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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF LITERATURE IN CANADA
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Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada Edited by
William H. New
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto
Buffalo
London
www.utppublishing.com © University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2002 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada
ISBN 0-8020-0761-9
oo
Printed on acid-free paper
National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data
Main entry under title: Encyclopedia of literature in Canada Includes index. ISBN 0-8020-0761-9 i. Canadian literature (English) - Encyclopedias. I. New, W.H. (William Herbert), 1938ps8oi5.E53 2002
c8io.9'97i'o3
02001-902244-1
PR9I80.2.E53 2O02
University of Toronto Press wishes to acknowledge the Brenda and David McLean Chair in Canadian Studies, University of British Columbia, for its support of this publication. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canadian 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
Preface vii Acknowledgments xi Permissions xiii Abbreviations xv Contributors xix
ENTRIES 3
Chronology 1237 Index by Contributor 1247 Index of Authors 1253 Supplementary Index 1277
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Preface
This is a resource book, one that provides currently available information about writers and writing in Canada, about oral literatures, and about a range of related subjects, including the social and cultural institutions that have an impact on literary expression and literary production. But it is inevitably selective. The idea that an 'encyclopedia' (as the word itself seems to suggest) will 'encircle all there is to know about a subject' is misleading; the word's derivation more helpfully indicates that an encyclopedia has to do with 'providing a course of general education,' a definition that clearly emphasizes the instructional, rather than the inclusive, nature of books of this kind. The emphasis also falls on the word 'general.' Although this book, for example, attempts to range across history (from early records to the year 2000) and to provide data about all parts of Canada and about literature in a range of languages, not just the two that are official (English and French), it would need to be several volumes long to deal with all these subjects (and more) in greater detail. Relatedly, while it alludes from time to time to particular influences from elsewhere (Shakespeare, the Persianghazal, B U D D H I S M , Victor Hugo, MARXISM, BLOOMSBURY, the PARNASSIANS, the Grimms' fairy tales), it makes no attempt to chart the history of the world's literatures, not even those with which literature in Canada is most closely connected. However much the articles range, the book's focus remains on Canada. It looks at the storytellers, the writers, the writings, and the cultural history that in one way or another are associated with Canada, and at the images, the attitudes, and the mythologies with which, in some instances, Canada is identified. To enable readers to find the information they are looking for, this Encyclopedia of Litera-
ture in Canada adopts seven organizational features: 1 The main series of articles follows an alphabetical sequence, with entries indicated in boldface. 2 Within this sequence is a series of crossreferences to other articles, indicated by names in SMALL CAPITALS; sometimes these cross-references allude to other mentions of the subject, and sometimes they extend the discussion through another topic. Cross-references are not always in the exact word form of the article titles to which they refer. 3 At the end of many of the main-text entries is a list of works that the contributors have recommended for Further reading, as extensions of or supplements to the articles in question. 4 An appendix at the end of the book traces a cultural Chronology against which to read the main-text entries. 5 An Index by Contributor lists the article or set of articles that each contributor wrote. 6 An Index of Authors included in the book enumerates all mentions of each author's name. 7 A Supplementary Index lists names of individuals and groups, pseudonyms, and some terms that are mentioned in the text but for which there is no separate entry. Some of the main entries are primarily informational, compiling lists of data, as in the article called AWARDS AND LITERARY PRIZES, which assembles the names of prizewinners and their books and outlines the terms of recognition. Related informational articles on ARCHIVES and on REFERENCE GUIDES explain where manu-
PREFACE
script materials are to be found and where to find out more about a variety of subjects. Still other entries provide information about crossconnections between literature, MUSIC, and the VISUAL ARTS. But many other entries are discursive. Some of these are surveys, constituting small 'courses of general education' within the larger one; they address such topics as recurrent motifs in ACADIAN WRITING, ANGLOPHONE writing, FRANCOPHONE WRITING OUTSIDE ACADIA AND QUEBEC, and QUEBEC WRITING IN
FRENCH. Another series of articles looks at literary modes and genres, recording features of, for example, CHILDREN'S LITERATURE, CRITICISM AND T H E O R Y , the D O C U M E N T A R Y , the N O V E L ,
THEATRE HISTORY, and the like. Further general studies are concerned less with genre than with questions of RELIGION, CLASS, GENDER, RACE, sexuality, ethnicity, NATIONALISM, REGIONALISM, and other systems of social organization, demonstrating how these concerns affect literature in Canada (across language differences) by shaping a shared - and/or a disparate and confrontational - understanding of value and power. So as to be as useful as possible, this book also interprets widely the term 'literature in Canada/ For example, the main entries deal primarily with individual authors - ATWOOD, BEAULIEU, CALLAGHAN, DESSAULLES, KING, LIM,
MISTRY, TYNES, and over 1,400 others -but no attempt has been made to define the term 'Canadian author.' There are Canadian-born writers listed here and literary figures who were born in what is now territorial Canada before 'Canada' ever existed. There are some writers listed who were temporary residents, some who immigrated, some who consider themselves exiles in Canada, some who are expatriates, some who have actively striven to separate from Canada, and some who have relinquished their Canadian citizenship, only to seek later to take it up again. In each case where a main entry exists for a writer, attempts were made to ascertain his or her matrilineal as well as patrilineal heritage and to be precise about dates and places of birth and other biographical details, but (despite questionnaires sent to contemporary authors) a few inconsistencies remain. In some instances, authors wished not to disclose data they considered private, and in others, the
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information was simply not available, having disappeared into inexact and incomplete historical records. Sometimes (j. MACKAY' is a case in point) even identities are unclear, and when research suggests two differing possibilities, the entry records both biographical hypotheses. At other times (the long-resolved mystery of'P.P. GROVE,' for example, and the identity of GREY OWL), the entries record both the mystery and the solution. Interspersed with the genre surveys, the informational compilations, and the authorcentred entries are articles on several other kinds of subject, though (as this book is not a 'companion' to a given set of books) there is one deliberate omission: with a very few exceptions, there are no entries on individual titles; instead, separate works are discussed, in varying degrees of detail, within the author entries and the general studies of genres, motifs, and ideas. The exceptions, moreover, are less for individual texts than for the impact that certain texts have had within Canadian cultural and social history, as with the ANNE OF GREEN GABLES phenomenon, the GOLDEN DOG tablet, or the TWO SOLITUDES school of cultural interpretation. Parallel entries address certain influential historical events - events that, whatever their origin, began over time to function iconographically, to signify cultural tensions or self-images that the society in general came to consider symbolic (the GUIBORD AFFAIR, the PERSONS CASE) Or
occasionally exotic (the GOUZENKO CONTROVERSY). Of special interest are those events that came to function recurrently as literary allusions - that is, to carry literary force within Canadian texts: the completion of the CANADIAN PACIFIC RAILWAY, CONFEDERATION, the HALIFAX EXPLOSION, the KLONDIKE gold rush, the UNITED EMPIRE LOYALIST arrival, the N O R T H - W E S T R E B E L L I O N , the R E B E L L I O N S OF
1837, the OCTOBER CRISIS, the QUIET REVOLUTION, the WINNIPEG GENERAL STRIKE. The entry on HISTORICAL ANALOGUES surveys how these and related allusions function; still other events (Dieppe, the Montreal Massacre, Joey Smallwood's Newfoundland referendum) are accessible through the supplementary index. Place, too, functions emblematically, as the articles on LANDSCAPE and the NORTH separately observe. In addition, each of the prov-
PREFACE
inces and territories has its own entry summarizing historical and statistical data, the kind of information that often proves relevant to a reading of the literature set in that specific part of the country. Society and culture are interconnected in this book: one entry mentions the active role of various writers in securing VOTING RIGHTS, another the importance of the REFUS GLOBAL manifesto; a third looks at literary HOAXES, a fourth at the trickster COYOTE; a fifth identifies the real CABBAGETOWN, a sixth the whereabouts of the fictional MANAWAKA. Among the other kinds of entries to be found here are several that deal with the institutional framework through which authors and readers meet. Hence there are entries not only on LITERARY HISTORY but also on BOOK HISTORY in Canada; still other contributors address questions associated with BOOKSTORES, BOOK
variously address the changes that occur in literary expression because of (and through) changes in systems of value, themselves related to the interactions between speech, print media, and electronic forms of communication. Yet another series of articles - those on ORAL LITERATURE AND HISTORY, on FOLKLORE, and on MYTHOLOGY, for example - demonstrate how culture in Canada is also shaped by inheritance as well as by contemporary fashion and the politics of the everyday. Numerous articles, therefore, record the plurality of Canadian culture, both directly - in the two entries called CULTURAL PLURALITY and MULTICULTURAL VOICES (the latter deals with writers who compose in one or another of Canada's 'unofficial' languages) and those that deal with JEWISH and MENNONITE writers, BLACK
D E S I G N , the PUBLISHING INDUSTRY, NEWSPAPERS, JOURNALS, EDITORS AND EDITING, LITERARY AGENTS, REVIEWING, READERS, LIBRARIES,
LITERATURE, and RELIGION - and indirectly, in the several articles on cultural connections with
COPYRIGHT, LIBEL, CENSORSHIP, TEACHING,
and academic programs in WOMEN'S STUDIES and creative WRITING. Because 'literature in Canada' is also a term that applies widely across many subjects and forms of expression, this range is also reflected here, in articles that deal with the usual categories of literature (POETRY, fiction, DRAMA, the ESSAY) - and those that look more closely at aspects of these genres; for example, the articles on SOUND POETRY, VISUAL POETRY, COWBOY POETRY, the LONG POEM, the SHORT STORY, the NOVELLA, the ANIMAL STORY, HUMOUR AND SATIRE, PARODY, the CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE, EXPLORATION LITERATURE, TRAVELLERS AND TRAVEL WRITING, BIOGRAPHY, LIFE WRITING, URBAN WRITING, SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY, MYSTERY AND ROMANCE, UTOPIA - as well as those that look through other lenses. Among the articles that consider these 'other' categories are those that examine the character of SCIENCE AND NATURE WRITING, of WAR AND LITERATURE, and of SPORTS WRITING, COMIC BOOK LITERATURE, COOKBOOKS, the HARLEQUIN, the lyrics of popular MUSIC, and other forms of POPULAR CULTURE. Articles on INTELLECTUAL HISTORY, on RHETORIC, On HISTORIOGRAPHY, On RADIO, On FILM, TELEVISION, AND LITERATURE, and On TECHNOLOGY, C O M M U N I C A T I O N S , AND LITERATURE
HISTORY, the DOUKHOBORS, SCOTTISH GAELIC
AFRICA, ASIA, AUSTRALIA, EUROPE, LATIN
AMERICA, and the UNITED STATES (and numerous more specific regions of the world) and in the three articles on LANGUAGE (Aboriginal and trade languages, Canadian English, and Canadian French). Further articles on FIRST NATIONS LITERATURE, On the METIS, On the NATIVE IN
LITERATURE, and on the Aboriginal oral literatures themselves extend even further the range of coverage within the Encyclopedia. Readers who wish to find out more about these subjects should consult the entries on ALGONQUIAN, CREE, HAIDA, INUIT, IROQUOIAN, K T U N A X A , KWAKWALA, NORTHERN ATHAPASKAN, OJIBWA, SALISH, TLINGIT, T S I M S H I A N I C , and WAKASHAN
and the related articles on individual authors who used these languages for literary expression (eg, George HUNT, SEIDAYAA, SKAAY,), as well as the articles on the BEOTHUK and the NORTH. To discuss all these writers, their works, the issues and emotions they deal with, the institutions that affect them, and the events and beliefs that shape their cultural contexts, the contributors to this volume (listed in the preliminary pages) have inevitably drawn from time to time on a conventional literary vocabulary and a series of historically familiar terms. (Editing the Encyclopedia has also necessitated the use of a number of abbreviations; these also are listed at
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PREFACE
the front of the book.) So that the conventions and references might be shared by all who use this book, several of the terms that are used in the articles are also denned within the list of main entries assembled here. No attempt is made to substitute for any of the numerous available dictionaries of literary terms, but there are entries on particular literary usages (eg,
interesting observations about literature and the character of a literate culture. Sampling the book will enable readers to return to literary texts themselves with more informed questions, and also with a greater understanding of the complexities of Canadian society and a renewed appreciation for the subtleties of the creative arts.
ALLEGORY. CANON, CHARACTER, ECOCRITICISM, E C R I T U R E . EXILE, IMAGERY, IRONY, PROSODY),
examples of specific cultural terminology (eg, A N C I E N R E G I M E , CANADA, C A N U C K , CHEECHAKO, DSONOQUA, GARRISON MENTALITY, J O U A L , L A U R E N T I A N T H E S I S , N A N A B U S H , NIAGARA, QUELQUES ARPENTS DE NEIGE, R A V E N , RED R I V E R , S E D N A , SOWESTO, WEST),
and entries that explain allusions to many literarily relevant groups, movements, and events (eg,
ACADEMIE CANADIENNE-FRANCAISE,
CANADA FIRST, D O M I N I O N DRAMA FESTIVAL, GROUPE-DES-SIX-EPONGES, INSTITUT CANADI E N , MASSEY R E P O R T , M O N T R E A L STORY T E L L E R S , N U I T DE LA P O E S I E , PARTI P R I S , ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA, TISH, ULTRAMONTANISM,
UNITED CHURCH). The Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada is a resource book. It will not provide all the answers. But it opens up a multitude of
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A Note on the Text The terms 'Eskimo3 and 'Indian' are used in this book whenever historical accuracy requires (as in the title of Samuel HEARNE'S work), but otherwise a variety of other terms is employed (eg, 'Inuit,' Aboriginal,' 'First Nations,' 'Native,' 'Cree,' 'Haida,' etc). Every effort has been made to ensure that the appropriate diacritical marks are used when referring to names, terms, and titles in such languages as Czech, German, Haida, and Swedish. With this principle in mind, the acute accent has been retained on the words 'Quebec' and 'Montreal' in entries for francophone writers, but these place names have been spelled without the accent when the allusion occurs within an anglophone context.
Acknowledgments
All reference works are indebted to the many scholars whose earlier works helped to chart the field; some of those scholars and works are mentioned in the entry here on 'Reference Guides' and elsewhere, and to them and their labours I and my colleagues in this present work are grateful. They helped us to understand our subject and our task; like them, and building on their work, we have endeavoured to bring together information and commentary that will facilitate still further the study of literature in Canada. Many individual persons have given greatly of their time and energy to help make this encyclopedia possible, and to them I am particularly grateful; to the many contributors, first of all, who with scholarly skill took on - and met - a variety of challenges: of finding out what was not yet known, of distinguishing between competing versions of'fact,' of condensing large bodies of data into readable form, and of balancing a sense of history with a sense of current concerns. I am indebted, too, to several research assistants: Peter Mahon, Mark Cochrane, Tamas Dobozy, and Rene Brisebois, together with Constantin Grigorut, Jerome Loisel, and Nancy Stevens. Their patient labours in the library and at the computer screen found 'missing' data for numerous entries, their eye for consistency and detail contributed greatly to the work as a whole, and their delight in discovery helped me maintain some degree of perspective during the compilation of the volume. It was a pleasure to work with them; it is a pleasure to thank them here. I thank, too, my many colleagues, both at the University of British Columbia and elsewhere, who generously answered questions, read draft entries, discussed the project with me, and made valuable suggestions: Carole Gerson of Simon Fraser University; Logan
Esdale of the State University of New York (Buffalo); David Staines and Robert Major of the University of Ottawa; Howard Fink of Concordia University; Tom Vincent of Royal Military College; Bruce Kirkley of Fraser Valley University College; Joe Pivato of Athabasca University College; Kenneth Landry of Universite Laval; Chelva Kanaganayakam of the University of Toronto; and David Andrien, Rejean Beaudoin, Nick Bradley, Warren Cariou, Richard Cavell, Jane Flick, Richard Gooding, Sherrill Grace, Michael Greene, Gabi Helms, Iain Higgins, Joseph Jones, Andre Lamontagne, Paula Marinescu, Kevin McNeilly, Catherine NelsonMcDermott, Laurie Ricou, and Allan Smith of the University of British Columbia. Brian Henderson and Brenda Clews of Toronto provided instrumental help in the early stages of the project. Robert Bringhurst offered his wisdom and encouragement throughout, designing the special character set to go with the typeface (Dante) and helping to solve problems that at the time seemed insurmountable. Without all these people, this book would not have been possible. Valuable institutional support was supplied as well. Leone Earls of the CBC Reference Library provided data that helped to shape several entries here. Still other questions were answered by the staffs at the UBC Library; the public libraries in Victoria, Vancouver, and North Vancouver; the National Librarv of Canada; the National Archives of Canada and the Public Archives of Nova Scotia; the University of Alberta Archives; and the library at Boston University. I wish to thank all these people - and, on behalf of the contributors, also the many other national and international library staffs who contributed their expertise for their courtesy, their kindness, and their
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
efficient attention to detail. I wish also to express my appreciation to the UBC English Department, the Hampton Fund, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for the support that gave me the time to devote to the shaping of this book; and to the Brenda and David McLean Chair in Canadian Studies at UBC, for support in aid of research and publication. The biographical data in entries on contemporary authors was checked, when possible, with the authors themselves; though questionnaires sometimes seem like an intrusion into privacy, most authors collaborated generously with the researchers, and I thank them for their kindness.
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Special thanks go to Shelley MacDonald, whose computer skills transformed a disparate set of texts, diskettes, e-mail messages, and handwritten memos into a coherent and consistent text; to Niroshi Sureweere for help with correspondence; and to my editors at the University of Toronto Press, Gerry Hallowell, Jill McConkey, Siobhan McMenemy, Frances Mundy, Cheryl Cohen, and Elizabeth Hulse, for their enthusiasm and their critical eye. Above all, for the countless ways in which she has encouraged me, helped find information, offered assistance, and provided sound advice, thanks go to Peggy New, with love.
Permissions
For permission to quote from material in copyright, the editor and publisher express their appreciation to the following:
George Bowering for all quotations from his works University of Toronto Press for the material adapted from Merrill Distad's chapter in Periodicals of Queen Victoria's Empire: An Exploration, ed Rosemary Van Arsdel andj. Don Vann (1996) Sandra Djwa for a quotation from her essay in On F.R. Scott Garland Publishing for material from 'Oral Literatures of the Northeastern Algonquians and the Northern Algonquians' by Michael K. Foster and Gordon Day Joy Kogawa for a quotation from 'The Splintered Moon' Patrick Lane for quotations from 'To the Outlaw' and 'Poetry cannot save us ...' HarperCollins for a quotation from Boys like Us by Peter McGehee (Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd., copyright © 1991 by Peter McGehee) Robin McGrath for quotations from her published and unpublished works ARTS Atlantic for a quotation from David Milne, 'Update,' ARTSAtlantic 9.3 (1989): 69 Eleanor Nichol for quotations from bpNichol's work
Mary Pacey for a quotation from Desmond Pacey's Ten Canadian Poets P.K. Page for quotations from her work Al Purdy and Harbour Publishing for quotations from works by Al Purdy Wendy Wickwire for a quotation from Harry Robinson's 'You Think It's a Stump But That's My Grandfather' University of Toronto Press for a quotation from F.R. Scott's essays in A New Endeavour, ed Michiel Horn (1986) McClelland & Stewart for a quotation from The Collected Poems of F.R. Scott by F.R. Scott (used by permission, McClelland & Stewart, Inc., The Canadian Publishers) ECW Press for a quotation from Peter Dale Scott's Alone on Ararat: Scott, Blake, Yeats, and Apocalyptic,' Essays on Canadian Writing 55 (1995): 288-302 HarperCollins for a quotation from Thy Mother's Glass by David Watmough (published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd., copyright © 1993 by David Watmough) Studies in Canadian Literature for a quotation from Gary Willis, 'Speaking the Silence: Joy Kogawa's Obasan,' SCL 12.2 (1987)
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Abbreviations
?: date uncertain AB: Alberta ABC: American Broadcasting Company ACCUTE: Assoc of Canadian College and University Teachers of English ACTRA: Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists AD: anno Domini AGM: annual general meeting AK: Alaska aka: also known as ALA: American Library Assoc Am: American AM: master of arts Assoc: associate-, associated, Association asst: assistant Aug: August AZ: Arizona b: born BA: bachelor of arts BASc: bachelor of applied science BBC: British Broadcasting Corp BC: British Columbia BCE: before the common era BCL: bachelor of civil law BEd: bachelor of education BEng: bachelor of engineering Bib: Bibliotheque BJ: bachelor of journalism BLitt: bachelor of letters BNA: British North America BNQ: Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec BScA: bachelor of science in agriculture BSP: bachelor of science in pharmacy BSW: bachelor of social work C: Celsius; College/College c: circa (about) CA: California CACL: Canadian Assoc of Children's Literature CBA: Canadian Booksellers Assoc
CBC: Canadian Broadcasting Corp CBS: Columbia Broadcasting System CCF: Co-operative Commonwealth Federation CD: compact disc Cda: Canada CE: common era CEGEP: College d'enseignement general et professionel CIHM: Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproduction CM: member of the Order of Canada CMG: companion of the Order of St Michael and St George CNR: Canadian National Railways Co: County; Company Col.: Colonel comp: compiled by Corp: Corporation CPR: Canadian Pacific Railway CT: Connecticut CUNY: City University of New York d: died DCL: doctor of civil law DD: doctor of divinity DDF: Dominion Drama Festival Dec: December Dept: Department dip: diploma/diploma in dir: director DLitt: doctor of letters Dr: Doctor DSO: Distinguished Service Order DSc: doctor of science ed: editor/edited by Ed: Editions educ: educated (at) eg: for example emig: emigrated enl: enlarged ESL: English as a second language
ABBREVIATIONS
est: established; estimated et al: et alia (and the rest) etc: et cetera EU: European Union exp: expanded Feb: February fl: flourished FLQ: Front de Liberation du Quebec FRGS: fellow of the Royal Geographic Society FRSC: fellow of the Royal Society of Canada FRSL: fellow of the Royal Society of Literature Fr: Father Ft: Fort GATT: General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade gen: general Gov: Governor HBC: Hudson's Bay Company Hist: Historical HS: High School IA: Iowa ie: that is illus: illustrated by Inc: Incorporated Insp: Inspector Inst: Institut, Institute intro: introduction/introduced by IODE: Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire J: Journal (of) Jan: January KB: knight bachelor KCMG: knight commander of the Order of St Michael and St George km: kilometre KS: Kansas L: Lake Lanes: Lancashire LC: Lower Canada LLB: bachelor of law LLD: doctor of laws LSE: London School of Economics Lt: Lieutenant Ltd: Limited m: married MA: Massachusetts/master of arts M&S: McClelland and Stewart MB: Manitoba MD: Maryland ME: Maine MEd: master of education Mgr: Monsignor MI: Michigan
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MLA: member of the Legislative Assembly MLS: master of library science mm: millimetres Mme: Madame MN: Minnesota MO: Missouri MP: member of Parliament MS: Mississippi Mt: Mount NA: North America NATO: North Atlantic Treaty Organization NB: New Brunswick NBC: National Broadcasting Company NC: North Carolina NCO: non-commissioned officer NDP: New Democratic Party NE: Nebraska NF: Newfoundland and Labrador NFB: National Film Board NH: New Hampshire NJ: New Jersey NM: New Mexico Nov: November np: no paging nr: near NS: Nova Scotia NWC: North West Company NWT: Northwest Territories NY: New York NZ: New Zealand Oct: October OH: Ohio ON: Ontario P: Press(es) PA: Pennsylvania PEI: Prince Edward Island perf: performed PhD: doctor of philosophy PM: prime minister pop: population POW: prisoner of war prod: produced pseud(s): pseudonym(s) pt: part pub: published Pubs: Publications Q: Quarterly QC: Quebec qtd: quoted R: Review/river/Regina (ie, the Crown) RCAF: Royal Canadian Air Force
ABBREVIATIONS
RCMP: Royal Canadian Mounted Police Rev: Reverend rev: revised RI: Rhode Island RIN: Rassemblement pour 1'independence nationale rpt: reprinted RR: rural route RSC: Royal Society of Canada sel: selected Sept: September SF: science faction Sgt: Sergeant SIFC: Saskatchewan Indian Federated College SK: Saskatchewan Soc: Society s.o.: someone s.t.: something sq km: square kilometres Sr: Senior
St/Ste:Saint(e) Supt: Superintendent tr: translated by TV: television TX: Texas U: University/Universite (of/de) UC: Upper Canada UCC: Upper Canada College UK: United Kingdom UN: United Nations UNICEF: United Nations Children's Fund US: United States (of America) UTQ: University of Toronto Quarterly vol: volume WA: Washington WWF: World Wildlife Fund XIXe: dix-neuvieme (ipth) XXe: vingtieme (2oth) Yorks: Yorkshire YT: Yukon
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Con ibutors
Adames, John, West Vancouver Andersen, Marguerite, U Toronto Andrews, Jennifer, U New Brunswick Atkinson, Anna Louise, Queen's U Babiak, Peter, UBC Balan,Jars, U Alberta Ball, John Clement, U New Brunswick Ballstadt, Carl, McMaster U Barrett, Caroline, Queen's U Batts, Michael, UBC Beaty, Bart, McGill U Beddoes, Julie, Toronto Beeler, Karin, U Northern BC Belier, Patricia L., U New Brunswick Belyea, Andy, Royal Military College Berman, Judith, U Pennsylvania Museum Besner, Neil, U Winnipeg Birks, Roberta, UBC Biron, Michel, U Quebec a Montreal Blake, Dale, U Alberta Blenkhorn, Deborah, Kwantlen College Blodgett, E.D., U Alberta Blom, Joost, UBC Blom, Margaret H., UBC Blom, Thomas E., UBC Boire, Gary, Wilfrid Laurier U Bok, Christian, Toronto Boone, Laurel, Goose Lane P, Fredericton Bowering, George, Simon Fraser U Bringhurst, Robert, Vancouver Brisebois, Rene, UBC Brydon, Diana, U Western Ontario Bucknor, Michael A., U West Indies (Mona) Bumsted, JackM., U Manitoba Butling, Pauline, Alberta C of Art & Design Butovsky, Mervin, Concordia U Calder, Alison, U Manitoba Cariou, Warren, Winnipeg Carpenter, Carole Henderson, York U Carriere, Marie, U Toronto
Carson, Neil, Guelph U Cavell, Richard, UBC Chan, Greg, UBC Chapman, Judy, U Regina Clark, Roger, UBC Clarke, George Elliott, U Toronto Clement, Lesley D., Medicine Hat College Coates, Donna, U Calgary Cochrane, Mark, UBC Coleman, Daniel, McMaster U Conrad, Margaret, Acadia U Cook, Margaret, U Ottawa Cooke, Nathalie, McGill U Cooley, Dennis, U Manitoba Cowan, Ann, Simon Fraser U Craig, Terrence, Mt Allison U Cruikshank, Julie, UBC Currie, Noel Elizabeth, Simon Fraser U Czaykowska-Higgins, Ewa, U Victoria Danaher, Cecilia M., UBC Dansereau, Estelle, U Calgary Darling, Michael, London, ON Davey, Frank, U Western Ontario Davies, Gwendolyn, Acadia U Davies, Richard A., Acadia U Dean, Misao, U Victoria Deer, Glenn, UBC Denisoff, Dennis, McGill U De Sousa, Grace, U Alberta Dewar, Kenneth C., Mt St Vincent U Dickinson, Peter, Simon Fraser U Diehl-Jones, Charlene, St Jerome's College, Waterloo Distad, Merrill, U Alberta Djwa, Sandra, Simon Fraser U Dobozy, Tamas, Memorial U Downey, Deane E., Trinity Western U Doyle, James, Wilfrid Laurier U Doyle, Kegan, UBC Doyle, Margaret, Wilfrid Laurier U
CONTRIBUTORS
Dutton, Paul, Toronto Dyer, Klay, Brock U Egan, Susanna, UBC Ellenwood, Ray, York U Fee, Margery, UBC Fetherling, George, Vancouver Fiamengo, Janice, U Saskatchewan Filewod, Alan, U Guelph Findlay, Len, U Saskatchewan Fink, Howard R., Concordia U (Loyola) Fleming, Patricia, U Toronto Flick, Jane, UBC Forbes, Alexander, UC Cariboo Forst, Graham N., Capilano College Forsyth, Louise H., U Saskatchewan Foster, Michael K., Canadian Museum of Civilization Fox, Lorcan, UBC Freeman, Barbara M., Carleton U Friesen, Gerald, U Manitoba Furlani, Andre, Concordia U Gerson, Carole, Simon Fraser U Gervais, Andre, U de Quebec a Rimouski Giguere, Richard, U Sherbrooke Gingell, Susan, U Saskatchewan Gittings, Christopher, U Alberta Givner, Joan, Mill Bay, BC Globe, Alexander, UBC Gooch, Bryan N.S., UBC Gooding, Richard, UBC Grace, Sherrill, UBC Grauer, Lally, Okanagan College, Kelowna Greene, Michael, Vancouver Greenstein, Michael, Toronto Grigorut, Constantin, UBC Gross, Konrad, U Kiel Gruben, Patricia, Simon Fraser U Grubisic, Brett, UBC Gustar, Jennifer J., Okanagan College, Penticton Guth, Gwendolyn, U Ottawa Guy-Bray, Stephen, U Calgary Haag, Stefan, UBC Hannan, Annika, U Toronto Harkin, Michael E., U Wyoming Harrison, Dick, U Alberta Hart, Alexander, UBC Harvey, Carol J., U Winnipeg Hastings, Tom, Toronto Hatch, Ronald B., UBC Hayward, Annette, Queen's U Hazelton, Hugh, Concordia U
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Heath, Tim, U Alberta Helms, Gabriele, Simon Fraser U Hengen, Shannon, Laurentian U Higgins, Iain, U Victoria Hinchcliffe, Peter, St Jerome's College, Waterloo Hodgson, Heather, SIFC, U Regina Hodgson, Richard G., UBC Holmes, Nancy, Okanagan College, Penticton Hotte, Lucie, U Ottawa Howells, Coral Ann, U Reading Hubert, Henry, Cariboo C Hulan, Renee, St Mary's U Hume, Margaret, Vancouver Huot, Giselle, U de Montreal Hurley, Michael, Royal Military College Irvine, Lorna, George Mason U Jaenen, Cornelius J., U Ottawa Jahner, Elaine A., Dartmouth College Jirgens, Karl E., Algoma UC Kadar, Marlene, YorkU Kanaganayakam, Chelva, U Toronto Katz, Yael, UBC Kealy.J. Kieran, UBC Keep, Christopher, U Victoria Kennedy, Michael RJ., U Saskatchewan Kent, David A., Centennial College Kertzer, Adrienne, U Calgary Kertzer, Jon, U Calgary Kinkade, M. Dale, UBC Kirkley, Richard Bruce, UC Fraser Valley Knowles, Ric, U Guelph Knutson, Susan, Universite Ste Anne Koustas, Jane, Brock U Kroller, Eva-Marie, UBC Kuester, Martin, U Marburg Labrie, Ross, UBC Lacombe, Michele, Trent U Lamonde, Yvan, McGill U Lamont-Stewart, Linda, York U Lamontagne, Andre, UBC Lane, Dorothy F, U Regina Lawn, Jenny, Massey U Lawson, Alan, U Queensland Leahy, David, Concordia U Leblanc, Julie, U Toronto Leckie, Ross, U New Brunswick Lecomte, Guy, U de Dijon Lepage, Yvan, U Ottawa Levitan, Seymour, Vancouver Lewis, Kent, Capilano C Libin, Mark, UBC
CONTRIBUTORS
Loisel, Jerome, UBC Loiselle, Andre, Carleton U Lynch, Gerald, U Ottawa MacDonald, Mary-Lu, Halifax MacGregor, Roy, Ottawa MacLaine, Brent, U Prince Edward Island MacSkimming, Roy, Assoc of Canadian Publishers, Ottawa Mahon, Peter, UBC Major, Robert, U Ottawa Martineau, Joel, UBC Mathews, Larry, Memorial U McCaig, Joann, U Calgary McClellan, Catharine, U Wisconsin McDonald, Larry, Carleton U McNally, Peter F, McGill U McNeilly, Kevin, UBC Meadwell, Kenneth W, U Winnipeg Messenger, Cynthia, U Toronto Michon, Jacques, U Sherbrooke Miller, Jay, Seattle Moffatt, John, Royal Military College Monkman, Leslie, Queen's U Moreau, Bill,Toronto Morgan, Lawrence R., Berkeley, CA Morrell, Carol, U Saskatchewan Moss, Jane, Colby College Mota, Miguel, UBC Mountford, Peter, Hamilton Moyes, Lianne, U de Montreal Murdock, Rebecca, Vancouver Nadel, Ira B., UBC Nelson-McDermott, Catherine, UBC New,W.H.,UBC Ng, Maria N., U Alberta Nichols, Miriam, UC Fraser Valley Nichols, John D., U Manitoba O'Brien, Susie, McMaster U O'Leary, Daniel, UBC Pache, Walter, U Augsburg Panofsky, Ruth, Ryerson Polytechnic Parker, George L., Royal Military College Parsons, Marnie, St John's Paterson, Janet M., U Toronto Pell, Barbara, Trinity Western U Pennee, Donna Palmateer, U Guelph Pentland, David H., U Manitoba Perron, Dominique, U Calgary Peterman, Michael, Trent U Phillips, Richard S., Salford U Pivato, Joe, Athabasca UC
Poirier, Gon Fraser U Querengesser, Neil, Concordia U College, Edmonton Rae, Ian, UBC Ramsey, Robin H., Simon Fraser U Rasporich, Beverley, U Calgary Rayner, Anne, UBC Ricou, Laurie, UBC Ridington, Robin, UBC Ritchie, Leslie, McMaster U Roberts, Katherine A., Bowling Green State U Rocheleau, Alain-Michel, UBC Rogers, David F, UBC Ross, Catherine Sheldrick, U Western Ontario Rubio, Mary Henley, Guelph U Runte, Robert, U Lethbridge Rusnak, Anne M., U Winnipeg Sanderson, Heather, UBC S anger, Peter, Nova Scotia Agricultural C Sawatsky, Marlene, Simon Fraser U Schroeder, Andreas, Roberts Creek, BC Scobie, Stephen, U Victoria Segal, Judy, UBC Sellwood, Jane, Hokkei Gakuen U Shostak, Dorothy, Dalhousie U Siemens, Ray, Malaspina C Siemerling, Winfried, U Sherbrooke Slemon, Stephen, U Alberta Smith, Nelson C., U Victoria Smith, Rowland, Wilfrid Laurier U Solie, Karen J., U Victoria St Pierre, Paul Matthew, Simon Fraser U Staines, David, U Ottawa Stevenson, Warren, UBC Stewart, Jack, UBC Stewart, Kevin G., UBC Stouck, David, Simon Fraser U Strong-Boag, Veronica, UBC Struthers, J.R. (Tim), Guelph U Stubbs, Andrew, U Regina Sugars, Cynthia, U Ottawa Tausky, Thomas E., U Western Ontario Taylor, Peter A., UBC ten Kortenaar, Neil, U Toronto Thomas, Gerald, Memorial U Thurston, John, Ottawa Tiefensee, Diane, Simon Fraser U Tiessen, Hildi Froese, Conrad Grebel C, U Waterloo Tiffin, Helen, U Queensland Tilley, Jane, Vancouver
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CONTRIBUTORS
Tompkins, Joanne, U Queensland Tremblay, Tony, St Thomas U Tuzi, Marino, Seneca College Tyndall, Paul, UBC Usmiani, Renate. Halifax Valverde, Mariana, U Toronto van Toorn, Penny. U Sydney Vautier, Marie, U Victoria Viswanathan, Jacqueline, Simon Fraser U Voldeng, Evelyne, Ashton, Ontario Wainwright, J. Andy, Dalhousie U Walchli, Julie, UBC Walker, Douglas C., U Calgary Ware, Tracy Queen's U Warley, Linda, Waterloo U
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Wasserman, Jerry, UBC Wasserman, Susan, Capilano College Watt, K. Jane, UC Fraser Vallev Waugh, Robin, Wilfrid Laurier U Weir, Lorraine. UBC Whalen, Terry, St Mary's U Whitfield, Agnes, Glendon College, York U Wilkshire. Claire, Memorial U Williams. David, U Manitoba Willmott, Glenn, Queen's U Wills, Deborah, Mt Allison U Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey, UBC Wolfart, H. Christopher, U Manitoba Xiques, Donez, South Orange, NJ York, Lorraine, McMaster U
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF LITERATURE IN CANADA
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ACADIAN WRITING
A MARI USQUE AD MARE (from sea to sea), the national motto; see CANADA. ABBEY, Lloyd Robert. Poet, critic, novelist; b London, ON, 4 April 1943; son of Madeleine (Ridell) and Edward Lloyd Abbey. The author of two books on Percy Bysshe Shelley, Abbey taught at U Toronto, where he earned his PhD (1971), and at U British Columbia. His strongly imagistic poetry, best represented in Selected Poems 1959-1989, examines the geology and marine life of the Pacific. He also wrote The Last Whales (1991), a novel told from the point of view of blue whales who outlive humanity. R. Gooding
ABLEY, Mark. Journalist, poet, travel writer, editor; b Leamington, England, 13 May 1955; son of Mary (Collins), teacher, and Harry Abley, church musician and piano teacher; emig Nov 1961. A Rhodes scholar, Abley moved frequently between England and Canada, settling in 1983 in Pointe-Claire, QC, as a freelance journalist. Beyond Forget: Rediscovering the Prairies (1986) records his personal travels back to the Saskatchewan town 'Forget' (pronounced 'forzhay'). Effectively, this book transcends the TRAVEL-WRITING genre. The double entendre of the title announces a different premise: encoded metaphors have the power to determine our attitudes to place and time. Abley's two books of poetry (Blue Sand, Blue Moon, 1988, and Glasburyon, 1994) extend this fascination with language, and his literary journalism is enhanced by a lucid style. G.N. Forst
ABORIGINAL writers, see FIRST NATIONS, INUIT, NATIVE, and names of individual language groups. ABSURD, a term used variously to describe (i) a logical dismissal, (2) an element in some forms of HUMOUR, or (3) a category of literary expression, derived from Albert Camus's description of the individual's condition in the modern world: that of being a stranger in an inhuman universe. Embraced by such international dramatists as Eugene lonesco and Samuel Beckett, the THEATRE of the Absurd came later to Canada; it is evident in the work of Claude
GAUVREAU, Jacques LANGUIRAND, Len PETERSON, and George WALKER. Some characteristics of the Absurd in poetry, fiction, and drama include repetition, lack of explanation, narrative discontinuity, incongruity between stage set and stage action, reductive logic, and the dissolution of received forms of'standard' grammar, vocabulary, and word order. ACADEMIE CANADIENNE-FRANCAISE, an organization, based on the Academic Francaise (and, indirectly, on Plato's Academy, or School of Learning, 387 BC-AD 529), established in 1944, and devoted to fostering and defending the standards of the French LANGUAGE in North America. Its founders, led by Victor Barbeau, included Marius BARBEAU, Robert CHARBONNEAU, Robert CHOQUETTE, Marie-Claire DAVELUY, Leo-Paul DESROSIERS, Alain GRANDBOIS, and RINGUET. The academy currently has 36 seats, and it annually organizes conferences and acknowledges a body of literary work (such as that of Anne HEBERT) that it considers to be of superior quality. It changed its name in 1992 to L'Academie des lettres du Quebec. Jean ROYER wrote its history. ACADIAN WRITING. Modern and contemporary Acadian literature ranges from fiction, poetry, and drama emphasizing regional, ethnic, and linguistic characteristics associated with Acadian identity to writing influenced by contemporary trends such as POSTMODERNISM and revealing a more cosmopolitan allegiance to the global North American and Canadian francophonic. For a long time Acadian writing could be compared to Irish or Quebec literature to the extent that it benefited from the rich ORAL tradition of a small, fairly homogeneous, and largely rural population, and to the extent that this heritage was supplemented by the NATIONALIST, conservative college dassique education offered to the elites by the Catholic Church until the 19805. What is specific to earlier Acadian writing, notably as it emerged in the i9th century, is the impact and memory of the deportation of the Acadians in 1755-60 from what is now Nova Scotia, their subsequent return in the 17603 and 17708, and their scattered settlement, mostly in what is now New Brunswick. In particular, the
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ACADIAN WRITING
dramatization of these events in the American Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's epic poem EVANGELINE (1847) and its broad circulation in the form of Pamphile LEMAY'S French translation (1865) - which every schoolchild learned by heart - contributed to prevailing definitions of Acadian writing. Inevitably, most Acadian writing of this period reveals a strong sense of place as well as of history, not least because in the 150 years between colonization and the identityconsolidating trauma of the Deportation, Acadian culture developed and thrived in relative isolation - 'benign neglect' is the term often used - from its European roots and its sister colony in NEW FRANCE. With France's rediscovery of Acadie through the works of the visiting French historian Edme Rameau de Saint-Pere (La France aux colonies: acadiens et canadiens, 1859), Acadian writers and scholars found new sources of inspiration for social and cultural reforms, while the founding of newspapers such as Le Moniteur acadien (est 1867) and L'Evangeline (est 1887) created venues for debate on the survival and re-emergence (or construction) of Acadian identity. Three themes emerge from the early stage of Acadian writing, which lasted until the late i9th century and arguably until the Second World War, if not later. Especially prevalent is the PASTORAL theme of a paradise lost, an ELEGY for the mythical pays de cocagne, the Arcadian golden age associated with the prelapsarian Nova Scotian LANDSCAPE of the Annapolis Valley and Minas Basin at the head of the Bay of Fundy. Poetry and fiction are its main vehicles, newspapers and local printers its sponsors. Secondly, the struggle for French-language education rights, then defined in denominational terms, particularly in the wake of the Caraquet Riots of 1875, led to DRAMA, published speeches, ESSAYS, and journalism in support of a politically defined sense of Acadian identity. Jules Boudreau and Calixte DUGUAY'S musical play Louis Mailloux (1975), about the riots and produced in Caraquet, addresses this legacy. The proceedings of the Acadian national conventions (held more or less annually after 1881) provide another focus for nationalist discourse, productively analyzed by Jean-Paid Hautecoeur in L'Acadie du discours (1975). Finally, during what became known as the Acadian Renaissance of
4
the 18805, Acadian writing at once looked forward to a glorious future and indulged in a cheerful nostalgia for the naive art of the folk, as expressed in the LOCAL COLOUR sketch and the transcription of legend, genres that joined ranks with other literary forms. However, Iate-i9thcentury Acadian writing blends such romantic, social-political, and REGIONALIST concerns; thematic and generic boundaries are fairly fluid. Typically, for example, the contributions of Marichette (Emilie Leblanc), published in L'Evangeline in the 18905 and edited as a book in 1982, prefigure the tongue-in-cheek humour of Antonine MAILLET and Viola Leger's famous personnage in La sagouine. Bridging the genres of theatre and monologue, the latter melding the POPULAR traditions of the raconteur, and the impersonator or stand-up COMIC, La sagouine (1970) has sometimes single-handedly borne the burden of representing Acadian identity, while also addressing important questions concerning education, politics, culture, language, religion, and social reform. Partly because of her spectacular international career, culminating in the awarding of France's prestigious Prix Goncourt to her novel Pelagie-la-Charrette (1979), Maillet also seems single-handedly to bridge the colonial and postmodern eras in Acadian writing. Contiguous with her prodigious output, the 19705 witnessed a broader cultural phenomenon sometimes referred to as the second Acadian Renaissance, which was characterized by the creation and expansion of publicly funded French-language post-secondary institutions such as U Moncton; new federal, provincial, and local community development initiatives; official bilingualism in the province of New Brunswick as of 1969; the emergence of Acadian publishers, most notably Editions de 1'Acadie in 1972; and the creation of the Acadian regional production office of the NATIONAL FILM BOARD in 1974. An Acadian literary renaissance, particularly in poetry, MUSIC, and film, accompanied these various social and cultural developments, and Maillet's work offers one significant point of reference for this period's effervescent literary nationalism. To the extent that such comparisons are valid, her La sagouine, published the same year as her PhD dissertation on Rabelais and Acadian popular traditions, could be said to have had the impact
ACADIAN WRITING
on Acadian society that Michel TREMBLAY'S Les belles soeurs had in Quebec during that province's QUIET REVOLUTION.
Although Acadian drama is not devoid of interest, it is in the genre of poetry that the 19705 witnessed seminal work, notably Raymond LEBLANC'S Cri dc terre (1972), Leonard Forest's Saisons anterieures (1973), Hermenegilde CHIASSON'S Mourir a Scoudouc and Ronald DESPRES'S Paysages en contrebande (both 1973), and Calixte Duguay's Les stigmates du silence (1975). Created largely by young men, this wave of poetry defiantly and eloquently broke the silence of inner exile. Probably Guy Arsenault (Acadie Rock, 1973) is the most defiant of this generation; his use of both French and English, his lack of reverence for Acadian cultural elites and for the influence of Catholicism on culture and education, and his allusions to popular music all are consistent with one set of trends in both popular and avant-garde Acadian writing. Acadian poetry of the 19703 cannot be discussed without reference to chansonniers and FOLK-rock groups. The former include Donat Lacroix (Viens voir I'Acadie, 1974), Calixte Duguay (Aboiteaux, 1976), Angele Arsenault (Libre, 1979), and the multifaceted and prolific Edith BUTLER. The two best-known rock groups are 1755 (1976-88) and Beausoleil-Broussard (1976-82); the former's name and first album both allude to the Deportation, the latter's name to Captain Joseph Broussard, who transported many Acadians to Louisiana and the French Caribbean, and whose ship - according to legend - was stolen from the British fleet that had deported the Acadians. On the whole, the poetry of the 19705, in its admixture of Acadian and standard French expressions and rhythms - its cadence and grammar of imagery inspired by the sea - gave voice to the quest for belonging, the love of the land, the mixed blessing of the Catholic religion as intellectual legacy, and the love-hate relation with the evocative eternal feminine associated with home and family. One of the recurring themes of Acadian writing in the modern era was its relation with the outside world, particularly with Quebec, both as the acknowledged heartland of the French LANGUAGE and culture in North America and as the ambiguous seedbed of a more politically oriented francophone nationalism. In 1969, on
the heels of the creation in 1968 of a Centre for Acadian Studies at U Moncton, a cultural cooperation agreement was signed by the provinces of New Brunswick and Quebec, a move initiated by the latter. While certain artists (such as the poet, dramatist, artist, and filmmaker Hermenegilde Chiasson) always adamantly both lived and worked in their native province, others (notably Antonine Maillet) more or less of necessity published, studied, and worked elsewhere, often in Montreal. If there is a tendency for European and Quebec-based writers, critics, and journalists to identify Acadian writers as Quebecois, some Acadian writers in fact chose such an affiliation. Among them, Jacques SAVOIE, author of the Quebec novel Les portes tournantes (1984), is one of the most gifted. Yet in the late 19705 he surfaced as one of the most important and promising young Acadian writers and musicians, associated with the folk-rock group Beausoleil-Broussard. His novel Racontemoi Massabielle (1979), published the same year as an NFB film about the creation of Kouchibougouac Park, uses as its imaginative point of departure the expropriation of Acadian citizens' property during the park's creation. The year 1979 also saw the publication of Maillet's Pelagic and Claude LE BOUTHILLIER'S Isabelle-sur-mer, set in a not-too-distant future where the northeastern Acadian peninsula of New Brunswick remains one of the few corners of the world untouched by a global environmental holocaust. Louis Hache's novel Adieu, P'tit Chipagan (1978), more quietly elegiac, is set in an indeterminate past on the Island of Miscou and evokes the passage of traditional ways of subsisting on land and sea. Also in the 19705, Nova Scotia-based author Germaine Comeau produced poetry, fiction, and drama of a more low-key nature, abjuring both UTOPIA and apocalypse, and giving voice to a feminine and FEMINIST sensibility. All these texts emphasize the Acadian relation to place, underscoring the shifting boundaries of bioregional and global forces and recontextualizing the themes of EXILE and homecoming. In this context one very influential non-fiction work of 1978 stands out for its poetic, philosophical treatment of emerging relations with global francophonie and the Quebec state, debating the lesser of the evils, given a real and ongoing sense of loss: Michel
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ACADIAN WRITING
Roy's book-length essay L'Acadie perdue. The emergence of Roch Voisine as a rock star beyond the borders of Acadie (not unlike that of Celine Dion as a diva from Quebec) underscores the necessity and difficulty of bridging the gap between traditional Acadian culture and globalization. Throughout the 19705 and 198 os Antonine Maillet remained one of the most prolific authors, producing a steady stream - indeed, an ocean - of NOVELLAS, novels, plays, and nonfiction, so much so that in the eyes of many, especially in Europe, her name is synonymous with Acadian writing. Certainly, she is the most stellar practitioner of an important tradition within Acadian literature, one that she invented virtually single-handedly; and she has countless admirers for whom the Acadian theme park Le Pays de la Sagouine in Bouctouche, NB, confirms the status of her writings as a living folk museum. At its best her style is reminiscent of the fabulation of an Italo Calvino or a Salman Rushdie - parodying an archaic narrative style, voice, structure, and point of view and undermining its own authority and status as EPIC, while affirming a specifically Acadian content and approach to literary experimentation. Maillet's work is characterized by an earthy, irreverent effervescence that is feminist within the DOCUMENTARY fantasy mode. Predominant influences on her work include the language of Rabelais in Gargantua and Pantagruel and that of Acadian folk culture. The latter emerged as a central focus for Acadian Studies at U Moncton at the time, leading to important masters' and doctoral work by Charlotte Cormier (traditional music), Lauraine Leger (popular sanctions), Catherine Jolicoeur (legends), and Ronald Labelle and others (popular medicine, the oral tradition, etc). Maillet's own PhD thesis, 'Rabelais et les traditions populaires acadiennes' (1971), completed at U Laval, inspired many of these studies. Perhaps because of her very success, which in Europe sometimes reinforced prevailing notions of Acadian (and French North American) archaism - not unlike one strain within the German idealized notion of Canada's FIRST NATIONS many younger Acadian writers strive for a different style of writing, avoiding her influence in their work. Maillet's fondness for linguistics
6
and folklore (however theoretically sophisticated and indebted to Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian theoretician of the carnivalesque), her preoccupation with the status of MYTH and HISTORY, her signature style, and her prolixity led in the 19905, for instance, to density, sparseness, and a radically different kind of POSTMODERN experimentation in the works of France DAIGLE and Jean Babineau. Babineau is the most controversial and least known of these two very different writers; his novel Bloupe (1993) is the Joycean analogue for a new generation of writers and songsters who marry various registers of French and English in literature focused on Moncton and influenced by both mass culture and literary THEORY. One of the most promising practitioners of this newly international Acadian writing is France Daigle. Her many novels and novellas, such as Films d'amour et de dependance: Chef-d'oeuvre obscur (1984), La vraie vie (1993), and especially 1953: Chronique d'une naissance annoncee (1995), are seen as mature - proof of the new Acadian writing's confidence, urbane, understated, grounded in its region, and open to the world. As with Jacques Savoie, cinema, human sexuality and love, the legacy of books and ideas, and especially language and desire influence and shape Daigle's oeuvre both formally and thematically. The postmodern and even POSTCOLONIAL dimensions of this new writing are characteristic of the younger generation who came of age in Acadie in the 19905; its popular dimension is the often bilingual Acadian FRINGE theatre, PERFORMANCE art, poetry, and music that coexists with more traditional Acadian writing in the cultural life of Moncton as the self-styled Acadian cultural capital. Postnationalist, heterogeneous, often feminist in its sympathies, contemporary Acadian identity constructs itself as contested - on contested terrain. The social is not absent so much as redefined in keeping within de siecle definitions of the body politic. It is less easy than it once was to detect leitmotifs in Acadian writing, whether the recurring imagery be the sea or any other element in the Acadian literary landscape. However, in keeping with the fact that - to paraphrase Antonine Maillet - the birth of Acadian identity in the i8th century was far from virginal (despite the 19th-century choice of the Catholic
ACORN
Virgin Mary and the Feast of the Assumption as Acadian patron saint and national holiday), HYBRIDITY and migratory writing (I'ecriture de I'errance) characterize much late-2oth-century Acadian writing. Thus the CANON of Acadian fiction must include the Acadian-oriented works within Quebecois writer Jacques PERRON'S oeuvre, especially his novel Les roses sauvages (1971), one of the more interesting examples of a long succession of Acadian-inspired works by Quebec authors. Cross-currents with Cajun culture - an example being the New Brunswickinfluenced Cajun zydeco music of Zacharie Richard's Cap Enrage (1998), a compact disc extremely popular in Quebec - and links with North American francophonie in general, both past and present, still leave much room for future literary CRITICISM, attesting to the richness of Acadian culture and writing. More controversial but no less worthy of critical attention is literary work by writers of Acadian ethnic origin who write in English, such as Clive Doucet, whose linked short stories in The Priest's Boy (1992) are set in Cape Breton and address the familiar Maritime theme of 'going down the road,' underscoring the need for comparative perspectives on Acadian writing. The need for such perspectives seems implicit in the AFRICAN, Aboriginal, and Acadian mix denoted by the term Africadian,' coined by African Nova Scotian poet and critic George Elliott CLARKE. It is to be hoped that some of this comparative research will be published in the French language, but also that some of its insights will circulate not only within but also beyond the Acadian literary community. Michele Lacombe
ACLAND, Peregrine Palmer. Army officer, historical novelist; b England 1891, d Toronto 6 May 1963; son of F.A. Acland, federal king's printer; educ at Upper Canada C and U Toronto. After being wounded at the Somme, Major Acland was a master at Groton School for Boys in Massachusetts. A sometime resident of Montreal and New York, he wrote All Else Is Folly: A Tale of War and Passion (1929), which includes a 'Note by way of Preface' by Ford Madox Ford. The novel's protagonist, Falcon, is a Canadian who longs for military adventure in Europe; he returns to Canada from overseas combat after a
disfiguring injury. Ford endorsed the novel less as a literary achievement than as a realistic account of an ordinary man's sufferings in the First World War and as a distinctly colonial statement of the horrors of WAR. Deborah Blenkhorn
ACORN, Milton James Rhode. Poet; b Charlottetown 30 March 1923, d Charlottetown 20 Aug 1986; son of Helen (Carbonell) and Robert Acorn, a civil servant. Milton Acorn was one of the most individualistic writers that Canada produced. He combined a restless spirit, a fierce romanticism, and a lifelong commitment to Communism with a deep love for his native country. Although he came from a middleCLASS background, he constructed a workingclass persona that contributed to the myths he made about himself, including his claim to have a steel plate in his head; during an attack by German U-boats on his troop ship in the Atlantic en route to Europe during the Second World War, he received a head injury that required an operation. The hospital where he was convalescing was also bombed, and these psychological stresses led to his discharge in 1943 and eventually to a disability pension and several periods of institutionalization later in life for depression and alcoholism. After the war Acorn trained as a carpenter, but later sold his tools in a symbolic gesture, choosing the 'trade' of poetry. In Montreal in 1949 he met and was influenced by the group of poets, including Louis DUDEK and Irving LAYTON, who were at the centre of MODERNISM in Canadian poetry. With Al PURDY he began publishing the little magazine Moment, which continued for seven issues. In Toronto he was briefly married to the poet Gwendolyn MACEWEN in the 19605, and while in Vancouver, he co-founded the alternative newspaper The Georgia Straight in 1967. Suffering from ill health, he returned to Prince Edward Island in 1981. Acorn published numerous books of poetry, including his first, In Love and Anger (privately printed, 1956), The Brains the Target (1960), Jawbreakers (1963), and a selection of fifty-eight poems in a special issue ofFiddlehead in 1963. His early poetry developed rapidly in style from a metrically regular, romantic lyricism to experiments with free verse and a clear expression of
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ACORN
his socialist politics. His first major collection was I've Tasted My Blood: Poems 1956-1968 (1969), for which he received acclaim, and when he did not win the Governor General's AWARD for Poetry, his fellow poets created the Canadian Poetry Award for him, naming him 'The People's Poet,' a title he proudly claimed for the rest of his career. This volume contains some of his best-known poems, including the title poem, 'I Shout Love,' 'The Natural History of Elephants,' 'Knowing I Live In a Dark Age,' and several of his best imagist lyrics, such as 'Charlottetown Harbour' and 'The Island.' Selected and with an introduction by Al Purdy, it established his reputation as one of Canada's major poets. The Island Means Minago (1975), a retelling of Prince Edward Island history in poetry and prose, won the Governor General's Award for Poetry in 1975. Injackpine Sonnets (1977), named for the resilient tree that survives and thrives in harsh elements, Acorn continued to experiment with the SONNET, a form that he felt lent itself to dialectical arguments and MARXIST political theory, which he expresses in his poems as a play of opposing forces, such as the tension between love and anger. He wanted his poetry to be accessible to everyone, and under the influence of the American poet Charles Olson's theories of'projective verse' (see BLACK MOUNTAIN), he experimented with poetry that was meant to be read aloud. He was a popular reader and influenced a younger generation of poets through his appearances at the Bohemian Embassy in Toronto in the 19605. His last major collection, Dig Up My Heart: Selected Poems 1952$3 (1983), reprints many of his best poems from earlier volumes. There have been several posthumously published collections, ed James Deahl. See also M. FAIRLEY, R. HARRISON, LAU, PRIEST, TYNES.
Further reading: James Doyle, 'For My Own Satisfaction: The Communist Poetry of Milton Acorn,' Canadian Poetry 40 (Spring/Summer 1997): 74-87; Chris Gudgeon, Out of This World: The Natural History of Milton Acorn (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp P, 1996); Edjewinski, 'Milton Acorn and His Works,' in Canadian Writers and Their Works, eds Robert Lecker, Jack David, and Ellen Quigley (Toronto: ECW, 1990): 21-74; Dorothy Livesay, 'Search for a style: The Poetry of
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Milton Acorn,' Canadian Literature 40 (Spring 1969): 33-42.. Heather Sanderson
ACQUELIN, Jose (Jose Soulie). Poet; b Montreal 4 April 1956; daughter of Jacqueline Riche and Pierre Soulie. After studying at U Montreal and U Toulouse, Acquelin worked as a journalist for Radio-Canada and wrote for the periodicals Dixit and Vice Versa. In her first volume of poetry, Tout va rien (1987), she developed an elliptical style through which to examine the relations between solitude and the environment, metaphors for the human condition. She continues these inquiries both in poetry (Chien d'agur, 1992) and in CRITICISM (Cite ouverte, 1994) on marginality. Further reading: Jean-Pierre Issenhuth, 'Entre Deux Embarquements,' Liberte 177 (June 1988): 3i-8. Margaret Cook
ADAM, Graeme Mercer. Editor, publisher; b Scotland 25 May 1839, d New York 30 Oct 1912. After emigrating to Canada in 1858, Adam rapidly became involved in Toronto PUBLISHING and JOURNALISM. As a partner in Rollo & Adam and Adam, Stevenson, & Co, the firms that respectively produced the British American Magazine (1863-4) and the Canadian Monthly &• National R (1872-8; with Goldwin SMITH), he actively encouraged Canadian writing and himself edited the latter JOURNAL (1879-82) after it merged with Belford's to become Rose-Belford's Canadian Monthly and National R. He was also involved in American publishing ventures (with John LOVELL). He opposed current COPYRIGHT legislation, contributing numerous articles to the trade journal Canadian Bookseller and to such NEWSPAPERS as the Week, the Globe, and the Mail. In 1863 Adam married Jane Beazley, the daughter of John Gibson, who had edited the long-lasting Literary Garland, and seven years after her death in 1884 he married Frances Isabel Brown. His own literary career was confined to a few poems and (in collaboration with Ethelwyn WETHERALD) a romance about early UPPER CANADA, An Algonquin Maiden (1886). In 1892 he emigrated to the UNITED STATES, where he
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edited the Chicago journal Self-Help and wrote about such subjects as the American Civil WAR. ADAMS, Levi. Lawyer, poet; b c 17 March 1802, possibly in Henryville, QC, d Montreal 21 June 1832. Little is known of his life except that he articled in Montreal and, while still a student, published two stories in the Canadian Magazine (1825), one of them about the WAR of 1812, and a long poem, Jean Baptiste (1828), a comic love story told in 160 Byronic, mock-heroic stanzas, which comments in passing on current Montreal fashions and political attitudes. Adams was admitted to the bar in 1827 and married Elizabeth Wright of Northampton, MA, in 1830; within two days of each other, they both died of cholera in 1832, leaving a three-week-old son. See also LONGMORE. ADDERSON, Caroline. Short fiction writer, teacher; b Edmonton, AB, 9 Sept 1963; daughter of Bernice (Goodfellow), homemaker, and Neil Adderson, engineer. After being raised in Sherwood Park, Adderson entered the Katimavik youth program and travelled across Canada. Six years after completing a degree in education at U British Columbia in 1982, she settled in Vancouver and began teaching ESL at Langara C. Her celebrated first book of short fiction, Bad Imaginings (1993), won the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and in audio format was chosen the CNIB Talking Book of the Year. The ten darkly humorous stories that make up the volume, set largely in British Columbia, sometimes depict domestic situations (marital strife, divorce, death, emotional instability). Stylistically, however, Adderson experiments with polyvocality, shifting points of view with poise and composed irony. A History of Forgetting (1999) tells of Alzheimer's disease, the Holocaust (see JEWISH), and the importance of memory as a means to avoid marginalization. See also METCALF. G.N. Forst
ADENEY, Marcus. Poet, novelist, musician; b London, England, i July 1900. Adeney grew up in Paris, ON, and after studying the cello in the United States and Europe, he joined the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and the faculty of the Royal Conservatory of Music. His classically formal poetry, published in various periodicals
in the 19305 and 19405, is often elegaic in tone, but with an underlying sense of confidence in human intellectual and cultural potential. His novel New Babylon, written 1929-30 but not published until 1991, is a BILDUNGSROMAN in which the protagonist comes to political consciousness in the years preceding the First World War. James Doyle
AFRICA IN CANADIAN WRITING. Africa, imaged as 'the dark continent,' has long persisted in the European consciousness as a nonChristian 'other,' featuring strange customs, savage rites, and no written history. Imaginary Africas persist in Canadian writing, although now more often transformed into whatever symbol or politic the non-travelling author wishes to project onto them. Hugh HOOD'S You Can't Get Therefrom Here (1972) presents the dilemmas facing a new African nation state; the tone is ironic, the African experiment presented as doomed. By contrast, M. Nourbese PHILIP'S Lookingfor Livingstone (1991) imagines a mythic place with its own communal and spiritual strengths, in counter-discourse to traditional disparaging representations of Africa. Three Quebec writers also use Africa for their novels' own political purposes: Jacques GODBOUT'S L'aquarium (1962), Hubert AQUIN'S Trou de memoire (1968; tr Alan Brown as Blackout), and Jacques PERRON'S Le Saint-Elias (1972; tr Pierre Cloutier as The Saint-Elias). Here it will be more informative to chart historically the progress of representations of Africa by those who have actually visited or lived there: travellers, sojourners, and citizens. A fairly representative account of early missionary attitudes is exemplified by Walter Inglis (Memoirs and Remains of the Reverend Walter Inglis, African Missionary and Canadian Pastor, ed Rev Wm. Cochrane, 1887). Inglis, while deploring Africans' belief in the power of fetishes, spirit possession, and the nearness to them of the spirits of the dead, equally abhorred slavery. Upon his petitioning the Volksraad about child enslavement in the 18505, he was charged with high treason and expelled from South Africa. At the turn of the century, Canada sent regiments to assist the British in their WAR against the Boers in South Africa. Many contemporary accounts painted vivid pictures of the Canadian
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campaigns and the experiences of the soldiers: Stanley KcKeown Brown's With the Royal Canadians (1900), T.G. Marquis's Canada's Sons on Kopje and Veldt: A Historical Account of the Canadian Contingents (1900), and W. Hart-McHarg's From Quebec to Pretoria with the Royal Canadian Regiment (1902) are a few. Carman Miller's Painting the Map Red: Canada and the South African War, 1899-1902 (1993) is the best comprehensive study of Canada's participation in that war. The soldiers began with nationalistic feelings about the 'mother country' that, as they suffered losses in battles, heat and cold, sand storms, thirst, enteric fever, and long stretches of boredom interrupted by forced marches, gradually dissolved into a desire to return home. More enjoyable by far were the experiences of the groups of young women teachers who departed Canada for the camps at the end of the war. Florence Hamilton Randal (LIVESAY) sent back her accounts to the Ottawa Journal in 1902 (qtd in Sandra Gwyn, The Private Capital, 1984). These described the 50,000 Boer children in need of schooling, the gradual transformation of the concentration camps to refugee shelters as Boer families were reunited, and the pleasantries of social life with the British and Canadian officers. E. Maud Graham's A Canadian Girl in South Africa (1905) reveals an equally sprightly and pro-British attitude. Graham also disparages both Boers and 'kaffirs.' TRAVEL descriptions by tourists range widely in their responses to Africa. Some explore the unknown as exotic, some find the climate unwholesome, and others project onto a particular locale the writer's deepest desires or promote a whole country as deserving better understanding. Alice JONES'S vignettes, published in the Week (1892 and 1895), chronicle her shopping and sightseeing adventures in Algeria and Egypt. She combines enthusiastic descriptions of scenery, ancient artefacts, and colourful markets with distrust of the local people and disdain for 'the bondage of Mohammedanism.' Later accounts of travel in North Africa also reveal the authors' attitudes. The narrator of A.M. KLEIN'S 'Casablanca' (The Second Scroll, 1951) abandons his poetic celebration of the song, food, and art of the city when he sees the impoverished, unsanitary Mellah, the Jewish slum. Panic bordering on terror of the ancient
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and the unknown combines with heat and airlessness in Ethel WILSON'S 'Egypt' (Mrs. Golightly and Other Stories, 1961). The discomforts and dirt confronting a Canadian family contrast with the hippie life led in Marrakesh by an international group of young people in Kildare DOBBS'S 'Morocco' (in Dobbs, ed, Away from Home: Canadian Writers in Exotic Places, 1985). Alberto MANGUEL'S 'The Painted Desert' (in George GALT, ed, The Saturday Night Traveller, 1990) scorches the reader with its description of the heat of the Algerian Sahara on its way to describing the eight-thousand-year-old cave paintings of Jassili. Scott SYMONS'S novel Helmet of Flesh (1986) follows a Canadian homosexual man's quest for sexual and spiritual unity in Marrakesh. Here place equals a long-sought quality of mind. Paul William Roberts's travel narrative River in the Desert: Modern Travels in Ancient Egypt (1993) likewise advocates knowledge of another place and spirit. The author's enthusiasm is contagious; unfortunately, he refers to the rest of Africa as the 'dark continent' that surrounds Egypt. Two books published in 1998 extend these themes: Christopher Ondaatje's Journey to the Source of the Nile tracks the travels of Sir Richard Burton and John Speke to find the headwaters of that river. Sharon BUTALA'S novel The Garden of Eden (1998) uses her observations of famine in Ethiopia to argue for preservation of the world's grasslands and for biodiversity. Jacques HEBERT offers a sustained investigation into many parts of Africa in Autour de I'Afrique (2 vols, 1950) and Nouvelle aventure en Afrique (2 vols, 1953). Alert and thoughtful, he is self-aware about his relative lack of sympathy for Islam, and he allows his romantic expectations and the thrill of adventure to be tempered by actual experience. A number of Canadian writers have spent time as sojourners in Africa, usually while teaching. Dorothy LIVESAY's Collected Poems (1972) includes 'The Second Language (Suite),' in which she comments on the difficulties of understanding another culture, in this case Zambia's. Dave GODFREY'S novel The New Ancestors (1970) is a postmodern, multi-narrated condemnation of postcolonial politics and corruption in Ghana. Audrey THOMAS wrote several novels based on her stay in that country. In the postmodernist Mrs. Blood (1970) the female protagonist understands that her Africa
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is real only for her. Blown Figures (1974) is more surreal, returning Isobel to Africa to seek the causes of her life's failures. Various short stories by Thomas in Ladies and Escorts (1977), Real Mothers (1981), and Goodbye Harold, Good Luck (1986) also revisit the African experience, but more realistically and ironically, as does her novel Coming Down from Wa (1995). David KNIGHT'S novel Farquharson's Physique and What It Did to His Mind (1981) explores the failing marriage of an expatriate teacher in Nigeria against the backdrop of the first year of the Nigerian War. In his volume of poems The Army Does Not Go Away (1969), Knight is an observer, sadly aware of protests, murders, and waste. J.C. Cairns shows more involvement in 'Tanganyika,' from his Bush and Boma (1959; rpt in Dobbs's Away from Home). A Canadian district officer under the British, he concerns himself with the famine, struggling to arrange transportation of foodstuffs from one district to another one more in need. Margaret LAURENCE'S engagement with Africa is similar to Cairns's. Accompanying her engineer husband, she lived from 1951 to 1957 in Somaliland and the Gold Coast (later Ghana). She collected, translated, and paraphrased Somali poems and folk tales, publishing them in A Tree for Poverty (1954), the first printed version of what was then an entirely ORAL language. The Prophet's Camel Bell (1963) is Laurence's memoir of her year in Somaliland. Here she questions her own understanding when confronted with behaviour foreign to her. Her first novel, This Side Jordan (1960), set in modern Ghana, centres on the conflict in outlook between Europeans and Africans in a country about to become independent. In that novel, as in The Tomorrow-Tamer and Other Stories (1963), her understanding of personal struggle applies to Africans as well as to Europeans. Long Drums and Cannons: Nigerian Dramatists and Novelists, 1952-1966 (1968) places the works of eleven writers in the context of Nigeria's history and culture and its traditional music and drama. Heart of a Stranger (1976), a volume of Laurence's autobiographical essays, includes several reflections upon Africa and the life story of the Somali nationalist leader Mohammed Abdille Hasan. Neither strangers nor citizens, some Canadian writers of African descent have made an
attempt to return to the land of their ancestors. Claire HARRIS, in Travelling to Find a Remedy (1986), tracks the narrator's love for a Nigerian man. But she discovers that the real barrier between them is the difference between the Western and African expectations of marriage. Damien Lopes (in poems published in Westcoast 22 [31/1, Spring/Summer 1997], North: New African Canadian Writing) journeys back to Kenya and Uganda, from which his relatives had fled. The visitors feel like Canadians, but the East Africans view them as compatriots. Lawrence Hill, in Some Great Thing (1992) and Any Known Blood (1997), dispatches his characters to Cameroon and Mali. These journeys ironically counterpoint events in Canada and the United States. Finally, former citizens of various African countries have made vigorous contributions to Canadian writing, representing their homelands out of long intimacy with their customs, language, and politics. All the former South Africans write about the cruel politics of apartheid. John Peter's novel Along That Coast (1964) evokes the beauty of the place, together with the futility of pursuing personal relationships there; Arthur Nortje's Dead Roots: Poems (1973) wrings out the themes of violence in nature and the social order, of anger and pity for his country; Jeni COUZYN'S Life by Drowning: Selected Poems (1983) shows how South Africa's violence can become internalized as a pattern of anxiety; Ernst HAVEMANN'S Bloodsong and Other Stories of South Africa (1987) describes farm life in the veldt and relations between blacks and whites; Reshard COOL'S novel Cape Town Coolie (1990) tracks the tragic career of an Indian lawyer caught up in the sexual and political conflicts of the apartheid years; Rayda Jacobs's The Middle Children: Stories (1994) draws a composite portrait of the people of Cape Town, the complexities of living as a mixed-race person there, and the dislocations of living in Canada; and Archie Grail's play Exile (1990) and The Bonus Deal (1992), a collection of short stories, examine the bitter personal cost both of open struggle against oppression at home and of attempts to form new alliances in Canada. Works by former Africans from countries other than South Africa range widely in topic and style. Jane Tapsubei Creider's Two Lives: My
ii
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Spirit and I (1986) is an imaginative autobiography in which the narrator's spirit self lives in the past with her tribe in Kenya. Miguna Miguna's Toes Have Tales (1995), on the other hand, is a nightmarish, surreal expose of Kenyan political injustice and Canadian racism. George Seremba's one-man play Come Good Rain (1993) explains how he survived after being arrested in Uganda, mixing standard English narrative with Ugandan songs, announcements, and common speech. Maguy Kabamba's novel Le dette colonniale (1995), set in post-independence Zaire, articulates the problems of that generation, adrift whether at home or in Europe. Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, in his early Night of Darkness and Other Stories (1976), draws an insider's picture of common events in the lives of Zimbabwean people. His later novel, Smouldering Charcoal (1992), details political corruption and violence in a newly independent country. Zeleza's The Joys of Exile: Stories (1994) often takes the long historical view, moving from realism into a mythic consciousness of repetitive, meaningless violence, and human suffering and loss. Four books by M.G. VASSANJI, formerly of Tanzania, explore the fortunes of the Shamsi community of Dar es Salaam. No New Land (1991) is a comedic treatment of an exiled community experiencing deracination, prejudice, and new beginnings in Toronto. The Gunny Sack (1989), Uhuru Street: Stories (1991), and The Book of Secrets (1994) are interrelated both through some characters they share and through the author's view of history as a subterranean connectedness of people and stories across time and place that underlies change and exile. See also BLACK HISTORY, C U L T U R A L P L U R A L I T Y , R A C E .
A.C. Morrell
AHENAKEW, Edward. Clergyman, ethnographer; b Sandy Lake, SK, n June 1885, d Canora, MB, summer 1961; son of Ellen (Ermine Skin) and Baptiste Ahenakew. An Anglican missionary among his own Plains CREE people in the Diocese of Saskatchewan, Ahenakew collaborated with H.C. Wolfart on a Cree-English dictionary (1999) and published a monthly bulletin for Cree speakers. His foremost literary monument is Voices of the Plains Cree, published posthumously in 1973 (rpt 1995, with foreword by Stan
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Cuthand). This work includes traditional tales collected from Chief Thunderchild (Peyasiwawasis) in 1923, and 'Old Keyam,' in which a fictional narrator, Keyam (Cree for 'I do not care') meditates on the changing world of his people. Keyam's cagey 'indifference' represents Ahenakew's vision of his culture's defensive assumption of a defeatist demeanour while tacitly enduring and renewing itself. John Moffatt
AHENAKEW, Freda. Cree linguist, author, editor, professor (retired), OC; b Atahkakohp, SK, ii Feb 1932; daughter of Annie (Bird) and Edward Ahenakew, soldier and farmer. Ahenakew holds a BEd (U Saskatchewan), an MA (U Manitoba), and an honorary LLD (U Saskatchewan). Among her twenty books are verbatim CREE transcripts and syllabic and English translations of stories told to her by Cree storytellers. Notable among them are kohkominawak otdcimowinawawa (Our Grandmothers' Lives, as Told in Their Own Words) and kwayask e-ki-pekiskinowdpahtihicik (Their Example Showed Me the Way: A Cree Woman's Life Shaped by Two Cultures), which won the 1988 Alberta Book AWARD for scholarly book of the year. Ahenakew's Cree translations depict life in Canada before and during colonization. The grandniothers' stories are distinctive for the flavour they retain from their original tongue. This characteristic is in large part the result of Ahenakew's accuracy and skill as a linguist. Further reading: Gretchen Bataille, Native American Woman: A Biographical Dictionary (New York: Garland, 1933); Kevin Tootoosis, Profiles: Professional Aboriginal Peoples of Saskatchewan (Saskatoon: Saskatchewan Indian Cultural Centre, 1990). Heather G. Hodgson
AIRD COMMISSION, see FLAUNT, RADIO AND L I T E R A T U R E , SPRY.
ALARIE, Donald. Novelist, poet, teacher; b Montreal 4 July 1945; son of Therese Raymond and Jean-Paul Alarie. A graduate of U Montreal, Alarie joined the faculty of the Cegep de Joliette in 1997. He published his first novel, La retrospection, in 1977; like all his work, it examines the
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character of memory. Of his later works, the AWARD-winning collection of short stories Jerome et les mots (1980), a volume of prose poems, Petits formats (1987), a novel, Comme un lievrepris au piege (1992), and a volume of lyrics, Parfois meme le beaute (1993), received favourable notice for their discovery of the magic in everyday life and their creation of a place with which people could identify. Margaret Cook
ALBERTA, province; joined CONFEDERATION 1905; capital, Edmonton, incorporated 1892, on the site of Fort Edmonton, est 1795; area 661,185 sq km (255,217 sq miles); 2001 pop 2,974,807, over 70 per cent of whom live in urban centres, primarily the capital and Calgary; provincial flower, wild rose. Explored by Anthony HENDAY, Peter POND, Alexander MACKENZIE, Peter FIDLER, and David THOMPSON in the i8th century, the territory was occupied by Blackfoot, Blood, and Peigan peoples in the south (see ALGONQUIAN) and by CREE, Slavey, and Beaver peoples in the north (see also NORTHERN ATHAPASKAN). The HUDSON'S BAY and North West Companies established trading posts in the later i8th century, claiming the land until it became part of Canada's NORTHWEST TERRITORIES in 1870 (Districts of Alberta, in the south, and Athabaska, in the north). Treaties were signed with the Native population between 1876 and 1889, and the Dominion Lands Act (1872) opened up the territory for agricultural settlement. Waves of immigrants from Europe and the United States (including substantial Ukrainian, Hutterite, and Mormon communities) moved there during the 18905. Alberta (named for Queen Victoria's daughter, Princess Louise Caroline Alberta, in 1882) became a province in 1905 when the territories were subdivided. Its substantial petroleum resources, developed after the Leduc field was found in 1947, increasingly gave the province economic power in Canada. It has a history of conservative political thought. Alberta writers include Georges BUGNET, Maria CAMPBELL, Joan CRATE, Bob EDWARDS, Hiromi GOTO, Claire HARRIS, Greg HOLLINGSHEAD, Myrna KOSTASH, Henry KREISEL, w.o. MITCHELL, John MURRELL, Sharon POLLOCK, Sharon RIIS, Aritha VAN HERK, Fred WAH, Thomas WHARTON, and Rudy WIEBE.
ALCUIN SOCIETY. Founded in 1965 by G.A. Spencer and based in Vancouver, BC, the society promotes the craft of book production, emphasizing BOOK DESIGN, binding, papermaking, typesetting, calligraphy, and illustration. It is named for Alcuin of York (735-804), an abbot who invented the lower-case alphabet, established many LIBRARIES, and ran Charlemagne's education system throughout Europe. The society awards several annual prizes for excellence in book production and publishes the journal Amphora. See also INKSTER. ALDERSON, Sue Ann. Writer, professor of creative writing, U British Columbia; b New York City n Sept 1940; daughter of Ruth (Sethuchowsky) and Eugene Hartley, psychologists and university professors; educ Antioch C, Ohio State U, and U California, Berkeley (1964-7); emig 1967. In a dozen books written for CHILDREN, Alderson addresses a range of ages and subjects and works in several genres, from the novel (The Not Impossible Summer, 1983) to the narrative poem (Ten Mondays for Lots of Boxes, 1995). She is best known for her realistic but humorous treatment of family in Bonnie McSmithers, You're Driving Me Dithers (1974), with sequels about Bonnie and her mother (1977, 1979), and for her sensitive picture books. These treat children in natural or rural settings, as in Wherever Bears Be (1999). Alderson often highlights a child protagonist's capacity to help, a theme developed in Ida and the Wool Smugglers (1987) or Sure as Strawberries (1992). Jane Flick
ALFORD, Edna. Short story writer, editor; b 19 Nov 1947, Turtleford, SK; daughter of Edith (Robbestad), hairdresser and beautician, and Robert Sample, carpenter, cabinetmaker. Alford published two collections of short stories A Sleep Full of Dreams (1981) and The Garden of Eloise Loon (1986) - and edited, with Claire HARRIS, Kitchen Talk: Contemporary Women's Prose and Poetry (1992). Her stories often address the marginalization experienced by, for example, women and the elderly, as well as that perpetrated by various social institutions. In 1975, with Joan CLARK, she co-founded and co-edited the literary journal Dandelion Magazine. For five years she was fiction editor of Grain, and she
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continues on the editorial board of Coteau Books. Alford is a co-recipient of the Gerald Lampert Memorial AWARD (1982) and also received the Marian Engel award (1988). She acknowledges the support of teachers such as Chris WISEMAN, Robert KROETSCH, and Jack HOD GINS and attributes much of her inspiration to women writers such as Joan Clark, Alice MUNRO, and Audrey THOMAS. Jennifer J. Gustar
ALGONQUIAN ORAL LITERATURES. Algonquian (also spelled Algonkian') is a group of about three dozen related languages that descend from a common ancestor, Proto-Algonquian, which was spoken about three thousand years ago. By the time of first European contact, the Algonquian languages had spread across eastern and central Canada from Labrador to the northern Plains and down the Atlantic coast to North Carolina. The Canadian representatives of the Algonquian family are Blackfoot (in Alberta), CREE (several dialects from James Bay to Alberta), Maliseet (New Brunswick), MI'KMAQ (in the four Atlantic provinces and the Gaspe Peninsula of Quebec), Montagnais-Naskapi (in Quebec and Labrador), Munsee Delaware (in southern Ontario), OJIBWA (from western Quebec to Minnesota and Saskatchewan), Potawatomi (in southern Ontario), and Western Abenaki (in southern Quebec). Many more Algonquian languages were once spoken in the United States, including Menominee, Fox-Sauk-Kickapoo, Miami-Illinois, and Shawnee south of the Great Lakes; Arapaho, Atsina (or Gros Ventre), and Cheyenne on the Plains; Passamaquoddy, Penobscot, Massachusett, and Pequot in New England; Mahican and Delaware in the midAtlantic states; and Powhatan in Virginia. Although there are still many fluent speakers of most of the languages in Canada (except Maliseet, Munsee Delaware, Potawatomi, and Western Abenaki, which are close to extinction) and of some in the United States, more than half the known Algonquian languages are no longer spoken. None of these languages, however, has ever had a large numbers of speakers; even Cree and Ojibwa, with about 50,000 speakers each at their peak around the middle of the 20th cen-
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tury, are vanishingly small from a worldwide perspective. In the i6th century Europeans collected isolated words and place names from Mi'kmaq and Montagnais speakers in the Gulf of St Lawrence and the Roanoke of North Carolina, but no connected texts. In the i/th century English and French missionaries recorded substantial texts (mostly of a religious nature) in various Algonquian languages, including John Eliot's translation of the entire Bible into the Massachusett language (Boston, 1663). Over the next four hundred years missionaries of various denominations produced a vast literature in many Algonquian languages, but since much of it was translated by the missionaries themselves from European originals, it is not a reliable guide to the grammar, usage, or literary style of Native speakers of the languages. From the mid-i9th century on, however, parts of the traditional ORAL literature were recorded in some Algonquian languages, mostly by linguists and anthropologists, although a few Native speakers wrote down their own versions. There is also a large corpus of stories recorded only in English or French TRANSLATION. Although some translators made valiant efforts to transmit the flavour of the originals, most silently edited the stories to suit EuroCanadian tastes and expectations, and some of the published versions (especially those intended for CHILDREN) were cut and bowdlerized beyond recognition. Of course, even the best translations provide only a second-hand experience of the literature (and even identifying the best requires some knowledge of the original text); attempting an analysis of Algonquian oral literature without first learning one or more Algonquian language is as unprofitable as analyzing Russian literature without knowing any Slavic language. All Algonquian languages have very complicated systems of inflection; a single word may have hundreds or even thousands of different forms. The inflections, not the word order, indicate the relationship among elements in a sentence, so merely looking up each word in a dictionary without reference to the grammar will often yield nonsense. But complete fluency is not required in order to sample the literature,
ALIANAK
because the texts are usually accompanied by a translation. The two most important genres of Algonquian literature may be conveniently referred to by their Cree designations, dtayohkewin and dcimowin. Stories in the first category, equivalent to the MYTHS and legends of European literatures, explain the origins of the present world and its inhabitants (see CREATION STORIES), tell the adventures of legendary characters, and teach the consequences of disapproved behaviour. Although winter was traditionally the appropriate time for narrating dtayohkewina, some of the largest collections were recorded in the summer. The second category comprises accounts of historic events and personal experiences; not all are literally true - some stories are clearly apocryphal, and some are outright TALL TALES - but they are presented as things that happened to specific real people. Fiction, in the sense of works of imagination by known authors, is not an Algonquian concept. The literatures of the various Algonquian groups vary greatly in detail. Some stories were borrowed from neighbouring non-Algonquian peoples (and from Eurppean FOLKLORE, especially in the Maritimes). The chief character in the dtayohkewina is named Napi (nddpiiwa, 'the old man') in Blackfoot but Glooscap (Mi'kmaq kluskap; Maliseet koluskap, 'the liar') in the Maritimes; like Wisahkecahk (Cree) and NANABUSH (Ojibwa), he is both culture hero and TRICKSTER/buffoon. Although some of the stories are identical, the culture heroes have different attributes and are probably not just the same character with different names. Sources for the various Algonquian languages include the following. The largest body of texts in Blackfoot are the Southern Piegan stories recorded in Montana by C.C. Uhlenbeck and J.P.B. de Josselin de Jong (published in the Verhanddingen of the Royal Dutch Academy, 191113). The literatures of the Munsee Delaware and Potawatomi of southern Ontario have not been published (or even written down?), except for a short Munsee text in Frank G. Speck's The Celestial Bear Comes Down to Earth (Reading, PA: Public Museum and Art Gallery, 1945). The Centre d'Etudes Nordiques at U Laval published a few Montagnais legends in Atanukana, by Marie-Jeanne Basile and Gerard E. McNulty
(1971), and in Basile's Innupminwan/Ethnocuisine montagnaise (1973). Anne(-Marie) Andre (in Montagnais, An Antane Kapesh), former chief at Sept-lies, wrote Eukuan nin matshimanitu innuiskueu/Je suis une maudite sauvagesse (Montreal: Ed Lemeac, 1976) and Tante nana etutamin nitassi?I'Qu'as-tu fait de man pays? (Montreal: Ed Impossibles, 1979), telling of the problems her people face in the modern world. Texts in Mi'kmaq are scarce, though large volumes of English translations of legends were published by S.T. RAND (1894) and others. A small selection, with both interlinear and free English translations, is available in A.D. DeBlois, Micmac Texts (Ottawa: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1990). Others have been published in Tawow and other periodicals. Like Blackfoot, Maliseet-Passamaquoddy is a single language spoken on both sides of the Canada-US border. John Dyneley Prince's Passamaquoddy Texts (Publications of the American Ethnological Society, v 10, 1921) includes ten Glooscap stories; a better version of his Wampum Records is Wapapi Akonutomakonol/The Wampum Records: Wabanaki Traditional Laws, ed Robert M. Leavitt and David A. Francis (Fredericton: Micmac-Maliseet Inst, 1990). At least one large collection of texts remains unpublished. Despite its title, Abenaki Indian Legends, Grammar and Place Names (1932), by Henry Lome Masta, a former chief of the Western Abenaki, contains mostly dcimowina that explain the origins of various place names. A large collection of legends recorded by Frank T. Siebert from the last speakers ofPenobscot (an Eastern Abenaki dialect) is to be published by the American Philosophical Society. Further reading: David H. Pentland and H.C. Wolfart, Bibliography of Algonquian Linguistics (Winnipeg: U Manitoba P, 1982); James Constantine Pilling, Bibliography of the Algonquian Languages (Washington: Bureau of Ethnology, 1891). David H. Pentland
ALIANAK, Hrant Michael. Playwright, director, actor; b Khartoum, Sudan, 5 Feb 1950; son of Armenian parents. Alianak came to Canada in 1967, bursting onto Toronto's alternate THEATRE scene with a series of intensely theatrical short plays published as Return of the Big Five (1974). Directing his own work for the compa-
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nies with which he remains associated, Theatre Passe Muraille and Factory Theatre Lab, he blended pop culture and SURREALISM in a potent combination that earned him the mantle of Canada's foremost experimental playwright. His major plays, such as The Blues (1984; prod 1976) and Lucky Strike (1989; prod 1978), rework Hollywood B-movie cliches through fantastic lighting, sound, and movement effects. Alianak earned a Genie nomination for Best Supporting Actor in Atom Egoyan's film Family Viewing (1987). Further reading: Robert Nunn, 'Mass Culture and the Plays of Hrant Alianak,' Canadian Drama 14.2 (1988): 159-68; Robert Wallace and Cynthia Zimmerman, The Work: Conversations with English-Canadian Playwrights (Toronto: Coach House, 1982): 226-36. Jerry Wasserman
ALLAN, Andrew Edward Fairburn. Actor, director, radio dramatist; b Arbroath, Scotland, ii Aug 1907, d Toronto 15 Jan 1974; son of Agnes (Fairbairn) and William Allan, a Presbyterian minister. Allan emigrated to Australia and Boston before settling in Ontario in 1925. He worked with The Family Doctor, Canada's first soap opera, on Toronto's CFRB RADIO, in 19317; then after two years with BBC London, he moved to Vancouver to develop CBC RADIO DRAMA, working with such actors as John Drainie, the musical director Lucio Agostini, and writers Lister SINCLAIR and Fletcher MARKLE. After moving to Toronto in 1943 as supervisor of CBC drama, Allan developed the prizewinning Stage series and CBC Wednesday Night, writing more than thirty plays, adapting fifty others, and directing over four hundred programs. In 1962 he became the first artistic director of the SHAW FESTIVAL; he returned to radio in 1965. His papers are at Concordia U in Montreal. See also LJUNGH, D.M. MOORE, P E T E R S O N , SHIP, M A C L E N N A N .
Further reading: Andrew Allan, Andrew Allan: A Self-Portrait (Toronto: Macmillan, 1974); Murray D. Edwards, Andrew Allan and His "Theatre of the Air,'" in A Celebration of Canada's Arts 19301970, ed Glen Carruthers and Gordana Lazarevich (Toronto: Canadian Scholars' P, 1996):
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47-54; N. Alice Frick, Image in the Mind: CBC Radio Drama, 1944 to 1954 (Toronto: Canadian Stage & Arts Pubs, 1987). ALLAN, Ted (Alan Herman). Novelist, playwright; b Montreal 26 Jan 1916, d Toronto 29 June 1995; son of Annie (Elias) and Harry Herman. Allan's early writing - The Scalpel, the Sword (1952), a fictionalized biography of Norman Bethune (written with Sidney Gordon), and This Time a Better Earth (1939), a novel of the Spanish Civil war - reflects a didactic but panoramic historic and tragic vision. In later work, such as Love Is a Long Shot (1984; Leacock Medal for humour) and Lies My Father Told Me (story, stage play, and film), he courted popularity with comic coming-of-age themes. James Doyle
ALLEGORY is a protean mode of figuration that is always double, always a reinscription, always a system for speaking 'otherwise.' Conventionally, allegory - literally, 'other speaking' - has been deployed as a way of representing objects and narratives not easily approached directly: the story concerns a protagonist walking along a path in a forest and losing his way, but the concealed 'other' meaning of the story pertains to the progress of the soul through life and to the potential for perdition. In recent times, allegory has been taken up by a variety of POSTMODERN theorists - as a structuring principle for reading the communicative contract in Third World film (Fredric Jameson); as the inescapably ironic relation between representation and genuine human community in late modernity (Walter Benjamin); as a name for the inability of the sign to align with its object and thus for the condition of language itself (Paul de Man). But allegory in Canadian writing has more to do with another history. During the rise and consolidation of the European colonial empires, it was a remarkably effective tool for the promulgation of imperialist ideology and for naturalizing unequal social and political relations between Europe and its others. In response to this practice, allegory subsequently became an important mode through which POSTCOLONIAL writers and readers from a variety of specific cultural and historical locations,
ALLEN
including ones in Canada, set out to interrogate Eurocentric imperial assumptions. Imperial forms of allegorical writing vary widely, but one of the most common manoeuvres in this archive is to represent colonial relations in terms of GENDER. Britannia, figured in some European allegories as a half-naked woman at the feet of the conquering Roman emperor Claudius, is also allegorized as a latterday Athena with hermaphroditic powers. Europe becomes a mother figure whose colonial children are locked into a structure of enduring affection, dependence, and allegiance. Such forms of allegorization are promulgated widely in i8th- and 19th-century Canadian writing. So too is the allegory of Canada as a feminized, passive, empty space that 'waits' for the colonizing European male culture to 'win her,' make 'her' replete, and precipitate her into 'history.' CANADIAN PACIFIC RAILWAY publicist John Murray GIBBON'S work Scots in Canada (1911) is one of many documents that simply reproduce imperialist assumptions through allegory as a way of justifying specific moments or modes of colonial settlement. Imperial allegory does not simply 'go away' in Canadian writing; rather, it is worked through, and 20th-century documents chart this working through in interesting ways. In Hugh MACLENNAN'S Barometer Rising (1941), the end of British imperial dominance and the beginnings of Canadian decolonization are encoded in the HALIFAX EXPLOSION, which kills the novel's Anglocentric tyrant, Geoffrey Wain, and facilitates the heroic rebirth of a new independent breed of Canadian, Neil Macrae. Leonard COHEN'S Beautiful Losers (1966) also allegorizes colonial Canada as a female body subject to sexual/imperial exploitation: here the rape of Edith, a FIRST NATIONS woman, by the descendants of the original French colonists in an American-owned quarry is intended to allegorize the Catholic Church's violation of First Nations culture in Canada and the US neo-imperialist 'rape' of Canadian resources. While texts such as these initiate a new relationship between the Canadian nation and the British Empire, they do not interrupt imperial allegory's appropriation of gender relations to questions of nation. Documents such as Hubert AQUIN'S Prochain episode (1965) and Margaret ATWOOD'S Surfacing (1972)
begin to undermine the normalized sexism of NATIONALIST, anti-colonial allegorical documents such as those produced by MacLennan and Cohen. But probably the most sustained attempt to relocate anti-colonialist Canadian allegory into a FEMINIST framework takes place in Susan SWAN'S 1983 novel The Biggest Modern Woman of the World. This work follows the life and career of Anna, a 'giantess' from Nova Scotia who finds employment in P.T. Barnum's freak show at the time of the American Civil War, tours London and meets the queen, marries 'The Kentucky Giant,' and eventually settles in the United States. Every moment in Anna's life is overwhelmed with allegorization: she is 'the GIRL GIANTESS in her colonial box,' 'the bumper crop' of Canadian natural resources, a mechanism for revenue, and a commodity constantly on display, and she ends up suffering from 'emblem fatigue.' Anna tries desperately to reverse the significatory legacy she has been born into; but at the level of gender politics, Canadian nationalist allegory that sets out simply to reverse the meaning of imperial allegories can end up saying pretty much the same things: Anna' read backwards is still 'anna.' Such a text shows that the process of rewriting the legacy of imperial allegory in Canadian writing is complicated, for what is gained in nationalist redefinition often comes about through a finesse of other levels of social life in Canada that require urgent political address: gender, ethnicity, RACE, CLASS, sexuality. Such a text also shows that the process of rewriting imperial allegory in Canadian writing has not yet been completed. See also BERSIANIK, HODGINS, J-A. LORANGER, Antonine MAILLET. Chris Gittings and Stephen Slemon
ALLEN, Charles Grant Blairfindie. Writer; b Kingston 24 Feb 1848, d Dorking, England, 28 Oct 1899; son of Charlotte Catherine Ann (Grant) and J. Antisell Allen, clergyman. An expatriate schooled in Europe, Allen was best known as a writer of essays and books on SCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY, and HISTORY who supplemented his income by writing fiction. Only a few of his more than forty popular novels and story collections continue to attract attention, notably his contributions to the genre of detective fiction (see MYSTERY) in An African Million-
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aire: Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay (1897), in which he creates one of the earliest 'gentleman crooks,' and two books featuring female sleuths: Miss Cayley's Adventures (1899) and Hilda Wade: A Woman with Tenacity of Purpose (1900). In 1895 Allen generated controversy on both sides of the Atlantic with The Woman Who Did, a best-selling novel about an unwed mother who makes herself a martyr to the cause of female emancipation. Further reading: Edward Clodd, Grant Allen: A Memoir (London: Grant Richards, 1900). Klay Dyer
ALLEN, Lillian Diana. Poet, performer, cultural activist; b Spanish Town, Jamaica, 5 April 1951; daughter of Amos andThelma Allen. She emigrated to Toronto in 1969 and completed a degree at York U. Though she is best known for her collections of DUB POETRY, Allen has also written plays, short fiction, and books for CHILDREN and adolescents. Her two albums, Revolutionary Tea Party (1986) and Conditions Critical (1988), won Juno Awards for their mixture of poetry, protest, and reggae music. In collections such as Rhythm an Hardtimes (1983), If You See Truth (1987), Let the Heart See (1987), and Women Do This Every Day (1993), she celebrates the distinctive character of the Jamaican community in Canada and the CARIBBEAN. Other works include The Teeth of the Whirlwind (1984), Curfew Inna B.C. (1985), Nothing But a Hero (1992), and Why Me (1991). Her poetry has also appeared in several collections and magazines and has been played on radio stations throughout the world. Allen describes her resistance writing as an attempt to promote empowerment and connectedness. Revolution, she believes, should come through art, love, and compassion. Further reading: Lillian Allen, A Writing of Resistance: Black Women's Writing in Canada,' in In the Feminine: Women and Words / Lesfemmes et les mots, eds Ann Dybikowski et al (Edmonton: Longspoon, 1985): 63-7; Michael Eldridge, 'Why Did You Leave There? Lillian Allen's Geography Lesson,' Diaspora 3.2 (1994): 169-83; Barbara Godard, 'Writing Resistance: Black Women's Writing in Canada,' in Intersexions: Issues of Race and Gender in Canadian Women's
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Writing, eds Coomi S. Vevaina and Barbara Godard (New Delhi: Creative Books, 1996): 10615Dorothy F. Lane
ALLEN, Robert Thomas. Marketer, novelist; b Toronto 5 June 1911, d San Bernardino, CA, July 1990. Allen worked in advertising and promotion for various employers until 1948, when he became a full-time freelance writer. Known for his light-hearted, colloquial, humorous works, many of them focusing on childhood and familial issues, he paints nostalgic portraits, as in My Childhood and Yours: Happy Memories of Growing Up (1977). Here he uses the passing of the seasons as a structural device on which to hang an examination of children's psyches. In 1971 Allen won the Stephen Leacock AWARD for Wives, Children and Other Wildlife. Tarnas Dobozy
ALLINE, Henry. Preacher, poet; b Newport, RI, 14 Jan 1748, d North Hampton, NH, 28 Jan 1784, the son of Rebecca (Clark) and William Alline, who emigrated in 1759 to occupy Annapolis Valley lands recently made available by the expulsion of ACADIAN farmers. Alline's Life and Journal (1806) reports that his conversion in 1775 led, despite his lack of formal education, to his life as an itinerant preacher. Torn between a desire for personal revelation and a need to evangelize, he helped to establish several independent churches in Nova Scotia (the basis for the Maritime Baptist movement), wrote theological treatises, and in 1783 prepared for publication the nearly five hundred religious poems that appeared in 1786 as Hymns and Spiritual Songs (reissued 1987). George Rawlyk edited his sermons (1986) and selected writings (1987). See also RELIGION. Further reading: J.M. Bumsted, Henry Alline (Toronto: U Toronto P, 1971); Thomas B. Vincent, 'Henry Alline: Problems of Approach and Reading the Hymns as Poetry,' in They Planted Well, ed M. Conrad (Fredericton: Acadiensis, 1988): 201-10. ALLISON, Susan Louisa Moir. Pioneer, occasional writer; b Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), 18 Aug 1845, d Vancouver i Feb 1937;
ALOUETTE
daughter of Susan Louisa (Mildern) and Stratton Moir. Of British stock, she immigrated to British Columbia as a teenager, and after marrying rancher John Fall Allison (3 Sept 1868), she moved to his Princeton homestead. There she learned CHINOOK to communicate with the Similkameen and Okanagan people who were her only neighbours. In a long verse epic, InCow-Mas-Ket (1900, published with its companion, Quin-Is-Coe), she recorded their legends and customs in narratives significant for their anthropological interest rather than their literary merit. Further reading: Margaret A. Ormsby, ed, A Pioneer Gentle-woman in British Columbia: The Recollections of Susan Allison (Vancouver: U British Columbia P, 1976). Anne Rayner
ALLOPHONE, a term developed in QUEBEC in the 19703 to refer to a third category of LANGUAGE speakers (along with FRANCOPHONE, or French-speaking, and ANGLOPHONE, or Englishspeaking) affected by that province's language laws. Allophones are persons whose first language is neither French nor English (see also CULTURAL PLURALITY, MULTICULTURAL
VOICES). In Canadian English the terms 'francophone' and 'anglophone' came to function both as adjectives and as nouns, referring to the French language and the English language respectively, or the speakers of these languages whatever their native tongue. ALLUSION, a literary technique of referring, for effect, to historical or literary figures, events, phrases, and the like. The effect is achieved when the reader brings to the reading of the present work the associations generated by the figure or phrase being alluded to. The BIBLE is a common source of allusion; so are Shakespeare, Voltaire, a host of other literary figures, and a range of historical moments, which will vary from society to society. In Canada, for example, an allusion to Dieppe (see HISTORICAL ANALOGUES, WAR) or to the WINNIPEG GENERAL STRIKE carries a particular nuance: a resentment against colonial status, a bitterness about CLASS presumptions and their impact. Allusions to the War of 1812 or the REBELLION of 1837 (and the
forces of authority at the time, the Family Compact and the Chateau Clique) suggest the continuing cultural irritation represented by American and establishment power. Allusion works by implication, and it need not involve direct quotation from the text it refers to. Other literary strategies that involve connections between texts include PARODY, BURLESQUE, plagiarism (the outright theft of another's work), and intertextuality (a technique of composition and CRITICISM that begins with the assumption that all texts are variously related to other texts, whether through forms of quotation, allusion, or repetition, and that in practice often draws attention to its own self-awareness about the artifice of art). ALONZO, Anne-Marie. Poet; b Alexandria, Egypt, 13 Dec 1951; daughter of Heliane Raymonde (Baindeky) and Noel Alonzo; emig 1963. After earning a MA in theatre studies (U Montreal, 1978), she founded in 1981 the troupe Auto/Graphe (which performed such texts as her own Veille, 1982, and Jean-Paul DAOUST'S City Lights) with Myrianne Pavlovic and Mona LATIFGHATTAS. Co-founder of the periodical Trois, which focuses on WOMEN'S writing, she sometimes collaborates with other female authors to examine women's personal and social experience. Her own style, evident in such volumes as Geste (1979), Ductus (1984; tr Sheila FISCHMAN), and Ecoute, Sultane (1987), attempts to mix or to fuse poetic and prose forms. Geste, about a young woman who is paralyzed in an automobile accident, is regarded as the most autobiographical. In 1985 Alonzo received the Emile-Nelligan poetry AWARD for her volume Bleus de mine (tr William Donoghue as Lead Mine, 1990). Among her later works are La danse des marches (1993), about a dancer. Margaret Cook
ALOUETTE is probably the best-known Canadian FOLK song. Though its origins perhaps lie in France, it was first recorded in print in A Pocket Song Book for the Use of Students and Graduates ofMcGill College (1879). Like many work or camp songs, it takes an antiphonal form: a leader introduces a new phrase (it tells of plucking the feathers from a lark's head, wings, tail, and - however unlikely - beak, feet and so on),
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ALOUETTE
and other singers repeat the phrase, adding it to all the previous phrases, until the singers stumble, tire of the game, or run out of new words. Marius BARBEAU'S Alouette (1946) summarizes variant forms of the words and music. ALPHABET, a magazine founded in London, ON, by James REANEY in 1960. The magazine, which lasted until 1971, was an important outlet and philosophical reference point for other mythopoeic writers, such as Jay MACPHERSON, Eli MANDEL, and to a lesser extent Margaret ATWOOD. These writers were influenced by the iconographic, mythological theories of Northrop FRYE, and Alphabet explored the importance of that emphasis in its essays and in the creative works it fostered. Terry Whalen
AMABILE, George Nicholas. Professor, editor, poet; b Jersey City, NJ, 29 May 1936; son of Mary Josephine (Mase), bookkeeper, and Anthony Thomas Amabile, civil engineer. After his arrival in Canada in 1963, Amabile founded and/ or edited three creative WRITING journals: The Penny Paper, The Far Point, and Northern Light. His own poetry appeared in twenty-eight different anthologies and almost two hundred journals, and his collections - The Presence of Fire (1983) and Rumours of Paradise/Rumours of War (J995) - won praise for their intense lyricism, startling imagery, theatricality, and preoccupation with sexuality, mortality, and individuality. Further reading: Arthur Adamson, "'Between Two Lives, Breathing": Poetic Identity in George Amabile's The Presence of Fire,' ECW 43 (Spring 1991): 108-17; Patrick Lane, 'George Amabile's Quest for Wholeness in the Elemental Male,' ECW 43 (Spring 1991): 118-32. G.N. Forst
AMPRIMOZ, Alexandre. Critic, writer; b Rome, Italy, 14 Aug 1948; son of Carmelina (Vitale) and Louis Amprimoz, French army officer and chemist. Known for his French-language academic studies of Rimbaud and others, Amprimoz also writes literary essays in English, especially on ethnicity in the context of ItalianCanadian experience. His important essay 'Death between Two Cultures' (in Contrasts, ed
2O
Joseph Pivato, 1985), co-written with Sante A. Viselli, addresses the process of immigration and the reformulation of cultural identity, asserting that cultural loss is internalized as a kind of longing for an Edenic rural Italy that never really existed. This reading of the contradictory situation of the minority subject is reconfigured thematically in Amprimoz's English-language fiction. In the brief short stories of Hard Confessions (1987) and Too Many Popes (1990), the everyday is represented almost surrealistically, the stories vacillating between a sombre pessimism and a sense of capriciousness. Instances from Canadian daily life reveal the effects of cultural displacement that shape identity in the host country and revise the picture of the past, invoking an Italian social ambiance that is at once magical and cruelly ephemeral. Dreamlike depictions of people and places have the underlying moral vision that is characteristic of FOLK tales, but Amprimoz's existentialism also suggests that the present, like life itself, is elusive and ultimately transitory. Complementing these works are his French-language short stories and poetry in both French and English. See also SCIENCE FICTION, C. CLOUTIER, MALENFANT, E. M A R T E L , M O R E N C Y , P. S A V O I E .
Marino Tuzi
AMYOT, Genevieve. Poet, novelist; b SaintAugustin, QC, 10 Jan 1945; daughter of Maria (Jobin) and Alphonse Amyot. A 1969 graduate of U Laval, she taught for awhile before turning to writing. Her books, which are known for their impressionistic style - for being poised between love and anguish, life and death - explore how life affects the psyche. Examples are her first, surrealistic volume of poetry, La mart etait extravagante (1975) and Dans la pitie des chairs (1982), which ranges across time as it seeks to define the self. Amyot's novels include L'absent aigu (1976), Journal de I'annee passee (1978), Corps d'atelier (1990), andje t'ecrirai encore demain (1994). The last of these continues her dialogue between life and death in the form of a letter to a friend who has disappeared, and it celebrates the fecundity of the seasons, the earth, and women. Margaret Cook
ANDERSON-DARGATZ
ANATOMY, a literary term used to refer to a systematic 'dissection' or explanation of the constituent parts of a field of knowledge. For example, in Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Northrop FRYE proposes a comprehensive THEORY of literary genres, which, he argues, reflects the processes of the human mind. His four categories of genre correspond with the seasons: comedy (spring), romance (summer), tragedy (fall), and irony (winter). The term also refers to a largescale, generally comic narrative form (deriving from Menippean SATIRE, as in the work of Jack HODGINS) that assembles catalogues, debates, diagrams, and freewheeling associations into a seemingly sprawling but implicitly coherent design. See also ANTHOLOGIES. ANCIEN REGIME, the political system in France and French colonies prior to the Revolution of 1789. The key figures in this system were those who headed the civil/legal, religious, and local/rural branches of governance: the intendant, the bishop, and the seigneur. In NEW FRANCE in the late i7th century, the first intendant, Jean Talon, put in place the civil structure (law, political governance); the first bishop of Quebec, Francois de Laval, established schools and a seminary, preserving the Roman Catholic Church's affiliation with Rome and its separation from the French court and securing the basis for ULTRAMONTANE Catholicism; and the politically managed, feudal seigneurial system in which lands were granted to a few people, who in turn rented parcels to dependent habitants - preserved the ancicn regime's hierarchical structure. Many Canadian HISTORICAL ROMANCES look back to this time to claim it as a symbolic and culturally defining point of origin or to castigate it as a site of moral decay. See also G O L D E N
DOG.
ANDERSON, Patrick. Poet, editor, autobiographer; b Ashtead, Surrey, England, 4 Aug 1915, d Essex, England, 17 March 1979; educ Oxford (BA, MA) and at Columbia U. He moved in 1940 to Montreal, where he soon became involved in literary circles, Freudian psychoanalysis, and (because of his wife, Peggy Doernbach) Communist politics. With F.R. SCOTT and others, he founded the literary JOURNAL Preview in 1942, espousing modernist poetics, but he resigned
from its successor, Northern R, after a 1948 feud with John SUTHERLAND. Two years later, after his marriage had dissolved, Anderson left Canada. He wrote memoirs and TRAVEL narratives (eg, Search Me, 1957; Dolphin Days, 1963) and prepared, with his companion, Alistair Sutherland, a GAY anthology, Eros (1963). Anderson's own poetry (selected in Return to Canada, 1977) tends towards the sumptuous use of LANDSCAPE imagery as a sublimation of sexuality. See also K L E I N , L A Y T O N , P.K. PAGE.
Further reading: Justin D. Edwards, 'Engendering Modern Canadian Poetry: Preview, First Statement, and the Disclosure of Patrick Anderson's Homosexuality,' ECW 62 (Fall 1997): 65-84; David Leahy, 'Patrick Anderson and John Sutherland's Heterosexism,' ECW 62 (Fall 1997): 13249; C.X. Ringrose, 'Patrick Anderson and the Critics,' Canadian Literature 43 (Winter 1970): 1023ANDERSON-DARGATZ, Gail Kathryn. Fiction writer; b Kamloops, BC, 14 Nov 1963; youngest of five daughters of Irene (Humphrey), part-time writer, and Eric Anderson, sheep farmer. Raised in Salmon Arm, BC, AndersonDargatz worked after high school for a local newspaper; she later earned a creative writing degree from U Victoria, where she studied with Jack HODGINS. In 1993 her story 'The Girl with the Bell Necklace' won the CBC Literary Competition. Her first book, The Miss Hereford Stories (1994), the off-beat chronicles of narrator Martin Winkle's coming of age, was shortlisted for the Stephen Leacock Medal for HUMOUR. With its earthiness and gallery of local eccentrics, it prefigures the darker The Cure for Death by Lightning, Anderson-Dargatz's first novel (1996), which established the author as an innovative voice nationally and internationally. It was a 1996 finalist for the Chapters /Books in Canada First Novel AWARD and the Giller Prize and won the Vancity Book Prize and the Ethel Wilson BC Fiction Prize the following year. Set on a farm in British Columbia's interior during the Second World War, the first-person narrative - a fascinating blend of magic and GOTHIC, recipes, NATIVE MYTHOLOGY, and gruesome deaths traces a young woman's struggles with the furies of the human and natural worlds. The
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ANDERSON-DARGATZ
semi-autobiographical A Recipe for Bees followed in 1998. Susan Wasserman
ANDRIESANU, Mircea. Journalist, professor, poet; b Patrauti, Romania, u May 1928; son of Elisabeta and Loghin Andriesanu, to whom he dedicated a book of poetry. A student of biology and history in Bucharest and then gerontology at U Montreal, Andriesanu also worked variously as a press correspondent, documentarist, and technician in civil engineering. His first volume of poetry, Instants d'eternite (1981), won various awards in France, and like his other texts - for example, Sous le signe de Dracula (1985) - it seeks to come to terms with the human condition by looking for signs of absolutes. Margaret Cook
ANECDOTE, a form of simple narrative that usually tells a single event, often for comic effect, whether on its own or in LIFE WRITING or other genres. See also FETHERLING, SHORT STORY. ANFOUSSE, Ginette. CHILDREN'S writer, illustrator; b Montreal 27 May 1944; daughter of Jean Anfousse and Fernande Vachon. After studying a the Ecole des Beaux-Arts (1964), Anfousse worked as a visual consultant for Radio-Canada from 1965 to 1969 and for Radio-Quebec from 1970 to 1975. She founded her own design company, Les Ateliers PIGI, in 1978. The president of Createurs associes de Val-David and a member of Communication-Jeunesse, she also wrote for such literary magazines as Lurelu and won AWARDS for La Chicane and Un loup pour Rose/ Une nuit au pays des malices in 1979 and 1983 respectively. Constantin Grigorut
ANGEL, Leonard J. Playwright, philosopher; b Montreal 20 Sept 1945; son of Ethel and Kalman Angel; graduate in philosophy from McGill and U British Columbia (PhD, 1974). Angel became associated with Vancouver's New Play Centre shortly after his first play, Forthcoming Wedding (1975; prod 1972), debuted at Toronto's Factory Theatre Lab. His major plays, The Unveiling (1982) and the biographical Eleanor Marx (prod 1984), deal with the intimacies of
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JEWISH family life. Angel has also published three books of philosophy, including Enlightenment East and West (1994), as well as a combination novella/poem/essay, The Book of Miriam (i997). Jerry Wasserman
ANGLOPHONE CANADIAN WRITING. The motifs of a national literature are produced by various segments of a society in the course of rivalries and contestations among them. The history of such motifs reflects an evolving pattern of power relations. A reader who conies to the motifs of an earlier period does not encounter them passively but as part of an ongoing interpretive and contestatory process that alters and elaborates them. Literary CRITICISM, for its own ideological purposes, may often attempt to terminate this interpretive process by declaring the motifs of a literature to be unchanging and timeless. These declarations, such as Margaret AT WOOD'S Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972), should be read historically as part of the contestatory production of literary meanings. The range of possible circulating motifs in a culture as large, regionally and linguistically varied, separated by disparities of CLASS and income, and multicultural and multiracial as contemporary Canada is vast. An individual reader's relation to these motifs is usually complex and conflicted, stemming as it does from the person's family history, class affiliations, REGIONAL location, GENDER, ethnicity, RELIGION, and LANGUAGE. For example, Canadians descended from unlettered agricultural workers who came to Canada from Britain or the United States in the late i8th or early igth century may find many of the early structures in anglophone Canadian writing distant in terms of their class affiliations yet close in terms of language, ethnicity, religion, and gender. Aboriginal Canadians and those whose families emigrated in other periods and from other ethnic or racially inflected cultures may experience the inherited structures of anglophone Canadian writing in even more conflicted ways; many in recent decades have made dissenting contributions to the literature as signs of such conflict. Those who read the literature from outside Canada will similarly read it with differing degrees of recog-
ANGLOPHONE CANADIAN WRITING
nition and identification, depending on the linguistic, national, racial, class, religious, and gender affiliations through which they read. Anglophone Canadian literature and its motifs until the early 2Oth century were largely a production of upper- and middle-class, Protestant, English-, Irish-, and Scottish-descended Canadians, as both writers and readers. The first non-British authors' names to appear in English Canada's canonical literature do so primarily after the First World War - names such as Martha OSTENSO, A.M. KLEIN, and the tellingly anglicized Frederick Philip GROVE and Irving LAYTON. Ostenso and Layton were the first of numerous authors to come from working-class parents and to bring that class perspective to their readership. From the earliest times until the present, immigration has been a major motif in Canadian writing, but it was only in the 2oth century that the lower-deck immigrants had opportunities to construct it. The early forms of this motif- exile from a dimly remembered paradisal Britain (Susanna MOODIE, Roughing It in the Bush, 1852) or the colonial responsibility to build a more vigorous version of England abroad (Oliver GOLDSMITH, The Rising Village, 1825; Sarajeannette DUNCAN, The Imperialist, 1904) - give way not surprisingly to more complex, more sceptical, and racially and ethnically more aware constructions in works such as Henry KREISEL'S The Rich Man (1948) or Fred WAH'S Waiting For Saskatchewan (1985). There is a similar history in Canadian CRITICISM, in which those able to contribute views on what Canadian texts and motifs are worth reading and preserving are largely of British ethnicity and middle-class descent until late in the 2oth century. At the conclusion of William KIRBY'S 1877 novel, The Golden Dog, British officers meet in the fortress of Quebec in 1777 to prepare for the attack by American revolutionary troops commanded by Benedict Arnold. With them are Quebecois aristocrats who had met here almost thirty years before to prepare for an attack on the fortress by British troops and American colonists - the scene with which The Golden Dog opens. In the several hundred pages between the two scenes Kirby has narrated a complex tale of the corruption of the French colonial administration, a tale in which venal administra-
tors and courtiers betray the bravery of the ANCIEN REGIME'S soldiers, ruin two prominent families, and cause the death of the idealistic merchant Bourgeois Philibert, who had lobbied for individual freedom and the rule of law. In this final scene, Kirby writes, the 'noblest names and lineage of NEW FRANCE, had come forward as loyal subjects of England's crown to defend Canada.' Among the unstated implications of this passage is that the British 'conquest' has ended government corruption, healed the class conflicts that killed Philibert, and created a society that possesses the freedoms which the dissident democrats of NEW FRANCE had struggled vainly to obtain. Such scenes of social rapprochement mark many of the major early anglophone Canadian novels. The History of Emily Montague (1769), written by Frances BROOKE in Quebec City during the decade that followed the British 'conquest' of New France, begins this process with its oddly mixed descriptions of French Canadians as 'ignorant, lazy, stupid' but also 'hospitable, courteous, civil.' The conclusion of John RICHARDSON'S Wacousta (1832) shows a younger generation abandoning the enmities that had destroyed much of the De Haldimar family, a minor friendship having developed between a De Haldimar son and one of the Aboriginal characters. Although much of the action in Ralph CONNOR'S The Man from Glengarry (1901) rests on conflict between French-Canadian and Scottish-Canadian loggers, the novel concludes with a grudging respect having developed between Ranald MacDonald, Connor's youthful protagonist, and his francophone antagonist, Louis LeNoir. Rapprochement depends on conflict - in the novels mentioned above most frequently on the most nationally characterizing of Canadian conflicts, that between its anglophone and francophone settler cultures. Even in Wacousta, where the central conflicts are between anglophones the manipulatively correct Col. De Haldimar and his murderously vengeful Scottish rival, Reginald Morton - francophone settlers are portrayed as passively disruptive in not involving themselves on either side. This passivity both relativizes the overall conflict and reveals its claustrophobic obsessiveness, as do other conflicts in the novel: between De Haldimar's
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ANGLOPHONE CANADIAN WRITING
British troops and Morton's Aboriginal allies, between De Haldimar's fixation on law and military practice and Morton's increasing impulsiveness, between factions within Morton's tribal allies, and between De Haldimar and his children. Implicit in some of these conflicts are further ones: between Canadian and American political ideologies, between Canadian and British cultural practices, and between civilization and landscape, a conflict between Tort and forest' that has been constructed in Canadian writing in various ways from early fur-trading narratives such as Alexander HENRY'S Travels and Adventures in Canada (1809) to present-day reflections on environmental and Aboriginal questions, such as Donna SMYTH'S Subversive Elements (1986) and John STEFFLER'S amusingly revisionist The Afterlife of George Cartwright (1992). These various conflictual structures, each with associated ethical questions, have received various inflections as historical particularities have changed and as the class, gender, RACE, and regional positions from which they have been perceived have become more numerous and complex. The ways in which they can be seen to interweave with one another in a text such as Wacousta suggest that, while they appear to be oppositions and were often presented as binaries by i8th- and 19th-century writers, they are perhaps better understood as parts of an array of interrelated tensions in Canadian writing and culture. Frequently, in fact, during most periods of anglophone Canadian writing one finds these structures standing as metaphors for one another, as in Wacousta, where the fort and forest of British order and North American wilderness imply not only Britain and America but also a feminized European culture threatened by unpredictable North American phallic energies (a metaphoric transformation that occurs with similar vividness in Samuel HEARNE'S wellknown account of the 'Indian' murder of'Esquimaux' at Coppermine River, in his Journey from Prince of Wales' Fort in Hudson Bay, to the Northern Ocean, 1795). Precisely how the metaphor is constructed - whether woman, for example, is identified with North American wilderness or with Europe - depends on the position and cultural identifications of the writer. Aboriginal
24
peoples can be made in different texts and in different readings of texts to represent a savage LANDSCAPE, a benign or 'wise' landscape, or anarchic US republicanism. WOMEN can be metaphorically linked to European culture, to an industrially threatened landscape, to a silent idealized nature, or even to a FOLKlorish francophone Quebec. Arguably, it is only by noting the interrelationships among these motifs and structures that one can particularize and historicize them sufficiently to be able to specify their 'Canadian' qualities. The prominence accorded by LITERARY HISTORY to certain early passages in anglophone Canadian writing - to Hearne's account of the Coppermine River massacre, to Henry's of the 1760 massacre of British soldiers and traders at Michilimackinac, and to Anna JAMESON'S comparison in 1838 of Canadian settler methods for killing trees to male methods for demoralizing and oppressing women - rests in part on the intersection in these passages of two or more motifs. Hearne, for example, implicitly genders himself and the 'Esquimaux' victims as female in his account, thus creating a structural portrait of European-Aboriginal relations in which Europeans, and white civilization, possess gentle, feminine sensibilities and values, while the 'Northern Indians' and the difficult landscape they inhabit are associated with ruthless violence. Henry's account brings together both the Aboriginal-European and the anglophonefrancophone contrasts, with the francophone 'Canadians' of his account occupying (as they do in Wacousta) a third position, where they function in the narrative structure as neither European intruder nor indigenous threat. In later Canadian literature the francophone will often serve, as in George BOWERING'S novel Caprice (1987), as the third possibility that destabilizes the polarities necessary for the maintaining of rigid ideologies. In the 19605 and 19705 much was made in critical accounts of Canadian literature of a structural opposition between nature and culture or between landscape and civilization. Northrop FRYE'S suggestion in his 'Conclusion' to the first edition of the Literary History of Canada (1965) that Canadian writing has characteristically constructed Canada as a GARRISON culture which unconsciously experiences the North American
ANGLOPHONE CANADIAN WRITING
wilderness as life-threatening and terrifyingly indifferent to settlement was founded to a large extent on eastern Canadian and Prairie settlement exploration and narratives, many of which represented most objects and situations unfamiliar to a European, particularly those that obstructed trade or agriculture, as ominous. Margaret Atwood's popular critical account, Survival, expanded Frye's 'bush garden' theory to include the idea that mere survival - as individuals, as a nation - had become the major motif of Canadian writing. Linked by a hostile climate, various submotifs, such as 'nature the monster/ 'animal victims,' 'failed sacrifices,' and 'the paralyzed artist,' in this account exemplify a Canada in which failure is commonplace and mere endurance is constructed as success. Among the numerous problems with such theories, the most serious is the extent to which they homogenize and dehistoricize Canada and its literature. 'Nature,' for example, means different things in different periods and is experienced in different ways by people from different classes, ethnicities, races, and cultural histories - as Susanna Moodie's well-known account in Roughing It in the Bush of working-class Irish immigrants shamelessly cavorting on Grosse Isle (Moodie's spelling) unwittingly demonstrates. Even if Frye's and Atwood's cultural portraits were accurate pan-historical ones for Ontario a doubtful contention - their projection onto other parts of Canada would remain at best a presumptive act of metonymy. Any discussion of specific motifs must be repeatedly qualified with reminders that such structures can have widely divergent meanings for Canadians in different periods, who are located in different positions within the regional, racial, gender, class, and other power relations of a given period. A structural opposition between nature and culture is certainly strongly expressed in much Canadian writing, but nature is not always a monster, nor is the point of view in these texts always hostile to monsters. Daphne MARLATT'S novel Ana Historic (1988), for example, offers a powerful argument that instrumentalist, patriarchal cultures construct as 'monstrous' whatever they most fear, including dark woods and female sexuality. Moreover, the grossly unequal distribution of education, leisure, and wealth in i8th- and 19th-century Brit-
ain and Canada meant not only that most Canadian texts from the settlement period were written from middle-class or upper-middle-class perspectives but that they were written from the perspectives of those with little appreciation of the material processes of agricultural and resource-industry labour that underpinned cultural achievements in 19th-century Canada. The overly 'natural' working-class immigrants of Moodie's 'Grosse Isle' anecdote rarely had opportunities to depict such scenes from their own viewpoints. Neither did her working-class LOYALIST or late-Loyalist settlers, such as the sardonically described 'Old Satan' and his family. The nature-culture dichotomy appears in early anglophone Canadian writing heavily marked by theology (as in Moodie's 'Old Satan') and by a tendency to conflate Aboriginal peoples and the landscapes in which they were encountered. For explorers such as Alexander MACKENZIE or Hcarne, passing through a challenging physical landscape meant passing through demanding cultural landscapes also. For Oliver Goldsmith in The Rising Village, to clear a terrain for agriculture means to clear it as well of only slightly differentiated wild beasts and wild peoples - of'barb'rous man and beast.' Both in Goldsmith and in Moodie the natural LANDSCAPE is frequently marked as theologically part of the fallen world - as dark, gloomy, satanic, and inhabited by monsters. The implication of such marking is that settlement and the clearing of land for agriculture is a Christian activity that redeems a landscape from darkness to light. This activity appears to displace here and elsewhere in the early writing the redeeming of Aboriginal souls, of which there is scant mention except in the now little read journals of 19th-century missionaries such as Edward Wilson or the Ojibway Peter Jones (Kahkewaquonaby). Awareness of a woman's particular gender positions can modify, or - as in the case of Anna Jameson - reverse parts of this general natureculture construction. In Isabella Valancy CRAWFORD'S Malcolm's Katie (1884) several modifications to the motif occur, intricately raising questions about NATIVE and gender constructions as well. The forests in which her protagonist, Max, seeks his fortune as an axeman are dangerous to the unwary but not
25
ANGLOPHONE CANADIAN WRITING
intrinsically unpleasant, and they are constructed in the poem as a source of wealth and a basis for future industry. They shelter industrious settlers and Native people such as the 'tough, lithe' 'half-breed lad' who assists Max in his labours. Elsewhere in the poem Crawford has transformed the images associated with aboriginals from the GOTHIC ones of Henry, Goldsmith, and Moodie to romantic mythopoeic ones that contribute to the Edenic qualities with which Katie concludes the poem by emphatically attributing to them Max's newly cleared land. What was a sharp opposition between natural landscape and culture in Goldsmith is frequently presented as a complementary relationship in Crawford. While the forest is still violently transformed by the settler into agricultural land, the transformation is not simply an oppositional one; it is because of the forest's richness and the reliability of the poem's Aboriginally characterized seasons that Max's new farm can prosper. Crawford also troubles considerably the gendering of nature, which is both masculine in its warrior trees and feminine in the lilies and wild roses with which Katie is symbolically linked. The trees, moreover, become increasing phallic and dangerous when culturally transformed into logs and stamped with the patriarchal initials of ownership, such as those of Katie's father. Crawford creates in Katie the most articulate female character to that date in Canadian poetry, who debates with Max at the poem's opening and speaks its concluding lines. Many of these changes from the nature-culture tensions evident in the work of writers such as Hearne and Goldsmith are due, of course, as much to the different historical circumstances in which Crawford writes as to awareness of gender. By the late ipth century in Ontario most of the independent and resistant aspects of Aboriginal culture had been destroyed by the imposition of white institutions such as the treaty and the reserve. Farmlands such as those of Katie's father were now held by second- and third-generation settlers, creating inheritance issues like that which lies at the heart of Crawford's poem - what man is qualified to assume possession of his lands and 'his' Katie. For the CONFEDERATION poets, writing mostly between 1880 and 1920, the potentially 26
oppositional tensions between nature and culture have yet different characteristics, and the poet's own identifications, particularly in Archibald LAMPMAN, can shift sharply away from culture. Behind this shift is a theological one, in which the Canadian landscape is no longer a fallen world below a lost British paradise but part of an international 'Nature' constructed as close to divine by German transcendentalism and English romanticism. As well, the changing material conditions of life in central Canada - the building of railroads and the growth of industrial cities - is placing this near-sacred nature in some jeopardy: the noise of crowded cities in many a Lampman poem intrudes, if only through memory, on the hushed voices of nature's creatures. These new conditions have also changed these writers' understanding of what constitutes both nature and culture. The farms that in Goldsmith's The Rising Village and Alexander MCLACHLAN'S The Emigrant were signs of culture are in Lampman andc.G.D. ROBERTS part of pastoral landscapes which blend with nearby swamps and forests to collectively constitute nature. No longer linked with phallic or violent signs, this nature is implicitly feminine - the silent muse that is verbally idealized and pursued by the male poet. In Duncan Campbell SCOTT'S At Gull Lake: August, 1810' the violence of the Native chief Tabashaw is dramatically dissociated from a feminized nature that accepts the body of the young wife he has slain as part of itself. In Scott's 'On the Way to the Mission' and 'Onondaga Madonna' Native culture is itself portrayed as both doomed and feminized. Another important change in these poems is that the savagecivilized contrast of early Canadian-writing has been greatly qualified. In At Gull Lake' the cultural distance between the violent chief and Nairne, the trader whom the chief's wife loves, is relatively narrow. In 'On the Way to the Mission' it is 'white men' who are savagely violent and a Native who is quietly faithful to a European institution. The material shift in power between Canadian Native and settler cultures has clearly influenced Scott's constructions here. In the 20th century these diverging strands became more accentuated, as economic, ethnic, gender, and other differences interreacted
ANGLOPHONE CANADIAN WRITING
with one another and with an expanding geographic diversity in Canadian writing, often interpreted critically as regionalism. The dichotomy between nature and culture appears now primarily in writing from the Canadian prairies, where settlement took place mostly between 1890 and 1920 and where an arguably hostile nature is often made, by writers and readers, to stand in for global economic conditions as a primary cause of Depression-era poverty, as in Anne MARRIOTT'S long poem The Wind Our Enemy (1939) and Sinclair ROSS'S novel As for Me and My House (1941). Into the space implied by the romantic dichotomy between industrial city and pastoral nature is built, first in Ontario, the motif of the small town, sometimes recalled nostalgically and often as a place that permits eccentricity and illusion (LE AC OCR'S Sunshine Sketches, 1912; George ELLIOTT'S collection of stories The Kissing Man, 1962; James REANEY'S long poem Twelve Letters to a Small Town, 1962). While in Prairie fiction w.o. MITCHELL'S Who Has Seen the Wind presents one of the most sanguine small-town portrayals in the literature, other Prairie small towns have been remarkable as contexts for meanness, discrimination, and repression of creativity, and have been metaphorically linked to barren, rather than pastoral, landscapes. Margaret LAURENCE'S small town, 'Manawaka,' in A Bird in the House (1970) and The Diviners (1974) follows the 'Horizon' of Ross's As for Me and My House as a place that a young artist must leave if he or she hopes to prosper. Changing modes of travel, however, appear to alter this motif in the 19705, 19805, and 19905. In novels by Robert KROETSCH (Gone Indian, 1973), Jack HODGINS (The Resurrection of Joseph Bourne, I 979)» and Jane URQUHART (The Underpainter, J997). the small town is easily reached from cosmopolitan centres and often appears as part of a global network of interconnected places. These interconnections deconstruct the nature-culture binary, as in Gone Indian, where much of 'nature' appears to have been textually produced by European idealisms. In Atlantic Canadian writing, the entire region often takes on many of the properties of a small town, as the place that the young and promising must leave (Ernest BUCKLER'S novel The Mountain and the Valley, 1952; David FRENCH'S plays Leaving Home, 1972, and Of the Fields, Lately, 1973) or as a once-
organic community attacked by the multinational commerce and cosmopolitan fashion (David Adams RICHARDS'S novels Lives of Short Duration, 1981, and Nights below Station Street, 1988). Later decades also saw numerous attempts to revise the Aborigine/white-settler binary, particularly in the WEST and NORTH of Canada, where Aboriginal cultures preserved more of their traditions, languages, and practices than in the EAST. Some of these, such as Rudy WIEBE'S The Temptations of Big Bear (1973) and Margaret Laurence's The Diviners, recreated the close association that Goldsmith first made between Native aborigine and landscape, while reversing the theological connotations of the landscape from demonic to sacred. Such novels have also helped to create the motif of the speaking and creative Indian in the place of Goldsmith's unspeaking and bestial Indian, the enigmatic or declamatory Indians of later i8th- and 19th-century narratives, or the poetic or tragic Indians of the late i9th century. This move to provide the Native with a subject position, giving him the focalizing narrative viewpoint in The Temptations of Big Bear and allowing his songs the privileged final position in The Diviners, takes a decidedly less paternal and romantic form with the emergence of such Aboriginal authors as Beatrice CULLETON (In Search of April Raintree, 1983), Jeannette ARMSTRONG (Slash, 1985), Tom KING (Medicine River, 1990; Green Grass, Running Water, 1993), and Tomson HIGHWAY (the plays The Rez Sisters, 1988; and Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, 1989). Among non-Native writers, George Bowering, in his novels Burning Water (1980) and Caprice, has been the most innovative in attacking through PARODY the cliche motifs the declamatory Indian, the mystic Indian, the poetic Indian - that Canadian literature frequently attached to the Aboriginal (see NATIVE IN LITERATURE). Running throughout 20th-century anglophone Canadian literature is the motif of the female orphan. From Anne Shirley of Lucy Maud MONTGOMERY'S Anne of Green Gables (1908) to Grace Marks of Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace (1996) and Eliziete of Dionne BRAND'S In Another Place, Not Here (1996), literal or metaphoric female orphans stand in for various themes, including woman's marginalization
2.7
ANGLOPHONE CANADIAN WRITING
within patriarchy (Maggie in Ethel WILSON'S Swamp Angel, 1954), the woman artist's double marginalization within the instrumentalism of patriarchy (Gail SCOTT'S Heroine, 1987), the abused body of an industrially assaulted Canadian landscape (Atwood's Surfacing, 1972), and the violated body of the racially marked immigrant (Naomi in Joy KOGAWA'S Obasan, 1981). This motif receives its darkest treatment in Canadian plays such as George RYGA'S The Ecstasy ofRitaJoe(1970), Carol BOLT'S One Night Stand (1977), and Sharon POLLOCK'S Blood Relations (1981) and Getting It Straight (1992), where murder is often the ultimate expression of orphanhood, and its lightest in novels such as Montgomery's, Atwood's Lady Oracle (1976), and Aritha VAN HERK'S The Tent Peg (1981). The motif has its origins in the themes of exile in 19th-century women's texts such as Moodie's Roughing It in the Bush or Anna Jameson's Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838), where emigration has orphaned the woman not only from parents but also from Europe and its familiar cultural forms. Such historical roots are impressively explored in Laurence's The Diviners and Marlatt's Ana Historic. The Diviners links the actual orphanhood of its protagonist, Morag Gunn, both with the isolation narrated by Moodie's sister, Catharine Parr TRAILL (The Back-woods of Canada, 1836), and with that experienced by Morag's British-immigrant stepmother, Prin, whose depressions in the face of patriarchally ordained poverty and powerlessness eventually deprive her of the power of speech. Ana Historic links its protagonist's feelings of alienation both from her father-dominated family and from male-dominated culture in general with the cavalier destruction of British Columbia forests by early loggers and with male-dominated psychiatry's destruction of her mother through shock therapy. In both novels the motifs of the vulnerable landscape, the vulnerable woman, and the vulnerable Native are as elsewhere in 20th-century Canadian writing - closely interwoven. All three face metaphorical orphanhood. Only occasionally, however, has the Canadian nation itself been constructed as the vulnerable and potentially orphaned state, as in Atwood's Surfacing, in which a multinational instrumentalism seems to threaten a Canadian polity as
28
much as it threatens the northern Ontario and Quebec landscapes, and as much as it has killed the narrator's aborted child. Partly this absence is because the Canadian national project has been configured, like the projects of most nation-states, as a patriarchal one (see William LIGHTHALL, ed, Songs ofthe Great Dominion, 1889; P.P. Grove, The Master ofthe Mill, 1944; Hugh MacLennan, Two Solitudes, 1945; E.J. PRATT, Toward the Last Spike, 1952; and Dennis LEE, Civil Elegies, 1968). In Thomas HALIBURTON'S The Clockmaker (1836), the first extended treatment ofthe recurrent tension between Canada and the United States, the two rival polities are represented primarily by men, by the narrating Nova Scotian squire and the New England clock salesman SAM SLICK. Here, however, this tension is not without its gender dimensions, for ofthe two men Slick is presented as overwhelmingly more misogynist and the more likely to characterize the Nova Scotians he criticizes as womanlike or effeminate. A similar hint of Canada as female and vulnerable in the face of violence from below its southern borders occurs in Richardson's Wacousta, in both the indecisiveness associated with Col. De Haldimar and the inability of his gentlemenofficers to prevent the rape and murder of his daughter, Clara. The most interesting treatment of a male United States versus a female Canada confrontation occurs in Bowering's Caprice, in which the American gunslinger Frank Spencer is hunted down in south-central British Columbia by a beautiful and well-educated Quebecoise poet; at the novel's climax she affirms a Canadian sense of community by declining to triumph over Spencer individually and by accepting a police officer's assistance in capturing him. Two ofthe most important motifs to emerge in the last few decades amid the changing social conditions of a self-consciously multicultural anglophone Canada have been the interrogative rewriting of EUROPEAN texts and the reverseimmigration voyage. The former - including such diverse works as Jack Hodgins's The Invention ofthe World (1977), George Bowering's Kerrisdale Elegies (1984), Robert Kroetsch's The Studhorse Man (1969) and Seed Catalogue (1977), Nourbese PHILIP'S long poem Looking for Livingstone (1991), and Aritha Van Herk's 'geografic-
ANIMAL STORIES
tione' Places Far from Ellesmere (1990) - implicitly argue the inapplicability of European mythological and literary constructions to contemporary Canadian social geography. The 'Canadian' effect of some of these texts - their affirmation that there are specific Canadian material conditions which are of prime value for particular Canadians - is often contested by the reverseimmigration voyage, which tends to place Canada in an international context that relativizes and sometimes questions its national call. These reverse-immigration voyages - an early example is Henry Kreisel's The Rich Man, in which Jacob Grossman, a Jewish garment worker from Toronto, naively visits relatives in Vienna on the eve of the Second World War reflect the changing modes of TRAVEL that allow the once-arduous immigration journey to be reversed, even by non-'rich' people like Kreisel's protagonist. A few are structured so as to affirm the centrality of Canada, as in Laurence's The Diviners, in which Morag's visit to her ancestral Scotland teaches her that Canada is her real ancestral home. Most, however, tend to problematize or relativize ties to Canada, or to locate such ties within a web of competing obligations. The pretended wealth of Kreisel's 'rich man,' which leads his relatives to believe he can rescue them, not only underlines the difficult life Canada often gives its immigrants, but it also helps to construct a contrast between a Canada in which materialism is often perceived as the greatest good and an Old World in which family, religion, race, and culture all have greater calls. The reverse-immigration voyage, as here, often raises the question of where or what is home. Sometimes home becomes multiple, as in Wah's Waiting for Saskatchewan, where the poet's father, long dead in Canada, keeps reappearing to him as he visits China. Or home becomes no longer a national or geographic concept and becomes instead gender defined, as in Daphne Marlatt's How Hug a Stone (1983), in which the protagonist's visit to the England of her parents' families leads her to Avebury and to a 'home' among women. Or through comedy or magic realism, the very notion of home can become subverted, as in Michael ONDAATJE'S Running in the Family (1982) or Hiromi GOTO'S A Chorus of Mushrooms (1996), where home argu-
ably becomes wherever there is someone to imaginatively produce it. The effort of critics to expand the range of motifs recognizable within anglophone Canadian writing, and to argue the heterogeneity of these motifs, has been one of the characteristics of anglophone Canadian criticism in the 19805 and 19905, much as an effort to locate transcendent national Canadian motifs characterized criticism in the 19605 and 19705. ANTHOLOGIES such as Smaro KAMBOURELI'S Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Literature (1996) and Makeda Silvera's The Other Woman: Women of Colour in Contemporary Canadian Literature (1993) and studies such as Lynette Hunter's Outsider Notes: Feminist Approaches to Nation State Ideology, Writers/Readers and Publishing (1996) and Lien Chao's Beyond Silence: Chinese-Canadian Literature in English (1997) constitute new readings and configurings of the literature, ones that attempt to define and legitimate motifs previously little recognized. Given the instability of national cultural formations at the end of the 20th century, and the continuing strength of paranational affiliations based on such concepts as gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and colour, this process of revision will almost certainly continue. See also HISTORICAL ANALOGUES, NATIONALISM, SCIENCE AND NATURE, RELIGION, URBAN WRITING, UTOPIA. Frank Davey
ANIMAL STORIES. In a culture such as Canada's, evolving in close proximity with the natural world, it is to be expected that animals would figure largely in the literature. In fact, the realistic animal story, in which the intention is to present animals as they are in nature rather than as ALLEGORICAL types or as characters in FABLES, was invented in Canada by Charles G.D. ROBERTS with Earth's Enigmas (1896). There is some controversy over whether Roberts deserves sole credit for the invention, however, because a claim can be made on behalf of Ernest Thompson SET ON for his Wild Animals I Have Known (1898). Literary history seems to support a reading whereby Roberts invented the realistic animal story, then abandoned it, the form was taken up by Seton and popularized, and Roberts returned to it. Seton may have been Roberts's superior as a naturalist, but there is consensus that Roberts, an excellent woods-
29
ANIMAL STORIES
man in his own right, was by far the better literary artist. Both writers proceeded to produce a great number and variety of animal stories (some 250 in Roberts's case), and it may be most accurate to consider them jointly as the creators of this distinctively Canadian form. Subsequently, the animal story has thrived in Canada, as both CHILDREN'S literature and reading for adults. Frederick Philip GROVE used ants with realistic precision, if more in the ALLEGORICAL tradition, in his underrated Consider Her Ways (1947). Naturalist-conservationists in the mould of Seton include such writers as Roderick HAIG-BROWN (Panther, 1934) and Farley MOWAT (with the creative non-fictional A Whale for the Killing, 1972.). Later still Marian ENGEL employed a bear to explore one woman's various intercourse with the natural world in Bear (1976), which won the Governor General's AWARD for Fiction. Later still, for similarly ecological-FEMINIST reasons, Barbara GOWDY attempted to figure forth the inner world of elephants in her popular The White Bone (1998). If the later igth century needed the animal story as a means both of exploring the new Darwinian universe and of recognizing human nature as also animal, the 2oth continued to need it as a way of expressing conservationist-ecological worries (which were also present in Roberts, Seton, and others). See also FINDLEY, Antonine MAILLET, SCIENCE AND NATURE.
Gerald Lynch
ANNE OF GREEN GABLES (1908) was originally produced for a general adult readership, and cultural critics now agree that Anne and L.M. MONTGOMERY'S other writings go far beyond CHILDREN'S LITERATURE. In Anne and her other writings, Montgomery subtly attacks authoritarianism and attitudes that denigrate the value of girls and WOMEN. The CHARACTER Anne ('of Green Gables') became a Canadian cultural icon: a little orphan girl, she is sent by mistake to an elderly couple who want a boy to help with their farm work. Anne is imaginative, talkative, and lovable, with a propensity for getting into scrapes. Her red hair marks her as an anarchic figure, and the book's episodes explode out of her confrontations with the repressive latei9th-century Scots-Presbyterian society of fictional Avonlea,' PEL However, cultures such
30
as the Japanese focus, not on Anne's independence and outspokenness, but instead on her quiet determination to succeed, to be respected, and to conform, and they find that her appreciation of the beauty in her small-scale world echoes their own national aesthetic. As a character in the Anne sequels, she becomes less interesting after she matures and marries, but Montgomery manufactures other outspoken characters to fill her role: Mary Vance, Miss Cornelia, Susan Baker. The 1919 silent movie version of Anne featured Mary Miles Minter. The 1934 'talkie' film starred Dawn O'Day, who later changed her name to Anne Shirley. In 1937 Alice Chadwicke wrote a three-act play based on Anne of Green Gables. A Polish stage play based on Anne was created sometime after the Second World War. In 1965 Norman Campbell and Don Harron wrote the popular Canadian musical stage play, which is a steady feature of Charlottetown summer theatre. In 1972 and 1975 the BBC serialized the first two Anne books. In 1985 a Canadian company made a successful TELEVISION version of Anne of Green Gables, featuring Megan Follows, Colleen Dewhurst, and Richard Farnsworth, followed by a sequel. Anne of Green Gables has inspired endless merchandising and book spin-offs, as well as legal battles over these rights. The book spinoffs include The Anne of Green Gables COOKBOOK, Aunt Maud's Cook-Book, Lucy Maud and the Cavendish Cat, The Annotated Anne of Green Gables, and The Lucy Maud Montgomery Album. The area around Cavendish, PEI, has spawned a series of gift shops, restaurants, bed and breakfasts, and amusement parks based on the Anne novels, making tourism one of the Island's largest industries. See also ANGLOPHONE, CHILDREN'S LITERATURE, MONTGOMERY.
Further reading: F.R. Bolger, The Years before Anne' (Charlottetown, PEI: Prince Edward Island Heritage Foundation, 1974); Wilfrid Eggleston, The Green Gables Letters (Toronto: Ryerson P, 1960); Mavis Reimer, ed, Such a Simple Little Tale: Critical Responses to L.M. Montgomery's 'Anne of Green Gables' (Metuchen, NJ, and London: Children's Literature Assoc and Scarecrow P, 1992); Elizabeth Waterston, Kindling
ANTHOLOGIES
Spirit: L.M. Montgomery's 'Anne of Green Gables' (Toronto: ECW, 1993). Mary Henley Rubio
ANTHOLOGIES, collections of exceptional or representative works (the term 'anthology' derives from the Greek root words anthos and legein, to gather flowers), are conventionally used as compendia or textbooks (see TEACHING) and usually described in terms involving constitutions and charters, lists and CANONS, introductions and assessments. They clearly display an editor's version of what deserves to be represented and read. Anthologies can also influence how readers will define - as the 'received version' - the subject that they address. They can, however, be thought of as acts of imagination, for behind every anthology is a fundamental act of vision, whether the EDITOR or prospective editor is a publisher, historian, literary critic, teacher, politician, or political scientist. In his 'Preface to an Uncollected Anthology' (1957; The Bush Garden, 1971), Northrop FRYE encapsulates what is involved: as author, he is writing the preface to the collection of poetry that he has imagined as 'ideal.' A sense of the whole, that is, precedes the assembly of the parts. Some anthologies - generally the more informal ones or those that date from the more distant past (miscellanies, commonplace books, scrapbooks put together over time by several hands) - do suggest that the shape of the 'whole' can be more accidental than planned, but even these books possess an overall shape. Contemporary PUBLISHING practice requires designing an anthology for a particular niche. Hence in Canadian literary circles, collections now exist to represent consciously such ideological questions as GENDER and sexuality, CULTURAL PLURALITY, RACE, REGION, FIRST NATIONS experience, and WOMEN'S lives and stories. Among the many available books, some examples are the following: Piece of My Heart: A Lesbian of Colour Anthology (ed Makeda SILVERA, 1991), The Second Gates of Paradise (ed Alberto MANGUEL, 1994), Voices from Quebec (ed Philip STRATFORD and Michael Thomas, 1977), Roman Candles (ed Pier Giorgio DI cicco, 1978), Quetes: textes d'auteurs italo-quebecois (ed Fulvio CACCIA and Antonio D'ALFONSO, 1983), Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Literature (ed Smaro
KAMBOURELI, 1996), and the bilingual 100 Years of Critical Solitudes (ed Caroline Bayard, 1992). Other collections, addressing the general topic of marginalization, include Canada in Us Now (ed Harold Head, 1976), Other Voices (ed Lorris Elliott, 19.85), Voices (ed Ayanna Black, 1992), Eyeing the North Star: Directions in African-Canadian Literature (ed George Elliott CLARKE, 1997), Daughters of the Sun, Women of the Moon: Poetry by Black Canadian Women (ed Ann Wallace, 1991), By Great Waters: A Newfoundland and Labrador Anthology (ed Peter Neary and Patrick o'FLAHERTY, 1974), Storiesfrom Ontario (ed Germaine Warkentin, 1974), Horizon: Writings of the Canadian Prairie (ed Ken MITCHELL, 1977), Skookum Wawa: Writings of the Canadian Northwest (ed Gary GEDDES, 1975), Paper Stays Put: A Collection oflnuit Writing (ed Robin Gedalof, 1980), Northern Voices (ed Penny Petrone, 1988), A Gathering of Spirit (ed Beth BRANT, 1983, 3rd ed 1988), An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English (ed Daniel David MOSES and Terry Goldie, 1992, 2nd ed 1998), Looking at the Words of Our People (edjeannette ARMSTRONG, 1993), Telling It (ed SKY LEE et al, 1990), Poetry by Canadian Women (ed Rosemary Sullivan, 1989), and The Oxford Book of Stories by Canadian Women in English (ed Rosemary Sullivan, 1999). Other current works focus on GENRE, such as David HELWIG'S, John METCALF'S, and other editors' work (with Oberon P) to assemble annual representations of the year's 'best' SHORT FICTION, or else they focus on specific themes, such as the collections that gather poems and stories about SPORTS, ANIMALS, artist figures, supernatural experience, FOLK literature, or the MOUNTIES. Such works serve particular ends, whether to sample the work of a given moment or place, or (in a more openly political fashion) deliberately to shape a field of inquiry. Anthologies, that is, can be ways of demonstrating the range and strength of areas of interest that conventional pedagogy or LITERARY HISTORY has marginalized or ignored. Such works come into existence because of a perceived need, an editor and publisher having imagined alternatives to whatever options currently exist and whatever opinions currently prevail. This process is an ongoing one. While the works by Brant, Clarke, and Kamboureli, for example, reveal the growing diversity of
3i
ANTHOLOGIES
Canadian culture during the 20th century, the history of Canadian anthologies indicates that many earlier books came into existence not only because writing in Canada had been nearly altogether overlooked in Britain, France, and the United States, but also because it was in danger of being overlooked in Canada as well. When James HUSTON assembled his fourvolume Le repertoire national (1848-50, ed Robert MELANCON, 1982), he was endeavouring to keep in print various French-language poems and stories in Quebec that were already in danger of becoming fugitive pieces, a task that in some ways Victor-Levy BEAULIEU re-enacted with Manuel de la petite litterature du Quebec (1974), which draws on forms often considered extraliterary, such as social tracts, pamphlets, and local histories. While politics deeply marks what Huston chose to include and omit, and while his taste was later called into question, his accomplishment nonetheless testifies to his cultural aspiration. The same might be said of the two most influential 19th-century anthologies of anglophone Canadian writing: E.H. DE WART'S Selections from Canadian Poets (1864; rpt 1973) and William Douw LIGHTH ALL'S Songs of the Great Dominion (1889; rpt 1971), both of which (despite their differences of coverage) celebrated a common ideal of NATIONALISM, sparked by an admiration of nature, God, and masculinity. Other anthologists attempted to focus on newer writers, such as Wilfred CAMPBELL in his early version of The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse (1913), to bridge the Canadian language divide, as with Our Canadian Literature: Representative Prose and Verse (ed Lome PIERCE, 1922; rev with Bliss CARMAN, 1935), to emphasize the collectivity of empire, as in Anthology of Empire (ed Anthony Haslam, 1932); or to celebrate the permanence of tradition, through the folk culture (J.M. GIBBON, following in the footsteps of H-R. CASGRAIN and Honore BEAUGRAND) or some other medium. In short, the shape of anthologies is limited only by the imagination of the editor and by the willingness of a publisher to finance what, during the 20th century, became an increasingly expensive enterprise. Despite current critical generalizations about the colonial past, anthologies had by the 1914-18 WAR already constructed divergent versions of
32
Canadian culture. Recurrent among them, however, was a tension between the imperial inheritance and different forms of cultural nationalism. The image that some books projected was of a Canada that had inherited EUROPE and still looked primarily across the Atlantic for cultural confirmation, a society that was dominantly male, that aspired to conventional elegance in language, and that was preoccupied with rural life, the LANDSCAPE, the NORTH, and (depending on the intended readership) either the whimsicality or the sturdiness of the past. Among the more conservative collections were A.M. STEPHEN'S enthusiastic The Voice of Canada (1926; rev J.F. Swayze, 1946) and Jules Fournier's Anthologie des poetes canadiens (1920; completed by Olivar ASSELIN after Fournier's death), the latter revealing the editor's general tendency to dismiss the quality of Quebec writing. With the postwar generation of the 19203, by contrast, anthologists' attention had begun to turn more to questions of national distinctiveness and issues involving form. In part this shift in intention reflected a new generation's attempt to free itself from systems of value that had come to be associated with aesthetic exhaustion and ethical decay. F.R. SCOTT and A.J.M. SMITH, who (as with New Provinces, 1936) were to be the chief anglophone anthologists of the next two decades, espoused international modernism, innovative literary forms (though they themselves would be critiqued by John SUTHERLAND'S Other Canadians, 1947), and SATIRE (The Blasted Pine, 1957, rev 1967). Raymond KNISTER, in his pioneering 1928 anthology of SHORT FICTION, recognized that stories could develop by style and not just by plot. Camille ROY, in Morceaux choisis d'auteurs canadiens (1934; 6th ed, 1948), argued for the quality of the texts that demonstrated his own nationalist version of Quebec's literary history. These collections at once served a desire for cultural distinctiveness and shaped a sense of what form such distinctiveness took. But these images, too, would stimulate alternative visions of Canadian culture, including Watson KIRKCONNELL'S assemblage of writings from the unofficial languages, Canadian Overtones (1935), and the socialist collections of the 19305 (including Oscar RYAN'S agitprop DRAMA collection Eight Men Speak, 1933).
ANTHOLOGIES
From 1920 on, then, anthologists continued to help redesign the received shape of the national culture, bringing into place the convenient (if restrictive) image of the northern mosaic as the national paradigm. With such popular collections as William Toye's A Book of Canada (1962) and William Kilbourn's Canada (1970), this new 'stable' version of the country appeared to be in place, although Al PURDY'S The New Romans (1968), anthologizing Canadians' versions of the United States, suggested concurrently that such stability was relative. What these anthologies demonstrated was that they could be an agency of critique as well as an embodiment of canonical value. Clearly, however, the positions advocated by any group of critics can readily turn into a new canon, over time inviting still further critique and further articulation of what is meant by the term 'representative.' During the middle decades of the 2oth century, several anthologies came to be influential textbooks. There had been numerous books recommended for junior schools prior to this time, many - such as the Highroads to Reading series (1946-50) or J.E. Wetherell's The Great War in Verse and Prose (1919) - consciously or unconsciously espousing the Imperial values that Scott and others were at once willing to criticize and yet much influenced by. But with several other books came the opportunity to devote substantial sections of class time at senior schools and universities to Canadian writing; these included Ralph GUSTAFSON'S Canadian Accent (1944) and The Penguin Book of Canadian Verse (1942; 4th ed 1984), Desmond PACEY'S A Book of Canadian Stories (19471 4th ed 1964), and especially Carl KLINCK andR.E. WATTERS'S Canadian Anthology (1955; rev 1966, but already largely out of fashion by the time of the 3rd ed in 1974). Parallel French-language texts included Guy Sylvestre's Anthologie de la poesie canadienne francaise (1942; 5th ed 1969) and, rather more specialized, Adrien THERIO'S L'humour au Canada jrancais (1968). By the 19605 a kind of literary ferment stirred Canadian writers to imagine still other social and literary possibilities - biculturalism, multiculturalism, multiracialism, gender equality in law as well as before the law, regional independence - and with the growing introduction of
separate courses in Canadian literature in schools and universities, publishers and editors were alike ready to prepare even more surveys of and introductions to the country's cultural achievements and challenges. One must emphasize how important these SCHOOL TEXTBOOKS were to the emergence of informed READERS readers who would buy Canadian BOOKS, borrow them from LIBRARIES, and seek to study and enjoy them further. Enterprises sponsored by such publishers as McClelland and Stewart (the New Canadian Library anthologies of poetry and criticism, ed Eli MANDEL, Malcolm ROSS, George WOODCOCK, and Milton Wilson) were aimed at the general public as well as at an academic readership, as were Oxford's trade paperbacks and general reference books (Robert WEAVER'S series of short story anthologies, predominantly concerned with the character of REALISM, and the 'Oxford Books' on various subjects, such as the general selections from the whole range of Canadian poetry edited successively by A.J.M. Smith in 1960 and Margaret ATWOOD IN 1982). As the 19708 were succeeded rapidly by the 19805 and 19905, even more text anthologies appeared on the market. Some of these continued to try to represent the broad history of literary change, including works edited respectively by Mary Jane Edwards, Douglas Daymond and Leslie Monkman, Robert Lecker and Jack David, and (most successfully, measured by course adoptions) Gary Geddes in Fifteen Canadian Poets x 2 (1990 and its predecessors from 1970 on) and 20th-century Poetry and Poetics (1969; 4th ed 1996) and Donna Bennett, Russell Brown, and Nathalie Cooke in Anthology of Canadian Literature in English (2 vols, 1982; rev 1990 in a concise onevolume format). In Quebec such texts as Litterature quebecoise (ed Heinz Weinmann and Roger Chamberland, 1996) and Ecrivains quebecois contemporains depuis 1950 (ed Lise Gauvin and Gaston MIRON, 1989) were also designed for college students both at home and abroad, as were Michel Laurin and Michel Forest's Anthologie de la litterature quebecoise (1966) and Luc Bouvier and Max Roy's La litterature quebecoise au XXe siecle (1996). Many other collections fastened more upon individual genres or placed Canadian writing in the context of world literature, such as several
33
ANTHOLOGIES
edited by W.H. NEW. Modern Canadian Essays (1976), Inside the Poem (1992), Canadian Short Fiction (1986, rev 1997), Four Hemispheres (1971), Voice &• Vision (with Jack HOD GINS, 1972), Modern Stories in English (with HJ. Rosengarten, 3rd ed 1991), Active Voice (3rd ed 1991), A zothCentury Anthology (1984; rev as Currents, 2000, by Kevin McNeilly and Noel Elizabeth Currie), and Literature in English (1993), the last three with WE. Messenger. August Viatte's Anthologie litteraire de I'Amerique francophone (1971) sampled writing from Louisiana, Haiti, and Martinique in company with that from Quebec; works by Claude BEAUSOLEIL and Axel Maugey translated Spanish, Romanian, and other Romance-language writing into French, emphasizing Quebecois and Acadian links with the wider world of lafrancophonie; and Alberto MANGUEL ranged across languages in his multiple anthologies of fantasy and GAY writing. Among other writers to compile genre-specific works, John Metcalf specialized in selections of short fiction, as in Sixteen by Twelve (1970), The Narrative Voice (1972), Making It New (1982), The New Story Writers (1992), and, with J.R. (Tim) Struthers, The Canadian Classics (1993); these volumes celebrate especially the kind of craftsmanship of the MONTREAL STORYTELLERS. Daymond and Monkman assembled an anthology of English-language Canadian NOVELLAS, On Middle Ground (1987), and Francois Gallays prepared Anthologie de la nouvelle au Quebec (1993). Several anthologies of the LONG POEM appeared, most notably those edited by Michael ONDAATJE, George Bowering, and Sharon THESEN. Carole Gerson and Kathy Mezei produced a useful anthology of the sketch form (see SHORT STORY); with Gwendolyn Davies, Gerson also edited Canadian Poetry From the Beginnings Through the First World War (1994). Jack Hodgins, Rudy WIEBE, Andreas SCHROEDER, Aritha VAN HERK, Robert KROETSCH, and other writers produced regional collections, using the anthology as a means of representing the political as well as environmental character of locale, and Linda HUTCHEON, George BOWERING, and others assembled polemical collections, arguing for changes in the politics of literary expression and preoccupation. Andree Ferretti and Gaston Miron, in Les grandes textes independantistes (1992), even chart the archeology of a political idea.
34
The importance of the editorial preface to anthologies needs to be further emphasized, for it encodes the set of mind that shapes the collection and also the set of mind that it encourages in its readers. Numerous critics, recognizing this connection - A.J.M. Smith, for instance (commenting on the shaping of his The Book of Canadian Poetry, 1943, or publishing in Canadian Literature in 1965 the 'Rejected Preface' to New Provinces), or Margery Fee (in Renee Hulan's Native North America, 1999), or Robert Lecker (in Making It Real, 1995), or Carole Gerson (in Lorraine McMullen's Re(Dis)covering Our Foremothers, 1990, and in Lecker's Canadian Canons, 1991), or John Metcalf (in Kicking Against the Pricks, 1982), or J.R. (Tim) Struthers, Ajay Heble, and Donna Palmateer Pennee in New Contexts of Canadian Criticism (1997, the title echoing Eli Mandel's classic Contexts of Canadian Criticism, 1971) - in consequence took as one of the subjects of their own research the often undeclared politics of critical assumption and expectation. From the 19705 on, anthologies multiplied. Collections of monologues appeared, as did examples of SOUND POETRY, one-act plays, CRITICISM AND THEORY, TRAVEL writing (ed Constance ROOKE, Keath ERASER), ACADIAN and other FRANCOPHONE writing from outside Quebec (ed respectively by Marguerite Maillet, J.R. Leveille, and Yolande Grise, of particular importance is Rene Dionne's multi-volume Anthologie de la litteraturefranco-ontariennes des origines dnosjours, 1997), SCIENCE FICTION, the ESSAY form (ed George GALT, Gerald Lynch and David Rampton, Laurent Mailhot, and Benoit Melancon), and interviews. Especially important were the books edited by Silver Donald CAMERON, Graeme GIBSON, Geraldine Anthony, AlanTwigg, Dionne BRAND, Beth Brant, and Donald Smith (tr Larry Shouldice). Assorted jubilee volumes also appeared, as did celebratory samplings of writing from particular presses (Michael Macklem's The Oberon Reader, I 99I! John Metcalf's The Porcupine's Quill Reader, with Tim INKSTER, 1996), RADIO programs (Weaver's The 'Anthology' Anthology, 1984; Peter GZOWSKI'S The Morningside Years, 1997), and JOURNALS (Cite libre, Canadian Forum, La Barre dujour, CANADIAN LITERATURE, Descant), each new volume setting up possibilities for yet another.
ANTOUN
Among many writers who focused on the recent past, Dennis LEE developed such collections as The New Canadian Poets (1985), and Jean ROYER compiled Introduction a la poesie quebecoise contemporaine (1989). Others looked to more distant history: John GLASSCO assembled translations of Quebec poetry; Matt COHEN and Wayne Grady translated Quebec short stories; and (like David Bentley in Early Long Poems on Canada, 1993), John Hare in Anthologie de la poesie quebecoise (1979), surveying the i9th century, provided an estimable scholarly apparatus that would enable the modern reader to appreciate the intricacies of both text and times. Quebec scholars in particular specialized in large-scale enterprises, among them Gilles MARCOTTE'S Anthologie de la litterature quebecoise (1978-80), Pierre NEPVEU and Laurent Mailhot's La poesie quebecoise des origines a nos jours (1980), and the multi-volume La vie litteraire au Quebec (ed Maurice LEMIRE et al, 1991-). Perhaps rarest of all were anthologies of drama, a gap resolved in part by such collections as E-F. Duval's Anthologie thematique du theatre quebecois au XIXe siecle (1978), Anton Wagner's four-volume Canada's Lost Play (1978-82), Richard Perkyns's Major Plays of the Canadian Theatre, 1934-1984 (1984), Richard Plant's The Penguin Book of Modern Canadian Drama (1984), Jerry Wasserman's Modern Canadian Plays (1985; rev ed 1986; expanded to 2 vols, 1993-4; rev 2,001), and Alan Filewod's The CTR Anthology (1993). These works are supplemented by valuable books of interviews and conversations, including Anthony's Stage Voices (1978) and Robert Wallace and Cynthia Zimmerman's The Work (1982). So far these comments emphasize the social function of anthologies and their breadth of coverage, and in this respect the working definition of'anthology' remains conventional: a book collecting smaller units of writing by divers hands. The term can also, however - as implied by the French word anthologie - apply to a single writer's collection of his or her own diverse works, the assembly of constituent parts revealing the same powers of imaginative conception as are usually attributed to an editor. Consider Harold INNIS'S Empire and Communications (1950; ed Dave GODFREY, 1986). A book containing seven individually titled chapters, it at once distills the author's thought, reflects back on the
past, and establishes the ground on which Marshall MCLUHAN and others would build. Metaphorically, formally, it 'gathers flowers' -brings together a selection of writings that, in total, suggest a grander understanding; in this instance (and perhaps in other works of CRITICISM) the book might also be taken as a kind of spiritual AUTOBIOGRAPHY. The same principle of formal analysis that can be brought to the reading of the long poem (eg, those by Bowering or MARLATT), the story sequence or cycle (eg, those by BLAISE or MUNRO), the collection of linked plays (eg, those by REANEY or Michel TREMBLAY), and perhaps even companions and guidebooks like the book in which this essay appears can also be brought to the anthology as a literary form in its own right. Indeed, the process of approaching subjects from a variety of perspectives, shaping understanding less through syllogistic logic than through associative patterning, characterizes much Canadian critical commentary, lending further support to the notion that the anthology form functions culturally, not objectively. Frye's Anatomy of Criticism (1957) provides an apposite example: a collection of essays, it reads cumulatively rather than in linear fashion, inviting the reader to balance the perceptions of one position against the related (but perhaps contrary) perceptions of another position. A principle is elucidated here. Despite all the intrinsic limits of the anthology form - among them the inevitable bias of selectivity and the perennial indeterminacy of the idea of balance - its invitation to read the word and the world against a multiplicity of contexts is its potential strength. J.R. (Tim) Struthers/WN
ANTOUN, Bernard. Poet; b Beirut, Lebanon, 1961; emig to Quebec 1978. His first volume of poetry, Felures d'un temps I (1987), introduces his characteristic themes: God, death, and the solitary soul. Descriptive and mystical, his writing takes a fragmented, note-like, and elliptical form, through which he examines life's secrets. Antoun also published a volume of haiku-like poems, Fragments arbitrages (1989), as well as a dramatic poem, Ombres de mines (1993), among other titles. Margaret Cook
35
AQUIN
AQUIN, Hubert. Novelist, essayist; b Montreal 24 Oct 1929, d Montreal 15 March 1977; son of Jean Aquin and Lucille Leger. Aquin studied at L'Ecole Olier, L'Externat classique Sainte-Croix, and C Sainte-Marie, and went on to obtain a licentiate in philosophy from U Montreal in 1951. He spent the following three years studying at the Institut d'etudes politiques in Paris, during which time he became director of Quartier Latin and also wrote articles for L'Autorite. On his return to Montreal, Aquin worked as a producer for RADio-Canada in J955-9 and from then until 1963 as both scriptwriter and FILM director for the NATIONAL FILM BOARD. He also served as editor for Liberte (1961-2), the nationalist journal with which he would be associated until his acrimonious departure in 1971, following a dispute concerning government subsidy and its influence over editorial autonomy during the OCTOBER CRISIS of 1970. Aquin joined the separatist organization, the Rassemblement pour Tindependance nationale (RIN), in 1960 and was elected vicepresident for the Montreal area in 1963. He broke publicly with the group when it merged with Rene Levesque's Mouvement Souverainete-Assoc in 1968 to form the Parti Quebecois, a move that Aquin considered disastrous for Quebec independence. In July 1964 he was arrested for illegal possession of a firearm, having previously announced an association with a terrorist organization. Pleading temporary insanity, he spent four months in the Albert Prevost Psychiatric Institute awaiting trial and under mental examination. During this time he wrote his first novel, Prochain episode (1965; tr Penny Williams, 1967), for which he is perhaps best known. Aquin was acquitted of the charges in Dec 1965, one month after the publication of this novel in France had established him as a major new literary force. In May 1966 he moved to Switzerland, but he was expelled shortly afterwards by the Swiss government, acting on information from the RCMP. In 1969 he became the first Canadian to refuse the Governor General's AWARD , a distinction he had earned for his second novel, Trou de memoire (tr Alan Brown as Blackout, 1974). He would, however, go on to win - and accept - several other prestigious literary awards. Over the next few years Aquin taught in a number of institutions, including U
36
Quebec a Montreal, where he served briefly as head of literary studies, and Carleton U. He also wrote two more novels, L'antiphonaire (1969; tr Brown as The Antiphonary, 1973) and Neige noire (1974; tr Sheila FISCHMAN as Hamlet's Twin, 1979), as well as a number of minor screenplays (eg, 24 heures de trop and De retour). In 1975 he joined Editions La Presse as literary director, a position he later abandoned following disagreements over editorial policies: in Aug 1976 he resigned publicly, accusing Roger LEMELIN, the editor and director, of cultural betrayal. Aquin committed suicide in March 1977, leaving the manuscript of an unfinished novel, Obombre, which dramatized his own writer's block, indicative perhaps of one of the reasons for his decision to take his own life. Hubert Aquin left behind him a substantial body of articles and essays, several of which were collected in Point defuite (1971) and Blocs erratiques (1977). These pieces are witness both to his political beliefs and to the aesthetic development of his creative writings, the one inextricably linked to the other. Throughout, he considered the potential for writing and the role afforded the writer within a colonized culture, as well as the shaping of that culture; it is no coincidence that each of his novels revolves around the written narrative of at least one character, thereby dramatizing the process of writing itself. Suspicious of the paternalistic appreciation often shown to the cultural creations of repressed peoples, Aquin aggressively challenged literary and aesthetic conventions. Indeed, exploration of language and form are fundamental to his search for a discourse in which to express the experience and identity of his people. He rejected the use of JOUAL, espoused by a number of his contemporaries, for fear that restriction to the prison house of such an impoverished language would lead to a paucity of ideas and reflect (rather than offer an escape from) a colonized mentality. His novels are infused with a sense of revolution on both the contextual and the textual levels, and they are marked by a sense of pleasure in language, by multiple layers of both reading and writing, and, in the spirit of Joyce, Borges, and Eco, who were among his principal influences, by a depth and variety of INTERTEXTUAL reference as his texts overflow the pages on which they were
AQUIN
written. Aquin's novels were later reissued as part of a critical edition of his oeuvre - a significant recognition of the influence of his writing on the literature of Quebec. In Prochain episode the narrator-protagonist, a would-be revolutionary, writes of his attempt to murder a counter-spy, the elusive H. de Heutz, on the direction of his lover, K., in order to advance the separatist cause. Following the trail of his elusive prey, the narrative performs a number of ellipses and about-turns that parallel the vertiginous car chase through Switzerland. However, as the narrator comes to identify himself with this same victim (manque), as H. de Heutz takes on a number of different identities, and as the mysterious lover of H. de Heutz would seem to be K. herself, he fails in his assignment and is incarcerated, where he begins (like Aquin) to write his story. Trapped and powerless, searching to understand his failure, unable to write the death of his enemy, the narrator typifies the alienated and (sexually) impotent hero common not only to Aquin's novels but also to much of the literature of the period. In Trou de memoire, Quebecois revolutionary pharmacist Pierre X. Magnant kills his EnglishCanadian lover, Joan Ruskin, in an incident of highly eroticized violence and sexual frustration; he writes in order both to conceal his crime and to fill the void left by her absence. His narrative is interspersed with the journal and letter of his 'double,' Olympe Ghezzo-Quenum, a revolutionary pharmacist from the Ivory Coast and lover of Rachel Ruskin (Joan's sister, known as RR). The many parallels drawn between these two characters include the experience of colonization and their ultimate powerlessness, expressed in their mutual choice of suicide. The blurring and multiplying of identities, along with the self-conscious exposure of the text's own artifice through the play of reflections, the critical intervention of at least two editorial voices (one being that of RR herself) which question the authenticity and reliability of the 'documents,' and the references to the painting by Hans Holbein that serves as a 'mise-en-abyme' or microcosm of the narrative, are part of an underlying neo-baroque aesthetic that would be taken to excess in the next novel. L'antiphonaire is perhaps Aquin's most intimidating novel, in part because of the compen-
dium of erudite references scattered throughout. The critical edition of the novel answers many questions as to the origins of sources, the citations within the novel itself being frequently incomplete or misleading; identification of all the sources is not, however, essential to a reading of the novel. L'antiphonaire consists of two primary narratives, that of Christine Forestier, a former doctor now writing a thesis in medical history, intertwined with the story of Renata Belsang, a 16th-century epileptic with whom she comes to identify. The backand-forth between these two narratives evokes the 'call and response' of the ecclesiastical antiphonary from which the novel takes its name. This dialogue and the 'fragmentation' it causes is reiterated as Christine's life story lurches between her own past and present, and as the text takes in the diverse elements of its intertext. The reader is enlisted in the process of production, his or her role prescribed within the novel as various characters are compelled to weave their own story or commentary into the text they are reading, thereby creating a multiplicity of narrative voices. The resulting 'textual violence' is reflected throughout in a markedly Sadeian intertext which sees both Christine and Renata as victims of multiple rapes and eroticized sexual abuse, while, propelled by this violence, the fragmentation of the text parallels the disintegration of Christine herself, her story ending in her suicide and the death of her unborn baby. The inclusion of so many references to the Renaissance period in particular draws a parallel with the new renaissance of revolutionary Quebec, illustrating the newfound awareness of historicity typical of the novels of the time and offering perhaps a new, unlimited literary and cultural 'space' for Quebec. Neige noire is often considered Aquin's most accomplished novel. Based on the autobiographical film script (in progress) by the protagonist-narrator, Nicolas Vanesse, the novel sets up a dialogue between the narrative of film, an intertext largely from Hamlet, a commentary on the script, and a philosophical discussion of the sacred, with the sado-erotic plot of Nicolas's life, thereby creating a totally 'open' text. The reader becomes both participant and viewer/ voyeur as the inclusion of cinematographic
37
AQUIN
devices adds a new level of visual experience, while the multiple incidents of violence of L'antiphonaire are reduced to a single act of precise and extreme sexual sadism, offered as one of regeneration, as Nicolas kills his Ophelia-like wife in a ritualistic 'purification' of her adultery and incest. In its choice of Hamlet, the story of a hero stricken by an inability to act, as its primary intertext, the novel finds an appropriate vehicle for the Quebec literary hero of this period, one that would be taken up in Robert GURIK'S 1977 play Hamlet, Prince du Quebec. Further reading: Andre Lamontagne, Les mots des autres: La poetique intertextuelle des oeuvres rom.anesqu.es de Hubert Aquin (Sainte-Foy: P de 1'U Laval, CRELIQ, 1992); Anthony Purdy, ed, Writing Quebec: Selected Essays (Edmonton: U Alberta P, 1988); Patricia Smart, Hubert Aquin agent double (Montreal: P de 1'U Montreal, 1973). Jane Tilley
ARABIC AND MIDDLE EASTERN connec tions with Canadian writing derive from such literary forms as the FABLE and the GHAZAL, the Arabic system of numbers, and more directly, the work of Bernard ANTOUN, Jean
at the same time as composing his first novel, Une supreme discretion (1963). As in his subsequentfictions- among them Lafuite immobile (1974; tr David Lobdell as Standing Flight, 1980), about a man's apprehension of his own death, and his AWARD-winning short stories, L'obsedante obese et autres agressions (1987; tr Lobdell as In a Minor Key, 1990) - Archambault used musical techniques in order to orchestrate an understanding of personal trauma. In his narratives, characters must try to come to terms with their own divided loyalties - to friendship but also to survival, even if it means sacrificing the past; to CLASS solidarity but also to social mobility. La fleur aux dents (1971; tr Lobdell as The Man with a Flower in his Mouth, 1983) tells of a technician in commercial radio who has lost his dream of being a journalist. Les pins parasols (1976; tr Lobdell as The Umbrella Pines, 1980) records the anxieties of a man past his prime who discovers that his childhood has vanished. In an introspective novel that sums up his previous work, Les maladresses du coeur (1998), Archambault conveys an optimistic-pessimistic vision of a writer as antihero, questioning the meaning of his own existence. Rene Brisebois
HALLAL, Naim RATTAN, Mona LATIF-GHATTAS,
Nadine LTAIF, Fauzia RAFIQ, and Ian Iqbal RASHID. Yesim TERNAR drew on her Turkish heritage, Hedi Bouraoui on Tunisia, and AnnMarie MACDONALD on her Lebanese connections; Gwendolyn MACEWEN adapted Arabic children's writings; Norman DUNCAN wrote about Arabs' in New York; and Margaret LAURENCE translated Arab-influenced Somali folk tales. More generally, Middle Eastern influences in Canada also appear in JEWISH WRITING and the vast body of literature influenced by CHRISTIANITY, ISLAM, and the RELIGION of the PARSI; see also AFRICA, B. CALLAGHAN, CHAPUT-ROLLAND, CULTURAL PLURALITY, LIFE WRITING, LORD, MULTICULTURAL VOICES, TRAVEL.
ARCHAMBAULT, Gilles. Fiction writer, RADIO journalist; b Montreal 19 Sept 1933; son of Colombe Poirier and Paul Archambault, municipal civil servant. A graduate of U Montreal (BA, I 957). he worked for RADIO-CANADA as a commentator on literature and music (especially jazz and blues, forms that permeate his fiction)
38
ARCHIVES, MANUSCRIPTS, AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS Archives. In The Canadian Archives and Its Activities (1924) Arthur Doughty writes, 'Of all national assets, archives are the most precious; they are the gift of one generation to another, and the extent of our care of them marks the extent of our civilization.' Canadian archival collections are varied and extensive, providing the researcher with countless opportunities and avenues for exploring Canadian literature. Historically, literary archival materials have been used mainly for editions of text, editions of letters, literary biography, and occasionally thematic literary criticism. However, the introduction of new theoretical approaches in the latter half of the zoth century opened new ways of using literary archives for scholarly research. Cultural Studies theory, in particular, lends itself naturally to the study of the sociocultural implications of all types of texts, published or unpublished.
ARCHIVES, MANUSCRIPTS, AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS
The word 'archive' can have two meanings; it can refer to the institution that is the repository of materials, or it can refer to the materials themselves. For purposes of clarity, this article uses the word 'archive' to mean 'repository.' At present, most Canadian archives use the term 'fonds' to describe what used to be called 'papers,' meaning the 'natural accumulation of personal and family materials.' The word also describes 'records,' meaning 'all recorded information, regardless of media or characteristics made or received or maintained by an organization or institution.' A fonds, then, covers 'the whole of the records, regardless of form or medium, automatically and organically created and/or accumulated and used by a particular individual, family or corporate body in the course of that creator's activities or functions.' Once a fonds is purchased by or donated to an archive, it becomes part of that archive's 'collection,' which is an 'artificial accumulation of documents of any provenance brought together on the basis of some common characteristic.' The common characteristic of the collections mentioned in this article is Canadian literature. Manuscripts. A so-called manuscript collection may contain a variety of items - manuscripts and drafts of published and unpublished literary works, certainly, but also correspondence, notebooks, diaries, random scribblings, grocery lists, telephone doodles, photographs, promotional materials, professional and personal correspondence, fan mail, sound recordings, and other miscellaneous items. The extensiveness of collections varies. While an archive may list an author as part of its collection, researchers are wise to determine whether the fonds consists of a single letter or of several metres of material. Some authors' fonds are held exclusively at a single archive; others are split among two or more repositories. For example, most of Margaret LAURENCE'S papers are at York U, but the McMaster fonds is also significant, including manuscripts, diaries, an unfinished novel, and some correspondence. Furthermore, some diligent sleuthing may well locate useful research materials in related repositories and collections. For instance, though authors may not include their personal correspondence in their own literary papers, such letters may be part of the
fonds of a contemporary, such as a publisher, editor, colleague, acquaintance, or friend. The Bibliotheque Nationale du Quebec has an extensive collection of materials related to French-Canadian literature, including significant fonds of Yves BEAUCHEMIN. Alain GRANDBOIS, and Yves THERIAULT, as well as smaller holdings of Hubert AQUIN, Marie-Claire BLAIS, Nicole BROSSARD, Octave CREMAZIE, Gratien GELINAS, Anne HEBERT, Andre MAJOR, Emile NELLIGAN, and Hector de Saint-Denys GARNEAU. Also available at the Bibliotheque Nationale are fonds of La Societe des ecrivains canadiens, the Theatre des Marguerites, the Theatre du Nouveau Monde, and the Theatre populaire du Quebec. Dalhousie U houses manuscript collections for Lesley CHOYCE (including items pertaining to Pottersfield Press), James DE MILLE, Archibald MacMECHAN, Thomas H. RADDALL, J. Andrew WAINWRIGHT, and Budge WILSON. It also has a Thomas Chandler HALIBURTON collection that includes editions, bibliographical and biographical information, and three letters. McGill U's Dept of Rare Books and Special Collections holds extensive materials on Canadian literature. The 19th-century collections include materials on William MCLENNAN and Charles SANGSTER and smaller holdings for Wilfred W CAMPBELL, Archibald LAMPMAN, Sir Charles G.D. ROBERTS, and Duncan Campbell SCOTT. The Norman Friedman Stephen Leacock Collection at McGill includes LEACOCK'S literary manuscripts and books, manuscript drafts of books and articles, some correspondence from and to the author, and first, variant, and signed editions of his works. Among 20th-century authors found at this university are Christopher DEWDNEY, John GLASSCO, and Bryan McCarthy, as well as many smaller fonds. The Hugh MACLENNAN fonds at McGill include correspondence, two unpublished novels, drafts of Two Solitudes and The Watch That Ends the Night, and the papers of Dorothy Duncan, including MacLennan's letters to her. The MacLennan digital project aims to have the entire collection on-line in the near future. McMaster U's manuscript collection is extensive: Pierre BERTON, Austin CLARKE, Matt COHEN, John Robert COLOMBO, Marian ENGEL, Sylvia FRASER, Robert FULFORD, David HELWIG, Raymond KNISTER, Margaret LAURENCE, David
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ARCHIVES, MANUSCRIPTS, AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS
MCFADDEN, Farley MOWAT, Susan MUSGRAVE, Peter C. NEWMAN, H.R. PERCY, Peter SUCH, and Jack Winter, among others. McMaster also has a strong collection of major Canadian PUBLISHERS, including Clarke, Irwin; Dodd, Mead; Macmillan of Canada; McClelland and Stewart; and others; as well as the papers of the WRITER'S UNION OF CANADA.
Holdings at the National Archives of Canada include the fonds of poets Milton ACORN, Patrick ANDERSON, Louis FRECHETTE, John GLASSCO, A.M. KLEIN, Archibald LAMPMAN, P.K.
PAGE, F.R. SCOTT, and Miriam WADDINGTON; of novelists Morley CALLAGHAN, Robertson DAVIES, Timothy FINDLEY, Nairn KATTAN, and Sinclair ROSS; and of critics, essayists, anthologists, and publishers E.K. BROWN, Lovat DICKSON, Jean LE MOYNE, Desmond PACEY, and Robert WEAVER. The fonds of the Canada Council are housed at the National Archives, as are those of a variety of literary figures, such as mystery writer Howard ENGEL, science fiction writer Judith MERRIL, children's author L.M. MONTGOMERY, humorists Stephen Leacock and Robert SERVICE, and nature writers GREY OWL and Ernest Thompson SETON. The collection of pre-Confederation writers includes Susanna MOODIE, Catharine Parr TRAILL, and Philippe AUBERT DE GASPS. Fonds of literary organizations are also held at the National Archives, including the CANADIAN AUTHORS ASSOC, the Canadian Writers' Foundation, and the LEAGUE OF CANADIAN POETS, as well as the records of the Colbert Agency. The National LIBRARY of Canada also has an impressive collection of literary manuscripts: 19th-century figures include Susanna Moodie, Duncan Campbell Scott, and Hector de SaintDenys Garneau. The library is particularly strong in the area of English-language poets, including George BOWERING, Louis DUDEK, Daphne MARLATT, Michael ONDAATJE, and Phyllis WEBB, and the French-language novelists and playwrights Jacques GODBOUT, Roger LEMELIN, Gabrielle ROY, and Michel TREMBLAY. While McMaster has archives of the major publishing houses, the National Library holds fonds of smaller literary presses, such as Coach House, House of Anansi, and Oolichan. Other Canadian writers housed at the National Library are Marie-Claire Blais.JacknODGiNS, Fernand
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OUELLETTE, Elizabeth SMART, and Audrey THOMAS. A descriptive catalogue, called Literary Manuscripts at the National Library of Canada, is available. The Queen's U collection began with the papers of Dr Lome PIERCE, who was editor of the Ryerson Press from 1920 to 1960. Nearly every Canadian literary figure of note for this period is represented by at least some manuscript material in the Ethel and Lome Pierce Collection of Canadian Manuscripts. The Bliss CARMAN Collection at Queen's (est 1925), contains 272 monographs and ten metres of papers. Additions in recent years include Hugh GARNER, Ralph GUSTAFSON, Dorothy LIVESAY, Al PURDY, and George WOODCOCK, as well as the Oberon Press fonds. The Canadian collection at Simon Fraser U includes Frank DAVEY, Michael McClure, and bpNiCHOL. The collection has a regional focus with fonds of bill BISSETT, Anne CAMERON, and Betty LAMBERT, as well the scholarly JOURNAL Open Letter and the Vancouver-based publisher Talonbooks. Simon Fraser also holds fonds of Lionel KEARNS, Archibald Lampman, John MILLS, Eleanor Wachtel, and Fred WAH. Trent U has a collection of archival materials from various fields. The Peter GZOWSKI fonds consists of eight metres of textual records. The fonds of Canadian Forum (founded in 1920) and the J Canadian Studies (since 1964) are held at Trent, as well as those of newspaper columnist Scott Young. The U Alberta's Bruce Peel Special Collections Library has some materials on the poet Dorothy Livesay. The U British Columbia Special Collections Dept has fonds primarily of BC authors, including Roderick HAIG-BROWN, Malcolm LOWRY, Eric NICOL, Spider ROBINSON, Jane RULE, Bertrand SINCLAIR, and Ethel WILSON. The Malcolm Lowry collection of manuscripts and books from Lowry's home in North Vancouver was established shortly after his death in 1957 and been substantially expanded since. The U Calgary's Canadian Collection was established in the early 19705 and includes fonds of authors working in a variety of genres, such as Maxwell Bates, Earle BIRNEY, Constance BERESFORD-HOWE, ClarkBLAiSE, Joanna GLASS, Robert KROETSCH, Hugh MacLennan, w.o. MITCHELL, Brian MOORE, Alice MUNRO, Alden
ARCHIVES, MANUSCRIPTS, AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS
NOWLAN, Sharon POLLOCK, Mordecai RICHLER, Gwen Pharis RINGWOOD, Malcolm ROSS, Guy VANDERHAEGHE, Aritha VAN HERK, and Rudy WIEBE. The U Guelph has strengths in Canadian drama, with holdings for playwrights such as Tomson HIGHWAY and Judith THOMPSON. Guelph also holds the fonds of the literary press Porcupine's Quill. The U Manitoba houses a collection of Prairie Literature Manuscripts. The first acquisition was the fonds of Frederick Philip GROVE in 1960. Since then, the collection has expanded to include Margaret AVISON, Ralph CONNOR, Henry KREISEL, Dorothy Livesay, Eli MANDEL, and John NEWLOVE. Manitoba's regional focus is carried through to its collection of materials from Prairie publishers: Turnstone Press (Winnipeg), Thistledown Press (Saskatoon), and NeWest Press (Edmonton). Because of its regional focus, the U Manitoba now describes itself as 'a leading research centre for the study of Western Canadian literature.' The Saskatchewan writers whose fonds are held at U Regina include Gail BOWEN, Sharon BUTALA, Anne Campbell, Saros COWASJEE, Lorna CROZIER, Rex Deverell, Joan Givner, Terry HEATH, Patrick LANE, Ken MITCHELL, Margot Osborn, Anne SZUMIGALSKI, and Geoffrey URSELL. Regina's collection also includes the publishing archives of Canadian Plains Research Centre Publications, Coteau Books, and Western Producer Prairie Books. At U Saskatchewan, holdings include fonds of Ralph GUSTAFSON, Paul HIEBERT, Irving LAYTON, Al PURDY, and Peter STEVENS, as well as the literary magazine of the Saskatchewan Writer's Guild, Grain. The Grain fonds includes correspondence, drafts, proofs, and finished copy for each issue. The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at U Toronto houses the fonds of Margaret AT WOOD, Earle Birney, Ernest BUCKLER, Leonard COHEN, MaZO DE LA ROCHE, W.H. DEACON, Douglas
FETHERLING, Mavis GALLANT, Graeme GIBSON, Dennis LEE, Gwendolyn MACEWEN, Malcolm ROSS, Duncan Campbell Scott, Josef SKVORECKY, David SOLWAY, Raymond SOUSTER, Anne WILKINSON, and Eric WRIGHT. The Victoria U Library at U Toronto has fonds of Bliss Carman, John Webster Grant, and Raymond KNISTER, but its most extensive collections are those of
Northrop FRYE and E.J. PRATT. Some Victoria archives (eg, the PICKTHALL papers) are housed in the E.J. Pratt Library, whereas others are in the Victoria U Archives (in the Birge-Carnegie Library) along with the UNITED CHURCH archives. At U Victoria, BC, the most significant holdings related to the development of Canadian literature are the fonds of Robin SKELTON, Gray's Publishing, and Reference West publishing. York U has a Canadian collection that includes fonds of Don COLES, Margaret LAURENCE, Norman LEVINE, Bruce POWE, Susan SWAN, Clara Thomas, Joyce WIELAND, and Adele WISEMAN. Canadian manuscripts can also be found at repositories outside the country's borders. A few examples are Brown, Harvard, U Texas at Austin, and the British Library. The most substantial Canadian fonds at Brown U in Rhode Island is that of John BUG HAN. At the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, located at U Texas, Austin, the Canadian collection includes the massive fonds of literary scholar Hugh Kenner. The centre also has significant holdings for Saul Bellow, Earle Birney, Thomas B. COSTAIN, John Craig, A.M. Klein, and Norman LEVINE. Some items are available for authors John Boyd, John Malcolm Brinnin, Morley CALLAGHAN, Bliss Carman, Jock Carroll, George Herbert Clarke, Mazo de la Roche, Rosaire Dion (pseudonym of Leo Albert Levesque), Basil KING, Sir Gilbert PARKER, and Ernest Thompson SETON. At the Houghton Library at Harvard U are found significant holdings on Bliss Carman, as well as the papers of Joseph HOWE and James Wolfe. The Houghton collection also includes miscellaneous documents of historical interest, in the form of manuscripts, letters, journals, military documents, drawings, and engravings. The British Library is a good source for historical literary materials and the repository of a great deal of early Canadian drama. Literary fonds consist mainly of letters by Canadian authors: those of historical interest whose correspondence is held include Thomas Edward Champion, Lily DOUG ALL, John Alexander Gemmill, Theodore Arnold Haultain, Stephen Leacock, James LE MOINE, William Hamilton Merritt, and William Wood; contemporary
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ARCHIVES, MANUSCRIPTS, AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS
writers are Norman Levine, Mazo de la Roche, and Richard Albert Wilson. The British Library also holds some rare published works of Canadian origin, such as the first book of poetry composed in English in North America, Robert HAYMAN'S Quodlibets, lately come over from New Britaniola (1628), and the first novel written (but not printed) in North America, Frances BROOKE'S The History of Emily Montague. Two other books of historical interest are a rare copy of the Ritual du diocese de Quebec (1703) and Nithira iriniui, a 1767 prayer book in the language of the MONTAGNAIS. As well, the British Library owns a copy of'the critical document of Canadian history, the Statement respecting the Earl of Selkirk's settlement upon the Red River (1817).' Special Collections. Canadian archives offer some fascinating sites for general research - on the history of medicine, for example - but the focus of this discussion falls on collections that are more directly relevant to the study of specific subject areas in Canadian literature. Collections featuring published works on particular subject areas are as follows. Dalhousie U's Killam Memorial Library is home to the English Canadian Small Press Collection, which contains many small-press publications of Canadian creative writing in English, with special attention to poetry and drama. The collection is strong in post-1970 publications and has a strong regional focus. The Lawrence Lande Collection at McGill has extensive resources on the discovery, exploration, and history of CANADA to the end of the ipth century, with particular emphasis on the search for the NORTHWEST PASSAGE and the controversy over CONFEDERATION. The collection includes pamphlets, maps, prints, periodicals, government documents, and broadsides, as well as travel narratives and books. The Arkin Collection, also at McGill, concentrates on the history and development of the Prairie provinces and British Columbia in the late i9th and early 20th centuries, particularly the NORTHWEST REBELLION, the Manitoba School Question, and immigrant literature. The Modern Canadian Poetry Collection at McMaster has materials on Canadian poetry from 1940 to the present. Queen's U houses the John Buchan Collection, established in 1955. The
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collection includes Buchan's personal library, together with about thirty of his manuscripts and first and early editions of all his books. Also at Queen's are the Frederick Philip GROVE Collection containing all available editions of Grove's works in English, as well as some rare early works in German, and the Major John RICHARDSON Collection, established in 1925, with comprehensive holdings of that author's works. As well, Queen's has rare first editions and various critical works by Thomas Chandler Haliburton. Simon Fraser U has a Contemporary Literary Collection, established in 1965, of little magazines, pamphlets, chapbooks, and ephemera related to poetry from the period between 1945 and 1965; the collection also includes some manuscripts and unpublished material. The emphasis is North American poetry, with some British, but Canadian poetry is well represented by extensive materials on the journal TISH. Another resource, which is not strictly an archival collection but is of great interest to researchers, is the Canadian Publishers' Records Database, which contains detailed descriptions of more than 1100 archival collections that relate to the history of secular English-language book publishing in Canada from the beginnings to 1980. The database covers the records of publishers, authors, and related individuals and associations, founded or active before 1980, that are housed in public repositories or in publishers' offices. The U Guelph is home to the L.M. Montgomery Collection of diaries and scrapbooks, photos, prints, and books from the author's personal library, some annotated. At U New Brunswick, the Rufus Hathaway Collection of Canadian Literature (est 1933) consists mainly of editions of Canadian works, especially by Sir Charles G.D. Roberts and Bliss Carman. The collection also has correspondence by and about other Canadian authors. The U Toronto's Canadian Literature Collection (est 1955) was expanded in the 19705 to include most fields of Canadian creative writing. The catalogue asserts, All editions of works of poetry and fiction by Canadian authors are acquired,' with the exception of CHILDREN'S literature. The EJ. Pratt Library at Victoria U in Toronto has a Canadiana collection which is
ASIA AND CANADIAN LITERATURE
particularly strong in ipth- and early-20th-century editions of poetry, drama, and fiction, including Wilfred Campbell, Bliss Carman, and Isabella Valancy CRAWFORD. The CANADIAN BROADCASTING CORPORATION (see RADIO), the CANADIAN PACIFIC RAILWAY, and HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY, corporate bodies centred respectively in Toronto, Montreal, and Winnipeg, also possess extensive archival collections relevant to Canadian literary studies (the HBC archives are housed in the Provincial Archives of Manitoba). An excellent resource for locating manuscripts and special collections pertaining to Canadian literature is U Saskatchewan's electronic catalogue, Canadian Archival Resources on the Internet. See also LIBRARIES, REFERENCE, TECHNOLOGY. Jo arm McCaig
ARMSTRONG, Jeannette. Writer, educator, activist; b 1948 nr Penticton, BC, a member of the Okanagan First Nation (see SALISH). Educated at the reserve's elementary school and Penticton S Secondary School, Armstrong also holds a diploma in fine arts from Okanagan C and a BFA from U Victoria. She is the cofounder and director of Penticton's En'owkin School of International Writing, which teaches traditional Okanagan philosophy and practice. The school, affiliated with U Victoria, is the first credit-giving creative WRITING school in Canada operated for and by FIRST NATIONS people. Armstrong's own writing career spans many genres, including two books for CHILDREN written as part of an Okanagan First Nation curriculum project, Enwhisteetkwa-Walk-in-Water (1982) and Neekna and Chemai (1984); a volume of poetry, Breath Tracks (1991), and many anthologized poems; and non-fiction prose, including Looking at the Words of Our People: An Anthology of First Nation Literary Criticism, which she edited in 1993. She is best known for her groundbreaking novel Slash (1985). Referred to as HISTORICAL fiction, fictional BIOGRAPHY, and a young adult novel, it has been both praised and criticized for its STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS narration and lack of concrete historical events and figures. The novel, which is set during the 19605 and 19705, explores the search of a young Penticton man to understand the history of his people
in the wake of colonialism. As Slash begins to awaken to traditional culture, he realizes that his future depends on his ability to understand and reinvent the traditional practices of the community. J.E. Walchli
ARNASON, David. Professor, poet, fiction writer; b Gimli, MB, 23 May 1940; son of Gudrun (Anderson) and Baldwin Ellis Arnason, a fisherman. Arnason regards his Icelandic roots and culture as a primary source of inspiration for his poems and stories. A prolific author in numerous genres - fiction, poetry, drama, television and radio scripts, and songs - he writes against the notion of a distinct, identifiable authorial style. His If Pigs Could Fly (1995) adapts the animal FABLE to a critique of Canadian politics, while in the long poems of Marsh Burning (1980), he fuses Norse mythology, Canadian geography, and technological references in a series of personal meditations on death, place, and self. Tamas Dobozy
ASIA AND CANADIAN LITERATURE. Set ting aside the accounts of journeys that possibly brought Asian explorers to North America many centuries ago, one can speak reliably of an Asian migration that began in the middle of the i9th century, first with the CHINESE who moved from the west coast of the UNITED STATES to British Columbia to work on the transcontinental railway (see CANADIAN PACIFIC) and two decades later with the JAPANESE and East Indians (primarily SIKHS and HINDUS) who came to Canada. Koreans, Filipinos, Vietnamese, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, and Sri Lankans arrived much later. Patterns of migration have been uneven, depending on immigration policies that were friendly or hostile, the urgent need for labour in Canada, and economic, social, or political pressures in Asia that drove people from their homelands to seek a better life in Canada. Thus Japanese migration reached a peak in the first decades of the 2oth century and came to a halt during the Second World War, mainly as a consequence of the policy of'evacuation' that uprooted and displaced several thousand people from coastal British Columbia, where they had settled, to camps in the interior.
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ASIA AND CANADIAN LITERATURE
The Chinese migration predates the Japanese, and resentment against this group took many forms, from a head tax to the 'exclusion act' of 1923, which effectively prevented Chinese migration for two decades. Migration from India, which received a major setback with the infamous KOMAGATA MARU INCIDENT in 1914 and the legislation requiring 'continuous passage,' gathered momentum much later and brought in a large number of professionals in the 19605. The 19505 and 19605 witnessed a substantial number of Filipinos arriving in Canada. The Sri Lankan inflow, which was no more than a trickle until the late 19705, escalated with ethnic tensions in the homeland in the early 19805, bringing thousands of refugees to Ontario. The narrative of Asian migration is thus a complex one, involving success and failure, integration and discrimination, a commitment to the new country and a sense of living on the margins. Fred WAH, in his Diamond Grill (1996), speaks of'the fantasy of longing' that captures the many facets within which this tale is told. As he points out in a comment about the process of naming restaurants, the mindset of the EXILE requires that the name reflect both a sense of pride and a willingness to accept the Orientalizing discourse of the West. And despite the considerable differences that separate the Japanese from, say, the East Indians and the periods of animosity among ethnic groups, the term 'visible minority' encompasses all of them, thus giving their experience of migration a commonality. But even while the experience of marginalization and otherness forms a link and suggests the possibility of an Asian' experience, it is important to keep in mind the differences that shaped the realities which are constructed in literature. Literary writing about the Asian connection at least in English - is a relatively recent phenomenon, although attempts go back to at least the igth century. An argument can be made that European EXPLORATION found North America in the first place because of the desire to contact Asia, hence the existence of terms such as 'Indian' and place names such as 'Lachine.' Many EUROPEAN-Canadian writers, moreover, found in Asia a place of residence and a stimulus to the imagination. South Asia captivated many, providing the setting for Sara Jeannette DUNCAN'S
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portraits of Raj society and satires and stories by Clark BLAISE, Frank DAVEY,J.T. HOSPITAL, Rona MURRAY, and Andrew WAINWRIGHT. Japan was the setting for stories by Steven HEIGHTON and Sarah SHEARD, among others, and Malaysia for some of Daphne MARLATT'S work. And as well as literary figures (Gary GEDDES, Patrick LANE, Alice MUNRO), China drew anthropologists, mission workers, political activitists, and travellers, probably the most famous being Pierre Elliott Trudeau (1919-2000), later prime minister; Davidson Black (1884-1934), the Toronto-born discoverer of the first fossil remains of'Peking Man'; and Norman Bethune (1890-1939), a surgeon on Mao Tse-Tung's Long March and the subject of a biogaphy by Ted ALLAN and a play by Ken MITCHELL. To stay with the migrant cultures, however, is to find still another range of writings. An article by James Doyle in a special issue of Canadian Literature (1994) devoted to East Asian connections, traces the work of Edith EATON and Winnifred Eaton REEVE as the first writers of Chinese descent (they were in fact of Eurasian ancestry). Writing in languages other than English was prevalent from the time the immigrants arrived, but for various reasons, particularly the need among them to survive and establish themselves in an alien land, writing in English was delayed (see CULTURAL PLURALITY, MULTICULTURAL VOICES). As the introduction to Many-Mouthed Birds (1991) observes, writing was hardly ever a priority, although it was considered acceptable as a hobby. The main impulse to write, however, appears to have been more recent, linked perhaps to the growing attention to multiculturalism as national policy and cultural reality and to a greater interest in minority discourses and POSTCOLONIAL studies. The ANTHOLOGIES of the late 20th century, which include Inalienable Rice (1979), Many-Mouthed Birds, Paper Doors (1981), The Geography of Voice (1992), Making a Difference (1996), and Aurat Durbar (1995), all attempt to bring together the diverse voices that have found expression in journals, newspapers, and occasional publications. Some of these collections are specific in that they focus on writings by WOMEN or reflect the work of a particular ethnic group; others are more inclusive. Paper Doors includes both writing in English and translations from the Japa-
ASIA AND CANADIAN LITERATURE
nese. The Geography of Voice deals with South Asian writing and makes no distinction between those who emigrated directly from South Asia and those who arrived via AFRICA, Fiji, or the CARIBBEAN. In order to preserve a measure of consistency, this essay includes only those writers who came to Canada directly from South or Southeast Asia. And it is really in the period 1980-2000 that one can speak of Asian voices in Canadian writing. While generalizations are likely to be misleading, the dominant issue in Asian writing continues to be an anxiety about exile and belonging, about living between two worlds, and about the struggle to maintain an identity in an ethos that threatens to engulf it and impose its own norms. This writing also concerns itself with nostalgia and memory, and with preserving continuity with a real or imagined past. Writing about the Indian experience and its expression in literature in In the Further Soil (1994), Milton Israel says that those who enjoyed a privileged status at home were totally unaware of the possibility of being marginalized, and those who left because of being shunned to the periphery did not see the point of being oppressed once again. It is this constant preoccupation with the margins that accounts for so much of the power and conviction of Asian writing. As Anthony Chan maintains in Gold Mountain: The Chinese in the New World (1983), literature is one of the many ways in which the various communities seek to combat their own sense of inferiority. Within this broad framework of recuperation and celebration, Asian writing takes place in several genres, fiction probably being the most popular. Indian-born Ven BEGAMUDRE, the author of Van de Graff Days (1993), writes, in an issue of Canadian Literature (132 [1992]) devoted to South Asian writing, about the HINDU myth of Trishanku, which narrates the story of a Hindu king who defied the gods and was compelled to live in the sky, between the earth and heaven. The metaphor is an important one, dealt with in greater detail in Uma PARAMESWARAN'S long poem Trishanku (1988). It is also an apt image for the various binaries that Asian writers are constantly confronted with. The poet Suniti NAMJOSHI observes in Because of India (1989): 'In the West I burn; / here, / when my lungs give out,
/ I cannot breathe'; and Rienzi CRUSZ, a Sri Lankan-born poet, creates a range of images such as flesh and thorn and elephant and ice to locate these dualities within the problematic terrain of racial difference and cultural translation. Such binaries are as applicable to Indian writing as they are to Chinese and Japanese literature. In all these works, home is not always paradise; Canada is, nevertheless, constantly associated with dispossession. In an essay entitled 'Invisible Woman' (Saturday Night, March 1981) the Indian-born American writer Bharati MUKHERJEE talks about her personal experience of discrimination and about her decision to leave Canada for the United States. Her stories are a further elaboration of her conviction about the presence of systemic RACISM in Canada. Although her attitudes have since changed, the stories that are set in Canada and form a part of her collection Darkness (1985) elaborate the sense of betrayal and alienation that she felt when she was living in Canada. Drawing on the historical circumstance of the internment of the Japanese during the Second World WAR, Joy KOGAWA writes, in her powerful novel Obasan (1981), about silence and speech and the need to liberate the latter from the shackles of the former. Among works by Japanese-Canadian writers, Obasan is probably the best known, and if the work is driven by a need to document historical injustice, it is also a memorable examination of a way of life with all its faults, richness, and sense of pathos. In a mode that is strikingly referential, Kogawa works from within the narrative of an extended family to depict the 'dark days in 1942' and the fragmentation that resulted from 'political expediency, race riots, the yellow peril.' Jim WONGCHU'S poetry, collected in Chinatown Ghosts (1986), is similar in intent, and the poems are a blend of satire, recuperation, longing, and celebration. In these poems, as in so much AsianCanadian writing, a noticeably tendentious edge gives some sense of urgency and conviction to the texts; in others the impulse to document injustice pushes in the direction of propaganda. An inevitable aspect of this consciousness is the loss of tradition or way of life associated with 'home.' Such a stance is probably more true of writers of Chinese and Japanese heritage
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ASIA AND CANADIAN LITERATURE
than it is of those of South Asian or Southeast Asian backgrounds. Denise CHONG'S long work The Concubine's Children (1994), for instance, is preoccupied with the past, with the values that held a community together in ways that no longer work. Along similar lines, SKY LEE'S Disappearing Moon Cafe (1990) recreates the gradual loosening of the bonds that connected previous generations with an Asian home. Not unlike Obasan, her novel remains one of the more significant works of fiction to have been written by an East Asian author. As the introduction to Many-Mouthed Birds quite rightly points out, Lee creates her novel by carefully constructing the past, working in a mode that is as indebted to orality as it is to popular culture, but the result is a form that is recognizably Canadian. Distinguished by its honesty, its commitment to going beyond essentialist depictions in order to trace patterns of change and loss, the novel spans four decades. It contains a number of micro-narratives, each told from a different perspective but put together in a manner that insists as much on unity as on multiplicity. Along similar lines, Ying CHEN, one of the few Asian-Canadian authors to write in French, creates a narrative of dislocation and reconciliation in L'ingratitude (1985). If tradition and the fantasy of home are a stay against displacement and discrimination, they can also be shackles that prevent the expression of a distinctive sensibility in a new country. In Nazneen SADIQ'S Ice Bangles (1988) and in the stories of Bharati Mukherjee, for instance, the need to survive in the West while still having to preserve the imagined culture of'home' becomes a source of tension and conflict. The oppressive presence of tradition finds powerful expression in Evelyn LAU'S Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid (1989), which is as much an indictment of Western society as it is of an inflexible tradition that leads to the rebellion of the authornarrator. Written in the form of a personal memoir, Lau's book records the experiences of the author as she struggles to find her own identity between hostile traditions. Easily the most controversial of all Asian-Canadian texts, it draws on her own life as a teen prostitute and a drug addict, and in the process it demonstrates the potential for psychic damage in the predicament of being located between two incompatible cultures.
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Living on the cusp denies the comfort of a stable cultural frame, but it has the advantage of distancing the authors, giving them a perspective that enables them to see their homeland from very different angles. As Begamudre comments in his essay in Canadian Literature, 'I've learned that India, like Canada, is less a country than a construct'; this awareness becomes a source of strength and insight. For various reasons, South Asian writers - and, for that matter, Southeast Asian authors such as GOH Poh Seng from Malaysia and Lakshmi GILL from the Philippines - are less concerned with Canada than with the land they left behind. Goh's The Immolation (1977), for instance, is set in Malaysia, while Gill's Third Infinitive (1993) explores the Manila of the 19505. The work of one of most prominent of South Asian-born writers, Rohinton MISTRY, is almost always concerned with India, especially with the Parsi community, although his 1995 novel, A Fine Balance, suggests a gradual expansion of scope. The dominant focus of his writing, however, continues to be the political upheavals and cultural changes in India rather than the daily and local realities of Canada. What often distinguishes these writers is the subtext that informs their writing, their capacity to see 'home' differently. In Mistry's work one perceives the survival of a Parsi community, a minority group in a predominantly Hindu India. In Shyam SELVADURAI'S highly acclaimed first novel, Funny Boy (1994), the work becomes the occasion to explore marginality - in sexual and political terms. The novel at once examines the tensions of a young boy's discovery of his homosexuality (see GAY) and tells of the Tamils and the ethnic strife engulfing Sri Lanka. Spatial distance offers perspective; the author here is able to transcend the various nationalist claims made by ethnic groups in order to suggest the need for a hybrid and holistic space. In Cinnamon Gardens (1998) Selvadurai returns to the Ceylon of the 19305 to explore from a different perspective the complex relation between the British and the Ceylonese elite. Sometimes, as in Suniti Namjoshi's The Conversations of Cow (1985) or Michael ONDAATJE'S In the Skin of a Lion (1987), there is very little to connect the narrative with the social, ethnic, or historical circumstances of the authors. Neither book is overtly Sri Lankan or Indian, but both
ASIA AND CANADIAN LITERATURE
work as metaphors for aspects of the immigrant experience. In the Skin of the Lion, for instance, is set in Toronto in the 19205 and 19305 and is about an immigrant group; The Conversations of Cow, which is set in London, describes the alienation experienced by the author-surrogate Suniti among a separatist lesbian community. Perhaps a fine example of this symbolic mode is Ondaatje's The English Patient (1992), which is hardly ethnic or racial in narrow terms, and yet its involvement with issues of borders, allegiances, maps, and nationality links the work to the consciousness that informs migrant writing. In this novel, as in so many others, hybridity becomes a central preoccupation, and if some such works are not ostensibly Asian, they are very much so in their sensibility. Issues of genealogy and origins, of historiography and syncretism, for instance, surface regularly in Asian-Canadian writing, as in the quest narrated by Ondaatje's Running in the Family (1982) and Chong's Concubine's Children. The former records, in both factual and fictive terms, a quest for the author's roots, while the latter works with a broader canvas. Chong attempts to reclaim a cpllective Chinese identity, while Ondaatje is concerned with the Burghers, a small group of marginalized Eurasians in Sri Lanka. The two books belong to the same mode, although there are crucial differences between them. Very much like Ondaatje is another Sri Lankan poet, Rienzi Crusz, whose Burgher roots make a search for the past a complex process. As he puts it in 'Roots' (Singing Against the Wind, 1985), A Portuguese captain holds/the soft brown hand of my Sinhala mother. / It's the year 1515 A.D., / when two civilizations kissed and merged.' AWARDS for Asian-Canadian writing in the recent past indicate its growing significance in Canada. FredWah's Waiting for Saskatchewan (1985) and Rohinton Mistry's Such a Longjourney (1991) won the Governor General's Award; Ondaatje's The English Patient won the Booker Prize, and his Anil's Ghost (2000) both the Ciller Prize and the Governor General's Award. Such recognition acknowledges not only that these writers bring to the Canadian literary scene a new body of experience, but also that they respond to language in ways that are different from mainstream writers. While they are
shaped by the language they use, they too shape the language, as is evident in a poem in Chinatown Ghosts, where Jim Wong-Chu says, 'I too was mired in another language / and I gladly surrendered it / for english.' Like many postcolonial authors, writers of Asian origin in Canada also interrogate and subvert the English language to produce an idiom that will express their own concerns. More significantly, how and what they write is influenced by the various intellectual and cultural traditions they have inherited. Thus, for instance, 'The Failed Tanka' in Roy MIKI'S collection entitled Saving Face (1991), with its intricate structure, clearly attempts to bridge two traditions, as does Suniti Namjoshi's poetry, which often tries to fuse an Indian world-view with Western poetic forms. The Asian connection is thus a multiple one, positioning itself at an angle to 'mainstream' writing while being very much a part of it. Regardless of how Asian-Canadian writing is perceived, its contribution in form and content has been substantial. As Rienzi Crusz puts it in 'Homecomings' (Insurgent Rain, 1996), 'the journey's throbbing walk / to this igloo of heaven' is what underpins this body of writing and gives it its distinctive texture. Asian writing offers much more than recuperation. It is about celebration and about broadening the contours of Canadian literature. Several writers of non-Asian origin have been drawn to the worlds depicted by these writers. Keath FRASER, the Vancouver novelist and TRAVEL writer, locates some of his work, included in Foreign Affairs, in Cambodia and South India. Karen CONNELLY, in Touching the Dragon (1992), provides a graphic and often complex description of the year she spent in Thailand. By discussing the intersection between disparate cultures, their work tells us about the reality of hybridity and the need to perceive and understand distinctive identities. The challenge for the reader, then, is not one of acknowledging difference - Asian-Canadian writing is recognizably different - but of refusing to locate this corpus within a discourse of otherness that denies it legitimacy or significance as Canadian literature. See also BECK, M. BOWERING, CUMYN, Robert LEPAGE, LEPAN, M E L L I N G , VUONG-RIDDICK.
47
ASIA AND CANADIAN LITERATURE
Further reading: Canadian Literature 163 (Winter J999); Lien Chao, Beyond Silence: Chinese Canadian Literature in English (Toronto: TSAR, 1997); Milton Israel, In the Further Soil: A Social History oflndo-Canadians in Ontario (Toronto: TOPIC, 1994). Chelva Kanagaiiayakam
ASSELIN, Olivar. Journalist; b Saint-Hilarion, QC, 8 Nov 1874, d Montreal 18 April 1937; the son of Adele-Cedulie (Tremblay) and Rieul Asselin, a tanner, who shortly after emig to Massachusetts. After his seminary education in Rimouski, Asselin rejoined his parents in 1892, taking out US citizenship in 1898 to fight in the Spanish-American WAR. Returning to Canada in 1900, he organized the Ligue Nationaliste to oppose British influence in Quebec and (along with the orator Henri Bourassa) Sir Wilfrid Laurier's support of the South African War. Asselin's journalistic skill is shown in his weekly NEWSPAPER, Le Nationaliste, and in such books as A Quebec View of Canadian Nationalism (1909). Breaking with Bourassa in 1910, after the latter founded Le Devoir, he took out Canadian (ie, 'British,' at the time) citizenship again in 1911, opposed Canada's entry into the First World War, and then in 1915 led a French-Canadian battalion into the war; he won the Legion d'Honneur and served on the Canadian delegation to the peace conference. He subsequently became editor of the Quebec Liberal Party paper, Le Canada (1930-4), and influenced the course of Quebec JOURNALISM for the next three decades. Further reading: Marcel-A. Gagnon, La vie orageuse d'Olivar Asselin (Montreal: L'Homme, 1962); Helene Pelletier-Baillargeon, Olivar Asselin et son temps: Le militant (Montreal: Fides, 1996). ASSINIWI, Bernard. Writer; b Montreal 31 July 1935, d Ottawa 4 Sept 2000; son of Eglantine Bleau and Joseph-Leonidas Zephirin Lapierre ne Assiniwi; educ U Guelph (BScA). Assiniwi was a non-status Algo-Cree who lived in Cantley, QC. A prolific writer on NATIVE subjects, he also served as curator of the Eastern Subarctic Cultural area of the Canadian Museum of Civilization. Despite his many publications, Assiniwi has received little critical attention in Quebec.
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From 1968 on, he published more than thirtyfive works, ranging from several volumes of IROQUOIS and ALGONQUIAN history to collections of stories, such as Anish-Nah-Be (1971), Sagana (1972), and Contes adultes des territoires algonquiens (1985), to literature for CHILDREN and young adults, such as Makwa, le petit algonquin (1973) and Le guerrier auxpieds agiles (1979). He also wrote for the theatre and for FILM, including II n'y a plus d'Indiens (1983) and PreRecruit Training Camp (1993), which won a Bronze Plaque as the best screenplay at the 4ist Columbus Film Festival. Among his novels are Lebras coupe (1976) and La saga des Beothuks (1996; tr Wayne Grady, 2000); the latter won the Prix France-Quebec-Jean Hamelin award in 1997. See also COOKBOOKS AND CULTURE. Renee Hulan ATHABASKAN, ATHAPASKAN, see NORTH ERN ATHAPASKAN.
ATKINSON, Diana. Novelist; b Vancouver 10 Nov 1964; daughter of Annette Charlotte (Abrams) and Jacob David Wigod, an English professor. Atkinson's first novel, Highways and Dancehalls (1995), grew out of a biographical essay based on her own experiences on the strippers' circuit in interior British Columbia. Recounted in the form of journal entries, it deals with issues of the body, the male gaze, and feminine archetypes, exploring the paradox of empowerment and disempowerment experienced by women involved in the sex trade. The novel illuminates an inner life of trauma, recovery, and self-actualization within the bleak world of British Columbia's rural bars and cabarets. Tamas Dobozy
ATLANTIC CANADA, see MARITIMES. ATWOOD, Margaret Eleanor. Author; b Ottawa 18 Nov 1939; daughter of Carl Edmund Atwood and Margaret Dorothy (Killam) Atwood. Margaret Atwood's name became synonymous with the cultural flowering that took place in Canada during the last 25 years of the 20th century. Poet, novelist, CHILDREN'S writer, cartoonist, and cultural commentator, she served as an editor and member of the board of directors of Toronto's Anansi Press (1971-3), as
A'TWOOD
president of the WRITERS' UNION OF CANADA (1981-2), and as president of a branch of PEN Canada (1984-6). Her stature derives from her thorough understanding of the history of literary traditions, combined with a critical perspective on current mores and events. Atwood has lived in the United States, England, Germany, and France but mainly in Ontario, especially the northeast (where she spent parts of her early years) and Toronto (from 1946 on). Travel shaped a keen sense of place. As a child, because of her father's work as an entomologist, she spent the spring, summer, and fall months of each year in the Ontario bush with her older brother, younger sister, and parents. Her father, self-taught as a young Nova Scotian, eventually earned a PhD in entomology which led to his fieldwork. Her mother, also a Nova Scotian, proved her husband's match in resourcefulness as a homemaker in those unusual circumstances. Atwood read often and widely: Orwell, Poe, Melville, Churchill, Grimms' fairy tales, religious stories, and NATIVE Canadian and classical MYTHOLOGY. As a teenager and young adult, she was drawn to Canadian poetry, including that by P.K. PAGE, James REANEY, A.M. KLEIN, Al PURDY, Doug JONES, and Anne HEBERT, and also work by WH. Auden and T.S. Eliot. She attended Leaside High School in Toronto (1952-7), then entered Victoria C at U Toronto to study English literature. Formative influences there were the poetprofessor Jay MACPHERSON and the literary critic Northrop FRYE. Macpherson and others belied the idea that 'Canadian' and 'poet' were mutually exclusive terms. Frye taught Atwood the recurring patterns or codes that underlie literature and that are interpreted variously by writers in differing regions - that 'universal' is tied to 'local.' The year 1961 saw Atwood enter Radcliffe C (later part of Harvard U) to pursue graduate work in Victorian Studies, and her work there, in both Victorian literature and American writing, sharpened her sense of her own country's literary voice. Just as (a century earlier) US critics had bemoaned the absence of an American idiom, so she and the other literati of her generation in Canada began to call for distinctively Canadian perspectives and the means of publishing them. (Also while at Harvard Atwood met
her future husband, James Polk, a graduate student in English. Divorced from Polk in 1973, she and Graeme GIBSON have been partners since then; they parented a daughter, Jess, in 1976.) Having completed her PhD exams and much of her thesis on late-Victorian FANTASY, she taught at several Canadian universities, including U British Columbia and Sir George Williams U (Montreal), while continuing to write poetry and fiction. In 1966 her book of poetry The Circle Game was published, winning the Governor General's AWARD. After her novel The Edible Woman appeared (1969), Atwood-the-author-ofimaginative-literature took precedence over Atwood-the-literary-critic. But her background in the tradition of English writing and its CRITICISM still informs her essays and her imaginative work. Structurally, her writing revises traditional stories and forms. Classical mythology appears in transformed ways in her poetry; biblical and folkloric characters and tropes occur in recombined ways in her fiction. She also reshapes such literary genres as the lyric, the romance, the dystopia (see UTOPIA), and the HISTORICAL novel. By 1999 Atwood had published fourteen volumes of poetry, nine novels, five collections of short stories, three volumes of literary criticism, and three children's books (including Up in the Tree, 1978). The poems in such volumes as Double Persephone (1961), The Circle Game, Procedures for Underground (1970), Two-Headed Poems (1978), Interlunar (1984), and Morning in the Burned House (1995) illustrate the substantial range of her poetic voices and concerns. The early lyrics, with their imagery of violence and circularity, pose questions about the limits of freedom in people's relationships. The 'animals' in The Animals in That Country (1968) are as much human as bestial, with all that this duality implies about connections between love and hurt, flight from the constraints of'civilization,' and dependence upon the conveniences of familiarity. Power Politics (1971) and the mordantly titled You Are Happy (1974) pointedly probe the tensions that at once join and divide the sexes, a subject that pervades Atwood's fiction as well. The linked poems in The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970) demonstrate yet another achievement, revisiting the journal as a literary GENRE. This work also constitutes a major site
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ATWOOD
of Atwoodian thought, reanimating an historical figure to examine the relevance of the past. (The historical figure here, Susanna MOODIE, also appears in Alias Grace, a 1996 novel that inquires into possible - even contrary - readings of historical evidence, using the celebrated 19thcentury Canadian murder trial of Grace Marks as its model.) This dialogue between past and present (and between nature and culture) takes place also within the divided selves of the booklength poem's central character. Separated from her history, her sense of place, her son, and her learned ideas about propriety, Atwood's Moodie must seek to resolve her loss of self. Subsequently in the poem she also becomes a prototypical ancestor for modern-day WOMEN, one who wanders, still divided, aboard a contemporary Toronto streetcar. The collages and cover design of this volume are also by Atwood; a later edition was richly illustrated by her friend, the painter Charles Pachter (who also illustrated The Circle Game and several broadsides). Atwood's novels pursue related themes, the issue of women's identity raised in edgily comic fashion as early as The Edible Woman (1969). She argues that victimization (one of the subjects of Survival) can be self-induced as well as imposed from outside, however, and her subsequent novels probe patterns of resistance and recovery; they do not espouse passivity. Hence Surfacing (1972), which draws in part on the ethnography of Selwyn DEWDNEY, submerges its central character in a world of difference in order to release her into the future. Self-esteem is the goal of numerous other characters as well, •whether they are depicted as would-be urban sophisticates (eg, the travel writer who gets trapped in a CARIBBEAN coup in Bodily Harm, 1981) or as urban naifs (eg, the romance writer who imagines alternative lives in Lady Oracle, 1976). While these characters live in chaos, they also seek (and sometimes pretend to find) order, but repeatedly they must be disabused of any easy acceptance of fad or fashion, for the idea of order, however attractive in principle, often proves destructive in practice. The dystopian vision of The Handmaid's Tale (1985), probably Atwood's most popular fiction, demonstrates this tendency most clearly. The futureworld it represents, one ruled by fascist religious autocrats who use, control, and dismiss women, is
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not merely fanciful; it is politically engaged, rooted in the present-day culture of marketing and power. (The names of all the female characters, for example, are drawn from commercial products on 19805 supermarket shelves.) In this world, as in the poetry, 'love' is real, as is friendship, but both nevertheless express themselves ambiguously, and when the novel closes selfreflexively, in a satire of how academia theorizes and reconstructs the past, it reasserts in irony the unlikelihood of anyone ever being able adequately to affirm truth. Still other novels probe further the social manifestations of power, particularly among women whose cruelties to each other are as devastating as those inflicted in other ways. The subject of Cat's Eye (1988) is youth and gendered violence, counterpointed by the narrator's efforts to understand 'string theory' and other ideas by which SCIENCE promises orderly explanations of life. The Robber Bride (1993) recounts the histories of female friends, focusing particularly on the one who most arbitrarily uses the others, a force of disruption whom the others have somehow permitted into their lives. This paradigm of the authoritarian woman also constitutes the subject of The Blind Assassin (2.000), which looks ahead to the process of aging as well as back into the manipulations of youth. Margaret Atwood's representative SHORT STORY collections include Bluebeard's Egg (1983), Wilderness Tips (1991), and Good Bones (1992,), which bring together experiments in contemporary FABLE and meditations on the power of language. Some of the stories retell fairytales for a modern, ironic glimpse of how behaviour sometimes changes and preconceptions sometimes do not. In a story such as 'Death by Landscape,' for example, the mindscape of the Group of Seven (see VISUAL ART) takes over perception and so takes over life. Atwood's several volumes of essays also extended her influence into CRITICISM. These include Second Words (1982) and Strange Things: The Malevolent NORTH in Canadian Literature (1995), while the title motif of her first, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972), attaches itself inextricably to her name. The motif of Canadians as survivors with a victim mentality, which, she argues, describes many characters in Canadian fiction, is in fact
AUBERT DE GASPE
frequently evoked by other critics to describe Atwood's own characters. Beyond the themes of survival and nature, Atwood often treats the numbing effects of conventional thinking. Other concerns that inform her writing include transformation, memory, forgetfulness, place, and time. Central characters struggle to define themselves, particularly as women in a Canadian milieu, one in which neither 'woman' nor 'Canadian' equates with power; moral ambiguity prevails. North American media images as false gods also weaken and block them. But histories and locales, personal and cultural, provide significant backgrounds against which the other issues unfold. Atwood's predominant tone is ironic, and HUMOUR recurs throughout. Honours for these works have included the Trillium Award for Excellence in Ontario Writing (1992,1994,1995), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1981), the Governor General's Award (1966, 1986), the Arthur C. Clarke Award for best SCIENCE FICTION (1987), the Giller Prize (1996), and the Booker Prize (2000). Atwood has also received honorary doctorates from Oxford (1998), Queen's (1974), Toronto (1983), Leeds (1994), and many other universities. Critical reception of her work opened out over the span of her career. Often seen as a FEMINIST writer (although her female characters can be remarkably cruel to one another) and a Canadian NATIONALIST in the contemporary North American tradition, Atwood is increasingly placed in the more internationalist context of POSTCOLONIAL writing; similarly, her work now enters into discussion of Canadian culture as a whole. Most literary studies focus primarily on her revisionist play with conventional figures and forms. Translated into many languages, her work has a readership worldwide, achieving canonical status in the anglophone milieu and beyond. In particular, The Handmaid's Tale was adapted into other media. It appeared (to tepid reviews) in FILM form in 1990, directed by Volker Schlondorff, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter and an American cast; and in 2000 (opening in Copenhagen to rave reviews) it was transformed into an opera called Tjenerindens Fortcelling, by the Danish composer Poul Ruders. Atwood has her own website (using her anagrammatical nom de plume, OWToad), and a
Margaret Atwood Society is based at UC of the Cariboo. See also COOKBOOKS AND CULTURE. Further reading: Margaret Atwood and VictorLevy Beaulieu, Two Solicitudes: Conversations, tr Phyllis Aronoff and Howard Scott (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1998); Nathalie Cooke, Margaret Atwood: A Biography (Toronto: ECW, 1998); Coral Ann Howells, Margaret Atwood (London: Macmillan, 1996); Earl G. Ingersoll, ed, Margaret Atwood: Conversations (Willowdale, ON: Firefly, 1990); Colin Nicholson, ed, Margaret Atwood: Writing and Subjectivity (London: Macmillan; New York: St Martin's, 1994); Sharon Rose Wilson, Margaret Atwood's Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics (Jackson: U Mississippi P, 1993); Lorraine York, ed, Various Atwoods: Essays on the Later Poems, Short Fiction, and Novels (Toronto: Anansi, 1995). Shannon Hengen/WN
AUBERT DE GASPE, Philippe-IgnaceFrancois. Reporter, novelist; b Quebec, LC, 8 April 1814, d Halifax 7 March 1841; the second of Suzanne (Allison) and P-J. AUBERT DE GASPE'S thirteen children. Educated mostly at home and in Quebec and Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, Aubert de Gaspe^iLs worked variously as a Quebec legislative reporter, as an editor (with Napoleon AUBIN) of a short-lived bilingual NEWSPAPER, and as a reporter for the Halifax Morning Post. He was repeatedly convicted as a result of his altercations with legislators. In 1837 Aubert de Gaspe produced Canada's first French-language novel, L'influence d'un livre (revised by H-R. CASGRAIN in 1864 as Le chercheur de tresors; tr Claire Rothman, 1991), a work of alchemy and intrigue that makes use of the FOLK legend ROSE LATULIPE. Further reading: Leopold Leblanc, Preface to Le chercheur de tresors (Montreal: Reedition Quebec, 1968): i-vii. AUBERT DE GASPE, Philippe-Joseph. Sei gneur, author; b Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, Quebec, 30 Oct 1786, d Quebec City 29 Jan 1871; the son of local landed gentry Catherine Tarien de Lanaudiere and Pierre-Ignace-Francois Aubert de Gaspe. After being educated in Quebec with a group of students that included Louis-Joseph PAPINEAU, he was called to the bar in 1811, the
5i
AUBERT DE GASPE
same year he married Suzanne Allison, the daughter of a British officer; his distinguished career was interrupted by scandal when he was imprisoned for debt (1838-41). Retiring to the family estate, Aubert de Gaspe pere devoted his time to educating his children and reading Sir Walter Scott and other authors. When, on his mother's death in 1842, he inherited the seigneuries of Saint-Jean-Port-Joli and La Pocatiere, he re-entered society (counting F-X. GARNEAU, j-c. TACHE, and Octave CREMAZIE as friends) and began to write. Known for his autobiographical Memoires (1866) as well as his enthusiasm for FOLK and NATIVE tales, he is best remembered for Les anciens canadiens (1863; rev 1864;tr three times - C.G.D. ROBERTS'S version, The Canadians of Old, reissued as Cameron ofLochiel, 1905), a novel about the 1759 WAR and the union between English and French in the new country. Jane Brierley translated his memoirs as A Man of Sentiment (1988). Further reading: Jacques Castonguay, Philippe Aubert de Gaspe (Sillery: Septentrion, 1991). AUBIN, Napoleon. Editor, scientist; b Geneva, Switzerland, 9 Nov 1812, d Montreal 12 June 1890; the son of Elizabeth (Escuyer) and PierreLouis-Charles Aubin, Swiss Calvinists. Born Aime-Nicolas, Aubin chose the name Napoleon out of admiration for Bonaparte. After emigrating to the United States at 16 and to Quebec at 21, he wrote a few stories and poems and two chemistry texts (he taught at the Quebec School of Medicine and invented a brick-pressing machine). But he was most influential as editor, publisher, and author of the politically satirical journal Le Fantasque (1837-49; see HUMOUR AND SATIRE). At various times supporting and criticizing Lord Durham and Louis-Joseph PAPINEAU, Aubin opposed the REBELLION of 1837, but twice the victim of CENSORSHIP, he was jailed in 1839 for ostensibly inciting further rebellion. Further reading: Jean-Paul Tremblay, A la recherche de Napoleon Aubin (Quebec: P de l'U Laval, 1969). AUBRY, Claude. Librarian, author; b Morin Heights, QC, 23 Oct 1914, d Ottawa 3 Nov 1984;
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son of Augustine (Lafleur) and Ernest Aubry. A graduate of McGill U (1945), Aubry directed Ottawa's municipal LIBRARY (1953-79) and quickly established a reputation as a leading CHILDREN'S writer. His AWARD-winning books include the fantasy Les iles de roi Maha Maha II (1960; tr Alice Kane as The King of the Thousand Islands, 1983). He was especially noted for drawing on Canadian FOLKLORE, in, for example, Loup de Noel (1962; tr Kane as The Christmas Wolf, 1965), Le violon magique (1968; tr Kane as The Magic Fiddler and Other Legends of French Canada, 1968), and Agouhanna, le petit Indian qui etait peureux (1974; tr Harvey Swados as Agouhanna, 1972). Aubry was named to the Order of Canada in 1974. Margaret Cook
AUDE (Claudette Charbonneau-Tissot). Novelist; b Montreal, 22 June 1947; daughter of Aurore Lemire, a secretary, and Rene Charbonneau, a food wholesaler. After graduating in French Studies at U Montreal (1971) and in creative writing at U Laval (1994), Aude taught at the Cegep Francois-Xavier Garneau from 1977 on. She wrote for several periodicals, including La Barre dujour and Chatelaine, and published collections of her stories, including Cet imperceptible mouvement (1997; tr Jill Cairns as The Indiscernible Movement, 1998), in which people (a widow, a young man) find ways to combat adversity; she won a Governor General's AWARD for this book. Other works include Bane de brume, ou Les aventures de la petite fille qui Von croyait partie avec I'eau de bain (1987), stories that use fantasy to tell about women's lives, and L'enfant migrateur (1998). Further reading: Michel Lord, Aude: les metamorphoses de la chrysalide,' Quebec francais 108 (Winter 1998): 79-82. Jerome Loisel
AUDET, Jean-Paul. Theologian, philosopher; b Saint-Anselme-de Dorchester, QC, 9 Dec 1918, d Orford, QC, 12 Nov 1993; son of Marie-Anne (Gagne) and Alphonse Audet. He obtained a degree in theology from U Ottawa (1947) and a doctorate in theology from U Saint ThomasAquinas in Rome (1949). From 1958 to 1969 he was professor of Greek, Hebrew, and theology in Jerusalem; he then taught in the department
AVISON
of philosophy at U Montreal. His many writings on ancient languages and archaeology, clerical duties, and the 'laic' teachings of Jesus established his theological influence (and that of the Dominican Order) in the QUIET REVOLUTION of Quebec in the 19605. A delegate to Vatican II in 1965, Audet was particularly celebrated for two books: Manage et celibat dans le service de I'eglise (1967; tr Rosemary Sheed as Structures of Christian Priesthood, 1967), and Pro jet evangelique de Jesus (1969; tr Edmond Bonin as The Gospel Project, 1969). Winner of the Molson AWARD (1970), he became a fellow of the ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA in 1971.
Margaret Cook
AUSTRALIAN literary links with Canada range from the political (see COMMONWEALTH) to the personal (see, eg, Norman DUNCAN, Janette Turner HOSPITAL, D.S. HUYGHUE, Daphne MARLATT, Gayla REID, Kevin ROBERTS, and Ann YORK). Earle BIRNEY, JackHODGiNS, Alice MUNRO, andp.K. PAGE are among the writers who have set poems and stories in Australia. Some individuals who took part in the 1837 REBELLION were exiled there (see, eg, Antoine GERIN-LAJOIE). Sir John FRANKLIN was one of many colonial officials who served in both places. See also GRAVEL, HANCOCK. AUTOBIOGRAPHY, see LIFE WRITING. AUTOMATISME, AUTOMATISTE, see REFUS GLOBAL.
AVISON, Margaret Kirkland. Poet, freelance editor, social worker; b Gait (now Cambridge), ON, 23 April 1918; youngest of two daughters and one son of Mabel (Kirkland) and Harold Avison, Methodist and then UNITED CHURCH minister. After growing up in Regina and Calgary, Avison moved with her family to Toronto in 1929 and initially published poetry under a PSEUDONYM ('Willamac') for a CHILDREN'S section in the Globe and Mail and later under her own name in high school publications. More poems appeared in Acta Victoriana while she studied English language and literature at Victoria C and was taught by, among others, E.J. PRATT, Kathleen Coburn, Roy DANIELLS, and Northrop FRYE (who became a mentor and life-
long friend). From her graduation in 1940 until the publication of her first volume, Avison often lived the bohemian artist's life, in estrangement from her Christian upbringing and holding an assortment of usually short-term jobs while writing and occupying a series of rented rooms in the vicinity of U Toronto. The jobs included freelance editing, working at the Canadian Institute of International Affairs, cataloguing books at the university library, GHOST WRITING, and preparing a history of Ontario for elementary grades. Her poetry appeared occasionally in Canadian periodicals, she reviewed for the Canadian Forum, and her work eventually found acceptance in prestigious American publications such as Poetry (Chicago), Kenyan R, and Origin. She gradually met her contemporaries in both Canada (her friendship with Miriam WADDINGTON, for example, led to her meeting A.J.M. SMITH, who promoted her work) and the United States, including Cid Gorman, Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, and Robert Creeley. A Guggenheim Fellowship in 1956 gave her time to organize the manuscript of Winter Sun (1960) while living in Chicago (one of her infrequent absences from Toronto). The reception welcoming this first volume was unanimous: a major Canadian poet had appeared. Avison published five volumes of poetry by 1997, two of which received the Governor General's AWARD: Winter Sun and No Time (1989). Her conversion to CHRISTIANITY in 1963 is reflected in the explicitly religious tenor of her other publications: The Dumbfounding (1966), sunblue (1978), and Not Yet but Still (1997). Her Selected Poems appeared in 1991, and A Kind of Perseverance, the text of the Pascal Lectures on 'Christianity and the University,' which she had given the previous year at U Waterloo, in 1994. Winter Sun, probably Avison's single most distinctive achievement, is a stunning collection of often difficult lyrics culled from twenty-five years of composition. The marks of metaphysical style are evident, but these are stamped with her own voice and manner, Eliotesque monologues, and sudden shifts in perspective punctuated with quizzical questions or parenthetical asides, all keeping the reader off balance. Poems such as 'Dispersed Titles,' allusive and intellectual, wrestle with matters of Renaissance cosmologies; elsewhere references may be based
53
AVISON
on Old Testament or classical sources. Part of the reader's challenge is Avison's compressed, dense style, as in the sonnets (such as 'Snow'), where syntax can be elliptical and adjectives frequently compounded. The poet's world is also relentlessly URBAN, as in All Fools' Eve,' and she meditates on issues in contemporary life such as the exploitation of the environment ('Mordent for a Melody'), the superficiality of social life, and the uncertainties of love ('The Agnes Cleves Papers'). Despite the deadening effects of modernism on identity (the 'packaged us-es' of 'Infra-Political'), moments of transfiguration are still possible ('the cryptic change' in 'Prelude' or the moment 'in the concert hall' in 'The World Still Needs'), illumination she usually associates with the faculty of imagination ('Voluptuaries and Others'). Avison's second volume appeared three years after her conversion to Christianity. The Dumbfounding is characterized by an openness to experience and the 'other' less evident in its predecessor. Dialogue replaces monologue; letting the ear experience' ('Pace') is more prominent than the 'optic heart' ('Snow'). Instead of celebrating fugitive moments of insight, the 'allswallowing moment' of Christian commitment becomes the touchstone for experience. The Word brings the 'unsealing day' ('The Word') of liberation from a past seen as time-wasting and in which her worship of art was idolatrous. Avison now registers experience through the filter of New Testament references (as in 'Janitor Working on Threshold') and encounters the poor and dispossesed with explicit compassion (eg, the old 'rubbie' in 'July Man'). Renewal, release, and celebration are the dominant notes struck by the poems in this collection. Twelve years - of graduate work, university teaching, social work, a writer-in-residency (U Western Ontario, 1972-3), and work in the CBC archives - separated the second volume from the third, sunblue. The centrality of the BIBLE to Avison's brand of Christianity is undeniable in this collection, and some critics had little sympathy for her open statements of belief or for poems acting as commentaries on biblical passages. Yet sunblue is a deceptive volume. The modest and minimal opening sketches disarm the reader with their simple celebration of spring and the analogous connections that
54
Avison makes with the inner life of the spirit. Formal skills are less insistently displayed, but are present nevertheless as she seeks a poetic that is congenial to her faith and embodies its principles. As she modifies her difficult style, the 'plainness' mentioned in Winter Sun is partially achieved, and poems such as 'Emmanuel' and 'Contest' disclose the links that Avison as a devotional poet shares with one of her most influential models, George Herbert. The volume ends with Christmas poems and more sketches, this time celebrating children and, implicitly, the child in each of us. Eleven more years passed before No Time, a massive collection, was published. During these years Avison retired from the Presbyterian mission office where she had worked while nursing her invalided mother at home and then in hospital prior to her death at the age of 102. She also overcame difficulties with her own health. This book, suffused with an elegiac tone (a number of poems are in memory of writers who have died), displays personal grief and a confrontation with death unprecedented in her earlier work. In addition to a sequence about her mother, 'My Mother's Death, I-VI,' Avison also writes a long sequence about a friend (Josephine Grimshaw) who died prematurely, 'The Jo Poems' (in ten sections), with its powerful, periodic repetition of'My friend is dead.' Both sequences articulate her complex reaction to the deaths of people she has loved. In facing their suffering and her bereavement, she also faces the mystery of time and a challenge to faith. In responding to her mother's death, she is led to consider the nature of'institutional care' but also to recognize her common bond with human beings suffering elsewhere in the world, such as in the mining disaster that occurred in South Africa the same day as her mother died. Yet there is balance and inclusiveness in No Time. Sorrow is matched by celebration (several poems are inscribed to still-living friends), secular and sensual concerns by religious and spiritual ones, poems about the pressures of obligation by poems about the continuing struggle for authenticity. There is much formal variety in the collection, ranging from meditation to confession to praise to self-reflection and selfcondemnation. There is also humour (All You Need Is A Screw-Driver!') and delight in linguis-
AWARDS AND LITERARY PRIZES
tic play and puns (eg, 'Making Senses' and 'Money Needs'). There are also the familiar Avison gestures: close observation of nature (birds, trees, weather, and 'whiskered' cats), poems about walking and social concern, and the disclosure of the extraordinary in the ordinary, the epiphanic revelation in 'minutiae': 'The unknown, the unrecognized, the / invisibly glorious / hid in reality / till the truly real / lays all bare' ('Meditation on the Opening of the Fourth Gospel'). While the poet lives, endures, in an urban setting and in a culture of relativistic values and of'plastic' and 'styrofoam' ('Conglomerate Space or Shop and Sup'), 'one triangle of grass' emblematizes timeless promise ('Future'), and that hope is Jesus Christ, her only liberation from time, history, and Heraclitan flux. It is that truth that she 'blazons' ('To a Seeking Stranger') before her readers. Another eight years passed before Avison's next collection appeared, Not Yet but Still, her first with named subdivisions creating a narrative form. In ways other than those in No Time, this volume recapitulates her characteristic themes and concerns. Explicit references to earlier poems enforce this impression. In 'Old Woman at a Winter Window,' the first lyric in the opening section ('Looking Out'), the speaker is clearly Avison herself ('I stare') looking east from her apartment window in Fellowship Towers on Yonge Street down the Rosedale Valley Road. The poem describes the apartment she lives in (its 'square ceiling and walls / and floor') as an assertion of'meaning, against the encroaching ice'; we hear 'New Year's Poem' from Winter Sun in these lines and then 'The Swimmer's Moment' in the concluding lines - 'the ice that somehow / signals another space, a fearful, / glorious amplitude.' The second poem, 'Beyond Weather, or From a Train Window,' invokes the opening of sunblue; 'Making a Living'juxtaposes 'young' and 'old' in a manner reminiscent of 'Young ... Old' in The Dumbfounding; and 'News Item' revisits the 'day of leafing out' more elaborately rendered in The Dumbfounding. The volume itself is more deliberately 'entrelaced' with images and motifs than any previous volume. Avison's themes are language and communication, seeing and hearing, moments of 'disruption' and ways of'liberation,' the focus on the immediate ('now'), delighting in nature
(birds), delineating her environment of the city, leaf shadow, yearning for clarity or the plain style, credal assertions, and the primacy of the Bible. Avison is now self-consciously a 'postcolonial white woman,' alive to the transformed culture in which she lives and still recording her experience of faith and of life in Toronto. Further reading: Margaret Calverley, 'The Avison Collection at the University of Manitoba: Poems 1929-1989,' Canadian Poetry: Studies/ Documents/Reviews 25 (Spring/Summer, 1991): 54-84; David A. Kent, ed, 'Lighting up the terrain': The Poetry of Margaret Avison (Toronto: ECW 1987); David A. Kent, Margaret Avison and Her Works (Toronto: ECW, 1989). David A. Kent AVONLEA, the fictional community invented b y L . M . MONTGOMERY.
AWARDS AND LITERARY PRIZES. Cana dian writers receive considerable recognition through international prizes and national awards programs. Listed below are the chief national and international awards that have honoured Canadian literary talents, as well as a representative number of the regional awards that do much to celebrate Canadian writing; each entry describes the prize and enumerates the winners. For further information, see Scott Anderson, ed, Awards, Contests, and Grants,' in The Book Trade in Canada (Toronto: Quill & Quire, 1998): 439—67; Claude Janelle, ed, Prix litteraires du Quebec: Repertoire 1997 (Quebec: Ministere de la Culture et des Communications, I 997). and Gordon Ripley, Awards,' in Eugene Benson and William Toye, eds, The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature (Toronto: Oxford UP, 1997): 69-73. (Note: Every effort has been made to verify the details of these awards with their administrative bodies.) CANADIAN OR JOINTLY CANADIAN AWARDS
Air Canada Award, see Canadian Authors Assoc Awards Program. Alberta Book Awards A number of awards, administered by the Writers Guild of Alberta, covering children's litera-
55
AWARDS AND LITERARY PRIZES
ture, fiction, non-fiction, first book, drama, and poetry. Each award winner receives $1,000 plus a leather-bound copy of the winning volume. R. Ross Annet Award for Children's Literature. Winners: 1999 Barbara Demers, Willa's New World', 1998 Anita Horrocks, What They Don't Know; 1997 Hazel Hutchins, The Prince of Tarn; 1996 Don Trembath, Tuesday Cafe; 1995 Tololwa M. Mollel, Big Boy; 1994 Beth Goobie, Mission Impossible; 1993 David Bly, The Mclntyre Liar; 1992 Monica HUGHES, The Crystal Drop; 1991 Hazel Hutchins, A Cat ofArtimus Pride; 1990 Jan HUDSON, Dawn Rider; 1989 Don Meredith, Dog Runner; 1988 William Pasnak, Under the Eagle's Claw; 1987 Marilyn Halvorson, Nobody Said It Would Be Easy; 1986 Monica HUGHES, Elaine's Way; 1985 Cora Taylor, Julie; 1984 William Pasnak, In the City of the King; 1983 Monica HUGHES, Space Trap; 1982 Monica HUGHES, Hunter in the Dark. Georges S. Bugnet Award for Fiction (Novel). Winners: 1999 Peter Oliva, The City of Yes, and Catherine Simmons Niven, A Fine Daughter; 1998 Greg HOLLINGSHEAD, The Healer; 1997 Margie Taylor, Some ofSkippy's Blues; 1996 Kristjana GUNNARS, The Garden Rose; 1995 Marion Douglas, Bending at the Bow; 1994 Richard Wagamese, Keeper 'n Me; 1993 Roberta Rees, Beneath the Faceless Mountain; 1992 Robert HILLES, Raising of Voices; 1991 Greg HOLLINGSHEAD, Spin Dry; 1990 Thomas KING, Medicine River; 1989 Jacqueline Dumas, Madeleine and the Angel; 1988 Helen Forrester, Yes, Mama; 1987 Mary Walters Riskin, The Woman Upstairs; 1986 Aritha VAN HERK, No Fixed Address; 1985 Marie Jakober, Sadinista; 1984 Pauline GEDGE, The Twelfth Transforming; 1983 Sam SELVON, Moses Migrating; 1982 w.p. KINSELLA, Shoelessjoe. Wilfred Eggleston Award for Non-Fiction. Winners: 1999 Alia Tumanov, Where We Buried The Sun; 1998 Rudy WIEBE and Yvonne Johnson, Stolen Life; 1997 Judy Schultz, Mamie's Children; 1996 David Bercuson, Significant Incident; 1995 Hugh Dempsey, The Golden Age of the Canadian Cowboy; 1994 Stacy Schiff, Saint-Exupery; 1993 Myrna KOSTASH, Bloodlines; 1992 F.L. Morton, Morgentaler v. Borowski; 1991 Kenneth McGoogan, Canada's Undeclared War; 1990 Donald B. Smith, Land
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of Shadows; 1989 Stephen Hume, Ghost Camps; 1988 Peter Jonker, The Song and the Silence; 1987 Myrna KOSTASH, No Kidding; 1986 Daniel Dancocks, Legacy of Valour; 1985 Douglas Curran, In Advance of the Landing; 1984 Edward Brado, Cattle Kingdom; 1983 E.J. Hart, The Selling of Canada; 1982 John Davenall Turner, Sunfield Painter. Henry Kreisel Award for Best First Book. Winners: 1999 Catherine Simmons Niven, A Fine Daughter; 1998 Rajinderpal Pal, Pappaji wrote poetry in a language I cannot read; 1997 Curtis Gillespie, The Progress of an Object in Motion; 1996 Lisa Christensen, A Hiker's Guide to Art of the Canadian Rockies; 1995 Thomas WHARTON, Icefields; 1994 Stacy Schiff, Saint-Exupery; 1993 Peter Oliva, Drowning in Darkness. Howard O'Hagan Award for Short Fiction. Winners: 1999 Barbara Scott, The Quick; 1998 Sally Ito, Floating Shore; 1997 Cecilia FREY, Salamander Moon; 1996 Fred Way, Diamond Girl; 1995 Greg HOLLINGSHEAD, The Roaring Girl; 1994 Rosemary NIXON, The Cock's Egg; 1993 Martin Sherman, Elephant Hook and Other Stories; 1992 Greg HOLLINGSHEAD, White Buick; 1991J. Jill Robinson, Saltwater Trees; 1990 Cecilia FREY, The Love Song of Romeo Paquette; 1989 w.o. MITCHELL, According to Jake and the Kid; 1988 Merna SUMMERS, North of the Battle; 1987 Cecilia FREY, The Nefertiti Look; 1986 Diane SCHOEMPERLEN, Frogs and Other Stories; 1985 no award; 1984 Mark Anthony JARMAN, Dancing Nightly in the Tavern; 1983 W.P. KINSELLA, Moccasin Telegraph; 1982 Merna SUMMERS, Calling Home. Gwen Pharis Ringwood Award for Drama. Winners: 1999 Clem Martini, Illegal Entry; 1998 Greg Nelson, Spirit Yesterday; 1997 Ron Chambers, Three Really Nasty Plays; 1996 Brad FRASER, Love and Human Remains; 1995 Brad FRASER, Poor Super Man; 1994 Pamela Boyd, Odd Fish; 1993 Greg Nelson, Castrate; 1992 John MURRELL, Democracy; 1991 Clem Martini, Nobody of Consequence; 1990 Brad FRASER, Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love; 1989 Robert Clinton, The Mail Order Bride; 1988 no award; 1987 Michael D.C. McKinlay, 'Walt Roy' New Works I; 1986 Sharon POLLOCK, Doc; 1985 Raymond Storey, Angel of Death.
AWARDS AND LITERARY PRIZES
Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry. Winners: 1999 Shawna Lemay, All the God-Sized Fruit; 1998 Monty REID, Flat Side; 1997 Tim BOWLING, Dying Scarlet; 1996 Kristjana GUNNARS, Exiles Among You; 1995 Charles Noble, Wormwood Vermouth, Warphistory; 1994 Bert ALMON, Earth Prime; 1993 Richard STEVENSON, From the Mouths of Angels; 1992 Roberta Rees, Eyes Like Pigeons; 1991 Fred WAH, So Far; 1990 Monty REID, These Lawns; 1989 Andrew WREGGITT, Making Movies; 1988 Christopher WISEMAN, Postcards Home; 1987 E.D. BLODGETT, Musical Offering; 1986 Claire HARRIS, Travelling to Find a Remedy; 1985 Monty REID, The Alternate Guide; 1984 Douglas BARBOUR, Visible Visions; 1983 E.D. BLODGETT, Arche/Elegies; 1982 Jon WHYTE, Homage, Henry Kelsey. R. Ross Annet Award for Children's Literature, see Alberta Book Awards. Atlantic Poetry Prize, see Writers' Federation of Nova Scotia Awards. Aurora Awards, see Prix Aurora Awards. Birks Family Foundation Award for Biography, see Canadian Authors Assoc Awards Program. British Columbia Book Prizes A number of awards, begun in 1985, are administered by the West Coast Book Prize Society. Bill Duthie Booksellers' Choice Prize ($2,000). Presented to the originating publisher and author(s) of the best book in terms of public appeal, initiative, design, production, and content. The publisher must have its head office in British Columbia, and the creative control in terms of editing, design, and production must have been within the province. The membership of the BC Booksellers' Assoc determines the winner by ballot, and the prize is supported by the BCBA and Duthie Books. Winners: 1999 Tom Henry, Westcoasters: Boats that Built BC; 1998 Ian and Karen McAllister and Cameron Young, The Great Bear Rainforest; 1997 Richard and Sydney Cannings, British Columbia: A Natural History; 1996 Bill RICHARDSON, Bachelor Brothers' Bed and Breakfast Pillow Book; 1995 Robert Davidson,
Eagle Transforming; 1994 Alan Haig-Brown, Fishing for a Living; 1993 NicksANTOCK, Sabine's Notebook; 1992 Robert BRINGHURST and Ulli Stekzer, The Black Canoe: Bill Reid and the Spirit ofHaida Gwaii; 1991 Michael Kluckner, Vanishing Vancouver; 1990 various artists, Carmanah: Artistic Visions of an Ancient Rainforest; 1989 M. M'Gonigle and Wendy Wickwire, Stein: The Way of the River; 1988 Hilary Stewart, The Adventures and Sufferings of John R.Jewitt; 1987 Doris Shadbolt, Bill Reid; 1986 Cameron Young et al, The Forests of B.C.; 1985 Islands Protection Society, Islands at the Edge. Sheila A. Egoff Children's Prize ($2,000). Awarded to the best book written for children sixteen years and younger, judged on content, whether text or illustration, and originality. The author and/or illustrator must be a BC resident (or someone who has lived there for three of the past five years). The prize is supported by the BC Library Assoc. Winners: 1999 Sandra Lightburn (text) and Ron Lightburn (illustrations), Driftwood Cove; 1998 James Heneghan, Wish Me Luck; 1997 Sarah ELLIS, Back of Beyond; 1996 Nan Gregory (text) and Ron Lightburn (pictures), How Smudge Came; 1995 Lillian Boraks-Nemetz, Old Brown Suitcase; 1994 Julie Lawson, White Jade Tiger; 1993 Shirley STERLING, My Name Is Seepeetza; 1992 Alexandra Morton, Siwiti: A Whale's Story; 1991 Nancy Hundal, I Heard My Mother Call My Name; 1990 Paul YEE, Tales from Gold Mountain; 1989 Mary Ellen Collura, Sunny; 1988 Nicola Morgan, Pride of Lions; 1987 Sarah ELLIS, The Baby Project; 1986 Joe ROSENBLATT, Poetry Hotel. Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize ($2,000). Awarded to the author, a BC resident (or someone who has lived there for three of the past five years), of the best original non-fiction literary work (philosophy, belles lettres, biography, history, etc). Quality of research and writing are major considerations in the judging of this prize, as are insight and originality. It is supported by the British Columbia Library Services. Winners: 1999 Peter NEWMAN, Titans: How the New Canadian Establishment Seized Power; 1998 Suzanne Fournier and Ernie Crey, Stolen from Our Embrace; 1997 Catherine Lang, O-Bon in Chimunesu; 1996 Claudia Cornwall, Letter from
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AWARDS AND LITERARY PRIZES
Vienna; 1995 Lisa Hobbs Birnie, Uncommon Will: The Death & Life of Sue Rodriguez; 1994 Sharon Brown, Some Become Flowers: Living -with Dying at Home; 1993 Lynne Bowen, Muddling Through; 1992 Rosemary Neering, Down the Road: Journeys through Small-Town British Columbia; 1991 Scott Watson, Jack Shadbolt; 1990 Philip Marchand, Marshall McLuhan; 1989 Robin Ridington, Trail to Heaven; 1988 P.K. PAGE, Brazilian Journal; 1987 Doris Shadbolt, Bill Reid; 1986 Bruce HUTCHISON, The Unfinished Country; 1985 David R. WILLIAMS , Duff: A Life in the Law. Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize ($2,000). Awarded to the author(s) of the book that contributes most to the enjoyment and understanding of British Columbia. It may deal with any aspect of the province (people, history, geography, oceanography, etc) and must be original; there are some exclusions. The prize is supported by the Government of British Columbia. Winners: 1999 Mark Hume with Harvey Thommassen, River of the Angry Moon: Seasons on the Bella Coola; 1998 Richard Bocking, Mighty River; 1997 Alan Haig-Brown, The Fraser River; 1996 Ken Drushka, A Biography ofH.R. MacMillan; 1995 Howard WHITE, Raincoast Chronicles: Eleven-Up; 1994 Alex Rose, ed, Nisga'a: People of the Nass River; 1993 Harry ROBINSON and Wendy Wickwire, Nature Power: In the Spirit of an Okanagan Storyteller; 1992, Herb Hammond, Seeing the Forest among the Trees: The Case for Holistic Forest Use; 1991 Paul Tennant, Aboriginal Peoples and Politics: The Indian Land Question in B.C., 1849 1989; 1990 Various Artists, Carmanah: Artistic Visions of an Ancient Rainforest; 1989 Celia Haig-Brown, Resistance and Renewal; 1988 W.A. Hagelund, Whalers No More; 1987 Ruth Kirk, Wisdom of the Elders; 1986 Donald Graham, Keepers of the Light; 1985 Hilary Stewart, Cedar. Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize ($2,000). Awarded to the author, a BC resident (or someone who has lived there for three of the past five years), of the best work of poetry, excluding anthologies or retrospective collections; supported by the BC Teachers' Federation. Winners: 1999 David ZIEROTH, How I Joined Humanity at Last; 1998 Patricia YOUNG, What I Remember from My Time on Earth; 1997 Margo Button, The Unhinging of Wings; 1996 Patrick LANE, Too Spare, Too Fierce;
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1995 Linda ROGERS, Hard Candy; 1994 Gregory SCOFIELD, The Gathering: Stones for the Medicine Wheel; 1993 bill BISSETT, inkorrect thots; 1992 Barry MCKINNON, Pulp Log; 1991 Jeff DERKSEN, Down Time; 1990 Victoria Walker, Suitcase; 1989 Charles LILLARD, Circling North; 1988 Patricia YOUNG, All I Ever Needed Was a Beautiful Room; 1987 Diana HARTOG, Candy from Strangers; 1986 Joe ROSENBLATT, Poetry Hotel. Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize ($2,000). Awarded to a BC resident (or someone who has lived there for three of the past five years) for the best work of fiction, excluding anthologies; supported by Friesen, Best Book Manufacturers, Webcom, and Hignell printers. Winners: 1999 Jack HODGINS, Broken Ground; 1998 Marilyn BOWERING, Visible Worlds; 1997 Gail ANDERSON-DARGATZ, The Cure for Death by Lightning; 1996 Audrey THOMAS, Coming Down from Wa; 1995 Gayla REID, To Be There with You; 1994 Caroline ADDERSON, Bad Imaginings; 1993 W.D. VALGARDSON, The Girl with the Botticelli Face; 1992 Don DICKINSON, Blue Husbands; 1991 Audrey THOMAS, Wild Blue Yonder; 1990 Keith MAILLARD, Motet; 1989 Bill SCHERMBRUCKER, Mimosa; 1988 George MCWHIRTER, Cage; 1987 Leona COM, Housefm>feen; 1986 Keath FRASER, Foreign Affairs; 1985 Audrey THOMAS, Intertidal Life. Georges S. Bugnet Award for Fiction (Novel), see Alberta Book Awards. Canada-Australia Literary Prize First awarded in 1976 and suspended as of 1995, this prize ($3,000 and a four-week author's tour of the other country) is intended to familiarize the reading audience of each sponsoring country with the writers of the other. It is awarded annually to an English-language Canadian or, in alternate years, an Australian writer for his or her complete works. The prize is supported and administered by the Australia Council and the Canada Council. Canadian winners: 1994 Rohinton MISTRY; 1992 David Adams RICHARDS; 1989 Audrey THOMAS; 1987 Sharon POLLOCK; 1985 JacknODGiNS; 1983 Mavis GALLANT; 1981 Leon ROOKE; 1979 Michael ONDAATJE; 1977 Alice MUNRO.
AWARDS AND LITERARY PRIZES
Canada Council Prizes for Children's Literature Awarded from 1975 to 1986 to Canadian authors and illustrators of children's literature, in both French and English; in 1987 the Canada Council Prizes for Children's Literature were made Governor General's Literary Awards; the earlier Governor General's Literary Award for juvenile books, established in 1949, was discontinued in 1959. See also Governor General's Literary Awards. Winners: 1986, Text (English): Janet LUNN, Shadow in Hawthorn Bay, Illustration (English): Barbara Reid, Have You Seen Birds?; Text (French): Raymond Plante, Le dernier des raisins; Illustration (French): Stephane POULIN, Album defamille and As-tu vujosephine? 1985; Text (English): Cora Taylor, Julie; Illustration (English): Terry Gallagher, Murdo's Story; Text (French): Robert Soulieres, Casse-tete chinois; Illustration (French): Roger Pare, L'alphabet. 1984, Text (English): Jan HUDSON, Sweetgrass; Illustration (English): Marie-Louise GAY, Lizzy's Lion; Text (French): Daniel Sernine, Le cercle violet; Illustration (French): Marie-Louise GAY, Drole d'ecole. 1983, Text (English): scan o HUIGIN, The Ghost Horse of the Mounties; Illustration (English): Laszlo Gal, The Little Mermaid; Text (French): Denis Cote, Hockeyeurs cybernetiqu.es; Illustration (French): Philippe Beha, Petit ours. 1982, Text (English): Monica HUGHES, Hunter in the Dark; Illustration (English): Vlasta Van Kampen, ABC/ 123: The Canadian Alphabet and Counting Book; Text (French): Ginette ANFOUSSE, Fabien i: Un loup pour Rose and Fabien 2: Une nuit au pays des malices; Illustration (French): Darcia Labrosse, Agnes et le singulier bestiare. 1981, Text (English): Monica HUGHES, The Guardian oflsis; Illustration (English): Heather Woodall, Ytek and the Arctic Orchid: An Inuit Legend; Text (French): Suzanne MARTEL, Nos amis robots; Illustration (French): Joanne Ouellet, Les papinacois. 1980, Text (English): Christie HARRIS, The Trouble with Princesses; Illustration (English): Elizabeth Cleaver, Petrouchka; Text (French): Bertrand Gauthier, Hebert Luee; Illustration (French): Miyuki Tanobi, Les gens de mon pays. 1979. Text (English): Barbara Smucker, Days of Terror; Illustration (English): Laszlo Gal, The Twelve Dancing Princesses; Text (French): Gabrielle ROY, CourteQueue; Illustration (French): Roger Pare, Une fenetre dans ma tete. 1978, Text (English): Kevin
MAJOR, Hold Fast; Illustration (English): Ann Blades, A Salmon for Simon; Text and Illustration (French): Ginette ANFOUSSE, La chicane and La varicelle. 1977, Text (English): Jean LITTLE, Listen for the Singing; Text (French): Denise Houle, Lune de neige; Illustration (French): Claude Lafortune, L'evangile en papier. 1976. Text (English): Myra Paperny, The Wooden People; Text (French): Bernadette Renaud, Emilie, la baignoire dpattes. 1975. Text (English): Bill Freeman, Shantymen of Cache Lake; Text (French): Louise Aylwin, Raminagradu: Histoires ordinaires pour enfants extraordinaires. Canada-French Community of Belgium Literary Prize, see Prix Litteraire CanadaCommunaute Francaise de Belgique/CanadaFrench Community of Belgium Literary Prize. Canada-Japan Book Award/Prix Litteraire Canada-Japon Currently being revived (1999) and recently in re-evaluation, this prize is awarded annually for a book, in English or French, by a Canadian author about Japan, by a Japanese author translated by a Canadian, or by a Japanese-Canadian writer. The award ($10,000) was financed by earnings from the Japan-Canada Fund, a gift from the Government of Japan to the Canada Council. Canadian winners: 1995 Hiromi GOTO, Chorus of Mushrooms, and Gabrielle Bauer, Tokyo, My Everest; 1994 Margaret Lock, Encounters with Aging: Mythologies of Menopause in Japan and North America; 1993 Barbara Rose, Tsuda Umeko and Women's Education in Japan; 1992 Keibo Oiwa, Stone Voices: Wartime Writings of Japanese Canadian Issei; 1991 E. Patricia Tsurumi, Factory Girls: Women in the Thread Mills of Meiji Japan; 1990 Vinh Sinh, The Future Japan (tr of Tokutomi Soho, Shorai no Nihori); 1989 Bernard Bernier, Capitalisme, societe et culture au Japan. Canada-Scotland Writers-in-Residence Exchange Established in 1978 and currently suspended, this annual program enabled a Canadian writer to take up residence in Edinburgh, Scotland, and a Scottish writer to be writer-in-residence at a Canadian university, for one academic year. It was co-sponsored by the Canada Council and
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AWARDS AND LITERARY PRIZES
the Scottish Arts Council. Canadian winners: 1995-6 Ven BEGAMUDRE; 1993-4 Christopher HEIDE; 1991-2. Joan CLARK; 1984-5 Alistair MACLEOD; 1983-4 Fred COGSWELL; 1982-3 Kent THOMPSON; 1981-2 Eraser SUTHERLAND; 1980-1 Dennis LEE; 1979-80 Ken MITCHELL; 1978-9 Graeme GIBSON. Canada-Switzerland Literary Prize, see Prix LitteraireCanada-Suisse/Canada-Switzerland Literary Prize. Canadian Authors Association Awards Program The Canadian Authors Assoc administers a number of annual awards (cash prize and medal), including the CAA Air Canada Award, the CAA Vicky Metcalf Awards, the CAA Literary Awards, and the CAA Allan Sangster Award. CAA Air Canada Award, (two tickets to any Air Canada destination). Awarded to a Canadian writer under 30 who shows the most promise in the field of literary creation. Winners: 1999 rob mclennan; 1998 Lynn Coady; 1997 Richard Van Camp; 1996 Gregory SCOFIELD; 1995 Kenneth Oppel; 1994 Lesley-Anne Bourne; 1993 Yann MARTEL; 1992 Leslie Smith Dow; 1991 Vivienne Laxdal; 1990 Evelyn LAU; 1989 Steven HEIGHTON; 1988 Wayne JOHNSTON; 1987 Nancy Painter; 1986 Karen CONNELLY; 1985 Andrea Lang; 1984 Mary DI MICHELE; 1983 Kevin Longfield; 1982 Gail Hamilton; 1981 Gordon KORMAN; 1980 Larry Krotz; 1979 Russel Martin. CAA Literary Awards ($2,500, medal). Six prizes, listed below, are awarded for full-length English-language literature for adults by Canadian authors, 'honouring writing that achieves excellence without sacrificing popular appeal'; excluded are reprints, self-published work, work that has been published at the author's expense, or translations, except novels where the original version is by a Canadian. CAA Award for Fiction (formerly the CAA Chapters Award for Fiction; full-length novel). Winners: 1999 Wayne JOHNSTON, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams; 1998 Rita Donovan, Landed; 1997 Ann-Marie MACDONALD, Fall on Your Knees; 1996 L.R. WRIGHT, Mother Love; 1995 Bernice Morgan, Waiting for Time; 1994 Margaret
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ATWOOD, The Robber Bride; 1993 NeilsissooNDATH, The Innocence of Age; 1992 Alberto MANGUEL, News From a Foreign Country Came; 1991 David Adams RICHARDS, Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace; 1990 James HOUSTON, Running West; 1989 Joan CLARK, The Victory ofGeraldine Gull; 1988 Brian MOORE, The Colour of Blood; 1987 no award; 1986 Robertson DAVIES, What's Bred in the Bone; 1985 Timothy FIND LEY, Not Wanted on the Voyage; 1984 Heather ROBERTSON, Willie: A Romance; 1983 w.p. KINSELLA, Shoeless Joe; 1982 Joy KOGAWA, Obasan; 1981 Hugh MACLENNAN, Voices in Time; 1980 no award; 1979 Marian ENGEL, The Glassy Sea; 1978 Jane RULE, The Young in One Another's Arms; 1977 Carol SHIELDS, Small Ceremonies; 1976 no award; 1975 Fred STENSON, Lonesome Hero. CAA Jubilee Award for Poetry (volume of poetry by one poet). Winners: 1999 Janice Kulyk KEEPER, Marrying the Sea; 1998 Anne SZUMIGALSKI, On Glassy Wings; 1997 E.D. BLODGETT, Apostrophies: Woman at a Piano; 1996 Di BRANDT, Jerusalem, Beloved; 1995 Tim LILBURN, Moosehead Sandhills; 1994 George BOWERING, George Bowering: Selected Poems; 1993 Lorna CROZIER, Inventing the Hawk; 1992 Anne MICHAELS, Miner's Pond; 1991 Richard LEMM, Prelude to the Bacchanal; 1990 Don Bailey, Homeless Heart; 1989 Bruce Rice, Daniel; 1988 Pat LANE, Selected Poems; 1987 Al PURDY, The Collected Poems, 1956-1986; 1986 P.K. PAGE, The Glass Air; 1985 Leonard COHEN, Book of Mercy; 1984 Don MCKAY, Birding, or Desire; 1983 George AMABILE, the presence of fire; 1982 Gary GEDDES, The Acid Test; 1981 Leona COM, Land of the Peace; 1980 Michael ONDAATJE, There's a Trick with a Knife That I'm Learning to Do; 1979 Andrew SUKNASKI, The Ghosts You Call Poor; 1978 Alden NOWLAN, Smoked Glass; 1977 Sid Stephen, Beothuck Poems; 1976 Jim Green, North Book; 1975 Tom WAYMAN, For and against the Moon: Blues, Yells, and Chuckles. CAA Birks Family Foundation Award for Biography (Canadian biography). Winners: 1999 Leslie Yeo, A Thousand and One First Nights; 1998 Charlotte Gray, Mrs. King: The Life and Times of Isabel Mackenzie King. CAA Lela Common Award for Canadian History (excellence in the writing of Canadian history, excluding biography). Winners: 1999 Rod McQueen, The Batons; 1998 Dorothy Harley
AWARDS AND LITERARY PRIZES
Eber, Images of Justice; 1997 Phil Jenkins, An Acre ofTime. CAA Jubilee Award for Drama (full-length play, first publication or performance). Winners: 1999 David YOUNG, Inexpressible Island; 1998 Judith THOMPSON, Sled; 1997 Jane Sherman, The League of Nathans; 1996 Vittorio Rossi, The Last Adam; 1995 Elise Moore, Live with It; 1994 Timothy FINDLEY, The Stillborn Lover; 1993 Guy VANDERHAEGHE, I Had ajob I Liked, Once; 1992 Drew TAYLOR, Bootlegger Blues; 1991 Ann-Marie MACDONALD, Goodnight Desdemona (GoodMorningjuliet~);1990 Kelly Rebar, Bodertown Cafe; 1989 George F. WALKER, Nothing Sacred; 1988 John GRAY, Rock and Roll; 1987 John MURRELL, Farther West; 1986 David FRENCH, SaltWater Moon; 1985 Ken MITCHELL, Gone the Burning Sun; 1984 W.D. VALGARDSON, Granite Point; 1983 w.o. MITCHELL, Back to Beulah; 1982 Allan STRATTON, Rexyl; 1981 Ted Galay, After Bob's Funeral and Sweet and Sour Pickles; 1980 Sheldon ROSEN, Ned andjack; 1979 no award; 1978 Rex Deverell, Boiler Room Suite; 1977 no award; 1976 John Hirsh, The Dybbuk. CAA Jubilee Award for Short Stories (collection by a single author). Winners: 1999 Dennis BOCK, Olympia; 1998 Joanne Gerber, In the Misleading Absence of Light; 1997 Alice MUNRO, Selected Stories. CAA Vicky MetcalfBody of Work Award ($10,000). Awarded to a Canadian author who has published a minimum of four books (fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and/or picture books) inspirational to young people. Winners: 1999 Joan CLARK; 1998 Kit PEARSON; 1997 Tim WYNNEJONES; 1996 Margaret Buffie; 1995 Sarah ELLIS; 1994 Welwyn Wilton KATZ; 1993 Phoebe Gilman; 1992 Kevin MAJOR; 1991 Brian DOYLE; 1990 Bernice Thurman Hunter; 1989 Stephane POULIN; 1988 Barbara Smucker; 1987 Robert MUNSCH; 1986 Dennis LEE; 1985 Edith FOWKE; 1984 Bill Freeman; 1983 Claire Mackay; 1982Janet LUNN; 1981 Monica HUGHES; 1980 John Craig; 1979 Cliff Faulknor; 1978 Lyn Cook; 1977 James HOUSTON; 1976 Suzanne MART EL; 1975 Lyn Harrington; 1974 Jean LITTLE; 1973 Christie HARRIS; 1972 William E. Toye; 1971 Kay Hill; 1970 Farley MOWAT; 1969 Audrey McKim; 1968 Lorrie McLaughlin; 1967 John Patrick Gillese; 1966 Fred Savage; 1965
Roderick HAIG-BROWN; 1964 John F. Hayes; 1963 Kerry Wood. CAA Vicky Metcalf Short Story Award ($3,000, plus $1,000 for editor). Awarded to the Canadian author of a short story in English that is 'inspirational to Canadian youth/ Winners: 1999 Anne Carter, 'Leaving the Iron Lung,' in Prairie Fire 19.3, and Linda Holeman, editor; 1998 W.D. VALGARDSON, Chicken Lady, and Shelly Tanaka, editor; 1996 Bernice Friesen, 'The Seasons Are Horses' in The Seasons Are Horses, and Susan MUSGRAVE, editor; 1994 Tim WYNNE-JONES, 'The Hope Bakery' in Some of the Kinder Planets, and Shelly Tanaka, editor; 1993 R.P. Maclntyre, 'The Rink' in The Blue Jean Collection, and Peter Carver, editor; 1992 Edna King, Adventure on Thunder Island' in Adventure on Thunder Island, and Linda Sheppard, editor; 1990 Patricia Armstrong, 'Choose Your Grandmother' in Jumbo Gumbo, and Wendy McArthur and Geoffrey URSELL, editors; 1989 Martha Brooks, A Boy and His Dog' in Paradise Cafe 2H2 + O2, or 'The fleur-de-lis is a plant of the genus Iris, of the family Iridaceae, with petaloid branches on the style.' All such statements assume a knowledge of context, and that context is always of two kinds. On one hand, the context of a myth is always another myth, just as the context of a botanical classification is always another classification. On the other hand, the context of a myth is always a world of living entities linked imperfectly but powerfully by moral obligations, while the context of a scientific statement often purports to be a purely material world that is devoid of moral concerns. The parallel careers of mythology and science raise a simple question: how do we put mythology to use? What, if anything, stands in the same relation to mythology as engineering does to science? The answer is evidently literature. Literature is, in other words, to a large extent applied mythology. But literature includes modes other than the narrative, and much that passes for literature is openly concerned with the transitory, the secular, the personal, the petty, the mundane - in short, with the nonmythic. Myths are stories that investigate the nature of the world from the standpoint of the world, whereas novels, for example, more often look at questions of proprietary interest to human beings alone. These are among the reasons why myth is often glossed as 'sacred story,' while other kinds of stories are taken to be secular. 'If the final goal of Image is Vision,' said the
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poet Charles Simic, 'the final goal of Metaphor is Myth, which is a narrative derived from taking the figurative literally.' The relation between myth and oral literature is generally closer. Myth is a major genre - usually the major genre - in ORAL LITERATURE worldwide. Every surviving Native Canadian LANGUAGE has an indigenous name for myth, and a contrasting term for stories of more personal or anecdotal kinds. In Cree, for example, a myth is dtayohkewin, in Dogrib whaehdog' godii, in Haida qqaygaang, in Western Inuktitut unipkaaq, in Kutenai 'ahqa/q'anuxwati/, in Lakhota ohuukaka, in Mohawk iontkaratakwahtha', in Nootka himwits'u, in Sechelt sxwaxweyam, and in Tsimshian adawx. These terms and the others that could be cited have several etymologies. Often, the root means simply to say or to tell. The result is an etymological match for the Greek word mythos and the English 'myth.' In other cases, the root means holy or sacred; in still others it means old. The myths stand in relation to other stories as the elders do to other human beings. They know more, because they have been learning things for longer. There is a Dogrib proverb, Tsdechiij Idani whaehdo4 godii eladH ade hol\-le: 'Like beaver stumps, the myths don't change.' The term used here for myth, whaehd^Q godii, can be glossed as 'long-ago-people story-of.' But 'long ago' and 'people' in this phrase have connotations that are easy to lose in English. DQ, meaning person or people, is not confined to the human species, and whae implies a separate province of time, free of the current in which we live. Whaehd$Q godii suggests 'a story of beings floating free of time' - yet, like all assertions contradicting time, the phrase continues to depend on a living relation to time itself. Narrative takes time, and it unfolds ideas in time - yet myths are narratives concerned with timeless things. Myth finds the roots of timelessness in time - and therefore ends up dealing, in most of the imaginable ways, with repetition, variation, and recursion. Myths, like other stories, have beginnings, middles, and ends, but a mythology usually does not. The end of a myth is routinely attached, through other myths, to its own beginning. Unlike the characters of history, fiction, or legend, the creatures of myth are as a rule ele-
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mental. The RAVEN, for example, is as mutable and complex as plutonium or sulphur, air or blood, but fundamental in the same sense. The Raven is a limit, irreducible; the mythology he lives in does not reach beyond him. His status in the mythworlds of the North Pacific Rim is something like the status of an element in chemistry or an axiom in mathematics. He is, within these worlds, a familiar, trusted theorem, not a new hypothesis. Yet the old, accepted elements and theorems are precisely where new revelations come from. Old myths are constantly retold, and old experiments repeated, for that reason. Northrop FRYE, Claude Levi-Strauss, and others have tried in different ways to state the basic themes that myths continually return to. Mythic paradigms encountered around the globe include the theft of fire (the Prometheus theme), the pursuit of a dead loved one into the country of the dead (the Orpheus theme), salvation from the flood (the Noah theme), the search for eternal life or rejuvenation (the Grail theme), and of course the TRICKSTER tale (which is not a single theme but a whole literature of themes, embodied in such figures as the Raven or COYOTE). The search for mythic universals has provided real excitement in the staid domain of literary CRITICISM, but for those who tell and listen to the myths, such metamythical typologies are rarely of importance. 'Mythicity,' like humanity or poetry or artistry or social equality, is embodied in quite real and local acts or it does not exist at all. In careless speech, all words, including the word 'myth' and its derivatives, are often stretched and flipped. So for example we find 'mythical' used as a synonym for 'imaginary' or 'fictional' (and as a synonym for 'little-known'), just as we find 'scientific' used as a synonym for 'technical' or 'dependable' or 'hard-to-understand.' Such usages belong more to the history of slang than the history of meaning. Still, there is such a thing as social mythology, which in its way resembles social science. Both can be traced at least to the Neolithic, and both have had a heyday since the Industrial Revolution. When humans cease to feel they are surrounded by the world, and come instead to feel that they have the world surrounded, the perspective on which mythic thought depends
MYTHOLOGY
has been inverted. Social mythologies, framed on the assumption that humans are surrounded only by other humans, not by a real world, are the usual result. But most social mythology is no more mythological than most social science is scientific. The 'myths' of racial superiority, manifest destiny, or the dictatorship of the proletariat, like the 'myth' of the New World and its divinely sanctioned conquest, are less attempts to celebrate and understand the world than charters for its wholesale exploitation. These social charters bear the same relation to genuine mythology that social and behavioural engineering do to genuine social science. Real myths are not created by humans, any more than the laws of physics are, though we rely on human beings, using human languages, to formulate and explore them. Because the kind of thinking that mythology embodies is rooted in the preliterate and preagricultural world, myth has to some degree a language of its own. This language is the language of oral narrative, which is neither verse nor prose and predates both. Oral narrative proceeds, most of the time, in patterned steps or clauses. It is usual nowadays, in the discipline known as ethnopoetics, to render these steps typographically as independent lines. This makes spoken narratives appear, in the silence of the page, as if they were stanzaic verse, which we associate in turn with lyric POETRY. But the steps of oral narrative are shaped and formed by meaning and by syntax, not by sound (though they are very often marked by acoustic pause and the repetition of certain particles). This kind of language is not organized, in other words, through features such as metre, alliteration, or rhyme. The patterns lie in the thought behind the words, not in the sounds of the words themselves. So the language of oral narrative is not the same as verse in the conventional sense of the term. Yet, because it forms repeating conceptual patterns more than a steady, rational flow, it is also not the same as prose. Mythtellers often say they listen to the world and see the myth unfold. The patterns and connections that emerge in the telling of the myth are reflections of an order that is sensed, not an order that is built by humans. The presumption of mythology is always that the world has more
knowledge and more power than any human being could possess, and that the order of the world is richer and more meaningful than any order humans could impose. Small-scale acoustic patterns can be found in songs and stories in every human language and from every civilization, but in hunter-gatherer societies, patterns of thought and not of sound are almost always the most obvious and powerful components of literary form. Acoustic organization often rises to the fore in agricultural societies. People who plant vineyards, fields, and orchards, imposing numerical order on the ecosystems around them, often impose numerical patterns on the language of their songs and stories too. The literary focus tends to shift at the same time. Human heroes - usually warriors rather than hunters - move to centre stage, ousting the spirit-beings of myth, and the gods close ranks to form a single household, like Olympus, or give way to a single god. Prose is a later development still: a kind of language found only in cultures that have writing. Here the organization is once again primarily conceptual, but the adaptable, reiterating patterns familiar in oral narrative are methodically broken down. They are replaced by a combination of logical flow and rhetorical pattern. This again devalues mythic thought and favours human will. The fact remains that verse and prose are adaptable forms, in which - when the writer is not watching - the inaudible, unspeakable, yet perfectly conceivable, dreamable dance of mythic language reasserts itself with ease. See also A L G O N Q U I A N , B E O T H U K , C R E E , F O L K L O R E ,
HAIDA, INUIT, IROQUOIAN, KTANAXA, KWAK'WALA, MALECITE, MI'KMAQ, NORTHERN ATHAPASKAN, OJIBWA, SALISH, SIOUAN, TLINGIT, TSIMSHIANIC ORAL LITERATURE, WAKASHAN. Further reading: Leonard Bloomfield, Sacred Stories of the Sweet Grass Cree (Ottawa: Nat. Museum of Canada, 1930); Robert Bringhurst, A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World (Vancouver: Douglas and Mclntyre, 1999); Northrop Frye, Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963), and Myth and Metaphor (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1990); J.N.B. Hewitt, Iroquoian Cosmology, 2 parts
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(Washington, DC: BAE Annual Report 21 & 43, 1903-28); Dell Hymes, 'In Vain I Tried to Tell You': Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics (Philadelphia: U Pennsylvania P, 1981); Sean Kane, Wisdom of the Mythtellers, 2nd ed (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 1998); Claude Levi-Strauss, Introduction to a Science of Mythology, 4 vols (New York: Harper and Row, 1969-81); Jaan Puhvel, Comparative Mythology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987). Robert Bringhurst
NAMJOSHI, Suniti Manohar. Writer, poet; b Mumbai (Bombay) 20 April 1941; daughter of Sarojini Naik Nimbalkar and Manohar Namjoshi. As a child she attended schools in Woodstock, ON, and the Rishi Valley, India, and later attended universities in Poona, India; Missouri; and Montreal. She worked as a bureaucrat in India and as an academic at U Toronto. The poems in Feminist Fables (1981,1990) use the canon against those who still try to control it, and in Saint Suniti and the Dragon (1993) she is concerned with 'the individual's desire to be good and the subsequent failure because it's too hard.' Her interest in multi-media comes across in the poetry of Flesh and Paper (1986), which is accompanied by tabla and violin recordings, on her interactive poetry Web site, Building Babel, as well as in Building Babel (1996), a book that grapples with fragmentation and the reconstruction of culture and community. At press time she was working on Anything at all Charity ever said, an attempt to deconstruct the glamour of power and to celebrate the value of charity. R. Clark
NANABUSH (Nanabozho, Manabozho, Winabojo). A culture hero in the tales of the OJIBWA and other ALGONQUIAN societies, who teaches animals and hence has the ability to trick enemies, and who appears as a character in the tales of Basil JOHNSTON and the plays of Tomson HIGHWAY; a life force, Nanabush is the source of life (in the abstract) and the creator of plants and animals, and in some representations also a TRICKSTER figure, one who aids people but sometimes plays games with them. NANOGAK, Agnes. Carver, printmaker, taleteller; b Baily Island, NWT, 12 Nov 1925; daugh-
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ter of Topsy (Alingnak) Steffanson and Billy Natkusiak Banksland, a guide; m Wallace J. Goose, 1943. Nanogak, the mother of eight children, has participated in local governance as a member of the Elders Committee in Holman, NWT; she also contributed to social change as a field worker for land claims inquiries in Holman. As an artist, she won attention for her illustrations of INUIT legends and children's stories, as in Tales from the Igloo (1972) and More Tales from the Igloo (1985). Mount Saint Vincent U awarded her a Doctor of Humane Letters in 1985. See also NORTH. NARRACHE, Jean (Emile Coderre). Poet; b Montreal 10 June 1893, d Montreal 6 April 1970; son of Jeanne (Marchaud) and Emile Coderre, pharmacist; adopted 1897 by M-A. Ouimet. Narrache was educated in pharmacy at U Montreal. He adopted his pseudonym (a pun: j'en arrache: 'I'm working at it') with his second book, Quandj'parl' tout seul (1932); his first, the only one he published as Coderre, was a volume of formally conventional poems, Les signes sur le sable (1922), influenced by his short association Withl'ECOLE L I T T E R A I R E DE M O N T R E A L . His
later poems - with the exception of Jean Narrache chez le diable, 1963, a more openly Quebec nationalist work, written in standard French all adapt Montreal slang (see JOUAL) to criticize how establishment power marginalizes the working CLASS. J'parle tout seul quandjean Narrache (1961), with his own witty introduction, samples the range of his work. NARRATOLOGY, the study of narrative - or the process and pattern of telling a story as distinct from describing something (description), explaining something (exposition), or arguing a point (argument), though narrative in practice may well make use of these other strategies of discourse. Narratology concerns itself with such questions as the relation between point of view (who is telling the story?) and focalization (whose perspective is being expressed?), and analyzes the relation between author, reader, text, implied author, narrators and personae. Such conventional narrative elements as plot (the arrangement of events), chronology, CHARACTER, theme (meaning both subject and
NATIONALISM
motif), STYLE, and voice also come under examination. See also CRITICISM AND THEORY. NATIONAL FILM BOARD, a FILM advisory board and then studio est 1939 in response to a government report by John Grierson; especially noted for its work in DOCUMENTARY and animation. See also P.K. PAGE, WAR. NATIONALISM. After the decades of national rivalries that culminated in the First World War, and after Nazism and savage outbursts of 'ethnic cleansing,' nationalism (even literary nationalism) is bound to be regarded with skepticism. In Blood and Belonging (1993), Michael IGNATIEFF distinguishes between 'civic' and 'ethnic' nationalism. Civic nationalism, he suggests, includes all those who accept the nation's political beliefs, whatever their colour, gender, language, or ethnicity, whereas ethnic nationalism claims that 'it is the national community that defines the individual, not the individuals who define the national community.' In English-speaking Canada, nationalism has had its passionate adherents, but it has also provoked strong objections. Associated initially with notions of Anglo-Saxon racial superiority, it increasingly moved towards a more inclusive and therefore more genuine form of civic nationalism, but could not shake the tensions inherent in competing visions of what constitutes Canadian nationhood. Quebec began deriving self-definition from the moment of the 'Conquest' (of 1759) in contrast, or in opposition to, 'English Canada,' and has often seen itself since CONFEDERATION as a separate nation, joined to the rest of the country in a marriage of convenience that might need to be dissolved. Literary nationalism, wherever it surfaced, was the companion, advocate, and often forerunner of political nationalism. The i9th century, the point of origin of modern nationalism, witnessed the linkage between nationalist writing and separationist movements in such diverse parts of the world as central and eastern Europe, Bengal, and Latin America. In the United States and Australia, nationalist writing was associated with a spirited championing of the New World and a rejection of the imperial power ('Let us away with this leaven of literary flunkyism towards England,' Herman Melville
wrote in 1850). In Canada, however, continuing reverence for the 'Mother Country' led to conflicted and diluted forms of nationalist expression. As early as 1769, Frances BROOKE raised the question of Canadian patriotism (as distinct from allegiance to Britain) in The History of Emily Montague. While one character, Arabella Fermor, wishes to establish 'a little Eden on Lake Champlain' for two British couples, the more stolid Ed. Rivers ultimately decrees that the 'magnificent scenes' of Canada are less worthy of allegiance than is the ideal of being an English country gentleman. Equally loyal, in sentimental recollection, to the vision of British gentry was the fascinatingly muddled Susanna MOODIE. Though Canada, in Roughing in the Bush (1852), offered her the opportunity to repair a damaged self-confidence and discover practical skills, she claimed that Canada was no place for the well-to-do. She exhorted 'British mothers of Canadian sons' to 'love Canada as I now love it,' but she acquired this patriotic zeal only after freeing herself from an environment dominated by uneducated Yankees. Her rejection of a different cultural world is emblematic of the fragmentation that was to characterize Ontario society for many decades. An interesting divergence between Moodie and her more placid, optimistic sister Catharine Parr TRAILL occurs in their accounts of an indigenous cultural institution, the 'bee' - for Moodie 'tumultuous, disorderly meetings,' for Traill an example of 'the equalizing system of America.' The petty quarrels of Upper Canada did not escape the attention of Anna JAMESON. Alienated in Toronto, 'a fourth or fifth rate provincial town,' she proclaimed early on in Winter Studies and Summer Rambles (1838) that 'Canada is a colony, not a country; it is not yet identified with the dearest affections and associations, remembrances and hopes of its inhabitants.' Anticipating later cultural trends, she rejected the city in favour of a different Canada based on a love of nature and an alliance with Aboriginal people. The period from Confederation to the First World War is a fascinating but enigmatic era in which to observe the interaction between political and literary nationalism. The fierce struggle that proponents of various political solutions engaged in - IMPERIAL FEDERATION, independence, or continentalism - to make their views
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prevail continued until the reciprocity election of 1911. Literary debates about the possibility of a viable national literature were most prominent between 1885 and 1895. While the highly partisan political climate often produced a stalemate and the literary speculation was often fruitless, by 1914 Canadian writing of considerable merit was reflecting a heightened national consciousness. The CANADA FIRST MOVEMENT, which began as a group of five young men in 1868 and attracted its most widespread political support in 1874, represents in microcosm the turbulent, confused patterns of political discourse in the period. From beginning to end, it numbered among its leadership strong personalities who favoured, in quite a pioneering way, imperial federation as a means of giving Canada a greater place in the world. In later years, it was dominated by those who favoured independence for Canada, and the movement was accused by its opponents of harboring annexationist sentiment. Prominent Liberal Edward Blake's 1874 speech at Aurora, ON, was suspected by its critics of flirting with the Canada First movement; his speech, like their platform, attempted to combine a desire to awaken a 'national spirit' with the suggestion that 'an effort should be made to reorganize the Empire on a Federal basis.' Two leading figures in the Canada First movement, Goldwin SMITH and Col. George T. Denison, stood for these opposed principles. Close friends at the time, they became bitter enemies in the early 18905 when closer ties with Britain or the United States became a critical political issue. One tenet Denison and Smith did agree upon was the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race' - ethnic nationalism was then as prevalent in anglophone as in francophone culture. Political nationalism found an outlet in new journals, the Canadian Monthly (est 1872) and The Nation (associated with the Canada First movement, est 1874). A more literary expression of nationalism had taken place as early as 1864: Edward Hartley DEWART, in the introductory essay to his Selections from Canadian Poets, had argued that A national literature is an essential element in the formation of national character ... it is the bond of national unity, and the guide of national energy.' Yet in 1887, Sara Jeannette
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DUNCAN, like Jameson before her, stated that 'In our character as colonists we find the root of all our sins of omission in letters,' and in 1893 Archibald LAMPMAN, like many of his contemporaries, seemed to view the time as transitional and uncertain: 'when the national spirit begins to show itself... it is impossible for a people to remain in the attitude of colonists without intellectual deterioration.' Goldwin Smith, as publisher, and Charles G.D. ROBERTS, as editor, formed a partnership when a new journal, The Week, was launched in 1884, but Roberts lasted as editor for only 12 weeks. Nevertheless, The Week for several years published an abundance of essays on the present condition and future prospects of Canadian writing. In keeping with its commitment to represent all shades of opinion, the journal found space in its pages for perspectives founded upon nationalism (Canada would have a glorious literary future), continentalism (Canada could not exist as a nation and had no literary future), and imperialism (Canada could contribute to the greatness of English literature). In the At the Mermaid Inn' columns that Lampman, Duncan Campbell SCOTT and Wilfred CAMPBELL contributed to the Toronto Globe, one finds a preoccupation with the literary institutions that were felt to be needed to bring about a national literature, and an acute awareness of the small audience for creative work. The narrow interests of that audience perhaps accounted in part for the genteel, bourgeois spirit that pervaded essays, poetry, and fiction of the period, in contrast to the more robust literary nationalism of the bush that emerged in AUSTRALIA at the same time. Yet the significant advance in Canadian writing marked by the poetry of Lampman, Roberts, Scott, and Isabella Valancy CRAWFORD and the fiction of Duncan and Stephen LEACOCK would not have occurred, at least in the same ways, without the heightened awareness of present and potential nationhood generated by the political and literary debates. The narrator of Duncan's The Imperialist (1904) remarks, in discussing changing social patterns, that 'we are here at the making of a nation'; most Canadian writers would have agreed. Though francophone literary nationalists seldom had much contact with their anglophone counterparts, the patterns of nationalism
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in the two communities reveal some surprising similarities as well as the striking differences one might expect. Both cultures, until recently, placed little emphasis on what was accomplished by the writers of their own time instead the present was sacrificed in favour of visions of a bright future and, particularly but not exclusively in French Canada, the idealization of a harmonious, rural past. FrancoisXavier GARNEAU celebrated the heroic struggles of NEW FRANCE in his three-volume History of Canada (1845-8); towards the end of the century the backers of imperialism erected monuments and engaged in commemorative ceremonies, thereby (to borrow Norman Knowles's phrase), inventing the LOYALISTS. Equally detested were two revolutions - the 1776 American Revolution, by the Loyalists; the 1789 French Revolution, by francophone clerics and literary myth-makers. Both English- and French-speaking writers sought to make a connection between the properties of the Canadian physical environment and the national character. By the start of the 2oth century, both societies were exploring the idea that a national culture could be glimpsed through regional identities. The sense of alienation from political power that has been observed in writers such as Jameson and Lampman was even more pronounced in French Canada, a culture that felt itself defeated by the 'Conquest' (1759), the suppression of the PAPINEAU rebellion (1837), and the execution of Louis RIEL (1885). In the 18405 and 18505 as Maurice LEMIRE has shown (1993), the disaffected Quebec bourgeoisie produced literary spokespeople who espoused a cultural declaration of independence to compensate for the apparent loss of political power; an active literary circle made possible the launching of an important nationalist periodical, Soirees canadiennes (est 1861). The correspondence between Henri-Raymond CASGRAIN and Octave CREMAZIE in the :86os, Lise Gauvin has pointed out, involved a crucial opposition between Casgrain's optimistic view that French Canadian writing would reflect the grave, meditative, and religious character of Quebec and Cremazie's more pessimistic position that without effective writers who were accorded a professional status, competent critics, and a language of their own, French Canadian writing would not flour-
ish. The dominance of ULTRAMONTANE Catholi-A cism and the consciousness of the need to protect a vulnerable language were the two characteristics that most profoundly divided Quebec nationalism of the time from the much more variegated strands of English Canadian national feeling. Henri Bourassa's revolt against the pan-Canadianism of Wilfrid Laurier and the conscription crises of the two world WARS inflamed EnglishFrench tensions and encouraged Quebec ethnic nationalism. Lionel GROULX, both an academic historian and the founder of the influential Actionfranc,aise and Action nationals movements, reinforced the nationalist sentiment of the previous century, claiming that literature had a responsibility to serve as 'the expression of our life, our thought, our own soul' (1917). French Canadian fiction until 1950 portrayed attachment to the LAND as a sacred value, with tragedy inevitably attending its abandonment and betrayal; RINGUET'S Thirty Acres (1938), though no less skeptical of the evils of the city, problematized this sentimental and ideological PASTORAL convention. In English-speaking Canada the few enduring works of fiction of the same period - the novels of Lucy Maude MONTGOMERY, Sinclair ROSS'S As for Me and My House (1941), Ernest BUCKLER'S The Mountain and the Valley (1952) - were also strongly REGIONALIST and rural in character, though the ambitious work of Hugh MACLENNAN thematized the conflict in Quebec with a political engagement rarely found in anglophone fiction. In both anglophone and francophone culture, an element of cosmopolitanism declared itself, sometimes in separate quartiers of Paris. A group of young poets associated with the journal NIGOG (est 1918) identified themselves with the French avant-garde in conscious opposition to the idealization of pre-revolutionary France espoused by the conservative nationalists; Hector de St-Denys GARNEAU, despite his tragically short life, was the most successful of the francophone poets seeking to bring the vocabulary of MODERNISM to Quebec. Anglophone Canadian poets also looked beyond Canada's borders for inspiration. A.J.M. SMITH combined zealous advocacy of international modernism in his essays with the practice of such a style in his poetry. Smith's colleague in the MCGILL Move-
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ment of the late 19205, F.R. SCOTT, also used a modernist idiom in his Laurentian poems, lyrics that in their celebration of the central Canadian landscape complemented the achievement of the Group of Seven in the VISUAL ARTS. Scott and Smith were united in their contempt for the shallow, conservative nationalism of the CANADIAN AUTHORS Assoc. In the introduction to his landmark ANTHOLOGY, The Book of Canadian Poetry (1943), Smith distinguished between 'native' and 'cosmopolitan' traditions in Canadian verse; John SUTHERLAND'S bitter attack upon Smith's essay repudiated 'colonialism' in the form of imitation of England and Europe, but invoked the United States instead as a healthier model for poets of the 19405 to emulate. The fiction of Morley CALLAGHAN was set in a Toronto that, for the most part, was undifferentiated from any other North American city. Like his rival, the fascinating memoirist John GLASSCO, Callaghan was attracted to the American and European writers he encountered in Paris. Canada has shared with other parts of the postcolonial world an astounding explosion of creativity that began in the late 19505, gathered force in the 19605 and 19705 and continues into the present. A national literature, the prominent Martiniquan writer Patrick Chamoiseau has said (1989), cannot emerge without three elements writers, literary critics, and an audience. In the case of English-speaking Canada, an acceptance of the principle of public support for the arts, combined with awakened academic interest and risk-taking publishers, helped to establish a much wider audience for the individual talents that emerged in profusion; in Quebec a radically altered political climate had the effect of galvanizing and directing literary energies. The 19505 initiated a transformation in the climate for Canadian writers and writing. The CANADA COUNCIL, endowed by the federal government in 1957 as a response to the MAS SET REPORT (1951), had an immensely positive influence on the arts; in Quebec, the rivalry between federal and provincial cultural agencies has been profitable for writers. Canadian Literature, founded in 1959, was the first of several academic journals to give serious attention to Canadian writing. The New Canadian Library reprint series, begun in 1959, revived dozens of
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forgotten works and thereby provided new contexts for the TEACHING and study of Canadian culture. These developments were not in themselves expressions of nationalism, but they contributed, along with such events as Expo 67 and the enactment of expansive social policies, to a consciousness of Canadian distinctiveness and a pride in collective accomplishments. Even the acidly satiric characterizations of Canadian life by such writers as Robertson DAVIES, Irving LAYTON, and Mordecai RICHLER were based on the premise that an identifiable Canadian social landscape existed. The roots of Canadian culture were exhaustively documented in the first edition of the Literary History of Canada (1965), and Northrop FRYE'S evocation, in the afterword to that volume, of a GARRISON MENTALITY at the heart of Canadian writing was an extraordinarily influential formulation. In its account of victim stages, Margaret ATWOOD'S Survival (1971) elaborated upon Frye's model. D.G. JONES'S Butterfly on Rock (1970) and John Moss's Patterns of Isolation (1974) were equally gloomy in their sweeping generalizations. But in purporting to find a key to Canadian writing, all three critics contributed to a climate of Canadian literary nationalism, since their schema implied a positive answer to the eternal question as to whether Canadian literature was distinctive. George Parkin GRANT'S Lament for a Nation (1965), with its idealized conception of the Canadian past and bitter condemnation of alleged Americanization in the present, became a cult text for nationalist intellectuals; Robin MATHEWS attracted attention for his crusade against the Americanization of universities. In the late 19605 and 19705, university courses in anglophone Canadian literature became far more widespread, a development that was accelerated by the nationalist findings of the Symons report, To Know Ourselves (1975); this trend was matched by the proliferation of Quebecois literature courses in Quebec. The whole character of Quebecois writing could not fail to be affected by such dramatic events as the QUIET REVOLUTION, the OCTOBER CRISIS, and the 1980 referendum. Literary artists in Quebec, more than their counterparts in English-speaking Canada, commanded attention for their opinions as well as their imagina-
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tive creations; Gilles VIGNEAULT, for example, has been admired for his ardent advocacy of separation as well as for his songs. Much of the preliminary skirmishing in Quebec about the merits of ethnic nationalism took place in intellectual journals. A young Pierre Elliott Trudeau made his objections to nationalism clear in Cite libre (est 1950), while the proponents of independence made their arguments in Parti pris (est 1963; among its principal contributors were the poets Paul CHAMBERLAND and Gaston MIRON, and the litterateur - later turned politician Gerald GODIN). Liberte (est 1959) published the work of many of the contributors to Parti pris, but took as its subject matter issues of literary, rather than directly political, nationalism. In the wake of the first acts of terrorism in Quebec, the temptation of political violence became the theme of two celebrated works published in 1965, Hubert AQUIN'S Prochain Episode and Jacques GODBOUT'S Le couteau sur la table; Aquin had been a contributor to Parti pris and Godbout was a co-founder of Liber te. The result of the 1980 referendum dealt a severe blow to Quebec literary nationalism. Even before this event, the male political novel was challenged by the experimental, FEMINIST, inward-looking, theorized novel written by women, notably Anne HEBERT and Nicole BROSSARD. Though as Laurent Mailhot bluntly puts it, 'the Anglo-Canadian novelists are generally ignored,' the Quebecois fascination with the United States is reflected in the settings of novels by Godbout and Jacques POULIN. To some degree, immigrant experience in Quebec has begun to find a francophone voice, most strikingly in the work of Haitian Quebecois writers Dany LAFERRIERE and Emile OLLIVIER. In English-speaking Canada, impressive writers have emerged from a wide variety of minority cultures (see CULTURAL PLURALITY), often representing the privilege of Anglo-Saxon culture in a critical light. Native writers such as Thomas KING andTomson HIGHWAY have used satire and fantasy as instruments with which to dissect the legacy of white RACISM (see HUMOUR AND SATIRE). In keeping with the principles of civic nationalism, there is an audience and critical attention for gifted Canadians of every heritage in the much-transformed literary landscape.
Previously, anglophone Canadian writers were not, on the whole, as fascinated with cultural origins as their francophone counterparts, but that is no longer the case. Davies's Deptford trilogy (1970-5), Rudy WIEBE'S The Temptations of Big Bear (1973), and Timothy FINDLEY'S The Wars (1977) were pioneering works in what has become a massive effort to imagine the Canadian past in new ways. Novels such as Daphne MARLATT'S Ana Historic (1989), John STEEPLER'S The Afterlife of George Cartwright (1992), and Jane URQUHART'S Away (1993) call attention to the suffering and endurance of Native peoples, poor immigrants, and disadvantaged WOMEN. These texts attempt to see history from the perspective of the marginalized. Both at the federal and the provincial levels, governments in the 19905 increasingly cut back on their subsidization of the arts, and the traditional arguments of cultural nationalists appeared to be out of favour. At the start of the 2ist century, however, the literary climate continues to be healthy: both in Quebec and elsewhere, major authors continue to be productive, and important new writers are appearing. Nevertheless, a consideration of nationalism must conclude with the feeling of uncertainty communicated by essayists a century earlier. Quebecois literary nationalism will continue to be linked to the fate, as yet unresolved, of the sovereignist movement. In English-speaking Canada old definitions of nationality have been abandoned as both political philosophies and the ethnic composition of the country, apart from Quebec, undergo fundamental change. In its extraordinary and enriching diversity, contemporary Canadian writing reflects the fragmentation that has replaced the racial and economic hierarchies that formerly prevailed. See also NORTH-WEST REBELLION.
Further reading: Rejean Beadoin, Naissance d'une Litterature: Essai sur le messianisme et les debuts de la litterature canadienne-jran^aise, i8jo1890 (Montreal: Boreal, 1989); Carl Berger, The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism 1867-1914 (Toronto: U Toronto P, 1970); Ramsay Cook, Canada, Quebec and the Uses of Nationalism (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1986); Sarah M. Corse, Nationalism and Litr
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erature: The Politics of Culture in Canada and the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997); Lise Gauvin, 'L'idee de litterature nationale,' in Les ecrivains du Quebec, ed Simone Dreyfus, Edmond Jouve, and Gilbert Pilleul (Paris: Assn des Ecrivains de Langue Francaise, 1994): 13949; Michael IgnatiefF, Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism (London: BBC Books, 1993); Laurent Mailhot, Ouvrir le livre (Montreal: Hexagone, 1992); Maurice Lemire, Introduction a la litterature quebecoise, 1900-1939 (Montreal: Fides, 1981), Formation de I'imaginaire litteraire au Quebec 1764-1867 (Montreal: Hexagone, 1993), and La litterature quebecoise enprojet au milieu du XIXe siecle (Montreal: Fides, 1993); Frank Underbill, In Search of Canadian Liberalism (Toronto: Macmillan, 1960). Thomas E. Tausky
NATIONS, Opal L. Poet, novelist, editor, playwright, musicologist; b Brighton, England, 19 Aug 1941; son of Rita Mae and William Jon Humm. Nations spent his early years as a singer for English blues bands, before working as a disc jockey. He edited Strange Faeces, a magazine started in England and subsequently published in Canada. Nations is a multidisciplinary artist, and has published as many as thirty books, mostly in small editions. His poetry tends to be non-narrative, CONCRETE, and ABSURDIST, and frequently uses formula and word displacement. He has also experimented with conceptual art, mail art, illustrations, PERFORMANCE POETRY, prose narratives, video, multimedia events, and RADIO broadcasts. He won the Perceptua Literary Award for Fiction, London (1974) and the Pushcart Prize, New York (1977). Further reading: Opal L. Nations, The Browser's Opal L. Nations, sel and ed Frank Davey and Jari Brodie; illus Paul Collins (Toronto: Coach House, 1981). Kent Lewis
NATIVE, see FIRST NATIONS; see also CULTURAL PLURALITY, INUIT, LANGUAGE (features of First Nations languages), METIS, ORAL LITERATURE, and names of individual groups and authors.
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NATIVES IN LITERATURE. Jacques CARTIER'S often-quoted description of Canada as the 'land God gave to Cain' located what was often called Terra Incognita ('land unknown' to Europeans) within a biblical perspective; descriptions of Indian nakedness suggested variously a temperate, Edenic climate, or the absence of culture, or savagery. The contradictions and paradoxes implied by these differing meanings shaped the first representation of Natives in Canadian literature. Some of the earliest accounts are those to be found in EXPLORATION and missionary narratives, including not only the Brefrecit... (1545) attributed to Carrier, but also Gabriel SAGARD'S Le grand voyage au pays des Hurons (1632), which one commentator (Jean-de-la-Croix Rioux) described as a 'precise and exact' account of daily life. Doubtful as that may be (the objectivity of the European observer always being in question), the concern for portraying specifics (reiterated in the letters of MARIE DE L'INCARNATION) suggests an approach to crossing a cultural divide that later informs much anthropological commentary. A more pervasive approach judged Natives according to European paradigms, as when the JESUIT RELATIONS couch the death ofBREBEUF at the hands of the IROQUOIS as a conflict between civilization and savagery, in the rhetoric of Christian martyrdom. Baron de LAHONTAN'S Nouveaux Voyage (1703), by contrast, contributes to the rhetoric of the 'bon sauvage,' a counter-image that would in its own way become a stereotype. Some explorers' accounts (those of Alexander MACKENZIE and David THOMPSON, for example) rely on plain description, being largely designed for European readers anxious to understand North American societies in relation to their own; others shift from denotative to connotative language in describing Natives. A good example is Samuel HEARNE'S Narrative ofajourney to Prince of Wales' Fort, which shifts from objective scientific description to figurative language in an account of the 'massacre' of a group of INUIT. In the published account of his journey, this scene is described as if it were a tableau Hearne watched, instead of an event in which he participated. Passive sentence structures deny agency, allowing Hearne to evade responsibility for his action (killing a young Inuit woman) and non-
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action (doing nothing to prevent the massacre), both reprehensible to him. By contrast, the character Edward Rivers' description of 'Americans' in Frances BROOKE'S History of Emily Montague (1763) relies on conventions of the 'noble savage'; Rivers compares Natives with WOMEN (both associated with nature), but Brooke's indirect purpose is to raise a FEMINIST argument supporting English women's place in the political sphere. Images of savagery, noble and otherwise, continue into the igth century. In 'Nobler Savages,' Carole Gerson examines how Susanna MOODIE and Catharine Parr TRAILL differed from their male counterparts in writing about Native people, particularly women. Gerson argues that while Moodie and Traill use the (European) stereotype of the noble savage, they also record their own experiences with interesting individual FIRST NATIONS women in ways that demonstrate their sympathies and connections with Native women in general. By contrast, Major John RICHARDSON'S Wacousta: or, The Prophecy: A Tale of the Canadas (1823), which portrays a territorial war between English soldiers and Ottawa in the period following the British 'Conquest,' depicts Natives as warlike and ferocious, although the nobility of some Native characters, notably Ponteac, is maintained by English soldiers who would rather call him ally than enemy. This sensibility occurs in writings by others as well, P-J. AUBERT DE GASPE among them. Near the end of the century, the poetry of Duncan Campbell SCOTT was presenting images of degeneration and extinction; in 'The Onondaga Madonna,' for example, the Iroquois are represented as a dying race. Although it is tempting to believe that 20thcentury Canadian writers were less reliant on old-world conventions, images of Natives were still used to serve narrative ends. At one extreme, these 'narratives' existed in real life in, for example, the political narrative by which Scott, as Deputy Minister of Indian Affairs, marginalized Native cultures. Other figures - E.T. SETON, with his 'Woodcraft Indians,' and GREY OWL, with his pretence at actually being Native - contrived personal identities that at once romanticized the wilderness and cast themselves in the role of 'wise man': as persons whose knowledge of nature intrinsically ele-
vated them into moral and spiritual guides. Pauline JOHNSON'S theatrical performances might even be read as a deliberate appeal to this same desire (in the population as a whole, trained as it was to look for stereotypes) for 'natural' sensibilities. Native characters appear as symbols of Canadian identity, of a national mythology, or of a conquered natural world (as in AT WOOD'S Surfacing, 1972, or Yves THERIAULT'S Agaguk, 1958; Ashini, 1960; Nakika, 1962; Mahigan, 1968; and Tayaout, 1969), or as foils by which white characters understand themselves and their place in the world (as in Margaret LAURENCE'S The Diviners, 1974, or John NEWLOVE'S 'The Pride'). This process is challenged by writers examining structures rather than themes in Canadian literature; for example, the fiction of Rudy WIEBE imagines Natives (eg, Big Bear) as agents rather than merely the victims of historical change. In Quebec, prizewinning writers such as Robert Lalonde (with Le dernier ete des indiens, 1982) and Louis HAMELIN (with Cow-boy, 1992) both stirred critical discussion - Lalonde because his stories of GAY love and the Oka were taken as partial critiques of 'white' society, and Hamelin because his glimpse of a post-millennial society poses the question of identity in a postmodern, defamilarizing way. Further changes in representation derive from the work of First Nations writers themselves. With Bernard ASSINIWI, Jeannette ARMSTRONG, Tomson HIGHWAY, Thomas KING, Lee MARACLE, and others establishing alternative versions of reality and elucidating the basis of the imaginative realities that grew out of Native traditions, the old stereotyped images of Natives in Canadian literature began to fade. See also BUGNET, CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE, DICK, JEWITT, RIEL, S K I N N E R .
Further reading: Carole Gerson, 'Nobler Savages: Representations of Native Women in the Writings of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill,'J Canadian Studies 32.2 (Summer 1997): 521; Terry Goldie, Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Literatures (Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP, 1989); Gudrun M. Hesse, 'The Invasion of Progress,' in Jorn Carlsson and Bengt Streljffert, eds, The Canadian North (Lund: Nordic Assoc for Canadian Studies, 1989): 73-85; Thomas King,
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Cheryl Calver, and Helen Hoy, eds, The Native in Literature (Oakville, ON: ECW 1987); Les Monkman, A Native Heritage: Images of the Indian in English-Canadian Literature (Toronto: U Toronto P, 1981); Ben-Z. Shek, 'Yves Theriault: The Would-be Amerindian and His Imaginary Inuit,' in Carlsson and Streljffert: 119-28; Ghislaine Theberge, 'Lecture et imaginaire,' Tangence 36 (May 1992): 85-95. N.E. Currie
NATTIEZ, Jean-Jacques Andre Rene. Semiotician, novelist; b Amiens, France, 30 Dec 1945; son of Jacqueline Lancelle and Jean Nattiez. He studied at U Paris VIII (PhD, 1973) and after 1972 worked as a professor of musicology at U Montreal, where he directs the Groupe de recherche en semiologie musicale. In the 19805 he collaborated with the composer Pierre Boulez. Author of the novel Opera (1997), he attracted attention primarily for his semiotic essays: Fondements d'une semiologie de la musique (1975); Proust musician (1984; tr Derrick Puffet as Proust as a musician, 1989); Wagner androgyne (1990; tr Stewart Spencer, J 993); Le combat de Chronos et d'Orphee (1993), in which he argued that linguistics and music are connected in that they are both semiotic systems. Further reading: Martine Turenne, 'Profession: chercheur; ville: Montreal,' Interface 13.3 (MayJune 1992): 9-17. Constantin Grigorut
NATURE WRITING, see ANIMAL STORY, ECOCRITICISM, LANDSCAPE, REGION, SCIENCE AND NATURE WRITING.
NAUBERT, Yvette. Novelist, playwright, short story writer; b Hull, QC, 19 Sept 1918, d Ottawa i Dec 1982; daughter of Theodora (DAoust) and Jean-Marie Naubert. A trained musician, Naubert wrote drama for RADio-Canada (1946-52) and a play, Les dmes captives, for a 1950 drama festival. After living for several years in the United States, she began to write: La dormeuse eveillee (1965); Contes de la solitude (1967); the prizewinning L'ete de la cigale (1968), critical of American culture; and Les Pierrefendre (1972-7), a three-volume saga of a Quebec bourgeois ily through the 2oth century. Margaret Cook
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NEEDLES, (Raymond Daniel). Writer, playwright; b Toronto 27 July 1951; son of Dorothy-Jane (Goulding) and George William Needles. After working as a newspaper editor, provincial ministerial assistant, and insurance company executive, Needles wrote a quintet of works dealing with the fictional town of Larkspur, ON, beginning with Letters from Wingfield Farm (1987), in which Walt Wingfield, Neediest protagonist, has given up his job as an executive at a Bay Street brokerage house to try his hand at farming. Through a series of letters written to the local paper, Walt relates his experiences on the farm, and his often unusual encounters with the locals. Letters from Wingfield Farm was a very successful one-man comic stage play, starring Rod Beattie as Walt. The other Wingfield works include Wingfield's Progress, Wingfield's Folly, Wingfield Unbound, and Perils of Persephone. Wingfield was adapted for television in 1999 (see FILM). Peter Mountford
NELLIGAN, Emile (pseud Emile Kovar). Poet; b Montreal 24 Dec 1879, d Montreal 18 Nov 1941; son of David Nelligan, the oldest member of an Irish family who had emigrated to Canada in the 18505, and Emilie Amanda Hudon, who had been born in Kamouraska and descended from French immigrants who had come to NEW FRANCE in 1664. In 1886, the family moved to Avenue Laval, near the Carre Saint-Louis, a part of Montreal with which the young poet was later to become strongly identified. In 1892, the family moved again, this time to 260, avenue Laval, the place Nelligan was to call home until well into the 19305. Nelligan's first known venture into the world of writing is a school assignment dated 8 March 1896: 'C'etait lautomne ... et les feuilles tombaient toujours.' It is generally assumed that he began writing poetry during the last few months of 1895. Nelligan wrote most of his poems between June 1896 and July 1899 - three years of struggle and creative energy unparalleled in the history of poetry in Quebec. In June 1886, the weekly Le Samedi published his poem 'Reve fantasque.' Over the next few months, the same periodical was to publish several more of his poems, under the PSEUDONYM Emile Kovar. On 10 Feb 1897, he was accepted as a member of
NELLIGAN
the ECOLE LITTERAIRE DE MONTREAL. It was at
the meetings of this society that Nelligan first recited some of his poems in public. Through such readings, his poetry slowly came to be known in the literary circles of late 19th-century Montreal. The summer of 1899 proved to be a time of crisis in the young poet's life: the mental illness that was to be with him for the rest of his life manifested itself dramatically and irrevocably. At the request of his father, Emile was committed to the Asile Saint-Benoit-Joseph-Labre. The diagnosis was schizophrenia, one of the most severe and, at the time, least understood forms of mental illness. He spent the rest of his life in an institution. Upon his death, at the age of 61, he was buried in the cemetery of Cote-desNeiges in Montreal. Several years after Nelligan was institutionalized, his poetry was first published in an edition compiled and edited by Louis DANTIN, entitled Emile Nelligan et son oeuvre (1904), which included 107 poems. In his preface to this edition, Dantin describes Nelligan's poetry as 'a mosaic of ideas, the marquetry of which allows for every shade of contrast/ Dantin's organization and method of presentation were to influence all future editions of the young poet's work, including the two most recent critical editions. In Dantin's view, Nelligan was the consummate aesthete, a somewhat tragic figure whose energies were almost exclusively invested in his art and who sought to express in poetry the pain he experienced in life. Inspired by some of the great 19th-century European SYMBOLIST poets such as Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Rodenbach, by the works of Edgar Allan Poe, as well as by the French PARNASSIANS Heredia and Leconte de Lisle (whom he had read voraciously), Nelligan in his own work both imitated his predecessors and created vibrant and highly lyrical poems in a style uniquely his own. After this first publication, his poetry decisively and repeatedly influenced much of 20th-century Quebec poetry. Much of the later criticism of Nelligan's work concerns the complex intertextual links between his poetry and that of his predecessors, including major figures such as Gerard de Nerval, as well as the many ways in which the poetry of Saint-Denys GARNEAU and Anne
HEBERT (among others) was strongly influenced by their reading of Nelligan's poetry. In addition to these important literary influences (and a host of others, extending to the BIBLE, Dante, and Shakespeare), Nelligan's poetry is heavily imbued with musical influences, including the work of composers as diverse as Mozart, Mendelssohn, Liszt, and Chopin. It is clear, for example, that Nelligan was more than passingly familiar with Chopin's mazurkas. His particular love for Chopin is expressed in poems such as 'Chopin' and 'Le tombeau de Chopin.' Numerous critics have studied the influence of musical structures on the rhythm and structure of Nelligan's lines, but music is also an explicit theme of his poetry, one often associated with nostalgic remembrances of childhood. Although he often refers to objects and situations taken from everyday life, the real world in which Nelligan the poet lived was the world of the imagination. He never travelled farther than the family's summer home in Cacouna, but his mental universe comprised elements of far-flung places of which he had only read and dreamed: Paris, Venice, Norway, Egypt, Japan. For Nelligan, as for Rimbaud, poetry was the only true religion, literary creation the only route to salvation. His imaginary universe is a troubled one, marked by duality, dichotomy, and unresolved and perhaps unresolvable conflicts: between the English and French cultures into which he was born, between nostalgia for the past and the difficulty of living in the present, between the remembered pleasures and pain of childhood and a pervasive obsession with what Emily Dickinson called mankind's inevitable 'rendez-vous with Death.' Because it is possible to detect signs of his mental illness in his poetry, considerable critical attention has been devoted to the theme of madness in Nelligan's work, as well as to the various forms of neurosis that manifest themselves in his writing. An ongoing debate continues to rage among Nelligan specialists as to the exact nature and importance of the deeply rooted psychological problems and the profound sense of anguish that are never far from the surface in his poetry. It is no doubt largely because of this dimension of Nelligan's work that he is now seen as a thoroughly 'modern'
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figure, much more of a 20th-century writer than a Iate-i9th-century 'decadent,' in that he was attuned at least as much to the concerns and uncertainties of the new century as he was to the aesthetic sensibilities of thefin-de-siecle. One of the most prevalent themes in Nelligan's poetry is childhood, evoked in one way or another in more than half of his poems. The Carre Saint-Louis near which he lived was transformed from a district of late-ipth-century Montreal into an imaginary world in which a child's perspective predominates. In poems such as 'Clavier d'antan' and 'La fuite de 1'enfance,' Nelligan describes the world of his childhood as one in which happiness and hope existed, but which was constantly threatened by the destructive power of time. In his use of childhood as an indirect but highly efficient means of evoking the pressures and the problems of adulthood, Nelligan strongly influenced such modern writers as Marie-Claire BLAIS and Rejean
NELSON, Sharon H. Editor, poet; b Montreal 2 Jan 1948. An editor of computer science texts, Nelson also worked as a journalist and a university writing instructor. FEMINISM and JUDAISM are integral parts of her widely anthologized poetry. Blood Poems (1978) encompasses Holocaust themes and the politics of identity from a female perspective. Women and Crazy Ladies (1983) presents portraits of women's lives; All the Dead Dears: A Biography,' the centrepiece of the collection, explores the life of Sylvia Plath. Nelson helped found the feminist caucus of the
DUCHARME.
NEOCLASSICAL FORM appeared as a feature of both English and French literature during the i8th century, with many Canadian writers in the i8th and I9th centuries (eg, Jacob BAILEY, Michel BIBAUD, GOLDSMITH,;. MACKAY) emulating neoclassical practitioners. The movement emphasized the artifice of form - order (utility, decorum, logic, society, proportion) being more important than feeling (individual sensibility, mystery, inventiveness, imperfection, unrestrained emotion). Typically, in poetry, neoclassical writers adopted the heroic couplet (rhyming pairs of lines in iambic pentameter), giving precedence to wit and satire. See also
In modern-day Quebec, Nelligan is revered as the first authentically Quebecois poet, one whose debt to a wide range of European literary traditions did not preclude his founding a new poetic tradition that was distinctly Quebecois, both in form and in content. The first major biography of Nelligan was published by Paul Wyczynski in 1987. In the early 19905, the definitive critical edition of his complete works, in two volumes, was published by Rejean Robidoux and Paul Wyczynski. At about the same time the playwright Michel TREMBLAY wrote the libretto for an opera by Andre Gagnon entitled Nelligan, un opera romantique, first performed in Montreal in 1990 (see MUSIC AND LITERATURE). A century after his remarkable three-year burst of creative energy, Nelligan had earned a prominent place in the history of Quebec poetry. (See also HISTORICAL ANALOGUES.)
Further reading: Rejean Beaudoin, Une etude des poesies d'Emile Nelligan (Montreal: Boreal, 1997); Pascal Brissette, Nelligan dans tons ses etats: un mythe national (Montreal: Fides, 1998); Paul Wyczynski, Nelligan 1879-1941: biographic (Montreal: Fides, 1987). Richard G. Hodgson
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LEAGUE OF CANADIAN POETS and CO-founded
the Federation of English-language Writers of Quebec. Further reading: Kenneth Radu, 'Speaking Daggers: The Poetry of Sharon H. Nelson,' Matrix 35 (1991): 72-8. Greg Chan
HUMOUR AND SATIRE, LONG POEM, POETRY IN SHORTER FORMS, PROSODY.
NEPVEU, Pierre. Critic, poet, novelist; b Montreal 16 Sept 1946; son of Aline (Legault) and Germain Nepveu. Active in literary circles, Nepveu published his first collection of poetry, Voies rapides (1971), shortly before becoming codirector of Ellipse (1972-6). He translated English-language Canadian poems for this publication, and in 1976 became poetry critic for Lettres quebecoises. After obtaining his doctorate from U Montreal (1977), he was appointed professor there in 1978. Nepveu published his first novel, L'hiverMira Christophe, in 1986. He has won several AWARDS, for the ANTHOLOGY of
NEW FRANCE
Quebec poetry he compiled with Laurent Mailhot (1981); for his book of literary criticism, L'ecologie du reel (1988); and for his poetry, Romans-fleuves (Governor General's Award, 1997). Dealing with the multilateral nature of modern, URBAN realities, his poetry evokes the elusiveness and transitoriness of certainty in contemporary life. He is also the editor of Albert LOZEAU'S work, and a critic of Quebec writing and of Fernand OUELLETTE; altogether he has published a score of volumes. Nepveu continues to be involved in cultural activities. See also Gilles MARCOTTE. Margaret Cook
NEW, William Herbert. Professor, critic, editor, poet; b Vancouver 28 March 1938; son of Edith (Littlejohn), housewife, and John New, mechanic; married Margaret Ebbs-Canavan, a teacher, 1967; educ U British Columbia and U Leeds in geography and English. New returned to U British Columbia in 1965 to teach and to set up COMMONWEALTH/postcolonial courses in the English Dept. Editor of the JOURNAL Canadian Literature for 17 years, he has published over 40 books: works of CRITICISM, several ANTHOLOGIES (including Canadian Short Fiction, 1986), and poetry for adults (Science Lessons, 1996; Raucous, 1999) and for CHILDREN (Vanilla Gorilla, 1998). From Articulating West (1972) to Dreams of Speech and Violence (1987), A History of Canadian Literature (1989), Land Sliding (1997), and Borderlands: How We Talk About Canada (1998), his critical writings examine relations between literary form and social context, especially those that involve LANDSCAPE and strategies of language use. See also LITERARY HISTORY, REGION, POSTMODERNISM AND POSTCOLONIALISM, SHORT STORY. NEW BRUNSWICK, the only officially bilingual province in Canada (capital: Fredericton, est c 1783, named for Prince Frederick of Osnaburg), joined CONFEDERATION in 1867; pop 729,498 (2001); provincial flower is the purple violet. The territory - 73,433 sq km (27,905 sq miles) - was originally inhabited by ALGONQUIAN speakers (Mi'kmaq and Maliseet). Settled by the French as early as 1604, it developed as the colony of ACADIA by the end of the i7th century. During the Seven Years WAR, the Acadians
were expelled to Louisiana (hence the term 'Cajun') - the subject of American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's influential poem 'EVANGELINE' (1847). The Acadians' slow return is recorded in Antonine MAILLET'S Pelagie-lacharrette. A British colony after 1763, increasingly settled by LOYALIST exiles from the UNITED STATES, New Brunswick (named for one of George Ill's German territories) was divided from NOVA SCOTIA in 1784. Other New Brunswick writers include Emily BEAVAN, Daniel Boudreau, Edith BUTLER, Bliss CARMAN, Hermenegilde CHIASSON, Fred COGSWELL, Robert GIBBS, Beth HARVOR, D.S. HUYGHUE, M.T. LANE,
Antoine-J. LEGER, Douglas LOCHHEAD, Alden NOWLAN, Jonathan ODELL, Desmond PACEY, Moses PERLEY, David Adams RICHARDS, C.G.D. ROBERTS, Dorothy ROBERTS, T.G. ROBERTS,
Francis SHERMAN, Kent THOMPSON, Liliane WELCH. See also MARITIMES. NEW FRANCE, term given to the North American territories claimed as French possessions from CARTIER'S arrival in 1534 to the Treaty of Paris in 1763 and Napoleon's sale of Louisiana to the UNITED STATES in 1803; it included ACADIA, the fortress at Louisbourg, and islands in the St Lawrence, and it extended from LABRADOR to the mouth of the Mississippi R, west of the Appalachian Mountains (the American Thirteen Colonies lay to the east, with twenty times the population), and from Lake Superior into the Great Plains, reaching indeterminately into the WEST, bounded by Rupert's Land in the North (see NORTHWEST TERRITORIES), and New Spain in the area now known as Texas. Widely separated settlements were the setting for the EXPLORATION narratives of CHAMPLAIN, Louis Jolliet, Jacques Marquette, the Cavalier de la Salle, and the LA VERENDRYE family, among others, and the missionary narratives of the JESUIT RELATIONS, primarily among the HURON. Ruled from France, under the Royalist ancien regime, the colonies developed the seigneurial system, placing power in the hands of the intendant, the civil authority, and the bishop of the Roman Catholic Church; the LANGUAGE accent stabilized as that of Norman French because it was literally the 'mother tongue,' the accent of most of the women in the colony (many hundreds sent by Louis XIV's command
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as lesfilles du roi, brides for the settlers). Montreal (Hochelaga, Ville Marie) and Quebec (Stadacona) were the chief centres in the part of the territory known as CANADA; primarily commercial in function, they developed political and cultural activities as the European population there grew from c 3000 to c 70,000 between the mid-i6th and Iate-i8th century. NEW ZEALAND AND PACIFIC ISLANDS connections with Canada range from the movement of peoples in colonial and postcolonial history (the KANAKA who worked to construct the CANADIAN PACIFIC RAILWAY, for example, or the immigrants from Fiji who arrived as part of the Indian DIASPORA) to the comparative study of the economies, political systems, and literatures of the COMMONWEALTH. Construed as an 'exotic' locale, the 'South Seas' has been a setting for numerous ROMANCES, such as those by Gilbert PARKER. More realistically and acerbically, other Canadian writers (eg, Earle BIRNEY) set a few poems in New Zealand, and some (eg, Ernst HAVEMANN) emigrated there; still other writers (eg, Charles DOYLE, Desmond PACEY) left New Zealand to settle in Canada. New Zealand's literary impact on Canada is indirect, largely through Katherine Mansfield's influence on the SHORT STORIES of Raymond KNISTER, Alice MUNRO, Mavis GALLANT, and Elizabeth BREWSTER. See also James COOK, POSTMODERNISM AND POSTCOLONIALISM, Kate PULLINGER.
NEWFOUNDLAND, province, now known as Newfoundland and LABRADOR; capital: St John's (est early 15005); area 404,519 sq km; pop 512,930 (2001); originally inhabited by Innu (see INUIT) and BEOTHUK; provincial flower is the pitcher plant. Artefacts of first European settlement reveal a Viking arrival at L'Anse aux Meadows (c 1000); Portuguese, Basque, and French sailors fished the Grand Banks in the i6th century; English settlement followed the EXPLORATION of John Cabot and Sir Humphrey Gilbert between 1497 and 1583, while French claims to 'Terre-neuve' date from Pierre le Moyne d'Iberville's Placentia settlement in the i66os. Reclaimed by Britain in 1763 (at which time James COOK was charting the coastline), Newfoundland achieved colonial status in 1855,
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slowly acquiring degrees of self-government; it was expanded by treaty to include Labrador in 1927. A series of financial setbacks, however, meant that in 1933 the British government reinstituted its authority in the territory, through what was called a Commission of Government, and Newfoundland remained a separate British protectorate till it joined CONFEDERATION in 1949. The term Atlantic Canada' includes Newfoundland and the MARITIMES. Newfoundland writers include Michael COOK, Michael CRUMMEY, Margaret DULEY, Norman DUNCAN, David FRENCH, Wilfred GRENFELL, Ray GUY, Robert HAYMAN, Harold HORWOOD, Wayne JOHNSTON, R.T.S. LOWELL, Kevin MAJOR, Carmelita MCGRATH, Lisa MOORE, E.J. PRATT, John STEF-
FLER, Michael WINTER. See also CANADA, FOLKLORE. NEWLOVE, John Herbert. Poet, editor; b Regina 13 June 1938; son of Mary Constant (Monteith), a teacher, and Thomas Harold Newlove, a lawyer. Newlove grew up in Veregin, SK, and subsequently travelled widely in Canada. He attended U Saskatchewan and worked for brief periods during the 19505 as a high-school English teacher, social worker, and RADIO announcer and producer. His first book of poetry, Grave Sirs, was privately printed in 1962, the year that several of his poems first appeared in literary magazines. By the mid-1960s his work was attracting attention, mainly because of the publication of some highly individual poems in Poesie /Poetry '64, an anthology edited by John Robert COLOMBO, and in Tamarack. The 19605 and early 19705 are his most creative years so far; by the mid-1970s Newlove was most active as an editor at McClelland and Stewart (1970-4), and with the federal government (Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages) in Ottawa (1986-96). His EDITING work includes Canadian Poetry: The Modern Era (1977), an influential ANTHOLOGY, and The Collected Poems ofER. Scott (1981). He has been writer-in-residence at various universities across Canada. Newlove's published books of poetry are Grave Sirs (1962), Elephants, Mothers and Others (1963), Moving in Alone (1965), Notebook Pages (1966), What They Say (1967), Black Night Window (1968), The Cave (1970), Lies (1972; winner of Governor General's AWARD for Poetry), The Fat
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Man, Selected Poems, 1962-1972 (1977), The Green Plain (1981), The Night the Dog Smiled (1986), and Apology for Absence: Selected Poems, 1962-1992 (i993), which is a new edition of The Fat Man. His early work shows some features similar to the work of the TISH poets: several of his poems appeared in Tish and he lived in British Columbia off and on throughout the 19605. But Newlove's poetry distinguishes itself from the work of West Coast writers, particularly with its sense of place. The Prairie is often the starting point for his compositions, and it often appears to lead to thoughts of home, family, memory, history, violence, and death. The acute concern with personal matters, evident in poems from the mid-1960s, has expanded to more 'universal' concepts by the time Lies is published. Poems such as 'The Pride' and 'Crazy KIEL,' for instance, show his interest in Canada's treatment of its NATIVE peoples and in Canadian history, while his various poetic returns to his hometown show an interest in immigrant society (especially DOUKHOBOR society). Critics have noticed the immediacy and pessimism of his poetry, its prosodic skill, its frequently colloquial language, its mastery of line breaks, and its acute perception of desire in its many forms. Canadian poets have often praised Newlove's work and acknowledged his influence (he is well represented in anthologies). He currently lives in Ottawa. Further reading: Douglas Barbour, 'John Newlove,' in Robert Lecker, Jack David, and Ellen Quigley, eds, Canadian Writers and Their Works 10 (Toronto: ECW, 1992): 279-334; Jan Bartley, 'An Interview with John Newlove,' Essays on Canadian Writing 23 (1982): 135-56; A.F. Moritz, 'The Man from Vaudeville, Sask,' Books in Canada (Jan 1978): 9-12.. Robin Waugh
NEWMAN, CJ. (ColemanJoseph/Jerry). Professor, writer; b Montreal 17 Feb 1935; son of Annie (Dubin), an embroiderer, and Leon Newman, a small-business operator; educ Sir George Williams U (BA, 1962). Newman taught creative WRITING at U British Columbia and published a volume of poetry, Sudden Proclamations (1992), and two novels, We Always Take Care of Our Own (1965) and A Russian Novel (1973). In
his fiction Newman examines, respectively, the Montreal JEWISH community and a Jewish writer's odyssey to Russia. Alexander Hart
NEWMAN, Peter Charles. Journalist, editor; b Vienna 10 May 1929; son of Wanda (Neumann), concert pianist, and Oskar Newman, industrialist; emig 1940; educ UCC and U Toronto (MCom, 1954). Much-honoured for his writing, Newman was named Companion of the Order of Canada in 1990. He occupied several editorial positions in Canadian JOURNALISM: asst ed Financial Post (1951-6), asst ed Maclean's (1956-63) and the editor (1971-82), and columnist with Toronto Star and other papers (1964-9). Between 1959 and 1998, Newman's often-reprinted books sold over two million copies. He established his reputation with his first volume, Flame of Power (1959), which coupled insights into the power that business corporations were exercising with details of executives' private lives. Subsequent books varied between continuing investigations into the sources of prestige and manipulations of political influence, and works that celebrated Canada, its LANDSCAPE, and its culture of freedom. Among the latter group are Home Country (1973), Canada 1892 (1991), and The Canadian Revolution (1995), all of which also probe the gap between social promise and social practice. The books that directly analyze power include an account of the Bronfman Dynasty (1978); a threevolume history of the HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY (1985-9); The Canadian Establishment (1975) and its sequels, The Acquisitors (1981), and Titans (1988); and an investigation into the life of the newspaper magnate Conrad Black (The Establishment Man, 1982). Stylistically direct, Newman specializes in 'unauthorized' commentary, reaching his wide readership partly by assembling narratives out of historical data and partly because his books characteristically promise revelation; repeatedly, he strives to demonstrate the political implications and underpinnings of what he considers are both earned and unearned authority. NEWSPAPERS, MAGAZINES, AND COMMERCIAL JOURNALS. The development of a periodical press played a significant role in the
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process by which Canada was welded into a modern nation. Periodicals served as political tools: in the creation of representative government in the provinces; in the establishment of a press free of political censorship; in the creation of a unified nation 'a mari usque ad mare'; in the creation of distinct cultures, both local and national; and in the promotion of innumerable other religious, commercial, and special-interest causes. Canada's periodical press was the first medium of national mass communication. The local nature of Canadian newspapers helped ensure their viability, but Canadian magazines, forced to compete with high-quality foreign imports, were - and remain - a risky financial undertaking. Since the founding of the Gazette de commerce et litteraire (Quebec, 1778-9) and the Nova Scotia Magazine and Comprehensive R of Literature, Politics, and News (Halifax, 1789-92) - the earliest French- and English-language examples - the history of Canadian magazines has largely been a story of attrition and failure. By contrast, the newspaper press, though not without its many casualties, grew to unprecedented size and power by adapting more successfully to the economic necessities of mass sales and distribution. Generally speaking, Canadian magazine publishers made this transition only after 1900, although the trial-and-error process, and the first few successes, occurred in the ipth century. One characteristic of the Canadian periodical press has been the existence of numerous obstacles to commercial success: an extremely small population base, whether contrasted with Britain or with the United States; the geographic distribution of Canada's population from coast to coast; the linguistic fragmentation between anglophones and francophones; the historically lower literacy levels among francophones; and foreign (particularly American) competition for readership, advertising revenue, and editorial talent. Inadequate COPYRIGHT protection was another obstacle. This lack of protection, however, also enabled Canadian publishers to pirate and plagiarize American works freely throughout much of the early period. Foreign periodicals have always found a ready audience in Canada. Major British periodicals, particularly the 'quarterlies,' were popular with Canada's elite readers, but it was beyond the
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capacity of a small colonial society to offer more than pale domestic imitations. The ability of American publishers to produce 'split runs' of their titles - in which extra copies containing Canadian advertisements, with or without additional Canadian content, are run off at very low unit costs - enabled them to export their publications on highly competitive terms. Indeed, Canadians could offer scarcely any competition that depended upon price, when, for example, American publications entered Canada dutyfree directly through the post, whereas the same publications were subject to duty when imported by Canadian news agents and booksellers. Moreover, Canadian publishers and printers were for many decades forced to pay a duty of 25 per cent on paper stock and printing equipment. The Canadian government did not act to ease postage rates for magazines until 1880, when a second-class rate was created for all domestic periodicals. This was again lowered from 4 cents to i cent per pound in 1900. Characteristically, the government justified this reduction, not on the basis of promoting literacy or an informed electorate, but instead on promoting 'a national consciousness.' One authority has suggested that the elusive growth of a Canadian 'national consciousness' was already reflected in the increase in Canadian monthly magazines from 41 in 1874 to 202 in 1900. Resisting pleas for further assistance to Canadian publishers, however, the government refused for a long time to remove the duty on paper and printing equipment. Another characteristic of Canadian periodicals was a lack of longevity. Few survived more than three years; yet despite this high attrition, new titles proliferated. As well, these periodicals tended to be largely derivative in both format and content from American and British models. This lack of originality can be explained on two grounds. First, because Canada's early printers and publishers were themselves immigrants, they transplanted foreign models in the process of creating a Canadian periodical press. Second, the need to compete with foreign imports encouraged imitation at the expense of innovation. A further characteristic was that Canadian periodicals remained essentially local until developments such as the building of the rail-
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ways made possible the production and much wider distribution of truly national publications. Whereas the power to influence public opinion was confined originally to publishers in major centres such as Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, or Halifax, geographic proximity to the centres of population and power was, by the end of this era, less important. Early newspapers in Canada were primitive affairs of no more than four pages, printed on hand presses, and distributed within a small area in editions of a few hundred copies. Their proprietors were job printers, whose incomes were precarious and often dependent upon government contracts. By the middle of the i9th century, with the advent of new, industrial TECHNOLOGY, papers could circulate thousands of copies daily, and their proprietors and editors often evolved into people of substance and considerable political influence. Many newspapers began as mere organs of, and apologists for, specific political parties. Two of the best-known examples were William Lyon MACKENZIE'S Reform-minded Colonial Advocate (1824-34) and George BROWN'S Liberal Globe (1844-), both published at Toronto. The increasing focus of the urban newspaper press upon politics, with particular attention to the business community's need for commercial information, reduced the ability of newspaper editors to offer a broader range of subject coverage, and may well have promoted the growth of more specialized periodicals, such as the agricultural and farm press, as well as magazines of all types. Until the advent of the popular or mass-audience 'new journalism' after about 1880, Canadian newspapers were filled mainly with political reportage and editorializing, often with no shortage of partisan invective. When newspaper editors were either politicians themselves, or the hired tools of political parties, and depended on political patronage for at least some of their revenue, few among them may have imagined that newspapers might exist to serve any but political ends, and thus the news they served up was often secondary, and even cribbed from distant and foreign sources. With the emergence of the 'people's press' - such as the Star (1892-) in Toronto; the Star (1869-1979) and La Presse (1884-) in Montreal; and the Journal (1885-) in Ottawa - came the recognizably
modern, urban, daily newspaper, with its focus on local as well as national and foreign events; its human-interest stories; its detailed, sometimes lurid, coverage of crime and disaster; its campaigns, crusades, and contests; its increasing use of illustrations; and, above all, its dependence upon advertising and the concomitant pursuit of increased circulation to satisfy advertisers and increase revenue. At its best, this new, popular press was free of direct control by political factions, and its values and biases were those shared with a majority of its readers. Invariably, however, these 'people's papers' were absorbed into the social and political establishment, and their formerly maverick, crusading editors and publishers were elevated to the Canadian equivalent of British press lords. From the somewhat pretentiously titled general magazines of the earlier period, with their promises to cover every conceivable subject, evolved both the later, popular, general-interest magazines more familiar to modern readers, and magazines aimed at a specialized audience. Thus, as the i9th century wore on, more and more titles appeared that targeted particular interests, whether of class, trade, profession, or hobby. At the same time, technological advances in the making of paper, in printing, and especially in the reproduction of illustrations combined with the rise of the modern advertising industry to transform the appearance of both newspapers and magazines. Periodicals from the end of the i9th century are most obviously differentiated from their descendants by the dated fashions and technology in the illustrations and advertisements. Another distinction is in their layout, which reflects the lingering reluctance of many proprietors to integrate advertisements with pages of text, a fetish that lasted into the 2oth century. ILLUSTRATION in Canadian periodicals began early. In 1777 a printed picture of Halifax graced Anthony Henry's Nova-Scotia Calendar. In 1792 the Quebec Gazette published Canada's first two engraved landscapes, while the Quebec Magazine/Magazine de Quebec issued the first known engraved portrait. George Gurnett (i792?-i86i), a successful Toronto newspaper proprietor, included a lithographic portrait in each issue of his Canadian Literary Magazine (1833), making it the first regularly illustrated
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title. John Allanson (1800-59), a student of the great English wood engraver Thomas Bewick, included wood-engraved views of Hamilton, Kingston, and Toronto in his Anglo-American Magazine and Canadian} (Toronto, 1852-5). By mid-century publishers found new ways to break up the unrelieved columns of text. Between 1832 and 1843 two lithographers set up shop in Toronto. Over the next few decades illustrations were increasingly used in magazines and the daily press. The Toronto Engraving Company (later Brigden's) made a specialty of catalogue, newspaper, and periodical work. The work of 'artist-reporters' began to grace the pages of newspapers such as the Toronto Globe. Photographic Portfolio: A Monthly View of Canadian Scenes and Scenery (1858-60) was an impressive, if short-lived, production by Samuel McLaughlin (1826-1914), an Irish-born watchmaker who, in 1861, became Canada's first official photographer. Portfolio featured mounted photographs of views in and around Quebec City. At that date, however, the mass production of photographic prints suffered from technical and cost limitations only relieved by the invention and exploitation of photoengraving, both of which first occurred in Canada. The Canadian Illustrated News (Hamilton, then Toronto 18624) was the brainchild of a retired Scots soldier, Alexander Somerville (1811-85), who arrived in Canada in 1858. It featured five engravings per issue, and local artists and photographers were commissioned to provide the pictures to the engravers. This was expensive, and Canada had nothing like the population enjoyed by the publishers of such archetypes as the British Illustrated London News or the American Harper's Weekly, so it ceased publication after fifteen months. In 1865 William Leggo (1830-1915) of Montreal patented the 'Leggotype,' the world's first true photo-engraving process. George-Edouard Desbarats (1838-93), who succeeded his father as Queen's Printer in 1865, saw the commercial possibilities of Leggo types, and launched the Canadian Illustrated News (1869-83), which featured the world's first published half-tone photoengravings. It was an instant success. The following year it was joined by L'Opinion publique illustre (1870-83), with which it shared illustrations, and for the next decade and a half they
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chronicled Canadian events in words and pictures. These, in turn, inspired similar efforts, such as the still-familiar Saturday Night (1887-). Zinc engraving ('zincography'), another photoengraving process, was pioneered in the i88os by the Grip Printing and Publishing Company ofToronto. Desbarats capitalized upon his successes. In 1871 he founded L'Etendardpublique, yet another version of Illustrated News, for export to francophones in the United States. But his ambitious invasion of the New York City newspaper market with the New York Daily Graphic (187380) - the world's first illustrated daily paper and the first to use photographic half-tones - led to bankruptcy. Desbarats was down, but undeterred. Following the demise of Illustrated News, he founded Dominion Illustrated, later known as Dominion Illustrated Monthly (1888-93), which carried on the tradition for a few more years, though now on glossy stock and with the finest half-tones. L'Opinion publique illustre also had a successor, Le monde illustre (1884-1900), published by Treffle Berthiaume (1848-1915), a seasoned Quebecois journalist who in 1889 purchased the Montreal daily La Presse (1884-) and revolutionized Quebec JOURNALISM by adopting the sensationalist 'new journalism' pioneered south of the border by Joseph Pulitzer. Many of Canada's French-language magazines continued to have an unspecialized, even encyclopedic, scope far longer than their English-language counterparts. This was perhaps a function of their smaller share of population, with its lower level of literacy. Thus, to succeed, French-language magazines had to appeal to the widest possible audience. At the same time, a contrary tendency was acceptance of a greater degree of editorial intellectualism, and often self-conscious didacticism, aimed at erecting bulwarks to defend French culture from hostile, assimilating influences. While purely literary publications generally escaped the censure of the Church, those that challenged its teachings or authority could be quickly brought to heel. Although slavish adherence to Church authority, or ULTRAMONTANISM, had its extreme apologists, a few daring and outspoken intellectuals who produced French-language periodicals of an opposite viewpoint challenged the moral
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authority and intellectual integrity of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in Quebec. This tension between the authority of the Church and secularism persisted until Quebec society underwent its QUIET REVOLUTION in the mid2oth century. The urge to set opinions down in print underlies nearly all publication; however, it was nowhere more apparent than in the 19th-century explosion of periodicals. Their multiplication continued despite abundant evidence that competition from cheaper imports, combined with high overheads, low circulations, economic fluctuations, and other hazards, had laid a curse upon the majority of new periodicals, while bringing the lives of many older titles to an abrupt end. While the proprietors of the newspaper press had learned the lesson of mass appeal earlier, they were never truly dependent upon acquiring a national audience. Thus, while Canadian newspapers prospered with the growth and urbanization of the new nation, the publishers of magazines continued to struggle against, and often appeared to ignore, hard demographic and economic realities. Apart from a few religious titles, 19th-century Canadian magazine circulations were pathetically small. Le Samedi (1888-1963) and the remarkably popular Saturday Night were exceptional in achieving weekly circulations in the 10,00015,000 range. Thus, almost no proprietor or editor ever attained the audience, and the apparent power to influence public opinion, that became commonplace for their counterparts at the larger daily newspapers. One man, however, Col (of militia) John Bayne Maclean (1862-1950), found a formula for success in the magazine business. Many others tried, and continue to try, with mixed success, to duplicate that formula; Canada's domestic periodicals owe their existence, then as now, to their proprietors' venturesome spirit. During the last two decades of the i9th century the explosive multiplication of periodicals overtook virtually every trade and industry in Canada; with almost 300 examples this genre was exceeded only by religious titles. The large number of trade- and product-specific magazines merely reflected their suitability as advertising mediums for manufacturers and wholesalers wishing to target trade audiences.
They also presaged the modern, domestic consumer magazines. One publisher enjoyed notable success in both fields. Col Maclean was the outstanding example of the new breed of publisher as business tycoon. He apprenticed as a reporter for several Toronto newspapers, including the Mail, where in 1884 he was made assistant commercial/financial/ marine editor. The assignment did little to alleviate Maclean's perennial innocence about finance, but it did bring him the acquaintance of the city's business elite, and soon inspired him to publish his first trade journal, Canadian Grocer and General Storekeeper (1887-93, continued as Canadian Grocer, 1894-), with $3,000 in capital. Such a specialized publication gave the business community the detailed information that the general newspapers of the day could not, and its success soon led to the appearance of Hardware: The Organ of Wrought, Cast, Stamped, Sheet, and Spun Metal Trades (1888-), Canadian Dry Goods R (1891-1901, continued as Dry Goods R, 1902-), Printer and Publisher (1892-), and Books and Notions (1894-5, continued as Bookseller and Stationer, 1896-1910). Thus began a magazine publishing empire based upon the profitability of upwards of 80 trade journals, but that is only half the story. In 1893 the Mail commissioned Maclean to produce a premium supplement entitled Art Weekly, which could be sold in bulk to other newspapers. Maclean left his trade journals in the hands of his brother, Hugh, and moved to New York City to organize production of the supplement. There he met the American publishing giants William Randolph Hearst, S.S. McClure, and Frank Andrew Munsey. Maclean's lifelong friendship with Munsey influenced him greatly, and helped inspire him to branch out into publication of high-quality general-interest and women's magazines. The other great passion of Maclean's life, the Canadian militia in which he served for over twenty years, inspired him in 1896 to purchase the Canadian Military Gazette (Montreal, 1892-1948; renamed Canadian Military Gazette and Gentlemen's Magazine in 1900; sold in 1906). Maclean's colleague, and later partner, Horace T Hunter (1881-1961) was a shrewd money manager, whose skills perfectly complemented Maclean's expansive manner and inattention to finances. By mastering the art of
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mass-market journal publishing, MacleanHunter Ltd elevated its founder to a position of national prominence and influence, and in the next century the firm became the largest private publisher in Canada. Maclean's policy of staffing his publications with university graduates, such as Hunter, was a watershed in the professionalization of Canadian journalism and publishing. Political ambition was rapidly declining as a motive for entering these fields. In 1905 Maclean acquired a five-year-old periodical entitled Business: The Businessman's Magazine, which he revamped as Business: The Busy Man's Magazine, then simply as Busy Man's Magazine. In 1911, it was retitled Maclean's, a generalinterest magazine along the lines of Munsey's. Over the years it went through several transformations as a general-interest and family magazine, and survives today as a weekly news magazine. In 1928 Maclean founded Chatelaine, A Magazine for Canadian Women, which became not only Canada's largest and most profitable women's journal, but also its most enduring. Much of the credit for Chatelaine's durability is owed to a succession of strong female editors, who ensured that the magazine's editorial tone accurately reflected the changing status of Canadian women, while they continued to present the traditional fare of articles on home, food, fashion, and beauty, without patronizing the reader. Successful spinoffs from Chatelaine included a French edition (1960-) and Miss Chatelaine (1964, renamed Flare, 1979-), a fashion magazine aimed at the younger woman. It is for the publication of popular titles such as Maclean's (1911-, and its French-language ed, 1961-), the Financial Post (1907-), Mayfair (1927-, sold 1955), Canadian Homes and Gardens (1925-, sold 1962), and Chatelaine (and its French-language edition), and not for its scores of trade journals, that Maclean-Hunter is best known. The 2Oth century also witnessed the arrival of new media for the dissemination of news and entertainment: newspapers and magazines were successively forced to compete for and share audience markets with the cinema, radio, television, and - most recently - with the Internet. The results were predictable: declining circulations; the demise of many general-interest magazines in favour of those appealing to more specialized interests; a reduction in the number
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of broadsheet daily newspapers, particularly those published for evening consumption, and their frequent replacement by TABLOIDS, such as those of the highly successful Sun Media Corp. By the last decade of the 2oth century both the Canadian newspaper and magazine industries faced challenges to their future credibility in the case of the former, and to their very viability in the case of the latter. Despite the warnings regarding the concentration of newspaper ownership that were sounded in 1981 by the Report of the Kent Commission (Royal Commission on Newspapers/ Commission royale sur les quotidiens\ nothing was done officially to discourage the trend. Indeed, while also positioning itself in the British newspaper market, Canadian newspaper mogul Conrad Black's Hollinger Corp began systematically acquiring small Canadian dailies, many of them from the Thomson chain, which nonetheless retained ownership of its flagship daily, the nationally focused Globe and Mail. By 1996, when Hollinger acquired control of the 34 dailies that made up the Southam newspaper chain, it extended its dominance to a total of 61 of Canada's 105 daily newspapers. Black's subsequent acquisition from Thomson of the Victoria TimesColonist and the Nanaimo Daily News led to protests from rival newspaper proprietors and fresh calls for yet another Royal commission to study concentration of newspaper ownership. On 27 Oct 1998 Black launched a new national daily, the National Post, headquartered in Toronto, a single urban market said to be worth a total of nearly $800 million in annual revenues from advertising, subscriptions, and single-copy sales. It was also a market that already supported four major dailies and - counting the ethniclanguage press, weeklies, monthlies, and community papers - an overall total of more than 220 newspapers. In terms of mere numbers Canada's newspaper industry would appear to be flourishing. The same cannot, however, be said for the Canadian magazine industry, which by 1993 had shrunk to about 1,500 titles, employed approximately 6,400 people in their production, and circulated a total of 183 million copies. Thanks to competition from (mainly) American titles, however, Canadian periodicals enjoyed only a one-quarter share of the English-language
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market compared with three-quarters of the French-language market. This was little better than the situation thirty years earlier, before a 1964 tariff measure banning the importation of split-run foreign periodicals and denying tax relief to Canadian companies advertising in them. Two American titles, Time and Reader's Digest, were exempted from the tax penalty, by virtue of having produced separate Canadian editions in Canada since 1943. The exemptions proved fateful, for within a few years these two titles alone attracted over half of all Canadian magazine advertising revenue. The government's response, Bill C-58, cancelled the exemptions in 1976. Time reacted by dropping its Canadian edition; Reader's Digest 'naturalized' its Canadian edition by selling it. Under the double stimuli of tariff and tax protection, Canada's magazine sector had experienced a surge of growth, that led to the appearance of more than 150 new consumer magazines and at least 35 new business and trade magazines over a lo-year period. In the subsequent decade, however, the movement toward freer world trade posed a renewed threat to Canadian periodicals, as Canada's right to protect its cultural industries was repeatedly challenged by international trading partners, principally the United States. At the end of the 20th century, the Canadian government reaffirmed its commitment to the protection of Canadian periodicals, while visibly struggling to find legally tenable means of doing so. Further reading: Merrill Distad, 'Canada,' in Periodicals of Queen Victoria's Empire: An Exploration (Toronto: U Toronto P, 1966); Douglas Fetherling, The Rise of the Canadian Newspaper (Toronto: Oxford UP, 1990); Fraser Sutherland, The Monthly Epic: A History of Canadian Magazines (Toronto: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1989). MerriE Distad
NG, Lucy Arlene. Writer, poet, teacher, mother; b San Fernando, Trinidad, 10 July 1966; daughter of grocers Cho Chui Fei and Ng Hoy Sang. She grew up in Vancouver, working in her parents' store and reading 'books, books, books!' before taking her BA in creative writing at U British Columbia and her MA in English at Concordia
U. Her poems ('Yellow Sleeve Princess' and 'The Sullen Shapes of Poems') and prose ('Food for a Chinese Soul') reflect her sympathy with the immigrant experience, especially that of her parents. She aims to 'define emotionally and intellectually a Chinese experience and the rift that exists between it and the English word.' At press time, she was working on a book of linked short stories. R. Clark
NIAGARA (Neutral word [see IROQUOIAN], 'thunder of water'). The waterfall over the edge of the Niagara Escarpment, emptying the Niagara R into Lake Erie, was long regarded as a place of the spirit, and after European contact it came to be an emblem of the 'sublime' (see LANDSCAPE), as in poems by Joseph MERMET and others. Among the earliest EXPLORATION reports to attempt to describe the falls was that by Louis HENNEPIN; subsequent TRAVEL literature and painting (see LATIN AMERICA, VISUAL ARTS) further emphasized its grandeur and awesomeness. Among later writers to record their visits were Charles Dickens, Frances Kemble, Harriet Martineau, Susanna MOODIE, and Frances Trollope. Niagara Falls subsequently became a motif in POPULAR CULTURE, celebrated as a honeymoon site, and analyzed by Pierre BERTON and others. Further reading: Elizabeth McKinsey, Niagara Falls, Icon of the American Sublime (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985); Rob Shields, Places on the Margin (London: Routledge, 1991). NICHOL, Barrie Phillip ('bpNichol'). Writer, poet, teacher; b Vancouver 30 Sept 1944, d Toronto 25 Sept 1988; son of Avis Aileen (Workman)~and Glen Fuller Nichol; survived by his wife Ellie and daughter Sarah. Nichol's father worked for the Canadian Pacific Railway, and the family was frequently on the move during his early years. His mother's family roots were in Saskatchewan, especially the town of Plunkett, which later assumed a central role in his poetry. In the early 19605 he briefly taught school in Port Coquitlam, BC, but in 1963 moved to Toronto, where he remained for the rest of his life. He quickly became known as one of the leading experimental poets in Canada,
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and was associated with the international CONCRETE Poetry movement. He won the Governor General's AWARD in 1970 for four books published that year. His major work, The Martyrology, was begun in 1967; the first volumes were published by Coach House Press in 1972, and subsequent volumes appeared throughout his life, and posthumously. He taught at York U, and worked with the therapy community Therafields. His tragically early death deprived Canadian literature of one its most vital and significant figures - and also, one of its most widely and deeply loved. Apart from The Martyrology, his major works of poetry include JOURNEYING & the returns (1967); Monotones (1971); love: a book of remembrances (1974); and Zygal: A Book of Mysteries & Translations (1985). Prose works include Two Novels (1971); Craft Dinner (1978); Journal (1978); Still (1983); and Selected Organs: Parts of an Autobiography (1988). Recordings with the FOUR HORSEMEN include CaNADAda (1972) and Live in the West (1977); the most comprehensive cassette of his solo SOUND POETRY is Ear Rational (1982). This list is, however, extremely selective: Nichol published in a wide variety of forms, many of which were pamphlets, cards, prints, and other forms of non-standard publication. Indeed, some early experience working in a library left Nichol, it could well be argued, with a lifelong desire to challenge bibliographers. The most immediately striking feature of bpNichol's work, then, is its astonishing range and formal diversity. He wrote what he called 'trad' poems: traditional, that is, within the modern conventions of open-form, FREE VERSE poetry. He wrote concise lyrics, book-length poems, and one extended life-LONG POEM. He wrote and designed VISUAL poems; he drew COMIC strips, and poems based on comic strips. He wrote poems in which words were replaced by individual letters (his favourite letter was H). He designed new alphabets. He created poems out of instant photographs, and as kinetic computer programs. He wrote 'novels' the length of short stories. He wrote prose narrative in STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS style, in the repetitive style derived from Gertrude Stein, and as PARODIES of POPULAR styles such as the WESTERN or the detective novel; in 1982, his book Still won the 3-Day-Novel-Writing contest. He was a
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sensitive EDITOR of other people's manuscripts, and a supportive teacher of creative writing. He wrote theoretical essays, manifestos, critical commentaries, and introductions. He wrote several books of CHILDREN'S poetry, and collaborated on songs and scripts for the television series Fraggle Rock (see Dennis LEE). He wrote TRANSLATIONS in a wide variety of experimental forms. He created and performed sound poems. In all these fields he worked solo as well as in collaboration: in the theoretical essays of the Toronto Research Group he worked especially closely with Steve MCCAFFERY, and in sound poetry the two of them were joined by Paul DUTTON and Rafael BARRETO-RIVERA to form the Four Horsemen. As a group, the Horsemen collaborated on PERFORMANCE texts, poems, stage performances, recordings, and fiction. There is scarcely a conceivable form of literary activity that bpNichol did not touch, try, and transform. Yet this multiplicity of form, often radically disruptive of conventional expectations, was held together by a deep and clear commitment to the value of communication, and indeed to the necessity of human community; 'language does not exist on one level,' he wrote, 'it exists on many, and rather than trying to find the one true level you must become fluent in all of them.' In a 1966 manifesto, he described his need to find 'as many exits as possible from the self (language/communication exits) in order to form as many entrances as possible for the other, the other is the loved one and the other is the key ... the other is emerging as the necessary prerequisite for dialogues with the self that clarify the soul & heart and deepen the ability to love. I place myself there, with them ... who seek to reach themselves and the other thru the poem by as many exits and entrances as are possible.' Thus formal experimentation was always grounded, for Nichol, in the emotional realities of desire and loneliness, in the continual reaching out to the 'human community' which he defined by the simple word 'we.' There is a great deal of pain in Nichol's poetry. The stories of the fictional 'saints,' on which the early books of The Martyrology are based, are stories of fathers who abandon their sons, of brothers searching for lost brothers, of a lonely clown crying by the
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edge of a sea. As the later books become more directly autobiographical, they confront with devastating honesty the loss of a stillborn child, and eventually the imminent prospect of the poet's own death. For all their depth of feeling, however, the poems always remain playful and witty. No matter how bleak the content, the tone is celebratory and even joyful. Nichol can touch the reader profoundly with the most apparently superficial tricks of linguistic manipulation. In The Martyrology, for example, the 'saints' are at one level merely word games: every word beginning with the letters 'st' is regarded as a saint's name, so that 'stand' becomes 'saint and.' (Other names are more elaborate, such as the sinister saint ranglehold.) But Nichol took his saints very seriously: their stories accumulated into a MYTHOLOGY, assuming their own lives, and deaths. They became the medium through which he could write the profoundest truths he knew. He never forgot that they were 'only' words, but they were 'the words you trust to take you thru / to what place you don't know.' A word, for instance, like 'impartial,' which he transformed into 'imp art i always wanted / a dance among the little ones.' For a moment in the reader's eye, the 'little ones,' the letters themselves, do dance, impishly, across the page; yet the original sense of 'impartial' is not lost. The poet's 'i', in its characteristic lower case, stands back from the dominating position of the Romantic Author, the Original Genius, and becomes himself one of the little ones, impartially dancing in the flow of language. It is in his multiple sense of language, 'the holy place of consecration,' that all the paradoxes of bpNichol's work attain resolution. His favourite image of himself was as an 'apprentice' to language. Language for him could be a physical material to shape, stretch, distort, fragment, reassemble, and play with. Letters became LANDSCAPES opening into real and fictional worlds; and the breath of human speech (in an image borrowed from Hopi mythology) 'set the vibratory axis of the world in motion.' He could push language to the edge of abstraction, where traditional 'meaning' remained only as a potentiality implicit in letter shapes and articulate sounds. Yet he could also write sentences so honest and direct that they seem to have
bypassed all artifice and come straight from the heart. The most comprehensive selection of Nichol's work outside The Martyrology is An H in the Heart: A Reader, ed George BOWERING and Michael ONDAATJE (1994). He has been the DOCUMENTARY subject of two FILMS: The Sons of Captain Poetry (dir Michael Ondaatje, 1970), and bp: Pushing the Boundaries (dir Brian Nash, 1997). Further reading: Douglas Barbour, bpNichol and His Works (Toronto: ECW, 1992.); Roy Miki, ed, Tracing the Paths: Reading & Writing 'The Martyrology' (Vancouver: Talonbooks/West Coast Line, 1988); Roy Miki and Fred Wah, eds, Beyond the Orchard: Essays on 'The Martyrology' (Vancouver: West Coast Line, 1998); Irene Niechoda, A Sourceryfor Books i and 2 ofbpNichol's 'The Martyrology' (Toronto: ECW, 1992); Stephen Scobie, bpNichol: What History Teaches (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1984). Stephen Scobie
NICHOLS, Ruth. Children's writer, novelist; b Toronto 14 March 1948; daughter of Ruby (Smith) and Edward Nichols. She won her first major award (Shankar International Literary Contest for Children's Gold Medal) in 1962 at the age of 14 for a novelette about the imprisonment of Catherine di Medici. She became one of the earliest creators of Canadian CHILDREN'S fantasies with the publication of A Walk Out of the World (1969) and The Marrow of the World (1972), the latter winning the Canadian Library Assoc Book of the Year for Children Award in 1973. Both present tales in which troubled adolescents leave their confining urban surroundings by escaping to worlds that artfully combine both Tolkienian detail and a uniquely Canadian background. In 1976, she returned to her initial interest in historical novels and has continued to write in this genre. J. Kieran Kealy
NICOL, Eric Patrick (pseud Jabez). Humorist; b Kingston, ON, 28 Dec 1919; son of Amelia (Mananock) and William Nicol, an accountant. After serving in the air force, Nicol was educated at U British Columbia (MA, 1948). He became a scriptwriter, a NEWSPAPER columnist for the Vancouver Province, an occasional play-
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wright, and a constant satirist. Of his several plays, Like Father, Like Fun (1966; pub in Three Plays, 1975) received international attention, but his most successful work derived from his comic journalism. Works such as Sense and Nonsense (1947), The Roving I (1950), and Still a Nicol (1972) gathered whimsical and barbed observations of contemporary sexuality, domestic behaviour, and politics. Nicol, married to the CHILDREN'S writer Mary Razzell, collaborated frequently with the cartoonist Peter Whalley to expose the HUMOUR in Canadian history, and with Dave More to find the humour in SPORT. Dickens of the Mounted (1989) was a playful HOAX, purporting to be the confessions of Charles Dickens' son. Nicol's own autobiography appeared in 1998. He was named a Member of the Order of Canada in 2001. NIGOG. The various contributors to this review, founded in 1918 by Marcel DUGAS and others, often looked to Paris rather than the Quebec countryside for their inspiration. Among its contributors were Paul MORIN, Rene CHOPIN, and Jean-Aubert LORANGER. The cosmopolitanism of the magazine is sometimes credited for revitalizing the ECOLE LITTERAIRE DE MONTREAL, and making it possible for that body to bring about the modernization of francophone writing in Quebec. See also CASOARS DE L'ARCHE. Terry Whalen
NIVEN, Frederick John. Novelist; b Santiago, Chile, 31 March 1878, d Nelson, BC, 30 Jan 1944; son of Jane (Barclay) and John Niven, British consul and muslin manufacturer. Growing up in Scotland, Niven rebelled against his Calvinist parents. Although he never named them in his autobiography, Coloured Spectacles (1938), he repeatedly cast them as martinets in the dozen novels he set in the Scots border country, including Justice of the Peace (1914), Two Generations (1916) - works that led critics in 1916 to see him as Thomas Hardy's successor - and Triumph (1934). He set another two dozen books in Canada and on the high seas: WESTERNS, ROMANCES, and settlement narratives. These grew out of his contact with British Columbia. After early travels there, he worked with John BUCHAN in the British WAR Office, subsequently
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emigrating to Nelson in 1920. While his Canadian reputation long rested on the loose immigrant trilogy that began with The Flying Years (1935), attention subsequently turned to his skill at the personal sketch, as in Wild Honey (1927) and Colour in the Canadian Rockies (1937). NIXON, Rosemary. Fiction writer; b Watrous, SK, 28 Aug 1952; daughter of Mabel (Bowman) and David Deckert; m Bob Nixon; mother of Jordan Daniel (1982) and Madeleine Anne (1985). Nixon's experiences in rural Saskatchewan led to the writing of Mostly Country (1991), a collection of linked SHORT STORIES centred on the fictional town of Wadden, SK. Her teaching experience in Zaire informs The Cock's Egg (1994), stories that explore Canadians' perceptions of AFRICA and examine the way these travellers are affected by their surroundings. Set in the rural locales of Saskatchewan and Zaire, respectively, Nixon's short fiction most often describes characters who are detached from their community, have lost a sense of home, and cannot locate themselves in their immediate geography. Mark Lib in
NOBLE SAVAGE, a convention that developed following Michel de Montaigne's essay 'Of Cannibals' (1580), which proposed that human beings in their 'natural' state were perfect - perfectly 'civilized,' that is - and that wickedness (and 'savagery') were the result of society corrupting them. Rousseau's Emile (1762) made this concept familiar; the Romantic poets incorporated it into literary practice; and such POPULAR forms as the Tarzan tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs conventionalized it for the 20th century. Susanna MOODIE is only one of many Canadian writers who saw the Aboriginal as 'Nature's Gentleman' (after her first, somewhat more fearful and distancing response). But like the EUROPEAN conventions that constructed Aboriginal peoples around the world as 'evil,' 'primitive,' and 'savage,' the image of the 'noble savage' also distorted reality. See NATIVES IN LITERATURE.
NOEL, Francine. Novelist, playwright, professor; b Montreal 9 March 1945; daughter of Leopold Noel and Jeanne Alice Pelletier; educ U
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Montreal (MA, 1970) and U Vincennes (Paris XIII; PhD, 1973). While still a university student, Noel embarked on an active, though brief, career as an actress, mainly performing with the theatre company Les Saltimbanqu.es. She began teaching drama at C Sainte-Marie in Montreal (1969); the college became U Quebec a Montreal, where she currently teaches in the arts faculty. Noel also worked as a theatre critic for the renowned Quebec journal Jcu. In an innovative 1980 article, 'Plaidoyer pour mon image,' she deplored the absence of women playwrights, which in turn, she felt, led to a scarcity of strong roles for actresses. While she herself then wrote a play, Chandeleur (first produced 9 Jan 1986 at Montreal's Theatre d'Aujourd'hui), she is better known for her fiction. Her first novel, Maryse (1983), became an instant best-seller in Quebec. In it, the main character Maryse O'Sullivan is torn between her dual cultural heritage: French-Canadian on her mother's side, IRISH on her father's. The only bond between her parents is their common lack of schooling and their poverty-stricken social condition. Maryse resolves to change her fate through college education and the company of better-off partners. But in the end, she finds salvation through literature and creative writing. Thus, more than just the tale of the coming of age of a young woman during the tumultuous 19705 in Quebec, Maryse can also be read as a KUNSTLERROMAN, the story of the unfolding, against all odds, of a true FEMINIST writer. Maryse was followed in 1988 by a sequel, Myriam premiere, which is set against the backdrop of the tangible social and political gloom in Quebec that followed the defeat of the 1980 independence referendum. Although still struggling with her personal phantoms, Maryse O'Sullivan has nonetheless managed to achieve fame as a respected playwright. She has a little money, a place of her own, and a decent boyfriend. Feminist issues are not relinquished, but are revealed through the eyes of several female characters, including Myriam Ladouceur-Grandmaison, Maryse's best friend's feisty eight-year-old daughter. Disappointed in her own attempts to bear a child, Maryse has lovingly taken little Myriam under her wing. Maryse thus passes on to her spiritual godchild the feminine cultural and literary legacy that had been painfully miss-
ing in her own childhood. Both Maryse and Myriam premiere at times depart from the conventions of what otherwise purports to be realist fiction, adopting such figures as genies and talkative angels. In this respect, Noel's first two novels are close to the Latin American MAGIC REALISM of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende. Above all, the main accomplishment of these novels is their ability to grasp, organize, and contextualize the ideas, images, and symbolic embodiment of feminist and GENDER thinking in Quebec. Moreover, the feminist themes in both Maryse and Myriam premiere are coupled with a feminist narrative structure, one that challenges the traditionally androcentric and monological character of the narrative voice. This is specially obvious in Maryse, where the female narrator appears as a true Fairy Godmother: feminist, motherly, omniscient - a narrative technique that playfully and cleverly reverses the convention of the ubiquitous and authoritative male narrator. Francine Noel published a third novel, Babel, prise deux ou Nous avons tous decouvert I'Amerique, in 1991. In 1992, the novel was distributed in France, as well as in other francophone countries, in a slightly revised version (titled only Nous avons tous decouvert I'Amerique). Babel, prise deux represents a rather abrupt change in Noel's tone and stylistic strategy, particularly in the use of the narrative voice. Indeed, the caring narrator has vanished, leaving the two characters, Fatima Gagne and Louis Langevin, with no choice but to speak for themselves in their respective diaries. Fatima Gagne is a 3O-something, free-spirited single woman who seemingly cherishes her freedom. In her diary, she jots down various remarks about her many lovers, her thoughts about Quebec's political situation, her mixed feelings about her mother, her friends. She especially admires Amelia Malaise, whom she sees as a surrogate sister. Amelia - with her threefold cultural and linguistic background: Spanish, French, and Quebecois - works as a translator. Her highly prized translating project, however - on the works of an obscure LATIN AMERICAN woman writer - is brought to an abrupt stop when she dies in a plane crash over Eastern Canada. Amelia thus remains a mysterious and troubling figure throughout the novel. Apart from a few letters
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she has written to Fatima, she takes shape only through Fatima's words and those of Louis Langevin, Amelia's former lover. By an unusual twist of fate, Fatima and Louis have in turn fallen in love. Fatima remarks that since she often dons Amelia's clothes, it is only fitting that she should also inherit her boyfriend. Louis's diary alternates with Fatima's, giving the novel an interesting doublevoicedness, each discourse appearing as a challenge to the other. Critics, unfortunately, did not warm to Babel, prise deux as they did to Maryse and Myriam premiere, perhaps because Babel, prise deux is not as joyously feminist, bold, and at times plain cheeky, as the two other novels were. Sorority and feminist politics instead give way to private matters (male/female relationships) and to broader NATIONALIST concerns (language and immigration issues). Babel, prise deux thus appears as the locus of a textual friction between nationalist and feminist discourses in Quebec. It may be, however, that this tension should be grasped as yet another symptom of the atavistic (and ongoing) exclusion of WOMEN from the political sphere, and of the difficulties Quebecois women writers face in trying to become true speaking subjects in the nationalist literary tradition. Futher reading: 'Francine Noel,' Voix et images, special issue 53 (1993): 216-332. Caroline Barrett
NORRIS, Ken. Poet, professor; b New York City 3 April 1951; son of Theresa (Castellano) and Leroy Norris, US navy; emig 1972. Norris studied with Louis DUDEK at McGill U and became involved with an avant-gardist group of artists and poets associated with Vehicule P, including writer Stephen MORRISSEY; Norris's Vehicule Days was published in 1993. Report on the Second Half of the Twentieth Century (1977-92) is Norris's multivolume poetic diary. Other collections include In the House of No (1991), featuring an introduction by Dudek; a selected poems (Full Sun, 1993); and Limbo Road (1998). Deemed a late Romantic for his advocacy of the common man, plain-spoken verse, and eclectic or open forms, Norris has been criticized for presuming to chronicle the age by reporting on his own unexceptional personae. He is also the author of a critical study of small-press JOURNALS, The Little
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Magazine in Canada, 1925-1980 (1984), and a volume of essays on contemporary poetics, A New World (1994). He teaches Canadian literature at U Maine (Orono). Mark Cochrane
NORTH. To ask what Canada's national anthem has in common with Wade Hemsworth's The Blackfly Song,' Canadian COMIC books of the 19405, coureurs du bois, or the story of Albert Johnson, the mad trapper, is to ask a central question about the country and one of the key aspects of its identity. From at least 1867, Canadians have seen themselves as a northern nation with a distinct set of northern values and characteristics. The 'true North strong and free,' as Robert Stanley WEIR called Canada in his version of Calixa LAVALLEE and Adolphe-Basile ROUTHIER'S 'Chant nationale,' provides a rallying point for Canadian unity, sovereignty, patriotism, and nationalist vision, regardless of what is understood by the term 'true North,' or where, precisely, North is located. To a significant degree, Canada's story is an attempt to define and locate North and to articulate what it means to be a northern nation. The territory that would become Canada was always seen as northern by the European powers who claimed to have 'discovered' the continent. Either they sought to get around the few acres of snow that God gave to Cain, thereby establishing an obessive search for a NORTHWEST PASSAGE, or they sought to explore, colonize, and profit from the fur, fisheries, and whaling that set the parameters of Canadian colonial history and geography. Either way, as a frightful place of cold and ice or a bountiful source of raw materials, these preCanadian concepts of place continue to determine how Canadians think of themselves. At the beginning of the 2ist century, Canadians remain both repelled by a northernness that can bring a metropolis to its knees (as when the ice storm of Jan 1998 crippled Montreal), yet drawn by the quest for oil, minerals, and the northern adventures that fuel so many Canadian stories. Most southern Canadians have always felt ambivalent about the North: attracted by its austere beauty, its challenge to the spirit and imagination, and its lure (qualities that characterize the rhetoric surrounding the 1897-8
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YUKON Gold Rush), they are equally horrified by the months of darkness, the remoteness, and the cold of those vast lands lying beyond the fragile chain of southern cities, or discouraged by the practical difficulties of developing a barren land, of transforming, as F.R. SCOTT observes in 'Laurentian Shield,' the muskeg and rock into a home. Consequently, many Canadians go south as 'snowbirds' to Florida, or to other warm climes; they turn their backs on the realities of their northern home, which, nonetheless, haunts them in imagination and follows them in the culture of northernness that pervades Canadian arts, historiography, and political life, and the marketing of the country abroad. Stephen LEACOCK, one of many writers who have attempted to explain the appeal of the North, put the matter succinctly in Til Stay in Canada' (1936): 'To all of us here, the vast unknown country of the North, reaching away to the polar seas, supplies a peculiar mental background.' This imaginative background is what informs so much of the cultural life of Canada even if- perhaps especially when Canadians seldom venture above the 50th parallel. The North is the LANDSCAPE of the GROUP OF SEVEN, Canada's most influential group of painters, whether the norths in their canvasses are just north of Toronto in the areas of Haliburton, Algonquin, or Algoma, or in the stretches of eastern Arctic ice and tundra of A.Y. Jackson, the NORTHWEST TERRITORIES of Frank Johnston, or the glaciers and peaks of Lawren Harris's paintings of the Rocky Mountains. The Group influenced other painters by attracting them to the Arctic, as is the case with Judith Currelly, Tony Onley, Jack Shadbolt, and Doris McCarthy, or by teaching them how to see a landscape of seemingly overwhelming dimensions (see VISUAL ARTS). The Group also influenced artists working in other media. Two examples suggest the scope of the connection between their paintings and poetry. Poet A.J.M. SMITH'S 'The Lonely Land' (1929), inspired by a 192,6 Group exhibition, was set to MUSIC by Violet Archer in a 1978 composition for solo voice and piano. And Robert KROETSCH celebrates fellow artist Tom Thomson in his colloquial, irreverent poem 'Meditation on Tom Thomson' (1975), thus pointing the way for contemporary artist-curator Andrew
Hunter to make Thomson the hero of his 1998 exhibition and catalogue-cum-mystery-novel called Up North: A Northern Ontario Tragedy (J997)- Harry Freedman's 1957-8 three-part composition for orchestra, Images, was directly inspired by Canadian paintings, and part one, 'Blue Mountain,' is Freedman's attempt to capture in music what Harris represented in his painting Lake and Mountains (1928). Perhaps the most interesting influence of the Group was their impact on the young Glenn Gould, who attributed his lifelong fascination with the North to their imagery. This fascination culminated in Gould's sound documentary (for five speaking voices and a train) called The Idea of North (1967). Interest in representing the North is by no means limited to the inspiration of the Group of Seven. Many other composers, including Francois Morel, Serge Gallant, Harry Somers, Diana Mclntosh, and R. Murray SCHAFER, have set the North to music. Artist Gwen Boyle visited the Arctic to create Tuning (1996), an installation piece using glass, bone, and a huge steel bar that resonates to the sounds Boyle taped at the pole. Filmmakers have been quick to explore the visual possibilites and technological challenges of filming in the North, from early examples - Nell Shipman's Back to God's Country (1919), or Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922) - to a long line of excellent NATIONAL FILM BOARD DOCUMENTARIES and contemporary feature films. Never Cry Wolf (1983) is based on Farley MOWAT'S novel and Shadow of the Wolf (1992) on Yves THERIAULT'S Agaguk (1958). More experimental films include Francois Girard's Thirty-Two Short Films about Glenn Gould (1993), which opens and closes with shots of a man in black walking across the snow, and Peter Mettler's filming of the Northern Lights, Picture of Light (1994). Perhaps the richest source of material about the North lies in Canadian fiction, non-fiction, and drama because it is narrrative art that constructs the mythic stories, legendary heroes, and symbolic landscapes of a northern culture. Howard O'HAGAN'S Tayjohn (1939), for example, captures the forbidding landscape of northwestern British Columbia and creates, in the title character, a haunting figure - part white, part Shuswap - whose life and disappearance into the snow seem to represent both the attractions
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and the terrors of a northern existence (see NATIVES IN LITERATURE). In La montagne secrete (1961), however, Gabrielle ROY describes a North that extends from Yukon to LABRADOR and whose majestic beauty inspires her hero to become an artist (modelled on Quebec painter Rene Richard) through his intimate experiences of northern rivers, tundra, taiga, and mountains. The North is so much a part of Roy's painter that he dies when separated from it. But northern narratives are not always as symbolic or tragic as these novels suggest. Canadian literature for children is rich in stories about the North such as Zoom Away (1985) by Tim WYNNE-JONES, with pictures by Eric Bedoes; the INUIT stories by Michael Arvaarluk Kusugak (Hide and Sneak, Baseball Bats for Christmas), illustrated by Vladyana Krykorka; or Buried in Ice (1992), the illustrated version of Owen Beattie and John Geiger's scientific account of opening graves on Beechey Island in Frozen in Time: Unlocking the Secrets of the Franklin Expedition (1987). For young teens there are Pierre BERTON'S Adventures in Canadian History series and such books as Farley Mowat's Lost in the Barrens (1956) or Eric Walters's Trapped in Ice (1997). Rudy WIEBE'S A Discovery of Strangers (1994) is a historical treatment of the first FRANKLIN expedition of 1819-21 with its encounter between two cultures, English and Dene, and Mordecai RICHLER'S Solomon Gursky Was Here (1990) is an epic PARODY of the foundations of the Canadian nation state that links southern Canada, from east to west, with the Arctic and a lost jEWisn-Inuit connection. Three decades after But We Are Exiles (1965), which is set on the Mackenzie River, Robert Kroetsch returned north to rewrite the story of the KLONDIKE and of Robert SERVICE'S famous poem 'The Shooting of Dan McGrew' (1907) in The Man from the Creeks (1998). Fiction writers as different as Fred BODSWORTH, Elizabeth HAY, M.T. KELLY, and Ann Tracy tell repeatedly what Margaret AT WOOD insists on in Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature (1995): the North is an inescapable part of the physical world in Canada and of the Canadian imagination. Non-fiction accounts of northern adventure are almost as common as the novels and stories, and they contribute fully to a narrative under-
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standing of national identity. Among the bestknown are books by Farley Mowat (eg, his Top of the World trilogy; Tundra, 1973; The Snow Walker, 1975; People of the Deer, 1952), and Pierre Berton (eg, The Arctic Grail, 1988; Klondike, 1958; The Mysterious North, 1956). There are numerous ethnographic memoirs of life and work across the North, such as James HOUSTON'S Confessions of an Igloo Dweller (1995), Diamond Jenness's People of the Twilight (1928), Raymond de Coccola's Ayorama (1956), Ernie Lyall's An Arctic Man (I979). and Vilhjalmur STEFANSSON'S The Friendly Arctic (1922). Moving Inuit autobiographies such as /, Nuligak (1971) and Minnie Aodla FREEMAN'S Life Among the Qallunaat (1978) present life as a Native northerner sees it. Most people who go North want to write about the experience, as if writing it down were a form of exorcism or a means of possession; three examples of this personal narration of North are Wiebe's Playing Dead: A Contemplation Concerning the Arctic (1989), Aritha VAN HERK'S Places Far From Ellesmere (1990), and John Moss's Enduring Dreams 1,1994). This personal mode of presentation also occurs in poetry and drama. The most important poetic examples are Henry BEISSEL'S Cantos North (1982), a i2-part meditation on aspects of North, Al PURDY'S North of Summer (1967), a sequence of poems inspired by his visit to Baffin Island, andj. Michael YATES'S Great Bear Lake Meditations (1970). In the theatre, Wendy LILL presents the disillusionment of an idealistic, young nurse sent to a northern, Native community in The Occupation of Heather Rose (1987), and Lawrence Jeffery captures the personal anguish of the Hornby tragedy in Who Look in Stove (1993). But Canadian plays about the North date back to the late 19205, when Herman VOADEN and Merrill DENISON created uniquely Canadian stories and characters by situating them in the Haliburton highlands and the country north of Lake Superior. Since the 19705, southern Canadians have written many plays with northern settings and subjects, including as Herschel HARDIN'S Esker Mike and His Wife Agiluk (1973), about the desecration of Inuit culture in the 19605, when Inuvik was being built; or Henry Beissel's magical play Inook and the Sun (1974). Colonial Tongues (1995) by Mansel Robinson and Sled (1997) by Judith THOMPSON have continued
NORTH
to explore the significance of the North for southern Canadian identity at the same time as northerners were putting their own stories on stage - Nakai Theatre in Whitehorse has workshopped plays by playwrights such as Philip Adams, Leslie Hamson, Sharon Shorty, and Patti Flather and Leonard Linklater; and Tunooniq Theatre, based in Pond Inlet on Baffin Island, has created strong Inuit drama. Canadians need not turn to serious literature and drama, however, to find themselves represented as northerners. Popular television programs such as North of Sixty and the music of Inuk star Susan Aglukark are contemporary examples of a northern popular culture that has existed in Canada since the 19205. In the early days of RADIO, children absorbed northern adventure from programs such as Men in Scarlet and Sergeant Preston of the Yukon. Films such as Rose Marie (1936) became synonymous with Canada itself, and the COMIC BOOK heroes of the 19405 - Nelvana of the Northern Lights and Johnny CANUCK - ventured into Arctic terrain more dangerous than their human foes. POPULAR culture also includes the tourist trinkets (polar bear key chains; mukluks; earrings shaped like ulus; parkas; and smoked arctic char) for sale in urban centres and airports, stamp series celebrating images of the North, and billboard advertisements for beer or mutual funds that use scenes of forests, glaciers, and Inukshuks to sell promises of pleasure and prosperity. Magazines such as Up Here, with stunning photographs of land, animals, and indigenous peoples, also market northern adventure and identity to southern Canadians (and other tourists) by assuring readers that the real North is only as far away as their computers and a Web site. Political rhetoric in Canada has exploited the idea of northern identity from the time of Confederation, whether the North that was being praised as the defining feature of national identity and economic prosperity was located in the eastern provinces or in the sub-Arctic zones of Hudson Bay and the domains of the fur-trading companies. An early example of this nationalist zeal is R.G. Haliburton's The Men of the North and Their Place in History (1869) in which Haliburton, a founding member of the CANADA FIRST MOVEMENT, insists that the northern cli-
mate of Canada will build a superior racfe of people and a unique national character. From Haliburton it is a short step to 20th-century nationalists such as George Denison, Charles Tuttle, and Richard Finnic, each of whom saw the North as a force for Canadian unity within the British Empire. Politicians also recognized and used this northern rhetoric to gain and hold power, no one more effectively than John Diefenbaker, who won the 1958 federal election by promising northern development and boosting northern pride. Canadian history has always been shaped by a northern vision, as is clear from the pages of Canada's oldest journal, The Beaver, and leading historians - with the exception of Donald CREIGHTON - have articulated a strong sense of Canada as a northern country, whether they were focusing on economics, as was Harold INNIS in The History of the Fur Trade in Canada (1930), or countering the eastern bias of Creighton as was W.L. MORTON in The Canadian Identity (1961). Since Morton's stress on the central place of the North in Canadian history, northern HISTORIOGRAPHY has developed to include the groundbreaking volumes of Morris Zaslow (The Northward Expansion of Canada, 1988, and The Opening of the Canadian North, 1971) and the work of historians such as Ken Coates and William Morrison, who have lived and worked in the North and argue that a truly northern history is written by those living north of 60 degrees. Canadian geographers -John Stager, William Wonders, R.A.J. Phillips, and Charles Camsell — made an equally important contribution to the concept of a northern identity for Canada, but perhaps the most significant is Quebec geographer Louis-Edmond Hamelin. In Canadian Nordicity: It's Your North Too (1978) and Realites Canadiennes: Le nord canadien et ses referents conceptuels (1988), Hamelin explains Canadian nordicity in precise geophysical and meteorological terms, but with a profound understanding of the emotional and political power of what Glenn Gould called 'the idea of North' to unify all Canadians. Hamelin's nordicity is a fact of climate, ecology, and culture; it is measured in latitude and permafrost. But it is also an attitude of mind, an ethos, a spirit that binds all Canadians, ALLOPHONE, francophone, and anglophone, to this place.
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The location of North has shifted with the passage of time. Like the historiography of Canada, North began in the east with the vaguely situated, romantic landscape of the pays d'en haut or a mythic grand Nord. This early North, which Creighton equated with England's dominions north of the St Lawrence, gradually metamorphosed into the great North West, the North of the Yukon Gold Rush, the sub-Arctic Barrenlands, and the Beaufort Sea. As provincial and territorial boundaries took shape, so did the norths of provincial, territorial, and high Arctic regions. The fabled NORTHWEST PASSAGE, which claimed Sir John Franklin in 1845, acquired new political and military significance in the post-Second World War period, when Canada asserted its sovereignty and security in the face of American claims to control over Arctic waters. And on i April 1999, the map of Canada and the Canadian North shifted once more to create the new territory of NUNAVUT from the eastern half of the Northwest Territories. The North, in short, has moved farther and farther north, while never relinquishing its hold over the southern imagination, which still insists on finding the North in its own backyard. It is this stubborn hold on the imagination that suggests the power of what Hamelin called Canadian nordicity to provide a central idea around which Canadians can gather in the zist century. The flexibility of this idea of North, its ability to include Newfoundland, Labrador, Quebec, Ontario, the Prairies, British Columbia, Yukon, the Northwest Territories, and Nunavut, its sweep from east to west and back again, as Roy's hero in La montagne secrete understood, is the source of its conceptual and symbolic strength. It is a strength derived from the capacity to include more than Haliburton imagined as North - the northerners themselves, from the Euro-Canadian settlers in Yukon to the Dene, northern Cree, Inu, and the Inuit of all three territories. This new Canadian North is circumpolar, with a culture that includes Dene music, the stories of MARKOOSIE, Agnes NANOGAK'S More Tales from the Igloo (1986), the illustrated narratives of Alootook IPELLIE, the sculpture of master carvers such as Osuitok Ipeelee, Oviloo Tunnillie, and Judas Ullulaq, and the constitution of Nunavut. It is the Canada of contemporary artist Jin-Me Yoon, who, in A
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Group of Sixty-Seven (1996), reclaims the empty landscape of a Harris painting by placing Korean Canadians in the scene. It is the Canada that playwright John GRAY celebrates in the oath of allegiance that he and others devised in 1995 to celebrate, not only 'the true north strong and free,' but also this 'ancient northern land.' See also LIFE W R I T I N G .
Further reading: Erling Friis-Baastad and Patricia Robertson, eds, Writing North: An Anthology of Contemporary Yukon Writers (Whitehorse: Beluga Books, 1992); Sherrill Grace, ed, Representing North, special issue of Essays on Canadian Writing 59 (Fall 1996); John Moss, ed, Echoing Silence: Essays and Arctic Narrative (Ottawa: U Ottawa P, 1998); Penny Petrone, ed, Northern Voices: Inuit Writing in English (Toronto: U Toronto P, 1988). Sherrill Grace
NORTHERN ATHAPASKAN ORAL LITERATURE. Requiring only a human mind to carry it about, ORAL LITERATURE has been a powerful force in maintaining the world view of Northern Athapaskan speakers and guiding their adaptations to the ever-changing aspects of their lives. This remains so even though some groups have lost or are fast losing their Athapaskan languages and narrators often tell their stories in varied forms of English or French. Although I9th- and early 2,oth-century missionaries developed writing systems enabling some Chipewyan, Kutchin (Gwich'in), and Carrier to became literate in their native tongues, these earlier peoples generally read only Christian scripture or wrote letters to each other, rarely recording their oral traditions. By contrast, current programs for preserving Native culture now include printed school texts - in English, French, or Athapaskan languages - of traditional MYTHS and histories told by elders, and linguists have now provided orthographies for almost all Northern Athapaskan LANGUAGES. Popular radio and TV shows run by northern Natives also feature live oral traditions, and Native newspapers or books written by Athapaskans themselves offer traditional stories. The compelling force of 'oral' literature continues no matter how the texts are delivered or to
NORTHERN ATHAPASKAN ORAL LITERATURE
what new circumstances their messages may be directed. At contact, which varied from the mid-i8th to the mid-i9th centuries, between 45,000 and 27,000 speakers of Northern Athapaskan languages were spread sparsely over a huge area of northwestern Canada and adjacent Alaska. All were hunters who in Canada lived primarily in the harsh boreal forest on the edges of the Barren Grounds and in the Cordillera. They were loosely linked by shared territory and extensive linguistic ties. Their Native neighbours were the INUIT, ALGONQUIANS (Algonkian), and various Northwest Coast groups with whom they traded or fought but whose languages were quite different. Athapaskan' is itself an Algonkian word. Athapaskans generally refer to themselves by specific contexts requiring identification: for example, their major food resource, the chief headman's name, or the stories linked to natural features in the area customarily exploited by a band. In fact Athapaskans habitually 'read' their homelands as a series of stories associated with such places, so that constant oral repetition of this information may enable them to travel without further guidance to places they have never been. Elders still express the wish to see with their own eyes places known to them only through myth. For political purposes present-day Athapaskans of the Shield and Mackenzie borderlands usually group themselves together simply as 'Dene,' meaning 'people'; in YUKON, the preferred term is FIRST NATIONS. All, however, are increasingly returning to Native terminology for their various subgroupings, while recognizing long-standing terminologies of anthropologists such as those in the Subarctic volume of The Handbook of North American Indians (1981), which are employed here. From Hudson Bay west these subgroups are the Chipewyan, Dogrib, Hare, Bear Lake, Mountain, and Slavey Indians of the Canadian Shield and Mackenzie borderlands in NORTHWEST TERRITORIES, northern Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. The Yellowknives, once closely allied to the Dogrib, are now extinct. Farther west are the Kutchin (Gwich'in), Han, and a few Upper Tanana (who live primarily in the Yukon River drainage basin), all straddling the Alaska-Canadian border. Southward in the
Cordillera are the Tutchone and the Tagish of southern Yukon, whose chief language became Tlingit during the late i9th century (as may be true of some of the inland Tlingit of Yukon). The Kaska and Tahltan live in the interior of southern Yukon and northern British Columbia while the Sekani, Beaver, Babine, Carrier, Chilcotin, and Sarsee inhabit central and southern British Columbia and Alberta. The Chilcotin are often included in the Plateau Indian cultural area and the Sarsee are treated as a branch of the Blackfeet Plains Indians, but neither group changed their language. The Tsetsaut worked their way from northern British Columbia to the Coast and were absorbed by the TSIMSHIAN. Critical for understanding Athapaskan oral literature is an awareness of the truly dynamic landscape of the subarctic. Alterations in weather, glacial, and drainage patterns; volcanic explosions; forest fires; and shifting tree lines mark the last several thousand years, and all have interacted with the changing seasonal movements and complex natural cycles of both small and large game and fish. Humans dependent on subarctic sources alone could never fully predict just where and when food would be abundant or scarce. Native oral traditions and written historical sources both attest vividly to starvation in the past. We still lack a full understanding of Athapaskan prehistory, but at contact all Northern Athapaskans were caught up in the fur trade. Specific contact histories vary widely, but by the late i8th century some Athapaskans of the Shield were being pushed west into new territory, especially by the Algonkian CREE, who first acquired guns. Many Chipewyan and Beaver stories recount the ensuing hostilities. As the fur trade developed, Athapaskans throughout the interior were drawn to Euro-American fur-trading posts, which were themselves positioned and then repositioned as European fashions and fur supplies also shifted. The traders employed Athapaskan, non-Athapaskan Indian, and METIS 'servants' whose wives, too, were often from distant places. All contributed bits of their own tradition to the local oral repertory, as did the missionaries who followed the traders in hopes of changing the Native value systems In the Cordillera adjacent to the Northwest Coast, the near-extinction of the sea otter forced
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early 19th-century Euro-American trading captains to look inland for furs. Building on old trading ties, coastal peoples became essential middlemen in this trade, and Athapaskans further expanded their store of oral literature in the storytelling sessions accompanying it. Arctic coastal whaling, gold, and other extractive activities of the Euro-Americans continued to develop the boom-and-bust economies that still characterize the NORTH. Every boom attracted temporary new influxes of Caucasian people. Most famous, perhaps, was the KLONDIKE Gold Rush of 1898, about which Indians and Caucasians tell very different stories, each embedded deeply in their respective oral and written literatures. Construction of the Alaska Highway during the Second World War brought record numbers of non-Natives north. On their return south, most left a legacy of greatly expanded contact with the 'outside' and the need for further Athapaskan adaptations. The most significant aspect of contact everywhere was the introduction of European diseases, which repeatedly reduced the scanty Native population, often by a half or more, and we can only guess how many kndwledgeable elders died before passing on their unique knowledge. Population figures rose again only after postwar government policies introduced health, welfare, and education programs. By then most Athapaskans lived for at least part of the year in permanent villages or towns. Some still rely heavily on subsistence activities in the bush, and some are full-time wage earners. Land claims remain a major political focus. The constant challenges of a difficult landscape and unpredictable history are probably linked to the 'mobility' - both physical and intellectual - and the pragmatic adaptability and rugged individualism encapsulated in the oral literature of Northern Athapaskans. It is probably no accident that in one form or another most groups tell of a single culture hero or of two (or three) brothers who long ago set out to travel about the world, usually by paddling a canoe. The strongest brother, often known as 'The Traveller' or by a similar epithet, makes the world fit for human life. Sometimes there are several culture heroes, including borrowed TRiCKSTER-transformers such as the Algonkian Wisakedjek or RAVEN of the Northwest Coast. 824
Ann Chowning has suggested that Raven ('Crow') may actually have been an Athapaskan creation, but he apparently drops out of narrative as one goes east on the Shield. The Tagish, Tahltan, Sekani, and Carrier attribute the birth of game and some other animals to a female Animal Mother, a concept also known to the Bella Coola (Nuxalk). The Chipewyan and some neighbouring groups attribute the origin of land, water, and animals to a mysterious 'tall man' who tore a dog-husband to pieces but whose primeval wife gave birth to humans. Various other forms of a dog-husband myth are widely told. Humans and animals are often not clearly differentiated in myth, and the quality of myth time may occur even today regardless of chronological reckoning, though in Athapaskan stories of long ago mythical events are usually distinguished from recent historical and presentday happenings. In any case, how to survive successfully in the various worlds they recognize has long engrossed the Athapaskans. Innumerable stories tell of animals assuming human appearance and bestowing superhuman powers and knowledge upon fortunate individuals who visit non-human worlds. They return with valuable information about how game and fish wish their bodies to be treated when they give them up for food, or how other natural phenomena expect to be regarded. Dreaming and vision quests for spirit helpers remain important to many Athapaskans. Required secrecy often limits our knowledge about them, but 'Prophets,' whether or not influenced by Christianity, may draw on their dreams to tell others publicly how to follow trails to other worlds. They explain moral precepts that humans must obey, and prescribe songs, dances, and other rituals. Oral literature also touches on other key concerns, especially proper relationships between humans. Some stories are primarily to amuse and are told mainly to CHILDREN by their grandmothers, but more serious myths are attempted only by older storytellers whose skills in narration are well known. Storytelling, singing, and oratory remain vital aspects of both domestic life and peaceful visits with others. Attentive listeners ponder their messages at different stages in their own lives and may even
NORTHERN ATHAPASKAN ORAL LITERATURE
ultimately incorporate their own memorable experiences into the fabric of oral tradition. Oral literature is never static. Samuel HEARNE, Alexander MACKENZIE, and Sir John FRANKLIN recorded Athapaskan stories, as did early missionaries. Some wanted only to illustrate the 'childlike' nature of the Indians; others, such as Fr Emile PETITOT or Fr A.G. Morice, published Athapaskan texts with translations. Extensive ethnographic fieldwork began only in the 20th century. Influenced by Franz BOAS, who thought that recording Native texts offered one way to escape Western ideology and enter the Native mind, ethnographers usually devoted some attention to oral literature, though often as a kind of collateral ending to their ethnography or as a separate publication in a FOLKLORE journal, so that those seeking full cultural contexts had to consult sources elsewhere. Lt George Emmons, Diamond Jenness, Cornelius Orsgood, and James Teit are among those who contributed significant ethnographic studies and folklore articles, but their texts were usually only in English. Among more linguistically oriented ethnographers, Pliny Goddard, familiar with the Athapaskan-speaking Hupa, recorded both Chipewyan and Beaver texts early in the 2oth century. Later, Li Fang Kwei published a Chipewyan text, and, with Ronald Scollon, a series of them. During the late ipth and 20th centuries, folklore scholars also drew on Northern Athapaskan oral traditions to pursue their own agenda - for example to build up evolutionary systems in the manner of Frazer's Golden Bough. By the 19405 the American J of Folklore had become influenced by European 'folklorists' interested in distribution studies of tale types or motifs, JUNGIAN and FREUDIAN interpretations, and attempts to systematize forms of oral literature while anthropologists developed 'functional' analyses and ethnohistorical interests. Following the Second World War a new surge of interest in oral literature drew together anthropologists, folklore and literary scholars. Claude Levi-Strauss in particular refocused this interest with his fourvolume Mythologiqu.es, attempting to link the oral literature of South America and North America through structural analysis. He included a relatively limited analysis of Northern Athapaskan myths, not knowing of the wide
northern distribution of some key stories such as Star Husband since the data were not yet published, nor did he appreciate the marvellous novelistic abilities of Athapaskan raconteurs since structuralism ignores it. Following his lead, however, many ethnographers came to view oral literature and sometimes all of culture as 'texts' to be analyzed in a wide range of ways. The literary qualities of stories, performance, audience participation, place names and storytelling, the use of myth and legend to convey political agenda or to comment on other aspects of modern life, careful linguistic analysis - all became grist in the mill of oral literature. We still need to understand just how Athapaskans manipulate their Native texts to incorporate Euro-American stories or those of nearby Natives. Why should an elderly non-literate Tutchone explain how people began to plant food and domesticate animals by telling a story of a princess and a swineherd, or volunteer a version of the well-known story published by Jack London as 'To Build A Fire,' leaving us to guess whether its origin is Aboriginal or a white man's tale of the Gold Rush of 1898? Or what are we to think when an Inland Tlingit, who also speaks Athapaskan, tells the universal 'Flood' story in English but definitely turns it into both a proof for ancient land claims and a moving love story, whereas the equivalent of Mrs Noah in Western tradition is, at best, a shrew? To catch the flavour of some newer approaches to Athapaskan oral literature, readers can consult Julie Cruikshank's Life Lived like a Story: Life Stones of Three Yukon Elders. Written in collaboration with a Tagish and two Tutchone women, it shows how oral literature shaped their lives. Reading Voices, developed for schools in collaboration with the Council for Yukon Indians, explores the similarities and differences between oral and written literature. In The Social Life of Stories, she shows, for instance, how narrators at a Yukon folklore festival conveyed their messages to a mixed Native and nonNative audience. In a separte work, Richard Slobodin analyzes the Kutchin story 'Without Fire' with respect to warfare, survival and vengeance, treating form, style, content, and motifs. Robin Ridington's studies of Beaver culture have expanded from Prophet rituals into a larger context of 'soundscapes.' Henry Sharp tells how
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'Big Foot' entered Chipewyan oral literature. June Helm and David Smith each ponder Dogrib and Chipewyan ethnohistory and traditions relating to power. Patrick Moore and Angela Wheelock consider Slavey Wolverine myths and visions, giving both colloquial and literal translations of their texts, while Ronald and Suzanne Scollon analyze the ethnography of speaking based on a short Chipewyan text. Dominique Legros presents the Crow stories of Tutchone Tommy McGinty as equivalent to Genesis. Above all, Northern Athapaskans themselves are now actively involved in presenting their own understanding of the oral literature that has been for so long a major art and guide in their lives. See also Lizette K'ATCHODI. Further reading: June Helm, ed, Subarctic, vol 6 of Handbook of North American Indians, ed W.C. Sturtevant (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1981); Julie Cruikshank, The Social Life of Stories: Narrative and Knowledge in the Yukon (Vancouver: UBC P, 1998). Catharine McClellan
NORTHWEST PASSAGE, term given to the water route that Europeans hypothesized to connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Early EXPLORATION LITERATURE Construed it 3S a
fast, direct link between Europe and Cathay, sometimes referring to it as the Kingdom of the Saguenay; it led such figures as Sir Martin Frobisher, Sir John FRANKLIN, Captain James COOK, and others to seek an entrance to it along Arctic and Pacific coasts, unsuccessfully and sometimes tragically. EUROPEAN fable also presumed it to exist, referring to it by such names as the Strait of Anian, an allusion that occurs in poetry by Earle BIRNEY, among other writers. After the railroad was extended across Canada in 1885, and linked with sea trade across the Pacific, the term 'Northwest Passage' came to be applied to the transportation route that speeded commercial traffic - as in references to the Canadian Pacific Railway's 'silk train' - between ASIA and England. Between 1942 and 1944, Captain Henry Larsen, with the help of the INUIT, sailed the RCMP supply ship St Koch (now housed in Vancouver's Maritime Museum) in both directions across the Arctic Ocean, and in 1950 he became the first to circumnavigate North America; sub-
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sequently, the UNITED STATES challenged Canada's territorial claim to Arctic waterways. Thus the term 'Northwest Passage' came into use with a new set of political implications. 'Northwest Passage,' a popular song (see MUSIC) by Stan Rogers (1949-83), deals with Franklin's search for the Beaufort Sea; the lyrics to this and other Rogers songs appear in Songs from Fogarty's Cove (1982), 'Fogarty's Cove' being the name of the recording company Rogers established in 1978. NORTH-WEST REBELLION, or Resistance, took place in SASKATCHEWAN between March and June 1885, largely because the issues that had led to the 1869 Red River Rebellion, or Resistance, remained unresolved. The earlier conflict occurred when the METIS of MANITOBA sought independence from both Canada and the RED RIVER Colony, which was administered by the HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY. With Louis RIEL as leader, the Metis sought a political agreement with Canada, and while they were on the point of negotiating a relation between their provisional government and CONFEDERATION, a violent confrontation broke out between some of the more militant followers and the authorities. Riel's legally questionable execution of a prisoner named Thomas Scott also complicated negotiations. Riel was banished; the province of Manitoba was established; and the Metis moved farther west. By 1885, Metis rights were still not recognized, and tensions were exacerbated by the deprivations being suffered by the CREE (under Chief Big Bear) and Blackfoot. Riel returned from the United States to lead another provisional government at Batoche, SK. Then Gabriel Dumont, the Metis military commander, occupied the village of Duck Lake, taking prisoners. Ottawa promptly responded by sending over 5,000 soldiers (mainly from Ontario, Quebec, and Nova Scotia) to suppress what the federal government saw as insurgency. In April, the Plains Cree and Dakota, led by Big Bear, captured white settlers as well as several Metis at Frog Lake (approx halfway between the current cities of Prince Albert and Edmonton). Dumont's forces continued for some weeks to win skirmishes, but the Woods Cree, Blood, and Blackfoot remained neutral, and by early June the federal forces overpowered the opposition.
NOVA SCOTIA
Riel was hanged later that year; Cree Chiefs Poundmaker and Big Bear were imprisoned; Durnont and others (temporarily) took refuge in Montana. Theresa GOWANLOCK and Alexander BEGG, among others, wrote journals and histories of these engagements, and (as is exemplified by the work of Rudy WIEBE and others) the conflict became one of the most critically significant events in Canadian culture. See also
cent DENE, 10 per cent INUIT, and 9 per cent METIS - largely English-, NORTHERN ATHAPASKAN-, and Inuvialuktun-speaking. Writers about the NORTH include Lyn HANCOCK, Samuel HEARNE, James HOUSTON, Paulette JILES, John Moss, Farley MOWAT, Aritha VAN HERK, and Rudy WIEBE; writers from the North include AlootookiPELLiE, MARKOOSIE, and Agnes NANOGAK.
BOULTON, HISTORICAL ANALOGUES.
NORTHWEST TERRITORIES. The term was given in 1870 to the territory (once called Rupert's Land and the North-Western Territory), lying north and northwest of ONTARIO and QUEBEC, which Canada acquired from Britain and the HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY. In 1870 it extended from MANITOBA to the Rocky Mountains and NORTH to the Arctic Ocean, and from the northern limits of Ontario and Quebec to Hudson Bay and the Arctic. Its several 'districts' were called Mackenzie (most of the mainland north of the 6oth Parallel), Keewatin (the western shores of Hudson Bay), Ungava (now northern Quebec), Athabaska (south of Mackenzie), Alberta (now southern ALBERTA), and Saskatoon and Assini (now southern SASKATCHEWAN). In 1880 Britain also ceded the Arctic Islands to the District of Franklin. As the prairie provinces were established between 1870 and 1905, and after the borders of Ontario and Quebec were extended by the federal government north to the ocean in 1912, the term 'Northwest Territories' came to refer in a more limited way solely to the districts of Mackenzie, Franklin, and Keewatin, north of the 6oth Parallel but east of YUKON. The Northwest Territories were governed after 1951 by a commissioner and assembly, with a local capital in Yellowknife (incorporated 1970, named for the Yellowknife or Copper band of the Chipewyan); territorial emblem, mountain avens. After 1985, a plan came into effect to divide the Territories into separate eastern and western divisions (respectively NUNAVUT, which came into existence on i April 1999, and a 'western territory' tentatively called Denendeh, but which in 1999 was still informally called the Western Arctic and officially called the Northwest Territories). The latter area in 1999 had an estimated population of 41,600 - 52 per cent non-Aboriginal, 18 per
NORWOOD, Robert. Poet, minister; b New Ross, NS, 27 March 1874, d New York 28 Sept 1932; son of Edith (Harding) and Rev Joseph Norwood. A student of C.G.D. ROBERTS in Nova Scotia, Norwood completed his education at Columbia U (New York). He later became an American citizen (1917) and a priest at New York's St Bartholomew's church. Writing poetry and closet dramas as moral exempla to aid his ministry, he affirmed Christian love as the answer to 20th-century chaos. In sonnet, dramatic monologue, vernacular critique of atheism (Bill Boram, 1921), and personal dialogue with spirituality (Issa, 1931), he adapted the LONG POEM to didactic purposes. See also RELIGION. Further reading: R. Alex Kizuk, 'Religion, Place, and Self in Early Twentieth-Century Poetry: Robert Norwood's Poetry,' Canadian Literature 115 (Winter 1987): 66-77; A.D. Watson, Robert Norwood (Toronto: Ryerson, 1923). NOUVELLE, a relatively long, character-based, French-language SHORT STORY; see also CONTE, NOVELLA, RECIT.
NOVA SCOTIA, province, joined CONFEDERATION 1867; capital Halifax (est 1749 as Chebucto, and soon renamed for George Dunk, Earl of Halifax); area 55,491 sq km; pop 908,007 (2001); provincial flower mayflower. This territory, originally inhabited by MI'KMAQ, was long disputed between the French and the English. Once part of ACADIA, with settlements at Port Royal (Annapolis Royal) and Louisbourg, it was the site of numerous attacks, with the 1714 Treaty of Utrecht assigning the Nova Scotia ('New Scotland') peninsula to England and Cape Breton to France. After 1763, Cape Breton also became English, rejoining Nova Scotia in 1820. PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND was separated from
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Nova Scotia in 1769. Increased LOYALIST settlement after 1776 also led to the construction of NEW BRUNSWICK out of Nova Scotia territory in 1784. After the WAR of 1812, the population rapidly increased, with large numbers of people who came originally from IRELAND and AFRICA (via the CARIBBEAN and UNITED STATES: see BLACK HISTORY) settling in Halifax, and Scottish GAELIC speakers settling primarily in Cape Breton. Nova Scotia writers include Henry ALLINE, Jacob BAILEY, Will R. BIRD, Charles BRUCE, Ernest BUCKLER, S.D. CAMERON, Lesley CHOYCE, G . E . CLARKE, Ann COPELAND, JamCS DE MILLE, Oliver GOLDSMITH, T.C. HALIBUR-
TON, Joseph HOWE, Rita JOE, Anna LEONOWENS, Marc LESCARBOT, Wendy LILL, Douglas LOCHHEAD, Hugh MACLENNAN,
Alistair MACLEOD, Thomas MCCULLOCH, Robert NORWOOD, Thomas RADDALL, Malcolm ROSS, Andrew SHIELS, MaxineTYNES, Roger VIETS, Andrew WAINWRIGHT. See also FOLKLORE, MARITIMES. NOVEL. The novel is generally a long work of prose fiction, narrative in structure, that tells a story (arranged into a plot), focuses on CHARACTER, deals with ideas, and reflects or criticizes current social values. While POPULAR fiction tends to follow formulaic patterns rather than to question (or even analyze) the social function of style, other works challenge all narrative conventions. A roman-d-these (or tendenzromari) espouses a social issue, using characters to work out an argument rather than for their inherent interest. The nouveau rowan favours stylistic nuance over plot. Even length and prose form come into question. Anne CARSON'S Autobiography of Red (1998) is told as a poem; some other novels are told as a series of letters or stories (see EPISTOLARY, SHORT STORY). Ordinarily, the novel differs from the NOVELLA, the short story, and the sketch because it is longer, and because it usually examines social values, or dramatizes their implications, by means of a broad range of interlocking characters and events. Rather than the short story's complex intensity, the novel seeks a complex expansiveness. Novels nevertheless range from the very long (eg, those of John RICHARDSON and AUBERT DE GASPE fere) to the
very short (eg, those of Marie-Claire BLAIS and Sheila WATSON).
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The novel emerged historically from other GENRES: the FABLE, the EPIC, other forms of narrative LONG POEM, the miscellany, the commonplace book (a kind of personal scrapbook of passages copied from other authors), the moral ALLEGORY, satire (see HUMOUR AND SATIRE), TRAVEL and EXPLORATION narrative, the 17thcentury character sketch, and various forms of LIFE WRITING (diary, journal, letters, saints' lives). While examples of long prose narrative can be found before the i8th century (Cervantes' Don Quixote, 1605-15, for one, and numerous Chinese tales), the novel did not come recognizably into existence in France and England until the 17005, with the allegories of Voltaire and Samuel Johnson, the epistolary (or letter-form) stories of Samuel Richardson and Mme Jeanne Riccoboni, the picaresques (episodic tales of rogues'journeys) of Henry Fielding, and the travel parodies of Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift (who set 'Brobdingnag,' in Gulliver's Travels, 1726, off the as-yet-unexplored coast of British Columbia, satirizing travellers' fanciful inventions: for examples of such fabrications see Louis HENNEPIN and Baron de LAHONTAN). Social developments also affected the emergence of the novel form. A rising literacy in the general population led to an increased demand for reading material; the increasing sophistication of printing TECHNOLOGY led to authors and publishers imagining narrative as a longer, BOOK-form structure, not just as a series of component episodes or sketches; and the drafting of LIBEL and COPYRIGHT law meant that authors, to avoid litigation in some instances, sought indirect or fictional means of commenting on real life. In other words, the novel emerged as a print-bound, ideologically marked form, within a growing market economy, reflecting 18th-century European thoughts about society and order. In the two centuries since then, writers around the world have attempted repeatedly both to question and to reconfirm these stylistic conventions and social attitudes. Two of the earliest examples of the novel in Canada - Frances BROOKE'S The History of Emily Montague (1769), the first novel written anywhere in North America; and L'influence d'un livre (1837), by AUBERT DE GASPE fils - suggest the directions that anglophone and francophone
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fiction would subsequently take. Aubert de Gaspe's novel, drawing on FOLK tale and GOTHIC conventions, was written in order to express the culture in place in Quebec. Brooke's work, analyzing the conventions of love and politics in colonial Quebec, adapts epistolary conventions to a study of exchanges between the New World and the Old. While Brooke ultimately affirms the orderliness of English society, especially that of the landed gentry, she also (with one eye on social reform) highlights the advantages to society of listening to the opinions and observations of independent-minded women. She also kept the market in mind, and when Emily Montague did less well than she had hoped, she wrote to her editor in London that a novel to sell must appeal to WOMEN, and that this novel's failing was that it appealed more to men. From early on, then, women participated visibly in Canadian literary culture, influencing directly the social values that the novel would espouse. From early on, too, the novel would display the competing voices of satire, realism, and Gothic ROMANCE. During the i9th century, relatively few major changes took place in the genre. Insofar as PUBLISHING houses were located largely outside Canada, fiction was written in order to satisfy the demands of a readership, or of EDITORS, located primarily in England, France, or the United States. Canadian publishers attempted to cope with the idiosyncrasies of 19th-century copyright (as, eg, in the case of William KIRBY'S The Golden Dog, 1877). And Canadian READERS, for their part, responded to foreign fashion, importing books as they imported taste, following serialized fiction through successive issues of JOURNALS, and assembling LIBRARIES out of the approved canons of EUROPEAN and American culture. Towards the end of the century, Sara Jeannette DUNCAN, arguably the most accomplished novelist before the First World War, was suggesting that if American journals were too readily available in Canada, American ideas would soon follow. It is less clear, however, whether she distinguished 'Canadian' from the 'Imperial' ideas of which she approved. That said, the novel took on a variety of shapes as the century advanced. The influence of the Gothic romance is apparent in Julia HART'S St Ursula's Convent (1824), the first novel
written in English by a Canadian-born writer, and in John Richardson's Wacousta (1832), a tale of frontier revenge inspired by James Fenimore Cooper as well as by Canadian history. Cooper, Sir Walter Scott, Eugene Sue, Alexandre Dumas: these were the literary masters than many writers emulated; and in the works of Scottish writers Robert BALLANTYNE and John GALT - or, much later, those of the French novelist Maurice CONSTANTIN-WEYER - readers could see Canadian life reimagined as colonial romance. Yet beside these adventures in formulaic fantasy, other conventions edged their way into Canadian fiction, prompted in part by a desire for moral order and in part by the rather more chaotic rigours of real life. For example, Thomas MCCULLOCH'S mannered satires of the 18205 (more directly influencing the history of the short story than that of the novel) depict an entire colonial village, its interrelated characters and its uneven application of moral judgment, in a way that hints at the emergence of an extended plot. Susanna MOODIE'S autobiographical journal Roughing It in the Bush (1852) sets out sketches that some 20th-century readers construe as a nascent novel; at the heart of this work, moreover, lies the same convention of the SENTIMENTAL tale that one finds in Emily Montague - the moral example (apparently unrelated to the main narrative line) that is intended to warn of the consequences of straying from the true path of social righteousness. While a number of other works by women reiterate this moral consciousness - Rosanna LEPROHON'S Antoinette de Mirecourt (1864), Laure COHAN'S Angeline de Montbrun (1884), perhaps even Lucy Maud MONTGOMERY'S Anne of Green Gables (1908) - it is not women alone who articulate the tensions between order and independence. The novel of sacrifice (women who choose faith over passion, men who stand for virtue against all odds, as in numerous tales by Ralph CONNOR) expressed the values of an entire age, values that were also put to political purpose, most obviously in the service of WAR in 1914. HISTORICAL fictions, practically an endemic form for decades, especially among male anglophone writers - Richardson, Kirby, Gilbert PARKER, and subsequently Frederick N I V E N , Philip C H I L D , F.D. MCDOWELL, Thomas
RADDALL - found virtue in the cause of replant-
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ing a usually Protestant civilization in Canada; sentimental in mode, and often melodramatic in style and structure, they emphasized incident and action more than character, and saw sacrifice as an accompaniment to progress. Within Quebec, this paradigm characteristically served the related sociopolitical purpose of espousing ULTRAMONTANE Catholicism over Protestantism, the rural over the URBAN, and the status quo over social change (as represented by the United States, technology, liberalism, 'English' Canada, and the city). Patrice LACOMBE'S La terre paternelle (1846) and Antoine GERIN-LAJOIE'S Jean Rivard (1874) set in motion the ROMAN DE LA TERRE, in which a commitment to the LAND stands as a symbolic defence against the forces of integration; this convention would achieve its most influential expression in Louis HEMON'S Maria Chapdelaine (1916), another tale of a 'model' woman sacrificing herself, in RINGUET'S Trente Arpents (1938), a story in which the 'ancestral' land becomes the symbolic site for a conflict between generational values, and in Felix-Antoine SAVARD'S Menaud, maitre-draveur (J937)- Writers who were more extreme politically used the image of the land to envision a separate Catholic state (eg, Jules-Paul TARDIVEL in Pour lapatrie, 1895), and Lionel GROULX in L'appel de la race, 1922; see NATIONALISM). Inevitably, these conventions invited challenge as well as imitation. In the case of James DE MILLE (A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder, 1888), and Stephen LEACOCK (Nonsense Novels, 1911), they led to a PARODY of fictional forms that had come to seem stale: UTOPIA, MELODRAMA, the family saga, the sentimental British aristocratic romance. REALISM came slowly into vogue instead. Much of the impulse towards realism in the francophone novel came from writers who had read Honore de Balzac, whereas anglophone writers more clearly responded to the fictions of the Ameri-, can writer and literary theorist William Dean Howells (whose sister Annie had, coincidentally, married Achille FRECHETTE). Prominent in Quebec - though condemned for their audacity, and even banned by the Church (see CENSORSHIP) - were writers such as Rodolphe GIRARD (Marie Calumet, 1904), Albert LABERGE (La scouine, 1918), and Jean-Charles HARVEY (Les demi-civilises,i934), whose anti-clerical (though
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not anti-religious) stances openly refused the conventional romance: variously meditating on the unhappiness of what have since come to be known as dysfunctional families, satirizing the pomposity of institutions, and delighting in the pleasures of love. English-language realism attracted possibly its foremost turn-of-the-century exponent in S.J. Duncan, whose novels of Anglo-American and Indian subcontinent romance - among them An American Girl in London (1891) and The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib (1893) - are enlivened by their attention to details of speech, place, and character, and by the careful use of double-edged IRONY. In The Imperialist (1904), Duncan turned her attention to the gendered political aspirations of small-town Ontario. The step from there to postwar MODERNISM was direct - but it was also huge, requiring not just further experiment in the art of representation but a substantial rethinking of the novel's relation to society. A growing realism permeated the novel from 1900 to the 19505, as in the work of ClaudeHenri GRIGNON, Harry BERNARD, Raymond KNISTER, P.P. GROVE, and even Ringuet, though the more popular writers remained Hemon, Arthur STRINGER, Katherine HALE, Nellie MCCLUNG, and Mazo DE LA ROCHE, whose politics drew, at least sometimes deliberately, on the conventions of sentimentalism. Critics singled out Grove for his 'NATURALISM,' though the term is less applicable than it perhaps seemed at the time; novels such as A Search for America (192.7), detailing a young man's pursuit of the 'true' spirit of America (represented in his own mind by Christ and Lincoln), follow familiar quest structures - they are conscious literary designs, not unmediated revelations of how society determines individual choices, no matter what the texts argue on the surface. Some writers, too, openly used the novel as a vehicle for political persuasion, whether for anti-war (Douglas DURKIN), anti-Oriental (Hilda GlynnWard, ie, Welsh-born Hilda Williams Howard, 1887-1966), inherently fascist (some critics place Ubald PAQUIN in this category), pro-labour (Irene BAIRD), or pro-nationalist purposes. Among those who sought to find a language to express the character of the Canadian nation, none surpassed Hugh MACLENNAN, whose name was established with Barometer Rising
NOVEL
(1941), an ALLEGORY of the First World War. MacLennan's popularity peaked with The Watch That Ends the Night (1959), a spiritual romance that extends from the Spanish Civil War to the Long March in China, and his critical influence continued primarily because of TWO SOLITUDES (1945), his narrative study of Montreal as the Canadian microcosm. Still other writers, using the language of REGIONAL fidelity - Sinclair ROSS in As For Me and My House (1941), w.o. MITCHELL in Who Has Seen the Wind (1947), Ernest BUCKLER in The Mountain and the Valley (1952), Andre LANGEVIN in Poussiere sur la ville (1951) - adapted the psychological conventions of the KUNSTLERROMAN and BILDUNGSROMAN
(novels about growing into artistry and into a socially sanctioned version of maturity). The greater change towards a modernist poetics came less from these writers, however, than from those who sought to represent the city in a more vernacular fashion (Arsene BESSETTE in Le debutant, 1914; Georgina SIME in Our Little Life, 192.1; Roger LEMELIN in Au pieds de lapente douce, 1944; Gabrielle ROY in Bonheur d'occasion, 1945, andAlexandre Chenevert, 1954; Mordecai RICHLER in The Apprenticeship ofDuddyKravitz, 1959), and from those who experimented more radically with style, treating the sentence, rather than the plot line, as the basic unit of revelation (Morley CALLAGHAN in Suck Is My Beloved, 1934; Howard O'HAGAN in Tayjohn, 1939; Malcolm LOWRY in Under the Volcano, 1947; A.M. KLEIN in The Second Scroll, 1951; Gerard BESSETTE in La bagarre, 1958, and L'incubation, 1965; Sheila Watson in The Double Hook, 1959). Callaghan wrote of prostitutes and priests in Toronto, O'Hagan of a mysterious loner in the wilderness, Lowry of a drunken ex-consul in Mexico, Klein of the postwar wanderings of modern Jewry in search of the promised land of Israel, Bessette of a homosexual student and a Montreal librarian who sees life decaying around him, Richler of a self-important smuggling czar and a skinny kid on the make, Watson of a murder in the Cariboo. These subjects are, for their time, daring; but they are less intrinsically important than are the authors' narrative methodologies. Callaghan and Watson write in a minimalist prose; Bessette USCSJOUAL; Richler laces his story with the street language of sex and power politics; Klein and Lowry layer their
prose with a rich density of allusion. Foregrounding artifice (L'incubation, eg, is a single 'sentence' long), these writers made language, the page itself, a site of social and psychological inquiry. Their novels asked to be judged not by the degree to which they mirrored the world off the page (as those of Roy and Lemelin did, critical as they were of the way the Depression, the Church, poverty, and the Second World War shaped behaviour), but by their fidelity to the system of language within which their characters are acting. Implicitly, they also asked for changes in the assumptions that CRITICISM AND THEORY brought to the challenges of reading. Between 1959 and 1999, the number of people reaching adulthood multiplied; TECHNOLOGY changed; TEACHING programs expanded (establishing Canadian Literature as an academic field of study); publishers and BOOKSTORES grew in number, size, and specialization; government support for the arts increased; and Canadian writers acquired a much higher profile internationally. During these four decades, the number of writers and the number of novels published increased so much that generalizations can be misleading. To mention some 70 writers from the period is merely to hint at the thousands of books that readers had the opportunity to appreciate. The work of these writers nevertheless does suggest how prose fiction again changed in the later decades of the 20th century, in response to, and in reaction against, social values, social structures, critical theory, CULTURAL PLURALITY, individual experience, historical events, regional politics, scientific hypotheses, and, among other pressures, the ongoing complexities of GENDER, sexuality, ethnicity, CLASS, and RACE. Not all of these changes imply radical rethinking. Such forms as the historical novel continued, as did the Bildungsroman (newly combined with the tale of adapting to a new culture, as in novels by Nino RICCI, M.G. VASSANJI, andTomson HIGHWAY), the quest (which Robert KROETSCH and Jacques POULIN, respectively in Badlands, 1975, and Volkswagen Blues, 1984, modified into tales of recuperative discovery and American adventure), the regional memoir (whether comic, as in Paul ST PIERRE'S Breaking Smith's Quarter Horse, 1966, or ecological, as in the tales of Fred BODSWORTH), the
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FABLE (as in the work of Bernard EPPS, Gwendolyn MACEWEN, Martin MYERS, Yves BEAUCHEMIN, YVCSTHERIAULT), and the personal confession (as in Sylvia PHASER'S Pandora, 1972, which has been read as a sublimated dramatization of child abuse; or in several declared autobiographies, such as those of Claire MARTIN). Numerous popular forms also continued, such as the detective novel (eg, Gail BOWEN), the speculative fantasy or SCIENCE FICTION dystopia (eg, Phyllis GOTLIEB, Elisabeth VONARBURG, William GIBSON), the romance (eg, the HARLEQUIN), the FILM novelization (eg, Kate PULLINGER), and the realistic domestic-problem novel (eg Joan BARFOOT). But even in these instances, the temper of the times altered what could be talked about and what language could appear in print. Writers became more open about sexuality (as with Leonard COHEN'S Beautiful Losers, 1966, or Dany LAFERRIERE'S Comment faire I'amour avec un Negre sans sefatiguer, 1985, erotically expressing heterosexual desire, or works by Jane RULE, Jovette MARCHESSAULT, Michel TREMBLAY, David wATMOUGH, and Shyam SELVADURAI, whose frankness about GAY AND LESBIAN experience at once reflected the greater social openness of the decades and helped alter social understanding). The vernacular was accepted as a legitimate (if, some thought, limited) artistic language, whether the joual of Claude JASMIN or the profanities of some of David Adams RICHARDS' characters. Violence became a commonplace in some writers' works (eg, TREVANIAN). And the convention of the happy-ever-after ending, like other forms of narrative closure, tended to disappear in favour of cautious optimism, less cautious cynicism, mordant irony, comic exaggeration, plain uncertainty, and metatextual (self-referential) artifice (see METAFICTION). The historical novel, for example, no longer characteristically celebrated the glories of progress or the eloquence of the past, nor did it find heroic models in generals and politicians. It rethought events instead, and re-examined the process by which the techniques of HISTORIOGRAPHY themselves shape understanding (some critics argued that history itself was a form of fiction). Margaret SWEATMAN'S The Fox (1991) reread the WINNIPEG STRIKE; George BOWERING'S Burning Water (1980) reread coastal explo-
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ration; Rudy Wiebe's The Blue Mountains of China (1970) and The Temptations of Big Bear (1973) reread Mennonite EXILE and NATIVE history; Thomas KING'S Green Grass, Running Water (1993) orchestrated allusions to received 'Indian' history into a comic but serious celebration of FIRST NATIONS alternatives; Antonine MAILLET'S Pelagie-la-charrette (1979) reread ACADIAN dispossession; Joy KOGAWA'S Obasan (1981) reread JAPANESE Canadian experience; Thomas WHARTON'S Icefields (1995) reread Rocky Mountain 'discovery'; Jacques PERRON'S Le del de Quebec (1969) revisited the entire course of Quebec history; Timothy FINDLEY'S The Wars (1977) and Jack HODGINS' Broken Ground (1998) looked back to the First World War; John STEEPLER'S The Afterlife of George Cart-wright (1992) re-examined LABRADOR'S past; and Guy VANDERHAEGHE'S The Englishman's Boy (1996) coupled a tale of the Cypress Hills Massacre with an account of the way film (or news broadcast) refashions events into marketable 'stories.' Where actual politicians did appear as fictional creations, they appeared with flaws, not as noble models: Wayne JOHNSTON'S The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (1998) dramatizes the mixed motives that gave Joey Smallwood his energy; Jacques GODBOUT'S Les tetes a Papineau (1981) comically allegorizes the tensions between Rene Levesque and Pierre Elliott Trudeau as a tale of a twoheaded man, one anglophile and contemplative, the other francophile and ebullient, who (when surgery fails to unite the two positive hemispheres) is transformed instead into a unilingual conservative. (See also ROMAN A CLEF.) With Findley, 'real' characters such as Ezra Pound and the Duchess of Windsor (in Famous Last Words, 1981) are written into fantasies about the fascism of violence, as is the biblical figure of Noah in a fabulist retelling of the Genesis story of gender and power, Not Wanted on the Voyage (1984). Hodgins, especially in The Invention of the World (1977), adapted the LATIN AMERICAN techniques of MAGIC REALISM to the re-imagining of history on Vancouver Island, and so to reconsidering the (fictional) conventions by which 'history' is so often equated with 'truth.' With Bowering most obviously, but others as well, the focus falls less on the ostensible subject (the 'historical' explorers) than on the means of knowing about any subject; hence 'George' VANCOUVER
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blends into 'George' Bowering - the observing eye creates that which it observes, and the narrative, metatextually foregrounding its own process, emphasizes the provisory nature of whatever goes by the name of knowledge. In other works, a sense of history functions differently - as, for example, the frame through which a personal narrative can be told, the context for a revisionary social premise, or the structure on which hangs a retrospective explanation of the course of social change. These differing narrative aims often combine, with one element or another given precedence, in such forms as the family saga (eg, SKY LEE, Carole SHIELDS), the multi-volume romanjleuve, the emblematic political story (eg, Jasmin's Ethel et le terroriste, 1964; Godbout's Le couteau sur le table, 1965), and the comic satire (eg, Roch CARRIER'S La Guerre, Yes Sir!, 1968, or works by Jean SIMARD, Leon ROOKE, Adrien THERIO). Of multi-volume enterprises, Hugh HOOD'S 12volume cycle The New Age/Le nouveau siecle, stands out for its ambitious scope; though focusing through the eyes of a character named Matthew Goderich, Hood adapts the form of each of his volumes to match the particular representative incident on which it turns - hence the cycle employs such techniques as those of the spy thriller, the AIDS journal, and the sciencefiction speculation as its means to suggest how the 2oth century relives the ancient epic trajectory from creation to Armageddon. Other romans fleuves include Michel Tremblay's family history, the ongoing Chroniques du Plateau MontRoyal series, and Andre MAJOR'S Histoires de deserteurs trilogy (1974-6). The linked novels of Margaret LAURENCE'S Manawaka cycle, those of Michael ONDAATJE, and even the various trilogies of Robertson DAVIES can also be read as multi-volume narratives. Insofar as their multiplicity emphasizes the gaps between them more than any obvious linearity, a sense of the inter ruptedness of life is given precedence by the form (as, in comparable fashion, it is in such linked short story series as Alice MUNRO'S Lives of Girls and Women, 1971). Interruptedness does not, of course, mean unrelatedness. Hence Laurence's largely realistic tales of prairie women in The Stone Angel (1964) and other works focus on separate figures but imply parallels and variations over time, rela-
tionships that chart a history not only of Manitoba but also of changes in opportunities for women to engage with life by choice, artistically and politically, on their own terms. Davies' works range from the satiric and somewhat dismissive Salterton trilogy of the 19505 to the JUNGIAN psychology of the Deptford trilogy of the 19705, to his adaptation of murder mystery formulas in the Cornish trilogy of the 19805; all are linked by their preoccupation with the debilitating power of psychological secrets. Ondaatje's works - arguably his mixed-genre The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970) is as much a novel as Coming Through Slaughter (1976), In the Skin of a Lion (1987), and The English Patient (1992) - relate not just because one character appears in both of the two last books, but more fundamentally by the way all the books function prismatically. Disputing the validity of a single overriding viewpoint, they require the reader to participate in the narrative, to put together the strands of 'history' as the characters do, each of them differently, aware of the inevitability of their separation even as they aspire to find love. . Subjectivity is also an issue in a series of novels examining the politics of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and race. Dionne BRAND and Rohinton MISTRY were among those who demonstrated how race and poverty (as well as gender and sexuality) curtail freedom; Mistry's A Fine Balance (1995), set in Indira Gandhi's India but with resonances in Canada, charts a numbing history of aspiration and constraint. The numerous novels that deal with the Holocaust and Holocaust survivors, such as Anne MICHAELS' 1997 work Fugitive Pieces, provide a different range of examples (see also JEWISH WRITING). With her futurist DYSTOPIA The Handmaid's Tale (1985), Margaret ATWOOD articulated the problem of gender disparities most directly: in a society in which women are commodities, says the novel, there is no freedom for anyone - an issue the author took up in other works as well, including Alias Grace (1996). Passion's power motivates the violent actions of Anne HEBERT'S novels, such as Kamouraska (1970) or Lesfous de Bassan (1982). Audrey THOMAS, in Mrs Blood (1970), Intertidal Life (1984), and other works, probed the consequences and responsibilites of motherhood as well as passion. Hubert AQUIN in Prochain Epi-
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sode (1965) uses the subjectivity of sexuality as a kind of substitute metaphor for RELIGION (Mother Church) in Quebec, constructing an allegory of separatist politics that hinted at the OCTOBER CRISIS to come. And writers such as Rejean DUCHARME, Gilbert LA ROCQUE, Robert MAJZELS, and Victor-Levy BEAULIEU - all probing the multiple faces of repression, in part through the ostensibly free-flowing techniques of stream of consciousness - experimented further with the kinds of layered prose that Aquin and other devotees of the nouveau roman had pioneered in Quebec (see ECRITURE). For other writers still, personal freedom remained an elusive ideal unless it could find expression in a narrative language that was itself free from the gendered biases of a hierarchical history. The desire to find an ecriture feminine led Louky BERSIANIK, for example, in L'Eugelionne (1976) to write a parable about a quest for a planet where language would not diminish the women who used it. Other writers whose novels expressed a related commitment to freedom of expression included Marie-Claire BLAIS, Yolande VILLEMAIRE, Helene OUVRARD, Madeleine OUELLETTE-MICHALSKA, Gabrielle POULIN, Madeleine GAGNON, France THEORET, Sharon RIIS, Aritha VAN HERK, Monique PROULX, Anne-Marie ALONZO, Susan SWAN, Francine NOEL, and Daphne MARLATT, but possibly the most influential was Nicole BROSSARD, for her own writings and also for how her work reshaped Canadian FEMINIST criticism in both English and French. Eschewing plot, Brossard's novels - among them Un livre (1970), French Kiss (1974), L'amer (1977), Picture Theory (1982) - assert a freedom from patriarchal structures, including 'heterosexism' and the gender rules of the French language. Positing that no freedom can exist within a hierarchy, the texts (as much manifesto as novel, in conventional terms) refuse traditional boundary lines (between reader and writer, for example) and argue instead that reading is a discursive act among equals. If life is itself constructed by language, moreover - an idea absorbed from French feminist and narratological theory - then such grammatical conventions as pronouns (I, you, je, vous) and linear sentence logic (subject+verb+object) have themselves to be questioned if life is ever to change. On Brossard's pages, therefore, pronouns can
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wander, sentences refuse closure, 'case endings' disappear, and subjects float freer, if not exactly free. In this account of the Canadian novel, Brossard and Marlatt (with Ana Historic, 1988) may consequently represent the most extreme departure from Brooke's mannered Emily Montague, but their interests are not unrelated to hers: women, freedom, and the physical/ textual/psychological landscape. Whatever their technical expertise, moreover, their works do not invoke closure on experimenation in the novel genre. By the end of the 19905, other writers were already calling for notice: Barbara GOWDY, Russell SMITH, Mark Anthony JARMAN, Andre ALEXIS, Elise TURCOTTE, Douglas COUPLAND, and many more - their voices often sardonic, their view of life marked by a sense of loss (all the more pointed in a time of apparent social plenty), their focus falling on their own generation and its new-found need to balance desire with commitment. At the same time, some of the technical experiments that had led the novel into non-linearity in the 19705 and 19805 were beginning to be regarded as conventions in their own right; in the new fictions, a brittle version of urbanity began to sound, an impatience with nationalism, a cavalier but perhaps not altogether ingenuous attitude towards uncertainty, an occasional ecological idealism, and, with some writers at least, a return to story. Criticism of the novel in Canada long followed thematic or evaluative models, seeking to distinguish what constituted a 'good' novel (drawing on such criteria as moral respectability, technical unity, and cultural verifiability) or to pursue such motifs as feminism, nationalism, REGIONALISM, or ETHNICITY. Numerous journal articles and monographs are devoted to the work of single authors, and still others to comparative studies of two or more. Often biocritical in methodology, these tend to focus on the progress and context of literary careers, but occasionally they deal with questions of ideological intent and formal practice and the relation between these concerns. Jack Hodgins's A Passion for Narrative (1994) approaches the genre from the vantage point of the writer; while not prescriptive, it constitutes a guide to a variety of techniques of literary composition (see WRIT-
NOWLAN
ING). Studies that deal with both anglophone and francophone narrative practice in Canada are rare; so are theoretical studies of the genre itself. NOVELLA. A prose fiction work of middle length, between the brevity of the SHORT STORY and the expansiveness of the NOVEL. There is significant overlap among these three genres, so the essential qualities of the novella remain somewhat uncertain in general usage. The standard publisher's definition is based on word count - anywhere from 15,000 to 50,000 words. The French-language NOUVELLE, a related but distinct form, is often much shorter. The novella is generally not as formally experimental as the short story and the novel can be, and it usually lacks the subplots, the multiple points of view, and the generic adaptability that are common in the novel. It is most often concerned with personal and psychological development rather than with the larger social sphere. The novella generally retains something of the unity of impression that is a hallmark of the short story, but it also contains more highly developed characterization and more luxuriant description. In Canada, unlike in some European countries, the novella has not approached the cultural stature of the short story or the novel. However, there are several excellent examples of the form in Canadian literature, and many of the best-known Canadian short story writers have written one or more novellas. Some notable practitioners include Ethel WILSON (Hetty Dorval), Mavis GALLANT (The Pegnitz Junction'), Alice MUNRO ('The Albanian Virgin'), Anne HEBERT (Le torrent), and Marie-Claire BLAIS (Lejour est noir). One factor in the marginalization of the novella may be the lack of a distinct market: it is usually too long for publication in a magazine, and too short for publication in book form. However, in Canada some developments indicate a change in this situation. In 1996 The Malahat R began encouraging the development of this genre by sponsoring a semi-annual novella writing contest. Likewise, in the mid-1990s, Thistledown P began soliciting novella manuscripts, and published several single novellas in book form.
Further reading: Douglas Daymond and Leslie Monkman, eds, On Middle Ground: Novellas (Toronto: Methuen, 1987); Michelle Gadpaille, 'The Canadian Novella 1920-1980,' Diss, U Toronto (1987); Graham Good, 'Notes on the Novella' Novel: A Forum on Fiction 10 (1977): 14763. Warren Cariou
NOWLAN, Alden Albert. Poet, journalist, humanist; b Stanley, NS, 25 Jan 1933, d Fredericton 27 June 1983; son of Grace (Reese) and Freeman Nowlan, a woods worker; m Claudine Orser. Relatively little is known about Nowlan's early life, a fact surprising for a writer so prolific and highly regarded (the critic and poet Robert Bly wrote in his introduction to Nowlan's Playing the Jesus Game, 1970, that Nowlan was one of the pre-eminent North American poets of his generation). What is known is that Nowlan was born in the Mosherville-Stanley area of central Nova Scotia, a rural stretch just east of Windsor that was populated mostly by Scottish Irish pulp cutters and labourers. Born out of wedlock and into Depression-era poverty, he was given up by his young mother to be raised by his father and grandmother, an upbringing similar to that of the fictional Kevin O'Brien in Nowlan's The Wanton Troopers (1988). Nowlan quit school a month into grade five and followed his father into the woods, working as a lumberman and millhand on the land he would later call 'Desolation Creek.' Always marked by a thirst for knowledge, he took full advantage of the opening of the Windsor Public Library in 1949, setting out on a path of self-study that would substitute for a formal education. A job as night watchman at a local sawmill subsidized Nowlan's growing library, and provided him with the quiet time necessary for reading and writing. At 19, two years after buying his first typewriter for $50, Nowlan applied for and received a reporter's job with the Hartland Observer, a weekly newspaper in western New Brunswick. That would be Nowlan's first of many jobs in JOURNALISM, jobs which he said taught him the writerly virtues of brevity, unadorned speech, and direct style. Several newspaper articles appeared in 1999 as Road Dancers, ed Robert Gibbs. Nowlan's first published collection of poetry, The Rose and the Puritan (1958), was completed
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NOWLAN
while he was in Hartland, as were the following collections of verse written in this especially creative period of his life: A Darkness in the Earth (I959), Under the Ice (1960), Wind in a Rocky Country (1961), and Things Which Are (1962). A 1960 Canada Council AWARD afforded Nowlan the leisure to write the novel The Wanton Troopers. When it was rejected for publication, Nowlan, for unknown reasons, shelved it, refusing to try another publisher, yet culling from it to write a second novel, Various Persons Named Kevin O'Brien (1973). The first novel was later published posthumously by Nowlan's widow. In 1963, Nowlan moved to the TelegraphJournal, the daily paper in Saint John, first as a reporter and then as provincial and night news editor. As he had done on night watch at the sawmill, Nowlan used the quieter night hours for the dominant passions of his life - reading and writing poetry. In 1966, still in Saint John, Nowlan was hospitalized for the removal of cancerous lymph glands; three major operations left him deeply shaken. The illness also altered his poetry, giving it a more forgiving, conciliatory tone, and redirecting its focus inward onto the psyche of the poet. In 1968, Nowlan became writer-in-residence at U New Brunswick in Fredericton, and a leading member of the writing community. His Windsor Street home, dubbed the 'Windsor Castle/ became a regular meeting place for wits and bons vivants of all descriptions. The legendary Ice-House Gang - writers such as Ray FRASER, Robert GIBBS, and David Adams RICHARDS - met there, as did politicians such as New Brunswick Premier Richard Hatfield and celebrity Maritimers such as singer Stompin' Tom Connors and painter Tom Forrestall. His larder and liquor cabinet open to all, the Windsor Castle conversation would range from Nowlan favourites such as Doctor Johnson or Brendan Behan to folk idols such as Hank Snow and Stan Rogers. Only close friends would know that, while in Hartland, Nowlan had managed a country music band, George Shaw and The Green Valley Ranch Boys. One memorable evening at the Castle, Nowlan and other revellers proposed the creation of The Flat Earth Society, an idea that grew into an international movement. The appeal of Nowlan here and elsewhere was his warmth and eclecticism, inherit-
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ances of a mind that had read widely and experienced much. During his time at U New Brunswick, Nowlan continued to combine creative writing with journalism. His columns for local papers and magazines, most notably his columns in the Atlantic Advocate and the Telegraph-Journal, were anticipated reading for many Maritimers. And, as in his poetry, Nowlan's prose was a blend of rustic humour and compassionate observation. Nowlan was the recipient of many accolades and awards during his lifetime, a few of which were: a Canada Council Special Award (1966); a Guggenheim Fellowship (1967); a Governor General's Award for the poetry collection Bread, Wine and Salt (1967); honorary doctorates (U New Brunswick, 1971, and Dalhousie U, 1976); and a Canadian Authors Assoc Award for Poetry (1978) for Smoked Glass (1977). He was also twice awarded (1970 and 1972) the President's Medal of U Western Ontario for the best Canadian SHORT STORY of the year. In June 1983 Nowlan died of respiratory failure. At his wake in Fredericton, close friend Jim Stewart played an Irish dirge on Nowlan's prized flute; then, so it would not be heard again, broke the pipe over his knee. In similar symbolic fashion, Nowlan's son Johnnie passed around Jameson's Irish whiskey as he and the other pallbearers covered Nowlan's casket with dirt, just as the poet had instructed. The man whom critics as respected as Fred COGSWELL and Louis DUDEK had called the best young poet in Canada was dead at 50. Nowlan's other major collections of poetry include A Black Plastic Button and a Yellow Yo-Yo (1968, privately printed), The Mysterious Naked Man (1969), Between Tears and Laughter (1971), I'm a Stranger Here Myself '(1974), I Might Not Tell Everybody This (1982), The Gardens of the Wind (1982, limited edition), and Alden Nowlan: Early Poems (1983). His published work in other genres includes the short story collections Miracle at Indian River (1968) and Will Ye Let the Mummers In? (1984); the TRAVEL books Shaped by This Land (1974) and Campobello, the Outer Island (1975); the collection of ORAL tales Nine Micmac Legends (1983); the non-fiction collection Double Exposure (1978); and three stage plays written in collaboration with Walter Learning, The Dollar Woman (1972), Frankenstein (1973), and The Incredible
O CANADA
Murder of Cardinal Tosca (1978). A number of editions of Nowlan's selected poems emerged shortly after his death, including An Exchange of Gifts (1985, ed Robert Gibbs), What Happened When He Went to the Store for Bread (1993, ed Thomas R. Smith), and Alden Nowlan: Selected Poems (1996, ed Patrick LANE and Lorna CROZIER). During his lifetime, Nowlan published over twenty-five books, appeared in most of the major literary magazines in Canada and the United States, and worked in genres as diverse as speech writing, radio, television, and travel. His work often displaying a touch of the confessional, Nowlan wrote in the London magazine Nomad in 1960 that his writing of poetry from age n was attended by a sense of shame that stayed with him all his writing life. This shame, as Nowlan described it, was rooted in the decidedly non-bookish experience of his first 19 years in a fiercely puritanical Nova Scotia, where the demands of a rural economy simply did not accommodate the sensibilities of young artists. Nevertheless, the harshness of that formative landscape, and Nowlan's determination to carry its toughness and brutality into language, resulted in the characteristic voice of the mature poet, one that combines plain speech and matter-of-fact representation with the deep sensitivity and devotion of an observer who has lived close to the land and its people. Indeed, it is the seemingly impossible ability to unsentimentally combine the tough and the tender that critics most often comment on in Nowlan's work. The critics who therefore have come closest to an intimate understanding of Nowlan's work are those who have moved beyond the common adjectives — luminous, compassionate, honest, revelatory, sparse, provincial, redemptive, and conversational - to grapple with the complexity and contradiction of Nowlan's mind and art. To readers who know his work well, Nowlan is that incongruous and all-too-human mix of loyalties, triumphs, and despairs. He is at once the fierce Irish nationalist and the defender of British royalism; the gregarious interlocutor and the lonely ascetic, crippled by shyness; and the neo-pagan Bacchus and the stalwart Calvinist, ruthlessly protective of his wrfting time and his own imaginative space. Nowlan's vast creative corpus is one that embodies all the paradox and incongruity of the human condition, and is
loved the deeper for it. Few other poets in Canada have been accorded such affection. Further reading: Robert Cockburn, ed, Alden Nowlan Special Issue,' The Fiddlehead 81 (Fall 1969); Fred Cogswell, Alden Nowlan as Regional Atavist,' Studies in Canadian Literature n (1986): 206-25; Ian Colford, ed, Alden Nowlan Tribute Edition,' Pottersfield Portfolio 18.1 (Fall 1997): 6-71; Michael Brian Oliver, Alden Nowlan (1933-83),' Canadian Writers and Their Works, Poetry Series vol 7, ed Robert Lecker, Jack David, and Ellen Quigley (Toronto: ECW, 1990): 76-132; Patrick Toner, If I Could Turn and Meet Myself [biography] (Fredericton: Goose Lane, 2000). Tony Tremblay
NUIT DE LA POESIE, a large-scale poetry PERFORMANCE that took place in Montreal 27 March 1970, attracting a great many francophone Quebec writers. Given the politics of their concerns (related in part to how a generation had been encouraged to read their cultural history), the event in some ways epitomizes the NATIONALISM of the 19605, anticipating the events of the OCTOBER CRISIS later that year. A second, though less successful, Nuit de la poesie was held in 1980, also political in intent. Both events were filmed by Jean-Claude Labrecque for the NATIONAL FILM BOARD.
NUNAVUT, legislative division of the Northern Arctic, established in 1999 from the eastern and northern portions of the NORTHWEST TERRITORIES (primarily from the former divisions of Franklin and Keewatin). It has its own assembly and premier. In size 1,900,000 sq km (722,000 sq miles), Nunavut ('our place') is the largest political subdivision in Canada, with the smallest population (26,745 in 2001; 83 per cent INUIT), the largest community being the legislative capital, Iqaluit ('place where there are fish,' incorporated 1980; formerly called Frobisher Bay, named for the 16th-century mariner Martin Frobisher, 1539-94). LANGUAGES spoken include Inuktitut, Inuinnaqtun, French, and English. Official flower, Arctic poppy. See also NORTH. O CANADA, the national anthem, officially adopted 1980. The MUSIC was composed by Calixa LAVALLEE, and first performed in 1880
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O CANADA
with French-language words by Adolphe-Basile ROUTHIER ('6 Canada, terre de nos ai'eux'); the band was that of the Musique des Voltigeurs de Quebec, directed by Joseph Vezina. Several English-language versions were suggested during the early 2oth century, including those by Thomas Bedford Richardson ('O Canada! Our fathers' land of old,' 1906), Mercy Powell McCulloch ('O Canada: in praise of thee we sing,' 1909), Lawrence and Ewing Buchan ('O Canada! our heritage, our love,' 1908-10), and L.E.O. Payment ('O Canada: beloved fatherland,' 1912); the official words approved by Parliament in 1967 (changed again by 1980) are a variant on those composed by R.S. WEIR ('O Canada, our home and native land') in 1908. OBSCENITY, see CENSORSHIP. OCTOBER CRISIS, the term given to the set of events that led up to and followed the kidnapping of a British trade commissioner, James Cross, and the murder of Quebec's minister of immigration and labour, Pierre Laporte, in Oct 1970, by members of a SEPARATIST organization, the Front de Liberation du Quebec (FLQ), in Montreal. The culmination of a series of violent protests in the city, these actions led the Quebec premier of the day, Robert Bourassa, to request the federal government of Pierre Elliott Trudeau to send troops into the city to re-establish order; this was done, but the only legal means at the time that permitted this action was to invoke the War Measures Act. This decision proved controversial: it temporarily withdrew a number of civil freedoms throughout the country, led police forces in some instances to exercise undue power, and permitted numerous local politicians to use the measures thus granted them to incarcerate groups they said they considered 'dangerous.' The events and competing issues of the time generated decades of further dispute, which found expression both in political actions and in art, as in the novels of Jacques GODBOUT, Gerald GODIN, and Pierre GRAVEL; drama by Gratien GELINAS; film by Pierre TURGEON; and the later fiction of Hugh MACLENNAN. See also NUIT DE LA POESIE.
ODE, a serious, sustained form of poetry, not necessarily following any metric pattern, that is
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usually intended to honour or praise someone or something, such as Sir Chalres G.D. ROBERTS's ode on the Shelley centenary; see POETRY IN SHORTER FORMS.
ODELL, Jonathan (pseud Camillo Querno). Poet, minister; b Newark, NJ, 25 Sept 1737, d Fredericton 25 Nov 1818; son of Temperance (Dickinson) and John Odell, a joiner. A graduate of C of NJ (later Princeton U), trained in medicine, Odell became a Church of England priest in 1767, and opposed the American rebellions a decade later. Outspoken - he wrote patriotic songs, anti-revolutionary satires (and, later, WAR of 1812 burlesques) - Odell became a target of an anti-British feeling; he fled north in 1776 from one safe house to the next, eventually reaching New Brunswick (1784). His major satire, The American Times (1780, pseudonymously), pillories American ambition and behaviour in lively rhyming couplets; it can be instructively read beside the pro-UNiTED STATES satires of British incompetence by his contemporary, Philip Freneau. Winthrop Sargent edited The Loyal Verses of Joseph Stansbury and DoctorJonathan Odell (1860). Further reading: Cynthia Dubin Edelberg, Jonathan Odell (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1987). ODHIAMBO, David Nandi. Novelist; b Nairobi 24 June 1965, son of Florence Engasia Asava and Barack Wellington Odhiambo, from the Luhya and Luo tribes of western Kenya. At 12 he moved to a boarding school in Winnipeg and afterward took his BA in classics at McGill U (1987). His writing is influenced by the lyricism of James Baldwin and George Elliott CLARKE and the innovative chordal progressions of Dizzie Gillespie and Thelonius Monk. His play affacentric (prod 1993) appeared in part in Beyo-nd the Pale (1996). His first novel, diss/ed banded nation (1998) reworks in unconventional, decapitalized prose the rhythms of his jazz influences, and chronicles the discoveries of a young musician living on Vancouver's East Side. See also AFRICA. Roger Clark
O'FLAHERTY, Patrick. Novelist, short story writer, journalist, historian; b Long Beach, Con-
O'HAGAN
ception Bay, NF, 6 Oct 1939; son of Augustine and Jane (Howell) O'Flaherty. He taught English at Memorial U, specializing in the work of Dr Johnson. O'Flaherty's novels take place in small Newfoundland communities: Priest of God (1989) focuses on a crisis and a testing of faiths, while Benny's Island (1994), set in the future, involves a young man's search for his missing brother. The short stories (Summer of the Greater Yellowlegs, 1987, and A Small Place in the Sun, 1989) encapsulate brief moments of significance, the characters' disappointments often mitigated by O'Flaherty's sense of IRONY. Non-fiction works include The Rock Observed (1979), a LITERARY HISTORY of Newfoundland, and Come Near at Your Peril: A Visitor's Guide to the Island of Newfoundland (1991). Claire Wilkshire
O'GRADY, Standish (likely Standish O'Grady Bennett). Poet; b Co Limerick, Ireland, c 1776/7, d Toronto 1846; son of James Bennett and (possibly) Eliza O'Grady. Scholars long confused him with a man named 'Standish Grady' (later, Rev Standish O'Grady, d 1829), who attended Trinity C (Dublin) at the same time as he did. O'Grady (Bennett) arrived in Quebec on 22 May 1836; soon afterward, he moved onto a farm at Sorel, QC, leaving in 1842 for Toronto. Biographical information here, based entirely on Brian Trehearne's research, still remains conjectural. The poet is known for one LONG POEM likely rooted in experience - The Emigrant (1841; ed Trehearne, with extensive intro and notes, 1989). NEOCLASSICAL in convention (rhymed couplets, elevated discourse, parallel structures, ironic satire [see HUMOUR]), the poem reads in part as a TRAVEL narrative; it later observes the NATIVE population, describes the social life of Sorel, and critiques PAPINEAU and the 1837 REBELLION.
Further reading: Brian Trehearne, 'Preliminaries for a Life of Standish O'Grady,' Canadian Poetry 21 (Fall-Winter 1987): 81-92. O'HAGAN, Howard. Novelist; b Lethbridge, AB, 17 Feb 1902, d Victoria, BC, 18 Sept 1982; son of Mary (McNabb) and Dr Thomas F. O'Hagan. O'Hagan has been described as 'the writer that Canlit forgot' because his major novel, Toy John
(i939), remained virtually unknown in his own country until McClelland and Stewart reprinted it in their New Canadian Library in 1974. The novel quickly won a place in the CANON, and interest in O'Hagan suddenly flourished. Fresh editions of his other work appeared, including a previously unpublished novel, as did commentaries on his writing. The mountains of the Crowsnest Pass were the landscape of O'Hagan's early childhood, but Dr O'Hagan changed practices frequently, so Howard grew up, from the age of eight, in Calgary and Vancouver. After a year at U British Columbia, he went on to McGill U, completing an Honours BA in economics and political science (1922) and an LLB (1925), meanwhile editing the McGill Daily and making friends with A.J.M. SMITH and Stephen LEACOCK. He spent his summers in the Jasper area, where his parents had moved in 1920. There O'Hagan worked on survey crews and as a packer and guide for the legendary outfitter Fred Brewster in the mountains that were later to provide the settings, ANECDOTES, and inspiration for his fiction. After graduation O'Hagan worked as a reporter for the Montreal Star and the Edmonton Journal. In 1927 he travelled to AUSTRALIA where, almost incidentally, he published his first story, 'How it Came About,' in the Sydney Mail, apparently to earn travel money. He went next to New York, where he met the American writer Harvey Fergusson, who would write the introduction to the New York edition of Tay John, and where O'Hagan later became an assistant to the US press representative for the CNR. He was transferred to Jasper as a publicity agent in 1930. During what was likely the last summer and winter he would ever spend in the Rockies, O'Hagan took time out to travel to London and secure a contract as head of publicity for the line that British Railway was building through Argentina. Thus for three years in the depth of the Depression, he lived luxuriously in Buenos Aires on an annual salary of $20,000. What followed was arguably the most imaginatively fertile period of O'Hagan's career. He returned to Jasper in 1934 determined to write, but his friend Harvey Fergusson lured him instead to Berkeley, CA. There O'Hagan met and married the painter Margaret Peterson,
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who taught fine art at U California, and for the next 15 years the couple regularly wintered in Berkeley and summered on the BC coast. In this period O'Hagan wrote Tayjohn, published in London by Laidlaw and Laidlaw in 1939, and many of his best short stories appeared in Queens Q, Tamarack R, and New Mexico Q. He also created the germ of his second novel, The School-Marm Tree, in 'The Pool,' published in the prestigious journal Story in 1939. In 1950, Margaret O'Hagan refused to take an oath of loyalty required during the witch-hunts of Senator Joseph McCarthy and resigned from U California at Berkeley. After two years of travelling, the O'Hagans settled on Vancouver Island, first near Cowichan Bay, then in Victoria. Howard was obliged to take on occasional work in sawmills and on survey crews, but the next 12 years were also a time of steady writing and publication. He sold stories and articles to magazines, including historical sketches of such figures as Albert Johnson and Almighty Voice to such adventure magazines as True and Argosy. O'Hagan regarded these as potboilers, but when they were collected as Wilderness Men by Doubleday in New York in 1958, they were well received. In 1959 O'Hagan won U Western Ontario's President's Medal for 'Trees are Lonely Company.' The New York edition of Tay John appeared from Clarkson N. Potter in 1960, and in 1963 eight of his stories were collected as The Woman Who Got On atJasper Station by Alan Swallow of Denver. The stories were praised for their economy of form as well as for O'Hagan's compelling evocation of the mountain setting and his gift for storytelling. This collection included a story entitled 'The School-Marm Tree,' and O'Hagan apparently completed the novel of that name during this period. By 1962 Howard had also begun a regular column in the Victoria Colonist, and the O'Hagans were active in an artistic and literary circle that included Robert WEAVER, Robert HARLOW, Rona MURRAY, and Robin SKELTON. This period of productive work and active involvement with a Canadian literary community was cut short in 1964 when Margaret O'Hagan won a Canada Council arts grant to study mosaics in Italy. During the decade the O'Hagans spent on the Lipari Islands off Messina, Howard appears not to have written or
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published anything. This was one of many absences from Canada that must have contributed to the long neglect of O'Hagan's work. As Margery Fee explains in Silence Made Visible, a career needs to be promoted. Admittedly, Tay John was issued into the tumult of war in London by a publisher that soon folded, and it was dismissed by reviewers at home, but O'Hagan also published all of his work outside Canada and was himself absent for half his adult life. At the time-of his departure for Italy, he had seemed on his way to finding a place in Canadian literature. When the O'Hagans returned to Victoria in 1974, they found that McClelland had reprinted Tayjohn, and leaders of the literary establishment, including George WOODCOCK, Margaret ATWOOD, P.K. PAGE, Michael ONDAATJE, and Gary GEDDES, were hailing it as an important text. Talonbooks published The School-Marm Tree and republished O'Hagan's stories and sketches. O'Hagan was awarded a Canada Council Senior Arts Bursary to write an autobiographical piece (never published) and, before he died in 1982, he was made an honorary member of the WRITERS' UNION and given an honorary doctorate by McGill U. O'Hagan was celebrated as a neglected talent and an authentic voice speaking out of the wilderness, some critics even casting him as a kind of poetic mountain man telling primitive and naive tales. O'Hagan certainly had authentic experience of his mountain wilderness, but he was also among the most sophisticated and cosmopolitan of Canadian writers. He went on to live a cosmopolitan life in cultivated circles, as when he became one of only three non-faculty members of the exclusive Berkeley Arts Club. In his writing O'Hagan was a student and follower of Joseph Conrad, hardly a model for the primitive or naive. Most of the newfound attention centred upon O'Hagan's first and most powerful novel. Set in the mountains near Jasper around the turn of the century, Tayjohn presents a character of mixed blood caught between his Indian heritage and the advancing white society that would name and appropriate the mountain wilderness. Its hero owes less to the blonde French Iroquois METIS called 'Tete Jaune,' who gave his name to the Yellowhead Pass, than he owes to a TSIMSHIAN legend of
OJIBWA ORAL LITERATURE
mysterious birth. Tay John is born from the grave of his mother, a Shuswap woman violated by an Irish trapper-turned-mad-evangelist. At birth he is taken for the blonde messiah the Shuswaps believe will lead them, but he cannot shoulder the burden of his people. Instead, Tay John attempts to claim the other half of his blood heritage - butfindshimself consigned to the margins of white society, acceptable only as a picturesque image of savagery. He then turns toward the natural world and in the end appears to walk back into the earth from which he emerged. Once rejected for flouting the REALIST conventions that dominated Canadian literature at the time of its publication, Tay John was welcomed 35 years later by readers with a variety of post-realist interests. O'Hagan's interweaving of history, lore, and legend, as well as his gifts for powerful metaphor and for bold and simple utterance delivered in biblical cadences, drew attention to the MYTHIC and archetypal dimension of his novel. His shift from omniscient voice to a visible and fallible Conradesque narrator attracted those interested in reflexivity and NARRATOLOGY in general. The narrative is METAFICTIONAL in the direct sense that it is often explicitly about the problems - even the ultimate impossibility - of capturing a story. Tay John was hailed as a precursor to the POSTMODERNIST texts of the 19705 and 19805 and as confirmation of the underlying postmodern bias of Canadian culture. Its PARODIC deconstruction of various racial, cultural, religious, and gender ideologies also drew it into postcolonial, ethnicand GENDER-based commentaries. In an era in which the margin had become the centre, Tay John, as a marginalized text about the margins of civilization, became a centre of attention. O'Hagan's second novel, The School-Marm Tree, suffered by comparison. The story of a girl in a mountain village torn between two suitors and what they represent - the known attractions of nature and the dreamed elegance of the metropolis - it raises again O'Hagan's themes of human dualities. Critics accused it of having neither the depth of Tay John nor the cohesion of the short stories, while granting it some of O'Hagan's stylistic strengths. Female reviewers in particular applauded the rare sensitivity of its insights into women's experience.
The appearance of two volumes of commentary on his work in the 19905 confirms that interest in O'Hagan continued to grow, especially among writers, students, and teachers of Canadian literature. The succession of different critical discourses applied to his writing further suggests that this interest may endure because O'Hagan's powerfully suggestive and at times ragged texts open themselves to current textual and contextual interests. In a poststructuralist age, Tay John may survive the canon from which it was so long excluded. Further reading: Margery Fee, Silence Made Visible; Howard O'Hagan and Tay John (Toronto: ECW, 1992); Gary Geddes, The Writer That Canlit Forgot,' Saturday Night 92, (2 Nov 97): 8492; Ella Tanner, Tay John and the Cyclical Quest (Toronto: ECW, 1990). Dick Harrison
O HUIGIN, Sean. Children's writer; b Brampton, ON, 27 June 1942. While primarily known for his CHILDREN'S verse - POE(tree}, a simple introduction to experimental poetry (1978), Scary Poems for Rotten Kids (1989) - and for his AWARDwinning Ghost Horse of the MOUNTIES (1991), o huigin also wrote for adults, as in The Inks and the Pencils and the Looking Back (1978) and The Nightmare Alphabet (1987). He subsequently moved to IRELAND. Several of his children's works are available on cassette; Scary Poems is also recorded as a 1990 CD-ROM, and one poem from it, 'Acid Rain,' was animated in 1985 by the NATIONAL FILM BOARD. See also SOUND POETRY.
OJIBWA ORAL LITERATURE. The Ojibwa (Ojibway, Ojibwe, Chippewa), as they are known in English, are an indigenous people of Canada and the United States. They call themselves Anishinaabe (Nishnaabe or Anishinini in some places; Anishinabe' elsewhere in this encyclopedia) and form one of the largest and most diverse of North American nations. Their traditional territories cover parts of western Quebec, where they are known as the Algonquin; the Great Lakes region, where one subdivision is known as the Ottawa (Odawa); and the prairie provinces, where they are also known as the Saulteaux. They speak Anishinaabemowin
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(Nishnaabemwin or Anishininiimowin in some places), a LANGUAGE of the ALGONQUIAN family, in a chain of overlapping regional dialects. It is a polysynthetic language in which word stems, containing multiple meaningful word parts and sometimes incorporating whole other words, inflect with affixes for grammatical categories such as the person, animate or inanimate gender, number, and focus of participants, as well as for tense, mode, negation, aspect, and location/direction. This language is the carrier of a rich performed literature, inextricably tied to its lexical and grammatical resources. There are three main genres of Anishinaabe ORAL LITERATURE for which transcribed and translated texts of performances are available: the aadizookaan, dibaajimowin, and nagamon. Most of the many texts that are available only in English translation reflect the original oral performances faintly, often being no more than plot outlines or simplifications remoulded by editors to suit European tastes and sensibilities. Even the transcribed texts written in Anishinaabemowin are stripped of such significant aspects of the performance as gesture, change in voice quality, pitch, loudness, pause length, and speed, and the use of special voices for certain characters. The aadizookaan (aadisookaan, aadsookaan, or dibaadizookaan in some dialects) tell of the mythic past when the world was young and its inhabitants were not as they are today - when animals spoke and lived in communities, and transformations of beings, the social order, and the LANDSCAPE were taking place. Many aadizookaan deal with the recreation of the earth. (There is no story of a primal CREATION or of an initial ordering of the world for humans.) The aadizookaan is a sacred story, taken to be true, with performances generally restricted to winter and early spring nights or to ritual occasions, and often requiring the presentation of tobacco and gifts to the teller. The stories are not attributed to any original teller or creator. Each teller is a creative performer, adjusting the performance to the particular situation and audience, and tolerant of variants of the same story performed by other tellers in their own traditions. A major cycle of stories centres on the culture hero and TRICKSTER Nenabozho (Nenbozh, Wenabozho, or Wiisakejaakin some dialects),
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following him from his miraculous birth through his interactions with the other beings of the plane of the earth (all addressed as his relatives), the sky world (from which he often receives instructions through bird messengers), and the underwater world (against which he struggles), until he brings on the flood and recreates the world. The particular stories, their order, and the details vary, but the main episodes typically follow an eight-part pattern, (i) Nenabozho is born. His mother, impregnated by the sun or wind, dies giving birth to him and his brothers. His grandmother finds him as a blood clot and raises him. (2) He takes fire. In the form of a rabbit, he steals fire from others through trickery and brings it to his grandmother, and thus, ultimately, to humans. (3) He leaves home and engages with other beings. In many versions he kills his brother or brothers, thus bringing war and death to future humans. (4) He hunts with the wolves. He travels with a pack of wolves and forms a team with a wolf companion, thus acquiring their hunting skills for the survival of the humans to come. (5) His companion dies. The underwater manitous, guardians of game, kill the companion, who has failed to heed Nenabozho's warning. (6) Nenabozho seeks revenge. Disguised as a stump, Nenabozho wounds the leader of the underwater manitous. (7) Nenabozho completes his revenge. Nenabozho tricks a healer, the toad-woman, and disguised in her skin, kills the wounded manitou. (8) The earth is flooded and recreated. The angry underwater manitous flood the earth, but Nenabozho escapes on a raft or tall tree and assigns some surviving animals to dive down to find the earth beneath the water and to bring it to the surface. All die in the attempt and are revived. But when the muskrat is successful, Nenabozho recreates the earth with the dirt recovered from the bottom. He transforms the world, and leaves, saying, 'So therefore I have now finished the creation of everything from which the Anishinaabeg will derive life.' These stories are interspersed with tales of Nenabozho's foolishness as a greedy and lecherous trickster, always trying to trick others and always being tricked himself. He breaks every rule of behaviour, yet beneficial transformations result from his actions - a new shape, mark, skill, or custom, something even now visible or
OJIBWA ORAL LITERATURE
understandable - and all derive pleasure from the telling of his violations of sense and order. In one of the most popular of the stories, he tricks the ducks and other water birds into joining him in a Shut-Eye Dance. He sings, warning the birds of the penalties for peeking, as he breaks their necks one by one, until the spying grebe calls out an alarm and the survivors scatter. Nenabozho kicks the grebe and imposes the penalties, giving it red eyes (for peeking) and a flat rump (from the kick). Nenabozho then sets his birds to cook in the hot ashes of the fire. Telling his own rear to be on watch, he falls asleep. Ignoring the rude alarms of his lookout, he is robbed of his dinner. He punishes the offending body part by burning it. Suffering, he runs about smearing blood on some small trees, the osiers, which, transformed in colour by his blood, are charged by him with furnishing a smoking mixture for the pleasure of the humans to come. Sliding on the rocks, he leaves behind his scabs to become lichens for the people to eat. Every Anishinaabe tradition bearer tells this story differently, some with rich descriptive detail, sound effects, and songs. All who hear it can recognize the truth of the story because they know what the grebe looks like, and what the inner bark of the red osier and lichens are used for, and all laugh when it is told well. There are many other types of tales. They and the motifs in them are shared with other North American peoples: heroes are tested in the course of their journeys and slay monsters; humans encounter supernatural beings in isolated places or visit their abodes; and animals attempt to outwit one another. All entertain and most teach something about proper behaviour and the techniques of survival. An example is 'The Woman Who Married a Beaver': on a . vision quest, a woman encounters a man in the woods who takes her to his home by a lake. He provides well for her and she always has lots of wood outside the lodge. They marry and have children, four at a time. Humans come and visit, bringing gifts, but never entering the lodge. Then the woman realizes that she has married a beaver and that she is herself transformed. The man and the children go away with the visitors, and yet always return with gifts such as 'kettles and bowls, knives and tobacco, and all the things that are used when a beaver is eaten.' After
some time, her husband tells her to go back to her home and he leaves. She is discovered in the lodge by hunters, and returned, once again human and beautifully arrayed, to her people, to whom she teaches the rules of reciprocity between humans and beavers to ensure the success of their hunt: the beavers yield themselves up to humans willingly when treated with respect and given gifts, and renew themselves. The Anishinaabe have always traded stories as well as goods, and whether from other indigenous traditions - the BIBLE, or the FOLK literature traditions of French and English traders and settlers - new stories and motifs were adapted and blended with Anishinaabe ones. Some Anishinaabe tell of creations like those in the Bible, while others tell of dragons, princesses, and golden rings; all such elements and tales now form part of the living stream of Anishinaabe oral literature. William Jones (1871-1909), a linguist and a speaker of a related Algonquian language, transcribed many texts of Anishinaabe aadizookaan in the Lake Superior region. While the translations, completed by an editor after Jones's death, are inferior, the Jones collection remains the best source for texts of classical Ojibwe oral literature. Another type of narrative, the dibaajimowin (dbaajmowin, or aajimowin in some dialects) tells of the activities of humans in the recent or distant past: the actions of known or named heroes, the history of tribes or bands, the personal experiences of the narrator, and amusing stories. Often, the narrator indicates what is known of the chain of transmission of the narrative from the time of the event to the performance, or acknowledges personal authorship. While the main characters are human, they often interact with non-human beings. Narratives of both types show extensive use of lexical and discourse particles to mark off sections of the story, complete and partial repetition at the formal and content levels, and quotative frames around direct discourse. While published bilingual texts have usually presented such narratives as prose, more recently editors have attempted to reflect the structure of the narratives by setting them in lines rather than paragraphs, and by using typographic devices to highlight style and performance features. Two
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sections of a dibaajimowin performed by Jim Littlewolf in 1971 illustrate some of the characteristics discussed. A war chief and his wife are in their lodge while a battle rages outside: Suddenly they heard something there at the doorway where the brave is sitting Suddenly it pulled aside that door of his, their curtained door. Suddenly a head poked through. Baanimaa go giiwenh gegoo gaa-initamowaad imaa ishkwaandming mii imaa namadabid a'aw ogichidaa. Baanimaa go giiwenh imaa ba-dawegishkaanig i'iw ayi'ii odishkwaandem, giba'igaadenig odishkwaandemiwaa Baanimaa go giiwenh awiya ba-zaagikweninid. [A bloodied enemy warrior crawls in and attacks.] WAAW When the brave saw him, he stands up, and jumps across the fire, YAAY and falls. The old woman sees him, grabs the axe, and, when she'd clubbed him on his head, that Dakota threw him outside. WAAW Ogichidaa wayaabamaad Bazigonjise ezhi-aazhawigwaashkwanid imaa boodawaanaanig, YAAY bangishing. Mii waabamaad aw mindimooyenh. onawadinaan giiwenh waagaakwad. gaa-izhi-niiwanaskindibe'waad iniw iniw bwaanan mii zaagijiwebinaad. The occasions for performances of both aadizookaan and dibaajimowin are now usually
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public, with tradition bearers performing at cultural conferences, in classrooms, or on radio or television. Skill in narrative performance remains highly valued even as English- or French-language performances supplement or replace Anishinaabemowin ones. Native authors such as Cecilia Sugarhead and BasiljOHNSTON now write the stories in Anishinaabemowin or English. The words of the nagamon (nagamowin, ngamwin or nigamon in some dialects) are sung, accompanied in many performances by drumming. They often show patterns of regular line length measured in syllables, repeated refrains contrasting with other text, pairing of words sharing one word part but varying in others, and repetitions with changes in word order, among other stylistic devices. Common types of songs include love songs, usually emphasizing the pain of separation from the loved one; war songs, memorializing specific military encounters of individual warriors; songs embedded in the performance of aadizookaan or games; and the ritual songs of the Midewiwin religion, among many others. Written Anishinaabe literature began in the early ipth century when Jane Johnston Schoolcraft wrote Ojibwe texts of songs as poetry, the first Anishinaabemowin speaker recorded as doing so, although ritual songs were recorded in pictographs on birch bark scrolls and tablets. The brief texts presented by the ethnomusicologist Frances Densmore (1867-1957), intended primarily as lists of the vocabulary used in the performances, have often been taken as the complete texts of the songs, resulting in comparisons of the Anishinaabe nagamon to the Japanese haiku. In performance, the repetitions of the songs showed improvisatory manipulation and patterning that were not fully recorded by Densmore, or even eliminated under her recording conditions. The following song by the warrior Ojibwe (c 1820-1911), retranscribed from Densmore's cylinder recording, illustrates some characteristics of one form of the nagamon: use of non-lexical vocables, here WE, to keep the syllable count of each line regular, complete repetition of a line (i, 3), and partial repetition with meaningful variation in contrasting material (2 and 4):
ONDAATJE
An Eagle Feather I See ginigwan niwaabamaa WE. ogichidaa ndebibinaa. ginigwan niwaabamaa WE ogichidaa ninawadinaa, golden eagle feather / I see it / VOCABLE warrior / I catch him golden eagle feather / I see it / VOCABLE warrior / I grab him Other common patterns have a single line or couplet set against a field of multiple repetitions of a single-line refrain or a set of lines of equal length framed by non-refrain lines of a different length. Most songs sung today at powwows have as texts only non-lexical vocables such as WE; songs with other texts have become increasingly rare, but are still being made or performed in some communities, especially with the resurgence of the Midewiwin. Speeches, prayers, and sayings are among the other genres of Anishinaabe oral literature for which there is, as yet, little or no documentation. Funny stories centring on bilingual puns, which can only be fully appreciated by Anishinaabe-speaking bilinguals, are among the newer popular forms. Further reading: Frances Densmore, Chippewa Music (Washington: Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 45,1910), and Chippewa Music II (Washington: Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 53,1913); William Jones, Ojibwa Texts, Publications of the American Ethnological Society 7.1-2 (Leyden: EJ. Brill, 1917; New York: Stechert, 1919); Maude Kegg, Portage Lake: Memories of an Ojibwe Childhood (Edmonton: U Alberta P, 1991); John D. Nichols, ed, An Ojibwe Text Anthology, Studies in the Interpretation of Canadian Languages and Cultures, Text+ Series 2 (London: Dept of Anthropology, U Western Ontario, 1988); Norman Quill, The Moons of Winter and Other Stories (Red Lake, ON: Northern Light Gospel Missions, 1965); Cecilia Sugarhead, Ninoontaan/I Can Hear It: Ojibwe Stories from Lansdowne House Written by Cecilia Sugarhead (Winnipeg: Algonquian and Iroquoian Linguistics Memoir 14,1996); Angeline Williams,
The Dog's Children: Anishinaabe Texts Told by Angeline Williams (Winnipeg: U Manitoba P, 1991). John D. Nichols
OLLIVIER, Emile. Novelist; b Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 1940; educ Haiti. Ollivier emigrated in 1966 to teach and work in educational administration in Quebec. After completing an MA in sociology at U Montreal (1980), he was appointed as a professor there. In addition to academic studies of adult education theory, his works include such novels as Paysage de I'aveugle (1977) and Mere-Solitude (1983), which recall through an intensely visionary prose the violence of power in Haitian society. See also CARIBBEAN. Further reading: Jean Jonassin, 'Les productions litteraires harden en Amerique du Nord (19691980),' Etudes francaises 13.2 (April-June 1980): 3I3-33ONDAATJE, Philip Michael. Poet, novelist, editor, photographer, filmmaker, professor; b Ceylon (Sri Lanka) 12 Sept 1943; son of Enid Doris (Gratiaen) and Philip Mervyn Ondaatje. After the separation of his parents, Ondaatje joined his mother, sister Janet, and brother Christopher in 1952 in England and attended Dulwich C in London. Following his brother to Canada in 1962, Ondaatje continued his education at Bishop's U in Lennoxville, QC. He earned his BA from U Toronto (1965) and his MA at Queen's U (1967) with a thesis on mythology in the work of Scottish poet Edwin Muir. Ondaatje began teaching at U Western Ontario in 1967 and became a professor at Glendon C (York) in 1971. He was a visiting professor at U Hawaii at Manoa in 1981, in Rome and Turin in 1986, and at Brown U in 1990. From 1967 to 1998, Ondaatje published eleven books of poetry, four works of prose, five ANTHOLOGIES, articles of literary CRITICISM, and a monograph on Leonard COHEN, and produced several FILMS and SCREENPLAYS. His novel The English Patient was transposed into a highly successful motion picture (directed by Anthony Minghella) that dominated the 1997 Academy Awards with nine Oscars. Ondaatje's numerous literary awards include Governor General's AWARDS in 1971, 1980, 1992, and 2000; the Booker Prize in 1992;
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the Ciller Prize and the Prix Medicis in 2000 (both for Anil's Ghost). He received the Order of Canada in 1988. Ondaatje's texts reveal an intensive preoccupation with the sound and texture of words, a preference for unexpected juxtapositions and conjunctions, and an often devious sense of humour. The dialogue and intersections between personal self, persona, MYTH, and a subterranean kind of history inform many of Ondaatje's works, and in interviews he repeatedly emphasizes the importance of discovery and process in the act of writing. This trust in process and experiment is balanced by intricate attention to tone and narrative architecture in the process of rewriting and editing. Moreover, Ondaatje has been fascinated, from the beginnings of his career as a poet, by the interplay between poetic image and narrative development, and he has combined lyric and narrative elements in many different forms in his work. His first collection of poetry, The Dainty Monsters (1967), opens with shorter lyrics that project defamiliarized human traits through the anthropomorphic 'social animals' evoked in the title (as he calls them in Rat Jelly, 1973), while the longer narrative poems in the second part employ personae from Greek myth, history, or of Ondaatje's own invention. His serial poem the man with seven toes (1969), produced also for the stage in 1968 and again in 1969, combines over thirty poems into a longer narrative; in a 1975 interview with Sam Solecki, Ondaatje acknowledged in particular the formal inspiration of Phyllis WEBB'S Naked Poems in this respect, and cited the image of the necklace that joins independent 'bead-poems' yet grants them value as individual lyrics, the man with seven toes is based on a series of paintings by the Australian artist Sidney Nolan and a short account of the life of Mrs Eliza Fraser among Australian aborigines after a shipwreck in 1836 (the subject also of Patrick White's 1976 novel A Fringe of Leaves). As in his later longer works, Ondaatje changes some of the events and works within the gaps of the available historical documentation. In its serial arrangement, its relation to VISUAL ART, and its treatment of historical material, the poem suggests many of Ondaatje's future orientations.
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Other visual forms besides painting that have influenced Ondaatje's writing include film and photography. In 1970, Ondaatje directed and produced Sons of Captain Poetry, a documentary film on the concrete and sound poetry of bpNiCHOL, and Ondaatje's 1972 film The Clinton Special documented Theatre Passe Muraille's tour of its play The Farm Show (see THEATRE HISTORY). In his monograph Leonard Cohen (1970), Ondaatje comments in particular on the visual and cinematic emphasis in Cohen's The Favourite Game, as well as on the novel's poetic form, its 'non-existent' plot line, and its hero's self-portraiture in process. In Cohen's Beautiful Losers, Ondaatje sees the essential drama in the orchestration of different styles, which liberate the narrator from restrictive laws by mixing pop, poetry, history, and 'Hollywood western dialogue.' Ondaatje himself experimented with similar possibilities in his next longer works, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left Handed Poems (pub also in 1970, Governor General's Award in 1971) and Coming Through Slaughter (1976, Books in Canada First Novel Award). Both works combine prose, verse, interviews, photography, and other forms in transgeneric collages that play with the possibilities of open-ended narrative, and include photography and film in their intertextual repertoire. These works are also performed as plays (initially at the STRATFORD FESTIVAL in 1973 and at Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto in 1980). The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and Coming through Slaughter are again based on historically documented characters and incidents - in this case the infamous outlaw William Bonney (aka Kid Antrim) and New Orleans jazz musician Buddy Bolden. Ondaatje's sources for these legendary figures range from historical research and archival documents to POPULAR CULTURE such as films, comics, and records (although none exist of Bolden himself). Yet Ondaatje also includes 'forged' documents (some 'historical' photographs in Billy are Ondaatje's), alters historical information, and generally adapts the material to suit the truth of his fiction. In a 1990 interview with Catherine BUSH (Essays on Canadian Writing 53), Ondaatje evokes a relationship between self and mask in this respect and speaks of self-portraits and possible fictional portraits. Both works are self-reflexive also because they
ONDAATJE
project the process of artistic creation into the text, and refuse strict boundaries between fictional worlds and the event of their production. Ondaatje's characters thus mediate history as well as aspects of the artist, the latter evoked overtly in the title of The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and through several characters in Coming Through Slaughter. These texts probe in particular the romantic persona of the highly creative but also self-destructive artist (as Solecki argues in Spider Blues'), featuring elusive outsiders, violence, and disappearance. Pursued by instances of the law that also come to signify narrative order - Sheriff Pat Garrett and, more parodically, the detective Webb invoke closure on the Kid's and Bolden's freedom respectively - the protagonists of these works also typify the exploration of liminal spaces and the unknown in Ondaatje's writing. Ondaatje's longer prose works typically maintain poetic qualities, and their creative concerns are often expressed in individual poems. 'White Dwarfs,' the title poem of the last section in Rat Jelly (1973), evokes a fascination with disappearing heroes directly relevant to Coming Through Slaughter; other poems, in this section central to Ondaatje's reflection on writing include 'Spider blues' and '"The gate in his head.'" With a poem about the death of this father, 'Letters & Other Worlds,' Rat Jelly also anticipates Ondaatje's fictionalmemoir Running in the Family (1982). Written mostly in prose, Running in the Family unites short, partially independent texts like a collection of poetry, and follows poetic strategies also in its exploration of an image of the father that appears in a dream at the beginning. As in his previous longer works, Ondaatje uses historical information - in this case largely derived from oral conversation - to create a partly fictional portrait. The text also mixes once more photography, prose, and poems, some of which - 'The Cinnamon Peeler' and 'Women like You' appeared in Ondaatje's subsequent collection Secular Love (1984). Ondaatje's other books of poetry include There's a Trick with a Knife I'm Learning to Do (Governor General's Award 1980), the LONG POEM Tin Roo/(i982, rpt in Secular Love), and the 1998 collection Handwriting, in which Ondaatje returns to Sri Lanka. Despite his previous prose publications, Ondaatje called In the Skin of a Lion his first
novel (1987; Trillium and City of Toronto Book Awards; finalist for the Ritz-Hemingway award). Employing sources that range from the City of Toronto Archives to research on the Macedonian immigrant community but also inventing incidents and characters, Ondaatje imagines aspects of a largely unnamed history of Toronto and of parts of Ontario in the 19205 and 19305. In the Skin of a Lion deals at many different levels with the entrance into language, history, and community. The novel begins with a child's experience of the absence and discovery of names, an immigrant's acquisition of a new language, and a woman's silence before beginning a new life and taking a new name. Later, the grown-up character Patrick Lewis will learn the stories of the Macedonian immigrant Nicolas Temelcoff, a worker on Toronto's growing Bloor Street Viaduct, and of the erstwhile silent Alice Gull. Narrating the conveyance of personal stories from speaker to speaker, the novel not only interweaves different strands of personal and public history, but also stages its own writing as the emergence of a communal story from collective oral history. Ondaatje emphasizes the subjective reality of this multi-voiced imagination in a scene of storytelling that prefaces the novel; at the end, this proleptic scene can be recognized as the further transmission of the novel's events to Hana, listening to her stepfather Patrick, who has become the involved recipient of the other characters' stories. While In the Skin of a Lion reconstructs history, it offers also a complex reflection on potentiality and fiction that does not fit the conventions of historical realism. This point is underlined by some overtly anachronistic details, but also more importantly by the undecidable status of crucial scenes between reality and dream in this novel, which uses light and darkness as indices of imaginative possibility and invention. In particular the nocturnal confrontation in the waterworks towards the end appears anti-climactic if read in realistic terms, but poses the question of historical survival with reference to the theme of immortality and sleep as it appears in The Epic of Gilgamesh, the intertext evoked by the novel's title. Hana and Caravaggio, two characters from In the Skin of a Lion, reappear in Ondaatje's next novel, The English Patient (1992, Booker Prize).
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Set around and during the Second World War and ranging in locations from North AFRICA to Europe and from Canada to INDIA, this work again unfolds past events as they are reconstructed in the interactions among several characters whose lives become part of a communal history. In a half-destroyed villa that (with its library, undefused bombs, and open walls) becomes a setting for reading, hazardous deciphering, and imagination, the nurse Hana, joined by the Indian sapper Kip and the thief Caravaggio, attends to a dying pilot who seems to have forgotten his past; because of the plane in which he was shot down, he is initially identified as 'the English patient.' Adding layer after layer to Herodotus' book of histories in which the enigmatic unknown has pasted documents from his life, the narrative reconstructs incidents that superimpose other identities of the patient. The curious questions of Caravaggio and the influence of morphine, reveal the circumstances of the parachute descent into the desert upon which the scene of narrative reconstruction is premised; the unfolding of past events eventually leads to a scene of reckoning between Caravaggio and the patient that is reminiscent of the ending of In the Skin of a Lion. The image of a burning figure falling from the sky, as Ondaatje has explained, initiated the process of writing and imagination, and Stephen SCOBIE (in Essays on Canadian Writing 53) has explored the poetic strategy and the network of associations that develops from Ondaatje's exploration of this image. Ondaatje has also shaped Canadian writing as a reader of manuscripts and as an EDITOR of journals and anthologies. His editorial activities include his work for the Kingston literary journal Quarry in the 19605, his important subsequent association with Coach House P, and then his involvement as a contributing editor of Brick magazine from 1985 onwards. His anthologies are: The Broken Ark: A Book of Beasts (1971); Personal Fictions: Stories by Munro, Wiebe, Thomas, and Blaise (1977); The Long Poem Anthology (1979); From Ink Lake: Canadian Stones (1990); and The Brick Reader (co-edited with Linda SPALDING, 1991). Many of the early important essays on Ondaatje's work and book reviews up to 1985 are conveniently collected in Spider Blues: Essays
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on Michael Ondaatje (1985); this volume also contains a bibliography by Judith Brady, and two interviews with Ondaatje. Another important early discussion of The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is provided in Savage Fields (1977) by Dennis LEE, who also edited this text for House of Anansi. Douglas Harbour's Michael Ondaatje (1993) offers detailed commentary on Ondaatje's work, and Ed Jewinski's biography Michael Ondaatje: Express Yourself Beautifully appeared in 1994. Further reading: Douglas Barbour, Michael Ondaatje (Toronto/New York: Macmillan/ Twayne, 1993); Karen Smythe, ed, Ondaatje Issue, Essays on Canadian Writing 53 (Summer 1994); Sam Solecki, ed, Spider Blues: Essays on Michael Ondaatje (Montreal: Vehicule, 1985). Winfried Siemerling
ONTARIO, province, joined CONFEDERATION 1867; capital: Toronto (likely from a HURON word meaning 'meeting place,' formerly called York, est 1793); area 1,068,587 sq km; pop 11,410,046 (2001); provincial flower, white trillium. Long the commercial hub of the country, Ontario is the national headquarters for many economic enterprises, including (until TECHNOLOGY made alternative systems of production possible) the NEWSPAPER and PUBLISHING industries. Political power is also concentrated in Ontario and Quebec, and the national capital, Ottawa (est as a settlement in 1806 and as the capital in 1867), lies within Ontario on the border with Quebec. (The word 'Ontario' is likely IROQUOIAN, meaning 'beautiful water,' the term being used in 1641 to refer to Lake Ontario.) Originally occupied by a range of ALGONQuiAN-speaking tribes (Huron, OJIBWA, CREE, Petun, Neutral, Potawatomi, and others), much of Ontario was part of NEW FRANCE, transferred to England (as part of 'CANADA') by the terms of the 1763 Treaty of Paris. Divided from the eastern half of 'Canada' in 1791 (its population having grown when the LOYALISTS moved north after 1776), it was constituted as Upper Canada because it occupied the upper reaches of the St Lawrence/Niagara/ Great Lakes river system. Rejoined with Lower Canada in 1841, Upper Canada was renamed Canada West; it became 'Ontario' in 1867, still
ORAL LITERATURE AND HISTORY
occupying only the southern portions of its current territorial limits. Federal legislation extended the province north to the Albany R in 1889 and to Hudson Bay in 1912, taking over part of the former NORTHWEST TERRITORIES District of Keewatin. By the terms of the Boundary Extension Act, Ontario would take over treaty negotiation responsibilities with the NATIVE peoples, and shortly after (D.C. SCOTT being involved in the process) signed Treaty 9 with the Ojibwa. Deeply REGIONAL, Ontario divides into such areas as the St Lawrence industrial belt, the Ottawa Valley (see FINNIGAN), the more rural 'SOWESTO' (which was the location for one of the FENIAN raids and the Donnelly murders [see REANEY]), the Bruce country (see MUNRO), lesspopulated Northern Ontario (a term that refers both to 'cottage country' north of Toronto and to the Canadian Shield country north and east of Lakes Huron and Superior), and the city of Toronto itself (the largest URBAN centre in Canada). The site for many GROUP OF SEVEN paintings (see VISUAL ARTS) and for numerous cultural venues (see, eg, LIBRARIES, LITERARY FESTIVALS, PUBLISHING, SHAW FESTIVAL,
STRATFORD FESTIVAL, THEATRE), Ontario and its policies powerfully affect the rest of the country. Ontario writers include Margaret ATWOOD, Margaret AVISON, Dionne BRAND, Morley CALLAGHAN, John CARROLL, Austin CLARKE, Cecile CLOUTIER, Matt COHEN, J.R. COLOMBO, Ralph
CONNOR, George COPWAY, i.v. CRAWFORD, Donald CREIGHTON, Kateri DAMM, Robertson DAVIES, Mazo DE LA ROCHE, Christopher DEWDNEY, Stan DRAGLAND, Sara Jeannette DUNCAN, Paul DUTTON, Timothy FINDLEY, Barbara GOWDY, Don GUTTERIDGE, Steven HEIGHTON, David HELWIG, Tomson HIGHWAY, Harold Adams INNIS, Anna JAMESON, Basil. JOHNSTON, Wayne KEON, Tom KING, William KIRBY, Raymond KNisTER, Archibald LAMPMAN, Stephen LEACOCK, Dennis LEE, Douglas LEPAN, Gwendolyn MACEWEN, W.L. MACKENZIE, Tom MARSHALL, StCVC MCCAFFERY, David MCFAD-
DEN, James MCINTYRE, Marshall MCLUHAN, Judith MERRIL, John METCALF, Rohinton MISTRY, Susanna MOODIE, bpNiCHOL, Michael ONDAATJE, Richard OUTRAM, Marlene Nourbese PHILIP, Al PURDY, Patrick SLATER, Raymond SOUSTER, Francis SPARSHOTT, Colleen THIBAUDEAU, Judith THOMPSON, Paul THOMP-
SON, Catharine Parr TRAILL, Jane URQUHART, M.G. VASSANJI, Robert WEAVER, George WHALLEY. See also BLACK HISTORY, SCHOOL TEXTBOOKS. ORAL LITERATURE AND HISTORY. Cana dian oral literature and oral history begin with the experience of FIRST NATIONS people, who have been in place for as long as it has been possible for humans to live in the land. Over the past few centuries, as other people have arrived from Europe, Asia, and Africa, other voices contributed to the conversation. The experience of First Nations people remains different from that of people who are not indigenous to the country that is now Canada. Despite the prevalence of written communication today, oral literature and oral history continue to play a role in shaping Canada's cultural identity. First Nations: Oral Traditions of Storytelling. For thousands of years, First Nations people passed stories of their lives by word of mouth in an unbroken succession from one generation to the next. Unlike a written text, which may be faithfully reproduced by hand-copying or mechanical printing, an oral text carries on through individual acts of creation. The listener shares authorship with the storyteller. As Dunne-za elder Tommy Attachie says in conversation with respect to the dreamer's dance songs of his tradition, 'when you sing it now, just like new.' For Okanagan writer Jeannette ARMSTRONG, stories are also inherent in the LANGUAGE in which they are spoken. She describes herself as a listener to the language's stories who merely retells them in different patterns. Wendy Wickwire tells a story about the way Thompson Indian doctor Josephine George responded to her grandson's question about how to remember the stories she told him. Josephine said that she told him simply to write it on your heart. Wickwire used this answer as the title for a book of narratives by Okanagan storyteller Harry ROBINSON. While the reader may absorb a written text in absolute and inscrutable silence, oral literature and oral history must be performed by a speaker and received by listeners who internalize the message and make it their own. The spoken word in an oral tradition is fundamen-
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tally social and interactive. The range of a speaker's voice defines a circle of communicants who share the physical space of common soundscape. For a message to carry beyond that physical circle, a listener must store it in his or her memory and then recreate it for another audience. Thus, each telling of a story is an act of creation. Each telling is written on the heart of a listener. Each telling now makes it 'just like new/ The oral traditions of Canadian First Nations situate human and non-human persons within a narrative space that is alive with meaning. Performers and listeners are mutually familiar with a common LANDSCAPE, common traditions, and a common circle of relations. As Jeannette Armstrong said, language was given to First Nations people by the land they live within. The most basic form of oral text is conversation. Its only physical existence is the back-and-forth flow of acoustic vibrations between speaker and listener, listener and speaker. Conversation is dialogue. It is the reciprocal exchange of storied speech and shared meanings. According to anthropologist Julie Cruikshank, it is important to share the context for knowing a story so that conversations can be built on shared knowledge. First Nations stories often take the form of narrated discourse, in which the storyteller recounts conversations between characters. These conversations may include a larger circle of communicants than those of non-Aboriginal discourse. Harry Robinson's stories, for example, include characters who are animals, features of the land, and natural forces. They speak to one another as sentient beings in a world that is alive with meaning. In one story about a boy's vision quest, Robinson recounts the dialogue between the boy and a chipmunk he encounters living beneath a stump in an avalanche slope. The boy tries to tease the chipmunk, who speaks to him as a person: 'Well, boy, you're here.' 'Yeah.' 'You think you're going to make a fun out of me.' 'Well,' he says. 'That's what I think.' You do not think of that.
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You my friend. You boy, and I'm a boy We both boy. So, it's better to be friends instead of making fun out of me. Now, I'm going to tell you something. This stump - you think it's a stump but that's my grandfather. The stump then speaks to the boy:
'You see me. You see my body. It was hit by the bullet for many, many years ... The bullet never go in through my body. So now, that's the way you going to be. When you get to be a man. If somebody shoots you, with the bow and arrow, or gun.' From this encounter, the boy obtains his personal power. And he started to sing. He sing the song. That old man. And the chipmunk was a boy, turn out to be a boy. He sing the song. The both of'em talked to him. And he's got two power. And he sing the song. The three of 'em sing the song, for a while. Robinson's stories, as edited by Wickwire, are an important contribution to First Nations oral literature in that Robinson composed and told them orally in a rich and evocative idiom. The TRANSLATIONS were his own. He performed the stories within the oral mode without the intermediary of writing. Wickwire wrote down his words in a poetic line-for-line transcription that preserves the sense of his stories as oral performance. Robinson's stories bring the reader into an Aboriginal circle of conversation in which stumps and chipmunks and boys and old men communicate easily with one another. Through them, the reader hears both an echo of
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the boy's power song and more than an echo of the First Nations narrative voice. First Nations Oral Tradition in Canadian Literature. During the past five hundred years, a substantial literature representing Native American oral tradition has come into being, as outsiders and First Nations people themselves have sought to translate and explain what participants have known all along through direct experience (see NATIVES IN LITERATURE). Some of these representations result from dialogue: they are reports of the conversations through which First Nations people communicated an understanding of their situation to one another or to an interested outsider. Others are adaptations of oral tradition written by First Nations people themselves. Penny Petrone has collected texts from both sources into two volumes: First People, First Voices (1983) and Native Literature in Canada (1990). In the first, she presents transcriptions of Aboriginal oratory beginning with the i/th century. One text is the 1676 speech of an unnamed MI'KMAQ chief to a Recollet priest, Chrestien Le Clercq: Thou reproachest us, very inappropriately, that our country is a little hell in contrast with France, which thou comparest to a terrestrial paradise, inasmuch as it yields thee, so thou sayest, every kind of provision in abundance ... I beg thee now to believe that, all miserable as we seem in thine eyes, we consider ourselves nevertheless much happier than thou in this, that we are very content with the little that we have, and believe also once for all, that thou deceivest thyself greatly if thou thinkest to persuade us that thy country is better than ours. For if France, as thou sayest, is a little terrestrial paradise, art thou sensible to leave it? ... As for us, we find all our riches and all our conveniences among ourselves, without trouble and without exposing our lives to the dangers in which you find yourselves constantly through your long voyages. This speech, while obviously filtered through Le Clercq's missionary perspective and translated across two languages, illustrates a rhetori-
cal use of IRONY, argument, and overstatement for emphasis that is characteristic of the formal oratory practised by many eastern tribes. Petrone reports a more desperate and defiant tone in an 1875 speech by the Plains CREE chief Big Bear explaining his refusal to sign Treaty No 6: 'We want none of the Queen's presents; when we set up a fox-trap we scatter pieces of meat all around, but when the fox gets into the trap we knock him on the head; we want no bait. Let your Chiefs come like men and talk to us/ Big Bear uses the metaphor of a trap to point out the white people's unwillingness to engage his people in dialogue. Both this speech and that of the Mi'kmaq chief demonstrate how First Nations orators use their voices and the rhetorical devices of their oral traditions as instruments of resistance. Another rich source of Plains Indian oral narrative that has entered Canadian literature, at least indirectly, is a series of WAR stories the Plains Cree warrior Fine Day told anthropologist David Mandelbaum in 1935. The old man's way of speaking gives one element of Plains history the sharp focus of a Cree participant observer. Big Bear's speeches, as recorded by treaty commissioner Alexander Morris, and Fine Day's narratives, as told to David Mandelbaum, are echoed by writer Rudy WIEBE in his 1973 award-winning novel, The Temptations of Big Bear. According to poet Robert BRINGHURST, some of the First Nations oral narratives that have been written down by outsiders constitute a classical body of literature equal to that of any great literary tradition. He includes among this literature the narratives John Swanton collected from HAIDA storyteller John Sky (SKAAY) in 1900-1. Issues of Voice and Representation. Concerns about voice, representation, and ethnographic authority are prominent today in both academic and First Nations communities. Like the conversations that constitute Native American oral literature itself, successful representations speak to the reader as a sentient and intelligent person. They speak from a position of respectful mediation between the First Nations oral voice and that of the reader. Writing about and transcribing oral literature is of necessity multi-vocal,
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reportorial, and reflexive. Its authors are most successful when they have documented and interpreted First Nations historical traditions in conversation with them. Examples of this conversational reporting are Julie Cruikshank's Life Lived Like a Story, Robin Ridington's Trail to Heaven: Knowledge and Narrative in a Northern Native Community, and Antonia Mills' Eagle Down is our Law. These works integrate the anthropologists' narratives with those of northern Canadian First Nations storytellers. All are examples of shared ethnographic authority. Perhaps more important, and certainly more exciting than the works narrated by outsiders, are those written directly by First Nations authors who have grown up within an oral tradition. Jeannette Armstrong is one of the most articulate of these writers; she has struggled to find appropriate English constructions to express the nuances of the spoken Okanagan narrative. In a passage that both demonstrates and comments on the stylistic fluidity of Okanagan, she writes: In Okanagan storytelling, the ability to move the audience back and forth between the present reality and the story reality relies heavily on the fluidity of time sense that the language offers. In particular, stories that are used for teaching must be inclusive of the past, present, and future, as well as the current or contemporary moment and the story reality, without losing context and coherence while maintaining the drama. There must be no doubt that the story is about the present and the future and the past, and that the story was going on for a long time and is going on continuously, and that the words are only mirror-imaging it having happened and while it is happening. Another First Nations writer who grew up speaking his native Cree language is playwright Tomson HIGHWAY. His widely performed works have provided an opportunity for Native actors to bring their oral traditions to audiences in the medium of oral performance. Highway gives a central role to the powerful OJIBWA culture hero and trickster, Nanabush. Like Armstrong,
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Highway composes his work first in his native language and then translates it into English. The work of the First Nations novelist and dramatist Thomas KING also strongly reflects the poetics of oral literature. As King told Peter GZOWSKI in a CBC interview, he had tried to recreate the sense of an oral storytelling voice in written form but with little success until he discovered Harry Robinson. With the help of Robinson and COYOTE, King drags a substantial chunk of the Western CANON through the voice of First Nations oral creation stories in his novel, Green Grass, Running Water. In 'The Dead Dog Cafe Comedy Hour' (which temporarily stopped in Dec 2000), King presented oral literature directly in the medium of RADIO D R A M A . Oral History in First Nations Law and Government. Because the institutions of Canada's First Nations function within the oral mode, storytelling provides a medium for the recording of Aboriginal history. The significance of oral history received intensive scrutiny in the legal action brought by 54 hereditary chiefs of the Gitksan and Wet'suwet'en First Nations (Delgamuukw v British Columbia, 1997). The plaintiffs presented evidence that their oral histories (Gitksan Adaawk and Wet'suwet'en Kungax) serve to validate and record the ownership of land by corporate kin groups known as 'Houses.' In their opening statement to the court, the chiefs described their ownership of territory as a marriage of the chief and the land. Each chief derives his or her authority from an ancestor who first encountered the spirit of the land. From that encounter came power which is carried in the histories, songs, and dances of the house and recreated in the feast when the histories are told, the songs and dances performed, and the crests displayed. In his trial judgment, Chief Justice Allan MacEachern of the BC Supreme Court discounted the validity of these records, concluding that he had serious doubts about the reliability of the Adaawk and Kungax as evidence of a detailed history of land ownership. MacEachern's judgment was sharply reversed in the Supreme Court of Canada opinion written by Mr Justice Antonio Lamer, who concluded that if oral histories had been correctly assessed,
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decisions about the facts of the case might have been different (see also TSIMSHIANIC LITERATURE, FINDER). Oral Histories and the Canadian Experience. Oral histories have been part of non-Aboriginal Canadian experience since people from Europe, Asia, and Africa first arrived on North American shores. Histories have been recounted in languages as diverse as French, English, Gaelic, German, Spanish, Polish, Icelandic, Russian, Yiddish, Hindi, Punjabi, Arabic, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Cantonese. Like the First Nations histories, many of these have been nourished by the linguistic and cultural communities in which they originated. Similarly, stories from these communities have found their way into Canadian literature in the works of writers such as Joy KOGAWA; Denise Chong; Rudy WIEBE; and Margaret LAURENCE, who used oral narrative extensively in The Diviners. Pioneers in documenting Canadian oral history include Marius BARBEAU, who joined the National Museum in Ottawa as an ethnologist in 1911. He collected songs and oral histories from his native Quebec as well as extensive materials from First Nations cultures. His successor at the museum was Luc LACOURCIERE, who collected thousands of tales and songs and created an index of French FOLKLORE in America. Other francophone oral histories were collected by Jean-Claude Dupont at U Laval's Centre interuniversitaire d'etudes sur les lettres, les arts et les traditions (CELAT). His 'Memoires d'homme' include Contes de bucherons, a classic collection of 'Tit-Jean' and other narratives by Issie John. Early contributors to documenting the oral traditions of Nova Scotia were W. Roy Mackenzie and Helen CREIGHTON, who also worked for the National Museum. Her work is archived there as well as at the Public ARCHIVES of Nova Scotia. Many of the songs Creighton collected are in the form of musical narratives. Her work influenced contemporary artists such as Ashley Maclsaac and Mary Jane Lamond. In the Ottawa Valley, Edith FOWKE collected oral history and songs that she made available in the form of books and audio recordings. On the BC coast, the Raincoast Chronicles series of publications
presented stories and the history of the area. A similar series, Sound Heritage, was sponsored by the Aural History Division of the BC Provincial Archives. The archives presented stories based on oral history sound recordings from throughout British Columbia, including Steveston Recollected by Daphne MARLATT. On the opposite side of the country, Memorial U of Newfoundland has sponsored and archived substantial oral history material. Another oral approach to Canadian history was pioneered by journalist Barry Broadfoot, who chose to document common historical experiences by collecting what he called living memories based on tape recorded interviews with ordinary people. His books describe episodes in Canadian history - the immigrant years, the Depression, the Second World WAR, as well as regional histories such as life on the prairies and the experiences of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War. The stories he reports are vignettes that, when read together, make up a historical mosaic of a particular time or place. Within each of his books, Broadfoot groups stories according to their shared subject matter. His stories are unlike the braided narratives that sustain a community of people united by shared discourse, since each one is told in isolation from the others. The history may be shared but his informants are not in communication with one another and remain anonymous. Oral history continues to be used to document a wide variety of Canadian cultural scenes. Toronto lawyer Christine Kates, for instance, collected several hundred pages of material from judges, lawyers, court officials, police and others about their places in the history of the Canadian justice system. Aubrey Kerr, a retired petroleum geologist in Calgary, wrote four books based on 400 interviews with participants in the oil industry. Many Canadian families use oral history as a means of documenting the experiences and recollections of family members (see LIFE WRITING). Oral Literatures in Canada. The spoken word is itself a medium of PERFORMANCE art. Oral literatures may be composed improvisationally (in settings as diverse as extemporaneous public
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ORATORY, preaching, or THEATRE SPORTS) or scripted and read aloud. Toronto artist Lilian ALLEN, for instance, gives voice to the experience of AFRICAN Canadians in her performances of DUB poetry. Oral performance underlies the work of SOUND POETS such as bpNiCHOL and bill BISSETT, but poets as diverse as Al PURDY and Lorna CROZIER also give narrative renditions of their written work. Novelist Timothy FINDLEY has performed readings of his stories in collaboration with dancer Veronica Tennant and other performers. RADIO personalities such as Max FERGUSON and Peter Gzowski are familiar voices in the lives of thousands, as is Stuart McLean with his stories from the Vinyl Cafe. Satirists such as Bob Robertson and Linda Cullen (Double Exposure) and The Royal Canadian Air Farce give an ironic twist to familiar current events and political figures, as does the annual French-language New Year's Eve satire, Bye-bye. CBC Radio also features First Nations narratives in a series hosted by Peter Hope called 'Native Voices' and a variety of First Nations programming on its Northern Native Broadcasting service. The verbal arts are specifically featured each year at the Yukon international STORYTELLING festival.
created, shared, and spoken. CBC Radio, in particular, provides a distinctively Canadian platform for a range of verbal arts not as readily available in the United States, as does the Aboriginal People's Television Network, est 1999. By contrast, television and video may have fatally damaged traditional oral performances such as CHILDREN'S skipping rhymes and songs. Cuts to government funding have also caused the demise of some important institutional supports for oral history programs. Despite some changes and losses, people continue to create a storied world in their conversations with one another. Perhaps because we are essentially a storytelling species, oral traditions continue.
Conclusions. Oral history and oral literature in Canada continue to influence fields as diverse as fiction writing and jurisprudence. First Nations oratory and storytelling still play a vital role, both within First Nations communities and in the larger Canadian society. Oral history continues to document rights of succession to names, lands, and titles in First Nations cultures as varied as those of the Northwest Coast and the eastern woodlands. Coyote continues to cross cultural and literary borders. Stories live on and are recreated with each new generation. Orators bring old stories to bear on contemporary situations. They continue to speak for the generations. Among non-Aboriginal Canadians, oral histories continue to be told wherever people gather in conversation. Some histories remain linked to particular linguistic and cultural communities while others are shared more widely. The electronic media, including radio, television, and FILM, provide opportunities for narratives to be
OSTENSO, Martha. Novelist; b Haukeland, Norway, 17 Sept 1900, d Seattle, WA, 24 Nov 1963; daughter of Lena (Tungeland) and Sigurd Brigt; emig 1902 to North America (South Dakota at first). At U Manitoba she met Douglas DURKIN, with whom she lived for some time before their marriage in 1944. A teacher and reporter in Manitoba (1918-20), a social worker in New York City (1921-2), she moved with Durkin to Minnesota, and her 15 novels were all written in collaboration with him. He devised plots; she drafted romances; he edited them; and together they achieved monetary success. In 1943 Ostenso wrote a BIOGRAPHY (with its subject, Sister Elizabeth Kenny, the polio nurse); it was adapted into the successful film The Sister Kenny Story (1946). While The Dark Dawn (1926) and The Young May Moon (1929) attracted some enthusiasm for their anti-puritanical stands, only Wild Geese (1925), a story of Judith Care's strong-willed resistance to her
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Further reading: Julie Cruikshank, The Social Life of Stories: Narrative and Knowledge in the Yukon Territory (Lincoln: U Nebraska P, 1998); Edith Fowke, Canadian Folklore (Toronto: Oxford UP, 1988); Penny Petrone, Native Literature in Canada: From the Oral Tradition to the Present (Toronto: Oxford UP, 1990). Robin Ridington
ORATORY, see HOWE, IROQUOIAN, ORAL LITERATURE AND HISTORY, RHETORIC, RIEL.
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father Caleb, received continuing (especially FEMINIST) critical attention.
74-89; Pierre Nepveu, Les mots a I'ecoute (Quebec: P de 1'U Laval, 1979).
Further reading: Joanne Hedenstrom, 'Puzzled Patriarchs and Free Women,' Atlantis 4.1 (1978): 2-9.
OUELLETTE, Michel. Playwright; b Smooth Rock Falls, ON, 15 Sept 1961. Ouellette lived in Ontario until 1993, taking an active part in the Franco-Ontarian community socially, politically, and culturally. He was editor-in-chief of Clic and currently works with the Assoc des auteures et auteurs de 1'Ontario francais. While he lives in Quebec and is making inroads into its THEATRE world, he still produces his plays in Ontario. More than six have been published, including Corbeaux en exil (1992), a play about an author who (guided by his mother) undertakes a voyage into memory; here he learns from his grandfather (as much his double as his ancestor) how to assert his identity and refuse the exile that is the lot of his fellow Franco-Ontarians. The AWARD-winning French Town (1994), historical in concept, pursues the theme of economic and cultural alienation, looking at Northern Ontario in 1936, where Franco-Ontarians live on the margins of an anglophone company town ('Timber Falls'), cutting the trees from which a New York-based paper company makes its wealth.
OUELLETTE, Fernand. Poet, novelist; b Montreal 24 Sept 1930; son of Gilberte (Chalifour) and Cyrille Ouellette. Although he trained initially in Ottawa to be a priest, Ouellette turned to the social sciences before being ordained, and subsequently worked for RADio-Canada as a scriptwriter on a range of literary subjects. In 1955, he married Lisette Corbeil, became affiliated with the poets at HEXAGONE P, and published his first book, Ces anges de sang, a collection of poems in which flesh and mysticism compete as routes to spiritual rebirth. By Sequences de I'aile (1958), sensuality is dominant. In 1972, Hexagone published his collected works up to that point, Poesie. One of the founders of Liberte (1959), he also worked with the NATIONAL FILM BOARD and produced over 20 more books by 1998, including an AWARD-winning biography of Edgar Varese; an ESSAY collection for which he refused the Governor General's Award, Les actes retrouves (1970); and a personal testament to his spiritual growth, Journal denoue (1974). Ouellette's novels - beginning with Tu regardais intensement Genevieve (1978) - also deal with opposition and mystical quest, probing as metaphor the failure of a marriage, the death of a painter, and the forms of the invisible. A few of his poems were translated by F.R. SCOTT, Gwladys DOWNES, and John REEVES in John GLASSGO'S The Poetry of French Canada in Translation (1970); Barry CALLAGHAN and Ray Ellenwood translated his selected poems as Wells of Light in 1989. Further reading: Noel Audet, 'L'irradiation poetique: Entretien,' Voixet Images 5 (1980): 435-70, and 'Structure poetique dans 1'oeuvre de Fernand Ouellette,' Voix et images 3 (1970): 103-24; Pierre-Justin Dery, 'Sur le trajet poetique de Fernand Ouellette,' Voix et images 5 (1980): 497513; Paul Chanel Malenfant, Lapartie et le tout (Quebec: P de 1'U Laval, 1983); Gilles Marcotte, 'Le poesie et ses mots,' Etudes francaises 9 (1973):
OUELLETTE-MICHALSKA, Madeleine. Novelist, essayist, dramatist, poet, journalist, literary critic; b on a farm in Saint-Alexandre de Kamouraska, QC, 27 May 1930, into a family of 15 children; daughter of Melanie Dumais, a teacher, and Charles-E. Ouellet, a farmer. Although her parents were educated, she did not attend elementary school because of financial difficulties. Her older sisters taught her to read and write, and she developed a passion for learning that has endured throughout her life. When her father died in 1948, the family moved to Riviere-du-loup, where she taught grade school. Ouellette-Michalska acquired a BA in 1965, a Licence es lettres in 1968, an MA in 1978, and a PhD in 1987. From 1976 to 1994, she worked for RADIO-CANADA preparing DOCUMENTARIES and was a journalist and literary critic for Le Devoir and L'Actualite. As a graduate student, Ouellette-Michalska focused on questions that became major themes in her writings, notably female language and identity, and cultural imperialism. As well, as a journalist, she
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observed the difficulties many WOMEN faced as a result of social and cultural inequities. In 1972, Ouellette-Michalska spent two years in Constantine, Algeria, teaching at an institute of technology and education. Her experience in a beautiful Mediterranean country fostered what was to become a significant characteristic of her fiction: a vibrant sensuality and a sensitivity to the beauties of nature. Ouellette-Michalska began her literary career while she was studying and working as a journalist. In 1968, she published a collection of short stories, Le Dome, and two years later her first novel, Lejeu des saisons. These and other works drew limited critical attention. It was the publication of her essay L'echappee des discours de I'oeil (1981), a revised version of her MA thesis, that brought her acclaim. As the title suggests, L'echappee des discours de I'oeil deals with the need for society to escape from an exclusively male view of women. Adopting a FEMINIST perspective, the book deconstructs patriarchal discourse in MYTHS, philosophy, PSYCHOANALYSIS, and literature by examining three stages of society in anthropological terms (primitive, barbarian, civilized). In particular, it seeks to bring to light and to denounce male strategies of appropriation - including various restrictions imposed on women's bodies throughout the ages. The essay also argues for a maternal language that would permit the expression of women's reality. L'amour de la carte postale (1987), partly drawn from Ouellette-Michalska's PhD thesis, expands the parameters of L'echappee des discours de I'oeil to embrace a broader social context. Focusing on the notion of otherness in Western society, Ouellette-Michalska demonstrates that this concept emanates from an attitude of cultural imperialism that moves from the centre to the periphery. She shows that cultural imperialism has an impact on language, philosophy, literature, and politics by marginalizing, albeit often in a folkloric manner, peripheral, cultural and social manifestations. She discusses in detail the inferior status of cultures such as Quebec from the perspective of France's self-proclaimed imperialist position. Contesting literary CANONS and exclusionary codified linguistic norms, she underscores the need for decentred values. Further developing her arguments in L'echappee des discours de I'oeil, Ouellette-Michalska demon-
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strates, with the help of concrete examples and statistics, that, in the cultural domain, women often remain at the margins of influence and power because they receive significantly fewer grants and awards when their sexual identity is known to juries. A biting critique of patriarchy and cultural imperialism, this book pleads for a new vision of otherness in contemporary society. Crossing generic boundaries, La tentation de dire (1985) lies somewhere between an ESSAY and a diary. Adopting a personal tone, Ouellette-Michalska deals, as in her previous essays, with issues such as cultural inequities and the condition of women. But if the themes are familiar, the form is experimental. An example of a POSTMODERN feminine autobiography, the book contests canonical LIFE stories while challenging patriarchal ideologies. Putting into question the traditional diary form and the humanist notion of a unified subject, it uses different voices and a variety of textual material to search for a feminine identity. In addition to the autobiographical passages, there are many quotations from letters and postcards received from friends and family and long fragments reproduced from Ouellette-Michalska's grandmother's journal (which she found in an old trunk in an attic). By employing a variety of voices and texts in the diary form, this book significantly expands Ouellette-Michalska's feminist poetics. Innovative and daring, it successfully inscribes a feminist ideology of inclusiveness and heterogeneity into a textual poetic. Ouellette-Michalska's fiction can be divided into two groups. The first, which includes her early work Lejeu des saisons, Lafemme de sable (1979; tr Luise von Flotow as The Sand-woman: Short Stories, 1990), Leplat de lentilles (1979), a volume of poetry (Entre le souffle et I'aine, 1981; tr W. Baldridge as Between Breath and Loins 1990) and her later novels La fete du desir (1990) and La passagere (1997) are lyrical discourses of desire. These writings represent an exploration of love and of woman's relations with time and nature. Though sexual desire is a prevalent theme, Ouellette-Michalska investigates most fully the desire to return to one's origins, to begin anew in order to reappropriate what has been lost. In La fete du desir, she tells the story of two lovers who seek to transcend traditional forms of logic
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and experience by attempting to return to a prenatal state of consciousness. Through poetry, music, and nature, they try to free themselves from the constraints of age and gender to discover a new buried identity and, hence, a different mode of being. The second group includes two historiographic novels that brought Ouellette-Michalska critical acclaim. La maison Trestler (1984), her best-known novel, can be seen as a synthesis of all her previous theoretical and fictional work. At the same time, this novel innovates both thematically and stylistically, creating a postmodern METAFICTIONAL story that explores the great myth of history. The novel features a young woman who is writing a story about a historic house called the 'Maison Trestler' (the house was built in 1798, at Dorion, QC, by a German soldier named Johan Josef Trostler, who fought for the British army during the American War of Independence; in 1969, the house became a historic monument). The narrator tells the story of Catherine Trestler, who, in spite of her father's strong opposition, insists on marrying the domestic servant Eleazar Hayst. Fleeing the family home to become secretly married, she eventually takes her father to court to recover the inheritance that her mother left her. Symbolically, the plot represents a struggle for power and autonomy. While telling Catherine's story, the narrator also recounts many experiences from her own life. Whether explaining the circumstances that led her to write or describing the birth of her son, she links the theme of writing to personal experience and to the need for self-affirmation. By destroying the boundaries between past and present, fiction and reality, she often fuses her own voice with that of Catherine's. In so doing, she situates woman's quest in a vast temporal and creative framework. This novel also challenges the discourse of history. Aligning itself with postmodern thought, it puts into question traditional views of history. While describing historical events, the narrator contests notions of truth by showing that a historical narrative (see HISTORICAL LITERATURE) is always necessarily subjective: the same battle will be described differently by winners and losers. Adopting a feminist voice of protest, she brings to the fore what historical discourse con ls and excludes, such as the role
of women during WARS. Thus, while drawing inspiration from history, the narrator problematizes the concept of historical knowledge. Using a more traditional form of writing, L'ete de I'ile de Grace (1993) also rewrites official history from the point of view of the commonplace. Based on the historical events of the typhoid epidemic of 1847 and the quarantine of Irish immigrants on the island of Grosse-Ile, it seeks to modify historical discourse by including perspectives of victims and healers. Challenging traditional notions of heroism, it casts a simple, non-educated female character, named Perseverance, as the physical and spiritual healer of the island. At the same time, this novel sets in a new context - that of illness and death the themes of love, nature, desire, and memory found in all of Ouellette-Michalska's writing. From a cultural and historical perspective, it brings to light, in a moving and dramatic manner, the largely unknown events of the typhoid epidemic for Quebec readers. Ouellette-Michalska's writings contribute significantly to feminist debates in Quebec and postmodern literature. Although, after the 19705, a rich body of feminist fiction and poetry emerged in Quebec to reach international readership, few women writers wrote substantial essays on feminism or related matters. To that extent, Ouellette-Michalska's essays represent an important contribution both to essay writing and to current discussions on colonialism and patriarchy. L'echappee des discours de I'oeil, her best-known essay, received the Governor General's AWARD in 1982. As for her fiction, La maison Trestler is her most complex and successful novel. In 1984, it was awarded the prestigious 'Prix Molson du roman' by the AC AD EM IE CANADIENNE-FRANCAISE. A powerful example of feminist historiographic fiction in Quebec, it has elicited readings from literary critics across North America. Awarded the Prix FranceQuebec, L'ete de I'ile de Grace was extremely well received by the general public. In 1994, Ouellette-Michalska received the Prix Arthur Buies for her entire work, and in 1998, she was awarded the 'Medaille d'or de la Renaissance francaise' for her literary achievements in Quebec and abroad. An important voice in women's writings, a versatile and stimulating author, Ouellette-Michalska helped renew intel-
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lectual debate and literature in contemporary Quebec. Further reading: Jane Moss, A House Divided: Power Relations in Madeleine Ouellette-Michalska's La Maison Trestler,' Quebec Studies, 12 (1991): 59-65; special issue of Voix et images, 23.1 (Fall 1997); Janet M. Paterson, 'History on Trial: La Maison Trestler,' in Postmodernism and the Quebec Novel, tr David Homel and Charles Phillips (Toronto: U Toronto P, 1994): 53-67. Janet M. Paterson
OUGHTON, John Parker. Poet, photographer, book reviewer; b Guelph, ON, n Dec 1984; son of Phyllis Mary (Smalley), librarian, and John George Oughton, professor of zoology. Author of four books of poetry, he is influenced by the BLACK MOUNTAIN tradition of free verse as brought to Canada by Frank DAVEY and George BOWERING. From his first book, TakingTree Trains (1973), he wrote about the freedom of sexual desire and the relation of desire to the visionary in poetry and the energies of nature. Suppression of desire, he argues, is a mode of political control - masculine in nature and fused to the structure of the nation state. His simple, conversational poems of personal experience and everyday life are thus closely tied to political life. Ross Leckie
OUTRAM, Richard Daley. Poet; b Oshawa, ON, 9 Sept 1930; son of Alfred Allan and Mary Muriel (Daley) Outram. Outram studied philosophy and English at U Toronto (BA, 1953) and worked as a technician for the CBC from 1956 until his retirement in 1995. In 1960 he founded Gauntlet P, which he operates with his wife, Barbara Howard. His poems are both theological meditations and celebrations of the particularities of existence. Although his themes are serious and his characters fall short of their spiritual aspirations, Outram treats human failings with sympathy and humour. His work is allusive, drawing on Renaissance poetry, classical MYTHOLOGY, and the BIBLE. His early collections - Exsultate, Jubilate (1966), Turns (1975), and The Promise of Light (1979) - exhibit a preference for metre, rhyme, and set verse forms (see PROSODY); in his subsequent work, Outram experiments with
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FREE VERSE while using dialect and enjambement to invest set forms with a high degree of suppleness. This later work also entails a movement toward elaborate verse sequences. While the early collections consist of short series on diverse subjects (trees, CHARMS, circus performers), Hiram and Jenny (1988) presents a single verse sequence about the two title characters, who live in the Maritimes among angels, serpents, and prophets. Mogul Recollected (1993) tells of the sinking of a ship transporting circus animals between New Brunswick and Maine in 1836. By reconstructing the fire and subsequent shipwreck from various perspectives, including that of Mogul, the drowned elephant, Outram inverts the Noah's Ark story in a meditation on the human capacity for cruelty. R. Gooding
OUVRARD, Helena. Novelist; b Montreal 3 Nov 1938, d Hemmingford, QC, 6 Jan 1999; daughter of Bernadette (Boily) andjean-de-laSalle Ouvrard, a bookseller. Her somewhat autobiographical first novel, Lafleur de peau (1965), tells of a young woman who, after a strict upbringing, decides not to become a nun, and of her discovery of work and love. For Ouvrard, love destines people to be both social and solitary beings. While her second novel, Le coeur sauvage (1967), also criticized Quebec society, the suffocating rural milieu as well as narrowminded 'urbanity/ her next two works, Le corps etranger (1973) and L'herbe et le varech (1977), sought to express the inner voice of WOMEN'S experience. She also designed postcards and wrote more than 25 brochures (on batik, tapestry, oil painting, etc) in the series Initiation aux metiers d'art du Quebec (1970-5), and Lafemme singuliere won the Prix du Xe Concours d'oeuvres dramatiques radiophoniques. Further reading: Mai'r Verthuy, 'Flirting with Female Be-ing: The Uneasy Search of Helene Ouvrard,' in Amazing Space: Writing Canadian Women Writing, eds Shirley Neuman and Smaro Kamboureli (Edmonton: Longspoon NeWest, 1986): 106-14. Margaret Cook
OXLEY, James Macdonald. CHILDREN'S novelist; b Halifax 22 Oct 1855, d Toronto 9 Sept 1907; son
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of Ellen (Macdonald) and James Oxley, merchant; educ Dalhousie U (BA, 1874) and Harvard U. Oxley was a lawyer in Halifax between 1878 and 1883, before moving on to work for the federal government and the Sun Life Assurance Company. In addition he wrote over twenty popular adventure novels - almost all published in Philadelphia and all aimed at boys - between 1889 (Bert Lloyd's Boyhood) and 1905 (The Family on Wheels). These historical adventures variously involved FRANKLIN, Louisbourg, Sable Island, and life in the NORTH. PACEY, William Cyril Desmond. Professor, critic, anthologist, short story writer; b Dunedin, NZ, i May 1917, d Fredericton 4 July 1975; son of Mary (Hunt) and William Pacey. After his father's death, Pacey was raised in England, then in Ontario when his mother remarried. He studied at U Toronto and Cambridge U (PhD, 1941), then returned to Canada to teach in Brandon, MB, and Fredericton, heading the Dept of English at U New Brunswick (1944-59), and subsequently serving as the university's president. Committed to Canadian cultural knowledge, Pacey pioneered commentary on GROVE, Ethel WILSON, C.G.D. ROBERTS, and others, and his survey Creative Writing in Canada (1945; rev 1961) long remained the standard LITERARY HISTORY of ANGLOPHONE Canadian writing. His CHILDREN'S verse was collected as The Cat, the Cow and the Kangaroo (1968), his generally optimistic short fiction as Waken, Lords and Ladies Gay (1974, ed Frank Tierney), and his letters as An Unexpected Alliance: The Layton-Pacey Correspondence (1994, ed J.D. Michael Pacey). PACI, F.G. Novelist; b Pesaro, Italy, 5 Aug 1948; son of Dorina (Filippini) and Luigi Paci; emig 1952. Frank Paci became the father of the Italian Canadian novel with the best-selling The Italians (1978) and the critically acclaimed FEMINIST novel Black Madonna (1982). Like The Father (1984), these are realistic narratives set in Sault Ste Marie, ON, where Paci grew up. At U Toronto (BA, BEd), Paci was encouraged to write by Margaret LAURENCE. A series of related novels set in Sault Ste Marie and Toronto - Black Blood (1991), Under the Bridge (1992), Sex and Character (1993) and The Rooming House (1996) explores philosophical and moral ideas.
Further reading: F.G. Paci, 'Tasks of the Canadian Novel Writing on Immigrant Themes,' in J. Pivato, Contrasts (Montreal: Guernica, 1985): 3560; J. Pivato, 'Hating the Self: John Marlyn and Frank Paci,' Echo (Toronto: Guernica, 1994): 195217. Joseph Pivato
PACKARD, Frank Lucius. Novelist; b Montreal 2 Feb 1877, d Lachine, QC, 17 Feb 1942; son of Mary Frances (Joslyn) and Lucius Henry Packard; educ McGill U (BASc 1897) and in Liege, Belgium. Packard practised as an engineer. He contributed to periodicals from 1906 on, but was best known for the 30 MYSTERY novels - especially the Jimmy Dale series - that appeared between On the Iron at Big Cloud (1911) and More Knaves Than One (1938). PAGE, P.K. (Patricia Kathleen). Poet, painter; b Swanage, England, 23 Nov 1916; daughter of Rose Laura (Whitehouse) and Lionel F. Page, army officer. P.K. Page was raised in Canada, where her English Canadian father had established himself in the military; he was eventually to attain the rank of major general, DSO. Page has described her mother as an iconoclastic figure whose creativity was inspirational. Both mother and father encouraged their daughter's interest in artistic endeavours. Lionel Page's military career took the family across Canada; hence P.K. attended various schools, completing her formal education at St Hilda's School in Calgary. In the mid-i93os, she lived with her parents in New Brunswick, where, in addition to writing poetry, she occasionally wrote for CBC Radio and a local theatre company and worked as a clerk in a retail store. In the late 19305 and early 19405, she began to publish her poems in a number of journals, including Canadian Poetry Magazine, Saturday Night, and Contemporary Verse. Her move to Montreal in 1941 proved to be a turning point, for she began to drift away from the Georgian verse she had been writing. (The influence of the Georgian poets is not easily characterized: Edward Marsh's series of anthologies titled Georgian Poetry featured not only the war poets Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon, but also Robert Graves and D.H. Lawrence, whose voices could be heard in Page's poetry long after
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she ceased to echo Brooke.) Even when Page's generation turned away from the writers of the First World WAR, they took with them a disdain for war that later led to the poetry written in protest against the Second World War. Page and her fellow poets in Montreal, including the Englishman Patrick ANDERSON, John SUTHERLAND, F.R. SCOTT, A.J.M. SMITH,
and A.M. KLEIN, were, in the 19405 and 19505, swept up by a new poetics based on the ideas of T.S. Eliot. As a member of the small group that launched the Montreal literary magazine Preview, Page was instrumental in the development of a new Canadian poetic practice that grew out of American and European artistic and political influences. In 1944, Page won the Oscar Blumenthal Prize for a selection of poems published in the important American journal Poetry (Chicago). That Page published there and received the award clearly illustrates the way in which literary influence criss-crossed borders during this period. Also in 1944, Page's place among the Canadian modernists was formalized by the publication of the ANTHOLOGY Unit of Five. Ronald HAMBLETON, James WREFORD, Louis DUDEK, and Raymond SOUSTER were the four poets published with Page in this volume. It was also in 1944 that Macmillan published Page's fictional experiment, The Sun and the Moon, written when she was in her early 2os. Aware of its limitations, she published it under a PSEUDONYM, Judith Cape. (It was reissued in 1973, with the addition of eight stories, under Page's own name and the expanded title The Sun and the Moon and Other Fictions.) As Ten, As Twenty, Page's first solo volume, appeared in 1946; it included many of her most frequently anthologized poems, such as 'The Stenographers,' 'Stories of Snow,' and 'Landlady.' Her work of this period, rich in metaphysical conceits, echoes Herbert, Hopkins, Eliot, Auden, and Yeats, to name only a few of the writers Page and her Montreal colleagues had absorbed, and reflects the socialist/protest politics of the milieu in which she lived. The social conscience Page developed in Montreal in the 19405 evolved into poems committed to the protection of the environment in the 19903. After the publication of her first volume, Page moved to Ottawa, where she worked at
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the NATIONAL FILM BOARD; in 1950 she met and married NFB chair - and longtime editor of Maclean's - Arthur Irwin (1898-1999). In 1953 Irwin was appointed Canadian high commissioner to AUSTRALIA for a three-year term. While in Australia, Page published The Metal and the Flower, dedicating it to her husband. It won the Governor General's AWARD for 1954. This collection established Page's continuing importance. Poems from this volume such as 'Photos of a Salt Mine,' T-Bar,' The Permanent Tourists,' and Arras' still resonate with readers more than forty years later. In her 19505 verse, Page's powers as a poet of social protest are at their height; at the same time, allusions to PSYCHOANALYSIS are in profusion, echoing contemporary ideas about the mind. Arthur Irwin's posting as Canadian ambassador to Brazil in 1957 resulted in an almost total change in artistic direction for Page. During the two years she spent in Brazil, Page did not write many poems; instead she began to draw and paint, partly in response to the overwhelming visual beauty of Brazil. She signed her work P.K. Irwin, a gesture that signifies her attempt to separate poet from painter. Examples of Page's VISUAL ART of the late 19503 - largely pen-and-ink sketches and gouaches - are reproduced in Brazilian Journal (1987), a prose work based on journals and letters she wrote in Brazil in the late 19505 and revised in the 19805. This book (nominated for a Governor General's Award) clearly demonstrates the powerful role of visual art for Page in the development of her verbal metaphors, but and this is only one of its paradoxes - it simultaneously expresses her frustration with representation itself. A small number of unpublished poems written in the late 19505 in Brazil reveal the anxiety the poet experienced over the competing interests in her life of poetry and visual art. Other poems from this period - 'Brazilian Fazenda' and 'Brazilian House,' for example - are drawn from the vignettes of Brazilian Journal and became part of Page's canon. These poems depend, as the Brazilian prose does, on striking conceits, and on the writer's sense of wonder at strange juxtapositions in a new land. In 1960 Arthur Irwin became Canadian Ambassador to Mexico and Guatemala, continuing in this role for four years. In her essay 'Ques-
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tions and Images' (Canadian Literature, 1969), Page considers the profound difference for her between Brazil and Mexico: 'If Brazil was day, then Mexico was night. All the images of darkness hovered over me in the Mexican sunlight.' The Mexican 'darkness' was enriching, for it was in Mexico that she mounted her first solo exhibit. In 1959 and 1960 Page studied at (among other institutions) the Art Students' League in New York on visits there, and she moved quickly beyond her figurative, Dufy-like gouaches. In the early 19605 she began creating highly complex drawings and crayon etchings that suggest in their lineation the metaphysical art of Paul Klee. Her drawings and paintings are today held in private collections and also in several of Canada's major public galleries. While experimenting with both figuration and abstraction, Page was reading Carl JUNG, Zen philosophy, and St John of the Cross, all of which laid the groundwork for much of her subsequent poetry. Page's lifelong interest in the connection between the human spirit and the cosmos began to show itself in her drawings in the early 19608. Cry Ararat! (1967) was her first selected volume and the first to reproduce her drawings. It asks the reader to read her poems alongside her visual art and to observe the parallels between the two forms. The title poem exemplifies Page's symbology and thematic strands (post-Brazil) through its preoccupation with seeing, refracted light, the painter's palette, dream, hyperconsciousness, geometry, the natural world, and the atom as our point of connection with the cosmos: 'In the dream the mountain near / but without sound. / A dream through binoculars / seen sharp and clear: / the leaves moving, turning / in a far wind / no ear can hear.' P.K Page: Poems Selected and New, ed Margaret ATWOOD, appeared in 1974. This volume's preoccupation with mind, inferiority, and the fragmentation of the self reflects Atwood's concerns in the 19705. The appearance of previously uncollected poems such as They Might Have Been Zebras' and 'Leviathan in a Pool' signals a highly metaphysical phase in Page's development as a poet. These poems mark a clear departure from 'The Stenographers' in their skill and in the depth of their thought. The crowning achievement of this period is embod-
ied in Another Space,' a poem with few rivals in the Canadian canon: 'I see them there in three dimensions yet / their height implies another space / their clothes' / surprising chiaroscuro postulates / a different spectrum.' The influence of Jung, the fourth dimension, and quantum physics is embedded in the Atwood selection and in the work of one of Page's finest volumes, Evening Dance of the Grey Flies (1981). Through poems as diverse as 'Mstislav Rostropovich With Love' and The Yellow People in Metamorphosis,' Page expresses her belief in the transcendent power of art and her commitment to the idea of a life force that binds the one to the many, and that compels the poet to protect the environment. Page's poetry was not simply 'mystical,' as had been asserted so often; it was shaped by early 20th-century ideas about how visual art signifies the natural world. Page's interest in Sufism, which emerged after she began to draw and paint, produced perhaps her most challenging poetry, verse that moved well beyond social protest and psychoanalytical conceptions of self. The new poems that appear in each of Page's selected volumes present a new side of a multifaceted poet and signal a fresh direction in the poetry. The Glass Air (1985) is the first volume to provide a sense of the full complexity of Page's work as a poet and painter. The 1962 work The Glass House,' featured in colour on the cover of the 1985 edition of The Glass Air, and The Red Garden,' on the cover of the 1991 edition, are, in the organic shapes of their finely etched lines, good examples of drawing based on forms in natthre, particularly the shapes of plant life. The 1991 volume The Glass Air: Poems Selected and New includes poems about visual art (eg, 'Conversation,' and 'Winter Morning') that skillfully interweave the verbal and pre-verbal threads of Page's art. Even Page's CHILDREN'S books, A Flask of Sea Water (1989) and The Goat That Flew (1993), explore through fairy tale the ideas of transcendence that Page was pursuing in her poetry. By threading others' lines through her own in the 'glosas' of the Spanish court in Hologram: A Book of Glosas (1994), Page acknowledges her indebtedness to a modernist heritage that includes George Seferis, Elizabeth BISHOP, Leonard COHEN, and Wallace Stevens, to name
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only a few. One of her most highly praised volumes, Hologram breaks new ground formally, by integrating baroque with modern, and it reinvigorates the themes of transcendence that run throughout her work. The exquisite two volumes of The Hidden Room: Collected Poems (1997) are arguably the most important Page had published by 1999, their seamless arrangement a carefully drawn portrait of the poet's major concerns. The fine mesh lineation of the breathtaking drawing that opens volume one of this collection conjures the same world as the 'sharp ideographic tracks of birds' in 'Before Sleep' in volume two. Both word and image, in their focus on slivers of line and space, signify what is central to Page's best work: a belief in a vitalist force that lives in even the smallest point of connection between the visible realm and the fourth dimension. Page's poems had an enormous influence on younger poets and inspired composers and painters alike. Her work was set to MUSIC by composers such as Murray Adaskin, Harry Somers, and Gavin Bryars, and in 1998 the painter Mimo Paladino published a collection of works on paper inspired by her poems. In recognition of her stature as Canada's pre-eminent poet, Page received several honorary degrees; she was made a Companion of the Order of Canada in Jan 1999. Further reading: John Orange, P.K. Page and Her Works (Toronto: ECW, 1989); 'P.K. Page: A Special Issue,' MalahatR 117 (1996); Still Waters: The Poetry of P.K. Page, National Film Board documentary (1991). Cynthia Messenger
PAGE, Rhoda Anne. Poet; b London, England, 1826, d Rice Lake, CW, 7 Dec 1863; emig at age six. Page grew up on a farm near Cobourg, ON. In her 205 she published poetry regularly in the Cobourg Star as R.A.P. These poems were republished by papers across Canada, as well as by the Victoria Magazine and the Maple Leaf Annual. She married William Faulkner (not the writer) and moved with her husband to Rice Lake, where they had eight children. Her popular and widely reprinted work was collected in her Wild Notes from the Backwoods (1850) and anthologized in E.H. DEWART'S Selections from Canadian Poets
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(1864). Although somewhat melancholic in their preoccupation with death, her poems evoke the beauty and tranquility of rural Ontario. Deborah Blenkhorn
PALLISER,John. Landlord, writer; b Dublin 29 Jan 1817, d Kilmacthomas, Ireland, 18 Aug 1887; son of Anne (Gledstanes) and Wray Palliser. Palliser hunted bison on the American plains in 1847 and 1848, an experience described in Solitary Rambles of a Hunter on the Prairies (1853). In 1856 his proposal for an expedition to the Canadian prairies was accepted by the Royal Geographical Society, and the journey took place from 1857 to 1859. Palliser wrote the general introduction to the expedition report; he stressed the agricultural potential of the prairies. Further reading: Irene M. Spry, The Palliser Expedition (Toronto: Macmillan, 1963). Bill Moreau
PANNETON, Philippe, see RINGUET. PANYCH, Morris Stephen. Playwright, director, actor; b Calgary 30 June 1952; son of Adel (Lyons) and Peter Panych, machinist. He grew up in Edmonton, and moved to Vancouver to study creative writing at UBC (BFA, 1977). After two years of THEATRE school in England, he returned to Vancouver to work as an actor. He performed in his own first play, Last Call (1983), 'a post-nuclear cabaret,' produced by Tamahnous Theatre, followed by a national tour and CBC-TV production. Its metatheatrical, black comic existentialism, together with composer/ designer Ken MacDonald's collaboration, would prove hallmarks of Panych's work. Following a term as artistic director of Tamahnous (198486), Panych established a productive link between Vancouver's Arts Club and Toronto's Tarragon theatres which premiered his major plays including 7 Stories (1990); The Ends of the Earth (1993), winner of the Governor General's AWARD; and Vigil (1996). His young people's plays for Vancouver's Green Thumb Theatre toured internationally; three are published as Other Schools of Thought (1994). Panych is the predominant theatre artist in Vancouver, having earned numerous Jessie Richardson awards for
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his work as the city's most versatile actor, imaginative director, and creative playwright.
MA, but returned to Montreal the following year, where he spent the rest of his life. He is best remembered for his play Kiel (1886). See
Further reading: Reid Gilbert, The Theatrical Stories of Morris Panych,' Canadian Theatre R 67 (Summer 1991): 5-11.
RIEL.
Jerry Wasserman
PAPINEAU, Louis-Joseph. Lawyer, seigneur, political journalist; b Montreal 7 Oct 1786, d Montebello, QC, 25 Sept 1871; son of Rosalie (Cherrier) and Joseph Papineau, notary and seigneur of Petite-Nation. Papineau trained in law at his cousin Denis-Benjamin VIGER'S practice, and was first elected to public office in 1809; he joined the Parti Canadien, which became the Patriote Party in 1826. The rhetorically effective voice of reform, Papineau nevertheless wanted to maintain current institutions, including the property rights of the seigneuries. Fearing anglicization, he balanced his anti-clericalism against his belief that Catholicism was a defence against Protestant power - yet maintaining the link with British institutions provided a rampart against expansive impulses in the UNITED STATES; he reversed this position after 1840, arguing for the next decades that US annexation would be preferable to joining Upper Canada. Though he became the titular leader of the 1837 REBELLION in Lower Canada, those who sought more than simply the reform of the Legislative Council broke with him. After the failure of the Rebellion, he fled to the United States, then to France, incurring more disapproval; his exile ended in 1845, a year after he had been granted amnesty, and though he continued briefly in politics, he retired to his Montebello seigneury in 1854. Papineau: textes choisis, ed Fernand Ouellet, appeared in 1964. See also INSTITUT CANADIEN, O'GRADY, PARENT. PAQUIN, Elzear. Doctor, journalist, playwright; b Saint-Raphael de 1'Ile Bizard, CE, 22 Dec 1850, d Montreal 15 Jan 1947; son of Julie Daout and Hyacinthe Paquin. After studying at C de Saint Therese and C des Jesuits de Montreal, Paquin went on to study medicine at U Laval, graduating in 1878. He practised medicine in Montreal for five years before moving to Chicago in 1883. While in Chicago, he founded the periodicals Le Combat and Vie. In 1896 he moved to Fall River,
Peter Mahon
PAQUIN, Ubald (pseuds Prosper Brisebois, Alcide Matagan.). Novelist, journalist; b Montreal 29 July 1894, d Montreal 14 July 1962; son of Georgina Lassiel and Hermenegilde Paquin, farmer. Paquin wrote for Le Devoir and other papers and was a member of Les CASOARS DE L'ARCHE. He became an activist in 1916, opposing conscription in his paper, Le Bataille, and after an incident in Montreal a year later - when he was involved in bombing a statue of Lord Atholstan, publisher of the Montreal Star - he fled to Abitibi to avoid arrest. Returning to Montreal in 1920, he became a member of I'ECOLE LITTERAIRE DE MONTREAL, a friend of GRIGNON, and the author of numerous NOVELS and NATIONALIST essays, including La cite dans lesfers (1926) and Le naturalisme intellectuelle (1930). PARADIS, Claude. Poet; b Lauzon, QC, 17 Sept 1960; son of Benoit Paradis and Huguette Gobeil. His first volume of poetry, Sterile Amerique (1985), concerned with the violence of the human condition, received the Octave-Cremazie AWARD. L'amourable (1989) - the title combining the words 'amour' and 'memorable' - seeks to identify the iconographic images that capture the moment when lovers meet. Le silence de la terre (1993) celebrates the power of conjugal love to counter the morbid feelings that stem from exile, separation, and solitude. Margaret Cook
PARADIS, Suzanne. Poet, novelist, critic; b Beaumont, QC, 27 Oct 1936; daughter of Marguerite (Mercier) andJean-Baptiste Paradis. She is the author of nearly 30 books, alternating between poetry and novels. She was awarded Le Prix Camille-Roy in 1961 for II nefaut pas sauver les hommes, Le Prix de la Province de Quebec in 1962 for La malbete, Le Prix France-Quebec in 1964 for Pour les enfants des marts, Le Prix Du Maurier in 1968 for L'oeuvre de pierre, and a Governor General's AWARD for poetry in 1984 for Un gout de sel. Her poems are included in numerous
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anthologies. She collaborated on several periodicals, including Le Soldi, Le Devoir, Livres et auteurs quebecois, and Possibles, and was extremely active in Quebec's literary community. She produced a RADIO series on Quebec WOMEN in the early 19705, organized workshops in various colleges and universities, and has served on a number of arts committees. Paradis obtained her teaching certificate from the Ecole normale in Quebec City, and taught for a few years before taking on the leadership of the Centre d'Art at Val-Menaud and devoting herself to writing. Her first collection of poems, Les enfants continuels, was self-published in 1959. Her poetry is characterized by an almost classical use of conventional rhyme and rhythm. It employs recurring motifs of love, truth, freedom, and the passionate quest for personal fulfilment. Her poems assemble a wealth of images; her metaphors, most often drawn from the natural world, suggest that communion between the self and nature, and between the feminine and the masculine, is crucial to the search for self-identity and its expression through the poetic voice. For Paradis, identity is explored through recourse to a fundamental feminine principle. The poems of La voie sauvage (1973) evoke a blend of Eastern and Western traditions to suggest the feminine as a vital life force. Those of Les chevaux de verre (1979) represent the search for female identity as necessarily transcending day-to-day reality. This book also indicates the emotional and social pitfalls of such a search, a theme prevalent in her earlier il y cut un matin (1972). Ungout de sel (1983) uses images of the natural world to create a vision of time that is characteristic of her work: her universe is structured by mythic, rather than historical, time, where dream takes poetic precedence over reality. This conception of time is also an important element of an earlier novel, Un portrait de Jeanne Joron (1977)Paradis's novels were initially less wellreceived than her poetry. Les cormorans (1968) chronicles the decimation of an island community by natural disaster, murder, and suicide. Finally, one Edenic young couple remains as a symbol of hope and rebirth. Later works such as Miss Charlie (1979) and Les Ferdinand (1984) garnered a more enthusiastic critical response, and
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prompted several critics to call her one of Quebec's major authors. Miss Charlie explores the relationship of the protagonist to figures from her past, a retrospective stimulated by an invitation from a former neighbour to his book launch. The novel emerges as an exploration of the relation between memory and history, past and present, as Miss Charlie's narratives of recollection grow more complex and intertwined. Les Ferdinand celebrates how the everyday ordinary human life reveals itself as extraordinary. Paradis subsequently wrote a novel, La ligne bleue (1985), and a collection of poems, Effets de I'oeil (1986). Critical reactions to Paradis's work are mixed. Admirers praise the vividness of her imagery, her passionate response to life and the joys and suffering of the human condition, and her celebrations of the power of femininity. The density, psychological insight, and at times daunting literariness of her poetry and prose, establish her, for some, as an important Canadian writer. Others, however, charge her poetry with vagueness and over-metaphorization. The subject matter of her novels is at times considered melodramatic, and her penchant for metaphor is said to overwhelm character and plot development, rendering her novels unnecessarily pretentious and obscure. Paradis is also the author of two short story collections, Francois-les-oiseaux (1967) and Grain de riz (1977). A volume of selected early poems spanning 1959-61 appeared in 1978. In addition to several journal articles, she wrote two critical works. Femmefictive,femme reelle examines female characters in novels by Quebec women, and was one of the first studies of its kind. Adrienne CHOQUETTE lue par Suzanne Paradis considers the work of the author ofLaure Clouet (1961). Further reading: Jeanne Turcotte, Entre Vondine et la vestale: analyse des Hauls cris de Suzanne Paradis (Quebec: P de 1'U Laval, 1988); 'Vivre de sa plume au Quebec: entrevue avec Suzanne Paradis,' Lettres quebecoises 43 (autumn 1986): 15-17. Karen Solie
PARAMESWARAN, Uma. Reporter, professor, poet; b Madras, India, 19 April 1938; daughter of Rajalakshmi (Subrahmanya), homemaker, and D.S. Ganesan, physics professor. Parameswaran
PARKER
is related to two Nobel laureates on her mother's side - C.V Raman and S. Chandrasekhar. She became a professor of English at U Winnipeg after emigrating to Canada in 1966. A critic and poet influenced by the Indian DIASPORA, she is concerned with the composite milieu she defines as 'culture/ Her poetry collection Trishanku (1988) and her play Rootless But Green are the Boulevard Trees (1987) use dramatic voicing to depict the domestic relations in South Asian immigrant families on the Prairies, and explore issues of acculturation, assimilation, and the bridging of identities across homelands and generations. See also ASIA, CULTURAL PLURALITY.
been a liaison agent during the Second World WAR when she was still a child. She went on to study law and political science in Paris. In 1955, she emigrated to Quebec, working first as a journalist at Cite libre and La Presse, and later teaching criminology at U Montreal (1970). In 1987 she was in charge of the foreign literature column at Le Devoir. Her first novel, Les lilas fleurissent d Varsovie (1981; tr A.D. Martin-Sperry as The Lilacs Are Blooming in Warsaw, 1985) won the Prix europeen de 1'Assoc des ecrivains de langue francaise. In her work, she examines both the Polish DIASPORA and the relation between an individual's fate and collective destiny. Margaret Cook
PARENT, Etienne. Essayist, journalist, civil servant; b Beauport, LC, 2 May 1802, d Ottawa 22 Dec 1874; son of Josephte (Clouet) and Francois Parent, farmers; father-in-law of Benjamin SULTE, Antoine GERIN-LAJOIE, and Evariste Gelinas, editor of La Minerve. Catalytic in political affairs, rather than rhetorically flamboyant like the speeches of his contemporary PAPINEAU, Parent's journalism distils early 19thcentury INTELLECTUAL thought. While a student in Quebec, Parent published his first articles (in Le Canadien); after 1825 he studied law, and in 1831 (as editor) he revived Le Canadien as the voice of the Patriote Party's ideas: liberty, French culture, and the civil rights that he considered 'the prerogative of an English country.' A moderate in 1837, ne insisted on the primacy of law and order, a position dismissed by the rebels and La Minerve, and even then he was briefly jailed; distrustful of Lord Durham's Report (which he translated), he opposed the Act of Union in 1840-1, but remained convinced that a progressive social contract could enable a francophone society to exist within Canada, and that annexation with the UNITED STATES (mooted as a possibility at the time) would mean Quebec's disappearance. PARIZEAU, Alice. Novelist, essayist; b Cracow, Poland, 25 July 1930, d Montreal 31 Nov 1990; daughter of Bronislawa Poznanska, a concert pianist, and Stanilaus Poznanski, an industrialist; m Jacques Parizeau, who later became the leader of the Parti Quebecois and premier of Quebec. She was awarded the Iron Cross for courage in the face of the enemy for having
PARKER, Sir Horatio Gilbert George. Novelist; b Camden East, Canada West, 23 Nov 1860, d London, England, 6 Sept 1932; son of Samantha (Simmons) and Joseph Parker. Parker, who trained in divinity, taught elocution at Queen's U before heading to AUSTRALIA in 1886; he began his career as a writer working for the Morning Herald in Sydney, then sailed to England in 1890. He was the MP for Gravesend (1900-18) and British director of American propaganda during the First World WAR. Parker was one of the most POPULAR writers of his day; he was the author of over 30 books, mostly HISTORICAL romances (eg, When Valmond Came to Pontiac, 1895, a tale of Napoleonic Canada; Donovan Pasha, 1902, set in Egypt), adventures of the near NORTH (eg, the dialect stories of a METIS gambler, Pierre and His People, 1893) and the South Seas (Cumner's Son, 1904). Most successful were The Seats of the Mighty (1896; see LE MOINE) and The Right of Way (1901), both dealing with French Canada, the first set during the Seven Years War, the second in a modern courtroom. Named a baronet in 1915, Parker continued to write, but his opposition to WOMEN'S suffrage and the labour movement limited the appeal of his later fiction. Further reading: John Coldwell Adams, Seated with the Mighty (Ottawa: Borealis, 1979); J.R. Sorfleet, 'Fiction and the Fall of New France: William Kirby vs. Gilbert Parker,' J Canadian Fiction 2 (Summer 1973): 132-40; Elizabeth Waterston, 'Gilbert Parker and His Works,' Canadian Writers and Their Work, fiction series 2, ed Robert
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Lecker, Jack David, Ellen Quigley (Downsview: ECW, 1989): 106-56.
C H O P I N , Guy D E L A H A Y E , Eudore E V A N T U R E L ,
PARKIN, Sir George Robert. Educator, administrator; b Salisbury, NB, 8 Feb 1846, d London, England, 25 June 1922; son of Elizabeth (McLean) and John Parkin; grandfather of George P. GRANT. He taught in rural New Brunswick schools at Buctouche and Campobello Island, and in 1867 was appointed headmaster of Bathurst Grammar School. From 1871 to 1889, he was headmaster of the Collegiate C in Fredericton, where Bliss CARMAN and C.G.D. ROBERTS were among his pupils. In 1889 he joined the IMPERIAL FEDERATION League, and lived in England till 1895, travelling and lecturing on the British Empire. In 1892 he revisited Canada as a special correspondent for the London Times, returning in 1895 as principal of Upper Canada C, which he shaped according to the model of the British public school. In 1902, he left UCC to become the first organizing secretary of the newly established Rhodes Scholarship Trust, retiring in England in 1920. His primary concern was with instruction, and his books (Imperial Federation, 1892; Round the Empire, 1898; Edward Thring: Headmaster ofUppingham School, 1898) seek strategies for both maintaining and disseminating pedagogical discipline and empire.
PARODY. Canada has proven to be a literary culture blessed with an abundance of writers and readers who appreciate the complexities of parody. Although often denigrated as being derivative or parasitic, parody has since the early i9th century contributed significantly to the general interrogation and evolution of the nation's cultural imagination. Linked in a complex and at times problematic relationship with the literary mode of satire through a common reliance on the rhetorical trope of IRONY, parody in the classical sense is a synthetic and reflexive mode of COMIC writing (see HUMOUR). Never ridiculing the textual and cultural models from which it takes its cues, parody allows writers to locate their work in relation to another imaginative tradition, while at the same time altering the direction of that tradition through a refunctioning of its conventions. Conforming to the patterns of its model so as to be familiar to readers, parody at the same time makes that model different, hence Cervantes' famous image in Don Quixote of parody as both a light and a mirror held up to an original. Appropriately it was Cervantes, along with the French humanist Francois Rabelais and the English novelist Henry Fielding, who remained significant influences on Canadian parody well into the 2oth century. Reaching a wide audience through the numerous anonymous verse and prose parodies in Victorian periodicals such as Grip and Diogenes, and through popular novels by such writers as Abraham S. HOLMES, James DE MILLE, and May Agnes FLEMING, parody emerged in the i9th century as a mode of writing through which Canadian writers could explore both the vitalities and anxieties that defined a culture in transition. At once acknowledging the centrality of various Old World literary models, cultural ideals, and systems of thought within the still nascent culture of the new Dominion, these writers raised questions about the unhesitating acceptance of such imported standards, the appropriateness of such models to this new place, and the willingness or desire of the majority of writers to invest them with a potentially inhibitive authority. To import the cultural presumptions of other times and
Peter Mahon
PARNASSIAN, term applied to a movement in Iater-i9th-century French poetry, involving C.M.R. Leconte de Lisle andTheophile Gautier, which served as part of the transition in style that led towards symbolism (see IMAGERY). Parnassian poets: (i) rejected previous Romantic theories of poetry (those that argued the social relevance of personal inspiration); (2) substituted a belief in 'art for art's sake,' aiming for a contrived objectivity; (3) declared that poetry, because it was musical and visual as well as verbal, was a complete art, and that the best poetry was therefore intrinsically pictorial; and (4) used rhyme in a structural way, so that verbal repetition was to be read in the same manner as an observer reads repetitions of colour (in painting) or of line (in sculpture). The movement provided models for many Frenchlanguage poets in Canada, including Rene
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Paul MORIN, and Eniile NELLIGAN.
PASTORAL
other places, these writers suggest, is to risk encouraging a static rather than innovative and dynamic view of Canadian culture. Both this classical sense of parody as a form of reflexive comic writing and this concern with establishing a cultural identity that was at once related to but distinct from those of the Old World can be found, too, in the works of such 20th-century writers as Stephen LEACOCK and Paul HIEBERT, whose Sarah Binks (1947) is an elegant blend of parody and satire. Parody continues to play a prominent role in Canadian literature while gradually being reconceptualized by such important critics as Northrop FRYE, who underscored its link with satire in his writing on myth and archetype, and Linda HUTCHEON, whose ideas about the POSTMODERN in Canada inevitably intersect with her theories of parody and irony. Although parody's comic spirit imbues the work of such writers as Aritha VAN HERK (No Fixed Address, 1986), George BOWERING (Caprice, 1987), and Robert KROETSCH, contemporary discussions of its practice reveal a move away from an emphasis on its classical roots. Pivoting on discussions of such non-comic novels as Timothy FINDLEY'S The Wars (1977) and Famous Last Words (1981), and Margaret ATWOOD'S The Handmaid's Tale (1985), these new understandings highlight instead the relevance of parody to various modes of theoretical inquiry into language and power, notably those articulated in FEMINIST writing and theories of postmodernism (the latter through such terms as METAFICTION and INTERTEXTUALITY). Parody, in this sense, has come to be advanced as proof of the maturity of the cultural imagination, as evidence of the willingness of Canadian writers to approach new and challenging dimensions (imaginative, social, and theoretical) in their fiction making. Even within such expanded discussions of its THEORY and practice, though, there remains a sense of parody as a fundamentally constructive mode of writing, one that denies the passive acceptance of art and literature, is at once a form of creation and critique, and allows for an acknowledgment of tradition while looking to the future. Unwavering in its prompting toward a testing of boundaries, Canadian parody appears determined to let even its own spirit rest secure.
Further reading: Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (New York: Methuen, 1985); Martin Kuester, Framing Truths: Parodic Structures in Contemporary English-Canadian Historical Novels (Toronto: U Toronto P, 1992); Margaret A. Rose, Parody: Ancient, Modern, and Post-Modern (Cambridge: Cambridge, UP, 1993). Klay Dyer
PARSI (from which the word 'Persian' originates), a member of the religious group that practises a form of Zoroastrianism. Parsi writers include Hiro Mcllwraith, author of Shahnaz (2000) and Rohinton MISTRY. PARTI PRIS. A Montreal leftist political and cultural periodical that also became a publishing house and the voice of a political movement. It took as its goal the advocacy of Quebec independence, socialism, and secularism. Its founding editorial committee included Paul CHAMBERLAND, Pierre Maheu, and Andre MAJOR. Parti pris (1963-8) debated the role of the writer in society, the value of literature in a subordinate culture, and the importance of language in the assertion of cultural identity. Terry Whalen
PASS, John Richard. Poet, college instructor; b Sheffield, England, 19 Dec 1947; son of Mary (Glossop), librarian, and Benjamin Pass, civil servant; m poet Theresa KISHKAN. After graduating from U British Columbia (where he developed an interest in the English Romantics and the school of Whitman, Pound, and Williams), Pass moved to the coastal town of Madeira Park, where he writes and works with letterpress printing and BOOK DESIGN. He is the author of such works as An Arbitrary Dictionary (1984), The Hour's Acropolis (1991), and Radical Innocence (1994). Characteristically, his work quietly probes the daily realities of family and place, listening for the resonances that link the individual's experience with the world. Water Stair, a much-admired set of variations on the motif of water, appeared in 1999. PASTORAL. This literary term (from Latin pastor, 'shepherd') was used historically to refer to Classical Greek and Roman sketches and
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poems about rural life, but over time became highly conventionalized, so that in the writings of Virgil (and many writings in modern EUROPEAN languages, especially in the i8th century, alluding to Virgilian practice) the life of shepherds was interpreted as an ideal. The shepherds' verse complaints, their artificial romances, their musicality, and their life of leisure - all recorded in decorous language - conveyed a version of courtly and idyllic behaviour that bore little resemblance to daily reality. In much WOMEN'S writing, and in that of some men, the 'anti-pastoral' subverted these conventions, though even conventional pastorals were sometimes used to examine contemporary artistic, philosophical, and social issues. The ideal world was known as 'Arcadia' (hence, by some definitions, AC ADI A). While some early accounts of Canada attempted to construe the countryside as idyllic (passages in Frances BROOKE and Robert H ATM AN, for instance), this image was countered by the more prevalent image of 'barren land' (see LANDSCAPE) and by the postVoltaire impulse to read the world as intrinsically imperfect - as a place that demanded experiential knowledge as a basis for survival. Various elements of pastoral (and anti-pastoral) do, however, survive into 21st-century writing, in the continuing idealization of rural life and in some lyrical nature writing. See also ELEGY, HISTORICAL ANALOGUES, PARODY, SCIENCE AND NATURE WRITING. PATTERSON, R.M. (Raymond Murray). Gold prospector, rancher; b Darlington, England, 13 May 1898, d Sidney, BC 1984; son of Emily Taylor (Coates) and Henry Foote Patterson. He attended Rossall public school (1911-7), graduated from St John's C, Oxford, in 1921, and became an FRGS in 1932. Patterson homesteaded in northwestern Alberta in 1924, and ranched in British Columbia from 1931 to 1946. He was a consultant for the US Army Corps of Engineers to build the Alcan Highway during the Second World War. Several parks, including the South Nahanni National Park Reserve in the Northwest Territories and Elk Lake Provincial Park in British Columbia, were created as a result of his love of wild places. Patterson's most enduring work is The Dangerous River (1954), about the South Nahanni. Others include The
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Buffalo Head (1961), about his ranching adventures; a collection of his articles from HBC Beaver and Blackwood's Magazine updated and titled The Far Pastures (1963); Trail to the Interior (1966), about the Stikine R in the northern regions of British Columbia; and Finlay's River (1968), about the headwaters of the Peace R. Lesser known are 'The Flat River Country, North West Territories of Canada' (1928); his self-published booklet Dear Mother about his life at Rossall public school; and a thoroughly researched introduction to Black's Rocky Mountainjournal, 1824 for the HBC Records Society (1955). His papers reside at the BC Provincial ARCHIVES. Joel Martineau
PAYERLE, George Thomas. Novelist, short story writer, freelance editor; b Vancouver 21 Aug 1945; son of Hungarian immigrants, Maria (Gfellner) and Akos Payerle. Payerle earned his BA at U British Columbia in 1968 and his masters in creative writing in 1970, at the time of the West Coast surrealist movement. While still at university, he edited a collection of essays with Gerald McGuigan and Patricia Horrobin, Student Protest (1968). His early fiction combines an experimental narrative line with a bright, jazzy prose style, as in The Afterpeople (1970), which tells of bizarre events following a bank robbery in Vancouver. The mini-saga Wolfoane Fane (1977) recounts with black HUMOUR a Viking marauding expedition. His most fully developed work is the novel Unknown Soldier (1987), involving the experiences of an ex-rifle-company sergeant from the Second World War who cannot bring his life together because of his memories of the WAR. Payerle based the novel on his discussions with many veterans who were tormented by their war experiences. He has also published the fiction chapbook Two from Babylon (1990) and the poetry chapbook The Weather and That (1993). Further reading: Elsa Linguanti, '"So Much Depends": George Payerle's Unknown Soldier and Its Reader/s,' in Cross-Cultural Voices, ed Claudio Gorlier and Isabella Maria Zoppi (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1997). Ronald B. Hatch
PEN CANADA
PEARSON, Kit (Kathleen Margaret). CHILDREN'S writer, librarian; b Edmonton 30 April 1947; daughter of Kathleen (Hastie) and Hugh Pearson; educ U Alberta, U British Columbia (MLS, 1976), and Simmons C, Boston (MA, 1982). She wrote six novels (1986-97) and a picture book retelling a French Canadian FOLK tale, The Singing Basket (1990), and edited This Land (1998), an anthology of Canadian fiction for young readers. Her many AWARDS include the Governor General's Medal and the Vicky Metcalf Award for a body of work. An adult novel was in progress at press time. Writing in plain prose, Pearson adapted various genres: the realistic school story (The Daring Game, 1986), time travel (A Handful of Time, 1987), ghost fantasy (Awake and Dreaming, 1997), and HISTORICAL fiction (The Sky Is Falling, 1989; Looking at the Moon, 1991; The Lights Go On Again, 1993, also published as The War Guests Trilogy, 1999, and available in French). Whatever form she chooses, Pearson concentrates on character studies of emotional growth, typically taking a 10- to 13-year-old girl from insecurity, anxiety, or loneliness to a growing self-awareness and confidence. Settings are identifiably Canadian, as in Victoria and its Ross Bay Cemetery (Awake and Dreaming) or Toronto and Muskoka (The War Guests books). Further reading: Jane Flick, '"Writing Is the Deepest Pleasure I Know": An Interview with Kit Pearson,' Canadian Children's Literature 74 (Summer 1994): 16-29.
and Paul Pelletier, civil servant. Co-founder and co-director of the Theatre Experimental de Montreal (1975-9) with Jean-Pierre RONFARD and Robert Gravel, she went on to establish Le Theatre Experimental des Femmes (1979-85) with Louise Laprade and Nicole Lecavalier, and to help create several plays, including La nefdes sorcieres (1976), in which six female characters deliver monologues about the place of WOMEN in society. Her own first published work was La lumiere blanche (1989). In 1993, she founded the Compagnie Pol Pelletier, and staged her show Joie (pub 1995), in which a woman recounts 10 years of a happy life (1975-85). Margaret Cook
PELOQUIN, Claude. Poet, songwriter; b Montreal 26 Aug 1942; son of Irene (Dupont) and Georges Peloquin, a doctor. After publishing his first book, Jericho (1963), he co-founded the group Zirmate (1965-6) - whose main preoccupation was the search for a total art. He also wrote song lyrics (see MUSIC), including 'Lindberg,' which won the Felix-Leclerc award (1969) for best original Canadian song, and 'CPR Blues.' In 1970, he worked as a producer at the NATIONAL FILM BOARD, receiving the Canadian Film Award for best script for a DOCUMENTARY (L'homme nouveau) in collaboration with Yves Landre. His three-volume Oeuvres completes (1976) was outdated by his subsequent works, a series of powerful innovations in prose and poetic form that include Les mers detroublees (1993) and Leflambant nu (1998).
Jane Flick
PELAGIE-LA-CHARRETTE, the title character in a novel by the most influential of 20th-century ACADIAN writers, Antonine MAILLET. Her name ('Pelagie-the-Cart') derives from her role as the person who 'carries' her people home from EXILE, both physically and in story. The FOLK tale technique of naming people/ CHARACTERS by their social role recurs in Bernard EPPS' Pilgarlic the Death. PELLETIER, Joseph Omer-Aime. See Bertrand VAC.
PELLETIER, Pol. Playwright; b Ottawa 6 Nov 1947; daughter of Madeleine Simard, teacher,
Further reading: Joseph Bonenfant, 'Peloquin, 1'oeuvre,' Lettres quebecoises 1.7 (Aug-Sept 1997): 42-6. Margaret Cook
PEN CANADA. PEN is an acronym for Poets, Essayists, and Novelists. PEN Canada is the Canadian chapter of International PEN, an organization that was founded in 1921 in London, England, as a writers' club. International PEN now has over 12,000 members around the world and it signs up only published authors. As a writer-oriented human rights organization, PEN Canada claims in its pamphlets that it is 'fiercely committed' to freedom of expression. As such, it systematically works
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for the freeing of writers who, because of their writing, are politically threatened, imprisoned, or under sentence of death. PEN Canada has developed a working relationship with the Dept of Foreign Affairs and focuses particular attention on prisoners in countries where the Canadian government has some influence. Its focus on internal Canadian issues is primarily on freedom of expression. It is thus vocally opposed to such actions as the banning of controversial books in schools and the incidental seizing of books by Canada Customs. Twice a year, International PEN publishes a list of about 900 cases of authors in political trouble that are of particular concern, and PEN members, or 'minders,' then give various forms of strategic support to the most urgent cases. As well, PEN engages in a number of organizational lobbying, petitioning, and writing campaigns on the author's behalf. PEN gathers pertinent information from IFEX ('International Freedom of Expression Clearing House'), of which it is a member, and develops relevant material on its own 'Rapid Action Network.' Relatedly, it reports the news and workings of its 'Writers in Prison Committee' in its quarterly newsletter. PEN maintains a Web site where it gives out information and directions on how to become effectively involved in particularly pressing cases. Past president Margaret AT WOOD has said that 'In a world where independent voices are increasingly stifled, PEN is not a luxury, it's a necessity' (PEN pamphlet). PEN Canada's address is The Canadian Centre, Suite 214, 24 Ryerson Avenue, Toronto, ON, M5T 2?3. Web site: http://www.pencanada.ca. Terry Whalen
PERCY, Herbert Roland (Bill). Novelist, short story writer, biographer; b Burnham, Kent, England, 6 Aug 1920; son of Herbert George and Alice (Martin) Percy. Bill Percy married Mary Davina James in 1942 and had three children. He retired from the Canadian navy in 1971 as lieutenant commander. The former founding chairman of the Writers' Federation of Nova Scotia and former editor of Canadian Author and Bookman, Percy lives in Granville Ferry, NS. His publications include biographies of Joseph HOWE (1976) and Thomas Chandler HALIBURTON (1980), several novels (including Painted Ladies,
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1983, nominated for a Governor General's Award), short stories, and essays. Claire Wilkshire
PERFORMANCE POETRY is less a genre than a broad term applied to creations wrought by poets working within various fields. It first emerged in the 19705 in reference to the work of poets such as (citing but two examples) John Giorno in the United States and the FOUR HORSEMEN in Canada. Initially intended to designate works best realized in - or only capable of dissemination by - public performance, the term often came to be used for public presentation of poetry that employed anything more than an unembellished reading of text. The term has not, however, been applied retroactively for instance, to the costumed and staged readings of Pauline JOHNSON in the early part of the 2oth century, or the theatrically mounted rendering at the STRATFORD FESTIVAL of Leonard COHEN'S verse in the 19605. This inconsistency of the term's application makes for imprecision both in definition and usage. Strictly speaking, any public reading of poetry is of course a performance, but any poetry thus performed in public is not thereby considered performance poetry. There are, however, those who do no more than read their poems in public, but who still refer to themselves as (or are referred to by others as) performance poets; most of these individuals tend to operate within the framework of the so-called spoken word (also vaguely defined, and applied to anything from lectures to performance art incorporating speech) and POETRY SLAM (circusatmosphere competition) events. While any markedly animated or movement-enhanced poetry reading (see GESTURAL) might give rise to the term 'performance' poetry, some consider that one or more of the two elements of props and theatricality (either in delivery or context) must be present to qualify a work for this category. Still others reserve the term only for poetry that requires an interpretation and fulfilment of mutable instructions (ie, the creation of the poetry resides in the performance). This latter definition certainly applies in the case of spontaneously composed ORAL poetry, as encountered in certain FIRST NATIONS traditions and in some SOUND poets' practices. Those
PETER
two fields, along with that of DUB poetry (see CARIBBEAN), are the ones wherein performance poetry is most commonly considered to occur, with some arguing for its application to rap and hip hop as well. Paul Dutton
PERLEY, Moses Henry. Writer, civil servant; b Maugherville, NB, 31 Dec 1804, d at sea, off Labrador 17 Aug 1862; son of Mary and Moses Perley. Born after his father's death, Perley grew up in Saint John and was educated in law there. He was, at various times, New Brunswick's fisheries commissioner and commissioner of Indian affairs, and wrote most of his essays on SPORT, industry, natural history, and NATIVE cultures within the context of the half-dozen government reports he assembled (1842-54). Actively encouraging immigration and inter-colony cooperation, his writings - sampled in Camp of the Owls (1990, ed Peter Mitcham) - bear comparison with those of DUNLOP and STRICKLAND. PERRAULT, Pierre. Filmmaker, poet, essayist; b Montreal 29 June 1927, d Montreal 24 June 1999; son of Candide Perrault, merchant, and Adrienne Goulet. After studying law in Paris and Toronto, he practised law briefly (1954-6), but - interested in how language, culture, society, economy, and politics define a people soon moved into the arts. His first feature FILM, Pour la suite du monde (1963), introduced his lyrical style and the concern for the relation between speech and writing that showed up in his poetry as well. Some of his 'poemes paries' recount his experience of the OCTOBER CRISIS in 1970. His play, Au coeur de la rose (prod 1963; pub 1964), received the Governor General's AWARD; other awards followed for his poetry collection Portulan (1968). Later works included the text of conversations with Perrault, La bete lumineuse (1982), and the essays ofDe la parole aux actes (1985). He directed the documentaries Le regne dujour (1966) and Les voitures d'eau (1969), and co-directed L'Acadie, I'Acadie ?!? (1971) with Michel Brault. Further reading: Michel Brule, Pierre Perrault ou un cinema national (Montreal: P de 1'U Montreal, 1974). Margaret Cook
PERRIER, Luc. Poet, accountant; b Saintefamille de 1'Ile d'Orleans, QC, 29 Sept 1931; son of Aime Perrier and Anne Richard. In his first volume of poetry, Des jours et des jours (1954), he explored the themes of nature and time. A second volume, Du temps quej'aime (1963) also spoke of his optimism; placing his faith in the power of love, he communicated this hope for the future through images of nature and light. He was then silent for thirty years before Champ libre (1994) appeared, affirming that the poet's function is to use ordinary speech to bring hope to an altogether too sombre world. Margaret Cook
PERSKY, Stan. Journalist, essayist; b Chicago 19 Jan 1941; son of Ida (Malis) and Morris D. Persky. Persky's published work takes two major forms, loosely categorized as political JOURNALISM and autobiographical ESSAYS. Buddy's: Meditations on Desire (1989), Then We Take Berlin (1995), and Autobiography of a Tattoo (1997) develop a fluid style that manages to achieve both a sense of writing to the moment and a meditative, considered tone. Indebted to the work of Roland Barthes, Perksy explores homosexual desire and the body as a site of discourse and knowledge. See also GAY AND LESBIAN, Gerry GILBERT.
N.E. Currie
PERSONS CASE, the 1929 case that established WOMEN as 'persons' in Canadian law, and confirmed their right to be named senators. See also Emily MURPHY, TORONTO WOMEN'S LITERARY CLUB, VOTING RIGHTS. PETER, LJ. (Laurence Johnston). Satirist, educational theorist; b Vancouver 16 Sept 1919, d Palo Alto, CA, 12 Jan 1990; son of Vicenta (Steves) and Victor Peter, an actor; educ Western Washington C (MEd, 1958) and Washington State U (EdD, 1963). Peter taught for many years at Vancouver schools, then at U British Columbia and U Southern California, from which he retired in 1974. He wrote widely applauded theoretical books (eg, Prescriptive Teaching, 1965), but achieved his POPULAR fame from a series of eight best-selling humorous analyses of behaviour, beginning with The Peter Principle (1969, with Raymond Hull) - which argued that people rise to the level of their incompetence, and dem-
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onstrated with satiric skill what the principle in practice implies about contemporary society and ending with The Peter Pyramid (1986). PETERSON, Len (Leonard Byron). Playwright; b Regina 15 March 1917; son of Marion and Nels Peterson; educ Luther C (Regina) and Northwestern U (Chicago). Peterson sold his first play to CBC RADIO in 1938; in 1942, while still in army camp, he had a play produced by Andrew ALLAN. Recognition of his writing skill led to a transfer to Ottawa to write DOCUMENTARIES for the army; at the same time he was sending more plays to Allan and to Esse LJUNGH, exploring such subjects as RACE and fear during wartime, and attracting both enthusiastic and highly critical listeners. A writer for FILM and television as well (as with Ice on Fire, 1957, on violence in SPORT), he remained constantly active in promoting THEATRE, from establishing Jupiter Theatre in Toronto (1951-4) to helping found the Canadian Theatre Centre (1954-72) and Playwrights' Co-op (1972). The prolific author of well over 100 plays, he is best known for the ABSURDist Burlap Bags (for radio 1946; television 1960; stage 1960; pub 1972), about a tramp's suicide after he fails to find meaning in a world where people live their lives inside burlap bags. Other significant works include his early fiction, Chipmunk (1949), his CHILDREN'S play about the CREE leader Almighty Voice (1970; pub 1974), and his plays They're All Afraid (for radio, 1944; television, 1953; pub 1981), and The Great Hunger (1960; pub 1967). PETITCLAIR, Pierre. Playwright; b SaintAugustin-De Desmaures, LC, 12 Oct 1813, d Pointe-au-Pot, CE, 15 Aug 1860; son of Cecile (Moisan) and Pierre Petit-Glair, farmers; educ Quebec. Petitclair wrote poetry ('Pauvre soldat!' 1842), stories ('Une aventure au Labrador,' 1848), and comic plays (Unepartie de campagne, 1857; pub 1865) while employed as a clerk and a tutor. His LABRADOR story tells of demonic haunting in a cold environment; the plays satirize social institutions (including the church) and petty infatuations with les anglais and love. PETITJEAN, Leon. Playwright; b 1869?, d 1923?. Petitjean, with Henri Rollin (aka Willie Plante,
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1887-1942), wrote the original version ofAurore, I'enfant martyre (1921), the most succesful melodrama in the history of Quebec THEATRE. Based on the true story ofAurore Gagnon, a nineyear-old girl tortured to death by her stepmother and father; the play underwent several changes, as it was performed 200 times a year for 30 years in Quebec and other francophone regions of North America. In 1951, a FILM version of the play was released to great popular acclaim. The only published version appeared in 1982, ed Alonzo Le Blanc. Andre Loiselle
PETITOT, Emile Fortune Stanislas Joseph. Roman Catholic missionary, lexicographer, linguist; b Grancey-le-Chateau, France, 3 Dec 1838, d Mareuil-les-Meaux, France, 13 May 1916. Petitot was ordained an Oblate priest in March 1862 and sent at once to northern Canada. He spent most of the next two decades at missions on or near Great Slave Lake and the Mackenzie R. Forcibly retired from the field in 1883, he spent the rest of his long life as a parish priest in Seineet-Marne, France. There he wrote and published several books about his years in Canada. His importance for Canadian literature rests on the large body of texts he transcribed in NORTHERN ATHAPASKAN languages between 1862 and 1880. He published these in France, first in free translation, then in strict bilingual form. In its second incarnation (1888), this book was the first substantive anthology of NATIVE Canadian literature. Further reading: Emile Petitot, Traditions indiennes du Canada nord-ouest (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larouse, 1886); Traditions indiennes du Canada nord-ouest: textes originaux et traduction litterale (Alencon: Renaut de Broise, 1888); Quinze ans sous le cercle polaire (Paris: Dentu, 1889); Autour du Grand Lac des Esclaves (Paris: Savine, 1891); Exploration de la region du Grand Lac des Ours (Paris: Tequi, 1893). Robert Bringhurst
PETROGLYPHS are images carved in stone such as rock outcroppings, cliffs, and large boulders - by Aboriginal peoples. Glyphs are distinguished from the more widely found pictographs, or rock paintings, in which pigment is
PETROGLYPHS
applied to the surface of the rock. While sites known to non-Aboriginal culture are few, they are scattered across the country, and significant collections of pictographs or petroglyphs are found, for example, along the BC coast and in the Stein Valley in the province's interior, in southern Alberta near Lethbridge, near Peterborough in Ontario, and on the Bedford Barrens of Nova Scotia. Clearly, several different FIRST NATIONS practised these forms of writing on the physical LANDSCAPE, but the images and techniques vary widely from one territory to the next. Geology partly dictates the location of petroglyphs, which require varieties of stone that can be easily abraded and will not shatter under the force of chipping and scraping. On the BC coast, for instance, petroglyphs are more common on the Gulf Islands and eastern Vancouver Island, where sandstone dominates the surface geology, than on the mainland side of Georgia Strait, were the surface rock is splintery, fragile granite, or the rest of Vancouver Island, where hard basalt is usual. Unlike other signifiers of First Nations presence in the landscape - such as totem poles and longhouses - petroglyphs and pictographs are generally hidden, whether intentionally by their makers or not. Petroglyphs often appear in forest clearings, where the emergence of the rock at the surface creates natural openings in the trees that are not apparent from any distance. Or they are placed openly on beach rock formations and boulders, where they still escape notice. Since the images are created by incision rather than pigment, some images become visible only in certain conditions: if the rock is wet, and if light glances obliquely across the surface (as at daybreak or toward sunset), shadow casts the etchings into relief. Glyphs on horizontal surfaces can become obscured by botanical material - forest debris, lichens, mosses, and grasses. The qualities of the stone that make it desirable for carving also make it susceptible to erosion by wind and water. While pictographs can be easier to discern, their very visibility makes them vulnerable to defacement. Through anthropological records, mainstream culture has easy access to the intended meanings of many visual image systems in First Nations culture, but such records are largely absent for petroglyphs. Two research sources
that provide some access to petroglyph and pictograph images are partial in coverage and intention: Annie York's They Write Their Names on the Rocks Forever (1993) investigates rock art in British Columbia's Stein Valley; and Petroglyph Island: Gabriola (1981; rpt 1998), in which Ted Bentley and Mary Bentley catalogue the large collection of petroglyphs at one site in the Strait of Georgia. York, of the 'Nlaka'pamux nation, explains in a fragmentary, conversational, and anecdotal fashion what the pictograph images mean to her own people, while the white, urban-dwelling Bentleys frame their book as a voyage of anthropological discovery, relying on speculation and their own imaginations to identify the images they locate, despite the quasiscientific framework in which they order their findings. It is unclear whether explications of rock art ought to be written at all: not only do the familiar issues of appropriation and disclosure of image and culture apply, but rock art by its nature is easily destroyed, whether by careless treatment or by deliberate vandalism. While known petroglyph and pictograph sites become the property of the federal Dept of Canadian Heritage, the department lacks the resources to protect sites that are brought to its notice. Sites that are identified are therefore by definition sites at risk. To the degree that literature encourages interest in and visits to such sites, it participates in this risk. While Canadian literature by non-First Nations people regularly uses many aspects of First Nations culture, however, it seldom refers to petroglyphs or pictographs. In Wilson's Bowl (1980), the poet Phyllis WEBB discusses a favourite stone artefact - a bowl carved into a boulder lying on the beach near her Salt Spring Island, BC, home - that would appear to have been made by the same culture that produced the local petroglyphs, which Webb associates with Wilson Duff (1925-76), the noted U British Columbia anthropologist and expert on coastal rock art. Fred WAH'S Pictograms from the Interior of B.C. (1975) is a book-length collection of poetry that Wah calls 'transcreations' of pictograph clusters: the poetry on the right-hand page responds to images on the facing page that Wah has selected from Pictographs in the Interior of B.C. (1968), by the ethnographer John Corner. In fiction, petroglyphs and pictographs dis-
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solve even when they offer some thematic substance. In Surfacing (1972), Margaret ATWOOD'S unnamed heroine cannot view the rock paintings her father was studying when he drowned - paintings she believes will give her insight into that death - because they have been covered by water rising from dam construction. In this aspect of her novel, Atwood was influenced by novelist and ethnoarchaelogist Selwyn DEWDNEY, who met her father, zoologist Carl Atwood, while engaged in research into pictographs. The plot of M.T. KELLY'S novel A Dream Like Mine (1987) concerns retribution for the methyl mercury poisoning of the Grassy Narrows Band on the English and Wabigoon River systems by the Reed pulp and paper plant in Dryden, northern Ontario: an OJIBWA elder decides not to take a white reporter to see pictographs on a sacred site near Lake of the Woods. In both cases, the petroglyphs hover above (or below) the fiction but are never directly seen. In a rare instance of First Nations use of pictographs in mainstream literary genres, the poet Theresa MacPhee arranges MI'KMAQ rock drawings on the cover and title page of Lnu and Indians We're Called (1991), and as cover and chapter heading illustrations to Rita Joe: Autobiography of a Mi'kmaq Poet (1996): see JOE. These images, from the Bedford area and Kejiminijuk Park in Nova Scotia, include sailing ships and Christian crosses, clearly reflecting post-contact experience, as well as recognizable images of moose, humans in canoes, and an eight-pointed star. Further reading: James D. Keyser and Michael A. Klassen, Plains Indian Rock Art (Vancouver: UBC P, 2001); Grace Rajnovich, Reading Rock Art (Toronto: Natural Heritage, 1994). Anne Rayner
PHENOMENONOLOGICAL WRITING draws on a school of philosphy and CRITICISM that emphasizes understanding as an act of consciousness. Within this system (articulated by such writers as Gaston Bachelard), it is of no consequence whether objects exist or do not exist in art, time, or physical space; what matters is how objects register on the conscious mind. Critics have suggested that Daphne MARLATT'S Steveston, in its concern for creating the
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rhythms of recognition - and some of the poems of Eli MANDEL - can be read as artistic exercises in phenomenology. See INTELLECTUAL HISTORY. PHILIP, Marlene Nourbese. Poet, essayist; b Woodlands, Moriah, Tobago, 3 Feb 1947; daughter of Parkinson Philip-Yeates, an elementary school principal, and Undine (Bowles) Philip. She later adopted the name Nourbese, a Benin name meaning 'wonderful child/ Philip was educated in Trinidad and at U West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, where she studied political science and international relations. She came to Canada in 1968 and took a degree in law from U Western Ontario in 1973. She worked as a lawyer, specializing in immigration and family law. Her several volumes of poetry include: Thorns (1980); Salmon Courage (1983), in which the title poem is about the need to return home; and the poem sequence She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (1989), notable for its sensuousness and for its vivid evocation of the pain inflicted by RACISM. A prominent theme throughout her work is the problem for the black woman writer of breaking silence when words and particularly English words are hard to separate from the racism and sexism they have so long carried. Looking for Livingstone (1991), subtitled An Odyssey of Silence,' is a sequence in prose and verse about The Traveller and her search through Africa for David Livingstone. The whole is a meditation on the meaning of words and the value of the silence before words. Harriet's Daughter (1988) is a novel for adolescents about young Margaret Cruickshank (the name belongs to a maternal ancestor of Philip's), born in Toronto to West Indian immigrants, who finds inspiration in Harriet Tubman to solve her difficulties with her father. Philip is also well known for her anti-racist essays, often very topical in nature, collected in several volumes: Frontiers (1992); Showing Grit (1993), an analysis of the significance of staging the musical Showboat in North York; and A Genealogy of Resistance (1997), part memoir, part reflection on the inspirations of her writing. Neil ten Kortenaar
PHILLIPS, Edward O. Teacher, painter, writer; b Montreal 26 Nov 1931; son of Dorothy (Skaife)
PIERCE
and A. Lovell Phillips, a businessman; educ U Montreal and U Boston. Phillips is the author of six POPULAR novels, primarily in the MYSTERY genre, including Sunday's Child (1981) and Buried on Sunday (1986), winner of the Arthur Ellis AWARD. He uses the genre to probe, primarily from the vantage point of GAY characters, the social values of Montreal's once-anglophone bastion, Westmount. Further reading: Linda Leith, 'Westmount: une comedie de moeurs,' Lettres quebecoises 53 (Spring 1989): 48-50. PHILLIPS-WOLLEY, Sir Clive Odnall Long. Writer; b Wimborne, Dorset, England, 3 April 1854, d Somenos, BC, 8 July 1918; son of R.A.L Phillips, FRGS. He assumed the Wolley coat of arms and name in 1876 after inheriting the family estate at Woodhall, Ham Wood, Shropshire. Educated at Rossall School, he served as British consul at Kertch, Russia. Later, he studied law and was called to the English bar from the Middle Temple in 1884. He moved to British Columbia in 1896, became the proprietor of the Nelson Miner, and president of the Victoria Navy League. Elected FRSC (1913), and created KB (1915), he was the author of Sport in the Crimea and Caucusus (1881), Gold, Gold in the Cariboo (1893), Big Game Shooting (1894), The Canadian Naval Question (1910), and Songs from a Young Man's Land (1917). Peter Mahon
Further reading: Kathleen O'Donnell, 'The Poetry of Alphonse Piche, 1946-1982,' U Windsor R 202 (Spring-Summer 1987): 75-81. Margaret Cook
PICKTHALL, Marjorie Lowry Christie. Author; b Gunnersby, Middlesex, England, 14 Sept 1883, d Vancouver 19 April 1922; daughter of Helen Mary (Mallard) and Arthur Christie Pickthall, an engineer. The ethereal aspects of Pickthall's poetry, apparent in The Drift of Pinions (1913; rev and enlarged as The Lamp of Poor Souls, 1917), appealed to early 20th-century cultural conservatives such as Archibald M ACM EC HAN, Andrew MACPHAIL, and Lome PIERCE, who promoted her in order to forestall the arrival of MODERNISM in Canadian literature. Her death at a young age, like that of Isabella Valancy CRAWFORD, enhanced her romantic image. Represented as an unworldly poetess by her advocates, Pickthall was in fact an ambitious, canny, and successful professional writer who tailored her prose to the demands of the international popular magazine market. Some of her more than 200 stories were collected posthumously in Angel's Shoes and Other Stories (1913). Further reading: Sandra Campbell, "A Girl in a Book": Writing Marjorie Pickthall and Lome Pierce,' Canadian Poetry 39 (Fall/Winter 1996): 80-95; Diana M.A. Relke, 'Demeter's Daughter: Marjorie Pickthall and the Quest for Poetic Identity,' Canadian Literature 115 (Winter 1987): 28-43. Carole Gerson
PHILOSOPHICAL WRITING, see INTELLECTUAL HISTORY, VALUE.
PICTURESQUE, see LANDSCAPE. PICHE, Alphonse. Poet, accountant; b Chicoutimi, QC, 14 Feb 1917; son of Marie. (Villeneuve) and Mendoza Piche, an accountant. His first volume, Ballades de la petite extrace (1946), won the Prix David. He went on to publish other volumes such as Remous (1947) and Voie d'eau (1950), and his collected Poemes (1976) won the Governor General's AWARD . Rhyming and traditional in form, his poems follow conventional rules of metrical versification. He particularly evokes LANDSCAPE (both rural and urban) to express his sense of tenderness and community. His selection of his own writings appeared as Le choix d'Alphonse Piche (1987).
PIERCE, Lome Albert. Editor, publisher, critic; b Delta, ON, 3 Aug 1890, d Toronto 28 Nov 1961; son of Harriet Louise (Singleton) and Edward Albert Pierce, a hardware merchant; educ Queen's U (BA, 1912), Union Theological Seminary, New York (BD, 1916), New York U (MA, 1916), Victoria C, Toronto (BD, 1917), and United Theological C, Montreal (ThD, 1920). Pierce was ordained as a Methodist minister in 1916. From 1922 to 1960 he was the editor of Ryerson P (see PUBLISHING). He wrote many books, including An Outline of Canadian Literature (192.7). He also founded the Ryerson series Makers of
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Canadian Literature in 1923 and the Ryerson poetry chapbooks in 1925. The authors he was first to publish in book (or chapbook) form included BIRNEY, DUDEK, GROVE, KNISTER, D. LIVESAY, MARRIOTT, P.K. PAGE, PRATT, and
A.J.M. SMITH. Despite this record, his personal taste leaned towards the late Romantic and Celtic twilight style, and many of the authors he published are now forgotten. His donation of the Lome Pierce Medal to the ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA for contributions to Canadian literature or literary CRITICISM and his donation of his collection of Canadiana to Queen's U have been a durable legacy. Further reading: Clarence Heber Dickinson, Lome Pierce: A Profile (Toronto: Ryerson, 1965). Margery Fee
PILON, Jean-Guy. Poet, literary critic; b SaintPolycarpe, QC, 12 Nov 1930; son of Alida (Besner) and Arthur Pilon. A lawyer (trained at U Montreal) before becoming a producer at RADio-Canada in 1954, Pilon published his first volume of poetry, La fiancee du matin, in 1953, subsequently winning numerous AWARDS for his writing, including the Governor General's Award in 1970 for his collected poems, Comme eau retenue (extended to 1977 in the 1985 reissue). Sometimes regular, often concise, his poetry evokes love and brotherhood in a direct yet intimate fashion, but is underscored by its acceptance of a tragic relationship between man and the world. Pilon, one of the founding members ofLiberte in 1959, was its director, and later became literary director of Editions de I'HEXAGONE; he is a member of both the ACADEMIE CANADIENNE-FRANCAISE and the ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA.
Further reading: Joseph Bonenfant, 'Lumiere et violence dans 1'oeuvre de Jean-Guy Pilon,' Etudesfranfaises 6 (Feb 1970): 69-90. Margaret Cook
FINDER, Leslie Hall. Writer, lawyer, teacher; b Elrose, SK, 21 Sept 1948; daughter of Margaret Shirley (Rathwell) and Raymond Hall. Pinder is a passionate defender of FIRST NATIONS rights. Her Vancouver-based law firm, Mandell Pinder, works exclusively for First Nations peoples, and
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has been involved in several important land claims cases in British Columbia and Alberta. First Nations culture is also the concern of many of her numerous magazine articles, poems, lectures, novels, short stories, and plays. Most notably, her second novel, On Double Tracks (1990), is set in the midst of a land claims trial and tells the story of hunter-gatherer people trying to find justice within the Canadian legal system; it was nominated for a Governor General's AWARD for fiction. Her monograph, 'The Carriers of No: After the Land Claims Trial,' a personal account of the experience of receiving the judgment of the Delgamuukw case, which extinguished Aboriginal rights in British Columbia (until the Supreme Court appeal reinstated them), is on the curriculum at U British Columbia's law school. Pinder has also written an opera, The World Is as Sharp as a Knife, which met with considerable critical acclaim when it was first performed at U British Columbia's Museum of Anthropology in Sept 1992. J.E. Walchli
PITTMAN, Al (Alphonsus J.). Poet, dramatist, short story writer, children's author, university professor; b St Leonard's, NF, n April 1940, d Corner Brook, NF, 26 Aug 2001; son of Mary (Leonard) and Alphonsus Pittman. After completing a BA at St Thomas U, he taught English at Memorial U of Newfoundland in St John's (1973-5) and then at Corner Brook (1975-98). In 1973, he co-founded Breakwater Books. Starting in 1966, he published five collections of poetry (including Dancing in Limbo, 1993), one volume of short fiction, three CHILDREN'S books, and two plays. His work examines Newfoundland culture, its unflinching frankness tempered by compassion and humour; he is widely regarded as one of the major figures of his generation of Newfoundland writers. Lawrence Mathews
PLANTOS, Ted. Poet, editor; b Toronto 24 Dec 1943, d Toronto 20 Feb 2001; son of Bernard and Elizabeth (McLean) Plantos. A writer of poetry, short fiction, and stories and poems for children, Plantos has also edited publications such as CrossCanada Writers' Quarterly, and the League of Canadian Poets' literary magazine, Museletter. The founder of Cross-Canada Writ-
POETRY IN SHORTER FORMS
ers' Workshop, he also participated in numerous educational projects. In his work, culminating in The Universe Ends at Sherbourne and Queen (1977), Plantos depicts a religious sensibility confronting a brutal, decaying universe. In Passchendaele (1983), a survivor of the 1917 offensive (see WAR) affirms the basic human will to master the instinct towards violence anatomized in the earlier works. Later works, including Mosquito Nirvana (1993), pursue this theme in more domestic terms. Daybreak's Long Waking (1997) selects from the range of his work. John Moffatt
FLAUNT, Alan Butterworth. Advocate of public broadcasting, political organizer, journalist; b Ottawa 25 March 1904, d Ottawa, 12 Sept 1941; son of Francois Xavier Flaunt and Mary (Butterworth). Along with Graham SPRY, he founded the Canadian Radio League, which was successful in lobbying for the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission (CRBC) in 1932 and its successor, the CANADIAN BROADCASTING CORPORATION (CBC), in 1936. He was a member of the original board of governors of the CBC (1936-40). A socialist and a pacifist, he joined the League for Social Reconstruction and he helped draft the REGINA MANIFESTO. In 1933 he founded the New Canada Movement. Along with Spry he published the Farmer's Sun (1932-4) to gain a better deal for rural peoples. He also employed his philanthropy to aid such publications as the Canadian Forum. In the late 19305 he helped organize the Neutrality League to promote pacifism and political neutrality for Canada. See also RADIO AND LITERATURE.
Further reading: Bill McNeill and Morris Wolfe, ed, Singing On: The Birth of Radio in Canada (Toronto: Doubleday, 1982). Ronald B. Hatch
PLAYWRIGHTS UNION OF CANADA (PUC) is a result of a merger, in 1984, between Playwrights Co-op and the Guild of Canadian Playwrights, organizations that evolved in the 19705 as advocates of playwrights' contract and performance rights, as publishers of plays, and as lobbies to government on behalf of the interests of Canadian playwrights. Centred in Toronto, PUC produces the magazine CanPlay several
times each year, and through Playwrights Canada Press publishes new plays and special collections of plays for the trade market. It also compiles extensive catalogues of plays by Canadian playwrights which are available from various sources. Many PUC publications are made available in its extensive system of reading rooms across Canada and around the world. Web site: http://www.puc.ca. Terry Whalen
PLOTNIKOFF, Violet (Vi). DOUKHOBOR cultural activist, writer; b Verigin, SK, 30 Dec (full date withheld), to Annie (Kootnekoff) and Ignace Peter Makaeff. Plotnikoff has worked as a radio copywriter and an instructor of creative writing. She lives in Castlegar, BC, with her songwriter husband. Plotnikoff's major publication is the collection of short stories Head Cook at Weddings & Funerals and Other Stories of Doukhobor Life (1994). It is reviewed in Western American Literature 29.4 (1995): 366-7; and Canadian Literature 151 (1996): 150-2. Joel Martineau
POETICS, any system of theory that deals with poetic composition, or, more loosely, with the aesthetic principles that underlie any art form; see, eg, CRITICISM AND THEORY, BLACK MOUNTAIN, PROSODY. POETRY IN SHORTER FORMS. A long stand ing tradition of lyric poetry in Canada, much of it distinctive in style and approach, begins to take root in the early British and French colonies of North America as a transplanted genre. Concerned first with relations between LANDSCAPE and self, and focused on the forms of perception and national identification, it gradually changes, fusing the personal and the objective, the meditative and the ecstatic, the artificial and the colloquial into a complex, multifaceted, and intense poetic practice. The term lyric' derives from the Greek adjective lyrikos, which means literally 'adapted for the lyre,' or meant to be sung. Calling the words for songs 'lyrics' captures this sense most closely. However, while lyric poetry may be set to music, it is a self-sufficient form; to modify a well-known epithet from the British aesthete Walter Pater, it is poetry aspiring to the condi-
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tion of music. Typically, lyric poems are short (under a page or two, although some odes can be extensive) and condensed, exploiting the sounds, rhythms, and textures of their language to great effect. The lyric is almost always subjective, presenting itself as vitally personal and putting at issue the thoughts and emotions of the writer or persona. The lyric also tends to be disengaged, dwelling on moments of romantic culmination or spiritual transcendence rather than on the mundane or the political; it tends to be associated with artifice, anti-realism, and aesthetic indulgence, although a number of efforts by Canadian writers attempt to recuperate various kinds of worldly engagement within lyric text. Because it is a deeply self-conscious mode, the lyric puts at issue the fundamental shapes and structures of language itself, interrogating the grounds of meaning and utterance that everyday speech often takes for granted. Because its compactness makes it ideal for anthologies, the lyric also came to be instrumental in the production of Canadian literary CANONS, in both English and French. As important literary works are collated, organized, and disseminated as 'traditions' of Canadian writing, and as critics and readers come to identify various sensibilities and perspectives within a national framework, the lyric offers representative instances of crucial voices and visions. A number of early ballads and songs have survived from the first European settlers to the territories that would eventually become Canada; they persist to the present as traditional folksongs (see FOLKLORE). Such traditional texts as 'En Roulant Ma Boule,' 'Malbrouk,' and 'Marianson' were translated from French by William MCLENNAN and issued as Songs of Old Canada (1886). Later versions by Henry Grafton Chapman (1904), Marius BARBEAU and Edward SAPIR (1925), and J. Murray GIBBON (1927) reflected a desire to establish, with some anthropological accuracy, the origins of a distinctive Canadian poetics. The opening stanza from 'Le Pommier Doux' suggests both the flavour of the original (which has its origins in the i/th century) and the connections to Romantic and Pre-Raphaelite art ballads popular in McLennan's day: An apple tree there groweth, / Fly away, my heart, away; I An apple tree there groweth / Within my father's close; / So sweet, I Within my father's
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close.' While BALLADS primarily combine narrative and dramatic elements, they also exploit a number of musical features of language associated with the lyric, including refrain, hyperbole, and metaphor. Various anonymous ballads were written in English in the late-i/th and early i8th century - principally by East Coast settlers and military men - many of them enthusing with exaggerated poeticisms over the merits of living in the colonies. By contrast, Donnchadh Ruadh MACCONMARA, an Irish poet who visited Newfoundland, composed a political ballad in the 17403 counterpointing Gaelic and English; the English lines appear to sing the praises of King George, while the Gaelic scathingly satirizes English imperialism and voices the poet's true Jacobite sympathies, which remain unintelligible to all but an Irish audience. While 'Donncha Rua In Newfoundland' is not properly lyric, it does demonstrate technical complexity and wordplay, as well as a close attention to internal rhymes and sound patterns in both English and Irish tongues (see IRELAND, MACARONIC VERSE). A number of traditional First Nations song forms were also collected and translated, for the most part by anthropologists and ethnographers on exploratory missions of cultural 'salvage,' during the early parts of the 2oth century. These texts have their origins outside the bounds of recorded Western history, and their styles reflect both the uniqueness of the cultures that produced them and the technical complexities of lyrical performance. While many FIRST NATIONS texts - from traditional ORATORY to the story cycles of mythtellers - concentrate on narrative and syntactical structure rather than lyric, there are also many early poems and songs that focus on moments of spiritual and linguistic intensity typical of the lyric (see MYTHOLOGY). Traditional INUIT songs were gathered by Knud Rasmussen in 1932 and later translated into English from Inuktitut and collected by John Robert COLOMBO in Poems of the Inu.it (1981). Colombo also published Songs of the Indians (1983), which included orature by Native speakers of the Six Nations that had been collected by the American ethnographer Charles G. Leland; this oratory often exploits the metaphor and resonant patterns of sound and rhythm that suggest its kinship to lyric form.
POETRY IN SHORTER FORMS
Constance Lindsay SKINNER published English translations of HAIDA poetry, her prizewinning 'Indian Poems,' in 1913 in the London Bookman and in 1914 in Poetry (Chicago); these translations - which are in fact adaptations, rather than accurate renderings - were eventually published as Songs of the Coast Dwellers (1930). Other translator-poets also produced versions of 'Indian' poetry well into the 2oth century, but until the work of Dell Hymes, Robin Ridington, Robert BRINGHURST, and others - collected in 1994 in the anthology Coming to Light, ed Brian Swann little effort was made to render the forms and conventions of Native poetry into English with any accuracy. Much of this work meant returning to source manuscripts, collected by anthropologists such as Franz BOAS and John S wanton, and the recovery of many poems from anonymity and obscurity. Anthologies such as Native Literature in English (2nd ed, 1997; ed Daniel David MOSES and Terry Goldie), and Canadian Poetry: From the Beginnings Through the First World War (1994; ed Carole Gerson and Gwendolyn Davies), did much to recuperate Native writing in English and to situate it in the context of a broader Canadian tradition. Probably the earliest poetry composed in Canada is by Marc LESCARBOT, a lawyer who had joined the second expedition of Sieur de Monts to ACADIA, and from the summer of 1606 had remained for a year in Nouvelle-France. His Adieu a la Nouvelle-France' was published among several poems in Les muses de la NouvelleFrance, an appendix to his historical account of the New World, in 1609. A long descriptive poem in rhyming alexandrines, mixing mythological allusion with elevated and artificial courtly stylings, it nonetheless contains striking passages of vigorous description, evoking the animal life and geography of Nova Scotia. The English explorer Henry KELSEY would attempt a similar poetic feat -juxtaposing the lyrical and the historical - in the dedicatory verses to his journal (1693), but by comparison to Lescarbot's finessed verse Kelsey's creaky heroic couplets seem to approach doggerel. The first recognizably lyric poems written in Canada were primarily descriptive and promotional. Called with false modesty 'unripe ears' of corn by their author, Robert HAYMAN, many of the fragments and epigrams of Quodlibets (1628)
hardly qualify as polished lyric. (The title of the collection literally pluralizes the Latin for 'what you like,' but might be best rendered as 'Whatevers,' suggesting the cast-off style Hayman favours.) Their genre is Skeltonic (after John Skelton, 0460-1529): rough rhymed couplets aimed at moral satire and ironic wit (see HUMOUR). Hayman's most syntactically complex and rhythmically interesting lines, however, evoke the style of the early Songs and Sonnets of John Donne (who is mentioned as Hayman's poetic mentor in one of the epigrams, although there is no evidence beyond the poem that the two actually met). The striking closing lines of epigram 117 from the first book, a poem 'in praise of my New-found-Land,' suggest Donne's metaphysical swagger: '(I say) if some wise men knew what this were / (I doe believe) they'd live no other where.' The mercantile colony at Bristol's Hope, in Conception Bay, NF (of which Hayman had been governor, 1610-28), was abandoned in 1629, and with its loss faded the brief Caroline moment of Canadian writing. Through the next hundred years, little lyric poetry was written in or even about Canada. A number of writers produced satires, BURLESQUES, religious and political verse, modelled on 18th-century NEOCLASSICAL styles (such as that of Alexander Pope in England and Jean Racine in France), but no lyric aside from occasional verse from writers such as Joseph QUESNEL, whose light opera Colas et Colinette premiered in Montreal in 1790, and Joseph MERMET, whose extensive 'Tableau de la Cataracte de NIAGARA' intersperses an extensive setpiece on the falls with moments of SUBLIME exhilaration. Michel BIBAUD wrote didactic poems, principally satires on political and religious subjects, but his writing offers none of the subjective intensity associated with lyric expression. In English, the Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1786) of Henry ALLINE use traditional church songforms to express RELIGIOUS fervour, but are laden with stock phrases and liturgical commonplaces. The Loyal Verses of Joseph Stansbury and Doctor Jonathan Odell (1860) collects work by two iSth-century writers, including a number of love poems. While their styles reflect the SENTIMENTALISM emerging at the close of the 17005 in English writing, and occasionally lapse into bathos, such poems as 'To Cordelia' by STANS-
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BURY or the anniversary celebration of 'Our Thirty-ninth Wedding Day* by ODELL evoke roaming 'o'er Nova Scotia's wilds' or braving 'a dark and stormy Night,' and employ a calculated poetic diction. Some poems by women that flourished in the 17805, such as those of Deborah How Cottham and Anne Hecht, were circulated privately, and combined conventional phrases with sharp wit to turn overwrought sentimentality against itself. After 1825, English and French Romanticism began to exert considerable influence on poetic writing; neoclassical long forms tended to be abandoned in favour of the short, intense, personal lyric, modelled on the work of Byron, Wordsworth, Lamartine, Hugo, and others. Francois-Xavier GARNEAU combined romantic sensibility with nationalist sentiment, ardently professing the cult of liberty. Pierre PETITCLAIR, in such poems as 'L'erable,' evinces a sombre romanticism as he describes the maple as 'L'arbre sacre, 1'arbre de la patrie,' again combining nationalist and religious sentiment with artful description of the tree through the seasons. Joseph Lenoir wrote poems ranging from dulcet elegy to scathing satire, as well as orientalist exotica, and also translated Goethe, Longfellow, and Byron; although unable to publish his poems in book form during his lifetime, he did see many of his pieces appear in L'Avenir, a liberal journal he co-founded. Probably the most accomplished lyric poet of the early 19thcentury writing in French was Octave CREMAZIE, who produced fervent paeans to French NATIONALISM - which tend to leave many readers somewhat cold - along with intense elegies and meditative lyrics on death, evoking shadowy mantels and fading light in a style prefiguring the twilight texts of the fin de siecle. Edward Hartley DEWART'S 1864 ANTHOLOGY Selections from Canadian Poets, the first collection of its kind in Canada, emphasizes the Romantic influence on pre-cONFEDERATiON writers. Principal among the poets Dewart selects are Charles SANGSTER, whose poems range from the historically inspired meditations of 'On Queenston Heights' (1856) to the invocations of 'mysterious Nature' in his Sonnets, Written in the Orillia Woods (1859); Alexander MCLACHLAN, whose colloquial song-like poems often celebrate masculinity and the domestication of the
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landscape, and evoke a variety of solitaries and 'lonely spirits'; Charles HEAVYSEGE, who produced a number of extensive poetic dramas (including The Revolt of Tartarus, 1855, and Saul, 1857) from which fragments of lyric extremity can be distilled; and Thomas D'Arcy MCGEE, who, while better known as a politician, composed tributes to Native spirituality and ballads honouring the heroic 'manly hearts' of explorers. Dewart includes a large number of women, such as Rosanna LEPROHON, whose poems, he writes in a footnote, are 'marked by simplicity and gracefulness of style, strong domestic and human sympathies, and high moral sentiment'; and Helen M.Johnson, who offers nationalistic and religious verse typical of the mid-i9th century, as well as quasi-Wordworthian set-pieces such as 'To a Dandelion.' Charles MAIR, one of the most frequently anthologized poets of his day, was one of the founders in 1868 of the CANADA FIRST movement, and his writing demonstrates a concern with national mythology, often falling into hyperbole and overwritten emoting. Agnes Maule MACHAR, an advocate for women's rights who wrote under the pen name Fidelis in the late i9th century, produced nationalistic and historical poems, as well as highly formal sentimental lyrics. Alfred GARNEAU worked as a parliamentary translator while producing some of the most accomplished and evocative verse in Quebec before Emile NELLIGAN; sonnets such as 'Mon insomnie' concentrate on dreamlike states of altered consciousness, which Garneau describes as 'grey clarities' suggesting the murky paradoxes of French SYMBOLISM. Many of his lyrics offer intimate portraits of nature and states of feeling. Louis FRECHETTE was sometimes called 'Victor Hugo le petit' because of his creative debts to the older Romantic writer. A lawyer by profession, Frechette wrote from self-imposed exile in Chicago in the i86os, aspiring to the role ofbarde national. His anti-Confederation pamphlet-poem La voix d'un exile won him notoriety in Quebec, where he returned to live in 1871. He went on to compose numerous ODES, evocations of national spirit, and what he called feuilles volantes; his lyric collection Lesfleurs boreales won the prestigious Montyon prize from the French Academy in 1880. Pamphile LEMAY, who was called to the bar at the same time as Fre-
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chette, composed animal FABLES and sonnets, but also represented the first instance of Quebecois REGIONALISTS who sought to produce a distinctive writerly style of poetry rather than to derive their work from the quaint oral traditions of the province. The clerical poet Moise-Joseph Marsile worked in a neoclassical mode that prefigures the work of Paul Valery in France. Apollinaire Gingras, also an ordained priest, published a collection of 'fugitive' verse in 1881 entitled Au foyer de man presbytere, which concentrated on folk tales and on descriptions of ordinary life. Neree BEAUCHEMIN, a medical doctor, wrote refined, subtle and highly crafted verse, combining simple language with complex lyrical forms. George COPWAY, whose Ojibwa name is KahGe-Ga-Gah-Bowh, combined Methodist faith with his First Nations cultural background to produce striking translations into English of Ojibwa oratory and song, published in 1847 and 1850. In poems such as 'The Canoe,' Isabella Valancy CRAWFORD sought to combine the mythopoeic, English bardic style of Alfred, Lord Tennyson with First Nations source material. Crawford published only one book of poetry in her lifetime, Old Spookses' Pass, Malcolm's Katie, and Other Poems (1884), which was not a critical success, but, through the efforts of James REANEY and others, her work was later recuperated, and now stands as a major achievement of 19th-century Canadian poetry. Her lyrics, while at times conventional, bear witness to her technical mastery and visionary intensity. Crawford is associated with a group of writers born in the i86os who have come to be known as the CONFEDERATION GROUP, including William Wilfred CAMPBELL, Charles G.D. ROBERTS, Bliss CARMAN, Archibald LAMPMAN, and Duncan Campbell SCOTT. These poets found inspiration when Roberts published his first collection of poetry, Orion, and Other Poems (1880), which overwhelmed Lampman with its accomplished style and its focus on Canadian subjects, particularly the landscape of the Tantramar region of southern New Brunswick. The poems of Orion are not, in fact, particularly regional and tend to mix classical allusion with the Romanticism of Percy Bysshe Shelley; Roberts' later work, particularly his meditative prospect poem Tantramar Revisited' (1883) and the SONNET sequence
Songs of the Common Day (1893), couple pictorial detail of the landscape with a rigorous examination of the dynamics of perception and consciousness. Campbell wrote careful, moody descriptions of Ontario landscape as well as satiric verse. In poems such as 'Heat' (1888), Lampman forges a sustained IMPRESSIONISM closely tied to the central Canadian landscape, while in his sonnets he anticipates Roberts' use of evocative detail. Carman is generally regarded as a versifier more than as a poet, but he did import into Canadian writing something of the symbolic twilight of fin de siecle poets such as Ernest Dowson and the early William Butler Yeats. Carman's 'Low Tide on Grand Pre' (1887) paints the New Brunswick landscape nostalgically from the perspective of expelled Acadians: 'Now and again comes drifting home / Across these aching barrens wide / A sign like driven wind or foam.' Scott, though subsequently criticized for his political activity as deputy minister of Indian Affairs, was the most adventurous stylist of the Confederation poets, shifting in his career from late-Victorian artifice to modernist free verse. Many of his poems examine what he understood as the vanishing cultures of Native peoples; in poems such as 'The Onondaga Madonna' (1894), 'Watkwenies' (1898), and 'The Forsaken' (1903), Scott attempts to generate a tragic pathos; his use of the sonnet form in the first two poems is particularly striking, building intense contrast through evocative detail. Other poems by Scott, including 'Night Hymns on Lake Nipigon' (1900) and 'The Height of Land' (1916), aspire to visionary transcendence through the fusion of images of landscape with both Native and Christian spirituality. Poets of the ECOLE LITTERAIRE DE MONTREAL (est 1895) sought initially to hone the French language and to import the Parisian symbolism of Paul Verlaine, Charles Baudelaire, and others to Quebec. The exoticism of Arthur de BUSSIERES, contained primarily in his sonnets, introduced an elegant version of what was to become PARNASSIAN writing, following the credo of 'art for art's sake.' Other members of the school, including Lucien Ranier and Hector Demers, as well as other poets such as Marcel DUGAS and Guy DELAHAYE, wrote formal lyrics fusing aesthetic concentration with symbolist complexity.
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Emile Nelligan is probably the most renowned poet of 1'Ecole litteraire de Montreal, but wrote nothing after the age of 20 in 1899; his inspired, 'golden' lyrics concentrate on states of overwhelming emotion and symbolic rapture, and celebrate creative freedom and aesthetic transcendence. Poems such as 'Le vaisseau d'or' and 'La romance du vin' embody a combination of ethereal wonder and imagistic fervour. Albert LOZEAU has been described as a poet of windows, his gaze at once limited and intimate, his style both gently nuanced and attentive. Poems such as 'Derniere fiamme' and 'La poussiere du jour' evoke nostalgic landscapes but also focus on the subjectivity of the writer, and the creation of a speaking persona, an 'I,' through poetic language. Both Nelligan and Lozeau stand at a transition point between^m de siecle aestheticism and modernist crisis. A number of important voices emerged in English at the close of the i9th century. Susan Frances HARRISON, who wrote under the pseudonym Seranus (originally a misspelling of her given names) at the turn of the century, composed a number of lyrics detailing her fascination with French Canada. Pauline JOHNSON, whose heritage was a mixture of Mohawk and English, sought a fusion of British diction and Native subject matter, and in poems such as 'The Song My Paddle Sings' (1892) and 'Ojistoh' (1895) creates an incantatory style that found considerable popular appeal among AngloCanadian audiences even though Johnson wrote as a keen advocate for Native peoples and for WOMEN. Labour activist Marie Joussaye published poems in the 18905 on the 'Working Girl,' while English emigre Marjorie PICKTHALL produced lyrics in the early decades of the 20th century celebrating Greek myth and the colours of the West Coast landscape. Frederick George SCOTT, an Anglican clergyman, in brief lyrics such as The Unnamed Lake' (1897) celebrated the 'silences of God.'John MCCRAE would become a representative Georgian poet, best known for'IN FLANDERS FIELDS' (1915), a rondeau eulogizing the dead of the First World War. Chief K'HHalsertan Sepass of the Chilliwack Salish supervised the translation of his own songs into English in 1911. The late Romantic sensibilities of these writers gradually gave way to both experimentation
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and fragmentation in the work of the early Modern period. In the 19205 and 19303, W.W.E. ROSS developed a style of stripped-down assertion and stark description, emphasizing objectivity and directness over subjective self-consciousness. Raymond KNISTER, known principally as a novelist, was one of the first critics to embrace the formal and philosophical innovations of modern poetry, with its emphasis on the dissolution of identity and tradition; he also wrote a number of FREE VERSE lyrics celebrating rural life, which seem to offer a somewhat Romantic return to the soil as an antidote to modern angst. Dorothy LIVESAY published Signpost in 1932, a volume of largely personal lyrics dealing with love, nature, and death; subsequent work shifted to formally complex and innovative poetry of political and social engagement, a poetic mode that Livesay called 'realism,' questioning the destructive influences of industrialization and war. E.J. PRATT is generally noted for his LONG POEMS, but in his early career he produced striking lyrics confronting the raw, visceral experience of the Newfoundland coast and effacing elemental forces. Newfoundland Verse (1923) collects much of this powerful work, which blends a careful technical formalism with torsioned free verse. High modernism was introduced into English Canadian writers by a group of young poets and critics at McGill U in Montreal in the mid-i92os. F.R. SCOTT, Leon EDEL, andA.j.M. SMITH published articles and poems in The McGill Daily Literary Supplement (1924-5) and The McGill Fortnightly R (1925-27), which Scott and Smith edited. Leo KENNEDY and A.M. KLEIN later joined the group, whose work, along with poetry by Pratt, was collected in New Provinces (1936), a pioneer anthology of modern verse. Smith fused the Imagism of Ezra Pound and T.E. Hulme with descriptions of landscape reminiscent of painting by the GROUP OF SEVEN. Scott is known principally for his incisive verse satires (such as his 1927 poem 'The Canadian Authors Meet,' or his 1957 parody of Pratt's epic ambitions, All the Spikes but the Last'), which mercilessly attack literary pretensions, employing direct and deliberately anti-lyrical language. Klein was an enthusiast of the work of James Joyce and a virulent antagonist of Ezra Pound's politics and anti-Semitism, despite his admira-
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tion for Pound's technical innovations. Klein wrote extensive meditations on being Jewish and on the textual traditions of Judaism; his many psalms echo with fervent craft the lush lyricism of the psalms of David. Klein attacked racial and national prejudices in his work, empathizing with ethnic minorities and Native peoples, but he also composed nostalgic reminiscences about his family and his faith, in such lyrics as 'Heirloom' (1940) and 'Autobiographical' (1951). W.E. COLLIN'S book of criticism The White Savannahs (1936) dealt directly with the thematic and formal concerns of Canadian modernists, and cemented the critical reputations of many of these poets. While many poets, such as Alfred DESROCHERS and Paul MORIN, continued through the first half of the century to write lyrics of impeccable craft and precision, focusing on regional aspects of the Laurentian countryside, and seeking inspiration, like Neree Beauchemin, in a nostalgic return to the countryside, modernism gradually took hold in Quebec. Poets such as Alphonse PICHE persisted in using traditional lyric forms even as they introduced a sensibility of urbane dread. Hector de Saint-Denys GARNEAU published only a single book of poetry, principally lyric, during his lifetime, Regards et jeux dans I'espace (1937), and its innovations went initially unregarded, although his work later came to represent the finest modernist writing in the province. Garneau's crafted free verse dwells on mystical experience and moments of illumination, but also examines the uncertainties and fragmentations of the human psyche. The work of Alain GRANDBOIS seemed to represent poetic modernity for an emerging generation of writers in Quebec, with its focus on alienation and sensuality and with its surrealist techniques and free-verse form. Rina LASNIER sought her inspiration primarily in the Bible, pursuing a form of spiritual illumination. Anne HEBERT understood the writer as poet-seer, dwelling on extreme psychological states in spare, chiselled lines. The work of Earle BIRNEY emerges from modernist preoccupations with alienation and meaninglessness (in poems such as 'Vancouver Lights,' 1941) to produce a large body of poetry of social commitment and formal experimentation. Ralph GUSTAFSON anthologized a number
of emerging poets in his Anthology of Canadian Poets (1942); his own work is characterized by detailed technical mastery, musicality, and philosophical questioning. Irving LAYTON wrote lyrics of intense passion and violent mastery, fabricating a means to 'dominate reality' as he says in 'The Fertile Muck' (1956); his work focuses on social injustice as well as on the power of the human mind to remake the world. By contrast, P.K. PAGE composed poems of crystalline precision and visionary clarity, exploring in such texts as 'Stories of Snow' (1946) the uncertainties of human perception and the inability of the mind simply to master its environment. Layton and Page represent antithetical tendencies in lyric work: an imperious aesthetic of self-assertion and an open mode of self-questioning. Other significant lyric poets of this period include Miriam WADDINGTON, whose poems explore the themes of Jewishness and women's social roles; Louis DUDEK, who reflects an increasing concern with urbanization; Eli MANDEL, whose work moves from a concern for rational order to a sustained confrontation with the irrational; and Raymond SOUSTER, who extends the techniques of W.WE. Ross to focus on instability and change, in a language at once simple and harsh. Margaret AVISON produces a concrete and sensuous poetry contained by highly crafted language; her work explores the tensions between formation and dissolution in human perception. Al PURDY moves away from formalism in his early work to embrace a fluid, modulating line; while much of Purdy's writing is regionalist, centred on the local experiences of Ameliasberg, ON, a great deal of his work also concerns itself with encounters between the organizing sensibility of the poet and alien or strange landscapes (eg, that of the Canadian NORTH or that of Aztec Mexico). The lyric, for Purdy, is an improvised exploration rather than an artfully overwritten product, and his style captures the energy of a mind in motion, testing out positions and attitudes as it proceeds. Poetry in Quebec in the 19405 and 19505 was influenced by SURREALIST painting and by jazz improvisation, much of it a poetry in revolt against what was perceived as the political strictures of the rule of Premier Maurice Dupleissis. Eloi DE GRANDMONT created brief surrealist
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lyrics that approached the condition of song. Claude GAUVREAU wrote dadaist nonsense verse and shadowy mood-pieces. Roland GIGUERE focuses on internal landscapes and his work strove to resist any external constraints on expression and style; his lyrics employ repetition, pun, and internal rhyme to weave interlocking textures with the fineness of engravings. Sylvain GARNEAU composed fragile, rhymed lyrics of adolescent longing, before taking his own life. Paul-Marie LAPOINTE combined the fervent longing of psalm with the improvisational energy of Jazz (in his AUTOMATISTE verse, akin to the automatic writing of the dadaists) to produce a poetry indebted to the surrealism of Arthur Rimbaud, but clearly located within Quebecois and North American social contexts. Gilles HENAULT quested for 'signals' of archetypal spirituality and human consciousness - pursuing the shapes and signs of collective memory - but also created a deeply lyrical and even humorous celebration of creative freedom. A group of central Canadian poets, including James Reaney, Jay MACPHERSON, D.G.JONES, and later Gwendolyn MACEWEN and Margaret AT WOOD, emerged in the 19505 and 19605, under the influence of the Toronto critic Northrop FRYE, as the 'mythopoeic' school. Their work sought out the archetypes of what they believed to be the Canadian imagination, or the literary imagination more generally. Reaney and Macpherson, in particular, sought inspiration in the mythical systems of Edmund Spenser, William Blake, and W.B. Yeats, and their writing reflects an often arch formalism that derives from their commitment to poetic tradition. MacEwen's poems often seek a return to a kind of incantatory shamanism, while her T.E. Lawrence Poems (1982) represent a conjunction of history - embodied in the life of the British adventurer - with moments of lyric brilliance. Atwood's work traces the dissonances between the English Canadian cultural heritage and the Canadian landscape. The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970) is a series of interconnected poems, based principally on Susanna MOODIE'S Roughing It in the Bush, that attempt to diagnose what the poet sees as a fundamental dividedness in the national psyche, epitomized by Moodie,
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while also dissecting the power politics of gender relations. During the 19605, the QUIET REVOLUTION brought to Quebec a cultural nationalism that had clear effects on its lyric poetry. Gaston MIRON, whose personality dominated the Quebec poetry scene at mid-century, aimed to produce a 'national' poetry, but did not repeat the folkloric nostalgia of earlier writers; instead, he sought a style combining a distinctive Quebecois inflection with a modernist sophistication. He founded L'Editions de I'HEXAGONE in 1953, publishing poetry that had emerged from a distinctly Quebecois tradition, fusing modern technical innovation with nationalist fervour. The 'Hexagone' group came to include Paul-Marie Lapointe; Olivier MARCHAND; Jacques BRAULT, whose 'Suitefraternelle' sustains an elegiac meditation on existence and self; and Yves PREFONTAINE, whose work draws on jazz, surrealism, and Native cultures to evoke a sense of Quebec as a pays of dissonant struggle. Pierre PERRAULT and Gatien LAPOINTE both celebrated the Quebec landscape, particularly the St Lawrence River, in work published in the 19605. Michel VAN SCHENDEL sought to reinvent the human by returning poetically to what he understood as the elemental and the essential in North American life. Fernand OUELLETTE fused a European intellectualism with mystical and erotic concerns; at times intense and even violent, his work is suffused with cultural nationalism. In 'Speak White' (1974), Michele LALONDE usedjouAL, urban street slang blending French and English, to create what has become the most famous of nationalist poems, using a HYBRIDIZED and colonized 'language' to resist what she saw as the encroachment of 'English' Canada into Quebecois culture. West Coast poets George BOWERING, Frank DAVEY, Fred WAH, and Daphne MARLATT are associated with the mimeographed journal TISH, which grew out of the influence of the American BLACK MOUNTAIN poets and other writers lauded in The New American Poetics (including Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, and Jack Spicer). These writers championed what they called projective verse and composition by field, and represented an important wave ofposTMOD-
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ERNISM in North America, emphasizing open forms, improvisation, immediacy, and the arbitrariness of meaning. The Tish group adapted the techniques of their American counterparts, experimenting with linear and rhythmic forms, especially having to do with breath and corporeality. Marlatt, with Betsy WARLAND and others, came increasingly under the influence ofecriture feminine (sometimes translated as 'writing the body'; see ECRITURE) of French and Quebecoise writers such as Helene Cixous, Monique Wittig, and Nicole BROSSARD, experimenting with sound, syntax, and typographical form to produce an essentially female language. Bowering's adaptation of Rainer Maria Rilke, The Kerrisdale Elegies (1984), transposes the visionary intensities of the German modernist to a residential district of Vancouver, seeking uncertain moments of vision in such mundane activities as a game of baseball. Wah continued to experiment with improvisational forms, seeking out 'the non-aligned and the unpredictable/ Davey's postmodernism mutated to align itself with the anti-lyricism of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry and to the fusion of critical and poetic discourses. Other important West Coast voices include John NEWLOVE, who pursued in poems such as 'The Pride' and 'Samuel Hearne in Wintertime' (1968) a notion of national history as writing, and questioned the ways in which identity and subjectivity are produced, and Phyllis WEBB, who incorporated the influence of Robert Duncan into a delicate formalism that often explores the darker side of human existence. Another poet, bill BISSETT, experimented with typewritten form and chant. Raoul DUGUAY fused poetry and music, moving away in the late 19605 from nationalist concerns to a more abstract and language-oriented style; his work includes concrete poems that aim to objectify poetic language and to distil it into its component parts. Nicole Brossard also rejected the simple linkage of nationalism and poetry, exploring the textures of language in collections such as Suite logique (1970) and la par tie pour le tout (1975), using fragmented syntax and de-centred forms to suggest the dissolution of meaning; her work is also closely tied to French FEMINISM, seeking in the eccentric and suppressed aspects of textuality an essentially feminine mode of writing and
thought. Normand DE BELLEFEUILLE traces the boundaries between discourse and poetry, theory and lyric to destabilize the 'dance' of meaning and form. Roger DBS ROCHES creates a discursive anti-lyricism that is closely tied to the avant-garde work of Brossard, although without her attention to GENDER and power. Andre ROY works through and against conventional syntax to pull at lyric form while also producing a verbal celebration of alternative and queer sexualities (see GAY). Feminist poets such as Madeleine GAGNON and France THEORET use avant-garde lyric forms to intervene in political and social formations dominated by patriarchy, and to begin to engender a distinctively female voice, recording the perspectives and experiences of women formerly silenced by the strictures of a male-centred language. The sensuous lyricism of Michael ONDAATJE, in collections ranging from The Dainty Monsters (1967) to Handwriting (1998), bespeaks a return to the personal aspects of the lyric, its roots in expressive song; many of Ondaatje's poems trace a mixture of eroticism and exoticism in his Sri Lankan background. A successful songwriter, Leonard COHEN has written what has been described as 'anti-poetry,' reflexive lyrics that interrogate love and betrayal, nationality and politics. Other important lyric voices include Joe ROSENBLATT, David MC FAD DEN, Alden NOWLAN, Milton ACORN, Patrick LANE, Pat LOWTHER, Paulette JILES, and Bronwen WALLACE, whose work in various ways represents a reassertion of the personal and of the experiential over purely aesthetic and formal concerns. Francois CHARRON begins by working in the mid-1970s in an overtly political mode, but modulates into a kind of neo-lyricism concerned with the corporeal, the subjective and the expressive. Philippe HAECK composed prose poems dominated by a lyrical approach to concrete experiences. Marie UGUAY created in the year before her death in 1981 a series of 'autoportraits' that focus on the blurring of memory and desire into uncertain language. Yves BOISVERT in writing from the 19805 and 19905 examines the collusion of place and personal history and the uncertain relationships between subjectivity and the ordering work of language.
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The shorter poems of Robert KROETSCH, including 'P.P. Grove: The Finding' (1975), map the incursion of a particular species of postmodernism into Canadian poetry, a disavowal of the aesthetic mastery preached by Layton and an embrace, instead, of the arbitrariness and uncertainty of language itself. Paul BUTTON, bpNiCHOL, and Steve MCCAFFERY pushed language to its limits in their work, often eschewing altogether the lyric impulse to express and instead concentrating on engaging the essential particles of sound, alphabet, and syntax that constitute texts. Roy KIYOOKA and Robin BLASER also sought increasing abstraction in their work, as well as an examination of the gaps in language that meaning is unable to fill. Christopher DEWDNEY'S collection Predators of the Adoration (1983) signals the fusion of a theoretical scientism with erotic song. The influence of the American L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets (see LANGUAGE POETS), such as Bob Perelman, Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, and Susan Howe, with their extreme self-consciousness, the abstract attention to the constructedness of the poetic voice, their anti-lyricism, and their heavily theorized style, can be felt in all of this work. A younger generation of poets, especially in Toronto and Vancouver, associated, for example, With the KOOTENAY SCHOOL OF WRITING, has continued to develop this line of poetic work, and includes Kevin Connolly, Jeff DERKSEN, Lise Downe, Clint Burnham, and Catriona Strang, among many others. Paradoxically, much of their poetry returns to a lyrical musicality in language or to an ethos of personal experience, reasserting the lyric mode in spite of itself. Erin MOURE and Lola Lemire TOSTEVIN blend linguistic and discourse theory into their poetics, challenging and reconfiguring the forms and structures that enable meaning and communication and insisting on the essential opacity of words. Anne SZUMIGALSKI evinces in her poems an interest in the inner 'landscapes' of the human psyche. Lorna CROZIER'S lyric sequences and books, such as Angels of Flesh, Angels of Silence (1988), develop a concern with personal history, gender politics, as well as a clear focus on sensuality (human, animal, and even vegetable). Late 19905 work also sees Crozier reworking literary antecedents in a manner reminiscent of
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Atwood; A Saving Grace: The Collected Poems of Mrs. Bentley (1996) voices a series of lyrics for the narrator of Sinclair ROSS'S novel As for Me and My House. Anne MICHAELS, in poems gathered in The Weight of Oranges (1986) and Miner's Pond (1991), writes meditative elegies for place and family, querying the premises of her own nostalgia. Steven HEIGHTON'S poetry seeks out visionary experience, while the work of Michael CRUMMEY looks to Newfoundland history and family anecdote, in such collections as Hard Light (1998), to reassert the primacy of the personal and of the musical inflections of human speech. Stephanie BOLSTER'S award-winning poems in White Stone (1997) look to literary and artistic antecedents, writing into the interstices of Lewis Carroll's Alice books and the photographs of Julia Margaret Cameron to recuperate a perceptive innocence and an insightful immediacy; in her poems, there is a clear reclaiming of an aestheticism interested in the artifice of poetic craft. These and other young poets (represented in the 1995 anthology Breathing Fire, ed Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane) appear to represent a return to the Romantic core of lyric writing, asserting self-expression and the musicality of words as key to their writingCarol Huynh Guay writes in her poems of the 19905 on the indeterminacy of intercultural travel and the 'trembling of certitudes' in our apprehensions of home and place. Jean-Paul DAOUST confronts the Americanization of culture while yearning for a connection between poetic text and the 'phantom pulse' of lived experience. Elise TURCOTTE examines the displacement of voice and the mediation of the body in lyric experience. The poems of Christine Belanger focus on the small objects of everyday life, seeking in details the keys to unlocking human perception and response. In 1992, Jan ZWICKY published Lyric Philosophy, and in 1995 Tim LILBURN edited Poetry and Knowing; the volumes represent critical work by poets claiming a particular philosophical function for the lyric poem, under the influence of thinkers from Ludwig Wittgenstein to Martin Heidegger. Writers such as Robert Bringhurst, Don MCKAY, Dennis LEE, Roo BORSON, and Kim MALTMAN, as well as Zwicky and Lilburn, sought to compose lyrics that produce forms of
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awareness, which activate thought and call for particular poetic practices of worldly action, emphasizing especially ecological responsibility and ethics (see ECOCRITICISM). Important volumes by this group include Bringhurst's The Calling (1995), Zwicky's Songs for Relinquishing the Earth (1996), Lilburn's Moosewood Sandhills (1994), McKay's Night Field (1991), and Lee's Nightwatch (1996). The last decade of the 2oth century witnessed the emergence in Canada of a number of voices of non-European or MULTICULTURAL heritages; for many of these writers, who represent a wide variety of cultural backgrounds, attitudes, and approaches to language - and therefore do not properly constitute a homogeneous group at all - the lyric poem becomes an important vehicle for interrogating the politics of voice: the means by which one asserts oneself both within and against a dominant culture. Dionne BRAND challenges the racial hegemony of literary writing in her sequence No Language is Neutral (1990), and works through the complexities and distensions of an inflected, immigrant mode of speech. George Elliott CLARKE, in collections and sequences such as Whylah Falls (1990) and Lush Dreams, Blue Exile (1994), blends a formalism attentive to English tradition with a vernacular style of Nova Scotian BLACK speech to interrogate the tensions of a racialized, minority existence; Clarke's 1997 anthology Eyeing the North Star includes important AFRICAN Canadian lyric poetry by Claire HARRIS, Frederick Ward, Gerard ETIENNE, and M. Nourbese PHILIP, as well as poems by Brand and himself. Poets including George FALUDY, Rienzi CRusz,Joy KOGAWA, George JONAS, Himani BANNERJI, Roy MIKI, Kristjana GUNNARS, Jim WONG-CHU, Corinne Allison Lee, Gerry SHIKATANI, Ian Iqbal RASHID, and Lucy NG all sought to interrogate, through lyric, the self-positioning that necessarily occurs when one is conferred with the label of 'ethnic' or 'multicultural' writer, and many resist this designation. First Nations writers, while again from a wide variety of linguistic and cultural backgrounds, demonstrated a pervasive concern in lyric poetry for the connections between personal empowerment and voice, and with the reflexive self-consciousness about the nature of meaning and language. Notable work has been
produced by poets including Jeannette ARMSTRONG, Lenore KEESHIG-TOBIAS, Alootook IPELLIE, Duncan Mercredi, Daniel David Moses, Louise Bernice HALFE, Armand Garnet RUFFO, and Gregory SCOFIELD. At the close of the 2oth century in Canada, lyric poetry came under fire as overly aesthetic, artificial, and anti-realist. But it also persists in a broad spectrum of work concerned particularly with questions of voice and self-expression; in this sense, lyric takes on a cultural and political function, distilling the subject positions of writers into moments of intense immediacy. See also CONCRETE POETRY, COWBOY POETRY, DUB, FOUND POETRY, LONG POEM, MUSIC, PERFORMANCE POETRY, PROSODY, SOUND POETRY, VISUAL POETRY, WORK POETRY. Kevin McNeilly
POETRY SLAMS are POPULAR cabaret-style amateur poetry competitions, similar to openmike poetry readings, that flourished in urban centres in Canada in the 19905. Creating a timelimited form of PERFORMANCE POETRY, slam participants must produce poems in front of a live audience - usually in a pub or small auditorium - and their work is subsequently rated by judges chosen at random from the audience. The poetry slam was originated in the mid1980s by Chicago poet Marc Smith, who held mock competitions on Sunday nights at the Green Mill Tavern, the first of which was dubbed 'The Uptown Poetry Slam.' A National Poetry Slam in the United States, offered in a different city each year, continues to draw large audiences. Kevin McNeilly
POINT OF VIEW, see CHARACTER AND CHARACTERIZATION, NARRATOLOGY. POISSANT, Claude. Playwright, actor; b Montreal 24 Oct 1955; son of Raymonde Baril and Andre Poissant; educ U Quebec a Montreal (BA in drama, 1978). Poissant was actively involved in the creation of Theatre Petit-a-Petit, of which he became artistic and general director. As a comic actor he appeared in performances of plays by Brad FRASER and others. He also won fame with performances of works by such playwrights as Judith THOMPSON and Claude GAU-
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VREAU, and with his more than 15 plays for young people as well as for adults - including Tournez la plage (1980), Les Beaux Cote (with L-D. LAVIGNE, 1983), Defendu (1984), Sortie de secours (1984), Ce qui reste du desir (1987), L'an de grace (1992), and Si tu meursje te tue (1993). Constantin Grigorut
POLIQUIN, Daniel. Novelist; b Ottawa 18 Dec 1953; son of Jean-Marc Poliquin and Anette Paris; educ U Ottawa (MA in German language and literature, 1978; PhD in French, 1987) and Carleton U (MA in comparative literature, 1982). Poliquin taught German at Carleton U (1975-9) and worked as a parliamentary interpreter for the federal government. After publishing his first two novels, temps pascal (1982) and L'Obomsawin (1987), he won three prestigious AWARDS in 1990 for Visions dejude (tr Wayne Grady as Visions ofjude, 1991). He is the first Ontario French writer who won the Prix du Salon du livre de Toronto (1993) for his entire literary work. Among other publications is his translation into French of two of Jack Kerouac's novels: Pic (1987) and The Town and the City (1990). Further reading: Francois Ouellet, 'Daniel Poliquin: I'invention de soi,' Nuit blanche 69 (Winter 1997): 139-42. Constantin Grigorut
POLITICAL WRITING, see INTELLECTUAL HISTORY.
POLLOCK, Mary Sharon. Playwright, director, actor; b Fredericton 19 April 1936; daughter of Eloise (Roberts, d 1954) and Dr George Everett Chalmers, a pioneer of polio treatment in New Brunswick and Tory MLA. Sharon attended an Anglican boarding school in Quebec's Eastern Townships, and in 1954, after two years at U New Brunswick, married Ross Pollock and moved to Toronto, where she had five children. After the marriage ended, she returned to Fredericton, where her apprenticeship in the THEATRE included acting, directing, and such jobs as ticket agent, box office manager, and stage manager at Theatre New Brunswick and its precursor, the Beaverbrook Playhouse. In the 19605 she moved to Calgary with actor Michael Bell and
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her family, and joined the touring company Prairie Players. She began to write plays in the early 19705 and her first major play, the black comedy A Compulsory Option, won the 1971 Alberta Playwriting Competition. Pollock's many contributions to the dramatic arts and to community and professional theatre life have been innovative, often controversial. In 1984, two months after being appointed as the first woman artistic director at Theatre Calgary, she made headlines when she resigned, citing the failure of the operational structure to allow for the centrality of the artist. In 1988, she was appointed artistic director of Theatre New Brunswick, and resigned before her contract expired because of what she perceived to be the conservatism of the theatre. In 1988 she took part in the public protest against The Spirit Sings, an Olympic exhibit of Native artefacts. From Sept 1992 to Sept 1997, Pollock ran her own cooperative, alternative theatre company at the restored Gary Theatre in Calgary's urban centre. At the Gary, community involvement, creative risk, artistic licence, and freedom from corporate and state subsidies served as operational standards. Although Pollock has recently been engaged in theatre outside the Canadian mainstream, she remains an icon of the theatre establishment. In 1966 she won a DOMINION DRAMA FESTIVAL Award for her performance in Ann Jellicoe's The Knack and she has continued to act, often in her own work, and to direct and teach. Pollock's career as a playwright, extending over more than two decades, gave her national and international recognition. Her plays have been produced in the United States, England, Australia, and Japan. From 1977 to 1980, she was the head of the Banff Playwrights' Colony. She also wrote television and RADIO scripts and a number of plays for CHILDREN (mainly for Vancouver's Playhouse Holiday). Her awards include the 1980 Nellie ACTRA Award for Sweet Land of Liberty (best radio drama) and the 1981 Golden Sheaf Award for the television drama The Persons Case. (See FILM, TELEVISION AND LITERATURE.) A passionate playwright, Pollock understands theatre as an art form as well as a political and social force. During the 19605 and 19705, she protested against those cultural authorities who still equated literary quality with elitist European
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and American art forms. Like other artists of the time, she worked to realize local, regional, and national artistic expression and to see the arts reflect Canadian history and realities. Her major works include the polemical and historical twoact play Walsh, which premiered in Theatre Calgary in 1973. It won the Alberta Theatre Competition and, like a number of Pollock's plays, was staged at the STRATFORD FESTIVAL (1974). Walsh centres on Major James Walsh, superintendent of the North West Mounted Police (see MOUNTIES), his friendship with Sitting Bull, and the unfair treatment of the Sioux; it demonstrates the playwright's concern with Aboriginal rights and social justice, as well as her fascination with individual moral choice. The Komagata Maru Incident, which has been produced many times since its 1976 debut at the Vancouver Playhouse, was similarly inspired by the history of government failure. Based on the Canadian government's refusal in 1914 to allow the entry of a shipload of Sikh immigrants into Vancouver (see KOMAGATA MARU INCIDENT, it reflects upon Canada's concealed RACISM. The equally popular One Tiger to a Hill, both an indictment of government and a character study, was begun shortly after a 1975 hostagetaking at the New Westminster penitentiary in British Columbia. Loosely based on these events, it premiered in Edmonton, 1980. These early works have contributed to Pollock's reputation as a social/political/historical playwright creating out of a DOCUMENTARY theatrical tradition. Blood Relations, a dramatization of the 1892 story of Lizzie Borden, the suspected axe murderer who was acquitted, was first produced in an early version as My Name is Lisbeth at Douglas C, New Westminster, in 1976, and in its revised version, at Edmonton's Theatre 3 in 1980. It won the first Governor General's AWARD for published drama (1981). Described by Ann Saddlemyer as a 'psychodramatic game,' the play examines domestic tensions, and the interior motivations, conflicts, and dilemmas of women, personified by the central character and presented through a double-time-frame structure, or a play-within-a play. Family drama and politics are again played out in the semi-autobiographical Doc, an exploration of a daughter's relationships with her successful father, a Mari-
time doctor, whose wife, like Pollock's mother, has died tragically. At the core of these plays is the theme of female identity, past and present. Doc, which won the 1984 Governor General's and the Chalmers awards, demonstrates, through Pollock's handling of time sequences, her mature presentation of dramatic structure an ongoing artistic interest. In Getting It Straight, produced as a one-woman show in Winnipeg (1988), the playwright illustrates her belief that structure can be part of content through the STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS monologue of a mad woman, who, discarded by society, has more insights and empathy than the sane. The naturalistic Whiskey Six Cadenza, a play about Depression bootlegging in the Crowsnest Pass that was shortlisted for the 1987 Governor General's Award, and the earlier Generations, centred on prairie farm life, and produced in Calgary in 1980, prove the playwright's attraction to western regional settings. In 1988, Pollock was awarded the Canada-Australia literary prize. In 1993, Saucy Jack, based on the infamous murderer Jack the Ripper, returned to such continuous Pollock concerns as the conditions of the poor and marginalized, the voicelessness of women, and the motivational psychology of the individual. See also ASIA AND CANADIAN WRITING, CLASS. Further reading: Diane Bessai, 'Sharon Pollock's Women: A Study in Dramatic Process,' in S. Neuman and S. Kamboureli, eds, A Mazing Space: Writing Canadian Women Writing (Edmonton, Longspoon, 1986): 126-136; Anne Nothof, 'Crossing Borders: Sharon Pollock's Revisitation of Canadian Frontiers,' Modern Drama 38.4 (1995): 457-87; Ann Saddlemyer, 'Crime in Literature: Canadian Drama,' in M.L. Friedland, ed, Rough Justice: Essays on Crime in Literature (Toronto: U Toronto P, 1991): 214-30; Denis Salter, '(Im)possible Worlds: The Plays of Sharon Pollock,' The Sharon Pollock Papers, First Accession (Calgary: U Calgary P, 1980): xi-xxv. Beverly Rasporich
POND, Peter. Fur trader, explorer, cartographer; b Milford, CT, 18 Jan 1740, d Milford 1807; son of Mary (Hubbard) and Peter Pond. As a youth Pond fought in the Colonial Army, and in 1765 entered the fur trade. He worked first
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around the Great Lakes, then in 1778 was the first white trader in the Athabasca region. A founding partner of the North West Company in 1783, he quit the trade five years later, leaving behind him a reputation for violence. His autobiography, written around 1805, tells of his life up to 1775. Further reading: Harold Adams INNIS, Peter Pond, Fur Trader and Adventurer (Toronto: Irwin and Gordon, 1930). Bill Moreau
POPULAR CULTURE IN CANADA. As a genre, popular culture cannot be succinctly defined. It is related to pre-industrial FOLK culture and post-industrial mass culture, with boundaries that are circumscribed by the varying connections among its artefacts and the media that articulate them, the size of its audience, and the profit realized from its sale. Influenced by the Frankfurt School - whose work exposed the social contradictions of capitalism in different cultural artefacts and practices sociological, psychological, philosophical, and literary theory have shaped the recent study of popular culture. The cultural industries have formulated and clarified policies affecting its economics and technological practices and the politics of its distribution. Argued by some to be reactionary in that it makes money by supporting the status quo, and by others to be subversive, in that it gives power to disenfranchised populations, contemporary popular culture has become a crucial area for debate, illustrating GENDER, RACE, CLASS, and sexual preferences, and even national identity. Its icons range from widely available artefacts -books, FILMS, clothes, compact discs - to everyday social practices such as SPORTS, television viewing, and COOKING. Most popular culture analyses erase traditional distinctions between high and low culture, between the cultural elite and the working classes. At any one time, popular culture may appeal to targeted groups of a particular age, nationality, ethnic origin, and so on. Currently, its study dominates the field of Cultural Studies. While discussions of popular culture in Canada follow global trajectories, they also illustrate problems between national and cultural
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identities. These problems differ between anglophone and francophone populations. The former is overwhelmingly affected by the mass marketing of popular culture in the UNITED STATES; the latter has more continually supported indigenous cultures. However, following the implementation of free trade with the United States, the economics of popular culture marketing makes both groups subject to costsaving; importing television programs, books, and movies from the United States saves money. As a result, Canadian institutions such as broadcasting systems, film industries, and publishing houses are particularly sensitive to foreign control of their markets. Arguments about Canadian identity have existed from the nation's beginnings. Consequently, attaching the term 'Canadian' to popular culture does not clarify its meaning. Because much popular culture comes from elsewhere, Canadians live a paradox that illustrates both its foreignness and its promotion of national identity. Mass markets are relatively absent in Canada; thus, the popularity of many cultural artefacts is not as evident as it is in the United States. Furthermore, anglophone Canadians in particular often deny their complicity in exploitative, violent, and pornographic culture; many term it American.' Popular Hollywood movies stereotype Canada. Images of the RCMP, wilderness areas, coureurs du bois, habitants, and so on, connote the nation for foreign observers. Myths of national identity also arise from such popularly conceived ideas as Canadian television's Heritage Minutes. Ranging from bites on well-known Canadian explorers, politicians, artists (Jacques CARTIER, Laura Secord, Emily CARR), events (building the CANADIAN PACIFIC RAILWAY, the RIEL rebellions, meetings of the Canadian flag committee), places (Signal Hill, Baffin Island), and people (IROQUOIS, MENNONITES, INUIT), the Heritage Minutes only peripherally touch on popular culture (Sam Steele and the RCMP, Superman and the 1931 comics, Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary, the popular sport of hockey), although they popularize Canadian culture for a general audience. Some confusion exists about the relative importance of national and regional influences, and about the global, transnational contexts of
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contemporary popular culture. Programs in Canadian Studies are not nationally supported by associations like the Popular Culture Assoc in the United States (which often includes a section on Canadian popular culture), and are often basically collections of exemplary material rather than critical or theoretical studies. Currently, work in Canada leans toward investigations of the cultural industries, that is, cultural policies, technologies and economies. Such studies attempt to delineate issues such as the historical development of cultures, their internationalization (including market globalization), the processes affecting denationalization, and the transformations of capitalism. While the various cultural industries in Canada are not devoted predominantly to the dissemination of popular culture, connections exist between national government initiatives and popular culture. The Canadian Broadcasting Act of 1932 linked policy, economics, and culture (the CBC) and has been the centrepiece of federal cultural policy ever since. The NATIONAL FILM BOARD was established in 1939 and has remained the major Canadian filmmaking organization, designed to interpret Canada for both Canadians and foreigners. The MASSET REPORT of 1951 isolated the effects of US culture on Canada, underlining the necessity of Canada's maintaining a strong national image. Two later reports - the Applebaum-Hebert Report, which encouraged Canadian artists, and Vital Links, directed to a lay audience - emphasized connections between economics and creativity. Other Canadian institutions have been closely tied to Canadian NATIONALISM, for example the CANADA COUNCIL, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, and Telefilm Canada. Generating nationalism by legal, institutional, administrative, economic, and cultural regulation, these policies and agencies have continued to influence anglophone culture, although Quebec has encouraged some open competition. Since 1991, concern about the increasingly multi-ethnic population of Canada, and the country's official linguistic duality, have further complicated such efforts as the evolving Canadian content rules, first put in place in 1971, and the role of the CBC with its decreasing budget allocations.
Two Canadian theorists, Harold INNIS and Marshall MCLUHAN, have influenced the production and analysis of contemporary Canadian popular culture. Both attempted to negotiate Canada's position on TECHNOLOGY. Innis was concerned with the threat of US imperialism, encouraging a Canadian civilizing discourse that was meant to moderate imperial and cultural demands. He saw Canadian technology as a means to balance European history and US economics. Basically a realist, Innis defined the Canadian mindset as colonial with technology central to the country's imagination. His workEmpire and Communications (1950), The Bias of Communications (1951) - profoundly influenced communications theory. The less nationalistic McLuhan developed a critical humanism that engaged the popular culture of North America. He focused on icons of popular culture, using POSTMODERN perspectives that, although less valued in the 19705 and 19805, became important to cultural theorists in the 19905. For McLuhan, technological shifts affected human perception, closely binding biology and psychology. More so than any other Canadian thinker, McLuhan recognized that a country's popular culture provided the language (visual and aural) that determines its identity. In publications such as The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), Understanding Media (1964), and The Medium Is the Massage (1967), he argued that national cultures inevitably move toward global markets. Despite commonly held beliefs that Canada has no national popular culture, it produces culture different from global popular culture. Although some nationalists argue that entertainment culture is predominantly American, and aesthetic culture Canadian, or that public culture (Canadian) is different from popular culture (American), such divisions are dubious. More helpful are studies that analyze global influences on national cultures or that suggest alterations tailored to fit a nation's needs. This discussion emphasizes the post-Second World War period because of rapid advances in technology, increasing self-consciousness about popular studies, and growing concern with national culture. Canadian popular literature includes everything from COMIC BOOKS, popular literary forms (HARLEQUIN romances), popularized his-
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POPULAR CULTURE IN CANADA tory, popular genres (MYSTERY, thrillers, horror), to magazines. As elsewhere, some writers straddle boundaries. Margaret AT wo CD'S novels (The Handmaid's Tale) have a wide popular following, while Douglas COUPLAND defined 'GENERATION x' with his 1991 novel of that name. Because of language, anglophone publications dominate the popular market. Comic books popularize images of Canadian identity: superheroes of the 19405 enact the Canadian government's economic and political role during the Second World War; the female hero, Nelvana of the Northern Lights (see NORTH), reflects Inuit MYTHOLOGY. Canadian cartoonists have often portrayed Canada as a beautiful young woman named Canada or Miss Canada, a character who spurns the advances of American Uncle Sam (see HALIBURTON). Other Canadian mythological comic-book characters include Keene of the RCMP, Johnny CANUCK (later Captain Canuck) and, in the 19705, the Quebecois superagent, Kebec. Media specialist McViewin appears in some underground comics, as does Frogueman, a counterculture figure from Quebec. Various of Canada's political cartoonists have kept some of these mythological characters alive, most often to make fun of US cultural superheroes. Pulp fiction, with its roots in the i9th century, is still dominated in the early zist century by the extremely successful Harlequin empire, begun in Canada in 1964. Marketing romance to the millions, Harlequin uses ROMANCE formulas that appeal to a widely divergent, although largely female, audience. It is one of the few Canadian examples of mass-market publication. Arthur HAILEY, author of the best-seller Airport (1968), has also sold millions of books. Influenced by Hailey, but Canadian in his fictional orientation, Richard ROHMER has published novels such as Exxoneration (1974) and Separation (1976) that range among such 'English' Canadian nationalist fantasies as Canada's winning a war against the United States, gaining control of Imperial Oil, and defeating the Quebec plebiscite on separation. Pierre BERTON has popularized Canadian history in books such as The National Dream (1970), explored the cliches of Hollywood's Canada, and was a regular panelist on television's long-running and popular Front Page Challenge (1957-95). Canadian magazines
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were, throughout the 20th century, a popular way of disseminating Canadian culture; by the 19905, they reached over 70 per cent of the population. One method of keeping production relatively inexpensive is through split runs - regionally edited foreign magazines that, as do the Canadian editions of Time, Sports Illustrated, and Reader's Digest, add a Canadian section to US publications. Common in the 19905 were city and regional periodicals such as Toronto Life and Western Living; these publications are marketed to specifically defined audiences. Widely distributed magazines such as Maclean's and Saturday Night focus on personalities, events, and places. Many Canadian periodicals are now available electronically. On the whole, magazine publication succeeds in Canada because publishers have created their own space. Public RADIO (CBC), while appealing less to a mass audience than television conventionally does, has been used to unify the Canadian population by marketing distinctively Canadian programming. During the 19405 and 19505, its popularity was at an all-time high: it featured such groups as the ubiquitous Happy Gang, the Just Mary tales for CHILDREN (see Mary GRANNAN), w.o. MITCHELL'S Jake and the Kid, and Roger LEMELIN'S Les Plouffe. Since 1959, to counter US control of broadcasting media, Canadian content has been regulated. Network ownership is mainly Canadian. The Peter GZOWSKI show Morningside, on the air for over two decades (with a break while Gzowski hosted television's short-lived 90 Minutes Live), was particularly popular. This cross-Canada program addressed subjects ranging from conversations with political figures, popular entertainers, and sports figures, to general Canadiana, games involving competitions such as writing the Great Canadian Novel. Gzowski's show exemplified 'Canadian content' as he brought the country together each weekday morning. In Quebec, the CBC set up the Radio-Canada French network in 1938. Quebec radio has produced locally based dramatic series that, like the TELEROMANS, attract a large francophone audience. Quebec has a tradition of film culture less evident in anglophone Canada. This province was the first to have its own theatres, distributors, cinema journals, international festival, and agency to regulate film and television produc-
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tion. Quebecois filmmakers take advantage of the French language, although English subtitles and voice-overs assure broad distribution. Widely distributed films that concentrate on Quebecois sensibility include perhaps the bestknown film from Canada, Claude Jutra's Mon Onde Antoine (1971), which looks at the Quebec of the 19408. Also well known are Denys Arcand's Le declin de I'empire americain (1986), a modern morality play, and Jesus of Montreal (1989). Both of these films were nominated for Academy Awards as best foreign films. More controversial, but also distributed widely, JeanClaude Lauzon's Leolo (1992) attacks Quebec's school system. While anglophone feature films and actors gained notoriety during the 19205, 19305 and 19405 (the internationally known Mary Pickford, for example), contemporary film critics single out Don Shebib's Coin' Down the Road (1970) as a landmark. With its documentary, low-budget perspective, this movie tracks a specifically Canadian journey from the Maritimes to Toronto, suggesting it as one from the margins to the centre. Patricia Rozema's 1987 I've Heard the Mermaids Singing parodies Hollywood films and the American dominance of the discourse of high art, while Atom Egoyan's Exotica (1991) skirts Canadian content by avoiding realism and presenting exotic locales, people, and events. The films of David Cronenberg are Canada's main contribution to mass movie culture; although films such as Scanners (1981), The Dead Zone (1983), The Fly (1986), and Naked Lunch (1991) have no particular Canadian content, the 1983 Videodrome, with its central media guru and focus on the biological effects of television, links up with the work of Marshall McLuhan. Theatre chains owned by Americans control 97 per cent of film distribution in Canada. (See FILM AND TELEVISION.)
The government-funded National Film Board, however, is Canadian. Founded in 1939 with John Grierson at the helm, over the next six decades it produced thousands of DOCUMENTARIES and educational films as well as several of the feature films mentioned above. Freed from certain market constraints, the NFB has experimented with technique and content, earning plaudits throughout the world. Some of its greatest successes, while not literally popular culture, certainly have wide and diverse audi-
ences: the animations of Norman McLaren; television films such as Gilles Groulx's Le chat dans le sac (1964), and Don Owen's Nobody Waved Goodbye; the documentaries; Sheldon Cohen's version of Roch CARRIER'S short story The Hockey Sweater/Le chandail (1980), and Terri Nash's If You Love This Planet (1982). Television is dominantly Americanized and while there have been attempts to create widedistribution Canadian programs, these are often modelled after successful US programs. Nonetheless, the changes made to make programs appealing to a Canadian audience are particularly interesting. In 1966, the dramatic series Wojek appeared; unlike similar US programs, the problems presented were not always solved and the common good frequently took precedence over individual achievement. Commentators make similar observations about other relatively popular Canadian programs: Quentin Durgens, MP (1967-9), and MacQueen: the Auctioneer (1969-70). In the 19705, The Manipulators and Sidestreet held brief sway, and in 1986, Street Legal began. Like the American program L.A. Law, Street Legal featured lawyers, but it gave the episodes particularly Canadian twists. Generally, Canadian writers are less restricted in choice of content than their US counterparts so that episodes could deal with such social issues as homosexuality and racism. Some argue that Canadian programs lean toward a higher level of realism and social consciousness than similar US programs. Canadian sitcoms have not been particularly successful. Although a number have been tried, the most successful was King of Kensington (1975-80); throughout its programming, it self-consciously made references to Canadian landmarks, politicians, and events. In Quebec, the popular teleromans (Lesfilles de Caleb; Lance et Compte) dramatize Quebec society using the language of ordinary people. To get away from the dominance/dependence model (Canadian popular culture as dominated by that of the United States), some contemporary cultural analysts focus on subversions of global mass/popular culture through IRONY, PARODY and self-satire. In the production of comedy, Canada has documented successes, from 19th-century parodies through The Dumbells of the First World War to My Fur Lady in the 19505, Seeing Things in the 19805, and Due South
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POPULAR CULTURE IN CANADA in the 19908. The satirical group Spring Thaw attacked Canadian politics and culture from the late 19405 to the mid 19605. Johnny Wayne and Frank Shuster (Wayne and Shuster) began broadcasting their brand of Canadian HUMOUR on radio, and moved to television in 1954. Most popular at the end of the 19505 and early 19605, this duo influenced all the satirical political/ cultural groups following them: the 19705 Second City (SCTV), which satirized US television programs; the Newfoundland group CODCO (1973-93), some members of which went on to This Hour Has 22 Minutes and continued to satirize Canadian politics; Kids in the Hall, which, from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, developed a cult following for its ambivalent gender border-crossing and far-out satire; The Royal Canadian Air Farce, which began in the early 19705 in the style of Spring Thaw, and continued for 23 years; and The Red Green Show, with its stereotyped Canadian characters. Individual comedians have also become popular culture stars. Rich Little began his career in Ottawa, as did Dan Aykroyd who, like John Candy, Bill Murray, and Martin Short was a member of Second City; the McKenzie brothers (SCTV's hosers aka Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas), famous for satirizing the very Canadian content regulations that put them on the air; Mike Myers (SCTV), notorious as Wayne Campbell of Wayne's World; and Jim Carrey, a popular culture phenomenon, star of the two 1994 movies Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and Dumb and Dumber. The producer Lome Michaels (Saturday Night Live) has promoted many Canadian comedians. Quebecois comedian Claude Meunier (Ding et Dong) uses caricature to laugh at local customs, while Yvon Deschamps sells out hundreds of shows and has played in Brou for more than a dozen years. Various Canadian musicians have become widely popular. In the late 19505, Paul Anka skyrocketed to international fame. While Anka abandoned Canada, other popular musicians stayed. Gordon Lightfoot, riding the popularity of 19605 FOLK music, composed the 'Canadian Railroad Trilogy,' now a national treasure. His career of more than 25 years is marked by the popularity of his original, and very Canadian, compositions ('For Lovin' Me,' 'Early Morning Rain,' 'Sundown'). Leonard COHEN and Bruce
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Cockburn have had long careers; their idiosyncratic music mingles different musical genres, and both use their own poetry as song lyrics. Joni Mitchell also rode high on the popularity of folksong, although she left Canada. Anne Murray, marketed during the 19705 as a cleancut, hometown Maritimer, has remained a Canadian while attracting huge audiences. Her 1970 song 'Snowbird' put her on the international charts. In Quebec, folksinger Felix LECLERC echoed the 19605 QUIET REVOLUTION, while Gilles VIGNEAULT'S 'Mon Pays' appealed to Quebec's political aspirations during the 19705. The 1971 'Can-Con' regulations assured Canadian musicians broad exposure. Western Canadian k.d. lang, an iconoclast who has wide international appeal, both uses and makes fun of country music, her Canadianness, and her gender preference. Sara McLachlan, famous for albums such as Solace (1991) and Fumbling Towards Ecstasy (1993), formed the touring female singers' festival Lilith Fair. Bryan Adams, Canada's major 19805 international rock star, fought with the Canadian music business which refused to give Canadian content blessing to some of his music. Alanis Morissette, another international Canadian rock star, is famous for songs such as 'Jagged Little Pill,' All I Really Want,' and 'Hand in My Pocket.' Jane Siberry ('No Borders Here,' 'Bound by the Beauty,' 'Maria') created an international audience while remaining resolutely Canadian. Country singer Shania Twain made it big with albums such as The Woman in Me, while upcoming Inuit star Susan Aglukark records in English and Inuktitiut (This Child). Maritimer Ashley Maclsaac, winner of several Juno awards, produced the albums Hi, How Are You Today and Fine Thank You Very Much. The most popular music groups include The Band, The Guess Who, the classic rock group Rush, The Tragically Hip, Barenaked Ladies, Cowboy Junkies, Crash-Test Dummies, and the Halifax group Sloan. Much of the recent popular music of Quebec demonstrates an overlay of French and North American forms. Quebec-born Daniel Lanois, a one-person music industry, gained attention with his album Acadie (1989) with its combination of English and French. Acadian superstar Roch Voisine ('Helene') grew up bilingual. The popular phenomenon Celine Dion, born in
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Montreal, released her first album in English (Unison, 1990) but continued to record in both French (D'eux, 1995) and English. Chanteuse Mitsou ('Dis-Moi, Dis-Moi') collaborated with the Montreal English-speaking band, Men Without Hats. (See MUSIC [popular lyrics].) Establishing cause/effect relationships between popular culture and its consumers initiates considerable debate. Some commentators treat the audience as passive, moulded by the objects that capitalist industries and patriarchal institutions foist on it. Others interpret consumers as active, controlling popular products by giving or withholding support. Populist readings construct audiences as subversive, using popular culture to undercut powerful institutions and people. Canadian consumers, like those elsewhere, respond to both domestic and international popular culture. While Canadian content rules have helped Canada to market itself, new communication technologies make defending nationalist concerns difficult. Increasingly, culture is transnational. Indeed, what constitutes an audience in Canada or anywhere else is, with new technologies, increasingly difficult to define. Even within Canada, ethnocultural industries are emerging and interest in the North increases. While Canadian popular culture has been dominated by anglophone products and consumption and is intimately connected with US-dominated global culture, MULTICULTURALISM has pressured Canadians to develop ethnic approaches popular in only limited, regional senses. Francophone Quebec has a repertoire of distinctive popular culture and intellectuals who share popular tastes. However, in the age of the Internet, national/regional approaches merge with multicultural and postnationalist ones. See also ANNE OF GREEN GABLES, CENSORSHIP, MOUNTIES, PSEUDONYMS, SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY, TABLOIDS.
Further reading: The Cultural Industries in Canada: Problems, Policies and Prospects, ed Michael Dorland (Toronto: Lorimer, 1996); The Beaver Bites Back? American Popular Culture in Canada, ed David Flaherty and Frank Manning (Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP, 1993); Mondo Canuck: A Canadian Popular Culture Odyssey, ed Geoff Pevere and Greig Dymond (Scarborough:
Prentice-Hall, 1996); Hal Niedzviecki, We Want Some Too: Underground Desire and the Reinvention of Mass Culture (Toronto: Penguin, 2000). Lorna Irvine
PORNOGRAPHY, see CENSORSHIP. PORTER, Agnes Helen Fogwill. Author, teacher; b St John's 8 May 1930; daughter of Amy Evelyn (Horwood) and Robert Wright Fogwill. Married in 1953 and the mother of four children, she teaches creative WRITING at Memorial U in St John's, and has run for political office four times as a candidate for the NDP. She has written plays for CBC RADIO and the stage and has published a memoir of growing up, Below the Bridge: Memories of the South Side of St John's (1980); a novel for CHILDREN, January, February, June orJuly (1988), which won the Canadian Library Assoc Young Adult Book Award in 1989; and a collection of stories, A Long and Lonely Ride (1991). She was also awarded the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council Lifetime Achievement Award in 1993. With Geraldine Rubia and Bernice Morgan, she co-edited From This Place: A Selection of Writing by Women of Newfoundland and Labrador (1977). Heather Sanderson
PORTUGAL, see LABRADOR, MEDITERRANEAN, MULTICULTURAL VOICES, RINGUET, STERNBERG.
POSTMODERNISM AND POSTCOLONIALISM. Critical terms in literary and cultural study. With their cognates (postmodern, postmodernist, postcolonial, postcoloniality, etc) they have been widely used and debated, internationally and in Canada, since the 19805. 'Postmodernism' is variously deployed to mean historical period (broadly contemporary), artistic style (parodic, self-conscious, fragmentary), worldview (skeptical, pluralist), and as the dominant cultural mode of late-2oth-century global capitalism. Seen as either a radical break from or a continuation of MODERNISM and the avant-garde, postmodern aesthetics influences architecture, VISUAL ART, photography, FILM, fashion, MUSIC, and writing. Intellectually, postmodern theory originates in post-Nietzschean continental philosophy, especially poststructuralism's emphasis on the unstable link between
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words and the things they represent (see INTELLECTUAL HISTORY). The resulting'crisis of representation' prompts postmodernists to question established systems of knowledge, value, order, and meaning. Postmodernism's anti-authoritarian and levelling impulses treat SCIENCE and RELIGION, history and culture as imperfect human constructs rather than revelations of transcendent truth, and human identity as indeterminate and fragmented rather than unified. French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition (1979), an influential report written for Quebec's Conseil des Universites, argued that the 'grand narratives' of human reason, progress, and liberation established by the 18th-century Enlightenment lack legitimacy in postindustrial, technologically advanced society. With the disappearance of previous certainties and fixed points of reference, boundaries between elite 'high' culture and POPULAR 'low' culture fall away, as do other binary divisions: image/reality, fiction/history, text/context. In an age of proliferating information and commodities (including art), images dominate human experience. The 'depthlessness' Fredric Jameson finds in the postmodern world - for which the television screen is a defining symbol - reaches an apocalyptic extreme in Jean Baudrillard's theories, in which reality itself is replaced by mass-produced images emptied of content. Postmodern literature both reflects and promotes these cultural anxieties, especially in its foremost genre, the NOVEL. It typically registers suspicion of unified structures through incompatible realities and unresolved contradictions. Writers playfully use pastiche, PARODY, disjointed structures, and self-reflexive narrators to reveal their product (the postmodern 'text') as a human process of fabrication and meaningmaking. Postmodern fictions often emphasize the socially or psychically marginal ('ex-centric') person over the mainstream figure, and explore (or invent) unofficial histories as alternatives to sanctioned history (see HISTORICAL ANALOGUES, HISTORICAL LITERATURE, HISTORIOGRAPHY). Canadian critic Linda HUTCHEON sees the ambiguous politics of postmodern texts as a function of their paradoxical use and abuse of received conventions: for example, narrative
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REALISM disrupted by fantasy, a single identity split into parts. Acknowledging its complicity with dominant structures, postmodernism wallows in what it hopes to question in the realms of art and society. Hutcheon argues that Canada's 'decentred' geography, MULTICULTURAL population, and ambivalence towards British and American 'centres' (and to its own history) make it 'ripe' for postmodernism. Canadians' obsession with borders and frontiers, and with unstable dualities (Native/colonial, French/English, federal/ provincial), is reflected in postmodern Canadian fiction, which uses the split meanings of IRONY to explore gaps and challenge cultural dominants. Canadian texts that are most often considered postmodern by Hutcheon and others include novels in English by Leonard COHEN, Sheila WATSON, Dave GODFREY, Rudy WIEBE, Michael ONDAATJE, Margaret AT WOOD, Audrey THOMAS, Susan SWAN, Timothy FINDLEY, and Robert KROETSCH; and in French, Hubert AQUIN, Victor-Levy BEAULIEU, Louky BERSIANIK, and Nicole BROSSARD. Kroetsch's writings are often singled out as exemplary postmodern specimens. Replete with fragments, formal tensions, and paradoxical play, Kroetsch's idiosyncratic ESSAYS, novels, and LONG POEMS (Canadian postmodernism's second major genre) approach history as archaeological traces and stories as simultaneously written and spoken. Studies of Canadian postmodernism following Hutcheon's The Canadian Postmodern (1988) include books by Glenn Deer, Sylvia Soderlind (who compares English- and French-language writers), and Marie Vautier. The latter two also employ postcolonial theory. A spirited academic debate occurred regarding the comparative suitability of postmodern and postcolonial models for Canadian literature: critiques of Hutcheon's book, for instance - suggesting that by interpreting Canadian novels through a global, 'Eurocentric' category she effaces their historical contexts and dilutes their politics -join the international argument with postmodernism made by advocates of postcolonial reading strategies. 'Postcolonialism' denotes both a diverse range of politically inflected theory and a large international body of literary texts, especially
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from ex-colonies of Europe. One branch of postcolonial theory, influenced by the pioneering 'colonial discourse analysis' of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), examines non-fictional and literary documents from imperial cultures. It analyzes the ways colonial lands and peoples were textually 'constructed' through European 'discourses' in writings by explorers, governors, travellers, scholars, and novelists. Poststructural theories of language and power help postcolonial critics to show how dominant cultures reflect and reinforce ideas of racial superiority and entitlement to foreign lands through the knowledges contained in (and produced by) their texts. Like postmodernists, postcolonial critics assume that representations are always biased misrepresentations, but they locate their work more specifically: in sites and peoples involved in imperial/colonial encounters. A second branch of postcolonialism shares these interests, but extends its view to texts that seem to resist colonial power, during and after its rule. Developing from COMMONWEALTH literary studies, this postcolonialism's main interest is English-language literature by authors from 'Third World' colonies of invasion (eg, India, Nigeria) and from settler (or 'invadersettler') colonies (eg, Canada, Australia). Critics view postcolonial texts as culture- and placespecific, believing that attributions of literary value based on 'universal relevance' assume a European worldview. Postcolonial writers signal difference from Europe (and redress their 'othering' by Europe) by incorporating local cultural practices, political concerns, and languages (including regional adaptations of English). Postcolonialism thus presumes a stronger referential dimension in literature, and offers firmer ground for a theory of human 'agency' (or worldly impact), than postmodernism. Yet because different groups converged under colonialism, and because many writers have left their homelands, postcolonial texts also invoke a hybrid and sometimes unstable world distinguished by cultural 'syncretism,' or mixture. Comparative studies such as the Australianauthored primer The Empire Writes Back (1989) trace common preoccupations across this large and varied body of work: home, place, and displacement; racial consciousness and conflict; identity and alienation; history and origins; anti-
imperialism; disjunctions between language and experience. Postcolonialism's usefulness is controversial. One important line of criticism concerns its inclusion of diverse cultures and historical experiences in one interpretive framework. Can Canada be theorized alongside a former slave colony such as Jamaica, critics ask? Many postcolonialists ignore the literatures of invadersettler societies, but Canadian academics Stephen Slemon and Diana Brydon are prominent among those advocating their inclusion. They suggest that the historical dualities embodied by such groups - colonizers of Aboriginal peoples, colonized by Britain - entail complex ambivalences that help dismantle imperialism's binary categories, positioning (post)colonial experience along a more nuanced spectrum of possibilities. Postcolonialism's historical grounding, antiimperial politics, and theory of agency, plus the non-European origins of its major advocates and intellectual sources, may fit better than postmodernism with Canada's prevailing nationalist critical tradition, which has claimed Canadian literature's distinctiveness. But for academics such as Donna Bennett and Brydon (who edited a special issue of Essays on Canadian Writing on the topic), articulating the precise nature of Canadian literature's postcoloniality raises complex questions: about scope (all Canadian literature, or a temporal or political selection?); about perceived colonizers (imperial Britain or neo-imperial America?); about 'internal colonization' (of Aboriginal peoples and Quebecois - both literatures have been deemed postcolonial: see Thomas KING); and about relations to other -isms (eg, NATIONALISM, REGIONALISM, multiculturalism, postmodernism). Although embraced by many academics in Canada and abroad as a superior model, postcolonialism as applied to Canadian literature is no less fraught with difficulties and limitations than postmodernism. Moreover, while Hutcheon endorses both (and sees more connections than disagreements between them), the 'difference' that both theories (differently) celebrate may play out another way. However influential or trendy such terms may be, most Canadian writers and readers still choose to focus on the special qualities of individual works, and leave the
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overarching theories to academics. See also CRITICISM AND THEORY, EUROPEAN INFLUENCES, EXPLORATION, LANGUAGE, RACE.
first volume of poetry, Petites fugues pour une saison seche (1991), shows the influence of surrealism (see REALISM). Margaret Cook
Further reading: Diana Brydon, ed, Testing the Limits: Postcolonial Theories and Canadian Literature, special issue of Essays on Canadian Writing 56 (1995); Linda Hutcheon, The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction (Toronto: Oxford UP, 1988); Marie Vautier, New World Myth: Postmodernism and Postcolonialism in Canadian Fiction (Montreal: McGill-Queens UP, 1998). John Clement Ball
POTREBENKO, Helen. Writer, laboratory technician, taxi driver, bookkeeper; b Woking, AB, 21 June 1940; daughter of Olena (Hapaniuk) and Makar Potrebenko, a farmer and logger. Potrebenko lives in Burnaby, BC. She has published numerous works in periodicals; her eight books include No Streets of Gold: A Social History of Ukrainians in Alberta (1977; see MULTICULTURAL VOICES), and collections of poetry (eg, Riding Home, 1995), and stories (eg, Hey Waitress, 1989). These, and her colloquial novel Taxi! (i975; rev 1989), derive from her close observation of working-CLASS experience, especially on the east side of URBAN Vancouver. While Taxi!, DOCUMENTARY in form, pessimistically doubts the likelihood of social change, the poetry is somewhat less dour, occasionally ironizing the author's MARXIST, FEMINIST world view. POULIN, Gabrielle. Critic, novelist; b SaintProsper, QC, 2i June 1929; daughter of Estelle (Champagne) and Charles-Edouard Poulin. She moved to Ottawa in 1971 after having studied in Montreal and Sherbrooke, where she completed a doctoral thesis on Paul Eluard (1974). She helped compile the fourth volume of the Anthologie de la litterature quebecoise (1980; gen ed Gilles MARCOTTE). That same year, she also won the Champlain award for her first novel, Cogne la caboche (1979; tr Jane Pentland as All the Way Home, 1984), the story of a nun who chooses to leave her community in order to fully experience life; it was followed by Le livre de deraison (1994), the story of a secret family history, bequeathed by a dying grandmother; Qu'est-ce qui passe id si tard? (1988); and other works. Her
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POULIN, Jacques. Novelist, translator; b SaintGedeon de Beauce, QC, 23 Sept 1937; a grocer's son, the second in a family of seven children. Having completed his elementary education in his native village, he went on to do his classical studies at the seminaries in Saint-Georges de Beauce and in Nicolet. He received his BA in 1957 and an MA in 1964 from U Laval. In 1965, after being a part-time translator with the secretary of state, he decided to write fiction. His first novel, Mon cheval pour un royaume (My Horse for a Kingdom) was published in 1967. He received the Prix de la Presse in 1974 for his novel Faites de beaux reves (Sweet Dreams'), the Governor General's AWARD in 1978 for Les grandes marees (Great Tides), and the coveted Prix Athanase-David from the Government of Quebec in 1995 for the ensemble of his literary works. The picaresque, post-Kerouac Volkswagen Blues (1984; tr Sheila FISCHMAN 1988) won admiring readers in both languages. In 1998 Poulin published his ninth novel, Chat sauvage (Wild Cat), in Quebec and in France, where he currently lives. This 1998 novel, like all the others, seems to be an addition to Poulin's literary edifice; the similarities between almost all the masculine protagonists and their individual situations run like a single strand from Pierre in Mon cheval pour un royaume through to Jack in Chat sauvage. After the first volume, each echoes a preceding novel; all the male characters are in search of their alter ego, their intimate feminine side. Against the symbolic background of numerous peregrinations through different regions of Quebec and across North America, Poulin's reader is constantly confronted by some of the pressing problems of the second half of the 20 th century: the feminist revolution, Aboriginal claims, the ethics of organ transplants, the breakup of the family. These peregrinations, however, reflect an interior voyage, that of the narrator engaged in his own introspection, in his own thoughts about himself, the meaning of life in general, and his relationship with others. D.R Rogers
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POULIN, Stephane. Storyteller, illustrator; b Montreal 12 Dec 1961; son of Florian Poulin and Francoise Borduas. He wrote and illustrated some three dozen CHILDREN'S books, ranging from stories about animals to tales of elves, some in French and some in both French and English, such as As-tu vu Josephine! (1986) and Benjamin et la saga des oreillers/Benjamin and the pillow saga (1989). Further reading: Linda Giroux, 'Les amours de maitre Stephane,' Des livres et desjeunes 43 (Winter 1993): 14-17. Margaret Cook
POUPART, Jean-Marie. Short story writer, novelist; b Saint-Constant, QC, 13 Dec 1946; son of Marie-Jeanne (Robert) and David Poupart, farmer and postal worker. A 1969 graduate of U Montreal, Poupart worked as literary editor for Editions du Jour and Editions Lemeac, and helped establish Editions Quinze. Dividing his time between teaching and writing, he wrote about cinema for Le Devoir and published more than 20 books for adults and CHILDREN, including the novels Angoisse play (1968) and Beaux drops (1987). Characteristically, he deconstructs the traditional realist novel by using a grating IRONY and the convention of a self-questioning narrator. Critics praise his short stories for their often bittersweet tone. Margaret Cook
POWE, B.W. (Bruce William). Novelist, essayist; b Ottawa 23 March 1955; son of Alys Maude (Brady) and Bruce Allen Powe (b Edmonton 9 June 1925), a novelist. In 1987, Powe established himself as a media critic with The Solitary Outlaw, in which he scrutinized the impact of media on five intellectuals, Marshall MCLUHAN, Glenn Gould, Pierre Trudeau, Wyndham LEWIS, and Elias Canetti. Situating them in a post-literate age, he shows how meditating on their lives and works can help other people understand themselves. Powe engages a similar topic in Outage: A Journey into Electric City (1995), namely the impact of media on life in cities, more specifically Toronto (to Powe, the epitome of the wired city) and Venice (standing in for an apocalyptic and future model of city life); see URBAN WRITING. Stefan Haag
POZIER, Bernard. Poet, critic; b Trois-Rivieres, QC, 5 Feb 1955; son of a French father (Robert Pozier) and Quebecoise mother (Gisele Aubry); educ Trois-Rivieres. Pozier, the author of many books of poetry, was one of the most active of his generation on the literary scene. He became director of the Atelier de production litteraire de la Mauricie (1976), the literary director of Ecrits des Forges (1985), literary columnist at Nouvelliste (1980), and he helped found such periodicals as APLM, Arcade, and La Poesie au Quebec. Focusing on the present moment, he sought a language for the rock-and-roll generation, as in Manifeste (1977) and Double Tram (1979). His 1981 collection, 4; Tours, is introduced by Lucien FRANCOEUR. Later works include Scenes publiqu.es (1993) and ANTHOLOGIES of Quebec poetry both in French and in translation. Margaret Cook
PRAIRIES, term referring to the rolling grassland countryside of Western Canada, roughly comparable to the term 'Great Plains' in the UNITED STATES, which is its extension to the SOUth. ALBERTA, SASKATCHEWAN, and MANITOBA are referred to as the 'Prairie Provinces,' a term that geographically describes only the extreme southern portions of their LANDSCAPE. PRATT, EJ. Poet, editor, teacher; b Western Bay, NF, 4 Feb 1882, d Toronto 26 April 1964; son of Fanny (Knight) and John Pratt, clergyman. After an itinerant outport childhood, Edwin John Pratt graduated from St John's Methodist C, returning to the outports as a teacher (19024) and student minister (1904-7). On moving to Toronto, he studied psychology and theology at Victoria C, and was ordained after obtaining his BA (1911), MA (1912), and BD (1913). Serving in the ministry while teaching psychology and completing a PhD on Pauline eschatology (1917), he married Viola Whitney (1918) and then taught English at Victoria C (1920-53). They had one child, Mildred Claire (b 1921). Rachel: A Sea Story of Newfoundland in Verse (1917) is the first of Pratt's many sea narratives. In its story of the widowed Rachel Lee, whose son dies at sea while attempting to support her, the poem anticipates later themes in Pratt's work: heroism means self-sacrifice, when nature ironically destroys the very hopes it sustains.
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Newfoundland Verse (1923) includes sketches of Newfoundland life, imagist experiments (including 'The Shark'), the conclusion of Rachel, and other poems about the hazardous sea ('Sea Variations,' 'The Toll of the Bells,' 'The Ice-Floes,' 'Loss of the Steamship Florizel,' 'Newfoundland'). WAR poems demonstrate human nature to be no less hazardous than the sea ('Ode to Dec, 1917,' 'Come Not the Seasons Here,' 'Before a Bulletin Board'). A Fragment from a Story (from the verse drama Clay, which was otherwise unpublished in Pratt's lifetime) upholds a law higher than evolutionary survival of the fittest. In the play the prophetic Thaddeus argues that pessimists and determinists, such as his friend Julian, fail to explain self-sacrifice, indestructible goodness, promptings not derived from sense, and hopes reborn throughout history. Slowly Pratt moved to longer narratives, such as The Witches' Brew (1925), a mock-epic FANTASY about an underwater drinking spree organized by three witches (see science FICTION AND FANTASY). All the fish are invited, and Tom the SeaCat protects them when Hell itself intrudes. The poem indulges in imaginative extravagance for its own sake, while challenging both insipid poetry and Prohibition. The LONG POEMS that comprise Titans: Two Poems (1926) combine fantasy with realism. In The Cachalot, a sperm whale defeats another titan (a kraken, or giant squid) only to be killed by whalers - but not before destroying them. In The Great Feud (A Dream of a Pleiocene Armageddon), an anthropoidal ape persuades land animals to battle sea creatures, only to discover the self-destructiveness of an unregulated indulgence of evolutionary instincts. Battles on behalf of species become battles for self-survival, as the ape discovers when her forces turn upon each other. When the volcano Jurania erupts and destroys all but the ape, she returns to care for her brood - dimly sensing, from her position on an evolutionary boundary, that love might ensure personal and tribal survival more effectively than contests of natural fitness. The death of Pratt's mother prompted The Iron Door: An Ode (1927), in which allegorical representatives of different hopes and fears approach the ultimate boundary, the Door of Death: although apparently immovable, the door finally opens to those who have sacrificed
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their lives, or otherwise demonstrated faith. The speaker cannot see beyond the threshold, but discovers evidence of life on the other side. With The Roosevelt and the Antinoe (1930), Pratt displays SCIENCE in the service of humanity, as TECHNOLOGY enables the liner Roosevelt to locate the sinking freighter Antinoe. But in Many Moods (1932), Pratt startles readers with the unexpected. 'The Depression Ends,' anticipates the end of the Depression by placing a banquet in the sky, to which all earth's poor are invited. 'The Sea-Cathedral' transforms an iceberg into a metaphorical cathedral, only to leave it a coldhearted titan of the sea. 'From Stone to Steel' discloses primitive shadows lurking within civilized people, while 'The 6000' transforms a locomotive into a titanic bull. The Titanic (1935) returns to DOCUMENTARY narrative. Unlike The Roosevelt and Antinoe, however, The Titanic is a study in IRONY: life is thrown away rather than sacrificed, by those whose faith in technology leads to the proud security that involves them fatally in the natural world. Pratt's imagery turns the Titanic into a sea creature, a natural titan, subject to the predatory natural laws that make it vulnerable to another sea titan. Instances of self-sacrifice are cited as some passengers give place to others in the lifeboats, but the narrative as a whole highlights the supposedly unsinkable liner's ironic susceptibility to the convergence of natural forces. Unlike the earlier animal fable The Great Feud, the title poem in The Fable of the Goats and Other Poems (1937) depicts the averting of war: when the leader of one tribe of goats yields to the leader of an opposing tribe who is determined to pass him, conflict is avoided by a sacrifice that transcends natural instinct or explanation. The imminence of war in the late 19305 also shapes other poems: 'Silences,' which addresses the importance of communication in preventing war; 'Seen on the Road,' which displays a world in danger; 'The Prize Cat,' which demonstrates how easily civilized life can return to the jungle. As the title ofBrebeufand His Brethren (1940) indicates, the poem (considered by Pratt to be his first true EPIC) is the story not of Jean de BREBEUF only, but also of his fellow Jesuits. As it documents the sufferings and eventual martyrdoms of the priests who came to bring the Word to the Hurons (in the years 1625-49), the
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national epic confirms the ultimately Christian basis of Pratt's conception of redemptive communication and self-sacrifice. By this time, the Second World War had broken out; in his next four volumes, Pratt turned to themes of patriotism and violence. Sea poetry merges with war poetry in Dunkirk (1941), which recounts the epic rescue of British forces while also emphasising its democratic nature: every trade and profession, every type of boat, joins in the grand regatta. Language plays a pivotal role as Churchill's call inspires the miraculous deliverance. The title poem in Still Life and Other Verse (1943) satirizes poets who ignore the destruction, the still life, all about them in wartime. 'The Truant' asserts human freedom - truancy - in the face of tyranny: political but also cosmic tyranny, as a representative human being dramatically confronts the tyrant of the poem, the great Panjandrum who ultimately represents the deterministic kingdom of physical nature in which atoms dance according to mechanistic laws. Other poems include 'The Radio in the Ivory Tower,' which shows isolation from world events to be impossible when the airwaves are filled with fascist abuses of communication; 'The Submarine,' which highlights the atavism of modern warfare by treating a submarine as a shark; and 'Come Away, Death,' which personifies death to show its new horrors in modern times. They Are Returning (1945) celebrates the anticipated end of the war but also introduces one of the first treatments in literature of the concentration camps. And retrospectively, Behind the Log (1947) commemorates the wartime role of the Royal Canadian Navy and the merchant marine. The long narrative documents the navy's protection of a convoy attacked by U-boats in 1941. As the title suggests, however, Pratt's concern is to go behind the cryptic remarks recorded in the Allied ships' logs, to understand the men who actually participated in the drama. Towards the Last Spike (1952), like Brebeufand His Brethren, returns to epic material in Canadian history for its subject. The panorama documents the difficultites that had to be surmounted in the 15 years prior to the completion of Canada's first transcontinental rail line (1885): the nightmarish political and economic battles (battles of language and of persuasion) confront-
ing Sir John A. Macdonald if British Columbia were to be married to Canada and not be lured away by her suitor, California; the engineering obstacles confronting William Cornelius Van Home as he faced prairies and mountains, and also the Laurentian Shield - which Pratt transforms into a gigantic prehistoric lizard, his last titan. Through individual and collective sacrifice, the enterprise succeeds, and the rail line - Pratt's last symbol of redemptive communication - helps Canada secure national identity. In his lifetime Pratt saw three editions of his Collected Poems published, two Canadian (1944, 1958) and one American (1945). Sandra Djwa and R.G. Moyles edited his Complete Poems in 1989. Winning the Governor General's AWARD three times, he was widely considered Canada's unofficial poet laureate, unrivalled in the generation between D.C. SCOTT and Earle BIRNEY. His influence was immense, for he not only assisted many writers personally but contributed much to Canadian literature as a lecturer, essayist, reviewer, and editor (of the Canadian Poetry Magazine, 1935-43, as well as of numerous texts). Although early critics focused as much upon the poet as his poetry, scholars such as Northrop FRYE soon called attention to the breadth and complexity of Pratt's achievement. As a result, Pratt came to be appreciated not only for his narratives, but also for his lyrics and satires about the two world wars. While some readers found his NATIONALIST epics both patriarchal in conception and conservative in execution, his formal experiments also came to be acknowledged: although he favoured pentameter or tetrameter lines, he also wrote free verse; although he valued objective clarity, he nonetheless employed recondite technological diction, experimented with surrealism and science fiction, and offered many proofs of an allegorical and mythopoeic imagination ready to explore the boundaries betwen the human and the natural, the actual and the possible. If Pratt's poetry reflects Romantic concerns with humanity's relation to nature, that relation is treated with an irony more modern than Romantic, although the ironic vision is itself subsumed within a sacrificial vision that is traditionally Christian (see RELIGION AND LITERATURE). Considered by many as a transitional
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poet between Romanticism and modernism, Pratt has also come to be seen as a poet whose originality refuses ready classification. Further reading: Jonathan Kertzer, Worrying the Nation (Toronto: U Toronto P, 1998); David G. Pitt, E.J. Pratt: The Truant Years 1882-1927 (Toronto: U Toronto P, 1984), and E.J. Pratt: The Master Years 1927-1964 (Toronto: U Toronto P, 1987). Alexander M. Forbes
PREFONTAINE, Yves: Poet; b Montreal i Feb 1937; son of Marie-Anna Dubreuil and Georges Prefontaine, microbiology professor. Prefontaine was educated in anthropology and sociology at U Montreal and in Paris, by which time he had already begun publishing poetry and involving himself in the cultural NATIONALISM of the 19605. One of the founders ofLiberte in 1959, he became its editor in 1961. His first poetry collection, Boreal (1957; rev 1967), was succeeded by five more in relatively quick succession; after Debacle (1970) there was more than a decade of silence until Le desert maintenant (1987; tr Judith Cowan as This Desert Now, 1993) and his collected poems to 1985, Parole tenue (1990). 'Parole' (language in use, as distinct from 'langue,' language as an abstract system) is a key word in commentary on his work, stemming in part from his 1967 title, the AWARD-winning Pays sans parole. From the start, Prefontaine espoused Quebec nationalism, rhetorically asserting the distinctiveness of the mindset of the people for whom he spoke. Repeatedly, in his poetry, the external world that is epitomized by winter snow constrains the poet (the representative individual) to search inside himself for meaning. If within the mind there exists a parallel potential for nothingness, this absence constitutes for him a tacit proof of the absence of a country and therefore a world of shared meaning- that he can recognize as his own. The consequence is anger, directed specifically at the 'Conquest' in Debacle, and tension: between a faith in the viability of a separate voice and a disbelief in the power of language to declare it. PREWETT, Frank James. Poet; b nr Mount Forest, ON, 24 Feb 1893, d Scotland 16 Feb 1962; son of Clara (Hellyer) and Arthur Prewett; educ
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U Toronto (1911-16), and Oxford (BA, 1922). The only Canadian writer to be associated directly with the BLOOMS BURY Group, Prewett (of IRQ QUOIS parentage) fought with the artillery at Ypres, and met the poet Siegfried Sassoon while recuperating in England. Sassoon sent Prewett's Georgian WAR poetry to Virginia Woolf, who published his Poems (1921). The poems of A Rural Scene (1924) and an early socialist novel called The Chazzey Tragedy (1933) followed. Known as 'Toronto' Prewett, he became a specialist in agricultural marketing and bomb disposal. He worked as an agricultural adviser in Southeast ASIA before retiring in England. PRIEST, Robert John. Poet, singer, composer, playwright, children's author; b Walton-onThames, England, 10 July 1951; son of Beatrice (Wheatley) and Edward Priest. Winner of the 1989 ACORN Prize for poetry, Priest has written seven books of poetry, including The Mad Hand (1988), Scream Blue Living (1992), Resurrection in the Cartoon (1997), and Time Release Poems (1998). Priest employs surreal HUMOUR, political satire, and zany eroticism in his poetry and he is a passionate live PERFORMER of his work. He has collaborated with various bands in Toronto's club scene and wrote the hit 'Song Instead of a Kiss' for rock singer Alannah Myles. He has performed for television and radio, and has also written books and plays for CHILDREN, including Knights of the Endless Day (1993; produced at Toronto's Young People's Theatre in 1992). Glenn Deer
PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND, province, joined CONFEDERATION 1873; capital Charlottetown (settled 1720, incorporated 1855; named for Queen Charlotte, wife of George III); area 5,657 sq km; pop 135,294 (2001); provincial flower, lady's slipper. Known as Abigweit ('cradle in the waves') by the MI'KMAQ, PEI became part of ACADIA, was ceded to Britain in 1763 as part of NOVA SCOTIA, then established as a separate colony in 1769. Called 'the home of Confederation' because of the Sept 1864 conference in Charlottetown that devised the terms of nationhood, the island has long been identified with ANNE OF GREEN GABLES b y L . M . MONTGOMERY.
Other PEI writers include: Milton ACORN, Ray-
PROVINCES AND TERRITORIES
mondpRASER, ReshardcooL, Sir Andrew MACPHAIL. See also M A R I T I M E S .
PRISON WRITING, term used to refer to writings set in prison and to writings by those writers who are or once were incarcerated in prison, or those who have worked in prisons. While the term suggests some form of criminal activity (whether before jailing or in jail, and whether in attacks on individuals or in questioning the objectivity of the legal system: see FIRST NATIONS), it also overlaps with writings that have to do with WAR, REBELLION, justice, and reform, in that incarceration and exile have in history often been the consequence of various forms of social resistance. Rudy WIEBE'S collaborative LIFE of Yvonne Johnson, Stolen Life (1998), provides one example; Prisoner of Desire (1979), an autobiographical volume by Britt Hagarty (b Victoria 2 April 1949, d Vancouver i Nov 1999), tells of his youth and his brief incarceration for drug offences. Souvenirs de prison by the journalist Jules Fournier (pseud Pierre Beaudry; b Coteau-sur-Lac, QC, 23 Aug 1884, d Ottawa 16 April 1918), records the charges o LIBEL brought against the writer by Lomer Gouin, and the prison sentence that followed. For others see Roger CARON, Alan CUMYN, Antoine GERIN-LAJOIE, Gerald GODIN, Pierre GRAVEL, John HERBERT, J.T. HOSPITAL, Susan
MUSGRAVE, Sharon POLLOCK, Andreas SCHROEDER, Patrick SLATER, Samuel Hull WILCOCKE, andj.M. YATES. See also COPWAY. PRIZES, see AWARDS. PROSODY, the study of poetic metre, rhythm, verse pattern, and stanzaic form. Standard metric units ('feet,' which measure the relation between stressed and unstressed syllables) include the iamb (- /), trochee (/ -), anapest (- /), dactyl (/ - -), amphibrach (- / -), amphimacer (/ - /), pyrrhic (- -), and spondee (/ /). Poetry that relies for its rhythmic pattern both on the number of syllables to the line and the metric design of the stressed and unstressed syllables is known as accentual-syllabic verse. Old English (ie, pre-nth century) verse was unrhymed, and typically it was syllabic (counting beats only, rather than measuring a line by metric feet); after Chaucer (in the i4th century), English
verse became characteristically accentual-syllabic (counting syllables as well as beats), perhaps borrowing the syllabic element from French poets, whose metrical verse was based on the number of syllables; much 20th-century verse in both languages - drawing on the cadences of speech rhythm to produce the illusion of FREE VERSE (vers libre) - repudiated metric regularity, though late in the century many poets were attempting to incorporate speech rhythms into what had earlier been considered 'conventional' stanzaic patterns. Lines of poetry (also known as 'verses') whose rhythm is measured by syllables include i-, 2-, 3-, 4-, 5-, and 6- beat measures, known respectively as monometer, dimeter, trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter, and hexameter; the rarer 7-beat line is known as a 'fourteener.' Among the many recurrent verse forms and stanzaic patterns in both English and French are blank verse, heroic couplets (see NEOCLASSIC), BALLAD stanza, SONNET, and sestina. Alliterative verse is more common in English-language poetry (as in Old English poetry, or see BIRNEY'S Anglo-Saxon Street' for a modern example), and so is the limerick; by contrast, such forms as the rondeau and villanelle, while they do occur in English, are more common in French. Forms such as the haiku and GHAZAL are borrowed from other cultural traditions (Japanese and Arabic, in these instances). See also BLACK MOUNTAIN, LONG POEM, POETRY IN SHORTER FORMS.
PROULX, Monique. Novelist, screenwriter; b Quebec City 17 Jan 1952; daughter of France (Chavigny de la Chevrotiere) and Gustave Proulx. She wrote several prizewinning novels from Sans coeur et sans reproches (1983) to L'homme invisible d lafenetre (1995), but is perhaps best known for Le sexe des etoiles (1993), which was turned into a FILM. As in her short stories (collected in Les aurores montreales, 1996), her characters live in slightly tormented worlds, where, with limited success, they seek moments of happiness. Margaret Cook
PROVINCES AND TERRITORIES, see ALBERTA, BRITISH COLUMBIA, L A B R A D O R , MANITOBA, NEW BRUNSWICK, NEWFOUNDLAND AND L A B R A D O R , NORTHWEST TERRITORIES,
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NOVA SCOTIA, NUNAVUT, ONTARIO, PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND, QUEBEC, SASKATCHEWAN, YUKON.
PSEUDONYMS. Canadian writers have used pseudonyms to disguise GENDER and social status, to avoid RELIGIOUS or political persecution, to conceal or flaunt ethnic origins, to dramatize personal fantasies, and to fulfil other more recondite (and trivial) purposes. In the i9th and early 2oth centuries many WOMEN writers took male or androgynous pseudonyms. Prominent examples include S. Frances HARRISON ('Seranus'), Agnes Maule MACHAR ('Fidelis'), and Marie-Louise Felicite Angers ('Laure CONAN'). Some, however, took their false names not entirely because of cultural misogyny: Sarajeannette DUNCAN used'Garth Grafton' to distinguish her JOURNALISM from her literary work. Some male writers also took journalistic pen names: Robert BARR wrote newspaper articles as 'Luke Sharp,' and John LESPERANCE produced a column as 'Laclede.' Before the Quiet Revolution, many Quebecois authors concealed their identities for religious reasons. Henri-Raymond CASGRAIN, an ordained priest, wrote as 'Placide Lepine' and 'Eugene de Rives.' Eugene Seers ('Louis DANTIN') and Rodolphe DUBE ('Francois Hertel') continued to use their pseudonyms even after they left the priesthood. Another literary priest, Lionel GROULX, signed Alonie de Lestres' to his controversial novel L'appd de la race. Probably the most famous pseudonymous literary cleric is Jean-Paul DESBIENS, who virtually initiated the QUIET REVOLUTION as 'Frere Untel.' In anglophone Canada, the Presbyterian minister Charles W Gordon wrote his best-selling novels as 'Ralph CONNOR.' Gordon had no fear of ecclesiastical disapproval, for most of his fiction was issued by his church's own publishing house, but his sense of professional dignity presumably prompted him to use a false name. Comparable motives might be attributed to the physician-novelists Philippe Panneton ('RINGUET') and Aime Pelletier ('Bertrand VAC'). Some writers adopted new identities because of their fascination with an exotic culture. The English-born Archie Belaney acted out his childhood obsession with Aboriginal North Ameri-
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cans by living and writing as the METIS 'GREY OWL.' 'Will James,' the popular novelist of the Wild West, was actually a Quebec-born francophone immigrant to the United States, Ernest Dufault (1892-1942). Winnifred Eaton REEVE lived publicly and wrote novels as the allegedly Japanese-born 'Onoto Watanna,' although she was the Montreal-born daughter of a Chinese mother and an English father. Reeve's imposture was perhaps influenced by anti-Chinese prejudice among Euro-Americans - but Reeve's sister, Edith EATON, proclaimed her ethnic origins by writing stories about Chinese immigrants as 'Sui Sin Far.' Eaton's pseudonym was less a disguise than a statement of her dual ethnicity, for she usually included her birth name parenthetically in bylines. The part-Mohawk poet Pauline JOHNSON similarly signed much of her work with both her European name and an appropriated Native name, Tekahionwake.' Felix Paul Greve became in Canada Frederick Philip GROVE, partly to disconnect himself from the failures of his past life and partly, like Winnifred Reeve, to avoid ethnic hostility - in his case post-1914 anti-German sentiment. But the practice of concealing ethnicity behind blandsounding anglophone names has never become common in multicultural English-language Canadian literature. Such names have more frequently been used for ventures into the literary demi-mondes of radical politics, pulp fiction, and pornography. As a member of the Communist Party, Dorothy LIVESAY signed 'Katherine Bligh,' 'Dorothy Randall,' and other names to her stories and poems; Dyson CARTER sometimes used 'John Karr.' Carter also became 'Warren Desmond' to write a pulp novel in the 19505. Two other writers who exploited the postwar boom in pulp fiction are Raymond SOUSTER ('Raymond Holmes') and Hugh GARNER ('Jarvis Warwick'). Between the 19305 and the 19705 John GLASSCO wrote pornography as 'Miles Underwood' and 'George Coleman' - although he also signed works by such names as 'Jean de Saint-Luc' and 'Hideki Okada' (see CENSORSHIP). Even among those who borrow names from exotic cultures, few Canadian writers have shown great ingenuity in contriving their noms de plume. The pharmacist-poet Emile Coderre
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wrote as 'Jean NARRACHE,' a phonetic evocation of a joual phrase meaning roughly 'I snatch a bare living from it,' alluding to the struggles of the working-class people he wrote about. Novelist Lucile Durand became 'Louky BERSIANIK,' a name constructed of multiple cryptic allusions. Durand's pseudonym was prompted mainly by her FEMINISM. In her rejection of patriarchal naming traditions she was more imaginative than Claire Montreuil, who simply adopted her mother's family name to become 'Claire MARTIN.' For Bersianik and Martin, the purpose of the pseudonym is not concealment, as it was for their 19th-century predecessors, but declaration of their true identities as women. Both women and men writers continued to use pseudonyms in the late 20th century, sometimes for motives similar to those of older generations, sometimes in response to new cultural conditions. Playwright David FENNARIO, born David Wiper, adapted his new name from a Bob Dylan song, thereby recreating himself within the milieu of the 19605. The Montreal-raised university professor Rodney Whitaker became 'TREVANIAN' to write espionage and crime thrillers, presumably for motives comparable to those of the clergyman-romancer Charles Gordon ('Ralph Connor'): to separate his vocational and avocational careers. The Ottawabased brothers Christopher and Anthony Hyde, who separately wrote spy novels under their own names, assumed the name 'Nicholas Chase' for their collaborative venture into a different genre, the politically subtle historical novel, Locks ley (1983). Whatever their motives, writers have rarely maintained their masquerades for very long. Many have readily acknowledged their pseudonymous works; those who have tried to preserve their secrets, such as P.P. Grove and Grey Owl, have been exposed by assiduous researchers. Ultimately, perhaps literary pseudonyms have less to do with the preservation of secrets than with the impulses of authors to include themselves, or fictive versions of themselves, in the processes of imaginative creation. See also CLASS, COOKBOOKS AND CULTURE. James Doyle
PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM is a school of CRITICISM AND THEORY, deriving from the the-
ories of Sigmund FREUD, that emphasizes the reading of the symbolic values inherent in a text's images and language, so as to elucidate the unconscious intentions of, or meanings in, a literary work. It uses such terms as Electra and Oedipus complex to describe psychosexual desires, and attaches significance to the imagery and narrative sequences of dreams. Critics have taken psychoanalytic approaches to the reading of various writers, including Margaret ATWOOD, Victor-Levy BEAULIEU, Gerard BESSETTE, Timothy FINDLEY, Robert KROETSCH, and Gilbert LA ROCQUE. See also JUNG, SEMIOTICS. PUBLIC LENDING RIGHT (PLR). This federal program, which pays Canadian authors for the availability of their books in Canadian LIBRARIES, began in 1986 after nearly 40 years of lobbying by a succession of Canadian writers' organizations. The program, whose founding chairman was the writer and longtime PLR crusader Andreas SCHROEDER, is operated in large measure by Canada's writers themselves, who constitute the majority on the PLR Commission. This commission, which determines the general policies and eligibility criteria of the program, also includes representatives from Canada's librarians and publishers, the CANADA COUNCIL, and the Dept of Canadian Heritage. It operates under the administrative aegis of the Canada Council. Andreas Schroeder
PUBLISHING INDUSTRY. One of Canada's oldest communication networks is the publishing industry, which itself is a web of occupations that include authorship, printing, publishing, bookselling, and readership. In Europe the publishers of each nation were sustained by their own authors, but in early Canada, booksellers and READERS relied upon imported books and periodicals, that is, a literary culture created and produced abroad. This situation more than anything else determined the shape of things to come, affecting COPYRIGHT laws, publishers' clashes over control of the market, and even the way authors would be handled. The struggle to rid publishing of its colonial attributes has been a long, complex story. Colonists in early Canada looked to their homelands for intellectual nourishment and
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approval. Because early authors such as the JESUIT missionaries or Frances BROOKE were temporary residents, they published in their home markets. All too often writers found themselves in the situation of Jacob BAILEY, most of whose works were printed in NEWSPAPERS or circulated in manuscript form. Because publishing is a risky and expensive business, local authors and publishers rarely profited from their ventures. But it was not too difficult to transplant printing and bookselling (see BOOKSTORES). In ACADIA and NEW FRANCE before 1759, there was a handful of private and institutional LIBRARIES, and several booksellers in Montreal. Americans brought the printing press and the newspaper, first to Halifax in 1753, then to Quebec City in 1764, and American rebels sent a French citizen to Montreal in 1778 to begin the first French-language paper. Often the newspaper office arrived simultaneously with the settlers, as happened in Saint John in 1783, Victoria in 1858, Battleford in 1878, and Dawson City in 1898. Printers such as Ludger Duvernay (17991852), Joseph HOWE, William Lyon MACKENZIE, and Amor de Cosmos (1825-97) were educated artisans who used their papers to agitate for reforms, gain entry into politics, and educate the public. Besides providing information about the outside world to the cash-strapped, isolated communities stretched along the American border, their newspapers reprinted literature by famous authors such as Sir Walter Scott and Charles Dickens, and other educational and entertaining material. It was not unusual for a printer to offer books for sale or rent, as did the poet Thomas GARY (author of Abram's Plains, 1789, and founder of the Quebec Mercury, 1805-1903). Outside the cities, access to books was limited, alleviated only by pedlars who carried books. Apart from the local newspaper, many pioneer homes contained only a Bible or a devotional work, an almanac, and perhaps a volume of Shakespeare or Burns. Between the American Revolution of 1776 and the REBELLIONS OF 1837, however, booksellers appeared in all the major towns of the eastern provinces, often supporting themselves by selling stationary and dry goods. While the British North American provinces reinvented themselves as they moved towards
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CONFEDERATION in 1867, revolutions in communications and TECHNOLOGY made books more available to larger sections of the public. Steamships replaced sailing vessels, railways and telegraphs spanned the country, all of them accelerating the flow of printed materials. Power presses and cheap paper manufactured from wood helped lower the price of printed materials, which thereby encouraged working people to buy books. In that same period, schools, libraries, and colleges were founded, and after 1840 there was a small but diligent public hungry for inexpensive books. At this point there was a burst of intellectual activity, nurtured by a sense of identity that combed the colonial past and scrutinized the contemporary scene. The flowering was most evident in Nova Scotia in the works of Thomas Chandler HALIBURTON and in Quebec, where French Canadians - insulted by Lord Durham's remark in his Report that they were 'a people with no history and no literature' - responded with Francois-Xavier GARNEAU'S Histoire du Canada (1842-50) and James HUSTON'S anthology Le repertoire national (1848). In Ontario, Catharine Parr TRAILL'S The Backwoods of Canada (1836) and her sister Susanna MOO DIE'S Roughing It in the Bush (1852) recorded their first experiences of the new world. Printers were the first to encourage that small but promising group of authors in their newspapers and their short-lived magazines, and as such acted as literary midwives to Canadian literature: Michel BIBAUD serialized his Histoire du Canada (182530) in his own magazine, La bibliotheque canadienne; Haliburton serialized The Clockmaker (1835-6) in the Novascotian; and portions of Roughing It in the Bush (1846-7) appeared in The Literary Garland. The Garland, published by John LOVELL of Montreal, was killed off in 1851 by the success of Harper's New Monthly Magazine of New York. Despite this and other ominous signs from the United States, several publishers in Halifax and Montreal attempted to kick-start literary publishing. But the publishing industry never could sustain itself on the modest output from Canadian authors, in spite of the thousands of volumes of sermons, essays, poems, fiction, history, and textbooks issued before 1900. Joseph Howe of Halifax profited from the first two series of Hali-
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burton's The Clockmaker (1836,1838). Then his author deserted him for publishers in London and Philadelphia, who edged Howe out of their agreements with Haliburton. In Montreal, Armour & Ramsay thought that John RICHARDSON'S The Canadian Brothers (1840) would launch Canadian literature, but they soon found that producing textbooks and reprints of the British quarterlies was more profitable. Around 1860 John Lovell believed the time appropriate to promote local authors; he commissioned Ebenezer Clemo's novel Canadian Homes (1858), and issued Rev Edward DEWART'S Selections from Canadian Poets (1864) and Rosanna LEPROHON'S Antoinette de Mirecourt (1864). When publishers avoided the economic risks, authors received financing through subscriptions, as with Charles SANGSTER'S Hesperus, and Other Poems (1860), or from the government, as with Garneau's Histoire du Canada. Authors who mastered bestseller formulas - Haliburton, May Agnes FLEMING, James DE MILLE - used foreign publishers and magazines to win international popularity. Since Canadian publishers were to be limited to their own markets, they tied their survival to monopolistic contracts for SCHOOL TEXTBOOKS. This market developed after the establishment of provincial school systems in the late 18405 (see, eg, MCCULLOCH, Egerton RYERSON, STRACHAN), which explains why there was viable REGIONAL publishing in the ipth century, and why the first large printing corporations evolved. They included John Lovell and Librairie Beauchemin & Fils in Montreal, and three Toronto firms that survived into the present, Copp Clark, WJ. Gage, and the Methodist Book and Publishing House (renamed the Ryerson P in 1919). With plants that contained up-to-date linotype machines, presses powered by electricity, and lithographic presses for illustrations and colour work, the big firms all weathered the terrible depression of the late i88os and early 18905. As scores of other publishers and booksellers went bankrupt, subscription book agents - the adventures of one of them is recounted in Frederick Philip GROVE'S A Search for America canvassed town and country, selling books on instalment plans at high prices and with low overheads.
By the middle of the i9th century, bookselling was on the verge of its first important transformation, but not because of local literary activity. Since the 18205 American printers had issued cheap pirated editions of British authors, for which they paid no royalties. These 'foreign reprints' circulated freely all over British North America until they were denied entry under a section of the 1842 Imperial Copyright Act. After four years of angry protests, the British government passed the Foreign Reprints Act (1848), which admitted the reprints when a duty was collected for the copyright owners in Britain. By 1854 bookstores were flourishing, according to Susanna Moodie. But unforeseen consequences allowed foreigners not only access to but control over the Canadian market. Viewing this market as an extension of their own, the Americans persuaded British authors to lump Canada in with the United States, and shipped about 10 per cent of their edition runs to Canada. British publishers assumed that colonial markets, including Canada, still belonged to them, and complained about the minuscule duties from the foreign reprints. France dominated the French-language market in Quebec. What in the short term had benefited consumers and booksellers would obstruct the publishing industry for generations. Eying the enormous sales of the foreign reprints (which returned a profit of only a few cents per unit), and taking advantage of loopholes in Canadian and imperial copyright, printer-publishers after Confederation issued hundreds of thousands of cheap editions of American, British, and French authors. This was the boast of John Ross Robertson, owner of the Toronto Telegram, one of the influential printers who almost persuaded protectionist-minded governments to ignore authors' rights. Determined to keep those Canadian reprints out of the United States, American publishers threatened retaliation against British authors as a way of forcing the British government to discipline the Dominion trade. John Lovell tried to beat the Americans at their own game and erected a modern printing plant at Rouses Point, NY, where he printed books both for import into Canada and for New York publishers. In contrast, Hunter, Rose of Toronto declared that they had made profitable contracts with British
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publishers and authors to reprint for the Canadian market. By trying to build Canadian publishing the way Americans had built theirs, the so-called Canadian pirates made their point about Canadian autonomy and played a role in the disappearance of piracy, which would transform Canadian publishing by 1900. The Berne Convention (1885) and the AngloAmerican copyright agreement (1891) ensured that the Canadian publishing industry was not to be built on piracy or the kind of reprinting that was permitted by the notorious licensing clause in the 1889 amendment to the Copyright Act of 1875, or the 1921 clause that was deadlettered in the 1924 act. Reprints and 'Canadian editions' would be negotiated with foreign publishers, or the authors and their literary agents. William Briggs (and his editor Edward Caswell) of the Methodist House, and S.E. Dawson of Montreal, secured Canadian rights to authors such as Mark Twain whose names guaranteed large sales. The same thing happened in the case of best-selling Canadian authors, for in 1896 Copp Clark issued Gilbert PARKER'S The Seats of the Mighty simultaneously with its American and British publication, an arrangement made with Parker's London and New York publishers. Similar success attended books by Sara Jeannette DUNCAN and Rudyard Kipling. Because the British government and authors liked these arrangements, they were entrenched in a 1900 amendment to the Copyright Act of 1875 through the efforts of three men: poet Louis FRECHETTE, publisher George Morang, and Professor James Mavor - and the support of the new Society of Canadian Authors. For the first time there was international recognition that Canadians had the right to negotiate in their own markets, even though they were not parties to lucrative international negotiations. This change opened the way for branch-plant publishing. William Copp, George Morang, and William Briggs had shown the way. These events took place just as the commodification of literature (marked by the rise of professional authorship in Britain and the United States, and by the appearance in 1895 of the first official best-seller lists) was accomplished. The American market was by far the largest in the English-speaking world, and as dozens of Canadian authors rushed to sell their wares in Boston
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and New York, many of them landed on the best-seller lists. They wrote CHILDREN'S stories, ANIMAL stories, nature stories, historical ROMANCES (see
HISTORICAL LITERATURE) and
regional idylls with 'exotic' - that is, Canadian and northern - settings. Some of them, like Bliss CARMAN, Charles G.D. ROBERTS, Gilbert Parker, Norman DUNCAN, and Edward THOMSON, pursued successful careers abroad. Ralph CONNOR, Lucy Maud MONTGOMERY, and Stephen LEACOCK remained at home but actively sought out foreign publishers. Parker stated that Canadian authors must look to American publishers for their fortunes; Montgomery would not even consider a Canadian house; and Connor felt obligated to stay with his friend and fellow Canadian, George H. Doran, a successful New York publisher. When these writers had Canadian imprints, it was by courtesy of their New York and London publishers, who often provided capital for their Canadian branches and agents. These firms and their families dominated Toronto publishing for three-quarters of a century. Protestant, British, and northern European in background, upper-middle-cLASS in their lifestyles, these astute businessmen broadly reflected the values of middle-class Canada and the political establishment. Bookseller CJ. Musson began his publishing operations in 1897. The American book traveller George McLeod settled in Toronto and formed a partnership with Thomas Allen (1901) to market American best-sellers. The Englishman Frank Wise moved from New York to open the Canadian branch of Macmillan's in 1904. William Briggs lost his most enterprising employees - S.B. Gundy, who established the Oxford U Press in 1906; and John McClelland and Fred Goodchild, who started out in 1908 selling books to the new Carnegie Libraries that dotted the Ontario landscape. All of them were successful agents, but in time their large inventories became expensive to maintain. In creative matters, the agent has no say in editing, BOOK DESIGN, or production, and little in the market strategy. And agents are powerless when the principal drops them because of foreign mergers. The agency firms played an important role by sending Canadian manuscripts abroad and by using their profits to underwrite their small original publishing pro-
PUBLISHING INDUSTRY
grams. As early as 1910, then, the agency system had transformed the Toronto publishing industry into a commercial satellite of the British and the Americans, and it took sixty years to restructure the system. In the 20th century, attempts to develop literary publishing went through two phases. The catalyst for the first one was the First World War, which, in spite of the divisions it created between English- and French-speaking Canadians, sharpened the sense of national identity like nothing else since Confederation in 1867. Having earned handsome profits from 1896 to 1912, booksellers and publishers were encouraged by record sales from Christmas 1914 until 1920, even as prices increased by one-third, and manufacturing and labour costs more than doubled. Reading tastes shifted from fiction to biographies and current histories such as Max Aitken's Canada in Flanders (1916). Some books reached sales of 'twenty-five, thirty and forty thousand,' according to Hugh Eayrs of Macrnillan. Because British publishers and wholesalers could not supply their Canadian representatives, the latter began to import plates, sheets, and books from New York.and to issue Canadian editions of British authors. Neither the shift from British to American suppliers nor the achievements in original publishing were lost on Toronto houses. Although Canadian authors were successful abroad, foreign publishers had no commitment to Canadian culture, and several agency publishers now stated their mission to support Canadian writing. Their first step was to lobby for a new copyright act with the CANADIAN AUTHORS ASSOC, founded in 1920 by Stephen Leacock and Bernard SANDWELL, and to help the association sponsor Canada Book Weeks, starting in 1920. It was an auspicious beginning for the decade, which erupted with creative energy in all the arts across the country. The older generation, associated with prewar traditions of romantic idealism - Roberts, Carman, Leacock, and Montgomery - all had continuing success and popularity. A new generation, among them the pOetS E.J. PRATT, F.R. SCOTT, Dorothy LIVESAY,
and Hector de Saint-Denys GARNEAU, and the novelists Frederick Philip Grove, Morley CALLAGHAN, Mazo DE LA ROCHE, Martha OSTENSO, and - somewhat later in Quebec - Philippe Pan-
neton ('RINGUET'), Anne HEBERT, Gabrielle ROY, and Roger LEMELIN, introduced MODERNISM into Canadian literature. Three publishers were in the vanguard of encouraging local writers and publishing Quebec works in translation. John McClelland, always on the lookout for a best-seller, rescued L.M. Montgomery from her perfidious Boston publisher and assisted her in negotiations with British and American publishers. He was so gratified with the success of the Canadian edition of Ralph Connor's novel The Major that in 1919 he announced a new policy of publishing Canadian books and hired Donald French as his first literary editor. French developed several textbooks, ANTHOLOGIES, and reprints of early Canadian writers. At Ryerson P the enthusiasms of literary editor Lome PIERCE and his disregard for profits brought him opposition from within his own firm and led him to accept manuscripts of dubious quality. But he supported Frederick Philip Grove in the 1920$ and attracted such distinguished poets as Pratt, Livesay, Earle BIRNEY, Louis DUDEK, andp.K. PAGE. Even in 1923-4 when Toronto firms sustained serious losses, Pierce was planning the Makers of Canadian Literature Series; he also started the Ryerson Poetry Chapbooks, developed textbooks of Canadian history and literature, and donated the Lome Pierce Medal for distinguished service to Canadian literature (1928). Like Pierce, the talented and mercurial president of Britishowned Macmillan, Hugh Eayrs (1894-1940), ignored the profit sheets and unabashedly boosted his authors in magazines, newspapers, and literary associations. His lists included de la Roche, Callaghan, and Pratt. These firms, along with the Clarke Irwin-Oxford affiliation, published most of the authors who composed the English-language Canadian literary CANON that prevailed until the 19705. In this first attempt to promote Canadian authors, Eayrs, his Toronto colleagues, and even the short-lived Graphic Publishers (1925-32) of Ottawa, were thwarted by the small size of the market and their inability to negotiate lucrative foreign and subsidiary rights. When the Depression forced them to survive by importing bestsellers, original publishing all but vanished. While authorship was given a boost with the inception of the Governor General's Literary
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AWARDS in 1937 (for the year 1936), the fledgling novelist Hugh MACLENNAN thought that choosing to publish in Canada rather than in the United States doomed a writer to limited distribution and a small readership. Even though Pratt and Livesay published volumes of poetry, they and their colleagues turned to little magazines such as Contemporary Verse and Preview in order to fill the vacuum created by the lack of publishing outlets for new, experimental writing. The little magazines expanded into book publication and in some instances their presses produced beautifully designed books. In Montreal, John SUTHERLAND'S First Statement P (1943-56) and in Toronto, Raymond SOUSTER'S CONTACT P (1952-67) published poetry by Irving Layton and Louis Dudek. Other writers embarked on similar ventures: among the best known were Fred COGSWELL'S Fiddlehead Books (Fredericton, 1952), the ALPHABET P started by James REANEY (London, ON, 1958), and William and Alice MCCONNELL'S Klanak P (Vancouver, 1958), and these were the vanguard of a trend that flourished nationwide in the 19705 as alternatives to mainstream trade publishing. The next attempt to develop original publishing exceeded all expectations, for it was launched by the Second World War, driven by profound changes in the market and within the industry itself, propelled by government intervention in the cultural industries, and most remarkable of all, sustained by the unprecedented sales and critical reception of Canadian writers. During the Second World War there was another extraordinary increase in sales and in reading, despite paper rationing and shortages of equipment and labour. The government, finally adopting the example of the British and the Americans, linked reading, especially among the armed forces, with democracy and freedom, but refused to consider books an essential industry. Frank Appleton of William Collins had great success printing books for the Canadian market. For the first time WOMEN assumed managerial positions in publishing firms; at Macmillan, for instance, Ellen Elliott served as managing director of the publishing department between 1939 and 1942, and company director after that. And at Saunders Publishing - Reginald Saunders (1898-1945) published Gregory
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CLARK, among others - Reginald's widow, Ila Saunders, ran the firm after 1945, with the help of Victor Knight; Saunders was absorbed by Thomas Allen in 1955. The marked shift to US sources of supply and concern over the loss of British business compelled the Book Publishers' Branch of the Board of Trade of the City of Toronto to examine trade problems in the Report on the Canada Book Trade, 1944, the first survey of its kind, and they visited Britain in Oct 1945 in hopes of reviving overseas business and promoting more original publishing in Canada. Although Canadians emerged from the war with a new sense of pride in their accomplishments, the publishing industry went into a downturn between 1946 and 1955, and the last half of the century turned into a roller coaster of prosperity, setbacks, inflation, and recession. A new generation of publishers after the war determined to move in new directions. In the 19605 as the academic market expanded, Marsh Jeanneret turned U Toronto P into one of the largest and most distinguished scholarly publishers in North America. Jack Stoddart Sr developed General Publishing into a major publisher of technical and trade books. John Morgan Gray (1902-78) efficiently and quietly guided Macmillan and attracted MacLennan, Robertson DAVIES, and Donald CREIGHTON to his lists. Unfortunately, after Gray's retirement in 1973, Macmillan ran into management and ownership problems. The most famous publisher of all, Jack MCCLELLAND, rejuvenated his father's firm through dramatic promotional gimmicks and a genius for attracting some of the best novelists and poets in the country. They included Layton, Leonard COHEN, Margaret LAURENCE, Mordecai RICHLER, and his friends Pierre BERTON and Farley MOWAT. He launched the paperback revolution in 1958 with the New Canadian Library and the Canadian Best Seller series. These were soon imitated by his competitors. For the first time, Canadian writers appeared in quality reprint editions that made the TEACHING of courses in Canadian literature viable. By 1962 McClelland had dropped most of his foreign agencies. The 19605, therefore, witnessed an explosion of new titles in English and French, especially in 1967, the centennial of Confederation. The marketing of Canadian writers entered a new phase as LITERARY AGENTS
PUBLISHING INDUSTRY
appeared on the scene and publishers negotiated and auctioned rights at international book fairs. As the Toronto firms reduced their agency connections, foreign publishers and wholesalers found new ways to crack the Canadian market, and Canada again became a battleground between the British and the Americans. 'Buying around,' the practice by which booksellers and libraries bypass the exclusive agent, was rampant. Foreign wholesalers and distributors flouted traditional Canadian practices. By 1970 educational publishing was in a state of chaos, in part because of foreign competition and because Ontario had deregulated its compulsory textbook lists. Just as expectations were at a peak for the industry, overexpansion and inefficiency took their toll. In 1970-1 Ryerson and Gage were sold to Americans and Librairie Garneau to a French corporation. In other countries publishing had evolved from the privately owned business into a corporation where big profits were made by marketing super best-sellers and widely adopted textbooks. At least one Canadian firm, HARLEQUIN Books, made the transfer to international markets successfully. Multinationals such as Prentice-Hall; Holt, Rinehart & Winston; and Hachette had no trouble obtaining financing from their parent corporations or from Canadian banks in order to develop their own Canadian textbook and original publishing programs in competition with the long-established and often underfinanced local firms. In pursuit of efficiency, the multinationals consolidated their worldwide operations and occasionally liquidated a Canadian subsidiary. In the 19905 as a result of the whirlwind of mergers, subsidiaries such as Ginn, Knopf, and Random House changed owners and policies, and some including Little, Brown Canada - disappeared in the jockeying among the three major international holding corporations, Time-Warner, Disney, and Bertelsmans. Cash flow and recession brought more changes, but not all Canadian-owned firms passed into foreign hands. In 1986 McClelland and Stewart was saved from bankruptcy when it was bought by Avram Bennett, and the firm continues to publish such internationally acclaimed writers as Jane URQUHART, Rohinton MISTRY, and Anne MICHAELS. Two former M&S
employees, Linda McKnight and Anna Porter, moved on to found their own firms. In 2000, Bennett donated three-quarters of the company's shares to U Toronto, and sold the other quarter to Random House. In the 19903 some firms were saved from ruin by bailouts or domestic acquisition, but Lester Orpen & Dennys disappeared into bankruptcy. Retailing changed with the arrival of the super bookstore chains Chapters (1995) and Indigo Books (1997), with Indigo taking over Chaptes in 2001. While these two giants battled for old markets in downtown cores and new markets in suburban malls, the American giants Barnes & Noble and Borders were denied entry into Canada, but they and Amazon now compete with Canadian virtual bookstores on the Internet. The super bookstores, committed to loss leaders, deep discounts, and huge turnovers, are a mixed blessing, for if they generate large sales, their policy of returning unsold copies means unexpected warehousing costs and other losses. And the electronic revolution changed everything the preparation of manuscripts, the management of accounts, electronic distribution, and the annual updating of REFERENCE works such as The Canadian Encyclopedia on CD-ROMs. Montreal experienced a renaissance after France fell to the Nazis in 1940. Through the previous century the bread and butter of commercial firms such as Garneau, Granger Freres, and Beauchemin had been textbooks and religious publications, supplemented by a small but steady flow of poetry, fiction, and history. The content of books was under the watchful eye of the Church, which was concerned with the spiritual life and the values of a rural society. In 1940, by special dispensation of the Berne Copyright Convention, Bernard Valiquette and Paul Peledeau's Les Editions Varietes were allowed to print French classics and contemporary works for the whole French-speaking world. Peledeau visited Paris in late 1945 to renegotiate his contracts, but the Paris publishers jealously retained their world rights and several firms folded because of the loss of their temporary markets. However, by 1960 the dominance of the religious publishing houses was broken. The QUIET REVOLUTION inspired a burst of French-language commercial and scholarly publishing, which capitalized on the revived nation-
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alism and pride in Quebecois culture. Novels and non-fiction streamed from new firms such as Fides, Lemeac, and Jacques HEBERT'S Les Editions du Jour (1961). Small presses (whether in English- or French-speaking regions) were started by academics, writers, and persons associated with RADIO-CANADA and the CBC. In 1953 poets Jean-Guy PILON, Fernand OUELLETTE, and Gaston MIRON founded Les Editions de THEXAGONE, which was the most influential publisher of poetry for a generation. Poet and chansonnier Gilles VIGNEAULT started Les Editions de 1'Arc in 1959, and Gatien LAPOINTE began Les Ecrits des Forges (1971), which published new poets. Andre MAJOR'S Les Editions PARTI PRIS (1961) advocated the use of JOUAL in Quebecois writing. The prolific poet, novelist, and biographer Victor-Levy BEAULIEU was associated with several presses before he established his own VLB-Editeur (1976-84) and Editions Trois-Pistoles (1994-). The promise of expanding educational markets attracted French and American subsidiaries, so that in the 19705, 85 per cent of the Quebec market was in the hands of foreign firms, mainly in France. The Quebec government and local publishers attempted to break the new monopolies by FUNDING only locally owned distributors. Among the new English-language publishers, Tundra acquired international fame for its children's books, while Guernica specialized in issues of ethnicity and gender, and Vehicule in attractive books of local interest. In the later decades of the 20th century, Vancouver (with other BC centres) rivalled Toronto and Montreal in the hundreds of titles published each year, perhaps partly because British Columbia has the largest number of readers per capita in Canada. Harbour Publishing (1974), Talonbooks, Oolichan, Raincoast, and Theytus Books (1981) focus on West Coast issues and writers, on NATIVE and ASIAN Canadian authors, and on drama and avant-garde writing. Ronsdale P ranges from TRANSLATION and poetry to the VISUAL ARTS and children's literature. Douglas & Mclntyre, founded in 1971 by James Douglas and Scott Mclntyre, is the largest national publisher outside Toronto; its lists include Bill RICHARDSON and Wayson CHOY. The resurgence of regional publishing in the form of small presses was the most important
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phenomenon of the 19605 and 19705, a clear indication that mainline publishers did not adequately serve new needs and conditions. Often begun in a basement or home office by one person or a small group, the small presses set new standards with their attention to fine printing and literary innovations. In particular, Coach House P (Toronto, 1965) was renowned for its handsome designs and graphics. The small presses provided an apprentice ground for Margaret AT WOOD, Michael ONDAATJE, Carol SHIELDS, and Nino RICCI. Writers themselves were closely associated with these presses: in 1973 Clyde Rose began Breakwater Books, which launched a literary revival in Newfoundland. The House of Anansi (1967), founded by Dave GODFREY and Dennis LEE, espoused modernism, social change, and Canadian NATIONALISM. Godfrey was later associated with New P and P Porcepic. Fred WAH was involved with TISH magazine's press, Andreas SCHROEDER with Sono Nis, and Rudy WIEBE with NeWest P of Edmonton. The small presses maintained low overhead costs and developed niche markets, in many instances by promoting regional writers and books of local interest. In Moncton, for instance, Les Editions d'Acadie (1972) was the first publisher to be devoted to ACADIAN culture and its dialect. Penumbra P (1979), which has operated out of Moonbeam, Waterloo, and Manotick, ON, publishes works pertaining to the NORTH, Native life, and the visual arts. Coteau Books (1975) of Regina and Longspoon of Edmonton served Prairie writers. Red Deer C P, established in 1975 as an alternative literary press, also features western authors and dramatists - as well as COWBOY life - in its Roundup Books, and beautifully illustrated books for children in its Northern Lights series. Indeed, children's books was one of the new areas developed in Canada by small presses devoted exclusively to this aspect of publishing - for example, Groundwood of Vancouver; Kids Can P (1973), a publishing collective; and May Cutler's Tundra Books (1967) of Montreal all achieved international acclaim. Still others found their niche with contemporary social, gender, and multicultural issues. Theytus Books issues works by and about First Peoples in different parts of the country. Arsenal Pulp P (1975)
PUBLISHING INDUSTRY
of Vancouver specializes in books related to gay subjects, while Press Gang Publishers (1975) of Vancouver promotes lesbian erotica (see GAY AND LESBIAN). Sister Vision P (Toronto, 1985) issues works by Black women, Native women, Asian women, and women of mixed racial heritages. The shortlived Williams-Wallace Publishers in Toronto gave a higher profile to writers of colour. Even more unique was Sixty-Eight P (1968-91), established in Toronto by novelist Josef SKVORECKY and his wife Zdena Salivarova to publish books banned in their native Czechoslovakia. While a handful of small presses evolved into medium-sized publishing operations - Oberon (1966) of Ottawa, for example - many transcended their original concepts, whether these were purely literary, or regional, or narrowly focused issues. Turnstone P (1973) of Winnipeg launched into GOTHIC, SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY. New Star Books (Vancouver, 1972), which evolved from the Georgia Straight Writing Series, shifted from its primarily literary focus to labour history and left/social justice issues, and began to include literary works again in the early 19905. Two publishers that continue to emphasize cultural nationalism are ECW P (1972) of Toronto, which branched out from scholarly and reference materials to trade books, and James Lorimer & Co (1968) of Toronto and Halifax, with its emphasis on political and economic issues. Small-press titles rarely become national bestsellers, even though some achieve sales of 2,000 to 10,000, and occasionally - for exmaple, George RYGA'S The Ecstasy of Rita Joe (1971) and Margaret Atwood's Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972) - they are were widely distributed. Finding strength in numbers, the small presses have promoted their titles at the annual Small Press Fair in Toronto and distributed them through the Literary P Group (1976), a collective that is part of General Publishing's distribution operations. These channels, along with foreign small-press distributors, helped them penetrate US and European markets. The Independent Publishers' Assoc (1969) was first composed of the small presses, but it lobbied so successfully for an indigenously owned industry that within a decade many of the larger Toronto firms joined it and it was reorganized as the
Assoc of Canadian Publishers. Since the late 19805 many small presses have suffered because their funding from federal and provincial agencies has been reduced or cut off. Several have survived through acquisition: M&S purchased Hurtig Publishers of Edmonton and Tundra Books; Douglas and Mclntyre took over Western Producer Books; and Stoddart Publishing acquired Anansi as its literary imprint. In effect, the small presses preserved history, rewrote it, gave experimental writers a chance, and contributed to the richness of Canadian culture. After the Second World War, Ottawa's decision to fund the cultural industries had profound effects on publishing and authorship. I 1951 the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences (the MASSEY Commission), following a European trend, recommended support for culture in the face of the increasing American presence in Canadian society. This resulted in the creation of the CANADA COUNCIL in 1957 and similar arts councils in all the provinces. The alarm over foreign takeovers led to royal commissions in Quebec (1963) and Ontario (1971), both of which recommended direct intervention, almost amounting to protectionism, to preserve locally owned publishing, distributing, and retail firms. Ottawa began to keep detailed statistics on the industry, and raised the profile of Canadian books abroad through federally funded bookstores in London and Paris. Foreign takeovers were slowed down under the Foreign Investment Review Agency (1974). As Canada entered into international treaties such as GATT and the Free Trade Agreement (1988) with the United States, clashes developed between federal departments supporting globalization of trade and those advocating continued protection for cultural industries, while American corporations pressed for 'level playing fields' (which is often code for American rules) in the cultural industries. Funding from the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (1979) flowed and ebbed as Ottawa pursued deficit reduction in the 19905. Nor were authors neglected. Two stages of a revised Copyright Act (1985,1997) were passed, to take account of new publishing and reproduction practices. Both Quebec and Ottawa created the PUBLIC LENDING RIGHT in order to recompense authors for the use of their
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books in institutional libraries, and the Canadian Reprography Collective distributes fees to creators for the photocopying of their copyright materials. Although the market is still heavily weighted towards imported books and although international corporations and trade regulations are still determining factors, the Canadian publishing industry now serves its consumers more adequately than fifty years ago. Agency distribution is no longer the raison d'etre for publishing, thanks to the vision of people like Jack McClelland, Jacques Hebert, and Anna Porter, to name only a handful. Canadian authors are internationally acclaimed prizewinners and subjects of critical and academic study, and are widely translated. Domestically, the industry contributed to the diversity of regional and ethnic culture that characterized Canada at the start of the new millennium. Globally, no longer merely the passive importer of foreign printed and electronic information, the publishing industry of Canada now actively distributes Canadian culture to the rest of the world. See also EDITORS AND E D I T I N G .
Further reading: John Morgan Gray, Fun Tomorrow: Learning to be a Publisher and Much More (Toronto: Macmillan, 1978); Groupe de recherche sur I'edition litteraire au Quebec [GRELQ], L'Edition litteraire au Quebec de 194 a 1960, 'Cahiers d'etudes litteraires et culturelles,' No 9 (U de Sherbrooke, 1985); Marsh Jeanneret, God and Mammon: Universities as Publishers (Toronto: Macmillan, 1989); Jack McClelland, Imagining Canadian Literature: The Selected Letters, ed Sam Solecki (Toronto: Key Porter, 1998); Ontario Royal Commission on Book Publishing, Background Papers (Toronto: Queen's Printer, 1972); George L. Parker, The Beginnings of the Book Trade in Canada (Toronto: U Toronto P, 1985); Quebec, Rapport de la Commission d'enquete sur le commerce du livre dans la province de Quebec (Montreal, 1963); Lucie Robert, LTnstitution du litteraire au Quebec (Quebec: P de l'U Laval, 1989). George L. Parker
PULLINGER, Kate. Novelist, short story writer, editor; b Cranbrook, BC, 22 Dec 1961; daughter of Percy Pullinger and Margaret (Low) Pull-
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inger. After living on Vancouver Island and attending McGill U she moved to London, England, in 1982, seeking the freedom to 're-create' herself as a writer. Her best-known title, The Piano (1994), co-written with FILM director and screenwriter Jane Campion, scrutinizes intrafamilial relations, feminine muteness, and the trading of the middle-class woman's body in colonial NEW ZEALAND. In Where Does Kissing End? (1995), female vampirism functions as an extended metaphor for sexual desire. The Last Time I SawJane (1996) explores the dilemma of an expatriate Canadian woman by interweaving historical references to colonist James Douglas in 19th-century British Columbia with a contemporary setting in London, England. Jenny Lawn
PURDY, Al (Alfred Wellington). Poet, writer; b Wooler, ON, 30 Dec 1918, d Sidney, BC, 21 April 2000; son of Alfred Wellington Purdy, Sr, a farmer, and Eleanor Louisa (Ross). Al Purdy was born two months after the Trenton disaster (when the munitions factory of the British Chemical Company was destroyed in an explosion); this event later became the subject of his novel, A Splinter in the Heart (1990). His father died when Al was two, and he was brought up by his mother in Trenton, ON. 'I learned to read when I was six or seven. From that time on I devoured a book a day, and as many as a dozen a week from Trenton Public Library,' he notes in his memoir Morning and It's Summer (1983). Leaving school after grade 10, he undertook the Depression adventure in 1936-7, riding the rails to Vancouver - 'Being a boy scarcely a moment and you / hear the rumbling iron roadbed singing / under the wheels at night' ('Transient') and becoming Al Purdy: worker, traveller, non-conformist, nationalist, writer, poet. Yet this transformation was more promise than immediate reality: homesickness had accompanied him cross-country, and the evening of the day he arrived he caught the train back east. Purdy memorializes this experience in his essays 'The Iron Road,' in the magazine Canada Month (1963), and 'Home Country,' in To Paris Never Again (1997). He held various jobs in Vancouver in the early 19303 (notably as a machinist at Vancouver Bedding), and enlisted in the Royal Canadian
PURDY
Air Force in 1939, serving in non-combatant roles at bases in British Columbia and Ontario. In 1941 he married Eurithe Parkhurst, his life's companion and greatest supporter. His first book of verse, The Enchanted Echo (1944), is a self-published work reflecting less Purdy's vanity than the rigours of verse publication in a new literature. Thirty years later, in an article in Weekend magazine (15 June 1974), 'How the Salvation of Canadian Literature May Rest on the Good Deed of Three Toronto Prostitutes: Jim Foley's Unlikely Path to the Classroom,' Purdy made a prescient case for a nation that would know and publish its own writers, who in turn would 'contain in their writing the hopes and aspirations of 23,000,000 Canadians.' Purdy's early verse is formational, of note less for any enduring merit than for anticipating his distinguished career, for recording what readers would eventuate into his legend as a Canadian folk hero, and for helping, if not exactly to put Canadian literature on the map, then at least to amend its colour symbolism, from imperial pink to a postcolonial red and white. Purdy started to come into his own as a poet in the 19505, after living for two years in Montreal (and taking in its vibrant poetic scene). He settled in Ameliasburgh, ON, in 1957, where he and Eurithe built their own house, and he began to experiment with a personal style. Finally, with the publication of The Cariboo Horses in 1965, Canada took notice. This book earned Purdy the Governor General's AWARD (which he won again in 1986 for his Collected Poems, 1956-1986). It caught the Canadian imagination. Here Purdy gives credit to people, known and unknown, in FREE VERSE: Malcolm LOWRY, union negotiator Percy Lawson, Dylan Thomas, unpublished poets, John F. Kennedy, a failed suicide, Fidel Castro, ghosts, and even Ameliasburgh ('How many miles to Alexandria / from dusty Ameliasburgh?'). These poems typify Purdy's sardonic wit, from the deprecating ('my wife appeared from the bathroom / where she had been brooding for days / over the injustice of being a woman and / attacked me with a broom -') and the droll ('one hemlock for the road'), to the facetious ('Thank God I'm Normal'), the bitter ('I mourn Lee Oswald / because he was a kind of Typhoid Mary / who had the disease in its pure form / one disease
we all have / ANIMAL HATE'), and the malicious ('[hockey players'] fractured skulls opening so doctors / can see such bloody beautiful things'). A career set in motion, albeit the precarious career of a Canadian poet who ekes out a circusact sustenance from writing and reading poetry and by juggling in freelance writing and 'Writerin-Rez' appointments, in the 19705 Purdy set about exploring his own subjectivity, intricately tied in with the land-construct 'Canada,' of which in 'Home Country' (1997) he observes, 'it wasn't an abstraction either, not just names on a map but dirt under your fingernails.' His travels took him into a north-south dialogue with a country that, like the railway, runs mainly eastwest, and he developed an affinity for the NORTH. He journeyed outside Canada also (through the Americas, ASIA, and AFRICA), and into some topics that were more inscrutable than home, notably in Hiroshima Poems (1972), and in 'Flying over Africa,' 'Sizwe Bansi Is Dead,' 'Iguana,' Athens Apartment,' and 'Hallucinations of a Tourist,' from the selection Sex and Death (1973). But if Purdy is undeniably a traveller, he is anything but a travel writer. His focus is presence, not journey: the presences of place, perception, expression, being, and ultimately death, but for now the presence of sex. The sexdeath binary is most evident in Love in a Burning Building (1970), whose poems, such as 'For Norma in Lieu of an Orgasm,' today reflect what some readers might mistakenly term 'Purdy's misogyny,' but which then were simply sexual discourse, with the potential to be vulgar - 'Five years without one? / migawd girl that husband / of yours is a sky-blue idiot!' -but also to be idyllic: And in the forest / there is a rumour / of love -.' Herein lie the mixed pleasures of Purdy's poetext, negotiating a continuum from predatory sex to romantic love. Within the trichotomy, the nominal structure, of person-place-thing (eg, in 'Imagine the Andes' the line 'Imagine Hitler in the Andes' sets up the trichotomy Hitler-Andes-poem; in A Handful of Earth' the lines 'you can hear soft wind blowing / among tall fir trees on Vancouver Island' draws on the structure you-Vancouver Island-poem), the poem is always the thing in which persons and places meet in an appearance of mutual understanding. Purdy exploited
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PURDY
this structure with increasing complexity in the 19805 and 19905 by making apparent nonmimetic persons and places, which come up against the mimetic poem that operates both as the only reality and as only reality. In 'The Uses of History,' from Piling Blood (1984), the speaker, after visiting the library, now sits in a hotel lounge, reading 'about the i6th century / Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagar / whose courtesans were so beautiful / that looking into their eyes / caused some men to dance like raindrops / on water and others to howl like dogs' and matching this tableau to an overheard conversation between the hotel manager and a stripper, 'as she contemplates the / timeless virtues of money / far beyond the borders / of the little kingdom of Vijayanagar.' Such a meeting could happen only in a poem, and, for Purdy, 'poem' is a phenomenon less between poet and audience, in voice, type, and text, than in the poet's mind. This onto-poetic (or sense that a POETICS is an expression of existence rather than a technique) is partly a function of his maturity as a poet and his awareness that he is growing old. It found expression in a new poem Purdy contributed to Russell Brown's edition, The Collected Poems ofAl Purdy (1986). In 'Pre-Mortem' his opening premise - A poem can have a soul / just as a man can' - draws attention to the possibility that a man might just as easily not have a soul, as when it slips out of 'the dying man.' Purdy questions whether 'man' can ever live on in verse, and thus live above, survive, 'cancer' and 'minor cumulative disorders.' In 'The Dead Poet' (1981) the speaker addresses 'the dead brother before me / who built a place in the womb / knowing I was coming,' but in the end he offers his brother the promise not of resurrection but of 'only a small whisper / of birds nesting and green things growing / and a brief saying of them / and know where the words came from! The poet speaks his message in passing, from the cloud of knowing to an unknown space from which poetry passes from consciousness. Purdy's ideas on ontology and death are a poetics, not a resignation to solipsism. This current poetics of being and death complements and completes the poetics of nominal structure that characterized his earlier writing. Both poetics come together in his subsequent
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work, tentatively in Rooms for Rent in the Outer Planets (1996), and assuredly in To Paris Never Again (1997). In the title poem 'To Paris Never Again' the speaker explores a city haunted by Sartre, de Beauvoir, Van Gogh, Bonnard, and other absences, including himself, 'tramping the Rue Pigalle / and Montmartre, at the Tuilleries and Odeon / making notes for poems / pretending to be a writer,' but in the end he turns back to the fleshly certainty of Irving LAYTON, a living writer like himself, and is 'finally beginning to understand / the man in my head was me.' This statement may be Purdy's greatest triumph, as a poet and a man. Further reading: Ofelia Cohn-Sfetcu, 'The Privilege of Finding an Opening in the Past: Al Purdy in the Tree of Experience,' Queen's Q 83 (1976): 262-9; Louis K. McKendrick, Al Purdy and His Works,' Canadian Writers and Their Works, ed, Robert Lecker, Jack David, and Ellen Quigley (Toronto: ECW, 1990): 135-90; Al Purdy, 'How to Be a Poet,' Waves 14.4 (Spring 1986): 4-7; Alfredo Riz^ardi, The Canadian Identity in Al Purdy's Poetry,' Imagination and the Creative Impulse in the New Literatures in English, ed M.T. Brindella and G.V Davis (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993): i73-8o. Paul Matthew St Pierre
QSPELL, QWF. Founded in 1987 (by Simon Dardick, publisher ofVehicule P, Endre FARKAS, and others), QSPELL (the Quebec Society for the Promotion of English Language Literature) joined with the Federation of English Writers of Quebec in 1998 to become QWF (Quebec Writers Federation). Headquartered in Montreal, the group annually recognizes Quebec English-language authors of poetry, fiction, drama, nonfiction, first book, and translation, naming three of its prizes after GALLANT, KLEIN, and MACLENNAN. Past winners include Anne CARSON, Raymond FILIP, Charles FORAN, Ralph GUSTAFSON, Hugh HOOD, D.G. JONES, Mary MEIGS, Witold Ribczynski, Mordecai RICHLER, T.F. RIGELHOF, Ray SMITH, David SOLWAY, and William WEINTRAUB. QUAIFE, Darlene Barry (Darlene Alice). Novelist, short story writer, essayist, radio and theatre playwright; b Calgary i Sept 1948; daughter of Elsie Violet (Cole), full-time mother, and Clif-
QUEBEC
ford Nelson Barry, ra ailway worker; educ U Alberta (MA in creative writing, 1986). Quaife cites a 'delight in the esoteric' as a motivation for her carefully researched novels. Bone Bird (1989), awarded the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book, is a finely crafted and poetic study of Yaqui.Native spirituality transplanted to a contemporary Vancouver Island logging community. Death Writes : A Curious Notebook (1997) collects creative non-fiction and POPULAR culture pieces. Jenny Lawn
QUARRINGTON, Paul. Musician, novelist; b Toronto 22 July 1953; son of Mary (Lewis) and Bruce Quarrington, both psychologists. Quarrington was educated in Toronto and played bass in the rock band Joe Hall and the Continental Drift. He won an admiring readership for each of his books, and received AWARDS for his FILM scripts (eg, Perfectly Natural, 1991) and for fiction and HUMOUR as well, as with KingLeary (1987) and Whale Music (1989). Home Game (1983) reveals his passion for baseball; Civilization (1994) and Fishing with My Old Guy (1995) continue his quest to find - or to reveal - meaning in ordinary life, in the power of love to establish connections between generations and the power of laughter to establish understanding between peoples. See also SPORTS WRITING. QUEBEC, province, joined CONFEDERATION 1867; capital: Quebec City (on the site of Stadacona, est as a trading post by CHAMPLAIN in 1608; the name comes from an Algonquian word meaning 'where the river narrows,' and until 1763 referred to the city only); area, !,538,637 sq km (584,682 sq miles); pop 7,237,479 (2001); provincial emblem, fleur-de-lis (madonna lily). Occupied, prior to French settlement, by INUIT, IROQUOIS and ALGONQuiAN-speaking peoples (Montagnais-Abenaki, CREE, Huron), the territory became part of New France after CARTIER and Champlain began to explore, map, and claim it in the i6th century. The French colony occupied only the southern portions of New France, along the shores of the St Lawrence R; in accordance with the 1763 Treaty of Paris, France transferred 'Quebec' to England and retained Guadeloupe, St Pierre and Miquelon, at which time Quebec became part of the
colony of CANADA. In 1791, divided from the western half of the former 'New France,' it was newly constituted as Lower Canada (because it occupied the lower reaches of the St Lawrence R); it was renamed Canada East in 1841 when the two colonies (Upper and Lower Canada: see ONTARIO) were reunited, and became the province of Quebec in 1867. Its boundaries were extended by federal statute north to the Eastmain R in 1889, and to the Arctic Ocean, taking over the former District of Ungava, in 1912; under the terms of the Boundary Extension Act, Quebec would take over responsibility for treaty negotiations with the NATIVE peoples. French-speaking by law, the province is the headquarters for many national enterprises, and politically influential. Montreal, the largest city in the country for many years (until surpassed in size by Toronto), remains the centre for the railway and other industries, including some manufacturing, and French-LANGUAGE communications - PUBLISHING, RADIO, and television (see FILM). The home of much political discourse (see INTELLECTUAL HISTORY), Quebec has a lively FOLK culture, a vigorous JEWISH community, and thriving literary activity in both of Canada's official languages. The nationalist St-Jean-Baptiste Society (founded 1834, named for Quebec's patron saint) encourages the patriotic celebration of FRANCOPHONE culture; the saint's day (June 24) has been a provincial legal holiday since 1922. Largely rural, Quebec REGIONS include the Beauce, the Gaspe, Charlevoix, and the Eastern Townships. See also INSTITUT CANADIEN, JESUIT RELATIONS, N A T I O N A L I S M , OCTOBER C R I S I S , QUIET REVOLUTION, TERRIEN ROMANCE, URBAN WRITING.
Quebec writers include Hubert AQUIN, Bernard ASSINIWI, AUBERT DE GASPE perc Ctflls, YveS BEAUCHEMIN, Honore BEAUGRAND, Victor-Levy BEAULIEU, Elisabeth BEGON, Constance BERESFORD-HOWE, Harry BERNARD,
Louky BERSIANIK, Gerard BESSETTE, MarieClaire BLAIS, Marguerite BOURGEOYS, Frances B R O O K E , Nicole B R O S S A R D , Roch C A R R I E R , Paul
CHAMBERLAND, Normand CHAURETTE, Robert CHOQUETTE, Leonard COHEN, LaurecoNAN, Octave CREMAZIE, Eliza CUSHING, Jean-Paul D E S B I E N S , L-A. D E S S A U L L E S , W.H.
DRUMMOND,
Rejean DUCHARME, Louis DUDEK, Jacques PERRON, Madeleine PERRON, Sheila FISCHMAN,
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QUEBEC
FRANgoiSE, Mavis GALLANT, F-X. GARNEAU, Hector de Saint-Denys GARNEAU, Claude GAUVREAU, Gratien GELINAS, Rodolphe GIRARD, John GLASSCO, Jacques GODBOUT, Alain GRANDBOIS, C-H. GRIGNON, Lionel GROULX, Germaine GUEVREMONT, Ralph GUSTAFSON, Charles HEAVYSEGE, Anne HEBERT, Louis HEMON, Hugh HOOD, Claude JASMIN, D . G .
JONES, A.M. KLEIN, Albert LABERGE, Dany LAFERRIERE, Baron de LAHONTAN, Michele LALONDE, Andre LANGEVIN, Jacques LANGUIRAND, Gatien LAPOINTE, P-M. LAPOINTE,
Gilbert LA ROCQUE, Rina LASNIER, Calixa LAVALLEE, Irving LAYTON, Felix LECLERC,
Roger LEMELIN, Robert LEPAGE, Rosanna LEPROHON, Hugh MACLENNAN, Andre MAJOR,
Robert MAJZELS, Jovette MARCHESSAULT, MARIE DE L'INCARNATION, Gaston MIRON, Emile NELLIGAN, Fernand ouELLETTE, Standish O'GRADY, Edward PHILLIPS, Mordecai RICHLER, RINGUET, Camille ROY, Gabrielle ROY, F-A. SAVARD, F.R. SCOTT, ScOttSYMONS, France THEORET, YveS THERIAULT, Michel TREMBLAY,
Gilles VIGNEAULT, William WEINTRAUB. See also QSPELL, SCHOOL TEXTBOOKS.
QUEBEC WRITING IN FRENCH, MOTIFS IN. Like writers everywhere in the world, Quebec authors have written in many ways about many different subjects and, like critics in all cultures, Quebec literary critics have identified and proved the existence of dozens of themes in the resulting works. The variety and range of literary expression throughout the centuries indicates the health of French-language culture in North America, but with such diversity to draw from it is difficult to produce a comprehensive theory, applicable to all periods and genres. Attempts to explain the development of a literary culture in Quebec as a seamless progression from difficult beginnings to POSTMODERN strength have tended to move quickly past the books, writers, and eras that do not fit the prescribed pattern, in order to concentrate on those that do. To give an idea of this diversity in works of the imagination, this article considers the question of thematic material in three different ways: first, in the way in which ideas moved chronologically between foreground and background; second, in the interrelation of content and form;
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and third, in the expression of an author's sense of identity. Although considerable evidence suggests that individuals were engaged in occasional literary activity before the arrival of the first printing press in 1764, it was not until that date that the means of print dissemination existed, with all that implies about the intention of an author to address a reading public. For the remainder of the i8th century, international politics - centred on the French and American revolutions and on that part of the Napoleonic Wars which took place in North America - affected Quebec writers both directly and indirectly. Directly, in that the unsuccessful American invasions during the revolution and the War of 1812 generated a patriotic literary response, and indirectly through the dissemination of French and American concepts of liberty and equality. Quebec authors wrote of their love of liberty, and of love of their native land, and incorporated both ideas into their developing perception of a NATIONAL identity. A number of literary works have cited the successful defence of their native land against American invaders as proof of the Quebec people's loyalty to the British crown. The political intention of such publications was to counter accusations of disloyalty made by some of the new English-speaking residents. After 1792, when elections began to be held, political positions became a favourite subject for the poetry published in Quebec newspapers; particular events, from banquets to shipwrecks, were also a source of inspiration. Alongside these occurrences appeared works exhibiting the human emotions relating to birth and death, love and loss, the sea and the LAND. The end of the Napoleonic era and the treaty ending the War of 1812 seemed to establish the fact that Quebec would remain under British control for the foreseeable future. The political component of literary production, in the period before the social upheavals of 1837-8 (see REBELLIONS), became increasingly partisan. Poems praised the patriote cause and condemned their opponents. Poems praising the heroic Greeks or Poles for their rebellions against oppression were thinly disguised calls to rebellion against English oppression. In fiction, a favourite topic was the era of NEW FRANCE, when the heroes and heroines were French, and the English were
QUEBEC WRITING IN FRENCH, MOTIFS IN
the enemy. In these works NATIVE peoples were always present, described as either friend or foe depending on their response to French settlement, their acceptance or rejection of Roman Catholic missionaries, and their choice of military allies. Religious sentiment became more common as a general'theme, always with the subtext that sentiment expressed in French was Catholic, not Protestant, and not English. Yet, despite the political component of much of the literature produced in this period, the dominant themes were more closely allied to the European Romantic movement: the feelings of young men admiring a sublime panorama from a vantage point, the feelings of the rejected lover, noble savages, melancholy, and similar subjects. Before 1842 only two books had been published in French in Quebec, along with several plays, and a few periodicals and newspapers containing short stories and fugitive poetry. The situation for English publications was not markedly different. However, improvements in printing technology and the increasing literacy level of a rapidly expanding population meant that more individuals were able to produce more literature for more readers. Between 1842 and 1849, seven novels were separately published, or began serial publication; James HUSTON produced the first volumes of Le repertoire national; and the first edition of Francois-Xavier GARNEAU'S Histoire du Canada depuis sa decouverte jusqu'd nos jours was published. Nine literary periodicals also appeared, although only two lasted for more than two years. This is generally described by literary historians as the response of Quebec writers to Lord Durham's assertion that the Quebecois were a people without a history or a literature. Most of the novels and stories were set in present time and dealt with present concerns. P-J-O. CHAUVEAU'S Charles Guerin, for example, which centred on overcrowding of the professions, was immediately recognized as a novel of contemporary manners. The patriotic nationalism of the participants in this cultural flowering took a variety of forms, from the most elementary technique of making all the villains English, to the positive manner of describing the history of the French in North America. Through them all a strong sense of national identity and defensive pride is apparent.
The necessity of expressing correct moral attitudes had always been a component of literary experience in Quebec, as it was elsewhere during the i9th century. However, the defeat of the rebels and the political union of Upper and Lower Canada that followed made it difficult for politicians to speak for the Quebec people. In this vacuum the clergy began to assert their role in defining and leading Quebec society. Consequently, the moral aspect of literature came under greater surveillance and local productions were judged against the critical standards of ULTRAMONTANE France. Authors responded in a variety of ways. Many accepted the idea that the Church, as the principal defender of the Quebec people, had the right to decide what they should read and how they should write; others, advocatng private judgment, resisted. Against poems describing the virtues of a Catholic nation and the pleasures of Catholic belief were set works praising personal liberty and the pleasures of human love; against popular novels about 'the land' in which the major characters lived lives of devotion to a Catholic and national cause, were set stories in which denominational RELIGION played no part in the lives of the characters. These works of resistance were few in number. They were critically deplored, or ignored, and the clergy, who controlled the LIBRARIES, kept them safely away from the general reading public. Nevertheless, such works continued to be written and published as a constant subtext to the dominant culture among the intellectual elite. Those writers who accepted clerical domination, in search of recognizable models of national identity, began to publish folk tales about voyageurs, lumberjacks, witches, and other inhabitants of 'the good old days' transforming these 'outlaw' individuals into patriotic 'characters' and always ending with affirmation of the established order. As women writers began to appear, they revealed themselves to be pious mentors to an audience of children and other women. Although there was always some resistance, and there were internal divisions around the best way of fulfilling the national obligations of 'the French' in North America - particularly early in the 2oth century when there was a split over the theories of the 'exotiques' who looked to France, and the 'regionalists' who sought inspiration in North
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QUEBEC WRITING IN FRENCH, MOTIFS IN
America - the majority of literary works adhered to clerical guidelines. Within the ranks of the clergy there was also, over time and with various personalities, some differences in the prescriptions for a national literature. However, church control of the content and diffusion of literature prevailed until the Second World War opened Quebec to outside influences. (See CENSORSHIP.) The REFUS GLOBAL of 1948 - manifesto of the new generation - is generally mentioned as a dividing line in the progress of Quebec culture, although changes had actually begun in the late 19303. When connections with France were cut off in 1940, Quebec became the international publishing centre for French literature. Although clerical control of reading material continued at the parish level, there were just too many 'unsuitable books' in circulation for absolute control to be maintained. As a result of the new intellectual climate, while literature continued to reflect Quebec life, this was now seen to be an urban, rather than rural, experience. Literary models, when followed at all, were taken from all over the world. No subject was forbidden, particularly if it reflected personal experience. Freed from the dictates of the Societe du parler francais au Canada, the LANGUAGE of the people, referred to as JOUAL, became the language of choice for many writers of the 19605. As time passed, the joy of revolt, of release from restrictions, became evident in many literary works. Some aspects of this chronological shift in thematic material can be seen as a reflection of changes in the dominant forms of expression: from scattered newspaper poetry, to short stories and serial fiction in revues, and finally to novels in book form. Except in the very early days all three forms have continually coexisted, but their relative importance in the CANON of Quebec literature has varied. In the i9th century, POETRY dominated. The themes of poetic discourse were limited by form to brief expressions of emotion and public comment on events, or to DRAMAS and EPICS intended to convey grand themes of nation and history. Early in the 20th century the tormented alienation of Emile NELLIGAN and Saint-Denys GARNEAU found expression in poetry. Contemporary poetry has as many themes as it has writers. Tales of the
920
past - in serial or SHORT STORY form, intended to reify a national identity - fitted well into the review format. Later, the short story evolved into a vehicle for expressing the experience of a moment in time. The NOVEL, encompassing increasingly multiple and complex themes, began as part of the Romantic movement, then adapted to the perceived need to produce a national epic, and finally began to reflect the twin poles of individualism and political engagement in the modern era. Nationalism is usually perceived as both the dominant component and the unique characteristic of Quebec literature. In the theoretical sense that authors reside in a particular space, and that this residency affects all aspects of their lives and works, this may be true. However, Quebec literature has seen many varieties of nationalist answers to the questions of identity Who am I? Who is 'the other'? What is my relation to space and time? In Quebec, before the middle of the 2oth century, authors most often found their personal identity as part of a collectivity which encompassed both a people and a native land. 'The other' was 'the English,' 'the Americans,' or the Native peoples. In one area there was ambivalence, the question of whether France was part of 'us,' or one of 'them.' There is chronological development within the concept of LAND, which was initially perceived as the entire interior of the continent, the territory of New France, inhabited by French men and women. It was described in stories about voyageurs and EXPLORERS. This perception persisted in literature until about the 18205, when as a result of the transfer of power from France to England, a new generation transformed the now-narrowly defined boundaries of Quebec into a spiritual as well as a literal homeland, the past into an age of gold, and France into a distant motherland. In the decades following 18378, the Quebecois were told by both priests and politicians that they had a providential mission to spread French language, culture, and religion in the new world. Conservative French literary models were part of the school curriculum. The NORTH and the WEST became MYTHIC territories, while the rural landscape of the colony became the focus of national life, the location of racial roots. Cities were depicted as the site of vice, poverty and loss of identity (see URBAN
QUELQUES ARPENTS DE NIEGE
WRITING). Later in the ipth century the mythic territories, as subjects, began to be described as evil and dangerous, identified with disorder and individualism, and rejection of the city intensified until it became the enemy of the French race in North America. In the literature of the second half of the 2oth century, the collective identification with the land tended to be expressed in terms of both city and country, with a territorial possessiveness verging on what Northrop FRYE called a 'GARRISON MENTALITY.' Similarly'the other,' which began in the settlement era as the Native peoples, turned in the century before CONFEDERATION into 'the English.' Under the influence of the clergy, who were seeking to avoid outmigration to the United States, that country also became 'the other' - a place into which people disappeared and were swallowed up by assimilation. In present time, an element of CLASS has been added to descriptions of 'the other' and France is often portrayed now as just one sibling among many. Over two and a half centuries, Native peoples as symbolic constructs of 'the other' have gone from fierce savages resisting conversion, to noble savages lamenting a lost way of life, to symbols of disorder and superstition, to modern symbols of the individual in the natural world. Quebec authors have always written, with varying degrees of realism, about human emotions in response to life situations: to birth and death, joy and sorrow, love and loss - experiences and emotions that change little over time. The seasons are as before, but the landscape described has altered thanks to human intervention. Themes of silence and solitude, of personal quest, of despair, of revolution, of the individual in opposition to society, rare and uncanonical in earlier times, have appeared since the 19405. Today, the North 'up there' is neither adventure, nor chaos, but solitude and the individual's relation to an overpowering natural environment. Quebec WOMEN writers, released from earlier social constraints, and relating as FEMINISTS to the wider world, have brought new themes and narrative patterns, related to their experience of life, into literary discourse. French-speaking immigrant writers of both sexes continue to write of their consciousness of being simultaneously 'not us' and 'not other' in a shared space.
There is no critical agreement about the thematic material in contemporary Quebec literature and any attempt to reach consensus would merely dissolve into a long list of subjects. In scholarly books and literary reviews, debate continues over appropriate models and cultural identity. Should the influence of EUROPE, the UNITED STATES, LATIN AMERICA, Or Other COUn-
tries in lafrancophonie, be accepted or rejected? What is unique to postmodern Quebec? Should writers be committed to social and political objectives, or should they stand apart? Is the collectivity more important than the individual? Depending on their answers to these questions, writers choose the forms, subject matter, and thematic expression meaningful to themselves. Further reading: Rene Dionne, Le Quebecois et sa litterature (Montreal: Naaman, 1984); Maurice Lemire, Formation de I'imaginaire litteraire au Quebec 1764-1867 (Montreal: L'Hexagone, 1993); Laurent Mailhot, La litterature quebecoise (Paris: P Universitaires de France, 1974); Lucie Robert, L'institution du litteraire au Quebec (Quebec: P de 1'U Laval, 1989); Jack Warwick, Literary Themes of French Canada (Toronto: U Toronto P, 1968). Mary Lu MacDonald
QUEDNAU, Marion. Novelist; b Toronto 1952; educ U Toronto. Quednau won the Books in Canada First Novel AWARD for The Butterfly Chair (1987), in which Else Rainer must come to terms with the murder-suicide of her parents, postwar immigrants from Germany. Fifteen years later, she confronts her anger and guilt, and examines her childhood, which was dominated by an angry and violent father and a martyr mother. Critics both praised and criticized the novel for its episodic form, its exploration of Jungian dreams, and its imagistic language. Quednau lives in Mission, BC. Gabriele Helms
QUELQUES ARPENTS DE NEIGE, a phrase from Voltaire's Candide (1759) that came to be used as a general dismissal of the barrenness of Canada; in context it refers to the Seven Years War, then under way. 'What are they fighting about?' one character asks; the answer: 'a few acres of snow.' See also LANDSCAPE, NORTH, WEATHER.
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QUESNEL
QUESNEL, Joseph (pseuds F, Francois). Composer, playwright; b Saint-Malo, France, 15 Nov 1746, d Montreal 3 July 1809; son of PelagieJeanne-Marguerite (Duguen) and Isaac Quesnel de la Ribaudais. After travels in ASIA, Quesnel joined his uncle's shipping firm in Bordeaux; when his ship (full of munitions to aid the American Revolution) was captured in,1779, he landed in Halifax, moved by permit to Montreal, married, and joined in commercial and social life there. In 1790, during a controversy over the morality of the THEATRE, Quesnel wrote a comic operetta, Colas et Colinette (libretto pub 1808); some of his occasional poems and songs appeared in a selection ed Michael Gnarowski (1970). In Michel S. Lecavalier's TRANSLATION (in collaboration with Godfrey Ridout, and with an intro by Helmut Kallmann), Colas and Colinette, or, The Bailiff Confounded appeared in 1974. See also MUSIC AND LITERATURE.
QUIET REVOLUTION ('La revolution tranquille'), term given to the social changes that took place in QUEBEC during the early 19605, under the premiership of Jean Lesage. These changes overturned what had been the policies of the long-standing premier Maurice Duplessis. They expanded civil rights; extended access to education (particularly scientific education) and information; reformed the VOTING act, the economic structure, and marriage and labour codes; and questioned the authority of the Catholic Church in civil matters. Lesage's political slogan - 'maitres chez nous' ('masters in our own house') - came subsequently to serve the different political cause of Quebec NATIONALISM. RACE AND RACISM IN CANADIAN LITERATURE. The perpetual difficulty of the question of race and the issue of racism in Canadian literature is that Canadians, especially the European-descended majority, tend to consider these matters as peculiarly American obsessions. For one thing, while Canadian history is oriented around anglophone and francophone dialogues (with slight attention accorded the grievances and aspirations of the FIRST NATIONS peoples), US history, with its grandiose narratives, focuses on the dilemma of Black/white inequality. Thus, most Canadians know that African SLAVERY,
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anti-BLACK 'codes,' racial segregation, and an openly racialized socio-economic and political system have all been features of the United States. Fewer Canadians know that African slavery, racial segregation, and anti-Black, anti-cmNESE, anti-East Indian, and anti-jswiSH immigration laws - as well as restrictions on domestic First Nations peoples, Asians, Blacks, Jews, and southern and eastern European immigrants - were all features of Canadian life. (A 1995 survey conducted by the Canadian Civil Liberties Assoc establishes this point.) An ignorance masquerading as innocence has prevented Canadians from confronting a literary, political, and cultural past that was openly racialist, preferring, in English-speaking Canada, to exalt white, Anglo-Saxon, and Nordic European Protestant cultures over all others, and, in Frenchspeaking Canada, to boost white, European, Catholic cultures. Thus, Canada's much-ballyhooed'innocence' demands critique. Indeed, the consequence of the Canadian practice of racism - no matter how 'polite' its manifestations - was the construction of what sociologist John Porter (1921-79) terms 'the vertical mosaic' in his revolutionary work of the same title (1965). Porter argues that Canadians of white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant affiliation sit atop this pyramid, while Aboriginal peoples occupy the bottom. Other groups take intermediate socio-economic positions based upon their colour, their ethnicity, and their religion. Thus some scholars charge that Canadian society exhibits a thoroughly racialized stratification (eg, Seymour Wilson's 'The Tapestry Vision of Canadian Multiculturalism,' CJPS 26.4, 1993). This fact has repercussions for the reception of minority-group literature in Canada. In his 1991 article 'Cultural Diversity and Canadian Literature,' the critic Enoch Padolsky posits that even though anglophone and francophone Canadian literatures have grown more accommodating of racial and ethnic minority voices, literary critics continue to ignore the dissenting perspectives these very voices utter. In other words, the master class continues to exercise a prerogative of silencing and erasing the boisterous publications of 'disruptive' minorities. Then again, 'race' as a term denoting racial minorities and majorities has always been subject to erasure in Canadian rhetorics. Conven-
RACE AND RACISM IN CANADIAN LITERATURE
tionally, the term referred primarily to Anglo-Saxon-descended anglophones and Gauldescended francophones who insisted upon the hegemony of a Canadian race or of les canadiens fran^ais. There was little place in such conceptions for other 'races,' save for their rejection, their forced assimilation, their exploitation, and their patronization. Hence, Quebec poet Louis FRECHETTE found occasion to celebrate his adventurous 'race' in his poems commemorating the explorations that extended the borders of NEW FRANCE. Susanna MOODIE writes unselfconsciously about the 'Saxon race' in her Roughing It in the Bush (1852), where she also finds that the 'Albion rose' is not as suited for the New World environment as the native-born AngloNorth American. In the works of Quebec intellectual Henri Bourassa (1868-1952), 'race' assumes its echt-Canadian signification as a means of denoting French and English. In La langue, lagardienne de lafoi (1918), Bourassa distinguishes the piety of French-speaking Christians from the alarming secularity of Tamericanisme saxonisant.' As late as 1971, in his poem 'Quebec Farmhouse,'John GLASSCO is able to employ 'race' to demarcate his liberal, anglo persona from that of Quebec nuns who symbolize a too-religious and too-conservative, even decaying people. The influential Jewish Canadian poet A.M. KLEIN, in his oft-cited poem 'Political Meeting' (1948), conflates 'race' with 'racism' to critique a French Canadian audience's acceptance of crypto-fascist demagoguery. Yet in her poem 'La cite des interdits' (1994), Quebecoise poet Suzanne Pellerin figures, two white Anglos as 'La nouvelle race aryenne,' thus equating anglophone economic power and cultural influence to a form of fascism. Throughout Canadian history, then, literature has often assigned the term 'race' a French or English signification, generally repressing the existence of other groups of Canadians. Yet when other 'races' are addressed, especially those deemed culturally or physiologically other, the term 'race' becomes imbricated with racism. A poem by Charles MAIR, 'Tecumseh' (1886), uses 'race' to tell of the decline of First Nations peoples before the depredations of white 'civilization.' Another poem, 'The Onondaga Madonna' (1898), by Duncan Campbell SCOTT, protests against the white-Native misce-
genation that signals, for him, the degringolade of Aboriginal people. In both instances, 'race' does double duty as a marker of difference and as a synonym for supposedly obsolescent people. Unfortunately, then, though 'race' also carries the popular - and relatively neutral - meaning of picturing the division of humanity according to a general and unscientific combination of conventions (cultural, linguistic, and biological), it appears primarily in Canadian literature in a racialist context. This point is understandable, for, in the i9th century, Canadians imbibed racist theories derived from Arthur Gobineau's infamous Essai sur 1'inegalite des races humaines (1853-5), which provided a pseudo-scientific argument for social inequality. Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, as adapted by Herbert Spencer, offered a further racial rationalization for poverty and 'backwardness': some races were just 'naturally' superior to others. Then, too, before the British Empire abolished slavery in 1834, British North America had countenanced an economic system dependent upon arguments that some human beings are inferior to others. In addition, pro-slavery ideologues in the United States and the fierce land campaigns against First Nations peoples in both British North America and the American Republic influenced public attitudes. British author Thomas Carlyle further inflamed opinions with his notorious 1849 essay 'The Nigger Question.' Out of this witch's brew of public racism emerged such promulgators of Canadian literary racism as Thomas Chandler HALIBURTON, 19th-century Canada's most successful author and most determined disseminator of noxious caricatures and nauseating stereotypes. In his well-circulated Clockmaker sketches (1836, 1838, 1840) and his other humorous writings, including Nature and Human Nature (1855), Haliburton allows his protagonist, Sam Slick, the itinerant Yankee clock pedlar, to defend slavery as a bulwark of civilization. For Haliburton, 'race' is a synonym for CLASS; thus, notions of aristocratic superiority vis-a-vis workers are defended by citing the 'obvious' inferiority of Blacks to whites. Indeed, Haliburton shares the paternalistic slave-holder's belief that merit - interpreted as white skin, maleness, European ancestry, and social rank- determines one's particular
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freedoms, privileges, rights, and responsibilities. In his 1836 Clockmaker sketch 'Sayings and Doings in Cumberland,' Haliburton bids his alter ego Slick announce that All critters in natur [sic] are better in their own element.' Thus, for Haliburton, servitude and slavery were literal, clanking symbols of the chain of being that bound all together. Moreover, Haliburton's Black characters serve as surrogate critics of the white, Anglo-Saxon community. They function as signs and warnings: if white AngloNorth Americans fail to achieve the vision of socio-economic and political unity and organic community that Haliburton promotes, they will descend to the level of Black slaves. Intriguingly, this literary 'blackface' minstrelsy had its real-life representations, for Moodie, discussing the custom of the charivari in Roughing It, reports that those young male settlers who undertook to roust objectionable newlyweds would first blacken their faces and don clownish costumes. These activities were not always features of minstrelsy and comedy; Moodie also recounts the charivaring - ie, lynching - of a Black man who had married an 'Irishwoman.' In the same chapter of Roughing It, however, Moodie objects to the Haliburtonesque anti-Black musings of one of her interlocutors, a Mrs D. (Elsewhere, though, Moodie denounces IRISH immigrants.) For his part, the fin de siecle Quebec poet Emile NELLIGAN could not resist casting a Black woman as a figure of ridicule in his poem 'Le Perroquet' (c 1899). Blackness signifies, in this late-late symboliste poem, indigence, gullibility, and pathos. Whiteness, however, is constructed by its exact invisibility, that is, as a positive opposite manifesting virtues. John RICHARDSON, in Wacousta (1832), attempts perhaps to come to terms with his dual LOYALIST and Aboriginal heritage both by denigrating Native people as dark-skinned 'savages' (thus satisfying the conventional attitudes of his day), and by according them a dignity that his white characters frequently seem to lack. Still, this 'dignity' is merely an elegiac ornament upon what is presumed to be their incipient extinction. Pace Haliburton and Richardson, the major disseminators of racialist thinking were the members, including Mair, of the literary and political movement CANADA FIRST, organized in
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1868. A fervent group of Anglo-Protestants who wanted Canada to become a New World Britain, Canada First was known for its anti-METis and anglophile attitudes. Not all racial imagery in 19th-century, white Canadian literature was negative. Joseph HOWE displays empathy for the Mi'kmaq people in his poem 'The Micmac' (1874), and, occasionally, for Black people, in his prose sketches 'Western Rambles' (1828). Like Richardson, Pauline JOHNSON found it necessary to reconcile her European and Aboriginal heritages. Unlike Richardson, she rejected conventional depictions of Native people, preferring to remember that it was European injustice that banished the indigenous people from their lands. Although her poems, such as 'Silhouette' (1903) and 'The Corn Husker' (1903), were pitched towards European audiences, the 'Indian' appears in them as a figure of anger-inciting, socially conscious pathos. Nevertheless, the sympathy expressed by some authors for the dark, ethnically different 'other' was hardly the common experience, nor did it establish a liberal agenda for race relations. Instead, the critic John Daniel LOGAN was able, in 1923, to extol Haliburton as the champion of a global, Anglo-Saxon imperialism. Other writers went further. In his excellent introductory study Racial Attitudes in EnglishCanadian Fiction 1905-1980 (1987), Terrence Craig notes that interest in the idea of a white Canadian 'race' increased in the first years of the 2oth century, as did the notion that all non-Anglo, non-white foreigners constituted a threat to its 'purity.' Thus, Andrew MACPHAIL exulted in British imperialism and railed against 'alien' and 'lower races' (as in his 1920 article 'The Immigrant'). The otherwise humanitarian Rev James S. Woodsworth, a co-founder of the socialist Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, rejects Asian immigrants as 'unassimilable' in his Strangers within Our Gates (1909), a thinly veiled argument in defence of Anglo-Protestant political and economic power. Robert J.C. STEAD advances a similar view in his first book of poetry, The Empire Builders and Other Poems (1908), which determines that 'yellow' and 'brown' immigrants can never become Canadian. A novel by Hilda Glynn-Ward, The Writing
RACE AND RACISM IN CANADIAN LITERATURE
on the Wall (1922), expresses vitriolic contempt for West Coast ASIAN Canadians at a time when their citizenship rights were being voided. Her novel imagines that, if granted the right to vote, Asian Canadians would flout the dream of British Columbia as a white-dominated province. Influenced by his Scottish ethnocentricism, the then-popular novelist Rev Charles Gordon, who wrote under the PSEUDONYM of Ralph CONNOR, attacks what he views as miscegenation-inspired white racial 'suicide' in his novel The Gaspards of Pine Croft (1923), and peddles anti-Jewish stereotypes in The Foreigner (1909). Embarrassingly, the first president of the CANADIAN AUTHORS ASSOC, John Murray GIBBON, espouses antiSemitic attitudes in his novel The Conquering Hero (1920), which also lauds, for good measure, the racist pseudoscience of eugenics. According to Charles TAYLOR in his Radical Tories (1982), even the great humorist Stephen LEACOCK lodged jibes against racial minorities. Lionel GROULX extends a particularly Canadian - if ULTRAMONTANE - tradition by insisting upon the sanctity of the French 'race' vis-d-vis English Canadians in his political history La naissance d'une race (1919). The French-born writer Louis HEMON, in his agrarian novel Maria Chapdelaine (1914), provides a comforting myth of Quebec 'racial' and spiritual insularity. After the First World War, and particularly after the Second World War (a war that Canada fought, in part, as an anti-fascist and anti-racist cause), racial attitudes began to shift, though hard-line prejudices continued to be voiced as well. Thus, although the German immigrant novelist Frederick Philip GROVE chastises British Canadians for their Anglo-centric biases in his non-fiction articles, in a 1929 piece he calls for white racial unity against the 'menacing' coloured 'races.' His fiction employs anti-Semitic caricatures as well. Other 'mainstream' authors also traded in simplistic images of minorities. In his novel They Shall Inherit the Earth (1935), Morley CALLAGHAN presents a Ukrainian Canadian heroine who has no specific Ukrainian traits. In The Loved and the Lost (1951), moreover, Montreal Blacks are merely the supporting cast for his white and saintly heroine. Historian Donald CREIGHTON regurgitates more than a touch of philosopher Oswald Spengler's racial theories in his influential The Commercial Empire
of the St. Lawrence, 1760-1850 (1937). Quebec novelist Eugene Seers, who used the nom de plume of Louis DANTIN, conjures up a doomed love affair between Sylvan Donat, a white francophone artist living in Boston and his widowed African American maid, Fanny Lewis, in his semi-autobiographical fiction Les enfances de Fanny (1951). Lewis, as it turns out, is a version of the 'tragic mulatto' cliche. She is torn between two worlds: the rarefied sphere of Donat and the earthy sphere of her friends and family in Roxbury, a Black section of Boston. Finally, for Seers's omniscient narrator, assimilation is the correct solution to the problem of racial prejudice. Another Quebec novelist, Andre GIROUX, tackles anti-Semitism in Au deld des visages (1948). By the beginning of the 19605, however, truly liberal views began to appear in Canadian literature, perhaps in response to the rapid decolonization of Africa and Asia, the humanist propaganda of the US Civil Rights Movement, the abandonment of racist immigration laws and the abolition of racial segregation in Canada, and the sense that Canada had a role to play in the developing world. Thus, Nova Scotia writer Ernest BUCKLER, in his 1959 short story 'Long, Long, after School,' imagines a white teacher who protects her lone Black student from racial abuse and who is then remembered fondly by him after her death. Though sentimental, even mawkish, the story is a good indicator of the liberalization of majoritarian attitudes. The remarkable novelist Margaret LAURENCE commenced her career in AFRICA, wheYe she lived between 1950 and 1957. Her first book, A Tree for Poverty (1954), is a set of translated Somali tales; her first novel, This Side Jordan (1960), and a collection of short stories, The Tomorrow-Tamer (1963), both set in Africa, establish Laurence's interest in recognizing difference, remembering ancestry, and reconciling divisions. She addresses the same interests in her treatments of METIS and UKRAINIAN Canadian characters in her later fiction. Earle BIRNEY, an inveterate global traveller, is noted for such lyrics as 'The Bear on the Delhi Road' (1962) and A Walk in Kyoto' (1962), which are set respectively in India and JAPAN, and which involve his attempt to enter imaginatively into the cultural experiences and histories of others.
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The Quebec writer and political activist Pierre VALLIERES argues for the equivalence of 'oppressed' white Quebecois and African Americans in his polemical tract Les negres blancs d'Amerique (1968). Yet he also maintains, with weird innocence, that white francophones feel little prejudice towards minorities. More importantly, the pro-Quebec independence militant and author Hubert AQUIN draws strong parallels between the 'rape' of Quebec and neo-colonialism in Africa in Trou de memoire (1968). Toronto poet Dennis LEE, in his long elegy The Death of Harold Ladoo (1976), memorializes the slain Trinidadian Canadian author. Coming through Slaughter (1976), a stunning novel by Sri Lankanborn author Michael ONDAATJE, re-imagines the life of the mysterious New Orleans Black creator of jazz Buddy Bolden (but without referencing either white racism or the wider Black community). Even so, such writings served to augur the new cosmopolitan and multicultural attitude that has become de rigueur in Canadian literature. Additional impetus for this adjustment can be traced back to the promulgation of official multiculturalism by the federal government of Pierre Elliott Trudeau in 1971. However, the greatest change has resulted from the development of minority-group voices (such as the Sri Lankan-born Ondaatje) who define their own cultures, articulate their group histories (inside and outside Canada), and dethrone majoritarian interpretations of their realities. Beginning in 1964, then, the Barbados-born author Austin C. CLARKE chronicles the lives of West Indian immigrants to Canada in powerful short stories and novels and speaks for their interests in his polemical essays. The Japanese Canadian writer, Joy KOGAWA in her novel Obosan (1981), bears witness to the shameful, racially motivated 'evacuation' - that is, internment - of West Coast Japanese Canadians during the Second World War. Bharati MUKHERJEE, in her incendiary short story collection Darkness (1985), tells of Indians entangled in the racism of North American culture. (White Canadians found her introduction shocking, for she lauds the United States for being more accepting of immigrants than Canada.) Rohinton MISTRY sets his epic, richly Dickensian novels in India, but his ironic sensibility is arguably Canadian. The fiction of
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M.G. VASSANJI explores East African Indian culture, both in Africa and in Canada. Frederick Ward, an African American author, gives voice to the indigenous African Nova Scotian (or Africadian') culture. Haitian Canadian author Dany LAFERRIERE explodes every conceivable Blackwhite sexual stereotype in his funny, boheniian novel Comment faire I'amour avec un Negre sans se fatiguer (1985). In their poems, the Trinidadian Canadian writers Claire HARRIS, M. Nourbese PHILIP, and Dionne BRAND fill in the blanks in Canadian and Caribbean history. Rita Wong, a Chinese Canadian poet, treats similar issues in her first book, monkey puzzle (1998). Among literary scholars, Arun Mukherjee skewers the liberal pretensions of Birney and other canonical white Anglo-Canadian authors. Other critics - Smaro KAMBOURELI, Linda HUTCHEON, Terry Goldie, Lucie Lequin, and Christl Verduyn (to name but a few) - edit ANTHOLOGIES, conduct interviews, and write essays promoting the democratic and multicultural CANON of Canadian literature. See also G.E. CLARKE, CULTURAL PLURALITY, MULTICULTURAL VOICES, Emile OLLIVIER, TABLOIDS AND PULP MAGAZINES, WOMEN'S STUDIES.
Further reading: Constance Backhouse, Colour Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada, 19001950 (Toronto: U Toronto P, 1999); Canadian Race Relations Foundation, Racism in Canada: Critical Readings (Willowdale, ON: CRRF, 1990); Nicholas Hudson, 'From "Nation" to "Race": The Origin of Racial Classification in Eighteenth-Century Thought,' Eighteenth-Century Studies 29.3 (1996): 247-64; Smaro Kamboureli, Canadian Multicultural Literature (Toronto: Oxford, 1996). George Elliott Clarke
RADDALL, Thomas Head. Novelist; b Hythe, England, 13 Nov 1903, d Liverpool, NS, i April 1994; son of Ellen (Gifford) and Thomas H. Raddall, army captain; emig to Nova Scotia 1913. In his memoirs In My Time (1976), Raddall recounts that he left school when his father was killed in France (1918) and that he became a seagoing wireless operator and bookkeeper near Liverpool, NS, writing his two dozen novels (His Majesty's Yankees, 1942; Roger Sudden, 1944), short story collections (The Pied Piper of Dipper Creek,
RADIO AND LITERATURE
1939; The Wedding Gift, 1945), and histories (Halifax, Warden of the North, 1948; The Path of Destiny, 1957) to help make ends meet. Popular throughout the Maritimes, Raddall's writing strives to entertain by narrative rather than to instruct; repeatedly the novels pursue HISTORICAL formulas, animating Nova Scotia's presence in the Seven Years and Revolutionary WARS. The sea, too, is a recurrent setting, as in the novel that many consider his best, a romance of a wireless operator on Sable Island, The Nymph and the Lamp (1950). Further reading: Alan R. Young, ed, Time and Place (Fredericton: Acadiensis, 1991). RADIO AND LITERATURE. Radio emerged as a literary form in the first decade of Canadian broadcasting. Programming in the 19205 and 19305 reveals the diverse role radio played in developing Canadian writing and the literary possibilities that arose from an ORAL performative medium. Early narrative and dramatic genres defined literary programming in the 19405 and 19505 golden age of Canadian radio broadcasting. During these years, the CANADIAN BROADCASTING CORPORATION (CBC)
W3S the
largest publisher of Canadian writing, with a cultural monopoly on literary talent and national audiences that numbered in the millions. Prior to the advent of Canadian television in 1952, rural Canadians turned to radio as a central forum of information, education, and entertainment - all functions served by literary programs. Radio listening took place in family living rooms and communal settings where life would halt for broadcasts of w.o. MITCHELL'S Jake and the Kid (1950-6) and Claude-Henri GRIGNON'S Un homme et sonpeche (1939-62), two highly popular radio serials. Radio actors such as John Drainie ('Jake' in Jake and the Kid), and Hector Charland and Estelle Mauffette (the miserly 'Seraphin' and his martyr wife 'Donalda' in Grignon's series) were not only accomplished professionals but also celebrities whose voices drew instant recognition and strong responses from radio fans. It is within this unique cultural climate that the CBC and its French network, Radio-Canada, broadcast programs that had a significant impact on the development of a literary voice on Canadian radio.
Canadian radio broadcasting began after the First World War and developed rapidly in the nationalist context of postwar reconstruction. In 1919, the Canadian Marconi Co of Montreal broadcast the first regular radio program on XWA (CFCF). By 1922, Canadian broadcasting was established, and Canada experienced a tremendous growth in radio stations and listeners. In 1923, the government-owned Canadian National Railways (CNR, now CN) created a radio department, equipping its transcontinental cars with receivers to publicize the railway and assist in Canadian settlement and colonization. Between 1923 and 1927, CN built stations in major cities and experimented with English- and French-language network broadcasting. By 1929, CN was airing regular coast-to-coast broadcasts on its trans-Canada and French networks. The (AIRD) Royal Commission on Radio Broadcasting was appointed in 1928 to define the organization and regulation of Canadian broadcasting. In its 1929 report, the commission recognized the educational and national purpose of radio in fostering national consciousness and national unity and it recommended a monopoly form of public ownership, operation, and control. After an intense debate, the government introduced the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Act of 1932, instituting a state-owned and publicly financed national broadcasting system and creating the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission (CRBC) to operate and regulate Canadian broadcasting in the public interest. A year later, the CRBC acquired CN's infrastructure and expanded its network to dozens of stations and affiliates. By 1936, when the CBC was established, Canadian radio audiences already numbered in the millions. CN and the CRBC developed radio as a highcultural medium fulfilling public-service and national-broadcasting objectives. Literary broadcasts on CN stations were part of a varied roster of educational and entertaining programs developed in cooperation with school boards, universities, and professional organizations such as the CANADIAN AUTHORS Assoc. Literary forms were narrative and dramatic. CN aired lectures, book REVIEWS, and school broadcasts. It also scheduled quality CHILDREN'S programs in the early evening: 'Bedtime Travel Tales,' Uncle Dick's 'Cosy Corner,' and French bedtime
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stories with Le Pere Antoine. The company's early radio literature took the form of dramatic literary recitations with vocal and instrumental arrangements featured in 'concerts,' a genre of studio programming prevalent in the 19205. Between 1927 and 1932, CNRV Vancouver also broadcast dramatic adaptations of mostly classical fiction, on its weekly series featuring the CNRV Players, the first repertory radio drama company. When the CRBC took over CN, it expanded literary programming, scheduling weekly book reviews on its Eastern, Western, and French-language networks. It also developed its French-language network further, airing such programs as Revons, c'est I'heure (I933~4), * weekly half-hour blend of literary readings by French Canadian poet, novelist, and radio pioneer Robert CROQUETTE with music by the Trio Mozart. Choquette first developed the series for CKAC in 1930-1, introducing Quebec listeners to a new recital format that privileged the literariness of the spoken word and drew on his skill at dramatic interpretation, generic translation, and oratorical detail. In 1935-6, the French network also broadcast an unprecedented series dramatizing 20 French Canadian novels, including 1'abbe Henri-Raymond CASGRAIN'S Lajongleuse and Laure CONAN'S L'oublie. The series is significant for its early recognition of Canadian literature as broadcasting material. The golden age of CBC literary broadcasting took shape in 1943-4, with the expansion of the CBC's Talks department and the proliferation of spoken-word programs aimed at developing Canadian literary CRITICISM and Canadian creative WRITING, particularly SHORT STORIES and POETRY, genres adapted to the narrative and dramatic radio voice. Many of these programs were developed by CBC Toronto producer Robert WEAVER for the CBC's prestigious Trans-Canada network and were aimed at developing alternative popular markets for Canadian writing. In 1946, Canadian Short Stones began airing i5-minute weekly readings of short fiction by established and new Canadian writers such as Ethel WILSON, Morley CALLAGHAN, and Hugh GARNER. Another Canadian short story program was Bernie Brad.cn Tells a Story, a series of i5-minute daily readings by the Vancouver actor-director and British radio personality. An
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important series for the development of the Canadian literary voice was CBC Wednesday Night (1947-63), launched as an innovation in North American radio broadcasting. Modelled on the British Broadcasting Corp's Third Programme, Wednesday Night aired a full evening a week (three hours) of high-culture programs that included literary talks, poetry, short stories, and adaptations. Performances included a 1954 dramatization of E.J. PRATT'S The Titanic and a musical comedy, 'The Hero of Mariposa' (19545), written and composed by Mavor MOORE and based on Stephen LEACOCK'S Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. The Canadian literary voice was popularized on radio by the CBC Stage series (1944-79) and radio serial productions. Created by the national supervisor of drama, Andrew ALLAN, as a showcase for Canadian writers and performers, CBC Stage aired several adaptations of 'classic' and contemporary Canadian fiction such as Louis HEM ON's Maria Chapdelaine, Ethel Wilson's Hetty Dorval, and Hugh MACLENNAN'S Two Solitudes (see RADIO DRAMA). Dramatizations of English and French Canadian fiction and poetry were also scheduled on CBC national school broadcasts, with the aim of fostering citizenship, and on literary broadcasts of the CBC's international service, with the aim of publicizing a Canadian literary voice abroad. The popular English-language serial Jake and the Kid was an adaptation of short fiction serialized in Maclean's magazine (1942-7); WO. Mitchell's stories of small-town prairie life drew some half-million listeners, becoming a valuable CBC instrument for national unity. Also popular was Whiteoaks of Jalna (1941—2), a serial adaptation of Mazo DE LA ROCHE'S novels, starring the distinguished British actress Barbara Everest with original MUSIC by Canadian composer John Weinzweig. During the 19405 and 19508, the CBC also expanded children's programs - including literary programs - and developed a children's department, encouraging Canadian writers to contribute original scripts. Two popular children's programs were Just Mary, created by children's author and storyteller Mary GRANNAN, a radio celebrity who wrote more than a thousand scripts for several CBC children's series, and the interactive Cuckoo Clock House, written by Babs Brown and narrated by Toronto actor
RADIO AND LITERATURE
and stage director Bill Needles. The series invited young listeners into its story room for readings and stories of Canadian relevance. Two golden-age highlights of the CBC children's department were the popular serials ANNE OF GREEN GABLES (1953) and Anne ofAvonlea (1954), adapted by Patricia JOUDRY and starring Toby Tar now. On French radio, Robert Choquette's Le cure de village (1935-8, CKAC) introduced the popular, long-running French-language radio serial ('radio-roman') form that launched le bel age of Quebec radio literature, beginning around 1939. During the 19405 and 19505, an unprecedented 10 to 15 radio serials aired in any given week, many in daily i5-minute segments and some destined to be broadcast regularly for more than 20 years. Radio serials, prevalent on the CBC's French-network during the golden age, provided both a vehicle for French Canadian cultural expression and a dramatic form for the popularization of French Canadian novels. Le cure de village, for instance, drew on FOLKLORE and popular language to construct a vision of Quebec village life, while Choquette's La pension Velder (1938-42), the first urban radio serial in Quebec, depicted modern life in Montreal. Claude-Henri Grignon's Un homme et son peche, an adaptation of his fiction, was the most popular radio serial in Quebec, airing for more than twenty years. In the early 19505, several other serial adaptations of French Canadian novels were broadcast: Roger LEMELIN'S Lafamille Plouffe (1952-5), Germaine GUEVREMONT'S Le survenant (1953-5), and Yves THERIAULT'S Maria Chapdelaine (1953-5), an adaptation of Louis Hemon's popular novel. During the golden age of literary programming, the French network paralleled its Englishlanguage counterpart with educational literary broadcasts aired on Radio-College (1941-56) and dramatic adaptations of novels featured in series such as Grands Romans Canadiens (1951). A noteworthy poetic event was the 1947 radio premiere of Choquette's 8,ooo-verse epic poem 'Suite Marine,' read by Jacques Auger, a radio actor known for his perfect diction. 'Suite Marine' was broadcast as a poetic drama series (1947-8) and later published in 1953 as a poem in 12 cantos, garnering several awards. Storytelling series, most of them broadcast as children's pro-
grams, drew on ORAL tradition - for example Contes et legendes de mon pays (1946-7) and Contes d'Yves Theriault (1948-9). At the height of CBC literary production, in 1949, the MASSET Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters, and Sciences was formed primarily to examine Canadian radio and television broadcasting. While the commission's 1951 report strengthened CBC radio's literary programming, it also redefined the relation between radio and literature by recommending the development of a national television service and the creation of a funding council. The rapid development of Canadian television in the 19505 eroded CBC Radio's cultural monopoly on literary talent and audiences, and the creation of the CANADA COUNCIL in 1957 altered the CBC's role as a patron of the literary arts. The golden age of literary radio broadcasting drew to a close by the early 19605. During the 19505, however, CBC literary programming continued to expand with increased book reviews and literary talks. In 1954, Weaver developed Anthology (1954-85), a half-hour weekly literary magazine featuring talks, poetry, and short stories. The series consolidated literary programming, which had been irregularly scheduled in the 19405 and early 19505, and became the largest of the literary magazines, broadcasting original, published, and commissioned material. Works premiered included short stories by Alice MUNRO and excerpts from Mordecai RICHLER'S novels. Many golden-age series continued broadcasting into the 19605 and 19705, and some new programs of literary importance were developed. In 1964, the CBC's NORTHERN Service created Indian Magazine, later Our Native Land (1964-85), the first weekly half-hour program devoted to NATIVE affairs broadcasting. Hosted by Native actress Bernelda Wheeler, the series included storytelling, legends, and literary readings broadcast to a nationwide audience. In the late 19605, the CBC's weekly national talks program Ideas was produced by poet-broadcaster Phyllis WEBB and featured literary broadcasts. In 1979, Weaver launched CBC Radio's literary competition with categories for poetry and short stories. In the 19805 and 19905, CBC Radio continued to develop and showcase Canadian literary talent. English- and French-language programs
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included series broadcasting both original and published literature, popular national magazines with some literary features (Peter GZOWSKI'S M.orningside'), new discussion and conversational formats (Deux sollicitudes - conversations between Margaret ATWOOD and Victor-Levy BEAULIEU), literary interviews (Eleanor Wachtel's Writers and Company), and popular dramatizations of Canadian fiction such as the 1987-8 five-part adaptation of Timothy FINDLEY'S Famous Last Words. These literary broadcasts reflect the continuing impact of CBC golden-age programming policies and practices on contemporary literary radio broadcasting. See also FILM, Reuben SHIP. Further reading: Pierre Page, Repertoire des oeuvres de la litterature radiophonique quebecoise 19301970 (Montreal: Fides, 1975); Mary Vipond, Listening In: The First Decade of Canadian Broadcasting, 1922-1932 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP, 1992). G. De Sousa
RADIO DRAMA. Canadian radio DRAMA, in both English and French, has played a number of major roles in Canadian culture, from the 19308 to the present. Principal among these was to create and support a national professional theatre in each of the two official languages. As Northrop FRYE observed, 'The CBC is one of the major defences behind which a Canadian culture can survive ... and nowhere has [CBC] radio been so important as in the field of drama/ Second, radio drama served to interpret, to very large audiences across Canada, the changing social and cultural attitudes of the turbulent 20th century - and even to guide these attitudes. Canadian radio drama began in the earliest days of RADIO, that is, at the start of public and commercial radio broadcasting in the mid-i92os. It was Canada's response to commercial US broadcasting, when the multiplicity of attractive American programs, and the efforts of the American radio networks to control the airwaves over the whole of North America, threatened to further culturally colonialize Canada. The original Canadian national radio network was the radio department of the Canadian National Railways, which in 1923 began broad-
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casting programs from studios in cities across the country (Moncton, Montreal, Ottawa, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Vancouver). The first CNR (now CN) radio plays were live broadcasts of dramatic readings of well-known English-language stage scripts; these broadcast 'plays' were hardly understandable to listeners who had not previously read the summaries published in the CN Radio schedules. The first individual CN drama department play, 'The Rosary,' was broadcast by the CNRA Players on 5 May 1925 from the CN's Moncton station, CNRA. Subsequently, four other plays were produced by the CNRA Players, from Sept 1925 to Feb 1926. By this time other CN radio stations, in Toronto and Vancouver, had begun play production. The first weekly anthology series of plays was broadcast from the CN drama department's Vancouver studios (CNRV) between 1926 and 1932. This series, called the CNRV Players, was produced and directed by Jack Gilmore, and included adaptations from American, European, and British stage plays (especially Shakespeare), and some local plays commissioned especially for this series. In 1931 the London theatre director Tyrone Guthrie (who had both written and directed radio plays for the BBC drama department in the mid-i92os) was invited to the CN radio department's Montreal studios, to direct an ambitious weekly English-language docudrama series on Canadian history, written by the Canadian playwright Merrill DENISON. Guthrie directed the first 14 weekly plays in 1931; one of his senior actors, the stage-trained Rupert Caplan (and producer Esmie Moonie) completed the series in 1932. In 1933 the CN radio department was formally nationalized as the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission (the CRBC). In its three-year existence (until it was transformed into the CANADIAN BROADCASTING CORPORATION - the CBC - in the fall of 1936), the CRBC created 17 network series of mainly English-language dramas. The best of these series was the Radio Theatre Guild, produced by Rupert Caplan, who was to become the senior Montreal drama producer for CBC in the early 19405. This series included original plays, and adaptations from the contemporary British and European stage repertoire. Among the best-known of the CBC's other dramas in the 19305 were
RADIO DRAMA
Don Henshaw's Forgotten Footsteps series, and the serial Youngbloods of Beaver Bend. The transformation of the CRBC to the CBC brought few immediate changes in drama programming. But the splitting of the corporation into English- and French-language networks did allow for more French-language drama productions. It also virtually completely separated the two radio-dramatic cultures. A number of individual and private Canadian stations had also begun to produce radio plays during the late 19205. Notable was the drama series produced from 1928 until 1939 by the drama extension department of U Alberta, over its station, CKUA, Edmonton. (In the early years, adaptations of stage scripts were frequent.) From 1933 this series was directed by Sheila Marryat, and by the mid-i93os was including a number of original plays by local writers, particularly Elsie Park GOWAN and Gwen Pharis RINGWOOD. For several years until late 1938 this drama feed from CKUA was being bought for broadcast by the CBC prairie network. CKUA's drama department was the prime training place and dramatic showcase for Alberta's growing theatre community; it played a crucial role in transforming an amateur drama scene into a professional theatre scene. It is the first notable example of this important role to be played by Canadian radio theatre in the development of professional stage theatre in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, and Halifax. In French, significant Canadian radio-play production also began in the early 19305. The most important early contribution was made by the private Montreal station CKAC, which was a pioneer of both individual radio plays and daily and weekly serials; the first series of French-language anthology plays, Le theatre dej. O. Lambert, began in 1933. Robert CHOQUETTE who was to become a famous and prolific radio playwright in the ensuing decades - was the first to create a significant radio-theatre series, broadcast from Montreal station CRCM in 1934. Soon there was also a considerable number of play series on other stations, particularly CBF the French-language CBC national network (est 1937). As for weekly serials: the first of CKACs radio serials was Alfred Rousseau's L'auberge des chercheurs d'or, broadcast from 1935 to 1938. Another CKAC serial was Rue principal, written
by Edouard Baudry (from 1937 to about 1944) and Paul Gury (to 1959). Many French-language radio serial dramas were broadcast in the following two decades, on private stations and on CBF; the vast majority were written locally, including Roger LEMELIN'S Lafamille Plouffe and Claude-Henri GRIGNON'S Un homme etsonpeche (both adapted from novels). For radio drama to progress as a new dramatic form, playwrights and director-producers across the country were obliged during the 19305 to invent and learn the new artistic and technical skills necessary to adapt stage drama to the radio. In this exclusively sound-defined medium, without any of the visual resources of the stage, a complex set of new techniques for dramatic communication developed - the most useful include a form of dramatic and lyric text unique to the radio; vocal expression; and sound effects. These techniques (and others) helped the aural medium to create ultimately visual scenes in the audiences' imaginations. Music was an important element as identifier of individual characters, creator of specific emotional backgrounds, and marker of scenes and scene changes. Rupert Lucas, the first supervisor of CBC English drama, extended the practices of the CRBC. The program mix was similar: original radio plays, supplemented by adaptations from the modern and classical stage repertory (including Shakespeare); dramatizations from fiction; and drama DOCUMENTARIES. To supplement the weekly drama series produced in Toronto and Montreal, Lucas established similar series in Vancouver and Winnipeg. When the Second World War broke out, he helped make CBC radio drama a central instrument of proBritish WAR education and propaganda for English Canadians. It was not quite as simple for CBF, but the French-language CBF drama department nevertheless also played an important role in reporting - and even guiding French Canadian public opinion on war-related issues. These educational and propaganda functions of radio drama paralleled the treatment of war themes on American radio drama. Indeed, most US wartime radio drama was at least strongly patriotic, if not outright propaganda. By the end of the war, the US radio giants moved quickly to
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complete the creation of the television networks which soon replaced American radio as the major entertainment and commercial medium (see FILM). Thus, the end of the 'golden age' of American cultural radio theatre may be most accurately dated from 1940 to 1941, when US radio drama became propagandized. This had a major impact on Canadian radio drama, which had previously been very much in the shadow of the prestige American drama series (by Welles, Corwin, Oboler). Canadian radio drama, without much further competition from the United States - nor from Canadian television until well into the 19505 - entered into its own golden age towards the end of the war. Of course, it took a theatre professional with a powerful vision of the potential of Canadian theatre to accomplish this, and the CBC found him in 1943 in the person of Andrew ALLAN. Allan had been a writer-producer-director in Toronto private radio from the mid-i93os. He had moved to London in 1938 to work as a producer of 'shows' in private British offshore radio. He returned to Canada at the outbreak of war in the fall of 1939, to become the supervisor of CBC Vancouver radio drama. Here he employed on his productions a number of talented Vancouver theatre actors and writers, such as Fletcher MARKLE, John Drainie, and Lister SINCLAIR. Allan's reputation grew with the success of his productions, particularly the experimental drama series Baker's Dozen (written by Markle). At the end of 1943, he replaced the departing Rupert Lucas as CBC national supervisor of drama, in Toronto. Allan had a clear understanding of the difficulties of aspiring Canadian theatre professionals at the start of the 19405, hampered as they were by the ownership of theatres and stage productions by professional British and American companies. Professional Canadian theatre companies were relatively few, professional productions of Canadian plays even fewer, while Canadian theatrical hopefuls could aspire mainly to victories in the semi-amateur DOMINION DRAMA FESTIVALS. Allan dared to believe that radio would provide a new medium with large countrywide audiences for a real professional Canadian national theatre, and he set out quite purposefully to make his vision reality. He created a repertory group of the best Canadian
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radio dramatists and actors he could find (including some of his brightest Vancouver talents), and in early 1944 he developed a major national hour-long weekly radio-drama anthology series to support them, called Stage (later CBC Stage). He also encouraged similar art series (though only a half-hour long) in the REGIONAL drama production sites, including (by 1948) Halifax. Allan himself produced and directed the Stage series, which he subtitled 'the state of theatre in Canada.' This claim for such a close relation between stage and radio theatre was quite logical in those days, when all radio dramas were live-to-air productions. Moreover, Allan included among his productions a large number of original Canadian plays, written mainly by his repertory dramatists, including, principally, Markle, Sinclair, w.o. MITCHELL, Len PETERSON, Patricia JOUDRY, Gerald Noxon, Reuben SHIP, Joseph Schull, Mac Shoub, Hugh Kemp, Alan King, Mavor MOORE, and Tommy Tweed. Many of these plays from 1945 on were dealing with the most serious postwar social and personal issues, and from an anti-traditional and very frank point of view. Allan educated his audiences in contemporary stage drama by also producing - in this series - adaptations from the major modern European playwrights. He obtained the services of a highly talented and imaginative composer-orchestra leader, Lucio Agostini, to write and conduct the original music for these live productions. Allan produced Stage for more than a decade, and returned in 1960-1 for a final season. It can be demonstrated that among the theatre professionals trained by Allan, many were directly involved in the founding of the new STRATFORD Shakespeare Festival and in the creation of Canadian television drama (both begun in the early 19505), as well as in the burgeoning of professional Canadian stage theatre at the end of the 19605. Allan was also involved in a number of other series, most important being the weekly evening-long cultural program CBC Wednesday Night (later Tuesday Night) created in 1947 by CBC program supervisor Harry BOYLE, which included not only full-length radio plays, original and adaptations, but also music and documentaries. All four senior CBC English drama producers were involved in its productions:
RADIO DRAMA
Allan, Esse W LJUNGH, andj. Frank Willis in Toronto; and Rupert Caplan, who had abandoned his CBC administrative position in 1941 to become senior Montreal drama producer. When Allan retired in 1955, Ljungh replaced him as national drama supervisor. The stage-trained Ljungh, whose style was different from that of Allan but, with his fifteen years of radio drama experience, just as professional and creative, carried on for another decade the tradition of CBC drama as the 'Canadian national theatre (and regional theatres) on the air/ Between 1944 and 1960 alone, some six thousand plays were produced in over a hundred CBC series, of which half were original Canadian radio plays. By 1960 Canada's own television networks were competing with radio drama for the audiences that Allan and his fellow producers had done much to create; the short-lived golden age of traditional Canadian radio drama was nearing its end. CBC radio drama production continued apace, however, until the beginning of the 19705, when the strong surge of Canadian professional stage companies and Canadian stage dramatists usurped the CBC drama department's claim to be the only 'Canadian national theatre.' The next generation of English CBC producers, particularly John REEVES in Toronto and Gerald Newman in Vancouver, began new experiments in dramatic techniques and structures in the 19605 and 19705. While such important series as Stage and Wednesday (Tuesday) Night were produced, by Ljungh and then Reeves, until well into the 19705, traditional liveto-air productions were nevertheless being replaced from the late 19505 by taped productions crafted in the CBC's new editing studios, like film or television plays. This change - perhaps the single most significant technical transformation in the creation of radio drama - led the well-known concert pianist Glenn Gould to begin experiments in 1967 with a revolutionary new form of taped radio documentary drama (in which he admitted frankly to being influenced directly by Andrew Allan's CBC Stage plays), organized by fugal structures of musical composition. The best-known of these experiments are the three 'plays' of Gould's Solitude Trilogy, created for the CBC from 1967 to 1974. Gould's work has had a permanent influence on contemporary European radio producers in the
creation of experimental sound-drama productions, called ars acoustica. But Gould's experiments, in the direct line from Allan, seem to have had little influence on his contemporaries among Canadian radio-drama producers, and only CBC producer Don Mowatt has in the 19905 created radio productions recognizably making use of ars acoustica techniques. On the French-language stations, a drama mix similar to that of the CBC was being produced during the golden age (19405 to 1970), mainly from CBF Montreal: original anthology plays, adaptations from classical and modern international theatre, and dramatizations from fiction; among the playwrights involved were Robert Choquette, Hubert AQUIN, Marcel DUBE, Louis Pelland, and Yves THERIAULT. However, by the late 19605, French-language play productions helped to train a new generation of francophone playwrights and actors, and provided stage writers with opportunities to test out original plays commenting on important local and national issues, for later transfer to the 'boards'. Among the dozens of French-language radio-play series broadcast during radio's golden age, the experimental Les nouveautes dramatiqu.es, produced by Guy Beaulne from 1950 to the early 19605, paralleled Stage as the most influential and important drama series on CBF; over 300 original plays were produced. The theatre professionals involved included Jacques GODBOUT, Jacques LANGUIRAND, Felix LECLERC, Marcel Dube, Marcel Cabay, Louis-Georges Carrier, Robert Gadouas, Francois Moreau, and Yves Theriault. But by the late 19605, French-language radio play productions were, like their English parallels, competing with the stage and television drama productions that radio had helped to foster, for audiences that radio had itself done much to develop. The history of Canadian radio drama in the age of television and a vigorous stage theatre has been understandably uneven. On the one hand the CBC has made extreme efforts to popularize English radio drama, to increase its populist audience (without great success). During the 19805, while there continued to be a large number of dramatic series and serials, more of them were MYSTERY, detective, and adventure plays, while fewer were serious art plays like the cultural series of the golden age. This was partly
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owing to the fact that radio in general was becoming less and less a medium of ideas and more a conduit for music of all kinds (classical, experimental, and popular). The 'talk radio' and the radio play of issues were replaced by the 'talking heads' of television. Canadian intellectual and cultural radio seemed to make a strong return in the 19905; but with some exceptions the popular expectations of radio drama established in the 19805 have defined the populist forms of much subsequent radio drama. Moreover, the drastic cutbacks in government grants to the corporation led the English-language CBC to feature a much larger proportion of dramas produced in Britain and AUSTRALIA. In the 19905, the CBC radio-drama producer John Juliani, based in Vancouver, played a major role in preserving and extending the traditions of English Canadian radio drama. Before his retirement, he created a large number of his own original productions, as well as training new producers across the network and co-producing plays with them. The only CBC producer who was attempting to carry on the original experimental work of Glenn Gould in the creation of 'musical-dramatic documentaries' - that is, a combination of dramatic 'dialogue' commenting on aspects of Canadian society, with the creation of experimental musical sound-fugues - was Vancouver CBC's radiodrama and music producer Don Mowatt (eg, Mowatt's production of George BOWERING'S 'Vancouver'). With Mowatt's retirement also, there seemed as the 2oth century ended to be few links between CBC producers and the European ars acoustica experiments (led by Klaus Schoening of the Western German Radio Network in Cologne). Nevertheless, in that same decade, a number of experienced, imaginative, and active English-language CBC drama producers emerged, including Wayne Schmalz at CBC Regina and Vancouver, who has attempted the Andrew Allan magic of deliberately encouraging new playwrights and actors, and producing their work imaginatively (and also making efforts to publish). In French, by contrast, there seem to have been almost no radio drama productions by private stations after the early 19703. CBF continues to create radio dramas, but in far fewer numbers, and more rarely are these art dramas.
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On the other hand, while the two English CBC networks have become interchangeable in the types of programming presented, with much repetition of the same programs on both of them (though that programming still includes some traditional drama as well as good ideas programs, music and interviews), CBF calls its FM network le chaine culturelle' - the cultural network - and on that network it seems to be supporting traditional cultural programming, including radio drama (though in reduced quantities), some of which are indeed seemingly influenced by the leading-edge ars acoustica experiments. See also FILM AND TELEVISION, MUSIC, ORAL LITERATURE, POPULAR CULTURE.
Further reading: Canadian Theatre R, 36 (Fall 1982) [issue on 'Radio Drama, Canada's Dramatic Voice,' ed. Robert Wallace]; Renee Legris and Pierre Page, 'Le theatre a la radio et a la television au Quebec,' Archives des lettres canadiennes, 5, Le theatre canadien-francais (1976): 291318; Howard Fink et al, Canadian National Theatre on the Air, A Critical Bibliography ... 1929+ (3 vols) vol i (Toronto: U Toronto P, 1983); vol 2 (Kingston: Quarry, 1995); vol 3 (Montreal: Centre for Broadcasting Studies, in progress); all 3 vols are on Web site of Concordia U Centre for Broadcasting Studies; Howard Fink, 'The sponsor's v. the nation's choice: North American radio drama,' Radio Drama, ed Peter Lewis (London & New York: Longmans, 1981). Howard R. Fink
RADIO-CANADA, the Montreal-based Frenchlanguage division of the CANADIAN BROADCASTING CORPORATION. RADISSON, Pierre-Esprit. Explorer, fur trader; b Avignon, France (?), c 1640, d England 1710; likely the son of Madeleine (Henaut) and Pierre-Esprit Radisson of Carpentras. Sometime before 1651 (when for about three years he was a CAPTIVE of the IROQUOIS), Radisson arrived in NEW FRANCE (probably to join his half-sister, Marguerite Hayet, who in 1653, after her first husband had been killed in a raid, married Medard Chouart Des Groseilliers). In 1654, Radisson was again in France, but he returned to Canada later that year, at which time, as recorded in the JESUIT RELATIONS, Des Groseil-
RAJIC
Hers had already embarked on a two-year EXPLORATION of the west. Recent research indicates that Radisson did not (as had long been thought) accompany him. Radisson did, however, join Paul RAGUENAU in a Jesuit venture into Iroquois country in 1757, when (as MARIE DE L'INCARNATION reports), Radisson's knowledge of the language proved invaluable. In 165960, Radisson accompanied Des Groseilliers to the lands west of L Superior, and there they acquired substantial wealth in furs, but the confiscation of these furs by officials in Montreal set in motion their dissatisfaction with the ANCIEN REGIME. By 1665 they were in England, seeking alternative financial backing, and their success led directly to the HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY charter in 1670. For the next twenty years, Radisson repeatedly changed sides, supporting English, then French, and then English factions, finally retiring to London in 1687. A1669 translation of his travels is in the Samuel Pepys papers in the Bodleian Library, Oxford; it contains numerous accounts of fictitious journeys in addition to those he actually undertook. Voyages of Peter Esprit Radisson appeared in 1885. RADU, Robert Kenneth. Teacher, poet, fiction writer; b Windsor, ON, 4 Jan 1945; son of Anna (Corches) and John Radu, steel worker. Radu twice won the QSPELL Prize, first in 1989 for his debut novel, Distant Relations, and then for A Private Performance (1998), a collection of stories about Romania. Radu, who is of Romanian heritage, uses fiction and poetry to explore the conflicts that occur between different backgrounds and modes of living. His cycle of poems, Romanian Suite (1996), weaves myth, religion, personal and cultural history, as well as contemporary politics, into an exploration of citizenship and identity. The stories of A Private Performance depict cultural, social, and sexual alienation. Further reading: Martin Townsend, 'Kenneth Radu: Disaster and Daily Life,' Quill a Marxist analysis of mercantile and industrial capitalism, ethnic tensions, CLASS struggle, and political instability in Canada from the preColumbian era to CONFEDERATION. James Doyle
James Doyle
RYERSON, Adolphus Egerton. Preacher, writer, policy-maker; b Charlotteville Township, UC, 24
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RYGA, George. Playwright, novelist, poet; b Deep Creek, AB, 27 July 1932, d Summerland, BC, 18 Nov 1987; son of George and Maria
SAAYAACH'APIS
(Kolodka) Ryga, UKRAINIAN immigrants. George Ryga grew up alongside the NATIVE people of whom he would later write. He left school at 12, thereafter studying by correspondence. In 1949, the BanffSchool of Fine Arts awarded him several creative-writing scholarships, but these were later retracted because of a poem he had written protesting the Korean WAR. In 1955 he travelled to Europe, where he studied Robert Burns's use of folk vernacular and attended the World Peace Assembly in Helsinki, meeting other politically minded writers including Chile's Pablo Neruda. In 1956, after returning to Edmonton, Ryga published a collection of poems titled Song of My Hands. He spent the next five years writing fiction - some 40 stories, many adapted for CBC RADIO. Ryga adapted one of these stories, 'The Pine Tree Ghetto,' into his first play, Indian, which garnered critical acclaim in 1962, when it was produced by CBC-TV Indian dramatizes the conflict between an itinerant Indian farmhand and his white employer, invoking - but then complicating - common Indian stereotypes as it goes. Five years later, these issues received darker articulation when The Ecstasy of Rita Joe Ryga's best-known work - premiered at Vancouver's Queen Elizabeth Playhouse. Published in 1970, Rita Joe portrays an Indian girl who leaves the traditional culture represented by her father, only to be destroyed by white URBAN society. Caught between two worlds, she is at home in neither; the horrific rape and murder that end her story seem to be her destiny from the start, a terrible imperative of the margins she occupies. Rita Joe also exemplifies the formal experimentation Ryga employed - with varying degrees of success - throughout his career as a dramatist. His plays are characterized by the juxtaposition of intense REALISM with sudden shifts in chronology and memory, and the employment of non-traditional stage media, such as FILM projection. The interim between these two plays saw the beginning of Ryga's career as a novelist in the publication of Hungry Hills (1963) and Ballad of a Stone-picker (1966). After Ritajoe, Ryga also wrote a number of plays that were successful in Canada and abroad. Grass and Wild Strawberries (1969) is a double-edged exploration of the strife between hippie culture and the 'establishment';
it was followed by Captives of a Faceless Drummer (1971), a play that echoes events from Quebec's OCTOBER CRISIS. A Letter to My Son (1981), perhaps Ryga's best play after Ritajoe, portrays an aging Ukrainian immigrant's attempt to come to terms with his Canadian-educated son, and was nominated for a Governor General's Award. Ryga also published a third novel, Night Desk, in 1976, as well as a set of impressionistic reflections on his own travels through China in Beyond the Crimson Morning (1979). His last novel was In the Shadow of a Vulture (1985). Further reading: Christopher Innes, Politics and the Playwright: George Ryga (Toronto: Simon & Pierre, 1985). Michael Greene
SAAYAACH'APIS (Saayaacchapis, Saayaac'apis). Ts'ishaa'athh (Sheshaht) trader, orator, autobiographer; b Hiikwis village (now Equis Reserve) on Barkley Sound, Vancouver Island, BC, c 1840, d near Port Alberni, BC, c 1920. In 1913-14, in the village of Tts'uuma'as, he dictated a large volume of stories and songs, and an extensive autobiography, in the Nootka (Nuuchahnulth) language, to the linguist Edward SAPIR. For several more years he dictated texts to his grandson Hiixuq'in'is (Alex Thomas, 1895-1971), who had learned from Sapir how to write his own language and who thereby became the first Nuuchahnulth writer. Many of these texts, edited by Sapir and Morris Swadesh, were published in 1939; many more are still awaiting publication. Saayaach'apis (whose name means 'Standing high up on the beach') lived an active life but was blinded in old age and turned to the tasks of reminiscence and reflection. He is not the best mythteller transcribed by Hiixuq'in'is and Sapir, but his autobiography is probably the fullest, and certainly one of the richest, yet recorded by any Aboriginal Canadian. His knowledge and his love of a lost world are two of the things that make it so. Another is the fact that it was shaped entirely by its author and spoken in his tongue. There is none of the usual anthropological cutting, pasting, and rewriting. The text was not obtained through a sieve of leading questions nor recast by the transcriber to fit the preconceptions of English-speaking readers. There is
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no doubt that editing occurred - that speeches were rewritten, and events rescheduled and reshaped - but all this editing was done by Saayaach'apis himself, and by the spirit-beings of his memory. See also WAKASHAN, MYTHOLOGY. Further reading: Susan Golla, A Tale of Two Chiefs: Nootka Narrative and the Ideology of Chiefship,'J de la Societe des Americanistes 74 (1988): 107-23; Edward Sapir, 'Sayach'apis, a Nootka Trader,' in Collected Works, vol 4: Ethnology (1994), 'The Rival Whalers,' in Collected Works, vol 6: American Indian Languages 2 (1991), Collected Works, vols 11-12: Nootka Texts and Ethnography (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, forthcoming); Edward Sapir & Morris Swadesh, Nootka Texts (Philadelphia: Linguistic Soc. of America, I939-) Robert Bringhurst
SADIQ, Nazneen (Nazneen Sheikh). Novelist; b Sirinagar, Kashmir, India, 19 June 1944, daughter of Dilafroze Anwar Sheikh (Sirajuddin), educationist and consultant to the Pakistan government on rural women's projects, and Mohammad Anwar Sheikh, civil servant with Pakistan's ministry of finance. She moved to Pakistan after the partition of the Indian subcontinent, attended Karachi and Punjab universities (graduating with a BA in philosophy and English), and emigrated to Canada in 1964. Her novel for adults, Ice Bangles (1988), which she calls 'semi-autobiographical,' follows the experience of a young woman who leaves a wealthy home in Pakistan to join her husband, who is studying at U Toronto. Several other books include Camels Can Make You Homesick and Other Stories (1985), Heartbreak High (1988), and the Degrassi Junior High series book Lucy (1989) all stories for young readers, strongly influenced by the experiences of her own children and of her friends' children. As a result, they explore the difficulties and rewards of South Asians growing up in Canada. See ASIA. R. Clark
SADLIER, Mary Ann Madden. Author; b Cootehill, Co Caven, Ireland, 31 Dec 1820; d Montreal 5 April 1903; daughter of Francis Madden, merchant; m James Sadlier Nov 1846. One of North America's leading Irish Catholic
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writers, Mary Ann Madden published her first book, Tales of the Olden Time (1845), shortly after immigrating alone to Montreal. Marriage to a publisher led to an extended residence in New York and facilitated a career that produced more than 60 titles in many genres. Like many widows of men in the book trades, Sadlier took over her husband's business after his death. One of her daughters, author Anna Theresa Sadlier (1854-1932), continued the family tradition of sectarian literary production. See IRELAND. Further reading: Michele Lacombe, 'Frying Pans and Deadlier Weapons: The Immigrant Novels of Mary Anne Sadlier,' Essays on Canadian Writing 29 (Summer 1984): 96-116. Carole Gerson
SAFARIK, Allan. Poet, editor, publisher; b Vancouver 27 Sept 1948; son of Kathleen (Balmer) and Norman Safarik, a fish merchant. Safarik studied at Simon Fraser U before co-founding Blackfish P. His first book, Okira (1976), exhibits a spare lyricism that contrasts sharply with the macabre humour that emerges in his later poetry. The Naked Machine Rides On (1980), God Loves Us like Earthworms Love Wood (1983), and On the Way to Ethiopia (1991) abound in SURREAL coincidences and startling images of dismemberment treated with grim humour. Safarik also edited Vancouver Poetry (1986) and, with Dolores Reimer, Quotations on the Great One: The Little Book of Wayne Gretzky (1992). R. Gooding
SAGARD, Gabriel (Theodat). Recollet priest, historian, TRAVEL writer; b France, before 1604 (by which time he was a priest), d c 1650. Sagard arrived in Canada in 1623, spending the next year among the HURON south of Georgian Bay before being recalled to Paris in 1624. His twovolume Le grand voyage au pays des Hurons (1632) and four-volume L'histoire du Canada (1636) constitute the earliest efforts to describe the history of the Recollet and Jesuit missions, and the most complete (if error-ridden) list of words in the Huron LANGUAGE. Praised for his descriptions of NATIVE life, and criticized for his acceptance of tales of demonic possession, Sagard left the Recollets for the Franciscans in the 16305.
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SAGARIS, Lake. Poet, fiction writer; b Montreal 29 Sept 1956; daughter of Lois (McClelland), a teacher, and Donald Batten, an insurance executive. Lake Sagaris grew up in Toronto. After graduating from U British Columbia in 1981, she moved to Chile, where she now lives, working as a writer, editor, and correspondent for international news agencies (including CTV and National Public Radio) and as a freelance contributor to a wide variety of media in Europe and North and South America. She has also edited and translated two bilingual Spanish-English ANTHOLOGIES of Canadian writing, published in Chile. She writes in both English and Spanish. Her experiences in Chile during the years of military dictatorship are reflected in her first book of poems, the bilingual Exile Home/Exilio en lapatria (1986), which deals with the claustrophobia of political repression. After the First Death (1996) blends testimony of the suffering of the Chilean people during those years with her own memories and insights into Chilean history. The poems of Circus Love (1991) use the terrors and joys of the carnival as a metaphor for Latin America, while Medusa's Children (1993) is a poetic comparison of the islands of NEWFOUNDLAND and Chiloe, juxtaposing extreme North and South, in order to discover the communality of human experience in the Americas. Hugh Hazelton
SAIA, Louis. Playwright; b Montreal 25 May 1950. After studying at Cegep Lionel-Groulx, Louis Saia wrote a number of plays in collaboration with Louise Roy (Une amie d'enfance, 1976; Ida Lachance, 1978; and Bachelor, 1979) and Claude Meunier (Broue, 1979; Appelez-moi Stephane, 1980; and Les voisins, 1980). His works are characterized by an absurdist depiction of the mundane lives of middle-class individuals whose blissful ignorance of political issues and endemic alienation from the dominant ideological discourse take the form of ridiculous materialism and superficiality. More recently he has worked mainly in FILM, directing two of the most successful comedies in the history of Quebec cinema, Les Boys (1997) and Les Boys II (i999). Andre Loiselle
SAINT-DENIS, Janou (Jeannine). Actor, director, poet; b Montreal 6 May 1930; daughter of Victoire Demers. After working as director and actor in the Montreal company Les Satellites (1956-61), she went to France for 10 years, and on her return founded Editions du Soudain (1972). She published her first collection of poetry, Mots a dire, that same year. In 1975, she founded and became organizer of 'Place aux poetes,' poetry evenings that were held in various cafes, galleries, and studios in Montreal, at which she recited her texts, commented on-current events - her anti-establishment writings demand change - and invited others to recite their poetry. Later works include her poetic biographical essay about her friend Claude GAUVREAU (1978), the person who gave her the nickname Janou, and such collections as Hold-up mental (1988), which contains some autobiographical comments. Margaret Cook
SAINTS are persons who are deemed to have lived exemplary lives, and who, after their death, can be appealed to in prayer to effect cures, resolve difficulties, prevent problems, achieve military successes, and the like; within the Roman Catholic faith (see RELIGION), saints are believed to have the power to intercede with God to effect these miracles. Several Canadians have been canonized or beatified. The earliest were Jean de BREBEUF, Gabriel LALEMANT, and other 17th-century missionaries; later figures include Marguerite BOURGEOYS, Mere MARIE DE L'INCARNATION, and Kateri Tekakwitha (see Leonard COHEN). Numerous Canadian sites are named after saints, revealing the influence of the church in early EXPLORATION and settlement (see LAND); these include St Stephen, NB; St Andrews, NB; St Anthony, NF (the site of Wilfred GRENFELL'S mission hospital); St Paul, AB; St-Denis, QC (one of the centres of Patriote resistance during the REBELLION of 1837); Sioux Ste Marie, ON; St Louis, SK; and St-Boniface, MB (a French settlement now within the metropolitan jurisdiction of Winnipeg). Ste Marie Among the Hurons was a 17th-century Recollet and later JESUIT mission; Ste-Anne-de-Beaupre is an important Roman Catholic pilgrimage site east of Quebec City. St-Jean-Baptiste (for whom the city of Saint John, NB, is also named) is the
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patron saint of QUEBEC, his feast day being June 24. About other saints there is more dispute. The origin of the name St John's, NF, for example, is uncertain, beyond the fact that it first appeared on a 16th-century Portuguese map; the Saint Lawrence River was named for St Laurence of Rome, a 3rd-century martyr, but the saint's celebrated manner of death (being roasted on a gridiron) has been dismissed as a narrative invention; and St Catharines, ON, (alluded to in work by Malcolm LOWRY among others) was named not for St Catherine (whether of Alexandria, Genoa, or Siena) but for Catharine Robertson, the deceased wife of an early merchant settler, Robert Hamilton. The RCMP vessel St Roch (named for a 14th-century French saint) was the first ship to sail in both directions through the Arctic Ocean (1940-4), thus reaffirming Canadian sovereignty over the NORTH; it is housed in Vancouver. Gabrielle ROY turned the municipality of St-Henri, on the south shore of the St Lawrence, into a resonant setting for her study of urban poverty, Bonheur d'occasion; and Mordecai RICHLER used St Urbain Street (once the central street for JEWISH immigrants in Montreal, but named initially for a 3rd-century pope) as the setting for The Street and numerous other books. SALISH ORAL LITERATURES. Within the Salish family there are 23 languages. Ten are/ were spoken exclusively in British Columbia, one has dialects spoken in British Columbia and Washington State (Colville-Okanagan [Nsilxcin]), and twelve are/were spoken only in the United States (mostly in Washington, and one each in Oregon, Idaho, and Montana). The Salish LANGUAGES as languages can be divided into five distinct groups; the Canadian languages fall into three of these: i) Bella Coola (Nuxalk); 2) Central (or coast) Salish, comprising Comox, Pentlatch, Sechelt (Shashishalhem), Squamish (Skwxwu/mesh), Halkomelem, and Northern Straits; and 3) Interior Salish, comprising Lillooet (Statimcets), Thompson (Nlaka'pamux), Shuswap (Secwepemctsin), and Okanagan. Of the Canadian languages, only Pentlatch is no longer spoken; Nuxalk, and the dialects of Comox, Halkomelem, Statimcets, Nlaka'pamux, Secwepemctsin, and Okanagan all have several hundred speakers, while the
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other languages have fewer than 50 speakers each. Culturally, the Salish FIRST NATIONS fall into two groups: Coastal (which includes the Central languages and Bella Coola) and Interior. (Not every langugage named in this article corresponds to a particular political entity; thus, Halkomelem has several distinct dialects on the Mainland and on Vancouver Island, and each community in which each dialect is spoken has its own name for the languages; in such cases, only the non-indigenous name used by linguists is given. In all other cases indigenous names of language groups are given - for example Skwxwu/mesh and St6:lo - and spelled in the local orthography of the group concerned. Words and names of characters in literature for example sxw3xwi>am> and QwiqwXqwaXt - are spelled in the standard Americanist orthography.) The long and rich historical and mythical ORAL traditions in all 23 Salish languages include tellings of various kinds, songs, speeches, and prayers. In each language, tellings situated solely in the MYTH age are designated by a special name and distinguished from other types of tellings. Thus, in Skwxwvr/mesh we find sxwxcwi?dm?, 'myth,' and sysc, 'non-myth,' while in Nlaka'pamux, sptekwl means 'creation story' and spilaxom 'story that takes places in historical time.' Tellers such as Hilda Austin of the Nlaka'pamux, Harry ROBINSON of the Okanagan, or Lillooet elders Charlie Mack and Baptiste Ritchie make clear that stories of the myth age 'are true,' taking place in another reality in which distinctions between animals and humans are blurred. This reality is inhabited by characters such as the TRiCKSTER-transformers RAVEN on the Coast and COYOTE in the Interior; by the Nlaka'pamux culture hero, QwiqwXqw3Xt (Smiley), who tames monsters, ogres, and cannibals like Grizzly Woman; by the Nuxalk Sniniq' who steals corpses and carries them off to a different world, by the two-headed serpent of the Sto:l5 (a Halkomelem-speaking community); and by inanimate objects such as the rock, clay, pitch, and wood daughters of a grandmother in a Secwepemctsin story. Tellings are PERFORMED at gatherings of various kinds, such as funerals and wakes, hunting and food-gathering camps, and at potlatches, and ceremonies; some are restricted to specific seasons. They
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may also be told at night, often to CHILDREN, although adults may listen as well. The tellings often serve to entertain, and may be funny and ribald; many present complex situations, deal with questions of respect, morality, codes of behaviour, family relations and histories, human relations to the natural world, and teach about traditions and beliefs such as spirit or nature power. Some stories, such as those about COYOTE in the Interior, belong to story cycles, which can be told over several nights. Outside the First Nations communities, the Salish oral traditions are known largely by what linguists, anthropologists, and archaeologists have recorded in writing (using some kind of phonetically based orthography) or on tape since the i9th century. This consists primarily of materials 'collected' during field work aimed at learning about the languages and/or cultures of the Salish communities, although some early Salish language material was also recorded by missionaries, EXPLORERS, and settlers. The serious 'collection' of Salish tellings began in the late i9th century with Franz BOAS. Boas principally worked on Nuxalk, Pentlatch, Comox, and the Halkomelem dialects of Cowichan and Nanaimo. Most of Boas' students collected material from the US Salish languages; his collaborator, James Teit, however, worked on Nlaka'pamux, Okanagan, Secwepemctsin and Halkomelem. Charles Hill-Tout independently collected much material on Shashishalhem, Skwxwvr/mesh, Halkomelem, Northern Straits, Statimcets, Nlaka'pamux, and Okanagan. Later published collections by linguists or anthropologists include those of Thomas Mcllwraith, Hank Nater, and Ross Saunders and Philip Davis on Nuxalk; Randy Bouchard and Dorothy Kennedy on Secwepemctsin, Statimcets, Okanagan, and Sliammon (Mainland Comox); Aert Kuipers on Skwxwu/mesh and Secwepemctsin; and Oliver Wells on Skwxwu/mesh and Chilliwack Halkomelem. Some stories have been published in ANTHOLOGIES such as those of Brian Swann's Coming to Light (1994) or Barry F. Carlson's Northwest Coast Texts: Stealing Light (1977); much unpublished material remains in ARCHIVES and personal collections. A number of collections of tellings have been put together by NATIVE people themselves.
These include volumes of written versions in English of stories from Salish oral traditions: Coyote Stories (1933) by MOURNING DOVE is based on her Native Colville-Okanagan 'folklores' as she called them; Legends of Vancouver (1911) contains stories retold by E. Pauline jOHNSON-Tekahionwake from 'legends' told to her by Chief Joe Capilano of the Skwxwxr/mesh Nation; and Kwulasulwut: Stories from the Coast Salish (1981) is a blend of original and traditional Salish stories by Ellen White, a Halkomelem elder and teacher from Vancouver Island. Our Tellings: Interior Salish Stories of the Nlhaykdpmx People (1996) presents in English stories told by Nlaka'pamux (Nlha7kapmx) elders either in English or in Nlaka'pamux in the 19605,19705, or early 19905 and transcribed and/or translated largely by two Nlaka'pamux people, Darwin Hanna and elder Mamie Henry. Write it on Your Heart (1989) and Nature Power (1992) are collections of Okanagan stories told in English by Harry Robinson, and recorded and transcribed by Wendy Wickwire. According to Wickwire, Robinson recorded the stories in English in order to keep them alive. An unusual feature of the collections is that the stories are presented so as to reflect visually the cadences and rhythms of Robinson's actual ORAL performance. Finally, many of the Salish communities produced or are producing educational materials to pass on their languages and cultures to their children; these are often in Salish and English. One early example of this latter type of collection is Cuystwi Malh Ucwalmicwts (Ltllooet Legends and Stories; 1981), eds Jan van Eijk and Lorna Williams. It is only since the 19705, influenced by the work of Dell Hymes, Dennis Tedlock, and Melville Jacobs, on Native American oral literatures, that the Euro-American scholarly tradition within which field workers were trained began to pay adequate attention to the literary qualities and value of Salish oral literatures. In their published forms, tellings are often given only in English (or, in some of Boas's work, in German), since the content of the telling was considered most important, not its form or its performance. In Hill-Tout's extensive collections, for example, one finds many (sometimes quite good) English paraphrases (usually somewhat bowdlerized) of the original tellings,
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giving little sense of the diction, style, or HUMOUR of the original, nor representing the narrative skill of the tellers themselves. Even when tellings are given in the original (for instance, the texts found in Kuipers's work on Skwxwu/mesh and Secwepemctsin, or in Davis and Saunders' work on Nuxalk), the translations reflect only minimally the literary qualities of the tellings and the skills of the tellers, but enough linguistic information is presented to allow dedicated readers to puzzle, their way through the stories and gain some sense of the original. Although the names of the Salish tellers are usually given in published materials, the central roles they play in presenting the stories they tell (and their gifts as tellers) tended to be taken for granted. Nevertheless, the names of some tellers do stand out, including Kwelweltaxen of the Okanagan, Chief Joe Mischelle of the Nla'kapamux, Dan Milo of the Sto:lo, Louis Miranda of the Skwxwu/mesh, Charles Draney of the Secwepemc, and Agnes Edgar of the Nuxalk. Subsequent presentations of Salish tellings, such as that of Hilda Austin's QwiqwXqw9Xt (tr Egesdal and Thompson in Swann, 1994) or of various Lushootseed (spoken in Washington) tellers (see Lushootseed Texts, 1996, ed Crisca Bierwert) began to appreciate the tellings as artistic compositions akin to those, for instance, of classical Greek or Anglo-Saxon tradition. Inevitably, in the written transcription of oral literature, and even more so in the TRANSLATION into English of the transcription, much information is lost about actual performance, about the tellers' voices and styles, about variations in the stories, and about audience response. To fully appreciate Salish oral compositions it is necessary to pay attention to forms of structure, including repetition, parallelism, use of pattern numbers, use of dialogue, terseness of narrative description, the dramatic, scenic, presentation of many stories, the use of discourse markers to indicate divisions in the storyline, and so on. The growing awareness of the artistry of Salish tellings means that as Salish oral literatures are made more generally available the stories will become more widely known and valued.
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Further reading: M. Dale Kinkade, 'Native Oral Literature of the Northwest Coast and the Plateau,' in Andrew Wiget, ed, Dictionary of Native American Literatures (New York and London: Garland, 1994): 33-45; Ewa Czaykowska-Higgins and M.Dale Kinkade, 'Salish languages and linguistics,' in Czaykowska-Higgins and Kinkade, eds Salish Languages and Linguistics: Theoretical and Descriptive Perspectives (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1997): 1-65. Ewa Czaykowska-Higgins
SALLANS, George Herbert. Novelist, historian; b Homing's Mills, ON, 1895, d Toronto 18 Nov 1960. In 1941, Sallans wrote a tract for the Canadian federal government, Canada's fighting men. His novel Little Man (1942), which won the Governor General's AWARD for Fiction the year it was published, follows the life story of George Battle, a soldier in the First World WAR; the protagonist survives the Great War and the Depression, only to lose his son in the Second World War. Although accused by reviewers of oversimplifying the difficulties of war, Sallans was praised for his sincerity. The theme of man's inability to control his own destiny is accompanied by political overtones, expressed elsewhere by Sallans in 'England goes "nucleus",' Canadian Business 15 (1942): 84-6, 88-9. Greg Chan
SALUTIN, Rick. Journalist, playwright, novelist; b Toronto 30 Aug 1942; son of Freda (Levenson), a secretary, and Saul Salutin, a salesman; educ Brandeis U (BA, 1964), Columbia U (MA, 1967), and New York's New School for Social Research. Upon returning to Toronto in 1970, Salutin worked as a trade union organizer and in the process cultivated a historian's interest in the lives of ordinary working Canadians. With a diverse writing career spanning more than four decades, Salutin offered the Canadian public the wry wit and insight of a political outsider. Even from his current post as media columnist for the Globe and Mail, Salutin speaks with a candour that has earned him respect from Canadian progressives and controversy among Canada's business elite. Salutin's playwriting career began with the production of Fanshan in 1972. Around that time he began to collaborate with Toronto's Theatre
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Passe Muraille, which shares a writing credit with Salutin for 1837: The Farmers' Revolt, first performed in 1973. That HISTORICAL drama chronicles William Lyon MACKENZIE'S failed attempt in 1837 to re-invent Upper Canada as a republic. When the play was remounted in 1997, the set included gargoyles of politicans Mike Harris and Preston Manning. An extended version of the play was published by Lorimer in 1975 under the title 1837: William Lyon Mackenzie and the Canadian Revolution. Along with his peers of the time, Salutin is credited with politicizing the Toronto THEATRE scene in the early 19705 with productions that reflected the Canadian experience, often from a POSTCOLONIAL, disenfranchised perspective. He won the Chalmers Outstanding Play award in 1973 for 1837: The Farmers' Revolt, and again in 1978 for Les Canadiens, about Montreal hockey (see SPORT). In the 19705 and 19805 Salutin wrote more than a dozen plays, including The Adventures of an Immigrant (1974), I.W.A. (1975), Money (1976), and his first television drama, Maria, which aired on CBC-TV in 1976. His first novel, A Man of Little Faith (1988), won the W.H. Smith Books in Canada First Novel Award. His second, The Age oflmprov (1995), is set in Canada in the near future; the main character Matthew Deans reflects the public's utter cynicism with partisan politics earmarked by mediocrity. Salutin's nonfiction includes Marginal Notes (1984) and Waiting for Democracy (1989). As an editor of THIS magazine, he continues his contribution to Canada's alternative arts scene. Perhaps his greatest success is taking his anti-establishment voice into the mainstream. In his weekly column in the Globe, he continues to produce razor-sharp alternative observations on politics and culture. See also N. COHEN, REBELLION OF 1837. Peter Roman Babiak
SALVERSON, Laura Goodman. Novelist; b Winnipeg 9 Dec 1890, d Toronto 13 July 1970; daughter of Ingborg (Gudsmunsdotte) and Laurus Goodman, who travelled throughout Manitoba and the Mississippi-Missouri Valley in search of a better living. These experiences together with her schooling in Minnesota, her 1913 marriage to a railwayman, George Salverson, and their subsequent travels through the Canadian prairies - form the basis for Salver-
son's LIFE story, Confessions of an Immigrant's Daughter (1939; rpt 1981). Her Icelandic heritage also provided inspiration for her novels, which range from HISTORICAL ROMANCE (Land of the Silver Dragon, 1927) to sagas of Norse discovery in the prairies (Immortal Rock, 1954). She remains best known for the novels that derive at least indirectly from her own experience of growing up as the child of immigrants, The Viking Heart (1923), When Sparrows Fall (1925), and The Dark Weaver (1937), the first of which ends with the immigrants' Canadianization during the First World WAR. See also MULTICULTURAL VOICES. SAM SLICK, a CHARACTER in several works by Thomas Chandler HALIBURTON. An energetic, garrulous, and successful clock pedlar, Sam (considered by some to be the model for the figure of 'Uncle Sam,' though that ascription is unlikely) is given to vernacular aphorisms. Among the many such phrases that Haliburton devised, and that are now considered commonplace terms or sayings in the English LANGUAGE, are: 'a nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse,' 'an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,' 'as large as life and twice as natural,' 'as quick as a wink,' 'conniption fit,' 'stick-in-themud,' 'the early bird gets the worm,' and 'upper crust.' See R.E. WATTERS' edition of The Sam Slick Anthology (1969). SAMUEL MARCHBANKS, a persona of Robertson DAVIES, which in several satiric columns and books he used to express curmudgeonly views on contemporary society and its mores. SANDWELL, B.K. (Bernard Keble). Editor, essayist; b Ipswich, England, 6 Dec 1876, d Toronto 8 Dec 1954; son of Emily (Johnson) and George Sandwell, Congregationalist minister; emig to Toronto 1888; educ Upper Canada C (taught by Stephen LEACOCK) and U Toronto (BA in classics, 1897). Sandwell worked as a journalist until, as Leacock's protege, he was appointed professor of economics at McGill U and editor of Canadian Bookman (1919-22). A series of jobs followed: head of English at Queen's U (1923-5), freelance writer, editor of Saturday Night (1932-51, replacing Hector CHARLES WORTH, who had moved into RADIO administration), and literary activist (calling for
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a new COPYRIGHT act, a bill of rights, and the establishment of a CANADIAN AUTHORS ASSOC). His reputation for HUMOUR rests on his two collections of sketches, The Privacity Agent (1928) and The Diversions ofDuchesstown (1955), which, like Leacock's work, use the device of the fauxnaive observer to satirize social foible. SANGSTER, Charles. Poet, b Kingston; UC, 16 July 1822, d Kingston 9 Dec 1893; son of Ann (Ross) and James Sangster, navy shipwright. Despite his lack of formal schooling, Sangster was writing LONG POEMS by the age of 17. He worked as a clerk and newspaper worker until 1868, at which time he was appointed to the Post Office in Ottawa. The title poem in The St Lawrence and the Saguenay, and other poems (1856, published at his own expense) records in no Spenserian stanzas a voyage on the two rivers, the differing LANDSCAPES of each inspiring a separate tribute to nature and love. Hesperus (1860) expresses personal grief and faith in a life of the spirit. The two volumes together, ed Gordon Johnston, were reprinted in 1972; David Sinclair also edited the earlier poem in 1972, in his Nineteenth Century Narrative Poems. Sangster had, however, spent his latter years revising these works, adding at least 29 new stanzas to St Lawrence; Frank Tierney edited the revised (and previously uncollected) works in four volumes (1976-84). David Bentley's 1990 edition is based on the first edition, resembling Sinclair's in emending primarily spelling and punctuation. Further reading: D.M.R. Bentley, 'Introduction' to his ed, Charles Sangster, The Saint Lawrence and the Saguenay (London, ON: Canadian Poetry P, 1990): ix-xli. SAPIR, Edward. Linguist, anthropologist; b Lauenburg, Pomerania, 26 Jan 1884, d New Haven, CT, 4 Feb 1939; son of Eva (Seagal) and Jacob Sapir, a JEWISH cantor. Sapir grew up in New York. He was educated at Columbia U, where he was a student of Franz BOAS and friend of the anthropologist Ruth Benedict. He spent the years 1910—25 in Ottawa as director of the anthropological division of the Geological Survey of Canada, and as an occasional poet participated actively in the local literary circles that Madge MACBETH was instrumental in
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organizing. Concerned as a scholar to study speech (Language, 1921) and preserve NATIVE LANGUAGES, Sapir devoted his Canadian fieldwork primarily to Nuuchal'nuth (see WAKASHAN). In his subsequent work at Yale, where Benjamin Whorf was one of his students, Sapir theorized relations between language, psychology, music, and cultural knowledge. See also SALISH. Further reading: Regna Darnell, Edward Sapir: Linguist, Anthropologist, Humanist (Berkeley: U California P, 1990). SARAH, Robyn. Writer, teacher; b New York City 6 Oct 1949; daughter of Toby Palker (Belkin) and Leon Lipson; emig 1951; educ McGill U and the Conservatoire de Musique du Quebec. Sarah teaches at Champlain C. She began publishing with Shadowplay (1978); The Touchstone (1992) offers a selection of her poetry notable for the hard-won peace it makes with domesticity, the surfaces of household objects rendered luminous by a straightforward, elegantly cadenced verse. Two volumes of subtle, introspective short fiction, A Nice Gazebo (1992) and Promise of Shelter (1997), feature a similar attentiveness to details and dailiness in conveying character and the nuances of mood. Mark Cochrane
SARAH BINKS, the fictional 'sweet songstress of Saskatchewan' whom Paul HIEBERT invented in order to PARODY literary CRITICISM and to satirize social fads and the excesses of contemporary politics. SARCASM, see IRONY. SASKATCHEWAN, province, joined CONFEDERATION 1905; capital, Regina (formerly called Pile O' Bones, est 1883; renamed for Queen Victoria); area 651,903 sq km; pop 978,933 (2001); provincial flower, Western red lily (prairie lily). The territory was first occupied by ALGONQUIAN, SIOUAN, and ATHAPASKAN-speaking peoples (Slavey, Chipewyan, CREE, Assiniboine, Blackfoot); the name 'Saskatchewan' was adapted from a Cree word for a swift river. It was first settled by Europeans in 1774, at Cumberland House, one of the HUDSON'S BAY COM-
SAVARD
PANY trading posts. Saskatchewan was part of the NORTHWEST TERRITORIES when they were first so named in 1870 (Districts of Athabaska, Saskatoon, and Assini), and became (and continues to be) the centre for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (see MOUNTIES); it was established as a province when the territories were subdivided in 1905. The northern reaches of Saskatchewan are mineral-rich and hilly, and form part of the Canadian Shield. But, since southern Saskatchewan is dominantly agricultural and mostly a level plain, the province is often held up as a fine example of PRAIRIE LANDSCAPE. Partly because of the severe drought the province experienced in the 19305, during the Depression, Saskatchewan politicans devised much of the social legislation that afterwards became national policy. Saskatchewan writers include Ven BEGAMUDRE, Gail BOWEN, David CARPENTER, Saros COWASJEE, Lorna CROZIER, GREY OWL, Terrence HEATH, Eli MANDEL, Edward MCCOURT, Ken MITCHELL, Len PETERSON, Erika RITTER, Sinclair ROSS, Andrew SUKNASKI, AnneszuMiGALSKI. See also NORTH-WEST REBELLION.
SATIRE, SATIRICAL WRITING, see HUMOUR AND SATIRE.
SAUL, John Ralston. Novelist, political essayist, philosopher; b Ottawa 19 June 1947; educ at McGill U (BA, 1969) and U London (PhD, 1972). Saul is active in PEN INTERNATIONAL and married to the writer and broadcaster Adrienne CLARKSON. First noted as a writer of actiondriven mysteries, such as The Birds of Prey (1977), Saul came into public prominence with several provocative, thoughtful, and widely read ESSAYS on the belief systems underlying Western civilization (Voltaire's Bastards, 1992; The Doubters' Companion, 1994) and on Canadian NATIONALISM, social tensions, and the implications of the nation's changing social structures (the AWARDwinning The Unconscious Civilization, 1995, and Reflections of a Siamese Twin, 1997). SAUNDERS, Margaret Marshall. Novelist; b Milton, NS, 13 April 1861, d Toronto 15 Feb 1947; daughter of Maria (Freeman) and Edward Manning Saunders, a Baptist minister; educ in Nova Scotia, Edinburgh, and Orleans, France.
Saunders frequently travelled through North America seeking story ideas. She also supported social causes generously. Beautifuljoe, her 1893 juvenile novel about an abused dog, established the moral, ecological, and social reform themes that were to inform most of her subsequent 22 books. Reputedly selling a million copies in 15 languages, Beautifuljoe still overshadows her regional (ACADIAN) and activist romances, such as Rose d Charlitte (1898) and The Story of the Graveleys (1903). Further reading: Karen Sanders, 'Margaret Marshall Saunders: Children's Literature as an Expression of Early 2oth Century Reform' (MA thesis, Dalhousie U, 1978); Elizabeth Waterston, 'Margaret Marshall Saunders: A Voice for the Silent,' in Silenced Sextet (Montreal: McGillQueen's UP, 1993). Gwendolyn Davies
SAVARD, Felix-Antoine. Writer, priest; b Quebec 31 Aug 1896, d Quebec 24 Aug 1982; son of Genevieve (Gosselin) and Louis-Joseph Savard. Educated by the Marist Brothers in Chicoutimi, QC, Savard taught languages there after being ordained (1922) and before being appointed professor of FOLKLORE studies at U Laval (1941). During his lifetime he was considered both a federalist and a leading voice in the Quebec NATIONALISM movement. Like Lionel GROULX before him, he argued that the 'true' Quebec was rural and Catholic, in the process attacking the growing economic dominance of the 'anglais' minority. Combining nostalgia with politics, his work consequently celebrates the folk past as the authentic voice of the LAND; see ALLEGORY, TERRIEN ROMANCE.
Savard's work ranges through all genres, often combining poetry, story, drama, and memoir in a single work, as in Le barachois (1959), a collection of writings that resulted from his research travels in the Gaspe and Acadia with Luc LACOURCIERE, or the formally inventive novel Menaud, maitre-draveur (1937; rev 1944, 1960, 1964), which critics consider his masterpiece. Twice translated (by Alan SULLIVAN as Boss of the River, 1947, and Richard Howard as Master of the River, 1976), the novel constructs a narrative about Menaud, a man who loses his son while working on a log run for a ruthless
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anglophone boss. In many respects Savard's work is thematically comparable to D.C. SCOTT'S account of river tragedy, At the Cedars,' and Allerdale GRAINGER'S critique of the hunger for power in the logging industry, Woodsmen of the West. However, Savard's work is more directly influenced by Louis HEMON'S Maria Chapdelaine, and focuses on problems related to ethnic disparity. While arguing that struggle against unfair economic dominance is necessary, Savard also argues against ethnic protectionism. His subsequent works return more directly to his RELIGIOUS faith, as in his poem Symphonic du Misereor (1968). He published his memoirs in four volumes: Journal et souvenirs (1973,1975) and Garnet du soir interieur (1978-9); some of his letters appeared posthumously. Further reading: lolande Cadrin-Rossignol, Felix-Antoine Savard: le continent imaginaire (Montreal: Fides, 1987); Andre Major, Felix-Antoine Savard (Montreal: Fides, 1968); Francois Ricard, L'art de Felix-Antoine Savard dans 'Menaud, maitredraveur' (Montreal: Fides, 1969); Donald Smith, Voices of Deliverance (1983; tr Larry Shouldice Toronto: Anansi, 1986): 14-30. SAVARD, Marie. Poet, playwright; b Quebec City 15 Aug 1936; daughter of Paul Savard, a forestry engineer, and Germaine Collin. She participated in amateur theatre with the Troupe des treize when it was run by Gilles VIGNEAULT, then in 1961 moved to Montreal and began to write plays and commentaries for RADIOCANADA. In 1965 she published her first volume of poetry, Les coins de I'Ove, and made her first recording. Her plays, such as the 1968 Bien a mot, marquise, are characteristically written in a poetic style. Her songs and poems appeared on such records as Quebekiss (1971) and Lafolle du logis (1981). She is also the founder of Editions de la pleine lune, the first Quebec publishing house entirely for WOMEN writers. Margaret Cook
SAVARD, Michel. Poet; b Riviere-du-Loup, QC, 20 Oct 1953; son of Bertha Boucher and Raoul Savard, radio announcer. His first volume of poetry, Forages (1982; with drawings by Michel Cormier), won a Governor General's AWARD. A series of observations of everyday events, it eli-
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cits the reader's emotional involvement by means of its recurrent imagery (water, rain, snow). Savard went on to publish Cahiers d'anatomie (complicites) in 1985 and Le sourire des chefs in 1987, his writing becoming more elliptical and condensed, his verse more sparse and telegraphic. Margaret Cook
SAVOIE, Jacques Jean. Novelist, poet, musician; b Edmundston, NB, 3 Feb 1951; son of Alexandre Savoie and Francoise Butler-Savoie. His first volume of poetry, L'anti-livre (1972), was written with Hermenegilde CHIASSON and Gilles Savoie, the year he completed his BA at C Bathurst. After completing his doctorate in Marseille (1976), he co-founded the group Beausoleil-Broussard and wrote lyrics for them. Turning again to literature in 1980, Savoie won wider attention with his first novel, Raconte-moi Massabielle (1979), an account of resistance in an ACADIAN town that he adapted for the NATIONAL FILM BOARD. His SCCOnd novel, Les
portes tournantes (1987), was made into a film by Francis Mankiewicz. Among his other writings are the television scripts for the series Bombardier (Gemini award 1982) and Les orphelins de Duplessis, and such books as Le cirque bleu (1995; tr Sheila FISCHMAN as The Blue Circus, 1997), a nostalgic novel in which dream and reality confront each other in memory, and Un train de glace (1998). Margaret Cook
SAVOIE, Paul. Poet, short story writer, songwriter; b Saint-Boniface, MB, n Jan 1946; son of Edith (Bibeau) and Emile Savoie. A composer of music and songs (with his brother Francois), Paul Savoie published his first book of free verse lyrics, Salamandre, in 1974, following it with Nahanni (1976), and several other collections of poetry and prose, such as Contes statiques et nevrotiques (1991) and literary translations of KIEL'S poetry (1993). Fishing for Light appeared in 1998. Savoie is bilingual and writes in both French and English. See also FRANCOPHONE. Further reading: Alexandre Amprimoz, 'Paul Savoie's Eternal Laughter,' in Replacing (Downsview: ECW, 1980): 125-30. Margaret Cook
SCHAFER
SAWAI, Gloria Ruth. Writer, teacher; b Minneapolis, MN, 20 Dec 1932; daughter of Ragnhild Skaret and Gustav Ostrem. Sawai was brought up in Saskatchewan and Alberta, and educated in Minnesota (BA) and Montana (MFA). Influenced by passionate musicals, she has acted and directed, and she wrote the children's play Neighbour (1980), produced by Alberta Theatre Projects in 1979. She has published stories in Douglas HARBOUR'S Three Times Five (1983) and other anthologies. Her work arises from the prairie landscape and grapples with spiritual conflicts, especially guilt and grace, fear and hope, estrangement and reconciliation.
SCAMMELL, Arthur Reginald. Songwriter, poet, story writer, teacher; b Change Islands, NF, 12 Feb 1913, d St John's 28 Aug 1995; son of Archibald and Sarah (Torraville) Scammell; educ Memorial U C, McGill U, and U Vermont. Scammell taught in Montreal until his retirement in 1970, when he returned to Newfoundland. He is best known for the song 'The Squid Jiggin' Ground,' which he wrote at age 15. Scammell wrote chiefly for the Atlantic Guardian, (1945), which he co-founded, and the Newfoundland Q', he published several books before the appearance of the Collected Works (1990), and was awarded the Order of Canada in 1988.
R. Clark
Claire Wilkshire
SAWYER, RobertJ. SCIENCE FICTION author; b Ottawa 29 April 1960; son of Virginia Kivley (Peterson) and John Arthur Sawyer. Building on a career as a freelance journalist, Sawyer began writing SF full-time in 1989. The critical interest generated by his first novel, Golden Fleece (1990), allowed him to launch an aggressive marketing campaign that quickly moved him into the front ranks of SF writers. Writing primarily for the American market, he nevertheless won major SF awards in Spain, France, and Japan, as well as five Auroras, an Arthur Ellis, five Hugo nominations and, in 1995, the Nebula for The Terminal Experiment (see AWARDS). Sawyer is active in the SF community: he was founding director of the Canadian Region (1992), and later president (1998-9), of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. His interest in paleontology is a recurrent theme of his early books, including the Quintaglio trilogy, arguably still among his best work to date. Increasingly, Sawyer sought a more mainstream audience through cross-over novels such as The Terminal Experiment, a murder mystery in which the chief suspect is a computer consciousness, and Flashforward (1999), in which a physics experiment accidentally gives everyone on Earth a two-minute glimpse of their future. Further reading: Robert J. Sawyer, home page, available at: http://www.sfwriter.com; Edo van Belkom, Northern Dreamers (Kingston: Quarry, 1998).
SCANDINAVIAN CONNECTIONS, see GERMANIC CONNECTIONS, GROUP OF SEVEN, MULTICULTURAL VOICES, NORTH.
SCHAFER, Raymond Murray. Composer, writer, educator; b Sarnia, ON, 18 July 1933; son of Belle (Rose) and Harold J. Schafer. Attended Royal Conservatory and U Toronto 1952-5, where he met Marshall MCLUHAN, who profoundly affected his thinking. He moved (195661) to Vienna and then to London, returning to Toronto in 1961, and was artist-in-residence at both Memorial U (1963-5) and Simon Fraser U (1965-75), where he initiated the World Soundscape project. In 1987 he moved to Indian River, ON. Schafer is a prolific, imaginative, and influential composer, critic, MUSIC educator, and writer with a marked fondness for the rural environment and a distaste for URBAN sonic chaos. His literary output includes Dicamus and Labyrinthos: A Philologist's Notebook (1979), which also displays his artistic and calligraphic interests; Ariadne (1985), first titled Smoke: A Novel; numerous libretti (some involving translations and/or adaptations) for his own works, including his cantata BREBEUF (1961), Adieu Robert Schumann (1976), Credo (1977), and various sections of and extracts from Patria; critical studies on E.T.A. Hoffmann and Ezra Pound and their relation with music; and other works such as The Public of the Music Theatre: Louis RIEL - A Case Study (1972), and Patria and the Theatre of Confluence (1991).
R. Runte
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Further reading: Helmut Kallmann, 'Schafer, R. (Raymond) Murray,' Encyclopedia of Music in Canada, 2nd ed, ed Kallmann and Gilles Potvin (Toronto: U Toronto P, 1992): 1186-9. Bryan N.S. Gooch
SCHEIER, Libby. Writer, editor, teacher; b Brooklyn, NY, 31 May 1946, d Toronto 14 Nov 2000; daughter of Celia (Lieberman), government clerk, and Murray Scheier, garment worker; educ Sarah Lawrence C (BA, 1968) and State U New York, Stony Brook (MA, 1972). After moving to Canada in 1975, Scheier became active in Canadian feminist CRITICISM (she coedited the important 1990 anthology on writing and GENDER, Language in Her Eye) and the JEWISH Renewal movement. Her own lyric poems and anecdotal prose made boldly honest, satiric incursions into the politics of gendered anatomy and family dynamics. Early collections The Larger Life (1983) and Second Nature (1986) offer angry but ultimately redemptive reports on women's bodily self-possession (pleasuretaking, physical transformation, childbearing) against a backdrop of male violence. SKY- A Poem in Four Pieces (1990) also deploys fearsome personal directness - as well as SURREALISM and dream devices - in its recovery of memories of child sexual abuse and rape. Saints and Runners (i993), a linked collection of stones and one NOVELLA, sketches with wry wit the domestic and community life of Aria, a protagonist striving to balance the roles of artist, teacher, single parent, and lover. It was followed by a volume of new and selected poems, Kaddishfor My Father (1999). Further reading: Beverley Daurio, 'Excavating Memories' (Interview), Poetry Canada R 12.1 (1991): i, 3. Mark Cochrane
SCHERMBRUCKER, William Gerald (Bill). Fiction writer, college instructor; b Eldoret, Kenya, 23 July 1938; son of Mavis (Munnik) and Christopher Schermbrucker, barrister; emig 1964. Schermbrucker, who holds a PhD and a PGCE, taught in Cape Town, Nairobi, and New York, and became the first English coordinator at North Vancouver's Capilano C (1968). His fictions include Chameleon and Other Short Stones
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(1983), Mimosa (1988, winner of the Ethel Wilson prize), Motortherapy and Other Stories (1993), and Crossing Second Narrows (1998). Using an enigmatic, humorous prose, he draws on his experiences in Kenya and a personal history reaching back to early Afrikaner settlers in South AFRICA. C.M. Danaher
SCHOEMPERLEN, Diane Mavis. Writer; b Fort William, ON, 9 July 1954; daughter of Ida (Tait), post office worker, and George Schoemperlen, grain elevator worker; educ Lakehead U (BA, 1976). Schoemperlen worked as a bank teller and teacher before writing full-time. Much anthologized, and herself the editor of Oberon P's Coming Attractions and other ANTHOLOGIES, she characteristically looks at items in daily life and transforms them through narrative meditations on meaning. Her books range from Double Exposures (1984) through Frogs and Other Stories (1987), The Man of My Dreams (1990), Hockey Night in Canada and Other Stories (1991), In the Language of Love (1994), to the Governor General's AWARD-winning Forms of Devotion (1998), a collection of SHORT STORIES that relates contemporary 'iconographies' to medieval woodcuts. Like other works, it shows her interest in VISUAL ARTS forms such as collage. Further reading: R. Wilson, 'Diane Schoemperlen's Fiction: The Clean, Well-Lit Worlds of Dirty Realism,' Essays on Canadian Writing 40 (Spring 1990): 80-108. SCHOOL TEXTBOOKS. As early as 1837, a British North American edition of Lindley Murray's The English Reader was printed in UPPER CANADA and distributed throughout the provinces. This printing of the Murray reader indicates the growing concern felt in the provinces over the use of American school books. In 1843, Egerton RYERSON travelled through Europe and the British Isles, and discussed the importance of standardized school texts with Archbishop Richard Whately and other members of the Commission of National Education in IRELAND. The non-sectarian - if patriotically British - school readers and texts that the commission produced for use in the Irish national schools had won widespread praise. The Irish National School series (1846) was subsequently championed by
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Ryerson for Canadian use, and the books (including Robert Sullivan's Geography Generalized) gained wide currency in British North America. During the CONFEDERATION period, NATIONALIST and LOYALIST sentiment - and commercial enterprise - spurred Ryerson, James Campbell, George W. Ross, and others to produce school readers with a Canadian perspective, and to popularize the work of the growing number of Canadian authors. William Foster, whose essay 'CANADA FIRST' (1871) became the widely influential manifesto of the early nationalist organization, wrote that 'Thanks to Dr. Ryerson, our school children have now the means of acquiring a knowledge of Canadian geography without first searching through every state in the American Union to find the country they live in, and can now learn something of Canadian history without first pumping dry the reservoir of Yankee buncombe.' School texts during this period were particularly important because of the scarcity of printed materials in rural Canada; and school readers became widely read ANTHOLOGIES in pioneer households, giving an extensive readership to many early Canadian poets including Charles HEAVYSEGE, Pamelia Vining Yule (182597), Susanna MOODIE, and Charles MAIR. The proliferation of Canadian and Canadianized British readers and textbooks increased rapidly in the decade after 1867, and the commitment of the country to universal education ensured that patriotic, and officially authorized, school readers such as The Canadian Series of School Books (1867), Campbell's British American Series (1867), The Royal Readers (1871), The Maritime School Series (1878), The High School Reader (1886), and The Ontario Readers (1909) contributed to collective notions of nationality in igth- and early 20th-century Canada. In 1893, George Ross, Minister of Education for ONTARIO, produced an anthology entitled Patriotic Recitations and Arbor Day Exercises (1893), which included numerous patriotic works by both canonical and less-remembered Canadian authors and public men and women of the period. Ross's poetic selections correspond closely with works included in such early anthologies as those edited by Edward Hartley DEWART and William Douw LIGHTHALL. In QUEBEC during this
period, provincial authorities had taken steps to ensure that only books authorized by the Council of Public Instruction would be used in Quebec schools, although Protestant and Catholic clergy were given exclusive right of selection of texts for RELIGIOUS and moral instruction for their respective schools. Between 1880 and 1914, school readers in use in Canada came to reflect both nationalist and imperial concerns. The Ontario Readers, for instance, printed and distributed by the T Eaton Co at a cost of 16 cents each, were illustrated with a flyleaf colour illustration of the Union Jack, with 'One Flag, One Fleet, One Throne' as a motto underneath. In 1893, the governments of the provinces collectively contributed $2,000 towards a prize for the preparation of a Canadian history for school use. In 1897, William Henry Pope Clement's The History of the Dominion of Canada was awarded the prize and authorized for use in every province and territory. Clement's History (imperialist, loyalist, and antiAmerican) commented drily in one chapter that during the American raid on Windsor, UC, in 1838, Colonel Prince had shown an only 'somewhat excessive zeal' in shooting some of his American prisoners. Clement also includes elements of social history in his work that were novel in a school book of his time. The writing of school histories of Canada also absorbed the energies of some of Canada's most gifted writers. John George BOURINOT and Charles G.D. ROBERTS both produced readable nationalist histories for school use, and this tradition was extended by Agnes LAUT, George Wrong (1860-1948), William Stewart Wallace (1884-1970), Duncan McArthur (1885-1943), and William John Karr (d 1938), who all produced patriotic histories in the 19205 and 19305. After this time, school readers and histories increasingly embraced more complex and pluralistic, and less anglocentric, conceptions of the country. Nevertheless, many of the school texts of the earlier period remained in use in parts of Canada as late as the 19605. See also INTELLECTUAL HISTORY, PUBLISHING, TEACHING. Daniel O'Leary
SCHROEDER, Andreas Peter. Freelance writer, translator; b Hoheneggelsen, Germany, 26 Nov 1946; son of Ruth (Bartel), church organist and
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music teacher, and Ernst Schroeder, cabinetmaker; emig 1951. Schroeder was educated at U British Columbia (MA, 1971), where he studied with Michael BULLOCK and J.M. YATES. He won AWARDS for his FILM scriptwriting and investigative and personal prose (eg, his PRISON memoir, Shaking It Rough, 1978). The founding editor of Contemporary Literature in Translation (1969-80), he also translated German-language works by Else Seel and others. Schroeder has worked as a RADIO playwright and raconteur, journalist, anthologist (Contemporary Poetry of British Columbia, withYates, 1970; Volvox, with Yates and Charles LILLARD, 1971; see MULTICULTURAL VOICES). He has also been a writer-in-residence and chairman of the WRITERS' UNION (1976-7), and was the first head of the PUBLIC LENDING RIGHT Commission (1986-8). Repeatedly returning to his MENNONITE roots (as in The Mennonites, 1990), he also is fascinated by the idiosyncratic and extreme - as in Dustship Glory (1986), his fiction about Tom Sukanen, the Saskatchewan Finn who built an ark on the Canadian prairie near Moose Jaw - and by literary and cultural HOAXES. His work often takes imaginative, even SURREAL flight, as in the parable-like stories and VISUAL/CONCRETE poems that appear in such collections as The Ozone Minotaur (1969), File of Uncertainties (1971), uniVERSE (1971), and The Late Man (1972). SCIENCE AND NATURE WRITING are cat egories of literature that elude precise definition. They can most helpfully be regarded as loosely defined macro-genres - related and often overlapping - whose individual examples range from the specialized to the POPULAR and sometimes belong to other genres as well. The two categories are not so much fixed pigeonholes as open-edged territories - ecosystems populated with unique species, variant offshoots, natural hybrids, and deliberate grafts, some of which have always occupied their place in the genres, others only conditionally or historically. Part of what makes these macro-genres hard to define is the culturally and historically specific nature of the terms by which they are designated. The word 'science' - which English took from French in about the i4th century ultimately derives from the Latin scientia,
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'knowledge,' but has somewhat different meanings in Canada's two official languages. In current English usage, as in the phrase 'the physical and life sciences,' the term 'science' normally defines both a practice and its results. Science, that is, is understood to be both a systematic activity - at once theoretical and experimental according to generally accepted methods and protocols - and the supposedly cumulative, selfcorrecting body of expert knowledge derived from the critical interplay of evolving theory with data-gathering or -making (how well science resembles its accepted definition is a matter debated by its historians and philosophers). This historically recent usage did not displace the word's more general meaning until about the mid-i9th century, the result of a semantic shift that had begun some two hundred years earlier. John Donne's poetic reference to the 'new science [that] throwes all in doubt' contains both senses of the word, although presentday readers more readily notice the emergent narrower meaning. Traces of the earlier meaning persist in two academic phrases that define areas of study: 'political science' and the 'social sciences' - the second of which in particular asserts its authority by associating such disciplines as sociology with the perceived objectivity and mathematical clarity of the 'hard sciences.' In contrast to English, current French usage remains closer to the original Latin meaning. One recent history of Quebecois literature, for example, distinguishes between the sciences humaines (defined as law, history, linguistics, literature, philosophy, and the sciences economiques, religieuses et sociales) and the sciences pures (biology, chemistry, mathematics, and medicine). These differences in nuance apart, English and French share the commonplace distinction between science and other areas of knowledge such as MYTHOLOGY, RELIGION (or superstition), magic, and lore, including not just FOLKLORE, but local or indigenous learning generally. This widely accepted distinction emerged from fairly recent developments in Euro-American INTELLECTUAL HISTORY, and is not usually relevant before about the mid-i7th century or in relation to Aboriginal traditions.
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Like 'science,' the word 'nature' entered English through French, in this case in about the rjth century. Originally, nature derives from the Latin natura, from the verb nasci, 'to be born' (related derivatives include 'innate,' 'native,' and 'nation'). As in Latin, the word 'nature' in English and French has several common and often overlapping meanings: the quality or character of something, as in a phrase such as 'the nature of culture'; the singular agent or force derived from or substituted for God and typically thought to be at work in the physical world, whether explicitly, as in the image of 'Mother Nature,' or implicitly, as in a term such as 'natural selection'; and the physical world as a whole, sometimes including, sometimes excluding the human, as in the not yet entirely discredited belief that indigenous peoples are part of North American nature, unlike European settlers and their descendants, or as in nature distinguished from culture, a separation that was also expressed as an opposition between 'civilization' and 'savagery' and that has sometimes been understood as gendered, the terms 'nature,' 'matter,' and 'woman' being set against 'culture,' 'mind,' and 'man.' Tracing the word 'nature' further, one finds a common origin for what are now distinct shades of meaning. Natura was the usual Latin translation of the Greek phusis, from which the English term 'physics' derives, but one of the pecularities of the shifting historical and cultural uses of the word nature is that 'nature writing' is generally not thought of as 'science writing.' Rather, it is understood to have a literary or para-literary relation to the natural or life sciences, occasionally even to the agricultural sciences, whereas science writing is usually thought of as directly explaining the results of the physical and mathematical sciences. In both cases, the common understanding of the genres excludes highly technical writing aimed at a specialized readership, whatever the writing's literary merits. The only exception to this exclusion sometimes occurs for older writings whose information or ideas are clearly outdated and yet whose writing is sufficiently powerful to keep them in circulation for aesthetic reasons. In the Canadian context, scholars have not yet begun to recover such works for general or academic reading, with the partial exception of
EXPLORATION and TRAVEL writings that began life as specialized reports (there is nothing like the literary sampler The Intelligence of Louis Agassiz: A Specimen Book of Scientific Writings, 1963 put together by US writer Guy Davenport because of Ezra Pound's enthusiasm for Agassiz's verbal precision). Clarity and a degree of imaginative verve tend to be the main goals of scientific writing, particularly in its 20th-century examples, since these are almost by definition aimed at nonspecialist readers (whose ranks necessarily include scientists). E.G. Pielou's Fresh Water (1998) exemplifies this type of writing, as do two books by the Quebec-born astrophysicist Hubert Reeves (a fact signalled by the literary allusions in their titles, phrases borrowed from the French poets Paul Valery and Charles Baudelaire, respectively): Patience dans I'azur: L'evolution cosmique (1981) and L'heure de s'enivrer: L'univers a-t-il un sens? (1986), both now available in English translation. None of these books avoids the appropriate use of diagrams, charts, tables, or properly explained mathematics or jargon. A less technical, more anecdotal mode of explanation appears in such books as Talk Talk Talk: An Investigation into the Mysteries of Speech (1992) and The Barmaid's Brain and Other Strange Tales from Science (1998) by the science journalist Jay Ingram, and The Fourth Horseman: A Short History of Epidemics, Plagues, Famine and Other Scourges (1992) by Andrew Nikiforuk. Clarity and inventive power also help define modern nature writing, but such writing in the 2oth century often tried to fuse these elements with authorial sensitivity and literary expressiveness. Nature writing thus tends to distinguish itself from science writing not merely by its less technical subject matter, but particularly by its more obvious aspirations towards the status of fine writing. David Adams RICHARDS'S Lines on the Water: A Fisherman's Life on the Miramachi (1998) exemplifies this mode of writing, as do most of the many books by Roderick HAIGBROWN, including A River Never Sleeps (1946), in which a chapter on fishing books takes care to note those 'that are properly classed as good literature.' Haig-Brown thus raises the question of the literary status of science and nature writing. Nowadays, of course, the word'literature' -
ion
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which English adopted from the French in about the i4th century and whose roots go back to the Latin littera, or letter (of the alphabet) - is roughly synonymous with imaginative or 'creative writing/ as it has been since the Iate-i8th century. While Haig-Brown clearly intends this meaning, his distinction still relies on the word's earlier meaning. Before the Iate-i8th century, literature in the modern sense was known as 'polite literature,' while the word 'literature' by itself typically referred to all writing, especially learned writing - a sense still preserved in references to 'the scientific (or medical or legal) literature' on a given subject. The crucial development in the specialization of the word 'literature' was the growing emphasis on the aesthetic quality of the writing in question, to the point where many would no longer admit Haig-Brown's slightly extended usage as legitimate. A similar historical development in French reveals itself in the emergence of the phrase belles lettres ('fine writing') - which English borrowed to designate aesthetically pleasing writing that sits uneasily inside the trinity of poetry, fiction, and drama - and in the mainly poststructuralist distinction between ECRITURE (literary or rhetorically aware writing) and discours (all [other] writing). A significant consequence of this historical shift in the term 'literature' is the uncanonical status of science and nature writing, whose examples scholars have typically limited in two ways: first, by excluding professional, technical, and practical writing (eg, articles promulgating research results, surveyors' reports, or field guides); and secondly by restricting their commentary to specific kinds of expository, descriptive, and narrative prose, typically 'non-fictional' and intended for a more or less general readership (eg, popular accounts of cosmology, memoirs of bush life, or certain SPORTS writing). The limiting exclusion of specialist works can be justified since much science and nature writing involves 'translating' the technical subject matter of such excluded texts into more accessible, entertaining, or literary forms. The limiting restriction to 'non-fictional' prose is harder to justify. Not only does this narrowing turn science and nature writing into merely verbal suspension bridges spanning the technical and the literary, it also disregards the modes (discur-
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sive, rhetorical, formal, conceptual, thematic, and ideological) that science and nature writing share with other genres, both literary and nonliterary - as, for instance, Don MCKAY makes engagingly plain in his poetry collection Birding, or Desire (1983). The list of contemporary poets whose work crosses these formal and categorical boundaries is impressive (there is scarcely a significant poet ever to have written in Canada whose poems could not be considered part of nature writing). In addition to McKay, the contemporary list would include Margaret ATWOOD, Robert BRINGHURST, Christopher DEWDNEY, Diana HARTOG (Polite to Bees: A Bestiary, 1992), Tim LILBURN, Kim MALTMAN (Technologies/ Installations, 1990), Daphne MARL ATT, Erin MOURE, Bruce Whiteman (The Invisible World is in Decline', ongoing since 1984: see the selection in his Visible Stars, 1995), and Jan ZWICKY (Songs for Relinquishing the Earth, 1996). With the partial exception of Dewdney and maybe Maltman, these poets might be considered to be writing nature rather than science poetry - a non-existent genre that contains one early masterpiece, Lucretius' On the Nature of Things (ist century BCE), and such sports of culture as the descriptions of plant sex in The Botanic Garden (1791) by Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of the famous naturalist and precursor of Lorna CROZIER (whose poetic sequence 'Erotic Chlorophylls' brings sex and botany together rather differently). The closest thing to science poetry in Canada apart from Dewdney's idiosyncratic texts are the works of E.J. PRATT, who made more orthodox use of scientific knowledge for poetic ends. What is true of poetry holds for fiction as well, in eluding SCIENCE FICTION, which is rarely thought of as a kind of science writing perhaps because it typically concerns speculative worlds, or the human and social consequences of TECHNOLOGY. Yet within a reasonably broad definition of nature writing, there seems no justification for excluding works such as Atwood's Surfacing (1972), Timothy FINDLEY'S Not Wanted on the Voyage (1984), Georges BUGNET'S Laforet (i935), or Jovette MARCHESSAULT'S fictionalized autobiographical trilogy (Comme une enfant de la terre, 1975; La mere des herbes, 1980; and Les cailloux blancs pour lesforets obscures, 1987). Each of
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these works imaginatively takes part in the longrunning Euro-American discussion of the relation of civilization to nature, and thus may send readers back into the world no less transformed than they would have been by the non-fictional works of Haig-Brown or Farley MO WAT, both of whom are regarded as genuine nature writers. Even clearer is the case to be made for opening the genres to ANIMAL STORIES such as those by C.G.D. ROBERTS and E.T. SETON - or in another vein, Antonine MAILLET'S animal epic L'oursiade (1990). Stories such as those of Roberts and Seton are recognized more than other kinds of fiction as nature writing, though often enough only to be regarded as marginal or eccentric (many would consider such works fantasy or CHILDREN'S LITERATURE, alongside Margaret Marshall SAUNDERS' best-selling Beautijuljoe, 1894, the didactic and sentimental autobiography of a maltreated dog). The more self-consciously literary works differ from most science and nature writing in the attention they give to their own medium. The words in conventional science and nature writing may be carefully chosen and the sentences finely wrought, but such writing almost by definition requires that its elements not draw attention to themselves - so as not to offer readers stained glass when they were expecting field glasses or a microscope. (Yet few scientists since Werner Heisenberg would argue that the mediating instruments of scientific investigation do not affect the thing investigated, which may be to say that science and nature writing are out of phase with advanced science.) European and American traditions deeply marked science and nature writing in Canada. The most famous of such examples is the biblical God's gift to Adam and Eve of lordship over the earth (Genesis i: 28), but other important influences include the natural disasters visited on Pharaoh by the Israelites' God (Exodus 7-12), and the spiritual autobiographies modelled on Augustine's Confessions (397-98 CE) that use nature as a theatre in which to dramatize their author's psychological struggles. The diverse idealizations of several important literary traditions since Hesiod (georgic, pastoral, topographical, meditative, and romantic) likewise helped shape science and nature writing, as did herbals, bestiaries, and natural histories. The
rich and multiform traditions of Canada's FIRST NATIONS were also influential. Knowingly or not, science and nature writers often make use of metaphors, modes, ideas, and attitudes that ultimately derive from or react against these cultural sources. Hugh MACLENNAN, for example, writing in Seven Rivers of Canada (1961) of his journey down the Mackenzie, confesses to a 'moment of panic' in which he wonders 'if human beings are necessary on this earth' - a dwelling-place so old, vast, and full of non-human nature that its unimaginable totality seems to mock his culture's biblically sanctioned claim to absolute dominion. MacLennan's Job-like uneasiness here stems from the collision of his post-Darwinian consciousness with his inherited allegiance to the Judeo-Christian notion of a Creator-God - an uneasiness common in late-igth- and 20th-century nature writing. This mood is alien to nature and science writers who look elsewhere for inspiration - to Asian traditions such as Taoism and Zen Buddhism, or to Aboriginal beliefs - even when they have no intention of discarding their scientific or religious inheritances. Some, in fact, aim at a transcending synthesis across time and cultures. Sharon BUTALA'S The Perfection of the Morning (1994) and Tim Lilburn's ESSAYS and poems (Living in the World As If It Were Home, 1999, and Moosewood Sandhills, 1994) are works that attempt to transform the biblical inheritance not only through encounters with nature, but through openness to other traditions as well. The note of uneasiness is also alien to those earlier writers who, influenced by British natural theology, found in nature's plenty the traces of God's commanding signature: the prolific Catharine Parr TRAILL, for example, whose work ranged from serious botanizing (Studies of plant life in Canada, 1885) through familiar yet learned essays (Pearls and Pebbles, 1894) to scientific instruction for children (Sketches from nature: or, Hints to juvenile naturalists, 1830), an important yet little studied subgenre of science and nature writing. Other unanxious writers include Philip Henry Gosse, whose didactic dialogue between grown-up and child - The Canadian Naturalist (1840) - was popular in its day, and William DAWSON, geologist and indefatiga-
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ble advocate for the harmony of science and faith, whose works range from the fine Acadian Geology (1855) to the widely read Archaia; or, Studies of the Cosmogony and Natural History of the Hebrew Scriptures (1860). The Quebecois nationalist and botanist Frere MARIE-VICTORIN reveals a religious confidence similar to that of his anglophone counterparts, despite his somewhat different intellectual history (his scientific views were eventually influenced by the spiritual evolutionism of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin). In dedicating his monumental scientific inventory, Flore laurentienne (1935), to the young of his 'pays,' Marie-Victorin hoped to encourage a return to God's other bible, the Book of Nature. Likewise undisturbed by cosmic anxiety are the writers of every period who are uninterested in seeing the earth as a staging ground for metaphysical or theological contests: most of the explorers, for example, or nature and science writers such as Don Gayton (The Wheatgrass Mechanism, 1990; Landscapes of the Interior, 1995), Haig-Brown, and the prolific and popular R.D. Lawrence and Mowat. These last three writers' works sometimes controversially blur the boundaries between fact and fiction, venture into polemic (like John A. Livingston in Rogue Primate, 1994) or HUMOUR (Mowat especially), and even experiment with biographical fiction centred in animal consciousness (eg, Haig-Brown's Panther, 1934). A quite different kind of natural mockery from that felt by MacLennan prevails in Wade Hemsworth's 'The Blackfly Song' (1955). This is possibly the most famous work in a long tradition of popular and folk songs that have contributed to the attitudes shaping nature writing, though such songs are not usually considered written genres. No less relevant, and no less conventionally excluded, are the sonic, vocal, and musical experiments of R. Murray SCHAFER (eg, his environmental MUSIC drama, And Wolf Shall Inherit the Moon, 1988-) and Glenn Gould, whose 'sound documentaries' The Idea of North (1967) and The Latecomers (1969) offer brilliant polyphonic voicings of issues central to much nature writing (see NORTH). While the cultural and academic evaluation of science and nature writing remained fairly constant over long stretches of time, the popularity of the genres varied considerably after the
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ijth century. Yet even when out of fashion, these 'sub- and para-literary' kinds never entirely disappeared from public view, persisting voluminously on the crammed shelves of public libraries and second-hand bookstores. They also persist in glossy magazines (Canadian Geographic, Equinox, Franc-Vert, geographica, Harrowsmith), and, appropriately transformed, in RADIO and television programs. The increased number of specialty cable channels (eg, the Discovery Channel) encouraged the making of more science and nature DOCUMENTARIES (catering still further to the North American appetite for informative entertainment and vicarious outdoor experience are the megaspectacles screened in the IMAX cinemas, and widely circulated US magazines such as National Geographic, which also sponsors a television program). Likewise important, especially from a historical standpoint, are the VISUAL ARTS of painting and photography. Natural scenes and LANDSCAPES abound in Canadian painting, influencing how nature writers see. By the same token, these writers affect painters' perceptions, and occasionally the influences go both ways at once. The painter Emily CARR was an occasional nature writer, just as the writer Seton was also a minor painter, illustrating his own books, including the four-volume Lives of Game Animals (1925-8). A significant intermediate figure is Paul KANE, known for both his paintings and his internationally circulated Wanderings of an Artist Among the Indians of North America (1859). Photography played a somewhat different role in relation to science and nature writing. Unlike paintings, science and nature photographs rarely stand alone (those of Freeman Patterson are a notable exception). Instead, they often act as attractive aids to memory, much as the apparently freestanding images and carvings made by the First Nations on the Pacific Coast deliberately recall moments in important national or family narratives. Called upon to serve both documentary and aesthetic ends (like Audubon's famous paintings), photographic images tend to circulate in an uncertain alliance with the written word, whether in the magazines already noted or in popular and informative coffee-table books. Notable instances ofthe latter include Richard and Sydney Cannings's
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British Columbia: A Natural History (1996), Wayne Grady's The Vulture (1997), Barbara Hodgson's The Rat (1997), R.D. Lawrence's The Natural History of Canada (1988), Sid MARTY'S A Grand and Fabulous Notion: The First Century of Canada's Parks (1985), Legacy: The Natural History of Ontario (gen edjohn B. Theberge, 1989), and Wilderness Canada (ed Borden Spears, 1970, with essays by Pierre Elliott Trudeau, John A. Livingston, and Fred BODSWORTH, better known for his novels about ecological issues, including The Last of the Curlews, 1954). Benefiting from the inescapable presence of these other media, science and nature writing were as popular as ever in the waning decades of the 2oth century, and their received cultural value again began to rise. The persistent niche market for nature writing in particular encouraged a growing academic sub-discipline of literary, historical, and cultural studies known as ECOCRITICISM that may lead to the wholesale re-evaluation of the various kinds of writing noticed here (another growing sub-discipline, media and communication studies, has affinities with science writing, and roots that go back to the work of Harold INNIS, whose The Fur Trade in Canada [1930] opens with a short natural history of the beaver). In literary studies, the new academic movement of ecocriticism concerns itself with the role that literature (especially nature writing) and literary studies have played or can play in influencing how Euro-Americans understand and dwell on earth. These are subjects that were central to the movement's precursors, most of them by significant literary writers: Dennis LEE'S Savage Fields (1977), Margaret Atwood's Survival (1972) and Strange Things (!995)> D - G - JONES'S Butterfly on Rock (1970), and Northrop FRYE'S The Bush Garden (1971). The recent rise in the cultural value of science and nature writing, like earlier fluctuations in their value, has its roots in the historical changes in the significance of the key terms. So naturalized are these terms - and with them the assimilation of science to empirical investigation and of knowledge to literacy - that they have made it virtually impossible to view the ORAL literature of indigenous peoples as including significant examples of science and nature 'writing.' This oversight looks all the more striking when one recalls that the First Nations in
Canada were often part of the subject matter of works that claim a place within the present categories: not only the classic accounts, journals, letters, voyages, and histories of Jacques CARTIER, David THOMPSON, and others, or of the many authors who contributed to the JESUIT RELATIONS, but also important writings such as Hugh BRODY'S Maps and Dreams (1981) and Living Arctic (1987); Rudy WIEBE'S Playing Dead (1989); or Wade DAVIS's One River (1997), which shifts the geographical focus to the Amazon. Representative examples of the earlier writings can be found in three anthologies: Germaine Warkentin's Canadian Exploration Literature (1993), with its literary emphasis; John Warkentin's The Western Interior of Canada: A Record of Geographical Discovery 1612-1917 (1964), with its scientific emphasis; and S.R. Mealing's The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: A Selection (1963). How much of the first North American peoples' scientific and natural knowledge has perished is impossible to say, but the amount must be substantial. Despite such losses, the recorded body of Aboriginal story and song is remarkably abundant. Coming to Light: Contemporary Translations of the Native Literatures of North America, ed Brian Swann (1994), contains relevant material from within Canada's current borders: for example, the Innu Uinipapeu Rich's farcical and sometimes obscene wolverine stories. English tellings (or retellings) of significant myths can also be found in such works as the Mohawk Pauline JOHNSON'S renderings of Legends of Vancouver (1911), George CLUTESI'S Tse-Shaht Son of Raven, Son of Deer (1967), and Harry ROBINSON'S Write It on Your Heart (1989) and Nature Power (1992). Drawing explicit attention to neglected or disparaged knowledge, the anthology First Fish, First People: Salmon Tales of the North Pacific Rim (1998) places the work of Jeannette ARMSTRONG and Lee MARACLE in a context that extends to eastern Asia (the Ainu, the Nyvkh, the Ulchi). These collections reveal the extent to which nature and science writing derive from a particular Judeo-Christian, European cultural and intellectual history, and how much in recent centuries the genres were defined by AngloAmerican models. To see this one has only to compare indigenous accounts with animal stories such as those written by Roberts and Seton.
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Wild Animals I Have Known (1898), for instance, reveals the culturally specific mix of science, imagined psychology, and sentiment that allowed Seton, like Roberts, to publish collection after successful collection for some forty years. A clearer proof of the historically shaped cultural specificity of science and nature can be found in the example of Canada's internationally famous nature writer GREY OWL. His Pilgrims of the Wild (1934) and Tales of an Empty Cabin (1936) derive their former authority partly from their author's supposed Indian blood and partly from their genial, semi-transparent prose. The way in which they easily combine close observation with factual instruction and implied moral teaching reveals that the books stand foursquare within the mainstream of Anglo-American popular natural history and travel and adventure writing in the late-igth and early 2oth centuries. 'Your bear,' runs a typical passage in Tales, 'is really a good fellow, and will eat almost anything that you give him, or that you may inadvertently leave lying around, just to show you that his heart is in the right place.' This is hardly the sort of interaction between human and animal natures that characterizes much traditional indigenous lore (which never sentimentalizes its comedy), nor is it much affected by the specialized insights of an increasingly influential scientific tradition that also left its mark on the genres in question here. The history of these influential macro-genres remains to be written, and would ideally examine them in the context of the Euro-American literary and cultural worlds where they flourished for centuries. Further reading: Wayne Grady, ed, Treasures of the Place: Three Centuries of Nature Writing in Canada (Vancouver: Douglas and Mclntyre, 1992); Andrea Pinto Lebowitz, ed, Living in Harmony: Nature Writing by Women in Canada (Victoria: Orca, 1996); Bruce Littlejohn and Jon Pearce, eds, Marked by the Wild: An Anthology of Literature Shaped by the Canadian Wilderness (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1973). Iain Higgins
SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY. The slow acknowledgement of Canada's extensive and significant contributions to the fields of science
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fiction and fantasy stems from the artificial division of the Canadian market into the mutually exclusive categories of genre fiction and Canadiana. The major science fiction (SF) and fantasy publishers are all either American or British, so that although Canadian writers always had a significant presence in these genres, their foreign packaging and distribution meant that these works were seldom identified as Canadian literature. Indeed, science fiction in particular became so closely associated in the public's mind with such high-profile American media series as Star Trek and Star Wars that most consumers came to think of SF as an American art form. In reality, space operas represent only one minor subset of imaginative literature, that of 'hard SF' (the term refers to the genre's supposed basis in the 'hard' SCIENCES) and does not accurately reflect the breadth or literary merit of the contemporary genre. Canadian SF tends not to be of the spaceship variety, and even when Canadians do turn their hands to space opera, it tends to be thematically distinct from the American version. Nevertheless, Canadians writing genre fiction are often seen as catering to the American market and excluded from the Canadian canon. Conversely, Canadian publishers have tended to shy away from genre labels, so that those works easily identifiable as Canadian are seldom acknowledged as SF. Margaret ATWOOD'S The Handmaid's Tale (1985), for example, is seldom to be found in the SF section of the bookstore, though it is clearly a work of science fiction. Without the population base to support its own genre-specific magazines and imprints, Canadian PUBLISHING becomes its own all-inclusive marketing category. The advantage of this lack of differentiation is that it has allowed Canadian authors considerable flexibility in crossing GENRE boundaries. Whereas American authors often find themselves typecast within a particular marketing category (since switching categories would imply surrendering one's current following and attempting to build up a new reader base from scratch), Canadian authors can experiment with different genres while still remaining within the market for Canadiana. As a result, practically all notable Canadian authors have at least one fantasy or imaginative piece in their portfolio, and Canadian SF includes a
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much higher proportion of critically acclaimed literature by such authors as Margaret Atwood, Ven BEGAMUDRE, Phyllis GOTLIEB, Frederick GROVE, William KINSELLA, Margaret LAURENCE, Stephen LEACOCK, Gwendolyn MAC EWEN, HughMACLENNAN, Leon ROOKE,
Stephen SCOBIE, Robin SKELTON, Michel TREMBLAY, and Michael YATES. The disadvantage of this arrangement is that many of these stories remain buried in the back issues of various small-press Canadian literary magazines. The difficulty in pulling this scattered material into a coherent body of literature is further complicated by definitional problems. As John Bell and Lesley CHOYCE point out in the introduction to their anthology of Atlantic Canadian SF, Visions from the Edge (1981), science fiction and fantasy constitute only two categories of a multifaceted literature that includes UTOPIAN fiction, political ALLEGORY, alternate histories and 'what if scenarios, near-future thrillers and disaster scenarios, horror and stories of the supernatural, magic realism, and thefantastique. Consequently, most Canadian authors prefer the term 'speculative fiction' (still abbreviated 'SF'), which permits these categories to blur and claims a higher literary value than that typical of mass-market formula series. (Readers are cautioned against use of the pejorative 'Sci-fi,' which properly refers to only low-end, non-literary forms, such as the Japanese Godzilla movie.) The true vigour of this impressive body of work is too often overlooked. The large and rapidly growing CANON of Canadian speculative fiction not only represents a significant crosssection of Canadian writing, but also provides one of the best windows into Canadian culture. Freed from the conventions of mainstream literalism, speculative fiction is often able to project Canadian cultural concerns and responses onto a much broader canvas. By radically altering setting or tampering with the familiar variables of lives and times, the SF author can conduct a powerful thought experiment, revealing, under controlled conditions, particular aspects of Canadian human nature. Other authors prefer ALLEGORY, or simply extrapolate current trends and issues into the future, but whatever the idiom, the questions posed and the answers provided are determined by, and often suggest the limits of, Canadian experience.
The point is perhaps best illustrated through reference to Guy Gavriel KAY'S Tigana (1990). To explore the importance of cultural identity, Kay creates a fantasy world in which a nation is not only conquered by a great foreign power, but its citizenry ensorcelled so that they lose even the ability to speak the name of their former province. The action and characterization are then developed to illustrate how this psychological occupation is far more devastating than the physical; that the loss of one's identity necessarily pervades and distorts every aspect of life, right down to one's sexual relations. In this instance the fantasy element is not mere window dressing, but the essential starting point for an examination of what happens to a people deprived of their voice. In other cases, the altered context frees the writer to address familiar issues without triggering the readers' preprogrammed responses. Kay's The Lions ofAl-Rassan (1995), for example, addresses another key theme that emerges from the Canadian experience, that of RELIGIOUS tensions within a cultural mosaic. It is clear that Kay's setting is modelled on Moor-occupied Spain, and that his three viewpoint characters represent analogues of the JEWISH, Christian, and ISLAMIC faiths; the fantasy backdrop, however, allows Kay to explore these issues without directly offending anyone's religious sensibilities. Similarly, Robert J. SAWYER'S Quintaglio trilogy (1992-4) is able to examine the impact that revolutionary ideas have on a society, without the distraction of readers thinking they already understand the histories of Galileo, Darwin, and FREUD. By projecting real-wo rid concerns onto the more universal stage of a mythical setting, the SF writer is released from the constraints of historical accuracy and debated interpretation, and so able to focus on the more fundamental question of underlying principles. Thus, although many of the volumes crowding the SF and fantasy shelves are mere escapist adventures written to a predictable formula, this tends to be less true of Canadian speculative fiction. Most Canadian writers adopt SF idioms for some larger purpose than merely to transport the reader out of their mundane lives. Donald Kingsbury's innocently titled Courtship Rite (1982), for example, is an elegant thought
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experiment in which the author is able to explore the limits of cultural relativism simply by positing a particularly hostile alien environment. Whereas formula fiction attempts to remain within the readers' comfort zone by relying on the familiar trappings of the genre, Canadian novels such as Courtship Rite or The Handmaid's Tale are often distinctly unsettling. Indeed, Canadian SF may be characterized by its tendency to subvert the conventions of the American /British versions of the genre. Dave DUNCAN'S Hero (1991), for example, turns the usual space-commander archetype inside out, giving us a sexually impotent protagonist whose heroic reputation is a politically motivated fabrication. In contrast to the victorious hero of American SF, Canadians tend to portray the hero as someone who copes, rather than someone who wins. Leslie Gadallah's various adventure novels are illustrative of the protagonist as bungler, caught up in events he or she cannot control, fighting the wrong battles, and losing more often than winning. Whereas American formula fiction requires a happy ending, the heroes of Canadian SF can manage only a draw at best. Duncan's Hero passes out before the reader can find out who wins, though the reader suspects the worst. Gadallah's protagonists either die for their cause or manage to survive only in dreary exile; on the rare occasions they succeed, the goals they achieve are not the ones originally sought. The computer protagonist of Sawyer's Golden Fleece (1990) gets his charges safely to their new world - only to succumb to a computer virus that gives away their location. Even when an occasional hero manages to save the world, as in Duncan's West of January (1989), the protagonist's self-image remains one of cowardice and inadequacy. Similarly, in the fantasy genre, Duncan's series A Man of His Word and A Handful of Men (1990-4) may be populated by elves, goblins, and gnomes, but the usual depictions are here debunked as RACIST stereotypes. Sean STEWART'S Nobody's Son (1993), inverts the fantasy convention of 'happily ever after' by demonstrating that the real struggles and character growth occur after the hero has already won the kingdom and the hand of the princess. Tanya Huff takes the point a step further in The Last Wizard (1989) by demonstrating that, having
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won the ultimate battle against evil (in Child of the Grove, 1988), there is nothing left for the hero to do, and therefore nothing to look forward to except a long, slow slide into depression. Accordingly, Canadian speculative fiction may be thematically distinguished from its American and British counterparts. In contrast to the high value placed upon technological progress and space exploration in American hard SF, Canadian writers tend to distrust technology and to reject space (consider the protagonist in Candasjane DORSET'S award-winning story 'Sleeping in a Box,' from Machine Sex, 1988). Canadian authors, especially those coming out of a mainstream tradition, tend to be drawn more towards the magic realism of William Kinsella's Field of Dreams than to Star Wars, and tend to emphasize setting and character over plot and action. In Dorsey's 'Willows' (Machine Sex), for example, the setting is the story. Nor are Canadians generally drawn to the galactic empires of British-style space opera, likely because Canada's colonial experience provides a more skeptical view of the benefits of empire. Furthermore, trying to hold the nation together across the length of a continent has been sufficiently challenging that the thought of expanding the experiment to a galactic scale is simply not credible. The 'bystander' role that Canadians often adopt internationally suggests yet another model, that of the supporter, working the Canadarm - like the workaday hero of H.A. Hargreaves' 'Tee Vee Man' in North by 2000 (1976), who happens to end a political crisis through his timely repair of a communication satellite. Nor do Canadians picture themselves blending into the Star Trek crew. The belief in cultural distinctiveness, combined with the support role as outside observer, produces one of the key characteristics of Canadian SF, namely, a unique take on the theme of alienation. SF is a particularly useful vehicle for exploring issues of alienation and 'otherness,' thanks to the ready metaphor of the alien monster. What distinguishes Canadian SF is that, in the Canadian version, the protagonists generally come to value their alienation, choosing to remain on the outside looking in, even when given the opportunity to be welcomed back into the fold. In Hargreaves' 'Dead to the World,' for example, a
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computer error erases the protagonist's identity, effectively cutting off his access to vital services. After his initial panicky attempts to have his existence officially recognized, he slowly realizes that he is better off 'dead.' Similarly, in Edward Llewellyn's Salvage and Destroy (1984) and Fugitive in Transit (1985), the protagonists are so alienated from their own species that they find it easier to relate to each other than to their respective societies, and ultimately defect to their former enemies. None of this is to suggest that Canadian SF is invariably bleak, slow-paced, and defeatist. On the contrary, even a cursory review of the genre's history demonstrates that a thoughtful subtext need not preclude a page-turning narrative structure. The history of anglophone Canadian speculative fiction can be usefully divided into two periods marked by the publication of John Robert COLOMBO'S Other Canadas in 1979. Prior to this ground-breaking anthology, there was little awareness of Canadian SF as a distinct body of literature, and Colombo's introduction was the first attempt to identify common elements within Canadian speculative fiction. In the same year, Colombo collaborated with Michael Richardson, John Bell, and Alexandre L. AMPRIMOZ to produce the first major bibliography of Canadian SF, the 85-page, 6oo-item CND SF&F. Although Colombo's overly inclusive definition of 'Canadian' was widely criticized, both works generated considerable interest, and the emergence of the Canadian school as a self-conscious movement can be traced to this period. The founding of Canvention, the national SF convention, and the creation of the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Achievement AWARDS (ultimately renamed the Aurora Awards) also occurred in 1979. The pre-Colombo period was initially characterized by brief forays into the fantasic undertaken by respected literary figures such as Sir Charles G.D. ROBERTS and E.J. PRATT. The first significant Canadian SF work is generally considered to be James DE MILLE'S A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888). A dystopian SATIRE - often touted as the best 19thcentury Canadian novel in any category - it chronicles the discovery of a lost civilization at the South Pole, whose values are the inverse of
our own: to be poor is to be esteemed, to be rich is to be shunned, death is more valued than life. Of similar historical interest is another social satire, Consider Her Ways (1947) by Frederick Philip Grove. Here the intrepid explorers are an army of ant scientists who eventually discover and interpret the mysteries of the New York Public Library. Excerpts from these and others of the more interesting examples of this classical period can be found in Other Canadas. Of more current interest is the early work of Winnipeg-born A.E. VAN VOGT, one of the key figures in the creation of the American golden age of science fiction. Between the publication of 'Black Destroyer' (one of the great short classics of genre SF) in 1939, and his move to California in 1944, he produced a significant portion of his lifetime output and some of the defining novels of the genre, including Slan (1940), The Weapon Shops oflsher (1941-2), Earth's Last Fortress (1942), and The Weapon Makers (1944). Many critics similarly lay claim to Edmonton-born Gordon R. DICKS ON as a Canadian author, but having left Canada at age 13, well before the start of his career, and with no discernible Canadian influences in his writing, it is difficult to see how this claim can be substantiated. Phyllis Gotlieb's Canadian credentials, by contrast, are unambiguous. Her first novel, Sunburst (1964) - still considered by many as her best - is a slightly dark coming-of-age story in which Gotlieb challenges the genre's then-predominant love affair with nuclear power and psi superpowers. Her later novels, O Master Caliban! (1976), A Judgement of Dragons (1980), Emperor, Swords, Pentades (1982), Heart of Red Iron (1989), Flesh &• Gold (1998), Violent Stars (1999), and The Son of the Morning (1983) collection, all deal with the Galactic Federation. In the same period, fellow Torontonian Gwendolyn MacEwen was producing some of the best Canadian exemplars of magic REALISM to date: the novel Julian the Magician (1963) and the 14 stories of the Neman collection (1985). The number of active writers increased rwentyfold as Canadian SF found increasing acceptance in the marketplace. Significant Englishlanguage Canadians, in addition to those already named, include Chris Atack, Frederick Brio, J. Brian Clarke, Michael Coney, Wayland DREW, James Alan Gardner, Steve George, William
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GIBSON, Terence Green, Tom Henigan, Nalo Hopkinson, Tanya Huff, Marian Hughes, Monica HUGHES, Don Hutchison, Eileen Kernaghan, Crawford Kilian, Nancy Kilpatrick, Donald Kingsbury, Don Kushner, David Nickle, John Park, Spider ROBINSON, Michelle Sagara, Heather SPEARS, Antony Swithin (William Sargent), Edo van Belkom, Peter Watts, Andrew Weiner, and Robert Charles Wilson. A major event in the creation of this community was the publication of the Tesseracts anthologies and the subsequent emergence of Tesseract Books (not to be confused with Tesseract, 1988, a weak SF novel by Joseph Addison). The original volume (1985) was edited by Judith MERRIL, the famed American anthologist and author who left the United States for Toronto in protest over the Vietnam War. Merril's anthology demonstrated the vitality and literary quality of Canadian speculative fiction, and led to a second volume, Tesseracts2 (1987), this time coedited by Phyllis Gotlieb and Douglas BARB OUR. By Tesseracts3 (1990), co-edited by Candas Jane Dorsey and Gerry Truscott, the pattern of assigning each subsequent volume to a new pair of editors was firmly established. Rotating the co-editorship through the emerging SF community, purposefully balancing each editorial team by gender, region, style, and subgenre, the Tesseracts anthologies managed to broadly represent the full spectrum of the Canadian genre. Each volume included a significant proportion of francophone stories in TRANSLATION, and the series included a separate 'best of Quebec' volume, TesseractsQ (1996). By Tesseracts4 (1992), the anthology was routinely receiving over 400 submissions. Becoming an annual with Tesseracts5 (1996), the series also committed itself to publishing new writers, reserving up to 20 per cent of each volume for this purpose. The success of the anthologies led in turn to the Tesseract book imprint. Providing the first consistent Canadian market, Tesseract Books both helped to create, and tapped into, the accelerating growth of Canadian SF, by launching the careers of such novelists as Michael Barley, Tereasa Plowright, and Sean Stewart; collecting the scattered works of established authors such as Dorsey and Gotlieb; translating the novels of Quebec authors such as Elisabeth
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VONARBURG; and reprinting out-of-print books by the likes of Michael Coney. The other half of the development of the Canadian market was the appearance of the ironically named On Spec magazine in 1989. Numerous attempts had been made to launch a Canadian SF magazine, but few had lasted more than a few issues, obtained national distribution, or achieved professional standards and production values. On Spec's immediate success again demonstrated that the growth in both writers and readers had at last reached critical mass. The appearance of a sustained magazine market was a crucial development, not only as a showcase for Canadian SF, but as a vehicle in the development of additional writers. A 'best of collection, On Spec: The First Five Years (Tesseract Books, 1995), celebrated the magazine's staying power, but it had already been joined by the critically acclaimed Transversions (1994) and the media-oriented Parsec (1995). A peculiarity of both Tesseract Books and On Spec Magazine are their editorial collectives. On Spec is edited and published by the Copper Pig Society, a variable member committee that decides each issue's content, with occasional input from an additional advisory board of established writers, editors, and critics. As with the rotating editorship of the Tesseracts anthologies, the committee structure of the magazine ensures a representative cross-section of Canadian SF, and has provided continuity as various key players have departed. Being unable to identify the magazine with a single editor or editorial vision, however, often confuses American reviewers more familiar with their own highly differentiated market, where the editor is the publication. Just as American SF is steeped in the ideology of rugged individualism and tends to feature the alpha male as hero, the history of the development of the American genre has been dominated by a few charismatic editors and producers, most notably John W. Campbell and Gene Roddenbury. That the development of Canadian SF has been characterized by a committee structure perhaps reflects a corresponding difference in national character and ideology. Just as the publication of Other Canadas marks the beginning of the modern period in English Canada, Norbert Spehner's founding of Requiem
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in 1974 (renamed Solaris in 1979) marks the creation of the SF community in Quebec. Here again the magazine was turned over to a committee - though in this case with clearly demarked areas of responsibility - when Spehner stepped down in 1983. A second influential magazine, Imagine... (est 1979) was in turn followed by a number of smaller publications. And, just as the Tesseracts anthologies were a driving force in English Canada, a variety of original anthologies constituted a key outlet for Quebec SF writers in the 19803. Key writers to emerge in the post-Solaris period include Jean-Pierre April, Alain Bergeron, Joel Champetier, Jean Dion, Yves MEYNARD, Francine Pelletier, Esther ROCHON, Daniel Sernine, Guy Sirois, JeanFrancois Somcynsky, Jean-Louis Trudel, and Elisabeth Vonarburg. Of particular interest to anglophone readers are Jane Brierley 's translations of Elisabeth Vonarburg's novels, The Silent City (1988), The Maerlande Chronicle (1992; US title, In the Mothers' Land) and Reluctant Vogager (i995), which manage to capture something of the characteristic style of francophone fiction; Jean-Louis Trudel's translation of Joel Champetier's The Dragon's Eye, a tightly written SF spy thriller, and Yves Meynard's The Book of Knights (1998), a charming young-adult fantasy, Quebec's answer to Stewart's Nobody's Son. The third and final component in the emergence of a self-aware Canadian SF community was the creation of national structures. In 1989, 10 years after the founding of the national convention and the Aurora AWARDS, Canadian SF writers recognized their common interests by founding SF Canada, the national writers' association. This was followed in 1992 by the formation of the Canadian Region of the Science Fiction Writers of America, an important recognition of the distinctive needs of Canadian authors by the genre's most powerful lobby group. In 1994, a coalition of readers, writers, artists, and academics founded the National Science Fiction and Fantasy Society to promote Canadian SF. The national organizations were careful to include the francophone community, although Quebec maintains its own independent awards (the Prix Boreal was founded in 1980, followed in 1984 by the Grand Prix de la ScienceFiction et du Fantastique Quebecois) in addition
to the French-language categories of the Auroras. The synergy created by an integrated Canadian market allowed the emergence of a speculative fiction that can more directly address the preoccupations and literary tastes of Canadians. Although the increasing diversity of a rapidly growing national output makes generalization difficult, one can nevertheless discern the outlines of a distinctive literary movement. It may no longer be feasible to read the entire Canadian canon, but it is possible to keep up with the current output, thus participating in the sort of literary community not seen in speculative fiction since the golden age of American SF. See also Michel BIBAUD, Wilfrid EGGLESTON, POPULAR CULTURE. Further reading: David Ketterer, Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992); National Library of Canada, Out of This World: Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy (Kingston: Quarry, 1995); Robert J. Sawyer, Canadian Science Fiction (available on-line: http:/ /www.sfwriter.com); Edo van Belkom, Northern Dreamers (Kingston: Quarry, 1998); Robert Runte
SCOBIE, Stephen. Poet, critic, editor, professor of English; b Carnousie, Scotland, 31 Dec 1943; son of Jean Hope Garvie (Slater) and Arthur Cross Scobie. After completing an MA at U St Andrews (1965), Scobie emigrated to Canada, where in 1969 he received a PhD from U British Columbia. He taught at U Alberta for 10 years andYiow teaches at U Victoria. A Fellow of the ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA, he has published numerous volumes of poetry, from formalist ELEGIES and verse biographies to PERFORMANCE and deconstructionist poetry. His collections include Babylondromat (1966), The Birken Tree (1973), Stone Poems (1974), McAlmon's Chinese Opera (1980), The Ballad of Isabel Gunn (1987), Ghosts: A Glossary of the Intertext (1990), and Gospel (1994). The Ballad of Isabel Gunn, which was made into an opera, concerns an Orkney woman who disguises herself as a man to travel with her lover to colonial Canada (see also THOMAS). Gospel is a first-person account of the life of Jesus.
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In 1980, Scobie won the Governor General's AWARD for McAlmon's Chinese Opera, which examines the legacy of MODERNISM in the person of one of its important yet neglected participants. Since then, Scobie's CRITICISM and verse have established him as a prominent Canadian exponent of poststructuralism. The essays that make up Signature Event Cantext (1989) are inspired by Jacques Derrida's claim (in his 1971 Montreal lecture 'Signature, Event, Context') that language is always quoted out of context, its original context unrecoverable. Among his books of criticism are Leonard Cohen (1978), Sheila Watson (1984), and bpNichol: What History Teaches (1984). He also wrote the biography Alias Bob Dylan (1991). With Douglas HARBOUR he both edited The Maple Laugh Forever: An Anthology of Canadian Comic Poetry and wrote The Pirates of Pens Chance: Homolinguistic Translations (both 1981). He has served on the editorial board of White Pelican, Precisely, Books in Canada, Line, and Malahat R. Further reading: Barbara Godard, 'Can/Con?' Open Letter 8.3 (Spring 1992): 104-7; Donna Palmateer Pennee, 'Being Patient with Emptiness,' Essays on Canadian Writing 55 (Fall 1991): 126-32. Andre Furlani
SCOFIELD, Gregory. METIS poet, playwright; b Moulting Moon, BC, 20 July 1966; son of Dorothy May Scofield. Raised in northern Saskatchewan, northern Manitoba, and Yukon, Scofield published his first collection of poems, The Gathering: Stones for the Medicine Wheel, in 1993; it won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. His lyric style encompasses traditional themes from his CREE heritage as well as the contemporary concerns - gathered from his work with street youth in Vancouver - expressed in Native Canadiana: Songs from the Urban Rez (1996). In Love Medicine and One Song (1997), Scofield addresses the complexities of GAY love. He also wrote two CBC RADIO dramas. I Knew Two Metis Women (1999) poetically reconstructs, through memoir and country-and-western MUSIC, the lives of his mother and aunt; Thunder Through My Veins (1999) is an AUTOBIOGRAPHY.
Ian Rae
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SCOTLAND. Scottish influences permeate all aspects of Canadian life, from POPULAR CULTURE (see, eg, FOLKLORE, MUSIC AND LiTERATURE[popular lyrics]) to institutional structures. Such SPORTS events as the Highland Games, especially in the MARITIMES, and the popularity of pipe bands in military and other parades all across the country provide obvious examples. Systems of education, too, were largely adapted from Scottish models (see, eg, MCCULLOCH); the Scots 'Common Sense' philosophers strongly influenced Canadian INTELLECTUAL HISTORY; and Presbyterianism had a profound impact on Protestant spiritual practice (see, eg, RELIGION, STRACHAN, UNITED CHURCH). Contemporary English-LANGUAGE idiom owes something to Scottish speech; place names (eg, NOVA SCOTIA) reflect immigration patterns (see also CULTURAL PLURALITY, EUROPEAN INFLUENCES, SCOTTISH GAELIC); and social history reveals a Scottish presence all across the country, including such enterprises as the Selkirk Settlement in MANITOBA and town planning in Western ONTARIO (see DUNLOP, GALBRAITH, John GALT). EXPLORATION literature provides examples of still further influence (see, eg, Alexander MACKENZIE); so does the world of politics: several prime ministers and other leaders in government and industry, from Sir John A. Macdonald on, claimed a Scottish ancestry, as did numerous writers. Ralph CONNOR turned GLENGARRY County into a representative model for MUSCULAR CHRISTIANITY; Frederick NIVEN balanced his memoirs of the Scottish Border Country against his appreciation of the mountainous BC Interior; John BUCHAN set his most famous MYSTERY in Scotland; and Margaret LAURENCE, Hugh MACLENNAN, and Alistair MACLEOD all probed the power of ancestral place in the lives of their contemporary characters. For other examples of writers with a claim to a Scottish connection (the list is far from complete), see G. CAMERON, H. INNIS, LOCHHEAD, MACCONMARA, MACEWEN, R. MACGREGOR, MCLACHLAN, B. REID.
Further reading: Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997); Elizabeth Waterston, Rapt in Plaid: Canadian Litera-
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ture and Scottish Tradition (Toronto: U Toronto P, 2001). SCOTT, Chris. Novelist; b Hull, England, 17 June 1945; son of Jessie Pearcy and John Scott, an engineer; educ U Hull (BA, 1966) and Manchester U (MA, 1967); emigrated to Canada in 1969, after a short stay in the United States. Scott's less experimental novels include Hitler's Bomb (1983), based largely on the Nazi bomb project as described in David Irving's The Virus House (1967), and the crime novel Jack (1988), which won the Arthur Ellis AWARD. Far from these, Bartleby (1971) demonstrates a textual playfulness reminiscent of Tristram Shandy - a half page of zeros, a chapter titled 'Wherein Divergencies Converge,' and a masque complete with interpolations of a 'NARRATOR of the Text at Large.' Antichthon (1982) follows the life and ramblings of Giordano Bruno, from his dangerous belief in an infinite universe, through his betrayal by the well-intended but ultimately weak scholar Bellarmine, to his execution for heresy in 1600. R. Clark
SCOTT, Duncan Campbell. Poet, short story writer, essayist, civil servant; b Ottawa 2 Aug 1862, d Ottawa 19 Dec 1947; son of Janet (Campbell MacCallum) and Rev William Scott, a Methodist minister. After attending junior college in Stanstead, QC, Scott became a junior clerk in the federal Dept of Indian Affairs at the age of 17. His astonishing 53-year civil service career in Indian Affairs included 19 years as deputy superintendent general - the most powerful nonelected position in that department. Scott's career saw the advent of such controversial assimilationist measures as cession of lands; the creation of reserves and residential schools; NATIVE enfranchisement; and later, the legalized erosion of such treaties through sale of lands, and through substantive changes to the Indian Act. The painful rift evident between the assimilationist policies promoted by Scott's office and the compassionate lyricism of Scott's poetry about Aboriginal people continues to inform many debates in Scott scholarship regarding issues of voice, cultural appropriation, criticism of Scott's literary works, and the place of these works in the Canadian literary CANON.
Scott's cultural life in Ottawa outside Indian Affairs was rich and varied, and his involvement in the ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA, the CANADIAN AUTHORS ASSOC, and the Ottawa Drama League demonstrates his genuine concern with fostering a national literature and a distinct Canadian culture, albeit one based on a British model. His social circle included poets Archibald LAMPMAN, John Masefield, Marjorie PICKTHALL, and Alfred Noyes; critics Pelham EDGAR and E.K. BROWN; and artists Lawren Harris, Walter J. Phillips, Edmund Morris, and Clarence Gagnon. Scott, himself an accomplished pianist, married American violinist Belle Warner Botsford in 1894. The couple had one child, Elizabeth, whose death at age 12 affected Scott deeply. Following his first wife's death in 1929, Scott married poet Elise AYLEN in 1931. He retired from Indian Affairs in 1932. Participation in collaborative projects and active promotion of the work of other Canadian writers and artists are two of the most salient features of Scott's public literary persona. His first literary work dates from his association with poet Archibald Lampman in Ottawa during the 18805-905. From 1892 to 1983, Scott collaborated with Lampman and Wilfred CAMPBELL on the Toronto Globe's weekly literature and arts column, 'At the Mermaid Inn,' thereby establishing a basis for narrative arts criticism in Canada. He continued to promote Lampman's poetry after the poet's death, in essays such as A Decade of Canadian Poetry' (1901), in 'Who's Who in Canadian Literature' (1926), and finally, by issuing a selected edition of Lampman, coedited with E.K. Brown in 1943. The Makers of Canada Series (1905), which Scott edited with Pelham Edgar, was another collaboration, an early attempt to assemble a comprehensive profile of significant Canadians and historical events. Scott's fervent nationalism also marks a number of essays he wrote under the aegis of his executive position with Indian Affairs. His historical essays on the administration of Indian Affairs, which appear in a second non-fiction series, Canada and Its Provinces (1914), and related later prose such as 'The Red Indian' (written for the Times of London in 1920) and The Aboriginal Races' (written for W.P.M. Kennedy's 1923 Social and Economic Conditions in the Dominion of
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Canada) also express both nostalgia for Native tradition and his credo of assimilation. As a long-standing member of the Royal Society of Canada (he was president in 1921-2) and, to a lesser extent, as a founding member of the Canadian Authors Assoc (he served a term as president from 1931 to 1933), Scott also exercised considerable influence in the Canadian arts community. He used the occasions of his presidential addresses to define and shape 'The Future of Canadian Literature/ the title of a 1894 article and a career-long concern, and he used his influence to make his colleagues aware of writers such as Elise Aylen and Marjorie Pickthall and artists such as Gagnon and Phillips, by writing introductions, reviews, and descriptive catalogues of their work. Scott had reservations about modern poetry: in his 1922 speech to the Royal Society entitled 'Poetry and Progress,' he dismisses MODERNISM as 'a virus'. Paradoxically, he is remembered most for stylistically innovative mixed-form poems such as 'The Height of Land.' Further, while poems based on northern and Native themes form only a small part of his oeuvre, they continue to be the most frequently anthologized and debated of his works. Scott's first collection of poetry, The Magic House and Other Poems (1893), initially printed at the author's expense, and well received, was subsequently published in London and Boston. That volume and others gave him a certain international reputation (Rupert Brooke referred to Scott in a 1913 letter as 'the only poet in Canada'). A second collection, Labour and the Angel (1898) contains two of his best-known poems, a SONNET, 'The Onondaga Madonna' and a mystical ballad, 'The Piper of Aril.' 'The Onondaga Madonna' sombrely describes a Native woman's infant son as 'the latest promise of her nation's doom.' In 'Watkwenies,' the lesser-known sonnet with which it is paired, an aged IROQUOIS warrior woman receives 'interest-money' from an Indian agent. Together, the two poems illustrate the tightly controlled elegiac aesthetic of much of Scott's poetry about Aboriginal people. As Stan DRAGLAND notes, Scott's 1905 and 1906 northern Treaty 9 trips for the Dept of Indian Affairs were particularly influential upon the sound, shape, and symbolic content of his
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poetry, but a 1905 collection, New World Lyrics and Ballads, had already signalled an aesthetic shift. Here, Scott experiments with the ragged line-ends of free verse in 'The Forsaken,' relocates fragments of Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard' in echoes of Latin and OJIBWA on a storm-pounded northern lake in 'Night Hymns on Lake Nipigon,' and tells the gruesome narrative of a Native trapper killed by avaricious white men in 'On the Way to the Mission.' This collection establishes Scott's characteristic use of silence, and his intensely lyrical descriptions of northern Canadian LANDSCAPES. His musician's rhythmic sensitivity is audible in his skilful use of assonance, consonance, and onomatopoeia, and in the sophistication of his metrical substitutions within such traditional forms as the sonnet. The Poems of Duncan Campbell Scott (1926) remains an important anthology for its gesture towards an evaluative summary of Scott's career. The Green Cloister: Later Poems (i935)> largely focuses on Scott's European travels with Elise following his retirement from the civil service, but also contains the poems A Scene at Lake Manitou' and At Gull Lake: August 1810,' poems that offer a surprising and perceptive interrogation of the negative effects of trade and assimilation upon Native populations. Scott's writing also includes a selection of SHORT STORIES entitled In The Village ofViger (1896; rpt 1945,1996), a cycle of short stories set in a fictional Quebec village, an unfinished novel (c 1905, pub as Untitled Novel, 1979), and a 1923 collection of stories called The Witching of Elspie. He also contributed numerous reviews and essays to periodicals such as the Week, the Bookman, and Scribner's. The topics of the magazine articles range from Canada's view of the United States to a tourist's view of prewar Dieppe, while his best short stories, like his poems, examine the relations between Natives and whites in northern settings. One of Scott's finest stories is 'Labrie's Wife.' Written in journal form and set at the northern HUDSON'S BAY co fur-trading post of Nipigon House in 1815, the story tells of the competition between clerk Archibald Muir and his French rival Labrie and is notable for historically authentic narrative style and ironic humour. Scott's last publication, a miscellany entitled The Circle of Affection and
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Other Pieces in Prose and Verse (1947), gathers early and late short stories, essays such as The Last of the Indian Treaties' and 'Poetry and Progress/ and a selection of later poems. Critical studies of Scott often depend on E.K. Brown's biographical 'Memoir,' which appears in the front of the 1951 Selected Poems of Duncan Campbell Scott. Brown's criticism, here and in his volume On Canadian Poetry (1943; rpt 1977), raises Scott and Lampman above Confederation poets who wrote about Canada 'as if it were a large English county,' and credits Scott's experimentation with original verse forms. Brown's identification of 'a mixture of restraint and intensity' as the key tension in Scott's verse has been influential. By focusing on the refined sensibility of his often-overlooked love poems, A.J.M. SMITH'S essays, 'The Poetry of Duncan Campbell Scott' (1948) and 'Duncan Campbell Scott' (1959) portray Scott's work as a link between that of CONFEDERATION POETS including C.G.D. ROBERTS, Lampman, and CARMAN and modernists such as Eliot. Arthur S. BOURINOT published two selections of Scott letters in 1959 and 1960, but the first carefully edited letters appear in Robert L. McDougall's collection (1983). McDougall also located the so-called ScottAylen papers, indispensable sources for biography. He describes his search and outlines some of the challenges facing Scott's biographer in 'D.C. Scott: A Trace of Documents and a Touch of Life,' an essay that appeared with other Scott Symposium papers in 1980. Gordon Johnston's 1983 monograph on Scott in Canadian Writers and Their Works argues that 'a set of variations' was his basic poetic form. He also censures Scott's more conventional versifying. John Flood's 'The Duplicity of D.C. Scott and the James Bay Treaty' (1976) was the first study of the culturally invasive aspect of the Dept of Indian Affairs and Scott's involvement with it. Stan Dragland's 1994 biographical and critical study Floating Voice expands and complicates this strain of sociocultural CRITICISM, discussing Scott's problematical relationship with Native peoples as portrayed in his poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. Duncan Campbell Scott, the poet and statesman whose life spanned the distance from before Confederation to after the Second World War, had - and continues to have - a
quiet but pervasive influence on the cultural and literary life of Canada. Further reading: Stan Dragland, Floating Voice: Duncan Campbell Scott and the Literature of Treaty 9 (Concord: Anansi, 1994); Leslie Ritchie, ed, Duncan Campbell Scott: Addresses, Essays, Reviews (London, ON: Canadian Poetry P, 1999); Robert L. MacDougall, ed, The Poet and the Critic: A Literary Correspondence between D.C. Scott and E.K. Brown (Ottawa: Carleton UP, 1983); W.H. New, Dreams of Speech and Violence: The Art of the Short Story in Canada and New Zealand (Toronto: U Toronto P, 1987). Leslie Ritchie
SCOTT, F.R. (Francis Reginald). Poet, lawyer, professor, political activist; b Quebec City i Aug 1899, d Montreal 31 Jan 1985; son of Amy (Brooks) and Frederick George SCOTT, Anglican minister and writer. Scott studied at Bishop's C (Lennoxville, QC) from 1916 to 1919 and, as a Rhodes scholar, at Oxford U from 1920 to 1923. After a year of teaching at Lower Canada C, he entered McGill Law School in 1924. With A.J.M. SMITH, he founded the McGill Fortnightly R (1925-7) and became interested in the possibilities of Canadian NATIONALISM and international MODERNISM. After graduation in 1926 he briefly practised law in Montreal, then returned to McGill U in 1928 to teach law. He remained for 36 years, eventually becoming dean of Law from 1961 to 1964. In 1928 he married the artist Marian Dale, and their only child, Peter Dale SCOTT, was born the next year. The Depression gave a new urgency to the social concerns that Scott absorbed from Oxford and from his father, who knew J.S. Woodsworth and who had supported the WINNIPEG GENERAL STRIKE in 1919. With Frank Underbill, Scott founded the League for Social Reconstruction in 1932. As a Canadian version of the Fabian Society and the American League for Democracy, it worked 'for the establishment in Canada of a social order in which the basic principle regulating production, distribution and service will be the common good rather than private profit.' Scott succeeded Underbill as league president in 1935, and was one of the authors of the league's main publication, Social Planning for Canada (1935). Though the league was not for-
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mally affiliated with the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), the two groups had similar ideals. Scott attended the first CCF convention in 1933 and helped amend the REGINA MANIFESTO. He was national chairman of the CCF from 1942 to 1950, and he and David Lewis co-wrote Make This Your Canada.: A Review of CCF History and Policy (1943). Combining an academic career with these political commitments left little time for other writing, yet Scott managed to contribute many poems and essays to the Canadian Forum and other journals throughout his career. He shared Smith's belief that aesthetic merit was independent of politics or religion, yet his own practice often belies that principle. Especially in his political and satirical poems, Scott tried to fill the need that he identified in 1942: 'But alas, all Canadian art has done for us is to teach us to admire our landscape through pictures: it has not yet opened our eyes to our social vices or portrayed for us a glorious future' ('A Decade of the League for Social Reconstruction'). Scott's early poetry tries to meet various demands: poems such as 'Old Song' (composed 1928) and 'Surfaces' (1933) celebrate the northern LANDSCAPE; 'The Canadian Authors Meet' (1927) and 'Social Notes' (1932,1935) attack social vices; 'Mural' (1935) is an attempt at a 'credible Utopia'; To Certain Friends' (1938) interrogates the liberal assumptions of his intellectual milieu; 'Overture' (1934), the title poem of his 1945 collection, asks a question that many contemporaries tried to answer: 'But how shall I hear old music? This is an hour / Of new beginnings, concepts warring for power, / Decay of systems - the tissue of art is torn / With overtures of an era being born.' According to Louis DUDEK, Overture contains most of Scott's best poetry. Since it collects poems from the two previous decades, it is an exceptionally rich and comprehensive first collection. Both Desmond PACEY and Sandra Djwa prefer Events and Signals (1954), Scott's second collection, in which Affirmation and compassion have largely replaced the destructive criticism and bitterness of Overture' (according to Pacey, Ten Canadian Poets). Djwa locates the transition immediately after the Second World War in the simultaneous publication of 'Laurentian Shield' and a review of Arthur Koestler's
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The Yogi and the Commissar in Northern R. Scott is still a socialist-humanist, but the emphasis is now on the second term. In 'Laurentian Shield,' Scott recognizes capitalism's 'exploitation' of the NORTH, but he is more interested in the 'deeper note' of the poem's UTOPIAN conclusion, in which he imagines the coming 'full culture of occupation.' He still feels indignant at social vices, but his SATIRE is gentler, as in 'The Canadian Social Register' (1949) and 'Social Sonnets' (1950). In A Grain of Rice' (1952), which was inspired by Scott's travel as a UN representative to Burma, he moves from political conflict to the 'ordered purpose,' 'glory,' and 'widening frontiers' of nature, in which 'We grow to one world / Through enlargement of wonder.' The confident affirmations of these poems made Scott a charismatic authority for both the group associated with the Montreal journal Preview (1942-5) and the larger world of Canadian writing. Yet we now know that Scott's public image concealed deep anxieties. According to his son, Scott's 'almost manic activity' with the CCF and Preview 'left him deeply divided and conflicted,' and his depressions had both political and personal causes. Despite these anxieties, Scott's greatest achievements as a lawyer came in three Supreme Court of Canada cases in the two decades after the Second World War. In 1957, he was part of the team that won a landmark case against Quebec's notorious Padlock Act. In 1959, Scott and A.L. Stein finally won against Premier Duplessis on behalf of Frank Roncarelli, a restaurant owner who had lost his liquor licence after providing bail for his fellow Jehovah's Witnesses. In 1962, Scott and Manuel Shacter won an acquittal for Lady Chatterley's Lover, which a Quebec court had found obscene (see CENSORSHIP). In a memorable satire, A Lass in Wonderland,' Scott identified the larger issues at stake, for the case was prompted by the publication of a paperback edition: 'Then too the sales made in the paperback trade / Served to aggravate judicial spleen, / For it seems a high price will make any book nice / While its mass distribution's obscene.' Other notable events of these years include a NORTHERN trip with Pierre Trudeau in 1956 that led to the sequence of poems 'Letters from the Mackenzie River'; the 1957 publication of both
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The Eye of the Needle, a collection of Scott's satires that included 'W.L.M.K.,' a mock elegy for Mackenzie King, and The Blasted Pine, an anthology of 'satire, invective and disrespectful verse' co-edited with Smith; and appointment to the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism in 1963. The exceptional diversity of Scott's career is indicated by the two Governor General's AWARDS that he received: for Essays on the Constitution (1977) and for Collected Poems (1981). Remarkable as that is, a fair summary of his achievements must also include at least two other volumes: Saint-Denys GARNEAU and Anne HEBERT: Translations/Traductions (1962), and A New Endeavour, a posthumous collection of political essays edited by Michiel Horn. The culmination of his career came in Feb 1981, when a conference was held at Simon Eraser U. 'Any summary of F.R. Scott's achievements reads as an index to Canadian culture and society over five decades,' Sandra Djwa notes in the introduction to the published proceedings, and such contributors as Thomas Berger, J. King Gordon, D.G. JONES, and Kenneth McNaught gathered to honour Scott. He was thus able to attend his own 'pre-mortem,' as he said with characteristic wit, and to do so in the company of such notable figures as Prime Minister Trudeau and Chief Justice Bora Laskin. A high point came when Dudek placed Scott 'at the top as the clearest poetic voice of this century in Canada.' Since then, Scott's literary reputation has suffered a few setbacks. Such critics as Robin MATHEWS and George WOODCOCK found it hard to reconcile his status as a civil libertarian with his support of Trudeau's invocation of the War Measures Act in the OCTOBER CRISIS of 1970. D.M.R. Bentley, Gary Boire, and Marilyn DUMONT criticized his exclusion of indigenous peoples from his northern landscapes, which he sometimes regarded as 'empty as paper.' Carole Gerson notes the sexism that disfigures 'The Canadian Authors Meet.'Jacques PERRON caricatures him in his fiction. Most disturbingly, Peter Dale Scott suggests that his father's Utopian idealism was out of touch with the brutal political forces of the 20th century. In his long poem Coming to Jakarta: A Poem about Terror (1988), he remembers his father (to whom the poem is dedicated) experiencing terrors that he
did not admit publicly. Despite these problems, Scott's best poems have an enduring appeal that should be recognized in a balanced estimation of his work. His verse satires are the best in Canadian literature, while his nature poems join his friend Smith's as the literary analogue of the work of the Group of Seven (see VISUAL ARTS). He did not see his political ideals fulfilled, and his various activities do not now seem as harmoniously integrated as they used to, but he remains the exemplary engaged -writer among Canadian poets. Further reading: Sandra Djwa, A Life of F.R. Scott: The Politics of the Imagination (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1987); Djwa and R. St J. Macdonald, eds, On F.R. Scott: Essays on His Contributions to Law, Literature, and Politics (Kingston: McGill-Queen's UP, 1983); Peter Dale Scott, Alone on Ararat: Scott, Blake, Yeats, and Apocalyptic,' Essays on Canadian Writing 55 (1995): 288302. Tracy Ware
SCOTT, Frederick George. Clergyman, poet; b Montreal 7 April 1861, d Montreal 19 Jan 1944; son of Elizabeth (Sproston) and William Edward Scott; father of F.R. SCOTT; educ Bishop's C and King's C (London). Scott was ordained in the Anglican Church in 1886, having already published his first poems; a novel of spiritual discovery, Elton Hazlewood (1891), quickly followed. Scott volunteered to go as chaplain to the Boer and First World WARS, and he received both the CMG and DSO. Imperialist in sentiment, his war poetry (traditional in form and faith, collected in 1934) and memoir (The Great War as I Saw It, 1922) appealed to his generation. SCOTT, Gail. Novelist, short story writer, journalist, theorist, essayist; b Ottawa, ON, 1945; daughter of Henry James and Vira (Darlene) Scott. Raised in bilingual Ontario, Scott studied at Queen's U (BA, 1966) and U Grenoble, France (1967). She worked as a journalist in the 19705, and helped found Spirale, a Quebec cultural magazine, as well as TESSERA, a bilingual periodical of feminist CRITICISM and creative writing. Scott's fiction revolves around Quebecois culture and politics, and is fragmented, autobio-
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graphical, even surrealistic. Spare Parts (1981) is a short story collection that uses imagery to disrupt journalistic style. Heroine (1987) records thoughts of a woman taking a bath, as she remembers her disenchantment with 19605 revolutionary movements, and her gradual discovery of FEMINISM. Main Brides (1993) describes a woman in a Montreal bar whose thoughts merge with the women she observes. In Spaces like Stairs (1989), Scott helped develop 'Fiction/ Theory,' criticism that mixes personal experience with critical analysis. Further reading: Gerard Hill, 'Across Reference: A Heroine Dictionary,' West Coast Line 5 (1991): 45-56; Gail Scott, Interview with Janice Williamson, Sounding Differences: Conversations with Seventeen Canadian Women Writers, ed Janice Williamson (Toronto: U Toronto P, 1993): 24565. Kent Lewis
SCOTT, Peter Dale. Writer, researcher, professor (emeritus) of English at U California (Berkeley), diplomat (1957-61); b Montreal n Jan 1929; son of Marion (Dale), painter, and Frank SCOTT, law professor and writer; educ in philosophy and political science at McGill U(BA, 1949; PhD, 1955). Scott is the author of many books criticizing covert politics, especially by the US government, and of a compelling autobiographicalcum-political LONG POEM issued as a trilogy: Coming to Jakarta (1988), Listening to the Candle (1992), Minding the Darkness (in progress). Murmur of the Stars (1994) selects from his shorter poems. He also translated, with Czeslaw Milosz, Zbigniew Herbert's Selected Poems (1968). Further reading: Special issue on the trilogy, Chicago R (Fall 1998); Robert Hass, 'Some Notes on Coming to Jakarta,' Agni 31-2 (1990): 334~6i; Iain Higgins, Rev of Listening to the Candle, Canadian Poetry 9 (1994): 110-23. Iain Higgins
SCOTTISH GAELIC LITERATURE IN CANADA. Highland Scots visited Canada early in the i8th century as members of British regiments, but the first permanent settlers whose language and culture were Gaelic arrived in the
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17705, settling initially in Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, and Upper Canada. Many of these settlers came as LOYALIST refugees from New York and North Carolina, while others were fleeing the economic and cultural upheaval that characterized the Scottish Gaidhealtachd (Gaelic-speaking region) in the post-Culloden era. All these new arrivals brought with them a rich ORAL tradition of song and narrative; the settlers sang old songs and told tales that encoded centuries of cultural history. Before long, New World singers and storytellers began to compose new works that addressed conditions in the new communities while adhering to traditional models and upholding traditional standards. Many of these works circulated orally for decades before being committed to paper by collectors in the i9th and 2oth centuries; some, including John Maclean's A'Choille Ghruamach (The Gloomy Forest), found their way back to Scotland and entered the repertoire of tradition bearers there. As in Scotland, the Gaelic poets in Canada were conscious of the public nature of traditional poetry. Their work tended to be conservative in form and reflective of community values; individual achievement consisted in combining mastery of form with a vivid presentation of subject matter. That subject matter ranged from anecdotal accounts of settlement life such as Angus MacLellan's mock-heroic 'Oran a Mhathain' (The Bear's Song) to elegiac songs such as Archibald MacDonald's 'Marbhrann d'a Mhnaoi' (Lament for his Wife). The experience of emigration and settlement created important new contexts for the pursuit of all the modes of the older poetry, as the poets mined rich traditions of panageyric, lament, and dispraisal to explore the positive and negative aspects of their new life. Some texts, such as A'Choille Ghruamach,' and the obscure 'Gearain air America' (Complaint About America) from Prince Edward Island, depict the isolation and disorientation of the emigrant; others, such as Duncan Black Blair's 'Eas Niagara' (NIAGARA Falls), see the Canadian landscape as a manifestation of divine glory. Ontario's Hugh MacCorkindale praised the economic opportunities that Canada afforded the settler, while 'Domhnall Diombach' (Resentful Donald) of Manitoba
SCOTTISH GAELIC LITERATURE IN CANADA
painted a scornful portrait of the homesteader's life. If the Gaelic tradition initially flourished in the context of individual communities in various regions, the advent of a Gaelic-language press made it possible for Gaels in different parts of the country and of the world to communicate with each other. Gaelic journalism and publishing in Canada developed at the same time and at the same pace as in Scotland. In fact, Mac-Talla (Echo), edited by Jonathan G. MacKinnon (18691944) in Sydney, NS, was the world's longestrunning Gaelic-only weekly (1892-1901; biweekly from 1901-4). Journals such as MacTalla, and the bilingual Casket (Antigonish, NS, 1852-) attracted contributions from Gaelic speakers from around the world. These publications featured current events and editorial material, and also provided a forum for the publication of poetry and traditional stories. Some bards, such as Angus Mackintosh, who settled at Fort Qu'Appelle, SK, before 1905, submitted their own compositions for publication, but much of the poetry that appeared in these journals had been in circulation for some time, and was submitted by descendants of the poets or others who remembered a variant of a given text. For example, Anna Gillis left Scotland in 1786, but her song 'Canada Ard' (Upper Canada) first appeared in print in Mac-Talla in 1903. This lag between composition and arrival in print also affected published poets such as John Maclean, the most well known of Canadianbased Gaelic poets. Bard Maclean, as he is more commonly known in Nova Scotia tradition, had published a volume of poetry in Scotland prior to emigrating, but his Canadian work could likewise linger for decades before appearing either in periodicals or anthologies. The publication of books in Gaelic evolved at a much slower pace. The first Gaelic book written in Canada was Alexander MacGillivray's Companach an Oganaich, no An Comhairliche Taitneach (The Youth's Companion or The Friendly Counsellor), printed in Pictou, NS, in 1836. In 1871, Father John Macdonald of Glengarry Co, ON, published a Gaelic-language Roman Catholic catechism, An Teagaisg Chriosd (The Teaching of Christ) with Nicholson and Co of Toronto. Perhaps the most important Gaelic-language publishing project in Canada, however, was Rev
Alexander Maclean Sinclair's publication of a series of anthologies of poetry, produced between 1881 and 1904 in Charlottetown and in Sydney, NS. Sinclair was a grandson of Bard Maclean, much of whose work he collected in Cldrsach na Coilk (Harp of the Forest) in 1881. While collections such as the three-volume Gaelic Bards are not exclusively devoted to Canadian material, Sinclair's efforts to foster Gaelic literary studies in North America reveal how seriously literary tradition was taken among Gaelic speakers. The current revival of interest in Gaelic, especially in Cape Breton, gives reason for optimism about the future of a Canadian Gaelic tradition in literature. Not only has much important traditional material been collected and published, but some of the mechanisms necessary for the promotion of Gaelic literature have been restored. Perhaps the most important development in this area has been the establishment of the bilingual quarterly Am Brdighe (Higher Ground), under the editorship of Frances MacEachen and Jim Watson. Am Brdighe's engaged editorial stance on behalf of Gaelic and other heritage languages keeps the reader up to date with contemporary cultural and political developments affecting Gaelic in Canada, Scotland, and elsewhere, through feature articles, specialized columns, and reviews of books, music, and film. The journal also takes the Gaelic past seriously, publishing stories and songs chiefly from the Cape Breton tradition, and, since the first issue, reprinting selections from Mac-Talla. Further reading: Charles W. Dunn, Highland Settler: A Portrait of the Scottish Gael in Nova Scotia (Toronto: U Toronto P, 1953; new ed, with additional bibliography, Wreck Cove, NS: Breton Books, 1991); Margaret MacDonnell, ed, The Emigrant Experience: Songs of Highland Emigrants in North America (Toronto: U Toronto P, 1982); Joe Neil MacNeil, Tales until Dawn/Sgeulgu Latha: The World of a Cape Breton Gaelic Storyteller, ed and tr John Shaw (Montreal: McGillQueen's UP, 1987); Am Brdighe. Quarterly (Mabou, NS, 1993-). John Moffatt
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SCREENPLAY, a script for a FILM or video; a television script is often referred to as a teleplay. The work is written in a highly specific format, and most POPULAR screenplays follow a structural model derived from Aristotle's Poetics. A 9o-minute feature film is usually constructed in three acts, propelled by the protagonist's conscious or unconscious desire. The drive toward the goal is complicated by conflicts generated by the antagonist, and resolved through a climax that pits protagonist and antagonist against each other. The climax resolves the conflict, usually with the triumph of one side or the other. Television structure depends on the length of the program, but typically begins with a 'hook' and follows with several relatively short acts in order to accommodate commercial breaks. This model of conflict and resolution does not necessarily apply to the work of great European modernists such as Godard, Bufiuel, or Bresson, and has more recently been challenged by POSTMODERNISTS, including Canadian filmmakers Robert LEPAGE (No), Atom Egoyan (The Sweet Hereafter), and Francois Girard (Thirty-Two Short Films about Glenn Gould). As literature in the conventional sense, the screenplay form is problematic because it is not intended as a completed work of art, and its authorship may be ambiguous. Screenwriters often complain that their work is underappreciated; although a few command enormous fees, they rarely hold COPYRIGHT and often see their scripts revised by other writers, directors, or even actors. Nevertheless, since the late 2oth century the screenplays for many popular films have been published in book form, and there are even a few film FESTIVALS that celebrate the screenwriter, signalling an increased recognition of the work. Well-known Canadian screenwriters are often directors as well - Egoyan, David Cronenberg, Don McKellar. Many others toil in relative obscurity or are better known for their work in FICTION or THEATRE - for example, Linda SVENDSEN, Sharon RIIS, and Judith THOMPSON. Television writers, because they have more credits and are often producers, are better known within the professional writing community than those who have written two or three features - although writing a feature film has higher status. Respected writers of television
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drama series and movies of the week include Chris Haddock, Suzette Couture, David Barlow, Peter Lauterman, Phil Savath, Charles Lazer, Donald Martin, Dennis FOON, and Rebecca Schechter. Canadians are particularly well known for sketch comedy, and several successful variety shows have been propelled by writing/ performing troupes: SCTV, This Hour Has 22 Minutes, The Kids in the Hall. Patricia Gruben
SCRIVER, Stephen. Teacher, poet, playwright; b Wolseley, SK, 13 Jan 1947; son of Edith (Stewart) and Harry Scriver; educ U Saskatchewan (BA, 1969). He currently teaches elementary school in Saskatchewan and coaches hockey. Scriver is best known for his poetry collections, All Star Poet! (1981), an enthusiastic observation of hockey culture (see SPORTS), and Under the Wings (1991), which recounts the experiences of Second World WAR Canadian aircraftmen. A play, Letters in Wartime (1994; written with Kenneth Brown), describes the maturation of two young lovers during the Second World War. Brett Josef Grubisic
SEARS, Dennis T. Patrick. Novelist, policeman, labourer; b Vancouver 1925, d Kingston, ON, 10 Oct 1976; son of Thomas Sears, farmer. Sears moved to Saskatchewan during the Depression and then to Garden Township in central Ontario. He led an itinerant life as a cowboy, sailor, and lift bridge operator, turning to writing late in his life. The Lark in the Clear Air (1974) is an episodic novel, prefaced as 'autobiographical' in that it reflects Sears' Ontario boyhood and a particularly devastating incident from when he was six years old. It tells the story of the descendants of Ontario farming pioneers in the mythical Brule Township. Fair Days along the Talbert (1976) and Aunty High over the Barley Mow (1977) also feature rural settings and family themes. Sears dedicates the latter work to his deceased Aunts Rosie, Minnie, and Theresa Aileen, all of whom died in the 22nd year of their lives and are the inspiration for the posthumously published novel. Greg Chan
SEIDAYAA
SEARS, Djanet (Janet) Christine. Playwright, actor, director; b London, England, 23 Aug 1959; daughter of Winnifred (Graham) and Quisbert Sears. After arriving in Canada at age 15, she earned a BFA in theatre from York U and began working as an actor in Toronto. The first of her plays to be produced, Afrika Solo (1990), explores her postcolonial AFRICAN / CARIBBEAN /British/ Canadian heritage through narrative, music, and dance. Sears starred in both the stage play and its award-winning RADIO adaptation. After stints as playwright-in-residence at Toronto's Nightwood Theatre and New York's Public Theater, she wrote and directed Harlem Duet (!997)> which she calls 'a rhapsodic blues tragedy,' re-imagining Othello and his Black wife in Harlem. It won the Dora Mavor Moore, Chalmers, and Governor General's AWARDS for best new play. Sears has been associate director of the Canadian Stage Company, and garnered Dora and Gemini Award nominations for her acting. Further reading: Djanet Sears and Alison Sealy Smith, 'The Nike Method,' Canadian Theatre R 97 (Winter 1998): 24-30. Jerry Wasserman
SEDNA ('the one far down there') is one of the most recurrent figures in the ORAL tales of the INUIT. The sea woman, Sedna (because of her marriage to a dog) is the ancestor of Inuit (the people) and Kabloona (whites) as well as dogs; in the tales, her father, trying to prevent the marriage, cuts off her fingers and other body parts, which fall into the sea and turn into seals, walruses, and other sea mammals. Traditionally she is appeased before the Inuit go off on a hunt, so as to encourage the animals to be plentiful. SEGAL, Yaacov Yitzchak (Jacob Isaac). Poet and essayist; b Solobkowitz, Ukraine, 3 Aug 1896, d Montreal 7 March 1954; son of Aaron Segal, a scribe and cantor. Segal, who was descended from a rabbinic family, received a traditional religious education in the town of Koretz, where he was raised. He moved to Montreal in 1911, worked for some years in a clothing factory, and was later employed as a teacher in a Labour-Zionist day school. He married Elke Shtaiman in 1916, and they had two daughters.
Except for a five-year period (1923-8) in New York, he resided in Montreal, where he served as a literary editor of the YIDDISH daily Der Kanader Odler (The Canadian Eagle). Considered the leading Canadian Yiddish poet, Segal was a prolific writer who published over ten volumes of poetry and was the author of many uncollected literary essays. His published work includes Lieder (Poems; 1926), Mein Niggun (My Melody; 1934), Leider un Loiben (Songs and Praise; 1944), and Sefer Yiddish (The Book of Yiddish; 1950). Mervin Butovsky
SEIDAYAA (Sedaya; Elizabeth Nyman). TLINGIT mythteller; b Taku River, BC, 12 April 1915, d Atlin, BC, 20 March 1999. Revered for many years in her own community as a master of the art of ORAL narrative and a repository of wisdom, Seidayaa came to the attention of the outside world after a volume of her stories was published in 1993, in Tlingit with facing English translation. The stories were tape-recorded, transcribed, and translated by Jeff Leer, a linguist with the Alaska Native Language Center in Fairbanks who was Seidayaa's adopted nephew. The close relationship between mythteller and translator is crucial to these stories, which like all oral literature are rooted in the moment of performance as well as in the eternity of the tale. The texts were not just recorded by Leer; they were specifically addressed to him, and through him to the larger but much vaguer world outside. Seidayaa's literary skills were highly developed but altogether oral; she could neither read nor write. Leer's position as both outsider and insider - not a native speaker, yet fluent in the language, and not native-born, yet entitled to respect as an adopted member of the clan - was therefore just as crucial to the form Seidayaa gave the stories as it was to their transcription, translation, and eventual publication. The result is a powerful work of literature. See also MYTHOLOGY. Further reading: Elizabeth Nyman and Jeff Leer. Gdgiwdul.dt: The Legacy of a Taku River Tlingit Clan (Whitehorse: Yukon Native Language Centre, 1993). Robert Bringhurst
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SELVADURAI, Shyam. Writer; b Colombo, Sri Lanka, 12 Feb 1965; son of Christine De Silva, doctor, and David Selvadurai, tennis coach. Selvadurai's family emigrated to Canada after the 1983 riots in Colombo, and he took his BFA in Toronto at York U. His first novel, Funny Boy (1994), deals with six separate episodes in almost ten years of a young Tamil's life, highlighting his nascent homosexuality and the Sinhalese Tamil riots of 1983. Cinnamon Gardens (1998) - the title is the name of a Colombo neighbourhood - is set in Ceylon in the 19205 and follows the lives of a young teacher whose liberal attitudes and political ties create problems for her, and a wealthy man in his forties whose marriage is threatened by the arrival of a past male lover from London. See also ASIA, GAY AND LESBIAN WRITING. R. Clark
SELVON, Sam (Samuel) Dickson. Novelist; b South Trinidad 20 May 1923, d Trinidad 16 April 1994. Sam Selvon was a CARIBBEAN novelist of mixed but primarily South Asian descent, part of the wave of West Indian writers who emigrated to England in the 19505. The novels for which he is best known are A Brighter Sun (1952), about Tiger, a peasant from rural Caroni who arrives in creolized Port of Spain; its sequel, Turn Again, Tiger (1958), which sees Tiger return to a rural setting; his novel about West Indians in Britain, The Lonely Londoners (1956); and its sequels in which the main character returns to Trinidad, Moses Ascending (1975) and Moses Migrating (1983). Selvon's novels are notable for their use of dialect not just in reported dialogue but also in narration, for their calypso-style comedy, and for the mixed-race creolized community they depicted. He was a self-styled FOLK poet, concerned with the ordinary lives of working CLASS Trinidadians. The comedy for which he was noted did not mock his characters but expressed their capacity for survival. He came to Canada in 1978, and worked as writerin-residence at U Calgary and U Victoria. While in Canada he wrote RADIO plays, essays, reviews, and short stories, but no major work. Several of Selvon's novels were reprinted by TSAR: The Lonely Londoners, An Island Is a World (originally 1955), and The Plains of Caroni (originally 1970).
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Further reading: Austin Clarke, A Passage Back Home (Toronto: Exile, 1994); Susheila Nasta, ed, Critical Perspectives on Sam Selvon (Washington: Three Continents, 1988); special issue of Ariel 27.2 (1996). Neil ten Kortenaar
SEMIOTICS is a branch of CRITICISM AND THEORY that considers all things, events, and conventions (including language and its forms, such as grammars, PROSODY, IMAGERY, and levels of discourse) as signs. Semiotics also examines the principles of interpretation that permit these signs, in a given society at a given time, to carry meaning. SENEGAL, Eva. Poet, novelist; b La Patrie, QC, 20 April 1905, d Sherbrooke, QC, 14 March 1988; daughter of Octavie (Beaudry) and Adelard Senecal, farmers; educ in Saint Hyacinthe, QC. Senecal worked as a journalist in Sherbrooke before joining the Ottawa civil service; along with other women writers of the 19205 and 19305 in Quebec (BERNIER, ROUTIER, VEZINA), she voiced some alternatives to the conventional literary politics of the time. Her novels contrasted a life of passion with a life of domestic order. Dans les ombres (1931) caused a furore, requiring the church to assert that it was not immoral, but Man Jacques (1933) raised little stir. Senecal's choice of her own best work appeared in a 1987 volume. SENIOR, Olive Marjorie. Poet, short story writer; b Jamaica 23 Dec 1941. Senior worked as a journalist for the Gleaner while still in high school. She then studiedjouRNALiSM at Carleton U, graduating in 1967. She has written two volumes of poetry, Talking of Trees (1985) and Gardening in the Tropics (1994), and three collections of short stories: Summer Lightning (1986), which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1987, Arrival of the Snake Woman (1989), and Discerner of Hearts (1995). She has also written books of non-fiction - The Message Is Change, about the Jamaican elections of 1972, A-Z of Jamaican Heritage (1984), and Working Miracles: Women's Lives in the English-Speaking Caribbean (1991) - and has served as editor of Jamaica J. Senior's stories, all set in Jamaica, are often about rural life a generation ago. When in an
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urban setting or in the present, there is usually a character who learns, often with difficulty, about new ways of seeing or being. The stories are notable for their rich and varied use of dialect, the poems for their lush exploration of environment, history, and mythology. Neil ten Kortenaar
SENTIMENTALISM refers to both (i) an indulgence in emotional excess, often with the deliberate intention of appealing to naivete, nostalgia, or sympathy (this meaning being a pejorative one), and (2) a literary movement that began in the i8th century and provided the underpinnings for Romantic fiction, poetry, and MELODRAMA. Some sentimentalist episodes, conventional in their day, seem to later readers to interrupt a narrative self-indulgently, but in their time they provided a kind of moral example of an issue that the work at large raised, as in works by Frances BROOKE, Oliver GOLDSMITH, and Susanna MOODIE. Tender scenes of childhood, death, good people gone wrong, and evocative LANDSCAPES could all serve as fillips to an outpouring of emotion, such scenes being devised in these works to affirm the fundamental worthiness of human society. SEPARATISM, see NATIONALISM. Separatist movements have long been a feature of Canadian political experience; they date at least as far back as the 18705, when BRITISH COLUMBIA threatened to withdraw from CONFEDERATION, but are more commonly associated with various political aspirations in some parts of francophone QUEBEC. These aspirations were given intellectual and emotional impetus by such writers as Lionel GROULX, propounded within the educational system, and later developed by a generation of politically active writers, including Hubert AQUIN, Jacques PERRON, Gerald GODIN, Michele LALONDE, and other supporters of Quebec independence. SERIAL, term used to refer to (i) a RADIO or television drama sustained over several weeks, in usually discrete episodes but with a continuing FRAME narrative, as in a 'soap opera' or TELEROMAN (see, eg, C-H. GRIGNON); (2) 3 WOrk
of fiction published in episodes over a period of time, in successive issues of a JOURNAL; and (3)
sometimes, in the term 'serial narrative,' to refer to the SHORT STORY 'sequence' or 'series,' that is, the collection of separate stories that is unified by a recurrent character, setting, structure, plot device, or the like. NOVELS in the ipth century were often published serially - generally to secure readers (and therefore sales of the JOURNAL) over several issues. Editors commissioned these works locally, or reprinted them from abroad (without necessarily paying much attention to COPYRIGHT). They also frequently used fiction to resist clerical control over PUBLISHING (the CENSORSHIP of opinions that might be considered contrary to church doctrine), and so to assert their contemporaneity and independence. See also FILM. Further reading: Kenneth Landry, 'Le romanfeuilleton dans la presse periodique quebecoise a la fin du XIXe siecle,' Etudes franfaises 36.3 (Summer 2000): 65-80. SERMON LITERATURE, see INTELLECTUAL HISTORY, RELIGION.
SERVICE, Robert William. Bank clerk, poet; b Preston, Lanes, England 16 Jan 1874, d Lancieux, France, n Sept 1958; son of Emily (Parker) and Robert Service, bank clerk. In his autobiography, Ploughman of the Moon (1945), Service claimed that while growing up in Glasgow he was encouraged to write verse because his family was related to Robert Burns - but that he was discouraged from enjoying it because of their church rigour. He was apprenticed to a commercial bank, but resigned in 1896 in order to sail to America to become a cowboy; a variety of jobs took him to a bank in Victoria, then in 1904 to Whitehorse, YUKON Territory. Talking to old-timers about the 1898 Gold Rush led him to write a series of verses that became Songs of a Sourdough (1907), which went through 15 impressions in its first year alone. Over two dozen tales and poem collections followed, and Service's verse remains in print in several volumes. Characterized by its strong rhythms, its internal rhymes, its appeal to cliches of the NORTH and manliness, and its combination of sentimentality and a somewhat ghoulish sense of HUMOUR (as in his most famous poems, 'The Cremation of Sam McGee' and 'The Shooting of Dan
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McGrew'), the verse lends itself to recitation and for many years was a staple of school textbooks (see PERFORMANCE). By 1912, Service had left Yukon, and a year later he settled in Paris, France (recorded in a second autobiographical volume, Harper of Heaven, 1948). A WAR correspondent with the Toronto Star (1914-18), he travelled to Los Angeles to write for FILM in the 19205, then moved with his family to the Riviera in 1931, fleeing to Los Angeles during the Second World War performing in the 1942 film The Spoilers, a KLONDIKE saga starring John Wayne and Marlene Dietrich - but returning to Monte Carlo in 1946. During these years, Service continued to write POPULAR rhymes and adventure novels; although they had lost some of their appeal by the end of the 2oth century, they came to be examined less as literary objects than as artefacts of cultural value. See also KROETSCH. Further reading: Carl F. Klinck, Robert Service (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1976). SETON, Ernest Thompson. Artist, writer, naturalist, lecturer, youth leader; b South Shields, Durham, England, 14 Aug 1860, d Santa Fe, NM, 23 Oct 1946; son of Alice Snowdon and Joseph Logan Thompson, shipowner and accountant. After several financial setbacks, Joseph Thompson emigrated to Toronto. Ernest assumed the surname Seton in 1883 in the belief that his family was related to a Scottish aristocratic family by that name; in the 18905 he sometimes signed his work 'Ernest Seton Thompson.' Seton exhibited a talent for art at an early age and was sent to art school, first in Toronto, where he won the gold medal from the Toronto Society of Arts; he then studied art in London and Paris. He maintained his interest in the natural world and published his first article in 1879, 'Key to the Birds of Canada/ In 1886 he published A List of the Mammals of Manitoba/ After spending some time in Manitoba at the homestead of his brother Arthur, he pre-empted a quarter section in what is now Saskatchewan. In the winters he studied art in New York and secured work producing illustrations for newspapers and magazines. In 1885, he secured a contract for a thousand drawings of animals for the Century Dictionary and provided the illustrations
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for Frank Chapman's authoritative Handbook of Birds. By 1885, he was submitting articles to Forest and Stream, an American magazine, and to Auk, the official publication of the American Ornithologists' Union. In 1891, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, published his Birds of Manitoba, and in 1892 he was appointed provincial naturalist to the government of Manitoba (the Ernest Thompson Seton Medal is still awarded annually by the Manitoba Naturalists' Society). He continued his studies in art, returning to London and Paris, with animals as his chief subjects. His picture Sleeping Wb//was accepted for the Paris Salon of 1891, and Awaited in Vain was hung at the Chicago Exhibition of 1893. The first book that Seton published was Studies in the Art Anatomy of Animals (1896), the same year he married Grace Gallatin of New York and Pasadena, CA. They had one daughter, Ann, who became a writer in her own right. In the mid-i89os, Seton and Charles G.D. ROBERTS developed the realistic ANIMAL STORY, with Seton's publication of 'Lobo, King of the Kurrumpaw' in 1894, and Roberts with his story 'Do Seek their Meat' in 1892. Defining this sort of animal story later, Roberts said that 'at the highest point of its development [it] is ... psychological romance constructed on a foundation of natural science/ Seton reprinted 'Lobo' in his first collection of animal stories, entitled Wild Animals I Have Known (1898), which became the most popular of his more than forty books, and which has remained in print ever since. The next 10 years were the most fruitful of his writing life. He published several more collections of animal stories, including The Trail of the Sandhill Stag, Biography of a Grizzly, Lives of the Hunted, Krag the Kootenay Ram, Monarch. The Big Bear of Tallac, and Biography of a Silver Fox. Most of these were illustrated from Seton's own drawings, from full-page illustrations of the text to fanciful drawings in the margins. Several of these books had been reprinted for schools, and Seton spent much of his time touring, giving lectures in towns and cities throughout the United States and Canada, often dressed in buckskins and giving bird and other animal calls. In the following decades, Seton published further animal books such as Legend of the White Reindeer (1915), Bannertail: The Story of a Gray
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Squirrel (1922), Cute Coyote and Other Stories (1930), and Santanna, the Dog Hero of France, published the year before his death. Seton's animal tales remained popular until the mid-i93os, and - with his lecture tours - helped make him comfortable enough to buy several acres in suburban Connecticut. In 1903, in an article titled 'Real and Sham Natural History,' the well-known American nature writer John Burroughs accused Seton, Roberts, and Jack London of being unscientific and sentimental in their portrayals of animals. Burroughs' attack was supported by President Theodore Roosevelt in an article titled 'The Nature Fakers/ Burroughs observed that Roberts had created 'simply human beings disguised as animals.' These claims came down to an issue of animal psychology, specifically to whether animals can learn or are controlled entirely by instinct. In one of Seton's stories, a wild horse commits suicide rather than accepting capture, and in his own defence, Seton replied that he consistently observed animals in the wild and had seen individual differences that could be explained only by rational activity in the animals. In any case, Seton saw that he needed to shore up his credentials as a naturalist and organized a seven-month canoe expediton to the NORTHWEST TERRITORIES to map the migration of caribou. He published an account of this journey and used the data from the trip to update his 1893 account of mammals, publishing his findings in Life Histories of Northern Animals (1909) and The Arctic Prairies (1911). Much of his time in the decade between 1915 and 1925 was devoted to a four-volume study, The Life of Game Animals (1918-25); in 1928 the book was awarded the prestigious John Burroughs medal. Earlier, at the turn of century, Seton had become interested in the education of boys in an increasingly urban society. He published a semiautobiographical book entitled Two Little Savages, about two boys who learn independence and a love for the natural world by being taught Indian woodcraft skills and attitudes. In 1902, he founded an organization for boys called The Woodcraft Indians, publicized by a magazine column in Ladies' HomeJ, much of which he reissued in book form, Birch-Bark Roll of the Woodcraft Indians. This organization was based not on
the patriarchal family, the school system, or the military brigade, but on a fictitious model of the American Indians, with offices such as 'Chief of the Council Fire, Keeper of the Tally, and Keeper of the Wampum.' Soon a number of groups had been formed with Seton's ideas and were called, first, The League of Seton's Indians and later The League of the Woodcraft Indians. Seton took his idea to England and met Robert Baden-Powell, who had formed a similar scheme for a boys' group, based on military organization, called Boy Scouts, after the young soldiers who had been scouts when Baden-Powell's unit was besieged in the Boer War. Seton showed Baden-Powell his 'Birch-Bark Roll' article, and they agreed to try the organization in Britain, but Baden-Powell insisted on 'Boy Scouts.' In 1910 Seton adopted a version of Baden-Powell's Scouting for Boys and combined it with ideas from his own Birch-Bark Roll, with the subtitle A Handbook of Woodcraft, Scouting, and Lifecraji. Seton agreed to be on the governing board of the Boy Scouts of America. But disagreements with Baden-Powell and the militaristic pressures brought about by the First World War and the fact that he was not an American citizen combined to move Seton off the executive board and gave him the purely honorary title of 'Chief Scout.' Seton resigned for good in 1915, and was bitter most of the rest of his life. But he maintained control of the so-called Woodcraft Indians. Since his time on the Manitoba homestead, Seton had been strongly attracted to the West, both in Canada and the United States. In 1893, he agreed to become a wolf hunter in New Mexico, the experience that he turned into 'Lobo.' In 1897, he travelled to Yellowstone on assignment from Recreation Magazine and stayed several months, returning through South Dakota. He travelled back and forth through the United States and Canada frequently on his lecture tours, gathering information for his naturalist interests. When he had an opportunity in 1907 to visit the Mackenzie District of the Northwest Territories with Edward Preble of the US Biological Survey, he was delighted to accept. By the end of the 19205, Seton's marriage had already been unravelling for several years. He returned to New Mexico to find property on
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which he could fulfil his desire to build a centre where he could teach his ideas about NATIVE attitudes toward the natural world. He located a promising property near Santa Fe and began building what he came to call Seton Village, and later, The Seton C of Indian Wisdom. Thus when he moved to New Mexico and married his second wife, Julie Butree, he was able to put into practice an open-air life based on many of the principles of his Woodcraft Indians. In 1937, Seton published an autobiography, Trail of an Artist-Naturalist, but essentially it covers only half of his life, up to his first marriage in 1896, with just a few pages for the remaining fifty years because his publishers urged that he cut the special pleading related to his disagreements with the Boy Scouts of America. He died soon after the end of the Second World War, and his own house in Seton Village, 'Seton Castle/ became a national historic landmark (with his adopted daughter, Dee SetonBarber, as its custodian). Seton's papers are preserved along with much of his library, and works of art are housed not far from Santa Fe in the Ernest Thompson Memorial Library and Museum at the Philmont Scout Ranch in Cimarron, NM. Further reading: Betty Keller, Black Wolf: The Life of Ernest Thompson Seton (Vancouver: Douglas and Mclntyre, 1984); John Henry Wadland, Ernest Thompson Seton: Man and Nature in the Progressive Era, 1850-1915 (New York: Arno, 1978). Peter A. Taylor
SHAPIRO, Lionel Sebastian Berk. Journalist, novelist; b Montreal 12 Feb 1908, d Montreal 27 May 1958; son of Fanny (Berkowitz) and Samuel Morris Shapiro; educ McGill U (BA, 1929). Shapiro served as a correspondent during the Second World WAR, chronicling the Allied campaign in Sicily in They Left the Back Door Open (1944). His three novels - The Sealed Verdict (1947), Torch for a Dark Journey (1950), and the Governor General's AWARD-winning The Sixth of June (1955) - also deal with the traumas of military life. Alexander Hart
SHAW FESTIVAL. Brian Doherty founded the Shaw Festival in the summer of 1962 at Niagara-
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on-the-Lake, ON, with eight amateur weekend performances drawn from two plays by George Bernard Shaw. Now in a six-month season, Shaw's professional company, under artistic directors such as Barry Morse (1966), Paxton Whitehead (1967-77), and Christopher Newton (1980-), specializes in comedy, farce, and other summer fare. Works of broad interest appear at the proscenium-stage Festival Theatre, opened in 1973; lunchtime theatre, musicals, and murder mysteries play at the Royal George Theatre; less familiar works, including some limited-run experimental risk plays, appear at the thruststage Court House Theatre. The festival's expanded repertory now includes plays written by Shaw's contemporaries during his lifetime (1856-1950), a mandate that includes selected Canadian plays. The Shaw Seminars (lectures, panel discussions and performances) and a reading series with some Canadian content complete the season. Further reading: Brian Doherty, Not Bloody Likely: The Shaw Festival 1962-1973 (Toronto: Dent, 1974). Margaret Doyle
SHEARD, Sarah Helen. Fiction writer; b Toronto 13 Feb 1953; daughter of Gloria (Newson), schoolteacher, and Joseph Sheard, judge. Sheard was raised in Toronto. She holds a BA in music from York U, an MA in counselling psychology from Chicago's Adler School, and a mediator certificate. She has worked in publishing, taught creative writing, edited a dozen books, published short fiction and non-fiction in several magazines, and written radio plays. In 1986 she won a Forty-Five Below Award for her first novel, Almost Japanese (1985), an adolescent's narrative of her obsession with an older, sophisticated Japanese man, an international symphony conductor who moves into the house next door. The Swing Era (1993) examines a young woman's struggle to come to terms with her mother's suicide and her own fear of inherited madness. A third novel, The Hypnotist (1999), traces how an intense relationship begins and ends, as the protagonist painfully finds out about her fiance's dysfunctionality. Susan Wasserman
SHIELDS
SHEARD, Virna (Virginia Stanton). Novelist, poet; b Cobourg, CW, 24 April 1862, d Toronto 22 Feb 1943; daughter of Eldridge Stanton and a descendant of UNITED EMPIRE LOYALISTS. In 1885 she married Dr Charles Sheard, who later served as MP for Toronto South. She wrote her first books, Trevdyan's Little Daughter (1898) and A Maid of Many Moods (1902), to entertain her four sons. Her adult fiction includes Fortune Turns Her Wheel (1929), a HISTORICAL romance set in Elizabethan London, and Below the Salt (1936), the melodramatic tale of Marcus O'Sullivan, a wealthy Ontario farmer. She wrote five volumes of poetry, much of it religious, collecting what she considered her best in Leaves in the Wind (1938). R. Gooding
SHERMAN, Francis Joseph. Banker, poet; b Fredericton 3 Feb 1871, d Atlantic City, NJ, 15 June 1926; son of Alice (Maxwell) and Louis Sherman. Sherman was a student of George PARKIN and Bliss CARMAN at high school. He later joined a Halifax bank, managing branches in Nova Scotia; Havana, Cuba (1899-1912); then Montreal, interrupting his career to serve as a major in the army. His Complete Poems (1935, ed Lome PIERCE) brings together five earlier volumes, primarily lyrics of nature and the seasons; while these appealed to the poet C.G.D. ROBERTS, they were displaced in both style and sensibility by postwar MODERNISM. SHERMAN, Jason Scott. Playwright; b Montreal 28 July 1962; son of Grace (Gangbar) and Cyril Henry Sherman, sales executive. With a BA from York U in creative writing, he edited the literary magazine what (1985-90) and began writing for Toronto theatres. His chronologically complex plays focus on ethical crises and issues of personal accountability. The League of Nathans (1994), winner of a Chalmers and Canadian Authors Assoc Literary AWARD, and Reading Hebron (1997) concern the vexed relationship of Canadian JEWS to Israel. Three in the Back, Two in the Head (1995), involving a Canadian weapon scientist's work for the CIA, won the Governor General's Award. Patience (1999), a contemporary take on the Job story, won another Chalmers. Sherman has been play-
wright-in-residence at Tarragon Theatre and edited the play collection Solo (1994). Jerry Wasserman
SHERMAN, Kenneth. Poet, teacher; b Toronto 3 July 1950; son of Eve (Diamond) and Ted Sherman, merchant; educ U Toronto. Sherman teaches English at Sheridan C. His 10 books from Snake Music (1979) to Void and Voice (1997) include The Book of Salt (1987), which particularly clearly reveals the influence of biblical story. Sherman's ANTHOLOGY Relations (1986) emphasizes his further interest in the nature and power of family relations. SHIELDS, Carol. Novelist, poet, playwright; b Oak Park, IL, 2 June 1935; daughter of Robert and Inez Warner; educ Hanover C, U Exeter, and U Ottawa (where she completed an MA thesis later published as Susanna MOO DIE: Voice and Vision, 1977). Shields relocated to Canada after her marriage and became a citizen in 1971. She settled and raised her family of five children in Winnipeg, where she taught part-time at U Manitoba and served as chancellor of U Winnipeg until retiring in 1999 to Victoria. Her other published works include Small Ceremonies (1976), The Box Garden (1977), Happenstance (1980), A Fairly Conventional Woman (1982), Various Miracles (1985), Swann (1987), The Orange Fish (1989), The Republic of Love (1992), Coming to Canada (1992), The Stone Diaries (1993), Thirteen Hands (1993), and Larry's Party (1997; adapted as musical theatre in Toronto in 2001 by Richard Ouzounian, with music by Marek Norman, directed by Robin Phillips. The libretto, with the score of four songs, was published separately as Larry's Party in 2000). For many of the years that Shields has lived in Canada and published novels, plays, and short stories, her work did not attract a great deal of attention, even though her novel Swann was shortlisted for the Governor General's AWARD in 1987. All that changed a mere six years later, with the publication and major success of her novel The Stone Diaries, a multilayered saga of Daisy Goodwill Flett's journey through life and her musings about the very project of writing and telling a life. It won the 1993 Governor General's Award, The American Book Critics' Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize, and was short-
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listed for the Booker Prize. As a result of the Stone Diaries publicity, five of Shields's earlier novels and short story collections were re-issued by Vintage Canada in new editions. In Shields's oeuvre, several main trends are apparent. She took as her field of investigation the world of middle-CLASS, middle-aged white Canadian men and women: the rituals of their daily lives and the strange, often unlooked-for illuminations and moments of creativity that punctuate those lives. As a novelist, then, her foremother is Virginia Woolf; like Woolf, Shields is acutely aware of the possibilities for creativity in 'small ceremonies' such as gardening and the preparation of food. Though her novels and stories may soar to the rhetorical level of Woolfian celebration, stylistically Shields tends, on the whole, to be more strongly influenced by her Canadian contemporary Margaret AT WOOD. This is especially apparent in some of the earlier novels, such as The Box Garden and Small Ceremonies, where Shields operates in the witty dry Atwoodian voice, with its air of sophisticated, 20th-century Anglo middle-class angst. In the later novels, she moves to develop a voice that is more markedly her own. The Republic of Love, for instance, shows Shields negotiating the relation between the celebratory prose that she uses to praise romantic love and the drier, sharp-edged tone of her earlier novels. The striking overall effect of the combination is an experiment that she carries further in The Stone Diaries, with its cacophony of many voices and levels of speech, nicely captured in her use of various narrators and letter writers. This fascination with multilayered writing led Shields to experiment with collaborative forms of authorship; she co-authored a novel, A Celibate Season, with Blanche Howard (1991). This novel tends to be left out of the current reappraisal of Shields, perhaps because it was not particularly warmly received, but also perhaps because doubly authored works are seen as less serious or less marketable 'experiments.' Similarly left out of the current retrospective work is Shields's Happenstance, a novel narrated by a middle-aged male historian whose anxiety about the book he has been trying to write for several years reaches crisis pitch while his wife is away at a convention. Suddenly, the book angst
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becomes part of a greater process of examining, for the first time, his life, his family, and his rapidly fading belief in historiographic detachment. The character is an important one, as a reshaping and deeper examination of the figure of Martin Gill, the Milton-scholar husband of biographer-narrator Judith Gill in Small Ceremonies, and as a foreshadowing of Shields's study of masculinity and self-negotiation in Larry's Party. Although much of the commentary on her work has, for good reasons, focused on her writings of women characters' lives, there is an equally absorbing topic to be explored in her work: her fascination with masculinity's construction and rites. In this respect, she carved out a distinct place in contemporary Canadian fiction. Larry's Party continues Shields's experimentation with novelistic forms. Working with a character who develops an obsession with mazes, she constructs her own novelistic maze - a sequence of 15 chapters, each devoted to a particular period in Larry's life and its events and crises, but each flashing forward or backward in time at certain points of crisis. Just as Swann: A Mystery (see MYSTERY AND ROMANCE) re-assembles at the end all the threads of the manyvoiced narrative, so the final portion of Larry's Party brings together, in Felliniesque fashion, the major dramatis personae of Larry's life story. This assembly reconstructs the final, most challenging maze of the novel: the maze of the life of one late-2oth-century man. In this final part, Shields incorporates visual analogues to the maze of Larry's life: a handwritten menu for the party, a sketch of the seating plan, and a map showing directions to Larry's apartment. Carol Shields, it would seem, continues her study of the maze of North American middle-class life, and of the cultural maps and diagrams that men and women devise to lead them through the winding avenues of social life at the start of a new century. Lorraine York
SHIELS, Andrew (pseud Albyn). Poet, blacksmith; b Oxnam, Roxburghshire, Scotland, 12 March 1793, d Dartmouth, NS, 5 Nov 1879; emig 1818. A Halifax blacksmith in Joseph HOWE'S political camp, he became a magistrate in 1857, publishing occasional poems (using his PSEUDO-
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NYM) in local papers; his The Witch of the Westcot; a tale of Nova-Scotia, in three cantos (1831) attempts, in rhyme, to adapt the Scots border dialect, with which he was familiar, to local speech.
All the Bright Company, 1987, a collection of plays produced by Andrew ALLAN), in which a Joseph McCarthy character investigates the great minds in Heaven and orders their deportation to 'Down There.'
SHIKATANI, Gerry (Osamu). Poet, prose writer, performance artist, editor; b Toronto 6 Feb 1950; son of Masajiro and Mitsuko (Mukai) Shikatani. A second generation Japanese Canadian, Shikatani grew up in Toronto's inner city, attended U Toronto, and received a BA in religious studies (1972). He worked as a writer, broadcaster, and an instructor at Sheridan C, and professor of creative WRITING at Concordia U (1993-5). Active in Toronto's poetry scene from 1973, Shikatani has authored sundry poetry chapbooks and broadsides. He is often anthologized, and has published three collections of his own poetry: A Sparrow's Food: Poems 1971-82, Selected Poems and Texts: Nineteen Seventy Three(1988), and Aqueduct 1979/1987: Poems and Texts from Europe (1996). In addition, he edited Paper Doors: An Anthology of Japanese-Canadian Poetry (1981). Lyrical, minimalist, CONCRETE and experimental, Shikatani's poetry frequently explores Japanese culture, demonstrating a Zenlike attention to particulars. See also ASIA.
Further reading: N. Alice Frick, Image in the Mind: CBC Radio Drama 1944 to *954 (Toronto: Canadian Stage & Arts Productions, 1987).
Further reading: Smaro Kamboureli, 'Gerry Shikatani,' Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Literature, ed Smaro Kamboureli (Toronto: Oxford, 1996): 351. Kent Lewis
SHIP, Reuben. Radio playwright; b Montreal 18 Oct 1915, d England 23 Aug 1975; son of Bella (Davis) and Sam Ship, union workers. Ship became involved in theatrical productions while studying at McGill U, and after graduation performed in anti-fascist plays with the New THEATRE Group. From 1944 to 1951 he wrote RADIO comedy for over 300 episodes of NBC's The Life ofRiley series; in 1953 he was deported from the UNITED STATES because he refused to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee. Hired by the CBC in Toronto (and perhaps continuing to sell scripts pseudonymously in the United States), he continued to write comic SATIRES, most successfully with The Investigator (1954; pub 1956; rpt in its original form in
SHORT STORY AND SKETCH. Common sense suggests what a short story is, and what a Canadian story is: the author is Canadian or/ and the setting is Canadian. Mavis GALLANT is a Canadian short story writer; Montreal is a Canadian setting. To subdivide prose narratives by length, there are anecdotes, sketches, tales, CONTES, RECITS, short stories, NOUVELLES, long stories (NOVELLAS), and longer stories (NOVELS, romans). But length alone does not explain the form. More usefully, Carole Gerson and Kathy Mezei provided a working definition of the sketch as 'an apparently personal anecdote or memoir which focuses on one particular place, person, or experience, and is usually intended for magazine publication' (The Prose of Life, 1981). Thus the sketch, mainly an i8th- and 19th-century form (though practised still in the magazine profile, TRAVEL writing, and NEWSPAPER columns), can be considered more personal than the short story, and more anecdotal, more tightly focused on one subject (a character, a natural event), perhaps also more obviously didactic, and supposedly less fictional. Similarly, the French Canadian conte, which Adrien THERIO succinctly defines for a contemporary audience in his introduction to the signal Conteurs canadiens-francais (1965) as 'a short account of imaginary adventures,' is more like the English-language sketch and tale than the modern short story, or nouvelle. But almost any element in the foregoing distinctions is open to contradiction. In Canadian LITERARY HISTORY the sketch is subsumed by short fiction as early as in Thomas MCCULLOCH'S Letters ofMephibosheth Stepsure (1821-3, which combines elements of the sketch with the EPISTOLARY tradition in fiction) and Thomas Chandler HALIBURTON'S The Clockmaker (1835-6, especially so in his use of the anecdotal aspect of the sketch), and later in the various writings of
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Catharine Parr TRAILL, Anna Brownell JAMESON, and Susanna MOODIE. And the conte continues in the early 2ist century to be the defining formal feature of the Quebecois short story. Prose forms cross-fertilize freely from about the i8th century onwards, irrespective of the literary historian's need for such distinctions as that between sketch and short story, or conte and nouvelle. Subsequently in Canadian literary history, many short stories continue to display to fine effect aspects of the 18th-century sketch (and, it might also be observed, of the i8th-century essay) and the various 19th-century prose forms that were already freely crisscrossing generic boundaries - literary inventiveness as always mocking the pedant. Consider, for example, the short stories of Charles G.D. ROBERTS, Duncan Campbell SCOTT, Louis-Honore FRECHETTE, Stephen LEACOCK, and Jean-Aubert LORANGER, along with the mixed forms of such writers as AUBERT DE GASPE (pere etfils), Frederick Philip GROVE, Emily CARR, Robertson DAVIES, Jacques PERRON, Hugh MACLENNAN, Margaret LAURENCE (who described her story cycle A Bird in the House, 1968, as spiritual autobiography), and Roch CARRIER. Despite such understandable difficulty in precisely establishing an 'origin of the Canadian short story' and its distinctiveness from the sketch and conte, those theorizing the genre still view as a literary historical fact that much of what is most lastingly productive was said with Aristotelian precision by Edgar Allan Poe in his 19th-century review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales. Working from the same intense Romantic aesthetic that made the lyric the dominant poetic form for decades after, Poe made the foundational assertion that a short story had to be short enough to be read in one sitting, else its chief aesthetic virtues of unity of effect and dominant impression are lost. To this end - and Poe suggests as much - short stories might better be composed working backwards from their dominant effect (as the detective story, which Poe also originated, often seems literally to be). Thus too the short story was often seen as closer to poetry than to the traditional novel, in both its effects and the most rewarding methods for its study; this is most obvious in the high-impact modern manifestation of the short story, the version most readers think of, from
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Chekhov to Joyce, from Morley CALLAGHAN to Jacques Perron and Norman LEVINE. The first stories composed in what was to become Canada were those MYTHS and tales collectively shaped over time by various First Peoples: the ORAL narratives involving the creator RAVEN and the trickster COYOTE, or, say, the INUIT legends of the sea-goddess SEDNA. Also, in the first EXPLORERS' records of their expeditions there are numerous accounts that, removed from their contexts, could stand alone as instances of the earliest 'Canadian' short stories. Consider, for example, Samuel HEARNE'S tendentiously constructed account of the slaughter of the 'Esquimaux' on the Snake River, or David THOMPSON'S many elaborated anecdotes of life among various Plains Indians, or Alexander HENRY'S riveting narrative of the lacrosse game that led to the capture of, and eventual cannibalism at, Fort Michilimackinac in 1763. Apart from their considerable historical and ethnographic importance, such stories are powerfully entertaining instances of the storyteller's art, in as harrowing, because graphically related, and as purposeful a manner as any written by such contemporary masters of the macabre and strange tale as the Scottish Canadian Eric MCCORMACK (Inspecting the Vaults, 1987) or Marie-Jose THERIAULT (Portraits d'Elsa et autres histoires, 1990). Moreover, these interpolated tales in explorers' journals can be seen to anticipate the similar practice in much 19th-century writing in both English and French, for instance, the apparently fictional story of 'Brian, the Still Hunter,' in Moodie's psychodramatic Roughing It in the Bush (1852), and many another exemplary tale here and in such other works as her sister Traill's The Backwoods of Canada (1836). Similarly, the elder Philippe Aubert de Gaspe's Les anciens Canadiens (1863), the first novel of French Canada, was largely composed of retellings of numerous FOLK tales and legends that had long been current in the culture of Lower Canada, and which, like those in Moodie and Traill, can stand alone as short stories. Despite such very early examples, whenever someone ascribes origins to the Canadian short story in NATIVE myths and legends, in passages from explorers'journals, in the conduct literature of pioneer women, and in conte-based romans, what comes to mind are the unconvinc-
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ing attempts of short story theorists who claim that their subject is actually the oldest, not the youngest, of the traditional genres. The present article assumes that the Canadian short story is a predominantly post-Poe literary form, one that is fictional by intent and design, and one that comes most fully to form in English Canada in the middle of the ipth century and not till the early 2oth in Quebec. At the earliest, we might locate a myth of origin in the first series of Haliburton's relation of the sayings and doings of Sam Slick of Slickville, and only at a stretch to McCulloch's Letters ofMephibosheth Stepsure; while for French Canada the same applies to the conte-dependent novel by Aubert de Gaspe (fils), L'influence d'un livre (1837), and even, at the end of the century, to the accomplished Louis-Honore Frechette's tall tales based on the very Catholic pattern of transgression and punishment. Pace Poe, the time it takes to write a short story probably had more to do with the form's popularity among 19th-century Canadian writers then did the time it takes to read one. Viewed in this way, the two activities - time to write, time to read - are creatively related, binding author to audience in the formative period of a new genre and the making of literary culture. The pioneer country of mid-i9th-century Canada was populated with domestically besieged mothers and fathers beleaguered by trees; who but the privileged few, the exceptionally dedicated, or the obsessed would have realistically considered a career as a novelist? (See John RICHARDSON.) Such eminent Canadian women short story writers as Margaret Laurence and Alice MUNRO were still, in the mid2oth century, giving lack of time as the reason for their writing short stories instead of novels (though only initially in the case of Laurence): maternal-domestic responsibilities intervened. Such considerations of GENRE choice as available time and residual energy may not be theoretically exciting, but they do remind us that the short story is, like all literature, also a product of the exigencies of context, culture, gender, and actual history. In his landmark study of the Canadian and NEW ZEALAND short story, Dreams of Speech and Violence (1987), W.H. NEW premises his argument on the presumption that the short story is the
marginal genre. In historically marginal cultures such as those of New Zealand, Canada as a whole, and French-speaking Canada vis-a-vis English North America, writers found the marginal form accommodating of their situations and ambitions. Canadian and New Zealand writers use the short story, even if all unconsciously, as a kind of cultural-ideological protest, subversively, and often with a sheathing IRONY that remains mostly lost upon the central, dominant, and self-regarding cultures in which, financially speaking, they often need to succeed. New's theory, tested in pseudo-scientific fashion, can be shown to have relevance elsewhere; in IRELAND, for instance, where writers, working on the margins of the dominant Englishliterature culture (and in a foreign language, as many of the more radical still claim), thrived not only in the form of the short story but also in the colonizer's language. (It might also be noted that in Frank O'Connor's The Lonely Voice, Ireland produced the 2Oth century's first accomplished study of the genre's appeal.) And consider: until quite recently, the British have been conspicuously lacking in eminent short story writers (with D.H. Lawrence being the most notable exception, Thomas Hardy and Graham Greene to a lesser extent). Finally, the Americans were most accomplished in the form - with Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville - when in their so-called Renaissance they were defining and asserting their culture's value against that of the British; in other words, when as a culture they, like the New Zealand, the Irish, and the Canadian after them, were feeling most marginal. It may be for such reasons that Canada's first internationally acclaimed author, T.C. Haliburton, was a writer of stories/sketches and a colonial man whose Sam Slick tales testify to a keen awareness of his position on the margins of two great cultures. Moreover, the first series of his Clockmaker sketches forms a coherent story cycle, and this in-between form or subgenre, the story cycle, came increasingly to dominate the genre of the short story in anglophone Canada. Throughout the i9th century, the romantic short story flourished in ANTHOLOGIES and a popular MAGAZINE culture that included such publications as Montreal's Literary Garland (1838-51), Susanna and Dunbar Moodie's Victo-
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ria Magazine (1847-8) out of Belleville, James HUSTON'S Le Repertoire national (1848-50), Halifax's Mayflower (1851-2), Toronto's Anglo-American Magazine and Canadian} (1852-5), La Ruche litteraire illustree (1853-9), Les Soirees canadiennes (1861-5), Quebec's Le Foyer canadien (1862-6), [Rose-Belford's] Canadian Monthly and National R (1872-82), the New Dominion Monthly (1867-79), the Canadian Illustrated News (1869-83), and Les Nouvelles soirees canadiennes (1882-8). These publications attracted regular contributions from such writers as Eliza Lanesford GUSHING, Harriet Vaughan CHENEY, Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill, JosephCharles TACHE, Henri-Emile CHEVALIER, HenriRaymond CAS GRAIN, May Agnes FLEMING, Rosanna LEPROHON, Ethelwyn WETHERALD, Susan Frances HARRISON, Agnes Maule MACHAR, Louisa MURRAY, andjoanna WOOD, to name but the more prolific and those who are becoming better known. With the exception of the French Canadian writers, whose aesthetic remained rooted in the nationalistically defining potential of the folkloric (in the conte, the recit), these short stories were written predominantly by women who thrived literarily on the fringes of patriarchal society, and who were pioneering something of a twice-marginalized Canadian literary culture (marginal to the preponderantly male-authored HISTORICAL novels, LONG POEMS, travellers' accounts, etc). These stories are not merely effusive romantic tales, or amateurish (and therefore dismissable) in any sense. They are fully realized short stories as accomplished and important in their historical-cultural contexts as any that came afterwards (as, of course, are the French Canadian collections of contes). It might even be observed that the majority of these women's stories, fortuitously liberated from the sociopolitical province of patriarchy, often address aesthetic matters absent in the works of the engaged male writers, and that one of their recurring subjects is the problems of the woman artist. By far the most important magazine of the ipth century in English was the highly influential Week (1883-96). Although primarily an organ of social and political culture, the Week regularly published short fiction and the journalism of Sara Jeannette DUNCAN in her 'Saunterings' column. This period, the latter i9th
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century, saw the rise and demise of many publications devoted to topical comic writings. The most important of these was the relatively longrunning Grip (1873-94), which published a great number of PARODIES, sketches, and SATIRES of the kind that would later win Stephen Leacock international acclaim (in fact, Leacock published his first comic piece in Grip while still a student at U Toronto). It was only in the late 2oth century that some of these prolific writers of comic stories, such as James MCCARROLL (Terry Finnegan), began to be recovered and valued for their contributions to the Canadian short story and sketch. This widely active, border-crossing world of magazine short fiction effectively contradicts two received critical notions about the English Canadian short story: namely, that it did not exist as a distinct genre in the mid to late i9th century apart from the sketch, and that Canadian short fiction has always been at its best when realistic (and DOCUMENTARY) in mode. In 1896, at the beginnings of the modern story, Duncan Campbell Scott published his seminal story cycle, In the Village ofViger, comprising a virtuoso's gallery of 19th-century story forms, from folk tale to GOTHIC to LOCAL COLOUR - with most being romantic rather than realistic in mode. In Quebec, Frechette, 19th-century French Canada's most important writer, was achieving something similar with his masterful recasting of contes and romantic legends. At about the same time, Charles G.D. Roberts invented the realistic ANIMAL STORY in Earth's Enigmas (1896), a uniquely Canadian form of short story that was subsequently popularized by Ernest Thompson SETON in Wild Animals I Have Known (1898), a popularity that was immediately capitalized upon by Roberts himself in numerous collections and novels. A little before this time, E.W. THOMSON published his first volume of mostly frontier tales, Old Man Savarin, and Other Stories (1895), stories of a gritty realism, combining local colour and romance in a manner that gained him lasting international success. At about this time, too, Duncan was publishing stories, many of which (such as the title story from her masterful The Pool in the Desert, 1903) are equal to Henry James' in the tenor of their exquisite psychological REALISM, and to William Dean Howells' in
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their attention to the particularities of place (if not exclusively a Canadian place). In Quebec, Honore BEAUGRAND in La chasse-galerie (1900) and Pamphile LEMAY in Contes vraies (1899) were bringing the tradition of the conte to its 19thcentury fulfilment - even if today the conte /recit remains a defining aspect of Quebecois short fiction. And a little later, Jean-Aubert Loranger was applying the aesthetic precepts of local colour fiction to rural life (see TERRIEN ROMANCE) in such collections as Le village: conies et nouvelles du terroir (1925). To the end of the i9th century, then, the English-language short story thrived in Canada to an extent matched only by the POPULAR, as opposed to the literary, short story of the mid20 th century; and the Canadian short story, in both English and French, was to the end of the i9th century almost exclusively romantic in mode. Roberts' achievement with the so-called realistic animal story may seem to gainsay this second point, but consider just what those stories are about - the secret lives of the furry kindred and the finny tribe, those real 'other Victorians/ Canada's next most famous writer of short stories after Haliburton - Stephen Leacock was not only also a humorist, like Haliburton, but wrote exclusively in the sketch and short story (Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, 1912) some hundred years after the author of The Clockmaker. After the humour of Leacock, though, and through the modern period to about 1960, the Canadian short story does indeed become more realistic in both English and French, despite the enduring French predilection for the fantastic. It continued to flourish in the hands of such practitioners as D.C. Scott and Raymond KNISTER (in 1928 Knister dedicated the first anthology of Canadian stories, which he edited, in tribute to Scott's achievement in the genre), and well into the contemporary period. J.G. SIME'S story cycle Sister Woman (1919) comprises a unique fictional record of the lives of mostly working CLASS and immigrant women in Montreal. Grove's Over Prairie Trails (1922) remains a signal achievement of the early modern period and the short story (Trails, another story cycle, is mixed genre actually, what now is called creative non-fiction, combining elements of the MEMOIR, the spiritual auto-
biography, the nature sketch, and the short story). Somewhat similarly, MARIE-VICTORIN in Recits laurentiens (1919) and Lionel GROULX in Les rapaillages (1922) figure the ties between identity and la terre in French Canada, although, in these instances, in the sentimental vogue of NATIONALISM. In A Native Argosy (1929) first, and subsequently in numerous stories (collected in No Man's Meat, 1931, and Now That April's Here, 1936), Morley Callaghan performed his own version of a Hemingway pruning of prose as he moved the modern Canadian story most residingly into an URBAN setting, where it has remained in both English- and French-speaking Canada. Through the Depression years of the 19305 and for a short time afterwards, Canada's more socially/socialist conscious writers, such as Dorothy LIVESAY, Albert LABERGE, Harry BERNARD, Louis DANTIN, Ted ALLAN, and A.M. KLEIN, published short stories critical of capitalism and other cultural assumptions (for example, the virtues of the rural) while being unsentimentally sympathetic to the conditions of its victims (or mostly so, as James Doyle has shown), in various popular and literary periodicals, in the official organs of the Canadian Communist party, and perhaps most influentially in the Canadian Forum (1920-). In Quebec, Marius BARBEAU showed how the conte could be employed for more modernist (realistic and critical) purposes in Le reve de Kamalmouk (1948). But most notably emergent in this mid-century modernizing/ recuperation in Quebec was the prolific and engage Jacques Perron, whose brief stories and tales were to refashion the 19th-century conte into the distinctively Quebecois mode of short story writing. In the mid-20th century, a great number of writers who would go on to achieve international reputations as novelists, and in Quebec also as playwrights and singers, first came to attention as writers of humorous sketches and realistic short stories. They were able to do so in such popular magazines and weekly supplements to newspapers as Maclean's Magazine, Liberty, Mayfair, Canadian Magazine, Star Weekly, Saturday Night, and Canadian Home J, and in such periodicals as La Releve and La Nouvelle Releve, First Statement, Preview, Northern R, Gants du del, Parti Pris, Queen's Quarterly, Liberte, Fiddlehead,
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and Tamarack R (the latter of which was edited by Robert WEAVER, also a key figure in the development of the contemporary English-language Canadian short story on CBC RADIO). These venues provided publication for writers too numerous to name, during what was the 20th century's heyday for short story writing and reading in Canada. The more literary of these writers passed through this period and their names survive, mainly because they went on to write novels (Hugh GARNER, w.o. MITCHELL, Roch Carrier) or, like Munro (who published her first paying story in Mayfair) and Mavis Gallant, they continued publishing short stories in elite magazines such as the New Yorker and collecting them into books. But (as Allan Weiss has shown) some of the forgotten anglophone Canadian writers who were the mainstays of these popular magazines and this mid-century explosion of short fiction included R. Ross Annett (1895-), Leslie Gordon BARNARD (1890-1961), Louis Arthur Cunningham (190054), David K. Findlay (1901-), John Patrick Gillese (1920-), H. Gordon Green (1912-91), Rhoda Elizabeth Playfair, and Kerry Wood (1907-). Ironically, the well-crafted modern short story and the more formulaic popular story were probably assisted in gaining their high point of popularity in the mid-20th century by the falling off of literary attention spans (short stories are short, magazines are ephemeral), before the full occupation of an electronic mass media bent on assisting with the homogenizing of national cultures and, it now appears obvious, the rendering obsolete of literary pursuits, or the reflective sensibility necessary to them. Inarguably, it was the rise of radio and television that attracted advertisers from the popular magazines and led quickly to their demise. Numerous the new literary short story writers of the ensuing period (say, 1950-80) certainly were. Any rigorously selective list of those who would appear to be destined for a place in the continuum of the Canadian short story would have to include (apart from those already named): Felix LECLERC, Sinclair ROSS, Yves THERIAULT, Ethel WILSON, GilleS VIGNEAULT,
RINGUET (Philippe Panneton), Hugh HOOD, Alistair MACLEOD, Clark BLAISE, Anne HEBERT, Gabrielle ROY, Hubert AQUIN, Matt COHEN,
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Margaret ATWOOD, Carol SHIELDS, and Michel TREMBLAY. Alice Munro's first book of stories, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), won the Governor General's AWARD and announced the arrival of a writer, arguably Canada's best, who works exclusively in the short story and who in some quarters has been acclaimed as its greatest practitioner. It is worth observing further that Canada's pre-eminent literary prize, the Governor General's Award, has often gone to a collection of short stories (Greg HOLLINGSHEAD'S The Roaring Girl, 1997), sometimes a first collection (Munro's; Guy VANDERHAEGHE'S Man Descending, 1982), which says much about the high place that the short story continues to hold in Canada's literary culture. Some of the names in the foregoing list belong in what is customarily labelled the contemporary period of Canadian literature, which is usually seen to begin at about 1960. But in Canadian literary history especially, distinguishing a period of modern short story writing from a contemporary or postmodern period is an especially dicey enterprise (as is selecting writers for inclusion in what can only be a provisional CANON). After all, it is cultural-temporal myopia that usually makes Canadian critics think of 'the 19th-century story' in grab-all terms and of the 2oth as worthy of two or three literary historical divisions. There is even something of a critical consensus on the view that the Canadian short story flourished exceptionally in the 19605 and 19705 (with Perron, Carrier, Ross, Munro et al): in other words, a view that sees recent history as deserving of consideration decade by decade. But such a perspective is misleading in more than its unbalanced literary historical view. If the short story can be said to have flourished in the second half of the 20th century, it is not because of burgeoning reader interest; nor have the short story writers had more of an influence than their predecessors in, say, the 18905, when authors such as Duncan, Scott, and Roberts made a marked impact on the broader English Canadian culture (Duncan from her pulpit at the Week; Scott as deputy superintendent general of Indian Affairs and in stories and poems about Natives; and Roberts - whose popularity can be gauged by the fact that he was exempted from the so-called nature-fakir tarring
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of President Theodore Roosevelt - was an influential editor who brought many of his fellow Canadian writers to a wider readership: he was knighted). Rather, the purported flourishing of the contemporary Canadian short story occurred predominantly in the self-perpetuating world of literary periodicals attached to, and financially dependent on, Canada's universities, periodicals whose readership is limited to the like-minded. In Quebec, the high literariness of periodical short fiction from about the 19705 onwards can be seen as evidence of an even greater turning away and inwards from the wider culture of French Canada, a development that seems in resigned contradistinction to the exuberant confidence of the QUIET REVOLUTION. In fact, with the arguable exception of Vanderhaeghe, and perhaps Monique PROULX, it is difficult to think of short story writers who first came to prominence in the 19805 and 19905 for whom a claim to eventual canonicity could be made as safely as for such writers as Duncan, Roberts, Scott, Callaghan, Perron, Roy, Ross, Carrier, Munro, and Atwood. It needs to be said, too, that many of those Canadian novelists who first found success in the short story are (or were) better in it than in the novel. Some of the causes of this irrational development from good short story writer to middling novelist may parallel (if inversely) those given for the attraction of the short story in 19th-century Canada: the relation between time spent writing and monetary reward, and market considerations given inflated importance by publishers' delusions about what readers want (not short stories). But whatever the causes - and they would include mistaken perceptions of relative merit and the megalomaniacal tendencies of 20th-century culture - the novel became and remains the form in which fiction writers feel they must prove themselves. And publishers do encourage them to think so: both Laurence and Munro had to resist pressure from their American publishers to turn story cycles into novels (with A Bird in the House in 1970, and Who Do You Think You Are? in 1978, respectively). Not just novels but big novels remain the order of the day. Yet one might well wonder if late-2oth-century jumbo narratives are being read at all. Or do they signal the terminal stage
of literary fiction, a sort of novelistic tumescence that finds an astronomical parallel in the red-giant phase of a dying star? The short story, whether romantic, high modern, or popular, is a dense reading experience, one whose fullness - to shift metaphors to the computer world decompresses beyond the time taken to read it. It may well be the case that 'readers' are no longer willing to take their entertainment in this way. With reluctant publishers and the curtailed prospect of reaching a rewarding readership, there are (understandably) few Canadian writers who still work exclusively in the short story. Setting aside the exceptional Munro and Gallant, a selection of the 'younger' Canadian writers for whom the genre of choice continues to be the short story and novella (which has always had a cachet in francophone Canada that it lacks outside) would include Andre CARPENTIER, Edna ALFORD, Marie-Jose Theriault, Isabel HUGGAN, Diane SCHOEMPERLEN, and few others. That dismal observation having been made, many of Canada's most accomplished novelists do continue to write short stories and publish collections that are among the best still being published anywhere. The form may yet hold an enduring attraction for Canadian writers, even if not to most commercial and literary publishers, though The Porcupine's Quill (and its fiction editor, John METCALF) deserves mention for distinguished service, as does Oberon P. Publishers' declarations that story collections do not sell, and therefore cannot be successfully published, become self-fulfilling prophecy. New's theory of marginality helps explain the traditional (and to some extent lasting) appeal of the short story for Canadian writers in both official languages. What then might its weakening, assisted by (im)purely marketing interests, portend? That Canada's is no longer a marginal culture? That the concept of a marginal culture no longer applies in our Webbed world? Or that, as a distinct culture, Canada is drifting closer to the expanding-while-contracting American centre, that place where incisive IRONY bewilders the single-minded and where literary fiction, like all else, is successful or not in terms exclusively pecuniary and megalomaniacal. That place where the title of Alice Munro's brilliant cycle of stories Who Do You Think You Are? was
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SHORT STORY AND SKETCH
changed to The Beggar Maid because the US publisher found the original too mystifyingly Canadian. Tellingly, Munro's original title points directly to the question of identity, the revised one to somewhere else. A survey such as this has little space even for brief commentary on those historically important short story writers accorded notice. It would be an ever greater slight, then, not to expand that highly selective bestowing of attention, if only by listing the names of some of the many distinguished writers of short stories who have made contributions to the continuum of the Canadian short story in English and French: Pierre-Joseph-Olivier CHAUVEAU, Gilbert PARKER, Robert BARR, Mary Anne SADLIER, Isabella Valancy CRAWFORD, Archibald LAMPMAN, Mary Eliza HERBERT, James Oakley, Theodore ROBERTS, Margaret Marshall SAUNDERS, Nellie MCCLUNG, Adjutor RIVARD, Thomas RADDALL, Edmund Grignon, Henry KREISEL, Germaine GUEVREMONT, Malcolm LOWRY, Sheila WATSON, Ernest BUCKLER, Elizabeth BREWSTER, Antonine MAILLET, W.D. VALGARDSON, Marcel Godin, Alden NOWLAN, Austin CLARKE, Alain GRANDBOIS, Rudy WIEBE, Jack HODGINS, George ELLIOTT, Ray SMITH, Jacques RENAUD, Audrey THOMAS, Louise MAHEUX-FORCIER, Timothy FINDLEY, Leon ROOKE, John Metcalf, Thomas KING, Andre MAJOR, David Adams RICHARDS, Suzanne JACOB, Gaetan BRULOTTE, Anne DANDURAND, Dorothy Speak. It would be easy to double this list with names from the 2Oo-year history of the Canadian short story. The primary purpose of the foregoing account has been to trace the broad historical outlines of the Canadian short story and sketch, while noting some high points of achievement. But its purpose has also been to offer a corrective to uninformed views that priorize the modern and the contemporary, by addressing the implied question: What are some of the literary and cultural antecedents of the Canadian short story? The continuing exploration of this question should help to affirm a continuum of the Canadian short story from at least the midipth century to the present. Such a readerlyscholarly attitude should remind us of the value of literary predecessors in their own terms, thus suggesting how better to read contemporary
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Canadian short stories, and perhaps help to keep alive this threatened form of literary pleasure. See also HUMOUR, MYSTERY AND ROMANCE, WRITING PROGRAMS.
Further reading: Matt Cohen and Wayne Grady, eds, The Quebec Anthology 1830-1990 (Ottawa: U Ottawa, P, 1996); David Jackel, 'Short Fiction,' in Literary History of Canada, 2nd ed, vol 4, ed WH. New (Toronto: U Toronto P, 1990); Gerald Lynch and Angela Robbeson, ed, To Be Continued: Essays on the Canadian Short Story (Ottawa: U Ottawa P, 1999); WH. New, Dreams of Speech and Violence (Toronto: U Toronto P, 1989); Gerard Tougas, Histoire de la litterature canadienne-francaise (Paris: P U de France, 1960; 5th ed 1974). Gerald Lynch
SHREVE, Sandy. Poet, administrator; b Matane, QC, 13 Aug 1950; daughter of John Shreve, radio technician, and Rosalie (Granville Shreve) Angus, secretary. Shreve was raised in Sackville, NB. She left for British Columbia in the 19705, where at first she worked primarily as a staff assistant in union organization and WOMEN'S STUDIES at Simon Fraser U, and after 1994 as a communications coordinator for the Legal Services Society. Her sometimes humorous, always serious, technically adept, and often linguistically playful poems - The Speed of the Wheel Is up to the Potter (1990), Bewildered Rituals (1992), Belonging (1997) - range from re-perceptions of New Brunswick history, especially those involving women's society, to revelations of ways in which the personal and the political intertwine. SIKH WRITERS include Lakshmi GILL and Surjeet KALSEY; see also DIASPORA, INDIA. Sikhism was founded by a HINDU religious leader named Nanak in the i6th century; it expanded from its beginnings as a Khalsa ('pure' community) in the Punjab into an international monotheistic RELIGION with various devotional writings, including the Adigranth. From the late i7th century, men began to carry daggers, wear turbans, and not cut their hair; through these rituals and by taking on the name Singh ('lion'), they all joined the warrior caste and thus became social equals.
SIME
SILVERA, Makeda. Writer, editor; b Kingston, Jamaica, 9 Jan 1955; educ York U and U Toronto in WOMEN'S STUDIES. Silvera is the co-founder and managing editor of Sister Vision P, which is devoted to the work of women from minority groups (especially women of colour) and tends to present FEMINIST and LESBIAN perspectives on WOMEN'S experiences. Her fiction and nonfiction anthologies deal with issues related to culture, RACE, social relations, and women's socio-economic conditions in the CARIBBEAN and Canada, as in Remembering G and Other Short Stories (1991). These stories evoke, partly in Jamaican idiom, the childhood memories of life in a small neighborhood in Kingston: family life, the community, social and economic conditions, and the natural environment (especially the sea) all shape the narrator's adult sensibilities. In sharp contrast to the Jamaican family and the spiritually inspiring Caribbean environment are the hardships of the immigrant experience in Canada, the inhospitable cold Canadian landscape, and the exclusionary, racially based structures of contemporary Canadian society. This social consciousness is also present in Silenced (1983), which recounts the experiences of female Caribbean domestic workers living in Canada. By allowing the women in the book to tell their stories, Silvera stresses the cultural heritage of her subjects, a heritage in which orality is central to the transmission of the community's values. Marino Tuzi
SIMARD, Andre. Playwright, professor; b Chicoutimi, QC, 22 Nov 1949, d Quebec City 7 Jan 1990. His first play was written in 1971 for the Troupe des treize at U Laval (from which he graduated in 1973; MA, 1981), but he also wrote for RADIO, television, and cinema. Between 1971 and 1983 he wrote 18 plays, almost all of which were staged at the Centre d'essai des auteurs dramatiques. In 1976, Cinq pieces en un acte appeared, including En attendant Gaudreault (!973; tr Henry BEISSEL and Arlette Franciere as Waiting for Gaudreault, 1978). Simard was a popular writer who espoused the possibility of solutions to social problems. He eschewed the theatre of stagnation, auto-analysis, and resignation, but while his writing questions accepted
values, it also entertains. See also FILM, TELEVISION, AND LITERATURE. Margaret Cook
SIMARD,Jean. Novelist, translator; b Quebec City 17 Aug 1916; son of Marie (de Varennes) and Joseph Simard, undersecretary of the province. He studied at Montreal's Ecole des Beaux-Arts (1933-9) and then taught there until he became professor at U Quebec a Montreal in 1969. His partly autobiographical satirical novel Felix (1947) looks at family, society, and political morals. It was followed by the ironic and religious novels Monfils pourtant heureux (1959) and Les sentieres de la nuit (1959); a play, L'ange interdit (1961); short stories, Le singe et leperroauet (1983); a study of LANGUAGE, Unefacon deparler (1973); and translations of works by Mordecai RICHLER. Margaret Cook
SIMCOE, Elizabeth Posthuma. Writer, artist; baptized at Aldwincle, England, 22 Sept 1762, d nr Honiton, England, 17 Jan 1850; daughter of Elizabeth (Spinkes) and Thomas Gwillim, army officer. Raised by an aunt after her mother died in childbirth, Elizabeth Gwillim married John Graves Simcoe in 1782, who in 1791 was appointed It-gov of Upper Canada. They stayed in Niagara, York, and Quebec till 1796; her diary of her travels - it expresses her observations of LANDSCAPE, which she found picturesque, and her encounters with people, to whom she felt superior - appeared in 1911; a more reliable edition, Mrs. Simcoe's Diary, ed Mary Quayle INNIS, followed in 1965. Further reading: Mary Beacock Fryer, Elizabeth Posthuma Simcoe (Toronto: Dundurn, 1989). SIME, Jessie Georgina. Writer; b Hamilton, Lanark Co, Scotland, 12 Feb 1868, d Wootton Wawen, England, 13 Sept 1958; daughter of teacher and writer Jessie Aitken (Wilson), and James Sime, minister, writer, and translator; niece of Daniel WILSON. Georgina Sime came to Canada from Edinburgh in 1907, settling in Montreal for almost 50 years. Her most important works - the frame tale Sister Woman (1919) and the novel Our Little Life (1921) - are a generic mix of realism and sentimentalism. They reveal the conflicts and joys of URBAN Canadian
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SIME
WOMEN as they struggle to secure sexual fulfilment, personal happiness, and financial stability in the era of the First World War. Sime retained close ties to Britain throughout her years in Canada, particularly to her lifelong friend, editor, amanuensis, and collaborator, Frank Carr Nicholson, the head of Edinburgh U Library from 1910 to 1939. Nicholson's relation to Sime's work was complex. Because of his advice, he was a part of virtually everything she wrote, her late works owing him the greatest debt. As age and physical infirmity overtook Sime, Nicholson devoted more and more time to revising her copious drafts. Without his constancy, it is likely that Sime's late works - her dream sequences Dreams of the World of Light (1951) and Inez and her Angel (1954); her autobiographical sketches, Brave Spirits (1952); and their collaborative novel about a Viennese family's wartime exile to Canada, A Tale of Two Worlds (i953) - would never have been published.
nature, foregrounding the problems of selfexpression and personal identity in an alienating world. R.J. Birks
SIMPSON, Leo James Pascal. Story writer, novelist, journalist, fashion editor; b Limerick, Ireland, 1934; son of Anne (Egan) and Gerald Simpson; educ Clongowes Wood C. Simpson was a writer-in-residence at U Ottawa (1973) and U Western Ontario (1978). His publications include the story collection The Lady and the Travelling Salesman (1976) and contributions to the anthologies New Canadian Stories 1972-75, Best Canadian Stories (1980), and Small Wonders (1982). Among his novels are Arkwright (1971), Peacock Papers (1973), Kowalski's Last Chance (1980), and Andrea in the Daytime (1986). He is particularly noted for his ebullient comedy and his representations of contemporary urban dilemmas.
K.Jane Watt
SIMMIE, Lois. Community C instructor, writer; b Eclam, SK, n June 1932; daughter of Bessie Thomson and Edward Binns. She is a writer of award-winning books of fiction and non-fiction including Secret Lives ofSgt. John Wilson: A True Story of Love and Murder (1995), a meticulously researched account of a First World War MOUNTIE who almost gets away with murder, which won her the Arthur Ellis Best True Crime AWARD for 1996. She has also written plays, films, and stories for younger audiences, the most noteworthy being An Armadillo Is Not a Pillow (1986) and Mister Got to Go (i995), the account of a stray cat who makes his home in Vancouver's Sylvia Hotel. J. Kieran Kealy
SIMONS, Beverly. Musician, playwright; b Flin Flon, MB, 31 March 1938. Simons won a scholarship to the Banff School of Fine Arts for her oneact verse drama Twisted Roots (1956). After completing her education at McGill U and U British Columbia (BA, 1959), she travelled and worked in Europe before returning to Vancouver in 1961. Her plays - which include Crabdance (1969); Green Lawn Rest Home (1973); and Preparing (1974), the title play in a series of four short plays - are often experimental and symbolic in
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Further reading: Michael F.N. Dixon, 'Leo Simpson and the Comic Element,' Studies in Canadian Literature 2.2 (Summer 1977): 5-16. K.G. Stewart
SINCLAIR, Bertrand William. Novelist; b Edinburgh 9 Jan 1881, d Fender Harbour, BC, 20 Oct 1972; son of George and Robina (Williamson) Sinclair. Bertrand Sinclair was taken to the United States as a child. He worked as a cowpuncher in Montana before settling in British Columbia to pursue a writing career. His 12 novels are tales of adventure featuring cowboys, prospectors, and fishermen, celebrating individualism while criticizing monopoly capitalism. His best work is Poor Man's Rock (1920), an attack on the corporations controlling the Pacific salmon fishery, within a romantic plot of a WAR veteran who by his personal and commercial decency wins economic success and the heroine's love. James Doyle
SINCLAIR, Lister. Playwright; b Bombay, India, 9 Jan 1921; son of Lillie Agnes and W. Shedden Sinclair, a chemical engineer. Sinclair attended school in England; in 1941, he began studying science at U British Columbia, where he became involved in writing and acting. In
SIOUAN ORAL LITERATURE
1944, he joined the CBC in Toronto, where he helped develop the RADIO DRAMA Stage series. In addition to taking leading roles in many dramas, he wrote original radio plays and adapted plays and novels for radio. Most characteristic of Sinclair's work are his verse dramas, such as Socrates (1947/1952), and his witty SATIRES, such as All about Emily (1943/1948). In addition to writing for the stage, Sinclair wrote historical DOCUMENTARY programs, primarily for CBC's Ideas series. R.J. Birks
SIOUAN ORAL LITERATURE. Siouan-speaking peoples in Canada are divided into two major groups - those who speak Dakota and are associated with the eight Sioux reserves in Manitoba and Saskatchewan; and the Nakota speakers living in Saskatchewan, whose history in the Rocky Mountain West goes back at least to the i7th century when they were mentioned in the JESUIT RELATIONS as having recently separated from the Yanktonai Sioux. The term 'Canadian Sioux' generally applies only to the Dakotas and those few Lakotas who remained in Canada after the 19th-century wars with the United States. The Nakotas are commonly referred to as the Assiniboine, or the Stoneys, an appellation that separates Canadian from US bands. The published material on the narrative traditions of the different dialect groups reveals more apparent differences than similarities. However, that observation must be weighed against all the factors guiding the selectivity of both professional and amateur collectors. Informed commentary about narrative traditions, their history and current vitality, requires an overview of the entire body of materials as a preliminary to new local studies of narrative performance. No such intensive study of narrative traditions had been written by 2001, although early 20th-century surveys of narrative throughout the Americas consistently highlighted Sioux texts with Dakota and Nakota materials assuming particular importance. Robert Lowie's ethnographic study of the Assiniboine - with its appendix of eighty tale summaries in English, two Stoney texts and two Assiniboine texts in Nakota - is a classic ('The Assiniboine,' Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, 1910).
Wilson D. Wallis's published studies on the Wahpetons brought these Canadian traditions to the attention of the early 20th-century comparatists and classifiers who were developing the historic-geographic method ('Beliefs and Tales of the Canadian Dakotas,' J American Folklore, 1923, and 'The Canadian Dakota,' Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, 1947, 1952). Stith Thompson and Gladys Reichard used Sioux texts to devise classifications for plots and motifs in the Americas. Claude Levi-Strauss, following their lead, emphasized the same texts in developing his structuralist analyses. More culturally focused and updated studies of the available materials are hampered by the fact that the protocols of early 20th-century scholarship did not include reference to performance criteria or to patterns of transmission and the authority implied by an individual's knowledge of tales. Nor did the conventional approaches taken by early narrative scholars encourage the recording of fieldwork data that would support pragmatic analysis about how distinctive narrative elements achieved culturally approved variations, whether these might be internal, affecting the nature of actors, or external, affecting the validity of various plot combinations. Yet it is analysis of precisely such variation that can advance our understanding of how narrative functioned to maintain a culture's symbolic coherence through storied mediation between beliefs about spiritual forces and the social circumstances that define a group's historical action within a particular landscape. And it is precisely the need to devise strong hypotheses in spite of a defective historical record that becomes a primary motive behind studying the entire archive of narrative in all three Sioux dialects in order to see what patterns support speculations that can then become the basis for contemporary narrative study. A survey of the entire archive reveals an extensive body of TRICKSTER tales. In addition, there are strong local variants of recognizably ancient and complex plots that can be traced throughout the Americas. And there are some exceptionally useful ORAL HISTORY transcriptions. Wallis's 1947 collection of personal histories with particular emphasis on dream and
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vision experiences stands as uniquely valuable evidence of how the symbolic organization taught through mythic narrative affected the lives of individual Dakotas in the early part of the 20th century. Dream experience transfers mythic meaning to historical action as individuals interpret dreams. These exceptional Dakota data allow us to extrapolate relations between narrative and belief for all peoples sharing common ritual elements. Trickster tales retain both internal and external consistency in different regions, but transforming adaptations clearly operated in relation to other widely distributed narrative elements such as the Star Husband story, the Abandoned Children, the Shell (or Bead) Spitter, the Orphan Hero, and the Double Women tales. We find the famous Star Husband complex among all groups but evidence suggests that it retained more links with ceremonial life among the Dakotas and Nakotas than it did with the Lakotas, whose adaptations to the buffalo-hunting culture of the plains led to an emphasis on ritual and narrative elements more immediately and obviously bound to beliefs about the buffalo. Wherever it is found, the Star Husband complex reveals details of how GENDER categories are related to the development of temporal and spatial categories. The woman who comes back home from a sojourn in the sky becomes an elaborated point of reference for temporal changes guided by astronomical observation and for spatial movements necessitated by changing weather conditions. This justly famous complex is, however, only one part of a much larger set of narratives that allowed people to conceptualize how movement among contrasting spatial domains related to social divisions with their associated behavioural requirements. Belief systems taught that mythic beings, like humans, had their specified, earthly dwellings; as people migrated, they adjusted to new beings in new places whose previous existence in these places imposed requirements that narrative tracked. Considering the requirements of location as a series of operations that set up sociological responses to all degrees and forms of difference reveals why migration required changes in stories. A clearly ancient text in the Riggs collection of Dakota ethnology and narrative illustrates
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how a major function of Sioux MYTH was to teach the way that cultural order related to life in a given place (Dakota Grammar, Texts and Ethnography, 1893). This text narrates how the Double Women arrange to have the moon marked so that it can be 'read.' Their actions bring them across a body of water (a standard motif in narratives of replacement). Once in the new territory, they control who cohabits with whom, first establishing, then undoing, the necessary conditions of social stability. Their subsequent actions reveal the distances that must be established and retained (respected) in order to maintain order. The being who is at the origin (Bead or Shell Spitter) is distanced from the beings who use what he gives, a distance that necessitates ceremonial action to connect with what has been placed far away in time and in space. The image of Shell Spitter's head on the moon makes the moon a cosmic text, with markings analogous to those found on stones and pictographs used in rituals (see PETROGLYPHS). Wallis (1947) refers to dream experiences that show how ordinary people incorporated these elements into daily living. A man who is consistently lost, disoriented in space, regains his spatial orientation when he fulfils his promises to the Double Women. Concrete historical testimony shows how the design of culture replicates the cosmic design just as women's art in pre-reserve times, taught by the Double Women, replicated an economy of powers associated with colour and form while men's art marked actualizations of what represented powers can accomplish within the temporality of history. Personal histories show how art, ceremony, and narrative action are coherent expressions of the same cultural principles; but that coherence has to be deduced from detailed study of all the available ethnographic materials. For the Sioux, no replication was identical, a fact that is consistently enacted through rituals with their emphasis on movement (social movement - hunting, war, migration; and individual internalized 'movement' - breathing, thinking, willing) as the dynamic that society has to mark so that known distinctions can be honoured and collectively respected. Any reproduction, including that of human beings, derives from and marks a difference that is a consequence of how the human intellect first envisages and then
SKAAY
enacts a progression that is understood as the movement of life itself and, therefore, of culture. Robert Lowie's collection of Assiniboine texts includes one in which a brother/sister pair takes the place of the Double Women found in the Dakota version. What narrative scholars frequently call 'The Abandoned Children' plot replaces elements based on twin women among the Dakota or on four brothers living alone the most common instance in Lakota myth. In each case, the narrative consistently functions to explain the origin of differences between the rule-defined life within the group (spatially figured as the tipi) and the rule-defying quality of life outside the group. Asking what is meant by these contrasting narrative configurations (in relation to details of social and ceremonial life) could lead to productive narrative research based on a comparative study of the combined Sioux materials. Enough evidence exists to suggest that local adaptations nevertheless sustain a long-standing cultural order. Any effort to understand the history of Sioux narratives or Sioux beliefs must include reference to the Canadian Sioux. With the notable exception of James Howard's The Canadian Sioux (1984), an ethnological study based on his own fieldwork in the 19708, recent publications on Sioux narrative have been directed toward local educational needs and cultural revitalization movements. From the perspective of narrative study, Howard's book is notable for the oral history he recorded from Canadian Sioux. Local understandings of history can also be gleaned from books such as Dan Kennedy's Recollections of an Assiniboine Chief '(1972), which includes 16 legends that show the continuity of the oral tradition. Gontran Laviolette's The Dakota Sioux in Canada (1991) is an adequately documented history with a final chapter on contemporary Dakota society. His references to beliefs and related narratives imply a contemporary blending of Lakota, Nakota, and Dakota belief and narrative systems. All of the materials pose questions that argue for continuing narrative study that intensifies emphasis on local detail while using comparisons to formulate what is at stake in local variations and adaptations.
Further reading: Ella Deloria, Dakota Texts, Publications of the American Ethnological Society, vol 14 (New York: G.E. Stechert, 1932), and 'Dakota Texts from the Minnesota Manuscript,' (1941; MS 30 [x8a.i7], Boas Collection, American Philosophical Soc, Philadelphia.); Charles Eastman, The Soul of the Indian (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911); James Howard, 'The Cultural Position of the Dakota: A Reassessement, in The Science of Culture, eds Gertrude E. Dole and Robert L. Carneiro (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1960): 249-68; James R. Walker, Lakota Myth, ed Elaine A Jahner (Lincoln: U Nebraska P, 1983); Clark Wissler, 'Some Dakota Myths,' J American Folklore 20 (1907): 121-31,195-206. Elaine A. Jahner
SKAAY (John Sky). HAIDA oral poet and mythteller; b Qquuna (Skedans) in Haida Gwaii (Queen Charlotte Islands, BC) c 1827, d Hlghagilda (Skidegate, BC) c 1910. Skaay belonged to the lineage called Qquuna Qiighawaay (Descendants of Qquuna) of the Eagle moiety. He moved as a young man from Qquuna to the neighbouring village of Ttanuu, where he lived in the house of Gitkuna, the village headman; both villages maintained close ties with Nishga and TSIMSHIAN communities on the mainland. Skaay's intellectual milieu was therefore richly multicultural, but he learned the craft of oral poetry under excruciating conditions. At the close of the i8th century, the combined population of Qquuna and Ttanuu was over 1,000. By 1885, after a series of smallpox epidemics, Qquuna was a ghost town and Ttanuu was home to no more than 100. In 1889, when Ttanuu was abandoned in turn, Skaay and the other survivors established a new community, nominally Christian, at Qqaadasghu. Eight years later, when Qqaadasghu also was abandoned, fewer than 70 were alive to move to the mission village of Skidegate. It was there that Skaay spent his final years and there that his extant works were transcribed. Missionaries gave him several Christian names in the i88os and 18905. The one that stuck, John Sky, is a name he was given in 1894. There is, however, no evidence that he was active in the church, and nothing in his work suggests that his thinking or his LANGUAGE had been coloured by missionary teachings.
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By the end of the ipth century (and probably well before), Skaay was known to other Haida for his skill as an oral poet and his knowledge of Haida MYTH. At the request of the linguist John Swanton, Skaay spent all of Oct 1900 dictating in Haida to Henry Moody, nephew and heir of the headman of his native village, Qquuna. (Headships of Haida villages are important to this day, even when the villages are long abandoned.) Moody repeated Skaay's words, sentence by sentence, while Swanton wrote them in phonetic script. Swanton and Moody later prepared interlinear translations. By this means, roughly 7,000 lines of Skaay's oral poetry were preserved (nine or ten hours of ORAL LITERATURE at normal performance speed). Swanton published the first translations of these texts, and a sample of the Haida, in 1905. New translations, and more of the Haida originals, were published in the 19905 by John Enrico and Robert BRINGHURST. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Skaay declined to tell Swanton any autobiographical tales. He appears as a young warrior in a story told by his friend, the Haida oral historian Kilxhawgins, but of his private life we still know little except that he was fit and active as a young man, and in later life suffered a crippled back. His extant works consist of the following: The Qquuna Cycle or Large Poem. This cycle of five narrative suites explores the careers of over a dozen mythological characters and totals well over 5,000 lines. The integrity of the cycle has been a subject of debate - yet there is no doubt that Skaay himself regarded it all as a single work, though he neglected to give it a name. It is indeed episodic (superficially more like the Metamorphoses than like the Aeneid), but the individual episodes routinely last for several hundred lines, and their thematic interrelations are invariably subtle and complex. It is not continuity of character that binds the work together but the pattern of thematic repetition and variation. Xhuuya Qaagaangas (Raven Travelling), a narrative poem of some 1,400 lines. Skaay's account of the adventures of the TRICKSTER is one of the longest, most intricate, most intense trickster tales yet recorded in a Native American language. It begins with the creation of the world, continues with a series of adoptions and
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rebirths, and ends with the RAVEN hosting a house-building potlatch. Interwoven with this structure are many familiar themes - the theft of light, the theft of salmon, the creation of the tides, and so on - all told in Skaay's distinctive way. In one especially potent episode, found only in Skaay's version of the poem, another character asks the Raven to tell the very story - Raven Travelling - which is at that moment being told. The story of Skaay's lineage, the Qquuna Qiighawaay. This is less a family history than it is a meditation on the price of human arrogance, but all the major characters are members of the Qquuna Qiighawaay, and family rights to fishing grounds and lands are among the major themes. At 200 lines, this is by far Skaay's briefest work, and the only one that focuses overtly on the relations between the spirit beings of myth and historical human beings. Skaay's Large Poem and his Raven Travelling are the two physically largest and most challenging extant works of Haida oral literature, and the two richest sources of insight into Haida metaphysics and cosmology. Among the other Haida poets whose work survives, there is no one with Skaay's extraordinary sense of narrative architecture, and none with his ability to portray the Haida holocaust (and the prospect of ultimate renewal) through the inherited motifs of Haida myth. Like other Native American oral poets, he has often been misread as nothing but a mouthpiece for tradition. In fact, the style, tone, resonance, and scope of all his works mark them unmistakably as his alone. Further reading: Robert Bringhurst, A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World (Vancouver: Douglas & Mclntyre, 1999); John Enrico, Skidegate Haida Myths and Histories (Skidegate: Queen Charlotte Islands Museum P, 1995); John Swanton, Haida Texts and Myths, Skidegate Dialect (Bureau of Am. Ethnology Bull. 29. Washington, DC, 1905). Robert Bringhurst
SKELTON, Robin. Writer, professor, translator; b Easington, Yorks, England, 12 Oct 1925, d Victoria, BC, 22 Aug 1997; son of Eliza (Robins) and Cyril Skelton, both teachers. After a stint with
SKVORECKY
the Royal Air Force in South Asia, Skelton attended Cambridge U and U Leeds (MA, 1951), then reviewed regularly for the Manchester Guardian and lectured in English at U Manchester and U Massachusetts before emigrating to Canada in 1963. At U Victoria, he set up the creative WRITING program, and taught there until retirement. Skelton was the Oxford editor of J.M. Synge's works, co-founder of the Peterloo Poets & Painters (1957), founder of Malahat R (1967), editor at Sono Nis Press, and a selfdeclared white witch (The Practice of Witchcraft Today, 1976); he was also the author of more than 70 books of poetry, drama, and prose, in addition to his score of ANTHOLOGIES and his editions of George FALUDY, David Gascoyne, and the poetry of IRELAND. Eclectic, energetic, passionately engaged with the world around him, he wrote of his own LIFE - characteristically, with amusement - in Memoirs of a Literary Blockhead (1988). Skelton's early poems - Patmos and Other Poems (1955) and other volumes published before and shortly after his arrival in Canada, most collected in Selected Poems (1968) - display a talent for language, if of a rather more conventional kind than he was later to possess. In a variety of stories for both adults and children he continued to entertain, but in poetry he grew more sensitive to the local environment and expressed with confidence his love of family and art. With Timelight (1974), Callsigns (1976), and The Collected Shorter Poems (1981), he began to demonstrate how radically he had rerooted himself on Vancouver Island, and - even while critically addressing the writers and conventions of the past - how perceptively he understood the locale in which he lived. During these years he was also writing a series of books on the art and craft of composing poetry, including The Poet's Calling (1975), as well as teaching writing, encouraging new writers to follow their hearts and minds into innovation, and producing yet more poems of his own, on an average of more than a book a year. In some critics' minds Skelton was more productive than selective, yet he was widely known and appreciated internationally. All his work, moreover - up to and including such late volumes as Wordsong (1983), Distances (1985), and One Leaf Shaking: Collected Later Poems (1995) - contains writing that the
poet Ron SMITH has called 'the genuine article': poems filled with 'curiosity, energy, and great beauty.' Further reading: Francis Sparshott, 'Skelton's Canon,' Canadian Literature (Spring 1982): 134-7; Dorothy Stott, 'Robin Skelton: An Important Voice in Our Time,' Waves 12.1 (Fall 1983): 5-19; Ron Smith, Skelton at Seventy (Victoria, BC: Reference West, c 1995). SKETCH, see SHORT STORY AND SKETCH. SKINNER, Constance Lindsay. Critic, editor, historian; b Quesnel, BC, 7 Dec 1877, d New York 27 March 1939; daughter of Anne (Lindsay) and Robert J. Skinner. She moved at 14 to Vancouver and at 16 to California. She began her writing career as a literary and musical critic for the San Francisco Examiner and the Los Angeles Times, then for the North American R and Poetry. Her successful play Good Morning, Rosamund! (1917) debuted in New York. Pioneers of the Old Southwest (1919) was one of three works she contributed to the Yale Chronicles of America series; she also wrote fiction based on frontier life (NATIVE culture, gold rush, fur trade) for both juveniles and adults. Songs of the Coast Dwellers (1930) is an acclaimed poetic retelling - in dramatic monologues - of Squamish legends (see SALISH). Her papers are housed in the NY Public Library. Further reading: Diana M. Relke, 'The Actualities of Experience: Constance Lindsay Skinner's Indian Poems,' Atlantis 14 (Spring 1989): 10-20. Deborah Blenkhorn
SKVORECKY, Josef Vaclav. Novelist; b Nachod, Bohemia, Czechoslovakia, 27 Sept 1924; son of Anna Kurazova-Skvorecka and Josef Skvorecky, bank clerk; educ Charles U, Prague (PhD); emig 1969, living in exile in Toronto, Skvorecky continued to write in Czech - as did his wife, Zdena Josefa Salivarova-Skvorecky. Their works circulated unofficially behind the Iron Curtain (see MULTICULTURAL VOICES). Skvorecky has written more than 30 works (1958-99) - many of them in English TRANSLATION - including FILM scripts. He acquired a substantial reputation as a novelist of ideas
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(especially in Europe) and as a writer whose wry sense of IRONY informed his observations of middle-aged behaviour. The Cowards (1958), The Bass Saxophone (1967), and Dvorak in Love (1986) exemplify the range of his work. In Canada, where critics found some of his MYSTERY and comic writing strained, the one volume to attract extended attention was The Engineer of Human Souls (1977), a many-levelled political book that received the Governor General's AWARD for Fiction. The multiple levels permit the author to deal with a range of seemingly disjointed times, events, and cultural themes -jazz, sculpture, poetry, fiction - in POSTMODERN fashion, engaging the reader in seeking correspondences and relationships amongst the apparently unrelated motifs. Further reading: Sam Solecki, Prague Blues (Toronto: ECW, 1990); Sam Solecki, ed, The Achievement of Josef Skvorecky (Toronto: U Toronto P, 1994). SKY, John: see SKA AY. SLADE, Bernard (Bernard Slade Newbound). Playwright; b St Catharines, ON, 2 May 1930; son of Bessie (Waebourne) and Fred Newbound; educ England. Slade returned to Canada in 1948 as an actor, and turned to scriptwriting during the next decade. Successes with CBC and NBC television led him to Los Angeles in 1964, where he won fame as the script editor and writer for Bewitched, The Flying Nun, and The Partridge Family; he also wrote numerous plays. His most POPULAR success (in both stage and FILM versions) was Same Time, Next Year (1975; turned into the 1994 musical Every Time I See You), a sentimental comedy about the six annual meetings in an adulterous affair. His autobiography, Shared Laughter (2000), recounts his years in theatre. SLATER, Ian David. Lecturer, editor, novelist; b Toowoomba, Queensland, Australia, i Dec 1941; son of Mavis (Horton) and David Slater, an automobile painter. Educ U British Columbia (PhD, 1977); ernig 1966. Slater was editor of the political science journal Pacific Affairs until 1999. His POPULAR thrillers include Firespill (1977), Orwell: The Road to Airstrip One (1985), and sev-
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eral in an apocalyptic Third World War series (1990-1). See also WAR. Further reading: Geoff Hancock, An Interview with Ian Slater: The Art of the Thriller,' Canadian Fiction Magazine 26 (Autumn 1977): 33-51. SLATER, Patrick (John Wendell Mitchell). Novelist, lawyer; b nr Mono, ON, i April 1880, d Toronto 18 Oct 1951; son of Clara (Henderson), boardinghouse-keeper, and William Mitchell, farmer, veterinarian, later chief RCMP surgeon (Prince Albert, SK). Mitchell, a friend of PRATT and DEACON, was the author of five books of fiction, patriotic sentiment, and local history, but is known for one only: a fictitious autobiography (see LIFE WRITING) by an orphaned immigrant named 'Patrick Slater,' who ostensibly died in 1924, The Yellow Briar: A Story of the Irish on the Canadian Countryside (1933; see IRELAND). It was praised for its accuracy of detail its accounts of MYTHOLOGY, political feuding, and REGIONAL idiom - and continued to be POPULAR even after the HOAX was revealed. Mitchell's life is as unusual as his book: he moved to Toronto after his parents separated, trained and practised as a lawyer, but charged himself with larceny and was jailed in 1935. Two books recorded his PRISON experience, a poem (The Water-Drinker, 1937) and a novel (Robert Harding, 1938). These did not restore his popularity, however, and he died in poverty. Further reading: Dorothy L. Bishop, 'The Story of John Mitchell,' in The Yellow Briar (Toronto: Macmillan, 1970). SLAVE NARRATIVES tell of the experiences of those who were once enslaved. The best-known example in Canada records the early life of James Henson (dates unknown; slave name 'Charley Chance'), his escape from the United States, and his subsequent life in Owen Sound, ON; Henson's oral tales were taken down by John Frost ('Glenelg,' 1838-1908) and published as Broken Shackles (1889; re-edited by Peter Meyler, 2001). Benjamin Drew's The Refugee: or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada (also published as A North-side View of Slavery, Boston, 1856) collects anecdotal reminiscences by 117 former slaves about life before and after reach-
SMART
ing Canada. See also BLACK HISTORY, CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE, S. MOODIE.
SLAVIC (primarily Baltic, Croat, Czech, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, UKRAINIAN) connections with Canadian literature include the influence of specific cultures (language, folk tale, food customs, and the like) but in the 20th century were primarily political, involving the consequences of the Bolshevik Revolution (see MARXISM) and the Cold WAR (as in the GOUZENKO AFFAIR), or religious (see DOUKHOBORS, MENNONITE WRITING, JEWISH
CANADIAN WRITINGS). Rudy WIEBE'S The Blue Mountains of China traces the Russian origins of some Mennonite emigrants, and Shirley FAESSLER deals with the plight of Romanian Jews in Canada; R.A.D. FORD, as Canadian ambassador to the Soviet Union, drew for much of his poetry on his perceptions of Russian culture; TRAVEL and LIFE WRITING also took some writers (eg, Daryl HINE, Janice Kulyk KEEPER) to Eastern European sites. Among the many 20th-century Canadian writers to draw on or represent their Slavic heritage are Mircea ANDRIESANU, Andrew BuszA, BogdanczAYKOWSKI, Marya FIAMENGO, Raymond FILIP, Waclaw IWANIUK, KarljiRGENS, Alexis KLIMOV, Myrna KOSTASH, John KRIZANC, Vi PLOTNIKOFF, Helen POTREBENKO, Josef SKVORECKY, and George SWEDE. See also CULTURAL PLURALITY, EUROPEAN INFLUENCES, EXILE, MULTICULTURAL VOICES. SLEIGH, Burrows Willcocks Arthur. Writer, soldier; b Lower Canada 1821, d Chelsea, England, 22 March 1869; son of Sarah (Campbell) and William Willcocks Sleigh, a doctor; educ England and (after 1834) Lower Canada. Sleigh was a soldier with the West India Regiment (1842-8). After selling his lieutenancy, he bought substantial property in PEL He returned from Halifax to England in 1852, after a series of commercial setbacks, and published Pine Forests and Haanatack Clearings (1853), a series of personal accounts of Joseph HOWE and other glimpses of colonial life. In England he began the Daily Telegraph in 1855, but sold his interest in the NEWSPAPER shortly afterward after again becoming bankrupt.
Further reading: B.W.A. Sleigh, 'Crossing Northumberland Straits in March 1852,' ed P.B. Waite, Dalhousie R 42 (1962-3): 55-67. SLIPPERJACK, Ruby Violet Marilyn, now Ruby Farrell. Writer, painter, assistant professor; b Whitewater Lake, ON, 24 Dec 1952 to Daisy and Albert Slipperjack; educ Lakehead U (BA, 1988; MEd, 1993). Farrell is currently assistant professor in the faculty of education at Lakehead U. Oil painting is one of her hobbies; her paintings appear on the covers of her books. She has published two novels: Honour the Sun (1987) and Silent Words (1992). Further reading: Contemporary Challenges: Conversations with Canadian Native Authors, ed Hartmut Lutz (Saskatoon: Fifth House, 1991): 203-15. Joel Martineau
SMART, Elizabeth. Poet, novelist, magazine editor; b Ottawa 27 Dec 1913, d London, England, 3 March 1986; daughter of Louise (Parr) and Russell Smart, lawyer. Smart is best known for By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, a work of stunning poetic prose that devastates the reader as it lyrically and allusively records the progress and decline of Smart's agonizing, transformative affair with the married British poet George Barker, eventually father of Smart's four children. Written at Pender Harbour, BC, the brief book was originally published in 1945. It scandalized her socially prominent family, who tried to have it suppressed. The book was republished in a revised edition in Britain in 1966", and became a literary success when reissued in 1978. Other works include two posthumous volumes of journals, Necessary Secrets (1986) and On the Side of the Angels (1994), both edited by Alice Van Wart; The Assumption of the Rogues and Rascals (novel, 1987); and A Bonus (poetry, 1977). Smart moved to England in 1943, remaining there to the end of her life with the exception of two years (1982-4) spent in Edmonton (writer-in-residence, U Alberta) and Toronto. Further reading: May Gallus, writer and director, Elizabeth Smart: On the Side of the Angels. Film (1991); Rosemary Sullivan, By Heart: Elizabeth Smart/A Life (Toronto: Viking, 1991). Catherine Nelson-McDermott
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SMITH, A.J.M. Poet, editor, essayist, anthologist; b Westmount, Montreal, 8 Nov 1902, d East Lansing, MI, 21 Nov 1980; son of English emigrants, Octavius and Louise (Whiting) Smith. Through his poetry and criticism, Arthur James Marshall Smith had a profound influence on Canadian poetry in the 19205 and 19305; moreover, his evaluative essays and anthologies helped define how Canadian readers understood their national literature throughout much of the 20th century. As a teenager, Smith was an enthusiast of modernist poets, and MODERNISM itself later became the measure by which Smith attempted to reform Canadian poetry of the era, which he saw as parochial and mawkishly late-Victorian in subject and style. While studying at McGill U, Smith edited a 'Literary Supplement' (1923-4) for the McGill Daily and met F.R. SCOTT, with whom he founded the McGill Fortnightly R (1925-7). The Review provided an important venue for new Montreal voices, including Leon EDEL and Leo KENNEDY who with Smith and Scott - formed the influential MCGILL GROUP, largely under Smith's leadership. After Smith's graduate work at McGill U (MA, 1926) and Edinburgh U (PhD, 1931), the group - along with Toronto poets E.J. PRATT and Robert FINCH - produced New Provinces (1936), an ANTHOLOGY of modern Canadian poets. Smith's preface for the book so venomously attacked the traditional romanticism of his contemporaries that it was dropped in favour of a less controversial introduction by Scott. The original preface eventually saw light in Canadian Literature (Spring 1965) and in the 1976 re-issue of New Provinces. By the mid-i94os, Smith's influence among fellow poets began to wane, but his many literary anthologies - including The Book of Canadian Poetry (1943), and Masks of Fiction (1961) - influenced students of Canadian literature. Several of Smith's critical essays can be found in Towards a View of Canadian Letters: Selected Critical Essays 1928-1971 (1973) and On Poetry and Poets: Selected Essays of A.J.M. Smith (i977). Smith's own poetry comprises a reservoir of about 200 individual works which he printed (and often reprinted) in several volumes, including News of the Phoenix and Other Poems (1943), A Sort of Ecstasy: Poems New and Selected (1954), and
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The Classic Shade: Selected Poems (1978). Often quite formal, these poems range stylistically from lyrical meditative poems to burlesques and satires. Further reading: John Ferns, A.J.M. Smith (Boston: Twayne, 1979). Michael Greene
SMITH, Goldwin (pseud A Bystander). Journalist; b Reading, England, 13 Aug 1823, d Toronto 7 June 1910; son of Elizabeth (Breton) and Richard Smith, doctor and railway promoter. Enjoying the privileges of wealth, Smith was educated in classics and law (he wrote Latin verse himself) at Eton C and Oxford U. He was well connected, and was appointed regius professor of modern history at Oxford U in 1858; in this role he began to publish the opinionated essays that would characterize his career. Not a bystander by temperament, and not a dispassionate scholar, he espoused free trade and colonial emancipation as early as The Empire (1863). After his father's suicide, Smith left Oxford for North America, to teach at Cornell U, then moved to Toronto in 1871, where he married an American-born heiress. An active political commentator, he soon quarrelled with George BROWN of the Globe, founded Canadian Monthly (with Graeme Mercer ADAM, 1872), supported the Week, attacked Catholicism in Quebec, and criticized Conservative policies. He was not always consistent: he dismissed Jewish influence in social affairs, but supported the building of a synagogue; supported Christian charity, but opposed social programs to cope with poverty; espoused individualism, but opposed the franchise and higher education for women; rejected conventional religion, but spent much of his later life preoccupied with questions of faith. Smith was praised by some in his day as a giant of INTELLECTUAL HISTORY. He met opposition from George Monro GRANT and George PARKIN on national and economic grounds. Equating NATION with ethnic uniformity, Smith agreed with their belief in the superiority of Anglo-Saxon culture, but rejected their quest for IMPERIAL FEDERATION and championed annexation with the United States instead, affirming that Canada, because of its diversity, could never be a separate nation (Canada and the Canadian
SMITH
Question, 1891; rpt 1971, with intro by Carl Berger). Further reading: Carl Berger, The Sense of Power (Toronto: U Toronto P, 1970); Elisabeth Wallace, Goldwin Smith (Toronto: U Toronto P, 1957). SMITH, Ray (James Raymond). Fiction writer; b Inverness, NS, 12 Dec 1941; son of Jean (MacMillan) and Fred Smith, RCAF pilot and banker. Smith grew up in Mabou, Cape Breton; he was educated there and in Sydney, New Glasgow, and Halifax, graduating from Dalhousie U (BA, 1963). He worked variously as a systems analyst and writer in Toronto (1963-8), then moved to Montreal in 1968, where (from 1970 on) he taught English at Dawson C. He subsequently earned an MA in creative writing at Concordia U (1985), but had been writing fiction as early as the 19605. He was affiliated with the MONTREAL STORY TELLERS, and like his fellow writers in that group (among them, John METCALF, Clark BLAISE, Hugh HOOD) he committed himself to the art and craft of composing fiction and of reading it aloud. Recurrently praised for his control over style, Smith won admiration - especially from other writers - for his five novels and collections of stories. He attracted critical notice with his first book, a collection of elliptical tales that was among the earliest House of Anansi publications, Cape Breton Is the Thought Control Center of Canada (1969). As in such works as 'The Dwarf in His Valley Ate Codfish' and 'Raphael Anachronic,' Smith's experiments in POSTMODERN form demonstrated his early skills: anecdote replaces linear plot, fragmented dialogue replaces extended character development. Together, the stories glimpse a generation resisting both the social conventions of the rural past and those of the hypothetically sophisticated urban present. A satiric impulse carries through Smith's later work as well, as in two sets of linked stories, Lord Nehon Tavern (1974) and Century (1986) published together in 1989 - and his first novel, A Night at the Opera (1992), winner of a QSPELL prize. The stories respectively tell of a group of Halifax university students whose subsequent lives interconnect, sometimes comically, and of a character named Jane Seymour, whose family history chronicles Europe's 19th-century expan-
sion into commerce and empire. Particularly strong is Smith's capacity to differentiate and orchestrate separate voices. A Night at the Opera (the title reiterating that of a Marx Brothers film) satirizes the pretentiousness of both a German city's preoccupations with an 'unrecognized' musical genius and the burghers' attempts to exalt their own lives through a contrived interest in current intellectual fashions, among which are a claim on historical longevity and the 'proof of having survived a social revolution. Throughout these works runs a further tension involving sexual vulnerability and economic power. Sometimes criticized for their representation of WOMEN, Smith's works do not espouse conventional social formulas; rather, they dramatize the forces - especially those involving the politics of GENDER, money, and influence - that undercut people's perennial desire for love and continuity. This motif becomes especially clear in The Man Who Loved Jane Austen (1999), a novel that suggests yet another direction for Smith. Adapting Austen's character types to North America, it tells a harrowing tale of social inequities in contemporary Montreal (inequities involving money, status, intelligence, law, civility, and power), tracing their impact especially on children and single fathers, and their hypocritical distortions of love. Further reading: Douglas Barbour, 'Some approaches to the entrances of Lord Nelson Tavern,' Open Letter 5 series 3 (Summer 1976): 50-64; Arnold E. Davidson and Cathy Davidson, 'Vernissage: Ray Smith and the Fine Art of Glossing Over,' Canadian Literature 92 (Spring 1982): 58-70; Colin Nicholson, 'Satire, Parody, and Self-Consciousness,' Essays on Canadian Writing 55 (Spring 1995): 169-73; J.R. (Tim) Struthers, The Montreal Story Tellers (Montreal: Vehicule, 1986). SMITH, Ron (Ronald Fenwick). Writer, publisher, college instructor; b Vancouver 7 Aug 1943 to Marguerite (Chester) and David Fenwick Smith; m novelist Pat Smith; educ U British Columbia (BA, 1969) and Leeds U (MA, 1970). From 1971 to retirement, Smith taught creative WRITING at Malaspina U-C in Nanaimo, BC. In 1974 he founded the publishing house Oolichan
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Books, which continues to publish poetry and fiction with fine editorial taste and visual elegance. He lives with his wife in Lantzville, BC. Smith's publications include A Secret Weapon (drama, 1973); The Silver Fox (prose, 1981); Rainshadow: Stories from Vancouver Island (ed with Stephen GUPPY, 1982); Seasonal (poems, 1984); A Buddha Named Baudelaire (prose poem, 1988); Enchantment and Other Demons (poems, 1995); and The Last Time We Talked (prose chapbook, 1996). 'What influence does Ron Smith have on Stevens, Baudelaire, Donne?' he has asked; 'History doesn't move through time and space in only one direction. Writing is when we let the chaos in, when we acknowledge its place in our lives.' Joel Martineau
late the design of a quilt in its narrative strategy. In her essays, she often combines an acute awareness for injustices with very poetic language - an example is her 'Gnosis,' in Barbara Godard's Collaborations in the Feminine (1994). In 1976, Smyth was one of the founders of Atlantis: A Women's Studies Journal. She co-edited (with Margaret Conrad and Toni Laidlaw) No Place like Home: Diaries and Letters of Nova Scotia Women, 1771-1938 (1986). Stefan Haag
SNOW, see QUELQUES ARPENTS DE NEIGE, WEATHER.
SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES RESEARCH COUNCIL OF CANADA, see CANADA COUNCIL, CANADIAN FEDERATION FOR
SMITH, Russell Claude. Fiction writer; b Johannesburg, South Africa, 2 Aug 1963; son of Ann (Lane), a teacher/librarian, and Rowland Smith, university administrator; educ U Poitiers, U Paris, and Queen's U (BA, 1986; MA, 1987). Smith became a freelance writer for magazines, radio, and television. His work includes DOCUMENTARY studies of 'Noise' in modern art (CBC Ideas), and of the PORNOGRAPHY industry ('The Money Shot,' in the 1999 series The Sexual Century). A series of articles on 19905 URBAN fads and fashions led to the fictions for which he has won most attention, particularly How Insensitive (1994), a novel about a young man's discovery of Toronto Chic, and Young Men (1999), a linked series of stories that observe, with an edgy wit and a feeling for generational disparities, how several young people deal with their growing awareness of competitive image, emotional rivalry, and advancing age. SMYTH, Donna. Dramatist, essayist, fiction writer; b Kimberley, BC, n July 1943; daughter of Ellen Hazel Mackie and William Ivan Smyth. She studied at the universities of "Victoria, Toronto, and London, then taught creative writing and English at Acadia U in Wolfville, NS (1973-98). Smyth is perhaps best known for her play Susanna Moodie (1976), where she combines MOODIE'S Roughing It in the Bush with AT wo CD'S The Journals of Susanna Moodie into a convincing dramatic statement about the pioneer mentality. One of Smyth's novels, Quilt (1982), tries to emu-
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THE HUMANITIES, FUNDING.
SOCIETE DES ECRIVAINS CANADIENS. Founded in 1938, this writers' association grew out of the francophone section of the CANADIAN AUTHORS ASSOC, an organization founded in 1921 as an advocate body for writers' professional rights and development. The two organizations are affiliated but independent. Terry Whalen
SOLWAY, David. Poet, critic, professor, broadcaster; b Montreal 8 Dec 1941; son of Sylvia (Rabinovitch), housewife, and Samuel Solway. A professor of English at John Abbott C in Montreal, Solway is the author of books on education - Lying about the WbZ/(i997) critiques the contemporary pedagogy of college composition - and literature (Random Walks, 1997), as well as a book of CHILDREN'S verse, a meditation on the nature of TRAVEL, and over 10 collections of poetry. Selected Poems (1982) samples early work; Stones in Water (1983) and Bedrock (1993) followed. Associated with Leonard COHEN for his combination of JEWISH background and mannered machismo with an attraction to Greek islands and Hellenic culture, Solway is distinguished by a technical, even metaphysical bent, a wry and whimsical formalism. Modern Marriage (1987) was acclaimed for its artful weaving of tough talk and romance into a loose-fitting SONNET form. Mark Cochrane
SOUCY
SOMMER, Richard Jerome. Poet; b St Paul, MN, 27 Aug 1934; son of Henning V and Ida (Jerome) Sommer. After attending Harvard U, Sommer moved to Canada in 1962 to teach at Concordia U, Montreal. He has published eight books of poetry, including Selected and New Poems (1983). While exploring the nature of human relationships, The Shadow Sonnets (1992) displays a wariness of the form's patriarchal conventions. Sommer has acted upon the environmental concerns that inform some of his poetry: the NFB FILM The Poet and the Pinnacle (1995) documents his successful struggle to preserve Pinnacle Mountain, QC, as a natural habitat. L.Fox
SONNET, a form of LYRIC verse, conventionally in 14 lines of iambic pentamenter and rhymed according to one of two models: the Petrarchan form (octave + sestet, rhyming ABBA ABBA and some variant of CDE CDE) and the Shakespearean form (4 quatrains + couplet, rhyming ABAB CDCD EFEF GG). In practice numerous variations occur, modifying length, rhyme pattern, and diction. Early sonnet cycles include C.G.D. ROBERTS' Songs of the Common Day and works by Arthur de BUSSIERES and A.M. KLEIN. Margaret AVISON wrote a 'Sonnet Against Sonnets,' and several contemporary sonnets and sonnet sequences sometimes even forgo rhyme entirely, as do George Elliott CLARKE'S 'Blank Sonnet' in Whylah Falls and W.H. NEW'S Science Lessons. Ross LECKIE'S The Authority of Roses contains several accomplished variations on the sonnet, as do Daniel David MOSES' The White Line and David MCFADDEN'S The Art of Darkness. See also ACORN, DESROCHERS, ELSTED, L. FRECHETTE, A. GARNEAU, GUSTAFSON, D. LEE, LOZEAU, POETRY IN SHORTER F O R M S , PROSODY, SANGSTER, D . C . SCOTT, SOLWAY, SOMMER.
author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, characteristically depicting the West as the site of discourse, whether of PETROGLYPHS in Piegan country or of the contemporary laconic prairie voice. His works, which include Ancestral Dances (1979), Jan Lake Poems (1984), Hold the Rain in Your Hands (1985), Air Canada Owls (1990), West into Night (1991), and Icons of Flesh (1998), range technically from an early interest in imagism to a later reliance on experiential realism. SOUCY, Gaetan. Novelist; b Montreal 21 Oct 1958. Soucy won critical attention for the stylish originality of his first novel, L'immaculee conception (1994). This portrait of a timeless Quebec, where holy days are still viewed as points of reference, focuses on the life of Remouald Tremblay, the pariah of his Montreal East neighbourhood. Although destined for greatness during his childhood, Tremblay has been marked by a tragic event that happened during an evening of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. L'acquittement (1997) extends the motif of memory being haunted by the indescribable; here a man returns to spend the winter solstice in the village of his youth, to expiate a sin committed twenty years earlier. La petite fille qui aimait trop les allumettes (1998) takes on the dimensions of a metaphysical FABLE, where Quebec itself becomes the person at the crossroads of history. The novel tells of two adolescents living on the family domain under the religious and tyrannical authority of a father who is also the petty potentate of the nearby village. Their father's sudden death forces them to meet the villagers for the first time, to decide what will become of their father's body and how to settle an inheritance that is both menacing and heavy. Rene Brisebois
Kevin McNeilly
SORESTAD, Glen Allan. Writer, lecturer; b Vancouver 21 May 1937; son of Myrtle (Dalshaug), hospital aide, and John Sorestad, dock worker, tradesman; educ U Saskatchewan (MEd, 1962). Sorestad taught before becoming a full-time writer. Active in the Saskatchewan Writers' Guild, and the compiler of numerous ANTHOLOGIES designed for schools, he is the
SOUCY, Jean-Yves. Novelist, short story writer; b Causapscal, QC, 2 March 1945; son of Gabrielle St-Laurent and Auguste Soucy. Travelling salesman, social worker, accountant: Soucy's work experience is varied. He began to write fiction at the age of 16; however, working first as a journalist at Radio-Canada International and at Radio-Quebec, he did not publish his prizewinning stream-of-consciousness first novel, Un
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dieu chasseur (tr John GLASSCO as Creatures of the Chase, 1979), for several years. His short stories (La buse et I'araignee, 1988), attracted less attention, though a sound recording of his stories, read by Jacques Godin, was released as L'etranger au ballon rouge (1987). Margaret Cook
SOUND POETRY denotes a poetic use of sound as much as, or more than, a sonic approach to poetry. Also called text-sound composition, this intermedia art treads the mutually inclusive territories of literature, MUSIC, and THEATRE. Its antecedents are tribal chants and language-distortion songs, nonsense verse, and mouth music. The art began to take shape with the phonetic poems of the Dadaists and Futurists, widened its scope when tape and then computer TECHNOLOGIES arrived, and continues to exploit, both acoustically and electronically, the expressive potential of human utterance within and beyond words. Common (but not universal) techniques include tongue clicks, lip pops, inhaled speech and song, throat rasps, gargles, coughs, sputters, and smooches - which are but a few of the multitude of available effects (called in music circles 'extended vocal techniques,' although many of them have nothing to do with the voice). Sound poetry today is practised (though seldom under that name) by artists of every stripe, including singers and instrumentalists in anything from rock to chamber music, by performance artists, audio artists, dancers, actors, and even a few poets. Rare is the poet who works exclusively in sound poetry, and all but three or four of those mentioned in this discussion have published books of poetry and/or other writing. Those who haven't, have approached sound poetry from an artistic matrix other than writing. The first Canadian writer to work with sound poetry was Claude GAUVREAU (1925-71) of Quebec, whose phonetic poetry, which bears clear relationship to the Dada tradition, was incorporated in writings for the stage as early as the 19405 (eg, in Entrailles, 1947, and the opera Le vampire et la nymphomane, 1949), and continued as an element in his writing up to the late 19605, when it was the exclusive technique for a sequence of poems entitled Jappements a la lune (1968-70).
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Independently of Gauvreau, two other writers, bpNiCHOL (1944-88) and bill BISSETT (b 1939), individually developed their separate approaches to the art of sound poetry during the early to mid-1960s. In Vancouver, bissett evolved a style that relied heavily on repetition and melodic chant, with both verbal and nonverbal content, and further introduced into his performances the use of rattles similar to those of FIRST NATIONS peoples. He continues to feature these elements in his readings. His early work can be heard on the i2-inch LP Awake in th Red Desert (1969) (included with the book of the same name), and his later work on cassettes such as Sonic Horses (1985) and Off the Road (1998). In Toronto, Nichol also employed chant and melody, but in addition developed techniques inspired by his reading about Dadaists such as Hugo Ball, Raoul Hausmann, and Kurt Schwitters, as well as applying electronic effects achieved through tape-recorder manipulation. His work in these areas is documented on the 7inch LP Borders (included in bp, 1966) and the 12inch LP Motherlove (1968). By the mid- to late 19605 two other Toronto poets were active in the field, scan o HUIGIN (b 1942) and David W. Harris (later David UU, pronounced 'double u'; 1948-94). Working more with a narrative structure, o huigin employed verbal and non-verbal elements, often accompanied by the electroacoustic music of composer Ann Southam, as exemplified on their i2-inch LP, Sky Sails (1971)- UU (before he called himself that) worked with verbal and non-verbal elements, chant, and tape-manipulation techniques, which both he and Nichol were exploring. A cassette compilation, Past Eroticism, documents several early soundworks by Nichol, Harris, bissett, and o huigin/Southam. By the late 19605, Nichol was searching for a context larger than the single voice within which to create sound poetry. He began acoustic duets with Harris and with Steve MCCAFFERY (b 1947), who had recently arrived from England. Harris eventually moved to Vancouver, took the surnom de plume of UU and ceased performing. In 1970 Nichol and McCaffery joined with Rafael BARRETO-RIVERA (b 1944) and Paul DUTTON (b 1943) to form the FOUR HORSEMEN. The Horsemen (as they were frequently called) inspired two other groups, Owen Sound and
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Re:Sounding. Owen Sound, based in Toronto, comprised Michael Dean (b 1947), David Penhale (b 1948; he remained only briefly with the group), Steven Ross Smith (b 1945), and Richard Truhlar (b 1950). Re:Sounding, a duet formed by Douglas HARBOUR (b 1940) and Stephen SCOBIE (b 1943), operated first out of Edmonton, and subsequently Edmonton and Victoria, to which Scobie relocated. All three groups worked in varying degrees with verbal, non-verbal, and narrative and/or theatrical elements, and all performed widely throughout Canada during the 19705, with some incursions into the United States by The Horsemen. Meanwhile, various members of these groups continued their activities as sound soloists - most significantly and durably, Nichol, McCaffery, Dutton, Smith, and Truhlar. Torontonian Penn KEMP (formerly Penny Chalmers) emerged in the 19705 with a strong commitment to sound-into-verbal compositions. Most of her books have had accompanying tapes, and she has had two sound plays mounted, Eros Rising (1977) and What the Ear Hears Last (1994). Quebecois troubadour Raoul DUGUAY was another prominent 19705 practitioner of sound poetry. During the 19705 the Canadian presence began to be felt in Europe. From 1973 to 1976, o huigin was in London and appeared at the seventh to tenth International Sound Poetry Festivals on the continent, co-producing the eleventh in Toronto in 1978. Nichol, McCaffery, bissett, and Owen Sound also presented work in Europe during this period. Significant recordings from the 19705 include the 12-inch LPs Canadada (officially, Nada Canadada) (1972) and Live in the West (1976) by the Four Horsemen; Dutton's side of the 12" LP Blues, Roots, Legends, Shouts and Hollers; the 7-inch LPs, with accompanying books, Medicine My Mouth's on Fire (1974) by bill bissett, and Meaford Tank Range (1977) by Owen Sound; and Penn Kemp's audiocassette with book, Trance Forms (1974). The 19805 saw significant developments and transitions in Canadian sound poetry, notably a wealth of collaboration between poets and musicians, especially in Ontario. The Horsemen and Owen Sound individually and collectively worked with numerous Toronto musicians in various contexts during the early 19805; bill bissett (who had moved east) connected with sev-
eral musicians in London during the latter years of the decade and into the 19905; and Penn Kemp continued her work of the 19705 with New York musician Charlie Morrow. Another alliance was that formed in Ottawa by composer Andrew McClure with writers Susan McMaster (b 1950) and Colin Morton (b 1948). McClure speech-arranged the writers' works, which all three performed as First Draft, active from 1981 to 1991. Gilles Arteau, of Quebec City, is another who scored text (his own) for performance, both verbal and phonetic, by single and multiple voices, in a more explicitly musical context, from the late 19705 until the mid-1990s demise of Quebec's Galerie Obscure. Quebec City produced two other noteworthy sound poets during the 19805: Richard Martel, operating largely within a performance art context; and Pierre-Andre Arcand, whose electronically treated voice poems have earned him international repute. Owen Sound called it quits in 1984, though group members continued individual projects. The Four Horsemen abandoned repertoire work in favour of collective sonic free improvisation (where the group's roots lay), as exemplified by their cassette Two Nights (1988). The quartet made a few European appearances, and ceased working after Nichol's death in 1988. New voices continued to emerge. DUB poets Lillian ALLEN (b 1951) and Clifton Joseph (b 1957) both made sorties into sonic territory beyond their reggae and black diasporic roots. The duo of Stuart Ross (b 1959) and Mark Laba (b 1959), which formed in the late 19705, performed through to 1988, issuing one cassette, Preacher Explodes During Sermon. Ross subsequently collaborated with Gary Barwin on a cassette called These Are the Clams I'm Breathing. Gerry SHIKATANI (b 1950) of Toronto began incorporating purely sonic effects in his poetry performances during the 19805, and Toronto (now Ottawa) writer jwcurry (b 1959) is another who took to intermittently creating and performing soundworks. The early 19905 were years of relative hiatus in the field. Sound had become a diminished element in the work of both McCaffery and Barreto-Rivera (as it had become for Nichol). Truhlar stopped performing and focused on voice-sourced electronic composition, First
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Draft wrapped things up, and Dean withdrew from performance. Of those poets still performing sound, many took up or continued alliances with musicians and/or bands, Dutton joining the Toronto-based free improvisation band CCMC, Smith forming the similarly oriented Saskatoon group Duct, Kemp recording with violinist David Prentice, and Allen and Joseph playing with reggae sidemen. Recorded documentation of these collaborations are CCMC's Decisive Moments CD (1993), Duct's Duct Tape cassette (1994), and Kemp and Prentice's cassette Epiphanies (1994). Also -developing during this period was the increased sound poetry activity of Toronto interdisciplinary artist Nobuo Kubota (b 1932), who had moved into it during the 19803 and worked briefly with Dutton. The early-i99os hiatus was short-lived, and by mid-decade new artists had established themselves. In Toronto, there were W. Mark Sutherland (b 1955), working acoustically and on tape and video with verbal and non-verbal sound, and Christian sOK (pronounced 'book'), creating original verbal soundworks and interpreting classic Dada texts. In Vancouver, a new group appeared - AWOL Love Vibe, formed by Alex Ferguson (b 1963), Kedrick James (b 1965), and John Sobol (b 1963), focusing equally on orally improvised lyric verse and improvised and orchestrated, verbal and non-verbal sound poetry. In Montreal, Eric Letourneau began focusing more intently on sound poetry, which he had been using in his audio and radio art since 1985, Philippe Lambert began performing and recording, and the two artists formed the duo Luciole. Also by the mid-1990s, Sutherland and Kubota were working together in a duo. A few recordings of the late 19905 are worthy of mention: Dutton's cassette Full Throatle (1996) and his CD with CCMC, aCCoMpliCes (1998); AWOL Love Vibe's CD Verbomotorhead (1997, in conjunction with their book Exstatic Almanac); and Arcand's CD series Eres (1995-7). In J999 there appeared an important CD, Carnivocal, which sampled Canadian sound poetry from the 19705 on, and brought to light two new entries to the field: Stephen Cain of Toronto, and the group Verbomotorhead (as opposed to the CD by that name), a five-voice ensemble from Vancouver, headed up by AWOL Love Vibe's James and Ferguson.
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A noteworthy feature of Canadian sound poetry is the international stature of its practitioners. In addition to the European and US activity of the 19705, Dutton, bissett, Arcand, Martel, and Sutherland (solo and with Kubota), have made frequent European appearances; Re: Sounding has performed in Europe, Australia and New Zealand; Dutton, Sutherland, Letourneau, and Re:Sounding have each performed in the United States; and both Allen and Joseph have toured to the United States, Europe, and the West Indies. See also GARCIA. Further reading: Paul Dutton, 'Beyond Doo Wop or How I Came to Realize That Hank Williams Is Avant Garde,' Music-works 54 (1992): 8-19; bpNichol, 'Improvising Sound: Ten Poets on the Poetics of Sound,' Music-works 38 (1987): 8-17; bpNichol and Steve McCaffery, eds, Sound Poetry: a Catalogue (Toronto: Under which Editions, 1978). Paul Dutton
SOUSTER, Raymond. Poet, editor, anthologist, publisher; b Toronto 15 Jan 1921. Souster grew up in west-end Toronto and, except for the years 1941-5, when he was in the RCAF, lived in Toronto, the milieu for his poetry, his entire life. He graduated from Humberside Collegiate in !939> at which time he went to work as an accountant for the Imperial Bank, later the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, from which he retired in 1984. While in the RCAF, Souster co-edited the little magazine Direction (1943-6), the first of many editing/publishing ventures. By the time of his discharge his literary career was well under way: he had appeared in the Canadian Forum, in Preview, and, from 1942, in John SUTHERLAND'S First Statement. He was also included in Unit of Five (1944). His first solo book, When We Are Young, was published by First Statement P in 1946. Souster, widely read in the work of the major English and American poets of the 19305 and '405, found his major affinity with politically aware, leftist-oriented writers in Canada such as F.R. SCOTT, Dorothy LIVESAY, and John Sutherland's First Statement group, including Louis DUDEK and Irving LAYTON, who eschewed what Sutherland considered the intellectual, cosmopolitan, elitest thrust of the earlier
SPALDING
MCGILL 'movement' in favour of a more localized, vernacular-based poetics. In 1952 Souster, Dudek, and Layton, dissatisfied with the increasingly conservative stance adopted by Sutherland and feeling a need to take the initiative in what had become, comparatively, a downtime in Canadian poetry publishing, began the magazine Contact. This led to the establishment of CONTACT P (1952-67). Through Dudek, Souster was introduced to William Carlos Williams' work, a final, crucial influence on his poetics, which now moved decisively in the direction of contemporary American MODERNISM. Souster, who also produced the magazine Combustion between 1957 and 1966, carried on correspondence with Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and others; his work now appeared in American magazines. Over the years Souster had extensive contact with writers in Canada and beyond - partly through his work at Contact P, which published a significant number of the new writers. He also co-edited selected works of several of the CONFEDERATION POETS and produced ANTHOLOGIES and texts for high-school students. Souster, whose poetry shuns conventional forms in favour of capturing the human voice, published prolifically from the 19405 to the 19905 - not only poetry, in various new and selected editions, but, under PSEUDONYMS, two novels: The Winter of Time (1947, as Raymond Holmes) and On Target (1972, as John Holmes), as well as a memoir, From Hell to Breakfast (1980), all of which explore a WAR theme. Distinctively a poet of the isolated or marginal individual, his The Colour of the Times: The Collected Poems of Raymond Souster won the Governor General's AWARD in 1964. Later, the Collected Poems of Raymond Souster appeared in eight volumes from Oberon P (1980-99). Souster was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1995. Further reading: Frank Davey, Louis Dudek &• Raymond Souster (Vancouver: Douglas & Mclntyre, 1980); Bruce Whiteman, 'Raymond Souster,' in Canadian Writers and Their Works, vol 5, ed Robert Lecker, Jack David, and Ellen Quigley (Toronto: ECW, 1985): 235-76. Andrew Stubbs
SOUTH, a term that in southern Canada refers in general to the United States, but that in the NORTH refers specifically to the portion of Canada lying to the south of the 6oth parallel, and to its political and cultural assumptions. The term also, of course, functions directionally, as in such specific spatial references as the South Shore (of the St Lawrence R, at Montreal; or of Nova Scotia near Lunenburg), southern Saskatchewan, Edmonton South, and the like. SOWESTO, a term developed by the painter Greg Curnoe and adapted by James REANEY and others to refer to the REGION of south-western ONTARIO, the area around London that Reaney in particular represented in his writing, animating in poetry and drama the details of local history, LANDSCAPE, anecdote, and person, and using this locale as a site in which both to discover and to reveal the universals of MYTH. Further reading: Marty Gervais, 'Oh Captain! My Captain! James Reaney and his faith in the "Story,"' Windsor R 2.9.1 (Spring 1996): 1-2.
SPAIN, see j. BUTLER, M. COHEN, CULTURAL PLURALITY, LATIN AMERICA, MEDITERRANEAN, MULTICULTURAL VOICES.
SPALDING, Esta Alice. Editor, teacher, screenwriter; b Boston, MA, 12 Aug 1966; daughter of Linda (Dickinson) SPALDING, writer, and Philip E. Spalding III, photographer; stepdaughter of Michael ONDAATJE. Spalding moved to Toronto in 1982 after a childhood spent in Hawaii, and was educated at U Chicago and Stanford U. An associate editor for Brick magazine and House of Anansi P, and formerly an English instructor at U Guelph, Spalding relocated to Vancouver in 1997 to work on the CBC-television series Da Vinci's Inquest. A winner of both the Malahat R LONG POEM prize and the LEAGUE OF CANADIAN POETS National Poetry Contest, Spalding is the author of three collections of poetry, including Carrying Place (1995). Skilled with autobiographical vignettes and sustained metaphors drawn from her study of natural SCIENCE, she delves into the condition of loss, her elegant FREE VERSE taut with personal and political urgency. The verse novel Anchoress (1997) concerns Helen, a character who self-immolates in
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protest against the Gulf WAR; Peter H-, the marine biologist who is her grieving lover, 'remembers' Helen's life as he articulates the skeleton of a whale. This lush, ardent exploration of love, global connectedness, and individual conscience reveals a talent for narrative montage. Motifs reverberate through the diverse lyrics of Lost August (1999); its final section refines an imagist sensibility to the level of enigma and haunting experiment. Mark Cochrane
SPALDING, Linda. Novelist; b Topeka, KS, 25 June 1943; daughter of Edith (Senner), homemaker, and Jacob Dickinson, lawyer; educ U Colorado (BA, 1965). She married Philip Spalding in 1964 (divorced 1972); their daughter Esta SPALDING is also a writer. After moving to Hawaii (the setting for her novel Daughters of Captain Cook, 1988), Linda Spalding met and subsequently married Michael ONDAATJE. Spalding is the editor of Brick literary magazine. She publishes reviews regularly in Toronto journals; her second novel, The Paper Wife, appeared in 1994. SPARSHOTT, Francis Edward. Philosopher, professor, poet; b Chatham, England, 19 May 1926; son of Frank Brownley Sparshott, schoolteacher, and Gladwys Winifred Head. Attended King's School (Rochester, England) 1934-43 and Corpus Christi C (Oxford, BA, MA), receiving second-class honours, classical moderations (1944) and first-class honours, litterae humaniores (1950). He emigrated to Canada in 1950 to teach philosophy at U Toronto (1950-91), mainly at Victoria C. Sparshott has served as president of the Canadian Philosophical Assoc (1975-6),
Toward a Philosophical Understanding of the Arts of Dance (1995) reflect the seminal nature of his work. The Future of Aesthetics (1998) collects the four 1996 Ryle lectures delivered at Trent U. Meticulously well-organized and thorough, Sparshott's books of closely argued philosophical analyses seem designed for the intelligent generalist more than the erudite specialist. In A Measured Pace, for example, he notes that having to teach the subject was the catalyst to much of his published work in aesthetics. Having discussed in Off the Ground the concept and meaning of dance, he could take for granted that dance was a well-established art form and set out to deal with the problems that arose therefrom. Similarly, in Taking Life Seriously, Sparshott sought to present the continuity of thought in Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics rather than explicate isolated passages. He decried excessive specialization, distinguishing minuteness from precision (as in Looking for Philosophy, 1972). The publication of 10 volumes of poetry, as well as many individual poems in periodicals such as Alphabet and Tamarack R, further confirms the breadth of Sparshott's intellectual activity. The frequent wit and complex array of poetic forms (from classical ODE to nursery rhyme) only thinly disguise a seriousness of intention. His poetry collections include A Divided Voice (1965), A Cardboard Garage (1969), The Naming of the Beasts (1979), The Cave of Trophonius (1983), The Hanging Gardens ofEtobicoke (1983), Storms and Screens (1986), Sculling to Byzantium (1989), Views from the Zucchini Gazebo (1994), and Home from the Air (1997). See also VALUIE.
LEAGUE OF CANADIAN POETS (1977-9), and
American Society for Aesthetics (1981-2); he was elected fellow of the ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA in 1977. With numerous books and articles, especially on ethics and aesthetics, to his name, and an international reputation among scholars, Sparshott is one of Canada's leading philosophers of the arts. Titles such as The Structure of Aesthetics (1963), The Concept of Criticism (1967), Off the Ground: First Steps to a Philosophical Consideration of the Art of Dance (1988), Taking Life Seriously: A Study of the Argument of the Nichomachean Ethics (1994), and A Measured Pace:
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Further reading: Special issue of J Aesthetic Education 31.2 (Summer 1997). Deane E.D. Downey
SPEARS, Marion Heather. Writer, artist, art teacher; b Vancouver 29 Sept 1934; daughter of Dorothea (Bolton) and Robert Spears, an insurance manager; educ U British Columbia. Spears divides her time between Canada and Denmark, writing poetry and FANTASY fiction (eg, The Children ofAtwar, 1993). Her AWARD-winning poetry volumes include Drawings from the Newborn (1986), The Word for Sand (1989), and Human
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Acts (1991). Spears' poems and life drawings, notably of children in hospitals and war zones, study the anatomy of the face and head, rendering physiological and political fact in graphic and verbal lines. Critical of masculine arrogance and corporate euphemism, Spears looks directly upon human cruelty and disfigurement; her acts of unflinching, sympathetic witness recognize life in all its shapes. Mark Cochrane
SPENCER, Elizabeth. Fiction writer, creativewriting teacher; b Carrollton, MS, 19 July 1921; daughter of Mary (McCain) and James Luther Spencer, farmers. After meeting her husband, John Rusher, while on a Guggenheim fellowship in Italy, Spencer moved with him to Montreal in 1958. The winner of numerous literary AWARDS in the United States (including the John Dos Passes Award, 1992), she belongs to the American Academy and the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and maintains in her fiction as in her life a connection with her birthplace. The Stories of Elizabeth Spencer (1981) and Jack of Diamonds and Other Stories (1988) explore how Southern bourgeois female experience (of love, of travel) acts as a window on life in general. Her novel The Salt Line (1984) analyzes the relationship between two academic rivals who try to make sense of the South after history has played havoc with their ideals. Another novel, The Night Travellers (1991), is set in 1960, with Vietnam in the background; again it focuses on a woman's relationships, this time involving her scientist mother and her idealistic husband. Further reading: Terry Roberts, Self and Community in the Fiction of Elizabeth Spencer (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1992). Peter Mahon
SPETTIGUE, Douglas Odell. Professor, writer; b London, ON, 6 June 1930; son of Sarah (Odell), schoolteacher, and Charles Spettigue, car salesman. Spettigue grew up in Westminster Township, near London, ON; he later became a literature professor at Queen's U, retiring in 1994. From 1967 to 1972, he investigated the contradictory claims in the autobiographies of the Manitoba writer Frederick Philip GROVE, discovering through extensive research that Grove had
fictionalized his past and even his identity. These discoveries were the basis of two books. The first, Frederick Philip Grove (1969), documents his thwarted inquiries; the second, FPG: The European Years (1973), provides his solution to the Grove puzzle. Written in engaging and understated prose, these books represent a major contribution to Grove scholarship and studies in LIFE WRITING. A clear prose style also marks his collection of short stories, Pretending (1993); the brief stories often contain a sense of mystery, as in the title story, where all the adults vanish after a group of children play a game of pretending to be orphans. Heather Sanderson
SPORTS WRITING. There is a curiosity - perhaps intended, perhaps accidental - in Mordecai RICHLER'S marvellous 1997 novel, Barney's Version, in which the central character, the irascible, degenerating Barney Panofsky, keeps making mistakes in fact that have to be cleaned up in footnotes later supplied by his son. As Barney ages, he messes up movies, poems, people's names, famous artists, historical dates, and even political dates and policies. Yet the older he gets and the more confused he grows, the clearer his memories remain of the Montreal Forum and his beloved Canadiens. If a footnote is required during these later lapses, it is merely to offer more detail: not only who scored, but who assisted, and when. Barney's affection for the Canadian game, for the poetry and art supplied Saturday nights by Maurice Richard and Jean Beliveau and Guy Lafleur, remains intact, and perfect, for life. His version, in this singular case, could never improve on the original. Perhaps there is a hint here as to why sport in Canada has so rarely been effectively lifted from the ice and the playing fields and dropped into the pages of Canadian literature. Writing is simply not up to capturing the feelings and emotion of a people as they embrace a national game. Perhaps, too, there is irony here: sports writing but a footnote to the real matters of Canadian literature, and not a very important one at that. Or perhaps it is nothing more than an effective literary device employed by the brilliant Richler: that there is something seriously wrong with Barney is undeniable the moment he turns down tickets to see Wayne Gretzky
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play perhaps his final game in Montreal, claiming, 'I've had enough of hockey.' In Canada, that is roughly the equivalent of having had enough of life itself. Of the many oddities that set Canadian literature apart from American and British, the fact that it tends to be more academically based may largely be due to the economics of writing. This has many arguable repercussions: self-supporting authors become more prolific; SHORT STORIES - the meat of creative WRITING classes, classroom TEACHING, and magazine sales of literary work - become more significant; and sports, that bastion of the uneducated, the lower classes, the beer drinkers, the active, tends to become less suitable fodder for examination. One cannot possibly imagine Robertson DAVIES ever having led a debate on the relative merits of hockey and lacrosse, Canada's two official national sports, at the high table of Massey C. Margaret AT WOOD has yet to explore the extraordinary loneliness of the playoff goaltender and his relation with the supernatural. Such has never been the case in the United States or Britain. Many of the most literary of American writers - George Plimpton, Roger Angell, even Ernest Hemingway - considered sport as worthy a topic as love and war, and even the internal rural and suburban angst that is so beloved by Canadian writers. Richard Ford, one of the more literary of modern American writers, came to his fame with a novel entitled The Sportswriter (1986). Certain writers on certain games have even reached a luminescence usually accorded only those writers who deal with the more traditionally literary ground: Bernard Malamud, Roger Khan, and Roger Angell on baseball; Trinidadian writer C.L.R. James on cricket; Norman Mailer and Joyce Carol Oates on boxing; Brian Glanville on soccer ... There is, in Canada, a deep-bred publishing antipathy toward sports. Sports books occupy a very specific, usually highly restrictive publishing niche, not unlike books on the Cape Breton Trail and the inner workings of provincial politics. Canadian sports books are seen to have a set market, with a restrictive press run, with an entirely predictable sales of 4,000 to 12,000 copies, reprints unlikely and returns kept to a minimum. As John Richardson, a Toronto pub-
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lisher and former co-owner of A Different Drummer Books in Burlington, ON, puts it, 'If you like hockey in this business, you're automatically a mouth breather.' In American sports-writing circles, the rule of thumb has always been that 'the smaller the object being chased or thrown or hit, the better the writing.' Basketball has next to no literature; football precious little. Baseball, by contrast, and more recently, golf, have seen so much precious writing that much baseball writing in the 19905 felt like its own parody. This rule of thumb, if applied to Canada, should suggest that curling is hardly going to inspire Canadian writers, but hockey should be blessed by their rapt attention. Such is not the case. The best-known work on the Canadian game is a children's story, The Hockey Sweater, which appeared in Roch CARRIER'S 1979 collection, Les enfants du bonhomme dans la lune (tr Sheila FISCHMAN as The Hockey Sweater and Other Stories, 1979). With rare exception - Richler, Richard B. WRIGHT in his exquisite 1995 novel, The Age of Longing, David Adams RICHARDS in his 1996 memoir, Hockey Dreams: Memories of a Man Who Couldn't Play - Canadian literary types have ignored the game that means more to Canadian people than, truth be told, Canadian literature itself. Rarely is sports the specific in Canadian literature, but it is often found in reference. Hockey historians have recently settled upon Windsor, NS, as the probable birthplace of the great Canadian game, largely on accounts (of young men playing a similar game) by Thomas Chandler HALIBURTON, who would later find fame with his series of Sam Slick sketches. Pioneer author Susanna MOODIE wrote poetry about fishing ('With spear high poised, and steady hand, / The centre of that fiery ray / Behold the skilled fisher stand, / Prepared to strike the finny prey') and the Rev John Lowry Stuart (1849-81) wrote poetry and edited a serious book on the art of skating. Gentle, recreational sports such as fishing, horse races, tennis, badminton, and variations on baseball are mentioned in the works of wellknown earlier Canadian writers such as Stephen LEACOCK and Ralph CONNOR and even Lucy Maud MONTGOMERY, yet the best portrayal of an innocent game of pickup softball is probably found in an earlier Richler novel, St. Urbain's
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Horseman - though the game itself is played in London, England, by literary and film expatriates. As a genre, the Canadian sports book dates, essentially, from the growth of the Canadian publishing industry. While the better-known Canadian writers, such as Hugh MACLENNAN, would occasionally turn to sport, usually hockey, on magazine assignment, the book side of hockey writing became almost exclusively the ground of sports writers doing 'as-told-to' biographies or children's books, the best known of which were Scott Young's trilogy, Scrubs on Skates (1952), Boy on Defense (1953), and A Boy at the Leafs' Camp (1966). Young, of course, came up through the newspaper trade, and was for years the main sports columnist for the Globe and Mail. It would be fair to say in Canada that the very best sports writing has been found not between hard covers, but in the daily newspapers and in the old weekend supplements that produced many of the best magazine sportswriters in North America. Some of the better stylists of those times would include Earl McRae, Trent Frayne, Tom Alderman, David Cobb, Marci McDonald, John Gault, Michael Posner, and Jack LUDWIG, the Winnipeg-born novelist who was turned into a marvellous magazine sportswriter for Maclean's. Why should this come as any surprise? There is a freedom in sports that does, and should, appeal to the more adventurous journalists. 'Newspaper people speak of a police reporter, a City Hall man, and a Washington correspondent, but always of a sports writer,' A.J. Leibling noted in 1946. 'The sports writer is not expected merely to tell what happened. Upon small, coiled springs of fact, he builds up a great padded mattress of words. His readers flop themselves down upon this Beautyrest and escape into a dream world where most of the characters are titanic heroes, devouring monsters, or gargantuan buffoons, and the rest are clean, high-type, aristocratic sportsmen who own yachts, racing stables, or baseball clubs and are occasionally depicted as setting up schnapps for the scribes (a sports-page word for sports writers). The scribe is expected to be entertaining even when there's nothing to be entertaining about.'
Such training ground - as well as such opportunity to let fly with the typewriter - has produced some of the best of American novelists, Hemingway included, but few, if any, Canadians have passed through the sports pages and onto the best seller list for fiction. The best of the newspaper sportswriters in this country tend to stay where they are, move on to magazines (Michael Farber of Sports Illustrated) or move on into more mainstream columnist work (both Allan Fotheringham of Maclean's and the late Gary Lautens of the Toronto Star began as sports 'scribes'). In the province of Quebec there is no higher journalistic calling than to be a sportswriter at one of the major daily papers. Money, fame, and respect all combine to keep the very best at their original work, and the likes of Rejean Tremblay (La Presse) and Bertrand Raymond (Journal de Montreal) are considered the intellectual and influential equivalent of the top political writers, which is only appropriate in a province where hockey has been compared to religion and the rinks often referred to as 'shrines.' Perhaps this tendency to stay in the job has had its own influence on the types of books produced in Canadian sports. Most are what is referred to in the trade as 'quickies' - the evening and weekend work of an already overworked sportswriter trying to pick up a little extra cash by 'ghosting' a book for a sports celebrity or, as is now more often the case, doing all the writing for a publication that will carry a shared byline. The result of all this effort has been a biography (or GHOST-written autobiography) on almost every Canadian hockey player who reached the National Hockey League, and a long list of books that have seriously harmed the Canadian sports book's ambition to be taken seriously. Written far too quickly, with market rather than product in mind, the books have by and large been an embarrassment. In presuming the sports book market is a given, and that such books are almost exclusively bought as gifts, the Canadian PUBLISHING INDUSTRY does not even know if the books are read after being sold, and, judging from the number of similar sports books that are annually shipped out each Christmas season, couldn't care less. In demanding so little, they have delivered little.
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Thirty years after Globe and Mail sports columnist Dick Beddoes appeared before the Senate Committee on the Mass Media, his words still ring harshly. 'It is unfortunately a fact that the quality of performance on Canada's sports pages is too seldom on a par with that in Canada's sports arenas,' Beddoes told the committee chaired by Senator Keith Davey. 'The profession is still burdened with hacks who make tin-can gods out of cast-iron jerks.' There have, of course, been exceptions. Scott Young always sought to deliver a genuine book, whether working on his own or else writing for the likes of Conn Smythe or Punch Imlach. Peter GZOWSKI, a fine journalist long before he became a national figure in RADIO, wrote one of the best hockey books in The Game of Our Lives (1981), his account of a season spent with a young Wayne Gretzky and the Edmonton Oilers. Jack Batten wrote a number of fine books, and Trent Frayne some of the very best, his own peak being 19748 The Mad Men of Hockey. John Macfarlane, a longtime editor at Maclean's and Toronto Life, joined with runner, activist, and political scientist Bruce Kidd in 1972 to produce The Death of Hockey. During the latter part of the 20th century, several hockey books flew above the rest to establish themselves as best-sellers by any possible measure. Alison Griffiths and David Cruise, with Net Worth (1991), and American Russ Conway, with Game Misconduct: Alan Eagleson and the Corruption of Hockey (1995), brought investigative journalism to hockey book writing. Fine work was also offered up by journalists such as Michael Ulmer (Captains, 1995), Martin O'Malley (Gross Misconduct: The Life of Spinner Spencer, 1998), Bruce Dowbiggin (The Defense Never Rests, 1993), D'ArcyJenish (The Stanley Cup, 1992), Roy MACSKIMMING (Gordie, 1994; Cold War, 1996), Red Fisher (Hockey, Heroes and Me, 1994), Charles Wilkins (After the Applause, 1989, with Colleen and Gordie Howe), Chris Goyens and Allan Turowetz (The Lions in Winter, 1986, rev 1994; Beliveau, 1992), Georges-Hebert Germain (Overtime: the Legend of Guy Lafleur, 1990), Lawrence Martin (The Red Machine, 1990), Douglas Hunter (War Games, 1996), Chris Cuthbert and Scott Russell (The Rink, 1997), and Dick Irvin's series of oral histories on goalkeeping, refereeing, and coaching. Some of the best
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hockey books were sadly overlooked, by both the public and the sports pages, one of the finest being Robert (Diver's incisive, The Making of Champions: Life in Canada's Junior A Leagues (1970), and Michael A. Smith's Life After Hockey (1987). There is also one excellent academic study available, Hockey Night In Canada: Sport, Identities and Cultural Politics (1993), by sociologists Richard Gruneau and David Whitson. If hockey books had a seminal year, however, it was probably 1983. Published that year were Ken Dryden's The Game, the first superb book written solely by an athlete; and Roy MACGREGOR'S The Last Season, signalling the first serious attempt to crack the adult fiction shelves with a hockey novel. The books were published on the same day by Douglas Gibson, then with Macmillan of Canada. Both books were lavishly reviewed and praised. The Dryden book became the (then) best-selling Canadian book of all time. MacGregor's book bombed. Canadian booksellers, so unused to treating hockey as a serious fiction matter, did not even know where to place the novel, often electing to stash it in the young readers' section of stores. Fiction remains the black hole of hockey, a fact in sharp contrast to the remarkable fiction that has become the hallmark of baseball (Bernard Malamud's The Natural, 1952; Philip Roth's The Great American Novel, 1973; Canadian w.p. KINSELLA'S Shoeless Joe, 1982). There have been valiant attempts - Frank Orr's hilarious Puck Is a Four Letter Word (1982), RicksALUTiN's wonderful play Les Canadiens (1977), Paul QUARRINGTON'S stylish and whimsical KingLeary (1987) - but Canadians do not yet appear to have reached the point at which they consider their dearest game art as well as entertainment. Collections of the best of hockey writing have been released by such editors and writers as Doug BEARDSLEY (Country on Ice, 1987) and David Gowdey (Riding on the Roar of the Crowd, 1989), but while they have been treasured by aficionados, they have garnered little attention and not sold well. The great Canadian game also found itself the subject of poetry down through the years, the best being the gritty understanding of pond hockey shown in several works by Al PURDY, hockey as a sense of family preoccupation in work by Joan FINNIGAN (daughter of former
SPRY
great, Frank Finnigan) and a compelling sense of the game as icon in the works of Richard HARRISON (Hero of the Play, 1994). Hockey, however, is also meant to be simple fun. It is about cold rinks and cold beer and stupid comments, and no poet has ever captured the silliness of the game as sweetly as Saskatchewan's Stephen SCRIVER (All-Star Poet!, 1981). CHILDREN'S literature, as well, has often turned to hockey to inspire young Canadians to read. Scott Young's books still sell today, more than 40 years after they were first marketed. Over the years, many other hockey-oriented children's books have been published, with even the legendary broadcaster Foster Hewitt once trying his hand at the art, but none has enjoyed the lasting success of Young. A more recent series, Roy MacGregor's The Screech Owls, met with considerable success among young readers, and was translated into Swedish, French, and Chinese. Hockey, of course, is hardly the sole Canar dian sport to command words to appear on the page. George BOWERING and WP. Kinsella have written lovingly, and successfully, on baseball. C.D. Howell's Northern Sandlots (1995), about the meaning of baseball in the Maritimes, is one of those hidden treasures only the true ball fan knows about. And journalists Dan Turner and Stephen Brunt brought out superior books on the two professional teams in Canada, the Montreal Expos and the Toronto Blue Jays. FISHING has also received an enormous amount of attention, but none compare to the writings of Roderick HAIG-BROWN and, more recently, Paul Quarrington and Edith IGLAUER. Paul YEE wrote a children's story about soccer, using the playing field as a leveller to resolve issues of RACISM. Sadly, there has never been a work of literary substance on Canada's other national sport, lacrosse. Those who write sports in this country know only too well how elusive literary acceptance has been. There is, after all, an enormous, and lingering, anti-intellectual side to most sports cultures. Longtime NHL executive Emile Francis once said of player and college graduate Red Berenson, 'If I ever see him read a book on the bus again, I'm going to throw him off.' Players now read openly on the bus. Children now read widely about their favourite games,
particularly hockey. And the time is bound to come when a novel that dares examine the single most widespread of Canadian experiences, the national game of hockey, will be found high on the list of current adult fiction, with readers taking seriously something that Canadians have taken very seriously for more than a century. See also M.A. JARMAN, MYSTERY AND ROMANCE, POPULAR CULTURE, SPROXTON.
Roy MacGregor
SPROXTON, Birk Ernest. Professor, writer; b Flin Flon, MB, 12 Aug 1943; son of Alice (Horney), matron of a seniors' home, and Keith Sproxton, miner. Sproxton, who teaches at Red Deer C, edited the poetry of Bertram BROOKER and commentaries on prairie writing (Trace, 1986). His own work, which captures his interest in hockey and cross-genre techniques, includes Headframe (1985) and The Hockey Fan Came Riding (1990). SPRY, Graham. Advocate of public broadcasting, political organizer, journalist; b St Thomas, ON, 20 Feb 1900, d Ottawa 24 Nov 1983; son of Maj-Gen D.WB. Spry and Ethelyn Alma (Rich). In 1930, Spry and Alan PLAUNT co-founded the Canadian RADIO League, a lobby group that persuaded the Conservative government to adopt the recommendations of the (Aird) Royal Commission on Radio Broadcasting (1929) which gave Canada public broadcasting. As a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, Spry had been influenced by Fabian socialism. He joined the League for Social Reconstruction and was its national secretary, 1933-6. He ran unsuccessfully as a political candidate for the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation in 1934 and 1935. As a political activist, he purchased and published the Farmer's Sun, renamed the New Commonwealth (1932-7). After 1937 he was unemployable for some years in Canada and worked abroad. In 1962 he effectively countered the Saskatchewan doctors' strike against medicare. Throughout his life he continued to work for public broadcasting in Canada. Further reading: Rose Potvin, ed, Passion and Conviction: The Letters of Graham Spry (Regina: Canadian Plains Research Centre, 1992). Ronald B. Hatch
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STAINES
STAINES, David. Critic, professor; b Toronto 8 Aug 1946; son of Mary Rita (Hayes) and Ralph McKenzie Staines, floral designers; educ U Toronto (BA, 1967) and Harvard (AM, 1968; PhD, 1973). Staines became dean of arts at U Ottawa, a specialist in Victorian and medieval literature, and (in part through his work as the general editor of the New Canadian Library, succeeding Malcolm ROSS) one of the country's most influential commentators on Canadian literary culture. He is the translator of The Complete Romances of Chretien de Troyes (1990), has edited stories and letters by Stephen LEACOCK, and in Beyond the Provinces: Literary Canada at Century's End (1995) charted the sophisticated relation between literature and the society at large. He won the Lome PIERCE medal in 1998. STANCE, Ken. Poet, visual artist, lecturer; b Chicago 18 Sept 1946; adopted son of Lillian and John Kristian Stange; educ Loyola U, Chicago (BSc, 1968). Stange moved to northern Ontario in 1971, began teaching psychology at Nipissing UC, and started on his major works. He dubs these his 'hypotheses' because they are tentative literary explorations, sometimes inquiring into what (in A Smaller Pebble, A Prettier Shell, 1996) he calls the 'SURREAL land of SCIENCE.' Music, mathematics, and TECHNOLOGY influence works of his such as Bushed (1979). In 1995, Stange created a Web site (http://www. kenstange.com) to showcase his poetry. Stange's Gallery includes an online selection of works from his public and private collections, such as Euclidean Hexaemeron (1988), Muse(sic) i (1988), and Time Frames (1991). Greg Chan
STANLEY, George. Poet, English instructor; b San Francisco 7 Jan 1934, son of Marie Patricia (Hennessy) and George Anthony Stanley. Before moving to Vancouver, Stanley served in the US Army, was one of the Off-Beats in San Francisco (along with Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan), and received his MA in English from San Francisco State C (1971). Major influences include the early T.S. Eliot and Charles Olson. After Tete Rouge (1963), Stanley published eight volumes, including Opening Day (1983) and Gentle Northern Summer (1995). A versatile writer, he ranges from light-hearted to serious, examining what it
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means to live in the present - whether in the small town of Terrace, BC, or in the bars and streets of Vancouver, Dublin, Moscow, and Berlin. Roger Clark
STANSBURY, Joseph. LOYALIST poet; b London, England, 9 Jan 1742?, d New York 9 Nov 1809; son of Sarah (Porter) and Samuel Stansbury. He married Sarah Ogier in 1765, and they emigrated to Philadelphia, where he became a china merchant. He worked for the Crown in the Revolutionary WAR, during the British occupation of Philadelphia, and was later discovered to be a secret agent for the British, having been the courier for Benedict Arnold's messages to enemy headquarters. Because of his verse - SATIRES of the colonial cause - he was unable to stay in Philadelphia after the war. He travelled to England, and eventually spent two years (1783-5) living in Shelburne, NS, before returning to Philadelphia in 1786. In 1793 he went to New York to work as a secretary of the United Insurance Co. His verse was collected and edited by Winthrop Sargent in The Loyal Verses of Joseph Stansbury and Dr. Jonathan Odell (1860). Peter Mahon
STANWELL-FLETCHER, Theodora Morris. Botanist, nature writer; b Dimock, PA, 4 Jan 1906; daughter of Evelyn Flower and Francis R. Cope, Jr. Her education included, in her words, American schools and college [Holyoke], graduate work in a big university [Cornell], and stretches in between spent in New Zealand, the Dutch East Indies, Asia, the British Isles and Subarctic Canada.' She visited the Arctic in 1930, where she met English naturalist John StanwellFletcher, whom she subsequently married. In 1937 the Stanwell-Fletchers were commissioned to 'collect' flora and fauna specimens for the BC Provincial Museum. They built a cabin and lived atTetana Lake 1937-41. Theodora StanwellFletcher returned to Dimock for the birth of her daughter Patricia, in Oct 1939. She later separated from her first husband and in 1954 married Lowell Sumner, a biologist for the US National Park Service in the Pacific coast states and Alaska; in 1967 she married Dr Philip Gray of Scripps C, Claremont, CA. She currently resides in Dimock.
STEFFLER
Her works include: 'Naturalists in the Wilds of British Columbia,' co-written with John Stanwell-Fletcher, which ran in three parts in Scientific Monthly 50 (Jan-March 1940): 17-32,125-37, 210-24; Some Accounts of the Flora and Fauna of the Driftwood Valley Region of Central British Columbia (1943), also co-authored; Driftwood Valley (1946), with drawings by Stanwell-Fletcher, recounting their experiences travelling to the area, building the cabin, interacting with Natives, and observing birds and animals; Tundra World (1952), about flora and fauna on the edge of the Barrens, near Churchill, MN; and Clear and Icy Seas: A Voyage to the Eastern Arctic (1958), about a summer voyage aboard a Hudson's Bay Co supply ship around the coasts of Ungava, southern Baffin Island, and eastern Hudson Bay. Driftwood Valley earned the John Burroughs Medal,
1947Further reading: John F. Stanwell-Fletcher, 'Three Years in the Wolves' Wilderness,' Natural History 49.3 (1942.): 136-47Joel Martineau
STAUNTON, Ted (Edward). Writer, musician; b Toronto 29 May 1956; son of Frederick and Ethel (Stewart) Staunton. Staunton's first CHILDREN'S book, Puddleman (1983), was an assignment for a course at U Toronto. Mushmouth and Marvel (1988) is part of a five-volume series about friends Maggie and Cyril. Staunton's readings and popular workshops for children and combine stories and music involve teaching children to write stories. His novel Hope Springs a Leak (1998) is set in Port Hope, BC, where the author and his family reside. Greg Chan
STEAD, Robert J.C. (James Campbell). Novelist, poet, publicity agent; b Middleville, ON, 4 Sept 1880, d Ottawa 25 June 1959; son of May (Campbell) and Richard Stead, homesteaders in Manitoba in 1882. stead was by turns a newspaperman, magazine publisher, lumber and feed merchant, and publicist for the federal Dept of Immigration and Colonialization (after 1919), and he used his advertising skills to increase the demand for his patriotic verse and his novels. Generally MELODRAMATIC in plot and weak in characterization, but of historical interest for
their details of early prairie settlement life, the novels include The Bail Jumper (1914), The Homesteaders (1916; rpt 1973), and Neighbours (1922). Grain (1926; rpt 1963), emotionally too realistic to be popular in his own day, attracts continuing attention for its greater psychological depth. Further reading: Dick Harrison, Unnamed Country (Edmonton: U Alberta P, 1977); Laurence Ricou, Vertical Man/Horizontal World (Vancouver: U British Columbia P, 1973); Eric Thompson, Robert Stead and His Works (Toronto: ECW, 1988). STEFANSSON, Vilhjalmur. Explorer, writer; b Ames, MB, 3 Nov 1870, d Bethel, VT, 26 Aug 1962; son of Ingibjorg andjohann Stefansson. After studying anthropology, Stefansson made three long expeditions to the Western Arctic, from 1906-18; in 1910 he encountered the Stone Age Copper INUIT. He wrote a score of books on the Arctic, its peoples, and its mysteries, from My Life with the Eskimo (1913) to Northwest to Fortune (1958); his most popular volume was The Friendly Arctic (1921). He also gave hundreds of lectures and collected an unparalleled library on Arctic subjects. See NORTH. Further reading: Vilhjalmur Stefansson, Discovery (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964). Bill Moreau
STEFFLER, John Earl. Poet, novelist; b Toronto 13 Nov 1947; son of Dorothy (Hoelscher) and Harold StefBer, factory payroll supervisor; educ U Toronto (BA, 1971) and U Guelph (MA, 1974). Steffler teaches English at Memorial U. His writing is strongly influenced by the landscape of rural Ontario and has won several awards, including the Newfoundland Arts Council Artist of the Year Award (1992) and the Joseph S. Stauffer Prize (1993). His publications include the poetry collections An Explanation of Yellow (1981), The Grey Islands (1985), and The Wreckage of Play (1988), and the CHILDREN'S book Flights of Magic (1987). His first novel, The Afterlife of George Cartwright (1992), is based on the life and journals of an 18th-century British soldier and adventurer who lived on the coast of LABRADOR for 16 years. The novel, an example of historiographic
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STEFFLER
METAFICTION, explores the complexities of European imperialism by interweaving elements of Cartwright's journals into the supernatural story of the adventurer's ghost being forced to haunt the English countryside as punishment for a lifelong exploitation of NATIVE peoples and the environment. The novel was well received critically, as its contradictory central character, who sees a need to civilize the Aboriginal peoples yet admires them for who they are, allows the text to rise above stereotypical anti-colonial sentiment.
books of drama, fiction, and non-fiction. His works include Toronto for Sale (1972) and Going Downtown: Reflections on Urban Progress (1993), which record Stein's responses to the cityscape of his hometown. In his first novel, Scratch One Dreamer (1967), Stein's JEWISH protagonist raises his consciousness as he becomes involved in the politics of protest during the 19605. Political and social activism also informs the novels My Sexual and Other Revolutions (1971) and Taking Power (1992).
Further reading: James Harrison, 'The Afterlife of George Cartwright,' Brick 45 (Winter 1993): 66-9.
STEINFELD, JJ. Playwright, fiction writer; b in a displaced persons' camp in Munich, Germany, ii Dec 1946; son of Esther (Biezunska) and Leon Steinfeld; emig to the United States A in 1947 and to Canada on 22 April 197; educ Case Western Reserve U (BA, 1968) and Trent U (MA, 1978). Steinfeld won numerous literary AWARDS for his plays (most unpublished) and his fiction a novel, Our Hero in the Cradle of Confederation (1987), and seven collections of short stories, including Dancing at the Club Holocaust (1993) and Should the Word Hell Be Capitalized? (1999). Although his work does not always foreground JEWISH themes, many of the harrowed protagonists of Steinfeld's Kafkaesque fiction are children of Jewish survivors of the Shoah, often artist figures, for whom Jewish identity has been refracted through their parents' experience and consciousness as survivors and thus threatens their sanity and their lives in general. Exploring the nuances of Jewish survival, displacement, memory, and meaning in a post-Shoah world, Steinfeld juxtaposes the horrors of his protagonists' inherited memories and knowledge of genocide with the reality of a mostly complacent and uninterested Canadian society, to jarringly powerful effect.
K.G. Stewart
STEGNER, Wallace Earle. American educator, environmentalist, writer; b Lake Mills, IA, 18 Feb 1909, d Santa Fe, NM, 13 April 1993; son of Hilda (Paulson) and George H. Stegner, factotum. Stegner's memoir, Wolf Willow: A History, a Story and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier (1963), addresses the six adolescent years he spent in East End, SK, and their subsequent impact on his life and work. A deeply committed environmentalist and teacher of creative WRITING, Stegner - as in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Angle of Repose (1971) - portrayed the search for a stable identity and geographical affiliation in an increasingly fractured and rootless society. Further reading: Jackson J. Benson, 'Wallace Stegner and the Battle against Rugged Individualism,' North Dakota Quarterly 61:2 (Spring 1993): 5-18; Janet Occhino, 'Inside Out: The West of Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose,' ANQ: A Quarterly} of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews 9:3 (Summer 1996): 30-39; Charles-E. Rankin and William Farr, eds, Wallace Stegner: Man and Writer (Albuquerque: U New Mexico P, 1996). Tamas Dobozy
STEIN, David Lewis. Columnist, novelist; b Toronto 12 Feb 1937; son of Gussie (Moore), a milliner, storekeeper, and businesswoman, and Ben Stein, a bookmaker, gambler, storekeeper, and real estate agent; educ U Toronto (BA, 1960; MSc in urban planning, 1974). Stein is a feature writer for the Toronto Star and the author of 10
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Alexander Hart
Alexander Hart
STENSON, Fred (Frederick). Novelist, scriptwriter; b Pincher Creek, AB, 22 Dec 1951, son of Ida and E.G. Stenson; m to the poet Pamela BANTING; educ U Calgary (BA, 1972). Stenson published his first novel, Lonesome Hero, in 1974 and followed it with several others, together with books of local history, short stories, and various kinds of freelance writing. He attracted national attention with The Trade (2000), a novel
STEVENS
that revisits the history of the HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY, using often unimaginable but historically 'real' events as the context within which to trace a fictional narrative. The story tells of the tense relations among the men in the fur trade, and the tensions involving youth, age, love, power, and personal definitions of ethnic identity. STEPHANSSON, Stephan Gudmundsson. Poet; b on Kirkjuholl farm, northern Iceland, 3 Oct 1853, d nr Innisfail, AB, 10 Aug 1927. Stephansson emigrated to Wisconsin, then North Dakota, in 1873, and moved to the Territory of ALBERTA in 1889, working as a farmer. He was active in local Icelandic cultural associations. Between 1898 and 1920 he published half a dozen volumes of poetry, in Reykjavik, winning a reputation as the finest Icelandic-language writer since the i3th century, especially for A Ferd ogFlugi ('En Route,' 1900), a LONG POEM tracing the life of an immigrant girl and criticizing the social structures with which she had to contend. He was particularly praised for his descriptive powers - of the Rocky Mountains, for example - and noted for his resistance to both capitalism and alternative 'fanaticisms.' Stephansson's leading enthusiast in Canada was Watson KIRKCONNELL, who translated his work. See also MULTICULTURAL VOICES. Further reading: Kristjana GUNNARS, 'The Hypothetical Text: Stephan G. Stephansson's Autobiography,' in Canada and the Nordic Countries, ed J0rn Carlsen and Bengt Streijffert (Lund: Lund UP, 1988): 109-22; Jane McCracken, 'Stephan G. Stephansson: Icelandic-Canadian Poet and Freethinker,' Canadian Ethnic Studies 15.1 (1983): 33-53-
a novel about radical union activity. Through the 19305 his poetry and essays vigorously attacked international fascism and Canadian anti-labour political and economic policies. James Doyle
STERLING, Shirley. Interior Salish novelist, Native educator; b Merritt, BC, 13 Jan 1948; daughter of Sophie (Voght) and Albert Sterling. Sterling's interest in innovative Native pedagogies led to doctoral work in curriculum studies at U British Columbia, as well as diverse publications. Sterling's first novel, My Name Is Seepeetza (1992), aimed at a juvenile readership, uses an Interior SALISH child's voice and perspective to critique life at a Catholic residential school. On the academic level, Sterling examines the relation between matriarchy and orality in Quaslametko and Yetko (1995) and The Grandmother Stories (1997). She also edited a collection of stories written and illustrated by Native CHILDREN. Ian Rae
STERNBERG, Ricardo da Silveira Lobo. Poet, professor; b Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 29 Sept 1948; son of Carolina (da Silveira Lobo) and Hilgard Sternberg, geography professor (Berkeley). Sternberg moved to California at the age of 15, and was educated at U California, Riverside and U California, Los Angeles (PhD, 1978). In 1979, he was appointed to U Toronto, to teach Portuguese and comparative literature. The author of numerous books and essays on Brazilian and Portuguese writers, including the explorer-poet Luis de Camoes, he is also the co-director (with Richard S anger) of Tapir P. His volumes of primarily lyric poetry include The Invention of Honey (1990) and Map of Dreams (1996). See also LATIN A M E R I C A .
STEPHEN, A.M. (Alexander Maitland). Poet, novelist, essayist; b near Hanover, ON, 18 May 1882, d Vancouver i July 1942; son of Margaret (Whiteford) and Alexander Stephen. After serving in the First World War, Stephen settled in British Columbia as a writer, editor, and teacher. The Rosary of Pan (1923) and other volumes of poetry, although imitating the romantic and mystical manner of Bliss CARMAN, achieved substantial success. Stephen's strong social conscience emerged in The Gleaming Archway (1929),
STEVENS, Paul-Jules-Joseph. Writer, teacher; b Brussels, Belgium, i May 1830, d Coteau-duLac, QC, 29 Oct 1881; son of Adelaide (Wautier) and Jacques-Joseph Stevens, contract and civil servant; educ in Brussels. Stevens emigrated to Canada East c 1854, becoming a teacher in Berthier-en-Haut (and, in 1858, Montreal). He contributed numerous letters and FABLES (or 'apologues') to such NEWSPAPERS as Le Pays, L'Avenir, and Le National. The author of a series
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STEVENS
of essays on Canadian historical figures, such as Adam Dollard des Ormeaux, he won more lasting fame with his SHORT STORIES, regarded more highly in the 19905 than in the i86os. These ranged from Fables (1857) - 64 imitations of early fable writers (such as Aesop and Jean de La Fontaine) - to Contes populaires (1867), a series of verses and short tales on such subjects as drunkenness, exile, and moral truisms. STEVENS, Peter. Poet, professor; b Manchester, England, 17 Nov 1927; son of Elsie (Hill) and Stanley Stevens; emig 1957; educ U Nottingham (BA, 1951), McMaster (MA, 1963), and U Saskatchewan (PhD, 1968), Stevens taught English at U Windsor and wrote CRITICISM on KNISTER, the MCGILL GROUP, WADDINGTON, and other aspects of modern Canadian verse. He is the author of some 15 volumes of poetry which include Out of the Willow Trees (1986), Swimming in the Afternoon: New and Selected Poems (1992), and Attending to This World (1998). His poetry is essentially MODERNIST in its exploration of emptiness. Other major poetic topics include a fascination with LANDSCAPE, and the effects of a flight from a crumbling Empire. He also wrote Dorothy Livesay: Patterns in a Poetic Life (1992), a BIOGRAPHY that explores the importance of the events of LIVES AY'S life in reading her work.
1906; son of Elizabeth (Dubuc) and George Stewart, auctioneer; emig 1851. After growing up in Saint John, NB, Stewart apprenticed as a pharmacist, ran a philately journal (1865-7), and, arguing early for a national culture, began Stewart's Literary Quarterly Magazine (1867-72), attracting D'Arcy MCGEE, SANGSTER, MCLACHLAN, LE MOINE, andj.G. BOuRiNOT as contributors. An influential essayist, he moved to Toronto in 1878 as editor of Rose-Belford's Canadian Monthly, and (after a COPYRIGHT dispute with the journal's owners) to Quebec City in 1879 as editor of the Morning Chronicle. STEWART, Michael Sean. Roofer, semi-professional actor, computer specialist, novelist; b Lubbock, TX, 2 June 1965; son of Kay Lanette (Thornton) Stewart, a university English teacher. At the age of three, he moved to Edmonton, where he grew up. Places seem to have a larger impact on his work than do events. Edmonton, Vancouver, and Texas all contribute to grounding his work not so much to a particular location as to a sense of place. He now lives in Monterey, CA. Since 1993, Stewart has produced an average of one novel a year. Most at ease where SCIENCE FICTION meets fantasy, his novels include Nobody's Son (1993). Stefan Haag
Peter Mahon
STEVENSON, Richard William. Poet, lecturer; b Victoria, BC, 4 March 1952; son of Marguerite (D'aleva), nurse, and Robert Stevenson, dockyard planner/estimator. Stevenson, a graduate of the creative WRITING school at U British Columbia, teaches at Lethbridge Community C. He developed his first work - Driving Offensively (1985) - from his master's project. The experience of working in Nigeria in the early 1980, then led to Suiting Up (1986) and Horizontal Hotel (1989), both of which convey a highly personal, often sardonic encounter with AFRICA. These, along with several subsequent books, are sampled in A Murder of Crows (1998), a volume of new and selected poems; witty, often ribald, and frequently acerbic, Stevenson's poems deal repeatedly with what it means to be male. STEWART, George, Jr. Editor, writer; b New York City 26 Nov 1848, d Quebec City 26 Feb
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STINSON, Kathy. Children's writer; b Toronto 22 April 1952; daughter of Joyce (Gallinger) and Douglas Powell, appliance repairman. Author of over a dozen books for CHILDREN of various ages, Stinson is perhaps best known for her preschooler titles - Red Is Best (1982), translated into seven languages, and The Bare Naked Book (1986) - and for the young adult title Fish House Secrets (1992). Her socially aware books deal with such subjects as divorce and adoption; those for young children are enlivened by a sense of the humour children enjoy - particularly 'body humour.' She taught writing for children at George Brown C (Toronto). Her success with writing for the very young led to Writing Your Best Picture Book Ever (1994). Jane Flick
STORY, Gertrude. Storyteller, novelist; b Saskatoon 19 Sept 1929; daughter of Matilda (Jabusch) and Rheinhold Wudrick, farmers. In 1979, Story
STRACHAN
realized that she was attended by a 'writer inside'; she credits this prolific 'angel' with the composition of an extensive body of work that sensitively details the prairie experience. Her fictions include The Way to Always Dance (1983), It Never Pays to Laugh Too Much (1984), The Need of Wanting Always (1985), and After Sixty: Going Home (1991); her reminiscences include How to Saw Wood with an Angel (1992). Story received The President's Medal and Arts Prize, U Saskatchewan (1981); CBC Radio Fiction Award (1980); the Okanagan Short Story Award (1981). Apart from her internal angel, she attributes inspiration to Robert KROETSCH, w.o. MITCHELL, and Ken MITCHELL. Jennifer J. Gustar
STORYTELLING refers variously to (i) the art of ORAL narrative, whether among the NATIVE peoples (see names of specific groups) or others, (2) the spoken preservation of FOLK or other cultural traditions (see, eg, FINNIGAN, HISTORIOGRAPHY, IRELAND), (3) adaptations of narrative to oral media such as RADIO or FILM (see also TECHNOLOGY), (4) the oral communication of narrative to CHILDREN, and (5) loosely, to any form of narrative (eg, the SHORT STORY). The bilingual organization called Storytellers of Canada/Conteurs du Canada, founded in Montreal in 1992 and affiliated with many parallel local groups in the country, brings together some 150 Canadian storytellers who are committed to the active, dramatic art of storytelling - as distinct from story-writing - with child audiences especially in mind. On questions involving spoken idiom and Canadian pronunciation, see LANGUAGE. See also MONTREAL STORY TELLERS.
STOWE, Emily Howard. Teacher, physician, suffragist; b Norwich Township, UC, i May 1831, d Toronto 30 April 1903; daughter of Hannah Lossing (Howard) and Solomon Jennings, farmers; m John Stowe 22 Nov 1856. The first female public-school principal in Ontario and the first woman to practice medicine in Canada, Stowe enters the literary record in 1876 as one of the founders of the TORONTO WOMEN'S LITERARY CLUB, Canada's first suffrage group, which in 1883 identified itself more explicitly as the Toronto Women's Suffrage Assoc. The word
'literary,' which reflected the contemporary prevalence of educational and cultural clubs for middle-class women, was not entirely a disguise, as the membership included author Sarah Anne CURZON. See also VOTING RIGHTS. Further reading: Mary Beacock Fryer, Emily Stowe, Doctor and Suffragist (Toronto: Oxford UP 1990). Carole Gerson
ST PIERRE, Paul. Writer, editor, police commissioner; b Chicago 14 Oct 1923; son of Pearl Clayton (Stanford) and Napoleon St Pierre. Educated in Dartmouth, NS, he became a reporter for various Vancouver and district newspapers between 1945 and 1979, serving as Liberal Party MP for Coast Chilcotin riding (1968-72). St Pierre wrote NEWSPAPER columns, RADIO and television scripts, plays (Sister Salonika, 1969), CHILDREN'S fiction (Boss of the Namko Drive, 1965), essays (Chilcotin and Beyond, 1989), and stories; all his books, through several reprints and changes of publisher, remain in print. He became especially famous for his POPULAR fictions about the life of Chilcotin (Central BC) COWBOYS, as in Breaking Smith's Quarter Horse (1966) and Smith and Other Events (1985), both of which tell comic narratives about the virtues of common sense and gumption, and the complications that ensue when individualists meet official culture and each other. See also HUMOUR; NATIVES IN LITERATURE; FILM, TELEVISION, AND LITERATURE. STRACHAN, John. Bishop, educator, writer; b Aberdeen, Scotland, 12 April 1778, d Toronto i Nov 1867; son of Elizabeth (Findlayson) and John Strachan, quarryman. Poverty, not a sense of adventure, sent Strachan to Upper Canada to teach in 1799, but he became passionately attached to Canada. It was in Canada that he was ordained (in the Church of England, though brought up Presbyterian), began his own school (in Cornwall, ON), married, asserted his opposition to the United States during the War of 1812, sought legislative office, and argued for the establishment of universities and a governmentsupported elementary school system. Consecrated bishop of Toronto in 1839, he had long espoused conservative views, and sought prefer-
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ences for his church in matters of land ownership and EDUCATION, views that brought him the opposition of W.L. MACKENZIE during the 18305 and of the Reform government of 1849, but which led to the establishment of Trinity C (Toronto) in 1852. See also REBELLION of 1837.
author of four volumes of poetry in the MODERNIST tradition - including Rage of Space (1992) and Verse Portraits (1997) - and works for CHILDREN. Hawthorn House (1999) appeared posthumously.
Further reading: Sylvia Boorman, John Toronto (Toronto: Clarke Irwin, 1969); J.L.H. Henderson, John Strachan (Toronto: U Toronto P, 1969).
STRATFORD FESTIVAL. The renowned Stratford Festival began in July 1953 with a sixweek season of two Shakespeare plays performed under a canvas tent on a thrust stage designed by Tanya Moiseiwitsch and the first artistic director, Tyrone Guthrie. The Stratford, ON, theatre company has since replaced the tent with a permanent festival Theatre (1957), added the proscenium stage Avon Theatre (1963) and the thrust stage Tom Patterson Theatre (1971), named for the Festival's founder, and expanded to a six-month season. The festival quickly established an international focus and a classical repertory, performing the first non-Shakespeare play in 1954 and dropping the word 'Shakespearean' from its title in 1960. Yet a Canadian element has often been discernible. Canadian actors played distinctive Shakespeare, for example, in director Michael Langham's 1956 Henry V with its anglophone and francophone cast. The Avon and Tom Patterson Theatres have offered a few Canadian plays, and the Celebrated Writers Series, part of the festival's fringe, includes Canadian writers. Canadians such as Jean Gascon (1968-75), John HIRSCH (1981-85), and Richard Monette (1994-) became artistic directors. But, in 2000, financial issues seemed to outweigh national ones as dependence on box-office revenues resulted in summer entertainment seasons of musicals, comedies, and popular Shakespeare. See THEATRE HISTORY.
STRARAM, Patrick (pseud le Bison ravi). Writer; b Paris, France, 12 Jan 1934, d Montreal 6 March 1988; son of Daisy (Brooker) and Enrich Straram, head of the library at Radio francaise. At the age of 14, he left his family, and in 1954, left France for Vancouver. He spent four years there writing his first novel, Lafaim de I'enigme, which was not published until 1975. By 1959, he was in Montreal working in the TV newsroom of Radio-Canada and writing film reviews. A member of the PARTI PRIS group, he founded the Centre d'art de 1'Elysee with Jean-Paul Ostiguy. In his first published book, One + one cinemarx & Rolling Stones (1971), he called both for social revolution and for respect for the needs and desires of the individual. His works among them, Bribes I &• II and Blue clair (1984) demonstrate both his familiarity with contemporary POPULAR culture and his commitment to the constant questioning of social beliefs. Margaret Cook
STRATFORD, Philip. Critic, translator, and poet; b Chatham, ON, 13 Oct 1927, d Montreal 23 April 1999; son of Dr Reginald Killmaster Stratford and Phyllis (Coate) Stratford. Educated in Canada and France, Stratford had a distinguished career as an academic at U Montreal. In addition, he was book editor for Saturday Night magazine and a literary columnist with the Globe and Mail. Stratford's numerous scholarly works include a comparative study of Graham Greene and Francois Mauriac, a monograph on Marie-Claire BLAIS, and AH the Polarities (1986), a comparative analysis of 12 Canadian novels in French and English. He was an accomplished TRANSLATOR of francophone writers such as Claire MARTIN, Felix LECLERC, Andre Laurendeau, and Antonine MAILLET, and also the
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Further reading: John Pettigrew and Jamie Portman, Stratford: The First Thirty Years, 2 vols (Toronto: Macmillan, 1985). Margaret Doyle
STRATTON, Allan. Playwright, actor; b Stratford, ON, 1951; son of Dorothy (McPhedran) and John Stratton; educ Switzerland and U Toronto (MA, 1974). Stratton began his career in James REANEY'S Alpha Centre in Stratford and acted in various Canadian theatres. Stratton's plays
STRUCTURALISM AND POSTSTRUCTURALISM
incorporate HUMOUR and farce, and, frequently, biting SARCASM. Rexy (1981), which combines personal material from the diaries of Prime Minister Mackenzie King with dream sequences and historical data, earned Chalmers, Dora Mavor MOORE, and Canadian Authors Assoc AWARDS. Other plays-include 72 Under the O (1977), and The 101 Miracles of Hope Chance (1988). RJ. Birks
STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS, INTERIOR MONOLOGUE, see CHARACTER, NARRATOLOGY, PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM, STYLE.
STREN, Patti. Children's author and illustrator; b Brantford, ON, 8 Aug 1949; daughter of Sadie (Goldberg) and Maurie Stren, a manufacturer. Known for their ability to address both children and adults, Stren's unaffected illustrations and stories follow a wide variety of protagonists, from owls to champion wrestlers; she handles subject matter as diverse as porcupine intimacy and bulimia. Most often concerned with the plight of the lost, the outsider or the intrusive presence, Stren's books detail the need for acceptance and love. Her 1982 work I'm Only Afraid of the Dark (at Night!!) follows the developing relationship between two owls who help each other overcome their identical fears. Tamas Dobozy
STRICKLAND, Samuel. Writer; b Suffolk, England, 6 Nov 1804, d Lakefield, CW, 3 Jan 1867; son of Elizabeth (Homer) and Thomas Strickland, farmer. Strickland, the younger brother of Susanna MOODIE and Catharine Parr TRAILL, was, like them, educated locally; he himself emigrated to UPPER CANADA in 1825, and after his efforts to clear land for farming were thwarted, joined in John GALT'S Canada Company venture to establish settlements at Guelph and Goderich. In 1835 Strickland moved to the Lakefield district, and in time wrote anecdotally of his experiences; as edited by his sister Agnes Strickland in England - she had considered his original to be vulgar - the work appeared as Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West (1853; rpt 1970), in many respects a counter-document to his sisters' versions of backwoods life.
STRINGER, Arthur John Arbuthnot. Novelist; b Chatham, ON, 26 Feb 1874, d Mountain Lakes, NJ, 13 Sept 1950. While Stringer remained a journalist (with Harper's, Atlantic, and other magazines) throughout his life, he made his name as a writer of popular ROMANCES. Some critics consider The Silver Poppy (1903) and The Wine of Life (1921) the best of his 60 books, for their fidelity to experience; others rank the prairie trilogy higher (The Prairie Wife, 1915; The Prairie Mother, 1920; The Prairie Child, 1922), for the historical accuracy. All, however, tend to the maudlin, as do the 15 books of verse. Stringer (whose first wife was the actress Jobyna Howard, the original 'Gibson Girl') may well be remembered most for his SCREENPLAYS, especially as the mind behind The Perils of Pauline. Further reading: Victor Lauriston, Arthur Stringer: Son of the North (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1941). STRUCTURALISM and POSTSTRUCTURALISM are schools of CRITICISM AND THEORY that developed initially from the work of Ferdinand de Saussure and Claude Levi-Strauss in linguistics and anthropology, roughly during the two decades that followed the Second World War. Structuralism looks for recurrent patterns in a work of literature - generally formal ones, semantic or thematic motifs - and for ways in which these patterns organize, and so encode, social meaning, and it attaches aesthetic value to the presence of such patterns. Poststructuralism, a term loosely defined and applied in practice by FEMINISTS, MARXISTS, New Historicists and other critical theorists (among them Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, and primarily after 1970), argues that codes of meaning do not exist independent of the culture in which they are constructed - hence that they have value only in relation to one's concurrence with the values of the cultural context. Because the language of commentary is considered an extension of (rather than different in kind from) the language of 'creative writing,' moreover, literary texts contain within them the techniques by which they can be 'deconstructed' - that is, the codes of literature will be interpreted by other codes, which in turn require further codes to interpret them, and so on.
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STRUTHERS, Betsy. Writer, editor; b Toronto ii July 1951; daughter of Suzanne (Day), assistant teacher, and Leslie Porter, business teacher. Struthers is the author of MYSTERY novels and four poetry collections, including Running out of Time (1993) and Virgin Territory (1996). She writes a sensuous prose lyric in frank celebration of marital sexuality, both before and after parenthood; other poems report on childlessness, family tensions, and the physical ravages of aging. Her work is emotionally direct, and noted for its anecdotal clarity and subtle, straightforward imagery. Struthers has served as president of the LEAGUE OF CANADIAN POETS (1996). Mark Cochrane
STYLE, a term referring to the manner and organization of writing, the choice and arrangement of words, the control over sound and other patterns (grammatical, structural, figurative, tonal), and the relation between these choices and the effects they achieve; see IMAGERY, LANGUAGE, POETICS, RHETORIC.
SUFFRAGE, see VOTING RIGHTS. SUI SIN FAR, see Edith EATON. SUKNASKI, Andrew. Poet, visual artist; b Wood Mountain, SK, 30 July 1942; son of Julia (Karasinsky) and Andrew Suknaski Sr. Based in his native Wood Mountain since 1976, Suknaski has travelled widely in Canada and elsewhere. Under the influence of Vancouver's CONCRETE POETRY movement, he created the anarchic 'underground' magazine Elfin Plot in 1969, and pursued the idea of the poem as visual/tactile artifact. Despite experiments with form, the affirmation of roots is central to Suknaski's life and work, and in Wood Mountain Poems (1973) and The Ghosts Call You Poor (1978) he explores in FREE VERSE the collective cultural, spiritual, and linguistic history of Wood Mountain and of Western Canada. While Montage for an Instellar Cry (1982) sets forth a far-reaching, visionary indictment of the modern world, his anecdotal evocation of the Western Canadian past, steeped in the nuances of its dialects, has been recognized as his greatest achievement to date. See
SUBLIME, see LANDSCAPE.
also COWBOY POETRY.
SUCH, Peter Dennis. Writer, editor; b London, England, 29 April 1939; son of Amy (Gunthorpe), florist, and Lionel Such, pilot, killed in action 1944. Such was raised in a Masonic orphanage. He emigrated to Canada in 1953, and took teacher training after attending U Toronto (BA, MA); but before moving into academic administration (Atkinson C, York U), he entered the world of PUBLISHING. Founder of Impulse magazine, and managing editor of Books in Canada for some time, he wrote scripts for CBC-Television (see fiLM), SCIENCE FICTION stories, biographies of composers (Soundprints, 1972), impassioned histories of the Dorset INUIT and BEOTHUK (Vanished Peoples, 1978), and novels. His most critically acclaimed novel, Riverrun (1973), tells a Beothuk story; its style also reveals his rhetorical range, the fluidity of genre that characterizes his work as a whole, and his inquiries into the philosophical basis for perception and creation.
Further reading: Andrew Suknaski, The Land They Gave Away: New and Selected Poems, ed Stephen Scobie (Edmonton: NeWest, 1982); Pat Lane, 'The Poetry of Andy Suknaski,' Essays on Canadian Writing 18/19 (Summer/Fall 1980): 9099; Harvey Spak, dir, Wood Mountain poems (National Film Board, 1978).
Further reading: Patricia Keeney-Smith, Interview, Cross Canada Writers Q 7.2 (1985): 5-7. 26.
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SULLIVAN, Alan (pseud Sinclair Murray). Businessman, novelist, translator of F-A. SAVARD; b Montreal 29 Nov 1868, d Surrey, England, 6 Aug 1947; son of Francis (Renaud) and Edward Sullivan, Anglican priest and bishop of Algoma. Following on his Sault Ste Marie and private-school childhood, Sullivan for twenty years enjoyed a variety of outdoor jobs (surveying, prospecting, contracting). In time a successful gold-mining entrepreneur, he married into the well-to-do Hees family in 1900; fortune gave him the liberty to write and estates in Toronto and Surrey in which to live. His fifty books which include The Great Divide (1935), about the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and
SUTHERLAND
Cariboo Road (1946), about early British Columbia - are anglocentric and socially hierarchical. As his most famous work, The Rapids (1920; rpt 1972, based on the life of the American industrialist Francis Clergues) reveals, he celebrated the wilderness but portrayed the business tycoon, who turns wilderness into economic empire, as the ideal social model.
Summers has served as writer-in-residence at U Alberta (1991-2) and the Winnipeg Public Library (1990-1), and as a faculty member in the Banff School of Fine Arts WRITING program (1989, 1990).
Further reading: Gordon D. McLeod, Essentially Canadian: The Life and Fiction of Alan Sullivan (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 1982).
Cynthia Sugars
SULTE, Benjamin (pseud Joseph Amusard). Journalist, translator, poet, soldier, historian; b Trois-Rivieres, CE, 17 Sept 1841, d Trois-Rivieres 6 Aug 1923; son of Marie-Antoinette (Lefebvre) and Benjamin Suite, a sailor. Largely self-taught, Suite wrote two volumes of poetry, and his first stories appeared in 1862-3. His most ambitious work was probably his eight-volume Histoire des Canadiens-Francais, 1608-1880 (18825), which describes all aspects of French Canadian life: origins, history, religion, wars, discoveries, colonization, customs, domestic life, politics, economic development, and prospects for the future. His criticism of the Jesuits provoked much controversy. By 1867 he worked as a translator in the federal government - for the House of Commons and then in the Dept of Defence - until his retirement in 1903. He was a founding member of the ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA in 1882, and served as its president in 1904. Margaret Cook
SUMMERS, Merna. Short story writer, journalist; b Manville, AB, 22 March 1933; daughter of Anna (Modin) and Lewis Edward Summers. Married Carleton Leviston in 1959. Working first as a reporter for the Edmonton Journal (1953-61), she turned to freelance journalism and RADIO and television broadcasting, winning the Ohio State Award for Educational Broadcasting in 1968. Selections from her books of stories, The Skating Party (1974) and Calling Home (1982), appeared as North of the Battle (1988). Her AWARD-winning stories, which deal with rural Canadian prairie life, guide the reader towards moments of revelation at the heart of vaguely understood family and community dramas.
Further reading: Gloria Sawai, An Interview with Merna Summers,' Dandelion 7.2 (1980): 4855-
SURREALISM, see REALISM. SUTHERLAND, Fraser. Writer; b Pictou, NS, 5 Dec 1946; son of Russell and Mary (McHardy) Sutherland. He was educated at U King's College (Halifax) and at Carleton U (BJ, 1969) before becoming a reporter for such papers as the Wall StreetJ and the Globe and Mail, an EDITOR (Northern Journey, Books in Canada), and a writer working in a wide range of genres and styles. He has produced several volumes of poetry, from Strange Ironies (1972) to the ambitious Jonestown (1996), a dramatic account of a religious cult leader. He has written a novel, In the Village of Alias (1986), NOVELLAS, and short stories. His non-fiction includes a study of Ernest Hemingway and Morley CALLAGHAN, The Style of Innocence (1972), as well as studies of John GLASSCO, Canadian magazines, and Canada's SCOTTISH heritage. R.H. Ramsey
SUTHERLAND, John. Critic, editor; b Liverpool, NS, 21 Feb 1919, d Montreal i Sept 1956; son of Lois (Parker) and Frederick Sutherland, business administrator. Sutherland's fame rests not in his poetry (collected by his friend, Miriam WADDINGTON, 1972), nor even in his CRITICISM, which looked sharply at PRATT and other modern poets, but in the stir he created as editor of First Statement and its successor Northern R (1942-56). Sutherland was part of a Montreal literary group that included Mavis GALLANT, Louis DUDEK, and William MCCONNELL and he was impatient with current critical standards in poetry. He began First Statement (with his wife, Audrey Aikman, and sister, Betty Sutherland, who married Irving LAYTON) to redirect attention to the poetic power of the contemporary voice. His dismissals of C.G.D.
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ROBERTS and Robert FINCH and his quarrels with Arthur SMITH and Patrick ANDERSON, became legendary; they were part of his effort to turn Canadian poetry from unthinkingly 'English' to critically 'American' literary practice. Further reading: Miriam Waddington, All Nature into Motion,' Canadian Literature 41 (Summer 1969): 73-85; Miriam Waddington, Introduction to her ed, John Sutherland: Essays, Controversies and Poems (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1972): 7-18; Bruce Whiteman, ed The Letters of John Sutherland, 1942-1956 (Toronto: ECW, 1992). SVENDSEN, Linda Jane. Professor, story writer; b Vancouver 24 July 1954; daughter of Hazel (Sumner) and Robin Svendsen; m Brian McKeown - their children are Gabriel, b 1994, and Kathleen, b 1995. Svendsen earned her BA from U British Columbia (1977), her MFA from Columbia U (1980), a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford U for 1980-1, and a Bunting Fellowship from Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for 1981-2. Svendsen won first prize in the 1980 American Short Story Contest sponsored by the Atlantic. She lives in Vancouver and teaches creative WRITING at U British Columbia. Marine Life (1992) is a collection of short stories set in Vancouver and New York, and was selected to the Best Books List (1992) by the Globe and Mail and the New York Times. Svendsen's screen adaptation of Margaret LAURENCE'S The Diviners (1993) earned several awards. Svendsen also edited Words We Call Home: Celebrating Creative Writing at UBC(i99o). Joel Martineau
SWAN, Susan. Novelist, journalist, critic; b Midland, ON, 9 June 1945; daughter of Jane (Cowan) and Churchill Swan; educ McGill U (BA, 1967). Swan teaches CREATIVE writing at York U. Her three novels, The Biggest Modern Woman of the World (1983), The Last of the Golden Girls (1989), and The Wives of Bath (1993) are coming-of-age stories of young girls who explore their female identity. In particular, her novels broke new ground in their treatment of female sexuality. Her first, and probably most challenging, novel, The Biggest Modern Woman of the World, a finalist for the Governor General's
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Award, works within realist conventions while simultaneously pushing their limits. Swan relies on the basic facts of the life of Anna Swan, the Nova Scotia giantess (1846-88) who exhibited with P.T. Barnum, but deliberate anachronisms are part of the legend she seeks to create, helping her to explore the mythical elements of life. Swan writes Anna into history and explores the possibility of her subjectivity through her use of INTERTEXTUAL references. She recalls historical and literary texts, showing their inevitable influence on Anna's story, but also PARODIES them for their silences and one-sidedness, critiquing the very process of history writing. The many dichotomies that the story sets up, such as male/female, public/private, American/ Canadian, black/white, rich/poor, normal/ freaky, are broken down because, according to Teresa Heffernan, every character is exposed as different and the concept of normality is defamiliarized. See also ALLEGORY, UNITED STATES AND CANADIAN LITERATURE.
Further reading: Teresa Heffernan, 'Tracing the Travesty: Constructing the Female Subject in Susan Swan's The Biggest Modern Woman of the World,' Canadian Literature 133 (1992): 24-37; Smaro Kamboureli, 'The Biggest Modern Woman of the World: Canada as the Absent Spouse,' Studies in Canadian Literature 16.2 (1991/92): 1-16. Gabriele Helms
SWARD, Robert. Writer; b Chicago 23 June J 933; son of Gertrude (Huebsch) and Irving M. Sward, a doctor. After serving with the US navy in Korea, Sward was educated at U Illinois (BA, 1956) and U Iowa (MA, 1958). He subsequently worked as a CBC broadcaster and as a teacher before resettling in Santa Cruz, CA. Founder of Soft P (1970-9), he published over a dozen works of poetry and prose, most (as the titles of his volumes of collected poems suggest: Haifa Life's History, 1983; Four Incarnations, 1991) constituting a kind of inventory of his life's experience: an Iowa suite, a Toronto Island suite, a Santa Cruz suite. Energetically engaging with the visible world, his personal anecdotes reach towards more abstract possibilities - for Sward, the surreal juxtapositions of the material world are the avenue through which people reach mystery and grace.
SZABADOS
SWEATMAN, Margaret Lisa. Writer, teacher; b Winnipeg 13 May 1953; daughter of Lorraine (Macdonald) and Alan Sweatman, a lawyer; educ U Winnipeg (BA, 1974) and Simon Eraser U (MA, 1987). Sweatman restages the WINNIPEG GENERAL STRIKE of 1919 in her prizewinning first novel, Fox (1991). Through a collage of voices largely forgotten or obscured (eg, those of WOMEN of the working and upper CLASS), and through a recontextualization of familiar voices (eg, those of J.S. Woodsworth and MARX) and mainstream NEWSPAPERS, the novel dissolves the conventional linear historiographic narrative, calling on the reader to revision the events of 1919. Sweatman's lyrical style and her interest in counterpoint, improvisation, and the performative (she also wrote extensively for the stage) come together in her CD recording Broken Songs (1995), featuring a poetry chapbook and original music by Glenn Buhr. Further reading: Daniel Fischlin, "As sparrows do fall": Sweatman's Fox and Transforming the Socius,' Open Letter 9.4 (1995): 57-68; Reinhold Kramer, 'The 1919 Winnipeg General Strike and Margaret Sweatman's Fox,' Canadian Literature 160 (Spring 1999): 50-70; Margaret Sweatman, 'Dialogue and Difficulty: Narrative as Performance,' in Studying and Writing the Difference, ed Hans Braun and Wolfgang Klooss (Trier: Zentrum fur Kanada-Studien, 1993): 159-64. Gabriele Helms
SWEDE, George (Juris Purins). Writer, professor, editor; b Riga, Latvia, 20 Nov 1940; son of Valdis Purins, law student, and Virginia (Zeberga) Purins (later Swede, Paynter). After his father was shot by the Nazis (1942), Swede was raised by his mother and adoptive father, Arnold Swede, a motorcycle racer and businessman; he emigrated to Canada in 1947. Swede was educated at U British Columbia (BA, 1964), Dalhousie U (MA, 1965), and Greenwich U in London (PhD, 1996), and teaches psychology at Ryerson Polytechnic. He is the author of over 30 works, including haiku, MYSTERY stories for CHILDREN (with his wife, Anita Krumins), and numerous picture and poetry books for children, which include Time Is Flies (1984) and High Wire Spider (1986).
SYLLABIC VERSE, see PROSODY. SYLLABICS, see CREE, James EVANS, INUIT. SYMBOL, SYMBOLISM, see IMAGERY. SYMONS, Hugh Brennan Scott. Novelist; b 13 July 1933; son of Harry and Dorothy (Bull) Symons; grandson of William Perkins Bull, who wrote several works on Ontario history. Of LOYALIST stock, Symons attended private schools, U Toronto, Cambridge U, and the Sorbonne, becoming a journalist, teacher of fine arts, and curator at the Royal Ontario Museum before turning away from what he found too confining a cultural atmostphere and moving to Montreal. A series of autobiographically based fictions followed, startling at the time for their frankness about GAY life, their assertions of intellectual - even revolutionary - freedom, their experimental format, and their technical innovations. Place d'armes (1967) is set in Montreal, Civic Square (1969) in Toronto, Helmet of Flesh (1986) in Morocco. A selection of his work, Dear Reader (1998), appeared at the same time as a DOCUMENTARY FILM on him, God's Fool, directed by Nik Sheehan. Further reading: Graeme Gibson, Eleven Canadian Novelists [Interview] (Toronto: Anansi, 1973): 301-24. SZABADOS, Bela. Author, editor, aesthetician, professor of philosophy (U Regina); b Kolozsvar, Hungary, 18 Oct 1942; son of Rozalia (Niedermeyer) and Bela Szabados, engineer/architect. Szabados is the author of In Light of Chaos, an autobiographical account of LIFE growing up in Russian-occupied Hungary, of youth in a refugee camp, and of his early years as an immigrant and student in Montreal where his family settled. He is an editor of On the Track of Reason: Essays in Honour ofKai Nielsen, and author of numerous essays in philosophical and literary journals, and occasional contributor of poetry. Further reading: Marlene Kadar, 'Reading Ethnicity in Lifewriting: In the Light of Chaos and out from Under the Ribs of Death: Bela Szabados Rewrites Sandor Hunyadi,' Essays on Canadian Writing 56 (1995): 70-83. Heather G. Hodgson
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SZANTO, George H. (Herbert). Fiction writer, playwright; b Londonderry, Northern Ireland, 4 June 1940; son of Dora (Zollschan), a college teacher, and Miklos Szanto, who managed a textile mill; educ Harvard (PhD in comparative literature, 1967). Szanto was raised in New Hampshire. He taught literature and communications at universities in Brazil and the United States, as well as at McGill U, where he directed the comparative literature program. His literary output includes five plays, two collections of short stories, three novels, and four works of literary criticism. From the outset, in the play The Great Chinchilla War! (1983) and the stories of Sixteen Ways to Skin a Cat (1977), his work was marked by the eruption of the fantastic into everyday life and the subversion of structured, familiar reality by the unexpected. His increasing interest in Mexico and the magic REALISM inherent in its cultural palimpsest infuses his novel The Underside of Stones (1990), which was translated into French and Italian, and led to the interviews published in the literary study Inside the Statues of Saints: Mexican Writers on Culture and Corruption, Politics and Daily Life (1996). One of his short stories, 'How Ali Gran Got His Name,' won a National Magazine Award for Fiction in 1988. See LATIN AMERICA. Hugh Hazelton
SZUCSANY, Desiree. Novelist, short story writer, translator; b Montreal 14 Feb 1955. Her father, Charles Szucsany, was a potter of Hungarian origin and her mother, Michele Lefebvre, of Quebec extraction. Educated in Spanish and German at universities in Madrid and Montreal, Szucsany founded her own publishing house, Deesse, in 1980, publishing her first novel, La chasse-gardee (1980), and then Le violon (1981). In 1981 she also published her first collection of short stories, La passe, and in 1983 her first book of poetry, L'aveugle, both of which puzzled critics. She worked on translations from 1981 to 1992, including works by M.T. KELLY (1990) and Morley CALLAGHAN (1991). Margaret Cook
SZUMIGALSKI, Anne. Poet, editor; b London, England, 3 Jan 1922, d Saskatoon, 22 April 1999; daughter of Major Herbert E. and Molly
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(Winder) Howard-Davis. She was educated privately in Hampshire and served as a welfare officer and interpreter during the Second World War. In 1951 she emigrated to Saskatchewan with her husband and children. A founder of the Saskatchewan Writers' Guild and Grain, and a frequent participant in collaborative endeavours, most notably with Terrence HEATH, Szumigalski was a key figure in the Saskatchewan literary establishment. Doctrine of Signatures (1983) and Instar (1985) were finalists for the Governor General's AWARD for poetry, which Szumigalski won in 1995 for Voice. Her densely textured poetry is notable for its botanical and entomological metaphors, its use of MYTH, and its explorations of diverse facets of femininity. Further reading: John Livingstone Clark, ed, Anne Szumigalski, special issue of Prairie Fire 18.1 (1997)R. Gooding
TABLOIDS AND PULP MAGAZINES are examples of concise, usually sensationalized JOURNALISM, aimed at the POPULAR market. Tabloid topics include social scandal and gossip, sometimes extending to hucksterism and selfinterested politics (eg, tabloids in the 19205 helped stir up a fear of white slavery and the 'yellow peril': see RACE AND RACISM). Though often short-lived, and occasionally PARODIC, such papers - they include Hush, Axe, and later Frank - depend on low overhead and wide circulation (Jack Canuck, for example, distributed 63,000 copies a week in 1920). Generally claiming to be the voice of ordinary people, they also were written in such a way as to reconfirm the suspicions and biases of their particular readership. Pulp magazines - monthly narrative collections that advertised the 'true facts' of real crimes, eg, Feature Detective Cases, Scoop Detective Cases, Sensational Crime Confessions, True Police Cases, Daring Crime Cases - emerged after 1940, when Canadian law (exercising wartime restrictions) banned the importation of American crime periodicals; they lasted into the 19505, when paperback fictions, just becoming widely available, replaced them. While promising explicit and titillating information, and illustrated with lurid photographs of posed models,
TAYLOR
the stories in these magazines were generally written as moral fables, reaffirming the status quo and the judiciousness of the forces of law and order. See also CANUCK, CLASS, MYSTERY AND ROMANCE, NEWSPAPERS, MAGAZINES, and COMMERCIAL JOURNALS.
TACHE, Joseph-Charles (pseud Gaspard le Mage). Essayist, journalist, short story writer; b Kamouraska, LC, 24 Dec 182.0, d Ottawa 16 April 1894; son of Henriette (Boucher de la Broquerie) and Charles Tache, a captain in an elite militia regiment. He became a doctor and then, in 1847, was elected to the legislative assembly as a Conservative (1847-57). In *%57 he cofounded the conservative newspaper Le Courrier du Canada with Alfred GARNEAU, and in 1859 wrote about prospects for CONFEDERATION (Des provinces de I'Amerique du nord et d'une union federale). As a novelist and storyteller he published Forestiers et voyageurs (1863) and Trois legendes de monpays (1871), both of which reveal his love of nature. He was named professor of physiology at U Laval in 1860, and later became deputy federal minister of agriculture and statistics (186488). Margaret Cook
TAKASHIMA, Shizuye Violet. Painter, author; b Vancouver 12 July 1928; daughter of Teru Fujiwara and Senji Takashima. Although she grew up and retired in Vancouver, Takashima graduated from Ontario C of Art, lived in London for three years and New York for seven, travelled in South and East Asia for a year, and taught at Ontario C of Art for over 20 years. She was profoundly influenced by her three years in an internment camp for JAPANESE Canadians in New Denver, BC, as witnessed in her poetic prose memoir, A Child in Prison Camp (1971). This simply written, penetrating journal highlights family and community bonds, pathos, perseverance, and reverie. It is illustrated by her own luminous water-colour scenes of life in the camp. R. Clark
TALL TALE, an exaggerated and often extended ANECDOTE, much admired as a form of vernacular storytelling (as in some Quebec and Maritime FOLKLORE). Common in the
West, on Vancouver Island, and in Newfoundland as well, tall tales constitute the basis for numerous more serious narratives, such as some of those by Jack HODGINS and Robert KROETSCH. TARDIVEL, Jules-Paul. Journalist, novelist; b Covington, KY, 2 Sept 1851, d Quebec City 24 April 1905; son of an English mother converted to Catholicism, Isabella (Brent), and a French father, Claudius Tardivel. Tardivel was raised by his aunt and uncle (Frances and Julius Brent) in Ohio. He moved to Canada in 1868, learned French, and in 1873 became a journalist, working for La Minerve and Le Canadien. In 1881, in Quebec, he founded the weekly La Verite, which he published until his death. Opposed to all forms of liberalism, he became one of the leaders of the ULTRAMONTANE party. In his novel Pour lapatrie (1895; tr Sheila FISCHMAN as For My Country, 1975), set 50 years in the future, Quebec is dominated by Freemasons from Ottawa. Patriotic by Tardivel's own definition, and assertively pro-Catholic, the novel was in many respects a veiled attack on his one-time associate, the liberal journalist Israel Tarte; it was later criticized for its restrictive definition of racial and religious purity. La langue francaise au Canada (1901) speaks of the dangers of anglicization. Jules-Paul Tardivel (1969), ed Pierre Savard, samples the range of his work. See also DICK. Further reading: Tom Sinclair-Faulkner, 'God's Flower of Hope: The Religious Matrix of Quebec's Independantisme,' Canadian Issues 7 (1985): 367-89Margaret Cook
TAYLOR, Charles. Philosopher, political theorist; b Montreal 5 Nov 1931; son of Simone (Beaubien) and Walter Margrave Taylor; educ McGill U (BA in philosophy, 1952), Oxford U (BA, 1955; DPhil, 1961). Taylor has taught in the Dept of Philosophy at McGill U since 1961, except for an appointment as the Clichele professor of social and political theory at Oxford, 1976-81. In 1981-2 he was a member of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton U. He is a fellow of the ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA and of the British Academy.
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Taylor is an internationally respected philosopher whose principal theme is that empiricist descriptions of human behaviour are too narrow to explain a number of important aspects of human existence and consciousness. In Explanation of Behaviour (1964) he argued that behaviourism in particular was too reductive a model of human learning since it ignored perceived purpose and intentionality. In a twovolume collection entitled Philosophical Papers (1985), containing Philosophy and the Human Sciences and Human Agency and Language, he argued that two aspects of human consciousness have eluded empirical study: (i) the dimension of selfinterpretation, and (2) a tendency in human cognition to imbue that which is perceived with VALUE. Both of these qualities in human cognition, he maintained, resist empirical investigation. In Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989), his most influential work, Taylor concluded that the moral imperatives of modern culture are freedom, autonomy of the self, benevolence, the affirmation of ordinary life, and equality. Because of the philosophical conflict surrounding the sources of these imperatives, contemporary thinkers have tried to reconstruct ethics without reference to the good. Such an ultimate idea of goodness inheres, however, in all human thought and activity whether or not recognized as such even in the case of technological culture. It is important to recognize that all of these implicit goods in modern culture and consciousness have a rational aspect, and are not merely expressions of feeling or desire. In The Malaise of Modernity (1991), published in the United States as The Ethics of Authenticity (1992), Taylor described three malaises of modernity: radical individualism, the primacy of instrumental (technological) reason, and the atomism of the self-absorbed individual. The effect of these features of modern life is to detach people from a concern about society and the good of others as well as in the case of instrumental reason to cause a focus on means rather than on ends. In Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition (1992) and Reconciling the Solitudes: Essays on Canadian Federalism and Nationalism (1993), Taylor argued that the recognition of identity involves a dialogical understanding. While
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modern liberalism dictates that all citizens be treated as equals, a view that reflects the thinking of most of English-speaking Canada, Taylor maintained that some other cultures, such as that in Quebec, require recognition of their distinctiveness and value as communities. He concluded that the Canadian federalist system is a flexible instrument that can accommodate both the desire for egalitarianism and uniformity and the desire to be recognized as distinctive. Nowhere else, he added, is Quebec likely to satisfy these two kinds of longing - certainly not in a society such as the United States with its strong inclination towards uniformity. See also INTELLECTUAL HISTORY.
Further reading: James Tully and Daniel Weinstock, eds, Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism: The Philosophy of Charles Taylor in Question (New York: Cambridge, 1994). Ross Labrie
TAYLOR, Drew Hayden. Dramatist, essayist; b Peterborough, ON, i July 1962; son of Fritzie Taylor. An OJIBWA from Ontario's Curve Lake reserve, he studied radio and TV broadcasting at Seneca C, then worked as a journalist while writing television scripts for such series as The Beachcombers and Street Legal. His plays deal comically with serious elements of NATIVE life such as alcohol abuse and the 'scoop-up' of Native children. Toronto at Dreamer's Rock (1990) won a Chalmers AWARD, and The Bootlegger Blues (1991) the Canadian Authors Assoc Literary Award. Someday (1993) and its sequel Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth (1998) toured widely. The latter won a Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding New Play. Taylor has served as artistic director of Toronto's Native Earth Performing Arts theatre company and published an essay collection, Funny, You Don't Look like One: Observations from a Blue-Eyed Ojibway (1996). Jerry Wasserman
TEACHING CANADIAN LITERATURE. The intersection between Canadian literature and the classroom is a site of radical ambivalence. Whether addressing issues of curricular structure, course content, or classroom pedagogy, teachers have produced and responded to com-
TEACHING CANADIAN LITERATURE
plex, often ambiguous perspectives on questions of both literary value and imagined nationhood. The shifting inflections of course titles such as Canadian Literature(s), English-Canadian Literature, or Literature in Canada suggest something of the struggle for ascendancy of differing if often overlapping conceptions of both Canada and Canadian writing. Similarly, in Quebec, the move from the term 'litterature canadienne' to 'litterature canadienne-francaise' or 'litterature canadienne-francaise et quebecoise' marks a variety of struggles. Early writers, readers, and teachers, shaped by EUROPEAN ideologies, not surprisingly measured both literature and nationality by imported standards. Even when these standards and assumptions were difficult to reconcile with local experience, their influence was pervasive. Selections from Canadian Poets, ed E.H. DEWART, for example, is working at constructing Canada through its literature even before CONFEDERATION. It and other early ANTHOLOGIES and LITERARY HISTORIES reflect an acceptance of a compendium of 19th-century Anglo-European literary and social assumptions: literature joins RELIGION as a vehicle for inculcating domestic morality. In 'English' Canada, British imperialism and Canadian NATIONALISM combine as complementary rather than opposed allegiances. What is surprising is the extent to which these and other assumptions born out of European Romantic nationalism would influence the teaching of Canadian literature throughout the following century. Arnoldian humanism dominated in anglophone Canada, while in Quebec, the influence of such critics as Madame de Stael, Hippolyte Taine, Ferdinand Brunetiere, and Sainte-Beuve was pervasive (these French critics were influential in anglophone Canada as well). A major nationalist turning point for francophone writers was Francois-Xavier GARNEAU'S Histoire du Canada (1845-52), a powerfully literary assertion of nationalism that countered the defeat of the rebels of 1837-8, but which also profoundly influenced a whole range of writers. However a strong conservative tradition of 'clerical criticism' meant that until the QUIET REVOLUTION of the 19605, this nationalism was generally cultural rather than political.
A fundamental tenet of European Romantic nationalist ideology saw national cultures developing through an organic process expressed in metaphors of parent/child, tree/branch, or river/tributary. A second tenet saw national cultural achievement as validating national sovereignty. These problematic assumptions provided the underlying framework for the establishment of LANGUAGE and literature departments along national lines when formal university study of modern literatures began in the i9th century. These same structures governed the development of formal literary study in colonial universities, offering no room for a reconceptualization of culture, literature, or nationality outside of European norms. Instead, literary study served as a powerful extension of European aesthetic and social codes. In both anglophone and francophone systems, the fundamental assumption behind literary study was that without a great literature, no nation could claim its distinct identity. In Quebec, French literature was part of the arts curriculum at U Laval from its founding in 1852. The idea that French Canadian literature could be used to support nationalist aspirations dates from Henri-Raymond CASGRAIN'S manifesto, 'Le mouvement litteraire en Canada' (1866), which inspired Camille ROY to argue in 1904 for the inclusion of Quebec literary history in the curricula of not only the classical colleges but also the high schools. He subsequently published and revised an influential textbook, Manuel d'histoire de la litterature canadienne francaise (1918; first ed 1907), designed to assist teachers in carrying out this task. The study of English literature in anglophone Canada dates from the appointment of W. J. Alexander to the chair of English at Dalhousie U in 1884. Five years later, Alexander took a chair at U Toronto, by which time other English Canadian universities were also introducing formal classes. Like Roy, Alexander influenced generations of high-school teachers and students through the poetry anthology he edited, Representative Poetry, which contained poems by Archibald LAMPMAN, Duncan Campbell SCOTT, and Marjorie PICKTHALL (1920 ed). Although they were products of European training and influence, Alexander and his generation were not hostile to the idea of Canadian literature,
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and many fulfilled a perceived social responsibility by writing appreciative commentary on its achievements or supporting writers and their associations. The perspective governing their early lectures and essays (like that of so many of their successors) was, however, one of the literary colony 'coming to voice,' implicitly in the wake of established CANONS of European literature. Not until the 19605 and the publication of Robin MATTHEWS' and James Steele's The Struggle for Canadian Universities (1969) would Canadians effectively transmute the assumptions of European Romantic nationalism to argue for their own pedagogical independence. Even then, the perceived threat was the cultural imperialism of the United States rather than the institutional influence of Britain, although the latter 'parent' culture still dominated the culture and curricula of English departments in both Canada and the United States. In anglophone Canada and francophone Quebec, courses in the national literatures were usually introduced as 'add-ons' to a curriculum still overwhelmingly dominated by British and French texts. In Canada, institutional histories are often incomplete, but the first undergraduate course in English Canadian literature was apparently offered by J. B. Reynolds in the summer of 1907 to the women registered at Macdonald Institute, an affiliate of what is now U Guelph. In 1907-8 Susan Cameron taught a course in American and English Canadian literature at McGill U. Archibald MACMECHAN, Alexander's successor at Dalhousie U, introduced a course that examined literature in both English and French in 1923. By the end of the 19205, courses in English Canadian literature had been introduced at Bishop's U, U British Columbia, Dalhousie U, Mount Allison U, Queen's U, and U Western Ontario. Courses in what was then termed 'litterature canadienne' were established in the early 19205 by Camille Roy at the Ecole normale superieur in Quebec City and Emile Chartier at U Montreal. (Most of the postwar founders of literary presses in Quebec devoted to the national literature were graduates of U Montreal.) Chartier taught French Canadian literature at the Sorbonne in 1927; both he and Roy knew and promoted English Canadian literature as well as French. McGill U also introduced a course in the 19205 as part of the French
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literature program; a separate course would not appear until 1949. U Ottawa introduced courses in French Canadian literature in 1924. U Toronto first offered English Canadian literature in 19345 as part of a course in American and Canadian literatures, a recurring combination at other institutions through to the 19605. Although the numbers may seem impressive, there was a widespread pattern of half-courses, irregularly offered courses, non-credit courses, courses not counted as credit towards honours or majors degrees, or courses dependent on a single professor. In a pattern continuing through the latter half of the 20th century, the inclusion of such courses, while announced as innovation, usually also signalled the containment of influence on larger curricular and institutional issues. Chronological lists of course offerings can offer only a partial indication of actual practice in the teaching of Canadian literature. As early as 1924, the Canadian Bookman could proudly report the results of a survey initiated by the CANADIAN AUTHORS ASSOC on'Canadian Literature in Education': 'Canadian literature is receiving good attention in the courses of our universities. This should create a sound Canadian mentality, and prepare a better future for Canada's population.' In 1975, T.H.B. Symons's report of the Commission on Canadian Studies, To Know Ourselves, tempered nationalist enthusiasm with the finding that only 8 per cent of undergraduate courses in Canadian departments of English considered Canadian literature. David Cameron's follow-up to the Symons report, Taking Stock (1996), found this number rising to 12 per cent. Cameron expresses surprise that English departments report the smallest proportion of Canadian content among the nine disciplines surveyed, 'barely more than one in ten course offerings.' An indication of the institutional ambiguity underlying this figure emerges when it is placed beside a report received by Cameron from the Assoc of Canadian College and University Teachers of English which echoed the Bookman in proclaiming Canadian studies 'a very powerful force in the discipline.' The comparable figures for the inclusion of French Canadian literature in French departments are much higher: 17 per cent (Symons 1975) and 22 per cent (Cameron 1996). The differences between Quebec and the rest of
TEACHING CANADIAN LITERATURE
Canada during this period might be explained by the movement of English Canada closer to economic integration with the United States and the contemporary rise of Quebec nationalism, which led to the flight of Anglo capital from Montreal and the establishment of French as the official language of Quebec. Despite slow progress in the institutionalization of the teaching of both English and French Canadian literature in the Canadian university, gradually resources for such teaching were produced. Teachers of the 19205 built on the 19thcentury achievements of Dewart, LIGHTHALL, andH.j. MORGAN in documenting and anthologizing Canadian writing in six literary handbooks or histories (most notably Archibald MacMechan's Headwaters of Canadian Literature, 1924, rpt 1974), various collections of poetry and prose, the first anthology of Canadian SHORT STORIES, the first anthology of Canadian plays, and the first collection of English Canadian FOLK songs. Added to these in the next two decades were E.K. BROWN'S On Canadian Poetry (1943), A.J.M. SMITH'S Book of Canadian Poetry (1943) and from 1936, the annual reviews of Canadian writing (both English and French) in the 'Letters in Canada' supplement to 17 Toronto Q. When the teaching of Canadian writing rapidly expanded in Canadian schools, colleges, and universities in the 19605, new courses in Canadian literature could be supported and sustained by R.E. WATTERS'S A Checklist of Canadian Literature (1959), the first edition of the Canadian Anthology (1956) co-edited by Walters and C.F. KLINCK, the New Canadian Library series of reprints initiated in 1957, the publication of the first edition of the Literary History of Canada (1965) and the establishment of the scholarly JOURNAL, Canadian Literature (1959-). In Quebec, Jules Fournier and Olivar ASSELIN edited Anthologie des Poetes Canadiens in 1920; Guy Sylvestre followed with his Anthologie de la poesie canadienne d'expressionfrancaise, 1942. F. Le Jeune led a tradition of French Canadian Studies at U Ottawa, publishing Dictionnaire general de biographic, histoire, litterature, agriculture, commerce, industrie et des arts, sciences moeurs, coutumes, institutions politiques et religieuses du Canada in 1933. The 19608 and 19705 saw new journals (Etudes francaises, 1964-; Etudes litteraires, 1968-;
Voix et images du pays 1967-), and the publication of literary histories and guides, notably the Dictionnaire pratique des auteurs quebecois, 1976, ed Reginald Hamel, John Hare, and Paul Wyczynski. Several long-term projects began in this period, including a major series of sociological studies of Quebec literature, initiated by the publication in 1964 of the proceedings of a conference, Litterature et societe canadienne-franfaises, ed Fernand DUMONT and Jean-Charles Falardeau, and a bibliographic project started in 1971, Dictionnaire des oeuvres litteraires au Quebec, directed by Maurice LEMIRE. Succeeding decades saw impressive developments of these initiatives as publishers responded to growing scholarly interest and classroom markets. If the publication of anthologies, textbooks, editions, and supporting bibliographical and critical materials (see CRITICISM, REFERENCE GUIDES) was crucial to the expansion of Canadian literature in high school, college, and university classrooms after 1960, the education of the instructors in those classrooms was equally influential. R.P. Baker and C.F. Klinckhad demonstrated that it was possible to complete doctoral dissertations on Canadian literature at Harvard U in 1916 and Columbia U in 1943, as had Seraphin Marion in Paris in 1927. However only three Canadian universities offered doctoral degrees in literature before the Second World War (Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa) and the number of those devoted to Canadian literature until the 19605 was negligible. In 1940, a graduate program was established at U Montreal for both master's and doctoral study (ironically, many of the first theses on French Canadian literature were written by anglophones destined to teach outside Quebec). The first graduate course in English Canadian literature at U Toronto was introduced in 1947-8. Over the next 40 years, however, rapidly expanding doctoral programs saw hundreds of doctoral dissertations on Canadian literature registered by Canadian universities. As larger numbers of university instructors came to classrooms with a specialized interest in teaching and research in this field, students subsequently employed as teachers in schools and colleges were influenced by the scholarly legitimacy assigned to the field within the professoriate. Nevertheless, the number of Canadianists
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(defined by Cameron as someone who had, in a three-year period, taught a course, supervised a thesis, or conducted a research project on a Canadian subject) found to be working in English departments in the early 19905 was the lowest, 25 per cent, of the disciplines surveyed. Canadianists formed 29 per cent of French department faculty, the second lowest. For both these groups, the founding of the Assoc for Canadian and Quebec Literatures/Assoc de litteratures canadiennes et quebecoises (ACQL/ ALCQ) proved an important site for the initiation of major research projects and the dissemination of knowledge. In Quebec, several university research centres supported the production of publications crucial to the study of francophone writing in Canada: for examples, U Ottawa's Centre de recherche en civilisation canadienne francaise and the Centre de recherche en litterature quebecoise at U Laval. Olivar Asselin's preface to his and Jules Fournier's Anthologie des poetes canadiens begins with the comment that a national literature requires more than national subject matter and went on to display the cultural cringe typical of colonies everywhere: 'ce qui s'est public chez nous d'ouvrages a pretentions litteraires sur des sujets canadiens ne saurait constituer une litterature canadienne.' In Britain, the introduction of English studies in general as an Arnoldian vehicle for a secularized moral training required arguments that the study of the literature of England could meet a standard of excellence and rigour sufficient to allow it to serve as an alternative to Latin and Greek. Indeed, for some time in Britain, English literature was a subject reserved for colonials and women. Once the battle for English literature was won in Britain, however, the study of English literature itself was not constructed as political, nor was its use to inculcate positive stereotypes acknowledged; thus, arguments that more attention should be paid to English-language Canadian writing could always be dismissed as attempts to politicize an ideal of unproblematized excellence at the heart of the discipline of literary study. Running alongside arguments about whether Canadian literature was really good enough to be taught - even as an index to a national culture - was an ambivalent English Canadian
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response to the whole idea of such literary nation building. In the United States, European Romantic nationalism offered ideological support for the assertion of a distinctive American cultural voice. In English Canada, a different history of political evolution made this kind of assertion difficult to sustain. Indeed the speed with which American nationalist discourse was normalized within imperialist discourse not only encouraged Canadian maintenance of symbolic connections with a British extraterritorial past but also discouraged easy assumptions about any claims for a national imaginary reconciling of French and English, REGION and nation. Thus, the pattern of the 2oth century was one in which the idea of an imagined nation and the study of the validity of such a notion developed at the same time. Whether one looks at the mixed response to the classroom activities of the Canadian Authors Assoc in the 19205 or the equally mixed reaction to Margaret ATWOOD'S Survival (1972) in the 19705, one sees both the rejection of what would now be identified as postnational ideologies and heated interrogation of attempts to identify national patterns of recurring symbols and themes. Earlier narratives of national identity that ignored regional, ethnic, NATIVE, and female difference (see
CULTURAL PLURALITY, FIRST NATIONS,
WOMEN'S STUDIES) began to be supplanted by readings exploring the negotiation of multiple identities through language. Quebec, however, has - at least from a nationalist perspective - an enviable cultural, geographic, and linguistic unity compared to English Canada, especially when French Canada is included in the national imaginary. Thus the failings of nationalist literary readings were felt less strongly, although the presence of francophone writers from outside Quebec, such as Gabrielle ROY and Antonine MAILLET, as well as immigrant writers such as Dany LAFERRIERE certainly trouble any simplistic conceptions of Quebec literature formulated in the 19905. For those most committed to the explanatory power of nationality as hermeneutic strategy, the fields constituted as Canadian Studies, COMMONWEALTH literatures, and POSTCOLONIAL Theory introduced particularly important new pedagogical perspectives. Canadian Studies emerged in the 19605 with an emphasis on
TECHNOLOGY, COMMUNICATIONS, AND CANADIAN LITERATURE
formal interdisciplinary programs and the education of informed citizens. The same decade saw the development of Commonwealth Studies as a vehicle for comparative study of the literatures and history of former British colonies. By the 19805, postcolonial theory (see CRITICISM) offered an enhanced vocabulary for addressing differences of RACE, CLASS, and GENDER within narratives of nationality. The international profile of all three fields also influenced the teaching of Canadian literature outside Canada's borders and all three contributed to an increased understanding not only of the relation between cultural forms and social power but also of the politics of pedagogy. With the encouragement and support of the federal government, the Assoc for Canadian Studies (est 1973) and the International Council for Canadian Studies (est 1981) were instrumental in establishing Canadian Studies associations in more than two dozen countries. Within these, teachers of English and French Canadian literature in other countries found both pedagogical support and a disciplinary infrastructure. Inside Canadian universities and colleges, however, Canadian Studies has remained an interdisciplinary subfield with relatively little impact on discipline-based pedagogy. Given the entrenched institutional strength of departmentalized disciplines, this limited impact is perhaps not surprising. What remains to be seen is whether the strongest undergraduate programs in Canadian Studies (Carleton U, U Calgary, U Alberta, Trent U), the Institute for the Study of Canada at McGill U, or the MA programs at Carleton U and Trent U can establish a strong counterpoint to the powerful disciplinary organization of knowledge and the departmentalized structures of the academic community. Further, these programs must continue to grapple with the French-English divide: programs at McGill U and U Quebec a Hull are particularly well situated in this regard, in a province where Quebec Studies is the norm. As governments in Canada reconsider the relation of educational curricula to Canadian society in ways often unwelcome to teachers, such interdisciplinary structures may offer the potential for important alliances with other fields of study. Despite nationalism, the idea of giving more classroom attention to the work of writers out-
side Euro-American canons continues to encounter resistance in Canadian universities. Canadian nationalists in English departments of earlier eras had little success in encouraging readings of canonical British and American texts from a local context. Postcolonial theory caused a partial shift, with its insistence on the multidimensional legacy of colonization. But as various commentators have noted, postcolonial theory gains power in the Euro-American academy as part of a shift from literary text to philosophical critique. Thus, Anglo-European theory assumed the power once held by the Euro-American text just at the time when writers outside Europe and the United States became more prominent than ever before. For teachers of Canadian literature, a continuing challenge will be to insist on the importance of actually reading Canadian texts even as contemporary theory illuminates both the indeterminate boundaries of literary texts and the fragile structures of nationality. See also SCHOOL TEXTBOOKS, WRITING. Further reading: Caroline Bayard, ed, 100 Years of Critical Solitudes: Canadian and Quebecois Criticism from the i88os to the 19805 (Toronto: ECW, 1992); Frank Davey, Canadian Literary Power (Edmonton: NeWest, 1994); Margery Fee, 'Canadian Literature and English Studies in the Canadian University,' Essays on Canadian Writing 48 (1992-3): 20-40; Nicole Fortin, Une litterature inventee: Litterature quebecoise et critique universitaire, 1965-75 (Sainte-Foy: P de 1'U Laval, 1994); Don Gutteridge, Stubborn Pilgrimage (Toronto: Our Schools/Our Selves Education Foundation, 1994); Robert Lecker, Making It Real (Concord: Anansi, 1995); Joseph Melancon, ed, Le discours de I'universite sur la litterature quebecoise (Montreal: Nuit Blanche, 1996); Heather Murray, Working in English (Toronto: U Toronto P, 1996) Margery Fee/Leslie Monkman TECHNOLOGY, COMMUNICATIONS, AND CANADIAN LITERATURE. New communications technologies are having a dramatic impact on the means by which Canadian literature is written, published, and read. Word processors have changed how many writers compose their texts by allowing them to easily add, alter, or delete materials, to store multiple drafts, or to experiment with page formatting and design.
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Fax machines, digital scanners, and modems have accelerated the exchange of contracts and manuscripts between authors, agents, publishers, and distributors, and in the process have decreased the amount of time involved in and the cost of bringing a book to market. Digital design has allowed new typefaces and editorial formats to proliferate (see BOOK DESIGN). Online reviews and interviews have proven to be important promotional tools for established and novice authors alike. Many small presses have used desktop PUBLISHING software to replace costly typesetting, while Web sites provide an important alternative to competing for shelf space in the new generation of retail megabookstores. The new tools, however, have often left the end product, the conventional 'codex' book, little altered by the publishing process. In many respects a hardcover first-edition novel or volume of short stories looks and reads today very much like its predecessor of a hundred years ago. To better understand the impact of computer-mediated communications, one must look not only at the ways in which they have worked with the traditional mechanisms of the publishing process, but at those experiments that have tried to realize, the potential of the new media to reshape and redefine 'literature' in the digital age. Since the 19805, Canadian writers have used computer-mediated communications to knit together the country's widely scattered writing communities, to mentor student writers and promote literacy (see TEACHING), to devise alternative methods of publication in an era of government cutbacks, and to investigate new aesthetic frontiers. In assessing these experiments, it will be useful to distinguish between those that have used information technology to enhance the processes of writing and publishing print-based texts, and those that have sought to explore the nature of the computer itself, to treat it as a medium with its own possibilities and challenges for artistic expression. One of the earliest attempts to adapt computers to the task of writing and distributing literary texts was Swift Current. Described as 'the world's first online literary magazine,' Swift Current was in fact something quite distinct from a traditional print journal. Taking its name from
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an A.J.M. SMITH poem, the network was launched by Frank DAVEY and Fred WAH in Sept 1984. It was installed on a VAX 750 machine at York U; users accessed Swift Current through dial-in modem ports available through DataPac, the first commercially available network for the transmission of data in Canada. Individuals and institutions could subscribe to the system for an annual fee. A set of UNIX-based menus allowed readers to choose from among several generic categories, including poetry, fiction, drama, and commentary. Each category contained its own subdirectory listing the authors who had contributed to that section. Users then chose an author, calling up the specific text to read either on screen or in a printout. Davey and Wah envisioned Swift Current as an online writers' workshop, allowing authors to post works-in-progress, and to receive feedback in a way that print simply did not permit. Multiple drafts could be posted, allowing readers to trace the development of the work and to watch as the writer responded to the criticism that she or he incorporated into the evolving text. Provisions were also made for subscribers to print personalized anthologies from the system's electronic archives, allowing Swift Current to become, in effect, an electronic publishing house, one that connected authors directly to readers without the intervention of EDITORS and publishers. In practice, however, Swift Current encountered several obstacles. First, there was the uneven demographic distribution of both the wealth and the knowledge that computers require. While Swift Current included amongst its approximately forty regular and sixty occasional users such names as Eli MANDEL, George BOWERING, David MCFADDEN, and Libby SCHEIER, the contributors were predominantly male and concentrated in Toronto and Vancouver, with only a small representation from the prairie provinces and even fewer from other regions. Second, users found that the directory/ subdirectory organization of the site was not able to manage the hundreds of texts from dozens of authors that soon accumulated there. They also complained of the inability to attach commentary directly to the file they were reading. Third, contributors to the system, who, unlike ordinary subscribers, enjoyed full e-mail
TECHNOLOGY, COMMUNICATIONS, AND CANADIAN LITERATURE
privileges, tended to be more interested in talking with one another than in discussing the literature they had helped make available. One category, that of collaborations, for example, was not used at all. According to Davey, Although approximately 300 texts were contributed to [Swift Current] ... more than 90% of its activity consisted of private messages, most of which had little connection to the texts contributed.' Frustrated by the participation rate, running short on funding, and with software problems consuming most of its administrators' time and energy, Swift Current's UNIX-based version ceased operation in 1989. It was resurrected in 1990 but this second incarnation lasted only one year. A print ANTHOLOGY that collected a sampling from the tape archives of its original incarnation was published by Coach House Press in 1986. While this anthology is an interesting snapshot of Canadian literature in the period, particularly as it flourished in Vancouver and Toronto, the works that it collects do not, in and of themselves, indicate the radical nature of their genesis. Swift Current, it might be said, was less important for what it produced than for what it was, not so much the first online literary magazine, but as Davey indicates in his concern for the amount of private e-mail traffic that the system generated, the first online literary community. Ahead of its time, Swift Current's pioneering experiments in computer-mediated communications may have failed in the late 19805, but they planted the seeds of interest that have ripened into several noteworthy projects. One of its early subscribers, Trevor Owen, took up the idea of using e-mail as a means of linking authors and readers and developed Writers in Electronic Residence (WIER). The project started at Simon Eraser U in 1988. WIER's first incarnation involved only one author, West Coast poet and Swift Current alumnus Lionel KEARNS, and a handful of pupils, but it quickly grew. In the spring of 1990, the WRITERS' TRUST OF CANADA adopted WIER as its educational program and, three years later, the faculty of education at York U assumed pedagogical and technical responsibility for the program. By 1995, WIER included 10 writers and 3,600 student writers, from grades one and up. The stu-
dents are given classroom instruction in the technology and then they send their efforts (anonymously if they so choose) via a modem connection to one of the professional authors. The authors, in turn, consider the students' work, offer reactions and ideas, and guide discussions. Among those who have participated in WIER are Katherine GOVIER, Susan MUSGRAVE, George Elliot CLARKE, Di BRANDT, Marilyn BOWERING, Patrick LANE, and David MARGOSHES. WIER thus helps foster an interest in literature and creative writing among youth while also providing employment for several writers each year. While WIER has adapted Swift Current's idea of an online writers' workshop, the possibility of using the Internet as an alternative means of distributing new Canadian literature is being explored by Coach House Books (CHB). Rising out of the ashes of one of Canada's most respected small presses, CHB was formed in Dec 1996. It publishes both print and electronic versions of new works and select titles from the press's back catalogue. In order to remunerate authors for the online texts, CHB uses a 'tip' system: if they enjoy what they see, readers are encouraged to use a Web-based credit card service to leave the writer a fixed gratuity much as they might a waiter in a restaurant. The result is that the literature is made quickly and easily available to a global readership, and the author's royalty, in the form of the tip, is actually greater than it would be in a trade edition. Furthermore, an arrangement with the National LIBRARY allows the press's electronic texts to be deposited at a mirror site (a virtual copy of the host Website) and thus COPYRIGHTED just as print books. As important as these innovations are, most of the works published by CHB are first and foremost print-based texts: its titles are typically conceived as books and the online versions usually offer only modest variations on the content and organization of the print original. As such, most of its publications are not digital literature in the fullest sense, but rather hybrids that incorporate aspects of the two media. To discover the makings of a specifically electronic literature in Canada, one must look at the kinetic poetry of bpNiCHOL. Having worked extensively in such visual forms of literature as CONCRETE poetry and in multimedia projects
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such as the sound poetry group the FOUR HORSEMEN, Nichol took an early interest in the computer. In the mid-ipSos he contributed to Swift Current, and, what was rarer, learned a programming language in order to produce his own executable files for the Apple II computer. Collected by Red Deer C P and issued posthumously in 1993 as First Screening, Nichol's series of VISUAL POEMS is considered to be among the earliest extant examples of the electronic genre in any national literature. The brief animated sequences seem primitive by the standards of today's GRAPHIC user interfaces, but they show a genuine perception of the computer's ability to interrogate the materiality of the written word. In 'Self-Reflexive No. 2,' for example, a vertical column is formed by stacking copies of the sentence 'THE BOTTOM LINE is WHERE THE CHANGE is' one above the other. The very lowest stratum, however, pulses in and out of sight, literally 'changing' while the rest remain inert. These electronic poems thus effectively reveal, where a print version could not, the stasis of the written word, and, in the process release it from the strictures of the page. Here literature exists not in some idealized space before or beyond the flux of time, fixed and permanent, but actually in time, with a fleetingness that marks our embeddedness in a present that is always slipping into the past. The influence of Nichol's early experiments can be glimpsed in a second generation of kinetic poets, such as Robert Kendall and Darren Wershler-Henry. Canadian-born Kendall now lives in the United States, where he has developed what he calls the 'SoftPoem': animated displays of words and phrases that rotate, slide, and change shape in such a way that meaning is choreographed with movement. For Kendall, the result is a form that recoups the performative aspects of ORAL poetry and the visual richness of the illuminated manuscript. In texts such as The Clue: A Mini-Mystery (1991) and A Life Set for Two (1996), he has also explored the possibilities of interactivity. In the latter title, for example, the reader may choose different menu items that in turn alter the content and even the phrasing of the subsequent screens. WershlerHenry's Nicholodeonline (1997) is an explicit homage to Nichol. Initially published in a limited-edition print version, called Nicholodeon, the
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text was subsequently translated and, in the process, transmogrified into an electronic text that reflects on its relation to the printed word. For Wershler-Henry, kinetic poetry serves as a means to trouble the conventions of linguistic signification: 'Like traffic signs from a parallel world, the job of these poems is to produce a vague sense of anxiety in the reader, fuelled by the mistaken belief that they house some kernel of meaning that they desperately wish to communicate, despite nearly impossible odds.' In its online form Nicholodeonline thus interrogates the cultural and artistic status of the book as a fetish object, forcing the reader to consider the aesthetic ideologies that have worked to make the book seem the 'natural' or 'inevitable' vehicle of literary expression. Alongside these experiments in kinetic poetry has emerged a second trend in electronic literature, one usually referred to as 'hypertext.' A term originally coined by Thedor Nelson in the mid-1960s, hypertext refers to an electronic document composed of individual nodes of prose or verse, graphics, video clips, or sound recordings, which are connected to other nodes through a system of programmable links. The reader uses his or her mouse to click on the anchors, highlighted words that take him or her from one node to another. Thus, where the codex book is organized in a linear fashion, with the reader conventionally following from a determinate beginning to a fixed end, a hypertext is read in a lateral or associative manner. Each reading is thus different, with the reader being able to choose which links to follow, and thus which nodes to connect. Hypertexts on the Internet, moreover, may be linked to other texts, blurring the bounds of what constitutes the unique property of the author. The result is a decentring of the reading process: the hypertext is less a 'finished' work than it is an ensemble of possibilities, the control of which passes from the author to the reader. Sherbrooke-based poet Rod Willmot was one of the first Canadian writers to apply the idea of hypertext to the writing of literature. The author of several books of poetry, Willmot began his experiments with computer applications in 1988. Devising his own hypertext authoring system, he organized his texts in such away that the two-dimensional plane of the
TECHNOLOGY, COMMUNICATIONS, AND CANADIAN LITERATURE
printed page gave way to a three-dimensional labyrinth. The result of these investigations was Everglade, a hypertext poem that was released in 1989 as shareware (a system whereby the free copying and distribution of computer programs is encouraged, but a mail-in contribution is requested). Willmot uses the term 'door' to describe the anchors that yield to other nodes. The opening screen of the poem evokes the image of a house, with certain words acting as 'doors' onto different reading paths. These doors, however, are invisible at first sight, allowing one to read each screen without the distractions of the highlighted anchors which tend to focus the reader's attention on certain words and not others. Only by clicking on the right mouse button does one discover which words are in fact 'doors' to other spaces. This arrangement allows the reader to navigate the poem as if it were itself a house of concealed entrances and exits. One passes from one room to another, even as the poem passes from one scene to another. The very shape of the poem thus extends its central conceit and provides its author with the formal means to explore the architectonics of memory. Lyric poetry such as Willmot's is well suited to hypertext. The short, self-contained stanzas, with their emphasis on inward states of mind and feeling, do not depend on the reader's familiarity with any of the other nodes in the text and, indeed, are enhanced by the digressive and associational nature of the electronic form. But for fiction writers, whose use of plot and character does depend to a large extent on certain events being read in sequence, the choices and alternatives offered by hypertext pose unique challenges. At its most mundane, hypertext fiction might appear as simply another version of the choose-your-own-ending adventure tale. But, at its best, hypertext fiction requires both authors and readers to redefine the nature of prose narrative. Tim McLaughlin, the author of several wellreceived electronic texts and art installations, is perhaps Canada's best-known exponent of hypertext fiction. His Notes toward Absolute Zero is a 'philatelic NOVELLA' that interweaves historical documents of the ill-fated FRANKLIN expedition with diary entries, postcards, and letters; it was published in 1996 by Eastgate Sys-
tems, the US-based publisher that specializes in hypertext. The opening screen is a collage of stamps, some real and some imaginary, each of which, when clicked on, takes the reader to a section of the text. Eschewing the conventional narrative machinery of plot and sequential action, McLaughlin's hypertext novel is sharply imagistic, with an emphasis on slivers of time and reflection, the connections between which are left up to the reader to forge. Notes Toward Absolute Zero runs under Eastgate's StorySpace program, but McLaughlin has also produced several shorter texts for the World Wide Web. 'Women of Vision,' for example, opens with a class photograph dating from the late igth century. Each of the faces is itself a link to an aphoristic or epigrammatic description of that person. Clicking on one face, for example, the reader learns: 'She was the type of woman who spun her tension into string during the day and at night wound the string into a tightly circled ball. The only way she could relax was by driving far over an open road, winding the window down, and tossing the ball out, so that it unrolled and unravelled down the long length of the quiet highway.' These shorter works are notable for the transparency of their interface, that is to say, the ease with which the reader can navigate the materials, and the elegant symmetry of their spatial arrangement. Several other hypertext fictions written for the web deserve notice. The ambitious, ongoing Project X, by damian lopes, which presents a translation of Vasco da Gama's diaries of his voyage to the Indian subcontinent in 1497-9. The style here, especially in its use of found and imagined sources, is distinctly Borgesian, recalling such print-based experiments in non-linearity as 'The Garden of Forking Paths.' By creating a densely interconnected or layered text, in which every word is a linked to another document, lopes hopes to use the hypertextual properties of the World Wide Web as a means to explore the issues of discovery, technology, and colonialism. 'Narrative and history are, after all,' he writes, 'forms of navigation.' Douglas COOPER'S Delirium (1998) makes less use of the interactive and multilinear properties of hypertext, but it is notable for being the first novel by an established author that was serialized on the Internet (Cooper began serializing the novel in
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1994, shortly after the Web became widely available). As such, it represents an early attempt to engage the new medium as something other than a promotional tool for a marketing department, and perhaps an indication of the extent to which formats such as hypertext are beginning to enter the literary mainstream. Other examples of the genre can be found in the Web-based literary magazine NWHQ, run by the Vancouver arts collective Knossopolis, the Coach House Books Web site, and the artist directories for the Deep Web project at the Banff Centre for the Arts. Kinetic poetry and hypertext represent two of the most significant trends in electronic literature, but they do not account for the whole range of experimentation that Canadian writers have undertaken. Vancouver-based science fiction writer William GIBSON is best known for having coined the word 'CYBERSPACE' in his 1984 debut novel, Neuromancer. Though this glimpse of a hard-wired future was famously written on a 1927 Hermes typewriter, Gibson has also contributed to the electronic genre. Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) was published in a limited edition of 95 copies in 1992 by Kevin Begos Publishing. The text is contained within a metal case sheathed in Kevlar, the polymer of which bulletproof vests are made. Within this case is a book of 93 distressed pages that appear to have survived some disaster. Designed by artist Dennis Ashbaugh, these pages contain long sequences of genetic code, laboratory-generated images of DNA signatures, and advertisements for early 20th-century electronic instruments such as the telephone. At the heart of this collection is a computer diskette containing Gibson's autobiographical poem. The text itself, however, is of less interest than what happens to it: the diskette, once inserted in the computer, corrupts itself with a virus that erases the poem as it is being read. For many critics, this self-eradicating text is symptomatic of the very nature of representation, of the way that words make present an object only by simultaneously displacing it. In the age of digital reproduction, this concern for the lost presence of the object is dramatically accelerated: electronic texts have no physical existence that might guarantee their unique place in time and space; they are, rather, endlessly reproducible, with each copy serving only
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to mark the disappearance of its origin. It is thus fitting that computer hackers quickly cracked the Agrippa virus and distributed the text over the Internet: the very moment of the text's disappearance was that in which it reappeared everywhere. Another project that defies easy categorization is John Cayley's Indra's Net. Adapting the Hindu concept of 'a network of jewels that not only reflect the images in every other jewel, but also the multiple images in the others,' Cayley describes this multi-volume work as 'machine modulated poetry.' It is, in essence, a quasirandom text generator: a set of variable algorithms reads a hidden source text, such as Cayley's own translations of classical Chinese quatrains, breaks it up into a set of constituent semantic elements, and then stitches them together into a new work. The approach is related to the aleatory techniques of John Cage, William S. Burroughs, and Jackson Mac Low, but provides for greater interaction between the emerging text and the reader. At each screen, the user is prompted to choose two words from the current text; these choices then determine the ways in which the program will subsequently reconfigure the source material. The text that emerges from this process is a unique, improvised, real-time collaboration between the computer and the reader. Commenting on Indra's Net, critic Espen Aarseth writes: 'It would be a grave mistake to see this text as a metaphor of the "impossibility of perfect communication" or as the embodiment of the gap between sign and meaning in texts. Instead, it shows how meaning struggles to produce itself, through the cyborg activity of writing.' Cayley's poems have been published by WellSweep P in England (where the author now resides) and in electronic journals such as Postmodern Culture. Canadian writers have provided some of the most influential analyses of the relation of technology to society. Building on the foundational work of Harold INNIS, Marshall MCLUHAN argued that the computer is not so much an instrument for calculating complex equations, or archiving the masses of data produced by our census bureaus and polling agencies, as it is an extension of our nervous system, less something that we use and more something that we wear. Our new technologies, however, have also
TERNAR
brought with them new problems, such as the accessibility of computer-mediated communication and the danger of creating a technological underclass; the continuing concentration of computer literacy in the hands of white, middleCLASS men; and, as McLuhan foresaw, the potential erosion of cultural differences as the emerging 'global village' becomes increasingly homogeneous in terms of language and values. In such a world, the very category of the 'NATION,' or, more specifically, of a uniquely 'Canadian' literature, might be obsolete; in an age of instantaneous communication, where every point is electronically connected to every other point, the lines that divide one culture from another may fade as quickly as the text from Gibson's Agrippa. But it is precisely such problems that demand new aesthetic forms, if not to provide answers then to better articulate their unique nature, to distinguish the issues faced by an information society from those of an industrial society. E-mail, electronic libraries, Web-based literary magazines, online bookstores, kinetic poetry, text generators, and hypertext - these are but the incunabula of the digital age, the first experiments of writers stretching their electronic skin, testing its properties and abilities, and finding out what new languages are made possible by the perceptions it affords.
Apocalyptic Book,' South Atlantic Q 92 (1993): 617-26. Christopher Keep
TEFS, Wayne. Fiction writer, professor, teacher; b St Boniface, MB, 17 Nov 1947; son of Stella (Spelchak) and Armin Tefs, a house builder. Tefs's encounters and interactions with Robert KROETSCH, Dennis COOLEY, and David ARNASON, and his experience with Turnstone P in Winnipeg helped solidify his commitment to writing a kind of fiction that shaped the LANDSCAPE of the Prairies rather than one moulded by it. This impulse is evident in Tefs's first novel, Figures on a Wharf {1983) and the later The Canasta Players (1990). Among his other novels which include Dickie (1993) and Home Free (1997) - The Cartier Street Contract (1985) most clearly shows his awareness of and response to the QUIET REVOLUTION and Quebec NATIONALISM. Further reading: Birk Sproxton, 'Figures on a Wharf. Shaping Things to Come,' Contemporary Manitoba Writers, ed Kenneth James Hughes (Winnipeg: Turnstone, 1990): 110-30. Mark Libin
TELEROMAN, see V-L. BEAULIEU, CHAPUTROLLAND, FILM, SERIAL.
TELEVISION, see FILM. Internet reading: 'Voice of the Shuttle: Web Page for Humanities Research,' available at http: //vos.ucsb.edu; Writers In Electronic Residence, available at http://www.edu.yorku.ca/ WIERhome; Coach House Books, available at http://www.chbooks.com; John Cayley, 'Indra's Net,' available at http://wvvnv.shadoof.net/in/ inhome.html; damian lopes, 'Project X,' available at http://www.bitwalla.com/project_x/; Tim McLaughlin, 'Women of Vision,' available at http: // www. / nwhq.net/ tim / WOV/ tim_ 25w.html. Further reading: Espen J. Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997); Frank Davey and Fred Wah, The Swift Current Anthology (Toronto: Coach House, 1986); Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Signet, 1964); Peter Schwenger, 'Agrippa, or, The
TERNAR, Yesim. Writer, researcher, professor of anthropology, social worker; b Istanbul, Turkey, 7 Nov 1956. Ternar moved to Montreal in Sept 1980, and obtained a PhD in anthropology from McGill U (1990). In 1994, she published the creative non-fiction work The Book and the Veil: Escape from an Istanbul Harem. She has published two collections of short stories Orphaned by Halley's Comet (1991) and True Romance with a Sailor (1996) - as well as a novel, Rembrandt's Model (1998). Her RADIO play 'Looking for Leonard COHEN' was broadcast on CBC Arts National in 1992. Ternar has also published poetry in a number of journals. Many of her works present the crises of displacement experienced by travellers or immigrants as opportunities for transformation through the re-examination of cultural inheritances. Jennifer J. Gustar
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TERRIEN ROMANCE, TERROIR, AND ROMAN DE LA TERRE
TERRIEN ROMANCE, TERROIR, AND ROMAN DE LA TERRE. These terms all apply to a movement that dominated Quebec writing during the late i9th and early 2Oth centuries. The novels of Louis HEMON (Maria Chapdelaine), C-H. GRIGNON (L7n homme et sonpeche), F-A. SAVARD (Menaud maitre-draveur), and Germaine GUEVREMONT (Le survenant) are often taken to epitomize the movement. Terrien literature literature of the land - stands in strong contrast to the works of, for example, Rodolphe GIRARD and Albert LABERGE (whose social critiques some readers, especially those in the Church, considered risque). Terrien literature celebrated the rural environment as the site of tradition, 'true faith' (ie, Catholicism), and identity (by which was meant both family and the francophone social family, the set of connections and political attitudes that later came to be referred to by such terms as quebedcite or 'pure laine' collectivity). Some readers (those who preferred URBAN, MODERN, secular, and satirical writing [see HUMOUR]) regarded this rural preoccupation as a sign of Quebec's lack of sophistication, but this judgment mistook the setting for a literal representation of the reality. Within Quebec the terrien movement, which began much earlier than Hemon, served a different political purpose. Its roots go back to the version of Quebec history that had been advanced by F-X. GARNEAU and extended by the social politics of Abbe Lionel GROULX and others (see HISTORIOGRAPHY, INTELLECTUAL HISTORY), emerging in the LANDSCApE-based poetry of, for example, William CHAPMAN, and romanticizing the figures of WOMEN and habitant farmers. These attitudes to the land - connecting it with francophone cultural survival, if not necessarily with Catholicism - continued to permeate (largely SEPARATIST) political thought even after the terrien movement had lost its literary appeal. TESKEY, Adeline Margaret. Author, teacher; b Appleton, CW, c 1855, d Toronto 21 March 1924; daughter of Elizabeth (Kerfoot) and Thomas Teskey, a farmer and merchant. After teaching school for a year (1900-1), Adeline Teskey hit her stride as a writer of popular stories in the 'kailyard' mode, which promoted Protestant virtues in rural Ontario communities, often veiled in pioneer nostalgia. The suc-
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cess of her first book, Where the Sugar Maple Grows (1901), prompted another six titles over the next twelve years. Some of her fiction acknowledges contemporary social issues such as women's independence, temperance, and conservation; her short novel, The Yellow Pearl (1911), addresses racial discrimination. Further reading: Sandy Campbell, 'Change and the Kailyard: The Fiction of Adeline M. Teskey,' Canadian Literature 127 (Winter 1990): 189-93. Carole Gerson
TESSERA COLLECTIVE is a group that came together in 1984 following a period of extraordinary activity in the FEMINIST literary community, including conferences in Montreal (1981), Toronto (1982), and Vancouver (1983). Eager to make the technical and theoretical innovations of Quebec women writers and artists accessible across Canada, the founding members of the collective (Barbara Godard, Daphne MARLATT, Kathy Mezei, and Gail SCOTT) launched the bilingual, biannual magazine Tessera. Joined by Susan Knutson and Louise COTNOIR, the founding co-editors opened a forum for collaborative feminist intellectual work and published texts that cross cultural, linguistic, and generic boundaries. Collaboration in the Feminine (1994), edited by Godard, offers a selection of writing published in Tessera between 1984 and 1992. In 1993, with issue 14 (Memory Work/des memoires des femmes), Godard brought a new generation of feminist thinkers to the collective. The new co-editors, Katherine Binhammer, Jennifer Henderson, and Lianne Moyes, expanded the collective to include a mix of writers (Patricia Seaman, Margaret Webb, Lise Harou, Nicole Markotic), researchers (Anne-Marie Gauthier, Ellen Servinis, Lauren Gillingham, Julie Murray, Nancy Roussy), and others such as translator (Chantal Vezina, and VISUAL ARTIST Cheryl Sourkes, all concerned with culture, widely defined. Several of their issues focus on the unruly borders between, for example, written and visual, literary and non-literary, POPULAR and academic, feminist and queer. See also CRITICISM AND THEORY, GAY AND LESBIAN, GENDER AND GENDER RELATIONS, WOMEN'S STUDIES. Lianne Moyes
THEATRE HISTORY
TETREAU, Francis. Poet, translator; b Rimouski, QC, 10 July 1953; son of Janine (Couillard), a researcher, and Jean Tetreau, a writer. Dividing his time between Paris and Montreal, he came to be known for his elliptical poems, such as Cirque electrique (1974) and L'architecture pressentie (1981). He also wrote art criticism and translated Jim Morrison and Hart Crane, the range of his work suggesting his broad interests: rock music, painting, film, and design. His first novel, Le lit de Procuste (1987) ingeniously structured (Gauguin, Van Gogh, and others, including Matisse's model, narrate various events) - is part psychological fiction, part fictional reportage. It was followed by Attentats a. la pudeur (1993) and Le lai de la clowne (1994). Margaret Cook
THEATRE HISTORY. A survey of Canadian theatre history must begin with the caution that the theatre comprises a vast diversity of changing practices - from the traditional stage to street jugglers, stand-up comics, and carnival parade. Historians have tried to impose order on this diversity by narrowing the field of study to the staged production of canonical dramatic texts. It is only by such means that critics have been able to claim that theatre in Canada arrived with the European colonizers in the i6th century. The history of representational PERFORMANCE in Canada can never be fully narrated, because most theatrical forms and performances have been unwritten and unrecorded. This includes the great variety of Aboriginal performance modes, including shamanistic spirit plays, potlatches, sun dances, and masking, some of which have produced elaborate scenographic effects (see FIRST NATIONS). It also includes ongoing traditions of local performance that came with the European settlers, of seasonal festivals, mummers plays, and FOLK dramas from various cultural sources, of mock trials in lumber camps and nautical ceremonies. In coming to terms with these complexities (Is an operetta theatre or MUSIC? Is a comic lecture a play?), historians have narrowed the field to an orthodox narrative of Canadian theatre history, one that examines the development of the theatre as a professional and public enter-
prise producing the work of Canadian playwrights. That orthodoxy narrates Canadian theatre history as the maturation of an industry from colonial infancy to a postcolonial autonomy (see POSTMODERNISM). It identifies the turning point in the MAS SET Commission of 1949-51 and the subsequent founding of the CANADA COUNCIL and the introduction of public arts subsidies in 1957, which enabled the shift from a skilled amateur to a professional arts industry. As a template for discussing Canadian theatre history, there is some value in this pattern because it establishes a measure of growth. In its first funding year, the Canada Council granted FUNDING to three theatre companies; by the start of the 2ist century, this figure had risen to close to two hundred. But this figure does not take into account the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of companies - including the ephemeral companies of the FRINGE culture - that actually exist in Canada. It is useful therefore to reconsider the history of theatre not as an evolutionary movement towards an undefined cultural maturity enacted in a professional theatre, but rather as a series of changing relationships of national ideology and theatre professionalism. Like the European project of imperial expansion, the first recorded theatrical production in what is now Canada was an act of displacement and absorption of Aboriginally. Le theatre de Neptune en la Nouvelle-France, a masque produced by Marc LESCARBOT at Port Royal in the Annapolis valley in 1606, included NATIVE performers in a classical ALLEGORY staged on the water in canoes. It marked the beginning of a centuries-long tradition in which theatre functioned as one of the mechanisms of transforming Aboriginal North America into a European new world. In the colonial period, through the i7th and i8th centuries, theatrical performances were expressions of colonial power, closely regulated by civic, military, and religious authority. In the British colonies, theatre was a means of maintaining a vestige of polite society in garrison cultures; in NEW FRANCE, it was a more disruptive force that by its intermittent presence challenged clerical authority. The theatre of the :8th century was an index of metropolitanism and culture, and thus played an important role in the development of a CLASS
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system in the colonies by defining specific boundaries of taste and access. Playhouses began to appear in the late i8th century, typically in the form of small assembly rooms in hotels that could be turned into theatres for the touring companies that had become more common, particularly as commercial traffic increased with the American colonies. The first 'professional' company to tour regularly in Canada (in Nova Scotia) was the American Company of Comedians, a Boston-based troupe that dispersed after the revolution. By the close of the i8th century, a number of intersecting factors that replicated changes occurring in Britain and the United States began to democratize the theatre. The development of new popular dramatic forms - particularly MELODRAMA and sentimental tragicomedy increasing urbanization, and the rise of a daily press resulted in an increase in theatrical performances for the common people. In many parts of Canada, both English- and Frenchspeaking, this increase met religious opposition, with the consequence that theatre in Canada still tends be to be regarded as a suspicious occupation unless it generates profit. The theatre of the ipth century was characterized by a great variety of new forms, genres, and stage techniques produced by the commodification of spectacle after the Industrial Revolution. Like the incipient NATIONALIST ideologies that resulted in CONFEDERATION, the theatrical culture of the first half of the century owed much to the development of new systems of communication, especially the railways. Initially enabling the development of stock companies in most Canadian cities, later in the century the railway enabled the touring circuits that centralized theatrical production in New York and drove local stock companies out of business. In both cases, the defining condition of theatre in 19th-century Canada was its place in an expanding American theatre system. This does not mean that Canadian theatre was entirely colonized by American commercial interests, although that was indeed the case by the end of the ipth century, when the New York-based Theatrical Syndicate controlled almost every playhouse in North America. Rather, it makes clear that as theatre became business, it was from the beginning an integral part of a conti-
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nentalist cultural system. If the typifying performance in the i8th century was a garrison production of The Rivals by British officers, the typical 19th-century performance was a blackface minstrel show in Toronto (see RACE) or a road production of Uncle Tom's Cabin in Winnipeg. The 19th-century theatre was extraordinarily busy, and its diversity is only hinted at by listing the variety of performances that pulled audiences into small-town theatres (usually dignified by the label 'opera house') wherever the railways reached: melodramas, minstrel shows, pyrotechnic pageants, touring road shows of American potboilers (some written by Canadians), heroic tragedies, visiting stars from the continent (including Sarah Bernhardt), local political burlesques (in the manner of H.M.S. Parliament, which in 1880 plundered Gilbert and Sullivan to satirize Sir John A. Macdonald), medicine shows, rodeo, and - by the end of the century - vaudeville, where Canadian audiences first saw the new medium of FILM. The cinema quickly overtook live performance in popularity, and, as vaudeville houses turned into movie theatres, effectively killed the theatre business for almost half a century. By the end of the i9th century there were over two hundred companies, Canadian, Ameri can and British, 'on the road' in Canada, following touring circuits either owned or controlled by American booking agencies. The impact of the syndicate control of playhouses and touring circuits in Canada was profound, because it arrested the development of a literary dramatic CANON in Canada in the crucial decades that preceded the massive recession of the theatre industry brought about by FILM. Although there are thousands of recorded titles of plays written in Canada in the i9th century, few of them were products of the professional stage, and fewer still found production or publication. Would-be playwrights had to choose between a career writing potboilers for the American syndicates or composing 'CLOSET DRAMAS' for the literary reader. Just over a century later, a similar condition applies in the film industry, which is dominated by American distribution companies that control access to screens. The comparison is not accidental: the Hollywood distributors learned their business from their theatrical antecedents,
THEATRE HISTORY
just as the present generation of theatrical impresarios re-adapted Hollywood distribution and marketing techniques to the commercial stage. By the close of the ipth century, nationalist critics recognized that such control would necessarily impede the development of Canadian DRAMA, which, following the currents of Romantic thought, they saw as an organic expression of nationhood. One of the most vociferous was B.K. SANDWELL, who in a series of articles and addresses to business clubs, argued that 'alien' American control of the theatre jeopardized Canadian cultural development, while exposure to British drama ('the drama of our own people') would encourage it. The noted critic Hector CHARLESWORTH, who like Sandwell had been an editor of Saturday Night, was the first to propose a remedy to the dominance of the American commercial stage in the model of the civic repertory theatre, which had become a lively subject of debate in Edwardian Britain. In the first decades of the zoth century, the argument in favour of public subsidy was invariably linked to the proposition of a national theatre. In Britain, debates about the role of theatre argued that a transcendent national ideology, reinforced by the canon, would erase class differences. The class assumptions of the British model were grafted onto the proposal of a youthful and distinct Canadian theatre, which would thereafter carry with it the assumption that the theatre and drama should uplift the populace. This renewed colonial deference, fifty years after CONFEDERATION, had many sources; in part it was built on dismay at the vulgarity of American popular drama, and in part, it was rooted in ideas of RACE and ethnicity that are unsavoury to the modernreader. Despite the premise that the stage enacts the nation, a rupture occurred between the actual practice of the theatre as a business and the theoretical principles that would lead to the development of a national cultural policy. For the intellectual elite of the immediate post-Confederation era, a thriving theatre dedicated to Canadian dramatic writers was an imperative sign of national presence. This period saw a pronounced moralistic didacticism in Canadian theatre, from the imperial rhetoric of heroic
pseudo-Shakespearean tragedies such as Charles MAIR'S Tecumseh (1886) to the educational evangelism of the CHAUTAUQUA movement. In both English- and French-speaking Canada, the theatre was indeed an American theatre in the largest sense of the term. It was this that dismayed Sandwell and Vincent Massey, because although questions of power and ownership might be resolved through public funding, the issue of popular taste was more problematic. Hence Massey's quest for a theatrical system that could embody and imbue 'true Canadianism.' At the same time, in both linguistic cultures, 'the Drama' was the repository of national aspirations - although it attracted considerably more respect in francophone Quebec than elsewhere. The structural principle of non-profit public theatre derived from British models, but the informing ideology of theatrical production derived from the American experience of MODERNISM, as circulated by the Little Theatre movement. In contrast to today's usage, 'Little Theatre' initially referred to the revival of the principles of beauty and art, with roots in the arts and crafts movement, theosophy, and the European avant-garde, particularly via modernists such as Antoine, Strindberg, and later, Copeau. The Canadian citadel of modernism in the theatre was Hart House, donated to U Toronto by the Massey family. Under such directors as Roy Mitchell and Carroll Aikins (founder of the Home Theatre in British Columbia), Hart House Theatre was a monument to the idea of modernist national culture; its scene painters and designers regularly included members of the GROUP OF SEVEN (see VISUAL ARTS). With encouragement from its unofficial patron (and occasional actor), Vincent Massey, Hart House played a significant role in the development of playwrights, notably Merrill DENISON and Herman VOADEN, who defined an original Canadian attitude towards dramatic dialogue and scenography. Through the 19205 the Little Theatre movement consolidated as a network of amateur theatre groups with a great variety of interests and skills. Some were highly disciplined and experienced, and later became the foundations of professional companies; others were no more than social clubs. The network entered a new phase
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with the establishment of the DOMINION DRAMA FESTIVAL (DDF) in 1932. For the next 40 years the DDF sponsored elaborate annual regional and national competitions in English and French, leading to a national trophy. Many of the groups that took part in the DDF were sincere in their love of the theatre and their desire for rigorous training and adjudication, which the festivals provided. At the same time, the DDF tried hard to sustain an atmosphere of refinement and elitism, with its deference to the British canon, its rigid protocols of hierarchy, its reliance on British adjudicators, and its formal balls and banquets. Historians commonly identify the DDF as the basis of the subsequent professional theatre, but it was in fact only one arm of an active theatrical culture in the 19303. Less well known but no less active was the loose network of dozens of radical troupes known collectively as the Workers' Theatre Movement. These companies, such as the Workers' Experimental Theatre in Toronto, were the Canadian aspect of an international movement, encouraged and in some cases actively backed by the member parties of the Communist International, and to varying extent subject to shifts in ideological policy in the revolutionary left. They were notably absent in francophone Quebec, where revolutionary communism failed to establish support in the 19305. Their repertoire consisted of short agitprop sketches on political topics, performed by unemployed workers and militant students. In the mid-i93os the agitprop troupes gradually disbanded as the emergence of the Popular Front encouraged the development of more traditional theatre forms with a progressive inflection, and thus enabled left-leaning theatre artists to claim space in the theatrical profession, tenuous as it was. The foremost Canadian example was the Theatre of Action, founded in 1935 by former members of the Workers Experimental Theatre in Toronto. It was through such leftwing companies that the techniques of Stanislavsky first circulated in North America. Throughout the Americas, a resurgence of theatrical activity took place in the prosperous years following the Second World War, sparked in part by the resumption of cultural exchanges with European theatre artists, and in part by widespread public acceptance of the principle of
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state intervention in the social economy. In 1949, the government of Prime Minister Mackenzie King addressed the state of Canadian culture by establishing a Royal Commission to investigate the arts and sciences. Its recommendations, submitted in 1951, became the foundation of national cultural policy and made possible the remarkable theatrical renaissance of the next decade. The Massey Commission deplored the lack of artistic activity in Canada, and argued that the development of a national culture (framed in Cold War rhetoric as 'cultural defences') was inhibited by the absence of state subsidy. The chief recommendation of the commission was the Canada Council, which after its founding in 1957 undertook to provide grants, awarded by peer juries, to professional artists and arts organizations. In its first year it distributed $250,000 to three theatre companies (two anglophone and one francophone) and to the DDF. The three companies involved were the STRATFORD Shakespearean Festival; its offshoot, the Canadian Players; and Le Theatre du Nouveau Monde. All three were dedicated to a classical repertoire; the two anglophone companies performed mostly British plays with Britishtrained actors. The Massey Commission had concluded that the underdevelopment of Canadian theatre would be rectified by state funding and the construction of civic theatres in major cities across the country. In contrast to the British model of a single paramount national theatre, the commission (and its advisers, amongst whom Massey's close friend Robertson DAVIES was particularly influential) recognized the decentralizing force of REGIONALISM in Canadian culture, and therefore proposed that the national theatre of Canada must be considered as the whole of theatrical effort across the country. At the same time it paid allegiance to the national idea by suggesting the desirability of a touring National Theatre - an ideal tentatively realized, in form if not in repertoire, by the Canadian Players, which from 1954 to 1966 toured a repertoire of European classics across the country. Through the 19505 and 19605 there came into being a network of professional theatres that appeared to realize this vision. The prototypes of the new model were the Theatre du Nouveau
THEATRE HISTORY
Monde, founded in 1951, and the Manitoba Theatre Centre in Winnipeg, founded in 1957. In Toronto there were several false starts, the most famous being the Crest Theatre, founded in 1953 in Toronto by Donald and Murray Davis; despite its high production standards and encouragement of Canadian playwrights, it was unable to make the transition to a communitysupported civic theatre. Some of these companies were created by coalitions of amateur theatres and civic supporters, others by dedicated individuals. Most of them appealed to middle-class audiences with cautious programming that relied heavily on classics and British and American hits. The most celebrated theatre of this period was the Stratford Festival, which since 1953 has in effect regulated the standards of theatrical professionalism in anglophone Canada. Stratford's reputation as a classical company has ebbed and flowed, the prime source of controversy being its generally conservative programming. Despite its record of critical acclaim over the decades, Stratford's isolation from the theatrical centre in Toronto and its reliance on summer tourist audiences has meant that it has had remarkably little effect on the development of Canadian theatre practice. Although most of the newly established regional theatres expressed an interest in Canadian drama, few did anything to promote it, and until the early 19705, Canadian plays were rarely seen. There were of course exceptions: Toronto Workshop Productions remained committed to left-wing drama and ensemble performance from its founding in 1959 until the retirement of its director, George Luscombe, almost 30 years later. No sooner was the regional theatre model in place than it was challenged by a new generation that rejected it as colonial and irrelevant. Between 1968 and 1975, literally hundreds of small theatre companies were founded. Commonly known as the 'alternative' or 'alternate theatre' movement in English-speaking Canada and le jeune theatre' in Quebec, this new wave rejected the regional theatre idea as artificial and false: the large theatres might be supported by local or regional sentiment, but their repertoires, determined as they were by class interest, were virtually indistinguishable. In contrast, the
new generation of localist, politically engaged, and experimental theatres declared themselves to be the authentic voice of regional difference in Canada - and of cultural independence in Quebec. This emerging independent Canadian theatre - the theatre of Canadian and Quebecois NATIONALISM - was identified from the beginning with the approaches that typified the new theatre of the 19605 in Europe and the United States: collective creation, left-wing populism, a critique of artistic hierarchy, and a strong impulse towards local culture. These theatres repudiated the established model of regional theatre as the product of a colonized mentality, and sought to define indigenous culture by returning to historical and localist subjects. Historically, the most important examples are Theatre d'Aujourd'hui, the cauldron of the wave of new playwrights and directors that set off the jeune theatre' movement, and Toronto's Theatre Passe Muraille, whose 1972 collective documentary, The Farm Show, based on conversations with farmers, became the prototype for dozens of similar groups across the country and initiated a revolution in Canadian theatre. Whereas in Quebec collective creation was a political strategy of decentring power, in English-speaking Canada it was also a necessity occasioned by the absence of Canadian playwrights. From that movement there evolved the present condition of Canadian theatre, in which the work of the Canadian playwright has become integral. The new companies gave aspiring playwrights an opportunity to develop their art and consequently many of the new theatres became known for their commitment to Canadian dramas. In this they were responding to the increasingly vocal demands of the growing community of playwrights, who in two conferences in 1971 had formed the Playwrights Co-Op (nOW PLAYWRIGHTS U N I O N OF CANADA)
and called for a minimum quota of 50 per cent Canadian content in subsidized theatres. Although that proposal was unacceptable to most theatre companies, it focused the debate that would frame Canadian theatre through the 19705. By the end of the decade it was possible for a few playwrights to make a decent living, but a generation later, it is still the norm in
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Canada that most new plays are generated by the theatres that receive the smallest share of public funding. The development of the alternative theatres at first appeared to validate the idea of a regional theatre network, in which the major theatre in a region would be surrounded by a cluster of experimental companies that would feed into it. As the alternative companies became more institutionalized and their audiences more affluent, the distinctions between them and the regional theatres began to blur. The 1989 merger of the once-radical Toronto Free Theatre and the regional CentreStage to form the Canadian Stage Company seemed to many critics to signify the 'arrival' of the alternative theatre generation in the 'mainstream' of Canadian culture The now-established alternatives in turn generated their own alternatives in subsequent waves of companies marked by more specialized repertoires. For these companies that developed in the late 19705 and early 19805, the struggle to legitimize Canadian playwriting as such had been won. The profile of Canadian theatre became more diverse as new theatres emerged to articulate the experience of different communities. Most of the companies of this generation were founded during the boom years of escalating real estate costs in Canada and consequently were unable to acquire permanent performance spaces of their own. Throughout the 19705 arts funding from all levels of government continued to increase. By the early 19805 the financial climate took a turn for the worse and support to the arts began to decrease annually - largely because of a succession of federal and provincial governments that placed less importance on arts and cultural autonomy than did the Liberal government of the Trudeau years. As a result, theatre companies relied on season subscription sales and increased corporate sponsorship, moves that many in the theatre community criticized as regressive and hostile to artistic experimentation. In the 19805 two important developments brought renewed energy to the theatre: POPULAR theatre, and physical mime. The use of theatre for social action in Canada dates to the Workers' Theatre Movement of the 19305, but
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the modern approach to popular theatre began in the 19703 when companies such as Theatre Euh! and the Mummers Troupe of Newfoundland created collective DOCUMENTARIES to intervene in community and labour struggles. Many of the troupes that specialize in political and social-action performance use Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed techniques, which allow the spectators to intervene and change the course of the dramatic action to test social solutions. Popular theatre troupes have been instrumental in articulating Canada's multicultural reality; many of these theatres voice the struggles of minority and immigrant communities. The widespread introduction of the techniques of physical mime and clowning owes much to 1'Ecole Jacques Lecoq, which trained a number of Canadian students in the arts of corporal mime and buffon. The leading figure in Canadian clown theatre was Richard Pochinko, who fused Lecoq's approach with the native Indian clown traditions of the TRICKSTER. Until his death in 1990, Pochinko taught a generation of clowns at his Theatre Resource Centre in Toronto. There are now over a dozen Pochinkoinspired 'physical theatre' troupes in Canada, some of which have progressed beyond clowning to a distinct new style of playwriting. In structural terms, the most important development in the theatre profession also emerged as a response to the changing climate in arts funding. The Fringe phenomenon began in Edmonton in 1980 when the small Chinook Theatre hosted a FRINGE FESTIVAL that featured over 200 performances by new and young theatre troupes. That first Fringe was the prototype for a rapidly expanding movement that within a decade had reached cities across Canada. These festivals offer no juries and no prizes. Anyone can enter a performance; selection is on a firstcome, first-served basis, and entries are assigned to venues according to size. The festival charges a modest fee for participating groups and sets a ceiling on ticket prices, but the performers keep all their box-office receipts. The success of the Fringe phenomenon had a major impact on Canadian theatre. In the 19705, novices could take advantage of government support to start new theatres; in the 19805, with most of those funding programs discontinued,
THEORET
young artists saw the Fringe as a launching pad to a professional career. The Fringe operates as a laissez-faire marketplace, in which young artists can establish a reputation, and as a result has become one of the principal routes of entrance into the theatrical profession. Not surprisingly, the Fringe festivals rely heavily on comedy and PARODY, although serious experimental work can be found. (See also IMPROVISATIONAL.) By the 19905 it had become clear that the dialectic exchange between alternative and mainstream theatre was inadequate to explain the new forces that governed theatrical production in Canada. Since 1984, federal funding for the arts has diminished annually and provincial governments obsessed with deficit-cutting have gutted the arts councils. At the same time production costs have soared. This in turn has meant a revival of investor-financed commercial theatre to the extent that in Toronto at the close of the 2oth century, four large commercial houses (the Royal Alexandra Theatre, the ElginWinter Garden, Pantages, and the Princess of Wales) could sell more seats in any one night than all of the thirty or so subsidized theatres in the city. Local 'branch-plant' productions of international blockbuster musicals (The Phantom of the Opera, Cats, Les Miserables, Miss Saigon) attracted mass audiences but as well provided ammunition to politicians hostile to arts funding, who saw the profitability of the commercial hits as proof that public subsidy of the arts was a waste of money. The rise of transnational commercial production through the 19905 began to destabilize the complex of nation and stage that had driven the idea of public theatre for most of the previous century. The most celebrated Canadian impresario was Garth Drabinsky, who made his reputation in cinema with Cineplex Odeon, and then moved into live theatre production with his company, Live Entertainment Corp, commonly known as LiveEnt. Drabinsky specialized in 'offshore' productions of American musicals, taking such shows as Show Boat and Ragtime to Broadway. His claim that he was beating the Americans at their own game (with American shows staged by American artists) rang increasingly hollow, especially in 1998 when Drabinsky surrendered control of LiveEnt following a corpo-
rate takeover in the United States and charges of fraud. By the end of the century, the terrain of Canadian theatre was different from what its architects and policy makers had foreseen. In an era of global economy and transnational business, the relation between nation and stage had been severely fractured and the idea of a public theatre enterprise substantially devalued. At the same time, Canadian theatre artists were producing more work than ever both at home and abroad. The international success of innovative artists such as Robert LEPAGE, le Cirque du Soleil, and R. Murray SCHAFER proved that Canadian theatre could meet the world on its own terms. At home however, most aspiring artists, like their predecessors at the close of the previous century, faced a career marked by poverty and diminished opportunity in a theatrical market dominated by transnational spectacle. Alan Filewod
THEATRE SPORTS, an improvisational version of sketch comedy in which individuals or teams of performers develop scenes extemporaneously, based on suggestions from an audience or games host. The audience, when the performances are competitive, also serves as judge. IMPROVISATIONAL THEATRE groups exist in various locales across Canada, developing in part out of the games exercises devised by Viola Spolin, and the work of Keith Johnstone at U Calgary. One of the pioneers in adapting improv technique to the 'sports' format was the Vancouver Theatre Sports League (est by a co-op in 1980). See also POETRY SLAMS. THEORET, France. Poet, novelist, essayist; b Montreal 17 Oct 1942; daughter of Roger and Jeanne (Blais) Theoret. Although her parents were local merchants, many critics have assumed that Theoret is from a poor background, probably because of the proletarian context of most of her writing, the tone of which is often autobiographical and intensely personal. She holds a doctorate in Etudes francaises, has studied semiology and PSYCHOANALYSIS in Paris, and taught literature at the CEGEP level for 19 years. Theoret has been very active on Quebec's feminist and literary fronts. Co-founder of the feminist JOURNALS Les Tetes
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de Pioche and Spirale, she has published a number of poetry collections as well as fiction, essays on her own poetics, literary criticism, theatrical pieces, and journal entries. Theoret often works at the confluence of various genres, blending poetry with prose, fiction with autobiography and theory, journal with essay writing. Avowedly feminist, much of her work conveys a working class, Catholic, and patriarchal setting, in which female poet-speakers or protagonists agonize over the demands and limitations of moral, social, and intellectual conformity. Despite Theoret's resistance to traditional writing practices, some critics have commented on the REALISM of her work, which becomes more evident in later fictions such as Laurence (1996). Yet her writing style is most often self-consciously fragmentary, elliptical, even enigmatic. In her work the prosaic and the theoretical meld with the oral and the personal. Bloody Mary (1977) is Theoret's first publication, yet critics began paying serious attention to her work only with the appearance of Une voixpour Odile (1978). Invoking many of the themes explored in Theoret's first book, the poetic prose texts of Une voixpour Odile retrace a woman's untold history and the female speaker's own difficult relation to language, the physical body, and her female genealogy. Influenced by psychoanalytical theory, Theoret's poetry abounds with female speakers who fluctuate between the codes of a learned and internalized patriarchal language and the more 'bodily,' passionate, freer, though suppressed zones of speech. In the poems of Necessairement putain (1980), the novel Nous parlerons comme on ecrit (1982), and the short stories of L'homme qui peignait Staline (1993), Theoret pursues her exposure and displacement of the social, cultural, and familial structures of power that oppress WOMEN and hinder the development of their autonomous subjectivities in relation to writing, male-female relationships, and mother-daughter bonds. Theoret's work resounds with a polyphony of voices. Women's stories of violence, rape, abortion, divorce, and economic hardship are heard but also suppressed by their own fears and generations of silence. The struggle for self-expression continues to figure at the heart of the LONG POEM Etrangete, I'etreinte (1992). The essays on FEMINISM and Quebecois modernity gathered
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in Entre raison et deraison (1987) treat the practice of a 'writing in the feminine' ('ECRITURE au feminin'), which other feminist writers in Quebec have also sought to articulate. Although constantly faced with the inadequacies of language, the indispensable tools for the inscription of women's histories remain, according to Theoret, writing and reading. As in the short poems of La fiction de I'angc (1992), Theoret privileges female friendship which offers a successful model of mutual respect and of a more ethical society. She was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada in 2001. Further reading: Catherine Den-Tandt, 'Mapping Identity in Quebec: France Theoret,' Diacritics 23.3 (1993): 91-108; Karen Gould, 'Voicing the Agony of Discourse,' Writing in the Feminine: Feminism and Experimental Writing in Quebec (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1990): 200-43; Holly Leclair, '"Chacun peut inventer sa vie": The Problem of the Female Speaking Subject in France Theoret's L'homme que peignait Staline,' Women by Women: The Treatment of Female Characters by Women Writers of Fiction in Quebec since 1980, ed Roseanna Dufault (Canbury, NJ: Assoc UP, 1997): 68-84; Voix et images, special issue on France Theoret, 14.1 (1988). Marie J. Carriere
THEORY, see CRITICISM AND THEORY. THERIAULT, Marie-Jose (Marie Perron). Poet, novelist, story writer; b Montreal 21 March 1945; daughter of the novelist Yves THERIAULT (and author of his biography) and Michele Blanchet. Primarily a dancer and singer till the mid-1970s, she began publishing for Lettres quebecoises and Le Devoir, and in 1987 established her own artbook publishing house, Les Editions Sans Nom. For the poems oflnvariance (1980) she received the Canada-Switzerland Prize. She also twice won the Governor General's AWARD for TRANSLATION (1996, 1997), once for Arracher les montagnes, the French version of Digging Up the Mountains by Neil BISSOONDATH. Further reading: Lise Morin, 'De la nouvelle fantastique au roman fantastique,' Etudes canadiennes 40 (1996): 17-28. Constantin Grigorut
THIBODEAU
THERIAULT, Yves. Writer; b Quebec City 27 Nov 1915, djoliette, QC, 20 Oct 1983; son of Aurore (Nadeau) and Alcide Theriault, a carpenter. Lack of financial support meant that he left school at the age of 15. While he tried various occupations to earn his living (as a trapper, truck driver, aircraft pilot, radio speaker, RADIO DRAMA writer), his insatiable passion for reading prepared him to become a self-made writer, in fact the most prolific writer in Quebec, producing over seventy books altogether. His first important book to attract public attention was Contes pour un homme seul (1944). But what brought him fame was his novel Agaguk (1958), an EPIC story about a young Ungava Inuk who breaks away from his village and lives a colourful tundra life; the book was later translated into 20 languages. Theriault wrote in different genres for various audiences, about such Canadian minorities as the INUIT (Agaguk, 1958), INDIAN (Ashini, 1960), JEWISH (Aaron, 1954), and Scandinavian (Kesten, 1968) subcultures. He won several awards, including the Prix David (1979) and the 1960 Governor General's AWARD for fiction. Particularly representative of his imaginary universe and his writing style is the novel Ashini, in which the main character undertakes a hopeless solitary struggle against the ruling society, while seeking the absolute, and living in harmony with the savage nature of the forest. See also NORTH. Further reading: Andre Carpentier, Yves Theriault se raconte - Entretiens avec Andre Carpentier (Montreal: VLB, 1985); Maurice Emond, Yves Theriault et le combat de I'homme (Montreal: Hurtubise HMH, 1973); Jean-Paul Simard, Rituel et language chez Yves Theriault (Montreal: Fides, 1979). G.A. Lecomte
THERIO, Adrien. Novelist, short story writer; b Saint-Modeste, QC, 15 Aug 1925; son of Eva (Bouchard) and Charles-Eugene Theriault; educ U Ottawa, U Laval, Harvard U, and U Notre Dame. Therio became a professor at U Ottawa in 1969, founded Livres et auteurs quebecois and ran it from 1961 to 1973, then in 1976 founded Lettres quebecoises. An influential enthusiast for Quebec literature, he published novels, short stories, plays, essays, and anthologies - among
them, a 1968 sampling of Quebec HUMOUR, a 1962 translation of Henry David Thoreau's A Yankee in Canada, a 1995 collection of mid-century storytellers, and several studies of the nationalist journalist Jules Fournier. His fiction - for example, Marie-Eve, Marie-Eve (1983) sometimes deals with childhood, emphasizing the father's role in providing love; much of his fiction takes place in the area where he grew up (chemin Tache). Margaret Cook
THIBAUDEAU, Colleen. Poet, short story writer; b Toronto 29 Dec 1925; daughter of Alice (Pryce) and Stewart Thibaudeau. Colleen Thibaudeau's parents met in Belfast, where her father was en route back to France after having been wounded at Vimy; she herself married James REANEY in 1951. At U Toronto she was influenced by Margaret AVISON; by Marshall MCLUHAN, who partly directed her MA thesis (1949), 'Canadian Poetry of the 19405'; and by Robert FINCH. Among her major books of poems are My granddaughters are combing out their long hair (1977), Ten Letters (1978), The Martha Landscapes (1984), and The 'Patricia' Album and Other Poems (1992), all of which express in a somewhat POSTMODERNIST style an appreciation of domestic detail and a strong commitment to WOMEN'S independence, as in 'from the planned woodlot to the freedom of Mrs Field' (The Artemesia Book, 1991). Perhaps reflecting her ACADIAN heritage, Thibaudeau's poetry focuses on a surreal maritime mandala image, as in 'Four Corners: King's Park, Manitoba' (My granddaughters). Her work combines sophistication with wonder: just enduring wisely/Into old age has its mystery - .' Further reading: Peggy Dragasic, 'Colleen Thibaudeau's Big Sea Vision,' MA Thesis, U Western Ontario, 1978; Brick, Colleen Thibaudeau issue, 5 (Winter 1979). W. Stevenson
THIBODEAU, Serge-Patrice. Poet, b Riviere Verte, NB, n Aug 1959; educ U Moncton. Thibodeau moved to Montreal in 1986, becoming a poetry reviewer for numerous journals in Quebec and Europe, and working with RadioCanada as a music researcher (1990-2). His
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prizewinning volumes of poetry, which deal in part with the power of isolation, the force of otherness, include La septieme chute (1990; France-Acadie Prize 1991), Le cycle de Prague (Prix Emile-Nelligan 1992), and Le quatuor de I'errance (1995; Governor General's AWARD, 1996). L'appel des mots (1993) is a critical study of Saint-Denys GARNEAU. Jerome Loisel
THOMAS, Audrey Grace. Short story writer, novelist, radio playwright; b Binghamton, NY, 17 Nov 1935; daughter of Frances Waldron (Corbett) and Donald Earle Callahan, a teacher. Audrey Callahan grew up during the war years; she was educated at Smith C, MA, with a year at St Andrews U, Scotland, and received a BA in 1957. She moved to Canada after her marriage to Ian Thomas, artist-teacher, in 1958, and later earned an MA in English at U British Columbia. In 1969 Audrey Thomas moved to Galiano Island in the Gulf of Georgia where she alternates years of full-time writing and teaching creative WRITING, and divides her time between Galiano and Victoria. Although she spent her childhood and youth in the United States and has lived and worked in Canada most of her adult life, much of her fiction imaginatively recalls life as a young woman in AFRICA. In 1964 Thomas accompanied her husband to Ghana, where she wrote her first published story, 'If One Green Bottle... .' Recognizing her abilities as a writer, editors of the Atlantic Monthly awarded it a 1965 Atlantic First' award. A collection of stories, Ten Green Bottles, followed in 1967. During the 19605 and 19705 Thomas lived and travelled in Africa, Greece, France, England, and Scotland. Her impressions of foreign places generated a major part of her large literary output. In many of Thomas's narratives, the traveller's experience of dissonance is played out against recurring issues of female biology. Most notable is the Isobel trilogy: the novels Mrs. Blood (1970), Songs My Mother Taught Me (1973), and Blown Figures (1974; Du Sang, tr Henriette Etienne, 1972). In Mrs. Blood, Thomas's first published novel, a North American woman living with her family in Africa describes her prolonged miscarriage in a Ghanaian hospital (the novel reshapes Thomas's earlier short story, 'If
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One Green Bottle...'). Arguably, Mrs. Blood is the first Canadian novel that details pregnancy, birth, and miscarriage in a frank way. The novel's unnamed narrator uses two voices: 'Mrs Blood,' an emotional and poetic voice, and 'Mrs Thing,' the voice of a teacher's wife. A similar 'splitting' effect is constructed in Songs My Mother Taught Me, which is presented in two sections, 'Songs of Innocence' and 'Songs of Experience.' This novel's double-voiced narrator, who uses T when referring to herself and 'Isobel' when observing herself, tells enchanting yarns about family life at grandfather Corbett's summer place and disturbing tales about working at a hospital for the mentally ill. Point of view in both of these novels is sometimes playfully, sometimes sardonically, objectified. Blown Figures, the final novel in the trilogy, makes Isobel's past an important dimension of a present inner narrative. The Isobel we meet in Blown Figures recalls and relives her miscarriage in the African hospital; as well, we hear new details about her childhood and young womanhood; we are given additional information about her past lover, Richard - his brutal response to the news of pregnancy: 'Get rid of it.' Disrupting Isobel's past/present story are frequent authorial intrusions in the form of biblical allusions, allusions to literature of the past, excerpts from children's rhymes and African folk tales, details from historical texts, newspaper ads, a cartoon, isolated words and sentences, and (in the Canadian edition) many blank (silent) spaces and pages. Blown Figures treats physiological and psychic fragmentation literally and symbolically as one of its main themes. Margaret LAURENCE'S perceptive review of Blown Figures (Montreal Gazette, 1975; rpt Room of One's Own, The Audrey Thomas Issue' 10,1986) describes the Isobel trilogy as a moving characterization of a woman's psychic pain. Blown Figures, Thomas's most experimental novel (and possibly one of the most experimental novels in Canadian literature), connects the physical page and narrative reality in a manner reminiscent of Sterne's Tristram Shandy. Accompanying her vigorous experimentation with narrative form, Thomas writes within and between the genres of TRAVEL narrative, LIFE WRITING, and fiction. Munchmeyer and Prospero on the Island (1971), two interrelated NOVELLAS
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(pub together), foreground the interplay of genre: a diary written by Miranda Archer (Prospero on the Island) is about writing a novel (Munchmeyer); Munchmeyer, a male writer who keeps a diary, is the central character of this novel. Similarities between characters and recurring details in Thomas's narratives (which draw heavily on her experiences in New York, Canada, and Africa and her life as a writer) contribute to the sense of her work as a kind of continuing, semi-fictionalized autobiography. Beyond this deliberate blurring of generic boundaries is Thomas's almost obtrusive use of literary references (such as reminders of The Tempest in Munchmeyer and Prospero, and the Blakean echoes in Songs). A particularly telling reference is Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, from which the following epigraph to Mrs. Blood is taken: 'But I don't want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked. 'Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat: 'we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.' 'How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice. 'You must be,' said the Cat, 'or you wouldn't have come here.' Whether about the traveller's experience, female biology, disintegration, or madness, Thomas's fictions are rendered in a satiric, often playful, manner. The act of writing is, perhaps, the overarching subject of her fiction. In work published during the late 19705 and early 19805, Thomas combines continuing concerns: shifting perceptions; language and writing; desire and disintegration; culture and contemporary family relationships. Trips to Greece in 1976 and 1977 inspired stories that explore what some critics regard as the gap between the traditional marriage-romance plot and alternative feminist romance plots. Ladies and Escorts (1977) and Real Mothers (1981), collections containing some of Thomas's best short stories, unravel traditional plots within alternative plots; the latter work includes the motherdaughter plot, a concern reintroduced in Intertidal Life (1984). Latakia (1979), an EPISTOLARY novel set in Crete, tells the story of Rachel
and Michael's doomed romance and their failure to communicate. After her marriage ended in 1979, Thomas published her most celebrated novel: Intertidal Life. Her narrator-protagonist, Alice, who lives on a small island on the West Coast of British Columbia with her youngest daughter Flora, still loves her former husband Peter, who has fallen in love with a younger woman and moved to the mainland. Alice offers careful observations of the details of marine life, word derivatives, and failed contemporary marriage. Alice's view of Peter, at once too perfect and too flawed, is itself an insightful portrayal of memory's capacity for contradiction and distortion, of the construction of a linguistic reality. Readers who recall passages in Intertidal Life from their reading of Ladies and Escorts become, at times, uncomfortable participants in Alice's relentless, obsessive introspection of a failed marriage. The intertextuality of character and incident typifying Thomas's oeuvre creates a consistent picture of the past as a dimension of the present. Admirers of Thomas's writing delight in the intricate warp and weave of her semi-invented/re-invented tales, for continuities are usually present within and between stories and novels. With Intertidal Life Thomas confirmed her reputation as a respected Canadian writer. Her work is often compared to that of Margaret ATWOOD, Alice MUNRO, and Michael ONDAATJE, whose narratives also develop expository links through recurring images, characters, and motifs. Thomas's 'Basmati Rice: An Essay about Words' (1984) perhaps best describes her approach to language and writing. Linguistic surprise, she explains, comes from a wide range of everyday sources: overheard snippets of conversations among people chatting in the streets or on the phone; bits of text on consumer items such as an ordinary bread wrapper; reported scenarios in local newspapers; the metaphors of everyday speech. Connections through juxtaposed words, linguistic absurdities, are often the origin of Thomas's 'unlikely' stories. In her introductory commentary to Goodbye Harold, Good Luck (1984), a collection of brilliantly crafted SHORT STORIES, Thomas explains that 'correspondences' between the past and present are provided through sense and
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memory. In Goodbye Harold, female narrators tell witty ironic stories about leaving relationships; often humour provides a distance from grief and loneliness. 'The Man with Clam Eyes' plays on the nonsense created by a simple typographical error (dam ... calm); a gentle irony reveals the fragile nature of the utterance when language has lost its force. Fragmentation at the level of words, sentences, paragraphs, and narrative structure reproduces a sense of dissonance, dissociation, and distance; at the same time, language play creates laughter, and with laughter, renewal. Later publications include The Wild Blue Yonder (1990), a collection of stories about laughter, pain, and emotional entrapment in somewhat disturbing male-female relationships; Graven Images (1993), Coming Down From Wa (1995), and Isobel Gunn (1999), three carefully researched novels about family secrets. In Graven Images, two women travel to England to study the Corbett family's history (Thomas's own family). William Kwame MacKenzie, in Coming Down From Wa, is an art history researcher who travels to Africa to investigate the Ashanti lost wax process, a casting technique; William is also a classical quester, searching for the truth about his parents' secret past. The title figure in Isobel Gunn, based on a real event, is an Orkney woman who masquerades as a man in NORTHERN trading posts. Two of the novels use the situation of the traveller to explore relationships with the past; Graven Images, however, more directly explores the relation between identity, language, and writing. Best known for her exquisitely crafted experimental fiction, Thomas is an important contributor to the development of the Canadian literary landscape. She has served on such committees as the Arts Advisory Board of The Canada Council, on its Reading Tours Committee, and on the national executive of the WRITERS' UNION OF CANADA. By 2000 she had published ten novels, six short story collections, and more than twenty RADIO DRAMAS. She has contributed to many anthologies, written numerous articles, essays, and reviews, and provided many detailed interviews. AWARDS for her fiction include the National Magazine Award, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Literary Contest (three times), the Scotland-Canada
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Writers Award, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize (first winner in British Columbia), the Marian Engel award, and a number of honorary degrees. Further reading: George Bowering, 'The Site of Blood,' Canadian Literature 65 (1975): 86; Joan Coldwell, 'Memory Organized: The Novels of Audrey Thomas,' Canadian Literature 92 (1982): 46-56; Frank Davey, Alternative Stories: The Short Fiction of Audrey Thomas and Margaret Atwood,' Canadian Literature 109 (1986): 5-14. Marlene Sawatsky
THOMPSON, David. Fur trader, surveyor, writer; b Westminster, London, England, 30 April 1770, d Longueuil, CE, 10 Feb 1857; son of Ann and David Thompson. Thompson came from a poor family of Welsh extraction. When he was two his father died, and in 1777 a benefactor sponsored his entry into Westminster's Grey Coat charity school. He received an education for Royal Navy service, but was instead apprenticed to the HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY. In 1784 he was sent to the HBC post at Churchill Factory, then under the command of Samuel HEARNE. Thompson spent 13 years in the HBC's employ. After serving at Churchill and York Factories, from 1786 to 1790 he worked at various inland posts, and spent a winter at the Piegan encampment on the Bow River. Towards the end of this period he was taught surveying by Philip Turner. In 1790 his contract was renewed, and he spent the following six years engaged in surveying projects, most notably the charting of a new route to Lake Athabasca in 1796. For reasons that remain unclear, Thompson left the HBC in 1797 for the rival North West Company, where he was to work for the next 15 years. His career with the NWC provided him with a broader scope for his trading and surveying activities, and his exploits included a journey to the Mandan villages on the Missouri in 17978, expansion of the fur trade west of the Rocky Mountains, and a voyage to the mouth of the Columbia in 1811. In 1799 Thompson had married Charlotte Small, of CREE extraction, and in 1812 he brought her and their children to Montreal, retiring from active service in the fur trade. In
THOMPSON 1815 the growing family moved to a farm near Williamstown, Upper Canada, and from 1817 to 1827 Thompson was employed as astronomer and surveyor to the commission set up under the Treaty of Ghent to chart the boundary with the United States. Thompson's financial situation began to worsen in 1825, and by the late 18305 he had to give up his farm and return to Montreal. Here he worked on several minor surveying jobs, but he was frequently in debt and pawned many of his possessions. As early as 1820 he had considered writing a book about his western experiences, and had made a start in 1843 and again in 1845. He began to write steadily in 1846, and eventually produced over 700 manuscript pages for the work he called 'My Travels.' Composition was suspended twice, first when he suffered an attack of blindness and then when he fell ill with cholera. In late 1850 Thompson stopped writing altogether, leaving the work unfinished. He lived his last years in obscurity, as a member of a son-inlaw's household at Longueuil. There he died in 1857-
Thompson's early reputation rested almost entirely on his work as a surveyor, and no other figure contributed as much as he to the early mapping of Western Canada. But his professional, scientific activities were part of a much wider pursuit of knowledge. He read extensively and was especially animated by works of geography, exploration, and travel. It was as a clerk that Thompson first gained employment in the fur trade, and he continued to write throughout his life, keeping journals, corresponding with figures in the fur trade and in government, and contributing articles and letters to newspapers. He also had a reputation as a first-class storyteller. The bulk of Thompson's extant written work is to be found in 77 notebooks currently housed in the ARCHIVES of Ontario. These volumes contain a largely unmined resource of surveys, astronomical observations, catalogues of events, financial accounts, and daily journals. The journals are the most voluminous of these items, covering the years 1789-1851 almost inclusively. Several of Thompson's surviving letters concern the boundary disputes of the 18403; his correspondents included the governors of Canada and members of the British Ministry, and he
argued for a strong British stand on the unresolved points of the Treaty of Ghent and on the division of the Oregon Territory. Thompson began writing for newspapers almost as soon as he retired from the fur trade, and during the 18405 he contributed frequently to the Montreal Gazette. The bulk of his pieces dealt with his western experiences, and he also wrote on contemporary Canadian social and political issues. But Thompson's literary reputation rests almost entirely on his last great project, the 'Travels,' which stands alongside the works of Hearne, John FRANKLIN, and Alexander MACKENZIE as one of the central texts in the literature of Canadian EXPLORATION. The 'Travels' provides an account of some of Thompson's activities as a fur trader and surveyor between 1784 and 1812, including such episodes as the winter with the Piegan, the journey to Lake Athabasca, the founding of Kootenae House, and the voyage to the Pacific. The 'Travels' is as much about the geography, natural history, and NATIVE peoples of western North America as it is about Thompson's own work; almost every topic concerned with this region falls under his gaze, from the smallpox epidemic of 1781-2 to caribou migrations, and from copper mines to the Sasquatch. The Natives of the WEST pervade the narrative, and Thompson writes on more than thirty distinct Aboriginal groups, devoting special attention to the Cree, Mandan, and Piegan peoples. Beyond its significance as a geographical, historical, and anthropological record, the 'Travels' is a distinguished literary work. Thompson's account is suffused by a restless spirit of inquiry and marked by an analytical engagement with the places and people of the West. The author alternates between the prose of the scientist, expository and descriptive, and that of the storyteller, characterized by immediacy, vivid imagery and irony. Thompson frequently slips into the voices of Native figures and juxtaposes Native and European culture and values, and some of the work's touchstone episodes include an account of Cree belief systems, a curious encounter with the Devil, and the narrative of the Piegan elder Saukamappee. The 'Travels' has been edited by J.B. TYRRELL (1916) and Richard Glover (1962) as David Thomp-
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son's Narrative, and by Victor Hopwood (1971) as Travels in Western North America. The first two editors attempted to be faithful to Thompson's manuscript, but cut much material and were free with punctuation and orthography. Hopwood tried to reconstruct what he saw as the finally intended text, compiling a slimmer hybrid work from various Thompson writings. Tyrrell hailed Thompson as 'the greatest practical land geographer that the world has produced' and Hopwood called him 'the foundation mythmaker of the Canadian West,' but despite his historical and literary significance, fame came late to Thompson; his contributions had been virtually forgotten by the end of his own life and it was not until the end of the ipth century that his importance began to be appreciated. Most of the critical body of work on Thompson relates to the 'Travels.' This text was at first used only as a historical and biographical primary source, and several debates have concerned the personal character of the author and the details of his professional activities; for example, Tyrrell wrote about Thompson's technical skill, piety, and strong sense of morality, while Glover emphasized his personal faults and professional failings. After 1970 the 'Travels' received attention as a literary work, with Hopwood, T.D. MacLulich, and Germaine Warkentin discussing most fully the qualities of Thompson's writing and the many critical problems that the text presents. Hopwood and Warkentin note that Thompson's authorial voice shifts between the empirical and the colloquial, while all three critics comment on Thompson's use of alternating passages of narration and description, as his focus shifts between his own activities and the lands and peoples of the West. The description/narration divide is in turn tied to the broader question of the work's unity, which has been the most debated literary aspect of the text. The 'Travels' gathers diverse matter related in diverse voices, and its unifying principle has been stubbornly evasive. Hopwood's commentary on and editorial treatment of the 'Travels' show how difficult it is to grasp the work in its entirety; he wrote that it is united by several themes, including adventure, the exposition of the West, and the revelation of the narra-
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tor, while in his edition he sought to accentuate the narrative aspects of the text, excising the most purely descriptive and thematic passages. Conversely, MacLulich argued that these thematic digressions are more important than the chronological narratives they adjoin, and claimed that the text possesses a 'unity of vision' which brings together all apparent disjunctions and digressions. Warkentin responded cautiously to the problem of unity by simply stating that 'it is the passionate activity of Thompson's mind that shapes his narrative.' To some extent, questions of voice, structure, and unity reflect Thompson's dual persona of surveyor and storyteller. The former provides empirical data, while the latter spins a tale; so, at one point in the narrative Thompson the scientist copies out temperature tables for two furtrading posts while scant pages later Thompson the bard relates his conversation with a self-confessed murderer. These critical problems also reflect the conditions of the text's production - the aspect of the work that has received the least attention. Thompson strove to integrate effectively a mass of material, touching on the fields of history, anthropology, geography, travel, and autobiography. His solution to this problem evolved over the course of six years and five drafts, but he was unable to complete his work, leaving it open-ended and fragmentary. The critics' struggles to understand the nature of the text reflect the problem of assimilation that Thompson himself faced and never ultimately resolved. The field of Thompson studies remains largely untilled. His letters and journalism have not been collected, and a full biography and a critical edition of the 'Travels' that meets current bibliographical standards remain to be compiled. Further reading: Victor Hopwood, 'Introduction,' Travels in Western North America (Toronto: Macmillan, 1971): 1-39; T.D. MacLulich, 'The Explorer as Sage: David Thompson's Narrative,' J Canadian Fiction 4.4 (1976): 97-107; Germaine Warkentin, 'David Thompson' Profiles in Canadian Literature i (Toronto: Dundurn, 1980): 1-8. Bill Moreau
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THOMPSON, John. Poet; b Timperley, Cheshire, England, 17 March 1938, d Sackville, NB, 26 April 1976; son of Beatrice (Wilkinson) and Harold Thompson. Raised by his mother after his father was killed in the Second World WAR, Thompson was educated at Manchester Grammar School, Sheffield U (psychology), and Michigan State U (comparative literature, PhD 1966, supervised by A.J.M. SMITH), after which he taught at Mount Allison U until his death. His two volumes of poetry - At the Edge of the Chopping there are no Secrets (1973) and Stilt Jack (1978) - won enthusiastic response from writers who were familiar with the 'open form' of Ezra Pound's poetry, including Phyllis WEBB, whose 'anti-ghazals' respond to the particular Arabic couplet form that Thompson himself used in his 1978 volume, adapting it from the American poet Adrienne Rich. Thompson's poetry, in densely layered metaphor, charts a journey away from the familiar, stripping language itself from familiar referents until the experience of lyrical perception becomes, even in the face of pain, itself an affirmation of the world's grandeur. His poems were collected as I Dream Myself into Being (1991) and as John Thompson: Collected Poems and Translations (1995), the latter volume edited by one of his students, Peter S anger. THOMPSON, Judith Clare Francesca. Playwright, screenwriter, director; b Montreal 20 Sept 1954; daughter of Mary Therese (Forde) and William Robert Thompson; studied at Queen's U majoring in drama and English (BA, 1976), and graduated from the acting program of the National Theatre School in Montreal (1979). Thompson grew up mainly in Kingston, ON, where she attended Catholic schools. Through her father, who was a behaviour geneticist and head of the Psychology Dept at Queen's U, she developed an interest in psychology, and through her mother, who taught English, wrote, directed and acted in amateur THEATRE, Judith Thompson discovered her vocation for the theatre. Thompson has worked as a nursing aide, social worker, and actor. After the success of her first play, The Crackwalker, in 1980, she began to concentrate on writing and, later, directing. She married Gregor Duncan Campbell in 1983, and
now divides her time between her career in the theatre and her family of four children. She has taught acting, directing, and playwriting at several universities and, since 1992, has been on faculty with the Drama Dept at U Guelph (see WRITING). Thompson drew upon her experiences as an adult protective services worker in capturing the voices of society's poor and battered in her first play. Set in Kingston among characters who balance precariously on the razor-sharp edge of life, just avoiding the ultimate plunge into the abyss, The Crackwalker focuses on two couples: Theresa, a mentally disabled child-woman, and Alan, who transforms Theresa into a Madonna figure in his desperate need for love and security; Sandy, whose mask of normality and practicality constantly slips to expose deeply etched scars, and Joe, cocky and abusive. Nothing is resolved; the abyss still gapes ominously after Alan strangles his infant son, who might have been his means of salvation. This play explores Thompson's belief that we are all an amalgam of good and evil and that we all have the potential to lose control when confronted with our own crackwalkers in life. Thompson gained immediate recognition, much of it hostile, when The Crackwalker premiered at the Backspace in Toronto's Theatre Passe Muraille in Nov 1980, directed by Clarke Rogers. Some reviewers praised her skills as a creator of vigorous dialogue, achieved through juxtaposing fragments of intense monologues, duologues, and, occasionally, conversations. The Crackwalker was a finalist in both the Clifford E. Lee playwriting competition and the National Repertory Theatre Play Awards, and a nominee for the Dora Mavor Moore Award for outstanding new play in 1980; however, several years passed before audiences and reviewers accommodated themselves to the brutality of the play's content and its raw, virile language. The production was mounted on the mainstage by Montreal's Centaur Theatre in the spring of 1982, under artistic director Maurice Podbrey, and then, after touring, remounted in Toronto under the direction of Rogers, and was critically acclaimed. To celebrate the xoth anniversary of The Crackwalker in 1990, Tarragon Theatre mounted a production, directed by Urjo Kareda and Andy McKim, that then moved to the Cen-
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taur Theatre in 1991, where it was one of the Canadian entries in the Theatre Festival of the Americas. The Crackwalker became more accessible to readers when it was included in Thompson's The Other Side of the Dark: Four Plays (Coach House, 1989), but the play had undergone some apparent changes, which were incorporated into the 1990 Tarragon production. The first published version of The Crackwalker (Playwrights Canada, 1981) treats Alan's murder of his infant son very differently: the infanticide occurs offstage and as a consequence of Alan's deranged hallucinations. Thompson has maintained that the 1989 version of this scene is actually a return to the more blatantly political original version: the strangulation takes place before our eyes as Alan, angry with interference from social services, attempts to calm his child. Thompson followed up the success of The Crackwalker with White Biting Dog (Playwrights Canada, 1984), which won the Governor General's AWARD for drama. While retaining naturalistic characters in an identifiable Toronto environment, White Biting Dog foregrounds the inner life of its characters through surrealistic, symbolic, musical and rhythmic elements to a much greater extent than The Crackwalker. These elements are typical of Thompson's style, which she herself describes as 'magic REALISM and naturalism/ White Biting Dog focuses on Cape Race and his mission to save his father, Glidden, from death. A talking white dog has communicated this mission to Cape as he was on the verge of a suicidal jump. Pony miraculously appears, singing to her now dead dog, and Cape thinks she is an angel sent to aid him. The play ends with Pony's sacrificial suicide and her appearance, as an apparition, to her father. She tells him that she killed herself because she was 'invaded ... by the worst evil ... it happened when I fell in love, on account of I had to open my mouth so wide to let the love in that the evil came in, too.' The unconditional love and loyalty of Pony and of Glidden for his wayward wife, Lomia, have prompted critics to explore the FREUDIAN and the religious dimensions of this play. White Biting Dog reveals clearly the concept of grace that in varying ways informs all Thompson's plays. Thompson explained to Judith Rudakoff that Grace 'happens through
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penitence, through sight. Through seeing who you are and changing things. You achieve it through humility.' White Biting Dog premiered at the Tarragon Theatre, directed by Bill Glassco, in Jan 1984, initiating Thompson's close relationship with Tarragon over the next decade. Under the direction of Morris PANYCH, Tarragon Theatre remounted White Biting Dog in April 1994 as part of the World Stage Festival. Thompson had rewritten large segments of the play to heighten the drama and eliminate exposition. Thompson received her second Governor General's Award for The Other Side of the Dark (1989), which comprises The Crackwalker; the short monologue Pink (1986), commissioned for the Arts Against Apartheid Benefit in Toronto; Tornado (1987), broadcast on CBC's Sextet series and awarded a Nellie for Best Original Radio Drama; and her third full-length play, I Am Yours, first produced at the Tarragon in Nov 1987, under the direction of Derek Goldby, and a runner-up for the Chalmers Canadian Play Awards. In 1990 le Theatre de la Manufacture produced Je suis dtoi,a French translation of I Am Yours, at La Licorne in Montreal, directed by Claude POISSANT. Thompson's stage adaptation of Tornado premiered at U Guelph in 1993. Pink, Tornado, and I Am Yours demonstrate Thompson's continued interest in parent-child relationships and the role of a surrogate parent. Tornado and I Am Yours connect to Thompson's next full-length play, Lion in the Streets (Coach House, 1992), in their movement towards the transfiguration and redemption that the infant or young child can effect in lives witnessing what Thompson, in a 1991 interview with Eleanor Wachtel, referred to as 'the beautiful, pure god in us.' These plays also reveal Thompson's preoccupation with the abyss, conveyed metaphorically as the storm, the dark, the animal, or even the epileptic seizure. (Thompson herself has suffered several seizures since age nine.) In these later plays, a saintly child, an idealization of goodness, draws the adult characters through 'the other side of the dark' to the 'big white light.' In Lion in the Streets, Thompson again employs her preferred form of short, fragmented scenes, but here links them through one constant figure, the ghost of Isobel, a 9-year-old
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Portuguese girl murdered 17 years previously, and through her 'relay' structure whereby one character from each scene is carried over into the next scene. With approximately 30 characters and 15 scenes, the play achieves its dramatic intensity as Isobel conies to see that her mission is not only to confront and forgive her murderer but also to warn residents in her old neighbourhood of the lion stalking their streets and to advise, as the title's biblical reference to Proverbs suggests, resistance to oppression and oppressors. Lion in the Streets grew out of a RADIO play, A Big White Light, that Thompson wrote for CBC's Sextet series, broadcast Dec 1989. As with her next play, Sled (Playwrights Canada, 1997), she developed the script of Lion in the Streets as a workshop project at Tarragon Theatre. Directed by Thompson herself, it was first performed in May 1990 and then in June as part of the du Maurier World Stage Theatre Festival in Toronto, Thompson also directed a revised version at the Tarragon in November; she then rewrote entire sections for the published text. Lion in the Streets received the Chalmers Canadian Play Award in 1991. Montreal's Theatre de Quat'Sous produced a French translation, Lion dans les rues, directed by Poissant, in Sept 1991. Produced not only across Canada, Thompson's plays have acquired international recognition and have been performed either in English or in translation in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Sweden, and Israel. Her canon may seem to comprise a number of unfinished works in progress, yet Thompson firmly believes that her plays contain a vision, immune to interpretation, that should be respected in their premieres. Perhaps for this reason, she is no longer content simply to produce her own plays, as she had sometimes done previously, but now opts to direct them as they are still evolving to discover that vision. Canadian Theatre R devoted a series of articles in its Winter 1996 issue to Thompson's Sled, which underwent a four-week development process from Dec 1995 to Jan 1996 at a Tarragon Theatre Public Workshop. Sled, which premiered at the Tarragon in Jan 1997 under the direction of Duncan Mclntosh, incorporates mythical elements new to Thompson, and a more extensive use of music than previously, but continues to
explore evil, violence, and connections between the living and dead. As well as her own plays, Thompson directed a production of Miller's The Crucible while she was resident at U New Brunswick in 1990 and her own adaptation of Ibsen's Hedda Gablerfor the SHAW FESTIVAL, Niagara-on-the-Lake, in 1991. Thompson feels her vocation is as a writer for the stage, but she has had success writing for radio, TELEVISION, and more recently FILM, with such dramas as Quickening (CBC Radio, 1984), A Kissing Way (CBC Radio, 1986), White Sand (CBC Radio, 1991; winner of a B'nai B'rith Media Human Rights Award), Sugarcane (CBC Radio, 1993), Turning to Stone (CBC-TY 1986; winner of Prix Italia), Life with Billy (CBC-TV, 1993; winner of Golden Gate Award for Best Screenplay), and Perfect Pie (CBC-TY 1994). Further reading: George Toles, '"Cause You're the Only One I Want": The Anatomy of Love in the Plays of Judith Thompson,' Canadian Literature 118 (1988): 116-35; Cynthia Zimmerman, Playwriting Women: Female Voices in English Canada (Toronto: Simon & Pierre, 1994). Lesley D. Clement
THOMPSON, Kent. Short story writer, poet, novelist, playwright; b Waukegan, IL, 3 Feb 1936; son of Maurice and Clarice (Graves) Thompson; educ Hanover C (BA), U Iowa (MA), and U Wales, Swansea (PhD). Prior to his retirement, Thompson taught English and creative WRITING at U New Brunswick. He now lives in Annapolis Royal, NS. Thompson's five novels include Playing in the Dark (1990); he has also published short fiction and poetry. He is known primarily for his invention of the 'postcard story' (as in Leaping Up/Sliding Away, 1986). Claire Wilkshire
THOMPSON, Paul William. Director, playmaker; b Charlottetown 4 May 1940; son of Beatrice (Bonar) and Ross Thompson, veterinarian. With degrees in English and French (U Western Ontario) and history (U Toronto), he apprenticed with populist director Roger Planchon in France and worked briefly at STRATFORD before becoming the central figure in 19705 Canadian alternate THEATRE. As artistic director of Toronto's Theatre Passe Muraille (1972-82), he
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established the model for collectively created DOCUMENTARY-style plays on Canadian subjects. His most important work includes The Farm Show (1976; prod 1972.), 1837: The Farmers' Revolt (1976; prod 1973) with Rick SALUTIN, and Maggie and Pierre (1982) with Linda GRIFFITHS. By 1998 he had collaborated in over 40 plays as co-author or, his preferred term, 'scenarist,' and directed internationally and across Canada. He served as director-general of the National Theatre School from 1987 to 1991. Further reading: Diane Bessai, Playwrights of Collective Creation (Toronto: Simon & Pierre, 1992); Robert Wallace and Cynthia Zimmerman, The Work (Toronto: Coach House, 1982): 237-51. Jerry Wasserman
THOMPSON, Thomas Phillips. Journalist, social critic; b Newcastle-on-Tyne, England, 25 Nov 1843, d Oakville, ON, 22 May 1933; son of Sarah and William Thompson, both Quakers. Thompson was brought to Canada at 14 by his parents, and went on to become both a republican and socialist. His most important work, The Politics of Labor (1887), critiques the political economy of the United States, where he lived for four years. Although essentially expository and analytical, the book uses illustrative narrative and stresses the importance of literary culture in elevating the working CLASSES and achieving the peaceful reformation of society. James Doyle
THOMSON, Edward William. Short story writer, journalist; b Peel Co, CW, 12 Feb 1849, d Boston, MA, 5 March 1924; son of Margaret (Foley) and William Thomson, farmers. Thomson joined the editorial staff of the Toronto Globe in 1878, leaving in 1891 to become editor and writer of Youth's Companion (Boston); from 1901 until 1923 he was Ottawa correspondent with the Boston Evening Transcript. A friend of Archibald LAMPMAN (their letters were edited in 1980) and D.C. SCOTT, he wrote political articles and poetry, but was best known for Old Man Savarin, and Other Stories (1895; rev as Old Man Savarin Stories: Tales of Canada and Canadians, 1917, rpt 1974 with intro by Linda Sheshko). The 'Canadian' tales - such as the title story or 'The
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Privilege of the Limits' - tend to sketch characters' canny solutions to authoritarian dilemmas. Of equal interest are the stories set in Boston, such as 'Miss Minnelly's Management,' a SATIRE of DIDACTICISM and hypocrisy in the book trade. Further reading: Lorraine McMullen, 'E.W. Thomson and the Youth's Companion,' Canadian Children's Literature 13 (1979): 7-10, and 'Tales of Canada and Canadians,'/ Canadian Fiction 2 (Summer 1973): 191-4. TIBO, Gilles. Artist, cartoonist; b Nicolet, QC, 18 July 1951; son of Henriette (Vandemeulebrooke) and Bernard Thibault. One of the bestknown cartoonists of his generation, Tibo worked on posters, record covers, book jackets, comic strips, illustrations (eg, of Felix LECLERC'S Le tour de I'ile), and numerous other works, especially for children, and was artistic director of Productions Le Tamanoir (1976-9). In 1992 he won the Governor General's AWARD for CHILDREN'S illustration for his book Simon et la ville de carton, about a boy who invents magical worlds out of cardboard boxes. Margaret Cook
TIHANYI, Eva. Poet; b Budapest, Hungary, 15 July 1956. Tihanyi came to Canada with her parents in 1962. After receiving a BA (1977) and MA in creative writing (1978) from U Windsor, she taught English at George Brown C, Humber C, St Clair C, Seneca C, and U Windsor. Tihanyi has worked as a writer and columnist for Books in Canada. She lives in Welland, ON. Tihanyi, a lyric poet, had published three books of poetry by 1998: A Sequence of the Blood (1982); Prophecies Near the Speed of Light (1984); and Saved by the Telling (1995). Her work is unified by two abiding themes: women's experience of love, and the making of poetry and art. Her poetry has a cynical edge, an underlying acceptance of the inequities of modern life and relationships. Each collection, however, moves through an exploration of pain to a muted celebration of life's small pleasures. The title of Tihanyi's first collection suggests a rite of passage and, in fact, the poems in A Sequence of the Blood are imagistic considerations of love. These introspective poems record the
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mounting intensity of new love that soon recedes as the demands of daily life assert themselves. The speaker here is a young woman whose happiness depends largely on her lover. Bound by their mutual love of art - she is a writer and he is a painter — the speaker gives herself over to their relationship. From the start, however, she prepares for treachery: 'if the lover takes form like a rising tide, his eyes are cool, / and his scorpion tattoo "menacing as deep water.'" Betrayal is a constant theme in Tihanyi's work. Always on guard against the infidelities of life and love, the speaker seeks inspiration and redemption in poetry. By the end of the volume, when love has died and she awakes, she asks what god called her to this place and why. Finally, vulnerability in love is overcome through the creative act. Prophecies Near the Speed of Light is less personal and more abstract. Here the speaker is an equal partner in love but her new independence results in a poetry of detachment and loss. She no longer can embrace a partner whose loyalty she questions throughout this collection. Less resilient than her earlier self, she prefers to look squarely at relationships and measure their possibilities, including the possibility that each day, each experience, will be the last. The broad focus of this volume includes sardonic poems about modern, urban experience where the relentless pace of the city and 'the insurmountable clock' regulate day-to-day life. Moreover, in a setting that is blind to the events of history, friendships become superficial and family life is severely strained. Once again, poetry is a necessary anodyne for the speaker who seeks meaning amid the chaos and fatigue she observes. By this time she is a more assertive poet who understands that creativity requires defiance and faith. Intelligent and sensitive poems counter the real threat of death and record the eternal process of change. Tihanyi's third volume is dedicated to her paternal grandmother, Elizabeth Kalan Tihanyi, and represents her most ambitious and mature work. The self-conscious quality of many of these poems is a mark of the developing poet. Here, the diction is less formal than in earlier work and, for the first time, she experiments with prose poems. Unlike her two previous col-
lections, Saved by the Telling is divided into three parts. Part one, 'Women's Rites,' includes poems about women's experience as friends, lovers, wives, teachers, and writers. Tihanyi's interest in betrayal is evident still in poems that are now openly caustic, condemning men. The title poem describes a vicious argument between a man and a woman, with women always at the mercy of the man's duplicity. Many of these poems look beyond the speaker to the lives of friends and strangers she observes. A zy-year-old is seduced by an older man who leaves her pregnant; a hotel maid is abandoned by her husband of ii years; a sick wife is abused by an alcoholic spouse. Poems that pay homage to Naomi Wolf, Bronwen WALLACE, Virginia Woolf, and Sylvia Plath place Tihanyi within the tradition of women writers, while others recognize the gulf between the poet and women who assess her with 'round cynical eyes.' 'Life in the Home Lane,' part two of the volume, includes personal poems about the poet's parents, her own marriage, and the birth of her son. Despite their compelling images, these poems remain reticent. They merely allude to the extremes of pain and pleasure that have shaped the speaker's life. Belatedly, she sees a pattern between her parents' divorce and the breakdown of her own marriage. She recognizes herself in an aging mother who still loves her ex-husband, and she admits to a lack of faith in her own spouse. The poems to her distant father and her young son are particularly poignant. Finally, 'Who You Are Is What You See' includes poems about the randomness of relationships, about language and the making of art. Poetry remains a source of deep satisfaction for the speaker. When love is unreliable and modern life is arbitrary, only writing leads to strength. Further reading: R.D. MacKenzie, U Windsor R 17.2 (Spring-Summer 1983): 86-91. Ruth Panofsky
TISH GROUP. The term refers to a group of poets and to a literary magazine that they founded in Vancouver in 1961 and published through to 1969. 'Tish' suggests the sound of breath and underscores the group's interna-
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tional affinities with the oral, performative traditions of American 'projectivist' verse as practised by BLACK MOUNTAIN poets such as Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, and Charles Olson. The Tish Group of poets also admired and emulated other formally rebellious writers such as the beat-generation poets, inclusive of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg. (The scatalogical echo in the group's name was not accidental.) Tish magazine was edited by Frank DAVEY, George BOWERING, Fred WAH, David DAWSON, and James Reid, all of whom favoured and encouraged spontaneity of expression in the place of adherence to traditional, fixed poetic forms. Tish magazine inspired the creation of a number of similarly focused West coast magazines, and when it folded in 1969 Frank Davey founded Open Letter, which many saw as the editorial and philosophical successor to Tish. Open Letter carried on with the Tish advocacy of open forms, humanist concern, and internationalism in the arts. Tish's aesthetic and humanist values had an extensive influence on contemporary poets all across Canada; John NEWLOVE, Andrew SUKNASKI, Robert KROETSCH, Margaret AT WOOD, and David MCFADDEN, among many others, were greatly influenced by the unfreezing effects of the Tish Group rebellion. Many now see Tish in retrospect as the first Canadian stimulus to a POSTMODERN tradition in Canadian poetry. Further reading: Douglas Barbour, ed, Beyond Tish (Edmonton & Vancouver: Newest & West Coast Line, 1991); Frank Davey, ed, Tish, 1-19 (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1975); Ken Norris, The Little Magazine in Canada 1925-80 (Toronto: ECW, 1984): 97-131. Terry Whalen
TLINGIT ORAL LITERATURE. A conventional definition of literature as a body of written texts initially promises to elevate verbal oratory from the messiness of daily life to some loftier status. Tlingit poet, writer, and translator Nora Marks Dauenhauer and her linguist husband Richard are architects and editors of a series entitled Classics of Tlingit Oral Literature and pose different questions. They observe that
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current debates surrounding oral literature sometimes echo those about Tlingit art, the magnificent sculptural works long coveted by distant collectors. Ceremonial regalia and ORAL tradition acquire their original power because they invoke a system of human relations that makes and maintains the world. Once they become uprooted from familiar contexts and displaced to 'collections,' social action becomes 'art,' words are enshrined as 'text,' and process becomes product. The Dauenhauers have devoted their professional lives to documenting the viability of an oral tradition that resists this process in Alaska and Canada. They embrace a concept of literature that is embodied rather than disembodied, that occurs in real time and in live performance, and that derives meanings from embeddedness in clan traditions. Tlingit, the most northerly of Northwest Coast languages, is centred in Alaska but also spoken in inland Canadian communities along the Stikine and Taku Rivers in northern British Columbia, and in southern Yukon. Archaeological and linguistic evidence as well as Tlingit tradition suggest that Tlingit people established their presence there very early. With the arrival of Russian, British, and American traders on the coast in the late 17005, more Tlingit moved inland, consolidating their position as middlemen in the competition for furs. One way of regulating social interaction necessary for smooth trade was to formalize ongoing trading partnerships between coastal and interior communities through marriages. Gradually an increasing number of Tlingit men and women moved in from the Coast to be closer to the source of furs, bringing language, social customs, clans and crests, and blending them into local cultures. Stories travel, too, neither contained nor constrained by national boundaries. Their telling helps to organize perceptions about the world, to locate human history, to affirm connections among families and clans and to anchor humans to place. The Dauenhauers' series comprises three volumes and ranks as one of the most comprehensive studies of Native American ORAL LITERATURE. A Tlingit speaker, Nora became professionally interested in Tlingit language and oral literature as an adult and undertook academic training during the late 19605. Richard
TLINGIT ORAL LITERATURE
brought linguistic and literary background to the study of Tlingit at approximately the same time and they began their professional collaboration in the early 19705. Though based primarily in Alaska, they have also worked with elders in Teslin, Yukon, notably Tom Peters. Defying notions of boundary, many Canadian Tlingit speakers claim as family members coastal elders whose oratory appears in the three Dauenhauer books. A fourth bilingual volume of Tlingit clan narratives grew from a i5-year collaboration between Tlingit elder Elizabeth Nyman (SEIDAYAA), who lived in Atlin, BC, and her longtime friend and colleague, linguist Jeff Leer. Her narratives offer one lens through which inland Tlingit in Canada view their history as ancient and as firmly anchored to place. Tlingit is one of the most complicated languages in the world but shares with other Native American languages a history of suppression that puts it at great risk at the beginning of the 2ist century. By 1998, most Tlingit speakers were over 65 years of age, and while a few in their 405 and 505 spoke Tlingit, most fluent speakers were elderly. The loss of tribal languages throughout the world is an issue of international concern and has motivated Tlingit elders to work for more than two decades with linguists like the Dauenhauers and Jeff Leer to record, transcribe, edit, and annotate texts that convey complex knowledge in the Tlingit language. The Dauenhauers' first volume, Haa Shukd, Our Ancestors (1987), presents narratives told by elders, in a bilingual format with Tlingit oration and English translation appearing on facing pages. This is a crucial volume for any student trying to understand Tlingit oral literature, and a lengthy introduction includes sections for general readers and sections for readers with more specialized interests in Tlingit translation. Building on the work of their predecessors, the Dauenhauers developed a standardized alphabet, and their explication of Tlingit alphabet and grammar is clear and accessible for anyone with a basic understanding of linguistic concepts. They discuss choices made about an ethnopoetic format that attempts to match the cadence of spoken words, problems encountered in translating Tlingit to English, and contrasts between Tlingit oral style and English written
text. Their translations retain impressive density - clan narratives and family histories; accounts of meetings with the explorer La Parouse in 1786 and later with Russian traders who arrived by sea; and stories that explore universal questions about how human hubris is inevitably constrained by encounters with superhuman forces. Haa Tuwundagu Yis, For Healing Our Spirit: Tlingit Oratory (1990) follows a similar bilingual format, but delves further into intersections between spoken words and social life. These are speeches recorded during performance, most taped between 1968 and 1988. Two speeches recorded on wax cylinders in 1899 by the Harriman expedition are also included, the oldest known Tlingit sound recordings. Formal oratory further illustrates the complexity of translating oral performance into written text: the concepts articulated by elders in these speeches are precisely those they find most difficult to explain to younger generations or to interested outsiders. The third volume in this series, Haa Kusteeyi/ Our Culture: Tlingit Life Stories (1994) is in English, but no less critical to the larger project. Here, the editors incorporate an overview of Tlingit socio-political history, integrating oral, written, photographic, archival, and anecdotal sources that illuminate the lives of 50 Tlingit men and women, many born between 1890 and 1910. The memories provide living generations with an understanding of how stories are embedded in patterns of interaction. Living people, living traditions, and the ongoing lives of orally narrated stories remain central in this book. Connections between oral narrative and place frame the six narratives told by Elizabeth Nyman, born in 1915, in Gdgiwdul.dt: Brought Forth to Reconfirm, The Legacy of a Taku River Tlingit Clan (1993). The Tlingit transcriptions and facing English translations of her collaborator, Jeff Lear, make this the most extensive bilingual account yet published by one traditionbearer about one community. Her narratives anchor her Yanyedi clan history to specific places along the Taku River, originating far inland in Canada and flowing into the Pacific Ocean near Juneau, AK. The name 'Takhu,' she reports, comes from the sound geese make when they rest at the mouth of the Taku River
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during their annual migration from the arctic. Two giants once battled at the river's mouth. The winner decapitated his rival and cast the loser's head across the river, where it remains as a mountain known as Lkudasets'k Shayi, and flung his heart and windpipe into the river, where each became an island. She speaks about Taku Glacier, which once surged, forming an impassable barrier across the river. Tlingit people first discovered neighbours living across that glacier when they lost a stone adze and heard distant voices responding to their cries of distress. She recounts how people travelled on that river, paying respectful attention to the glacier, and how her own father, who understood glaciers to be sentient beings, used to remind the Taku glacier: 'We don't want trouble. We want to [travel] back and forth [on the river].' Contemporary Tlingit orators are choosing print as one medium for transmitting stories, and bring to this process their own ideas about form, style, audience, and communication. They demonstrate to ever-widening audiences the continuing power of verbal oratory to do two things. First, it forges proximity with the distant past by repeatedly engaging ancient narratives to address contemporary issues. Second, it constitutes social relationships and makes the world by bringing those relationships into being. Performance continuously creates and recreates human relationships as long as tellers can count on responsive listeners to hear what they have to say. In these fine volumes, power remains in the spoken word and stories engender sites where social agreement can be negotiated. The commitment of Tlingit elders to work with linguists to record traditions 'brought forth to reconfirm,' in Nyman's words, enriches all who have an opportunity to hear and read these words. As she reflects, 'I will not live forever / But those who come after me will read it. / If only you were taken by boat along the Taku River / You could write the whole story down in a book.' Further reading: Nora Marks Dauenhauer and Richard Dauenhauer, eds, Haa Shukd, Our Ancestors (Seattle: Washington UP, 1987), and Haa Tuwundagu Yi's/For Healing Our Spirit: Tlingit Oratory (Seattle: Washington UP, 1990); Eliza-
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beth Nyman and Jeff Leer, Gdgiwdul.dt: Brought Forth to Reconfirm: The Legacy of a Taku River Tlingit Clan (Whitehorse: Yukon Native Language Centre and Fairbanks: Alaska Native Language Center, 1993). Julie Cruikshank
TORGOV, Morley. Lawyer, writer; b Sault Ste Marie, ON, 3 Dec 1927; son of Janey (Colish) and Allan Torgov, retail merchants. Winner of the Leacock AWARD for HUMOUR, Torgov wrote such comic works as The Outside Chance of Maximilian Click (1982), The Abramsky Variations (1977), and St. Farb's Day (1990), all of which use the arts of ridicule and irony to reveal the gap between ordinary human aspirations and characteristic human behaviour. A Good Place to Come From (1974) is a memoir. TORONTO WOMEN'S LITERARY CLUB. The true purpose of the club, founded in 1876 by Dr Emily Howard STOWE, became explicit when its name changed in 1883 to the Toronto Women's Suffrage Assoc, then in 1889 to the Dominion Women's Enfranchisement Assoc (see VOTING RIGHTS). Author Sarah Anne CURZON was a member, as was Stowe's daughter, Dr Augusta Stowe-Gullen, who was to follow her mother as a leading campaigner for equal rights for WOMEN. In addition to seeking the vote, the club discussed women's education, property rights, professional rights, and protection in the workplace. The designation 'literary' was not entirely a disguise, as its programs included poetry readings and the cultural education of its members. Carole Gerson
TOSTEVIN, Lola Lemire. Poet, novelist, essayist; b Timmins, ON, 15 June 1937; daughter of Laurette (Seguin) and Achille Lemire; educ at convent schools in Timmins and Sturgeon Falls, ON, and at U Alberta. Tostevin now lives in Toronto. She published her first book of poems, Color of Her Speech, in 1982 with Coach House P. Her editor was bpNiCHOL, with whom she worked closely until his death in 1988. This first book introduces themes and techniques that recur in Tostevin's writing; puns (often bilingual) and wordplay that rejoices in the material qualities of language are always integral to the
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way her writing develops. The wordplay is witty, always graceful, and frequently poignantly beautiful, serving her themes. Her work explores the aesthetics and the politics of language, the tensions between the temptation to play with sound and the requirements of meaning. The untitled poems take many forms, from crisp narrative to minimalist association of sounds and ideas; nonetheless, repetition of sound and sense rhymes give the book unity and a sense of completion. Like much of Tostevin's work, Color of Her Speech examines the ways language constructs identity. In particular it looks at the struggle this process entails for a woman who grew up FRANCOPHONE in a working class environment in northern Ontario but who now lives in a city and speaks mostly English. Language, CLASS, and GENDER politics become interchangeable; though the predominant trope is the silencing of the poet's French-speaking identity, a highly political issue in Canada, it is compared and made equivalent to the loss of female selfhood when sexuality is reduced to the serving of men's needs. The book contains the sequence Gyno-text, also published on its own in a limited edition in 1985. Here, language and bodily experience are again interchangeable as the poet celebrates her joy in the material qualities of language as well as the process of gestation and birth. The minimalist poems, mostly in lines of one word, are dense with reference: to the experience of giving birth, to language, and to the process of writing; the wordplay, the leaps in logic, and the reliance on suggestion rather than statement all combine into a narrative of pregnancy. Gynotext's Afterword refers to several FEMINIST critics and poets whose work has informed Tostevin's linguistic practice, notably Julia Kristeva, Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Nicole BROSSARD, and Adrienne Rich. These writers hold a wide range of theoretical positions but have in common a concern with the ways human identity, in particular female identity, is confined, or 'silenced,' by the language in common use. At the same time, the recognition of this limitation permits the writer/speaker to transcend it. In Tostevin's work, the celebration of all the power, joy, and subversiveness of poetic language becomes both a trope for and an example
of the ways WOMEN can escape the restricted range of identities, of self-understanding, conventionally allowed them. Double Standards (1985) shows a wide technical range with fewer minimalist poems and more overt storytelling. The poem 'for Wayne,' an ELEGY in English for a dead relative, is followed by an untitled lyric meditation on the sounds of the poet's name. Here the language flows where the sounds take it, anchored by the syllables Lo la Le mire the way a jazz improvisation is anchored by an underlying harmonic progression. The 1988 work sophie further extends Tostevin's formal range. It includes intellectually challenging and very funny responses to the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, a sequence of poems entirely in French, and a contemporary woman's rewriting of the Song of Songs. Here, the poet sings and celebrates her own desire and pleasure; they are not subordinated to the experience of her lover. The novel Frog Moon (1994) again explores the politics of language, silencing, identity, and love. Its layered storylines and shifting pronouns show the many ways the main character's sense of herself derives not only from language but also from roles she plays in the stories she is told and those she tells herself. Although the narrative is discontinuous, the intricate systems of self-reference echo and reinforce the theme of continuity. The protagonist is linked with the lives of her mother, father, and grandmother, even when she resists them. Frog Moon was followed by the exquisite book of poems Cartouches (1995). Including a memoir of a journey in Egypt and an elegy on the death of the poet's father, the book ends with an acknowledgment of Tostevin's debt to bpNichol. Its spare, suggestive, and complexly layered language forms a moving meditation on death and commemoration whose central trope is again the relation of the materiality of language to the material world in which it is spoken. From 1986 to 1993, Tostevin taught creative WRITING at York U in Toronto. She TRANSLATED several francophone writers into English and also published ESSAYS and CRITICISM, collected in 1995 in Subject to Criticism. Formally varied like her poetry, the book includes reviews, interviews, an exchange of letters, and a speech.
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Again, this variety coheres into a kind of narrative, a double one about the formation of a feminist intellectual and the aesthetic of a major poet. Further reading: Steve McCafFery, 'the scene of the cicatrice,' Brick 25 (1985): 43-44; Lianne Moves, '"to bite the bit between the teeth": Lola Lemire Tostevin's bilingual writing practice,' Textual Studies in Canada 5 (1994): 75-83; Danny O'Quinn, '"Restore me with apples": The Amatory Discourse of Lola Lemire Tostevin's sophie,' Open Letter 7.5 (1989): 37-51. Julie Beddoes
TOUGAS, Gerald. Novelist, short story writer; b Sainte-Anne-des Chenes, MB, 26 April 1933; son of Antoinette Mousseau and Omer Tougas, farmer. After moving to Quebec, he established his literary reputation with his AWARD-winning La mauvaisefoi (1990), about returning to one's native place, and about a writer who chooses serenity over a life of sterile revolt. Combining humour, lyricism, and tenderness, it was followed by a collection of short stories, La clefde sol (1996; tr Rachelle Renaud as Any Mail?, 1999), celebrating life and liberty over the hypocrisy of a rigid traditional society. Margaret Cook
TRAGEDY, a term that has changed meaning over the course of many centuries, referring loosely and inexactly to any set of unhappy events but more specifically to a particular configuration of literary and social assumptions. Traditionally, 'tragedy' referred in drama to the set of conditions in which a figure of high or noble standing was brought low because of the weakness ('hamartia') in his or her character 'pride' (hubris) being a standard example. The intent was not simply to dismay an audience but to arouse 'pity' and 'fear' - pity for the characters so entangled by life, and fear that these entanglements might apply also to one's own life - but then also to permit the catharsis of these emotions, so that the audience could go away uplifted. In an age when IRONY or REALISM prevails, these conditions are less easy (if possible at all) to suggest convincingly in literature, though some writers have suggested that domestic relationships, for example, can readily give rise to the tragic, and others have argued
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that 'contemporary tragedy' consists in people's lack of willingness to act in difficult circumstances, or their inability to recognize the difference between moral, immoral, and amoral choices, or their lack of faith in their own strength. While critics generally accept that Canadian writing is more ironic than tragic, some CRITICISM AND THEORY (such as that of Northrop FRYE) deals with the features and implications of these categories. TRAILL, Catharine Parr. Autobiographer, novelist, essayist; b Rotherhithe, Kent, England, 9 Jan 1802, d Lakefield, ON, 29 Aug 1899; daughter of Elizabeth (Homer) and Thomas Strickland, dock manager and manufacturer. Traill spent her childhood in Suffolk, in surroundings that fostered a lifelong love of nature that was to be the central theme of her writing. From 1803 until late 1808 her father rented a house overlooking the Waveney River near Bungay, Suffolk. In Dec of 1808 he purchased a manor house and farm in the village of Reydon, not far from the coastal town of Southwold, Suffolk. In these locales Thomas and his wife superintended the education of their eight children - six girls and two boys. The parents gave them access to Thomas's well-stocked library, allowing them a rich grounding in history and literature, and directed them to the observation of natural phenomena and the development of domestic and horticultural skills. Because of business interests Thomas also kept a house in Norwich, where he spent a part of each year. Catharine Parr Traill and other members of the family sometimes joined him there. Hence, she added a limited urban experience to her predominantly rural upbringing. Other persons supplemented the education of the Strickland children. Tenants and servants nourished their imaginations with local legend and superstition; Suffolk writers stimulated an interest in East Anglian history and encouraged them in the pursuit of literary careers. Extant letters reveal that James Bird, a poet and merchant living in Yoxford, acted as both a literary model and supplier of writing materials and books. Another Suffolk writer and editor, Thomas Harral, led the Stricklands to publishing opportunities in London. Literary inclinations were in place, however,
TRAILL
well before either Bird or Harral was an influence. Writing in her journal in 1860, Traill recalled her childhood and that of her siblings and compared it to 'the early days of the Brontes' (Traill Family Collection, 2966. National Archives of Canada). She was thinking of the extent to which the separation of the family and the relative isolation of Reydon Hall often cast the children on their own resources and led them to exercise their imaginations in literary activity. That she, four of her sisters, and one brother (Samuel STRICKLAND) became rather prolific authors indicates that the comparison was not without validity. Traill was first among them to have a book published. Shortly after her father's death in May 1818, her book of stories for children, The Tell Tale: An Original Collection of Moral and Amusing Stories, was published in London. It was the first of many works of didactic and historical fiction and poetry for juveniles that Traill and her sisters were to have published over the next dozen years. That production was supplemented by pieces that appeared in popular annuals and periodicals usually intended for a female readership. From such an apprenticeship the elder sisters, Agnes and Elizabeth, went on to become noted writers of series of historical biographies, including Lives of the Queens ofEngland(i84o~48), which appeared under Agnes's name only. Her fame and her contacts with publishers enabled her to act positively on Traill's behalf in the development of a literary career. That career might have taken a rather undistinguished course were it not for events that dramatically changed Traill's life beginning in 1831. In April, while visiting an aunt in London, she attended the wedding of her sister, Susanna, to Lieutenant John Dunbar MOODIE of the 2ist North British Fusiliers (see also Susanna MOODIE). There she met Thomas Traill, a halfpay officer in the same regiment. They met again in May 1832 at the Moodies' home in Southwold where they hastily decided to marry and, like the Moodies, to emigrate to Upper Canada. The marriage took place on 13 May. Shortly thereafter they left for Scotland to visit Traill's family and sailed out of Greenock for Quebec on 7 July. The Traills did not enjoy success as pioneer farmers in Peterborough Co, where they settled
in 1832. Thomas was not well suited to the hardships of a pioneer life and sporadic bouts of depression that he suffered further inhibited material progress. His personal failings combined with a widespread economic depression resulted in the sale of the Traills' farm in 1839. Thereafter, they lived at various locations in Peterborough Co and in Hamilton Township along the south shore of Rice Lake. In 1849 they bought a property they called Oaklands, to the east of Gore's Landing. But at no time did they prosper, even though Catharine Traill supplemented their income by selling her writings. After Thomas's death in June of 1859, with her modest means and the help of her brother, Samuel, she built a small house in Lakefield. She moved into "Westove" in 1860 and, except for occasional travel and visits with friends, lived there for the rest of her life. She continued to write with a genuine love of her craft, but there was always behind her work a need for money. Despite the difficulty of her own settlement experience, Catharine Parr Traill made the heroic accomplishments of the pioneer the principal subject of her writing. From her first Canadian book, The Backwoods ofCanada(i8i6), subtitled Letters from the Wife of an Emigrant Officer, to her penultimate work, Pearls and Pebbles; or, Notes of an Old Naturalist(i&94), in essays and in fiction she celebrated the hazards and charms of a pioneer's life and offered a literary record of the forest world that she knew and saw receding before the woodcutter's axe. The Backwoods was published by Charles Knight in London as part of The Library of Entertaining Knowledge. The EPISTOLARY form allowed Traill the flexibility to augment her account of her and her husband's progress, as settlers building a pioneer home, with digressions on a wide range of matters that might assist prospective emigrants. Hence she provides useful information on Canadian society and aspects of domestic economy. In other significant and entertaining digressions she describes Canadian landscape, some flora and fauna, and NATIVE people whom she met. Even though the book reveals many of the difficulties of settlement, Traill's loving descriptions of nature, her curiosity and her open-mindedness toward people and phenomena give the work a prevailingly positive tone.
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Traill did not have another book published until 1852, but she made important contributions to newspapers and periodicals. These 'forest gleanings,' as she often called her stories and essays, conveyed further aspects of her own settlement experience and that of others. Notably, she produced several stories of children lost in the backwoods, a theme that was of special fascination to her. By 1850 she was writing a novel based on that theme and echoing Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Canadian Crusoes (1852) relates the adventures of three children, a brother and sister and their male cousin. Having gone to fetch their parents' cows, they become lost in the dense forest and must draw on their resourcefulness and independence to shelter, feed, and clothe themselves. Into the story of their activities, including capture by a tribe of OJIBWA Indians, Traill weaves information on the natural history of her region of southern Ontario. Liberal doses of the author's Victorian and Christian values make the work highly DIDACTIC as well. In the happy ending of the tale, by having a British woman and her French cousin and a British man and an Indian woman united in marriage, Traill offers her sense of a new society. Catharine Traill continued to extol the beauties and virtues of Canada for British readers and prospective emigrants in her next two books. The Female Emigrant's Guide, and Hints on Canadian Housekeeping (1854) offers a compendium of information on the natural and domestic resources of Canada together with reflections on the skills and attitudes essential to rendering them both useful and attractive. In Lady Mary and Her Nurse; or, A Peep into the Canadian Forest (1856) she repackaged many of the same favourite materials in a familiar form of CHILDREN'S LITERATURE, a dialogue between tutor and student. The dialogue enabled her to cast into a narrative form much of her nature lore and recollections of the settlement process, its trials and pleasures. Although Traill's writing often reflects an interest in many facets of Canadian life, her special love was of its flora. She received her greatest recognition in the latter half of the century for two botanical works. Both were produced in collaboration with her niece, Agnes Fitzgibbon Chamberlain. In Canadian Wild Flowers (1868),
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brought out by subscription and printed by John LOVELL in Montreal, a selection of Traill's botanical descriptions (see SCIENCE AND NATURE) was used to complement the floral art of Agnes Fitzgibbon. The success of the volume led to the publication of a larger work featuring Traill's text. Studies of Plant Life in Canada; or, Gleanings from Forest, Lake and Plain (1885) brought to fruition a project that she had been working on for many years. The book has both scientific and literary purpose. As a botanical work it offers sections devoted to wild flowers, flowering shrubs, and grasses; each of the several hundred entries includes the common and scientific names of the plant and a description of its physical characteristics. More important is the literary quality of Studies. Entries are embellished with poetic associations, personal and historical anecdotes, statements on the imaginative and religious value of botanical study, and assessments of the medicinal and nutritional virtues of plants. Traill often lavishes praise on the Native people and the 'old settlers' from whom she derived much of the traditional lore. Despite its great importance to her, Traill's botanical writing was not the basis of her reputation in the 20th century. Instead, her status as a key figure in early Canadian literary history now rests almost solely on The Backwoods of Canada (modern ed by Michael Peterman, 1997). Through much of the 2oth century it was valued chiefly as a vivid, historical record of Canadian pioneer life. Its characteristics as a literary work were examined by several writers in the last half of the 2oth century, usually in comparison with Susanna Moodie's much different account of settlement life, Roughing It in the Bush. Generally speaking Traill's work is valued for the clarity of its prose and for the delineation of a persona who shows remarkable qualities of adaptation, feminine strength, and intelligence. Further reading: Carl Ballstadt, Catharine Parr Traill and Her Works (Downsview, ON: ECW, 1983); Carl Ballstadt, Elizabeth Hopkins, and Michael Peterman, eds, / Bless You in My Heart: Selected Correspondence of Catharine Parr Traill (Toronto: U Toronto P, 1996). C.P. Ballstadt
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TRAINER, Yvonne Madeline. Poet, lecturer, scholar; b Medicine Hat, AB, 18 Oct 1959; daughter of Sarah Ann Jane (Bennett) and James Warren, retired ranchers. Although she studied and worked in various regions of the country most notably the Maritimes and Central Canada -Trainer still considers herself primarily a 'prairie writer.' She studied for her doctorate in 20thcentury poetry at U Manitoba. Her four collections are Manyberries (1980), Customers (1983), Everything Happens at Once (1986), and Landscapes Turned Side-ways (1988). Influenced by writers as varied as w.o. MITCHELL and Alden NOWLAN, Trainer aims in her poetry to disclose a 'clarity beyond clarity.' Her writing also grows out of the traditions of Sufism and ORAL poetry, drawing from these an emphasis on compression, aurality, and vivid imagery. Further reading: Faye Reineberg Holt, 'Conversation with Yvonne Trainer,' PrairieJ Canadian Literature 18 (1992,): 44-51. Dorothy F. Lane
TRANSCENDENTALISM, an American philosophical movement of the mid-igth century, based on European Romanticism (see ROMANCE), which had its greatest impact on such writers as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Not uniform in practice, Transcendentalist belief emphasized the divinity of the individual, closeness to nature, and the power of the individual to 'transcend' the limits of the physical senses. The movement particularly influenced some of the CONFEDERATION GROUP of poets. TRANSFORMATION TALES, stories in which people or animals turn into each other or are turned by some force into another kind of being entirely: a star, a tree, a mountain - whether to honour or punish them, or by sheer accident or malevolent action. EUROPEAN tradition is full of such tales, including those of Ovid (The Metamorphoses') and various stories about the origins of natural phenomena. Some critics read the BILDUNGSROMAN as a transformation tale, in which character is modified by experience; others read 'conversion narratives' in this context - those in which characters resolve their dilemmas by espousing, finally, a particular faith
(see, eg, the JESUIT RELATIONS, the biblical romances of such writers as W.H. WITHROW, and the MUSCULAR CHRISTIANITY of Ralph CONNOR). The term also refers to FIRST NATIONS narratives, as in WAKASHAN and other cultures; for example, the INUIT tale of SEDNA depicts the transformative connection between animal and human worlds. See also ORAL LITERATURE AND HISTORY. TRANSLATION. Scholars have stressed the importance and relevance of translation as a gauge of a given society's treatment of, and reaction to, the 'other' culture. Translation theory, principles, and scholarship have thus focused on the history, implications, and validity of the accuracy versus adaptation, traduttore/ traditore, beautiful versus faithful debate, or the xenophile/xenophobe dichotomy: these being 'ways to face otherness.' From Aristeas, a Greekspeaking Jew who argued for perfect accuracy in his Letter of Aristeas, c 130 BC, to Edward Fitzgerald who, in 1851, boastfully claimed that he liked to take what liberties he could with Persian poetry, translators and translation scholars have argued for and against fidelity to either the source or target language. Whether it be Matthew Arnold arguing that the translation should appear to be from 'an English hand' or Vladimir Nabokov claiming that a clumsy translation is better than a pretty paraphrase, scholars are clearly divided over what they perceive to be right or wrong ways of translating literature. John O'Connor, a Canadian translation scholar, proposes a 'middle ground' definition of a good translation: neither an enlightened forgery nor an immaculate duplication, it is rather an authentic counterpart of the source text that provides the reader with one work in two languages, not with two fully independent works. Throughout the history of translation in Canada, Canadian translators have sought their own solutions developing, in many cases, unique translation styles. From C.G.D. ROBERTS' cavalier approach, to Sheila FISCHMAN'S respectful mindfulness of the authority of the original, translation in Canada shows itself to be an infinite game in which the rules change in the course of the play according to the socialhistorical context, the text, the author, and the translator's own style and inventiveness.
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In Jean Delisle's La traduction au Canada/ Translation in Canada (1987), Jean-Francois Joly notes that the history of translation is closely linked to that of the nation. From the IROQUOISFrench lexicon of Jacques CARTIER to contemporary multilingual texts, translation has been the tool of the conqueror, the conquered, and cultural bridge-builder, and LANGUAGE at the forefront of political debate and MULTICULTURALISM policy. Far more than a literary practice then, translation, in the Canadian context, can be seen as a reflection, if not an instrument, of prevalent social forces. Attitudes towards translation differ in the two major linguistic communities: translation into English has frequently symbolized colonization for French Canada. While English-speaking authorities immediately identified the need to translate in order to maintain and communicate their authority (Sir Guy Carleton hired translator Francois-Joseph Cugnet in 1768), French Canada saw its language and culture relegated to the status of the Other - more often a target than a source - text. Sherry Simon's Le trafic des langues (1994) considers the presence of English and the role of translation in the ongoing political and cultural power struggle. It is not surprising therefore that translation activity between the two groups is unbalanced. Statistics support the commonly held belief that English-speaking Canada is interested in Frenchlanguage literature because it offers a window into Quebec society, and that French-speaking Canada wants the SCIENCE and TECHNOLOGY (the voice of authority) that is available in English. French-language texts enjoy most frequently the status of source text in the field of literature. In his valuable Bibliography of Canadian Books in Translation: French to English and English to French (1977), Philip STRATFORD, an accomplished translator, indicated that FrenchEnglish translations in literature (fiction, poetry, drama, essays) have always outnumbered those in the other direction by about two to one (380 titles in English, 190 in French). The CANADA COUNCIL, which inaugurated its program of financial support for literary translation in 1972, granted funds evenly. For the 1982-96 period, 608 translations from English to French were funded compared to 514 for French to English. However, only 30 per cent of all English-to-
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French grants were in the area of literature as compared to 59 per cent for French-to-English translation. This pattern is confirmed by Canadian Translations, the National LIBRARY'S catalogue of all monographs, pamphlets, and brochures (excluding government documents) published and translated in Canada in any language. Between 1988 and 1992 French-to-English translation accounted for only 0.58 per cent of the total. However, in the literature category, 13 per cent of all texts were translated from French to English. Similarly, 25 per cent (the highest percentage by category) of all French-to-English translation was in the area of literature in 19934. Translation from and into languages other than French and English increased. While only 0.62 per cent of all translation fell into this category between 1988 and 1992,15 per cent of all translation involved other languages during 1993-4. Any study of translation practice must consider the social and historical forces driving these trends. Simon (1994) argues that much French-toEnglish literary translation can be attributed to anglophone Canada's desire both to learn more about French Canada and to appropriate this literature by claiming it as its own in order to build up a national literature. These attitudes can be traced back to the outset of English-toFrench literary translation. Georgiana Pennee's translation of Philippe-Joseph AUBERT DE GASPE'S landmark novel, Les anciens Canadiens (1863), appeared in 1864 and was reissued in 1929. Charles G.D. Roberts published The Canadians of Old (1890) and a later version, Cameron of Locheil (1905). (Jane Brierley's 1997 translation, Canadians of Old, is the only complete and highly readable version.) While the title of the ethnocentric second version and his cavalier handling of the text suggest the contrary, Roberts indicates in his foreword that he translated out of respect for the original and a profound desire to provide English readers access to French Canada through its literature. Similarly, translators of Louis HEMON'S classic, Maria Chapdelaine (1916), W.H. Blake (1921) and Andrew MACPHAIL (1921), state that they, too, were translating out of a deep, sentimental admiration for French Canada and a desire to share their experience and sentiments with English-speaking Canadians.
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From the turn of the century to the QUIET REVOLUTION, 67 literary translations, mostly novels, were published at the average rate of one per year. Both the selection of the texts and the quality of the translating suggest that the importance of these translations lay not in their literary worth but in their capacity to provide access to French Canadian society. Alan SULLIVAN'S poor translation of Felix-Antoine SAVARD, entitled Boss of the River (1947), accurately portrays the conservative values and traditional lifestyle held dear by the author, but does terrible injustice to Savard's prose. Half the novels translated were written by four authors: Louis Hemon, Maurice CONSTANTIN-WEYER, Roger LEMELIN, and Gabrielle ROY. Other important translations include RINGUET'S (Philippe Panneton's) Trente arpents (Thirty Acres, Dorothea and Felix Walter, 1940) and Germaine GUEVREMONT'S Lesurvenant (The Outlander, Eric Sutton, 1945). Some poetry, notably by Louis FRECHETTE, Hector de Saint-Denys GARNEAU, and Roland GIGUERE, as well as two little-known plays were also translated. The Tin Flute (1947), Hannah Josephson's notoriously poor translation of Roy's Bonheur d'occasion (1945), signalled a new direction in Canadian translation. When Roy won the 1947 Governor General's AWARD for The Tin Flute (at the time there was no French-language category), the English-language literary institution became aware of the possibilities afforded by using French-language literature to help build up a NATIONAL literature, and of the need for quality (and ideally local) translation. Fraught with errors, Josephson's translation suffered primarily from the translator's unfamiliarity with Quebec. While translation activity did not increase dramatically until the 19605, Frenchlanguage literature in translation was thus well established in its capacity to provide a privileged glimpse into French Canada and to augment English-language literature. While the turbulent 19605 did not provide additional financial or institutional support for translation, increased interest in Quebec and concern about the status and identity of Canadian literature prompted an increase in translation. From 1960 to 1971 an average of six titles were translated per year as opposed to one for the previous period. Writers such as Marie-
Claire BLAIS , author of Une saison dans la vie d'Emmanuel (1965; A Season in the Life of Emmanuel, Derek Coltman, 1966); Roch CARRIER, whose La Guerre, Yes Sir! (Sheila Fischman, 1970) achieved instant success; Gerard BESSETTE; and Yves THERIAULT established themselves as favourites of the English-language audience and publishers. Five of Gabrielle Roy's novels were published in translations by Harry Lorin Binsse and by Joyce MARSHALL. Interest in the QUIET REVOLUTION prompted Penny Williams' timely translation of Hubert Aquin's Prochain episode (1967) and Jacques GODBOUT'S Le couteau sur la table (Knife on the Table, 1968). While certain authors established their popularity, translators were also gaining prominence and recognition. Philip Stratford, D.G. JONES, Sheila Fischman, Penny Williams, David Lobdell, and Alan Brown earned respect for the field and their work. John GLASSCO'S classic French-Canadian Poetry in Translation (1970) opened up new directions in poetry translation. Fred COGSWELL edited two supplements, One Hundred Poems of Modern Quebec (1970) and A Second Hundred Poems of Modern Quebec (1971). Selected poems of Emile NELLIGAN and Alain GRANDBOIS were also translated during this period, and dramatist Gratien GELINAS' popularity established a market for Quebec theatre. Important as well was the increased institutional recognition of translation both as a scholarly and literary activity. The J des traducteurs became Meta in 1966, published under the auspices of the linguistics department of U Montreal. In 1969 Ellipse, a bilingual journal devoted to literature in translation, was established. Run from U Sherbrooke, it remains an important outlet for writers and translators. The adoption of the Official Languages Act in 1968 and the establishment of the Canada Council's supportive translation grants provided the official recognition needed to support the rapidly increasing market for translation. While there was no translation category for the Governor General's Literary Award until 1987, the Canada Council in 1973 began to provide prizes of $2,500 each (increased to $5,000 in 1976) for translations of French- and English-language literature. (For a list of laureates, see AWARDS.) Frank SCOTT, Larry Shouldice (founding editor of Ellipse), Ray Ellenwood, Carol Dunlop, Barry
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CALLAGHAN, Patricia Claxton, and Raymond Chamberlain all earned recognition as translators. The collaborative effort initiated by Nicole BROS SARD in Les strategies du reel/The Story so far (1980), an ANTHOLOGY of Quebec prose and poetry from the 19705, marked yet another new direction for translation practice: translator/ authors, such as Brossard, Gail SCOTT, and Daphne MARLATT, worked together writing and translating out of affinity and mutual interest. In addition to FUNDING, translators benefited from anglophones' increased desire to learn more about francophone Canada in the wake of the OCTOBER CRISIS in 1970. The list of important translations published during the 19703 is long and Blais, Carrier, and Roy remained favourites. Anne HEBERT, whose collaborative effort with Frank Scott Dialogue sur la traduction apropos du 'Tombeau des rois' (1970) remains a classic, and Michel TREMBLAY (prod and tr Bill Glassco and John Van Burek), found an Englishlanguage audience. Although poetry and drama were gaining in popularity, the novel remained the most translated genre. In the 19705 several smaller presses dedicated themselves sometimes exclusively to translation. House of Anansi, Oberon, Coach House, Exile Editions, and Guernica, for example, together with larger houses such as McClelland and Stewart, supported increased translation activity. The publication of Philip Stratford's bibliography and other forms of institutional recognition, such as an annual article on translation that began appearing in the U Toronto Q in 1977, confirmed the importance of translation to Canadian letters. The decades following 1980 saw a steady increase in the number of French-language books and authors translated, in the diversity of the selection, and in the interest in translation scholarship. The rise to power of Rene Levesque's Parti Quebecois in the 19705 and the discussions surrounding sovereignty referenda motivated the English-language public to seek greater understanding of Quebec through its literature. While Roy, Hebert, Tremblay, Carrier, Blais, and others remained at the forefront, the ACADIAN writer Antonine MAILLET, feminist writers such as Brossard, best-selling authors such as Yves BEAUCHEMIN and Haitian exile Dany LAFERRIERE (whose first novel in transla-
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tion by David HOMEL, How to Make Love to a Negro, 1987, was an instant success) saw their works appearing in translation shortly after the publication of the original. Dramatists MichelMarc BOUCHARD, Rene-Daniel DUBOIS, Normand CHAURETTE, Marie LABERGE, translated by Linda Gaboriau and others, competed with Michel Tremblay for attention on the Toronto stage. The Assoc des traducteurs litteraires/ Literary Translators' Assoc, founded in 1975, awarded the first John Glassco translation prize in 1981. In addition to more and generally better translations, the 19805 brought greater recognition of translation scholarship. Kathy Mezei's bilingual Bibliography of Criticism of English and French Literary Translations in Canada (1988) indicates the extent of this activity. Translators and translation scholars Sherry Simon, Betty Bednarski, Ben-Zion Shek, E.D. BLODGETT, Barbara Godard, and Philip Stratford all published significant studies. The establishment of the Canadian Assoc for Translation Studies and the journal Traduction, Terminologie, Redaction confirmed the importance of scholarship in the field. While translation activity and scholarship remained important in the 19905, decreased funding led to the demise or decreased production of publishers such as Coach House (reconfigured in 1996) and Guernica. However, scholarly pursuits such as the Pedagogic de la Traduction series from U Ottawa, under the direction of Jean Delisle, or the Gerstein seminar series held at Glendon C (Toronto) reiterate translation's significance. In contrast to the availability of French-language literature in translation stands the limited selection of anglophone Canadian authors published in French, even though English-to-French translation benefits from the same financial support and scholarly attention. While this may be due to the dominance of American and British resources and market control, attitudes towards the Other remain central to any discussion of translation in Canada. The poet/translator Jacques BRAULT argues that Quebecois do not like to translate or be translated, because the key to translation belongs to those in power. French Canada's historical lack of interest in this literature prompted early writers such as
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Stephen LEACOCK, Mazo DE LA ROCHE, L.M. MONTGOMERY, and more recently, Robertson DAVIES, Malcolm LOWRY, Hugh MACLENNAN, Alice MUNRO, Margaret LAURENCE, Mordecai RICHLER, Leonard COHEN, Arthur HAILEY, Graeme GIBSON, Margaret ATWOOD, Timothy FINDLEY, Michael ONDAATJE, Jane URQUHART, Isabel HUGGAN, Nino RICCI, Carol SHIELDS, and numerous others to seek translators and publishers in Paris (or Geneva for some early writers). Stratford lists 75 English-to-French titles for the novel (only 25 of which were published in Canada). However, in all, four times as many texts were translated between 1920 and 1960 than during the previous years. The number almost tripled in the 19608 and reached 120 for the year 1975. The list includes 19th-century translations of Frances BROOKE, Voyage dans le Canada; ou I'histoire de Miss Montaigu (Madame T.G.M., 1809), Rosanna LEPROHON (Antoinette de Mirecourt ou Mariage secret et chagrins caches, J.A. Genaud, 1865), William KIRBY (Le chien d'or: legende canadienne, Pamphile LEMAY, 1884), and T.C. HALIBURTON (Le vieuxjuge ou Esquisses de la vie dans une colonie, 1849). By 1981, 300 texts (almost entirely novels) representing 240 authors were available in French - many of which, however, had been translated and published in France. In addition to Canada Council support, the establishment, in 1973, of the Cercle du Livre de France's 'Collections des deux Solitudes' under the direction of translator/editor Michelle Tisseyre was crucial to the development of Englishto-French literary translation in Canada. The collection, which includes children's books, also lists translations of Morley CALLAGHAN (Telle est ma bien aimee, 1974, L'hiver, 1974 and Get ete-ld a Paris, 1976, all by Michelle Tisseyre), Robertson Davies (Cinquieme emploi, Arlette Franciere, 1975; Le monde des merveilles, Claire MARTIN, 1979), and Mordecai Richler (Monpere, ce heros, 1975; Duddy Kravitz, 1976; and Jacob Deux-Deux et le vampire masque, 1978, all by Jean SIMARD) all of whom had previously relied on French publishers. Brian MOORE (Lefol ete de Sheila Redden, Jean Simard, 1978), WO. Mitchell (Qui a vu le vent, Arlette Franciere, 1974), Patrick Watson (En ondes dans cinq secondes, Laurier LaPierre, 1978), Richard B. WRIGHT (Un homme de weekend, Jean Pare, 1977), and Margaret Atwood (Sur I'arbre
perches, Michel Caillol, 1979) were added to the collection. Editions Hurbutise HMH published translations of Hugh MacLennan (Le temps tournera au beau, 1966, and Le matin d'une longue nuit, 1967 both by Jean Simard), Richler (Rue Saint-Urbain, Rene Chicoine, 1969), Marshall MCLUHAN, Margaret Laurence (Ta maison est en feu, Rosine Fitzgerald, 1971; L'ange de pierre, Claire Martin, 1976), and Robert KROETSCH (Badlands, Georges-Andre VACHON, 1985). In the 19905, more Quebec publishers entered the translation market, including QuebecAmerique (Munro: La danse des ombres, 1979, Pour qui teprends-tu, 1981, both by Colette Tonge; Kroetsch: L'etalon, Marie-Jose THERIAULT, 1990; Scott SYMONS: Marrakech, Michel Gaulin, 1996; and numerous others in Donald Smith's Traduction series), Les Quinze (Atwood: Marquee au corps, 1983, and Lafemme comestible, 1984, both by Helene Filion, and Les danseuses et autres nouvelles, Jean Bernier, 1986; Guy VANDERHAEGHE: Une histoire de man temps, Charlotte Melancon, 1990), Editions Lemeac (Richler: Les cloches d'enfer, Gilles Rochette, 1979), L'Etincelle (Atwood: Lady Oracle, Marlyse Piccand, 1981), XYZ, I'HEXAGONE, L'Instant Meme (Steven HEIGHTON: Theatre des revenants, Christine Klein-Lataud, 1994; Urquhart: Verre de tempete, Nicole Cote, 1997), and Du Roseau (Laurence: Un oiseau dans la maison, Christine Klein-Lataud, 1989; Vanderhaeghe: En chute libre, Charlotte Melancon, 1991). By the late 19905 Boreal listed over 30 titles, including A.M. KLEIN (Le second rouleau, Charlotte and Robert MELANCON, 1990), Atwood (Essai sur la litterature canadienne, Helene Filion, 1987), Neil BISSOONDATH (Le marche aux illusions, Jean Papineau, 1996, A I'aube des lendemains precaires, 1995 and Arracher les montagnes, 1997 both by Marie-Jose Theriault), Ondaatje (Le blues de Buddy Bolden, Robert Paquin), Alberto MANGUEL (Laporte d'ivoire, Charlotte Melancon, 1991) and Robert Walshe (L'oeuvre de Gallois, Marie-Jose Theriault, 1993). Other publishers of translators include Guernica Editions (Elizabeth SMART: A la hauteur de Grand Central Station je me suis assise etj'ai pleure, Helene Filion, 1993), Vehicule P, VLB (Ann Charney: Dobryd, Paule Pierre, 1993), Gilles Pellerin (Douglas GLOVER, Alistair MACLEOD), and Exile Editions. Les Editions du
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Remue-Menage, specializing in FEMINIST texts, supports intercultural dialogue through its translation of authors including Marlatt (Ana historique, Lori Martin, 1996) and Atwood (Meurtre dans la nuit, Helene Filion, 1987). The late translator/writer Matt COHEN, as well as Daniel POLIQUIN, Wayne Grady, and Andre CARPENTIER contributed to mutual exchange as illustrated by Voixparalleles/ Parallel Voices (ed Carpentier and Cohen, XYZ and Quarry P, 1993). Thus, while the availability of English-language Canadian literature in French (particularly poetry and theatre, which accounted for a total of only 57 Canada Council grants between 1982 and 1996) does not compare to its counterpart, there is both increased interest in and recognition of this literature and its market potential in Quebec. This is suggested in Deux solicitudes (1996) by Margaret Atwood and Victor-Levy BEAULIEU (tr Phyllis Aronoffand Howard Scott as Two Solicitudes, 1998) and by Lettres quebecoises (71, automne 1993), which now reviews English-French translations. Noteworthy as well are the many literary translations from languages other than English and French that received 26 Canada Council grants from 1982 to 1996. Canadian authors (Marco MIC ONE through Guernica), foreign authors (Julio Cortazar, Marco Denevi, Lilian Heker through Coach House; Maria Luisa Spaziani, Umberto Eco and many others through Guernica), including foreign classics (Chekhov through Talonbooks), are translated and published in Canada. (See also CULTURAL PLURALITY, MULTICULTURAL VOICES.) In 200O-
i, the Canada Council granted 81 international grants (Canadian books translated into international languages outside of Canada), and 76 domestic grants (27 to English-language publishers, 49 to French-language publishers). While literary translation in Canada is still unbalanced, favouring as it does the rendering of French-language novels, considerable progress has nonetheless been made in other important directions: more English-language literature, including theatre and poetry, is available in French, as are translations from other languages, thus extending the horizons of the field. Stratford (1977) claimed that Canada has a history, but not a tradition, of translation. The
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history continues and a tradition has been established. During the years 1980-98, translation expanded in new directions, reflecting multiculturalism, English-language readers' continued interest in French-language literature, and Quebec's recognition of English-language authors. Readers and writers can be assured of qualified and talented translators and competent publishers. Thanks to their efforts, translation has perhaps ceased to be the tool of the conqueror, the fate x>f the conquered, and the symbol of the Other, and has become instead an avenue for mutually enriching exchange. Further reading: Annie Brisset, A Sociocritique of Translation: Theatre and Alterity in Quebec, 19681988, tr Rosalind Gill and Robert Cameron (Toronto: U Toronto P, 1966); special translation issue, Canadian Literature 117 (Summer 1988). Jane Koustas
TRAVELLERS AND TRAVEL WRITING. While EXPLORATION LITERATURE concerns the mapping of a new territory for commercial and strategic purposes, travel writing assumes that this process has been largely completed and that travellers may now retrace in relative comfort the routes previously established by their predecessors. This is not to say that travel cannot be ambitious and adventurous; indeed, because of the vastness of the land and the challenges posed by it, some Canadian travel writing is barely distinguishable from exploration narrative. One such work is Viscount Milton's The Northwest Passage by Land: Being the Narrative of an Expedition from the Atlantic to the Pacific, undertaken with the View of Exploring a Route across the Continent to British Columbia through British Territory, by one of the Northern Passes (1865). This book was made extraordinary by the publication in 1931 of the diary of Milton's companion, Dr Walter Cheadle, which counterpoints Milton's heroic rhetoric with a candid record of the physical and emotional strain experienced by the participants. The appeal of Milton's narrative derives from the scope of the journey, an allure that is also associated with narratives describing the building of, and travel on, the railway as a national enterprise.
TRAVELLERS AND TRAVEL WRITING
One of the most famous railway narratives is Ocean to Ocean: Sandford Fleming's Expedition through Canada in 1872 (1873), written by George Monro GRANT, then secretary to Sir Sandford Fleming, engineer-in-chief of the CANADIAN PACIFIC RAILWAY (CPR). Using every imaginable means of transport (including trains where they were available), Fleming explored the possibilities for a railway route to the West. The results were of political as well as practical importance, as they helped to support Sir John Macdonald's ambitions for westward expansion and, by implication, protection from undue American influence. A decade later, Fleming published his own England and Canada: A Summer Tour between Old and New Westminster (1884), an urbane narrative, where the blurring of spatial and temporal borderlines illustrates some of the narrative innovation that Wolfgang Schivelbusch (in The Railway Journey: Trains and Travel in the Nineteenth Century, 1979) has attributed to the advent of railroad travel. The contrast between Grant's and Fleming's books could not be greater: whereas the former conveys the excitement of an expedition into unknown territory, the assured reminiscence of the latter implies that these exertions have now borne fruit. While trains no longer hold the political and social significance they had in the days of Grant and Fleming, railway journeys still provide a comprehensive glimpse of transnational Canada. Trains also allow for one of the classic episodes of travel writing, namely the random meeting with passengers from all walks of life who will then add a social panorama to the geographic one the observer sees from the train's scenic car. George GALT'S Whistlestop: A Journey Across Canada (1987) deliberately sets itself up in opposition to the messianic tone of earlier train journey narratives, describing the sights seen and passengers observed in a distinctly jaded tone, while Anne Montagnes's essay 'Intimate Pleasures of a Cross-Country Train' (Saturday Night, 1973) adopts for its wry observations the unassuming persona of a travelling homemaker. Tourism. The emergence of an infrastructure that made tourism possible was paralleled by the development of sights that seemed to epito-
mize the essence of the country but also responded to established aesthetic criteria: it is not coincidental that the CPR sponsored photographers and painters to help promote the route west, and that their most inspired promotional work focused on the Rockies, a LANDSCAPE easily comprehensible within existing aesthetic norms such as the picturesque and the sublime. It took some time to formulate such criteria for unaccommodating geographies such as the Prairies, as William Francis BUTLER'S The Great Lone Land: A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the Northwest of America (1872) illustrates, but the sublime spectacle of NIAGARA Falls early on became a compulsory stop for virtually all travellers to Canada, many of them competing for the most successful literary evocation of the falls. The long tradition of emoting over Niagara began with Father Louis HENNEPIN who, travelling with LaSalle, is reputed to have been the first European to see Niagara and record, in writing and in drawing, his impressions in A New Discovery of a Vast Country in America (1697). Famous visitors from abroad who followed in Hennepin's footsteps were Anna JAMESON (Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada, 1839), and Anthony Trollope (North America, 1862). Aestheticism, commercialism, and political expediency all contributed to making Niagara a tourist site equally popular with North American honeymooners and visitors from abroad. The allure of the Falls has been admirably described in several studies, Patricia Jasen's Wild Things: Nature, Culture, and Tourism in Ontario, 1790-1914 (1995) among them. Jasen offers a host of observations not only on Niagara, but also on related subjects such as the exploitation of NATIVE people as exhibition objects and tourist guides. The Native guide, as facilitator, interpreter, and cultural educator, plays an important role in travel narratives about the physically and aesthetically challenging territories of the NORTH, even if the writer does not always acknowledge his or her guide's mediating significance. The North remains an important destination, as indicated by the publications of writers such as Jim Christy (Rough Road to the North: Travels along the Alaska Highway, 1980), Barry Lopez (Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape, 1986),
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James Raffan (Summer North of Sixty: By Paddle and Portage across The Barren Lands, 1990), or Lawrence Millman (Last Places: A Journey in the North, 1990). The typical northern travel narrative looks upon the land as a tabula rasa inspiring the author to experience an exalted and distinctly 'manly' state of spirituality, but there have also been remarkable female versions. Clara Vyvian's Arctic Adventure (1961; re-issued as The Ladies, the Gwich'in, and the Rat, 1998) describes a trip Vyvian undertook with her friend Gwendolen Dorrien Smith on the Athabasca, Mackenzie, Rat, Porcupine, and Yukon Rivers in 1926. Like many of the earlier Victorian women's travel narratives, this book is made fascinating not only by its precise descriptions of the territory traversed (in particular its flora, as both women were accomplished amateur botanists [see SCIENCE AND NATURE WRITING]), but also by its apparent contradictions: the women earn the reader's respect by exploring a challenging environment, but lose much of it when they report on the indigenous people encountered with undisguised condescension and prejudice. However, their narrative is also an illustration of the mediating presence of Native guides, their influence and independence, all of which unintentionally but nonetheless effectively serve to modify the superior tone of the text. The Ladies, the Gwich'in, and the Rat is copiously illustrated with amateur photographs and watercolours, and as in all travel narratives the images add an important rhetorical dimension to the narrative. In Canadian Pictures Drawn with Pen and Pencil (1885), by Sir John Campbell, the Marquis of Lome, the intimacy and amateurism suggested in the title cunningly infuses the author's position as governor general with a human dimension, a strategy also apparent in Lady Aberdeen's Through Canada with a Kodak (1893). Selling royalty in an increasingly democratic world was a challenge even in the i9th century, but tourism and its paraphernalia were a great help in doing so. Neither Campbell's nor Lady Aberdeen's narrative, however, gives as much insight into the process of image-making as Paul KANE'S Wanderings of an Artist among the Indians of North America from Canada to Vancouver Island and Oregon through the Hudson's Bay Company Territory and Back Again (1859), which, in
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carefully recording a vanishing way of life, provides a nostalgic and accusatory mirror image to the messianic railway narratives. Campbell's and Lady Aberdeen's pictures were meant to legitimize western expansion by lending it both a royal and a human cachet; from the wisdom of hindsight, Paul Kane's images may be said to question the same process by depicting indigenous people as royalty in their own right (an assumption that, in itself, is of course not without its Eurocentric subtext). The travel narratives discussed so far have focused on Canadian wilderness, and to this day the promotion of tourism emphasizes Canada's natural environment rather than its cities. With the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway, however, the URBAN centres along the railway also flourished, especially since the company asserted its presence by building palatial hotels that in some cases became attractions in their own right. Unlike most Canadian cities, Quebec attracted positive commentary early on because of its spectacular location, which reminded visitors of Edinburgh or Gibraltar, its proximity to picturesque sights such as the Saguenay and the Montmorenci Falls, and the charm of its wintertime activities. The CPR's Chateau Frontenac hotel successfully blended in with these existing features. Built in the style of a French chateau (and completed in time to provide travellers en route to the 1893 Chicago World Fair with an attractive stopover), it confirmed the city's role as a kind of ersatz Europe. Charles Dickens waxed enthusiastic over the sight of the citadel in his American Notes (1842), Henry Thoreau was alternately repulsed and attracted by the city's old-world and distinctly non-republican air (A Yankee in Canada, 1866), Henry James mused about 'how the city would strike one if the imagination had not been bribed beforehand' (Portraits of Places, 1883), and Willa Gather was so impressed with her visit in 1928 that she used it as the basis for her novel Shadows on the Rock (1931). The other sites where the building of CPR hotels enhanced already existing tourist attractions were Victoria and Vancouver, the former because it resembled British seaside resorts such as Torquay to an almost 'comical' degree, as Lady Aberdeen put it, and the latter because, in Stanley Park, it provided a large area of attractive wilderness within reach of urban
TRAVELLERS AND TRAVEL WRITING
amenities. Rudyard Kipling compared Vancouver's civilized demeanour favourably with the brashness of American cities (From Sea to Sea: Letters of Travel, 1899). More recently, the" French writer Michel Tournier was enchanted by the proximity of ocean and forest in Stanley Park, sketching his impressions in Canada: Journal de voyage, 1977). Remarkable cross-country tours that attempt to focus on all major Canadian cities are relatively recent. Norman LEVINE'S youthfully cantankerous Canada Made Me (1958) is worth mentioning here because it deliberately turns its back on the sightseeing priorities of earlier books and instead emulates George Orwell's 'leftist tourism' in its gritty pictures of the seamier parts of town. Written at the beginning of an intensely nationalist period, Canada Made Me was greeted with frosty disapproval and, as Levine claims, brought a steady procession of Canadian visitors to the expatriate author's home in Cornwall wanting 'to see what [he] looked like.' By contrast, Jan Morris's hyperbolically entitled City to City: Canada through the Eyes of the Greatest Travel Writer of Our Day (1990) revives tourist cliches about Canadian cities from St John's to Vancouver by navigating between Jamesian urban impressionism, social reporting (both the Orwellian and the boulevard kind), and wilderness writing. In 1832, when Susanna MOODIE emigrated to Canada, her Atlantic crossing took nine weeks. Even if they could afford the expense, new Canadian citizens would think twice about undertaking such a perilous journey again to visit their homelands. However, with the beginning of regular steamship travel it became possible by the i88os to cross the Atlantic in just over a week, while the introduction of reduced return fares and of organized travel such as Cook's Tours brought overseas travel within the reach of a greater social range of people than ever before. Travel abroad for 19th-century Canadians almost exclusively meant travel to Europe, with a marked preference for the cities of London, Paris, and Rome, although some travellers also extended their journey to Greece, Egypt, and the Holy Land. However, travel rarely meant mere sightseeing. In adaptation of the iSth-century grand tour, wealthy parents sent their offspring to acquire social polish in the
capitals of Europe and a first-hand classical education in the Mediterranean. Among them was 17-year-old Thomas Stinsonjarvis, offspring of one of Canada's most powerful LOYALIST families and later in life an eminent lawyer, who described his experiences in Letters from East Longitudes: Sketches of Travel in Egypt, the Holy Land, Greece, and Cities of the Levant (1875). The author and university professor James DE MILLE derived material for many of his novels and a fictionalized travel narrative (The Dodge Club; or, Italy in MDCCCLIX, 1869) from a grand tour undertaken in 1850. In addition to accompanying his children on educational tours abroad (see Ryerson's letters in My Dearest Sophia, 1955), Egerton RYERSON, then chief superintendent for Canada West, shopped for educational displays to be used in the classroom at home, as did his colleagues at U Laval, who returned with globes, thermometers, and Bunsen burners as well as notes jotted down during visits to botanical gardens and zoological museums. Art. Education was also the motivation for young artists to travel to Europe, especially after the 1878 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, where France had made a particularly strong showing. Both Sara Jeannette DUNCAN (in A Daughter of Today, 1894) and Alice JONES (in Gabriel Praed's Castle, 1904) wrote novels set in the painters' studios of Paris that they had come to know as tourists, and the painters Robert Harris and WL. Forster described their experiences in their respective autobiographies Some Pages from an Artist's Life (1910) and Under the Studio Light (1928) (see also VISUAL ARTS). While these painters were mostly eager to absorb the influences of modern European art, the sculptor and painter Napoleon BOURASSA sought out models in the early 18505 that revived medieval ideals, such as the German Nazarenes and the French muralist Hippolyte Flandrin. In sketches published in the Revue canadienne, Bourassa reported with disapproval on the sensual abandon he witnessed during 'Le Carnaval a Rome.' The art criticism of John Ruskin and Walter Pater shaped the accomplished travel writing of Alice Jones; daughter of Lieutenant-Governor Alfred Gilpin Jones of Nova Scotia. Jones wrote
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impressionist and sensual sketches of Italian cities and their art treasures for the Week during her extensive travels in the 18805 and 18905. Jones and her art-loving colleagues at the Week provided an important antidote to the dogmatic approach to art typical of such influential works as the Methodist minister William WITHROW'S A Canadian in Europe: Being Sketches of Travel in France, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Holland and Belgium, Great Britain and Ireland (1881), which spawned an equally successful novel entitled Valeria: The Martyr of the Catacombs; a Tale of Early Christian Life in Rome (1880). Withrow's critical views of what he perceived to be European licentiousness are echoed in the writings of French Canadian travellers, although their views are of course coloured by their own religious and political agenda. Jules-Paul TARDIVEL, the fiercely ULTRAMONTANE editor of La Verite, perceived a sharply dualist Europe divided between decadent Paris on the one land and spiritual Rome on the other (Notes de voyage en France, Italic, Espagne, Irlande, Angleterre, Belgique et Hollande, 1890), a vision that also informs Judge Adolphe-Basile ROUTHIER'S writing in A travers I'Europe: impressions etpaysages, 1881-3. Even in their accounts of the Holy Land, writers of both Protestant and Roman Catholic backgrounds often felt that the reality of the biblical sights did not measure up to their idealized expectations of them. The Abbe Leon Provancher, for instance, writing in De Quebec a Jerusalem: Journal d'un pelerinage canadien en Terre-Sainte en passant a travers I'Angleterre, la France, I'Egypte, lajudee, la Samarie, la Galilee, la Syrie et ITtalie (1884), expressed disappointment and suspected that the New Jerusalem was to be found elsewhere, possibly in the New World. Special Events, For those Canadians unable to travel themselves, the serialized reports of journalists dispatched to cover special subjects or events served as a welcome substitute. At a time when illustrations were costly and therefore rarely used, journalists' evocative powers had to be considerable, and their work provides particularly well-crafted specimens of the urban SKETCH, a short descriptive prose form otherwise mostly associated with Canadian nature writing. Grace Denison, social reporter for Sat-
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urday Night for 22 years, combined the leisurely inquisitiveness of the flaneur with the high social (and feminist) conscience of the reformer in A Happy Holiday; A Tour through Europe (1890). Kathleen COLEMAN'S coverage of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee for the Mail and Empire, collected in To London for the Jubilee (1897), is an exemplary series of such sketches, paying equally close attention to the imperial pageantry and to the fashions worn by the Empire's ladies, a literary performance made somewhat piquant by Coleman's Irish allegiances and unpredictable wit. Once WAR reporting became an important staple of JOURNALISM, it also helped to generate lucrative sidelines in the tourist business. Thus, the battle sites of the Crimean War detoured Canadians on their way to Palestine well into the i9th century, and Thomas Cook conducted tours to the ruins of Paris after the Franco-Prussian WAR. The poet Octave CREMAZIE, involuntarily exiled to Paris because of financial difficulties, experienced the siege first-hard, recording in his journal the sufferings caused by constant shelling, hunger, and cold. An important magnet for travellers were the world exhibitions initiated by the 1851 Great Exhibition in London. Assembling the latest in technological developments and in the arts, these fairs also provided important opportunities for the formation of national identities and indeed for competition among nations. A particularly fine travel report depicting the role of Canadians at world exhibitions is Andrew Spedon's Sketches of a Tour from Canada to Paris, By Way of the British Isles, During the Summer 0/1867 (1868). Domestic fairs became an important means of attracting hinterland tourists into Canadian cities. Some of these fairs later developed into major international tourist attractions, the Calgary Stampede among them. War Years. Domestic tourism by necessity moved to the foreground during the two world wars and regions that had been neglected by CPR-fostered tourism, such as the Prairies or the Maritimes, now received greater attention. The advent of the motor car permitted a more idiosyncratic approach to the cross-country tour, as in Percy Gomery's Motor-Scamper 'cross
TRAVELLERS AND TRAVEL WRITING
Canada: A Human Interest Narrative of a Path-FindingJourney from Montreal to Vancouver (1922). The purposeful imperialist narratives of earlier coast-to-coast travelogues were now replaced by equally fervent nationalist ones. Bruce HUTCHISON'S remarkable The Unknown Country: Canada and Its People (1942, Governor General's Award) casts the country as 'a boy who has passed his boyhood but is not yet a man' and opens its account with the declaration that 'now our time is come and we are ready.' The book intersperses lively vignettes of rural and urban life, lyrical contemplation, and political treatise, and it makes a rare effort to seek out both the obvious and lesser-known aspects of Canadian life. Not free of the prejudice of his time, Hutchison pays scant attention to the role of Native people in Canada's future, and his objections to the JAPANESE are virulent. While, for Hutchison, there was no question that the two 'founding races' of Canada would accomplish their task in harmony, Eugene Cloutier travelled across the country 25 years later with the specific purpose of countering Quebec separatism. Le Canada sans passeport (1967, tr and condensed as No Passport: A Discovery of Canada) describes the country as a collection of distinct societies, many of them outlandish to a visiting Quebec intellectual, but Cloutier's lively and often amusing travelogue makes an emphatic plea for their survival as a political ensemble. Like Hutchison's and Cloutier's books, Dorothy Duncan's Here's to Canada\ (1941) illustrates once again that travelogues, far from being merely escapist literature, often reinforce the political preoccupations of their times. Besides offering, especially in the chapters on the Maritimes and British Columbia, fascinating detail on Canada at war, Duncan (who was married to the Canadian writer Hugh MacLennan) describes the country not only as a scenic destination for Americans to whom European vacations are currently off-limits, but also as 'the spearhead of American defense' whose 'inrush of new strength, vitality and purpose ... is sufficient to hearten us all.' Duncan's prejudice toward Asians, especially the Japanese, is as pronounced as Hutchison's. By contrast Robert D. Kaplan's An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America's Future (1998), written half a century later,
credits Asian immigrants with the creation of multicultural, transnational communities along the West Coast. Kaplan, too, views Canada as an ideal extension of the United States and conjures up a vision of Vancouver as a rose-bedecked pastoral equally devoid of cellphones and social problems. Postwar Writing. Once international travel resumed in the period between the wars and from the mid-i94os onwards, its nature changed extensively. Travel through selected countries in Europe and the Holy Land was the exception for the tourist from Victorian Canada (a book such as Chester Glass's The World; Around It and Over It. From England, Ireland, Scotland, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, France, Spain, Monaco, Italy, Austria, Greece, Turkey, Turkey-in-Asia, The Holy Land, Egypt, India, Singapore, China, Japan, California, Nevada, Utah, and New York, 1881, was very rare), but now Canadian travel became very cosmopolitan indeed, and there were many distinguished authors among the travel writers. Daryl HINE gave a dandyish and often hilarious account of his brief visit to Cold War Poland in Polish Subtitles: Impressions from a Journey (1962). Margaret LAURENCE, who lived in Ghana and Somalia during the 19505, wrote The Prophet's Camel Bell (1963) about her sojourn in AFRICA; Gwendolyn MACEWEN reminisced about Greece in Mermaids and Ikons: A Greek Summer (1978); P.K. PAGE described her life as an ambassador's wife and apprentice painter in Rio de Janeiro, also in the 19505, in Brazilian Journal (1987); and Charles RITCHIE chronicled his diplomatic career in the Canadian foreign service in diaries spanning the years from the Second World War to the early 19705. The first of these diaries, The Siren Years: A Canadian Diplomat Abroad, 1937-1945 (1972) won the Governor General's Award, as did poet Karen CONNELLY'S Touch the Dragon: A Thaijournal (1992). Alain GRANDBOIS'S extensive travels inform all of his oeuvre; some of his impressions appear in Visages du monde: images et souvenirs de I'entre-deuxguerres (1971). Denise BOUCHER, author of the controversial play Lesfees ont soif, wrote about her travels in Italy (1987). Together with Jacques HEBERT, Pierre Elliott Trudeau recounted his experience travelling in Red
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China in Deux innocents en Chine Rouge (1961; tr as Two Innocents in Red China, 1968). Their perceptive and witty narrative contrasts with George RYGA'S ponderous reflections in Beyond the Crimson Morning: Reflections from a Journey (1979). George WOODCOCK matches Ritchie in his cosmopolitanism and in the breadth of his observations about the cultures encountered. Woodcock's own social commitment and pacifism preclude a superficial guidebook approach, as his books about Mexico, Asia, and the South Seas all illustrate (see, for example, To the City of the Dead: An Account of Travels in Mexico, 1957; Faces of India: A Travel Narrative, 1964; Asia, Gods and Cities: Aden to Tokyo, 1966; South Sea Journey, 1976). Some of Woodcock's sympathies and concerns are shared by Ronald WRIGHT, whose work eschews a structured itinerary, preferring the chance encounter and replacing the white tourist's controlling eye with indigenous perspectives. Cut Stones and Crossroads: A Journey in the Two Worlds of Peru (1984) and Time among the Maya: Travels in Belize, Guatemala and Mexico (1989) are among Wright's publications. Writing Away: The PEN Canada Travel Anthology, edited by Constance ROOKE (1994), includes numerous essays in the Woodcock-Wright tradition, but it is perhaps most noteworthy for the perspectives of authors such as Daniel David MOSES, Thomas KING, George Elliott CLARKE, and Rohinton MISTRY, whose forebears frequently found themselves the objects of the tourist gaze. A special and growing sub-category of the travel book is Canadians' accounts of their return journey to their own or their ancestors' homeland, in which the complex identities of immigrants' existence and their equally complicated allegiances are revealed. A particularly sophisticated instance is Bharati MUKHERJEE and Clark BLAISE'S joint narrative in Days and Nights in Calcutta (1977); others include Michael ONDAATJE'S memoir/fiction Running in the Family (1982), written after a return visit to Sri Lanka, and David Suzuki's The Japan We Never Knew: A Journey of Discovery (1996). A particularly large group of such travelogues is devoted to Eastern Europe, the result of political turmoil and of the aftermath of the Holocaust. Myrna KOSTASH'S Bloodlines: A Journey into Eastern Europe (1993) is to be mentioned here, as is Eva
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Hoffman's Exit into History: A Journey through the New Eastern Europe (1993; a sequel of sorts to Hoffman's earlier Lost in Translation, which includes an account of her early immigrant years in Vancouver), Irena F. Karafilly's Ashes and Miracles: A Polish Journey (1998), and Honey and Ashes: A Story of Family (1998), where author Janice Kulyk KEEPER translates her numerous travelling fictional characters into autobiographical terms. The end of the travel book has been announced periodically throughout its history, but in Canadian writing at least its interest has been continually renewed and made relevant to the larger project of formulating the country's cultural identity. Further reading: Greg Gatenby, ed, The Wild Is Always There: Canada through the Eyes of Foreign Writers (Toronto: Knopf, 1995), and The Very Richness of That Past: Canada through the Eyes of Foreign Writers (Toronto: Vintage, 1995); EvaMarie Kroller, Canadian Travellers in Europe, 18511900 (Vancouver: U British Columbia P, 1987); Carol Martin, ed, Local Colour: Writers Discovering Canada (Vancouver: Douglas and Mclntyre, 1994); Constance Rooke, ed, Writing Away: The PEN Canada Travel Anthology (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1994). Eva-Marie Kroller
TREGEBOV, Rhea. Poet, children's author, freelance editor, reviewer, creative writing teacher; b Saskatoon 15 Aug 1953; daughter of Jeanette (Grosney), social worker, and Sam Block, civil engineer; educ U Manitoba, Cornell U, and Boston U. Tregebov, who was raised in Winnipeg, moved to Toronto in 1978. The author of CHILDREN'S books such as The Big Storm (1992), and the editor of Sudden Miracles (1991) and other anthologies, Tregebov is known for her four collections of poetry, including Remembering History (1982), which received the Pat Lowther AWARD, and Mapping the Chaos (1995). Her work explores the presence of history, particularly the legacy of the Holocaust, as cultural memory in daily life. Other concerns include a child's sickness, urban geography, and balancing care for others with affirmation of the self- an acute challenge for women. More soci-
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ological than lyrical at times, richly elegiac at others, her verse is characterized by empathy for the disenfranchised, expressive clarity, and hard detail. Mark Cochrane
TREMBLAY, Larry. Playwright; b Chicoutimi, QC, 1954. Larry Tremblay founded the acting troupe LAG (Laboratoire gestuel) in 1984 and wrote plays from the late 19805 on. His preferred mode of dramatic writing is the monologue. His first published play, Le declin du destin (1989), follows a man's descent into a ferociously phantasmagoric world in which parts of his body are progressively lost. A similar theme appears in Lef on d'anatomie (1992), a monologue in which the metaphor of cadaveric dissection is applied to a couple's problems. His best play is The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi (1994), a one-man show in which language, or rather its absence, is at the centre of the drama. Its main character, Gaston Talbot, is a French Canadian who speaks only English in an attempt to disappear into his surroundings. Tremblay also writes poetry (La place des yeux, 1989, and Gare a I'aube, 1992) and teaches in the theatre department of U Quebec a Montreal. Andre Loiselle
TREMBLAY, Martin-Pierre. Poet; b Gagnon, QC, 22 May 1972; son of Lucille Theriault, teacher, and Marcel Tremblay, electromechanic. Critics praised his AWARD-winning first collection of poetry and prose, Le plus petit desert (I993), for the incandescent force of its metaphors. In Une annee bissextile (1994), a suite in concise FREE VERSE takes the form of CONTES or tableaux, inspired by the small dramas of a northern city that lives with the rhythms of nature. This distinctive environment gives the poet the clearsightedness of childhood. Rene Brisebois
TREMBLAY, Michel. Dramatist, novelist, memoirist; b Montreal 25 June 1942; son of Rheauna (Rathier) and Armand Tremblay, a linotypist. Tremblay's first play, Le train (1959), won first prize in Radio-Canada's 1964 Young Authors' Competition. His first staged play, Les bellessoeurs (1968; tr John Van Burek and Bill Glassco as Les belles soeurs, 1974), revolutionized QUEBEC
theatre with its use of JOUAL (the LANGUAGE of working CLASS Montrealers) and its gritty depiction of marginal Quebecois characters. Tremblay has become one of Quebec's most prolific and honoured writers, winning multiple Chalmers and Governor General's awards, as well as the Victor Morin, France-Quebec, David, and Molson Prizes. France made him a Chevalier de 1'Ordre des Arts et Lettres and numerous universities have awarded him honorary doctorates. Tremblay's THEATRE transcends the cultural and linguistic specificity of its East Montreal origins and has been translated into many languages for performances all over the world. The novels of his 'Chroniques du Plateau Mont-Royal,' his semi-autobiographical fictions, and his memoirs unify and explain the universe created by his dramatic works. He has also translated a number of plays, and written musical dramas and film scenarios. The success of Les belles-soeurs marked the advent of le nouveau theatre quebecois, a fusion of avant-garde DRAMATURGY with popular language and Quebecois subject matter that reflected the desire of Quebec writers to assert a national identity. When Les belles-soeurs was first mounted, it was denounced by conservatives because of its vulgar, ungrammatical, anglicized language, and its grim view of life in East Montreal. On the other hand, cultural nationalists such as Jean-Claude GERMAIN saw it as a revelation of what an authentic Quebec theatre could be. Les belles-soeurs has become a classic of the Canadian theatre because of its profound insights into the social, psychological, and sexual problems of working-class women and because of its innovative blending of poetic lyricism, musical composition, and what critic Renate Usmiani calls super-REALiSM. The action of Les belles-soeurs takes place in Germaine Lauzon's tenement kitchen where 14 women - neighbours and relatives - have been invited to paste a million trading stamps into booklets. Germaine has just won the stamps in a contest and plans to refurbish her apartment by redeeming the stamps for catalogue merchandise. As they paste the stamps, the women gossip, argue, and becoming increasingly jealous of Germaine's good fortune. In monologues, dialogues, and choruses, they complain about the mediocrity of their lives which are
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characterized by repetitive housework, pregnancies, childrearing, boorish husbands, and puritanical moral codes. The women seethe with anger, frustration, and resentment, yet prayer and gossip are their only outlets and bingo is their sole diversion. They vent their frustrations by quarrelling, exchanging insults, and stealing Germaine's stamp books. The play ends with a burlesque battle royal over the stolen stamps which rain down on the stage as the women sing a derisive chorus of 'o CANADA.' For all its verbal comedy and farcical touches, Les bellessoeurs is a TRAGEDY about the emptiness of modern URBAN life and the alienation of the average Quebecois. While Tremblay pokes fun at the quetainerie (kitschiness), xenophobia, bitchiness, and ignorance of his women characters, he also blames the Catholic Church for their spiritual, emotional, and material poverty Les belles-soeurs introduced a cast of characters, a neighbourhood, and a quotidian reality that would become the basis for a group of plays known as the 'cycle of the Belles-Soeurs.' Alternating between the dysfunctional families of 'la rue Fabre' (the street where the author grew up) and the drag queens, prostitutes, and petty criminals of 'la Main' (rue Saint-Laurent, Montreal's red-light district), Tremblay places his characters in situations and allows them to reveal themselves, their past, their unhappiness through monologues, contrapuntal simultaneous dialogues, or choral recitations. His originality lies in his ability to combine the techniques of classical tragedy, Brechtian dramaturgy, opera, and avant-garde anti-realism with elements of POPULAR culture and BURLESQUE comedy. Language is the key to Tremblay's dramaturgy; he transcribes orality in a manner that transforms popular speech into a distinctive literary language. The social and psychological problems created by urban poverty and outmoded social codes provide ample material for Tremblay in his early plays. En pieces detachees (1969; tr Allan Van Meer as Like Death Warmed Over, 1975) revolves around Therese, a waitress in a cheap restaurant who drinks to forget the depressing boredom of her menial job and the unhappiness of her marriage to Gerard, an unemployed moron who does nothing but watch television cartoons. Her home life is further complicated
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by her quarrelsome mother, Albertine, and her insane brother, Marcel. The character Albertine (based on one of the author's aunts) reappears in Albertine en cinq temps (1984; tr Van Burek and Glassco as Albertine, in Five Times, 1986) in which she is represented simultaneously by five different actresses at ages 30, 40, 50, 60 and 70. This ingenious dramatic structure enables Tremblay to give the troublesome Albertine psychological depth over time. Her mad son, Marcel, reappears in Marcel poursuivi par les chiens (1992; tr Van Burek and Glassco as Marcel Pursued by the Hounds, 1996) in which he seeks refuge with his sister after witnessing a murder in a nightclub on 'la Main.' Tremblay introduces another of his dysfunctional families, the Brassards, in A toi, pour toujours, ta Marie-Lou (1971; tr Van Burek and Glassco as Forever Yours, Marie-Lou, 1975). Carmen, who works as a country-and-western singer in a sleazy nightclub, tries in vain to convince her pious sister, Manon, to forget their unhappy childhood and the car accident that killed both parents and a young brother 10 years earlier. As the sisters talk in the kitchen of the family home, their parents have a parallel conversation 10 years back in time from opposite ends of the same stage, a scenic metaphor for the emotional distance separating Leopold and Marie-Lou Brassard. The contrapuntal dialogues underscore the destructive effects of ignorance, poverty, alcoholism, and puritanical piety. In reaction to the disastrous failure of their conjugal sex life, Marie-Lou has turned to the Church and Leopold to the tavern for consolation. Since these outlets cannot compensate Leopold for his boring job nor Marie-Lou for her domestic disappointment, the two tacitly agree to commit vehicular suicide. Although Tremblay's portrayal of Carmen suggests the possibility of escape through artistic expression, this hope is dashed in Sainte-Carmen de la Main (1976; tr Van Burek as Sainte Carmen of the Main, 1981), in which the singer is killed for replacing her country-and-western repertoire with songs about the reality of life in Montreal's slums. The dramatist brings Manon Brassard back to the stage in Damnee Manon, sacree Sandra (1977; tr Van Burek, 1981), in which she becomes the unhappy symbol of repressed sexuality and fanatical religiosity.
TREMBLAY
Numerous recurring characters link the tenements of 'la rue Fabre' to the bars of la Main.' As Tremblay completed the dramatic cycle of Les belles-soeurs, he began writing the novels of the 'Chroniques du Plateau Mont-Royal,' going back 25 years in the lives of his characters to give them psychological depth. Pierrette Guerin, for example, is an alcoholic barmaid disowned by her sisters when we first encounter her in Les belles-soeurs, but in the novel, Therese et Pierrette a I'ecole des Saints-Anges (1980; tr Sheila FISCHMAN as Therese and Pierrette and the Little Hanging Angel, 1984), she and her best friend, Therese (of En pieces detachees}, are beautiful and studious sixth-graders participating in a religious pageant for Corpus Christi day. The mental alienation of Therese's brother, Marcel (son of Aibertine), is the focus of the fifth 'chronique,' Le premier quartier de la lune (1989). The aging homosexual of the monologue, La duchesse de Langeais (1969; tr Van Burek in La Duchesse de Langeais and Other Plays, 1976), is presented as Edouard, shoe salesman at Ogilvy's by day and reigning queen of gay clubs on 'la Main' by night in the third and fourth 'chroniques,' La duchesse et le roturier (1982) and Des nouvelles d'Edouard (1984). In the play, La maison suspendue (1990), Tremblay reveals that Edouard was born of the incestuous relationship between grandmother Victoire and her brother, Josaphat-le-Violon, a family secret that explains why the older generation abandoned the family home in Duhamel and migrated to Montreal. In his daring use of transvestites and homosexuals, Tremblay played a pioneering role in the creation of GAY theatre and fiction in Canada. While the critics initially read sexual difference and GENDER confusion as metaphors for Quebec's political situation, over time itbecame clear that Tremblay was equally intent on dramatizing homosexual desire and problematizing gender roles. In plays such as La duchesse de Langeais, Demain matin, Montreal m'attend (1970), Hosanna (1973; tr Van Burek and Glassco, 1974), Damnee Manon, sacree Sandra (1977), Les anciennes odeurs (1981; tr John Stowe as Remember Me, 1984), and La maison suspendue, he explores homoerotic desire, exposes the performative nature of gender, eroticizes the male body, and seeks to renew father-son relationships. In his novels, Tremblay continues this
exploration by presenting Montreal gay culture from the 19505 to the present. With each new text, Tremblay deepens readers' understanding of his world - a real world transformed by his imagination, mythic vision, and poeticized use of oral language. As his corpus grows, the autobiographical impulse of his work becomes clear: Tremblay writes to record his childhood memories and to explore his identity as a gay man and an artist. The eponymous character of the first of the 'Chroniques du Plateau Mont-Royal,' La grossefemme d'd cote est enceinte (1978; tr Fischrnan as The Fat Woman Next Door Is Pregnant, 1981) is a fictional version of Tremblay's mother, on the verge of giving birth to the author himself, who will reappear as 'le fils de la grosse femme' in all of the 'Chroniques' and in different guises in Tremblay's plays and other novels. He is the transgendered drag queen, Sandra, of Damnee Manon, sacree Sandra and the Outremont French professor, Jean-Marc, of Les anciennes odeurs, La maison suspendue, and the semi-autobiographical novels Le coeur decouvert (1986) and Le coeur eclate (1993). In the novel La nuit des princes charmants (1995), he is the gay teenager whose quest for sexual initiation leads him from 'la rue Fabre' to the Montreal opera and then to the clubs of 'la Main.' In Les vues animees (1990), Douze coups de theatre (1992), and Un ange cornu avec des ailes de toiles (1994), Tremblay discards dramatic and fictional masks in favour of autobiography. In these 'portraits of the artist as a young man,' he talks with humour and nostalgia about how his artistic vocation was fuelled by his family and by his childhood encounters with films, theatre, and literature. In the play Encore unfois, si vous permettez (1998; tr Linda Gaboriau as For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again), the conversation between Nana and the Narrator dramatizes the relationship between Tremblay and his beloved mother. Further reading: Jean-Marc Barrette, L'univers de Michel Tremblay: Dictionnaire des personnages (Montreal: P de 1'U Montreal, 1996); Gilbert David and Pierre Lavoie, Le monde de Michel Tremblay (Montreal: Cahiers de theatre Jeu/ Lansmann, 1993). lane Moss
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TREMBLAY
TREMBLAY, Mildred Sarah. Businesswoman, writer; b Kenora, ON, 21 June 1925; daughter of Agnes (Harkins), teacher and homemaker, and Charles Ratchford, businessman. Now a resident of Vancouver Island, she won critical attention with Dark Forms Gliding (1988), a poetry collection that reflects on FEMINISM and the life of the individual. Old Woman Comes Out of Her Cave (2001) - irrepressibly confronting taboos: alcoholism, bigotry, the sexuality of older persons - reconfirmed her skill. TREVANIAN (Rodney Whitaker). POPULAR thriller writer, author of The Main (1976) and Shibumi (1979). See PSEUDONYMS, WESTERNS. TRICKSTER FIGURES in the ORAL tales of the FIRST NATIONS include Azeban (the Abenaki raccoon), Bluejay, COYOTE, Mink, NANABUSH, Rabbit, and RAVEN. One of the recurrent characteristics of trickster figures is that (unlike some of the characters who represent the ideal or noble aspirations of the tribe) they display the faults and foibles of humankind as well as some of the more admirable and moral qualities. Traditional trickster tales can sometimes be scatalogical and (in this respect like some medieval European fabliaux) even obscene. But they are also instructive. Hence the actions of the Trickster can aid people or dislocate their lives. Tricksters bring food, fire, and light to the world; they teach; they also upset the order that prevails at any given time, and their tricks often bring about entirely unexpected consequences, sometimes even to the detriment of the Tricksters themselves. The Trickster is thus more a function or process in society than a particular individual, though often embodied in a single figure, as in Howard O'HAGAN'S 'Tayjohn.' Carl JUNG read the Trickster as a quintessential Shadow figure. Later 20th-century First Nations writers (among them Thomas KING and Bill REID) adapted the Trickster to contemporary social politics - Reid calling for Raven to revisit the earth to sort things out, and King turning Coyote loose on the assumptions that lie behind many current literary and cultural conventions. Trickster figures appear in other cultures as well, as Anansi in West AFRICA and Brer Annancy, the spider, in the CARIBBEAN, for example; contemporary writers in Canada
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adapted the Trickster also to current political concerns, as a challenge to convention and a call for change. See, eg, HIGHWAY. TROPE, from the Greek for 'turn,' a term used in RHETORIC to refer to various figurative uses of language, such as metaphor. The term subsequently came to be used as a verb, to indicate how particular choices of metaphor, even if unconscious or cliched, carry particular ideological resonances, as with the divergent implications of, for example 'troping' Canada - rhetorically imagining the state - as northern, wilderness, bilingual, multicultural, or a mosaic. TROTTIER, Pierre. Poet, essayist; b Montreal 21 March 1925; son of Marie-Rose (Lalumiere) and Louis Trottier, a businessman. A1945 graduate of U Montreal, he worked first as a lawyer and later as a diplomat with postings in Moscow, Djakarta, London, and Paris. After his first collection of poetry, Le combat centre Tristan (1951), he went on to write Poemes de Russie (1957), Les belles au bois dormant (1960), and numerous other volumes of lyrics. A repeated theme involves man's perennially unsatisfied search for woman. Several of his essays on French Canadian identity are collected in Man Babel (1963), and his poems from the years 195186 in En vallees closes (1989). Margaret Cook
TROWER, Peter Gerard. Poet, novelist; b St Leonard's-on-Sea, England, 25 Aug 1930; son of Gertrude Eleanor Mary (Gilman) and Stephen Gerard Hugh Trower; emig 1940 with his widowed mother and younger brother. After graduating from high school and two years at the Vancouver School of Art, Trower worked for 22 years as a logger on the BC coast. He was the subject of the 1976 CBC-TV film Between the Sky and the Splinters. He lives on British Columbia's Sunshine Coast. Trower's 12 collections of poems include moving through the mystery (1969), Ragged Horizons (1978), The Slidingback Hills (1986), Unmarked Doorways (1989), Hitting the Bricks (1997), and Kisses in the Whiskey (1997). He later turned to prose, with the trilogy Grogan's Cafe (1994), Dead Man's Ticket (1996), and The Judas Hills (2000) and a number of non-fiction works. He is a frequent contributor to Raincoast
TSIMSHIANIC ORAL LITERATURE
Chronicles. Trower's early work examines the social underpinnings of the logger's lot, while his later work increasingly attends to the environmental devastation wrought by BC forestry practices. Joel Martineau
TRUDEL, Sylvain. Novelist; b Montreal, 18 May 1963. After obtaining two degrees in science and cinema, Trudel began to write in 1985. Two years later he was on the list of Governor General's Award nominees for Le souffle de rharmattan; the novel, which is set in AFRICA and is about escaping from the world of adults onto an imaginary island, won Le Prix Molson and Le Prix Canada-Suisse (1988). Muchadmired more recent novels include Le monsieur qui se prenait pour I'hiver (1996), Le grenier de Monsieur Easile (1997), and Les dimanches de Julie (1998). Besides his studies in biology, Trudel's other works include a collection of short stories, Lesprophetes (1994). Further reading: Rejean Beaudoin, 'Le Chemin du milieu du monde,' Liberte 189 (June 1990): 168-73. Constantin Grigorut
TSIMSHIANIC ORAL LITERATURE. Probably the oldest continuing traditional literature in Canada if not the world, Tsimshian epics recorded by NATIVE scholars such as William Beynon and Henry Tate working with academics - have been vilified in provincial court, then, most honourably, redeemed by the Canadian Supreme Court in a 1998 legal case involving LAND claims (see Leslie Hall PINDER). The experience has been unique in the humanities, though not in the annals of colonialism. The Tsimshianic language family, speakers of a linguistic isolate, perhaps related to the Penutian stock, consists, in the interior, of Nishga (Nisga'a) on the middle Nass River, and of Gitksan (Gitxsan) on the upper Skeena R, and, near the ocean, of Coast and of Southern Tsimshians. Coastal Tsimshians recognize four paired clans (semi-moieties) called Ganhada (RAVEN) and Laxsgiik (On Eagle) or Gispwudwada (Orca, locally called Blackfish, Killerwhale) and Laxgibuu (On Wolf). Inland
Gitksan and Nishga use Frog for Raven, and Grizzly or Fireweed for Orca. Neighbours to the north were TLINGIT, to the west HAIDA, to the south WAKASHAN speakers, and to the east various ATHAPASKANS. For millennia, these nations interacted through trade, warfare, ceremonial exchanges, and royal intermarriages, effectively overarching differences of town, tribe, or parent language to blend oral motifs and themes. Tsimshianic distinguishes two basic narrative types known as maalsk, 'tellings,' or adaawx, more culturally dense, rich, nuanced, and owned accounts that Natives call history, although 'sacred history' better conveys their many other-worldly aspects, as Claude LeviStrauss made famous with the minor example of Asdiwal. Stylistically, both narratives use repetition to underscore a main theme; to build momentum, rhythm, balance, or suspense; and to lull an audience while the narrator plans ahead. While the plot is familiar to listeners, subtleties in the word choice, along with rephrases and refrains, have provided the basis for aesthetic judgments. Text has sometimes varied with song, particularly when claiming privileges to MUSIC. Tellings have no restrictions on time, manner, or person speaking or hearing them. They are general tales that can have moral as well as entertainment value. Many involve their TRICKSTER Raven (txamsri), also known as Giant (witgyet), who does good by both intent and mistake as well as by providing a singularly negative example. Ravenous in his appetites, he tricked the original owners out of the sun, moon, stars, tides, freshwater, and other necessities. Indeed, ownership has been a primal feature of the Tsimshian universe and distinguishes these tellings from sacred histories, where many details of place, creativity, and individuals are manifested as the hereditary property of a noble house, the basic unit of North Pacific cultures. A house is simultaneously a cedar plank building, its membership traced through mothers and sisters, its landed estate frequented by named ancestors, and its crests - artistic treasures consisting of hats, masks, regalia, songs, dances, and other means of display - specifically explained in terms of a name in a sacred history.
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TSIMSHIANIC ORAL LITERATURE
Each name serves in the way that 'Arthur' does for the 'Matter of Britain,' providing a tag for events, neither solitary nor unique as with EuroCanadians, but, according to FIRST NATIONS, as exemplary and worthy of repeated emulation through subsequent generations. Tsimshians say that people are given to names rather than the reverse because the names are immortal and each benefits a 'holder' who treats it with respect by leading an honourable and generous life. Moreover, names are said to 'live again' in another mortal body, recursively interweaving past, present, and future within an overall context of immortality. Thus, Native history is a progressive viewing of glimpses of the divine to benefit an ongoing community through public events such as feasts, ceremonies, and potlatches. So vital is this mortal/immortal connection that during and after devastating European-derived epidemics, in the absence of suitable heirs, names were passed on to pets such as dogs or to arms, legs, and other body parts of overburdened 'holders.' Tsimshians also say 'names feed people' because each is firmly grounded in a portion of the landscape, conferring rights to all its resources. These rights were and are witnessed at validating public events to make them 'legal,' with a new totem pole providing that 'deed,' as long as that holder and name generously share that bounty with household members and with many guests. In this manner, the immortal sustains the mortal to benefit their shared prestige. Because the highest-ranking name holders were and are invited to every feast and potlatch, they were in a position to hear all the major epics recited in public. Their role, however, was to witness rather than to record or judge these 'other' adaawx for only the master of a house had the unassailable right to recite its epic, personally or, for greater prestige, via a 'hired' narrator. While sacred histories primarily validated ownership to crests, many of these were shared among a cluster of houses whose ancestors participated in the same epic events, setting them off as a subset within a clan to create clusters such as Gispwudwada (Orca, Grizzly, Grouse, Mosquito, Stars, Sun, Fireweed), Ganhada (Raven, Frog, Sculpin, Starfish), Laxgibuu (Wolf,
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Bear, Crane, Owl), and Laxsgiik (Eagle, Beaver, Halibut, Octopus). Native moral and religious law demands respect toward all forms of life. Thus, while humans might use parts and pieces of other beings, the entire body could be used only by members of that particular species. Adaawx, therefore, carefully interdict any abuse of living things or their articulated skeletons, their source of eternal vitality, which were burned to assure reincarnation. Indeed, a primary duty of any chief, as with the leader of any species, was to become so 'evolved' as to channel such vitality down his spine (or its representation in totem pole or cane) to fructify the land of his people. Beginning with the actions of divine Heaven (laxha) in a stark and wet world that is obviously post-glacial, the most ancient adaawx span at least 12,000 years. Later ones sort themselves out as overlying episodes that happened relatively close to each other. Because of the past glacial conditions and present watery environment, flood stories reappear throughout the full chronology. Any version is told from the perspective of one house so it is both personal and laudatory, reporting triumphs always but defeats rarely. Each is thoroughly 'grounded' in its claimed, consumed, and imagined landscape. By about 8000 BCE, obsidian was being traded from Mt Edziza, north of the Stikine R, throughout northern British Columbia and the Alaska panhandle. Established towns and trails (c 3000 BCE), today paved as modern highways, spread trade goods throughout the region. This trade included exotic goods supporting a ranked society much like that of modern Tsimshian. Armour, weapons, and fractured bones from graves indicate increasing warfare. Trophy heads and rod armour imply ripples of influence from the Old Bering Sea complex (c 1000 BCE) on both sides of the Pacific, which in turn had connections with Shang China (c 1600 BCE), suggesting an ancestral foundation for the cultures of the Inuit, Aleut, and northern Northwest Coast. Abroad range of foods began to narrow toward the use of shellfish (c 2000 BCE), then salmon (c 500 BCE). Coinciding with this specialization, concern with ranking restricted the
TURGEON
access to any resource as corporate property and encouraged its more intensive production, under the supervision of that leader, to benefit not just individual but also house, town, and clan prestige. Plank houses and towns grew larger (c 500 BCE), indicating population increase, and complex woodworking tools elaborated the formline art style for which Tsimshians are famous. Social rank was indicated by differences in house size and imported goods, with the greatest house in the centre of the front row, as in historic times. Tlingit ancestors (c AD 200) in the shadow of Asian military strategies applied them to Tsimshians, who in turn used them on Haida and various Wakashans. Slavery was almost surely one of the motivations for these attacks, adding extra labour for the elaboration of chiefly prestige. Particularly significant among the 15 or more overlying episodes are the descent of Raven, the visit undersea to Nagwinaks, the revenge of the Heavenly Children leading to the founding of the great city of Temlaxam, the wars of Medeek (Grizzly) over hundreds of years, and the rise of Metlakatla from 1,800 years ago until the 18305, when Tsimshians moved to the trading post at Fort (later Port) Simpson run by the HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY, entrenching strong tribal chiefs by lavish generosity at potlatches to intensify rivalry and confrontation so as to sort out overall chiefly rankings. From these tests, the Eagle crest of the Gispaxlo'ots tribe elevated the Kitimat-derived name of Ligeex to Coast Tsimshian 'high chief/ Religious beliefs shifted when, about AD 1800, a series of Athapaskan prophets called Bini ('mind') preached a blend of European and traditional beliefs, until William Duncan, an Anglican lay missionary, settled among Coast Tsimshian, learned their language, and created a cooperative Christian community that still exists in Alaska. Today, adaawx, as a basis of clans (p'teex) and heraldic crests, continue, while naxnox (masked wonders) and halaayt (elite privileges vested in four guilds) do not. In other words, the realm of WOMEN survived well through the power of narrative, while the realm of men did not,
except as recast in biblical, Christian, particularly Anglican, ways. Further reading: Marius Barbeau and William Beynon, Tsimshian Narratives I: Tricksters, Shamans and Heroes, Tsimshian Narratives 2: Trade and Warfare, in John J. Cove and George F. MacDonald, eds, Canadian Museum of Civilization, Mercury Series, Directorate Paper 3, 1987; Franz Boas, Tsimshian Mythology, Based on Texts Recorded by Henry Tate, Bureau of Am Ethnology, Ann Rpt 31: 29-1037,1916; Jay Miller, Tsimshian Culture, A Light through the Ages (Lincoln: U Nebraska P, 1997). Jay Miller
TURCOTTE, Elise. Poet, novelist; b Sorel, QC, 26 June 1957. Twice awarded the Emile-Nelligan prize for her poetry, Turcotte contributed to the literary renewal of the 19805 and 19905, especially through her sensitivity to the everyday world. Two years after the publication of her book of short stories, La mer a boire (1980), describing the mystery of love and death through a drowned character, she published her first book of poetry, Dans le delta de la nuit. Several volumes followed, including La voix de Carla (1987), La terre est id (1989), and a novel entitled Le bruit des chases vivantes (1991; tr Sheila FISCHMAN as The Sound of Living Things, 1993). Margaret Cook
TURGEON, Pierre. Novelist, playwright, screenwriter; b Quebec City 9 Oct 1947; son of Lucille (Sicard) and Leandre Turgeon, a translator. A RADIO announcer who wrote more than 200 accounts of Quebec and foreign writers for Radio-Canada, Turgeon was also a journalist and literary critic, and wrote screenplays for feature FILMS: Lagammick, Lafleur aux dents, La crise d'octobre (see OCTOBER CRISIS), and an adaptation of Hubert AQUIN'S Prochain episode. He was founding president of Editions Quinze (1975-7), director of U Montreal P (1977-8), and director-general of Editions Sogides (1978-81). His partly autobiographical first novel, Faire sa mart commefaire I'amour (1969; tr David Lobdell as Sweet Poison ... Coming Soon, 1983), analyzes the psychology of the rise and fall of a bourgeois family. Among another dozen works, La premiere personne (1980; tr Lobdell as The First
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TURGEON
Person, 1982), won the Governor General's AWARD, and some of his reflections on writing were collected in En accelere (1991). Margaret Cook
TURNBULL, Gael. Poet; b Edinburgh 7 April 1928. Only briefly a resident of Canada (1940-4, 1951-5), Turnbull was never a citizen. He did, however, publish his first poems in Canada, some of them appearing in Trio, an early collection with Eli MANDEL and Phyllis WEBB. A collection of later works appeared from The Porcupine's Quill in 1992 (While Breath Persist), and a series of of TRANSLATIONS of works by de Saint-Denys GARNEAU, Roland GIGUERE, Gilles RENAULT, and Paul-Marie LAPOINTE were distributed by CONTACT P in 1955. TURNER, Michael Barclay. Musician, poet, novelist, screenwriter, journalist; b North Vancouver 23 Aug 1962; son of Mary (MacDonald) and John Turner. After receiving a BA in anthropology from U Victoria, Turner co-founded a seminal Vancouver rock band, The Hard Rock Miners, and pseudonymously wrote PORNOGRAPHY for a California company. He later launched two literary salons. His poetry, particularly in Company Town (1991) and Kingsway (1995), reveals his fascination with BC history. Hard Core Logo (1993; made into a FILM by Bruce McDonald, which in turn inspired the book Hard Core Roadshow: A Screenwriter's Diary by Noel S. Baker, 1997) exuberantly recreates an illstarred rock-band tour. A postmodern novel, American Whiskey Bar (1997), which parodies the entertainment industry, was followed by The Pornographer's Poem (1999). This latter narrative, which won wide critical attention, casts the reader as voyeur; it interrogates the short life of a middle-class Vancouver youth who, disenchanted with his hypocritical milieu, experiments with love, drugs, and sexually explicit filmmaking. Further reading: Zsuzsi Gartner, 'Rebirth of Cool,' Quill &- Quire 60.8 (Aug 1994): 1,16; Esta Spalding, A Shotgun Interview,' Brick 58 (Winter 1998): 27-35. Brett Josef Grubisic
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TWO SOLITUDES is the title of a 1945 novel by Hugh MACLENNAN that is concerned with the division and the rapprochement between anglophone and francophone cultures in Canada, epitomized by the mingling of the Ottawa and Saint Lawrence Rivers at Montreal (see also LAURENTIAN THESIS). In common journalistic parlance, the term 'two solitudes' came to be used as shorthand for cultural division in Canada, a usage that tacitly accepted the SEPARATIST rhetoric that divides Canada into a binary - 'French Quebec' and 'English Canada' (though neither of these terms is politically or linguistically accurate). A 'two solitudes' school of CRITICISM also argued that francophone and anglophone literary traditions differed so radically in Canada that comparison between the two was unproductive, though this position was countered by alternative versions of LITERARY HISTORY. For his part, MacLennan drew his epigraph from the writings of the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke: 'Love consists in this: that two solitudes protect, touch, and greet each other,' which resonates more positively than the shorthand usage might suggest. Margaret ATWOOD and Victor-Levy BEAULIEU adapted this phrase in their Deux solicitudes (1998), and Michael Greenstein in his commentary on JEWISH Canadian writing, Third Solitudes (1989). See also CHILDREN'S LITERATURE IN FRENCH, TRANSLATION.
TYNES, Maxine. Teacher, poet; b Dartmouth, NS, 1949. Daugher of Ada (Maxwell) and Joseph Tynes. While attending Dalhousie U, Tynes won the Dennis Memorial Poetry Prize in 1974. Currently she teaches English at a Dartmouth high school. Tynes is descended from Black LOYALISTS who settled in Nova Scotia after the American Revolution, and she became the first BLACK Nova Scotian to be appointed to the Dalhousie U Board of Governors. In 1990, the Maxine Tynes Room was opened in the Dartmouth Public Library. Her strongly rhythmic and sensual poetry celebrates her cultural heritage as well as her commitment to FEMINISM. Her popular first collection, Borrowed Beauty (1987), earned her the title of Milton ACORN People's Poet of Canada for 1988. Woman Talking Woman (1990) features several poems on Africville and three
UKRAINIAN
short stories, including 'For Tea and Not For Service,' about a Black opera singer who is invited to tea in Halifax's wealthy South End before the Second World WAR; a fictional version of the singer Portia White, Celie is invited only because she is famous - none of the society ladies condescend to speak to her. Door of My Heart (1993) further developed Tynes' distinctive voicwe. Further reading: George Elliott Clarke, ed, Introduction, Fire on the Water: An Anthology of Black Nova Scotian Writing (Lawrencetown, NS: Pottersfield, 1991) I: 11-29. Heather Sanderson
TYPOGRAPHY refers both to the actual process of setting type in any printed document and to the design of a typeface itself, and therefore to the principles and practice of aesthetically pleasing print design in general. Involved in such an enterprise are decisions involving typeface, font size, layout, use of ornaments, and legibility. In Canada, one of the foremost commentators on typographical design is Robert BRINGHURST, in such works as Ocean, Paper, Stone (1984), a publication by the bookseller William Hoffer (see BOOKSTORES) that at once catalogues an exhibition of print styles in British Columbia and reflects on the power of effective design. Bringhurst comments further on BOOK DESIGN in The Elements of Typographic Style (1992; rev 1996). See also COOLEY, CONCRETE POETRY, COPITHORNE, ELSTED, PUBLISHING.
TYRRELL, Joseph Burr. Geologist, explorer, miner, historian; b Weston, CW, i Nov 1858, d Toronto 26 Aug 1957; son of Elizabeth (Burr) and William Tyrrell, pioneer; educ U Toronto (BA, 1880; MA, 1889) and Victoria C (BSc, 1889). Tyrrell was employed 1881-98 by the Geological Survey of Canada, and made historic expeditions WEST and NORTH in 1893 and 1894. In 1884 he discovered dinosaur beds in the Alberta badlands and coal beds at Drumheller. He was the brother of James William, civil engineer and explorer, whose Across the Sub-Arctics of Canada (1897) records the brothers' joint canoe trip. Joseph Tyrrell edited important editions of Samuel HEARNE (1911) and David THOMPSON (1916) for the CHAMPLAIN SOCIETY, of which he
was president (1927-32). The Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology at Drumheller was founded in his name in 1985. See also SCIENCE AND NATURE. Further reading: Alex Inglis, Northern Vagabond: The Life and Career ofJ.B. Tyrrell (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1978); Katharine Martyn, J.B. Tyrrell: Explorer and Adventurer: The Geological Survey Years 1881-1898 (Toronto: U Toronto Library, 1993). Iain Higgins
UGUAY, Marie. Poet; b Montreal 22 April 1955, d Montreal 26 Oct 1981; daughter of Jacques Lalonde and Denise Uguay. She wrote three volumes of poetry, published by Noroit, the last one posthumously: Signe et rumeur (1976), L'outre-vie (1979), and Autoportraits (1982). Poemes (1986) gathered her intimate, sensitive work, in which the poet seeks repeatedly to elucidate the essence of words. Anguished, aware of the progress of her cancer, Uguay also expressed a sense of measured time. Shortly before her death, she was interviewed about her life and her writing for a 1982 NATIONAL FILM BOARD FILM by Jean-Claude Labrecque with Jean ROYER. The NELLIGAN Foundation awarded her a medal posthumously in 1983 for Autoportraits. Margaret Cook
UHER, Lorna. See Lorna CROZIER. UKRAINIAN immigration to Canada may have begun with early MENNONITE immigration in the 18705, but the first major wave occurred when agricultural labourers were invited to settle the PRAIRIES during the two decades prior to the First World War. Subsequent immigration occurred throughout the 2oth century, principally for economic and political reasons, with Winnipeg, Edmonton, and Toronto becoming the chief urban destinations. Ukrainian characters are represented in works by CONNOR, LAURENCE, and G. ROY, as well as in those by the many Canadian writers who draw on their own Ukrainian heritage, such as Janice Kulyk KEEPER, Illia Kiriak, Myrna KOSTASH, Vera Lysenko, Helen POTREBENKO, and Andrew SUKNASKI. See also CULTURAL PLURALITY, JEWISH WRITING, F.R. LIVESAY, E. M A N D E L , MULTICULTURAL VOICES, SLAVIC.
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ULTRAMONTANISM
ULTRAMONTANISM, a conservative branch of Roman Catholicism that developed during the French Revolution and the early ipth century. The term (meaning 'over the mountains') asserts fidelity to the pope in Rome, on the 'other' side of the French Alps. Resisting any compromise with modernity (whose proponents they castigated as 'liberals'), its adherents fought to maintain church control over education, to affirm the infallibility of the pope, and to assert the precedence of the church over the state. Its strongest advocate was perhaps Archibishop Ignace Bourget (see GUIBORD AFFAIR). Its commitment to the existence of a separate Catholic state became linked, later in the century, with Quebec NATIONALISM. See also CHRISTIANITY, INTELLECTUAL HISTORY, RELIGION AND LITERATURE.
UNITED CHURCH OF CANADA, the largest Protestant CHRISTIAN church in Canada, formed in 1925 by an amalgamation of Methodist, Congregationalist, and approximately 65 per cent of Presbyterian congregations; it subsequently embraced other denominations as well. Liberal in social attitude, the Church permitted the ordination of women from 1936 on, involved itself in labour relations and other forms of secular politics, and (deriving largely from its Methodist and Presbyterian roots) committed itself to secular education. Many Canadian writers were trained to the United Church ministry (eg, FRYE) or otherwise strongly influenced by its message (eg, LAURENCE, PRATT). H.A. INNIS analyzed the institution itself in the context of his theories of communication. See also ARCHIVES. UNITED EMPIRE LOYALISTS (UEL), a term that refers to the c 50,000 persons (of European, BLACK, and NATIVE - mainly IROQUOIS - heritage) who espoused the Royalist cause during the American Revolutionary War (1775-83), and who emigrated to British North America mostly in 1783-4. Some 30,000 settled in the MARITIMES (leading to the creation of NEW BRUNSWICK and Cape Breton), 2,000 in the area now known as Quebec, the rest in what is now Ontario. They became the dominant group in the new province of UPPER CANADA and in the Maritimes, and (while they and their descendants were later
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outnumbered by subsequent immigrant groups) they continued to exert substantial cultural influence on Canadian social policies. Writers and educators such as William KIRBY and Egerton RYERSON made a point of their UEL connection. The term 'UEL' - primarily a Maritime usage by the 20th century - derives from a proclamation of Lord Dorchester, the governor of British North America in 1789, who affirmed that the Loyalist immigrants could attach 'UE' to their names, to acknowledge their commitment to the 'Unity of Empire.' UNITED STATES AND CANADIAN LITERATURE. It is an irony befitting Canada's ambivalent literary relationship with the United States that its first best-selling author should be dubbed 'the father of American humor.' Bestowed on Thomas Chandler HALIBURTON for the series of sketches collected in The Clockmaker (1836), the label seems particularly incongruous given the LOYALIST flavour of his satire, which pits a caricature of Yankee excess (the clock peddler SAM SLICK) against the normative moral voice of the English judge who narrates the sketches. Embodying another contradiction that defines Canadian literary representations of the United States, the figure of Sam Slick, for all his crudeness and vanity, is not without appeal. His sales techniques might seem dubious, but they prove successful in duping the morally upright but industrially challenged Nova Scotians. Reflecting the precarious state of Nova Scotian culture and economy which the SATIRE of Sam Slick sought to remedy, Haliburton's subsequent works were published not in Canada, but in Britain and the United States. The sense of being caught between Britain and the United States which informed Haliburton's vision of the colony of Nova Scotia continued to shape the cultural life of Canada. Debates in the late iSoos about whether Canada should throw its economic lot in with the COMMONWEALTH or with the United States found their way into literary texts such as Sara Jeannette DUNCAN'S The Imperialist (1904), whose protagonist, Lome Murchison, answers prevailing arguments in favour of Reciprocity with the solemn declaration that Canada's survival depends on her people's will 'not only to reject American overtures in favour of the overtures of our own
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great England, but to keenly watch and actively resist American influence, as it already threatens us through the common channels of life and energy.' Economic relations with the United States were not just a subject of vital interest in the early years of Canadian literature; they also profoundly shaped the development of it. Until the early part of the 2oth century, a struggling PUBLISHING industry in Canada, hampered by the preferential tariff agreements the United States enjoyed with Britain, meant that many Canadian writers looked south for publication. Charles G.D. ROBERTS' poetry was first published (1879) in Scribner's Monthly, which, along with such periodicals as the Atlantic, the Century, and Harper's, was an important outlet for the work of the CONFEDERATION POETS and their contemporaries. Book publishing was similarly concentrated in the United States; Copeland and Day was particularly receptive to Canadian work, publishing the collections of Archibald LAMPMAN, Duncan Campbell SCOTT, and Bliss CARMAN. The pattern continued into the 2oth century, with US publishers bringing out the first novels of Ernest BUCKLER, Morley CALLAGHAN, Frederick Philip GROVE, Hugh MACLENNAN, Lucy Maud MONTGOMERY, Thomas RADDALL, Sinclair ROSS, and Mazo DE LA ROCHE. These publishing arrangements obviously influenced the kind of work that was produced in the i9th and early 20th centuries: though certain topics - MOUNTIES, the NORTH, Indians, and French Canada - afforded some romantic interest to American readers, there was not a strong market for Canadian REALISM, and authors such as Marshall SAUNDERS (Beautifiiljoe, 1894) are known to have had to Americanize their settings in order to have their fiction published. Some writers, however, set their fiction in the United States for thematic reasons, often to highlight critically the ills of an American society that Canada - it was to be hoped - might still avoid. Stephen LEACOCK'S Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich (1914) satirizes the extravagant lifestyles of the moneyed class in a city that resembles Montreal, but is explicitly American. A Search for America (1927), Frederick Philip Grove's story of an immigrant's struggle to survive in the New World, is similarly critical of the
commercialism that has swamped the nobler American virtues of generosity and freedom. These texts embody a growing recognition through the early decades of the 2oth century, bolstered by Canada's participation in two world wars, that Canada was no longer a British colony but a North American nation whose future would be negotiated with and against, not England, but the United States. Growing national confidence inspired calls, spearheaded by F.R. SCOTT and his co-editors at the McGill Fortnightly R (1925-7), to abandon the parochialism of the CANADIAN AUTHORS ASSOC in favour of more cosmopolitan aesthetic standards, embodied in the works of such poets as Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams. The American poetry connection was maintained into the 19505 by Raymond SOUSTER, who, with the support of Louis DUDEK and, later, Irving LAYTON, edited CONTACT (1952-4), which published the work of the American BLACK MOUNTAIN poets Robert Creeley and Charles Olson. The connection worked both ways, with Layton becoming a contributing editor of the Black Mountain R, and the American periodical Origin devoting special issues to Layton and Margaret AVISON. At the same time, the 19505 were marked by an increasing receptivity of Canadian journals to American submissions, to the extent that Northrop FRYE complained, in 1958, that Fiddlehead was 'becoming a dumping ground for otherwise unpublishable American stuff.' Frye's concerns were consistent with the findings in the 1952 MASSEY Commission Report, whose analysis of the state of Canadian culture was strongly coloured by warnings about the impact of American commercialism, 'which is beneficial in many respects no doubt, but which, at the same time, may be almost overpowering.' The report confirmed, in the cultural sphere, the arguments advanced by Harold INNIS, that Canada's economy was powerfully shaped by its status as a dependent nation on the periphery of an imperial power. Innis's thesis was taken up by George Parkin GRANT, whose work (Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism, 1965; Technology and Empire: Perspectives on North America, 1969) decries the capitulation of Canada to American liberalism and individualism. Echoes of Grant
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are evident in the work of a whole generation of writers, particularly Dennis LEE, whose Civil Elegies (1972) is a poetic rendering of Grant's national vision, and whose critical essay 'Cadence, Country, Silence' (Open Letter 1973) documents the difficulty of articulating a Canadian identity in a language that is grounded in a foreign (once British, now American) experience. The difficulty Lee described was not just figurative. In 1963 the Pearson government began to allow American magazines such as Time to produce split-run issues in Canada, thereby luring Canadian advertisers away from an already fragile publishing industry. The sense that Canadian voices were being drowned out by the noisy clamour of US cultural imperialism found expression in nationalist efforts such as the 1968 collection The New Romans (Al PURDY, ed) whose subtitle, Candid Canadian Opinions of the US, conveyed a sense of defensive indignation that was only partly tongue-in-cheek. Canada's literary relationship to the United States was complicated in the 19705 by the Vietnam WAR, which brought an influx of Americans into Canada at the same time as it intensified anti-American Canadian NATIONALISM. As Americans were appointed in significant numbers to university faculty positions, critic Robin MATHEWS decried what he saw as the consequent diminishment of a distinct national perspective. In Canadian Literature: Surrender or Revolution (1978) Mathews outlines his vision of an authentically Canadian literature, defined (explicitly against American individualism) by a socialist emphasis on communal values. Mathews's argument echoed, in somewhat reductive terms, the critique of American imperialism that informed such literary works as Dave GODFREY'S Death Goes Better with Coca Cola (1967) and bill BIS SETT'S nobody owns th earth (1971). The ambivalence of Canadian literary attitudes towards the United States during this period are powerfully expressed in the writing of Margaret ATWOOD, who, while acknowledging the positive influence of American popular culture in helping Canada to break with colonial tradition (Second Words, 1982), also draws a clear connection between Canada's subservience - once to Britain, now to the United States - and what she identifies as an abundance of victims in Canadian literature (Survival, 1972). Negative Cana-
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dian stereotypes of the United States are reinforced, and also subverted, in her 1972 novel Surfacing, when the narrator denounces the boorish and violent behaviour of a group of American' hunters, only to discover that they are Canadians. Her insistence that 'they're still American' reflects an important distinction between the mythological values that define America' and the geophysical place of the United States, a distinction that confirms Frye's assertion, in his Conclusion to the Literary History of Canada (1965), that the United States itself was becoming Americanized - and his subsequent hopeful suggestion that it might become Canadianized. Atwood's DYSTOPIAN portrait of a right-wing fundamentalist American society in The Handmaid's Tale (1987) is not so optimistic. Her FEMINIST critique of US culture finds a metaphorical echo in Susan SWAN'S 1983 novel, The Biggest Modern Woman of the World, in which the exploitation of a Nova Scotia giantess, Anna Swan, by P.T. Barnum figures ALLEGORICALLY the exploitation of women by men, and of Canada by the United States. The period that saw a burgeoning of antiAmerican Canadian NATIONALISM also saw an increase in border crossings, both metaphorical and literal. A growing interest in documenting the literary connections between the two countries is expressed in the work of scholars such as James Doyle; his studies of a cross-border literary romance, Annie Howells and Achille Frechette (1979), and of US literary images of Canada, (North of America (1983), along with his edited volume of US TRAVEL writing, Yankees in Canada (1980), belied the stereotype of a hapless Canada in thrall to the powerful culture of its mostly indifferent, sometimes aggressive neighbour, by providing evidence of a historical relationship marked by a high level of reciprocal interest and influence. The literary cultures of both countries was undoubtedly enriched throughout the 19705 and 8os by the participation of Canadian writers such as Clark BLAISE, Dave Godfrey, W.P. KINSELLA, and Robert KROETSCH in the Iowa Writers' Workshop and other US WRITING programs. Most of these writers went on to produce fiction set wholly or partly in the United States, and Kroetsch in particular delves (in Gone Indian, 1973), into the tensions that define and divide Canadian and American national mythol-
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ogies. His critical essays (The Lovely Treachery of Words, 1989) contain more detailed maps of the psychological spaces of Canada and the United States, drawn from an explicitly western perspective. For many western writers, the division between Western and Central Canada is as significant as the US-Canada border. The powerful sense of connection between North and South that informs both BC and prairie cultures in different ways is illustrated in such ventures as the U British Columbia-based TISH (1961-9), inspired by the Black Mountain movement, the US-based Western Literature Assoc, which draws many of its members from Canada, and meetings such as the 1978 Banff literary conference, Crossing Frontiers, which gathered writers and critics from both sides of the border to discuss western literature. Boundary crossing takes on a different significance for FIRST NATIONS writers, for whom the political border between Canada and the United States is frequently seen as an arbitrary line drawn through an indivisible land. The absurdity and the power of that line is comically illustrated in Thomas KING'S short story 'Borders' (1991), in which a woman spends two nights in the parking lot between borders after being turned back from both when she persistently gives her citizenship as 'Blackfoot.' In other First Nations writing the border is practically invisible, as in Jeannette ARMSTRONG'S Slash (1985), in which the narrator's national identity is formed as much by Wounded Knee and the American Indian Movement as it is by Native Canadians' struggles with the Dept of Indian Affairs, and in Monique MOJICA'S play Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots (1991), which represents a cultural history of First Nations that encompasses North and South America. The tendency to define Canada by the way it differs from the United States has also waned in the face of successive waves of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, ASIA, AFRICA, and the CARIBBEAN, for whom the significance of the US-Canadian border fades in comparison with other borders - those dividing North America from the places they have come from, and, for some, those political, cultural and economic borders that divide Canada itself. For the Czech-born Josef SKVORECKY (The Engineer of
Human Souls, 1983; Dvorak in Love, 1986), the meaning of Canada is subsumed in a wider framework of America as a land of freedom. Though his work is inflected with a more nationalist consciousness, Sri Lankan-born writer Michael ONDAATJE takes a similarly sanguine view of US culture, playing with the myth of the wild west in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970), and legends of jazz in Coming through Slaughter (1976). For Austin CLARKE, who moved to Canada from Barbados, the border does make a difference. While he acknowledges the literary influence of Harlem Renaissance writers, Clarke's writing, in particular his 1997 novel Origin of Waves, emphasizes the different forms of African American culture that have developed in Canada and the United States. Those differences are elaborated by the Nova Scotian-born writer George Elliott CLARKE, whose 1998 article 'Contesting a Model Blackness: A Meditation on African-Canadian African Americanism, or The Structures of African Canadianite,' highlights the difficulty for BLACK Canadian writers of writing themselves out from under a dominant African American literary model. Quebecois literary representations of the United States, are, like those in English-language Canadian writing, informed by attitudes ranging from fascination to denunciation. Both are present in Louis HEMON'S Maria Chapdelaine (1916), in which Maria is wooed by a suitor who offers the promise of a better life in the United States. Her choice to stay in Quebec, thereby consigning herself to a life of continued hardship for the sake of preserving community and tradition, becomes paradigmatic for the roman de la terre tradition (see TERRIEN) which asserts the superiority of the rural French Canadian tradition against Americanizing forces of industry and urbanization. This tradition is critiqued by social realists such as RINGUET (Trente arpents, 1938) and Roger LEMELIN (Les Plouffe, 1948), though an anti-American flavour persists through the mid-20th century with novels such as Jean Pellerin's Le diable par la queue (1957). On the whole, Quebec literature moved away from an emphasis on Old World tradition towards a critical acknowledgment of the americanite of Quebec literature and culture. Victor-Levy BEAULIEU'S 1978 biography, Monsieur Melville, draws analogies between the American POSTCO-
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LONIAL nationalism of the ipth century and Quebecois literary renaissance of the 19605, while his 1973 work, Jack Kerouac, repatriates the Beat poet by focusing on Kerouac's French Canadian origins. Cautiously embraced in Jacques POULIN'S Volkswagen Blues (1984), American POPULAR culture takes on a more ominous cast in Jacques GODBOUT'S Une histoire americaine (1986), which focuses on the marginalization of the French LANGUAGE in North America. Throughout the 19805 and 19905, the introduction of international free-trade agreements placed new pressures on both francophone and anglophone Canadian culture, some of which are analyzed in Laurier LaPierre's 1987 collection If You Love This Country: Facts and Feelings on Free Trade. In 1999, proposed legislation against split-run magazines was watered down, in the face of strong US pressure, to allow US publishers continued access to the Canadian magazine market. Concerns about the future of Canadian literature, heightened by American megaBOOKSTORES straining at the border, were partly realized by 1998 legislative changes in Ontario to permit school boards to buy textbooks produced in the United States. In contrast to nationalist moves to block such changes, some critics, including Frank DAVEY (Post-National Arguments, 1993) and David STAINES (Beyond the Provinces: Literary Canada at Century's End, 1995) either suggested that the US-Canadian border means increasingly less in literary and cultural terms or probed the consequences of any assumption that the disappearance is inevitable. A rich assortment of other critical texts - Canadian-American Literary Relations (Special Issue of Essays on Canadian Writing 1981), Stanley Fogel's A Tale of Two Countries (1984), T.D. MacLulich's Between Europe and America (1988), Robert Lecker's Borderlands (1991), Camille La Bossiere's Context North America (1994), Sarah M. Corse's Nationalism and Literature (1997), and W.H. NEW'S Borderlands: How We Talk about Canada (1998) testifies to an abiding interest in Canadian-US literary relations, and in the significance of a border that, in the words of the American-born Saskatchewan writer Wallace STEGNER, lies 'among our loyalties as disturbing as a hair in butter/ Susie O'Brien
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UPPER CANADA, see CANADA, ONTARIO. URBAN WRITING Town and Country: An Ambiguous Pattern. Urban writing appears to be a simple, straightforward concept, but for complex reasons it is not. The city as fabricated habitat is no recent invention but, as Lewis Mumford (The City in History, 1961) showed, dates back several thousand years, with the long duration of urban history generating many different types of cities. Babylon, Rome, and Manhattan have little in common. The metropolis has long presented a confusing challenge to the literary imagination: UTOPIAN vision and emblem of human creativity, dynamism, and progress on the one hand; epitome of human isolation and alienation, of loss of values and moral depravity on the other. The city might encapsulate a fundamentally bifocal vision of Western culture as the great reification of ambivalence inherent in Western civilization. While urban writing responds to the changing urban condition, it projects onto the city its own categories, converting reality into texts that have a certain referentiality but construct alternative urban spaces, mythologizing, making use of metaphor or metonymy. The phrase 'town and country' exemplifies this conceptualization - stable and absolute only at the surface, flexible and shifting in its implications, according to the prevailing cultural discourse. In Land Sliding (1997), W.H. NEW writes about this 'floating relationship' between opposing poles: Any absolute distinction between the sophisticated metropolis and the backward hinterland simply re-inscribes the familiar dichotomy between civilization and savagery ... but in practice, this binary breaks down' because 'categories [are] in constant negotiation.' In other words: the town/country pattern, favoured by i9th- and 20th-century writers as the seemingly absolute key to defining urban space, is in itself deeply ambiguous. This ambiguity is aggravated by another fact: for all practical purposes, the town/country dichotomy has all but vanished. In the early 2ist century, Canada is a nation of city dwellers and urban writers. While 80 per cent of the population lived in rural areas in 1871 and, as recently as 1931, rural dwellers accounted
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for more than half the total population, by 1976 three-quarters were living in urban communities, with an ever-increasing concentration in the larger urban centres. Urban space in Canada is also MULTICULTURAL space. The city and the codes of urban writing inform all texts, critical and otherwise. Conceptualizing the Canadian City. Beyond these general questions, what are the specific forces that might be said to govern urban discourse in Canada? There is no homogeneous tradition of urban writing, nor has urban writing so far stirred much attention in CRITICISM. Whereas Canada's urban growth itself is well documented in theory and practice, these discontinuities of literary discourse are all the more striking. One relevant argument is summed up by Sherrill Grace, who suggests that the writers' strong identification with nature results in the absence of major urban writing. Whatever the reasons for the enduring desire - even in a largely urban society - to define oneself through open space and rural values, the dialectic forms a necessary context. The comparatively slow process of urban growth, the long-lasting dependence on London as imperial metropolis (as well as the peculiar decentralized urban development in Canada) account at least in part for the low profile of urban writing. Towards the end of the ipth century, at a time when controversial urban myths were formulated in Europe and the United States - the sacred city versus the city of destruction, the city as Darwinian space where desperate masses struggled for survival and the energetic but morally questionable individual had unlimited possibilities, the city that Walt Whitman exuberantly praised as a unique source of human emancipation and revitalizing powers - Canada played only a moderate and marginal role. When Canadian literature eventually caught up, it was under radically changed conditions: urban development no longer presented the central challenge to the literary imagination; literary codes had become decentralized. Although cities such as Montreal and Toronto grew, in particular after CONFEDERATION, to be important focal points of literary culture and communication for authors, publishers, and an
educated readership, there was no Canadian centre comparable to Boston (before 1850), or to New York. As far as the role of metropolitan centres for the economic and commercial development of the country is concerned, opinions seem to be divided. While some Canadian historians, notably W.L. MORTON, support the 'frontierist' school in emphasizing the importance of the WEST, the NORTH and the physical environment, others (A.R.M. Lower and D.C. Masters) stress the overriding function of the East, that is, of the big cities as driving forces in the opening of the West. They see Toronto and Montreal as commercial centres struggling for metropolitan dominance over the hinterland. In his influential 1954 paper on 'frontierism,'J.M.S. Careless even argued that metropolitanism shows up more clearly in Canadian development than in American because there were fewer controlling centres competing with each other and less agricultural hinterland. The metropolitan influence could more easily dominate. It is difficult to determine the bearing on urban writing of the famous heartland/hinterland controversy, closely linked as it is to the East/West debate, especially since the Canadian situation cannot clearly be embedded in the larger North American context. Canada's industrial heartland may be called an extension of the American heartland; within this paradigm, the rest of Canada is merely periphery. Since the 'metropolitanism' debate in Canadian HISTORIOGRAPHY is not matched in literary criticism, many problems remain. How is the concept of 'city' and 'urban experience' constructed in Canadian writing, and what are the cultural forces behind these constructions? How was urban writing in Canada shaped by the fact that Canadian literature came into its own fairly late and quite suddenly? What follows is an attempt to single out a few narrative and poetical models in which urban experience in Canada has been given literary expression. The Missing Metropolis. One influential and persistent model of urban culture in Canada is the 'missing metropolis,' originating in the i8th century but reaching far into the 2,oth. At a time when Samuel Johnson, with some justification, could glorify London as the epitome of human
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vitality, of social and intellectual achievement ('When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life'), there was no Canadian equivalent: Montreal, founded in 1642, had fewer than 20,000 inhabitants in 1800. Such urban writing as existed in regional centres such as Montreal, Quebec, or Toronto was provincial in the sense that it had to come to terms with standards shaped by the imperial metropolis, and the stereotypes provided by it. At the same time early writers had to come to terms with the problem that external concepts left a gap: they didn't fit the new reality. There were mainly three choices available to them: accept and apply European categories, invoke a North American alternative, or try to develop an eclectic culture of their own. An early example of the first choice is provided by Frances BROOKE'S The History of Emily Montague (1769), the first Canadian city novel. The epistolary convention provides the solid framework for the master narrative that constructs the city as social space functioning according to hierarchical rules, observed by a narrowly defined circle. Within this unchallenged context, Canadian 'otherness' is safely embedded. Thus, LANDSCAPE is brought in line with contemporary convention through the picturesque angle ('Nothing can be more striking than the view of Quebec as you approach'), while urban culture, or rather the limitations of it, are explained from a metropolitan viewpoint that regards the fundamental difference as preordained by nature: 'I no longer wonder the elegant arts are unknown here, the rigour of the climate suspends the very powers of the understanding; ... Those who expect to see 'A new Athens rising near the pole" will find themselves extremely disappointed.' Quebec, reduced to its colonial nucleus, the Anglo-Saxon GARRISON, gains whatever status it has from being measured against metropolitan culture: 'It is like a third or fourth rate country town in England; much hospitality, little society; cards, scandal, dancing, and good cheer,' as Arabella Fermor writes to Miss Rivers in England. Just as metropolitan language takes over provincial colonial space, the plot presents British characters involved in conventional conflicts, reported to, and eventually resolved by, authorities overseas.
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In the end, significantly, the entire anglophone cast leaves Quebec for England. Brooke's novel projects an incipient urban culture of the margins ('the spirit of urbanity begins to diffuse itself from the centre'), skilfully set off against exotic, foreign elements (which include not only 'sublime' nature like the Montmorenci Falls but also the French Question), balancing distance from the metropolitan centre with a stream of communication across the ocean. With accelerating urban growth and new fictional codes, the seemingly 'natural' binary pattern of metropolitan/provincial hierarchy came under scrutiny during the ipth century. Even as Canadian cities and urban culture developed, aspiring here and there to metropolitan status, the cold gaze of outside viewers, most frequently travellers, registered the incongruities and contradictions of this process: the dangerous proximity to nature; the continuing social or economic limitations, occasionally even the disappointing absence of New World otherness. As Anna JAMESON (Winter Studies) describes Toronto in 1821: 'I did not expect to find here in this new capital of a new country, with the boundless forest within half a mile of us on almost every side - concentrated as it were the most evils of our old and most artificial social system at home, with none of its agremen[t]s, and none of its advantages. Toronto is like a fourth or fifth rate provincial town, with the pretensions of a capital city.' In such statements the 'missing metropolis' model is still recognizable but the distinctions have become blurred, as the town/country dichotomy based on the romantic paradigm recedes, and Victorian realism takes over. Henceforth, urban writing has to grapple with a changing reality whose facts cut across established literary constructions. During the second half of the ipth century Canadian cities changed rapidly: Montreal had a population of under 50,000 in 1844 but close to 500,000 before the first World War, and over 800,000 if the suburbs are included. From a metropolitan perspective, none of these cities are storied cities in the sense that they have become cultural icons in an extended process of imaginative construction, reception, and revision. The Canadian West appears unfamiliar, threat-
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ening, unfathomable to a sensitive young writer such as Rupert Brooke, who writes from Calgary: 'You can't think how sick one's heart gets for something old. For weeks I have not seen or touched a town as old as myself. Horrible! Horrible!' (see TRAVEL WRITING). Here the imperial master concept of urban writing seems to have lost touch with urban reality in the New World, and is about to withdraw, while other paradigms take over. It is perhaps no accident that Brooke wrote this on the eve of the First World WAR, which marked the end of an era. After 1918 a new type of urban experience was to generate new models. The Canadian City as Political and Moral Space. While the 'missing metropolis' model worked on the assumption that 'city' signifies something external that could be imitated but never equalled in Canada, the focus shifted during the 19205 and 19305. With the late advent of MODERNISM, new patterns emerged: as in Europe and the United States, the big city was redefined as the scene of change, of conflict, but also of potential progress. Historically speaking, it cannot be claimed that the dynamics of swift modernization and industrialization that brought about powerful urban developments, such as the rise of Toronto to metropolitan status, the emergence of Montreal as 'shock city' of the i9th century, and the rapid expansion of new centres in the West, are adequately reflected in Canadian literature of the time. Again, the pace is set elsewhere - in Britain by Charles Dickens's construction of the city as (in Raymond Williams' phrase) 'knowable community' under adverse circumstances, by Oscar Wilde's London as emblem of aesthetic refinement and moral decadence, in the United States by writers who analyze the city as arena of the fierce struggle for survival (Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, 1906), as a place where the energetic if morally questionable individual can display his power (Frank Norris, The Pit, 1903), as urban space where transcendental truths are ecstatically revealed (Walt Whitman, 'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,' 1856). These violently diverging city myths are not met by Canadian equivalents: rather, Canada is mythologized as non-city and non-literary, as rural and loyal British hinterland.
Frequently, Canadian cities are even encoded as urban extensions of nature. Ironically, in 1922, which with the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses and T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land became the annus mirabilis of international urban literature, Canada's contribution was Katherine H ALE'S Canadian Cities of Romance, a nostalgic and sentimental celebration of cities from Halifax to Victoria defined through their glorious history and stunning scenery. This coincidence is more than the stuff of anecdotal dismissal. It represents an extreme case of escapist, nostalgic counter-narrative, a colonial supplement to the master tale. But even if it is true to say the concept of the modernist metropolis - fragmented, many-voiced, polyphonic, but subject to strong artistic control was initially viewed by Canadians from the periphery, they were eventually drawn into the vortex - biographically, as with Morley CALLAGHAN or John GLASSCO (who both went to Paris) or formally. From the 19305 onwards, alternative modes of conceptualizing the Canadian city may be distinguished, epitomized in the fiction of Callaghan and MACLENNAN. Both writers mark the transition from Canadian space as predominantly rural to predominantly urban. Both define the city not statically but in terms of conflict and change. But while both largely rely on the descriptive bias of mimetic REALISM in writing the city, Callaghan fictionalizes urban space in terms of moral choice, MacLennan in political terms. In Callaghan's Such Is My Beloved (1934), for instance, Father Cowling's naive attempt to practise Christian charity by helping two young prostitutes in downtown Toronto is eventually doomed because the urban elite in power will not tolerate any competing Utopian vision cutting across the established code. Here as elsewhere Callaghan's rendering of the streetwalkers' milieu is fairly specific: characters and plot are clearly grounded in a 19305 Toronto setting. Nevertheless, there are hardly any topical references. Quite deliberately Callaghan tends to sacrifice realism and local colour and universalize city settings, in order to tell moral ALLEGORIES that are applicable anywhere (and perhaps also acceptable for the American market).
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While Callaghan's cities are international constructs, MacLennan typically uses the urban code as a medium for his NATIONAL project, which starts with Barometer Rising (1941). Rather than keeping local references deliberately vague, MacLennan makes them explicit. At the same time the figure of the dispassionate observer gives way to a narrator who is not afraid of taking sides: 'This book,' as the foreword states, 'is one of the first ever written to use Halifax, Nova Scotia, for its sole background/ Indeed the city, as numerous descriptive passages demonstrate, becomes a kind of collective protagonist at a crucial stage of the narrator's progress towards self-fulfillment. The explosion of the ammunitions ship in the harbour, for all its destructive power, jolts the city out of its ahistorical, almost primeval peripheral stagnation into a new mode of existence. As the traditional structural and social fabric of the urban organism is torn, new urban structures emerge, and new forces take over as agents of a process of revitalisation that has wider implications. Just as Neil McRae stands for the new generation, Halifax becomes a metaphor for Canada: beyond a merely borrowed tradition the country, through the war, takes on a new independent, self-reliant role. This role seems defined in urban terms. More recently other Canadian cities have been constructed as the setting for moral, political or cultural problems, such as Edmonton in Robert KROETSCH'S The Studhorse Man (1969), Montreal in Hugh HOOD'S short story cycle Around the Mountain (1967) or his novel sequence The New Age/Le nouveau siecle (1975-2000), or in Mordecai RICHLER'S novels The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959) and St Urbain's Horseman (1971). While Roger LEMELIN, in Au pied de la pente douce (1944) sets his novels in Quebec City, particularly after the 19405 Montreal became a focal point for French Canadian urban fiction and drama, notably as a setting of working CLASS problems (Gabrielle ROY, Bonheur d'occasion, 1947), of political controversy (Hubert AQUIN, Prochain episode, 1965), or of a clash involving cultural and linguistic codes such as JOUAL (Michel TREMBLAY, Les belles-soeurs, 1968). The politics of this focus involves not only issues of class, GENDER, RACE, and ethnic nationalism,
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however, but also a change in social and literary convention (see INTELLECTUAL HISTORY): the conservative religious and social attitudes that privileged agrarian sensibilities and the TERRIEN ROMANCE as the signs of the 'true Quebec,' for example, gave way during the QUIET REVOLUTION of the 19605, at least in literature, to urban modernism. Small Town versus City. D.C. SCOTT'S Viger, Stephen LEACOCK'S Mariposa, Sinclair ROSS'S Horizon, Robertson DAVIES' Deptford, Margaret LAURENCE'S Manawaka, Alice MUNRO'S Jubilee and West Hanratty - many critics have placed the small town in the very centre of the Canadian imagination, sometimes turning the small-town myth into its sole defining criterion. This approach is tempting but reductive and mistakenly essentialist, since it overlooks historical and generic implications. For one thing, the concept of the small, integrated, homogeneous community as a frequently remote and seemingly timeless place of order and harmony is the offshoot of the idyllic tradition as an international literary concept: Virgil's Georgics, i8thcentury pastoral poetry, American small-town fiction, to mark just a few examples. Further, the small town as modern version of the locus amoenus topos must not be regarded as absolute. It reflects a Utopian vision; shaped by the contrary experience of disharmony, alienation, fragmentation, a nostalgic evocation of past values, it is never naive but always an artificial, sophisticated construct. To draw attention to this general context is not to deny that the Canadian small-town myth has characteristic features. Thematically, smalltown fiction may absorb geographical, social, historical conditions; typologically, the introspective and defensive spirit of the 'garrison' (to invoke Northrop FRYE'S term) may have shaped the small-town set-up as psychological garrison, its structure and system of values closely knit. Above all, most Canadian small-town myths are subversive in the sense that they do not really offer an alternative to corrupt city life but are themselves corrupt, surreptitiously undermining the values they appear to uphold. The ironic narrator of Leacock's Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912), while pretending to survey MARI-
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POSA and its social fabric in a nostalgic evocation of a self-contained stable community bypassed by the process of modernization, actually reveals its egotism, provincial backwardness, and marginalization. Robertson Davies readjusts the small town/big city dichotomy in order to accommodate his provincial/imperial theme, notably in his early Salterton trilogy. Thus in A Mixture of Frailties (1958) the young singer Monica Gall serves as a wanderer between the two worlds, who by transgressing the narrow circle of her native Deptford exposes its limitations; at the same time, through her colonial innocence (which she significantly loses) the seemingly monolithic, impenetrable urban facade of the imperial metropolis is radically deconstructed. The moral subversion of standards is, of course, not always as straightforward as in Leacock and the early Davies. Later writers used modernist strategies, particularly in short fiction, to make the double vision more complex, shifting it from a predominantly descriptive ground to a system of conflicting perspectives and time levels. For the protagonists of Margaret Laurence's story cycle A Bird in the House (1970), 'Manawaka' is a cramped and claustrophobic place inhabited by eccentrics, whose isolation is compounded by the proximity of the empty prairie - a place one tends to get away from as soon as one possibly can. Looked at from a geographical distance, over an extended span of time, or from a metropolitan viewpoint, however, these places take on a mythical significance, emerge as inalienable home ground and shaping forces. In Laurence's perspective, small-town space may be repressive and cruel, but never dull. A similar tension prevails in many of Alice Munro's stories (eg, Dance of the Happy Shades, 1968). Perhaps Munro's fictional Ontario small towns are not as geographically specific as Laurence's Manawaka: local colour is transparent for the universal experience of growing up. But the autobiographical mode is distinctly informed by this mutual reflection, as the smalltown childhood is reconstructed from an urban viewpoint, remembered and evaluated in a carefully calculated retrospective located in an older narrator who juxtaposes and blends rural past
and urban present. Given this interplay between small-town and city myths, clearly there is a need to qualify the conventional wisdom that Canadian literature reacted to the challenge of urbanization by sidestepping into the smalltown myth. City Poetry. City poetry might well be said to offer a cross-section of urban discourse and its development from Confederation to the present. Significantly, there is only a handful of city poems in William Douw LIGHTHALL'S influential ANTHOLOGY Songsfrom the Great Dominion (1889), although the subtitle of the work ('Voices from the forests and waters, the settlements and cities of Canada') expressly includes urban space among the Canadian cosmos. In his introduction the editor, himself a practising lawyer and resident of fashionable Westmount, excludes his own background from the national myths that he constructs as fiercely masculine, imperial, and rural. The poets he canonizes speak 'of great NIAGARA falling, of brown rivers rustling with foam, of the crack of the rifle in the haunts of the moose and caribou, the lament of vanishing races singing their death-song as they are swept on to the cataract of oblivion.' However, there is more city poetry written by 19th-century Canadians than Lighthall (and other contemporary critics) would have us believe. In the work of CARMAN, LAMPMAN, and D.C. Scott, the newly emerging urban centres, far from being excluded, are quite frequently addressed in a panegyric tone, occasionally compared to attractive women or friendly giants with a glorious past and an even more glorious future. 'The maiden queen of all the towered towns,' D.C. Scott writes of Ottawa, but also 'called by a name as old as Troy or Rome' and 'too bright for guile, too young for tears.' The paradoxical, almost contradictory cluster of superimposed images, drawing on classical models as well as on romantic poetic diction, is held together by the SONNET form - one of numerous derivative versions of William Wordsworth's magisterial city poem 'Composed Upon Westminster Bridge.' By rigorously subjecting their themes to the conventions of the master discourse, Canadian poets bring their texts in line with British tradition, increasing its status, while avoiding
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the clash with a new reality that is difficult (and dangerous) to encode. Archibald Lampman's The City of the End of Things' (1895), with its apocalyptic vision of urban industrialization as a dehumanizing process, while choosing the opposite code, likewise suppresses topical and topographical references and links up with British decadent poetry of the 18905, conjuring up the nightmare of the evolutionary process taking a negative turn. In a third model, the country, presented as a timeless realm of harmony, is pitched against urban unrest: 'Here / abide unvisited by doubt, / Dreaming of far-off turmoil and despair, / The race of men and love and love and fleeting time' (Carman, 'Morning in the Hills'). This country/town binary breaks down with modernism. As an urban movement, the MONTREAL GROUP foregrounds informal language and international perspective though perhaps not primarily city poetry (with the exception of A.M. KLEIN). It is the group's poetic mode more than their subject matter that cleared the way for later poets such as Margaret AVIS ON ('Civility a Bogey. Or, Two Centuries of Canadian Cities,' 1960), Raymond SOUSTER ('The Hated City'), and Miriam WADDINGTON ('Old Women of Toronto,' 1972). New thematic fields - such as urban freedom, the city as ghetto, closely observed street scenes, the city as foreign territory - now come into focus. With the increasing number of city-based poets and urban poetry after the 19605, it is difficult to generalize. The rise of REGIONALISM as a positive label encouraged a lot of poetry concentrating on regional centres from Halifax to Winnipeg and Victoria. Structuring this kaleidoscopic variety is a distinct East/West dialectic, reflected also in different urban codes: self-scrutiny, idea-orientation, logic, and structure prevailing in the East; playful, language-oriented poetry, openness and anarchy favoured in the West. Examples for such opposing reactions to the city as a decentralized place hiding its structures abound. Atwood writing about reborn Susanna Moodie riding a bus in contemporary Toronto (A Bus Along St Clair') constructs the metropolis as transitory and transparent artefact superimposed on the starker reality of primeval wilderness - an interesting revision of older texts that
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conceptualize this very interpenetration as image of growth and progress, as does Isabella Valancy CRAWFORD'S ode to Toronto: 'She hears the marching centuries which Time / Leads up the dark peaks of Eternity: / The pulses of past warriors bound in her; / The pulses of dead sages beat in her; / The pulses of dead merchants stir in her.' Apart from Atwood, who cultivates a laconic, tightly controlled voice, the most characteristic representative of the urban East is Dennis LEE. In his Civil Elegies (1968, rev 1972) the city is carefully and convincingly placed in time and space: downtown Toronto in the late 19605. But for the speaker, or rather reflector, the city becomes an image of the course taken by the Western world, or more specifically, of Canada's role in this process. In its denunciation of a US-dominated mechanical civilization it is not unlike Lampman's 'City of the End of Things,' but interspersed with glimpses of a Utopian vision. As urban lament, Civil Elegies also shares certain similarities with George BOWERING'S Vancouver-specific Kerrisdale Elegies (1984). But Bowering writes from an opposite perspective - not only geographically, but also by poetic codes: his texts are openly intertextual, accepting urban and cosmic anarchy as well as the inevitable disintegration rather than trying to regulate it. Bowering's texts, including Urban Snow (1991), seem to mark the point furthest removed from the deep-seated fear of opening up to alien space that dominated the Dominion city poets. In the unarticulated West their obsession with closure evaporates. Urban Postmodern. The arrival in Canada of the POSTMODERN as literary and critical discourse had a strong impact on urban writing in Canada. There was, to begin with, a certain affinity between the anti-hierarchical bias of postmodernism and the Canadian commitment to deconstructing imperial myths and redefining colonial history. Furthermore, postmodernism (as Linda HUTCHEON defines the term) receded regionalism in literature as an expression of the different, the local, the particular, in opposition to the uniform, the universal, the centralized. This receding coincided with a fundamental socio-cultural change, the transition
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from a provincial to a regional culture. One of the writers whose works reflect this decisive paradigmatic shift most strikingly is Margaret Atwood. Most of her novels (and many of her poems) can be read as counter-narratives to a contemporary urban culture and its conventional discourse, which stresses a streamlined, purely contemporary, international quality. In Atwood's novels this glossy surface is continually disrupted and subverted by the continuing presence of the old city, its architectural features and its stuffy social mores. Cat's Eye (1988) is a novel that many readers have felt to convey a particularly acute, even autobiographically precise sense of place. The text uncovers what this place is trying to hide. Through the narrator's multiple perspective, which combines a spatial with a temporal dimension (eastern Toronto viewed from western Vancouver; the 19405 viewed from the 19805), the city as contemporary habitat becomes transparent, permitting the reader glimpses of a traumatic past: middleclass social structure, human relations, exact local details - the city as palimpsest. Although much contemporary urban writing remains close to the conventions of realistic modernism, most writers tend to experiment with postmodern techniques, including Timothy FINDLEY, many of whose stories (eg, those collected in Stones, 1988) are set in Toronto and its suburban environment. Few, however, have gone so far as Michael ONDAATJE in creating a new kind of postmodern urban novel. Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion (1987) transforms static urban space into a process in time that is both discontinuous and episodic. In focusing on an eminently urban theme, the construction of the Bloor Street Viaduct, Ondaatje's text remains fully referential, a powerful evocation of an important period in city history (between the two wars when Toronto grew into its leading role as metropolitan centre), yet it never allows the narrative to become definitive and conclusive. Instead, the novel represents the past in a collage of interwoven voices and multiple perspectives, of text and intertext (with literary echoes ranging from Rudyard Kipling's 'The Bridge Builders' to Upton Sinclair's The Jungle), shifting its focus (and narrative tense) from episode to episode in a non-linear cinematic fashion. At the same time, the narrative tense
neglects the canonized story, concentrating instead on gaps and omissions in the official text, on the anonymous workers rather than on the representative figures. It is up to the bewildered readers to assemble from fragments the image of the city that emerges from this approach. Theirs is the task to decipher the enigmatic patterns. Ondaatje's city cannot be experienced as organic unity or as a system organized on rational principles but as multidimensional, pluralistic space. City as Exile. The city, offering refuge and respite but also isolation and the severing of cultural ties, is the 'natural' habitat of exiles and expatriates. It is perhaps in the short fiction of Mavis GALLANT - vigorously modern, elliptical, suggestive - that this ineluctable ambiguity has been most cogently expressed in contemporary writing. Gallant's settings are international: Paris, Moscow, postwar Germany. While this focus does not exclude Gallant from Canadian literature, it shows that the complexities of the urban condition of EXILE are international. Gallant also, by implication, exposes Canadian marginality. Meanwhile, Canadian urban centres have developed into international meeting places of a different kind. The pattern of immigration, especially since the incisive changes in immigration policy during the 19705, has radically changed the ethnic mix. In the large metropolitan centres ethnicity and immigrant life are by now far more visible than a few decades ago - more visible even, as has been argued, than in the United States: the number of immigrants entering Canada is comparable to those entering the United States while Canada's total population is only one-ioth that of the United States. Here then might be the basis of a new definition of the city myth, replacing the discarded colonial myths: Toronto is no longer the uniformly Anglo-Saxon 'City of Empire' but a multicultural ensemble of ethnic neighbourhoods whose boundaries are already changing as ethnicities both confront each other and intermix. Similar conditions apply in other Canadian centres such as Montreal, with its wealth of ALLOPHONE cultures (Italo-Montrealais, Haitien, etc), or Vancouver with its large (and long-standing) ASIAN communities. Canadian city culture as a plurality of ethnic
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communities and cultural traditions - this is the decentralized, indeed postmodern vision that is officially projected and advertised (see CULTURAL PLURALITY). Ethnic urban writing to a certain extent reflects and confirms the way Canadians perceive themselves - but it also deconstructs it, exposing its faultlines and conflicting stories, penetrates not only to 'the real dynamic of encounter and competition among newcomers from many lands' but also to the permanent ethnic condition of exile and expatriation. Common features and differences of urban writing as writing about ethnic space become immediately apparent when two short story writers such as Austin CLARKE and Dionne BRAND are compared. Both authors describe the ethnic encounter in terms of a clash of cultures, of language codes, of levels of social privilege - with a certain claim to authentic documentation. Both writers construct Toronto and its ethnic communities as an urban environment that signifies, beyond its recognizable 'realistic' features, a place of alienation, of indifferent or hostile otherness where minorities are excluded, if not destroyed. It is in narrative mood and in the degree of universalization that significant differences emerge: with Clarke, Toronto occasionally stands metonymically for the metropolis in general, providing the setting for a culture clash that might occur anywhere. His CARIBBEAN characters, he suggests, could be Aboriginals, Maori, Native - they happen to be in Toronto but could also be in Paris or Moscow or elsewhere. The tragic potential inherent in this cultural clash is usually mitigated by an ironic point of view. In Dionne Brand's stories (eg, Sans Souci, and Other Stories, 1988), the underlying power structures appear in a much harsher light. The city not only refuses to assimilate the outsider but aggressively imposes its superiority - sometimes even leaving the ethnic underdog quite literally powerless and speechless, thus compounding his or her humiliation ('Train to Montreal'). Moreover, Brand's urban space is not only white space but also male space: the West Indian woman is doubly marginalized, but at the same time caught in her urban exile without having the chance of exchanging the urban for the rural code - although Brand seems to consider a
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return to the original culture as a possible course of action for the political activist to regain his or her lost authenticity. Similar cultural conflicts are exposed in dramatic texts that focus on the predicament of the FIRST NATIONS, analyzing, like George RYGA'S The Ecstasy of Rita Joe (1969), alienated urban existence or, like Tomson HIGHWAY'S The Rez Sisters (1988), the deceptive lure of metropolitan Toronto. Conclusions. Urban writing in Canada is ubiquitous but elusive. As a powerful but submerged subtext it provides a counter-discourse to the discourse of land and landscape that largely dominates Canadian critical mythmaking. Like 'land,' 'city' is not a stable concept but floats, quite often subverting conventional simple dichotomies of urban experience/rural innocence. This crucial interaction has long been overshadowed by the prevailing critical interest in naming and mapping based on landscape or wilderness metaphors. Any fresh perspective on urban writing therefore is bound to be revisionist. Further reading: Sherrill Grace, 'Quest for the Peaceable Kingdom: Urban/Rural Codes in Roy, Laurence, and Atwood,' Women Writers and the City, ed Susan Merrill Squier (Knoxville: U Tennessee P, 1984): 193-209; Heinz Ickstadt, 'The City in Canadian and US-American Literature,' Zeitschrift der Gesellschafifiir Kanadastudien 19/20 (1991): 163-73; Roger Kemble, The Canadian City: St John's to Victoria. A Critical Commentary (Montreal: Harvest, 1989); Eli Mandel, 'The City in Canadian Poetry,' in An Anthology of Canadian Literature in English, ed Russell Brown, Vol 2 (Toronto: U Toronto P, 1983): 128-37; Burton Pike, The Image of the City in Modern Literature (New Haven: Princeton UP, 1981); B.W. Powe, Outage: A Journey into Electric City (Toronto: Random House, 1995); Gilbert Stelter and Alan Artibise, eds, The Canadian City: Essays in Urban Writing (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1977). Walter Pachc
URQUHART, Jane. Poet, short story writer, novelist; b Little Long Lac, ON, 21 June 1949; daughter of Walter Andrew and Marian (Quinn) Carter. Although she grew up in Toronto, the author attended junior college in
UTOPIA
Vancouver and then studied English at U Guelph (BA, 1971), where she met her first husband, artist Paul Keele. After Keele died in a car accident, she returned to U Guelph to study art history (BA, 1976). In 1976 she married artist Tony Urquhart, with whom she collaborated on her first collection of poetry, I Am Walking in the Garden of His Imaginary Palace (1982). In the mid-1980s, Urquhart turned to fiction, writing a collection of short stories, Storm Glass (1987), and The Whirlpool (1986), a novel set near NIAGARA Falls late in the i9th century. Urquhart identifies her major influences as the visual arts and her childhood reading, notably L.M. MONTGOMERY and the Brontes. Her work is characterized by GOTHIC elements and a fascination with the Victorian age. Changing Heaven (1990), her second novel, interweaves the stories of a Bronte scholar's love affair with an art historian and a 19th-century balloonist's conversations with the ghost of Emily Bronte. Away (1993), for 132 weeks on a Toronto best-selling list, recounts the experiences of an Irish woman, Mary O'Malley, and three generations of her descendants in Canada. In The Underpainter (1997), which won a Governor General's AWARD for Fiction, Urquhart returns to the landscape of her childhood, the North Shore of Lake Superior, to recount the life of Austin Fraser, a painter who uses his art to isolate himself from human contact. Extremely popular abroad - she has won prizes in France and been nominated for the Orange Prize in Ireland - she has also won the Trillium Award (1993) and the Marian Engel Award (1994). Further reading: Geoff Hancock, An Interview with Jane Urquhart,' Canadian Fiction Magazine 55 (1986): 23-40. R. Gooding
URSELL, Geoffrey Barry. Writer for stage, RADIO, and television, publisher, editor, composer of musical comedy and FOLK song; b Moose Jaw, SK, 14 March 1943; son of Irene (Motta) and Barry Ursell, an office manager with a meat-packing company. He is the author of two books of fiction, two books of poetry, two plays, music for drama, and recorded songs. He was a founding editor of the PUBLISHING cooperative Coteau Books and remained an
editor from their 'in cooperation' date (1975) on, acting as president and publisher (1996-8). His novel Perdue (1984) won the Books in Canada First Novel Prize and his fiction has a direct, quick, breathless quality, underlined by precise observation and a crisp IRONIC or SATIRIC voice. He writes of the MYTH of Saskatchewan and the prairie landscape, variously rethinking and debunking it. The free verse is spare and sharp, the voice plain-spoken, but the narratives altered as in a dream. The poems concern the way waking and dreaming merge, frequently in nightmarish, violent fashion. Ross Leckie
UTOPIA. Combining elements of the Greek concepts of outopia ('no place') and eutopia ('good place'), the Utopian tradition in Canadian literature has a rich history with roots in the earliest EXPLORERS' visions of Canada as a New World Arcadia. Indeed, Arcadia (or Arcadie) was the name 16th-century cartographers gave to the Atlantic region of the New World, marking it in European imaginations as a pastoral paradise free from restrictive social hierarchies and inhibitive cultural pressures; the letter r eventually disappeared, giving the region its more familiar name of ACADIA. It is this Arcadian vision of French Canada that Antoine GERIN-LAJOIE returns to in his two-part novel Jean Rivard (1862,1864), in which the cultivation of Quebec wilderness is promoted as the means of securing the survival of a French Canadian nation. Utopian visions and writing have since experienced various periods of prominence in Canada's cultural history, over time becoming laden with meaning to include a literary genre, a state of mind or inclination of temperament, and an ideological program. Whichever of these threads one examines, Utopian narratives are commonly embedded in destination myths, in the deeply held belief that a good life lies waiting to be discovered or recovered in the ideals of another time and place, whether religious (a sense of heaven below) or secular, real or imagined. As such diverse writers as Susanna MOO DIE, whose A Visit to Grosse Isle' (1847) opens with an emigrant vision of the New World as paradise, and Cecil FOSTER in his evocatively titled A Place Called Heaven (1996) have
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pointed out, Canada has long been envisaged by those looking for a new start or escape from oppression as a place where idealized alternatives might flourish. But as Moodie soon realized, and as the histories of such populations as the Acadians and DOUKHOBORS bear out, these visions often proved chimerical and the social realities less than hospitable and at times openly hostile. (See BLACK HISTORY, RACE AND RACISM.) Although Utopian narratives have often been satirized as encouraging either a cultish futurism (Goldwin SMITH'S Essays on Questions of the Day, 1893) or a nostalgic escapism (Stephen LEACOCK'S Afternoons in Utopia: Tales of a New Time, 1932), such optimistic writers as the pseudonymous Ralph Centennius ('The Dominion in 1983/1883), Jules-Paul TARDIVEL (Pour la Patrie: Roman du XXe siecle, 1895; tr in 1975 as For My Country), and Hugh Pedley (Looking Forward: The Strange Experience of the Reverend Fergus McCheyne, 1913) saw their fictions as exhortations to address the social problems and spiritual malaise of the present. Dealing variously with issues of war and peace, the tensions between tradition and social change, and the practical and philosophical implications of socialism in the broadest sense, each of these writers explores through his Utopian project various strategies by which to harmonize the complexities of contemporary life into a dynamic, peaceful society. With Utopian visions necessarily come their darker counterpoints, and from James DE MILLE'S sensational A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888) through to William GIBSON'S CYBERPUNK novels, Canadian literature reveals no shortage of dystopian ('bad place') or negative Utopian visions that mark a growing disillusionment with social institutions and conventions. Commonly, SCIENCE and TECHNOLOGY play key roles in these visions, often to emphasize that dreams of techno-industrial advancement are realized only with a profound cost in human dignity and freedoms. Although articulating notably different views of such changes, Archibald LAMPMAN'S nightmarish poem 'The City of the End of Things' (1892), Hugh MACLENNAN'S short fiction 'The Finding of the Way' (1955), and Robert Green's The Great Leap Backward (1968) share with the computer-
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driven worlds of Gibson's Neuromancer (1984) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988) a desire to explore fully the denial of the Arcadian dream through the complex and often anxious relationship between technology and the monopoly of power within a culture. Monolithic technocracy plays a central role, too, in such noteworthy dystopian fictions as Matt COHEN'S The Colours of War (1977), set in a Canada torn by civil war and the systematic erasure of personal freedoms, and Margaret AT wo CD'S The Handmaid's Tale (1985), which marks dystopian literature as a site at which contemporary FEMINIST concerns with the complicities between sex, power, and language can be articulated. See also D. LEE, SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY.
Further reading: Frances Bartkowski, Feminist Utopias (Lincoln, NE: U Nebraska P, 1983); Justine Brown, All Possible Worlds: Utopian Experiments in British Columbia (Vancouver: Transmontanus/New Star Books, 1995); Robert Major, Jean Rivard, ou, L'art de reussir: ideologies et utopie dans I'oeuvre d'Antoine Gerin-Lajoie (SainteFoy: P de 1'U Laval, 1991). Klay Dyer
VAC, Bertrand (Joseph-Omer-Aime Pelletier). Surgeon, novelist; b Saint-Ambroise-de-Kildare, QC, 20 Aug 1914; son of Lumina (Labbe) and Arthur Pelletier, physician. A graduate of U Montreal, Pelletier served in the ambulance corps during the Second World WAR, returning to work at Verdun Hospital. Louise Genest (1950), the first of his dozen books, was condemned by the church; because the title character spurns her cruel husband and the hypocrisy of the village, and runs off with a NATIVE man, some readers characterized her as a lazy nymphomaniac. Vac's willingness to treat Quebec stereotypes unconventionally meant that, despite winning AWARDS, he never acquired the reputation as a realist that he might have expected. Saint-Pepin, P.Q. (1955) satirizes village life; Deux portes ... une adresse (1952) pits the exoticism of WAR against the banalities of life at home; L'assassin dans I'hopital (1956), a successful MYSTERY, started a series of works that tried out otherfictionalformulas - HISTORICAL fiction, sex comedies - and Vac's later work focused on Montreal's URBAN community. His selection of
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his own work, with an account of a visit to ASIA, appeared in 1989. VACHON, Georges-Andre. Critic, essayist, novelist; b Strasbourg, France, 8 Jan 1926, d Montreal 20 April 1994. He studied philosophy at U Montreal and in Paris, where he obtained a PhD in 1963 with a thesis later published as Le temps et I'espace dans I'oeuvre de Paul Claudel (1965), winner of the Prix Quebec-Paris (1965) and Governor General's AWARD (1966). After 1965 he taught full-time at U Montreal and directed the literary publication Etudes francaises. In 1980 he published Esthetique pour Patricia, a lyrical essay about life, philosophy, and literature, written as though it were being explained to an imaginary student (Patricia) through paradox, as an 'anti-discourse.' He also translated Robert KROETSCH'S Badlands (1985) and, under the name Andre Vachon, published Toute la terre d devorer (1987), a fantasy that explores the various districts of Montreal. Constantin Grigorut
VADEBONCOEUR, Pierre. Activist, essayist, intellectual; b Strathmore, QC, 28 July 1920; a graduate in arts from C Jean-de-Brebeuf (1940), and in law from U Montreal (1943). Vadeboncoeur was involved in many of Quebec's labour movements and took an active role during many crises. He started publishing in periodicals in 1940, and remained prolific through the years, contributing to periodicals such as Cite libre, Liberte, and Le Devoir. In more than a dozen collections, he consistently manifests a strong leftist social and political commitment and uses writing as activism, as in such works as L'autorite du peuple (1965), Independances (1972), and the AWARD-winning Trot5 essais sur I'insignifiance (1983). Further reading: Rejean Beaudoin et al, Un homme libre: Pierre Vadeboncoeur (Montreal: Lemeac, 1974); Paul-Emile Roy, Pierre Vadeboncoeur, un homme attentt/(Quebec: Meridien, 1995). Jerome Loisel
VALGARDSON, W.D. (William Dempsey). Short story writer, novelist, poet, playwright, professor of creative writing; b Winnipeg 7 May
1939; son of Rachel Iris (Smith) and Alfred Herbert Valgardson, a fisherman; educ United College (BA, 1961); U Manitoba (BEd, 1965); U Iowa (MFA, 1969). A former associate professor in the Dept of English at Cottey College in Nevada, MO (1970-4), Valgardson became professor of creative WRITING at U Victoria in 1974, serving as chair between 1982 and 1987. His childhood in Gimli, MB, a fishing village with strong Icelandic connections, provides the background for many of his stories, which often deal with poverty, family tensions, and death. His first collection of short stories, Blood/lowers (1973), portrays the harsh conditions of life in isolated environments, from an island off the coast of Newfoundland to northern Manitoba. The stories in God Is Not a Fish Inspector (1975) and Red Dust (1978) also depict the hardships and violence of rural life. A fourth book, What Can't Be Changed Shouldn't Be Mourned (1990), is typical in focusing on the Icelandic communities in which Valgardson was reared. 'The Cave,' anthologized in Robert WEAVER'S Canadian Short Stories (Fifth Series), is an exhilarating instance of Valgardson's ability to yoke together regional REALISM, GOTHIC romance, and POSTMODERN self-reflexivity. Identifying himself as the first-person narrator ('WD. Valgardson is hardly a name to conjure with, but here and there, people have read my stories'), he recounts a Poe-like tale of three generations of Icelandic Canadians mystically drawn into the treacherous corridors of an uncharted northern Manitoba cave. Like much of Valgardson's best work, the story oscillates skilfully between indeterminacy and immanence, between historical fatalism and postmodern contingency. His 1980 novel Gentle Sinners won the Books in Canada First Novel Award. It exploits myth to describe a rural youth's experience of urban life. A second novel, The Girl with the Botticelli Face (1992), concerns a recently divorced man's struggles to contain his contempt for women. It was awarded the Ethel Wilson Prize. Like several other of his works, it was adapted for broadcast on CBC Radio. Valgardson is also the author of two volumes of poetry, In the Gutting Shed (1976) and The Carpenter of Dreams (1986), and of two well-received CHILDREN'S books, Thor (winner of the 1995 Mr Christie Children's Book Award) and Sarah and the People of Sand River (1996). Val-
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gardson won the CBC Literary Competition twice (1980 and 1988 - the second time for his play Seiche), and received the Canadian Authors Assoc Silver Medal for the play Granite Point (1983). Andre Furlani
VALLIERES, Pierre. Journalist, political writer; b Montreal 1938, d Montreal 22 Dec 1998; son of a railway mechanic. Vallieres worked as a journalist and political writer, and is perhaps best known for his 1968 essay comparing the situation of the Quebecois to that of Black Americans, Negres blancs d'Amerique (tr Joan Pinkham as White Niggers of America, 1971). Between 1957 and 1962 he wrote for Le Devoir and Cite libre, and in 1963 for the international news desk of La Presse. He was co-founder of the monthly journal Revolution quebecoise (1964-5), and in 1965 became a member of the Front de Liberation du Quebec, and the next year was arrested in New York for involuntary homicide. Acquitted in 1970, he returned to JOURNALISM. He wrote his novel, Noces obscures, about a i7-year-old's revolt against the society of 'the great evil,' in 1955; it was published in 1986. Other works assembled FLQ documents and dramatized the events of the OCTOBER CRISIS. Margaret Cook
VALOIS, Leonise (pseud Atala). Poet; b Vaudreuil, QC, 12 Oct 1878, d Montreal, 20 May 1936; daughter of Marie-Louise Bourque and Avila Valois, a medical doctor. After completing her studies at the Beauharnois convent, Valois moved to Montreal with her family. From 1889 on, she contributed literary pieces and poems to newspapers, including Le Monde illustre and, in 1903, La Patrie. In 1910 she published a poetry collection, the first by a woman in Quebec. Her poems are romantic in inspiration, as her PSEUDONYM suggests. Traditional, they vary little in form, but her emotional nuance brings life to themes that were already becoming stale. The collection Fleurs sauvages, similar in approach, if more mature in its execution, appeared in 1934. Further reading: Louise Warren, Leonise Valois, femme de lettres, 1868-1936 (Montreal: Hexagone, 1993). Jerome Loisel
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VALUE, a vexed question in literary CRITICISM AND THEORY, related variously to questions of fad, fashion, aesthetic principle, ethical virtue, cultural priorities, received 'standards' of form and style, 'accuracy' (whether of grammar or mimetic representation), historical change, personal taste, and still other criteria. Philosophers such as Francis SPARSHOTT, interested in the field of ethics and aesthetics called axiology, examine what 'good' means and how it is measured. Various coterie manifestos assert more unilaterally what they mean by 'good.' While the division between 'serious' and POPULAR literature often invokes questions of value as though they were obvious and absolute, the dividing line between the two categories usually remains blurred; what a 'good' work of literature is always depends on the measuring system being applied. Some critics assert that evaluation is only ever a solipsistic act; others (often appealing to the notion of 'universality') cite such criteria as complexity of form, sophistication of argument, originality of imagination, continuing appeal over time and across cultures, and relevance to real life. Outside an 'ideal' frame of reference, each of these terms is also open to definition, suggesting that value is more relative than absolute. Given such ambivalence, some critics dismiss the usefulness of any claim on literary 'value.' Yet even in these conditions as, for example, in a list of texts to be included in an ANTHOLOGY or on a course or in a private CANON of 'favourite books' - the choice will still be governed by some 'preference,' which is another, if not necessarily clearly articulated, assertion of value. See also c. TAYLOR. VANCOUVER, George. Captain, explorer, b King's Lynn, England, 22 June 1757, d Petersham, England, 12 May 1798; son of Bridget (Berners) and John Jasper Vancouver, customs agent, of titled Dutch ancestry (Van Coeverden). In 1772, a year after joining the navy, Vancouver was appointed to James COOK'S ship Resolution, where he learned the principles of navigation. Four years later, Cook appointed him to his companion ship, the Discovery, when he set out to discover the Pacific entrance to the NORTHWEST PASSAGE. After Cook's death in 1779, Vancouver returned to England, and spent the years 1780-9 in military exploits in the CARIBBEAN. In
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1791, now in command of a new ship named Discovery, he set sail again for North America, mapping the North Pacific coast over several seasons. There he developed a friendship with the Spanish captain Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra (the subject of a PARODIC novel by George BOWERING); however, his relationship with Archibald Menzies, the botanist aboard his ship, was strained. Vancouver retired to Petersham in 1795, where he began to write his major narrative, A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean, and Round the World (1798; ed to completion by his brother John). See EXPLORATION. VANCOUVER INDUSTRIAL WRITERS' UNION, founded in 1979 by Vancouver poets Tom WAYMAN, Al Grierson, and Mark Warrior, was a relatively informal association inspired by San Francisco's Waterfront Writers and Artists. The group advocated writing that drew on the experience of daily WORK, and that explored how diverse occupations shape the lives of workers on and off the job. The group met monthly until 1996, produced the anthologies Shop Talk (Arsenal Pulp P, 1985) and More Than Our Jobs (Pulp P, 1991), assembled an aural anthology on cassette titled Split Shift, and in 1986, at the Trout Lake Community Centre in East Vancouver, organized the first North American conference on the new work writing. Further reading: Tom Wayman, Inside Job: Essays on the New Work Writing (Madeira Park, BC: Harbour, 1983), and A Country Not Considered: Canada, Culture, Work (Concord, ON: Anansi, 1993). L. Ricou
VANDERHAEGHE, Guy Clarence. Teacher, archivist, researcher, editor, writer; b Esterhazy, SK, 5 April 1951; son of Clarence Earl and Alma Beth (Allen) Vanderhaeghe; educ Esterhazy, at U Saskatchewan (BA Hons, 1971; MA History, 1975), and U Regina (BEd, 1978); m to the artist Margaret (Gottlieb) Vanderhaeghe, 1972. Influenced by Sinclair ROSS, Margaret LAURENCE, and Robert KROETSCH, by Russian novelists, and by American GOTHIC writers, Guy Vanderhaeghe became nationally prominent with Man Descending (1982), for which he received the
Governor General's AWARD. He has since won many awards, including the City of Toronto Book Award (co-winner for Homesick, 1989), and a second Governor General's Award, for The Englishman's Boy (1996). He also published two plays, I Had a Job I Liked. Once (1992), and Dancock's Dance (1996). Vanderhaeghe's first book, Man Descending, a series of short stories, establishes qualities that inform the rest of his writing. The stories deal with the humiliations of male characters, varying in age from childhood to old age. Many are told in the first person by figures who show no qualms about exposing their own most unflattering qualities. The world is so filled with disappointment that the characters feel jeopardized and unlikely to realize their wishes. The threat afflicts even children, who learn to deal with power that their inexperience cannot protect them against. In seeking means of self-protection, the young prefer a watchful scanning, the adolescents a smart-ass cynicism, and the old an outrageous mockery. They all live by their wits and by a capacity for comical invention in the midst of horrifying experience. Through the stories pass a parade of figures so crippled and maimed - one suffers from terrible eczema, another from grotesque obesity and self-delusion - they appear freakish. In a world of brutality and treachery they themselves become complicit. Embarrassment and shame threaten to undo them; cunning protects them; and pride in small ways sustains them. They see the world, themselves too, as part of a grotesque comedy that is best understood and best managed by mad, and at times macabre, inventions. Though foul-mouthed and scathing, they are driven by an extravagance of laughter. The laughter, sharpened with IRONY, marks their resourcefulness. Their efforts to maintain a sense of worth, and to accommodate human failings, also creates poignant moments. Virtually all political activists and all institutional authorities are construed as ridiculous in these stories. One protagonist resists the understandings of a FREUDIAN, another the outraged explanations of MARXISTS. Vanderhaeghe posits in his skeptical characters a deep sense of independence, one founded on 19th-century thought. Structurally the stories are conservative and given to climaxes. Characters are constructed
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within principles of American Gothic and COMIC or satiric modes. The narrators are given to retrospective summary and to guiding the reader with interpretive adverbs and adjectives. My Present Age (1984) is an account of a character in his early 305, grossly overweight, at odds with his world, and possessed with a quick-wittedness that borders on the malicious, even when it is pointed at himself. There are several tour-de-force scenes, among them a dispute over a parking stall and a showdown over the occupancy of an apartment building. The protagonist gains the reader's sympathy in his resistance to arbitrary power and his resentment of assaults on his personal dignity. Eccentric characters, driven by vanity and pretension, manoeuvre for power. A radio talkshow host, pretending to be thoughtful, impels the protagonist to desperate measures. A would-be writer shows himself to be oddly selfsatisfied and adept in coercion, though he appears in other respects to be unsophisticated. Ed, the protagonist, strong-arms others with his declamatory style, his flair for ridicule, and his capacity to conduct campaigns, though his acts are mainly defensive or retributive. Fuelled with paranoia, he resists fads, fears reformers, fends off the condescension of those in authority, who in his view are no more than collaborators in capricious systems of power. The texts resist narratives of improvement. The characters seldom change and almost never grow, presumably because they are defined by a core humanity that is virtually fixed. As a result Vanderhaeghe's comedy is one that discerns the ubiquity and force of human error, even as it understands and accepts these failings. In My Present Age Vanderhaeghe opens a language of wish, which takes its features from PASTORAL. On occasion Ed sets aside his mocking to think, longingly, of quiet tree-lined streets, the comfort of trees along the river. Mark Twain's Huck Finn, and his companion Jim, thread in and.out of Ed's mind as emblems of idyllic existence on the Mississippi. The WESTERN, one other narrative embedded in My Present Age, serves to anchor Ed. That story, which he writes in the face of ridicule and self-doubt, picks up from its first appearance in Man Descending. It helps to develop Vanderhaeghe's fascination with the lone figure who lives by a simple but severe 1162
code. My Present Age shows no developments in style or structure. The book is informed by blocks of retrospective narrative, the narrator's overt interventions, and a slightly stilted language. It is notable in its extravagant comedy, its ear for idiom and invective, and its lyrical and elegiac moods. The Trouble with Heroes and Other Stories (1986) in some ways is a throwback. Several of the stories are awkward and Victorian in anguish. The narrators preside in adverbs and in interpretation and, in the tales set in a biblical world, are drawn to ornate language, complex sentences, sustained speculation, and slowly developed narratives. Their protagonists commonly are old and deformed, freakishly powerful, and prophetic. Though the prairie narrators are more attracted to idiom and the macabre, and to speedier narratives of action, they too adopt formal resources of allusion, high diction, and parallel structure. The afflicted characters are many and shocking. Servicemen who return from war traumatically burned are waxy and reptilian, wearing livid scars and peering out of lidless eyes. Artists or would-be artists are crippled. The grotesques, like their counterparts elsewhere in Vanderhaeghe, possess extraordinary powers. Driven to drink or to fantasy, they nevertheless resist fashion and persist in their loyalties. They seek the possibility of heroism and ways of enduring in a heedless universe. Each of them tries to act with humour and compassion. All of them, however wayward or outcast they may be, accord to others the dignity they want for themselves. Homesick narrates the relationship between an old man, his estranged daughter, and her adolescent son. The themes of power play their way out in the book. The daughter, Vera Miller, is embittered that she has been denied the life she wished. Her father, Alec Monkman, is stricken by the loss of his son. The novel circles round a secret whose details we don't know for a long time, and it's quieter and more poignant than are earlier Vanderhaeghe books. The father and daughter seem frozen in their readings of the world, though Vera is more prone to summary judgment and to fixing the world in categories.
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Vanderhaeghe's narrator shows great skill in finding images and extending metaphors. He, like most of Vanderhaeghe's narrators, is especially adept at representing dialogue. His"ear is well tuned to elision, to the quick give and take of voices (as in the the pig-headed quarrelling between grandfather and grandson), and to depicting a range of voices (among them Daniel's profane and scatalogical speech). The descriptions are powerful, most memorably when we read about the effects of Alec Monkman's stroke. When he is thrown into disfigurement, his chair leaves gougings where he has struggled for hours to move from room to room. The novel deftly tells of the dance Vera and Alec perform in their painful quest toward one another. In the end Vera begins to be reconciled and to dance with her father. The parent-and-child narrative runs throughout Vanderhaeghe, usually involving father and son. Things as They Are? (1992) includes several such stories, most concerning horses and the fathers' skill with them. In 'Man on Horseback,' one of Vanderhaeghe's most experimental stories, the horse is part of a rural life that the father - to the son's resentment and envy - evidently experiences in a direct way. The father dies with dignity, stricken with cancer, showing in a code that Vanderhaeghe admires a quiet fortitude. Three other stories - 'The Master of Disaster,' 'Loneliness Has Its Claims,' and 'Teacher' - return to school kids, who enter a terrain of danger and manipulation. In 'The Master of Disaster' the main character is a site of manic energy and an intelligence bent on coercion. His speech is vivid, quick, and comical. Informed by popular American culture, his moves are calculating and aggressive. The two other pieces work out struggles between precocious boys and abusive teachers. Power in all three stories is sinister and vicious. The title story develops around a failed writer who meets a badly crippled man wanting to enter a monastery. The story invokes a principle of immediacy, and seeks an unclouded but sympathetic view of life, hoping to emulate Chekhov's example. It also describes the sky in lyrical and positive terms, part of a pastoral pattern that informs all of Vanderhaeghe's work. The Englishman's Boy is Vanderhaeghe's most daring book. A western, heavily influenced by F.
Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, it juxtaposes two narratives that alternate until they meet late in the book: the first is set in North America shortly after the arrival of the first white men; the second concerns Harry Vincent, a Canadian working in the raw days of Hollywood who is enlisted to find Shorty McAdoo - a cowboy that Vincent's boss believes will tell the grand story of America. As Vincent comes to terms with himself- choosing fidelity to history over cliche and commercial success - the narratives of Hollywood, cross-border conflict, and the Cypress Hills Massacre intersect. The novel, filled with startling, often visceral description, explores myths of the West and the ethics of art. In some ways atypical of Vanderhaeghe, it is his most ambitious and most accomplished book to date. Further reading: Tony Horava. 'Guy Vanderhaeghe: A Bibliography,' Essays on Canadian Writing 58 (1996): 241-64. Dennis Cooley
VAN DER MARK, Christine. Novelist; b Calgary 17 Sept 1917, of Dutch and English parentage; d Ottawa 1969. Van der Mark was raised as a Christian Scientist. She was educated in Calgary, graduating from the Normal School at age 18. She then worked briefly as a stewardess on a Mackenzie R paddle steamer, observing life in the NORTH, an experience that informed her first novel, In Due Season (1947), which she submitted as her MA thesis at U Alberta (1946). This tale of an emotionally astringent woman, who farms among the community-minded METIS but sacrifices all for material security, was followed by Honey in the Rock (1966), about tensions among rural fundamentalist immigrant families. Van der Mark was married to the economist Thomas F. Wise, and accompanied him to Pakistan and the Sudan between 1953 and 1964; they finally settled in Ottawa, where she taught and wrote for the Christian Science Monitor. Other novels - set in Pakistan and rural Alberta remain in manuscript. VAN HERK, Aritha. Novelist, anthologist, critic, university professor; b Wetaskiwin, AB, 26 May 1954; daughter of Maretje (van Dam) and Willem Van Herk, a farmer. In 1978, Van Herk achieved instant fame in the burst ofpub-
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licity surrounding the publication of her first novel, Judith. The manuscript of Judith won the very first Seal First Novel Award of $50,000 from the publisher McClelland and Stewart, guaranteeing the book widespread distribution in North America, the United States, and Europe. Van Herk, one of five children born to Dutch immigrants working a farm outside Edberg, AB, became a celebrity, touring Canada and Europe to promote her book. The manuscript of Judith, earlier submitted as her thesis, also earned her an MA from U Alberta and the Alberta Achievement Award in Literature in 1978. In 1976, her first published story, 'The Road Out/ had won the Miss Chatelaine Short Fiction Award, but nothing else had prepared readers for the daring, accomplished, entertaining narrative of Judith. Her second novel, The Tent Peg (1981), appeared to more mixed reviews, in part because reviewers were puzzled by the challenges it posed to the conventions of traditional REALISM and ill-prepared for its sly humour. No Fixed Address: An Amorous Journey (1986), mixing picaresque and magic realist conventions, was nominated for the Governor General's Award. In the same year, Van Herk was selected as one of the 10 best fiction writers in Canada under 45 years of age. She subtitled Places Far from Ellesmere (1990) 'a geografictione,J signalling further experimentation in pushing the boundaries of generic definitions and questioning the relation between cartography and plotting. Restlessness (1998) revisits the story of Scheherazade, weaving a suspense-filled narrative around the improbable fiction of a woman explaining her life to the man she has hired to kill her. With her two collections of essays, In Visible Ink: Crypto-Fictions (1991) and A Frozen Tongue (1992), Van Herk continues her experimentations in the blurring of genres and the mapping of a personal relation to space. These collections remain among the most helpful introductions to her work as well as significant contributions to Canadian literary CRITICISM AND THEORY. Since 1983, she has taught English and creative WRITING at U Calgary. She has travelled extensively promoting her work, and her books have been translated into many different languages. She is married to Robert Sharp, a geologist.
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The FEMINIST dimensions of Van Herk's fiction first attracted critics' attention. Some male reviewers were made uneasy by the castration scene in Judith, the mythic force of the biblical Jael driving a tent peg into her male adversary's brain as model for J.L. in The Tent Peg, and the promiscuous adventures of the amoral but engaging Arachne Manteia in No Fixed Address. Places Far from Ellesmere seeks to free the fictional Anna Karenina from the suicide to which Tolstoy's classic novel had doomed her, while exploring the narrator's conflicted relations to the significant places of her personal history: Edberg, Edmonton, Calgary, and Ellesmere Island, in Canada's far NORTH. The narrator of Restlessness explores her relation to European cities, literature, and history from a hotel room in Calgary to claim, unconvincingly, that Proust's madeleine was 'just a cookie.' Van Herk's fast-paced narratives challenge gender stereotypes and turn traditional MYTHS on their heads. As she puts it in A Frozen Tongue, Van Herk attempts to 'de-sire realism,' to explore how notions of realism may be changed when women's desire is voiced and given shape through narrative. Aritha Van Herk's writing, in its playful probing of conventional assumptions about GENDER and propriety, compels serious investigation of the terms on which women may enter the field of representation. Judith crosses the story of the biblical heroine, Judith, with that of the Greek sorceress Circe, a monstrous woman with the power to turn men into pigs. Just as Judith flees the city for the country and life as a pig farmer, so J.L. flees the south for the north in The Tent Peg, disguising herself as a boy to win a job as a cook in an all-male mining camp. The Tent Peg adopts a multi-voiced narrative technique to explore J.L.'s identity from multiple perspectives as she negotiates a new sense of relation to the men and the mysterious space of the Arctic. Whereas the pigs provide an alternative, female community in which Judith finds solace, J.L. finds her strength through mystic encounters with a giant she-bear. Judith concludes with Judith and her friend Mina dancing in the snow. Judith's readiness to assume a permanent address after this moment is both a personal victory and a surrender to the mystic power of the pigs. The Tent Peg concludes with J.L. danc-
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ing, as Mackenzie, the most perceptive of the men, muses about her transformation and how she has permanently changed him. While these ambivalent endings refuse the traditional closure imposed on women's stories (marriage, or death), they provide the satisfaction of a problem at least temporarily resolved. Judith andJ.L. have attained some peace, earning themselves and their readers a place to rest. As its title suggests, No Fixed Address denies that comfort, providing instead the POSTMODERN pleasures of indeterminacy and undecidability. In the manner of the earlier novels, No Fixed Address revises the Greek myth of the spinning contest between Arachne and Athena, turning a cautionary tale of the dangers of female ambition and rivalry into a celebration of female friendship, freedom, and desire. Arachne, named for the black widow spider, is a picara who traverses the countryside in her black Mercedes and eventually disappears into the northern LANDSCAPE. Following her trail, the novel's narrator feels as if she has fallen off the edge of the world. Like Judith andJ.L., Arachne feels confined by the limits of traditional female roles, but she is far freer of family and social constraints. In Coyote Country, Arnold E. Davidson argues that Judith, The Tent Peg, and No Fixed Address constitute feminist revisions of the WESTERN, including demonstrating its gradual transformation into what Sherrill Grace has termed the northern. The myth of the silent and empty North clearly fascinates Van Herk. The ambiguities inherent in her UTOPIAN celebrations of the release such a landscape may afford a woman fleeing patriarchal pressures have engaged her critics. Van Herk's writing acknowledges the ways in which cartography and northern EXPLORATION have been complicit with imperialism, yet some of her most sympathetic critics, such as Marlene Goldman and Renee Hulan, worry that the very metaphors, lyricism, and passion of Places Far from Ellesmere, the craft that makes it such a pleasurable readerly experience, may also draw it into complicity with the very forces it seeks to escape. Restlessness, indulging a longing for death, may arouse similar unease. Complexities such as these draw readers back to Van Herk's work and make it seem more valuable as the years since her first award have passed. The
liberating shock of her destabilizing wit, linguistic play, and mixings of genres encourages renewed attention to everything that has been taken for granted, assumed, or overlooked. Further reading: Arnold E. Davidson, Coyote Country: Fictions of the Canadian West (Durham and London: Duke UP, 1994); Marlene Goldman, Paths of Desire: Images of Exploration and Mapping in Canadian Women's Writing (Toronto: U Toronto P, 1997); Renee Hulan, 'Literary Field Notes: The Influence of Ethnography on Representations of the North,' Essays on Canadian Writing, Representing North, ed Sherrill Grace 59 (Fall 1996): 147-63; I.S. MacLaren, A Charting of the Van Herk Papers,' The Aritha Van Herk Papers: First Accession (Calgary: Calgary UP, 1987): xi-xlv. Diana Brydon
VANIER, Denis. Poet; b Longueuil, QC, 27 Sept 1949; son of Marguerite (Landry) and Paul Vanier. He has worked as a journalist, researcher, screenwriter, and songwriter, and was literary critic for Mainmise (1976-8) and codirector and writer for Hobo-Quebec (1977-82). After his first startling book of poetry, Je (1965), other collections appeared regularly, with a volume of collected poetry (1965-79) in 1980. His writing deals urgently and openly with violence, drugs, and sexuality, abruptly juxtaposing images from conventional Catholicism and the language of marginalized groups; provocatively the poetry thus alternately seeks subversion and transcendence. His prizewinning Lefond du desir (1994), anti-bourgeois, anti-religious, and anticonformist, continues his SURREAL verbal play with eroticism. Margaret Cook
VAN SCHENDEL, Pierre-Paul Michel. Poet, essayist; b Asnieres-sur-Seine, France, 16 June 1929; son of Simone Leveque and Marcel Van Schendel; educ U Paris, where he completed his baccalaureate in 1950 and his training in law in 1951. Van Schendel emigrated to Quebec in 1952, where he worked as a journalist, translator, and screenwriter. From 1969 he taught literature at U Quebec a Montreal. A frequent contributor to such NEWSPAPERS and JOURNALS asLaPresse and Cite libre, he himself edited Socialisms quebe-
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cois from 1968 to 1971. His collected essays appeared in the multi-volume Rebonds critiques from 1992 on. An influential commentator on politics and the arts, he established a reputation also as a poet with a particular gift for image and rhythmic lyricism. In works such as Variations sur lepierre (1964), published (like much of his work) by HEXAGONE, he deals allusively with European-North American relations - the Second World WAR, an awareness of JEWISH culture, the European dream of America as freedom. Later works include the Governor General's AWARD-winning De I'oeil ct de I'ecoute (1980) and L'impression du souci (1993). Throughout, his political commitments are integrated with his acute observations of the natural world. VAN TOORN, Peter. Poet, editor; b The Hague, Holland, 13 July 1944; son of C.H. van Toorn and M. W Dekker-van Toorn. Van Toorn has lived in Montreal since 1954 and currently teaches in the Dept of English at John Abbot C. He has published CRITICISM and edited selections of poetry by anglophone writers in QUEBEC, such as Sounds New (1990). Mountain Tea and Other Poems (1984) includes poems from an earlier collection, In Guildenstern Country (1973), as well as several TRANSLATIONS of poems by European and Asian writers. Further reading: Peter van Toorn, ed, Cross/cut: Contemporary English Quebec Poetry (Montreal: Vehicule, 1982). L. Fox VAN VOGT, A.E. (Alfred Elton). Clerk, publisher's representative, Dianetics advocate, novelist; b nr Winnipeg 26 April 1912, d Los Angeles 26 Jan 2000; son of Agnes (Buhr) and Henry Van Vogt, an attorney. Van Vogt was of Dutch descent. In the late 19405, he made the acquaintance of L. Ron Hubbard, and subsequently became the director and then the co-owner of the Hubbard Dianetics Centre (of Scientology) in Los Angeles, a position he held until 1961. With Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov, Van Vogt is considered one of the three principal SCIENCE FICTION writers of the 19405. Author and editor of nearly 60 books (some with his wife, E. Mayne Hull), he began writing short stories for SF journals in the 19405, introducing
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themes that later came to be used widely by other SF writers. He often maps the sociological implications of the motif of the 'Superhuman,' for instance, as in Slan (1946; originally serialized in Astounding Science Fiction, 1940), still regarded as a classic. The power of mind - a power that derives from order - takes his characters repeatedly into others' thoughts, through matter, and across time. Other highly praised works include The Weapon Shops oflsher (1941-2) and the earlier volumes of the 'Null-A series (1945, 1948). Stefan Haag
VASSANJI, Moyez Gulamhussein. Novelist, editor; b Nairobi, Kenya, 30 May 1950; son of Daulatkhanu (Manjijiwani) and Gulamhussein Vassanji. In 1978, after eight years as a nuclear physicist in the United States, he moved to Toronto. In 1981, he and his wife, Nurjehan Aziz, founded the Toronto South Asian R (now the Toronto R of Contemporary Writing Abroad) and, in 1985, TSAR Publications. The Gunny Sack (1989; Commonwealth Writers' Prize for AFRICA) introduces Vassanji's characteristic themes of migrancy and dislocation, RACE relations and cultural syncretism, and the discovery of identity through communal history. Objects retrieved from a gunny sack evoke memories, stories, and characters from four generations of ASIANS in Tanzania. The narrator's search for origins and inheritances connects ordinary lives to turbulent political events, including migrations, wars, and the disenfranchisement of Asians in African nations. Vassanji has called postcolonial writers the mythmakers and folk historians of collective experience; using episodic prose reminiscent of oral narrative, he ushers a largely unrecorded past into fictional form in a book that has been called the first'Tanzan/Asian' novel. See CULTURAL PLURALITY, POSTMODERNISM AND POSTCOLONIALISM. Uhuru Street (1992) collects 16 loosely linked stories about Indian shopkeeping families in Dar es Salaam. As in early collections by VS. Naipaul and Mordecai RICHLER, a street serves as locus for an alternately comic and melancholy evocation of URBAN life in transitional times, seen through child and adult eyes. Many characters reappear from The Gunny Sack, encouraging
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critics to compare the fictional world of the Dar es Salaam Shamsis with the extensively imagined communities of Faulkner, Hardy, and LAURENCE. A minor character from both books, the shopkeeper Pipa, is at the centre of The Book of Secrets (1994; Ciller Prize). More tightly plotted and character-driven than The Gunny Sack, it uses the lost-and-found diary of a British administrator to reconstruct his Africa (c First World War) and that of the Indians, including Pipa, who subsequently possessed his 'book of secrets.' A narrative frame set in 1988 reveals the imperfect, personal process of uncovering the past's mysteries. Joining dots from Alfred Corbin's life to his own, Pius Fernandes narrates a story about the possession and meaning of historical knowledge, the nature of cross-cultural encounters, and the place of home for the diasporic migrant. Vassanji's No New Land (1991), set in Canada, portrays Indians from Tanzania living in Toronto. Concise where the other novels are expansive, it employs a tragicomic mode to chronicle Nurdin Lalani's struggle to adapt to Canada despite underemployment, new spiritual and gender norms, and a wrongful accusation of sexual assault. Political themes are treated with understatement and gentle irony, and while history writ large is less important here, family and community again figure prominently: Nurdin's Don Mills apartment building is full of Shamsis from Tanzania. One passage in the novel summarizes the world view of Vassanji's fiction: 'We are but creatures of our origins, and however stalwartly we march forward, paving new roads, seeking new worlds, the ghosts from our pasts stand not far behind and are not easily shaken off.' Amriika followed in 1999. See also DIASPORA, EXILE. Further reading: Chelva Kanaganayakam, Configurations of Exile: South Asian Writers and Their World (Toronto: TSAR, 1995); Arun Mukherjee, Oppositional Aesthetics: Readings from a Hyphenated Space (Toronto: TSAR, 1994); Shane Rhodes, 'M.G. Vassanji: An Interview,' Studies in Canadian Literature 22.2 (1997): 105-17. John Clement Ball
VASSEUR, Annie Molin. Performer, poet; b Noisy-le-roi, France, 8 Jan 1938; daughter of Lucienne Mathieu and Maurice Molin. She acted with the Living Theatre in New York before emigrating to Canada in 1981. An active presence in the VISUAL ARTS milieu, she wrote articles for specialized journals in the field, cofounded Etc. Montreal, and served on the editorial board of Arcade. Her poetry includes Passion puissancez (1984) and L'ete, parfois (1996), which shows her fascination with words, sounds, and referential meanings. In her 1997 novel, Zero un, a computer permits travel between past and present (see SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY). Further reading: Jean-Piere Gilbert, 'Parler de 1'art,' Etc. ii (Spring 1990): 5-20. Margaret Cook
VAUGHN-JAMES, Martin. Artist, novelist; b Bristol, England, 5 Dec 1943; emig 1968. Vaughn-James's The Cage (1975) is a VISUAL novel (ie, it has visualized narrative form) which he composed while living in Paris two years earlier. It contains black-and-white ink drawings accompanied by a sparse narrative either above or under the drawings. Both drawings and narrative present a post-apocalyptic scene signified by the total absence of human life, where all that remains is a grumbling world of technical artefacts and finally the grumbling cage itself. He later returned to live in France Stefan Haag
VERDECCHIA, Guillermo Luis. Playwright, actor, director; b Buenos Aires, Argentina, 7 Dec 1962; son of Elvira (Bedreira), clerical worker, and Raphael Verdecchia, industrial engineer. Verdecchia grew up in Kitchener, ON, dropping out of high school to pursue theatre in Toronto. His first play, Chalmers AWARD-winning The Noam Chomsky Lectures (1991), co-written and performed with Daniel Brooks, established his dramatic signature: highly metatheatrical treatments of politics and culture as filtered through media distortions. Fronteras Americanos (1993), his MONODRAMA about LATIN AMERICAN stereotypes and his own bicultural identity, was performed across Canada, winning Chalmers and Governor General's AWARDS and earning Verdecchia a Dora Mavor Moore Award for best
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actor. A Line in the Sand (1997), written with Marcus Youssef, garnered his third Chalmers. He has also published a short story collection, Citizen Sudrez (1998).
Further reading: Denis F. Essar, 'Medje Vezina's Prophetic Voice,' Canadian Literature 127 (Winter 1990): 185-9.
Further reading: Mayte Gomez, 'Healing the Border Wound: Fronteras Americanos and the Future of Canadian Multiculturalism,' Theatre Research in Canada 16.1-2 (1995): 26-39; Nigel Hunt, 'The Chomsky Boys,' Brick 45 (Winter
VIETS, Roger. Priest, poet; b Simsbury, CT, 9 March 1738, d Digby, NS, 15 Aug 1811; son of Lois (Phelps) and John Viets; educ Yale U. Viets was ordained in the Church of England in 1763 and named to the Simsbury mission; he moved to Digby in 1785. Aside from his sermons (most left in manuscript, now in Halifax and Ottawa ARCHIVES), his one claim to literary fame is his LANDSCAPE poem Annnapolis-Royal (1788; ed and intro Thomas Vincent 1979). The first poem published as a separate book in British North America, it adapts conventional PASTORAL form to assert the benevolence of God in an ordered universe.
1993): 38-43Jerry Wasserman
VERDICCHIO, Pasquale. Poet, professor, essayist; b Naples, Italy, 4 March 1954; son of Elda (Bollori) and Mario Verdicchio. After emigrating to Canada as a young man, Verdecchio established a reputation as one of the country's leading Italian Canadian poets and translators. Among his several books are Moving Landscape (1985), A Critical Geography (1990), and Approaches to Absence (1994); here he not only spoke of how it felt to change 'geographies' - to exchange one place for another and still call it 'home' - but also reflected on the cultural consequences of any society being shaped in part by a DIASPORA. (See also CULTURAL PLURALITY, MULTICULTURAL VOICES.) Verdicchio returned to this subject in the essays collected as a study of 'post-emigrant cultures,' Devils in Paradise (1997), by which time he had become a professor of Italian and Head of the WRITING program at U California (San Diego), and director of the Education Abroad program in Bologna. VEZINA, Medje (Ernestine). Poet; b Montreal 16 April 1896; daughter of Fabienne (Alain) and Damien Vezina, a doctor; educ at a convent in Lachine, QC. Vezina worked first as a publicist in the Quebec Dept of Agriculture, then - until her retirement in 1961 - as co-director of the journal Terre et Foyer at the Quebec School of Art. Author of only one volume of poetry, Chaque heure a son visage (1934), she is nevertheless a principal representative of feminine Romanticism, a major movement in the 19305 in French Canada. Her dream poems, often written in alexandrine verse, represented her escape from monotony; they are among the works selected in Jacqueline Vezina's 1984 anthology of the author's writings.
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VIGER, Denis-Benjamin (pseud 'Un Canadien'). Essayist, politician; b Montreal 19 Aug 1774, d Montreal 13 Feb 1861; son of PerineCharles (Cherrier) and Denis Viger, contractor and politician; cousin of Louis-Joseph PAPINEAU. Trained in law by 1799, Viger was elected to office in 1808 and returned (as a leading member of the Parti Canadien) for fifty years. Financing and writing for La Minerve, he articulated the reform position during the arguments that led to the REBELLION of 1837, but many people (including William Lyon MACKENZIE) thought him too willing to reconcile with the establishment. His few poems were sampled in the second edition of James HUSTON'S Repertoire national (1893). VIGNEAULT, Gilles. Singer, poet, storyteller, composer and interpreter of original songs, editor; b Natashquan, QC, 27 Oct 1928; son of Marie Landry, teacher, and Willie Vigneauk, fisherman and provincial fisheries inspector. Vigneault is the best known and best loved of Quebecois chansonniers, despite the fact that his singing voice is often characterized as 'eraillee' (raucous, rough), because of a bout of laryngitis in his childhood. His songs stirred the nationalist fervour of the 19605 and 19705; they express a great love for humanity and for the landscape of rural Quebec. A prolific artist, Vigneault is the recipient of many prizes, including the Prix
VIGNEAULT
Felix-Leclerc (1965), the Prix Denise-Pelletier (1^83), the 1987 Genie Award ('Les iles de 1'enfance'), several prizes from 1'Academie Charles-Cros (1970, 1977, 1984, 1990), the highest award for a Canadian songwriter, the William Harold Moon prize (1996), and several honorary doctorates and lifetime career awards. He has received two Governor General's AWARDS, for poetry/theatre in 1965 (Quand les bateaux s 'en vont) and for the performing arts in 1993. Numerous artists have interpreted his works, frequently winning major awards for their efforts: Monique Leyrac, 'Mon pays/ first prize at the 1965 Sopot Festival in Poland; Pauline Julien, 'Jack Monoloy,' second prize at the 1964 Sopot Festival; Jacques Labrecque; Claude Leveillee; and Fabienne Thibeault. His work has been adapted for performance by the Orchestre symphonique de Montreal and Les Grands Ballets canadiens ('Tarn ti delam,' 1974). Vigneault's birthplace, a small fishing village, is central to his poetic vision. Located some 1,000 km (600 miles) northeast of Quebec City, on the lower north shore of the St Lawrence R, Natashquan ('where one chases the bear,' in MONTAGNAIS) was isolated from the technological progress of the mid-2oth century: it had no access to television until 1974 and no access by road until 1996. In his numerous poems and songs, Vigneault lauds the melancholy beauty of the open spaces of the Natashquan of his childhood: beaches, sand dunes, the wide river ('la mer'), the forest, and the enormous spread of the horizon. These songs celebrate the beauty of the land, nostalgia, and the fragility of leavetaking, and they frequently ascribe epic qualities to individuals who resemble the inhabitants of Natashquan. For instance, 'Jack Monoloy' is loosely based on local residents; the famous 'La Danse a St-Dilon' refers to local get-togethers at the home of a well-known fiddler in Natashquan. For Vigneault, Natashquan represents a microcosm of Quebec, and his poetic rendition of its beauty and its inhabitants has found an echo in the overwhelmingly positive response to his work in Quebec. Vigneault left Natashquan to study at the seminary in Rimouski and then at U Laval in Quebec City. One of his teachers, Felix-Antoine SAVARD, introduced him to the poetry of Emile N E L L I G A N , who became a source of inspiration
for him, along with French poets such as Ronsard, Francois Villon, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud. During and after his formal education, Vigneault worked at various jobs, as a labourer, a fisherman, a teacher of mathematics and of English as a second language. He began to recite poetry in the 'Boites-aux-chansons' in Quebec City, but did not begin singing in public until he was 30 years old. Although he has published several collections of poetry (including Etraves, 1959; Balises, 1964; Silences, 1978) and stories for CHILDREN (Contes sur la pointe des pieds, 1960), he is much better known for his recorded songs and especially his live performances (la Comedie-Canadienne, Le Theatre du Nouveau Monde, la Place des Arts in Montreal; Bobino, 1'Olympia in Paris), which stress simplicity and humour, the traditional music of Quebec, a strong connection with the audience, and a deep love of 'le pays.' Vigneault is often described as a troubadour. In the 19605 and 19705, when the notion of political and literary 'freedom' reigned in the cultural milieux of Quebec, he was composing works that adhered to ancient and classical French fixed poetic styles such as sonnets, rondeaus, and madrigals. Critic Donald Smith noted the similarities between his work and the poetry of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, especially with regard to his love songs ('J'ai pour toi un lac,' 'le Doux Chagrin,' 'Quand vous mourrez de nos amours'). His vocabulary, often taken from the traditional language of rural Quebec, and his use of traditional Quebec FOLK song rhythms further signal a rapport with 17th-century French language and poetry (see LANGUAGE: CANADIAN FRENCH). At the same time, 'le pays' (the country, with a NATIONALIST and REGIONALIST flavour) and 'le peuple' (the people) are underlying themes of his work, often reflected in his choice of titles: 'Mon pays'(i964); 'Gens du pays' (1975); 'Les gens de mon pays' (1965). Appealing to audiences of all ages, Vigneault made great efforts to reach out to youth, touring the CEGEPs of Quebec while using HUMOUR, song, and his magnetic personality to encourage the next generation and to underline his political aspirations for an independent Quebec. Vigneault's continuing popularity was evident at Quebec's Musee de la Civilization in 1995-6,
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during the very successful retrospective of popular music in 20th-century Quebec. The title of the exhibit 'Je. vous entends chanter' was taken from Vigneault's nationalist song 'Les gens de mon pays.' Although contemporary singers such as Celine Dion attracted large audiences to the audio section, the exhibit about Gilles Vigneault aroused the most interest. 'Le poete du peuple' is a legend in his time. See also MUSIC. Further reading: Donald Smith, Gilles Vigneault: conteur etpoete (Montreal: Quebec/Amerique, 1984); Marc Gagne, Gilles Vigneault: bibliographic descriptive et critique, discographie,filmographie, iconographie, chronologic (Quebec: P de l'U Laval, 1977); Lucien Rioux, Gilles Vigneault (Paris: Seghers, 1969).
Army Intelligence. Virgo emigrated to Canada in 1966 and, after teaching at U Victoria for a year, where he worked with Robin SKELTON, he moved to the Queen Charlotte Islands, the setting for much of his poetry. In 1978 he spent time at Memorial U, NF, as community artist-inresidence, and is associated now with Exile Editions in Toronto. His first collection of poetry, Pieces for the Old Earth Man (1974), was followed by Kiskatinaw Songs (1977), °n which he collaborated with Susan MUSGRAVE. He has also published short stories (Waking in Eden, 1990), and a much admired novel in which fantasy and psychological REALISM blend (Selakhi, 1987). In the 19905, he turned to electronic and aural media, as in Virgo Out Loud (1998). See also SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY.
Marie Vautier
Further reading: special issue, NewQ 6.2 (1998). VILLEMAIRE, Yolande. Novelist, poet, short story writer; b Saint-Augustin, QC, 28 Aug 1949; daughter of Evangeline (Larose), a schoolteacher, and Normand Villemaire, a carpenter; educ U Quebec a Montreal and U Montreal. Villemaire became a professor of theatre after a career in PERFORMANCE at the Theatre des femmes and elsewhere. Author of more than a dozen volumes, she won AWARDS for La vie en prose (1980), which was hailed as one of the most original of recent novels, and La constellation du cygne (1985). Love, the body, daily routine: all are subjects for VillemaireJs parodic IRONY. She has also received critical praise for the range of her poetic voice, as in Adrenaline (1982) and elsewhere. Belles de nuit (1983) collected several RADIO scripts, and Ange Amazone (1982) was translated in 1993 by Gerald LEBLANC. Later works include Le dieu dansant (1995), inspired by the HINDU god of dance, Shiva Nataraj; it tells of an nth-century woman who defies the taboo that surrounds traditional South Indian dance. Further reading: Caroline Bayard, 'Serait-ce cela inspirer lAmerique? La constellation du cygne de Yolande Villemaire,' Quebec Studies 6 (1988): 118-
20. Margaret Cook
VIRGO, Sean. Poet, fiction writer; b Mtarfa, Malta, Nov 1940; son of Eilimh Fleming (Grieve), teacher, and Sonny Virgo, British
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VISUAL ARTS AND WRITING. Perhaps the only safe general statement on the whole subject is that there exists a special relation between literature and the visual arts - especially between poetry and painting - but that nobody knows exactly what it is, though many have tried to isolate certain elements of the strange symbiosis. Some observers note that, in both literary and visual art, process is more important than individual acts of creation. Others point to a shared underlying geometry in both disciplines. Still others try to explain the connection by comparing it to the one that links poetry to popular MUSIC or popular music to art. (There is no coincidence, surely, in the fact that so many of the key rock musicians of the past two generations were once art students.) Perhaps the closest a person can come in the search for the common element is to look for a certain telltale quality of visual imagination combined with an understanding of the function of craft. Regardless of how it comes about, the meeting of forms doubtless can be seen in all or most of the developed (or inbred) cultures. While Canada may have some special characteristics in this regard (not all of them related to the Canadian obsessions with LANDSCAPE and DOCUMENTARY), the seeker does well to highlight them by putting the Canadian experience, however briefly, in a larger context.
VISUAL ARTS AND WRITING
Michelangelo's sonnets are probably among the most important early instances of ambidextrousness in the Western tradition, but in ASIAN cultures, where the very ideograms used in writing are themselves as much painted as written, the tradition is far older and certainly more intricate. In any event, some ages see the combination as natural and even inevitable. A more recent example would be the German EXPRESSIONISTS. Historically, however, poet painters have been mocked by the art world because their art is too literary and/or insufficiently nonliterary. Who can deny that some contemporary writers, when they take up the brush, seem genuinely unaware that MODERNISM ever found the antidote to anecdote? It is likewise true that with rare exceptions, such as Canada's P.K. PAGE, a mastery of coloration is not what you expect to find in a writer's art. (Max Beerbohm, on seeing nudes painted by D.H. Lawrence, observed wryly that Lawrence must have had a lot of pink friends.) What you do see in poets' art, however, is a sense of wholeness; the art, whatever direction it takes, forms part of an integrated response to the question of how to lead a good and useful creative life. In the i8th century, deftness with visual imagery was an accepted part of the equipment of a well-rounded individual, and thus one finds Goethe, for example, sketching incessantly as a subsidiary means of expression. In both literature and visual art, new developments - technical as well as imaginative - led to an increase in such duality during the Victorian age. This was the age of, for example, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, whose members, as one contemporary observed, wrote like painters and painted like writers. In clear contrast to the PreRaphaelite practice, however, works-on-paper were the favourite genre of literary figures generally. Victor Hugo is remembered as an all-round genius, not simply as a novelist and poet specifically. (As Jean Cocteau, himself a master of everything, once said, Victor Hugo was a madman who believed himself to be Victor Hugo.) Still, we do not usually remember the author of Les Miserable* as being a visual artist as well, but he was an interesting and protean one, whose washes and drawings are distinguished by a strange mix of SYMBOLISM and what might be
called proto-sciENCE FICTION. They are full of castles and monsters and darkness and sometimes pure abstract shapes as well. As an artist, Hugo will remind the viewer of both Turner and Dore. He also represents the distinctive break between the British notion of the gifted amateur of all the arts and the French refusal to recognize barriers between one discipline and another. Predictably, Canada shows traces of both influences, though most Canadian writers who are also visual artists owe far more to their contemporaries in modern culture than they do to the past. Prose writers as different as Isak Dineson and Giinter Grass (or Noel Coward for that matter) have been competent visual artists as well. Some are surprising only in what their art work confirms about their writing. James A. Michener's pictures were just like his novels: all information with no style or depth. Closer to home, both Pierre BERTON and Patrick Watson list art as their hobby in Canadian Who's Who. Poets, however, would seem less likely than non-fiction writers to be mere Sunday painters. Instead they are prone to occupy some middle ground between illustrator and book designer. Just as many Canadian artists, as far apart in time asJ.E.H. MacDonald and Vera Frenkel, illustrated books of poetry they also happen to have written, so many poets, James REANEY for example, wrote books they also illustrated. To control all physical aspects of a book, to be in effect its writer-producer-director, is an ideal many writers dream about but few ever achieve. In a 1957 article in the original Canadian Art magazine, Earle BIRNEY thought the future depended on visual artists and poets working together. 'Personally, until such collaboration exists,' he wrote, 'I do not think that either poetry or painting in this country will reach full maturity.' What happened instead was that a small group of poets took the visual more seriously. The result is often interesting in and of itself as well as being an oblique comment on their writing. Who are the Canadian poet-painters? P.K. Page, painting under her married name, P.K. Irwin, is represented in the National Gallery, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Vancouver Art Gallery. She began painting in the 19505, when she was in her 405 and her husband was at vari-
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cms times Canadian ambassador to Brazil and Mexico and high commissioner to Australia. The frustration and delights of mastering her materials and finding her own style come through clearly in her 1987 book Brazilian Journal, which features a number of black-and-white and colour plates of her gouaches. They give the not altogether inaccurate impression that much of her work at the time reflected the ecological complexity of the tropics. By contrast, her painting from AUSTRALIA recalls Sir Sidney Nolan's ochreous palette and his use of Aboriginal imagery. A number of Canadian poets of Page's generation (such as Eldon GRIER) and the one immediately before it (such as Robert FINCH) painted seriously, but Page has done the most to investigate the correlation between the two forms, as in a pair of essays appended to her 1985 selected poems, The Glass Air (which also includes samples of her painting). 'If I could write a drawing, I probably would,' she was once quoted as explaining. 'But I can't quite. I like a hard point - as if I were writing - perhaps for that reason. And I get pleasure from the sound of that point as it encounters the surface of the paper. A different sound from that of the nib as one writes (if one ever writes) for writing paper seldom has a tooth; and totally different from the clicking of typewriter keys. It is probably closer to playing a stringed instrument.' Other poet painters at work in Canadian literature now include Anne CARSON (who specializes in painting volcanoes), Heather SPEARS (whose drawings call to mind early anatomical studies), and George (Douglas) FETHERLING (who was once diagnosed, unkindly he thought but not inaccurately, as a neo-expressionist with anti-social tendencies). Collage has always been a favourite medium for many writers (perhaps the poet Robin SKELTON is the easiest example to name) but few have achieved the original results of the Toronto novelist, short story writer and poet Patricia Seaman, who uses innovative combinations of text and collage in such works as Untitled: Never Forget You Look Great II (1990). A painter who approaches poetry as some poets do painting is Chris Harris in his prose poems How to Paint (1998).
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Perhaps the Canadian poet artist whose work in the two forms is most thoroughly integrated is Joe ROSENBLATT. He has not only supplied drawings for several of his own collections of verse, such as Virgins and Vampires (1975), but also had many solo exhibitions beginning in the early 19705, and published one book of drawings exclusively (Doctor Anaconda's Solar Fun Club) as well as a portfolio (Snake Oil). In both word and line, he created his own imaginative world, in which strange humanoid creatures and critterlike humans emphasize the basic oneness of living things. His Rapidograph sketches are neither whimsical nor fantastical but something exclusive to Rosenblatt. He has quite a following both critically and commercially. Another example, a very different one, is bill BISSETT. When the critic Eli MANDEL called bissett a one-man civilization, he meant that bissett paints, draws, makes collages, and cuts recordings as well as writing literally scores of i96os-ish poetry books, many or most of which he has published himself and sometimes even printed (rather poorly). While bissett's rejection of orthography has put a distinctive stamp on his writing, it has also limited his impact on the general literary reader (though he has always been an in-house favourite of the writing community itself). His painting is similar to his poetry in that it, too, is rooted in the alternative culture of 1965-75, though more accessibly so. One would expect an underground visionary such as bissett to be influenced by the mythological and tribal significance of FIRST NATIONS art, and he is. But the debt is not to the cultural traditions of the contemporary Native painters; it is to their planar approach and their large modules of earth colours. In 1984 bissett had a retrospective at the Vancouver Art Gallery, complete with a full-dress catalogue - revealing to the astute browser that his visual art and his writing come from a common impulse. The shamanistic quality of his paintings and the chant-like rhythms of his poetry have one source. In that sense, his painting is a shadow criticism of his writing. By contrast, Patrick LANE has not borrowed anything from the First Peoples, but he sometimes writes about them and their world with what seems to fellow outsiders to be fierce understanding at times, something bissett
VISUAL ARTS AND WRITING
doesn't try to do. Lane's poetry is famous for dealing with humankind's inhumanity to itself and to the environment, and for using brutally direct and simple language that makes the message all the more horrifying. At first glance his drawings, sometimes allegorical, sometimes nightmarish, have little in common with his poetry. Yet the fact that he has used them as illustration in a number of his books makes perfect sense, because the intensity of emotion is the same in both cases. In this example, too, work in the one area can be taken as a clue to work in the other. Margaret ATWOOD is a third instance. She has been producing fine art for years, with landscape her main subject, summer landscape especially, which she engages in long spurts and bursts of painting and drawing, some of them lasting months. Generally speaking, she avoids oils and acrylics in favour of illustratorly media such as India ink and colour pencils as well as watercolour. More recently, she combined marking pen with water for special bleeding effects that heighten the sense of the GOTHIC so obvious in many of her pictures (and of course in some of her prose, too). She has never exhibited. Indeed, most of her prolific output is housed with her papers in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book LIBRARY at U Toronto. Until comparatively recent years, the public had only the slightest hint of her visual side, as in a COMIC strip that she used to draw for This Magazine, or an occasional watercolour used on a book cover, or a quick sketch of herself in an American anthology of self-portraits by literary people. But in 1988 two US academics, Kathryn Van Spanckern and Jan Garden Castro, brought out a critical anthology entitled Margaret Atwood: Vision and Forms, which reproduces eight of her watercolours and discusses her development as a visual artist. The precise cause and effect of what Atwood accomplishes in this field, as she herself has said, remains a mystery. But the relation between her work in these sister forms can be strikingly obvious to readers. One Atwood watercolour reproduced from time to time depicts a human skeleton wearing a bridal gown with veil. A more quintessentially Atwoodian image would be difficult to conceive of, in whatever discipline, in whatever medium.
The POSTMODERN movement in Canadian writing, which began operating on a VancouverToronto axis in the mid-1960s (and also enjoyed close connections with London, ON), had, by the late 19805, become the dominant diction in Canadian literary writing. It was marked at all times by a close and tangled relationship with the visual arts. At least one important figure, bpNiCHOL, is now seen as almost as much a visual artist as a poet, while the painter Greg Curnoe, a frequent collaborator with poets, was, by the end of his life, himself becoming almost as much writer as visual artist. A list of other crossover figures would have to include Robert Fones of Toronto and Brian Dedora of Vancouver. Perhaps the most wholly integrated member of this extended creative family, with both a sound art education and full acceptance as a writer, was the poet Roy KIYOOKA (192694), who studied with figures as different as J.E.H. MacDonald and Clement Greenberg. Yet even he was more visual artist than literary artist. Emily CARR was probably the one figure to make her mark equally as a writer and a painter. Since Bertram BROOKER (1888-1955), perhaps no other Canadian has been so ambitiously ambidextrous. Canadian visual art and writing moved along almost parallel lines for a time in the 19205, the nationalist heyday of the GROUP OF SEVEN, most of whose members, having begun their careers as commercial artists and designers, naturally illustrated books at one time or another. (Al PURDY, who grew up in the 19305, when the Group had entered schoolroom legend, would complain one day in a letter to George WOODCOCK that A.Y. Jackson's paintings in Purdy's poetry collection North of Summer were old-fashioned. This was in 1966, when Canadian cultural NATIONALISM had re-ignited and a new generation was discovering the Group's genius for the first time.) In any case, no member of the Group had so profound an influence on the book-as-object as J.E.H. MacDonald's son, Thoreau MacDonald, whose designs and illustrations for Canadian titles, especially those of the Ryerson P, led to perhaps the only distinctive Canadian visual style in book PUBLISHING (see BOOK DESIGN). The younger MacDonald also might be said to have had some effect on TYPOGRAPHY, a field in which Canadian literary and
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visual artists have not taken much interest, save for the poet Robert BRINGHURST in the present era. Some of the 19205 byplay between visual and literary artists was by means of a shared interest in political and cultural currents. For example, the MONTREAL GROUP of anglophone poets of the 19205, characterized by F.R. SCOTT and A.J.M. SMITH, was to some extent caught up in the Group of Seven's ambition to wipe clean the slate of Canadian culture and begin anew. On a lower plane, virtually all the writers associated with the literary journalist William Arthur DEACON shared intellectual ground with the Group of Seven and its acolytes; the common areas ran from admiration of Walt Whitman to belief in theosophy - requisites that strike us today as being at odds with Canadian nationalism or at least irrelevant to it. If the Group of Seven's own brand of nationalist sentiment was selectively cosmopolitan, it was also far from being truly pan-Canadian. Of the original Group, only A.Y. Jackson was comfortable with Quebecois culture. Yet for all that, and despite certain essential similarities, the writers and visual artists of English-speaking Canada were more interested in their Quebec counterparts than those in Quebec were in them. The single most important document is Canadian art history, REFUS GLOBAL by Paul-Emile Borduas and others (1948), was a literary device signalling the start of a new age in Quebec's art and politics but it has no equivalent in English-speaking Canada, where the manifesto is at best an obscure and distrusted literary form. Yet in each solitude the idea of the painter writer has flourished in each generation. In the Quebec of the 19405 and 19505, Richard Giguere was well regarded as a print-maker and as a poet. More recently, the poet Madeleine GAGNON is well respected as a painter also. But, as in anglophone Canada, a few have lapsed into visual silence: the poet Francois CHARRON, for example. Also to be found among both anglophones and francophones are painters who find inspiration in literature, and literary people who discover it in works of visual art. In Quebec, for example, no less a personage than Jean-Paul Lemieux has executed such works as 'Hommage a Nelligan,' and quite an interesting little anthology could be compiled of poems and
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prose poems inspired by individual works of art; perhaps the most recent practitioner of this subgenre is Stephanie BOLSTER, as in White Stone (1998). The great burgeoning of First Nations art that began in the 19605 produced its own examples of the writer/artist at work. Among many such persons is Norval MORRISEAU, whose paintings reveal the art of the shaman; he translated numerous OJIBWA tales. Bill REID used both his skills as sculptor/designer and his familiarity with the myths of the RAVEN to reclaim and revivify HAIDA culture. Shirley BEAR worked as a curator to bring the work of Joane Cardinal-Schubert and others to great public attention. See also INUIT LITERATURE, KOOTENAY SCHOOL OF WRITING, LANDSCAPE, NORTH, SCIENCE AND NATURE WRITING, SETON.
Further reading: George Bowering, The Moustache: Memoirs of Greg Curnoe (Toronto: Coach House, 1993); Kathleen G. Hjerter, Doubly Gifted: The Author as Visual Artist (New York: Abrams, 1986); J.D. McClatchy, ed, Poets on Painters: Essays on the Art of Painting by Twentieth-Century Poets (Berkeley: U California P, 1988). George Fetherling
VISUAL POETRY embraces a wide variety of verse forms, styles, and media, but always requires that a poem be seen for a total appreciation of its aesthetics or content. Although visual poetry has an ancient and rich history in world literature, it is a genre that only fully surfaced in Canadian writing in the mid-1960s. This development was prefigured by occasional texts that employed eye-catching layouts and typefaces to convey their message, usually in advertising. Some traditional visual forms were also imported by immigrant authors such as Teodor Fedyk (1873-1949), who included several UKRAiNiAN-language acrostic verses in the 1911 edition of his Winnipeg collection, Songs about Austria and Canada. Finally, the loosening of line arrangements, punctuation, and orthographic practices by the TISH Group of poets, influenced by trends in modern American literature, helped to set the stage for the early indigenous attempts at an expressly visual poetry. Arguably the first Canadian visual poet was the expatriate painter and writer Brion Gysin
VOADEN
(1916-86), who was raised in Edmonton but lived mostly abroad as a member of the international avant-garde. Gysin developed an intense interest in calligraphy while studying Japanese with the Canadian army in Vancouver in 1943, and during a postwar sojourn in Morocco. He subsequently produced numerous calligraphically inspired paintings, as well as literary collages, innovative cut-up texts, and other works of intermedia. In English-speaking Canada, the spread of the 19605 counterculture brought with it the sound and visual poetry of the international CONCRETE movement, which found adherents among younger poets who felt stifled by conventional verse forms. Pioneers of the visual genre at this time included Bill BISSETT, bpniCHOL, Judith COPITHORNE, Gerry GILBERT, Steve MCCAFFERY, Hart Broudy, David UU, Stephen SCOBIE, Barbara Caruso, and Andrew SUKNASKI. Even established poets such as Earle BIRNEY and the composer R. Murray SCHAFER were influenced by Concretism, as was the critic Marshall MCLUHAN in his collaborative publications with the graphic designer Harley Parker. Poets published their works in books and periodicals, and also displayed them in exhibitions. Significantly, many of the same authors were simultaneously active as SOUND poets, and some visual poems were designed to serve as scores for sonic performances. After the flowering of concrete poetry in the early 19705, visual poetry continued to be made by such authors as Robert ZEND, Jon WHYTE, jw curry, John Riddell, Jars Balan, Paul DUTTON, Peggy Lefler, Brian HENDERSON, Steven Ross Smith, and Richard Truhlar. More recent contributors to the growing body of Canadian visual poetry have included W. Mark Sutherland, Leroy Gorman, Stephen Cain, Darren Wershler-Henry, Christian BOK, and Peter Jaeger. Visual poetry first appeared in the literature of French-speaking Canada in the late 19605, but on the whole has attracted fewer practitioners. Paul C H A M B E R L A N D , Raoul DUGUAY, Jean CHAR-
LEBOIS, Claude BEAUSOLIEL, Michel Cote, and Jacques Thisdel are among those responsible for introducing concrete poetics to Quebecois literature. Their groundbreaking work has since been followed by such writers as Pierre-Andre
Arcand, Richard Martel, Carol Dallaire, and Alain Arthur-Painchaut. Viewed by many mainstream critics as a marginal phenomenon historically, and as an 'experimental' activity on the fringes of serious literature, it is likely that visual poetry will nevertheless continue to evolve as a distinct thread within the broad fabric of Canadian belles lettres. Further reading: bpNichol, ed, The Cosmic Chef: An Evening of Concrete (Ottawa: Oberon, 1970); Ellipse ij, Concrete Poetry issue, 1975. Jars Balan
VIZINCZEY, Stephen. Writer, novelist; b Kaloz, Hungary, 12 May 1933; son of Erzsebet (Mohos) and Istvan Vizinczey, a school principal. He emigrated to Canada in the wake of the Hungarian revolution in 1956. Along with Leonard COHEN and Vittorio Fiorucci, he founded and edited the intellectual magazine Exchange. Vizinczey's reputation rests upon his first, selfpublished novel, In Praise of Older Women (1966). A critical and commercial success, this picaresque tale of a young man's journey through Europe and North America became notorious for its explicit and cavalier attitude towards sex. Vizinczey's primary theme, explicitly stated in The Rules of Chaos (1969), is that chance, rather than determinism, accounts for the events of history. Tamas Dobozy VOADEN, Herman. Playwright, director, teacher; b London, ON, 19 Jan 1903, d Toronto 27 June 1991; son of Louisa (Bale) and Arthur Voaden, a doctor. A graduate of Queen's U, Voaden taught in Toronto until his retirement in 1964, but was active at the same time in the Canadian Arts Council and as a playwright, often in collaboration with people in MUSIC (libretti) and the VISUAL ARTS. Known for his 'symphonic EXPRESSIONISM,' he attempted to evoke on stage, through setting and score as well as dramatic exchange, a spiritual relation between human being and land. Rocks (1932) evokes tragedy in the NORTH; Earth Song (1932; pub 1976), Hill-Land (1934; pub 1984), and Ascend As the Sun (1942) seek to represent spiritual transfiguration, through encounters with death and doubt. Just as his early work was influenced
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by the GROUP OF SEVEN, so Emily Carr (1960), a LIFE story performed against a slide show of CARR'S paintings, seeks to express heroic individualism by appealing to a range of sensory stimuli. Anton Wagner edited 13 plays from the period 1928-45 as A Vision of Canada (1993), with extensive information on staging. Further reading: Geraldine Anthony, Stage Voices (Toronto: Doubleday, 1978): 28-54; Sherrill Grace, Regression and Apocalypse (Toronto: U Toronto P, 1989); Anton Wagner, Intro to his ed, A Vision of Canada, and editorial commentary (Toronto: Simon & Pierre, 1993): 6-60, 408-24. VONARBURG, Elisabeth. Novelist, b Paris, France, 5 Aug 1947; daughter of Jeanne (Morche) and Rene Ferron-Wherlin; educ U Dijon (MA, 1973) and U Laval (PhD, 1987). She emigrated to Canada in 1973 to teach in Chicoutimi, QC, and from 1979 to 1990 was literary editor for the magazine Solans. An important figure in the world of SCIENCE FICTION in Quebec, she has published AWARD-winning books, including some for CHILDREN. Her first collection of stories, L'oeil de la nuit (1980), and her 1981 novel, Le silence de la cite (tr Jane Brierley as The Silent City, 1988), are, like most of her works, set in the future. Some of her stories in translation appear in TesseractsQ (1996). Margaret Cook
VORTICISM, a literary and artistic movement that developed with Wyndham LEWIS. It attempted to free artists from 'representing' nature by converting the energy of nature into an energy that would be located spatially, in planes of relationship, in form itself. VOTING RIGHTS are one measure of how attitudes to CULTURAL PLURALITY, GENDER, and RACE governed access to power and the efficacy of opinion in Canada, and of the role of literary persons in effecting social changes. Franchise, or the right to vote in elections, was held in the i8th century by males who owned property. Until 1920, when Parliament passed a Dominion Franchise Act, numerous political forces manipulated the voting lists - for example, by making property, gender, or race into a prerequisite, or by dropping the requirement in
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particular circumstances - in order to favour their own party. Women, non-Caucasian immigrants, Aboriginals: all at one time or another were disenfranchised, as when the Wartime Elections Act and the Military Voters Act of 1917 took the vote away from conscientious objectors and from British subjects born in an 'enemy' country, and from those who ordinarily spoke an 'enemy language' and who were naturalized after 1902. Persons of ASIAN origin were denied the vote over much of the first half of the 20th century, though after India and Pakistan became independent in 1947, Canada - having committed itself to the equality of member nations in the COMMONWEALTH - could no longer sustain the disenfranchisement of Asian Canadians; in 1948, Japanese Canadians (not having a Commonwealth connection to claim) were the last Asian Canadians to acquire the vote. Non-status Natives acquired the vote over the 20 years from 1949 (in British Columbia) to 1969 (in Quebec), though Voluntary enfranchisement' - the act of their choosing to vote had been used since 1867 as a way of removing Natives from their status rights. The INUIT acquired the federal vote in 1950, and status Indians in 1960. While a number of WOMEN who owned property in the igth century did enjoy the vote, the patterns were not consistent and not sustained. Quebec women voted between 1809 and 1849, but were excluded from voting when the Quebec Franchise Act of 1849 wrote the word 'male' into the requirements. Ontario women with property acquired limited local or municipal voting rights in 1850, a freedom extended through most of the country by 1900. The women's suffrage movement worked from at least 1876 (the founding of the TORONTO WOMEN'S LITERARY CLUB, by Emily Howard STOWE) to extend the franchise further; the Women's Christian Temperance Union, and later the work of Nellie MCCLUNG in Manitoba, added more pressure for change. Each province extended provincial voting rights to women separately: Manitoba in Jan 1916, Saskatchewan in March 1916, Alberta in April 1916, British Columbia and Ontario in April 1917, Nova Scotia in April 1918, New Brunswick in April 1919, Prince Edward Island in May 1922, Newfoundland (still a separate British protectorate at the time) in
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April 1925, and Quebec not until after Therese Casgrain (a RADIO host on the program 'Femina') and F.R. SCOTT pursued the matter, in April 1940. In Yukon, men could vote in 1902 provided they swore they were at least 21, British subjects, not Indian, and had resided in the territory for at least 12 months; with parallel restrictions, Yukon women acquired the vote in 1919. Federally, the partisan Wartime Elections Act of 1917, which had disenfranchised some people, at the same time enfranchised women in the armed forces and women who had husbands or sons in the armed forces; the federal franchise was then extended to all women over 21 in 1918, and the right to stand for parliament in 1919. Their right to be appointed to the Senate was not won until the 1929 PERSONS CASE - when it was established in law that women were indeed 'persons,' in a legal case that involved the 'Famous Five,' Alberta suffrage reformers McClung, Emily MURPHY, Henrietta Muir Edwards, Louise McKinney, and Irene Farley. The quest to obtain female suffrage and political rights became the subject of numerous literary works, including dramas by Madeleine Greffard (L'incroyable histoire de la lutte que quelques-unes on menee pour obtenir le droit de vote pour toutes, 1980, and Pour toije changerai le monde, 1981) and Sharon POLLOCK (The Persons Case, 1981). VUONG-RIDDICK, Thuong. Writer, poet, university instructor; b Hanoi 2 May 1940; daughter of To Thi Yen and Vuong Nai Cam. She went to Catholic schools in Hanoi, Saigon, and Dalat, completed a masters and doctorate in Paris, then worked as an associate professor at the universities of Montreal, McGill, and Victoria. She has worked in television and published on French, Quebec, and Franco-Vietnamese writing. Her poems in Two Shores/Deux Rives (1995) reflect her life's cultural and linguistic shifts, exposing the grim paradoxes of Vietnam and lyrically examining how to keep hold of the past while remaining sensitive to the present. Her memoir, in progress, is called The Country That I Have Left. R. Clark
WADDINGTON, Miriam. Poet, short story writer, critic; b Winnipeg 23 Dec 1917; daughter of Isidore and Mussia (Dobrusin) Dworkin.
Waddington earned her BA from U Toronto (1939), and studied social work in Toronto and Philadelphia, receiving an MSW from U Pennsylvania (1945). That year, she moved to Montreal, doing social work and making her literary debut with Green World, a collection of vivid and lyrical poems. Noted for her luminous imagery and social conscience, Waddington experimented with poetic form throughout the next several decades in books such as The Season's Lovers (1958), The Glass Trumpet (1966), Say Yes (1969), and Driving Home, which won the 1972 Segal Prize. In 1964 Waddington joined the English department at York U, a post from which she retired in 1983. She subsequently moved to Vancouver. Throughout the 19705, her writing increasingly reflected a desire to explore WOMEN'S experience and the process of aging. Later titles include The Price of Gold (1972), The Visitants (1981), and a collection of short fiction titled Summer at Lonely Beach and Other Stories (1982). Her academic writing produced a number of reviews and essays, and an important critical study of A.M. KLEIN. Further reading: L.R. Ricou, 'Into My Green World: The Poetry of Miriam Waddington,' Essays on Canadian Writing 12 (Fall 1978): 144-61. Michael Greene
WADE, Bryan. Playwright, screenwriter; b Sarnia, ON, 9 May 1950; son of Evelyn and Richard Wade; educ U Victoria (BFA, 1974) and U California, Los Angeles (MFA, 1979). Wade's plays, which include Electric Gunfighters (1976), Blitzkrieg (1974) and Underground (1975), frequently revolve around historical figures, drawing on fantasy and POPULAR CULTURE to examine the power relations and frustrations that arise from cultural and environmental constraints. Although best known for his plays, Wade also writes SCREENPLAYS for TELEVISION, and RADIO plays; his radio plays include an adaptation of Ethel WILSON'S Swamp Angel (1995). R.J. Birks
WAH, Fred (FrederickJames). Poet; b Swift Current, SK, 23 Jan 1939; son of Corrine Marie Erickson (b Goteborg, Sweden), who immigrated to Canada to live in Swift Current, and Frederick Clarence Wah (b Medicine Hat), who
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was half Chinese as well as part Scottish and Irish and lived in China from age 5 to age 23. Wah's mixed ancestry resulted in a reluctant acceptance by both Chinese and Anglo communities and kindled in him a sense of estrangement. He confirms that he has maintained an interest in aesthetic and political positions of departure, displacement, decolonization, and deterritorialization. The sense of displacement evident in Wah's writing is mitigated by an integration of language and the physical environment; key motifs are geographic topography and the act of writing itself. Wah uses a selfreflexive style to depict the West Kootenay region of British Columbia, where he grew up, and his writing often investigates paradoxical yin/yang-like interplays between social displacement and aesthetic integration. Wah studied music (trumpet), and English literature at U British Columbia in the early 19605. His experience with the ensemble known as the Kampus Kings (which included writer/ musician Lionel KEARNS, saxophone), shaped some of his free-form literary expression. Also, he points out that he was once inspired by a movie about Shaolin Monks training at martial arts in the unusual 'drunken style' which is characterized by unpredictability in movement, or what Wah identifies as a Keatsian 'negative capability.' In his writing, Wah applies Ludwig Wittgenstein's theory on the gap between thought and language, and Viktor Shklovsky's technique of 'ostranenie' (making strange or 'defamiliarization'; see FORM, FORMALISM). Ajazz-like improvisational sense characterizes much of his creative and critical endeavour. Language itself constitutes one focus in Wah's writing, and the processes of perception provide a second. He has acknowledged the influences of writers and critics such as Louis Zukovsky, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, and Warren Tallman (West Coast Line 27). In his tribute 'Warren Tallman, 1921-1994' (Canadian Literature 145), he notes that Tallman was instrumental in introducing the BLACK MOUNTAIN influence to the Canadian West Coast. Wah recalls how a group of young U British Columbia students that included Gladys HINDMARCH, Frank DAVEY, George BOWERING, and Kearns gathered at Tallman's house to discuss poetry. (Around this time, Wah met Pauline Butling,
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whom he later married.) Under Tallman's guidance, the group brought Duncan and Creeley to the university, and at a 1963 poetry conference, Wah and his colleagues met Olson, Denise Levertov, Margaret AVIS ON, and Allen Ginsberg among others. Still later, other poets including Robin BLASER visited. During this important formative period, Wah was encouraged by Tallman and Duncan, and in the 19605, along with Davey and Bowering, became one of the founding editors of the poetry newsletter TISH. Wah's contemporaries in Vancouver at the time included Phyllis WEBB, bill BISSETT, Gerry GILBERT, Roy KIYOOKA, Maxine GADD, Judith COPITHORNE, and Daphne Buckle (MARLATT), many of whom appeared in Tish as well as at local literary events. After the dispersion of the Tish group in 1963, Wah did graduate work in literature and linguistics at U New Mexico in Albuquerque, where he was instructed by Creeley and edited Sum magazine. In 1967, Wah graduated with a masters degree from State U New York (Buffalo), where he studied under Olson and co-edited the Niagara Frontier R and the Magazine of Further Studies. He returned to the Kootenays in late 1967, editing Scree and teaching at Selkirk C. Bowering states that by the late 19605 Wah was an integral voice in the American post-Olson generation of poets. Wah served as contributing editor to Open Letter from 1970 on; also, he was the managing editor of Swift Current, Canada's first electronic literary magazine, and with Davey edited The Swift Current Anthology (1986). He maintains his interest in electronic TECHNOLOGY and writing and after 1996 served with the Electronic Mentoring Program at the Kootenay School of Art. He was also founding coordinator of the writing program at David Thompson U Centre (1978-84); taught at Selkirk C (1985-88); held writer-inresidence positions at Bemidji State U in Minnesota (1983), U Manitoba (1982-3), and U Alberta (1988-9); and in 1989 joined the English Dept at U Calgary, where he currently teaches. Fred Wah has 15 books of poetry in print, with more on the way. Diamond Grill (1996), his only collection of prose, won the Howard O'Hagan prize for short fiction. So Far (1991) won the Stephansson Prize for Poetry in 1992. His poetry collection Waiting for Saskatchewan was awarded the Governor General's AWARD in
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1986. Other works include Alley Alley Home Free (1992), Limestone Lakes Utaniki (1989), Music at the Heart of Thinking (1987), Breathin' My Name with a Sigh (1981), Lofei Is Buried at Smoky Creek: Selected Poems (1980), and Pictograms from the Interior of B.C. (1975; see PETROGLYPHS). Much of Wah's poetry and fiction appeared in Canadian journals such as Absinthe, Canadian Literature, Capilano R, Prairie Fire, Prism International, and West Coast Line. His writing also appeared in a variety of foreign journals including Mattoid and Span (Australia), as well as Chicago R, the Massachusetts R, and Tyuonyi (United States). Wah's editorial work reflects his own interests in what might be termed the poetics of indeterminacy. For example, along with Roy MIKI he co-edited Beyond the Orchard (1996), a collection of essays on bpNicnoi/s The Martyrology. This project is related to Wah's ongoing service as editorial adviser to West Coast Line magazine in Vancouver. His interest in postcolonial issues of ethnicity, ethics, CLASS, RACE, and colour are evident in the special West Coast Line (13/14,1993) edition titled Colour. An Issue, which he co-edited with Miki (see POSTMODERNISM). Wah's abilities as both writer and critic are evident in a special issue of Open Letter (8/5-6) coedited with Susan Rudy Dorscht and Ashok Mathur; based on a conference held in Calgary (1991) and titled Interventing the Text, the issue addresses matters such as the power politics involved with innovative and contemporary literature in Canada. Wah wrote numerous critiques on contemporary Canadian and American literature, notably in Essays on Canadian Writing, Open Letter, and West Coast Line. He argues that linguistic fragmentation helps realize poetic potentiality. In his critical articles, he valorizes authors such as Nicole BROSSARD and bpNichol, whom he recognizes as kindred spirits in that they integrate the idea of writing with the act of writing. Recently, Wah has formulated a theory of 'tr=geo=ethno=poetics' which addresses language, place, and ethnicity. A number of influential critics have commented on Wah's writing. Davey in From There to Here stresses the importance of locale and place as setting for cosmological discovery in Wah's writing. Bowering in the foreword to Lofei Is Buried at Smoky Creek identifies a romantic impulse and comments on the recurring image
of 'scree' - a natural, linguistic, and conceptual detritus that gestures to dislocation and a sense of being in several spatio-temporal loci simultaneously. A range of critics - including Pamela Banting, Jeff DERKSEN, Charlene Diehl-Jones, Smaro KAMBOURELI, and Laurie Ricou - have written on Wah's profound engagement with language and his representations of self-conscious awareness during moments of perception. Ed Dyck identifies the notion of presence integrated with topographic symbolism as a key to understanding the deconstructive nature of Wah's linguistic play. Susan Rudy Dorscht notes a number of gender-relations shaping Wah's poetry, with the absence of the father figure ameliorated by the presence of a 'feminine' slippage in signification. Most critics agree on Wah's paradoxical linguistic flux, which is characterized by an 'open' or unfixed jazz-like structure. The yin/yang motif sometimes appearing in Wah's writing gestures to opposing ideas of binarism and monism, or, order and chaos, evident in his avant-garde response to ASIAN and Eurocentric aesthetics. With Breathin' My Name with a Sigh, Wah joins the ranks of an influential group of Canadian authors investigating the form of the LONG POEM. In collections such as Waiting for Saskatchewan and Diamond Grill, Wah engages in a linguistic flux while challenging hegemonic perceptions of identity, race and culture to explore the 'tr=geo=ethno=poetics' of his own mixed cultural background. If language is the true practice of thought, then for a proprioceptive writer such as Wah, the organic is engaged with the SEMIOTIC, and ethnicity becomes a kind of biologue. Throughout his literary career, Wah defamiliarized social situations through a linguistic 'jazz' that celebrates heterogeneity, dialogism, and perceptual pluralities. Wah's writing continues to offer sensual representations of the perception, language, breath, and music that lie at the heart of thinking. Further reading: Pamela Banting, The Undersigned: Ethnicity and Signature-Effects in Fred Wah's Poetry,' West Coast Line 2 (Fall 1990): 8394; Douglas Barbour, ed, special issue of West Coast Line 25.1 (1991); Charlene Diehl-Jones, Fred Wah and His Works (Toronto: ECW, 1997). KarlE.Jirgens
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WAINWRIGHT, Andy (John Andrew). Poet, novelist, professor; b Toronto 12 May 1946; educ U Toronto (BA, 1969) and Dalhousie U (MA, 1973; PhD, 1978). After his studies Wainwright taught at Dalhousie U, editing Margaret LAURENCE'S letters and writing a biography of Charles BRUCE. While living in Toronto, he had absorbed the cultural milieu of the time (ATWOOD, Dave GODFREY, Dennis LEE), and his several poetry collections - marked by measured cadence, and sampled in Landscape and Desire (1992) - reveal both these influences and the power of the Nova Scotia LANDSCAPE to shape individual observation. The relation between nature and solitary man preoccupies other works as well, particularly Flight of the Falcon (1987), a collage evoking Robert Scott in Antarctica in 1910-2, counterpointing photograph and history with the poetry of Scott's journals; and the prizewinning novel A Deathful Ridge (1997). The latter, telling the story of George Mallory, the British climber who disappeared on Everest in 1924, imagines Mallory's survival and subsequent confession; paradoxically overtaken by history itself (Mallory's body was found on the mountain in 1998), the novel addresses the relation between history and 'truth,' and probes the artifice of both. Further reading: Peter Sanger, 'Speaking the Silence: J.A. Wainwright's Flight of the Falcon,' Antigonish R 81-2 (Spring-Summer 1990): 109-17.
WAKASHAN ORAL LITERATURE. Wakashan languages are spoken from Washington's Olympic Peninsula to Kitimat in northern British Columbia. Linguists divide these into two gross, mostly non-contiguous families: Northern and Southern Wakashan. The former is further subdivided into Upper (Haisla, Heiltsuk, and Oowekyala) and Lower (KWAKWALA) subfamilies. Southern Wakashan is synonymous with Nootkan, which includes Nootka proper, spoken by the Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootka) of Vancouver Island; Nitinaht spoken by the Ditidaht; and Makah, spoken by the Makah of the Olympic Peninsula. The Haisla, Heiltsuk, and Oowekyala languages have rich ORAL traditions. Franz BOAS and George HUNT recorded collections of Heiltsuk texts in the early part of the century. Subse-
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quent scholars, including Marius BARBEAU, William Beynon, Gordon Robertson, Ronald Olson, Susanne Storie and Jennifer Gould, John Rath, and Evelyn Walkus Windsor, collected materials from Haisla and Oowekyala, while Storie, Gould, and Rath published Heiltsuk material. Nootkan materials were collected in the 19105 by Edward SAPIR, Boas's student and the greatest of the Boasian linguists. Along with Morris Swadesh and Native informant Alex Thomas, Sapir assembled a significant body of texts. Sapir also collected recordings of songs. Later, musicologists Helen H. Roberts, Ida Halpern, and Frances Desmore would add to the data on Nootkan songs. Philip Drucker collected texts in the 19308, although they are not published as such. Beginning in the 19603 a talented generation of linguists - including Eugene Arima, Susan Golla, Randy Bouchard, and Dorothy Kennedy - collected Nootka texts. Oral literature historically played a central role in Wakashan-speaking societies. In addition to their undeniable aesthetic and entertainment value, stories served important functions in the culture: defining social identity and group membership, establishing claims to political office and to land and resources, establishing claims to ritual and ceremonial office, and expressing and teaching cultural values.There is also a strong sense in which chiefs in these ranked societies have led lives that would lend themselves to being retold as stories. Achievements in potlatching, warfare, food gathering, and contact with the supernatural were assimilated to preexisting narrative archetypes. In this way, chiefs and nobles were able to place their achievements within the context of achievements of ancestors and heroes of MYTH; in some cases a near identification was achieved. Oral literature has been intimately associated with other art forms. In the plastic arts, carved and painted objects are almost invariably associated with narratives; often, the visual depiction of a story is the raison d'etre for the piece. Totem poles are a well-known example of this relation between plastic and verbal arts. Others include clan or crest representations in various media such as painted fabric screens (essential in the staging of potlatches and other ceremonial events); carved and painted utilitarian objects, such as dishes, canoes, weapons, and masks.
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Masks themselves have traditionally been used in elaborate cultural PERFORMANCES of narratives, which represents a third important art form in Wakashan societies. One such performance is the Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootka) Wolf Dance (tlokwana), which enacts a basic text involving a culture hero's receiving the power of life and death from wolves who at first dragged him away. The young men of a village put on this dramatic performance annually, generally in mid-winter. Historically, oral literature was a central component of social life in Wakashan societies. Narratives were a means of expressing the relation of individual to group, and, more broadly, the place of humans in the cosmos. The existence of a wide variety of gods, heroes, monsters, and personified natural species and forces invites comparison to Hellenic and Norse mythologies. Indeed, such a comparison is not far-fetched; it is only the often fragmentary collection and obscure publication of this material that prevents the wider reading public from appreciating its accomplishment. Several basic forms of narrative constitute most of the Wakashan oral tradition. These are: encounter with a supernatural being and the gaining of supernatural treasure; the origins of social privilege and ownership of territory; encounters with and stories about sentient animal beings; 'just so' stories about the coming into being of the present world in its specificity; ecological narratives, about relations between humans and resources, and predator-prey relations in the non-human world. In addition, stories about warfare, chiefly succession, lineage histories, and historical events are important components. One important motif encountered in a wide range of traditional narratives is reincarnation, which was believed to define human existence. The most common type of reincarnation occurred within a family group, such as a lineage or clan. Often, an infant would be perceived as the reincarnation of an ancestor. Telltale marks or extraordinary behaviour would be proof of this; such cases then became part of a body of oral literature relating to reincarnation. Stories also tell of reincarnation between species. The best documented example of this involves human twins and salmon. The Heiltsuk
and Oowekeeno thought that twins were 'really' salmon, and so did not live long as humans. Moreover, salmon themselves reincarnated into salmon. In fact, salmon were the prototype of reincarnation beliefs, since their reappearance at the same spawning grounds on a regular and predictable basis was seen as a magical act. The descent of fingerlings downstream would barely be visible to the human eye, reinforcing the notion of a marvellous TRANSFORMATION. This transformation was dependent, however, upon the ritual actions of humans. Several general lessons were embodied in this narrative class: the intimate connection among living things, the willing sacrifice of salmon for the good of humans, the necessity to treat game animals and other non-humans with respect, and the recursivity of all life forms. In a general sense, life was not unique and singular, but part of larger cycles. This explains remarkable cultural features such as stoicism in the face of death, and the desire to live up to mythical prototypes. The stories that people told are both the condition for and product of this ethos. Reincarnation is part of a larger theme of boundary crossing that narratives, in some fashion, treat. Traditionally, the cosmos divided into distinct realms: heaven, the underworld, the sea and other bodies of water, and the deep forest. Humans travelling into these realms face unknown dangers and opportunities. Common story motifs, such as Mucus Boy (about a young boy who is ostracized from his village, but who finds a supernatural treasure) and the Girl Who Married a Bear, which have wide distribution within and beyond the Wakashan area, demonstrate this theme. Communication, and even marriage, with non-humans - including natural species, heavenly spirits, and spirits of the dead are shown to be possible and (usually) desirable. The literature also commonly portrays such characters as Sisiutl, the two-headed serpent which bestows either great wealth or death upon those who encounter it. Ogres and monsters also occur frequently. These include the dreaded anthropophagous Baxbakwalanusiwa, who inspires the Cannibal Dance of the Winter Ceremonial of North Wakashan groups. Another common figure is Dzonokwa (DSONOQUA), an ogress who steals children by placing them in her cedar-bark
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basket, which she wears upon her back. Other characters include sea monsters, giants, and Sasquatch-like wild men. Origin myths are varied (see CREATION STORIES), since each clan or social group has its own origin story, often involving the transformation into human form of a supernatural being. In the time frame involved, today's species had not all developed. Beings were not fully differentiated. Social groups were founded by such beings who decided to take human form. However, descendants continue to embody some physical or personal characteristic of the ancestor. More general tales of origin involve RAVEN, who creates the world by stealing and releasing the sun. Raven tales are widespread on the Northwest Coast, embracing most of the trickster motifs seen in the COYOTE tales farther south. Nootka tales emphasize the role of the transformer in creating the world as we know it, and prefer the culture hero, Kwatyat, who plays much the same TRICKSTER role as Raven. However, throughout the entire Wakashan area, flood stories are common. These are often connected with origin stories, as landforms are created in the wake of the flood. These stories may encapsulate social memories of the late Pleistocene-early Holocene period, when sea levels were much higher than today. Wakashan traditional narratives persist into the present, although in less rich form than before. Few communities possess a large enough body of native speakers to provide a speech community in which these stories may be publicly told. However, English versions of the stories are well known and frequently repeated and referred to. The entextualization of these stories changes the dynamic of transmission, so that the texts of Boas and Sapir may be the ultimate source for many people, rather than intergenerational oral transmission. Further Reading: Franz Boas, Bella Bella Texts (New York: Columbia UP, 1928); Ralph Maud, A Guide to B.C. Indian Myth and Legend (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1982); Edward Sapir, Nootka Texts (New York: AMS, 1939). Michael E. Harkin
WALES. Welsh contributions to Canada began with the Cardigan settlement in NB, the Cam-
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bria settlement in NS, and the London Township settlement in Upper Canada in the years following the Napoleonic Wars. The 19th-century painter Robert Harris, famous for his painting of 'The Fathers of CONFEDERATION,' had a Welsh heritage, as did the writers Robertson DAVIES (who made direct allusion to it), Hilda Glynn-Ward, Anna LEONOWENS, Elizabeth SIMCOE, David THOMPSON, and George WOODCOCK. WALKER, David Harry. Novelist; b Dundee, Scotland, n Feb 1911, d St Andrews, NB, 5 March 1992; son of Elizabeth (Newsom) and Harry Walker; educ Sandhurst C. Walker served in the British army (1931-47), then retired to New Brunswick, where he began to write POPULAR adventure novels, served as a member of the CANADA COUNCIL (1957-61), and acquired numerous honours. His nearly 20 works of fiction for adults and children include the comic Geordie (1950; adapted for film as Wee Geordie, 1956), a tale of a Scottish athlete who reaches the Olympic Games; The Pillar (1952), based on his own experiences as a prisoner of WAR, and Digby (1953), both winners of Governor General's AWARDS; and Where the High Winds Blow (1960), based on his adventures in the NORTH. Lean, Wind, Lean (1984) is his autobiography. WALKER, George F. Playwright; b Toronto 23 Aug 1947; son of Florence (Braybrook) and Malcolm Walker, a labourer. The youngest of four children, Walker grew up in a working class family in Toronto's east end. After leaving high school, he earned a precarious living driving a cab, and found spiritual sustenance by reading voraciously and writing poetry. In 1970, in response to an appeal for new Canadian scripts by the recently formed Factory Theatre Lab, he wrote his first dramatic piece, The Prince of Naples. The work was accepted and produced the following year. During the next four years, Walker wrote five more works for the company: Ambush at Tether's End (1971), Sacktown Rag (1972), Bagdad Saloon (1973), Demerit and Beyond Mozambique (1974). After a year travelling through the United States and British Columbia, he returned to Toronto, where he added directing to his theatrical accomplishments, present-
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ing his new play Ramona and the White Slaves (1976) at the Factory Theatre. In 1977 Walker moved to Toronto Free Theatre, which premiered Gossip and Zastrozzi that season. During the next three years he alternated between the two Toronto companies, spending the 1978-9 season as artistic director of the Factory, and seeing his new plays, Filthy Rich (1979) and Rumours of Our Death (1980), produced at Toronto Free Theatre and the Factory Theatre respectively. During the summer of 1981, he served as playwright-in-residence at the New York Shakespeare Festival, which produced Zastrozzi under the direction of Andrei Serban. In the autumn he returned to Toronto to direct the premiere of Theatre of the Film Noir at Factory Theatre. Thereafter Walker produced an average of one play a year: The Art of War (1982), Science and Madness (1983), Criminals in Love (1984), Better Living (1986), Beautijul City (1987), Nothing Sacred (an adaptation of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, 1988), Love and Anger (1989), Escape from Happiness (1991), and Tough. (1993). Four early plays were collected as Somewhere Else (1999). In 1997 he completed a play cycle entitled Suburban Hotel (rev 1999) featuring six dramas all set in the same motel room: Problem Child, Adult Entertainment, Criminal Genius, Featuring Lor~etta, The End of Civilization, and Risk Everything. Very much the practical playwright, Walker has evolved as a writer as he has gathered theatrical experience. When he became playwrightin-residence at the Factory Theatre in 1971, he had seen only one play in his life. He has now actively mounted his works at not only the Factory, but also in Ottawa and Sydney, Australia. Nor has his practical experience been confined to the stage. His several plays for RADIO and TELEVISION include versions of Prince of Naples (1973) and Ambush at Tether's End (1974) and several original works. He has served as story consultant on the CBC-TV series The Newsroom and written for the Alliance Communications series Due South. What popular success Walker now enjoys in Canada came slowly. Critics were puzzled by his early experimental works and the plays at the Factory and Toronto Free Theatre played to small, coterie audiences. Indeed (not uncharacteristically) his reputation developed faster
abroad, where his plays appeared in many parts of the English-speaking world as well as in French and several foreign languages. After winning his first Canadian AWARD for Zastrozzi in 1977, however, Walker became one of Canada's most honoured playwrights. He has won seven Floyd S. Chalmers Awards (for Zastrozzi, Theatre of the Film Noir, Criminals in Love, Nothing Sacred, Love and Anger, Escape from Happiness, and Problem Child), two Governor General's Awards (for Criminals in Love and Nothing Sacred), and several Dora Mavor Moore Awards (for Theatre of the Film Noir, Nothing Sacred, and Escape from Happiness). In 1994 he won the Toronto Arts Council Award for Drama. Most distinctively, Walker's drama blends outrageous comedy with serious philosophical concern. Behind the strangled laughter in his plays lies a genuinely frightening cosmos - a materialistic world of naked self-interest in which the once-reassuring myths of 19th-century romanticism no longer console. His oeuvre is a series of modern morality plays in which the forces of good fight a desperate rearguard action against the fast-encroaching forces of evil. This astringent mixture of laughter and anxiety has earned Walker his reputation as 'Canada's most serious comic dramatist.' The playwright's career can be somewhat arbitrarily divided into three phases. In his early period (1970-6) he rejected the prevalent realistic mode of English Canadian THEATRE and experimented with a variety of European aesthetic modes. The works were in the tradition of Beckett and Pinter and portrayed ALLEGORICAL or literary characters struggling in a world of mysterious menace. In the most successful of these early plays, Beyond Mozambique, the playwright outrageously BURLESQUES the junglemovie genre. In a remote tropical outpost, Roco, an ex-Nazi mad scientist, has fled the world to carry on his fiendish experiments in secret. Surrounded by cannibals who threaten to overrun the base, he lives with other fugitives from 'reality' including Liduc, a failed priest, and a woman who thinks she is Olga, a character out of Chekhov's Three Sisters. In this fetid environment, even the representative of the law (an ex-RCMP officer named Lance Corporal) is corrupted, and the play ends with the impend-
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ing massacre of the whites by the advancing Natives. The paradigm of humanist values succumbing to the more powerful forces of chaos, anarchy, or darkness continues to underlie the plays Walker produced in his second period (1977-84). But now the stylistic model was the Hollywood detective movie with its fast action, criminal intrigue, and stereotype underworld characters. Theatre of the Film Noir, for example, takes place in 1944 in newly liberated Paris, a society that during the war lost both its traditional sense of morality and its belief in absolute values, and where murder seems not so much blameworthy as a product of circumstances and luck. A similar postwar existentialist despair infuses the socalled 'Power plays' (Gossip, Filthy Rich, and The Art of War). Here the antagonists are Tyrone Power, a rather bumbling detective still capable of sympathizing with the 'pain of the universe,' and General Hackman, a too-obvious embodiment of WAR and fascism. In an inversion of both comic and detective fiction conventions, the play ends with Power's defeat and the escape of the criminal Hackman. During his first decade, Walker tended to create rather stereotypical or literary characters who provoked laughter or generalized angst but elicited little real sympathy. Their anxiety was directed outwards towards an impersonal and immutable force such as luck or evil. In the plays of his third phase (since 1984) Walker's concerns become more pointedly political. He shifts his attention from master criminals such as Zastrozzi to the pathetic losers who haunt the fringes of the working CLASS urban milieu he knows at first hand. In these plays the author becomes more emotionally engaged with his characters and somewhat less despairing. The new note is struck first in Criminals in Love, with a touchingly sympathetic treatment of the young lovers, Junior and Gail, who are the 'criminals' of the title. While once again Walker traces the baleful influence of destiny or 'the shadow' on the lives of these young people, and the play ends with the menace of a police raid, his tone is much more hopeful than previously. Better Living and Escape from Happiness follow the fortunes of Gail and Junior and Gail's eccentric family. Here the threatening forces are more specifically social. In the face of institu-
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tional corruption and injustice, these plays chronicle the gradual consolidation, through the healing power of love, of what had appeared to be a dysfunctional family. Two other plays of this period present a similarly hopeful perspective. Beautiful City concerns the world of corrupt real estate development but focuses on an improbable romance between a disillusioned architect and a Bargain Harold's checkout clerk. Love and Anger presents a 'holy war' between a down-and-out lawyer, who speaks up for the disadvantaged, and the power elite as represented by a press baron and a politician. Here again, Walker's love seems to win out over his anger and the play ends in true comic fashion with the expulsion of the forces of evil. Suburban Motel shows a further politicization of the playwright's vision. Like the earlier Tough, which dealt with teenage pregnancy, the plays in this series examine very particular social problems such as child abuse and downsizing. While the characters are increasingly complex and sympathetic, the underlying anger at social injustic is deeper and more focused. Problem Child, for example, examines the insensitive way in which the media and social workers treat individuals, and the potentially explosive anger this generates in the victims. These plays do not end so much as pause before the ultimate denouement, which Walker seems to suggest is some form of social cataclysm. Whereas previously the threatening forces seemed existential, now they wear a recognizable capitalistic face. Summaries and plot outlines cannot capture the almost manic comic energy that infuses Walker's plays. Much of the HUMOUR derives from brilliant dialogue and the totally uninhibited and outrageous opinions pronounced by characters who say what we might feel but never express. A great deal of the plays' audience appeal is a result of this carnival release of frustration and resentment. But while the format is comic, Walker for the most part repudiates the comic resolution. His plays' endings presage not the consolidation of society as in traditional dramatic modes, but its final convulsion. The effect is deeply disturbing - rather like a children's fairy tale without a fairy godmother. Indeed there is something rather childlike about Walker's vision. His imaginative world is inhabited by larger-than-life villains, powerful ogres,
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frightening bogey men, wicked stepmothers, and generally innocent victims. It is a world that at one level seems simplistic or unreal, but which nevertheless, at least temporarily, convinces because of Walker's ability to infuse the laughter of innocence with the bitter indignation of experience. Further reading: Chris Johnson, 'George F. Walker,' Post-Colonial English Drama: Commonwealth Drama since 1960, ed Bruce King (London: Macmillan, 1992): 82-96; 'George F. Walker Directs George F. Walker,' Theatre History in Canada 9.2 (Fall 1988): 157-72; Robert Wallace, 'Looking for the Light: A Conversation with George F. Walker,' Canadian Drama 14.1 (1988): 22-33. Neil Carson
WALLACE, Bronwen. Poet, short story writer, essayist; b Kingston, ON, 26 May 1945, d Kingston, ON, 25 Aug 1989; daughter of Ferdinand and Marguerite (Wagar) Wallace. Bronwen Wallace was a lifelong resident of Kingston. She received her BA (Hons) at Queen's U in 1967 and her masters in 1969, and she subsequently worked at Queen's U as a part-time teacher. In a career cut short by cancer, she distinguished herself as a writer of great power and sensitivity, and an eloquent commentator on WOMEN'S lives. By the time of her death, she had published several exceptional volumes of poetry, including Marrying into the Family (1980; winner of the National Magazine AWARD for Poetry), Signs of the Former Tenant (1983; winner of the Pat Lowther Award), Common Magic (1985) and The Stubborn Particulars of Grace (1987). These works delineate the contours of women's experience, focusing on the entrapments, enforced silences, hidden truths, and potential brutalities of domestic existence. In 'The Heroes You Had as a Girl,' Wallace's narrator recalls the days of adolescence spent with friends, watching the older boys who were their 'heroes,' but in whose eyes the girls were marginal, never more than 'part of the landscape.' Later in life, when the woman encounters one of these men - now balding and overweight - her immediate evaluation of her own 'figure' suggests a self-image that still occupies the margins she learned to inhabit while young. In 'The Woman in This Poem' a house-
wife considers infidelity, insanity, promiscuity, and death as avenues of escape from her life only to find herself emotionally and psychologically ensnared by the duties and relational obligations that compose a social persona. In a similar vein, A Simple Poem for Virginia Woolf' artfully portrays woman-as-poet as problematic, a possibility of self-articulation caught in the interstices of the cultural marginalization of women's voices and the obligations of housework and grocery shopping. Several of the pieces in The Stubborn Particulars of Grace draw on Wallace's experience of working in a Kingston shelter for battered women. Three collections of Wallace's writing have been published posthumously. Set in working class Kingston, People You'd Trust Your Life To (1990) is a selection of short stories that develop the themes of her poetry. Keep That Candle Burning (1991) collects prose poems. Arguments with the World (1992) comprises the columns on women's issues Wallace wrote for the Kingston Whig-Standard. During the 19805, Wallace also collaborated on two DOCUMENTARY FILMS: All You Have to Do (1982), a moving portrayal of a friend's struggle with Hodgkin's disease; and That's Why I'm Talking, a profile of Canadian poets Pier Giorgio DI cicco, Mary DI MICHELE, Robert PRIEST, and Carolyn Smart. Further reading: Donna Bennett, 'Bronwen Wallace and the Meditative Poem,' Queen's Q 98:1 (Spring 1991): 58-79Michael Greene
WALLACE, Ian. Illustrator, children's writer; b Niagara Falls, ON, 31 March 1950; son of Kathleen and Robert Wallace. He is a prolific writer and illustrator of numerous AWARD-winning children's books including Chin Chiang and the Dragons Dance (1984), which won the Canadian Library Assoc Award, Best Illustrated Book in 1984, and The Name of the Tree (1989), which was given both the Mr Christie Book Award and Elizabeth Mrazik-Cleaver Canadian Picture Book Award. Known for the vibrancy and extreme accuracy of his illustrations, his nomination for the prestigious Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 1993 is a clear indication of the international prestige that he enjoys. J. Kieran Kealy
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WALLACE, Joseph Sylvester. Poet, journalist; b Toronto 29 Oct 1890, d Vancouver i Dec 1975; son of Mary (Redmond) and Thomas Wallace. Wallace joined the Communist Party in 1922, and for fifty years contributed poems and political commentary to left-wing publications. He completed his first book of poems in 1943 (Night Is Ended) while interned under the War Measures Act. Two more collections were published in Toronto in the 19505; three were published in the Soviet Union, where he was immensely popular. Although limited by traditionalist forms, Wallace's poetry expresses his fervent political commitment with epigrammatic wit and, occasionally, with considerable lyric power. James Doyle
WALMSLEY, Tom (Thomas). Playwright, novelist, poet, screenwriter; b Liverpool, England, 13 Dec 1948; son of Veda Maxine (Orr) and Thomas Walmsley, electrician. He grew up in Oshawa, ON, battling heroin addiction and in constant trouble with the law. His books of poetry, Rabies (1975) and Lexington Hero (1976), draw on the same naturalistic world of crime and violence, drugs and sado-masochistic sex that would characterize nearly all his subsequent work. The Working Man (1976) and his most notable play, Something Red (1980), were first produced by Vancouver's New Play Centre. Significant Toronto premieres include the comedy White Boys (prod 1982), Getting Wrecked (prod 1985) - Dora Mavor Moore AWARD winner for CHILDREN'S theatre - and the drama Blood (prod 1995). He also wrote the novel Dr. Tin (1979) and its sequel, Shades (1994), and the SCREENPLAY for Paris, France (1994). Further reading: Robert Wallace and Cynthia Zimmerman, The Work (Toronto: Coach House, 1982): 68-79. Jerry Wasserman
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Conflicts before the First World War. War writing in Canada likely begins with Baron de LAHONTAN'S Nouveaux Voyages... (1703), which chronicles his campaigns against the IROQUOIS in the i68os and draws on the Enlightenment ideology of the
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NOBLE SAVAGE. Other early writing dates from the Seven Years War, concluded by the Treaty of Paris (1763). While few literary figures recorded their responses to these events at the time, several did so a century later - Rosanna LEPROHON, in The Manor House ofDe Villerai (1859), for example, uses the dramatic HISTORICAL military events of 1756-60 as background to her romantic narrative. Her hero enlists in the Royal Rousillon Regiment that attacked Ticonderoga in 1758; other characters participate in the conquering of Fort William Henry in 1757. Leprohon's depiction of the French in Montreal society finds its counterpart in the English temporary sojourner Frances BROOKE'S The History of Emily Montague (1769), set in the English GARRISON of Quebec. Adele BIBAUD (using the PSEUDONYM Eleda Gonneville), wrote about the British attack on Quebec City in 1759 in Trois ans en Canada, an historical ROMANCE in which General Louis-Joseph de Montcalm makes an appearance. Laure CONAN tells of the 1760 Battle of Sainte-Foy in La seve immortelle (1925); her battle-weary hero is torn between his desire to return to France or remain true to the patriotic cause in Canada. P-J. AUBERT DE GASPE'S Les anciens canadiens (1863), also about the Seven Years War, recounts the story of Scottish and French friends who find themselves on opposite sides. Ultimately a tale of the consequences of the French defeat, the novel was adapted for the stage in 1865. Gilbert PARKER'S The Seats of the Mighty (1896), made into a popular film starring Lionel Barrymore several decades after its publication, relays the adventures of a British army spy who is imprisoned during the last days of the French regime in Quebec. Writers in the 2oth century also found the 'Conquest' fascinating. In Roger Sudden (1994), Thomas RADDALL sets the demise of the ANCIEN REGIME in North America against the growth of the British menace, focusing on the French fortress of Louisbourg and the founding of Halifax in 1749. Other battles fought on Canadian soil figure in literature as well. John RICHARDSON'S Wacousta (1832), set during Pontiac's 1763 siege of Forts Detroit and Michilimackinac, skilfully blends Elizabethan revenge tragedy with the SENTIMENTAL and GOTHIC, and was later adapted for the stage. Much early poetry by
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English visitor-poets - such as Valentine Neville's description of The Reduction ofLouisburg (1759) and George Cockings' War: an heroick poem (1762) - also describes these key military affairs. Other events related to these AngloFrench struggles, such as the ACADIAN expulsion, are recounted in several relatively unsophisticated novels by A-J. LEGER and numerous others. The events of the War of 1812, which occurred (1812-4) at the height of the Napoleonic conflicts and saw the United States declaring war on Britain and attacking Canada, also attracted much narrative attention, as in Richardson's sequel to Wacousta, The Canadian Brothers (1840; rpt 1992, ed Donald Stephens). Richardson, who fought as a gentleman volunteer beside Tecumseh, explores the CanadianAmerican hostilities and recalls his experiences as a prisoner of war in Kentucky during this period. His poem Tecumseh (1828) describes these antagonistic relations; Annals of Niagara (1896) takes up the border fights; and The War of 1812 (1842) constitutes the one volume he completed, at the request of the Legislative Assembly of Upper Canada, of a projected series of historical volumes. The War of 1812 also figures in Charles E. Beardsley's The Victims of Tyranny (1847); Agnes Maule MACHAR'S historical romance For King and Country (1874); W.H. WITHROW'S Neville Trueman, the Pioneer Preacher (1880); and Joseph Doutre's Les fiances de 1812 (1844). Not to be overlooked is the story of Laura Secord, who figures prominently in the War of 1812 (see HISTORICAL ANALOGUES); she was celebrated in Sarah Anne CURZON'S play Laura Secord: The Heroine of 1812 and other works. Another play to explore the War of 1812 is Charles MAIR'S overly long and sentimental Tecumseh (1886), in which General Isaac Brock dies in glorious victory at the battle of Queenston Heights. Several novelists wrote of the Canadian involvement in the American War of Independence (1775-83) which, triggered by the resentment of British economic policies, gave way to the forceful overthrow of the British government. American-born John LESPERANCE wrote an even-handed account of Montgomery's illfated siege of Quebec City in The Bastonnais (1877). Raddall, too, drew on the American Rev-
olution for his subject, in such novels as His Majesty's Yankees (1942), about Nova Scotia in the 17705; The Rover (1958), highlighting political unrest in the 13 colonies; The Governor's Lady (1960), following the demise of British rule; and Hangman's Beach (1966), set during the period 1803-12, anticipating the coming confrontation with America. Sharon POLLOCK'S Fair Liberty's Call (1995) concerns the LOYALIST immigration to Canada after the Revolution, and seeks to understand present-day Canada by exploring the past; like Curzon's account of Secord, this play also enlarges the concept of HEROISM by handing a prominent role to a cross-dressing woman warrior (see also WOMEN). Among the many works that touch on the REBELLION OF 1837, which in Quebec expressed a resurgent French Canadian NATIONALISM, are such novels as Parker's The Pomp of the Lavilettes (1896) and Bibaud's Les fiances de St-Eustache (1910), which draws on the actual speeches of Louis-Joseph PAPINEAU that inspired the Patriotes. Somewhat later works include Jacques PERRON'S Le del de Quebec (1969), which marks the centenary of these patriotic rebellions, viewing the action through the eyes of the METIS and the Quebecois. Perron's drama, Les grands soleils (1958), juxtaposes the 19505 Duplessis era with the circumstances leading to the rebellions of 1837-8, which the playwright believes occasioned the cultural birth of the Quebecois. Another drama, Pierre PETITCLAIR'S Griphon, never performed, makes direct reference to political events in Lower Canada, and William KIRBY'S The U.E. (1859), though unfocused, blends the Loyalist challenges of 1776 and 1812 with the 1837 Rebellion. Of the few fictional accounts of the RED RIVER Rebellion (1869-70; see MANITOBA) most focus on Metis leader Louis RIEL, including a small number of temporary residents who wrote fictionally of their own experiences: Sir William Butler in Red Cloud: The Solitary Sioux (1882), and John Mackie, who served with the North-West Mounted Police, in The Rising of the Red Sun (1905), which casts Riel in a bad light (see MOUNTIES). After their defeat, the METIS moved farther west, once again attempting to assert their rights under Riel in the NORTH-WEST REBELLION (1885). Several novels from this period -
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for example, Joseph-Emile Poirier's Arpents de neige (1909) - continue to misconstrue Kiel's motives. Much later, in The Scorched-Wood People (1977), Rudy WIEBE rejected conventional interpretations of Kiel. Told from the point of view of the Metis people, his novel ultimately testifies to their courage, to the military leadership of Gabriel Dumont, and to Riel himself, whom Wiebe depicts as a complex but great leader. From a contemporary perspective, Perron's rarely performed drama La tete du roi (1963) draws unique parallels between the Front de Liberation de Quebec and their vandalism of a statue of Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham (see OCTOBER CRISIS) with Kiel's 1870 and 1885 rebellions a century earlier. Wiebe also recorded in his fiction other battles between NATIVES and whites, as in The Temptations of Big Bear (1973), which delineates conflicts between the federal government and the CREE. Pollock's play Walsh (1973), a historical DOCUMENTARY, depicts Sitting Bull's exile in Canada after the Montana massacre at Little Big Horn in 1876, and his relationship with Supt James Walsh of the Mounties. Walsh, sympathetic to Big Bear's plight, becomes bitter and disillusioned after the Canadian government's betrayal of Sitting Bull's people, 5,000 of whom tried, unsuccessfully, to survive in the Wood Mountain area of southern Saskatchewan. While the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1) is the subject of D.C. Scott's story 'Sedan' (1890), and writers such as Georges BOUCHER DE BOUCHERVILLE fought for the Emperor Maximilian in Mexico (see LATIN AMERICA), the last battle of the i9th century that Canadians participated in was the Second Boer War, which broke out in Oct 1899 in South AFRICA. As tension mounted prior to the outbreak, the Englishlanguage Canadian press urged Canada to send troops to support Britain, but the Quebec press insisted that Canada's interests did not extend to South Africa, and moreover, that the Afrikaners were, like the Quebecois, oppressed by British imperialism. In spite of their objections, Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier sent 8,000 men to the war; 224 lost their lives and 252 were wounded. But the Boer War did not seem to capture the imagination of the nation's writers, though Barbara Roberts tells about Gertrude
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Richardson's pacifist activities during this period in A Reconstructed World (1996). (English-born Richardson, who emigrated to Manitoba in 1911, was an influential writer and activist in both suffrage and peace movements; see VOTING RIGHTS.) The events of the Boer War also propelled the articulate journalist Olivar ASSELIN to organize the Ligue Nationaliste in order to bring together the forces of opposition to imperialism in Canada. But in 1915, Asselin shocked his supporters not only by enlisting in the First World War, but by organizing a battalion entirely composed of French Canadians. In Pourquoije m'enrole (Why I Enlisted, 1916), he claimed he was not fighting in defence of the British Empire, but coming to France's rescue. First World War. The 2oth century provides the most scope for Canadian war writing. At the outbreak of the First World War (1914-8), Canada was automatically at war; but as earlier, anglophone and francophone perceptions of the war effort differed markedly. Quebec was unenthusiastic about voluntary enlistment, and adamantly opposed to conscription. Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden declared conscription a necessary measure in 1917 and offered a political coalition to Laurier, the Liberal leader. Laurier refused, every French-speaking MP sharing his opposition to the plan. By contrast, almost all English-speaking MPs supported conscription, which was implemented after the 1917 election. By 1918, of the 125,000 conscripted, only 24,000 reached the front. In the end, of the 600,000 who signed up in the First World War, only 50,000 were francophone. Like many political issues raised by poets of the First World War - the causes of the conflict, Canada's involvement in Flanders, the reasons behind the continuation of war, or war profiteers - conscription is rarely seriously analyzed; rather, the poems, whether by combatants or people on the home front, reflect a remarkably uniform naivete. Most of the poets -Jean BLEWETT, A . S . B O U R I N O T , Wilfred C A M P B E L L ,
Helena COLEMAN, Douglas D U R K I N , Katherine HALE, Isabel Ecclestone MACKAY, John MCCRAE, Marjorie PICKTHALL, C.G.D. ROBERTS, F.G. SCOTT, Virna SHEARD, Robert STEAD, and others whose work appears in separate collections and
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ANTHOLOGIES such as John Garvin's Canadian Poets of the Great War (1918) - failed to portray the day-to-day horrors of the battlefields. By contrast, these poems overflow with expressions of loyalty to Britain and an overriding confidence that the Empire can easily repulse the menacing Germans. These poems also feature a surfeit of patriotic slogans and an excess of praise - for Canadian soldiers' great deeds on behalf of freedom and liberty; for Canadian victories at Ypres, Vimy Ridge, or Langemarck; for the strength and bravery of the mothers and wives who 'give' their sons to battle; for the women who contribute to the war effort as knitters and factory workers; for the growing selfreliance and maturity of Canada as a nation. McCrae's IN FLANDERS FIELDS reassures soldiers that their sacrifices will never be forgotten. Only when the final price of war was realized one-tenth of those who enlisted died; 200,000 more were casualties - did the doubts begin. Robert SERVICE and Edgar W. McGinnis (who fought in the frontlines) were among the few who depicted the brutality of war frankly. Both Service's The Rhymes of a Red Cross Man (1916) and McGinnis's Poems Written at the 'Front' (1918) eschew the literary conventions of sacrifice and godliness. Frank PREWETT'S Poems (1920) collects his trench verses, written in the Georgian manner. In spite of the political ferment caused by the conscription crisis, few francophone men or women took up the subject of war in their fiction, with the exception of the curious novel by Ulric Barthe - Simtlia similibus; ou, La guerre au Canada: essai romantique sur un sujet d'actualite (1916) - in which two young journalists liberate Quebec from German capture. Laetitia Filion's Yolande la fiancee (1935) finds the titular character repeatedly asking, 'Qu'est-ce que cela pourrait bien nous faire a nous, ici au Canada, s'il y avait la guerre en Europe?' There was no shortage of fiction in Englishspeaking Canada, however. Men wrote about forty novels between 1914 and 1926 in which war plays a part; international successes at the time included Beverly Baxter's The Blower of Bubbles (1920), Ralph CONNOR'S The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land (1919), S.N. Dancey's The Faith of a Belgian (1916), John Murray GIBBON'S Drums Afar (1918), Basil KING'S The City of Comrades (1918), T.G.
ROBERTS'S The Fighting Starkleys (1922), and works by Bertrand SINCLAIR and Robert Stead. As Peter Buitenhuis observes in The Great War of Words (1988), many of these writers were heavily influenced by British propaganda in North America, directed by Gilbert Parker. Thus their fictions camouflage the horrifying conditions of war and aim instead to incite nationalistic feelings, to encourage Canada's participation, and to depict the Germans as marauding barbarians. Employing the rhetoric of chivalry, these writers draw upon the conventions of medieval romance to structure their narratives of soldier heroes performing incredible military feats and/ or dying gallantly. If they survive, they return to society dedicated to making the world a better place by promoting pioneer and family values. These sentimental novels make for light reading today, but they illuminate later works such as Donald JACK'S humorous multi-volume The Bandy Papers (1973-87), Robertson DAVIES' Fifth Business (1970), and Timothy FINDLEY'S The Wars (i977)> which either PARODY these conventions or use them in a more complex fashion. A decade after the horrors they had witnessed and the traumas they experienced as enlisted men, Peregrine ACLAND (All Else Is Folly, 1929), Charles Yale HARRISON (Generals Die in Bed, 1928), and Philip CHILD (God's Sparrows, 1937) delivered hard-hitting accounts of life at the front. They depict war as a degrading experience where powerless soldiers, caught in a war of attrition and led by incompetent officers, wait among ghastly conditions to be killed. Or, as Harrison's title aptly suggests, while generals die in bed, ordinary soldiers live and die like animals amongst damp, mud, lice, rats, and disease. Acland's novel is the first in Canada to come to terms with the hellish reality of the Western Front and Child's provides a sophisticated examination of the spiritual impact of war, but Harrison's offers the most authentic account of the brutalizating effects of war. The fictions by English Canadian women put the lie to the common assumption that women understood nothing about war. A number of women rewrite the term 'total war' by arguing that war is catastrophic, affecting every living creature, including children and domestic animals; their texts thereby challenge the convention that a war story simply concerns a hero's
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experiences in the trenches. Correspondingly, their fictions concentrate on the home front. Francis Marion BEYNON'S Aleta Dey (1919) Grace Blackburn's The Man Child (1930), Nellie MCCLUNG'S The Next of Kin (1917), and Laura Goodman SALVERSON'S The Dark Weaver (1937) are set in Manitoba; L.M. MONTGOMERY'S Rilla of Ingleside (192,0) takes place in a PEI village and Evah McKowan's Janet ofKootenay (1920) in rural British Columbia. Only Gertrude Arnold's Sister Anne! Sister Anne!! (1919) depicts a nurse's experience tending the wounded and the dying overseas. These writers' attitudes to conflict varied. McClung, a pacifist prior to the war, assumed a pro-war stance when her son enlisted, arguing in The Next of Kin and 'Men and Money' (Maclean's, 1919) that every family had an obligation to send sons to the trenches. She also indicated her support of the war effort by GHOST WRITING Three Times and Out: A Canadian Boy's Experiences in Germany (1918) for a Canadian private named Simmons, who had been a prisoner in Germany and made several escapes. Both Beynon and Salverson, by contrast, were pacifists. Salverson raises the issue only in the conclusion to The Viking Heart (1923), but Beynon's Aleta, subjected to parental beatings as a child, spends the rest of her life advocating peaceful means of settling disputes. Critical of the government's suppression of information, Aleta is incarcerated for distributing pamphlets advocating freedom of speech, and then ironically killed by a returned soldier for speaking her piece. With the exception of Jean Blewett's sentimental Heart Stories (1919), these women writers are unified in protesting the social marginalization of women's voices and values, and in forcefully reiterating that women deserve a place alongside men, not as their subalterns. One of the tactics Canadian women writers employ to demonstrate that women are not men's inferiors is to show them 'in action,' functioning in the workplace as effective teachers, farmers, and shopkeepers. J.G. SIME'S 'Munitions' (Sister Woman, 1919) illustrates the joy women feel once they are liberated from poorly paid domestic drudgery and can move into better-paying jobs in the munitions industry. (Sime's Canada Chaps, 1917, offers vignettes of Canadian women and men in wartime, but as part of the formu-
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laic Chaps series, it lacks the emancipatory qualities of Sister Woman.) Canadian women's novels were also pleas for peace. They pointed to the dangers of propaganda and made their characters resistant to it. One of the strengths of these novels lies in their promotion of non-violent ways of solving problems. Writers encourage their characters to be tolerant of others' beliefs, and to solve disagreements by exploring differences of opinion through negotiation. They demonstrate that verbal battles are the only ones worth waging, and that the only 'power' worth possessing is that of the mind. A number of later writers imaginatively recreated First World War events in their poetry, drama, and fiction. With the advantage of distance from the hostilities and the benefit of studying their predecessors' work, they were freer to evaluate the war. Alden NOWLAN'S critical poems include 'Ypres: 1915,' in which a soldier tells of his disgust at the war after only a few days in the trenches. Marilyn BOWERING'S Grandfather Was a Soldier (1987) skilfully juxtaposes the horrors of the battlefront with the landscape of modern France, demonstrating how the past continues to influence the present. Philip Child, an artillery subaltern in 1914-8 who found that the horrors of war remained with him for the rest of his life, revisits the war in a long narrative poem, The Wood of the Nightingale (1965). Contemporary playwrights also drew upon these events. John GRAY and Eric Peterson's musical play Billy Bishop Goes to War (1981) depicts Bishop as a complex fighter-pilot hero. Anne CHISLETT'S Quiet in the Land (1983) demonstrates how a pacifist religious sect - the Amish in Ontario - responds to the pressures of war. Wendy LILL'S The Fighting Days (1985) highlights the ideological quarrels over conscription and pacifism between McClung and Beynon. Colleen Wagner's award-winning The Monument (1993) is a harrowing account of a young soldier convicted of war crimes. A number of novelists also revisited the war. Kevin MAJOR'S short No Man's Land (1995) depicts the slaughter of the Newfoundland Regiment at the 1916 Battle of the Somme. Hugh MACLENNAN, who, like Raddall, experienced the explosion that destroyed much of HALIFAX in 1917 when an ammunition ship exploded in the harbour, viv-
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idly reconstructs those events in Barometer Rising (1941), a tragedy Robert MAC NEIL also explores in Burden of Desire (1992). In Two Solitudes (1945), MacLennan also raises the contentious issue of conscription. French Canadians did not re-vision the events of the First World War in the same way, although RINGUET'S Trente arpents (1940) explores the period, and Lespoids dujour (1949) takes up the subjects of war and industrialization. The latter novel tells about a young man who swears revenge against the authorities who considered him unfit to serve; although he becomes a successful urban businessman, he returns to the simple agrarian way of life in old Quebec prior to 1939. In another vein, Max BRAITHWAITE reminds readers of the need to redefine the temporal limits of war; his Why Shoot the Teacher? (1965) features an English war bride who waves goodbye to her family and follows a Canadian soldier to a new land, but who suffers such cultural deprivation and emotional neglect on the prairies that she nearly goes mad. The end of the hostilities fails to bring peace to the home front in other ways as well. Jack HODGINS's Broken Ground (1998) also casts a critical eye on the treatment of war veterans, especially as regards land settlements, and at the same time examines how the war, and its explosive disruption of received values, reconfigures the shape of the entire 20th century. Spanish Civil War. In the 19305, a number of Canadians on the home front, such as F.R. SCOTT, were sympathetic to the Spanish Civil War (1936-9); 13,000 volunteers went to fight (in the unofficial 'Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion' the 'Mac-Paps/ named for the leaders of the 1837 Rebellion - supporting the Republican cause against the fascists) but few writers besides Dorothy LIVESAY took up the events. Her poems appeared in Selected Poems (1957) and her reminiscences in Right Hand Left Hand (1977). In The Watch That Ends the Night (1959), MacLennan writes of a character destroyed by the Spanish Civil War, but his novel, which laments in general the broad failure of the 19305, also covers other historical periods and social issues. In 1995, Nicola Vulpe and Maha Albari edited
Sealed in Struggle, an anthology of Canadian poetry that refers to the Spanish Civil War. Second World War. A scant two decades after the tragedy of the First World War, Canadians found themselves once again involved in conflict. Although the nation was not automatically at war in 1939, there was little debate in Parliament over Canada's participation. The government tried to avoid the conscription battles of the First World War by pledging not to conscript men for overseas service, but eventually, Prime Minister WL. Mackenzie King's ambiguous proclamation, 'Conscription if necessary, but not necessarily conscription,' served only to anger French Canadians. As news of the defeats suffered by Britain and France continued to be reported in the presses, the issue was once again raised, and in 1944, over 16,000 conscripts were ordered overseas, provoking a political crisis that almost destroyed the government. While about 150,000 Quebecois enlisted (more than double their numbers in the First World War), their contribution, in light of the i.i million overall enlistment, was disproportionate. Canadian losses were high: 42,000 were killed in service and thousands more wounded, but the end result was nonetheless a swelling of national pride. Fewer Canadian poets wrote about the Second World War than the First, but those who did moved away from Romanticism and metrical rigidity towards a more colloquial form and greater variation in tone. In Poems for People, Livesay attempted to see the war through veterans' eyes. Patrick ANDERSON and Bertram WARR tell of mothers' and wives' bereavement. Warr, already living in England at the outbreak of war, at the age of 25, went down with a Halifax bomber during a Royal Air Force raid over Germany; his broadsheet of 14 poems, Yet a Little Onwards, appeared posthumously in 1945. While Earle BIRNEY and Livesay feel the loss of nature's solace, that subject alone does not sustain poets' interest. E.J. PRATT, Raymond SOUSTER, and Louis DUDEK began to interrogate the war, to examine its ability to dehumanize, and to analyze the meaning of sacrifice. Souster in particular examines physical mutilation, psychological damage, and death. Pratt's narrative
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'Dunkirk' (1941) depicts the slaughter of thousands of soldiers, but by distorting the allies' heroism and the enemies' primitivism, it belies its own involvement in the cause it seeks to record. Other poets, such as Irving LAYTON, in A Red Carpet for the Sun (1959), are disturbed by the wounding and crippling of men. Anderson's long poem on Canada, The White Centre (1946), describes, among other subjects, wartime Montreal. A.M. KLEIN'S The Hitleriad (1944) attacks both Nazism and Hitler. Pessimism and despair were not the dominant poetic responses to war, however; a number of poets also wrote about hope. Birney finds his in a spirit of unselfishness and love, whereas Douglas LEPAN draws upon the courage and resilience of the fighting man. Others seek hope in the future. But when victory finally came in 1945, few of these poets were elated, for little had been learned; several gloomily realize that war could easily happen again. LePan, a gunner with the First Canadian Field Regiment in Italy, captures the urgency and despair of battles fought in the air and on the ground; The Net and the Sword (1953) was inspired by his experiences in the Italian campaign. Birney, who had served overseas as a personnel selection officer, in particular questions what the future could hold under the state of tension during the Cold War and the ever-present threat of nuclear destruction, and he queries what the artist can hope to accomplish in the face of such a bleak future. The men's fiction that emerged during the Second World War does not perceive war as a crusade for the restoration of the right; nor does it unquestionably assert the justness of the Allied cause, find nobility in self-sacrifice, or cling to illusions about life after the war. Perhaps because many of the writers had served overseas, their war was not about heroes. Their soldier figures are not gallant young men laying down their lives for the good of their country, but ordinary men who carry their weaknesses or limitations with them. These novels focus on the inner consciousness of the individual fighting man who is increasingly alienated in mechanized battles, yet feels a responsibility to fight to the finish. The bravery of the 'little man' is a recurring theme, as in George SALLANS'S Little Man (1942), which tells the story of a man who
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survives the First World War but loses his son to the Second. In Execution (1958), Colin MCDOUGALL traces Canadian soldiers through major offensives in Italy, culminating in a bloody battle at Monte Cassino, but the 'execution(s)' of the title depict the senseless killing of innocent victims in wartime. Edward Meade's Remember Me (1946), written overseas and sent home to his wife to type, provides documentary-like descriptions of London under attack, aerial dogfights, and the Normandy invasion. In Storm Below (1949), Hugh GARNER - who served in both the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War explores the private thoughts of sailors who spend six days on convoy escort duty in the North Atlantic. Birney's comic, episodic Turvey (1949), in part a SATIRE on the Intelligence Corps, features a hapless recruit who is motivated to fight by simple patriotism, but the war ends before he gets his chance. A somewhat uncharacteristic work in this period is Edward MCCOURT'S Music at the Close (1947); set primarily on the prairies, it features a disillusioned young man who finds (as did many First World War fictional heroes) peace within himself as he dies gallantly on the battlefront. Other somewhat unsuccessful novels include Norman LEVINE'S semi-autobiographical The Angled Road (1952), the most convincing parts of the novel occurring when the bomber pilot is stationed in England. Souster, too, who enlisted in 1941 but never saw action, pseudonymously wrote three novels, including The Winter of Time (1940), about air-force men, but their crudity places them in the genre of pulp fiction. LePan's The Deserter recounts a soldier's difficulty finding a balance between meaninglessness and commitment in the demobilization period following the war in London. Other war stories include Ralph Allen's Home Made Banners (1946), James NABLO'S The Long November (1946), and Lionel SHAPIRO'S The Sixth of June (1955). James Jackson's To the Edge of Morning (1964) is one of the few novels to deal with the air war in the Indian Ocean; a psychological case study, it is particularly noteworthy for its evocation of flight combat. Two short story collections that have a more POPULAR appeal are Gregory CLARK'S War Stories (1964) and Mabel Tinkiss Good's The Bridge at Dieppe (1973).
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A number of works explore Nazi Germany and the impact of the Holocaust on survivors (see also JEWISH), such as Philip Child's Day of Wrath (1945) and several of Klein's stories, published in the 19305 and 19405 (collected in Short Stories, 1983), which consider the Nazi menace, the threat of the atomic bomb, and the nascent Cold War. Klein's poetic novel The Second Scroll (1951) features a young man who searches for an uncle who survived the Holocaust. Henry KREISEL, who was interned with his parents as an enemy alien, gives a vivid day-to-day account of life in the camp in 'Diary of an Internment' (Another Country, ed Shirley Neuman, 1985). In Bernard VAC'S Deuxportes ... une adresse (1952), based on the writer's experiences in the liberation of France, the protagonist returns to Montreal after his tour of duty but, unable to forget what he has witnessed, finds life meaningless. (Vac himself joined the Canadian Army Medical Corps in 1942 and served in London as a surgeon member of the field ambulance corps.) Other novels include Jean Vaillancourt's Les canadiens errants (1952) and Jean-Jules RICHARD'S Neuf jours de hame (1948). Several important plays dealing with wartime issues in Quebec emerged some years after the war. Gratien GELINAS' Tit-Coq (1950) features a young army recruit who feels that his illegitimacy as an orphan denies his acceptance into Quebec society. Marcel DUBE'S Un simple soldat (1958) picks up a similar theme; his central character is also a Quebec archetype of alienation and frustration, one who returns from the European war before he has had a chance to prove himself, and who then attempts to overcome his sense of failure by enlisting in the Korean combat of the 19505. Like Tit-Coq, the play depicts an URBAN wartime climate, but in this instance, the realities of the postwar situation - primarily unemployment - concern the writer more. Women's fiction of the Second World War is somewhat disappointing after the feisty novels about the First. Irene BAIRD tells her story in He Rides the Sky (1941) from a male point of view, the novel clearly intended as a tribute to the men of the air force. Baird takes a series of letters that parents made available and weaves them into a single set, whereby a disciplined Canadian pilot writes to his family chronicling
his training as a pilot, but the dialogue remains unconvincing and the tone overly exuberant. Gwethalyn GRAHAM'S Earth and High Heaven (1944), which dominated the American bestseller list in 1945, candidly examines antiSemitism in Montreal. (Other novels that raise anti-Semitic issues are Andre GIROUX'S Au deld des visages, 1948, and Yves THERIAULT'S Aaron, 1954.) In addition to questions about the relation between war, ethnicity, and poverty, Gabrielle ROY'S Bonheur d'occasion (The Tin Flute, 1945) takes up another major concern in women's writing - unwanted pregnancy, one of the side effects of war for women. Alice Boissonneau's Eileen McCullough (1976) also recounts the dilemma of a young pregnant woman who is left to cope when her 'lover' runs off to join the army. Mavis GALLANT'S story, 'The Flowers of Spring' (Northern R, 1950) points to a different challenge married women faced - how to resume a normal life with a seriously wounded veteran. And still another postwar dilemma surfaces for a returned soldier in Lillian Beynon Thomas's New Secret (1946): he has been brought from overseas during the war to work on the atomic bomb in New Mexico, and remains so disturbed by the human potential for destruction that he is unable to make a successful integration into civilian life. (Like her sister Francis Marion Beynon, Thomas was a well-known Manitoba suffragist and journalist; because of their unpopular pacifist leanings, she and her husband Vernon Thomas fled to New York during the First World War. They returned to Manitoba some years later.) Although Edward McCourt presented an unhappy Irish war bride in Home Is the Stranger (1950), none of his contemporaries - male or female - followed his lead. Why there should be such a paucity of stories about these women is curious, given that nearly 48,000 women, mostly from Britain, moved to Canada after the war, bringing with them some 22,000 children. One of the best examinations of the difficulties these women faced appears in Mavis Gallant's introduction to editor Joyce Hibbert's compilation The War Brides (1974). While many of these 'brides' (a term Gallant points out they detested) were unprepared for the harsh living conditions, many managed to adapt. Several more of these life stories were collected in
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Blackouts to Bright Lights (1995), edited by Phillis Spence and Barbara Ladouceur, who (with Frances Martin Day) also edited 31 memoirs of women in the Canadian Red Cross Corps as Women Overseas (1988) (see LIFE WRITING). The majority of those depicted in contemporary literature do not fare well. The three English, Scottish, and Italian brides in Margaret HOLLINGSWORTH'S play Ever Loving (1981) have serious difficulties adapting to their husbands' lives, primarily because these former soldiers have overstated their potential. The future also looks grim for Gallant's mother and son in 'Up North' (Home Truths, 1981), and the war bride in Margaret ATWOOD'S The Robber Bride (1993) is so miserable in the 'cultural backwater' of Toronto that she abandons her daughter and flees to California. Joyce MARSHALL'S 'bride' in 'An Old Woman' (A Private Place, 1975) is eventually able to escape from her crazed husband and finds work as a midwife in the remote Quebec countryside. A few writers in the latter half of the 20th century revisited the Second World War in drama and poetry. John MURRELL'S drama Waitingfor the Parade (1980) tells the story of five Calgary women who gather to work for the war effort while their men are overseas. One of Frank DAVEY'S early books of poetry surveys the events of D-Day (D-Day and After, 1963), whereas Gary GEDDES depicts, in Hong Kong Poems (1987), the experiences of two Canadian battalions in the Pacific campaign. Torn Saunders, a chaplain who served in the Canadian Army, 1939-45, recalls his struggles to come to terms with war's horrors in D-Day Plus Fifty Years (1994). In Macalister or Dying in the Dark (1995), Douglas LePan tells a story that had long haunted him about a fellow soldier who had parachuted into France in 1943 and was later executed in Buchenwald. The bulk of the 'writing back' to the Second World War is by English Canadian novelists, with Roch CARRIER'S La Guerre, Yes Sir! (1970) an exception. The first and most popular volume of a triptych, this novel exposes the animosity Quebec villagers feel towards les anglais during the country's second conscription crisis. In other fictions, men's absence from the home front is noted. Margaret LAURENCE'S narrator in A Bird in the House (1963) laments that there are no men in her high-
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school graduating class; all have gone to war an observation Elizabeth BREWSTER echoes in The Sisters (1974) and Gallant in Home Truths. Timothy Findley is one of the few Canadians who has written extensively about both world wars. His NOVELLA You Went Away (1996), set in Toronto and on air-force bases in Ontario, demonstrates how the events of the First World War impinge upon the Second; both Findley and Laurence also stress in their fictions that women and children, as much as men, are affected by wartime events. The title story of Stones (1988), for example, recounts the Dieppe landing through the eyes of a young boy contemplating his father's shattered life. As well, Findley's The Butterfly Plague (1969) critiques Nazi ideology, and Famous Last Words (1981) analyzes the allure of fascism for historical figures such as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.' The paradoxical appeal of fascism constitutes other writers' subject as well, as in Gallant's The PegnitzJunction (1974), on fascism's origins, or The Other Paris (1956) and From the Fifteenth District (1979), about those whose lives were displaced or ruined by war. Winifred BAMBRICK in Continental Revue (1946) allegorized Hitler's rise to power. Novels about refugees who came to Canada in the 19405, and which take up themes of alienation, dissociation, and assimilation, include Henry Kreisel's The Betrayal (1964) and John MARLYN'S Under the Ribs of Death (1957). Rudy Wiebe's central character in Peace Shall Destroy Many (1962,) recounts his frustration as he witnesses his Saskatchewan MENNONITE community ironically accepting the authority of a domineering leader who purports to preserve the special qualities of his people. In another context, Joseph SKVORECKY'S The Engineer of Human Souls features a central character who fled Czechoslovakia in 1968; while he finds life in Toronto comfortable, he cannot reconcile his present circumstances with the knowledge of the political tyrannies he previously witnessed. Dennis BOCK'S story collection Olympia (1998) with the Olympic Games of Berlin, Munich, and Barcelona in the background - tells of a postwar German immigrant family adapting uneasily to life in Ontario and Spain, and coming slowly to terms with memory, death, and the political tensions of their European past. In a category by itself (essentially a work of EROTICA),
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Stephen VIZINCZEY'S In Praise of Older Women (1^65) tells of a middle-aged HUNGARIAN-born academic who makes his way to Canada, where he retells, in memoir form, details of his many sexual adventures as a young mair; These 'conquests' are set against a series of different historical eras. Like Findley and Gallant, other writers explore the origins of fascism. David GURR posits in The Ring Master (1986) that Richard Wagner's The Ring Cycle was the ominous prelude to the rise and fall of the Third Reich. Sylvia ERASER'S Berlin Solstice (1984) depicts the spiritual and moral decay of Germany after 1918. Other writers re-visioned shocking events at home. Livesay responded to the internment of JAPANESE Canadians during the Second World War by writing a documentary RADIO poem, Call My People Home (1950), in which she pleads for reconciliation, but most writing about these events did not take place for another several decades. Joy KOGAWA'S Obasan (1981) is the first novel to trace the internment and dispersal of 20,000 Japanese Canadians from the West Coast during the 19405. In a similar vein, Kerri Sakamoto's The Electrical Field (1998), set in the pre-redress years of the 19705, reveals Japanese Canadians' hurt and anger. Less well known in literature is the internment of Italians during the Second World War. Vittorio Rossi's play Paradise by the River (1998), set in 1940, tells the story of an Italian man who, along with hundreds of other men of Italian descent, is interned. In the 19908, a number of established Canadian writers turned to Second World War events as sources for their fiction. Katherine GOVIER'S Angel Walk (1996) features an unconventional young woman who serves as a war photographer for the newspapers of press baron Lord Beaverbrook (Max Aitken) in London. In Daphne MARL ATT's Taken (1996), a woman living during the Gulf War thinks back over her mother's life in AUSTRALIA during the Japanese invasion of southeast ASIA. Michael ONDAATJE'S The English Patient (1992) brings together four characters at the end of the war, telling an enigmatic story of espionage and love. Anne MICHAELS'S Fugitive Pieces (1996) also traces time, memory, and history across several locations, featuring two plots, one about a Polish boy who tries to come to terms with the deaths
of his family at the hands of Nazis, and the other about a Canadian professor whose parents survived the death camps. Conflicts since the Second World War. While the Korean War (1950-3) cost Canada 1,550 casualties, it did not attract much attention in literature; several personal accounts appeared in interviews in Remembrances (1997), by Dave Hutchinson, Anne Dorion, and Rick Desjarlais, and edited by Harvey J. Linnen; and in John Gardam's Korean Volunteer: An Oral History from Those Who Were There (1994). The Vietnam War (1961-75), however - although Canada was not an official participant - involved at least 6,000 Canadians in action; another 6,000 Canadians who were living in the United States also joined up. A handful of poets - David HELWIG, David MCFADDEN, Henry BEISSEL, Tom WAYMAN, Wilfred WATSON - responded critically to the US military actions, and in fiction, Atwood's Robber Bride features a rather unsavoury US draft dodger. Other novels that touch upon issues arising out of this war are David E. Weischadle's 228: a Novel (1997), Ernest HEKKANEN'S The House ofSamsara (1997), and Alison Lohans's Don't Think Twice (1997). In drama, Louis CARON'S L'emmitoufle (The Draft Dodger, 1980) takes place in Quebec and New England, as two men attempt to live in peace, one caught up in the 1917 conscription crisis, the other, his nephew, faced with US involvement in Vietnam. Diane GIGUERE also deals with Vietnam survivors, and Michael HOLLINGSWORTH'S cycle of history plays, The History of the Village of the Small Huts (1994), mentions the role of the Vietnam War in Canadian history. In the 19805 and 19905, Canadians sent 'peacekeepers' to many troubled areas, from Cyprus to Somalia, and sent active troops to the Persian Gulf in order to protect airfields after Iraq invaded and occupied Kuwait, and to the Balkans, in the Kosovo War. Many Canadians civilians and politicians -felt that these latter involvements jeopardized Canada's ability to carry out peacekeeping operations. But in A Line in the Sand (1970), Guillermo VERDECCHIA challenges this national perception. The play tells of a friendship that arises between two men - a Canadian soldier and a Palestinian black-mar-
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keteer - who meet in the Qatar! desert in the autumn of 1990 during Operation Desert Shield. Verdecchia places the Canadian in a bad light, as he not only witnesses but perhaps also participates in the torture of his unlikely 'friend.' Unflattering depictions they may be, but these stories - like the tales of social conflict at home - need to be told and critically read. See also Charles BRUCE, HISTORICAL LITERATURE,
their homonyms. Her 'theorograms' and extended suites juxtapose quotations, aiming to deconstruct sexist discourse while offering punning commentary and an intimate reportage of lesbian sexuality, medical treatments, and the recovery of memories of childhood sexual abuse. For Warland, interrogating language as a repository of patriarchal subtexts is essential to WOMEN'S survival and selfhood.
MAGEE, MUSIC (POPULAR LYRICS), QUIET REVOLUTION, SPENCER, STANSBURY.
Further reading: Anne Geddes Bailey, Timothy Findley and the Aesthetics of Fascism (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1998); Donna Coates, 'The Best Soldiers of All: Unsung Heroines in Canadian Women's Great War Fictions,' Canadian Literature 151 (Winter 1991): 66-99; Eric Thompson, 'Canadian Fiction of the Great War,' Canadian Literature 91 (Spring 1981): 81-96; Lorraine M. York, Introducing Timothy Findley's The Wars (Toronto: ECW, 1990). Donna Coates
WARLAND, Betsy Barbara. Freelance editor, teacher, arts administrator; b Ft Dodge, Iowa, 27 Dec 1946; daughter of Mildred (Hovey) and Cyrus Warland, farmers and community and church activists. Two years after graduating in art and education from Luther C, Iowa (BA, 1970), Warland emigrated to Canada. Over the next two decades she became an articulate critic of homophobia (see GAY AND LESBIAN WRITING), helping organize the 1983 'Women and Words/Les femmes et les mots' conference in Vancouver, editing Inversions (1991), and co-editing (with her partner Daphne MARLATT, and others) such feminist ANTHOLOGIES as Telling It (1990), In the feminine (1985), and the feminist newsletter (f)Lip (1986-9). Marlatt also collaborated in two poetry and prose collections - Two Women in a Birth (1994) and Double Negative (1988) - and Warland separately published six collections of poetry, prose, and drama, including open is broken (1984), serpent (w)rite (1987), and Proper Deafinitions (1990). Ascribing to language a complicity in suppressing non-dominant modes of thought, Warland's poems and fractured prose unpack the politics of dead metaphors and excavate meaning from the etymologies of compound words, word fragments, and
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Further reading: Di Brandt, 'Interview,' CV/II 11.4 (1988): 42-7; Susan Standford Friedman, 'When a "Long" Poem Is a "Big" Poem: SelfAuthorizing Strategies in Women's TwentiethCentury "Long Poems,"' LIT 2 (1990): 9-25; Janice Williamson, Sounding the Differences (Toronto: U Toronto P, 1993): 303-15. WARR, Bertram. Poet; b Toronto 7 Dec 1917, d over Essen, Germany, when his bomber was shot down 3 April 1943. Warr spent his youth in Toronto where he worked at a range of jobs to finance his studies at Birkbeck C (London). He had written fewer than fifty poems (collected in Acknowledgment to Life, ed Len GASPARINI, 1970) when he was killed during a bombing raid in the Second World WAR, but the poems, full of socialist commitment, social despair, ironic attacks on institutional authorities, and rejection of his Catholic upbringing, retain their power to move. WARREN, Louise. Poet; b Montreal 23 March 1956; daughter of Samuel Warren and Aimee Hebert. Her first volume of poetry, L'amant gris (1984), was followed in 1989 by her first novel, Tableaux d'Aurelie, in which a narrator interacts with her ancestor, and by a critical study, Leonise vALOis,femme de lettres (1993). Among other volumes, a series of prose poems, Le lievre de mars (1994), further demonstrates her technical range, assembling a kaleidoscope of sensations, images, and memories to evoke the intensity of everyday moments. Margaret Cook
WATADA, Terry. Writer, b Toronto 6 July 1951; son of Matsujiro and Chisato (Takehara) Watada; educ U Toronto (BA, 1974; BEd, 1978) and York U (MA, 1975). Watada has contributed articles to Nikkei Voice and poems to numerous
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journals. Repeatedly, in plays (eg, The Tale of the Mask, 1995), poems (A Thousand Homes, 1997), and stories (Daruma Days, 1997), he focuses on JAPAN, his Japanese heritage, and the experience of the immigrant in Canada. The stories focus particularly on the internment of Japanese Canadians during the Second World WAR. His Bukkyo Tozen (1996) is a history of Jodo Shinsu BUDDHISM in Canada. From 1977 on, Watada also worked as a musician, recording several albums, including The Art of Protest (1994) for Windchime Records. WATANNA, Onoto, see Winifred REEVE. WATMOUGH, David. Novelist, short story writer, playwright, journalist; b London, England, 17 Aug 1926; son of Ethel Florence (Bassett) and Gerald Arthur Watmough. David Watmough spent the early years of his life in Cornwall, was educated in England, and did a stint in the Royal Navy before moving first to the United States and eventually, in 1960, to Canada, where he became a citizen in 1969. Watmough has written full-time since leaving university, producing over 17 books. Ten of these - including No More into the Garden (1978), which won Best Novel of the Year Award from Giovanni's Room, Philadelphia; Thy Mother's Glass (1992); and The Time of the Kingfishers (1994) - feature his ongoing protagonist, Davey Bryant. Watmough's fictional persona, Davey is a GAY Englishman living in Vancouver, and a writer; his life in fiction follows his development from childhood to middle age. As a narrator, Davey moves seamlessly between his Cornish childhood and reflections on his experience from the perspective of adulthood, in considerable sensory detail. Although Watmough recounts Davey's sexual adventures throughout the novels and is, like Jane RULE, an important (and early) gay writer in Canada, Davey's homosexuality is almost incidental; the focus falls on his individuality, particularly his fluid sense of time (in which memory informs the present) and his somewhat ironic consciousness of self. It is as if Watmough depicts Davey's gayness to be true to his character, rather than to make political statements. Other books include the linked collection of stories Hunting with Diana (1996) and a
series of 'monodramas,' or plays for single voice. N.E. Currie
WATSON, John. Philosopher; b Glasgow, Scotland, 25 Feb 1847, d Kingston, CW, 27 Jan 1939; son of Elizabeth (Robertson) and John Watson. He obtained his MA in philosophy from U Glasgow in 1872 and an LLD in 1880. He joined the Philosophy Dept at Queen's U in 1872 and went on to become the university's vice-principal (1901-24). The author of a number of books on Kant, some of which are still read today, he published two well-known works on the relation between philosophy and RELIGION, The Philosophical Basis of Religion (1907) and The Interpretation of Religious Experience (1912). In these he argued that there was a rational basis for religious - especially Christian -beliefs. See also INTELLECTUAL HISTORY. Ross Labrie
WATSON, Sheila Martin. Novelist; b New Westminster, BC, 24 Oct 1909, d Nanaimo, BC, i Feb 1998; daughter of Elweena (Martin) and Dr Charles Edward Doherty, superintendent of the Provincial Mental Hospital (Riverview) at Essondale, near New Westminster. The young Sheila Watson went to Catholic schools in New Westminster, and after two years at a Catholic college in Vancouver, took her BA (Hons) in English at U British Columbia (1931). She went on to earn a teaching certificate and an MA at U British Columbia, specializing in iSth-century prose. Her teaching career, begun in the middle of the Depression, took her first to a church school in New Westminster, and thence to tiny Dog Creek, across the Fraser River from the enormous Gang Ranch. Her two years there, with a handful of pupils, provided the tiny young woman with her first experience of interracial rurality, and the raw materials for her fiction (especially an early novel, Deep Hollow Creek, about teaching in the Cariboo, written in the 19305 but not published until 1992). When the provincial government closed her school, she found a job in the high school at Langley Prairie in the lower Fraser Valley. A few years later she was dismissed along with her colleagues for
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trying to unionize, and took a teaching position at Duncan. Duncan, a small town north of Victoria, was the adopted home of Wilfred WATSON who was then working in a sawmill and writing poetry. The new schoolteacher in town, just two years his elder, talked him into attending U British Columbia, and married him late in 1941. When he joined the navy for the last years of the Second World War, Sheila Watson taught in Mission City, BC. After the war, the Watsons moved to Toronto, where Sheila taught at a college and took part-time graduate studies at U Toronto. The couple continued their lives as gypsy scholars, with temporary jobs at U British Columbia, a high school in Powell River, BC, and the Calgary outlet of U Alberta. It was there that Sheila Watson completed the draft of her best-known book, The Double Hook. She has said publicly that the idea for the book came to her 'right in the middle of Bloor Street,' while she and Wilfred were in Toronto. The Watsons moved to Edmonton in the mid-1950s. In 1954 Sheila Watson went to France, where she wrote a journal that her readers hope will be published soon. In 1957 she returned to U Toronto, and wrote a doctoral dissertation under the direction of Marshall MCLUHAN, a convert to Catholicism and an original thinker about modernism and what would succeed it. The subject of the dissertation was the great MODERNIST writer and painter Wyndham LEWIS, who had been born just off Canada's East Coast, and who had spent the years of the Second World War in Toronto and Windsor. McLuhan, born in 1911 in Edmonton, was teaching at Assumption C in Windsor when Lewis was there. His famous concrete essays, combining writing, design and photography, were influenced by Lewis's work, and in the 19505 he knew more about Lewis and most of the other modernists than did anyone else in the country. During her years with McLuhan, Watson set about learning everything about the 20th-century European avant-garde, but she never forgot her 18th-century writers, especially Addison and Swift. She would become Dr Watson in 1965. In the interim, she had joined her husband as a professor at U Alberta. She spent her first sab-
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batical back in Toronto, working with McLuhan at his Centre for Culture and Technology. During her career at Alberta she was a favourite of graduate students and young writers, until her retirement in 1975. Along with Wilfred Watson and a cadre of younger writers she edited White Pelican, a little magazine devoted to contemporary writing and graphics which she founded in 1971. Wilfred Watson retired in 1977, and in 1980 the couple moved to a little bay just north of Nanaimo, on the Vancouver Island of Wilfred's youth. In her old age Sheila Watson developed the habit of falling off things she had clambered onto to look for something, and consequently breaking bones in her sparrow's body. It was after one such fall that she broke her hip in January of her 89th year, and she died in a Nanaimo hospital where Wilfred was already an inpatient. He died shortly thereafter. Sheila Watson had unusual knowledge and sophisticated opinions about the entire course of international writings, arts, and philosophy in the 20th century. In a conference address, she could deliver an elaborate extemporized argument that illuminated the connectives in 20thcentury thought and art. Thus the puzzlement and disappointment over the most obvious feature of her career - the long silence after The Double Hook. (Her devotees reason that as that novel is the high point of Canadian literature, its 116 pages are the equal to any other writer's two dozen volumes.) Sheila Watson published five short stories, and translated two stories by Madeleine PERRON for publication. Her first publication was 'Brother Oedipus,' in Queen's Q (Summer 1954). She published 'The Black Farm' two years later in the same magazine. Antigone,' a muchanthologized story, was printed in the Tamarack R just before The Double Hook was published in 1959. The first readers of these stories found something uncommon in Canadian literature, which was mainly given over to some kind of referential realism. Here the reader is introduced to a family that bears names from Greek Classical MYTHS, but which lives in a seemingly contemporary BC setting. The language of narration, too, is doubled: there seems to be a slight disjunction and a brevity that makes it appear to
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be the ritualized language given to myth. But a reading aloud provides a sense of actuality. The stories are unlikely, symbolic, parodic. The narrator and his brothers have grown up on the grounds of a mental hospital, a setting necessary to society in the real world, suggestively accurate to those who like autobiography in their fiction, but amenable to invention in the fictive one. With great wit the narrator makes allusions to the worlds of Sophocles, Freud, and the farmer's almanac. Watson was working in the purview of Joyce and Eliot, inside language as they were, and her stories appeared somewhat outre to readers who were accustomed to the Canadian fiction that had managed to avoid the touch of such modernism. It is no wonder, then, that The Double Hook took a long time to see print. Through the late 19505 it was an underground novel; its few early readers included Professor P.M. Salter, the chief encourager for young writers in Edmonton. The novel's appearance in 1959 announced a new day in Canadian publishing. The 'paperback revolution' had caused a lot of excitement in the United States. In 1959 and 1960 the Canadian publisher McClelland and Stewart published its first two paperback originals, choosing two newcomers to advance the guard: the second book was Mad Shadows, the translation of Marie-Claire BLAIS'S first novel, published a year earlier when she was 20 years old. The first, by a few months, was The Double Hook. Both books were designed by Frank Newfeld, who would become the first notable postwar book designer in Toronto, and they would openly declare the primacy of innovative BOOK DESIGN. Adepts might have thought about Wyndham Lewis and Marshall McLuhan. The proper text of The Double Hook begins after 12 pages of highly noticeable front matter. The design of the first page of text also calls attention to itself, being made up of much white space, and resembling a page of avant-garde poetry. Readers and reviewers in 1959 were not comfortable; they did not know what kind of book this was. It was called a NOVELLA and a prose poem and a FABLE. During the first few years its critics applied Northrop FRYE more often than they did Marshall McLuhan. Much was made of mythic simplicity in the story of symbolically named siblings and neighbours in
an unsituated and timeless rural landscape. The language of narrative and dialogue without quotation marks was seen as vatic. But readers who read the book aloud can hear the language they have heard spoken by country people in western valleys. As to the thematic matter, Watson commented, when introducing her first reading of the book in 1973, '[TJhere was something I wanted to say: about how people are driven, how if they have no art, how if they have no tradition, how if they have no ritual, they are driven in one of two ways, either towards violence or towards insensibility - if they have no mediating rituals which manifest themselves in what I suppose we call art forms.' (See also COYOTE, TRICKSTER.)
The Double Hook has since its publication been an icon for other writers who do not fit easily into the realist tradition. In fact it makes an appearance in the novels and poems of writers such as Robert KROETSCH, Rudy WIEBE, Michael ONDAATJE, bpNiCHOL, and George BOWERING. Writers have also been involved in Watson's publications. The Coach House P, operated by writers and printers, published Four Stories in 1979. In 1980 Coach House published Watson's most enigmatic story And the Four Animals' in an 'MS Edition,' and included it in Five Stories (1984). Coach House was also the publisher of a thick issue of Frank DAVEY'S Open Letter (Winter 1974-5) dedicated to Watson's writing. It contained the first four stories, six essays on Wyndham Lewis, four other essays, and Watson's spoken preface to The Double Hook. Further reading: Angela Bowering, Figures Cut in Sacred Ground (Edmonton: NeWest, 1988); George Bowering, ed, Sheila Watson and The Double Hook (Ottawa: Golden Dog, 1985); Stephen Scobie, Sheila Watson and Her Works (Toronto: ECW, 1984). George Bowering
WATSON, Wilfred. Poet, playwright; b Rochester, Kent, England, i May 1911, d Nanaimo, BC, 26 March 1998; son of Louisa (Clayton) and Frederick Watson, sailor in the Royal Navy. Watson's family emigrated to Duncan, BC, in 1926, where Watson worked in a sawmill until he enrolled at U British Columbia (BA, 1943). He
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and Sheila WATSON married in 1941, and he joined the Canadian navy in 1943. After the war, he attended U Toronto, receiving his PhD in 1951. He taught English at U British Columbia prior to completing his PhD, and then at U Alberta, both in Calgary and Edmonton. He retired in 1976, and moved back to Vancouver Island, settling in 1980 in Nanaimo. Watson won the Governor General's AWARD for his book of poetry Friday's Child (1955), which Northrop FRYE had singled out as worthy of attention. The collection suggests the influences of W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, and Dylan Thomas, and makes explicit references to various poets and artists, including Yeats, Thomas, Jack and Doris Shadbolt, and Emily CARR. The mythopoeic flow of classical and biblical references supports the poems' focus on such modernist binaries as nature/society and chaos/order. Friday's Child returns more than once to the theme of the mind's struggle through chaos and confusion toward new modes of awareness. The purpose of art, the collection reveals, is to abet the imaginative shift toward the (however fleeting) synthesis of what had appeared chaotic and unruly. Some of the poems imply the attainment of this clarity through sympathy or love. The proliferation of references to diverse mythical paradigms and past and present cultural authorities, however, suggests a sense of instability or uncertainty regarding universalizing efforts to define such an experience. This sense becomes more apparent in Watson's later writing which, although often overtly political (discussing such issues as the Vietnam WAR or the Czech revolution), makes greater use of SATIRE, comic flippancy, and POSTMODERN techniques. Watson's work after Friday's Child was especially innovative with regard to form. His second collection of poetry, Sorrowful Canadians and Other Poems (1972), was published by White Pelican, which also published a quarterly arts review (White Pelican) founded by Sheila Watson in 1971. In Sorrowful Canadians, which did not receive major critical attention, Watson's use of space, typeface, and repetition foreshadows later techniques found especially in his drama. Indeed, the CONCRETE quality of the poetry in Sorrowful Canadians encourages the vocalization of the text. Along with the poems' often bitter
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HUMOUR, Watson's visual play with the letters has the pieces exude a sense of agitation and urgency that, on occasion, suggests the later performances of the FOUR HORSEMEN (see PERFORMANCE POETRY, SOUND) or spoken word poets. A recurrent issue in Watson's poetry, especially in material appearing later in the 19705, is the relation of multi-media to human consciousness and perception. Much of his interest in this topic arose through his friendship with Marshall MCLUHAN, with whom he collaborated in From Cliche to Archetype (1970). In both 'Education in the Tribal/Global Village' (Twentieth Century Literature, 1970) and 'Marshall McLuhan and Multi-consciousness: The Place Marie Dialogues' (Boundary 2,1974), Watson acknowledges his respect and admiration for his friend. Nevertheless, he also makes it clear that he does not see his own methodologies and interests as perfectly aligned with, let alone derivative of, McLuhan's. A similarly constructive conflict appears in the play Let's murder Clytemnestra, according to the principles of Marshall McLuhan (prod 1969; published in Plays, 1989). One of Watson's most complex formal innovations arises from his investigation of how words relate to numerical systems - suggesting the influence that TECHNOLOGY has had on contemporary Western sensibilities. Visually, this poetry, called number grid verse, suggests verbal fishbones attached to vertebrae of numerical cyphers. The numerals i through 9 are repeated again and again with words attached down the sides of each string. When a poem is intended for more than one voice, the numerals are stacked: three is followed by three 25, and so on. In / Begin with Counting (1978), Watson's first collection of number grid verse, the vertical rows of numbers are coloured, emphasizing the artifice of the verbal arrangements and forcing the reader to attend to the numerical intrusions. The combination of words and numbers forces both particular visual groupings of words and an asymmetry that disrupts the grammar of the language itself, bringing attention to form without erasing content. A reader accustomed to more familiar patterning will gradually ignore the numbers, but these digits nevertheless assert themselves through rhythm and repetition, stops and starts both more subtle and more
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demanding than traditional line breaks. The initial intrusiveness of the numbers wanes as the reader falls into the cadences that they reinforce through their patterning. According to Watson, patterns - verbal or otherwise - are languages in themselves, and the recognition of such patterns is equivalent to the comprehension of a non-verbal poetry. His number grid poems reconstruct what he refers to, in 'Education in the Tribal/Global Village,' as the 'modern tendency for environment to become language.' For Watson, this reconstruction was a return to the metrical experimentation that had been curtailed by modernist verse. His new system reaffirms a separation between verse and prose, as well as between form and content, while nevertheless meshing such binaries in order to spark new meanings. At the same time, Watson also saw number grid verse as encouraging a poem's shift from a visual to an auditory space such that the actual poem exists in the transformative moment. Bringing to mind chaos theory, Watson equates his numerical patterning to the biological patterning of radial symmetry. His association of this experiment with a biological language suggests that, despite his poetry's radical formal shifts over the decades, he nevertheless sustained a faith in some 'natural,' universal language. Watson's 1982 collection Mass on Cowback is not especially innovative thematically, and some pieces, such as 'letter to marian engel' (see Marian ENGEL) and 'o/possum deconstruction/ sophoclea' can be read as anti-feminist. The collection is notably innovative, however, when it comes to form, with the poet adding to the numerical disruptions with multicoloured paper, sketches, and collage. Mythopoeic and contemporary cultural references are still present in this later collection, but the sense of agitation found in Sorrowful Canadians and even I Begin with Counting was toned down with gentler humour and a less intrusive typeface. Watson is at least as well known for his drama as he is for his poetry. He began producing plays after moving to Alberta in the 19605. Marked by satire and an attention to ritual and ceremony, his early drama strongly reflects the influence of the theatre of the ABSURD, with which he came into direct contact while in Paris in 1955-6. Plays by Watson such as Oh holy ghost
dip your finger in the blood of Canada and write, I LOVE YOU (prod 1967; published in Plav5, 1989) and Let's murder Clytemnestra... depend heavily on stylized speech and acting. In addition, Watson incorporated diverse technologies (televisions, projection screens, etc) into the plays. The communication systems that populate his plays are used not simply as props, but as actors - both agents and speakers - within the performances. In contrast to Friday's Child, with its celebration of the artist attaining some sort of understanding through the chaos of nature, his plays do not struggle as vehemently to override this chaos, or to locate a collective consciousness. They seem satisfied with exploring the possibility of each person's unique multi-consciousness, even though Watson reinforces the view, in both his creative and theoretical works, that such diversity does not threaten fragmentation so much as offer a means of integration. For Watson, the theatre of the absurd is a recognition of non-verbal discourses, what he explains in 'Education in the Tribal/Global Village' as 'an extension of the verbalizations of language to theatre arts like acting, set-designing, dance, music, multi-media.' The multilingual aspect of his drama reflects an attitudinal shift - concordant with a broader cultural shift of perception from modernism to POSTMODERNISM. (Indeed Watson explicitly compares McLuhan's views to postmodernism.) It was important for Watson, therefore, that the U Alberta Studio Theatre, which was the main producer of his works during the 19603, allowed him to be involved in the production process. In 1983, Watson published his dramatic trilogy Gramsci x 3, which depicts the life and struggles of Antonio Gramsci, the leader of Italy's Communist party during Mussolini's rise to power. The first play, The Young Officer from Cagliari, uses the number grid technique, with the digital disruption of the sentences encouraging a choppy, forced speech - effectively suggesting a fated development of the narrative toward Gramsci's imprisonment and death. Against the blood and anguish of the actual story, this forced drive attains a painful poignancy. However, in the closing epilogue, in which Gramsci's sisterin-law reads out a letter that she has written informing relatives of the man's death, the pat-
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tern is significantly altered, forcing the reader out of the now familiar number grid. This shift into a new state of dislocation can be read to suggest that Gramsci's death, rather than simply being the inevitable result implied by the play's predominant rhythms and patterning, was itself a constructive disruption of the march of the political forces against which Gramsci had struggled. Despite being a play, The Young Officer from Cagliari is clearly also intended as a text to be read, as shown not only by the numerical patterning but also by Watson's layering of the verbal text with visual reproductions of what appeared to be grids of wire mesh, as well as with portraits of Gramsci in Warholesque repetition. A collection of Watson's poetry, Poems: Collected/Unpublished/New, appeared in 1986, followed by a collection of his plays, Plays at the Iron Bridge: The Autobiography of Tom Horror, in 1989; 1993 saw the publication of The BaieComeau Angel and Other Stories, a collection of Watson's short stories. His papers are in the ARCHIVES at U Alberta. Further reading: Thomas Peacock, 'Introduction.' Poems: Collected/Unpublished/New (Edmonton: Longspoon/NeWest, 1986): xi-xix; Steven Scobie, 'Love in the Burning City: The Poetry of Wilfred Watson,' Essays on Canadian Writing i8/ 19 (1980): 281-303; Lorraine Weir, 'Meaning in Numbers: Wilfred Watson's Gramsci xj,' in Inside the Poem, ed WH. New (Toronto: Oxford UP, 1993): 225-9. Dennis Denisoff
WATSON, Wreford, see James WREFORD. WATTERS, Reginald Eyre. Bibliographer, anthologist, professor; b Toronto 15 April 1912, d Kingston, ON, 19 Dec 1979; son of Kathleen (Eyre) and Bartholomew Watters, realtor; educ U Toronto (BA, 1935) and U Wisconsin (PhD, 1941). Watters taught at U British Columbia, setting up courses in Canadian literature in 1957 (see TEACHING), and moving to Royal Military C as head of the Dept of English in 1961. The foremost Canadian bibliographer of his generation (see REFERENCE GUIDES), and the co-editor (withc.F. KLINCK) of Canadian Anthology (1955, rev 1974), he prepared A Checklist of Canadian Literature and Background Materials, 1628-1960
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(1959, rev 1972) and On Canadian Literature (with Inglis Bell, 1966), and editions and articles on such writers as HALIBURTON (see SAM SLICK) and on Canadian connections with the COMMONWEALTH. See also ANTHOLOGIES. WAYMAN, Tom (Thomas Ethan). Poet, essayist, editor; b Hawkesbury, ON, 13 Aug 1945; son of Morris, a pulp mill chemist, and Sara (Zadkin) Wayman, a social worker. After studying English at U British Columbia (BA, 1966), Wayman attended U California at Irvine (MFA, 1968), where he became involved in the radical student movement. For the next thirty years, Wayman worked at numerous manual and academic jobs, including Kootenay School of the Arts, maintaining his ties with the political left. After his first collection, Waiting for Wayman (i973), Wayman published a dozen books of poetry, including the selections Introducing Tom Wayman (1980) and I'll Be Right Back (1997). He also wrote two collections of essays - Inside Job: Essays on the New Work Writing (1983) and A Country Not Considered: Canada, Culture, Work (1993) - and edited ANTHOLOGIES, including East of Main: An Anthology of Poems from East Vancouver and Goingfor Coffee: An Anthology of Contemporary North American Working Poems (1981). Influenced by T.S. Eliot and Pablo Neruda as well as Earle BIRNEY and Al PURDY, Wayman addresses what he considers the central overlooked fact of modern existence: the experience of WORK told from the perspective of the participants. In keeping with his goal of examining common experience, he developed a poetry that is clear, often humorous, and politically minded, relying for its effect more on anecdote and tone than on figurative language. The most recognizable formal feature of Wayman's poetry is the 'Wayman' persona, a figure who is often detached, self-deprecating, and ironic, as evidenced in 'Wayman in Love.' See also CLASS, VANCOUVER INDUSTRIAL WRITERS UNION.
Further reading: Phil Hall, 'Waiting for Wayman to Get off Work,' Quarry 36.4 (1987): 73-77; Wendy Keitner, 'Looking for Owls: The Quest Motif in Tom Wayman's Poetry,' Canadian Poetry 12 (1983): 24-33. R. Gooding
WEAVER
WEATHER and climate (ie, weather averaged over space and time) so preoccupy Canadians that the degree to which they pervade Canadian writing often goes unremarked. The climate, and the sometimes chaotic nature of severe weather conditions (ice storm, blizzard, tornado, drought, flood), function in literature, as in life, both as a condition of surviving in a NORTHERN environment and as an active agent affecting individual lives. Primarily 'continental' (ie, high summer humidity and temperature, harsh low winter temperature), the climate is locally modifed by maritime currents (especially on the West Coast), altitude, latitude, and rainshadow effects. All temperatures are reduced by the current windchill factor. The highest and lowest recorded temperatures in Canada occurred in Windsor, ON (52.1° C, taking humidity into account) on 20 June 1953, and in Snag, YT (-63° C) on 3 Feb 1947. Other records include the most fog during the year (1,890 hours on the average, Argentia, NF), the most rain in one day (489.2 mm, Ucluelet, BC), the most snow annually (1,433 cm, Rocky Mountains), and the least amount of annual precipitation (12.7 mm, Arctic Bay). Not just these extremes, but even the normal range of annual temperature and precipitation is enough to have an impact on Canadian housing, clothing, health, energy consumption, transportation, and agricultural productivity. The timing of ice breakup in northern and eastern rivers and harbours has had, among other effects, a direct impact on exploration (see FRANKLIN), assertions of political authority (as with the RCMP's St Roch, patrolling the Arctic), and shipping contact with Europe (affecting food supply, communication, immigration). The lack of preparedness for meteorological severity led to the difficulties that many early European settlers' journals record, as in the JESUIT RELATIONS or MOODIE'S Roughing It in the Bush. Sometimes whole settlements (eg, Saskatchewan's Barr Colony) did not survive the winter. Such failures helped perpetuate the image of Canada as barren LAND, an image perpetrated by Jacques CARTIER, reinforced by Voltaire's phrase QUELQUES ARPENTS DE NEIGH, and sustained by Hollywood FILM stereotypes and by American forecasting practice, which refers to winter storms as 'Canadian air.'
The consequent notion that weather is an antagonist or enemy recurs in numerous literary references to snow, as in the storms at sea and the blizzards that kill characters in plays and stories by Michael COOK, Norman DUNCAN, Alistair MACLEOD, and Sinclair ROSS (as indeed they do kill people in reality), or the threat that cold and whiteout represent in stories by P.P. GROVE. Grove counters the convention somewhat by insisting that knowledge reduces the danger. Other writers (eg, Patrick LANE in his 'Winter' poems, Gilles VIGNEAULT singing that winter is his country, Thomas WHARTON ironizing European unpreparedness in Icefields) reverse or modify the convention, reflecting the culture at large by finding ways to celebrate winter. 'Bonhomme d'hiver' is a FOLK icon in Quebec winter festivals, reiterating the energy and joy that are also expressed in tales of winter SPORTS (even as early as Frances BROOKE'S enthusiasm for sledding on the pain de sucre at Montmorency Falls), in folk tale, and in POPULAR CULTURE in general. WEAVER, Robert. Radio producer, editor, anthologist; b Niagara Falls, ON, 6 Jan 1921 to Walter and Jessie Weaver. After serving in the RCAF and the Canadian army (1942-5), Weaver attended U Toronto, graduating in 1948 with a degree in English and philosophy. The same year he began a career at the CANADIAN BROADCASTING CORPORATION that would span four decades and foster one of the most fertile and important periods in Canadian RADIO. Among the best known of the many programs Weaver organized was Anthology, which he initiated in 1953 and produced until his retirement in 1985. Along with his seminal radio work, and his efforts as cultural advocate and impresario, Weaver worked extensively in editing, including being one of the founding EDITORS of Tamarack R (1956-82), and in compiling some of the bestknown ANTHOLOGIES of Canadian literature, including five volumes of Canadian Short Stories (1960,1968,1978,1985, and 1991), The Oxford Anthology of Canadian Literature (1973; 2nd ed 1981), and, with Margaret ATWOOD, The Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English (1986; 2nd ed 1995). R.H. Ramsey
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WEBB, Phyllis. Poet, essayist; b Victoria 8 April 1927; daughter of Mary Patton and Alfred Wilkes Webb, who were married in 1922 (later divorced). Phyllis Webb was the youngest child and only daughter in a family of three. She wrote poetry in high school and at university and, in the early 19505, her poems began to appear in the current literary magazines. In 1954 she was published in Trio, a collection which included herself, Eli MANDEL, and Gael TURNBULL. In 1956 she published her first book, Even Your Right Eye. By 1998 she had published 10 poetry collections (including two Selected Poems'), two essay collections, and numerous contributions to literary magazines. Webb also began a lifelong interest in politics while in high school and joined the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) (forerunner of the current New Democratic Party) in 1945. In the 1949 BC provincial election, as a CCF candidate in a three-seat Victoria riding, Webb was billed as representing the socialist leanings of postwar youth. From 1945 to 1949, Webb attended U British Columbia in Vancouver, graduating with a BA in English and philosophy. The highlights of her university education included reading Modernist and contemporary Canadian and British writers alongside the traditional literary CANON, discovering the work of Canadian women writers such as P.K. PAGE and Dorothy LIVESAY, seeing contemporary Canadian visual art, participating in political and literary groups, being introduced to the ideas of FREUD and MARX, and debating the merits of various economic systems. Webb moved to Montreal in 1950 and lived there for most of the decade, except for a year of work and travel in England and Ireland in 1954, and 18 months in Paris in 1957-58 on a Canadian Government Overseas Award. She supported herself throughout the decade by freelance secretarial work, RADIO journalism, and the occasional secretarial job, but she mainly focused on her writing projects. In Montreal, she became part of an informal writers' group that included F.R. SCOTT, Louis DUDEK, Irving and Betty LAYTON, John SUTHERLAND, Gael Turnbull, Eli Mandel, Miriam WADDINGTON, and, later on, Leonard COHEN and Al PURDY. She also completed a major research project on 'The Poet
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and the Publisher,' which she had begun while working as a secretary at MacDonald C in Sainte Anne de Bellevue and continued while attending McGill U to do a qualifying year for graduate school. Her research results influenced the recommendations for CANADA COUNCIL programs that were formulated at a conference on 'The Writer, His Media, and the Public' at Queen's U in 1955. Webb's poems up to and including her third book, The Sea Is Also a Garden (1962), are both playful and philosophical, reflecting the modernist penchant for a dialectic of opposites, often with an ironic twist. Webb gradually moves away from the MODERNIST dialectic with poems that emphasize flux and change. Her literary mentors at this time included Scott, Dudek, and Marianne Moore. She writes of love and the loss of love ('The Second Hand,' And in Our Time,' A Walk by the Seine'); she engages in metaphysical/existential debates about being and nothingness ('Lament,' 'Double Entendre,' 'To Friends Who Have Also Considered Suicide'); and she often questions the poet's relation to literary traditions ('Poet,' 'Marvell's Garden,' 'Poetics against the Angel of Death,' 'Poems of Dublin'). Several poems also indicate an early interest in FEMINIST issues ('Poet,' 'The Colour of the Light,' 'Earth Descending'). In 1960, Webb moved to Vancouver to become a teaching assistant in the Dept of English at U British Columbia and to enter graduate school, but she never did begin graduate work. There she became part of a group of young professors and student writers at U British Columbia including John and Sally Hulcoop, George WOODCOCK, Earle Birney, Warren and Ellen Tallman, Jane RULE, and Helen Sonthoff. In 1963, Webb met and interviewed some of the leading American avant-garde writers who came to Vancouver to teach a Summer Poetry Workshop, including Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, and Robert Creeley. She made a deliberate shift in her poetry at this time, a shift anticipated at the end of The Sea Is Also a Garden, where she declares her dissatisfaction with the iambic pentameter rhythm and monologic voice of the lyric ('Poetics against the Angel of Death'). Stylistically, she turns to the field poetics and breath line of Olson, Duncan, Creeley, and Levertov as well as
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to non-Western literary forms, derived from Sappho and the Japanese haiku. Naked Poems (1965) reflects these changes in its minimalist lines and fragmented syntax. Thematically, Naked Poems focuses on female vulnerability and the difficulties of articulating a woman's desire: 'a new alphabet / gasps for air.' Naked Poems, together with Selected Poems (1971), firmly established Webb's reputation as one of Canada's foremost writers. From 1964 to 1969, Webb worked for CBC Radio in Toronto. Together with William A. Young and Janet Sommerville, she developed the radio program Ideas; as executive producer from 1967-69, she produced programs on many major artists and intellectuals of the 19605 such as R.D. Laing, Northrop FRYE, Marshall MCLUHAN, Martin Luther King, and Glenn Gould. Webb resigned from her CBC job in 1969 and returned to the West Coast of Canada where she subsequently made her home, living mostly on Saltspring Island and supporting herself through freelance journalism and by teaching creative writing. Her reviews and essays were first collected in Talking (1982). A second collection, Nothing But Brush Strokes (1995), includes selections from Talking, later essays, and colour reproductions of some of her visual collages. Following Naked Poems, Webb's subject matter shifts to a critique of power relations and culture heroes, in 'Poems of Failure,' 'Portraits,' and 'Crimes.' These poems, collected in Wilson's Bowl (1980), are influenced by her reading of the 19505 American anarchist writer Paul Goodman and her study of the 19th-century Russian anarchist Prince Kropotkin. She later became disenchanted with anarchism and turned to a feminist analysis of social systems (A Question of Questions,' 'Spots of Blood,' 'Imperfect Sestina'). Webb cites Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born (1976) as a crucial influence in developing her feminist analysis. The title poem of Wilson's Bowl is a poetic sequence dedicated to Webb's friend Lilo Berliner, who had committed suicide in 1977. Berliner left her correspondence with anthropologist Wilson Duff on Webb's doorstep before she died. The Duff / Berliner letters discuss the paradoxes in HAIDA art, Duff's essay on the Haida creation story ('Nothing Comes Only in Pieces'), and the pair of identical stone masks -
one with eyes closed, the other with eyes open that were featured in an exhibition of Haida stone carvings curated by Duff. Webb takes up these themes in an essay, A Correspondence' (which includes excerpts from the Duff/ Berliner letters), and in the poetic sequence 'Wilson's Bowl.' Other themes in Wilson's Bowl include the use and abuse of power (A Question of Questions'), totalitarianism, imprisonment, and torture ('Crimes'). The poems collected in Wilsons Bowl cover a 15-year period. Webb's political activism also resurfaced in the 19705 and 19805. She launched a formal protest against CBC Vancouver with the BC Civil Liberties Assoc for its sexist hiring policies, protested gender bias in Canada Council awards, became a Greenpeace supporter, and started a chapter of Amnesty International on Saltspring Island. With Water and Light: Ghazals and Anti Ghazals (1984), Webb returns to the minimalist, disjunctive style of Naked Poems, but with the addition of the melodic texture of the GHAZAL. Stylistically and thematically, the poems are modelled on the Ghazals ofGhalib, an i8th-century Urdu writer who excelled in the use of this form. Traditionally, the ghazal is a series of disconnected couplets linked by an intricate rhyme pattern and is used to sing of divine and human love, of loss and grief. Webb explains in the preface to Sunday Water that she both imitates and changes the traditional form with poems that focus more on 'the particular, the local, the dialectical and private.' Some of Webb's familiar themes recur in this book - women's struggles for self-fulfilment ('The Birds'), the violence that is all around us ('Sunday Water'), the decline of patriarchy ('Leaning'), and the relation of the writer to society ('I Daniel'). However, these poems differ from her previous work in focusing more on the West Coast LANDSCAPE. In Hanging Fire (1990), Webb again makes a stylistic shift. She uses a form of dictation as her writing method, taking words or phrases that speak to her from her unconscious as the starting point for a poem. She describes this method (in her essay 'Message Machine') as a form of passive resistance in the tradition of Gandhi, which can indirectly have social/political effects - in this instance, because the dictated phrases lead her to address social issues. Hanging Fire is
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the most varied of all her work: the poems are witty, playful, parodic, sad, celebratory, ironic, accusatory, and angry. The speaker often wryly observes her own performativity. In 'Performance,' she asks: 'Who is this "/" infesting my poems?' There are prose poems, lyric poems, a SOUND poem, CONCRETE poems, playful dialogues, translations, and comic and serious improvisations. The poems are densely intertextual with references ranging from popular culture figures to Cassandra and Nostradamus. Thematically, they cover ecological, political, biological, historical and aesthetic issues. With the publication of Wilson's Bowl in 1980, she was honoured with an award organized by bpNiCHOL and Michael ONDAATJE with help from Margaret AT WOOD and P.K. Page, which included a statement of Webb's central place in Canadian poetry. She received the Governor General's AWARD in 1982 for The Vision Tree: Selected Poems. In 1992, she was featured in a special issue of West Coast Line - 'You Devise, We Devise;' A Festschrift for Phyllis Webb - and also was made an officer of the Order of Canada. She won the BC Gas Lifetime Achievement Award in 1999.
The Trail of Mankind was adopted in 1972 as the basis for the Canadian Museum of Civilization's Orientation Hall, and he won the 1995 Sri Lanka State Literary Award for Poetry. R. Clark
WEINER, Steve (Steven Harrison). Writer, animation camera operator; b Milwaukee, WI, 19 March 1947, son of Sylvia (Harrison), social worker, and Samuel Weiner, professor of chemistry at U Wisconsin. Brought up in Wausua, WI, Weiner attended U California (Berkeley; BA, 1969), and later received an MFA in animation from U Southern California. After working as an animation and slide cameraman in Princeton, NJ (1976-7), he lived in England for seven years (1979-86), then emigrated to Canada. He lives in Vancouver and writes full time. His first novel, The Museum of Love (1993), traces the life of Jean-Michel Verhaeven, a young French Canadian growing up in a dysfunctional family: his father is a morbid prison guard; his mother, a mystical Catholic; and his brother, disabled. Black HUMOUR underscores the novel as JeanMichel grapples with the emotional turmoil of suicides, guilt, and his own sexual maturation. K.G. Stewart
Further reading: Pauline Butling, Seeing in the Dark: The Poetry of Phyllis Webb (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 1997); Susan Glickman, 'Proceeding Before the Amorous Invisible: Phyllis Webb and the Ghazal,' Canadian Literature 115 (Winter 1987): 48-61; John Hulcoop, 'Webb's Book of Revelation,' Inside the Poem, ed WH. New (Toronto:. Oxford, 1992): 230-45. Pauline Butling
WEERASINGHE, Asoka. Poet, communications executive, art dealer; b Colombo, Sri Lanka, 13 Feb 1936; son of Janet Wickaramaseckera and Arnolis Weerasinghe. He lived in Britain for 12 years before moving to Canada in 1968, receiving a masters in palaeontology from Memorial U, NF, and settling in Gloucester, ON. He has been president of the Ottawa Buddhist Assoc and director of the Gloucester Arts Council. Influenced by the poetry of Yeats, Thomas, Larkin, and Moreas, his works include Lotus and Other Poems, Hot Tea and Cinnamon Buns, Selected Poems (1958-1983), Kitsilano Beach Songs, Tears for My Roots, and Poems from Daddy. His long poem
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WEINTRAUB, William. Documentary filmmaker, novelist; b Montreal 19 Feb 1926; son of Mina (Blumer) and Louis Weintraub, a storekeeper; educ McGill U (BA, 1947). Weintraub actively contributed to the cultural life of Montreal, as artist (Portraits by Weintraub, 1963), dramatist (The Underdogs, 1998), satiric novelist (Why Rock the Boat?, 1961; The Underdogs, 1979), and especially as URBAN historian and journalist. He built his correspondence with his close friends Mordecai RICHLER, Brian MOORE, and Mavis GALLANT into a lively memoir of the 19505, and his City Unique (1996) visually recounts the social and political life of Montreal during the 19408 and 19505, focusing on the heyday of what was Canada's literary and cultural capital city. Alexander Hart
WEINZWEIG, Helen. Novelist, dramatist; b Radom, Poland, 21 May 1915; daughter of Lily (Wekselman) and Joseph Tenenbaum; emig 1924; m composer John Weinzweig in 1940. In
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her novels, Passing Ceremony (1973) and Basic Back with Pearls (1980), and short story collection, A View from the Roof(1989), Weinzweig experiments with surreal, fragmented form, creating POSTMODERN texts that foreground FEMINIST issues. Alexander Hart
WEIR, Ian Ralph. Dramatist, screenwriter; b Durham, NC, 3 Sept 1956; son of Joan (Sherman), writer, and Ormond Weir, surgeon. Raised in Kamloops, BC, he earned degrees in English from U British Columbia and U London, then began writing RADIO plays and a nationally syndicated newspaper column. His literate stage comedies about failed idealism and the crassness of modern life include, for Vancouver's New Play Centre, The Idler (1990) - which won the 1988 Jessie Richardson Award for best new play - and The Delphic Orioles (prod 1988), and, for Kamloops' Western Canada Theatre, St George (prod 1994). He has written for numerous Canadian television shows, including The Beachcombers, Northwood, and Cold Squad (see FILM). Jerry Wasserman
WEIR, Robert Stanley. Judge, writer; b Hamilton, CW, 15 Nov 1856, d Lake Memphremagog, QC, 20 Aug 1926; son of William Park Weir and Helen Craig Smith; educ McGill Normal School, McGill U (BCL, 1897). Weir taught at several Montreal schools before turning to the study of law. He was called to the bar in 1881, and went on to practise law in Montreal until 1899, when he was appointed one of the two joint recorders of the city. In 1923 he was elected to the ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA, and in 1926 became a judge of the Exchequer Court of Canada. Considered an authority on the history of municipal law, he was the author of several legal works and also of two volumes of poetry. His 1908 version of 'o CANADA' provided the basis for the official English-language words of the national anthem that were adopted in 1967 (changed by 1980). See also LAVALLEE, ROUTHIER. Peter Mahon
WELCH, Liliane. Poet, professor; b EschAlzette, Luxembourg, 20 Oct 1937; daughter of Claire (Bravi) and Jean-Pierre Meyer; educ
Pennsylvania State U (PhD in French, 1964). Welch immigrated to Canada in 1967 to teach at Mount Allison U. She is the author of commentaries on the French symbolists (with her husband, Cyril Welch) and of 15 books of poetry from Winter Songs (1977) to Fidelities (1997), in which she characteristically adopts the role of the watchful visitor, the observer of lives. This stance reappears in her collections of essays on poetry-making (Seismographs, 1988) and TRAVEL (Frescoes, 1998), where her enthusiasm for physical place (whether New Brunswick or the Dolomites) is enlivened by precise detail. Further reading: Marie-Anne Hansen-Pauly, 'Liliane Welch: Poetry between the Old and the New World,' Revue luxembourgeoise de litterature generate et comparee (1991): 6-13. WELD, Isaac. TRAVEL writer; b Dublin 15 March 1774, d Bray, Ireland, 4 Aug 1856; son of Elizabeth (Kerr) and Isaac Weld. A man with a range of scientific interests, Weld travelled to North America, spending three years (1795-7) in search of a possible new home, only to return to IRELAND; his popular Travels through the states of North America, and the provinces of Upper and Lower Canada (1799; rpt 1807, 1970) critiqued racial policies particularly in the United States, praised scenery, and suggested that Canada might be an appropriate place for persons with property to settle in. WEST is a term with several variant meanings, from its general use to mean Occidental to its more specific application to the entire area that lies directionally west of ONTARIO. More specifically still, it refers in common parlance to the PRAIRIE provinces, but only sometimes to BRITISH COLUMBIA, which is often called the West Coast. In NEWFOUNDLAND, however, 'West Coast' also refers to the west shore of the Island, though in NOVA SCOTIA what might be construed from a map as the west coast of that province is referred to locally as the 'North Shore' or sometimes the 'French Shore.' Historically, 'West' referred to Upper St Lawrence territory - hence the terms 'Canada West' (see CANADA) and 'Western Ontario' (see SOWESTO). More metaphorically, 'West' came to imply a world, or a mindset, that was free from the
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restrictions or received categories of social and religious organization that applied in a metaphoric EAST ('East' referring to Ontario and Quebec, as distinct from 'Down East/ referring to the MARITIMES). The term 'West' did not, however, acquire quite the same cultural power in Canada that it did south of the border. In the United Statues the 'frontier thesis' of F.J. Turner suggested that the true American character developed on the Western frontier, where 'free land,' at the border between civilization and savagery, encouraged independence; the American notion of an 'expanding frontier' was subsequently applied to other, often more metaphorical borders, such as outer space. Canadian usage developed partly in resistance to American practice. See also CANADIAN PACIFIC RAILWAY, COWBOY POETRY, MOUNTIES, NORTH, R E G I O N , WESTERNS.
Further reading: WH. New, Articulating West (Erin, ON: New P, 1972). WESTERNS, forms of POPULAR fiction and FILM, related to the romance, but devoted to the conflict between good and evil, or between the worthy and the wicked, on the Western North American frontier (see MYSTERY AND ROMANCE). Primarily a form that developed to suit the binary oppositions that characterize culture in the UNITED STATES - and emulated in both France and Italy (the so-called 'spaghetti western') - westerns are less common in Canada. Examples include Frederick NIVEN'S formulaic The Lost Cabin Mine (1908) and TREVANIAN'S psychological thriller Incident at TwentyMile (1998). A substantial tradition does exist, however, of COWBOY POETRY - which, like much Canadian country-and-western MUSIC, tends to follow American models - and some writers did write (whether from experience or imagination) of ranch life in the Canadian West. Among these writers were Alan FRY, Richmond P. Hobson, Jr, and Paul ST PIERRE. George BOWERIN G used the Western as the basis for his PARODY, Caprice, which gives power to a woman/stranger (see also ROSE LATULIPE), Thomas KING for his satiric critique of cultural stereotypes, Green Grass, Running Water, and Guy VANDERHAEGHE for his novel about filmmaking, the Cypress Hills Massacre, and images
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of NATIONALISM and the Old West, The Englishman's Boy. See also EVERSON. WETHERALD, Agnes Ethelwyn (pseud Bel Thistlethwaite). Poet, journalist; b Rockwood, ON, 26 April 1857, d Fenwick, CW, 9 March 1940; daughter of Jemima Harris (Balls) and William Wetherald, schoolmaster. Wetherald was raised by her Quaker family in New York State and the Niagara Peninsula. She contributed sketches to the Globe pseudonymously in the i88os, at the same time as she collaborated with G.M. ADAM on An Algonquin Maiden (1886), an unrealistic romance of NATIVE life that raised the hackles of both Pauline JOHNSON and s.j. DUNCAN. Wetherald moved to London, ON, in 1889 to write for the feminist journal Wives and Daughters, and to Philadelphia in 1895 as an editorial assistant with Ladies' Home Journal, but soon after she left JOURNALISM, and increasingly turned her attention to poetry. Six volumes appeared, including Lyrics and Sonnets (1931, ed John Garvin), demonstrating her facility with metrics and detail. Further reading: Margaret Whitridge, 'The Distaff Side of the Confederation Group,' Atlantis 4 (Autumn 1978): 30-9. WEVILL, David Anthony. Poet; b Yokohama, Japan, 15 March 1935; son of George Frederick and Sylvia (Bryan) Wevill. Wevill was brought to Canada as a child. After studying at Cambridge U (BA, 1957), he joined 'The Group,' a circle of international poets working in London, England. He later worked in Burma and Spain, before joining the faculty at U Texas. A Christ of the Ice-Floes (1966) was runner-up for a Governor General's Award. Although Wevill immigrated to the United States in the 19505, he considers himself a Canadian writer who strives for the terseness of the Spanish-language poets Neruda, Lorca, and Paz. His poetry often engages in intense self-exploration through contemplation of other writers; child eating snow (1994) recaptures the imagery of Wevill's childhood in Ontario. Further reading: 'Where the Arrow Falls: David Wevill,' Lives and Works, ed Bruce Meyer and Brian O'Riordan (Toronto: Black Moss, 1992). R. Gooding
WHITE
WHALLEY, George. Poet, critic, biographer; b Kingston, ON, 25 July 1915, d Kingston, ON, 27 May 1983; son of Dorothy (Quirk) and Arthur Francis Cecil Whalley, an Anglican minister. Whalley studied classics at Bishops U, QC (BA, 1935) before winning a Rhodes scholarship to Oriel C, Oxford U (BA, 1939; MA, 1945). From 1940 to 1945 he served as a navigator in the Royal Canadian Navy, where he designed a marker buoy used in the landing on Italy. After the war Whalley resumed his studies at Bishops U (MA, 1948) and U London (PhD, 1950). He taught at Queen's U from 1950 until his retirement in 1980. Whalley's major poetry, Poems: 1939-1944 (1946) and No Man an Island (1948), balances a fragile humanism against the surreal violence of naval warfare and the night bombings of London. After the war, Whalley turned to CRITICISM and BIOGRAPHY, writing the influential Poetic Process (1953), biographical and scholarly studies of Coleridge, and the essays collected in Studies in Literature and the Humanities (1985). His most popular work was The Legend of John Hornby (1962), the biography of an arctic adventurer who died of starvation near the Thelon River in 1927 (see NORTH). Whalley's translation of Aristotle's Poetics was published posthumously. Further reading: James Cranton, 'Pathos-asPraxis in The Legend of John Hornby,' English Studies in Canada 21.3 (1995): 301-19; Michael D. Moore, ed, George Whalley: Remembrances (Kingston: Quarry, 1989). R. Gooding
WHARTON, Thomas. Novelist, professor; b Grand Prairie, AB, 25 Feb 1963; son of Anne (Kons) and Thomas Joseph Wharton; educ U Alberta (BA, 1990; MA, 1992) and U Calgary (PhD, 1998). Wharton was raised in Grand Prairie, and now resides in Edmonton with his wife, Sharon, and their two children. He is a former student of Rudy WIEBE, and his first novel, Icefields (pub by NeWest, 1995, to wide acclaim), won three Alberta book prizes as well as the 1996 Commonwealth Writers Prize for best first book in Canada and Caribbean regions (see AWARDS). It is a novel loosely based on the European 'discovery' and early exploration of the Rocky Mountain glaciers near Jasper; like
Wharton's subsequent fiction, it highlights the power of narrative itself (tale, memoir, history, fantasy, journal report) to govern the way characters and readers alike lay claim to 'truth' by the way they perceive and lay claim to place. He teaches Creative WRITING at U Alberta. Rebecca Murdock
WHEELER, Jordan Henry. Writer, storyteller, screenwriter for television and film; b Victoria, BC, 16 Dec 1964; son of Bernelda Winona (Pratt) and Peter Henry Wheeler. Wheeler is a METIS of Cree, Assiniboine, Ojibwa, English, Irish, and Scottish decent. He was educated at St John's Ravenscourt School in Winnipeg, and began writing at age 17. He has written short fiction, CHILDREN'S books, and dramas, and is a former editor of the Manitoba Aboriginal newspaper Weetamah. He is also an ORAL storyteller and a vocal Aboriginal advocate. His body of work includes Just a Walk (1984), a children's picture book; Brothers in Arms (1989), a collection of three NOVELLAS about the family and cultural crises that Native brothers must face; and several television scripts for North of 60. K.G. Stewart
WHITE, Franklin Howard. Writer, publisher; b Abbotsford, BC, 18 April 1945; son of Kathleen (Boley) and Franklin White, a logger. A politically active anthologist, poet, and prose writer, as well as founder, editor, and publisher of Raincoast Chronicles (1972-) and founder and president of Harbour PUBLISHING in Madeira Park, BC (1974-), White is committed to the REGIONAL culture of the BC Coast. His work both examines and celebrates local history, as in the writing he did with (and on) individuals such as Jim Spilsbury (Spilsbury's Coast, 1987; The Accidental Airline, 1988). His poems, stories, and essays appeared in Writing in the Rain (1990) and Ghost in the Gears (1993), and he also performed in the touring stage show Caulk Boots and Marlin Spikes. His poetry focuses on political and environmental themes. The winner of AWARDS for HUMOUR and historical writing, White has an ear for West Coast idiom and the cadences of working lives in rural communities.
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Further reading: Jane Fredeman, 'Book Publishing in BC,' J Canadian Studies 25.3 (Fall 1990): 124-38. WHYTE, Jon Anthony. Nature writer, journalist, popular historian, museum curator, poet; b Banff, AB, 15 March 1941, d Banff 6 Jan 1992; son of Barbara (Carpenter) and Jack ('Dave') Whyte (1908-61), a merchant. His uncle and aunt, Peter Whyte (1905-66) and Catharine Robb Whyte (1906-79), were artists who established Banff's Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies. The history of his family's settlement in Banff and the museum's unique collections of alpine paintings and photographs inspired much of Whyte's writing. His Stanford U MA thesis was a film DOCUMENTARY on 'Jimmy Simpson, Mountain Man.' He collaborated closely with photographers and painters in such works of regional history as The Rockies (1978), and the poetry collection Homage, Henry Kelsey (1982), winner of the 1983 Stephan G. Stephansson Award. In the poems of Gallimaufry (1981), he displayed erudite wit and linguistic playfulness. Of the projected five volumes of The Fells of Brightness, only two appeared (in 1983 and 1985) before Whyte died. Sampled in an earlier version in Gallimaufry, this sequence (drawing on a range of prosodic forms, and using TYPOGRAPHY and photography as design) attempts nothing less than a coherent understanding of the Rocky Mountains - for example, through MYTH, metaphor, geology, ECOLOGY, and personal history. Whyte was also a columnist for the Crag and Canyon newspaper (1969-91), and from 1980 was curator of the Whyte Museum's Heritage Collection. Glenn Deer
WIEBE, Rudy Henry. Novelist, short story writer, educator; b Speedwell, SK, 4 Oct 1934; son of Katerina (Knelsen) and Abram Jacob Wiebe, a farmer. Wiebe's parents were Mennonites who had emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1930 to escape persecution under the Stalinist regime. In Speedwell, and later in Coaldale, AB, Wiebe grew up in a polyglot environment, speaking Friesian-Prussian Low German at home, High German in church, and English at school. His family was part of Western Canada's MENNONITE Brethren Church
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community, a Bible-centred Anabaptist community that remained separated from the rest of Canada not only by physical distance but also by religious belief, and linguistic and cultural practices. Wiebe's early life experiences, and his spiritual beliefs and ideals of social justice have shaped his deep plot structures, his thematic interests, and his character types. He has frequently focused on moments of spiritual and moral crisis that occur when large, secular historical forces break in upon small, isolated, tradition oriented religious communities. Despite his abiding thematic interests and underlying narrative patterns, Wiebe is not a predictable writer. He has worked, sometimes collaboratively, in a range of genres, including short stories, religious JOURNALISM, TRAVEL writing, editorials, a HISTORICAL documentary, and drama. He is best known, however, for his seven major novels and his collaborative biographical writing. Artistically and intellectually, he is adventurous and rigorously exploratory. Each successive major work sees him striving to move beyoud his previous limits, and to negotiate a new relationship with his readers. He has experimented with a variety of different styles and innovative narrative techniques, and has moulded the English language into new, powerfully expressive shapes that reflect the rhythms, lexicon, and syntax of other languages. He critically examines the textual foundations of historical and religious certainty, and his writings have provoked controversy by raising sensitive political questions and exploring taboo realms of experience. Wiebe's first novel, Peace Shall Destroy Many (1962), caused a furore in the Mennonite community by depicting church leaders as dogmatic, self-serving, and hypocritical. Set in the isolated Mennonite farming community of Wapiti in northern Saskatchewan in 1944, the action centres on Thorn Wiens as he and the other young men of Wapiti decide how to respond to the Canadian government's call to join the armed forces. The legal authority of the state clashes with the moral authority of the scriptures; actions that the state condemns as treachery, the church praises as pacifism. Wiebe writes of religious faith not as a static state of being, but as a dynamic, mysterious phenomenon that has to be tested, expressed, and renewed in surprising
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ways. The Anabaptist ideal of foliowing Jesus is complicated by an awareness that God's word is accessible to human consciousness only as mediated through the historically and culturally contingent words of human beings. Peace Shall Destroy Many so thoroughly offended sections of the Mennonite community that in 1963 Wiebe resigned his post as editor of the Mennonite Brethren Herald, and took a job teaching English at Goshen C, IN. While at Goshen, Wiebe published his second novel, First and Vital Candle (1966), the story of Abe Ross's rediscovery of Christian faith. Set in Winnipeg and a remote northern Ontario OJIBWA community, the novel contains many elements from popular adventure romance (see MYSTERY AND ROMANCE) while also being grounded in the historical realities of the Cold WAR era. Wiebe explores the relation between language, moral perception, and behaviour. He also addresses the general question of the writer's political relation with readers, and the specific question of why people, even in moments of extreme spiritual need, may be repelled by Christian proselytizing. In 1967, Wiebe returned to Canada to take up a position teaching literary studies and creative WRITING at U Alberta, where he remained until his retirement from full-time teaching in 1990. In 1970 he published The Blue Mountains of China, the first of his epic HISTORICAL fictions. The novel traced the history of the Mennonite diaspora over a period of a hundred years, beginning in UKRAINE, then spreading to North and South America and eastern ASIA. As well as bringing Mennonite history to public attention for the first time in literature, Wiebe brought the rhythms, diction, and syntax of Low German into the English language. The Blue Mountains of China was also acclaimed for its skilful interweaving of narrative strands and its utilization of multiple points of view. The Temptations of Big Bear followed in 1973, winning Wiebe his first Governor General's AWARD . In this novel, Wiebe turned his attention to Western Canadian history between 1876 and 1888, when the federal government was opening up the West by enclosing the aboriginal population on reserves. Temptations focuses on the CREE elder Big Bear, a powerful orator and spiritual leader. In colonial historiography, Big
Bear was branded a troublemaker because he refused to sign a treaty or settle on a reserve. Wiebe offers an alternative interpretation of Big Bear's life, presenting him as a prophetic leader who resists the temptations of both physical violence and abject surrender. Big Bear alone understands that the most crucial battles take place not on the physical plane but in verbal and ideological spheres, and that his people's political and cultural survival depends ultimately on the strength of their spiritual faith. Researching The Temptations of Big Bear, Wiebe went back to the primary archival documents as well as to published memoirs and journals of white settlers and government officials. The Cree peoples' perspectives he had to reconstruct imaginatively, from material evidence such as Big Bear's sacred bundle, from anthropological information, and from the few scraps of their speech preserved in writing. The novel incorporates found historical documents such as newspaper reports, letters, a diary, and Big Bear's treaty document. By recontextualizing existing writings, Wiebe permits readers to elicit new meanings from them, meanings never imagined by the original authors of the documents. The multitude of narrative perspectives in the novel reminds readers that the past is never directly or objectively knowable, but is always partial, always a construct, and always textually mediated. The Temptations of Big Bear was followed four years later by The Scorched-Wood People (1977), which focuses on the relatively well-known story of METIS leader Louis RIEL and the socalled rebellions at RED RIVER in 1869-70 and in Saskatchewan in 1885 (see NORTH-WEST REBELLION). Wiebe presents Riel's story as an oral tale told by Metis bard Pierre FALCON. His depiction of Riel is highly ambivalent: he is a prophetic hero fighting for the rights of his people against the oppressive alien power of the Ottawa government, and yet he resembles certain fanatical leaders of the early Anabaptist churches in Reformation Europe who resorted to violence to obtain their objectives. The Scorched-Wood People provides a religious answer to questions traditionally framed in political terms. For Wiebe, politics and RELIGION are inextricably mixed, partly because power and faith often share common textual foundations. As in all his other
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novels, he dramatizes the hypocrisy and injustices that arise when people confine spiritual life to a separate compartment within the psyche, isolated from other dimensions of human experience. A sixth novel, My Lovely Enemy (1983), took sexual passion and spiritual love out of their separate compartments and used the former as a vehicle for concretely imagining the latter. Wiebe's social purview narrows, but his narrative pattern remains fundamentally intact: the boundaries of the nuclear family break open when Gillian Overton invades the body space of James Dyck, a happily married, middle-aged history professor. Wiebe parallels James's disorientation with that of the Cree chief Maskepetoon during the period of early contact with white culture. As James begins a process of emotional, moral, and spiritual re-evaluation, he must grapple, like Maskepetoon, with the mysterious power of written texts. Wiebe's next book, A Discovery of Strangers, which won the 1994 Governor General's Award for Fiction, tells the story of explorer John FRANKLIN'S 1820 expedition through the territory of the Tetsot'ine (Yellowknife) Indians to Canada's Arctic coast. As Franklin's party advances across the pristine northern landscape, the beautiful face of Birdseye, a Tetsot'ine woman of great prophetic wisdom, is progressively corroded by disease. Yet momentarily, and miraculously, given the imbalances of power that exists between them, two strangers Greenstockings, a Tetsot'ine woman, and Robert Hood, a young English midshipman come together as lovers by free mutual agreement. (See also NORTH.) Wiebe has won critical acclaim for his breadth of vision and technical virtuosity; however, his early works attracted criticism for allowing religious rhetoric to intrude jarringly into his narratives and dialogues. This tendency to preach is not only an aesthetic problem but a political one as well, and Wiebe has grappled with it both thematically and stylistically by developing various modes of indirect address. In his middle and later works, his authorial voice becomes dispersed and refracted in complex ways through the voices and texts of others. These indirect modes of enunciation allow readers to act consciously as co-creators, rather than
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as passive recipients of the meanings they discover in Wiebe's texts. Yet Wiebe's refractive modes introduce new problems of their own. They lay him open to charges of cultural appropriation for using indigenous and female voices to articulate his own beliefs and values. Wiebe's subsequent work - Stolen Life: The Journey of a Cree Woman (1998) - is a biographical account of the LIFE of Big Bear's great-great granddaughter, Yvonne Johnson, who coauthored the book with Wiebe. Until her late teens, Johnson was literally all but voiceless: she was born with a double-cleft palate that made clear or sustained speech impossible. Her family life was chaotic, violent, abusive, povertystricken, and deeply scarred by the death of her eldest brother under highly suspicious circumstances in police custody. In 1989, at the age of 27, Yvonne Johnson was sentenced to life imprisonment for her part in the killing of a man believed to be a child abuser. In the Kingston Women's Prison Library she read The Temptations of Big Bear and wrote to Wiebe, inviting him to help her write her story. Wiebe builds Johnson's story out of her own tapes and journals, as well as from information gathered from interviews, official records, and other DOCUMENTARY sources. Part of the story is the framing narrative of how the story was made, and of the developing relationship of trust and understanding between the two co-authors. Stolen Life is an extraordinarily powerful and disturbing book in which the voices of Wiebe and Johnson interweave in a manner that is not merely appropriative, but genuinely collaborative and mutually beneficial. Wiebe was named an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2001. Further reading: Penny van Toorn, Rudy Wiebe and the Historicity of the Word (Edmonton: U Alberta P, 1995); WJ. Keith, ed, A Voice in the Land: Essays by and about Rudy Wiebe (Edmonton: NeWest, 1981); WJ. Keith, Epic Fiction: The Art of Rudy Wiebe (Edmonton: U Alberta P, 1981). Penny van Toorn
WIELER, Diana Jean, writer; b Winnipeg, MB, 14 Oct 1961; daughter of Jean Florence (Zebrasky), accounting clerk, and Heinz Egon Petrich, chef. Writing for C H I L D R E N , chiefly young adults, Wieler creates well-developed
WILLIAMS
characters, lively dialogue, and dynamic plots. Her protagonists are teenaged males, usually in highly charged emotional situations. In Drive (1998) and earlier books she explores 'tough' themes such as controlling anger and aggression, coming to terms with sexuality, and dealing with family crises (divorce and family secrets, fetal alcohol syndrome, and the murder of a mother by an estranged, suicidal father). Bad Boy (1989), winner of the Governor General's and other AWARDS, excited controversy in its treatment of a macho young hockey player who discovers that his sports idol is GAY. The awardwinning RanVan trilogy - Ran Van the Defender (1993), Ran Van: A Worthy Opponent (1995), and Ran Van: Magic Nation (1997) - combines gritty realism and elements of fantasy through the exploits of video-game warrior Rhan. Further reading: Bridget Donald, 'Diana Wieler's Angry Young Men,' Quill and Quire (Sept 1998): 63-4. Wieler Web site: http://www. makersgallery.com/wieler/index.html Jane Flick
WILCOCKE, Samuel Hull (pseud Lewis Luke McCulloch). Translator, journalist; b Reigate, England, c 1766, d Quebec 3 July 1833; son of Rev Samuel Wilcocke. Apparently educated in Europe, Wilcocke translated 'mercantile' texts in Liverpool for 20 years before moving to Montreal as a journalist in 1817. He was hired by the North West Company (NWC) to assert its cause in disputes with the HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY over Lord Selkirk's Red River Settlement (see MANITOBA). Three years later he was arrested by the NWC in Vermont, accused of forgery and grand larceny, tried and acquitted, immediately rearrested for debt, and illegally imprisoned in 1821 (at which time he began the NEWSPAPER Scribbler, which continued after he was released the following year). The journal was printed in Montreal, but he edited it out of reach of Lower Canada law from the UNITED STATES). In it, he criticized those who held power in Lower Canada, devising (with his wife, Ann Lewis) a series of fictional strategies to spell out obliquely the scandals of Montreal society. Returning to Montreal in 1828, he spent his last years compiling a direct record of Lower Canada's political debates.
Further reading: Carl F. Klinck, 'Samuel Hull Wilcocke,' J Canadian Fiction 2.3 (1973): 13-21, and 'The World of The Scribbler,' J Canadian Fiction 4.3 (1975): 12.3-48. WILKINSON, Anne Cochran Boyd. Poet; b Toronto 21 Sept 1910, d Toronto 10 May 1961; daughter of Mary (Osier) and George Gibbons. Her two volumes of elliptical poetry, Counterpoint to Sleep (1951) and The Hangman Ties the Holly (1955), much praised in the 19605 - gathered with uncollected poems, after her death from cancer, in Collected Poems (1968, ed A.J.M. SMITH) - use sensuous metaphor to express the power of desire. A children's book, Swann and Daphne (1960), also engages with the lushness of nature; and her idiosyncratic Lions in the Way (1956) tells a history of the characters in her distinguished maternal family (the Osiers). Further reading: Christopher Armitage, Anne Wilkinson and Her Works (Toronto: ECW, 1987); Douglas Barbour, 'Day Thoughts on Anne Wilkinson's Poetry,' in Shirley Neuman and Smaro Kamboureli, eds, A Mazing Space: Writing Canadian Women Writing (Edmonton: Longspoon, 1986): 179-90; Joan Coldwell, The Tightrope Walker: Autobiographical Writing of Anne Wilkinson (Toronto: U Toronto P, 1992). WILLIAMS, David Larry. Professor, novelist; b Glenwood, MB, 22 June 1945; son of Dorothy (Dahl) and Jack Williams, a farmer and stationary engineer; educ U Saskatchewan (BA, 1968) and U Massachusetts (PhD, 1973). Williams teaches at U Manitoba, his literary CRITICISM primarily dealing with the KUNSTLERROMAN (the artist figure in Canadian writing) and with RIEL and aspects of prairie culture (see REGION). His novels - The Burning Wood (1975), The River Horsemen (1981), The Eye of the Father (1985) - deal with the attractions of authority: sons cope with family, racial difference, faith, and their own souls, using language as the medium through which they express their resistance. Further reading: Reinhold Kramer, 'Scatology in the Novels of David Williams,' Studies in Canadian Literature 15.2 (1990): 180-93.
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WILSON, Budge Marjorie. Writer, teacher, photographer; b Halifax 2 May 1927; daughter of Helen (Dustan) and Maynard Archibald; educ Dalhousie U. Wilson wrote a score of books between 1984 and 1997. While her reputation primarily rests on her writing for CHILDREN - as in Thirteen Never Changes (1989), part of her continuing Blue Harbour series, in which children in a Nova Scotia fishing village age year by year, and Oliver's Wars (1992) - she attracted most critical notice for The Leaving (1990), a collection of ii stories for young adults. All concern teenaged women dealing with teachers, parents, first love, and language; characteristically, the parents are absent, either physically or emotionally, and severe because they fear their own frailties; the teachers are compensating for their own loss of youth; and the language (often couched in diary form) is metaphoric and impatient with cliche. Further reading: Janice Kulyk Reefer, '"Brightly, Aggressively Golden": Verbal Agency in Budge Wilson's The Leaving,' Atlantis 20.1 (Fall-Winter 1995): 195-201. WILSON, Sir Daniel. Educator, author; b Edinburgh 3 Jan 1816, d Toronto 6 Aug 1892; son of Janet (Aitken) and Archibald Wilson, merchant. Daniel Wilson trained as an engraver. He was commissioned by a London publisher to produce an engraving of one of painter J.M.W. Turner's works; he also produced several illustrated books on architecture and archaeological artefacts. He received an honorary LLD from St Andrews U for one book and despite having no university training, was subsequently appointed to the chair in history and English literature at U Toronto (1853); he later became university president. A friend of Sir William DAWS ON, a vitriolic opponent of Egerton RYERSON, and the uncle of J.G. SIME, he occupies an influential place in the history of educational practice and SCIENCE writing. He supported the establishment of the Toronto Ladies' Educational Assoc (1869-77) and the ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA
(1882); he opposed co-educational universities and regarded literary practice in Canada (except for the work of Goldwin SMITH) as mediocre. His Prehistoric Man (1862) argued for further attention to the prehistory of NATIVE North American cultures. It was followed by Caliban:
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The Missing Link (1873) and The Lost Atlantis (1892). While some dismissed his writing for its lack of fieldwork and its failure to fully take up Darwinian models (Wilson insisted that humans' moral sense distinguished them from animals), he was avant-garde in other ways: he attacked the Indian reserve system; he dismissed conventional racial biases; and he recognized early the fact of CULTURAL PLURALITY in North America. He was knighted in 1888. Further reading: Elizabeth Hulse, ed, Thinking with Both Hands: Sir Daniel Wilson in the Old World and the New (Toronto: U Toronto P, 1999); A.B. McKillop, A Disciplined Intelligence (Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP, 1979). WILSON, Eric Hamilton. CHILDREN'S writer, teacher; b Ottawa 24 Nov 1940; son of Evelyn (Hamilton), a nurse, and Robert S.S. Wilson, RCMP superintendent and author of Undercover for the RCMP (1986) (see MOUNTIES); educ U British Columbia. Wilson gave up a teaching post to write children's MYSTERY novels full-time. His 20 best-selling books, from Murder on the Canadian (1976) to Escape from Big Muddy (1997), appeal through their use of specific cross-Canada settings (Vancouver Nightmare, 1978; Terror in Winnipeg, 1979; Vampires of Ottawa, 1984; Cold Midnight in Vieux Quebec, 1989; The Green Gables Detectives, 1987) and through their assertion of children's intelligence. Characteristically they avoid both monstrosity and violence, rooting solutions in a reaffirmation of the everyday. Study guides are available for several of Wilson's novels, as is a video (Eric Wilson's Canada, 1991); an Eric Wilson Mystery Club, with its own newsletter, is headquartered in Victoria. WILSON, Ethel Davis (Bryant). Novelist, short storyist; b Port Elizabeth, South Africa, 20 Jan 1888, d Vancouver 22 Dec 1980; daughter of Eliza Davis (Malkin) and Robert William Bryant, a Methodist missionary. In her later years, Wilson received the Canada Council Medal (1961), the Lome Pierce Medal of the ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA (1964), and the
Order of Canada Medal of Service (1970). In 1890, following her mother's death in South AFRICA, Wilson's father took her to England, where he provided her with several idyllic
WILSON
years. He died when Wilson was nine; she was subsequently 'collected' by her maternal grandmother, Ann Malkin, and taken to Vancouver in 1898. She returned to England in 1902 to attend Trinity Hall School (a school for daughters of Methodist ministers) in Southport, Lancashire. After four years, she returned to what was now her home city of Vancouver, where she continued her self-guided education in the classics of English literature as she undertook formal teacher's training: in 1907 she graduated from Vancouver Normal School with a teacher's certificate. She taught elementary school in Vancouver for 13 years, until her marriage in 1921 to prominent Vancouver medical doctor Wallace Wilson. This marriage centred her life and grounded her writing until her husband's death in 1966. Even late in her life, when her recognition as an important Canadian writer was assured, Wilson described herself in terms of her relationship to her husband, always a wife before a writer, as if to commit herself to the second was necessarily to diminish the first. She had no children. Ethel Wilson was a private woman, and from this privacy grew myths of her sudden fall into fiction near the age of 60 with the publication of her first novel, Hetty Dorval, in 1947. She published five other works in the next 14 years: The Innocent Traveller (1949), The Equations of Love (1952), Swamp Angel (1954), Love and Salt Water (1956), and Mrs. Golightly and Other Stories (1961). Perhaps this idea of her sudden bloom into fiction grew from the story that she wrote Hetty Dorval in a single burst of three weeks. According to David Stouck, however, it is clear that she had entered into a long and committed apprenticeship in the craft of writing many years, even decades, before her work appeared in print. Much of Wilson's work is about women and the shifting expectations of the communities to which they belong, a sometimes isolating dance between their own hopes and needs and the conflicting demands of family life and marital intimacy. Her loosely autobiographical collection of sketches, The Innocent Traveller, traces the collective history of the women of the fictional Hastings family (based on the Malkin family) as they emigrate to Vancouver. It details the life of the spinster aunt Topaz, both a curious figure and a repository of wisdom about human
nature. She talks too much, overstepping bounds of conventional propriety: in 'Dinner at Noon,' while her family is entertaining esteemed intellectual Matthew Arnold, a young Topaz disappears under the dining-room table, where she interprets the world of Victorian manners through the footwear displayed in this secret place. She looks, she touches, she laughs, and she manages to elicit approval from the important guest even as she shocks her family. Throughout her life, Topaz's words and actions illustrate the boundaries of protocol, first in the rigidly stratified society of England and later in the cultural flux of early Vancouver. Never married, Topaz is an 'odd' woman who lives a life outside the expectations of normal women. As a young adult in 'What a Delightful Evening!,' she is courted informally by a local dignitary and is accompanied to many parties at his house by her unmarried brother. Here Topaz is an integral part of local society. When her brother suddenly marries and can no longer escort her, Topaz's heart is broken because she must withdraw from this world of possibility she now loves. As an unchaperoned single woman, she has the potential to upset the controlled calm of the dinner party simply by her presence without a governing male hand. Wilson's work illustrates the petty, often racial, injustices of Vancouver society. Topaz speaks out when the book club to which she belongs threatens to bar a woman who has been seen learning to swim in the arms of a BLACK man (Joe Fortes, the real-life swimming teacher, is now celebrated as a local hero). Yow, the Chinese cook, is a reminder of the Hastings family's privilege: their upstairs world of entitlement and Yow's downstairs world of hard work exist concurrently. Yow's wife remains in China as he cooks and cleans alone. It is a complex situation: despite his drudgery and his separation from home, Yow displays a fierce loyalty to the people in the family he favours even as he manipulates those around him to serve his own interests. As he plans a trip to China, ostensibly to father a son, he protects his interests in Vancouver by selling his position as cook for 10 per cent of his salary, making the deal with someone who cannot cook as well as he, thereby assuring that this arrangement is not only lucrative but also temporary. The character of Yow apparently
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exceeded his original treatment in The Innocent Traveller. He appears again in the novella 'Lilly's Story' (collected with Tuesday and Wednesday' in The Equations of Love), this time enamoured with the pale and listless Lilly. Yow seeks to allay the problems and prejudices of their cross-cultural courtship with his generosity, but the gifts he gives are family treasures purloined from the informal archive of the Hastings family storeroom. The possibility of human control over environment and lives is often at issue. Wilson's characters articulate their relationships in a local vernacular, along the way suggesting the world of emotion that lurks behind the banalities of everyday speech and the vital communication that exists in the unsaid. Human intimacy is dangerous and, for some women, adherence to recognized manners and social duties provides an illusory safety net for lives lived (according to Nora in Love and Salt Water) on the brink. For others, healing or redemption can be found in the land itself, in the richly described topography and foliage of British Columbia. In Swamp Angel, Maggie Lloyd finds peace and establishes new family connections at a fishing camp near Kamloops, BC, said to be based on the camp on Lac Le Jeune, BC, to which the Wilsons returned year after year from the 19205 to the 19605. Maggie Lloyd's spirit quest unfolds as she slips out of one persona and into another, travelling by taxi, bus, and on foot, shedding the city and her name as she goes. Part of Wilson's legacy is her able evocation of place, her inscription of British Columbia as a fit place for fiction, from the town of Lytton, perched at the confluence of the Fraser and Thompson Rivers in Hetty Dorval, to the mistshrouded mountains that frame the city of Vancouver in The Innocent Traveller, to the serenity of the bush in Swamp Angel. In Love and Salt Water, the raging Pacific shoreline is the scene of a climactic accident and significant event in the maturation of Ellen Cuppy. Wilson also reminds us of the world beyond the immediate place, of the empire writ large in the ordinary lives of women corresponding with far-flung families and never-seen relatives. Topaz's immediate family ties extend across the British Empire: as she sits in her turret room on the western edge of the continent reading letters, the women of
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her family sew busily. Topaz regales them with correspondence from the two nieces she has never met (the offspring of her sister's hasty marriage to a missionary, and of her ill-fated life in India); from one brother in Australia; and from another brother in England, at which distance Topaz's eccentricity is sufficiently managed for his approval. Wilson's work often deals with missed opportunities and misjudgments and their consequences, particularly in the lives of marginal women; it also concerns the wonders of connection, the legacies of love, and the resilience of families. In Swamp Angel, the arrogant Nell Severance traded her part in her daughter's childhood and adolescence for a chance to travel with a circus sideshow, to see the world unencumbered by a child's needs. Now much older, and largely confined to her chair, this massive woman is an unlikely nurturer of people and a diviner of human aspirations: she supports her friend Maggie Lloyd in her bid for freedom and in her determination to find a community away from Vancouver; she counsels Maggie's shattered husband; and she makes amends with her own daughter Hilda, making it possible for Hilda to marry and to create the kind of stable life she craves. Ethel Wilson immersed herself in her work and rewrote diligently to achieve a simplicity and elegance of style. She humbled her achievements, eschewed the world of academia, and insisted that her stones were merely about people and their decisions, not creations layered with symbols and obscure meanings; however, such proclamations belie her obvious devotion to her craft. She resisted nationalistic formulations of writing, insisting that writers were individuals, not representatives of nations. Despite her ambivalence with regard to her critical position, Wilson believed herself to belong to the community of Canadian writers and she corresponded with a circle of them, including Margaret LAURENCE, MaZO DE LA ROCHE, P.K. PAGE, and Roderick HAIG-BROWN. Her work was supported and ushered through publication at Macmillan for many years by John Gray, her literary mentor, friend, and literary executor. Although Ethel Wilson's career began comparatively late, she continued to write productively into her seventies. Following her husband's
WINTER
death, she declined in health and had to leave her beloved apartment overlooking Vancouver's English Bay. She died in a nursing home. Wilson's papers are housed in Special Collections at U British Columbia Library.
there. Major influences on her work are Alice MUNRO, John Updike, and Raymond Carver. Windley lives in Nanaimo, BC, with her husband and daughter.
Further reading: Lorraine McMullen, ed, The Ethel Wilson Symposium (Ottawa: U Ottawa P, 1982); David Stouck, Ethel Wilson: Stories, Essays, Letters (Vancouver: U British Columbia P, 1987).
WINNIPEG GENERAL STRIKE is not the
K. Jane Watt
WINDIGO (wendigo, witiko) is a figure in NORTHERN ATHAPASKAN and ALGONQUIAN Cul-
tures. A fearsome giant - created out of the spirits of the NORTH and ice - the windigo is represented in MYTH as an ice-hearted cannibal who uses treetops as snowshoes and travels great distances in search of food. The windigo can take possession of human beings through their dreams, and can turn people into cannibals, a transformation that can be reversed through cultural ritual (eg, the 'shaking tent' ceremony). The windigo is the subject of a play by Dennis FOON, a novel by Wayland DREW, anthologies by Bernard ASSINIWI and J.R. COLOMBO, a collection of Ojibwa tales by Norval MORRISSEAU, and a mystery by Giles Blunt, Forty Words for Sorrow (2000). Parallel figures exist in other ORAL cultures, such as those represented in the West Coast tales of Hamatsa ('monstrosity') and DSONOQUA. WINDLEY, Carol Ann. Writer, instructor, librarian; b Torino, BC, 18 June 1947; daughter of Mavis Rose (Turner) and Anthony Wilfred Guppy, marine artist; sister of Stephen GUPPY. Windley has worked as a copywriter for two radio stations, as a librarian, and as a creative WRITING instructor. She has published poetry and short stories in various journals, and won first prize in the short story category of CBC Radio's literary competition in 1987. Her first short story collection, Visible Light (1993), won the Bumbershoot/Weyerhaeuser Publication Award, and was also nominated for the Governor General's AWARD . Both Visible Light and Breathing Under Water (1998), a novel about mothers and daughters, are concerned with the LANDSCAPE of British Columbia's west coast, and its effects on the lives of the people who live
J.E. Walchli
only major dispute in Canadian labour history (others include the 1949 Asbestos Strike in Quebec [see j.j. RICHARD and DRAMA IN FRENCH] and the Bloody Sunday unemployment riots in Vancouver in 1935), but the one that came to be something of a social touchstone and hence a forceful ALLUSION in Canadian literature, as in Ann HENRY'S Lulu Street and Margaret SWEATMAN'S Fox. Lasting from 15 May to 25 June 1919, the strike took over thirty thousand workers off the job, paralyzing the city; it was a response initially to the failure of negotiations in the building trades. On the one side, the fledgling union movement was attempting to demonstrate some strength; on the other the employers were trying to destroy it. Without evidence, but with the support of the NEWSPAPERS, the employers accused the strike organizers of being Bolsheviks. The scare tactics (in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917) led to public fear and to the federal government stepping in, supporting the employers, and refusing to meet with the strike leaders. The government expanded the definition of sedition, altered the Immigration Act so as to be able to deport British-born strikers, and ordered the MOUNTED POLICE to attack, which they did, leading to injuries and death. When the workers returned to work, the dispute was not resolved, and resentments continued to fester; sympathetic strikes took place elsewhere in the country, and 'Winnipeg' came to epitomize issues of continuing CLASS conflict. WINTER, see WEATHER. WINTER, Michael Hardy. Fiction writer; b Durham, England, n March 1965; son of Anne (Hardy) and Thomas Leo Winter; immig to Newfoundland in 1968; studied English and geography at Memorial U (BA, 1986). Winter grew up in Corner Brook, NF. His first book is a commissioned 'young adult' novel about sexual abuse (officially co-authored by two supervisors
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of the project), Ask Me No Questions (1990), remarkable for its sensitive portrait of its female protagonist, whose experience is tactfully and convincingly depicted. He next published two collections of adult short fiction, Creaking in Their Skins (1994) and One Last Good Look (1999). Their realist and regionalist subject matter (youth and early adulthood in NEWFOUNDLAND) is transcended by the power and subtlety of the prose, the strength and complexity of the characterization, and the author's dry wit. Lawrence Mathews
WISEMAN, Adele. Author; b Winnipeg 21 May 1928, d Toronto i June 1992; daughter of Chaika (Rosenberg), dressmaker/dollmaker, and Pesach Waisman, tailor. Adele Wiseman was educated formally at U Manitoba (where she was a student of Malcolm ROSS and began a lifelong friendship with another student, Margaret LAURENCE), but she received a different kind of education from the stories handed down by her Ukrainian JEWISH parents. Her formal studies took her into social work and teaching; the family tales turned indirectly into her essays, plays, and fiction. Some of her later books made clear her appreciation of the creative process. Old Woman at Play (1978) is at once a tribute to her mother's doll-making talents and a meditation on her own craft; it also articulates the relation between the two creative acts and affirms the necessity of a connection between mother and daughter, between generations. The autobiographical Confessions of a Book Molesting Childhood and Other Essays (1987) voices this affirmation in another way, drawing on a rich strain of IRONY to celebrate how community offsets social marginalization, especially the kinds of exclusion that characterize how Jews through history have been treated. In plays such as Testimonial Dinner (1978), Wiseman explores ways in which the past and present coexist. The inheritance of a history affects the individual because it affects cultural identity; hence, the need to acknowledge the force of the past precedes and inevitably shapes how people live their way into the future. People's difficulties, in Wiseman's fiction, derive from the dilemmas they create by not always seeing clearly the ramifications of their histories. Crackpot (1974) disturbed readers who responded
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to the surface narrative without recognizing how it revealed the irony of people's helplessness against fate; in the novel, an aging prostitute finds herself sexually initiating her own son - though he is unaware of her relationship to him. The impulse to celebrate life animates the AWARD-winning The Sacrifice (1956), which was regarded during Wiseman's lifetime as her most successful work, perhaps partly because it is formally the most conventional. Told by an omniscient narrator, the novel reiterates the tale of Abraham, Sarah, and Isaac, turning the biblical figures into modern-day immigrants to a Canada that this Abraham cannot comprehend. Instead of fulfilling his patriarchal promise, he consequently descends to a mad act of murder, mistaking the role he thinks he has been assigned for the life he has the opportunity to lead. In her later years, Wiseman published some works for CHILDREN (Kenji and the Cricket, 1988); her Selected Letters to Laurence were edited by John Lennox and Ruth Panofsky in 1997Further reading: Michael Greenstein, Adele Wiseman,' Canadian Writers and Their Works, fiction series 6, ed Robert Lecker, Jack David, Ellen Quigley (Toronto: ECW, 1985): 239-70; Marco LoVerso, The Circle of Conversation in The Sacrfice,' Studies in Canadian Literature 7.2 (1982): 168-83, and 'Language Private and Public: A Study of Wiseman's Crackpot,' Studies in Canadian Literature 9.1 (1984): 78-94. WISEMAN, Chris (Christopher Stephen). Professor, poet; b Hull, Yorkshire, England, 31 May 1936; son of Winifred (Rigby), teacher, and Stephen Wiseman, Manchester U professor of education; educ Manchester Grammar, Cambridge U, Strathclyde U, and U Iowa (where he studied with the poet Donald Justice). Wiseman went on to teach English and creative WRITING at U Calgary, working successively as poetry editor of Ariel and Dandelion (1970-91). Postcards Home (1988) samples several volumes of his poetry; it was followed by the elegiac Missing Persons (1989) and Remembering Mr. Fox (1994), dedicated to his friend Don COLES. The impulse to ELEGY recurs in Wiseman's work, whether focusing on Caedmon in Yorkshire or Elvis Presley's death; fascinated by contrast (the Banff
WOMEN'S STUDIES
Springs Hotel versus the suburban basement laundry room), the poet brings a realist voice to his measured observation of lived experience. WITHROW, William Henry. Writer, minister; b Toronto 6 Aug 1839, d Toronto 12 Nov 1908; son of Ellen (Sanderson) and James Withrow, contractor. Withrow was ordained as a Methodist minister in 1864. He spent his career facilitating the spread of information about doctrine, church history, and the mission movement. Related to this enterprise were his temperance tracts, textbooks on Canadian history, TRAVEL notes, and didactic HISTORICAL fictions such as Valeria, the Martyr of the Catacombs: A Tale of Early Christian Life in Rome (1882). See also RELIGION AND LITERATURE. WOMEN AND LITERATURE, see ANGLOPHONE WRITING, BIOGRAPHY, COOKBOOKS AND CULTURE, CRITICISM AND THEORY, DRAMA, FEMINISM, FRANCOPHONE WRITING, GAY AND LESBIAN WRITING, GENDER AND GENDER RELATIONS IN CANADIAN LITERATURE, HUMOUR AND SATIRE, LIFE WRITING, LONG POEM, NOVEL, POETRY (iN SHORTER FORMS), QUEBEC, SHORT STORY AND SKETCH, THEATRE HISTORY, TRAVELLERS AND TRAVEL WRITING, UTOPIA/ DYSTOPIA, VOTING RIGHTS, WAR, WOMEN'S STUDIES.
WOMEN'S STUDIES originated early in the 19703 at a number of Canadian universities and colleges. By the late 19905, programs, departments, journals, publishers' lists, conferences, and texts of every sort flourished. Beginnings. The rise of women's studies, like the appearance of interest in female experience in history, literature, anthropology, and other disciplines, was intimately related to the emergence of the second feminist wave in both English- and French-speaking Canada. More generally, women's studies in Canada was part of a widespread questioning of disciplinary knowledge that saw the appearance of a host of interdisciplinary fields in the same years. Like Canadian Studies in particular, it reflected the nation's burgeoning interest in itself that had been ushered in with the 1967 Centennial celebrations. In some ways, subsequent develop-
ments in women's studies mirrored the uncertain efforts of Canada as a whole to come to terms with the question of identity at the end of the 2oth century. From its birth, women's studies challenged dominant assumptions of conventional academic discourse and organization. During the 19705 it was often preoccupied with working out relations with scholarship and TEACHING on women in the individual disciplines, and in beginning to deconstruct 'women' as a unitary category, particularly in regards to CLASS. By the 19805 and 19905, disciplinary and interdisciplinary work was often closely allied; questions about the meaning of difference had extended to include racialization, sexuality, and, to a much more limited degree, (dis)ability and age. Early essentialism, often predicated on a white, heterosexual, middle-class, youthful, and ablebodied standard of experience, began to dissolve under searing criticism from women of colour, LESBIANS, and women with disabilities, among others. Resulting debates about relevance, inclusiveness, and appropriation that occur among and between academic and community feminists have frequently been painful. They also represent a high level of continuing intellectual energy and engagement. The rapid pace of the field's development in theory, methodologies, and empirical research remains intense, as attested to in the major JOURNALS in the field: Resources for Feminist Research/Documentation sur la recherche feministe (est as the Canadian Newsletter of Research on Women in 1972), Canadian Women's Studies/Les cahiers de lafemme (est 1980), Atlantis. A Women's Studies J/ Revue d'etudes sur les femmes (est 1975), and Recherchesfeministes (est 1988). The growing pangs in women's studies were accentuated by attacks from neo-conservative critics who feared both its commitment to the liberation of women and its increased challenge to inequities of all sorts. In Canadian universities, misogyny often masquerades as defences of 'academic freedom' that target employment equity and efforts at curriculum reform. At a more popular level, many right-wing media and political groups regularly condemn women's studies and its practitioners for betraying the
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part of the Western tradition that they treasure, notably the male-breadwinner family, compulsory heterosexuality, and patriarchal authority. It is impossible to understand women's studies as an academic field of inquiry without appreciating that it is often under direct, continuing, and bitter siege by forces within and external to Canadian universities. This contested development in Canada is similar in some ways to obstacles encountered elsewhere in the world. It is also reflective of the uncertain and fractured visions of the future that were endemic in the Canadian community and state in the late 2oth century. Women's studies emerged as part of widespread questioning of dominant values in institutions of higher education and the country at large. Like Canadian studies, NATIVE studies, and labour studies, it voiced the discontent and the hopes of Canadians who found the nation and its scholarship wanting. For many such critics, the academy was only one field of action. At the beginning of the 2ist century, many advocates of women's studies remain active in the community with interests ranging from opposition to free trade and the championship of Native land claims to shelters for battered women and children, and BOOKSTORES with feminist stock (see CENSORSHIP). Such connections add a particular sense of urgency to pursuits within universities. In efforts at academic transformation, early feminist advocates of women's studies tended to emphasize one of two options: the first might be termed 'integrationist' and the second 'separatist' or better still 'independentist.' Integrationists, captained by well-qualified female professionals, were directly to challenge traditional disciplines and departments, forcing them to incorporate new insights. Success varied dramatically. Some fields - history, literature, and sociology, for instance - were notably more responsive to the idea of increasing commentary by and about women than others such as political science, philosophy, and economics (see HISTORIOGRAPHY). Courses on women began to appear in university departments across the country. Substantial gaps in coverage nevertheless persisted. Fortunately, the work of feminist integrationists was matched by the independentists' efforts to develop free-standing interdisciplinary schol-
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arship and programming. They were determined to innovate free from the constraints of disciplinary boundaries and conventions. In general, the independentists were also more explicit and determined in connecting their work to feminist struggles in the community at large. Such links made them all the more suspect within universities that pretended non-partisanship. At the same time, ties to the movement offered significant moral and strategic benefits. In the 19708 efforts across Canada were rewarded by courses that, while heavily dependent on sessional and borrowed faculty, provided the critical beginnings to later more solidly established programs and departments. While suspicion and conflict over strategy, motives, and credentials characterized early relations between the advocates of the two approaches, differences were never hard and fast. Integrationists came to appreciate that within any discipline they were likely to remain an embattled minority. For their part, the pioneers of independent women's studies came to recognize that academic viability and vitality were significantly enhanced by secure bases within conventional disciplines. As women's studies developed in the 19805 and 19905, original distinctions often faded still more. Joint faculty and programming seemed the best way of guaranteeing progress within frequently conservative institutions. The appearance of women's studies journals in the last quarter of the 20th century, like the proliferation of special 'women's' issues of other journals, shared knowledge and shored up gains. The efforts of interdisciplinary, often activist, organizations such as the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women I Institut canadien de recherches sur les femmes (est 1976) and the Canadian Women's Studies Assoc/Assoc canadienne des etudes sur les femmes (est 1982), similarly reflected the strong proclivity for collaboration. The work of such feminists as sociologists Nicole Laurin-Frenette and Dorothy Smith, the philosopher Mary O'Brien, historians Andree Levesque and Joy Parr, political scientists Chantal Maille and Jill Vickers, literary scholars Carole Gerson and Louise DUPRE, and writers such as Nicole BROSSARD, Lee MARACLE, and Dionne BRAND built bridges between disciplines and women's stud-
WOMEN'S STUDIES
ies and contributed to the growing sense of common purpose. A relatively small population also means that it remains far easier in Canada than, for example, in the United States, to have personal knowledge of and contacts with contemporary thinkers in the country, an important asset when building a field of study. Issues of Difference. Right from the beginning Canadian scholars debated the significance of difference among women. Those with liberal and radical feminist views often identified the fact of womanhood, whether originating socially or biologically, as lying at the heart of the condition of all women. The surmounting of women's specific disadvantages, whether by the dismantling of oppressive strictures and structures or by the equalization of difference, was a priority for those holding such views. Other supporters of women's studies, drawing on Canada's strong social democratic, Marxist, and trade-union traditions, emphasized class as a critical variable that distinguished women from one another. Sisterhood might exist in some situations but women's experiences were, it was argued, mediated in critical ways by the fact that they shared class privileges or disadvantages with groups of men. The eradication of the class oppression was of equal, or even sometimes greater, significance for such scholars and activists. This insight, continually reinforced by a flourishing tradition of political economy and influential associations with European, British, and Australian scholars in particular, has remained powerful. At the beginning of the 2ist century, as other forms of difference increasingly demanded attention, class has sometimes seemed pushed aside, but it remains at the heart of much Canadian scholarship and teaching. Anglophone claims about the universality of female or class experience always also had to take some account of the determination of many francophones to claim difference from similarly situated groups, whether women or men, in English-speaking Canada. The ambivalent relations of 'Canada' and 'Quebec' only slowly sensitized Euro-Canadian feminists to the meaning of racial/ethnic distinction in general. Canada's'TWO SOLITUDES' of European origin initially understood racial difference most
often in terms of the great divide that separated the 'English' from the 'French.' Even as the 2ist century begins, women's studies in Quebec and the rest of Canada often continue to develop largely in isolation. When it came to considering the nature of the modern nation, the realities of FIRST NATIONS peoples and of those Canadians whose origins lay in ASIA and AFRICA were, in large measure, ignored by the Euro-Canadian population until the last years of the 20th century. The early refusal of women's studies and FEMINISM in general to acknowledge 'white as a colour' or to give adequate weight to women's diversity was part of this more general failure. And yet, for all the obvious inadequacy, it is also true, at least some of the time, that in Canada any tendency to essentialize has been countered by highly visible divisions among French, English, and Native nations, recurring heavy immigration, strong REGIONAL identities, and traditions of social democracy. Albeit imperfectly, Canadians have had to admit the absence of any monolithic nationalism and the presence, even merits, of competing views of experience and identity. In the 19805 and 19905 women's studies, like universities in general, began to wake up to the significance of 'racialization' as an organized system of oppression. The consciousness of academic feminists was further raised through membership in the wider Canadian and international women's movements that increasingly prioritized the significance of RACE. Postcolonial scholars such as bell hooks and Chandra Talpade Mohanty were also influential (see POSTMODERNISM AND POSTCOLONIALISM). Acknowledgment frequently began with recognition of the significance of 'immigration' in constructing disadvantage. Since the fact of immigration alone was clearly inadequate in explaining the full range of discrimination and its perseverance through Canadian-born generations, women's studies soon moved to talking about 'women of colour' and 'visible minority women.' In the 19805 and 19905, anti-racist theorists and activists increasingly came out to condemn the commonplace privileging of white and middle-class experience within women's studies courses.
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Not surprisingly, since the history of relations among 'races' is highly contingent, the nature of the recognition of race differs substantially across Canada. While Aboriginal people live in all parts of the country, the relative size of the population varies considerably and so, too, does attention from women's studies. Native women such as Jeannette ARMSTRONG and Patricia Monture-Angus are, however, increasingly effective in forcing general recognition that the Canadian women's movement and women's studies have too often been products of white women and their concerns. Black, Asian, and LATIN-AMERICAN Canadians have also demanded awareness of their presence. The election of Indo-Canadian Sunera Thobani to the presidency of the National Action Committee, Canada's leading feminist group, in 1991, and of Jamaican Canadian Joan Grant-Cummings to the post in 1996, as well as the appointment of Jamaican Canadian Glenda Simms to the presidency of the Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women/Conseil consultatif canadien sur la situation de lafemme in 1990 reflected, at least at a symbolic level, an unprecedented willingness on the part of the Englishspeaking Canadian women's movement to integrate race into assessments of women's place in the nation. Such developments were critically tied to debates in women's studies. While the problem of racism was the most visible issue at the beginning of the 19908, other issues of difference have been troubling Canadian women's studies. Most notably there are issues of sexuality and sexual orientation and those raised by a consideration of disabilities, both mental and physical. While some Quebec sovereigntist and feminist scholars worry that English-speaking counterparts have expanded their recognition of diversity in order, at least in part, to avoid dealing with the long-standing 'Quebec question,' a better explanation lies with pressure from disadvantaged women themselves. In the 19805 and 19905 feminist writings and courses recognized widespread resistance to universalizing discourses. Special caucuses also appeared in disciplinary and women's studies associations as women from a variety of communities struggled to have their concerns addressed.
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Intrinsic to many debates was a strong sense of the need to articulate Canada's distinctive experience within North America and the world. Many women's studies scholars, wherever they found themselves, were determined to resist the 'colonial cringe' that afflicted so many of their colleagues. In particular, there was strong resistance to accepting uncritically American models and explanations of female experience. Feminist academics, many of them allied to NATIONALIST, movements, regularly pointed to Canada's, or Quebec's, unique mixture of indigenous and immigrant peoples and its relation to successive empires, French, English, and American. While women's studies in Canada is strongly rooted in the particulars of its own location, its position on the imperial margin also makes it acutely sensitive to what is happening elsewhere in the world. Gender Studies. In the 19805 women's studies, like Canada itself, was urgently confronted with the impossibility of any unitary category, with the need to acknowledge in meaningful ways overlapping and sometimes conflicting loyalties and fractured consciousness. One response was to embrace women's diversity in theory and practice, to listen to previously marginalized voices. Another option, not always separate or in opposition, was to explore the concept of 'GENDER' as a tool of analysis. Unlike women's studies with its recent history of essentialism and internal and external struggles, gender studies appeared to offer a relatively clean slate. Women's difference could, it was presumed, be incorporated. At least as importantly, gender studies offered the chance to extend analysis to include men and masculinity in a more systematic way. While foundational feminist analysis had a good deal to say about male privilege and power, gender studies seemed to promise more nuanced understanding of how masculinities were constructed and experienced. From the beginning many women's studies scholars harboured reservations about the newcomer. There seemed a real danger of losing sight of women's collective oppression and experience. Just where would deconstruction lead? The postmodern tendencies to fragmentation seemed, sometimes at least, to bear comparison
WOOD with the privatized visions of liberal individualism. In a country with strong collectivist traditions, and one facing the prospect of disintegration, the postmodern character of some gender studies had perhaps more limited appeal than elsewhere in the Western world. Concerns went further still. Wasn't gender just one more way of returning to the study of men, of making'malestream' authorities more comfortable, of finding an easier accommodation with traditional scholarship which so often refused legitimacy to the focus on women? Gender studies' uncertain connection to feminism heightened these suspicions. Just what were its politics? Many of these suspicions remain to haunt gender studies, but feminists are strongly represented in the area. In their hands gender studies provides an opportunity to take arguments further and deeper into the academy, complementing the study of women. Conclusion. Women's studies began exploring the fact of difference in the late 19605, an exploration that has occurred simultaneously with momentous national debates about the future of Canada. The uncertainty and conflict found in women's studies in some ways mirror the larger uncertainty of a state that is struggling to cope with the reality of divergent perspectives about where Canadians are, have been, and should be as a people. Critical reflections on diversity have evoked attacks from those who believe that the admission of difference endangers the survival of Canada itself. Such attacks say more about fear and privilege than reality. At its best, women's studies offers critical clues about deep diversity; when properly understood, that diversity should make it possible to find ways of living together that do not require some voices to be disadvantaged while others are allowed to monopolize decision-making about what constitutes truth, citizenship, and identity. See also June CALLWOOD, CRITICISM AND THEORY, TORONTO WOMEN'S LITERARY CLUB, VOTING RIGHTS.
Further reading: Himani Bannerji, ed, Returning the Gaze. Essays on Racism, Feminism and Politics (Toronto: Sister Vision, 1993); Helen M. Buss, Mapping Our Selves: Canadian Women's Autobiog-
raphy (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's UP, 1993); Barbara Godard, ed, Collaboration in the Feminine. Writings on Women and Culture from TESSERA (Toronto: Second Story, 1994); Roberta Hamilton, Gendering the Vertical Mosaic. Feminist Perspectives on Canadian Society (Toronto: Copp Clark, 1996); Roberta Hamilton and Michele Barrett, eds, The Politics of Diversity: Feminism, Marxism and Nationalism (London: Verso, 1986); Shirley Neuman and Smaro Kamboureli, eds, A Mazing Space: Writing Canadian Women Writing (Edmonton: Longspoon/ NeWest, 1986); Ruth Roach Pierson et al, eds, Canadian Women's Issues. Twenty-Five Years of Women's Activism in English Canada. 2 vols (Toronto: James Lorimer, 1993,1995); Alison Prentice et al, Canadian Women: A History (Toronto: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1996). Veronica Strong-Boag
WONG-CHU, Jim. Editor, poet, letter carrier; b Hong Kong 28 Jan 1949; son of Lau Sui Tong and Chu Wing Kee. He arrived in Canada at the age of four and, before settling in Vancouver in 1968, spent most of his days in Chinese cafes all over North America. His Chinatown Ghosts (1986) breaks new ground in the Chinese North American landscape. As a founding member and president of the ASIAN Canadian Writers Workshop, Wong-Chu assists emerging Pacific Rim writers. He co-edited and contributed to Many Mouthed Birds (1991), which contains seminal work by Larissa LAI, SKY LEE, Denise Chong, Evelyn LAU, Paul YEE, and Wayson CHOY. He is working on a novel entitled The Apprentice Suffering Sage, an anthology of Chinese Canadian poetry, a book on Chinese Canadian cafes, and a sequel to Many Mouthed Birds. R. Clark
WOOD, Joanna Ellen. Author; b Lesmahagow, Scotland, 28 Dec 1867, d Detroit, MI, 1927; daughter of Agnes (Tod) and Robert Wood, a farmer. Although much of Joanna Wood's work seems to have disappeared into the abyss of ephemeral periodicals, for about a decade over the turn of the last century she published distinctive fiction that attracted serious attention in the Canadian press. Best known is her first novel, The Untempered Wind (1894), whose anat-
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omy of a small town's vicious treatment of a young unmarried mother constitutes a penetrating contribution to turn-of-the-century discussions of marriage and female sexuality. Wood's subsequent books are less marked by social realism; in Judith Moore; or, Fashioning a Pipe (1898), she seems almost to recant her earlier radicalism with a heroine who renounces her operatic career in order to marry Further reading: Carrie MacMillan, 'Joanna E. Wood: Incendiary Women,' in Carrie MacMillan, Lorraine McMullen, and Elizabeth Waterston, Silenced Sextet: Six Nineteenth-Century Canadian Women Writers (Montreal: McGillQueen's UP, 1992). Carole Gerson
WOODCOCK, George (pseud Anthony Appenzell). Poet, novelist, dramatist, critic, biographer, autobiographer, travel writer, translator, broadcaster, activist, anarchist; b Winnipeg 8 May 1912, d Vancouver 29 Jan 1995; son of Margaret Gertrude (Lewis) and Samuel Arthur Woodcock, a frustrated musician employed as a clerk for the Great Western Railway before and after prospecting for silver in Ontario and farming in Manitoba. The infant Woodcock left Canada with his mother in 1912, his father joining them in England the following spring. Woodcock grew up in what he called 'soured gentility' caused mostly by his father's declining health and financial troubles. In 1947 Woodcock returned to Canada with his wife, Inge (Ingeborg Linzer Roskelly), and settled permanently in British Columbia. Woodcock's name is synonymous with West Coast culture and politics, and with the flourishing of Canadian letters. Moreover, he negotiated the immigrant experience and international involvements in ways that continue to bear suggestively on Canadians' sense of themselves and their place in the world. Woodcock's childhood with his Welsh relatives in Market Drayton, Shropshire, and then in Buckinghamshire was marked by eclectic reading (which would feed important later interests): Homer, Asia, the British Columbia depicted in Frederick NIVEN'S The Lost Cabin Mine, and reference books of all sorts. Although the death of his father in 1927 meant that Wood-
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cock could not afford to attend university, he refused his grandfather's offer to supplement a scholarship to Oxford or Cambridge if he would agree to study for the Anglican priesthood. And so, at the age of 17 and already stubbornly independent, he began work in the Great Western Railway office at Paddington Station, where he would remain for u miserable years, earning enough to keep his mother and himself free from the worst effects of economic depression, with a little left over for buying books. He soon acquired habits of frugality and individualism that allowed him gradually to attach himself to bohemian London. Woodcock began his literary career as a poet, and he continued to write poetry and to publish and review the work of other poets throughout his life. He published his own poems first in small magazines and chapbooks in London in the 19305, and this brought home to him the need of young writers for advice and assistance. Woodcock's early verse is understandably influenced by 20th-century British work, and his Collected Poems (1983) is fittingly dedicated to two important associates of those early years, Roy Fuller and Julian Symons. The modified IMAGISM of the early work was followed by a period of some twenty years when he wrote verse only for dramas. However, the return to poetry marked by Selected Poems (1967) was followed at regular intervals by slim volumes inspired by his TRAVELS, his many friendships, and his taste for bleakness and tenacity. Woodcock rarely gets everything right in his poetry, but his verse is studded with lines memorable for wry humour where generally 'The view is mean' ('Buntingsdale Revisited,' 1940). The indigence and political menace of the 19305 honed his IRONY, while his experience as a conscientious objector assigned to farm work in Essex generated effective anti-pastorals. Brutal or fumbling sex, or pining for city life, in settings framed by ancient injustice and the current insanity of WAR achieves a mix of alienation and attachment where neither culture nor nature yields the degree of freedom Woodcock pursued and defended throughout his adult life. Nature would later disclose in the Canadian NORTH purer freedoms, but such freedoms were available only fleetingly to the visitor or at
WOODCOCK
a price to the indigenous 'outlaw' such as the Gitksan Gun-an-Noot. Woodcock can show generous sympathy for W.H. Auden: allegiance to the ways of MYTH and matter in 'On Jack Wise's Painting, Igneous Rock' (1977), adding ecology to human justice among the later themes explored in freer but no less disciplined verse, where the anarchist poet comes to terms with poetic 'law.' But a consistent commitment to poetic effort and poetry's truth leaves Woodcock the poet both readily accessible and oddly elusive, irretrievably inside the maze he wished to leave behind him: let me be hunted / down its endless passages, / emitting scents, ventriloquial calls, and die at its heart, bellowing, / still untrapped, the Minotaur, / famed, yet uncouth, unknown' ('The Maze,' 1994). Woodcock's remarkable versatility served a wide-ranging curiosity and anti-authoritarianism, haunted though it also was by what he called 'the incurable / hurt that comes from knowing I oneself inferior' ('A Poet's Dozen: Memorial Medallions,' 1994). Woodcock's autobiography tells of his conversion experience while reading William Morris's socialist writings on a train in 1930. In London he discovered 'a paradise for the aspirant scholar and aesthete' within which he gravitated towards the 'interlocking worlds of literature and radicalism.' The prickly young autodidact set about acquiring a reputation as a man of letters as well as a rationale for his own unconventionality, ably assisted by German exile Charles Lahr, the eccentric, anarchist proprietor of the Blue Moon Bookshop in Red Lion Street. Woodcock came to anarchism via pacificism, the only doctrine that he could cling to in light of the Spanish Civil War, the Stalinist purges, the rise of fascism, the experience of annual visits to Wales and France, and farm labour for Middleton Murry's Christian commune at Langham and the Cambridge War Agriculture Committee. While intermittently editing the anarchist journals NOW and War Commentary he got to know Herbert Read, George Orwell, and a woman who made a permanent impression on his life and work, Marie Louise, daughter of the recently martyred Italian anarchist Camillo Berneri. The publication of the 'partly historical and partly polemical' Anarchy or Chaos in London by Freedom Press in 1944 staked Woodcock's claim to territory and
precursors he would make very much his own because, even though the end of the war removed the primary focus for pacifists, 'those whose dissent embraced a total criticism of existing society ... were able to continue [their] central activity of attacking the state without interruption.' Woodcock's anarchism was a reliable source of some of his most important achievements as biographer and essayist. Anarchy or Chaos was followed by several pamphlets offering trenchant social analysis, and then in 1948 by William Godwin: A Biographical Study, where Woodcock established both his own intellectual authority and the native as well as 'foreign' strands in the anarchist tradition. Woodcock both demystified this doctrine and suggested for it a broad relevance that he would illustrate in his later analyses of Canadian political history and support for figures such as Gabriel Dumont, Amor de Cosmos, Gandhi, and the Dalai Lama. The study of Godwin allowed him to spell out again the main arguments made in the Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), to focus on the individual as theme and libertarian principle, and to feed off the English Jacobin capacity for fusing demands for justice with the claims of the imagination. The fact that anarchism had a history of political and literary achievement countered the pervasive sense of hopeless factionalism and pointed to the productive diversity of anarchist individualism. Woodcock added to this history through his book on the 17th-century writer Aphra Behn (1948), whom he reclaimed from neglect and prudish censure and for feminist, abolitionist anarchism as a literary pioneer and 'revolutionary influence on the social life and literature of her age.' Studies of Kropotkin (1950), Proudhon (1956), Orwell (1966), and Herbert Read (1972) built on this sense of a rich and living tradition of thought and social practice, while some of its specifically Canadian articulations were pursued in The Doukhobors (1968, with his regular collaborator Ivan Avakumovic). Woodcock embarked on a new life in Canada as a principled individualist for whom society's regulative institutions were necessary evils to be dealt with warily and circumvented whenever possible. To activities as different as clearing land for a market garden on Vancouver Island, teaching literature at U British Columbia, and
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writing plays for RADIO, he brought a taste for heresy that posed for his neighbours and colleagues challenges as real and enduring as those he posed for himself. Originality was for him as much an ethical and political concept as an artistic one, and he invested enormous energy in Canadianizing his conviction that 'The really independent writer, by the very exercise of his function, represents a revolutionary force.' If you believed, as Woodcock did, that dismantling the state and decentralizing services and responsibilities was the way to go, then there was some obligation to counter social atomism with evidence of 'natural,' unadministered goodness and Kropotkinian mutual aid. So, in a Canada where dispersal, fragmentation, and appropriation posed special dangers, he had to nourish as well as critique forms of collective life and representation. He did so with great skill and put his new-found intellectual confidence and connections to work for a regionally inflected, endlessly vulnerable, but recognizably Canadian culture while his own particular provocations were now being monitored not by Scotland Yard but by the RCMP. (In 1955, Woodcock's politics had prevented his consolidating his employment as a lecturer at U Washington, an application of the McCarran Act that became something of a cause celebre in American literary and academic circles.) With the assistance of Earle BIRNEY, Alan CRAWLEY (editor of Contemporary Verse), John SUTHERLAND (editor of Northern R), and Robert WEAVER of CBC's Anthology program and the fledgling Tamarack R, Woodcock began his serious education in Canadian literary culture. His own experience as an embattled editor contributed to the success of a journal established at U British Columbia in 1959, CANADIAN LITERATURE. However, his individualism and allegiance to the imagination as citadel of inalienable freedom did not prepare him for the special sociability of West Coast writers and the emergence of creative WRITING curricula from workshopping and group exchange. Woodcock was more at home as editor and critic with what purported to be a finished product. But Canadian Literature rapidly achieved eminence as 'a broadly critical magazine rather than as a scholarly journal,' fed by and feeding the remarkable cultural achievements of Canada in the 19605.
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Woodcock was able to attract good work and to republish it in collections that amplified the impact of Canadian Literature as terminus and staging post for an emerging CANON of Canadian writing. He renegotiated relations between academic and non-academic work, the critical and the creative, to accommodate his own ambivalence about universities and his desire to extend the cultural franchise of the general reader. Early during what became an i8-year term as editor of Canadian Literature, Woodcock was able to shed the teaching and administrative duties he found irksome and to use his influence to promote the socially transformative agenda of an increasingly populous and diverse community of writers. While contributing invaluably to a distinctive NATIONAL culture, Woodcock continued to see the nation state and its cultural apparatuses as an excludable middle between local authenticity and global diversity. In his extensive travels, and the voluminous descriptive, historical, and DOCUMENTARY response they stimulated, he complicated the rootedness that came with the purchase of a permanent home on McCleery Street in Vancouver (which he calls 'Cherry Street' in his late poems). Indeed, he contributed to the reformation of Canadian identity not only through the details and caveats of books such as Ravens and Prophets (1952) or the more inclusive Canada and the Canadians (1970), but also via sharply internationalist books on the ancient civilizations and current travails of Mexico (1957), Peru (1959), the newly independent India (1964), and ASIA (1966) (see TRAVEL). As a Governor General's AWARD in 1967 (for The Crystal Spirit: A Study of George Orwell) and a string of honorary degrees attested, Woodcock was now a leading figure who could be entrusted with jurying CANADA COUNCIL applications and writing a chapter on new Canadian poetry for the second edition of the Literary History of Canada. And as one comes to grips with the repetitive, sometimes imperious, but consistently engaged and engaging collections of essays and studies on Canadian topics he produced in the 19705 and 19805, one has to marvel at a degree of commitment that endangered his health while helping persuade Canadians that theirs was no branch-plant culture, and culture no form of passivity but instead passivity's arch-
WRIGHT
enemy. Woodcock's advocacy and exemplificatidh of the labour of writing, reading, debating policy, mobilizing opinion (and his material aid to groups such as the Tibetan Refugees, Canada-India Village Aid, and the WRITERS' TRUST OF CANADA), went well beyond the Protestant work ethic to call into question what it means, in a world so full of need and opportunity, to have done 'too much.' George Woodcock lived indefatigably within and by dissent.
well as short stories and non-fiction articles. Written with his wife, Rebecca Shaw, The Wild Guys (1994) won the Canadian National Playwrighting Competition. Wreggitt worked as head writer for the CBC-Television series North of Sixty and Black Harbour. His poetry is collected in Zhivago's Fire (1997) and other books. See also FILM and CANADIAN BROADCASTING CORP.
Further reading: Douglas Fetherling, The Gentle Anarchist: A Life of George Woodcock (Vancouver: Douglas and Mclntyre, 1998); William H. New, ed, A Political Art: Essays and Images in Honour of George Woodcock (Vancouver: U British Columbia P, 1978).
WRIGHT, Eric. Professor, writer; b London, England, 4 May 1929; son of Caroline (Curnow), seamstress, and Joseph Wright, carter. After growing up in Lambeth and immigrating to Canada in 1951 (as he recounts in his autobiographical Always Give a Penny to a Blind Man (i999), Wright was educated at U Manitoba and U Toronto; until his retirement he taught at Ryerson C. Aside from the comic Moodie's Tale (1994), his fiction consists of 13 mystery novels (1983-97), including The Night the Gods Smiled (1983), Death in the Old Country (1985), A Fine Italian Hand (1992), and Death of a Sunday Writer (1996). Wright's recurrent character is a detective named Charlie Salter, whose private life and occupation entangle, in cases involving bomb threats, pornography, murder, and horse racing. Wright won the Arthur Ellis AWARD in 1983, 1985, 1987, and 1991.
L.M. Findlay
WORK POETRY, a term referring to poetry that deals primarily with manual labour, with low-paid work (eg, in the service industries), or with issues involving the economics of CLASS and GENDER differentials, as in the work of Tom WAYMAN and others. See also DRAMA and THEATRE HISTORY for comments on 'Workers' theatre' movements. WORKERS' THEATRE, AGITPROP, see CLASS, DOCUMENTARY, DRAMA IN ENGLISH,
L. Fox
RYAN, THEATRE HISTORY.
WREFORD, James (James Wreford Watson). Geographer, poet; b Shensi, China, 8 Feb 1915; son of Evelyn (Russell) and James Watson, a clergyman. After receiving an education in China and Scotland, he immigrated to Canada in 1939 to study at U Toronto (PhD, 1945), then returned to U Edinburgh, 1954-82, to teachgeography and Canadian Studies. Author of A Social Geography of Canada (1991), he wrote AWARD-winning, technically adept if thematically familiar poems about sin, love, apocalypse, and salvation (Of Time and the Lover, 1950); metaphors of CLIMATE, geology, and place recurred in Countryside Canada (1979). WREGGITT, Andrew. Poet, screenwriter; b Sudbury, ON, 3 Nov 1955; son of Margaret (Dyek) and Jerry Wreggitt, a golf-course owner. Wreggitt has published five books of poetry, as
WRIGHT, L.R. (Laurali Rose [Bunny]). Journalist, teacher, writer; b Saskatoon 5 June 1939, d Vancouver 25 Feb 2001; daughter of Evelyn (Barber) and Sidney Appleby, teachers. Wright, the winner of the 1991 and 1996 Arthur Ellis AWARD (for Mother Love and A Chill Rain in January) and the Edgar Allan Poe award for The Suspect (1986), wrote more than a dozen MYSTERY novels, adapting several for stage, screen, and RADIO. Characteristically she set her works in Vancouver and communities nearby, using the device of the recurrent, attractive detective figure (a MOUNTIE, in this instance) to solve crimes of physical and psychological violence. WRIGHT, Richard B. Teacher, novelist; b Midland, ON, 4 March 1937; son of Laura (Thomas) and Laverne Wright, grain elevator worker; educ Trent U and Ryerson Polytechnic. Wright worked for Macmillan PUBLISHERS for several
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years before moving to teaching and writing. The author of eight novels (1971-95), he broke into prominence with his first, The Weekend Man (1971), a reputation reconfirmed by the success of In the Middle of a Life (1973), Farthing's Fortunes (1976), Final Things (1982), and, though some of the later work tended towards formula, The Age of Longing (1995). The earlier novels express a middle-aged, ironic angst, the sensibilities of a man caught waiting for an enlightenment he cannot see; the story of Bill Farthing's life is that of modern Canada, from the KLONDIKE to the Depression; Final Things deals with the rape and murder of a young boy, with the violence of contemporary society, and the trauma of crisis. Wright subsequently completed Clara Callan, which won both the Giller and Governor General's awards for fiction when it appeared in 2001. An EPISTOLARY novel set in the 19305, it records the lives of three women: an Ontario teacher who is trapped by rape, pregnancy, Protestant-Catholic rivalries, and the judgmental mores of her small town; her sister, a radio actress in New York; and their friend, a lesbian Hollywood scriptwriter. Behind the surface story - particularly interesting for its details on early RADIO serials - lies the author's distinction between lives lived and those that soap opera imagines into truth. WRIGHT, Ronald. TRAVEL writer, novelist; b Weybridge, England, 12 Sept 1948; son of Shirley Wilkinson and Alan Ashfield. Wright studied archaeology and anthropology at U Calgary and Cambridge U, and worked as a freelance archaeologist. He travels widely and his books include Cut Stones and Crossroads: A Journey in the Two Worlds of Peru (1989), Time among the Maya (Trillium Book Award, 1989), and Stolen Continents: The 'New World' through Indian Eyes since 1492 (1992). Wright considers himself a writer who travels and is often critical of the colonial legacy in the countries he visits. His books have been praised by other noted writers such as Jan Morris and George WOODCOCK. Wright's fiction, A Scientific Romance (1997), won the David Higham Prize for Fiction. Maria N. Ng
WRITERS' TRUST OF CANADA, a charitable organization (first called the Writers' Develop-
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ment Trust) devoted to mentoring young writers, encouraging literary programs in schools and the community, and helping Canadian writers who find themselves in financial difficulty. Founded in 1976 by Margaret ATWOOD, Pierre BERTON, Graeme GIBSON, and Margaret LAURENCE, the trust administers the Woodcock Foundation (initially endowed in 1989 by George and Ingeborg WOODCOCK), together with prizes and AWARDS bearing the names of figures such as Marian ENGEL and Bronwen WALLACE. WRITERS' UNION OF CANADA, THE. This is a writers' trade organization, founded in 1973 by Farley MOWAT with the help of Margaret ATWOOD, June CALLWOOD, Graeme GIBSON, Ian Adams, and Fred BODSWORTH. It emerged in response to the surge of production in Canadian books during the late 19605 and early 19705. For some time, the organization was considered essentially a lightning rod for the concerns of fiction writers only, because journalists, poets, and playwrights had their own organizations to look to for support. Nevertheless, it has grown considerably in membership and scope over the years. It now requires simply that members 'must have had a trade book published by a commercial or university press' ('The Writers' Union of Canada: Membership Information,' 1997) and be a Canadian citizen or landed immigrant. The organization elects a major Canadian author annually as its chair, and engages regional representatives in a system of close contact with its authors. In its capacity as a community network for its writers, it publishes a 'Newsletter' nine times a year, has an e-mail list, a Web site, and holds both regional and national meetings for its members. The Writers' Union of Canada is dedicated to advancing the freedom and status of the writer in Canada, and providing a number of specialized services. It has always focused on the need for COPYRIGHT protection and the setting of contract standards, and it gives detailed advice related to various kinds of writers' grievances. It provides a service for contract negotiation, as well as a manuscript evaluation service. It also promotes Canadian content in school curricula and generally makes visible the importance of Canadian writing in the society. An effective watchdog for the rights of Canadian writers, it is
WRITING PROGRAMS IN CANADA
often at the forefront of anti-censorship drives and protests related to the border seizures of Canada Customs. The organization's greatest economic lobby success brought about the creation in 1986 of the PUBLIC LENDING RIGHT, which compensates writers for the LIBRARY use of their books. Web site: www.writersunion.ca Terry Whalen
WRITING PROGRAMS IN CANADA. Virtu ally all post-secondary institutions in Canada offer courses in creative writing (in French creation litteraire). While continuing education divisions of community colleges, universities, and public school boards offer non-accredited courses, several institutions in both English- and French-speaking Canada offer university credit courses, options, or degrees in creative writing, many of these courses being at the undergraduate level. Historically, creative writing is a new academic discipline, having emerged only in the 19608. Canadian university writing programs, which are popular with students, were developed by writers, rather than academics, although most of these writers were universitytrained. Many well-known writers gravitated to literature departments in the 19605, particularly Earle BIRNEY - who founded Canada's first Creative Writing Dept, at U British Columbia, in 1963 - but also several other individuals who developed Canada's first university writing classes such as Fred COGSWELL at U New Brunswick, Eugene MCNAMARA at U Windsor, Rudy WIEBE at U Alberta, and Christopher WISEMAN at U Calgary. These institutions continue to dominate Canada's creative writing programs, but they have been joined by the universities of Victoria, Manitoba, York and Concordia, and, in Quebec, U Montreal, and U Quebec a Montreal. Classes usually focus on specific major genres - poetry,fiction,or drama - although many drama departments house the playwriting courses. Some introductory courses deal with all three genres. Continuing education courses often feature journal and memoir writing (see LIFE WRITING), writing for CHILDREN, and songwriting; these areas are rarely offered in university degree programs although some are beginning to expand their accredited offerings
to include creative non-fiction and screenwriting. Few university creative writing programs make literary THEORY a strong component, though students are usually introduced to a wide range of contemporary writing. U Quebec a Montreal focuses on both workshops and a wide range of THEORY and contemporary reading in a variety of non-literary subjects. Creative writing students at many institutions receive editorial experience with literary JOURNALS based on the campus. Most faculty at universities are writers who have received a master of arts or master of fine arts in creative writing, but publication record is usually as important as the degree. Continuing education courses are often taught by local published writers. Teaching writing has become the most reliable source of writing-related income for creative writers throughout Canada, especially for poets and fiction writers. Creative writing programs in Canada were influenced by the workshop model, a pedagogical strategy patterned on early creative writing classes in the United States, such as the influential writing school at U Iowa and Yvor Winters's Stanford U tutorials. Rather than going through lecture/essay/examination formats or formal studies of poetics and form through imitation, students practise revising their original work and evaluating their peers' work. After students submit manuscripts-in-progress to the class, the instructors and fellow students respond to the works' aesthetic and technical values. More rarely, creative writing classes encourage in-class writing and focus on the creative process. The free-fall method of writing and classes based on this technique were developed and promoted by w.o. MITCHELL. Most criticism of creative writing classes concerns conventionality: students conform to a style that carries an aura of the workshop, a style that is finely crafted and firmly modernist, but lacking passion. Others complain that students get little rigorous training in PROSODY, imitation, and traditional techniques. However, undoubtedly creative writing workshops offer students mentors, literary communities, and excellent editorial skills. Most institutions offer at least one or two undergraduate courses in creative writing, and many have some type of degree program. A few institutions offer a bachelor of arts or a bachelor
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WRITING PROGRAMS IN CANADA
of fine arts degree specifically in creative writing, but most writing courses are taken as part of a BA in English (or, in Quebec, French) literature with a creative writing option or minor. Similarly, masters degrees in this area fall into one of two categories. The institution awards either an MA in creative writing (usually an MA in English with a creative thesis, as is the case at Concordia U), or an MFA in creative writing (as at U British Columbia). A creative thesis consists of a book-length work of poetry, drama, or fiction, with a possible critical component. At U Montreal, students receive an MA in etudes francaises with an option creation. The U Calgary offers a PhD with a creative thesis option. Since the 19805, as university programs have diversified, several post-secondary institutions across Canada have established separate writing departments that offer professional training in not only creative writing, but also non-fiction, JOURNALISM, EDITING, publishing, and other related disciplines. U Victoria has such a program and it includes a co-op work placement component. Internet TECHNOLOGY has prompted recent innovations. U Northern British Columbia has developed an online course; electronic mentoring programs or electronic writers-in-residence using e-mail also exist, frequently sponsored by the writers' unions of both English- and Frenchspeaking Canada. Also important are writing programs for FIRST NATIONS writers, such as the En'Owkin International School of Writing and Arts (in Penticton, BC), led by Jeannette ARMSTRONG and affiliated with U Victoria. Reputable non-credit writing programs are offered by the National Theatre School of Canada in Montreal for playwriting and the Banff Centre for the Arts, which has a variety of arts journalism as well as creative writing courses. Other instructional opportunities exist throughout the country, from the Humber School for Writers in Toronto to the Sage Hill Writing Experience in Saskatchewan, and many other retreats and private schools that offer intensive workshops hosted by experienced writers. Writers-in-residence act as resource people for emerging writers in several institutions, including U Toronto and U Quebec a Montreal. Institutions' calendars and relevant departments can provide information on spe-
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cific programs and degrees, as can local and national writers, and organizations such as the WRITERS' UNION OF CANADA and the SOCIETE DBS E C R I V A I N S C A N A D I E N S .
Further reading: Anthony Bukoski, The Canadian Writer and the Iowa Experience,' Canadian Literature 101 (Summer 1984): 15-34; Creative Writing Articulation Committee of BC, Where to Write: A Guidebook to Post-Secondary Creative Writing Courses and Programs in Canada (Vernon: RSVP, annual publication). Nancy Holmes
WYATT, Rachel Evadne. Writer, playwright; b Bradford, Yorkshire, England, 14 Oct 1929; daughter of Rachel Florence (Brumfitt) and Kenneth James Rycroft Arnold, a wool merchant. Wyatt began her career writing newspaper stories and short fiction for Chatelaine and the CBC. She has written over 100 RADIO features for the CBC and BBC, and in 1982 won the CBC Literary Award for radio DRAMA. Her first novel, The String Box, was published by Anansi P in 1970; later books include The Rosedale Hoax (1977), Foreign Bodies (1982), and Time in the Air (1985). She has also written plays, including an adaptation of Adele WISEMAN'S novel Crackpot (1995), and published two short story collections, The Day Marlene Dietrich Died (1996) and Mona Lisa Smiled a Little (1999). Much of her writing explores, with HUMOUR and IRONY characteristic of British comedy of manners, the experiences of immigrants dislocated in the unreal landscapes of North American cities. Wyatt lives in Victoria; her manuscripts are held by the National Library, Ottawa. J.E. Walchli
WYNAND, Derk. Professor, poet; b Bad Suderode, Germany, 12 June 1944; son of Odette and Jan Wynand, a civil engineer; emig 1952; educ U British Columbia (MA, 1969). Wynand taught creative WRITING at U Victoria, where he edited Malahat R after 1992, and is the author of ii books written over the period 1971-97, including some short fiction and three TRANSLATIONS of works by the GERMAN-language writer H.C. Artmann. Wynand has won most attention for his poetry, as in One Cook, Once Dreaming (1980),
YERGEAU
Heat Waves (1988), and Closer to Home (1997). Looming throughout his work is a sense of threat, of imminent disaster, held in abeyance only by a love that acknowledges the limits of reality. In such conditions, language is no adequate defence; unstable, it promises more security than it can deliver. In consequence, the characteristic persona in a Wynand poem wanders into the world looking as closely as he can at details of environment and action, meditating later on the possible meanings to which observation might - or might not - lead. WYNNE-JONES, Tim (Timothy). Children's writer, songwriter, graphic designer; b Bromborough, Cheshire, England, 12 Aug 1948; son of Sheila (Hodgson) and Sydney Wynne Jones, an engineer; emig 1952. Raised in Kitimat, Vancouver, and Ottawa, Wynne-Jones, a successful performer and storyteller, studied for degrees at U Waterloo (BA, 1974) and York U (MA, visual arts, 1978) and subsequently moved to rural Ontario to write. He is the author of three novels for adults, including Fastyngange (1988; UK title, Voices), together with RADIO dramas, short stories, libretti for works by Harry Somers (see MUSIC AND LITERATURE), narrative material for the PERFORMANCE group Nexus, and songs for the Jim Henson TELEVISION series Fraggle Rock (see Dennis LEE) . He is perhaps still better known for his AWARD-winning books for young children; these include the fantasy Zoom at Sea (1983, illus Ken Nutt), poems about monster adults Mischief City (1986), and novels for young adults, such as The Maestro (1995) and Stephen Fair (1998), the last a tale about nightmare's instructiveness, its metaphoric guide to a personal history of friendship, love, kidnapping, and dislocation. WYNVEEN, Tim. Musician, novelist; b Leamington, ON, Aug 29,1951; son of Pauline (Levert) and Bill Wynveen. After attending York U, Wynveen worked as a professional musician and a copy editor. In Angel Falls (1997; winner of the Commonwealth Literature Prize for first novel), Wynveen's narrator, the mournful musicianturned-writer Benoni Van Buskierke, endeavours to find contentment by unearthing his family's secrets.
Further reading: E. Tihanyi, 'Golden Bough, Ontario,' Books in Canada (Nov 1997): 2-4. Brett Josef Grubisic
YATES,J. Michael. Poet, playwright, journalist, story writer, prison guard; b Fulton, MO, 10 April 1938; grandson of US poet Rosemary Carmichael; son of Marjorie Dianne (Carmichael), a ballet teacher, and Joel Hume Yates, a US Air Force colonel. Yates received his BA (1960) and MA (1962) from U Missouri and his PhD in comparative literature from U Michigan. He founded Sono Nis P in 1966 and Canadian Fiction Magazine in 1968, and in 1972 became a Canadian citizen. Yates is a prolific writer and respected EDITOR whose body of work includes the poetry collections Spiral of Mirrors (1967) and Schedules of Silence (1986); the drama Night Freight (1975); the story collections Torque (1987) and Torpor (1989); and a memoir, Line Screw: Memoir of a Prison Guard (1993). An experimental writer who blurs the boundaries of form, Yates often draws on wilderness and technological imagery to explore the sense of self. K.G. Stewart
YEE, Paul Richard. Archivist, policy analyst, children's writer; b Spalding, SK, i Oct 1956; son of Gim May (Wong) and Gordon Yee, who ran a cafe; educ U British Columbia (MA, 1983). Yee became a Vancouver city archivist and in 1991 a policy adviser with the Ontario Minsitry of Culture. Influenced by the experiences of Chinese people in British Columbia (1858-19605), Yee wrote in order to reclaim a heritage and a history. Books of social commentary (Saltwater City: The Chinese in Vancouver, 1988; Struggle and Hope: The Story of Chinese Canadians, 1996) were intermixed with books for CHILDREN. Teach Me to Fly, Skyfighter! (1983), The Curses of Third Uncle (1986), and Breakaway (1994) - the last a SPORTS story, about a boy learning not to hide his soccer skills - demonstrate how Yee embodies his didactic message (about self-esteem) within an engaging narrative. See also ASIA AND CANADIAN LITERATURE. YERGEAU, Robert. Poet, essayist; b Cowansville, QC, 25 Dec 1956; son of Adelina (Albert) and Walter Yergeau. His first book of poetry, the self-published Les miroirs chavirent (1976),
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VERGEAU
appeared before Yergeau graduated from U Sherbrooke, it was followed by L'oralite de I'emeute (1980); both collections drew praise for their style. Ranging from the ironic to the lyric, these poems deal recurrently with desire, death, the limits of language, and the immediacy of the present world. Yergeau's 1987 poems, Le tombeau d'Adelina Albert, were inspired by the death of his mother, and in 1994 he wrote an essay about literary AWARDS in Quebec, A toutprix. In 1998, for the loth anniversary of his publishing house, Le Nordir, he prepared an ANTHOLOGY of works discussing the vitality of FRANCOPHONE Ontario. Margaret Cook
YIDDISH WRITING, seeYehuda ELBERG, JEWISH CANADIAN WRITING, Rahel KORN, MULTICULTURAL VOICES, Regine ROBIN, Chava ROSENFARB, Y.Y. SEGAL.
YORK, Ann. Poet; b Forbes, New South Wales, Australia, 1945. After coming to Canada in 1969, York taught French in Athabasca, AB, and studied at U Alberta; in 1977 she moved to Victoria. Her poems have appeared in many Canadian and Australian periodicals. Her first collection, In This House There Are No Lizards (1980), voices her sense of displacement in Canada as she recreates Aboriginal beliefs of AUSTRALIA. 'The Walsh Poems' in Agapanthus (1987), York's second collection, explore the last days of the young American flier and poet Ernest Walsh, who died in Monaco in 1926. L. Fox
YORK, Thomas Lee. Novelist, clergyman; b Washington, DC, 21 Sept 1940, d Illinois 2 Jan 1988; son of Alice (Byrd) and Harold York. Raised in Little Rock, AR, he received a BA (1961), MA (1974), and PhD (1982) from Tulane U in New Orleans. He moved to Canada in 1962, was ordained as a UNITED CHURCH minister in 1967, and served in parishes in Toronto; Bella Coola, BC; the Queen Charlotte Islands; and Yellowknife. At the time of his death, he was chaplain at U Waterloo. His memoir And Sleep in the Woods (1978) describes his spiritual awakening and his conflict with US authorities over draft evasion charges, of which he was acquitted in 1974. York wrote five novels, We, the Wilder-
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ness (1973), Snowman (1976), Musk Ox Passion (1978), Trapper (1981), and Desireless: a novel of New Orleans (1988). He died in an automobile accident in Illinois, on his way home from visiting his mother in Arkansas. Rebecca Murdock
YOUNG, David Samuel D'Arcy. Playwright, story writer, novelist, editor, and writer for television, film, and radio; born Oakville, ON, 17 July 1946; son of Winifred (Hodges) and Samuel Crawford Young; educ U Western Ontario (BA, 1967). Young won several AWARDS, including the Chalmers Award (1989), the Dora Mavor Moore Award (1989), and a Genie for Most Promising Screenwriter (1989). His diverse body of work includes the novels Agent Provocateur (1976) and the dramas Love Is Strange (1985), Fire (1989), and Glenn (1993). Young often explores the blurred lines between autobiography, biography, and fiction, as in his ostensibly autobiographical (but deliberately misleadingly illustrated) fiction, Incognito (1982), and the fictionalized account of an historical Arctic expedition in Inexpressible Island (1997). See also LIFE WRITING. K.G. Stewart
YOUNG, Patricia Rose. Teacher, poet; b Victoria 17 Aug 1954; daughter of Margaret (Love), homemaker, and Walter Barr, welder. Singly, Young's poems have frequently won contests, and her seven collections, including All I Ever Needed Was a Beautiful Room (1987) and More Watery Still (1993), garnered praise from reviewers and admiration from other poets. Young acknowledged the influence of contemporary women writers on her work, especially Louise Gliick, Mary Oliver, and Paulette JILES. An engaging practitioner of accessible, though often nostalgic, free-verse lyrics, she celebrates in her writing the fierce passions of daily living, looking askance at love, family, and fidelity with a sensitivity to the earthy, evolutionary, and animal energies that are alleged to drive us. Mark Cochranc
YOUNG, Phyllis Brett. Novelist; b Toronto 1917; daughter of Marion Grace Kernick and George Sidney Brett, who was head of the Dept of Philosophy at U Toronto, first editor of U Toronto Q, and author of such books as the
WON
three-volume The History of Psychology (1912-21). Educated at Ontario C of Art, Phyllis Brett married Douglas M. Young, and wrote her first novel, Psyche (1959), in Switzerland, where her husband worked for a United Nations agency. She continued writing on their return to Canada, publishing The Torontonians (1960), Undine (1964), and two other novels, all to popular acclaim. Her papers are held at Boston U. YOUNG-ING, Greg. Poet, publisher, instructor; b 18 March 1961; son of Rosalyn Young and George Ing. Member of the Pas Indian BandCREE Nation, Treaty 5. Young-Ing received a BA from Carleton U and an MA from the Institute of Canadian Studies, Carleton. A researcher and writer for numerous Aboriginal associations, including the Assembly of FIRST NATIONS and Native Advisory Council, Greg Young-Ing has served on the Canada Council First Peoples Committee on the Arts and the BC Arts Board. Since 1990, he has worked as the manager of Theytus Books at the En'owkin Centre in Penticton, BC (see PUBLISHING INDUSTRY). His articles and poems have appeared in Paragraph, Quill and Quire, Fuse, the Globe and Mail, and the Canadian Journal of Native Education. He edited several volumes of Gatherings: A Journal of North American First Peoples. The poems collected in his first book of poetry, The Random Flow of Blood and Flowers (1996), use language that is sparse and hard-hitting when evoking the violence and injustice of colonization, or lyrical when celebrating themes of continuance and survival. Further reading: Greg Young-Ing, Aboriginal People's Estrangement,' in Looking at the Words of Our People, edjeannette Armstrong (Penticton: Theytus, 1993): 177-87. Renee Hulan
YUKON, mountainous territory in Canada's NORTH-west; capital, Whitehorse; area, 536,327 sq km (203,804 sq miles); pop 28,674 (2001); territorial flower, fireweed. These lands, occupied by Nadene peoples (largely Nahanni, Kaska, Teslin, Tuchone, Tagish, TLINGIT, and Kutchinspeaking, with whom LAND claims were settled in 1991), became part of the HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY trading territory as early as the 18405, and
were transferred to Canada (as part of the agreement involving the NORTHWEST TERRITORIES) in 1870. With the discovery of gold in 1896, the KLONDIKE gold rush began, reaching its peak in 1898, with the influx of tens of thousands of miners, turning Dawson City briefly into the largest city west of Winnipeg, and leading the government to create Yukon (from the Loucheux word Yu-kun-ah, 'great river') as a separate territory in 1898. Most of the prospectors arrived via Skagway, AK, by foot (and after one year, rail) over the White Pass, leading to increased border security; the MOUNTED POLICE required all would-be miners to bring with them one full year's worth of supplies. Fortunes were made and lost; the town thrived, its escapades celebrated in the verse of Robert SERVICE; and by 1906 the gold rush was over. With the development of the Alaska Highway during the Second World WAR, Yukon grew again, the capital moving from Dawson to Whitehorse in 1953, and the territory moving towards local self-government through a series of changes between 1899 and 1979. Other Yukon writers include Pierre BERTON, Alan FRY, and Ivan E. Coyote. See also DENISON. YVON, Josee. Poet, novelist; b Montreal 13 March 1950, d Montreal 12 June 1994; daughter of Marie-Paule (Dulude) and Fernand Yvon. Her first volume, Filles-commandos bandies (1976), introduces her world - one of dancers and COWBOYS, a world that conveys the violence of North America as well as the war between the sexes. In her poetic novel, Travesties-Kamikaze (1979), the women characters are feminists who have to cope with the cruelties of the everyday world. A 1971 graduate of U Quebec a Montreal, she devoted herself to literature full-time in 1978, when she began giving PERFORMANCES of her poetry. Known for her close association with Denis VANIER and the Quebec counterculture, she wrote for Hobo-Quebec, Les Herbes rouges, Mainmise, and Cul Q. Her later REG ITS include Les laides otages (1990) and La cobayc (i993). Further reading: Paul Chamberland, 'Le retour de Calamity-Lilith,' Les Herbes rouges 35 (June 1976): np. Margaret Cook
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ZAREMBA
ZAREMBA, Eve Maria. Novelist; b Kalisz, Poland, 29 June 1930; daughter of Janina (Sterczynski), house worker, andjerzy Zaremba, soldier, factory worker; emig 1952. Zaremba established her reputation as a MYSTERY writer; her books feature a street-smart LESBIAN detective named Helen Keremos, who works with (and sometimes in order to counter the mistakes of) a male police sergeant. The novels (among them A Reason to Kill, 1978, and Uneasy Lies, 1992) pick up on issues reported in contemporary news media; they deal with missing persons, RACISM, radicals, arms dealers, and recurrently with MUSIC. ZELLER, Ludwig. Poet, artist, anthologist; b Rio Loa, Chile, i Feb 1927; son of Rosa Elvira (Campo) and Guillermo Zeller; emig 1971. A Spanish-language poet, Zeller has published over 15 volumes from Exodo y otras soledades (1957) on (see MULTICULTURAL VOICES). He also creates collages, which he has both exhibited and published in several books (eg, 50 Collages, 1980, and a collaboration with A.F. MORITZ). Zeller contributed to the recognition and appreciation of LATIN AMERICAN poetry in North America through a major ANTHOLOGY, The Invisible Presence: Selected Poets of Spanish America 1925-1995 (1996); his daughter Beatriz Zeller translated most of the poems into English and introduced the volume. Stefan Haag
ZEND, Robert. Film librarian, CBC Radio producer, poet, prose writer; b Budapest, Hungary, 2 Dec 1929; d 1985; son of Stephanie and Henrik Zend, a translator for an import/export company; emig 1952. A graduate of U Toronto, Zend regarded Northrop FRYE as one of his major influences, and Luigi Pirandello, Borges, and Frederic Karinthy as three writers who shaped his literary work. Author of From Zero to One (1973), Beyond Labels (1982), Oab (1983,1985), Dayma res (1991, with intro byj.R. COLOMBO and afterword by Frye), collections of HUNGARIAN poetry, and the novel Nicolette (1993), he has attempted to use textual form to disrupt the 'authority' of a stable point of view, and experimented with SEMIOTICS.
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Further reading: Sherrill Grace, 'In the Nameof-the-Father,' Canadian Literature 120 (Spring 1989): 117-36. ZIEROTH, David Dale. Poet; b Neepawa, MB, 7 Nov 1946; son of Christina (Rossnagel) and Alfred Zieroth; educ U Manitoba (BA, 1967) and Simon Fraser U (MA, 1987). Zieroth grew up in Neepawa, and moved to Toronto in the late 19605 where his work about PRAIRIE figures and LANDSCAPE began to appear in literary journals and in ANTHOLOGIES such as Soundings (1970) and Storm Warning (1971). His first collection of poems, Clearing: Poems from a Journey (1973), immediately established his reputation as a poet of narrative force who grounded his restrained but resonant lyrical expression in natural world imagery and lived experience. In 1971 he moved, with his family, to Invermere, BC, where he worked as a park ranger in the Banff-Kootenay region, and wrote the poems for Mid-River (1981), in which metaphysical reflections on the local and larger human condition arise from intense response to physical topographies, animal life, and the passing of time. Zieroth communicates these reflections through storytelling in a direct, unpretentious style that is deceptive in its apparent simplicity. Since 1978, he has lived in North Vancouver and has been a creative WRITING instructor at Douglas C. In his poems he became more concerned with URBAN experience, but in When the Stones Fly Up (1985) stories of ancestors and inheritors speak of a heritage beyond city limits, and of MYTHOLOGIES found in the intersecting of natural landscapes with human journeys. He peoples the world of The Weight of My Raggedy Skin (1991) with immediate family members, neighbours, and imagined figures who raise deeply personal questions of identity that are nonetheless accessible to the reader, who is considered part of the poet's community. In How I Joined Humanity at Last (1998), Zieroth considers the fine line between his persona's private and public/professional self. Hauntings of aging, loneliness, and death complicate memories of childhood and youth, as the poet assesses his own role as parent while recalling the strengths of his mother and father and their lasting presence in his life and work.
ZWICKY
Zieroth's poetry continues to appear in major literary journals and in anthologies such as The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English (1982), The New Canadian Poets: 1970-1985 (1985), and A Matter of Spirit: Recovery of the Sacred in Contemporary Canadian Poetry (1998). From 1981 to 1987 he was an instructor at the Banff School of Fine Arts, and between 1985 and 1996 he edited the prestigious West Coast literary magazine Event. Further reading: Peter Buitenhuis, Attempted Edens: The Poetry of Dale Zieroth,' Essays on Canadian Writing 32 (Summer 1986): 92-105; Tom Wayman, 'Marty and Zieroth: Nature and Family,' Canadian Literature 136 (Spring 1993): 82-98. J.A. Wainwright
ZONAILO, Carolyn Joyce. Poet, critic, editor; b Vancouver 21 Jan 1947; daughter of Anne (Gibb), salesperson, and Matter Zonailo, builder; educ U Rochester and Simon Fraser U. Zonailo pursued courses in JUNGIAN psychology, a subject that affects how her poetry and prose express her sense of human consciousness; for Zonailo - as in her selected poems, The Taste of Giving (1990) or Wading the Trout River (i997) - the mystical is part of daily experience. Her poems read characteristically as forms of prayer or ritual devotion, tapping into the power of MYTH (as a form of RELIGION) to locate the cyclical patterns of life. The poet reads the details of the external environment as signs of a universal truth, and the circle is a recurrent metaphor for the covenant of faith. Married to Stephen MORRISSEY, she founded Caitlin P, and with the graphic artist Ed Varney runs The Poem Company in Montreal. ZUMTHOR, Paul. Novelist, literary critic, poet, playwright; b Geneva, Switzerland, 5 March 1915, d n Jan Montreal 1995; son of Albert Franz Zumthor and Leontine Alexandrine Marin. He moved to Paris in 1922, completed his doctorate there in 1943, and emigrated in 1972 to teach comparative literature at U Montreal (retiring in 1980). Known primarily for his scholarly work on the Middle Ages, he also wrote commentary on ORAL literature and several volumes of poetry, beginning with Le chevalier
(1938), and fiction, beginning with La griffe (1957). Author of more than 30 volumes, he won many AWARDS, including the Prix Quebec-Paris for La troversee (1991), a novel based on Christopher Columbus's travel log from Aug to Oct 1492. Further reading: Yves Bonnefoy, 'Paul Zumthor: errance et transgression dans une destinee d'historien,' Esprit Createur 38.1 (Spring 1998): 106-16. Margaret Cook
ZWICKY, Jan. Poet, musician, philosophy professor; b Calgary 10 May 1955; daughter of Jean (Keeley), farmer and music teacher, and Robert Zwicky, mining engineer; since 1985, partner of Don MCKAY. Zwicky was educated at U Toronto (PhD, 1981, with a dissertation on the 'ineffability claims' of artists and mystics). She is an editor for Brick Books and Fiddlehead, and teaches at U Victoria. Influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein and his 'vision of an inexpressible, crystalline world of logical relationships,' her poetry and scholarship share a dedication to LYRIC as a form of philosophical inquiry. In Wittgenstein Elegies (1986) Zwicky adapts the language and biography of her subject to represent stages in his career. Lyric Philosophy (1992) is a large-format collage text urging against analytic rigour as the exclusive mode of academic discourse in philosophy. Zwicky's book-length essay takes the form of fragments and aphorisms amplified, on facing pages, by citations from other thinkers and poets - thus demonstrating the effectiveness of cumulative lyric meaning. Zwicky rejects the narrow misappropriations of Wittgenstein's thought by the Logical Positivists in favour of the lyric's capacity for resonance, polydimensionality, attentiveness, and gestures of integration. Mournful poems in The New Room (1989) and Songs for Relinquishing the Earth (1998) - originally self-published as a hand-sewn limited edition - blend abstract speculation with physical precision in image and METAPHOR. Drawing themes from MUSIC, musicians' lives, ECOLOGY, and acts of dwelling and domesticity, Zwicky's often spare meditations feature a startling intricacy and clarity. See also BRINGHURST. Mark Cochrane
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Chronology COMPILED BY GERALD FRIESEN
Date
Milestones
nooo BC
Earliest records of Bluefish Cave people (Yukon)
10000
Receding of last ice sheet
9000
Earliest records of Fluted Point people (Ontario)
7000
Earliest records of human habitation on Pacific Coast
5000
Burial mounds on south coast of Labrador
4000
Fishnets, weirs in southern Ontario
1000
Agriculture in Atlantic Canada
800
Dorset culture (Hudson Strait)
300 AD
Village culture on Prairies
1000
Thule culture replaces Dorset in Arctic;
Communications and Culture
Viking settlement in N E W F O U N D L A N D 1348
Black Death (Europe, Asia)
1385
English translation of BIBLE c 1385
1390-1450
Founding of Iroquois Confederacy
Gutenberg press c 1450 (PUBLISHING)
1497
John Cabot sails to Grand Banks (Newfoundland) (EXPLORATION)
French translation of Bible c 1487
1521
Hernando Cortes (Spain) conquers Aztecs
1532-33
Francisco Pizarro (Spain) conquers Incas
1534-41
Jacques cARTIER sails to Quebec
1605
Founding of Port Royal (Sieur de Monts)
1608
Founding of Quebec (Samuel de CHAMPLAIN)
1610
Henry Hudson sails to Hudson Bay
1611
Jesuit mission in A C A D I A
Mercator's map of the world 1538
King James Version of Bible (OT 1609)
12.37
CHRONOLOGY
Date
Milestones
1624
First written treaty (Algonkian-FrenchMohawk Peace)
Communications and Culture
1632
JESUIT RELATIONS begun (annually to 1673)
1640
Bay Psalm Book (first book printed in N America)
1642
Ville Marie (Montreal) founded
1649
Iroquois destroy Huronia; Death of Jean de BREBEUF and Gabriel LALEMANT
1660
Iroquois battle French at Long Sault
1663
NEW FRANCE becomes a royal province
1665
Arrival of Jean Talon, intendant
1670
HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY
1682
La Salle reaches mouth of Mississippi River
1683
Algonquin game of baggataway renamed 'lacrosse' (SPORTS)
1713
Treaty of Utrecht (British claims in northern NA)
founded
1730
Road system in New France now operational
1734
LA VERENDRYE reaches Prairies, Red River
1749 1752
Halifax founded Printing press in Nova Scotia; Halifax Gazette Expulsion of the ACADIANS (to Louisiana)
1755 1756-63
Seven Years War
1758
Nova Scotia Legislative Assembly
1759
Battle of the Plains of Abraham
1763
Royal proclamation sets rules for Aboriginal land transfers; Treaty of Paris (France cedes NA territory to Britain)
1764 1774
1238
Laval founds seminary (Quebec)
Quebec's first printing press; La Gazette de Quebec Quebec Act (Roman Catholic 'religious freedom,' civil law)
CHRONOLOGY
Date
Milestones
1776
US Declaration of Independence (Revolutionary War 1776-83)
1778
Capt James COOK sails to Vancouver Island
1783
Canada-US border agreed Atlantic to Lake of the Woods;
Communications and Culture
LOYALIST emigration from US to MARITIMES and Canada Watt invents steam engine in Scotland
1785 1789 1791
Alexander MACKENZIE to Beaufort Sea
French Revolution; Nootka Convention (1790)
Constitutional Act creates UPPER and LOWER CANADA
1792
Capts VANCOUVER and Galiano chart Pacific Coast
1793
MACKENZIE expedition from Canada 'by land' to Pacific
1804
Adoption of Napoleonic Code in France and Lower Canada
1812
War of 1812 (to 1814); Founding of Selkirk Settlement on Red River
1816
Battle of Seven Oaks, Red River
1818
Canada-US boundary set at 49th parallel (L of the Woods to Rocky Mtns)
1820
Colony of Cape Breton joins NOVA SCOTIA
1824
Completion of Lachine Canal
1825
Steam railway runs in England (George Stephenson)
1827
First MECHANICS' INSTITUTE (St John's)
1829
Death of Shawnadithit, last of BEOTHUKS
Methodist Book Room, Toronto
1830
Daniel Massey's threshing machine, Upper Canada
1833
First steamship crossing of Atlantic (Royal William)
1836
22-km railway (St Jean-LaPrairie, Lower Canada)
1837
REBELLION, Upper Canada, Lower Canada
Telegraph (Samuel Morse)
1239
CHRONOLOGY
Date
Milestones
1838
Communications and Culture Usable newsprint from wood fibre (Fenerty, NS)
1839
Durham Report on causes of rebellion
1841
Act of Union (Upper and Lower Canada)
1842
Ashburton-Webster Treaty (NB-Maine boundary)
1844
New Brunswick Indian Reserve
Toronto Globe est (George BROWN)
1846
Strait of Georgia boundary (Canada-US) agreed
Sewing machine patent (US)
1848
Responsible government in NS and Cda; Vancouver Island (Crown colony)
1851 1854
New York Times est Canada-US Reciprocity Treaty; Seigneurial system (Canada E land tenure) abolished
1855
Mass production of guns (Samuel Colt, US)
1856
Notman photo studio, Montreal
1857
Ottawa named capital of Canada by Queen Victoria; PALLISER and Hind-DAWSQN expeditions to Northwest
1858
Crown colony of BRITISH COLUMBIA established
Transatlantic telegraph cable (NY-NFIreland) Grand Trunk Railway opens
1861 1864
Charlottetown and Quebec Conferences consider BNA union
1867
British North America Act: federation of four British colonies;
Pasteurisation (Louis Pasteur)
Sir John A. Macdonald PM, 1867-73, 1878-91 1868
CANADA FIRST movement founded
1869
Red River RiEL-led Resistance; NF rejects entry into CONFEDERATION
1870
MANITOBA (mainly METIS province) and N O R T H - W E S T T E R R I T O R I E S enter
Confederation 1871
BC joins Confederation; Signing of seven prairie treaties 1871-7
1872
1240
Public (National) ARCHIVES of Canada
CHRONOLOGY
Date
Milestones
1873
Alexander Mackenzie PM, 1873-8; North West MOUNTED POLICE founded; PEI joins Confederation
1874
Communications and Culture Grip est (HUMOUR: JW Bengough, cartoonist) WOMAN'S Christian Temperance Union (in Cda)
1875
Supreme Court formed (highest appeal still Judicial Committee of Privy Council, London)
G.A. Lockhart, first woman to earn university degree
1876
Indian Act
Intercolonial Railway opened; TORONTO WOMEN'S LITERARY CLUB
1877
Saint John fire
Telephone (Alexander Graham Bell); Disc recording (Emile Berliner, Montreal studio) Internal combustion engine automobile (Karl Benz)
1878 1879 1884
1885
National Policy Tariff
Light bulb (Edison)
Legislation forbids potlatch ceremony; IMPERIAL FEDERATION League
Eaton's catalogue; Standard Time Zone System (Sandford Fleming)
NORTH-WEST REBELLION Under RIEL's
C A N A D I A N PACIFIC RAILWAY Completed
leadership
1887
First premiers' conference
International COPYRIGHT Convention
1891
Sir John A. Macdonald dies; Sir John Abbott PM (to 1892)
Papal encyclical Rerwn novarum
1892
Sir John Thompson, PM, 1892-4 Canadian Magazine; Stanley Cup
1893 1894
Sir Mackenzie Bowell, PM, 1894-6
1896
Sir Charles Tupper PM; Sir Wilfrid Laurier PM, 1896-1911
Women's Institute est
1897 1898
YUKON Territory formed
1899
Boer War; Canadian troops dispatched (ends 1902) Marconi wireless signal NF; U Toronto P; Carnegie LIBRARY system developed
1901
1905
Maclean's magazine (JOURNALS)
SASKATCHEWAN and ALBERTA become provinces
1241
CHRONOLOGY
Date
Milestones
1906 1908
RADIO technology and broadcasting (Reginald Fessenden) Arctic islands claimed by Canada (NORTH)
1910
Marquis wheat released (Charles Saunders) Le Devoir founded (NEWSPAPERS)
1911
Sir Robert Borden PM, 1911-20
1912
Boundary extensions for MANITOBA, ONTARIO, and QUEBEC
1914
First World WAR, War Measures Act
Pauline JOHNSON writes Legends of Vancouver
Panama Canal opened First women's suffrage (Prairie provinces) (VOTING RIGHTS)
1916 1917
Communications and Culture
Battle of Vimy Ridge; Conscription legislation
1919
Treaty of Versailles (Canada signs under UK);
First aerial survey of Canada;
WINNIPEG GENERAL STRIKE and national strike wave
Canadian Bookman
1920
Arthur Meighen PM, 1920-1, 1926
1921
Mackenzie King PM, 1921-6, 1926-30, 1935-48
1923
Canada-US Halibut Treaty (the first negotiated by Canada) Wirephoto process (William Stephenson)
192.4 192.5
CFCF Radio, Montreal;
U N I T E D CHURCH OF CANADA CSt
(Methodist, Presbyterian, Congregational)
1926
'King-Byng' Affair
192.7
LABRADOR becomes part of NF (British colony);
SCIENTIFIC aerial photography of Canada begins; William Aberhart begins AB radio broadcasts Bombardier develops snowmobile
Old-age pensions Frozen fish sold commercially in Atlantic Canada
192.9
1930
R.B. Bennett PM, 1930-5 Economic depression lasts for most of decade
I93i
12.42.
Statute of Westminster (UK: dominions autonomous; basis for COMMONWEALTH)
Papal encyclical Quadragesima anno
CHRONOLOGY
Date
Milestones
Communications and Culture Foster Hewitt radio broadcast from Maple Leaf Gardens
1932 1934
Commission governs NF
Roy Thomson buys Timmins P
1935
Riddell incident at League of Nations;
MGM FILM Rose Marie (POP culture version of Canada)
John BUG HAN governor general, 1935-40 1936
CANADIAN BROADCASTING CORP and
Radio-Canada (RADIO) Trans-Canada Airlines
1937 1939
Canada enters the Second World War (to 1945)
Un homme et son peche (Radio-Canada) (GRIGNON); NATIONAL FILM BOARD
1940
Rowell-Sirois Report (dominionprovincial relations); Unemployment insurance
1941 1942.
Pearl Harbor; US enters Second World War
Farm Radio Forum (CBC); Service du cinephotographie a Quebec
Expulsion, internment of JAPANESE Canadians; Conscription plebiscite (QC opposes; others accept)
1944
Collective bargaining institutionalized
1945
Atomic bombs dropped on Japan;
St Roch (RCMP) sails NW PASSAGE
GOUZENKO spy scandal (Ottawa) 1946
Joint Commons-Senate Committee on Indian Act (to 1948)
1947
Canadian citizenship est INUIT cooperative sells art (James HOUSTON)
1948 1949
Newfoundland enters Confederation; Louis St Laurent PM, 1940-57
1950
Korean War (to 1953; Canada part of UN action)
1951
Indian Act amended; potlatch and sun dance permitted
1952
Vincent Massey first Canadian governor general
'Beaver' bush plane; 'Les nouveautes dramatiques,' RadioCanada
Canadian television service Universal COPYRIGHT Act
1243
CHRONOLOGY
Date
Milestones
Communications and Culture National LIBRARY of Canada;
1953
Neighbours, N. McLaren (NFB); STRATFORD FESTIVAL;
LafamillePlouffe,
R. LEMELIN, CBC-TV
1956
Suez crisis and creation of UN Emergency Force
Trans-Canada Pipeline debate
1957
John Diefenbaker PM, 1957-63
Front Page Challenge, CBC-TV CANADA COUNCIL founded (FUNDING)
1958
The Friendly Giant, CBC-TV
1959
St Lawrence Seaway
1960
Kenojuak, The Enchanted Owl (print); First INUKTITUT radio broadcast; Regular jet service, Toronto-Vancouver; The Nature of Things, CBC-TV (BERTON) Trans-Canada Highway;
1962
Telephone cable, Vancouver Island to NZ, Australia; ALOUETTE I (communications satellite)
1963
Lester Pearson PM, 1963-8
1965
Canada adopts Maple Leaf flag
1966
Cda Pension Plan and QC Pension Plan; National medicare act passed (provinces follow)
1967
Expo 67 Montreal and centennial celebrations
1968
Pierre Trudeau PM, 1968-79, 1980-4
Radio-Quebec
1969
Official Languages Act passed
Harold CARDINAL, The Unjust Society, US man on moon (Neil Armstrong)
1970
FLQ terrorist murder, kidnapping; War Measures Act (OCTOBER CRISIS); Royal Commission on Status of WOMEN reports
1971
This Country in the Morning, Peter GZOWSKI, CBC Radio; Mon oncle Antoine, C. Jutras, ONF
1972.
Anik I (Canadian communications satellite);
1973
Anik satellite provides TV to Arctic
The Beachcombers, CBC-TV
1244
CHRONOLOGY
Date
Milestones
1976
Quebec referendum on sovereignty defeated
1977
Berger Commission, Northern Frontier, Northern Homeland (NORTH) Project Inukshuk to develop Inuit film/ video production
1978 1979
Communications and Culture Communications Culture
Joe Clark PM, 1979-80
1981
Inuit Broadcasting Corp licensed by CRTC; Home computers
1982
Patriation of Constitution, Charter of Rights
1984
John Turner PM; Brian Mulroney PM, 1984-93
1985
Macdonald Royal Commission on Economic Future report
1988
Free Trade Agreement (Canada-US)
Native Earth Performing Arts; The Grey Fox, P. Borsos (FILM)
Friendly Giant series ends after 27 years (CBC-TV) Jesus de Montreal (film), D. Arcand
1989 1990
Meech Lake Accord (constitutional amendment) fails
1992
Charlottetown Accord national referendum fails
1993
North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA); Kim Campbell PM; Jean Chretien PM (re-elected 1997, 2000)
1995
Quebec referendum on independence narrowly reaffirms federalism
Leolo, J-C. Lauzon; Tommy Hunter Show, CBC-TV ends 27-year run
Margaret's Museum (film), s. CURRIE
1996
The English Patient (film), ONDAATJE; Mr Dressup, Ernie Coombes, ends 29 seasons (CBC-TV)
1998
National Post est (Conrad Black)
1999
NUNAVUT est; Adrienne c LARKS ON governor general
Aboriginal TV channel est
12.45
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Index by Contributor
Adames, John: Layton Andersen, Marguerite: Blais, M. Perron, Laberge, Routier Andrews, Jennifer: Humour and Satire Atkinson, Anna Louise: Captivity Narrative, Jewitt Babiak, Peter: Michael Cook, Drabek, W. Gibson, Iwaniuk, S. Lee, McCormack, Rule, Salutin Balan, Jars: Concrete Poetry, Visual Poetry Ball, John Clement: Postmodernism and Postcolonialism, Vassanji Ballstadt, Carl: Traill Barrett, Caroline: Noel Batts, Michael: Multicultural Voices Beaty, Bart: Comic Book Literature and Graphic Novel Beddoes, Julie: Tostevin Beeler, Karin: M. Engel Belier, Patricia L.: A. Bailey Belyea, Andy: Klein Berman, Judith: Hunt Besner, Neil: Begg, Bishop, W Cameron, Collins, Gallant, Gowanlock Birks, Roberta: Fineberg, Gass, Griffiths, Heide, Hendry, Kinch, Mojica, Simons, L. Sinclair, Stratton, Wade Biron, Michel: J. Perron Blake, Dale: Inuit Literature Blenkhorn, Deborah: Acland, Beattie, Beck, Beynon, Boulton, Bowman, M.W. Campbell, H. Coleman, Dougall, Fleming, Footner, H. Fraser, Hale, Jaques, Lanigan, Laut, Machar, Maclnnes, Mcllwraith, R. Page, Skinner Blodgett, E.D. (Ted): Literary History Blom, Joost: Copyright, Libel Blom, Margaret: Ewing Blom, Thomas: Ewing Boire, Gary: Callaghan
Bok, Christian: C. Dewdney Boone, Laurel: C. Roberts Bowering, George: Mourning Dove, S. Watson Bringhurst, Robert: Ghandl, Haida Oral Literature, Ka-kisikaw-pihtokew, Kanyataiiyo', K'atchodi, Kwakwala Literature, Mandeville, Mythology, Petitot, B. Reid, Saayaach'apis, Seidayaa, Skaay Brisebois, Rene: Archambault, V-L. Beaulieu, Belley, Coppens, Dandurand, De, Deland, Frenette, Lavigne, Mongeau, Robin, G. Soucy, M-P. Tremblay Brydon, Diana: Van Herk Bucknor, Michael A.: Caribbean and Canadian Literature Bumsted.JackM.: Riel Butling, Pauline: Webb Butovsky, Mervin: Elberg, Levine, Rosenfarb, Segal Calder, Alison: Bolster, Braid, Meira Cook, Crozier, Hogg, G. Roy Cariou, Warren: Novella Carpenter, Carole Henderson: H. Creighton, Fowke Carriere, Marie J.: Bersianik, Theoret Carson, Neil: G. Walker Cavell, Richard: Book Design and Illustration Chan, Greg: Bacque, Banting, Beardsley, Belford, C. Corbeil, Hambleton, Hekkanen, Landale, McNeil, Nelson, Sallans, Dennis T.P. Sears, Stange, Staunton Chapman, Judy: E. Mandel Clark, Roger: Bannerji, Crusz, Goh, Kalsey, Kitagawa, Lai, Lau, Lim, Namjoshi, Ng, Odhiambo, Rafiq, Sadiq, Sawai, C. Scott, G. Stanley, Takashima, Vuong-Riddick, Weerasinghe, Wong-Chu Clarke, George Elliott: Race and Racism in Canadian Literature Clement, Lesley D.: Judith Thompson
INDEX BY CONTRIBUTOR
Coates, Donna: War Cochrane, Mark: Babstock, Bartlett, Barton, N. Bauer, M. Bowering, Brandt, Brewster, Burnard, J.D. Carpenter, Carson, Christensen, Conn, Cowboy Poetry, Crosbie, Derksen, di Michele, Fitzgerald, Glickman, Harlequin Enterprises, Homel, Karasick, Kearns, Kootenay School of Writing, D. McKay, McKinnon, Norris, M. Reid, L. Robertson, Rogal, R. Sarah, Scheier, E. Spalding, H. Spears, Struthers, Tregebov, Patricia Young, Zwicky Coleman, Daniel: Bissoondath, A. Clarke, Ladoo Conrad, Margaret: Historiography Cook, Margaret: Acquelin, Alarie, Alonzo, Amyot, Andriesanu, Antoun, Aubry, Audet, Baillargeon, J. Barbeau, Barcelo, Barrette, Basile, Maurice Beaulieu, Michel Beaulieu, Beausoleil, Belanger, Belleau, J. Benoit, A. Bernard, Berthiaume, Boisvert, Bombardier, Bonenfant, Bosco, Bouchard, D. Boucher, Boucher de Boucherville, Boulerice, Bourget, Brebeuf, Brochu, Brodeur, Brulotte, Bujold, L. Caron, Carpentier, Chabot, Chaput-Rolland, H. Charbonneau, J. Charbonneau, J. Charlebois, R. Charlebois, Chatillon, Chen, Chiasson, Chopin, G. Cloutier, M. Corbeil, Corriveau, Cotnoir, Cousture, Cyr, Daigle, Dalpe, Daoust, David, de Bellefeuille, Delahaye, J. Delisle, M. Delisle, Derome, Dery, Desaulniers, J-P. Desbiens, P. Desbiens, Desjardins, Despres, Des Roches, DesRuisseaux, H. Dessaulles, Dor, Dorion, Dreux, Drouin, Dufresne, C. Duguay, R. Duguay, F. Dumont, Dupre, Dupuis, Favreau, Felx, Filiatrault, Filion, Fortin, Fournier, Francoeur, C. Frechette, J-M. Frechette, Gagnon, J. Garneau, Gaudet, Gaulin, M. Gay, Germain, G. Gervais, D. Giguere, Giroux, Godin, Grand'Maison, Grandmont, Gravel, Haeck, Haeffely, Hallal, L. Hamelin, P. Harvey, LP. Hebert, Hennepin, Houde, L.Jacob, S. Jacob, Jolicoeur, Kattan, Kurapel, Lacelle, Laferriere, Lafond, Lalonde, N. Landry, U. Landry, Larue, Latif-Ghattas, Le Beau, S. Lebeau, R. Leblanc, Le Bouthillier, M. Leclerc, R. Leclerc, Lecompte, Lefrancois, Lemaire, Lemire, Roland Lepage, Longchamps, Lopez Pacheco, F. Loranger,
1248
Ltaif, Andree Maillet, Adrienne Maillet, Malenfant, Mallet, Marcel, O. Marchand, Marcotte, Marinier, E. Martel, S. Martel, Micone, H. Monette, M. Monette, f. Morin, Naubert, Nepveu, Ouvrard, C. Paradis, Parizeau, P. Pelletier, Peloquin, Perrault, Perrier, Piche, Pilon, G. Poulin, S. Poulin, Poupart, Pozier, Proulx, T. Renaud, Y. Rivard, Rochon, Royer, Saint-Denis, Marie Savard, Michel Savard, J. Savoie, P. Savoie, A. Simard, J. Simard, J-Y Soucy, Straram, Suite, Szucsany, Tache, Tardivel, Tetreau, Therio, Tibo, Tougas, Trottier, Turcotte, Turgeon, Uguay, Vallieres, Vanier, Vasseur, Vezina, Villemaire, Vonarburg, Warren, Yergeau, Yvon, Zumthor Cooke, Nathalie: Cookbooks and Culture Cooley, Dennis: Vanderhaeghe Cowan, Ann: Editors and Editing Craig, Terrence: Ringuet Cruikshank, Julie: Tlingit Oral Literature Currie, Noel Elizabeth: Cardinal, J. Cook, C. Edwards, N. Kelly, T. King, Manguel, Miki, Natives in Literature, Persky, Watmough Czaykowska-Higgins, Ewa: Salish Oral Literatures Danaher, Cecilia M.: I. Ross, Schermbrucker Dansereau, Estelle: Bernier, J-A. Loranger, Antonine Maillet Darling, Michael: Richler Davey, Frank: Anglophone Canadian Writing Davies, Gwendolyn: Hart, Hensley, A. Jones, Leonowens, Saunders Davies, Richard A.: Haliburton Dean, Misao: Carr Deer, Glenn: Choy, Goto, R. Harrison, Priest, Whyte Denisoff, Dennis: Wilfred Watson De Sousa, Grace: Radio and Literature Dewar, Kenneth C.: Intellectual History Dickinson, Peter: Dubois, Rashid, A. Roy Diehl-Jones, Charlene: Long Poem Distad, Merrill: Newspapers, Magazines, and Commercial Journals Djwa, Sandra: Daniells, Klinck Dobozy, Tamas: R. Allen, Arnason, Atkinson, Blaise, Buday, Call, A. Cameron, G. Clark, Cookshaw, Curwood, Edel, B. Edwards, Annie Frechette, Gadd, G. Gait, M. Gibson, D. Godfrey, Grey, Hogben, Jarman, Kenyon, Krizanc, Macfarlane, A. Morgan, Radu, Rajic, Ruzesky, Stegner, Stren, Vizinczey
INDEX BY CONTRIBUTOR
Downey, Deane E.D.: Sparshott Doyle, James: Adeney, T. Allan, Baird, Barnard, Bucke, D. Carter, Durkin, Eaton, B. Fairley, M. Fairley, Fontaine, Achille Frechette, Garner, Gouzenko Controversy, McFadden, Murtha, Pseudonyms, Reeve, Ryan, S. Ryerson, B. Sinclair, Stephen, P. Thompson, J. Wallace Doyle, Kegan: Coupland, C. Doyle, C. Rooke Doyle, Margaret: Dominion Drama Festival, Drama Festivals (Summer), Fringe Festivals, International Writers Festivals, Shaw Festival, Stratford Festival Dutton, Paul: Bok, Performance Poetry, Sound Poetry Dyer, Klay: G. Allen, De Mille, Holmes, Kirby, Parody, Utopia/Dystopia Egan, Susanna: Binnie-Clark, Gzowski, Houston, Ignatieff, Ritchie Ellenwood, Ray: Gauvreau, Henault, P.M. Lapointe Fee, Margery: A. Bourinot, E.K. Brown, Collin, Edgar, Language (Canadian English), Lighthall, Logan, MacMechan, Pierce, Teaching Canadian Literature Fetherling, George: Literary Agents, Visual Arts and Writing Fiamengo, Janice: McClung Filewod, Alan: Theatre History Findlay, Leonard M.: Woodcock Fink, Howard R.: Radio Drama Fleming, Patricia: Book History in Canada Flick, Jane: Alderson, Burnford, Ellis, Hughes, K. Major, Pearson, Stinson, Wieler Forbes, Alexander M.: Pratt Forst, Graeme N.: Abley, Adderson, Amabile, Barb our, Frye Forsyth, Louise H.: Francophone Writing outside Acadia and Quebec Foster, Michael K.: Iroquoian Oral Literature in Canada Fox, Lorcan: Grier, Gruending, Sommer, Van Toorn, Wreggitt, A. York Freeman, Barbara M.: Journalism Friesen, Gerald: Chronology Furlani, Andre: Chislett, Heighten, Michael Hollingsworth, Mazza, Murrell, Reibetanz, Scobie, Valgardson Gerson, Carole: Blennerhassett, Blewett, G. Campbell, Gowan, S.F. Harrison, M. Keith, Macbeth, McLaren, Pickthall, Sadlier,
Stowe, Teskey, Toronto Women's Literary Club, Wood Gervais, Andre: G. Langevin Giguere, Richard: DesRochers Gingell, Susan: Brand, Lowther Gittings, Chris: Allegory, Hodgins Givner, Joan: D. Livesay, F.R. Livesay Globe, Alexander: Davies Gooch, Bryan N.S.: Music and Literature (libretti, settings), Schafer Gooding, Richard: Abbey, Borson, Downes, Elsted, Maltman, McNamara, Outram, Safarik, V Sheard, Szumigalski, Urquhart, Wayman, Wevill, Whalley Grace, Sherrill: Brooker, Hubbard, North Grauer, Lally: First Nations Literature Greene, Michael: Bissett, Criticism and Theory, Gothic and Grotesque, Kinsella, A-M. MacDonald, A. MacLeod, Michaels, WO. Mitchell, B. Moore, F. Mowat, Munsch, J. Richardson, Ryga, A.J.M. Smith, Waddington, B. Wallace Greenstein, Michael: Jewish Canadian Writings Grigorut, Constantin: Anfousse, Bissonnette, dAmour, Ethier-Blais, Etienne, J. Hamelin, Klimov, G. Leblanc, Mailhot, C. Marchand, Meynard, Nattiez, Poissant, Poliquin, M-J. Theriault, Trudel, Vachon Gross, Konrad: Grove Gruben, Patricia: Screenplay Grubisic, Brett Josef: Boyle, Foran, Griggs, Jack, M.T. Kelly, Rohmer, Roscoe, Scriver, Turner, Wynveen Gustar, Jennifer J.: Alford, Barclay, McFee, Story, Ternar Guth, Gwendolyn: Lampman Guy-Bray, Stephen: Hine Haag, Stefan: Geddes, Gunnars, Kay, Merril, Myers, Powe, Rhenisch, Smyth, S. Stewart, Van Vogt, Vaughn-James, Virgo, Zeller Hannan, Annika: Maheux-Forcier, Marchessault Harkin, Michael E.: Wakashan Oral Literature Harrison, Dick: O'Hagan Hart, Alexander: Boyarsky, Bushkowsky, R. Currie, Drache, H. Engel, Garber, Gold, Kreiner, Lazarus, Ludwig, Majzels, Mayne, C.J. Newman, Rawin, Shapiro, Stein, Steinfeld, Weintraub, Weinzweig Harvey, Carol J.: Bugnet Hastings, Tom: Gay and Lesbian Writing
1249
INDEX BY CONTRIBUTOR
Hatch, Ronald B.: H. Innis, Morton, Payerle, Plaunt, Spry Hayward, Annette M: Dugas Hazelton, Hugh: Etcheverry, Garcia, Kokis, Latin America and Canadian Writing, Rodriguez, Sagaris, Szanto Heath, Tim: Documentary Helms, Gabriele: S. Clark, Lill, J. MacLeod, Quednau, Riis, Swan, Sweatman Hengen, Shannon: Atwood Higgins, Iain: Bringhurst, Busza, Czaykowski, Davis, Science and Nature Writing, P.D. Scott, Tyrrell Hinchcliffe, Peter: D.G.Jones Hodgson, Heather: F. Ahenakew, Ka-KisikawPihtokew, RufFo, Szabados Hodgson, Richard G.: Nelligan Holmes, Nancy: Writing Programs in Canada Hotte, Lucie: Lemelin, Martin Howells, Coral Ann: Munro Hubert, Henry: Rhetoric Hulan, Renee: Assiniwi, Baker, Bear, Brant, Crate, Cuthand, M. Dumont, M.A. Freeman, Larocque, Markoosie, Young-Ing Hume, Margaret: Grannan Huot, Giselle: H. de S-D. Garneau Hurley, Michael: Klein Irvine, Lorna: Popular Culture Jaenen, Cornelius J.: Jesuit Relations Jahner, Elaine A.: Siouan Oral Literature Jirgens, Karl E.: Wah Kadar, Marlene: Life Writing Kanaganayakam, Chelva: Asia and Canadian Literature Katz, Yael: Bromige Kealy, J. Kieran: Foon, Nichols, Simmie, I. Wallace Keep, Christopher: Technology, Communications, and Canadian Literature Kennedy, Michael P.J.: Ipellie Kent, David A.: Avison Kertzer, Adrienne: Children's Literature (in English) Kertzer, Jon: G. Bowering Kinkade, M. Dale: Language (Aboriginal and Trade Languages in Canada) Kirkley, Richard Bruce: Film, Television, and Literature Knowles, Ric: Drama in English Knutson, Susan: Kogawa Koustas, Jane: Translation
1250
Kroller, Eva-Marie: Travellers and Travel Writing Kuester, Martin: Historical Literature Labrie, Ross: G. Grant, C. Taylor, J. Watson Lacombe, Michele: Acadian Writing Lamonde, Yvan: L. Dessaulles Lamont-Stewart, Linda: D. Lee Lamontagne, Andre: A. Langevin Lane, Dorothy E: L. Allen, Commonwealth and Canadian Literature, Gool, Trainer Lawn, Jenny: F. Duncan, D.M. Fraser, Maillard, Mills, Pullinger, Quaife Lawson, Alan: Funding for Literature in Canada Leahy, David: Class and Canadian Literature Leblanc, Julie: La Rocque Leckie, Ross: Bowling, Farkas, C. Ford, Luxton, Oughton, Ursell Lecomte, Guy A.: Y. Theriault Lepage, Yvan G: Guevremont Levitan, Seymour: Korn Lewis, Kent: Copithorne, Davey, Kiyooka, McCafFery, Moure, Nations, G. Scott, Shikatani Libin, Mark: Frey, Nixon, Tefs Loisel, Jerome: Aude, Bienvenue, Collette, Daveluy, Desautels, Houde, Thibodeau, Vadeboncoeur, Valois Loiselle, Andre: Bienvenue, Danis, Drama in French, Leroux, Magny, Petitjean, Ronfard, Saia, L. Tremblay Lynch, Gerald: Animal Stories, Short Story and Sketch MacDonald, Mary Lu: L. Frechette, Quebec Writing in French, Motifs in MacGregor, Roy: Sports Writing MacLaine, Brent: Buckler MacSkimming, Roy: Bookstores and Bookselling Mahon, Peter: V Coleman, Grey, Halpenny, Hickman, Hudson, W Keith, McWhirter, E. Paquin, Parkin, Phillips-Wolley, Rogers, Spencer, Peter Stevens, R.S. Weir Major, Robert: A. Major Martineau, Joel: Badami, Brody, D. Day, Fawcett, Hay, Hindmarch, Marty, Patterson, PlotnikofF, Slipperjack, Ron Smith, StanwellFletcher, Svendsen, Trower Mathews, Lawrence: Hood, L. Moore, Pittman, Winter McCaig, Joann: Archives, Manuscripts, and Special Collections
INDEX BY CONTRIBUTOR
McClellan, Catharine: Northern Athapaskan Oral Literature McDonald, Larry: Birney McNally, Peter P.: Libraries McNeilly, Kevin: Boas, Gustafson, Poetry in Shorter Forms, Poetry Slams, Sonnet Meadwell, Kenneth W.: Brault, C. Cloutier, Grandbois Messenger, Cynthia: P.K. Page Michon, Jacques: R. Charbonneau, Editors and Editing Miller, Jay: Tsimshianic Oral Literature MofFatt, John: E. Ahenakew, Domanski, Donnell, Fleet, Ireland, Keon, MacConmara, Moses, Plantos, Scottish Gaelic Literature in Canada, P. Stratford, Suknaski Monkman, Leslie: Teaching Canadian Literature Moreau, Bill: WF. Butler, Carrier, Champlain, Exploration Literature, Fidler, Franklin, G.M. Grant, Henday, Alexander Henry, Heriot, H. Hind, Kalm, Kane, Kelsey, Palliser, Pond, Stefansson, D. Thompson Morgan, Lawrence: Ktunaxa (Kutenai) Oral Literature Morrell, A. Carol: Africa in Canadian Writing Moss, Jane: Michel Tremblay Mota, Miguel: Lowry Mountford, Peter: Fulford, Hicks, N. Huston, Needles, D. Ross Moyes, Lianne: Brossard, Tessera Collective Murdock, Rebecca: M. Gervais, Hartog, Lynch, Wharton, T. York Nadel, Ira B.: Biography, L. Cohen, Galbraith, Glassco Nelson-McDermott, Catherine: Blodgett, Callwood, Maracle, Smart Ng, Maria N.: Benison, Bowen, M. Fraser, Gough, P. Robinson, Ronald Wright Nichols, Miriam: Blaser Nichols, John D.: Ojibwa Oral Literature O'Brien, Susie: United States and Canadian Literature O'Leary, Daniel: School Textbooks Pache, Walter: Urban Writing Panofsky, Ruth: Tihanyi Parker, George L.: Publishing Industry Parsons, Mamie: Macpherson Paterson, Janet M.: A. Hebert, OuelletteMichalska Pell, Barbara: Berton, Religion and Literature
Pennee, Donna Palmateer: Gender and Gender Relations Pentland, David H.: Algonquian Oral Literatures Perron, Dominique: Y. Beauchemin Peterman, Michael: Crawford, McCarrroll Phillips, Richard S.: Ballantyne Pivato, Joseph: Caccia, Paci, Ricci Poirier, Guy: J. Renaud Querengesser, Neil: P. Lane Rae, Ian: MacKinnon, Scofield, Sterling Ramsey, Robin H.: Braithwaite, Fischman, Inkster, MacSkimming, F. Sutherland, Weaver Rasporich, Beverley: Pollock Rayner, Anne: Allison, Bantock, A.A. Brown, Petroglyphs Ricou, Laurie: Ecocriticism, Region and Regionalism, Vancouver Industrial Writers' Union Ridington, Robin: Oral Literature and History Ritchie, Leslie: D.C. Scott Roberts, Katherine A.: R. Carrier, R. Choquette, Robert Lepage Rocheleau, Alain-Michel: Chaurette, Gelinas, Gurik Rogers, David F: J. Poulin Ross, Catherine Sheldrick: Reference Guides to Canadian Writing Rubio, Mary Henley: Anne of Green Gables, Montgomery Runte, Robert: de Lint, G. Dickson, D. Duncan, Montpetit, Sawyer, Science Fiction and Fantasy Rusnak, Anne M.: Children's Literature in French Sanderson, Heather: Acorn, G. Clarke, S. Currie, Duley, Elliott, Haley, Joe, Kerslake, L. McKay, Porter, E. Richardson, Spettigue, Tynes Sanger, Peter: Lochhead Sawatsky, Marlene: Thomas Schroeder, Andreas: Hoaxes, Public Lending Right Scobie, Stephen: Nichol Segal, Judy: Rhetoric Sellwood, Jane: Brooke Shostak, Dorothy: MacEwen Siemens, Raymond G.: Awards Siemerling, Winfried: Cultural Plurality and Canadian Literature, Ondaatje Slemon, Stephen: Allegory
1251
INDEX BY CONTRIBUTOR
Smith, Nelson C.: K. Millar, M. Millar, Mystery and Romance Smith, Rowland: Lewis Solie, Karen: Charron, S. Paradis, Richard Staines, David: Leacock Stevenson, Warren: Fiamengo, Jonas, Mathews, Musgrave, Thibaudeau Stewart, Jack: Bullock Stewart, Kevin G.: Bergen, Cooper, Ducornet, K. Fraser, G. Gibson, Morriseau, Mosioner, G. Reid, E. Robinson, H. Robinson, L. Rooke, V Ross, Simpson, Steffler, Weiner, Wheeler, Yates, D. Young Stouck, David: S. Ross St Pierre, Paul Matthew: Purdy Strong-Boag, Veronica: Women's Studies Struthers, J.R. (Tim): Anthologies Stubbs, Andrew: Dudek, E. Mandel, Souster Sugars, Cynthia: Summers Tausky, Thomas E.: Nationalism Taylor, Peter A.: Haig-Brown, Heming, Lord, Seton ten Kortenaar, Neil: Dabydeen, S. Duncan, Foster, Itwaru, Mordecai, Philip, Selvon, Senior Thomas, Gerald: M. Barbeau, E. Benoit, J. Burke, E. Butler, Folklore, Lacourciere Thurston, John: S. Moodie Tiefensee, Diane: Kroetsch Tiessen, Hildi Froese: Mennonite Writing in Canada Tiffin, Helen: Aylen Tilley, Jane: Aquin Tompkins, Joanne: Reaney Tremblay, Tony: Nowlan, Richards Tuzi, Marino: Amprimoz, Barreto-Rivera, Daurio, Fraticelli, Gasparini, Y. Martel, Melfi, Silvera Tyndall, Paul: Music and Literature (popular lyrics) Usmiani, Renate: Highway Valverde, Mariana: Censorship, Pornography, Obscenity van Toorn, Penny: Wiebe Vautier, Marie: Vigneault Viswanathan, Jacqueline: R. Giguere, Lozeau
1252
Voldeng, Evelyne: Miron Wainwright, J. Andrew: Zieroth Walchli, Julie E.: Armstrong, Holden, Lillard, Pinder, Windley, Wyatt Walker, Douglas C.: Language (Canadian French) Ware, Tracy: F.R. Scott Warley, Linda: Marlatt Wasserman, Jerry: Alianak, Angel, Bolt, Cone, Fennario, B. Fraser, D. Freeman, S. Gilbert, Gray, Ann Henry, Maclvor, Mighton, K. Mitchell, Panych, Rosen, Djanet Sears, J. Sherman, D.H. Taylor, P. Thompson, Verdecchia, Walmsley, I. Weir Wasserman, Susan.: Anderson-Dargatz, S. Sheard Watt, K.Jane: Sime, Ethel Wilson Waugh, Robin: Cooley, D. Dawson, P. Friesen, Halfe, T Marshall, Newlove Weir, Lorraine: McLuhan Whalen, Terry: Alphabet, Canadian Authors Assoc, Confederation Group, Contact, Delta, Ecole Litteraire de Montreal, Four Horsemen, Groupe-des-Six-Eponges, Hexagone, League of Canadian Poets, McGill Group, Montreal Story Tellers Fiction Performance Group, Mouvement litteraire du Quebec, Nigog, Parti Pris, PEN Canada, Playwrights' Union of Canada, Royal Society of Canada, Societe des ecrivains canadiens, Tish Group, Writers' Union of Canada Whitfield, Agnes: G. Bessette Wilkshire, Claire: Couzyn, Crummey, M. Ferguson, K. Harvey, Humphreys, James-French, Janes, Lilburn, McGrath, O'Flaherty, Percy, H. Robertson, Scammell, K. Thompson Williams, David: Mistry Willmott, Glenn: Findley Wills, Deborah: Essays Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey: W. Bauer, Beissel Wolfart, H. Christopher: Cree Literature Xiques, Donez: Laurence York, Lorraine: Shields Unsigned articles are by the editor.
Index of Authors
A Abbey, Lloyd 3 Abley, Mark 3 Acland, Peregrine 7,1189 Acorn, Milton 7-8, 40, 70, 2,11, 212, 351, 475, 634, 689, 719, 885, 902, 1059, 1142 Acquelin, Jose 8 Adam, Graeme Mercer 8-9, 604, 682, 1056,1208 Adams, Levi 9, 679 Adderson, Caroline 9, 58, 155, 739 Adeney, Marcus 9, 783 Ahenakew, Edward 12, 375 Ahenakew, Freda 12, 243, 375 Alarie, Donald 12 Alderson, Sue Ann 13 Alford, Edna 13-14, 66, 207,1045 Alianak, Hrant 15-16, 308 Allan, Andrew 16, 674, 712, 756, 872, 928, 932-4, 1039 Allan, Ted 16, 44, 74, 694, 719,1043 Allen, Grant 17-18, 788 Allen, Lillian 18, 122, 178-80, 313, 854, 1061 Allen, Robert Thomas 18, 74 Alline, Henry 18, 185, 207, 828, 879, 956 Allison, Susan 18-19 Alonzo, Anne-Marie 19, 78, 421, 631, 834 Amabile, George 20, 60, 544 Amprimoz, Alexandre 20, 215, 390, 544, 705, 717, 757, 1006, 1019 Amyot, Genevieve 20 Anderson, Patrick zi, 40, 211, 422, 567, 583, 638, 729, 860, 1080, 1191-2 Anderson-Dargatz, Gail 21-2, 58, 62, 949 Andriesanu, Mircea 22, 1055 Anfousse, Ginette 22, 59, 202 Angel, Leonard 22 Antoun, Bernard 35, 38 Aquin, Hubert 9, 17, 36-8, 39, 71, 77, 94, 100, 117, 135, 211, 342, 419, 429, 612, 739, 789, 799, 833,
834, 896, 917, 926, 933, 951, 958, 1033, 1044, H25, 1141, 1152
Archambault, Gilles 38, 69, 77 Armstrong, Jeannette 27, 31, 43, 155, 372, 373, 374, 375, 801, 849, 850, 852, 887, 1015, 1147, 1222, 1230,1233 Arnason, David 43, 342, 350, 431, 586, 709, 716, 1095 Asselin, Olivar 32, 48, 105, 165, 338, 455, 1087, 1088,1188 Assiniwi, Bernard 48, 104, 235, 375, 801, 917, 1217 Atkinson, Diana 48 Atwood, Margaret 17, 20, 22, 25, 27-28, 33, 41, 48-51, 60, 62, 66, 69, 71, 76, 82, 83, 85, 99, 116, 121, 122, 124, 136, 170, 178, 192, 223, 227, 235, 259, 276, 277, 295, 296, 300, 328, 329, 330, 333, 337, 342, 350, 363, 365, 392, 426, 429, 430, 433, 443, 444, 450, 466, 492, 494, 495, 496, 497, 514, 516, 519, 521, 530, 541, 552, 566, 584, 594, 662, 675, 676, 678, 685, 696, 697, 717, 722, 751, 754, 780, 790, 798, 801, 820, 833, 840, 849, 861, 867, 870, 874, 884, 886, 892, 896, 905, 912, 913, 930, 939, 947, 951, 958, 988, 990, 1012, 1015, 1016, 1017, 1038, 1044, 1045, 1058, 1066, 1088, 1107, 1108, 1116, 1127, 1128,1142, 1146, 1154, 1155, 1156, 1158, 1173, 1180, 1194, 1195, 1203, 1206, 1228 Aubert de Gaspe, Philippe-J. (pere) 40, 51—2, 117, 186, 343, 344, 382, 496, 581, 680, 736, 801, 828, 917, 949, 979, 986, 1040, 1124, 1186 Aubert de Gaspe, Philippe Ignace (fils) 51, 8289, 917, 1040,1041 Aubin, Napoleon 51, 52, 197, 941 Aubry, Claude 52 Aude 52, 67, 194 Audet, Jean-Paul 52—3 Avison, Margaret 41, 53-5, 68, 72, 123, 605, 849, 883, 957,1059, 1105,1145,1154, 1178 Aylen, Elise 86—7, 491, 525, 1023, 1024
INDEX OF AUTHORS
B Babstock, Ken 87 Bacque, James 87,698 Badami, Anita Rau 87 Bailey, Alfred G. 76, 87-8, 567, 989 Bailey, Jacob 88, 804, 828, 906, 956 Baillargeon, Pierre 88, 329 Baird, Irene 88,155, 210, 691, 830,1193 Baker, Marie (Annharte) 88-9, 373 Ball, Nelson 89,142 Ballantyne, Robert 89, 216, 829 Bambrick, Winifred 73, 89, 960,1194 Bannerji, Himani 89-90,150, 270, 491, 887, 959, 1223 Banting, Pamela 90, 241, 324,1072,1179 Bantock, Nick 57, 90,136,155, 524 Barbeau.Jean 91-2 Barbeau, Marius 3, 20, 76, 91,133, 542, 601, 778, 779. 853, 878,1043,1141,1180 Barbour, Douglas 57, 92, 224, 276, 280, 516, 574, 583, 675, 715, 807, 815, 848,1007,1020,1022, 1057,1061,1116,1179,1213 Barcelo, Francois 92, 496-7 Barclay, Byrna 80, 92 Barfoot, Joan 64, 66, 92, 302, 832 Barnard, Leslie Gordon 92-3,1044 Barr, Robert 93, 788, 904,1046 Barreto-Rivera, Rafael 93,384, 720, 814,1060-1 Barrette, Jacqueline 93 Barry, Robertine See Francoise Bartlett, Brian 93-4, 136, 667 Barton, John 94,183,422 Basile, Jean 94, 269, 568 Bauer, Nancy 76, 94 Bauer, Walter 94-5, 101, 344, 431, 765 Bear, Shirley 95, 375,1174 Beardsley, Douglas 95,1068 Beattie, Jessie 95 Beauchemin, Neree 95-6, 710, 881, 883 Beauchemin, Yves 39, 73, 96-7, 363, 518, 832, 917, 1126 Beaugrand, Honore 32, 97-8, 352, 386, 494, 632, 917, 958,1043 Beaulieu, Maurice 98 Beaulieu, Michel 70, 74, 98, 328, 431 Beaulieu, Victor-Levy 32, 51, 71, 73, 78, 79, 98-100, in, 135, 215, 327, 328, 355, 429, 431, 548, 612, 739, 834, 896, 905, 912, 917, 930,1095,1128, 1142,1147 Beausoleil, Claude 34, 73, 78,100, 633 Beavan, Emily 100, 541, 805
12.54
Beck, Lily Adams 47, 100 Begamudre, Ven 45, 46, 60, 80, 81, 100, 225, 430, 491, 525,1005, 1017 Begg, Alexander 101,190, 827 Begon, Elisabeth 101, 192, 654, 917 Beissel, Henry 95,101, 431, 632, 637, 820,1047, 1195 Belaney, Archibald See Grey Owl Belanger, Marcel 101 Belford, Ken 101-2 Belleau, Andre .102,193, 214, 261 Belley, Marlene 78,102 Benison, C.C. 65, 102, 788 Benoit, Emile 102-3, 778 Benoit, Jacques 103 Beresford-Howe, Constance 40,104, 332, 368, 9i7 Bergen, David 75,104, 738 Bernard, Anne 104 Bernard, Harry 104-5, 2°5. 29°, 739. 830, 917, 1043 Bernier, Jovette-Alice 105, 289, 290, 644, 1032 Bersianik, Louky 17,106, 161, 262, 428, 519, 557, 607, 710, 834, 896, 905, 917, 958 Berthiaume, Andre 106-7 Berton, Pierre 39, 71, 72, 74, 107-9,115,176, 235, 367, 495, 502, 586, 722, 813, 820, 892, 910, 995, 1171, 1228,1233, 1244 Bessette, Arsene 109, 831 Bessette, Gerard 71, 77, 109-11, 211, 261, 389, 518, 519, 599, 612, 629, 739, 831, 905, 917, 1125 Beynon, Francis Marion 111-12, 534,1190,1193 Bibaud, Adele 112, 941,1186 Bibaud, Michel 112, 255, 341, 681, 804, 879, 906, 1021 Bienvenue, Yvan 67, 112, 311 Binnie-Clark, Georgina 113 Binning, Sadhu 113, 155, 525, 768 Bird, Will R. 62,117, 828 Birdsell, Sandra 64, 66, 75, 80,117-18, 429, 709, 738, 739 Birney, Earle 40, 41, 53, 73, 75, 76, 84,116, 11820, 135,168, 170, 178, 206, 210, 211, 276, 326, 474, 504, 514, 516, 517, 566, 568, 574, 632, 663, 672, 674, 683, 719, 722, 725, 735, 780, 782, 806, 826, 876, 883, 901, 903, 909, 925, 926, 947,1171, 1175, 1191, 1192, 1202, 1204, 1226, 1229 Bishop, Elizabeth 120-1, 861 bissett, bill 40, 58, 121, 236, 372, 436, 554, 568, 573, 577, 609, 854, 885, 939, 1060-2, 1146, 1172, 1175, 1178
INDEX OF AUTHORS
Bissonnette, Lise 121-2 Bissoondath, Neil 60, 122, 179, 228, 268, 430, 1104, 1127 Blais, Marie-Claire 39, 40, 67, 70, 71, 77, 78,1235, 136, 353, 376, 395, 421, 428, 444, 514, 5i8, 541, 691, 719, 735, 785, 804, 828, 834, 835, 917, 1076, 1125, 1126, 1199 Blaise, Clark 35, 40, 44, 64,125-6, 225, 346, 393, 429, 491, 525, 544, 739, 751-2, 763, 848, 947, 1044, 1057, 1134, 1146 Blaser, Robin 126—8, 147, 155, 590, 675, 886, 1178 Blennerhassett, Margaret 128 Blewett, Jean 128,1190 Blodgett, E.D. xix, 57, 60, 67, 128,151, 229, 262, 300, 557, 591, 670, 960, 1126 Blondal, Patricia 128 Boas, Franz 91, 129, 467, 522, 535, 536, 595, 596, 597, 598, 599, 825, 879, 1001, 1004, 1051, 1141, 1180, 1182 Bock, Dennis 61, 129, 431,1194 Bodsworth, Fred 129, 820, 831, 1015, 1228 Boisvert, Yves 73, 129, 885 Bok, Christian 130, 295, 1062, 1175, xix Bolster, Stephanie 67, 130, 495, 886,1174 Bolt, Carol 28, 64, 130-1, 212, 214, 360, 361 Bombardier, Denise 131 Bonenfant, Rejean 131,417 Borsky, Mary 142 Borson, Roo 63, 142, 705, 886 Bosco, Monique 71, 77, 142-3, 550 Bouchard, Michel-Marc 63, 73, 143, 311, 315, 420, 1126 Boucher, Denise 143, 311, 699, 778,1133 Boucher de Boucherville, Georges 143, 941,1188 Boulerice, Jacques 143 Boulton, Constance Rudyard 143, 827 Bourassa, Napoleon 144, 345, 956, 1131 Bourgeoys, Marguerite 144, 292, 917, 999 Bourinot, Arthur 73, 144, 780, 1025, 1188 Bourinot, Sir John George 144,145, 255, 581, 1009, 1074 Bowen, Gail 41, 65, 145, 787, 832,1005 Bowering, George xiii, xix, 24, 27, 28, 34, 35, 40, 60, 70, 71, 123,127, 145-7, 155, 224, 300, 329, 350, 418, 436, 493, 496, 499, 506, 520, 557, 568, 590, 662, 678, 713, 715, 739, 740, 762, 780, 815, 832, 833, 858, 867, 884, 885, 934, 939, 951, 1069, 1090, 1108, 1116, 1154, 1161, 1174, 1178, 1179, 1199, 1208 Bowering, Marilyn 47, 58, 147-8, 270,1091, 1190 Bowling, Tim 57, 148
Bowman, Louise Morey 148 Boyarsky, Abraham 148 Boyle, Harry 74, 148, 204, 932 Braid, Kate 148-9, 494 Braithwaite, Max 74, 149, 1191 Brand, Dionne 27, 34, 67, 83, 122, 149-50, 178, 180, 209, 213, 214, 228, 269, 270, 421, 425, 430, 520, 521, 662, 679, 719, 833, 849, 887, 926, 1156, 1220 Brandt, Di 60, 75, 150, 429, 711, 737, 738, 1091, 1196 Brant, Beth 31, 34, 150, 372, 373, 375, 421, 425 Brault, Jacques 67, 70, 71, 77, 78, 79, 128,150-1, 411, 414, 704, 736, 742, 744, 757, 884, 977, 1126 Brebeuf, Fr Jean de 73, 151,177, 178, 180,192, 491, 492, 496, 548, 603, 676, 727, 759, 778, 783, 800, 900, 901, 953, 955-6, 999, 1007, 1159, 1238 Brett, Brian 151-2 Brewster, Elizabeth 152, 672, 806, 957,1046, 1194 Brien, Roger 152 Bringhurst, Robert xi, xix, 57,131, 142,152-4, 155, 164, 433, 467, 547, 571-2, 573, 599, 708, 793-4, 851, 872, 879, 886, 887, 950, 954, 959, 998, 1012, 1031, 1052,1143,1174, 1235 Brochu, Andre 68, 73, 80, 155, 211, 229, 260, 262, 263, 323, 570, 612, 704, 736 Brodeur, Helene 79, 155-6 Brody, Hugh 156, 1015 Bromige, David 156 Brooke, Frances 23, 42,115, 156, 157-8, 265, 334, 344, 353, 425, 795, 801, 828, 829, 834, 868, 906, 917, 947, 949, 1033, 1127, 1150, 1186, 1203 Brooker, Bertram 73,132, 158, 306, 1069,1173 Brossard, Nicole 39, 70, 71, 77, 98,124, 159-61, 262, 323, 325, 353, 418, 421, 428, 569, 590, 633, 665, 678, 714, 784, 799, 834, 885, 896, 917, 1119, 1126,1179, 1220 Brown, Audrey Alexandra 76, 161 Brown, E.K. 40, 73, 76, 161-2, 257, 326, 605, 952, 979, 1023, 1025, 1087 Brown, George 115, 162, 280, 357, 559, 565, 693, 722, 809, 1056,1240 Bruce, Charles 72, 162, 828, 1180, 1196 Bruce, Harry 85, 162 Brulotte, Gaetan 162-3, 4J7,1046 Buchan, John 41, 42, 66, 163, 175, 404, 816,1022, 1243 Bucke, Richard Maurice 163, 957 Buckler, Ernest 27, 41, 74, 113, 163-4, 418-19, 429, 780, 797, 828, 831, 925, 948, 1046, 1145 Buday, Grant 164
1255
INDEX OF AUTHORS
Buell, John 164, 789 Bugnet, Georges 13, 56, 58, 165, 801,1012 Buies, Arthur 165, 338, 857 Bujold, Francoise 165 Bullock, Michael 166,167, 181,1010 Burke, Johnny 166,170, 305, 382, 778 Burnard, Bonnie 66, 80, 82, 85,166, 429 Burnett, Virgil 166 Burnford, Sheila 166, 713 Burwell, Adam Hood 167 Bush, Catherine 167, 846 Bushell, John 167, 559 Bushkowsky, Aaron 167 Bussieres, Arthur de 167, 881, 1059 Busza, Andrzej 167, 273, 766,1055 Butala, Sharon 10, 41, 66, 81, 82, 168, 241, 950, 1013 Butler, Edith 5, 168, 778, 805 Butler, Juan 168, 227,1063 Butler, WE 168,1129
C Caccia, Fulvio 31, 68,168-9, 2,69, 270, 544, 766 Call, Frank Oliver 134,169, 422 Callaghan, Barry 38, 75,169,170, 329, 568, 855, 1125-6 Callaghan, Morley 40, 41, 72, 76, 82,123,169-71, 210, 211, 219, 307, 364, 427, 439, 540-1, 756, 774, 798, 831, 849, 909, 925, 928, 958, 1040, 1043, 1045, 1079, 1082, 1127, 1145, 1151, 1152 Call-wood, June 172, 1223, 1228 Cameron, Anne 40,155, 172,, 313, 364 Cameron, George Frederick 172, 255,1022 Cameron, Silver Donald 34, 85,172, 828 Cameron, William Bleasdell 172-3 Campbell, Grace 132, 173 Campbell, Maria 13,173, 370, 373, 375, 454, 665, 739 Campbell, Marjorie Wilkins 72,173 Campbell, William Wilfred 32, 39, 43,173, 230, 2.55, 305, 329, 336, 604, 605, 666, 780, 796, 881, 980, 1188 Canuck, Janey See Emily Murphy Cardinal, Harold 178, 375, 1244 Cariou, Warren xi, xix, 81,180, 835 Carman, Bliss 32, 40, 41, 42, 43, 76,134,180, 221, 227, 230, 256, 266, 336, 341, 345, 604, 606, 666, 780, 781, 805, 866, 881, 908, 909, 949, 951, 957, 978, 980, 981, 1025, 1037, 1073, 1145, 1153 Caron, Louis 79,180—i, 541,1195 Caron, Roger 70, 181, 903
1256
Carpenter, David 80, 81, 165, 181, 429, 1005 Carpenter, J.D. 181 Carpentier, Andre 181, 223,1045, IIO5, II28 Carr, Emily 69, 70, 73, 83, 94, 133, 148, 149, 155, 181-3, 215, 297, 313, 455, 491, 494, 520, 609, 663, 711, 717, 734, 781, 890, 950, 1014, 1040, 1173, 1176, 1200 Carrier, Jean-Guy 183-4 Carrier, Roch 74, 174, 184-5, 344, 376, 497, 514, 518-19, 833, 893, 917, 951, 1040, 1044, 1045, 1066, 1125, 1126, 1194 Carroll, John 185, 540, 849, 957 Carson, Anne 185, 430, 679, 828, 916, 1172 Carter, Dyson 186, 904 Cartier, Jacques 107,173, 186, 194,198, 265, 342, 347, 349, 350, 542, 653, 656, 777, 800, 805, 890, 917, 1015, 1124, 1203, 1237 Gary, Thomas 131,186, 906 Casgrain, Henri-Raymond 32, 51, 116,117, 186, 247-8, 255, 267, 326, 338, 412, 500, 565, 797, 904, 928, 992, 1042, 1085 Chabot, Cecile 189 Chamberland, Paul 135,151,155,189-90,195, 212, 557, 569, 677, 719, 748, 785, 799, 867, 917, 1175, 1233 Champlain, Samuel de 116, 174, 190, 265, 347, 349, 350, 653, 656, 805, 917, !237 Chapman, William 191, 1096 Chaput-Rolland, Solange 38, 191, 447, 563,1095 Charbonneau, Helene 192—3 Charbonneau, Jean 193,325,342,566 Charbonneau, Robert 3, 193, 258, 268, 327, 413, 611 Charbonneau-Tissot, Claudette See Aude Charlebois, Jean 194,778,1175 Charlebois, Robert 194, 315, 775, 776 Charron, Francois 73, 78, 194-5, 2I2, 7*9, 885, 1174 Chatillon, Pierre 195 Chaurette, Normand 63, 67, 195-6, 311, 314, 315, 492, 917, 1126 Chauveau, Pierre-Joseph-Olivier 197, 247, 412, 762, 919, 935,1046 Chen, Ying 46, 79, 197, 203 Cheney, Harriet Vaughan 197, 272,1042 Chevalier, Henri-Emile 198, 528,1042 Chiasson, Hermenegilde 5, 67,198, 643, 805, 1006 Child, Philip 72, 134, 198, 829, 1189, 1190,1193 Chisholme, David 204, 565 Chislett, Anne 63, 64, 70, 148, 204, 312, 941, 1190
INDEX OF AUTHORS
Chopin, Rene 204, 318, 758, 816, 866 Choquette, Adrienne 204-5, 495, 864 Choquette, Robert 3,133, 205, 289, 290, 423, 680, 751, 917, 928, 929, 931, 933 Choy, Wayson 83, 84, 203, 205-6, 912, 953, 959, 1223 Choyce, Lesley 39, 206, 554, 828,1017 Christensen, Peter 206, 241 Clark, Catherine Anthony 198, 207 Clark, Gregory 74, 207, 910,1192 Clark, Joan 13, 14, 60, 61, 66, 84,199, 207-8 Clark, Sally 63, 208, 309 Clarke, Austin 39, 40, 75,122, 178-80, 208, 209, 228, 269, 430, 849, 926,1032,1046,1147, 1156 Clarke, George Elliott xix, 7, 31,122, 208-9, 2.14, 270, 430, 471, 678-9, 828, 838, 887, 926,1059, 1091, 1134,1143, 1147 Clarkson, Adrienne 203, 209, 723, 751,1005,1245 Cloutier, Cecile 20, 69, 214-15, 319, 390, 849 Cloutier, Guy 215 Clutesi, George 155,183, 215-16, 371, 375,1015 Cochrane, Mark xi, xix, 87, 94,148,150,152,166, 181, 185, 206, 216, 231, 241, 263, 287, 295, 296, 376, 439, 472, 474, 490, 508, 554, 573, 574, 590, 731, 818, 954, 981, 983, 1004, 1008, 1058, 1064,
1065, 1078,1135, 1232, 1235 Coderre, Emile See Jean Narrache Cody, Hiram 216, 586, 774 Cogswell, Fred 60, 76, 216, 320, 329, 385, 567, 628, 805, 836, 837, 910,1125,1229 Cohen, Leonard 17, 41, 60, 71, 83,116, 135,164, 216-19, 2.38, 261, 269, 419, 429, 444, 520, 550, 583, 631, 638, 646, 707, 708, 777, 781, 785, 832, 845, 846, 861, 870, 885, 894, 896, 910, 917, 956, 959, 999, 1022, 1058, 1095, 1127, 1175, 1204 Cohen, Matt 35, 39, 66, 135, 219, 269, 343, 551-2, 735, 849, 959, 1044, 1046, 1063, 1128,1158 Cohen, Nathan 219, 552, 1003 Coleman, Helena 219,1188 Coleman, Kit 220, 562,1132 Coleman, Victor 220 Coles, Don 41, 66, 68, 220,1218 Collette, Jean-Yves 78,221 Collin, W.E. 221, 257, 883 Collins, J.E. 221 Colombo, John Robert 39, 136, 221, 299, 351, 384, 504, 521, 535, 536, 545, 720, 781, 806, 849, 878, 990,1019,1217, 1234 Conan, Laure 202, 229, 311, 353, 386, 711, 829, 904, 917, 928, 956,1186 Cone, Tom 230, 308
Conn, Jan 231, 633 Connelly, Karen 47, 60, 68, 231, 1133 Connor, Ralph 23, 41, 216, 231, 363, 426, 439, 539, 575, 761, 774, 829, 849, 904, 905, 908, 909, 925, 957, 1022, 1066, 1123, 1143, 1189 Constantin-Weyer, Maurice 86, 2,31-2, 346, 390, 709,739, 829,1125 Cook, James 155, 232-3, 341, 348, 463, 492, 574, 692, 806, 826,1160,1239 Cook, Meira 233 Cook, Michael 212, 233-4, 308, 312, 806, 1203 Cookshaw, Marlene 235-6, 576 Cooley, Dennis xix, 236, 258, 554, 678, 707-8, 709, 952, 953,1095,1143, 1163 Cooper, Douglas 236,1093 Copeland, Ann 236, 828 Copithorne, Judith 236, 1143,1175, 1178 Coppens, Carle 78, 237 Copway, George 237, 370, 849, 881, 903, 955 Corbeil, Carole 82, 238, 429 Corbeil, Marie-Claire 238 Cornish, John 238 Corriveau, Monique 238, 718 Costain, Thomas 41,238-9 Coste, Donat 123, 239, 495 Cotnoir, Louise 239, 262,1096 Coulter, John 132, 239, 300, 307, 361, 540, 739, 756, 780, 785, 974 Coupland, Douglas 155, 223, 239-40, 430, 834, 892 Cousture, Arlette 240 Couzyn, Jeni n, 194, 227, 240 Cowasjee, Saros 41, 225, 240, 541,1005 Crate, Joan 13, 241, 372, 374, 494, 555, 739 Crawford, Isabella Valancy 25-6, 43,115, 230-1, 241-2, 469, 539-40, 666, 671, 674, 676, 781, 782, 796, 849, 875, 881, 980, 1046, 1154 Crawley, Alan 242, 567, 672, 696, 716, 732,1226 Creighton, Donald 72, 84, 107, 114, 115, 247, 502, 527, 528, 636, 759, 821-2, 849, 910, 925, 989 Creighton, Helen 247, 378, 380, 494, 539, 778, 853 Creighton, Luella 247 Cremazie, Octave 39, 52,145, 186, 247-8, 267, 288, 325, 343, 396, 397, 399, 431, 504, 649, 762,
778, 779, 797, 863, 880, 917, 1132 Crosbie, Lynn 263, 302, 679 Crozier, Lorna (Uher) 41, 60, 62, 68, 81, 263-5, 428, 514, 519-20, 609, 731, 837, 854, 886, 989, 1005,1012,1143 Crummey, Michael 84, 265, 806, 886 Crusz, Rienzi 45, 47, 225, 265, 887
12.57
INDEX OF AUTHORS
Decks, Florence 282, 297, 504 Delahaye, Guy 282, 318, 758, 866, 881 Deland, Monique 78, 283 de la Roche, Mazo 41, 42, 76,115,171, 225, 283, 306, 307, 367, 496, 671, 830, 849, 909, 928, 1127, 1145,1216 de Lint, Charles 77, 283 Delisle, Jeanne-Mance 69, 73, 283 Delisle, Michael 78, 283-4, 2-84 De Mille, James 39, 284-6, 385, 828, 830, 866, 907, 1019, 1131, 1158 Dempster, Barry 286 Denison, Merrill 286-7, 2-87, 306, 820, 930, 1099, D Dabydeen, Cyril 179, 180, 228, 229, 270, 273 12.33 Derksen, Jeff 58, 155, 287, 589, 590, 627, 886, 1179 Daigle, France 6, 76, 273 Derome, Gilles 287 DAlfonso, Antonio 31,168, 216, 270, 273, 464, Dery, Francine 287, 679 544,766 Desaulniers, Gonzalve 287-8 Dalpe, Jean-Marc 66, 69, 273-4, 3H, 391, 712 Desautels, Denise 68, 73/288 Darnm, Kateri 274, 373, 575, 666, 849 Desbiens, Jean-Paul 288, 904, 917, 958 dAmour, Francine 79, 274 Desbiens, Patrice 288, 389, 391 Dandurand, Anne 274, 281, 1046 Desjardins, Louise 73, 288 Daniells, Roy 53, 76, 134, 176, 224, 274-5, 568, Despres, Ronald 288-9 692, 725, 783 Desrochers, Alfred 105, 205, 289-91, 331, 342, Danis, Daniel 68, 275, 311 Dantin, Louis 123, 205, 258, 275, 290, 803, 904, 459, 486, 679, 883, 951, 994, 1059 Des Roches, Roger 73, 189, 291, 885 925, 1043 Desrosiers, Leo-Paul 3, 76, 291-2, 758 Daoust, Jean-Paul 19, 69, 275, 886 Desruisseaux, Pierre 69, 292 Daurio, Beverley 275, 1008 Dessaulles, Henriette (Fadette) 66, 292, 350, 562 Daveluy, Marie-Claire 3, 202, 275-6 Dessaulles, Louis-Antoine 67, 292-3, 343, 534, Davey, xix, Frank 29, 40, 44,120,123,135, 146, 214, 225, 262, 270, 276, 299-300, 301, 317, 329, 917, 94i Deverell, William 65, 155, 293, 429, 786, 788 495, 52.5, 568-9, 593, 627, 678, 679, 690, 713, 721, Dewart, Edward Hartley 32, 254, 255, 256, 266, 800, 858, 884-6, 1063, 1089, 1090-1, 1095, 1108, 293, 540, 681, 796, 862, 880, 907, 1009, 1085, 1116, 1148, 1178, 1179, 1194, 1199 1087 David, Carole 78,276-7,277 Dewdney, A.K. 293-4, 2.95 Davies, Robertson 40, 60, 71, 75, 76, 82, 85, 116, Dewdney, Christopher 39, 62, 294-5, 436, 447, 133, 277-80, 307, 357, 361, 403, 418, 443, 478, 554, 627, 849, 886, 1012 494, 497, 514, 517-18, 571, 7i8, 719, 781, 785, Dewdney, Selwyn 50, 294, 295, 330, 874 798, 799, 833, 849, 910, 949, 958, 984, 990, 1003, Di Cicco, Pier Giorgio 31, 296, 544, 735, 766, 1185 1040, 1066, noo, 1127, 1152-3, 1182, 1189 Davin, Nicholas Flood 162, 280, 516, 540, 739, 756 Dick, Eugene 296, 600, 801,1083 Dickinson, Don 58, 296 Davis, Wade 280, 632, 950,1015 Dickson, Gordon R. 86, 296, 1019 Dawson, David 146, 280,1116 Dickson, Lovat 40, 116, 296-7, 454, 961 Dawson, William 280-1, 532, 654, 1013, 1214, Dilworth, Ira 297 1240 di Michele, Mary 60, 63, 297, 429, 544, 735, 1185 Day, David 270, 281 Dobbs, Kildare 10, n, 72, 297, 514 Day, Frank Parker 210, 281, 376 Dobozy, Tamas xi, xix, 18, 43, 48, 126,164, 169, De, Claire 274, 281 172, 207, 236, 271, 297, 326, 330, 394, 407, 410, Deacon, William Arthur 41, 132, 281-2, 730, 434, 440, 453, 506, 521, 547, 576, 592, 690, 757, 1054,1174 De Bellefeuille, Normand 78, 282, 323, 557, 885 935, 936, 996, 1072, 1077, "75
Culleton, Beatrice See Beatrice Mosioner Cumyn, Alan 47, 271, 903 Currie, Robert 82, 271, 586 Currie, Sheldon 271, 667,1245 Curwood, James Oliver 271,761 Curzon, Sarah Anne 272, 305,1075,1118,1187 Gushing, Eliza Lanesford 197, 272, 305, 681, 917, 1042 Cuthand, Beth 272, 372 Cyr, Gilles 68, 272-3 Czaykowski, Bogdan 167, 273, 344, 766,1055
1258
INDEX OF AUTHORS
Domanski, Don 301 D