a white city’ (Ball 9). In the Skin of a Lion has become one of the most important and canonical literary representations of the Canadian immigrant city as it mythologizes the historical immigrant labour that literally built Toronto. Nine Men Who Laughed, in contrast, demystifies the immigrant city by raising questions about the more recently arrived immigrant’s temporal and spatial place in the city. Whereas immigrant labour is retrospectively valorized in Ondaatje’s novel to the point of becoming heroic, there is nothing heroic about the labour that Clarke’s immigrants perform – when in fact it is available to them. Both texts raise questions not only about the immigrant’s place in the city but about the transformation of the city itself. Read in tandem, they call into question whether Toronto really is a harmonious ‘world within a city,’ as Tourism Toronto would have us believe (and thus in keeping with the postmetropolitan city Soja describes),1 or instead a diverse series of cities coexisting (not always harmoniously) within the same geographical boundaries. Both Ondaatje’s and Clarke’s texts locate the immigrant as being simultaneously inside and outside the city. In both texts, the immigrant is subjected to discrimination as well as social and economic marginalization, kept outside the city’s centralized capital and power. The immigrant’s marginalization, and sometimes alienation, within the city produces an ‘immigrant city,’ one that exists in the interstitial spaces of the city. The distinction between the immigrant city and the city as constructed in dominant discourse is reinforced by the spatial divisions that demarcate the areas available to the immigrant, and by the tension between the two as the immigrant must negotiate his (in these cases) presence within the various contested spaces. Ondaatje’s and Clarke’s immigrants, however, must negotiate their presences in different ways as they are faced with a different series of relations between themselves and the city. In Ondaatje’s novel, Toronto is infused with the immigrant spirit that builds it, and much of the text is set in those spaces inhabited and, significantly, constructed by the immigrants. Like Ondaatje’s novel, Clarke’s stories also privilege those spaces inhabited by immigrants, but, in contrast, the West Indian immigrants Clarke describes play little, if any, role in constructing those spaces. Unlike Ondaatje’s Macedonians, Clarke’s West Indians are forced to fit themselves into the already constructed spaces of the city. Clarke’s immigrants remain outside the city’s centre. They remain outside the

124

Batia Boe Stolar

city’s story since they do not form part of the city’s making. They are not part of the immigrant labour force that built Toronto, nor are they part of the labour force that continues to build the postmodern glassed structures. Rather, they are relegated to less easily glamorized menial service jobs that maintain the city but do not leave behind visible signs of their presence, like the Bloor Street Viaduct. In both books, the city itself is assigned centrality within the text. Ondaatje’s novel positions Toronto ‘at the centre of the story’ (Perosa 185), and as such ‘the city assumes almost human proportions; it too is a character that wears many skins, acts and is acted upon’ (Spearey 57). Similarly, Toronto in Clarke’s stories occupies an elusive and often ambiguous space that is nevertheless central. Its ‘inner city,’ unlike that of other cosmopolises, is not a ‘diasporic space’ (Soja 152) but instead a centralized powerhouse that keeps the diasporic subject on its margins. Clarke’s Toronto, as we will see, takes the form of a translucently white female character who deters, rejects, consumes, and ejects the black immigrant who seeks to enter her. The tension between the immigrant city and the city as constructed in dominant discourse in Ondaatje’s and Clarke’s texts reflects a similar tension found in some of the tourist literature that markets Toronto as a multicultural city. In a recent pamphlet, for instance, Tourism Toronto promotes the city as follows: When we call ourselves ‘The World Within a City,’ we’re referring in part to Toronto’s amazing mosaic of cultures. Within our many distinct neighbourhoods, you’ll find colourful features representing every part of the globe. However, there’s more to this world than great ethnic dining and shopping. The countless things that make world travel fascinating – museums, galleries, major-league sports, prime hotels, natural wonders, history and so many other features – come together here in one tremendously accommodating city. It’s no surprise that more than a million business and convention visitors choose to attend functions in Toronto each year. (Tourism Toronto; emphasis mine)

Drawing on what Stanley Fish aptly terms ‘boutique multiculturalism’ as an exotic lure to attract visiting consumers, this promotional material quickly emphasizes other aspects that make Toronto a great city – aspects that have nothing at all to do with multiculturalism. Conversely, the literary representations of the immigrant city, as we shall see, tend to focus primarily on the ‘distinct neighbourhoods’ rather

Michael Ondaatje’s and Austin Clarke’s Toronto

125

than on the convention centres, and present these exotic locations not as tourist traps but as sites of everyday cultural negotiation. Tourism Toronto’s privileging of boutique multiculturalism points to the continued disregard for the city’s immigrants that is prevalent, albeit quite differently, in Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion and Clarke’s Nine Men Who Laughed. As Fish explains, in spite of their approval, appreciation, and even sympathy for ‘the traditions of cultures not their own ... boutique multiculturalists will always stop short of approving other cultures at a point where some value at their center generates an act that offends against the canons of civilized decency as they have been either declared or assumed’ (378). Hence, the superficial celebration of diversity maintains cultural difference; the ‘many distinct neighbourhoods’ (or ghettoes) are at once accessible to the local or foreign tourist/consumer in search of the safe exotic experience yet easily circumvented by those who prefer to keep the ‘other’ at bay but who nevertheless want to partake of the city. Similarly, the literary reader as boutique multiculturalist can enter the ‘distinct neighbourhoods,’ both contemporary and historical, without ever having to actually step inside – much less live in – them. Mapped as such, Toronto, as an immigrant city, appears to be made up of peripheral neighbourhoods, which, although an integral part of the city used to attract physical and literary tourism, do not constitute the inner city itself. Debunking the urban legend that it was the United Nations which externally, thereby authoritatively, crowned Toronto with the coveted title of ‘the world’s most multicultural city,’ Michael J. Doucet rightly questions how it is even possible to determine such a claim, and asks if such a decision would be ‘based on a simple count of the number of different ethnic, racial, and linguistic groups living in a given space’ (Doucet).2 Indeed, as a multicultural city, there is nothing unique about Toronto. As Soja observes, ‘every individual urban centre, from the largest to the smallest, seems increasingly to contain the entire world within it, creating the most culturally heterogeneous cityspaces the world has ever seen’ (152). As a postmetropolis, Toronto ‘can be represented as a product of intensified globalization processes through which the global is becoming localized and the local is becoming globalized at the same time’ (152). If the difficulty – if not impossibility – of designating the most multicultural urban centre stems from the problems in defining what a multicultural city is, then it follows that, as Fish suggests, a distinction first needs to be made ‘between multiculturalism as a philosophical problem and multiculturalism as a demographic fact’

126

Batia Boe Stolar

(385). It is unclear, however, how such a distinction can be made when the subject in question exemplifies both a demographic reality and the philosophical ideal of a nation. The inextricability of the two is evident in the various ways in which Toronto promotes and writes itself. For example, when ‘the amalgamated City of Toronto was taking shape late in 1997, the editors of the Toronto Star ran a contest to pick a new slogan for the new city. The winning entry was “Toronto – Home to the World.” When the local politicians came to the task of deciding on a motto for the new enlarged City of Toronto, their choice reflected Toronto’s post– World War II demographic transformation: “Diversity – Our Strength”’ (Doucet). Similarly, the slogan ‘Expect the World,’ used by Toronto’s Olympic Council in its unsuccessful bid for the 2008 Summer Olympics, is meant to represent the changing demographics but also the selfconsciousness of the city’s embracing of its growing diversity: ‘People from every part of the world have chosen Toronto as their home, and have blended into a new international urban culture ... Everyone has a relative in Toronto ... Toronto is a city of the future. Urbane and sophisticated, it is a deliberately multicultural city that rejoices in its diversity. We believe Toronto may well be the most multicultural city on Earth’ (qtd. in Doucet, emphasis mine). Yet another possibility in defining the multicultural city is offered by the 1998 ‘report produced by the Access and Equity Centre of the City of Toronto for Mayor Mel Lastman,’ entitled Together We Are One: A Summary Paper on Diversity in Toronto (Doucet). In this report, an observation is made ‘that “no other city in the world has a higher proportion who are foreign-born than Toronto”’ (qtd. in Doucet). Laying claim to the validity of the urban legend, this observation effectively renders the ‘multicultural city’ the ‘immigrant city.’ While it is unclear what legal status these foreign-born residents have (e.g., landed immigrant, illegal alien, Canadian citizen, non-immigrant, etc.), the marker of multicultural difference is simply located in the residents’ birthplace. This gross oversimplification makes synonymous the terms ‘multicultural’ and ‘immigrant,’ and in doing so marks those who are born in Canada, regardless of race, ethnicity and/or religion, as ‘Canadian,’ whereas those who are born outside Canada, regardless of legal or national status, are branded ‘multicultural.’ Illogically, this premise suggests that ‘Canadian’ and ‘multicultural’ are two opposing categories, a rather problematic distinction considering the adoption of multiculturalism as official federal government policy. Even if the terms ‘multicultural’ and ‘immigrant’ were interchangeable, what an ‘immigrant city’ is, how it is

Michael Ondaatje’s and Austin Clarke’s Toronto

127

imagined, constructed, and literarily represented, needs further critical enquiry. Ondaatje’s and Clarke’s texts invite such critical analysis because of their often ambiguous or paradoxical representations of Toronto as simultaneously an immigrant, multicultural, global, and white city – or as coexisting cities. Ondaatje’s immigrant city is characterized by the early immigrants and their direct or indirect relationship to three main events: ‘the disappearance of theatre entrepreneur Ambrose Small in 1919, and the building, under city commissioner Rowland Harris, of the Bloor Street Viaduct in 1917 and of the new city waterworks in the early 1930s’ (Davey 141). The immigrants are implicitly connected to the world of theatre, as they learn English ‘from recorded songs or, until the talkies came, through mimicking actors on stage’ (Ondaatje, Skin 47). The immigrants mimic the actors linguistically as well as metaphorically; their performance extends to staged puppet shows in which they enact their revolutionary politics. Described as a ‘dangerous new country,’ their stage is a metaphor for the multicultural New World that is rendered less threatening by the ‘blend of several nations’ that is represented by the actors’ costumes (116). The threat the emerging multicultural country poses is reflected in a new rule in the city, imposed by Police Chief Draper, forbidding ‘public meetings by foreigners. So if they speak this way in public, in any language other than English, they will be jailed’ (133). The perceived threat the foreigners pose is informed, in part, by the internal destabilization evident in Small’s disappearance. As the existing authority seeks to solidify and exert its control, the immigrants become a unified body politic that threatens to disrupt the English-speaking hegemony. The immigrants embrace their perfomative roles as puppets, and re-enact their mistreatment at the hands of the EnglishCanadian authorities. Mimicry as an assimilation strategy produces a powerful new discourse that uses the natives’ own means, the theatre, as a vehicle of destruction. Mimicry, as Christian Bök explains, becomes a symptomatic manifestation of resistance: ‘Non-verbal aggression becomes the only apparent recourse for the immigrant worker who wishes to speak in anger without succumbing to the ruling-class language’ (21). Early in the novel, Patrick Lewis, the native-born Canadian protagonist, is naturalized as an immigrant, thereby recalling Roland Barthes’s assertion that ‘the city is the place of our meeting with the other’ (96), and that it is in the city centre ‘where we play the other’ (96). Patrick’s characterization is not unlike that of Nicholas Temelcoff, a fictional

128

Batia Boe Stolar

representation of the historical Macedonian immigrant whose work on the Bloor Street Viaduct is legendary. In the novel, Temelcoff, upon arriving in ‘Upper America’ (46), has ‘no passport, he could not speak a word of English. He had ten napoleons which he showed them to explain he wouldn’t be dependent. They let him through’ (46). Like him, Patrick arrives passportless at Union Station from rural Ontario: ‘He owned nothing, had scarcely any money. There was a piece of feldspar in his pocket that his fingers had stumbled over during the train journey. He was an immigrant to the city’ (53). A native Englishspeaker, Patrick’s choice to reside in the multilingual southeastern section of the city inhabited by immigrants emphasizes his dislocation: ‘he walked everywhere not hearing any language he knew, deliriously anonymous. The people on the street, the Macedonians and Bulgarians, were his only mirror. He worked in the tunnels with them’ (112). His eventual inclusion into the immigrant community is relative: ‘he was their alien’ (113). Patrick, paralleled with Temelcoff, is one of the many national representatives that make up the multicultural community. His inclusion is also the necessary vehicle for his becoming its spokesperson. The political force of the revolutionary immigrant is thus transferred to the English voice that has been naturalized an immigrant voice by virtue of his choice of urban residence and employment – however mitigated the circumstances of those choices may be. According to Frank Davey, however, ‘very close behind Patrick “speaks” and names the signator of the novel, Michael Ondaatje, immigrant from Sri Lanka, canonical Canadian poet, university professor, younger brother to financier Christopher Ondaatje’ (145). Patrick’s authorial voice, as Davey suggests, is a ventriloquist performance, masking the ‘authentic’ assimilated immigrant who hails from Sri Lanka via England to become the poetic voice of the early Macedonian, Greek, Finnish, Italian, Polish, Lithuanian, and Bulgarian immigrants. In emphasizing the cultural and political unity of all immigrants, Ondaatje is able to use multiculturalism as a means of legitimizing his metonymic voice. Multiculturalism also endorses his vision of the immigrant city as a ‘fairy tale’ (39). As interviewer Eleanor Wachtel notes, the novel ‘transforms the city into an exotic, almost mythological place’ (Ondaatje, ‘Interview’ 250–1). As cultural mythology, multiculturalism offers a useful universalization that allows one immigrant, regardless of racial, ethnic, religious, sexual, and/or class privilege, to speak for all others, especially those who are underprivileged, voiceless, or already dead. Unlike Patrick, Ondaatje’s role in the building of Toronto has nothing

Michael Ondaatje’s and Austin Clarke’s Toronto

129

to do with manual labour but with the memorialization of said labour. It is not coincidental that Patrick’s interest in the building of the bridge stems from his coming across a photograph of ‘a group of men working on the Bloor Street Viaduct’ in which he recognizes Temelcoff’s face (139). At the Riverdale Library, Patrick ‘read up on everything – survey arguments, the scandals, the deaths of workers fleetingly mentioned’ (143–4). But the novel is more concerned with what Patrick does not find: There were no photographers like Lewis Hine, who in the United States was photographing child labour everywhere – trapper boys in coal mines, seven-year-old doffer girls in New England mills ... Hine’s photographs betray official history and put together another family ... His photographs are rooms one can step into – cavernous buildings where a man turns a wrench the size of his body, or caves of iron where the white faces give the young children working there the terrible look of ghosts. But Patrick would never see the great photographs of Hine. (145)

Ondaatje’s tribute to Hine’s ‘compassionate vision’ (Rosenblum 11) touches on the conflicting pulls of his immigrant city. The allusion to Hine’s work for the National Child Labour Committee (NCLC) in this passage positions Hine as an ethical, sociological photographer who documented the dark side of industrial capitalism (and thus urbanism). Curiously absent in this passage is a specific reference to his early photographs of the immigrants in Ellis Island, which, Walter Rosenblum argues, ‘became the crucible that formed Hine, gave him direction, and schooled him for what was to follow’ (11). Certainly, the mention of these photographs would make the parallel between Ondaatje and Hine more explicit. Focusing instead on Hine’s images from Men at Work (1932), the emphasis begins to shift from the images that reveal the exploitative labour of immigrants and children to the heroic image of the male worker. Hine’s study valorizes the men who built, and the building of, the Empire State Building. As Alan Trachtenberg notes, in these series ‘the subject matched the ideology – the creative contribution of labour’ (136). In his introduction to Men at Work, Hine writes: ‘Cities do not build themselves, machines cannot make machines, unless back of them all are the brains and toil of men ... Then the more you see of modern machines, the more may you, too, respect the men who make them and manipulate them’ (5). These sentiments equally apply to In the Skin of a

130

Batia Boe Stolar

Lion. As Josef Pesch puts it, ‘Temelcoff and his fellow bridge builders are part of the Bloor Street Viaduct now, and no one can look at the waterworks without thinking of the immigrants watching Alice’s puppet show or Patrick and the tunnel workers. In the Skin of a Lion has inscribed the immigrant workers into the cityscape’ (102). Behind the camera, and behind the pen, Hine and Ondaatje also inscribe themselves into their respective urban histories. Hine’s ‘often quoted statement ... “There are two things I wanted to do. I wanted to show the things that had to be corrected. I wanted to show the things that had to be appreciated”’ (Doherty 2) epitomizes Ondaatje’s role in In the Skin of a Lion. Ondaatje’s sentimentalized photograph-like images mesh with those more popular and nostalgic images of the building of New York that the allusion to Hine’s photography evokes. Juxtaposing these famous photographs with similar images set in Toronto, the novel transposes the connotations of New York as an immigrant city to the Canadian urban landscape. The transposition is also made possible in part because of the novel’s representation of Canada ‘as an unnamed and undefined space, a vacuum and a void’ (Jannetta 94). Nodding to Arthur Goss, who worked for the City of Toronto for forty-eight years, the novel acknowledges the presence of its appointed photographer. According to Ralph Greenhill and Andrew Birrell, the ‘photographs of Jacob A. Riis [who is absent in Ondaatje’s novel] in the slums of New York, and Lewis W. Hine’s pictures of child labour in the United States are well known, but the work of [Arthur Scott] Goss in Toronto has received little recognition’ (146). Goss photographed the ‘housing conditions in the poverty-stricken core of the city and of sewer construction ... [His] photographs taken for the Engineer’s and Health Departments are unforgettable documents of how the other half lived in Toronto’ (146).3 His cameo in Ondaatje’s novel, however, leaves much to be desired: In the tunnel under Lake Ontario two men shake hands on an incline of mud. Beside them a pickaxe and a lamp, their dirt-streaked faces pivoting to look towards the camera. For a moment, while the film receives the image, everything is still, the other tunnel workers silent. Then Arthur Goss the city photographer packs up his tripod and glass plates, unhooks the cord of lights that creates a vista of open tunnel behind the two men, walks with his equipment the fifty yards to the ladder, and climbs out into sunlight. Work continues. The grunt into hard clay. The wet slap. Men burning rock and shattering it wherever they come across it. (105)

Michael Ondaatje’s and Austin Clarke’s Toronto

131

Unlike Hine’s testimony of the reality of the working conditions, the official city photographer in this passage undermines the worker’s cause by betraying their reality. The trick of light is as equivocal as the workers taking a break, shaking hands. The novel further distances Goss from the workers by having him do what the workers cannot – climb out of the tunnel and into the sunlight. Metaphorically, few climb upwardly and out of economic darkness. Unlike Hine’s photographs, which provide an entry, Goss’s image maps an exit. Ondaatje as photographer privileges the vision of how the city ought to be memorized and historicized. For this reason, the novel is not as critical of Commissioner Harris. It is Harris’s vision of the city, rather than Pomphrey’s, the English architect, that is glorified: ‘Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined’ (29). Harris seeks to make Toronto a world-class city that is recognized for the beauty of its utility. When, during their confrontation, Patrick condemns Harris’s installation of the ‘goddamn herringbone tiles in the toilets [that] cost more than half [their] salaries put together’ (236), Harris’s response is, like the architectural structure, modernist: ‘in fifty years they’re going to come here and gape at the herringbone and the copper roofs. We need excess, something to live up to’ (236). Rather coincidentally, by the time of In the Skin of a Lion’s publication, it is the multicultural city rather than the waterworks’ herringbone tiles that the ambiguous ‘they’ are coming to see. It is precisely the multicultural excess that is celebrated and used as promotional material, which in turn promotes the selffulfilling task of becoming the most multicultural city in the world, something to live up to. Harris’s failure, which Ondaatje seeks to right, is his inability to see the real beauty of his buildings – the immigrant labour that builds them. Ondaatje’s novel makes clear that it is the anonymous lives of these workers that are the real beauty of the city’s structures. Ghost-like, the constructed features of the city come to life. The city, personified as a unified immigrant body, is infused with certain characteristics. Superficially, the allocation of the immigrants into one section provides the visible and audible traits that mark the immigrants’ presence in the city. But because, as Perosa suggests, the novel focuses on buildings that emphasize movement like the bridge and tunnel, the city is characterized as a nomadic space privileging continual motion rather than as a space regulated by boundaries and limits. The Viaduct and waterworks ‘are intended to link rather than separate, to unite rather than divide, to allow for conditions of roaming, ranging, wandering: in the cities themselves, and from them into the countryside or the wilderness’ (185). Privileging movement, the novel

132

Batia Boe Stolar

also focuses on the one key landmark that serves as the city’s Ellis Island (or Pier 21), Union Station. Returning to the city after his incarceration, Union Station is, for Patrick, a ‘cathedral-like space [that is] the nexus of his life’ (Ondaatje, Skin 209). Centralizing the immigrant in Union Station locates ‘home’ not in the immigrant communities but at – and in – the border. The border is the only safe haven for the transient, paranoid immigrant Patrick sees upon his first arrival to the city: The ‘man with three suitcases, [was] well-dressed, shouting out in another language ... Two days later Patrick returned to pick up his luggage from a locker. He saw the man again, still unable to move from his safe zone, in a different suit, as if one step away was the quicksand of the new world’ (54). The paranoid immigrant’s choosing to reside within the boundary itself, within the place of constant flux and transition, calls attention to the architectural structure that houses and mirrors the boundary. Somewhat paradoxically, the immigrant, like Union Station itself, is simultaneously static and mobile, inside yet outside the city. Unlike the other immigrants in the novel, there is little that is known about the paranoid immigrant: his language is ‘another,’ his clothing is described as ‘a different suit.’ Given the detail ascribed to other characters’ languages and clothing, the lack of specificity marks this immigrant as being truly different from the rest. Like him, Patrick’s attraction to Union Station marks his difference from the others. For him, Union Station represents a sanctuary. Outside the station, ‘standing in front of strangers, studying the new fashions,’ he feels ‘invisible’ (210). Inside the comfort of Temelcoff’s Geranium Bakery, he is embraced by multiculturalism; Temelcoff’s embrace feels like the ‘grip of the world’ (210). The boundary offers what no other place in the city can: a meeting point between these two extremes. Ondaatje’s literary representation of Toronto as an immigrant and multicultural city is made possible by his treatment of the city as a global cityspace that draws in the various individual components from its outer worlds. This contrast is necessary in differentiating the city from its ‘other’ – that ambiguous space that surrounds and extends beyond its limits. Like Ondaatje, Clarke also represents the city by contrasting it with its perceived ‘other.’ However, in Clarke’s stories the city’s ‘other’ is the black immigrant who is living in but appears to be beyond the city’s limits. By the time that Clarke’s immigrants in Nine Men Who Laughed come to inhabit Toronto, as early as two decades after the construction of the waterworks in Ondaatje’s novel, the city has changed considerably. The modernist city has become a postmodern urban space made

Michael Ondaatje’s and Austin Clarke’s Toronto

133

of refracting glass. As Engin Isin notes, the ‘professional ethic’ that motivates such projects as glass towers envisions ‘building a society anew,’ which although is a subversion of modernism is nevertheless similar to the modernist impetus of building a new city (Being 262). It is largely because of this professional ethic, Isin argues, that ‘immigrants, constituted as strangers, are necessary for the functioning, organization, and appropriation of the cosmopolis by the professions’ (Being 270). Hence, Clarke’s architectural focus shifts from the modernist city waterworks to the postmodern glass buildings that house the banks’ headquarters, marking the shift in power from the governmental to the corporate. Another significant shift in Clarke’s stories is cartographical; unlike Ondaatje’s novel, which is predominantly set in the east end, Clarke’s stories are set in the west end of the city. Like Ondaatje’s novel, Clarke’s stories also emphasize the peripheral immigrant ghetto that has shifted westward. It is worth noting that the east end immigrant ghetto does make an appearance in ‘A Man.’ As Joshua Miller-Corbaine rushes west along Bloor Street, he curses ‘the East end and the young teacher and all the cautious cars slipping into his path, maligning in his native dialect the European immigrants who congregated in this ghetto of the city as they walked across the street. He thought they used the street with a disregard for traffic familiar to those accustomed to inhabiting large fields and farms’ (129–30). Because Clarke does not deal with European immigrants, it is not known whether his are newly arrived or whether they are descendants of earlier immigrants. Apparently unaccustomed to the movement of urban traffic, the suggestion is that they are new arrivals to Canada and to the city. The German mechanic’s thick accent supports this presumption. But their arrival date is inconsequential; the east end of the city, as in Ondaatje’s novel, is still the European ghetto. That Clarke’s West Indian immigrants occupy a different section of the city rather than enter, as Patrick does, the already existing immigrant ghetto calls attention to the segregation between white and black immigrants that is symptomatic of the racial discrimination against West Indian immigrants for housing and employment (Walker 18). Clarke’s immigrants are coerced into a ghetto of their own, illuminating a rupture in the universalized multicultural body propagated in Ondaatje’s novel. Describing the West Indian ghetto in the west end of the city in ‘Doing Right,’ the narrator offhandedly remarks that ‘Wessindians accustom to parking in the middle o’ the road, or on the wrong side, back home. And nobody don’t trouble them nor touch their cars. And since

134

Batia Boe Stolar

they come here, many o’ these Wessindians haven’t tek-on a change in attitude in regards to who own the public road and who own the mottocars’ (57). The West Indian immigrants claim the street by imposing a rural (equated here with native-soil) use of space. In doing so, they enact the very agonistic strategies that outsiders or strangers do; they ‘spatialize their jurisdictions, markets, and spheres of authority, they outcast, exclude, and ban some from those spaces and include, valorize, and enable others in them’ (Isin, Being 274). However, fissures within the outcast body are evident and rupture the agonistic authority claimed by those who are disenfranchised. An assimilating and ambitious West Indian ‘green hornet,’ looking for financial and career advancement, imposes the Canadian urban order and tickets their illegally parked cars. Curiously, a similar transposition occurs at the beginning of In the Skin of a Lion. Patrick’s first encounter with the immigrant ‘other’ occurs when he sees the group of Finnish loggers that he often saw with his father skating at night on the river with lit cattails. At the sight, ‘Patrick was transfixed. Skating the river at night, each of them moving like a wedge into the blackness magically revealing the grey bushes of the shore, his shore, his river’ (21). Patrick, however, does not own the river. In fact, neither he nor his father own the land they work on ‘as the owner of the cows does’ (7). The episode in the river is photographed into Patrick’s memory and indicates his first acquiescence to the immigrants’ natural right to (or ownership of) his native land. In this episode, it is his realization that the Finnish loggers have a deeper understanding of the landscape than he does, and their utilizing the frozen river in ways he had not thought possible, that naturalizes their claim on the land. Symbolically, the river is transposed into the urban landscape when the immigrant workers tar the city’s streets: ‘The smell of tar seeps through the porous body of their clothes. The black of it is permanent under the nails. They can feel the bricks under their kneecaps as they crawl backwards towards the bridge, their bodies almost horizontal over the viscous black river, their heads drunk within the fumes’ (27–8, emphasis mine). Like the Finnish loggers, the ‘true’ owners of the urban rivers (or streets) are the immigrant workers who make them. Naturalized as the ‘real’ owners of the city’s streets because it is their labour that makes these urban rivers possible, the immigrant in Ondaatje’s novel retains only historical ownership. The newly arrived West Indian immigrants, in contrast, cannot lay claim to the already tarred urban streets. Unlike the Finnish loggers who use the already existing frozen river, the West Indians of Clarke’s stories attempt to claim

Michael Ondaatje’s and Austin Clarke’s Toronto

135

the urban landscape by imposing their own landscape. In spite of their attempt to impose a rural order on the urban streets, the urban landscape imposes its own order on them, claiming their presence. Dissent and disagreement over the rightful use of the urban space is one of the many tensions in Clarke’s West Indian ghetto. Multicultural fissures also appear within the black community of the St Clair–Oakwood district. ‘Doing Right’ challenges multiculturalism by questioning what happens when immigrant groups deemed similar by the host country are coerced into sharing the ghetto. In the story, when another West Indian green hornet tickets the expensive-looking car of an AfricanAmerican man, stereotypically wearing flashy gold chains and rings, the African-American man picks up the green hornet and calls him ‘nigger.’ The green hornet replies: ‘What you call me? I am no damn nigger. I am Indian. Legal immigrant. I just doing my job for the City of Toronto in Metropolitan Toronto. You are a blasted Amerrican negro!’ (62). Watching this altercation, the narrator exclaims: ‘Well, multiculturalism gone-out the window now! All the pamphlets and the television commercials that show people of all colours laughing together and saying, “We is Canadians,” all them advertisements in Saturday Night and Maclean’s, all them speeches that ministers up in Ottawar make concerning the “different cultures that make up this great unified country of ours,” all that lick-up now, and gone through the eddoes. One time. Bram!’ (63). He waits for the police to arrive and break up the fight, since ‘the Police does-be up in this St Clair–Oakwood district like flies around a crocus-bag o’ sugar at the drop of a cloth-hat’ (63). This conspicuous absence points to the inherent racism of Toronto’s police department, which has already been alluded to when the ambitious green hornet cannot advance and become a ‘real policeman’ in spite of his overzealousness in ticketing illegally parked cars, especially those of West Indians. The narrator calls further attention to the authorities’ duplicity when he states that ‘the big boys in Toronto don’t particular notice we unless um is Caribana weekend or when election-time coming and they looking for votes or when the Star doing a feature on racism and Wessindians and they want a quotation’ (58). Unlike Ondaatje’s novel, in which the immigrants unite against the oppressive English-Canadian authority and somebody speaks and acts for them (however problematic that voice may be), Clarke’s stories identify varying degrees of difficulty within the multicultural system, revealing the inherent hierarchy that is race and class based. If Ondaatje’s immigrants occupy the bottom of the multicultural pyramid insofar as they

136

Batia Boe Stolar

constitute the exploited working class, many of Clarke’s immigrants remain outside the pyramid altogether, especially if they are illegal immigrants. Yet, they also have an integral place in the city, as Isin reminds us: ‘immigrants, constituted as strangers, are necessary for the functioning, organization, and appropriation of the cosmopolis by the professions’ (Being 270). In spite of the obvious multicultural growth depicted, in part, by the very presence of non-white immigrants in the literary urban landscape (and the absence of non-whites in Ondaatje’s novel), Clarke’s stories question whether the city’s multicultural growth actually effects change in the otherwise ‘white city.’ In ‘Canadian Experience,’ for example, Bay Street houses ‘the business district of banks, brokerages and corporations’ where the city centralizes its economic power (32). Surrounded by ‘tall office buildings’ that ‘look like steel,’ George, the protagonist, who comes to the district for an interview at a bank, enters a building that is ‘built almost entirely out of glass’ and ‘shimmers like gold’ (42). For the black immigrant, however, there is no gold to be attained. John Ball argues that ‘the solid grip that Toronto’s white community has historically held over the city’s economy, institutions, culture, and self image’ persists (9). According to him, although ‘Toronto’s non-white population has swelled from a small fraction to a sizable and visible collection of diversified communities ... white power has remained well entrenched’ (9). In Clarke’s story, even the janitorial work is performed by ‘white’ marginalized labour; it is ‘the Italians and the Greeks and the Portuguese’ who clean the office building (49). It should be noted, however, that George does work illegally with the ‘Italians, Greeks and Portuguese, cleaning the offices of First Canadian Place, a building with at least fifty floors, made of glass, near [but significantly not in] Bay Street’ (37; emphasis mine). Fragmenting the already dispossessed black immigrant, the buildings’ reflecting surfaces keep him from seeing the centre; the reflection of George’s body ‘tears him into stripes and splatters his suit against four panels, and makes him disjointed’ (42). Although he is able to enter the building, he is deterred by the word ‘BANK written on the glass, cheerless and frightening’ (43), and by the blue eyes of a woman that ‘are like ice-water’ (44). The imagery of glass, mirror, and icewater calls to mind a fairy tale in which the city is made of glass. But there is nothing magical or fragile about Clarke’s glass city. It obscures and refracts, casting shadows and doubt. As his mirror, the city reflects back that it is the black immigrant, not the city, who is fragile. George tells

Michael Ondaatje’s and Austin Clarke’s Toronto

137

Pam, an aspiring actress and fellow tenant in the rooming house, that the people at the bank ‘looked on [him] and at [him] and through [him], right through [him]. [He] was a piece of glass’ (44–5). Unlike the city’s smoke-and-mirrors multicultural welcome, the black immigrant’s glasslike appearance not only reinforces his fragility but also marks him as transparent, invisible. His fragmented image at the beginning of the story, like that in the building, beheads him; he ‘was cut off at the neck’ (31). It is only at the end of the story that he sees himself reflected in another: ‘his own eyes, and the [subway] driver’s makes four’ (51). This flicker of recognition suggests that only another black immigrant can actually see George; only another black immigrant can see himself reflected in another black immigrant. Symbolically, such recognition occurs beneath the surface of the city. Clarke’s glass city is a nod to the white North, represented here by an urban rather than a rural landscape. The lonely immigrant is in danger not from a cold, white, sublime wilderness as in, for example, Louis Hémon’s Maria Chapdelaine (1914), but from an unnatural metallic coldness; a distorting mirror that dislocates and fragments him. The natural world is associated with the homeland, whereas the artificial world, itself a comment on the act of immigration, is associated with the host land. When, for example, George compares Canada and the Caribbean, he does so by contrasting the urban and the rural: ‘He thinks of the flowers and the glass in that office and of the flowers more violent in colour, growing in wild profusion, untended, round Edgehill House, where he was born in a smiling field of comfortable pasture land’ (47). The natural disorder of his Barbadian home is seen as warmly human, infused with passion. The unnatural, or urban, order of Toronto, in contrast, is seen as inhuman. The natural/artificial binary also informs the feminization of Clarke’s glass city. According to George Elliott Clarke, in ‘his short fiction, Clarke agrees, tacitly, with [Jean] Baudrillard [in Seduction] that women, whiteness, and hence, white women symbolize attractive, glistening surfaces that can entrap and destroy the unwary, meaning, for Clarke, black male immigrants. Thus, Clarke considers the psychological threat posed to self-conscious blackness by the omnipresence of white-supremacist imagery in North American society’ (116). Toronto is portrayed, rather stereotypically, as an ice queen, unyielding, impenetrable, and unforgiving. Clarke’s feminized city is infertile, cold, dispassionate, and, above all, unnatural. Rather conservatively, the story’s sexual politics projects the whore/nurturer dichotomy onto a backdrop of white/black racial division, perpetuat-

138

Batia Boe Stolar

ing ‘the split between the love of the Mother country – a nearly incestuous desire for that country – versus lust for the stepmother, the new country, a passion expressed in terms of desire for material gain at any price’ (G.E. Clarke 120). The city as stepmother/whore is neither nurturing nor seductive. ‘She’ is also refracted in every white woman with whom George comes into contact. When, for example, George gets ready for his interview, he enters the shared bathroom in the rooming house: Mist floated out of the bathroom door, and he brushed through it as if he were a man seeking passage through thick, white underbush. And as he got inside and could barely see his way to the toilet bowl, there she was, with one leg on the cover of the bowl, which she had painted black, bending down, wiping the smell of the soap from between her legs and then the red, rough dots of bruises on the bottom of her spine, which she insisted were cold sores. (38–9)

Enveloped in the suffocating whiteness, George is confronted by Pam’s white body. He is not seduced by her; indeed, he is repulsed by her. Her ‘cold sores’ suggest sexual infection and, as orifices, unsatisfied appetite. George’s misogyny points to his fear of being devoured by the sexualized white female body. His repulsion is further evident in his reaction to the bank. Riding up in the elevator, symbolic of an erection, he cannot penetrate the glass entrance to the bank. Consequently, he loses his erection. He descends below ground, defeated, emasculated as if castrated. The imagery of the ice queen, in contrast, is asexual. ‘She’ simply consumes, digests, and expels the intruder: he travels ‘through the bowels of that glassed-in building’ (50) and is excreted to the underground, where he sees people ‘coming up out of the subway at greater speed as if they are fleeing the smell of something unwholesome’ (40). His function in her body fulfilled, she promptly expels the resultant waste. The representation of Toronto as ultimately a ‘white city’ suggests that white society may most value multiculturalism as a superficial (or ‘boutique’) front that screens or masks its retention of control over its economic centre. Herein resides the underlying difference between Ondaatje’s and Clarke’s representations of the immigrant city. Unlike the unskilled labour available to early white immigrants, the alreadybuilt city offers little, if any, employment to the newly arrived black immigrant. Unlike the process of building new bridges and water-

Michael Ondaatje’s and Austin Clarke’s Toronto

139

works, there are no plans for construction articulated in Clarke’s stories. Although the city continues to grow, the black immigrant is kept from participating in the act of (pro)creation. Arriving ‘as a non-landed immigrant,’ George in ‘Canadian Experience’ is forced to live ‘in and out of low-paying jobs given specifically to non-landed immigrants’ while waiting for amnesty (36). Lacking ‘Canadian experience,’ meaning a Canadian education or employment, George can only aspire to lowpaying jobs that have been traditionally ‘black,’ such as those of ‘porters, bellhops and maids’ – occupations that reinforce the stereotypes of blacks as being limited to service positions (Walker 8). His economic prospects are largely informed by the immigration policies that restricted West Indian immigrants into two main categories: domestics, for single women between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five, who could apply for landed-immigrant status after at least a year of domestic service (Walker 10); and students, who could apply for landedimmigrant status upon graduating (Walker 11). Illegal activity in Clarke’s stories is closely connected to immigration, but, unlike in Ondaatje’s novel, it is neither romanticized nor offered as a revolutionary tactic. Disillusioned with the Canadian system that inhibits his social and economic advancement, the ambitious green hornet in ‘Doing Right’ dreams up and implements unlawful schemes that victimize illegal West Indian immigrants. Taking advantage of their inability to call on the Canadian authorities for protection, the ambitious green hornet exploits the illegal immigrants, who are already marginalized in the workforce. Unlike the cause of workers’ rights that Ondaatje’s immigrants strive to attain by then-illegal means, there is nothing honourable or heroic about the ambitious green hornet’s schemes, which seek to advance not the West Indian community’s standard of living or profile but his own economic gain. Implicit in the story, however, is a revolutionary voice that condemns what George Elliott Clarke calls ‘a polite, right, white-iste caste system’ (111) that keeps the black immigrant from economic and social advancement. Clarke’s revolutionary voice is most explicitly unveiled in ‘Coll. SS. Trins. Ap. Toron. – A Fable,’ a story that depicts the two paths available to the West Indian male student. Virtually indistinguishable at the outset, Boy Sonny and Sonny Boy arrive ‘frightened and cold’ at Trinity College, University of Toronto, in 1955 – ‘the nearest they could get to a men’s college in Oxford and Cambridge’ (177). Sonny’s assimilation into the white system grants him economic and social power, especially when he acts to maintain white power. His opinion ‘would percolate up

140

Batia Boe Stolar

to the leaders in Ottawa, as when he pointed out the need to restrict the number of black immigrants into Canada’ (201). Rich but alone, Sonny’s success is undermined by Boy’s. Finding himself in a hostile environment that disagrees with his ‘radical black consciousness’ (196), Boy’s eventual return to the Caribbean allows him to flourish as an activist and succeed in local and international politics. When the successful but nostalgic Sonny calls up Boy in Barbados, he finds that Boy has become the prime minister and is at that moment in Ottawa. Pointedly, the receptionist asks Sonny: ‘Mr. Boy, do you happen to know if it is possible for you to reach Ottawa from where you are?’ (204). Geography aside, this question privileges the black-consciousness activist who refuses to assimilate and buy into the white system, where political and social advancement is relative. Moreover, this question underscores the black immigrant’s position in Toronto. Unable to reach Ottawa either as an immigrant or as a naturalized citizen, it is the Barbadian politician who has acquired ‘Canadian experience’ that can make a positive difference. Nodding to Clarke’s own activism, Ball similarly reads into Clarke’s stories ‘[s]omething of the activist’s desire to oppose unjust hierarchies, and to rally those whose case he or she advocates into militant selfrespect’ (10). Clarke writes that he detests ‘the use of the term “immigrant” to define the presence of these [nine] men upon the landscape of Toronto’ (Introduction 6). Clarke’s antagonism questions whether the immigrant city is a deflective image that masks the ‘real’ city of which immigrants are truly not a part. Yet, like Ondaatje, Clarke also universalizes the immigrant and the immigrant city by writing that the nine men ‘could also be in London, Paris, New York or Moscow. They happen to be in Toronto’ (1), and that they ‘could be aboriginals, maoris, coloured, native peoples’ (2). According to Ball, in spite of his ‘universalizing gesture’ and his ‘act of translating Toronto into New York or one immigrant’s story into a racially different immigrant’s story ... Clarke’s critical frame retains a degree of particularity – the minority immigrant in a majority-white city’ (11). As such, there appears to be little fundamental difference between Ondaatje’s and Clarke’s texts – one focuses on class and the other focuses on race, but both focus on the unjust treatment of the city’s immigrant minorities. Still, whereas Ondaatje’s immigrants represent the life of the city, Clarke’s “immigrant[s]” [are] merely living’ (Clarke, Introduction 6). Both Ondaatje’s and Clarke’s literary representations of the multicultural city portray Toronto from the perspective of the immi-

Michael Ondaatje’s and Austin Clarke’s Toronto

141

grants who are simultaneously inside and outside the city. As outsiders, these literary immigrants are kept from the city’s power structures and are thus politically, socially, and economically alienated. Stigmatized by class and/or by race, they are segregated and isolated. In Ondaatje’s novel, their isolation leads to their unification as a multicultural body that includes other outcasts and strangers. In Clarke’s stories, however, social isolation leads to fragmentation within what is presumed to be a unified multicultural body. Yet, as insiders, these literary immigrants participate in the complex social structure that makes up the multicultural city – the very structure that necessitates outsiders within.

NOTES 1 ‘The World Within a City’ is a slogan launched by Tourism Toronto in the summer of 1998. It is discussed in greater detail below. 2 Doucet does not contest the fact that Toronto has become one of the most multicultural cities in the world. He states that, undoubtedly, ‘Toronto is Canada’s most cosmopolitan city, and certainly one of the most diverse urban centres in the world, a place recently described as a “City of Nations”’ (Doucet). His article merely follows the trajectory of the urban myth as it has appeared in the mainstream media, political speeches, Canadian and American travel guides, and so forth. 3 A 1931 photography by Goss is used on the cover of the 1996 Vintage Canada edition of In the Skin of a Lion.

142 Lisa Salem-Wiseman

Divided Cities, Divided Selves: Portraits of the Artist as Ambivalent Urban Hipster lisa salem-wiseman

For many young novelists, the city held the special charm of magical colors and mysterious marvels where opportunities are plentiful and varied, but also inseparable from accompanying frustration and anxiety. Roberta Seret on Theodore Dreiser’s The ‘Genius’ I’m the kind of man who craves to be alone, but once alone I crave company. Michael Winter, This All Happened

In his 1985 essay ‘Disunity as Unity: A Canadian Strategy,’ Robert Kroetsch suggests that Canadian fiction is replete with frustrated and failed artists, fictional creators who, in their estimation, possess the potential to produce great works of art, yet who ultimately fail to do so; ‘Canadian writing,’ writes Kroetsch, ‘is obsessively about the artist who can’t make art’ (358).1 In Kroetsch’s examples, Sinclair Ross’s As For Me and My House (1941) and Ernest Buckler’s The Mountain and the Valley (1952), the fault would seem to lie with the stultifying conventions and mundane concerns of the rural communities in which the protagonists live. In both novels, the inhabitants of the small farming towns possess neither the ability nor the inclination to appreciate art, while the urban centre represents a cosmopolitan place where people are free to express themselves creatively, and where people possess confidence, style, and awareness of literary and cultural developments; in the modern parlance, city people are ‘hip.’ When Buckler’s David Canaan accepts a ride from strangers, he immediately recognizes them as urban dwellers:

Portraits of the Artist as Ambivalent Urban Hipster

143

He knew from the way she smiled and spoke that they were city people. She smiled as if it were an outside gesture, like a movement of hands or feet. This was a bigger car than any of the town cars. These were the people the town people tried to imitate. They had that immunity from surprise the town people could never quite catch. That automatic ease. These were city people. (161)

Although David receives his epiphany atop a mountain, isolated from his farming community of Entremont, he longs for the excitement and diversity of the city of Halifax. Ultimately, he dies having neither reached the urban centre nor realized his potential as an artist, suggesting, as David Williams posits, that ‘a romantic view of art is totally inimical to the Canadian imagination and its sense of community’ (160). In other words, it is not merely the lack of an appreciative audience in Entremont that renders his failure inevitable, but his faith in the notion of the ‘artist-god’2 – the image of the artist as isolated, superior, possessed of divine power, physically and spiritually separate from society – that ironically undermines his literary production. Recent Canadian fiction also contains its share of frustrated artists, but while the artist’s dilemma continues to be mapped in terms of urban versus rural space, the contemporary artist is more frequently depicted as an urban dweller who is tempted by the simplicity and solitude that is perceived to lie outside the boundary of the urban; in an increasingly urbanized Canada, this ideal is often located not in the wilderness, but in the suburbs.3 This paper will focus on the ambivalent relationship between the artist and the city in Russell Smith’s Noise (1998) and Michael Winter’s This All Happened (2000). While each of these novels features an aspiring writer for whom the city represents the site of creativity, freedom, and the imagination, each also reveals a marked ambivalence towards urban living, which is depicted, paradoxically, as the condition of both possibility and impossibility for the contemporary artist. The protagonists of these texts are urban dwellers who, while revelling in the diversity of experience and community offered by their respective cities – Toronto, Ontario, and St John’s, Newfoundland – nevertheless find the economic and social realities of urban life to be detrimental to the production of art. Both are temporarily seduced by the perceived blandness, homogeneity, and anonymity that Paul Milton, in his contribution to this volume, identifies as aspects of the ‘suburban myth’ (169). The city, in these novels, emerges as a place where everybody seems to be an artist, yet where the focus and concentration that are essential to the

144 Lisa Salem-Wiseman

creative process are difficult to sustain. However, the contemporary urban artist novel is not necessarily a tale of aborted creativity and frustrated vision; while Smith’s and Winter’s writer-protagonists fail to produce the works of art towards which they at one time aspire, the works which they do eventually produce are perhaps not ‘failed’ works, but are rather new forms that represent a negotiation between the contradictory poles of engagement and detachment, and that more accurately reflect a fragmented, overdetermined urban existence. In his 1964 study of the Kunstlerroman, entitled Ivory Towers and Sacred Founts: The Artist as Hero in Fiction from Goethe to Joyce, Maurice Beebe writes of the artist figure as a ‘divided self,’ caught between two conflicting models of creativity: We have seen that the usual situation of the artist-hero involves a conflict between those opposing ideals which I have characterized as the Ivory Tower and Sacred Fount traditions. The former insists that the true artist must hold himself aloof from life, while the latter finds the source of art in experience ... Almost always the two selves are at odds, and it is a rarely fortunate artist who achieves happiness and success both as a man and a creator. (308)

The Ivory Tower tradition, exemplified for Beebe in works by writers such as Flaubert and Joyce, assumes that the artist must remain detached from life in order to view it clearly and objectively. While the work produced by this type of artist may be rooted in personal experience, it is experience viewed from a temporal and spatial distance and subjected to the artist’s manipulation and control. In contrast, in the Sacred Fount tradition, ‘the experience is lived in the process of writing’ (102); the chasm between life and art is diminished, if not entirely closed. Beebe traces this tradition from the early Romantics to writers such as Oscar Wilde, D.H. Lawrence, and Ernest Hemingway, all of whom portray the artist as a man who lives and loves passionately, engaging with humanity and resisting the ivory tower. Whichever model the fictional artist may favour, Beebe argues, he almost universally experiences yearnings in the other direction: ‘The artist-hero may move toward the Tower or the Fount, but it is seldom that he is not tempted to take both directions’ (65). The artist in fiction thus often finds himself oscillating continually between the equally tempting poles of engagement and withdrawal.

Portraits of the Artist as Ambivalent Urban Hipster

145

Although the divided-self paradigm is frequently cast in geographical terms, with the urban as the site of freedom and experience, and the rural as the locus of inspiration and reflection, this overly reductive polarization of city versus country denies the complexity of the effect of the city on the human imagination: if the city is the site of freedom, it is also a place of exhaustion; if the country is the site of solitude, it is also a place of stagnation. As Burton Pike writes in The Image of the City in Modern Literature, attitudes towards the urban in Western society are far from simple: Indeed, the image of the city stands as the great reification of ambivalence, embodying a complex of contradictory forces in both the individual and the collective Western minds. The idea of the city seems to trigger conflicting impulses, positive and negative, conscious and unconscious. At a very deep level, the city seems to express our culture’s restless dreams about its inner conflicts and its inability to resolve them. On a more conscious level, this ambivalence expresses itself in mixed feelings of pride, guilt, love, fear, and hate toward the city. (8)

The fluctuation between the love of city life and the desire to flee it is reflected in literature; in The Mountain and the Valley, David Canaan is attracted to the cosmopolitan existence embodied by the ‘city people,’ but he ultimately fails to make the journey, choosing to return to his family and community. If the city represents, for many, ‘the place where the pulse of life is most strongly felt’ (Pike 7), it also represents decadence, corruption, and overdetermination. The city has been represented in literature as a space where art is both inspired and impeded, suggesting that the urban stimulation that can prove so inspirational for the artist can also be detrimental to the production of art. In Baudelaire’s ‘At One O’Clock in the Morning,’ the poet-protagonist, revelling in long-awaited solitude and silence, exclaims ‘Dreadful life! Dreadful city!’ and offers a summary of his day, which consists of a series of petty annoyances: [I] saw several men of letters, one of whom asked me if you could get to Russia by land (he probably thought Russia was an island); argued generously with a journal editor, who answered to each objection, ‘Here we are on the side of respectability,’ implying that all the other papers are run by scoundrels; greeted about twenty persons, fifteen of whom I didn’t

146 Lisa Salem-Wiseman know; distributed handshakes in the same proportion, and without even the precaution of buying gloves ... Refused an easy favour to a friend, and gave a written recommendation to a perfect idiot. Phew! Is that all? (16–17)

All of these activities are related to the social responsibilities of membership in an urban community of artists and intellectuals, yet far from contributing directly to the artistic process, they result in the dissipation of the artist’s energy and attention. The daily life of James Willing, protagonist of Noise, the second novel by Toronto writer Russell Smith, is no less hectic. A lapsed classical violinist earning a living in Toronto as a journalist, James finds life as a young, urban writer to be so overflowing with social obligations, romantic entanglements, financial difficulties, confrontations with editors, and other distractions and annoyances, that he briefly considers moving to the suburbs to simplify his life. During one visit to his family’s home in Munich, Ontario, asked what he will do upon his return to the city, he replies: ‘Run around. Try to find someone who I’m supposed to be working with. Then I’ll probably fight with an editor. I need a place to live. Panic. Be hot. I’m going to talk to the police again about a noise complaint’ (179). For Smith’s protagonist, the urban life that provides him with the experience that feeds his writing exacts a price that proves inimical to the very production of that art. James’s added afterthought, ‘it will all be very exciting,’ is steeped in ambivalence; while he thrives on the noise and excitement of the city, he has grown weary of it. As a writer of articles about the cultural and social life of his city, James is an obvious example of Beebe’s Sacred Fount tradition; his writing is wholly dependent on the urban environment and makes use of the various types of ‘noise’ that provide the soundtrack to the city. The process of directly transforming experience into art in the Sacred Fount tradition is captured in a humorous scene in which James, dictating a restaurant review over the phone while waiting in a queue for the washroom, incorporates both a snatch of overheard conversation and his own overwhelming need to urinate into the phrase ‘distant tinkle of apple’ (35). In this model of creative process, life is converted into art without an interim period of removal and reflection; consequently, the artist risks producing work that is superficial in its treatment of human experience and emotion. In order to write about the city, James must participate in its social life, attending literary readings and video screenings, and visiting nightclubs and restaurants, thereby interfering with

Portraits of the Artist as Ambivalent Urban Hipster

147

the time and concentration needed for writing. As Beebe suggests, the artist’s ambivalence is exacerbated by the fact that the experience which provides the material for artistic creation often interferes with the act of production. By embracing experience, the artist ‘runs the risk of dissipating creative energy in the mere process of living and therefore proving incapable of transforming experience into art’ (Beebe 18). The novel begins with James struggling to meet an approaching deadline, but unable to concentrate on his writing because of the noise from the street, the phone ringing with offers of more articles, and the knowledge that he has to leave his room to attend a literary reading that evening: ‘And the fucking goddam fucking Loon Lake reading tonight, SHIT, at the Culture Corner, which he had promised he would cover for Reams and Reams because the goddam Prairie poet novelist playwright and dramaturge, whatever that was, would be there. Flown in all the way from Medicine Hat’ (7). At the reading, he meets Nicola Lickson, a hip photographer, and becomes embroiled in a complicated personal and professional relationship which in turn distracts him from producing the sort of writing to which he aspires. James’s desire to produce something more intellectually engaging and demanding than reviews of Toronto restaurants and nightclubs is initially sacrificed to both the economic and social demands of living in Toronto. Smith himself tells interviewer Michelle Berry: ‘I have very little time to work on fiction these days. I haven’t worked on fiction for a couple of months now because I struggle to make a living’ (Berry and Caple 360). His protagonist shares this struggle; James dismisses writing as ‘a specialized skill’ (174), something he does solely ‘to make money’ (173). He accepts writing assignments, not because he has opinions he needs to express or ideas he wants to share, but because he needs to pay his rent and expenses, which are quite high, ironically, due to the nature of his work. Defending himself to his father, who questions his son’s ‘extravagant lifestyle,’ James responds that ‘the kind of thing I write about’ – restaurants, nightclubs – requires that he live such a lifestyle; he must experience glamorous urban life in order to write about it. He is, as his editor puts it, a professional ‘hipster’ (14), but an increasingly ambivalent one. While James appears to revel in the excitement of urban life, and to scorn those who betray their ideals by establishing committed relationships and moving to the suburbs, he begins to question his choices. For James, the city, while it provides the stimulation necessary for the production of art – the streets of Toronto seem to teem with artists, be

148 Lisa Salem-Wiseman

they poets, photographers, video artists, performance artists, or chefs – does not allow for the quiet contemplation and deep thought necessary for what James thinks of as more cerebral forms of art. In an early scene, James attempts to play a musical composition on the violin, but he is unable to sustain the level of concentration necessary to play with the correct technique: He played the first few bars of an easy partita and his hand began to tighten. He heard, as he knew he would always hear, for the rest of his life, Dumbrowsky’s voice, again: the fore arm does the work ... His hand was aching, somewhere in the palm. Some booming started up from the stereo next door, and he tried to ignore it. Sweat dripped onto the varnish. The song from next door interfered with his concentration and suddenly the whole thing was gone. By the end of the partita his hand had clamped up completely. Which was what always happened. (20–1)

While the artist in fiction is often torn between isolation and engagement, the former often triumphs, albeit temporarily, due to the fact that art is, at a basic level, a solitary endeavour. As Beebe writes, while ‘it is possible to move back and forth between the Tower and the Fount ... the artist as artist must turn his back on life’ (308), withdrawing from society in order to devote himself to the creative process.4 If James seems to follow the Sacred Fount tradition, Ludwig Boben, the ‘Prairie poet’ (81), represents the Ivory Tower ideal; as Boben’s identity as wilderness sage is exposed as hollow – unable to write for years, he lives a mundane, suburban life in an Ontario suburb – Smith seems to be following Ernest Buckler in suggesting that this Romantic ideal is at odds with the Canadian reality. Census information for 2001 reveals that 80 per cent of the Canadian population lives in cities of more than ten thousand people. However, just as Paul Milton, having read the Canadian novels commonly prescribed in high school and university classes, recalls feeling ‘that I hadn’t grown up in Canada after all’ (166), in Noise, Smith reveals Canada’s urban-suburban reality to be obscured by the myth of the Canadian wilderness, which continues to be propagated through our fiction and culture. When a New York magazine editor muses that a publishing house named ‘Pussy Hollow’ sounds ‘rural,’ James ‘wonders how rural she would consider downtown Regina’ (85). Other publishers in the novel have names such as Loon Lake (7), Pussy Hollow (16) and Squirrel Brook (23). The falsity of

Portraits of the Artist as Ambivalent Urban Hipster

149

this rural ideal is exemplified by Boben, the winner of the ‘Responsible Fiction Award’ from a literary magazine called Prairie Afternoon. Boben’s public image as ‘something of a recluse ... [who] lives in a log cabin with husky dogs or something like that’ (16) is fraudulent, as is Canada’s self-image as a rugged, rural country; he lives not on the prairies but in Burlington, Ontario, ‘this suburb town for commuters’ (84); not in a log cabin but in a bungalow with an attached garage and ‘clear plastic nonslip runners over the carpet’ (137); his ‘most recent’ novel was written in 1974 and hauled out to fulfil a publisher’s request for new material; and his interview with James is given by his wife, as Boben himself is drunk to the point of incoherence. In attempting to explain Boben’s work, his wife says: ‘I would say he’s trying to understand the vastness of the natural environment ... he’s trying to reconnect to the vastness that dominates our collective imagination’ (144). Ironically, James himself is complicit in the propagation of this myth, through his description of Boben, who passes out midway through the interview, with words and phrases such as ‘placid,’ ‘contemplative,’ ‘profound calm,’ ‘serene indifference,’ and ‘majesty’ (146). Both Smith and James seem ambivalent about the suburbs: on the one hand critical of the suburban myth, they ridicule them for their ugliness, predictability, and lack of diversity; on the other hand vulnerable to the suburban dream (see Milton), they imagine them as the new wilderness, an idealized, bucolic space ‘apart from the cellphones and breakfast meetings’ (146) of the city, a place where couples stroll hand in hand down empty streets, talking intelligently and passionately about classical music. In Noise, the suburbs represent the sole alternative to the urban landscape, representing the promise of both isolation from the distractions and responsibilities of urban life and meaningful human connection. In late-twentieth-century Canada, Noise suggests, the tundra and the bush have been replaced by the suburb. Smith’s juxtaposition of urban centre and suburban periphery reflects what urban theorist Edward W. Soja refers to as ‘the Modern Metropolis,’ first appearing in the years following the First World War and characterized by a ‘distinctively dualized configuration of a monocentric urban world surrounded by a sprawling suburban periphery’ (239). The ‘distinct and cosmopolitan urban world concentrated in the core or central city’ is contrasted with a ‘more extensive and culturally homogeneous ... ‘middle class’ suburban world’ (238). Smith contrasts the sameness, conformity, and boring silence of the suburban Ontario towns of Munich5 and Burlington with the diversity, creativity, and stimulating noise of Toronto, where every

150 Lisa Salem-Wiseman

character seems to be engaged in an exuberant performance of individuality. Smith’s characters have chosen city life because, as Pierre Filion, Trudi Bunting, and Len Gertler write in Canadian Cities in Transition, it not only allows for, but encourages, difference: The suburban landscape, which now comprises the vast majority of the urbanized perimeter, does not express the diversity of lifestyles and values characteristic of contemporary life. Generally, within the suburban realm housing types and neighbourhoods are differentiated according to the income of their residents and, to a lesser extent, their life cycle, rather than according to lifestyle and values. This is why ... individuals espousing alternative lifestyles and values tend to opt for the inner city because they are unable to see their distinct identity reflected within the suburban realm. (15)

In Noise, while houses and lives in Burlington are identical to those in Munich,6 Toronto provides space for every kind of lifestyle: gentrified streets full of ‘little blond children ... rolling around on three-wheelers like little CEOs, talking softly to one another about mergers’ (245) exist only a few blocks from Portuguese working-class neighbourhoods in which loud music is played on the street and drugs are dealt in the alleys behind houses. This diversity extends to the city’s apartment buildings, which are inhabited by tenants from disparate cultural, geographic, and socio-economic backgrounds. Unlike the suburban environs of the Willings and the Bobens, where anyone from a large city is considered ‘unusual’ or ‘interesting’ (188) and where silver miniskirts, black T-shirts, and noserings are likely to draw suspicious attention, James’s urban environment is accepting of difference in appearance, occupation, and behaviour. The Canadian suburbs, as described by Smith, are devoid of any cultural or regional specificity; Munich and Burlington are virtually interchangeable with one another and with any American suburb. However, what distinguishes Smith’s Toronto most markedly from similarly sized cities to the south is its need for external validation. Real estate in 1990s Toronto is depicted as on the verge of a new trend, yet it is a trend that is determined by American urban planning and architecture. DeCourcy, in speaking of the Bomb Factory – a converted munitions factory designed by a Miami architect – sums up the encroaching move towards loft conversions: ‘Architect from Miami, new breed of loft dweller, new urban blah blah’ (31). Proximity to and reliance upon

Portraits of the Artist as Ambivalent Urban Hipster

151

American values and ideals is a defining feature of Smith’s Toronto. Indeed, the main source of James’s frustration with city living seems to be linked to the constant effort on the part of Toronto’s media and entertainment industry to prove the city as ‘hip’ as New York or Miami. James’s former classmate, although ‘a heroin addict [who] lives in hostels,’ is admired by Alison simply because he lives in Manhattan (170). When the New York editor of Glitter expunges all references to Canada from James’s profile of Boben, explaining that ‘[f]rankly ... our readers aren’t interested in Canada. And we are most concerned with pleasing our readers’ (227), James realizes the futility of Toronto’s desperate search for U.S. validation. To New York, Miami, and other American cities, Canada is merely a suburb, a geographical void. While not an ‘artist’ in the strictest sense, James occupies a social space in which everyone is free to adopt that designation. With the emphasis now placed on art as social performance, Toronto chefs have supplanted writers and painters as the new avant-garde of the art scene. A host apologizes for a chef’s disruptive behaviour by explaining that ‘[t]his is one of the things you can expect when working with an Artist’ (115), and a chef acquaintance responds to James’s description of him as an athlete with: ‘Say artist ... I‘d prefer it if you said artist’ (231).7 The social milieu to which James aspires to belong is epitomized by Nicola Lickson,8 ‘the photographer’ (32), who, like other denizens of her world, is fashionable but unreflective and non-intellectual. Her choices about everything from her place of residence – the Bomb Factory – to her accessories are determined by fashion. As James’s friend Piers De Courcy tells him, Nicola is ‘cool’ because ‘she doesn’t know why she likes things. She can’t explain it’ (64), while the thing that makes James ‘deep down, fundamentally, basically uncool’ (61) is not merely, as he thinks, his love of music, but his intellectualization of everything. As De Courcy points out to James, ‘explaining things. Is what you do. Only too well’ (64). His city’s emphasis on surface ‘coolness’ causes him to automatically dismiss his desire – felt as almost a ‘calling’ – to write about classical music, a subject which he automatically dismisses as not ‘hip’ enough for an urban audience: ‘He thought once again of writing an essay about how the whole system of Western music is embodied in the four notes of the violin,’ before stopping himself with the thought ‘Who would print it, anyway?’ (20). James’s passionate desire to write thoughtful, intelligent critical pieces about music is stifled by the belief that to do so would ruin his ‘hip’ reputation. ‘It would kill my image if this came out,’ he tells De Courcy. ‘It would kill my career. You know what

152 Lisa Salem-Wiseman

classical music buffs look like?’ (54) James’s repression of his interest in music in the name of hipness effectively cuts him off from his past and precludes any serious human connection. For James, emotional connection and commitment connote a suburban lack of hipness; when De Courcy admonishes him for his failure to sustain a relationship for ‘more than a week’ as ‘grown-up people’ do (64), James scornfully suggests that he might as well ‘drive a minivan and promote Montessori schools’ (65) . However, while he eschews such attachments, he finds himself increasingly drawn to the suburbs as a retreat from the overabundance of superficial relationships that his urban life provides: ‘He thought of Alison and how much nicer he would become if he spent more time with her, and suddenly wanted to and knew he was not going back to the city right away’ (188). The suburban ideal or myth appeals to James because it promises an existence that is simpler, more virtuous, and more emotionally satisfying. Urban theorists have commented on the difficulty of creating community ‘in the sense of Gramsci’s cultural-social unity’ in urban areas ‘with a transient population, little shared history, and no community culture’ (Mendell 79). James’s desire to connect to something beyond the superficially ‘hip’ leads him to briefly consider leaving the city, first through his affair with the suburban Alison, who, as a former friend from his home town, represents a retreat to the perceived simplicity and security of childhood, and then through his even briefer fantasy of marrying Fiona and moving to Meat Cove, Cape Breton, a place that seems defiantly regional and free from the pervasive influence of urban America that marks Toronto. For Smith, the only alternative to both the suburbs’ predictability and anonymity and the city’s desperate emulation of urban America seems to be located in Atlantic Canada, the sole source of any ‘authentic’ sense of regional identity in Noise.9 For Smith’s characters, the suburban realm, with its emphasis on conformity, sameness, and ‘no surprises’ (184), where women wear ‘ugly sandals’ (169) and men talk about sports, represents a sinister force threatening to destroy urban individualism, creativity, and vitality. This depiction is consistent with the frequent representation of the suburbs in North American literature as what Paul Milton in this volume refers to as ‘sites of everyday monotony leading to dissatisfaction’ (172). Yet, in James’s urban world of contingent identities and fragmented realities, in which women disappear down dark alleys and people cannot exit a restaurant without having ‘a large transvestite prostitute ... keel over towards them in unconsciousness or despair’ (117), the ‘everyday mo-

Portraits of the Artist as Ambivalent Urban Hipster

153

notony’ of the suburban periphery provides an alternative that is not without appeal. As Smith wrote in a Globe and Mail column about the overuse of the word ‘community,’ ‘[T]he word community is reassuring. It suggests that the world is not a fragmented place of isolated people and sharply defined social classes, but a kind of Pleasantville of softball diamonds and volunteer committees. Community is a myth we all strive to realize, like some communally remembered Hesperides’ (‘Arts Community?’). This myth is at the root of James’s desire to join Alison’s clean, quiet, orderly suburban world, in which ‘[t]he floodlights were on all night in the baseball diamond’ by the community centre (175). Such a landscape is in stark contrast to James’s urban world; in an environment in which people from widely divergent backgrounds share houses, where one can be evicted from one’s home through no fault of one’s own, and where one’s income depends on the whim of editors and publishers, the suburban landscape represents an ideal that both repels and attracts him: He closed his eyes and tried to picture himself with a curler girlfriend. He would drive a Ford Windstar van and they would watch a video every Friday night, of the kind that Kurt and Brenda watched, and go to a wedding every Saturday. Eventually he would learn to curl himself. And eventually they would begin to talk about having children. They wouldn’t have too much sex, which was okay, because sex was stressful anyway. He resolved to think seriously about this. (183)

Despite this resolution, however, he is unable to give this option serious consideration; however tired he may be of the noise, hipness, and superficiality of the city, he is irresistibly drawn to it. The solution is not to move to the suburbs, but to attempt to bridge the gap between urban and suburban, as is reflected in his decision to move to a new apartment in a downtown Toronto neighbourhood whose peaceful streets and culturally and economically homogeneous inhabitants mark it as part of the suburban imaginary. Similarly, his ambivalence is manifest in his rejection of both the urban Nicola and the suburban Alison, neither of whom is as simple as he first imagines.10 James’s most significant effort to reconcile his fundamental suburban ‘uncoolness,’ represented by his passion for music, with his love of the excitement of urban life is enacted through writing; he fights for, and wins, a contract to write his own regular column, ‘the hipster’s guide to classical music’ (264). The column will be about ‘ideas,’ which, as De Courcy pointed

154 Lisa Salem-Wiseman

out to James, have no place in the ‘Bomb Factory,’ the epitome of U.S.approved urban hipness. The ambivalence seems resolved; James will educate the beautiful people, bringing high art to the hip, glamorous, yet unreflective restaurant-and-nightclub world that he finds so aesthetically appealing. Like his namesake, the apostle James, notable for effecting a compromise between the Jews and gentiles who had converted to Christianity, James is willing to bring together two seemingly irreconcilable entities: high art and popular culture. Throughout the course of the novel, the significance of James Willing’s surname shifts, from a willingness to assume any available petty writing assignment in order to survive, to a sense of a higher purpose, which he alone is poised to fulfil, to become the ‘Sister Wendy of music’ (263). In conversation with Michelle Berry, Russell Smith has said that ‘James gets a real column at the end of the book and I got mine too’ (Berry 370). Like Smith’s weekly Globe and Mail column, Virtual Culture, which debuted in the fall of 2000,11 James’s proposed column will attempt to bridge the perceived gulf between high art and popular culture, between suburban contemplation and urban noise, between James’s ‘uncool’ love of music and his ‘hip’ lifestyle: I write an essay every issue – not a service piece, not a news piece, not an article, but an essay – on some trend, some idea I’ve had about music, some new composer – but the music only. I could explain what makes it interesting and what you’re supposed to listen for. I could compare, say, the rhythmic minimalist stuff to techno music, and show how they both happened at around the same time, one in high culture and the other in low. (263)

However, while the subject of the piece seems to enact a reconciliation between the life of the mind and the life of the appetites, James is still left to struggle with the fact that, while isolation is often necessary for creative composition, it is utterly foreign to his urban sensibility; silence proves more distracting than noise. As Beebe notes, the withdrawal of the artist into solitude may be inevitable, if temporary, because, ‘[i]n a sense all creative work must be a solitary endeavor’ (309). The transition between the realms of life and art is often marked by the artist performing a ritual to ‘abstract himself from the distractions around him’ (309). According to Beebe, Balzac wore a robe and drank a specific type of coffee, while another writer required the smell of a rotting apple. Regardless of the particularities of

Portraits of the Artist as Ambivalent Urban Hipster

155

the ritual, ‘its purpose is to set up barriers between the worker and whatever may interfere with his concentration’ (309). To this end, James, having set himself the task of writing about ‘ideas,’ moves to a new apartment on a quiet street, which he rents by himself, without roommates, a monastic cell whose blank walls ‘gleamed white’ (257). He sets up his favourite chair and desk in the exact centre of the wall and begins to write, not with his computer, but by hand, ‘in his new intellectual mode’ (265). While the circumstances may seem favourable, James, whose senses are attuned to the noise and confusion of urban life, is unable to write. He solves his dilemma with the help of the same European industrial hardcore music that he had been hired to review; like the city itself, the music functions as both an impediment and an aid to what he considers to be his ‘real’ writing: With a sudden urgency, he strode to the boom box on the floor and spread out a pile of CDs. His hands shaking, he snapped open a plastic case – the blackest cover he could find: Hostilator X, the Vacuum Mixes – and jammed the disc into the machine. He slammed down the cover and hit play. There was a shattering sound like glass, a siren, and a chest-hollowing blast from the box. (266)

The introduction, not the removal, of noise forms an integral element of James’s ritual of withdrawal and is a function of his sensibility and location, and the subject of his column. James is writing about German modernist art, and the words he composes include: ‘The chrome glare of the subway car. The romance of the fax machine’ (266). Attempting to invoke such imagery in a silent, orderly, barren room is as incongruous as Boben’s attempt to write about the wilderness in the sterile landscape of the suburbs, and proves even more difficult. While James attempts to isolate himself in his ivory tower, he finds that he needs the urban noise – or at least its facsimile – to inspire his writing, which is itself evocative of urban forms and experiences. Not unlike the artistprotagonists in the works discussed by Peter Dickinson in his essay in this volume, James draws his material from the detritus of contemporary culture, which is contained within the ‘vast archaeological site’ of the urban environment (s90). Thus, it is not a withdrawal from, but a connection to, the city that enables him to compose his column. The novel ends with the beginning of James’s first ‘real’ piece of writing: ‘With the thumping all around him, he sat at the desk and began’ (266).

156 Lisa Salem-Wiseman

In Michael Winter’s This All Happened, the protagonist, Gabriel English, is, like James Willing, a frustrated urban writer with a vision that he struggles to realize on the page. On New Year’s Eve, he resolves to finish a historical novel, set in a small town down the coast from St John’s. However, while the outcome of James’s project is promising but uncertain, Gabriel’s novel is abandoned before its completion. While this would seem to mark Gabriel as yet another Canadian ‘artist who can’t make art,’ as identified by Kroetsch, he does, however, succeed in producing a different sort of document. In a note at the beginning of the novel, Winter explains that Gabriel is ‘supposed to be writing a novel. Instead, he writes a collection of daily vignettes over a full calendar year,’ which makes up the text of This All Happened. In this journal, Winter writes, ‘Gabriel discusses his friends, confesses his failings, copies overheard drunken conversations, declares his dreams, reports gossip, and charts the ebb and flow of his love affair with the people and geography of Newfoundland – in particular, the port city of St. John’s’ (n.p.). Gabriel, like James, has an ambivalent relationship with his urban environment; he, too, is divided between the Ivory Tower and the Sacred Fount, between isolation from and connection to the social and cultural life of his city.12 Winter portrays St John’s as a dynamic, shifting network of social connections and relationships; this is in part a function of the geographical layout of the city, with its relatively concentrated downtown area, in which Gabriel is repeatedly meeting his friends on the street or watching their movements from his window. St John’s, as Lydia tells Gabriel, is a city where ‘everybody knows everyone else even if you havent met them’ (151). Gabriel’s journal entries create a portrait of an active and close-knit social scene, an impression which is backed up by Winter’s comments to Natalee Caple: In Newfoundland you have to create your own story. There are far more dinner parties, day trips to abandoned communities, dips in the ocean. The landscape of Newfoundland is such that you can see an entire afternoon’s walk ahead of you. Whereas in Toronto you can only peer about a block or two ahead. Toronto feels short-sighted and claustrophobic and full of choices. Newfoundland, pretty much everything that happens in St. John’s you can be a part of. There’s an art show and a music night and a bonfire but that’s Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. You’re at all of them. You can experience the whole city in your mouth, whereas Toronto can only be taken as a slice. (Berry and Caple 475)

Portraits of the Artist as Ambivalent Urban Hipster

157

While St John’s may not offer Gabriel many choices, it is certainly an environment in which something is always happening, and in which social life is concentrated into a small urban space. The size and design of St John’s creates a sense of proximity and commonality, a sense that all the inhabitants of the city walk down the same streets, drink in the same bars, and climb the same stairs. A flirtatious walk with Alex Fleming is interrupted by Lydia, who happens to be riding past on her bicycle (11); a conversation about Earl is conducted, unknowingly, under his window (6); and Gabriel is able to walk to three different parties in one evening (279). Although the city attracts a diverse collection of individuals, they are linked by the shared experience of their urban geography: We manage the stairs to Duckworth Street and speak quietly under the ear that hears all of downtown St. John’s. Quiet with the stories you tell, or the wrong person will hear you. Whispers from actors, from producers, from songwriters and one drummer. There are people who believe in God and people seeking God and people who are convinced there is no God. All walking up the stairs into cars on Duckworth Street. (95)13

Gabriel, like James Willing, thrives on the chaotic energy and human connection of urban life; as he writes in his journal: ‘Sometimes, to be squeezed shoulder to shoulder in a kitchen party, the frenetic energy of bodies, the physical pull and tug and unanimous decision to be frenzied and fun and enjoy being incarnate’ (81). However, he also desires both a deeper emotional connection with Lydia Murphy and the distance and objectivity required to reflect on his experiences and relationships and translate them into art. His comparison of Lydia’s house to his own rented house ‘on the cusp of downtown’ (4) reveals his indecision regarding the merits of attachment: ‘Lydia’s house is of better material than mine, but she has no view and the house is attached ... My house is the windows, the eyes that study the downtown and the harbour, that witness the marine traffic and the weather accumulating over the Grand Banks’ (5). Although he shares it with frequently absent roommates, Gabriel’s house is emblematic of his desired status as detached observer, the recording angel of St John’s; if he were to move in with Lydia, he would lose his perspective on the city and its life. ‘I’d miss the view’ (15), he writes in his journal. His two New Year’s resolutions – to ‘decide on Lydia and to finish a novel’ (4) – are in conflict with one another; he often finds

158 Lisa Salem-Wiseman

himself unable to write, due to his obsession with Lydia, his flirtation with Alex, and his involvement in the various relationships and artistic pursuits of his many friends. In his observations of the city through his binoculars, Gabriel realizes both the advantages and disadvantages of viewing life at close range: ‘Magnification breaks down smears to components (blue and grey and yellow and pink, instead of a smudgy green). Enlarging encourages colour to show itself. Lydia says Monet has become an adjective, describing something that, close up, breaks into fragments’ (70). Similarly, Gabriel’s proximity to and involvement in his friends’ lives results in an intimate yet fragmented narrative. In order to attain the perspective that he requires to write his novel – which, as a historical novel about people he has never met, is removed from his contemporary existence – he feels a need to absent himself through exile in a metaphorical ivory tower, a borrowed house in the town of Heart’s Desire. The exemplar of artistic exile in Winter’s novel is Rockwell Kent, the early-twentieth-century artist and adventurer who spent seven months (August 1918–March 1919) on a small island in Resurrection Bay, near Seward, Alaska, with only his nine-year-old son and an Alaskan trapper and farmer for companionship. In his book Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska, which chronicles his time on Fox Island, he glorifies isolation as the sole path to self-awareness and civilization as a corrupting influence: ‘It seems that we have ... turned out of the beaten, crowded way and come to stand face to face with that infinite and unfathomable thing which is the wilderness; and here we have found OURSELVES – for the wilderness is nothing else’ (217). Kent’s sojourns in Alaska, Greenland, and Tierra del Fuego provided him with not only spectacular vistas to paint, but also the solitude needed for contemplation. As Laurie Norton Moffat writes in her foreword to Distant Shores: The Odyssey of Rockwell Kent: ‘This search for self in distant wilderness locales led to striking paintings, haunted by the isolated quality of his quest’ (7). Gabriel’s choice of Kent as one of the subjects of his novel-inprogress, ‘a historical novel, set in Brigus, where the painter Rockwell Kent and the northern explorer Bob Bartlett both lived’ (12), indicates Gabriel’s attraction to the model of the artist represented by Kent. He attempts to emulate it, but is repeatedly drawn out of his solipsism by his connection to his friends, and particularly to Lydia: ‘I should be writing the novel,’ he writes in his journal, ‘but instead I concentrate on Lydia’ (34). This All Happened, like Noise, explores the ways in which the ideal of

Portraits of the Artist as Ambivalent Urban Hipster

159

the artist as a lone figure, isolated from his society, is no longer attainable in what Soja calls the ‘postmetropolitan’ era, in which urbanization is encroaching on the wilderness and it is becoming increasingly difficult to position oneself outside the city. Gabriel’s attempt to isolate himself from the distractions and responsibilities of urban life, in order to write a novel about a man who did precisely that, takes him not to the wilderness, but to a borrowed house in the town of Heart’s Desire, on the coast of Trinity Bay. Both Winter and Smith, like the authors Milton cites in his essay in this collection, ‘came of age in a world where post-war suburbia was an established fact of life’ (168); thus, Winter’s novel, like Smith’s, locates an alternative to urban chaos and fragmentation, not in the wilderness of Rockwell Kent and Bob Bartlett, but in small suburban towns which possess neither the excitement of the urban nor the timelessness, majesty, and ‘uneventful solitude’ (Kent vii) of the wilderness: Heart’s Desire is not a pretty town. The modern bungalows clutch the road, the abandoned saltboxes are pilfered for lumber. The church was torn down and relocated in a complex that includes a bingo hall and the mayor’s office. There’s no vista here; a bare inlet, a spruce backyard, and flat land. (13)

Like the suburban towns in Smith’s novel, Heart’s Desire is devoid of a specific regional identity, which provides stark contrast to Winter’s affectionate portrayal of St John’s, which, unlike the Toronto of Noise, is relatively free from the influence of American culture and values. Far from providing Gabriel with the solitude he requires to write his novel, Heart’s Desire merely replaces one community with another; while he is ostensibly sequestered in Heart’s Desire to work on his historical novel, he becomes distracted by the stories told to him by Josh and Toby, two boys who are ‘like old men in their depictions and knowledge’ (17) of the lives of their neighbours. Writing, for Gabriel, involves the encapsulation of meaning into gesture. As he explains it to the boys, ‘I try to capture people by their actions. By quick glimpses of how they do or say things. Moments’ (16). This statement of artistic purpose is realized not through his novel, but through his Heart’s Desire file, in which he copies down Josh and Toby’s descriptions of the people who live in the town: ‘I close up my novel file and open the Heart’s Desire one. I am going to use these boys in the novel. What they tell me I’ll inject into the story’ (18). As Gabriel witnesses the boys’ connectedness

160 Lisa Salem-Wiseman

to their community, he responds first by documenting it, and second by proposing marriage to Lydia over the telephone. He is ultimately unable to write his novel in Heart’s Desire, not only because of the presence of Josh and Toby, but the absence of Lydia: ‘I do no writing. There is nothing in Heart’s Desire to fill the absence of Lydia’ (19–20). However, when he returns to the city, his attempts to resume his novel are interrupted by his relationship with Lydia and his fascination with the activities occurring in the lives of his friends and strangers outside his window (162). As he later acknowledges, he is ambivalent about solitude, desiring it when he is with others, but desiring connection and belonging when alone: ‘I’m the kind of man who craves to be alone, but once alone, I crave company’ (284). Gabriel’s attempt to write a novel is in contrast to that of his friend Maisie Pye, who is writing ‘about what’s happening now’ (29). However, Gabriel’s novel, like Maisie’s, is ‘thinly veiled autobiography’ (29); although he is writing a historical novel, it is ‘full of contemporary events’ (58) and the characters are all versions of people he knows. In the course of Winter’s novel, Maisie’s novel is completed, published, and launched, while Gabriel’s is abandoned. The distinction, Winter seems to be saying, is that Gabriel repeatedly attempts, and fails, to tear himself away from ‘the here and now’ (65) and connect to his material, while Maisie chooses material that is inextricably connected to her own life. Gabriel begins with a generic category – historical novel – and attempts to contort his material to fit that form. In using his friends and family members as models for the historical figures in his novel, he attempts to ‘be present in the past’ (30), to breathe life into material that holds no intrinsic interest for him. He tells Lydia: ‘I’m stuffing the novel with facts from the present, stuffing garlic and sage into a leg of lamb’ (25), a rather reductive description of the process of transforming experience into art. Ironically, while his choice of Rockwell Kent as his protagonist signifies an attraction to the figure of the isolated artist, alone in the wilderness, Gabriel’s use of his friends and family as models for the historical characters reveals a need to view the past through a contemporary lens: ‘I’m using Max and Lydia and others as these historical characters. Max is going to be my Rockwell Kent. My father might be Bob Bartlett’ (29–30). His attempts to write his novel end in vain, however, as he becomes more interested in the ‘here and now,’ and less involved in his constructed narrative of the past: ‘This is all plot and action. And invented. It doesnt interest me’ (38). It is not surprising that Gabriel’s novel is never completed.

Portraits of the Artist as Ambivalent Urban Hipster

161

The work that Gabriel does produce, his journal of ‘small windows onto moments’ (n.p.), succeeds by violating the rules of novel writing set forth by Maisie, who tells Gabriel that a novel should be ‘told by the voice of an authority’ (15). Gabriel’s journal, however, reveals bewilderment, despair, obsession, and, ultimately, surrender; he presents no façade of authority. Maisie also counsels that ‘all traces of the technical problem a novel delivers (that is, how do you keep the story afloat for three hundred pages?) should be erased or masked’ (15–16); conversely, Gabriel’s journal presents not a seamless, completed narrative, but a sequence of ‘honest moments,’ strung together with no connectors apart from the date on which they were written. Gabriel’s description of his journal as ‘honest’ is in marked contrast to his criticism of an author whose novel about Newfoundland is being made into a Hollywood feature,14 and whom Gabriel hears speak at a conference; Gabriel ‘found the voice false,’ due to the fact that she ‘heightened, or torqued, the language in order to best capture the place and people’ (253). Her novel,15 which one character intimates is stolen from Maisie’s manuscript, is, like Gabriel’s historical novel, an outsider’s attempt to capture a community, and thus rings false to those on the inside. While Gabriel does draw on material from his and his friends’ lived experiences for his aborted novel, the process is much more transparent in his journal, in which the experiences are more immediately translated into writing, and conventions – such as syntax and punctuation – are ignored. Gabriel’s social life in St John’s, which consists of contingent encounters among various city dwellers, is reflected in this narrative structure, which presents a series of discrete glimpses into the meetings, partings, arrivals, and departures of the members of Gabriel’s urban community: ‘I like trying to put words to these moments give particulars and hand them delicately to people like Lydia and I want them from her too that is my only demand on anyone because that is life that is all life is is moments doesnt she think’ (5–9; my emphasis). Henri Lustiger-Thaler suggests that communities are best understood as ‘socially constructed “intended moments”’ (20) which are ‘directed toward building a series of routinized human attachments’ (Lustiger-Thaler 20). Through their various tangled relationships, and through their impromptu meetings at the Ship,16 on the streets of downtown St John’s, and in each other’s kitchens, Gabriel’s friends forge their community from moments. The fact that Gabriel’s journal overshadows and ultimately usurps his novel suggests that he has stumbled upon a more appropriate form for depicting the discontinuities and contingencies of communal affiliation.

162 Lisa Salem-Wiseman

Unable to reconcile his need to absent himself from human contact with his need for social connections, Gabriel makes a choice; he opts for isolation, and leaves the city in search of ‘a desolate, foreign place,’ declaring that he has exhausted the possibilities for experience that the city offers: ‘All that can happen to me here has happened’ (286). Gabriel’s comment, ‘I’ve used up everything here. I have to let the city go fallow’ (285), marks him as an artist in the Sacred Fount tradition; his art is dependant on his experience of life, and once ‘all that can happen has happened,’ he must leave in order to replenish the fount. According to Beebe, the artist who draws on experience for his art, engaging rather than withdrawing from his society, may nonetheless ‘rebel against society, but when he does, he usually flees to high mountains or ocean shores so that he may commune directly with nature, become rejuvenated at the fountain source of his being, then return to the society of men’ (114). This appears to be Gabriel’s motivation for flight at the end of Winter’s novel; finding himself drained by his involvement in human society, he goes into exile, not to write, but to renew the source of his creativity. When Robert Kroetsch wrote in 1985, ‘It is no accident that the hero of the Canadian story often is the artist’ (‘Disunity’ 30), he attributed this phenomenon to what he identified as a peculiarly Canadian suspicion of our own metanarrative; when ‘the very nature of story itself falters,’ he wrote, ‘the artist in the act of creating art becomes the focus’ (31). Interestingly, the last decade has seen the resurgence of the creation of art as the focus of Canadian fiction, with a number of novels by young, male, urban Canadian writers chronicling the difficulties of creating relevant, meaningful works of art amidst the demands of life in urban Canada. The hero of David Eddie’s Chump Change (1996), a novel that begins, significantly, with the words ‘I am a failure,’ is an aspiring novelist who finds that the demands of work as a news writer in Toronto make it impossible for him to write a novel; David Carpenter’s Banjo Lessons (1997) ends, as does Noise, with the hero setting pen to paper to write the novel whose production has been deferred throughout the narrative; Michael Turner’s The Pornographer’s Poem (1999), discussed at length in Peter Dickinson’s contribution to this volume, chronicles the efforts of a young filmmaker to reconcile pornography and socially conscious filmmaking, while attempting – unsuccessfully – to survive the violence and corruption of the downtown Vancouver drug scene in the late 1970s; and the protagonist of Steven Heighton’s The Shadow Boxer (2000) flees the city to write his novel in isolation, only

Portraits of the Artist as Ambivalent Urban Hipster

163

to suffer a harrowing encounter with a nature that proves to be as hostile as the city to the creation of art. Perhaps this reappearance of the artist as hero can be linked to the attempts by young Canadian writers to distinguish their writing from that of previous generations, whose work, as Kroetsch points out, often ‘centres on the small town or the isolated community’ (30). Unlike the protagonists of Kunstlerromane by Buckler, Ross, Grove, Laurence, Munro, and others, the artist-heroes of contemporary Canadian novels are urban-based; the city is the fount that feeds their art, but, like James Willing and Gabriel English, they discover that the demands of contemporary urban life threaten their artistic production. The contemporary artist-hero is not the solitary self struggling against nature, but an ambivalent figure, caught between the demands of a cosmopolitan urban lifestyle and the myth of a more simple existence; however, flight from the city is recognized as no longer providing a viable solution to the artist’s dilemma, for in latetwentieth-, early-twenty-first-century Canada, there is increasingly nowhere to flee to. Rather than opposing art and life, isolation and experience, rural and urban, or success and failure, the Canadian Kunstlerroman at the turn of the twenty-first century contests and complicates these simplistic oppositions, and thus reveals the growing obsolescence of the critical frameworks wherein this stark field of possibilities was first delimited.

NOTES 1 Margaret Atwood makes the same observation in Survival (1972), attributing the preponderance of failed or frustrated Canadian artists to the colonialism afflicting the Canadian imagination. 2 In the Western tradition, the linking of artistry and divinity has both biblical and especially Greek philosophical roots. Indeed, it is precisely this quasi-divine power which produces such ambivalence towards the artist in thinkers as diverse as Plato and Nietzsche. Even Kant, as Derrida so persuasively shows, unwittingly invests the artist with god-like powers (freedom, originality, the exemption from labour) in his very effort to ‘discipline’ and constrain the figure of genius. See Derrida, ‘Economimesis.’ 3 For a detailed analysis of the suburban myth and the suburban dream, as they are reflected in cultural and literary representations, see Paul Milton’s ‘Rewriting White Flight: Suburbia in Gerald Lynch’s Troutstream and Joan Barfoot’s Dancing in the Dark,’ in this volume.

164 Lisa Salem-Wiseman 4 In a revealing twist, Smith himself wrote Noise not in the midst of the glamorous, exciting urban world that it depicts, but in isolation at Pierre Berton’s retreat in the Yukon. Smith tells Michelle Berry that, although he became depressed at being separated from his girlfriend and friends, ‘it was really good for me obviously, because I got a lot done’: ‘I had been living in the noise and then suddenly I went up north and there was absence of noise and stress and nothing but the snow outside and my computer screen and the noise of the furnace and nothing to do that evening but watch TV’ (Berry and Caple 369). 5 The fictional town of Munich bears many similarities to Kitchener-Waterloo, where Smith’s family resides. 6 While Canada’s suburbs are becoming more heterogeneous, Smith’s depictions of Burlington and Munich are exaggerated in their emphasis on homogeneity and conformity. 7 Similarly, as a journalist James is more artist than reporter, appealing to the reader’s imagination, senses, and intellect with descriptions such as the following: ‘A gregarious duck in blood orange sauce consorts freely with wild rice, raisins, almonds and vinegary cabbage – a precarious success, arranged with the zest of fauvist painting’ (14). James’s restaurant reviews are excerpted from Smith’s own, written in the 1990s for Toronto publications such as NOW and Toronto Life (Davis 160). 8 In conversations with Nicola, he attempts to telegraph belonging through the use of catchphrases; when describing a restaurant’s architecture, he refers to a staircase with the adjective ‘great,’ before correcting himself: ‘a fly, a phat steel staircase’ (40). Significantly, while he scales its walls, hangs off the roof, and jumps off a balcony, he never enters the Bomb Factory; he remains excluded from the true inner sanctum of hipness. 9 Smith similarly locates ‘authentic’ regional identity and community in Atlantic Canada in his short story ‘The Stockholm Syndrome,’ in the collection Young Men. 10 The hip, sexy Nicola is revealed to have both a dislike of sex and a conventional desire to marry a water quality control engineer, while the unglamorous Alison is surprisingly uninhibited in bed, and surprises James by purchasing PVC pants and making plans to move to the city. 11 Smith’s column, like James’s, makes connections between popular culture and ‘high art.’ A recent column about the ‘found music’ emerging from dance-club culture – including music made from the recorded sounds of liposuction and laser eye surgery – suggests that ‘the most important root of this trend comes from “high art,”’ namely, the found-music experiments of John Cage (‘From high art’ R6).

Portraits of the Artist as Ambivalent Urban Hipster

165

12 This ambivalence is manifest in his name. In an interview with Natalee Caple, Winter explains that ‘English’ signifies the perspective of the outsider: ‘Traditionally, I guess, an Englishman who is living in Scotland or Ireland ... would be called English. So I liked that sense of estrangement from a place, even though from the ouside it appears as a name that is of a place’ (Berry and Caple 470). Winter’s protagonist, then, embodies both belonging and exile. The juxtaposition of this name with that of ‘Gabriel,’ the archangel who announces miracles, interprets visions, and explains predictions, suggests a desire to speak to and for his community, but from a position of self-imposed exile. Gabriel’s discovery that ‘[t]he angel’s sole purpose is to praise God’ (261) further marks him, through his name, as possessing a higher calling. 13 Roger Kemble, writing in The Canadian City, St John’s to Victoria: A Critical Commentary, makes a similar statement about the steps leading to Duckworth Street: ‘The street pattern of St. John’s follows the length of the contours of the hills skirting the harbour. Pedestrian steps and pathways cross connect. For obvious reasons the streets follow the easy grade, leaving the steep part for pedestrian steps. McMurdo Steps is typical of this response to hills and harbour, for it climbs from Water Street to climax in the most necessary watering hole, the Duke of Duckworth. So many pilgrims wend their inevitable way to the Duke of Duckworth at the top, that estimating the value of McMurdo Steps to the overall economy of St. John’s cannot be overblown’ (134). 14 Even the mention of the filming of a Hollywood feature film in the area brings very little excitement, and certainly no dreams of American validation or fame. 15 Although the novel and the author are unnamed, the reference is to E. Annie Proulx and her novel The Shipping News. Proulx spoke at the annual Learned Societies Congress in 1997, which was held at Memorial University, St John’s. The Shipping News, a film directed by Lasse Hallström, was filmed on location in the area around Trinity, Newfoundland, in the spring of 2001. 16 While Smith uses pseudonyms for many of the bars, restaurants, publishing houses, and media personalities portrayed in Noise, Winter retains such markers of regional identity in This All Happened.

166

Paul Milton

Rewriting White Flight: Suburbia in Gerald Lynch’s Troutstream and Joan Barfoot’s Dancing in the Dark paul milton

While growing up in suburban London, Ontario, in the late 1970s I first encountered Canadian literature as an object of study in my Grade 13 English class. There we read Two Solitudes, Fifth Business, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, and The Tin Flute. When I went on to do my undergraduate degree at Western, I read Wacousta, Roughing It in the Bush, The Imperialist, As For Me and My House, The Mountain and the Valley, St Urbain’s Horseman, and The Edible Woman. Having read these novels, among others such as Kroetsch’s Badlands, Ondaatje’s Coming through Slaughter, and a handful of other representatives of Canadian literature, I came to the conclusion that I hadn’t grown up in Canada after all. My suburban life was not a factor in Canadian literature, contemporary or otherwise. ‘Where is here,’ you ask? ‘Someplace else,’ I would respond. Canada was Moodie’s backwoods or Kroetsch’s Drumheller, or maybe it was rural sites such as Munro’s Jubilee or Buckler’s Annapolis Valley or Ross’s Horizon, or maybe it was Atwood’s and Callaghan’s Toronto, or Richler’s Montreal. At any rate, it wasn’t the semi-bucolic space of Westminster Park, Phase II, or as the residents preferred to call it, Westminster Heights, a collection of seemingly forever-under-construction subdivisions squeezed between south London and Highway 401. My childhood landscape was one of curving streets flanked by unfinished foundations, populated by saurian bulldozers and backhoes, eventually giving way to a scattering of splitlevels, bungalows, prefabricated Alcan houses, carports, repetitions with variation on a limited number of themes. Where was the book that explained this landscape to me, this yet-to-be-haunted unwilderness where butterflies perched on poured concrete as much as on rocks, where neatly trimmed lawns surrounded gardens more often than

Suburbia in Gerald Lynch and Joan Barfoot

167

bush, where survival was more about paying the mortgage and the cable bill than about fending off progressive insanities? At that time, nowhere. Had I thought really hard about it, I might have come to the conclusion that I lived conceptually in an American space on Canadian soil, because it was American pop culture, mostly television, that reflected images of the suburban life around me. But no, I would have rejected that idea if it had come to me, for this was the seventies, and we still basked in the post-Centennial glow of cultural nationalist pride; while sitting on my desk in a suburban Grade 8 class, I had watched a barely visible image of Paul Henderson forcing that puck past Tretiak on a cheap Board of Education television set, the kind with doors. With my best friend, who lived in a split-level three crescents away from our grey brick bungalow, punching my arm repeatedly with joy, I didn’t need a beer commercial to tell me that I was Canadian. It was only as I read our national fiction that I began to doubt that I actually lived in Canada. So I came to question the relative absence of suburban sites in major Canadian fiction, an absence made all the more significant given that a large proportion of Canadians live in suburban areas. Why might Canadians choose to live in the suburbs yet choose not to write about them? Having grown up in the suburbs, I know the obvious answers. As a teenager, I wanted out. Nothing, I believed, of any consequence ever really happens on a crescent. These are the sites of complacent banality, of the here and now, of everydayness. Art is about the there and then. Excitement takes place elsewhere. At best, suburban sites produce the pleasant smirks of situation comedy. More affluent suburbs than the one I lived in might produce the domestic tragedies of infidelity and murder, but in the fourteen years that I occupied suburban space, no one was ever murdered on my street. There was the odd tale of separation or divorce, and occasionally an untimely death by illness or a drowning out at the quarry. But, in general, we were expected to live out our youth relatively insulated from danger or excitement. As such, I had no tangible reason to hate the suburbs. There were always other kids to hang out with and play sports with, and there was substantial freedom to roam the curvilinear streets without fear. There were playgrounds, a variety store, and for a more ambitious walker, the shopping mall. But I still learned to hate my life there. Was it just adolescent restlessness, or a desire to break from the parental home? For my parents, who immigrated to Canada from the tenements of

168

Paul Milton

post-war Glasgow in the centennial year of 1967, Westminster Park, Phase II, represented the proud dream of home ownership and the promise of opportunity for the kids. Theirs was the suburban dream. But having grown up among the balloon frames and fields of mud, my dreams lay elsewhere, and all that I had heard and read fanned my discontent. The suburbs, I learned, was a place from which you must escape, a not-so-old sow that eats its farrow. My discontent was part of a larger discourse which I later would learn to call ‘the suburban myth.’ In the intervening twenty years since I made my break from the burbs, I have discovered that more writers have taken up the challenge of responding aesthetically to a landscape occupied by a significant number of Canadians. In the eighties and nineties, on both sides of the border, suburban representations acquired a cachet that they never had before as writers who grew up in the post-war suburbs came of age. These writers constitute a second generation of suburban writers, distinct in both practice and attitude from the sixties generation of John Cheever and John Updike, both of whom represented suburban life for an earlier generation coming to grips with post-war suburbanization as a social phenomenon, both as a product of and at odds with modernity. A newer generation, including writers such as Jeffrey Eugenides, Rick Moody, Gloria Naylor, and David Gates in the United States, and Gerald Lynch, Barbara Gowdy, Joan Barfoot, and Michael Turner in Canada, came of age in a world where post-war suburbia was an established fact of life. But what does it signify? As Lisa Salem-Wiseman points out elsewhere in this collection, the city both invites and frustrates the artistic dreams of the hero of the contemporary Kunstlerroman. The suburb offers freedom from urban distraction and the absence of meaningful human connection, so it provides only an ambivalent escape for the artist seeking an authentic milieu. But not all suburbanites are artists seeking to forge do-it-yourself uncreated consciences in the garage workshop of their souls. My interest lies in examining how writers respond to the everyday life of the suburbs, particularly in terms of two notions, the dream that informed my parents’ vision of suburbia and the myth that informed mine. City dwellers have been motivated to relocate to the suburban areas for a number of different reasons throughout the history of suburbanization. During periods of industrialization on both sides of the Atlantic, wealthier citizens sought the romantic escape from urban pollution into the fresh air and clean water of the countryside. How-

Suburbia in Gerald Lynch and Joan Barfoot

169

ever, later movements to suburbia came as industries decentralized and sought cheaper land on the outskirts; workers often followed in order to be close to the source of employment (Linteau 260). The economies of mass production also attracted many buyers to inexpensive serviced lots in subdivision developments. In the post-war years, for many, the suburbs represented an opportunity to take advantage of post-war prosperity to escape tenancy into ownership, to escape the caprices of landlords. Still others struggled to obtain the two salaries necessary to make the upward move. As the automobile became more affordable and more widely available, the distance from the suburb to the urban centre became increasingly less significant to potential buyers. In the final thirty years of the twentieth century, many urban geographers, sociologists, and journalists turned their attention to the suburbs as an increasingly significant element in the built environment. Early critical evaluations of the suburbs were often disdainful of suburban developments, characterizing them as bland, inorganic, faceless, and lacking in culture. In the United States, the suburbs were also seen to be the space of ‘white flight,’ the exodus of middle-class white city dwellers from urban industrial pollution and the social problems imagined to be the concomitant of city life, particularly after the great migration of African-Americans from the agrarian South to the industrialized North; hence, the suburbs were seen as homogeneous in race and class. These negative views of life in the suburbs have been collectively categorized as the ‘suburban myth.’ Negative criticism has focused on the social dimension of suburbia, the negative environmental effects of suburban dependency on the automobile, the escapist politics of city flight, the aesthetic banality of mass-produced tract housing, and the implicit acceptance of consumerism. As early as 1960, sociologists were beginning to speak of the existence of a ‘suburban myth,’ a negative view of life in the suburbs that may have been exaggerated to serve the desires of urban critics. Herbert J. Gans writes that the myth posits a new breed as mass produced as the houses they lived in, driven into a never ending round of group activity ruled by the strictest conformity. Suburbanites were incapable of real friendships; they were bored and lonely, alienated, atomized, and depersonalized. As the myth grew, it added yet more disturbing elements: the emergence of a matriarchal family of domineering wives, absent husbands, and spoiled children, and with it, rising marital friction, adultery, divorce, drunkenness, and mental illness. In

170

Paul Milton

unison, the authors chanted that individualism was dying, suburbanites were miserable, and the fault lay with the homogeneous suburban landscape and its population. (xv–xvi)

Gans locates the myth in the popular fiction and journalism of the time, but acknowledges that it also influenced some academic studies of suburbia. S.D. Clark concurs in his 1966 study of Canadian suburbia: ‘So deeply imbedded in sociological thinking, however, is the suburbia myth that it has determined the very design of much of the research undertaken’ (5). Although the suburbs themselves changed over time, aspects of the critical approach towards them evolved more slowly. More than thirty years later, Richard Harris and Peter Larkham still see the need to contextualize their collection of suburban studies in terms of negative myths: Too often are the aesthetics of suburbia, and the middle-class suburban lifestyle, derided by a cultural elite – often professionals, well-educated and of upper-class origins ... Too rarely is the general satisfaction of suburban dwellers with their lifestyle adequately explored ... suburbia is, after all, home to the many, and a lifestyle to which many aspire ... In short ... the suburban experience is dominated by academic and professional myths, based in part on prejudice and in part on lack of knowledge. (3)

In other words, the attacks on suburbia are displaced attacks on middleclass philistinism that ignore the lived experience of suburban dwellers. In response to such a position, many studies have been undertaken that rely on participant observation, surveys, and interviews to counterbalance preconceptions fostered by the myth. The duality at the heart of the critical discourse surrounding suburbia has been characterized differently by a number of critics. Richard Harris says the duality reflects two opposing views: one that emphasizes individual agency in the production of society and views suburbia as answering the aspirations of workers, and its opposite, which emphasizes institutions as the primary determinant in human history and sees suburbia as a place where workers end up living (Unplanned Suburbs 15). Engin Isin distinguishes between modernist critics, who view suburban sprawl as socially alienating, economically unsustainable, environmentally destructive, and aesthetically displeasing, and postmodernist apologists, who see the suburbs as the vital and vibrant new frontier of urbanism (‘Metropolis Unbound’ 115). For Isin’s modernists,

Suburbia in Gerald Lynch and Joan Barfoot

171

suburbia causes alienation, while the postmodernists see it as an effect of either structural causes or individual decisions on the part of suburbanites. Neither narrative takes into consideration social, political, or economic conditions. Government policy assuredly plays a major role since suburbia could not have flourished or grown as quickly without the mortgage support of the Federal Housing Administration in the United States (Jackson 203) and the Dominion Housing Act in Canada (Belec). Similarly, road-building and public-transportation initiatives contribute to the development of suburban space. But the desires and aspirations of individual families also play a role in the decision to move from the city to the suburban fringe. A more rationalized approach recognizes the interaction between both individual and institutional influences. Many commentators in the past twenty years have oriented their research towards correcting the view of the ‘suburban myth’ critics, challenging the race, class, and gender assumptions of the myth. Barbara Kelly’s 1993 analysis of Levittown balances the view that the repeated design patterns of Levitt’s tract housing reinforced gender roles and separate spheres with the view that residents embraced home improvement as a means of individualizing their own spaces. Kelly also emphasizes that while many academic and journalistic critics of suburbia lambasted the banality of Levittown and its lack of Gemeinschaft community, the inhabitants of the development were at pains to emphasize their own satisfaction with the environment built around them. Robert Fishman also points out that the twentiethcentury suburb extended the benefits of suburban living, which had been accessible only to a bourgeois elite in the nineteenth century, to the entire middle class (15). Even the notion that the suburbs were consistently the site of middleclass flight from urban problems has been challenged. Canadian research has been particularly informative in this regard. Richard Harris, in his study of owner building in the blue-collar suburbs of Toronto in the first half of the twentieth century, says that the relative absence of scholarly attention to working-class suburbs reflects a refusal among North Americans to acknowledge the realities of class stratification in their own society: ‘Even the best blue-collar suburbs were less than ideal; the worst could appear mean and ugly. They were not likely candidates for myth making. Their very presence might seem to blemish, or even to challenge, the middle-class suburban ideal’ (Harris 286). Harris notes that the lack of private or public transit serving the subur-

172

Paul Milton

ban fringe of Toronto made it less attractive to developers, so the prospect of inexpensive land drew immigrant workers out where they could build their own houses (279). Indeed, the real impetus for middleclass migration to the suburbs probably came from the mortgage guarantees of the Dominion Housing Act (1935–8), which favoured middle-class and affluent homeowners (Belec 61). As Larry McCann has shown, Canadian suburbs remained socially diverse in the early twentieth century, but as time passed, entry into the suburbs became less accessible to certain groups. Federal housing policy in the interwar years imposed standards on new suburban developments that, combined with the increased cost of modern house building, limited suburban house ownership to buyers from certain income brackets. But the desire to own remained a powerful cultural imperative: ‘a suburban lifestyle was believed accessible to all consumers who shared in the modern assumption that the acquisition of urban property (rather than land per se) was now the measure of personal achievement. Happiness resided in owning a home and enjoying the pleasures of suburban living’ (112). The suburban dream consists in this notion of desire for a better living environment in a suburban setting. Given the large population of suburban North America, there have been relatively few attempts to chronicle suburban life in literature. ‘Who sings the song of the suburbs?’ Philip Nicholson has plaintively asked. ‘Where is its poet? Where is the Woody Guthrie of Woodmere, the Sinclair Lewis of Levittown?’ (207). Nicholson dismisses much suburban literature on the grounds that the suburbs merely provide the backdrop for universal themes and struggles. If literature demands conflict, perhaps suburbia’s association with the flight from conflict renders it relatively non-aesthetic. The suburbs contain people who are satisfied that they have realized their dream: ‘The ground floor struggle for a better life is over. All that remains for apparently contented homeowners and those who accept or emulate their values is getting a little more (or a lot, depending on the level of ambition) of the same’ (208). Yet others see suburban writing as riddled with narratives of frustration, broken dreams, broken marriages, and failed families. Consistent with the suburban myth, as articulated by Gans, many writers represent the suburbs as soulless and their families as dysfunctional. More often than not, the suburbs are represented as sites of everyday monotony leading to dissatisfaction or as the quiet backdrop against which gothic horror or absurdity takes place. In her study of three representa-

Suburbia in Gerald Lynch and Joan Barfoot

173

tive ‘American’ writers of the 1960s and 1970s (one of whom is Alice Munro), Marilyn R. Chambers finds evidence of the view that suburbs are ‘places where living space has become confining, isolating, and fragmenting, and where apparent order and even gentility effectively conceal the darker side of life that grows more sinister by repression’ (216). In a recent study, Catherine Jurca locates a racial myth of white dispossession in a number of pre-war attempts to deal with the suburban phenomenon. Jurca suggests that there is a ‘tendency in twentiethcentury literary treatments of the American suburb to convert the rights and privileges of living there into spiritual, cultural and political problems of displacement, in which being white and middle class is imagined to have as much or more to do with subjugation as with social dominance’ (4). Suburban literature colonizes the margin through narratives of alienation in which the suburban house loses its status as a privileged site of connection and stability or the artefacts and habits of domestic culture jeopardize or destroy the emotional texture of the home (Jurca 4–5). In other words, the suburban house subverts the desires of the suburban dreamer, and the dream becomes a nightmare. The place of escape becomes the place of a different kind of imprisonment. Dissatisfaction may continue to dominate expressions of suburban existence, but then does this not also describe urban fiction and rural fiction in some ways? Gerald Lynch’s Troutstream filters his analysis of suburban life through two literary intertexts that inform us that dissatisfaction is not site specific: Eliot’s The Waste Land and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. If you read enough twentieth-century literature, you’ll probably come to the conclusion that nobody’s happy anywhere. So while novels set against suburban backdrops may often feature narratives of dissatisfaction or regret, neither regret or the appropriation of a victim discourse particularly defines suburban fiction. Rather, the dynamism of suburban narrative may result from the interaction between the competing discourses of the dream and the myth. I want to turn my attention now to two representations of suburban life: Joan Barfoot’s 1982 novel Dancing in the Dark and Gerald Lynch’s 1995 novel Troutstream. Barfoot’s novel works on assumptions consistent with the gender narrative of the myth in a story of marital disintegration and madness. Lynch’s novel, or short-story sequence if you prefer, presents a variety of stories set in a suburb diversified by class and circumstance. Madness figures here too, as do the gothic elements, but only as partial stories within a complex whole. Lynch invokes the suburban myth but acknowledges the persistence of the dream; he

174

Paul Milton

recognizes the determinist institutional position while remaining aware of the agency of suburbanites in the construction of suburban space. In Joan Barfoot’s Dancing in the Dark, Edna Cormack manifests some of the characteristics associated with the suburban wife in the suburban myth. The caricature of the bored housewife figures prominently in many versions of the suburban myth. Within this caricature, the repressed sexuality of the bored housewife becomes something of a male erotic fantasy as well as the parody of that fantasy; Kathy Baker’s performance in director Tim Burton’s suburban satire Edward Scissorhands captures the role effectively as she flirts suggestively with the appliance repairman who has been summoned to repair an unbroken dishwasher. The combination of a confining domestic role and the advantages of post-war consumer technologies left the caricatured housewife bored, and, proverbially, an idle mind is the devil’s workshop. Where suburban housewives aren’t seen as adulterous tinderboxes, they are seen as frustrated shrews ruling a matriarchal ghetto ‘in which husbands and fathers were reduced to harried visitors who turned over their paycheques to becurlered, complaining, coffee-klatching wives and materialistic whining children, whereas wives and mothers were reduced to neurotic, child-driven chauffeurs’ (Kelly, Expanding 99–100). Valerie Korinek points to a 1958 Chatelaine article, ‘The Sickness in Our Suburbs,’ which argued that the ills of suburbia were caused by a blurring of gender roles creating unnatural matriarchies and that the demands placed on women compromised their femininity (303). In such representations of the suburban housewife, the woman becomes a metonym for the general dissatisfaction of the commuter husband, who also experiences a diminishment of his masculine identity. Veronica Strong-Boag suggests that the Canadian woman’s experience of suburban life proved to be more diverse than the profoundly negative image presented by American feminist Betty Friedan. While the post-war suburb did produce a kind of feminine ghetto, many of the women who were part of the ‘suburban experiment’ found suburban life to be ‘a step up in terms of convenience, comfort, and security. Days previously spent as tenants, in too few rooms and without domestic conveniences, could make even modest bungalows feel very good. While not without flaws, suburbs were a good deal better than alternatives’ (Strong-Boag 502). At base, Strong-Boag’s research shows that the experiences of suburban women ‘were neither homogeneous nor uncomplicated’ (504). As such, no singular story can be seen to be representative of the experience of suburban women.

Suburbia in Gerald Lynch and Joan Barfoot

175

But Edna’s story is representative of certain aspects of the mythical housewife. Her shift to the suburbs from a working-class city background takes the form, in her mind, of an escape from the oppressive lives of her parents. Her marriage to Harry, an ambitious business student, affords her the chance to construct her own bourgeois utopia and to escape the unpleasant reality of her parents’ house: That dark, sad house where even the smells were damp and heavy; that house where despair and grimness and disappointment and impatience warred to become the theme of each day. Where the couch and chairs were dark brown, nubbly and cheap, and the curtains were heavy and lined, and all the wood was painted over and as brown as the furniture. Where wallpaper had light colours but heavy designs, great green flowers and ferns slammed onto white so that it was a wonder they stayed up; so cumbersome one might expect to get up one morning and find a heap of paper greenery tumbled on the floor. (31)

Edna marries to escape the stagnant atmosphere of the city house; in this, her flight resembles the flight of the urban middle class from the oldness of the industrial city to the newness of contemporary housing. Suburbia offers airiness and freshness in comparison to the dankness of her parents’ limited horizons. Both her suburban house and her own body become symbols of the immaculate ideal that she craves. She devotes her life to keeping the house clean; indeed, the cleanliness of the house becomes an index of her perfection as a wife and her worthiness to exist in the utopia she has created with her husband. Paradoxically, given the domestic ideals that drive her, Edna’s inability to conceive allows her to preserve the ideal body. Although her failure to conceive a baby would seem to damage her conventional image of perfection, she perceives her lack of stretch marks and scars to provide a compensatory perfection in her youthful body itself. Her unblemished body, like a Grecian urn, suggests an escape from history and the ravages of time and decay. Her perfect body acts as an analogue for her perfect house, classical, clean, and tidy. But her suburban ideal is shattered when an acquaintance tells her that her husband, Harry, has been having an affair with his secretary. In Edna’s mind, Harry’s infidelity represents a blot on the perfection that her obsessive devotion to cleanliness has produced, a destruction of the domestic ideal that she has imbibed from women’s magazines. In retrospect, she seeks to explain the failure of her marriage in some imperfec-

176

Paul Milton

tion in her cleaning rituals: ‘If I could track back through my days, could I find the spot I missed? It must be somewhere in that house. Under a bed, or in the corner of a closet?’ (80). She regards Harry’s infidelity as a judgment on some failure on her part to uphold the domestic ideal of the bourgeois utopia. Her image of perfection is shattered shortly after her fortieth birthday, when she begins to worry about aging. After the phone call, Edna takes stock and begins to realize that her sexual relationship with her husband was not as transcendent as she had heretofore assumed it to be. She had imagined sex as a means of escape from a condition in which she loathed herself: she had expected the act to be ‘a loss of self, a splitting of bonds’ (58). Ironically, she only finds the escape that she sought in both sex and her suburban dream through the murder of her husband: ‘It is the way I once thought making love would be: a soaring loss of consciousness, transcendence, and removal. I have gotten out of myself at last – so this was the way; and I am joined and free. This instant is wholly mine, and I am so free and light, tiny and light, a helium being’ (179). If the murder of her husband produced the soughtfor transcendence, then her marriage and her suburban domesticity had been merely another form of the prison she had escaped in leaving her parents’ home. She had traded the prison of her father’s house for the prison of her husband’s house, and the flight to suburbia had merely altered the furnishings of her cell. Barfoot’s version of the suburban dream gone bad depends upon her protagonist’s unresisting susceptibility to models of femininity represented in women’s magazines. Edna is allowed little agency for resistance. As a child, she would pose before mirrors ‘mimicking advertisements in my mother’s magazines, those models selling dresses and cosmetics’ (24). It puzzled her that her mother bought such magazines without following their advice and imitating their images: ‘The magazines and books, the world itself outside our own, showed clearly that the real and normal system was the reverse of the one in our home. My parents unaccountable aberrations’ (25). She describes her mother as a ‘mutant of a woman’ for this failure (25). Edna’s suburban dream, built on a foundation of self-loathing, is characterized as an illusion perpetrated on an unsuspecting and uncritical receiver of ideological messages who is inspired to an act of class treachery by the promise of her own shiny domestic bliss in a consumerist utopia. Strong-Boag says that the initial generation of post-war suburban housewives were both victims and beneficiaries of the suburban dream (504); Edna seems only

Suburbia in Gerald Lynch and Joan Barfoot

177

to be the victim of this cultural illusion, despising her family’s reality and escaping into an unachievable fantasy. Formally, the first-person narrative focuses our attention on the relative solitude of Edna’s suburban experience. Edna represents the suburban emphasis on the private domain, figured architecturally by fences and property lines. In Edna’s neighbourhood, the fences symbolize deeper divisions between herself and the other women. Although she has coffee with the neighbouring women, she never fully develops friendships with them: ‘The conversations were not intimate. It was partly, I think, because Harry and I did not have children. The others did. It was a big thing to talk about, and a big thing not to have. It made a space’ (87). Although she alludes to the social elements of suburban lives – backyard barbecues, pool parties – her narrative never represents them in detail. They remain the trappings of social interaction, but they have no significant impact on the developing story. We see Edna alone or with Harry – she embodies the suburban as the retreat from the social. Edna’s deteriorating mental state also complicates Barfoot’s representation of suburban life. Edna’s obsessive cleaning and her violent reaction to her husband’s infidelities suggest psychological instability, a mad violence barely repressed by the surface of suburban existence. This theme of suburban life as a powder keg of middle-aged frustration and unfulfilment is familiar to readers of John Cheever, the American writer known as the ‘Chekhov of the suburbs,’ who has described his own fictional suburbs as ‘metaphors for human confinement’ (O’Hara 132). Edna’s dream fails when she recognizes that she has exchanged one confinement for another; her act of murder violates the tidiness and order of the bourgeois suburban household, itself a metaphor for the escape from the disorder and violence of the industrial city. The shock comes from the appearance of the crime of passion in the passionless suburb. Surely, these things don’t happen in suburbia. In contrast to Barfoot’s single-family gothic version of the suburban dream, Gerald Lynch’s 1995 novel Troutstream emphasizes the class diversity that develops in the suburbs over time. Where Barfoot builds her narrative around the central fact of Edna’s descent into madness and murder, Lynch maintains the presence of evil in the background of his stories, as a motif that provides a pervasive sense of menace. The suburban dream is haunted by desire. There are hints of darkness about several characters, though none is explicitly identified as evil. Lynch manipulates the gothic tendencies of other representations of suburban

178

Paul Milton

life by providing the book with a manifestation of real evil in the murder of two local girls. At the same time, there are intimations of an inchoate evil afoot in the suburb represented by the unexplained subterranean booming heard by residents. Eugene Davies, a zealous neighbourhood politician, supposes the noise comes from unregulated explosions at a nearby quarry. Iris O’Connor, a psychic who lives in the local townhouse complex, interprets the same sounds as evidence of some rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouching towards Troutstream. She has visions of a ‘great moaning desire’ (64). Frank O’Donaghue, a teacher who suffers a nervous breakdown after the death of his mother and the murder of one of his students, interprets the immanent presence of evil as the return of Elvis. It might be more appropriate to consider Troutstream as a linked short-story sequence than as a novel. The various chapters focus on distinct characters at roughly the same moment in history. Some chapters involve first-person narration by their protagonists while others are in the third person. While the narrative that forms each chapter emphasizes the story of an individual or an individual family, the polyphonic nature of the connection in the novel emphasizes the social. The resultant interplay of voices approximates the multiplicity of the suburban population, from the settled professionals on Anglers Court through the working-class inhabitants of the complex and the underemployed and welfare recipients in the subsidized housing project. In making Troutstream the central focus of this novel, or short-story sequence, Lynch develops a historical understanding of shifts in the suburban dream. Troutstream, a late-1950s development, consists of three phases of development; the first is the original suburban dream, single-family dwellings punctuated by park space: There, some twelve models of houses originally dubbed Garden Homes repeat distantly to avoid the impression of sameness that colours so many latter-day developments in their tempered pastels and earth tones. Here and there, individual contractors were licensed to build custom-made houses. Here, a triple-gabled house rests not too close to a modestly deceptive backsplit of equivalent square footage; there, two identical bungalows sit side by side in the kind of sameness that distinguishes twins. Everywhere in the development trees were saved by design, mature trees were planted at great expense, and saplings have grown into flourishing thirty-year-olds. A good number of the homes back not onto other yards,

Suburbia in Gerald Lynch and Joan Barfoot

179

but onto those evergreen and maple-shadowed walkways which are generously interrupted by small parks and the more open fields of schools. Circular by design and self-contained by greenbelt, Troutstream will eventually deliver walkers back to where they began, conveying the impression that, in the pictorial sense, the setting has no real background, only a foreground of garden homes and a mid-ground of parks and trees. (17–18)

Lynch’s description suggests that the older Troutstream North escapes the ‘urbanist’ criticism that suburbs demonstrate no concern for design. Troutstream appears to realize the initial ideal of suburban living – the attempt to merge the conveniences of modern living with a natural setting. Mature trees indicate the harmonious combination of modernity and pastoralism, which was the original appeal of suburban living. But Lynch notes the solipsistic circularity of the development’s design. Troutstream folds back in upon itself. Symbolically, the circularity of the design reflects the desire to withdraw into a self-contained perfection, not unlike Edna’s expectations of her suburban house, a perfect untouched surface that excludes the dangers of the outside. Historically, however, suburbs like Troutstream have failed to maintain that insularity and exclusivity. Over time, Troutstream has expanded to include townhouses and a subsidized housing project. Although Troutstream North may have been built to facilitate the escape of ‘white flight,’ its attempts at exclusion have failed and a more inclusive development has evolved. So Lynch’s suburb becomes the site of tensions among spatially differentiated class interests: the second wave of the original professional class that inhabited the suburb from its beginnings live in Troutstream North and feel superior to the inhabitants of the areas south of Inglis Road. They are the settled homeowners committed to long-term residency in the suburb, in contrast to those in the townhouses, who are all hurrying to something better or worse, to a small detached house beyond Troutstream to the east, in a new development like some Legoland uncrated on a planet whose atmosphere contains defoliant; or, if suddenly lucky in love or a lottery, to an older home in the leafy streets north of Inglis; or, if suddenly unlucky, to the subsidised housing project, or some other project. In the Complex south of Inglis families also come and go because fathers up and leave when, upon entering middle age, they see purposelessness everywhere: in their work, their children, their gadget-clogged residences,

180

Paul Milton

their cereal, their marriages. They leave the children who weren’t reared properly anyway and the women with poor incomes originally intended as supplemental, leave for a last fling at satisfying desire. (67)

Lynch’s suburb reflects some of the diversity of desire and attitude that is ignored by the purveyors of the suburban myth. But Troutstreamers of all phases are unified by their common disillusionment, a disillusionment that is expressed in different ways and in different voices here, one of which is the voice of Elvis, or perhaps to conform to the dialogic principle of the book, the voices of Elvis in the form of Elvis impersonators gathered for a karaoke competition in the conclusion of the book. The presence of Elvis in the text brings us to Lynch’s central parodic gesture: the book recontextualizes both Eliot’s Waste Land and its own primary pre-text, the Fisher King legend, integrating local folklore (La Corriveau, Big Jacques) and popular culture. The suburb itself takes its name from the original planner’s desire to acknowledge his funding from the Izaak Walton Foundation by naming the various streets in a fishy motif drawn from The Compleat Angler. The irony is that there are no fish for the taking in Troutstream. The king that must be healed is the ‘King,’ Elvis himself. As in Eliot’s poem, the novel mobilizes multiple voices of the disillusioned and the defeated in presenting a picture of the compromised or shattered suburban dream. The body of the king mirrors the degradation of the suburban dream in Lynch’s novel. The early Elvis as slim, vigorous object of desire corresponds to the initial post-war suburban dream; the later Elvis, referred to by Frank O’Donaghue as ‘the Vegas Porker,’ represents the decadence of that dream – the lean vision of a consumerist owner-occupied suburbia has given way to a site of compromise, infiltrated by renters and subsidized housing, a flabby suburb in decay. Teacher Frank O’Donaghue represents the voice of the dream, beaten and broken by the evolution of the suburb: ‘To the sensible rest of us, Troutstream North is one of the few remaining communities that looks affordable, holding out the possibility of recovering and continuing that spankingly clean dream of the suburban fifties. That was a good dream, make no mistake’ (113). But in the face of change, O’Donaghue breaks down; his nostalgia for the post-war dream becomes an obsession with the figure of the early Elvis. O’Donaghue is also obsessed to some degree with the murder of the talented young student Teresa Archer. Like the disintegration of Elvis, the murder of Teresa shatters his idealism.

Suburbia in Gerald Lynch and Joan Barfoot

181

O’Donaghue’s idealism, figured because of his age on the pop culture of the 1950s, resembles the 1960s idealism of Les Mellanson, the aging hippie whose life appears to be going nowhere. His collapsing dream collides with the cynicism of journalism student Dennis Ames, who achieves success from what one of his professors likens to detached retina: ‘a mechanically correct ... eyeball without the impulse to convey meaningful messages to the brain’ (102). Ames’s journalism thesis derives from a fabricated set of notes written on a trip to the Mexican town of Malaconsejado (roughly translated, ‘ill-advised’). But Ames can only make narrative sense of his notes with the assistance of Mellanson’s wife, Linda, whose role in life seems to be to attach herself to needy cases. A special education teacher, she attends to (in turn) her husband Les (psychologically damaged by both drugs and guilt over the death of his twin brother Wes), Dennis (who has the fabricated raw material for his thesis, but doesn’t understand its significance), and Frank. Like Les, who works as a handyman in the complex, Linda effects repairs on these damaged individuals. Troutstream itself is in need of symbolic repair; the novel occasionally points to holes in the ice and gaps in the bushy barrier separating Troutstream from the construction of the new bypass, suggesting that the circularity figured in the design of the suburban streets is permeable. The novel concludes with an envoi, which licensed some reviewers to link Lynch’s fictional suburb to his own academic interest in Stephen Leacock, whose Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town also famously concludes with an envoi. But Troutstream is much darker than Mariposa and probably owes more to Winesburg, Ohio, than to Leacock’s small town. The envoi in Troutstream offers some respite from the pervasive menace that has haunted the satire. A family attending the annual Troutstream Fun Fest confronts the menace when their ten-year-old daughter goes missing in the crowd. The menace intensifies when a neighbour tells them she was seen going off with one of the Elvis impersonators. But when she returns unscathed with an autograph, the tension is allayed. In the same chapter, the family’s twelve-year-old blind son has a vision – he sees a spot of light – and exorcizes the evil. The ninth of nine Elvis impersonators produces a near-perfect version of the pre-army Elvis singing ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’ with its Messianic line, ‘Shall I come back again?’ And at long last, a fish is caught in the trout stream. There is hope in the symbolic fish for the resurrection of the dead suburban dream and a return of the fallen king, but it will be a chastened suburban dream, one that has come to recog-

182

Paul Milton

nize the non-ideality of suburban existence, the unreality of the suburban myth, and the presence of evil that suburban flight had sought to escape. Both of these novels revisit and revise the suburban dream, acknowledging the illusory quality of its claim to transcendence. Lynch, however, seems to concede the historical changes in the suburban dream over time. Lynch’s suburb reflects the tensions that emerge through the changes in the demographic makeup of suburban space over time. While the suburbs may have initially held out the promise of bourgeois escape from an increasingly overburdened city, in time they come to be the logical extension of the expanding city. What the bourgeois elite fled in the first instance comes out to meet it as the suburbs evolve. I speak now from the position of having returned in middle age to the kind of landscape I so eagerly sought to escape as a teen. Having moved from my parents’ suburban bungalow to a downtown apartment and then through jobs and education which took me through a number of small towns and cities in southern Ontario and Nova Scotia, I now reside in a suburb in the BC interior, about three-thousand miles away from Westminster Park. I didn’t do it out of choice, per se, but out of a need to find a suitable and affordable house to raise my two teenage children. Mind you, I didn’t recoil from the prospect of curvilinear streets and backyard barbecues as much as I might have ten years ago. The dream didn’t drive me here, but neither did the myth frighten me off. But it’s a different suburb I find myself in now, a suburb that occupies space in the interface between urban settlements and the edge of the forest. It is the bucolic space of the suburban dream, with park-like lots dotted with Ponderosa pines, and spectacular views of Lake Okanagan. I should say, it was that bucolic space, until 22 August 2003, when the Okanagan Mountain Park forest fire pursued its own suburban aspirations down my street, consuming more than two hundred south Kelowna houses, including my own. A lightning strike in the park during a summer drought produced a massive fire that burned many of us out and frightened thousands of others for the last few weeks of the summer. All of a sudden, those themes of survival don’t seem so far away, and perhaps I can believe that things of consequence do happen in suburbia, not just myths and dreams. Perhaps even the stuff of literature.

Transnational Urbanism in Catherine Bush

183

Duelling and Dwelling in Toronto and London: Transnational Urbanism in Catherine Bush’s The Rules of Engagement john clement ball

Although London, England, is not a Canadian city, Canadian novelists often turn to it as a site for explorations of individual and national identity. London’s history as the central node of the British Empire, together with its contemporary status as a multicultural ‘world city,’ make it a uniquely overdetermined setting. An examination of postwar Canadian novels set there reveals a recurring narrative in which a young woman, between nineteen and twenty-one years of age, migrates to the metropolis to escape something limiting or unpleasant in Canada. Arriving on the cusp of adulthood, the protagonists in a variety of fictions reinvent themselves and come of age in London, which proves to be an enabling space of access, opportunity, and broadened horizons. They pursue more-or-less successful careers and romantic relationships; through the education in culture, loyalty, and morality these experiences provide, each character arrives at a reinvigorated understanding of the ways the Canadian past has made her who she is. London becomes most interesting for how the worldly experience it provides both clarifies and complicates notions of identity that originate in and persistently return to Canada. Versions of this narrative can be found in novels as diverse as Robertson Davies’s A Mixture of Frailties (1958), Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle (1976), and Kate Pullinger’s The Last Time I Saw Jane (1996). In the most recent variation on the theme, Catherine Bush’s The Rules of Engagement (2000), London emerges as a transnational space of global relatedness. Fully and multiply interlinked with the world, Bush’s London is an enabling space that in various ways – demographically, historically, imaginatively, politically – includes and engages with national others and elsewheres. Specifically, it includes others from Asia and

184 John Clement Ball

Africa and becomes intimately interlinked (through the narrator’s mental and physical journeys) with their homelands as well as with the elsewhere of Toronto. As a result of her experiences in London, Arcadia Hearne, the young Canadian at the centre of Bush’s novel, gains a new understanding of her embeddedness in the world and a new vision of her ethical responsibilities and potential transnational agency. Her journey towards a new level of worldly engagement has significant implications for Canada at a time when, as Andrew Cohen argues in While Canada Slept, our diminished international commitments – to ‘defence, aid, trade, and diplomacy’ (3) – have seriously undermined ‘our Place in the World.’ In his 1984 essay ‘Of Other Spaces,’ Michel Foucault describes the contemporary experience of the world as one of ‘simultaneity’ and ‘juxtaposition’; we dwell less in time, he says, than amid ‘a network that connects’ ‘the near and far ... the side-by-side ... the dispersed’ (22). In the early 1990s, the geographer Doreen Massey proposed an influential model of place that, like Foucault’s, applies to Bush’s London. Because ‘the social relations which constitute a locality increasingly stretch beyond its borders,’ Massey writes, ‘it seems that you can sense the simultaneous presence of everywhere in the place where you are standing’ (Space 162). Instead of thinking of a locality or place as ‘bounded ... as singular, fixed and unproblematic in its identity’ and defined against ‘the other which lies beyond’ it, she invites us to see places as ‘open and porous’; their identities are defined not by what they contain but by ‘the specificity of the mix of links and interconnections to that “beyond”’ (Space 5). But even though the multiplicity of our increasingly globalized and multicultural places can be disorienting, Massey opposes rearguard efforts to stabilize and circumscribe place-identities. A relational view of place, she argues, can be enabling: ‘Instead ... of thinking of places as areas with boundaries around, they can be imagined as articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings. And this in turn allows a sense of place which is extra-verted, which includes a consciousness of its links with the wider world, which integrates in a positive way the global and the local’ (‘Power-Geometry’ 66). London is especially suited to being envisioned as a global locality, a hub in a network of spatial and temporal relations. Its imperial history made it a centre of worldwide power, influence, and trade; in the era of decolonization that began after the Second World War, the metropolis has increasingly become a demographic microcosm of the world. In a phenomenon sometimes called ‘the reinvasion of the centre,’ it has

Transnational Urbanism in Catherine Bush

185

come to be inhabited, reterritorialized, and transformed by hundreds of thousands of migrants from former colonies. By the 1990s, when Bush’s narrative is set, London was much more willing to acknowledge and embrace its multiculturalism than it had been in the 1950s and 1960s. The same is true of Toronto, which has adopted ‘The World Within a CityTM’ as its official tourism slogan and ‘calls itself the most heterogeneous city in the world’ (Toronto; Cohen 13). In both cities, the immigrants so often resisted as a threat to white Englishness or Canadianness were, as their numbers and cultural influence grew, beginning to be recognized as contributors to a multicultural identity that was each city’s post-war inheritance. A revised sense of what it meant to be a Londoner or a Torontonian (or, for that matter, a Briton or a Canadian) emerged as a function of international changes. Post–Cold War shifts in national boundaries and influence, combined with an increasingly mobile global populace, meant that throughout the world traditional place-identities were becoming destabilized. According to the editors of Space and Place: Theories of Identity and Location, ‘The presumed certainties of cultural identity, firmly located in particular places which housed stable cohesive communities of shared tradition and perspective, though never a reality for some, were increasingly disrupted and displaced for all’ (Carter et al. vii). Describing this phenomenon theoretically requires the assertion of ‘a more fluid and relational notion of difference’ and ‘identity’ (x). David Morley and Kevin Robins argue, quoting Alexander Lisser, that ‘In the context of centuries of imperialism and cross-cultural contact, we would do better to think of human societies as open systems “inextricably involved with other aggregates, near and far, in weblike, netlike connections”’ (129). Imperialism certainly brought diverse societies into new (if unbalanced) networks and webs of interconnection; modern communications media have done the same, as Marshall McLuhan conveyed with that most famous metaphor for the internationalized locality, the ‘global village’ (Gutenberg Galaxy 31). In the decades since McLuhan’s coinage, during which information technology, multinational capitalist restructuring (i.e., ‘globalization’), and border-crossing migration have had massive effects on the identities of places and peoples, some theorists see the whole notion of locality disappearing. For Manuel Castells, the identity-endowing properties of ‘place’ are being submerged by a dynamic, liminal, nationless ‘space of flows’ that increasingly dominates human activity (6). However, the teleology of a world of porous bound-

186 John Clement Ball

aries and places evacuated of social meaning that a pure ‘space of flows’ would create is resisted by theorists who seek to preserve a role for place. Erica Carter and her co-editors assert that ‘If places are no longer the clear supports of our identity, they nonetheless play a potentially important part in the symbolic and psychical dimension of our identifications’ (xii). The psychological and ethical journey of Arcadia Hearne in The Rules of Engagement involves a process of fashioning a self that is imbricated in two different views of London: as a unique place with a strong, historically embedded identity, and as a link in a globalized space of flows that is separate from but virtually connected to the ‘world.’ Arcadia has lived in London for ten years since abandoning her undergraduate degree at age twenty-one and fleeing Canada secretly ‘to escape the past’ (38). Two young men with whom she was involved fought a duel over her in a Toronto ravine, an event she witnessed but did not stop. Without knowing whether the man who was shot would live, and without leaving a note for her family, she unlinked herself from home and self and vanished across the ocean. ‘I burned with desire,’ she says, ‘for transformation, to create a new life’ (39); ‘I wanted a blank slate. No traces. Terra nullius’ (38). The London to which she fled was, for Arcadia, a safe ‘haven’ from which she assumed she would never return (13). But ten years later she is drawn out of isolation through experiences that force her to reconsider her own agency – specifically, her willingness to intervene at sites of conflict, whether in international affairs or interpersonal ones. Her refusal to try and prevent the duel continues to haunt her, yet her life in London parallels that earlier detachment. She works for a think tank called The Centre for Contemporary War Studies, where she theorizes about military intervention from a secure position of non-involvement far from any war zones. In her office, she is both protected and connected: ‘These rooms are our shell, the carapace that hides the telecommunication lines and fiber-optic cable and complex binary codes that store our information and connect us to each other, to colleagues, and to conflicts around the globe. We cross borders with ease this way, even though the computers are chained to bolts in the floor’ (15). As these spatial metaphors make clear, the border crossing is only virtual. It exists in the abstract space of McLuhan’s global village or Castells’s space of flows rather than in a material world of real, separate places. The ‘white cocoon’ of Arcadia’s flat contains an old-fashioned, low-tech version of that same virtual connectedness: one wall is cov-

Transnational Urbanism in Catherine Bush

187

ered with ‘maps dotted with pins and pencil lines to demarcate the world’s restlessly new and shifting borders’ (13). These are the hot spots to which she and London are connected but from which, she believes, they are protected. Arcadia glibly excuses herself from more tangible links: ‘The work I do is perfectly valid. I’m a theorist. I hardly need to race about the globe. Besides, I value safety. And here in London I’ve found a sort of safety’ (27). Her views are anachronistic, recalling an old idea of London as a place linked to and acting upon imperial territories while remaining safely untouched by their distant events and retaining a purely ‘English’ identity. Just as that idea has been challenged – by relational models of place, by scholars’ insistence that London and Englishness were not just creators but products of Empire,1 and by the city’s post-war ‘invasion’ by its erstwhile empire – Arcadia is forced to reconsider her avoidance of risks and real border-crossing. In doing so, she wrestles with some of the urgent questions that Morley and Robins ask in Spaces of Identity: ‘How do we position ourselves within the new global cultural space? How do we reconcile our cognitive existence in hyperspace, in the virtual space of electronic networks, with our bodily existence in localised space?’ (38). Arcadia is prodded into reassessing these aspects of her London life when the outside world converges upon her and punctures her cocoon. It does so in the form of Basra Alale, a Somali refugee she is asked to assist, and Amir Barmour, an Iranian who forges passports for refugees and makes her an unwitting participant in this work. Through her involvement with them, Arcadia comes to rethink her avoidance of risks and her selforiented obsession with safety. At the end of the novel, she is about to begin participating more actively and altruistically in zones of international friction. Arcadia’s renewed perspective on the relations between self and world is also prompted by her revisiting, through memory and a return trip, the scenes and states of paralysis her younger self experienced at the time of the duel. The narrative of her Canadian romances is spliced in as memories prompted by her current involvement with a racial and national ‘other’ (Amir) in the world city of London. Bush’s narrative shuttles back and forth between London in 1996 and Toronto in 1986, with the parallels between political and personal intervention – and between wars and duels – clearly drawn and reinforced. Arcadia’s fascination with duels has led directly to her interest in war studies and the book she is writing on military intervention. She has read enough on the history of duelling that she ‘could have drawn up a duelists’ map

188 John Clement Ball

of the city of London’ (77); she views the city as a palimpsest that both conceals and reveals its violent past, observing that in London ‘a history of war was mapped upon the city as scars are mapped upon a body ... I lived in a city saturated by war culture’ (84). Present-day Toronto is similarly laid over its violent past; walking at the Yonge and College intersection, Arcadia recalls a duel there in 1817, musing that there is ‘blood under our feet somewhere’ (223). These layerings are described as physical, if hidden, urban presences. In the immaterial realm of the mental map, Arcadia’s Toronto and London also hide and reveal each other: half-asleep one morning in Toronto, she imagines that under its streets, ‘like a ghost stratum, lay London, remembered, conjured London’ (165). The Rules of Engagement is a tale of two cities, each physically overlaying its own history and imaginatively underlying the other through Arcadia’s experiences in them. They are further linked through resemblances between Toronto’s ravines and London’s canals. Arcadia compares them explicitly, and both are described in separate passages as spaces of wildness and difference where people mysteriously appear and disappear; walking in these heterotopic sites is ‘like entering border country’ and ‘leaving the rest of the city behind’ (17, 69). Like the Atlantic Ocean that separates them, these watery spaces represent inbetweenness and transformation. The Toronto ravine where the duel takes place corresponds to the London canal where Arcadia confronts Amir about his passport forging and deceptive involvement of her in it; in both scenes, Arcadia poises on the brink of involvement and uninvolvement, risky intervention and safe neutrality. In the canal scene, Amir overtly challenges her penchant for detachment; he asks, ‘What are the risks that you’d be willing to take?’ but she later remembers the question differently: ‘what I heard was not only risks, but What borders are you prepared to cross?’ (146, 151). Bush’s prose is peppered with references to borders and border crossing – as literal facts and as metaphors for processes of transformation (of the self, of the lives of others) that always involve a moral imperative. As Amir challenges her, Arcadia plunges from his boat into the canal; she flees from him and then, without telling him, traverses the Atlantic’s watery border to Toronto. Once there, however, haunted by both the recent conflict on the canal and the decade-old one in the ravine, she does not remain detached. Her priorities change from dwelling in London (safely, hermetically, and solipsistically) to dwelling on the past and the lives of others (which involves risk, movement, and outreach). As she revisits key sites and

Transnational Urbanism in Catherine Bush

189

tries to locate those involved in the duel, she also helps Amir stay safe in her London flat, and she goes out of her way to find Basra Alale in Toronto to ‘make sure she’s safe’ (206). When Arcadia crosses the Atlantic again to return to London, it is with a new resolve resulting from her visit to Basra (and her acceptance of a passport-smuggling mission to Nairobi) and also from what she has learned about the consequences of her inaction before the duel. She realizes that if she is going to put herself in the same category of expatriate border-crossers and ‘continent jumpers’ as Amir (126) – who fled Iran illegally and now helps others doing likewise – and if she is going to claim expertise in global military intervention, she must come out of her cocoon and start attaching herself more tangibly to the world. As Arcadia’s journey demonstrates, a city like London can provide temporary escape, anonymity, and seclusion, but eventually its cosmopolitanism will not only enable access to the wider world but enforce engagement with it. If you are living in a place as spatially, politically, demographically, and historically connected as London, Bush implies, you cannot forever shut out the world or the past, or retain only virtual connections with them. Watering and weeding your tiny backyard garden is not enough of a way to make a haven. Larger bodies of land and water must be taken on; other selves must be made safe. In the sanctuary of Arcadia’s childhood bedroom was a trompe l’oeil ceiling with painted stars and moon; this is one of many images of enclosure that, like her office at the think tank, juxtapose safe containment with a virtual openness to the outside.2 After Arcadia’s departure, that painting was eventually erased – a symbol of her growing up and moving out into the ‘real’ world beyond her bedroom walls. A decade later, as her childhood home begins to seem ‘eerily permeable’ (191), Arcadia develops a more mature and expansive ethical position by, in effect, erasing her false image of the world outside London (and outside the walls of her flat) as a trompe l’oeil. London long ago outgrew its walls, and ever since it has been intricately related to the outer world; Arcadia begins to do the same. Her new resolve implicitly involves a more realistic assessment of her own situation. Arcadia’s sense of safety and security in London has always been self-deceiving. She is highly aware of the city’s permeability to violence from Irish outsiders: ‘I learned to fear not rockets or sniper fire but suitcases, briefcases, brown paper packages. Domestic war. Phone booths. Rubbish bins. Letterboxes. Buses. Cars’ (84). And she lives in the metropolis ‘illegally’ and therefore ‘gripped by the

190 John Clement Ball

temporary. I could not shake my fear that at any moment the life I’d fashioned could be taken away’ (39). She is, in T.F. Rigelhof’s words, ‘a refugee of sorts’ (221). Becoming willing to help ‘other’ refugees is a way of acknowledging her own vulnerability – her kinship to them as well as her privileged state of dwelling relative to theirs. Rigelhof also mentions Bush’s debt to modernists such as Joseph Conrad and Thomas Mann. Her rendering of the city certainly begins in the manner Raymond Williams associates with modernist writings, in which the city becomes a function of the consciousness inhabiting and perceiving it (see Williams 239, 243–44). Modernist influences are also apparent in the ways her London and Toronto are places of chance encounters and miscellaneous strangers, about whom Arcadia speculates with an idle detachment. ‘Out of curiosity,’ she writes, ‘I tried to imagine’ how various travellers on the Underground ‘would look transformed by anger’ (3). In his 1903 essay ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life,’ which influenced modernist representations of the city, Georg Simmel wrote that the individual’s greater bombardment by external stimuli and ‘differences’ in the city (compared to the small-town or rural dweller) leads the city dweller to a less ‘sensitive,’ more ‘matterof-fact’ and ‘intellectualistic’ attitude (325, 326). ‘Instead of reacting emotionally’ to the environment, Simmel writes, ‘the metropolitan type responds primarily in a rational manner’ and so ‘creates a protective organ ... against the profound disruption with which the fluctuations and discontinuities of the external milieu threaten’ to unsettle the self (326). This person’s ‘unrelenting hardness’ is caused by a ‘blasé attitude [and] an indifference toward the distinctions between things’ (326, 329).3 Arcadia may be more emotionally engaged than Simmel’s ‘metropolitan type,’ but she is similarly self-contained and intellectualizing in her perceptions of the city and her life in it. The trajectory of Arcadia’s story moves her and her vision of London towards an awareness of the connectedness of self and place that Simmel also moves towards to offset his vision of indifferent detachment: The most significant aspect of the metropolis lies in this functional magnitude beyond its actual physical boundaries ... A person does not end with [the] limits of his physical body or with the area to which his physical activity is immediately confined but embraces, rather, the totality of meaningful effects which emanates from him temporally and spatially. In the same way the city exists only in the totality of the effects which transcend their immediate sphere. (335)

Transnational Urbanism in Catherine Bush

191

Here, almost a century earlier, is a version of the ‘relational’ model of place and individual place-identity that Massey advanced in the 1990s. This is what Arcadia is beginning, at the end of the novel, to embrace – a concept of the self and the city as no longer securely bounded. Bush’s vision of an ethically responsible form of metropolitan dwelling affiliates her narrative to Michael Peter Smith’s notion of ‘transnational urbanism.’ Building on Massey’s work on place, Smith outlines a compelling theory of transnational localities as a corrective to influential models of globalization that, in his view, create a binary schism between a dynamic ‘global’ realm of transnational capital and communication flows and a static ‘local’ domain constituted by ‘embedded communities’ and ‘collective resistance to disruptive processes of globalization’ (102). Such thinking opposes the grounded and bounded authenticity of the local ‘within’ to the spatially dispersed ‘outside’ of a transcendent global sphere that threatens the integrity of locales and nations and is accordingly resisted by individuals and groups seeking to shore up ‘communities’ and threatened place-identities. To break down this binary, Smith argues that ‘the “local” itself has become transnationalized’ (110). He critiques the theories not only of Castells but of Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau, whose writings on the everyday uses of space also, he believes, identify ‘the local’ with a space of opposition to structures of domination that exist in the global realm. ‘In transnational cities,’ Smith writes, ‘people’s everyday experiences are affected by a wide variety of phenomena, practices, and crisscrossing networks which defy easy boundary-setting’ (117). Human dwelling and agency in the contemporary world occur not in valorized local spaces beleaguered by global machinations but among processes whereby networks of power, subsisting at every point from the most ‘local’ to the most ‘global,’ are formed, related to each other, and transformed. Since human agency operates at many spatial scales, and is not restricted to ‘local’ territorial or sociocultural formations, the very concept of the ‘urban’ thus requires reconceptualization as a social space that is a cross-roads or meeting ground for the interplay of diverse localizing practices of national, transnational, and even global-scale actors, as these wider networks of meaning, power, and social practice come into contact with more locally configured networks, practices, and identities. (127)

Even the populist mantra ‘Think globally, act locally’ overly dichotomizes the two realms, and Smith recommends three alternatives:

192 John Clement Ball

‘(1) thinking locally while acting globally; (2) living bifocally, i.e. thinking transnationally while acting multilocally; and (3) thinking and acting simultaneously at multiple scales’ (158). By the end of The Rules of Engagement, Arcadia has begun to do all three of these. While her narrative reveals identity to be complicatedly relational and stretched over multiple spatial scales, it is so not just within a sphere of imaginative awareness and understanding. It also inhabits a sphere of worldly activity – of incipient realpolitik. Even when Arcadia is simply walking – which she does constantly, in both cities – the implications of that activity transcend the local, individual act of resistance that de Certeau would see in it. However, what Bush’s novel may appear to lack is any direct thematic engagement with Canada as a sociopolitical entity and Canadianness as an aspect of identity. Though Toronto plays an important role, Canada as a polity and culture – as a constitutive context for the self – is not foregrounded. Indeed, The Rules of Engagement could be seen as an exemplary recent version of what Frank Davey, in Post-National Arguments, calls the postnational Canadian novel. Reading a group of sixteen novels published between 1967 and 1992, Davey discovers and implicitly laments that the nation’s importance as a field of activity has diminished. In these narratives, he writes, ‘There is usually little faith or interest offered, even in the social and political processes by which communities are constituted or modern states constituted and maintained. As well, in the imaginary geographies the novels construct for their characters to inhabit, the Canadian homeground is more often part of a global field than of any inter-regional Canadian one’ (253). Nationalism has gone AWOL, replaced by ‘various discourses of intimacy, home, and neighbourhood, together with others of global distance and multinational community. Between the local and the global, where one might expect to find constructions of region, province, and nation, one finds instead voyages, air flights, and international hotels’ (258–9). Although the novels he examines are all set partly or entirely on Canadian soil, he finds that in many, ‘neither the text nor its protagonists inhabit any social geography that can be called “Canada.” They inhabit a post-national space, in which sites are as interchangeable as postcards, in which discourses are transnational, and in which political issues are constructed on non-national (and often ahistorical) ideological grounds’ (259). Their narratives typically emphasize ‘individual salvation’ rather than ‘the possibility of a participatory politics’ (253).

Transnational Urbanism in Catherine Bush

193

Arcadia Hearne begins with exactly this bias, of course, but her narrative journey is entirely about a movement towards political agency. That agency is both post-national in Davey’s deprecatory sense (it doesn’t occur on a national field or pursue nationalist goals) and transnational in Smith’s favourable sense (it joins global and local fields in multiply interlinked ways). Davey’s analysis is pervaded by a sense of nostalgia for a more nationalist, sovereign Canada whose loss was heralded by the 1989 Free Trade Agreement, which Ian Angus would later identify as a watershed moment in the decline of a post-war ‘leftnationalist’ ‘consensus’ in which ‘the national pole of identification held sway over other social identities’ in Canada (27, 23). Davey’s own leftnationalism leads to a binary split between the national and the postnational or transnational (which he uses interchangeably). As in the localist discourses that Smith critiques, the nation is seen as the appropriate sphere for political commitments and identifications that will strengthen it against encroachments by multinational, transnational, or continentalist forces. Bush’s novel has no interest in a nationalist mode of political agency, but in its only direct comment on Canadian identity it does point to a thematic reconciliation between national and transnational spheres. Arcadia remarks that Canadian passports are highly desirable among forgers and people-smugglers because ‘traveling as a Canadian is perhaps the easiest way to find safe passage. In a crisis, everyone wants to be one of us. We’re known globally for our innocuousness, our apparent harmlessness’ (154). Arcadia initially personifies this national stereotype: she values invisibility, passivity, detachment from aggression, safe and risk-free observation. But her reluctance to cross physical and ethical borders, she comes to realize, has the potential to be harmful to others in cases where intervening could do some good. Since the novel is steeped in references to military intervention in 1990s hot spots like Bosnia and Somalia – places to which Canadian peacekeepers were sent – an allegorical reading is inviting. Given the debates that have taken place in Canada and globally over the value and timing of military intervention in regards to the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, an allegorical reading may now be more inviting; those developments give Bush’s political themes even greater currency than when her novel was published in 2000. The anxieties that inaugurated the new millennium – global insecurity, border-crossing threats, terrorist enemies of no fixed nationality – gave urgent new contexts to old debates about Canada’s willingness and ability to inter-

194 John Clement Ball

vene in international conflicts. Indeed, in October 2001 William Thorsell argued in the Globe and Mail that ‘Canada needs to leave its teenage years behind’ and embrace its transnational responsibilities. The era of our ‘free-riding posture on security and its sometimes preening stance on morality’ was over: ‘Canada needs to temper its often self-serving idealism in world affairs with more credible commitments to share the burdens of war-making and prevention through stronger counterintelligence and security establishments’ (Thorsell). A renewed national identity, in other words, will be a function of Canada’s willingness to act in diverse capacities – that is, to intervene – on the multiple spatial scales of the transnational while remaining firmly (if less distinctively) independent in its nationhood and military policies. The national soulsearching that accompanied the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns gave new impetus to long-standing debates over Canada’s most appropriate international role: should we aim to be warriors, peacekeepers, mediating diplomats, intelligence gatherers, providers of aid to the less fortunate, or some combination of these and other activities? Recent books by Andrew Cohen and Lloyd Axworthy have agonized over the issue of how Canada can become more worldly, less immature and parochial, more internationally respectable by, among other things, more effectively taking responsibility for the safety and security of others.4 Arcadia, having failed to keep the peace in the duel, seems at the end of the novel to be on the brink of a new role gathering intelligence, mediating between distant nations, and providing a new, subversive form of international aid in the form of a Canadian passport – a compromised but useable symbol of the national identity she is implicitly remaking as she attaches herself more actively to the world. It is among the transnationally engaged people of London that Arcadia begins her journey to renewed agency and identity; it is in Toronto that she furthers it; and it is notably in the airspace between cities and nations that, at the end of the novel, she confirms it. Indeed, in the important role Toronto plays in Arcadia’s journey, The Rules of Engagement can be seen to have further implications for Canada as a polity. London was not the only place whose traditional identity altered as it became more multicultural and more aware of itself as multicultural in the 1980s and 1990s; Canada went through such changes as well. Toronto shares with London the distinction of being among the most multicultural cities in the world. As emplaced identities formerly available in cities and other locales were challenged by global movements, Canadians, too, were rethinking their collective identity as a

Transnational Urbanism in Catherine Bush

195

society. In Morton Weinfeld’s words, ‘Canada [in the 1990s] is becoming a microcosm of the planet, blessed with a growing roster of ethnic and cultural groups contributing to the ever-elusive Canadian identity’ (120). For Reg Whitaker, such local and global changes lead to an enhanced sense of relational identity among Canadians: In a traditional world, we are rooted, placed, located; our identities are ascribed, not achieved. In modernity, we shape and reshape ourselves in interaction with others. There is great promise here, but great insecurity and anxiety as well. We recognize ourselves as we are reflected in the eyes of others. In other words, our recognition of ourselves lies in our recognition by others. (77)

Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, in his influential essay ‘The Politics of Recognition,’ shows how relational (or ‘dialogical’) conceptions of personal identity underlie contemporary demands for cultural recognition (Multiculturalism 32). Such demands have prompted Canada’s Multiculturalism Act and more complex ways of conceptualizing Canadian identity than the old ‘two solitudes’ model of English and French Canada allowed. Indeed, for Ian Angus, ‘Multiculturalism as a social ideal requires that the plurality of ethno-cultures be seen as a key content of a shared national identity’ (144). It also, logically, entails de-emphasizing the old model of relational identity that positions an implicitly homogeneous Canada in relation to the United States and Britain in favour of a national identity characterized in terms of relations with many elsewheres and relations within Canada among peoples originally from many elsewheres. For Angus, multiculturalism should be seen not as a threat to national identity (as it is sometimes seen to be), but its foundation (see 166–7). Basra Alale, whom Arcadia first meets in London, finds refuge in a Somali neighbourhood of multicultural Toronto. The Canada that inadvertently accommodates her is, like the metropolitan ‘world city’ from which she arrived, increasingly transnational and multicultural in its identity; it is correspondingly faced with ethical questions about its responsibilities towards the peoples who come to dwell within its porous borders and constitute its citizenry. In this sense too, then, Bush’s vision of London is also, indirectly, a vision of Toronto and Canada. For Arcadia, London may represent a larger and more expansive ‘world’ than her Canadian home, but as such it transcends its own national space. The metropolis is decentred; no longer an easy symbol of British

196 John Clement Ball

culture, it becomes most significant for the other places it enables Arcadia to travel to, both literally and metaphorically, and for the other people and other times to which it draws her, including Toronto past and present. Moving comfortably through and beyond London, Bush’s narrative figures the former heart of empire most importantly as an international contact zone that ultimately leads Arcadia elsewhere: into an absorbing past, back to a newly understood Canada, out into the real ‘world.’

NOTES 1 See, for instance, Roy Porter’s London: A Social History, Simon Gikandi’s Maps of Englishness, and Ian Baucom’s Out of Place. 2 In a connected but reversed image, Arcadia says that in her childhood, ‘The ravines were rooms, great green rooms expanding around us’ (69). References to the sky, clouds, and the moon recur throughout the novel. 3 C.f. Jane Jacobs: ‘Great cities are not like towns, only larger. They are not like suburbs, only denser. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers’ (‘Uses’ 104). 4 See Cohen’s While Canada Slept and Axworthy’s Navigating a New World.

Epilogue

197

Epilogue justin d. edwards and douglas ivison

Having read the preceding chapters, one becomes acutely aware that the authors of Downtown Canada all share an interest in ‘place’: where we come from, where we are going, and how we reconcile those two. As readers and writers in Canada we are obsessed by this idea. Whether we are discussing the landscape or the cityscape, how we fit as individuals or as a society has been and continues to be omnipresent in Canadian literature. Perhaps this comes from a feeling of angst that our immediate sense of place is threatened by the sleeping elephant of a neighbour to the south, a neighbour who could awake at any moment and crush us with one swift, yet sleepy, movement. Or perhaps it comes from a desire to construct a unified place – a sense of home and belonging – from a series of fragmented languages, cultures, histories, memories, and myths. As Ian Angus suggests in A Border Within, in English Canada anyway, ‘geography becomes important for identity where history has failed to provide it’ (114), leading Canadian writers to engage in a ‘continuing meditation on place’ (115). Canada is an urban country. But the myth of Canada as a non-urban place has, in many respects, worked to construct our imagined community, unifying us through a common sense of place. In so doing, this myth has also been used to distinguish us from our southern neighbour. In 1995, for instance, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation expanded the fifteen-minute Canadian segments of the American children’s program Sesame Street in a way that completely eclipsed the urban setting of the U.S. show. The CBC purchased the rights to the Canadian version of Sesame Street and decided to remake the program: the official Canadian version of the American original was now to be called Sesame Park. This transformation, according to the CBC, would make the program

198 Justin D. Edwards and Douglas Ivison

‘more relevant to Canada’s culture and environment’ (‘Sesame Park’). No longer would we see Oscar the Grouch emerging from his curb-side trash can to discuss life with the diverse cast of whites, African Americans, Chicanos, and Asians who lived on this multi-ethnic street. Apparently the diversity and excitement of an inner-city street did not reflect the Canadian lifestyle. The urban scene, according to the CBC’s producers, was more of an American thing. For, rather than putting in its place a Canadian urban scene emphasizing the particularities of Canadian linguistic and ethnic identities, Sesame Park would feature a small town inhabited by folks like an otter and a bear, a bush pilot, a disabled child in a wheelchair, and her cat. What did an otter, a bear, or a bush pilot have to do with our experiences growing up in Toronto or Ottawa? How were these characters relevant to our version of Canadian culture? And how did the small town reflect our daily lives? Whereas Sesame Street offered us an urban place that was racially mixed and exciting – a homely street that was integrated and comfortable, albeit clearly American – the CBC insisted on turning the Canadian version into something pastoral and rural. By turning to the prevalent myths about Canada, the television production team was engaged in the conventional discourses of nationalism which attempted to distinguish the Canadian program from its American cousin. The underlying logic, then, was that if the United States was urban, then Canada must be non-urban. Even when the central ‘place’ of a text is a Canadian city, the natural world creeps in and becomes a dominant theme. ‘The wind is a sea in Lethbridge,’ writes Rudy Wiebe in Place: Lethbridge, City on the Prairie, ‘and usually by noon the tide rises and the city begins to flood’ (12). Here, the images of Lethbridge’s aging commercial buildings and new subdivisions are submerged by the elements, covered by the paintpeeling wind and the kicked-up sand. This could be a city on the American prairie: the buildings are surrounded by the same flat landscape, the architecture echoes that found in Grand Forks, North Dakota, or Shelby, Montana. But, echoing Sinclair Ross’s classic portrait of the prairie small town, As For Me and My House, Wiebe insists on Lethbridge’s uniqueness – on its Canadianness – by describing a series of natural forces which, to use Richard Cavell’s term, ‘defeature’ the urban environment of Canada’s city on the prairie. Here, the urban scene is erased and the city’s sites are articulated in the familiar language of the wilderness. Urbanization thus gives way to the harsh nature of the landscape, an unexplored and threatening wilderness. Such a conflation, once

Epilogue

199

again, represses the city and replaces it with the metanarratives of Canadian nordicity. This insistence on the city’s subordination to the natural world is, we have suggested throughout this book, part of a place-based struggle to express a sense of self and the desire for a space that constitutes a unique ‘home’ – be it the local neighbourhood or the national home, an indigenous home or one recently adopted. But we must always remember that the politics produced by places in the process of being articulated as ‘home’ is also tied to a politics of identity in which ideas of nationality, ethnicity, race, gender, class, and community are formed. For the politics of identity and place is not simply built around structures of power internal to the local place or even to the globally linked processes of power and homogenization. It is also a politics that is concerned with the nation; a politics constituted by a national history and geography that has composed narratives of self and home into the dominant discourses of belonging within a nation. A range of cultural processes has contributed to this sense of belonging, including the social constructs of natural and urban spaces, which, as binary oppositions, have provided the fundamental building blocks for an imagined Canadian citizenry, as W.H. New has suggested in Land Sliding (156). The processes by which the notions of natural and urban spaces have been defined, articulated, and negotiated are a crucial part of what might be thought of as an important cultural dimension of Canadian nationalism. In the first instance, these processes mark out the very categories of difference that have come to be the positively or negatively ascribed spaces of national identity and the dominant structures of power. But the very making and remaking of identity also occurs through representational and discursive spheres, both official and literary, material and ideological. Indeed, these spaces have always been imagined and energized through signs, metaphors, and narratives. The vitality of such binary spatial constructs in Canada is most likely a result of their being anxiously reinscribed in the face of their contested or uncontainable certainty. It is, in part, this anxious vitality that gives spatial categorizations elaborated in Canada such a long life and allows them to remain cogent features even of those contemporary spaces in the nation that are formally ‘beyond’ the wilderness. As a result, the metropolitan self in Canadian narratives has often been located elsewhere, in New York or London or Paris. It is in this displacement, this dislocation of the urban, that the myths of Canada’s rural culture are intimately tied to discourses of nationalism and the promotion of a non-

200 Justin D. Edwards and Douglas Ivison

urban space that is distinct from the United States or Europe. And yet recent playwrights such as Brad Fraser have begun to rely on an access to American culture in order to find a place for the urban in Canadian cultural production. For instance, Fraser’s Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love draws on the work of Gary Indiana, Dennis Cooper, and Bret Easton Ellis to underscore the harsh brutality of a dislocated metropolis and a correspondence between dark mental realities and the physical location of a bleak post-industrial cityscape. Although Fraser’s play is set in Edmonton, the drama’s action, language, and characters capture urban experiences that could just as easily take place in Chicago or New York. Indeed, the urban sensibility of Fraser’s work reflects various anxieties about disorientation, incoherence, fragmentation, consumption, and alienation and depicts a fragmented postmodern city of isolated individuals beset by guilt, anxiety, and despair. The play, then, explores how internalizing fear produces narratives that centre on psychological disturbance within an urban space – narratives which are dominated by the disorientation and ‘blankness’ of the city. In this place, the destabilizing of the boundaries of the stable subject exacerbates unease about boundaries generally, and uncertainties about difference. A ‘blank’ subjectivity thus arises whereby the individual is not anchored in a secure sense of self, resulting in an identificatory void upon which excess, indulgence, decadence, consumption, and violence are inscribed. This, then, accounts for the emphasis on extreme marginalization and violence, the sense of indifference and indolence, that we find in the cityscape composed by Fraser. For it is here, in this urban context, that the limits of the human body seem indistinct and blurred by brutality, disease, narcotics, and violence. It is this vision of ungrounded subjectivity, distance, and coldness in the city that links Fraser’s play to the elements of ‘blank’ American literature discussed by, among others, James Annesley, and Elizabeth Young and Graham Caveney. Blank writing, they suggest, is preoccupied with the violence, indulgence, excess, decadence, and consumerism of a generation marked by urban despair and a general lack of commitment. In this textual form, of which Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991) is a prime example, bodies become reduced to commodities to be consumed and devoured, offering the violence inflicted upon others as a metaphor for the process of hyper-commodification, which is infiltrating, objectifying, and cutting up the social body of the latetwentieth-century North American city. Likewise, Fraser’s play focuses on a serial killer, and the question at the heart of the drama is, What

Epilogue

201

happens when you discover that your best friend is a mass murderer? Indeed, at the climax of the play, David, the main character, finds out that his close friend, Bernie, is a killer who has been brutally murdering anonymous women in Edmonton. The story of the play, such as it is, focuses on David and his friends – Candy, Bernie, Benita, and Kane – all of whom struggle to find a sense of belonging and home in an indifferent city. David projects himself as an empty vessel who lives only for the excesses of anonymous sex and the consumption of various drugs. David’s insouciance, his urbane coolness, is also part of an urban sensibility that ties him to a cityscape in which everything has been seen and done, nothing can shock or surprise him. From this perspective, Fraser’s work moves beyond the urban-jungle horror of, say, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle or the indifferent urban space of, say, Sinclair Lewis’s Babbit. For the play’s characters – like those found in Ellis’s American Psycho – are not simply affected by the fear and terror, the indifference and malaise, of the cityscape; they perpetuate these urban feelings, so that their own anxieties and cool indifference are ingrained into the city itself. The play, which highlights the blankness of Bernie’s acts, makes powerful links between an urban culture of mass consumerism and the brutal violence which such a society perpetuates. In this context, Bernie’s crimes are not just the acts of an urban monster, but the murders are crimes for which an increasingly commercial, materialistic, and dislocated urban North American culture is forced to take some responsibility. From this perspective, the play is not just an Edmonton story; indeed, the play could be set in any North American city, a fact that Denys Arcand recognized when he set the film version of Fraser’s play in Montreal. Likewise, the off-Broadway production of Human Remains at the Orpheum Theatre made no mention of Edmonton; the setting of the play was changed to New York City. As such, Fraser’s play uncovers the unsettled geography of urban space and the shifting boundaries of national identity within the contemporary moment. The contours, boundaries, and geographies of city-space are thus ‘called upon to stand in for all the contested realms of identity,’ and the Canadianness of the play, if any existed in the first place, is easily displaced within an urban American setting (Vidler 167). The possibility of material and imagined geographies being neatly separate is of course unthinkable – one constitutes the other. But Fraser’s play draws on an urban sensibility that is transnational, and, as a result, the drama is not limited by a nationalist notion of either material or

202 Justin D. Edwards and Douglas Ivison

imagined space. Instead, the fluid space of Fraser’s work, which can move back and forth across national borders, reminds us of Doreen Massey’s assertion that space is a part of an ‘ever-shifting social geometry of power and signification’ in which the material and the ideological are co-constitutive (Space 3). In this case, the play is at home not within a particular nation but in the material and ideological space of the North American city. Whereas traditional conceptions of Canadian literature have often relied on the regional specificities of place to articulate Canadian identity, the urban space of Fraser’s play is not regionally specific, at least not in terms of a national place. The play might be urban-specific, but such a notion is not tied to a specific national identity, and thus the space of Fraser’s play – the North American city – is partly what Marc Augé describes as a ‘non-place,’ meaning a space that, in contrast to the ‘sociological notion of place,’ is not associated with ‘the idea of a culture localized in time and space’ (34). What this does is give rise to a geographical tension, a spatial struggle that is not simply about the control of a territory articulated through the clear binaries of self and ‘other,’ us and them. Instead, the space of the play gestures towards the way in which the local and the global are always at a crossroads, inhabiting a space defined by mergers and intersections. Human Remains is thus a product of the disparate and contradictory geographies of identification produced within the sensibility of a postmodern and continentalist city. As a result, the fluid setting of the drama produces promiscuous geographies of dwellingin-place in which the categories of self and other, here and there, constantly solicit one another. This inter-urban form of spatialization works to disrupt the flow of nationalism by challenging the stereotypes of Canadian space. A similar challenge is made in Russell Smith’s Noise when James Willing – the young writer who Lisa Salem-Wiseman calls an ‘urban hipster’ – waves out a car window at the area surrounding the QEW and states that ‘Novels are like movies now. They can’t be about things here’ (135). As he waves out the window dismissively, James seems to suggest that, in the words of Gertrude Stein, there is no there there. But he goes on to elaborate his comment, saying that this is a recent phenomenon: ‘It didn’t used to be like that. It used to be that you could get a lot of recognition by writing about Canada, as long as it was about small towns and nature ... ‘Yeah. You could have canoes and the prairies ... There was a lady who wrote about fucking a bear, which was like a union with the land. There

Epilogue

203

was a lady who wrote about mystical experiences she had at a cottage in northern Ontario. I was never sure what that was about. They were important at one time, very stern and important. I had to study them in school.’ (135)

Here, James criticizes the notion that the Canadian literary canon – exemplified by works such as Marian Engel’s Bear and Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing – must have a deep and abiding relationship to the land. Those Canadian authors who wrote about ‘here’ were, for him, limited in their settings and subject matter: they were forced to subscribe to the entrenched landscape theory of Frye’s ‘garrison mentality,’ maintaining that the fundamental experience of Canadian literature was that of a malevolent and unyielding land and of the material and conceptual garrisons constructed to protect us from the harsh landscape. But James wonders what this kind of literature has to do with him. How is it related to his life in the city? Certainly the boreal landscape has been used in Canadian writing to develop discourses of difference: Canada, some writers claim, is distinct from, say, England or even the United States because of its harsh climate and rugged terrain, a land that has yet to be tamed. However, for urban writers like James, this form of nationalism is no longer acceptable; the literature that he was forced to study at school does not map out his experience in Toronto, nor does the Canadian canon provide him with a sense of belonging. Instead, when Nicola asks him if Ludwig Boben – the poet whom James is going to interview – is any good, James cannot suppress his contempt and disgust for Boben’s participation in Canada’s landscape literature: ‘There’s one Boben book, I think it’s Cold Season, or maybe it’s Comfort of Winter, which ends with the line, “a story which Canadians must never tire of telling.” What do you think of that line? A story which Canadians must never tire of telling.’ She shrugged. ‘I have no idea.’ ‘I’ll tell you what you think of it. You don’t give a shit. I’ll tell you what I think of it. I don’t give a shit either. But I also think it’s the worst bullshit I’ve ever heard.’ (136)

James’s ‘Canadian story’ does not correspond to Boben’s national metanarrative. As the urban dweller, the young hipster, James’s experience lies outside the vastness of the wilderness: the city is, for him, a homely site of noise, restaurants, cafés, and creativity, a place that offers

204 Justin D. Edwards and Douglas Ivison

him cultural work and the proper setting for his performed insouciance. In the city, his conception of self negotiates between the contradictory poles of engagement and detachment, a negotiation that reflects his fragmented, overdetermined urban environment. James is at once a classically trained violinist and a reviewer of industrial-noise music; he is a respected reviewer of exclusive Toronto restaurants, but he spends most of his personal food budget on pizza; he despises Ludwig Boben’s entire oeuvre, but agrees to write a long, positive article on Boben for Glitter. Such fragmentation speaks to the notion that the city is the site of ambivalence and ambiguity, embodying a complex matrix of opposing forces in both the individual and the larger urban community. Indeed, representations of the city often capture conflicting impulses, pushing and pulling the urbanite in a series of very different directions. For James, like the characters in Human Remains, the city seems to be a place of restlessness, inner conflict, and incoherence. Like Edward Soja’s ‘fractal city,’ which is marked by ‘unsettled complexity and instability’ (283), James’s Toronto with its many layers of conflict shows the cityscape to be a source of perpetual effacement and reformulation of identity, and in Noise the heterogeneous sensory impressions of city life cannot be attenuated by the projection of an ordered narrative onto otherwise random events. The city thus becomes the site par excellence in the elaboration of the postmodern subject, as its constantly reconstructed streets and alleys, its forever changing cafés and restaurants, represent a fragmented mental map that reflects a decentred sense of self. Part of this splintering of identity is also present in the city’s challenge to the narratives of nationhood put forward by Boben and others. By turning to the city, Smith turns his back on the story of the wilderness – the ‘story which Canadians must never tire of telling’ – and thus effaces the imagined national identity that links identity and space. In fact, the story of James the urban hipster need not take place in Toronto; it could just as easily be set in, say, Philadelphia or Vancouver. What Noise explores is the fact that it makes less sense now to think of the nation as defining who people are, how they live, and where they belong. In this sense, Noise captures a situation in which cosmopolitanism weakens the cultural coherence of Canada, while simultaneously illustrating that a sense of cultural coherence in Canada has always been questionable. Lest the seeming loss of national distinctions cause us to go misty-eyed, the increase in cosmopolitanism enables Smith to call the assumed coherence of Canada’s relationship to the wilderness forcefully into question. For, in the text, it is not only James who is

Epilogue

205

affected by the forces of the cityscape. Even Boben, who has been the voice of the land, articulating the poetic mysteries of the forest, is influenced by Canada’s increasingly urbanized society, an expanding city that encroaches upon the landscape. Indeed, Boben is seen to be displaced from the wilderness of which he writes; James finds him living in Burlington, Ontario, a suburban area that lies between the cities of Toronto and Hamilton. This area is an overdetermined space that is both anywhere and nowhere. It is no longer a place in itself, but a by-product of the two cities: Toronto to the east and Hamilton to the west. As such, Burlington is also a homogeneous North American suburb, a subdivision of bungalows, sidewalks, and lawns that could just as easily be located to the west of Cincinnati, Ohio, as to the west of Toronto, Ontario. What does this suburb mean for a poet who writes about the importance of place? What does it mean for a writer who links the Canadian sense of self with the wilderness? One possible answer to these questions is that Boben’s dislocation from the setting of his literature – the ‘vast wilderness of the Western prairie’ – illustrates the cultural poverty of Canada’s metanarrative of the wilderness. Even those poets, like Boben, who constructed the national sense of self as intimately tied to the land are now washed up on the suburban shores of Lake Ontario. The nation has long served as a device for positioning people and literature. And the nation may still stand as the fundamental demarcation of geographical space, the primary organization of place. But cosmopolitanism has meant that the nation is no longer the domino in the only game in town. The nation is not necessarily the primary ideological unit in determining the identificatory divisions of self and other, us and them. Among other things, urbanization and cosmopolitanism link Canada to other places in a virtual and literal sense, paying little heed to national borders. Global forces, in other words, connect the world, so that it makes less sense to think of the nation as defining who people are, how they live, and where they belong. For some, like John Tomlinson, these global forces ‘weaken the cultural coherence of all nation-states, including economically powerful ones’ like Canada (175). While the sense of cultural coherence within the nation has always been questionable (something which the preceding chapters highlight), the transnational flow of people, capital, and goods from city to city does enable us to call this assumed coherence more forcefully into question. This may well be an era of globalization; however, urban Canadian writers like Timothy Taylor have done much to set our ideas of the local

206 Justin D. Edwards and Douglas Ivison

and global city in order. His novel Stanley Park, for instance, attempts to give a sense of rootedness to what can seem like the rootless cosmopolitanism of the North American city, not just through a splash of local colour, but through an acknowledgment that there might be a here here. Indeed, Jeremy, the main character of Stanley Park, is a chef trained in France who returns to his native Vancouver to open the Monkey’s Paw Bistro, a restaurant that only serves local produce. But Jeremy’s obsession with regional ingredients is threatened when Dante Beale, the owner of a transnational chain of coffee bars, becomes the main investor in the Monkey’s Paw. It is through the relationship of Dante and Jeremy that Stanley Park explores the ways in which the local and the global come together to produce new experiences of the local in the global, a process which a number of critics have described as ’glocalization’ (Soja 199). As a result, in Taylor’s text, Vancouver becomes a site where ‘glocalization’ develops out of both a conflict between the local and the global and a celebration of the connectedness between global lives and invididual orders. Dante, for instance, sees an individual’s everyday decisions as having as great an effect on the global outcome as globalization on an individual’s day-to-day life, and he celebrates the dissolution of national boundaries and regional specificity. Jeremy, by contrast, bemoans the loss of authenticity of the local in the wake of globalization; he sees this loss as part of a deterritorialization, whereby spatial experiences are altered so that proximity and distance are reformulated in our minds and everyday lives. But Dante’s enthusiasm for an increasingly homogeneous and globalized city is also motivated by profit and greed. It is here that the culture of urbanization is linked to a culture of commodification and consumption, which is situated within a history of globalizing capital. After all, de Certeau suggests that the ‘language of power is itself “urbanizing” and that the city stands as a totalizing and almost mythical landmark of socioeconomic and political strategies’ (95). If the urban present, as de Certeau and others suggest, is a paradigmatic site of the condition of postmodern capitalism, then perhaps as city dwellers we are cast adrift in an unmappable place of decentred and rootless multinational corporations. Indeed, the spatial and social complexity of the postmodern capitalist city requires a cognitive remapping of space in terms of multinational capital (Jameson 89). And the global city is, for Dante, a place where a multicultural and cosmopolitan population is generated by, and in turn generates, complex transnational financial services. While Vancouver might not be a global city in the same category as London,

Epilogue

207

New York, or Tokyo, Jane M. Jacobs correctly argues that lesspopulated cities like Vancouver now display, albeit on a smaller scale, the same economic power structures and accumulative ways of late capitalism as the super-cities of the developed world (Edge 31). For theorists like Jameson, the accumulative logic of capital appropriates autonomous cultural spheres, resulting in an ‘unauthentic’ culture of commodification, simulation, and pastiche. The forces of capital, then, replace a specific culture that articulated and negotiated a sense of identity. Jameson thus presents us with a space that is stripped of its cultural specificity and replaced with the seamless homogeneity of hyperspace (92). But what Timothy Taylor explores is the new space of a city in which the forces of capital are depicted as being in a complex and contradictory arrangement with the local. Stanley Park does of course represent the undeniable effects of globalization on the city; however, in a seemingly paradoxical reverberation, place specificity and social difference are articulated as strongly as ever. As a result, this novel is in line with the notion that globalization does not always signal the erasure of difference, but can, at times, be held responsible for the reconstitution and revalidation of place, locality, and difference. Taylor’s text, in other words, refuses to deny the need for roots: there is no giving up on a sense of belonging, of having deep and abiding feelings for a place or a series of places, demarcated by memories of streets, alleys, parks, shops, buildings, or food. Jeremy, for example, scorns what he calls ‘post-national’ fusion cuisine; he is only interested in dishes that are ‘respectful of tradition’ and ‘linked to “local” by the inheritance or adoption of a culture, linked to a particular manner and place of being’ (32). His Vancouver restaurant only serves food from the area: local duck, wild Pacific salmon, mushrooms from Vancouver Island. Unlike Dante, who seeks the uprootedness of transnational citizenry of the global village, Jeremy searches for origins and that which is ‘of this place’ (58; his emphasis). But where is this place? What is Vancouver? It is indeed a cosmopolitan North American city, but it is also a place that includes the spectre of the wilderness. Jeremy’s apartment building, Stanley Park Manor, is located between the ‘density of downtown,’ where the prostitutes are ‘floating in the mouths of alleys like salmon,’ and the ‘black bulk of Stanley Park crouch[es] at the foot of his street’ (104, 61). As a result, Jeremy’s movements through the city take him from the multicultural diversity of Crosstown, through the Downtown East Side to the heroin trade of Hastings Street, and eventually on to the forbidding forest of

208 Justin D. Edwards and Douglas Ivison

Stanley Park. Vancouver is thus mapped along various borders and boundaries in which ‘the city abruptly ends and the park begins,’ a series of lines that are not impermeable, but that allow Jeremy and others to move fluidly from city space to wilderness (61). Such fluid movements challenge the urban-wilderness binary, conceiving of these spaces not as distinct or separate entities but as interacting and merging, influencing and altering one another. A hybrid space, then, develops not just through a mixing together, but through a dialogic dynamic in which certain elements of the dominant discourse of Canadian nordicity are appropriated and rearticulated in new ways. From this perspective, the text seizes upon the sign of the metanarrative and contests the dichotomies that have been articulated by authoritative voices. Consequently, in the space of Stanley Park, we find the uncanny return of the wilderness, a place where the once disavowed and repressed subject of the city does not eclipse the forest but coexists with it, providing a local place that is at once homely and unhomely. The wilderness is no longer categorically placed ‘outside’ the city, nor is the city emphatically removed from the wilderness. This constitutes a radical disruption of the spatial ordering of Canada, a reterritorialization of Canadian space which defies measures to repress and contain the city by pushing it to the margins. The incorporation of city and wilderness eradicates the mythic domain and the cultural logic of Canadian space, unsettling the ordered zoning of discrete spaces seen on the transparent mapping of nordicity. In Downtown Canada we have sought to de-tour this map by pointing to texts that transgress the network of the closed narrative frontier that divides us up into distinct spaces. The similar perspectives of our various authors are conjoined in their attention to the relationship between discourse and power, the socially constituted and fragmented subject and the unruly politics of signification. Our readings of Canadian texts, then, propose a new cognitive map that highlights the disordered geographies of the urban present. Indeed, when an activated politics of cultural production and identity articulation are factored into the condition of postmodernity, slightly different stories are told. Not the stories of Ludwig Boben’s prairies or Frye’s garrison mentality, but the stories of complex urban spaces that tread the unstable ground between the local and the global, the authentic and unauthentic, cultural specificity and cosmopolitanism.

Works Cited

209

Works Cited

Adderson, Caroline. A History of Forgetting. Toronto: Key Porter, 1999. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Angus, Ian. A Border Within: National Identity, Cultural Plurality, and Wilderness. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1997. Annesley, James. Blank Fictions: Consumerism, Culture and the Contemporary American Novel. London: Pluto P, 1998. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996. Arnason, David. ‘Canadian Nationalism in Search of a Form: Hugh MacLennan’s Barometer Rising.’ Journal of Canadian Fiction 1.4 (1972): 68–71. Atwood, Margaret. Lady Oracle. 1976. Toronto: Seal, 1977. – ‘The Planters.’ Brown, Bennett, and Cooke 584–5. – ‘Progressive Insanities of a Pioneer.’ The Animals in that Country. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1968. 36–9. – Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. Toronto: Anansi, 1972. Augé, Marc. Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Trans. John Howe. London: Verso, 1995. Axworthy, Lloyd. Navigating a New World: Canada’s Global Future. Toronto: Knopf, 2003. Ball, John Clement. ‘White City, Black Ancestry: The Immigrant’s Toronto in the Stories of Austin Clarke and Dionne Brand.’ Open Letter Series 8, no. 8 (1994): 9–19. Banks, Margaret A. Sir John George Bourinot, Victorian Canadian. His Life, Times, and Legacy. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2001. Barfoot, Joan. Dancing in the Dark. Scarborough, ON: Avon, 1982. Barthes, Roland. ‘Semiology and the Urban.’ The City and the Sign: An Intro-

210

Works Cited

duction to Urban Semiotics. Ed. M. Gottdiener and Alexandros Ph. Lagopoulos. New York: Columbia UP, 1986. 87–98. Bates, Emily Catherine. A Year in the Great Republic. 2 vols. London: Ward and Downey, 1887. Baucom, Ian. Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1999. Baudelaire, Charles. The Parisian Prowler: Le Spleen de Paris. Petits Poemes en prose. 2nd ed. Trans. Edward K. Kaplan. Athens and London: U of Georgia P, 1997. Beebe, Maurice. Ivory Towers and Sacred Founts: The Artist as Hero in Fiction from Goethe to Joyce. New York: New York UP, 1964. Belec, John. ‘The Dominion Housing Act.’ Urban History Review 25.2 (1997): 53–62. Bellamy, Rhoda. ‘The Architecture of Government.’ Construire une capitale: Ottawa / Ottawa: Making a Capital. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 2001. 433–65. Benjamin, Walter. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. Trans. Harry Zohn, London: NLB, 1973. – ‘Some Motifs in Baudelaire.’ Trans. Harry Zohn. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken, 1968. 152–196. Berger, Carl. A Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism, 1867– 1914. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1970. Berry, Michelle, and Natalee Caple, eds. The Notebooks: Interviews and New Fiction from Contemporary Writers. Toronto: Anchor Canada, 2002. Blakeley, Phyllis R., and D.C. Harvey. Glimpses of Halifax. 1949. Canadian Reprint Series No. 55. Belleville, ON: Mika, 1973. Bök, Christian. ‘Destructive Creation: The Politicization of Violence in the Works of Michael Ondaatje.’ Canadian Literature 132 (1992): 109–24. Bok, Edward W. ‘Young Canadian Writers From an American Standpoint.’ Globe [Toronto] 1 April 1893: 17. Bonanno, Giovanni. ‘Barometer Rising and the Birth of Post-colonial Canadian Consciousness.’ Imagination and the Creative Impulse in the New Literatures in English. Ed. M.-T. Bindella and G.V. Davis. Cross / Cultures: Readings in Post/Colonial Literatures in English 9. Atlanta: Rodolphi, 1993. 165–71. Borrett, William Coates. Historic Halifax in Tales Told Under the Old Town Clock. Toronto: Ryerson, 1948. Bourinot, John George. Our Intellectual Strength and Weakness. A Short Historical and Critical Review of Literature, Art and Education in Canada. Montreal: Foster Brown; London: Bernard Quaritch, 1893. Brossard, Nicole. French Kiss. 1974. Montreal: Quinze, 1980. Brown, Russell, Donna Bennett, and Nathalie Cooke, eds. An Anthology of

Works Cited

211

Canadian Literature in English. Rev. and abridged ed. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1990. Buckler, Ernest. The Mountain and the Valley. 1952. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1989. Bush, Catherine. The Rules of Engagement. Toronto: HarperFlamingo, 2000. Calvino, Italo. Le Città Invisibile. Milan: Oscar Mondadori Editore, 1993. Campbell, William Wilfred. Poetical Tragedies. Toronto: William Briggs, 1908. Cannadine, David. Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire. London: Allen Lane / Penguin, 2001. Careless, J.M.S. Frontier and Metropolis: Regions, Cities, and Identities in Canada before 1914. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1989. Carpenter, David. Banjo Lessons. Regina: Coteau, 1997. Carter, Angela. The Sadeian Woman. New York: Pantheon, 1978. Carter, Erica, James Donald, and Judith Squires. Introduction. Space and Place: Theories of Identity and Location. Ed. Carter, Donald, and Squires. London: Lawrence, 1993. vii-xv. Castells, Manuel. The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring and the Urban-Regional Process. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. Caulfield, Jon. Introduction. Caulfield and Peake 3–12. Caulfield, Jon, and Linda Peake, eds. City Lives and City Forms: Critical Research and Canadian Urbanism. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1996. Cavell, Richard. ‘Felix Paul Greve, the Eulenberg Scandal, and Frederick Philip Grove.’ Essays on Canadian Writing 62 (1998): 12–45. – ‘Jane Rule.’ Profiles in Canadian Literature 7. Ed. Jeffrey M. Heath. Toronto: Dundurn, 1991. 159–66. – ‘Material Querelle: The Case of Frye and McLuhan.’ Essays on Canadian Writing 68 (2000): 238–61. – McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography. 2002. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2003. – ‘The Race of Space.’ New Formations 31 (Spring/Summer 1997): 39–50. – ‘Theorizing Canadian Space: Postcolonial Articulations.’ Canada: Theoretical Discourse/Discours théoriques. Ed. Terry Goldie, Carmen Lambert and Rowland Lorimer. Montreal: Association for Canadian Studies, 1994. – ‘“Visibile parlare”: Verga, Derrida, and the Poetics of Voice.’ Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century Italian Novels. Ed. Guido Pugliese. University of Toronto Italian Studies 5. Toronto: Dovehouse, 1989. 135–44. Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. Chambers, Marilyn R. ‘Voices Crying in the Suburbs.’ Kelly, Suburbia 215–22. Clark, S.D. The Suburban Society. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1966. Clarke, Austin. Nine Men Who Laughed. Markham, ON: Penguin, 1986.

212

Works Cited

Clarke, George Elliott. ‘Clarke vs. Clarke: Tory Elitism in Austin Clarke’s Short Fiction.’ West Coast Line 22 (31/1) (1997): 110–28. Clements, Marie. The Unnatural and Accidental Women. Ratsoy and Hoffman 477–520. Cohen, Andrew. While Canada Slept: How We Lost Our Place in the World. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2003. Collin, W.E. ‘Archibald Lampman.’ Archibald Lampman. Ed. Michael Gnarowski. Critical Views on Canadian Writers. Toronto: Ryerson, 1970. Compton, Wayde. 49th Parallel Psalm. Vancouver: Advance, 1999. Connor, Carl Y. Archibald Lampman. Canadian Poet of Nature. New York and Montreal: Louis Carrier, 1929. Cosentino, Andrew J. and Henry H. Glassie. The Capital Image. Painters in Washington, 1800–1915. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1983. Creelman, David. ‘Conservative Solutions: The Early Historical Fiction of Thomas Raddall.’ Studies in Canadian Literature 20.1 (1995): 127–49. – Setting in the East: Maritime Realist Fiction. Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s UP, 2003. Davey, Frank. Post-National Arguments: The Politics of the Anglophone-Canadian Novel since 1967. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1993. David, Jennifer. ‘History of Ottawa from an Aboriginal Perspective: Part 1.’ Ottawa Life Magazine Dec. 2001: 28+. Davies, Barrie, ed. At the Mermaid Inn: Wilfred Campbell, Archibald Lampman, Duncan Campbell Scott in The Globe, 1892–1893. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1979. Davies, Robertson. A Mixture of Frailties. 1958. Toronto: Penguin, 1997. Davin, Nicholas Flood. Eos: A Prairie Dream and Other Poems. Ottawa: Citizen Printing and Publishing Co., 1884. Davis, Robert Murray. ‘Everything Old/New Is New/Old Again: The Fiction of Russell Smith.’ Essays on Canadian Writing 73 (2001): 151–65. Dawson, Aeneas McDonnell. The Last Defender of Jerusalem. Ottawa: Free Press, 1882. – The Temporal Sovereignty of the Pope, with Relation to the State of Italy: A Lecture Delivered in St Andrew’s Catholic Church, Ottawa, with Additional Facts and Observations. London and Ottawa: Catholic Publishers and Book-Selling Company, 1860. – Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra. Ottawa: C.W. Mitchell, 1883. Dawson, Robert MacGregor. The Civil Service of Canada. London: Oxford UP, 1929. Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. 1967. Detroit: Black & Red, 1983. Delaney, Paul, ed. Vancouver: Representing the Postmodern City. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp P, 1994.

Works Cited

213

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Capitalisme et schizophrénie. Mille plateaux. Paris: Les éditions de minuit, 1980. – A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987. Derrida, Jacques. ‘Economimesis.’ Trans. R. Klein. Diacritics 11 (1981): 3–25. Dickinson, Peter. Here Is Queer: Nationalisms, Sexualities, and the Literatures of Canada. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1997. Doherty, Jonathan L. Introduction to the Dover Edition. Men at Work: Photographic Studies of Modern Men and Machines, by Lewis W. Hine. 1932. New York: Dover, 1977. Doucet, Michael J. ‘The Anatomy of an Urban Legend: Toronto’s Multicultural Reputation.’ 2001. Accessed 20 July 2002. Economist. ‘Canada’s New Spirit.’ Economist 27 Sept. 2003: 13. Eddie, David. Chump Change. Toronto: Random House, 1996. Edgar, James David. Canada and Its Capital. Toronto: George N. Morang, 1898. Eggleston, Wilfrid. The Queen’s Choice. Ottawa: National Capital Commission, 1961. Ferguson, Priscilla Parkhurst. ‘The Flâneur on and off the Streets of Paris.’ The Flâneur. Ed. Keith Tester. New York: Routledge, 1994. 22–42. Filion, Pierre, Trudi Bunting, and Len Gertler. ‘Cities and Transition: Changing Patterns of Urban Growth and Form in Canada.’ Canadian Cities in Transition: The Twenty-First Century. Ed. Trudi Bunting and Pierre Filion. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. 1–25. Fingard, Judith, Janet Guildford, and David Sutherland. Halifax: The First 250 Years. Halifax: Formac 1999. Fish, Stanley. ‘Boutique Multiculturalism, or Why Liberals Are Incapable of Thinking about Hate Speech.’ Critical Inquiry 23.2 (1997): 378–95. Fishman, Robert. Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia. New York: Basic, 1987. Fix: The Story of an Addicted City. Dir. Nettie Wild. Canada Wild Productions, 2002. Forbes, E.R., and D.A. Muise, eds. The Atlantic Provinces in Confederation. Toronto: U of Toronto P; Fredericton: Acadiensis, 1993. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Volume One: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1990. – ‘Of Other Spaces.’ Diacritics 16.1 (1986): 22–7. Fraser, Brad. Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love. Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1996. Fries, Marilyn S. ‘The City as Metaphor for the Human Condition: Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz.’ Modern Fiction Studies 24 (1978): 41–64.

214

Works Cited

Frye, Northrop. The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination. Concord, ON: Anansi, 1995. – Conclusion. Literary History of Canada. Gen. ed. Carl F. Klinck. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1965. 821–49. – Conclusion. Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. Carl F. Klinck. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1976. 318–32. Gans, Herbert J. The Levittowners: Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community. New York: Vintage, 1967. Garreau, Joel. ‘Manifest Destiny Lives! We Want the Blue Jays and Niagara Falls ... Mounties, Maybe ... But Not Quebec.’ Washington Post 17 June 1990: D1. Gelfant, Blanche. The American City Novel. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1954. Gikandi, Simon. Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism. New York: Columbia UP, 1996. Godard, Barbara. ‘The Geography of Separatism.’ Revue de l’Université Laurentienne 9.1 (1977): 46–62. – ‘En mémoire de l’avenir: Les stratégies de transformation dans la narration de Jovette Marchessault.’ Voix et images 49 (1991): 100–15. Golden, Anne. ‘Cities Are Pivotal to Innovation.’ National Post 22 July 2002: FP9. ‘Gowan’s Hall.’ Daily Citizen [Ottawa] 2 March 1872: 3. Grant, George Parkin. Technology and Empire. Toronto: Anansi, 1969. Gray, John. ‘Forever Home.’ Globe and Mail 29 June 2002: F2. Greenhill, Ralph, and Andrew Birrell. Canadian Photography, 1839–1920. Toronto: Coach House, 1979. Grosz, Elizabeth. Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space. Cambridge, MA.: MIT P, 2001. – ‘Bodies-Cities.’ Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies. New York: Routledge, 1995. 103–110. Grove, Frederick Philip. ‘Snow.’ Brown, Bennett, and Cooke 187–204. Hall, Neal, and Kim Bolan. ‘Eight Names Added to List of Missing Women.’ Vancouver Sun 7 Oct. 2004: A1-2 Harel, Simon. ‘La parole orpheline de l’écrivain migrant.’ Montréal imaginaire: ville et littérature. Ed. Pierre Nepveu and Gilles Marcotte. Montreal: Fides, 1992. 373–418. – Le voleur de parcours: Identité et cosmopolitanisme dans la littérature québécoise contemporaine. Montreal: Le Préambule, 1989. Harney, Nicholas DeMaria. Eh, Paesan! Being Italian in Toronto. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1998. Harris, Richard. Unplanned Suburbs: Toronto’s American Tragedy, 1900 to 1950. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996.

Works Cited

215

Harris, Richard, and Peter J. Larkham, eds. Changing Suburbs: Foundation, Form and Function. London: Routledge, 1999. Harrison, Susan Frances. Pine, Rose and Fleur de Lis. Toronto: Hart and Co., 1891. Hébert, Anne. Le premier jardin. Paris: Seuil, 1988. Heighton, Steven. The Shadow Boxer. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2001. Henighan, Stephen. When Words Deny the World: The Reshaping of Canadian Writing. Erin, ON: Porcupine’s Quill, 2002. Hine, Lewis W. Men at Work: Photographic Studies of Modern Men and Machines. 1932. New York: Dover, 1977. ‘Hon. Mr. Archibald’s Speech at the Mechanics’ Institute Festival.’ Ottawa Times 7 Feb. 1868: 2. Howe, Joseph. ‘Address. Delivered before the Young Men’s Christian Association, Ottawa, February 27, 1872.’ Poems and Essays. Intro. M.G. Parks. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1973. 317–37. Huggan, Graham. ‘Decolonizing the Map.’ The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. Ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin. New York: Routledge, 1995. 407–11. – Territorial Disputes: Maps and Mapping Strategies in Contemporary Canadian and Australian Fiction. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1994. Hurst, Alexandra J. The War among the Poets: Issues of Plagiarism and Patronage Among the Confederation Poets. London, ON: Canadian Poetry Press, 1994. Isin, Engin F. Being Political: Genealogies of Citizenship. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2002. – ‘Metropolis Unbound: Legislators and Interpreters of Urban Form.’ Caulfield and Peake 98–127. Itwaru, Arnold Harrichand. The Invention of Canada: Literary Text and the Immigrant Imaginary. Toronto: Tsar, 1990. Jackson, Kenneth T. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985. Jacobs, Jane. ‘The Uses of Sidewalks: Safety.’ 1961. The City Reader. Ed. Richard T. LeGates and Frederic Stout. London: Routledge, 1996. 104–8. Jacobs, Jane M. Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City. New York: Routledge, 1996. Jameson, Fredric. ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.’ New Left Review 146: 53–92. Janigan, Mary. ‘Saving Our Cities.’ Maclean’s 3 June 2002: 22–7. Jannetta, Armando E. ‘Onomastic Devices in Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion.’ Commonwealth: Essays and Studies 13.2 (1991): 92–103. Johnson, Jeri. ‘Literary Geography: Joyce, Woolf and the City.’ The Blackwell

216

Works Cited

City Reader. Ed. Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. 60–70. Joyce, Greg. ‘Pickton Hearing Adjourned until June 30.’ Vancouver Sun 24 April 2003: B4. Jurca, Catherine. White Diaspora: The Suburbs and the Twentieth-Century American Novel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2001. Keats, John. Poetical Works. Ed. H.W. Garrod. London: Oxford UP, 1956. Keith, W.J. Literary Images of Ontario. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1992. Kelly, Barbara. Expanding the American Dream: Building and Rebuilding Levittown. Albany, NY: SUNY P, 1993. Kelly, Barbara, ed. Suburbia Re-examined. New York: Greenwood, 1989. Kemble, Roger. The Canadian City, St John’s to Victoria: A Critical Commentary. Montreal: Harvest House, 1989. Kent, Rockwell. Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska. New York: Modern Library, 1930. King, Anthony D. Global Cities: Post-Imperialism and the Internationalization of London. London: Routledge, 1990. Klinck, Carl Frederick. Wilfred Campbell. A Study in Late Provincial Victorianism. Toronto: Ryerson, 1942. Koolhaas, Rem. Delirious New York. A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. New York: Oxford UP, 1978. Korinek, Valerie J. Roughing It in the Suburbs: Reading Chatelaine Magazine in the Fifties and Sixties. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2000. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror. New York: Columbia UP, 1991. Kroetsch, Robert. ‘Disunity as Unity: A Canadian Strategy.’ The Lovely Treachery of Words: Essays Selected and New. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1989. 21–33. – ‘F.P. Grove: The Finding.’ The Stone Hammer Poems. Lantzville, BC: Oolichan, 1976. 46–7. – ‘No Name Is My Name.” The Lovely Treachery of Words: Essays Selected and New. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1989. 41–52. Lamoureux, Georgette. Ottawa 1876–1899 et sa population canadienne française. Ottawa: Author, 1982. Lampman, Archibald. Among the Millet and Other Poems. Ottawa: J. Durie and Sons, 1888. – At the Long Sault and Other New Poems. Ed. Duncan Campbell Scott. Toronto: Ryerson, 1943. Lane, Patrick. ‘The Unyielding Phrase.’ Canadian Literature 122–3 (1989): 57–64. Lee, Nancy. Dead Girls. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2002. Lee, SKY. Disappearing Moon Café. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1990. Lefebvre, Henri. Le droit à la ville. Paris: Anthropos, 1968.

Works Cited

217

– The Production of Space. 1974. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Lehan, Richard. The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History. Berkeley: U of California P, 1998. Lett, William Pittman. Recollections of Bytown and its Old Inhabitants. Ottawa: Citizen, 1874. Linteau, Paul-André. ‘Canadian Suburbanization in a North American Context : Does the Border Make a Difference?’ Journal of Urban History 13.3 (1987): 252–74. Loriggio, Francesco. Introduction. Social Pluralism and Literary History: The Literature of the Italian Emigration. Ed. Francesco Loriggio. Toronto: Guernica, 1996. 7–28. Lustiger-Thaler, Henri. ‘Community and Social Practices: The Contingency of Everyday Life.’ Urban Lives: Fragmentation and Resistance. Ed. Vered AmitTalai and Henri Lustiger-Thaler. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1994. 20–44. Lynch, Gerald. Troutstream. Toronto: Random House of Canada, 1995. MacKenzie, John M. ‘The Persistence of Empire in Metropolitan Culture.’ British Culture and the Decline of Empire. Ed. Stewart Ward. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2001. 21–36. MacLennan, Hugh. Barometer Rising. 1941. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1989. MacMechan, Archibald. ‘Storied Halifax.’ The Book of Ultima Thule. 1927. 2nd ed. Toronto: McCelland and Stewart, 1928. 29–46. Mair, Charles. Dreamland and Other Poems. Montreal: Dawson Brothers; London: Sampson Low, Son and Marston, 1868. Majzels, Robert. City of Forgetting. Toronto: Mercury, 1997. – Interview with Lianne Moyes. The Matrix Interviews: Moosehead Anthology 8. Ed R. Allen and Angela Carr. Montreal: DC Books, 2002. 127–45. Maracle, Lee. ‘Yin Chin.’ An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English. 2nd ed. Ed. Daniel David Moses and Terry Goldie. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1998. 290–4. Marchand, Philip. ‘Literati Leave Big Smoke Out in the Cold.’ Toronto Star 23 Nov. 2002: J4. Marchessault, Jovette. Des cailloux blancs pour les forêts obscures. Montreal: Leméac, 1988. – Comme un enfant de la terre/1. Le crachat solaire. Montreal: Leméac, 1975. – La mère des herbes. Montreal: Quinze, 1980. – ‘Les vaches de nuit.’ Tryptique lesbien. Montreal: Pleine Lune, 1980. Martens, Klaus. F.P. Grove in Europe and Canada: Translated Lives. Trans. Paul Morris and Klaus Martens. Edmonton: U of Alberta P, 2001.

218

Works Cited

Martin, Constance. Distant Shores: The Odyssey of Rockwell Kent. Berkeley: U of California P, 2000. From an exhibit held at the Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, MA: 24 June–29 Oct. 2000. Massey, Doreen. ‘A Global Sense of Place.’ Studying Culture: An Introductory Reader. Ed. Ann Gray and Jim McGuigan. London: Edward Arnold, 1993. 232–40. – ‘Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place.’ Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change. Ed. Jon Bird et al. London: Routledge, 1993. 59–69. – Space, Place and Gender. London: Polity, 1994; Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994. Mathews, Robin. ‘Hugh MacLennan: The Nationalist Dilemma in Canada.’ Studies in Canadian Literature 1 (1976): 49–63. McCann, Larry. ‘Suburbs of Desire: The Suburban Landscape of Canadian Cities, 1900–1950.’ Harris and Larkham 111–45. McGee, Thomas D’Arcy. ‘The Mental Outfit of the New Dominion.’ Towards a Canadian Literature: Essays, Editorials and Manifestos. Ed. Douglas M. Daymond and Leslie G. Monkman. Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1984. 74–89. McLuhan, Marshall. ‘Address at Vision 65.’ The Essential McLuhan. Ed. Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone. Toronto: Anansi, 1995. 219–32. – The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1962. – ‘John Dos Passos: Technique vs Sensibility.’ Dos Passos: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Andrew Hook. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974. McLuhan, Marshall, Kathryn Hutchon, and Eric McLuhan. City as Classroom: Understanding Language and Media. Agincourt, ON: Book Society of Canada, 1977. ‘Mechanic’s Festival.’ Ottawa Times 5 Feb. 1868: 2. Mendell, Marguerite. ‘New Social Partnerships: Crisis Management or a New Social Contract?’ Urban Lives: Fragmentation and Resistance. Ed. Vered AmitTalai and Henri Lustiger-Thaler. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1994. 71–92. Metson, Graham, ed. The Halifax Explosion, December 6, 1917. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1978. Michaud, Ginette. ‘De la “Primitive Ville” à la Place Ville-Marie: lectures de quelques récits de fondation de Montréal.’ Montréal imaginaire: Ville et littérature. Ed. Pierre Nepveu and Gilles Marcotte. Montreal: Fides, 1992. 13–95. Moffatt, Laurie Norton. Foreword. Distant Shores: The Odyssey of Rockwell Kent. Constance Martin. Berkeley: U of California P, 2000.

Works Cited

219

Moore, Paul, and Meredith Risk, eds. Culture of Cities: Under Construction. Oakville: Mosaic P, 2001. Morgan, Henry J. Bibliotheca Canadensis or, A Manual of Canadian Literature. Ottawa: G.E. Desbarats, 1867. – Recollections of Father Dawson. Ottawa: Paynter and Abbott, 1895. – ‘Ottawa Society.’ Globe [Toronto] 1 June 1895: 1. Morin, Marie. Les Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal, 1659–1725. Histoire simple et véritable. Montreal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1979. Morley, David, and Kevin Robins. Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries. London: Routledge, 1995. Moss, John. Patterns of Isolation in English Canadian Fiction. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1974. Moyes, Lianne. ‘French Kiss in the Urban Corps.’ Paper presented at ‘Montreal and Vancouver: Imagining and Writing our Cities.’ Simon Fraser University, March 1993. Mumford, Lewis. The Culture of Cities. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1938. Munt, Sally. ‘The Lesbian Flâneur.’ Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities. Eds. David Bell and Gill Valentine. New York: Routledge, 1995. Myers, Charles S. Shell Shock in France, 1914–1918. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1944. Nasaw, David. Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements. New York: Basic, 1993. Nepveu, Pierre, and Gilles Marcotte. Montréal imaginaire: Ville et littérature. Montreal: Fides, 1992. New, W.H. Land Sliding: Imagining Space, Presence, and Power in Canadian Writing. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1997. Nicholson, Philip Y. ‘The Elusive Soul of the Suburbs: An Inquiry into Contemporary Political Culture.’ Kelly, Suburbia 207–14. Niedzviecki, Hal. ‘Welcome to the Concrete Forest: Population 30 Million.’ Concrete Forest: The New Fiction of Urban Canada. Ed. Niedzviecki. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1998. xi–xx. Norris, Douglas, and Cindy-Ann Bryant. ‘Demographic Change in Canada’s Urban Areas: Results from the 2001 Census.’ Canadian Issues Feb. 2003: 11–13. O’Brien, Mike. ‘Manhood and the Militia Myth: Masculinity, Class and Militarism in Ontario, 1902–1914.’ Labour / Le Travail 42 (1998): 115–41. O’Donnell, Kathleen. ‘The Wanderer in Barometer Rising.’ University of Windsor Review 3.2 (1968): 12–18. O’Hara, James Eugene. John Cheever: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1989. Olier, Jacques. Les Véritables Motifs des Messieurs et Dames de la Société de Notre-

220

Works Cited

Dame de Montréal pour la conversion des Sauvages de la Nouvelle France. 1643. Mémoires de la Société historique de Montréal, neuvième livraison. Montreal: Berthiaume et Sabourin, 1880. Ondaatje, Michael. ‘An Interview with Michael Ondaatje.’ Interview with Eleanor Wachtel. Essays on Canadian Writing 53 (1994): 250–61. – In the Skin of a Lion. 1987. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 1996. Pache, Walter. ‘Urban Writing.’ Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada. Ed. W.H. New. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2002. 1148–56. Parker, George L. ‘Charles G.D. Roberts.’ Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature. 2nd ed. Ed. Eugene Benson and William Toye. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1997. 1007–10. Perosa, Sergio. ‘Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion and the Building of Cities.’ Imagination and the Creative Impulse in the New Literatures in English. Ed. M.-T. Bindella and G.V. Davis. Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1993. 181–9. Persky, Stan, and John Dixon. On Kiddie Porn: Sexual Representation, Free Speech, and the Robin Sharpe Case. Vancouver: New Star, 2001. ‘Personal.’ Daily Citizen [Ottawa] 23 Oct. 1884: 3. Pesch, Josef. ‘Globalized Nationalisms: Michael Ondaatje’s Novels and (Post)Colonial Correctness.’ Zeitschriff für Kanada-Studien 17.1 (1997): 96–109. Pharos. ‘Pharos at Ottawa.’ Globe [Toronto] 19 May 1894: 6. Pike, Burton. The Image of the City in Modern Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1981. Pile, Steve, and Nigel Thrift. Mapping the Subject: Geographies of Cultural Transformation. London: Routledge, 1995. ‘The Poet and His Poem.’ Evening Journal [Ottawa] 18 May 1895: 6. Porter, Roy. London: A Social History. London: Hamilton, 1994. Potvin, Claudine. ‘Entrevue avec Jovette Marchessault.’ Voix et images 47 (1991): 218–29. Pullinger, Kate. The Last Time I Saw Jane. Toronto: Little, 1996. Pyper, Andrew. Lost Girls. Toronto: HarperCollins, 1999. Raddall, Thomas H. Halifax, Warden of the North. 1948. Rev. ed. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1971. – In My Time: A Memoir. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1976. – The Nymph and the Lamp. 1950. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1963. Radice, Martha. Feeling Comfortable? The Urban Experience of Anglo-Montrealers. Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2000. Ramadanovic, Petar. ‘From Haunting to Trauma: Nietzsche’s Active Forgetting and Blanchot’s Writing of the Disaster.’ Postmodern Culture 11.2 (2001). 11 March 2001. .

Works Cited

221

Ratsoy, Ginny, and James Hoffman, eds. Playing the Pacific Province: An Anthology of British Columbia Plays, 1967–2000. Toronto: Playwrights Canada, 2001. Razack, Sherene. ‘Introduction: When Place Becomes Race.’ Race, Space, and the Law: Unmapping White Settler Society. Ed. Razack. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2002. Reevely, David. ‘Surrey School Board Rejects Same-Sex Books.’ Vancouver Sun 13 June 2003: B6. Reid, John G. Six Crucial Decades: Times of Change in the Maritimes. Halifax: Nimbus, 1987. Rigelhof, T.F. ‘Catherine Bush and the Other Talent in the Room.’ Essays on Canadian Writing 73 (2001): 208–26. Roberts, Charles G.D. The Collected Letters of Charles G.D. Roberts. Ed. Laurel Boone. Fredericton, NB: Goose Lane, 1989. – ‘When Twilight Falls on the Stump Lots.’ Brown, Bennett, and Cooke 117–20. Robin, Régine. ‘Presentation.’ Études françaises 36.2 (2000): 5–9. – La Québécoite. Montreal: Québec/Amérique, 1983. – ‘Sortir de l’ethnicité.’ Métamorphoses d’une utopie. Ed. Jean Lacroix and Fulvio Caccia. Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle/Triptyque, 1992. Roper, Henry. ‘Archibald MacMechan and the Writing of the “Halifax Disaster.”’ Ground Zero: A Reassessment of the 1917 Explosion in Halifax Harbour. Ed. Alan Ruffman and Colin D. Howell. Halifax: Nimbus and Gorsebrook Research Institute for Atlantic Canada Studies at Saint Mary’s University, 1994. 85–90. Rosenblum, Walter. Foreword. America and Lewis Hine: Photographs, 1904–1940. New York: Aperture, 1977. 9–15. Ross, Sinclair. ‘A Field of Wheat.’ Brown, Bennett, and Cooke 301–8. Roy, Gabrielle. La petite poule d’eau. Montreal: Beauchemin, 1950. Roy, Marina. Sign After the X. Vancouver: Advance, 2001. Rule, Jane. Contract with the World. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1980. – Detained at Customs: Jane Rule Testifies at the Little Sister’s Trial. Vancouver: Lazara, 1995. – The Young in One Another’s Arms. New York: Doubleday, 1977. Saggs, H.W.F. Civilization before Greece and Rome. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1989. Sandalack, Beverly A., and Andrei Nicolai. Urban Structure – Halifax: An Urban Design Approach. Halifax: TUNS P, 1998. Saul, John Ralston. Reflections of a Siamese Twin: Canada at the End of the Twentieth Century. Toronto: Viking, 1997. Schuster, Marilyn R. Passionate Communities: Reading Lesbian Resistance in Jane Rule’s Fiction. New York: New York UP, 1999.

222

Works Cited

Scott, Duncan Campbell. The Magic House and Other Poems. London: Methuen, 1893; Ottawa: Durie and Son, 1893. Seret, Roberta. Voyage into Creativity: The Modern Künstlerroman. New York: Peter Lang, 1992. ‘Sesame Park.’ Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. . Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974. Shrive, Norman. The Voice of the Burdash: Charles Mair and the Divided Mind in Canadian Literature. London, ON: Canadian Poetry Press, 1995. Sibley, David. Geographies of Exclusion. London: Routledge, 1995. Simmel, Georg. ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life.’ Trans. Kurt H. Wolff. The Sociology of Georg Simmel. New York: Free P, 1950. 409–24. – ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life.’ On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings. Ed. Donald N. Levine. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1971. 324–39. Simmins, Geoffrey, ed. ‘Documents Relating to the 1859 Ottawa Parliament Buildings Competition.’ Documents in Canadian Architecture. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 1992. 59–76. Simon, Sherry. Hybridité culturelle. Montreal: L’Île de la tortue, 1999. Smith, Michael Peter. Transnational Urbanism: Locating Globalization. Malden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. Smith, Neil. Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space. New York: Blackwell, 1984. Smith, Russell. ‘Arts Community? Gay Community? Napster Community? I Hear the C-word and I Reach for my Walkman.’ Globe and Mail 19 Aug. 2000: R5. – ‘Dear [Non-]Reader, It Might Not Be Your Fault.’ Globe and Mail 11 Dec. 2002: R1–R2. – ‘From High Art to the Music of Liposuction.’ Globe and Mail 8 June 2002: R6. – Noise. Erin, ON: Porcupine’s Quill, 1998. – Young Men. Toronto: Doubleday, 1999. Soja, Edward W. Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Spearey, Susan. ‘Mapping and Masking: The Migrant Experience in Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion.’ Journal of Commonwealth Literature 29.2 (1994): 45–60. Story, Norah, ed. The Oxford Companion to Canadian History and Literature. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1967. Strong-Boag, Veronica. ‘Home Dreams: Women and the Suburban Experiment in Canada, 1945–60.’ Canadian Historical Review 72.4 (1991): 471–504.

Works Cited

223

Sulte, Benjamin. ‘How the Name Was Obtained.’ Daily Citizen [Ottawa] 18 Dec. 1893: 3. – ‘The Name of Ottawa.’ Transactions of the Ottawa Literary and Scientific Society. Ottawa: E.J. Reynolds, 1898. 21–3. – ‘Origin of Ottawa’s Name.’ Daily Citizen [Ottawa] 23 Dec. 1893: 10. Sutherland, D.A. ‘Warden of the North Revisited: A Re-Examination of Thomas Raddall’s Assessment of Nineteenth-Century Halifax.’ Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada 4 (1981): 81–91. Svendsen, Linda. Marine Life. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1992. Tâché, Joseph-Charles. Forestiers et voyageurs. 1863. Montreal: Fides, 1946. Taylor, Charles. Multiculturalism and ‘The Politics of Recognition.’ Ed. Amy Gutmann. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1992. Taylor, John H. Ottawa: An Illustrated History. Toronto: James Lorimer and Canadian Museum of Civilization, National Museums of Canada, 1986. Taylor, Timothy. Stanley Park. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2001. Tester, Keith. Introduction. The Flâneur. Ed. Keith Tester. New York: Routledge, 1994. 1–39. Tétu, Michel. ‘La Poésie (1860–1900).’ Histoire de la littérature française du Québec. Ed. Pierre de Grandpré. Vol. 1. Montreal: Beauchemin, 1967. 201–37. Thompson [Godard], Barbara J. ‘The City of Montreal in the English and French Canadian Novel, 1945–1965.’ M.A. thesis, Université de Montréal, 1967. Thorsell, William. ‘Manley: A Man with a Message.’ Globe and Mail 15 Oct. 2001: A21. Through a Blue Lens. Dir. Veronica Mannix. Odd Squad Productions/NFB/ CBC, 1999. Tomlinson, John. Cultural Imperialism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1991. Toronto Convention and Visitors Association. Home page. 23 Oct. 2003. . Tourism Toronto. Toronto: The World within a City. Toronto: Tourism Toronto, n.d. Trachtenberg, Alan. ‘Ever – The Human Document.’ America and Lewis Hine: Photographs, 1904–1940. New York: Aperture, 1977. 118–37. Turner, Michael. American Whiskey Bar. Vancouver: Arsenal, 1997. – Company Town. Vancouver: Arsenal, 1991. – Hard Core Logo. Vancouver: Arsenal, 1996. – ‘An Interview with the Author.’ With Michelle Berry. Berry and Caple 416–25. – Kingsway. Vancouver: Arsenal, 1995. – The Pornographer’s Poem. Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 1999.

224

Works Cited

Vidler, Anthony. The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. Cambridge: MIT P, 1992. Walker, James W. St. G. The West Indians in Canada. Ottawa: Canadian Historical Association, 1984. Warley, Linda, John Clement Ball, and Robert Viau. Introduction. Writing Canadian Space. Spec. issue of Studies in Canadian Literature 23.1 (1998). Ed. Warley, Ball, and Viau 1–8. Watson, Scott. ‘Discovering the Defeatured Landscape.’ Vancouver Anthology: The Institutional Politics of Art. Ed. Stan Douglas. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1991. 246–65. Wedman, Neil. Burlesck. Vancouver: Advance, 1999. Weinfeld, Morton. ‘Social Identity in the 1990s.’ Clash of Identities: Media, Manipulation, and Politics of the Self. Ed. James Littleton. Toronto: PrenticeHall, 1996. 119–25. Welch, Edwin. Introduction. Lett’s Bytown. Recollections of Old Bytown. William Pittman Lett. Ottawa: Historical Society of Ottawa, 1979. n.p. Whitaker, Reg. ‘Sovereign Division: Quebec Nationalism between Liberalism and Ethnicity.’ Clash of Identities: Media, Manipulation, and Politics of the Self. Ed. James Littleton. Toronto: Prentice-Hall, 1996. 73–87. Wiebe, Rudy, and Geoffrey James. Place: Lethbridge, City on the Prairie. Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 2003. Williams, David. Confessional Fictions: A Portrait of the Artist in the Canadian Novel. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1991. Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. 1973. St. Albans, UK: Granada/ Paladin, 1975. Willmott, Glenn. ‘On Postcolonial Modernism: The Invisible City in The Mountain and the Valley.’ American Review of Canadian Studies 25 (1995): 301–321. – Unreal Country: Modernity in the Canadian Novel in English. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2002. Wilson, Elizabeth. The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women. London: Virago, 1991 Wilson, Ethel. ‘The Window.’ Brown, Bennett, and Cooke 262–70. Winter, Michael. This All Happened. Toronto: Anansi, 2000. Withrow, W.H. Our Own Country Canada. Toronto: William Briggs, 1889. Young, Elizabeth, and Graham Caveney. Shopping in Space: Essays on American ‘Blank Generation’ Fiction. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1992. Zukin, Sharon. The Cultures of Cities. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995.

Contributors

225

Contributors

Christopher J. Armstrong is an associate professor in the School of World Englishes at Chukyo University in Nagoya, Japan. The author of a number of articles on Canadian literature, he is currently working on a book on modernism in Maritime writing. Steven Artelle completed his PhD at the University of Western Ontario in the spring of 2004. His dissertation is entitled ‘The Meaning of Ottawa: The Confederation-Era Literary Culture of Canada’s Capital.’ He is currently working on a biography of Archibald Lampman, and has written on Lampman and Ottawa’s literary history for the Winter 2003 issue of Arc: Canada’s National Poetry Magazine. John Clement Ball is a professor in the Department of English at the University of New Brunswick. He has published numerous articles on post-colonial and Canadian literatures, as well as Satire and the Postcolonial Novel: V.S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie (2003) and Imagining London: Postcolonial Fiction and the Transnational Metropolis (2004). He is the co-editor of Studies in Canadian Literature. Domenic Beneventi recently completed a PhD in comparative Canadian literature at l’Université de Montréal. His thesis examines the representation, marginalization, and exclusion of visible minorities in Canadian urban spaces. He is contributing co-editor of Adjacencies: Minority Writing in Canada (2004) and has forthcoming articles on Italian-Canadian literature. His main research interests include Canadian and Québécois literatures, minority/ethnic writing, and urban theory.

226 Contributors Richard Cavell is professor of English and director of the International Canadian Studies Centre at the University of British Columbia. In addition to numerous articles, he has published McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography (2002), is editor of Love, Hate and Fear in Canada’s Cold War (2004), and is joint editor of the Cultural Spaces series at University of Toronto Press. Peter Dickinson is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Simon Fraser University, where he teaches courses in modern drama, comparative Canadian literature, gender and queer studies, and film studies. He is the author of Here Is Queer: Nationalisms, Sexualities, and the Literatures of Canada (1999) and editor of Literatures, Cinemas, Cultures (2002), a special issue of Essays on Canadian Writing. Recent essays have appeared or are forthcoming in the Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Modern Drama, Theatre Journal, and Screen, and he is currently completing a manuscript entitled Screening Gender, Framing Genre: Canadian and Québécois Literatures into Film. Justin D. Edwards is an associate professor of American and Canadian literature at the University of Copenhagen. He is the co-editor (with Jay Bochner) of American Modernism across the Arts (1999). He is the author of Exotic Journeys: Exploring the Erotics of U.S. Travel Literature (2001) as well as Gothic Passages: Racial Ambiguity and the National Gothic (2003). His book Gothic Canada: Reading the Spectre of a National Literature is forthcoming in 2005, and he is currently working on a book-length manuscript titled ‘Legal Fictions: Charles Brockden Brown, Transgression and the Law.’ Barbara Godard is the Avie Bennett Historica Chair in Canadian Literature at York University. She is a prolific translator and is the author of numerous articles on Canadian literature and literary theory. She is the author of Talking about Ourselves: The Cultural Productions of Canadian Native Women (1985) and Audrey Thomas: Her Life and Work (1989), and has edited a number of books, including Gynocritics/Gynocritiques: Feminist Approaches to the Writing of Canadian and Quebec Women (1987), Collaboration in the Feminine: Writings on Women and Culture from Tessera (1994) and, with Coomi S. Vevaina, Intersexions: Issues of Race and Gender in Canadian Women’s Writing (1996). She has recently published a translation of Nicole Brossard’s Intimate Journal (2004) and a revised translation and audiobook of Antonine Maillet’s The Tale of Don L’Orignal (2004). Douglas Ivison is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Lakehead University. He has published essays on Canadian, British, and American literatures in Is Canada Postcolonial? Unsettling Canadian Literature, ed. Laura

Contributors

227

Moss (2003), English Studies in Canada, ATQ, Pynchon Notes, Canadian Issues, and other journals and books, and is the editor of Dictionary of Literary Biography 251: Canadian Fantasy and Science-Fiction Writers (2002). He is currently completing a manuscript on the production of space in nineteenth-century adventure narratives. Paul Milton is an assistant professor of English at University of British Columbia – Okanagan. He has published articles on Leonard Cohen, Alden Nowlan, and George Eliot. Lisa Salem-Wiseman is a professor of English at Humber College in Toronto. She has published book reviews and articles in Canadian Literature, English Studies in Canada, Essays on Canadian Writing, Literary Review of Canada, Studies in Canadian Literature, and University of Toronto Quarterly. She is a regular contributor to Books in Canada. Batia Boe Stolar is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Lakehead University. She has published articles on Atom Egoyan and Michael Ondaatje, in the Canadian Journal of Film Studies, and Jack Hodgins (with Andrew Lesk), in Studies in Canadian Literature, and contributed a chapter to a forthcoming collection of essays on Atom Egoyan. She is currently completing a manuscript on immigrant literature in Canada and the United States, and is also working on North American immigrant film and photography.