The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature 9780199941865, 9780199941872, 9780190274542, 0199941866

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T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f

C A NA DIA N L I T E R AT U R E

The Oxford Handbook of

CANADIAN LITERATURE Edited by

CYNTHIA SUGARS

1

3 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America

© Oxford University Press 2016 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Oxford handbook of Canadian literature / edited by Cynthia Sugars. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature provides a broad-ranging introduction to some of the key critical fields, genres, and periods in Canadian literary studies” — Provided by publisher. ISBN  978–0–19–994186–5 (cloth) — ISBN  978–0–19–994187–2 (updf) — ISBN  978–0–19–027454–2 (oso) 1.  Canadian literature.  2.  Authors, Canadian.  3.  Canada—In literature.  4.  Canadian literature—History and criticism.  5.  National characteristics, Canadian.  I.  Sugars, Cynthia Conchita, 1963– editor. PR9180.2.O95 2015 810.9′971—dc23 2015009270

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Contents

Acknowledgments  Contributors  Introduction  Cynthia Sugars

xi xiii 1

PA RT I   R E F L E C T ION S ON T H E DI S C I P L I N E 1. Constructing “Canadian Literature”: A Retrospective  Frank Davey

17

2. National Literature, Canadian Criticism, and National Character  Adam Carter

41

3. Remembering Canada: The Politics of Cultural Memory  Richard Cavell

64

4. Canadian Celebrity Authorship Moves On  Lorraine York

80

5. Toward a Planetary Poetics: Canadian Poetries after Globalization  Erin Wunker

92

6. Cultural Studies in Canada: Past, Present, and Future  Imre Szeman and Andrew Pendakis

110

PA RT I I   I N DIG E N O U S L I T E R AT U R E S A N D C ON T E X T S 7. Contemporary Metis Literature: Resistance, Roots, Innovation  Emma LaRocque

129

vi   Contents

8. From Profound Silences to Ethical Practices: Aboriginal Writing and Reconciliation  Jonathan Dewar

150

9. Indigenous Autobiography in Canada: Uncovering Intellectual Traditions  Deanna Reder

170

10. “What Inuit Will Think”: Keavy Martin and Taqralik Partridge Talk Inuit Literature  Keavy Martin and Taqralik Partridge

191

11. In/Hospitable “Aboriginalities” in Contemporary Indigenous Women’s Writing  Julia Emberley

209

PA RT I I I   L I T E R A RY P E R IOD S A N D G E N R E S 12. Reading, Writing, and Speaking of Contact: Explorations from Both Sides  Jennifer S.H. Brown and Frieda Esau Klippenstein

227

13. Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century French-Canadian Literature  Andrea Cabajsky

242

14. English-Canadian Narratives of Settlement  Janice Fiamengo

260

15. British Poets, Classical Myths, Canadian Locations  D.M.R. Bentley

277

16. Cosmopolitan Nationalism: Canadian Literature of the Confederation Period, 1867–1914  Tracy Ware

295

17. Modernist Poetry in Canada, 1920–1960  J.A. Weingarten

314

18. Mid-Century Modernity and Fiction by Women, 1920–1950  Carole Gerson

337

19. Mainstream Magazines: Home and Mobility  Faye Hammill and Michelle Smith

352

Contents   vii

20. Canadian Drama and the Nationalist Impulse  Craig Walker

369

21. The Stratford Festival and Canadian Cultural Nationalism  Ian Rae

386

22. The Not So Quiet, Nor Short, Révolution Tranquille  David Leahy

403

23. The Canadian Short Story in English: Aesthetic Agency, Social Change, and the Shifting Canon  Alexander MacLeod

426

24. The English-Canadian Novel: Counter-Memory and the Claims of History, 1950–2000  Cynthia Sugars

448

25. Fracture Mechanics: Canadian Poetry since 1960  Tanis MacDonald 26. Humour and Irony in Québec Women’s Writing, 1970–2010: Taking the Pulse of a Resistance  Lucie Joubert 27. The Digital Turn in Canadian and Québécois Literature  Kate Eichhorn

471

495 512

PA RT I V   I N T R A- NAT IONA L P E R SP E C T I V E S A N D T R A DI T ION S 28. Diasporic Citizenship and De-Formations of Citizenship  Lily Cho

527

29. Black Canadian Literature: Fieldwork and “Post-Race”  David Chariandy

539

30. (East and Southeast) Asian Canadian Literature: The Strange and the Familiar  Eleanor Ty

564

31. South Asian Canadian “Geographies of Voice”: Flagging New Critical Mappings  Mariam Pirbhai

583

viii   Contents

32. You Say You’ve OD’d on Leonard Cohen: Canadian Jewish Writing and the Mainstream  Norman Ravvin

602

33. For Better or for Worse: Revisiting Écriture migrante in Québec  Marie Carrière and Catherine Khordoc

621

34. On the Poetics of Arab-Canadian Literature in French and English  Elizabeth Dahab

639

35. “People Are Made of Places”: Perspectives on Region in Atlantic-Canadian Literature  Tony Tremblay

657

36. “If I Were a Rugged Beauty …”: Contemporary Newfoundland Fiction  Paul Chafe

676

37. Retracing Prairie Literature  Alison Calder

691

38. Canadian Literature on the Pacific Coast  Nicholas Bradley

709

PA RT V   C R I T IC A L F I E L D S A N D N E W DI R E C T ION S 39. Ecocriticism in Canada  Pamela Banting

727

40. Canadian Postcolonialisms  Diana Brydon and Bruno Cornellier

755

41. Reading Historiography and Historical Fiction in Twentieth-Century Canada  Renée Hulan

780

42. Canadian Book History  Eli MacLaren

799

43. Canadian Auto/biography: Life Writing, Biography, and Memoir  Julie Rak

813

Contents   ix

44. Canadian Children’s Literature in English  Deirdre Baker 45. Canadian Feminist Literary Criticism and Theory in the “Second Wave”  Cecily Devereux

826

845

46. Gay and Lesbian Literature in Canada  Terry Goldie and Lee Frew

863

47. Survival of the Fittest: CanLit and Disability  Sally Chivers

877

48. Canadian Literature in the Neoliberal Era  Herb Wyile

892

Index

907

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Oxford University Press for their interest in this collection, particularly my editor, Brendan O’Neill, who expressed enthusiasm for this project from day one. I am also indebted to my family—Paul, Neve, Abbey, Morgan (more than I can say!)—for putting up with my increasingly OCD tendencies these last few years as the book neared its way to completion. Thanks also to Herb Wyile, friend and co-editor with me of Studies in Canadian Literature, for not commenting on my more distracted moments over the past year or two (and for saying “yes,” after some persuasion, to my request for a chapter). I am also grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC) for its ongoing support of my research, and for supporting Humanities research in Canada generally. Without the financial support of SSHRCC, I and many of the scholars represented in this volume could not conduct our research in Canadian literary studies. I continue to be indebted to this important resource for Humanities scholarship in Canada. My thanks, as well, to the University of Ottawa for its continued support of my teaching and research. Most of all, I would like to thank the contributors to this volume, not only for their dedication and patience in participating in the making of this book, but for contributing to the field of Canadian literature as a whole, and for sharing in the ongoing debates and enthusiasms of Canadian literary study itself. I have learned an enormous amount about the field from working on these chapters. These scholars—with their divergent, often contesting, perspectives—make the field of Canadian literature the exciting and compelling discipline that it is today. I feel privileged to be part of a literary community made up of such tenacious, generous, challenging, dedicated, garrulous, and insightful colleagues. Thanks, everybody!

Contributors

Deirdre Baker has been the children’s book reviewer for the Toronto Star since 1998. She is co-author with Ken Setterington of A Guide to Canadian Children’s Books, and author of the children’s novel Becca at Sea. She reviews and writes regularly for The Horn Book Magazine and Quill and Quire. She is an Assistant Professor of English literature at the University of Toronto. Pamela Banting, Associate Professor of English at the University of Calgary, founded and served as the inaugural President of the Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada (ALECC). She is currently working in the intersection between ecocriticism and animal studies: her interdisciplinary research is about the lives of wild animals in petrocultural landscapes. Through an analysis of former park warden Sid Marty’s nonfiction narrative The Black Grizzly of Whiskey Creek, she examines aspects of energy, oil, and automobility from the points of view of bears. Her article on Karsten Heuer’s Being Caribou: Five Months on Foot with an Arctic Herd, published in Greening the Maple: Canadian Ecocriticism in Context (2013), explores the ontology and epistemology of walking with wild animals through contested spaces. She has also published on the grammar of bear-human interactions, reading geography as an intertext in fiction, cultural and biological diversity in Canadian literature, animals and sense of place, and other topics. D.M.R. Bentley is a Distinguished University Professor and the Carl F. Klinck Professor in Canadian Literature at Western University. He has published widely in the fields of Canadian literature and culture and Victorian literature and art, and on the importance of the arts and humanities in Canadian society. Among his books are The Gay]Grey Moose: Essays on the Ecologies and Mythologies of Canadian Poetry, 1690–1990 (1992), Mimic Fires: Accounts of Early Long Poems on Canada (1994), The Confederation Group of Canadian Poets, 1880–1897 (2004), and Canadian Architexts:  Essays on Literature and Architecture in Canada, 1759–2006 (2009). His recent and forthcoming publications include “Reflections on the Situation and Study of Early Canadian Literature in the Long Confederation Period” in Home Ground and Foreign Territory (2014), edited by Janice Fiamengo; an essay on the fin de siècle in Canada in The Fin-de-Siècle World (2014), edited by Michael Saler; and By Necessity and Indirection: Essays on Modernism in Canada (2013). Nicholas Bradley is an Associate  Professor in the Department of English at the University of Victoria and the coordinator of the Department’s graduate program in

xiv   Contributors Literatures  of the West Coast. His areas of research include Canadian literature and American literature. Among his recent publications is We Go Far Back in Time: The Letters of Earle Birney and Al Purdy, 1947–1987 (Harbour Publishing, 2014). Jennifer S.H. Brown, FRSC, Professor Emeritus, taught history at the University of Winnipeg for 28 years and held a Canada Research Chair, Tier 1, in Aboriginal history from 2004 to 2011. She served as director of the Centre for Rupert’s Land Studies, which focuses on Aboriginal peoples and the fur trade of the Hudson Bay watershed, from 1996 to 2010. She is general editor of the Rupert’s Land Record Society documentary series (McGill-Queen’s UP), which publishes original materials on Aboriginal and fur-trade history. She has published several books and many articles on these topics, on Aboriginal-missionary relations, on Métis history, and also on anthropologist A. Irving Hallowell and the Berens River Ojibwe—notably Chief William Berens, who made Hallowell’s fieldwork in the 1930s possible. She now resides in Denver, Colorado, where she continues her scholarly work. Diana Brydon, FRSC, Canada Research Chair in Globalization and Cultural Studies and Distinguished University Professor in the Department of English, Film, and Theatre at the University of Manitoba, has published widely on Canadian and postcolonial literary studies and how communities are adjusting to globalizing processes. Her books include Decolonising Fictions, Timothy Findley, Postcolonialism:  Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, Shakespeare in Canada, Renegotiating Community, and Crosstalk: Canadian and Global Imaginaries in Dialogue. She studies how national and global imaginaries are changing, how they are interconnected, and what they mean for Canadian culture and research. Current projects include partnership development with the “Brazil/Canada Knowledge Exchange,” “Concurrences: Archive, Voice, and Place,” and “Ethical Internationalism in Higher Education.” Andrea Cabajsky is an Associate Professor of Comparative Canadian literature at the Université de Moncton. She is the editor of The Manor House of De Villerai by Rosanna Mullins Leprohon (Broadview, 2015) and the co-editor of National Plots: Historical Fiction and Changing Ideas of Canada (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2010). Her recent publications have appeared in Canadian Literature (2013), Novel: A Forum on Fiction (2011), and the Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Novel (2011). Alison Calder is a Professor in the Department of English, Film, and Theatre at the University of Manitoba, where she teaches Canadian literature and creative writing. She has published widely on topics relating to Canadian prairie literature and culture. Recent publications include critical editions of Settlers of the Marsh and Over Prairie Trails, both by Frederick Philip Grove. Her second poetry collection, In the Tiger Park, was published in April 2014. Current research includes rereading early Canadian prairie fiction, and undertaking a critical/creative project centred on materials in the HBC archives in Winnipeg and Kirkwall, Scotland. Marie Carrière teaches English, French, and Comparative Literature at the University of Alberta, where she also directs the Canadian Literature Centre/Centre de littérature

Contributors   xv canadienne. She has authored several articles and books on contemporary women’s writing, feminist theory, and migrant writing (or écriture migrante) in Canada and Québec. Her latest publications include the monograph Médée, protéiforme (U of Ottawa P, 2012), and the co-edited essay collection Regenerations: Canadian Women’s Writing/Régénégrations: Écritures des femmes au Canada (with Patricia Demers, U of Alberta P, 2014). With Libe García Zarranz, she recently co-edited a special issue of Canada and Beyond: A Journal of Canadian Literary and Cultural Studies on women’s writing in Canada and Québec today. Adam Carter is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Lethbridge. He specializes in critical theory and the history of criticism with related interests in Romantic and Canadian literatures. His research currently engages the intersections of aesthetic theory and nationalism. Richard Cavell is author of McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography (2002), the editor of Love, Hate, and Fear in Canada’s Cold War (2004), and the co-editor (with Peter Dickinson) of Sexing the Maple (2006). He has also written the critical performance piece Marinetti Dines with the High Command, published in the Essential Drama series of Guernica Press (2014). Professor of English at the University of British Columbia, he is the founder of the International Canadian Studies Centre and the principal founder of the Bachelor in Media Studies Program. Paul Chafe teaches in the Department of English at Ryerson University. His project to “flip” the introductory writing course has received funding from Ryerson’s Learning and Teaching Enhancement Fund (LTEF) and the National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT). He continues to write about the literature of Newfoundland and Labrador, and his latest analysis, “ ‘Where the Mysterious and the Undefined Breathes and Lives’: Kathleen Winter’s Annabel as Intersex Text,” has appeared in the special “Literary Ecologies” issue of Studies in Canadian Literature (2014). David Chariandy is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Simon Fraser University. He specializes in English-Canadian, Anglo-Caribbean, and African Diasporic literatures, and has published repeatedly on Black Canadian literature and culture in academic journals and books. His first novel, entitled Soucouyant (Arsenal Pulp, 2007), was nominated for 11 literary prizes internationally, and was translated into German and French. In the spring of 2014, Transition Magazine (Harvard) published an interview on his development as both an academic critic and fiction writer entitled “Straddling Shifting Spheres,” as well as an excerpt from his novel Brother, forthcoming in 2017 from McClelland and Stewart. Sally Chivers is Professor of English Literature at Trent University. Author of From Old Woman to Older Women:  Contemporary Culture and Women’s Narratives and The Silvering Screen: Old Age and Disability in Cinema, and co-editor of The Problem Body:  Projecting Disability on Film, her current research focuses on the interplay between aging and disability in the public sphere, with a focus on care narratives in the context of austerity.

xvi   Contributors Lily Cho is an Associate Professor of English at York University. Her research focuses on diasporic subjectivity within the fields of cultural studies, postcolonial literature and theory, and Canadian literature. Her book, Eating Chinese: Culture on the Menu in Small Town Canada, examines the relationship between Chinese restaurants and Canadian culture. She is currently conducting research on a set of Chinese-Canadian head tax certificates known as “C.I. 9’s.” These certificates mark one of the first uses of identification photography in Canada. Drawing from this archive, this research explores the relationship between citizenship, photography, and anticipation as a mode of agency. She is also co-editor, with Jody Berland, of TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies. Bruno Cornellier is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Winnipeg, where he teaches courses in film and cultural studies. He is the author of La “chose indienne”: Cinéma et politiques de la représentation autochtone au Québec et au Canada (Nota Bene, 2015). He has also published articles in Settler Colonial Studies, the Canadian Journal of Film Studies, the London Journal of Canadian Studies, and Nouvelles Vues. Elizabeth Dahab is Professor of Comparative Literature in the Department of Comparative World Literature and Classics at California State University, Long Beach. She has published extensively on the topic of Arab-Canadian literature. She published a monograph entitled Voices of Exile in Contemporary Canadian Francophone Literature (Lexington Books, 2009/11). Her edited anthology, Voices in the Desert: An Anthology of Arabic-Canadian Women Writers, appeared in Toronto in 2002. She has also published a children’s book (Hurly and the Bone) and a translation into English titled Comparative Literature Today: Methods and Perspectives. She is presently working on a novel and a collection of poems. She earned her Bachelor of Arts from McGill University and her Master’s from the University of Alberta. She received her doctorat de littérature comparée in Comparative Literature from the Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne. Frank Davey is Professor Emeritus and former Carl F.  Klinck Chair of Canadian Literature at Western University. From 1965 to 2013 he edited and published Open Letter: A Journal of Canadian Writing and Theory, and from 1975 to 1999 was an editor at Coach House Press. He was chair of the York University Department of English (1985–90), and president of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (1996–98). His books include Surviving the Paraphrase (1983), Reading Canadian Reading (1988), Post-National Arguments: The Anglophone-Canadian Novel since 1967 (1993), Canadian Literary Power (1994), and the biography aka bpNichol (2012), as well as poetry collections such as The Abbotsford Guide to India (1986), Bardy Google (2010), and Poems Suitable to Current Material Conditions (2014). Cecily Devereux is a Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. Her research focuses on questions of femininity in the nineteenth-century Anglo-imperial context across a range of categories, including the maternal body, ideologies of imperial motherhood, eugenic feminism, the figure of the “white slave,” the “Indian maiden,” and the burlesque dancer. She has published a book

Contributors   xvii on first-wave feminist Nellie L. McClung and an edition of L.M. Montgomery’s 1908 novel Anne of Green Gables. Jonathan Dewar is descended from Huron-Wendat, Scottish, and French-Canadian grandparents. He currently serves as the Director of the Shingwauk Residential Schools Centre and Special Advisor to the President at Algoma University in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, site of the former Shingwauk Indian Residential School. From 2007 to 2012, he served as Director of Research at the Aboriginal Healing Foundation and as an advisor to the Legacy of Hope Foundation. His research explores the roles of art and artists in truth, healing, and reconciliation. Kate Eichhorn is Associate Professor of Culture and Media Studies at The New School University in New York City. She is the author of Adjusted Margin: Xerography, Art and Activism in the Late Twentieth Century (MIT Press, 2016) and The Archival Turn in Feminism (Temple UP, 2013). As a literary critic, she has published the co-edited anthology Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women’s Writing (Coach House, 2009), and dozens of essays and reviews on feminist poetics and digital poetics. Julia Emberley, FRSC, is a Professor in the Department of English and Writing Studies at Western University. She has published four books and several articles on various topics related to Indigenous literature and other cultural practices such as film and fashion. Her recent book is The Testimonial Uncanny: Indigenous Storytelling, Knowledge, and Reparative Practices (SUNY Press, 2014). Janice Fiamengo is Professor of English at the University of Ottawa, where she teaches Canadian literature. She is the author of The Woman’s Page: Journalism and Rhetoric in Early Canada (2008), and the editor of Home Ground and Foreign Territory: Essays on Early Canadian Literature (2014). Lee Frew teaches in the Department of English at Glendon College, York University, where he specializes in Canadian and postcolonial literatures. He has published articles on Margaret Atwood, Dionne Brand, and Ernest Thompson Seton. He is currently working on a critical edition of the works of Seton, founder of the woodcraft movement and a key figure in both Canadian and American environmental history. Carole Gerson is a Professor in the Department of English at Simon Fraser University and was a co-editor of the multivolume project, History of the Book in Canada. She has published many articles on various aspects of Canada’s literary and cultural history. With historian Veronica Strong-Boag she has issued two books on Pauline Johnson. Her recent book, Canadian Women in Print, 1750–1918 (2010), which applies principles of print culture analysis to a wide range of early authors, received the Gabrielle Roy Prize for Canadian criticism. In 2013 she received the Marie Tremaine medal from the Bibliographical Society of Canada. Terry Goldie is author of The Man Who Invented Gender: Engaging the Ideas of John Money (UBC Press, 2014), queersexlife:  Autobiographical Notes on Sexuality, Gender

xviii   Contributors and Identity (Arsenal Pulp, 2008), Pink Snow:  Homotextual Possibilities in Canadian Fiction (Broadview, 2003), and Fear and Temptation:  The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian and New Zealand Literatures (McGill-Queen’s UP, 1989). He is editor of In a Queer Country: Gay and Lesbian Studies in the Canadian Context (Arsenal Pulp, 2001) and co-editor, with Daniel David Moses and Armand Garnet Ruffo, of An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English (Oxford, 2013). He is working on a book tentatively titled Are We Men Yet?: Straight, Gay, Trans and Other Masculinities. Faye Hammill is Professor of English at the University of Strathclyde in the United Kingdom. Her research areas are early twentieth-century literature and Canadian studies. She is author of Sophistication: A Literary and Cultural History (2010), winner of the European Society for the Study of English book award; Women, Celebrity and Literary Culture between the Wars (2007); Canadian Literature (2007); and Literary Culture and Female Authorship in Canada, 1760–2000 (2003), winner of the International Council for Canadian Studies book prize. She established the AHRC Middlebrow Network in 2008, and has recently completed another AHRC-funded project, on Canadian magazines. Currently, she is working on a co-authored study of modernist print cultures. She is a former associate editor of the International Journal of Canadian Studies and former editor of the British Journal of Canadian Studies. Renée Hulan teaches Canadian literature at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She is the author of Canadian Historical Writing: Reading the Remains (Palgrave, 2014)  and Northern Experience and the Myths of Canadian Culture (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2002). From 2005 to 2008, she served with Donald Wright as editor of the Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d’études canadiennes. She is also the editor of Native North America: Critical and Cultural Perspectives (ECW, 1999), and, with Renate Eigenbrod, Aboriginal Oral Traditions: Theory, Practice, Ethics (Fernwood, 2008). Lucie Joubert is a Professor at the University of Ottawa. She has published two books on women’s humour and irony: Le carquois de velours: L’ironie au féminin dans la littérature québécoise (1960–1980) and L’humour du sexe: Le rire des filles. In 2010, she published an essay on voluntary childlessness, L’envers du landau: Regard extérieur sur la maternité et ses débordements. In 2012, with her colleague Marcel Olscamp, she edited the first book of Jacques and Madeleine Ferron, and Robert Cliche’s letters: Une famille extraordinaire. Correspondance 1 /1946–1960. They are currently working on the second and third volumes. Finally, she edited last year, with Robert Aird, Les Cyniques: Le rire de la révolution tranquille, an anthology (followed by seven articles) of the most famous humor group of the 1960s in Québec. Catherine Khordoc is Associate Professor of French and Associate Dean (student affairs) in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Carleton University. She is the author of Tours et détours: Le mythe de Babel dans la littérature contemporaine as well as co-editor with Marie Carrière of Migrance comparée: Les littératures du Canada et du Québec/Comparing Migration: The Literatures of Canada and Québec. Her research interests include transnational and transcultural approaches to Francophone literatures,

Contributors   xix and in her current research project she examines the literary œuvre of Québécois writer Monique Bosco. Frieda Esau Klippenstein has been an historian with Parks Canada since 1991 and supports National Historic Sites across western Canada by providing research, training, and program advice. Specializing in Western Canadian topics, Frieda considers her main areas of expertise to be fur-trade and Aboriginal histories, prairie settlement, and women’s history. Special interests are the potential and techniques of oral history, how narratives are constructed, and the art of storytelling itself. She considers her work most rewarding when there is evidence of the power of National Parks and Historic Sites to enrich people’s lives by providing excellent experiences and raising ecological and historical consciousness. Frieda studied at the University of Winnipeg and the University of Manitoba. Emma LaRocque is a Metis scholar, author, poet, and professor in the Department of Native Studies at the University of Manitoba. For more than three decades she has lectured locally, nationally, and internationally on Native/White relations, focusing on colonization and its currency in academia and society. She has advanced an Aboriginalbased critical resistance theory in scholarship, and is one of the most recognized and respected Native Studies scholars today. Her prolific career includes numerous publications in the areas of colonization, Canadian historiography, misrepresentation, racism, violence against women, and First Nations and Metis literatures and identities. Her poems are widely anthologized in prestigious collections and journals. She has been recognized as an outstanding teacher and scholar, and in 2005 she received the National Aboriginal Achievement Award. Dr. LaRocque is the author of When the Other Is Me: Native Resistance Discourse 1850–1990 (2010), which won the Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for Non-Fiction, and Defeathering the Indian (1975). She remains active as a professor, researcher, writer, and human rights advocate. David Leahy is an independent scholar. He was an Assistant Professor in Études anglaises et interculturelles and in Littérature canadienne comparée at the Université de Sherbrooke from 2008 to 2014. His areas of specialization and publication are comparative Canadian and Québécois literatures, and postcolonial, gender, and cultural studies. His current major research project, which received funding from the Fonds de recherche Société et Culture (Québec), involves re/articulating ways that neoliberalism is manifest and represented in contemporary Canadian and Québécois cultures, especially their literatures. He is currently editing a collection of interdisciplinary essays related to this project, as well as a monograph. He is a member of the Université de Sherbrooke’s interdisciplinary research group, VersUS: Transcultural Laboratory/Laboratoire transculturel. Tanis MacDonald is the author of The Daughter’s Way:  Canadian Women’s Paternal Elegies (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2012), a finalist for the 2012 Gabrielle Roy Prize in Canadian literary criticism. She is also the editor of Speaking of Power: The Poetry of Di Brandt (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2006) and has written three books of poetry, including Rue the Day (Turnstone, 2008). She has written extensively on poetics, memory

xx   Contributors and memorialization, postcolonial literature, and feminist literature and is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, where she teaches Canadian literature and creative writing. Eli MacLaren teaches Canadian literature and the history of the book in the Department of English at McGill University. His book, Dominion and Agency: Copyright and the Structuring of the Canadian Book Trade, 1867–1918, was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2011. He is the editor of the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada/Cahiers de la Société bibliographique du Canada and a member of the research team, Groupe de recherches et d’études sur le livre au Québec (GRÉLQ). With colleagues at the Université de Sherbrooke and Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, he organized the 2015 conference of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) in Montreal. Alexander MacLeod teaches in the English Department at Saint Mary’s University and is the coordinator of the school’s Atlantic Canada Studies Program. His first collection of short stories, Light Lifting (2010), was named a “Book of the Year” by the American Library Association, the Globe and Mail, Quill and Quire, Maisonneuve Magazine, the Chronicle Herald, The Coast, and amazon.ca. The collection won the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award and was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and the Commonwealth First Book Award (Canada and the Caribbean). Keavy Martin teaches Indigenous literatures in Treaty 6 territory at the University of Alberta. She also worked for several years as an instructor with the University of Manitoba’s Pangnirtung Summer School in Nunavut. Her book,  Stories in a New Skin: Approaches to Inuit Literature—which explores the relationship of Inuit literary knowledge to southern academic practice—won the 2012 Gabrielle Roy Prize for literary criticism in English. Taqralik Partridge is a writer and spoken-word performer originally from Kuujjuaq, Nunavik. An urban Inuk, she speaks to the soundscapes of the north and to city life in the south, weaving real-life stories with rhyme and Inuit throat-singing. She has toured with the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, produced works under commission for the CBC, and has been featured on CBC Radio 2’s NEXT! series. Her short story “Igloolik,” published in the December issue of Maisonneuve magazine, won first prize in the 2010 Quebec Writing Competition. Andrew Pendakis is an Assistant Professor of Theory and Rhetoric at Brock University and a Research Fellow at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. His research focuses on contemporary political culture, with a special interest in the genealogy of centrist reason in the West. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Criticism, Imaginations, Politics and Culture, South Atlantic Quarterly, and Mediations. He is also a co-editor of Contemporary Marxist Theory: A Reader (Bloomsbury, 2014).

Contributors   xxi Mariam Pirbhai is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies, Wilfrid Laurier University. She is the author of Mythologies of Migration, Vocabularies of Indenture: Novels of the South Asian Diaspora in Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia-Pacific (U of Toronto P, 2009), and co-editor of Critical Perspectives on Indo-Caribbean Women’s Literature (Routledge, 2013). Her current research includes the development of a book-length study on South Asian Canadian fiction, and a forthcoming special issue of Studies in Canadian Literature commemorating one hundred years of South Asian settlement in Canada. Ian Rae is an Associate Professor of Modern Languages at King’s University College at Western University. He is the author of From Cohen to Carson: The Poet’s Novel in Canada (2008) and editor of George Bowering: Bridges to Elsewhere (2010). He holds a SSHRC Insight Development Grant for his Mapping Stratford Culture project, which aims to develop an interdisciplinary history of the cultural life of the city. The project will include an anthology and an interactive, web-based timeline of productions in Canadian theatre, literature, music, and the visual arts. Julie Rak is a Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. She specializes in life writing and narrative, English Canadian literature, and popular culture. Julie is the author of Boom! Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market (2013) and Negotiated Memory: Doukhobor Autobiographical Discourse (2004). She has edited book collections about life writing and auto/biography, including Auto/biography in Canada: Critical Directions (2005); with Anna Poletti, Identity Technologies:  Constructing the Self Online (2014); with Jeremy Popkin, On Diary by Philippe LeJeune (2009); and, with Andrew Gow, Mountain Masculinity: The Writings of Nello “Tex” Vernon-Wood, 1911–1938 (2008). Julie is the author of many articles and book chapters about auto/biography, memoir, and aspects of popular culture in print, on television, and online. Currently, she is completing the SSHRC-funded book manuscript, “Social Climbing: Gender and Mountaineering Writing,” for McGill-Queen’s University Press. Norman Ravvin held the position of Chair in Canadian Jewish Studies at Concordia University from 1999 to 2012. His scholarly publications include the co-edited volumes Failure’s Opposite:  Listening to A.M. Klein and The Canadian Jewish Studies Reader. He has written on Jewish travel to Poland, on the reception of Canadian Jewish writing before and during World War II, as well as on the Jewish response to death in hospice care. His fiction publications include the story collection Sex, Skyscrapers, and Standard Yiddish, and the novels Lola by Night and The Joyful Child. His stories and creative nonfiction have appeared in Canadian magazines across the country, as well as on CBC Radio. He is at work on his fourth novel, set in Vancouver and Poland. A native of Calgary, he lived in Vancouver, Toronto, and Fredericton before settling in Montreal. Deanna Reder (Cree-Métis) is an Associate Professor in the Departments of First Nations Studies and English at Simon Fraser University, where she teaches courses in Indigenous popular fiction, Indigenous perspectives on gender and sexuality,

xxii   Contributors and Canadian Indigenous literatures, especially autobiography. She has co-edited an anthology with Linda Morra entitled Troubling Tricksters: Revisioning Critical Conversations (2010) and is the current series editor for the Indigenous Studies Series at Wilfrid Laurier University Press. She co-founded, with Daniel Heath Justice, Sam McKegney, Renate Eigenbrod, Keavy Martin, Kristina Bidwell, Rick Monture, Jo-Ann Episkenew, and Armand Garnet Ruffo, the Indigenous Literary Studies Association (ILSA) in October 2013. Michelle Smith was, most recently, Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde. She has published several articles on Canadian periodicals, as well as the poetry book dear Hermes. … Her monograph, Magazines, Travel and Middlebrow Culture, coauthored with Faye Hammill, was published with Liverpool University Press in 2015. Cynthia Sugars is Professor of English at the University of Ottawa. She is the author of Canadian Gothic: Literature, History, and the Spectre of Self-Invention (U of Wales P, 2014) and is the editor of Unhomely States: Theorizing English-Canadian Postcolonialism (Broadview, 2004), Home-Work:  Postcolonialism, Pedagogy, and Canadian Literature (U of Ottawa P, 2004), Unsettled Remains:  Canadian Literature and the Postcolonial Gothic (with Gerry Turcotte; Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2009), and the historical anthology, Canadian Literature in English: Texts and Contexts (with Laura Moss; Pearson/Penguin, 2009). She has recently edited, with Eleanor Ty, the collection Canadian Literature and Cultural Memory (Oxford, 2014), and is the co-editor, with Herb Wyile, of the journal Studies in Canadian Literature. Imre Szeman is Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies and Professor of English, Film Studies and Sociology at the University of Alberta. He conducts research on and teaches in the areas of energy and environmental studies, social and cultural theory, and Canadian studies. Recent projects include After Globalization (coauthor, 2011), Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory (co-editor, 2012), Contemporary Marxist Theory:  A  Reader (co-editor, 2014), and Fueling Culture:  Politics, History, Energy (co-editor, 2015). He is currently working on Oil Theory:  Aesthetics, Philosophy and Energy (Fordham UP, 2015) and the fourth edition of Popular Culture: A User’s Guide (coauthor, 2015). Tony Tremblay is Professor of English at St. Thomas University and Canada Research Chair in New Brunswick Studies. He is founding editor of the Journal of New Brunswick Studies/Revue d’études sur le Nouveau-Brunswick and general editor of the New Brunswick Literary Encyclopedia. His recent work includes the critical edition Fred Cogswell:  The Many-Dimensioned Self (2012), the documentary film Last Shift:  The Story of a Mill Town (2011), and the critical biography David Adams Richards of the Miramichi (2010). His current research examines New Brunswick’s modernist cultural workers—A.G. Bailey, Elizabeth Brewster, and Desmond Pacey—and he is working on an edition of The Selected Letters of New Brunswick’s Pioneering Modernists.

Contributors   xxiii Eleanor Ty (鄭 綺 寧) is Professor of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario. She has published on Asian North American and eighteenthcentury literature, and is the author of Unfastened: Globality and Asian North American Narratives (U of Minnesota P, 2010), The Politics of the Visible in Asian North American Narratives (U of Toronto P, 2004), Empowering the Feminine: The Narratives of Mary Robinson, Jane West, and Amelia Opie, 1796–1812 (U of Toronto P, 1998), and Unsex’d Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790s (U of Toronto P, 1993). She has also edited Memoirs of Emma Courtney (Oxford, 1996) and The Victim of Prejudice (Broadview, 1994) by Mary Hays, and has co-edited, with Cynthia Sugars, Canadian Literature and Cultural Memory (Oxford 2014); with Russell J.A. Kilbourn, The Memory Effect: The Remediation of Memory in Literature and Film (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2013); with Christl Verduyn, a collection of essays, Asian Canadian Writing Beyond Autoethnography (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2008); and, with Donald Goellnicht, Asian North American Identities beyond the Hyphen (Indiana UP, 2004). Craig Walker is Professor of Drama and Director of the School of Drama and Music at Queen’s University. He holds an M.A. in English and a Ph.D. in Drama from the University of Toronto, and has worked as a professional actor and director at many theatres, including the St. Lawrence Shakespeare Festival, Stratford Festival, Shaw Festival, the National Arts Centre, and Theatre Kingston—the last a company of which he was Artistic Director from 1997 to 2007. He is the author of The Buried Astrolabe: Canadian Dramatic Imagination and Western Tradition (2001); co-editor, with Jennifer Wise, of the two-volume and concise editions of The Broadview Anthology of Drama (2003, 2005); and editor of the Broadview Press edition of King Lear (2011). Tracy Ware has taught Canadian literature at Queen’s University since 1994, after teaching Romanticism for seven years at Bishop’s University. He has published on Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Poe, Trilling, Keneally, Naipaul, and various aspects of Canadian literature. From 2009 to 2013, he was the co-editor of the MacLennan Poetry Series of McGill-Queen’s University Press, and he is now the Reviews Editor of Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Review. J.A. Weingarten is an Assistant Professor at Concordia University. His research and teaching centre on twentieth-century Canadian literature and media, with an emphasis on creative representations of cultural or personal histories in poetry, fiction, theatre, documentary, and graphic novels. He is also the co-managing editor and co-founder of The Bull Calf: Reviews of Fiction, Poetry, and Literary Criticism. In addition to his editorial work on John Newlove’s selected letters (currently under revision), he has also recently published on photography in Canadian writing and on private libraries as research tools in the humanities. Erin Wunker teaches and researches in the field of Canadian literatures. Her research primarily focuses on cultural and poetic production by women. She is the Chair of the Board of Canadian Women in the Literary Arts (www.cwila.com) and co-founder and

xxiv   Contributors contributor to the feminist academic blog Hook & Eye: Fast Feminism, Slow Academe. She is working on a manuscript about the poetics of collapse. Herb Wyile is a Professor in the Department of English and Theatre at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, where he teaches Canadian literature, Atlantic-Canadian literature, and literary theory. His research interests are globalization and neoliberalism, historical fiction, regionalism, and Atlantic Canada. He is the author of Speculative Fictions: Contemporary Canadian Novelists and the Writing of History (2002), Speaking in the Past Tense: Canadian Novelists on Writing Historical Fiction (2007), and Anne of Tim Hortons: Globalization and the Reshaping of Atlantic-Canadian Literature (2011). He is also the co-editor, with Cynthia Sugars, of the journal Studies in Canadian Literature. Lorraine York is Professor and Senator William McMaster Chair in Canadian Literature and Culture at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. She has published books on women’s collaborative writing, Timothy Findley, photography in Canadian fiction, and has edited or co-edited books on Margaret Atwood and early Canadian literary culture. Her book, Literary Celebrity in Canada (U of Toronto P, 2007), was a finalist for the Canadian Federation for the Humanities’ Raymond Klibansky Prize for the best Canadian book published in the Humanities. Her newest book, Margaret Atwood and the Labour of Literary Celebrity, appeared with the University of Toronto Press in 2013. A new project examines the phenomenon of the reluctant celebrity.

T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f

C A NA DIA N L I T E R AT U R E

I n t rodu c tion Cynthia Sugars

There are two infamous “CanLit” anecdotes that are likely to elicit a chuckle from Canadian literature specialists:  Northrop Frye’s confident assertion, in 1965, that Canadian literature was “as innocent of literary intention as a mating loon” (822) and Matthew Arnold’s oft-quoted dismissal of colonial literatures from his 1887 essay “General Grant.” “We have ‘the American Walter Scott,’ ‘the American Wordsworth’; nay, I see advertised The Primer of American Literature,” Arnold writes with dismay, “Are we to have a primer of Canadian Literature too?” (177). Famous last words as we open the pages of The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature! Arnold’s resistance to the idea of a Canadian literature arises from his presumption that Canadian literature (like American literature) was nothing but a colonial offshoot: provincial in nature, derivative in form, mundane in content, and above all, lesser in quality. Certainly there could not be enough of value to merit such a thing as a “primer” to the topic, if the topic could be said to exist at all. What Arnold perhaps did not know was that in 1887, there was rather a lot going on in Canadian literary circles. The decades after Confederation in the 1880s and 1890s saw the emergence of fierce debates about the definition of a national Canadian literary tradition; the impact of cosmopolitanism; questions about aesthetic form, social engagement, and local subjects; and the influence of literary cliques and factions. These decades were also marked by an ongoing attempt to articulate a Canadian identity or “character,” a national self-definition based on exclusionary conceptions of racial (and cultural) fitness and desirability. Canadians, according to R.G. Haliburton in 1869, were hardy, noble, civil, industrious, and … White—all elements that were thought to constitute the ideal of a “northern” nation with identifiably northern European (and expressly not Indigenous) roots. Notwithstanding the tone of racial and cultural superiority that pervaded such nineteenth-century expressions of Canadian culture, the writings of the post-Confederation period were also responding to a long-established tradition of colonial disparagement reaching back into the early 1800s, a tradition that Arnold himself was participating in. This tradition was marked by a perception among both visitors

2    The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature and some Canadian-born writers that the potential for Canadian literary production was meagre, a sense that Canada lacked the cultural traditions, history, or local inspiration to ground a properly resonant local literature.1 Many writers were furiously writing to counter this perception, and by the post-Confederation period, Canadian authors were able to assume that an emergent national literature was in the wings and that they, themselves, were participants in its consolidation.2 In some instances, writers contested the romantic nationalism of the age, but whatever their position, there was a sense that a lively literary community clearly existed—in the periodical press, in the publishing industry, in the lecture circuit, in reading circles and literary clubs. “Canadian literature” as a concept could be probed and debated, but dismissed out of hand? Any such dismissal would have been to display an ignorance of the times. Canadian writings of the late 1800s took a multitude of forms, anticipating many of the areas that are central to literary studies today: this period was witness to the emergence of early feminist writing, ecological narratives, epic long poems, historical novels, regional poetry, local literary movements and clubs, literary translations, performance poetry, children’s literature, Indigenous writings, diasporic and immigrant narratives, transnational aesthetics, anti-slavery publications, settler-Indigenous politics, French/ English collaborations, imperialist and/or nationalist celebrations, and anti-colonial contestation (both in form and content). Politically, Canada was in the midst of intense debates about its future on the continent, fueled by an economic depression, debates about free trade, and uncertainty about the future form that the nation would take in the years to come: independence, stronger imperial ties to Britain, or annexation to the United States. Its publishing industry was facing fierce competition from American and British markets, including a series of unfair copyright laws, making it difficult for Canadian writers and publishers to support themselves and hence necessitating the exodus of many Canadian writers, such as Sara Jeannette Duncan, Charles G.D. Roberts, and Bliss Carman, to more cosmopolitan centres.3 Some of the earliest Canadian literature anthologies and literary histories date from this period or earlier, so the idea of a “primer” to the literature of the country in 1887 was not as preposterous as Arnold may have thought. Indeed, a number of them already existed. “There is a wide difference, though comparatively few years span it, between a colonial and a Canadian,” Sara Jeannette Duncan wrote in the Toronto paper The Week in July 1887 (118). Arnold would have done well to read the work of some of his Canadian contemporaries.

Canadian Literature in the Making According to Jonathan Kertzer, in modern nations such as Canada, “the state usually is created first, and a sustaining sense of nationhood must be forged afterward” (62–63). While this was only partially true in Canada, in which the inklings of a local literature and culture found expression prior to the foundation of the official Canadian nation-state in 1867, some engagement with this sense of forging—whether in the name of settler-colonial

Introduction   3 interests or in counter-discursive responses to national foundations—is an implicit element of many essays in this collection: the ways in which Canadian cultural motifs and national narratives were fashioned and became self-constituting, or, indeed, the ways authors intervened to question the emergent status quo. Some of the chapters in this volume are contestatory in nature, challenging the ways that Canadian nationhood and social cohesion were actively constructed through appeals to an imagined national literature or “national spirit,” a project that was founded on the exclusion of diverse perspectives, cultures, races, and ideologies. The idea of a primer of Canadian literature thus comes under question, not for the reasons that Matthew Arnold mocked the concept, but because a primer might today be seen to be too institutional, too exclusive, too partial. The theme of “coverage” or “authority” or “exhaustiveness” is thus something that many writers in this volume feel a certain discomfort with, while the adjective “Canadian” comes under frequent qualification. We see this, for instance, in the excellent contribution (Chapter 6) by Imre Szeman and Andrew Pendakis on the history of Canadian cultural studies, in which the term Canadian itself is opened up for analysis: Canadian to designate a place from which the discourse is constituted and emerges versus Canadian as an adjective delineating specific qualities of a topic (see also similar questions raised by Marie Carrière and Catherine Khordoc in Chapter 33, and Elizabeth Dahab in Chapter 34). Interestingly, many early discussions of Canadian literature were grappling with this very dilemma—a version, we might say, of the debate about nature versus nurture. Indeed, in many of the early histories and anthologies of Canadian literature, critics were interested in addressing the following questions: What is distinctive about Canadian literature? Is there such a thing as a “Canadian” mentality or mode of expression? What is the connection between literature and nation? This was made even more difficult because of the need to set Canadian literature apart from its British, French, and Indigenous antecedents. Some of the most urgent and passionate debates of the period concerned the so-called “Canadianness” of Canadian literature. Canadian writers, in the effort to forge a new national identity, found themselves in the predicament of consciously creating a cultural-historical tradition, and hence looked for distinguishing elements that appeared “indigenous” to the Canadian locale: nature, geography, Indigenous peoples, French-Canadian habitants, distinct historical associations, revised social conventions, and a new vernacular, among others. The quest for—and refutation of—a securely “Canadian” mode of expression marked Canadian literary activity from at least the 1850s onward, the assumption being that national identity would go hand in hand with the consolidation of a national literature. As Thomas D’Arcy McGee expounded in his paper The New Era in 1857, “No literature, no national life,—this is an irreversible law” (2). Edward H. Dewart, in his discussion of Canadian writing in Selections from Canadian Poets in 1864, insisted on the importance of fostering a local Canadian literature: “A national literature is an essential element in the formation of national character. … It may be fairly questioned, whether the whole range of history presents the spectacle of a people firmly united politically, without the subtle but powerful cement of a patriotic literature” (ix). Many writers, however, rejected the idea of a distinctive national Canadian literature. Goldwin Smith, in a comment that

4    The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature reflects his impatience with Canadian culture and nationality at the time, stated in The Week of 31 August 1894 that “no such thing as a literature Canadian [sic] in the local sense exists or is likely ever to exist. ‘Canada’ is a political expression. There is no literary unity, there is not even unity of language” (86). Smith held a rather atypical position among the writers of the time as a supporter of Canada’s annexation to the United States, and his comments on Canada’s tentative cultural status reflect this political position. However, even the poet Archibald Lampman, in his oft-cited lecture “Two Canadian Poets” from 1891, was hesitant to declare that Canadian literature was firmly established, though he did foretell of its arrival: “The time has not come for the production of any genuine national song. It is when the passion and enthusiasm of an entire people … enters into the soul of one man specially gifted, that a great national poem or hymn is produced.” Nevertheless, there were notable authors and critics who felt otherwise. McGee, in his 1858 essay “Protection for Canadian Literature,” invoked the importance of geography to the Canadian character and, by extension, to Canadian literary expression: “There is a glorious field upon which to work for the formation of our National Literature. It must assume the gorgeous coloring and the gloomy grandeur of the forest. … Its lyrics must possess the ringing cadence of the waterfall, and its epics be as solemn and beautiful as our great rivers” (2). By 1886, Duncan, writing in the Washington Post, confidently stated that a national literature “should have its roots in the national character and within national limits, and it should be, so to speak, racy of its native soil” (“International” 102). Similar sentiments were echoed by many of the Confederation poets, and reached their apotheosis in Lighthall’s 1889 poetry anthology, Songs of the Great Dominion. In his introduction to the book, Lighthall makes a case for the new voice of Canada, as though the ancient land and its history have been resurrected in the poets of the day: “Through [these poems], taken all together, you may catch something of great Niagara falling, of brown rivers rushing with foam, of the crack of the rifle in the haunts of the moose and caribou, … shrill war-whoops of Iroquois battle, proud traditions of contests with the French and the Americans, stern and sorrowful cries of valour rising to curb rebellion” (xxi). This and similar statements assumed a romantic connection between imaginative expression, place, and national identity. The national spirit, Kertzer argues, is seen to emerge from the land and attain self-consciousness through art (38), an assumption that is evident in a good deal of Canadian literary criticism from the late nineteenth century onward. Lionel Stevenson, in 1926, would speak of the “primordial forces” that dominated Canadian expression (11). Years later, this semi-mystical fusion of identity and landscape would pervade Margaret Atwood’s infamous “survival” motif of 1972 as representative of Canadian literature. However, this conceptualization of a Canadian “national spirit,” which Canadians have inherited in varying forms into the present day, was also a radically restricted one, based on a foundational sense of Canada as a White (and, following the Conquest, primarily British) nation. This national construction, and its accompanying literary tradition, became the norm whose notion of civility and citizenry did not extend to everyone;4 indeed, its self-definition was founded on the exclusion of groups designated less civilized or desirable, groups that were (at best) posited as being in need

Introduction   5 of Anglicization (groups such as Indigenous peoples, Black Loyalists, Asian Canadians, Jewish Canadians, Eastern European settlers, disabled people, and others). It is these gaps in the Canadian cultural and historical record that many present-day critics, including many of the contributors to this volume, are interrogating and seeking to repair. From the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (established in 2010 as part of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement) to investigations of varying degrees of citizenship, inclusion, and belonging, many Canadian critics are today exploring the ways in which literature contributed to the formulation of a national imaginary, consolidated in a national literary canon, at the same time that many voices remained excluded or misrepresented. Placed alongside this history of contending voices and intense creative and polemical activity, Northrop Frye’s pronouncements about mating loons, plucked alouettes, and garrisoned settlers in his meditations on the foundations of early Canadian literature appear as rhetorical flourish. Nevertheless, his often self-deprecating statements, particularly those that appeared in his “Conclusion” to the Literary History of Canada in 1965, had a lasting effect on discussions of Canadian literature for generations. In his famous “Conclusion,” Frye outlined his well-known “garrison mentality” account of early Canada, in which he argued that settlers were too busy defending themselves against a hostile wilderness to engage in literary pursuits. As Sherrie Malisch argues in her ecocritical analysis of Frye’s “garrison” thesis, Frye’s essay assumed that “The fear that drives the erection of garrisons causes inhabitants to remain … incapable of the creative drive required for the proper arts” (185). The evidence of Canadian literary activity throughout the nineteenth century puts the lie to this account. Indeed, Frye’s dismissal of early Canadian writing seems more of a colonialist reflex than a reasoned assessment. That Frye’s accounts were later enthusiastically taken up in support of the romantic nationalism of the centennial period (1960s–70s) in Canada is a curious irony, as literary and cultural critics of this period sought easy images, themes, and symbols to bolster their vision of a national spirit. The ways in which Canadian literature has been mobilized in the service of national consolidation and institutional entrenchment is explored by a number of chapters in this volume, from Frank Davey’s, Adam Carter’s, Richard Cavell’s, and Cecily Devereux’s metacritical accounts of Canadian literary discourse (Chapters 1, 2, 3, and 45), to Ian Rae’s analysis of the Stratford Festival (Chapter 21), Lily Cho’s discussion of varying forms of citizenship (Chapter 28), and Herb Wyile’s account of neoliberalism (Chapter 48). The “making” of Canadian literature, as much as Canadian literature itself, has come to be a central area of analysis and interest among Canadian scholars.

Canadian Literary Histories In form, the current collection resembles Carl F. Klinck’s well-known Literary History of Canada, first published as a single volume in 1965. The original one-volume edition included lengthy essays by many established scholars of his day: Fred Cogswell,

6    The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature Roy Daniells, Edith Fowke, Alec Lucas, Desmond Pacey, Munro Beattie, and others, culminating, of course, in the famous “Conclusion” by Frye. Klinck saw it as his goal to provide a “comprehensive reference book on the (English) literary history of this country” and to “encourage established and younger scholars to engage in a critical study of that history” (ix). The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature mirrors Klinck’s volume in its collection of original essays by individual scholars specializing in particular areas of Canadian literature, and in its goal of encouraging further critical study of the field. The “comprehensive” nature of Klinck’s book is something about which a scholar of today may feel less at ease, in part because the encyclopedic urge becomes foiled the moment it sets into action. It is impossible to contain the myriad nature of the field of Canadian or any other literature because the field changes by the day. Notwithstanding Klinck’s acknowledgment of the fact that the contributors to his collection were working with a relatively narrow research base for pre-1920 materials (ix)—in other words, much of the primary research was yet to be done, and databases, which we are so dependent upon today, were nonexistent—he still felt confident to assert the comprehensiveness of his product, a position that was certainly echoed in Frye’s lofty pronouncements and dismissals of the field in his concluding chapter to the book. The current collection does not claim this kind of exhaustiveness, in part because such an achievement is belied by the contents of the volume itself: a plethora of approaches and resources—sometimes working in tandem, sometimes contestatory in nature—that constitute the field of Canadian literature today. However, like Klinck’s volume, this work does try to provide a sense of the divergent topics and traditions within the field that come under the heading “Canadian literature.” Indeed, Klinck’s volume anticipated many of the “literary” concerns of our own day: an assumption that all narrative materials—and not necessarily only classically “literary” ones—merit consideration in a work of Canadian literary history (hence his chapters on exploration writing, folk tales, theological writings, scientific writing); an interest in non-canonical literary forms (children’s literature, autobiography, travel literature); an interest in topics that today might come under the heading of “book history” (literary publishing, the writer and his or her public); metacritical discourse (literary scholarship, historical writing, Canadian English); and an interest in trans-Atlantic movements and inheritance (hence his section entitled “The Transplantation of Traditions”). Unlike Klinck’s volume, which covered only Canadian writing in the English language, this collection includes chapters on Québécois and French-Canadian writing. These chapters are not exhaustive, of course, but they do provide a sense of the sometimes overlapping, sometimes disparate, traditions of the two language streams, which were developing in tandem with the aesthetic and literary traditions of other communities within the Canadian state, including Indigenous traditions, regional initiatives, and multiple diasporic contexts. Comprehensiveness, within any one of these long-established traditions, would be impossible. This book offers a range of

Introduction   7 perspectives, with the aim of encouraging future research, reading, and scholarship in these areas and more. Klinck’s 1965 Literary History—which was succeeded by a subsequent three-volume edition in 1976, with a fourth volume added in 1990 edited by W.H. New—was not the first literary history to be devoted to Canadian writing, but it was the first to include essay-length treatments of diverse areas constituting the field. Other anthologies and literary histories were abundant earlier in the century: Edward Hartley Dewart’s Selections from the Canadian Poets (1864), William Douw Lighthall’s Songs of the Great Dominion (1889), Albert Watson and Lorne Pierce’s Our Canadian Literature (1922), Edmund and Eleanor Broadus’s A Book of Canadian Prose and Verse (1923), Archibald MacMechan’s Headwaters of Canadian Literature (1924), J.D. Logan and Donald French’s Highways of Canadian Literature (1924), Lionel Stevenson’s Appraisals of Canadian Literature (1926), and subsequent studies and collections by Lorne Pierce, Camille Roy, A.J.M. Smith, John Robins, Desmond Pacey, W.H. New, W.J. Keith, and many others—though most of these were shorter, single- or coauthored accounts, which aimed to consolidate the literary field into a manageable history. These works are fascinating documents in the constitution of the field of Canadian literature, though they lack the breadth of Klinck’s achievement. E.D. Blodgett’s critical study of Canadian literary histories, Five-Part Invention: A History of Literary History in Canada (2004), provides a useful metacritical context for the production of these early works. In the contemporary period, the two most well-known literary histories of Canadian literature are certainly W.J. Keith’s Canadian Literature in English (1986, 2006) and W.H. New’s A History of Canadian Literature (1989), supplemented by two major encyclopedias of the field, The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature (ed. Eugene Benson and William Toye [2nd ed. 1997]) and the Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada (ed. W.H. New [2002]).

Canadian Literary Studies Today In Chapter 38 of this volume, Nicholas Bradley expresses the dilemma and attraction of the enterprise at hand in his poetic description of Canadian literature. “ ‘Canadian literature,’ ” he states, “is a designation nearly as capacious as [Earle] Birney’s ocean. In principle it comprehends works spoken and written in many languages, and spans time and space, from the pre-Columbian era to the present, and, in the psalmic phrasing of Dominion, from sea to sea—and indeed to the third sea.” If, as Glenn Willmott argues, Canada has always been a “chronically incomplete project” (3), so has its literature. A “handbook” to this leviathan is challenging indeed, but its capaciousness and contradictions are what also make the field so compelling. One of the healthy signs of Canadian literature as a discipline is that its “future” cannot be reduced to a central approach or theoretical modality.

8    The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature Assessing the field of Canadian literary criticism from today’s standpoint, one might identity five main directions, all of which remain equally prominent into the twenty-first century, and which, in turn, reveal significant overlaps: 1. Attention to the links between the literary and the public sphere, including a concern with discourses of neoliberalism, class, trauma and memory, human rights, citizenship, urban studies, material culture, literary prizes, disability studies, digital cultures, literature and science, globalization studies, and environmentalism or ecocriticism. 2. Continued interest in what I would broadly call the connections between Canadian literature and the nation’s colonial and pre-colonial foundations. This takes a number of directions. Foremost among these is a widespread focus on Indigenous literatures and settler-Indigenous relations. This field of interest has become especially prominent since the 1990s. This field was given impetus by the growing interest in postcolonial discourse and literatures of the 1970s and 1980s, although the term postcolonial has been widely critiqued by Indigenous authors and critics in Canada, who insist that Canada is not a “post”-colonial state with regard to its treatment of Indigenous peoples, and who reject the assessment of a people’s literature that takes as its point of origin the onset of European colonization. Connected to this is an interest in colonial resistance, diasporic literatures, and theories and contexts of globalization. 3. The previous two categories often overlap with an interest in the institutionalization of Canadian literature as a category or discipline. This scholarship offers materialist investigations of the institutionalized production of Canadian literature and the ends it has served in the interests of national agendas, political power, market imperatives, and the societal mainstream. The influence of the TransCanada Institute (2007–13) at the University of Guelph has been central in consolidating this field of inquiry. 4. Also prominent today is a turn toward book history and literary history, with a renewed interest in early Canadian literature. This includes a number of interests:  materialist histories, editing and bibliographical projects, and digital resources. Here one sees an interest in historicizing Canadian literary history, including a focus on book clubs, anthologies, generic conventions, literary magazines and periodicals, publishing companies, and studies of the production and mediation of Canadian literature. 5. In addition to these historicist approaches is a growing interest in articulating the evocative and/or affective character of the “literary”—including an interest in affect theory, mourning, melancholy, haunting, memory, autobiography, and cognitive theory. Such approaches do not represent a naïve return to new criticism, but undertake closely embedded textual and historical analyses that are tied to extra-literary contexts. The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature aims to represent these approaches by taking stock of the major topics, debates, and areas within the discipline of Canadian

Introduction   9 literature today and highlighting current critical directions in the field. Contributors were asked not only to survey their topic of focus, but also to outline some of the central issues or debates related to that field and to offer their own appraisal, and in some cases redefinition, of the material. The chapters in this volume reflect the plurality of critical perspectives, regional and historical specializations, and theoretical positions that constitute the field of Canadian literary criticism across a range of genres and historical periods. My aim has thus been to represent a diverse array of interests—from the current revival of the field of early Canadian writing, to the continued interest in Indigenous, regional, and diasporic traditions, to more recent discussions of globalization, market forces, and neoliberalism. The volume also highlights the extent to which people were, from early on, concerned with situating aesthetic concerns within regional, national, and global contexts, both in terms of Canada’s imperial legacy and in terms of transnational influences. This wealth of perspectives is itself a vibrant expression of the multiple, often contradictory elements of Canada’s national culture, which remains indelibly marked by the formative pressures of its own colonial foundations:  caught between regional, national, and global impulses, and animated by a range of minority voices and by an increasingly prominent Indigenous literary community. Many of those working in the field of Canadian literature are interested in taking stock of the discipline in some way, either by historicizing the field or by situating it within a mediating field of cultural interrelations. For this reason, I chose to open the present volume with a section that offers a set of critical reflections on the field, including chapters that interrogate the nationalist foundations of the discipline and chapters that survey the different institutional forms the field has taken: from cultural studies to globalization, to literary celebrity. Rather than beginning the volume with a chronological or generic approach, I open the volume with a group of essays that engage with the discipline as a discipline, thus highlighting some of the controversies and debates that have informed the field since its beginnings. Frank Davey’s opening chapter on Canadian literary criticism provides a good overview of the changing critical directions in the field itself, and thus offers an excellent beginning point for a Handbook that aims to demonstrate critical approaches in the field today. Davey’s essay is followed by chapters that undertake a wider perspective on the discipline as a whole. These include Chapter 2 on the symbiotic relationship between national character and national literature (Adam Carter), including a discussion of Northrop Frye; Chapter 3 on Canadian cultural memory (Richard Cavell), itself a burgeoning field in Canadian literary and cultural studies; Chapter 4 on Canadian literary celebrity (Lorraine York); Chapter 5 on Canadian literature and globalization (Erin Wunker); and Chapter 6 on the discipline of Canadian cultural studies (Imre Szeman and Andrew Pendakis). In recent decades, there has been continued and growing critical interest in Indigenous writings in Canada and in diasporic, regional, and transnational contexts.5 In order to reflect these different areas of scholarship, and to signal the central importance that Indigenous literary studies currently has in the field of Canadian literature, I have included a distinct section dedicated to Indigenous literatures and traditions, although Indigenous works form part of the discussions throughout the volume as well.

10    The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature The divergent Indigenous groups, and the wealth of critical interest in this field, called for a wider coverage of this material than just one or two chapters. For this reason, I have created a section that allows more extensive coverage of this field (though not, once again, exhaustive), on topics such as Métis writing (Chapter 7, by Emma LaRocque, who has here written one of the first extended discussions of Métis literature as a distinct category); truth and reconciliation (Chapter  8, by Jonathan Dewar, former Director of Research for the Aboriginal Healing Foundation and currently Director of the Shingwauk Residential Schools Centre); Indigenous autobiography (Chapter 9, Deanna Reder); Inuit literature (Chapter 10, Keavy Martin and Taqralik Partridge, the former an Inuk poet); and Indigenous women’s writing (Chapter 11, Julia Emberley). Studies of generic and historical periods have long been part of Canadian literary history, and continue to be of interest today. The section entitled “Literary Periods and Genres” includes a series of chapters that cover a historical range of Canadian literary topics in English and French-Canadian contexts. Early Canadian literature and Canadian Modernism are two fields, in particular, that are currently of significant interest (from Carole Gerson’s prize-winning study Canadian Women in Print: 1750–1918 [2010], Janice Fiamengo’s The Woman’s Page [2008], and Daniel Coleman’s White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada [2006] to Dean Irvine’s major initiative, the Editing Modernism in Canada project, at Dalhousie University). These chapters cover a wide range of periods and historical contexts—from narratives of first contact (Chapter 12, Jennifer S.H. Brown and Frieda Esau Klippenstein) to early French-Canadian writing (Chapter 13, Andrea Cabajsky), to the settlement period (Chapter 14, Janice Fiamengo), to writing of the Confederation period (Chapter 15, D.M.R. Bentley; Chapter 16, Tracy Ware), to Canadian modernist contexts (Chapter  17, J.A. Weingarten; Chapter  18, Carole Gerson; Chapter 19, Faye Hammill and Michelle Smith), to the October Crisis (Chapter 22, David Leahy), to the centennial period (Chapter 21, Ian Rae; Chapter 24, Cynthia Sugars), to contemporary digital contexts (Chapter  27, Kate Eichhorn). The essays in this section also include chapters on specific generic traditions: Craig Walker on Canadian drama (Chapter 20); Alexander MacLeod on the Canadian short story (Chapter 23); Cynthia Sugars on the late twentieth-century novel (Chapter 24); Tanis MacDonald on contemporary English-Canadian poetry (Chapter 25); and Lucie Joubert on contemporary Québécois women’s writing (Chapter 26). The subsequent section, “Intra-National Contexts and Traditions,” is devoted to a range of regional, racial, and diasporic traditions that continue to play a central role in Canadian literary discourse. Each author provides an overview of the debates central to his or her field, followed by a discussion of specific literary examples and important cultural moments. Lily Cho opens the section with a critical discussion in Chapter 28 of theories of diaspora and citizenship and their application to Canadian literature. Her piece is followed by essays that focus on specific diasporic contexts: David Chariandy on Black Canadian Writing (Chapter  29); Eleanor Ty on East and South-East Asian Canadian literature (Chapter 30); Mariam Pirbhai on South Asian Canadian narratives (Chapter 31); Norman Ravvin on Canadian Jewish writing (Chapter 32); Marie Carrière and Catherine Khordoc on écriture migrante (Chapter 33); and Elizabeth Dahab on Arab

Introduction   11 Canadian literature (Chapter 34). Also included in this section are chapters devoted to significant intra-national regional literary contexts in Canada:  Tony Tremblay on Atlantic-Canadian literature (Chapter  35); Paul Chafe on Newfoundland fiction (Chapter 36); Alison Calder on prairie literature (Chapter 37); and Nicholas Bradley on writings from the Pacific Coast (Chapter 38). Each of the latter reassesses notions of regionalism as these have informed discourse about Canadian literature over the last few decades. The final section, “Critical Fields and New Directions,” includes chapters that address specific theoretical or thematic topics, highlighting additional areas that have been important fields of discussion, or pointing to new directions in which critical interest is moving. These include Chapter 39 by Pamela Banting on ecological literature and ecocriticism; Chapter 40 by Diana Brydon and Bruno Cornellier on Canadian postcolonial studies in English and French-Canadian contexts; Chapter 41 by Renée Hulan on theories of history and historical fiction; Chapter 42 by Eli MacLaren on Canadian book history; Chapter  43 by Julie Rak on autobiography; Chapter  44 by Deirdre Baker on Canadian children’s literature; Chapter 45 by Cecily Devereux on feminist discourse in Canada; Chapter 46 by Terry Goldie and Lee Frew on gay and lesbian writing; Chapter 47 by Sally Chivers on disability and Canadian writing; and Chapter 48 by Herb Wyile on neoliberalism. An increasing interest in global contexts and neoliberal forces informs many of the essays of this collection (see, for example, Banting, Tremblay, Wunker, York, LaRocque, Chariandy, Brydon and Cornellier, and Wyile). Canadian literary criticism, from its beginnings, has been embedded in politics. Since Canadian literature, as Canadian—whether considered a form of anti-colonial assertion or a form of neo-colonial homogenization—is by definition politically motivated, it did not easily mesh with the supposedly apolitical greatness of “universal” (i.e., British) aesthetic standards in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, making the field itself one of contesting political-aesthetic positions. The relativism of Arnoldian humanism, and of Frygian evaluative codes, could only be applied to Canadian literature as a fraught and deficient endeavour (an observation that is a keystone of early postcolonial literary analysis). Nevertheless, the primer of Canadian literature, which Matthew Arnold considered miniscule and preposterous, is bursting at the seams.

Notes 1. See Chapter 2 of Sugars, Canadian Gothic, for an extended account of this argument. 2. See Bentley for an excellent discussion of these debates about a national literature during the post-Confederation period. 3. For a discussion of Canadian copyright laws during the post-Confederation period, see MacLaren. For accounts of Canadian authors’ exodus to the United States during this period, see Mount. 4. See Coleman for an extended account of these exclusionary “civil” processes in early Canadian cultural discourse.

12    The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature 5. A list of relevant critical works would be too long to offer here; instead, I direct readers to the individual chapters on specific literary communities and traditions in this volume for a detailed discussion of specific authors and related critical works. For an important study of Canadian literary transnationalism, see Dobson.

Works Cited Arnold, Matthew. “General Grant.” The Last Word. Ed. R.H. Super. Vol. 11 of The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1977. 144–79. Print. Atwood, Margaret. Survival:  A  Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. Toronto:  Anansi, 1972. Print. Bentley, D.M.R. The Confederation Group of Canadian Poets, 1880–1897. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2004. Print. Blodgett, E.D. Five-Part Invention:  A  History of Literary History in Canada. Toronto:  U of Toronto P, 2003. Print. Coleman, Daniel. White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2006. Print. Dewart, Edward Hartley. Selections from Canadian Poets. 1864. Intro. Douglas Lochhead. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1973. Print. Dobson, Kit. Transnational Canadas: Anglo-Canadian Literature and Globalization. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2009. Print. Duncan, Sara Jeannette. “American Influence on Canadian Thought.” 1887. Towards a Canadian Literature: Essays, Editorials and Manifestos. Vol. I: 1752–1940. Ed. Douglas M. Daymond and Leslie G. Monkman. Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1984. 116–20. Print. ———. “International Copyright.” Sara Jeannette Duncan:  Selected Journalism. Ed. Thomas E. Tausky. Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1978. 102–03. Print. Fiamengo, Janice. The Woman’s Page: Journalism and Rhetoric in Early Canada. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2008. Print. Frye, Northrop. “Conclusion.” Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English. Ed. Carl F. Klinck. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1965. 821–49. Print. Gerson, Carole. Canadian Women in Print, 1750–1918. Waterloo, ON:  Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2010. Print. Haliburton, R.G. The Men of the North and Their Place in History. Montreal: Lovell, 1869. Print. Kertzer, Jonathan M. Worrying the Nation: Imagining a National Literature in English Canada. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1998. Print. Klinck, Carl F. “Introduction.” Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English. Ed. Carl F. Klinck. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1965. ix–xiv. Print. Lampman, Archibald. “Two Canadian Poets[:] a Lecture.” Essays and Reviews. Ed. D.M.R. Bentley. Canadian Poetry Press. www.canadianpoetry.ca Web. Accessed 26 Dec. 2014. Lighthall, William Douw. “Introduction.” Songs of the Great Dominion: Voices from the Forests and Waters, Settlements and Cities of Canada. Ed. Lighthall. London: Walter Scott, 1889. xxi–xxxvii. Print. MacLaren, Eli. Dominion and Agency:  Copyright and the Structuring of the Canadian Book Trade, 1867–1918. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2011. Print. MacMechan, Archibald. Headwaters of Canadian Literature. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1924. Print.

Introduction   13 Malisch, Sherrie. “In Praise of the Garrison Mentality:  Why Fear and Retreat May Be Useful Responses in an Era of Climate Change.” Studies in Canadian Literature 39.1 (2014): 177–98. Print. McGee, Thomas D’Arcy. “A National Literature for Canada.” The New Era [Montreal] 17 June 1857: 2. Print. ———. “Protection for Canadian Literature.” The New Era 24 Apr. 1858: 2. Print. Mount, Nick. When Canadian Literature Moved to New  York. Toronto:  U of Toronto P, 2005. Print. Smith, Goldwin. “What Is the Matter with Canadian Literature?” 1894. The Search for English-Canadian Literature: An Anthology of Critical Articles from the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. Ed. Carl Ballstadt. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1975. 85–88. Print. Stevenson, Lionel. Appraisals of Canadian Literature. Toronto: Macmillan, 1926. Print. Sugars, Cynthia. Canadian Gothic:  Literature, History, and the Spectre of Self-Invention. Cardiff: U of Wales P, 2014. Print. Watson, Albert Durrant, and Lorne Albert Pierce. Our Canadian Literature:  Representative Prose and Verse. Toronto: Ryerson, 1922. Print. Willmott, Glenn. Unreal Country: Modernity in the Canadian Novel in English. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2002. Print.

Pa rt  I

R E F L E C T ION S ON  T H E DI S C I P L I N E

Chapter 1

C onstru c t i ng “ Canadian Lit e rat u re ” A Retrospective Frank Davey

Beginnings “Without an ending, how can one know where to begin? For in fixing the period, the last word constructs meaning” (“Structuralism” 25). So Barbara Godard wrote in beginning her 1987 essay on structuralism and poststructuralism in Canada for John Moss’s anthology Future Indicative—itself a starting point for some, and a way station for others. Hers is also my problem, approaching an even larger subject—where to begin, where will it end? As well I find myself imagining Northrop Frye as he began his 1965 “Conclusion” to Carl F. Klinck’s Literary History of Canada—a large subject indeed—firm in the belief that he was dealing with a literature, however large, that was often “as innocent of literary intention as a mating loon” (822). It was an arresting, provocatively voyeuristic declaration, one that he felt obliged to modify 20 years later when given a rare second chance to begin, and end.

“Canadian Literature” Sometimes I have thought that in 1959 the University of British Columbia should have named its new national journal Literature in Canada rather than Canadian Literature. If it had, it might have been easier to perceive “literature” in this newly beginning context as an unpredictably collective noun rather than the monolith that many Canadian writers, readers, and critics have often hoped, or feared, or wondered it might be. Even though George Woodcock, the first editor, saw the journal as one both written and

18    Reflections on the Discipline appreciated by general readers as well as by those in the academy, Canadian Literature was the first big step toward the non-occasional academic study of Canadian writing. It prepared the way for the launch in 1969 of the thin New Canadian Library, Copp Clark, Ryerson Press, and Forum House monographs1 that passed as substantial literary criticism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and for the various anthologies and handbooks that vied also in those decades to serve the numerous new “Canadian literature” courses that were coming into existence. These were, of course, almost always monolingually English “Canadian literature” courses, housed in English departments; in response to that reality, the new anthologies were almost all collections of anglophone-Canadian writing (though “anglophone-Canadian” was at this time a term no Canadians of any linguistic group had learned). The anthologies and guidebooks usually referred to “Canadian literature” as if it were a self-evident, uncontested entity, even as they reflected an awareness of the bicultural impossibility implied by “Canadian literature”— as in Mary Jane Edwards’s four-volume anthology The Evolution of Canadian Literature in English (1973), Catherine McLay’s Canadian Literature (1974), Donna Bennett and Russell Brown’s two-volume Canadian Literature in English (1982), Margaret Atwood’s guidebook Survival:  A  Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972), and Clara Thomas’s explicitly totalizing guide Our Nature—Our Voices (1972). Even Carl Klinck and Reginald Watters’s less specifically titled Canadian Anthology (1965), with its notably brief and non-generalizing introduction, in its 1966 second edition described itself as an anthology of “Canadian Literature in English.” The repetitions of the phrase “in English” signaled the major issue of those early years of the regular academic study of “Canadian” writing—how to deal with the fact that literature within Canada was at least two literatures, written in the nation’s two official languages. The need to add “in English” to these titles paradoxically signaled a subtraction, absence, or amputation—that the entity being offered was not whole, had spaces and silences as much beside it as within. Significantly, the “in English” did not literally refer only to the absence of francophone-Canadian writing—writing done in many other languages, including those of First Nations, was usually also absent—although most 1970s readers of the collections likely assumed that the reference was to Canadian writing in French. These early years, however, also saw much zeal, both intellectual and patriotic, to reverse the amputation. UBC’s Canadian Literature was initially conceived as a bilingual journal that offered nearly equal treatment of English- and French-language writing—but unfortunately it never received the numbers of French-language submissions that such an ideal required (Potter 155). Frye, in that “Conclusion” to the 1965 Literary History, wrote that “Canada has two languages and two literatures, and every statement made in a book like this about ‘Canadian Literature’ employs a figure of speech known as synecdoche.” He added, “Every such statement implies a parallel or contrasting statement about French-Canadian literature” (823–24). It was a cleverly noble and inexpensive solution to the problem, inexpensive both intellectually and materially. In 1969, in an attempt to make meaningful room for such “parallel or contrasting” statements, several faculty at the Université de Sherbrooke founded ellipse, an

Constructing “Canadian Literature”    19 actual bilingual and comparative journal of anglophone and francophone Canadian literature that was published until 2012—though in later years it was rarely cited. In 1971, one of its founders, Ronald Sutherland, published the study Second Image, in which he argued that only literary texts which explicitly referenced both Canadian and Quebecois cultures could be considered “mainstream” Canadian—a claim that, along with Frye’s, would probably be considered folkloric in many parts of today’s Canadian studies. The Association of Canadian and Quebec Literatures (ACQL) struggled at its 1973–74 founding not only to interest francophone academics but also to find a name acceptable to most members. The conjoined but not necessarily interacting words “Canadian” and “Quebec” survive both as relics of the “two nations” politics of the Canadian 1970s and as an all-too-fitting sign for sessions I’ve attended at which clusters of delegates filed out or in as the languages of presentation alternated. Many of those who in the 1960s and 1970s were organizing new doctoral programs in Canadian literature assumed that French would be one of the languages that Canadianist candidates would present in fulfillment of “foreign-language” competence, but rarely was this assumption expressed as a requirement. Today, when many programs require only one additional language, that assumption is not widespread, nor is the required level of competence high enough to increase interlanguage dialogue. There were at least three large causes of the steady drift away from that early anglophone-Canadian ideal of a mixed English/French-language literature. One was the university practice of using languages as a basis for subdividing arts and humanities faculties—a practice born out of nineteenth-century European imperial rivalries. Within Canadian English-language universities, the practice could produce mini-imperialisms, with French and English departments often rigorously policing the linguistic boundaries of their territories. Canadian literature had been introduced to these universities not as a program or department, as women’s studies or film studies would often later be, but as two linguistically pure offerings of rival English and French departments (a decision that has deprived it of adequate numbers of courses, as well as adequate coverage and comparative pedagogies). In francophone universities in Quebec, “Canadian literature” was viewed as entirely anglophone, and was usually taught, if at all, as part of North American literature. The second cause was that our universities did not produce significant numbers of Canadianists who could write and publish in both languages—and most often did not attempt to do so—let alone ones who could analyze both French- and English-language texts. Students who wished to be bilingual English-French scholars were mostly left to invent their own paths. The third was the growing global imbalance between English and French as languages, together with the imbalance in interest between Canadian English and French speakers in each other’s literary productions. The very nationalism that caused Trudeau-era English-speaking Canadians to see Quebec culture as an attractive aspect of “Canada” was perceived in many parts of Quebec as a threat to Quebec specificity. At a time when the academic use of French was declining even in France, so that eventually the French government would begin requiring French academics to speak in French at conferences in France (law 94-665 of 4 August 1994, also known as “le loi Toubon”—and parodically

20    Reflections on the Discipline as the “Allgood Law”), most scholars of Quebec writing preferred to speak and hear less English rather than more, and did not find contact with English-speaking Canadians useful—particularly when there were very few texts that both communities had read and few critical methodologies that they shared. There are not a great number of reminders of that 1955–75 moment of unachieved English-French biculturalism in this volume, though Cecily Devereux, in Chapter 45, provides a sense of this history among English- and French-Canadian feminists. However, two developments from that time remain large. Both of these emanated from the Dialogue Conference organized by Barbara Godard at York University in 1981. The first was the spreading of continental literary theory to anglophone-Canadian writing more systematically than was being done by other early adopters. Godard accomplished this largely through the bilingually produced magazine Tessera, founded in 1984 by Godard, Daphne Marlatt, Kathy Mezei, and Gail Scott and drawing contributions almost equally from anglophone and francophone women writers, many of whom had participated in the conference. Again, the lack of a francophone among the founding editors (Godard, born Barbara Thompson, first learned French in Toronto schools, then more extensively during her years spent in Montreal and France) indicates the cultural limits such projects were forced to work within. The second was the somewhat belated inscription of feminist theory into Canadian literature with the publication in 1987 of the anthology Gynocritics/La Gynocritique: Feminist Approaches to Canadian and Quebec Women’s Writing, collected by Godard from work begun at the conference.2 Throughout the previous decade and a half, Godard had also worked as a volunteer editor of the Coach House Press Quebec translations and as a translator to introduce poststructuralist Quebec fiction and poetry to anglophone-Canadian readers. Godard herself was one of the few who had invented a path to bilingual scholarship, proceeding from a bachelor of arts at the University of Toronto, through a master’s at the Université de Montreal, a maitrise at the Université de Paris, to a doctorate at the Université de Bordeaux. Outside Quebec she had few with whom she could share the full range of her intellectual engagements.

Canadian “Literature”? A second starting point for the academic study of Canadian writing was Klinck’s 1957– 65 editorial project, Literary History of Canada. According to his 1991 memoir Giving Canada a Literary History, Klinck had first conceived this project in the fall of 1956 during a conversation with Frye—the starting point of a starting point. He had asked Frye, he writes, “whether Canadian literature could be tested against international standards. Norrie replied, in effect, ‘Of course, why not?’ ” (103). Nine years later, this would be an opinion on which Frye had waffled—a waffling with some consequences, among them that preoccupied loon I cited as I began. Despite his evaluation-based hope that Canadian writing could measure up to “international standards,” the understanding of

Constructing “Canadian Literature”    21 the literary adopted by Klinck for the project had been, quite sensibly, a wide, belletristic one that could include letters, diaries, essays, folk tales and folk songs, explorers’ journals, memoirs, autobiography, historical, travel, and theological writing, philosophical writing, scientific writing, nature writing, the animal story, and children’s books. The implied audiences of these largely realist texts collectively resembled the educated general readerships envisioned by Woodcock as the readers of Canadian Literature. It was this Canadian “literature,” widely understood, that Frye would be referring to in his frequently cited “Conclusion” when he wrote that “[t]‌he literary, in Canada, is often only an incidental quality of writings which, like those of many of the early explorers, are as innocent of literary intention as a mating loon. Even when it is literature in its orthodox genres of poetry and fiction, it is more significantly studied as a part of Canadian life than as a part of an autonomous world of literature” (822). Uneasily holding the concepts of literature and “life” together here was Frye’s understanding of both, outlined in his 1955 Anatomy of Criticism as unchanging mythic possibilities that have emerged from human dreams and desires that preceded and originated civilization. In studying Canadian literature, one was not investigating something “purely” literary—that was not possible in Canada—but one was investigating something almost analogous to the literary, and possessing similarly stable qualities.3 Studying Canadian writing “as a part of Canadian life,” together with Frye’s dichotomy between “Canadian life” and “an autonomous world of literature,” became almost immediately a standard approach to the literature, commonly known as “thematic criticism.” D.G. Jones, in his 1970 Butterfly on Rock: A Study of Themes and Images in Canadian Literature, would note that his approach was “cultural and psychological rather than purely aesthetic or literary,” and that it aimed “to reveal something of the Canadian temper”—“the dreams and nightmares of a people” (4). Margaret Atwood, in her introduction to her 1972 Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, would describe her book as “a book of patterns”—“patterns of theme, image, and attitude which hold our literature together” (11–12). The Toronto Star reported that Survival had had a “staggering first printing of 20,000 copies. With college-course outlines snapping it up sight-unseen” (McDonald 77). Atwood’s phrase “our literature” signaled a characteristic assumption in thematic criticism that both the literature and culture were largely homogenous. Such a usage appealed to the nationalist sentiments that resonated in the early 1970s in English Canada following the 1967 celebrations of the centennial of Canada’s founding. But very soon it would offend those Canadians who began perceiving it as referring mostly to middle-class Ontario citizens. Many of the challenges to thematic criticism fell into the trap of attempting to reverse the binary opposition that Frye had created, and of thus repeating the modernist form-content debates. Despite the parallel archetypal standing that Frye’s theories had assigned to both Canadianness and to the literary, his separating of them had also implied that “Canadian literature” might be fundamentally a contradiction of terms—that if a text were authentically Canadian it might not fit easily into “the autonomous world of literature,” and if it were literary it might be unlikely to be experienced as “Canadian.”4 A simple reversal of the binary was particularly evident in the title of

22    Reflections on the Discipline the “Minus Canadian” issue that Barry Cameron and Michael Dixon edited in 1977 for Studies in Canadian Literature, as well as in the title of their introduction, “Mandatory Subversive Manifesto:  Canadian Criticism vs. Literary Criticism.” Urging critics to cease “pretending that literature consists only of content” (141) and to acknowledge the “harmony of form and content,” they called for Canadian literary works to be “treated as autonomous verbal structures with a literary integrity of their own” (140)—that is, as part of the “autonomous world of literature” from which Frye might have them excluded. Five times in the seven-page essay they favourably quoted or repeated Frye’s phrase, an over-repetition that hinted at some uneasiness about their own arguments. Their new binary of preferring “minus Canadian” to a “plus” still carried those two now seemingly transcendent concepts—Frye’s autonomous literary world and Jones’s “the Canadian temper” (4). These concepts would trouble those who saw the relative value accorded to various formal creations, and to the “content” that those creations imply or extend, as being socially constructed out of the practices and experiences of the culture within which those creations are made and responded to. My own contribution to the thematic criticism debates was the paper “Surviving the Paraphrase,” which I  presented to the founding meetings of the Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures in May 1974 and published in Canadian Literature in 1976. Here I noted thematism’s preference of cultural sociology over actual literary texts; its preference of texts that contained clearly expressed ideas over those that signified obliquely through non-lexical elements such as sounds, rhythms, imagery, syntactic disruptions, irony, or abrupt disjunctions of focus or form; its habit of totalizing Canada and Canadians—and its corresponding lack of interest in writing not easily incorporated into such totalizations; its disregard for the effects of international literary history on Canadians; and its tendency to essentialize both the cultural and the literary and thus remove them from politics and history. Later critics have called my intervention “vastly influential” (Scobie, “Frank” 276), one that “took the small world of Canadian literary criticism by storm” (Brydon, “Surviving” 7) and “inaugurate[d]‌a pivotal moment … in the development of Canadian criticism” (Kamboureli, “ ‘Frank’ ” 212). I did not experience it as having been quite that determinative, and over the next decade readdressed and expanded my concerns, both discursively and formally, in the essays collected in my Reading Canadian Reading (1988). The thematic criticism debates have recurred intermittently—most curiously in the late 1980s, when thematics was frequently appealed to as a “common-sense” and more “Canadian” alternative to poststructuralist theory, which objectors characterized as foreign, difficult, and inappropriate to “our” literature. Such was the position of T.D. Maclulich in 1987 in “Thematic Criticism, Literary Nationalism, and the Critic’s New Clothes,” who argued that the “continued existence of Canada as an independent nation only makes sense if we continue to pursue collective goals and values” (30)—values that for him precluded the “jaw-breaking and mind-bending critical neologisms” (32) which he appeared to believe all post-Saussurean literary theories encouraged. His belief that only thematic criticism could preserve Canadian “cultural history” and “social context” from the destructive effects of “imported” theory rested not only on a

Constructing “Canadian Literature”    23 narrow understanding of theory, but on a unitary and conflict-free understanding of Canadian “context” and “history.” “[I]‌f we wish to have an appreciable impact on our countrymen,” he wrote, “we must operate within the constraints imposed by Canada’s history and traditions” (29). The debates emerged again from a contrasting viewpoint in 1999 in Lorraine Weir’s “The Ethos of Censorship in English-Canadian Literature: An Ontopornosophical Approach,” in which she argued that the realist bias of the 1970s Canadian literature canon had been at best a “sanitized” realism, produced by writers and critics who, because they read literature “as a mirror of the ‘real world,’ ” chose texts most likely to idealize that world and produce “civility” and “codes of decorum” (200) in their student readers—texts that preferred “ ‘region’ to revolution, ‘man’ and the ‘land’ to sweat and blood” (201). Among those critics, she included Frye for having championed Canadian writing not as part of his autonomous world of literature but as “essential to the formation of the ‘Canadian imagination’ and to Canada as a nation” (200). To Weir, his “Canadian life” had been one already “sanitized” to accord to a “moral agenda of social purification” (201) and placid citizenship.

Canadian (Postmodern) Literature Many of the objections to thematic criticism had been to its implication, particularly in the writings of Frye, Jones, and Atwood, that there was a single, unified Canadian culture centred in the eastern half of Canada. One way of countering this implication was to construct a regional thematics, as Laurence Ricou attempted for the prairie provinces in 1973 in Vertical Man, Horizontal World. But a potentially more powerful way in the 1960s and early 1970s was a challenge based on the internationally growing concept of postmodernism, with its loosely interrelated theories of indeterminacy, the simulacrum, the unreliability and relativity of narrative knowledge, the game-playing intrinsic to rhetoric, the performativity of knowledge creation, and the situatedness of knowledge. Such ideas had been evident in 1960s small-press activity in Vancouver (TISH, Blew Ointment, Very Stone House, Talonbooks) that assumed that regional communities could be agents of cultural legitimation alongside the traditionally legitimating national centres. By the 1970s and 1980s, regional small presses throughout the western provinces were publishing anthologies and literary criticism, legitimating their own authors rather than waiting for them to be recognized in Toronto, and publishing some of the first Canadian examples of poststructuralist critical prose. Much of the early evidence of literary postmodernism in Canada was of this type, cultural work that was articulated by being enacted. Decentring, positioning, and relativizing in this period were activities as much as they were theories. Robert Kroetsch’s 1974 declaration that Canadian literature had gone “directly from Victorian into Postmodern” (“A Canadian Issue” 1)—implying that in Canada the postmodern had been necessary because the modern had failed to occur—was itself a decentring, postmodern (and openly political) gesture, written into a space usually occupied by discursively reasoned

24    Reflections on the Discipline judgment.5 Postmodern literary criticism was begun in Canada primarily by such writers, who assumed that criticism should be postmodern in form if it were to be postmodern in content—that is, that it should make its arguments indirectly and paratactically, by sharp juxtapositions, syntactic repetitions, aphorisms, puns, and numerous dramatically narrow focuses, rather than hypotactically, by the careful structuring of complex and interrelated sentences. A postmodern essay could resemble a poem, as did Stephen Scobie’s “I and I: Phyllis Webb’s ‘I Daniel,’ ” written in one eight-page paragraph. Or it could be modular in structure, with its paragraphs resembling stanzas and each lacking the conventional paragraph’s topic sentence and sequential development. Such critical writing had loose ties to the alternative gallery scene in which conceptual and performance artists such as General Idea, The Clichettes, Anna Banana, Gathie Falk, and Mr. Peanut6 were developing. Its discourse-based resistances were initially concerned with geographic, literary, and economic power, but eventually spread to include gender, ethnicity, race, sexuality, and, more recently, globalization. Among the earliest were the collaborative writings of bpNichol and Steve McCaffery, publishing as the Toronto Research Group, also known as TRG, from 1973 to 1982 and collected in 1992 under the title Rational Geomancy: The Kids of the Book-Machine. Their work and the dramatically performed modular close-reading essays of George Bowering, such as “Stone Hammer Narrative,” emphasized theorizing and reading as processes, and foregrounded the means by which readings were reached as much as they did the readings themselves. Informing them was not Frygian theory but a phenomenology derived from the writings of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, sometimes filtered through the “art does not seek to describe but to enact” (10) theories of Charles Olson. The most influential was probably Kroetsch’s essay “For Play and Entrance: The Contemporary Canadian Long Poem,” which, by blurring the genre distinctions between essay, poem, and performance art, enacted aspects of the poems it discussed. It was first performed/presented at the 1980 Modern Language Association conference in Houston, then published regionally, in Dandelion in 1981, and twice republished in Kroetsch’s essay collections. Other notable examples included the Toronto Research Group’s collection Canadian ”Pataphysics (1981); Kroetsch, Shirley Neuman, and Robert Wilson’s collaborative Labyrinths of Voice (1982); Nichol’s “shuffle text,” “Things I Don’t Really Understand about Myself,” presented at the 1984 Long-liners Conference; Aritha van Herk and Lynette Hunter’s papers at the 1994 Niederbronn Conference on Kroetsch, at which Hunter baked a pizza while she spoke; Hunter’s Outsider Notes (1996); Daphne Marlatt’s Readings from the Labyrinth (1998); and Erín Moure’s O Cidadán (2002). While the theoretical base of these was inconsistent—having slowly expanded to variously include Bakhtin’s concepts of carnival and dialogism, Foucault’s archaeology, Cixousian fluidity, Kristeva’s semiotic, and Bataille’s theories of libidinal excess and transgression—the performed reading that anchored interpretation to textual encounter, and which purported to regard the text as a trace, deferral, or construction rather than a record, continued. The formal contrast between these critical texts and the more public face of Canadian postmodern literature and criticism, Linda Hutcheon, was sharp. Hutcheon’s scholarly books on international and Canadian postmodern writing, A Poetics of Postmodernism

Constructing “Canadian Literature”    25 (1988), The Politics of Postmodernism (1989), and The Canadian Postmodern (1988), were not metacritically or performatively postmodern, nor did they make known Canadian work apart from fiction, or make known the particular political and postcolonial inflections that they were carrying. As Lorraine Weir has suggested, Hutcheon’s work could be viewed as “normalizing” postmodernism, and thus obscuring its abrasive cultural challenges. As well, through its wide circulation it unintentionally concealed the nonstandard discourses of other Canadian postmodernist criticism. Also confusing the latter’s reception was Kroetsch’s own tendency in his essays to celebrate his “postmodern” epistemological ambiguities, which made it possible for detractors to confuse the Canadian postmodern cultural work with the purportedly ungrounded, amoral, and ahistorical postmodern funhouse perceived by Fredric Jameson.

Canadian Literature as Institution(s) One of Godard’s most significant observations, made at the 1986 “Future Indicative” conference at the University of Ottawa, was that the development of both Canadian literary theory and the academic study of Canadian literature had incorporated a somewhat carnivalesque misreading of the history of the last century of critical theory in Europe. In Europe, she argued, structuralism had been a criticism of phenomenology; in Canada, phenomenology had underpinned an attack on structuralism and on the partial structuralism of Frye. In Europe, deconstruction challenged the metaphysics of presence in structuralism; in Canada, deconstruction was a successor to phenomenology, exposing and critiquing phenomenology’s commitments to a metaphysics of presence. She sketched how deconstruction’s emphasis on difference, “which is relational, labyrinthean, web-like, rather than hierarchical,” was unraveling long-standing binary oppositions—male/female, empire/colony, centre/margin—and the assumption of essential unchanging attributes that accompanied them. She accurately predicted that the collapsing of racial binaries and their accompanying essentialisms would lead to the recognition of “Canadian literature within world literature, as the rise of the repressed, dislocating and undermining the logic of the literary systems of the Anglo-American world, produces a limit to writing” (44). Godard’s remarks were prophetic in several ways, particularly of the essentialism/constructionism debates of the late 1980s and the 1990s, as in the 1990 feminist theory anthology Language in Her Eye (ed. Libby Scheier et al.) or the parallel arguments about “racialization” and “race writing” (see Philip, Frontiers, and Miki, Broken Entries). Her repeated uses of the term “ideology”—on almost every page—were pointing toward a new attention about to be given to the roles of ideology and institutional structures in the creation, distribution, preservation, and evaluation of literary texts. As with the move toward postmodernism through phenomenology, she suggested, writers were playing at least as significant a role in these moves toward deconstruction and the revealing of ideological commitments as were critics. She cited as examples

26    Reflections on the Discipline bpNichol’s The Martyrology for its assertions and enactments of concurrent yet contradictory truths, and Steve McCaffery’s 1977 essay “The Death of the Subject” for offering a “model for criticism that will be a deferral of meaning, ceaseless movement of interpretation”—one valuable in itself rather than as “applied criticism” (42). She cited also Kroetsch’s 1980 “The Exploding Porcupine” for its readings of undecidability and self-contradiction in canonical novels by Sinclair Ross, Rudy Wiebe, Sheila Watson, Michael Ondaatje, Audrey Thomas, and Jack Hodgins, and Stephen Scobie’s 1984 bpNichol: What History Teaches for tracing “heterogeneity, self-contradiction and différance” throughout Nichol’s writing (“Structuralism” 41–44). But she noted the absence to date of cultural studies approaches in Canadian criticism and the unused availability of Foucault’s work on “the historical dimension in textual production,” and suggested that the Derridean approach to ideology through treating “tropes and rhetoric as performative words to be interrogated … has so far proved more engaging” (45). Globally, she noted, the “discourse” (adding a footnote to explain that term) of criticism was now shifting to one that examined the circumstances of its own “production, reproduction and reception” (27)—that is, the literary institution. Those instrumental in moving Canadian literary studies toward attending to such institutional/ideological determinants would be not the writers and critics whose engagements with structuralism, phenomenology, and deconstruction were being highlighted here by Godard, but the members of a research team already organized the previous year by Milan Dimić, chair of Comparative Literature at the University of Alberta, as the Research Institute for Comparative Literature, and its conference series “Towards a History of the Literary Institution in Canada” (HOLIC). This was the largest Canadian literature undertaking since Klinck’s Literary History, comprising a proposed 10 bilingual conferences, one each on 10 topics:  Literary Reception; Funding, Publishing, and Distribution; Prefaces and Literary Manifestoes; Literatures of Lesser Diffusion; Literary Genres; Women’s Writing and the Literary Institution; Native Oral Traditions; Literary Translation; Paraliterature; and Canonization—each to be accompanied by a published proceedings. The team’s ultimate goal was to create and publish a history of the literary institution in Canada, a goal that Dimić abandoned in the early 1990s when the university downsized his Comparative Literature department into a program, provoking him to quietly devote his research to more prestigious international projects.7 Though only the first six conferences were held and their proceedings published, in that four-year period, 1986–90, they were attended by senior francophone scholars from Quebec, where the study of the literary institution was well advanced, and by various senior anglophone scholars, many of whom participated in more than one conference. The project favoured the understandings of “institution” established by Itamar Even-Zohar (who attended the first conference), Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Dubois, and Jürgen Habermas—as a word that denoted social practices and forms of organization as well as specific organizations such as councils, foundations, agencies, industries, awards, associations, and schools. Most current work by Canadianists on institutional literary formations and practices is at least indirectly indebted to HOLIC’s dissemination of that understanding, and on the production of research that its bilingual

Constructing “Canadian Literature”    27 cross-disciplinary conferences encouraged. Among the anglophone scholars who regularly contributed, E.D. Blodgett later published Five-Part Invention: A History of Literary History in Canada (2003), and Carole Gerson co-edited the third volume of the History of the Book in Canada (2007) and published Canadian Women in Print 1750–1918 (2010). HOLIC established a much more formidable and systematic alternative to Frye’s understanding of the literary and to thematic criticism than postmodernism and deconstruction could offer—a systematicity alien to both. In place of Frye’s viewing of both literature and culture as transcendent systems, HOLIC assumed them to be socially constructed multiples whose values and “standards” varied according to the wealth, priorities, and ideological commitments of the participants; in turn, these factors marked the discourses and genres preferred and images deployed within particular systems. “What is literature?” was a contestable question that could have different answers for different generational, regional, class, race, ethnicity, gender, or sexuality constituencies within a culture. Difference, after Derrida, was no longer a binary choice, as it had been to Saussure, but a multiply relative and unfixable position among a potentially changing array of variables. Differences did not merely create cheerful disagreements but had, as Bourdieu was proposing, material consequences in terms of careers, employment, and health, as well as in terms of the ideas that could receive prominent cultural dissemination. Literature was not a genteel discussion among genially aging men, as a reader of the Literary History might have concluded, but a power struggle among self-constructed constituencies attempting to be read, heard, or acknowledged—and sometimes to prevent others from being read and acknowledged. To some extent the new Canadian interest in institutions that began with HOLIC has evolved into a version of British cultural studies, with its favouring of analyses of class and power relations, and its implicit goal of creating a more just society, as in Daniel Coleman’s White Civility (2006), Lorraine York’s Literary Celebrity in Canada (2007), D.M.R. Bentley’s The Gay]Grey Moose (1992), and my own Canadian Literary Power (1994). HOLIC may also have contributed to Robert Lecker’s concerns about canonicity (Canadian Canons: Essays in Literary Value [1991]), which was to have been the subject of the tenth and final conference.

Multicultural Canadian Multicultural Literature The HOLIC conferences, with their dissemination of constructionist understandings of culture, appear as well to have had a decisive impact on the reception of multiculturalism as a Canadian literary concept. The conferences occurred against a background of contentious cultural legislation. The federal government’s “redress” bill, granting an apology and compensation to Canadians of Japanese origin who were interned during World War II, was signed into law on 22 September 1988, the year that the proceedings of the first HOLIC conference were published. The government’s Multiculturalism

28    Reflections on the Discipline Act, which offered definitions and programs to those of non-British, non-French, and non–First Nations ancestry, was signed on 21 July 1988. Criticism of the Act almost immediately focused on its conception of such cultures as static and folkloric, rather than as sites of cultural production, and on how its provisions favoured preservation over creation—thus echoing HOLIC’s views of culture as social process and legislation as a culture-shaping institution. One measure of how quickly the discussions of multiculturalism became informed by the topics raised at HOLIC is the 1991 “Interventing the Text” conference at the University of Calgary, a conference organized by Susan Rudy Dorscht, Ashok Mathur, and Fred Wah to investigate how the interventions of institutional agents—editors, interviewers, anthologists, publishers, universities, magazines, publishing houses, the law, and pedagogical practice—could shape the “critical reception of language as text” (6). At least six of the presenters had attended the HOLIC series. One of them, Janice Williamson, who had co-edited a HOLIC volume, presented a paper on her interview anthology then in process, Sounding Differences (1993), and on how she had somewhat unexpectedly found it engaging questions of race. Roy Miki presented a paper on magazine editing, and to the proceedings added a poem on the Japanese-Canadian “redress settlement.” Ashok Mathur convened a panel on “marginalized voice” and participated with Aruna Srivastava in a dialogue on the “appropriation” of First Nations cultural materials, while Smaro Kamboureli presented a paper, largely about the Multiculturalism Act, titled “The Technology of Ethnicity: Law and Discourse.” At the conference’s close, participants who could claim on some ground to be “marginalized” Canadians were invited to the stage, which soon could hardly contain the numbers—including many of the presenters and organizers—who were attempting to gather there. The invitation indicated how quickly the study of institutional practice was merging with that of more public social issues—as well as how urgently the conference’s simple binary of centre/margin was in need of differential analysis. Moreover, in Bourdieu’s terms, there was cultural capital at stake in being on stage in that concluding scene, in ways not always easy to determine (Rules 156–57). The scene also showed how a conference—or paper—on institutionality could not itself get outside the institutional processes it was studying. Multiculturalism and how multicultural Canadian cultural productions should be received had become national issues within months of the Multiculturalism Act’s passage. Writers gathering together as “writers of colour” had requested substantial representation at the 1989 PEN International meetings in Toronto as partial compensation for decades of exclusion from Canadian literary culture; their protests circulated across the country in the national media. PEN itself offered 6 percent representation because that, it suggested, was the “colour” proportion of the Canadian population. In 1990 large numbers of anglophone-Canadian artists, calling themselves the “Common Agenda for the Arts,” had taken out national advertisements to oppose the proposed Charlottetown Accord on the Canadian Constitution on the grounds that it would “devolve” responsibility for arts policy from the federal government to the provinces, which might unevenly protect the interests of ethnic, racial, gender, and sexual constituencies. The

Constructing “Canadian Literature”    29 “Common Agenda” artists preferred to work under a single national set of arts policies than to have to lobby each province separately for appropriate funding and protections. In early 1991, Joyce Zemans, chair of the Canada Council, observed to a Globe and Mail reporter that the Council now “must continue to talk the language of excellence and quality, but always in the context of where the artist lives” (Drainie C3)—raising the possibility that artists in different regions could be judged by differing “national” criteria. In 1992 she announced that Council juries were going to be “sensitive” to issues of “cultural appropriation” and when necessary require “collaboration with minority groups” (Godfrey C1). The Globe received so many letters from offended readers that it published them the next weekend as a featured block. In 1994 the Council’s award of $10,000 to the “Writing Thru Race” conference, a conference partly organized by a subcommittee of the Writers Union of Canada, at which the daytime sessions were to be open to only non-White writers, was protested by both conservative politicians and various writers barred from attending those sessions as an abetting of racial separation. While the Council defended and sustained its award, funding of $22,500 by government-controlled Heritage Canada was rescinded on instructions by the Minister, Liberal Member of Parliament Michel Dupuy (see Miki, Broken 144–59). Once again, the Globe and Mail published numerous letters that displayed the intensity of the views of both the conference’s proponents and critics. Multiculturalism was becoming understood by Canadians to contain most of the issues raised as “marginalizing” at “Interventing the Text”—gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race, indigeneity (although First Nations people are specifically excluded from the Act)—and to be an institution that interacted with other institutions (e.g., PEN, the Writers Union, the Canada Council, Canadian constitutional reform). Multiculturalism also very quickly became the site of much of the public discussion of poststructuralist theory—much like debate over poststructuralism in the United States had become conflated with the so-called “culture wars.” Paradoxically, in the academy, thematic criticism was making a quiet disguised return, as many scholars, in the United States (see Sollors) as well as in Canada, were becoming interested in who was newly writing, what social constituency they had emerged from, how they depicted these constituencies, and what social questions they raised in their texts, and were often forgetting that language, both literary and institutional, is much less a mediation of “reality” or “life” than a means of producing it. “Writing is not a thin film of expendable substitutions that, when reading, falls away like scales to reveal a meaning” (A Poetics 86–87), Charles Bernstein would be moved to protest in “Artifice of Absorption,” a paper he delivered at Simon Fraser University in 1986 and published in the United States in 1987 and 1992. Much as David L. Clark had detected thematicism and “thematic cataloguing” (62) returning to haunt such Robert Kroetsch essays as “Disunity as Unity: A Canadian Strategy” and “Unhiding the Hidden,” the ghost of thematic criticism could also be detected in emerging Canadian postcolonial criticism that, as Stephen Slemon observed in 2003, necessarily placed “a sustained challenge to the dominant in contemporary distributions of valuation and power” (321) near the top of its priorities.

30    Reflections on the Discipline

Canadian Literature Postcolonial There are a number of reasons that “postcoloniality” became a part of the vocabulary of Canadian literature studies so quickly after “institution” and “multiculturalism.” The most obvious is that all three terms are concerned with differential access to power and with struggles for power. A second is that Canada is a creation mostly of immigrants, many of whom fled violences caused by colonization—whether fleeing Scotland or the new American republic in the eighteenth century, Ireland in the nineteenth, or the Ukraine, Hungary, Vietnam, Palestine, or Sri Lanka in the twentieth. A third is that in emigrating to Canada, the new arrivals created of the Indigenous population additional colonized subjects and with them various power-reflecting institutions such as treaties, reservations, residential schools, and the Indian Act. A fourth is the fear within worldwide postcolonial studies itself that it may be a time-bound discipline, one conceived amid the post–World War II decolonization struggles and likely to have only those decades as its subject—particularly when its ideologies have made it difficult for its practitioners to recognize colonizations occurring within Europe, or elsewhere by non-European peoples.8 Hybrid versions of postcolonial studies, embedded within “mainstream disciplines” such as sociology, psychology, and national literary studies, have appeared to offer a longer institutional future despite the risk they bring of reducing postcolonialism to “just another methodology in their respective disciplinary traditions” (Malreddy 669). By the beginning of the current century, much of international postcolonial studies was segueing into globalization studies (see Benhabib, Claims and Another; Gilroy; and Spivak, “Planetarity” and Aesthetic) and citizenship studies (see Canclini; Benhabib, Rights; Somers; Benhabib and Resnik; and McNevin), while in Canada many scholars associated with the field were somewhat ambiguously transforming themselves into Canadianists, thus not only claiming a place in an arguably more stable field but also a role in a general “undisciplining” of traditional fields which has been seeing some North American and British universities—usually as much for economic reasons as pedagogical ones—rolling traditional departments into super-departments of “literature,” “English and related literature,” “critical studies,” “interdisciplinary studies,” or “literary studies.” This shift was in sharp contrast to how postcolonialism’s precursor, Commonwealth Literature, had remained a separate field beside rather than inside Canadian literary studies, even in cases where both were studied and taught by the same scholar. Over the past two decades there has also developed a visible struggle among cultural-studies Canadianists and postcolonialist Canadianists for control of the terms through which Canadian writing is read and discussed. Canadianist work inflected by cultural studies has aimed to alter society by increasing the social awareness of how meanings are constructed, how popular culture is increasingly shaped or created by the privileged and powerful, how social customs can help maintain injustice, and how the

Constructing “Canadian Literature”    31 formation of new institutions, and the waning of older ones, can shape literary and other judgments. Recent cultural studies approaches to Canadian literature, such as Blodgett’s Five-Part Invention: A History of Literary History in Canada (2003), Henderson’s Settler Feminism and Race Making in Canada (2003), and Coleman’s White Civility:  The Literary Project of English Canada (2006), assume that the laying out of evidence of rhetorical bias can de-naturalize what has been assumed as natural or delegitimize what has been assumed as reasonable. This work has usually considered Canadian writing from the eighteenth century onward and has been addressed mainly to literary specialists. It has portrayed the Canadian nation-state as a contested, conflicted, and contradictory space, but has assumed that state’s necessity for a Canadian literary field. As Godard had elaborated in 1992: An interest in post-modernism or theory or romantic poetry is not axiomatic in, nor productive of, an interest in Canadian literature. Without some form of nationalism (national difference, that is) the textual system of the Literary would not overlap with the textual system of the Canadian. Nationalism is the political imperative overdetermining this intersection. (“Canadian?” 9)

The postcolonial studies approach has been wider, addressing an audience interested in both literature and the politics of indigeneity, migration, transnationalism, and globalization. Sometimes influenced by post-Marxist philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (Empire and Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire), it has frequently looked forward to the diminishing, or the eliminating, of the power of nation-states, as in Kit Dobson’s Transnational Canadas: Anglo-Canadian Literature and Globalization (2009)—a development which, as Godard suggested, could terminate the recognition of “Canadian” literature. When Diana Brydon offers qualified approval of Hardt and Negri’s call for “access to global citizenship to all,” she worries about its potential conflict with Indigenous desires for “cultural integration and cohesion” (“Canada” 67), but not about its possible effects on what is currently conceived as Canadian culture and literature. Postcolonialism has emphasized ethics more than it has literature; to think postcolonially, Brydon has written, is “to imagine a more socially equitable future” (“Canada” 50); postcolonialism’s goal is “to encourage citizens desirous and capable of creating a better world” (“Cross-Talk” 64). It has portrayed Canada as a fortuitously “unravelling” nation-state (Miki, “Globalization” 96)—a state in a “crisis” that only postcolonial analysis can identify and help resolve (90, 94).9 It has focused on redress for past wrongs—on reading previously ignored texts by non-White or gay authors, on reading recent texts by such authors differently from how texts by other writers have usually been read—on “reading with respect,” as Susan Gingell has written (107). It also has aimed to foreground gay and Aboriginal critiques of dominant cultures. Its arguments for social justice have been so strongly expressed that dissenting critics can be hesitant about stating their positions. Offering a minor dissent at a 2002 Canadian conference on postcolonialism and pedagogy by arguing for the nation-state to be retained as a postcolonial

32    Reflections on the Discipline literary category, Donna Palmateer Pennee amusingly made fun of herself as “Pollyanna Pennee” (“Literary” 81) and then came close to apologizing for making the proposal when she recurrently called the national “not negligible” (79, 83). Another Canadian postcolonial critic, Gary Boire, phrased this problem within postcolonialism as “You are either with us (as postcolonialists) or against us (as fossilized academic detritus). The question … is how to de-totalize this naive binary: how to decolonize the colonizing drive of postcolonial theory itself ” (232). The didacticism of postcolonial studies has been so strong in Canada that even Brydon found it necessary to declare as early as 1990 that “[p]‌ostcolonial reading strategies confer neither moral superiority nor inferiority on either the critic or the subject matter” (“Reading” 171). Another limitation has been the presentism of its interests. Most of its major collections—Laura Moss’s Is Canada Postcolonial (2003), Cynthia Sugars’s Unhomely States:  Theorizing English-Canadian Postcolonialism (2004), Smaro Kamboureli and Roy Miki’s Trans.Can.Lit (2007), Christine Kim et  al.’s Cultural Grammars of Nation (2012), and Brydon and Marta Dvořák’s Crosstalk:  Canadian and Global Imaginaries in Dialogue (2012)—make only a handful of references to pre-1970 writing. Even when making generalizations about the entire literature, the critics may seem to be referencing only the last five or six decades of publication. Underlying the various debates about the relevance of postcolonialism have again been Frye’s distinctions between everyday “Canadian life,” now largely understood as social justice concerns, and “autonomous” Western literature, now most cogently expressed by postcolonialism’s most severe critics as the constructed but irreducible physicality and linguistic specificity of literary structures. Also evident have been echoes of the 1990s canonicity debates, with most parties questioning, as at the 2005 TransCanada conference, what should be understood as “Canadian literature” itself.10 Visibly at dispute also has been whether canonicity is a presentist or enduring textual attribute—whether the currency of the issues a text raises or the manner of how it raises them, or even the manner of how it avoids raising issues, should be the most important determinant. In both North of Intention (1986) and Prior to Meaning: The Protosemantic and Poetics (2001), Steve McCaffery has argued that less critical attention should be given to the apparently intentional meanings of poetic texts and more to “the noncommunicative functions of reading, speech, and writing” (Prior xvi). Hunter, writing descriptively rather than prescriptively, had theorized in 1996 that “canons are made up of works which address issues perceived to be relevant, in a generic mode appropriate to their status,” and that “the more relevant the issue the less appropriate the status need be”—noting that in the current period in Canada “a short story … may be canonized not because it is well written within a high-status mode but because it discusses an Aboriginal community or child abuse” (19). Christian Bök at the 2005 TransCanada conference argued that much of the new attention to writing that is critically “constructed along issues of colour, gender etc.” repeats Canadian literature’s historic interest in victims and victimhood, as in Atwood’s Survival (1972), and accused Canadian postcolonial critics of being “humanists” who prefer easily “teachable texts” that invite the construction

Constructing “Canadian Literature”    33 of “varied [new] models of victimhood, with their attendant themes of finding an authentic voice and telling a neglected story.” Bök’s argument imprecisely echoes the 1996 anti-multiculturalism arguments of Timothy Findley that artists should be judged as individuals, rather than as members of groups—that each writer should be only “a nation of one” (20).11 However, both writers, in their apparent concern to protect their own claims to canonicity, may have been picking the wrong fight. For the canon being constructed by Canadian postcolonialism has to date had limited influence on the introductory English-Canadian teaching canon currently shaped, according to Lecker (Keepers 332–38), by multinational publishers, high book-production costs, cautiously compromising editors, and the preferences of unadventurous instructors. Such material factors may be among, in Kamboureli’s words, “the institutional limits of Canadian postcolonial practice” (Making xiv). Signs in Canada of multinational postcolonialism’s metamorphosis into varieties of globalization studies and citizenship studies have only very recently appeared: Dobson’s Transnational Canadas (2009), Siemerling and Casteel’s collection Canada and Its Americas:  Transnational Navigations (2010), and Kim, McCall, and Singer’s Cultural Grammars of Nation: Diaspora and Indigeneity in Canada (2012). These have tended to focus on reading specific texts rather than examining institutional issues, and so have to date left unexamined the growing phenomenon of ambiguous citizenship and readerships. Various noted Canadian writers—Nancy Huston, Steve McCaffery, Alan Davies, Anne Carson, Dionne Brand, Gail Scott, Yann Martel, and Lisa Robertson among them—now have significantly larger readerships and/or more positive critical reception outside Canada than within. In some cases, this has been produced by complicated citizenships and expatriation, in some by membership in newly transnational communities, in some by a preference for the readerships of non-Canadian publishers. In many, it may have also been at least partly produced by the preoccupations and institutional structures of Canadian literary criticism.

Endings This unruly array of factors also suggests that there can be no definitive ending to my narrative, only a succession of critics, editors, and publishers with conflicting ideologies and slowly or more rapidly evolving canons, plus a new wild card—digital canons. There is no evidence of an autonomous world of literature, either here or persuasively evoked from elsewhere, to offer closure. The conflicts continue, the issues change, the attentions of critics migrate unpredictably, crises are tactically announced and soon conveniently forgotten. Globally, migrancy and citizenship ambiguities are likely to increase and potentially further empty “diasporic” of its meaning. But the nation-state will continue, at least until transnational institutions of democratic governance are created and accepted. And at least until then, the one true Canadian canon will be neither made nor found, nor will the claims to have found it cease.

34    Reflections on the Discipline

Notes 1. Almost all of the editors and critics of these series had been contributors to Canadian Literature. The New Canadian Library’s Canadian Writers series began under the editorship of Dave Godfrey with 64-page monographs on Marshall McLuhan and E.J. Pratt by Dennis Duffy and Milton Wilson, respectively. Copp Clark’s series Studies in Canadian Literature, under the editorship of Hugo McPherson and Gary Geddes, began with a 130page study of Brian Moore by Hallvard Dahlie. The first release of the short-lived Ryerson Press series, Critical Views on Canadian Writers, edited by Michael Gnarowski, was David Pitt’s 154-page study of E.J. Pratt. The similarly short-lived Forum House series Canadian Writers and their Works, edited by Globe and Mail columnist William French, began with an 83-page study of Hugh MacLennan by Peter Buitenhuis. 2. See Chapter 45 on Canadian feminist criticism by Cecily Devereux in this volume. 3. The belief that Canadian literature might not be “literary” strongly influenced the early years of university-level Canadian literature teaching. There were very few academics in the 1950s or 1960s who had specialized in Canadian literature at the doctoral level; for most who taught the subject, it was an interest secondary to an English- or American-literature specialization—much as it had been for the contributors to Klinck’s Literary History. Early specialists, such as York University’s Clara Thomas, would condemn the view of many department chairs that “anyone” could teach Canadian literature. 4. Regarding Frye’s “Conclusion,” Barbara Godard commented, “ ‘Canadian Literature’ is a contradiction in terms, for to be acknowledged as good, as ‘Literature,’ Canadians must follow the norms of writing in England. To be recognized as true, as authentically ‘Canadian,’ they must break these norms by writing ‘differently’ ” (“Canadian?” 7). Blodgett in 2003 made roughly the same argument when he wrote that Frye placed Canadian literature in a “double bind: there is no Canadian literature because its writing possesses primarily a sociological value and because its literature”—since the forms of literature are autonomous—“has no national specificity” (121). Recently critics Les Monkman and Lily Cho have separately ascribed Frye’s perception and its continued valency to what Cho calls “a provincializing Anglo-American curriculum” (187), which has to a large extent awarded itself a monopoly on global understandings of what is “literature.” 5. Kroetsch’s high-profile assertion, made as the opening sentence of the “Canadian Issue” of a major avant-garde American journal, in one gesture had appeared to render nameless, and possibly historically inconsequential, three decades of Canadian writing, while simultaneously awarding the postmodern in Canada a historical standing equivalent to the Victorian. The assertion was simultaneously both questionable and memorable, a jest that might mischievously, and permanently, slander Canadian writing from Pratt to Layton, from Callaghan to Wiseman:  “Canadian literature evolved directly from Victorian into Postmodern. Morley Callaghan went to Paris and met the Modern writers; he, for Canada, experienced the real and symbolic encounter; he, heroically and successfully, resisted” (1). Moreover, the jest carried an element of truth. There were indeed no parallels in Canadian writing to the major international works of Modernism—no Remembrance of Things Past, no Ulysses, no The Waste Land, no A, no Dadaism, no The Waves, no Ubu Roi, no Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, no The Cantos, no As I Lay Dying, no Malone Dies, and little evidence in Canadian journals or elsewhere that writers here had ever seriously read such works. Kroetsch’s next mischievous sentence, however, suggested that Callaghan’s resistance may have also yielded early and unlikely “postmodern”

Constructing “Canadian Literature”    35 benefits: “The country that invented Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye did so by not ever being Modern.” 6. Canadian alternative art galleries were, and still are, operated mostly by visual and conceptual artists, many committed to the dematerialization of visual art. Vancouver’s Mr. Peanut (Vincent Trasov) and Anna Banana (Anne Long) were best known for their semi-satirical performances in brand-name costumes; visual and performance artist Gathie Falk is known for both her paintings and ceramic sculptures and her performances of mundane actions such as reading a book, eating an egg, or washing clothes. In Toronto, The Clichettes (Louise Garfield, Johanna Householder, and Janice Hladki) were known for satiric lip-synch miming of mainstream female vocal ensembles, and General Idea (Felix Partz, Jorge Zontal, and AA Bronson) for File, their parody of Life magazine, their parodic beauty pageants, and creation of brief fumetti or photonovels. 7. See Gerald Gillespie, “In Memoriam Milan V. Dimić (1933–2007).” CLC Web: Comparative Literature and Culture. 1 Mar. 2009. http://www.thefreelibrary.com/In+memoriam+ Milan+V.+Dimic+%281933-2007%29.-a0204861622. The university’s termination of Comparative Literature’s departmental status had been precipitated by a Province of Alberta directive to the university to make more efficient use of its resources. Ironically, such institutional actions and their consequences were among those the ill-fated HOLIC project was studying. 8. See Hjartarson (103), Brydon (“Canada” 73), Slemon (147–48), and Lawson (152–53) for discussions of the current instability of postcolonial studies as a field. 9. Characterizing Canadian literature as being in “crisis” has become something of a Canadian critical tradition in the past 40 years. Miki here was following at the very least Frye, Mandel, Godard, and Lecker. Frye, in 1976 in his “Conclusion” to the second edition of the Literary History, had suggested that “the trends I noted in the previous conclusion have reached something of a crisis since then” (318); Mandel, in his 1985 review of the 1983 Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, lamented how much of it seemed “stammering and stuttering … incoherent” and immediately quoted Frye’s “crisis” observation; Godard, in her 1985 “Epi(pro)logue” to the Long-liners Conference, described Canadian criticism as caught in “a crisis of paradigms” (303); and Lecker, in his third canonicity fusillade, lamented that “identity politics” may be leading “to anarchy or at least a kind of radicalized self-consciously ideological narcissism” (“A Country without a Canon” 13). 10. See the selected proceedings of the conference in Kamboureli and Miki, Trans.Can. Lit: Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature. 11. See also my poem “Italian Multiculturalism” in Cultural Mischief (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1996: 75–85) in which I quote Findley’s remarks at a 1994 conference near Venice in some detail, including his announcement that “we” must each be “a nation of one” and his claim that “minority group protests, like Naziism, are an enemy of good writing.” The claim echoed his remarks in a letter that the Globe and Mail published on 28 March 1992.

Works Cited Atwood, Margaret. Survival:  A  Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. Toronto:  Anansi, 1972. Print. Bennett, Donna, and Russell Brown, eds. Canadian Literature in English. 2 vols. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1982. Print.

36    Reflections on the Discipline Benhabib, Seyla. Another Cosmopolitanism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. Print. ———. The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era. Princeton. NJ: Princeton UP, 2002. Print. ———. The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. Print. Benhabib, Seyla, and Judith Resnik, eds. Migrations and Mobilities: Citizenship, Borders, and Gender. New York: New York UP, 2009. Print. Bentley, D.M.R. The [Gay]Grey Moose: Essays on the Ecologies and Mythologies of Canadian Poetry, 1690–1990. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 1992. Print. Bernstein, Charles. “Artifice of Absorption.” Paper presented at the New Poetics Colloquium, Simon Fraser University, 25 August 1985. Paper Air 4.1 (1987): n.pag. Print. [Rev. and republished in A Poetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992. 72–89.] Blodgett, E.D. Five-Part Invention:  A  History of Literary History in Canada. Toronto:  U of Toronto P, 2003. Print. Boire, Gary. “How Long Is Your Sentence?” Sugars, Home-Work 229–44. Bök, Christian. “En Garde (For Thee).” Paper presented for discussion at the TransCanada conference, Simon Fraser University, 25 June 2005. http://www.transcanadas.ca/transcanada1/ bok.shtml#proposal. Web. Accessed 3 Aug. 2007. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Trans. Susan Emanuel. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996. Print. Bowering, George. “bpNichol on the Train.” bpNichol festschrift. Spec. issue of Open Letter 6.5–6 (Summer–Fall 1986): 7–20. Print. ———. “Stone Hammer Narrative.” Long-liners Conference. Spec. issue of Open Letter 6.2–3 (Summer–Fall 1985): 131–44. Print. Brydon, Diana. “Canada and Postcolonialism: Questions, Inventories, and Futures.” Moss, Is Canada Postcolonial? 49–77. ———. “Cross-Talk, Postcolonial Pedagogy, and Transnational Literacy.” Sugars, Home-Work 57–74. ———. “Reading Postcoloniality, Reading Canada.” Essays on Canadian Writing 56 (1995): 1–19. Rpt. Sugars, Unhomely 165–79. ———. “Surviving the Paraphrase: Poetics and Public Culture in Canada.” Studies in Canadian Literature 32.2 (2007): 7–27. Print. Brydon, Diana, and Marta Dvořák, eds. Crosstalk:  Canadian and Global Imaginaries in Dialogue. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2012. Print. Cameron, Barry, and Michael Dixon. “Mandatory Subversive Manifesto: Canadian Criticism vs. Literary Criticism.” Studies in Canadian Literature 2.2 (1977): 137–45. Print. Canclini, Nestor Garcia. Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts. Trans. George Yudice. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001. Print. Cho, Lily. “Dreaming through Disenchantment:  Reappraising Canadian and Postcolonial Literary Studies.” English Studies in Canada 31.4 (2005): 177–95. Print. Clark, David L. “Forget Heidegger; or, Why I Am Such a Clever Postmodernist.” Canadian Poetry 29 (1991): 59–70. Print. Coleman, Daniel. White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2006. Print. Davey, Frank. Canadian Literary Power. Edmonton: NeWest, 1994. Print. ———. Reading Canadian Reading. Winnipeg: Turnstone, 1988. Print. ———. Surviving the Paraphrase. Winnipeg: Turnstone, 1983. Print.

Constructing “Canadian Literature”    37 Dobson, Kit. Transnational Canadas: Anglo-Canadian Literature and Globalization. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2009. Print. Dorscht, Susan Rudy, Ashok Mathur, and Fred Wah, eds. Interventing the Text. Proceedings from The Calgary Conference, May 1991. Open Letter 8.5–6 (1993). Print. Drainie, Bronwyn. “Making a Case for the Reinvention of the Canada Council.” Globe and Mail 16 Feb. 1991: C3. Print. Edwards, Mary Jane, ed. The Evolution of Canadian Literature in English. 4 vols. Toronto: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1973. Print. Findley, Timothy. Letter to the Editor. Globe and Mail 28 Mar. 1992: D7. Print. ———. “A Nation of One.” Memoria e Sogno: Quale Canada Domani? Ed. Guilio Marra, Anne de Vaucher, and Alesssandro Gebbia. Rome: Supernova, 1996. Print. Frye, Northrop. “Conclusion.” Literary History of Canada. Ed. Carl F. Klinck. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1965. 821–49. Print. ———. “Conclusion.” Literary History of Canada. 2nd ed. Vol. 3. Ed. Carl F. Klinck. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1976. 318–32. Print. Gerson, Carole. Canadian Women in Print, 1750–1918. Waterloo, ON:  Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2010. Print. Gerson, Carole, and Jacques Michon, eds. The History of the Book in Canada: Volume Three: 1918–1980. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2007. Print. Gilroy, Paul. After Empire: Postcolonial Melancholia or Convivial Culture? London: Routledge, 2004. Print. Gingell, Susan. “The Absence of Seaming, Or How I  Almost Despair of Dancing:  How Postcolonial Are Canada’s Literary Institutions and Critical Practices.” Moss, Is Canada Postcolonial 97–110. Godard, Barbara. “Canadian? Literary? Theory?” Open Letter 8.3 (1992): 5–27. Print. ———, ed. Gynocritics/La Gynocritique: Feminist Approaches to Canadian and Quebec Women’s Writing. Toronto: ECW P, 1988. Print. ———. “Epi(pro)logue: In Pursuit of the Long Poem.” Open Letter 6.2–3 (1985): 301–35. Print. ———. “Structuralism/Post-Structuralism: Language, Reality and Canadian Literature.” John Moss, Future Indicative 25–51. Godfrey, Stephen. “Canada Council Asks Whose Voice Is It Anyway.” Globe and Mail 21 Mar. 1992: C1, C15. Print. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2000. Print. ———. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin, 2004. Print. Henderson, Jennifer. Settler Feminism and Race Making in Canada. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2003. Print. Hjartarson, Paul. “Culture and the Global State: Postcolonialism, Pedagogy, and the Canadian Literatures.” Sugars, Home-Work 101–16. Hunter, Lynette. Outsider Notes: Feminist Approaches to Nation State Ideology, Writers/Readers and Publishing. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1996. Print. ———. “The Puppeteer: Being Wedded to the Text.” Kroetsch at Niederbronn. Spec. issue of Open Letter 9.5–6 (Spring-Summer 1996): 199–218. Print. Hutcheon, Linda. The Canadian Postmodern:  A  Study of Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1988. Print. Jones, D.G. Butterfly on Rock: A Study of Themes and Images in Canadian Literature. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1970. Print.

38    Reflections on the Discipline Kamboureli, Smaro. “ ‘Frank Davey’ and the Method of Cool.” Studies in Canadian Literature 32.2 (2007): 203–26. Print. ———, ed. Making a Difference. 2nd ed. Toronto: Oxford UP, 2007. Print. Kamboureli, Smaro, and Roy Miki, eds. Trans.Can.Lit:  Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2007. Print. Kim, Christine, Sophie McCall, and Melina Baum Singer, eds. Cultural Grammars of Nation, Diaspora, and Indigeneity in Canada. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2012. Print. Klinck, Carl F. Giving Canada a Literary History. Ottawa: Carleton UP, 1991. Print. ———, ed. Literary History of Canada. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1965. Print. Klinck, Carl, and Reginald Watters, eds. Canadian Anthology. Toronto: Gage, 1965. Print. Kroetsch, Robert. “A Canadian Issue.” boundary 2 2.2 (1974): 1–2. Print. ———. “Disunity as Unity: A Canadian Strategy.” Lovely Treachery 21–33. ———. “The Exploding Porcupine.” Lovely Treachery 108–16. ———. “For Play and Entrance: The Contemporary Canadian Long Poem.” Lovely Treachery 117–34. ———. The Lovely Treachery of Words: Essays Selected and New. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1989. Print. ———. “Unhiding the Hidden.” Lovely Treachery 58–63. Lawson, Alan. “Postcolonial Theory and the ‘Settler’ Subject.” Sugars, Unhomely States 151–64. Lecker, Robert. Canadian Canons: Essays in Literary Value. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1991. Print. ———. “A Country without a Canon?: Canadian Literature and the Aesthetics of Idealism.” Mosaic 26.3 (1993): 1–19. Print. ———. Keepers of the Code: English-Canadian Literary Anthologies and the Representation of Nation. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2013. Print. Maclulich, T.D. “Thematic Criticism, Literary Nationalism, and the Critic’s New Clothes.” Essays on Canadian Writing 35 (1987): 17–36. Print. Malreddy, Pavan. “Postcolonialism:  Interdisciplinary or Interdiscursive?” Third World Quarterly 32.4 (2011): 653–72. Print. Mandel, Eli. “Review of The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, ed. William Toye.” Canadian Poetry 16 (1985): 83–86. Print. Marlatt, Daphne. Readings from the Labyrinth. Edmonton: NeWest, 1998. Print. McCaffery, Steve. “The Death of the Subject.” Open Letter 3.7 (1977): 61–77. Print. ———. North of Intention: Critical Writings 1973–1986. New York: Roof Books, 1986. Print. ———. Prior to Meaning:  The Protosemantic and Poetics. Evanston, IL:  Northwestern UP, 2001. Print. McDonald, Marci. “A New Literary Star Emerges in Canadian Letters.” Toronto Star 21 Oct. 1972: 77. Print. McLay, Catherine, ed. Canadian Literature:  The Beginnings to the 20th Century. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1974. Print. McNevin, Anne. Contesting Citizenship: Irregular Migrants and New Frontiers of the Political. New York: Columbia UP, 2011. Print. Miki, Roy. Broken Entries: Race, Subjectivity, Writing. Toronto: Mercury, 1998. Print. ———. “Globalization, (Canadian) Culture, and Critical Pedagogy:  A  Primer.” Sugars, Home-Work 87–100. Monkman, Leslie. “Canadian Literature in English ‘Among Worlds.’ ” Sugars, Home-Work 117–33. Moss, John, ed. Future Indicative:  Literary Theory and Canadian Literature. Ottawa:  U of Ottawa P, 1987. Print.

Constructing “Canadian Literature”    39 Moss, Laura, ed. Is Canada Postcolonial?:  Unsettling Canadian Literature. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2003. Print. ———. “Playing the Monster Blind? The Practical Limitations of Updating the Canadian Canon.” Canadian Literature 191 (2006): 7–11. Print. Moure, Erín. O Cidadán. Toronto: Anansi, 2002. Print. Neuman, Shirley, and Robert Wilson. Labyrinths of Voice: Conversations with Robert Kroetsch. Edmonton: NeWest, 1981. Print. Nichol, bp. “Things I Don’t Really Understand about Myself.” Long-liners Conference. Spec. issue of Open Letter 6.2–3 (1985): 152 and passim. Print. Olson, Charles. “Human Universe.” Human Universe and Other Essays. New York: Grove, 1967. 3–15. Print. Philip, M. Nourbese. Frontiers: Essays and Writings on Racism and Culture. Stratford: Mercury, 1992. Print. Potter, Laura. “A Short History of Canadian Literature.” From a Speaking Place: Writings from the First Fifty Years of Canadian Literature. Ed. W.H. New et  al. Vancouver:  Ronsdale, 2009. Print. Ricou, Laurence. Vertical Man, Horizontal World: Man and Landscape in Canadian Prairie Fiction. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 1973. Print. Scheier, Libby, Sarah Sheard, and Eleanor Wachtel, eds. Language in Her Eye:  Writing and Gender. Toronto: Coach House, 1990. Print. Scobie, Stephen. bpNichol: What History Teaches. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1984. Print. ———. “Frank Davey.” The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature. Ed. Eugene Benson and William Toye. 2nd ed. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1997. 276–77. Print. ———. “I & I: Phyllis Webb’s ‘I, Daniel.’ ” Long-liners Conference. Spec. issue of Open Letter 6.2–3 (1985): 61–68. Print. Siemerling, Winfried, and Sarah Phillips Casteel, eds. Canada and Its Americas: Transnational Navigations. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2010. Print. Slemon, Stephen. “Unsettling the Empire: Resistance Theory for the Second World.” Sugars, Unhomely States 139–50. Sollors, Werner, ed. The Return of Thematic Criticism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993. Print. Somers, Margaret R. Genealogies of Citizenship: Markets, Statelessness, and the Right to Have Rights. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008. Print. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2012. Print. ———. “Planetarity.” Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia UP, 2003. 71–102. Print. Sugars, Cynthia, ed. Home-Work:  Postcolonialism, Pedagogy, and Canadian Literature. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 2004. Print. ———, ed. Unhomely States:  Theorizing English-Canadian Postcolonialism. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2004. Print. Sutherland, Ronald. Second Image:  Comparative Studies in Québec/Canadian Literature. Toronto: new press, 1971. Print. Thomas, Clara. Our Nature—Our Voices: A Guidebook to English-Canadian Literature. Vol. 1. Toronto: new press, 1972. Print. Toronto Research Group [bpNichol and Steve McCaffery]. Canadian ”Pataphysics. Toronto: Underwhich Editions, 1981. Print. ———. Rational Geomancy: The Kids of the Book Machine. Ed. Steve McCaffery. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1992. Print.

40    Reflections on the Discipline Van Herk, Aritha. “Gazing at Coffins: A Meditation on Erectile Death, for Robert Kroetsch.” Kroetsch at Niederbronn. Spec. issue of Open Letter 9.5–6 (1996): 147–57. Print. Weir, Lorraine. “The Ethos of Censorship in English-Canadian Literature: An Ontopornosophical Approach.” Interpreting Censorship in Canada. Ed. Alan C. Hutchinson and Klaus Petersen. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1999. http://lorraineweir.files.wordpress. com/2011/08/theethosofcensorship.pdf. Web. Accessed 10 May 2015. ———. “Normalizing the Subject: Linda Hutcheon and the English-Canadian Postmodern.” Lecker, Canadian Canons 180–95. York, Lorraine. Literary Celebrity in Canada. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2007. Print.

Chapter 2

National Lit e rat u re , Canadian Cri t i c i sm, and National C ha rac t e r Adam Carter

The idea that a nation’s literature somehow expresses the national character, or as we are more likely to say today, the national identity,1 of the people inhabiting that nation has waxed and waned over the last two and a half centuries. This idea has had a trajectory in Canadian literary and social history well worth considering insofar as this course connects suggestively to wider historical patterns but also responds to some of the unique challenges of Canada’s particular history and environment. Given the complex, variegated social groups that comprise even small nations, the very idea of a single, unified national character has, at least since the eighteenth century when such reflections become more frequent, struck some commentators as little more than dubious stereotyping. “The vulgar,” writes David Hume in “Of National Characters,” an essay appearing in 1748, “are apt to carry all national characters to extremes; and having once established it as a principle, that any people are knavish, or cowardly, or ignorant, they will admit of no exception, but comprehend every individual under the same censure” (195). Yet some belief in the distinctiveness of the peoples of different nations is very much the raison d’être of nationalism and the national literatures that play such an integral role in sustaining them. As numerous pronouncements on the topic demonstrate, it is easier to critique national character (as vulgar, naïve, dangerous, etc.) than to do without it. Hume’s essay is a case in point. He goes on to represent different nationalities and ethnicities in reductive ways that will strike contemporary readers as, at best, “vulgar”: “The integrity, gravity, and bravery of the TURKS, form an exact contrast to the deceit, levity, and cowardice of the modern GREEKS,” and so on (205). Indeed, it is difficult to even conceive of a national literature that does not depend upon some idea of an underlying national identity that it expresses or reflects, even, as I will discuss, one that exists only negatively, in the sense of being negated, erased, or canceled out.

42    Reflections on the Discipline The first part of this chapter considers some of the historical background in Europe with respect to the relationship between environment and identity, the concern for national character that partly develops out of it, and the idea that a national culture, and its national literature as an essential part of it, is rightly understood as the expression of such a character. Against this background I then consider some of the efforts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to understand a Canadian literature within such a mold and the challenges that such efforts have confronted. The last part of the chapter considers some of the efforts to break the constraining mold and answer the challenges posed to Canadian identity by asserting that Canada has no identity, or only an ironic sense of identity, or an identity whose very meaning is multiplicity or heterogeneity. Although sometimes predicated as relatively recent postmodern, postcolonial, or postnational insights into national identity, I suggest that such assertions themselves have a lengthy history in the discourse on national character, that they can be seen as structurally inherent within it, and as serving nationalism’s ends rather than signaling its end.

Climate, Culture, and Character The belief in a formative relationship between human character and physical environment is ancient and persistent. As J.W. Johnson argued more than half a century ago, it stretches from primordial myths concerning the autochthonous origins of humankind to the latest developments in the Darwinian theory of evolution (465–70). And if humanity springs from the soil, then the climatic conditions for its growth become key considerations. The division of the earth into various climatic zones, believed to wield profound effects on the character, intelligence, sexuality, language, military prowess, customs, and governments of the humans inhabiting such zones, can likewise be traced back to the ancients. While various ancient Greeks such as Poseidonius, Polybius, Strabo, and Diodorus Siculus divided the world into differing numbers of geographical zones and provided colourful reflections on the effects of such climates on plants and animals, the “kernel of all ‘climatanthropological’ thought,” Johnson suggests, “is contained in [the ancient Roman] Pliny’s succinct summary” (472) in his Natural History: it is beyond question that the Aethiopians are burnt by the heat of the heavenly body near them and are born with a scorched appearance, with curly beard and hair, and that in the opposite region of the world the races have white frosty skins, with yellow hair that hangs straight; while the latter are fierce owing to the rigidity of their climate but the former wise because of the mobility of theirs. … in both regions men’s stature is high, owing in the former to the pressure of the fires and in the latter to the nourishing effect of the damp; whereas in the middle of the earth [the central zone], owing to a healthy blending of both elements, there are tracts

National Literature, Canadian Criticism, and National Character     43 that are fertile for all sorts of produce, and men are of medium bodily stature, with a marked blending even in the matter of complexion; customs are gentle, senses elastic, intellects fertile and able to grasp the whole of nature; and they also have governments, which the outer races never have possessed, any more than they have ever been subject to the central races, being quite detached and solitary on account of the savagery of the nature that broods over those regions. (qtd. in Johnson 472)

Insofar as Pliny situates his own Mediterranean region in the middle of two other climatic zones represented as undesirable polarities, and represents his people as benefiting immensely in terms of health, intellect, manners, and government from the “marked blending” provided by this more moderate middle ground, this “kernel of all climatanthropological’ thought” anticipates the dialectical structure of many later assertions of “national character.” Developing out of such theories of climate and character, the classical period left a legacy of more regionally and ethnically focused stereotypes. The legacy was influential enough that Isidore of Seville, a figure spanning the end of antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages, “was able to state them with encyclopedia terseness: Romans (seriousness), Greeks (levity), Africans (craft), Gauls (ferocity) and so forth” (Johnson 478). In the following centuries such stereotypes were “transmitted by medieval and Renaissance collections of epithets and proverbs” (Richards 147). John Gailhard’s The Compleat Gentleman of 1678 provided characteristics of different national peoples for the benefit of gentlemen travelers. To quote just a portion of this taxonomy is to indicate that such reductive terseness continued to be transmitted, although not always with the same allocations of character. In Behaviour. French courteous. Spaniard lordly. Italian amorous. German clownish. In Conversation The French jovial. Spaniard troublesome. Italian complying. German unpleasant.  (qtd. in Hayman 4)

In the eighteenth century, a discourse on a yet more specifically and explicitly “national” character (although not always coinciding with our more contemporary sense of nations) became increasingly prevalent and intellectually respectable. As both John G. Hayman and Earl Jeffery Richards have explored, such a discourse was subject to significant tensions in the Enlightenment period. On the one hand, in keeping with the spirit of the Enlightenment, inspired by both advances in scientific method and understanding, and an expanding sense of the world provided through travel, commerce, and imperialism, all of which became more widely and rapidly disseminated through advances in the technologies of print culture such as books, newspapers, and

44    Reflections on the Discipline magazines, the thinkers of the period sought as full a record of the established knowledge of the world and its peoples as possible, to be set down ultimately in works aiming at definitive and comprehensive knowledge, such as Denis Diderot and Jean D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie (1751–1772), which contains entries attributed to both writers on the characteristics of different nations (Richards 144–47). These trends, then, might all be seen to feed the burgeoning interest in delineating the characteristics of the peoples of different nations. On the other hand, the notion of distinct differences in human character based on nationality sat uneasily with an Enlightenment belief in the universality of reason and human nature, and the thinkers of the period endeavoured in various ways to reconcile this tension. For two central figures, Hume and Montesquieu, a key issue then became the extent to which such differences might be attributed to “moral” versus “physical” causes—a sort of eighteenth-century version of the “nurture versus nature” debate. Hume puts the distinction clearly in “Of National Characters”: By moral causes I mean all circumstances, which are fitted to work on the mind as motives or reasons, and which render a peculiar set of manners habitual to us. Of this kind are, the nature of the government, the revolutions of public affairs, the plenty or penury in which the people live, the situation of the nation with regard to its neighbours, and such like circumstances. By physical causes I mean those qualities of the air and climate, which are supposed to work insensibly on the temper, by altering the tone and habit of the body, and giving a particular complexion, which, though reflection and reason may sometimes overcome it, will yet prevail among the generality of mankind, and have an influence on their manners. (198)

The degree to which one emphasizes moral or physical causes in the formation of national character has implications for the extent to which national differences are to be regarded as conventional or natural, or at least as so deeply engrained by the environment that they challenge the ability of individuals and institutions to control them. Thus these two kinds of causes have implications for the extent to which differences in national character challenge the universality of reason and human nature. While Montesquieu in The Spirit of the Laws allows a mixture of moral and physical causes in the determination of national character, he emphasizes the role of climate, a physical cause, and is influential in the dissemination of climate theory in the eighteenth century and beyond. For example, the high rate of suicide in England, its relatively lax laws toward such self-destruction, its rule of law more generally (as opposed to tyranny), and its ability to change its laws through parliamentary process are all at least partially attributed by Montesquieu to the country’s foul weather—to “an illness of climate that carry the repugnance for all things to include that of life” (241–42). Hume allows the influence of moral causes in producing differences in national character but

National Literature, Canadian Criticism, and National Character     45 counteracts the lengthy tradition of climate theory in rejecting physical causes. “As to physical causes, I am inclined to doubt altogether of their operation in this particular; nor do I think, that men owe any thing of their temper or genius to the air, food, or climate” (200). While Hayman and Richards are both concerned with the tension between the particularities of national differences and the universality of reason and human nature, they chart in this respect quite opposite trajectories for the discourse on national character through the course of the eighteenth century. Hayman, looking more selectively at the English tradition, argues that there is a kind of progress away from the more stereotypical assertions of national identity found in earlier seventeenth-century sources—that not only does the discourse become more empirically based but that “as the century advanced the recognition of a common humanity was reinforced by an increasingly cosmopolitan attitude. Indeed, the very existence of national characters came to be questioned” (2). Taking a more comparative European view (although one that amply considers English sources), Richards also notes figures like Helvétius, who reject the idea of national character (147–48). On the whole, however, as my earlier comments have indicated, he suggests that the general evolution of the discourse moves toward an understanding of national character that views such differences in more entrenched and essentialist terms, as Enlightenment universality, cosmopolitanism, and rationalism give way to the nationalist, even racist, beliefs that become increasingly prevalent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (139, and passim). This is centrally true in Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encylopédie, which, while aiming to be a summa of Enlightenment knowledge, essentialized national characteristics as immutable traits, thus erasing the more careful considerations of causality in Hume and Montesquieu. Kant is a key terminus in the evolution toward more absolutized notions of national difference. In countering a claim made by Hume that the “English, of any people in the universe, have the least of national character,” Kant maintains—in what can be read as an anthropological and nationalistic application of his philosophical argument with Hume concerning the status of a priori knowledge—that Hume “is mistaken. … England and France are perhaps the only nations to which we can assign a definite and … unchangeable inborn character, which is the source of their acquired and conventional character. … this character is arrogant rudeness, as opposed to the courtesy that lends itself to easy familiarity” (Anthropology 174). In such moments, Enlightenment universalism has clearly given way to more nationalistic agendas. With the rise of modern nationalism from the later eighteenth century onward, conceptions of national character play an increasingly central role, both in explicitly political discourse and in the more pervasive forms of social ideology that solicit individuals to recognize themselves as possessing a cohesive identity. In the writings of Johann Gottfried von Herder, himself influenced by Montesquieu’s climate theories, it is argued that a combination of geography, climate, language, and customs form, over centuries, unique peoples whose natural, optimal, destiny is to rule over themselves

46    Reflections on the Discipline in autonomous, self-determining nation-states. In Ideas for a Philosophy of History of Mankind (1784–91), Herder articulates this influential idea: the most natural state is, therefore, one nation, an extended family with one national character. … For a nation is as natural a plant as a family, only with more branches. Nothing, therefore, is more manifestly contrary to the purpose of political government than the unnatural enlargement of the state, the wild mixing of various races and nationalities under one sceptre. A human sceptre is far too weak and slender for such incongruous parts to be engrafted upon it. Such states are but patched-up contraptions, fragile machines, appropriately called state-machines for they are wholly devoid of inner life, and their component parts are connected through mechanical contrivances instead of bonds of sentiment. … Yet since they are bereft of national character, it would only be the curse of Fate which condemn to immortality these forced unions, these lifeless monstrosities. (Herder 324)

In striking terms, Herder here both emphasizes the centrality of national character in underpinning the ideal of nationhood and articulates a central, recurring rhetoric of the nation as the natural organism productive of life and health versus the state (particularly if it has not grown naturally out of the national people) as the lifeless and death-inducing techné of the machine.2 In the study of nationalism in recent decades, the ideas articulated by Herder, and later by many others, are sometimes referred to as “romantic nationalism.” This designation variously situates nationalism historically in the Romantic period, 1780–1830, when it arises and begins to become influential, differentiates it conceptually for purposes of comparative analysis from other forms of nationalism (such as multicultural nationalism or civic nationalism), and perhaps also suggests critically that there is something “romantic” in its conception, notably a simplistic, dangerously idealizing and homogenizing notion of how community and character spring spontaneously from environment and tradition. Given such a concept of the nation, a thriving national culture becomes of paramount importance. If the nation is “an extended family with one national character” that has arisen through its relation to the land and the traditions that have developed as part of its whole way of life, then culture is the repository of these traditions and the expression and guarantor of such a national character. Literature plays a key role in this process insofar as its material is language, which is itself so central to Herder’s idea of nationality. In its mimetic capacity, it might hold a mirror up to the national life that many might see, as in its expressive capacity it might be seen to communicate characteristic attitudes, emotional responses, and ideas that are a part of this national life. Thus the later eighteenth century onward witnesses the construction of national literary traditions to perform these functions. Benedict Anderson’s landmark Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism attributes a central role to novels and newspapers in the production of national consciousness and identity, and much scholarship over the last two decades and more has developed his lead in exploring the connections of literature and nationalism across numerous nations and historical periods.

National Literature, Canadian Criticism, and National Character     47

National Character and National Literature in Canada Romantic nationalism, with its attendant assumptions about the nature and function of a national culture, has long found an uneasy ground in Canada and yet persists as an enduring ideal. The concept of a unified national character formed over centuries in an intimate, primordial relationship to place has always risked ringing false in a country populated to a great extent through colonization and settlement, predominantly from France and Britain in the earliest centuries but increasingly from across Europe and many parts of the world. That the process involved the appropriation of land from First Nations peoples who, as was sometimes dimly recognized, had a greater claim to the Herderian model of nationhood than the colonizers, likewise profoundly troubles the adequacy of the concept. As Magdalene Redekop has written, “Canadian literatures, both written and oral, constitute a collective repudiation of Herder’s model of a Geistesgeschichte as the one story of one nation told in one language” (264). Jonathan Kertzer’s Worrying the Nation: Imagining a National Literature in English Canada provides a detailed, thoughtful exploration in the Canadian context of the romantic nationalist model and its discontents (37–61 and passim). Quebec, with its longer history of European settlement and its more distinct and homogenous language and cultural traditions, could adopt the model more persuasively, which may partially account for the stronger currents of nationalism within its borders. The picturesque images of the Quebecois paysan have functioned at times as influential figures of the rustic, rural folk living in a cherished, long-standing relation with the land that has been central to the romantic model of nationalism. Slogans such as “emparons-nous du sol” (let us seize the soil), attributed to Jacques Cartier and taken up as a nationalistic motto, have likewise emphasized the intimate connection to the land. Although the fact that images of the paysan were so strongly popularized by non-French Canadians for non-French-Canadian audiences, such as the poet William Henry Drummond and the painter Cornelius Krieghoff, says something interesting about the production and function of such nationalistic types insofar as it at least partially undermines the idea that such identities spring spontaneously from the folk. Sylvia Söderlind has argued that although Quebec is frequently ignored in the theorizing and critical study of Canadian literature, given the more powerful model of cultural nationalism that it has long presented it can never be entirely exorcized; rather, it haunts the Canadian nationalist imaginary as a sort of repressed presence—a “ghost-nationalism.” Yet as D.M.R. Bentley has explored, efforts were made in the nineteenth century to conceive of English-Canadian culture along the lines of the romantic nationalist model, and in the poets of the last two decades of that century, such an idea becomes strongly influential (37–42). The first thing to consider in the Canadian context, however, is the influence of the climate theory of character, which compensated for the absence of other aspects of the romantic nationalist model.

48    Reflections on the Discipline If Canada could not appeal to a unique, shared language, ancient traditions, and a primordial relation to place to fashion a model of national character, it could and did look to its climate and geography to imagine a unifying, homogenizing model of national character that, given much of the population’s recent and heterogeneous origins, it lacked—but which would, it was hoped, develop in time. As Carl Berger has explored in a landmark essay, “The True North Strong and Free,” Canada was figured in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a nation whose “unique character derived from her northern location, her severe winters, and her heritage of ‘northern races’ ” (Berger 158). Thus, although not self-consciously recognized in their provenance, the climate theories of ancient antiquity, with their later manifestations in Montesquieu and Herder, mixed with yet more recent elements of social Darwinism to circulate influentially in the half century or so following Confederation. In the climate theories of ancients such a Pliny, as we have seen, the effects of an overly northern provenance were argued to be the root cause of barbarism. Yet, as J.W. Johnson argues, the theory proved readily adaptable over the centuries. The sixteenth-century English writer Jean Bodin, for example, found a happy solution to the unfavourable position the English might be seen to inherit from classical writings when he declared in his Method for the Easy Comprehension of History of 1566 that the ancients had really meant the Swedes and the Finns when they had derided the character and intelligence of northerners, and that England was still within the privileged middle, moderate zone. Furthermore, increasingly in the climatic writings of the English, virtually anyone on the European continent could be construed as too southerly to enjoy the formative effects of a beneficial climate, such as moderation and self-control (Johnson 476). There appears to have been little in the rhetoric of climate and character in nineteenth-century Canada asserting that particular peoples suffered from being too northerly, at least if they were of European rather than First Nations descent. Certainly the “Norse” were seen as important components of the privileged northern group. The theory, rather, posited a host of benefits accruing from the higher latitude of Canada, such as physical strength, good health, individualism, self-control, chasteness, ingenuity, and love of liberty, all deriving from a cold, rugged climate and the struggles to survive and thrive within it (162–63). In some instances the theory of climate and character was employed optimistically to posit an underlying unity between the English and the French, despite the long-standing linguistic, historical, political, and cultural divisions between them. Since many of the latter descended from Normandy, they could be amalgamated to the group. F.B. Cumberland, vice president of the National Club of Toronto, included the “Norman French” when he declared in an address circa 1890–1891 that the geographical contour of our Country assists by creating a Unity of Race. Living throughout in a region wherein winter is everywhere a distinct season of the year, inuring the body and stimulating to exertion, we are by nature led to be a provident, a thrifty, and a hardy people; no weakling can thrive among us, we must be as vigorous as our climate. … nature is welding [the northern European immigrants to

National Literature, Canadian Criticism, and National Character     49 Canada] together into Unity and by very similarity of climate creating in Canada a homogenous Race, sturdy in frame, stable in character, which will be to America what their forefathers, the Northmen of old, were to the continent of Europe. (qtd. in Berger 164)

In other instances, such as Charles R. Tuttle’s Popular History of the Dominion of Canada (1877), the ameliorating, unifying effects of the Canadian climate were extended even more broadly to all immigrants from continental Europe (Berger 161). Alternatively, however, as with the Imperialist spokesman George Parkin, the northern theme could become overtly racist, as it was employed to argue for the unsuitability of immigrants from southern Europe, who had begun to appear in larger numbers in the more southerly United States, as well as African American descendants newly freed from slavery in the post–Civil War period (161–62). Canada, because it was only suitable for people of White, northern European descent, would avoid “contamination” from such elements. In the “Teutonic germ theory” of George Bourinot’s constitutional and political writings on Canada in the 1890s, which posited that liberty was “in the blood” and inherited from Teutonic peoples of northern Europe, such racist ideas took on an even more disturbingly essentialist and deterministic caste (167). The relation between northern climate and Canada’s national character persists well into the twentieth century. Vincent Massey, a few years before becoming Canada’s governor general, rehearses most of the central themes in his On Being Canadian of 1948: Climate plays a great part in giving us our special character, different from that of our southern neighbours. Quite apart from the huge annual bill our winter imposes on us in terms of building construction and clothing and fuel, it influences our mentality, produces a sober temperament. Our racial position—and this is partly because of our climate—is different, too. A small percentage of our people comes from central or southeastern Europe. The vast majority springs either from the British Isles or Northern France, a good many, too, from Scandinavia and Germany, and it is in northwestern Europe that one finds the elements of human stability highly developed. Nothing is more characteristic of Canadians than the inclination to be moderate. We are not given to extremes in Canada. (29–30)

W.L. Morton likewise draws his The Canadian Identity of 1961 to a conclusion by affirming that “[f]‌inally, the northern quality of Canadian life is maintained by a factor of deliberate choice and natural selection. … In consequence, Canadians become generation by generation more and more a northern people, either because northern origins have fitted them for northern life, or because they have become adapted to it” (11). If the northern climate was to select, shape, and homogenize Canada’s national character, some of the earliest reflections on the functions of a national literature conceived its central purpose to be the expression of such a character. In two separate editorials appearing in 1857 and 1858 in his newspaper The New Era, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, one of

50    Reflections on the Discipline the “Fathers of Confederation,” espoused a strongly nationalistic outlook and argued the need for a Canadian literature to serve its ends. Every country, every nationality, every people, must create and foster a National Literature, if it is their wish to preserve a distinct individuality from other nations. If precautions are not taken to secure this end, the distinctive character and features of a people must disappear; they cannot survive the storms of time and the rude blasts of civil commotion. The popular mind must be trained and educated according to the physical appearances and social condition of the country; and the people who are so unfortunate as to possess no fountain from which they can procure the elixir of their existence, will soon disappear from the face of the earth, or become merged in some more numerous or more powerful neighbour. (“Protection” 43)

In keeping with the difficulties outlined earlier of applying the romantic nationalist model to Canada, McGee’s language communicates more anxiety about the precarious nature of such a national character than confidence in it as a pre-existent quiddity awaiting its expression. Given that his editorial precedes Confederation by a decade, such a viewpoint might appear perfectly natural. Yet the model of Herderian nationalism suggests that the character of the people is a long-established entity which then finds its proper destiny in the nation-state. By contrast, McGee’s language emphasizes that the national literature must “create” and “foster” the national character; it must provide the “fountain from which [the people] can procure the elixir of their existence” or else “soon disappear from the face of the earth.” Furthermore, McGee emphasizes that a sense of identity can only be sustained as a result of what Homi Bhabba characterizes as a “nationalist pedagogy” (297), whereby the “popular mind [will be] trained and educated according to the physical appearances and social condition of the country.” McGee also argues (as will Edward Hartley Dewart a few years later) that a thriving national literature depends to a considerable extent on gaining some control over the economics of the publishing trade that made books from abroad cheaper to purchase than those published in Canada. “While the reading public can be supplied at a cheap rate from abroad, it is by no means probable that it will patronize a dearer home market” (“Protection” 44). To this extent his reflections also recognize, as Benedict Anderson later argues, that nationalism is produced and sustained by what Anderson terms “print-capitalism” (40). To a degree, then, McGee’s comments anticipate a now more widely accepted viewpoint that national characters, and nationalist consciousness more generally, is produced, not simply reflected or expressed, in the discourses that represent them, but his words do so uneasily, suggesting that this predicament is a peculiarly weak aspect of Canada’s tenuous claim to a nationhood more strongly rooted in Europe, as if the Canadian nation must be reluctantly recognized as a phantasm (at least for a while, until it has gained stronger roots) but elsewhere has a solid reality.3 Edward Hartley Dewart’s introductory essay to Selections from Canadian Poets (1864), the first major anthology of Canadian poetry, communicates a similar anxiety.

National Literature, Canadian Criticism, and National Character     51 A national literature is an essential element in the formation of national character. It is not merely the record of a country’s mental progress: it is the expression of its intellectual life, the bond of national unity, and the guide of national energy. It may be fairly questioned, whether the whole range of history presents the spectacle of a people firmly united politically, without the subtle but powerful cement of a patriotic literature. On the other hand, it is easy to show, that, in the older countries of the world, the names of distinguished poets, enshrined in the national heart, are the watchwords of national union; and it has become a part of the patriotism of the people to honor and love their memory. (ix)

A national literature is required for “the formation of national character,” suggesting that the character does not precede the literature, but insofar as this literature will be “the expression of [the nation’s] intellectual life,” which one assumes is a part of such character, it develops out of and expresses a character that precedes it. The “older countries of the world, [wherein] the names of distinguished poets [are] enshrined in the national heart”—a figure that intimately entwines national literature and national life—have achieved a desirable embodiment of the nationalist ideal, but in Canada such a mirroring correspondence of the mental and the material has not been achieved, and it remains uncertain which should be engendering which. In his study of the Confederation poets, D.M.R. Bentley argues that a similarly conceived predicament bedevils the efforts to create a self-consciously Canadian literature in the last two decades of the nineteenth century: “It is no exaggeration to say that a major reason for the group’s very existence was a viciously circular conviction in the minds of many thinkers of the day that only a distinctive Canadian literature could validate Canada’s nationality and that only the full achievement of that nationality could produce a distinctive Canadian literature” (16). Nationalism perhaps always exists in this vertiginous void between idea and embodied reality, but, again, the predicament appears to have been acutely felt in Canada, and the anxieties it produced extend through much of the twentieth century. A further challenge to the romantic, nationalist model grasped by both McGee and Dewart concerns Canada’s colonial predicament—the fact that its language and mindset are inherited from elsewhere—a predicament that would continue to be reflected upon in the mid- to later twentieth century by critics and poets such as Northrop Frye and Dennis Lee. “Our colonial position,” writes Dewart, “whatever may be its political advantages, is not favorable to the growth of an indigenous literature. Not only are our mental wants supplied by the brain of the Mother Country, … but the majority of persons of taste and education in Canada are emigrants from the Old Country, whose tenderest affections cling around the land they have left” (xiv). Yet whatever challenges to the romantic nationalist model their remarks might intuit, their statements are equally notable for the extent to which they propound the model as an ideal to be achieved. “[A]‌lthough we may not be able to form a literature purely Canadian in its identity,” McGee writes, “yet we can gather from every land, and mould our gleaning into a form, racy of the new soil to which it is adapted” (“Canadian” 42).4 In a separate editorial several months later, he expanded: “It [the national literature] must

52    Reflections on the Discipline assume the gorgeous coloring and the gloomy grandeur of the forest. It must partake of the grave mysticism of the Red man and the wild vivacity of the hunter of the western prairies. Its lyrics must possess the ringing cadence of the waterfall, and its epics be as solemn and beautiful as our great rivers” (“Protection” 44). Here the central ideal of a national literature in the romantic nationalist model, that it be intimately expressive of the character of the people and the geography of the nation, is strongly proclaimed, demonstrating early on the hold the tenacious concept would have in cultural and political discourse. If the romantic nationalist model of culture has, as the term partly suggests, roots in Romanticism, with its expressive view of literature, its conception of nature as a kind of moral and spiritual guide, its organicism, and its idealization of rustic folk, Modernism in the early to mid-twentieth century, with its more international and formalist emphases, puts considerable pressure on the concept. If the forms from which a literary work derives, and the standards by which it is to be judged, are international—T.S. Eliot’s “tradition,” which forms an “ideal order” being an influential example—if the literary work is not essentially expressive or mimetic but autotelic, self-reflective, in some key sense about its own processes, then the understanding of it as expressive of a national character appears mistaken, naïve, or atavistic. Relatedly, Modernism could posit lower and higher forms of art, with the lower, demotic, forms regarded as reflective of locality but the higher, esoteric forms transcending such limitations to achieve a more powerful universalism. In Canadian literary history, the modernist A.J.M. Smith’s controversial distinction between “native” and “cosmopolitan” poetic traditions articulated in his introduction to the first edition of his 1943 anthology The Book of Canadian Poetry forms an example of such a critical construction (Smith 5).5 The poets of the Confederation period with their nationalistic outlook and their strong connection between Canadian character and landscape were a key target in the critique, and the hierarchy, embedded in Smith’s distinction.6 Nonetheless, as Daniel Coleman’s White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada demonstrates, the more popular and broadly influential literature of these decades, as in the novels of Ralph Connor, continued to construct and promote certain ideals of national character such as “the muscular [Protestant] Christian” (128–67). Furthermore, some of the most powerful currents of Modernism in Canada, most centrally the paintings of the Group of Seven (and Smith’s frequently anthologized poem “The Lonely Land,” inspired by this group), were continuous with the tradition of emphasizing the northern character of the nation. In an article early in his career, “The Case of the Missing Face,” the Canadian Hugh Kenner, who would become one of the most influential scholars and champions of literary modernism in Anglo-American literary studies, followed the lead of older figures like Smith and Kenner’s former professor Northrop Frye in critiquing the strong emphasis upon external nature in Canadian culture and upon the north in particular. “The surest way to the hearts of a Canadian audience is to inform them that their souls are to be identified with rock, rapids, wilderness, and virgin (but exploitable) forest. This pathological craving for identification with the subhuman may be illustrated in every department of Canadian culture” (203). Yet in desiring to see “the tortured Canadian

National Literature, Canadian Criticism, and National Character     53 face … at last illuminated” (208) by its culture, Kenner rehearses one of the most central tropes in the tradition of national culture in constructing national character: prosopopeia, giving face to a name, wherein the complex political, historical, social, and geographical entity that is a nation is construed as a human subject and given the centrally identifying feature of one—the singularity of a human visage.7 Charles G.D. Roberts’s patriotic poem “Canada,” for example, published in 1885, concludes with the anthropomorphized nation about to come into its full glory as it awakens to the light of the morning sun illuminating its face: But thou, my country, dream not thou! Wake, and behold how night is done,— How on thy breast, and o’er thy brow, Bursts the uprising sun! (53–56)

Kenner, albeit, provides a modernist twist to the familiar figure. The face of the nation he anticipates will be a “tortured,” rather than a glorious, one, and one which has been hiding itself in the “subhuman.” The nation’s “pathological craving for identification with the subhuman” (shades here of Sartre’s critique of consciousness’s inauthentic yearning to identify with the en soi, with natural things lacking consciousness) suggests some sort of repressed anxiety, one that the artist, presumably, can reveal in illuminating this face. Nonetheless, the comparison with Roberts some 70 years earlier demonstrates how a concern with national character performs its own “return of the repressed,” indicating that modernism was far from done with it. Northrop Frye is an informative figure to consider with respect to such tensions in the mid- to late twentieth century and in general. His internationally influential literary theory is partly informed by the modernist currents outlined above, which put critical pressure on the underlying assumptions of national culture and national character. For Frye, literature derives from other literature, from the collective body of story types (mythos) and archetypes, which form a coherent, centred structure, a universal “order of words” informing all of literature from primitive myths to Modernism. Thus early and late, a leitmotif in his essays and addresses on Canadian literature and culture is a critique of the idea that content shapes form, that a national literature can arise from, and be shaped by, the experience of the national life. In “Canada and Its Poetry,” his 1943 review essay of Smith’s The Book of Canadian Poetry, Frye names this idea the “Ferdinand the Bull theory of poetry” (CW 12:31) and characterizes it as a “fallacy.” In “Culture and the National Will,” a 1957 convocation address at Carleton University, Frye again articulates the view. It is often believed that a new environment is a creative influence: that because we have a lot of new things and experiences in Canada, we ought to have a new literature too. So we ought, except that novelty relates to content, not to form or technique. Form and technique don’t exist outside literature, and a writer’s technical power will depend, not on new experience or new feelings, but only on how well he can absorb

54    Reflections on the Discipline what he reads. A hundred years ago Canada was a much newer experience than it is now, and critics were predicting that new Iliads and heroic sagas would emerge from the virgin forests. But what the poets produced was faint echoes of Tom Moore and a few bits of Byron and Wordsworth, because that was what they had absorbed from their reading. That is why the ultimate standards of Canadian literature have to be international ones. (CW 12:276)

Yet the ghost of the romantic nationalist concept of a culture that grows organically from place is less easily exorcized by such oft-repeated statements than Frye seems, in such moments, to desire, and in numerous essays and addresses throughout his lengthy career he sustains a concern with mapping Canadian culture and comes close to reinstating the romantic nationalist model, sometimes in the same essays that are critiquing it. To return to his earliest significant statement on the topic, in “Canada and Its Poetry,” Frye states that “whatever may be true of painting or music, poetry is not a citizen of the world. It is conditioned by language, and flourishes best within a national unit. … the empire is too big and the province too small for major literature” (CW 12:28, 29). In his 1956 essay, “Preface to an Uncollected Anthology,” however, he asserts that “it is not a nation but an environment that makes an impact on poets” (CW 12:256). Frye here revises his earlier dismissal, in “Canada and Its Poetry,” of the regional in art as productive of the merely provincial and parochial. Now, rather, he predicates a close relationship between culture and locality. “Political and economic units tend to expand as history goes on; cultural units tend to remain decentralized. Culture, like wine, seems to need a specific locality, and no major poet has been inspired by an empire” (12:268, my emphasis). The nation at this stage strikes Frye, particularly in his Canadian context, as too abstract and general, as well as too political and rhetorical a concept to stand as the locus of genuine culture. However, in retreating from the nation as the basis of culture, Frye approaches even closer to the romantic nationalist model in which “culture, like wine,” grows organically from place. Marking yet another shift, however, his 1967 Whidden lectures delivered at McMaster University and published as The Modern Century explicitly reject his earlier views, both that the nation is the optimal ground of culture and that culture develops from place, seeing such a viewpoint as part of a troubling genealogy of romantic nationalism that culminates in the atrocities of the National Socialist Party in Germany (CW 11:28–29). In his strongest assertion of the international basis of culture, Frye states: the “[s]‌eeds of culture can only come from the centres of civilization which are already established, often those centres against which the local culture is revolting. … Complete immersion in the international style is a primary cultural requirement” (31). Frye’s Preface to The Bush Garden, published only a few years later in 1971, shifts back to his earlier position in asserting that “there is always something vegetable about the imagination, something sharply limited in range” (CW 12:412), with the result that culture is always strongly shaped by environment. Clearly in response to the separatist tensions in Quebec and the FLQ crisis, Frye’s theory of Canadian culture is by this point a strongly regional one, which posits a productive, creative, necessary tension between

National Literature, Canadian Criticism, and National Character     55 decentralizing forces of culture that produce unity and the centralizing forces of politics that produce identity. The tension between this political sense of unity and the imaginative sense of locality [identity] is the essence of whatever the word “Canadian” means. Once the tension is given up, and the two elements of unity and identity are assimilated to each other, we get the two endemic diseases of Canadian life. Assimilating identity to unity produces the empty gestures of cultural nationalism; assimilating unity to identity produces the kind of provincial isolation which is now called separatism. (CW 12:414)

Thus across his more than four decades of writing on Canadian literature and culture, Frye fluctuates, sometimes quite vertiginously, between comprehending the international, the national, or the regional as the ground of culture and between affirming or critiquing the shaping influence of environment on imagination. Such fluctuations are partly attributable to tensions within his own thought between a modernist internationalism and formalism that would transcend locality, and a conception much more amenable to the romantic nationalist conception of culture that sees it as rooted in place, as, for example, in the oft-articulated, centrally informing principle running throughout all his works that culture seeks to establish an imaginative identity between the human and the natural worlds—seeks, as he writes in The Educated Imagination, “to recapture, in full consciousness, that original lost sense of identity with our surroundings, where there is nothing outside the mind of man” (CW 21:444). If Frye grapples with the location of culture and shifts positions on the question, he likewise grapples with national character, sometimes theorizing historical and environmental forces, such as his influential “garrison mentality” that he perceived as, for better or for worse, profoundly shaping Canadian consciousness in unifying ways, and sometimes asserting that there is no definable Canadian identity, or only one that is created by its literature. “It is often assumed,” Frye states in “Culture and the National Will,” one of his strongest earlier critiques of the reality of national characters, that there is something unique, or at least distinctive, about the Canadian environment or character, and that it is the duty of our writers to interpret those distinctive qualities. Well, this is, of course, the most hackneyed problem in Canadian culture: all our intellectuals are thoroughly tired of it, and very suspicious of attempts to revive it. But they would not feel tired or suspicious if it were or ever had been a genuine problem. The question is put the wrong way round. Writers don’t interpret national characters; they create them. (CW 12:275)

Frye is also conscious, and suspicious, of a central paradigm that followed in the construction of national character—to situate the privileged national character as the mediation, or happy synthesis, of other national characters figured as static, undesirable extremes, a rhetorical structure that, as we have seen, was already operating in Pliny’s ancient writings on climate and character. In his Conclusion to the 1965 edition of the Literary History of Canada, he writes:

56    Reflections on the Discipline It is often suggested that Canada’s identity is to be found in some via media, or via mediocris, between [Britain and America]. This has the disadvantage that the British and American cultures have to be defined as extremes. Haliburton seems to have believed that the ideal for Nova Scotia would be a combination of American energy and British social structure, but such a chimera, or synthetic monster, is hard to achieve in practice. (CW 12:344)

Such an understanding of Canada’s national character is indeed a strong and persistent one, at least for so long as such a character was, consciously or not, conceived of as an Anglo-Canadian identity, or such an imagined identity was promoted as a unifying ideal. Vincent Massey, for example, essentially rehearses Haliburton’s pre-Confederation ideal when he opens On Being Canadian (1948) with the claim that while in London during World War II he could “with a very small margin of error” spot Canadian soldiers in the streets, that while they resembled in many ways both Englishmen and Americans, … they could not have been mistaken for either. … They could not have come from anywhere but Canada. Something in their bearing told the story—a combination of qualities—on the one hand a naturalness and freedom of movement, a touch of breeziness and an alertness which suggested the new world. They also showed self-control, an air of discipline and good manners, and they had generally taken some trouble about their appearance. (3)

Likewise George Grant, in his popular Lament for a Nation (1965), as Ian Angus notes quoting Grant, defined “the American empire … [as] based exclusively on the principle of the freedom of the individual. He defined the difference of Canada as based in the British tradition of effecting ‘a compromise between two extremes of liberty and order’ and a Canadian as ‘the blending of the best of the ancient civilization of western Europe with maturity and integrity, with the best of North American life’ ” (234). Thus one’s own nation finds an ideal balance between freedom and structure, spontaneity and self-consciousness. As David Simpson has explored in his study of the construction of a “culture of British common sense” (40) over several centuries (although with a primary focus on the Romantic period), to situate one’s own nation as the via media between two other nations figured as undesirable extremes has long been commonplace in British cultural and political discourse, wherein the British are frequently figured as the desirable mediation between a cold, rigid, French intellectualism and an excessive German emotionalism and passion—between the head and the heart (Simpson, chaps. 2-4). As I have argued elsewhere, Kant and Friedrich Schlegel configure the German national character as a similarly ideal mediation by situating the French as the overly rational and the English as the naively empirical and commonsensical (“Namelessness” 11–18). Frye, then, correctly identifies and critiques the key underlying structure and content of assertions of Canadian national character. To a considerable extent, however, he participates in the predication of a Canadian identity and does so furthermore in ways that rehearse these long-standing manoeuvres in the tropings of national character in

National Literature, Canadian Criticism, and National Character     57 European history. Having rejected the above manner of defining the Canadian identity, Frye maintains: “It is simpler merely to notice the alternating current in the Canadian mind, as reflected in its writing, between two moods, one romantic, traditional and idealistic, the other shrewd, observant and humorous” (CW 12:344). The wider context of his remarks makes clear, however, that the former mood is associated with Canada’s British connection and the latter to its proximity to the United States, and thus the distance between the more conventional assertion of Canada’s national character and his own is not that great. The American, Frye maintains, has a “deductive or a priori” mindset, which tends to impose a rigid and unified pattern on cultural life as a result of “being founded on a revolution and a written constitution” (CW 12:345). Canada, on the other hand, “adheres more to the inductive and the expedient” (12:345). Frye’s comments parallel not only Grant and the long persistent myth of Canada’s loyalist origins, but the ways in which the British defined themselves against the French, particularly in the decades following the French Revolution. The French were likewise represented within a British tradition in terms of a rigidly deductive a priori mindset, which imposes its theories and plans upon the world with dangerous, violent consequences. By contrast, the British are more subtly empirical and inductive, responding commonsensically and pragmatically to events as they occur. Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France is the best-known and widely influential work in this tradition. By virtue of having a less rigid mindset, the Canadian, Frye asserts, has a much more fragmented and heterogeneous national identity. Frye writes in 1976: “Canada never defined itself as a unified society in this [American] way: there is no Canadian way of life, no hundred per cent Canadian, no ancestral figures corresponding to Washington or Franklin or Jefferson, no eighteenth-century self-evident certainties about human rights, no symmetrically laid out country” (CW 12:500). He may here be echoing W.L. Morton: “one of the blessings of Canadian life is that there is no Canadian way of life, much less two, but a unity under the Crown admitting a thousand diversities” (111).

The Ends of National Character The boom years in the development of a professionalized Canadian literary studies from the late 1960s into the mid-1970s produced a number of prominent works, influenced by Frye to some extent (although largely bypassing his skepticism about national literatures and identities), that continued to mine Canadian writing for characteristic Canadian attitudes and experiences, such as Margaret Atwood’s Survival, D.G. Jones’s Butterfly on Rock, and John Moss’s Patterns of Isolation. These works, then, were continuous with a lengthy tradition that sought connections between a national literature and its underlying national character, but insofar as such studies were most often trying, much as Hugh Kenner had called for in the early 1950s, to analyze some sort of underlying national neuroses and to suggest its cure, they have been aptly characterized as a species of cultural psychoanalysis. Such studies, however, quite quickly produced a backlash from

58    Reflections on the Discipline other critics who believed that in the absence of proper social scientific methodology they were only second-rate sociology and psychology, and in the absence of a more rigorous formal and/or theoretical approach to literary texts they were only second-rate literary criticism.8 The relative latecomer among such thematic critical studies, Gaile McGregor’s The Wacousta Syndrome, was widely disparaged, having had the misfortune to appear after others had their critical weapons honed. Thus the skepticism concerning generalizations about national character made by Hume and Helvétius in the eighteenth century was repeating itself. Continuing such a backlash, scholarly studies in recent decades have largely jettisoned the view that national literatures express a unified national character and that it should be the goal of criticism to elucidate this character. In Post-National Arguments, Frank Davey looks critically upon “metaphors of unity” (19), such as Northrop Frye’s influential “garrison mentality.” Such metaphors, in Jonathan Kertzer’s words, implied that “all cultural expressions are shaped by the same national character” (21). One might take the concluding words of W.H. New’s introduction to the fourth volume of the Literary History of Canada, published in 1990 and covering the period from 1972 to 1984, as definitively marking the movement away from such older critical assumptions: “As far the 1970s and 1980s are concerned, historians essentially gave up any fixed notion of the ‘whole’ society; the whole was inapprehensible, in flux. Criticism, too, edged away from seeing literature as foremost an expression of a single national character” (xxxii). Yet, with modifications, the discourse on national character survives and thrives. In the 1980s and 1990s, with the popularity of theorizing the postmodern, some began to argue that Canada is a postmodern nation with a postmodern identity, either because it has always deliberately and playfully negated its identity to achieve a greater plurality and freedom, as argued by Robert Kroetsch (41–52), or similarly because it shares a self-consciously ironic sense of identity which refuses singular, stable meaning, as Linda Hutcheon maintains (vii, 84, and passim), or because it has, through the course of its history, developed more plural and heterogeneous identities than other nations, as argued by the journalist Gwyn Dyer, among others (243–53). Sometimes such observations are attached to the decentred, federalist political structure of Canada, in which power has increasingly devolved to the provinces, to increasing immigration from numerous parts of the world, and/or to musings on historical forces such as globalization, postnationalism, or “transnationalism,” which are eliminating older, supposedly more unitary and stable, national identities. According to some of these lines of thought, Canada has come earlier and further along this historical path than other nations because nationalism was never very strongly rooted here, and thus it is relatively better equipped for the new world order rapidly dawning. Frye engaged in such musing as early as 1965 in the closing paragraphs of his “Conclusion” to the first edition of the Literary History of Canada, and he more than once remarked that Canada had missed ever becoming a nation, at least for very long, and that such a fate might be a net gain in the long run. In the postcolonial studies that have become influential from the late 1980s to the present, and in the broadly political turn in literary studies that has accompanied it, there is something of a parallel rejection of the romantic nationalist idea that national

National Literature, Canadian Criticism, and National Character     59 characters develop organically from the whole way of life of the people and thus precede the discourse that represents it. But the interest in the production of national identities that nonetheless have very real political, social, and psychological effects (and affects) has become stronger than ever. Following Benedict Anderson’s lead in Imagined Communities, contemporary scholars have emphasized how national identities are produced and sustained through print technologies such as newspapers and novels that construct a sense among a population (who even in the smallest of nations will overwhelmingly remain anonymous to one another) of being a common people existing along a shared, national historical continuum (Anderson 37–46). The best of such studies in the Canadian context, Daniel Coleman’s White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada, develops out of such concerns and methodological assumptions, and provides a sustained, detailed, theoretically informed exploration of the production of a White, Anglo-Canadian identity from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. As Coleman argues, the “literary project of English Canada” has been to produce and naturalize “a specific form of civility modelled upon the gentlemanly code of Britishness” (10). He identifies four recurrent figures in Canadian literary history that are essentially national characters constructed in a nationalist literary discourse and pedagogy to promote this model of behaviour and the White, Anglo racial identity it covertly privileges: “the loyalist brother,” “the enterprising Scottish Orphan,” the “muscular Christian,” and the “maturing colonial son” (5, and passim). Indeed, historians of nationalism such as Eric Hobsbawm have emphasized the extent to which the supposedly ancient traditions of nations in which the national character is supposedly rooted, such as the Scotsman in his kilt, are relatively recent inventions concocted to solicit identification with a political cause, either an existing state or a nationalistically based challenge to its authority. Herder, as we have seen, starkly juxtaposed the living organism of the nation to the dead techné of the state, yet the upshot of recent scholarship is that the nation and its national identity exist largely in its production through various technés, such as print capitalism and (to update the list as others have) radio, film, television, and the Internet, technés that precede and exceed the nation, rather than being unique to it, and thus are capable of undoing the identities they construct and circulate as readily as they make them. In this line of thinking, the nation is less a living organism than a sort of apparition or ghost, or in language friendlier and more familiar to nationalistic thought, a spirit (Geist being the German word for both) produced, like the mighty voice and face of the Wizard of Oz, through the technics of a machine.9 In these various strands of the more contemporary discourse on national identity one can perceive parallels with, and repetitions of, the older one on national character, suggesting that the more recent reflections may represent less of a departure from tradition than realized and that they may not stand in as critical a relationship to traditional nationalism as they desire and assume. Thus, as we have seen from McGee in the 1850s to Frye in the 1950s, there is a recognition that literature produces national character, rather than merely reflecting a pre-existing one. To this recognition is added, for McGee at least, the view that a sense of national character will depend upon a national literary pedagogy and favourable conditions in the marketplace of print capitalism. The

60    Reflections on the Discipline multiplicity and heterogeneity of national identity—sometimes promoted as variously postmodern, postcolonial, and/or postnational, in opposing older, supposedly more unitary and homogenous conceptions of national identity—are likewise an idea that has old roots in nationalist discourse. McGee concludes his first editorial promoting the need for a Canadian literature by asserting that “a Canadian literature would tend to the creation of a thoroughly Canadian feeling. Not as ignoring British sentiment and exalting nativism, but in the acknowledgement of all elements, foreign and provincial; the dispelling of all separate ‘clannishness,’ and the recognition of all nationalities in one idea and in one name” (“Canadian” 42–43). As Robert Young has explored in the British context, and Daniel Coleman in the Canadian, “British,” and even the less inclusive “English,” have long been self-consciously hybrid, pan-ethnic identities (Coleman 17, 86), as evidenced in Daniel Defoe’s praise of “that Het’rogenous Thing, An Englishman” (qtd. in Anderson x), and they have performed the ideological work of nationalism all the better for their seeming flexibility and open-endedness. In the older reflections on national character as in the more recent arguments, one’s own nation is the richly variegated, the other’s drably uniform. More recently, such a conception has been given an historicist twist: national identities used to be drably uniform, now they have become complexly mixed. Though the heterogeneity imagined in these earlier centuries may be, in comparison to the global diasporas of the last half century or more, distinctly limited, nevertheless, as Young and others have argued, the long-standing existence of ideas of the hybrid and heterogeneous, and the ideological work they have performed, should give one pause to think about our contemporary conceptions and the extent to which they stand in a meaningfully critical relationship to nationalism.

Notes 1. While I focus largely on “national character” in this chapter and treat the later shifts to concerns with “national identity” as significantly continuous with the earlier discourse, I do not want to suggest that there are no significant differences between the ideas. I agree with the first half of an assertion by Jack Bumsted, “one simple distinction could be that identity is what people think of themselves,” but not the second half: “while character is what others think of them” (17). As much of my discussion aims to show, “national character” is heavily invested in self-ascription, although it often achieves this through ascribing less desirable characteristics to others. Assertions of national character, it seems to me, predicate underlying traits strongly influencing behaviour and attitudes, whereas identity, in its contemporary usage at least, is more an issue of psychological self-recognition. The marked preference for the latter from the mid-twentieth century to the present likely relates to the history of racism and xenophobia in which the former participates, as well as the rise in prestige of the social sciences and in particular, as Jonathan Rée has suggested, the popularity of Erik Erickson’s Childhood and Society (1950), which devoted a chapter to American identity (Rée 86). A relatively recent, detailed exploration of the concept of national character in the English tradition is provided by Peter Mandler in The English National Character.

National Literature, Canadian Criticism, and National Character     61 2. For a detailed analysis of the rhetoric of the nation as living organism and the state as dead techné in the German idealist tradition (although one that oddly ignores Herder) and in postcolonial literatures, see Pheng Cheah, Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation. 3. As David Bentley has pointed out, several of the early, influential exponents of Canadian literature, such as McGee, Dewart, and Nicholas Flood Davin, were Irish born and likely influenced by the strong nationalistic sentiments and intellectual currents deriving from Ireland (24–42). 4. Bentley is enlightening on the phrase “racy of the soil” and its circulation in nineteenth-century writings on a national literature in Canada: “a phrase meaning ‘characteristic of a certain country or people’ that was ‘chiefly used with reference to Ireland.’ … By the early 1890s ‘racy of the soil’ would be in frequent use as a description of Canadian poetry” (28). 5. For a thoughtful earlier discussion of the “native” and “cosmopolitan” opposition invoked by A.J.M Smith and the shifts in the location of culture in Frye’s work, see Sugars 119–133. 6. Bentley demonstrates persuasively that the poets of the Confederation period were themselves fully self-conscious about the need for their poetry to meet international standards and an international audience, and that they were far from content to be Canadians speaking to Canadians about Canada (48, and passim). 7. I draw here on Paul de Man’s definition of prosopopeia: “prosopon poien, to confer a mask or a face (prosopon). … by which one’s name … is made as intelligible and memorable as a face” (76). See my “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the National Ode” for a fuller exploration of anthropomorphism and prosopopeia in nationalist literature, especially the patriotic poems of Charles G.D. Roberts. 8. Frank Davey’s “Surviving the Paraphrase” is the best known of these arguments, but several other critics made similar points. A useful anthology of such debates is Branko Gorjup’s Northrop Frye’s Literary Criticism and Its Influence, particularly the essays by Davey, Rosemary Sullivan, Barbara Belyea, Barry Cameron and Michael Dixon, John Moss, and Heather Murray. 9. Here I draw upon Marc Redfield’s suggestive Derridean reading of Benedict Anderson (45–73).

Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities:  Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. London: Verso, 1991. Print. Angus, Ian. “The Social Identity of English Canada.” Canadian Cultural Studies: A Reader. Ed. Sourayan Mookerjea, Imre Szeman, and Gail Faurschou. Durham, NC:  Duke UP, 2009. 231–47. Print. Atwood, Margaret. Survival:  A  Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. Toronto:  Anansi, 1972. Print. Bhabha, Homi K. “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation.” Nation and Narration. Ed Homi K. Bhabha. New York: Routledge, 1990. 291–22. Print. Bentley, D.M.R. The Confederation Group of Canadian Poets, 1880–1897. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2004. Print. Berger, Carl. “The True North Strong and Free.” Interpreting Canada’s Past. Vol 2. Ed. J.M. Bumsted. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1986. 157–73. Print.

62    Reflections on the Discipline Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. 1757. Ed. J.T. Boulton. London: Routledge, 1958. Print. Carter, Adam. “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the National Ode.” Recalling Early Canada:  Reading the Political in Cultural and Literary Production. Ed. Jennifer Blair, Daniel Coleman, Kate Higginson, and Lorraine York. Edmonton:  U of Alberta P, 2005. 117–44. Print. ———. “Namelessness, Irony, and National Character in Contemporary Canadian Criticism and the Critical Tradition.” Studies in Canadian Literature 28.1 (2003): 5–25. Print. Cheah, Pheng. Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation. New York: Columbia UP, 2003. Print. Coleman, Daniel. White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2006. Print. Davey, Frank. Post-National Arguments: The Politics of the Anglophone-Canadian Novel since 1967. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1993. Print. ———. “Surviving the Paraphrase.” Gorjup 133–43. De Man, Paul. The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: Columbia UP, 1984. Print. Dewart, Edward Hartley. “Introductory Essay.” Selections from Canadian Poets. 1864. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1973. ix–xix. Print. Dyer, Gwyn. Nationalism without Walls:  The Unbearable Lightness of Being Canadian. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1995. Print. Frye, Northrop. Collected Works of Northrop Frye. Gen. ed Alvin Lee. 30 vols. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1996–2012. Print. Gorjup, Branko. Northrop Frye’s Literary Criticism and Its Influence. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2009. Print. Hayman, John G. “Notions of National Characters in the Eighteenth Century.” Huntington Library Quarterly 35.1 (1971): 1–17. Print. Herder, Johann Gottfried von. Herder on Social and Political Culture: A Selection of Texts. Ed. and trans. F.M. Barnard. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1969. Print. Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983. Print. Hume, David. “Of National Characters.” Essays:  Moral, Political and Literary. Ed. Eugene Miller. Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1985. 197–215. Print. Hutcheon, Linda. Splitting Images:  Contemporary Canadian Ironies. Toronto:  Oxford UP, 1991. Print. Johnson, J.W. “Of Differing Ages and Climes.” Journal of the History of Ideas 21.4 (1960): 465–80. Print. Jones, D.G. Butterfly on Rock: A Study of Themes and Images in Canadian Literature. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1970. Print. Kant, Immanuel. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Trans. Mary Gregor. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974. Print. ———. Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. 1764. Trans. John Goldwait. Berkley: U of California P, 1959. Print. Kenner, Hugh. “The Case of the Missing Face.” Our Sense of Identity:  A  Book of Canadian Essays. Ed. Malcolm Ross. Toronto: Ryerson, 1954. 203–08. Print. Kertzer, Jonathan. Worrying the Nation: Imagining a National Literature in English Canada. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1998. Print.

National Literature, Canadian Criticism, and National Character     63 Kroetsch, Robert. The Lovely Treachery of Words: Essays Selected and New. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1989. Print. Larrimore, Mark. “Sublime Waste:  Kant on the Destiny of the ‘Races.’ ” Civilization and Oppression. Ed. Catherine Wilson. Calgary: U of Calgary P, 1999. 99–126. Print. Mandler, Peter. The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2006. Print. Massey, Vincent. On Being Canadian. Toronto: J.M. Dent, 1948. Print. McGee, Thomas D’Arcy. “A Canadian Literature.” 1857. Towards a Canadian Literature: Essays, Editorials and Manifestos. Vol. 1. Ed. Douglas Daymond and Leslie Monkman. Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1984. 41–43. Print. ———. “Protection for Canadian Literature.” 1858. Towards a Canadian Literature:  Essays, Editorials and Manifestos. Vol. 1. Ed Douglas Daymond and Leslie Monkman. Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1984. 43–45. Print. McGregor, Gaile. The Wacousta Syndrome: Explorations in the Canadian Langscape. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1985. Print. Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron de. The Spirit of the Laws. Trans. and ed. Anne M.  Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone. Cambridge:  Cambridge UP, 1989. Print. Morton, W.L. The Canadian Identity. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1961. Print. Moss, John. Patterns of Isolation in English Canadian Fiction. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1974. Print. New, W.H. “Introduction.” Literary History of Canada. 2nd ed. Vol. 4. Ed. W.H. New. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1990. xi–xxxii. Print. Redekop, Magdalene. “Canadian Literary Criticism and the Idea of a National Literature.” The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature. Ed. Eva-Marie Krӧller. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. 263–75. Print. Redfield, Marc. The Politics of Aesthetics:  Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2003. Print. Rée, Jonathan. “Cosmopolitanism and the Experience of Nationality.” Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation. Ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1998. 77–90. Print. Richards, Earl Jeffrey. “The Axiomatization of National Differences and National Character in the European Enlightenment:  Montesquieu, Hume, D’Alembert, Helvetius and Kant.” Komparatistik und Europaforschung:  Perspektiven vergleichender Literatur-und Kulturwissenschaft. Ed. Hugo Dyserinck and Karl Ulrich-Syndram. Bonn: Bouvier, 1992. 137–56. Print. Roberts, Sir Charles G.D. “Canada.” 1885. The Collected Poems of Sir Charles G.D. Roberts. Ed. Desmond Pacey. Wolfville, NS: Wombat Press, 1985. 85–86. Print. Simpson, David. Romanticism, Nationalism and the Revolt against Theory. Chicago:  U of Chicago P, 1993. Print. Söderlind, Sylvia. “Ghost National Arguments.” University of Toronto Quarterly 75.2 (2006): 673–92. Print. Smith, A.J.M. “Introduction.” The Book of Canadian Poetry: A Critical and Historical Anthology. Ed A.J.M. Smith. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1943. 3–34. Print. Sugars, Cynthia. “Can the Canadian Speak? Lost in Postcolonial Space.” ARIEL 32.3 (2001): 115–54. Print. Young, Robert. The Idea of English Ethnicity. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007. Print.

Chapter 3

Remembering  C a na da The Politics of Cultural Memory Richard Cavell

Introduction Caroline Adderson’s 1999 novel, A History of Forgetting,1 poses major questions for contemporary Canadian culture, and, more broadly, for the political domain: How does a nation remember? How does it memorialize itself? To what extent are shared memories necessary to the survival of a nation? In an avowedly multicultural nation such as Canada, to what extent are the memories of other nations part of Canadian cultural memory? Is cultural memory relevant in a postnational context? These and cognate questions are neither abstract nor exclusively the concern of humanists: Canada is currently involved in a massive statist process of re-memorialization. Cultural memory in Canada occupies an increasingly uneasy terrain, and the questions it raises have come to preoccupy Canadian literature and politics, especially over the last 15 years.2 The period of “late capitalism,” as Fredric Jameson dubbed it, witnessed an explosion of interest in the historical past, especially insofar as it could be commodified in museums, in “Heritage Minutes” on television, and in movie blockbusters. This tendency, critiqued by cultural theorists such as Andreas Huyssen, is often seen as a form of cultural forgetting, insofar as what is “remembered” is reified and thus lacks the interplay between past and present that theorists such as Jan and Aleida Assmann consider to be essential to memory as social and cultural performance. Although Maurice Halbwachs had articulated the notion of mémoire collective in the first quarter of the twentieth century, cultural memory studies became an international phenomenon only toward the last decade of the twentieth century. While this fin-de-siècle context accounts for some of the interest in memory studies per se, the more immediate problematic of the disappearance of the generation of witnesses of the world wars (and the anticipation of their anniversaries) gave an acute urgency to these studies. Canada was no exception; not only has there been a plethora of literary works that deal in one way or another with

Remembering Canada   65 cultural memory, but the Conservative government of Canada has made cultural heritage one of its political concerns. The question of cultural memory in Canada is complicated by Canada’s avowal of multiculturalism; “collective” memory is necessarily multiple in this scenario. This sets up a tension with the notion of cultural memory as myth or tradition: Whose myth? Whose tradition? Cultural memory thus re-poses the infamous question of Canadian “identity” while repositioning the answer from the present (or future) to the past. As Marc Maufort puts it, “cultural memory [is] an umbrella phrase incorporating a latent but nevertheless profound doubt of identity that plagues hybridized Western societies in an age of globalization” (11). This recapitulates Pierre Nora’s notion of the lieux de mémoire, which likewise sought to arrest a certain past when France was becoming concerned about a lessening of its cultural “exceptionalism” due to the prospect of “Europeanization” and to increased immigration (Olick et al. 23). Nora distinguished between a “genuine” temporal past and the spatialized “places” of “constructed” memory in the present, which fetishize and objectify memory, rather than living it. The Canadian problematic emerges in the relative lack of a shared historical past, evident in the Canadian government’s recent celebration of the War of 1812, fought before the 1867 Confederation of Canada. If in Canada the greatest recourse to cultural memory has been made in the context of the memorialization of the two world wars, it must also be acknowledged that the fundamentally traumatic nature of those events produced narratives of disruption, rather than continuity. But even here the multicultural problematic emerges: Whose war is being remembered, and how is it being remembered? These problems are inherent in Halbwachs’s foundational thesis, which argued that an individual’s memories are fundamentally shaped by sociocultural practices; that the family is a major site of cultural memory; and that religious communities are powerful encoders of la mémoire collective. None of these concepts is without problems; they ignore the tensions between statist and individual memories; they exclude kinship groups other than families; and they give a prominence to religious communities that no longer obtains universally in the twenty-first century. What this suggests is that cultural memory has the potential to be a site of multiple narratives—of dissidence; of articulating a place both within but separate from the state; of politicizing a social movement; or of articulating a myth outside the mainstream—and many of the works of literature discussed in this entry do precisely that. Indeed, cultural memory and cultural memory studies are increasingly unfolding in a political context; whereas history ultimately defers to statist sanction, memory does not. This raises an epistemological question: What precisely constitutes knowledge of the past? Here, literature plays a special role in that it articulates a space of knowledge production outside the regimes of fact-based inquiry. ‘ “It matters to get the facts straight’ ” (183) says Aunt Emily in Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, but for Naomi, the novel’s narrator, “Aunt Emily’s words … are not made flesh” (189) as they are in the novel. This interchange reminds us that the interest in cultural memory emerged at a time when history was being interrogated as the sole arbiter of our understanding of the past; this was a result in good part of

66    Reflections on the Discipline the decline of print media (with their concomitants of abstraction and distance) and the rise of interactive media (which emphasize interface and engagement). Paradoxically, as Kenneth Dewar notes, “history is dying and the past is very much alive.” One sign of this paradox, according to Dewar, is the “ego-histoire” proposed by Pierre Nora, in which personal memoir is combined with historical study, as in Modris Ekstein’s Walking since Daybreak: A Story of Eastern Europe, World War II, and the Heart of Our Century. The advent of the “ego-histoire” proposes that “cultural memory is performative,” as Ric Knowles has put it (49). He goes on to propose that “through bodily practices … communities in diaspora interact and constitute themselves as communities through the performative enactment of intercultural memory” (49). Knowles contrasts this intercultural memory with the cultural heritage emerging out of statist multiculturalism, which “problematically constructs memory in essentialist, static, and nostalgic terms in relation to dehistoricized ethnic ‘homelands,’ atomizing communities of memory into separate ‘ethnic’ enclaves” (50). Knowles’s focus on diaspora is complemented by issues of cultural memory emerging from indigeneity in Canada, as Christine Kim and Sophie McCall note in Cultural Grammars of Nation, Diaspora, and Indigeneity in Canada. As Kim and McCall state, “diaspora represents a new phase in the ongoing critique of the nation in the era of globalization that can simultaneously address Indigenous sovereigntist concerns” (“Introduction” 27; see also McCall). That critique of the nation is ultimately a critique of cultural memory as state ideology. Concerns about cultural memory in Canada are being raised precisely at the moment when multiculturalism is being revisited, both on the political left and right. The way on the right was paved by J.L. Granatstein’s Who Killed Canadian History? (1998), which argued that too much history was being produced about women and immigrants and not enough about soldiers. Granatstein’s voice was particularly important because he was director general of the Canadian War Museum (1998–2001), and subsequently wrote a book titled Who Killed the Canadian Military? (2004), in which he decries, among other issues, the forgetting of the Battle of Vimy Ridge. Granatstein’s work was easily dismissed as a diatribe from someone on the political right, but the debate has continued; Granatstein reissued his book with two new chapters in 2007. Jeffrey G. Reitz et al.’s Multiculturalism and Social Cohesion: Potentials and Challenges of Diversity (2009) defines the parameters of the debate as it is currently being waged on the centre left; the book argues that multiculturalism has worked so far in Canada (in a way not comparable to Europe3) but that there is room for improvement. While Will Kymlicka could argue in Finding Our Way: Rethinking Ethnocultural Ways in Canada (1998) that multiculturalism is working, Reitz argues that the book’s “evidence on integration has other explanations,” and that to attribute successful integration exclusively to multiculturalism is “absurd” (“Getting Past” n. pag.). A focus on cultural memory, in this context, allows a distinction to be made between multiculturalism as a policy of the state and interculturalism as a socially transformative process of cultural memory, in the way articulated by Knowles. Questions of cultural memory came late to Canada. As a verspätete Nation or delayed nation (Winthrop-Young 91),4 the Canadian state has long been preoccupied by questions of identity. Linked to the question of identity was Canada’s avowedly multicultural status, which raised the question of a singular identity and provided an answer in its

Remembering Canada   67 suggestion that such an identity was necessarily multiple. With the current questioning of the ideology of multiculturalism, however, cultural memory has emerged within the state ideology as offering another answer: a unitary identity, but one that exists in a past accessible only through the memory machine of the nation. What the state asks us to remember is functionalized by what the state wants us to forget. This notion of forgetting is the theme of Adderson’s novel. As I discuss in the subsequent section of this chapter, it addresses both the forgetting of the historical past as well as the re-inscription of that past in the present—a gay-bashing by a neo-Nazi that takes place in Vancouver. Does that act make the Holocaust part of Canadian cultural memory? Or is the removal of Canada from that event geographically and historically a legitimate reason to elide it from the national memory? If we remember the Holocaust, do we forget the cultural genocide represented by the residential school system (a program of forced education of Native children designed to deprive them of their culture), or the bombing of Air India flight 182 (the largest mass murder in Canadian history, perpetrated by Sikh militants on a flight where the majority of passengers were Canadian)?5 Theories of cultural memory ask such questions and pose a variety of answers to them. The term “cultural memory” was established by Jan Assmann in Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, published in 1992 (translated in 2011 as Cultural Memory and Early Civilization:  Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination). Theorists have taken memory theory in multiple directions, from an emphasis on formulations of collective commemoration to a focus on the ways that memory is transmitted or mediated across generations (see, especially, Marianne Hirsch and Paul Connerton). Aleida Assmann expands the concept of “cultural memory” in the recently translated Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives (2011). In this work, she distinguishes between Gedächtnis, memory as knowledge, and Erinnerung, memory in action. These two aspects of cultural memory illustrate how it is possible to have a history of forgetting: the past (history) must be activated by the present (the place of forgetting) for memory to be functional (see Hutchison). Memory thus expresses a relationship between an irretrievable historical past and a present through which that past will inevitably be recreated. It pits the historical past against remembering in the present; the past is remade, in this process, to serve contemporary needs. Canadians did not fight in the War of 1812, yet that war is being made into a Canadian one to serve present statist needs for a collective past. Literature—the child of memoria—is able to address such questions in a way that history is not; as Aristotle reminds us in the Poetics,6 history can only tell us what was, whereas literature can tell us what might have been, and Canadian literature, over the past decade and a half, has been obsessed with telling stories about the past.

Fictions of Remembering A.M. Klein’s novel The Second Scroll (1951) was written in the wake of World War II, the founding of the state of Israel, and the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.7 Klein confronted this complex heritage by producing a fragmented text that refuses, on a number

68    Reflections on the Discipline of levels, to produce a unitary discourse about these events. Rather, it spatializes these issues (as Frances Yates had suggested in The Art of Memory, space is as crucial to memory as time) by representing Erinnerung and Gedächtnis geographically: in Klein’s novel, Canada is the place of active memory, and Europe and the Middle East the places of the historical past. Sent by his Montreal editor to collect an anthology of the new poetry of Israel, the novel’s unnamed narrator combines this quest with a personal one: discovering the fate of his Uncle Melech, a survivor of pogrom and the Holocaust. The narrator fails in both quests: the poetry is only to be found in the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language; and Melech is the victim of sectarian violence, dying in yet another holocaust. These failures point to the problematics of a unitary discourse about the cultural past; the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls at Qumran in 1947 extended these dangers to the Pentateuch itself. Klein structures his novel in five chapters, corresponding to those five books, but adds a series of secondary scrolls that read as glosses on them, suggesting thus that the memory of the past lies in its relationship to the present: remembering is reparative of the dismemberings of the war and its aftermath. Identity need not be unitary in this scenario; the narrator finds his identity between Canada and Israel, reclaiming in this context the diaspora itself. Klein’s novel did not set the stage for the Canadian novel of memory; indeed, it has remained an outlier, the issues it raises rarely revisited on either the literary or the political level—Canada is the only member of the G8 that does not have a Holocaust memorial. Caroline Adderson confronts this absence in A History of Forgetting. Alison, stylist in a Vancouver salon catering to elderly women, asks a client the meaning of the numbers tattooed on her arm, and with this appallingly naïve question begins a quest that will inevitably take Alison to Auschwitz (thus confirming Paul Connerton’s notion that memory is embodied [How Societies 5]8). Spurred in large part by a young colleague’s fatal gay-bashing at the hands of a neo-Nazi, Alison seeks to discover the relationship between the two events—how can an event in the past be made present again? Is this the role of history, or is it history itself that is an agent of forgetting? What Alison finds when she goes to Auschwitz is uncanny: “Kanada”—the room where the victims’ belongings were stored. She thus discovers another Canada in Auschwitz, suggesting a notion of history at odds with constructs of nation and identity: Canada is always already doubled by its historical others, and the last image of the book is of the seemingly unending series of death camps that spread out in front of Alison as she leaves Auschwitz. A subplot of A History of Forgetting concerns a fellow stylist, Malcolm, and his lover Denis, who is succumbing to Alzheimer’s, which poses the question of forgetting in another register: if forgetting can have a physiological basis, must our relationship to the past be considered a construct, at best a representation? This is to enter into the territory defined by Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory,”9 which argues that, beyond the generation of eyewitnesses, our direct relationship to the past is sundered and can only be reconstituted imaginatively, but that such imaginative reconstructions can constitute significant memories of their own. The Canadian memorialization of World War I is the focus of Jane Urquhart’s novel The Stone Carvers (2001), which takes the historical event of Canada’s commissioning

Remembering Canada   69 the Vimy memorial from architect Walter Allward and complicates it with the multicultural narrative that the memorial excludes.10 It does this along two plot lines: that of Father Archangel Gstir’s building of a church in Shoneval, northern Ontario, and that of parishioner Klara Becker and her desire to memorialize her lover, Eamon (who died in the battle), in one of the monument’s representations of a soldier. Echoing Hirsch’s notion of postmemory in the comment that “by telling stories one becomes a witness” (Urquhart 6), Urquhart contrasts the statist memory produced by the monument with the stories from below (literally: the stone carvers live in the tunnels that the soldiers had used) told by the multicultural cast of characters who come to populate its gaps, including her gay brother, Tilman. Klara herself must transvest in order to breach the patriarchal environment with which Allward has interfused his project. At first furious at Klara’s intervention in his monument, which he had wanted to remain “allegorical, universal” (337), Allward comes to realize that, by personalizing the monument, Klara had “allowed life to enter it” (340). Unlike this heavy-handed plot line, the secondary plot line is far more complex, in that Father Gstir’s church is financed by the Ludwig Missions (Ludwigs-Missions-Verein) established by King Ludwig I of Bavaria to promote the Catholic religion abroad.11 It is Ludwig II to whom Father Gstir appeals for funding; by bringing the “mad” king into her plot, Urquhart is able to produce a highly ironic context for Klara, who apprentices as a carver on the church in Shoneval, and for the Vimy Memorial, which would be inaugurated in 1936, three years before the world war launched by the Wagnerite Hitler; it was Ludwig whose financial aid made Der Ring des Nibelungen possible. Thus ironizing the stone (Vimy) and wooden (Shoneval) memorials in her novel, Urquhart subtly gestures toward a third:  the story we have just read. Trauma is strangely absent in The Stone Carvers; Tilman is the only veteran who has a major role in the story, and his most traumatic experiences occur in Canada before the war. Timothy Findley’s The Wars (1977) likewise re-inscribes trauma from the national to the personal, the plurality of the title indicating “the war with Eros and the Great War itself,” as Urquhart puts it (Stone 22). Findley sets his novel within the framework of a historical reconstruction that seeks to understand the reasons for the irrational behaviour of a soldier, Robert Ross, during World War I. Deranged (or perhaps not) by the effects of the war, Ross tries to rescue horses from a stable that is threatened by bombs; he shoots an officer who tries to stop him, but a bomb hits the stable before Ross is able to release the horses. Ross then rides to the railway (shooting another officer) and releases 130 horses from the cars in which they are penned and herds them to some barns. Ross refuses to release the horses to his commanders, who set the barns ablaze, and Ross is burned beyond recognition. Nothing that the narrator discovers in the archives is able to explain Ross’s act, but as the narrator is about to leave the archive on his last day of research, he sees a photo of young Robert and his sister, on the back of which is written the phrase, “ ‘Look! You can see our breath!’ ” (226). To this the narrator responds, “And you can,” thus empathizing with Robert in a way that powerfully conveys the embodiment of memory (Erinnerung), a notion that brings together the plurality of wars alluded to in the title.

70    Reflections on the Discipline Robert Ross, Tilman Becker, and Malcolm Firth are all represented as gay: these characterizations are crucial to an understanding of cultural memory because they go to the heart of the notion of the social collectivity that was the foundation of Maurice Halbwachs’s pioneering formulation of collective memory: “While the collective memory endures and draws strength from its base in a coherent body of people, it is individuals as group members who remember” (140). This “coherent body” has come to be identified with the family, as in the work of Hirsch,12 and subsequently with the nation, through Pierre Nora’s concept of les lieux de mémoire. Nora was formulating his thesis at a time when France was concerned with cultural homogeneity, and was “timed to engage with the problematics of the French Revolution bicentennial” (Olick et al. 23) and its assumptions of universalism and French exceptionalism. Cultural homogeneity is especially problematic in the Canadian context, however, given that Canada is not one nation but many, and this problematic is extended when groups outside traditional normative and political structures, such as lesbians and gays, are factored into the equation. Robert, Tilman, and Malcolm serve to highlight the gaps in statist (especially nationalist) elaborations of cultural memory. Rather than seeking a coherent narrative of belonging, however, they acknowledge the loss inherent in citizenship—that it is a giving up of one’s own identity for that of the state. Ann Cvetkovich has theorized this acutely: Migration can traumatize national identity, producing dislocation from or loss of an original home or nation. But if one adopts a queer and depathologizing approach to trauma and refuses the normal as an ideal or real state, the trauma of immigration need not be “healed” by a return to the “natural” nation of origin or assimilation into a new one. … The desire for “natural” reproduction can be understood as a way of refusing the trauma of cultural dislocation through a fantasy of uninterrupted lineage. As a more obviously recent and invented tradition, gay and lesbian culture can provide alternative models for migrant cultures. (121–22)

A complete, fully realized identity is not only impossible but also undesirable from the position articulated by Cvetkovich; in this new guise, identity becomes identified precisely through its incompleteness, its processual nature, which is to say that it becomes identified by loss. This sense of loss stands at the heart of Helen Weinzweig’s Basic Black with Pearls (1980). The novel initially presents itself as a mystery: the unnamed female narrator is seeking to contact her lover Coenraad (O’er Canad[a]‌?), a world traveler who is perhaps a spy. Despite the international gambit with which it opens, however, much of the novel takes place along the Spadina corridor, famously the conduit for Toronto’s immigrants. As one reads further in the novel, one is struck by a disconnection between the world described and the world experienced by the narrator. This is the affect of trauma, and what soon becomes clear is that the narrator is a survivor of the Holocaust. Weinzweig’s genius, however, is to map the narrator’s suffering onto patriarchy, such that her quest to escape from the compulsive repetition of her unforgettable past becomes at the same

Remembering Canada   71 time a need to assert herself as a woman. In this process she rejects Coenraad, not as a sign that she has overcome her trauma, but as an acceptance of her loss as that which has allowed her to survive. Marianne Hirsch and Valerie Smith have noted that “[w]‌hat a culture remembers and what it chooses to forget are intricately bound up with issues of power and hegemony, and thus with gender” (6).13 To this observation, Anne Whitehead adds that “[p]ublic media and official archives memorialize the experiences of the powerful and it has therefore been necessary to turn to alternative archives, such as … oral testimony archives … to hear the voices of women and other disenfranchised groups” (13). These voices remind us of the embodied dimension of memory. Familiar from the plight of Denis in A History of Forgetting, this notion takes on a broadly political dimension in David Chariandy’s Soucouyant (2007). Subtitled “A Novel of Forgetting,” this work inflects a woman’s dementia in terms of a much larger political forgetting that is inherent in a multicultural ideology which affirms Whiteness as the ultimate badge of belonging. History takes on an exclusionary role in the novel. The narrator’s mother’s forgetting paradoxically leads him to piece together (re-member) the past that has traumatized her: the progressivist ideology of colonialism in early twentieth-century Trinidad and its avatar, modernization. The politics of memory is also the concern of Madeleine Thien’s Dogs at the Perimeter (2011). Both protagonists of the novel work at Montreal’s Brain Research Centre, where they study how the brain functionalizes memory. This setting is juxtaposed with the traumatic stories of Hiroji Matsui and his associate, Janie, both of whom have ties to the period when the Khmer Rouge governed Cambodia. Here, the question of what constitutes madness takes on the contours of a state in which forgetting is by governmental decree. The key factor in the trauma experienced by the researchers is repetition: the characters are forced to go on reliving their horrific experiences. In the case of Hiroji, this repetition takes the form of a fugue state: “Hiroji knew what it was to have the missing live on, unending, within us” (9). The resulting multiplication of identities operates as a critique of statist multiculturalism, in which Whiteness becomes the indemnification of the colonialist denial of identity: “so many selves are born and reborn here, lost and imagined anew” (35). Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1981) addresses the political and personal aspects of the World War II internment of Canadians of Japanese heritage. This story, told as an extended act of mourning for the narrator’s uncle, is set against that of the narrator’s mother, who was a victim of the bombing at Nagasaki, a fact kept from Naomi, the narrator, by her uncle and his wife, Obasan. The past comes to illuminate the present for Naomi, but in such a way as to extend the past into the present, rather than reconcile the two. Naomi’s aggressive aunt, Emily, a “word warrior” (32), urges Naomi to “remember everything” because “you are your history” (49–50). Ultimately, however, it is not Emily’s history but Naomi’s narration that produces the necessary interplay of Gedächtnis and Erinnerung. The complexities of this relationship extend to the larger political context: “What this country did to us, it did to itself ” (33), says Emily at one point. Here, the multicultural model is both affirmed (as accommodating multiple stories) and profoundly critiqued (for its

72    Reflections on the Discipline statist univocality). Like Weinzweig, Kogawa interfuses her double plot with a sexual narrative of abuse; Naomi’s attempt to repress this memory has parallels with her “forgetting” of the internment. These doublings are key to the novel; Emily’s history must be set against Naomi’s telling—the attic archive of Obasan’s house is both “graveyard and feasting-ground” (25).

Nationalizing Memory Excerpts from Kogawa’s Obasan were read in Parliament on 22 September 1988, when Prime Minister Brian Mulroney announced that the state would make reparation to Canadians of Japanese heritage who had been interned during World War II. Mulroney’s act indicates the extent to which cultural memory in Canada has become a major site of political activity, and this has especially been the case under the Conservative government. One of the government’s interventions in this arena has been a new guide to Canada for immigrants. As Joe Friesen and Bill Curry have remarked, “Canada’s new immigration guide traces a national portrait that will be unfamiliar to many Canadians, one that draws heavily on historic symbols long exiled from the national consciousness. The monarchy and the military … are given much greater prominence in this new document. The land, the environment, and health care, mainstays of Canada’s self image through the past two decades, are largely ignored” (see also Ibbitson, “Remaking”). To this assessment, historian Margaret Conrad has added that the new guide is “ ‘kind of like a throwback to the 1950s. … It’s a tough, manly country with military and sports heroes that are all men’ ” (qtd. in Friesen and Curry). References in the draft guide to gays and lesbians were deleted from the final version (see Beeby), which does contain references to Quebec separatism, residential schools, and the wartime internments of ethnic Canadians. The rebranding of Canada as a military nation was evident in the bicentennial of the War of 1812–1814; the government spent nearly $30 million during a period of fiscal restraint on the commemoration of this event, which took place from 2011 to 2015 (see Allemang), although there is controversy about what exactly was being celebrated. John Allemang cites Ray Hobbs, an 1812 researcher and honorary colonel of the 41st Regiment of Foot Living History Group, who describes “a divided province quite different from the united-we-stand message the war now generates. Dissent and dissatisfaction with the Tory-dominated status quo was rife, and hand-to-mouth farmers did their best to avoid war duty and steer clear of rattled authorities, who saw treason everywhere among the recently arrived Americans, dissenting Methodists and rebellious Irish” (qtd. in Allemang F7). Nor did all Canadians wish to celebrate the war. “North of Toronto, in Stouffville, a group of people who belong to pacifist churches are asking their MP to tone down a June event tied to the bicentennial [of the war of 1812]. They say it doesn’t accurately reflect the history of the town, which was founded by Mennonites who conscientiously objected to war” (Mills). An American observer noted in the New York Times that

Remembering Canada   73 “[m]‌uch about the war is fiercely debated by historians but one thing is clear: Canada was not yet a country at the time of the war, which pitted the United States against the British” (Austen). A statue proposed for Parliament Hill honouring the war will dwarf a nearby statue of Liberal Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier (Chase, “Move Over”). Another government initiative is the rebranding of the Canadian Museum of Civilization as the Canadian Museum of History. As Daniel Leblanc reported, “The Harper government is calling on the Canadian Museum of History to dedicate half of its permanent space to a new gallery honouring Canadian heroes, achievements and milestones at a cost of $25-million in an era of cultural cuts. The exhibition will feature a host of ‘national treasures,’ such as explorer Samuel de Champlain’s astrolabe, the ‘last spike’ from the Canadian Pacific Railway, and Maurice Richard’s No. 9 Habs jersey” (see also Taylor). John Ibbitson noted that these changes took place in the context of severe cuts to the cultural sector:  The Conservatives display two-facedness in the telling of history, systematically reducing the role of the informed and the neutral in explaining the country to Canadians, while enhancing the capacity of the government to cherry-pick what it chooses to highlight. In the last budget, for example, funding was reduced for Library and Archives Canada, the CBC, Telefilm Canada, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and Parks Canada by a government that had already scrapped plans for a National Portrait Gallery. (The government also is eliminating support for scholars in other countries who study Canada.) … By contrast, the government found money in a “restraint” budget for projects that will allow it to highlight those scattered and fading (or faded) remnants of our history that suit the government’s political agenda. … For the Harper Conservatives, there is no sense of contributing to a new or evolved sense of Canadian identity, but rather a reaching back and dusting off of fragments of the past that suit their politics. (“Making”)

The disconnection between the event being celebrated and the historical record gesture toward the fact that this rebranding is double: it is both the rebranding of Canada and the rebranding of the Conservative party as the party of Canada, focusing particularly on the Arctic, the military, and the monarchy (see Friesen and Curry); “Royal” has been restored to the Canadian army and navy, and Canadian embassies around the world have been ordered to display a portrait of the Queen. When the battle of Vimy Ridge was commemorated in 2010, the government flew the Red Ensign, which incorporates the Union Jack.14 Upcoming commemorations include the 200th birthday of Conservative (and first) prime minister Sir John A. Macdonald (2015); the 100th anniversary of the National Hockey League; the battle of Vimy Ridge (the focus of Jane Urquhart’s The Stone Carvers); and the 75th anniversary of the World War II battle of Dieppe (2017, the year in which Canada turns 150, as well as the year in which the Canadian Museum of Civilization becomes the Canadian Museum of History); and the 25th anniversary of the North American Free Trade Agreement, signed by Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney (2019) (see Chase, “History”). As Ibbitson remarks, “Many of this country’s most cherished symbols and values—the flag, the Charter of

74    Reflections on the Discipline Rights and Freedoms, peacekeeping, public health care, multiculturalism—are the product of Liberal policies. The Harper government seeks to supplement, or even supplant, those symbols with new ones, and old ones revived. These new symbols are rooted in a robust, even aggressive nationalism that celebrates the armed forces, the monarchy, sports, the North and a once overshadowed Conservative prime minister [John Diefenbaker]”(“Remaking” A7). If the rebranding of Canada is meant to be a response, in part, to the association of the Multiculturalism Act with the Liberal party, the multicultural heritage has nevertheless come back to haunt the Conservative government via the Canadian Museum of Human Rights, nearing completion in Winnipeg. Headed by a former leader of the Conservative Party of Manitoba, and funded largely by the federal government, the Museum has found it difficult to reconcile the national with the international (as the Canadian War Museum did, as well, when veterans, backed by the Senate, successfully opposed the Museum’s description of the bombing of Dresden as criminal [see Bradshaw]). Particularly contentious has been the place that the Holocaust will have in the Museum, which has proposed that there be only two permanent galleries, one representing the Holocaust and the other devoted to Aboriginal issues, although there are no indications that connections between the two will be explored; this would be a lost opportunity to promote intercultural understanding in terms of “an act of transfer,” Paul Connerton’s definition of cultural memory (How Societies 39). As James Adams has reported, however, the Ukrainian-Canadian Congress, which claims to represent 1.2 million Canadians of Ukrainian heritage, has asked that “the Holodomor (Ukrainian for ‘death by hunger,’ and the term used to describe the famine/genocide that claimed millions in Soviet-occupied Ukraine in 1932–33) ‘be provided no less coverage … than the Holocaust.’ ” Instead, the Museum has stated that the Holomodor will be represented alongside three other genocides recognized by the Canadian government— Armenia (the subject of Atom Egoyan’s film Ararat), Rwanda, and Srebenica—in a gallery called “Breaking the Silence” (Basen F1). The Museum board has struggled with these issues, convening a Content Advisory Committee, whose final report, issued on 25 May 2010, stated that the “Museum should seek to navigate the difficult line between cultural relativism and universalism” (Canadian Museum for Human Rights 89). What the museum overlooks, however, is a third aspect of the museum: that it is Canadian—as A.M. Klein suggested in The Second Scroll, there is a geography of memory. If the Holomodor is to be represented, then it must be represented in terms of its effects on Canada, which would focus on immigration (which included “hundreds of veterans of the notorious Ukrainian Galician Division of the Waffen SS” [Basen F7]); the Holocaust should be represented in similar terms (about 40,000 survivors of the Holocaust emigrated to Canada in the 1940s [see Duffy]), and should include Canada’s deeply culpable record of rejecting Jews fleeing Nazism.15 Contextualizing these events is the cultural genocide pursued through the residential school system in Canada, which is the focus of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.16 The Commissioners’ work is hampered, however, by underfunding, by the exclusion from its remit of the Métis-only residential schools, and by the resistance of the Canadian government to

Remembering Canada   75 release millions of documents pertaining to the 150-year residential school system. In December 2012, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission sued the Canadian government in order to obtain access to this material (see Curtis). This, too, should be recorded in a Museum of Human Rights. Aleida Assmann has argued that history does not trump memory, and that the two must be understood in terms of their interaction. This implies an active engagement with the past, rather than a static relationship to it. A reified cultural “heritage” is no answer to a reified “multiculturalism.” History can only prevail in the present tense, and that is the tense of telling a story. In a postnational and postmemorial Canada, the critical imperative now is for an archaeology of the present.

Notes 1. See the discussion of this novel in the context of cultural memory in Cavell, “Histories.” 2. The works discussed in this chapter by no means span the output of Canadian “memory” fiction; see, for example, the authors interviewed in Wyile and the authors covered in Sugars and Ty’s Canadian Literature and Cultural Memory (2014). 3. As Joe Friesen and Sandra Martin note, Kymlicka has argued that Canadian multiculturalism has a number of special advantages: “Canada does not share a border with a poor country that produces thousands of illegal migrants. Nor does it have an empire-colony relationship, … nor a long-term guest worker policy like Germany’s, that creates an isolated, ethnic underclass or an unstable pool of resident non-citizens. It doesn’t, as in the Balkans, have a large ethnic minority population with homeland ties to a regional rival.” I would argue, however, that the fact that Canada has an apartheid system of Native reserves complicates all of these points. 4. This term figures in Geoffrey Winthrop-Young’s discussion of McLuhan’s place in German media theory (91). 5. 48 percent of Canadians polled in 2007 considered the Air India bombing to be a Canadian tragedy, and 22  percent an Indian one. See Patrick Brethour, “Why Canada Chose to Unremember Air India and Disown its Victims,” Globe and Mail (26 June 2010):  A15. Upon learning of the bombing, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney phoned the Indian prime minister to express his condolences. Subsequently, realizing his error, Mulroney wrote letters of condolence to the families of victims. 6. See Aristotle, “On the Art of Poetry”: “The difference is that the one tells of what has happened, the other of the kinds of things that might happen. For this reason poetry is something more philosophical and more worthy of serious attention than history” (43–44). Marianne Hirsch notes that Raul Hilberg, after completing his 1,300-page study The Destruction of the European Jews, “deferred to storytelling as a skill historians need to learn” if they are to convey the meaning of that event (“Generation” 104). 7. On the scrolls, see John J.  Collins, The Dead Sea Scrolls:  A  Biography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2013). 8. Connerton’s analyses of the modern city as a place of forgetting are acute; he is less convincing on the mediated environment because he does not grant the materiality of mediation (How Modernity 124). See also Connerton’s The Spirit of Mourning, in which he discusses mediation and the empathic (151–56).

76    Reflections on the Discipline 9. Hirsch writes of the memory accorded to the second generation: those whose relationship to traumatic memory is not direct, but “inherited” from a previous generation, though in a way that can be equally traumatic. I would argue, however, that all memory partakes of this imaginative quality; eyewitnesses often differ about what in fact they have witnessed. In counterposition to Hirsch’s thesis, the Assmanns grant a far greater significance to mediation in the production of memory. The performative and the memorial come together powerfully in the digital era; with every keystroke of this essay I am creating an archive. 10. Urquhart wrote about Vimy Ridge in 2012, on the occasion of the 95th anniversary of the battle: “Here at home we will think about the farm boys, labourers, office clerks, schoolboys, fishermen, loggers, grandsons of Underground Railroad survivors, and first nations hunters who ran out of those [staging] tunnels that morning, in 1917, into a living hell” (“Our Lost” A6). 11. The Ludwig Missions were supported by the Royal House of Wittelsbach until the end of their reign in 1918, and a church in Formosa, Ontario, was funded by the Ludwig Missions; the church in Shoneval was consecrated in 1881, five years before Ludwig II’s deposition and death (“Ludwigs-Missionsverein”; “Formosa, Ontario”). 12. Hirsch also associates the concept of postmemory with the memory of the Holocaust and of Auschwitz in particular; current historical research, however, argues that the Holocaust was largely eastern European rather than central and that Auschwitz was not its epicenter. See Snyder. 13. I quote this passage as well in my article “Jane Rule and the Memory of Canada.” 14. See Boswell. Retired in 1965, when Canada adopted the current maple leaf flag, the ensign is controversial because its incorporation of the Union Jack made it deeply unpopular in Quebec; it was the preferred flag of Conservative leader John Diefenbaker. 15. See Boesveld on the inauguration of a memorial by Daniel Libeskind in Halifax that commemorates Canada’s rejection of the MS St. Louis in 1939, which was carrying 900 Jewish refugees, a third of whom died in concentration camps when the ship was forced to return to Germany. 16. See Chapter 8 by Jonathan Dewar in this volume for an extended discussion of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Works Cited Adams, James. “Group Says Rights Museum Slights Suffering of Ukrainians.” Globe and Mail 11 Dec. 2010: A8. Print. Adderson, Caroline. A History of Forgetting. Toronto: Key Porter, 1999. Print. Allemang, John. “The Myth of 1812.” Globe and Mail 10 Mar. 2012: F1; F6–7. Print. Aristotle. “On the Art of Poetry.” Classical Literary Criticism. Trans. T.S. Dorsch. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965. 37–77. Print. Assmann, Aleida. Cultural Memory and Western Civilization:  Functions, Media, Archives. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. Print. Assmann, Jan. Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. Print. Austen, Ian. “Canada Puts Spotlight on War of 1812, With U.S. as Villain.” New York Times 8 Oct. 2012: A7. Print.

Remembering Canada   77 Basen, Ira. “Rights and Wrongs.” Globe and Mail 20 Aug. 2011: F1; F6–7. Print. Beeby, Dean. “Kenney Denies Role in Removal of Gay-Rights Text.” Globe and Mail 4 Mar. 2010: A5. Print. ———. “Minister Nixed Gay Rights Mention in Study Guide.” Globe and Mail 3 Mar. 2010: A3. Print. Boesveld, Sarah. “Memorial Recalls a Shameful Moment from Canada’s Past.” Globe and Mail 31 Aug. 2010: A2. Print. Boswell, Randy. “Red Ensign to Fly in Remembrance.” Globe and Mail 9 Apr. 2010: B3. Print. Bradshaw, James. “It Takes a Lot of Wrongs to Make a Museum of Rights.” Globe and Mail 12 Dec. 2009: F1; F3. Print. Canadian Museum for Human Rights, Content Advisory Committee. “Appendix C: Recommendations.” Final Report. 25 May 2010. Web. Accessed 11 June 2012. Cavell, Richard. “Histories of Forgetting: Canadian Representations of War and the Politics of Cultural Memory.” Mémoire de guerre et constructions de la paix:  Mentalités et choix politiques—Belgique/Europe/Canada. Ed. Serge Jaumain and Éric Remacle. Bruxelles: Peter Lang, 2006. 67–80. Print. ———. “Jane Rule and the Memory of Canada.” Unruly Penelopes and the Ghosts: Narratives of English Canada. Ed. Eva Darias-Beautell. Waterloo, ON:  Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2012. 157–81. Print. Chariandy, David. Soucouyant. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp, 2007. Print. Chase, Steven. “History Goes to Head of the Class.” Globe and Mail 12 Oct. 2012: A4. Print. ———. “Move Over, Laurier:  Ottawa Plans 1812 War Monument.” Globe and Mail 12 Sept. 2012: A1. Print. Connerton, Paul. How Modernity Forgets. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. Print. ———. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. Print. ———. The Spirit of Mourning:  History, Memory and the Body. Cambridge:  Cambridge UP, 2011. Print. Curtis, Christopher. “Commission Collects ‘Archive of Pain’ on Shameful Chapter in Canadian History.” Vancouver Sun 29 Apr. 2013: B3. Print. Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feelings:  Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003. Print. Dewar, Kenneth. “Does the Past Have a Future?” Literary Review of Canada Jan.–Feb. 2012. Web. Accessed 15 Jun. 2012. Duffy, Andrew. “The Hidden Horrors of Bad Arolsen.” Vancouver Sun 12 Nov. 2011: C2. Print. Ekstein, Modris. Walking since Daybreak: A Story of Eastern Europe, World War II, and the Heart of Our Century. New York: Mariner, 2000. Print. Findley, Timothy. The Wars. Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1977. Print. “Formosa, Ontario.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation Inc. 24 Sept. 2012. Web. Accessed 11 Dec. 2012. Friesen, Joe, and Bill Curry. “The New Canada: A Question of Emphasis.” Globe and Mail 13 Nov. 2009: A1. Print. Friesen, Joe, and Sandra Martin. “Toppling the Multicultural Myth.” Globe and Mail 5 Oct. 2010: A8. Print. Granatstein, J.L. Who Killed Canadian History? Toronto: HarperCollins, 1998. Print. ———. Who Killed the Canadian Military? Toronto: Phyllis Bruce, 2004. Print. Halbwachs, Maurice. “From The Collective Memory.” The Collective Memory Reader. Ed. Olick et al. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. 139–50. Print.

78    Reflections on the Discipline Hirsch, Marianne. “The Generation of Postmemory.” Poetics Today 29.1 (2008): 103–28. Print. Hirsch, Marianne, and Valerie Smith. “Feminism and Cultural Memory.” Signs 28.1 (2002): 1–19. Print. Hutchison, Ben. “Forget to Remember.” Rev. of Cultural Memory and Western Civilization, by Aleida Assmann. TLS 19 Apr. 2013. Web. Accessed 20 Apr. 2013. Huyssen, Andreas. Twilight Memories:  Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. London: Routledge, 1994. Print. Ibbitson, John. “Making the Past a Slave to Power.” Globe and Mail 4 May 2012: A11. Print. ———. “The Remaking of the Canadian Myth: Harper’s Year of Reinvention.” Globe and Mail 2 May 2012: A6–7. Print. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991. Print. Kim, Christine, and Sophie McCall. “Introduction.” Cultural Grammars of Nation, Diaspora, and Indigeneity in Canada. Ed. Kim, McCall, and Melina Baum Singer. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2012. 1–18. Print. Klein, A.M. The Second Scroll. New York: Knopf, 1951. Print. Knowles, Ric. “Performing Intercultural Memory in the Diasporic Present:  The Case of Toronto.” Signatures of the Past. Ed. Marc Maufort. Bruxelles: Peter Lang, 2008. 49–72. Print. Kogawa, Joy. Obasan. Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1981. Print. Kymlicka, Will. Finding Our Way: Rethinking Ethnocultural Ways in Canada. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1998. Print. Leblanc, Daniel. “Museum’s New Focus a Celebration of ‘National Treasures.’ ” Globe and Mail 17 Oct. 2012: A5. Print. “Ludwigs-Missionsverein.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation Inc. 16 Apr. 2012. Web. Accessed 11 Dec. 2012. Maufort, Marc. “Introduction.” Signatures of the Past:  Cultural Memory in Contemporary Anglophone North American Drama. Ed. Maufort and Caroline De Wagter. Bruxelles: Peter Lang, 2008. 11–14. Print. McCall, Sophie. “Linked Histories and Radio-Activity in Marie Clements’ Burning Vision.” Trans/Acting Culture, Writing, and Memory: Essays in Honour of Barbara Godard. Ed. Eva C. Karpinski et al. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2013. 245–66. Print. Mills, Carys. “Bicentennial Events Decried as ‘Affront’ to Pacifist Roots.” Globe and Mail 5 May 2012: A12. Print. Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les lieux de mémoire.” Trans. Marc Roudebush. Representations 26 (1989): 7–24. Print. ———, ed. Essais d’ego-histoire. Paris: Gallimard, 1987. Print. Olick, Jeffrey K., Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Daniel Levy. “Introduction.” The Collective Memory Reader. Ed. Olick et al. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. 3–62. Print. “Pierre Nora.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia, Inc. 9 June 2013. Web. Accessed 15 June 2013. Reitz, Jeffrey G. “Getting Past ‘Yes’ or ‘No’: Our Debate over Multiculturalism Needs More Nuance.” Rev. of Multicultiphobia, by Phil Ryan. Literary Review of Canada (July/August 2010). Web. Accessed 14 Sept. 2013. Reitz, Jeffrey G., et  al. Multiculturalism and Social Cohesion:  Potentials and Challenges of Diversity. New York: Springer, 2009. Print. Snyder, Timothy. “Holocaust:  The Ignored Reality.” New  York Review of Books 16 July 2009: 14–16. Print.

Remembering Canada   79 Sugars, Cynthia, and Eleanor Ty, eds. Canadian Literature and Cultural Memory. Toronto: Oxford UP, 2014. Print. Taylor, Kate. “ ‘The Devil Is in the Details.’ ” Globe and Mail 17 Dec. 2012: L5. Print. Thien, Madeleine. Dogs at the Perimeter. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2011. Print. Urquhart, Jane. “Our Lost and Found Memories of Vimy Ridge.” Globe and Mail 9 Apr. 2012: A6. Print. ———. The Stone Carvers. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2001. Print. Weinzweig, Helen. Basic Black with Pearls. Toronto: Anansi, 1980. Print. Whitehead, Ann. Memory. London: Routledge, 2009. Print. Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey. “Cultural Studies and German Media Theory.” New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory. Ed. Gary Hall and Clare Birchall. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2006. 88–103. Print. Wyile, Herb. Speaking in the Past Tense:  Canadian Novelists on Writing Historical Fiction. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2006. Print. Yates, Frances. The Art of Memory. London: Routledge, 1966. Print.

Chapter 4

Canadian C e l e bri t y Au thorship Mov e s  On Lorraine York

Virginia Woolf may have announced that in 1910 “human nature changed,” but one century later, the writer and academic Warren Cariou came to the same conclusion about Canadian literature. “It is a time of transition in Canada’s literary history,” he observed late in 2010, because the writers who are associated, by so many readers, with the mainstream canons of Canadian literature—Atwood, Ondaatje, Richler, Findley— “are either well into their senior years or have already passed on.” Canadian literature, wrote Cariou, is passing into an afterlife of sorts, as the generation that saw Canadian literature become “CanLit,” “an institution and a marketing category,” and a “way of considering our place in the world” slowly passes on—and yet its literary works retain their canonical power. Why 2010? Cariou’s elegiac moment was brought on by the publication, in 2006, of Alice Munro’s The View from Castle Rock, and its surprising back-cover claim that “This is her last book.” As we now know, it wasn’t; Too Much Happiness happily came along in the summer of 2009. Hence Cariou’s ambiguous elegy: to him, it was as though Munro and her generation of immensely successful authors were not able to relinquish their position as members of the pantheon of CanLit; or perhaps more accurately, we as readers have been unable to relinquish them. In this chapter, I consider the generations of writers who have succeeded Cariou’s giants of CanLit and their relationship to the forces of literary celebrity. If literary celebrity in Canada is still being defined by the standards of success and marketability that Munro’s generation helped to establish, then how are we to understand the cultural visibility of these new generations of writers: writers such as Lisa Moore, David Bezmozgis, Sheila Heti, Christian Bök, Joseph Boyden, David Chariandy, Larissa Lai, Rawi Hage, Shane Koyczan, Shyam Selvadurai, Johanna Skibsrud, Madeleine Thien, Esi Edugyan, and many others? I suggest that we are moving into another phase of celebrity culture in Canada—one that departs from the consecration of a few “major” stars in favour of a more diversified and varied field of literary production and celebrity. This is not a bad thing in the least; indeed, it may facilitate a more culturally diverse understanding of

Canadian Celebrity Authorship Moves On    81 CanLit. However, many of our standards and expectations of “literary success” remain mired in the literary culture of those previous generations of Canadian writers, whose success was enabled by a different combination of government arts policy and publishing conditions. First of all, it is important to note that, methodologically, studies of literary celebrity, whether in Canada or elsewhere, tend to fasten their gaze on the previous generation(s) of writers. In the United States, for instance, Loren Glass’s Authors Inc (2004) seeks the origins of American literary celebrity in the careers of Twain, London, Stein, Hemingway, and Mailer; Aaron Jaffe’s Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity (2005) focuses on canonical Anglo-American modernist figures like Eliot, Joyce, Pound, and Lewis; and Joe Moran’s Star Authors (2000) treats Philip Roth, John Updike, Don DeLillo, and the late Kathy Acker. Jonathan Goldman, in Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity (2011), attends to Wilde, Joyce, Stein, and Chaplin, and the title of Faye Hammill’s Women, Celebrity and Literary Culture Between the Wars (2007) makes her historical framework clear. In Canada, much the same is true. In my own Literary Celebrity in Canada (2007), I see earlier writers such as Stephen Leacock, L.M. Montgomery, Mazo de la Roche, and Pauline Johnson as important celebrity precursors to my main objects of study: Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, and Carol Shields. In fact, I was concerned much more about failing to look back, historically, than with failing to look forward to the writers who would succeed the CanLit generation. Smaro Kamboureli’s critique of Canada Reads,1 in “The Culture of Celebrity and National Pedagogy,” turns on a critique of the competition’s first winner, Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion (1996). Geoff Martin has published an engaging study of the celebrity of the now almost-forgotten Pierre Berton, and Katja Lee keenly assesses the celebrity persona of Berton’s colleague, Farley Mowat, in the light of scandals involving the veracity of his nonfiction books. Joel Deshaye examines the way in which celebrity phenomena and tensions informed the poetic friendship between Irving Layton and Leonard Cohen. In all of these instances, members of Cariou’s CanLit generation form the basis of study. It is, methodologically, understandable that members of those generations of Canadian writers should form the basis for the beginnings of a study of Canadian literary celebrity. After all, they did achieve significant visibility as writers both at home and abroad, and their celebrity bears the marks of that duplicity. As Laura Moss argues, in the case of Canada’s most visible literary celebrity abroad, Margaret Atwood, such celebrities enact a form of “transnational-nationalism” (22); they become native-informers, producing a narrative of “Canadian-ness” for export abroad. It makes sense, then, to understand how this most visible and mobile form of literary celebrity has operated, and continues to operate, in Canadian literary culture. With this scholarship supporting us, though, we need to move on, to understand how the next generations of Canadian writers, post-Atwood and Munro, inhabit literary celebrity. In his examination of the curious afterlife of this generation, Cariou does try to move us forward, by focusing on a selection of writers who he feels will “come into ascendancy when our current literary pantheon has faded into history”:  Lisa

82    Reflections on the Discipline Moore, David Bezmozgis, David Chariandy, and Dionne Brand. Significantly, he notes that this generation voices a critique of the very paradigm of nation-building that has been associated, on the level of culture, with Atwood et al.; they “represent significant shifts,” he argues, “toward narratives of de-mythification and decolonization rather than the implicitly nation-building project of the CanLit years.” But Cariou also warns that some new writers are not meeting the aesthetic standard that was set by their illustrious predecessors; he notes that “many recent Canadian fiction writers have not been taking as much care with their craft as they might,” and he (questionably, in my view) attributes this, in part, to the fiction boom at the beginning of the millennium, a time marked by larger advances from publishers. As an antidote, he suggests that those writers who are more careful with their craft are those who have served apprenticeships as poets or short-story writers, working in forms that require a close attention to language. Cariou is not alone in bemoaning the lack of apprenticeship among writers of the post-CanLit generations; Michael Ondaatje and Atom Egoyan, in a fascinating conversation, compared the conditions of literary and filmic success now with those that they knew as young artists. “Coach House [Press] was … a perfect gift,” Ondaatje recalled of his time with the small press in the late 1960s and early 1970s. “We could design and print our own books, make mistakes, fall flat on our faces, it didn’t matter because our books weren’t reviewed for six months and only got three lines or so. It was a different world; but a spotlight on me at the age of 21 would have killed me” (D6). Egoyan agreed, observing that “Everyone wants to make a first feature and expects to hit all the film festivals and think they will be bestowed with fame” (D6). Although Egoyan comes close to blaming the young for their expectations, Ondaatje’s analysis seems more systemic in nature, pointing to a time in Canadian literary production when the pressures of being inserted into the market early were less emphatic. As his peer Margaret Atwood notes, this pressure now exerts itself most strongly in the case of young writers who are trying to sell a second work, and whose earlier artistic success—or lack therof—is held to their account: “We’ve all heard the story about the writer whose first novel hasn’t done well, and who then presents the second one. ‘If only this were a first novel,’ sighs the agent. ‘Then I might be able to sell it’ ” (65). There is little time today, Atwood and Ondaatje imply, for the sort of apprenticeship that Ondaatje recalls so fondly. As these anecdotes suggest, it is necessary to turn to material culture, to the history of publishing in Canada, to assess the conditions that newer generations of writers face at this time and, thereby, to assess the conditions of their literary celebrity. The generation of writers who came to prominence in the 1960s were potentially able to benefit from the quality paperback movement (evidenced by Jack McClelland’s New Canadian Library series [NCL]). Janet B. Friskney and Carole Gerson point out that Margaret Laurence, for example, was financially dependent on NCL sales throughout the 1970s, and she was understandably upset about the cheaper, mass-market Seal editions of her novels that began to encroach upon those sales in the last years of that decade. Friskney and Gerson also draw attention to the “new infrastructure support, such as Canada Council programs” (138), that allowed some writers of this generation to realize financial returns,

Canadian Celebrity Authorship Moves On    83 however modest, from their writing (and allowed presses like Coach House to provide that experimental space for younger writers). In order to offer some focus, I will attend to the publishing histories of two recently celebrated young Canadian writers—Johanna Skibsrud and Sheila Heti—and will place their stories about the literary marketplace in the context of current, less hospitable publishing conditions. Admittedly, I have chosen young writers who have, in a sense, won the lottery in terms of literary celebrity in Canada, but it is precisely at the point of “consecration” (to use Pierre Bourdieu’s term) that broader assumptions about celebrity appear in their starkest forms. As Gillian Roberts explores in her comprehensive study of prize culture in Canada, Prizing Literature (2011), the power of the literary prize is to “increase the opportunity for reception by promoting the circulation of celebrated texts, proliferating the possibilities of hospitality through readership” (7). Roberts examines how the literary prize can turn the immigrant writer, in particular, from uneasy “guest” to welcomed “host.” A similar transition, I argue, potentially attends the younger writer whose work is consecrated by a prize, though changing conditions of literary publishing can keep these newer generations of Canadian writers seemingly still on the threshold of hospitality, not fully welcomed into the fold. Johanna Skibsrud won the Giller Prize in 2010,2 the year of the “afterlife” of CanLit. She published The Sentimentalists (2009), a novel about a daughter’s gradual discovery of her terminally ill father’s Vietnam experiences, with Gaspereau Press, a small press in Kentville, Nova Scotia. Gaspereau is dedicated to small-scale production of carefully printed and assembled books. Their trade paperbacks are “Smyth sewn,” which means that the sections (or signatures) of pages are physically sewn into the binding and then reinforced. Many of those trade paperbacks have handprinted jackets made from handmade paper, and Gaspereau’s hardcover books are case-bound, which means that the signatures are sewn together and then attached to the hard covers in a sequence of careful steps. Unsurprisingly, Gaspereau’s annual production is small; the catalogue for Spring 2013 lists five new releases. So when Johanna Skibsrud published The Sentimentalists, Gaspereau released 800 copies. And when the book went on to win the Giller Prize, even working at full tilt they could not produce more than 1,000 copies per week to meet the increased demand. (A Giller Prize–winner typically sells 75,000 copies in hardcover alone.) What interests me from the perspective of literary celebrity is the way in which this situation was depicted in the media in the aftermath of Skibsrud’s win. Gaspereau Press and its publisher Andrew Steeves were painted as recalcitrant villains standing between Johanna Skibsrud and international fame. Initially, Steeves was reluctant to hand over the printing of subsequent copies; when an offer came from Douglas and McIntyre to produce a wide-distribution edition, he at first refused, telling the Globe and Mail, “If you are going to buy a copy of that book in Canada, it’s damn well coming out of my shop” (Barber, “Johanna Skibsrud”). Eventually, a deal was struck, and Douglas and McIntyre obtained trade paperback rights, with Gaspereau retaining the right to produce a smaller run for book collectors. But the main complaint in the media was that the book was not available during “Giller week” in Chapters bookstores. Still, one cannot

84    Reflections on the Discipline weep too copiously for the book superstore; because of the shortage of the physical book, the Kobo e-book version became the top-selling title that week. The author herself became caught up in this controversy, in a way that rashly inserted her into this narrative of the suffering multinational, the rescuing midsize press, and the stubborn small publisher. After her win, backstage, she observed, “I think that [the publishers] had said that they would cross that bridge when they come to it, so here’s the bridge! There have definitely been times that I’ve wished that it was out there in more readers’ hands but I know that Gaspereau has been working very, very hard to get them there and they are in the independent bookstores now and they are, or should be, in Chapters again soon” (“Montreal’s Johanna Skibsrud”). It was as though the news media heard the first part of that utterance and not the second; suddenly, Skibsrud herself was annexed to the steady stream of criticism that the media had been directing toward Gaspereau. Moreover, she was entirely aware of how she was being positioned in this battle over cultural legitimacy, and she took several steps to reassert her position and her agency. She publicly praised the Gaspereau–Douglas and McIntyre deal, and took care to reassert the values that Gaspereau stands for: “I admire Gaspereau precisely for the values that made a mass printing of my book on demand impossible for them post-Giller. … If there was something that made me sad, it was the way that the media [were] so eager to write the story that they wanted to write that they twisted some things that I said to make it seem as if there was this ‘good guy, bad guy’ story. It was never like that—it never is” (Bennett). This situation, in which a young Canadian writer finds herself at the messy crossroads of various sizes of publishers, needs to be read in the context of recent publishing history. As David Creelman writes of Maritime writers, small presses are not “positioned to launch an international sensation” (61) because they have almost no budget for marketing campaigns. The government monies that they receive, from the likes of the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council, are not to be used to fund marketing. Midsize publishers, on the other hand, do often have (modest) budgets for marketing and publicity purposes, but even they, Creelman writes, “have sometimes struggled to devote the resources and funds needed to create and sustain the media buzz that produces strong sales” (62). Further complicating the picture, for Canadian publishers, is the dearth of access to distribution, especially in the wake of the failure of General Publishing, which was, until 2002, the largest Canadian-owed distribution company. As Danielle Fuller explains, Canadian-owned publishers “have very few options for distribution” because print and, more recently, digital distribution is “dominated by large foreign-owned companies such as Ingram, HarperCollins and Random House” (13). For young writers, then, gravitating toward midsize publishers—like Skibsrud’s Douglas and McIntyre—would seem to hold advantages. But as anyone who has followed the fortunes of that particular publisher in recent years might appreciate, those houses are vulnerable to economic pressures as well. In 2012, Douglas and McIntyre filed for bankruptcy; one contributing factor to their financial woes, according to Charles Foran, was their “expensive failed venture into digital publishing.” Foran speculates

Canadian Celebrity Authorship Moves On    85 that midsize publishers are tempted to compete with the larger companies on the latter’s turf, but they lack the financial cushioning for such riskier ventures that the larger companies have, thanks to their publication of international blockbusters such as The DaVinci Code. Where does this leave young writers just embarking on their careers? Buffeted back and forth from small to midsize to small publishers, hoping along the way to land a publisher who is able to distribute their books widely.3 Indeed, one effect of the failure of a number of midsize publishers has been for young writers to return to smaller presses. For those who achieve extra visibility through the workings of prize culture, like Skibsrud, there is always the chance of moving to the multinationals; in April 2011, Hamish Hamilton Canada, owned by Penguin, bought the rights to Skibsrud’s next two books after what was described as a “heated auction” (Medley). In media treatments of these writers, their publishing challenges tend not to be portrayed as the result of the long-standing difficulties of publishing literary fiction in Canada. Instead, recent media narratives of youthful Canadian literary fame make an unfortunate connection between youth and obscurity. John Barber, reporting on Skibsrud’s Giller win, for instance, drew attention to, in his words, “the short list’s strong tilt in favour of new and obscure authors publishing with small presses” (“Johanna Skibsrud”), as though youth, obscurity, and small-scale production were mutually defining. Vit Wagner, writing in the Toronto Star, underscored Barber’s point by describing The Sentimentalists not as the dark horse in the competition but “the darkest horse.” Barber, for his part, called Skibsrud’s novel “Undoubtedly the most obscure book ever to win a major literary award in Canada” (“Johanna Skibsrud”). The same thing happened the next year, when David Bezmozgis, Lynn Coady, Patrick deWitt, Esi Edugyan, Zsuzsi Gartner, and Michael Ondaatje were listed as finalists for the Giller. Although John Barber performed an act of hospitality by announcing in the Globe and Mail that “A new generation of Canadian writers took centre stage” at this Giller competition (“Generation Giller”), his article also hinted at the negative reception of this generation. He reported that one of the judges, Annabel Lyon, explained that six books, rather than the usual five, were nominated because the field was exceptionally strong, but Barber undoes his hospitable gesture by observing that “Given the distinctly youthful cast of the short list, observers joked that it was extended … this year in order to include at least one recognizable name.” The comfort of canonical recognizability that is arguably at the heart of Warren Cariou’s concept of the “afterlife” of CanLit is at work here, and it is a distinctly inhospitable tendency. Rather than acknowledging the ongoing challenges to publishing and gaining the sorts of national audiences that Atwood, Munro, and Ondaatje did, these accounts conflate youth with a shameful obscurity, as though young writers do not measure up to the standards of the CanLit generation. My second writer under study, Sheila Heti, casts a critical eye on this very paradigm:  the idea that Canada is inhospitable to its younger writers by denying them access to the star-making apparatus that bolstered previous generations’ literary careers. She responded in this way to a Globe and Mail profile of her career and recent

86    Reflections on the Discipline publishing success with her second novel, How Should a Person Be? (2010). In that profile, John Barber tied the story of the belated recognition of Heti’s novel to the familiar narrative of “the deficiencies of a culture indifferent to its own achievements” (“How Should a Novel Be?” R12).4 According to this narrative, only when Heti’s novel was excerpted in the New York–based online magazine N + 1, defended in a New York Observer piece, and then reviewed by James Wood in The New Yorker, was it recognized at home. As Barber himself seems to acknowledge, though, there are cracks in this narrative. The House of Anansi Press, he points out, “first took a chance” on How Should a Person Be? when Heti’s American publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, passed on it. They did much more, in fact; Anansi also published her first collection, The Middle Stories, in 2001, when she was 24, and they also published Ticknor, her first novel, in 2005, before it was published in the United States by Farrar, Straus & Giroux the following year. He also cites Anansi publisher Sarah MacLachlan, to the effect that Heti has been something of a “media darling” in Canada (R12), though her sales remained small. Once Barber traces the story of Heti’s success south of the border, though, he is prepared to see her as an inheritor of the CanLit generation. He opens his article by relegating How Should a Person Be? to the Canadian narrative of discomfort with success implied by the similar Alice Munro title, Who Do You Think You Are? Later in the article, he explicitly frames Heti as Munro’s successor: “One would have to go back a generation—two, perhaps, to Munro—to find a Canadian author who has enjoyed such an acclaimed international debut” (“How Should a Novel Be?” R12). In her response, published not in the Globe but in a Toronto-based artists’ group blog, Back to the World, Sheila Heti energetically refutes Barber’s narratives. (In fact, she characterizes the Globe as the previous generation’s publication, referring to it as “the newspaper I saw my father reading every day when I was growing up.”) She describes the narrative that Barber produced as a “familiar Canadian” one: “Canadian artist, neglected in Canada, finds acclaim in the States, and only then at home” (Heti, “A New Canadian Myth”). While Heti acknowledges that there is a measure of truth in this, she thinks that it is time for “a new story”—one that doesn’t so easily get co-opted by the “myth … that Canada generally has of Canadian artistic success.” Heti was particularly concerned to correct the impression that she did not have support while working in Canada. But the kind of support she points to, in this blog, is not of the official Canada Council/Giller/Governor General’s Awards type.5 It is, instead, the generous artistic support offered by fellow artists. This, Heti argues, is the part of the narrative that is never captured by the usual story of Canadian literary success: the way that artistic communities thrive “without external validation.” Precisely because the rewards are not lucrative, Heti argues, artists collaborate, work in various media, help each other in material and non-material ways. (Her own list of indebtedness includes everything from fellow artists reading her drafts, to lending her an apartment so that she could complete an edit.) The “ones who facilitate success” in Canada, Heti concludes, “are primarily the other artists.”

Canadian Celebrity Authorship Moves On    87 This is as true today as it was when Atwood and Ondaatje were young writers at Anansi and Coach House Presses, and it is easy to see why a young and increasingly successful artist should wish to correct the impression that she has had little support in her own country. Beyond this, however, Heti’s intervention has implications for the very way in which we conceptualize literary celebrity in Canada. Our ways of measuring literary celebrity are invariably caught up in discourses of individualism, as is the very concept of celebrity itself. (As the celebrity theorist David Marshall wrote, “The term celebrity has come to embody the ambiguity of the public forms of subjectivity under capitalism” [4]‌). But Heti’s counter-concept of success is communal rather than individual: “The years I spent on my book,” she reminds us, “weren’t years spent alone in my apartment.” She pays tribute to all the artists—musicians, painters, as well as writers—who served as mentors to her, and whose “thoughts developed my art and changed its direction.” She recognizes that the public forms of artistic validation—what she calls “the presumed engines of Canadian culture”—may not recognize this communal system of artistic validation, but she emphatically closes her blog with a testament to it: “We are the arbiters. Whether the myth of Canadian achievement includes this world or not, this world exists. It’s true.” Heti’s communalism is a salutary reminder of some of the more blatantly entrepreneurial forms of literary celebrity that have been validated by those “presumed engines of Canadian culture.” The publishing history of Terry Fallis’s comic novel about political backroom politics, The Best Laid Plans (2007), for example, is a narrative about the value of authorial self-promotion. Fallis, a public relations man and former Liberal strategist, was not able to find a publisher for his first novel, and decided, instead, to develop and share podcasts of sections from the book. He also self-published the manuscript, using an online program called iUniverse. The Best Laid Plans subsequently won the Stephen Leacock medal for humour in 2008, was bought by McClelland and Stewart, and eventually won the Canada Reads 2011 competition for the best novel of the decade. Juxtaposed with Sheila Heti’s paean to writerly collectivism, Fallis’s narrative is distinctly individualistic, and would seem to justify her call for alternative ways of understanding literary achievement. Heti’s denunciation of the official arbiters of Canadian literary success has its limits, however, since some of these official means of production and promotion may be turned to more egalitarian or communitarian purposes. This, after all, is the finding of the extensive research on what Danielle Fuller and DeNel Rehberg Sedo, in their study Reading Beyond the Book, call “mass reading events”: “book reading pursued and promoted as a social practice through the vehicle of reading events that operate on a citywide, regional, or national scale” (3). Fuller and Rehberg Sedo focus on events such as the Canada Reads competition, the televised Richard and Judy Book Club in the United Kingdom, and the One Book One Community movement.6 Though Fuller and Rehberg Sedo are clear about the way in which such events channel cultural and economic power in a neoliberal age, they are also mindful of the manifold pleasures and advantages of these events. In fact, they determinedly hold fire on taking one stark position, for or

88    Reflections on the Discipline against mass reading events; the phenomena are simply too complex in their workings for such a partial view. Instead, they see the Mass Reading Event as unleashing a range of possible cultural desires: What becomes clear, as we scrutinize the component organizational parts of MREs [Mass Reading Events] in the following chapters, are the ways in which this contemporary iteration of shared reading becomes overcharged with desires: from utopian dreams of democratizing access to reading and connecting cultural groups to each other, to functional goals about increasing print literacy. (20)

The star-making engines that Heti seeks to displace—the Giller Awards, the Globe and Mail, the Governor General’s Awards—are similarly capable of multiple social desires and outcomes, some that confirm existing hegemonic values in the artistic and ideological marketplace, and some that disrupt those same values. This multiple outcome can even be discerned within the same act of cultural consecration. To choose one example, the 2012 Canada Reads competition became an explicit ground for contesting claims to national belonging, most shockingly when one of the celebrity judges, Anne-France Goldwater (described as “Quebec’s Judge Judy”) burst into a discriminatory rant against two of the nominated books: Marina Nemat’s Prisoner of Tehran (2007) and Carmen Aguirre’s story of growing up as a child of anti-Pinochet revolutionaries, Something Fierce (2011). Goldwater called Aguirre a “bloody terrorist. … How we let her into Canada, I don’t understand” (Lederman). The resulting furor was a scandal in the sense that James F. English understands the scandalousness of literary prizes: “Every new prize,” he declares, “is always already scandalous. The question is simply whether it will attract enough attention for this latent scandalousness to become manifest in the public sphere” (192). In the case of Canada Reads 2012, it certainly did; and the resulting public-sphere discussion of the competition was occasion for dramatically opposed narratives:  Anne-France Goldwater’s encapsulation of Canadian racism, on one hand, and the triumph of winner Aguirre’s Something Fierce as a multiculturalist refutation of that racist exclusion, on the other. If younger writers can be potentially served or disciplined by these and other publishing initiatives, then how are we to enact hospitality to the newer generations of writers in Canada? There are several ways that we can lose the fruitless nostalgia for the CanLit generation. First of all, we need to pry open and question old assumptions about what constitutes literary success; recognizing the material effects of publishing pressures in Canada is one way of correcting the tendency to see the career trajectories of Atwood, Munro, and Ondaatje as normative narratives of success. Accordingly, we should welcome a more diversified field of literary accomplishment that does not look like the dominance of three or four star authors on the national stage, rather than decrying it as “obscurity.” And finally, we must question the narratives that privilege only particular arbiters of literary success, and only certain valued media or genres, because they neglect a large part of the artistic production and reception, much of it popular, that goes on in Canada. Sheila Heti’s rejoinder applies more broadly to this expanded sense

Canadian Celebrity Authorship Moves On    89 of literary accomplishment: “Whether the myth of Canadian achievement includes this world or not, this world exists. It’s true.”

Notes 1. Canada Reads is a literary competition produced by Canada’s public broadcaster, the CBC, and has been held over five days every year since 2002. Five Canadian public figures act as judges, each one defending one nominated book. Each day, one book is voted out of the competition by the judges, in the manner of a “Survivor”-style reality television show, until, on Day 5, the winning book “survives” and wins. 2. The Giller Prize is an award for Canadian fiction that was established by a Toronto businessman, Jack Rabinovitch, in 1994 (renamed the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2005). It is known especially for its generous cash prize of $50,000 CAN. 3. The case of Esi Edugyan, who won the Giller in 2011, the year after Skibsrud, is a similar one. She published her first novel, The Second Life of Samuel Tyne, with Knopf Canada in 2004, as part of their New Face of Fiction program; although it was warmly received, it did not sell prodigiously. As a result, she had a very difficult time selling her second novel, Half-Blood Blues, to publishers. Finally, the small British publisher Serpent’s Tail picked it up, but they had trouble placing it in Canada, until Key Porter Books’s editor, Jane Warren, saw its promise. Key Porter Books then went under, and the midsize Thomas Allen Publishers picked it up. In the aftermath of the novel’s success, it was picked up by Picador (a Macmillan imprint) for publication in the United States. 4. See also Nick Mount, When Canadian Literature Moved to New York. Mount argues that Canadian literature was produced, in large part, by the literary exodus to the United States that took place in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Fame, he maintains, happened elsewhere—not in Canada. Clarence Karr, writing of the early years of the twentieth century, argues that Canadian writers were unaffected by their success; fame didn’t happen to them in the same way that it presumably happened to their American counterparts. See, also, Caroline Rosenthal on what she sees as the differences between US and Canadian literary fame. 5. The Canada Council for the Arts, a government granting agency founded in 1957, funds Canadian artists through a series of grants. The Governor General’s Literary Awards, established in 1937, are annual prizes awarded to French- and English-language books in several categories: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama, children’s literature (text and image), and translation. 6. The Richard and Judy Book Club was an annual segment on the Richard and Judy chat show in the United Kingdom, starting in 2004. Each year, 10 books were chosen for discussion, and the winner was chosen by public vote. The One Book One Community movement is a grassroots reading event that encourages members of a community to read one book and discuss it at various events. It started in 1998 in Seattle, and has since spread to Canada and the United Kingdom.

Works Cited Aguirre, Carmen. Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter. Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 2011. Print.

90    Reflections on the Discipline Atwood, Margaret. Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. Print. Barber, John. “Generation Giller: New Young Writers Dominate Canada’s Richest Fiction Prize.” Globe and Mail. 4 Oct. 2011. Web. Accessed 3 May 2012. ———. “How Should a Novel Be? Don’t Ask Sheila Heti.” Globe and Mail 13 Apr. 2013:  R1, R12. Print. ———. “Johanna Skibsrud Wins Giller Prize for The Sentimentalists.” Globe and Mail. 9 Nov. 2010. Web. Accessed 3 May 2010. Bennett, Andrea. “Prism International Interviews Johanna Skibsrud.” Prism. 25 Nov. 2010. Web. Accessed 3 May 2012. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Ed. and introd. Randal Johnson. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. Print. Cariou, Warren. “CanLit Afterlife.” Canadian Dimension 44.6 (2010): 47+. Canadian Periodicals Index Quarterly. Web. Accessed 17 Feb. 2013. Creelman, David. “Swept Under: Reading the Stories of Two Undervalued Maritime Writers.” Studies in Canadian Literature 33.2 (2009): 60–79. Print. Deshaye, Joel. “Celebrity and the Poetic Dialogue of Irving Layton and Leonard Cohen.” Studies in Canadian Literature 34.2 (2009): 77–105. Print. English, James F. The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards and the Circulation of Cultural Value. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2005. Print. Fallis, Terry. The Best Laid Plans. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2007. Print. Foran, Charles. “End of Story.” The Walrus. March 2013. Web. Accessed 15 Apr. 2013. Friskney, Janet B., and Carole Gerson. “Writers and the Market for Fiction and Literature.” History of the Book in Canada, Vol. 3: 1918–1980. Ed. Carole Gerson and Jacques Michon. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2007. 131–38. Print. Fuller, Danielle. “Citizen Reader: Canadian Literature, Mass Reading Events and the Promise of Belonging.” The Eccles Centre for American Studies. London: British Library, 2011. Web. Accessed 15 Apr. 2013. Fuller, Danielle, and DeNel Rehberg Sedo. Reading Beyond the Book: The Social Practices of Contemporary Literary Culture. New York: Routledge, 2013. Print. Glass, Loren. Authors Inc:  Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States, 1880–1980. New York: New York UP, 2004. Print. Goldman, Jonathan. Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity. Austin: U of Texas P, 2011. Print. Hammill, Faye. Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture Between the Wars. Austin: U of Texas P, 2007. Print. Heti, Sheila. How Should a Person Be? Toronto: Anansi, 2010. Print. ———. “A New Canadian Myth for New Canadian Times.” Back to the World. 15 Apr. 2013. Web. Accessed 15 Apr. 2013. Jaffe, Aaron. Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. Print. Kamboureli, Smaro. “The Culture of Celebrity and National Pedagogy.” Home-Work: Postcolonialism, Pedagogy, and Canadian Literature. Ed. Cynthia Sugars. Ottawa:  U of Ottawa P, 2004. 35–55. Print. Karr, Clarence. Authors and Audiences:  Popular Canadian Fiction in the Early Twentieth Century. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2000. Print. Lederman, Marsha. “Canada Reads Panellist Defends Her ‘Gloves-Off ’ Comments.” Globe and Mail, 7 Feb. 2012. Web. Accessed 28 Mar. 2012.

Canadian Celebrity Authorship Moves On    91 Lee, Katja. “Goddard v.  Mowat:  F***ing the Facts Fifteen Years Later.” Canadian Literature 206 (2010): 30–44. Print. Marshall, P. David. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997. Print. Martin, Geoff. “Pierre Berton, Celebrity, and the Economics of Authenticity.” Canadian Literature 212 (2012): 50–66. Print. Medley, Mark. “Giller Prize Winner Johanna Skibsrud Signs with Penguin Canada.” National Post. 20 Apr. 2011. Web. Accessed 3 May, 2012. “Montreal’s Johanna Skibsrud Wins $50,000 Giller Prize.” The Canadian Press. ctv.ca. 10 Nov. 2010. Web. Accessed 3 May 2012. Moran, Joe. Star Authors: Literary Celebrity in America. London: Pluto, 2000. Print. Moss, Laura. “Margaret Atwood: Branding an Icon Abroad.” Margaret Atwood: The Open Eye. Ed. John Moss and Tobi Kozakewich. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 2006. 19–33. Print. Mount, Nick. When Canadian Literature Moved to New  York. Toronto:  U of Toronto P, 2005. Print. Nemat, Marina. Prisoner of Tehran. New York: Free Press, 2007. Print. Ondaatje, Michael. In the Skin of a Lion. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 1996. Print. Ondaatje, Michael, and Atom Egoyan. “The Kitchen Table Talks.” Globe and Mail 8 Apr. 2000: D6. Print. Roberts, Gillian. Prizing Literature:  The Celebration and Circulation of National Culture. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2011. Print. Rosenthal, Caroline. “Canonizing Atwood: Her Impact on Teaching in the US, Canada, and Europe.” Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact. Ed. Reingard M. Nischik. Rochester: Camden House, 2000. Print. Skibsrud, Johanna. The Sentimentalists. Kentville, NS: Gaspereau, 2009. Print. Wagner, Vit. “Johanna Skibsrud is the Darkest Horse in the Giller Prize Race.” Toronto Star. 5 Nov. 2010. Web. Accessed 3 May 2012. Woolf, Virginia. Selected Essays. Ed. David Bradshaw. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. Print. York, Lorraine. Literary Celebrity in Canada. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2007. Print.

Chapter 5

Toward a Pl a neta ry P oet i c s Canadian Poetries after Globalization Erin Wunker

This chapter addresses questions pertaining to how “globalization” impacts Canadian poetics. Canadian poetry is, today, potentially infinite, as lines of influence and poetic communities form themselves in distributed and networked fashions that may maintain an awareness of the nation-state without being constrained by it. Poetry forms communities at multiple scales, be those communities local, regional, provincial, national, transnational, digital, or otherwise; in this sense, I look to Jeff Derksen’s notion of “rescaling poetry” (“Rescaling” 93) in order to think about the significance of how poetics function today. Julia Kristeva frames literary production in terms of texts, which she describes as systems “of multiple connections that could be described as a structure of paragrammatic networks” (“Towards a Semiology of Paragrams” 32). Rather than a single-authored document created in isolation, the text as network both bespeaks and embraces the heterogeneity and polyvocality of its production. Literary networks resurface our ability to perceive and address the literary, political, and global landscape. Or, Kristeva suggests, “the signification of poetic language evolves through relationship” (“L’engendrement de la formule” 126). Poetics embody their signification processes and make it possible to trace not only other histories that challenge dominant discourses, but those that make space for the possibility of acting otherwise in today’s world. Many challenges arise under the conditions of what generally goes under the rubric of globalization, which are also considered by Herb Wyile in Chapter 48 of this volume on neoliberalism. My concern here will be with ways in which Canadian poetics have responded to, mobilized, and made use of the conditions in which they exist. Rather than trace a linear development of Canadian literary production alongside the emergence of globalization, my aim is to establish networks of literary and cultural exchange that respond to contemporary conditions. In order to pursue these interests, I  will, first, provide an understanding of the key terms that I deploy—globalization, poetics,

Toward a Planetary Poetics    93 planetarity—and examine a series of key sites of production that I will discuss through three texts: Nicole Brossard’s Notebook of Roses and Civilization (2003; 2007), Dionne Brand’s Inventory (2006), and Sina Queyras’s Expressway (2009). These texts will allow me, in turn, to make links—the networks with which I am concerned—with groups such as Quebec feminist writers; diasporic and Caribbean writers; and digital, transnational, and conceptual writing communities. My goal is to demonstrate the importance of understanding poetics in Canada as open, mobile, polyvalent sites of productivity that push against or offer alternatives to the seemingly relentless movement of global capitalism.

Poetics, Planetarity Poetry in Canada responds to the contemporary moment in a range of ways. While Canadian criticism has tended to frame poetic production in terms of nation, region, language, race, and gender, the current moment calls for a retooling of critical approaches so as to recognize these elements at the level of globality. What has often been called “globalization” affects poetry in Canada at the scales of production, consumption, and circulation. The term “globalization,” as I  am using it, refers to the processes through which capitalism renders the entire globe ever more accessible for investment, resource extraction, colonization, and the movement of people. This is a process that was identified by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto, when they state that capital has rendered the globe a site of colonization: “the bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption of all countries” (65). That capital requires continually expanding markets in order to resolve its contradictions—what David Harvey terms “the spatial fix” (26)—suggests that it operates in a manner that flattens difference while claiming a form of universality in applying its logic and systems to everything. The current interest, for instance, in the notion of biopolitics stems from a recognition that capitalism maintains an interest in opening new markets within our very bodies. Within this context, it is important to note that what critic Paul Jay has described as “the transnational turn” in literary studies has had a deep impact on the Canadian literary context. In addition to book-length considerations that clearly announce their affinity for this shift—such as Kit Dobson’s Transnational Canadas: Anglo-Canadian Literature and Globalization (2009), Herb Wyile’s Anne of Tim Hortons:  Globalization and the Reshaping of Atlantic-Canadian Literature (2011), Roy Miki’s In Flux: Transnational Shifts in Asian Canadian Writing (2011), and Diana Brydon and Marta Dvořák’s edited volume Crosstalk: Canadian and Global Imaginaries in Dialogue (2012)—many critics and authors have been influenced by this shift. Indeed, much of the work associated with the University of Guelph’s recently closed TransCanada Institute and published in Wilfrid Laurier University Press’s TransCanada series, both under the auspices of Smaro Kamboureli, has repeatedly demonstrated the impact of the transnational turn (see especially Kamboureli

94    Reflections on the Discipline and Miki’s edited volume Trans.Can.Lit:  Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature [2007] and Kamboureli and Robert Zacharias’s edited volume Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies [2012]). In a recent essay, Jeff Derksen—whose Annihilated Time: Poetry and Other Politics (2009) also signals this shift in Canadian criticism—has argued that poetry increasingly reflects the transnational turn as well. He argues that there is “a growing body of poetry in North America that is critically and intensively engaged with the politics and restructuring brought by neoliberalism” (“National Literatures” 58). It is within this context that I wish to situate my thinking here. It is Gayatri Spivak’s formulation of “planetarity” that I will deploy throughout this essay, a formulation that provides the specific means of thinking through how to respond to the conditions of globality within a poetic framework. Spivak defines “planetarity” as a means of challenging globalization, but not as an “anti-globalization” action; she suggests that while “globalization is the imposition of the same system of exchange everywhere,” planetarity might usefully “overwrite the globe” in an attempt to recognize the ways in which we inhabit it (72). Planetarity becomes a means of thinking of the self and political action across a range of scales, so that rather than opposing a monolithic, totalizing force, action takes place at local, transnational, or global scales, all the while keeping the notion of the planet itself in mind. Spivak’s notion continues to be relevant because she makes questions of race and gender, in particular, foundational ones in order to begin to work across a variety of registers, whereas criticism that falls more squarely within Marxist traditions is routinely critiqued for its overriding economic determinism. Spivak’s concept of planetarity invites us to remake our understanding of how we relate to the world; these considerations are important for understanding poetics in Canada today because these poetics are ones that move across similar scales.1 A poetic practice that centres on a specific site—such as Sachiko Murakami’s Rebuild (2011) or Robert Kroetsch’s The Hornbooks of Rita K (2001)—can be as much a planetary poetics as one that sets out to respond directly to global conditions, such as Jeff Derksen’s Transnational Muscle Cars (2003) or Rita Wong’s forage (2007). Poetics can move across scales, within the framework that a notion of planetarity might enable. In order to demonstrate how our understanding of a poetics of planetarity might work within a Canadian context, I  will turn to three case studies—three constellations of poetic enactment—that work within the gendered, racialized, geographic, and transnational sites that are foundational to Spivak’s concept.

Nicole Brossard, Notebook of Roses and Civilization Spivak’s notion of planetarity offers a concrete challenge to the ways in which globalization has been read to both overwrite and overdetermine the body. More specifically, transnational feminist strategies for critiquing globalization have underscored the

Toward a Planetary Poetics    95 necessity of a situated and embodied standpoint.2 In the Canadian context, as in other postcolonial nations, the flattening of globalization is linguistic, just as it is economic and geographic. Hence, I begin this consideration of planetary poetics as a strategy for addressing globalization in the Canadian context with a Quebec feminist writer. Since the “Grande noirceur” (great darkness) of the Maurice Duplessis era in Québec, feminist poetic communities have been making space for discussions of gender, language, and French continental theory.3 These communities have been particularly concerned with staking new territories of collaboration, and political as well as artistic engagement. A central figure in these discussions, the poet, essayist, and writer Nicole Brossard, in collaboration with France Théoret, Louise Cotnoir, Louky Bersianik, and Gail Scott, established clear discursive connections with French conceptions of écriture féminine (a term, coined by theorist Hélène Cixous, that articulates the connection between women’s writing and the body).4 Cixous’s concept, which she situates most clearly in her foundational essay “The Laugh of the Medusa,” not only maintains that women’s writing is a visceral and embodied act, but also calls for a form of writing that would have a destabilizing effect on patriarchal paradigms of thought. The creation of this concept in the midst of international second-wave feminism both challenged and pushed further the North American focus on equality and underscored the fissures in a movement that was at the time frequently conceptualized in binaristic terms. Though écriture féminine does not follow a strict referential genealogy, it draws on Virginia Woolf ’s earlier assessment of the masculine-versus-feminine sentence in A Room of One’s Own. Woolf suggested that porous, poetic prose might leverage space for a feminine speaking voice that would upset habitual structures of writing and allow for the articulation of different, feminized experiences. In Quebec, écriture feminine and the feminine sentence were reworked in the crucible of national and provincial politics that were drawing attention to both language and gender. While Canada as a nation-state was working to further entrench itself in global markets, Quebec had been something of an anachronism—and poetic feminist communities in that province enacted this anachronism by grounding their work in a global context as a part of the growing international feminist intervention in the overwriting of the gendered subject. Writing in the context of questions of racialization and globalization, Larissa Lai has suggested “that citizenship in liberal democratic states depends on the coherent ego of the lyric ‘I’ to declare allegiance, mark a ballot, and take on civic duty,” a series of social powers that are being “evacuated … by neoliberalism” (172). One important response, she suggests, is to challenge the singularity of the subject in this context. Fiction/theory/fiction théorie emerged as the dominant concept for Quebec women writers in order to perform just such a challenge. This mode of writing hinged upon a theoretical engagement, collaboration, and polyvocal speaking voice. Variously described as “mutual listening” (Marlatt, in Godard et al., “In Conversation” 120) and entendu, fiction/theory is conceived of as a participatory and collaborative reading and writing practice where the feminist reader reads “with rather than about the text” (Godard, in Godard et al., “Theorizing Fiction Theory” 54). The journal Tessera emerged as a leading venue for Quebec feminist writers in English and French. The early work

96    Reflections on the Discipline of Tessera aimed to build collaborative bridges between Anglo- and Franco-Quebecois feminist writers and to foster broader connections, such as to the West Coast. The early editorial collective included poet Daphne Marlatt, Anglo-Quebec writer Gail Scott, translator and critic Barbara Godard, and critic Kathy Mezei. Collectively, they developed the idea for a discursive feminist engagement across the two official languages of Canada. Fiction/theory emerged as a Canadian iteration of écriture feminine that was intended to underscore the connection between theory and creative production, as well as to demonstrate the generative and collaborative quality of feminist thinking. Nicole Brossard’s oeuvre embodies generativity, polyvocality, and collaborative methods in order to generate texts that foreground the féminine. The text upon which I am drawing here, Brossard’s Cahier de roses et de civilisation (2005), translated as Notebook of Roses and Civilization by Erín Moure and Robert Majzels (2007), is important in this context insofar as it gathers together Brossard’s long-standing concern with humanity, relating, and the female body. In this text, the poems function as small spaces of sensibility, small objects or “rooms” (stanza is Italian for room) that are brought together through a series of what Brossard terms “soft links.” These links of quotidian experience, rendered through prose poetry, encapsulate the speaker’s shifting sensibility. These rooms assemble glimpses of intimate experience from the perspective of the speaker, though without the tyranny of a lyric-I perspective: the future the future naked things design audacity vertical a woman in panties half-spoken surrounded by syntax and paintings dark eyebrows a starlet sings an amphetamine clenched in her teeth (8)

In this passage, two stanzas or rooms appear to separate female figures, though they could equally be the same woman. The effect of the stanza here suggests the snapshot, or two images between blinking. The stanzas, then, record experience at a deeply personal level, and yet the individual is nowhere to be seen. What is objectified is not the women at the end of the gaze, but materiality and design—“the future the future” upon which one may have designs. The images are also not simply visual: the woman in panties is also spoken, “half-spoken,” in syntax that evades the “audacity” of design. The movement shifts from the visual to the syntactic and back again. Here, then, the poet makes a planetary reach from the interiority of the lyric I. Rather than sanctify the closed circuitry of lyric address, Brossard’s speaker extends it. The stanzas become situated spaces from which to name and critique the isolating effects of singularity, its flattening of subjective experience, and the overdetermination of the gendered body.

Toward a Planetary Poetics    97 In other words, what the rooms of the stanzas show is the need to think the visual and syntactic simultaneously without losing sight of the corporeal body. The text moves to intertwine the self into the other through this admixture: the c of cerise that is not yet a comma between you and me and this foretaste of translation traced like an arc in the mouth an obsessive curve that could look like your belly, or those typos found in books (46)

Language moves between the intimate and the public, between the private and the commingling that has to take place at the level of language and translation. This is a translation not only between languages, but also between bodies: the letter “c” has material, physical effects, ones that can be traced both to the belly and to the book. The body struggles with language, with its contours, and with the ways it structures action. Two pages later, Brossard writes: when we’re struggling to hang on to solutions why must we suddenly stretch a part of our being toward fiction step back from words just as we emerge from the time of scars (48)

Fiction/narrative is a structure into which we find ourselves interpellated; it is an ideological construct that binds the body within a telos in which the gendered self is both over- and under-determined. The narrative pre-scribes, writing on the body, its way of being in the world, such that the body itself buckles under the burden of that ideological thrust. Specificity gets lost; intimacy gets flattened. The self moves suddenly, unexpectedly, back toward fiction at the moment in which struggle becomes visible, yet Brossard’s line breaks provide a rupture with that impulse, taking the sentence and fracturing away from the deterministic structures that narrative would otherwise provide. Importantly, this body is not singular; it is, in this instance, collective: “we” suddenly step back into fiction from the threshold of moving beyond the injurious experience of narrative and interpellation. The structure of the book requires that the reader engage with the intimate minutiae of the everyday, yet refuses to let the reader forget that she is part of a wider collective—or civilization, as per the book’s title. Brossard moves the reader from rooms of sensibility to concrete engagement with the global, particularly in the sections of prose poetry that punctuate the text. This globality emerges in the figure of the outside: But there’s outside, the cold the heat the violence doubled over in pain in a real bind at the edge of city and forest, there’s outside and it’s worse each time as there’s

98    Reflections on the Discipline traffic of weapons, traders of women and children, white-shirted men who manipulate our genes and cells like so much merchandise. (57)

Outside appears to be cold, hard, and concrete, the barrage of text a rude interruption after the measured lines and stanzas of the earlier poems. It is a space of warfare and violence, of human trafficking, of weapons, and of death. One also has a very clear sense of the speaker’s positioning here, as there is an implied dialogue between the speaker and her implied audience: But there’s outside and you might say as a result that the world’s hard to take despite the December luminosity of tropical breezes. Inside, words let us invent, weave cords strong enough to hang by our wrists and help balance the body. (57)

When the intimacy developed in the syntax of the rooms of the earlier poems is brought into the public space of “outside,” what changes is not simply the structure of intimacy, but also the public space itself. In other words, the motion between outside and inside becomes a dynamic working of the self into the world; the interaction with language, with the other, becomes a way of working against the interpellative structures of narrative. “Inside” words “let us invent,” and that collective invention starts in the situated space of the speaker’s interiority. The collectivity of “us” and “our wrists” stems from a singular body—the body literary—that challenges neoliberal discourses of isolation and individuality. This collective body borne in the voice of the speaker in turn informs the “outside” world of global violence into which the speaker is thrown. The world outside might be “hard to take,” but in Brossard’s poetic reach it needn’t be “taken” alone. As the text progresses, the intimate is freed from private space to come into collaboration with the open. Brossard writes: finally in the midst of a living tongue well irrigated i’ll have such momentum at my fingertips we could call it theatre with petals humanity’s days numbered or apparition of objects then come the conflagrations (79)

A shared organ of speaking, “a living tongue,” provides momentum to the lower-cased i, the speaker who moves toward the “we” who would rename civilization a “theatre with petals” as the human is removed from humanity. The vision is not bleak, nor is it totalizing: what could be seen as a destructive conflagration is, instead, simply the “apparition of objects” as the human, the monolithic speaker of the masculine text and

Toward a Planetary Poetics    99 of the dominant narratives of globalization, is destabilized and, however temporarily, collapses. “[A]‌living tongue,” a “theatre with petals,” the “apparition of objects” shore reader and speaker up together against the coming conflagrations.

Dionne Brand, Inventory The network of transnational feminist poetics extends, importantly for the Canadian context, to the Global South. While the history of Canadian immigration limited people’s arrivals prior to the Trudeau era’s liberalization of migration policy, racialized writers in Canada have a long history of connections across time and space. Within Canada, writers grapple with the legacies of settler-invader history across a wide range of subject formations that coalesce around questions of race and cultural difference. For a writer like Dionne Brand, these concerns are manifested particularly with reference to questions of movement linked to the Caribbean. Critical and poetic considerations of the transnational history of the Black Atlantic are central to her work. Networks of writing extend from Africa to the Caribbean to the United States and Canada in order to create a strong critique of colonial legacies—and present-day colonialism and racism—as well as to understand the possibilities for building community through acts of resistance. A great deal of literary activity and activism locates itself within the Toronto of which Brand writes and where she lives, in particular projects such as the now-defunct Sister Vision Press, which was run primarily by writer-activist Makeda Silvera (Butling and Rudy 131–32). Dub poetry plays a similarly important role in community building, with artists Lillian Allen, Afua Cooper, and others situating their work both very much within their immediate urban contexts and transnational routes. Indeed, the boundaries between such communities are very porous; a writer like M. NourbeSe Philip, for instance, bridges spoken word performance and experimental textuality in her book Zong! (2008), an examination of a slave ship by the same name that murdered its cargo in order to make an insurance claim. Members of Black diasporic communities like Austin Clarke highlight the challenges experienced not only through the processes of immigration but also through the ways in which systematic racism continues to form and inform the nation-state, while younger writers like David Chariandy are extending these examinations for a new generation. Brand’s writing moves between criticism, poetry, and prose in order to articulate how communities might relate to one another without occluding or reifying historical trauma and injustice. Her devastating critique of the nation-state, of gendered forms of oppression, and of ongoing, everyday experiences of racism not only react to neoliberal globalization, but also construct communities by gathering voices together across space and time. Her 2006 book of poetry, Inventory, marks a particularly incisive moment in her writing. Inventory appeared shortly after Brand’s novel What We All Long For (2005), a novel that was received to wide acclaim, and that was frequently read as a comparatively positive assessment of the possibilities for racialized youth in contemporary

100    Reflections on the Discipline Toronto and, by extension, Canada. Inventory, which takes the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as its point of departure, is an act of witnessing in which a lyric speaker continually displaces her own subjectivity in order to make space for the bodies that are killed, discarded, and disregarded in an era of racist warfare. Inventory opens by announcing the absence of collective belief in the human project: We believed in nothing the black-and-white american movies buried themselves in our chests, glacial, liquid, acidic as love … and the light turnings to stone, inside and out, we arrived spectacular, tendering our own bodies into dreamery, as meat, as mask, as burden (3)

From the outset, the book announces both a strong voice and one that experiences the contemporary moment as one of loss. There is no belief, there is no hope, there is no collective despite the “we.” Instead, the body is experienced as “meat,” “mask,” and “burden,” the frame in which “we” are trapped. And in the interim the “black-and-white american” movies, which stand in for popular media, are ubiquitous and benumbing. The oscillation between subjects and speaking voices is thus announced at the beginning as a crucial means of recognizing and encountering politics. Speaking in the first-person plural is by no means a simple act of collectivity or enunciative politics. Rather, the “we” is fully implicated in the wrongs of the world, in spite of Brand’s recourse throughout the book to calling out a violently reactive “they”: the steel we poured, the rivets we fastened to our bare bones like cars, we stripped, so fastidious, the seams of dirt excised from apples and gold all the railways everywhere, and the forests we destroyed, as far as the Amazonas’ forehead, the Congo’s gut, the trees we peeled of rough butter, full knowing, there’s something wrong with this (6–7)

Here, the speaker tracks the destruction undertaken in the name of progress, from building national railways through ecologically sensitive spaces in order to access resources, the “fruit” and “gold” to which Brand refers, to the destruction of spaces of the Global South, from the Amazon to the Congo. In these cases, both action and inaction

Toward a Planetary Poetics    101 span from the local to the global, implicating “us” in processes of destruction. Brand is careful, however, to note that there are forces beyond “us” at work: they waited, watched, evacuated all our good lyrics of the goodness, of the science, the delicious being of more than, well more, so hard now to separate what was them from what we were how imprisoned we are in their ghosts (8–9)

Who are “they”? This phrasing is indicative of Brand’s relentless capacity to place blame where it is due, and yet the passage simultaneously acknowledges that such a sharp us/ them distinction is the site at which politics can both be enunciated—and at which it fails. The collective “we,” a “small-l” liberal collectivity that relies upon accusing others for their wrongdoings, falls apart, collapses around its inability to recognize the ways in which “we” remain inseparable from “them.” We are “imprisoned … in their ghosts”; the inseparability is constellated around an image of “the woman … lying in the alleyway” whom Brand describes in the following passage (9). Violence occurs, violence is perpetrated. However, the actors, those who commit violence, are not simply others, are not simply wrongdoers, but are also us. As a result, the collective voice decrying violence cannot hold. As the text moves toward developing an inventory of the dead, of those killed in warfare, of those who are rendered faceless, the marginalized who are left uncatalogued, the speaking voice of the book shifts. From section two onward, the pronoun shifts to a “she” who “felt ill” and who wishes to enact retribution on the “fascism” that exists all around her (16, 17). Her rage, however, is quickly transmuted into “weeping” in the following section (21), as her imperative to witness the violence of the present produces a near-catatonic alienation. She is in a frenetic state of attentiveness, one in which she positions herself as the receptacle or index for all of the global violence that is occurring. We thus see her list in long, tercet stanzas, places, numbers, and modes of murder, particularly from sites in the Middle East. “At least someone should stay awake, she thinks/someone should dream them along the abysmal roads” (26), Brand writes. “She” is thus someone who sits beside the dying, recording their passing, and keeping them company; she becomes a Charon figure, ferrying the dead into what lies beyond. Brand’s archive of the dead is relentless and demonstrates the utterly cruel circumstances into which most of the world’s population is placed, and it is this cataloguing that occupies much of the book. Yet this externalized, third-person voice is not tenable either; the lyric self forces its way into the poem: don’t pray it only makes things worse, I know, think instead of what we might do and why, why are only the men in the streets, all over the world (34)

102    Reflections on the Discipline From here on, there is an oscillation, a movement between a “she” and an “I” who responds, who personalizes the violence perpetrated against women and those who are othered. This oscillation between the “she” and the “I” splits the lyric I such that the listener and the speaker are contained in the same body; there is a conversation that takes place in the pages of the book that performs the split subjectivity against which Brand works—against the passive recognition of violence and the active work of the activist self: this divide is embodied in the split-speaking subject upon which Brand relies. This oscillation continues throughout the book, which ultimately concludes in the first-person singular, thus returning the agential imperative to the individual: “happiness is not the point really, it’s a marvel,” Brand argues (100). Instead, and to finish the volume, she writes: I have nothing soothing to tell you, that’s not my job, my job is to revise and revise this bristling list, hourly. (100)

The ethical imperative is resituated in the individual, but only after tracking the ways in which collectivity has to be continually revised. The subject may become part of a collective we—or a collective they—but can only do so through an attentiveness to the actions that take place around her, through her, and with her consent, whether spoken or tacit. Inventory can thus become a touchstone for transnational understandings of selfhood, one in which “they” might create a violent globalization that relies upon violence, bloodshed, and suffering in order to effect their ends, but in which “we” might respond through a planetary connectedness that seeks to re-route, re-situate, and undermine such impulses.

Sina Queyras, Expressway Canadian poetics of the twenty-first century have, to date, demonstrated a willingness to treat the nation-state as only one of a series of points of reference and scale. Poetics in the twenty-first century may link to the nation-state without being bound by it. Whether or not this shift is liberating or constraining—or even a succumbing to aspects of neoliberalism—remains up for debate. For Indigenous writers, for instance—and here I have in mind poets such as Gregory Scofield, Lee Maracle, and Marie Annharte Baker—the nation can remain a vital point of concern (indeed, what the nation itself is—or may be—is a key point of contention). Yet movement across, beyond, and through is crucial to tracking the shift into twenty-first century poetics in a globalizing era. Bodies in a globalizing era move not only across communities and borders—with a

Toward a Planetary Poetics    103 great deal of differential capability, based upon race, gender, and class—but into digital networks that build ever-shifting modes of connectivity. Such experimental modes of connectivity have been at the heart of the communication and community-building practices of, for instance, the Kootenay School of Writing (KSW) and the more specifically digital forms of organizing taking place today. Figured as a publicly accessible Marxist-inflected site for poetic education, KSW is and has been engaged in the material realities of both its local context and the global context. In addition to facilitating praxis-oriented writing workshops and lecture series, KSW fosters a form of open-source poetics. The collaborative workshop environment and commitment to political engagement within Vancouver (in which it is now based, having originated in Nelson, British Columbia) enables writers, both locally and connected to other locations, to associate themselves with its various projects according to their work at different periods. We might understand projects undertaken through the Banff Centre or through the Indigenous-run En’owkin Centre in similar ways.5 A variety of online sites, often run by individual poets, such as rob mclennan’s blog and more recently Margaret Christakos’s Influency Salon, have demonstrated the capacity to organize and fuel literary endeavours.6 The blog Lemon Hound (2005), which is the brainchild of Sina Queyras, has been one of the most important of these digital interventions in Canada. Initially begun as a space for artistic and poetic contemplation, Lemon Hound has emerged as the central space for public discussions about poetics in Canada. Queyras’s commitments are to a tripartite discussion of new directions in the lyric, of the poet as public intellectual, and of the space for women in contemporary and especially conceptual poetry. Queyras is closely aligned with conceptual writing, a border-crossing movement that foregrounds processes of composition as a central component of its poetics. Whereas conceptual writing has tended to abstract its relationship to identity politics, Queyras maintains a fidelity to a reoriented lyric I as a means by which to reaffirm the centrality of the female speaking voice. Her “Lyric Conceptualism” manifesto (2012) debuted nearly simultaneously on her own blog and the American Poetry Foundation’s literary blog Harriet as an intervention into heated discussions about the political efficacy of conceptual writing: “the Lyric Conceptualist,” she writes, “remains true to her politics of inclusion, appreciating the thinkership of conceptual poetry, the revelations in mass assemblages that concretize the ephemeral textuality of daily life” (“Lyric Conceptual Manifesto,” n. pag.). It is in such a context that the role of the public intellectual is theorized in relation to the poetic act. Using the space of the blog, which is traditionally understood as a subjective and confessional space, Queyras has articulated her own concerns, trepidations, and anger over the continued need to return to questions of gender and sexuality in contemporary discourses around poetry as well as the public more generally. That is to say, Queyras’s use of the blog is a deliberately public act that shifts private concerns into public space. In 2012 Lemon Hound transformed, and is now a multi-authored literary journal that curates transnational criticism and creative production simultaneously. In other words, Queyras foregrounds a vulnerable, identifiable subject who is working within a wider,

104    Reflections on the Discipline immeasurable, networked readership; the effect of this vulnerable subjectivity is to make visible the continued effects of exclusionary and inherently patriarchal modes of writing and being at precisely the space in which these things might be assumed to have vanished into irrelevance. These concerns are equally reflected in her poetic practice to date, particularly in her fourth collection, Expressway.7 Expressway is an invective lament for our modern condition of alienation, consumption, and anonymity. Working within the Romantic tradition, Queyras reorients the lyric speaking voice, the I, away from the traditional, singular masculine perspective, outward toward the force of the poem itself. Expressway is structured, like the transnational roadways of its title, as a series of crumbling infrastructures. A variety of routes traverse the book: in a short opening section entitled “The Endless Path of the New,” the reader encounters a woman whose solitariness is interrupted by the number of technological apparatuses attached to her, from the “Cellphone at her ear” (6) to the expressways all around her. The initially individual woman, then, comes to be interconnected, mediated. The solitary, lyric I is immediately interrupted, connected across time and space and the ether to other subjects of late capitalism. Queyras immediately adopts the practice, which is prevalent throughout the book, of placing bodies into a third-person voice that reflects this simultaneous insertion into a series of spatio-temporal relatings. These relatings are both connecting, connected, and profoundly alienating, solitary. On the one hand, the speaker is carrying her father’s ashes up a mountain, reaching for her uncle’s cell phone in order to call her mother, but this act of human connection shunts her into the alienation of history: It is not her first time here, though, in truth, It is. But what is truth? Fact? Body? Idea? Word? The heat waking up now, a new century Ahead, and at the top, a bit of bread and cheese, A cellphone out, Ta mère, he says, Tell her your father is laid to rest. (8–9)

The questioning voice in this section, which here ponders truth, fact, body, idea, and word, runs throughout the text; questions appear throughout, undermining the seeming positivism of the present, the belief that things can, in fact, be known in an unmediated fashion. Tangible interventions into the desire for sovereign knowledge come in the form of “Memorable Fancies.” Scattered throughout the text, these poems are uncanny snapshots with recognizable markers of the contemporary urban present, whose familiarity is interrupted by poetry. The mechanical everyday or the industrial present is transmuted into poetic, sinuous understandings, as in the encounter between two women in the first “Memorable Fancy,” where we hear one of the women, the tollbooth operator, state that “The roar of the tires is the rhythm of my day … every fourteen cars a sonnet” (13). This moment marks a shift in which internal feelings are no longer structured against the external world: here, instead, the internal, perceptual

Toward a Planetary Poetics    105 world is what structures the external: we find an unmaking here that is remade through perception. This remaking through perception is crucial because readers move quickly in the next section, in which injured bodies are figured as the road into the future. In a move that is reminiscent of Brand’s catastrophic catalogue of global atrocity, Queyras creates a dialogue, a post-human, aerial view of a landscape made of glass, metal, and concrete between “A” and “B.” This dialogue “is uncontainable, because transnationalism presents no / barriers,” to quote B (17). Yet, Queyras points to a potential paradigm shift that comes in the form of poetry: the “poem stinks of dynamite” (17), it is an explosive that has the capacity to blow up modernity, which is figured as having been “the new god, mobility its blood” (16). The road, which is “yawning from its nest” (20), is full of dangerous and shiny promise, where there is traffic and conversation between bumper stickers rather than between daffodils, and there is nothing dividing people except for sixteen lanes of road. The collection announces in its opening section that it will void itself of meaningful human interaction in the present, thereby opening itself up to interaction that is structured through absences, through the connectivity that is simultaneously fostered and undermined by the technology, the techne, through which we create ourselves today. This technological desert reaches its apotheosis in the section entitled “Crash.” “Crash” is a series of informational statements gathered from another collector lane, this time culled from the Internet using the procedures of “flarf.”8 These statements constitute a six-page inventory of car accidents, moments in which the human is abstracted or lost as a result of the destructive capacity of technology. “Crash” thus invokes, in a sense, Brand’s procedure of inventorying the dead, but takes it beyond the human register. Unlike Brand’s speaker, who becomes exhausted and buried under her ceaseless inventory, Queyras offers another approach to reframing the human. Her approach is to return to the cultural and historical contexts of the lyric in the Romantic period from the marginalized perspective of Dorothy Wordsworth. We thus move from “Crash” to country in the poem “Lines Written Many Miles from Grasmere,” a poem that again is relentlessly mobile, but this time the reader is carried by Dorothy’s ceaseless walking rather than by modernity’s ceaseless mechanical motion. The text of the poem, culled from Dorothy’s journals, speaks back to the seemingly unavoidable momentum of technological intervention into human life. Here it is bodies and not cars that have “melted into sonnets” (54). This shift in historical context reanimates the poet’s project: as the reader moves from the lyric that is made cybernetic by the constant interventions of technology—technologies that collapse time and space and yet render us solitary—through the sojourn into Dorothy’s journals, an aphoristic attack on the present emerges in “The Endless Hum.” These aphorisms provide multiple perspectives on key discursive elements of contemporary life, unsettling them from their meanings: “freedom,” for instance, is said to be “a commodity,” “not a commodity you need to own,” “a choice,” “exportable,” “a fee,” “available for import” (61), and yet it is ultimately an abstraction that is personified: “What does Freedom see when she closes her eyes?” (62), the text asks.

106    Reflections on the Discipline The text ultimately asserts that poetry is able to accumulate in the detritus of its moment without becoming wholly commodified by it. Poetry thus offers a pause in the poem “Acceptable Dissociations”: This poem resembles urban sprawl. This poem resembles the freedom to charge a fee. The fee occurs in the gaps. It is an event. It is not without precedent. It is a moment in which you pay money. It is a tribute to freedom of choice. (74)

Crucially, the poem is not the things that the poem describes: rather, it merely resembles them. In this latter half of the text, the poems are embroiled in the work of shaking themselves from their ossified significations. They exist as a form of exchange, resembling the market in which they are embedded, yet also moving “in the gaps” and events that provide ruptures in the technologies that surround us. It is in this context that the sequence “Three Dreams of the Expressway” begins to dismantle the structures that constrain human bodies into forms of interaction predicated by technology. “The men build and the women dismantle,” we read, as women “move out of the domestic sphere” and onto “the expressways with pickaxes” in order to remove what the text identifies as “a symbol that has undone us” (88). The expressways are torn up, yet remain present in “the ethos of moving on” (91) that the third poem in this section envisages. Clearly gendered, Queyras envisions or figures “Innovation” in the framework of the failed Cartesian discourse of the individual subject (90). The possibility of renewal comes through the action of “Women with sledgehammers / and picks” unmaking the devastating architecture of industry (91). The collection closes with the imperative not just to “Go forth and undo harm” but, crucially, also to “Go forth and do” (98).

Concluding with I As Canadian poetics move more firmly into the twenty-first century, it is clear that the networks of engagement and affiliation are shifting. Whereas the twentieth century offered Canadian poets the opportunity to grow their craft in a national milieu that was coming into being, and subsequently beginning to question itself, the twenty-first century offers poets a moment in which lines of flight move within, below, and outside the nation-state and into a consciously planetary engagement. As a means of responding to a time and space of ecological devastation, warfare, continued or even reinforced oppression derived from neoliberal politics, the ability to recognize and witness spaces, gaps, and fissures within the global order has become crucial to poetic practice in Canada and beyond. This is not to say that the local has no place in twenty-first century poetics; rather, the local remains one of the scales of poetic practice that can be gathered into the fold of a planetary consciousness.

Toward a Planetary Poetics    107 What I see in the poets I have been examining in this chapter is an engagement across a variety of registers that returns to historical understandings of selfhood situated within the nation-state in order to move these questions into a planetary framework. Brossard’s Notebook of Roses and Civilization brings global humanitarian concerns into practical engagement with linguistic tensions that highlight the ongoing and contested nature of the simple problematic of speech itself. Brand’s Inventory demands that the reader engage with the horror of the long twentieth century as the new millennium begins, an engagement that forces the recognition of the reader’s and speaker’s imbrication with bodies that are silenced and disappeared. Finally, Queyras’s Expressway signals a move from the sovereign self that can either pave the way to new and ethical modes of care, or, if we do not take action, lead to certain dissolution. While these three works provide a limited account of the possibilities for a poetics of planetarity in contemporary Canada, the extent to which these works consciously situate themselves in deliberately constructed networks suggests the breadth across which these notions might be carried forward.

Acknowledgments I would like to acknowledge the Banff Research in Culture residency at the Banff Centre, and funding from a Research Creation Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes 1. This chapter offers a valuable pairing with Herb Wyile’s discussion of literary responses to neoliberalism in Chapter 48 by considering the ways in which Canadian poets respond to neoliberal contexts by articulating a profoundly connected and enabling planetary consciousness. 2. See, for example, the work of Sherene Razack, M.  Jacqui Alexander, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Karen Caplan, and Inderpal Grewal. 3. The “Grande noirceur” or “great darkness” refers to the period in Quebec history between 1936–39 and 1944–59. During this period Maurice Duplessis was the premier of the province. His regime was characterized as problematically backward-thinking, in part because it was overly tied to the Catholic Church. Indeed, the Church’s political campaigns elided religious ideology with the two-party system (a popular slogan was the statement that Le ciel est bleu; l’enfer est rouge—Heaven is blue like the Union National, hell is red like the Liberal party). Duplessis was opposed to unions, virulently against communism, and was credited with keeping the province of Quebec in darkness for the duration of his time in office. 4. See Chapter 26 in this volume by Lucie Joubert and Chapter 45 by Cecily Devereux for further discussion of feminist writers in Quebec.

108    Reflections on the Discipline 5. The Banff Centre is a non-degree granting postsecondary institution in Banff, Alberta, that offers a wide range of programming, including significant programs for writers, including residencies. The En’owkin Centre in Penticton, British Columbia, is also a postsecondary institution that provides college and university readiness programs as well as a diversity of arts and writing programming. It operates in partnership with Theytus Books, the oldest Indigenous publishing house in Canada. 6. See also Chapter 27 by Kate Eichhorn on digital texts in this volume. 7. See my “O, Little Expressway” for a further discussion of this work. 8. “Flarf,” a term attributed to poet Gary Sullivan, is a form of procedural poetics based upon inputting unusual strings of terms into Internet search engines.

Works Cited Alexander, M.  Jacqui. Pedagogies of Crossing:  Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2006. Print. Brand, Dionne. Inventory. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2006. Print. ———. What We All Long For. Toronto: Knopf, 2005. Print. Brossard, Nicole. Cahiers de roses et de civilisation. Trois-Rivières: Sabord, 2005. Print. ———. Notebook of Roses and Civilization. 2003. Trans. Robert Majzels and Erín Moure. Toronto: Coach House, 2007. Print. Brydon, Diana, and Marta Dvořák, eds. Crosstalk:  Canadian and Global Imaginaries in Dialogue. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2012. Print. Butling, Pauline, and Susan Rudy. Writing in Our Time: Canada’s Radical Poetries in English (1957–2003). Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2005. Print. Caplan, Karen D. Indigenous Citizens: Local Liberalism in Early National Oaxaca and Yucatán. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2010. Print. Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs 1.4 (1976): 875–93. Print. Derksen, Jeff. Annihilated Time: Poetry and Other Politics. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2009. Print. ———. “National Literatures in the Shadow of Neoliberalism.” Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies. Ed. Smaro Kamboureli and Robert Zacharias. Waterloo, ON:  Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2012. 37–63. Print. ———. “Rescaling Poetics:  Neoliberalism and the Cultural Spatiality of Globalization.” Annihilated Time: Poetry and Other Politics. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2009. 93–110. Print. ———. Transnational Muscle Cars. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2003. Print. Dobson, Kit. Transnational Canadas: Anglo-Canadian Literature and Globalization. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2009. Print. Godard, Barbara, ed. Collaboration in the Feminine:  Writing on Women and Culture from Tessera. Toronto: Second Story, 1994. Print. Godard, Barbara, Daphne Marlatt, Kathy Mezei, and Gail Scott. “Theorizing Fiction Theory.” Godard, Collaboration 53–62. Print. Godard, Barbara, Susan Knutson, Daphne Marlatt, Kathy Mezei, and Gail Scott. “In Conversation.” Godard, Collaboration 120–26. Print. Grewal, Inderpal. Transnational America:  Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2005. Print. Harvey, David. Spaces of Hope. Berkeley: U of California P, 2000. Print.

Toward a Planetary Poetics    109 Jay, Paul. Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2010. Print. Kamboureli, Smaro, and Robert Zacharias, eds. Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2012. Print. Kamboureli, Smaro, and Roy Miki, eds. Trans.Can.Lit:  Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2007. Print. Kristeva, Julia. “Towards a Semiology of Paragrams.” 1969. The Tel Quel Reader. Ed. Patrick Ffrench and Roland-François Lack. New York: Routledge, 1998. 25–49. Print. ———. “L’engendrement de la formule.” Semeiotike:  recherches pour une sémanalyse. Paris: Seuil, 1969. 217–310. Print. Kroetsch, Robert. The Hornbooks of Rita K. Edmonton: U of Alberta P, 2001. Print. Lai, Larissa. “The Time Has Come:  Self and Community Articulations in Colour. An Issue and Awakening Thunder.” Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies. Ed. Smaro Kamboureli and Robert Zacharias. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2012. 151–72. Print. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. 1848. Ed. L.M. Findlay. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2004. Print. Miki, Roy. In Flux:  Transnational Shifts in Asian Canadian Writing. Edmonton:  NeWest, 2011. Print. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Feminism without Borders:  Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003. Print. Murakami, Sachiko. Rebuild. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2011. Print. Philip, M. NourbeSe. Zong! Toronto: Mercury, 2008. Print. Queyras, Sina. Expressway. Toronto: Coach House, 2009. Print. ———. “Lyric Conceptualism, A Manifesto in Progress.” Harriet. poetryfoundation.org/harriet. 9 Apr. 2012. Web. Accessed 4 Oct. 2012. Razack, Sherene, Malinda Smith, and Sunera Thobani, eds. States of Race:  Critical Race Feminism for the 21st Century. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2010. Print. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia UP, 2003. Print. Wong, Rita. forage. Gibsons: Nightwood, 2007. Print. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. 1929. Boston: Mariner Books, 2005. Print. Wunker, Erin. “O Little Expressway: Sina Queyras and the Traffic of Subversive Hope.” English Studies in Canada 36.1 (2010): 37–55. Print. Wyile, Herb. Anne of Tim Hortons:  Globalization and the Reshaping of Atlantic-Canadian Literature. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2011. Print.

Chapter 6

Cultu ral St u di e s in Cana da Past, Present, and Future Imre Szeman and Andrew Pendakis

One of the problems of identifying and describing what constitutes the field of Canadian cultural studies is that, in practice, cultural studies would itself raise an alarm about the presumptions and conceptual problems guiding such a project. Rather than assume a clear and neatly defined area of scholarly inquiry that takes place within an equally clearly defined geographical area—the fiction guiding all forms of area and nation-specific studies—cultural studies would draw attention to the mistakes, limits, and problems of imagining a national culture, national-cultural movement, or an intellectual heritage delimited by transient and necessarily artificial political borders. Cultural studies would point instead to the ways in which sites and fields of analysis are always already connected to numerous other spaces of invention and creation, whether local, regional, or national. It would draw attention to the ways in which researchers in Canada who are engaged in the interdisciplinary critical analysis of culture and of the relations between culture and power—what defines cultural studies at its core—make use of conceptual antecedents and intellectual heirs with origins around the world, primarily (though not exclusively) in the English-language academic traditions of the United States and Britain, German philosophy and social sciences, and French sciences humaines. Cultural studies would point to the major divide that still exists in the approaches to the study of culture and power in the anglophone and francophone academy, as well as to the growing influence and impact of First Nations writing and theory within Canada. And it would attend to the very real significance of the belated development of cultural studies in Canada, which has tended to undercut a specifically Canadian contribution to cultural studies, and which has meant that cultural studies north of the 49th parallel is very similar to that practiced south of that line: “a highly disaggregated field composed of several dozen relatively autonomous subfields, whose numbers seemed ready to increase … an accepted term of convenience for all kinds of

Cultural Studies in Canada    111 historical or popular-culture-based inquiries, very often disconnected from the British line of cultural studies, from French poststructuralism, from Frankfurt School theory, and from Anglo-American traditions of cultural criticism deriving from writers from Swift to Williams and Ralph Waldo Emerson to Susan Sontag to Noam Chomsky” (Leitch and Lewis 88). Yet the connections between culture and power that cultural studies has always insisted must be at the centre of the analysis of contemporary culture also means that in avoiding a too easy account of Canadian cultural studies, it nonetheless would not give up on the importance of naming just what it is that is distinctive about this practice in the Canadian academe. National borders may well be fictions, but they are fictions given reality through cultural forms and practices, communication systems, and a variety of state institutions and structures, including that of the university and the ways in which it identifies its objects of analysis. And while it is important to be cautious about too quickly aligning national borders with national ideas, the practice of cultural studies is acutely aware that “if we do not achieve some general sense of a cultural dominant, then we fall back into a view of present history as sheer heterogeneity, random difference, a coexistence of a host of distinct forces whose effectivity is undecidable” (Jameson 6). The specific structural-historical configuration of Canada—a settler colony located next to a nation distinguished by its cultural and communicative prominence in the twentieth century as much as by its political and military power—has meant that the very adoption and appropriation of American and British theoretical models has drawn attention to the operations of cultural hegemony and the power of communication systems. If cultural studies in Canada has come to have themes, theories, and theorists that are similar to cultural studies done elsewhere in the world—a consequence of the development of cultural studies as a field in the era of the global circulation of academic ideas—it is nevertheless the case that specificities of the development of Canadian culture has meant that there is a focus on questions related to the way in which the Canadian nation-state has configured the nation’s media, culture, and race and ethnicity in order to exercise the biopolitical management of its citizenry. The earliest examples of the practice of cultural studies in Canada—a group of thinkers who could be considered to have shaped the direction taken by cultural studies in the country after the work of the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies hit its shores—can be found in the work of a group of thinkers who have influenced a wide range of scholarly research (including research in literature) in the country:  Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980), George Grant (1918–1988), and Harold Innis (1894–1952).1 McLuhan was one of a number of important cultural theorists (including literary critic Northrop Frye and Innis) located at the University of Toronto in the 1950s. Of primary interest to McLuhan was the relationship between technology and culture, with a special emphasis on the transformations introduced into human “patterns of association” and the forms of subjectivity produced by new modes of communication (McLuhan and Watson 57). His central thesis is that technology is not primarily a question of utility—technical problems neutrally solved by innovation perfected—but is a holistic cultural phenomenon that creates and re-creates the human sensorium,

112    Reflections on the Discipline multiplying and mutilating its capacities to collectively see, think, and feel. Any new technology, what he called an “extension of man,” negates and erases as much as it capacitates or induces (McLuhan, Understanding 6). A medium’s form shapes, in a manner more total (and unconscious) than its content, the tone and feel of a society. In fact, content could perniciously blind critics to the broader, genuinely ontological changes enacted upon a society by its media. The task for McLuhan is to evaluate the sensorial and social opportunity costs of any given technological regime, a process that requires an eye to the history of technological and social forms, as well as a capacity to intuit those dimensions of the present that are crystallizing future modes of perception. According to McLuhan, the mechanical age—linked to the technology of writing and characterized by detachment—was being replaced by a digital one, linked to electric, televisual forms of communication and characterized by ecstasy, feeling, simultaneity, and connectedness. McLuhan’s work felt (and still does feel) prophetic, charged by an evocative urgency and scale; his ideas would influence figures as widely separated from each other as Jean Baudrillard and Pierre Trudeau, and would enter public culture in a way completely at odds with the traditional reach of Canadian academic work. McLuhan is in many ways the methodological “father” of cultural studies in Canada. His interest in popular phenomena—slang, for example—called into question the text-centric, highly disciplined tendencies of the Leavisite New Criticism in which he was formally trained, without sacrificing the rigor and “seriousness” with which that tradition approached its objects. Highly muted in McLuhan—and in this he is 30 years ahead of his time—was the early twentieth-century literary tendency to denounce and degrade the popular as mere entertainment. His 1951 book The Mechanical Bride was probably the first text in Canadian history to engage in sustained close analyses of commercial texts and to do so with an eye to their inherent meaningfulness. In McLuhan, the most vapid commercial still functions as a vector for the production/reflection of social meaning and is in this sense interesting. He sees both high and low culture as equally meriting attention, and he shies away from overt Arnoldian moralizations. Employing a method that draws eclectically (sometimes awkwardly) from sources ranging from Shakespeare to Oswald Spengler, and from James Joyce to Henri Bergson, while at the same time heavily referencing contemporary forms of media, popular culture, and journalism, McLuhan’s method anticipates the interdisciplinarity that characterizes institutionalized cultural studies, though in a manner that at times borders on indiscipline or whimsy. While freed from classical textual criticism, McLuhan’s method is not properly sociology either: rather than systematic analysis of contemporary trends and patterns, he opts for a kind of broad cultural sampling—“a look around to see what is happening”— which throws into contiguity a whole range of phenomena located at disparate points and levels within the social whole (McLuhan, Medium 10). Though this will strike many as haphazard and unrigorous (allegations that continue to haunt the practice of cultural studies as a whole), this aggregative method, “a collide-oscope of interfaced situations” (10), is one that would later characterize the works of thinkers such as Fredric Jameson in their attempt to dialectically “take the temperature of the age” (Jameson xi). Eschewing

Cultural Studies in Canada    113 specialization for the way it carves the present mechanically into non-communicating fragments, McLuhan engenders a methodological expansiveness that will find its way into much of institutionalized cultural studies in Canada, even if the latter is much less feral and free in its modality. If McLuhan usually avoids or trivializes attempts to apply hysterical moral binaries to the study of culture, he nevertheless insists on sustaining a tone of politico-moral urgency: in this, too, he anticipates a cultural studies that refuses to separate knowledge from politics and which sees in the present (to echo Walter Benjamin) a state of emergency, an event in need of analysis, curation, and discursive critical investment.2 McLuhan does not call for a knee-jerk rejection of television (or today, the Internet), but encourages us to think through just what is lost and gained in a society saturated by its perceptual logics and habits. In addition to the importance of McLuhan’s methodological habits, his interest to contemporary cultural studies also lies in the fact that he occasionally attempted to explicitly think of “Canada” as a symbolic space. McLuhan makes the effort to think through something like a Canadian cultural essence, which he links to the experience of the northern frontier, one that led Canadians to associate nature with warfare and struggle, and the home with protection and society. His search for what he called “Canadian borderlines”—distinctions that were at once physical, mental, and symbolic—also implies a certain constitutive solitariness, a taste for meandering and adventure that was built into the Canadian spirit via its history and experience. In all of this, McLuhan presumes a category of homogenous national mentality founded on the explicit exclusion of Indigenous peoples and women, both of whom disrupt this masculine idyll of colonial adventurism. Though the content of McLuhan’s research—his interest in popular culture, technology, new media, and globalization avant la lettre—all properly locate him (proleptically) in the tradition of Canadian cultural studies, some aspects of his work strike a discordant note. Within that tradition today, there is little left of his taste for broad anthropological or metaphysical generalization about the structure or direction of the present. This is an ambiguous difference: precisely what makes McLuhan interesting is this scope of observation, the sense he creates of a time arriving at the doorstep of a new order or future. At the same time, McLuhan is also side-stepped today for what many see as a position bordering on technological determinism—the emphasis he places on a historical process disproportionately driven by technical innovation and change. This emphasis has of late been supplemented by more nuanced maps of historical causality that emphasize decentralized, unequally distributed forms of agency, institutional pluralism, and discontinuous leaps between historical moments and modes. Closely associated with this shift is the tendency to associate McLuhan’s work with a techno-utopianism to which few contemporary theorists of new media would subscribe. McLuhan’s insistence on the fact that the new era of electric connectedness would force injustice into the light has been replaced by much more measured empirical assessments of the simultaneously promising and retarding political potentialities of the Internet or social media in Canada. Finally, notwithstanding the remarks made above, McLuhan generally showed little scholarly interest in the cultural specificity of Canada, an effect, no doubt, of the

114    Reflections on the Discipline emphasis he placed on the universality of technology, but also of his astute intuition that its proximity to America—then the epicentre of a burgeoning worldwide capitalist culture—rendered any such specific interest myopic. In contrast with McLuhan, the work of George Grant represents an extended engagement with the specificity of Canada. Grant was an anti-capitalist conservative whose work is perhaps best understood today as a telling symptom of mid-century Canadian political fantasy and culture, but which also continues to effectively problematize many of the structuring platitudes used to reproduce contemporary Canadian liberalism. Pairing a classical philosophical orientation with a passionate sense for what he saw as the specificity and preciousness of the Canadian experience, Grant was able to articulate a powerful (sometimes slightly ornery) critique of postwar American hegemony. For Grant, American “state capitalism” was a homogenizing force that threatened to institutionalize the domination of technological imperatives over properly human activities and functions (9). Not only did American capitalism replace culture, thought, and experience with mere technique, it did so imperialistically through explicit acts of political aggression (e.g., Vietnam) or via direct (often militarized) control and exploitation of other countries’ resources. According to Grant, the origins of a standardized North America characterized by a consumerist erosion of stable moral criteria could be traced to modern liberalism’s focus on the sovereignty and natural equality of the rights-bearing individual. Away from every conception of stable or meaningful social order, bourgeois individualism envisions a good inseparable from absolute (or negative) freedom, an abstract liberty without limits or standards of any kind, which leads to the breakdown of all discernible “common intention” (67). At stake for Grant was the very essence of Canada, an entity whose roots in communitarian British and French traditions—traditions imbued by a “public conception of virtue”—placed it closer in spirit to Plato’s well-ordered kallipolis than to John Locke’s individualist commonwealth (which generates wealth and “liberty” at the expense of social meaning and value). For Grant, the early Canadians fled revolutionary America, and sustained the experiment called Canada, on the basis of a passionate contempt for “freedom-loving” American republicanism and a deep commitment to the formation of a society grounded in “order and restraint” (68). Much of Grant’s work remains very far from the content and spirit of contemporary cultural studies. His interest in the possibility of an ideal human function—a life characterized by the pursuit of truth and virtue, one revelatory of our very essence as children of God—places him firmly (and, for most, unworkably) within the tradition of Christian and/or Platonic idealism. His conception of a lost or possible Canadian essence fits uncomfortably with the presence of identities incommensurate with (or even openly hostile to) the ethnic and moral content of his idealized rural polis. Cultural studies, of course, is today predominantly historicist, historical materialist, and/or anti-essentialist; it posits its project not as a restitution of origins, but as an enterprise of infinite (unfinishable) critique. However, what remains salient in Grant is his critique of liberal modernity. Though this critique of liberal modernity was not a new one—much of this is already discernible in Joseph de Maistre and Edmund

Cultural Studies in Canada    115 Burke—Grant’s conservative critique of “progress” bears scrutiny for its sophistication and for the way in which it resonates with the prerogatives of a dominated (and of course etiolated) Canadian sociality. Grant’s critique of the universality of technology—its hostility toward clearly and holistically conceived human ends, as much as its deification of thoughtless convenience—places him into territory unevenly shared by Martin Heidegger and Baudrillard alike. Most saliently, Grant keenly perceived the tension between capitalist social relations and the preservation of local cultures, though there is no small irony in the fact that the “indigenous societies” he saw as threatened in Canada were the dominant traditions of the British and French, rather than the First Nations cultures that preceded them (74). One final significant antecedent to the practice of cultural studies in Canada was Harold Innis. Innis was an important Canadian political economist and communications theorist who directly influenced the work of Marshall McLuhan; the latter’s expressive extravagance has in many ways unfairly eclipsed the legacy of Innis’s less jubilant, but equally eccentric, oeuvre. Innis’s primary concern was to understand the ways in which technology, especially modes of communication and transportation, have influenced the development of culture. This was an interest embedded in a civilizational rhetoric inherited from figures like Arthur Toynbee and Spengler, one that conceived of cultures as world-historical wholes characterized by dominant personalities (subject to “birth” and “decline”), rather than as webs of practices constituted by difference (the approach more commonly accepted today). Innis’s early work was characterized by a series of concrete investigations into the emplaced cultural effects of geographically specific networks of trade and technology: his dissertation on the history of the railway in Canada (A History of the Canadian Pacific Railway, 1923) was followed by books on the Canadian fur trade (The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History, 1930) and on the international historico-political economy of cod fisheries (The Cod Fisheries: The History of an International Economy, 1940). This early work played an essential role in clarifying Canada’s location within the world economic system: not only did the export commodities on which Canada relied for its growth structurally mandate its underdeveloped position vis-à-vis the industrial cores of Britain and the United States, the articulation of these resource-based economies within Canada itself stabilized the regional differences and inequalities that intimately conditioned the configuration of social life in these regions. As Innis shifted his attention away from transportation and trade networks and toward communication systems (in his influential Empire and Communications [1950] and The Bias of Communication [1951]), he came to believe that the latter were characterized inherently by “bias,” that is, by a constitutive inner logic that simultaneously engendered and repressed particular forms of epistemic and social organization. Innis, then, places Mesopotamian clay and cuneiform into the same techno-historical conversation as radio and television. This bias can be oriented toward space or time, the former characterized by portability and prone to spatial extension, the latter characterized by durability and centralization. Undergirding this work is a materialist historiography that emphasizes relations between geography, materials, and the structured distribution

116    Reflections on the Discipline of knowledges, as well as the various configurations of power and disempowerment that subtend, but also emerge from, such arrangements. This is a philosophy of history not wholly forgetful of class relations (Innis keenly understands the relation between what he calls “monopolies of power” and knowledge, for example), but one which nevertheless largely ignores a more recognizable Marxist position grounded in the history of productive relations and classes. Equally bracketed by Innis is a Hegelian division of history into the forms of consciousness that organize a society’s self-understanding; Innis instead chooses to replace the history of ideas with a history of assemblages and concrete material aggregations. Of course, what is neglected here are precisely the strengths of the above two positions (Marxist and Hegelian), each of which will find their way into later cultural studies practice in Canada. Marxism’s attention to the dynamic inequalities and divisions that undergird (and dialectically engender) societies could be seen by some to offset an Innisian position that has problems locating the points of agency and change in history. Moreover, Hegel’s emphasis on the role played by the Idea within history has also been taken up by post-Gramscian cultural studies (albeit supplemented by historical materialism itself). That said, Innis’s work today can be seen to retrospectively anticipate the new materialist and object-oriented philosophies—initiated, respectively, by Gilles Deleuze and Graham Harman—that are slowly filtering their way into the Canadian academe, including the work of cultural studies scholars. Also of significance today is Innis’s prophetic insistence on registering our own culture’s particular “bias”: though this was sequestered to questions of space and time rather than identity, this injunction to reflect upon and challenge our own inherited cultural limits and points of blindness is an important part of the politics of contemporary cultural studies. Like Grant, Innis associated the United States with a form of technological imperialism, and even went so far as to echo the former’s conservatism by advocating that Canada resist this influence through a return to “common law traditions” and the “cultural heritage of Europe” (Empire 195). According to Innis, “mass production and standardization” endangered the very existence of “the West” because their constitutive bias threatened to destroy the basis upon which societies rely for life and energy—culture itself. Though there is an echo here from Grant’s crypto-authoritarian call to “order and restraint,” it should be borne in mind that Innis’s own bias toward “the vitality of the oral tradition” and his insistence on its indispensability to the possibility of a renewed “West” had to do with the way the spoken word and a plurality of interlocutors could be seen to call into question the antidemocratic and hierarchical tendencies of a clerically curated system of writing. Just as they do in both Grant and McLuhan’s work, these calls to a renewed or protected national cultural essence get bogged down in an obvious Eurocentrism (as well as dubious historiography), though the sheer strangeness of Innis’s position—the difficulty one has placing it on the traditional political spectrum—ensures that these moments in his thought continue to warrant our close attention. The emphases given by Grant, Innis, and other Canadian intellectuals to the necessities of national culture and national self-determination in the period following World

Cultural Studies in Canada    117 War II ensured that the attractions and deficits of the nation remained central to social and cultural criticism in Canada through to the end of the 1980s (if not beyond).3 Even as literary and cultural theory was infused by new modes of continental thought (starting in the early 1960s with the structuralism associated with figures such as Claude Lévi-Strauss and Michel Foucault), the multiple nations within Canada—francophone, anglophone, and First Nations—meant that the already unstable idea of nationalism and national self-identity that Grant probed in his work had to be continually addressed, alongside related concepts such as belated modernity, economic and cultural dependency, and Canada’s colonial legacy (both as a colony itself and the internal colonialism practiced on its Aboriginal populations). The ways in which early forms of post–World War II Canadian cultural studies address this legacy was vexed. On the one hand, there has been ongoing critical recognition of the ways in which nationalism produces domination, exclusion, and violence based on the repression of difference. But simultaneously, because of the inevitable link of culture to nation in the modern period, and especially within fields of cultural analysis within universities (where cultural study is divided into distinct national spaces), the desire of a thinker like Grant to establish canons and foster homegrown cultural production—indexes of a successful, mature state—haunted (and continues to haunt) contemporary cultural criticism. In his writing on Canada’s struggle with the conceptual and political demands of Canada’s belated modernity, Imre Szeman has drawn attention to the largely unacknowledged class politics at work in the desire for local, “native” cultural production (“Literature on the Periphery”). Drawing on the work of Brazilian critic Roberto Schwarz, who discusses a similar dynamic in his own postcolonial nation, Szeman argues that those who desire a distinct national culture are those for whom the cultural capital it would generate means the most—not working classes or even the moneyed elite, but cultural workers such as university professors. The best work on nationalism and nationalist culture in Canada has been careful to uncover the tricky ways in which it operates as both problem and possibility, and has tried to address the reality of the creation of the Canadian nation without ossifying it, but by looking at “Canada” as a sociopolitical formation whose logics need to be better understood in order to undo the disempowerment that remains a feature of social life under capitalism. If one essential feature of the work of an earlier Canadian criticism was its nostalgia for an “indigenous” culture believed to be lost or possible, much contemporary cultural studies deals with a working through of the tropes and repetitions that produce and re-produce the symbolic consensus of Canadian social life. From the 1960s to the 1990s, work in cultural studies in Canada took place primarily within three intersecting streams of inquiry: nationalism and national culture; race, difference, and multiculturalism; and the electronic signs and communication systems addressed by McLuhan and Innis, which are so important to the constitution of a nation with so small a population in such a large geographical space. Canadian Cultural Studies: A Reader (edited by Sourayan Mookerjea, Szeman, and Gail Faurschou) is divided roughly into these categories, and includes work by some of the most important critics and theorists working in cultural studies during these years, including Ian Angus, Himani Bannerji,

118    Reflections on the Discipline Jody Berland, Maurice Charland, Ioan Davies, Len Findlay, and Will Straw. While these scholars represent a diverse range of theoretical approaches and thematic interests, each explores the specificities of the Canadian national-cultural situation, drawing on the work of McLuhan, Grant, and Innis, as well as on the ideas of the founding figures of British cultural studies (such as Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall), and, to a lesser extent, that of the Frankfurt School as well. As in the work of Innis and Grant, much of this research continued to be shaped by the specific social, cultural, and political circumstances of living next to “the United States, the undisputed hegemon of the past century,” and the role of its “empire of electronic signals and the economies-ofscale might of its cultural industries” (Mookerjea et al. 10). Berland’s North of Empire (2009), which collects her wide-ranging and important writing on the Canadian media landscape, offers a particularly insightful interrogation of the challenges faced by a settler nation in trying to shape the space of its own nation while having to contend with the onslaught of sounds, images, and ideas from its neighbour to the south. In large measure due to the significance of media technologies in defining subjectivities and shaping political possibilities in the postwar era, the major site of writing in cultural studies between the work of its early progenitors and the contemporary moment has been in the field of communication studies—a particularly rich and fruitful site of cultural analysis in Canada. By comparison with this interest in the complex dimensions of nationalism and national culture, work in cultural studies in Canada today is extremely diverse. Despite the considerable legacy of the early progenitors of cultural studies and the work of critics of the generation of Berland and Straw, there is no single dominant tendency or trend in contemporary work. Researchers draw on a range of theoretical traditions—though, it has to be said, more on American and continental thinkers and theories than on the work of McLuhan and the others who first gave shape to cultural studies in Canada—and address topics and issues across the spectrum of the humanities and social sciences. Nor can it be said that the primary topics of analysis are Canadian themes and issues. The practice of cultural studies in Canada has over time become more formalized and institutionalized, and is anchored by a number of professional associations (e.g., the Canadian Association of Cultural Studies, which has been based at various times in Hamilton, Edmonton, Montreal, and Waterloo), graduate programs (e.g., Cultural Studies and Critical Theory at McMaster and Queen’s University’s recently developed PhD in Cultural Studies), book series (e.g., the University of Toronto Press’s Cultural Spaces and the Cultural Studies and Environmental Humanities series at Wilfrid Laurier University Press), and journals (e.g., Mosaic and the online Reviews in Cultural Theory). Of the latter, the most significant venue for the circulation and promotion of research in cultural studies has been Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies. Founded in 1997, Topia has consistently published work by Canadian scholars in the field, with a strong (though not exclusive) focus on topics related to Canadian culture, society, and politics, including a recent series of special issues devoted to a range of pressing social and political issues (recent issues have explored the fate of the university, militarization, and environmental studies).

Cultural Studies in Canada    119 Though it is difficult to establish a distinct set of concerns within Canadian cultural studies today, there are nevertheless a number of critical, conceptual, and political issues to which a significant amount of attention is paid and to which Canadian scholars have devoted unique insights as a result of the intellectual milieux in which they work. As in other spaces and sites where research in cultural studies is carried out, a key dimension of work in the field in Canada has been a broad assessment of the institutions of knowledge production and legitimation in the country. The critical function of this work has been to examine the role played by these institutions—which range from government agencies to universities and from television to advertising—in producing and managing social consent in Canada. Though it might appear to the world at large to be an uncomplicated liberal democratic state, Canada is riven by divisions that have necessitated the production of institutions and practices of social consent. In many ways, these practices reflect the political dramas and conflicts of the globalized world. For this reason, even scholarship devoted explicitly to Canada has been of value to researchers engaged in the analysis of hegemony around the world. One of the key forms through which state power has been exercised in Canada has been through multiculturalism, both as an official policy and as an unofficial, increasingly widely accepted social principle. The crucial work carried out in the 1970s and 1980s on multiculturalism as a form of governmentality (for which Eva Mackey’s The House of Difference: Cultural Politics and National Identity in Canada [1998] acts as a capstone) has over the past decade expanded into a broader interrogation of the multiple ways in which the state uses difference for social management and control. In Exalted Subjects: Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in Canada (2007), Sunera Thobani engages in a historically wide-ranging analysis of race and difference in Canada in which multiculturalism is but one step in an ongoing social process of control over the course of the nation’s historical development. She ends with an assessment of race and nationalism in the context of the war on terror, a subject also explored in depth in Sherene Razack’s influential Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics (2008). When researchers such as Sourayan Mookerjea look at specific developments in race and ethnicity in Canada, such as the anti-immigrant policies developed by the city of Hérouxville, Quebec, in 2007, the references go beyond forms of state control specific to Canada to an analysis of forces of globalization and neoliberalism that have shaped state policies around the world since the end of the Cold War. This shift from interrogations of Canadian multiculturalism to the operations of neoliberalism, governmentality, and biopower exemplifies a general move in cultural studies in Canada away from older modes of thinking about Canada to an engagement with the broad set of ideas constituting contemporary global social and cultural theory. Though research on the specificity of the Canadian national situation, with attention to nationalism, national institutions, and icons, as well as to ongoing developments in Canadian politics, remains important, the sense of the overall significance of nationalcultural self-definition has faded away from the centre of critical consciousness in much the same way that it has tended to disappear more generally from public consciousness in the global era. The sense of cultural belatedness that haunted Canadian scholars and

120    Reflections on the Discipline policy-makers alike in the decades following World War II, beginning with the work of figures such as Innis and Grant, and which provided such fruitful terrain for critical research in both literary and cultural studies, has shifted to a confident isochronic—that is to say, a world in which advanced and belated spaces have shifted to a shared temporal terrain—cultural narrative: Canada no longer has to play cultural catch-up, because the whole world now occupies the same global terrain. Some critics have warned against the retirement of the narrative of national belatedness and a too-quick and too-easy adoption of the global present as the new landscape in which analyses of Canada take place (Szeman, “Isochronic”). Stephen Crocker, for example, has challenged the notion of Canadian synchronicity by focusing on the various time signatures and developmental statuses still operative within Canada itself. His work on Newfoundland traces out the consequences of this “belatedness” but moves away from any claims about the purity or special legitimacy of local cultural autonomy. Others have replaced a nostalgia for a “lost” Canadian culture with tactical inquiries into how a kind of minor, local Canadianness is always already in the process of producing and reproducing itself. Such critics are uninterested in pursuing a homogeneous national mythology, but seek out and describe localities that are at once within and beyond any working definition of what it means to “be” Canadian. Ioan Davies, for example, has attempted to think the specificity of Toronto as a unique interweaving of particular architectural and political histories, in order to propose a criticism that finds its way into the especially challenging and fragmented totality of the contemporary city. Lily Cho’s cultural history of smalltown Chinese-Canadian food also bears mentioning here as an exemplary attempt to weave the particular and the universal within the space-time of a national (but in no way homogenous) locality. In its best forms, what cultural critics are hoping to achieve through their work is no longer the production of a distinct Canadian culture, but to challenge the mechanisms through which culture is used, whether in conjunction with nationalism or not, to sustain configurations of power that undergird globalization’s expansion of social and economic divisions and the production of precarity across the globe. In addition to the above, three areas stand out in which Canadians are making especially significant contributions to the study of culture today. The first is in the study of popular culture in Canada, an area of research exemplified by Susie O’Brien and Szeman’s Popular Culture: A User’s Guide (3rd ed., 2013), which has been widely used in introductory cultural studies classes across the country. O’Brien and Szeman offer an overview of theories and concepts important to the analysis of contemporary culture, drawing on Canadian films (e.g., Waydowntown), television advertising (e.g., the Molson’s “Rant” ad), music (e.g., the class politics of Céline Dion’s music), and cultural practices (how and why people visit Tim Hortons or Starbucks). Other important works on Canadian popular culture include Geoff Pevere and Greig Dymond’s Mondo Canuck:  A  Canadian Pop Culture Odyssey (1996), Lynne van Luven and Priscilla Walton’s Pop Can: Popular Culture in Canada (1999), Joan Nicks and Jeannette Sloniowski’s Slippery Pastimes: Reading the Popular in Canadian Culture (2002), and Garry Sherbert, Annie Gérin, and Sheila Petty’s Canadian Cultural Poesis:  Essays on

Cultural Studies in Canada    121 Canadian Culture (2006). While television viewing practices have undergone significant shifts that might have undercut their national bases, there have nevertheless been a number of recent studies focused on Canadian television, including Serra Tinic’s On Location: Canada’s Television Industry in a Global Market (2005), a study of television production in Vancouver in the context of globalization, Marusya Bociurkiw’s Feeling Canadian: Television, Nationalism, and Affect (2011), an assessment of affect and nationalism on the small screen, and Michele Byers’s Growing Up DeGrassi: Television, Identity and Youth Cultures (2005), on the DeGrassi series, one of the country’s most successful TV exports. While the study of Canadian cinema has generally remained within the traditions of film studies, the Canadian Cinemas book series, edited by Bart Beaty and Will Straw, has allowed cultural studies scholars to offer their own pointed and original analyses of specific films in the Canadian canon (e.g., Darren Wershler on Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg and Johanne Sloan on Joyce Wieland’s The Far Shore). A second area in which Canadian cultural studies researchers have distinguished themselves is in the examination of the politics of literary institutions and the status and function of literature at the present time. One of the key institutions for this work has been the University of Guelph’s TransCanada Institute (2007–13), founded by Smaro Kamboureli. The goal of the Institute was “to initiate, facilitate, and produce collaborative research on the institutional and disciplinary structures, methodologies, pedagogies, and contexts that shape the production and study of Canadian literature and culture in Canada, as well as globally” (TransCanada Institute); research from the team of scholars associated with TransCanada include Kit Dobson and Kamboureli’s edited volume Producing Canadian Literature (2013). Julie Rak’s ongoing work on the complex politics of autobiography in Canada, starting with the collection Auto/biography in Canada: Critical Directions (2005), has resulted most recently in Boom!: Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market (2013), a monograph that treats contemporary memoir as a consumer product generated by the publishing industry.4 Finally, Sarah Brouillette, in Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (2011), has explored the trade in postcolonial literature and the careers of its most prominent authors. The primary way in which these approaches can be differentiated from treatments of similar themes in literary studies is the much closer attention to the production, reception, and circulation of texts; such analyses understand literature as belonging to a cultural market that continues to expand in scope and scale. There have also been strong and unique contributions in the broad area of cultural theory, including Eric Cazdyn’s The Already Dead: The New Time of Politics, Culture, and Illness (2012), Peter Ives’s award-winning Gramsci’s Politics of Language: Engaging the Bakhtin Circle and the Frankfurt School (2006), Ian Angus’s Identity and Justice (2008), Davide Panagia’s The Political Life of Sensation (2009), and Matthew Flisfeder’s The Symbolic, the Sublime, and Slavoj Zizek’s Theory of Film (2012), among many others. What characterizes the strongest contributions of Canadian researchers to areas of theory that draw on and relate to cultural studies is the analysis of the links between power, politics, and culture in the period of neoliberal globalization. Cultural studies scholars have interrogated the specific contributions made by contemporary visual

122    Reflections on the Discipline arts to the political challenges to globalization, as reflected in J. Keri Cronin and Kirsty Robertson’s collection, Imagining Resistance:  Visual Culture and Activism in Canada (2011), and Dobson and Áine McGlynn’s Transnationalism, Activism, Art (2013). They have also engaged in a broad examination of the causes and consequences of globalization, from Nick Dyer-Witheford’s Cyber-Marx (1999) to Catriona Sandilands’s The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy (1999), which explores gender, sexuality, and environmental politics. The new directions in which cultural studies in Canada is heading includes the work of the Petrocultures research group at the University of Alberta, which addresses the significance of oil, energy, and natural resources for contemporary practices of social and cultural life—a return after a long detour to the analyses of resource cultures, initiated in the work of Innis. Cultural studies in Canada remains a vibrant and expanding field, despite a number of institutional limits embedded within the Canadian university system. The first of these is the result of the current funding crisis, which has blocked the creation or expansion of cultural studies programs. There also remains a stubborn divide between research in anglophone and francophone communities, a gap that is difficult to bridge, even though there have been attempts to do so (for example, the collection Canadian Cultural Studies:  A  Reader [Mookerjea et  al.] explicitly puts research on French and English Canada into dialogue with each other, as did a special session at the 2009 Canadian Association of Cultural Studies conference). Whether this gap is something that can be overcome in the near future—along with an increased engagement with First Nations issues, ideas, and cultural objects—remains to be seen; at present, there is (for instance) almost no incentive or professional reward for anglophone scholars to plunge into work published in Québécois journals. Finally, if too great a focus on the nation was once a worry, the gradual disappearance of the nation as a key element of cultural studies research in Canada is equally troubling. In their call for a “critical international cultural studies,” Akbar Abbas and John Nguyet Erni suggest that an important task for researchers in the field is to “render visible the nationalist assumptions behind nation-based and area-based work” (2), whether one works in the metropole or the periphery. However, they also argue for the need to engage in an “intervention into a state of unevenness in the flow and impact of knowledge” (10). In recent years, research in cultural studies in Canada may have grown too comfortable with the power of American, British, German, and French academic industries to define the terms of debate. Even in the global era, for contemporary scholars it is perhaps worth revisiting some of the energies that defined earlier work in Canadian cultural studies in order once again to animate the field and to give it new critical and political direction and purpose.

Notes 1. The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham—what became known as “The Birmingham School”—was founded in 1964, and is frequently referenced as the birthplace of academic cultural studies. Founded by

Cultural Studies in Canada    123 Richard Hoggart, some of the most important thinkers in cultural studies have been associated with the CCCS at various points in its life, including Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Angela McRobbie, and Jackie Stacey. 2. The reference here is to Benjamin’s provocative claim in “Theses on the Philosophy of History” that “the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule” (257). 3. For example, in Technology and the Canadian Mind: Innis/McLuhan/Grant (1984), Arthur Kroker identifies a unique modality of Canadian cultural discourse (a response to technological change that is marked by an oscillation between celebration and restraint) that emerges in the work of these theorists. 4. See Chapter 5 by Wunker, and Chapter 43 by Rak in this volume.

Works Cited Abbas, Akbar, and John Nguyet Erni, eds. Internationalizing Cultural Studies: An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. Print. Angus, Ian. Identity and Justice. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2008. Print. Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1969. 253–64. Print. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. London: Paladin, 1972. Print. Berland, Jody. North of Empire: Essays on the Cultural Technologies of Space. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2009. Print. Bociurkiw, Marusya. Feeling Canadian:  Television, Nationalism, and Affect. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2011. Print. Boutros, Alexandra, and Will Straw, eds. Circulation and the City: Essays on Urban Culture. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2010. Print. Brouillette, Sarah. Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Print. Byers, Michele, ed. Growing Up Degrassi:  Television, Identity and Youth Cultures. Toronto: Sumach, 2005. Print. Cazdyn, Eric. The Already Dead:  The New Time of Politics, Culture, and Illness. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2012. Print. Cho, Lily. Eating Chinese: Culture on the Menu in Small-Town Canada. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2010. Print. Crocker, Stephen. “Hauled Kicking and Screaming into Modernity: Non-Synchronicity and Colonial Modernization in Post-War Newfoundland.” Topia 3 (2000): 81–94. Print. Cronin, J. Keri, and Kirsty Robertson, eds. Imagining Resistance: Visual Culture and Activism in Canada. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2011. Print. Davies, Ioan. “Theorizing Toronto.” Topia 3 (2000): 14–36. Print. Dobson, Kit, and Áine McGlynn, eds. Transnationalism, Activism, Art. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2013. Print. Dobson, Kit, and Smaro Kamboureli, eds. Producing Canadian Literature: Authors Speak on the Literary Marketplace. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2013. Print. Druick, Zoë. Projecting Canada: Government Policy and Documentary Film at the National Film Board. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2008. Print.

124    Reflections on the Discipline Dyer-Witheford, Nick. Cyber-Marx:  Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism. Champaign-Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1999. Print. Erickson, Bruce, and Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, eds. Queer Ecologies:  Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2010. Print. Flisfeder, Matthew. The Symbolic, the Sublime, and Slavoj Zizek’s Theory of Film. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012. Print. Grant, George. Lament for a Nation:  The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2005. Print. Innis, Harold. The Bias of Communication. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1951. Print. ———. The Cod Fisheries: The History of an International Economy. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1954. Print. ———. Empire and Communications. Toronto: Dundurn, 2007. Print. ———. The Fur Trade in Canada:  An Introduction to Canadian Economic History. Rev. ed. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1956. Print. ———. A History of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Rev. ed. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1971. Print. Ives, Peter. Gramsci’s Politics of Language: Engaging the Bakhtin Circle and the Frankfurt School. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2006. Print. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991. Print. Kenneally, Rhona Richman, and Johanne Sloan, eds. Expo 67: Not Just a Souvenir. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2010. Print. Kroker, Arthur. Technology and the Canadian Mind:  Innis/McLuhan/Grant. Montreal:  New World Perspectives, 1984. Print. Leitch, Vincent, and Mitchell Lewis. “Cultural Studies: 2. United States.” Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory: The Johns Hopkins Guide. Ed. Michael Groden, Martin Kreiswirth, and Imre Szeman. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2012. 84–90. Print. Mackey, Eva. The House of Difference:  Cultural Politics and National Identity in Canada. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2002. Print. McLuhan, Marshall. The Mechanical Bride. 1951. Berkeley: Gingko, 2008. Print. ———. The Medium Is the Massage. Berkeley: Gingko, 1967. Print. ———. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. 1964. Berkeley: Gingko, 2003. Print. McLuhan, Marshall, and Wilfred Watson. From Cliché to Archetype. New  York:  Viking, 1970. Print. Mookerjea, Sourayan. “Hérouxville’s Afghanistan, or, Accumulated Violence.” Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies 31.2–3 (2009): 177–200. Print. Mookerjea, Sourayan, Imre Szeman, and Gail Faurschou, eds. Canadian Cultural Studies: A Reader. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2009. Print. Nicks, Joan, and Jeannette Sloniowski, eds. Slippery Pastimes: Reading the Popular in Canadian Culture. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2002. Print. O’Brien, Susie, and Imre Szeman. Popular Culture: A User’s Guide. 3rd rev. ed. Toronto: Nelson, 2013. Print. Panagia, Davide. The Political Life of Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2009. Print. Pevere, Geoff, and Greig Dymond. Mondo Canuck:  A  Canadian Pop Culture Odyssey. Scarborough, ON: Prentice-Hall, 1996. Print. Rak, Julie. Boom!:  Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market. Waterloo, ON:  Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2013. Print.

Cultural Studies in Canada    125 Rak, Julie, ed. Auto/biography in Canada: Critical Directions. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2005. Print. Razack, Sherene. Casting Out:  The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2008. Print. Sandilands, Catriona. The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999. Print. Sherbert, Garry, Annie Gérin, and Sheila Petty, eds. Canadian Cultural Poesis:  Essays on Canadian Culture. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2006. Print. Sloan, Johanne. Joyce Wieland’s ‘The Far Shore’. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2010. Print. Szeman, Imre. “Belated or Isochronic?: Canadian Writing, Time and Globalization.” Essays on Canadian Writing 71 (2000): 145–53. Print. ———. “Literature on the Periphery of Capitalism: Brazilian Theory, Canadian Culture.” Ilha do Desterro [Brazil] 40 (Jan/Jun 2001): 25–42. Print. Thobani, Sunera. Exalted Subjects:  Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in Canada. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2007. Print. Tinic, Serra. On Location:  Canada’s Television Industry in a Global Market. Toronto:  U of Toronto P, 2005. Print. TransCanada Institute. “Mandate.” https://www.uoguelph.ca/transcanadas/institute Web. Accessed 1 Apr. 2014. Van Luven, Lynne, and Priscilla Walton, eds. Pop Can:  Popular Culture in Canada. Scarborough, ON: Prentice-Hall, 1999. Print. Wagman, Ira, and Peter Urquhart, eds. Cultural Industries.ca: Making Sense of Canadian Media in the Digital Age. Toronto: Lorimer, 2012. Print. Wershler, Darren. Guy Maddin’s ‘My Winnipeg.’ Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2010. Print.

Pa rt  I I

I N DIG E N OU S L I T E R AT U R E S A N D C ON T E X T S

Chapter 7

C ontem p ora ry Met i s Literatu re Resistance, Roots, Innovation Emma LaRocque

Dear John: I’m still here and halfbreed, after all these years Marilyn Dumont, A Really Good Brown Girl (52)

I was born into the world speaking Mechif a language whose base is Cree with a whole bunch of French thrown in for good measure Kipaha la porte! I say

Mechif for “close the door” Rita Bouvier, Blueberry Clouds (37)

Historical Context The history of the Metis people is marked by a complexity that reflects the duality of their origins and the many forms of resistance that have characterized their ongoing relations with the Canadian nation-state.1 The Metis are a distinct ethnic Indigenous people who are recognized as Aboriginal in the Canadian constitution, and whose history, ancestry, and cultural expression emerged out of the First Nations, French, and

130    Indigenous Literatures and Contexts English fur trade during the seventeenth century. The first “metis” were children of relations between First Nations women and European men. From these early relations grew “halfbreed” families, who by a process of endogamy (marrying within their own group), became Metis peoples. By the early 1800s large populations of Metis merged and located in the Red River Valley. By 1869 there were about 10,000 Metis in the Red River Settlement (see Weinstein 5). Early Metis cultural development largely revolved around the fur trade, as their familial knowledge of Native cultures, languages, and lands were indispensable to the Hudson’s Bay and North West companies. The Metis played central and distinguished roles as guides, voyageurs, provisioners, traders, interpreters, and cultural brokers. They were known and respected for their hard work and independence, and in Red River for their growing sense of nationalism as they fought to protect their bison-hunting territories as well as their right to trade freely with competing fur trade companies. Their unique blending of cultures was reflected in the iconography of the Metis flag, an infinity symbol whose double loops indicate the strength of Metis duality, which was first used by Metis resistance fighters in the Battle of Seven Oaks in 1816. Metis determination to protect their lands and distinct culture took on a more dramatic form in the mid-1800s when they were excluded from land negotiations between the newly formed country of Canada and the Hudson’s Bay Company. The Metis, who formed the vast majority of the Red River Settlement, established a provisional government in 1869 under the leadership of Louis Riel to represent their interests when land surveyors arrived in the Red River area (now Winnipeg and the vicinity) to facilitate the transfer of western lands to Canada. Relations broke down as the Metis stood their ground; the “Red River Rebellion” of that same year led to the Manitoba Act and that province’s entry into Confederation. Although the Metis wrested legal recognition for their lands through the Manitoba Act of 1870, they suffered widespread dispossession; by the early 1880s, two-thirds of the Metis had moved out of the province (see Weinstein 13). The majority moved west and northwest. The unresolved issues of land loss and displacement in Red River followed the Metis to the Northwest, giving rise to the second Metis resistance, known in Canadian history as “the 1885 Northwest Rebellion.” This resistance in northern Saskatchewan—again led by Louis Riel (who had been retrieved from exile in the United States)—culminated in the unsuccessful Battle of Batoche with the Canadian militia, leaving the Metis with loss of lives, lands, and leadership. Riel and his men, along with Native supporters, were arrested, and Riel was executed in November 1885. Military strategist Gabriel Dumont escaped into exile in the United States. After 1885 the Metis made more mass migrations further west and north, once again in search of lands and legal recognition for ownership of these lands. What is of note is that despite the massive losses, repeated dispersals, and political isolation, and the harsh socioeconomic conditions that followed, the Metis continued to adapt, finding ways to re-establish communities and to maintain a strong sense of their Metis identity. Today there are about 400,000 Metis who live in both rural and urban communities across Canada. Metis communities with their distinct culture and traditions continue to exist;

Contemporary Metis Literature    131 90% live in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta (Métis National Council). However, the issue of Metis identity has grown complicated, in part due to government policies. These complications have impacted the Metis in many crucial ways with respect to Aboriginal land rights, but also in the defining and reading of Metis literature. Metis literature reaches as far back as the European and Indigenous peoples’ inscriptions, and it will reach as far forward as the next “new peoples” generate text. This is not to romanticize “metissage”; it is to point out that Metis peoples have inherited a wealth of literatures—literatures spoken, sung, performed, painted, carved, engraved, pictographed, penned, and stereo/typed (pun intended). And now cybered. It is not surprising, then, that from the very beginnings of Metis ethno-political consciousness, the Metis were multilingual, and within the bison-hunting context on the Red River plains, invented a language (Michif) that combined mostly Cree with French, though in some regions it also mixed some English and Saulteux (Bakker 177–79). In all these languages, the Metis “re-cree-ated” or invented anew stories and traditions steeped in European and Indigenous oralities and alphabets. They were also involved, along with their Cree and Anishinaabe (Ojibway) kin, in the development of the Cree syllabary, “a mixed system containing both syllabic and alphabetic characters” that was collaboratively created by the Wesleyan missionary James Evans in the 1840s (Nichols 4). Not only did the northern Native peoples such as the Cree, Metis, Anishinaabe, and perhaps Dene assist in the invention of this system, but once available, they “spread it across Rupert’s Land” (1). It is interesting to speculate that, were it not for political interventions in Red River and Saskatchewan, the Metis may very well have developed literatures written in the syllabic system as well as a standardized Michif writing system.2 But the prairie Metis did not have much opportunity to develop written literatures, for in the words of Pamela Sing, “Different histories of displacement have resulted in different linguistic and cultural practices” among the Metis (100). Michif as a language could not develop under the diasporic conditions in the aftermath of the Red River (1869) and Northwest (1885) Metis Resistances;3 however, it certainly did not disappear. As Sing points out, Michif can be found in writings by Riel, Dumont, and others, and is now inserted into some contemporary Metis writings as a marker of cultural belonging, distinction, and resistance (102–03). But whether or not Michif is used, Metis peoples continue to be among the great storytellers and writers of Canada. This writing, however, is not without genealogical and sociocultural politics.

Definitional Problems Metis literature has been subject to a series of misrepresentations and misnomers emerging from the legacy of colonial history. The problem for most scholars and theorists—and for many writers who identify or have been identified as Metis—centres on identity. It is virtually impossible to treat Metis literature without dealing with the

132    Indigenous Literatures and Contexts intricacies of identity. One of the most significant obstacles is the issue of terminology. It has become common practice to universalize the Metis as “metis” (to replace the word halfbreed, which some find offensive but is actually a term used by most Metis people right into the 1970s), a term that encompasses all individuals of any mixed White-Native (or “mixed blood”) ancestry.4 What this difficult matter of terminology reveals is that Metis identity or identities is/are not uniform. Just as there were “many roads to Red River” (Peterson and Brown 37–72), so there are many different ways through which individuals or communities have come to identify as “metis.” Indeed, the shifting terrain of identity politics and legislative changes have dogged the Metis, no less so for the post-1990 writing community, as many well-known Aboriginal writers5 relocated from Metis (or mixed ancestry) to First Nation memberships (see Frideres).6 However, some have continued to associate as Metis by hyphenating their identities, for example, the veteran Cree/Metis poet Duncan Mercredi (Spirit of the Wolf, 1991), or the recently published Metis/Mennonite poet Katherena Vermette (End Love Songs, 2012), or the very innovative Metis/Dene dramatist Marie Clements (DraMétis, 2001). Marilyn Dumont and I also hyphenate as Cree/Metis, even though our identities are decidedly Metis Nation, a distinction that I will take up later. On the other hand, not all peoples who have assumed metis identities are necessarily Metis. To put it rather baldly, what distinguishes a first-generation mixed-blood from being a Metis is ethnicity. Metis identity is not just biologic; Metis peoples developed families, communities, and culture (or cultures, because there are a number of different Metis cultures—the Red River ones became the Metis Nation and remain the most prominent). But there are other communities that sprang up all over North America that had no direct relationship to or with the Red River Metis. Among the many complicating factors concerning metis/Metis identity,7 it is the common and generalized use of the term metis that is perhaps the most controversial—and the most confusing. The confusion lies in conflating the term metis, a racial category, with The Metis, a sociopolitical and ethnic category. In an effort to explain and keep this distinction, the Métis National Council, an umbrella organization for the Metis Nation peoples, presented the following to the United Nations in 1984: “Written with a small ‘m’, metis is a racial term for anyone of mixed Indian and European ancestry. Written with a capital ‘M’, Metis is a sociocultural or political term for those of mixed ancestry who evolved into a distinct indigenous people during a certain historical period in a certain region of Canada” (qtd. in Peterson and Brown 6). The “certain region of Canada” includes the historic fur-trade areas from Ontario westward and into the Territories. In the landmark study The New Peoples: Being and Becoming Métis in North America (1985), Jacqueline Peterson and Jennifer S.H. Brown trace the development of Metis peoples whose identity moved from their beginnings in the fur trade as “half-Native and half-White” to that of a “new people,” that is, to an unhyphenated ethnicity, or “ethnogenesis,” which they explain is about “how new peoples, new ethnicities and new nationalities come into being” (8). By the late 1600s, such new peoples were developing their own communities throughout North America but were especially concentrated in the Great Lakes/Ohio Valley areas. By the early 1800s a distinct Metis population converged

Contemporary Metis Literature    133 in the Red River Valley region. According to Peterson and Brown, these “new peoples” were not merely biracial, multilingual and bicultural, but the proud owners of a new language; of a syncretic cosmology and religious repertoire:  of distinctive modes of dress, cuisine, architecture, vehicles of transport, music and dance; and after 1815 of a quasi-military political organization, a flag, a bardic tradition, a rich folklore and a national history. … (64)

These are the peoples that the wandering artist Paul Kane took such an interest in, and about whom he opined that this “race, in keeping themselves distinct from both Indians and whites, form a tribe of themselves; and although they have adopted some of the customs and manners of the French voyageurs, are much more attached to the wild and savage manners of the Red Man” (qtd. in Minnesota History 310). Kane was, of course, viewing the people through “imperial eyes,” particularly from the perspective of European travel writing (Pratt), but he also indicates the strong Indigenous foundation of Red River Metis identity. As already noted, this Indigenous-based, ethnically cohesive, and increasingly nationalist population, concentrated in the Red River Valley area, was seriously dislocated by political developments in the 1870s (and again in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the Northwest), which ushered in an expanded Confederation, a Confederation that resolutely refused to acknowledge their unique peoplehood or to respect their culture and lands as separate from Indians or Whites (see Weinstein 11). In the ungenerous and polarizing words of Prime Minister John A.  Macdonald in the House of Commons debate in 1885 regarding land settlements:  “If they are Indians, they go with the tribe … if they are Halfbreeds, they are whites” (qtd. in Jannetta, Ethnopoetics 33). This attitude and policy had a devastating impact on the Metis. While prairie Indians secured reserves and other rights through treaties, and White re-settlers received homesteads and other assistance, the Metis were subjected to a chaotic scrip program, both in Red River and again in the North West, which left them largely without ownership of lands, either as individuals or as a collective (see Sprague, “Government Lawlessness” and Canada; see also Sawchuk et al.).8 As a result, the Metis found themselves squatters on lands not yet claimed by White immigrants, or on “road allowance” strips of land in unoccupied Crown lands, literally living on the edge of roads and valiantly making a living both from harvesting the land and wage-based seasonal labour. For about a century the Metis were indeed Canada’s “forgotten people” (Sealey and Lussier). The Metis, particularly in Saskatchewan and Alberta, continued to organize and press for their well-being and land settlements through the Depression era, but it is only since the early 1970s, and as part of the larger Native political movements throughout Canada, that the Metis could indicate the severe extent of their dispossession and eventually begin to gain recognition as Metis with Aboriginal rights (Weinstein). As happened in decolonizing movements throughout the world, intellectuals, artists, and

134    Indigenous Literatures and Contexts writers became the voice and vehicle for articulating peoples’ histories, experiences, and aspirations. In Canada, contemporary Metis Nation resistance discourse relies on its own resistance history; this discourse is located in “an arena of struggle” (Harlow 2) for justice, recovery, and historiographic and constitutional redress.9 Necessarily contestatory in its beginnings, Metis writing involves a re-collection of scattered parts, both personal and communal, and while in its initial stages it talks back and at the proverbial imperial centre, it quickly repositions by decentring the “empire” (Ashcroft et al.), “coming home” (McLeod), and foregrounding “healing” (Episkenew, Taking Back), cultural rebuilding, and self-determination. The body of literature that forms a Metis literary aesthetic is marked by mixing, transgression, and a reinvention of genres, languages, tropes, and techniques. It is characterized by a style of deconstructing and reconstructing, often mixing documentation with “voice” informed by cultural ethos (LaRocque, “Preface” xviii; When 18, 164). Threaded through all of this is a “love of words,” a point I will return to at the end.

Metis Nation Literature The first wave of Metis writers who published between the early and mid-1970s articulated the multilayered facets of this discursive resistance, as have subsequent (post-1990) writers. Given the historical significance and literary importance assigned to the first wave, and given that these writers have consistently produced a body of work that is clearly identified as Metis literature, I will begin by foregrounding the major texts by Maria Campbell, Howard Adams, and Beatrice Culleton (now Mosionier). I will also discuss the post-1990 work of Marilyn Dumont and Gregory Scofield, who are widely recognized as two of the major contemporary Metis poets. These writers all have strong (though not uniform) connections to the historic Red River Metis. Maria Campbell is best known for her 1973 autobiography Halfbreed. The book contains her devastating revelations about “what it is like to be a Halfbreed woman in our country, about the joys and sorrows, the oppressing poverty, the frustrations and dreams” (Halfbreed 2). For Campbell, the personal is historical. Campbell, raised in a Saskatchewan Metis hamlet, tells of both warm and funny family and community events, but also of the long history of marginalization and tragic despair that she traces back to the Northwest Resistance at Batoche. Indeed, Campbell herself is a descendant of Gabriel Dumont. Like Harold Cardinal’s The Unjust Society (1969), which revealed the inequities and hypocrisies that girded Canadian liberal-state philosophy with respect to Status and Treaty Indian (now First Nations) peoples in the country, Halfbreed shattered the benevolent White Canadian self-image, a critique of Canada that was to be repeated by most Metis and other Aboriginal writers that followed these early exposés of dispossession, neglect, extreme poverty, brutal racism, and sexism. Campbell barely survived to tell her story. With directness and uncompromising politics, Halfbreed relates her struggles with poverty, racism, domestic violence, drug addiction, and prostitution.

Contemporary Metis Literature    135 The publication of Halfbreed changed the course of Aboriginal writing, and ultimately non-Aboriginal literary criticism in Canada, for it not only inspired younger generations of Indigenous authors to re-inscribe the Canadian narrative, but also provoked White Canadian readership to see Aboriginal peoples in a new light. Campbell’s book proved that the extreme conditions of the Metis had not happened by any fault of their own; in other words, this was not a choice or a sign of a defect on their part, but rather part of societal prejudice that had long historical roots. Because it is sometimes difficult to see these historical roots from the context of the present, Campbell begins her book with the history of Louis Riel and the Red River Resistance—to show that her people’s problems did not begin with her generation, but with the refusal of the Canadian government to acknowledge the Metis people’s claim to recognition and land. In this way, Halfbreed was a source of affirmation and political awakening, since it affirmed Metis experience while at the same time uttering a challenge to dominant interpretations of Canadian history. Since then, Campbell has worked as a teacher and cultural activist. She has written television and radio plays and has published many other works, including children’s stories, a play based on her life entitled “Jessica” (published in The Book of Jessica, 1987), and the popular collection of Metis short stories, Stories of the Road Allowance People (1995). Reprinted in 2010 with fresh, bold illustrations by Sherry Farrell-Racette, Stories of the Road Allowance People is a rich collection of prose poems that give voice to the great storytelling traditions of the Michif Metis. Using humour, irony, and a combination of “village English” and Michif, Campbell in a new way tells stories of racism and colonization, but most of all, stories that are filled with colourful Metis personalities, ghosts, and legendary shape-shifters (both human and not), along with gentle chiding of mischief-making within the community. On the heels of Halfbreed, Howard Adams’s docu-biography, Prison of Grass, was published in 1975. Adams was an academic, an author, and a social activist who believed that the Aboriginal struggle was best understood as an international struggle “against world capitalism” (Lutz, Howard 228). Although Prison of Grass was labeled (or dismissed) as “protest writing” (Petrone 383–88), and certainly was not considered a literary work, it is an important autobiographical and historical text that rings with orality in style. It tells a similar story to Halfbreed. Adams, too, was raised in a caring Metis home scarred by abject poverty and racial segregation in rural Saskatchewan. Unapologetic and raw, Prison of Grass rips the hide off the grand Euro-Canadian myth of White “civilization” naturally overpowering Indian “savagery,” and unmasks Canadian society’s racist treatment of Native peoples. Interspersing documentation with his personal account, Adams reveals the heartbreaking legacy of colonial racism: the racial shame and disintegrating effects of internalizing the “White Ideal” (16). The theme of racial shame is also central in Beatrice Culleton Mosionier’s first novel, In Search of April Raintree (1983). While Mosionier has published several children’s stories, including a moving allegory of the white bison, plus another novel (In the Shadow of Evil, 2000), and, recently, a memoir (Come Walk with Me, 2009), her revised April Raintree, often described as fictionalized autobiography, continues to receive both

136    Indigenous Literatures and Contexts popular and scholarly readings. In Search of April Raintree is a graphically violent story of two metis sisters, April and Cheryl, whose tragic lives are largely determined by the different colour of their skins. Separated through foster care but reunited as young adults, the sisters often argue (through letters) about their relation to their mixed-race identity. Cheryl identifies with “Indians”; April feels ashamed of being Native. After a series of traumatic and disturbing experiences, Cheryl commits suicide. Sadly, it is only after Cheryl’s death that April comes to a greater understanding of her feelings and explains that, although “[s]‌hame doesn’t dissolve overnight” (168), she will embrace her Metis heritage. Interestingly, in April Raintree, both Cheryl and April blur “metis” with “Indian” in their search. There are no Red River or any other Metis community cultural markers in the novel. To be sure, there are many references to the term Metis, and Cheryl does adopt a “Metis” identity (which she gets from her foster mother Mrs. MacAdams), but it is often cast in historical terms and often elided into “Indianness.” For example, in one letter to April, Cheryl enthuses about her school speeches and papers on “the history of the Métis” (which she associates with buffalo hunts) and in the next paragraph remarks that she may need a pair of glasses but would not want to wear them because “It’s unIndian” (77). Deeply impacted by school and societal stereotypes about “halfbreeds,” it is onerous for Cheryl and April to embrace their metis heritage. Cheryl, in reference to Louis Riel, exclaims, “He’s a Metis like us. … It means we’re part Indian and part white. I wish we were whole Indians” (44–45). Coming to accept the distinctive nature of Metis culture and heritage, what I describe as a form of “returning home” later in this chapter, is a consistent theme in Metis (or metis) writing of the twentieth century. This arduous process of self-acceptance and “returning home” is clearly evident in the writing of poets Gregory Scofield and Marilyn Dumont, two of the most well-known post-1990 wave of Metis writers. Like their literary elders, Scofield and Dumont foreground themes of racial shame and defiance. In his first published collection of poetry, The Gathering: Stories for the Medicine Wheel (1993), Scofield writes “survival poetry,” of keeping his “head down” and ducking “the put downs/Shoved it all down” (44). In his autobiography Thunder Through My Veins (1999), Scofield tells of his multilayered identity struggles, fueled by racism and poverty and, in large measure, homophobia and homelessness. Like Culleton, Scofield was not raised in a stable, Metis-affirming home, which initially led him to turn to “Indian” instead of Metis cultural markers in an effort to clarify his identity. When he first learned that his family was “halfbreed,” he “was disappointed that [they] weren’t pure Indians” (Thunder 107), and for some time he refused to accept this and assumed his great-great-grandmother’s (Kohkum Otter’s) Cree identity. He begins his process of “returning home” when he first visits a Metis cultural centre in Batoche and learns about Metis history and culture. He weeps “openly” when he first meets “the heroes” he “was ashamed of in school” at a Batoche museum and watches a re-enactment of the 1885 “Northwest Rebellion” (Gathering 48). He adopts Batoche as his homeland: “The importance that I had once placed on being Cree—a true and pure Indian—seemed to disappear with the sinking sun. … Never again would I search for a place of belonging. This place, Batoche, would always be ‘home.’ My home” (Thunder

Contemporary Metis Literature    137 166–67). By adopting Batoche as his homeland, by honouring his mother and adopted aunt in I Knew Two Metis Women (1999), and by relearning Cree, Scofield reconstructs and regains his Metis family and community origins. In Singing Home the Bones (2005), Scofield collects and embraces the many pieces that finally make up his identity. Through “conversations” with the dead and the living, he reconnects with his Cree-Metis ancestors and simultaneously discovers that his father was Jewish; by linking all these bones with his own, he celebrates his Metis heritage. This collection of poetry, like many of his other poems, is not merely ethnographic or historic; rather, Singing Home the Bones reveals the full splendour of his own humanness. Like life, bones are brittle, even if connective. Known for his performative presentations that blend haunting Cree chants with contemporary lyrical readings, Scofield metaphorically brings home the diasporic Metis bones, including his own, and, most recently, Riel’s in Louis: The Heretic Poems (2011). Like Scofield, Marilyn Dumont deals with Metis dispossession, racism, and “halfbreed” identity in her three books of poetry: A Really Good Brown Girl (1996), green girl dreams Mountains (2001), and that tongued belonging (2007). In her first book she confronts Canadian icons such as John A. Macdonald, as well as “squaw” stereotypes and other gross misrepresentations of Aboriginal peoples. Her poems mix genres and languages and are marked by political edginess, yet never lose sight of human needs and emotions about love, loss, family, friends, and the beauty of the land. In A Really Good Brown Girl, Dumont recounts a childhood humiliation that is on one level about racialization. On another level, it offers us an opportunity to review what standards are employed when assessing Metis identity and literature. Dumont recalls: My skin always gave me away. … a little white girl stared at the colour of my arms and exclaimed, “Are you ever brown!”. I wanted to pull my short sleeves down … but she persisted, “Are you Indian?” … How could I respond? If I said yes, she’d reject me: worse, she might tell the other kids my secret and then they’d laugh and shun me. If I said no, I’d be lying. … I said “No,” and walked away. (14–15)

In one sense, Dumont was not lying; she is not “Indian,” she is Metis, or “halfbreed,” as she sometimes puts it. Of course, as a child she could not explain this. She could only respond to the power of the White colonial gaze, which in numerous ways distorted her identity.10 That she is not Indian is brought home to her later in life when in a conversation with “this treaty guy,” she finds herself saying, “I’m Metis like it’s an apology and he says, ‘mmh,’ like he forgives me … he’s got ‘this look,’ that says he’s leather and I’m naughahyde” (58). The issue of identity varies considerably among other post-1990 Metis writers such as Joanne Arnott, Sharron Proulx-Turner, Rita Bouvier, and Warren Cariou. Joanne Arnott, who identifies as Metis/mixed blood, is the author of seven books, including poetry, nonfiction, and children’s literature. Wiles of Girlhood (1991), a collection of poetry, is her first publication. Her material deals with social issues such as abuse, poverty, women, and mixed-race identity. Sharron Proulx-Turner, who comes from a

138    Indigenous Literatures and Contexts mélange of Native and European ancestry from the Ottawa Valley but is now a member of the Métis Nation of Alberta, has published a memoir (under a pseudonym) and three other books. The theme of rebirthing and revisioning, which draws from and points to a new order of Indigenous, woman-centred spirituality and hybridity, runs through her mixed-genre writing. In her episodic storytelling poem what the auntys say (2002), she sees stories as giving “one long birth of one old metisse lady,” and explains “metisse means metis woman-girl/two half-bloods not half and half like cream” (13). Rita Bouvier is a Saskatchewan Metis teacher, community worker, and author of three books of poetry, Blueberry Clouds (1999), Papiyahtak (2004), and Better That Way (2008). Expressive and politically conscious, Bouvier’s poetry clearly reflects her Metis cultural grounding in her use of Michif Cree and her moving memories of her grandfather, who gently showed her the ways of the land. Warren Cariou, well known to mainstream Canadian literary culture, represents yet another facet to the complexities of identification. Cariou is a scholar, novelist (The Exalted Company of Roadside Martyrs, 1999), filmmaker, and an emerging poet. Born in northern Saskatchewan to a German mother and a father whose Metis ancestry was a “family secret,” indicating “the historical stigma attached” to Native ancestry, Cariou grew up as “a white kid” who identified himself as “French, German and Norwegian” (Lake 76). It was not until he was in his twenties that he slowly learned about his Red River Metis roots. In his wonderfully written autobiography, Lake of the Prairies (2002), Cariou takes a tentative position regarding his identity: “I feel closely connected … particularly to the Metis, but it doesn’t seem quite right to claim that I am one” (224). However, he now identifies as “of mixed Métis and European Heritage” (Manitowapow) and is active in the Native academic and writing community. Many of these first- and second-wave Metis writers have received or have been short-listed for an array of literary awards. This is not only an indication of the quality of their work, but also of the fact that the wider Canadian literary community has paid increasing attention to Aboriginal writers. Indeed, critical reception of First Nations and Metis writing has changed dramatically, particularly since the 1990s. While much Indigenous writing from the 1970s to the late 80s was met with initial incomprehension, defensiveness, and labeling—confirming what the writers were articulating, namely, that there was a huge divide between Native and White peoples—subsequent reception has become more open and judicious. The early years of the 1990s stand out as a dramatic turning point in Aboriginal writing and in criticism, as indicated by the appearance of a number of anthologies at that time, including All My Relations (King 1990), Writing the Circle (Perreault and Vance 1990), Native Writers and Canadian Literature (New 1990), and An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English (Moses and Goldie 1992). However, none of the “Native literature” anthologies published between the late 1980s and the 2000s has a “Metis literature” category, though all of them include or analyze authors of Metis or “mixed” ancestry. Although both mainstream Canadian literary critics (Fee; Godard; Grant; Hoy) and Indigenous critics (Acoose; Akiwenzie-Damm; Fagan et al., “Reading”; Ruffo) have, since the 1980s, given overwhelming attention to Campbell’s Halfbreed

Contemporary Metis Literature    139 and Mosionier’s April Raintree, the time is overdue for a more focused study of Metis literature.

Metis Aesthetics The only substantial book-length study of Metis writing is Armando Jannetta’s Ethnopoetics of the Minority Voice:  An Introduction to the Politics of Dialogism and Difference in Metis Literature (2001). Employing concepts of dialogism, hybridity, and border-crossing, Jannetta links three Metis men’s nineteenth-century (largely 1840s–1930s) landscapes of vanishing open spaces and “nomadic” lifestyles to Campbell’s and Mosionier’s autobiographical narratives, arguing that “the experience of open spaces and the subversive historical tradition of ‘border- jumping’ reemerge and have been recovered by male and female Metis writers in order to decolonise literary discourse and to counter colonial mentality” (161). Jannetta profiles what might be taken as a Metis aesthetics in his rather large leaps of linking these five different, if not disparate, auto/biographies: all the texts of the Metis writers discussed share a perception of a holistic universe in which humour and tragic vision are balanced, as well as a dialogic orientation and nomadic quality. The peripatetic element of contemporary Metis literature is characterised by a constant process of becoming, rootlessness, displacement and restlessness, a reality of multiple belonging, of being caught between cultures and loyalties, wandering a mindscape and landscape that is neither white nor Indian. Finally, however, it reclaims a vision beyond the lost savage, reasserting a Native consciousness and legitimising Native epistemologies in a third space located in communal relations outside the white-Indian dichotomy. (162)

This portrayal of a supposed Metis genre is actually quite a classic stereotype of the wandering halfbreed caught between White and Indian worlds. Although Jannetta advances the notion of a “third space,” he never demonstrates what exactly that might be. In fact, the only option he presents for the Metis writers is that they jump back into the borders of Native (rather than Metis) consciousness and epistemology, which, in effect, is not outside the White-Indian dichotomy. Further, I am troubled by his unfortunate wording about “the lost savage,” which recalls the civ/sav lens of the colonizer’s gaze (LaRocque, “The Metis” 86). Jannetta does insist that “Metis life histories … in a space of contestation, participate in the creation of ‘new genres’ ” (160), and he extrapolates from my argument in my 1990 essay, “Preface or Here Are Our Voices,” but he somewhat misreads my point, which was not about border-jumping but rather that Native (in the inclusive sense of the times) contestation had developed new genres which, among other things, combined “footnotes” with “facts of biography” (xviii). Indigenous writers and literary critics Kateri

140    Indigenous Literatures and Contexts Akiwenzie-Damm and Armand Ruffo have also noted this pattern in Metis writing. In her essay on Maria Campbell and Beatrice Culleton, Akiwenzie-Damm (then named Damm) describes their style as “dispelling and telling” (93); Ruffo notes that there is a Metis literary tradition in “the documentary/autobiographical mode of writing [which] continues a tradition of speaking out to address the colonizer … which can be traced back to the likes of Louis Riel” (“Remembering” 86). In fact, quite contrary to Jannetta’s thesis, most contemporary Metis writers and scholars seek to deconstruct the West’s stereotype of the itinerant hybrid and to re-inscribe or, more properly, re-root the Metis with home(land), community, culture, and agency. As Nehiyaw (Cree)-Metis literary scholar Janice Acoose states, “Campbell’s text challenges existing stereotypes and images … by providing vivid spiritual, social, political and economic context to her Halfbreed … way of life” (Iskwewak 90). Metis aesthetics, then, is a re-humanization art—a discourse that counters dehumanizing romanticizations of the tragic lost “Hybrid” and at the same time offers “cultural signifiers such as language, song, dance, and social protocol” (Ruffo, “Remembering” 80), which should guide how we understand the cultural category of “Metis” (see also LaRocque, “Reflections”). Metis do in fact cross or integrate many borders, but this does not mean that they are rootless or can only bounce from White to “Indian”—they are more than the sum of the two. But knowing how to read Metis culture remains a difficult issue for many critics. Part of the problem is that the struggles that Metis writers have shared have been taken to mean that the Metis lack a coherent core culture, despite the fact that most of these writers also offer much cultural information. The other problem is that most critics cannot make any distinction between First Nations cultures and the Metis. There are some significant distinctions, but these are issues that require much greater treatment than I can give them here. Suffice it to say, colonial imaginings and the “White-Indian dichotomy” continue to plague the study of Metis peoples and literatures. Some critics reach for a concept of “whole Indians” as the standard by which they measure Metis aesthetics. Julie A. Davies, an American teacher, characterizes April Raintree as “neither entirely Native nor entirely white … a work that is also not firmly grounded. … There are no recurring Native themes such as connection to the land, spirituality, communal cooperative living, or the wisdom of elders” (“Beatrice Culleton”). This list is problematic for the Metis (and other Aboriginal people, for that matter) for a number of reasons. First, it is quite simply too categorical. But what is at issue for the Metis is that even if this list typified “Nativeness” (which in its generalized, typologized, and ruralized way it does not), it is not Metis. While Metis have profound Indigenous roots to their identity, such a list does not encompass Metis culture(s). But how do we read Metis writing in light of Metis standards of culture and aesthetics, rather than Indian or White standards? The critical literature seems not to know what to do at this juncture—what are the standards, what are the cultural markers from which one could appraise Metis identity and aesthetics discourse? As a rule, and with the exception of Jannetta, non-Native critics shy away from asking this question and, perhaps understandably, side-step the issue with acknowledgments that it is “extremely difficult” (Andrews, “Irony” 11) or “highly charged” (Lutz, “Not ‘neither-nor’ ” 190). And while Native critics in Canada have long

Contemporary Metis Literature    141 been calling for criticism that respects cultural diversity and specificity,11 there is little attempt to outline what this may actually mean when it comes to a Metis aesthetics discourse. It seems straightforward enough to outline Metis difference from Whites, and indeed most theorists (and even some writers) use “White” instead of “Indian” standards to measure “difference” in the Metis. But what about the differences between Metis and First Nations cultures? Here there is a noticeable tendency to subsume Metis under pan-Aboriginal cultural criteria. At the same time, as I  noted earlier, there is some insistence on blurring the racial category “metis” with the ethno-political Metis Nation.12 If Metis Nation culture is distinct, coherent, and present, which it is, then the literary community must properly identify and respect this ethno-cultural coherence. It is here that the universalized use of “metis” is a problem. And it is here that “hybridity” as the fulcrum from which the generalized metis are theorized serves to obscure rather than clarify Metis identity (and literature). Perhaps the clarion call for “Indigeneity” (and “indigenization”) serves to drown out Metis distinctiveness, although this is complicated by the fact that Metis Nation peoples are also Indigenous, and many First Nations peoples are of mixed ancestry or are closely related to the Metis. The simultaneous appeals to Indigeneity and hybridity seem to be a difficult combination or concept to grasp for some critics (and politicians), but for the Metis Nation peoples there is no necessary conflict. The myriad and convoluted theories and contentious debates surrounding hybridity are beyond the scope of this chapter;13 however, there is no discussion of the Metis/metis without some consideration of hybridity. The worst use of “hybridity” is to be found in colonial writings and popular culture, which have characterized “halfbreeds” as suffering from unresolvable conflict innate to their presumed polarized “civilized/savage” natures (see LaRocque, “The Metis”). The old academic version of this is the frontier view of the Metis caught between “the chase” and “civilization” (87). The new version may be the “neither Native nor White” formulation still evident in some creative and theoretical works. A more nuanced reading of hybridity emphasizes “both and more” (Lutz, “Not ‘neither-nor’ ” 197), a plurality or blending rather than a straddling of cultures, a syncretic thing. This liminal or “third space” is outside the White-Indian polarization and offers room for agency (Jannetta, Ethnopoetics; see also Andrews, “Irony”). This has critical potential as long as it goes beyond mere “dialogics” or “border-jumping,” and does not impose the “colonizer’s model of the world” (Blaut 10), which assumes that everything belongs to Europeans and that hybridity is a one-way street. Obviously, weaving the master narrative into hybridity theories premised on the belief that the (post)colonial world begins and ends with Europe is the problem, not hybridity or halfbreedness itself. Further, while there is some basis for thinking of the Metis as located in hybrid space, and while this has been difficult for a certain generation of Metis writers, such portrayals should not be generalized because they serve to distort and obscure specific unfragmented cultures (or homes), particularly for the Metis Nation, who are arguably no longer a “hybrid race” (see Lundgren 63) but a “new people,”14 and not necessarily

142    Indigenous Literatures and Contexts suffering from an “in-between” location; or if they do, their suffering is caused by external social and political disruptions, prejudices, and misperceptions, rather than their Metis identity. Care should be taken that a Metis aesthetics is not developed solely from “the icon of the confused and alienated Halfbreed,” as Jo-Ann Episkenew puts it (“Socially” 57). There is a powerful “returning home” motif that runs throughout Metis writing, obviously suggesting that there is an unbroken and cohesive home to return to. As complex as the discussion of Metis identity is, Metis Nation peoples have a very strong sense of identity as a distinct culture. While this culture is not congealed, neither is it culturally unmarked. When we employ a reading strategy that does not privilege theory over people, what is striking is the extreme racism (and sexism) and marginalization that Metis writers across the eras have experienced and confronted—not only because they were/are Native but specifically because they were/are “halfbreed.” This racism is what has confounded their lives and their identities. The racism, hostility, and antipathy expressed and exercised against peoples of mixed ancestry reaches very far back into human history, and is certainly conjoined to colonialism (Young; Stoler). My discussion of the Metis Nation as constituting “new peoples” is an ethnographic and historical fact, but the thorny politics of identity—especially challenging for Metis Nation peoples, as their particular identity faces erasure by conflation of terms—necessitates delineations and name changes. Needless to say, those peoples with “mixed ancestry” but not of Metis Nation backgrounds also have their own cultures; what is needed are new designations to clarify the differences. Terms and notions such as “whole” or “pure” cultures (and their reverse, “contaminated”), “mixed” or “full blood,” and certain derogatory usages of “halfbreed”—all terms that come from eras of unscientific folk biology and racist ethnography—are problematic. Most Metis/metis align themselves with the iconic Red River and with Indigeneity, whether they come to this identity after a process of genealogical self-discovery or whether they grew up Metis with clear Metis heritage and culture. Earlier I noted that Marilyn Dumont and I hyphenate our identities. I believe Dumont does this to accentuate her alliance with the Cree language as she fills “that tongued belonging” (the title of Dumont’s 2007 collection of poetry) with a Cree-sense. I do it to show a simultaneity, not a straddling, of heritages. Most important, I identify as Cree/Metis because my “soul language” is Plains Cree/Michif, and because I  was raised in a family and community whose lives and cultures were of the land (see LaRocque, “For the Love of Place”), who approached the world—and still do—with a Nehiyawew Apeetowgusanak (“Cree-speaking half-sons”) epistemology, which is at once multi-holistic and dynamic. As I have argued in my book When the Other Is Me (2010), I resist being read as an ethnographic “other” hybrid. Indigeneity and halfbreedness run deep in Aboriginal literary expression. Memorializing nohkomak (the grandmothers) in her haunting honour song Blue Marrow (1998), the brilliant Cree poet Louise Halfe gives vision to the Native women in the fur trade who “Ribboned the Sky” (89).15 The ribbons are the halfbreed children who carried their Nehiyawewin (Cree), their atowkehwin (mythologies/worldviews),

Contemporary Metis Literature    143 and their aski pimatsewin (life from the land) to become the Metis Nation. And like their Indigenous and European forebears, the Metis Nation is resilient and enjoys a very rich “storied” and literary inheritance. In my case, not only did I grow up with Cree Michif orality, but also with a mother who corresponded with her sisters in Cree Michif syllabics right into the 1970s. And while my own English literacy did not officially begin until the age of nine when I started (public) school,16 I was “pre-schooled” through comic books (now elevated to “graphic novels”) since infancy. And most of all, my mother, like my grandmother, could mesmerize us with her vast cultured storehouse of lexical magic in her animated telling of atowkehwin (myths and legends) or achimoowin (nonfiction). It is through my Metis heritage and culture, reaching back many generations, that I learned to appreciate literature, in all its presentations: oral, visual, performative, musical, syllabic, and alphabetic.17 While I have noted the “resistance” voice and aesthetics of the writers foregrounded here, it is important not only to place this in the national context from which it grew, but equally, to appreciate the poetics of this literature. Metis writers have inventively gathered roots, relations, stones, bones, beads, and songs as their work has developed in range, depth, and style. Many reviewers have noted the innovative qualities of this art; indeed, most of these writers have themselves expressed a desire to be read as poets, as creative writers, not merely as ethnographic exhibits or political signs. Much remains to be explored about Metis writing and criticism. The future will bring a new generation who will continue to push the edges of identity and genre. My chapter has not addressed the many other forms of Metis literature: drama, short stories, diaries, journals, songs, commentaries, children’s literature, war memoirs, Riel’s religious and resistance diaries, petitions, the bardic Pierre Falcon’s songs, to say nothing of the wealth of archival material. And this list does not include what may be available in French, in Michif, or in syllabics. Literature is perhaps finally about words. Love of words. Attention to imagination and creativity might be the task for the next generation of both writers and critics. Of course, this does not mean we can ignore our cultural groundings or political locations, but the very nature of literature demands innovation and exploration into what makes us human. Any study of Metis literature must include not only the meaning of nationalism, resistance, or agency in Metis history and ethnocultural development, but also an interest in Indigenous-based but decidedly Metis poetics. We write for many reasons, but ultimately we write because, like Marilyn Dumont, we are “fascinated with language” (“BCP Honours”)—or languages, as befits Metis inheritance.

Notes 1. Because not all the Metis are necessarily francophone in origin, I write the word without the accent on the “e.” 2. Metis Elder Rita Flamand of Manitoba has developed and teaches a standardized Michif writing system. See Rita Flamand at http://speakingmytruth.ca/downloads/AHFvol2/08_ flamand. Accessed 11 July 2013.

144    Indigenous Literatures and Contexts 3. For a detailed study of the two resistances, see Sprague, Canada. 4. This chapter focuses entirely on Metis issues in Canada. The term “mixed-blood” is used mostly in the United States, where mixed ancestry is approached quite differently by Native American communities, writers, and theorists. See, for example, Louis Owens’s study Mixedblood Messages (1998). See also Braz. 5. Such writers include Duke Redbird and Lee Maracle (who were prominent in the 1970s wave of “Metis” writers), Drew Hayden Taylor, Ian Ross, Duncan Mercredi, Margo Kane, Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm, and Jordan Wheeler. These writers have made significant contributions to the Metis writing community. 6. This was in large part due to Bill C-31 (1985), which reinstated non-status Indians to status under the Indian Act (1876). For a broad survey of the different Aboriginal groups in relation to legal distinctions and exclusions, see Frideres. The recent ruling that the Metis now qualify as “Indian” under the Constitution Act (1867) bears on Metis Aboriginal rights, not on Metis Nation identity per se. 7. Such factors include confusing legal distinctions, a wide variety of individual and community backgrounds, and outsider definitions. For more details, see my essay “Native Identity.” See also Dickason 359–65. 8. The scrip system (certificates redeemable as cash or land given to individuals) was complicated and in part grew from the 1870 Manitoba Act which had guaranteed lands for the Metis. See the recent Manitoba Metis Federation vs. Canada decision at http://scc.lexum. org/decisia-scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/12888/index.doc Accessed 5 July 2013. 9. For an excellent discussion on the complexities of Metis constitutional, Aboriginal, and/or land rights, see the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (Vol. 4, Chap. 5, 1996). 10. Almost all Metis writers across eras and genres deal with the destructive power of White looking. For yet another example, see Cariou, “The Racialized Subject in James Tyman’s Inside Out.” It is not clear that Tyman is Metis—he was labeled as “metis Indian” by social workers. 11. Most Aboriginal writers and critics have long been citing their specific cultural locations. This practice is now being reworked in terms of “Indigenous literary nationalism” advanced by some Native American literary theorists. For Canadian considerations, see Fagan et  al., “Canadian Indian Literary Nationalism?” See also Weaver, Womack, and Warrior, American Indian Literary Nationalism (2006). 12. Note, for example, the way the media and critics have conferred a “Metis” identity on Joseph Boyden, even though Boyden does not come from any Metis community. See www. quillandquire.com/authors/profile.cfm?article-i.d.=6573. Accessed 5 May 2013. 13. Niigonwedom James Sinclair in “Tending to Ourselves” reviews some of the arguments between Native American literary theorists and some postcolonial renderings of “hybridity.” See also Daniel Heath Justice’s essay in this same collection. 14. For those of us who come from many generations of Metis ancestry—not uncommon in numerous Metis communities in western Canada—how long are we to be “a hybrid race”? See my “Native Identity,” especially note 5. 15. Ribbons are important symbolic art pieces in Metis culture. Louise Halfe’s grandparents were halfbreed, probably from among some Metis who had “taken treaty” in the heyday of de-territorialization. 16. As a rule, Metis in Alberta did not go to residential schools, but public schools were not available until the mid-1950s. English was not spoken in many communities until well into the 1970s; my parents managed with “store” English. On Metis and residential schools, see

Contemporary Metis Literature    145 Larry N. Chartrand, Tricia E. Logan, and Judy D. Daniels, Metis History and Experience and Residential Schools in Canada (Ottawa: Aboriginal Healing Foundation, 2006). 17. For a good overview of Metis culture and heritage in land use, language, music, clothing, traditional and contemporary art, as well as historiographic essays on contemporary Metis writing and scholarship, see the voluminous collection Metis Legacy (Winnipeg: Pemmican, 2001), edited by Lawrence J. Barkwell, Leah Dorion, and Darren R.  Prefontaine. For Metis recipes, see Metis Cook Book and Guide to Healthy Living (Ottawa: Métis Centre/National Aboriginal Health Organization, 2008).

Works Cited Acoose, Janice. “Halfbreed:  A  Revisiting of Maria Campbell’s Text from an Indigenous Perspective.” Looking at the Words of Our People: First Nations Analysis of Literature. Ed. Jeannette Armstrong. Penticton, BC: Theytus, 1993. 137–50. Print. ———. Iskwewak—Kah’ Ki Yaw Ni Wahkomakanak. Toronto: Women’s P, 1995. Print. ———. “Post Halfbreed:  Indigenous Writers as Authors of Their Own Realities.” Armstrong 27–42. Adams, Howard. Prison of Grass. Toronto: General Publishing, 1975. Print. Akiwenzie-Damm, Kateri. “Dispelling and Telling:  Speaking Native Realities in Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed and Beatrice Culleton’s In Search of April Raintree.” Armstrong 93–114. Andrews, Jennifer. “Irony, Métis Style: Reading the Poetry of Marilyn Dumont and Gregory Scofield.” Canadian Poetry http://canadianpoetry.org/volumes/vol50/andrews.ht Web. Accessed 16 May 2013. Andrews, Jennifer, Renate Eigenbrod, and Emma LaRocque, eds. “For the Love of Words”:  Aboriginal Writers of Canada. Spec. issue of Studies in Canadian Literature 31.1 (2006). Print. Armstrong, Jeannette, ed. Looking at the Words of Our People: First Nations Analysis of Literature. Penticton, BC: Theytus, 1993. Print. Arnott, Joanne. Wiles of Girlhood. Vancouver: Press Gang, 1991. Print. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literature. New York: Routledge, 1995. Print. Bakker, Peter. “The Michif Language of the Metis.” Metis Legacy: A Metis Historiography and Annotated Bibliography. Ed. Lawrence J. Barkwell, Leah Dorion, and Darren R. Prefontaine. Winnipeg: Pemmican, 2001. 177–79. Print. Blaut, J.M. The Colonizer’s Model of the World:  Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History. New York: Guilford P, 1993. Print. Bouvier, Rita. Better That Way. Saskatoon: Gabriel Dumont Institute, 2008. Print. ———. Blueberry Clouds. Saskatoon: Thistledown, 1999. Print. ———. Papiyahtak. Saskatoon: Thistledown, 2004. Print. Braz, Albert. “North of America.” Comparative American Studies 3.1 (2005): 79–88. Print. Campbell, Maria. Halfbreed. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1973. Print. ———. Stories of the Road Allowance People. 1995. Saskatoon:  Gabriel Dumont Institute, 2010. Print. Campbell, Maria, and Linda Griffiths. The Book of Jessica:  A  Theatrical Transformation. Toronto: Coach House, 1989. Print. Cardinal, Harold. The Unjust Society. Edmonton: Hurtig, 1969. Print.

146    Indigenous Literatures and Contexts Cariou, Warren. The Exalted Company of Roadside Martyrs: Two Novellas. Regina: Coteau, 1999. Print. ———. “Hybrid Imaginings.” Review of Gregory Scofield’s I Knew Two Métis Women and Thunder Through My Veins, David Day’s The Visions and Revelations of St. Louis the Martyr, and Robert Hunter’s Red Blood. Canadian Literature 167 (Winter 2000): 141–44. Print. ———. Lake of the Prairies: Stories of Belonging. Scarborough: Doubleday, 2002. Print. ———. “The Racialized Subject in James Tyman’s Inside Out.” Canadian Literature 167 (Winter 2000): 68–84. Print. Clements, Marie, Greg Daniels, and Margo Kane. DraMétis: Three Métis Plays. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2001. Print. Davies, Julie A. “Beatrice Culleton (1949–).” Writers of Multicultural Fiction for Young Adults: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1996. The African American Experience. Greenwood Publishing Group. http://testaae.greenwood.com/ doc_print.aspx?fileID=GR9331&chapterID=GR9331-790&path=encyclopedias/greenwood. Web. Accessed 11 May 2013. DePasquale, Paul, Renate Eigenbrod, and Emma LaRocque, eds. Across Cultures/ Across Borders:  Canadian Aboriginal and Native American Literatures. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2010. Print. Dickason, Olive. Canada’s First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples from Earliest Times. 2nd ed. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1992. Print. Dumont, Marilyn. “BCP Honours Indigenous Sovereignty Week 2010: Interview with Cree/Metis Poet Marilyn Dumont.” Black Coffee Poet. Nov. 2010. http://blackcoffeepot. com/2010/11/23bcp-honours-ind. Web. Accessed 10 Feb. 2014. ———. green girl dreams Mountains. Lantzville, BC: Oolichan, 2001. Print. ———. A Really Good Brown Girl. London, ON: Brick Books, 1996. Print. ———. that tongued belonging. Cape Croker Reserve, ON: Kegedonce, 2007. Print. Eigenbrod, Renate. Travelling Knowledges:  Positioning the Im/Migrant Reader of Aboriginal Literatures in Canada. Winnipeg: U of Manitoba P, 2005. Print. Eigenbrod, Renate, and Jo-Ann Episkenew, eds. Creating Community:  A  Roundtable on Canadian Aboriginal Literature. Penticton, BC: Theytus, 2002. Print. Emberley, Julia V. Thresholds of Difference:  Feminist Critique, Native Women’s Writings, Postcolonial Theory. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1993. Print. Episkenew, Jo-Ann. “Socially Responsible Criticism: Aboriginal Literature, Ideology, and the Literary Canon.” Eigenbrod and Episkenew 51–68. ———. Taking Back Our Spirits: Indigenous Literature, Public Policy, and Healing. Winnipeg: U of Manitoba P, 2009. Print. Fagan, Kristina, Daniel Heath Justice, Keavy Martin, Sam McKegney, Deanna Reder, and Niigonwedom Sinclair. “Canadian Indian Literary Nationalism?” Canadian Journal of Native Studies 29.1–2 (2009): 19–44. Print. Fagan, Kristina, Stephanie Danyluk, Bryce Donaldson, Amelia Horsburgh, Robyn Moore, and Martin Winquist. “Reading the Reception of Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed.” Canadian Journal of Native Studies 29.1–2 (2009): 257–81. Print. Fee, Margery. “Upsetting Fake Ideas: Jeannette Armstrong’s ‘Slash’ and Beatrice Culleton’s ‘April Raintree.’” Native Writers and Canadian Writing. Ed. W.H. New. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 1990. 168–82. Print. Frideres, James S. Aboriginal Peoples in Canada: Contemporary Conflicts. 5th ed. Scarborough, ON: Prentice Hall, 1998. Print.

Contemporary Metis Literature    147 Godard, Barbara. “The Politics of Representation: Some Native Canadian Women Writers.” New 183–228. Grant, Agnes. “Contemporary Native Women’s Voices in Literature.” New 124–32. Halfe, Louise Bernice. Blue Marrow. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1998. Print. Harlow, Barbara. Resistance Literature. New York: Methuen, 1987. Print. Heath Justice, Daniel. “A Relevant Resonance: Considering the Study of Indigenous National Literatures.” DePasquale et al. 61–76. Hoy, Helen. How Should I Read These? Native Women Writers in Canada. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2001. Print. Hulan, Renée, ed. Native North America: Critical and Cultural Perspectives. Toronto: ECW P, 1999. Print. Hunter, Lynette. Outsider Notes: Feminist Approaches to Nation State Ideology, Writers/Readers and Publishing. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1996. Print. Jannetta, Armando E. Ethnopoetics of the Minority Voice:  An Introduction to the Politics of Dialogism and Difference in Metis Literature. Augsburg, Germany:  WiBner-Verlag, 2001. Print. ———. “Metis Autobiography: The Emergence of a Genre amid Alienation, Resistance and Healing in the Context of Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed (1973).” International Journal of Canadian Studies 12 (Fall 1995): 168–81. Print. King, Thomas, ed. All My Relations: An Anthology of Contemporary Canadian Native Fiction. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1990. Print. LaRocque, Emma. “For the Love of Place—Not Just Any Place: Selected Metis Writings.” Place and Replace: Essays on Western Canada. Ed. Adele Perry, Esyllt W. Jones, and Leah Morton. Winnipeg: U of Manitoba P, 2013. 179–85. Print. ———. “The Metis in English Canadian Literature.” Canadian Journal of Native Studies 3.1 (1983): 85–94. Print. ———. “Native Identity and the Metis: Otehpayimsuak Peoples.” Passion for Identity: Canadian Studies for the 21st Century. Ed. David Taras and Beverly Rasporich. Scarborough, ON: Nelson, 2001. 381–400. Print. ———. “Preface or Here Are Our Voices—Who Will Hear?” Writing the Circle: Native Women of Western Canada. Ed. Jeanne Perreault and Sylvia Vance. Edmonton:  NeWest, 1990. xv–xxx. Print. ———. “Reflections on Cultural Continuity through Aboriginal Women’s Writings.” Restoring the Balance: First Nations Women, Community and Culture. Ed. Gail Guthrie Valakakis et al. Winnipeg: U of Manitoba P, 2009. 149–74. Print. ———. When the Other Is Me: Native Resistance Discourse 1850–1990. Winnipeg: U of Manitoba P, 2010. Print. Lundgren, Jodi. “Being a ‘Halfbreed’:  Discourses of Race and Cultural Syncreticity in the Works of Three Metis Women Writers.” Canadian Literature 144 (1995): 62–77. Print. Lutz, Hartmut. “Not ‘neither-nor’ but ‘both, and more?’: A Transnational Reading of Chicana and Métis Autobiografictions by Sanda Cisneros and Howard Adams.” Native Americans and First Nations: A Transnational Challenge. Ed. Waldemar Zacharasiewicz and Christian Feest. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schoningh, 2009. 190–208. Print. Lutz, Hartmut, Murray Hamilton, and Donna Heimbecker, eds. Howard Adams:  Otapawy! Saskatoon: Gabriel Dumont Institute, 2005. Print. McLeod, Neal. “Coming Home Through Stories.” Ruffo, (Ad)dressing 17–36. Mercredi, Duncan. Spirit of the Wolf: Raise Your Voice. Winnipeg: Pemmican, 1991. Print.

148    Indigenous Literatures and Contexts Minnesota History [B.L.H.]. “Artist as Buffalo Hunter: Paul Kane and the Red River Halfbreeds.” 1959: 309–14. http://collections.mnhs.org/MNHistoryMagazine/articles/36/ v36i08p309-314.pdf. Web. Accessed 7 Aug. 2014. Métis National Council. http://www.metisnation.ca/index.php/who-are-themetis. Web. Accessed 6 May 2013. Moses, Daniel David, and Terry Goldie, eds. An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1992. Print. Mosionier, Beatrice. Come Walk with Me: A Memoir. Winnipeg: Portage and Main, 2009. Print. ———. In Search of April Raintree. Winnipeg: Pemmican, 1983. Print. ———. In Search of April Raintree: Critical Edition. Ed. Cheryl Suzack. Winnipeg: Portage and Main, 1999. Print. ———. In the Shadow of Evil. Penticton, BC: Theytus, 2000. Print. ———. Spirit of the White Bison. Winnipeg: Pemmican, 1985. Print. New, W.H., ed. Native Writers and Canadian Writing. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 1990. Print. Nichols, John D. “The Composition Sequence of the First Cree Hymnal.” Essays in Algonquian Bibliography in Honour of V.M. Dechene. Ed. H.C. Wolfart. Winnipeg: U of Manitoba P, 1984. 1–21. Print. Payne, Brenda. “A Really Good Brown Girl: Marilyn Dumont’s Poems of Grief and Celebration.” Ruffo, (Ad)dressing 135–42. Perreault, Jeanne. “Memory Alive: An Inquiry into the Uses of Memory in Marilyn Dumont, Jeannette Armstrong, Louise Halfe, and Joy Harjo.” Hulan 251–70. Perreault, Jeanne, and Sylvia Vance, eds. Writing the Circle: Native Women of Western Canada. Edmonton: NeWest, 1990. Print. Peterson, Jacqueline, and Jennifer S.H. Brown, eds. The New Peoples: Being and Becoming Métis in North America. Winnipeg: U of Manitoba P, 1985. Print. Petrone, Penny. Native Literature in Canada:  From the Oral Tradition to the Present. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1990. Print. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992. Print. Proulx-Turner, Sharron. what the auntys say. Toronto: McGilligan, 2002. Print. Ruffo, Armand Garnet, ed. (Ad)dressing Our Words:  Aboriginal Perspectives on Aboriginal Literatures. Penticton, BC: Theytus, 2001. Print. ———. “Remembering and (Re)Constructing Community:  Considering Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed and Gregory Scofield’s Thunder Through My Veins: Memories of a Métis Childhood.” Canada and Decolonization:  Images of New Society. Japan:  Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies of Science and Culture, Kyoritsu Women’s University, 2003. 77–87. Print. ———. “Why Native Literature?” Hulan 109–21. Sawchuk, Joe, et  al. Metis Land Rights in Alberta:  A  Political History. Edmonton:  Métis Association of Alberta, 1981. Print. Scofield, Gregory. The Gathering:  Stones for the Medicine Wheel. Vancouver:  Polestar, 1993. Print. ———. I Knew Two Métis Women: The Lives of Dorothy Scofield and Georgina Houle Young. Vancouver: Polestar, 1999. Print. ———. Louis: The Heretic Poems. Gibsons, BC: Nightwood, 2011. Print. ———. Singing Home the Bones. Vancouver: Raincoast, 2005. Print.

Contemporary Metis Literature    149 ———. Thunder Through My Veins: Memories of a Métis Childhood. Toronto: Harper Collins, 1999. Print. Scudler, June. “ ‘The Song I Am Singing’: Gegory Scofield’s Interweavings of Métis, Gay, and Jewish Selfhoods.” Studies in Canadian Literature 31.1 (2006): 129–45. Print. Sealey, Bruce D., and Antoine S.  Lussier. The Métis:  Canada’s Forgotten People. Winnipeg: Manitoba Métis Federation P, 1975. Print. Sinclair, Niigonwedom James. “Tending to Ourselves: Hybridity and Native Literary Criticism.” DePasquale et al. 239–58. Sinclair, Niigaanwewidam James, and Warren Cariou, eds. Manitowapow: Aboriginal Writings from the Land of Water. Winnipeg: Highwater P, 2011. Print. Sing, Pamela V. “Intersections of Memory, Ancestral Language, and Imagination; or, the Textual Production of Michif Voices as Cultural Weaponry.” Studies in Canadian Literature 31.1 (2006): 95–115. Print. Sprague, Doug N. Canada and the Métis, 1869–1885. Waterloo, ON:  Wilfrid Laurier UP, 1988. Print. ———. “Government Lawlessness in the Administration of Manitoba Land Claims, 1876–1887.” Manitoba Law Journal 10 (1980): 415–41. Print. Stoler, Laura A. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkeley: U of California P, 2002. Print. Vermette, Katherena. North End Love Songs. Winnipeg: The Muses Company, 2012. Print. Weaver, Jace, Craig S. Womack, and Robert Warrior. American Indian Literary Nationalism. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2006. Print. Weinstein, John. Quiet Revolution West: The Rebirth of Métis Nationalism. Saskatoon: Fifth House, 2007. Print. Young, Robert C. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. New York: Routledge, 1995. Print.

Chapter 8

F rom Profou nd Si l e nc e s to Ethical Prac t i c e s Aboriginal Writing and Reconciliation Jonathan Dewar

If one looks for and subsequently finds reconciliation in a work of Canadian First Nations, Inuit, or Métis literature, one may say one is, by definition, contemplating a fiction. Commentary by Indigenous writers, however, takes up notions of reconciliation in more concrete ways and in some cases creates a fascinating—and perhaps temporally fixed—tension. This tension—the idea that opinions are changing rapidly within a landscape that has itself changed rapidly over the course of several years, 2005–2014 in particular—emerges from two sources: questions about the degree to which we should (or must) examine the stories and lives behind texts by Indigenous authors, and the fear that the terms of reconciliation are potentially complicit with the mandate of the colonial nation-state. In order to address these tensions, one must focus significantly—but not exclusively—on the history and living legacy of Indian1 Residential Schools and the terms that have come to define that legacy in recent years, such as reconciliation, healing, and truth. However, that is not enough. The history and legacy, particularly the intergenerational effects of residential schools and the ignorance that still abounds, must be placed within the larger context of Canada’s colonial history and the pre-contact history of First Nations and Inuit peoples, as much of the Canadian Indigenous literature and resultant scholarship discussed in this volume makes clear. This notion of context is essential. There is too much pain and trauma, resilience, resurgence, and revitalization, and beautiful, thoughtful art-making in the efforts to tell truths about the Aboriginal experience—and, perhaps, to heal and reconcile—to get this wrong. As such, the study of Aboriginal writing and reconciliation requires careful thought and deliberate action. Residential schools2 refer to all government-funded, church-run “schools” where children were in residence, including industrial schools, boarding schools, student

From Profound Silences to Ethical Practices    151 residences, hostels, billets, and even Inuit tent camps in the North. First Nations, Inuit, and Métis children were all subject to the assimilatory goals of the government and the proselytizing efforts of the various church entities through schooling; however, the Government of Canada has only formally apologized for the Residential School Experience. The “Day School” experience, which affected many more Métis students, proportionally, as well as some First Nations and Inuit students, has not been formally addressed.3 The profound silences with regard to residential schools are still very recent and, some might say, still evident. This silence was and is deeply personal, but also communal, felt across and within families and Aboriginal communities and within the body politic for decades. Beyond mere ignorance, which is an essential component of the Residential Schools story, deliberate silences existed on all sides of this issue. Those silences are reflected in the writings of many Aboriginal writers, past and present. The bottom line is that there was a time in the very recent past, despite the attention paid to Aboriginal literatures, when virtually no one was naming residential schools as context or, more boldly, as character. More recently, however, we can argue that there have been watershed moments from which these themes have emerged, both within the literature and the scholarship that goes with it. We can safely say that concepts of health and healing are explored by First Nations, Inuit, and Métis authors, poets, playwrights, and scholars and have been for decades—perhaps even from time immemorial. These issues arose in my recent conversation with one of our inarguably securely canonized writers, Maria Campbell. On describing her artistic work as being front-line, grassroots healing work, Campbell says, It’s always been my work because of my own background. In order for myself to heal and to find some semblance of sanity in my life, I went to work with other people who were going through what I had gone through. … it was all about healing family because I feel if families are not healed and helped, then we don’t have anything, we don’t have any kind of future, no matter how many apologies, no matter what, we have nothing if we can’t. (Campbell, Personal interview)

And when asked if she would ever separate this interest in being on the front lines from artistic sensibility, Campbell says it’s all grassroots: My concern and my sole purpose as an artist is to heal my community. And to help myself. … I get my power from the community, so I give it back. There’s reciprocity. Reciprocity is a big teaching in our community, that what you take, you have to give back. And there are responsibilities to taking people’s power to heal yourself, whether it’s their stories or their friendship, or just making a place in the community … you can’t just go and take that power. You’ll get sick. … I can talk about myself as an artist because over the years I’ve come to terms [with the fact] that the artist is a community worker. … That’s my definition of an artist. I get power from the people and I give it back to them. And how it affects them and what happens is

152    Indigenous Literatures and Contexts not up to me. I go in there with truth and with kindness, and whatever is supposed to happen will happen.

Yet the concept of reconciliation, despite an explosion of references to such in recent years,4 is another story.

Historical Context There are numerous essential sources for both introductory and in-depth discussion and analysis of the history and legacies of residential schools, including John Milloy’s A National Crime, which grew out of research conducted for perhaps the most important and integral watershed publication—which, in turn, led directly to key watershed moments in truth and healing—the Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples in 1996. Later, numerous publications and other educational and public awareness initiatives from the Aboriginal Healing Foundation (AHF; established in 1998), the Legacy of Hope Foundation (LHF; established in 2001), and other organizations, including the Assembly of First Nations (AFN), as well as other scholarly efforts, would further solidify the contextual and historical foundations. The AFN would also play a central role in advocacy around the need for apology and redress. Most recently, Canada’s Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) released two publications in 2012: its Interim Report and They Came for the Children, the latter of which summarizes the historical facts as follows: For over a century, generations of Aboriginal children were separated from their parents and raised in over-crowded, underfunded, and often unhealthy residential schools across Canada. They were commonly denied the right to speak their language and told their cultural beliefs were sinful. Some students did not see their parents for years. Others—the victims of scandalously high death rates—never made it back home. Even by the standards of the day, discipline often was excessive. Lack of supervision left students prey to sexual predators. To put it simply: the needs of tens of thousands of Aboriginal children were neglected routinely. Far too many children were abused far too often. … Residential schools disrupted families and communities. They prevented elders from teaching children long-valued cultural and spiritual traditions and practices. They helped kill languages. These were not side effects of a well-intentioned system: the purpose of the residential school system was to separate children from the influences of their parents and their community, so as to destroy their culture. The impact was devastating. Countless students emerged from the schools as lost souls, their lives soon to be cut short by drugs, alcohol, and violence. The last of the federally supported schools and residences, of which there were at least 150, closed in the 1990s.5 (1)

From Profound Silences to Ethical Practices    153 The above describes a significant swath, historically and contemporarily, of the landscape occupied by First Nations, Inuit, and Métis and, obviously, the artists representing these broadly defined communities and the many more complex, complicated, and intersecting communities therein. This landscape, from which and into which they are writing, is forever changing, and Aboriginal writing is part of that change.

The Healing Movement(s) While residential schools found more and more prominence in literature and scholarship from the 1980s onward, concepts of healing and reconciliation began to develop and evolve. Healing, in particular, became well defined in grassroots efforts as well as national, government, and nongovernmental initiatives (most notably in the name, mandate, and publications of the Aboriginal Healing Foundation). Needless to say, the various healing movements, as others have described them (Legacy of Hope, Healing), overlap and are inextricably woven through and within the experience and legacy of residential schools. In fact, one may also argue that these healing movements are some of the few positive legacies of residential schools, among the many painful and destructive legacies, which were first meaningfully illuminated at grassroots levels during the late 1970s and early 1980s, when former students, or survivors, came together for the first well-attended reunions or gatherings. At roughly the same time, various health, healing, and social movements began to grow within and across Aboriginal communities, as Emma LaRocque explores in When the Other Is Me: Native Resistance Discourse, 1850–1990 (2010). Communities also began to demand and receive apologies from churches that had run particular schools.6 And in 1991, future National Chief of the AFN Phil Fontaine, then grand chief of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, publicly shared his story of the abuse he had suffered in the residential schools he had attended. As Sam McKegney notes, “Fontaine’s early efforts to intervene in this chronology of violence, like that of many courageous survivors, took the form of ‘disclosure.’ To disclose is to open up to view what has been hidden, to give voice to what has been silenced” (5). Fontaine told his first-person truth and encouraged others to do the same, which they began to do in greater and greater numbers over the following decades. However, the issue came to what was then unprecedented national prominence in 1996 with the release of the Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP Report), a Commission organized in large part as a response to the 1990 armed standoff at the Oka reserve in Quebec, known as the Oka crisis,7 but it raised much broader questions about the past and present realities of Canada’s Aboriginal peoples. We must remember how surprising it was for both the commissioners and their researchers, as well as for the government and public that received the report, that survivor accounts of their experiences dominated all aspects of the inquiry into the realities of Aboriginal peoples in Canada. The negative impacts of the Residential School experience for survivors and their descendants loomed large throughout the

154    Indigenous Literatures and Contexts RCAP Report8 and the many shocking details led to a federal policy document entitled Gathering Strength: Canada’s Aboriginal Action Plan (1998). It provided for the creation, in March 1998, of the Aboriginal Healing Foundation (AHF) as a national, Aboriginal-managed, not-for-profit corporation, funded by a grant of $350 million dollars. The AHF was given an 11-year mandate9 to encourage and support community-based, Aboriginal-directed healing initiatives that would address the legacy of physical and sexual abuse suffered in the residential school system and its intergenerational impacts (Aboriginal Healing Foundation). During these years, individual lawsuits against government, churches, and perpetrators grew in number, as did class action lawsuits, such as the one Basil Johnston mentions later in this chapter. This wave of activity led to negotiations that culminated in 2005 with an agreement-in-principle for the multibillion dollar Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement (IRSSA) that was finalized on 19 September 2007. Two components of the IRSSA in particular received significant (and often negative) mainstream attention: compensation10 and the creation of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The TRC was meant to be an official, independent body with a five-year mandate to provide former students and anyone else affected by the Indian Residential School System with an opportunity to share, through statement-taking, their individual experiences in a safe and culturally appropriate manner.11 The TRC finally got under way12 in September 2007, and the commissioners began their work on 1 June 2008. Ironically, the first commissioners resigned within a year, citing their inability to work with each other. Thus, 2009 saw three new commissioners appointed—Chair Murray Sinclair, Commissioner Marie Wilson, and Commissioner Wilton Littlechild—and it was this formulation that ultimately began to deliver on the TRC’s ambitious mandate.

Basil Johnston and the Shift in Residential School Writing The latter decades of the twentieth century saw more and more Indigenous authors, poets, and playwrights see publication and experience varying degrees of success. These authors saw their work taken up by various audiences, particularly within academia, as many other chapters in this volume demonstrate. Nevertheless, into the 1970s and 1980s, residential schools remained in the proverbial shadows, even as artists were lauded for their frank depictions of so-called “native life” and their works were described as seminal and influential, words often associated with Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed (1973) and Jeannette Armstong’s Slash (1985). Tomson Highway’s plays The Rez Sisters (1988) and Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing (1989) also received national prominence. We now know with absolute certainty that the context of the residential schools, and related realities such as Day Schools,13 the Sixties Scoop,14 and off-reserve or urban realities, lurk in the background of these works.

From Profound Silences to Ethical Practices    155 In 1988, Basil Johnston’s Indian School Days was not the first autobiography,15 memoir, or example of life writing that tackled residential schools to some degree (see Recollections of an Assiniboine Chief by Dan Kennedy [Ochankugahe], for example); however, we can say that with this book a relatively well-known First Nations (Anishinaabe) writer shone a light on this experience. Indian School Days tells the story—remembrances—of Johnston’s removal at the age of 10, along with his fouryear-old sister, and delivery to the Spanish Indian Residential School. Johnston ultimately spent two stints there and at the Garnier School, 1939–44 and 1947–50, respectively. Using the framing technique of first recounting an encounter in 1973 with former classmates, Johnston mixes humour and a spirit of rebellion into the darker context. This approach holds for the first several chapters, in fact, but it wanes in the latter few—a portent of the fact that there was much more behind the stories than he relates. This text, both then and certainly now, can be seen as deliberately withholding some part of the story, his story, even as it details many of the facts, figures, and scandalous details that we now accept as open, indisputable truths of the residential schools. Only recently, in the foreword to McKegney’s Magic Weapons (2007), have we begun to hear Johnston’s account of what still lurked in those shadows: [Indian School Days] was intended to amuse readers, to recount and to relive some of the few cheerful moments in an otherwise dismal existence, a memorial to the disposition of my people, the Anishinaubaek, to find or to create levity even in the darkest moments. And this is how I would like my book to be seen. Had I known what I now know, perhaps I might have written an entirely different text. (Johnston, Foreword viii)

When Indian School Days was originally published in 1988, there were no references to sexual abuse. It was only later that Johnston began to discuss the subject, when testifying to the lawyer representing hundreds of complainants from the Spanish Residential School in a class action lawsuit: I girded myself to tell the story I had never told before, without breaking down. But I broke down. I wept. … For years I had laboured under the conviction that I was the only one to be debauched in Spanish Residential School. … During the negotiating meetings, not only did I learn that I was not the only one who had been befouled and desecrated, but that we had all been damaged in some way. Even those who had not been ravished suffered wounds, scars, and blemishes to heart, mind, and spirit that would never fully heal. (Foreword ix–x)

A few months after Johnston’s Indian School Days, Highway’s play Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing (1989) was released. Dry Lips followed Highway’s highly successful The Rez Sisters, a hard-hitting play that focused on the lives of seven women; Dry Lips is concerned with the flip side, the lives of seven men. The principal characters each struggle with the addictions that allow them self-destructive release from the unnamed forces of White society that have damaged and destroyed culture and community for so many. Simon Starblanket dies a meaningless, preventable death as he attempts to avenge

156    Indigenous Literatures and Contexts a rape at the hands of Dickie Bird Halked, who suffers from fetal alcohol syndrome and is denied by his father, Big Joey, the Rez Stud; Spooky Lacroix swapped the bottle for the Bible; it is his cross that literally becomes the weapon of rape and the cause for vengeance. While Dry Lips filled in some of the gaps that Johnston chose not to explore—in this case the subjects of physical and sexual violence, as Randy Lundy points out in his 2001 article “Erasing the Invisible: Gender Violence and Representations of Whiteness in Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing”—there was both praise and “plenty of angry criticism from women, particularly Indigenous women,” about the misogyny in Dry Lips (102). Many critics, Lundy notes, took issue with the invisibility of a sense of White responsibility, essentially arguing that the play portrays First Nations women and men as victims of their own dysfunction. Many made this argument with passionate claims that the colonial context of this fictitious reserve community is not adequately, if at all, explained or expounded upon. There is no overt reference to residential schools in Dry Lips. Yet reading or viewing Dry Lips today is a very different experience, given the revelations that have been made since the play debuted. It is impossible not to see, except for those truly ignorant of Aboriginal realities in Canada, that the experiences of forced separation from family and community, segregation of boys and girls, separation from siblings, and institutionalized living in loveless, proselytizing settings with strict, foreign, doctrinal gender norms, is a direct cause of the dysfunction and misogyny we see in Dry Lips. Simply put, a 1989 reading of Dry Lips was unlikely to have focused on contextualizing it within a residential schools paradigm because of the silences and ignorance of that time. In fact, we may argue that Highway himself did not tackle these issues directly until his 1998 novel Kiss of the Fur Queen. In an early review of the novel that I wrote in 2001, I note that the book “frankly depicts the abuse of Native students at the hands of the Catholic priests who run the residential schools, but falls short of overt condemnation. This startling material is tempered, in a remarkably skilful manipulation of prose, by an almost complete lack of editorial intrusion by the sympathetic narrator” (Dewar, Review). Kiss of the Fur Queen begins with Abraham Okimasis’s victory in “The World Championship Dog Derby,” a major dog-sled race. Part of his prize is a kiss from the “Fur Queen,” a young White woman who is the winner of a local beauty pageant. This touch of White culture indelibly marks the lives of Abraham’s sons, Champion and Ooneemeetoo—later changed to Jeremiah and Gabriel—who grow into acclaimed artists attempting to work within White, European traditions while retaining the influence of Cree culture. The novel follows the boys from the idyllic innocence of their Cree childhood through a forced relocation to an abusive residential school, which has a lasting effect on their adult lives as young artists attempting to discover how far their natural talents can take them. All the while, a trickster Fur Queen watches and influences their lives. While Highway’s treatment of physical, sexual, and spiritual abuse is devastating, the novel moves into the complicated territory of an honest treatment of the impact—dare I say benefits?— of Western education. The brothers ultimately must learn to live in two worlds in order to continue to study their chosen art forms, even as they retain as much Cree influence

From Profound Silences to Ethical Practices    157 as possible. Champion and Ooneemeetoo’s experiences predate and foreshadow the incongruities in Richard Wagamese’s 2007 commentary, which will be discussed in the following section. Another example of the theme of syncretization of influence, in this case Haisla and Western, appeared shortly after Highway’s novel. In Haisla-Heiltsuk author Eden Robinson’s complex novel Monkey Beach (2000), residential schools are a deliberate spectre in the remote Haisla community that is featured in the novel. The legacies of residential schools are ever present, though they are deliberately set in the background rather than forming a central element of the plot. The novel lacks an outright attack on the legislation and policies that gave rise to assimilation and Christianization; instead, characters struggle. Lisamarie Hill’s brother, an Olympic hopeful swimmer, has gone missing under mysterious circumstances at sea, and this loss combines with both her struggles with drugs and alcohol and her supernatural powers to drive her out to sea where she, too, is lost, washed ashore upon Monkey Beach, where she awaits her brother’s return or the revelation of the circumstances of his disappearance. Their pain and the violence that begets violence is perhaps the best example of the negative impacts of the residential school legacy. Yet, Lisamarie remains gifted in the eyes of her culture and this proves to be her salve—if not her salvation.16 Over the last two and a half decades, critics and scholars have focused more intensively on the colonial context of Indigenous writings. Jerry Wasserman, in 2005, went a step further. He argued that “staging plays about the residential schools and their traumatic aftermath involved tricky negotiations of race and gender issues, personal anguish, and cultural politics” (24). Keeping in mind the criticism that Highway faced with Dry Lips, one might argue that Wasserman’s comments speak only to reception within the Aboriginal community. Adding a diversity of audiences and audience experiences and, centrally, ignorance creates a cascade of complicating factors. Recently, Nlaka’pamux First Nation playwright Kevin Loring’s Where the Blood Mixes (2009) has taken on these challenges. In this work, residential schools are not a spectre in the background; rather, protagonist Floyd and his drinking buddy Mooch—and Mooch’s partner, June—overtly name their experience of abuse as a driving force of their pain. But the legacy of residential schools, of which most Canadians are ignorant, are also at play in Floyd’s struggle with the proposed visit of his daughter Christine, raised in foster care because Floyd was too damaged by his experience and the death of Christine’s mother to be a father. Audiences must ask themselves how they relate to these characters, particularly if the subject matter is new to them. Many Canadian viewers may only truly understand the empathetic bartender, who listens to all of Floyd’s stories but keeps pouring drinks. It is clear, looking back now, how much I wanted Highway to go on the attack, to pillory Catholicism for all its evil deeds. Stepping back, I recall wondering how I was meant to read that tempered approach and the fact that the horrible details of abuse remained an unexplored context in Highway’s earlier works. Perhaps the more relevant question is why that context is unexplored. With Johnston’s revisiting of his experiences in McKegney’s Magic Weapons in mind, we must ask ourselves to what degree—if at all—the evolution of these truths should be open to literary analysis. Whose interests are we serving?

158    Indigenous Literatures and Contexts

Richard Wagamese’s Incongruities When invited in the summer of 2008 to contribute to what would become Response, Responsibility, and Renewal, the Aboriginal Healing Foundation’s second volume in its Truth and Reconciliation Series, author and journalist Richard Wagamese offered “Returning to Harmony,” in which he combines elements of two previous newspaper columns from 2007. The Settlement Agreement received considerable and sustained press in late 2007 and early 2008, and Wagamese, a regular contributor to Postmedia Network Inc., Canada’s largest publisher by circulation of paid English-language daily newspapers, was one of a handful of notable Aboriginal writers to publish written commentary on the Settlement Agreement and its contexts, particularly the yet-to-be-constituted Truth and Reconciliation Commission. On 7 May 2008, the Ottawa Citizen ran a piece under the title “The Value of Residential Schools.” In it, Wagamese wrote, Residential schools are Canada’s shame. For roughly 100 years, their aim was to break the back of family, community, history and spirituality. Their aim was to end Canada’s “Indian Problem,” to invoke the might of the right of the white to eradicate a people’s sense of themselves and their rightful place in the history of the country. Some call it genocide. Others call it a holocaust. More refined thinkers label it mere assimilation. Whatever the label, the grievous hurt that was inflicted on Canadian consciousness festers even now, long after the last of the schools was closed.

Yet he also goes on to argue that There are other stories that need to be told as well. Stories like my mother’s. … When you enter my mother’s house, there’s one thing more than anything that strikes you. It’s incredibly neat. She cleans fastidiously. Every surface in her home gleams and everything is organized and arranged to make the most of the living area. There is a cross on the wall, a Bible by her bed and a picture of Jesus in the living room. … She credits the residential school experience with teaching her domestic skills. … My mother has never spoken to me of abuse or any catastrophic experience at the school. She only speaks of learning valuable things that she went on to use in her everyday life, things that made her life more efficient, effective and empowered. … Why is this important? Well, because the Truth and Reconciliation commission needs to hear those kinds of stories too. As a journalist since 1979, I’ve heard people credit residential schools with the foundation for learning that allowed them to pursue successful academic careers. Others tell of being introduced to skills that became lifelong careers, and still others, like my mother, talk of being introduced to a faith that guided the rest of their lives. … [L]‌et the commission hear from those for whom the residential school experience might have been a godsend, or at the least, a steppingstone to a more empowered future. Because those stories happened too. … [Admitting that] the residential school experience was not exclusively a horror show is to tell Canada that we have grown as nations of people, that we recognize that truth means a whole vision and not just a selective memory.

From Profound Silences to Ethical Practices    159 It was striking to hear a well-known Aboriginal author, whose literary works, such as the 1994 novel Keeper’n Me, so thoughtfully explore loss and the need to return and reclaim family, community, and identity, make the argument that so many (usually right-leaning) non-Aboriginal commentators were making—that we needed to focus on the good as well as the bad. But it was especially jarring when Wagamese, a mere three months later, published “Embracing Forgiveness” in the Calgary Herald. This piece opened with the incongruously framed “I am a victim of residential schools” and described residential schools as a “spectre” among his family living the “last vestiges of the old Ojibway life.” Though he differentiates between being a victim and being a “survivor,” he says the “incredible hurt, isolation and sorrow that sprang from [his parents’] residential [sic] experiences erupted in drink and violence and ultimately, neglect. I was taken,” he writes, “into child care the year I was three. I would not see my native family again for 21 years. When I came back, I was as wounded as they; unable to speak my language, ashamed of my native identity, ignorant of my culture and traditions. The institution of child care was as much a kidnapping as the schools they attended.” It was precisely this incongruity that led me and my fellow editors to invite Wagamese to contribute to Response, Responsibility, and Renewal. Quite frankly, we were curious to see how such an accomplished writer would reconcile these seemingly contradictory viewpoints: that, on the one hand, his mother’s experience was positive, but, on the other, it contributed to her role in the violence and neglect that led to his seizure by the child welfare system. In the end, Wagamese’s solution was profoundly simple; he responded to us as editors. We asked him to connect the dots and he did. And doing so led to a much more descriptive but brutal telling of the same stories. Of his mother’s experience, Wagamese now wrote, All the members of my family attended residential school. They returned to the land bearing psychological, emotional, spiritual, and physical burdens that haunted them. Even my mother, despite staunch declarations that she had learned good things there (finding Jesus, learning to keep a house, the gospel), carried wounds she could not voice. … For a time, the proximity to family and the land acted as a balm. Then, slowly and irrevocably, the spectre that followed them back from the schools began to assert its presence and shunt for space around our communal fire. When the vitriolic stew of unspoken words, feelings, and memories of their great dislocation, hurt, and isolation began to bubble and churn within them, they discovered that alcohol could numb them from it. And we ceased to be a family. (129–30)

That meant, when he again made the call for the TRC to hear all the stories, it was a much more pointed declaration, this time focusing on both the bad and the good in the following way: When the Truth and Reconciliation Commission makes its tour of the country and hears the stories of people who endured the pain of residential schools, I hope it hears more stories like mine—of people who fought against the resentment, hatred, and anger and found a sense of peace. Both the Commission and Canada need to hear stories of healing instead of a relentless retelling and re-experiencing of pain.

160    Indigenous Literatures and Contexts They need to hear that, despite everything, every horror, it is possible to move forward and to learn how to leave hurt behind. Our neighbours in this country need to hear stories about our capacity for forgiveness, for self-examination, for compassion, and for our yearning for peace because they speak to our resiliency as a people. That is how reconciliation happens. (133)

Wagamese’s nuanced approach to residential school history is evident in his 2012 novel Indian Horse, which tells a fictionalized version of many of the details he provides in his TRC commentary. Saul Indian Horse is an intergenerational survivor of residential school; his mother is lost to him in drink and despair long before he, too, is scooped up by the authorities to attend St. Jerome’s Residential School. Saul endures all the abuses we have come to know as part of too many students’ experiences. He experiences the kindness of one idealistic young priest, who introduces Saul to hockey and takes him under his wing. However, this doesn’t save Saul from his experiences of abuse; his ascent through the junior hockey system is rife with racism and self-destructive behaviour, and the priest, it turns out, subjected the young Saul to emotional manipulation and sexual abuse while encouraging the boy’s hockey career. Ultimately, Saul, like Wagamese, proves to be resilient and is able to embrace healing, but it is a long and arduous journey before he reaches a point of self-acceptance.

The Apology Despite all these developments, the legacy of residential schools only received true national prominence on 11 June 2008, when Prime Minister Stephen Harper delivered an official apology in the House of Commons. The prime minister’s apology led to an outpouring of responses by Aboriginal artists and commentators. Since then, more and more Aboriginal writers have engaged with the topic of residential schools in overtly thematic ways, from Loring’s Where the Blood Mixes (2009), to Robert Arthur Alexie’s novel Porcupines and China Dolls (2009), to Wagamese’s Indian Horse (2012), to Anishinaabe playwright Drew Hayden Taylor’s recent play God and the Indian (2014). Taylor, himself never one to shy away from controversial topics, wrote about the Apology directly. He, like Wagamese, is a regular contributor to Canada’s national and regional newspapers. In 2009, Taylor published “Cry Me a River, White Boy,” a humorous17 but pointed personal essay that attempted to contextualize, from his personal and cultural perspective, the experience of hearing, viewing, and receiving the Apology: Aabwehyehnmigziwin is the Anishnawbe word for apology. … I know a lot of people who were a little cynical about the sincerity of the apology. That is their right. If an abusive husband apologizes to his abused wife and kids, however sincere it might sound, some may doubt the authenticity of that apology. Same as in this situation, an

From Profound Silences to Ethical Practices    161 admission of responsibility is as good a place as any to start. Ask any lawyer. But the healing must start somewhere. … (94)

The TRC, too, has and will continue to come under scrutiny. Since 2008, the TRC has organized seven mandated national events and numerous community events, which have included authors such as Johnston, Beatrice Mosionier, and Joseph Boyden as part of the artistic programming. The TRC has also made an open call for artist submissions, initially placing the call firmly on the testimony side of its mandate: One of the main roles of the Commission is the gathering of statements and experiences of those impacted by the Residential School System. This is often done through written, audio, video and recorded statements. Artistic expressions are another way to make a statement about the residential school experience. All statements will be archived at the National Research Centre on the Residential School System. This Centre will act as the country’s largest and most complete record of the Residential School System and the experiences of survivors. (TRC, Call)

A more refined and detailed description followed, saying that the TRC believes that artists have a profound contribution to make in expressing both truth and reconciliation. The TRC invites all artists to submit works that relate to experiences at Indian Residential Schools or that relate to the legacy and impact of those experiences on former students, parents, future generations, communities, and on relationships within families and between communities. In addition, the TRC invites artists to submit works relating to apology, truth, cultural oppression, cultural genocide, resistance, resilience, spirituality, remembrance, reconciliation, rejuvenation and restoration of Aboriginal culture and pride. Why is the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada gathering artistic works? The TRC believes that collecting artistic works is an important and meaningful way to express the truth, impact and legacy of the Residential School experience and to assist with reconciliation. (Open Call)

Reconciliation in Theory Many survivors and others impacted by the legacy have submitted artworks to the TRC. It goes without saying, of course, that Aboriginal writers have been exploring these themes for decades, and that a call by the TRC in 2009 was not the catalyst for residential schools–related writings. It was a catalyst, however. AHF funding certainly was a major incentive for poet and playwright Armand Garnet Ruffo, who used an early call put out by the AHF to begin work on the screenplay that would eventually become his award-winning film A Windigo Tale (released in 2010). He, too, notes the silence: “[In the 60s, 70s, and 80s] nobody talked about it. … We played right by the residential

162    Indigenous Literatures and Contexts school. When I’d ask my mother what’s that building, she’d say, don’t worry about that and then eventually it was torn down” (Ruffo, Personal interview). But A Windigo Tale is very much about healing: [W]‌hat struck me is that [Armstrong and Highway] were dealing with [Residential Schools] in an oblique way, not hitting it dead on. But really talking about the impact of it more, and that’s what I was interested in, as well, loss of culture … and language. So that became a big issue and of course residential schools did come up, because that’s why most of us have lost [our culture], either directly or indirectly, because of that. So I wanted to talk about those issues as well, like we were all doing [at the Enowkin Centre in Penticton, British Columbia, in the 80s and early 90s]. (Personal interview)

However, it is important to keep in mind LaRocque’s cautionary note about an “aesthetic of healing” (168): As constructive as [it may sound], we must be careful not to squeeze the life out of native literature by making it serve, yet again, another utilitarian function. Poets, playwrights, and novelists, among others, must also write for the love of words. Healing is fast becoming the new cultural marker by which we define or judge Aboriginal literature. (168)

Some may see this as contradictory to many artists’ and critics’ assertions that, as Jo-Ann Episkenew writes, “Contemporary Indigenous writers manipulate the English language and its literary traditions to narrate Indigenous experiences under colonialism in an effort to heal themselves and their audiences from the colonial trauma” (12). It is not. I share LaRocque’s concern. I also believe that there is far more to say about healing than about reconciliation. Just as Aboriginal artists and scholars rejected postcolonialism, so, too, do some reject notions of reconciliation. Some, like Taiaiake Alfred and Jeff Corntassel, argue that the reconciliation discourse is, in fact, flawed at its very roots: “Far from reflecting any true history or honest reconciliation with the past or present agreements and treaties that form an authentic basis for Indigenous-state relations in the Canadian context, ‘aboriginalism’ is a legal, political and cultural discourse designed to serve an agenda of silent surrender to an inherently unjust relation at the root of the colonial state itself ” (598). Alfred further calls reconciliation an “emasculating concept” (Wasáse 152), saying that “[r]‌econciliation as a concept or process is not as compelling, factually or logically speaking, as resurgence because, being so embedded in the supposedly progressive discourses on Onkwehonwe/Settler [Aboriginal/non-Aboriginal] relations … it is almost unassailable from within established legal and political discourses, thus presenting a huge obstacle to justice and real peacemaking” (152). Without “massive restitution … for past harms and continuing injustices committed against our peoples,” he writes, “reconciliation would permanently enshrine colonial injustices and is itself a further injustice” (112). He argues that we must place the discourse within the broader colonial context of Canada’s history and present, otherwise Indigenous/settler relations

From Profound Silences to Ethical Practices    163 will continue to be built on a foundation of “false decolonization,” which continues to be immoral. Alfred attacks the notion of Indigenous peoples being “victims of history” (130), arguing that the discourse has been too conciliatory on the Indigenous side, with Indigenous people seeking only to “recover from the past” (emphasis in original) and settling for White notions of reconciliation. This is not resistance or “survivance,” Gerald Vizenor’s concept of survival and resistance. Instead, it is acquiescence to “a resolution that is acceptable to and non-disruptive for the state and society that we have come to embrace and identify with” (Alfred 130). Maria Campbell summed up the feelings of many with regard to truth and reconciliation when she said quite succinctly to me: I don’t like those words. I don’t like them. … It seems like it’s really easy for us to get caught up in government language, or in language, the words of the state. Those words came out of South Africa and everybody was buzzing with those words when South Africa [had its own Truth and Reconciliation Commission]. … Never mind reconciliation, just look at our history in the last 35 years of government funding. They determine what words we’re going to use … and then they become the sexy words, they become the buzz words and then everybody is saying that stuff and we buy into that and it doesn’t liberate us. It ends up causing divisions and grievances and awful things happen to us as a result of that. (Personal interview)

Others, like Thomas King in The Inconvenient Indian, argue less for rejection of reconciliation than for the same kind of caution called for by LaRocque. King’s work looks to tell some of the truths about Aboriginal/non-Aboriginal relations. Of Canada’s prospects for reconciliation, King argues that ignorance is not the problem, rather “[t]‌he problem was and continues to be unexamined confidence in western civilization and the unwarranted certainty of Christianity. And arrogance. Perhaps it is unfair to judge the past by the present, but it is also necessary” (265).

Reconciliation in the (Literary) Works Joseph Boyden may be said to be testing Thomas King’s assertion as he goes deep into Canada’s past in his 2013 novel The Orenda, which intertwines three narratives as it explores mid-seventeenth-century Huronia and the last days of the Wendat Confederacy as it succumbs to war with the Haudenosaunee, disease, and Jesuit missionary zeal. This book came out at the height, we may argue, of the valuation of the currency that is reconciliation discourse in Canada and, as such, many reviews and commentators explicitly ring that bell, even if Boyden’s narrators—the Jesuit known to his captors as Crow (Cristophe); Bird, the vengeful Wendat warrior; and Snow Falls, his teenage Iroquois captive—do not. Boyden attempts “to reconcile the irreconcilable” (Al-Solaylee). This means juxtaposing, unflinchingly, the violence of the times and the

164    Indigenous Literatures and Contexts rites and rituals practiced by the Wendat and Haudenosaunee with the reverence for nature and spirit—the Orenda—held in those same beliefs. Where Boyden may be said to have invoked a spirit of reconciliation within families and communities scarred by the many points of colonialism in his previous novel, Through Black Spruce, there is no question that the centrality of killing and torture to the lives and beliefs of these First Nations peoples is an often overlooked fact with which we Canadians must reconcile. In fact, as musician and public intellectual Wab Kinew argued in his defense of The Orenda on CBC’s 2014 Canada Reads as the book Canadians must read, it must be acknowledged, understood within its own Indigenous paradigm, and celebrated. In so doing, Canadians can be reconciled with a mostly dishonourable history of failed relations with First Peoples. Returning to the subject of residential schools, in June 2014 the Aboriginal community sadly marked the passing, at 58, of the author of Porcupines and China Dolls, Robert Arthur Alexie. He was found with fatal head wounds alongside the Dempster Highway in the Northwest Territories near where he was born. Like his Porcupines protagonists, James Nathan and Jack Noland, Alexie struggled throughout his lifetime with his experiences at residential schools. He lost friends to drink and suicide, as do James and Jack. His novel, written years after Basil Johnston’s Indian School Days, might be said to have benefited from the tireless and ceaseless work of many survivors—Alexie was certainly one of them—to create safe (enough?) spaces to begin to share and heal. Like James and Jack, though, it meant a booze-filled and booze-fueled journey first, which for some lasted a lifetime. Alexie did not shy away from pulling the veil off the stories of severe physical and sexual abuse. Not only do James and Jack fight their demons and win, they seek justice and see their perpetrators punished for their crimes. Alexie lived to see tens of thousands of survivors get the opportunity to tell their stories to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and to the adjudicators of the Independent Assessment Process, which provides compensation to survivors for the abuses they suffered. For those who have worked tirelessly to create spaces and opportunities for survivors to share their experiences at residential schools in meaningful ways, the recent exponential growth in scholarly interest in residential schools broadly is, to many, disconcerting, bordering on worrisome. Are scholars, both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, claiming—colonizing18—yet another facet of the Aboriginal experience to further their careers? In whose interest is activist scholarship being carried out? While it may seem that I am arguing for some to back off19—as was sometimes the call in the 1980s and 1990s with debates around “appropriation of voices, denial of Indigenous subjectivities, and the exploitative politics surrounding the treatments of Native literatures by the academy” (Sinclair and Eigenbrod)—I am not.20 Rather, I am arguing for a careful and thoughtful exploration of residential schools and related issues, particularly with regard to the theory and practice of reconciliation. This is an important part of the Aboriginal writing and reconciliation question, and recent critical studies seek to contextualize this work within Indigenous ethical practices and research methodologies, such as McKegney’s Magic Weapons (2007) and Episkenew’s Taking Back Our Spirits (2009).

From Profound Silences to Ethical Practices    165 How do we practice a responsible, ethical, and Indigenous-centred literary criticism of Indigenous writings? First, we acknowledge that the jury is still out on the practice of reconciliation, particularly with regard to Canada’s and individual Canadians’ coming to terms with the history and living legacy of residential schools. And, in terms of reconciliation being a part of Indigenous literatures, in the same way that we may argue that these works tell truths that do or do not contribute to healing, we should, first and foremost, consider ensuring that said jury is composed of the real experts—those engaged in ongoing survival despite the conditions wrought by centuries of legislation and policy meant to destabilize and eradicate Indigenous cultures. This does not mean that only survivors can speak of residential schools, or that only Aboriginal scholars can study and teach Aboriginal literatures. What it does mean is that these topics require a careful and critical consideration of the Aboriginal/settler/ally relationship, as always. I argue that such a topic is still a nascent one, and one that has itself been destabilized by significant recent developments, many of which have left individual survivors (and those affected intergenerationally) reeling. Many more continue the work of supporting their fellow survivors. As such, we owe them our support, primarily through the acceptance that they can and should be—and are, most important—leaders in the efforts to educate Canada and the world about our shared history.

Notes 1. “Indian” remains the legal term for First Nations people identified by the federal government under the Indian Act as status Indians. Individuals may also refer to themselves as non-status Indians, although there is no legal standing as such. I will use the more culturally appropriate term “First Nations” to discuss both. The term “Aboriginal” in Canada refers, constitutionally, to First Nations, Inuit—once known as Eskimo—and Métis. It is also essential to note that “Métis,” that is, with a capital “M,” denotes a specific history and culture of mixed racial and/or cultural heritage that is not to be confused with “halfbreed,” sometimes used interchangeably in Canada, and “mixed blood,” which is largely American terminology. Small “m” “métis” has some currency in Canada to refer to mixed heritage, generally, as in “métissage,” but it is often misused or misunderstood. 2. “Indian residential schools” is the official term used by the government of Canada, with some variants, including the addition of Inuit as a descriptor. Hereafter, I  will use the broader, inclusive term “residential schools” to ensure that all of Canada’s Aboriginal peoples are included, except where necessary to refer to the policy and system. The term will not be capitalized when referring to one or more schools informally. 3. For more information on the Métis experience, which is not covered in great detail here, I recommend Métis History and Experience and Residential Schools in Canada (Chartrand et al.). A short description of the unique experiences of Inuit and Métis are also featured in Where Are the Children? (see Legacy of Hope Foundation). 4. A simple Google search of popular and scholarly writing with “reconciliation” in the title and/or as a keyword since 2005 yields hundreds of returns. 5. In fact, the last federally run Indian residential school, the Gordon Residential School, was closed in Saskatchewan in 1996.

166    Indigenous Literatures and Contexts 6. The first to apologize was the United Church of Canada in 1986. Other apologies and statements followed:  the Oblate Missionaries of Mary Immaculate (Roman Catholic) in 1991, the Anglican Church in 1993, and the Presbyterian Church in 1994. See Brant Castellano et al. 7. From the RCAP: “This Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples was born in a time of ferment when the future of the Canadian federation was being debated passionately. It came to fruition in the troubled months following the demise of the Meech Lake Accord and the confrontation, in the summer of 1990, between Mohawks and the power of the Canadian state at Kanesatake (Oka), Quebec” (Report 1996). 8. In fact, the RCAP received in excess of 60,000 formal complaints of abuse suffered while attending one or more schools (Fournier and Crey 49). 9. In 2005, the Government of Canada committed an additional $40 million for a two-year period to the AHF to 31 March 2007, enabling the AHF to extend 88 projects for 36 months. This funding augmented the initial $350 million but did not extend the timing of the AHF mandate, and no new projects were funded. These additional funds were intended to carry the AHF and its funded projects through to the implementation of the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement, which would happen on 19 September 2007. 10. There are two compensation elements: (1) the Common Experience Payment (CEP), a process through which all former students who can prove their residency at a school on the government-approved list could apply for compensation based on a formula of $10,000 for the first year of attendance and $3,000 for each additional year; and (2) the Independent Assessment Process for specific abuse claims. The media attention in 2007 was decidedly negative, focusing on speculation that survivors would not or could not handle an influx of money responsibly, which would lead to drug and alcohol abuse, violence, and financial predation. The AHF conducted two studies that explore these issues: Lump Sum Compensation Payments Research Project: The Circle Rechecks Itself (2007) and The Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement’s Common Experience Payment and Healing: A Qualitative Study Exploring Impacts on Recipients (2010). 11. Its mandate was extended to 2015, with the final event scheduled for June 2015. 12. An interim executive director appointed in September 2007 to set up the TRC Secretariat in advance of the process would name Harry LaForme as Commission Chair and Claudette Dumont-Smith and Jane Brewin Morley as the two Commissioners. 13. Day schools were just that—schools that students attended without being “in residence.” These may have been schools located within a reserve community or a residential school, which for some students did not include residing at the schools; those students may have been billeted in White homes, or the students may have returned home each night. Nonetheless, the experiences of students have been described as similar, if not identical, in terms of the assimilationist and proselytizing aims. 14. The Sixties Scoop refers to the alarming number of Indigenous children removed from their homes by various Children’s Aid or social services bodies during this decade and beyond. 15. See recent works by Deanna Reder and Sophie McCall for in-depth critical discussion of the long history of autobiography and as-told-to narratives, as well as McKegney’s Magic Weapons. 16. For a further discussion of this aspect of Robinson’s novel, see Chapter 11 by Julia Emberley in this volume.

From Profound Silences to Ethical Practices    167 17. For a more critical treatment of the Apology see, in particular, Chrisjohn and Wasacase. 18. Kimberly Blaeser made this point some 20 years ago, arguing that “reading Aboriginal literature by way of Western theory [is] a new act of colonization and conquest” (55). 19. See Lee Maracle’s “Moving Over.” 20. Armand Garnet Ruffo also makes this point: “[Kimberly] Blaeser’s call is cautionary and not separatist” (“Exposing” 93).

Works Cited Aboriginal Healing Foundation. FAQs. 2012. www.ahf.ca/faqs. Web. Accessed 13 Mar. 2012. Alexie, Robert Arthur. Porcupines and China Dolls. Penticton, BC: Theytus, 2009. Print. Alfred, Taiaiake. Wasáse:  Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2005. Print. Alfred, Taiaiake, and Jeff Corntassel. “Being Indigenous: Resurgences against Contemporary Colonialism.” Government and Opposition 40.4 (2005): 597–614. Print. Al-Solaylee, Kamal. “The Orenda, by Joseph Boyden.” http://www.quillandquire.com/review/ the-orenda/. Web. Accessed 19 May 2014. Armstrong, Jeannette. “Let Us Begin with Courage.” Centre for Ecoliteracy. 1999. http://www. ecoliteracy.org/publications/pdf/jarmstrong_letusbegin.pdf. Web. Accessed 10 Apr. 2009. ———. Personal interview. 3 Jan. 2012. Unpublished. ———. Slash. Penticton, BC: Theytus, 1985. Print. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literature. New York: Routledge, 1995. Print. Brant Castellano, Marlene, Linda Archibald, and Mike DeGagne, eds. “Timeline.” From Truth to Reconciliation: Transforming the Legacy of Residential Schools. Ottawa: Aboriginal Healing Foundation, 2008. 64–65. Print. Blaeser, Kimberly. “Native Literature: Seeking a Critical Centre.” Looking at the Words of Our People: First Nations Analysis of Literature. Ed. Jeannette Armstrong. Penticton, BC: Theytus, 1993. 51–62. Print. Boyden, Joseph. The Orenda. Toronto: Hamish Hamilton, 2013. Print. Campbell, Maria. Halfbreed. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1973. Print. ———. Personal interview. 31 Oct. 2011. Unpublished. Chartrand, Larry N., Tricia E. Logan, and Judy D. Daniels. Métis History and Experience and Residential Schools in Canada. Ottawa: Aboriginal Healing Foundation, 2006. Print. Chrisjohn, Roland, and Tanya Wasacase. “Half-Truths and Whole Lies:  Rhetoric in the ‘Apology’ and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.” Younging et al. 195–206. Dewar, Jonathan. “Review of Kiss of the Fur Queen.” Amazon.ca. http://www.amazon.ca/ Kiss-Fur-Queen-Tomson-Highway/dp/0385258801. Web. Accessed 10 Apr. 2009. ———. “ ‘Where Are the Children?’ and ‘We Were So Far Away…’: Exhibiting the Legacies of Indian Residential Schools, Healing, and Reconciliation.” Museum Transformations: Art, Culture, History. Ed. Annie E.  Coombes and Ruth Phillips. London:  Wiley-Blackwell, 2015. Print. Episkenew, Jo-Ann. Taking Back Our Spirits. Winnipeg: U of Manitoba P, 2009. Print. Fournier, Suzanne, and Ernie Crey. Stolen from Our Embrace: The Abduction of First Nations Children and the Restoration of Aboriginal Communities. Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1997. Print.

168    Indigenous Literatures and Contexts Gathering Strength: Canada’s Aboriginal Action Plan. Ottawa: Ministry of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, 1998. http://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2012/ aadnc-aandc/R32-192-1998-eng.pdf. Web. Accessed 28 Apr. 2015. Highway, Tomson. Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing. Markham, ON:  Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1989. Print. ———. Kiss of the Fur Queen. Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 1998. Print. ———. The Rez Sisters. Markham, ON: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1988. Print. Johnston, Basil. Foreword. McKegney vii–xv. ———. Indian School Days. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1989. Print. Kennedy, Dan (Ochankugahe). Recollections of an Assiniboine Chief. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1972. Print. King, Thomas. “Godzilla vs. Postcolonial.” World Literature Written in English 30.2 (1990): 10–16. Print. ———. The Inconvenient Indian:  A  Curious Account of Native People in North America. Toronto: Random House, 2012. Print. LaRocque, Emma. When the Other Is Me: Native Resistance Discourse, 1850–1990. Winnipeg: U of Manitoba P, 2010. Print. Legacy of Hope Foundation. Where Are the Children? Healing the Legacy of Residential Schools. 2012. http://www.legacyofhope.ca/projects/where-are-the-children/website. Web. Accessed 13 Mar. 2012. ———. “The Healing Movement.” Where Are the Children? Healing the Legacy of Residential Schools. http://www.wherearethechildren.ca/en/blackboard/page-18.html. Web. Accessed 16 Apr. 2013. Loring, Kevin. Where the Blood Mixes. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2009. Print. Lundy, Randy. “Erasing the Invisible: Gender Violence and Representations of Whiteness in Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing.” (Ad)dressing Our Words:  Aboriginal Perspectives on Aboriginal Literatures. Ed. Armand Garnet Ruffo. Penticton, BC:  Theytus, 2001. 101–23. Print. Maracle, Lee. “Moving Over.” Trivia 14 (Spring 1989): 9–12. Print. McCall, Sophie. First Person Plural:  Aboriginal Storytelling and the Ethics of Collaborative Authorship. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 2011. Print. McKegney, Sam. Magic Weapons: Aboriginal Writers Remaking Community after Residential School. Winnipeg: U of Manitoba P, 2007. Print. Milloy, John. S. A National Crime:  The Canadian Government and the Residential School System, 1879–1986. Winnipeg: U of Manitoba P, 1999. Print. Reder, Deanna. “Writing Autobiographically: A Neglected Indigenous Intellectual Tradition.” Across Cultures, Across Borders: Canadian Aboriginal and Native American Literatures. Ed. Paul DePasquale, Renate Eigenbrod, and Emma LaRocque. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2010. 153–69. Print. Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. 1996. http://www.collectionscanada. gc.ca/webarchives/20071211051527/http://www.ainc-inac.gc.ca/ch/rcap/sg/sg2_e.html#4. Web. Accessed 13 Mar. 2012. Robinson, Eden. Monkey Beach. 2000. Toronto: Vintage, 2001. Print. Ruffo, Armand Garnet. “Exposing the Poison, Staunching the Wound: Applying Aboriginal Healing Theory to Literary Analysis.” Canadian Journal of Native Studies XXIX.1–2 (2009): 91–110. Print. ———. Personal interview. 31 October 2011. Unpublished.

From Profound Silences to Ethical Practices    169 ———. A Windigo Tale:  The Feature Film. Dir. Armand Ruffo. Windigo Productions, 2010. http://www.awindigotale.com. Shingwauk Residential Schools Centre. The Shingwauk Project. http://www.shingwauk.org/ srsc/node/7. Web. Accessed 18 Apr. 2013. Sinclair, Niigaanwewidam James, and Renate Eigenbrod, eds. The Canadian Journal of Native Studies 29.1–2 (2009). Print. “Statement of Apology to Former Students of Indian Residential Schools.” Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada. 11 June 2008. http://www.aadnc-aandc.gc.ca/eng/11001 00015644/1100100015649. Web. Accessed 13 Mar. 2012. Taylor, Drew Hayden. alterNatives. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2000. Print. ———. “Cry Me a River, White Boy.” Younging et al. 89–96. ———. God and the Indian. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2014. Print. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Call for Artist Submissions. http://www.trc. ca/websites/trcinstitution/index.php?p=200. Web. Accessed 18 Apr. 2013. ———. Open Call for Artistic Submissions. http://www.trc.ca/websites/trcinstitution/index. php?p=194. Web. Accessed 18 Apr. 2013. ———. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada: Interim Report. Winnipeg: TRC, 2012. http://www.trc.ca/websites/trcinstitution/index.php?p=580. Web. Accessed 11 May 2015. ———. They Came for the Children: Aboriginal Peoples and Residential Schools. Winnipeg: TRC, 2012. http://www.trc.ca/websites/trcinstitution/index.php?p=580. Web. Accessed 11 May 2015. Wagamese, Richard. “Embracing Forgiveness.” Calgary Herald 20 Aug. 2008: A9. Print. ———. Keeper’n Me. Toronto: Doubleday, 1994. Print. ———. Indian Horse. Toronto: Douglas and McIntyre, 2012. Print. ———. One Native Life. Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 2008. Print. ———. “Returning to Harmony.” Younging et al. 127–33. ———. “The Value of Residential Schools.” Ottawa Citizen. 7 May 2008. http://www.canada. com/ottawacitizen/views/story.html?id=251542fe-aaba-4062-b676-d641f17b63d5&__federated=1. Web. Accessed 25 Aug. 2014. Wasserman, Jerry. “ ‘God of the Whiteman! God of the Indian! God Al-fucking-mighty!’: The Residential School Legacy in Two Canadian Plays.” Journal of Canadian Studies 39.1 (2005): 23–48. Print. Waziyatawin. “You Can’t Un-Ring a Bell:  Demonstrating Contrition through Action.” Younging et al. 173–80. Younging, Gregory, Jonathan Dewar, and Mike DeGagné, eds. Response, Responsibility, and Renewal:  Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Journey. Ottawa:  Aboriginal Healing Foundation, 2009. Print.

Chapter 9

Indigenou s Au tobio graph y i n C a na da Uncovering Intellectual Traditions Deanna Reder

When major studies of Native American autobiography were released in the 1980s (Bataille and Sands; Krupat; Brumble), scholars formed a field that was interested in Native American autobiography specifically, generating a conversation with its own approach and vocabulary. When work on Indigenous autobiography in Canada emerged a decade later, it generally did not join the preceding conversation, as Canadian critics were immersed in different discussions, interested less in Indigenous autobiography as a category and more in specific texts by Indigenous authors that acted as limit cases for questions they were considering. For example, Maria Campbell and Linda Griffiths’s The Book of Jessica (1989) and Yvonne Johnson and Rudy Wiebe’s Stolen Life (1998) were ideal sites to examine the line between collaboration and appropriation (Perreault; Hoy; Egan); Lee Maracle’s Bobbi Lee: Indian Rebel (1975) was considered an example of testimonio (Beard); and Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed (1973) was a study in identity and hybridity (Lundgren; Cairnie).1 The effect is that literary discussions in Canada have been more interested in the genre of life-writing and less in Indigenous intellectual production. This chapter reverses this approach, examining four pivotal autobiographies by Canadian Aboriginal authors—written in the 1840s, 1920s, 1970s, and 2013—as classics that preserve Indigenous knowledge and specific tribal understandings for their descendants and subsequent generations. The first text I discuss is the first full-length book by an Aboriginal author in Canada, George Copway’s The Life, History and Travels of Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh (1847), written at a time when writings by Anishinaabe Christians were enthusiastically embraced, in which Copway draws on Anishinaabe ideas of marking the landscape to leave signs of his presence. The second is the autobiographical writings of Cree cleric Edward Ahenakew (1885–1961), which were never published during his lifetime. Ahenakew draws on the Cree tolerance for multiple perspectives and kisteanemétowin, respect between people,

Indigenous Autobiography in Canada    171 to speak from conflicting positions as both Anglican and Cree. The third is Métis autobiographer Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed (1973), released at the height of the Red Power movement to unprecedented success, in which Campbell draws on Cree ideas of wâhkotowin, of kinship, and the tradition of protest to theorize opposition and allegiance. The fourth is Xweliqwiya: The Life of a Sto:lo Matriarch (2013) by the celebrated weaver Rena Point Bolton, co-written with her lifelong friend, anthropologist Richard Daly. Identified in childhood as a steward for valued family knowledge, called chu’chelángen, Point Bolton uses her life story to record community genealogies that, along with the names of ancestors, also include the presence of those who will come after. Given their widely differing reception histories, an understanding of the Canadian context is needed to identify other factors that influenced these texts. In my discussion of these works as part of a coherent field of study, I follow the example of several accomplished scholars. Recently, coinciding with the Canadian government’s establishment of the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission after its 2008 apology to survivors and their families, there have been a number of excellent full-length monographs on Indigenous autobiography:  Sam McKegney’s Magic Weapons (2007) on residential school memoirs; Deena Rymhs’s From the Iron House (2008) on incarceration life-writing; Sophie McCall’s First Person Plural (2011) on as-told-to narratives; and Jo-Ann Episkenew’s Taking Back Our Spirits (2009), which examines the therapeutic potential in contemporary Indigenous writing, especially autobiography. These studies examine many often neglected texts as significant creative responses to state domination. While these studies are timely, published just as the nation was eliciting residential school life stories for purposes of reconciliation, there is a danger that a sole focus on narratives of resistance replicates the founding ideas in much criticism about Native American literature that Indigenous texts only exist because of the existence of the colonizer. As a corrective, this chapter argues that these autobiographies are legible as examples of their specific tribal/national philosophies. My argument is shaped by the work of Cherokee scholar Robert Warrior titled The People and the Word: Reading Native Nonfiction (2005). Warrior asserts that nonfiction—his definition includes autobiography—is “the oldest and most robust type of modern writing that Native people in North America have produced as they have sought literate means by which to engage themselves and others in a discourse on the possibilities of a Native future” (xx). Rather than being dismissed as examples of assimilation, Warrior insists that these texts need to be claimed—indeed, championed—as continuations of intellectual traditions. While I am inspired by the work of Warrior, my analysis stands in opposition to that of Arnold Krupat, a scholar of Native American autobiography whose monograph, For Those Who Come After (1985), is considered a classic and continues to be influential.2 My contention that Aboriginal authors write autobiographically as a continuation of varying Indigenous intellectual traditions challenges Krupat’s key premise that “unlike traditional Native literature, the Indian autobiography has no prior model in the collective practice of tribal cultures” (31); that “there simply were no Native American texts until whites decided to collaborate with Indians and make

172    Indigenous Literatures and Contexts them” (5), so that Native American autobiographies “contain, inevitably, a bicultural element” (31). Foundational to my argument against Krupat is that careful reading of works by Copway, Ahenakew, Campbell, and Point Bolton identify ways in which their life-writings continue specific tribal/national work. Second, I reject the assumption that certain generic adaptions are the property of Europe. By that logic, the novels of Thomas King, Tomson Highway, or Louise Erdrich would be considered bicultural simply because there were no Native American novels before contact. (In fact, novels and autobiographies, as those genres are currently understood, did not exist in 1491, either in Europe or America.) Instead, we Indigenous authors have absorbed, adopted, and appropriated a myriad of styles, including European, and have integrated them into our traditions in order to tell Indigenous stories. To categorize literacy and autobiography as “White” inventions while designating orality and “the communal self ” as “Indian” only obscures the multiple and complex influences that have shaped the genre of Indigenous autobiography, including the influence of Indigenous intellectual traditions that continue to exist to the present day. This argument does not ignore the histories of racism, state-sanctioned attempts to dismantle Indigenous nations, or the need for healing. It does, however, consider autobiography as an Indigenous mode of cultural and national expression that demonstrates that there is more to the politics of self-determination than resistance to oppression. Indigenous philosophies predate contact and continue to this day. Prioritizing Indigenous knowledges is one way to support intellectual sovereignty. What complicates the understanding of Indigenous texts as contributions to Indigenous knowledge is the reception history of texts by Aboriginal authors in Canada that demonstrates the limited access to publication. Even as I argue that writers continue specific cultural practices through the writing of autobiography, as well as other, more fluid forms of life-writing, what I have access to through libraries and archives is limited by what was considered worth publishing, storing, and, in some cases, translating. For example, until recently, when it was translated from Inuktitut to English in 2005, only excerpts of the diary of Abraham Ulrikab were available. Born in Labrador in 1845, Ulrikab wrote about the experiences of himself, his wife, their two children, and three others, the year that they were working as zoo attractions in Germany in 1881. The last diary entry tragically records the death of several of the group from smallpox, and ends with his description of his last visit with his daughter before her death and before the deaths of the final members of the group. Robin Gedalof (alternatively, McGrath), author of Paper Stays Put (1980), when reflecting on the large amount of diary writing among Inuit, suggests that it might have resulted from the influence of missionaries, who believed that diary writing promoted the adoption of the Christian calendar. However, in a manoeuvre to prioritize Inuit knowledge, Keavy Martin, author of Stories in a New Skin (2012), likewise considers the large amount of autobiographical writing and notes the tendency of Inuit elders to shy away from discussing events that are outside their personal experience, preferring to discuss only what they have personally witnessed: “The genre of life history … is an effective way of ensuring that the knowledge shared remains grounded in the context of individual experience” (109). In other words,

Indigenous Autobiography in Canada    173 if we choose to see the introduction of writing as an example of assimilation, we fail to see what cultural work it continues to accomplish.3

George Copway: Marking the Landscape In Native Literature in Canada (1990), Penny Petrone credits the European genre of autobiography more generally and Christian testimony in particular for the predilection of the nineteenth-century “Ojibway literary coterie” to write about their lives.4 Those in this coterie—George Copway is its most well-known member—were educated in English, usually through the Methodist Church. I take issue with Petrone’s attributions, not to pretend that there was no influence from Europe, but rather because this supposition obscures the Anishinaabe intellectual traditions, particularly the reading and marking of the landscape that made life-writing a culturally recognizable activity. While no longer widely read, upon its release George Copway’s The Life, History and Travels of Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh (1847)5 became an immediate bestseller, with six editions released in its first year. Typically this work has been read as an example of internalized colonization, and Copway’s passages devoted to Christianity have been deemed incompatible with Anishinaabe thought. For example, Tim Fulford argues in Romantic Indians: Native Americans, British Literature and Transatlantic Culture, 1756–1830 (2006) that Copway and his contemporaries—Peter Jones, another Anishinaabe preacher, and William Apess, the first Native American autobiographer in the United States—wrote in “White discourse,” citing Cheryl Walker’s argument that Copway is using “subjugated discourse”: By this term Walker refers to the double-edged quality of much of colonized Indians’ writing in English. For example, Apess and Copway employ white liberal stereotypes, referring to themselves by such terms as “poor Indian” and “child of the forests.” Walker argues that these terms—though in context they embarrass, disturb or even ironically challenge white readers, bringing their own appropriateness in question—also indicate the Indian writer’s internalization of pejorative and infantilizing white definitions. (37)

There is no question in Fulford’s mind that Copway and Apess are writing “White discourse,” which is inextricably linked to humiliation, despite the fact that “poor Indian” resonates with Alexander Pope’s famous quotation from his 1732 “Essay on Man,” which considers non-Christian understandings of God: “Lo! the poor Indian, whose untutor’d mind / Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind” (7). In this case, Pope’s reference to the “poor Indian” is as an example of those who do not have the “advantages” of Christianity or European philosophy and still see evidence of the divine in nature. Pope invokes the stereotype of the “noble savage,” who is often more naturally pious and moral than his European counterpart, a “child of the forest” living in harmony with

174    Indigenous Literatures and Contexts others and the land. It is possible that Apess and Copway employ these terms to position themselves rhetorically as morally superior to their European audience, rather than as humiliated and subjugated. But to Fulford, humiliation is unavoidable. He continues: Though the writers do not embrace them as the whole truth about themselves or other Indians, nevertheless they adopt them as an indication of their sense of Indians’ humiliating colonized status in a white-dominated world. Such terms, then, are the price that an Indian writer pays when he chooses to write in white people’s language and in white people’s technology (print): they highlight his awareness that his literary authority, indeed his very literacy, stemmed from affiliation to the non-Indian culture which had successfully deprived most Indians of their independence and many of their pride as well. (37)

According to Fulford, Copway and Apess are necessarily humiliated when they use both the English language and literacy because both are the inventions of the colonizer, to which they have no inherent right. Furthermore, through their use of written English they make a choice to affiliate themselves with this humiliation and oppression of their people. According to Fulford’s assessment, there is no way that Apess or Copway can draw on Indigenous traditions, or European ones, for that matter, to imagine a better world for their nations. At best they are bold, manipulating the emotions of Whites to try, but inevitably to fail, to make change. Fulford’s reading of Copway as tainted and ineffectual—colonized, infantilized when using the vernacular of the day, humiliated, and compromised—blunts the political impact of Copway’s defense of Anishinaabe land rights. Yet Copway is not a notable member of a dying race. Anishinaabe people remain. No matter what one’s opinion is about his writing as “White discourse,” the land that Copway writes about, holding the bones of his ancestors, still exists. While Copway’s text records early battles over Anishinaabe sovereignty and territory, this also supports contemporary efforts because land claims, like the Anishinaabe understandings of the world, are still relevant today. There is little wonder that contemporary Indigenous critics would want to find new ways to analyze these texts. For example, poet and scholar Heid E. Erdrich claims “early Ojibwe writers” as part of her literary ancestry as a way to link “the notion of landmark literary works and the pictographic marks/signs/presence that Anishinaabe people left/leave/find on rock and elsewhere” (14). She looks to her language for evidence and proposes that the transitive animate Anishinaabe verb—name’—can be translated as “find/leave signs of somebody’s presence” (14); this, she contends, in an Anishinaabe-centred epistemology, “relates writing with landmark, and marking with ongoing presence in place” (14). This understanding of literacy as pre-contact, because in the Anishinaabe world the petroglyphs and the land itself are infused with stories and could be read, is evident in Copway’s autobiography. If Copway’s repeating focus on “spots” is any indication, it is clear that his imagination and memory are organized around land, as territory, and specific, sacred places.

Indigenous Autobiography in Canada    175 One of Copway’s most famous and often quoted passages focuses on a particular location, reflecting his geographic imagination: I was born in nature’s wide domain! … Is this dear spot, made green by the tears of memory, any less enticing and hallowed than the palaces where princes are born? I would much more glory in this birth-place, with the broad canopy of heaven above me, and the giant arms of the forest trees for my shelter, than to be born in palaces of marble, studded with pillars of gold! Nature will be nature still, while palaces shall decay and fall in ruins. Yes, Niagara will be Niagara a thousand years hence! The rainbow, a wreath over her brow, shall continue as long as the sun, and the flowing of the river! While the work of art, however impregnable, shall in atoms fall. (15)

It is not difficult to recognize that Copway’s writing is influenced by Romanticism, with his comparison of transitory cultural artifacts that are subject to corruption and decay versus undiminished nature, constantly renewed, eternally beautiful, and by implication morally superior. Yet Copway encodes within this sublime description what Erdrich calls the “signs of presence” (14). Copway’s assertion that the rainbow shall exist “as long as the sun, and the flowing of the river” is reminiscent of the rhetoric that surrounded treaties.6 One of the earliest and often cited treaties in Native North America is the 1613 agreement between the Haudenosaunee and the Dutch to peacefully coexist, as recorded in the Two-Row Wampum or Kaswentha, and considered by the Iroquois to be the basis of all future treaties.7 Haudenosaunee oral tradition records that “as long as the sun shines on this Earth, this is how long our agreement will stand. Second, as long as the water still flows and third, as long as the grass grows green at a certain time of year.” Similar phrases like “as long as the sun shines” and “as long as the river runs” became common vernacular in treaty negotiations, often used by treaty-makers to assure Indigenous populations that the Crown would live up to its promises (Quinn 138). Copway also describes other “dear spots,” revealing that for him, geography is a sacred mnemonic. He describes Rice Lake, his birthplace, as the “spot on which I roamed my early days” (50), a place his people were cheated out of by corrupt treaty-makers. He records the place where he and his family experienced near-death: his “father, with feelings of gratitude, knelt down on the spot where we had nearly perished” (37). Likewise, he remembers where he first learned to read: “Memory, like an angel, will still hover over the sacred spot, where first you taught me the letters of the alphabet” (51). Copway considers his ability to read not as something imposed upon him but rather as a part of him. He writes, “The mind for letters was in me, but was asleep” (11), and literacy becomes an aid to previous Anishinaabe ways of preserving history: “I have not the happiness of being able to refer to the written records in narrating the history of my forefathers; but I can reveal to the world what has long been laid up in my memory” (and his memory is filled with, and linked to, “sacred spots,” to land) (13). He writes so that his experiences, “the crooked and singular paths which I have made in the world” (13), may be a warning to others and an inspiration to trust in God and also so “that the world may learn that there

176    Indigenous Literatures and Contexts once lived such a man as Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh, when they read his griefs and joys” (14). To rephrase this using Heid E. Erdrich’s words, Copway writes to “leave signs of [his] presence,” and that of his ancestors, a foundational autobiographical (and Anishinaabe) impetus.

Edward Ahenakew: Cree Perspectives of Contradiction While Copway and his generation drew a large readership—and large crowds at public lectures until both Copway and Christianized Indians fell out of favour as celebrities—by Confederation few books were published by Indigenous authors. The notable exceptions are those at the turn of the century by the famously charming Mohawk performer E. Pauline Johnson (1861–1913), who wrote several books of poetry and whose journalism was often inflected with autobiographical commentary. While the feeble state of the Canadian publishing industry is likely one factor in the difficulty in getting published, library historian Brendan Edwards measures the influence of Duncan Campbell Scott, Canadian poet and notorious assimilationist who served as deputy superintendent of the Ministry of Indian Affairs. Scott, Edwards writes, “very nearly single-handedly quashed the aspirations of (today largely unknown) Aboriginal writers like Anglican Priest Edward Ahenakew (Plains Cree) and Indian Affairs employee Charles A. Cooke (Mohawk)” (56–57). Edwards describes how Cooke tried to start an Indian National Library within the Department of Indian Affairs as early as 1904, but that “the idea was stopped dead in its tracks by Scott who saw no value in the proposal” (57). With this explicit lack of support at such a high level of government, it is no wonder that several, like Edward Ahenakew (1885–1960), Mike Mountain Horse (1888–1960), and Joseph Dion (1888–1960), did not live to see their books published during their lifetime. Yet while Mountain Horse’s My People the Bloods (1979), Dion’s My Tribe the Crees (1979), and Métis community worker Eleanor Brass’s I Walk in Two Worlds (1987)—she was alive at its release—are clearly about themselves and their communities, Edward Ahenakew’s Old Keyam stories are more complex, even though critics (e.g., Jennifer S.H. Brown, Neal McLeod) typically refer to “Old Keyam” as “semi-autobiographical.”8 Those who knew Ahenakew, such as Cree writer Stan Cuthand, considered his “Old Keyam” character to be disguised just enough to free him from the censure of his bishop. This is partly because some of the narrative comes directly from Ahenakew’s life, such as, for example, much of Chapter 7, which is an address9 he delivered in 1920 to a Women’s Auxiliary in Saskatchewan, and several passages that are taken directly from the author’s notes on his own family history.10 While autobiographical, perhaps because it is autobiographical, there is an unstable quality to “Old Keyam,” posthumously published as the second half of a book released as Voices of the Plains Cree (1973). Passages are written from the position of a government critic and Cree activist and then shift quickly and radically to passages preaching submission to government and church authority; these contradictory points of view from

Indigenous Autobiography in Canada    177 a man who is, as Jenny Kerber writes, “perched between white and Native worlds” (57), can be read, as described by Jennifer S.H. Brown, as “fascinatingly subversive” (67). Yet I suggest that in these moments of contradiction, rather than understanding Old Keyam as a subversive, colonized subject, Keyam can be understood as expressing Cree values for reciprocity in an attempt to reconcile possibly irreconcilable perspectives. I build this argument on the work of contemporary Cree scholars Maria Campbell and Winona Stevenson (now Wheeler), who argue that while “Old Keyam” seems to be addressed to non-Aboriginal readers “who have the power to address ineffective and harmful federal Indian policies” (180), the text instead ought to be considered as resistance literature, full of coded messages for a Cree audience.11 Campbell and Stevenson argue that only those who know the language and culture can determine the status of certain characters based on actual people or recognize the references to sacred stories in High Cree. Likewise, it is only the Cree reader who can decipher Ahenakew’s embedded codes or recognize “word bundles.” Stevenson summarizes Campbell’s argument: In the stories of Chief Thunderchild and Old Keyam, [Campbell] explains, are the teachings of Napewatsowin, man ways, in the context of nehiyawewin, Cree ways. Encoded for future generations are instructions on how to be warriors, providers, and protectors in an ever changing world. (183)

I am persuaded by Campbell and Stevenson that the text is full of word bundles, teaching nehiyawewin. But when I focus on the more vitriolic passages that seem to be critical of the Cree and more allied with the colonizer’s agenda, I believe Keyam’s shifting positions are not fully explained by an interpretation that sees them as either heroic or subversive, but by one that places them within the context of Cree traditions. For example, in Chapter 10, Keyam defends the Sun Dance and other Cree religious practices, asking “Why should individuals be forced to give up what they consider to be a means of reconciliation with the author of their being?” (95). Yet in Chapter 4 he defends the “prohibition by Canadian law” of the Mah-tah-e-to-win (the give-away dance), “for it is like a drunken orgy, releasing all that is most reckless in Indians” (69). Declarations made confidently in one place and retracted in another are contradictory. Contradiction in Cree philosophy, however, is tolerated because there is an understanding that everyone speaks from a different perspective. Cree philosopher Lorraine Brundige (now Mayer) explains that upon contact, Cree people in traditional society understood that Europeans had a different worldview, yet because of Cree understandings of multiple perspectives, perceptual differences were accommodated: Historically, Swampy Cree people were prepared to accept “other” stories and found no contradiction in the idea that Europeans and Swampy Crees had different beliefs about the world. Far more important than having the same beliefs was an ability to engage in respectful interaction. (85)

In Cree epistemology, respectful interaction functions as a core value.12 Brundige explains that because of the “cultural value of kisteanemétowin [respect between

178    Indigenous Literatures and Contexts people], [Crees] would not have had reason to dismiss Europeans as less than human or incapable of relational interaction” (116). The value of maintaining good relations was more important than epistemological differences. Because of the preponderance of the stereotype of the Indian in the North American imagination, with the marketing of New Age shamanism as a recent incarnation, it is possible to dismiss kisteanemétowin as a naïve, uncomplicated value that emerges from a prelapsarian culture. But “respect between people” comes out of a complex epistemological system based on the interrelationship of all things. Rather than the famous Cartesian mind/body split or the hierarchies of human beings over animals and plants, the animate over the inanimate, Cree philosophy is based on the concept that everything is interconnected and kisteanemétowin is the recognition of these relationships. If, as Brundige suggests, Cree philosophy emphasizes that people have different perceptions of reality, this encourages tolerance for different perspectives; likewise, the Cree value of reciprocity reinforces respectful relationships. There is less emphasis on agreement and more emphasis on good relations. As Keyam articulates contradictory statements, it is possible that Ahenakew is less concerned with being consistent, and more with expressing allegiance to both Cree and Anglican communities. As an extension of kisteanemétowin, I also am concerned that I offer a way to interpret “Old Keyam” respectfully given the fact that it has suffered years of neglect. In the introduction to “Old Keyam,” written in June 1923, Ahenakew explains his motivation to write this work: “The time has come in the life of my race when that which has been like a sealed book to the masses of our Canadian compatriots—namely the view that the Indians have of certain matters affecting their lives—should be known” (9, my emphasis). Yet Ahenakew’s manuscript remained sealed, despite his several foiled attempts to have it published.13 Not until after Ahenakew’s death in 1961 was his work edited by family friend Ruth M. Buck, who writes in the 1973 introduction that the immediate relevance of this work had expired: “The papers in this collection deal with the traditions and past history of the Plains Cree and with the effects, fifty years ago, of a changing way of life” (1). This work did not find its intended audience, what genre theorists call “uptake,” until it was generically transformed by the passage of time from political commentary to cultural artifact, blunting its revolutionary potential.14 It was not until the late 1960s and early 1970s that autobiographical and political texts by Indigenous authors found willing publishers and an audience.

Maria Campbell: Theorizing Allegiance If there were few books published by Aboriginal people from Confederation to the 1960s, the opportunities in the subsequent decade can be attributed to Aboriginal activism and the reaction against the 1969 assimilationist White Paper, most famously

Indigenous Autobiography in Canada    179 articulated by Harold Cardinal in The Unjust Society (1969). In fact, the following decade saw the publication of several works of autobiography or political analysis that rely on the autobiographical: Henry Pennier’s Chiefly Indian (1972);15 Anahareo’s Devil in Deerskins (1972); Jane Willis’s Geniesh: An Indian Girlhood (1973);16 Howard Adams’s Prison of Grass (1975). And while many of these became instant classics, none has been so influential or so popular across Canada as Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed, published by McClelland and Stewart in 1973. It is difficult to explain Halfbreed’s popularity, although in a 2009 article on its reception, Fagan and her many co-authors quote from Cornelia Holbert’s 1973 book review: Half-Breed … is shocking, not because of what Maria Campbell has been (yes, a fifteen-year old bride, yes, a prostitute, yes, a narcotics addict, a twice attempted suicide), but because the hand that holds the book trembles at what it has done. (344)

Yet while Fagan, Danyluk, Donaldson, Hosburgh, Moore, and Winquist point out that this reading places more critical emphasis on the Euro-Canadian reader, “inadvertently reproducing that society’s dominance” (265), this reaction does point to some renewed appetite, however suspect (because it is based on a reading that makes the reader feel guilty, rather than concerned for the protagonist’s life), on the part of the audience, to listen to this story. And Campbell wants this audience. In her introduction, when she realizes that her “people are gone,” whether dead or, like her, now living in urban areas, she decides that to find peace she will need to search within herself; from this point of autobiographical reflection she writes to “all of you, to tell you what it is like to be a Halfbreed woman in our country” (8). It is clear that she considers everyone in Canada, every one of her readers, as participating in her story, even if they do not know the history. Campbell’s autobiographical impulse to implicate her reader in her life is inspired by her understanding of how the Cree value of wâhkotowin, or kinship, functions. Her nephew, Cree scholar and poet Neal McLeod, explains: Kinship, wâhkotowin, is very important with nêhiyâwiwin [Cree people]. These are important relationships not only between human beings, but also with the rest of creation. … wâhkotowin keeps narrative memory grounded and also embedded within the life stories of individuals. It also grounded the transmission of Cree narrative memory: people tell stories to other people who are part of the stories and who will assume the moral responsibility to remember. (22)

In this way, Campbell treats her audience like kin. The key ingredients in the bond of kinship, in wâhkotowin, are intense loyalty and obligation that, once understood, sustain “the moral responsibility to remember.” While much is written about the culture of Métis people, whether as a distinct nation with its own history, flag, and language (Marcel Giraud), or as a matrilineal society in which women indigenous to the region became the centrifugal force incorporating successive waves of outsider males (Brenda Macdougall), for the purposes of this chapter I

180    Indigenous Literatures and Contexts draw on Campbell’s own distinctions. In her comparison of her halfbreed community with her Indian relatives, Campbell describes the poverty and famous quick temper of the Métis when compared with the relative wealth and passivity of status Indians. She describes an incident when an Indian agent calls a community meeting and does all the talking, which causes Maria to question her Mushoom, her grandfather: “ ‘You’re the chief. How come you don’t talk?’ ” (27). Her grandmother, her Kokum, attributes Maria’s outspokenness to “the white in her,” and Campbell states that “treaty Indian women don’t express their opinions, Halfbreed women do” (27). While Campbell uses essentialist language to describe the differences, underneath this explanation of blood is the differences the two communities have in legislation. While status Indians have reserves and the promises of treaty, halfbreeds have “No pot to piss in or a window to throw it out” (26), having been disinherited from the land their ancestors owned and then displaced from the land they lived on by subsequent waves of settlers; yet while status Indians have lands reserved for their use, they have been governed under the Indian Act as though they are minors, and subject to the pervasive control of the Indian agent, a bureaucrat who controls the reserve’s resources, while Métis are free to criticize and complain without fear of retribution. In Campbell’s vignette, it is their different legislative identities that subjects Mushoom and Kokum to the control of the Indian agent while leaving Maria free to complain. In Campbell’s introductory description of her extended family, it is clear that the assigning of legislative categories is capricious. Her grandmother Cheechum, for example, is both a non-status Indian whose people “weren’t present when the treaty-makers came” (15) and a member of a noted Métis family as the niece of Gabriel Dumont. Had her family been present to take treaty, Cheechum’s legal identity and experiences would be different. Instead, Cheechum understands how the Cree value of wâhkotowin functions, but as a Métis woman she also understands how to use it to protest, to keep outsiders at bay by refusing to be in relationship with them. If the Cree value of wâhkotowin requires certain obligations toward kin, Cheechum’s policy is one of non-compliance. She understands that the only way to defy the hegemony that infiltrates every aspect of Métis life is an absolute refusal to interact with White society. She does not sleep on a bed or eat at a table (19). When she meets settlers who have built on what she believes to be her land, she ignores them and refuses to acknowledge them even when passing on the road (15). When her grandson wants to enlist, Cheechum is “violently opposed to the whole thing … [because] the war was white business, not ours, and was just between rich and greedy people who wanted power” (24). She understands that the poverty of her community is created by the arrival and settlement of Whites, and sees it connected to imperialism internationally. Likewise, Cheechum understands how hegemony functions. When Maria becomes upset about their family poverty and insults her parents, Cheechum metes out punishment with a searing critique of White Canadian society: “they try to make you hate your people” (47). When the family goes to a film about the Riel Resistances, Maria is horrified to see her Métis heroes “made to look like such fools” while the North West

Indigenous Autobiography in Canada    181 Mounted Police and General Middleton “did all the heroic things” (97). While others, her people included, are willing to stay and laugh hysterically, “Cheechum walked out in disgust” (97). She understands how powerful the use of images is in influencing how people or communities see themselves. For Cheechum, the only answer is complete non-participation. She refuses to convert to Christianity. She scorns welfare and even her old-age pension, insisting that she should try her best to be self-sufficient (15). For her, pride is also a protection. At one point, when Maria begins to understand that she and her family are not welcome in town, Maria refuses to walk as though she were ashamed. Cheechum heartily endorses this: “ ‘Never forget that, my girl. You always walk with your head up and if anyone says something then put out your chin and hold it higher’ ” (36). Cheechum opposes welfare, Christianity, and schools, to her all arms of the government, because they erode personal self-esteem and self-reliance. Campbell describes her philosophy this way: My Cheechum used to tell me that when the government gives you something, they take all you have in return—your pride, your dignity, all the things that make you a living soul. When they are sure that they have everything, they give you a blanket to cover your shame. (137)

When Campbell tries to get off the streets, she moves to Calgary, and before she has a chance to get work, she needs money to feed her small children. She is coached by her roommate to “act ignorant, timid and grateful” (133) and arrive at the Welfare office wearing a “threadbare red coat, with old boots with a scarf ” (133) dressed up to look like the stereotype of a squaw. There she is given financial assistance, but is warned not to waste government money. According to Cree values, Campbell was wealthy because she had a lot of family, and as a descendant of original inhabitants on the Prairies she also, by rights, should have had some benefit from the economic prosperity built on the land of her ancestors. Instead, she is begging and being treated as though she deserves this disrespect. At this point in the narrative, Campbell has run away from her family and has struggled with addiction and failed romances numerous times. Yet even when comparing her life as a kept woman or a prostitute or an addict or a drug mule, it is only after going to the Welfare office that she mentions a sense of shame. She says, “I left his office feeling more humiliated and dirty and ashamed than I had ever felt in my life” (133). In fact, she tells her friend that she would rather work on the street than have to return to welfare. As much as Campbell is unwilling to humiliate herself and turns down a chance to work “dressed up as an Indian” for the Calgary Stampede, she knows that she has been vulnerable to messages from White society and has internalized shame of herself and of her people. She knows that she wears the blanket that Cheechum warned her about: “I don’t know when I started to wear it, but it was there and I didn’t know how to throw it away” (137). Even when she is involved in activism and politics, she still struggles

182    Indigenous Literatures and Contexts because she does not know how to be free of it. In one of her final visits with Cheechum, Maria tells her that she is working at a halfway house for women, not to solve their personal problems but to offer shelter and friendship. Cheechum approves: “Each of us has to find himself in his own way and no one can do it for us. If we try to do more we only take away the very thing that makes us a living soul. The blanket only destroys, it doesn’t give warmth” (150). Taking over someone’s autonomy under the guise of charity is one way to understand what Cheechum refers to as “the blanket.” But Cheechum also considered “scrip” to be such a pretext. When, during the Riel Resistances, the federal government issued land scrip to a chosen few, it caused “a split within the Halfbreed ranks” (11). This tactic of divide and conquer eroded the loyalty that lies at the core of Cree/Métis systems of obligation and threatened the collective. In order to get land under the scrip system, Métis people would literally be divided. As Pamela Sing explains, the Canadian government “signed two types of treaties with the Aboriginals who, in exchange, agreed to extinguish their property rights. The First Nations received collective treaties in the form of reserves, whereas the Métis had to apply for individual ‘scrips,’ certificates for either land or for money with which to purchase land” (112)—land that was typically located far from home communities and far from other kin, leading the scrip to be sold well under value. A similar divide-and-conquer scheme collapsed the hopes of Campbell’s father: when he tried to work with Métis leaders Malcolm Norris and James Brady to improve the living conditions of their community, some of their men were “hired by the government, and this had caused much fighting among our people, and had divided them” (67). Campbell discovers that it is only in reclaiming the Cree value of wâhkotowin, which considers family relationships to be sacred and obligations between kin to be immense, mixed with her community tradition of protest, that she can discard this blanket of self-hatred and internalized racism. She understands the need to oppose policies of divide and conquer and no longer restricts her vision to “an armed revolution of Native people” (156), but rather to “brothers and sisters, all over the country” (157). By sharing her story with her readers she has been able to unite with innumerable readers who now have the “moral responsibility to remember.”17

Rena Point Bolton: Stewardship of Knowledge of Those Who Came Before While several notable autobiographies—including Lee Maracle’s Bobbi Lee, Indian Rebel (1975) and Beatrice Culleton Mosionier’s Come Walk with Me (2009)— were published between Maria Campbell’s work and the present day, several are

Indigenous Autobiography in Canada    183 specifically focused on residential school experiences, including Basil Johnston’s Indian School Days (1988), Shirley Sterling’s My Name is Seepeetza (1992), and Bev Sellars’s They Called Me Number One (2013). While each articulates Indigenous perspectives of survival, none is as overtly committed to preserving community knowledge as Rena Point Bolton’s Xwelíqwiya: The Life of a Sto:lo Matriarch (2013). Point Bolton, the mother of 10 (including British Columbia’s former lieutenant-governor, Steven Point), was featured in Cree filmmaker Loretta Todd’s Hands of History (1994) and is credited with re-establishing Tsimshian weaving practices and reinvigorating Stó:lō basket-weaving. Yet even more notable is her position as a high-status woman in Stó:lō Nation to preserve knowledge made illegal during the years that the anti-potlatch laws were in effect, work that she inherited as someone obliged to carry out the duties of the chu’chelángen” (the family right and duty to protect and pass on family knowledge). In 1989 Point Bolton, with only a sixth-grade education, approached her lifelong friend, anthropologist Richard Daly, with her life story that she had already started, wanting him to look over her notes and help her produce a book (xix). While the subsequent text is necessarily affected by this collaboration—Daly’s introduction spends some time acknowledging his influence as he transforms dialogues with Point Bolton into a monologue demanded by the genre of autobiography—the introduction by Steven Point emphasizes Daly’s time spent in the community, even noting that in 2012 he presented Daly a talking stick at his home, “in the presence of [his] mother and with her approval, so there is no doubt that he speaks on behalf of [Rena Point Bolton] in this book” (x). This ceremonial recognition acknowledges that whereas Point Bolton wanted to tell the story of her life, particularly for the benefit of her community, she needed the assistance of Daly to tell her story.18 Daly includes an introduction spelling out his own reflections, as well as maps of the territory, a pronunciation guide and glossary for Halq’emelem, a chart establishing Point Bolton’s right and responsibility as custodian of ceremonial masks, and a genealogical chart that establishes Point Bolton’s line of descent from cultural hero Xéyeleq. Point Bolton’s desire to tell her life story is not unique in her community. Stó:lō academic and educator Jo-ann Archibald notes in Indigenous Storywork:  Educating the Heart, Mind, Body and Spirit (2008) that “I did not hear traditional stories being told when I was a child; however, I  did hear many life-experience stories” (86), teaching Archibald about the protocols around storytelling. As she worked as a young teacher with Elders to collect traditional stories, called sXwōXwiyám, she noted that Elders often evaded providing answers to certain questioners, instead answering with life stories. Archibald reflects: It might seem that Elders are not directly answering or co-operating, even though they have agreed to help the person who asks. But they are answering and directing the learning process by providing life-experience stories that contain values, background or contextual information, and issues that one must know in order to make meaning through storywork. (108)

184    Indigenous Literatures and Contexts Life stories, then, are a way to teach others, even if traditional stories are forgotten or forbidden to be told, or if the listeners do not know enough to be able to understand them. Throughout Xwelíqwiya: The Life of a Sto:lo Matriarch, Point Bolton interweaves her life story with codes of behaviour and names of ancestors and family members. She reflects that this is common in her community since “Sto:lo people have lots of family and complicated ties. Outsiders who read this might get lost, but I think it is important to record it for our own people and their connections to the past” (46). One of the connections that she is alluding to is the need to know about ancestors because of the Stó:lō belief in reincarnation: W‌hen babies return, at the moment they are born, they are elders coming back. They are people who have gone through life before, at some earlier time. First we welcome them into the family; then, we try to find out who they are. Or who they were. We look for behaviour traits. (218)

As an example, Point Bolton describes her own mother, who was born with “pierced ears,” which signaled that she was a perfectionist like her recent ancestors who excelled at making baskets, and how someone from almost every generation in her family was born with a sixth toe, which reminded the family of their lineage that extended back to the Steqó:ye Wolf People. Point Bolton’s commitment to preserving sacred knowledge and family stories is an obligation she holds and that is entwined with her own story. When, early in the book, Point Bolton is quoted as saying that she wanted to leave a document “for those who come after” (xvii), she is not articulating an understanding of family that is linear, with ancestors in the past and descendants in the future, but rather family members who reappear in new guises and forms.

Conclusion Copway, like innumerable Anishinaabe, left his mark on the literary landscape; Ahenakew, as a well-trained Cree intellectual, attempted to reconcile the irreconcilable; Campbell, as a Métis activist, came to understand the value of the principle of interrelatedness to build alliances within and external to her; and Point Bolton, as a Stó:lō knowledge keeper, interweaves her obligations to preserve family history with her own story. Like these forerunners, subsequent generations of Indigenous autobiographers draw on the traditions of their specific nations to narrate their lives. Like Copway, Louise Erdrich describes territory as a way to discuss her life in Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country:  Traveling through the Land of My Ancestors (2003) and Richard Wagamese draws on Anishinaabe traditions in his memoir, For Joshua:  An Ojibway Father Teaches His Son (2003). Like Ahenakew, Cree researchers Shawn Wilson and Margaret Kovach value and accommodate multiple and sometimes conflicting self-reflective

Indigenous Autobiography in Canada    185 commentary in their respective monographs, Research Is Ceremony (2008) and Indigenous Methodologies (2010); similarly, linguist Arok Wolvengrey has collected a variety of what in Cree is understood as wawiyatâcimowina, a subgenre of Cree stories that are autobiographical and comical, in a volume called Funny Little Stories: Memoir 1 (2007); in fact, Dawn Dumont’s recent collection of autobiographical short stories, Nobody Cries at Bingo (2011), is easily identified as wawiyatâcimowina. While Maria Campbell has been enormously influential, the most obvious example of subsequent work influenced by her and by Métis perspectives is Gregory Scofield’s Thunder through My Veins: Memories of a Métis Childhood (1999), the narrative arc of which is based on Halfbreed. And Rena Point Bolton’s own granddaughter, Saylesh Wesley, is currently drawing on her own and her family’s story in her own research on Stó:lō transgender identity (see Transgender Studies Quarterly 1.3). Canadian Indigenous authors who write autobiographically are not borrowing or having imposed on them a European genre; they are drawing on ideas and traditions that their people have always considered, traditions which, pace Krupat, include writing and speaking autobiographically.

Notes 1. The exception to this was the discussion of Halfbreed among junior Indigenous scholars—junior being the only sort of Indigenous scholar at the time—as an example of Indigenous perspectives (e.g., Acoose; Thom [now Episkenew]). 2. As recently as Spring 2013, Carolyn Sorisio and Heidi Hanrahan cite Krupat in their essays in MELUS on Native American autobiography; in “Imagining Self and Community in American Indian Autobiography” (2006), Kendall Johnson relies on Krupat’s categories as defined in For Those Who Come After to discuss the field; in Reading Autobiography (2001), Smith and Watson state: “In Native American life writing, Arnold Krupat, Dexter Fisher, and A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff have been path-breakers …” (151); in “Reviewing Past and Future” (1996), Linda Warley calls For Those Who Come After a “foundational study” (75, 5n). 3. Likewise, Tsimshian diarist Arthur Wellington Clah kept a daily record of half a century, from the 1860s until 1909. Its tireless transcriber, Peggy Brock, speculates that Clah began his lifelong work inspired by either his clergyman, missionary William Duncan, or by his employer, the Hudson’s Bay Company, and that “if the diary is viewed as an extended narrative, it is a tragedy” (41). Yet this is not the perspective of Tsimshian scholar Mique’l Askren (now Dangeli). In the footnotes of her master’s thesis on the ways Tsimshian traditions were preserved within the nineteenth-century photographs of a presumably assimilated generation, Askren notes how highly Clah is held in esteem in her community of Metlakatla, Alaska—most particularly by his descendants like matriarch Sarah Wellington—who insist that “without the assistance of a man of Arthur Wellington’s stature our community would not exist” (16). While it is not necessary that we judge whether Brock or Askren are correct, as it is possible that both judgments are accurate, both come out of different discursive traditions: Brock’s assessment emphasizes that the foreign form of the diary records Clah, like the Tsimshian, as the loser in the colonial relationship; Askren’s emphasizes that the photography was adopted as Tsimshian technology to record

186    Indigenous Literatures and Contexts cultural survival and acknowledges the contributions of Clah as an ancestor that continue to this day. Which position is favoured will affect how the surviving texts are interpreted. 4. For a detailed list and biographies of the other members, see Donald B. Smith’s Mississauga Portraits: Ojibwe Voices from Nineteenth-Century Canada (2013). 5. Republished in 1850 as Recollections of a Forest Life. 6. See also Sharon Venne’s examination of this phrase in her essay “Treaties Made in Good Faith.” 7. For further recent Aboriginal discussion on the Two-Row Wampum, see Alfred 52–53; Burrows and Rotman 110; and Valaskakis 46–47. 8. See the review of the revised edition of Voices of the Plains Cree by Brown. 9. In this address, Ahenakew celebrates the heroic involvement of status Indians in World War I, a conflict in which, because they were not considered full citizens, they had no obligation to fight. 10. For an extensive discussion of Edward Ahenakew’s writing opportunities and barriers, see Miller. 11. In her dissertation Stevenson credits Campbell for the argument about word bundles; Campbell’s article is to date unpublished and in the possession of the author. 12. I would like to thank Paul DePasquale for pointing out to me that the early history of contact between the Swampy Cree and Europeans, including treaty-making, confirms this point. See Louis Bird’s discussion of the 1930 adhesion of Treaty Nine in Telling Our Stories: Omushkego Legends and Histories from Hudson Bay (2005). 13. While nephew Stan Cuthand presumes that Ryerson simply rejected the manuscript, Brendan Edwards, in “He Scarcely Resembles the Real Man,” quotes directly from a letter written by Duncan Campbell Scott that refuses Ryerson’s requests of the Department of Indian Affairs to fund the work (57). 14. Yet other kinds of writing by Ahenakew were readily received: for example, his collection of Cree trickster tales was published by the Journal of American Folklore in 1929; he worked with Archdeacon Faries to complete a Cree-English dictionary (1938); throughout his career as a clergyman, he regularly wrote in the Cree Monthly Guide, a self-published Anglican tract that he began in February 1925 (Edwards 138). But as a status Indian and cleric, Ahenakew was not free to participate in any activity he wished. For example, in 1933 he was forced to give up his position in the League of Indians for Western Canada: “the Indian Department urged the bishop to tell him to attend to his duties as a churchman and not meddle in the affairs of the state” (Ahenakew xviii). While it was acceptable for Ahenakew to act in roles that positioned the Cree as a vanishing people (as an ethnographer to collect “Native American folklore” or as an informant to Cree linguists) or as a people in need of civilization (in his work as a missionary, spreading the gospel and Western standards of cleanliness and propriety), it was not acceptable when Ahenakew stepped outside the roles sanctioned by church and state. Thus, while Ahenakew found a publisher and audience for certain kinds of texts, he could not find either for “Old Keyam” during his lifetime. 15. Re-released in 2006 by editors Keith Thor Carlson and Kristina Fagan as ‘Call Me Hank’: A Sto:lo Man’s Reflections on Logging, Living, and Growing Old. 16. See Linda Warley’s 1998 article on Geniesh in Canadian Literature for publishing information about this text, now long out of print although recently accessible through the University of Saskatchewan iPortal: Indigenous Studies Research Resources.

Indigenous Autobiography in Canada    187 17. This idea of implicating the audience resonates with the work of Episkenew, who argues that Indigenous literatures can both heal Indigenous people and advance social justice by helping both Indigenous people and settler society understand the traumas of colonization. She states that “Everyday stories … have transformative powers, but they must first implicate the audience before transformation can occur” (15). 18. This is in contrast to the long tradition of ethnographers who search out Indigenous people to act as Native informants, so that ethnographers can collect their stories to be held in academic repositories.

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188    Indigenous Literatures and Contexts Burrows, John, and Leonard Rotman. Aboriginal Legal Issues:  Cases, Materials and Commentary. Toronto: Buttersworth of Canada, 1998. Print. Cairnie, Julie. “Writing and Telling Hybridity: Autobiographical and Testimonial Narratives in Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 34.2 (1995): 94–108. Print. Campbell, Maria. Halfbreed. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1973. Print. Cardinal, Harold. The Unjust Society:  The Tragedy of Canada’s Indians. Edmonton:  Hurtig, 1969. Print. Copway, George. The Life, History and Travels of Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh. Philadelphia:  James Harmstead, 1847. Print. Cruikshank, Julie. Life Lived Like a Story:  Life Stories of Three Yukon Native Elders, Angela Sidney, Kitty Smith and Annie Ned. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 1990. Print. Cuthand, Stan. “Introduction.” Voices of the Plains Cree. By Edward Ahenakew. Ed. Ruth M. Buck. Rev. ed. Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, 1995. vii–xx. Print. DePasquale, Paul W., ed. Natives and Settlers—Now and Then:  Historical Issues and Current Perspectives on Treaties and Land Claims in Canada. Edmonton: U of Alberta P, 2007. Print. Dion, Joseph F. My Tribe, the Crees. Ed. Hugh A  Dempsey. Calgary:  Glenbow Museum, 1979. Print. Dumont, Dawn. Nobody Cries at Bingo. Saskatoon: Thistledown, 2011. Print. Edwards, Brendan. Paper Talk: A History of Libraries, Print Culture and Aboriginal Peoples in Canada before 1960. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2005. Print. Egan, Susanna. “The Book of Jessica:  The Healing Circle of a Woman’s Autobiography.” Canadian Literature 144 (1995): 10–26. Print. ———. “Telling Trauma:  Generic Dissonance in the Production of Stolen Life.” Canadian Literature 167 (2000): 10–29. Print. Episkenew, Jo-Ann. Taking Back Our Spirits: Indigenous Literature, Public Policy, and Healing. Winnipeg: U of Manitoba P, 2009. Print. Erdrich, Heid E. “Name’:  Literary Ancestry as Presence.” Centering Anishinaabeg Studies: Understanding the World Through Stories. Ed. Jill Doerfler, Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair, and Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 2013. 13–34. Print. Erdrich, Louise. Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country: Traveling in the Land of My Ancestors. Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, 2003. Print. Fagan, Kristina, Stephanie Danyluk, Bryce Donaldson, Amelia Horsburgh, Robyn Moore, and Martin Winquist. “Reading the Reception of Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed.” Canadian Journal of Native Studies 29.1–2 (2009): 257–81. Print. Fulford, Tim. Romantic Indians: Native Americans, British Literature and Transatlantic Culture, 1756–1830. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. Print. Gedalof, Robin, ed. Paper Stays Put:  A  Collection of Inuit Writing. Edmonton:  Hurtig, 1980. Print. Giraud, Marcel. The Métis in the Canadian West. Edmonton: U of Alberta P, 1986. Print. Griffiths, Linda, and Maria Campbell. The Book of Jessica:  A  Theatrical Transformation. Toronto: Coach House, 1989. Print. Hanrahan, Heidi M. “ ‘[W]orthy the imitation of the whites’:  Sarah Winnemucca and Mary Peabody Mann’s Collaboration.” MELUS:  Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S. 38.1 (2013): 119–36. Print. Hoy, Helen. “ ‘When you admit you’re a thief, then you can be honourable’: Native/Non-Native Collaboration in The Book of Jessica.” Canadian Literature 136 (1993): 24–44. Print.

Indigenous Autobiography in Canada    189 Johnson, Kendall. “Imagining Self and Community in American Indian Autobiography.” The Columbia Guide to American Indian Literatures of the United States since 1945. Ed. Eric Cheyfitz. New York: Columba UP, 2006. 357–404. Print. Johnson, Yvonne, and Rudy Wiebe. Stolen Life: The Journey of a Cree Woman. Toronto: Knopf, 1998. Print. Johnston, Basil. Indian School Days. Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1988. Print. Kerber, Jenny. “Settlement and Dispossession in EarIy Twentieth-Century Saskatchewan Literature.” The Literary History of Saskatchewan 1 (2013): 57–84. Print. Kovach, Margaret. Indigenous Methodologies:  Characteristics, Conversations, and Contexts. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2009. Print. Krupat, Arnold. For Those Who Come After:  A  Study of Native American Autobiography. Berkeley: U of California P, 1985. Print. Krupat, Arnold, and Brian Swann. I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1987. Print. Lundgren, Jodi. “Being a Half-Breed:  Discourses in Race and Cultural Syncreticity in the Works of Three Metis Women Writers.” Canadian Literature 144 (1995): 62–77. Print. Maracle, Lee. Bobbi Lee: Indian Rebel. Rev. and ed. Don Barnett and Rick Sterling. Richmond, BC: LSM, 1975. Print. Martin, Keavy. Stories in a New Skin: Approaches to Inuit Literature. Winnipeg: U of Manitoba P, 2012. Print. McCall, Sophie. First Person Plural:  Aboriginal Storytelling and the Ethics of Collaborative Authorship. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 2011. Print. Macdougall, Brenda. “Wahkootowin:  Family and Cultural Identity in Northwestern Saskatchewan Metis Communities.” Canadian Historical Review 87.3 (2006): 431–62. Print. McKegney, Sam. Magic Weapons: Aboriginal Writers Remaking Community after Residential School. Winnipeg: U of Manitoba P, 2007. Print. McLeod, Neal. “Exploring Cree Narrative Memory.” Diss. U of Regina, 2005. Print. Miller, David R. “Edward Ahenakew’s Tutelage by Paul Wallace: Reluctant Scholarship, Inadvertent Preservation.” Gathering Places: Aboriginal and Fur Trade Histories. Ed. Carolyn Podruchny and Laura Peers. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 2010. 249–73. Print. Mosionier, Beatrice Culleton. Come Walk with Me:  A  Memoir. Winnipeg:  HighWater, 2009. Print. Mountain Horse, Mike. My People, the Bloods. Calgary: Glenbow-Alberta Institute/Standoff, AB: Blood Tribal Council, 1979. Print. Pennier, Henry. Chiefly Indian: The Warm and Witty Story of a British Columbia Half Breed Logger. Ed. Herbert L. McDonald. West Vancouver: Graydonald, 1972. Print. Perreault, Jeanne. “Writing Whiteness:  Linda Griffiths’s Raced Subjectivity in The Book of Jessica.” Essays on Canadian Writing (1996): 14–31. Print. Petrone, Penny, ed. Native Literature in Canada:  From the Oral Tradition to the Present. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1990. Print. Pope, Alexander. Essay on Man. Ed. Jim Manus. Pennsylvania: An Electronic Classic Series Publication, 1999–2012. http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/a~pope/onman.pdf. Web. Accessed 15 June 2014. Quinn, Frank. “As Long as the Rivers Run: The Impacts of Corporate Water Development on Native Communities in Canada.” Canadian Journal of Native Studies 11.1 (1991): 137–54. Print. Rymhs, Deena. From the Iron House:  Imprisonment in First Nations Writing. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2008. Print.

190    Indigenous Literatures and Contexts Scofield, Gregory. Thunder through My Veins:  Memories of a Métis Childhood. Toronto: HarperFlamingo Canada, 1999. Print. Sellars, Bev. They Called Me Number One. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2013. Print. Sing, Pamela V. “Intersections of Memory, Ancestral Language, and Imagination; or, The Textual Production of Michif Voices as Cultural Weaponry.” Studies in Canadian Literature 31.1 (2006): 95–115. Print. Smith, Donald B. Mississauga Portraits:  Ojibwe Voices from Nineteenth-Century Canada. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2013. Print. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography:  A  Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001. Print. Sorisio, Carolyn. “Introduction:  Cross-Racial and Cross-Ethnic Collaboration and Scholarship: Contexts, Criticism, Challenges.” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S. 38.1 (2013): 1–8. Print. Sterling, Shirley. My Name Is Seepeetza. Toronto: Douglas and McIntyre, 1992. Print. Stevenson (Wheeler), Winona L. “Decolonizing Tribal Histories.” Diss. U of California, Berkeley, 2000. Print. Thom, Jo-Ann. “The Effect of Readers’ Responses on the Development of Aboriginal Literature in Canada: A Study of Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed, Beatrice Culleton’s In Search of April Raintree, and Richard Wagamese’s Keeper ‘n Me.” In Search of April Raintree: Critical Edition. Winnipeg: Peguis, 1999. 295–305. Print. Todd, Loretta. Hands of History. Ottawa: National Film Board, 1994. Print. Ulrikab, Abraham. The Diary of Abraham Ulrikab:  Text and Context. Trans. Hartmut Lutz and students from the University of Greifswald, Germany. Ed. Hartmut Lutz. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 2005. Print. Valaskakis, Gail. Indian Country:  Essays on Contemporary Native Culture. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2005. Print. Venne, Sharon H. “Treaties Made in Good Faith.” Natives and Settlers—Now and Then: Historical Issues and Current Perspectives on Treaties and Land Claims in Canada. Ed. Paul W. DePasquale. Edmonton: U of Alberta P, 2007. 1–16. Print. Wagamese, Richard. For Joshua:  An Ojibway Father Teaches His Son. Toronto:  Doubleday, 2002. Print. Walker, Cheryl. Indian Nation:  Native American Literature and Nineteenth-Century Nationalisms. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1997. Print. Warley, Linda. “Reviewing Past and Future: Postcolonial Canadian Autobiography and Lee Maracle’s Bobbi Lee, Indian Rebel.” Essays on Canadian Writing 60 (1996): 59–77. Print. ———. “Unbecoming a ‘Dirty Savage’: Jane Willis’s Geniesh: An Indian Girlhood.” Canadian Literature 156 (1998): 83–103. Print. Warrior, Robert. The People and the Word:  Reading Native Nonfiction. Minneapolis:  U of Minnesota P, 2005. Print. Wesley, Saylesh. “Twin-Spirited Woman:  Sts’iyóye smestiyexw slhá:li.” Transgender Studies Quarterly 1.3 (2014): 338–51. Print. Willis, Jane. Geneish: An Indian Girlhood. Toronto: new, 1973. Print. Wilson, Shawn. Research Is Ceremony:  Indigenous Research Methods. Black Point, NS: Fernwood, 2008. Print. Wolvengey, Arok. Wawiyatācimowinisa:  Funny Little Stories. Regina:  Canadian Plains Research Center, 2007. Print.

Chapter 10

“ W hat Inuit Wi l l  T h i nk” Keavy Martin and Taqralik Partridge Talk Inuit Literature KEAVY MARTIN AND Taqralik Partridge

Preface by Keavy Martin: On the Formal Considerations of Writing for the Handbook In the midst of the April 2013 conversation that produced this chapter, the Inuk writer Taqralik Partridge pauses. “Can I just tell you a beef?” she asks. She turns the conversation to Yann Martel’s acclaimed 2001 novel, Life of Pi. Carefully stipulating that she does not mean to criticize the author, Partridge points to a problem with the novel’s framing narrative, in which the author recounts how, in the midst of an uninspired period in his writing life, he traveled to India and was told the story of one Mr. Patel—and therefore came to write the novel. As Partridge notes, the implication, “once again, [is that] this story can only be told because there’s the White guy who does that intro part. The story is beautiful, but my problem is that if it had not been framed in the way it was, then it—and the movie adaptation—most likely would not have reached the same success. And that is too bad. I think it shows the world’s appetite for stories that are framed by Whiteness.” This observation about the continued requirement—based on the ongoing cultural dominance of White audiences (and therefore of White markets)—for White intermediaries to translate, shepherd, or make accessible stories belonging to other peoples renders my present task even more troubling. A volume such as this one provides a wonderful way for students, scholars, and a few general readers to get a sense of the various facets of Canadian literature via the companionable and convenient access-route of the “Handbook.” But as I have argued elsewhere,1 Inuit cultural production has often been distinguished by its inaccessibility to Southerners—and it is regularly overlooked on

192    Indigenous Literatures and Contexts the same grounds. Inuit writers and performers, by gearing the majority of their work toward Inuit audiences, have largely resisted the generic and linguistic demands of the South, producing few English-language novels but abundant Inuktitut-language life stories, adaptations of old tales, films, and many new songs. The Inuit homeland spans three continents and four nation-states, and it contains dozens of diverse Inuit communities, each with its own unique political and cultural history. The task, then, of rendering the mind-bogglingly wide variety of materials that could fall under the heading “Inuit literature” both coherent and accessible to a generalist audience seems problematic, if not impossible—particularly when performed by a qallunaaq (non-Indigenous) scholar. While most literary critics are trained to pay the strictest of attention to the intricacies and complex allegiances of language in the texts that we read—one definition of “literature,” as I always tell my first-year classes, is “language in which the way things are said matters as much as what is said”—it seems far less habitual for us to turn this critical attention to the form of the texts that we write. Rather, years of academic conditioning—particularly time spent in the purgatory of peer review—have trained many of us to conform almost automatically (though not without anxiety) to standards of scholarly rigour and their attendant formal conventions. In responding to the call for an article about Inuit literature to appear in this authoritative volume, then, this contribution attempts to offer something slightly different by considering the following factors: 1. When it comes to Inuit literature, a broad, authoritative overview may be less appropriate than observations grounded in the specific perspectives of one or two individuals. In their introduction to the Interviewing Inuit Elders oral history series, Frédéric Laugrand, Jarich Oosten, and Alexina Kublu observe that Inuit language and culture tends to set little value on generalizations. Not the movement from the specific to the general, but, inversely, the movement from the general to the specific is what is important. One should be precise in statements, specifying time, place, subject and object. General statements are viewed as vague and confusing, whereas specific statements are seen as providing much more interesting information. In Inuit society, we are dealing with a completely different tradition of knowledge. All knowledge is social by nature and the idea of objectified true knowledge holds little attraction or fascination. (Laugrand et al. 9, emphasis added)

The authors note, furthermore, that the tendency of scholars to present theories about Inuit society as if they were universal truths renders their observations not only inaccurate but also uninteresting to Inuit audiences, as they are deprived of key interpretational markers: that is, Whose opinion does this reflect? What is it based on? Where did this originate? (9). The reality that all knowledge is inevitably grounded in (and contingent upon) particular places and perspectives should therefore be foregrounded rather than concealed—as has tended to be the case in the classic ethnographic studies. For this reason, this contribution does not attempt to provide a broad and overarching survey of Inuit literature. To “survey,” after all, connotes the “examin[ation] … of a

“What Inuit Will Think”    193 property on behalf of its prospective buyer” (“survey”) and arguably echoes the colonial practice of appraising lands about to be (or recently) claimed—with the ultimate goal of apportioning these into marketable chunks.2 Rather than aiming, then, to bundle dozens of key Inuit texts into one convenient and accessible package—thereby risking overgeneralized conclusions and the conflation of numerous different cultural and political contexts—this contribution highlights the specifics of one Inuit author’s career in her own words. The work of the Montreal-based spoken-word poet and writer Taqralik Partridge is therefore not intended to represent the experience of other Inuit authors, or of all Inuit literature; rather, this contribution aims to narrow drastically its field of authoritative “coverage” so that readers can engage with one specific and personal experience—and practice—of Inuit literature. The work of the many other Inuit authors (which forms a broader context within which Partridge’s could be considered) is mentioned, though not described fully; readers interested in gathering more information may do so via some of the references provided. In short, I hope (and I am grateful for the tolerance of both readers and editors here) that the form of the interview, while not necessarily exemplifying Inuit rhetorical traditions, might at least function as an alternative to the more usual scholarly pursuit of encyclopedic thoroughness and accessibility. 2. The practice of direct argumentation may need to be reconsidered in this context. The rhetorical structure of this interview offers ideas in fragmented and colloquial forms; rather than pursuing points doggedly to their conclusions, we meander through the terrain of our topic as our interests and associations compel us. The result is that no single line of argumentation emerges strongly from the piece; indeed, arguing was not our goal. While the explicit and persuasive thesis statement acts as the rhetorical cornerstone of most academic papers, time spent in Inuit territory has taught me to reconsider the implications of this practice. After all, arguing with people, or attempting directly to sway them to your opinion, comes across as a rude and aggressive infringement on their isuma—their own intelligence, over which they should have full autonomy.3 While more subtle rhetorical tactics (such as storytelling or hinting) are certainly employed, they almost always allow the listener to make his or her own decisions about the meaning of what is being said and the course of action that should result. The interview included here, then, does not allow the reader full access to the opinions of either speaker; nor does it attempt to persuade the reader of a particular thesis. Instead, ideas are offered tentatively, to be taken up—or not—by the reader according to his or her own interests and understanding. A second feature of this particular interview, I  believe, is a strategic eschewing of authority on the part of both speakers. While the interview has been edited for style and clarity, its tone remains casual. Partridge repeatedly references her resistance to the process of becoming a professional author, whereby she is expected to shamelessly market herself, to adopt a very public persona, and also to endure the scrutiny that such a position entails. Again, her role in this volume is therefore not to represent all Inuit (or all Inuit authors), and to underscore this idea, her tone remains personal and colloquial rather than authoritative and general. Meanwhile, I inhabit somewhat uncomfortably the position of authority that has been granted me as a university professor, particularly

194    Indigenous Literatures and Contexts within a field of study that is eager for more discussion of Inuit literatures—and for “experts” who might render these traditions legible. The form of the interview, therefore, allows us both to speak more honestly and humbly than the form of the persuasive essay might permit—and thereby to avoid the awkward situation of having to speak “expertly” for and about Inuit. My hope is that readers will take these formal considerations into account as they approach the interview that follows. And while I am wary of glossing the contribution excessively—thereby aggressively foregrounding my own understanding or perhaps risking the inadvertent appearance of an argument (or of further seemingly inevitable generalizations)—the convention of the preface requires that I highlight a few points that readers may want to consider. One idea that my conversation with Partridge has prompted me to re-evaluate is the way in which recent “nationalist” trends in Indigenous literary criticism have encouraged scholars to consider Indigenous literatures within “intellectually sovereign” frameworks—for instance, to theorize contemporary texts via the lens of earlier writings or oral traditions.4 In approaching this interview, I was eager to place Partridge’s work within the context of other Inuit literature—for instance, the unikkaaqtuat, or “stories that go on for a long time” (often called myths); the inuusirminik unikkaat, or life stories of elders; the song traditions, as categorized in 1999 by elder Emile Imaruittuq as pisiit (personal songs), ikiaqtagait (embarrassing songs), and sakausiit (shaman songs); and the work of writers like the late Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk, author of the “novel” Sanaaq (1984), Mini (Minnie) Aodla Freeman, author of the autobiography Life Among the Qallunaat (1978), Michael Arvaarluk Kusugak, renowned author of young-adult fiction, and the late Alootook Ipellie, whose combination of narrative and line drawing in Arctic Dreams and Nightmares (1993) continues to dazzle readers.5 I had assumed, then, that in order to approach Partridge’s work responsibly, I would need to consider it in relation to the key texts of the adaptive and enduring Inuit literary tradition. Partridge, however, disrupted this expectation in several different ways. While we discussed these “canonical” Inuit writers briefly, she made it clear that among her Inuit influences were writers whom I had never even heard of—for instance, the late Tumasi Kudluk of Kangirsuk, whose writings exist primarily in the archives of the Avataq Cultural Centre, or of Adamie Kalingo of Ivujivik, who often shares stories of the way things used to be on Facebook. In other words, Partridge reminded me of the numbers of Inuit cultural figures whose work is meaningful in the Inuit world but who—perhaps because they have never appeared in the various editions of An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English (Moses, Goldie, and now Ruffo) or other comparable publications—are unknown in the South. Second, although Partridge made it clear that the reception of her work among Inuit audiences is a primary concern, her own frame of reference and influence as an artist is much wider, as she draws upon the work of other Indigenous (but non-Inuit) writers and of writers belonging to other minoritized groups. Finally, Partridge surprised me when she said that as an artist, she actually tries to avoid becoming influenced by other writers whose work she might begin to emulate. These ideas made me wonder whether the emphasis on tradition in my previous work

“What Inuit Will Think”    195 on Inuit literature (which has been heavily influenced by Indigenous literary nationalism) might have been telling only part of the story—whether, like the ethnographer Franz Boas, who visited Cumberland Sound in the mid-1880s following several decades of industrial whaling operations in the region, I had been focusing excessively on the continuance of seemingly “authentic” traditions and purposefully downplaying other influences. The second theme that emerged prominently for me was the problem, for Partridge, of publishing and being public. I have long taken it for granted that good and interesting writing should be widely celebrated and shared, and—along with many other scholars of Indigenous literatures—I fret regularly about the ways in which mainstream literary recognition is bestowed only to certain literatures, while many others remain ignored, out of print, or forgotten. I continue to believe strongly in the transformative powers of these marginalized texts both to inspire new generations of Indigenous writers and to challenge mainstream readers (and especially academics) by disrupting convention. The challenge that Partridge posed, however, was aimed at the very idea of recognition itself. As an artist whose primary modes of dissemination are still Myspace and YouTube, Partridge is often considered to be an “upcoming” writer, who is expected to “progress” to print publication—and, to be honest, I still hope that she will. As a professor who has benefited significantly—both personally and professionally—from reading and listening to Inuit literature, I often imagine that one of the ways that I can give back is by creating opportunities for Inuit writers. Yet these opportunities are inevitably geared toward accessing mainstream, academic audiences. Partridge’s repeated insistence on prioritizing the response of Inuit readers and listeners (following the model of Igloolik Isuma Productions director Zacharias Kunuk)6 threw into question my assumptions about what a successful writer should do—and what the celebration of Indigenous literatures within mainstream venues and institutions really means. While I remain hopeful that these spaces might be indigenized (or at least somewhat decolonized), I wonder whether there are other modes of artistic “success”—or perhaps other paradigms of the Artist as a public figure—that might also be considered. This said, I cannot shake the impulse to encourage all readers of this piece to seek out the haunting, clever, and achingly beautiful work of Taqralik Partridge via whatever medium you can find it. And I hope that the following conversation provides you with some food for thought.

“What Inuit Will Think” (The original version of this conversation was recorded in a café in downtown Montreal in late April 2013 and was transcribed by Daniel Nikpayuk.) KEAVY:  These conversations around Indigenous Literatures—or Canadian Literature—can tend to be kind of insular: they usually seem to happen in

196    Indigenous Literatures and Contexts university settings. The reason why I wanted to have this conversation was so that it will open up the audience a little bit, particularly for younger people who are studying Indigenous literature. I think it’s often more interesting to hear from a writer, rather than only from the academics. But just to provide a bit of background: I first encountered your work because there was an announcement for a spoken word event in Toronto. I was going to be out of town, but I wanted to know: “Who’s Taqralik Partridge?” I googled your name, and your Myspace page came up. TAQRALIK:  When was that? KEAVY:  2006? A while ago. Back when we used to use Myspace! Some of your work was there, but I couldn’t find out much else. I was wondering, “Does she have a book?” “Does she have a CD?” And for a long time, it was just Myspace. But then you did the CBC Concert, “Quiet Is Not Silent.” How did that come about? TAQRALIK:  It’s because CBC was doing this series of commissioned performances across Canada for the occasion of Harper’s “Apology,” and they somehow ended up contacting me and commissioning me to do a performance. That was my first real solo show, which was really cool. I wrote a new piece for that called “No Sleep for the Wicked.” It’s a piece that I really like, but I never came up with a good name for it.7 That was in 2008, but 2004 is when I really started writing. In 2005, I started having performances here and there, and then I had a solo show in Toronto in, I think, late 2008 or 2009. But then I kind of slowed things down: I had another baby, and I wanted to take a break from everything. So, I’ve kind of been saying no to performances, because I didn’t want to be traveling a lot. And now I’m starting to write more stuff again and do more performances. But we’ll see what happens. KEAVY:  And your short story “Igloolik” won first place in the 2010 Quebec Writing Competition.8 TAQRALIK:  Yes, but I didn’t do anything else after that. KEAVY:  Well, you had a baby, right? You created a child . … TAQRALIK:  Yeah, that’s true. That’s my experience. But I would like to have time to work on more short stories. KEAVY:  Where were you born? TAQRALIK:  Montreal. My Dad was working for the NQIA—the Northern Quebec Inuit Association. And my Mom was working for CBC; she’s from Vancouver. I’ve lived everywhere. It’s because my parents are Bahá’ís, so they ended up moving to Haida Gwai’i for that. We lived there until I was four or five, so I went to kindergarten there with little Haida kids. After that, we moved to Rankin [Inlet] and we lived there for about four years. Then we lived in Iqaluit for only six months, and then we went to Kuujjuaq. KEAVY:  Wow, that must have given you lots of different perspectives. We’ve been asked to talk about “Inuit literature” today, but it seems to me that that also requires many different perspectives; it can mean a lot of different things. I wanted to start by asking, when you hear “Inuit literature,” what do you think of? Are there particular people or texts that come to mind? TAQRALIK:  Well, there are names of known Inuit authors that come to mind first, and then also Inuit traditional stories.9 I don’t think literature is confined to whatever is put down with a pen.

“What Inuit Will Think”    197 KEAVY:  Absolutely. Are there particular stories or authors that you’re thinking of? TAQRALIK:  Well, authors like Mini Aodla Freeman.10 Zebedee Nungak, of course.11 Alootook Ipellie—I have a special place in my heart for him.12 The last time that I had seen him, we had an Inuit Writer’s Gathering in Montreal. He had written me a letter following that event, saying how he thought it was a really important thing that we had done, and he wanted to see more of it. I kept the letter when I left my work at Avataq [Cultural Institute].13 But he died after that. You know, he was someone who really just insisted on being himself, and I think that he had difficulties with other Inuit and with other people as well. He just … was himself. I think that especially when you come from a really small community, it can be hard to be yourself sometimes. And it can be really scary, because Inuit love each other but also can be very critical of each other, in ways that are really direct. Who else? KEAVY:  What about Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk?14 TAQRALIK:  Yes, very well respected—famous in Nunavik; she’s famous in the Inuit world. And also, at Avataq they have this whole collection—you should do a book about this—by Tumasi Kudluk? Do you know him? KEAVY:  No. … TAQRALIK:  He was from Kangirsuk. He did hundreds and hundreds of drawings, very simple line drawings, of Inuit life—traditional life, but also to do with the Hudson’s Bay Company and things like that. And on each drawing he did a little caption, depending on what he felt like—it could be just a line, or even up to a page of writing describing the scenario that he’s depicting. Just amazing! When you first look at the drawings, it doesn’t look like very much because they seem kind of naive. But then when you go through them, there’s so much that’s not being put out there in the world that could be. I used to go through them and tag them for archiving,15 and I would read the stories. There’s really interesting things, like talking about when they used to have to rely on the Hudson’s Bay Company and use store credits. But other things, too, like if a dog eats a polar bear liver, then it will usually automatically start vomiting, because its body knows that it cannot have that. But if it doesn’t vomit, then it will die. And about so many cool different things. … Oh, I remember one where these two ladies—one had only boys, the other one had only girls—so they cut their front amautik-flap16 and switched and sewed it, so they can try to get a boy or a girl. KEAVY:  Wow. When was he doing all this? TAQRALIK:  Maybe in the ’70s, ’80s. He’s not alive anymore. KEAVY:  That’s interesting because Alootook Ipellie has those incredible line drawings and the stories that go with them; it’s almost as if he’s working in the same kind of tradition. TAQRALIK:  That could be another PhD. KEAVY:  Totally. I hope all those students out there are listening. TAQRALIK:  Another thing that I really appreciated as a kid was that they used to have those vignettes on TV, like with the owl and the raven.17 We used to see throat-singing on those little vignettes. There was never throat-singing in any town

198    Indigenous Literatures and Contexts that I lived in, as I can recall. And then throat-singing sort of had a big comeback. And in Culture class—I went to school in Nunavut, and also in Nunavik, and we always had Culture class—we used to hear stories. KEAVY:  Would Elders come in and talk to you? TAQRALIK:  Well, sometimes the teacher was an Elder. But also sometimes younger people; I guess they would be Elders now, but back then they were in their forties and fifties. KEAVY:  And do you think those kinds of things influenced you in becoming a writer? TAQRALIK:  Maybe. Yeah, it could be. Well, I love stories; I guess everyone loves stories. But I especially love the way Inuit tell stories. That’s the best part about getting together with people. You know? When you’re camping or you’re visiting somebody and they just suddenly start telling you stuff; it’s the most enthralling thing. KEAVY:  Especially when you’re camping; that’s when you really get a chance to listen. There’s something extra special about it when you’re out on the land. … TAQRALIK:  Yeah. And also extra scary if it’s a ghost story. Inuit ghost stories are really scary. KEAVY:  Are they ever! There are so many great song writers out there too; I’m thinking of people like Beatrice Deer,18 and Elisapie Isaac.19 And the late Charlie Adams—talk about a poet!20 TAQRALIK:  Yeah. We used to always listen to him. Actually, I wrote a poem about when he was living on the streets here. KEAVY:  Can we hear it? TAQRALIK:  This is getting expensive. Charlie Adams is begging down by the old forum. Seated supplicant. He can walk again, but he looks greyer and he already has street-grit sunk-in pores. He still has the same moustache. He’s Charlie Adams goddammit. Inuk Country crooner. Every day we walk down Ste. Catherine— for some reason or other. Every eskimo here is tied to this street— like it or not. It’s ones and twos for him. Charlie you sang for us when we were kids. So Charlie we’re paying you now. It’s quarters and dimes for him.

“What Inuit Will Think”    199 And pennies for the other beggars. It’s getting expensive— we doled out five bucks this week. But when he stands smoke in hand in a doorway, we know he’s not working so Elisapi bums a light. At that time, I was thinking about how Inuit can really inhabit two completely different parts of the world at the same time. Inuit can come to the South and they can have a great job, and they can have this life that they maybe can’t have back in their own communities—with all this material wealth—and then suddenly, they can lose it. Or they can come here for whatever—maybe for the hospital—and they can get stuck here for whatever reason. You know, what happened with Charlie Adams, was: Here’s this guy who is really famous for Inuit. You would expect that he would hold a certain status in the Inuit community for his entire life because of that. And he did, but at the same time, physically, he was in a difficult place. But it’s fun how, even though there are situations like that, you don’t see Inuit ignoring him on the street, like “oh because he’s a homeless person, he’s untouchable,” you know? That’s how North American society is: homeless people are untouchable. He would be sleeping on the street, but me and my coworkers would talk with him, and they would smoke with him. You know, Inuit are just Inuit wherever you happen to be, whatever your situation. KEAVY: That poem is such a perfect tribute. I remember seeing him in that Isuma documentary, Urban Inuk.21 Speaking of Isuma, what about films like Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner)? TAQRALIK: Mmm. I remember we rented Atanarjuat and brought it home and I was so happy to see it. I thought it was really beautiful. And also the thing that really made me happy about that film was when Zach Kunuk was in Cannes and he said he doesn’t care what other people think—only Inuit. I thought that was the coolest thing ever. KEAVY:  And it seems like he has really maintained that stance; he’s really making films about and for Inuit. It’s pretty radical, actually! There’s this other branch of Isuma that does the marketing, but he doesn’t seem too concerned with what the South wants to see. Did you watch The Journals of Knud Rasmussen? TAQRALIK:  No, I didn’t. I’ve had always this mixed feeling about reading and watching Inuit things, because I always know it doesn’t end well. And I can’t take it anymore. No, that’s just a silly excuse; I need to watch more. KEAVY:  I think I know what you mean, though. The gloom of colonial history is kind of hanging over everything. I don’t know if you saw Before Tomorrow? TAQRALIK:  I did.

200    Indigenous Literatures and Contexts KEAVY:  That ending! It was so heartbreaking. TAQRALIK:  Yeah. That was a nice movie, though. Talking about not wanting to watch things, I have this thing about not wanting to read other Native authors because I don’t want to feel like I’m referencing them. And I think that might be kind of a silly thing, but when I first started reading Sherman Alexie back in like the 90s, I remember thinking, “Wow, I really understand this.” It was just so easy to see where he was coming from. But then I started to feel that I wouldn’t be able to write anything that’s really distinct, so I stopped wanting to read Native authors. And I think that’s kind of a shame. But I bought one of Richard Van Camp’s books, and I read that.22 I know that I would never write in a style like Richard, so that’s good. I can read his stuff. KEAVY:  That’s really interesting. As a reader, I’m always trying to think about tradition and influence, so it’s neat to hear you resisting that. But yes, if you want to have a distinct voice and find your own way, that makes sense. TAQRALIK:  Well, you know that whole thing of “intertextuality”? I don’t want to be too intertextual. KEAVY:  Right. But I remember you saying in an interview that you did have influences who were spoken word artists. TAQRALIK:  Yes. I especially got inspired by the one guy who I always talk about: [Ian] Kamau. He’s in Toronto. And there’s a lot of Black authors—Black spoken word artists—whose work I really enjoy. There are so many different scenes of poetry, and there are so many different—I think pretty artificial—ways that people divide poetry into categories. And now there’s “Slam Poetry”; there’s some sort of spoken word scene where people always take the same tone of voice and the same sort of crescendo, or performance, and it doesn’t really appeal to me. Whereas the ones that I really like tend to have more their own voice. It doesn’t necessarily follow a set style of performance. KEAVY:  Did you discover that work live? Were you going to events where people were performing it? TAQRALIK:  Well, what happened was I heard on a CD—on a K-OS album actually—about this one fellow [Kamau], and then I tried to find any performances that he might have.23 But there was nothing-nothing-nothing, and then finally there was one little tiny performance where it was a book launch for Black authors in Toronto. Somebody in their community had put it together, so I decided to go there and go see him. And I met him afterwards and he thought I was nuts. KEAVY:  What happened? TAQRALIK:  Well, I was just so happy to see him. And he just said, “Uh, Hi?” and I was like: “Hi! I just wanted to meet you.” Anyway, we got to be friends after that—later—because we were actually put together in a performance set, but at first he was like: “Okay. Who’s this lady?” KEAVY:  Fast forward ten years and you had your own stalker fans? Other than me, I mean. … TAQRALIK:  Oh my god! I don’t think I have any more stalker fans, because I’ve been on the down-low. I had one guy, though, show up a couple of years ago to a performance. And he had that look that I must have had when I met Kamau … I got

“What Inuit Will Think”    201 kind of freaked out. Thank goodness he had a girlfriend who was pregnant. So, all things were well in his world. KEAVY:  I guess that’s the thing about writing and putting things on the Internet is that they go out and they create these fans and these enthusiasms, and you have no idea what’s happened out there until it comes back and finds you. TAQRALIK:  Yeah, that’s true. Well, you kind of just make something, and then you just sort of let it go. KEAVY:  So, when you write, then, are you thinking of particular audiences? Who are you writing for? TAQRALIK:  Usually, when I’m writing, I’m just trying to write something that I’m interested in. There’s a story—it’s not finished—that I’m working on; it’s about fishing in the spring—you know, when you go out on the ice when it’s spring. We used to do that when we lived in Nunavut. And it looks like the ice is about to just suddenly break up. But it’s not necessarily—there’s just cracks, and you can go and it even looks like water sometimes because it’s covered with water on top. It’s kind of creepy, but you can go ice fishing like that. I was just thinking about how I really want to just describe that. But what happens is that I’ll write something and then afterwards, I’ll think: “Okay, now, who’s this going to offend?” Or, “How are people going to perceive this?” And the other thing is that, in a way, because it’s in English, it’s not really being written for Inuit—especially from Nunavik, because my experience has been that people from Nunavik are not really into it. You know, except for the ones who really speak English well. They’re not really into it, and I don’t blame them; I mean, English is not the language of choice. If I really want to have an Inuit audience, I need to do things in Inuktitut. KEAVY:  Have you used Inuktitut in your poetry? TAQRALIK:  A little bit. And then in my short stories that I’m working on, I had more in there. But I don’t speak Inuktitut well enough to really write well. Or I think it needs to be a different medium. Because Inuit use rap, so kids already have a medium in English that they enjoy more, while spoken word is a little bit slow. It’s funny, though, because I’ve had people from Nunavut and even Greenland contact me over Facebook and say they really like my work. KEAVY:  So, I know that we’re always bugging you about this, but do you think about writing a book? Or publishing your work? TAQRALIK:  Well, yeah, but you’re supposed to keep your ideas to yourself so that they can come to fruition, right? But yes, I do want to. I really love short stories; that’s my favourite form of literature. KEAVY:  Is that right? TAQRALIK:  It’s my preferred form. I would any day take a book of short stories over a novel. Maybe I’m lazy? No! No, I just think that a really well-written story is just the perfect morsel. So, I would like to do a book of short stories, and I know that people think that: “Okay, you do progression”: you do short stories, and then a novel. But I don’t know—I don’t really have huge ambitions; I’m having a hard time picturing myself being that writer that just has the novels. KEAVY:  I feel like there’s a lot of pressure on writers to produce novels. You know, you look at the major award winners and they’re mostly novel writers.24 And even that idea of progression—that a short story is a beginning form, and you will move

202    Indigenous Literatures and Contexts on to the novel—that’s a problem. The novel has this particular cultural baggage attached to it, like the idea of the individual, capitalism, etc. That was one thing I always was asked when I started trying to learn about Inuit literature: everyone I’d talk to would ask: “Do they have novels?” And I’d say, well, there are a couple, but there’s so much other stuff too! Inuit are making films, and there are spoken word artists, and there are singers, and that’s where this creative work is happening. It’s not necessarily people hunkering down for eight months in a cabin, not talking to anybody, and cranking out this epic work of fiction. But it seems to me that we’re a ways away before, I don’t know, the Governor General’s Award goes to folks who are doing really different kinds of things. TAQRALIK:  Yeah, so if I want to get the Governor General’s Award, I’d better write a novel, is that what you’re saying? KEAVY:  No! I’m saying: “Resist! Resist!” so you don’t get sucked in. But then there’s that question of popularity and influence. Let’s say you do the eight-month thing, and you write this novel with an Inuit protagonist, and then Canada goes crazy, and you’re the literary darling, and then you’re on CBC’s “Canada Reads.”25 On one hand, that would be cool! But at the same time, there are artists, like Zacharias Kunuk, who don’t care what the South thinks. There’s something kind of wonderful in thinking outside of that too. But back to your own work—do you have a favourite piece that you’ve done? Something that stands out for you? TAQRALIK:  Well, one piece that I find works the best—even if it’s not everybody else’s favourite—is “Battery.”26 KEAVY:  That one actually is my favourite; it’s so haunting and beautiful. That last line as the speaker tells us what to do “in case of fire”—it always gives me chills: “And lastly / and just in case / concerning the children / commit their faces to memory / every turn / every corner / every line.” You deliver it so perfectly. Though it actually took some time before it dawned on me that the poem might be referencing more than a literal “fire.” … TAQRALIK:  I find that one works really well; I felt like I was really inspired when I wrote that. And there’s quite a few pieces that I wrote just for me, because I wanted to write better. But they’re not really performance pieces; so I’m not performing or showing them. And you know, I’ve tried once to get things published. Somebody had suggested some publishing place to send them to. But their response was: “It’s not what we’re really looking for.” I don’t necessarily want to have those published anyway; it’s just things that I’ve written that are maybe not necessarily for everybody else. Yeah, that’s the thing about Inuit, you know: not necessarily wanting to achieve what it is that people think is the thing that you’re supposed to achieve if you’re in this category. KEAVY:  I think that’s a really important idea. In the university, particularly—or maybe in the writerly world—there’s this idea that you’ve got to publish. And there’s this push to, you know, “aim for the top” and this insistence that texts have to be available. Even things that are out of print—they have to be made available. I do believe that sharing your work is important, just because I know what it’s like for students starting out. My students, when they hear “Eskimo Chick,” or something

“What Inuit Will Think”    203 like that, it means a lot to them.27 But at the same time, I think it’s an important idea that there are some things that aren’t for everybody. I think that’s a really challenging idea for the West. The belief in the necessity of access—or of spreading things across the world—it’s just ingrained. TAQRALIK:  Well, I think it’s kind of like life is a rhetorical performance, especially in Western culture. You have to have your resume and your CV, or whatever, and you have to build it up, and you have to put all these things: “I’ve won this award,” “I have these grants,” or “I’ve performed at this thing,” you know? But somebody like Zach Kunuk, they could care less. I always run into this problem when I have these shows: they always want a photo—a good photo—and a bio, and I never have anything ready. I’m like: “Just say I’m going to be there.” I’m really, really bad for that: doing the PR thing. I think I might be a lot further ahead if I was better at it. You know, I was Communications Director for Avataq. I was okay at doing PR for them, but for something like this, it’s hard to understand the value. You know what I mean? KEAVY:  Yeah, “self-promotion”: that’s a really weird thing on so many levels. Can I ask what you think about the future of Inuit literature? Are there things you’d like to see happen? Or see more of? TAQRALIK:  Well, do you know of Napatsi Folger? She published a book with Inhabit Media—a young adult novel. It’s called Joy of Apex.28 But I think that Inuit people need to see more of that stuff—more publications by Inuit—in order to be encouraged to try things. And I think that people need to be encouraged to write. Well, first of all, people need to be encouraged to read. When I was going to school in the North, it was really hard to come by stuff to read, and it was worse in Nunavik than it was in Nunavut. I remember in Rankin and Iqaluit—because I went to school in those two places—we had more access to books than when I came to Nunavik. And the last time I was at the library in one of the schools in Nunavik, I noticed it was still the same. And, you know, that’s how you learn to be a writer is by reading. Of course, it’s not just by reading books—you’re going be exposed to all different mediums. But reading books, I think, is the best way to have people learn to write. And when you have people writing in their second language, that’s fine, you know? It brings a different flavour to it. KEAVY:  That’s true. TAQRALIK:  There’s Janice Grey: she writes really well.29 And there’s Adamie Kalingo coming from Ivujivik. I keep telling him he should write a book. Do you know him? KEAVY:  No. … TAQRALIK:  He’s an interesting guy from Ivujivik; he’s in his fifties. And on Facebook, he used to always do these postings of photos from different parts around Ivujivik, and he’d write this whole long thing about: “This is where we bury…”; “This is where the old graveyard is …”; “This is how things used to be …”; and then he’d go into this aside about Inuit customs and culture and stuff. Really interesting stuff! And I keep telling him that he should write. It’s not really literature. … KEAVY:  But it is though. Isn’t it?

204    Indigenous Literatures and Contexts TAQRALIK:  I know, but it’s just there on Facebook. Atii [please, go ahead], put it somewhere where people can see it, instead of letting Facebook own it. KEAVY:  That’s true. Maybe it would work for TV? TAQRALIK:  I think maybe graphic novels. I mean, that’s getting to be a big trend in the mainstream. I think that that is a really good medium that Inuit can tap into. There’s one graphic novelist from Greenland—Nuka Godtfredsen—who’s a friend of mine, and I really like his work. His girlfriend Lisbeth Valgreen is Danish and works with him on some things. She studied Eskimology. They’re actually looking for a Canadian publisher. Nuka’s already a cartoonist with Sermitsiaq, the Greenland newspaper. And then he started that series in collaboration with an anthropologist at the Danish National Museum, because they wanted to chronicle a “prehistory” of Inuit people. So they did all this research with him, and he tried to do it as accurately as possible, in a series of three books. The one that they had was already in three languages—in each different version, not all together in one. But there was English, Danish, and Greenlandic. KEAVY:  That’s amazing! I can’t wait to see this. TAQRALIK:  He’s kind of a celebrity in Greenland. And he’s also doing his own graphic novels too. KEAVY:  Very cool. And if you think about it, the work of Alootook Ipellie and Tumasi Kudluk—aren’t those graphic novels, in a way? TAQRALIK:  They could be. I think that they could be put into something like that. I think that Tumasi Kudluk’s work could be either put together in a book that has extra commentary, or somebody might put in the stories and do new illustrations. KEAVY:  Yeah. Actually, Daniel Nikpayuk—the person who’s transcribing this conversation—he’s from the Western Arctic originally, and one of his goals is to create an Inuit manga. TAQRALIK:  Yeah? That’s a good idea. My kids are crazy about manga. Well, I think that the way to do stuff like that is to just collaborate with people from different places. And I think Inuit need to really look at ways to collaborate that are not just the Western way. Like even manga is definitely not Western. KEAVY:  Have you seen Red: A Haida Manga? TAQRALIK:  No. … KEAVY:  It’s by Michael Yahgulanaas. That was his idea: he wanted to tell this story from his community, but he didn’t want to use a Western genre, so he did a manga instead. At the end of it, he invites you to destroy the book. You actually cut out the pages—we did this in my class. And if you have two copies, you can put them up on the wall. You know how in a comic book, there are the little square panels? So instead of having those gutters—those spaces between the panels—his shapes are Haida form lines, so when you put it all together, it actually creates this huge image! So I love the way that he challenges us to interact differently with the book—or even to reconsider what a book is. So any final thoughts on the future of Inuit literature? TAQRALIK:  I mean, there’s a lot of people that are writing. It’s just there’s that thing of: Are they actually wanting to go for that category of “this is what makes you a writer”?

“What Inuit Will Think”    205 KEAVY:  Yes, the self-promotion, and putting things into print. Would you say that’s your main worry as you are writing? TAQRALIK:  What I worry most about is what Inuit will think. …

Notes 1. See Martin, “The Sovereign Obscurity of Inuit Literature” and Stories in a New Skin. 2. As Graham Huggan writes in Territorial Disputes:  “The role of the seventeenth/eighteenth-century explorer or navigator was taken over in time by the nineteenth-century land surveyor, ‘harbinger of the inevitable transformation of a land and its people’ (Thompson 2). Increasing immigration necessitated the allocation of territory, the development of communications networks, and the relocation of indigenous lands; by helping to implement policies of territorial negotiation, appropriation, and expansion, nineteenth-century surveys became indispensable agents of the colonizing process” (37). My sincere thanks to Professor Sarah Krotz for bringing this source to my attention. 3. For more on the concept of isuma, see the work of the anthropologist Jean Briggs, who writes: “The possession of isuma entitles a person to be treated as an autonomous, that is, self-governing individual whose decisions and behaviour should not be directed, in any ways, outside the limits of the role requirements to which one is expected to conform” (267). 4. See, for instance, Robert Allen Warrior’s concept of “intellectual sovereignty” in Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions. 5. This translation of the term unikkaaqtuat (or unipkaaqtuat) is owed to Louis-Jacques Dorais (personal communication). My understanding of life stories is indebted to the various publications of Nunavut Arctic College, in particular the Interviewing Inuit Elders series—and especially Vol. 2, Perspectives on Traditional Law (wherein Imaruittuq’s categorization of Inuit songs can also be found) (Aupilaarjuk et al. 202). 6. See note 21. 7. “No Sleep for the Wicked,” along with several other spoken-word pieces, can be heard on Taqralik Partridge’s Myspace page or on YouTube (“Taqralik Partridge, Poem for CBC”). 8. “Igloolik” was published in December of 2010 in maisonneuve:  A  Quarterly of Arts, Opinion & Ideas. 9. See the above reference to unikkaaqtuat (or “stories that go on for a long time”). 10. Originally from the James Bay region, Mini [Minnie] Aodla Freeman is the author of the acclaimed autobiography Life Among the Qallunaat (1978). The book tells the story of Freeman’s childhood in the James Bay region and of her eventual 1957 journey to Ottawa, when she was 20 years old, to work for the Department of Northern Affairs. Brimming with rich detail, humour, and potent social critique, the text was republished in 2015 by the University of Manitoba Press. 11. Zebedee Nungak is a writer and politician from Puvirnituq, Nunavik. Having been very active in the journey toward Inuit land claims, he is well known for his columns, especially his satiric series on “Qallunology”—the study of Qallunaat (White people). He is featured

206    Indigenous Literatures and Contexts in the films Qallunaat!:  Why White People Are Funny (2006) and The Experimental Eskimos (2009). 12. Alootook Ipellie is the author of Arctic Dreams and Nightmares (1993), a collection of writings and Ipellie’s famous line drawings. Originally from Frobisher Bay (Iqaluit), he passed away in Ottawa in 2007. 13. Avataq Cultural Institute is the cultural organization of Nunavik (the Inuit territory in northern Quebec). It has offices both in Inukjuak and in Montreal. 14. Salomé Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk is the author of the long fictional narrative Sanaaq (1984), which was originally published in Inuktitut and later in French translation (2002) by Bernard Saladin d’Anglure. The first English translation of the book (translated from French by Peter Frost) was published in January 2014 by the University of Manitoba Press in partnership with Avataq Cultural Institute. 15. Avataq Cultural Institute’s Documentation and Archival Centre holds a large collection of Nunavik-centred publications, manuscripts, photographs, artwork, and ephemera. 16. An amautik (literally “something that you use for carrying”) is a garment that allows a woman to carry a young child on her back. The shape of the front flap is one aspect of the design that distinguishes it from a man’s parka. 17. See, for instance, the short 1973 NFB film Owl and the Raven: An Eskimo Legend. 18. Beatrice Deer is a singer from Quaqtaq, Nunavik. See her self-titled album Beatrice Deer (2010). 19. Also known for her role in the group Taima, Elisapie Isaac is a well-known singer originally from Salluit, Nunavik. 20. Charlie Adams was a famous musician originally from Puvirnituq. His songs (such as “Quviasupunga”) are known and continue to be performed throughout Inuit territory. He was featured in the 2005 documentary Qallunajatut (Urban Inuk). He passed away in Montreal in 2008, at the age of 55. 21. Igloolik Isuma Productions is an Inuit-run film company founded by Zacharias Kunuk, Paul Apak Angilirq, Pauloosie Qulitalik, and Norman Cohn. While they have been making films since 1990, they are best known for the 2001 feature film Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner), which won the Caméra d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Their films—including the subsequent features The Journals of Knud Rasmussen (2006) and Before Tomorrow (2009)—can be viewed online at www.isuma.tv. The 2005 documentary Qallunajatut (Urban Inuk), directed by Jobie Weetaluktuk, follows the lives of three urban Inuit during the course of one summer in Montreal. 22. Richard Van Camp, a Tlicho (Dogrib) writer and storyteller raised in Fort Smith, Northwest Territories, is the author of the novel The Lesser Blessed (1996) as well as three short-story collections—Angel Wing Splash Pattern (2002), The Moon of Letting Go (2010), and Godless But Loyal to Heaven (2012)—three comics books, and several books for young audiences. 23. See, for instance, the K-OS track “Ballad of Noah” featuring Ian Kamau. 24. This conversation took place before the short-story writer Alice Munro won the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature—and before Lynn Coady won the 2013 Giller Prize for her short fiction collection, Hellgoing. 25. “Canada Reads” is an annual CBC radio program that features five prominent Canadian public figures, each championing a work of Canadian literature. At the end of the debates, a winner is chosen. The program has been running since 2002.

“What Inuit Will Think”    207 26. Partridge’s 2010 performance of “Battery” at the Words Aloud 7 Spoken Word Festival in Durham, Ontario, can be viewed on YouTube (“Taqralik Patridge, ‘Battery’ ”). 27. Partridge’s poem “Eskimo Chick” can be heard on her Myspace page. 28. Napatsi Folger’s first book, a novel for young readers called Joy of Apex, was released by the Iqaluit-based publisher Inhabit Media in 2011. 29. Janice Grey is a young writer from Aupaluk, Nunavik. Some of her work can be seen on her blog, “shades of Grey” (http://itsnever-blackandwhite.blogspot.ca).

Works Cited Adams, Charlie. Inuit and Indians. Inukshuk, 2003. CD. ———. Quviasupunga. Inukshuk, 1997. CD. Alexie, Sherman. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Boston:  Little, Brown, 2009. Print. Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner). Dir. Norman Cohn and Zacharias Kunuk. Igloolik Isuma Productions, 2001. Film. Aupilaarjuk, Mariano, Emile Imaruittuq, Akisu Joamie, Lucassie Nutaraaluk, and Marie Tulimaaq. Perspectives on Traditional Law. Ed. Frédéric Laugrand, Jarich Oosten, and Wim Rasing. Vol. 2 of Interviewing Inuit Elders. Iqaluit: Nunavut Arctic College, 2000. Print. Briggs, Jean. “Expecting the Unexpected: Inuit Training for an Experimental Lifestyle.” Ethos 19.3 (1991): 259–87. Print. Deer, Beatrice. Beatrice Deer. 2010. CD. The Experimental Eskimos. Dir. Barry Greenwald. White Pine Pictures, 2009. Film. Folger, Napatsi. Joy of Apex. Iqaluit: Inhabit, 2011. Print. Freeman, Mini [Minnie] Aodla. Life Among the Qallunaat. 1978. Winnipeg: U of Manitoba P, 2015. Print. Grey, Janice. shades of Grey. Blogspot, 16 Mar. 2012. Web. Accessed 23 Dec. 2013. Godtfredsen, Nuka K. Andala Misigisarpassuilu/Andalas største bedrifter. Nuuk: Atuakkiorfi, 2001. Print. ———. Andalas største bedrifter II. Copenhagen, BIOS, 2006. Print. Huggan, Graham. Territorial Disputes:  Maps and Mapping Strategies in Contemporary Canadian and Australian Fiction. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1994. Print. Ipellie, Alootook. Arctic Dreams and Nightmares. Penticton, BC: Theytus, 1993. Print. Isaac, Elisapie. Travelling Love. Pheromone, 2012. CD. ———. There Will Be Stars. Pheromone, 2010. CD. The Journals of Knud Rasmussen. Dir. Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn. Igloolik Isuma Productions, 2006. Film. K-OS. “Ballad of Noah.” Feat. Ian Kamau. Atlantis: Hymns for Disco. EMI, 2006. CD. Kusugak, Michael. The Curse of the Shaman: A Marble Island Story. Toronto: Harper Trophy, 2006. Print. Laugrand, Frédéric, Jarich Oosten, and Alexina Kublu. “Introduction—Interviewing the Elders: Nunavut Arctic College Oral Traditions Project.” Introduction. Vol. 1 of Interviewing Inuit Elders. Ed. Frédéric Laugrand and Jarich Oosten. Iqaluit: Nunavut Arctic College, 1999. 1–12. Print. Martel, Yann. Life of Pi. Toronto: Vintage, 2002. Print.

208    Indigenous Literatures and Contexts Martin, Keavy. “The Sovereign Obscurity of Inuit Literature.” The Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literature. Ed James H.  Cox and Daniel Heath Justice. New York: Oxford UP, 2014. Print. ———. Stories in a New Skin:  Approaches to Inuit Literature. Winnipeg:  U of Manitoba P, 2012. Print. Moses, Daniel David, Terry Goldie, and Armand Garnet Ruffo, eds. An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English. 4th ed. Don Mills, ON: Oxford UP, 2013. Print. Nappaaluk, Mitiarjuk. Sanaaq. Trans. Bernard Saladin d’Anglure. Paris: Stanké, 2002. Print. ———. Sanaaq: An Inuit Novel. Trans. Peter Frost. Winnipeg: U of Manitoba P, 2014. Print. ———. Sanaaq: Sanaakkut Piusiviningita Unikkausinnguangat. Ed. Bernard Saladin d’Anglure. Québec: Association Inuksiutiit Katimajiit, 1984. Print. Nungak, Zebedee. “Contemplating an Inuit Presence in Literature.” Windspeaker 22.1 (2004): 21, 26. Rpt. in Inuktitut 102 (2008): 62–66. Print. ———. “Introducing the Science of Qallunology.” Windspeaker 24.2 (2006): 18. Print. Owl and the Raven: An Eskimo Legend. Dir. Co Hoedeman. National Film Board, 1973. Film. Partridge, Taqralik. “Igloolik.” maisonneuve: A Quarterly of Arts, Opinion & Ideas. maisonneuve, 17 Dec. 2010. Web. Accessed 23 Dec. 2013. ———. “Quiet Is Not Silent.” Perf. DJ Madeskimo, Philippe Brault, Guido del Fabbro, and Taqralik Partridge. CBC Radio, 27 June 2008. ———. Taqralik. Myspace, n.d. Web. Accessed 23 Dec. 2013. ———. “Taqralik Patridge [sic], ‘Battery.’ ” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 12 Jan. 2011. Web. Accessed 23 Dec. 2013. ———. “Taqralik Patridge [sic], Poem for CBC re the Prime Minister’s Apology.” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 11 Jan. 2011. Web. Accessed 23 Dec. 2013. Qallunaat!:  Why White People Are Funny. Dir. Zebedee Nungak and Mark Sandiford. Beachwalker Films and National Film Board of Canada, 2006. Film. Qallunajatut (Urban Inuk). Dir. Jobie Weetaluktuk. Igloolik Isuma Productions, 2005. Film. Van Camp, Richard. The Lesser Blessed. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1996. Print. ———. Angel Wing Splash Pattern. Wiarton, ON: Kegedonce, 2002. Print. Warrior, Robert Allen. Tribal Secrets:  Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994. Print. Yahgulanaas, Michael. Red: A Haida Manga. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2009. Print.

Chapter 11

In/Hospi ta bl e “ Ab origina l i t i e s ” in C ontemp ora ry Indigenous Wome n’ s Writi ng Julia Emberley

Like other discourses of knowledge developed in the pursuit of cultural imperialism, “aboriginality” occupies a significant place in the history of colonial epistemic encounters and contestations. “Aboriginality” refers to the history of representation deployed by settler colonies to circumscribe the meaning of Indigenous existence, including social, political, and economic values and cultural knowledge.1 This representational history, perpetuated through an oppositional and hierarchical duality of savagery/civilization and permeating European philosophical and ethnographic discourses of the late nineteenth century, came to substitute for the actual experience of Indigenous peoples and nations. Furthermore, Indigenous people were not permitted access to dominant technologies of representation, including print media and visual forms such as film, photography, and later, television. In spite of this exclusion, over the last 40 years, Indigenous people wrote, engaged in cultural production, and created a body of work that addressed both their experience and this history of representational violence. More recently, through the revitalization of Indigenous epistemologies, many Indigenous writers have taken up themes of political kinship and an ethics of hospitality to re-create dynamic forms and new representational techniques that bring into dialogue Indigenous storytelling and mainstream literary forms. In tandem with this critical engagement with the history of representational violence exist several challenges to specific forms of social violence against Indigenous people, including a political movement to expose violence toward Indigenous women, a significant number of whom have gone missing and have been murdered in Vancouver’s

210    Indigenous Literatures and Contexts Eastside, notably at the hands of two serial killers over a period of 30 to 40 years in the late twentieth century and well into the twenty-first.2 Four authors discussed in this chapter, Jeannette Armstrong, Marie Clements, Lee Maracle, and Eden Robinson, wrote plays, novels, and film scripts that placed the lives of Indigenous women and youth, and their kinship relations, at the forefront of decolonizing representational practices. Other political practices that emerged at the same time as this body of work include the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP), 1993–96, and the Indian Residential School Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), 2009–15. The testimony gathered for the RCAP Report (1996) and the TRC exposed the damaging effects of the residential schools, to which Indigenous children from across the country were forcibly sent. Not only were children severed from their kinship families and communities, they were also brutally violated and exposed to various forms of social, psychological, physical, and importantly, spiritual harms, that in their totality created a comprehensive form of eradication of a people and their way of life. Representational violence and social violence worked concurrently to interrupt the flow of knowledge from elders, parents, and other adult kin to youth and children. Such knowledge not only provided Indigenous children with an essential understanding of their history, values, and identity, it also carried an epistemological orientation that, through particular techniques, militated against the formation of nation-state powers used to secure the oppression and exploitation of, among other things, women’s reproductive potential and their central role in the politics of kinship relations.3 This essay examines the rewriting of aboriginality by contemporary Indigenous cultural practices that lie at the intersection of cultural and political modes of representation. Specifically, I will discuss how the encounter between Indigenous and Western epistemologies has reconfigured the limits and possibilities of intimacy, friendship, and other political kinships in postcolonial Indigenous nations through a discussion of Lee Maracle’s Ravensong, Marie Clements’s The Unnatural and Accidental Women, Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach, and Jeannette Armstrong’s Whispering in Shadows.4 Initially, however, I want to discuss further the concepts of aboriginality and hospitality in the decolonizing context of Indigenous ways of knowing and critiquing the colonial settler-nation.

Aboriginality and Decolonization Cultural representation has an enormous impact on viewers, readers, and consumers. It shapes the perception of people, often homogeneously identified on the basis of gendered, sexualized, class, race, or Aboriginal markers. The body becomes a script on which to write the meanings and values of a hierarchical society that draws lines between the privileged and the dispossessed, a ruling elite and the governed, the human and the non-human. Those who control the technological means of representational reproduction produce images needed to maintain these distinctions as hierarchically

In/Hospitable “Aboriginalities”   211 oriented social and political positions. This form of control over how technologies of representation culturally represent groups of people for the purpose of maintaining economic and political power over actual people constitutes a form of representational violence because of the real material effects that cultural representation has on peoples’ perception of themselves and others as self-determined political leaders and cultural producers. “Aboriginality,” as a cultural form invented by settler and European nations to signify the identities of Indigenous peoples and their ways of life as essentially savage, was deployed in opposition to the mutually intertwined European and settler North American constructions of civilization. The savagery/civilization divide constitutes the most significant binary opposition used by White European settlers to determine hierarchical relations between themselves and Indigenous peoples during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Emberley 2007). As if to fill in the gap of knowledge left in the wake of removing Indigenous children from their kinship-oriented communities, films such as those produced in the genre of Westerns, photographs taken by inveterate explorers or surveyors and other government employees, books written to demonstrate the settler life and its challenges, and drawings or paintings representing the settler experience of the forest, the bush, or the landscape created a wealth of images with which to contain Indigenous peoples. These images would become a representational force in shaping Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples’ sense of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit identities, values, and ways of life. Spurred on by the historical forces that gave way to the rise of new social movements in the 1960s, including the American Indian Movement, and the intellectual shifts in cultural studies that saw the development of theories and methods for the analysis of power, culture, and society, Indigenous writers took hold of the field of representation in an effort to combat decades of identitarian and representational violence. The Stó:lō writer Lee Maracle is a notable figure because her entry into publication in the 1970s, with Bobbi Lee, Indian Rebel (1975), was initiated through two men who saw in her political activism and life story a unique platform for challenging state power in the United States and Canada. Irrespective of the political use of her work in the service of a leftist cause, Maracle republished a revised version of her life story solely under her own name as Bobbi Lee: Indian (1990). She has gone on to write fiction, poetry, and critical essays that focus on Indigenous knowledge and settler/Indigenous relations, attending to the interwoven diversity of gendered, racialized, and intimate Indigenous relations, notably in works such as her 1993 novel Ravensong. Jeannette Armstrong, Okanagan scholar, poet, and novelist, and Maria Campbell, Métis autobiographer and playwright, also wrote in the context of this earlier and continued engagement with Indigenous experience, highlighting the losses and suffering endured as a result of the Indian Act, especially its effects on women and children. The continued development of anti-colonial cultural and political movements in the 1980s opened up the pursuit of knowledge to questions of justice and, for Indigenous peoples especially, decolonization. Multiple decolonizations exist today that span governmental and legal jurisdictions with an emphasis on land and treaty rights, as well

212    Indigenous Literatures and Contexts as human rights, largely with reference to anti-racist and sexist institutional contexts. In addition to the political stream of decolonization is a cultural movement to bring Indigenous storytelling into the realm of various cultural practices in order to educate and heal, in Jo-Ann Episkenew’s words, the heart and the mind. While cultural and political domains of representation appear to be worlds apart, I contend that they do intersect in the pursuit of justice, and in particular, in the pursuit of an ethics of nonviolence. This decolonizing ethics of nonviolence aims to bring about a “reconciliation” between the disparate peoples of the settler nation. While the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission represents a federal government-directed strategy for mandating the truth of the history of abuses associated with the residential schools, other forms of “reconciliation” are also on the minds of Indigenous writers and artists. In the discussion of three works of fiction, I examine a cultural mode of reconciliation that emerges in these works through figures of hospitality and friendship.

Hospitality and the Indigenous Uncanny The concept of hospitality became a central concern of the French poststructuralist Jacques Derrida (see the Derrida listings in the Works Cited). Interestingly, his ideas on hospitality can be traced to the ethnographic record, where early European explorers, and subsequent ethnographers and anthropologists, noted the significance of the politics and ethics of hospitality (Emberley, “Epistemic” and Testimonial). Important to establishing hospitable relations is the idea of welcoming the stranger into one’s home or community. Ceremonial practices enable a process of formally recognizing the stranger as an element in establishing cultural belonging across various and different tribal, linguistic, and cultural realities. Thus, the relationship to “the stranger” is a defining aspect of cultural belonging, where to know one’s culture is to know that it differs elsewhere and for others. To welcome “the stranger” is to open the self and the community to new knowledge, to establish a basis for economic exchange, and to forge political kinships. Today, in the nation of Canada, “the stranger” has uncannily become Indigenous peoples themselves. And the domain of cultural representation has been at the root of their estrangement within the nation. Strangely enough, however, it has also become the basis for a continuing process of defamiliarization, in which Indigenous writers have taken back storytelling modes of representation and have created a new place from which to invite the reader, listener, or viewer in, so that she or he can take part in a process of re-envisioning Indigeneity today. On their own terms and within Indigenous epistemological frameworks, writers and artists are decolonizing the history of representational violence, and are doing so through a process that I term the indigenous uncanny.

In/Hospitable “Aboriginalities”   213 In my recent book, The Testimonial Uncanny: Indigenous Storytelling, Knowledge, and Reparative Practices, I examined a selection of Indigenous storytelling from Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand (that is, Aotearoa) that enables a reader’s or listener’s understanding of Indigenous spirituality as a knowledge practice attuned to creating and strengthening affiliative and filiative kinships between and among humans, animals, nature, and ancestors or spirits. The indigenous uncanny is intended to provide a way to conceptualize how this practice accomplishes several decolonizations: one being to decolonize European knowledge, specifically Freud’s psychoanalytical approach to spirituality as a pathological agent within late nineteenth-century imperial configurations of civilization. Departing from Freud’s well-known essay “The ‘Uncanny,’ ” I examined how his use of the figure of “Primitive Man” and his discussion of intrauterine existence served to link the figures of horror, fear, and the non-human. Furthermore, I set out to critique how, through contemporary notions of infantilization, feminization, and domesticity, he represented Indigenous spirituality as pre-scientific and non-rational in order to situate such knowledge “outside the episteme,” to borrow Michel Foucault’s phrase. Today, postcolonial scholars such as Dipesh Chakravorty are challenging this Eurocentric view of spirituality, explaining that one must “take gods and spirits to be existentially coeval with the human, and think from the assumption that the question of being human involves the question of being with gods and spirits” (Chakravorty 16). Another decolonization strategy brings into view how Indigenous storytellers re-imagine kinship affiliations/filiations in the aftermath of the Indian residential schools. The Indigenous uncanny opposes the formation of systems of power that can harm or destroy kinship relations between peoples, animals, the land, and the genealogical histories of the ancestors. Through a constant play of oppositions, a strategy emerges that makes it virtually impossible to fix one side of a duality as canonic or binding. In this way, power does not solidify or become a fixed entity. Within the Indigenous uncanny, immobility or fixedness are constantly undone, introducing a state of flux that refuses the formation of hardened or irrefutable regimes of “truth.” The struggle against power is thus a struggle against immobility, stagnation, and conservatism. Indigenous storytelling, although varied among Indigenous peoples as well as specific to places and the genealogies of kinship ties, does in its contemporary manifestations embody a collective spirit of change in how we learn to engage critically with the world(s) we share and inhabit. Contemporary Indigenous storytelling appears in various forms: novels, plays, film, poetry, dance, street performances, and art installations. The storytelling aspect that runs through this varied media is like a thread that sutures together, perhaps in an effort to repair a wound, those human relations that have been torn apart by the institutional violence of the state. In the Indigenous uncanny, the scene of telling is one of connecting, more often than not, to those who are no longer alive, but whose memory and life stories provide guidance for those who still endure the violence of the colonial-settler nation-state. In particular, the reader will invariably encounter an element in the story that is designed to teach them something they need to know to have good relations with others. In Lee

214    Indigenous Literatures and Contexts Maracle’s novel, Ravensong (1993), it is the hypocrisy of religious institutions and the damage such institutions do to the energy needed to keep spirit alive and well that the reader must be warned of. In her play The Unnatural and Accidental Women (2005), Marie Clements brings to the fore the misogyny of state legal and policing institutions that do not defend the vulnerable who are disempowered by these institutions. They are consumed by those who retain enough “privilege” to be able to execute the violence of the state. I am speaking here about the murdered and missing women of Vancouver, and elsewhere, whose deaths, often at the hands of serial killers, have been repeatedly ignored by federal and provincial governments who are reluctant to investigate deeply how it is that Indigenous women have become the target of instrumental serial murder. In his novel Three Day Road (2005), Joseph Boyden tells us about the damaging effects of patriarchal religious institutions and their influence on Indigenous men who forget how to nurture, as in protect, themselves and others. The result is a loss of the spirit to addiction and self-harm. In Whispering in Shadows, Jeannette Armstrong draws on the figure of the artist and her language of colour as a way to create meanings and values that can combat the exploitation and destruction of the land, the body, and the spirit. Each of these works of Indigenous storytelling creates a scene of telling in which the reader must look inward toward his or her ways of being and consider what is at stake in our relationship to other humans, as well as to animals, ancestors, and the natural world. Spirits belong to the living, and not the dead, although Freud tried to overturn this perception in his scientific re-writing of the uncanny, based on a European Gothic tradition that re-enforced a fear of “shadows” and those who deal in them. Colonialism kills the spirit; the spirit leaves the body, and then the body dies. In the Indigenous uncanny, however, the body returns to the earth and thus becomes “spirit,” as expressed in the concluding poem to Whispering in Shadows, “earth love”: I said that I would Give my flesh back but instead my flesh will offer me up and feed the earth and she will love me. (296)

Shadow Stories and the Reparative Text Ravensong foregrounds the life of a young Salish woman, Stacey, who is at a point in her life when she needs to learn about the complexities of human intimacy and social belonging. Stacey observes the hypocrisy of “White town,” and how hypocritical

In/Hospitable “Aboriginalities”   215 Christian attitudes toward sexuality, love, and human reproduction lead a young White woman named Polly to kill herself. Polly’s death is the apparent catalyst for Stacey’s gaining knowledge of Salish protocols concerning intimacy and their social practices. These protocols are designed to protect the interests of a young woman in learning about her relationship to family, self, love, and reproductive knowledge. Stacey is a “bridge figure,” who must literally cross over a bridge to “White town” to experience her own alterity in its “world.” Nevertheless, she perseveres in order obtain the knowledge she needs to survive the colonial world she intends to enter to obtain a university degree. In the trickster narrative of the novel, the Raven’s song, it is the catastrophe that becomes an uncanny figure for bringing to light what has been kept hidden. Polly’s suicide is one such catastrophe, as are the epidemics that killed many Indigenous peoples in the early twentieth century. The use of physical catastrophes to implant a tangible sense of loss is a very common technique in Indigenous storytelling. However, there is just as often a shadow event that, by its very nature, is less tangible and, thus, more difficult to comprehend, such as “social illnesses,” demonstrated by events that drive a wedge between people and make it difficult to survive or endure. Such storytelling is about the restoration of human relations as the very basis of what it means to be human, contrary to an ideology of individualism that runs through the more dominant and contemporary driving forces of “Western” society. In an earlier incarnation of storytelling, people would gather, face to face, to listen and tell stories. They would use their bodies, and especially their voices, to cajole and entice, seduce and manipulate, invite and insist, that you, the listener, become complicit with the storyteller’s vision. In visual, digital, and print technologies of representation at our disposal today, Indigenous writers and artists often trick—or more accurately, trickster—us into paying attention. The Raven is very close to Celia, Stacey’s younger sister. She is the one who feels his presence the most keenly, and it is the suicide of her son, 33 years after the events in which the present novel takes place, and which the reader discovers only at the end of the novel, that is the real “subject” or “shadow” of the story. While the reader witnesses Stacey’s coming to terms with women’s sexual and intimate agencies, reproductive histories, and the political kinships that cross over heterosexual and homosexual sexual practices, the reader, herself, is left with a more difficult problem by the conclusion. She must attend to the question of why Celia’s son killed himself. What, for instance, are the consequences to mental and emotional health in the context of the sort of hypocrisies that are rampant throughout Canadian society with regard to sexuality and young people? We, the readers, the ones who have been invited in to share the telling, are left with the work of thinking through this question based on the story Maracle has constructed for us, to help guide us, as the Trickster Raven does, through the difficult terrain of human association—or the lack thereof. Constitutive of the Indigenous uncanny is this serious play with opposites, of overturning expectations, or defamiliarizing the experience of reality, so that the reader can gain insight, or see things differently—for instance, that a story about coming together is really a story about driving apart, and the consequences of the latter for human life.

216    Indigenous Literatures and Contexts Gerald Vizenor coined the term survivance to describe how Indigenous storytelling is about survival, about the human depths of a survival that is not only physical but also oriented toward emotional, intellectual, and spiritual health. Survival is about maintaining spirit, being able to ward off hypocrisy, misogyny, racism, and other socially manufactured illnesses that threaten one’s well-being and the will to live. Many scholars refer to the pedagogical aspect of Indigenous storytelling, but just what it is we are learning also needs to be considered. To use novels, dramatic forms, and other genres to think about kinship relations and to make use of storytelling technologies to achieve such thinking are the very basis of storytelling “technique”: to make use of the materials or technologies at hand to tell a “shadow story,” another story that is also a way of teaching and learning about the human predicament and its current needs, spiritually, ethically, intellectually, and emotionally. In Ravensong, the shadow story is the untold story of Celia’s son and the manner of his death, a story that remains untold but is implicated in questions of sexuality, disease, and social hypocrisy. One can only guess why he killed himself. Needing to know, however, is the spur to a narrative of justice in decolonization. In The Unnatural and Accidental Women (2005), Marie Clements, who is Métis, explores the dark terrain of how it is that Indigenous women often become estranged from their kin and end up living in the impoverished zone of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, sometimes working as prostitutes for money for drugs and alcohol. Becoming a stranger to their families and communities is what leaves them vulnerable to serial killers such as Philip Jordan and Robert Pickton.5 Clements’s play is often described as surreal in that the realities she brings into existence on the stage are populated by spirits and other uncanny figures, such as animated dresser drawers. The “shadow story” in her play is spurred on by the spirits of the women murdered by the serial killer Philip Jordon, and especially, how professional authorities in the public domain, such as the coroner, failed to account for these women’s deaths. They are labeled “accidental and unnatural,” which meant that their deaths were not considered murders. This inability to “see” the reality of the deaths of these women prompts an exploration of the “unseen” or invisible aspects of social life, which requires the insight gained from the realm of spirits to comprehend why these women were murdered and how their murders went unrecognized. To render the unseen seen, Clements defamiliarizes the estranged lives of the women involved in the context of a daughter’s search for her mother. Various characters, based on the names of the real women murdered by Jordon, appear in their own vignettes, struggling with an existence that eventually finds them sitting in Jordon’s barber chair, killed by forced consumption of fatal levels of alcohol, their braids cut off and stored in a drawer in the shop. Through the mediation of a Disney-type story, the audience is told about a young child, likened unto a deer, who is fostered out of her Indigenous community to a White family. This “family” eventually abandons her to the seemingly “natural” Indigenous environment, only to see her killed by a White hunter when she tries to return to the only “family” (i.e., the White family) she has ever known. A woman sits in her room alone, trying to contact her family on the phone, only to be met with a meddling switchboard operator and a recorded voice-mail

In/Hospitable “Aboriginalities”   217 message. Her disconnection is filled and fueled by alcohol consumption, which eventually leaves her prey to Jordon’s designs. In the form of spirits, the murdered women return to kill The Barber. It is the sacred energy of justice that is performed at the conclusion of the play, correcting the lack of attention and insight on the part of the coroner and police to recognize the fact that these women were murdered by a serial killer. In the play, Rebecca, a young woman in the present who is searching for her mother, is impelled by “mother love,” which becomes the key sacred energy that can combat the desolation of the individual women. This “mother love” is the emotional tie that was broken by the Indian Act and its discrimination against Indigenous women, and by the residential schools and fostering-out programs of the 1960s, which severed the young from their mothers and communities—all in the name of “civilizing” the Aboriginal by attempting to assimilate her or him to White society. What is important to recognize here is that it was Indigenous women’s bodies and reproductive potential that was targeted by colonial government policies to achieve the cultural genocide of Indigenous political, social, and economic systems based on a kinship mode of reproduction. This cultural genocide led to the politics of dispossession experienced by Indigenous women, leaving them vulnerable to serial killers and other forms of violence and oppression. The unrecognized slaughter of Indigenous women continued—or continues—to do the work of the colonial nation-state. To be estranged from the land, the country, the nation, the community into which one is born constitutes the mode of dispossession experienced by Indigenous peoples, in general, and Indigenous women and children, in particular. This “dispossession” occurs at the level of the female body and the reproductive rights of women. It also occurs at the level of kinship, familial relations that are biological and political—in a sense, bio-political, since biology is itself always already a political language inscribing the right to belong to someone or to a state, for instance. To awaken society to the forms of estrangement to which Indigenous people have been subjected requires a fiction of defamiliarization. This storytelling epistemology works to turn estrangement into a visible and material reality, a graspable entity, but one that can only be comprehended partially and provisionally. It is as if a tissue or membrane has torn away and one can see over to the other side. In Indigenous storytelling, the land of dead ancestors or kin, a land populated by spirits, constitutes this other side, a place that reflects back to the viewer or the reader a space of representational unfamiliarity by which to see anew the construction of colonial settler-state realities of dispossession and estrangement. In other words, one can see them for what they truly are. Only through the experience of estrangement or defamiliarization can the estranged be rendered visible. The land of the dead, the land of the spirits, is a hospitable place, alluring and seductive as a place of no pain or suffering. While many may visit, often they cannot stay. They must return to the living and provide knowledge of how to live with suffering. Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach (2000) is just such a story. Like Ravensong, Monkey Beach begins with a catastrophe, and like The Unnatural and Accidental Women, it involves a disappearance, in this case, the disappearance and presumed death of the central

218    Indigenous Literatures and Contexts character’s brother, Jimmy, who has gone missing on a fishing boat a few days before the novel's timeframe begins. In Monkey Beach the historical roots that give rise to the journey that the protagonist, Lisamarie, will take to the land of the dead and back—a journey based on a modern telling of the Haisla Spirit Canoe Journey—are located in the Indian residential schools. Her uncles and aunts were direct victims of residential school sexual abuse, and its effects register in Lisamarie’s life and that of her brother Jimmy and his girlfriend, Karaoke, in specific ways. The intergenerational transfer of sexual abuse supplanted the forbidden transmission of Indigenous knowledges and spiritual practices in the Indian residential schools, creating scenes of violence that either turned inward toward the self-inflicted violence of suicide and alcoholism, as in the case of Lisamarie’s Uncle Mick and Aunt Trudy, or outward toward the youth in the community, as in the rape and violation of Karaoke. The logic of substitution that pervades the transfer of intergenerational violence is represented visually through a seemingly innocuous postcard originally sent to Mick’s friend Josh from a priest at the school. Toward the end of Monkey Beach, Lisamarie finds the altered postcard: In the pocket of Jimmy’s brown leather jacket, I  found an old photograph and a folded-up card. The picture was black-and-white. Josh’s head was pasted over a priest’s head and Karaoke’s was pasted over a little boy’s. I turned it over: Dear Joshua, it read. I remember every day we spent together. How are you? I miss you terribly. Please write. Your friend in Christ, Archibald. I asked Karaoke about it later, and she uncomfortably said it was meant as a joke, Jimmy was never supposed to find it. But she wouldn’t look at me, and she left a few minutes later. Jimmy’d picked it up the same way I had. The folded-up note card was a birth announcement. On the front, a stork carried a baby across a blue sky with fluffy white clouds. It’s a boy! was on the bottom of the card. Inside, in neat, careful handwriting it said, “Dear, dear Joshua. It was yours so I killed it.” (365)

The image itself undergoes a reiteration from the original postcard, with Josh as a boy and the adult priest expressing his desire for Josh, to a new iteration in which the posture of seeming love and desire becomes a scene of violence and abuse. Robinson thus shows how the legacy of residential schools had destructive effects on the kinship relations of subsequent generations. By defamiliarizing the image, the originary violence is exposed and its violence is laid bare not only for Karaoke, who it is implied has had an abortion, but also for Jimmy who loves her and has apparently killed Josh for what he did to her. In her work of Indigenous epistemological storytelling, The Sasquatch at Home (2011), Robinson focuses on traditional protocols and their reconfiguration in Monkey Beach. In keeping with protocols of naming and introducing herself, Robinson begins with her Haisla and Heilsuk national affiliations and the story of her naming ceremony. She then teaches us about nusa, the way that stories teach protocols of kinship relations, by telling us a story about her visit to Graceland, home of the late Elvis Presley, with her mother.

In/Hospitable “Aboriginalities”   219 The influence of this story is apparent in Monkey Beach through Lisamarie’s name as well as other popular culture references. In her journey to Graceland in The Sasquatch at Home, Robinson observes her mother’s engagement with the stories of Elvis, his life and home, and especially his mother’s bedroom: I turned my Walkman on and began the tour. Halfway through the first room, I realized Mom wasn’t with me. I found her staring at a white bedroom with purple furniture. I was about to explain the headphones to her when I realized she was trembling. “This is his mother’s room,” she said. We spent a week in Memphis, and I got the immersion course in Elvis. But there, at that moment, while Mom was telling me stories about Elvis and his mother, I was glad we’d come here together. (11–12)

In the second of the three stories that Robinson recounts in The Sasquatch at Home, she tells a story in relation to her father and the importance of the oolichan fish, through which she reveals the history of where her family and clan come from and the importance of oolichan grease as a valued commodity in trade. She writes: “If the oolichans don’t return to our rivers, we lose more than a species. We lose a connection with our history, a thread of tradition that ties us to this particular piece of the Earth, that ties our ancestors to our children” (23). If the first story is about origins, the second one is about loss and mourning. The third story is about healing, performed with reference to the medicinal plant, the oxasuli. In this story, Robinson talks about her father and the stories of the Sasquatch, a figure that pervades the novel Monkey Beach: “My father said the b’gwus, as Sasquatch are called in Haisla, had clans and families, their own songs and feasts. In the stories that Ma-moo-oo told him when he was a child, b’gwus meant Wild Man of the Woods, and he thought they might not be ape-like creatures at all, but exiles who had been banned from their villages and had gone to live where they wouldn’t be harassed and that it was loneliness and isolation that made them so strange” (35–36). Her father also tells her that “[l]‌ong ago,” … some Haisla people were camping on the beach. When they woke up, the sacks of cockles they’d collected were emptied, the shells sucked clean. Footprints, large and strange, trailed into the woods. That night, they heard it, a howl not quite wolf, not quite human. “You don’t see them around any more. Some people say they’re extinct,” Dad said. “But they’re not. They’re up in the mountains somewhere, and they’ve built a mall and they’re too busy driving around and shopping to visit us anymore.” (39)

As Robinson narrates the stories she has collected from her father as they travel together on the water in a boat, she concludes when they are getting ready to leave, “No hungry Sasquatches here today.” To which her Dad replies, “They must be at home … writing” (41). Robinson is herself the illusory figure of the Sasquatch, inhabiting the wilds of the imagination, occasionally bringing to voice and text the howl of the Sasquatch, who demands to be heard. The conclusion of her award-winning novel, Monkey Beach, remembers this

220    Indigenous Literatures and Contexts voice in order to remind the reader that the voice is still there: “Close, very close, a b’gwus howls—not quite human, not quite wolf, but something in between. The howl echoes off the mountains. In the distance, I hear the sound of a speedboat” (Monkey Beach 374). The governmental discourses of decolonization currently dominate many of the legal and legislative concerns involved in achieving a just resolution to such an unjust practice as the Indian residential schools; nevertheless, there is more to justice and decolonization than the legislative accounts of violence in the colonial context. The Indigenous arts and humanities have a great deal to offer about how to think an ethics of nonviolence. Such a “thinking through,” however, may have less to do with thinking (that thunderous clap of Reason before the storm), than about defamiliarizing colonial history and opening one’s eyes to the storytelling insights of Indigenous writers whose work insists on generating a howl or a cry that can no longer be silenced. This is what, I would venture to say, Indigenous storytelling does best: it resists the forces of cultural genocide by bringing into existence, again and again, the unforgettable event, through a process of defamiliarization and a hospitable practice of storytelling that invites the reader in to unlearn and relearn the meaning of kinship.

“It’s All in the Story and How It Unfolds” If the howl in Monkey Beach represents a voice that will not be silenced, in Whispering in Shadows, it is its opposite, a whisper—“That waking murmur low,” enunciated in Pauline Johnson’s poem “Moonset” and included at the beginning of the novel—that will not be silenced. Armstrong’s novel creates a state of flux across several oppositions: the present and the past, light and dark, the artistic and the pragmatic, desire and impotence. The transit between this play of oppositions is carried out through several narrative techniques, including letters to sisters and “sisters,” prose pieces linked by a maternal genealogy among daughters, mothers, grandmothers, and even great-grandmothers, Penny’s internal monologues, and poetic interludes from Penny’s diary. The text is like an assemblage constructed from the fragments that remain after the catastrophe that was, and perhaps still is, colonization—a history defined by the Canadian nation-state’s willful destruction of the cultural, political, and economic histories of Indigenous people. As the emphasis on “in” in the title denotes, Armstrong’s novel is about talking in shadows, where shadows constitute a language. This shadow-language is the language of the central character, an artist named Penny. Penny, from the Okanagan First Nation, is a modern-day Copper Woman,6 whose language and political economy create meanings and values about kinship with people and the land in opposition to global and local capitalisms. For Penny, working through the possible alliances between mainstream environmental activism (such as that practiced by organizations like Greenpeace) and West Coast

In/Hospitable “Aboriginalities”   221 Indigenous land-claims politics, such political activism is in danger of overlooking “the communities which are still connected to the land in a healthy way as an opposing force to [capitalism]” (147). Both personally and politically, Penny chooses to live in her community and to allow the life of the natural world to guide her vision of a just and meaningful life. The story of Penny’s life is a story of generation, degeneration, and regeneration, of the cycle of life and death that is being tampered with by environmental destruction and the genetic manipulation of food and life. The result is a “culture of discontent,” where “[c]‌ommunity has come to mean a collection of people, unrelated strangers, living side by side. A town, a city. An uncaring and dangerous place” (274). But even this world of discontent still retains the “shadows of the new world inside her body” (276). This “new world” is not the European version that brought the exploitation and destruction of Indigenous ways of knowing and being, but a new world that is to come. As a sign of the body’s inability to deal with the forces of degeneration, Penny succumbs to cancer. At the end of her life she learns that I knew that putting images out there changes the world, yet I feared the shadows. I know now that one should not fear them. The story must be told to be understood and changed. One should leap into the void and let the wind carry you. And then things new come. I never knew how to cross that line … saints and sinners are alike, too, in everything under the sun. It’s all in the story and how it unfolds. (293)

The trickster figure Coyote appears in Whispering in Shadows to disclose the many ways humans distract themselves from the here and now, falling prey to all sorts of “political solutions” and yet finding even in those solutions, uncannily, additional sources of alienation. The Indigenous uncanny makes readable, as it were, the bizarre state in which Indigenous people find themselves, so radically estranged from a society they form the basis of, yet in which they are only “recognized” insofar as they remain invisible to the mainstream. Storytelling processes of defamiliarization make it possible to comprehend this estrangement, based on the breaking of hospitable kinship relations that lead to suicide in Ravensong, the death of many Indigenous women in The Unnatural and Accidental Women, the death of Lisamarie’s brother, Jimmy, in Monkey Beach, and Penny’s death in Whispering in Shadows. The restoration of kinship ecologies by Indigenous writers today creates a new mode of hospitablity as the reader, viewer, and listener become privy to stories and struggles that genuinely create a way to see and hear what was previously unseen and unheard—what lies in the shadows.

Acknowledgments Many thanks to Nandi Bhatia and Teresa Hubel for reading an earlier draft of this chapter and providing thoughtful comments that helped me to shape the text into its present form.

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Notes 1. Further to the history of images of Indigenous peoples, see Francis and Vizenor. 2. Amnesty International, in conjunction with the Native Women’s Association in Canada, launched a campaign called “Sisters in Spirit” in 2004 in order to draw attention to this specific form of violence directed against Indigenous women. In Defamiliarizing the Aboriginal, I discuss this work in greater detail with reference to the instrumental attempt on the part of the Canadian state to eradicate Indigenous women’s kinship ties to their nations, families, and communities. 3. Further to the specificity of Indigenous women’s issues, and intersections of race, gender, and sexuality to colonial settler, political, and social formations and Indigenous feminist resistance, see Suzack et al., and Smith. 4. Note that in the title of Armstrong’s novel, the word in is italicized; in order to signal this, I have set it in plain type when italicizing the title. 5. Gilbert Paul Jordan was suspected of killing nine Native women from Vancouver’s downtown eastside during the mid-1960s to the late 1980s. His method involved inducing excessive intoxication in the woman through alcohol. He was finally arrested for manslaughter in the death of Vanessa Lee Buckner in 1987 and served six years in prison for the murder. “ ‘The underlying reason why he [Jordan] went on so long is that cases involving native women are taken very lightly,’ said [Irene Richards, ‘Indian family counsellor’]. The view was echoed by Fran Johnson, whose sister Velma Gibbons died after drinking with Jordan: ‘It was just another dead Indian to them. If they were white, they would have done something quicker’ ” (“Race Bias Charged in Jordan Case”). Robert Pickton, another serial killer who preyed on Native women from Vancouver’s downtown eastside, was convicted of the murders of six Native women in 2007 and sentenced to imprisonment with no parole for 25 years, which is the longest possible sentence imposed under Canadian law for murder. 6. Despite the controversy surrounding Anne Cameron’s Daughters of Copper Woman (see Emberley 94–96), her collection of stories (told from a non-Indigenous perspective) retells the origin stories of Copper Woman, the First Woman of the Okanagan nation.

Works Cited Armstrong, Jeannette. Whispering in Shadows. Penticton, BC: Theytus, 2000. Print. Boyden, Joseph. The Day Road. 2005. Toronto: Penguin, 2008. Print. Cameron, Anne. Daughters of Copper Woman. Vancouver: Press Gang, 1981. Print. Chakravorty, Dipesh. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2000. Print. Clements, Marie. The Unnatural and Accidental Women. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2005. Print. Derrida, Jacques. “Hospitality.” Acts of Religion. Ed. Gil Anidjar. New York: Routledge, 2002. 66–69. Print. ———. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes. New York: Routledge, 2001. Print. ———. “The Principle of Hospitality.” Paper Machine: Cultural Memory in the Present. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2005. Print.

In/Hospitable “Aboriginalities”   223 ———. “Step of Hospitality/No Hospitality.” Of Hospitality:  Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA:  Stanford UP, 2000. 75–156. Print. Emberley, Julia. Defamiliarizing the Aboriginal:  Cultural Practices and Decolonization in Canada. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2007. Print. ———. “Epistemic Encounters: Indigenous Cosmopolitan Hospitality, Marxist Anthropology, Deconstruction, and Doris Pilkington’s Rabbit-Proof Fence.” English Studies in Canada 34.4 (2008): 147–70. Print. ———. The Testimonial Uncanny: Indigenous Storytelling, Knowledge, and Reparative Practices. Albany: SUNY Press, 2014. Print. ———. Thresholds of Difference:  Feminist Critique, Native Women, and Postcolonial Theory. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1993. Print. Episkenew, Jo-Ann. Taking Back Our Spirits: Indigenous Literature, Public Policy, and Healing. Winnipeg: U of Manitoba P, 2009. Print. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. London: Tavistock, 1972. Print. Francis, Daniel. The Imaginary Indian:  The Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp, 1992. Print. Freud, Sigmund. “The ‘Uncanny.’ ” 1919. Trans. James Strachey. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 17. London:  Hogarth, 1955. 219–56. Print. Maracle, Lee. Bobbi Lee:  Indian. Fwd. Jeannette Armstrong. Ed. Viola Thomas. Toronto: Women’s P, 1990. Print. ———. Bobbi Lee, Indian Rebel: Struggles of a Native Canadian Woman. Ed. Don Barnett and Rick Sterling. Vancouver: LSM, 1975. Print. ———. Ravensong. 1993. Vancouver: Press Gang, 2002. Print. “Race Bias Charged in Jordan Case.” Vancouver Sun 22 Oct 1988. Canadian Newsstand. Web. Accessed 10 Jan. 2009. Robinson, Eden. Monkey Beach. Toronto: Vintage, 2000. Print. ———. The Sasquatch at Home: Traditional Protocols and Modern Storytelling. Edmonton: U of Alberta P, 2011. Print. Smith, Andrea. Conquest, Sexual Violence, and American Indian Genocide. Cambridge, MA: South End, 2005. Print. Suzack, Cheryl, Shari Huhndorf, Jeanne Perreault, and Jean Barman, eds. Indigenous Women and Feminism: Politics, Activism, Culture. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 2011. Vizenor, Gerald. Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance. 1994. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1999. Print.

Pa rt  I I I

L I T E R A RY P E R IOD S A N D  G E N R E S

Chapter 12

Reading, W ri t i ng , an d Speaking of C ontac t Explorations from Both Sides Jennifer S.H. Brown and Frieda Esau Klippenstein

For many people, “first contact” evokes memories of schoolbooks that introduced North American history with dramatic accounts of intrepid explorers and flag-planting “discoverers of the New World” meeting primitive peoples for the very first time. History survey texts have long divided the history of the Americas into phases such as prehistory or pre-contact, contact-period, and post-contact, arranging their timelines around the great moments of Europeans’ arrivals in various places. They leave the impression that the newcomers, fortunate in their ability to write down their observations, were the ones who started the history clock ticking; before they came, history and change were unknown, or at least unrecorded. Explorers’ writings have long provided readers with discourses of heroic, literate men and their voyages, framed in a progressive linear chronology satisfying to the Europeans who laid claim to the newly found lands and peoples across the ocean.1 Times have changed. As Aboriginal people discovered the places they were assigned in outsiders’ stories—in starting the White men’s history clocks—they responded by setting forth their own perspectives, reclaiming history on their terms. In 1989, to cite one small but effective example, the Dene Cultural Institute published a picture and story book in which Dene people along the Dehcho (Mackenzie) River gave their views on first contacts. “Mom, We’ve Been Discovered” combines history, images, and cartoons (e.g., “It must be too late to organize a Department of Immigration,” 39). The Dene creators of the book remind readers gently and firmly that they understand their past quite differently from Alexander Mackenzie and other intruders who came down their river. So how do we assess and situate the Europeans’ literature of “discovery,” of first encounters between the “Old World” and the “New”? In popular culture, such stories

228   Literary Periods and Genres still stand as foundational, placing the genesis of Native-Newcomer relationships within larger narratives of colonialism and conquest. First Nations descendant communities, however, have retained their own versions of early encounters with strangers and have assigned to them historical and literary meanings that diverge widely from those of the Europeans. The elucidation of the stories from both sides requires delving into a range of complex issues surrounding their creation and transmission, while exploring their multiple and shifting motivations and purposes. This chapter explores these issues and selects for study some evocative first-contact stories drawn from the Atlantic coast, from Hudson Bay, and from British Columbia, where the formidable Rocky Mountains long served as a barrier to the European traders’ push westward.

Contact Narratives as History and Literature On both sides, accounts of first contact are stories of intrigue and suspense. They describe times full of danger and possibility, liminal spaces of first impressions and gut reactions. Those who met began without shared understandings or a common language—only expressions, tones, and gestures; posturing, pantomime, and efforts to interpret. They could not tell whether a meeting would be friendly or violent, a comedy or a tragedy. Heroes and villains emerged as the dramas played out and as the stories were retold. First encounters also often involved efforts to negotiate exchanges of items that each party desired from the other and valued quite differently. The Europeans might acquire canoes or snowshoes, furs and leather items, or foodstuffs such as meat or fish, essential for their travels or even survival. Aboriginal people received manufactured goods such as axes, knives, glass beads, mirrors, and copper kettles, which were novel and useful, and upon which they might confer meanings and powers quite foreign to the donors. Firearms were associated with thunder beings. The bright colours of beads and cloth and the special qualities of metal items fostered their use in ornamental and ceremonial contexts and in mortuary observances as grave goods. As Laurier Turgeon observed, “What Europeans considered to be baubles and bangles were to Amerindians objects of ideation” (42; see also Hamell). But these first meetings involved much more than exchanges of material objects. The “middle ground”2 of these encounters set the stage for new expectations, hopes, and anxieties. The need to deal in entirely new languages and social structures whose strangeness was not even yet recognized brought a profound awareness of a larger world, a consciousness of selves versus others, spheres in which fears, ethnocentrism, and stereotyping could flourish, along with efforts to communicate and find bases for understanding. European first-contact narratives echo many themes found at the heart of some of the oldest universal dramas of travel and travail: those of the Israelites in the Torah, of

Reading, Writing, and Speaking of Contact    229 Homer’s Ulysses in the Odyssey, of Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, Leif Ericson, and others. The literature of first contacts also finds parallels in modern science fiction, transporting readers to an exotic universe peopled by characters utterly unfamiliar and outlandish. Like the genres of travel literature and science fiction, first-contact narratives tell of encountering people, places, or experiences so jarringly “other” that all previous rules and assumptions do not apply. Aboriginal accounts, of course, also entail meeting alien peoples, but they have different reference points. Rather than telling of long-distance travelers crossing frontiers or getting lost and imagining where they might have arrived (for example, Columbus, or more obscurely, Captain Thomas James in Hudson Bay fancying that he was on the way to Japan [Brown, “Rupert’s”]), Indigenous narratives usually recount surprise visitations by foreign beings. Sometimes these visitors are viewed mistakenly (and usually briefly) as higher beings or mythological figures, or sometimes more accurately as trespassers. Their appearances are often interpreted with foreboding as ill omens or fulfillments of prophecy. The fact that the first consequences of European contact (notably disease and resulting social disorganization) often had far-reaching effects, even before most Aboriginal people ever encountered the strangers face to face, likely contributed to such foreshadowing. Scholars over the past several decades have generated a significant body of literature on first contact, taking a variety of approaches. Some have published Aboriginal narratives, listening with care to the storytellers’ voices and their ways of telling (e.g., McClellan, Cruikshank). Others have compared cultural concepts of history (Nabokov), connections between myth and history (Hamell), or how Indigenous texts are constructed and symbols developed and conveyed (Harkin). Some studies reveal how cultural blind spots regarding the “other” shape the contact stories: for example, the phenomenon of Aboriginal people mistaking European explorers for gods, spirits, or ghosts (Haefeli), or of Europeans assuming the savagery or heathenism of those they met (MacLaren, “Caledonian”), or of each party wrongly perceiving evidence of cannibalism in the other (Thrush). The quest to understand first-contact narratives has increasingly moved beyond seeing the stories as primarily historical evidence to appreciating their qualities as literature, with the depth of meaning and possibilities that this perspective adds. The essays in John S. Lutz’s Myth and Memory: Stories of Indigenous-European Contact (2007) take a multidisciplinary approach as historians, anthropologists, linguists, and literary critics analyze and reflect on various first-contact texts and issues. They expand our view of the genre beyond written texts and oral stories to include other media such as theatrical performances and visual representations. Placing the narratives in the realm of intercultural encounter, they challenge the traditional privileging of European perspectives and texts. They also sharpen our awareness of what the stories communicate about people in a “zone” of contact. Mary Louise Pratt succinctly defines contact zones as “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination” (4). Such zones have endured through the centuries since first contacts. Their dynamics are continually expressed as the stories from both sides still continue and collide in the present day.

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The Power of Audiences and Editors Recent analyses also emphasize that first-contact narratives need to be understood as culturally constructed discourses, limited by perspective and shaped by conscious and unconscious forces. While European first-contact stories exude apparent authority as the testimonies of eyewitnesses who “were there,” they are never simply faithful renderings of what happened.3 For one thing, their audiences were never far from the writers’ minds, even if geographically distant. As elsewhere in the colonial world, most Europeans recording first encounters in North America kept their journals as reports for their employers or expedition sponsors. Surveyors and explorers such as Samuel Hearne, David Thompson, and Simon Fraser reported to the fur-trade companies employing them, while the missionaries of New France reported directly to church authorities. All had vested interests in presenting themselves as the heroes of their stories, or at least as maintaining control of volatile situations and not making any terrible mistakes. Travelers and their sponsors also became aware of much larger potential audiences for their writings. Literate Europeans were fascinated by discovery stories from the New World and expected to be intrigued, shocked, amused, or instructed by them. Readers’ expectations affected the course of the narratives’ evolution into printed form. Editors and ghostwriters commonly revised original texts to assure their publication and sales. Unfortunately, many published versions became accepted as primary sources, taken at face value as faithful, unmediated accounts. Close investigation, however, reveals their problematic origins and histories, showing that they have their own storied histories. In fact, every narrative that reached the stage of print had a checkered or even mysterious history at the hands of copyists, editors, publicists wanting to satisfy a market or attract certain constituencies, translators, or others who meddled with the originals—if indeed the manuscripts survived their journeys home intact. The example of Jacques Cartier is “notorious,” to quote I.S. MacLaren, who has explored the histories of several revered explorer texts. The problem with Cartier’s so-called record of his explorations is that “no known manuscript writings exist in the hand of the ‘discoverer’ of Canada” (MacLaren, “Herbert,” 189 n17). The texts of his three voyages (1534, 1535–36, and 1541) followed long, mysterious trajectories before being published at different times and in different languages. Yet as Ramsay Cook (x–xi) observed in his edition of the Cartier voyages, readers rely on this “fragile tripod” for the details of Cartier’s encounters with the Mik’maq, and then, more fatefully, with Donnacona and his two sons, and the other Iroquoians of Stadacona. Do “details” and the lack of original manuscripts matter? Indeed they do, to judge by MacLaren’s examinations of the publishing odysseys of Samuel Hearne’s travels with the Chipewyans and Paul Kane’s purported narrative, Wanderings of an Artist—instances in which MacLaren had sufficient source materials to track versions of these works through different hands and to compare their different incarnations (see MacLaren, “Herbert,” 189 n17 for citations of his

Reading, Writing, and Speaking of Contact    231 studies). Excesses of editorial polishing (or suppression), plagiarism from other writings, misattribution of authorship, and basic errors in transcribing names and words from one to another handwritten or printed text are among the many pitfalls we face. It is all too easy, as MacLaren warns, “to overlook the complexity of the textual evidence in favour of clearer claims based on the inferred authority of the eyewitness” (“Herbert” 91). Further, when we rely on such texts to cross the gulfs between different cultures and languages, the problems multiply. Venerable written documents and their authors hold an enduring power and authority that the Indigenous objects of their pens and printings could not have imagined. Of course, early explorers themselves were part of the problem, being typically naïve and ethnocentric in their views of others. But even the efforts of professional anthropologists to represent the lives and words of their “informants” present cautionary tales, as H. David Brumble warns in his essay on “Editors, Ghosts, and Amanuenses” (75–82). The problem for all those who enter “contact zones” is that no party ever enters with a blank slate. Europeans arrived, as Lutz reminds us, “full of expectations, ideas, and stereotypes: what they found was—in large measure—what they expected to find” (2).

Literary Influences—on Both Sides Aboriginal people also framed first contacts in terms of their expectations and worldviews. Characters and events that outsiders viewed as beyond the “real world” and in the realm of the mythic or magical populated their stories. For example, western Canadian Aboriginal first-contact narratives sometimes include Transformer or Trickster characters, most notably in the story cycles on the Pacific Slope. The Transformer, known by such names as “Xá:ls” (literally meaning “to change”), is the central figure in Coast Salish mythology (Suttles 185). During a primordial age when things were still in flux, he traveled through the land transforming people into rocks, plants, or animals, and creating the world as it exists today. In one example (as later described), Simon Fraser and his men were mistaken as the returned Transformer. The Trickster, also from the mythological age and sometimes appearing as Coyote, Mink, or Raven, thrives in the space of misunderstandings, for which the contact stories provide rich ground in the mistranslations of the words, meanings, and intentions of the strangers. Other recurring motifs in the Aboriginal accounts are comedic episodes—poking fun, for example, at the people’s shocked reactions to the first sight of ships or common trade items such as matches, mirrors, and guns, which are described with metaphors and similes as means of making the strange familiar (see Moore 69–99). This tactic appears even as the element of surprise is often mitigated by casting the visitations as expected arrivals foretold by Indigenous prophets. While analysts often point out “mythic” elements in the Aboriginal accounts, we must note that European travelers also had expectations, fears, and fantasies influenced by mythic literature and, later, mytho-scientific understandings embedded or emergent in

232   Literary Periods and Genres their culture. In older European accounts, the encountered “other” can seem strangely familiar, reminiscent of the giants in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), the cannibals in Daniel Dafoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1717), the various monsters in Milton’s or Dante’s underworlds, or the Philistines and other dangerous strangers in the Old Testament. By the late eighteenth century, scientific writings were much influenced by, for instance, Linnaeus’s botanical and biological classification schemes in the emergent discipline of “natural history.” Pratt finds that writers accordingly created “a picture of the planet appropriated and redeployed from a unified, European perspective” (36). In the century that followed, Europeans subjected peoples of the world to a variety of classificatory schemes based on racial and social-evolutionary thinking. The immensely popular work The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion similarly influenced the scholarly work of many anthropologists in the early twentieth century. First published in 1890, and expanded from two to 12 volumes by its third edition (1906–15), this work by Scottish scholar George James Frazer reviewed a vast range of story, myth, and symbol to propose an evolutionary model whereby human societies progressed from magic to religious belief, and finally to scientific thought. Its compelling depiction of Aboriginal peoples as superstitious primitives, incapable of the logic and reason of Europeans, was widely accepted by pre-Boasian social scientists who lacked the tools and perspectives needed to demystify and begin to understand other cultures on their own terms. European first-contact stories could also serve a psychological purpose, providing confirmation of a worldview that must have been deeply consoling. Reading about the hardships and dangers of the wilderness, Europeans could feel grateful for their own comforts and advantages, while descriptions of the “primitives” and “savages” provided reassurance of their status as civilized and superior people. In turn, the accounts provided a powerful political rationale for conquest and empire building. Pratt emphasizes that this expansionism was reinforced by the burgeoning eighteenth-century European obsession with scientific exploration (15), which in turn confirmed Europeans as carriers of a superior civilization. In tandem with these views, the legal concept of terra nullius provided justification for Europeans to claim “uninhabited” lands—that is, lands considered to lack permanent settlers and used only by people who ranged about “like beasts in the woods” (Dickason, Canada’s 153).

Seeking Balance: Reading and Listening across Languages and Cultures If explorers as “eyewitnesses,” and editors and publishers shaping their accounts to public tastes, tended to confirm what their readers already believed to be true, how useful are the partial truths in their fragmentary, biased, and often much redacted records?

Reading, Writing, and Speaking of Contact    233 For all their limitations, these narratives shed light on at least some dimensions of the early and sometimes seminal encounters between Europeans and Indigenous people. It would be a mistake to dismiss the texts linked with Cartier, Hearne, and others because of their flaws. Tracing their paper trails, and bringing to bear clues arising from other sources of their times and from archaeology, linguistics, and other disciplines, we can still learn a considerable amount. The two lists of Aboriginal words found in the Cartier texts, for example, show that the Frenchmen were meeting people who spoke a Northern Iroquoian language—not “Iroquois” as sometimes stated, but related to Huron, which was later much better documented. As linguist Wallace Chafe observes, “we are in the dark concerning the person or persons who elicited these words, from whom they were elicited, and when and where the elicitation took place” (253). But the Iroquoian words, even mistranscribed or mistranslated, offer reminders of the dynamics of contact as partial or failed communication. The Frenchman who asked for the word for “salmon” received the term for the pot in which the salmon must have been sitting. A request for the word for “bronze” elicited the word for “ring,” presumably worn on someone’s finger (Chafe 254). It is worth mining these documents for all their veins of ore and dross; the dross itself has something to tell us. And sometimes other writings come to light to complement such texts. For example, a sixteenth-century author, Andre Thevet, told of certain Aboriginal beliefs about the soul as recounted by one of Cartier’s Iroquoian kidnap victims—“Donacona [who] died in France … speaking French, for he had lived there four years” (Chafe 253). Beyond recognizing the limitations of these documents and reading beyond them, we need to seek out and listen to the best possible Aboriginal sources and stories on early contacts. This work presents challenges. Few older Aboriginal stories about such meetings were ever faithfully recorded without rewriting or dubious insertions of content congenial to what listeners or editors wanted to hear. For example, Marc Lescarbot, who met the senior Mik’maq chief Membertou at Port-Royal (Nova Scotia) in 1606–07, reported in his 1609 History of New France that Membertou told him that when he was “already married and the father of a family he had known Jacques Cartier” (Campeau 500). Cartier had met Mik’maq people for a few days on the shore of Chaleur Bay in the summer of 1534, 72 years earlier. Membertou doubtless had seen earlier Europeans along the coast as increasing numbers of ships and fishermen came by, but he and the Mik’maq had no reason to learn or remember Cartier’s French name—aside from the issue of whether Membertou was even old enough to be a father in 1534. Lescarbot made an interpretive leap, wanting to hitch a famous forebear to what he heard. Some Aboriginal stories, however, were listened to and better served by their outsider listeners. In the 1860s, an American explorer and journalist, Charles Francis Hall, visited an island at the mouth of Frobisher Bay, just north of the entrance to Hudson Bay. On discovering remains of buildings, mining trenches, and puzzling artifacts, he spoke with local Inuit who told him that a long time ago, White men had come first in two ships, then two or three, then many. Their detailed oral memories of Martin Frobisher’s three voyages to the bay in the 1570s, three centuries earlier, complemented European accounts of Frobisher’s sailing and mining enterprise, giving added meaning to recent

234   Literary Periods and Genres archaeological work on the expedition’s remains (Auger et al., 263–64, 278, 284). The interdisciplinary integration of written texts, oral stories, and material culture in this instance has greatly enhanced multidimensional understandings of all these forms of information. The best opportunities to hear Aboriginal stories of early contacts have come when the finest of storytellers could speak to receptive listeners with time enough to hear them out, in settings where they were at ease with sharing all that they know. Wendy Wickwire, writing from her experience working with Salishan storyteller Harry Robinson, highlights “the benefits of undertaking intensive work with living Aboriginal historians,” adding that “such communicative experiences force us to question the composition of the mainstream records. … and break down the sharp lines that we have drawn between myth and history” (Wickwire, “Stories” 138–39). Robinson’s stories, she points out, “have mythological associations but they also have a context. Knowing, for instance, that neither he nor his storytelling tradition supported fictional accounts (indeed, the very concept was a foreign one) opens new possibilities for the interpretation of myth. Rather … instances where myth and history merge … can be taken as serious reflections on the past” (130). Hudson Bay Cree storyteller Louis Bird has retold several old stories where myth and history combine to express Cree understandings about early contacts with outsiders. In 2003, one of us, Jennifer Brown, had the privilege to work with him as part of the Omushkego Oral History Project at the University of Winnipeg. The first Cree-European encounters in Hudson Bay date back to the early 1600s. Louis Bird undertook to record all the stories he had learned that evoked those earliest meetings. Their significance does not lie in dates, chronology, or names of explorers. Rather, they evoke themes and values embedded in Cree thinking. With regard to encounters with strangers and other worlds, powerful knowledge may come from spiritual beings or dreams, or both. In Bird’s story, “Cha-ka-pesh and the Sailors,” for example, a small mystical man lives with his domineering older sister, who is wise through her dreams and warns him of dangers. But on hearing strange sounds out on the Bay, he disobeys and flies as a seagull to explore—and finds a sailing ship, something his sister has dreamed of as happening in the future (Bird 154–56). Bird’s other tales tell of strange sounds and sights on Hudson Bay—ships’ guns firing and flashing like thunder and lightning, tall masts and sails seen far out on open salt water where Cree people in canoes would not venture (Brown 21, 22). There follow episodes of personal meetings—a ship gets grounded on tidal mud flats, and Cree people come to help get it afloat at high tide and receive some gifts in return, notably the first steel ax (Bird 157–60). Tellingly, the Hudson Bay Cree term for “White men” is we-mis-ti-go-si-wak, “men with wooden boats” (Bird 26; Brown 21). Aboriginal terms for newcomers commonly encapsulate striking features of equipage or behaviour that struck people as new and strange—linguistic echoes of early contacts. Louis Bird’s stories tell of mysterious yet relatively benign first signs and encounters that opened the way for a long fur-trade period on Hudson Bay. Contact stories from farther south often have darker themes of conflict and trouble. An old story told by Ojibwe elder Omishoosh (Charlie George Owen) of Pauingassi, Manitoba, in the

Reading, Writing, and Speaking of Contact    235 1990s foreshadowed the impact of intensifying trade competition. In “Waabitigweyaa, the One Who Found the Anishinaabeg First,” Ojibwe contact with European goods and their benefits begins with the arrival of a stranger whose name, in their language, connects him with Quebec and traders from the east; “That’s when the Anishinaabeg were rich with things.” Then, however, other White men come, identified in the story as “Kwampanii.” This borrowed term, “Company,” turns up elsewhere as the Ojibwe term for the Hudson’s Bay Company. The Kwampanii is powerful, does not like the Anishinaabeg, and fights to dominate the trade and defeat Waabitigweyaa, ending the competition. The story then melds company and government power into one: “The appropriation is very evident today. The wealth of kwampanii. … That’s the government’s wealth” (Owen in Brown and Roulette, 168–69). Similarly, several Lenape (Delaware) stories recalling, over two centuries, the arrival of the Dutch at the mouth of the Hudson River (Rementer 49–61) are mild in tone but evoke the Europeans’ power and wealth, recalling the clever tricks by which the strangers laid claim to more land than the Lenape expected to give them. Contested possession of land is a recurring theme in many contact stories as they highlight basic differences between Aboriginal and European concepts of ownership and foreshadow a history of colonial takeovers and imbalances of power.

Stories from the Far West First-contact accounts from the interior of what is now British Columbia provide fruitful opportunities for study. Because these European-Aboriginal meetings occurred much later than those east of the Rocky Mountains, written texts are more likely to have survived, and contemporary First Nations’ stories about them are often only a few generations removed from their origins. Written accounts of Alexander Mackenzie’s famous 1793 journey through the Peace River mountain pass to Bella Coola, of Simon Fraser’s journey onto the plateau in 1806 and his 1808 voyage down the Tacouche Desse (later “Fraser River”), and of David Thompson’s 1810–11 Columbia River expedition have all survived, albeit mostly in published forms subject to the pitfalls of transmission noted earlier. The journals are rich chronicles of encounters with people who received the strangers with varying degrees of surprise, kindness, suspicion, and hostility. They are paralleled by a wealth of preserved Aboriginal accounts, as the Pacific slope attracted intensive scholarly attention from the late 1800s onward from such ethnologists as Franz Boas, James Teit, Edward Sapir, Marius Barbeau, Diamond Jenness, Charles Hill-Tout, and others more recently.4 Simon Fraser’s journey down the Tacouche Desse River in 1808 left a particularly rich legacy of stories from both sides. When Fraser’s party of over 20 men reached the “forks” (junction of the Fraser and the Thompson rivers), they were warmly received by the “Hacamaugh” (Nlaka’pamux), who offered them feasts and regaled them with singing and dancing. On 19 June 1808, Fraser described a curious event where the “principal

236   Literary Periods and Genres chief ” brought him to a camp where some 1,200 people were sitting in rows. After he shook hands with “all of them,” the Great Chief made a long harangue, in course of which he pointed to the sun, to the four quarters of the world and then to us, and then he introduced his father, who was old and blind, and was carried by another man, who also made a harangue of some length. The old [blind] man was placed near us, and with some emotion often stretched out both his hands in order to feel ours. (87)

Fraser concluded, “The respect and attention, which we generally experience, proceed, perhaps, from an idea that we are superior beings, who are not to be overcome” (88). Nlaka’pamux accounts of this meeting collected by James Teit in the late nineteenth century confirm the matter. As one Nlaka’pamux woman commented: “Very many people thought they were the beings spoke of in tales of the mythological period, who had taken a notion to travel again over the earth” (qtd. in Wickwire, “To See” 11). This understanding is exemplified in a Nlaka’pamux account of an event on 21 June 1808, when Fraser’s party suffered a traumatic near-loss of several men and three canoes in turbulent rapids shortly downstream from Lytton. As transcribed by James Teit: Many years ago, but at a time long after Coyote had finished arranging things on earth, he appeared on Fraser River in company with Sun, Moon, Morning-Star, Kokwela, numuipEm (“diver”) and SkwiaxEnEmux (“arrow-armed person,” “person with arrow arms or shoulders”). … Continuing their journey, and when in the middle of the river, a short distance below Lytton, the Moon, who was steersman of the canoe, disappeared with it under the water. The others came out of the water and sat down on a rock close above the river. Then SkwiaxEnEmux fired many lightning arrows, and numuipEm dived many times into the river. The Sun sat still and smoked; while Coyote, Kokwela, and Morning-Star danced. Coyote said, “Moon will never come up again with the canoe”; but Sun said, “Yes, in the evening he will appear.” Just after sunset, Moon appeared holding the canoe, and came ashore. All of them embarked, and, going down the river, were never seen again. This is the only time Coyote has appeared since the end of the mythological age. (qtd. in Laforet and York 41–42).

Although it may initially seem unrelated, Simon Fraser’s detailed journal account is of the same event. Fraser recorded that he and another officer were called out of their tent, “alarmed by the loud bawling of our guides, whom upon looking out we observed running full speed towards where we were, making signs that our people were lost in the rapids” (90). Fraser described finding one of the men, Mr Quesnel, standing alone and helpless on shore, while “one of the canoes and some of the men” were visible on the opposite shore. From this they “had reason to believe that the others were either ahead or perished, and with increased anxiety we directed our speed to the lower end of the rapids” (90). About four miles downstream, they found another of the men, La Chapelle, carrying packs he had rescued. Yet further, they caught up to D’Alaire, “walking slow

Reading, Writing, and Speaking of Contact    237 with a stick in his hand” (90). Washed ashore, he was “so wet, so weak, and so exhausted that he could scarcely speak” (90). He reported that the “foreman” and “steersman” of his canoe had managed to swim ashore. Trapped under the thwart, D’Alaire had almost drowned before the canoe shifted when the other two released, allowing him to escape and to climb and straddle the overturned canoe. He was in this precarious position as the canoe plunged over two or three “cascades,” the last being a drop from such a height that the canoe struck the bottom, splitting in half. Clutching a piece of the canoe, D’Alaire had “drifted three miles among rapids, cascades, whirlpools, etc. all inconceivably dangerous” (Fraser 91–92). Wickwire is impressed by the similarities between Fraser’s “factual” and the Indigenous “contextual” accounts, especially the remarkable accuracy of the Nlaka’pamux descriptions of such details as the travelers’ behaviour and the canoe crews. She concludes, “Even my preliminary research suggests that Nlaka’pamux accounts of their initial encounters with whites are an important and reliable historical record” (“To See” 18). Jarold Ramsey, who comprehensively compared the accounts, proposes that the prominent vocabulary of mythology in the Indigenous version effectively functions to “imaginatively transform” real but highly strange events according to its system, so that the people could assimilate such events and “believe” in them (164). Some early histories of British Columbia make much of the newcomers being mistaken as “sky-people,” and Simon Fraser as “son of the sun” (McKelvie). Wickwire suggests that this perception was partially connected with a large silver brooch Fraser was prominently wearing and later gave to the chief of the “Camshins” (Fraser 95). In any case, Aboriginal “reverence” for the newcomers was not universal. As Fraser’s party approached the Pacific Ocean, they experienced increasingly hostile actions on the part of their Indigenous hosts. For five long days (2–6 July 1808), the expedition constantly dodged disaster until they finally retreated upriver, paddling for their lives to escape the pursuit of “Masquiamme” warriors. In the end, Euro-Americans found a place in Salishan history as transformers of a certain type—as “change” certainly followed. But the enduring term for Euro-Americans in the Halq’eméylem language was not “sky people” but Xwelítem, meaning simply “hungry people” (Carlson, You Are Asked ii).

Contact Stories as History, Literature, and Sources of Power On both the Aboriginal and newcomer sides, memories of and reflections on contact have generated oral and written literatures that merit analysis of motifs, style, and idiom, as well as content. Like all historical accounts, first-contact narratives were and are affected by the motivations and purposes of their narrators, both European and Aboriginal, past and present. Like all literature, they contain multiple meanings and are filled with mystery and possibility. As the stories are performed and re-performed in

238   Literary Periods and Genres oral storytelling, pageants, poetry, movies, and various written formats, timelines may become reordered, characters inserted, and events conflated or expanded. Historians have sometimes held that textual records are more accurate, because at least they change less. The above examples, however, show that it can be just as difficult to pin down an author’s original meanings from written and published texts as from oral versions. And as Indigenous oral traditions have overwhelmingly been collected by anthropologists, their texts have undergone significant alterations through translation, and as scholars and others have transcribed them into textual forms suited to their own conventions and desires. As a consequence, we have largely lost the meanings encoded in oral language and discourse and embedded in the storytellers’ pauses, nuances, and facial expressions, through which irony, humour, sarcasm, or hyperbole are communicated. Historians argue over whether the Aboriginal accounts are “just stories,” or “real history,” but such arguments risk missing a central point about their importance. Even though both Indigenous stories and European written narratives are so clearly vulnerable to alteration, the first-contact stories remain of profound historical and current relevance as a part of our shared European and Aboriginal histories. In fact, as Lutz notes, “All over the world, settler populations and indigenous peoples are engaged in negotiations regarding legitimacy, power, and rights” (“Introduction” 1). Rather than fading in significance, first-contact stories have gained new currency and serve contemporary ends, affirming identity and connections with places, and sometimes serving in court cases. Whether mined for literal details or read between the lines for symbolic and metaphorical meanings, they hold invaluable clues, not only about the motivations and understandings of the players, but also about what actually happened. The accounts retain meaning and value when they are allowed to stand, resisting appropriation and defying efforts to reconcile them into a unified narrative. As they are collected and compared, the accounts illuminate each other, whether speaking in counterpoint, in opposition to each other, or in harmony. Julie Cruikshank noted the social power of storytelling while examining how Yukon elders structured and performed their narratives. In The Social Life of Stories, she emphasized the need to investigate “the social systems in which all of our narrative accounts are embedded” (120) and to recognize how narrative and history “reciprocally shape one another” (164). Wayne Suttles (“Private Knowledge” 501) provided a poignant case in point for the Salishan people of the lower Fraser River, where memory of one’s individual and community history was central to status and survival. In traditional Stó:lō society, people of higher class were those who possessed private or guarded language. Essentially, they knew where they came from—they valued and preserved their genealogy and could explain how they got their potlatch name, with its associated rights to resource areas such as the best fishing spots, drying areas, or cranberry bogs. Others who had “lost” their history, their links to the past, could not defend their rights to resource areas, and risked becoming slaves or dependents (see also Carlson, “Reflections”). For the Stó:lō, great power resided in stories, and serious consequences arose from their loss.

Reading, Writing, and Speaking of Contact    239 The idea that there is a connection between the traditional stories and the essential foundations and bonds of human communities, between remembering one’s history and maintaining one’s identity and place in this world, is a valuable insight. As first-contact stories persist, re-emerge, and find contemporary applications, they find new life beyond the aging schoolroom history textbooks, continuing to capture and challenge imaginations and affirm relationships, while deepening our perspectives and understandings.

Notes 1. Discussed in this chapter are some texts by such well-known explorers as Jacques Cartier, Samuel Hearne, Alexander MacKenzie, Simon Fraser, and David Thompson. Providing important balance to the Eurocentric versions of North American exploration history, we will also draw attention to First Nations’ accounts, which are less known. 2. See Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815, the middle ground being both a geographic area of European-Aboriginal contact and, figuratively, a space for efforts at negotiation and communication. 3. Aboriginal oral traditions collected by anthropologists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries challenged long-accepted notions about the authority of European accounts of Aboriginal peoples on the Pacific Slope. O.B. Sperlin in his 1916 article, “The Indian of the Northwest as Revealed by the Earliest Journals,” surveyed “every known record of first contact between Indians of the Northwest and explorers and traders.” Comparing these texts with oral traditions collected by Franz Boas, James Teit, and others, Sperlin found that errors and misconceptions were rampant in the old texts and was one of the first to offer a revisionist view of these narratives. 4. A rich selection of oral traditions is compiled and edited by Darwin Hanna and Mamie Henry in Our Tellings: Interior Salish Stories of the Nlha7kapmx People (1995).

Works Cited Auger, Reginald, William W.  Fitzhugh, Lynda Gullason, Anne Henshaw, Donald Hogarth, and Dosia Laeyendecker. “Decentring Icons of History: Exploring the Archaeology of the Frobisher Voyages and Early European-Inuit Contact.” Decentring the Renaissance: Canada and Europe in Multidisciplinary Perspective, 1500–1700. Ed. Germaine Warkentin and Carolyn Podruchny. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2001. 262–86. Print. Bird, Louis. Telling Our Stories:  Omushkego Legends and Histories from Hudson Bay. Ed. Jennifer S.H. Brown, Paul W. DePasquale, and Mark F. Ruml. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2005. Print. Brown, Jennifer S.H. “Rupert’s Land, Nituskeenan, Our Land: Cree and English Naming and Claiming around the Dirty Sea.” New Histories for Old: Changing Perspectives on Canada’s Native Pasts. Ed. Ted Binnema and Susan Neylan. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 2007. 18–40. Print.

240   Literary Periods and Genres Brown, Jennifer S.H., and Roger Roulette. “Waabitigweyaa, the One Who Found the Anishinaabeg First.” Algonquian Spirit:  Contemporary Translations of the Algonquian Literatures of North America. Ed. Brian Swann. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2005. 159–69. Print. Brumble, H. David. American Indian Autobiography. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. Print. Campeau, Lucien. “Membertou, Henri.” Dictionary of Canadian Biography. Vol. I. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1966. 500–01. Print. Carlson, Keith Thor. “Reflections on Indigenous History and Memory: Reconstructing and Reconsidering Contact.” Lutz 46–68. ———. “Stó:lō—Xwelítem Relations during the Fur and Salmon Trade Era.” You are Asked to Witness: The Stó:lō in Canada’s Pacific Coast History. Ed. Keith Thor Carlson. Chilliwack, BC: Stó:lō Heritage Trust, 1997. Carlson 41–52. ———, ed. You Are Asked to Witness: The Stó:lō in Canada’s Pacific Coast History. Chilliwack, BC: Stó:lō Heritage Trust, 1997. Print. Chafe, Wallace. “The Earliest European Encounters with Iroquoian Languages.” Decentring the Renaissance: Canada and Europe in Multidisciplinary Perspective, 1500–1700. Ed. Germaine Warkentin and Carolyn Podruchny. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2001. 252–61. Print. Cook, Ramsay. The Voyages of Jacques Cartier. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1993. Print. Cruikshank, Julie. The Social Life of Stories: Narrative and Knowledge in the Yukon Territory. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 1998. Print. Cruikshank, Julie, in collaboration with Angela Sidney, Kitty Smith, and Annie Ned. Life Lived like a Story: Life Stories of Three Yukon Native Elders. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 1990. Print. Dene Cultural Institute. “Mom, We’ve Been Discovered.” Yellowknife, NWT:  Dene Cultural Institute, 1989. Print. Dickason, Olive P. Canada’s First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples from Earliest Times. Don Mills, ON: Oxford UP, 2002. Print. ———. The Myth of the Savage and the Beginnings of French Colonialism in the Americas. 1984. Edmonton: U of Alberta P, 1997. Print. Fraser, Simon. The Letters and Journals of Simon Fraser, 1806–1808. Ed and introd. W. Kaye Lamb. Toronto: Macmillan, 1960. Print. Frazer, George James. The Golden Bough:  A  Study in Magic and Religion. 1890. Toronto: Macmillan, 1976. Print. Haefeli, Evan. “On First Contact and Apotheosis:  Manitou and Men in North America.” Ethnohistory 54.3 (2007): 407–43. Print. Hamell, George R. “Strawberries, Floating Islands, and Rabbit Captains: Mythical Realities and European Contact in the Northeast during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.” Journal of Canadian Studies 21.4 (1987): 72–94. Print. Hanna, Darwin, and Mamie Henry. Our Tellings:  Interior Salish Stories of the Nlha7kapmx People. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 1995. Print. Harkin, Michael. “History, Narrative, and Temporality: Examples from the Northwest Coast.” Ethnohistory 35.2 (1988): 99–130. Print. Laforet, Andrea, and Annie York. Spuzzum: Fraser Canyon Histories, 1808–1939. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 1998. Print. Lutz, John S. “First Contact as a Spiritual Performance: Encounters on the North American West Coast.” Lutz 30–45. ———. “Introduction:  Myth Understandings; or First Contact, Over and Over Again.” Lutz 1–14.

Reading, Writing, and Speaking of Contact    241 ———, ed. Myth and Memory: Stories of Indigenous-European Contact. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 2007. Print. MacLaren, I.S. “ ‘Caledonian Suttee’? An Anatomy of Carrier Cremation Cruelty.” BC Studies 149 (2006): 3–37. Print. ———. “Herbert Spencer, Paul Kane, and the Making of ‘The Chinook.’ ” Lutz 90–102. McClellan, Catharine. “Indian Stories about the First Whites in Northwestern North America.” Ethnohistory in Southwestern Alaska and Southern Yukon: Method and Content. Ed. Margaret Lantis. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1970. 103–33. Print. McKelvie, Bruce A. Fort Langley: Outpost of Empire. 1947. Toronto: Nelson, 1957. Print. Moore, Patrick. “Poking Fun: Humour and Power in Kaska Contact Narratives.” Lutz 69–89. Nabokov, Peter. “Native Views of History.” The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, Vol. 1: North America, Part 1. Ed. Bruce G. Trigger and Wilcomb E. Washburn. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. 1–59. Print. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge, 1992. Print. Ramsey, Jarold. Reading the Fire: The Traditional Indian Literatures of the Far West. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1983. Print. Rementer, Jim. “The Arrival of the Whites.” Algonquian Spirit: Contemporary Translations of the Algonquian Literatures of North America. Ed. Brian Swann. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2005. 49–61. Print. Sperlin, O.B. “The Indian of the Northwest as Revealed by the Earliest Journals.” Quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society 17.1 (1916): 1–43. Print. Suttles, Wayne. “The Plateau Prophet Dance among the Coast Salish.” Coast Salish Essays. 1972. Ed. Wayne Suttles. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1987. 152–98. Print. ———. “Private Knowledge, Morality, and Social Classes among the Coast Salish.” American Anthropologist 60 (1958): 497–507. Print. Thrush, Coll. “Vancouver the Cannibal: Cuisine, Encounter, and the Dilemma of Difference on the Northwest Coast, 1774–1808.” Ethnohistory 58.1 (2011): 1–35. Print. Turgeon, Laurier. “Beads, Bodies and Regimes of Value:  From France to North America, c.  1500–c. 1650.” The Archaeology of Contact in Settler Societies. Ed. Tim Murray. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. 19–47. Print. White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. Print. Wickwire, Wendy. “Stories from the Margins:  Toward a More Inclusive British Columbia Historiography.” Lutz 118–39. ———. “To See Ourselves as the Other’s Other: Nlaka’pamux Contact Narratives.” Canadian Historical Review 75.1 (1994): 1–20. Print.

Chapter 13

Eighteen t h - a nd Nineteenth - C e nt u ry French-C a na dia n Literat u re Andrea Cabajsky

Two major waves of literary nationalism define the period under consideration, that is, the century and a half that opens with the Treaty of Paris and closes with the turn of the twentieth century. The first wave of literary nationalism is bracketed by the Fall of New France (1759–60) and the Treaty of Paris (1763), on the one hand, and the Patriote uprisings (1837–38) and the Durham Report (1839), on the other. Initially, literary production conformed to eighteenth-century notions of “belles lettres,” comprising forms of multidisciplinary erudition in the arts, law, history, philosophy, and theology. This first wave, impelled by the American and French Revolutions (1775–83 and 1787–99, respectively) and the Napoleonic Wars (1799–1815), was energetic and purposive, achieving primary expression in the periodical press, which, E.D. Blodgett notes, represents the “most assertive mode of publication in the period” (51). Bernard Andrès has argued that, in 1763, New France may have “passed from one empire to another,” but, more important for its literary history, it also passed “from one space of reference (Europe) to another (North America)” (“Quebec” 383).1 It has become a historical commonplace to note the absence of a printing press in New France, as Marie de l’Incarnation and Pehr Kalm observed in 1670 and 1749, respectively (Marie de l’Incarnation 883; Kalm 758). The change in space of reference from Europe to North America, together with the arrival of the first printing press in 1764, proved pivotal to French Canadians, who, for the first time, wrote for other French Canadians through local channels. Within these discursive and material contexts, a nascent literature emerged in the form of songs, poems, drama, fiction, and an evolving literary criticism. Spanning the late 1830s to the 1890s, the second wave of literary nationalism was impelled by two textual events:  the publication of the Durham Report and of

Eighteenth- & Nineteenth-Century French-Canadian Literature    243 François-Xavier Garneau’s response to Durham, Histoire du Canada depuis sa découverte jusqu’à nos jours (1845–48, 1852). Garneau’s phenomenally popular Histoire gave birth to a French-Canadian cultural nationalism responsible for the patriotic poems that proliferated at this time, the historical novels that explored cultural origins and national characters, and the novels of manners that advocated attachment to the soil. While genres of literary romance dominated textual production, they did not preclude the development of other movements and subgenres, such as psychological realism and avant-garde poetry, both of which emerged toward the end of the nineteenth century. Literary production in this period comprised fiction and poetry, along with drama, literary anthologies, and literary and cultural histories. The struggle between social liberals and conservatives for ideological and cultural dominance, which originated in the late eighteenth century but culminated in the late nineteenth, at once generated and curtailed literary production, inspiring bursts of literary activity but hindering the development of an autonomous literary sphere. Responding variously to such historical events as Canadian Confederation (1867), the first Acadian National Congress (1881), and the hanging of the Métis leader, Louis Riel (1885), Canada’s francophone communities in the latter half of the nineteenth century shared in common their awareness of being neither French, nor British, nor American. They deployed the materials of print culture to define themselves regionally, from Quebec east to Acadie on the Atlantic coast and west to the Pacific Ocean. Historical and political events shaped literary development, which begins in the cities of Quebec and Montreal, expanding east and west as print culture emerged in francophone communities in Acadie and the Canadian West.

1763–1837 With the ratification of the Treaty of Paris and the transfer of power from France to Britain, New France, which had stretched the length of North America from Labrador to Louisiana, ceased to exist. It was replaced by the Province of Quebec, bordered on the southeast by the Thirteen Colonies, which became, within a generation, the United States of America. Along with these geopolitical changes came, in the sphere of “belles lettres,” a significant change in notions of authorship. Andrès explains that, in the “space of some thirty years, a new ‘generation of writers’ [had] passed from the old image of the scholar to the new concept of the philosopher, from ‘the erudite man of letters’ to ‘the militant man of causes’ ” (“Quebec” 385). Although Quebec had endured military rule between 1760 and 1763, that is, between the capitulation of the French army at Montreal and the ratification of the Treaty of Paris, a public sphere emerged relatively quickly after the transfer of power. The first printing press arrived in the province in early 1764, with William Brown (1737–89) and Thomas Gilmore (1741–73), the founders of the bilingual Quebec Gazette/La Gazette de Québec (1764–1873). The second press followed in 1778 when Fleury Mesplet (1734–94), a conveyor of pro-American attitudes and Enlightenment philosophy, founded La Gazette littéraire de Montréal (1778–79).2

244   Literary Periods and Genres The generational and conceptual shifts to which Andrès refers were fueled by the revolutionary spirit infusing the American colonies to the south (impinging directly on Quebec with the American invasions of 1775–76),3 along with the Enlightenment philosophy of Voltaire (1694–1778).4 Together with these generational and conceptual shifts lies a third, that is, a movement from ethnography, which defines the corpus of New France, to autoethnography. Beginning with documents relating the Canadian voyages of Jacques Cartier (1491– 1557) and Samuel de Champlain (1570–1635), the corpus of New France had been published in Western Europe and was intended for European readers. Michel Biron, François Dumont, and Élisabeth Nardout-Lafarge note that approximately 50 published texts appeared between 1534 and 1763, including travel narratives, diaries, correspondence, histories, and memoirs (1). Some of these early texts bear witness to France’s fervour to uncover the geographical and anthropological scope of New France. They span the continent in the writings of Pierre-Esprit Radisson (c. 1640–1710), Louis Hennepin (1626–1705), the Quebec-born Louis Jolliet (1645–1700), and the Trois Rivières–born Pierre de La Vérendrye (1685–1749) and his sons. Other texts, such as the multiauthored Jesuit Relations (1632–72), variously captured or provoked a clash of civilizations between Europeans and Native populations. Still others questioned the primacy of Western forms of knowledge, such as Baron de Lahontan (1666–1716), whose philosophical Dialogues (1704) with a Huron named Adario constitute, 20 years before the appearance of Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721), an influential attempt to criticize the foundations of the European conscience (see Biron 40). Lahontan preceded others who challenged accepted knowledge, such as Joseph-François Lafitau (1681–1746) and the Jesuit historian (and teacher of Voltaire) Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix (1682–1761). The dozen poems, play (Le Théâtre de Neptune), and history (Histoire de la Nouvelle France)5 by the lawyer Marc Lescarbot (1570–1642) shed invaluable light on colonial society and on the precarious existence of the arts. Considered to be the first European theatrical production conceived and performed in the Americas, Le Théâtre de Neptune was performed at Port Royal, Acadie (today’s Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia), on 14 November 1606, a mere month and a half prior to Shakespeare’s premiere of King Lear in London, England. Taking the form of a court masque, Le Théâtre de Neptune consists of welcoming speeches by Mi’kmaq chiefs who offer the New World to the French King. Despite Lescarbot’s inaugural effort, theatre did not thrive in the colony. By 1694, the Bishop of Quebec, Monseigneur de Saint-Vallier (1653–1727), had banned theatre in New France. It would take another century, if not more, for theatre to recover. The corpus of New France, although largely ethnographic, thus anticipates important cultural and ideological factors that shaped literary development after the Conquest, such as intercultural conflict and the clash between religious and secular points of view. In 1763, the Province of Quebec comprised a hybrid society experiencing unprecedented sociopolitical change. Norah Story describes a primary dilemma facing French Canadians, “a French[-speaking] and Roman Catholic people living chiefly by agriculture under a semi-feudal seigniorial system,” faced with the “new status of the province as part of a British and Protestant empire whose people were accustomed to and

Eighteenth- & Nineteenth-Century French-Canadian Literature    245 demanded representative institutions and were active in … commercial enterprises” (674). The civil reconciliation to which Story refers expressed itself, materially, in the first newspapers launched at this time, many of which were bilingual, including the weekly Quebec Gazette/La Gazette de Québec, the monthly Quebec Magazine/Le Magasin de Québec (1792–94), and the weekly British American Register (8 Jan.–6 Aug. 1803), founded by Brown’s nephew, John Neilson (1776–1848). In La Gazette littéraire de Montréal (1778–79), Mesplet and his partner, Valentin Jautard (1738–87), adapted a hybrid French- and British-style periodical format to post-Conquest Quebec. They did so by following the French practice of encouraging submissions that today’s readers would classify as letters to the editor (Doyon, “Introduction” 5), while adhering to the formula of British-style gazettes, steering clear of politics while entertaining readers with stories, fables, and poems (Doyon, “Introduction” 31). Increasing unrest between the two linguistic communities after the turn of the nineteenth century resulted in an increasingly unilingual periodical press. Some nineteenth-century periodicals, like the anglophone Quebec Mercury (1805–63), launched by Thomas Cary (1751–1823) to represent the interests of English-speaking merchants, and the francophone Le Canadien (1806–93), founded by Pierre-Stanislas Bédard (1762–1829) and members of the Parti canadien, were known rivals. In the post-Conquest period, the idea of “French Canadianness” took root and changed shape depending on the context in which it was deployed. Taken together, early contributors to the two Gazettes based in Quebec and Montreal worked to encourage the development of public opinion, notions of citizenry, and communal identity by apostrophizing French Canadians in their contributions, which variously satirized, celebrated, or evoked political figures and events.6 Noteworthy contributions in this context include poems by Louis Labadie that satirized Napoleon (see Lortie 420), anonymous poems celebrating Nelson’s victory at the Battle of the Nile (known in French as the Bataille d’Aboukir [Lortie 429–30]), and poems by Augustin Raby celebrating the Constitutional Act of 1791, which divided the Province of Quebec into two jurisdictions—Upper and Lower Canada—while retaining French civil law and creating a legislative assembly (Lortie 363).7 These contributions, among others, represent popular responses to historical and political events that would have been lost to literary historians had they not been captured in verse. Furthermore, some poems that respond negatively to the French Revolution represent early expressions of a point of view that would come to be known, in the nineteenth century, as “messianism,” that is, the belief that French Canadians enjoyed a preordained purpose in North America, for, with the transfer of power to Britain, they had escaped France’s perceived social and moral decline after 1789. From the poems published in Montreal’s Gazette to the “Poet’s Corner” featured in the Quebec Gazette/La Gazette de Québec, containing both original contributions and transcriptions of local folk songs, poetry and verse were deployed to serve the society’s activist and preservationist needs. Moreover, in featuring regular, often satirical, responses by Jautard to the form and content of poetic contributions, the Gazette littéraire de Montréal remains noteworthy as the material site of a nascent literary criticism.

246   Literary Periods and Genres Literary historians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were divided in their assessments of the “literariness” of contributions to the Gazette littéraire de Montréal. A paradigmatic example involves James Huston (1820–54) who, in his Répertoire national (1848), the first French-Canadian literary anthology, defined his objective of collecting and disseminating literary texts from the last half-century as an “honneur au pays et à ses écrivains” (v) [“honour to the country and to its writers”],8 while paradoxically describing extracts from the Gazette littéraire as “ces vers médiocres” [these second-rate verses] (Doyon, “Introduction” 10). In the eyes of more recent literary historians, however, the Gazette littéraire remains significant, at the very least for the light it sheds on the growth of a middle-class readership in the late eighteenth century, or on Mesplet’s attempts to call such a readership into being (Andrès, Histoires 172). This influential newspaper’s immediate descendants include Le Canadien, La Minerve (1826–37, 1842– 99), Le Spectateur (1813–29), L’Abeille canadienne (1818–19), and others, variously owned or edited by energetic literary nationalists, including Henri-Antoine Mézière (1771–c. 1819), Ludger Duvernay (1799–1852), and Étienne Parent (1802–74), who encouraged the deployment of “belles lettres” to crystallize public opinion. Some contributors to the Gazette littéraire employed female pseudonyms, such as “Sophie Frankly,” “Félicité, canadienne,” and “Le beau sexe,” among others. By contrast to the women who appear in the corpus of New France, such as Élisabeth Bégon (1696–1755), Marie de l’Incarnation (1599–1672), and Marie Morin (1649–1730), and whose identities remain relatively clear, the actual identities of women authors in the post-Conquest period are difficult to trace given the practice of pseudonymous authorship. Nevertheless, these apparently female authors engendered lively debates, in the pages of the Gazette, about women’s place in the public sphere.9 These debates provide literary historians with invaluable insight into the routes that presuppositions about gender took to inscribe themselves into the emergent literary sphere. Apart from the first newspapers, other significant literary historical texts include works by Luc de La Corne Saint-Luc (1711–84), Pierre du Calvet (1735–86), and Joseph Quesnel (1746–1809). One of seven surviving passengers of the ill-fated Auguste, which sank off the coast of Cape Breton Island on 15 November 1761, Saint-Luc published an account of his three-month return to Quebec, by foot, in the dead of winter. Written in 1762, his Journal du voyage de M. Saint-Luc de La Corne became phenomenally popular, its literary historical significance deriving from its status as “le premier jalon de l’histoire littéraire québécoise” (Lesperance 329) [“the first milestone in Quebec’s literary history”]. It would be revisited by literary nation-builders over the next two centuries.10 A contributor to the Gazette littéraire de Montréal, du Calvet is remembered for his Appel à la justice de l’État (1784), a collection of letters addressed to both British officials and inhabitants of Quebec, openly criticizing the form of government ratified by the Quebec Act (1774) and agitating for a new constitution. Du Calvet contributed to the involvement of citizens, francophone and anglophone, Catholic and Protestant, in a common effort to obtain a legislative assembly for Quebec. His pamphlet fueled the reformism of Joseph Papineau (1752–1841), father of Patriote leader Louis-Joseph, while informing the poetry of Louis Fréchette (1839–1908) who, a century later, eulogized du

Eighteenth- & Nineteenth-Century French-Canadian Literature    247 Calvet as “Le premier des martyrs de notre cause sainte” (225) [“the first martyr of our sacred cause”]. The author of over 30 extant poems,11 along with extensive correspondence,12 Quesnel deserves sustained attention for his operas Colas et Colinette ou le Bailli dupé (1790) and L’Anglomanie ou Le Dîner à l’anglaise (1802), although he is also remembered as a co-founder of the Théâtre de société (Montreal, 1789), devoted to financing and producing drama and opera. Literary historians believe that Colas et Colinette was the first opera, with original music, to have been written and performed in Canada.13 For Maurice Lemire, L’Anglomanie, in which Quesnel satirizes the French-Canadian bourgeoisie’s eagerness to ape British manners, offers unique insight into contemporary intercultural relations (La Vie I:319).14 The literary eighteenth century is significant, not only for introducing autoethnography to Quebec, but also for the discursive and ideological uses to which its corpus was put in the nineteenth century—together with that of New France—by poets (Crémazie, Fréchette), novelists (Aubert de Gaspé, père, Marmette, Conan), and cultural historians (Garneau, Casgrain), among others. The century to come, in turn, witnessed milestones in the institutionalization of French-Canadian literature, such as the naming of French Canada’s first national historian (Garneau) and national poet (Crémazie), along with recognition by the French Academy for Fréchette (1880). Henri-Raymond Casgrain (1831–1904) earned the designation “the father of French-Canadian literature” in part for his efforts to promote the recognition of Quebec literature within Quebec. The fruits of his vast labour include biographies of his contemporaries (Garneau, Aubert de Gaspé, père, and others), publication of Crémazie’s Oeuvres complètes (1882), along with his identification of French-Canadian books for school prizes. The first periodical to pay its contributors, La Revue canadienne (1863–1922) enjoyed unprecedented success in its efforts to professionalize authorship. The early decades of the nineteenth century saw the publication of the first two novels, Philippe Aubert de Gaspé, Jr.’s L’Influence d’un livre and François-Réal Angers’ Les Révélations du crime (both 1837). The remainder of the century witnessed political movements (Patriote uprisings, Confederation), controversies (the hanging of Riel), and events (First Acadian Congress) that shaped, and were themselves shaped by, the forms of print culture that French-Canadian authors deployed within and outside Quebec to build the foundations of multifaceted, yet meaningful, literary and public spheres. Some events catalyzed literary activity more than others, however, with the most notable among them being the publication of the Durham Report and Garneau’s Histoire du Canada.

1837–1900 In upholding the French-Canadian seigniorial system, the Constitutional Act of 1791, which granted voting rights to Catholic landowners, had effectively favoured the French Canadians over the British, the latter of whom were richer in capital than in land. French-Canadian confidence in British benevolent government changed, however, with

248   Literary Periods and Genres the Union Bill of 1822, which, if passed, would have rendered the francophone majority of Lower Canada a minority in the proposed parliament. Louis-Joseph Papineau (1786–1871), the leader of the Patriote party and a coordinating force behind the uprisings of 1837–38, inspired the famous Ninety-Two Resolutions (1834) that articulated grievances against the colonial administration. The 1837 Lower-Canadian uprisings revolved around questions of responsible government, farmers’ concerns about the economic depression, and tensions with the anglophone community, while coinciding with Upper-Canadian rebellions against the Crown. Charged by British Prime Minister Lord Melbourne (1779–1848) with determining the reasons for Canadian unrest, John George Lambton, First Earl of Durham (1792–1840), published the results of his findings in his Report on the Affairs of British North America (1839), whose political and literary historical significance cannot be understated. Identifying “racial” conflict (Lambton 23) as a primary cause of the Lower-Canadian uprisings, Durham recommended political union between Lower and Upper Canada. The ensuing Union of 1840–41 effectively assimilated the French to the English Canadians by securing the cultural and numerical majority of the latter group. In describing the French Canadians as “a people with no literature and no history” (262), Durham aggravated sentiments of oppositional nationalism that had been growing for a generation, if not longer. The early literary history of this nationalism begins in the 1820s and the 1830s, during increasing social and economic unrest, and culminates in the 1840s in the wake of the Durham Report. In the 1820s and the 1830s, French-Canadian literature exerted an increasingly perceptible influence on local writers, with the anonymous short fiction “L’Iroquoise: Une légende nord-américaine” remaining a case in point. First published in English in the Irish-Catholic newspaper, The Truth Teller (New York, 14 July 1827), “L’Iroquoise” was reprinted in French translation in the October and November 1827 issues of La Bibliothèque canadienne (1825–30), founded by Michel Bibaud (1782–1857).15 From there, its plot, which revolves around an impossible romance between a European man and a Native woman, shaped the content of Georges Boucher de Boucherville’s “Louise Chawinikisique” (1835).16 In dramatizing the clash of cultures between Europeans and Natives, Boucherville’s story inscribes itself into a corpus of Romantic-period fiction that includes François-René de Chateaubriand’s Les Natchez (1826) and James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826).17 Further evidence of local influence lies with Boucherville’s short story “La tour de Trafalgar” (1835), which introduced the popular Romantic-period genre of gothic romance to Quebec. Boucherville’s innovations to Romantic-period fiction extend to his adventure novel, Une de perdue, deux de trouvées (serial 1849–51; book 1874), one of a handful of adventure novels to appear in this period that also include Eugène L’Écuyer’s La Fille du brigand (serial 1844; book 1914), Joseph Doutre’s Les Fiancés de 1812 (1844), and the novels of Henri-Émile Chevalier (1858, 1859), among others. Adventure, folklore, and historical fiction intersect in L’Influence d’un livre (1837), whose plot revolves around the quest for gold by a peasant named Charles Amand. The novel, which is peppered with French-Canadian folk songs, customs, and retellings of local legends, has earned the status of Quebec’s first novel, although it was published in the same year as Réal Angers’s Les Révélations du crime (1837), which

Eighteenth- & Nineteenth-Century French-Canadian Literature    249 recounts the violent crimes of a real historical band of criminals while also offering meditations on the criminal mind. Shaped by Romantic preoccupations with attachment to the soil, novels of manners published in this period influenced readers and writers alike. Paradigmatic texts include Patrice Lacombe’s La Terre paternelle (1846) and P.-J.-O. Chauveau’s Charles Guérin (1852), which together anticipate Antoine GérinLajoie’s Jean-Rivard, le défricheur (serial 1862; book 1874) and Jean Rivard, économiste (serial 1864; book 1876). An important two-part novel in the genre of “roman du terroir” or “novel of the soil,” Jean Rivard at once defines and defends the links between agriculture and the national character while also campaigning against the contemporary mass migration from the country to the city. Despite such burgeoning literary influence, however, Garneau’s Histoire (1845–48, 1852) nearly singlehandedly inspired a generation of writers to take up the pen. Deploying Romantic nationalism to revise French-Canadians’ self-understanding, Garneau rejected Durham’s claim that French Canada had no history. The Histoire rewrote the fall of New France from a historical loss into a celebration of French Canadians’ resilience in the face of sustained material, cultural, and political threats to their nationality. In the wake of Garneau, the editors of Les Soirées canadiennes (Quebec, 1861–65), who included Casgrain, Lajoie, F.-A.-H LaRue, and Joseph-Charles Taché, called upon readers to “vulgariser la connaissance de certains épisodes peu connus de l’histoire de notre pays” (see Casgrain, “Prospectus”) [“to popularize little-known events in the history of our country”], thus effectively giving birth to the “Literary Movement of 1860.” The literary journals Les Soirées canadiennes, Le Foyer canadien (Quebec, 1863–66), and La Revue canadienne first published serially many of the books that twentieth-century literary historians recognized as foundational contributions to the national literature. Representative fictional texts include historical novels, such as Philippe Aubert de Gaspé’s Les Anciens Canadiens (Les Soirées canadiennes, 1862), a foundational work of historical fiction set in Quebec in the years that bracket the Fall of New France. Les Anciens Canadiens deploys folklore, descriptions of cultural customs, and the author’s personal memories of life under the French regime to defend the particularity of French-Canadian national character while ultimately advocating intercultural rapprochement between French and English Canadians. Other important novels include Napoléon Bourassa’s Jacques et Marie (La Revue canadienne, 1865-66) and the series of novels by Garneau’s son-in-law, Joseph Marmette, including Charles et Eva (Revue canadienne, 1866–67) and L’Intendant Bigot (L’Opinion publique, May–Oct. 1871). This first generation of historical novelists inspired others, like Edmond Rousseau (Le Château de Beaumanoir [1866], Les Exploits d’Iberville [1888], La Monongahéla [1890]), an avid reader of Marmette, and the first women historical novelists, Adèle Bibaud (Trois ans en Canada [1887]) and Laure Conan (pseud. Félicité Angers, À l’oeuvre et à l’épreuve [1891]). The latter is credited with introducing a psychological dimension to historical fiction in À l’oeuvre et à l’épreuve, a historical novel set in New France at the time of the Jesuit missions in the seventeenth century, while also introducing psychological realism to French-Canadian fiction with Angéline de Montbrun (serial 1881–82; book 1884), an innovative adaptation of epistolary fiction and a meditation on religion

250   Literary Periods and Genres and filial love. Garneau’s influence fueled a discourse of messianism that extended to history proper with Abbé Ferland’s Cours d’histoire du Canada (1861–65), a history of missionary endeavour in New France that defends the place of Catholicism in colonial society. In the growing field of literary history, Edmond Lareau’s Histoire de la littérature canadienne (1874) offered a comprehensive examination of literary development in French Canada that included journalism and natural sciences, along with poetry and fiction, and whose scope extended back to the ancien régime. As they did a century earlier, folk songs satisfied the preservationist needs of cultural historians, including Ernest Gagnon, who compiled the entries in Chansons populaires du Canada (1865), while Casgrain himself compiled local legends in Légendes canadiennes (1876). In the wake of Garneau, the remainder of the century witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of literary activity and a concomitant intensification of ideological conflict. The clash between religious elites and liberals emerged, in part, as a battle between “la bonne presse” and the liberal press, which aimed, respectively, to control and encourage literary production. Jules-Paul Tardivel’s contradictory observation, in the preface to Pour la patrie (1895), was that “Le roman, surtout le roman moderne, et plus particulièrement encore le roman français me paraît être une arme forgée par Satan lui-même pour la destruction du genre humain. Et malgré cette conviction j’écris un roman!” (3) [“The novel, above all the modern novel, and more particularly yet the French novel appears to be a weapon forged by Satan himself for the destruction of humankind. And despite this belief I write a novel!” (3)]. Tardivel’s sentiment captures the attitude of many ultramontanists, who asserted the primacy of French Canada’s Catholic traditions while communicating their ideas through modern print media. Ultramontanists’ influential attempts to ensure the Church’s supremacy in social and political life extended, in the press, to such organs as Les Mélanges religieux (1841–52), Le Courier du Canada (1857– 1901), L’Ordre: Union catholique (1858–71), and Le Nouveau monde (1867–81), among others. Often associated with the Instituts canadiens (Montreal, Quebec, Ottawa),18 the liberal press espoused, in its turn, the principle of “libre examen” (Dostaler 105), or free inquiry. Its organs included, in Montreal, L’Avenir (1847–52) and Le Pays (1852–69), and in Ottawa, Le Progrès (May–Nov. 1858).19 The famous “Guibord case” of 1869–74, in which the Bishop of Montreal, Monseigneur Bourget (1799–1885), refused ecclesiastical burial to Joseph Guibord (1809–69), a founding member of the Institut canadien de Montréal and a former typographer for Le Pays, illuminates the remarkable energy the clergy expended to counter liberal ideology.20 Garneau’s Histoire itself bears the marks of this clash between ultramontanists and liberals, for Garneau was forced to rewrite certain passages after the clerical elite concluded that his religious liberalism was antiFrench Canadian. Whether it first appeared in periodicals or in book form, the poetry published in the latter half of the nineteenth century generally fell within three main categories: patriotic poetry, satirical poetry, and intimate poetry. The preferred form of literary commentators and critics, patriotic poetry achieved early expression in poems by the historian, Garneau, and exemplary expression in poems by Octave Crémazie (1827–79), who became known as Quebec’s national poet with such works as Le Drapeau de Carillon

Eighteenth- & Nineteenth-Century French-Canadian Literature    251 (1858), which recalls the last major French victory prior to the Fall of New France, the Battle of Carillon (known in English as the Battle of Ticonderoga) in July 1758. Favouring themes of exile, at once territorial and existential, Crémazie’s poetry ironically anticipates the poet’s own exile to France, where he died in 1879 after fleeing Quebec in severe debt. Disciples of Crémazie, including Pamphile Le May (Essais poétiques, 1865) and Louis Fréchette (La Légende d’un peuple, 1887)—the first French-Canadian recipient of the prestigious Montyon prize bestowed by the French Academy in 1880—deployed poetry to recall foundational moments in French-Canadian history. In 1880, AdolpheBasile Routhier was commissioned to compose a poem for Quebec’s national holiday, Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day. The resulting “Chant National” was set to music by Calixa Lavallée; this piece would later become the basis of the Canadian national anthem, “O Canada.” Representative practitioners of intimate poetry include Fréchette (Les fleurs boréales. Les oiseaux de neige, 1879), Le May (Une Gerbe, 1879), and Alfred Garneau (son of the historian),21 while noteworthy practitioners of satirical poetry include Ernest Tremblay (La Carabinade ou combat entre les carabins et les chérubins, 1871) and Rémi Tremblay (Caprices poétiques, 1883; Coups d’aile et coups de bec, 1888; Boutades et rêveries, 1893). The periodical press played an important role in disseminating poetry by women, including Anna-Marie Duval-Thibault, Atala (pseud. Léonise Valois), MarieLouise (pseud. Marie-Louise Lalonde), and Élisa (pseud. Marie-Anne Routhier), who favoured the periodicals Le Recueil littéraire (1889–92), Le Glaneur (1890–92), and Le Coin du feu (1893–96), the first French-Canadian magazine run by women, for women, founded by Josephine Marchand (1861–1925).22 By the turn of the twentieth century, poets belonging to the École littéraire de Montréal had begun to expand poetry’s traditional themes, forms, and techniques. The variously urban, erotic, and psychological poems of Édouard-Zotique Massicotte (1867–1947), Louvigny de Montigny (1876–1955), Jean Charbonneau (1875–1960), Henry Desjardins (1874–1907), and Émile Nelligan (1879–1941) heralded new directions that modern poetry would take in the twentieth century.23 Although he suffered a devastating psychotic breakdown prior to publishing a single book of poetry, Nelligan became one of Quebec’s most celebrated poets based in part on the publication of Émile Nelligan et son oeuvre (1904), a collection of poems written between 1896 and 1903 and edited by Louis Dantin (1865–1945). Influenced by a unique combination of poets, from the French Symbolists Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) and Arthur Rimbaud (1854–91), to the British poet, Lord Byron (1788–1824), and the French Canadians Crémazie and Fréchette, Nelligan broke new ground by exploring the inner landscape of the mind over such traditional poetic themes as patriotism and fidelity to the land. A major catalyst of literary activity in the mid- to late nineteenth century, Canadian Confederation (1867) divided French Canadians, with some arguing that constitutional monarchy was the best safeguard of French-Canadian nationality, and others, like the Métis of Manitoba, remaining frustrated in their demands for recognition. The leader of Métis uprisings in 1869 and 1885,24 Louis Riel (1844–1885), was condemned to death by an all-Protestant and anglophone jury. Public opinion was divided, mainly along linguistic lines, with the campaign for or against Riel’s exoneration turning largely into a

252   Literary Periods and Genres conflict between French and English Canadians, respectively. Riel’s execution prompted a wave of francophone literary activity that spanned the country. Noteworthy events in this context include the appearance of Riel’s own posthumous Poésies religieuses et politiques (1886), a small collection of sacred and secular poems published by his family and “read” by his “sympathizers in Québec [sic]” (Stanley xxv). Riel’s execution inspired some French-Canadian writers to celebrate him as a martyr of English-Canadian prejudice. Noteworthy in this context is Fréchette’s poem Le dernier des martyrs (1885–86), which, as the literary critic Albert Braz observes, “situates Riel in the long line of francophone and Catholic martyrs” (Braz 71). It seems, however, that Riel’s death proved too painful a subject to write about. As Adjutor Rivard observes: “le nom Riel a été mêlé à des luttes trop violentes, et le souvenir est encore trop vif, pour qu’un Canadien français puisse … prendre pour cadre d’un roman les événements de 1885” (v–vi; see also Braz 88) [“the name Riel was intermingled with struggles too violent, and the memory is still too keen[,]‌for a French Canadian … to make the events of 1885 the framework of a novel”]. Although Riel became a symbol of antagonistic relations between French and English Canadians, such relations alone do not define the Confederation Period, which otherwise witnessed important developments in print culture within and outside Quebec. For example, Franco-Ontarian literature benefited from Confederation after numerous functionaries and men of letters moved to Ottawa when it became the legislative capital in 1866. Quebeckers who moved west played a pivotal role in the development of print culture, including Joseph Royal (1837–1902), who moved to Winnipeg and co-founded the newspaper, Le Métis (1871) (which became Le Manitoba in 1881), and Modeste Demers (1809–71), the Catholic bishop who established the first printing press in Victoria, British Columbia, in 1858. Meanwhile, in the east, the Acadians were re-establishing themselves, politically and culturally, in the aftermath of the Expulsion. Monumental events in Acadian self-expression include the First Acadian Congress, a political rally in Memramcook, New Brunswick (1881), along with the creation of the first newspapers, Le Moniteur acadien (1867–1926), L’Évangéline (1887–1982), and L’Impartial (1893–1915). Although they were not written by Acadians, two profoundly influential texts were published around this time: Evangeline (1847), the elegiac long poem about the Expulsion by the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–82), and Le May’s French translation, which appeared in Essais poétiques. The latter half of the nineteenth century witnessed an important diversification of authors, literary genres, and classes of readers. To Laure Conan, literary historians add the names of other women authors, including the feminists Josephine Marchand and Robertine Barry (1863–1910), who remain memorable for their collections of legends (Marchand 1889; Barry 1895), along with their journalism. In their newspaper articles, Marchand and Barry intervened on the side of social liberals, and against ultramontanists, in debates about foreign influence on local authors and literary representations of French-Canadian nationality. Theatre became saleable at this time, thanks to the formative efforts of Fréchette (Félix Poutré, 1871), Pierre Petitclair (Une Partie de campagne, 1865), and Gérin-Lajoie (Le Jeune Latour, 1844). As Maurice Basque and Amélie Giroux observe, moreover, the “circulation of printed matter between Quebec, French Canada,

Eighteenth- & Nineteenth-Century French-Canadian Literature    253 and the Franco-American communities of the United States” remained constant in this period (55). Finally, classes of readers were diversified, owing to the exponential growth of literacy between 1870 and 1890.25 Nevertheless, book publication remained precarious, with fewer than two novels published per annum in Quebec for the period 1870 to 1894 (Lemire, La Vie IV:507). At the same time, the literary sphere remained insufficiently autonomous to pay its writers well. The contradiction that inheres in the proliferation of literature and simultaneous lack of autonomy is symptomatic at once of the promise and precariousness of French-Canadian literature at the turn of the twentieth century. The connection between literature and nationalism that defines the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries persisted well into the twentieth. The cultural nationalism that issued from the Boer War, the two world wars, and the Quiet Revolution would fundamentally define French Canadians, in politics as in letters.

Notes 1. See also Hare, La pensée socio-politique. For more on the role of the press in literary development, see Doyon, Formations. 2. Mesplet founded La Gazette du commerce et littéraire, pour la ville et district de Montréal (1778–79). After his release from jail in 1785, Mesplet launched the bilingual La Gazette de Montréal/The Montreal Gazette. The Gazette became an English-only newspaper in 1822. 3. For more on the impact of the American Revolution on Quebec, see Lanctot and Monette. 4. For more on Voltaire’s influence in French Canada, see Trudel. For more on French-Canadian responses to revolutionary and post-revolutionary France, see Simard and Galarneau. 5. Lescarbot’s Histoire includes an appendix titled Les muses de la Nouvelle-France, containing both poems and the play, Le Théâtre de Neptune. 6. For more on the Gazette littéraire in this context, see Andrès, Histoires 195. For more on the significance of the term citizen in French Canada, especially in the wake of the French Revolution, see Hare, La Pensée. 7. See Hare, “Case Study,” which quantifies the reaction in the periodical press to the ensuing election of 1792. 8. All translations of French quotations are my own. 9. See, for instance, the lively (albeit short-lived) debate, waged in poetic form, between Jautard and a woman identified as “Madame J.D.H.R.” in late summer and autumn of 1778, in Lortie 252–54, 257–59. 10. La Corne’s memoir was first recorded in writing in 1762 and subsequently printed in abridged form in the New York Mercury (12 April 1762) and then by Mesplet in 1778. For more, see Tousignant 154–55. 11. Helmut Kallmann observes that Quesnel penned “at least 34 surviv[ing]” poems. See Kallmann, “Joseph.” For examples of Quesnel’s poems, see Lortie 521. 12. For more on Quesnel’s correspondence, see Hare, “Aperçus.” For more on Quesnel’s theatre productions, see Hayne, “Le théâtre de Joseph Quesnel.” 13. For a detailed account of the publication history of Colas et Colinette, along with the revivals it has enjoyed, see Ménard. 14. For more on L’Anglomanie, see Hare, “Joseph.”

254   Literary Periods and Genres 15. “L’Iroquoise” also appeared in Huston’s Répertoire. It must be noted that, five years earlier, Bibaud had published Épîtres, satires, chansons, épigrammes et autres pièces de vers (1830), the first volume of French-Canadian verse. 16. For her summary of debates between Lemire and Hare about the authorship of “L’Iroquoise,” see MacDonald 110 n18. 17. See Lemire, La Vie II:366 for evidence that Boucherville had read “L’Iroquoise.” 18. The Instituts canadiens were liberal associations that provided public libraries and debating rooms for their members. The Institut canadien de Montréal came into conflict with the Catholic Church over its possession of books banned by the Church, including novels by Alexandre Dumas (1802–70) and Eugène Sue (1804–57). It closed its debating room in 1871 and its library in 1880 as a result, in part, of the conflict with the Church. The Institut canadien de Québec avoided the same fate by the dispensing of prohibited works. The Instituts in Quebec and Ottawa remain open today. 19. Le Progrès was the first francophone newspaper in Ontario, although it was preceded by three Detroit-based papers that served a francophone readership in southwestern Ontario: the short-lived La Gazette française (1825), L’Ami de la jeunesse (1843), and Le Citoyen (1850). The Franco-Ontarian press flourished in the late nineteenth century, with Le Canada (Ottawa, 1865–66), L’Étoile canadienne (Sandwich 1870–18??), Le Courrier d’Essex (1884–85), and others. For more information, see Basque 59–60. 20. For more on the Guibord Case, see Clark. 21. Although many of Alfred Garneau’s poems remained unpublished in his lifetime, others appeared in Le Foyer canadien and La Revue canadienne. The posthumous Poésies appeared in 1906. 22. Of the poets mentioned here, only one published her poems in book form. See Duval-Thibault. 23. Under the pseudonym Émile Kovar, Nelligan published his first poem, “Rêve fantasque,” in Le Samedi on 13 June 1896. The collection Émile Nelligan et son oeuvre (1904), edited by Louis Dantin (1865–1945), appeared after the poet’s psychotic breakdown. Poems by most members of the École littéraire de Montréal discussed here appear in Les soirées du Château de Ramezay (1900) (see under Gill). 24. Known as the Red River Rebellion, the 1869 uprising stemmed in part from Riel’s establishment of a provisional government at the Red River Colony. It resulted in the creation, in 1870, of the province of Manitoba, of which Riel is considered the founder. 25. Examining civil registers and marriage signatures in Quebec, Michel Verrette and Yvan Lamonde observe that the rate of spousal signatures increased noticeably from the 1870s, when 52.6% of the population was literate, to the 1890s, when 74.4% was literate (455).

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256   Literary Periods and Genres Chateaubriand, Vicomte de. Oeuvres complètes. Paris: Ladvocat, 1826–31. The Internet Archive. Web. Accessed 31 Aug. 2013. Chauveau, P.-J.-O. Charles Guérin: Roman de moeurs canadiennes. 1852. Montreal: Cherrier, 1853. Print. Chevalier, Henri-Émile. L’Héroïne de Chateauguay: Épisode de la guerre de 1813. Quebec: Lovell, 1858. Print. ———. La Huronne: Scènes de la vie canadienne. 1859. Paris: Poulet-Malassis, 1862. Print. Clark, Lovell C., ed. The Guibord Affair. Toronto: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1971. Print. Conan, Laure. À l’oeuvre et à l’épreuve. Quebec: Darveau, 1891. Print. ———. Angéline de Montbrun. 1884. Montreal: Boréal, 2002. Print. Cooper, James Fenimore. The Last of the Mohicans. 1826. Introd. Wayne Franklin. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2011. Print. Crémazie, Octave. Oeuvres complètes d’Octave Crémazie. Ed. H.R. Casgrain. Montreal: Beauchemin, 1882. Print. Dostaler, Yves. Les Infortunes du roman dans le Québec du XIXe siècle. Montréal: Hurtubise HMH, 1977. Print. Doutre, Joseph. Les Fiancés de 1812:  Essai de littérature canadienne. 1844. Montreal: Réédition-Québec, 1969. Print. Doyon, Nova. Formations des cultures nationales dans les Amériques: Le rôle de la presse dans la constitution du littéraire au Bas-Canada et au Brésil au début du XIXe siècle. Ste. Foy: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2012. Print. ———. “Introduction: Un journal littéraire dans l’esprit des Lumières.” La Gazette littéraire de Montréal (1778–1779). Ed. Nova Doyon. Ste. Foy: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2010. 5– 84. Print. Du Calvet, Pierre. Appel à la justice de l’État de Pierre du Calvet. 1784. Ed. Jean-Pierre Boyer. Sillery, QC: Septentrion, 2002. Print. Duval-Thibault, Anna-Marie. Fleurs du printemps. Pref. Benjamin Sulte. Fall River, MA: L’Indépendant, 1892. The Internet Archive. Web. Accessed 31 Aug. 2013. L’Écuyer, Eugène. La Fille du Brigand. 1844. Quebec: Nota Bene, 2002. Print. Ferland, J.-B.-A. Cours d’histoire du Canada. Quebec:  Augustin Côté, 1865. The Internet Archive. Web. Accessed 31 Aug. 2013. Fréchette, Louis. “Du Calvet.” La Légende d’un peuple. 1887. Quebec: Darveau, 1890. 221–25. The Internet Archive. Web. Accessed 31 Aug. 2013. ———. Félix Poutré: Drame historique en quatre acts. Montreal: Beauchemin, 1871. Print. ———. Le dernier des martyrs. n. pag., 1885–86. Early Canadiana Online. Web. Accessed 15 June 2014. ———. Les Fleurs boréales. Les oiseaux de neige. Poésies canadiennes. Quebec:  C. Darveau, 1879. Print. Gagnon, Ernest, ed. Chansons populaires du Canada. Quebec:  Foyer canadien, 1865. Early Canadiana Online. Web. Accessed 31 Aug. 2013. Galarneau, Claude. La France devant l’opinion canadienne (1760–1815). Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1970. Print. Garneau, Alfred. Poésies. Montreal: Beauchemin, 1906. The Internet Archive. Web. Accessed 31 Aug. 2013. Garneau, François-Xavier. François-Xavier Garneau. Poésies. Ed. Yolande Grisé and Paul Wyczynski. Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2012.

Eighteenth- & Nineteenth-Century French-Canadian Literature    257 ———. Histoire du Canada depuis sa découverte jusqu’à nos jours. 4 vols. Vol. 1; Vol. 2. Quebec: N. Aubin, 1845, 1846; Vol. 3. Quebec: Fréchette et Frère, 1848; Vol. 4. Quebec: Lovell, 1852. Print. Gérin-Lajoie, Antoine. Jean Rivard, le défricheur. 1862, 1864. Montreal: Boréal, 2008. Print. [This edition includes Jean Rivard, économiste.] ———. Le Jeune Latour. 1844. Montreal: Réédition Quebec, 1969. Print. Gill, Charles. Les Soirées du Château de Ramezay. Par l’École littéraire de Montréal. Montreal: Eusèbe Sénécal, 1900. The Internet Archive. Web. Accessed 31 Aug. 2013. Hare, John. “Aperçus de la correspondence de Joseph Quesnel.” Voix et images 20.2 (1995): 348–61. Web. Accessed 31 Aug. 2013. ———. “Case Study: An Election in the Press: Lower Canada, 1792.” History of the Book in Canada, Vol. 1: Beginnings to 1840. Ed. Patricia Lockhart Fleming, Gilles Galichan, and Yvan Lamonde. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2004. 219–20. Print. ———. “Joseph Quesnel et l’anglomanie de la classe seigneurial au tournant du XIXe siècle.” Co-Incidences 6 (1976): 23–31. Print. ———. La Pensée socio-politique au Québec, 1784–1812:  Analyse sémantique. Ottawa:  U of Ottawa P, 1977. Print. Hayne, David. “Le Théâtre de Joseph Quesnel.” Le Théâtre canadien-français:  Évolution, témoignages, bibliographie. Ed. Paul Wyczynski, Bernard Julien, and Hélène Beauchamp-Rank. Montreal: Fides, 1976. 109–17. Print. Huston, James. “Préface de la première édition.” Le Répertoire national ou Recueil de littérature canadienne. 1848. Ed. James Huston. Vol. 1. 2nd ed. Introd. A.B. Routhier. Montreal: J.M. Valois & Cie, 1893. v–viii. The Internet Archive. Web. Accessed 31 Aug. 2013. Kallmann, Helmut. “Joseph Quesnel.” The Canadian Encyclopedia/The Encyclopedia of Music in Canada. Historica Canada. Web. Accessed 31 Aug. 2013. Kalm, Pehr. Voyage de Pehr Kalm au Canada en 1749. Ed. Jacques Rousseau and Guy Béthune. Montreal: Pierre Tisseyre, 1977. Print. Lacombe, Patrice. La Terre paternelle. 1846. Montreal: Bibliothèque québécoise, 1999. Print. Lafitau, Joseph-François. Customs of the American Indians Compared with the Customs of Primitive Times. 2  vols. Ed. and trans. William N.  Fenton and Elizabeth L.  Moore. Toronto: Champlain Society, 1974–77. Print. ———. Moeurs des sauvages amériquains, comparées aux moeurs des premiers temps. 2 vols. Paris: Saugrain l’aîné, Charles Estienne Hochereau, 1724. The Internet Archive. Web. Accessed 31 Aug. 2013. Lahontan, Baron de. Dialogues avec un sauvage. 1704. Montreal: Lux éditeur, 2010. Print. ———. Lahontan: Oeuvres complètes. 2 vols. Ed. Réal Ouellet and Alain Beaulieu. Montreal: Les presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1990. Print. Lambton, John George Lambton [Lord Durham]. Lord Durham’s Report: An Abridgement of Report on the Affairs of British North America. 1839. Ed. G.M. Craig. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1963. Print. Lamonde, Yvan. Histoire sociale des idées au Québec (1760–1896). Montreal: Fides, 2000. Print. Lanctot, Gustave. Le Canada et la Révolution américaine. Montreal: Beauchemin, 1965. Print. Le May, Pamphile. Essais poétiques. Quebec: Desbarats, 1865. Print. ———. Une Gerbe. Poésies. Quebec: C. Darveau, 1879. Print. Lareau, Edmond. Histoire de la littérature canadienne. Montreal: Lovell, 1874. Print. Lemire, Maurice, ed. La Vie littéraire au Québec. 6 vols. Sainte-Foy: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1991–2010. Print.

258   Literary Periods and Genres Lescarbot, Marc. Histoire de la Nouvelle France. Paris: Chez Jean Milot, 1609. Early Canadiana Online. Web. Accessed 31 Aug. 2013. ———. History of New France. 3  vols. Ed. W.L. Grant. Toronto:  Champlain Society, 1907–14. Print. Lesperance, Pierre. “La Fortune littéraire du Journal de voyage de Saint-Luc de La Corne.” Voix et images 20.2 (1995): 329–41. Web. Accessed 31 Aug. 2013. Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie. 1847. New York: Alden, 1892. Print. Lortie, Jeanne d’Arc. Les Textes poétiques du Canada français, 1606–1867. Tome I. Montreal: Fides, 1987. Print. MacDonald, Mary Luc. “Red and White Man; Black, White and Grey Hats: Literary Attitudes to the Interaction between Europeans and Native Canadians in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century.” Canadian Literature 124–125 (1990): 92–111. Print. Marchand, Joséphine. Contes de Noël. Montreal: Lovell, 1889. Print. Marie de l’Incarnation. Marie de l’Incarnation, Ursuline (1599–1672): Correspondance. Ed. Dom Guy Oury. Solesmes, France: Abbaye Saint-Pierre, 1971. Print. Marmette, Joseph. Charles et Eva:  Roman historique canadien. 1866–67. Montreal:  Lumen, 1945. Print. ———. L’Intendant Bigot. 1871. Trois-Pistoles: Édition Trois-Pistoles, 2005. Print. Ménard, Denise, and Annick Poussart. “Colas et Colinette ou le Bailli dupé.” In The Canadian Encyclopedia/The Encyclopedia of Music in Canada. Historica Canada. Web. Accessed 31 Aug. 2013. Monette, Pierre. Rendez-vous manqué avec la révolution américaine:  Les adresses aux habitants de la province de Québec diffusées à l’occasion de l’invasion américaine de 1775–1776. Montreal: Québec/Amérique, 2007. Print. Montesquieu. Persian Letters. 1721. Ed. C.J. Betts. London: Penguin, 2004. Print. Morin, Marie. Annales de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal. 1697. Ed. A. Fauteux, É.-Z. Massicotte, and C. Bertrand. Montreal: L’Imprimerie des éditeurs limitée, 1921. The Internet Archive. Web. Accessed 31 Aug. 2013. Nelligan, Émile. Émile Nelligan et son œuvre. 1904. Ed. Louis Dantin and Réjean Robidoux. Montreal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1997. Print. Petitclair, Pierre. Une Partie de campagne:  Comédie en deux actes. Quebec:  Joseph Savard, 1865. Print. Quesnel, Joseph. L’Anglomanie, suivi de Les Républicains français. Ed. Mario Brassard and Marlène Gill. Trois Pistoles: Éditions Trois Pistoles, 2003. Print. ———. Colas et Colinette ou Le Bailli dupé: Comédie en trois actes, et en prose, mêlée d’ariettes. Quebec: John Neilson, 1808. Early Canadiana Online. Web. Accessed 31 Aug. 2013. Riel, Louis. Poésies religieuses et politiques. Montreal:  L’Étendard, 1886. Early Canadiana Online. Web. Accessed 15 June 2014. Rivard, Adjutor. “Préface.” Les Arpents de neige:  roman canadien. By Joseph-Émile Poirier. Paris: Nouvelle librairie nationale, 1909. v–x. Our Roots/Nos racines. Canada’s Local Histories Online. Web. Accessed 15 June 2014. Rousseau, Edmond. Le Château de Beaumanoir: Roman canadien. Lévis: Mercier, 1886. Print. ———. Les Exploits d’Iberville. Quebec: Darveau, 1888. Print. ———. La Monongahéla: Histoire du Canada popularisée. Quebec: Darveau, 1890. Print. Saint-Jacques, Denis. “Fonctions et statut discursif de l’Appel à la justice de l’État.” Canadian Literature 131 (1991): 64–71. Web. Accessed 29 Aug. 2013.

Eighteenth- & Nineteenth-Century French-Canadian Literature    259 Saint-Luc, Luc de La Corne. Journal du voyage de M. Saint-Luc de la Corne, Écuyer, Dans le navire l’Auguste, en l’an 1761. Montreal: Fleury Mesplet, 1778. Early Canadiana Online. Web. Accessed 31 Aug. 2013. Simard, Sylvain. La Révolution française au Canada français. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 1991. Print. Stanley, George F.G. Foreword. The Collected Writings of Louis Riel/Les Écrits complets de Louis Riel. Vol. 4. Ed. Glen Campbell. Edmonton: U of Alberta P, 1985. xxv–xxvii. Print. Story, Norah. The Oxford Companion to Canadian History and Literature. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1967. Print. Tardivel, Jules-Paul. Pour la patrie:  roman du XXe siècle. Montreal:  Cadieux & Derome, 1895. Print. Thwaites, Ruben Gold, ed. and trans. The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France 1610–1791. Cleveland:  Burrows, 1896–1901. Early Canadiana Online. Web. Accessed 31 Aug. 2013. Tousignant, Pierre, and Madeleine Dionne-Tousignant. “La Corne, Luc de.” Dictionary of Canadian Biography. University of Toronto/Université Laval. Web. Accessed 31 Aug. 2013. Tremblay, Ernest. La Carabinade ou combat entre les carabins et les chérubins (poème héroï-comique). Montreal: Chérubins, 1871. The Internet Archive. Web. Accessed 31 Aug. 2013. Tremblay, Rémi. Boutades et rêveries. Fall River, MA: L’Indépendant, 1893. The Internet Archive. Web. Accessed 31 Aug. 2013. ———. Caprices poétiques et chansons satiriques. Montreal: A. Filiatreault, 1883. The Internet Archive. Web. Accessed 31 Aug. 2013. ———. Coups d’aile et coups de bec. Montreal: Gebhardt-Berthiaume, 1888. The Internet Archive. Web. Accessed 31 Aug. 2013. Trudel, Marcel. L’Influence de Voltaire au Canada: De 1760 à 1850. Montreal: Fides, 1945. Print. Verrette, Michel, and Yvan Lamonde. “Literacy and Print Culture.” History of the Book in Canada, Vol. 2:  1840–1918. Ed. Yvan Lamonde, Patricia Lockhart Fleming, and Fiona A. Black. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2005. 451–58. Print.

Chapter 14

English-Ca na dia n Narrati v e s of Set tleme nt Janice Fiamengo

In her 1991 study, literary scholar Elizabeth Thompson declared the nineteenth-century pioneer woman to be a “Canadian character type,” a stock figure of English-Canadian fiction, depicted as heroically confronting the challenges of physical or psycho-social frontiers. According to Thompson, the figure was first developed in the writing of actual pioneer Catharine Parr Traill and then extended by turn-of-the-century novelists Sara Jeannette Duncan and Ralph Connor, ultimately becoming a staple of later fiction. While not all Canadian authors have made positive use of the pioneer woman archetype—for Robertson Davies in his play At My Heart’s Core (1950), she represented the intellectual and cultural deprivation of the colonial condition, while for Thomas King in Green Grass, Running Water (1993), she contributed by her presence and representations to Native cultural genocide—the pioneer woman has inarguably had an enduring role in the twentieth-century Canadian literary imagination. Perhaps most famously, Margaret Atwood memorialized pioneer writer Susanna Moodie in her poetic sequence The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), employing her to represent a tension at the heart of the Canadian relationship to the land (“We are all immigrants to this place even if we were born here” [62]), while for Margaret Laurence’s protagonist Morag Gunn in The Diviners (1974), Moodie’s sister Catharine Parr Traill embodied an admirable if impossible-to-realize competence. The following survey of early nineteenth-century narratives of settlement suggests that the intense physical and emotional struggles articulated in these texts account at least in part for their centuries-long hold on Canadians’ interest. In the early nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the British Isles came to make homes in the Canadian bush, hoping to find the financial stability they had lost in the Old World and to secure an independent future for their children.1 Many of these were well-educated members of the middle classes, often younger

English-Canadian Narratives of Settlement     261 sons and their wives fleeing the economic depression that had followed the termination of the Napoleonic Wars. A number left detailed accounts of their experiences. Ranging from the informative to the artful and from the materially particular to the psychologically nuanced, they tell of the difficult labour and personal challenges such sojourns involved. The best of them—in particular, the canonical texts of the Strickland sisters, Catharine Parr Traill and Susanna Moodie—are skillfully rendered to appeal to a wide audience, providing not only a record of arduous experience but also a complex story of dislocation and adaptation.

Writing Home in Journal Letters Unlike the polished productions of professional writers such as Traill and Moodie, many Canadian narratives of settlement were not designed for publication, surviving in the possession of family members to be published by descendants, or deposited in archives to be unearthed by scholars. Most commonly written as “journal letters” (Carter 11)— daily or regular diary entries carried over a number of days or weeks before being sealed up as a letter and sent home—they were originally created to maintain contact with loved ones across the Atlantic, and were often carried over many years. Because it was a particularly female task to nurture domestic bonds, and because the outdoor orientation of men’s lives in the bush left little time or energy for lengthy letter-writing, the vast majority of such accounts were authored by women. The most significant cluster emerged in the 1820s–1840s, when, as Moodie noted of her husband’s interest in Canada, the “great tide of emigration flowed westward” (Roughing 2).2 The generic status of these (now published) journal letters is often complicated: they are a blend of autobiography and documentary, serving both public and private aims, and variously edited and redacted. Primarily, the author wrote to share her life with intimate others and to chart for herself her changed circumstances. But she was aware that the letters were apt to be distributed among a wide circle of friends and family, that they would eventually form a substantial repository for future generations, and that they might possibly be collected for publication. Shaped by quotidian experiences and written to the moment, they seem artless and spontaneous, but are by no means transparent, for self-editing and rhetorical shaping are always features of such texts (Douglas and MacNeil 25). For the purposes of this chapter, I survey—with the exception, in the latter half, of the brilliant travel writer Anna Brownell Jameson—representative accounts of writers who understood themselves not as visitors to Canada but as settlers making a permanent home in the bush. In memoirs of travel (as, for example, the much-read journal letters from the 1790s by Elizabeth Simcoe, wife of Upper Canada’s first lieutenant-governor), the writer often produces an adventurous tale of tents, dirt, mosquitoes, snakes, and strange foods gamely embraced, with emphasis on exotic difference. Stories of settlement, in which writers seek to adapt themselves to their new surroundings and to form

262   Literary Periods and Genres new identities, are quite different, constituting a distinct genre. In Mapping Our Selves (1993), Helen Buss has outlined three characteristics of such writings: “a deep and abiding attachment to relationships,” both those lost in the process of immigration and those newly formed, “a desire to represent the experience of the new land with accuracy and detail, especially when there is a wish to convince the other to immigrate or when the account is meant for the woman’s personal posterity, and a keen and growing interest (as each account covers a number of years) in showing the unanticipated personal changes in abilities and consciousness that the new world has afforded” (38). A reader is likely to be struck also by the revelation of the mental and spiritual resourcefulness necessary to meet the enormous challenges of these new lives. What Buss identifies, above, as “an abiding attachment to relationships” often appears as an emphasis on family duty as both impetus and controlling rhetorical principle in many such accounts, nowhere more clearly than in the writing of Mary (Gapper) O’Brien, whose journal letters cover the period 1828–1838. O’Brien was from a genteel clergy family based in the English hamlet of Charlton Adam, Somerset. After her father’s death, Mary’s two brothers—probably enticed by the flood of immigrant propaganda touting the attractions of Upper Canada—made the decision to try their fortunes on cleared farms in the village of Thornhill, just north of York (later Toronto). Mary and her mother joined the brothers three years later, in 1828, for what was planned as a visit but became a permanent stay when Mary agreed to marry Edward O’Brien, a well-educated military man—though only after her sister Lucy Sharpe had explicitly released her from her promise to return to England. Mary’s letters home, written mostly to Lucy and her friend Clara, tell of her adjustments to pioneer life and her growing love for Edward (“I wish I could make you understand,” she wrote after his marriage proposal, “the primitive and religious holiness with which he talks. … it works on me so that if my circumstances permitted our union, I should enter into it in the full conviction that it was not only sanctioned by God but the immediate work of His providence” [89]). Once she was married, Mary’s letters are full of domestic detail: cooking misadventures, the challenge of milking (a hilarious account of trying to keep a cow’s legs together with a handkerchief to reduce her kicking), an attempt to churn butter while keeping up her reading (“sitting under the verandah and reading Milton all the time. Only I found to my sorrow … that I had ground off one of my nails” [118]), the supervision of animal butchery, house painting and partitioning, the making of clothes—and especially the birth of children, described in some detail and with notable zest, as in this account of the birth of her second child: “After dinner I went into mama’s room to get out of [the family’s] way and from thence I did not very immediately return, for a few minutes made me the mother of another son. The nurse had not arrived, but Mama was so completely taken by surprise that she had no time to be alarmed. With Edward’s assistance and Flora’s ministrations she did all that was requisite for me and the baby” (197). Much is suggested here about the necessary adaptations and resilience of genteel women in the bush who, “taken by surprise,” have “no time to be alarmed.” O’Brien’s sense of her own and her family’s toughness is often expressed with understated jocularity, as when she explains in this same instance that “I was glad to find that my nurse had patients

English-Canadian Narratives of Settlement     263 requiring assistance more imperiously than myself, so, having got rid of all useless hands, we had nothing to do but enjoy ourselves, look at the baby which is pretty tolerably ugly, write my journal, and await the return of the boat. Such is the way we manage things in the bush” (197). Such is the way we manage things in the bush. O’Brien’s awareness of the difference of her life from the habits and social conventions of the Old World is emphatically evident—but hers is not a work of social reflection or analysis. It would be impossible to say whether O’Brien finds women’s lot more tolerable or less in the bush, more “free” and self-determining than in a culture in which women had plenty of opportunity “to be alarmed.” If she thought in those terms, she did not record it. The Christian framework that shaped her life materially and spiritually (many of the journal letters record family prayers, visits from clergymen, and the attempt to secure a regular minister for the neighbourhood) inclined her to accept her life and seek her duty without repining. Certainly she was aware that her situation brought out a physical strength that she might not otherwise have had to exercise: “It yet wants a day of a fortnight since my confinement and I have been all day superintending not only the household affairs but the labours of seven or eight men, besides nursing my babies” (198). In accounts of all subsequent births—O’Brien had five children in all—she took particular care to record, in quite explicit detail, the efficiency with which she, assisted by her husband, brought her babies into the world. “I was secretly rejoicing in the probability of being beforehand with the doctor. I then methodically, with Edward’s assistance, undressed and prepared myself. … In about ten minutes after, and almost as soon as I became assured that the crisis of my complaint was actually coming on, the little damsel was in her father’s hands, audibly existent” (232). Modern feminist scholars have tended to look in accounts like O’Brien’s for aspects of female experience of current interest: a “realization of self in the wilderness” (Buss, “Women” 130) or the development of a feminine or “maternal idiom” (Freiwald 157). While these are not irrelevant concerns, they are not what most of these pioneer journals are about, which seem more interested in containing and conquering strong feeling than expressing it. Successful adaptation was about cheerfulness, energy, the refusal to dwell on discomforts, fears, or melancholy thoughts. O’Brien’s decision to marry Edward, for example, is articulated in a letter that seeks rhetorical as well as emotional balance between competing forms of duty and familial love: “There was much in the moment of this decision [Lucy’s letter releasing her from her promise] which was painful to me, for I could not forget the friends from whom it separated me, even at the side of the one to whom it unites me. Even whilst rejoicing in the happiness which it gave to him, I could not but feel that every tear of pleasure which it drew from him was to be numbered against tears of regret from one whom I cannot call less dear” (102). The decision to make a life in Upper Canada was not about self-fulfillment but about devotion and responsibility—though the zest with which O’Brien often recounted family affairs suggests the satisfactions her life brought. Stoic determination and refusal of self-pity are the keynotes of Anne Langton’s journal letters also, written almost contemporaneously with O’Brien’s and in similar

264   Literary Periods and Genres surroundings. Langton came from the Yorkshire Dales to join her brother John (who had immigrated four years earlier) on a bush farm at Sturgeon Lake near Fenelon Falls, Upper Canada, with her parents and her mother’s sister in 1837. For the first decade of their new life, Langton—who never married—kept a seasonal journal that was at intervals sent back, with sketches and other letters, to her brother William and his family in Manchester. Like O’Brien’s account, the journal letters were not written for publication but rather to furnish, as she self-deprecatingly put it, “an evening’s amusement … and a little matter for thought and conversation” (195) among the family group. Langton found in the bush a life of dangers and ordinary discomforts for which nothing in her previous experience—she had been a cultivated gentlewoman who had traveled in Europe, studying painting and languages—could have prepared her. “I often admire the providential arrangement by which our blood continues to circulate when everything freezes about us” (199), she commented of the extraordinary cold. She describes in detail the unaccustomed labour in which she immersed herself: chopping firewood, washing clothes and bedding, baking bread without an oven, hanging mosquito netting (to little avail, it seems—the bugs were apocalyptic), dressing pigs’ heads, and tending the sick, all with scant help from servants, who were difficult to keep and often untrained. It was wearying, often disagreeable work, as she acknowledged to her correspondents at home: “Both an ox and a pig died the day before. I need say no more—give the reins to your imagination to fill up the details of our morning,” she wrote with high-spirited disgust (194). Isolated in a small, scattered community as they were, wishing for greater variety among their neighbours, the days often passed unvaryingly, and the family resorted to minor stratagems for recreation. Rather than walking together, for example, they practiced “dividing [their] numbers,” “for when we meet again we have our little adventures to relate” (184). Langton occasionally contrasts the activities considered appropriate for a lady in the New World with the different ideas of home, noting, “How strangely one’s ideas accommodate themselves to the ways and necessities of the country one is in!” (186) and confessing that “perhaps you would think my feminine manners in danger if you were to see me steering a boat for my gentleman rowers, or maybe handling the ropes a little in sailing” (183). Overall, however, the journals make few references to the life left behind and its difference from the present, for it seems to have been a moral principle for Langton, and certainly a strategy of successful living, to neither dwell on her old life nor look ahead to an uncertain future. If inclined to worry, she found it “very comforting to know that amidst all the changes and chances of this our life, there is one who is ‘the same Yesterday, to-day, and forever’ ” (258). Such seemingly unforced piety was often lightened by self-mockery: “We had an excellent sermon on evil speaking, and by way of showing how much we had profited by it, we began talking over the weak points of our several neighbours immediately afterwards” (189). Seeking always to make the best of bad situations and to find sources of amusement in such matters as the badness of the roads and the impossibility of maintaining social standards in the wild (“You cannot imagine how perfectly comme il faut rough log walls appear to us now; when we have got our striped green print up we shall feel as grand as Queen Victoria amidst the damask

English-Canadian Narratives of Settlement     265 hangings at Buckingham Palace” [181]), she refrained from outpourings of feeling that might distress her family, and produced a remarkable document of endurance. So many of these journal letters are records of suffering and endurance: of young women missing their mothers, facing the pain of childbirth with misgivings, seeking spiritual consolation after a child’s death. Even in her happiest moments, Lucy (Meek) Peel’s letters register the unbridgeable distance between her wilderness home and the parents left behind in England: “May 1st—a most important day. Celia went into short petticoats,” she wrote of her first-born, “and as she sat smiling on my knee looking the picture of health, good temper, and beauty, I longed for you and papa to see her and admire your grandchild” (104). Peel had come in 1833 as a newly married young woman to Sherbrooke County in Lower Canada’s Eastern Townships with her husband Edmund, a half-pay naval officer, and her early letters enthuse about the domestic happiness and useful work that, as she assured her mother (and, perhaps, herself), more than made up for the pleasures and ease lost in immigration: “I am convinced that we are never so happy as when fully and usefully occupied, and that there is much more satisfaction in the quiet rational life I now spend, than that when gayer scenes took up so much of my attention” (57). But when baby Celia died just short of her first birthday after a brief illness, Lucy’s outpouring of grief highlighted both the necessity and inadequacy of a letter account for which she would have to wait months for a reply: “Oh Mama, I know you will deeply feel, and bitterly grieve for us when you know; our little darling upon whom we so doated, who was our all, our comfort and joy, so good, so affectionate, so very fond of us both, is taken from us, and now lies in her cold and last bed. I must collect my bewildered thoughts, and tell you every particular” (130). Postcolonial critical frameworks, designed to highlight the gender and race inflections of the colonial experience, can often seem quite tone-deaf to the emotional valences of such texts. Gillian Whitlock, for example, in The Intimate Empire (2000), has stressed how “What we see in the autobiographical writings from that ‘partial’ society [of genteel British military families in the bush] is an intense awareness of how gender, race, and class coalesce in the production of subjectivity” (47) and how ideas about “appropriate [White] femininity and masculinity” (48) were challenged and reaffirmed on the frontier. It seems unremarkable that refined men and women in areas barely reclaimed from wilderness should be aware that their roles were being recast, hardly worthy of the emphasis Whitlock provides. For Lucy and Edmund Peel, the lonely realities of bush life—their near-total dependence on each other, both materially and emotionally, the lack of a fully developed community to support them at a time of crisis—brought a heightened intimacy that, whatever it contributed to British imperialism or to what Whitlock calls, disapprovingly, “the cult of domesticity” (48), revealed a notable ability to adapt to difficult circumstances and to sustain each other. Like Edward O’Brien before him, Edmund attended his wife during childbirth, writing to her parents that he considered it “nothing more than false delicacy which would make a man absent himself ” at such a time, though confessing that he was “quite distracted” by his wife’s prodigious sufferings. “As soon as the child was born,” he related, “I staggered into an adjoining room and cried like a child until I again saw Lucy smiling and free from

266   Literary Periods and Genres pain” (82). After Celia’s death, he was as heartbroken as his wife; together they looked forward with trepidation and longing to the birth of their next child, and Lucy reported how a good friend had reminded them that they “must not mourn without [Christian] hope” (135). To consider them primarily as subjects of a “disciplinary regime” (Whitlock 56) seems to miss a great deal that matters about their story. Preoccupied with imperial power, much postcolonial criticism also neglects the evangelical faith that informs so much of this writing. Whitlock’s discussion of evangelicalism, for example, acknowledges its role in the anti-slavery movement and stresses its influence in “a more widespread reform of manners and morals that led to a new lifestyle, a new ethic in the celebration of domesticity through a well-ordered, well-managed daily life” (51). This account leaves out evangelicalism’s powerful spiritual conviction and its ability to render heroic the daily trials of settler life. Far from being merely a discourse of self-management, it was for many settlers, and certainly for Frances (Browne) Stewart in her new life in Douro Township, the only thing that made hardship bearable. Stewart was a well-educated Irish gentlewoman who had come with her husband, three daughters, two servants, and her husband’s sister’s family to settle along the Otonabee River north of Peterborough in 1822, where she later became a close friend of Catharine Parr Trail. There she encountered trials for which she felt ill-suited and about which she struggled to maintain the good cheer she knew to be necessary for her family’s survival. Stewart’s letters often reveal the complex emotional dynamics of trans-Atlantic communication—the strain of maintaining contact while not burdening family members. She more than once wishes she could “unsay” what she had previously written: “I have been in a state of repentance,” she wrote on one such occasion, “ever since my last letter was sent off, for I wrote in rather a desponding humour and am sure you will all be in a state of misery about me, thinking that we are very miserable. But I assure my dearly loved friends that I am not very miserable. I am only sometimes more prone to low spirits than I have been, but I will not yet touch on this subject” (114–15). Such a reassurance, alluding to the difference between the contented self of the past and the self of the present who is “prone to low spirits” but determined not to speak of them, suggests the depth of a sadness that can neither be fully shared nor effectively repressed. The burdens of near-constant illness, unaccustomed physical labour, financial worry, and loneliness—exacerbated by an awareness that such privations were likely permanent and that the refined, educated life left behind could never be regained—seem to have been magnified in Stewart’s case by a difficult, often gloomy husband (the opposite of Lucy’s tender Edmund) and by her own vulnerability to depression. Speaking of a neighbour who managed well without servants, she admits that such a person was “so much better suited to this country than useless I am,” and worries that “I am not half clever enough for a farmer’s wife, and [Tom] has been so much accustomed to very clever English women that he is rather hard to please” (116). She goes on to detail the weariness and depression that sometimes overcame her, noting a feeling of “great deadness over me, not laziness for I like to exert myself when I can but a sort of stupidity and compression of mind which I used not to have at all” (116).

English-Canadian Narratives of Settlement     267 Although Stewart did learn to do a great deal—taking, for example, “the entire care” of her baby from one week old and becoming “quite expert and … a very good nurse” (110)—her troubles were almost unceasing, and she often wrote to her mother in great distress, fearful of “giving [her] pain” but confessing the need to “relieve [her] mind.” Ultimately, only a strengthened religious commitment brought peace: “He made me to feel the insufficiency of worldly comfort in trials. … His word and grace alone can support and instruct me” (127), she wrote in gratitude. Though placed “in very trying situations” and often “regretting those friends from whom I could procure advice” (127), she was in time able to write hopefully about the family prospects: “At present we could not live at home independently. Here we can and have overcome our worst difficulties. Our farm is doing better. Our children are becoming useful and their minds are opening. My dear Tom enjoys good health this year. No ague has appeared yet. May the Lord incline the heart of my dear Tom to that Wisdom which never faileth and may He preserve him from being overcome by the thoughts and cares of this life” (127). Far from being primarily a mechanism for the domination of self and others, religious faith provided a powerful means to endure otherwise overwhelming burdens.

Literary Renderings of the Transformed Self To turn from such journal letters to the travel memoir of Anna Brownell Jameson, published as Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838), is to encounter a different kind of enterprise altogether—written by a woman who was already a well-established author of literary criticism and travel narrative when she came to Toronto in mid-December 1836 to join her husband, Robert Jameson, attorney-general of Upper Canada. Jameson determined to use the occasion of her 10-month visit—which she took unwillingly, having been estranged from her husband for some years and to whom she went now to arrange for a separation—as a platform for social analysis and riveting self-performance. Aiming to craft a persona who would engage the reader without damaging her husband’s reputation or ambitions, she created a sophisticated document, a blend of notes and research materials, carefully shaped to serve her aesthetic and ideological purposes. In the first part of the book, Jameson combines her comments on a translation project with descriptions of Upper Canadian society. In the second part, she describes her travels from Mackinaw to Sault Ste. Marie in an open boat and down Lake Huron to Manitoulin Island and then on to Penetang, including extensive interactions with the Aboriginal peoples of the area. The three-volume work was published to acclaim. Jameson is present from the beginning as a vividly realized persona seeking the attention and empathy of her readers through her frank laments, spontaneous outbursts, and vivid detail. The emphasis on restraint and forbearance of the journal writers is here

268   Literary Periods and Genres completely reversed. Describing Toronto as a mean, ugly, and “melancholy” little town, Jameson admits that she is projecting personal feelings of alienation onto the place, confessing that “it is regret for what I have left and lost—the absent, not the present—which throws over all around me a chill, colder than that of the wintry day—a gloom, deeper than that of the wintry night” (16). The emphatic parallelism of the dramatic assertion reveals the speaker’s claim to emotional centrality. Jameson’s is an appealingly self-divided persona, one who finds intellect at war with emotion and expectation in conflict with experience. Her description of her disappointment in seeing Niagara Falls—which leaves her cold—is deliciously self-mortified and chagrined: “What has come over my soul and senses?” she upbraids herself, “I am no longer Anna—I am metamorphosed—I am translated—I am an ass’s head, a clod, a wooden spoon, a fat weed growing on Lethe’s bank, a stock, a stone, a petrifaction—for have I not seen Niagara, the wonder of wonders; and felt—no words can tell what disappointment!” (54). Her inconsolable self-disgust is exuberantly on display. Only Jameson can write with such zest about an inability to feel. Very little that comes under her observation fails to elicit a vivid, particularized response. Jameson does ultimately console herself, first through intellectual work (her translation of Goethe and extensive reflections on German literature), then through social and political observations of the colony, and eventually in personal adventure and friendship. In addition to being a lavish display of Jameson’s carefully crafted interiority, Winter Studies and Summer Rambles is nothing less than a disquisition on Canada, bristling with sharp observations, extended descriptions, historical and statistical background, and personal assessments of the colony’s ways of life, customs, landscape, political disputes, and peoples. Toronto’s social system is incisively summed up in a single scathing sentence (“the worst evils of our old and most artificial social system at home, with none of its agrémens, and none of its advantages” [65]), while a substantial paragraph is devoted to whimsical reflections on the possibility that trees may actually feel “the first stroke of the axe” (231), this latter concern a proof, she claims, of “how far I am yet from being a true Canadian” (231). Observations range from playful remarks on the incapacity of the human mind to grasp the “degrees of badness” of Upper Canadian roads (256), to serious reflections on the plethora of “repining and discontented women” in Canada—not “one woman recently settled here who considered herself happy in her new home and country” (247). Jameson also provides detailed description of Aboriginal social customs, folklore, and religious beliefs—with unorthodox observations that neither condemn nor romanticize Aboriginal difference: “You must not imagine, after all I have said, that I consider the Indians as an inferior race, merely because they have no literature, no luxuries, no steam-engines; nor yet, because they regard our superiority in the arts with a sort of lofty indifference, which is neither contempt nor stupidity, look upon them as cast beyond the pale of our sympathies. It is possible I may, on a nearer acquaintance, change my opinion, but they do strike me as an untamable race. I can no more conceive a city filled with industrious Mohawks and Chippewas, than I can imagine a flock of panthers browsing in a penfold” (322). Throughout her substantial account, Jameson creates a

English-Canadian Narratives of Settlement     269 patchwork of styles and subjects, impressions and assessments, claiming her multiplicity as a challenge to her readers: as she travels, “I am disgusted, or I am enchanted; I despair or I exult by turns; and these inconsistent and apparently contradictory emotions and impressions I set down as they arise, leaving you to reconcile them as well as you can” (303). The result is a tour de force of portraiture and wit, showcasing Jameson’s vivacious style and command of detail. Were it not for the fact that it was published before Jameson’s book, Catharine Parr Traill’s account of life in the bush north of Peterborough, The Backwoods of Canada (1836), might be seen as a response to it, at least to that part of Winter Studies detailing the discontent of backwoods’ wives. Traill had immigrated with her Scottish husband Thomas in 1832 to Douro Township, where they struggled to wrest a living from an unforgiving environment. Her book, structured as a series of letters sent home to her mother in the Old Country from 1832–1835, presents itself as a practical and pedagogical guide designed “to afford every possible information to the wives and daughters of emigrants of the higher class who contemplate seeking a home amid our Canadian wilds” (9) in order to prepare them for the experience. Most especially, it entreats them to “cultivate all the mental resources” necessary and to “discard all irrational and artificial wants and mere useless pursuits” (11). In addition to providing information about pioneer life, Traill’s text models the psychological disposition necessary for it: namely, curiosity and delight in one’s surroundings and a confiding faith in Providence. “The simplest weed that grows in my path, or the fly that flutters about me, are subjects for reflection, admiration and delight” (23), boasts Traill. Cheerful, busy, and ever-hopeful, the author of The Backwoods of Canada presents herself as the model partner in her husband’s pioneer enterprise, constructing her story as a journey of self-discovery and happy transformation. The book was an enormous publishing success, reprinted many times and translated into French and German—though unfortunately the always penurious Traill made only a modest profit from it. Traill was well aware of the problem of the unhappy bush wife: “This seems to be the general complaint with all the classes,” she writes, “the women are discontented and unhappy. Few enter with their whole heart into a settler’s life. They miss the little domestic comforts they had been used to enjoy; they regret the friends and relations they left in the old country; and they cannot endure the loneliness of the backwoods” (90). Traill is confident that this will never be her lot: well-fortified against boredom or loneliness, she is determined to make her own contentment “for the sake of [her] beloved partner” and to forge her own “felicity” (90). Even in the midst of confusion, danger, and lonely scenes, she describes her sense of confiding peace and confidence: “Great as was the sacrifice, even at that moment, strange as was my situation, I felt no painful regret or fearful misgiving depress my mind. A holy and tranquil peace came down upon me” (100). Traill’s description of the society and social relations of the New World is generally positive as well, her cheerfulness tending to cast a benevolent glow over everything, as when she describes the practice of “bees” as “those friendly meetings of neighbors who assemble at your summons to raise the walls of your house …” (112). Emphasizing the necessity of such community exertion, the wholesome debt of gratitude incurred, the

270   Literary Periods and Genres cheerful readiness with which it is discharged for others, and the liberating dissolution of class barriers that necessarily results, Traill suggests that in the communal exertions and cooperation of bush life lie the seeds of a more egalitarian order of mutual aid and enlightened exertion (103). All in all, Traill’s outline of the qualities of a good settler’s wife are precisely those that her text most clearly manifests: “active, industrious, ingenious, cheerful, not above putting her hand to whatever is necessary to be done in her house-hold, nor too proud to profit by the advice and experience of older portions of the community” (149). This and Traill’s other autobiographical works, The Canadian Settler’s Guide (1855) and Pearls and Pebbles (1894), remain arresting portraits of pioneer life, not least because the fit between author and subject—the necessity of cheerful exertion and piety—seems so fully realized. Though her family suffered many tragedies, including the deaths of two children and the destruction by fire of their home, and although economic security eluded them always, Traill “sustained her positive attitude towards Canada and towards life generally” (Ballstadt 180). Susanna Moodie’s major settler memoir, telling of seven years (1832–1839), first on a cleared farm in Hamilton Township near Cobourg, and later in the backwoods of Douro near her sister, is dramatically different in tone from that of the uncomplaining and optimistic Catharine: it speaks much more forcefully and bitterly of the privations and disagreeable necessities of a settler wife’s life, and indeed suggests—indirectly and circumspectly, but almost unmistakably—blame of her husband, author of her misfortunes.3 For this reason and many others, Roughing It in the Bush (1852) has achieved canonical stature as an account of pioneering life, combining angry lament and complex self-assertion. It is an assemblage of sketches and poems that includes three chapters authored by Moodie’s husband, John Dunbar, and one by her brother, Samuel Strickland, whose Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West (1853) provides a portrait of immigrant success full of incident. The Moodie persona is the reluctant immigrant par excellence, the gentlewoman who bewails lost refinement, expressing repulsion and disgust at the people and experiences she encounters in the New World—the dirty work and crop failures, the dead skunk and the mice and the marauding bears, the ignorant Yankee squatters who borrow from her and tell her that they are as good as she is, the near-constant indignities of illness, unwanted visitors, vulnerability to bad weather, and hand-to-mouth subsistence. Even nearly two decades after the experiences she relates, and supposedly at a time when she is “not only reconciled to Canada, but loving it, and feeling a deep interest in its present welfare” (89), the memory of her homesickness is strong, and she still longs, she emphasizes, to return to England’s “sacred bosom” and to “die upon [its] wave-encircled shores” (69). At some moments, her narrative seems written expressly to rebut the rosy portrait of bush life presented by her sister, as when she notes of misrepresentations by those who “talked of log houses to be raised in a single day by the generous exertions of friends and neighbors, but they never ventured upon a picture of the disgusting scenes of riot and low debauchery exhibited during the raising, or upon a description of the dwellings when raised—dens of dirt and misery” (3). Whatever Canada has to offer the industrious sons of honest poverty, she stresses, it offers heartbreak to gentle folk.

English-Canadian Narratives of Settlement     271 And although Moodie never engages in open criticism of her husband, whose decisions and poor investments hurt the family materially, a vivid subtext of complaint and accusation finds voice through surrogate characters such as the failed settler Tom Wilson, who berates John Moodie for his inability to realize not only that his “refined habits” and “unfortunate literary propensities” (67) would unfit him for the work he was contemplating, but also that in involving wife and child in his failure, he took an unforgivable risk. It is hard not to hear in Tom’s comic tongue-lashing the wife’s oblique representation of her husband’s reckless overconfidence. In one of the final scenes in the book, “A Walk to Dummer,” Moodie again employs a surrogate, abandoned wife of the alcoholic Mr. N______, whose husband has left her to starve alone in the bush with four children; this portrait of utter vulnerability and destitution enables Moodie to contemplate how much worse her own situation might have been. It was certainly bad enough—especially in 1836, when the Moodies were reduced to a condition of penury, forced to rely on the generosity of friends for sufficient food to keep their children alive. What prevents Moodie’s text from being merely a litany of misfortune, a chronicle of self-pity by a woman forever disgruntled and ill-pleased (though the text has been read this way by unsympathetic critics), is Moodie’s flair for melodrama, her sense of the comic and the ridiculous, her saving ability to mock herself and others, to stand outside a situation to exploit it for dramatic potential. This ability is evident from the first shipboard scene even before landing, when the Moodies’ vessel, which has cast anchor off Grosse Isle, is boarded by two health officers—one a robust Scotchman, the other a French official who was “no bad representation of him who sat upon the pale horse” (11): Moodie immediately makes use of the humorous potential of the scene through her broad-stroke character types, pungent dialogue, and deployment of cross-cultural misunderstanding, which sees a book by renowned atheist Voltaire substituted for the Bible to swear on, and a brace of puppies brought for the inspection of the dour French official, who had asked about shipboard births. This is her way throughout the text, always to create amusing moments or encounters to enliven her story. Often Moodie herself is at the centre of such scenes, as when, for example, she describes how she managed to milk a cow unaided only to spill the pail while running from an ox that, in the event, posed no threat (410). The moment of her arrival at the Moodies’ first dwelling—the shack on the property adjoining the one they had purchased, which was still occupied by the former owner—is a brilliantly conceived moment of ironic homecoming as poor Mrs. Moodie, conveyed in a carriage by a Yankee driver who enjoys her discomfiture, “takes possession of [the] untenable tenement” (88). The dialogue is brilliantly handled, with Moodie expostulating in horror—“You must be mistaken; that is not a house, but a cattle-shed, or pig-sty”—and the driver prophesying her coming disillusionment: “You were raised in the old country, I guess; you have much to learn, and more, perhaps, than you’ll like to know before the winter is over” (88). The scene is pithily effective, especially through its emphasis on Moodie’s now-useless refinement and genteel language (she notes “the open space from which that absent but very necessary appendage [the door] had been removed” [88]) to showcase her pathetic ill-suitedness for bush life. In another episode of cross-purpose dialogue, Moodie

272   Literary Periods and Genres barters with an old woman for a “rooster” (98), thinking that she is negotiating for a “roaster” instead (a suckling pig); the New World, for Moodie, is characterized by a total breakdown in all familiar frameworks of meaning. It is the effectively handled mixture of self-mocking melodrama, zesty humour at her own and others’ misfortunes, and gothic revelation of psychic battering that makes the book so compelling. Even as Roughing It takes its textual revenge on all those who used the Moodies disdainfully and cruelly (“I made some deuced clever speculations, but they all failed” [128], says Uncle Joe, indicting himself out of his own mouth), the text also demonstrates the harrowing process by which all of Moodie’s previous coordinates of identity were irreparably shattered, symbolized in the moment, upon their removal to the uncleared farm in Douro Township, when Moodie’s prized English crockery is smashed in the overturning carriage. Once again working with a skillfully realized surrogate figure—Brian, the Still-Hunter—Moodie explores the possibility of mental breakdown in the bush. Brian, like Moodie, is refined, sensitive, and thoughtful, a gentleman who loves beauty. But amidst the drudgery and degraded society of the bush, he loses himself in alcoholism and despair; through his questioning of God’s justice, Moodie is able to express indirectly what would be shockingly impious if written as her own words. The sketch ends with his suicide. Moodie, in contrast, survives to write Roughing It, her record of self-reliance and (precarious) overcoming: “I have contemplated a well-hoed ridge of potatoes on that bush farm,” she tells her readers with dogged triumph, “with as much delight as in years long past I had experienced in examining a fine painting in some well-appointed drawing-room” (384). Recipes for dandelion coffee and references to squirrel stew suggest the pleasures of bush-inspired ingenuity. Given that Roughing It was shocking enough in its uncouth revelations that Moodie’s own sister, Agnes Strickland—to whom it was dedicated—did not want her name associated with a woman who admitted to labouring in the fields, we can understand something of the author’s achievement. The later Life in the Clearings versus the Bush (1853), written about the period following the Moodies’ move to Belleville in 1840, is less gripping to the degree that it lacks the agonistic charge of Roughing It. In her dramatic rendering of repulsion and imperfect adjustment, leavened by humour, satire, and religious faith, Moodie’s is the ultimate representation of the Canadian settler story.

Critical Reception The dominant scholarly approaches to these narratives over the past four decades provide some perspective on the markedly various responses they have inspired. As Canadian literature underwent an intensive post-Centennial nationalist examination, a major strand of criticism sought the outlines of uniquely Canadian visions and language, and tended to read settler texts as charting the arduous but inevitable transformation of the settler from reluctant colonist to (ambivalent) Canadian, whose writing about the land and its challenges established patterns for later generations.

English-Canadian Narratives of Settlement     273 Thus Marian Fowler, in The Embroidered Tent (1982), found the pioneer women she examined to be “representative Canadians” and “our fore-mothers” (11) in their creation of the “forms and prototypes for much later Canadian literature” (12). For D.M.R. Bentley, settler writers Moodie, Traill, and others “inscribed a part of themselves that endures,” their texts revealing “something of the complex process of retention and modification, disintegration and reassembly” (118) that is fundamental to the immigrant experience. Other critics, following Atwood’s depiction of Moodie as “divided down the middle” (62), sought and found ambivalence in pioneer texts—the irresolvable tension between delight in a New World and horror that it was not the Old—that itself provides, as David Stouck phrases it, the “origins of a Canadian imaginative tradition” (470). As feminist theory assumed dominance in literary criticism, the gendered dimension of the settlement experience came to the fore, with women’s texts celebrated or—less frequently—found wanting for their depiction of modes of female subjectivity and self-expression in uncharted territory. Buss, for example, traced in pioneer narratives evidence of the female body as the ground of a “subjectivity that had been radicalized” and an “agency that had been created by the suffering and loving of that body” (85). For Misao Dean, in contrast, settler texts were not yet radical enough, preoccupied with the performance of gender in frontier conditions—with showing how unwomanly exertion could be appropriately feminine after all—and thus with maintaining, rather than subverting, conventional norms (16–28). For most such critics, as in the reflections in Lorraine McMullen’s Re(Dis)Covering Our Foremothers (1989), the watchwords in the analysis of female settler texts were recovery, subversion, double-voiced discourse, resistance, and (m)othering. Later critics, influenced by the postcolonial emphasis on the meanings of empire—and on the textual construction of race generally—were less inclined to solidarity with female pioneers, finding their attitudes to place and to Native peoples colonizing and harmful, and certainly no positive model for a multicultural and postcolonial Canada. According to the authors of The Empire Writes Back, the writing of colonial settler-invaders, preoccupied with the imperial centre and with staking an illegitimate land claim, “can never form the basis for an indigenous culture” (Ashcroft 5). In Writing the Pioneer Woman (2002), Janet Floyd argued that the home-making focus of settlement narratives makes them the ultimate symbol of the imperial project, despite the seemingly non-political nature of their domestic work. Thinking along similar postcolonial lines, Jennifer Henderson, in Settler Feminism and Race Making in Canada (2003), reads settler women’s texts as engaged in a colonial feminist project to prove White women’s capacity for self-government “against backgrounds of moral and racial ‘inferiority’ ” (13). It remains to be seen now whether such texts may be rehabilitated for a less ideologically determined reading strategy. Certainly the disparities of approach, from claiming the writers as foremothers to disavowing them as colonizers, suggest the degree to which these stories of “painful experience in a distant land” (Moodie, Roughing It epigraph) continue to matter to Canadian readers, being at once historically remote and surprisingly close to the bone.

274   Literary Periods and Genres

Notes 1. Charlotte Gray, biographer of Moodie and Traill, puts the number at 655,757 between 1831 and 1841 alone (52). 2. Rich accounts of pioneer life on the prairies and in British Columbia, representing a much later period and distinct geographies, lie outside the bounds of this study but are well worth examination. Key texts include Sarah Ellen Roberts’ lyrical account of “hardship and heartbreak and trial and triumph” (264) on a homestead farm near Talbot, Alberta, in the early twentieth century (Alberta Homestead: The Chronicle of a Pioneer Family [1968]); Mary Hiemstra’s memoir of struggle and failure near Battleford, Saskatchewan, during the same period (Gully Farm [1955]), and Susan Allison’s autobiography of life on the West Coast and in the British Columbia interior in the late nineteenth century (A Pioneer Gentlewoman in British Columbia: The Recollections of Susan Allison [1976]). 3. Buss, for example, examines Moodie’s use of surrogate figures to express what she cannot say directly, including casting aspersions on her husband’s poor judgment. Moodie’s tale about another British emigrant, Tom Wilson, who appears in some of the early chapters of Roughing It in the Bush, can be understood as “a strategy by which she may say things, realize things about her husband that cannot be said, cannot even be thought, inside the wife’s discourse” (Mapping Our Selves 89).

Works Cited Allison, Susan. A Pioneer Gentlewoman in British Columbia: The Recollections of Susan Allison. Ed. Margaret A. Ormsby. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 1976. Print. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 1989. Print. Atwood, Margaret. Afterword. The Journals of Susanna Moodie. Toronto:  Oxford UP, 1970. 62–64. Print. Ballstadt, Carl. “Catharine Parr Traill.” Ed. Robert Lecker, Jack David, and Ellen Quigley. Canadian Writers and Their Works. Fiction Series. Vol. 1.  Downsview, ON; ECW P, 1983. Print. Bentley, D.M.R. “Breaking the ‘Cake of Custom’: The Atlantic Crossing as a Rubicon for Female Emigrants to Canada?” Re(Dis)covering Our Foremothers:  Nineteenth-Century Canadian Women Writers. Ed. Lorraine McMullen. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 1990. 91–122. Print. Buss, Helen M. Mapping Our Selves:  Canadian Women’s Autobiography in English. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1993. Print. ———. “Women and the Garrison Mentality:  Pioneer Women Autobiographers and Their Relation to the Land.” McMullen 123–36. Carter, Kathryn. “Neither Here Nor There: Mary Gapper O’Brien Writes ‘Home,’ 1828–1838.” Diversity and Change in Early Canadian Women’s Writing. Ed. Jennifer Chambers. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008. 8–21. Print. Connor, Ralph. The Man from Glengarry. 1901. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1994. Print. Davies, Robertson. At My Heart’s Core & Overlaid:  Two Plays. Toronto:  Clarke Irwin, 1966. Print.

English-Canadian Narratives of Settlement     275 Dean, Misao. Practising Femininity: Domestic Realism and the Performance of Gender in Early Canadian Fiction. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1998. Print. Douglas, Jennifer, and Heather MacNeil. “Arranging the Self:  Literary and Archival Perspectives on Writers’ Archives.” Archivaria 67 (2009): 25–39. Print. Duncan, Sara Jeannette. The Imperialist. 1904. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1994. Print. Floyd, Janet. Writing the Pioneer Woman. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2002. Print. Fowler, Marian. The Embroidered Tent: Five Gentlewomen in Early Canada. Toronto: Anansi, 1982. Print. Freiwald, Bina. “ ‘The Tongue of Woman’: The Language of the Self in Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush.” McMullen 155–72. Gray, Charlotte. Sisters in the Wilderness:  The Lives of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill. Toronto: Penguin, 1999. Print. Henderson, Jennifer. Settler Feminism and Race Making in Canada. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2003. Print. Hiemstra, Mary. Gully Farm:  A  Story of Homesteading on the Canadian Prairies. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1955. Print. Jameson, Anna Brownell. Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1990. Print. King, Thomas. Green Grass, Running Water. Toronto: HarperCollins, 1993. Print. Langton, Anne. A Gentlewoman in Upper Canada:  The Journals, Letters and Art of Anne Langton. 1950. Ed. Barbara Williams. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2008. Print. Laurence, Margaret. The Diviners. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1974. Print. McMullen, Lorraine, ed. Re(Dis)covering Our Foremothers:  Nineteenth-Century Canadian Women Writers. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 1990. Print. Moodie, Susanna. Life in the Clearings versus the Bush. 1853. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1989. Print. ———. Roughing It in the Bush; or, Life in Canada. 1852. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1989. Print. O’Brien, Mary. The Journals of Mary O’Brien, 1828–1838. Ed. Audrey Saunders Miller. Toronto: Macmillan, 1968. Print. Peel, Lucy. Love Strong as Death:  Lucy Peel’s Canadian Journal, 1833–1836. Ed. J.I. Little. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2001. Print. Roberts, Sarah Ellen. Alberta Homestead: Chronicle of a Pioneer Family. Ed. Lathrop E. Roberts. Austin: U of Texas P, 1968. Print. Simcoe, Elizabeth. The Diary of Mrs. John Graves Simcoe: Wife of the First Lieutenant-Governor of the Province of Upper Canada, 1792–6. Ed. J. Ross Robertson. Toronto: William Briggs, 1911. Print. Stewart, Frances. Revisiting “Our Forest Home”: The Immigrant Letters of Frances Stewart. Ed. Jodie Lee Aoki. Toronto: Dundurn, 2011. Print. Stouck, David. “ ‘Secrets of the Prison-House’: Mrs. Moodie and the Canadian Imagination.” Dalhousie Review 54 (1974): 463–72. Print. Strickland, Samuel. Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West: Or, the Experience of an Early Settler. 1853. Ed. Agnes Strickland. Edmonton: Hurtig, 1970. Print. Thompson, Elizabeth. The Pioneer Woman:  A  Canadian Character Type. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1991. Print. Traill, Catharine Parr. The Backwoods of Canada. 1836. Toronto:  McClelland and Stewart, 1989. Print.

276   Literary Periods and Genres Traill, Catharine Parr. The Canadian Settler’s Guide. 1854. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1969. Print. ———. Pearls and Pebbles; or, Notes of an Old Naturalist. 1894. Ed. Elizabeth Thompson. Toronto: Natural Heritage Books, 1999. Print. Whitlock, Gillian. The Intimate Empire:  Reading Women’s Autobiography. London:  Cassell, 2000. Print.

Chapter 15

British P oets , C l as si c a l My ths, Cana dia n L o cati ons D.M.R. Bentley

[A]‌short run across the Atlantic brings the emigrant, at once, to his “location” … Sir James E. Alexander, L’ Acadie (1849, 2:101)

In a move that memorably encapsulates the truculent and anxious American rejection of the British literary tradition, J.D. Salinger opens The Catcher in the Rye with a disavowal by Holden Caulfield of “David Copperfield kind of crap” (3). Such reactions are by no means absent from Canada, but in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries they were more often directed against the American than the British tradition and, very occasionally, against both, as in Daniel Wilson’s well-known characterization of the poetry of E.J. Chapman and Charles Sangster in 1858 as dismayingly ‘ “old worldish’ ” and his stern rejection of Longfellow’s Hiawatha and later Whitman’s Leaves of Grass as models (qtd. in Klinck 154, and see 160). Far more common than hostility toward the British literary tradition, or dismay at Canadian adherence to it, was a desire for trans-Atlantic continuity that led poets to write imaginatively about the transference of forms, ideas, myths, and even writers from Britain and, by extension, Europe to certain locations in Canada and to explain and express their presence by way of metaphors.1 Of course, such transference and presence is easily explicable from a commonsensical perspective through those highly portable products of the age of mechanical reproduction—books, magazines, and newspapers—the contents of which were available in shops, libraries, and private collections such as that of Robert Addison, who brought more than a thousand volumes with him when he emigrated to Upper Canada in 1792 and subsequently purchased “many more,” including, while in Quebec en route to the Niagara Peninsula, a three-volume edition of James Thomson’s The Seasons (see Cameron and

278   Literary Periods and Genres McNight vii). Yet the process of reading, learning, and inwardly digesting, and its intellectual, emotional, and spiritual results, invited and encouraged metaphors, three of which—conversation, transplantation, and inspiritation—will provide the focus of this chapter as it moves from the pre- to the post-Confederation period with an eye on the shifting literary, cultural, and economic context in which the three metaphors participated.

Conversation Sometime before 1787, Thomas Cary emigrated from his native England to Lower Canada, where he settled at Quebec and, in due course, published Abram’s Plains: A Poem (1789), established a subscription library (1797), and founded the Quebec Mercury (1805). In the opening lines of Abram’s Plains, Cary apostrophizes the location of the decisive battle on the Plains of Abraham, whose thirtieth anniversary his poem commemorates, and then sets in motion the conventional muse machinery of neoclassical poetry: Thy Plains, O Abram! and thy pleasing views, Where, hid in shades, I sit and court the muse, Grateful I sing. For there, from care and noise, Oft have I fled to taste the silent joys: There, lost in thought, my musing passion fed, Or held blest converse with the learned dead. (ll. 1–6)

A field that 30 years earlier was the site of the conflict and victory that secured Britain’s permanent presence in Lower Canada is now a place of peace, in every sense of the word, where the poet can retreat from the nearby city to indulge in the closely related activities of writing and reading. That “court[ing] the muse” and “hold[ing] blest converse with the learned dead” are indeed closely related is indicated by the parallelism of “musing passion fed” and “with the learned dead”2: conversing figuratively with writers of the past is as critical to the production of the poem as selecting aspects of the locale and environment for poetic treatment, including the “balmy breeze of Zephyrus” (l. 9), the personification of the west wind in classical mythology. It is scarcely surprising, then, that most, if not all, of the opening lines of Abram’s Plains reveal Cary’s courtship of and conversation with neoclassical English writers, most obviously Dryden, whose translation of the Aeneid begins “Arms, and the man I sing” (5:343), and Thomson, who “hold[s]‌high Converse with the MIGHTY DEAD” in the “Winter” section of The Seasons (361). Nor is Cary at all reticent about his reliance on major English poets as sources and models. In his brief Preface to Abram’s Plains, he places “Thomson, the harmonious Thomson,” above Pope among the modern poets3 who have “excelled” in “descriptive

British Poets, Classical Myths, Canadian Locations    279 poetry,” the primary reason being that he wrote in “blank verse” rather than in “rime,” and “to excel in blank verse … requires a far more poetical fancy as well as greater strength of imagination than are requisite to please in rime, where correctness of numbers often passes on the generality of readers for every thing” (1–2). “I cannot avoid making this avowal,” he adds, “however it may operate against myself ” (2). Since Abram’s Plains is written in “rime,” these remarks function as a modesty topos that signals Cary’s humility in face of the achievements of the great modern poets of the British neoclassical tradition. So, too, can the statement that follows: “Before I began this Poem I read Pope’s Windsor-Forest and Dr. Goldsmith’s Deserted Village, with the view of endeavouring, in some degree, to catch their manner of writing; as singers in country-churches in England … modulate their tones by the preclusive sound of a pitch-pipe” (2). Yet this passage also bespeaks Cary’s desire, even ambition, to emulate Pope and Goldsmith and, by so doing (and in his own words earlier in the Preface), “make [his poem] palatable to a judicious and poetical reader,” a goal that, he allows, “requires no small genius and skill” (ll. 11–12). Cary’s “genius and skill” would reside, not in displaying first-order creativity, but in adopting and localizing the “manner” of Windsor Forest and The Deserted Village successfully enough to please the typical “soldier, statesman, [and] merchant” (l. 530)  in Lower Canada to whom Abram’s Plains was originally directed. Almost needless to say, the modest ambition and ambitious modesty displayed in Cary’s Preface accord fully with the vision of the province as a “happy middle scene, /… / Beneath the blaze of mad ambition’s fire, / Yet above want, where all our joys expire” (ll. 572–75) to which he later enjoins his readers to subscribe. They are also an attitudinal hallmark of pre- and post-Confederation Canadian poetry. Cary’s presentation of Abram’s Plains as a combination of British models and local materials draws it into close proximity with the creation of one of several typical figures—the ship builder—in the body of the poem (the “saint” in the following passage is the St. Lawrence River): Tall forests their high-waving branches bow, And yield, submiss, to lay their honors low; The plowing keel the builder artist lays, Her ribs of oak the rising ship displays; Now, grown mature, she glides with forward pace, And eager rushes to the saint’s embrace. Then rising, Venus like, with gay parade, Strait turns kept-mistress to the god of trade. (ll. 108–15)

Here, allusions to the Christian story of the creation of Eve from Adam’s rib and to the classical myth of the birth of Venus from the waves describe the creation of a merchant ship (rather than a man-of-war, as would have been the case if the allusion were to Venus’s relationship with Mars) add wit and complexity to the creation by the “builder artist” of a commixture—the ship—constituted by local materials shaped in accordance

280   Literary Periods and Genres with a British model. Like many other components of Abram’s Plains, especially its lists of primary product exports such as minerals, fish, and furs, and its promise of imminent agricultural productivity and, by implication, exportable surpluses, the ship passage ties the poem to the dominant economic structure of the day, this being, of course, the mercantile system whereby finished goods—and literary forms—were shipped from the imperial centre to the colonial periphery, and raw materials (Canadian content[s]‌) were shipped in the opposite direction4—the direction of the west-east flow of the St. Lawrence and, not coincidentally, Cary’s comprehensive survey of Canada’s scenic and economic prospects from Lake Superior to the Atlantic Ocean. But while the riverine structure, the bulk of the content, and the relationship between finished goods and raw materials in Abram’s Plains are closely linked to the mercantile system that would continue to control the economic and social development of Canada for decades, the poem does in one important respect reflect contemporary developments that heralded a more independent future for the colony: it was published, not in Britain, but in Quebec, and for a local readership, albeit on paper imported from England and in a font (Caslon) designed in England.5 In the years surrounding its appearance, two acts—the Declaratory Act of 1778 and the Constitutional Act of 1791— were “provid[ing] the basis for the beginning of a made-in-Canada trade policy” (Hart 30) that, in concert with other developments (not least Britain’s shift from “mercantilist control to liberal decontrol” in its attitude to the Empire [Neill 9]), would eventually wean Canada from its dependence on Britain. Nowhere in Abram’s Plains does Cary evince anything but pride in Britain and belief in its greatness; indeed, implicitly as well as explicitly, the poem is a celebration of the benefits for Canada of all things British. Yet it also contains an element of local pride, a sense of Lower-Canadian community, and expressions of local achievement and potential. “At a time when literature seems to be emerging from the closet to illuminate our horizon” are the opening words of its Preface (1; emphasis added), and the poem that follows contains passages that hymn the praises of Canadian scenery, the healthfulness of Canadian weather, and even the cuisine of local cooks. Moreover, in its final verse paragraphs Cary opens a parenthesis in the midst of a paean to the skill and hardiness of the French Canadians to chide the milquetoasts of the metropolitan centre: “blush ye London fops embox’d in chair, / Who fear, tho’ mild your clime, to face the air” (ll. 564–65). “[O]‌n both sides [of the St. Lawrence] commerce a footing gains,” he writes at one point, and at another: “Our infant world asks but time’s fost’ring hand, / Its faculties must by degrees expand” (ll. 107, 219–20). In sum (and in economic terms), Abram’s Plains is everywhere and at many levels a product of a textual conversation with the British’s literary tradition that mirrors the dynamic of mercantilism, but it was written and published by a “domestically-oriented producer” (Hart 9) who saw himself as a member of a colonial community with a bright future as well as an illustrious past. As such, Cary anticipates Adam Hood Burwell, George Longmore, Adam Kidd, and other poets, who, unlike J.  Mackay, Cornwall Bayley, and even the Nova Scotia–born Oliver Goldsmith (who initially published The Rising Village in England), published their long poems locally. Whether they were writing primarily for a domestic audience or not, however, all such poets remained in

British Poets, Classical Myths, Canadian Locations    281 conversation with poets in the English and, increasingly, American traditions, the last in tandem with Canada’s increasingly close and sporadically reciprocal trade relationship with the United States.6 To cite just a few other examples: Charles Sangster’s The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay (1856) draws heavily on the British tradition, but it was published in both Auburn, New York, and Kingston, Ontario, and was clearly aimed at readers on both sides of the border, and Isabella Valancy Crawford’s Malcolm’s Katie (1884), although published in Toronto, draws on Longfellow as well as Tennyson and takes place in a setting that could be in either Canada or the United States, a deliberate indeterminacy that applies also to Archibald Lampman’s The Story of an Affinity (1900).7

Transplantation Very likely the last thing that the Anglo-Irish poet Thomas Moore wrote before he left Canada at the end of his travels in North America in 1803–04 was a letter to Joseph Dennie, the founder and editor of the Philadephia periodical The Portfolio. Before, during, and after his North American travels, Moore himself published several poems in The Portfolio, so he almost certainly had it specifically in mind as an outlet for his work when he wrote on 29 September 1804 to Dennie: “I have seen … the chief beauties of upper and lower Canada, and they have left impressions upon my heart and fancy which my memory long shall love to recur to. If the soil be not very ungrateful, the new thoughts it is scattered with, will spring up, I hope, into something for your hand to embellish by transplanting” (Letters 1:99). Beyond both its immediate context and its post-Kantian conception of the mind as a more-or-less fertile field into which “thoughts” are “scattered” and “grow” like seeds, Moore’s figurative (and emphatic) use of the term “transplanting” has far-reaching implications on account of the historical resonances of the verb upon which it is based (transplant) and the noun and adjective to which it is related (transplantation, transplantable). As well as referring to the action or result of “removing a plant from one place or soil and planting it in another” (OED), the verb “transplant” and its cognates refer to the “transference or removal … of people from one country and [the] settling of them in another” (OED). Indeed, the earliest use of “transplanting” cited by the Oxford English Dictionary (1608) refers particularly to the movement of people (“natives”) from one place to another, and three of the early citations of “transplant,” “transplantation,” and “transplantable” refer explicitly and predictably to Ireland.8 Moore may have been thinking only of the transit of his poems across the Atlantic from England to America, but the term that he used and emphasized— “transplanting”—is rich in imperialist resonances, not least because of the long history of English and Scottish colonization in Ireland, a “plantation” whose troubled history had recently touched Moore personally through the execution of his friend Robert Emmet for his part in the Irish Rebellion of 1798. What, then, does the heavily loaded word “transplantation” have to say about the transference of British-authored poems to North America and, more specifically,

282   Literary Periods and Genres about the cultural work of Moore’s “Ballad Stanzas,” “A Canadian Boat Song,” and the other lyrics about Canada and Canadians that were published as “Poems Relating to America” in his Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems (1806) and thence in numerous Canadian newspapers, including the Quebec Mercury?9 Viewed through a postcolonial lens, the metaphor points to the imperialistic dimension of Moore’s North American writings as a whole, especially their representation of the United States as a “barren” and “savage” culture (Letters 1:84, Poetical Works 118), a wilderness in all but name, whose soil and inhabitants would benefit from re-colonization by Britain, and their representation of Canada as, in contrast, a realm whose inhabitants are possessed of qualities and characteristics that accord with the British social and psychological constitution. With its secluded “cottage,” its peaceful surroundings, and its Edenic fantasy of a “ ‘blush[ing]’ ” and “ ‘innocent’ ” “ ‘maid who … [is] lovely to soul and to eye’ ” (Poetical Works 124), “Ballad Stanzas” is a celebration of the attainability in Upper Canada of the happiness associated with gentlemanly retirement to the English countryside in Augustan writing. With its prayerful, cooperative, and strenuous voyageurs and a mood and crepuscular setting reminiscent of Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, “A Canadian Boat Song” is a hushed testament to the existence in Lower Canada of a peasantry given to singing “simple airs” in “barbarous accents” (124 n1) while paying due respect to God and Church and labouring hard under the watchful and appreciative eye of one of their cultural, social, and racial betters. No mention is made in “Ballad Stanzas” of the hardships and deprivations that for many, if not most, people accompanied their transplantation to Upper Canada in the early nineteenth century. Nor does “A Canadian Boat Song” acknowledge the mercantile rapacity and physical cruelty that were then helping mightily to make the city that is the poem’s setting—Montreal—the commercial hub of British North America. In both poems, Moore’s (small “r”) romantic fantasies of Canada erase the harsh realities of the place and the lives of its inhabitants. Concealing such matters behind a skein of exotic, local detail (“yon sumach,” “Utawa’s tide”), he suggests that to the north of the United States there exists or could exist a trans-Atlantic Britain of lush and picturesque landscapes and virtuous and contented servants—a residually feudal Britain in a new but essentially similar and certainly accommodating realm. Avant la lettre, the Canada of the poems by Moore that were given local currency by “transplanting” in the Quebec Mercury and elsewhere accord well with Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s influential assertion that Britain’s colonies should be “not new societies, but old societies in new places” (329), a view that helped enormously to influence and shape patterns of emigration to Canada in the nineteenth century. Given the biological, even biopolitical, nature of Moore’s conception of poems as organisms that can be transplanted from one environment to another, his metaphor of “transplanting” is entirely consistent with what Alfred W.  Crosby calls “ecological imperialism”—that is, the overseas migration of plants, animals, and pathogens that accompanied and sustained the European colonization of North America and other parts of the world.10 Not until the late nineteenth century, in the Prolegomena of Thomas Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics (1893), was there a sustained articulation of the

British Poets, Classical Myths, Canadian Locations    283 analogy between the “formation of a garden” and “the process of colonization”(16),11 but arguably the parallel and the actuality had always been explicit in the very concept of transplantation. “Why … not … take up your roots and transplant?” (Jesuits’ Reasons Unreasonable [1675], qtd. in OED) is a question that refers to human beings, but it could equally well apply to the plants that migrants would take with them from one soil to another. Moreover, the fact that the term “planter” is a synonym for a colonist speaks loudly of the relationship between settlers and their flora (as, moreover, do numerous references to imported plants and seeds in the writings of Catharine Parr Traill and other British settlers in Canada).12 To add poems (and, for that matter, novels and other genres) to this relationship is merely to confirm what may already have been evident to Moore when he wrote to Dennie: that poems as well as plants, literary works as well as vegetable gardens, culture as well as agriculture,13 are all integral to the process of successful colonization and settlement. Coupled with Moore’s stature as a poet, the affective quality of “Ballad Stanzas” and “A Canadian Boat Song” ensured that, once transplanted in Canada, they flourished and proliferated as vigorously as purple loosestrife. “Ballad Stanzas” provided a point of departure for both the title poem in Adam Kidd’s The Huron Chief, and Other Poems (1830), which is fulsomely dedicated to Moore, and it furnished the meter for the lyric entitled “The Log Cabin” in Alexander McLachlan’s The Emigrant (1861). It is treated as a foil in Standish O’Grady’s The Emigrant (1841), when the horrors of emigrant life in Lower Canada—“a cottage, dismal, cold, and dark” surrounded by “stunted alders,” “stagnant waters,” and repellant creatures (ll. 1833–47)—invite unflattering comparison with the picturesque cottage, the pastoral setting, and the harmless “wood pecker tapping a hollow beech tree” of Moore’s poem (Poetical Works 124). But perhaps the most telling evidence of the interconnectedness of “Ballad Stanzas” and emigration to Upper Canada comes from John Galt and William Cattermole, two of the most influential figures in the history of settlement in the province during the period of “explosive colonization” that followed the War of 1812 (Belich 9, and see 178–79 and 182–85). In Bogle Corbet; or, the Emigrants (1831), Galt refers to the tradition that Moore wrote the “woodpecker poem” (as “Ballad Stanzas” came to be widely known) under a small tree on the north shore of Lake Ontario and remarks through the novel’s protagonist that such objects “give an indescribable charm to … a landscape” in which “the scenery as yet cannot furnish man such talismans to command the genii of memory and fancy” (3:4). Appended to Cattermole’s The Advantages of Emigration to Canada (1831) is a letter purporting to be written by a happy emigrant in Guelph named John Inglis, who states that on seeing a woodpecker he “often … remember[s]‌the song of ‘the woodpecker tapping the hollow beech-tree’ ” (213). Not merely did “Ballad Stanzas” give poetic resonance to aspects of the environment of Upper Canada and then Canada West; it also made the province a more appealing destination for emigrants. If anything, “A Canadian Boat Song” flourished and proliferated in Canada even more vigorously than “Ballad Stanzas,” but in very different soils. Countless times reprinted and quoted, it transformed its setting, St. Anne’s Rapids and St. Anne’s Island, not merely into a tourist site but, in the mind of Sangster, “sacred, and classic ground”—a “ ‘green

284   Literary Periods and Genres spot … upon memory’s waste dedicate[ed] to Moore,” who had, in essence, imbued it with his “manes” (spirit) (125–26). “A Canadian Boat Song” has been credited with creating a “mythical image” of the voyageur (Gross 78), and its influence and presence are apparent in a host of French- and English-Canadian works, from Traill’s Backwoods of Canada (“the island of St. Anne’s brought to mind … Moore’s Canadian boat song” [46]) to Émile Nelligan’s “Le Vaisseau d’or” (1904) (which may also owe a debt to another of Moore’s quickly transplanted poems about Canada, “Written on Passing Deadman’s Island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence”).14 Even a partial list of the authors who drew in one way or another on “A Canadian Boat Song” reads like a roll call on a Canadian literary parade ground: Achilles Daunt, Louis-Honoré Fréchette, William Kirby, Archibald Lampman, Charles Sangster, Allan Sullivan, Benjamin Sulte, and many more (see Grisé and Gross). No writer was more predictably influenced by Moore than his fellow Irishman and Irish nationalist Thomas D’Arcy McGee, who emigrated to Canada in 1857 and almost immediately began to use his Montreal periodical the New Era to “elaborate … [a]‌programme of political and economic expansion” (Neill 84), and, in line with the economic protectionism favoured by the Canadian Nationalist School with which he associated himself, argued in “Protection for Canadian Literature” (1858) for the “formation of … a National Literature.”15 Indeed, in his own poetic contribution to that literature, Canadian Ballads (1858), McGee alludes specifically to “A Canadian Boat Song,” using it to generate a biological metaphor that resonates almost uncannily with Moore’s “transplanting”: “ye who dream / To be the poets of the land,” he asserts, must look for “theme[s],” not in classical and other mythologies, but in the surrounding environment: So, while our boat glides swift along, Behold! from shore there looks forth That tree that bears the fruit of song— The Laurel tree that loves the North. (Canadian Ballads 43)

McGee’s point is that national subjects must provide the content of a national literature, but here, as in his other poems, the native “Laurel” has been cross-pollinated by a transplanted one in the form of the ballad. Given the compatibility between, on the one hand, the celebration of Canada, its inhabitants, and its potential as a British colony that lies at the heart of “Ballad Stanzas” and “A Canadian Boat Song” and, on the other, the teleologies of both nation and empire, it is arguable that their truest ideological heir is the boat song evocative of the latter by William Wye Smith that closes the section entitled “The Imperial Spirit” in William Douw Lighthall’s Songs of the Great Dominion (1889). In “The Canadians on the Nile,” a refrain reminiscent of “A Canadian Boat Song” is combined with Kiplingesque phrases and sentiments to celebrate the stamina of the corps of Canadian lumbermen and Caughnawaga Indians under the command of Colonel Frederick Denison who ascended the Nile in 1884 to relieve General C.G. Gordon at Khartoum:

British Poets, Classical Myths, Canadian Locations    285 O, the East is but the West, with the sun a little hotter; And the pine becomes a palm, by the dark Egyptian water: And the Nile’s like many a stream we know, that fills its brimming cup,— We’ll think it is the Ottawa, as we track the batteaux up! Pull, pull, pull! As we track the batteaux up! It’s easy shooting homeward, when we’re at the top! (11)

A little less than a century after Moore expressed the hope that his poem would be suitable for “transplanting” in North America, the unnamed narrator of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, recalling the great “[h]‌unters for gold or pursuers of fame” who had sailed down the Thames on their quests, exclaims: “What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! … The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires” (63). He could have added to his list “the plants of colonies and the poems of nations.”

Inspiritation “As to ghosts or spirits they appear totally banished from Canada. … We have neither fay nor fairy, ghost nor bogle, satyr nor wood-nymph; our very forests disdain to shelter dryad or hamadryad. No naiad haunts the rushy margin of our lakes, or hallows with her presence our forest rills” (Traill 128). “This was the lamentation of a poet,” comments Traill, adding, “[f]‌or myself, though I can easily enter into the feelings of the poet … I can yet make myself happy and contented in this country” (128–29). Sangster echoes Traill’s sentiments in the Thousand Islands section of The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay: “No Nymphic trains appear … Nor Nereids from the deeps below; nor hideous Gnomes … but crystal streams through endless landscapes flow, / And o’er the clustering Isles the softest breezes blow” (ll. 58–63). Undergirding the statements of both Traill and Sangster was a Christian faith that led them to perceive and read Nature as God’s book. By the final decades of the century, however, shadows cast upon Christianity by the Higher Criticism, geological discoveries, Darwinism, and other destabilizing developments led many writers in Canada, as elsewhere, to look to Transcendentalism, Spiritualism, Pantheism, and eventually Theosophy for alternative sources of enlightenment and spirituality. This was certainly the case with the majority of the poets of the Confederation group. But if Canada was indeed as devoid of the supernatural beings that inhabited the landscapes of Europe as Traill and Sangster asserted, then how could such beings be introduced into the Canadian landscape and then apprehended by Canadians seeking intimations of the spiritual and supernatural in the material? In “The Emigration of the Fairies” (1888), John Hunter-Duvar, a poet of the generation preceding the Confederation group, found a whimsical solution: during a violent storm a “sweet nook of the English coast” that is still inhabited by fairies breaks off and becomes a “floating

286   Literary Periods and Genres raft of peat” that carries the fairies across the Atlantic to Hernewood, near Fortune Cove on Prince Edward Island, where an elderly recluse—by implication, the poet himself—ensures that they have a safe home (153, 172). In due course, they multiply, “So that ’tis not uncommon now to see / … Fairy processions ‘mong the white-stemmed birches” and to hear “the sound of pipes and tabors” (172). The narrator’s concluding assertion that he has “told the true tale” of “how, obeying Colonization’s law, / The genial Fairies came to Canada” (172) reflects Hunter-Duvar’s own experience (he emigrated to Canada from Scotland in 1857)  and harkens back to an earlier stage of Canadian development and, precisely for those reasons, would not have satisfied the poets of the Confederation group, all of whom were born in Canada. Nor would “conversation” or “transplanting” provide the solution: a native-born generation of poets weaned on Wordsworth and Matthew Arnold, P.B. Shelley and Robert Browning, Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites, needed metaphors in keeping with their late Victorian times and a more urban and industrialized society whose anxious, exhausted, and neurasthenic inhabitants were in need of the mental, physical, and spiritual solace and refreshment that Nature could provide. This was the era, it should be recalled, when the protective tariffs of the National Policy (1878) were encouraging Canadian industrial development to the extent that “in the decade 1881–1891 the population increased only 11.5%, [but] employment in manufacturing industry rose 40.6%,” a trajectory that continued with some interruptions to World War I because “settlement in the West provided markets for the factories built under the National Policy” (Goodwin 128). In fact, by 1883 in “The Pipes of Pan,” the acknowledged leader of the Confederation group, Charles G.D. Roberts, had already arrived at a way of imagining the inspiritation of Canadian Nature—the putting of “spirit, life, or energy into” it (OED)—that is rooted in Romantic-Victorian Hellenism and reliant on the idea of spirit as both “breath” and “animating principle” (OED). At the times when he felt “his piping / Flag,” imagines Roberts, Pan (the Greek god of flocks, shepherds, and the natural world) would seek out a “pregnant earthy spot” to make a new syrinx from “reeds … with the weird earth-melody in them” (ll. 23–25). He would then break his “outworn pipes” and cast them into the water, where, infused with his spirit, they would float away (ll. 24–31). From there they were dispersed “Over the whole green earth …, / Coming to secret spots, where in a visible form / Comes not the god, though he come declared in his workings” (ll. 33–36). For “mortals” who find the pipes, “blow, and fling them away” as did Pan, the result is transformative and irreversible: Ay, they fling them away,—but never wholly! Thereafter Creeps strange fire in their veins, murmur strange tongues in their brain, Sweetly evasive; a secret madness takes them,—a charm-struck Passion for woods and the wild, the solitude of the hills. Therefore they fly the heedless throngs and traffic of cities, Haunt mossed caverns, and wells bubbling ice-cool and their souls Gather a magical gleam of the secret of life, and the god’s voice Calls to them, not from afar, teaching them wonderful things. (ll. 39–47)

British Poets, Classical Myths, Canadian Locations    287 The inspirited “voice” of Pan has metaphorically crossed the ocean in these lines, but so too have some major British poets: the Arnold of “The Scholar Gypsy” (“fly our paths, our feverish contact fly!” [221]) and “Kensington Gardens” (when Pan puts in an appearance), and the Tennyson of several poems in which the word “gleam” is associated with supernatural light, most conspicuously in “Merlin and the Gleam” but also in several other poems such as “The Two Voices” and “The Higher Pantheism.” Some six years after the publication of “The Pipes of Pan” in Roberts’s In Divers Tones (1886), Lampman produced his own version of the inspiritation metaphor, “Favorites of Pan,” which was first published in Lyrics of Earth (1895). The poem turns on the bizarre suggestion that before the Greek gods “left the earth” because of the arrival of Christianity, Pan “Cut … new reeds” for a pipe and “in … sore distress / Passed from land to land” and, when frogs responded to his “note divinely large, He took them in his hairy hands, and set His mouth to theirs awhile, And blew into their velvet throats; And ever from that hour the frogs repeat The murmur of Pan’s pipes, the notes, And answers strange and sweet; And they that hear them are renewed By knowledge of some god-like touch conveyed, Entering again into the eternal mood Wherein the earth was made. (Poems 133)

Frogs are the vehicle in which the spirit of Pan and, by extension, the spirit of classical Greece remains available to those who are “in love with life” and capable of “Wandering like children with untroubled eyes, / Far from the noise of cities and … strife” (41–44, 33–35). As was the case with “The Pipes of Pan,” more than just “ ‘the note of Pan’ ” can be heard in Lampman’s poem: for example, lines such as “The loveliness and calm of earth / Lay like a limitless dream remote and strange” (132) bespeak the presence of Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” and several lines that precede them—“Now … no more by marsh or stream / … sounds the secret reed— / For Pan is gone”—bespeak the presence of Tennyson, particularly the Tennyson who establishes spiritual contact with Hallam in the closing sections of In Memoriam. The emulation of British poets that is implicit in the echoes of their work in “The Pipes of Pan” and “Favorites of Pan” is explicit and more complex in two lengthy commemorative poems by members of the Confederation group: Roberts’s “Ave! (An Ode for the Shelley Centenary, 1892)” (1893) and Duncan Campbell Scott’s “Ode for the Keats Centenary” (1921). The seminal Canadian poem in this subgenre is Bliss Carman’s much shorter and less accomplished “Shelley” (1887), which, while more a lyrical tribute than a commemorative ode, contains a move that is developed in the later poems—namely, the association of the poet with a portion of the Canadian landscape. After concluding the first five stanzas

288   Literary Periods and Genres at the site of Shelley’s grave “beneath the wall / Of changeless Rome,” Carman uses the remaining five to suggest that a more congenial “home” for the poet’s “soul” would be the lyric’s compositional setting of “Frye Island, N.B. Canada,” where, “Beneath … matchless azure skies” and within hearing of the “eternal sea,” he would sleep “More soft[ly]” and “well might deem the world were new” (qtd. in Glickman 23–24). Moving through the seasonal cycle from spring to winter, “Shelley” concludes with a stanza that gives a local habitation and a name to the traditional association of the soul with a bird: And there the thrushes, calm, supreme, Forever reign, Whose glorious kingly golden throats Hold but a few remembered notes; Yet in the song is blent no dream Or tinge of pain!” (24)

Like the references to the “sea,” “azure skies,” and other aspects of the environment, the “thrushes” of these lines do not merely pay tribute to Shelley by evoking elements of such poems as “Adonais,” “To a Sky Lark,” and “Ode to the West Wind”; they also associate those aspects of the environment with him and with the spirit of his work. The same can be said of “Ave! (An Ode for the Shelley Centenary, 1892),” only more emphatically. Although not strictly an elegy, Roberts’s poem belongs in the tradition of the pastoral elegy (the subject of a substantial essay that he published in 1888), two recurring characteristics of which are tributary allusions to the work of the dead poet and a strong emphasis on the sympathetic relationship between the dead poet and “Nature,” with which in “Adonais” Keats is “made one” so that “there is heard / His voice in all her music” and “He is a presence to be known” in the natural world (ll. 370–74). In “Ave!” the identity and presence lies in the background of Roberts’s audacious assertion of a kinship of spirit and affect between Shelley and his work and the Tantramar River and Marshes at the head of the Bay of Fundy, a land- and seascape that Roberts had made poetically his own in “Tantramar Revisited” (1883). In “Ave!” Roberts revisits in memory (and with numerous echoes of Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”) his youthful times spent in the environs of the “mystic” Tantramar, gaining instruction from its “secret spell” and feeling “The breath of inspiration on … [his] face” (Collected Poems ll. 51, 27, 34). When the focus shifts to Shelley, the language of spirituality follows: “Strangely akin you seem to him,” writes Roberts of the tidal marshes in an apostrophe that echoes the opening line of “Ode to the West Wind”: Like yours, O marshes, his compassionate breast, Wherin abode all dreams of love and peace, Was tortured with perpetual unrest. Now loud with flood, now languid with release, Now poignant with the lonely ebb, the strife Of tides from the salt sea of human pain That hiss along the perilous coasts of life Beat in his eager brain

British Poets, Classical Myths, Canadian Locations    289 But all about the tumult of his heart Stretched the great calm of his celestial art. Therefore with no far flight, from Tantramar And my still world of ecstasy, to thee, Shelley, to thee I turn, the avatar Of Song, Love, Dream, Desire, and Liberty; To thee I turn with reverent hands of prayer And lips that fain would ease my heart of praise, Whom chief of all whose brows prophetic wear The pure and sacred bays I worship, and have worshipped since the hour When first I felt thy bright and chainless power. (ll. 88–111)

The echoes between the second of these two stanzas and Roberts’s earlier reminiscences of his youth strengthen the affinity between the spirit of Shelley and the Tantramar. As the poem proceeds to heap praise on Shelley’s works and ideas within a narrative of his life and death, the Tantramar landscape recedes into the background, to return only in the final two stanzas. Once again addressing the tidal area in the language of spirituality (“wizard flood”), Roberts now uses a metaphor reminiscent of the “tide in the affairs of men” in Julius Caesar (IV.iii.208) and the “Sea of Faith” in “Dover Beach” (21), to characterize the “tide … at the full” in the marshes as “the possessor of the utmost good, / With no more left to seek” (ll. 295–300). In the conceit that occupies the entire last stanza of the poem, the rising and falling of the tide is likened to the “destiny” of “some lord of men” who “ponders … the scrolled heaven” and “sift[s]‌” the “stars’ ” conflicting message” (ll. 301–07). As the night ends and the “signs recede,” an “ominously scarlet” dawn (a proverbial warning to sailors and shepherds) breaks on the “day he leads his legions forth to war” (ll. 308–10). Enigmatic and suggestive as the poem’s concluding stanzas are, their overall meaning is clear enough: read correctly as subject to the same laws of rise and fall, ascent, descent, and re-ascent, the Tantramar, Shelley, and the Canadian poet whose commemorative ode they together inspired are not separate and distinct but “akin” in spirit and destiny. A further continuation and, arguably, the culmination of the line initiated by Carman’s “Shelley” is Duncan Campbell Scott’s “Ode for the Keats Centenary” (1921).16 Perhaps remembering the commemorative poems of both Carman and Roberts, Scott follows some preliminary remarks on Keats’s posthumous fame by focusing on his burial site “Beneath the frown of … old Roman stone” and conceding the impossibility of reviving and contacting him either through a passionate “incantation” of “his most sacred lines” or through “all the praise that sets / Towards his pale grave” (Poems 151–52). But if Keats were to escape the “Shadow” of death, suggests Scott, then his “power / Of ‘seeing great things in loneliness’ ” would propel his “Spirit” away from the “toil and press” of southern Europe to the solitude and purity of the Canadian Arctic. Two parallel verse paragraphs—the first a catalogue of northern flora and fauna and the second a tribute to lonely scientists and poets—conclude with incantatory prayers to the “Spirit of Keats” to “unfurl [its] deathless wings” in Canada and “Teach us … /

290   Literary Periods and Genres Beauty in loneliness” (153–54). What makes Keats a valuable teacher not only for poets, but also for scientists, was his lonely dedication, “oft in pain and penury” (153), to the cause of beauty, truth, and the betterment of the human condition. “[W]‌hen … calling on the name of poetry,” Scott told the Royal Society of Canada in “Poetry and Progress” in May 1922, I am thinking of that element in the art … in which the power of growth resides, which is the winged and restless spirit keeping pace with knowledge and often beating into the void in advance of speculation. … This spirit endeavours to interpret the world in new terms of beauty. … It is rare, but it is ever present, for what is it but the flickering and pulsation of the force that created the world. (Addresses 2:310–11)

The fact that Keats is mentioned and quoted several times in “Poetry and Progress” reinforces the suspicion that in Scott’s mind the winged “Spirit of Keats” and the “winged and restless spirit” of poetry were so closely linked as to be almost identical. The remainder of “Ode for the Keats Centenary” is a meditation on the forces that have driven Beauty into the Canadian Arctic and the means by which the “goddess” might be persuaded to return to the “desolate world” (Poems 155). Driven into solitude by human ignorance, aggression, and sordidness, Beauty might return to “the great highways” of human life “if the world’s mood” were to change for the better and if the “Spirit of Keats” would “lend [its] voice” to that of the poet and her other devotees (154–55). Without the necessary change in the Weltkultur, however, even a chorus containing Keats’s “Spirit” must fail to tempt Beauty away from the “precinct of pure air / Where moments turn to months of solitude” (156). Beauty, it would appear, has taken permanent “refuge” from life and can only be found in regions “beyond the bitter strife” (156). Such regions are as geographically remote as the Canadian Arctic—and as readily reachable as the local library, for, as Scott says at the conclusion of “Poetry and Progress,” “[i]‌f the poetry of our generation is wayward and discomforting, … bitter with the turbulence of an uncertain and ominous time, we may turn from it for refreshment to those earlier days when society appears to us to have been simpler, when there were seers who made clear the paths of life and adorned them with beauty” (Addresses 2:319). It was exactly this anti-modern yearning for less complex and more aesthetically neutral times that drew Scott to both Keats and the “lonely north” and led, in “Ode for the Keats Centenary,” to his removal of the poet’s “Spirit” from postwar Europe to the Canadian Arctic, a realm that, at least since the writing of “The Height of Land” in November 1915, he had regarded as more spiritual than the “crowded southern land / With all the welter of the lives of men” (Poems 47). During the long farewell to the Confederation group in the decades following World War I, the continuation and attenuation of the Romantic-Victorian tradition led S.I. Hayakawa to observe caustically that there were only four types of Canadian poetry:  “Victorian, Neo-Victorian, Quasi-Victorian, and Pseudo-Victorian” (qtd. in Kennedy 100). In the rage for newness that such remarks reflect, old topics of conversation, old candidates for transplantation, and old notions of inspiritation would be cast

British Poets, Classical Myths, Canadian Locations    291 aside as “old world,” passé, and unCanadian, but, like so much else that was “laid aside / discarded,” they had in their different ways helped to create and leave “a place to stand on” (Purdy 133).

Notes 1. Since it derives from the Greek metaphorá (meta-pherein), meaning to carry, transfer, carry over or across, the term “metaphor” is not only metaphorical in itself, but also etymologically descriptive of the movement being discussed in this chapter. 2. In Cary’s day, the word “conversation” could mean “sexual intercourse or intimacy,” a sense not entirely irrelevant to the passage quoted or to the relationship in Abram’s Plains between local content and the form and genre into which it is placed (decasyllabic couplets, the topographical poem). Also relevant to the passage is the fact that “converse” can mean “spiritual or mental intercourse; communion” other than through speech. 3. Cary’s “mighty dead” would include both ancients and moderns; Pope died in 1744, Thomson in 1748, and Goldsmith in 1774. 4. See Michael Hart, A Trading Nation, 23–25 for a succinct description of mercantilism, which, among other things, required an abundance of staples such as furs, fish, and grain in the colony and, to transport them to the metropolitan centre, “ships built in the mother country or in the colony” (24). 5. For details of the publication and distribution of Abram’s Plains, see my Introduction to the poem xxxix–xliii and xlvii n69. 6. See Hart’s chapter entitled “Reciprocity and Preferences” (45–84) for the tension between its two elements during the pre- and post-Confederation periods as Canada’s preferential treatment by Britain and eroded trade with the United States became increasingly important. See Tracy Ware’s contribution to this volume (Chapter 16) for further discussion of the cosmopolitanism of Confederation-era writing. 7. See the Introductions and Explanatory Notes to my editions of The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay and Malcolm’s Katie for further details of their publication and sources. 8. “The transportation and transplantation of the Grames and other[s]‌… into the realm of Ireland” (1606), “[t]he Irish are unwilling to transplant or prove theire qualificacions, but they will bee forc’d to goe and make way for the English planters”(1655), and “[w]hat popish proprietors of lands Transplantable [in Wexford], do yet remain untransplanted” (1656). 9. In the months immediately following the appearance of Moore’s book, three pieces from “Poems Relating to America” were published in the Quebec Mercury under the titles “The Dead Man’s Island,” “A Ballad:  The Lake of the Dismal Swamp,” and “The Rapids: A Canadian Boat Song,” as well as a lyric beginning “When the spires of Quebec first open’d to view” that did not appear in the book. 10. See Crosby’s Columbian Exchange (1972) and Ecological Imperialism (1986) and, as Canadian supplement, my own The Gay] Grey Moose (1992). 11. “Suppose a shipload of English colonists [is] sent to form a settlement,” writes Huxley, “They clear away the native vegetation, extirpate or drive out the animal population, so far as may be necessary, and take measures to defend themselves against the re-immigration of either. In their place, they introduce English grain and fruit trees; English dogs, sheep, cattle, horses and men; in fact they set up a new Flora and Fauna and a new variety of

292   Literary Periods and Genres mankind, within the old state of nature” (16). Almost all the items in Huxley’s list of things introduced by settlers appear in Abram’s Plains. 12. See, for example, Letter 9 in The Backwoods of Canada (1836), in which Traill asks her mother to send her from England “flower-seeds … the stones of plums, damsons, bullace, pips of the best kind of apples … a few nuts from our beautiful old stock-nut trees … the seeds of our wild primrose and sweet violet,” and “lucerne-seed” (124–25). 13. See Oliver Goldsmith, The Rising Village (1825, 1834), for “culture” used to mean “agriculture” (121). 14. Greatly assisting the dissemination of “A Canadian Boat Song” in French Canada was the translation by Dominique Mondalet that was first published in 1827 (see Grisé 51–54). 15. The title of McGee’s article, which was published in 1858, reflects the drive for protectionism in the late 1850s that resulted in the passage of the Cayley-Galt Tariff in the legislature of the United Provinces in that year (see Hart 54–55). The combination of nationalism and protectionism in the article anticipates by 25 years the “alliance” between the two elements in Macdonald’s National Policy (56). 16. It is curious that, although Lampman greatly admired Keats, drew heavily on his work in such major poems as “April” (1888), wrote extensively about him in “The Character and Poetry of Keats” (1893), and sent money in support of the Memorial to him that was unveiled in England on 14 July 1894, he never made him the subject of a poem. Very likely this would have changed if he had lived to the Keats Centenary in 1922, but there may have been another reason: he lacked the distance from Keats necessary to write such a poem without it being mawkish. “I am only just now getting quite clear of the spell of that marvelous person; and it has taken me ten years to do it,” Lampman told Edward William Thomson in 1892, adding: “Keats has always had such a fascination for me and has so permeated my whole mental outfit that I have an idea that he has found a faint reincarnation in me” (Annotated 119)—a statement of another kind of inspiritation that may well reflect the interest in Theosophy that is apparent in other letters and in some of Lampman’s later poems.

Works Cited Alexander, Sir James E. L’Acadie; or Seven Years’ Explorations in British America. 2  vols. London: H. Colburn, 1849. Print. Arnold, Matthew. Poems. Ed. Kenneth Allott. London: Longmans, Green, 1965. Print. Bentley, D.M.R. The Gay]Grey Moose: Essays on the Ecologies and Mythologies of Canadian Poetry, 1690–1990. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 1992. Print. ———. “Introduction.” Cary xi–xlviii. Cameron, William J., and George McKnight. Robert Addison’s Library: A Short-Title Catalogue of the Books Brought to Upper Canada in 1792 by the First Missionary Sent Out to the Niagara Frontier by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Hamilton, ON: Synod of the Diocese of Niagara, 1967. Print. Cary, Thomas. Abram’s Plains:  A  Poem. 1789. Ed. D.M.R. Bentley. London, ON:  Canadian Poetry P, 1986. Print. Cattermole, William. Emigration: The Advantages of Emigration to Canada. London: Sumpkin and Martin, 1831. Print. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Ed. D.C.R.A. Goonetilleke. 2nd ed. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 1999. Print.

British Poets, Classical Myths, Canadian Locations    293 Crawford, Isabella Valancy. Malcolm’s Katie:  A  Love Story. Ed. D.M.R. Bentley. London: Canadian Poetry P, 1987. Print. Crosby, Alfred W. The Columbian Exchange:  Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972. Print. ———. Ecological Imperialism:  The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900. Studies in Environment and History. Cambridge; Cambridge UP, 1986. Print. Dryden, John. Works. Ed. Edward Niles Hooker, H.T. Swedenberg, Jr., et al. 20 vols. Berkeley: U of California P, 1956–89. Print. Galt, John. Bogle Corbet; or, The Emigrants. 3 vols. London: Henry Colburn and R. Bentley, 1831. Print. Glickman, Susan. “Carman’s ‘Shelley’ and Roberts’ ‘Ave.’  ” Canadian Poetry:  Studies, Documents, Reviews 24 (Spring/Summer 1989): 20–28. Print. Goldsmith, Oliver. The Rising Village. Ed. Gerald Lynch. London, ON:  Canadian Poetry P, 1989. Print. Goodwin, Craufurd D.W. Canadian Economic Thought: The Political Economy of a Developing Nation, 1814–1914. Durham, NC: Duke UP; Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1961. Print. Grisé, Yolande. “La Présence de Thomas Moore, auteur de A Canadian Boat Song, dans la poésie canadienne-française, au XIXe siécle.”‘ Writing and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Canada. Ed. Michael Peterman. Spec. issue of Journal of Canadian Studies 32.2 (1997): 48–71. Print. Gross, Conrad. “Coureurs-de-bois, Voyageurs, and Trappers: The Fur Trade and the Emergence of an Ignored Canadian Literary Tradition.” Canadian Literature 127 (1990): 76–91. Print. Hart, Michael. A Trading Nation: Canadian Trade Policy from Colonialism to Globalization. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 2002. Print. Hunter-Duvar, John. De Roberval, a Drama; also The Emigration of the Faeries, and The Triumph of Constancy, a Romaunt. Saint John, NB: J. and A. Macmillan, 1888. Print. Huxley, Thomas. Evolution and Ethics, and Other Essays. 1893. New York: Appleton, 1898. Print. Kennedy, Leo. “The Future of Canadian Literature.” Canadian Mercury 1.5–6 (April-May 1929): 99–100. Print. Klinck, Carl F. “Literary Activity in Canada East and West:  1841–1880.” Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English. Ed. Carl F. Klink. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1965. 145–73. Print. Lampman, Archibald. Poems. Ed. Duncan Campbell Scott. Toronto: Morang, 1900. Print. Lampman, Archibald, and Edward William Thomson. An Annotated Edition of the Correspondence between Archibald Lampman and Edward William Thomson (1890–1898). Ed. Helen Lynn. Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1980. Print. McGee, Thomas D’Arcy. Canadian Ballads. Montreal: John Lovell, 1858. Print. ———. “Protection for Canadian Literature.” New Era [Montreal] 24 April 1858: [2]‌. Print. Moore, Thomas. Letters. Ed. Wilfred S. Dowden. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1964. Print. ———. Poetical Works. Ed. A.D. Godley. London: Humphrey Milford; Oxford UP, 1915. Print. Neill, Robin. A History of Canadian Economic Thought. London: Routledge, 1991. Print. O’Grady, Standish. The Emigrant. Ed. Brian Trehearne. London, ON:  Canadian Poetry P, 1989. Print. Purdy, Al. Collected Poems. Ed. Russell Brown. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. 1986. Print. Roberts, Charles G.D. Collected Poems. Ed. Desmond Pacey. Wolfville, NS:  Wombat, 1985. Print.

294   Literary Periods and Genres Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye. Boston: Little, Brown, 1945. Print. Sangster, Charles. The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay. Ed. D.M.R. Bentley. London, ON: Canadian Poetry P, 1990. Print. Scott, Duncan Campbell. Addresses, Essays, and Reviews. Ed. Leslie Ritchie. 2 vols. London, ON: Canadian Poetry P, 2000. Print. ———. Poems. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1926. Print. Shakespeare, William. Complete Works. Ed. G.B. Harrison. New  York:  Harcourt, Brace, 1948. Print. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Complete Poetical Works. Ed. Thomas Hutchinson. London: Oxford UP, 1943. Print. Smith, William Wye. “The Canadians on the Nile.” Songs of the Great Dominion: Voices from the Forests and Settlements and Cities of Canada. Ed. William Douw Lighthall. London: Walter Scott, 1899. 11–12. Print. Tennyson, Alfred, Lord. Poems. Ed. Christopher Ricks. London: Longman; New York: Norton, 1969. Print. Thomas, James. The Seasons. Ed. James Sambrook. Oxford: Clarendon, 1981. Print. Traill, Catharine Parr. The Backwoods of Canada: Being Letters from the Wife of an Emigrant Officer, Illustrative of the Domestic Economy of British America. 1836. New Canadian Library. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1989. Print. Wakefield, Edward Gibbon. England and America: A Comparison of the Social and Political States of Both Nations. 1834. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1967. Print.

Chapter 16

C osmop ol i ta n Nationa l i sm Canadian Literature of the Confederation Period, 1867–1914 Tracy Ware

Although there was much optimism about Canadian literature in the late nineteenth century, bookended by the eras of two notable prime ministers, John A. Macdonald and Wilfrid Laurier, there were also plenty of doubts. Because Canada “enshrined or was made to enshrine the rights of imperial and foreign owners to the detriment of its own interests in printing and publishing” (169), as Eli MacLaren argues, “Isolation, financial distraction, and the temptation to emigrate hounded Canadian writers in the decades after Confederation” (3). Such fiction writers as Ralph Connor, Lucy Maud Montgomery, and Stephen Leacock achieved remarkable international success while remaining in Canada, but their careers were as singular as they were unexpected. In part because they were relatively free of the economic pressures that constrained fiction, the poets were more successful and more cohesive, especially in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. As a student at the University of Toronto, Archibald Lampman was inspired by Charles G.D. Roberts’s first volume, Orion and Other Poems (1880): I had been under the depressing conviction that we were situated hopelessly on the outskirts of civilization, where no art and no literature could be. … I sat up all night reading and re-reading Orion in a state of the wildest excitement and when I went to bed I could not sleep. It seemed to me a wonderful thing that such work could be done by a Canadian, by a young man, one of ourselves. It was like a voice from some new paradise of art calling to us to be up and doing. A little after sunrise I got up and went out into the College grounds. … everything was transfigured for me beyond description, bathed in an old world radiance of beauty, the magic of the lines that were sounding in my ears, those divine verses, as they seemed to me,

296   Literary Periods and Genres with their Tennyson-like richness and strange, earth-loving Greekish flavour. (“Two Canadian” 94–95)

Duncan Campbell Scott lamented “the uncertain aim, the lack of any national solidarity that acts and reacts upon everything thought and done” (“Decade” 70), but his response to Orion was similar: “Almost for the first time a Canadian reader whose ear was attuned to the music of Tennyson, Keats and Arnold might, in quoting one of his own poets, do so with the feeling that here at last was verse flowing with the stream of general poetical literature” (“Decade” 62). In this way, Roberts became the unofficial leader of “the Confederation poets,” including his cousin Bliss Carman, Lampman, Scott, E. Pauline Johnson, and William Wilfred Campbell, all born a few years before Confederation. Their shared aesthetic involves what D.M.R. Bentley calls “cosmopolitan nationalism,” an “enabling combination of the international and the local, the classical and the Canadian” (Confederation 62). That term is at first surprising, since, as Will Kymlicka states, “in today’s world, cosmopolitanism is almost always defined in contrast to nationalism” (204). An influential exception comes from Kwame Anthony Appiah, who refers to “a rooted cosmopolitanism, or, if you like, a cosmopolitan patriotism” (91). Bruce Robbins concedes that “For better or worse, there is a growing consensus that cosmopolitanism sometimes works together with nationalism rather than in opposition to it. It is less clear what cosmopolitanism is opposed to, or what its value is supposed to be” (2). The best answer comes from Kymlicka: instead of nationalism, “cosmopolitanism should be defined by contrast with its real enemies—xenophobia, intolerance, injustice, chauvinism, militarism, colonialism, etc.” (220). Their cosmopolitanism saves the Confederation poets from an uncritical nationalism, and so Lampman is not reluctant to criticize Roberts in the same lecture in which he remembers reading Orion. In Bentley’s words, the Confederation poets were “in different proportions post-colonials, loyal Victorians, and committed North Americans, at different times proudly Canadian, truculent or deferential towards Britain, receptive, attracted, and obedient to American literary culture and the opportunities that it afforded” (Confederation 16). Two other aspects of Confederation poetry make the idea of “cosmopolitan nationalism” attractive. First, these poets respect the regional diversity of Canada, often identifying their settings in detail. Roberts’s best poetry is set in the Tantramar area near his childhood home in Sackville, New Brunswick, and Carman was also born in that province, but the others came from Ontario, though their work (especially Scott’s) is sometimes set elsewhere. Unlike later regionalists, they showed little interest in defining themselves against the centre (Hutcheon 4), and their work supports Kymlicka and Kathryn Walker’s claim that “Our geographic diversity may play a role in positioning Canada as uniquely cosmopolitan by forcing Canadians to develop bonds of solidarity that transcend the very different physical landscapes and regional economies we inhabit” (24, n10). Second, Roberts’s understanding of nation was as flexible as his understanding of region. Ian Woodward and Zlatko Skrbis suggest that “the critical defining feature of the cosmopolitan ethic is the acceptance and institution of self-problematizing relationships with cultural difference” (135). Roberts would not

Cosmopolitan Nationalism   297 have used that language, but he recognized as early as 1883 that French was as important as English: “In Canadian literature it is now apparent that there must long continue to be two parallel streams; and I can see no reason for imagining that either of these will ever absorb the other” (“Beginnings” 248). In addition to the poetry of Octave Crémazie and Louis-Honoré Fréchette, he translated Phillippe Aubert de Gaspé’s novel Les Anciens Canadiens as Canadians of Old in 1890. His several poems on Aboriginal mythology, whatever their shortcomings (Bentley, “Roberts’ Use”), demonstrate that he was not exclusively Eurocentric, and the Senecas and the Sarcees made him an honorary chief (Collected Letters 624n). He was a Canadian nationalist who published in the leading American and British journals (Brown, “To the North” 79; Mount), and he was included in such surveys as Jessie B. Rittenhouse’s The Younger American Poets (1904). Perhaps Roberts did know something about “self-problematizing relationships.” Some of these concerns emerge in “The Beginnings of a Canadian Literature,” an 1883 University of New Brunswick Alumni Oration. After Roberts notes that French-Canadian writers “have attained a richer energy of national feeling and patriotic devotion than has yet quickened in our more sluggish veins” (249), his survey of English-Canadian writing omits Charles Mair, damns Charles Heavysege with faint praise (252–54), shows a similar ambivalence toward other poets, and deals with fiction in one sentence (257).1 His purpose is to stake out his own position: as Bentley argues, “keenly aware … that his claim to fame in Canadian literature and his hope for an appointment in a Canadian university rested to that point on a volume of poetry entitled Orion, and Other Poems, Roberts also argues that a ‘workman’ of ‘genius’ (such as himself) will inevitably produce work that is both international in stature and Canadian in ‘flavour’ ” (Confederation 60–61). Accordingly, the oration ends with a qualification: let me say a word concerning that perpetual injunction to our verse-writers to choose Canadian themes only. Now it must be remembered that the whole heritage of English Song is ours and that it is not ours to found a new literature. The Americans have not done so nor will they. They have simply joined in raising the splendid structure, English literature, to the building of which may come workmen from every region on earth where speaks the English tongue. The domain of English letters knows no boundaries of Canadian Dominion, of American Commonwealth, nor yet of British Empire. All the greatest subject matter is free to the world’s writers. (258)

Roberts is a long way from his distant relative Ralph Waldo Emerson, who, at the end of “The American Scholar,” gave his Harvard audience contrary advice: “this confidence in the unsearched might of man belongs, by all motives, by all prophecy, by all preparation, to the American Scholar. We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe” (68). Convinced that neither New Brunswick nor New England is a “new world,” Roberts anticipates later developments in Canadian criticism. What looks like Canadian modesty is actually a belief in universal standards and a suspicion of uncritical nationalism. As Bentley writes, Roberts’s aesthetic “was centred on his notion of craftsmanship or worksmanship,” and his insistence “that poems by

298   Literary Periods and Genres Canadian writers should be the technical equals of the best poetry being produced in France, Britain, and the United States” (Confederation 111–12). Far from regretting the lack of a more aggressive nationalism, other Canadian writers agreed. Sara Jeannette Duncan wrote that “Gold is gold all over the world, and the literary standard should be equally unalterable. If not, the inferior metal we pretend to appraise at the same value because it was mined in our own country will be certain one day to be tried as by fire, with disastrous results” (“Dangers” 117). Scott argued that “We talk too often and too lengthily about Canadian poetry and Canadian literature as if it was, or ought to be, a special and peculiar brand, but it is simply poetry, or not poetry; literature or not literature; it must be judged by established standards, and cannot escape criticism by special pleading” (“Poetry and Progress” 302). Campbell complained of the uncritical nationalism in W.D. Lighthall’s anthology, Songs of the Great Dominion (1889), which represented Canada “as a crude colony, whose literature, if it could be called by such a name, is merely associated with superficial canoe and carnival songs, backwoods and Indian tales told in poor rhyme, and all tied together by pseudo-patriotic hurrahs, which are about as representative of our true nationality as they are of literature” (Davies 203). Later writers sometimes assume that the Confederation poets must have been so determined to put a new country on the map that they were not concerned with aesthetic merit (Vance 248), but the opposite was the case. They both understood and avoided the dilemma outlined by MacLaren: “On the one hand, there was the bullish celebration of Canadian writing regardless of its quality; on the other hand, there was the espousing of international standards of excellence with snobbish disregard for local tradition” (168). In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Roberts was influential precisely because he insisted that poems about Canada mattered if and only if they were first of all good poems. Furthermore, the insistence that “All the greatest subject matter is free to the world’s writers” is no deference to empire. Canadian writers are at no disadvantage if they have access to “the whole heritage of English Song,” and especially if, as Roberts says at the beginning of his oration, “Literature is not only the revelation of present mood and character, but it also has in its hands the moulding of future character. The exponent of the present, it is also the architect of the future” (244). As his own work demonstrates, his idea is not to avoid Canadian themes, but to bring all the resources of the language to bear on them. Understood in these terms, he anticipates Northrop Frye’s great insight: the forms of literature cannot exist outside literature, just as the forms of sonata and fugue cannot exist outside music. When a poet is confronted by a new life or environment, the new life may suggest a new content, but obviously cannot provide him with a new form. The forms of poetry can be derived only from other poems, the forms of novels from other novels. (173)

If the Confederation poets were less original than Emerson demanded, so was Emerson.2 And so were the Canadian Modernists, who sometimes blurred the distinction between a new content and a new form. As Malcolm Ross argued in 1960,

Cosmopolitan Nationalism   299 our best writers today have much more in common with Roberts and the others than they would care to admit. … Fashions have changed. Techniques have changed. But the changes have not really been ours—at least, we have not been the innovators. … The point is—the debt is assimilated now (as it was then) and therefore is almost paid back. Then as now the feeling for place checks and balances the feeling for time. (xi)

Dependent as they were on journals, publishers, and audiences abroad, the Confederation poets were necessarily international, and Roberts blazed the trail. Lampman felt that the promise of Orion “was strengthened and in part fulfilled” (96) in Roberts’s second volume, In Divers Tones (1886). As the title (an allusion to Tennyson’s In Memoriam) suggests, the volume explores a wide variety of forms and genres, and it includes some of Roberts’s best work. Lampman was not impressed with the three patriotic poems (107), but he thought that the “workmanship” of “Actaeon” enabled it “to stand comparison favourably with Tennyson’s ‘Oenone’ ” (98), while “The Tantramar Revisited” demonstrates Roberts’s “keen sympathy with nature and his strenuous and scholarly gift of expression” (100). A meditative poem in the manner of “Tintern Abbey,” “The Tantramar Revisited” is Wordsworthian without being derivative, in part because it also responds to a range of Classical, British, and American poets (Bentley, Confederation 62). What Roberts calls “the formal alternation of hexameter and pentameter lines” (“Prefatory” 302) suits both the speaker’s shifting moods and the ebb and flow of the tides: “Ah, how well I remember those wide red flats” (29), he says, before deciding to “Muse and recall far off, rather remember than see” (62).3 The volume also includes seven of the 37 sonnets that would make up the sequence in Roberts’s next volume, Songs of the Common Day (1893). As Bentley argues, the Petrarchan sonnet “provided Roberts with a frame within which to place on view his own miniature word-paintings of the Tantramar landscape” (“Poetics” 22). The best sonnets use the simplest diction, as suggested by the Wordsworthian title. In “The Potato Harvest,” for instance, rural labour has a quiet dignity in a sestet that moves between background and foreground: Black on the ridge, against that lonely flush,    A cart, and stoop-necked oxen; ranged beside,   Some barrels; and the day-worn harvest-folk, Here emptying their baskets, jar the hush   With hollow thunders; down the dusk hillside    Lumbers the wain; and day fades out like smoke. (Collected Poems 91)

Along with “Ave! An Ode for the Shelley Centenary” in the same volume, the sequence is Roberts’s most successful attempt to adapt Romantic conventions to depict his native region; it also marked the end of his most productive phase (Pacey 35). Even before he resigned from King’s College in Nova Scotia in 1895, he had written two guidebooks and two Acadian romances, and, after he moved to New York in 1897, he had to become even more prolific to earn a living. His greatest commercial success came when he and Ernest Thompson Seton simultaneously invented the animal story.4 Starting with “Strayed” in

300   Literary Periods and Genres 1889 and flourishing until World War I, the genre was so topical that Roberts visited the White House to discuss animals with Theodore Roosevelt (Adams 104).5 After serving in World War I, he returned to Canada in 1925, publishing two more volumes of poetry, and joining E.J. Pratt’s circle in Toronto. For Roberts, Lampman’s Among the Millet (1888) was one of the “manifestations, unmistakable enough to the heedful observer, of an approaching harvest for these acres which so long we have been tilling almost in vain” (Rev. 41). Lampman, he writes, “seems to drench himself in his landscapes, so that the very essence of them is reproduced in his verse” (Rev. 42), but Lampman’s best work involves more than landscape. In “Heat” (1888), the speaker recognizes that he cannot escape the burden of thought: And yet to me not this or that   Is always sharp or always sweet; In the sloped shadow of my hat   I lean at rest, and drain the heat; Nay more, I think some blessèd power   Hath brought me wandering idly here: In the full furnace of this hour   My thoughts grow keen and clear. (Poems 13)

Among the Millet was well received, and his poems continued to appear in American journals (Brown, “To the North” 79), but Lampman encountered difficulties with publishers that Roberts and Carman were spared: two of his three volumes were privately published, and he was unable to find a publisher for A Century of Sonnets (Bentley, Confederation 137–38), a sequence that surpasses Roberts’s in quantity, quality, and variety. In the five years before his death in 1899, Lampman wrote a few political poems that explain why he was so critical of Roberts’s patriotic verse (“Two” 107).6 In such sonnets as “To a Millionaire” and “To an Ultra Protestant” (both from 1894), “The Land of Pallas” (1899), and, most memorably, in the dystopian “The City of the End of Things” (also 1894), he offers a sharp critique of contemporary capitalism. Given his dedication to the form, it is fitting that his last poem is the sonnet “Winter Uplands,” which ends with this couplet: “The crunching snowshoes and the stinging air / And silence, frost and beauty everywhere” (Poems 299). It’s not just his winter landscapes but their austere beauty that make Lampman distinctive. Lampman did for Duncan Campbell Scott what Roberts did for Lampman: in Scott’s words, “It never occurred to me to write a line of prose or poetry until I was about twenty-five—and after I had met Archibald Lampman” (qtd. in Brown, “Memoir” 115). After writing On Canadian Poetry (1943), E.K. Brown told Scott that “our literary history must be rewritten, and some of the landmarks removed. Carman and Roberts will no longer do as landmarks.” He looked instead to Scott, Lampman, and E.J. Pratt as “the main landmarks” (letter of 17 July 1943, McDougall 70).7 In his discussion of The Magic House and Other Poems (1893), Scott’s first book, Brown finds “At the Cedars” to be “miles removed” from both the other poems in the volume and the other Confederation poets

Cosmopolitan Nationalism   301 (On Canadian 125; for a disagreement, see Pacey 146). This awkward narrative continues to be anthologized because of a dubious association between the wilderness and originality: in Brown’s words, “By his choice of the wilds [Scott] has won an immense advantage over his contemporaries” (On Canadian 123). You would never know from Brown that “At the Cedars” was originally dedicated to Campbell, or that The Magic House included poems dedicated to Roberts, Lampman, and Carman. The best poem in the book is the less frequently anthologized “In the Country Churchyard,” Scott’s moving elegy for his father. Reworking Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” Scott’s poem resists the false peace of death in order to reach a modest resolution: “Not to forget / This quiet beauty, not to be Time’s fool, / I will be man a little longer yet” (Magic 29). Until recently, however, most of Scott’s critics followed Brown in preferring his relatively few poems, often in free verse, about Aboriginal people and remote settings. As late as 1983, George Woodcock called Scott “the Confederation poet whose work has in recent years seemed most congenial to the contemporary sensibility” (21). Since then, a vigorous reaction to the policies and programs (including the notorious residential schools) that Scott implemented as deputy superintendent-general of the Department of Indian Affairs from 1913 to 1932 has led to a wholesale critique of his work, which some critics regard as consistently racist. In an important book, Stan Dragland argues that “dwelling on [the government policy of] assimilation reduces the interest and significance of most of Scott’s characters of Indian or mixed descent to regard them merely or even mainly as representing racial types or combinations” (192). For Dragland, Scott’s poem “The Onondaga Madonna” (1894) concerns assimilation in this sense, but such poems as “At Gull Lake: August 1810” and “A Scene at Lake Manitou” (both 1935) are more individualized and more compassionate. Perhaps the recent revelation of Scott’s own Onondaga ancestry will provoke a more flexible reassessment (McNab 265–66; Long 111). In addition to poetry, Scott wrote two collections of short fiction: In the Village of Viger (1896), an early story cycle; and The Witching of Elspie (1923). The latter includes “Labrie’s Wife,” which takes the form of the journal of a Hudson Bay Company’s clerk in 1815. His unreliability is emphasized by the very title, since this woman is not Labrie’s wife, and his many prejudices, including his contempt for the First Nations and for women, are exposed in his journal, as he dimly realizes when he vows to “set down the occurrence here although it be against myself ” (153). As a Canadian nationalist who took pride in her Loyalist Mohawk ancestry, E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake) shared the excitement for Roberts: for her, the Tantramar “is the spot that every lover of Canadian literature longs to see. It is not grand scenery, to some it may not even be distinctive, but it is more than these, it is Roberts” (“Singer” 17). For his part, Roberts called her “one of the acknowledged leaders of our Canadian group” (letter to Richard Watson Gilder, 12 October 1895, Collected 210). But her extraordinary popularity was never based on her similarities to the others. From the night in January 1892 when she began a sensational career as a performer until she retired to Vancouver in 1909, she was known as “the Mohawk Princess.” The poem that excited that first audience was “A Cry from an Indian Wife,” a dramatic monologue written for the North-West Rebellion of 1885. Though the speaker hesitates, she finally urges her

302   Literary Periods and Genres beloved to “Go forth, and win the glories of the war / … By right, by birth we Indians own these lands” (Collected 15). For the next 17 years, Johnson followed a punishing schedule of performances that captivated her Canadian, American, and English audiences. As Carole Gerson and Veronica Strong-Boag observe, she “became well known for wearing her Indian dress for the first half of her concerts and an elegant evening gown for the second,” the “Indian dress” (inspired in part by a picture of Longfellow’s Minnehaha) including a necklace of bear claws received from Ernest Thompson Seton and a scalp acquired from a Blackfoot chief (xvii). She was not recognized as a cosmopolitan, but her ability to embrace all aspects of her complex heritage (Mohawk and Loyalist on her father’s side, English and American on her mother’s) made her a citizen of the world in an unusual sense. She claimed that the division in her identity was only apparent, since “White Race and Red are one if they are but Canadian born” (qtd. in Gerson and Strong-Boag xix). In a skeptical response, Daniel Francis asks, “What could be more comforting for an Anglo-Saxon audience than to hear a Native woman singing the praises of Canada and the British-Canadian way of life?” (350). He may be right that her popularity “stultified” her “development as a writer and limited her effectiveness as a spokeperson for Native people” (348), but she had other interests as well, and her editors concede that “only a small proportion of her verse directly concerns First Nations material or issues” (Gerson and Strong-Boag xxxiii). Even the work (much of it prose after she became famous) that engages these issues does so in surprising ways. In “As It Was in the Beginning” (1899), a short story about a residential school, the protagonist poisons her White boyfriend after the minister denies them a future together; when she returns to her Cree family, she is suspected of murder for the wrong reason: “They account for it by the fact that I am a Redskin. They seem to have forgotten I am a woman” (212). In “Silhouette” (1894), a Chief of the Sioux stands alone: With eyes that lost their lustre long ago, With visage fixed and stern as fate’s decree, He looks towards the empty west, to see The never-coming herd of buffalo. (Collected 104–05)

Johnson’s financial difficulties in her last years were alleviated by the success of Legends of Vancouver (1911), which was followed by two posthumous collections, The Mocassin Maker and The Shagganappi (both 1913). At least until Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics in 1905, Bliss Carman was a fine poet with a distinctive voice, and a well-known editor with various American journals. Ezra Pound said in 1910 that he “is about the only living American poet who would not improve by drowning” (qtd. in McGillivray 7), while the young Wallace Stevens was both an admirer and an imitator, especially of the Vagabondia volumes that Carman co-wrote with Richard Hovey from 1894 to 1900 (Richardson 276–81). Canadian Modernists were often less appreciative. Perhaps, as Nick Mount suggests, Carman and his colleagues “provided the early modernists with a domestic model for precisely the cosmopolitanism to which they aspired—which, as much as their no longer fashionable romanticism,

Cosmopolitan Nationalism   303 perhaps explains why they and their contemporaries were rejected so strenuously” (162).8 Carman is at his best in the title poem of his first book, Low Tide on Grand Pré (1893), a poignant expression of the speaker’s loss of his beloved:  Now and again comes drifting home, Across these aching barrens wide, A sigh like driven wind or foam: In grief the flood is bursting home. (Low Tide 18)

Later poems suggest a consolation: “No sound nor echo of the sea / But hath tradition of your voice” (“The End of the Trail,” Low Tide 117). In another carefully arranged collection, By the Aurelian Wall and Other Elegies (1898), Carman endorses Roberts’s idea of a literary heritage without national boundaries when he begins with poems about Keats, Shelley, and Blake. He concludes with his self-elegy, “The Grave-Tree”: Leave me by the scarlet maple, When the journeying shadows fail, Waiting till the Scarlet Hunter Pass upon the endless trail. (132)

After 1905, he became preoccupied with the harmonization of body, mind, and spirit in what he called “unitrinianism,” and later he turned to the occult. To the chagrin of such younger writers as A.J.M. Smith and F.R. Scott, however, he attracted enthusiastic crowds on his Canadian tours of the 1920s. Overshadowed by Carman and others in his lifetime, William Wilfred Campbell was an uneven but talented poet and novelist. Because his best poems depicted the lakes of Ontario, and perhaps also because he grew up near Owen Sound, he inspired Tom Thomson (Murray 64–65). His well-known “Indian Summer” (1881) is remembered in Alice Munro’s “The Ottawa Valley” (246): Now by great marshes wrapt in mist, Or past some river’s mouth, Throughout the long, still autumn day Wild birds are flying south. (Selected 21)

A lively but cantankerous critic, Campbell joined Lampman and D.C. Scott in writing a weekly “At the Mermaid Inn” column for the Toronto newspaper The Globe from February 1892 to July 1893. That collaboration ended shortly after Campbell mocked nature sonnets in general and Lampman in particular.9 In June 1895 he started the “war among the poets” in an anonymous column that called Carman “perhaps the most flagrant imitator on this continent” (Hurst 30).10 There were various responses over the next four months, including signed contributions from Campbell. For all his exaggeration, he had a point: recognizing that a phrase (“small innumerable sound”) in “The

304   Literary Periods and Genres Eavesdropper” was identical to a line in “Heat,” Carman apologized for the “unconscious (or, better, subconscious) appropriation” and revised his poem for the second edition of Low Tide on Grand Pré (Hurst 91). But Campbell erred when he argued that Carman’s “The Unreturning” was “a decided imitation, if not a complete steal” of Campbell’s “Belated” (Hurst 39): as Peter McArthur observed, “The Unreturning” had been published before Campbell submitted “Belated,” and so “All the stealing that was done in this case was done by William Wilfred Campbell” (Hurst 72). The controversy inspired some thoughtful considerations of the vexed questions of originality and imitation, including one from the man whose article provoked Campbell in the first place. For Joseph Dana Miller, even Carman’s appropriation from Lampman is debatable: The resemblance is in the word “innumerable,” and it therefore remains to be asked if Lampman did not get it from Tennyson, where it occurs; and if Tennyson did not get it from Homer, who speaks of the “innumerable ripple.” It was Byron who said that the greater the poet, the greater and closer their resemblances, and it is precisely because Mr. Campbell is not sufficiently equipped with a knowledge of these parallelisms with which literature is full, that he has given us—blinded by anger and vanity—an array of coincidences that resemble one another only as the conte[n]‌ts of dictionaries do. (Hurst 86)

That perspective is consistent with the cosmopolitan values that Roberts worked so hard to establish in the decade before Campbell’s disruptions (Bentley, Confederation 291). Despite facing greater obstacles than males, several female poets had notable careers (Wanda Campbell; Fiamengo; Gerson, Canadian; McMullen). Isabella Valancy Crawford supported herself and her mother on income from Canadian and American newspapers and journals. Her novel Winona; or, the Foster-Sisters won a prize in 1873, but she never received all the prize money, despite taking legal action (Early and Peterman 9). At her own expense, she published one collection of poetry, Old Spookses’ Pass, Malcolm’s Katie, and Other Poems in 1884, but only 50 of 1,000 copies sold. Her poetry is sometimes topical (“Canada to England”), sometimes traditional (“The Earth Waxeth Old”), and sometimes mythopoeic (“The Canoe,” “Malcolm’s Katie”). Susan Frances Harrison (“Seranus”) wrote two novels, several volumes of poetry (notably Pine, Rose and Fleur de lis, 1891), and much nonfiction, including many columns on music. She claimed to be “the first writer in Canada to attract general attention to the local colour … of the French” (qtd. in MacMillan 187), and the stories in Crowded Out! and Other Sketches (1886) do more than exploit their subject: in the best stories, as Margaret Steffler argues, “the techniques of the sketch are both used by the narrator and applied to the narrator, who is actively engaged in sketching others even as he himself is being sketched. The narrative point of view, specifically the male gaze, becomes the focus” (243). Sophia Almon Hensley knew and admired Roberts in Nova Scotia before moving to New York City, where she became an “outspoken advocate of American motherhood” (Mount 93) in such works as The Heart of a Woman (1906). The author of such titles as The Drift of Pinions (1913) and The Woodcarver’s Wife and Other Poems (1922), Marjorie

Cosmopolitan Nationalism   305 Pickthall was a very successful author at the end of her brief career: as Jonathan Vance notes, “In 1922, the year of her death, Pickthall earned some $8,000 (over $99,000 in current values) from her writing” (194). The inclusion of her poetry and fiction in recent anthologies indicates an ongoing reassessment. Early Canadian fiction suffered from the lack of Canadian publishers: in MacLaren’s words, “There were writers in Canada and there were readers, but the one who generally connected them was based elsewhere” (14). The problem was the persistence of imperial copyright: instead of revising the law so that Canadian publishers could reprint British books, the Canadian Copyright Act of 1875 “reinstated the London publisher’s nominal control of the Canadian market, drove south those Canadians who were set on competing seriously in the North American publishing arena, and had an important negative impact on the development of Canadian publishing” (7). These issues disfigured the careers of William Kirby and Ralph Connor. Kirby’s The Golden Dog (1877), a romance about New France,11 was well received in both English and French Canada, but sales brought little income or comfort to the author. Because the Canadian publisher failed to secure American copyright, The Golden Dog was soon published in unauthorized American editions. It remained in print, but Kirby received only $100 from an American edition of 1897 (George Parker 190–92). Ralph Connor (the pen name of Charles Gordon) had the largest sales of any Canadian author of this period. Between 1898 and 1906, his first five novels (including The Sky Pilot: A Tale of the Foothills and The Man from Glengarry) sold an astonishing two million copies.12 His appeal was based on an unusually muscular Christianity: Gordon had been a Presbyterian missionary in Alberta, and he turned to fiction in order “to awaken [his] church in Eastern Canada to the splendor of the mighty religious adventure being attempted by the missionary pioneers in the Canada beyond the Great Lakes” (Postcript 148). His first novel, Black Rock (1898), depicts the harrowing effects of alcohol on the men in a lumber camp.13 The book, Gordon’s most popular, was widely pirated by American publishers after the Canadian publisher failed to secure copyright.14 In MacLaren’s words, “Subsequent Canadian writers may have envied the money that Connor later made from writing without abandoning his native country, but he had not paved a way that they could follow. Publication in the United States remained as indispensable as ever to aspiring writers from north of the border” (163). Not one to depend on either Canadian publishers or careful research, Gilbert Parker maintained that his sequence of stories, Pierre and His People (1892), “was the pioneer of the Far North in fiction” (xiii), but he felt no need to visit the region. A resident of England after 1889, Parker became a Member of Parliament in 1900 and eventually a baron. After his novel of New France, The Seats of the Mighty (1896), became a film starring Lionel Barrymore in 1915, Parker helped adapt several of his other works for Hollywood before his death in 1932. Three writers take a more cosmopolitan perspective than that afforded by historical romance. James De Mille was a professor at Acadia and Dalhousie and a prolific author. In the Swiftian novel A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder, posthumously published in New York in 1888, four travelers debate the contents of a manuscript they find sealed in a container floating in the ocean. The manuscript

306   Literary Periods and Genres contains Adam More’s story of his encounter with the Kosekin, an Antarctic people who demonstrate “an incessant effort to benefit others at their own expense. Each one hates life and longs for death” (163). Here and elsewhere, the manuscript suggests utopian and/or dystopian purposes, but the frame keeps the questions open: one of the travelers regards the manuscript as a hoax, while two others are so obsessed with the details that they ignore larger questions (Guth 40). Indeed, through the four travelers’ comments about More’s narrative, the novel contains a self-reflexive assessment of its own conventions. Robert Barr worked as a teacher and then a reporter (for the Detroit Free Press) before moving to England in 1881. There he associated with such writers as Joseph K. Jerome and Arthur Conan Doyle and wrote both detective stories (The Triumphs of Eugène Valmont, 1906) and parodies of detective stories (“The Great Pegram Mystery” in The Face and the Mask, 1894), among many other books. His first novel, In The Midst of Alarms (1894), concerns the Fenian invasion and the Battle of Ridgeway of 1866. The comedy resides in the lively exchanges between Richard Yates, an American newspaper reporter, and his Canadian friend, Professor Renmark. Each has the defects of the national qualities that he facetiously represents (Parr 20). When Yates is asked about “soft soap,” for instance, his response situates the novel in a tradition that goes back to Thomas Chandler Haliburton: “In the States we say that if a man is very diplomatic he uses soft soap, so I suppose it has lubricating qualities. Sam Slick used the term ‘soft sawder’ in the same way; but what sawder is, soft or hard, I haven’t the slightest idea” (Barr 87). Sara Jeannette Duncan is the most cosmopolitan Canadian writer of this period. She wrote for several American and Canadian newspapers before taking the trip that became the basis of her first book, A Social Departure: How Orthodocia and I Went Round the World by Ourselves (1890). Most of her work focused on Anglo-Indian society after she married and moved to India in 1890, but The Imperialist (1904) is based on her home town of Brantford.15 When Lorne Murchison, a nationalist who becomes obsessed with the idea of Imperial Federation, travels to England with a “deputation to urge improved communications within the Empire” (106), he has difficulty understanding “the thick London idiom” and is mistaken for an American (109). If he does not betray his cause in his intemperate anti-Americanism, he does when he goes to Florida to recover from his disappointment in politics and love. He could never have shared the more flexible nationalism evident in the narrator’s local history: “It was a sorry tale of disintegration with a cheerful sequel of rebuilding, leading to a little unavoidable confusion as the edifice went up. Any process of blending implies confusion to begin with; we are here at the making of a nation” (37). Most of the writers discussed in this chapter would have agreed that their core values were challenged if not destroyed by World War I.  Both Bentley (Confederation 292) and Vance (247) cite Carman’s letter of 5 April 1917: “The Victorian days belong to history. I believe the new days will be better, but I doubt if any of the men who came to maturity before the great war will be able to find the new key, the new mode, the new tune” (“To R.H. Hathaway,” Letters 244). The Canadian nationalism that emerged after the war favoured distinctiveness over cosmopolitanism and looked with disdain on

Cosmopolitan Nationalism   307 picturesque landscapes and historical romance. But popular culture follows a different chronology from conventional literary history. The popular works of Stephen Leacock and Lucy Maud Montgomery display the nostalgia once associated with regionalism, but they are also marked by incisive social commentary. Leacock began with an influential textbook, Elements of Political Science (1906), followed by Literary Lapses (1910), the first of many collections of humorous pieces. In his collection of linked short stories, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912), he looks back on the small-town past from the perspective of the urban present. Mariposa, the name of the town that forms the setting of the collection, is filled with both “the sunshine of the land of hope” (“Preface” xviii) and affectionately observed folly: “In Mariposa practically everybody belongs to the Knights of Pythias just as they do to everything else. That’s the great thing about the town and that’s what makes it so different from the city. Everybody is in everything” (36). In the conclusion, “L’Envoi:  The Train to Mariposa,” the narrator imagines taking the train back, but the last paragraph breaks the illusion: “And as we listen, the cry grows fainter and fainter in our ears and we are sitting here in the leather chairs of the Mausoleum Club, talking of the little Town in the Sunshine that once we knew” (145). In Anne of Green Gables (1908) and its more than seven sequels, Montgomery created the most famous character in Canadian literature. Anne Shirley flourishes in Prince Edward Island, despite nearly overwhelming the brother and sister who adopt her; they are both taken aback and enchanted by the red-haired orphan whose charming yet incisive observations of her surroundings bring vitality to the community of Avonlea. Anne’s loquacious commentaries have resonated with readers worldwide: as Anne observes, “it’s such an interesting world. It wouldn’t be half so interesting if we knew all about everything, would it? There’d be no scope for imagination then, would there?” (19). Montgomery followed Roberts and Carman to the Boston publisher L.C. Page, but Page “regarded her as the producer of raw material for the process of book production over which he had absolute control” (Gerson, “Author” 313). As a result, Montgomery was soon involved in lawsuits over royalties and film rights. Alice Munro was more taken with the series that began with Emily of New Moon (1923), but it is Anne Shirley who inspires tourists to visit Prince Edward Island, and she can still provoke controversy: when Laura Robinson dared to discuss Anne’s sexuality at the 2000 meeting of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE), she found herself at the center of a media firestorm, much of it from commentators who had neither read nor heard her paper.16 The concept of cosmopolitan nationalism has its own limitations, but it avoids the environmental determinism of the criticism of Frye and Atwood, and it enables one to consider the complex production and reception history of this substantial body of work. Book historians have demonstrated how publishers and audiences have shaped the texts that have too often been studied in isolation. Furthermore, such editorial initiatives as the Centre for Editing Early Canadian Texts (which published its final volume in 2012 with an authoritative edition of Kirby’s The Golden Dog), the Canadian Poetry Press, the Canadian Critical Editions of Tecumseh Press, Wilfrid Laurier University Press’s Early Canadian Literature series, and the Broadview Press editions have

308   Literary Periods and Genres brought more exacting standards to texts that are now more widely available, in print and online, than ever before. Much remains to be done: Bentley is now editing the collected works of Lampman and D.C. Scott, while Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston are publishing in complete form the Montgomery journals that previously appeared in five volumes of selections. With other texts and issues bound to emerge, we can now read early Canadian writers in various contexts, without expecting them to agree on nationalism—or anything else.

Notes 1. One of the founders of the Canada First movement, Mair published Dreamland and Other Poems in 1868. For Roberts, Mair’s most important work was his verse drama Tecumseh (1886). In a letter to Mair of 10 March 1886, he writes, “I have hitherto considered my own poetry the best yet done in Canada. But Tecumseh is better. It is by far the finest thing Canadian Literature has produced. It is much more artistic and masterly in technique than [Charles Heavysege’s] Saul” (Collected Letters 58). 2. Patrick J. Keane notes that “For all its greatness, ‘The American Scholar’ is both belated and derivative,” and it is particularly derivative of English Romanticism (187). 3. Since the text in The Collected Poems is missing line 52, I follow the text in the Selected Poetry (ed. Keith). 4. Around this time, Marshall Saunders wrote Beautiful Joe, the “story of a dog, written for children … the first Canadian book to become a world bestseller” (Waterston 137). 5. Roberts wrote over two hundred animal stories and reprinted them in “at least twenty different collections” (Whalen 1). In the preface to Eyes of the Wilderness (1933), he revised his earlier stance: “Hunting to kill has no longer any zest. … To my mind the field-glass or the camera is a more exciting weapon that the rifle or the shotgun, and may yield results of a more lasting value” (“Introductory” 232). 6. In “Two Canadian Poets,” Lampman is more appreciative of George Frederick Cameron’s political poetry:  “Cameron is a successor of Shelley in his fiery championship of liberty” (113). As the quotations reveal, Cameron was much less interested than Roberts in Canadian topics. 7. “There are those,” notes Alfred Bailey in 1981, “who regard Brown as having done less than justice to the two Maritime poets. Nevertheless it was Brown’s book … which initiated a general revision in literary evaluation” (96). 8. In 1963, A.J.M. Smith admitted that “Bliss Carman was the only Canadian poet we had heard of and what we heard, we didn’t care for much. It was only later, when I began to compile books on Canadian poetry, that I found that Lampman, Roberts and Carman had written some very fine poetry” (qtd. in Burke 99). 9. His column includes a parody of a sonnet and a mock-commentary: “It is Millet-like in its terse realism” (Davies 341). Noting that Lampman’s first book was Among the Millet and that Roberts’s “The Sower” was inspired by Jean-François Millet’s painting of the same name, Bentley argues that “It is difficult to doubt that the terminations of ‘At the Mermaid Inn’ with the 1 July 1893 column was not a consequence at least in part of Campbell’s increasingly rebarbative and finally satirical attitude to his fellow poets” (Confederation 125).

Cosmopolitan Nationalism   309 10. He later revealed that he was provoked by his treatment in Joseph Dana Miller’s “The Singers of Canada” (Munsey’s Magazine, May, 1895): “Mr. Campbell is a rhetorician rather than a poet. He has caught, however, a sympathetic knowledge of certain aspects of nature, and without the joyousness of Lampman, the exhilarant music of Carman, or the subtlety of Scott, his pictures of lake scenery have an individual charm, born of a fancy that is a little too somber to be entirely wholesome” (Hurst 22). 11. That Kirby was called “the Walter Scott of Canada” (Gerson, Purer 68) indicates the taste for historical romance in Canada before World War I. 12. It took Lucy Maud Montgomery from 1908 until her death in 1942 to sell two million books (MacLaren 143). 13. Like Nellie McClung and Agnes Maule Machar (Fiamengo 34, 177–208), Gordon was active in the temperance movement. 14. The 1891 Chace Act “extended the possibility of American copyright to all foreigners, but the copyright divide persisted because this extension of privileges was made conditional upon first publication in the United States.” The condition remained in effect until 1962 (MacLaren 142). 15. Many have noted the similarities between The Imperialist and Francis William Grey’s The Curé of St. Phillipe: A Story of French-Canadian Politics (1899). 16. Robinson describes the incident in “ACCUTE and the Media: Bosom Friends?” Her presentation was eventually published in Canadian Literature in 2004.

Works Cited Adams, John Coldwell. Sir Charles God Damn: The Life of Sir Charles G.D. Roberts. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1986. Print. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “Cosmopolitan Patriots.” Robbins and Cheah 91–114. Barr, Robert. In the Midst of Alarms. 1894. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1973. Print. Toronto Reprint Library of Canadian Prose and Poetry. Bailey, Alfred. “Eggleston’s Literary Life.” Rev. of Literary Friends, by Wilfred Eggleston. Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews 8 (1981): 95–97. Print. Bentley, D.M.R. “Charles G.D. Roberts’ Use of ‘Indian Legend’ in Four Poems of the Eighteen Eighties and ‘Nineties.” Canadian Poetry:  Studies, Documents, Reviews 51 (2002): 18–38. Print. ———. The Confederation Group of Canadian Poets, 1880–1987. Toronto:  U of Toronto P, 2004. Print. ———. “The Poetics of Roberts’ Tantramar Space.” The Proceedings of the Sir Charles G.D. Roberts Symposium. Ed. Carrie MacMillan. Halifax, NS: Nimbus, 1984. 17–41. Print. Brown, E.K. On Canadian Poetry. 1943. Rev. ed. 1944. Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1973. Print. ———. “Memoir.” Selected Poems of Duncan Campbell Scott. Ed. Brown. Toronto: Ryerson, 1951. xi–xlii. Print. Rpt. in Responses 112–44. ———. Responses and Evaluations:  Essays on Canada. Ed. David Staines. New Canadian Library. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1977. Print. ———. “To the North: A Wall against Canadian Poetry.” Saturday Review of Literature 29 April 1944: 9–11. Print. Rpt. in Responses 78–82. Burke, Anne, ed. and introd. “Some Annotated Letters of A.J.M. Smith and Raymond Knister.” Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews 11 (1982): 98–135. Print.

310   Literary Periods and Genres Campbell, Wanda, ed. Hidden Rooms: Early Canadian Women Poets. London, ON: Canadian Poetry P, 1999. Print. Campbell, William Wilfred. Selected Poetry and Essays. Ed. Laurel Boone. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 1987. Print. Carman, Bliss. By the Aurelian Wall and Other Elegies. Boston: Lamson Wolffe, 1898. Print. ———. Letters of Bliss Carman. Ed. H. Pearson Gundy. Montreal:  McGill-Queen’s UP, 1981. Print. ———. Low Tide on Grand Pré: A Book of Lyrics. 3rd ed. Boston: Lamson Wolffe, 1895. Print. Crawford, Isabella Valancy. Collected Poems. Introd. James Reaney. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1972. Print. Davies, Barrie, ed. At the Mermaid Inn: Wilfred Campbell, Archibald Lampman, and Duncan Campbell Scott in The Globe 1892–3. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1979. Print. De Mille, James. A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder. 1888. Ed. Daniel Burgoyne. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2011. Print. Dragland, Stan. Floating Voice: Duncan Campbell Scott and the Literature of Treaty 9. Concord, ON: Anansi, 1994. Print. Duncan, Sara Jeannette. “Dangers of Literary Nationalism.” Montreal Star 31 Jan. 1888. Rpt. in Selected Journalism. Ed. Thomas E. Tausky. Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1978. 116–18. Print. ———. The Imperialist. 1904. Ed. Thomas E. Tausky. Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1996. Print. Canadian Critical Edition. Early, Len, and Michael A. Peterman. Introduction. Winona; or, the Foster-Sisters, by Isabella Valancy Crawford. 1873. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2007. 9–61. Print. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The American Scholar.” 1837. Emerson’s Poetry and Prose. Ed. Joel Porte. New York: Norton, 2001. 56–69. Print. Norton Critical Edition. Fiamengo, Janice. The Woman’s Page: Journalism and Rhetoric in Early Canada. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2008. Print. Francis, Daniel. “On Pauline Johnson.” Early Canadian Short Stories: Short Stories in English before World War I. Ed. Misao Dean. Ottawa:  Tecumseh, 2000. 341–51. Print. Canadian Critical Edition. Frye, Northrop. “Preface to an Uncollected Anthology.” Studia Varia: Royal Society of Canada, Literary and Scientific Papers. Ed. E.G.D. Murray. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1957. 21–36. Rpt. in The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination. Toronto: Anansi, 1971. 163–79. Print. Gerson, Carole. “Author, Publisher, and Fictional Character.” L.M. Montgomery and Canadian Culture. Ed. Irene Gammel and Elizabeth R. Epperley. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1999. 49–63. Print. Rpt. in Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables 309–16. ———. Canadian Women in Print 1750–1918. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2010. Print. ———. A Purer Taste:  The Writing and Reading of Fiction in Nineteenth-Century Canada. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1989. Print. Gerson, Carole, and Veronica Strong-Boag. “Introduction: ‘The Firm Handiwork of Will.’ ” Johnson, Collected xiii–xliv. Gordon, Charles W. Postscript to Adventure: The Autobiography of Ralph Connor. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1938. Print. Guth, Gwendolyn. “Reading Frames of Reference: The Satire of Exegesis in James De Mille’s A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder.” Canadian Literature 145 (1995): 39–59. Print. Harrison, Susan Frances. Crowded Out! and Other Sketches. 1886. Ed. Tracy Ware. Ottawa: Tecumseh, 2010. Print. Canadian Critical Edition.

Cosmopolitan Nationalism   311 Hurst, Alexandra J. The War among the Poets: Issues of Plagiarism and Patronage among the Confederation Poets. London, ON: Canadian Poetry P, 1994. Print. Hutcheon, Linda. The Canadian Postmodern:  A  Study of Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1988. Print. Johnson, E. Pauline (Tekahionwake). Collected Poems and Selected Prose. Ed. Carole Gerson and Veronica Strong-Boag. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2002. Print. ———. “The Singer of Tantramar.” Massey’s Magazine 1.1 (Jan. 1896): 15–19. Print. Keane, Patrick J. Emerson, Romanticism, and Intuitive Reason: The Transatlantic “Light of All Our Day.” Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2005. Print. Kirby, William. Le Chien d’or/The Golden Dog: A Legend of Quebec. 1877. Ed. Mary Jane Edwards. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2012. Print. Centre for Editing Early Canadian Texts. Kymlicka, Will. “From Englightenment Cosmopolitanism to Liberal Nationalism.” 1998. Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and Citizenship. Toronto: Oxford UP, 2001. 205–20. Print. ———, and Kathryn Walker. “Rooted Cosmopolitanism:  Canada and the World.” Rooted Cosmopolitanism: Canada and the World. Ed. Kymlicka and Walker. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 2012. 1–27. Print. Lampman, Archibald. The Poems of Archibald Lampman (including At the Long Sault). Ed. Margaret Coulby Whitridge. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1974. Print. Literature of Canada. ———. “Two Canadian Poets[:] A  Lecture.” 1891. The Essays and Reviews of Archibald Lampman. Ed. D.M.R. Bentley. London, ON: Canadian Poetry P, 1996. 91–114. Print. Leacock, Stephen. Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. 1912. Ed. Gerald Lynch. Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1996. Print. Canadian Critical Edition. Long, John S. Treaty 9: Making the Agreement to Share the Land in Far Northern Ontario in 1905. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2010. Print. MacLaren, Eli. Dominion and Agency:  Copyright and the Structuring of the Canadian Book Trade, 1867–1918. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2011. Print. MacMillan, Carrie. “Susan Frances Harrison (‘Seranus’): Paths through the Ancient Forest.” Harrison 187–214. McDougall, Robert L., ed. The Poet and the Critic: A Literary Correspondence between D.C. Scott and E.K. Brown. Ottawa: Carleton UP, 1983. Print. McGillivray, Mary B. “The Popular and Critical Reputation and Reception of Bliss Carman.” Bliss Carman: A Reappraisal. Ed. Gerald Lynch. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 1990. 7–19. Print. Reappraisals: Canadian Writers. McMullen, Lorraine, ed. Re(dis)covering Our Foremothers:  Nineteenth-Century Canadian Women Writers. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 1990. Print. Reappraisals: Canadian Writers. McNab, David T. “A Lurid Dash of Colour:  Powassan’s Drum and Canada’s Mission, The Reverend William and Duncan Campbell Scott.” Aboriginal Cultural Landscapes. Ed. Jill Oakes et al. Winnipeg: Aboriginal Issues, 2004. 258–71. Print. Montgomery, L.M. Anne of Green Gables. Ed. Mary Henley Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston. New York: Norton, 2007. Print. Norton Critical Edition. Mount, Nick. When Canadian Literature Moved to New  York. Toronto:  U of Toronto P, 2005. Print. Munro, Alice. “The Ottawa Valley.” Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You. 1974. Toronto: Penguin, 1996. 227–46. Print. Murray, Joan. Tom Thomson: Design for a Canadian Hero. Toronto: Dundurn, 1998. Print.

312   Literary Periods and Genres Pacey, Desmond. Ten Canadian Poets:  A  Group of Biographical and Critical Essays. Toronto: Ryerson, 1958. Print. Parker, George L. The Beginnings of the Book Trade in Canada. Toronto:  U of Toronto P, 1985. Print. Parker, Gilbert. Introduction. Pierre and His People: Tales of the North. 1894. Vol. 1 of The Works of Gilbert Parker, Imperial Edition. New York: Scribner’s, 1912. ix–xiii. Print. Parr, John. Introduction. Selected Stories of Robert Barr. Ed. Parr. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 1977. 11–21. Print. Richardson, Joan. Wallace Stevens:  The Early Years 1879–1923. New  York:  William Morrow, 1986. Print. Rittenhouse, Jessie B. The Younger American Poets. Boston: Little, Brown, 1904. Print. Robbins, Bruce. “Introduction Part I:  Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism.” Robbins and Cheah 1–19. Robbins, Bruce, and Pheng Cheah, eds. Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1998. Print. Roberts, Charles G.D. “The Beginnings of a Canadian Literature.” 1883. Selected 243–59. ———. The Collected Letters. Ed. Laurel Boone. Fredericton: Goose Lane, 1989. Print. ———. Collected Poems. Ed. Desmond Pacey. Wolfville, NB: Wombat, 1985. Print. ———. “From the Prefatory Note to Selected Poems (1936).” Selected 302–03. ———. “Introductory.” Eyes of the Wilderness. Toronto:  Macmillan, 1933. 1–6. Print. Rpt. in Selected Animal Stories 231–34. ———. Rev. of Among the Millet, by Archibald Lampman. Saint John Progress 26 Jan. 1889. Rpt. in “Roberts’ Review of Among the Millet.” Ed. Tracy Ware. Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews 29 (1991): 38–45. Print. ———. Selected Animal Stories. Ed. Terry Whalen. Ottawa: Tecumseh, 2005. Print. Canadian Critical Edition. ———. Selected Poetry and Critical Prose. Ed. W.J. Keith. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1974. Print. Literature of Canada. Robinson, Laura. “ACCUTE and the Media:  Bosom Friends?” ACCUTE Newsletter June 2000: 37–39. Print. ———. “Bosom Friends: Lesbian Desire in Montgomery’s Anne Books.” Canadian Literature 180 (2004): 12–28. Print. Ross, Malcolm. Introduction. Poets of the Confederation. Ed. Ross. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1960. ix–xiv. Print. New Canadian Library. Scott, Duncan Campbell. Addresses, Essays and Reviews. 2 vols. Ed. Leslie Ritchie. London, ON: Canadian Poetry P, 2000. Print. ———. “A Decade of Canadian Poetry.” The Canadian Magazine 17 (1901):  153–58. Rpt. in Addresses 1: 62–70. Print. ———. “Labrie’s Wife.” The Witching of Elspie:  A  Book of Stories. Toronto:  McClelland and Stewart, 1923. 143–64. Print. ———. The Magic House and Other Poems. Ottawa: Durie, 1893. Print. ———. “Poetry and Progress.” Royal Society of Canada Proceedings and Transactions. 3rd Series, 16 (1922): xlvii–lxvii. Print. Rpt. in Addresses 1: 299–319. Steffler, Margaret. “The Framing of the Sketching Narrator.” Harrison 241–57. Vance, Jonathan F. A History of Canadian Culture. Toronto: Oxford UP, 2009. Print.

Cosmopolitan Nationalism   313 Waterston, Elizabeth. “Margaret Marshall Saunders: A Voice for the Silent.” Silenced Sextet: Six Nineteenth-Century Canadian Women Novelists. By Carrie MacMillan, Lorraine McMullen, and Waterston. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1992. 137–68. Print. Whalen, Terry. “Editor’s Preface.” Roberts, Selected Animal Stories 1–5. Woodcock, George. Introduction. Canadian Writers and Their Works, Poetry Series, Vol. 2. Ed. Robert Lecker, Jack David, and Ellen Quigley. Downsview, ON: ECW P, 1983. 7–24. Print. Woodward, Ian, and Zlatko Skrbis. “Performing Cosmopolitanism.” Routledge Handbook of Cosmopolitan Studies. Ed. Gerard Delanty. London: Routledge, 2012. 127–37. Print.

Chapter 17

Modernist P oet ry in Canada, 192 0–19 6 0 J.A. Weingarten

Child of the North, Yearn no more after old playthings, Temples and towers and gates Memory-haunted thoroughfares and rich palaces And all the burdensome inheritance, the binding legacies, Of the Old World and the East. Here is a new soil and a sharp sun. Scott, “New Paths,” Collected (37)

This excerpt from F.R. Scott’s “New Paths” (1926) illustrates the paradox of Canadian modernism:  its beginnings as an import of Anglo-American modernism—a literary movement predicated on iconoclasm, social and cultural antagonism, and the radicalization of both literary aesthetics and national or world politics—adapted to build institutions and infrastructures for the arts in Canada. Although Scott’s vision of an ahistorical nation suppresses a long history of Indigenous cultures, it also suggests that the modern Canadian writer tended to feel less like a participant in the anarchic modernism of Ezra Pound or T.S. Eliot and more like one inaugurating a national literary tradition. One of the central figures of Canadian modernism, A.J.M. Smith, said as much in 1960 when he proposed that it was when the Canadian pioneer began to “aspire to something more gratifying than colonialism, [that] it became possible also—indeed, it became imperative—to cultivate the arts” (“Introduction” xxiii). Smith’s claim has been echoed in recent criticism by Gregory Betts, who contends that the aesthetics, methods, and models of Anglo-American modernism were used by Canadian writers and artists “to create the basic institutions and conditions … that would enable cutting-edge art to be made” for the first time in the nation’s history (62). This exciting cultivation of the arts was not, however, a project undertaken solely by Canadian modernists; more

Modernist Poetry in Canada    315 traditional writers participated as much as their radical antagonists in the building of a national literature. To put it another way, the movements and institutions for which modernists wished to be gravediggers were actually contemporary with Canadian modernism. Discourses on Canadian literature have tended to downplay this fact by stressing modernists’ hostility toward the “old” Romantics and Victorians. That particular interpretation of the era is a skewed one. When the figurehead of the Romantic literary group known as “The Confederation Group of Poets,” Charles G.D. Roberts, wrote in 1931 that modernists and Romantics “all lie down together very amicably, the lions and the lambs; and no one is quite sure which is which” (23), he had, even if much too tenderly, captured the unusual dynamic of Canadian literature during the modern era. Organizations like the Canadian Authors Association (est. 1921) promoted and financially backed writers that were generally conventional, yet they established themselves at almost the exact same time as the young modernist groups that lambasted them. The Romanticism that began with Roberts in the 1880s was still in fashion while Canadian modernism flourished: surviving members of the Confederation Group, such as Roberts, Bliss Carman, and Duncan Campbell Scott, received medals, did speaking tours across the country, and continued publishing during the interwar years. Their continued popularity in the twentieth century was due partly to a surging cultural nationalism engendered by Canada’s involvement in World War I. For many, that nationalism was fed by the rediscovery of earlier writers who belonged to a distinctly Canadian literature. Hence, the Confederation Group earned unexpected status as living trailblazers in Canada’s burgeoning literary tradition. Modernist writers, however, were ambivalent in their attitudes toward these earlier writers. They balanced an appreciation for the national literary tradition begun in the nineteenth century with their own striving for innovative writing that responded, in ways conventional poetry could not, to the conditions of modernity. These modernist communities formed in Canada, as elsewhere, around collaborative projects like poetry groups and little magazines; for that reason, Canadian novelists never achieved the same social coherence as poets. Unsurprisingly, this has led poets and even recent critics to contend that poetry was the territory of Canadian modernism, or at least its “dominant genre” (Rifkind 82). That argument may be premature given that “the study of modernist Canadian prose is,” as Colin Hill argues, “still in its early stages” (5). Nonetheless, it is reasonable to claim that from 1920 to 1960 (the most intense phase of Canadian modernism) Canadian novelists did not generally perform collaborative cultural work with the same vigour as poets.1 With the exception of some higher-profile figures, such as the German-born Frederick Philip Grove (who came to Canada after faking his death to avoid his European creditors) or celebrated Montreal-based authors such as Hugh MacLennan and Mordecai Richler, most novelists lived in isolation from other writers, and many of them wrote and published outside Canada: Sinclair Ross published As for Me and My House (1941) with a New York publisher, Elizabeth Smart lived in England when she published By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (1945), Ernest Buckler (author of The Mountain and the Valley [1952]) lived and wrote in rural Nova Scotia for much of his life, and Sheila Watson did much of the work on

316   Literary Periods and Genres her masterpiece The Double Hook (1959) while living in Paris. Even if it is difficult to talk about a geographically coherent group of modernist novelists, there was still a coherent project in which they participated: the blending of modernist and realist traditions in Canadian novels is the subject of Hill’s excellent study, Modern Realism in English-Canadian Fiction (2012). Canada’s lively group of individual novelists (including those Hill describes) nevertheless had weak footing as writers during decades of economic uncertainty and unadventurous publishers. Modernist projects thrived more noticeably among those Canadian poets who built their own publishing community through independent presses and mimeographed magazines.

The Beginnings of Canadian Modernism, 1914–1930 From 1914 until 1925, there were only individual and scattered, though prescient, calls for a modernized Canadian literature. In his preface to Open Water (1914), the Canadian poet and novelist Arthur Stringer was already lamenting the “immuring traditions” (9) and praising the “formal emancipation” of free verse (10). Frank Oliver Call, in his preface to Acanthus and Wild Grape (1920), lauds the “modern poet” who joins “the great army of seekers after freedom” and questions the efficacy of “old conventions” (10) that foster poems in which “emotion, whether real or fancied, has stifled thought” (9). These debates about free verse were not limited just to prefaces; they found their way into the verse of other writers who came of age during the 1910s and 1920s, such as Louise Morey Bowman. Bowman’s poetry may not be radical in its presentation, but her use of free verse in spectacularly vivid poems in Moonlight and Common Day (1922) and Dream Tapestries (1924) are, like the prefaces and poetry of Stringer and Call, evidence of subtle tremors of a growing discontent among Canadians with conventional poetic forms and styles. The same could be claimed for the poetry of R.G. Everson and W.W.E. Ross, both of whom published internationally in little magazines. Ross in particular has gained significant critical attention because of his experiments with imagism in Laconics (1930), a volume that was, curiously, countered by his unexpected return to traditional verse forms in Sonnets (1932). Each of these poets experimented with modern verse, but none of their efforts was consistent or forceful enough to merit the announcement of a modernist movement in Canada; they were signs only of a turning tide in the minds and craft of individual writers. E.J. Pratt is one of the more notable transitional figures of the 1910s and 1920s: he was neither radical enough to be considered “modernist” nor conventional enough to be “Romantic” or “Victorian.”2 Pratt’s experiments with multivocality in Newfoundland Verse (1926)—see, for example, his long poem, “Monologues and Dialogues”—and his evident interest in imagist aesthetics are part of his modern style, but his poems are bereft of the social and aesthetic antagonism built into most modernist writing.

Modernist Poetry in Canada    317 Nonetheless, Pratt’s consistent development of this modern style in remarkable long poems such as The Titanic (1935) and Towards the Last Spike (1952), and in collections like Many Moods (1932), The Fable of the Goats (1937), and Still Life and Other Verse (1943), has made him a central figure in the literary canon. Canadian modernism began to take clearer shape in the mid-1920s when several young students attending McGill University formed “the Montreal Group” under the leadership of A.J.M. Smith. Enrolling at McGill in 1921, Smith became acquainted with F.R. Scott, Leon Edel, Leo Kennedy, and other aspiring writers. When Smith’s The McGill Daily Literary Supplement (1924–25) lost its funding from McGill’s student council, he, Edel, Kennedy, Scott, and others founded the McGill Fortnightly Review (1925–27), which was meant to be a forum for essays, reviews, and creative writing; it began the literary careers of major writers such as Smith, Scott, Kennedy, and John “Buffy” Glassco. The prose contributions to the Fortnightly demonstrate the seriousness with which its editors (Smith in particular) took their role. Smith’s “Contemporary Poetry” (1926), for instance, sternly endorses “the New Poetry” (28)—a term he surreptitiously imports from the American editor Harriet Monroe’s 1917 anthology of the same name. He cites Monroe’s introduction to that anthology when he defines the New Poetry as “ ‘a concrete and immediate realization of life’ ” that values “absolute simplicity and sincerity” and boasts “ ‘an individual, unstereotyped rhythm’ ” (qtd. in Smith “Contemporary Poetry” 29). The editors’ commitment to “the New Poetry” meant that they were sometimes unwilling to publish anything that deviated from very particular standards: they famously denied a sonnet by the Montreal poet A.M. Klein on the grounds that his use of the word “soul” was not modern enough—and Klein refused to change it (though he would later say, in a letter to Edel, that Smith and Scott were right to refuse publication).3 This kind of anecdote has led many critics to regard the Fortnightly as the powder keg of Canadian modernism, but the extent to which its editors and contributors actually espoused the radicalism and experimentalism of modernism has been exaggerated.4 While articles such as “Contemporary Poetry” affirm Smith’s personal study of modernism, only the last few issues of the Fortnightly evoke a modernist poetics with noticeable flair. Otherwise, the general tone of the publication was quite tame. As a case in point, in the first issue the editors acknowledged “the privilege of listening to a course of lectures from so distinguished a poet as Bliss Carman” (“Editorial” 2). Carman would, oddly enough, be among the primary targets of F.R. Scott’s modernist assault on conventional poetry, “The Canadian Authors Meet” (1927), which he published in the final issue of the Fortnightly. That sharp contrast suggests that the publication began with a vague investment in Canadian writing and ended as a testing ground for a modernism that its staff and contributors were still discovering. The real legacy of the Fortnightly may simply be that it brought together several of the most gifted and influential Canadian poets of the twentieth century, though their mature careers as modernist poets began in earnest several years after the periodical concluded its run. The initial intentions and achievements of the McGill Movement may be more modest than many critics care to admit, but the Fortnightly was still the venue in which some canonical modernist poems first appeared. Smith, for instance, published one of

318   Literary Periods and Genres his best poems, “The Lonely Land,” in the January 1926 issue. It was, however, almost unrecognizable when it reappeared in the Canadian Forum in July 1927, and was revised again several times thereafter.5 In the version that Smith included in Poems New and Collected (1967)—the canonical version—the speaker describes “a beauty of dissonance” in nature: This is a beauty of dissonance, this resonance of stony strand, this smoky cry curled over a black pine like a broken and wind-battered branch when the wind bends the tops of the pines and curdles the sky from the north. This is the beauty of strength broken by strength and still strong. (ll. 23–38)

Only in the last four lines (missing from the Fortnightly version), when Smith’s speaker finds an appropriate paradox to explain the scene, does he move from the indefinite “a beauty” to the more assured “the beauty.” The difficulty of that paradox, the way in which it perfectly captures the strength and weakness of the scene with an imagistic sharpness, affords the speaker the confidence to speak more surely without sacrificing the visual dissonance and emotional complexity of what he observes. These were qualities of Smith’s poetry that he elsewhere describes as an attempt “to fuse thought and feeling” in ways akin to those of “metaphysical” poems (“Rejected Preface” 8) in which “thought is the root, but it flowers in the feeling” (9). This was the aesthetic to which Smith aspired and about which he learned through his readings of T.S. Eliot’s poetry and prose during the mid-1920s. F.R. Scott’s contributions to the Fortnightly demonstrated that, as Leon Edel later put it, the Montreal Group had learned “they didn’t have to blow up buildings” to kindle change; they simply needed to write “shattering verse” (“When” 114). One of the most iconoclastic, and still contentious, poems published in that periodical is Scott’s “The Canadian Authors Meet.” A vituperative portrayal of Canadian literature, Scott’s poem belittles Romanticism, Victorianism, and British colonialism: Expansive puppets percolate self-unction Beneath a portrait of the Prince of Wales. Miss Crotchet’s muse has somehow failed to function, Yet she’s a poetess. Beaming, she sails

Modernist Poetry in Canada    319 From group to chattering group, with such a dear Victorian saintliness, as is her fashion, Greeting the other unknowns with a cheer— Virgins of sixty who still write of passion. (ll. 1–8)

Today, Scott’s poem is often criticized for its apparent celebration of masculine poetry as a counter to an allegedly feminine Victorianism.6 Scott disregards the possibility of a strong female modernist, despite the fact that, by the time he republished his poem in the Canadian Forum in 1935, the socialist poet Dorothy Livesay had become a regular and admired contributor to the same magazine. Scott’s blatant misogyny notwithstanding, many writers and critics of the twentieth century also regard “The Canadian Authors Meet” as an effective commentary on an embryonic Canadian literature stymied by the formation of conservative organizations such as the Canadian Authors Association (to which Scott alludes in his title). For Scott, Canadian literature of the 1920s suffered from a deficiency of innovative poetics and writing capable of capturing the experiences of a generation traumatized by World War I, fascinated by the sexual and psychological complexity of the individual mind, and anxious to produce engaging and difficult verse. Such antagonistic poetry was uncommon during the years that mark the beginnings of Canadian modernism. The writings published between 1914 and 1930 generally suggest subtler movements in the direction of modernism: a greater openness to free verse among some rising Canadian poets, as well as small-scale efforts to publish and circulate modern poetry. The 1920s ended with young writers discovering the value of forming literary groups and of founding venues in which the modernist Canadian poet could publish. Despite the vitality of certain pockets of writers across the country (especially those belonging to the McGill Movement), there were only faint hints of an intelligible modernist movement emerging in Canada by the end of the 1920s.

Publishing Modernism, 1930–1957 The first generation of Canadian modernists entered and exited the thirties leaving a modest paper trail. Leo Kennedy’s The Shrouding (1933) was the only book of poetry published by any member of the Montreal Group until the early 1940s. The material conditions of the Depression were as much a hindrance to publication as the conservative tastes of publishers during the 1930s, and so Canadian modernism was for that decade mostly confined to the pages of magazines, some of which were overtly left leaning (Canadian Forum, New Frontier, and Masses) and others that were more nationalistic in tone, such as the Canadian Poetry Magazine (edited by E.J. Pratt and sponsored by the Canadian Authors Association). Contributors to the McGill Fortnightly Review kept the spirit of modernist poetry aflame by publishing in these Canadian magazines or founding their own. The short-lived Canadian Mercury (1928–29) was founded by Kennedy, Scott, and Louis

320   Literary Periods and Genres Schwartz. A much greater volume of modernist writing was published in the Canadian Forum, the magazine to which A.J.M. Smith contributed one of the most vitriolic documents in Canadian literary history, “Wanted—Canadian Criticism” (1928). The essay echoes Scott’s “The Canadian Authors Meet” in its lampooning of the Canadian Authors Association, an organization that Smith wished “had the honesty to change the name of their society to the Journalists’ Branch of the Canadian Manufacturers’ Association” (“Wanted” 32). Scott also contributed to the Forum: his two-part essay, “New Poems for Old” (1931), is evidence of his continued education and investment in modernist literature. By the early 1930s, the Forum became the magazine in which Canadian poets such as Smith, Scott, Kennedy, and numerous others began or continued their careers. The fact that Canadian modernist poetry was surviving the Depression mostly in magazines made the publication of New Provinces:  Poems of Several Authors (1936) especially important. Conceived over a period of four years, the anthology was put together by its contributors: Scott (the primary editor), Kennedy, Klein, Pratt, Smith, and Robert Finch. Smith drafted a preface for the anthology that was rejected in favour of a much less hostile one written by Scott and Kennedy.7 Whereas their preface briefly and broadly contextualizes the “new poetry,” Smith’s preface (published almost 30 years later in Canadian Literature) laments the state of Canadian poetry: “The fundamental criticism that must be brought against Canadian poetry as a whole is that it ignores the intelligence. And as a result it is dead” (7). Scott objected to Smith’s preface because it bespoke a modernist radicalism that he felt the volume itself lacked.8 Indeed, New Provinces is hardly uniform in its innovativeness. Smith’s free-verse meditations on the “difficult, lonely music” of modernism in “Like an Old Proud King in a Parable” (New Provinces 66)9 sharply contrast with Finch’s metrical obedience in a poem like “Egg-and-Dart” (1936): “This never-ended searching for the eyes / Wherein the unasked question’s answer lies” (New Provinces 2). Unsurprisingly, Finch objected to Smith’s grim assessment of Canadian writing in the rejected preface and, like Scott, felt it should not be included in New Provinces (see Gnarowski, “Introduction” xix). The aesthetic discordance of the anthology and the editorial skirmishes over Smith’s preface are evidence of broader tensions in Canadian literature between those sympathetic to verse more in line with the nineteenth-century aesthetes and those who identified as modernists. The gap between these two traditions was rapidly widening in the 1930s. Another controversy surrounding the history of New Provinces is its lack of female contributors. Given that the anthology was intended to be a sampling of the modern poetic talents of the era, Dorothy Livesay’s absence is glaring. Livesay was a poetic force throughout the 1930s: she published in the Canadian Mercury and the Canadian Forum, and remarkably had two books of poetry in print by the mid-1930s, The Green Pitcher (1928) and Signposts (1932), the first of which appeared when she was only 19. Her modernism is a continual negotiation of her socialist leanings (which encouraged her to reject Eliot’s modernism as elitist and bourgeois) and her simultaneous urge to be modern in form and content. Livesay’s discovery of “post-Eliot” writers who belonged to the “Auden Generation” offered her Anglo-American models that were “socially and politically conscious,” as well as formally experimental (Irvine, Editing 62).10 Drawing

Modernist Poetry in Canada    321 on these models for the latter half of the 1930s, Livesay began to self-identify as a socialist poet, and this identity shaped one of her most anthologized poems, Day and Night (1936). Through modernist multivocality, Livesay imagines a socialist revolution led by members of the proletariat; it ends with a vision of “crumpled men / Pour[ing] down the hill” (ll. 156–57) as a revolt inverts the power dynamics of the upper and lower classes. Her poem appeared in the inaugural issue of the Canadian Poetry Magazine and it was republished as part of the Ryerson Chap-Book Series (1925–1962; the series was managed by the Toronto-based publishing icon Lorne Pierce). In light of the success Livesay was having as an author in the 1930s, her exclusion from New Provinces still shocks and puzzles critics: it may have had to do with her gender, politics, youth, or any combination of those factors.11 Livesay’s appearance in Pierce’s Ryerson Chap-Book Series is noteworthy because the tone of the series was generally Romantic (Pierce, for example, published chapbooks by Charles G.D. Roberts and Bliss Carman); still, Livesay and several other Canadian modernists, such as the West Coast poet Anne Marriott, had great success with their Ryerson publications. Inspired by the vocal complexity and social vision of Livesay’s Day and Night, Marriott published a long poem, The Wind Our Enemy (1939), in a chapbook of the same name. After witnessing firsthand the effects of the “Dust Bowl” on Canadians living in the prairies (namely, widespread starvation and poverty), Marriott wrote her long poem in order to illuminate the working class’s struggle to survive prairie droughts: “Well—let’s forget politics, Forget the wind, our enemy! Let’s forget farming, boys, Let’s put on a dance tonight! Mrs. Smith’ll bring a cake. Mrs. Olsen’s coffee’s swell!” The small uneven schoolhouse floor Scraped under big work-boots Cleaned for the evening’s fun, Gasoline lamps whistled. One Hungarian boy Snapped at a shrill guitar, A Swede from out north of town Squeezed an accordion dry, And a Scotchwoman from Ontario Made the piano dance (ll. 119–34)

Marriott imagines the proletariat as a culturally diverse group united by its common sense of struggle and, in so doing, crafts a “harmonious” scene: a social harmony is complemented by the pianist’s musical harmony. The Wind Our Enemy, like Livesay’s Day and Night, is further evidence of the interdependence of socialism and modernism in Canadian literature, the latter of which is more explicitly signaled by Marriott’s use of

322   Literary Periods and Genres free verse, compressed time (“They said, ‘Sure, it’ll rain next year!’ / When that was dry, ‘Well, next year anyway’ ” [ll. 44–45]), and multivocality. In partnership with Alan Crawley, Doris Ferne, Floris McLaren, and Dorothy Livesay, Marriott helped establish the first truly modern magazine in Canada. Contemporary Verse (1941–52) was one of four major efforts to establish little magazines dedicated to modern poetry. Each of the editors wanted Contemporary Verse to capture the spirit of Harriett Monroe’s Poetry—in which each of Livesay, McLaren, and Marriott had published—in a Canadian context.12 Unlike the McGill Fortnightly Review, Contemporary Verse had, from its inception, a position on and dedication to modern poetry, which also distinguished it from other magazines that published both conventional and modern verse (such as the Canadian Poetry Magazine). On the other side of the country in Montreal, Preview (1942–45) brought together a tightly knit group of poets, most of whom served as editors:  Patrick Anderson, Neufville Shaw, Margaret Day, Bruce Ruddick, F.R. Scott, A.M. Klein, and P.K. Page. After unsuccessfully attempting to join the Preview group, John Sutherland and his sister Betty began their own magazine, First Statement (1942–45), and Montreal poets Louis Dudek and Irving Layton eventually joined them. Sutherland also founded First Statement Press, which published the first books of poetry written by some of the best poets of the 1940s and 1950s: Patrick Anderson, Irving Layton, Miriam Waddington, Raymond Souster, and Anne Wilkinson. Preview and First Statement are considered by most critics to be rival publications, mostly because of Sutherland’s public and sustained antagonism toward Anderson and Page.13 While the editors of and contributors to these magazines sometimes found themselves in conflict, they still at times amicably commingled: Anderson published his first book with Sutherland’s press, Klein and Page published in both magazines, and the editorial teams eventually came together to form Northern Review (1945–56). After Sutherland maliciously reviewed Robert Finch’s award-winning Poems (1946) in that magazine, however, the majority of the editorial staff resigned. Northern Review was kept afloat for almost a decade until Sutherland’s death in 1956. Although these four magazines had only brief and sometimes tumultuous runs, they were nonetheless successful in generating excitement across Canada about the modernization of Canadian writing. Much of the perceived antipathy among the Preview and First Statement poets was rooted in personal conflicts, but critics have also attempted to root it in the context of one of the most passionate literary debates of the 1940s and 1950s: A.J.M. Smith’s theory of “native” and “cosmopolitan” literature, which he outlined in his introduction to The Book of Canadian Poetry (1943). Smith proposed that modern English-Canadian poetry was divided into these two categories: the “native” tradition focuses on the local and the Canadian, whereas “cosmopolitan” poetry (Smith’s preferred genre) is “a heroic effort to transcend colonialism by entering into the universal, civilizing culture of ideas” (5). Some have used this distinction to classify the two magazine groups of the 1940s by arguing that First Statement is “native” and Preview is “cosmopolitan,” but that argument downplays the fact that these magazines overlapped in terms of both poetics and contributors.14

Modernist Poetry in Canada    323 Even if Smith’s division is reductive, his anthology was still revolutionary in its coverage: it spans hundreds of years to include Indigenous oral traditions (though their inclusion should not give the false impression that Smith’s assessments of these songs and poems are especially admiring) and to connect colonial literary traditions with more contemporary ones. One of the new poets whom Smith enthusiastically published was Margaret Avison. Regularly appearing in the Canadian Forum, Contemporary Verse, and Harriett Monroe’s Poetry, Avison’s poetry (especially her later writing) is often rooted in Christian myth. One of the poems that Smith included in The Book of Canadian Poetry, “The Butterfly” (1943), exemplifies her impressive and difficult style. Witnessing a struggling moth flung around during a tempestuous storm, Avison’s speaker struggles to make sense of the tortured moth’s predicament: The meaning of the moth, even the smashed moth, the   meaning of the moth— can’t we stab that one angle into the curve of space   that sweeps so unrelenting, far above,   towards the subhuman swamp of under-dark? (ll. 17–21)

Avison’s juxtaposition of the freeing image of flight with a hellish vision of swampy, primordial darkness is striking in its starkness and violence. Her dense allusions and intertexts speak, too, to her Eliot-like combing through the literary past: the visual construction of the stanza and the angelic image of the moth recall George Herbert’s “Easter Wings” (1633), the interruptive dashes are nods to Emily Dickinson, and there is something of John Donne’s paradoxically “round corners” of the earth resonating in Avison’s “one angle into the curve of space.”15 This poem, Avison’s high-modernist poems in her award-winning Winter Sun (1960), and her devotional writing in The Dumbfounding (1966) and later volumes are stellar examples of a mythic, metaphysical poet whose aesthetic difficulty, precise imagery, and conceptual ambiguity place her squarely in the modernist tradition of Canadian literature. Against this backdrop of new and emerging poets, magazine culture, and innovative anthologies, first- and second-generation modernists were publishing their first full volumes of poetry. A.J.M. Smith’s first book, News of the Phoenix (1943), was followed by A Sort of Ecstasy (1954). F.R. Scott published Overture (1945), Events and Signals (1954), and The Eye of the Needle (1957). The editor of Preview, Patrick Anderson’s first collections were A Tent for April (1945) and The White Centre (1946). Louis Dudek collaborated with P.K. Page, Raymond Souster, and several other poets to produce Unit Five (1944), and he published three of his own volumes in the 1940s and 1950s: East of the City (1946), The Searching Image (1952; a Ryerson Chap-Book), and Twenty-Four Poems (1952). Dudek also began work on two long poems, Europe (1954) and En Mexico (1958), a genre to which he dedicated much of the rest of his writing career. After publishing When We Are Young (1946), Go to Sleep, World (1947), and City Hall Street (1951), Souster collaborated again with Dudek (and Irving Layton) to publish Cerberus (1952). Layton himself was one of the most active poets

324   Literary Periods and Genres of those two decades, and he became a central figure in a growing culture of literary celebrity in the 1950s;16 his celebrity was bolstered by his prolific output as a poet. He had, by 1960, published more than a dozen volumes of poetry and won the prestigious Governor General’s Award for Poetry for A Red Carpet for the Sun (1959). Earle Birney and P.K. Page both won Governor General’s Awards for David and Other Poems (1942) and The Metal and the Flower (1954), respectively. A.M. Klein emerged from the 1940s as one of the most respected poets of the era. His poetry is eclectic in its use of forms (he is as likely to write spare modernist free verse as he is to write in traditional forms) and challenging in its demanding allusions to literature and religious history. After his inclusion in New Provinces, Klein published some of the most sophisticated Canadian poetry in Hath Not a Jew … (1940), Poems (1944), and The Hitleriad (1944); he also wrote a novel, The Second Scroll (1951), inspired by his visit to Israel. Klein’s last book of poetry, The Rocking Chair and Other Poems (1948), includes his most famous poem, “The Portrait of the Artist as Landscape.” The poem imagines the modern Canadian poet, a “shelved Lycidas” (l. 2), as a symbol of neglect who makes “a halo of his anonymity” (l. 161); tellingly, Klein originally titled the poem “The Portrait of the Poet as Zero.” The fantastic irony of Klein’s poem about critical disregard is that his book sold remarkably well and won him the Governor General’s Award for Poetry in 1948.17 Such recognition was a sign to many writers that Canadian readers and critics were becoming increasingly receptive to modernist writing. Even exceptionally challenging poets such as Margaret Avison and Jay Macpherson won Governor General’s Awards for Winter Sun (1960) and The Boatman (1957), respectively. Suddenly there was much less room for the Romantic in the mainstream of Canadian writing. Instead, more modernist collaborations appeared. With editorial assistance from Dudek and Layton, Aileen Collins and several others founded the literary magazine CIV/n (1953–55) and, as a result of personal frustrations with John Sutherland’s stewardship of Northern Review, Souster founded Contact (1952–54). Like CIV/n, Contact benefited from the editorial expertise of Dudek, as well as from Dudek’s acquaintanceship with American poets Cid Corman and Robert Creeley.18 This magazine led to the creation of Contact Press (1952–67), which published emerging modernist poets such as Al Purdy, Milton Acorn, Phyllis Webb, Eli Mandel, and Gael Turnbull. The 1950s were the decade in which modernist Canadian literature had, Layton would later say, “come in from the cold and was starting to gain momentum” (“Recalling” 249). Although many writers nurtured a larger reading audience by actively participating in the editorial construction and cultural work of modernism, few magazines survived for very long. The brief run of modernist little magazines is evidence of the meager funding available to Canadian writers before 1957. Aileen Collins, in a retrospective on CIV/n, recalls having “to sell the electric typewriter” just to finance the penultimate issue of her magazine (“Introduction” 9). The financial situation for writers was dire. Canadians’ cultural nationalism, however, intensified after World War II, which led to the creation of the Canada Council for the Arts in 1957. With a dedicated federal organization funding Canadian art and with a broader, willing audience, the next generation

Modernist Poetry in Canada    325 of Canadian writers found themselves in an ideal position to found new magazines and presses and to publish experimental poetry for a willing audience. Many of these new writers were working, for the first time, primarily within a Canadian tradition. Margaret Avison, Jay Macpherson, Margaret Atwood, Dennis Lee, and James Reaney studied under Northrop Frye at the University of Toronto and inherited his fascination with mythopoeic writing, which he first articulated in two of his most popular critical works: Fearful Symmetry (1947) and Anatomy of Criticism (1957). The other mentor figure of the period was Irving Layton, who took poets Eli Mandel, Leonard Cohen, and Al Purdy under his wing during the 1950s and 1960s. Earle Birney also mentored Purdy, as well as younger poets like Florence McNeil and Andrew Suknaski. P.K. Page and Jay Macpherson had a significant influence on Margaret Atwood’s early writing. F.R. Scott was a major figure of inspiration to emerging poets such as John Newlove and Phyllis Webb. There was a general feeling of indebtedness among younger Canadian authors to these writers, critics, and editors of the 1940s and 1950s who helped legitimize a Canadian literary tradition, which was especially important for nationalists anticipating Canada’s 1967 centennial celebrations. Although there was no definitive “modernist” group in Canada after the mid-twentieth century, the post-1960 era of Canadian poetry was not a period “after modernism,” as it is sometimes presumed to be.19 The era is perhaps better understood as one in which the novelty of modernism wore off as it gained formal and institutional recognition. Whatever identifiable modernism survived after 1960 was made even less visible by postmodernists attempting to devalue their predecessors, just as Smith and Scott had censured theirs. These detractors were mostly poet-critics (Frank Davey, Robert Kroetsch, and George Bowering) who understandably, if sometimes reductively, argued that literary modernism offered an aesthetic and a poetics that was neither liberal nor radical enough for audiences of the 1960s and 1970s. The label of “modernist” thus became unfashionable, even though many of the first- and second-generation modernists continued to mentor and publish well into the 1980s.

Post-1960 Concepts of Modernism: An Overview of the Critical Scholarship The earliest critical discussions about modernism came during the era in which Layton and other writers witnessed that literary project becoming part of the mainstream. Many of these discussions were efforts to establish some sense of a coherent “Canadian” literary tradition that connected several generations of writing (see works by E.K. Brown, W.E. Collins, Northrop Frye, Desmond Pacey, and R.E. Rashley); after 1960, however, some of the best critical reflections on Canadian modernism could be found in autobiographies, biographies, memoirs, and collections of essays or letters. A.J.M. Smith was one of the more prolific critics of that period; his most important essays are

326   Literary Periods and Genres gathered in Towards a View of Canadian Letters: Selected Critical Essays 1928–1971 (1973). Patrick Anderson published an autobiography, Search Me: Autobiography—The Black Country—Canada and Spain (1957), and a memoir, “A Poet Past and Future” (1970), the latter of which responded to Wynne Francis’s somewhat overdramatic portrayal of the Preview and First Statement “rivalry” in her article “Montreal Poets of the Forties” (1962). Other notable autobiographies and memoirs were published by Margaret Avison, Dorothy Livesay, Irving Layton, Earle Birney, and John Glassco. Some of the most basic and most important readings in the field are the collections of primary sources gathered between 1965 and 1980: Louis Dudek and Michael Gnarowski’s exceptional and still unparalleled anthology, The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada (1967), J.L. Granatstein and Peter Stevens’s Forum: Canadian Life and Letters, 1920–70 (1972), Peter Stevens’s The McGill Movement (1969), Miriam Waddington’s edition of John Sutherland’s works, Essays, Controversies, Poems (1972), and Louis Dudek’s Selected Essays and Criticism (1978). Other important essay collections came from prolific critics such as Northrop Frye (The Bush Garden [1971]). There were also many epistolary collections printed during these decades and after: The Letters of John Sutherland (1992), Irving Layton’s three separate epistolary collections, and Dudek’s Dk/Some Letters of Ezra Pound (1974). Emerging scholars writing before 1990 contemplated Canadian modernism mostly in critical indexes, articles, or book chapters. Neil Fisher published First Statement, 1942–1945: An Assessment and an Index (1974), Don Precosky edited a similar index of Preview in 1981, and Hilda M.C. Vanneste published Northern Review 1945–56: A History and an Index (1982). Two outstanding anthologies of critical prose appeared: Eli Mandel’s Contexts of Canadian Criticism (1971) and John Moss’s Modern Times (1982), the latter of which offered fresh thoughts on modernist fiction. The renowned critic Sandra Djwa broke new ground with articles and books on major figures in Canadian modernism such as Smith, Pratt, Scott, and, more recently, Page. Djwa also guest-edited a special issue of D.M.R. Bentley’s Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews, which included new essays on Scott, Smith, Souster, Klein, Page, and Avison (Canadian Poetry 4 [Spring/Summer 1979]). Bentley participated in the construction of Canadian modernist studies as a critic (see the last chapter of The Gay] Grey Moose [1992]), and as the editor of Canadian Poetry: his journal has produced special issues on Canadian modernism broadly and on individual writers (e.g., John Glassco and A.J.M. Smith).20 The first significant book-length studies attentive to Canadian modernism appeared in the 1980s: Ken Norris offered new insights into modernist print culture in The Little Magazine in Canada (1984), Frank Davey published his perceptive study Louis Dudek and Raymond Souster (1980), and Elspeth Cameron established herself as the leading biographer of Canadian writers with books on Irving Layton, Earle Birney, and the novelist Hugh MacLennan. Brian Trehearne’s Aestheticism and the Canadian Modernists (1989) dispels many myths about the formation of Canadian modernism through diligent analyses of the archives, poems, and unpublished works of numerous Canadian modernists influenced by Anglo-American poets from the eras of aestheticism and decadence. Despite the originality and achievement of these publications, there was

Modernist Poetry in Canada    327 only a small audience for them during the 1980s and early 1990s; these years represented the climax of a period during which Canadian critics gravitated toward poststructuralist literary theory and studies of the postmodern Canadian novel. As a result of these newer directions in criticism, modernist scholars were often working to revive studies of modernists whose work was out of print: with the release of Klein’s Complete Poems in two volumes (1990), Zailig Pollock inaugurated a 20-year long project to restore Klein’s reputation, Sandra Djwa and R.G. Moyles published Pratt’s Complete Poems (1989), Stan Dragland collected P.K. Page’s poems in two volumes titled The Hidden Room (1997), and Dean Irvine edited Archive for Our Times: Previously Uncollected and Unpublished Poems of Dorothy Livesay (1998). Two books appeared in the 1990s that helped legitimate Canadian modernism as a field of study: Brian Trehearne’s The Montreal Forties: Modernist Poetry in Transition (1999) and Glenn Willmott’s Unreal Country:  Modernity in the Canadian Novel in English (2002). Arguing for second-generation modernist poets’ gradual rejection of various early modernist dogmas and for their increased attraction to testimonial lyrics, Trehearne reinvigorated studies of Canadian modernist poetry. A theoretically vigorous text, Willmott’s Unreal Country established for scholars a method of reading Canadian modernist novels as expressions of a longing for cultural maturity and national consciousness. More than most other criticism, the work of Trehearne and Willmott became touchstones for modernist scholars of the twenty-first century; in his introduction to the proceedings of a groundbreaking conference on Canadian modernism, The Canadian Modernists Meet (2005), Irvine notes that Trehearne and Willmott “initiated the most significant transformation of the critical field since its mid-twentieth-century beginnings” and, in so doing, guided “the restructuring” of modernist studies (6). Irvine’s own book, Editing Modernity: Women and Little-Magazine Cultures in Canada, 1916–1956 (2008), has likewise guided this restructuring by offering the most thorough and complex discussions of Canadian magazines to date. With this foundation for future modernist studies, younger critics and veteran scholars continue to participate in correcting historical misconceptions and enlarging the field of Canadian modernism. Among the most lively discussions today are those about modernism and feminism, some of which build on the early work of Carole Gerson (Di Brandt and Barbara Godard, Janice Anderson, Kristina Huneault), leftism (James Doyle, Candida Rifkind, Dean Irvine), the development of modernist fiction in Canada (Colin Hill, Glenn Willmott, Reingard M. Nischik), literary modernism and the visual arts (Gregory Betts, Michele Rackham, Cynthia Messenger), modernism and popular culture (Joel Deshaye, Peggy Lynn Kelly, Lorraine York), and Canadian modernism in the context of international modernisms (Betts, Willmott, Lianne Moyes). There have also been several recent anthologies that take thorough stock of Canadian modernism: Robert Lecker’s Open Country (2007), the second volume of Cynthia Sugars and Laura Moss’s Canadian Literature in English: Texts and Contexts (2009), Brian Trehearne’s Canadian Poetry 1920 to 1960 (2010), and Gary Geddes’s 70 Canadian Poets (2014) offer wide-reaching introductions to the canon of Canadian modernist writing.

328   Literary Periods and Genres

Conclusion: Romantic Revivals and the New Poetry Although current scholarship on Canadian modernism is certainly broad in its coverage, the discourse often stresses a rhetoric of “rupture” between the old and new, instead of attending to an unusual and fascinating aspect of Canadian modernism that I have foregrounded here:  its proximity (temporally, aesthetically, and intellectually) to the traditions its practitioners rejected. The Anglo-American modernists had a century of Romantic and Victorian traditions to tear down; that was not the case in Canada, where the vanguards of Romanticism were receiving honorary doctorates and medals at the exact time that young modernists were founding little magazines and radicalizing Canadian writing. While the aesthetic tastes and artistic visions of Contemporary Verse, Preview, and First Statement may have at times seemed incompatible with those of the Canadian Poetry Magazine and the Canadian Authors Association, their shared goal of building a Canadian literary tradition meant that modernist groups came into frequent contact with and sometimes even wrote poetry similar to writers they deemed “conventional.” Hence, in the decades following World War I, the efforts to nurture arts communities at the local and national level were both integral to and much bigger than the project of Canadian literary modernism. The antagonisms among writers and movements lost momentum as time went on, partly because of this common investment in identifying and creating a Canadian literary tradition. That unique intersection of the old and new is at the heart of Canadian modernism. Brian Trehearne, for example, has documented at length the understated impact of aestheticism and decadence on modernist works by John Glassco, Raymond Knister, W.W.E. Ross, F.R. Scott, and A.J.M. Smith.21 Dean Irvine has shown that the modernist little magazine Contemporary Verse actually had its beginnings in local poetry groups sponsored by the Canadian Authors Association, the literary organization that symbolized all of the traditions from which the modernists desired to break.22 The narrative of modernism I have sketched out here offers further evidence of such connections: the praise for Bliss Carman’s poetry in the first issue of the McGill Fortnightly Review that contrasts with F.R. Scott’s belittling of him in the last issue, the aesthetic diversity in New Provinces, the Ryerson Chap-Book Series that published both Romantic poets and left-leaning modernists, the oscillation between modernist free verse and the traditional sonnet in the works of A.M. Klein and W.W.E. Ross, and the appearance of both modernists and Romantics in Canadian Poetry Magazine. Even if the gap between the old and the new widened during the 1930s, these traditions still ran closely alongside each other. That sustained proximity partly explains why that gap again narrowed after 1940. In the early 1940s, Earle Birney wrote a passionate letter about the potential publication of his masterful long poem David to persuade the editors at New Directions that modernist poetry, indeed, needed “new directions”:

Modernist Poetry in Canada    329 It is my belief that the really new directions in literature are away from the metaphysical, contorted, the spitless intellectualism, the clever-clever allusiveness to a misunderstood Marx or an ill-digested Vico and towards a new colloquial gusto, the reassertion of heroic values (even at the cost of some romanticism), and a fresh, sensuous and emotional appraisal of the lives we live. (qtd. in Cameron, Earle Birney 188)

When David was finally published in the Canadian Forum (New Directions rejected Birney’s manuscript), it showed that the “new poetry” could move forward without too determinedly severing ties to the Romantic writing that was still being taught in Canadian schools and published in magazines. Even the antipathy that dedicated modernists like Smith felt toward the “old poetry” subsided over time: in “Eclectic Detachment: Aspects of Identity in Canadian Poetry” (1961), an older Smith contradicted his younger self when he reprimanded his contemporaries for putting down nineteenth-century Canadian writing. “I would not,” he wrote, “wish to discard and do not think it necessary to scorn our older poetry” (26). As his career evolved from modernist poet to anthologist, Smith had evidently become more willing to acknowledge the traditions that he and others had at one time rejected. His accommodation of earlier writers was not especially deep, but it allowed new poets to situate themselves within a broader and more diverse tradition of Canadian literature. Such attitudes are part of a more interesting and prominent trend than many critics of Canadian literature appreciate. Reflecting on his career, Souster wrote of the waning influence of the Auden Generation during the 1940s in Canada: “my own work was moving away from ‘proletarian concerns’ and to a much more romantic approach” (“Some Afterthoughts” 1). Layton, like Souster, expressed his growing distaste for the Auden Generation and the impersonal poetics of Eliot’s modernism. Layton turned to the New Apocalypse poets (Trehearne, Montreal Forties 179), which precipitated his “return to lyric” in the 1950s (Trehearne 221). Other examples of this phenomenon abound. In her famous essay “The Documentary Poem: A Canadian Genre” (1969), Dorothy Livesay proposed that nineteenth-century long poems and modernist long poems share a specifically Canadian impulse to “create a dialectic between the objective facts and the subjective feelings of the poet” (267). P.K. Page’s mid-1950s poetry reveals a “cautious subjectivism” that contrasts with the impersonal poetics of her 1940s poems (Trehearne, Montreal Forties 95). The veneration with which emerging poets of the 1960s regarded Birney, Page, Layton, Livesay, and other participants in this Romantic revival allowed this complex relationship between modernism and antecedent literary movements like Romanticism to shape a great deal of Canadian writing, especially lyric poetry, until the late twentieth century. That is not to say that this modern revival of Romantic forms, styles, and ideas was a specifically “Canadian” phenomenon. During the 1960s, Charles Hoyt and Ronald Davis both noted that the decline of optimism in the United States after World War II had nurtured the subjective “reason, emotion, and passion” (Davis 220) of what American critics began calling the “new romanticism.” For Canadians, however, this “new romanticism” had as much to do with a reaction to the horrors of World War II as with an unusual and sustained

330   Literary Periods and Genres negotiation of old and new literary traditions. That negotiation was, if not consistent in its intensity, surely consistent in its presence during decades in which both Canadian authors and readers were looking for evidence of a diverse national literature. Arguably, the hostility many Canadian writers expressed toward other movements was, in terms of its severity, another import from Anglo-American modernism. These writers’ expressions of that enmity therefore gradually softened as the influence of Anglo-American modernism waned and the nationalistic need for a distinctive and more inclusive Canadian literary tradition became clearer to authors. That need was vital in guiding the aesthetic and conceptual development of Canadian modernism between 1920 and 1960.

Notes 1. Admittedly, my division of poets and novelists may seem too absolute, but the majority of Canadian modernist poets did not have successful or long careers as novelists. Some (such as A.M. Klein and P.K. Page) wrote excellent fiction, but they were much better known for their achievements in poetry. The “poet-novelist” was a phenomenon more typical of Canada’s post–World War II era. 2. See Brian Trehearne’s afterword to Canadian Poetry 1920–1960, in which he offers a similar assessment of Pratt’s poetry. 3. See Elizabeth Popham’s A.M. Klein: The Letters: “Obdurate though I was during my freshman year in refusing to change, at the advice of Mssrs. Frank Scott and A.J.M. Smith, the last line of my sonnet, I eventually did come around to their viewpoint. You may be interested to know that the objection to that line was that it had the word, soul, in it, and Scott and Smith, sitting upon their Olympian heights, would not tolerate fiction in poetry” (20). 4. See works by Ken Norris (The Little Magazine in Canada), Peter Stevens (The McGill Movement), W.J. Keith (Canadian Literature in English), and Michael Gnarowski (“Introduction”); each regards the Fortnightly as an experimental modernist magazine. In Aestheticism and the Canadian Modernists (1989), Brian Trehearne rejects this narrative and argues instead that the magazine demonstrates “an intermediate stage between Modernism and an older attitude that preceded it” rather than of a full-blown embrace of modernist aesthetics and poetics (261). 5. Brian Trehearne’s The Complete Poems of A.J.M. Smith (2007) includes the full publishing history of this poem and others by Smith (see 391–92). 6. See, for instance, Carole Gerson’s “Sarah Binks and Edna Jaques: Parody, Gender and the Construction of Literary Value” (1992), to which Di Brandt and Barbara Godard allude in their introduction to Wider Boundaries of Daring: The Modernist Impulse in Canadian Women’s Poetry (2009). 7. The editing history of New Provinces is somewhat inconsistent. Candida Rifkind (Comrades and Critics), Ken Norris (The Little Magazine in Canada), and Michael Gnarowski (“Introduction”), for instance, offer historical accounts that slightly differ. 8. See W.J. Keith’s “How New was New Provinces?” (120–21). 9. Michael Gnarowski’s reprinting of New Provinces uses pagination identical to that of the original 1936 edition, and so I have not distinguished between the original and later editions here.

Modernist Poetry in Canada    331 10. Dean Irvine traces Livesay’s turn toward socialism in Editing Modernity (52–59). 11. Peggy Lynn Kelly offers a fuller account of Livesay’s exclusion in “Politics, Gender, and New Provinces:  Dorothy Livesay and F.R. Scott” (2003). It remains unclear who was responsible for Livesay’s exclusion from New Provinces; Scott, Pratt, and Smith have all been suggested by critics. Smith was, however, the first to suggest Livesay’s inclusion (see Gnarowski’s “Introduction”). W.J. Keith also touches on some of these issues in “How New was New Provinces?” (1979). 12. See Irvine’s Editing Modernity (80–82). 13. Brian Trehearne documents Sutherland’s conflicts with Anderson and Page in The Montreal Forties (1999), and Sandra Djwa’s Journey with No Maps (2012) adds some deeper insight into Page’s relationship with Sutherland. 14. W.J. Keith, for instance, argues that “Preview … was decidedly cosmopolitan in its allegiances … while First Statement, founded by John Sutherland, conspicuously flaunted native energy and originality” (Canadian Literature 110). 15. The line is from Donne’s “Holy Sonnet 4”: “At the round earth’s imagin’d corners” (l. 1). 16. See Joel Deshaye’s chapters on Layton in The Metaphor of Celebrity: Canadian Poetry and the Public, 1955–1980 (2013) and Elspeth Cameron’s Irving Layton: A Portrait (1985). 17. See Chapter 32 by Norman Ravvin in this volume for further discussion of Klein’s work. 18. Gnarowski offers a detailed background on the magazine in Contact, 1952–1954 (1966). 19. The phrase is from Robert Stacey’s Re: Reading the Postmodern: Canadian Literature and Criticism after Modernism (2010). 20. See Canadian Poetry 19 (Fall/Winter 1986)  for the special issue on twentieth-century poetry, Canadian Poetry 13 (Fall/Winter 1983)  for the special issue on Glassco, and Canadian Poetry 11 (Fall/Winter 1982) for the special issue on Smith. 21. See Trehearne’s Aestheticism and the Canadian Modernists. 22. Irvine explores the early affiliation many editors of Contemporary Verse had with these local groups (Editing 82–84).

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334   Literary Periods and Genres Lecker, Robert, ed. Open Country: Canadian Literature in English. Toronto: Thomas Nelson, 2007. Print. Livesay, Dorothy. Archive for Our Times:  Previously Uncollected and Unpublished Poems of Dorothy Livesay. Ed. Dean Irvine. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp, 1998. Print. ———. Day and Night. Toronto: Ryerson, 1944. Print. ———. “The Documentary Poem:  A  Canadian Genre.” 1969. Contexts of Canadian Criticism:  A  Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Eli Mandel. Chicago:  U of Chicago P, 1971. 267–81. Print. ———. The Green Pitcher. Toronto: Macmillan, 1928. Print. ———. Journey with My Selves:  A  Memoir 1909–1963. Vancouver:  Douglas and McIntyre, 1991. Print. ———. Right Hand Left Hand: A True Life of the Thirties. Ed. David Arnason and Kim Todd. Erin, ON: Porcépic, 1977. Print. ———. Signposts. Toronto: Macmillan, 1932. Print. Macpherson, Jay. The Boatman. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1957. Print. Mandel, Eli, ed. Contexts of Canadian Criticism: A Collection of Critical Essays. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1971. Print. Marriott, Anne. The Wind Our Enemy. Toronto: Ryerson, 1939. Print. Messenger, Cynthia. “ ‘But How Do You Write a Chagall?’: Ekphrasis and the Brazilian Poetry of P.K. Page and Elizabeth Bishop.” Canadian Literature 142/143 (1994): 102–17. Print. Monroe, Harriet. The New Poetry: An Anthology. New York: Macmillan, 1917. Print. Moss, John, ed. Modern Times. Toronto: NC Press, 1982. Print. Moss, Laura, and Cynthia Sugars, eds. Canadian Literature in English:  Texts and Contexts. 2 vols. Toronto: Pearson-Penguin, 2009. Print. Moyes, Lianne. “Discontinuity, Intertextuality, and Literary History: Gail Scott’s Reading of Gertrude Stein.” Wider Boundaries of Daring: The Modernist Impulse in Canadian Women’s Poetry. Ed. Di Brandt and Barbara Godard. Waterloo, ON:  Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2009. 163–87. Print. Nischik, Reingard M., ed. The Canadian Short Story: Interpretations. Rochester, NY: Camden, 2007. Print. Norris, Ken. The Little Magazine in Canada 1925–80: Its Role in the Development of Modernism and Post-Modernism in Canadian Poetry. Toronto: ECW P, 1984. Print. Pacey, Desmond. Ten Canadian Poets:  A  Group of Biographical and Critical Essays. Toronto: Ryerson, 1958. Print. Page, P.K. The Hidden Room: Collected Poems. Ed. Stan Dragland. 2 vols. Erin, ON: Porcupine’s Quill, 1997. Print. ———. The Metal and the Flower. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1954. Print. ———. The Sun and the Moon and Other Fictions. Toronto: Anansi, 1973. Print. Pratt, E.J. Complete Poems. Ed. Sandra Djwa and R.G. Moyles. 2 vols. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1989. Print. ———. The Fable of the Goats and Other Poems. Toronto: Macmillan, 1937. Print. ———. Many Moods. Toronto: Macmillan, 1932. Print. ———. Newfoundland Verse. Toronto: Ryerson, 1923. Print. ———. Still Life: And Other Verse. Toronto: Macmillan, 1943. Print. ———. The Titanic. Toronto: Macmillan, 1935. Print. ———. Towards the Last Spike. Toronto: Macmillan, 1952. Print. Precosky, Don. “Preview: An Introduction and Index.” Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews 8 (1981): 74–89. Print.

Modernist Poetry in Canada    335 Rackham, Michèle. “Between the Lines: Interartistic Modernism in Canada, 1930–1960.” Diss. McGill University, 2011. Print. Rashley, R.E. Poetry in Canada: The First Three Steps. Toronto: Ryerson, 1958. Print. Rifkind, Candida. Comrades and Critics:  Women, Literature and the Left in 1930s Canada. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2009. Print. Roberts, Charles G.D. “A Note on Modernism.” Open House. Ed. William Arthur Deacon and Wilfred Reeves. Ottawa: Graphic, 1931. 19–25. Print. Ross, Sinclair. As for Me and My House. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1941. Print. Ross, W.W.E. Laconics. Ottawa: Overbrook, 1930. Print. ———. Sonnets. Toronto: Heaton, 1932. Print. Scott, F.R. “The Canadian Authors Meet.” McGill Fortnightly Review 2.9–10 (Feb. 1927): 39. Print. ———. The Collected Poems of F.R. Scott. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1981. Print. ———. Events and Signals. Toronto: Ryerson, 1954. Print. ———. The Eye of the Needle: Satires, Sorties, Sundries. Montreal: Contact, 1957. Print. ———.”New Poems for Old:  I—The Decline of Poesy.” Canadian Forum 11.128 (1931): 296–98. Print. ———. “New Poems for Old:  II—The Revival of Poetry.” Canadian Forum 11.129 (1931): 337–39. Print. ———. Overture: Poems. Toronto: Ryerson, 1945. Print. Scott, F.R., et al. New Provinces: Poems of Several Authors. Toronto: Macmillan, 1936. Print. Smart, Elizabeth. By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. London: Poetry London, 1945. Print. Smith, A.J.M., ed. The Book of Canadian Poetry: A Critical and Historical Anthology. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1943. Print. ———. The Complete Poems. Ed. Brian Trehearne. London, ON: Canadian Poetry, 2007. Print. ———. “Contemporary Poetry.” McGill Fortnightly Review 2.4 (Dec. 1926): 31–32. Print. Rpt. in Dudek and Gnarowski 27–30. ———. “Eclectic Detachment: Aspects of Identity in Canadian Poetry.” Canadian Literature 9 (1961): 6–14. Print. ———. “Introduction.” The Oxford Book of Canadian Verse. Toronto:  Oxford UP, 1960. xiii–li. Print. ———. “The Lonely Land: Group of Seven.” McGill Fortnightly Review 1.4 (Jan. 1926): 30. Print. ———. News of the Phoenix and Other Poems. Toronto: Ryerson, 1943. Print. ———. Poems New and Collected. Toronto: Oxford, 1967. Print. ———. “A Rejected Preface.” Canadian Literature 24 (1965): 6–9. Print. ———. A Sort of Ecstasy:  Poems New and Selected. East Lansing:  Michigan State College, 1954. Print. ———. Towards a View of Canadian Letters: Selected Critical Essays 1928–1971. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 1973. Print. ———. “Wanted—Canadian Criticism.” Canadian Forum 8 (1928):  600–01. Print. Rpt. as “Wanted: Canadian Criticism” in Dudek and Gnarowski 31–33. Souster, Raymond. City Hall Street. Toronto: Ryerson, 1951. Print. ———. Go to Sleep, World: Poems. Toronto: Ryerson, 1947. Print. ———. “Some Afterthoughts on Contact Magazine.” Contact:  1952–1954. Ed. Michael Gnarowski. Montreal: Delta, 1966. 1–2. Print. ———. When We Are Young. Montreal: First Statement, 1945. Print. Stacey, Robert, ed. Re:  Reading the Postmodern:  Canadian Literature and Criticism after Modernism. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 2010. Print.

336   Literary Periods and Genres Stevens, Peter, ed. The McGill Movement:  A.J.M. Smith, F.R. Scott, and Leo Kennedy. Toronto: Ryerson, 1969. Print. Stringer, Arthur. Open Water. New York: John Lane, 1914. Print. Sutherland, John. Essays, Controversies, and Poems. Ed. Miriam Waddington. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1972. Print. ———. The Letters of John Sutherland, 1942–1956. Ed. Bruce Whiteman. Toronto:  ECW P, 1992. Print. Trehearne, Brian. Aestheticism and the Canadian Modernists:  Aspects of a Poetic Influence. Kingston: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1989. Print. ———, ed. Canadian Poetry 1920 to 1960. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2010. Print. ———. The Montreal Forties:  Modernist Poetry in Transition. Toronto:  U of Toronto P, 1999. Print. Vanneste, Hilda M.C. Northern Review 1945–56: A History and an Index. Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1982. Print. Waddington, Miriam. Green World. Montreal: First Statement, 1945. Print. Watson, Sheila. The Double Hook. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1959. Print. Wilkinson, Anne. Counterpoint to Sleep: Poems. Montreal: First Statement, 1951. Print. Willmott, Glenn. Unreal Country:  Modernity in the Canadian Novel in English. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2002. Print. York, Lorraine. Literary Celebrity in Canada. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2007. Print.

Chapter 18

Mid-Century Mode rni t y and Fiction by Wome n, 1920– 19 50 Carole Gerson

The nationalistic spirit that flourished in Canada following World War II, as embodied in the 1951 report of the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences authored by the federally appointed Massey Commission, led to the identification of Canadian writing and publishing as a focus of cultural investment and scholarly interest, along with the development of dedicated Canadian literature courses for undergraduate and graduate students in Canadian universities. The goal of this newly established academic field was to identify the specific features of Canadian writing that distinguished it from the literatures of Britain and the United States, and to reduce the proportion of Canadians’ reading material that emanated from these major foreign sources of English-language books and magazines. During the 1950s and 1960s, this nationalist endeavour was pioneered by men whose own academic and cultural formation was shaped by the masculinist modernism that characterized British and American literature in the first decades of the twentieth century. Canada’s most influential writers and critics had received their highest education abroad: Northrop Frye, F.R. Scott, and Hugh MacLennan at Oxford; Desmond Pacey at Cambridge; A.J.M. Smith at Edinburgh; Malcolm Ross at Cornell; E.K. Brown at the Sorbonne; Frederick Philip Grove in Germany; and Carl F. Klinck at Columbia. With the exception of Klinck’s dissertation on Wilfred Campbell and E.K. Brown’s on Edith Wharton, those who wrote doctoral theses focused on European cultures: Classics (MacLennan), the Metaphysical poets (Smith), Milton (Ross), Blake (Frye), and nineteenth-century European fiction (Pacey). Such training did little to orient them toward the middlebrow tastes of Canadian readers or to the work produced by women writers. Symptomatic of the normative gender inequity of this era is the monumental Literary History of Canada, edited by Klinck, which provided the foundational scholarship that undergirded the growing edifice of Canadian literary studies. The initial one-volume

338   Literary Periods and Genres edition that appeared in 1965 included just five women in its cast of 33 expert authors; altogether, women wrote or contributed to six of the volume’s 40 chapters, their efforts concentrated in such marginal areas as children’s literature, folklore, travel literature, and autobiography. As this generation of critics constructed a distinctive narrative for the literary history of English-speaking Canada, they looked for local equivalents to the British Romantics and New England Transcendentalists for the nineteenth century; for the twentieth they sought Canada’s versions of Eliot, Joyce, and the host of modernist realists who shaped American fiction such as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Steinbeck. At the time, few seemed eager to find a Canadian Virginia Woolf or Willa Cather. Central to the prevailing narrative created by the Literary History of Canada is the view that modernism arrived late in Canada with the generation of young male writers who clustered in Montreal and Toronto in the 1920s and hung out in Paris whenever possible, and that what Colin Hill terms the “modern-realist movement” (6) represented the best of Canadian writing until the arrival of postmodernism in the late 1960s. The resulting canon of mid-twentieth-century fiction that was established in the 1950s and 1960s defined a Canadian modernism that favoured masculine values and norms by focusing mostly on disaffected characters who were usually male, labouring on the farm (in the bleak naturalistic fictions of Grove, published from 1925 to 1944), or adrift in the city (in the many stories and novels published from 1928 to 1988 by Morley Callaghan, who emulated the detached style of Hemingway), or alienated from their small-town environment (in Sinclair Ross’s stories and best-known novel, As for Me and My House, 1941). Some writers sought to create master narratives that spoke for the country as a whole (notably MacLennan’s Two Solitudes, 1945). University-based critics such as Desmond Pacey and E.K. Brown helped position these men as the only Canadian authors to confront what they perceived to be the country’s colonial mentality and cultural Puritanism—issues outlined most persuasively in Brown’s essay “The Problem of a Canadian Literature” (1943)—and they shared Northrop Frye’s distinction between “the romancer, who stays with established values … and the realist, who deals with contemporary life and … is more serious in intention, more concerned to unsettle a stock response” (837). To be innovative was to portray the grittier aspects of Canadian life such as social alienation, failure, and sex, through the lens of middle-class realism, thereby following patterns that prevailed in the United States, still “the major market for Canadian literary wares of all sorts,” as Sara Jeannette Duncan had shrewdly observed in 1887. The fiction written by Canadians hoping to earn more than a pittance was largely in line with What America Read, to cite the title of Gordon Hutner’s illuminating study of American middlebrow fiction of the decades between 1920 and 1960. Because most mid-twentieth-century canonical Canadian fiction was less concerned with style (i.e., finding new ways of saying things) than with content (i.e., telling stories of daily life), critics have paid more attention to the sociocultural issues associated with Canadian modernity than to the aesthetics of modernism.1 Alongside this select list of canonized male writers, scores of Canadian women published poetry and fiction during the first half of the twentieth century, but most received little more than passing attention in the Literary History of Canada and have remained

Mid-Century Modernity and Fiction by Women    339 absent from subsequent inclusive studies, exemplifying the persistence of the “cordon sanitaire” established by male modernists throughout the Anglo-American literary world “to protect a newly defined domain of metropolitan high art from the culture of the partially educated and feminized masses” (Pykett 111). While all critical discussions of modernism in Canadian poetry filter through the landmark anthology New Provinces (1936), which features six male poets and no women, there are no similarly convenient signposts for modern Canadian fiction. Availability has much to do with canonicity, and the New Canadian Library (NCL) reprint series, which was initiated in 1957 under the direction of Professor Malcolm Ross to provide inexpensive paperback editions for classroom use, has played a significant role. While inclusion in the NCL was sometimes tempered by market value or copyright availability (Friskney 49–50) and did not guarantee canonical longevity, most novels that achieved canonical recognition appeared on its list.2 The first two decades of the series (1957–77) included only five fiction titles written by women that had first appeared between 1920 and 1950: number 5 was Gabrielle Roy’s The Tin Flute (1945), reissued in 1958; number 13 was Gwethalyn Graham’s Earth and High Heaven (1944), reissued in 1960; number 18 was Martha Ostenso’s Wild Geese (1925), reissued in 1961; number 21 was Mazo de la Roche’s Delight (1926), also reissued in 1961; and a latecomer was Laura Goodman Salverson’s The Viking Heart (1923), reissued in 1975 as number 116. During the same period, the NCL reprinted 31 fiction titles initially published by men between 1920 and 1950, including six by Grove, three by Callaghan, and three by Thomas Raddall. To understand the literary landscape of Canadian fiction of the modernist era, it is helpful to establish its conceptual boundaries. The female novelists I discuss later in this chapter were writing in the middle ground between modernism and anti-modernism, two poles shaped by a small coterie of male academics, authors, and journalists. The exclusion of fiction by women from the masculine den of Canadian modernism was generated in part by the popularity of several prolific female authors whose success was viewed as symptomatic of their lack of serious value. Hence L.M. Montgomery, whose Anne of Green Gables (1908) and its seven sequels have been Canada’s best-selling novels at home and abroad over the entire twentieth century, was dismissed by Pacey, who declared that “it would be silly to apply adult critical standards” to “a children’s classic” (Creative 105); in the same vein, the powerful literary editor at the Toronto Globe, W.A. Deacon, opined that “Canadian fiction was to go no lower” than Anne of Green Gables (qtd. in Thomas and Lennox 105). Interestingly, the same two men rose to the defense of Mazo de la Roche, whose novel Jalna (1927) initiated a series that extended to 16 volumes after it won the Atlantic Monthly prize of $10,000. The status of her award, the vitality of her unconventional characters, her erotic plots, and her enigmatic personality all contributed to de la Roche’s appeal, which elicited Pacey’s apologetic praise: “Judged as a realistic novelist she was a failure; but judged as a romantic novelist she projected an imaginative vision of reality which was remarkably consistent and, in its admittedly minor way, powerful and compelling” (Creative 199). Nonetheless, de la Roche’s books, like those of Montgomery, were demoted as “literature” (i.e., as books worthy of scholarly attention) as her critical reputation declined significantly between 1933 and 1960

340   Literary Periods and Genres (Panofsky 57, 64). Generally speaking, the readers of Canadian bestsellers were constructed as lower-brow fans of escapist adventure and saccharine romance, whereas the limited sales of the higher-brow modernists contributed to their aesthetic elevation, following the principle of inverted cultural value described by Pierre Bourdieu (38–39). In the words of Northrop Frye, the goal of popular literature, “the kind that is read for relaxation and the quieting of the mind,” was “to persuade us to accept existing social values” (838), thereby rendering it beneath serious consideration. The position of women in the Canadian canon shifted dramatically with the second-wave feminism of the late 1960s and 1970s, which celebrated numerous women writers of that period; Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, and Carol Shields, among many others, quickly rose to prominence and continue to be studied and read. Yet despite that era’s interest in researching Canada’s “herstory” and identifying literary foremothers, surprisingly little effort was made to recuperate earlier women writers of the twentieth century, other than a cluster of significant poets, notably Dorothy Livesay, Anne Marriott, P.K. Page, and Ann Wilkinson (Brandt and Godard; Irvine; Rifkind). The period before 1920, rather than the following decades, has been the focus of reprint series and of anthologies of lost women poets and writers of short stories.3 The problem of reception that I am addressing is therefore twofold—most Canadian women writers who were well reviewed in the press and widely read by the general public between 1920 and 1950 were not treated seriously by the academics who shaped the canon in the 1950s and 1960s; as a consequence, the majority have remained outside the purview of feminist scholars aiming to revise the dominant narrative of Canadian literary history. The few female prose writers from that era subsequently deemed worthy of scholarly attention have qualified because of their perceived deviation from the conventions of women’s writing, and in most cases were recognized for one book, often their first (after which critics bemoaned their failure to live up to their initial promise—see, for example, Pacey’s assessment of Laura Goodman Salverson in the Literary History of Canada [666]). Martha Ostenso’s Wild Geese (1925) has been canonized because it fits the trope of “man’s overwhelming loneliness in a barren, empty land” (Ricou 74), its reputation boosted by its receipt of a prize of $13,500 in a contest for the best North American first novel that was jointly sponsored by The Pictorial Review, the publisher Dodd, Mead, and Company, and Famous Players-Lasky. Irene Baird’s Waste Heritage (1939), which documents the occupation of the Vancouver Post Office by unemployed men in 1938, was much praised as “the Canadian Grapes of Wrath” (Thomas 6)  but failed to win that year’s Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction due to the cronyism of the men in the Canadian Authors Association which then ran the competition (Gerson 52–53). Elizabeth Smart’s passionate prose poem, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (1945), which was unknown until it was reprinted in 1966 on the rising wave of second-wave feminism, fits the trope of abused/neglected genius because her upper-crust family destroyed most copies of their underaged daughter’s account of her repudiation of conventional sexual behaviour. Indeed, the only woman to be wholly welcomed into the pantheon of mid-century Canadian modernist fiction during the

Mid-Century Modernity and Fiction by Women    341 time that she was writing was Gabrielle Roy, who eloquently described the poverty and desperation of Montreal’s urban underclass in two of her early novels, The Tin Flute (1945 in French, 1947 in English) and The Cashier (1954 in French, 1955 in English). In their depiction of characters trapped by sociohistoric circumstances, both books implicitly criticize the role of the Catholic Church in French-Canadian society. Among Roy’s many accolades was instant induction into the Royal Society of Canada in 1947—the first woman writer to enjoy this honour—followed by the Society’s Lorne Pierce Medal in 1948, an award that recognizes contributors to the development and appreciation of Canadian literature.4 Because she was so widely read in translation, Roy negotiated the French/English divide more successfully than any other Canadian novelist before or since, due in part to her magnetic relationship with her English-Canadian publisher, Jack McClelland, who was thrilled to publish anything she produced, even though there was less public interest in her later, more lyrical work. Because his firm of McClelland and Stewart also published the New Canadian Library, the first decades of that series saw the inclusion of more titles by Roy than by any other female writer. As these examples show, the few canonized fictions written by Canadian women before 1950 were commended for resembling books written by men in the mode of modernist realism. At the same time, several female writers whose poetry and fiction were characterized by Edwardian elegance and romantic nostalgia were recruited into the anti-modernist cause.5 As I have discussed elsewhere, from the 1920s through the 1940s, poets Marjorie Pickthall and Audrey Alexandra Brown were mentored and promoted by prominent men (Pelham Edgar, professor of English Literature at Victoria College in Toronto; Andrew MacPhail, professor of medicine at McGill and editor of the University Magazine; and Lorne Pierce, head of the Ryerson Press) who resisted the hard edges of modernist poetics and the social and sexual realism of modernist fiction (Gerson 50–54). Their reactionary agenda then made it easy to caricature virtually all of Canada’s female writers as “virgins of sixty who still write of passion” (55), to quote from Frank Scott’s well-known misogynist squib, “The Canadian Authors Meet” (1927). As well, some women novelists planted themselves squarely within the anti-modernist camp. In the 1920s, L.M. Montgomery despised the overt sexual realism of Morley Callaghan and argued that just because pigsties existed in real life didn’t mean that people wanted to read about them (Lefebvre 123–26). Not that her own fiction lacks awareness of sexuality, but she preferred the pigsties to remain behind the barn, even while their aroma made their presence known, as in the desire of decadent Dean Priest for his young cousin Emily, which haunts the three books of the Emily of New Moon trilogy written in the 1920s.6 More overtly anti-modernist is the nostalgia of Grace Campbell’s two historical romances that celebrate the traditional social values of pioneer days in Upper Canada, Thornapple Tree (1942) and The Higher Hill (1944). Beautifully designed, and illustrated with accomplished woodcuts by Franklin Carmichael (of the Group of Seven) that contribute to the volumes’ old-fashioned aura, the books proved extremely popular: the first sold nearly 20,000 copies, making it Canada’s bestseller of 1942, and the second enjoyed an initial print run of 10,000 (Grant Campbell 49–54). While retrogressive in their description of gender roles, the appeal of these novels may be attributed

342   Literary Periods and Genres in part to their offer of solace during wartime. The Higher Hill concludes with the end of the War of 1812, when the talented and educated heroine relinquishes her art for domesticity: “She sighed deeply but she was not unhappy. Why should she be? For a long time women had been throwing their special gifts back into the common pool. Like the clover field ploughed under for the enrichment of the future yield. She thought, ‘When I am an old woman I shall remember not that I once painted a few good pictures, but that Peter came home from the wars and we were together again’ ” (315). The writers I  have been describing—on the one hand, the few women who earned recognition for writing like men, and on the other, those who represented anti-modernism—present a framework for the discussion of modernity in much of the fiction written by Canadian women during the first half of the twentieth century. Most of the novels I am about to discuss are out of print. Many have been condescendingly classified as “the regional idyll,” a genre described by Pacey (whose Creative Writing in Canada was one of the most influential studies during the canon-shaping years of the late 1950s through the early 1970s) as being “written predominantly in Canada, at least, by women, is feminine and domestic in emphasis, and treats of young love, the home and the family” (Creative 197). In Pacey’s analysis, unlike the historical romance, which is often written by men and “is concerned to a significant degree with the impact of public events upon its characters,” the regional idyll “is concerned rather with the private lives of its characters, and if public events occur they are very much in the background” (Creative 196). It is indeed true that these novels focus less on the grand sweeps of history that contribute to national narratives than on the commonalities of women’s experience; yet reading them today, what I find remarkable is that, far from being light sentimental romances, they address many of the anxieties of the modern era (sometimes deflected into the past when the setting is historical), as represented in their depictions of women’s bodies, minds, and daily lives. While some treatments of sexual realism are overtly reformist, such as Nellie McClung’s depiction of the entrapment of naïve immigrant girls by predatory men in Painted Fires (1925), which advises do-gooders to stop haranguing single mothers and “get busy on the men” (221), the novels I am addressing are driven at least as much by character and plot as by social purpose. Two additional factors impeded these books’ reception among male critics: the fact that most female-authored fiction was viewed as reading matter only for women (in line with Christiane Rochefort’s quip that “a man’s book is a book. A woman’s book is a woman’s book” [183]), and the notion that nothing that addressed sexual issues could be published in Canada. The latter myth was propagated by Grove with regard to his naturalistic novel Settlers of the Marsh (1925), whose inclusion of a prostitute and attention to abortion certainly raised eyebrows, but never led to the outright banning that he claimed the book experienced, in large part to enhance his own reputation (Gammel 33–35). But such views die hard, and were repeated by Hugh MacLennan two decades later. In 1945, having just published his second novel, Two Solitudes, MacLennan claimed that he couldn’t understand why he was criticized for including “too much sex” and opined that the problem was caused by Canadians having become accustomed to reading about sexual matters only in books by American writers such as “Steinbeck, Dos

Mid-Century Modernity and Fiction by Women    343 Passos, and Hemingway” (Duncan 39). Evidence of MacLennan’s limited acquaintance with Canadian writing (and with the transgressive sexuality that imbues both Jalna and Wild Geese, nicely illuminated by Hammill) is his view that “the bulk of Canadian literature, until recently, concerned itself with stories of wild life and historical romances,” as a result of which “few writers have suggested in print that Canadians are equipped with the same kind of human instincts as other people, and are quite apt to follow those instincts in normal ways” (Duncan 39). Unbeknownst to MacLennan, for several decades Canadian women writers had been dealing directly with “human instincts.” So far as I have been able to ascertain, their novels raised little public ire and were usually well received in the daily press and mainstream magazines. If one were to ask a current feminist literary scholar for a chronological list of important books of fiction written by Canadian women during the first half of the twentieth century, she would likely begin with Jessie Georgina Sime, a writer recuperated in the 1990s with reprints of her volume of stories, Sister Woman (1919, rpt. 1992 and 2004), and her novel Our Little Life (1921, rpt. 1994). Sime would be followed by the big prize-winners of the 1920s, Martha Ostenso’s Wild Geese (1925) and Mazo de la Roche’s Jalna (1927). The 1930s would be represented by Irene Baird’s Waste Heritage (1939); the 1940s by Gabrielle Roy’s The Tin Flute (1945) and perhaps also Gwethalyn Graham’s Earth and High Heaven (1944). The latter was Graham’s second novel to win the Governor General’s Award for fiction—it was preceded by Swiss Sonata (1938), a book with much less staying power because its setting in a girls’ finishing school in Lausanne didn’t interest nationalistic critics looking for Canadian authors who told stories about Canada. Very much about Canada but even less visible today is the previous winner of this award, Laura Goodman Salverson’s The Dark Weaver (1937), one of her many books about Icelandic immigrants in the West. Our hypothetical scholar would be less likely to know about Madge Macbeth’s Shackles (1926, rpt. 2005), and very unlikely to be aware of novels about women’s lives and bodies that have not been reissued recently, such as New Furrows (1926) and Broken Gods (1930) by Flos Jewell Williams, The Two Decanters (1930) by Mary Coad Craig, Presently Tomorrow (1946) by Joyce Marshall, Serpent’s Tooth (1947) by Isabelle Hughes, and In Due Season (1947) by Christine van der Mark. What brings all these novels together is their insistence on addressing key aspects of female experience in a Canadian context: sexual desire, unwanted pregnancy, childbirth, unhappy marriages, and the options for women to choose meaningful work and control their lives. In treating these topics, some of the most explicit books are the least known today. Grace Blackburn’s only novel, The Man Child, reportedly written in 1916 (Reaney), was not published until 1930, two years after the death of its author, who was a prominent journalist and member of a major newspaper publishing family. The story details the experience of a young woman in a small Ontario town, from the time she is widowed shortly before her only child is born until her son’s death in the trenches of World War I. Its intense focus on the physical experience of childbirth (six pages are devoted to Emma’s 14-hour labour) and on maternal emotion carries into its critique of war.7 The honesty about women’s bodies, childbirth, and reproduction that permeates Salverson’s

344   Literary Periods and Genres Confessions of an Immigrant’s Daughter (which won the Governor General’s Award for nonfiction in 1939, but has long been out of print) was anticipated in the obstetrical details in her first novel, The Viking Heart (1923), in which a baby is successfully delivered using two heirloom silver serving spoons as improvised forceps (56–58).8 During the interwar years, unwanted pregnancies—supposedly a forbidden topic in Canadian fiction—appeared in many books by women. In New Furrows (1926), a novel that recounts the failures of an immigrant Belgian family in rural Alberta, Flos Jewell Williams explicitly reveals the presence of an abortionist. Madame Fourchette informs a newcomer that “Over here, you don’t need to have children unless you like. … when you need me, tell me and I’ll fix you up” (30), and her services are soon put to use. The community’s attitude is forgiving; a respected neighbour advises the eldest Fourchette daughter, “When you get older, you will understand a little better a woman’s dread of bringing an unwanted child into the world; and God, who is as old as time, how great must be his understanding and pity” (63). Unplanned pregnancies and abortions also figure prominently in Mary Coad Craig’s The Two Decanters (1930), a novel cast as a memoir written by a doctor in order to explain rumours about his experiences in a small Ontario town some 40 years previously, in 1883–84. Incidents include the dilemma of a lusty widow who makes the mistake of getting pregnant while her husband is away and dies due to a “criminal operation” (69) from an unscrupulous local doctor, and the rehabilitation of the reputation of a young woman who bears a child out of wedlock. The baby’s father insists on marrying his disgraced sweetheart and many express compassion toward the couple whose “consciences are too tender to comport with passions so strong and a self-control so weak” (167). The reception of these books is difficult to discern. The one review I have found of New Furrows, written by prominent modernist poet E.J. Pratt, implicitly echoes the values attributed to Grove. Pratt opens with the assertion, “This is a story of the soil” and commends Williams for presenting “a picture where the conflicts are grippingly wrought out under the ironic formula of a realist” (8). Williams’s next novel, Broken Gods (1930), adds religious hypocrisy to the mix of social and sexual issues. Charles Peters, an aspiring poet who becomes a small-town Methodist minister by default, is troubled by his sexuality during his student days: “He had thought there was a lack of sexual impulse in his family, little realizing that it had been merely heavily veiled by wisps of the Victorian era” (49). After extricating himself from a clandestine youthful affair, he marries a somewhat older career woman who enjoys a drink and refuses to conform to the role of minister’s wife, announcing, “I will not trim my life to the measure of these people in the village” (193). Caught between her need for her own identity (“It is the possessiveness of marriage that appalls me” [201]) and her sense of responsibility to her husband, Helen has little taste for enforced togetherness: “I could stand it no longer and used the hot weather as an excuse for a separate [bed]room” (202). Each spouse then becomes involved in extramarital relationships. While Helen finds a new mate and happily takes on the role of stepmother to a ready-made family, Charles’s indiscretions lead to resignation from the ministry and a second marriage to an unfaithful flapper. His downward spiral concludes into alcoholism and a semi-suicidal drowning. Here again, surviving reviews are sparse; those

Mid-Century Modernity and Fiction by Women    345 I have found commend the book’s portrayal of issues of modernity, noting that “The last hundred or so pages of Mrs. Williams’ novel are not pleasant reading; yet they are by no means illusory. … It is a book likely to cause a vast amount of discussion” (Rev. of Broken Gods).9 Notwithstanding the admired urban realism of Gabrielle Roy and Morley Callaghan, the dominant view that the great Canadian narrative concerned man’s contest with nature enabled Desmond Pacey to claim in 1969 that “the Canadian imagination thus far is mainly a function of a landscape and a climate and only secondarily of a society” (“Canadian” 234). Consequently he and other critics tended to give scant consideration to stories of city life, especially when focused on the domestic and emotional survival of women, a topic tackled quite differently by Jessie Sime, Madge Macbeth, Joyce Marshall, and Isabelle Hughes. Sime’s Sister Woman, a collection of stories about women in Montreal that was published in London in 1919, probably owes its existence to the European sensibility of its Scottish-born author, who brought with her a keen awareness of literary naturalism when she immigrated to Canada in 1907. Although Sime became well known in Montreal as a writer and lecturer, with substantial involvement in such major organizations as the Canadian Authors Association and the Canadian Women’s Press Club, this book sold fewer than 250 copies and cannot lay much claim to influencing other writers. Its 28 brief stories, organized in a “kaleidoscopic, multi-levelled fashion,” focus on women who are “social pariahs or at the margin of social acceptance” (Sandra Campbell 44, 45). Their circumstances are often threadbare; their lovers and their pregnancies bring more unhappiness than joy. Pacey conceded Sime’s significance as the first author of urban realism in Canada, especially in her novel Our Little Life: A Novel of Today (1921), yet in his survey chapter in the Literary History of Canada (676, 675) he denigrated the latter’s account of a one-sided romance between a middle-aged seamstress and a frail young Englishman who inhabit the same decrepit apartment building in the slums of Montreal as a “terribly honest book” characterized by “grey, drab photographic realism” and he omitted Sime completely from his Creative Writing in Canada. Madge Macbeth, Joyce Marshall, and Isabelle Hughes suffered similar marginalization in the construction of the Canadian canon, even though their books received considerable attention from contemporary newspaper reviewers. The model for canonized fiction by Canadian women was Wild Geese (1925), the prize-winning novel about Manitoba pioneer farmers attributed to Martha Ostenso but now believed to have been coauthored with her husband Douglas Durkin (McGregor). In this book, young Judith Gare embodies the fertility of the western prairies in a scene in which she takes off her clothes to lie naked on the ground, and in her pregnancy with the man she is to marry. In true romantic fashion, the novel celebrates youthful sexuality and concludes with the death of her villainous father, consumed by the land he had tried to conquer, leaving the lovers free to wed. This novel fits the criteria for national significance by depicting a farmer’s obsessive struggle to tame the land, while also fulfilling the expectations of women’s fiction by permitting happy endings for two pairs of lovers. Neither trope animates Madge Macbeth’s uncanonized novel Shackles (1926), about a miserable urban marriage in which a writer cannot escape her overbearing and

346   Literary Periods and Genres demanding husband, a man unable to distinguish between normal marital relations and rape (202). Naomi Lennox is so tied down by social convention and by her sense of obligation that her futile efforts to find time for writing (which generates much-needed family income) and to break free of her marriage reveal the extent to which the shackles of the book’s title are part of her inner psyche as well as her outer material and social circumstances. Because Macbeth was well known, this book was widely reviewed and caused considerable consternation. One reviewer who found the situation exaggerated and the characters unsympathetic declared, “There isn’t a scrap of reality in Shackles” (Bothwell 329), while another noted that “The question of sex being involved in the question of marriage, we are given a generous supply of such things presented, some will think, with unnecessary frankness” (M. 334). In contrast, two men whose opinions carried considerable weight, journalist W.A. Deacon and poet Raymond Knister, praised the book as “that rare thing in Canadian letters—a mature novel” (Deacon 331), and for being “one of the few grown-up books which have been written in Canada” (Knister 332). The 1940s saw a new wave of adult novels by Canadian women, some of which achieved recognition. Preceding Gabrielle Roy’s The Tin Flute, in which both middle-aged Rose-Anna Lacasse and her 19-year-old daughter cope with unwanted pregnancies, Gwethalyn Graham’s equally successful Earth and High Heaven (1944) permits her two mature lovers to spend several weekends together in a country inn before they decide to marry. In addition to depicting the couple in bed together, Graham devotes several pages to Erica’s arrangement of an abortion for her sister. Both of these Montreal novels, which are set during World War II and reflect the era’s sense of urgency and uncertainty, won accolades when they first appeared and subsequently achieved a degree of canonical status because they were viewed as contributing to a national framework by addressing larger issues: The Tin Flute situates the Lacasse family at the bottom of Canada’s language-based socioeconomic ladder, and Earth and High Heaven confronts the anti-Semitism that contaminated English Canada’s bastions of power. Other novels of the 1940s, whose subtler social content implicitly addresses the anxieties of the postwar era, have since been forgotten. Joyce Marshall’s stylistically innovative Presently Tomorrow (1946) openly addresses youthful sexuality in her account of 24 hours at a girls’ boarding school, during which time four 17-year-olds who are about to graduate encounter a sexually repressed Anglican priest who is seduced by one of them. While a few reviews expressed dismay at Marshall’s characterization of the naïve cleric, the vast majority (collected in Marshall’s papers at the Eastern Townships Resource Centre) commend the book as “one of the best Canadian first novels in years” (Weaver 6)  “whose appearance may have been the dramatic moment for Canadian fiction in 1946” (“Joyce Marshall” 11). The following year, Isabelle Hughes published Serpent’s Tooth (1947), followed by Time in Ambush (1949); set in current-day Toronto, both novels address the need for middle-class women to escape the confines of their social class and find meaning in their lives. Both include women whose quest for happiness takes them into the beds of men who are not their husbands, a detail noted by reviewers without flinching. An unsigned review in the Globe (likely by W.A. Deacon)

Mid-Century Modernity and Fiction by Women    347 judged Hughes’s first book to be “sound rather than exhilarating,” adding that “It is bound to be widely and earnestly discussed because we have not had for a long time any piece of Canadian fiction that reveals so sharply the manners and morals of today” (“Thoughtful” 10). The postwar novel whose absence from the Canadian canon I find most surprising is Christine van der Mark’s In Due Season (1947), which receives only passing mention in Pacey’s Creative Writing in Canada and Ricou’s Vertical Man/Horizontal World and is utterly absent from the Literary History of Canada. Superficially reminiscent of Willa Cather’s earlier novels My Ántonia and O Pioneers! in its focus on a determined, hardworking prairie farm woman, this book differs substantially in its conceptualization of its major character, Lina Ashley, whose single-mindedness leads to material success at the cost of emotional failure. When her husband proves a deadbeat, Lina abandons their dried-out farm in southern Alberta and takes her father and her small daughter, Poppy, to start afresh in the more fertile Peace River region. On her own, she manages the legal logistics of homesteading and the back-breaking labour of farming with equal skill, and when the brief return of her husband leaves her with an unwanted second child, she grits her teeth and soldiers on. The narrative style grants Lina no interiority—the reader watches her actions rather than sharing her thoughts or emotions and learns about the impact of her behaviour through the responses of her children and neighbours. The community’s diverse ethnic makeup, including the continuing presence of First Nations and Métis, is much more inclusive than was usual for Canadian prairie fiction of this era. The novel concludes bleakly: Lina’s daughter runs off with a Métis boy in a match that Lina had opposed, and a judgmental neighbour speaks for the community as a whole when she says of Poppy, “What she needed was a mother” (358). Written in the detached style of modernist realism and describing a woman whose narrative follows the classic masculine trajectory of taming the land at the expense of family love and friendship, In Due Season seems a particularly strong candidate for recuperation by feminist scholars seeking under-acknowledged literature by Canadian women, even while it troubles the expectation that mothers should empathize with their children and that women should value social engagement above material prosperity. Dorothy Livesay recognized the book’s value in her introduction to the 1979 reprint, noting that “this is one of the first if not the first Canadian novel wherein the plight of the Native Indian and the Metis is honestly and painfully recorded.” Despite Livesay’s praise for the novel for being “sparingly written, objectively written in the Canadian genre of realist documentary” (iv), this reprint sold poorly and the book has again dropped out of sight.10 To bring such novels to the attention of critics, students, and general readers requires the kind of effort exemplified in Dean Irvine’s Editing Modernity: Women and Little-Magazine Cultures in Canada, 1916–1956. This immaculately researched study counters the virtual absence of women from Louis Dudek and Michael Gnarowski’s influential volume, The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada (1967), by restoring women to their rightful place in the history of Canadian poetry through attention not only to their published writing but also to their work within the cultural infrastructure of

348   Literary Periods and Genres literary organizations and specialized periodicals that supported modernist poetry and poetics. Canada’s female fiction writers from the same period deserve similar recognition.11

Notes 1. Except for studies of Elizabeth Smart, A.M. Klein, and Sheila Watson, who are celebrated for deviating from the norm of middle-class realism. 2. Copyright issues and competition from Ryerson and Macmillan accounted for the absence of such writers as Hugh MacLennan and Robertson Davies (Friskney 63). 3. The late professor Lorraine McMullen at the University of Ottawa, editor of Re(Dis)covering our Foremothers (1989), oversaw the publication of the Early Canadian Women Writers series of a dozen novels and three volumes of stories, all of which had first appeared before 1920. Recuperative studies of women writers active before 1920 include Carrie MacMillan, Lorraine McMullen, and Elizabeth Waterston, Silenced Sextet:  Six Nineteenth-Century Canadian Novelists (1993); Wanda Campbell, ed., Hidden Rooms: Early Canadian Women Poets (2000); and Janice Fiamengo, The Women’s Page: Journalism and Rhetoric in Early Canada (2008). 4. Initiated in 1926, this medal went to three women before it was awarded to Roy: Mazo de la Roche (1938), Audrey Alexandra Brown (1944), and Dorothy Livesay (1947). After Roy, there was a dearth of female recipients until it was awarded to Ethel Wilson in 1964, followed by Rina Lasnier in 1974. The pairings of de la Roche and Roy in fiction, and Brown and Livesay in poetry, suggest that notions of literary significance were broader in 1938–47 than in the 1950s and 1960s. 5. See Bobak (86–92) for a summary of anti-modernist responses to realism in Canadian fiction and Vautour for a recent analysis of the dialectic between modernism and anti-modernism in Atlantic Canadian poetry. 6. My students find the pedophiliac undertones of the Emily books “creepy” and are vastly relieved when Emily finally escapes marriage to the allegorically named man who burns the manuscript of her novel because he wants her all to himself. 7. As young Canadian men enlist to join the British troops fighting in France, Emma ruminates, “Suppose women had a war and killed each other by the million the way [men] do? We women go on as if we hadn’t a bit of power in the world. Talk about ‘Our Side’ … the only side that’s the woman’s side is the side of life. Life! That’s her patriotism! That’s her country!” (212). 8. Salverson’s interest in writing more explicitly about social prejudice and sexual mores was thwarted by her publisher. In the 1940s, Lorne Pierce rejected two manuscripts for novels that were never published and have now disappeared; see Campbell, Both Hands, 351–59. 9. It is probably significant that these three novels were all published by the Graphic Press, a small Ottawa enterprise outside the mainstream of Canadian book publishing. Unfortunately, there are no surviving records to illuminate the production history of these books. While Jody Mason has described Graphic as anti-modernist, these titles, which do not figure in her discussion, counter her analysis. See Jody Mason, “Anti-Modernist Paradox in Canada: The Graphic Publishers (1925–32) and the Case of Madge Macbeth,” Journal of Canadian Studies 45.2 (2011): 96–122.

Mid-Century Modernity and Fiction by Women    349 10. Some details of the book’s publishing history can be gleaned from the New Star fonds at Simon Fraser University. Upon winning the Oxford-Crowell prize, the novel was published by Oxford UP and sold about 3,600 copies. When the rights reverted to the author’s family, some years after van der Mark’s death in 1969, her daughter, Dorothy Wise, arranged for the New Star reprint, whose uptake proved disappointing, with only 1,100 copies sold by 1988. A new edition is forthcoming in the Early Canadian Literature series from Wilfrid Laurier University Press, with a critical Afterword by Carole Gerson and Janice Dowson. 11. Colin Hill makes a modest start with some attention to Van der Mark and several other under-recognized women in Modern Realism in English-Canadian Fiction (2012), which mostly concerns Callaghan, Grove, MacLennan, and Knister.

Works Cited Baird, Irene. Waste Heritage. Toronto: Macmillan, 1939. Print. Blackburn, Grace. The Man Child. Ottawa: Graphic, 1930. Print. Bobak, E L. “Seeking ‘Direct, Honest Realism’: The Canadian Novel of the 1920’s.” Canadian Literature 89 (Summer 1981): 85–101. Print. Bothwell, Austin. Rev. of Shackles, by Madge Macbeth. Canadian Bookman 8.10 (Oct. 1926): 308. Rpt. in Shackles. By Madge Macbeth. Ed. Peggy Lynn Kelly. Ottawa: Tecumseh, 2005. 328–29. Print. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Ed. Randall Johnson. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. Print. Brandt, Di, and Barbara Godard, eds. Wider Boundaries of Daring: The Modernist Impulse in Canadian Women’s Poetry. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2009. Print. Brown, E.K. “The Problem of a Canadian Literature.” On Canadian Poetry. 1943. Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1973. 1–27. Print. Campbell, Grace. The Higher Hill. Toronto: Collins, 1944. Print. Campbell, Grant. “William Collins During World War II:  Nationalism Meets a Wartime Economy in Canadian Publishing.” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada 39.1 (2001): 45–65. Print. Campbell, Sandra. Both Hands: A Life of Lorne Pierce. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2013. ———. “ ‘Gently Scan’: Theme and Technique in J.G. Sime’s Sister Woman (1919).” Canadian Literature 133 (Summer 1992): 40–52. Print. Craig, Mary Coad. The Two Decanters. Ottawa: Graphic, 1930. Print. de la Roche, Mazo. Jalna. Boston: Little Brown, 1927. Print. Deacon, W.A. “The Worm Squirms.” Saturday Night 2 Oct. 1926: 4. Rpt. in Shackles. By Madge Macbeth. Ed. Peggy Lynn Kelly. Ottawa: Tecumseh, 2005. 330–32. Print. Dudek, Louis, and Michael Gnarowski, eds. The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada: Essential Articles on Contemporary Canadian Poetry in English. Toronto: Ryerson, 1967. Print. Duncan, Dorothy. “My Author Husband.” Maclean’s 15 Aug. 1945: 7, 36–40. Print. Duncan, Sara Jeannette. “American Influence on Canadian Thought.” The Week 7 July 1887: 518. Print. Friskney, Janet B. New Canadian Library: The Ross-McClelland Years, 1952–1978. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2007. Print. Frye, Northrop. “Conclusion.” Literary History of Canada. Ed. Carl F. Klinck. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1965. 821–49. Print.

350   Literary Periods and Genres Gammel, Irene. Sexualizing Power in Naturalism: Theodore Dreiser and Frederick Philip Grove. Calgary: U of Calgary P, 1994. Print. Gerson, Carole. “The Canon between the Wars:  Field-Notes of a Feminist Literary Archeologist.” Canadian Canons: Essays in Literary Value. Ed. Robert Lecker. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1991. 46–56. Print. Graham, Gwethalyn. Earth and High Heaven. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1944. Print. ———. Swiss Sonata. London: Cape, 1938. Print Hammill, Faye. “The Sensations of the 1920s: Martha Ostenso’s Wild Geese and Mazo de la Roche’s Jalna.” Studies in Canadian Literature 28.2 (2004): 66–89. Hill, Colin. Modern Realism in English-Canadian Fiction. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2012. Print. Hughes, Isabelle. Serpent’s Tooth. Toronto: Collins, 1947. Print ———. Time in Ambush. Toronto: Collins, 1949. Print. Hutner, Gordon. What America Read: Taste, Class and the Novel, 1920–1960. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2009. Print. Irvine, Dean. Editing Modernity: Women and Little-Magazine Cultures in Canada, 1916–1956. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2008. Print. “Joyce Marshall.” Globe and Mail 2 Nov. 1946: 11. Print. Klinck, Carl F., ed. Literary History of Canada. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1965. Print. Knister, Raymond. Rev. of Shackles, by Madge Macbeth. Canadian Magazine 67 (Apr. 1927): 42. Rpt. in Shackles. By Madge Macbeth. Ed. Peggy Lynn Kelly. Ottawa:  Tecumseh, 2005. 332–33. Print. Lefebvre, Benjamin. “Pigsties and Sunsets:  L.M. Montgomery’s A Tangled Web and a Modernism of Her Own.” English Studies in Canada 31.4 (2005): 123–46. Print. Livesay, Dorothy. Introduction. In Due Season. By Christine van der Mark. Vancouver: New Star, 1979. Print. M. “Literature and Life: A Booklover’s Corner.” Ottawa Journal 23 Oct. 1926. Rpt. in Shackles. By Madge Macbeth. Ed. Peggy Lynn Kelly. Ottawa: Tecumseh, 2005. 333–35. Print. Marshall, Joyce. Presently Tomorrow. Boston: Little Brown, 1946. Print. Macbeth, Madge. Shackles. Ottawa: Graphic, 1926. McClung, Nellie. Painted Fires. Toronto: Ryerson, 1925. Print. McGregor, Hannah. “Martha Ostenso:  Editing Without Author[ity].” “Editing as Cultural Practice.” TransCanada Institute, University of Guelph. Oct. 2011. Presented paper. Montgomery, L.M. Anne of Green Gables. Boston: L.C. Page, 1908. Print. ———. Emily Climbs. New York: Stokes, 1925. Print. ———. Emily of New Moon. New York: Stokes, 1923. Print. ———. Emily’s Quest. New York: Stokes, 1927. Print. New Provinces: Poems of Several Authors. Toronto: Macmillan, 1936. Print. Ostenso, Martha. Wild Geese. New York: Dodd Mead, 1925. Print. Pacey, Desmond. “The Canadian Imagination.” Essays in Canadian Criticism, 1938–1968. Toronto: Ryerson, 1969. 234–40. Print. ———. Creative Writing in Canada. 1952. Rev. ed. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1961. Print. ———. “Fiction, 1920–1940.” Literary History of Canada. Ed. Carl F.  Klinck. Toronto:  U of Toronto P, 1965. 658–93. Print Panofsky, Ruth. “At Odds: Reviewers and Readers of the Jalna Novels.” Studies in Canadian Literature 25.1 (2000): 57–72. Print. Pratt, E.J. “An Alberta Novel.” Saturday Night 4 Dec. 1926: 8. Print,

Mid-Century Modernity and Fiction by Women    351 Pykett, Lynn. “Writing Around Modernism:  May Sinclair and Rebecca West.” Outside Modernism:  In Pursuit of the English Novel, 1900–1930. Ed. Lynne Hapgood and Nancy L. Paxton. London: Macmillan, 2000. 103–22. Print. Reaney, James. “Blackburn, Victoria Grace.” Dictionary of Canadian Biography. U of Toronto P, 2000. http://www.biographi.ca/009004-119.01-e.php?&id_nbr=8034. Web. Accessed 5 Mar. 2012. Rev. of Broken Gods, by Flos Jewell Williams. Montreal Star, n.d. Clipping in Canadiana Collection, Toronto Reference Library. Print. Ricou, Laurie. Vertical Man/Horizontal World: Man and Landscape in Canadian Prairie Fiction. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 1973. Print. Rifkind, Candida. Comrades and Critics:  Women, Literature, and the Left in 1930s Canada. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2009. Print. Rochefort, Christiane. “Are Women Still Monsters?” New French Feminisms. Ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivon. New York: Schocken, 1981. 183–86. Print. Roy, Gabrielle. The Cashier: Alexandre Chenevert, caissier. Trans by Harry Binsse. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1955. Print. ———. The Tin Flute. Trans by Hannah Josephson. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947. Print. Salverson, Laura Goodman. Confessions of an Immigrant’s Daughter. London:  Faber, 1939. Print. ———. The Dark Weaver. Toronto: Ryerson, 1937. Print. ———. The Viking Heart. 1923. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1975. Print. Scott, F.R. “The Canadian Authors Meet.” New Provinces:  Poems of Several Authors. Toronto: Macmillan, 1936. 55. Print. Sime, Jessie Georgina. Our Little Life: A Novel of Today. New York: Stokes/London: Richards, 1921. Print. ———. Sister Woman. London: Richards, 1919. Print. Smart, Elizabeth. By Grand Central Station I  Sat Down and Wept. London:  Nicholson & Watson, 1945. Print. Thomas, Clara. Canadian Novelists, 1920–1945. Toronto: Longmans, Green, 1946. Print. Thomas, Clara, and John Lennox. William Arthur Deacon: A Canadian Literary Life. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1982. Print. “Thoughtful Toronto Novel of Marriage and Divorce.” Globe and Mail 1 Nov. 1947: 10. Print. van der Mark, Christine. In Due Season. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1947. Print. Vautour, Bert. “Modernism, Antimodernism, and the Song Fishermen.” Canadian Poetry 70 (2012): 15–44. Weaver, Robert. “Conflict and Growth.” The Varsity 26 Sept. 1946: 6. Print. Williams, Flos Jewell. Broken Gods. Ottawa: Graphic, 1930. Print. ———. New Furrows. Ottawa: Graphic, 1926. Print.

Chapter 19

Mainstream Mag a z i ne s Home and Mobility Faye Hammill and Michelle Smith

Mainstream magazines were at their height in Canada in the early and mid-twentieth century, peaking in both popularity and diversity of titles between the late 1920s and late 1950s. Their rise kept pace with the growing urban, White professional middle class that sought out such magazines for advice, news, and entertainment. The topics broached were typically inflected with an appeal to readers’ patriotism, not least because this was a reliable means of distinguishing Canadian periodicals from their American competitors.1 The magazines’ efforts to articulate a coherent Canadian and/or Québécois identity are legible not only in the editorial material but also in the advertisements that increasingly funded these publications. Periodicals such as Canadian Home Journal, La Revue Populaire, Maclean’s, and others therefore illuminate the relationships among nationalism, consumerism, and print culture—three defining features of the twentieth century. At the same time, a shared and central theme running across the most successful titles is mobility, by which we mean representations of economic and social mobility, as well as fantasies of geographic mobility. By focusing on the ways in which the magazines balanced images of mobility and travel against ideals of home, nation, and domesticity, this chapter aims to open up vital new ways of interpreting the mainstream magazine as a textual genre in itself. We also seek to understand how this type of periodical functioned as a cultural and commercial force in twentieth-century Canada.

Key Titles We take “mainstream” to mean magazines that targeted a general audience and published a miscellany of contents, including articles, fiction, poetry, illustrations, and columns on a range of topics (e.g., book and cultural reviews, recipes, childrearing advice, fashion, travel). Physically, mainstream magazines announced themselves

Mainstream Magazines   353 on newsstands through a common format:  11 x 14  inch folio pages, generally with a full-colour cover. Length ranged from 48 to 120 pages. The magazines usually addressed readers in a friendly, intimate tone, and they attracted advertisers of consumer goods that ranged from prosaic household items to grand purchases, such as cars or luxury cruises. The key anglophone monthly and bimonthly magazines were Canadian Magazine (1895–1939), Canadian Home Journal (1905–1958), Maclean’s (1911–, published as The Busy Man’s Magazine, 1896–1911), Canadian Homes and Gardens (1924–60, published as Canadian Homes 1960–62), Mayfair (1927–59), Chatelaine (1928–), and National Home Monthly (1932–51, published as Western Home Monthly, 1899–1932). The major francophone monthlies were La Revue Populaire (1907–63), La Revue Moderne (1919–60), and Châtelaine (1960–).2 A single company, Maclean-Hunter of Toronto, owned Maclean’s, Chatelaine (and Châtelaine), Mayfair, and Canadian Homes and Gardens.3 The Canadian Home Journal also was based in Toronto, La Revue Populaire and La Revue Moderne in Montreal, and the National Home Monthly in Winnipeg. Comparisons of the French- and English-language titles reveal many divergences, but also some key similarities. Most obviously, companies ranging from Canadian Pacific to Magic Baking Powder used identical advertisements in the different magazines, while all the magazines appealed to Canadian or Québécois patriotism as they negotiated the complex terrain of Canada’s colonial history and contemporary role. Certainly, the francophone titles looked to France, and the anglophone ones to Britain, for a sense of cultural heritage. Nevertheless, there is an important crossover in that magazines in both languages traded in nostalgia for the Old World, while marketing a modern North American lifestyle to a readership addressed as middle class.

Circulation, Pricing, Audience Throughout the 1930s, the nationally oriented magazines (Maclean’s, Chatelaine, Canadian Home Journal) each proclaimed, on their front covers, a net paid circulation of about 130,000. This number rose to approximately 250,000 per title in the 1940s, and rose again to just under half a million in the 1950s. La Revue Populaire’s circulation increased from 5,000 to 125,000 over the period of its existence, while La Revue Moderne’s circulation stood at 23,000 in the early 1920s, and had grown by 50 percent by the end of the 1930s (Sarfati and Martin; Beaulieu and Hamelin 294–95).4 Toward the end of the 1950s, however, mainstream magazines went into a steep decline: the Journal was sold to Maclean-Hunter Publishing, which merged it with Chatelaine, and La Revue Moderne also was purchased by Maclean-Hunter and turned into the French-language Châtelaine. Meanwhile, Mayfair, Canadian Homes and Gardens, and La Revue Populaire went out of print. There are several possible explanations for this decline, most notably the availability of other forms of mass culture, such as television and cheap paperbacks, the growing fragmentation of periodical publishing into niche markets, and the

354   Literary Periods and Genres migration of advertising to other venues, such as television and newspaper colour supplements (see Vipond, especially 65–67). The surviving titles, Maclean’s, Chatelaine, and Châtelaine, are all owned by the Rogers Media conglomerate. They no longer publish fiction or poetry, and they devote a higher proportion of space to advertising than they did in earlier decades. Chatelaine has become a much more frothy production, heavily focused on cooking, health, and beauty, while Châtelaine offers a slightly different mix of content, including coverage of cultural events. Both titles run a book club. Maclean’s maintains a strong nationalist agenda and an emphasis on in-depth investigative reporting, and is complemented by L’actualité, a Québécois current affairs magazine, also owned by Rogers. All four titles have a strong online presence. Deducing the meaning of magazine pricing is complex: there is no direct correlation between price and production quality, format, cultural value, or audience appeal. In the late 1920s, for example, Mayfair, Maclean’s, and La Revue Moderne all commanded an annual subscription fee of $3.00, but this price was attached to three very different magazines. Mayfair was the glossiest among them, with its 100-page issues filled with advertisements, illustrations, and photographs. It was unabashedly upward-looking, frequently profiling diplomats, industry leaders, and socialites, and offering coverage of topics (sports, fashions, society gossip) thought to reflect the interests of this group. La Revue Moderne, at only 50 pages per issue, was not glossy at all, had an intellectual slant, and gave less space to advertising. Maclean’s came in between in terms of production quality, and its scope was general interest, with an abundance of advertisements. A typical issue was 70 pages long, but it was published semi-monthly, so that an annual subscription included 24 issues. At this period, Chatelaine and the Journal each asked for $1 per year, while La Revue Populaire, which was essentially a pulp magazine in the 1920s, surprises with its relatively high annual subscription price of $1.50. La Revue Populaire maintained this price for the rest of its print run, even though it changed in 1932 to a slick-magazine format resembling the other titles discussed here.5 Subscription fees dropped for Mayfair, Maclean’s, and La Revue Moderne in the 1930s and 1940s, but remained the same for the lower-priced titles. This was presumably because the more expensively produced titles were increasingly able to finance their production via advertising and wished to maintain subscriber numbers through the period of the Depression in order to continue to attract advertising. Prices begin to climb in the 1950s ($2.50 for Mayfair, $2 for Maclean’s, $1.50 for all the others), but this postwar prosperity was quickly diverted into other media, forcing magazines into collapse or redesign. Maclean’s, for instance, reverted to monthly publication during the period from 1967 to 1975, due to financial pressures and competition from Canadian editions of American weeklies such as Time and Newsweek, but reinvented itself as a weekly newsmagazine in 1978.6 The general magazine contained an assortment of loosely connected items, offering readers endless possibilities for the active generation of meaning. Richard Ohmann notes that popular American monthlies at the turn of the twentieth century “included an astonishing potpourri of material, but organised explicitly and tacitly into categories

Mainstream Magazines   355 that implied the diversity and individuality of taste among the readership” (224–25). Similarly, Canadian titles were addressed to a broad audience—for instance, women of several different generations, or all the members of the middle-class family. La Revue Populaire presented itself as a family magazine, while La Revue Moderne, Chatelaine, and Canadian Home Journal appealed to a specifically feminine readership. All four titles sometimes featured material for children. Mayfair was the most sophisticated of the Canadian magazines: its coverage of both motor shows and dress shows, horse racing and hairstyling, indicates a balanced cross-gender appeal. The legacy of The Busy Man’s Magazine was evident in Maclean’s primarily masculine focus, although it had a separate department entitled “Women and Their Work.”7 This gendering of the different titles continued into the later twentieth century, and is legible in editor Blair Fraser’s evidence to the 1960 Royal Commission on Publications: “We think of a Maclean’s reader as a serious person in a relaxed mood, and much of what we offer is intended only for his entertainment and not for his improvement. However, we have serious purposes. We want to report Canada and the world through the eyes of Canadians” (“Joint Submission” 16). Fraser’s comment is also illuminating in other ways: the blend of entertainment and education, inflected by patriotism, defined all the magazines discussed in this chapter. The keynote of self-improvement aligned them closely with the middlebrow cultural formations taking shape in North America in the earlier and mid-twentieth century. Tellingly, the anglophone magazines proclaimed, in their heyday, that their audience consisted of “the leadership families of the Dominion from coast to coast” (see Figure 19.1). This phrase appeared in an advertisement for the Maclean publishing company printed in Chatelaine in 1928 (“Straight to the Heart”). The magazines constructed their readership as upwardly mobile and able to influence business and society through their buying power. The “coast to coast” national scope was also claimed by Maclean’s, the Canadian Home Journal, Canadian Magazine, and Canadian Homes and Gardens, while other magazines targeted more regional audiences. The francophone titles concentrated primarily on Québec, while Mayfair was centred on Toronto and Ottawa, and National Home Monthly, despite its change in name, continued to focus largely on the prairies. The contrast between these last two titles pushes the boundaries of what could be encompassed by the mainstream, as Mayfair was glibly elitist, while National Home Monthly was left-leaning in tone. The range of periodicals intersected, however, in format and type of contents: even though the slant of editorials and articles varied, the topics discussed overlapped, as did the choice of fiction writers published.8 In addition, advertisements were often identical across the different titles and consolidated their shared aspirational quality. An advertisement for Canada Dry Ginger Ale, which appeared in the June 1934 issues of several of the magazines, ties together home and mobility with class and consumer desire. Beneath an image of a family dining out, the copy reads: there scarcely is a place you’ll go where you won’t find Canada Dry waiting to cheer and refresh you. It’s an honored guest at all the better hotels, clubs, and restaurants. On dining cars. On ocean liners. And you can enjoy it in virtually every port and city

356   Literary Periods and Genres of the world. … And for the home, buy The Champagne of Ginger Ales by the case. (Canada Dry)

The ad copy suggests a continuity between the private home and the glamorous environments of modern travel. Ginger ale was far more affordable than an ocean cruise or a trip to a hotel, yet it seems to bring the inaccessible prestige of luxury travel into the ordinary household. The visual image of the Canadian leadership family is cheerfully aspirational—comfortable with their everyday lives, they are nonetheless both outwardand upward-looking.

Editors and Authors The most influential magazine editors in early to mid-twentieth-century Canada included J. Herbert Hodgins, who oversaw Mayfair for its first 18 years; Anne-Marie Huguenin (“Madeleine”), founding editor of La Revue Moderne; Byrne Hope Sanders, who ran Chatelaine from 1930 to 1953; and H. Napier Moore and William Arthur Irwin, who each held editorial positions at Maclean’s for over two decades. Hodgins reflected on his own work in a July 1927 editorial: Browsing around is the most delightful of occupations for an editor. I can imagine nothing more joyous in life than to be permitted a never-ending browse—with none of the interludes of routine that fill the usual working hours. But that, it seems, is the exclusive privilege of one’s readers. For the magazine’s readers alone are given the rewards of editorial browsing. … Variety is the spice of our publication and the ways for you to secure this month-to-month variety are two-fold. Either you send us your personal cheque to cover one year’s passage through Mayfair or you can step up to the nearest news-stand—as you would to the ticket office at the railway station—and secure your single trip.

Hodgins suggests a consumerist dimension (“browsing”) to his own productivity, and reveals that the imagery of home and mobility was integral to his editorial vision. The world was brought to the reader’s door in the form of the magazine, and reading itself, like travel, is presented as a reward, a leisure activity available after the completion of “working hours.” Anne-Marie Huguenin focuses more on reading and writing as forms of work in themselves. She situates La Revue Moderne as an intermediary between home and abroad, between individual heart and national community, and even between Englishand French-speaking Canada, writing in her inaugural editorial in 1919: Nous vous demandons de lui ouvrir vos maisons et vos coeurs. Il faut aimer cette Revue, créée pour vous, pour faire meilleures vos idées, plus justes vos principes,

Mainstream Magazines   357

Figure 19.1  Maclean Publishing Company advertisement, Chatelaine June 1928.

plus meublés vos cerveaux. Elle sera l’oeuvre de talents profonds et sincères, de talents de chez-nous, triés dans toutes nos classes, dans tous nos groupes, talents canadiens-anglais, comme canadiens-français, tous conquis au “motto” qui doit dorénavant presider à nos actes: “S’unir pour grandir,” afin de donner à la patrie canadienne la pleine mesure de nos energies et de nos vaillances. (Madeleine 9)

358   Literary Periods and Genres [We ask you to open your hearts and your homes to it. We want you to love this magazine, which was created for you, to improve your knowledge, your ideals and your minds. It will be the work of profound and sincere talent, talent of our own, drawn from all our classes, all our communities, English-Canadian as well as French-Canadian, all won over by the motto which will henceforward guide us: “Unite to grow,” that we may give to the Canadian homeland the full value of our energies and our courage.]9

Huguenin strongly emphasizes the intellectually “improving” qualities of the new magazine, suggesting that it will equip readers to be better citizens of Québec and of Canada. Three decades later, in another postwar era, Byrne Hope Sanders was equally earnest, and even more ambitious, about the potential influence of periodical culture on the nation. She wrote in January 1949: We make our country mean something when we encourage its creative artists with our interest and our dollars. When we take definite action to keep our young people in Canada. When we see that our children know something of the men and women who make Canada great—yesterday and today. When we use our vote. When we try to build into our own individual way of life the principles which build the way of life our nation expresses.

Sanders devoted much of her editorial attention to these concerns. She published features and columns on family life, informed readers about volunteer and charity work done by women, and introduced Canadian authors to a wider audience. She advocated that readers see their individual actions as the expression of a way of life particular to Canada, which should be made visible to the outside world. As these quotations suggest, editors addressed readers in a tone that was personable yet authoritative. Editorials sometimes provided a behind-the-scenes anecdote about how a writer was discovered or a topic for discussion chosen, and were occasionally accompanied by photographs of staff writers and editors. These revelations seemed to invite readers into the magazine’s inner circle. Much of what editors engaged in, then, was a pattern of endless introductions, as if they were the hosts at a grand party. Indeed, Hodgins remarked in his inaugural editorial for Mayfair in May 1927: “I have the honor to present to you—our first readers—a magazine which will interpret the life and interests of Canadians in their most gracious moods.” Similarly, in the first issue of The Chatelaine—as it was called until 1932—Mrs. Hilda Pain, winner of Maclean-Hunter’s competition to name its new women’s magazine, comments: “I pictured, in my mind’s eye, the cover of the new women’s magazine decorated with the gracious figure of a chatelaine, standing at the head of a flight of steps, inviting with outstretched hands the women of Canada to enter and enjoy the restful charm of her home” (“Why I Chose” 30). The construction of the magazine in terms of hospitality fitted in with the scenes of socializing and entertainment that appeared in illustrations and advertisements. Several of the mainstream magazines relied heavily on literary content. La Revue Populaire printed a complete romantic novel or novella in each issue, as well as serial

Mainstream Magazines   359 fiction, while La Revue Moderne published short stories, serials, and sometimes poetry. Although both magazines (and especially La Revue Moderne) foregrounded essays and journalism by French-Canadian writers, virtually all their fiction was foreign. The vast majority was by popular French romance writers (such as Magali, Max du Veuzit, or Claude Jaunière),10 and there were occasional translations of English or American authors. In the anglophone magazines, by contrast, most of the literary contributions were by Canadians.11 Chatelaine, the Canadian Home Journal, and Maclean’s published many of the authors who now make up the canon of early and mid-century literature, such as Mazo de la Roche, Dorothy Livesay, Raymond Knister, L.M. Montgomery, Laura Goodman Salverson, Robert Stead, W.O. Mitchell, Martha Ostenso, Charles G.D. Roberts, and Nellie McClung. But none of these was a regular contributor. The fiction and poetry sections were primarily sustained by authors who are now forgotten: among them, Madge Macbeth, Louis Arthur Cunningham, Leslie Gordon Barnard, Elsie Fry Laurence, Sir Philip Gibbs, Beryl Gray, Margaret Barnard, Eva Bruce, Ethel Gillespie, Edna Jaques, Ellen Evelyn Mackie, and Janet Erskine Scott.12 The purpose of most of the archival work that has thus far been carried out on mainstream Canadian magazines has been to locate contributions by major authors. Scholarship on the magazines themselves, in the context of periodical studies, has been extremely limited, though it has expanded somewhat in the past decade. Groundbreaking research on Chatelaine and Châtelaine in the post–World War II era has been conducted by Valerie Korinek, Marie-José Des Rivières, Jocelyne Mathieu, and Eva-Marie Kröller. Michelle Smith has compared Chatelaine and the Canadian Home Journal, while John Potvin has studied images of masculinity in Mayfair. Recent large-scale projects in Canadian book history and literary history have included chapters on periodicals or journalism (Gerson and Michon; Saint-Jacques and Robert), and new projects have been launched on Western Home Monthly (Hannah McGregor), on La Revue Populaire (Chantal Savoie), and on Canadian magazines and middlebrow culture.13 Yet, most of these magazines have been neither digitized nor indexed, and they represent a largely untapped resource, offering extensive possibilities for future research. What makes mainstream magazines important? The ways in which they addressed their intended audience tell us about an emerging demographic that still defines the norm in Canada:  White, middle class, and aspirational. Their contents tell us about gender divisions that continue to determine contemporary social structures, and their advertisements tell us about the development of consumer culture. The fiction they circulated tells us about shared ideals and value systems, while the disappearance of many of these authors from literary history hints at cultural hierarchies that came into play as the magazines went into decline. The middlebrow magazines sold themselves on the basis of the expert knowledge of their contributors in areas such as dress, interiors, health and beauty, cookery, domestic economy, travel, reading, and shopping. The guidance of magazine editors, authors, and advertisers was welcomed by readers and consumers who were faced with an increasingly wide array of choices, and the magazines offered fantasies of mobility—both geographical and economic—that speak to the material and social aspirations of the era.

360   Literary Periods and Genres

Home and Mobility In La Revue Moderne’s July 1932 issue, an anonymous columnist remarks: “En vacances, il faut savoir flâner sans perdre son temps. … il faut savoir profiter de ces journas [sic] physiquement et moralement’“ (“Simples”). [On holiday, it is essential to know how to relax without wasting one’s time … how to profit from the days away, both physically and mentally.] This is a perfect summary of the middlebrow ethos of enjoyable self-improvement. The same idea is elaborated in H. Napier Moore’s editorial, entitled “Holiday Dividends,” in the July 1934 Chatelaine:14 “Money spent in travel is a sound investment. Nothing can take from you the returns it guarantees—broadmindedness, pleasant education, relaxation, recreation and lasting memories.” In these lines, the mainstream magazines’ dominant attitude to tourism seems to crystallize. They often raise questions about whether leisure time and income should be used for relaxation or for personal development, and Moore’s editorial is typical in its attempt to balance these competing demands and to incorporate them into its strategic construction of its audience as patriots. It invokes the reader’s sense of duty both as a parent and as a Canadian: “You can render no greater service to your children, derive no greater pleasure yourself, than to enlarge knowledge of your own country.” This connection between travel, good citizenship, and self-development, already prominent in the interwar years, was consolidated as the century progressed.15 Moore goes on to survey the attractions of each province, celebrating Canada’s modern railways and roads as much as the beauties of its landscape: Have you … followed the Trail of ‘98 from the observation platform of the train that climbs over the White Pass and into the Yukon? Or driven over the spectacular highways of Vancouver Island from Victoria the Beautiful? Have you basked in the Okanagan; followed in retrospect the gold seekers plodding the Cariboo trail? (You motor over a smooth road now.)

The editorial suggests that the national past—the romance of Canadian history—is available as an accessible, “smooth” experience for middle-class families. Furthermore, in his gestures of surveying and enumerating, Moore performs the function identified by Ohmann in his analysis of American mass-market magazines: “The editor or his implied persona … was like a tour guide, pointing to this thing as interesting, that as notable, another as worrisome, still another as curious” (230). If the editor is positioned as a guide, then the reader becomes a tourist, collecting impressions, and there is a suggestive parallel between the repetitive itineraries of the tourist circuit and the repeating structures of periodical publishing. The experience of reading the magazine, like the experience of visiting scenic or historic sites, is constructed as both pleasurable and profitable, while the metaphor of reading as a tour through a periodical resonates with the magazines’ provision of vicarious experiences of travel, for those without the means or leisure to embark on actual journeys. Foreign and transatlantic travel, in

Mainstream Magazines   361 particular, would almost certainly have been beyond the reach of a majority of readers, especially during the Depression years. Overseas tourism is, nevertheless, extensively advertised and reported on—particularly in Mayfair. It presented foreign travel as an ideal to aspire to through its regular “Globe-Trotting Canadians” feature, which reported on the tours and journeys undertaken by the anglophone elite. Images of the foreign—especially of Europe—are evoked in visual and verbal form in all the magazines, most frequently in order to associate particular products or fashion trends with cosmopolitan sophistication. The usual perception of women’s magazines is that they address readers primarily as homemakers and mothers, directing their attention inward to the domestic realm. Yet Moore’s “Holiday Dividends” piece directly invites women to move outside the home, and this invitation is frequently reiterated in the magazines. Even the masthead above the editorial evokes Chatelaine’s ambition to combine modern mobility with traditional wisdom. It shows two hand-drawn figures: one wears seventeenth-century dress and holds a large key to the castle which stands behind her; the other is a highly modern figure wearing trousers, beret, and bobbed hair, who stands with her hands on her hips in front of a car. The emphasis on female mobility, communicated without words in the drawing of the modern woman, is made explicit in many advertisements in Chatelaine. For example, a full-page ad for Ford cars appeared in the July 1934 issue, opposite Moore’s editorial. It shows an elegant lady in the driving seat of a V-8, and endorses this model with a customer quotation: “ ‘I used to be afraid of traffic,’ ” one woman writes, “ ‘but now I go everywhere’ ” (Ford). The advertisement draws on a discourse of upward mobility—the phrase “go everywhere” hints at access to the best social circles, and the text also suggests that the owner of a new Ford will be able, quite literally, to get ahead: “Its quick acceleration enables you to get out in front and escape the jam at every traffic light—its instant, eager speed helps you to pass other cars with greater safety.” The magazines frequently construct travel in this way, as an expression of individual distinction, as well as a mode of escape. Across the mainstream Canadian magazines, the rhetoric of travel is intertwined with a middlebrow emphasis on accumulation—whether of knowledge, experience, or material resources.16 Yet travel is also, as Thorstein Veblen points out in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), invested in conspicuous consumption; it is a status marker.17 Advertisers and journalists throughout the twentieth century highlighted opportunities for experiencing luxury and also for networking while travelling. Canadian Pacific was one of the most prominent advertisers across the magazines, presenting an array of promotions for both overseas travel aboard steamships such as the Empress of Britain and domestic travel centred on the company’s railways and hotels. The first two hotels to be constructed were the Banff Springs, built in 1886–1888, and the Chateau Frontenac in Québec City, built in 1892–1893. These remained the flagship resorts, and from the 1920s through the 1950s an ad for at least one of them appeared in most issues of Mayfair and Chatelaine. The copy invited readers into a world of pleasure and prestige, amid scenic surroundings. As one ad from a May 1940 issue of Mayfair stressed, travelers could “enjoy mile-high golf at Banff, tennis, climbing, trail riding, hiking, motor trips

362   Literary Periods and Genres in Alpine grandeur! Thrilling fishing in lakes and streams. Swimming in cool and warm sulphur water pools. Dance and concert orchestras. You’ll enjoy the sense of exhilaration and high peaks—the association with people whose names make news” (Banff Springs) (see Figure 19.2). The advertising campaigns capitalized on fantasies of upward mobility, and also of cosmopolitanism. The architecture of the hotels borrows from European models: the Banff Springs was styled after a Scottish baronial manor, and the Frontenac evoked a French chateau. Canadian Pacific had designs on a tourist market that wanted a vicarious experience of Europe—its music, its leisure activities, its cuisine—without the trouble or expense of an overseas journey to a land that might be inconveniently historic and lacking in modern amenities. During World War II, when travel to Europe was not an option, the only way to access a version of Old-World culture was through North American replicas. Canadian Pacific’s nostalgic advertising campaign stripped out the realities of European history, as well as the contemporary crisis of the war, offering instead an escapist dream of fairy-tale castles and lavish entertainment. For those unable to afford a stay in the hotels, the magazines—commercial products in themselves—presented the images for consumption. Canadian Pacific offered free trips to journalists, and this no doubt explains why so many magazine articles describing cross-continental rail journeys appeared. A  1925 example, in La Revue Moderne, was contributed by Charles Heidsieck, whose very name connoted luxury consumption. Arriving in the Rockies, he enthuses: Ces montagnes énormes ont des arrêtes tourmentées, sombres et terribles. … C’est un spectacle désordonné mais magnifique. Le tout est grand et immense et l’homme se sent petit et étouffe sous cette atmosphère écrasante. L’arrivée à Banff, la fameuse station d’été crée par le “Canadian Pacific” vous tire de votre muette admiration. La vie semble reprendre tout à coup et c’est un village coquet et élégant qui vous accueille. … Dès l’arrivée à l’hôtel, le touriste bien impresionné est saisi par l’atmosphère de luxe qui y régne et c’est l’existence des palaces qui vous attend. Les relations mondaines se nouent vite et bientôt ce ne sont plus que parties joyeuses. (18) [These enormous mountains have tortured peaks, sombre and awe-inspiring. … It is a wild but magnificent spectacle. Everything is on an immense scale, while humans feel dwarfed and suffocated in the overpowering atmosphere. Reaching Banff, the famous summer resort created by Canadian Pacific, you will emerge from your speechless admiration. Life suddenly seems to start up again, as the charming, elegant village welcomes you. … Immediately on arriving at the hotel, the impressionable tourist is struck by the atmosphere of luxury which prevails. Social relationships are quickly formed, and life soon becomes a continual party of pleasure.]

The discourse of the Romantic picturesque here modulates abruptly into that of contemporary worldliness. The promotion of Canada to Canadians by means of a European writer, who refers to the Rockies as “cette Suisse merveilleuse” (18), reinforces the notion that domestic travel could offer a simulated experience of Europe.

Figure 19.2  Banff Springs Hotel advertisement, Mayfair May 1940.

364   Literary Periods and Genres The resort hotels offered a comfortable, leisurely experience of the grandeur of the natural world. An entirely different experience of Canadian nature is promoted in Maclean’s, in its numerous articles on canoeing, hiking, and camping. These pieces present visions of unspoiled wilderness as a reward for physical exertion, rather than as part of an indulgent holiday experience. For example, James Harman’s 1938 feature on hosteling evokes “the romance of travelling inexpensively, the thrill of undergoing a Spartan routine, of physical hardship or at least the absence of luxury, the lure of movement” and so on (16). The Canadian Youth Hostel Association (CYH) had been in existence only five years and was, to some extent, a nostalgic or anti-modern movement, seeking to discover the untouched natural world of pre-contact North America, and to escape the effects of urban modernity.18 At the same time, and paradoxically, the promise of the CYH was associated with the progress of a youthful nation—Harman quotes one of its founders, who argues that “the better understanding of each other’s problems, and the exchange of ideas which inevitably comes with travel, will do much to consolidate the national and political life of the Dominion” (35). From the 1950s onward, features on remote destinations were increasingly associated with anti-modernism. Fred Bodsworth, in his 1951 piece “The Fight to Keep the Wilderness Wild,” deplored the planned road access to Quetico in northwestern Ontario:  “In Quetico Park a canoeist can sometimes slap a moose on the rump with his paddle. And deep in the lake-and-forest fastness he can forget the civilized world and its worries. Trying to keep this piece of nature in the raw, an ardent band of wilderness lovers are fighting off the speedboats, dance halls and hamburger stands” (12). This presents an interesting inversion of the colonial project of importing civilization to the wilderness. Bodsworth writes of “the restful soul-cleansing sense of escape that only the wilderness traveler can know,” and claims that Canadians owe their grandchildren “at least one unspoiled fragment of the primitive mid-continental America that is now all but gone” (13). Insisting on the distinction between wilderness travel and commercial tourism, magazine pieces such as Bodsworth’s attempt to detach themselves from the consumer-based context of their own publication. The construction of the Canadian wilderness in anti-modern terms, as a place of escape and respite from modern capitalist culture, is in tension with the consumer-oriented travel writing and advertising that Maclean’s also published. This should not surprise us: as scholars of print culture have long recognized, contradictory discourses frequently coexist within a single periodical.19 The magazine is a multivocal form, and the relationship between editorial and commercial material is complex and cannot be fully controlled, even by an editor. Nevertheless, wilderness travel pieces represent a minority point of view in the mainstream magazines, and are more difficult to align with the priorities of advertisers. The dominant presentation of travel was as an opportunity for luxury consumption and the accumulation of social and cultural capital, and these practices were bound up with the idea of the magazine itself as a site of both entertainment and improvement. As a marketplace, the magazine offered a vicarious experience of mobility and freedom, while also emphasizing the primacy of home, family, and nation.

Mainstream Magazines   365

Acknowledgment The authors would like to thank Victoria Kuttainen and Carole Gerson for their insightful comments on early drafts of this piece.

Notes 1. Among the chief competitors for the Canadian magazines were US titles such as Ladies’ Home Journal, Saturday Evening Post, McCall’s, and Cosmopolitan (see Damon-Moore; Ohmann; Scanlon). The Canadian magazine Mayfair bears a striking resemblance to Vanity Fair and the American “smart” magazines (see Hammill and Leick), but lacks their intellectual depth. 2. The Canadian weeklies, notably Le Samedi (1888–1963) and Saturday Night (1887–2005), were a different genre of publication, falling between magazines and newspapers in terms of format and mix of content. 3. However, the Mayfair office moved to Montreal in 1937. 4. Copies of a magazine were shared within and between families, so the number of readers would have exceeded the net paid circulation figure (which covers subscriptions and newsstand sales). La Revue Moderne, for instance, claimed to have 100,000 readers by 1930. 5. “Pulps” were 7 x 10 inch pulp paper monthlies consisting of densely packed type with few illustrations, and intended for a wide audience. “Slicks” were so-named because of their glossy paperstock, in 11 x 14 inch format with different departments and lots of images; they positioned themselves as mainstream and middle class. Little magazines used diverse print formats, published the avant-garde and experimental, and appealed to coterie audiences. 6. Maclean’s started as a monthly, became a semi-monthly in 1920, and a fortnightly in 1955 and again (following its reversion to monthly publication) in 1975. 7. According to Korinek, “Within the Maclean Hunter Consumer Magazines Division, Maclean’s and Chatelaine were regarded as sibling publications. Yet all the glamour, prestige, expensive talent, parental encouragement, and pride went to Maclean’s” (49). 8. Better-known writers to be published across titles included Martha Ostenso, who was published in Maclean’s, Western Home Monthly, Canadian Home Journal, and Chatelaine; L.M. Montgomery and Mazo de la Roche, both published in the Journal and Chatelaine; and Madge Macbeth in Mayfair and Chatelaine. Less well-known writers included Leslie Gordon Barnard, Louis Arthur Cunningham, and Martha Banning Thomas, all of whom were routinely published by the Journal and Chatelaine. 9. All translations are our own. 10. Magali (pseudonym of Jeanne Philbert) was one of the most frequently published novelists in La Revue Populaire across its run. Among the very few Québécois literary authors who appeared were Gabrielle Roy and Odette Oligny, a novelist who was also an editor of La Revue Moderne. 11. Popular British or American novelists (e.g., Michael Arlen, Warwick Deeping, Stephen Vincent Benét, and Margaret Mitchell) occasionally featured in the anglophone magazines, or in translation in the francophone titles.

366   Literary Periods and Genres 12. Some recovery work has begun on these forgotten authors (see Rifkind; Smith, “Mainstream”). Editor’s note: See Carole Gerson’s Chapter 18 on middlebrow modernity and women’s fiction in this volume. 13. See McGregor and Smith; Savoie; and the “Magazines, Travel, and Middlebrow Culture in Canada, 1925–60” project website for Hammill and Smith at www.middlebrowcanada. org. See the bibliography on this site for work in other areas of Canadian periodical studies, including little magazines and modernism; pulps; women journalists; and feminist periodicals. 14. At this period, Moore was editor of Maclean’s and editorial director of Chatelaine, while Byrne Hope Sanders was Chatelaine’s editor. She usually wrote the editorial; Moore occasionally did so. 15. Kuffert writes that the mid-century period saw an unprecedented “willingness to link self-improvement with a decorous patriotism and, most important, to do so in magazines, on radio, and on television” (230). 16. The mass-market magazine itself is understood as an ephemeral, disposable form. Yet many subscribers collected and retained their copies, and some existing archives derive from such collections. This practice was encouraged by the editors’ presentation of their publications as repositories of knowledge. 17. For more recent discussions, building on Veblen, see MacCannell; Rojek and Urry; Urry. 18. Jessup defines anti-modernism as a paradoxical phenomenon. She writes of the “pervasive sense of loss that often coexisted in the decades around the turn of the century along with an enthusiasm for modernization and material progress” (4). On Canadian anti-modernism, see Hammill, “Wilderness”; Rifkind. 19. Beetham, for instance, describes the magazine as “a miscellany, that is a form marked by a variety of tone and constituent parts,” and as “fractured and heterogeneous” (1).

Works Cited Banff Springs Hotel. Advertisement. Mayfair (May 1940): inside front cover. Print. Beaulieu, André, and Jean Hamelin. La presse québécoise des origines à nos jours. Vol. 5. Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 1982. Print. Beetham, Margaret. A Magazine of Her Own: Domesticity and Desire in the Women’s Magazine, 1800–1914. London: Routledge, 1996. Print. Bodsworth, Fred. “The Fight to Keep the Wilderness Wild.” Maclean’s 15 May 1951:  12–13, 33–34. Print. Canada Dry Ginger Ale. Advertisement. Chatelaine June 1934: 33. Print. Damon-Moore, Helen. Magazine for the Millions: Gender and Commerce in The Ladies’ Home Journal and The Saturday Evening Post, 1880–1910. Albany: SUNY P, 1994. Print. Des Rivières, Marie-José. Châtelaine et la littérature, 1960–75. Montréal:  L’Hexagone, 1992. Print. Ford Cars. Advertisement. Chatelaine July 1934: 3. Print. Gerson, Carole, and Jacques Michon, eds. History of the Book in Canada, Vol. 3: 1918–1980. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2007. Print. Hammill, Faye. “Wilderness/Sophistication.” Pamphlet. The Eccles Centre for American Studies. London: British Library, 2012. Web. Accessed 25 June 2015.

Mainstream Magazines   367 Hammill, Faye, and Karen Leick. “Modernism and the Quality Magazines:  Vanity Fair; American Mercury; New  Yorker; Esquire.” The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Vol. 2:  North America, 1880–1960. Ed. Andrew Thacker and Peter Brooker. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. 176–96. Print. Harman, James. “Here Come the Hostelers.” Maclean’s 15 Aug. 1938: 16, 35. Print. Heidsieck, Charles. “De Montréal à Vancouver. “ La Revue Moderne août 1925: 17–19. Print. Hodgins, J. Herbert. Editorial. Mayfair May 1927: 9. Print. ———. Editorial. Mayfair July 1927: 9. Print. Jessup, Lynda. “Antimodernism and Artistic Experience:  An Introduction.” Antimodernism and Artistic Experience:  Policing the Boundaries of Modernity. Ed. Jessup. Toronto:  U of Toronto P, 2001. 3–10. Print. “Joint Submission of Maclean’s Magazine, Chatelaine and Canadian Homes: Blair Fraser (editor of Maclean’s), Doris Anderson (editor of Chatelaine) and Mr Gerry Anglin (editor of Canadian Home).” Report of the Royal Commission on Publications:  Hearings. Vol. 21. Toronto: Angus Stonehouse, 1961. Print. 32 vols. Korinek, Valerie. Roughing It in the Suburbs: Reading Chatelaine Magazine in the Fifties and Sixties. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2000. Print. Kröller, Eva-Marie. “ ‘Une terre humaine’:  Expo 67, Canadian Women, and Chatelaine/ Châtelaine.” Expo 67: Not Just a Souvenir. Ed. Rhona Richman Kenneally and Johanne Sloan. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2010. 61–80. Print. Kuffert, L.B. A Great Duty: Canadian Responses to Modern Life and Mass Culture, 1939–1967. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s UP 2003. Print. MacCannell, Dean. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Schocken Books, 1975. Print. Madeleine. [Anne-Marie Huguenin]. “S’unir pour grandir.” La Revue Moderne 15 nov. 1919: 8–9. Print. Mathieu, Jocelyne. “Châtelaine à Expo 67: chronique de la modernité.” Les cahiers des dix 63 (2009): 257–78. Web. Accessed 25 June 2015. McGregor, Hannah, and Michelle Smith. “Middlebrow Aspiration in Martha Ostenso’s Magazine Fiction.” International Journal of Canadian Studies 48 (2014): 67–83. Print. Moore, H. Napier. “Holiday Dividends.” Chatelaine July 1934: 2. Print. Ohmann, Richard. Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets and Class at the Turn of the Century. London: Verso, 1996. Print. Potvin, John. “Fashioning Masculinity in Mayfair Magazine: The Aesthetics of the Male Body, 1927–1936.” Diss. Carleton University, 2000. Web. Accessed 25 June 2015. Rifkind, Candida. “Too Close to Home: Middlebrow Anti-Modernism and the Poetry of Edna Jacques.” Journal of Canadian Studies 39.1 (2005): 90–114. Print. Rojek, Chris, and John Urry, eds. Touring Cultures:  Transformations of Travel and Theory. London: Routledge, 1997. Print. Saint-Jacques, Denis, and Lucie Robert, eds. La Vie Littéraire au Québec. VI:  Le nationaliste, l’individualiste et le marchand, 1919–1933. Québec:  Presses de l’Université Laval, 2010. Print. Sanders, Byrne Hope. “Would you die for Canada? (Well … would you live for her?).” Chatelaine Jan. 1949: 59. Print. Sarfati, Sonya, and Sandra Martin. “Magazines.” The Canadian Encyclopedia. Historica Foundation, 2007. Web. Accessed 25 June 2015.

368   Literary Periods and Genres Savoie, Chantal. “Femmes, mondanité et culture dans les années 1940: l’exemple de la chronique ‘Ce dont on parle’ de Lucette Robert dans La Revue populaire.” Revue internationale des études canadiennes 48 (2014): 105–17. Print. Scanlon, Jennifer. Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies’ Home Journal, Gender, and the Promises of Consumer Culture. New York: Routledge, 1989. Print. “Simples réflexions de la saison.” La Revue Moderne juillet 1932: 18. Print. Smith, Michelle. “Mainstream Magazines, Middlebrow Fiction, and Leslie Gordon Barnard’s ‘The Winter Road.’ ” Studies in Canadian Literature (Autumn 2012): 7–30. Print. ———. “Fiction and the Nation:  The Construction of Canadian Identity in Chatelaine and Canadian Home Journal during the 1930s and 1940s.” British Journal of Canadian Studies 27.1 (2014): 37–53. Print. “Straight to the Heart of Canada’s Buying Power.” The Maclean Publishing Company Ltd. Advertisement. Chatelaine June 1928: 59. Print. Urry, John. The Tourist Gaze. 2nd ed. London: Sage, 2002. Print. Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class. 1899. Ed. Martha Banta. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Print. Vipond, Mary. The Mass Media in Canada. Toronto: J. Lorimer, 1989. Print. “Why I Chose The Chatelaine.” The Chatelaine Mar. 1928: 30, 40. Print.

Chapter 20

Canadian Dra ma a nd t h e Nationalist I mp u l se Craig Walker

The history of Western civilization offers numerous examples of a national dramatic repertoire playing a key role in defining a given state’s national identity. It would be difficult, for example, to speak for long of what it meant to be English, German, or Italian in the ages of Shakespeare, Goethe, and D’Annunzio without alluding to the ways in which those particular writers helped to shape their fellow citizens’ ideas about their respective nations through their work. Undoubtedly this relationship between nation and dramatic repertoire has much to do with the power of the theatre to turn a group of disparate individuals into a single collective entity. The point is well enough established that from time to time, politicians, jealous of the way in which their people were enraptured and deeply affected by drama, have intervened to displace the independent work of playwrights with dramaturgical inventions of their own. The impulse was seen vividly, for example, in Mussolini’s efforts to create a “theatre of the masses” and in Mao’s efforts to establish the “eight model plays” repertoire. And we see a related if more banal version of that totalitarian impulse in Canada in the recent efforts of the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) of the Harper Government to micro-manage the brief dramatization of the War of 1812 that Canadians would see in a one-minute television advertisement (Chase).1 If the PMO stopped short of attempting a massive reform of the country’s theatres, its work on the War of 1812 is nevertheless a vivid example of what Alan Filewod has called the “institutionalized enactment of metahistorical nationalist fantasies” (6). However, notwithstanding the apparent assurance of the Harper Government’s attempts to use drama to shape the Canadian national outlook, a close examination of Canada’s dramatic history reveals that the very concept of a national drama has been a vexatious and for the most part elusive aspect of Canadian literature. This chapter discusses the various approaches toward and divergences from the concept of nationalist dramatic repertoires as a means of comprehending some of the most important features of Canadian dramatic history.

370   Literary Periods and Genres In most cases, it would be a truism to remark that a national dramatic literature develops hand in hand with the development of a national theatre. In Canada, however, the belated condition of Canadian culture offered a significant obstacle to that pattern. Theatre that is both fully professional and fully Canadian really only got under way after the end of World War II, when the first plays created and produced entirely by Canadians on a professional basis were mounted. Prior to that time, it seems to have been an unspoken rule that if a play were Canadian, it would be either produced by an amateur theatre or frequently—as in the case of many “closet dramas”—not produced at all; if a play were produced for the professional theatre, it would be of foreign authorship. So, until the late 1940s (and to a degree even afterward), the history of Canadian theatre and the history of Canadian dramatic literature present themselves as separate, roughly parallel narratives. It is also true that when we speak of either the history of Canadian theatre or Canadian dramatic literature, we are speaking, for the most part, of work created squarely in the Western European tradition. We do not have anything remotely like an exhaustive documentation of the First Nations performance traditions that were available for early European settlers to witness. But there is little doubt that any sustained thinking about and efforts toward the development of national theatrical culture took place with a firm view to transplanting European traditions to the “New World,” rather than assimilating what had been found in the Indigenous culture. It is intriguing to imagine what eventually might have come out of an effort to create a synthesis of European and Aboriginal performance traditions in the earliest periods of contact, but we know of none that was made. It is likely, rather, that the two traditions, one based in literature and the other in an oral culture, seemed so incommensurate to the early settlers that the very idea of fusing them would have seemed altogether absurd. An example of the outlook that would prevail instead is embodied in Marc Lescarbot’s Le Théâtre de Neptune en la Nouvelle-France, the work created for the first recorded performance in the territory that would become Canada and which was a part of a celebration of the safe return of the founders of New France to Port Royal on 14 November 1606. As I have remarked elsewhere (Walker 9), Lescarbot sets an example of the relation of the European immigrant to Aboriginal culture that would stand for years to come when he has the character of the Third Indian (possibly played by a Mi’kmaq warrior, although most historians assume that the performers were all European) declare: “It is not only in France / That Cupid reigns / But also in New France” (Wasserman 79). The assignment of the line to a First Nations character does little to disguise Lescarbot’s wishful thinking about importing and cleaving to European cultural traditions in this foreign country that he and his fellow colonists were trying to make their home. And the form chosen for the work is the reception, the French equivalent to the English masque, a theatrical genre expressly designed to flatter and aggrandize the royalty in the audience. Implicitly, then, the play’s contribution to “the idea of nation,” if such a phrase can be appropriately used at this early point, is to make a thoroughly colonial statement. The first Canadian plays in English arrived more than a century and a half later. George Cocking’s The Conquest of Canada; or, the Siege of Quebec, a closet drama written

Canadian Drama and the Nationalist Impulse    371 in 1766, dramatized the victory of Wolfe over Montcalm in a style that clearly owed something to the historic poetic dramas of John Dryden. Acadius; or, Love in a Calm, an anonymous play produced by the soldiers garrisoned in Halifax in 1774, apparently satirized local characters and manners (the text is lost). These plays introduced the two major traditions that characterize early English-Canadian drama: poetic drama and satire. That these two impulses—the urge to idealize and the urge to satirize—continued to emerge in early Canadian drama is in itself a strong indication of a will to dramatize a national identity into existence. They are a literary version of the carrot and the stick, a two-sided attempt to encourage the collective identity to pursue particular paths to self-realization. But in both cases, collective self-realization is presented as being an inherently British undertaking. In a sense, it is difficult to see how dramas of this sort, so thoroughly steeped in British literary conventions, could have been used to say much of anything else. The depictions of heroism, of noble thoughts, of dramatic action in Cocking’s work owe so much to a very British version of all these things, and the depictions of manners, eccentricities, and humour in Acadius likewise must have owed so much to British notions of social norms, that any dramatic definition of what it meant to be British North American was bound to lay the emphasis upon the first word of that phrase. Deliberate attempts to define a specifically Canadian identity inevitably arose as the idea of Confederation—the creation of the actual nation of Canada out of the cluster of European colonies it recently had been—having transformed the political agenda in 1867, subsequently took hold of the popular imagination. There followed what Eric Hobsbawm, writing of the idea of nation, has called “the invention of tradition,” a phenomenon well illustrated by two plays written shortly after Confederation. Driven by a need to find primordial events to help define the nation now at hand, Sarah Anne Curzon, in Laura Secord: The Heroine of 1812 (written in 1876), and Charles Mair, in Tecumseh (written in 1886),2 each created a closet drama that looked back to the most significant direct experience of violence in what was then still-living Canadian memory: the War of 1812. Like the Harper Government with their twenty-first-century television commercials, these writers seemed eager to establish a record of valour in that war as a part of the Canadian character, undoubtedly considering that the experience of the United States in matters of violence, already far more extensive than Canada’s, had played a central role in establishing the national identity there. Flawed though they are from a literary point of view, these two plays have become iconic for the study of early Canadian drama, partly because of the interesting glimpse they offer into the historical imaginations of some Canadians just after Confederation. Curzon evidently had a three-part agenda for the formation of the Canadian character, comprising imperialism, feminism, and Romanticism—ideologies that keep somewhat uneasy company with one another in her play, and contribute to the stylistic unevenness that most readers notice in the work. Likewise, in Tecumseh, Mair has not successfully disguised his efforts to stitch together the influence of sources as disparate as Shakepeare’s Henry V (which echoes through the speeches of General Brock) and Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (which can be heard in the speeches of

372   Literary Periods and Genres Lefroy). Both plays also contain more than a hint of melodrama, but neither evinces a clear understanding of the practical demands of the stage in the age in which they were written. They were, in short, well meaning but highly derivative and not especially competent attempts to dramatize Canadian heroic exploits in the same way that Europeans had successfully put their own such stories on stage. Trying to create a uniquely Canadian drama by cleaving closely to models celebrating other nations was an inherently self-defeating enterprise. Moreover, we can see that the idea of rooting a national identity in the dramatization of valour in combat is also inherently unpromising, in that however proud one might feel of a national hero or heroine, such a dramatization cannot capture an experience that is at once both widely shared and distinctive. To the extent that the valorous event is familiar, it is like valorous events everywhere, and so not distinctive; to the extent that it is unique, it is not widely shared. By contrast, when we ask what is unique to Canada, the first answer is, of course, the place itself. Consequently, for many Canadians, it has seemed essential that any question of national identity should engage the experience of the natural landscape. Of course, the extensions and consequences of this conviction are plain enough in painting and in poetry. In painting, for example, the work of the Group of Seven in the 1920s captured the experience in depictions of mainly unpopulated landscapes; in the poetry of Isabella Valency Crawford from the 1880s, the communion of the self with nature is often the subject. However, for drama, which uses live actors as its primary medium, any direct treatment of the experience of landscape is inevitably more difficult. Nevertheless, in the 1920s, two playwrights began to devise very different solutions to the problem of delineating the relationship of Canadian identity to landscape. On the one hand, there was Merrill Denison, who made his subject the very intransigence of the Canadian landscape, its refusal to yield to attempts at civilization. On the other was Herman Voaden, who followed the example of the Group of Seven in attempting to portray the landscape as an extension of the untamed soul. Denison’s major play, Marsh Hay (1923)—arguably the best play written in Canada before World War II—is a work of Naturalism centred on a family, the Serangs, who have been brutalized and coarsened by their attempts to eke out a living from their environment: “fifty acres of grey stone,” as the father, John Serang, repeatedly intones. Notwithstanding the realistic style of his play, Denison was as aware of the metaphorical implications of his work as Ibsen had been; in that respect, we may see in the Serangs’ hopeless attempt to coax their livelihood out of the unpropitious land a figure for Denison’s own attempts to set down cultural roots in Canada. He once complained that “writing about the Canadian theatre or drama [was] depressingly like discussing the art of dinghy sailing among the Bedouins” (Denison, “Nationalism” 65). Either way, Denison’s intention is to make Canadians see their country squarely as it is and then to build upon that view. Still, Denison was not altogether insensitive to the beauties of the Canadian landscape; he spent most of his summers on the land that would become Bon Echo Park, which he had inherited from his mother, but which he donated to the Province of Ontario in 1959 (Druker). However, he was impatient with any purely sentimental view of rural life. The omnibus title of Denison’s first volume of plays, The

Canadian Drama and the Nationalist Impulse    373 Unheroic North, is instructive, as is the way that idealized descriptions of the rugged Canadian landscape by city-dwellers are made ridiculous in the short play Brothers in Arms (1921). Both attest to Denison’s own deep resistance to romanticizing the Canadian landscape. By contrast, it is fair to say that romanticizing was central to the project of Herman Voaden. Voaden’s “Symphonic Expressionism,” despite borrowing its second term from the mainly German movement, evinced little of the disaffection and angst characteristic of most Expressionist playwrights.3 Rather, in plays such as Rocks and Earth Song (both 1932) and Hill-Land (1934), Voaden strove to capture the sense of a mystical union between nature and the magnanimous human soul. This, he implies in Ascend as the Sun (1941), could become the basis for a more God-like construction of the self. Voaden’s plays rejected the harsh realism of Denison’s work to instead embrace an abstract mise en scène in which lighting, music, and movement were combined to convey his somewhat Nietzschean metaphysical understanding of the Canadian character.4 The oddity of both Denison’s and Voaden’s approaches is twofold. First, the modern theatre for which they were writing had been chiefly an urban art form, partly because a certain demographic density is usually necessary before theatre becomes economically viable. Second, the experience of Canadians was becoming steadily more urbanized with the ongoing demographic shift from the country to cities. For an ever-increasing number of Canadians in the twentieth century, the rugged wilderness, whether seen as Denison’s harsh fact or Voaden’s mystical hope, was something that they would only encounter on vacation. In the 1920s and 1930s, attempting to define the national character using an urban art form for urban audiences by appealing to their experience of the natural landscape was, arguably, an approach the future prospects of which were already dwindling. The production of Robertson Davies’s Fortune, My Foe by the Arthur Sutherland International Players in Kingston, Ontario, in 1948 established a milestone in more than one respect. It was among the first fully professional Canadian productions of Canadian plays in Canada. Just the year before, The New Play Society in Toronto had presented Lister Sinclair’s The Man in the Blue Suit. Also in 1948, in Montreal, Gratien Gélinas’s Tit-Coq received its first professional production. A  full decade earlier, in 1938, Canadian Mazo de la Roche’s play Whiteoaks had been staged professionally at the Royal Alexandra Theatre, following its hugely successful runs in London, England, and New York, though that was a touring production out of the United States. But Fortune, My Foe was also new in that it attempted to squarely address what Davies saw as the chief obstacle to the establishment of Canadian cultural identity: not the natural environment, or the relatively small population, but philistinism. The protagonist of Davies’s play is Nicholas, a young professor at Queen’s University in Kingston, who, yearning for a more robust cultural life, attempts to help an immigrant Czech puppeteer mount a production of Don Quixote. However, the project is crushed by local authorities who are obstinate in their belief that puppet shows are for children, and should be used solely for purposes such as encouraging children to brush their teeth. Philistinism was a theme that Davies treated in other early plays, such as Overlaid (1946), Hope Deferred (1948),

374   Literary Periods and Genres and, to a degree, At My Heart’s Core (1950), the latter about the famous Strickland sisters (Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill) who wrote about settlement life in early Canada. So, when we note that, despite his promising start, Davies never quite achieved the success as a playwright for which he had yearned, it is tempting to suggest that this might have been because he was largely right about the accusations he made against Canadians: that they were guilty of a philistine indifference to their own culture.5 For some, the history of the Dominion Drama Festival (DDF), of which Davies himself had been a prime mover in its early years, provides ample evidence to refute his accusation. From 1932 to 1978 the DDF provided a venue for amateur theatre groups to gather and celebrate theatrically. There is little doubt that, particularly in its first years when it was exclusively devoted to one-act plays, the DDF contributed strongly to the general sense of cultural vitality across the country. But after World War II, during which DDF activities had been suspended, the Festival seemed a less vital force. And frustratingly, the sincere attempts by DDF organizers to encourage new Canadian playwriting (for example, 1967, the centennial year, saw an all-Canadian program of 62 plays, 29 of which were premieres) bore little lasting fruit, with most community theatre groups remaining largely indifferent as to whether they staged plays that dramatized Canadians’ own experiences. Instead, the most popular fare remained foreign—most often English—as well as artistically and politically conservative. Furthermore, it is arguable that the longevity and popularity of this amateur organization encouraged a regrettable culture of amateurism in Canadian theatre. For, while many witnesses have reported that the Festival often achieved high artistic standards in the first two decades, it is generally conceded that by the 1950s the social aspect of the Festival received more emphasis than what was on stage. In the end, it seems fair to remark that the DDF did not dislodge the prevalent view that theatre in Canada might very well be a pleasant hobby, but could hardly be said to be making an essential contribution to Canadian identity. Be that as it may, it is true that, for the most part in Canada, the growth of the opinion that a national dramatic literature should be considered an essential part of Canadians’ self-understanding lagged significantly behind another view:  that what was most important to Canadian self-respect was competent professional performance of the classic international repertoire. Certainly this was the view taken in the 1951 Report of the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, better known as the Massey Commission (after its chair, Vincent Massey), in which Robertson Davies himself had played a large role. The issues upon which the Commission focused had mainly to do with whether “a national theatre” should refer to a single building or whether it should be a company that toured across the country.6 The immediate effects of the final Report of the Massey Commission have often been overstated—two years later, only 12 of its 146 recommendations had been implemented (Litt 237)—but it did offer a forum and focus for a set of ideas that began to exert a force on the popular imagination, and it helped to supply momentum for certain projects, partly through the direct agency of Vincent Massey himself. So, for example, whereas Dora Mavor Moore had been devoting most of her energies to the New Play Society of Toronto, where she had been producing important Canadian plays such as John Coulter’s Riel (1950), it was not

Canadian Drama and the Nationalist Impulse    375 Moore’s small, struggling organization that received the help of rich benefactors such as Massey, but the founding of the Stratford Festival in 1953. In short, in the quest for a “national theatre,” the foundation of an institution aspiring to highly professional productions of classical repertoire had been privileged at the expense of a theatre mounting semi-professional productions of Canadian plays. (Ironically, the successful founding of the Stratford Festival was due in part to a couple of timely interventions from Dora Mavor Moore herself, including her initiative in bringing Tyrone Guthrie from England to be its first director.) By the time that the Stratford Festival explicitly began calling itself Canada’s “national theatre” in the 1960s, for many Canadians, this seemed no more than a formal acknowledgment of an established fact (see also Ian Rae’s Chapter 21 on the Stratford Festival in this volume). For some theatre practitioners, however, Stratford was not seen as a mecca, but rather as their bête noire. Some of the objections to Stratford were based in the elitist appeal and conservative aesthetics and politics of the institution, but perhaps the most forceful arguments had to do with how little Stratford was doing to promote the development of Canadian playwrights. This view held that, as an inherently colonial institution, the Stratford Festival was an obstacle to nationalist aspirations. Thus, in Toronto especially, the country’s so-called national theatre increasingly was seen as a sort of opponent, in defiance of which nationalist drama would be made by the so-called “alternative” theatres, such as Theatre Passe Muraille, Factory Theatre, Tarragon Theatre, Toronto Free Theatre, and others. The energy of the latter companies was buoyed by the demographic lift provided by the baby boomers, the earliest of whom, at the time these “alternative” theatres were getting underway, were entering their early twenties. For such young people, the alternative theatre scene at this time reinforced the cherished sense of new things being accomplished, of a vast international counterculture on the move. And so, along with the sense of a class divide between Stratford and the urban theatres, there was a sense of a generational gap that depended at least as much on cliché as on any firm reality: staid older anglophiles on the one hand, and young revolutionary nationalists on the other. However, young practitioners of theatre were not the only ones who had the idea that the relative paucity of widely known Canadian plays was a serious shortcoming that needed to be redressed. The point was there to be seen by anyone who cared about Canadian culture in general, and if we accept the premise that the interest in publicly shared stories grows with the public’s sense of itself as a definable entity, then it is not surprising that this opinion gathered force as the country began to approach its centennial year, 1967. In 1963, Secretary of State Judy LaMarsh announced the formation of a Centennial Commission to coordinate the thousands of projects, including new plays about Canada, that were expected to emerge in four years’ time. Centennial Commissioner John Fisher insisted on an upbeat approach:  “A birthday party,” he declared, “is no time for pettiness, no time for rubbing salt in old wounds” (McKenzie 7). In 1966, the Centennial Commission proudly announced that “every professional theatre and ballet company have [sic] made it a matter of policy to invite a composer or playwright of their choice to write a new work for premiere performances in 1967”

376   Literary Periods and Genres (Centennial Commission, Progress). As it happened, however, many of the works to emerge were not quite as upbeat as Fisher might have hoped. One play commissioned directly by the Centennial Commission was The Centennial Play, a historical pageant conceived by Leon Major to be performed by amateur community theatre groups, which was written collaboratively by Robertson Davies, W.O. Mitchell, Arthur Murphy, Eric Nicol, and Yves Theriault. Major described the play as “a vicious, nasty, satirical show” (Centennial Commission, Bulletin). There may have been a touch of jocular overstatement in that declaration, yet it is true that over the course of the play the authors manage to mock the pretensions of almost every region of the country. Undoubtedly some of the many other new plays commissioned for the centennial did take a more upbeat celebratory approach, but these do not seem to have endured as well as the darker efforts to emerge around this time have. Consider three of the best-known Canadian plays produced in or shortly after 1967: George Ryga’s The Ecstasy of Rita Joe offered an upsetting view of the harsh treatment of First Nations people at the hands of the uncomprehending mainstream society;7 John Herbert’s Fortune and Men’s Eyes was a shocking view of brutality among homosexuals in prisons; and Michel Tremblay’s Les Belles Soeurs suggested that an oppressive patriarchal culture had made Québécois women miserable, coarse, and predatory (moreover, the play was even focused on a different “nation”: Quebec rather than Canada). To be sure, these plays may have been written quite independently of the work of the Centennial Commission, but the point remains that the creative energies of Canadian playwrights were centred more on criticism than they were on celebration. Yet it is not wholly unreasonable to suggest that there was a nationalist impulse of sorts behind such plays; it was just that the passion for country did not manifest itself as jingoist flag-waving, but as stern self-scrutiny. The critic Northrop Frye might have been speaking for these playwrights when he declared, in 1967, that the “Canada to which we really do owe loyalty is the Canada that we have failed to create” (69). We see this approach continued when we turn to look at the output of the “alternative” theatres in the 1970s. There was generally a wish to frame the nationalist plays in a way that was, if not exactly seditious, at least rebellious. In that respect, there was a strong affinity with youth-oriented American popular culture. However, whereas playwrights in the United States were inclined to resist nationalism, which was associated there with war-mongering, in Canada there was still a sense that nationalist art was inherently a form of radical revolt in a colonial and philistine society. For example, 1837: The Farmers’ Revolt (1975), a play about the rebellion led by Toronto-based reformer William Lyon Mackenzie against the wealthy establishment “Family Compact,” written by Rick Salutin in collaboration with a collective at Theatre Passe Muraille, aimed on the one hand to proudly tell a story about Canadian history, but on the other it also struck a blow against anglophile elites. Similarly, The Donnellys (1973–75), a monumental trilogy of plays written by James Reaney but developed through collective workshops, told an exciting episode from Canadian history at the same time as it used the Donnelly family to embody the spirit of rebellion against authority. The Donnellys were Irish immigrants to Canada who, in Reaney’s view, had been ostracized and criminalized for their lack of

Canadian Drama and the Nationalist Impulse    377 conformity; but through the rich array of theatrical tropes he uses to tell their story—the “plastic expression of poetry,” as Cocteau called such techniques (14)—Reaney transforms the Donnellys into heroes of the creative imagination.8 Sharon Pollock’s Walsh (1973) and The Komagata Maru Incident (1976) both tell an interesting story from Canadian history, even though her dramatizations arouse the audience’s indignation at the crass inhumanity of the Canadian authorities. Walsh concerns the sojourn of Sitting Bull and his people in Canada, where they had fled after defeating Custer at the battle of Little Bighorn, staying until they were forced back into the hands of the American army. The Komagata Maru was a ship that arrived in the Vancouver harbour in 1914, carrying 376 mainly Sikh refugees from India, but which was not allowed to dock, instead being forced to return to India. In a similar vein, the Toronto Workshop Productions’ collective creation Ten Lost Years (1974; see Winter), in telling stories of Canadians during the Great Depression, struck a blow against class prejudice and income inequality. In short, Canada’s past was evoked not for purely celebratory purposes, but as a means of goading the country toward a better, brighter, more just future. This was love of one’s country as it might be, not as it had been. The frequency with which collective creations appear in the “alternative” theatres of this period is, in itself, an indication of both a shared interest in nationalist subjects and a determination to resist the hierarchies associated with an inherited British culture. Yet, at the same time, asserting Canadian nationalism meant not merely resisting the anglophile residue of a colonial heritage, but also resisting the assimilative pressure of American popular culture. Sometimes, paradoxically, we see playwrights appealing to analogy with another country in order to make a point about Canadian nationalism. One such work is John Palmer’s Henrik Ibsen on the Necessity of Producing Norwegian Theatre (1976), which takes the form of a nationalist lecture by the great playwright. Somewhat more opaque, but nonetheless fascinating, is George F.  Walker’s Bagdad Saloon (1973). Here the removal from Canada is, in a sense, double: apparently inspired by the Shah of Iran’s attempts in the 1970s to import the best of European and American culture into his country, Walker creates a surreal location, nominally in the Iraqi desert, to which a wealthy sheikh, Ahrun, has brought various minor American celebrities, including Doc Halliday and Gertrude Stein, in an attempt to grow a culture of his own. Clearly, this desert is not an actual location, but a metaphor for the state of culture in Canada as Walker saw it. Walker used similar devices, in which geography stands for an abstract philosophical or cultural state, in plays such as Beyond Mozambique (1974), Ramona and the White Slaves (1976), Zastrozzi (1977), Theatre of the Film Noir (1981), Science and Madness (1982), and other works. Indeed, apart from one very early play, Sacktown Rag (1972), Walker did not explicitly set one of his plays in Canada until he embarked on “The East Side” series of plays in 1984 with Criminals in Love. But those early works are all to some degree nationalist, in that he is chiefly concerned with articulating an outlook on the problems of modernity from a standpoint that is essentially Canadian: that is, evincing an ambivalence about various aspects of Canadian patrimony from the Old World while nonetheless shrinking from the embrace of any ruthless ideologies in the effort to carve a new destiny for Canadians.

378   Literary Periods and Genres As I  have implied, any attempt to forge a national identity and, hence, any nationalist-oriented theatre, will also look beyond its immediate boundaries to assume something of the posture of the age. By the mid-1970s in North America, first complacency then disillusionment set in, brought on less, I would argue, by those conspicuous failures of idealism so often seized upon (e.g., Watergate), than by the limited nature of the “successes,” such as they were: the end (or loss) of the war in Vietnam, the judicial accomplishments of the Civil Rights Movement across the continent, the liberalization of laws governing divorce and sex in Canada, the achievement of the most urgent objectives of the “Quiet Revolution” in Quebec, and so on. Each time someone felt a cause was more or less won, that would leave one less banner that person would feel motivated to march behind; and victory seldom brings all the elation of existential transformation that the striving implicitly promises. Consequently, as the baby-boomer demographic hump moved on, much of the sense of glamour that had been associated with the public protest march began to be expended on the person, resulting in the rise of what has been called “the culture of narcissism” (see Lasch). By the beginning of the 1980s, with the oil-industry recession and nuclear fears added to the shift from social to personal ambition, the thrilling sense of a massive, socially progressive generation had evaporated, leaving in its place among the early baby boomers a simple anxiety about maintaining personal prosperity, and, among the subsequent generation, a glib nihilism that became most manifest in the punk subculture. The effect on Canadian theatre was not difficult to see. Theatre is most effective when it is discovering for an audience their shared concerns as members of a community. Hence, the main problem presented by the shift in attitudes was the difficulty of finding a compelling theatrical form for an audience that had become disenchanted with the very idea of defining itself as a community in broad (i.e., nationalist) terms. Still, this did not mark an end to the role of political consciousness in Canadian drama. Rather, the 1980s were years in which we see a re-evaluation of political priorities. While the broad nationalist coalitions seem to have more or less dissolved, in their place there emerged many new communities who identified themselves according to more specific values and grievances; this was the advent of what Robert Wallace has called “particularism” (12). We see this progress from “nationalism” to “particularism” in the work of a number of important playwrights. For example, Linda Griffiths moved from working on collective creations with Theatre Passe Muraille’s Paul Thompson, to writing nationalist satire in Maggie and Pierre (1979), her play about 1970s Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and his wife, then proceeded to examine Canadians’ personal identity crises in O.D. on Paradise (1982), which focused on Canadian characters on holiday in the Caribbean. A few years later, she worked with Métis author Maria Campbell to create a play, entitled Jessica (1986), based on Campbell’s life story. The play, which, accompanied by Griffiths and Campbell’s charged arguments about White-Aboriginal appropriation, was subsequently published as The Book of Jessica (1997), explores connections between Aboriginal spirituality and feminist social issues. A loose parallel is seen in the progress of John Gray, who offered nationalist satire with Billy Bishop Goes to War (1978), his one-actor-plus-accompanist play about the legendary Canadian World War I pilot

Canadian Drama and the Nationalist Impulse    379 that toured across Canada for years; then he examined the identity crisis facing Nova Scotians of his generation in the nostalgic musical Rock and Roll (1981); and though, as Martin Knelman noted (qtd.in Bessai 208), Gray’s attempt to return to nationalism in Don Messer’s Jubilee (1985), his play about the legendary East Coast fiddler, rang hollow as nationalism per se, it made a powerful case for the vitality of regional culture. The point is also evident in the different sorts of collective creations that emerged in the 1980s, such as This Is for You, Anna (1984), an important feminist work created by six women for Nightwood Theatre on the theme of violence against women. This was also a time in which the prolific Sky Gilbert enjoyed great success at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre with a series of gay-themed plays, the best known of which are probably (because of their anthologization) Lola Starr Builds Her Dream House (1989) and Drag Queens on Trial (1994). As the decade came to a close, another form of particularism emerged in the form of the first of a series of critically acclaimed plays by First Nations playwrights treating issues faced by Indigenous communities, such as Tomson Highway’s The Rez Sisters (1986) and Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing (1989) and Daniel David Moses’s Coyote City (1988) and Almighty Voice and His Wife (1991). Of course, Aboriginal subjects had been seen on the Canadian stage before this time (Ryga’s The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, mentioned earlier, is the salient example), but the achievement of these new plays—a broadly comic and yet deeply humane approach from Highway, and a richly poetic approach from Moses—demonstrated that a new era was beginning, in which Canadian First Nations writers would claim the theatre as their own. The founding of theatre companies such as De-ba-jeh-mu-jig, on Manitoulin Island, and Native Earth Performing Arts, in Toronto, consolidated this important development. Naturally, such a broad analysis as this does not allow for all the numerous exceptions to the generalized narrative, and it must be acknowledged that my selection of examples is at least somewhat tendentious in support of my argument. Nevertheless, the trend I have described is clearly evident in many of the plays written in Canada in the 1960s through the 1980s. The question of what has happened to the idea of nationalism in Canadian drama since 1990, however, becomes more difficult to answer, mainly because it is no longer seen as being of such crucial importance. A good example is the relationship of Michael Healey’s hugely popular play, The Drawer Boy (1999), to one of the classics of nationalist collective creation, The Farm Show (1972), the final version of which was written by Ted Johns with Paul Thompson. In the 1970s, the actors in The Farm Show lived with and interviewed the residents of a rural farming community, with the intention of turning these “real” Canadians’ lives into drama. In The Drawer Boy, Healey traces the experience of one actor, Miles Potter, and the two brothers with whom he is billeted as the play is developed, gently suggesting that there was something inherently naïve, however charming, about such attempts to wed nationalism and drama in Canada: the enterprise had come to be seen as sweet, guileless, and somewhat immature. In hindsight, it is clear that even as Canada was struggling to articulate its sense of national identity in time for the 1967 centennial celebrations, Canadians were moving

380   Literary Periods and Genres into a world that was increasingly postnational. I say “in hindsight,” but interestingly, it was in that very year that the word “postnational” was (apparently) coined by Northrop Frye, in the Whidden Lectures at McMaster University (published as The Modern Century). Instead of striving to define the Canadian nation, as he might have been expected to do given the centennial, he chose instead to critique some of the most cherished ideas of “nation,” including the idea that Canada would grow out of its colonial state and into a mature nation, much like an individual growing up. As Frye puts it, It is widely believed, or assumed, that Canada’s destiny, culturally and historically, finds its fulfillment in being a nation, and that nationality is essential to identity. It seems to me, on the other hand, quite clear that we are moving towards a post-national world, and that Canada has moved further in that direction than most of the smaller nations. What is important about the last century in this country is not that we have been a nation for a hundred years, but that we have had a hundred years in which to make the transition from a pre-national consciousness to a post-national consciousness. (7–8)

Since then, there have been many critics—such as Benedict Anderson, Homi Bhabha, Partha Chatterjee, Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm—who have, in various ways, demonstrated the futility of pursuing the Enlightenment-based idea of national identity. The declaration of the Canadian critic Frank Davey, that Canada is “a post-national state—a state invisible to its own citizens, indistinguishable from its fellows, maintained by invisible political forces, and significant mainly through its position within the grid of world-class postcard cities” (266), might have once caused consternation; now the sentiment is seemingly so widely shared as to meet little resistance. At any rate, in Canadian plays of the last two decades, the idea of nationalism is seldom foregrounded, except by way of noting the complications inherent in its pursuit. For example, in Marianne Ackerman’s L’Affaire Tartuffe; or, the Garrison Officers Rehearse Molière (1993), a bilingual play, the point is made that the idea of Canada being composed of two monolithic founding cultures is clearly not only false, but barren of hope. The growth of the conviction that any discussion of “Canadian identity” must involve recognition of its multicultural sources is one of the most fundamental changes in the outlook of playwrights since the mid-twentieth century. Judith Thompson, one of the most celebrated Canadian playwrights of the last three decades, came as close to the traditional appearance of a Canadian “nationalist” play as she ever has with Sled (1997), in that she made some use of the trope of characters’ self-realization through their encounter with northern wilderness. But in this play we have come a long way from the optimistic representations of mystical purity and authenticity such as Voaden might have offered (not to mention the naturalist representations of environmental tyranny seen in Denison). Thompson shows us a violent confrontation between feral human nature and complex urbanity that is deeply unsettling, and the action of the play seems to imply that the closest we have ever come to managing these forces competently was through First Nations cultures that are nearly wholly lost to us.9

Canadian Drama and the Nationalist Impulse    381 Arguably, the extent to which Sled is specifically Canadian lies in its use of Canada as the quintessential postnational state. Certainly, in most of Thompson’s work, she shows more interest in psychology and class than in nationalism: in early plays such as The Crackwalker (1980), White Biting Dog (1984), I Am Yours (1987), and Lion in the Streets (1991), her choice of settings is more cultural than geographical, so that even when she has used a specifically Canadian setting, her interest lies in exploring the psychological dimensions of experiences common to most of modernity; in more recent plays, such as Palace of the End (2008), Such Creatures (2010), and The Thrill (2013), Thompson writes as a citizen of the world, setting her plays in any location appropriate to the topic that has compelled her attention. This idea of the Canadian playwright as international citizen has become ever more predominant in Canadian drama over the last two decades. When John Mighton’s Scientific Americans (1988), a drama about the ethical quandaries faced by scientists, which is set in Los Alamos, and A Short History of Night (1989), about the struggle of astronomer Johannes Kepler to have his ideas emerge from a world awash in ignorance, superstition, and chaos, were first produced, Mighton stood out a little from his fellow Canadian playwrights, who were mainly cleaving to Canadian topics. Since then the environment has greatly changed. A playwright such as Linda Griffiths, who once focused closely on Canadian topics, now chose to write of Wallis Simpson in The Duchess (1998), and to adapt the English novelist George Gissing’s The Odd Women in The Age of Arousal (2007). Similarly, while some of Daniel MacIvor’s plays, such as Never Swim Alone (1991) or Marion Bridge (1998), and some of Morris Panych’s plays, such as The Girl in the Goldfish Bowl (2002) and What Lies Before Us (2006), have specifically Canadian settings, these are the exceptions: most of their work could be taking place in any modern city. Panych is chiefly interested in the comic potential of the paradoxes and contradictions that human beings encounter in their efforts to accommodate themselves to modernity. MacIvor has often used his actor’s gift for mimicry to capture the dark truths that characters of many sorts reveal about themselves in the idiosyncratic “music” of their speech. More recently, MacIvor has written about the last days of Tennessee Williams in His Greatness (2011) and about sex and love in Japanese underground nightclubs in Arigato, Tokyo (2013). It is a good measure of how far Canadian drama has moved from the obsession with national identity that such topics are no longer regarded as “foreign,” but as “international,” as belonging to the legitimate intellectual and cultural heritage of any modern person. The list of Canadian plays from the last two decades that similarly have focused on an “international” topic is extensive, including important works such as Colleen Wagner’s The Monument (1993), Djanet Sears’s Harlem Duet (1997), Jason Sherman’s Reading Hebron (1995) and It’s All True (1999), David Young’s Inexpressible Island (1997), Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Belle Moral (2004), Sonja Mills’s The Danish Play (2004), Michael Redhill’s Goodness (2005), Hannah Moscovitch’s East of Berlin (2007), Stephen Massicotte’s The Clockmaker (2010), and David Yee’s Carried Away on the Crest of a Wave (2013). The point is best exemplified by the work of perhaps the most famous Canadian theatre artist, Robert Lepage, who moves effortlessly between French

382   Literary Periods and Genres and English productions of his work, and has created plays set in locations as diverse as Japan (Seven Streams of the River Ota, 2005, and Blue Dragon, 2009), Venice (Tectonic Plates, 1988–90), and Las Vegas (Playing Cards 1:  Spades, 2012), and whose characters have embraced international personalities such as Jean Cocteau and Miles Davis (Needles and Opium, 1990), Frank Lloyd Wright and Georgi Gurdjeff (The Geometry of Miracles, 1998), and Hans Christian Andersen (The Andersen Project, 2005). Canadians are still writing plenty of plays set in Canada, but there is no longer a sense of imperative attached to either geography or nation. Instead, the interest has turned from the relationship between the individual and the imagined nation toward another set of issues, at the heart of which lies the question of how contemporary culture, conceived as it now is on a global scale, is rapidly redefining what it means to be human. So far in the twenty-first century, when a major Canadian playwright looks more narrowly at the topic of Canadian nationalism, the effect is most often a satiric attack on the cynical political manipulation that lies behind the ideas of nation. A good example is Michael Healey’s play Plan B (2002), in which the strategies unfolding in the face of Quebec’s imminent separation from Canada are no more than a series of cynical public relations ploys. And lest anyone should suppose that Healey was suggesting that such cynicism arose only in response to political crisis, more recently he offered Proud (2012), which shows the prime minister ruthlessly taking advantage of a massive Parliamentary majority to cynically manipulate matters toward only one end: the downsizing of government. In short, so far as its appearance in recent Canadian drama goes, nationalism is viewed as a distraction from real issues. Indeed, in 2012, even as the Prime Minister’s Office was attempting to polish up its short television commercial celebrating Canadian heroism in the War of 1812, in several theatres audiences could see a play in which a character declared that war to be “the same as all wars—ugly and stupid” (Crew). This was Michael Hollingsworth’s History of the Village of Small Huts series: The War of 1812, a savagely funny and compelling attack on the exploitation of the common people by the politicians of two centuries ago, whose ruthless pursuit of political ends is shown to be abetted by their cynical appeals to national pride.

Notes 1. The “Harper Government” is the name by which the “Government of Canada” was officially known after a rebranding directive was sent out from the Prime Minister’s Office in early 2011 (see Cheadle). The Privy Council Office is reported to have had lengthy email exchanges with the advertising agency responsible for the television commercial, requesting changes in matters as small as the colour and cut of the costume for Laura Secord and the suggestion of wind in the sails of ships in the background (see Chase and LeBlanc). 2. Note that in many cases the dates of composition and production that I provide for individual plays in the text of this chapter differ from the dates of the published versions listed in the Works Cited. This is because published play texts tend to appear some years after the first production.

Canadian Drama and the Nationalist Impulse    383 3. In speaking of the “angst and disaffection” of Expressionist drama, I am thinking mainly of the period of German Expressionism proper (1912–29) which inspired Voaden rather than speaking more loosely of Expressionist aesthetic tendencies. For an excellent brief discussion of the sources of this “negative reaction” see Michael Patterson (49). 4. That Voaden was an energetic and ambitious cultural nationalist is not in doubt, but for those who find the mention of Nietzschean ideas in conjunction with nationalism in the 1930s uncomfortably redolent of National Socialism, it is perhaps worth mentioning that Voaden’s work seems to have been completely free of any racist or fascist overtones. 5. Revealingly, the accusation made by Gratien Gélinas, in his milestone production of 1948, Tit-Coq, is not of philistinism, but pharisaism. This difference between the two plays is echoed by the respective complaints about the English- and French-Canadian cultures for the next two decades or more. 6. A third possibility, in which productions from various regions would gather in a festival, was not much discussed at the time, but this became the recipe for the highly successful Magnetic North Festival that now has been running since 2003. 7. Not only was The Ecstasy of Rita Joe commissioned as the centennial play for the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre in 1967, it was remounted in 1969 to open the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. 8. The phrase “the plastic expression of poetry” was coined by Jean Cocteau in his Preface to Les mariés de la tour Eiffel (14). 9. Early drafts of Sled had included a scene known as “the barbecue dream scene,” which, Thompson declared, “is the politics of the play. In a sense it is the springboard of the play for me intellectually” (Fletcher 39). The scene depicts a nightmare in which a friendly multicultural gathering in the city degenerates into violence as the characters revert to ancient tribal allegiances and mutual hostility.

Works Cited Ackerman, Marianne. L’Affaire Tartuffe; or, the Garrison Officers Rehearse Molière. Montreal: Signature Editions, 1993. Print. Bessai, Diane. The Canadian Dramatist, Vol. 2:  The Playwrights of Collective Creation. Toronto: Simon and Pierre, 1992. Print. Centennial Commission. Bulletin No. 22. Ottawa. 2 December 1966. n. pag. Print. ———. Progress Report on Projects of National Significance. Ottawa. 1 Feb 1966. n. pag. Print. Chase, Stephen, and Daniel LeBlanc. “ ‘Little-known war’ of 1812 a big deal for Ottawa.” Globe and Mail, 27 Apr. 2013. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/little-known-warof-1812-a-big-deal-for-ottawa/article11588326/. Web. Accessed 10 May 2013. Cheadle, Bruce. “Tories Re-brand Government in Stephen Harper’s Name.” Globe and Mail 3 Mar. 2011. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/tories-re-brandgovernment-in-stephen-harpers-name/article569222/. Web. Accessed 10 May 2013. Cocking, George. The Conquest of Canada; or, the Siege of Quebec. Baltimore, MD: Hodge and Schober, 1772. Print. Cocteau, Jean. Les mariés de la tour Eiffel. Oeuvres complètes, Vol. 7. Geneva:  Editions Marguerat, 1948. Print.

384   Literary Periods and Genres Crew, Robert. “The War of 1812: Rollicking, Radical Retelling of Canada’s History.” Toronto Star, 11 July 2012. http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/stage/2012/07/11/the_war_of_1812_rollicking_radical_retelling_of_canadas_history.html. Web. Accessed 10 May 2013. Curzon, Sarah Jane. Laura Secord: The Heroine of 1812. Canada’s Lost Plays, Vol. 2: Women Pioneers. Ed. Anton Wagner. Toronto: CTR Publications, 1979. Print. Davey, Frank. Post-National Arguments: The Politics of the Anglophone-Canadian Novel since 1967. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1993. Print. Davies, Robertson. Fortune, My Foe and Eros at Breakfast. Toronto: Dundurn, 1993. Print. Davies, Robertson, et al. The Centennial Play. [Ottawa]: Centennial Commission, [1966]. Print. Denison, Merrill. Marsh Hay. Toronto: Simon and Pierre, 1974. Print. ———. “Nationalism and Drama.” 1929. Canadian Theatre History: Selected Readings. Ed. Don Rubin. Toronto: Playwrights Canada, 1996. 88–91. Print. ———. The Unheroic North. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1923. Print. Druker, Julia. “The Big Three Who Shaped Bon Echo Park.” Frontenac News, 28 Feb. 2013. http://www.frontenacnews.ca/2013/13-08_feb_28/bon_echo_13-08.html. Web. Accessed 10 May 2013. Filewod, Alan. Performing Canada: The Nation Enacted in the Imagined Theatre. Ed. James Hoffman and Katherine Sutherland. Kamloops:  U College of the Cariboo, 2002. Print. Textual Studies in Canada 15. Fletcher, Jennifer. “The Last Things in Sled: An Interview with Judith Thompson.” Canadian Theatre Review 89 (Winter 1996): 39–41. Print. Frye, Northrop. The Modern Century. 1967. Northrop Frye on Modern Culture. Ed. Jan Gorak. Vol. 11 of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2003. 3–70. Print. Gilbert, Sky. Drag Queens on Trial. Modern Canadian Plays, Vol. 1. 4th ed. Ed. Jerry Wasserman. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2001. Print. ———. Lola Starr Builds Her Dream Home. The CTR Anthology: Fifteen Plays from Canadian Theatre Review. Ed. Alan Filewod. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1993. Print. Gray, John, with Eric Peterson. Billy Bishop Goes to War. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1981. Print. Griffiths, Linda. Sheer Nerve: Seven Plays. Toronto: Playwrights Canada, 2003. Print. ———, and Maria Campbell. The Book of Jessica:  A  Theatrical Transformation. Toronto: Playwrights Canada, 1997. Print. ———, with Paul Thompson. Maggie and Pierre: A Fantasy of Love, Politics, and the Media. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1980. Print. Healey, Michael. The Drawer Boy. Toronto: Playwrights Canada, 1999. Print. ———. Plan B. Toronto: Playwrights Canada, 2002. Print. ———. Proud. Toronto: Playwrights Canada, 2013. Print. Herbert, John. Fortune and Men’s Eyes. New York: Grove, 1968. Print. Highway, Tomson. Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing. Saskatoon: Fifth House, 2010. Print. ———. The Rez Sisters. Saskatoon: Fifth House, 1992. Print. Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds. The Invention of Tradition. 1983. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992. Print. Johns, Ted, and Paul Thompson. The Farm Show. Toronto: Coach House, 1998. Print. Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of Narcissism:  American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. New York: Norton, 1979. Print. Lee, Betty. Love and Whiskey: The Story of the Dominion Drama Festival. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1973. Print.

Canadian Drama and the Nationalist Impulse    385 Litt, Paul. The Muses, the Masses and the Massey Commission. Toronto:  U of Toronto P, 1992. Print. Mair, Charles. Dreamland and Other Poems and Tecumseh: A Drama. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1974. Print. McKenzie, Ruth. “Planning for the Centennial.” Citizen [Canadian Citizenship Branch, Canada Department of the Secretary of State] 9.4 (4 Oct. 1963): 5–9. Print. Mighton, John. Scientific Americans. Toronto: Playwrights Canada, 1990. Print. ———. A Short History of Night. Toronto: Playwrights Canada, 1998. Print. Moses, Daniel David. Almighty Voice and His Wife. Toronto: Playwrights Canada, 2009. Print. ———. Coyote City. Toronto: Playwrights Canada, 1988. Print. Palmer, John. Henrik Ibsen on the Necessity of Producing Norwegian Drama. The CTR Anthology: Fifteen Plays from Canadian Theatre Review. Ed. Alan Filewod. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1993. Print. Patterson, Michael. The Revolution in German Theatre: 1900–1933. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981. Print. Pollock, Sharon. The Komagata Maru Incident. Toronto: Playwrights Canada, 1978. Print. ———. Walsh. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1976. Print. Reaney, James. The Donnellys: Sticks and Stones; The St. Nicholas Hotel; Handcuffs. Ed. James Noonan. Vancouver: Beach Holme, 2000. Print. Report of the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences. Ottawa: King’s Printer, 1951. Library and Archives of Canada. http://www.collectionscanada. gc.ca/2/5/h5-430-e.html. Web. Accessed 3 Dec. 2013. Ryga, George. The Ecstasy of Rita Joe. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1970. Print. Salutin, Rick, and Theatre Passe Muraille. 1837: The Farmer’s Revolt: A Play. Toronto: Lorimer, 1976. Print. Thompson, Judith. Sled: A Play. Toronto: Playwrights Canada, 1997. Print. Tremblay, Michel. Les Belles Soeurs. Trans. John Van Burek and Bill Glassco. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1992. Print. Voaden, Herman. “Creed for a New Theatre:  ‘Symphonic Expressionism,’ a Composite Blending of All Theatrical Arts, Explained in Detail as a Possible Stage Method for the Future.” The Globe [Toronto] 17 Dec. 1932: 5. Print. Walker, Craig Stewart. The Buried Astrolabe:  Canadian Dramatic Imagination and Western Tradition. Kingston: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2001. Print. Walker, George F. Beyond Mozambique, Bagdad Saloon and Ramona and the White Slaves: Three Plays. Toronto: Coach House, 1978. Print. Wallace, Robert. Producing Marginality:  Theatre and Criticism in Canada. Saskatoon:  Fifth House, 1990. Print. Wasserman, Jerry. Spectacle of Empire:  Marc Lescarbot’s Theatre of Neptune in New France. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2006. Print. Winter, Jack. My TWP Plays: A Collection Including Ten Lost Years. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2013. Print.

Chapter 21

T he Stratford Fe st i va l an d Canadia n C u lt u ra l Nationa l i sm Ian Rae

Ever since the Stratford Festival (SF) opened in 1953 with a performance of Shakespeare’s Richard III, cultural nationalists of different varieties have praised it as a centre of theatrical excellence or have condemned it as a bastion of imperial indulgence. The SF, originally the Stratford Shakespearean Festival of Canada, led the revival of anglophone theatre in Canada after World War II, at a time when professional acting companies and theatres had been decimated by the effects of the Great Depression and the war effort (Davies, Thirty n. pag.). The SF grew from a tent in a riverside park to become the largest classical theatre company in North America, and it now draws half a million visitors annually to its four stages by offering a program of canonical European and American works, complemented by Canadian plays in its smaller venues. However, the fact that a theatre company dedicated principally to Shakespeare receives large subsidies from Canadian taxpayers while commanding the talent of some of the country’s top actors and directors—or, worse, importing that talent—is endlessly controversial. Debates rage in dramatic and academic circles over the question of whether the SF has been an aid or an impediment to the development of Canadian theatre and cultural sovereignty. In theatre criticism, the SF figures as the primary site of contest between pre-centennial nationalisms (variants of nineteenth-century British imperialism and twentieth-century Liberal biculturalism) preoccupied with the preservation of cultural ties to Europe and a centennial nationalism that rejects this focus on European high culture in favour of “theorizings of cultural production as home-grown, ground-up activity less interested in civilizing the masses than in cultural and physical geography and local forms of work and social activity” (Knowles, “Othello” 372). However, the rejection of the SF by “localist” critics became such a habitual gesture of nationalism after Canada’s centennial celebrations in 1967 that most critics now ignore local histories of the social and political phenomena that generated the SF, preferring

The Stratford Festival and Canadian Cultural Nationalism    387 instead to interpret the SF as a product of the quest for a national theatre (Filewod, “National”; Groome; Salter, “Idea”). This chapter uses local histories and archival documents to identify the local antecedents of the SF, to reconsider the factors conventionally used to explain the SF’s emergence, and to reconfigure the relation of the local to the national in criticism of the SF by highlighting the cultural productions that have grown around it. Rather than accept the critically rehearsed story of the SF’s origin as the anomalous product of founder Tom Patterson’s quest to save his hometown from industrial decline and cultural oblivion—a myth of the “Stratford Miracle” fostered by Patterson through his memoir First Stage:  The Making of the Stratford Festival (1987, reprinted 1999) but contradicted by the evidence of local histories from Adelaide Leitch, Barbara Reid and Thelma Morrison, and Carolynn Bart-Riedstra and Lutzen Riedstra—this chapter shows how the SF grew out of a textual community dating back to 1832 with a strong commitment to theatrical and musical performance. In the process, this chapter challenges what J.A. Bumsted calls the “usual picture of Canada after World War II [which] shows a naive and complacent society that, with the aid of imported American ideas, suddenly questioned virtually all its values” in the centennial era (406), arguing instead that the localist turn in the cultural nationalism of the late 1960s and 1970s finds much of its impetus (both positive and negative) in struggles to combine local, national, and international influences in Stratford and at the SF. As Richard Knowles argues in his oft-cited essay, “From Nationalist to Multinational: The Stratford Festival, Free Trade, and the Discourses of Intercultural Tourism,” the SF “has served throughout its history as a site for recurring disputes about Canadian nationhood, theatrical and otherwise” (20). In the 1950s, the SF’s power to attract international actors, critics, and patrons prompted influential theatre critics to cheer its success as proof that Canada claimed full participation in an international cultural market (Stuart, “Stratford” 175), a feat akin to Canada’s postwar membership in transnational organizations such as the United Nations (1945) and NATO (1949). Hence Herbert Whittaker of the Globe and Mail argues that “nationalism was more responsible for the success of the Stratford Shakespearean Festival than any other factor,” even though, for Whittaker, this nationalism preceded a clear understanding of the nation’s defining characteristics (xxiii). The SF—and subsequently its touring company and training programs—was generally celebrated in the 1950s as a bold response to the call of the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences (1949–1951) to create an arts infrastructure commensurate with Canada’s postwar military and economic might (Morden 52–53; Massey and Lévesque 199). The ambition of a city of 19,000 citizens to create such a theatre, even if the enterprise lost money for “a year or three” (Reid and Morrison 40), convinced one of Britain’s foremost theatre directors, Tyrone Guthrie of the Old Vic, to accept the position of founding artistic director at the SF, bringing with him designer Tanya Moiseiwitsch and star actors Alec Guinness, Irene Worth, Douglas Campbell, and Michael Bates, the only non-Canadians in the 1953 company. The project also compelled Vincent Massey, co-chair of the Royal Commission and by 1952 the governor general of Canada, to donate money, serve on the board, and lay the cornerstone of the permanent Festival Theatre in 1957, which a

388   Literary Periods and Genres year later won the Massey Gold Medal for architecture. Other economic élites, such as the Eatons, Chalmers, Labatts, Iveys, and Meighans, followed Massey’s lead by contributing financial support to the burgeoning enterprise, which made the SF a de rigueur component of a privileged social circuit. Reaction to this élite patronage has produced a strain of criticism that interprets the SF as the twentieth-century home of the Family Compact, the Tory oligarchy who dominated economic, political, and judicial affairs in nineteenth-century Ontario and who actively promoted the study of Shakespeare (Fischlin 17). Knowles, for example, argues that the SF represents “the solidification of a delayed colonial celebration of a nineteenth-century brand of Canadian nationalism configured on an imperialist British model (one that allows Canada’s national theatre to be dedicated to the plays of the canonical British writer)” (“Nationalist” 20). For anglophones in the mid-nineteenth century, there was “no inconsistency between the promotion of a sense of Canadian unity and a larger British Empire” (Bumsted 304) because English-Canadian nationalism served to resist the military and cultural annexation of British North America by the United States. Through Confederation to World War I, the Conservative Party, ostensibly the standard-bearer of British tradition, also dominated the nationalist ticket in English-Canadian politics. For most critics, Massey embodied this culturally conservative amalgam of Canadian nationalism and British imperialism in his “various roles as founder and mentor of Hart House Theatre at the University of Toronto, as editor of anthologies of Canadian plays and author of critical articles about them, as organizer of the Dominion Drama Festival, as chair of the Royal Commission that bore his name, and as Governor General and silent patron of the Stratford Festival” (Filewod, Committing 62). Yet it is important to balance the portrait of Massey’s anglophilia (62) with the fact that Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent selected him as co-chair of the Royal Commission because, as a former Liberal cabinet minister, “his insistence that Canadian nationhood proceeded from the historical marriage of two founding cultures reflected the ideology of the Liberal party” (Filewod, “Between” 8), an ideology more recently subjected to feminist critique and theatrical parody (MacKay). Both Massey and the SF advocated bilingualism and internationalization as a counterfoil to American hegemony in the Cold War era of mass media and US military supremacy. Hence, alongside the Shakespeare performances on the SF’s main stage, the 1958 season at the Avon Theatre included “The Beggar’s Opera; The Festival Singers of Toronto; The New York Pro Musica; Little Carib Dancers, Trinidad; Folk music and Jazz concerts; Marcel Marceau; Le Malade imaginaire with Le Théâtre du Nouveau Monde; [and Canada’s first] International Film Festival” (“Facts” n. pag.). The Liberals’ postwar ethos also helped the founding director of Le Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, Jean Gascon, to become co-director of the SF in 1968 (with Manitoba’s John Hirsch) and the first Canadian-born artistic director of the SF from 1970 to 1974. By 1968, the SF company was “the only Canadian performing arts group with a genuine international reputation” (Cohen 260), which led to Gascon’s controversial idea of partnering the SF with the National Arts Centre to make Ottawa the winter home of the SF and to perform plays in the winter of 1969–70 under the name of the Stratford National

The Stratford Festival and Canadian Cultural Nationalism    389 Theatre of Canada. However, Filewod notes that this short-lived name change prompted even “critics abroad to ask why Canada’s national theatre was devoted to the canon of a foreign country” (“National” 430), and throughout the 1970s a firestorm of domestic criticism would engulf the SF’s activities (Knelman). Although The Stratford Festival Story, 1953–1962 and other early accounts emphasize that the SF was “always first and foremost a community enterprise” (12), its suitability as a potential, de facto, or titular national theatre came to dominate critical discussion of it. Massey highlights this shift in a speech he delivered at the founding of the permanent theatre, which appears as the foreword to The Stratford Festival: 1953–1957: “We are marking a great moment in the story of an enterprise which began as a local effort with unbelievable ambitions. We now see it as a national achievement winning incredible success” (Massey vii). An essay by Whittaker in this book concludes with the pronouncement that in the SF’s permanent theatre “Canada had found a National Theatre” (xxix). This dream of a national theatre had fired the imaginations of English Canadians since the 1890s (Filewod, “National” 425), but a logic peculiar to the post–World War II era conferred the title on the SF, as Margaret Groome observes: “The postwar concern that Canada should quickly develop an internationally recognized national culture implied a pre-disposition to the inverse—that any Canadian cultural institution receiving international attention would immediately be acknowledged as a national icon” (108). For centennial nationalists, this logic was doubly colonial: it invested a huge portion of the country’s creative labour and capital in the replication of the colonizer’s culture, and it took as the measure of its success foreign, instead of domestic, standards of cultural excellence. In the decade following Expo ’67, an alternative theatre movement exploded across Canada that combined the countercultural aesthetics of the 1960s with a “conscious opposition to the concept of a Canadian national theatre situated at Stratford and specializing in Shakespearean performances” (Usmiani 153). The rallying cry for the alternative movement was “localism,” a concept variously defined but consistent in its opposition to the SF’s treatment of Shakespeare as a timeless and universal genius. For Knowles, localism (a term applicable to both new plays and adaptations of classics) is best understood in Loren Kruger’s terms as resisting “the dual authority of the centralized state and metropolitan high culture” by embracing the American model of cultivating “regional politics and local culture” through “federated theatres whose national standing might no longer exclusively depend on the mass presence of the national audience in one place, but which might include a national federation of local audiences” (Kruger 5; qtd. in Knowles, “Nationalist” 20). This theory offers a model of republican postcolonialism, but it suffers from the importation of yet another set of foreign standards for the determination of value. To avoid this Americanization, Renate Usmiani interprets the alternative theatre movement as part of an international avant-garde that replaces the classical models of Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Molière with the revolutionary theatre practices of Brecht, Artaud, and collective creation (2). Robert Wallace avoids these territorial conflicts altogether by shifting the focus of postcolonial critique away from issues of national character and toward those of gender and sexuality, in the

390   Literary Periods and Genres process defining localism as part of a “particularist” methodology that examines the “ways in which theatre both responds to and affects cultural and political imperatives in communities” (Producing 29). In a similar vein, Belliveau, Weale, and Lea praise the alternative theatre movement for its incorporation of social activists who treat theatre as “a form of communication more conducive to localized social organization than the mass media of film and television” (Belliveau, Weale, and Lea 70). Engagement with a community, then, has largely replaced the definition of national character as the governing criterion of Canadian theatre criticism (Nothof). Yet theatre critics generally do not consider the SF a community theatre in the localist sense (Filewod, “Between” 12), despite the legendary community effort behind its creation; despite the fact that the populace largely “saw [it] as an extension of its own cultural tradition” (Leitch 220); despite the SF’s vital contribution to the local and regional economies (Mitchell); despite its central place in the city’s thriving arts community (Polèse); despite the new “sense of community and participation” Guthrie had hoped to achieve with the actor-audience relations of the SF’s unique thrust stage design (Falocco 11); and despite the fact that the city and the SF are virtually synonymous in theatre criticism. For Filewod, the SF does not count as an engaged community theatre because its actors do not necessarily use local accents, and most of its plays do not reflect the material culture and consciousness of the local audience. However, Filewod’s long-standing project of tracing the roots of authentic Canadian theatre to the class struggles of the radical left in the 1930s compels him to reprove the “alternative orthodoxy” of Canadian theatre (“Erasing”) for its self-serving narrative of nationalist becoming in the centennial period, which arose in part to compete with established theatres for Canada Council funding (Wallace, “Theatre” 40). “The conventional narrative,” Filewod argues, “grounds the discipline of theatre studies in Canada in a periodization myth of a radical thirties, a war-torn forties, a postcolonial sixties, and, in between, an empty, provisional, pre-national, and ideologically hostile fifties” (Committing 151). Ironically, Filewod, an outspoken critic of the SF, opens up a critical space for reconsidering its local and nationalist dimensions by arguing that “[t]‌he actual theatre culture of the 1950s … was not anything like that well-established myth. It was, instead, marked by diversity, plurality, activism, and fierce cultural nationalism” (150), a point explored further in Susan McNicoll’s The Opening Act:  Canadian Theatre History, 1945–1953. I  will pursue this reconsideration of the 1950s and its legacy in Stratford by highlighting the contributions of Stratford’s local cultural productions to the arts in Canada and by showing how these works arise from a textual community of ever-expanding complexity, of which the SF is a crucial part. Scholars use the term “textual community” to examine “the shaping role of culture and the contributions of literature in particular to political and power relationships and community formation” (Sauer 4). The concept has most often been used to illuminate the crucial place of texts in cultures transitioning from oral to print biases in communication. For example, Nicholas Howe uses the term to analyze the “cultural construction of reading” in Anglo-Saxon England, while Brian Stock, who defined the concept, uses it to explore the uses of radical interpretations among heretical Christian

The Stratford Festival and Canadian Cultural Nationalism    391 sects in medieval Europe (Implications; “Medieval”; see also Minton). Comparatively less critical work has been done on textual communities in English Canada (Fuller), although the concept illuminates the contradictions of a settler-invader culture that, from the eighteenth century onward, balances the pragmatic imperatives of a pioneer society—which often views reading as idle and theatrical performance as immoral (Eggleston; Granville-Barker 116)—and the loyalist desire to preserve European culture as a means of distinguishing British from American territory. The textual community of Stratford, Ontario, thus owes much to the garrison societies of British North America in the eighteenth century, where amateur productions of Shakespeare were a staple (Nothof 403), and the broader use of Shakespeare throughout the nineteenth century served as “a bulwark against the commercialization of American culture” (Vance 79). However, Stratford distinguishes itself by the way it has extended Shakespearean references across the lived space of the city, thereby blurring the boundary between text and “everyday life” in the manner that Stock says is characteristic of textual communities (Listening 13). According to Stock, an “important consequence of literacy in any human community arises from the area of social organization” (Implications 88) in which textual precedents are used “to structure the internal behaviour of the groups’ members and to provide solidarity against the outside world” (90). Although Stock focuses on the treatment of sacred texts by religious communities, his concept adapts easily to the uses of Shakespeare in the Victorian period, when he became a demigod in a British cult of genius. As Julia Thomas demonstrates in Shakespeare’s Shrine: The Bard’s Birthplace and the Invention of Stratford-Upon-Avon, a birthplace cult had emerged in the United Kingdom as early as 1759 that sent wealthy and educated admirers of the bard to his neglected birthplace in Stratford-Upon-Avon. This cult grew exponentially in the nineteenth century because of the rapid growth of literacy and railway travel among the middle and upper classes (Thomas 17). Bardolatry was also exported to Britain’s settler colonies, such as Canada, where educational systems enforced his position at the top of a hierarchy of cultural value (Makaryk 17). Thus in 1832, when a director of the Canada Company presented a portrait of Shakespeare to the lone innkeeper in a crossroads called Little Thames, the gesture was one of reverence and political solidarity. In the newly purchased Huron Tract, a former Chippewa and Huron territory close to the American border, the Canada Company aimed to restrict immigration to United Empire Loyalists and emigrants from the United Kingdom or nations with close ties to it, such as Germany (Bart-Riedstra and Riedstra 20). The Shakespeare portrait signified British imperial presence but also functioned as an enticement for cultural reproduction, since in pioneer society “most early theatres were extensions of drinking parlours with the stage usually upstairs” (Makaryk 10; Edwards 19). The local settlers quickly elaborated upon the symbolic import of the portrait: the inn became the Shakespeare Inn; the village became Stratford; the river became the Avon; the streets, wards, and schools of the village took their name from Shakespeare’s plays; and neighbouring villages, such as Shakespeare (formerly Bell’s Corners) and Gad’s Hill (the home of Falstaff in Henry IV), got into the act. Over the next century, Stratford’s citizens multiplied Shakespearean

392   Literary Periods and Genres signifiers through the city’s vast park system, especially in times of social crisis, such as the Great Depression. On one level, then, these developments fit Knowles’s model of cultural imperialism, in which the products of the imperial centre (London) extend into colonial space via élite agents (the Canada Company) who reshape the colonial margin (Little Thames) and the colonized imaginations of its subjects (e.g., the Irish innkeeper William Sargint). In Stock’s theory, however, there is a much more active and creative element to the community’s interiorization of the text. Textual communities, Stock says, supplant the universal message of sacred texts with local interpretations that establish a distinct identity for the group, and this interpretation becomes a road map to individual and group betterment. By spatializing Shakespearean references on maps and institutional buildings, Stratford’s citizens drew on the Victorian ethos of self-improvement, in which literacy and familiarity with high culture are vehicles of upward mobility, to facilitate colonial land claims by creating an aura of history to marginalize Aboriginal, French, and American claims to the region. In this method of identity formation, material and textual facts become confused, as Stock explains: “This approach to augmenting self-knowledge of course favoured the search after origins or first principles. … To be better was to be earlier and to be earlier was to find the ultimate precedent, which, not surprisingly, turned out to be a text” (Stock, “Medieval” 19). The search for first principles in Shakespeare’s texts would become a hallmark of cultural productions in Stratford, although these first principles would vary from British social Darwinism in the nineteenth century to Liberal internationalism in the mid-twentieth century. Arguably, the very idea of the SF represents an embattled city’s attempt to revisit its founding principles at a time of social crisis. In 1951, the Canadian National Railway (CNR) began phasing out Stratford’s steam-engine repair shops, the city’s largest employer, thereby putting an end to the city’s 65-year-old status as a railway hub. Patterson depicts the CNR news as the catalyst for him to realize his teenage dream, conceived near the Shakespearean Gardens “in the late 1930s” (25), to start a theatre festival in the same bandshell (the first of its kind in Canada) that housed the city’s successful music festival (est. 1927). This creation myth “made good copy,” as former SF publicity agent Barbara Reid recalls (53), but in historical fact the opening of the SF brought to fruition an idea that dates back at least to 1927, when the “Hon. Archibald Flower, former mayor of Stratford-upon-Avon, came on a fund-raising tour for the establishment of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in England, and urged Canadian Stratford also to embark ‘on something that would contribute to more frequent productions of Shakespeare’s plays.’ Nothing came of it—then” (Leitch 192). Again, “in 1934, the local paper carried a report of a dinner meeting of the local Rotary Club, at which J. Campbell McInnes, a visiting music adjudicator from Toronto, ‘suggested that Stratford should have a Summer Dramatic and Musical Festival, with the city’s park system as a setting’ ” (Monette 7). In the early 1950s, unbeknownst to Patterson, the Stratford Chamber of Commerce “was considering a Shakespearean play which might be performed for a week or ten days, perhaps using the local Little Theatre group as the nucleus of the company. Performances could be in the open air, in the bandshell, elsewhere along the

The Stratford Festival and Canadian Cultural Nationalism    393 river, or maybe in the Collegiate flats” (Leitch 195). Another scheme involved starting a drama school (Reid and Morrison 58) by capitalizing on the reputation of the city’s “Little Theatre, which, at its peak, had 1,700 subscribers, produced three plays a year, and became one of the most active in Southern Ontario” (Leitch 181). Yet another project involved “having Elizabethan-garbed troubadours play Shakespearean songs while walking about in Stratford’s parks” (Reid and Morrison 50). Thus Patterson’s gift to his hometown was not the idea of a Shakespeare festival, but rather his ambition for theatre on a “grander scale—a professional, high-quality, summer-long Festival, as good as that held in the city’s English namesake” (Leitch 195). Although some theatre critics scoff at the idea of a major theatre festival “in, of all places, Stratford, Ontario” (Salter, “Acting” 120), theatre and musical performance had thrived there in the nineteenth century:  “In 1857, when only a few more than 2,000 people lived in the village, they built a market building with a concert hall that could seat 500 of them. That was a quarter of the population—proportionately more than for the 1,500-seat Festival Theatre that would be built a century later in a city of 19,000, and draw its audience from a continent” (Leitch 180). Leitch notes that the town-hall performances functioned as a meeting place for different cultural communities in the Stratford area: “If the German settlers brought one outstanding thing into the life of the village, it was an early appreciation of theatre and music. In the German homeland, it was commonplace for every little village to have an impressive hall and stage. Many little communities of Upper Canada had their central halls and auditoriums too, but none produced them on so grand a scale as did Stratford. Nor did they use them so constantly and enthusiastically” (180). This neoclassical town hall, combined with the German and British esteem for European high culture, helps to explain why the newly minted city adopted the moniker “The Classic City” in 1885 (Bart-Riedstra and Riedstra 31), an epithet that endured until it was replaced by “The Festival City” after the founding of the SF, whose repertory mandate the old epithet helped to rationalize. There is also a direct connection between the Germanic population of Stratford, which in the nineteenth century supported two German-language newspapers (Leitch 284), and the SF’s second stage, the Avon Theatre. When fire destroyed Stratford’s first city hall in 1897, it was replaced by “a splendid municipal building” that “has few if any rivals in the entire province for what it is, a boldly ordered work of architecture in the romantic spirit of the late Victorian period, beautifully executed, as though it was always intended as the centre-piece of a famous festival city, which happily it now is” (Fairfield 275). Unfortunately, however, the new city hall only had auditorium seating for 335 in a city of 9,959 citizens, so Albert Brandenberger, the scion of a prominent musical family “who had backed many of the shows in the old hall, … determined that Stratford should still have its ‘opera house.’ He opened his 1,250-seat Theatre Albert January 1, 1901” (Leitch 181), on land near city hall that Brandenberger had purchased from Patterson’s grandmother (Fairfield 276). When the curtain—painted with a scene evoking the Swiss homeland of Brandenberger’s parents (“Theatre”)—rose at Theatre Albert, it showcased comedies and minstrel shows, reflecting the near monopoly of American agents and touring companies on the Canadian theatre circuit at the turn of the century (Filewod,

394   Literary Periods and Genres “National” 426). Thus, while professional Shakespeare persisted at Theatre Albert, the vaudeville of the American circuit predominated (“Facts” n. pag.). These shows were easily supplanted by the advent of cinema, and soon Theatre Albert became the Griffin, the Majestic, and then the Avon movie theatres. However, amateur groups continued to mount plays there for community fundraisers, and the theatre retained props and sets for these performances (“Sought”). From a local perspective, then, the return of live theatre to the Avon in 1956 is less a postwar anomaly than a reclamation of a cultural heritage embattled by American cultural imperialism. Still, neither Patterson, nor the local councils supporting his project, nor the general populace had any great familiarity with Shakespeare or professional theatre in 1952 (Reaney, “Stratford” 112–13), a fact that has compelled generations of critics to conclude that “Stratford had no tradition of live theatre” (Falocco 13). And for a textual community to thrive, according to Stock, it requires a charismatic figure whose interpretation of the sacred text guides and transforms local activity: “What was essential to a textual community[, Stock says,] was not a written version of a text, although that was sometimes present, but an individual, who, having mastered it, then utilized it for reforming a group’s thought and action. The text’s interpreter might … remain a charismatic figure in his own right, whose power to motivate groups derived from his oratory, gestures, and physical presence” (Stock, “Textual” 90). Stratford acquired this charismatic figure in Guthrie, who accepted the position in Stratford on the condition that the SF would perform Shakespeare on a thrust stage that “might reproduce the actor-audience relations for which he wrote” (qtd. in Patterson and Gould 64). The thrust stage was, in Stock’s terms, at once a “heretical” departure from the conventions of the proscenium stage that had dominated Western theatre for two centuries, and a partial return to the “first principles” of Elizabethan performance on a platform surrounded on three sides by the audience. Salter correctly notes, however, that the thrust stage designed by Moiseiwitsch is a hybrid space that employs Greco-Roman amphitheatre seating with a modernist building and lighting infrastructure, and it has yielded a mid-Atlantic performance style (“Acting” 121). Nonetheless, Moiseiwitsch’s design, which has been widely copied in the United States and the United Kingdom (Somerset xiv), helped to revive local interest in Shakespeare by facilitating the notion that authentic Shakespearean performance had shifted from England to Canada (Salter, “Acting” 121), a displacement fantasy that Guthrie encouraged (Pettigrew and Portman 14–15). By all critical accounts, however, Guthrie failed in his ambition to establish a style of Shakespearean performance that would strike audiences as distinctly Canadian yet still be grounded in classical training. No performance style has become standard nationwide and, even at the SF, C.E. McGee identified only four productions of Shakespeare in the twentieth century with distinctly Canadian settings or themes (McGee 155). Also, by 1969, the SF had such a poor record of mounting original Canadian works that playwrights John Palmer and Martin Kinch established the Canadian Place Theatre in Stratford “to stage Canadian plays by Canadian authors” (Edwardson 154), two years before Palmer, Kinch, and Tom Hendry founded the more celebrated Toronto

The Stratford Festival and Canadian Cultural Nationalism    395 Free Theatre for alternative Canadian productions. Though the Canadian Place Theatre proved insolvent, Ryan Edwardson argues that the SF “reacted to its theatrical rival—and the growing interest in domestic works—by establishing a ‘Third Stage’ [now the Tom Patterson Theatre] for Canadian and non-traditional performances” (155). Similar calls for more Canadian content in the 1990s led to the creation of a Studio Stage for Canadian and new productions in 2002. However, as the smallest of the SF’s four stages, it does little to appease nationalist critics. One might conclude from this mediocre record of staging original plays and distinctly Canadian adaptations of Shakespeare at the SF that Stratford’s cultural resources are simply vehicles for foreign productions (Makaryk 25). However, this common perception is flawed because it underestimates the abundant local productions of this textual community, which often connect to the SF in some way. In the interest of brevity, take the paradigmatic example of Stratford’s James Reaney, whose plays are a cornerstone of the alternative theatre movement. For example, Filewod underscores the historic importance of Reaney’s The Donnellys, a trilogy that debuted at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto in 1973, and he argues that this alternative theatre production evolved in contradistinction to the classical repertoire of the SF (“Introduction” 19). Ross Stuart makes an even bolder claim for Reaney when he argues that “[a]‌s far as most of our theatres are concerned, Canadian playwriting began with James Reaney or George Ryga” (“Theatre” 8; Parker 24). Knowles also credits Reaney and his peers with winning popular and critical acceptance of Canadian playwriting when he observes that 1967 “is often constructed as a turning point in the history of drama in Canada, the year in which George Ryga’s The Ecstasy of Rita Joe was produced at the ‘mainstream’ Vancouver Playhouse, John Herbert’s Fortune and Men’s Eyes ‘made it big’ in New York, and James Reaney’s Colours in the Dark premiered at the Avon Theatre in Stratford” (“Nationalist” 28). This emphasis on turning points overlooks the SF’s contributions to the process of Canadian playwriting through its workshop series, where Herbert honed Fortune and Men’s Eyes in 1965 and Reaney developed The Three Desks (1966), The Easter Egg (1970), and The Donnellys (1970). More importantly, the location of the third play in Knowles’s critical narrative should be noted because Colours in the Dark showcases how Reaney had made the area between Stratford and his family farm, three miles to the east of town, the primary focus of his art for 25 years prior to the centennial. Already in Reaney’s earliest publications from the 1940s, his short stories exhibit a clear focus on the Stratford area that Alvin Lee nicknames “Reaneyland” (155). Lee demonstrates that Reaney’s stories document Perth County customs, integrate small-town gossip, map urban and rural landscapes, and gradually transform the territory around Stratford into a “total imaginative construct” in the modernist fashion (155). However, Reaney’s story “The Box Social” caused a literary scandal in 1947 (Jackson) and thereafter he switched to poetry, a genre that won him a Governor General’s Award in 1949 for his first collection, The Red Heart. The short stories and the early poetry explore “a split between the romantic world of art, music, and poetry and the dreary environment of a cultural backwater” (Lee 17). For example, in a poem entitled “The Upper Canadian”

396   Literary Periods and Genres from The Red Heart, the speaker complains of the “cramped quality” (21) of life and mind in Perth County and laments: At night I’ll read The Collected Works of William Shakespeare By an empty stove And think at least there’s this Although I’ll never see it acted. (21)

The founding of the SF four years later would seem to fulfill this Upper Canadian’s wildest dreams, and, indeed, Reaney makes clear the influence of the SF on his early plays. In a memoir from 1978, Reaney responds to the question of why he began writing plays and launches into a long meditation on Shakespeare and the SF: The first years at [the] Stratford Festival showed me the playwright in a more influential way than ever before. … In the Alec Guinness-Tyrone Guthrie production, what one was thrilled by was the larger design around all the scores of metaphors. … The bare Stratford stage, of course, designed to create an emphasis on speech and actor [—] that helped one think of new techniques; the fluidity of a bare stage in which this author emphatically does not need to worry about a box set being changed every ten minutes—that impressed. (“Why” 144; see also Reaney, “Plays”)

Guthrie’s open stage, his fluid choreography, his love of ritual, and Shakespeare’s interlacing metaphors all became foundational to Reaney’s playwriting technique. In fact, Reaney professionalized his amateur dramatic activities in direct response to the SF. Mavor Moore notes that Reaney wrote his first full-length play, The Rules of Joy, for entry in a 1958 competition that rewarded the winner with workshops and performance at the SF. Reaney’s play did not win the competition but, rewritten as The Sun and the Moon, it was one of four works in the collection, The Killdeer and Other Plays, that won him a Governor General’s Award in 1962 (Moore 54). These plays highlight Reaney’s movement from poetry to verse drama, which persisted at the SF because of its Renaissance pedigree (Davies, Thirty n.  pag.), despite falling out of favour with the theatrical mainstream in North America (Filewod, “National” 425). Appropriately, Reaney’s first commissioned play was Colours in the Dark for the SF, a play that is essentially an anthology of Reaneyland poetry embellished with regional folklore. More crucially, the very idea of play—of word play, the play within the play, the city as stage, the nation as theatre—became the dominant trope for Reaney’s publications from the late 1950s onward, as Gerald Parker demonstrates in How to Play: The Theatre of James Reaney. However, Reaney had also criticized the non-Canadian focus of the SF in 1953 (“Stratford” 112–13) and in 1962 he denounced the SF’s emphasis on big-budget spectacles (“Editorial”) in a manner that would become typical of the alternative theatre movement he admired, fostered, and emulated after befriending

The Stratford Festival and Canadian Cultural Nationalism    397 director Keith Turnbull (“Story” 50). The transformation of Reaney’s hometown under the direction of foreign stars also seems to have dispelled for him the notion “in the society in which I lived … to see drama as, first, something somebody else wrote thousands of miles away, and as something that you could evolve physically, as out of a can,” through infrastructure (“Ten” 55). In many ways, such as Reaney’s vision of “a viable national theatre with a repertory of classics written by our own playwrights” (“James” 219), he sought to replace Guthrie as the charismatic interpreter who would reimagine his community and country. Thus in his 1962 lyric sequence, Twelve Letters to a Small Town, Reaney imagines a Stratford before swans and bards and inverts the conventional relation in theatre criticism between Stratford-the-stage and Stratford-the-city by treating the city as a stage for a verbal performance that will transform it with the help of found materials (sticks, leeches, bicycles) invested with symbolism by the speakers’ performance. This rhetorical inversion, wherein SF productions appear as plays within a poetic or prose narrative that foregrounds its theatricality while blurring the boundary between city and stage, has been widely adopted in works about Stratford such as Margaret Atwood’s long poem The Trumpets of Summer from 1964 (written as a libretto for Reaney’s musical collaborator John Beckwith), Robertson Davies’s novel The Lyre of Orpheus from 1988, Timothy Findley’s novel Spadework from 2001, Alice Munro’s short story “Tricks” from the collection Runaway in 2004, and arguably Andrew Pyper’s thriller The Guardians from 2011. It also animates the television show Slings and Arrows, starring well-known Canadian actors Paul Gross and Martha Burns, which is loosely based on the trials and tribulations of mounting productions at the SF. To conclude, I  believe that there is a localist turn in Stratford’s cultural productions whose interiorizations, involutions, and interdisciplinarity are unlike (and often precede) the established localist movements in Canadian theatre and literary criticism (Bowering). In contrast to the alternative movement’s rejection of the theatrical establishment and its strategies of political dissent, the logic of Stratford’s cultural productions better resembles the double movement that Stock identifies in textual communities, wherein the heretical departure from a conventional interpretation is coupled with an appeal to first principles to produce a truth claim that displaces the reigning convention without destroying it. For Reaney, this strategy means inverting the hierarchy between main-stage and ancillary activities at the SF that privileges foreign over domestic playwrights; in addition, he dramatizes Stratford-area characters and places, and theorizes the first principles of a Canadian intellectual tradition based on Northrop Frye’s archetypal criticism and Marshall McLuhan’s laws of media through Reaney’s influential journal, Alphabet: A Semiannual Devoted to the Iconography of the Imagination (1960–71; see Alphabet 6, 73–76 and Colours 93). Yet an imagined origin or first principle created by a new interpretative paradigm in a settler-invader culture is never stable or satisfactory, and thus a new origin must be continuously invented, as Filewod explains: “ ‘true Canadianism’ (or to use its more recent signifiers, ‘Canadian identity’ or ‘national unity’) can never be achieved: it is the constant

398   Literary Periods and Genres projection into the future of a nostalgia for a perpetually re-invented past” (“Between” 14). The protagonist in Reaney’s The Killdeer expresses this condition eloquently: I must find my source soon or fall. I circle and circle in the dark and cannot sense The nest below where I must be born. (38)

While Stratford’s cultural productions do not resolve the contradictions of the English-Canadian colonial experience, they do explore them in ways that are productive, and not simply reproductive, as Knowles demands of Canadian art (“Shakespeare” 225). Reaney alone is credited with pioneering the genre of Southern Ontario Gothic in the short story (Atwood, Backcover) and criticism (Hurley ix, 156–201), leading the mythopoeic school in poetry (York), and helping to found a tradition of contemporary Canadian drama, all on the basis of works about Stratford and neighbouring villages. In short, theorists interested “in cultural and physical geography and local forms of work and social activity” (Knowles, “Othello” 372) need to consider Stratford as more than “the enemy: a monolithic symbol of cultural colonialism impeding the growth of the real Canadian theatre” (Stuart, “Stratford” 174). This small city has made a huge contribution to the arts in Canada, a fact that gets occluded if localism ignores the SF’s place in the local arts community, or particularism overrides Stratford’s 183-year-old negotiation with Shakespeare’s legacy in the “belief that, as goes Toronto theatre, so goes that of English Canada” (Wallace, Producing 14). Interpreting Stratford as, instead, a textual community that is constantly affirmed and harangued; written and rewritten; performed, parodied, and reinterpreted by locals and visitors better captures the complex interplay of cultural forces in Stratford over nearly two centuries.

Works Cited Atwood, Margaret. Backcover blurb. The Box Social and Other Stories. By James Reaney. Erin, ON: Porcupine’s Quill, 1996. Print. ———. The Trumpets of Summer:  Choral Suite for Mixed Chorus, Fours Soloists, Male Speaker and Six Instruments. Text by Margaret Atwood. Music by John Beckwith. Montreal: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1964. Print. Bart-Riedstra, Carolynn, and Lutzen H. Riedstra. Stratford: Its History and Its Festival. Fwd. Richard Monette. Toronto: James Lorimer, 1999. Print. Belliveau, George, Josh Weale, and Graham Lea. “Theatre PEI:  The Emergence and Development of a Local Theatre.” Theatre Research in Canada 26.1–2 (2005): 64–81. Print. Bowering, George. “Reaney’s Region.” A Way with Words. Ottawa: Oberon, 1982. 37–53. Print. Bumsted, J.A. A History of the Canadian Peoples. 3rd ed. Toronto: Oxford UP, 2007. Print. Cohen, Nathan. “Stratford after Fifteen Years.” Canadian Theatre History: Selected Readings. Ed. Don Rubin. Toronto: Copp Clarke, 1996. 258–77. Print. Davies, Robertson. The Lyre of Orpheus. Toronto: Macmillan, 1988. Print. ———. Thirty Years at Stratford. Stratford: Stratford Festival, 1982. Print.

The Stratford Festival and Canadian Cultural Nationalism    399 Edwards, Murray. A Stage in Our Past: English-Language Theatre in Eastern Canada from the 1790s to 1914. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1968. Print. Edwardson, Ryan. Canadian Content: Culture and the Quest for Nationhood. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2008. Print. Eggleston, Wilfrid. The Frontier and Canadian Letters. 1957. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1977. Print. “Facts about the Avon Theatre.” Stratford Shakespearean Festival Foundation of Canada. Circa 1965. Albert Brandenberger File. Stratford-Perth Archives. Print. Fairfield, Robert. “Theatre and Performance Halls.” Early Stages: Theatre in Ontario 1800–1914. Ed. Ann Saddlemeyer. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1990. 214–87. Print. Falocco, Joe. “Conflicting Ideological Interpretations of the Founding of the Stratford Festival.” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 21.1 (Winter 2009): 5–20. Print. Filewod, Alan. “Between Empires:  Post-Imperialism and Canadian Theatre.” Essays in Theatre/Études théâtrales 11.1 (1992): 3–15. Print. ———. Committing Theatre:  Theatre Radicalism and Political Intervention in Canada. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2011. Print. ———. “Erasing Historical Difference:  The Alternative Orthodoxy in Canadian Theatre.” Theatre Journal 41.2 (1989): 201–10. Print. ———. “Introduction:  The Toy Shop of Myth.” The Donnellys. By James Reaney. Toronto: Dundurn, 2008. 9–21. Print. ———. “National Theatre, National Obsession.” Canadian Theatre History: Selected Readings. Ed. Don Rubin. Toronto: Copp Clark, 1996. 424–31. Print. ———. “The Ideological Formation of Political Theatre in Canada.” Theatre Research in Canada 8.2 (1987): n. pag. Web. Accessed 28 June 2013. Findley, Timothy. Spadework. Toronto: HarperFlamingo, 2001. Print. Fischlin, Daniel. “On Shakespearean Adaptation and Being Canadian.” Shakespeare: Made in Canada: Contemporary Canadian Adaptations in Theatre, Pop Media and Visual Arts. Ed. Daniel Fischlin and Judith Nasby. Guelph: Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 2007. 3–19. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism:  Four Essays. 1957. Princeton, NJ:  Princeton UP, 1990. Print. Fuller, Danielle. Writing the Everyday:  Women’s Textual Communities in Atlantic Canada. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2004. Print. Granville-Barker, H. “The Canadian Theatre.” Canadian Theatre History: Selected Readings. Ed. Don Rubin. Toronto: Copp Clark, 1996. 114–20. Print. Groome, Margaret. “Stratford and the Aspirations for a National Theatre.” Shakespeare in Canada: ‘a world elsewhere’? Ed. Diana Brydon and Irena Makaryk. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2002. 108–36. Print. Howe, Nicholas. “The Cultural Construction of Reading in Anglo-Saxon England.” The Ethnography of Reading. Ed. Jonathan Boyarin. Berkeley:  U of California P, 1992. 58–79. Print. Hurley, Michael. The Borders of Nightmare:  The Fiction of John Richardson. Toronto:  U of Toronto P, 1992. Print. Jackson, Jenny. “Ontario Gothic: James Reaney Gave Canada Its First Literary Scandal with The Box Social, Which Is Now a Regular in High Schools.” Ottawa Citizen 26 May 1996: C10. Web. Accessed 26 June 2013. Knelman, Martin. A Stratford Tempest. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1982. Print.

400   Literary Periods and Genres Knowles, Richard. “From Nationalist to Multinational: The Stratford Festival, Free Trade, and the Discourses of Intercultural Tourism.” Theatre Journal 47.1 (1995): 19–41. Print. ———. “Othello in Three Times.” Shakespeare in Canada: ‘a world elsewhere’? Ed. Diana Brydon and Irena Makaryk. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2002. 371–94. Print. ———. “Shakespeare, 1993, and the Discourses of the Stratford Festival, Ontario.” Shakespeare Quarterly 54.2 (1994): 211–25. Print. Kruger, Loren. The National Stage: Theatre and Cultural Legitimation in England, France, and America. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992. Print. Lee, Alvin. James Reaney. New York: Twayne, 1968. Print. Leitch, Adelaide. Floodtides of Fortune: The Story of Stratford. Stratford, ON: City of Stratford, 1980. Print. MacKay, Ellen. “The Spectre of Straight Shakespeare: New Ways of Looking at Old Texts in Goodnight, Desdemona and Mad Boy Chronicle.” Canadian Shakespeare. Ed. Susan Knutson. Toronto: Playwrights Canada, 2010. 67–76. Print. Makaryk, Irena. “Introduction: Shakespeare in Canada: ‘a world elsewhere’?” Shakespeare in Canada: ‘a world elsewhere’? Ed. Diana Brydon and Irena Makaryk. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2002. 3–41. Print. Massey, Vincent. Foreword. The Stratford Festival: 1953–1957. Toronto: Irwin & Company, 1958. vii. Print. Massey, Vincent, and Georges-Henri Lévesque. Report: Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, 1949–51. Ottawa: King’s Printer, 1951. Web. Accessed 26 June 2013. McGee, C.E. “Shakespeare Canadiens at the Stratford Festival.” Shakespeare in Canada:  ‘a world elsewhere’? Ed. Diana Brydon and Irena Makaryk. Toronto:  U of Toronto P, 2002. 141–58. Print. McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1962. Print. McNicoll, Susan. The Opening Act: Canadian Theatre History, 1945–1953. Vancouver: Ronsdale, 2012. Print. Minton, Gretchen. Elizabethan Theatre as Textual Community: Words as Essence, Action, and Historicization in Hamlet. MA thesis. University of British Columbia, 1995. Print. Mitchell, Claire. “The Arts and Employment:  The Impact of Three Canadian Theatre Companies.” Journal of Cultural Economics 13.2 (1989): 69–79. Print. Monette, Richard. Foreword. Stratford: Its History and Its Festival. By Carolynn Bart-Riedstra and Lutzen H. Riedstra. Toronto: James Lorimer, 1999. 6–9. Print. Moore, Mavor. 4 Canadian Playwrights. Toronto: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1973. Print. Morden, Pat. “A Good Block.” Shakespeare:  Made in Canada:  Contemporary Canadian Adaptations in Theatre, Pop Media and Visual Arts. Ed. Daniel Fischlin and Judith Nasby. Guelph: Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 2007. 49–59. Print. Munro, Alice. “Tricks.” Runaway. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2004. 236–69. Nothof, Anne. “Canadian Drama:  Performing Communities.” The Cambridge History of Canadian Literature. Ed. Coral Ann Howells and Eva-Marie Kröller. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. 402–21. Print. Parker, Gerald. How to Play: The Theatre of James Reaney. Erin, ON: ECW P, 1991. Print. Patterson, Tom, and Allan Gould. First Stage:  The Making of the Stratford Festival. 1987. Willowdale, ON: Firefly Books, 1999. Print.

The Stratford Festival and Canadian Cultural Nationalism    401 Pettigrew, John, and Jamie Portman. Stratford: The First Thirty Years (1953–1967). Vol. 1. Fwd. Robertson Davies. Toronto: Macmillan, 1985. Print. Polèse, Mario. “The Arts and Local Economic Development: Can a Strong Arts Presence Uplift Local Economies? A Study of 135 Canadian Cities.” Urban Studies (Oct. 2011): 1811–35. Print. Pyper, Andrew. The Guardians. Toronto: Doubleday, 2011. Print. Reaney, James. The Box Social and Other Stories. Erin, ON: Porcupine’s Quill, 1996. Print. ———. Colours in the Dark. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1969. Print. ———. “Editorial.” Alphabet 6 (June 1963): 6, 73–76. Print. ———. “Editorial, New Plays, Poems.” Alphabet 4 (June 1962): 3. Print. ———. “James Reaney Looks Towards a National Repertory.” Theatre Research in Canada 6.2 (1985): 218–26. Print. ———. The Killdeer and Other Plays. Toronto: Macmillan, 1962. Print. ———. King Whistle! A  Play about the Stratford Strike of 1933. Ilderton, ON:  Brick/Nairn, 1980. Print. ———. “The Plays at Stratford.” Canadian Forum 34 (Sept. 1953): 134–35. Print. ———. The Red Heart. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1949. Print. ———. “The Story Behind King Whistle!” Brick 8 (Winter 1980): 50–67. Print. ———. “The Stratford Festival.” Canadian Forum 33 (Aug. 1953): 112–13. Print. ———. “Ten Years at Play.” The Sixties:  Canadian Writers and Writing of the Decade. Ed. George Woodcock. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Publications Centre, 1969. 53–61. Print. ———. Twelve Letters to a Small Town. Toronto: Ryerson, 1962. Print. ———. “Why Did I Become a Playwright?” Stage Voices: Twelve Canadian Playwrights Talk about Their Lives and Work. Ed. Geraldine Anthony. Toronto: Doubleday, 1978. 139–64. Print. Reid, Barbara, and Thelma Morrison. A Star Danced: The Story of How Stratford Started the Stratford Festival. Toronto: Robert Reid, 1994. Print. Salter, Denis. “Acting Shakespeare in Postcolonial Space.” Shakespeare, Theory and Performance. Ed. James C. Bulman. London: Routledge, 1996. 113–32. Print. ———. “The Idea of a National Theatre.” Canadian Canons: Essays in Literary Value. Ed. Robert Lecker. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1991. 71–90. Print. Sauer, Elizabeth. “Paper-Contestations” and Textual Communities in England, 1640–1675. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2005. Print. Slings and Arrows. Creators Susan Coyne, Bob Martin, and Mark McKinney. Showcase. 2003–06. Television. Somerset, Alan. The Stratford Festival Story:  A  Catalogue-Index to the Stratford, Ontario, Festival, 1953–1990. New York: Greenwood, 1991. Print. “Sought By Festival: Theatre Building Has Interesting History.” Beacon-Herald [Stratford, ON] 7 Feb. 1963: n. pag. Brandenberger file. Stratford-Perth Archives. Print. Stock, Brian. The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1983. Print. ———. Listening for the Text:  On the Uses of the Past. Balitmore, MD:  Johns Hopkins UP, 1990. Print. ———. “Medieval Literacy, Linguistic Theory, and Social Organization.” New Literary History 16.1 (1984): 13–29. Print. The Stratford Shakespeare Festival Story, 1953–1962. Stratford, ON: Mirror, 1962. Print.

402   Literary Periods and Genres Stuart, Ross. “The Stratford Festival and the Canadian Theatre.” Theatrical Touring and Founding in North America. Ed. L.W. Conolly. Fwd. Michael Sidnell. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1982. 173–91. Print. ———. “Theatre in Canada:  An Historical Perspective.” Canadian Theatre Review 5 (1975): 6–15. Print. “The Theatre Albert: Opened with A Female Drummer on the Boards.” Stratford Daily Beacon 5 Jan. 1901: A1. Microfilm. Thomas, Julia. Shakespeare’s Shrine:  The Bard’s Birthplace and the Invention of Stratford-Upon-Avon. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2012. Print. Usmiani, Renate. Second Stage: The Alternative Theatre Movement in Canada. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 1983. Print. Vance, Jonathan. A History of Canadian Culture. Toronto: Oxford UP, 2009. Print. Wallace, Robert. Producing Marginality:  Theatre and Criticism in Canada. Saskatoon:  Fifth House, 1990. Print. ———. “Theatre and Transformation in Contemporary Canada.” 13th Annual Robarts Lecture. York University. 15 Mar. 1999. Print. Whittaker, Herbert. Introduction. The Stratford Festival:  1953–1957. Fwd. Vincent Massey. Toronto: Irwin & Company, 1958. Print. York, Lorraine M. “James Reaney.” Reference Guide to English Literature. Ed. D.L. Kirkpatrick. 2nd ed. Vol. 2. Chicago: St. James, 1991. 1131–32. Print.

Chapter 22

T he Not So Qu i et, Nor Short, Révolu tion Tr anqu ille David Leahy

The majority of historians and cultural critics have viewed the Révolution tranquille (the Quiet Revolution) in Québec as a synchronous sociopolitical and cultural phenomenon that took place within the six-year period of Jean Lesage’s provincial Liberal government (1960–66), while sometimes extending its reach to the late 1960s (Lemire et al. 11; J. Pelletier, “Octobre” 46–52; Ferretti; Linteau et al. 21–22, 33–36; Comeau; Biron et  al. 361–66, 483).1 Most literary-historical summaries emphasize how the Révolution tranquille’s politically driven rattrapage (catching up) with modernity, in opposition to a century of clerico-nationalism and the nearly two preceding decades of Maurice Duplessis’s right-wing, small “n” nationalist politics of conservation, such as the upholding of Catholic values in tandem with French-Canadians’ subordination to Canadian and American capital, had its literary and artistic correlatives. Accordingly, as Pierre Nepveu has remarked, significant literary actors of this cultural revolution, such as Gaston Miron, Paul Chamberland, and Jacques Brault, vilified the likes of Saint-Denys Garneau, a major modernist poet, of the preceding generation for the defeatism of his verse (and life), while asserting their own ethnolinguistic and ethnic-class inspired poetic heroism (see Nepveu, L’Écologie, especially c­ hapters 1–4) and their presumably more authentic expressions of modernity and québécitude.2 Given that the explosion of dynamic cultural changes in the 1960s was concomitant with the statist aspects of the Révolution tranquille, it is often too easy to elide the two (see Comeau, “La Révolution,” 36). Yet this approach is justified when one considers how the dynamics between the Lesage government’s creation of the Ministère des affaires culturelles (1961),3 the era’s exponential development of state funding for the arts, cinema, the publishing trade, and individual artists and writers, or the expansion of arts programming for Radio-Canada (the French

404   Literary Periods and Genres wing of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) and the new, dynamic sense of québécité allowed many authors to make a living from their writing for the first time and fostered a bold sense of social engagement. Writers created and increasingly used associations to lobby for and negotiate contractual conditions; to enhance the publication and marketing of their works; and to take public stands around issues of the day (as when many writers and intellectuals denounced the Lesage government’s initial dragging of its feet on the creation of a Ministry of Education). There was no end of op-ed pieces, essays, interviews, and public talks and rallies by writers that militated in favour of a secular state (see Maheu, Un Parti), the primacy of the French language at all levels of life and work (see Lalonde, “États”), a growing, accretive faith in the goals of cultural and political sovereignty in order to protect the culture and develop the socio-economic status of Québec’s francophone majority, and to resist the many ways in which Anglo-American capital’s dominance of the economy and mass culture threatened it. This broad culture of decolonization, influenced by international figures such as Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Aimé Césaire, and Malcolm X, was often necessarily ethnolinguistically parochial, insofar as it promoted an identity that allowed for social cohesion and solidarity as québécois in opposition to the hegemony of Canadian and American interests. This was rhetorically embodied, during what I call the Révolution tranquille tronquée (the short version, 1960–66/67), by the first Lesage government’s slogan of “Maître Chez Nous,” which was soon after superseded by the neo-nationalist slogan of “Le Québec pour les québécois”4—a term that initially expressed an essentialist article of faith, or an indépendantiste sentiment, but over time often signified a non-parochial, citizen-based sense of nationhood. This secular, civic stance was especially evident in important literary essays, interviews, fiction, and poetry during the rise of the neo-nationalist movement in the 1960s. For example, Pierre Vadeboncoeur’s internationalism, his sense of himself as a “citoyen du monde,” allows him to become a neo-nationalist as a means to “reéduquer nos faculties de novation” (R. Vigneault 517) [“re-educate our innovative faculties”]. Or consider the anti–anti-semitism of Claude Jasmin’s nationalist protagonist in the novel Éthel et le térroriste (1964); Hubert Aquin’s championing of the need for a nonethnic nationalism in “La Fatigue culturelle du Canada français”(1962) in response to Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s federalist essay of “La Nouvelle trahison des clercs” (1962); or the internationalism of the nationalist discourses of poems by Paul Chamberland— “je suis cubain / yankee no je suis nègre je lave les planchers dans un / bordel du Texas je suis Québécois” (L’Afficheur 71) [“i’m a cuban / yankee no i am a nigger i wash the floors in a / whorehouse in Texas i am Québécois”]—or of Michèle Lalonde’s “Speak White” (1974): “nous savons que le mot liberté est un mot noir / comme la misère est nègre”; “nous savons que nous ne sommes pas seuls” (n. pag.) [“we know that the word liberty is a black word / like misery equals negro”; “we know that we are not alone”]. Moreover, most of these values and objectives and their associated combative, often transgressive, literary aesthetics would remain popular well into the 1970s. I believe these continuities oblige us to extend the conventional periodization of the

The Not So Quiet, Nor Short, Révolution Tranquille   405 Révolution tranquille rather than viewing the 1970s as more formally “transgressive” (Nepveu, L’Écologie 212), or the Crise d’Octobre as the radical cutoff point that puts an end to it (J. Pelletier, “Octobre”).5

La Révolution tranquille (tronquée) Martin Jay speaks of “the difficulties faced by the … historian establishing the pertinent context and the mixed reality of historical occurrences themselves, some innerworldly, others genuine events” (569). Analogously, I am struck by how the “horizon of relations” (Jay 558) of literature of the Révolution tranquille is not easily contained by its conventional timeline. For example, it was at first a political-economic term for Québec statism of the early to mid-1960s that quickly became synonymous with the cultural realm. However, like most epithets for a literary-historical period, the Révolution tranquille glosses over much that was heterogenous—as do terms like “Romantic” or “Victorian” for British literature—and has obscured a considerable number of discourses and aesthetics that persisted into the next decade. Accordingly, like Marc Laurendeau and Lorraine Pintal, I contend that it is a mistake to claim that the Révolution tranquille ends in the late 1960s; that said position is exemplary of the difficulty of recognizing the “multidirectional interactions” of a heteroglossia of past voices within a specific time-frame and over time (Jay 562), a challenge that is especially the case when a sociopolitical period like the Révolution tranquille tronquée and its literary correlatives are over-determined by mechanical political or synchronic periodizations, and under-determined by what have become “common-sense” presumptions. Or, to appropriate Martin Jay again: “The very assumption that there is a single monolithic ‘text,’ or historical narrative, to be contextualized falters when we acknowledge that its meaning may vary according to the context(s) of its reception, which often alters its boundaries and even content” (Jay 561). In this spirit, I encourage a more elastic sense of the Révolution tranquille’s “scale” (560), of its continuities in the 1970s, while acknowledging that my “reception” of it is in part a result of the present historical moment. My position does not deny what was unique or important about sociopolitical and literary phenomena in the 1960s, nor oblige their conflation with distinct ones of the 1970s. Rather, it considers how the two decades’ “horizon of relations” had more in common than is generally thought, and how the Révolution tranquille may be more pertinent today than one might think. This said, here is a skeletal summary of some of the main literary-historical and aesthetic characteristics of the Révolution tranquille tronquée, with shorthand references to some of its most important authors: 1. Like the statist-identified sociopolitical Révolution tranquille, the literature most often associated with it embodies concomitant themes of modernization, including the secular contestation of the Catholic Church’s hegemony.6

406   Literary Periods and Genres 2. This happens in tandem with the proliferation of neo-nationalist political and literary discourses, and especially anti-colonial and left-nationalist ones that popularize and are inspired by contemporary decolonization theories (i.e., Césaire; Fanon; Memmi). 3. In keeping with these ideologies there is a tendency to valorize and write about the most oppressed of the predominantly francophone population as an ethnic class, as evidenced in Jacques Renaud’s novella Le Cassé (1964); the patâtes frites-stand magnate, anti-hero-writer of Jacques Godbout’s novel Salut Galarneau! (1967); Pierre Vallières’s polemical treatise Négres blancs d’amérique:  Autobiographie précoce d’un “terroriste” québécois (1968); and the increasingly frequent use of joual—francophone working-class vernacular inflected with large dollops of English—in poetry, fiction, and some plays.7 4. Poetry is generally in the vanguard of the cultural sea change (e.g., Miron, Chamberland, Jacques Brault, Fernand Ouellette), and like the period’s most remarkable fiction (e.g., Jacques Ferron, Marie-Claire Blais, Hubert Aquin), the most important literature evidences formal and stylistic innovations that affirm the culture’s postmodernity. There is a proliferation of socially engaged discourses and aesthetics (Chamberland, Ferron, Gérald Godin, Lalonde), critical realism and aesthetics of résistance in the fiction (Aquin, Gérard Bessette, Ferron, Renaud), the baroque (Aquin, Réjean Ducharme, Ferron), parody (Blais, Chamberland, Ducharme), and social themes of exile, alienation, and madness (see Nepveu, L’Écologie, especially c­ hapters 1, 5, and 6). 5. Theatre, auto/biography, short fiction, and most other genres remain rather conventional, with some major exceptions, such as Claude Gauvreau and Marcel Dubé’s dramas, and Michel Tremblay’s famous use of joual in Les Belles-Soeurs (1965); Ferron’s fantastic, compelling contes and histoirettes; and Claire Martin’s unprecedented accounts of the sociocultural tyranny of her childhood and adolescence.8 6. There is a gradual flourishing of more objective, “scientific,” and theoretical approaches to literary criticism, such as psychological, structuralist, and Marxist ones, in periodical venues like Liberté (1959–), Recherches sociographiques (1960–), Parti pris (1963–68), La Barre du jour (1965–77), Québec français (1965–), Voix et Images du pays (1967–), Études littéraires (1968–), Les Herbes rouges (1968–), and in books of criticism by André Belleau, Gérard Bessette, Fernand Dumont, Jean-Charles Falardeau, Pierre de Grandpré, André Major, Gilles Marcotte, Suzanne Paradis, and Antoine Sirois. 7. There is the expansion of existing publishing houses (i.e., L’Hexagone; HMH Hurtubise) and the creation of new ones, such as Éditions du Boréal (1963–) and Éditions Parti pris (1965–84).9 These cultural phenomena, and many others, soon come together to consolidate the establishment of what becomes known as la littérature québécoise (see Miron, “Quelle”; Grandpré; Bessette, Trois; Robert; Biron et al. 11–13).10

The Not So Quiet, Nor Short, Révolution Tranquille   407

You’re a frog / I’m a frog “You’re a frog / I’m a frog / Kiss me, / And I’ll turn into a prince suddenly / Donne moé des peanuts, / Je m’en va te chanter / Alouette sans fausse note” [“… suddenly/Give me peanuts, / And I’ll sing you / Alouette flawlessly”]. Robert Charlebois’s hit single “The Frog Song” (1976) was not qualified as “literature” by critics of the day, but from a cultural studies perspective it is consistent with the many ways that québécois writers of the Révolution tranquille tronquée had expressed, and would continue to express, their irate, often parodic sense of a collective identity in response to two centuries of second-class citizenship. It is also consistent with the recurrent cultural code of a “Je” (I) that is simultaneously a “Nous” (We/Us).11 During the Révolution tranquille tronquée the use of the first person as a synecdochic device to voice an oppressed, resistive sense of québécité was very common. Still, its ideological resonances varied. For example, the left-nationalist dithyrambic that one finds in Paul Chamberland’s L’Afficheur hurle (1964) or Terre Québec (1964) is a highly transgressive, revolutionary voice, while Gaston Miron’s “Je” (Everyman) in L’Homme rapaillé (1970)—a short, yet culturally central, group of poems that Miron would rewrite and republish over 30 years—is more representative of generations of alienated canadiens-français, of “[notre] vie agonique” [“our agonized life”], who are nevertheless imagined as en route to their liberatory “Octobre.” Accordingly, Miron’s “Je/Nous,” for all of its lyrical celebrations of the land of Québec and its people’s potential, is uncertain about the nation yet to be when “Je/Nous” would presumably no longer be a perjoratized Frog (see Cambron 150–61). This was qualitatively different from Chamberland’s more irreverent, provocative “Je/Nous,” from Gerald Godin’s more joualized satiric versions in Les Cantouques (1966), from Lalonde’s more combative Speak White! (1974), from Vallières’s polemical, Marxist-informed, life-writing in Nègres blancs d’Amérique, and from Ferron’s glosses for himself in baroque satires like La Nuit (1965, 1977) and L’Amélanchier (1970). Jacques Godbout’s coinage and dramatization of the first-person protagonist’s neologism vécrire [live-write] in Salut Galarneau! (1967) was yet another, more comic, expression of the collective desire to imagine and create a freer, less subordinate, subjecthood, what Cambron calls “le discours québécois” (175). The aforementioned authors and many others of the Révolution tranquille tronquée continued to produce symbolic representations of desires for and assertions of greater collective and individual freedom, and of quests for greater spiritual, sexual, and creative liberation, well into the 1970s.12 Consider, for instance, Aquin’s continued metafictional and self-reflexive approaches to the novel in Neige Noire (1974), though its misogyny is hardly liberatory from a gender-conscious perspective. Ferron continued to re/write ludic narratives and allegories, as in Les Confitures de coings et autres textes (1972) or the “histoirettes” of Du fond de mon arrière-cuisine (1973), which can be characterized as postmodern examples of historiographic metafiction (see Hutcheon) that recuperate folk tales, history, and the lives and works of authors as diverse as Paul Bruchesi, Gabrielle Roy, F.R. Scott, and Marshall McLuhan for transgressive purposes.

408   Literary Periods and Genres A major example of such avant-garde continuities is Ferron’s L’Amélanchier. It first appeared in 1970, and was reprinted in 1977 to renewed acclaim. Its oneiric, Freudian fabulation of colonial and modern Québec dramatizes both a nostalgia for an idealized pastoral past and a contrary painful need and desire for major social change (see L’Hérault). Léon de Portanqueu—whose surname is a scatological pun for a penis—regales his young daughter, Tinamer, the framing, first-person narrator, with stories about the wondrous region north of the St. Lawrence River where he grew up. She is both enchanted by his tales and internalizes them as proof of her father’s foolishness; she dismisses her father and idolizes him, convincing herself that he is secretly a successful bank-robber,13 while the banality of her daily life on Montréal’s South Shore is likewise opposed to her encounters with phantasmic figures in the adjoining woods. As critics have commented, Mr. Portanqueu’s homeland is clearly based upon the Berthierville and Maskinongé regions of Ferron’s childhood, and Tinamer’s environment is analogous to the working-class suburb of Saint-Jacques, where Ferron practiced medicine, whose impoverished conditions nourished the ethnic-class ressentiment of prominent fléquistes (members of the Front de Libération du Québec [FLQ]).14 These spatial and biographical points of reference can help one to appreciate the significance of L’Amélanchier’s valorization of a traditional sense of rootedness in the land, and its corroborating disenchantment with the dark side of modernity, as exemplified by Tinamer’s fall into reality when she learns her father is not an anti-heroic robber but a turnkey at a mental asylum—a powerful symbol of enforced social conformity. Given the historic centrality of térroiriste ideology to French Canada (see Dumont, Les Idéologies, especially Vols. 1 and 2), and Ferron’s roots, it is hardly surprising that L’Amélanchier presents nostalgia for the land (though Ferron’s nationalism was also embodied by his socialism and his founding of the parodic Rhinoceros Party).15 What is most striking from a literary perspective is L’Amélanchier’s generic and discursive hybridity, how its avant-garde strategies express a complex web of historical and cultural phenomena and ideas that resist reducing the text’s meaning. For example, while English-Canadian hegemony is mocked, the fantastic figures of Mr. Northrop (Frye?) and Father Scott,16 who are anachronistically haunted by their failures to save an Irish immigrant girl from destitution and death, undercut the text’s potential Manicheanism by reminding readers that French Canada was no more pur laine than other parts of the Americas, especially following the nineteenth-century Irish famine. Likewise, as François Gallays puts it, Tinamer’s fable undercuts “la lecture … manichéenne du monde par les clercs (le bien, la campagne, le mal, la ville) jusqu’à l’éffacement de cette dichotomie accompagnée … du danger que s’éfface aussi de la mémoire collective la trace des origines” (23) [“the manichean reading of the world by the clerics (the good rural life, the evil city) though the erasure of this dichotomy is accompanied by … the danger of its obliteration of the trace of origins from the collective memory”]. The significance of L’Amélanchier to my periodization is that it is exemplary of formally transgressive parodic, ludic, metafictional, and self-referential genres and modes that were popular among writers and readers during the Révolution tranquille tronquée, and would inspire, for instance, Victor-Lévy Beaulieu to create innovative

The Not So Quiet, Nor Short, Révolution Tranquille   409 bio-autobiographique works like Don Quichotte de la démanche (1974) and Monsieur Melville (1978) that interrogated québécois realities in complex ways in the 1970s. Or, as Cedric May has said of Don Quichotte, “À la fois reflet et contestation du messianisme québécois, le roman somme un Joyce, un Melville, un Cervantés (un Ferron, dirait Beaulieu) d’apparaître, capable de créer le mythe du pays et de ressusciter le Québec” (Lemire et al. 5:256; my italics) [“Simultaneously a reflection upon and contestation of quebecois messianism, the novel calls upon a Joyce, a Melville, a Cervantes (a Ferron, Beaulieu would say) to appear, capable of creating the myth of the country and thereby resuscitating Quebec”]. Likewise, Miron’s neo-nationalist verse continued to be popular throughout the 1970s, and many writers continued to create voices and narratives that troubled traditional insular values in favour of a secular, socioeconomically and linguistically just society (see Beaulieu, François Charron,17 Vadeboncoeur, Vallières, Pauline Julien, and Gilles Vigneault18). Such evidence does not support the belief that the sociohistorical blip of the conservative Union Nationale’s brief return to power in 1966, or that some writers’ tempering of their ethnic-class polemics for more countercultural themes by the late 1960s, somehow signaled the virtual end of the discourses, aesthetics, and values of the Révolution tranquille. Thus, while Paul Chamberland became disenchanted with the reductiveness of his left-nationalism, his spiritually oriented countercultural works of the late 1960s and mid-1970s, such as Éclats de la pierre noire d’où rejaillet ma vie (1971) and Demain les dieux naîtront (1974), still evidenced 1960s-identified contestation of the defeat of Western culture (Bayard, “Éclats” 5:268; see also Leahy), and Demain, while stylistically different from his Parti pris days, still centred its affirmation of alternative sexualities and gender relations in the everyday. In short, most of the aforenoted populist and avant-garde formal strategies would continue to represent the progressive, anti-colonial spirit of the ongoing not so quiet revolution that Biron et al., in a revisionist move typical of our neoliberal era, dismiss as a “mystique révolutionnaire” (412).

Troubling Revisions of the Révolution tranquille with Yet Another Revision Nepveu argued in L’Écologie du réel (1988) that the standard periodization of the Révolution tranquille is consistent with its literature’s constant sense of lack, with its prevalent melancholic, catastrophic, discourses and tropes (59–60) that Nepveu ultimately interprets as signs of its failure to become a literature qua Literature until supposedly more “transgressive” writings in the 1970s and, eventually, its more pluralistic, non-identitary post-québécoise phase (“Conclusion” 211–20). Pelletier’s standpoint in an article from 1990–91 is quite different, insofar as he sees the Crise d’Octobre of 1970 as the end of the Révolution tranquille in social, ideological, and aesthetic terms. It is true that a more self-conscious, postmodern emphasis on the end of meta-narratives, anti-logocentrism, and the questioning of objectivity as of the late 1970s in Québec

410   Literary Periods and Genres was concomitant with the rise of a broader range of identity politics, as elsewhere in the West—such as homosexual, lesbian, and queer politics, and a greater awareness of the oppression of Native peoples and other minorities—and that the predominance of an anti-essentialist “Je” by the early 1980s marked a significant turn away from faith in speaking for “Nous.”19 Furthermore, many writers no longer felt the need or passion to contest the oppression of francophones, particularly with the institution of French as Québec’s official language in 1977, and after the Parti québécois lost the 1980 SovereigntyAssociation referendum. But did the “Je/Nous” trope of the 1960s truly dissipate during the continued rise of neo-nationalist politics and culture during the first half of the 1970s? Texts by Ferron, Beaulieu, Charlebois, Cambron, and many others suggest otherwise (though the second half of the decade did see feminism begin to replace nationalism as an ideological driving force in the shift toward a more personal, intimate literature [Biron et al. 485]).20 Given the extent to which the sociopolitical and literary expressions of the Révolution tranquille tronquée were fundamentally about decolonization, language, ethnolinguistic class conflict, and the desire for a nation-state, how much were such phenomena not significant in the 1970s? It is a truism that many writers and chansonniers of the 1970s would continue to promote neo-nationalist culture (Lemire et al. 5:xv–xvi, xxii–xxiii). I also question the claim that cultural and literary expressions of québécois counterculture were essentially a phenomenon of the 1970s, as Biron et al. (486–94) and Pierre Nepveu (212) contend.21 Was not most of it the continuation of the globally influenced, youth-centered, countercultural power that François Ricard has called the “génération lyrique”? In the light of such considerations, I am indebted to a schema of Jacques Pelletier (“Octobre” 45–46), even if I use it differently, in the extension of our temporal sense of the Révolution tranquille’s process. Pelletier’s approach to the relations between literature and society deploys the notion of processus [process] to designate long-term historical realities that implicate major societal transformations (45); the notion of période [period] to designate medium-term realities, such as “la Révolution tranquille [tronquée]” (45); and the notion of an événement [event] for a short-term reality that can have minor consequences for particular groups or sectors, or major ones for a whole society (46). Unlike Pelletier and Nepveu, I contend that the Révolution tranquille tronquée is best understood as the first part of a longer process. This position helps one to trouble the quietism of the conventional trope of the Révolution tranquille for the ways it insidiously deflects attention away from sociopolitical and cultural phenomena that were often far from quiet, not always so peaceful, and to recognize that its process of social and artistic transgressiveness persisted into the 1970s. For example, as Lemire et al. have remarked about “La Langue et les thèmes” of the period between 1970 and 1976, “Le littéraire reste … rattaché au social et au politique … [et] les auteur(e)s utilisent très souvent une langue populaire, qu’ils apellent québécoise, ou encore ‘le joual’ ” [“The literary remains … connected to the social and the political … [and] authors very often use popular language, that they call québécoise, or else joual”], while the “realisme misérabiliste [et] la littérature de la violence” [“realism of the wretched and the literature of

The Not So Quiet, Nor Short, Révolution Tranquille   411 violence”] that were so strongly identified with québécois poetry and fiction of the 1960s, “se rencontrent encore plus souvent à partir de 1970” [“come together even more often as of 1970”] (5: xxii–xxiii), as one sees in the writings of Gilbert Larocque, Victor-Lévy Beaulieu, Yves Beauchemin, and Michel Tremblay. That joual, the sign par excellence of many 1960s writers’ resistance to ethnic-class oppression, remained central to many narratives’ and plays’ dramatizations of the ethnic-class poverty and socioeconomic violence that many québécois experienced until the more extensive implementation of provincial and federal social-democratic and neo-nationalist policies of the 1970s (see Linteau et al., especially ­chapters 44, 46, and 48) suggests strongly that the idea of a sociocultural and literary break between the two decades is highly questionable. In short, the ideological and aesthetic strategies of the Révolution tranquille tronquée could only truly begin to surpass the non-poème, as Gaston Miron self-mockingly, yet proudly, characterized his and others’ littérature engagée of the 1960s (Miron, “Notes”; see also Nepveu, Gaston 401–02), after the provincial election sweep by the predominantly social-democratic Parti québécois in 1976 and its political consolidation of the francophone majority’s cultural hegemony within Québec. I am not suggesting that this victory was an absolute endpoint to the diverse sources and strengths of the Révolution tranquille, but that it was a dramatic event that was the culmination of a non-partizan process of cultural assertion that had inspired many writers since the 1960s, whether one identified as an indépendantiste or not.22 Nepveu makes an important point when he refers to how the appropriation of nationalist discourse by the political apparatus leads to its literature’s “appropriation-normalisation” (L’Écologie 158). Yet I believe he fails to recognize that the “discours québécois” remained predominant well into the 1970s, and that it was not always a univocal literature that ultimately expressed a nationalist “réalité subjective” (60). Nepveu’s approach is consistent with the tendency by the mid- to late 1980s of a number of economists, historians, and cultural critics to look back to the 1930s–50s as not having been as backward or as repressed as partisans of the Révolution tranquille tronquée had claimed (Couture; Popovic).23 Many looked back to the famous Refus global manifesto of 1948,24 and to a significant number of anti-traditionalist, modernist writers during the 1950s, as prefiguring the Révolution tranquille (e.g., see Anne Hébert’s anti-terroiriste story Le Torrent [1950], André Langevin’s existentialist Poussière sur la ville [1953], Jean-Jules Richard’s pro-labour, anti-Duplessis, carnivalesque Un feu dans l’amiante [1956], and Gérard Bessette’s La Bagarre [1958]). Nepveu’s L’Écologie and Biron et al.’s much more recent Histoire de la littérature québécoise (2007) are impressive examples of such revisionism—a critical position that is nevertheless ironic given how much they dissociate Révolution tranquille tronquée themes and aesthetics from those of the 1970s. According to this now “common-sense” default, québécois literature of the 1970s generally represents transgressive breaks from the identity politics and the countercultural and avant-garde literary tendencies of the 1960s. L’Écologie makes the case that it is postnationalist, countercultural, migrant, feminist, and postmodernist themes and aesthetics that mark the end of the Révolution

412   Literary Periods and Genres tranquille’s social and literary legacies (what he terms “L’esthétique de la fondation” [212]) and the establishment of another literary period as of the late 1960s (“L’esthétique de la transgression” [212]). Yet contrary to Nepveu’s nod to the idea that “ces moments [la fondation and la transgression] ne peuvent être simplement lus comme des étapes successives” (211) [“these moments (of foundation and transgression) cannot simply be read as successive stages”], his postmodern insistence that the identitary elements of the literature of the Révolution tranquille tronquée were too replete with paradoxical signs and values of the past tends to negate the political and literary transgressiveness of the period of the Révolution tranquille tronquée and its continuities in the 1970s. Nepveu’s opposition between “L’esthétique de la fondation” and “L’esthétique de la transgression” (212) is questionable from diachronic and dialectical perspectives given that he acknowledges the significant presence of “underground” (and therefore “countercultural”) “groups, revues ou événements” as of the early 1960s and how they prepare the ground for “transgressive” writers like Denis Vanier and Gilbert Langevin in the 1970s (see 117, and especially its endnote 1). Yet ultimately Nepveu chooses to associate countercultural innovation with the period from 1968 to the end of the 1970s, a period that he claims is more subversive of “lois, de normes, [et] d’idéologies” (212). Nepveu convincingly identifies “feminisme” as a transgressive force-field and rightfully credits Nicole Brossard’s writings as being exemplary of it (see Nepveu, especially ­chapters 9 and 10),25 but his ironic characterization of the living-death of the literature of the Révolution tranquille in order to assert the greater formalism and ludic nature of his period of “L’esthétique de la transgression” is highly problematic. This binary can blind one to just how many literary works of the Révolution tranquille tronquée were already self-critical, avant-garde, ludic, and formally complex. Consider the content and form of Hubert Aquin’s Prochain épisode (1965). The novel’s revolutionary nationalist is plagued and outwitted by his doppleganger, and by a doppleganger of his female lover, and, like the text’s incarcerated intra-textual framing novelist/narrator, the revolutionary protagonist constantly swings from lamenting his setbacks to a manic, yet always unfulfilled, sense of his inevitable success. Notwithstanding the difficulty of its avant-garde aesthetic and ambiguities, Prochain épisode became an instant classic because contemporary readers could identify with the first-person framing narrator’s and protagonist’s angst and desire for change (Allard lxiv–lxxi). Many readers in the 1960s and 1970s obviously identified with the allegorical hope of the novel’s title that “next time” the protagonist and the framing narrator would not fail in their nationalist mission. One can retrospectively dismiss this vision as revolutionary mysticism, as advancing “à rien [que] l’abîme que vous [neo-nationalist writers] craignez comme un trou” (Brossard, Le Centre blanc, 394) [“towards nothing (but) the abyss that you (neo-nationalist writers) fear more than anything”], but Prochain épisode can also be interpreted as being profoundly transgressive within its historical moment precisely because, like Ferron’s L’Amélanchier, it insists upon radical change in political and formal terms while troubling identitary politics’ Manicheanism. Nepveu may judge most literature of the “fondation” to be non-dialogical because of the hegemony of neo-nationalist ideology to the detriment of “une autre parole … qui

The Not So Quiet, Nor Short, Révolution Tranquille   413 est la condition même d’exercice de toute littérature modern” (60) [“another voice … which is the condition or essence of all modern literature”], but the self-critical, often ludic, ambiguities and ambivalences, and diverse uses of joual and the carnivalesque—in works like Blais’s Une Saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel (1965), Réjean Ducharme’s L’avalée des avalés (1966), Roch Carrier’s La Guerre, Yes Sir! (1968), and related works during much of the 1970s, like Miron’s L’Homme rapaillé (1970), Godbout’s D’Amour P.Q. (1972), Beaulieu’s Don Quichotte (1974), and Tremblay’s Il était un fois dans l’Est (1974), to name a mere handful—often called identitary discourses and certainties into doubt.26 Moreover, André Belleau had already made convincing cases as of the late 1970s for just how dialogical many indépendantiste-oriented writers of the 1960s and 1970s were, given that, as in the case of Miron, “ses paroles prenaient la forme d’une réplique passionée, visiblement destinées à des interlocuteurs adverses” (“Indépendence” 125) [“his words took the form of a passionate response that was clearly aimed at adverse interlocutors”]. In other words, Nepveu’s barometer as to what is “transgressive” can be said to belie a poststructuralist bias that diminishes what was sociopolitically and formally transgressive about key literary works of the Révolution tranquille tronquée, and more constitutive of la littérature québécoise of the 1970s than this bias can admit. To suggest that québécois literature gets better to the extent that it is postnational—rather than simply acknowledging that literary trends and tastes change—that it becomes la littérature québécoise to the extent that it distances itself from combative discourses in politicized modes, champions a cultural notion of progress that occludes Nepveu’s own “horizon[s]‌ of limitation[s].”27 Consider, for example, that “la poésie du pays” remained prevalent in the 1970s, especially via popular oral performances and music (Lemire et al. 5: xxxii); that the contestatory québécité that was so important to literature of the Révolution tranquille tronquée only became commonplace in theatre of the 1970s, as drama became the cultural powerhouse that poetry had been in the 1960s (xxxviii; xlii–xliii; Biron et al. 511–14);28 or that postmodern theatre only became prevalent in the 1980s (Biron et al. 581–90). And what about Joseph Bonenfant’s account of thematic criticism’s continued prevalence and nationalism in the 1970s? 29 These accounts of the 1970s by established scholars cast strong doubts upon québécois literature being so phylogenetically distinct from that of the 1960s, suggesting that it was more consistent with the period of the Révolution tranquille tronquée than has been recognized and therefore that this process can be more accurately periodized as coming to an end in the late 1970s. Thus, to what extent does Nepveu perpetuate the traditional periodization of the Révolution tranquille because he privileges his preferred aesthetics and values over a supposed pre-poststructuralist binary inferior? It should also give one pause that this move justifies the diminishment of the literature of the Révolution tranquille tronquée on the basis of its politicized anger and contestation (“idéologies” and “nationalisme”) and, by extension, that its literary sequels were more transgressive and constitutive of world-class literature because of their postnationalism (60). In short, Nepveu’s deconstruction of the Révolution tranquille tronquée’s literary dreams of a nation may say more about 1980s disenchantment with or ennui about the québécois national project

414   Literary Periods and Genres than it does about the supposed lack of transgressiveness or lack of continuities of the literature of the Révolution tranquille tronquée in the 1970s. Jacques Pelletier’s article “Octobre 1970 et la transformation des rapports littérature/ société depuis la revolution tranquille” (1991) is a fine account of relationships between society and literature in Québec, even if I do not agree with its assessment that in the wake of the October Crisis (and the rise of the PQ) “[l]‌e néo-nationalisme … n’est plus un courant dynamique dans le champs culturel” (60) [“neo-nationalism … is no longer a dynamic current in the cultural field”]. Some of Pelletier’s more recent work is less definitive about the Crisis marking the end of the Révolution tranquille. However, his “Octobre 1970” article merits consideration since it argues that the Révolution tranquille [tronquée] was a “période” unto itself. My periodization of the Révolution tranquille is not only temporally longer, but I believe it is more consistent with Pelletier’s concept of a period as “une phase d’un processus plus englobant” (45) [“a phase within a more encompassing process”] than his own application of it to the Révolution tranquille. Pelletier sees “les Événements d’Octobre” (53) as consolidating the social-democratic version of québécois neo-nationalism that will lead to the 1976 election of the Parti québécois due to the ways the Crisis scared the population away from a more radical version of the national project, while it simultaneously drove highly committed, but small, factions into Marxist-Leninist sectarianism and other forms of left-wing politics that rejected nationalism as inherently bourgeois, and produced mechanical, formulaic proletarian art (Pelletier 59). He also credits the Crisis with accelerating Québec counterculture’s evacuation of mainstream politics in favour of other identity politics, such as Native, feminist, gay, and ecological politics, and new literary themes and aesthetics. I agree with Pelletier that the Crisis consolidated the social-democratic approach to the national question in the 1970s. But to imply that without the Crisis the social-democratic approach would have been surpassed by a more radical version is tenuous, while many former left-nationalists would likely have shifted toward support for the Parti québécois anyway, in favour of the goal of being able to assume and wield power,30 and the sectarian shift of the 1970s was a global phenomenon. I agree that diverse forms of feminism in Québec became the cultural force with the most counter-hegemonic influence (Pelletier 59–60)—as in the rest of Canada and the West. However, I am not convinced that one can separate out the Révolution tranquille tronquée from what transpires during the decade after the October Crisis. Marxist and anti-colonial ideas and values that inspired québécois activists and writers in the 1960s remained very influential after 1970 and, rather than dropping out politically, many québécois boomers were profoundly engaged in ethnic-class struggles, as the frequent wild cat and the three massive Common Front strikes of the 1970s testified (see Linteau et al. 67–77).31 Moreover, as Pelletier has since recognized, several left-nationalist groups of the 1970s were influenced by and pursued much of the intellectual and cultural work of Parti pris, especially in terms of the “mouvance ‘indépendance et socialisme’ ” (i.e., groups like the Centre de formation populaire, and journals such as Chroniques and Possibles; see Pelletier, Parti pris 20–22), a tradition that Pelletier, like many québécois today, sees as being reborn “dans un parti comme Québec solidaire (QS) ou encore dans

The Not So Quiet, Nor Short, Révolution Tranquille   415 le tout recent ‘printemps érable’ ” (21–22; see Bonenfant et al.) [“in a party like Québec solidaire (QS) or in the recent ‘maple spring’ ”].

Conclusion The period of the Révolution tranquille of the 1960s should be understood as the initial part of a longer process of struggle and modernization at the political-economic and cultural levels that was often not so quiet discursively, socially, or artistically. This more expansive sense of its process includes dialectically interrelated and opposed events such as the election of the Lesage government, and its subsequent defeat; the rise, decline, and “rebirth” of the kind of transgressive, left-nationalist values and cultural production associated with Parti pris during the 1960s; “l’Événement d’Octobre” and its anti-imperial and anti-colonial ideological and literary foreshadowings and aftermaths; the events of 1960s countercultures—the beginnings of second-wave feminism; the hippie movement and its diverse brands of communalism, including a back-to-the-land sense of québécitude—that would persist during the 1970s; and almost two full decades of cultural and literary innovation and transgression that, at the discursive and formal levels, often coincided with, critiqued, and thereby nourished (even as they also generated ideological and aesthetic alternatives to its ethnolinguistic and ethnic-class foundations) the rise and consolidation of the social-democratic values of the neo-nationalist movement as exemplified by the Parti québécois of the 1970s. For lest we forget, the Parti québécois was the movement that had the most pervasive popular, relatively “progressive,” political and cultural roots and effects in Québec throughout the late 1960s and 1970s (Warren 170; Saulnier).32 As I have tried to show, whatever individual writers’ ideological and political allegiances and literary intentions were between the 1960s and 1970s, francophone québécois literature of both decades was more representative of neo-nationalist, left-nationalist, and anti-colonial discourses and values, and far more innovative and less monological, than some critics have since characterized it. In 1980 few people foresaw that the world was on the cusp of the neoliberal counter-revolution, let  alone its “common-sense” consolidation in the 1990s as the global system. If québécois and other national cultures and literatures are to remain vibrant and avoid becoming mere historical footnotes to more superordinate cultures’ globalized power and privilege, it is important to recuperate the kind of communitarian, left-nationalist pluralism and culturally innovative resistance that was at the heart of the Révolution tranquille.

Notes 1. See Thomson (17) for, ironically, an account of the initially English-Canadian coinage of the term “Quiet Revolution.” For general online sources on the period, see Virtual

416   Literary Periods and Genres Museum Canada, The Beginning of a New Era, and La Révolution tranquille: Une onde de choc qui perdure depuis 50 ans. The latter site, by Québec’s Bibliothèque et archives nationales du Québec, provides bibliographical sources, as do all of the major research tools referenced in this chapter (i.e., Bayard; Biron et al.; Lemire et al.) and many of the critical works (i.e., Bessette, Histoire; Dumont, Littérature et société and Volume 3 of Les Idéologies; Major, Parti pris; Marcotte; and Nepveu, L’Écologie). See also Hamel et al.; Michon and Gerson. 2. According to the Centre national de resources textuelles et lexicales, québécitude is a québécism that refers to the “Ensemble des caractères propres à la communauté, à la culture des Québécois” (see http://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/québécitude) [“The ensemble of characteristics associated with Québécois society and culture”]. 3. For a basic source in English about the Ministère des affaires culturelles, see “Quebec Cultural Policies”, http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/en/article/ quebec-cultural-policies/. For other accounts of its policies over time, see Volume 2 of Linteau et al., especially Chapters 48, 53, and 54; and Couture. 4. Its usage became prevalent among québécois de souche—francophone québécois whose lineage goes back to the period of French colonization—during the rise of the neo-nationalist movement and in response to threats, and perceived threats, to québécois culture, particularly in the wake of the defeats of the Meech Lake (1987) and Charlottetown (1992) Accords—which would have brought Québec into the Canadian Constitution—and around the 1995 sovereignty referendum. 5. The Crise d’Octobre refers to the events surrounding the kidnapping of a British foreign trade commissioner and the vice premier of Québec in October 1970 by two cells of the Front de liberation du Québec (FLQ). Marshal Law (The War Measures Act) was implemented across Canada, habeus corpus suspended, and almost 500 people were arrested and imprisoned for various lengths of time. Only about three dozen people were ever charged. For historical accounts of the FLQ, see Fournier and Christophe Horguelin’s “Postface et notes” to the FLQ’s Manifeste d’octobre 1970. For an excellent bibliography of key political, historical, cultural, and artistic works related to the October Crisis, see Bibliothèque et archives nationales du Québec. 6. A synchronicity that caused many québécois to switch their primary “faith” or allegiance from the church to the secular state, a shift that helps explain the persistence of more social-democratic and statist policies and values in Québec than is the case elsewhere in Canada (at least for the moment). 7. For succinct accounts of the importance of joual to literature of the 1960s, see “L’Écriture, la parole et le joual” and “La Bataille des Belles-Sœurs” in Biron et al. 456–62 and 463–69, respectively. 8. Female writers such as Martin, Marie-Claire Blais, and Michèle Lalonde aside, as Pierre Nepveu has put it, “La révolution tranquille aura été essentiellement une histoire d’hommes” (L’Écologie 72) [“The Quiet Revolution was essentially a history of men”]. See also Saint-Martin and Boisclair. See Chapter 26 by Lucie Joubert in this volume for a discussion of female Quebec writers post-1970. 9. For histories and analyses of the significance of Parti pris to the Révolution tranquille, left-nationalism, and literature in Québec, see Maheu, Un Parti; Major, Parti pris; and Pelletier, Parti pris. 10. The term littérature québécoise for the period of the early to mid-1960s is mildly problematic given that its institutionalization would only be consolidated as of the late 1960s

The Not So Quiet, Nor Short, Révolution Tranquille   417 (see Major, “Pour”; Robert; and Belleau, “Problématique”) with the rapid expansion of journals, reprint collections, college and university courses, etc., devoted to it. Until the early 1960s the term littérature canadienne-française was commonly used (see Marcotte; Falardeau and Dumont), though many critics questioned whether it truly existed. Littérature québécoise now includes all texts produced in French going back to colonial times, and in Biron et al.’s recent book, even works produced in English since the modern period. Not all critics agree with this latter inclusion. 11. See Biron et  al. 363; Lemire et  al., Vol. 4, especially regarding the genres of poetry (xxii–xxiv) and the essay (xl); and Cambron regarding its frequency between 1967 and 1976. 12. As Patricia Smart, Lori Saint-Martin, and other feminist critics have remarked, however, the masculinist sexual politics of Aquin’s novels, as well as those by Jacques Godbout, Victor-Lévy Beaulieu, and a number of other male authors of the 1960s and 1970s, tend to be about male-identified liberation that often turns on “image[s]‌of the ‘femme-pays’ [that] can lead to the fantasy/reality of violence, rape and murder, where men destroy the beloved woman to win back the manhood they lost as ‘colonisés’ ” (Saint-Martin 197). 13. Québec was the bank robbery capital of North America during the 1960s and early 1970s and a number of robbers became anti-heroes within popular culture (e.g., Monica La Mitraille). Francophone ethnic-class poverty drove some people to desperate measures, like its contribution to the fostering of the FLQ. 14. See Vallières’s powerful account of growing up poor in Saint-Jacques in Nègres blancs d’amérique and Louis Hamelin’s fictionalization of this suburb in his novel La Constellation du Lynx (2010). 15. For a history of le Parti Rhinoceros, see http://www.ecrivain.net/ferron/index.cfm?p=1_ Vie/rhino_parti.htm. This neo-nationalist countercultural movement is often ignored in standard accounts of the Quiet Revolution. 16. Northrop Frye is one of English Canada’s best-known literary theorists and critics. F.R. Scott was a famous constitutional lawyer and poet, and one of the founders of the Canadian Commonwealth Federation (CCF), the precursor to today’s federal New Democratic Party. In the 1950s and early 1960s Ferron was friends with Scott and ran as a candidate for the CCF in 1958, but the two men fell out over the national question. This was exacerbated by Scott’s support for the War Measures Act during the October Crisis, and Ferron savaged him for it in several narratives. 17. Charron’s poetry is one of the most striking examples of the confluence of and tensions between ideological and formal heterogeneity during the 1970s, since different books by him evidence diverse degrees of Marxist, surrealist, parodic, and lyrical, individualistic perspectives and literary strategies. This said, his strong anti-nationalist, anti-ideological turn to metaphysics and the exploration of the ambiguities of language would only become truly dominant as of the 1980s. 18. See songs by Julien like “Mommy” (1971) and ones by Vigneault like “Gens du pays” and “La Queste du pays” (1976). Cambron analyzes examples of the “discours québécois” in songs by the popular pop-rock group of the 1970s, Beau Dommage. 19. For example, see Charron, especially La Passion. An irony of this anti-logocentric, anti-essentialist shift is that the radical “joual syntaxique” of Nicole Brossard (Le Centre blanc 152; Nepveu, L’Écologie 144) became, for many, synonymous with radical lesbian aesthetics and identity.

418   Literary Periods and Genres 20. Or as Pierre Milot periodizes the feminist poetic shift: “C’est dans la seconde moitié des années 1970 qu’émergera l’écriture féministe dont la Barre du jour deviendra la principale génératrice discursive à partir du numéro Femmes et langage en 1975” (323) [“It’s during the second half of the 1970s that l’écriture féministe will emerge and la Barre du jour will become its primary discursive force as of the number devoted to Femmes et langage in 1975”]. See Chapter 45 by Cecily Devereux in this volume on the history of feminist theory in Canada. 21. Lemire et al. claim the opposite: “que le mouvement de la contre-culture … est beaucoup moins fort [par la deuxième moitiée des années 1970] qu’à la fin des années 1960” (6: xviii) [“that the countercultural … movement is not as strong [by the second half of the 1970s] as it was at the end of the 1960s”]. 22. In fact, the recognition of Québec as a nation has become so hegemonic as to be uncontested by all major political parties within Québec, and even the Conservative Party of Canada under Stephen Harper has recognized it as a nation within Canada. This was done primarily for electoralist purposes, but it has not been reneged on. Moreover, the recent Spring 2014 electoral defeat of the Parti québécois is being interpreted by some as a sign of just how confident the younger generations are about the security of their ethnolinguistic identity (see Côté). 23. A number of historians and critics have contested this characterization as underestimating what was individually and collectively oppressive about Duplessism and modernization prior to the 1960s. See Bourque and Laurendeau. 24. For an annotated contextualization of the manifesto, see Borduas. For an excellent feminist focus on the female artists associated with Refus global, see Smart, 1998. 25. This said, it is worth noting that Éditions du remue-ménage, the first truly feminist publisher in Québec, was not founded until 1976. 26. For an important account of Bakhtinian ambivalences, “l’hybridation,” and “structures hybrides” in dialogical novels of the “esthétique de la fondation,” such as the above-noted novels by Blais, Ducharme and Carrier, see Belleau, “La Dimension.” 27. Though Nepveu does acknowledge that some of Nicole Brossard’s or François Charron’s most innovative work in the 1970s, especially in relation to poststructuralist explorations of the “Je” and “Nous,” was the result of its dialogues, ideologically and formally, with neo-nationalist predecessors and contemporaries (Nepveu 177–78, 189–90). For significant writers in Québec today who have been renewing the tradition of innovative writing that is rooted in diverse, yet collective, senses of resistance, often in opposition to neoliberal hegemony and its gendered and racialized manifestations, see Rawi Hage’s Cockroach (2008), Patrick Nicol’s Terre des cons (2012), and the late Nelly Arcan’s Putain (2001). 28. As Biron et al. note, referencing Gilbert David, “Entre 1967 et 1980 … la production de pièces quadruple et plus de quinze théâtres sont créés” (511) [“Between 1967 and 1980 … the number of productions quadruples and more than fifteen theatres are created”]. 29. Not all critics agree as to when thematic criticism began to seriously wane in Québec. See André Brochu’s premature announcement of its demise in the early 1970s (82–89). 30. For instance, Gérald Godin and Paul Chamberland, two founders of Parti pris, would support the Parti québécois’s approach to independence: Godin as an elected member of the National Assembly and a government minister, and Chamberland in the book Terre souveraine (1980). Other important left-nationalists who gravitated toward the PQ during the 1970s (then abandoned it because of its increasingly bourgeois nature) were Vallières and Vadeboncoeur.

The Not So Quiet, Nor Short, Révolution Tranquille   419 31. See Gagnon; Harvey (Chap. 10 and Annexes); Palmer (Chap. 6); and Rouillard, for more detailed relevant labour history sources. 32. For contrary, conservative perspectives on the significance of the Révolution tranquille, see Paquet.

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420   Literary Periods and Genres Bibliothèque et archives nationales du Québec. La Crise d’octobre. Préparée par Andrée Sabourin. 2010. https://www.banq.qc.ca/collections/collections_patrimoniales/bibliographies/crise_octobre.html?language_id=3. Web. Accessed 11 May 2015. Bibliothèque et archives nationales du Québec. La Révolution tranquille:  Une onde de choc qui perdure depuis 50 ans. Préparé par Venant Ntabona. Aug. 2010. http://www.banq.qc.ca/ collections/collections_patrimoniales/bibliographies/revolution_tranquille.html. Web. Accessed 11 May 2015. Biron, Michel, François Dumont, and Élisabeth Nardout-Lafarge, eds. Histoire de la littérature québécoise. Montréal: Boréal, 2007. Print. Blais, Marie-Claire. La Belle Bête. Québec: Institut littéraire du Québec, 1959. Print. ———. Une Saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel. Montréal: Les Éditions du jour, 1965. Print. Boisclair, Isabelle. “Roman national ou récit feminine? La littérature des femmes pendant la Révolution tranquille.” Globe 2.1 (1999): 97–115. Print. Bonenfant, Joseph. “Voies et impasses de la critique thématique au Québec.” Bayard, 100 Years 155–69. Bonenfant, Maude, Anthony Glinoer, and Martine-Emmanuelle Lapointe. Le Printemps québécois: Une anthologie. Montréal: Écosociété, 2013. Print. Borduas, Paul-Émile. Paul Emile Borduas: Écrits, 1942–1958. Ed. François-Marc Gagnon. Trans. François-Marc Gagnon and Dennis Young. Halifax, NS: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; New York: New York UP, 1978. Print. Bourque, Gilles. “La Révolution tranquille entre les velléités de l’oubli et les impératifs de la mémoire.” Bélanger et al. 107–19. Brault, Jacques. Mémoire. Montréal: Librairie Déom, 1965. Print. ———. Poèmes des quatre côtés. Saint-Lambert: Éditions du Noroît, 1975. Print. Brochu, André. “La Critique en question.” L’Instance critique 1961–1973. Montréal:  Leméac, 1974. Print. Brossard, Nicole. Le Centre blanc: Poèmes 1965–1975. Montréal: L’Hexagone, 1978. Print. ———. La Partie pour le tout. Montréal: L’Aurore, 1975. Print. Cambron, Micheline. Une Société, un récit:  Discours culturel au Québec (1967–1976). Montréal: L’Hexagone, 1989. Print. Cardin, Jean-François. “Octobre et l’histoire.” Liberté 32.5 (oct. 1990): 53–75. Print. Carrier, Roch. La Guerre, Yes Sir! Montréal: Éditions du Jour, 1968. Print. Chamberland, Paul. L’Afficheur hurle. Montréal: Parti pris, 1964. Print. ———. Demain les dieux naîtront. Montréal: L’Hexagone, 1974. Print. ———. Éclats de la pierre noire d’où rejaillet ma vie: Poèmes suivis d’une révélation (1966–1969). Montréal: Les Éditions Danielle Laliberté, 1971. Print. ———. L’Inavouable. Montréal: Parti pris, 1967. Print. ———. “Independence Is for 1993.” Trans. David Lenson. Massachusetts Review 31.1–2 (1990): 61–74. Print. ———. Terre Québec. Montréal: Librairie Déom, 1964. Print. ———. Terre souveraine. Montréal: L’Hexagone, 1980. Print. Charlebois, Robert. “The Frog Song.” Longue distance. Montréal:  Solution, 1976. LP. [Lyrics: http://www.lyricsmania.com/the_frog_song_lyrics_robert_charlebois.html]. Charron, François. Littérature-obscénité. Montréal: Éditions D. Laliberté, 1974. Print. ———. La Passion d’autonomie. Littérature et nationalisme suivi de Une décomposition tranquille. Montréal: Les Herbes rouges, 1997. Print. ———. Propagande. Montréal: Les Herbes rouges, 1977. Print. ———. La Vie n’a pas de sens. Montréal: Les Herbes rouges, 1985. Print.

The Not So Quiet, Nor Short, Révolution Tranquille   421 Chartrand, Alain. Un Homme de parole. Montréal: Office national du film, 1991. Film. https:// www.onf.ca/film/homme_de_parole. Comeau, Robert, ed. Jean Lesage et l’éveil d’une nation. Sillery: Les Presses de l’Université du Québec, 1989. Print. ———. “La Révolution tranquille: Une invention?” Bélanger et al. 11–20. Côté, Roch. “Un Combat perdu? Au contraire!” Le Devoir 11 avril 2014: A9. Print. Couture, Claude. Le Mythe de la modernisation du Québec: Des années 1930 à la révolution tranquille. Montréal: Éditions du Méridien, 1991. Print. David, Gilbert. Un Théâtre à vif: Écritures dramatiques et pratiques scéniques au Québec, de 1930 à 1990. Diss. Université de Montréal, 1995. Print. Dubé, Marcel. Les Beaux Dimanches: Pièce en trois actes et deux tableaux. Montréal: Leméac, 1968. Print. ———. Bilan. Montréal:  Leméac, 1968. Print. [first produced for Radio-Canada television in 1960]. ———. Pauvre amour: Comédie dramatique en cinq tableaux. Montréal: Leméac, 1969. Print. Duchaine, Jean-François. Rapport sur les événements d’octobre 1970. 2nd ed. Québec: Ministère de la Justice du Québec, 1981. Print. Ducharme, Réjean. L’Avalée des avalés. Paris: Gallimard, 1966. Print. ———. Les Enfantômes. Paris: NRF Gallimard, 1976. Print. ———. Le Nez qui voque. Paris: NRF Gallimard, 1967. Print. Dumont, Fernand. Les Idéologies au Canada français. 3 vols. Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1971–81. Vol. 1: 1850–1900. 1971. Ed. Jean-Paul Montminy and Jean Hamelin; Vol. 2: 1900–1929. 1974. Ed. Jean Hamelin, Jean-Paul Montminy, and Fernand Harvey; Vol. 3: 1940– 1976. Tome 1, La Presse-La Littérature; tome 2, Les Mouvements sociaux—Les Syndicats; tome 3, Les Partis politiques—L’Église. Print. ———. Le Lieu de l’homme. La culture comme distance et mémoire. Montréal: Éditions HMH, 1968. Print. ———. Littérature et société canadiennes-françaises. Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1964. Print. ———. “La Sociologie comme critique de la littérature.” Recherches sociologiques 5.1–2 (1964): 225–40. Print. Falardeau, Jean-Charles. L’Évolution du héros dans le roman québécois. Montréal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1968. Print. ———. L’Imaginaire sociale et littérature. Préf. Gilles Marcotte. Montréal: Hurtubise HMH, 1974. Print. ———. Notre société et son roman. Montréal: Éditions HMH, 1967. Print. Falardeau, Jean-Charles, and Fernand Dumont, eds. Littérature et société canadiennes-françaises. Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1964. Print. Ferretti, Lucia. “La Révolution tranquille.” L’Action nationale 89.10 (déc. 1999): 59–91. Print. Ferron, Jacques. L’Amélanchier. Montréal: Éditions du jour, 1970. Print. ———. Le Ciel de Québec. Montréal: Éditions du jour, 1969. Print. ———. Les Confitures de coings et autres textes. Montréal: Parti pris, 1972. Print. ———. Contes anglaises et autres. Montréal: Éditions d’Orphée, 1964. Print. ———. Contes du pays incertain. Montréal: Éditions d’Orphée, 1962. Print. ———. Du fond de mon arrière-cuisine. Montréal: Éditions du jour, 1973. Print. ———. Histoirettes. Montréal: Éditions du jour, 1969. Print. ———. La Nuit. Montréal: Parti pris, 1965. Print. Foglia, Alain. Chartrand, le malcommode. Montréal: Groupe PVP, 2011. Print.

422   Literary Periods and Genres Fournier, Louis. FLQ, Histoire d’un movement clandestine. Montréal:  Éditions Québec/ Amérique, 1982. Print. Front de libération du Québec. Manifeste d’octobre 1970. Postface et notes de Christophe Horguelin. Montréal: Lux Éditeur, 2010. Print. Gagnon, Mona-Josée. “Les Femmes dans le mouvement syndical québécois.” Travailleuses et feministes: La femme dans la société québécoise. Ed. Marie Lavigne and Yolande Pinard. Montréal: Boréal Express, 1983. 139–60. Print. Gallays, François. “L’Amélanchier, roman de Jacques Ferron.” Lemire et al. 5: 22–26. Gauvreau, Claude. Le Charge de l’orignal épormyable; fiction dramatique en quatre actes. Montréal: L’Hexagone, 1992. Print. ———. Œuvres créatrices completes. Montréal: Parti pris, 1977. Print. Godbout. Jacques. L’Aquarium. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1962. Print. ———. D’Amour P.Q. Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1972. Print. ———. Salut Galarneau! Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967. Print. Godin, Gérald. Les Cantouques:  Poèmes en langue verte, populaire et quelquefois française. Montréal: Parti pris, 1966. Print. ———. Libertés surveillés. Montréal: Parti pris, 1975. Print. ———. Poèmes et cantos. Trois-Rivières: Éditions du “Bien public,” 1962. Print. Grandpré, Pierre de, ed. Histoire de la littérature française du Québec. 4 vols. Montréal: Librairie Beauchemin, 1967–69. Print. Hage, Rawi. Cockroach. Toronto: Anansi, 2008. Print. Hamel, Réginald, John Hare, and Paul Wyczynski, eds. Dictionnaire des auteurs de la langue française en amérique du nord. Montrèal: Fides, 1989. Print. Hamelin, Louis. La Constellation du lynx. Montréal: Les Éditions du Boréal, 2010. Print. Harvey, Fernand. Le Mouvement ouvrier au Québec. Montréal: Boréal Express, 1980. Print. Hébert, Anne. Le Torrent: Nouvelles. Montréal: Beauchemin, 1950. Print. Horguelin, Christophe. Postface. Manifeste d’octobre 1970. Montréal: Lux Éditeur, 2010. Print. Hutcheon, Linda. The Canadian Postmodern:  A  Study of Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1988. Print. Jasmin, Claude. Éthel et le térroriste. Montréal: Librairie Déom, 1964. Print. Jay, Martin. “Historical Explanation and the Event:  Reflections on the Limits of Contextualization.” New Literary History 42 (2011): 557–71. Print. Julien, Pauline. “Mommy.” [Lyrics:  Gilles Richer and Marc Gélinas; Music:  Marc Gélinas]. Pauline Julien En Scène. Montréal:  Deram, 1975. LP. [Lyrics:  http://www. independance-quebec.com/musique/pauline_julien_mommy.php]. Lalonde, Michèle. “États de la parlure.” [1972, 1974 and 1976]. Défense et illustration de la langue québécoise; suivi de prose et poems. Paris: Éditions Seghers/Laffont, 1979. 178–83. Print. ———. “Speak White.” Montréal:  L’Hexagone, 1974. Print; Lalonde, Défense et illustration 37–40. Langevin, André. Poussière sur la ville. Montréal: Robert Laffont, 1953. Print. Langevin, Gilbert. Les Écrits de Zéro Lege, Première série. Montréal:  Éditions du jour, 1972. Print. ———. Mon refuge est un volcan. Montréal: L’Hexagone, 1976. Print. Larocque, Gilbert. Après la boue. Montréal: Éditions du jour, 1972. Print. ———. Serge d’entre les morts. Montréal: VLB éditeur, 1976. Print. Laurendeau, Marc. “L’Ébullition culturelle pendant la Révolution tranquille.” Bélanger et al. 253–58.

The Not So Quiet, Nor Short, Révolution Tranquille   423 Leahy, David. “Counter-Worlding A/américanité.” Canada and Its Americas:  Transnational Navigations. Ed. Winfried Siemerling and Sarah Phillips Casteel. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2010. 62–84. Print. L’Hérault, Pierre. Jacques Ferron, cartographie de l’imaginaire. Montréal:  Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1980. Print. ———. “Jacques Ferron et la question nationale.” Dérives: Tiers-Monde/Québec, une nouvelle conjoncture culturelle 14–15 (1978): 3–23. Print. Lemire, Maurice, Gilles Dorion, and Aurélien Boivin, eds. Dictionnaire des œuvres littéraires du Québec. 8 vols. Montréal: Fides, 1978–2011. Print. Linteau, Paul André. “Un Débat historiographique: L’entrée du Québec dans la modernité et la signification de la Révolution tranquille.” Bélanger et al. 21–41. Linteau, Paul-André, René Durocher, Jean-Claude Robert, and François Ricard, eds. Histoire du Québec contemporain. Tome II: Le Québec depuis 1930. Montréal: Boréal, 1989. Print. Maheu, Pierre. “de la révolte à la révolution.” Parti pris 1.1 (oct. 1963): 5–17; rpt. Pelletier, Parti pris 33–44. ———. Un Parti pris révolutionnaire. Montréal: Parti pris, 1983. Print. Major, André. “Les Armes à la main.” Liberté 5.2 (mars–avril 1963): 83–91. Print. ———. Histoires de déserteurs. 3 vols. Vol. 1: L’Épouvantail. Montreal: Éditions du Jour, 1974; Vol. 2: L’Épidemie, 1975; Vol. 3: Les Réscapés. Montréal: Quinze, 1976. Print. ———. Parti pris, Idéologies et littérature. Montréal: Hurtubise-HMH, 1979. Print. ———. Poèmes pour durer. Montréal: Éditions du Songe, 1969. Print. ———. “Pour une littérature révolutionnaire.” Parti pris 1.8 (mai 1964): 56–57. Print. ———. “Pour une pensée québécoise.” Voix et Images du pays 1 (1967): 125–31. Print. Marcotte, Gilles. Une Littérature qui se fait: Essais critiques sur la littérature canadienne-française. Montréal: Éditions HMH, 1962. Print. Martin, Claire. Dans un gant de fer. 2 vols. Montréal: Le Cercle du livre de France, 1965, 1966. Print. May, Cedric. “Don Quichotte de la démanche, roman de Victor-Lévy Beaulieu.” Lemire et al. 5: 255–57. Michon, Jacques, and Carole Gerson, eds. History of the Book in Canada, Vol. III: 1918–1980. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2007. Print. Milot, Pierre. “Tel Quel ou les conditions d’émergence des Herbes rouges.” Voix et Images 13.2 (1988): 317–23. Print. Miron, Gaston. L’Homme rapaillé. Montréal:  Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1970. Print. ———. “Notes sur le non-poème et le poème.” Parti pris 2.10–11 (1965): 88–97. Print. ———. “Quelle Part doit-on réserver à la littérature québécoise dans l’enseignement de la littérature?” Liberté 10.3 (mai–juin 1968): 85–86. Print. Nepveu, Pierre. L’Écologie du réel: Mort et naissance de la littérature québécoise contemporaine. Montréal: Boréal, 1988. Print. ———. Gaston Miron:  La vie d’un homme. Biographie. Montréal:  Les Éditions du Boréal, 2012. Print. Nicol, Patrick. Terre des cons. Montréal: La Mèche, 2012. Print. Ouellette, Fernand. Le Soleil sous la mort. Montréal: L’Hexagone, 1965. Print. ———. Poésie. Poèmes 1953–1971. Montréal: L’Hexagone, 1972. Print. Palmer, Bryan. Working-Class Experience:  Rethinking the History of Canadian Labour, 1800–1991. Toronto: Butterworths, 1983. Print.

424   Literary Periods and Genres Paquet, Gilles. “Après la Révolution tranquille: Un lien social modern à reconstruire.” Le Devoir 31 mars 2000; rpt. Bélanger et al. 88–93. ———. Oublier la révolution tranquille. Montréal: Liber, 1999. Print. Paradis, Suzanne. Femme fictive, femme réelle. Le Personnage feminine dans le roman feminin canadien-français, 1884–1966. Québec: Garneau, 1966. Print. Pelletier, Gérard. La Crise d’Octobre. Montréal: Éditions du Jour, 1971. Print. Pelletier, Jacques. “Octobre 1970 et la transformation des rapports Littérature/Société depuis la Révolution tranquille.” Québec Studies 11 (1990/91): 45–61. Print. ———, ed. Parti pris: Une anthologie. Montréal: Lux Éditeur, 2013. Print. ———. “La Révolution tranquille a-t-elle bien eu lieu.” Bélanger et al. 71–77; rpt. Question nationale et lutte sociale. La Nouvelle fracture: Écrits à contre-courant 2. Montréal: Éditions Nota bene, 2007. 159–69. Print. Pintal, Lorraine. “De l’autre côté de la cuisine, le Québec s’ouvre sur le monde.” Bélanger et al. 259–70. Popovic, Pierre. La Contradiction du poème: Poésie et discours social au Québec de 1948 à 1953. Montréal: Balzac, 1992. Print. Québec Underground 1962–1972. Montréal: Éditions Médiart, 1973. Print. Renaud, Jacques. Le Cassé. Montréal: Parti pris, 1964. Print. Ricard, François. La Generation lyrique:  Essai sur la vie et l’œuvre des premiers-nés du baby-boom. Montréal: Boréal, 1994. Print. Richard, Jean-Jules. Un Feu dans l’amiante. Montréal: Chezlauteur, 1956. Print. Robert, Lucie. L’Institution du littéraire au Québec. Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1989. Print. Rouillard, Jacques. “Le militantisme des travailleurs au Québec et en Ontario, niveau de syndicalisation et movement de grève (1900–1980).” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 37.2 (1983): 201–25. Print. Saint-Martin, Lori. “The Body Politic and the Erotic Body:  The (Male) Novel of the Quiet Revolution in Quebec.” British Journal of Canadian Studies 21.2 (2008): 194–217. Print. Saulnier, Alain. “La Question nationale et le P.C.O.” Les Cahiers du socialisme 14 (1984): 101–25. Print. Sirois, Antoine. “Une Littérature québécoise?” Québec français 7 (1972): 9. Print. ———. Montréal dans le roman canadien. Préf. Gilles Marcotte. Montréal:  M. Didier, 1968. Print. Smart, Patricia. Écrire dans la maison du père: L’émergence du feminine dans la tradition littéraire du Québec. Montréal: Éditions Québec/Amérique, 1988. Print. ———. Les Femmes du Refus global. Montréal: Les Éditions du Boréal, 1998. Print. Tetley, William. Octobre 1970—Dans les coulisses de la Crise. Saint-Lambert:  Héritage, 2010. Print. Thomson, Dale C. Jean Lesage et la révolution tranquille. Saint-Laurent: Éditions du Trécarré, 1984. Print. Tremblay, Michel. Les Belles-Soeurs. Montréal: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968. Print. ———. Hosanna, suivi de La Duchesse de Langeais. Montréal: Leméac, 1973. Print. ———. Il était un fois dans l’Est. [film script]. Montréal: L’Aurore, 1974. Print. ———. Saint Carmen de la Main. Montréal: Leméac, 1976. Print. Trudeau, Pierre Elliott. “La Nouvelle trahison des clercs.” Cité libre 13.46 (avril 1962): 3–16. Print. Vadeboncoeur, Pierre. L’Autorité du peuple. Montréal: Éditions de l’Arc, 1965. Print. ———. Chaque jour, l’indépendance … Montréal: Leméac, 1976. Print.

The Not So Quiet, Nor Short, Révolution Tranquille   425 ———. Un Génocide en douce: Écrits polémiques. Montréal: L’Hexagone, 1976. Print. ———. “Question en réponse à des questions.” Parti pris 5.8–9 (1968): 41; rpt. Pelletier 149–50. Vallières, Pierre. La Liberté en friche. Montréal: Éditions Québec/Amérique, 1979. Print. ———. Nègres blancs d’amérique: Autobiographie précoce d’un “terroriste” québécois. Montréal: Parti pris, 1968. Print. ———. Les Scorpions associés. Montréal: Éditions Québec-Amérique, 1978. Print. ———. L’Urgence de choisir. Montréal: Parti pris, 1972. Print. Vigneault, Gilles. J’ai planté un chêne. Le Nordet, 1976. LP. ———. Pays du fond de moi. Le Nordet, 1973. LP. Vigneault, Robert. “La Ligne du risqué, essais de Pierre Vadboncoeur.” Lemire et al. 4: 516–19. Virtual Museum.ca [Musée québécois de culture populaire]. “The Bottom Line:  A  Not So Quiet Revolution.” The Beginning of a New Era. http://larevolutiontranquille.ca/en/epilogue. php. Web. Accessed 11 May 2015. Warren, Jean-Philippe. Ils voulaient changer le monde: Le militantisme marxiste-leniniste au Québec. Montréal: VLB Éditeur, 2007. Print.

Chapter 23

The Canadia n Sh ort Story in E ng l i sh Aesthetic Agency, Social Change, and the Shifting Canon Alexander MacLeod

At the conclusion of Alice Munro’s “Family Furnishings,” the narrator, a well-known short-story writer, returns to her hometown to attend her father’s funeral. It is a socially awkward encounter, dominated by the feelings of forced intimacy and near suffocating self-consciousness that all readers of Munro will recognize. The celebrity author, “warm and relieved and reconciled,” has come back to her roots, back to the people who supposedly know her best, yet she still feels isolated and uncomfortable and admits she doesn’t recognize many faces in this crowd of near and distant family members (113). “There was a danger whenever I was on home ground,” the narrator admits: the danger of seeing my life through other eyes than my own. Seeing it as an ever-increasing roll of words like barbed wire, intricate, bewildering, uncomforting—set against the rich productions, the food, flowers, and knitted garments of other women’s domesticity. It became harder to say that it was worth the trouble. Worth my trouble, maybe, but what about anyone else’s? (111)

One of Munro’s most self-reflexive pieces, “Family Furnishings” is a story about the “trouble” of writing stories. It focuses in particular on the challenges of the artist “set against” the more stable and acceptable modes of domestic behaviour. Simultaneously inside and outside her community, the narrator sees and understands the social operation of this place, but she also sees herself being seen by others as a sort of arrogant rule breaker, an “uncomforting” presence standing against tradition. This is a role she embraces, and though she belongs to this family and with these people, she also loves

The Canadian Short Story in English    427 her self-imposed separation, the “blessing” of having “nobody I had to bother talking to or listening to” (117). Many of Munro’s recurrent themes return in this late-career story. There is the intergenerational tension between women who must follow the different social codes of different eras and there are the tough negotiations of autonomy and loyalty, self-reliance and love. Above all, however, “Family Furnishings” is a devastatingly honest analysis of the social index of creativity; and when it is read as a kind of “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman,” the story details not only the narrator’s desperate desire to be a writer, but also the painful costs she must be willing to pay if she freely chooses to craft fictions out of other people’s lives. The narrator understands that her work has caused plenty of “peculiar difficulties” for her father and for her extended community (111). She knows that her controversial decision to appropriate the experiences of her relatives as available raw materials, inherited “family furnishings,” for “her” stories has been viewed as a profound form of “wrongdoing” or “thoughtlessness,” but she does not care (111). In her mind, the story and the real lives it touches have “little to do” with each other (110). After the funeral, however, the writer receives an unequivocal reader response from her local audience. Standing in the graveyard, she comes face to face with the harsh judgment of a distant female relative. This woman, standing directly in the path of light as the blazing sun beats down on the narrator, makes it clear that not everybody embraces her work and not everyone sees the artist as an exceptional talent. In fact, the people who are most intimately connected to her stories consider the writer more like a morally hollow manipulator, a perverse collector or grave robber, preying on the pain of others to better fulfill her own aesthetic goals. Although the criticisms the woman levels at the narrator are phrased evasively, it is obvious that she is furious about the way that writers take the truth and “change things around” to fit their own purposes (116). In their final exchange, the woman asks the writer if she’d like to know what one of their closest relatives really thinks about her. When the writer agrees, the woman reports: “She said that you were smart, but you weren’t ever quite as smart as you thought you were” (116). As is the case in so many of Munro’s crucial scenes, this information is delivered with an intimate precision designed to inflict maximum pain, and the result is almost—almost—disastrous. But the story does not end on this note. Instead, there is a final flashback, another signature Munro manoeuvre, and we leave the death sentence behind in the cemetery so that “Family Furnishings” can conclude in a kind of supernatural nativity scene. The narrator goes back to her early twenties to recall the moment when she first saw herself as a fiction writer, a new kind of creature with a unique social power, the ability “to breathe a different kind of air, available only to myself ” (109). Wandering the anonymous streets after a visit with her cousin, Alfrida—the woman she would eventually build her infamous story around—the narrator feels herself pulling away from her family and the rest of her community. She remembers “such happiness, to be alone” and recalls that at the exact moment she decided to claim the family material for her fiction, the exact moment she felt “the trap closing,” she did not feel any panic or remorse: “I did not think of the story I would make about Alfrida—not of that in

428   Literary Periods and Genres particular—but of the work I wanted to do, which seemed more like grabbing something out of the air than constructing stories” (117). Munro paints this as a moment of pure transformation, a transition from one kind of protective domestic embrace to another much colder, more distanced, and clinical isolation. She is physically, emotionally, and psychologically separated from the community, yet still creatively fueled by her intimate connection to these people. The narrator feels the “cries of the crowd” coming to her “like big heartbeats, full of sorrows,” and she delights in the “lovely formal-sounding waves” of other people’s experiences, other people’s pain, “their distant, almost inhuman assent and lamentation” (117). Though she has not set down a single word yet, she knows that her stories will make serious demands on her life and her family and that it will not be easy to connect the person she once was with the person she is about to become. Despite all of this, however, the writer is ready, more than willing, and clearly eager to begin the work. The obstacles of the penultimate scene are overcome by the forceful conviction of the conclusion, and death gives way to birth. The last lines of “Family Furnishings” are: “This is what I wanted, this is what I thought I had to pay attention to, this was how I wanted my life to be” (117). *** What can we possibly learn about Canadian short fiction from such a close reading of just a few scenes taken from a single short story written by one author? Maybe not very much. Though Munro occupies a central position in the entwined histories of Canadian literature and the international publication of contemporary global short fiction—and though her 2013 Nobel Prize could be read as the most significant event in both of these unfolding narratives—her work should not be isolated from the rest of the national canon or interpreted as an exceptional anomaly. There is a lot of other ground to cover—plenty of names, dates, and titles to consider—before a reader can begin to appreciate the way that the short-story form has been so consistently and so strangely prominent in Canadian literature since the first anonymously authored fictions began to appear in the early colonial newspapers of the 1820s. It is a massive and somewhat mysterious subject, “The Canadian Short Story in English,” and explanations for the lasting relevance of the genre are difficult to find.1 Even if we were to study only the key developments in recent memory, it would be hard to imagine a single act of description or scholarly summary that could reconcile a collection of artistic projects as diverse as, to name just a few of the most striking achievements of the last few decades, Barbara Gowdy’s We So Seldom Look on Love (1992), Thomas King’s One Good Story, That One (1993), André Alexis’s Despair and Other Stories of Ottawa (1994), Eden Robinson’s Traplines (1996), Zsuzsi Gartner’s All the Anxious Girls on Earth (1999), Annabel Lyon’s Oxygen (2000), Mark Anthony Jarman’s 19 Knives (2000), Lynn Coady’s Play the Monster Blind (2000), Madeleine Thien’s Simple Recipes (2001), Lisa Moore’s Open (2002), David Bezmozgis’s Natasha and Other Stories (2004), Bill Gaston’s Gargoyles (2006), Pasha Malla’s The Withdrawal Method (2008), Ivan E.  Coyote’s Missed Her (2010), Sarah Selecky’s This Cake Is for the Party (2010), Michael Christie’s The Beggar’s Garden (2011), Rebecca Lee’s Bobcat and Other Stories (2012), Douglas Glover’s Savage Love (2013), or Eliza

The Canadian Short Story in English    429 Robertson’s Wallflowers (2014). Totalizing statements will not be very helpful under these conditions. Any attempt to pull all these works together, as well as the two centuries worth of writing that preceded them, is destined to end in frustration, or at least in some very painful and awkward intellectual straining. As Margaret Atwood wisely observes in her introduction to The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English, “to worry unduly over such matters as canons and classics is to make a fool of oneself eventually” (xii). There are simply too many writers with too many different projects, working in historical conditions that share nothing in common with each other. So, if we cannot say anything about shared concerns or a common style, then what is there to discuss? This is where Munro makes her critical contribution, because if we cannot see any consistent form or any specially recurring content in the history of the Canadian short story, we should at least be able recognize the plot and the central conflict of “Family Furnishings” replaying itself over and over again in many different times in many different contexts. Like Munro’s “uncomforting” narrator, purposely set against the rules of her community, most of the authors and most of the memorable works of Canadian short fiction emerged out of similarly inhospitable, and often overtly hostile, social or artistic conditions. Rather than following a line of well-established literary tradition, or being passively carried along by the dominant cultural or political currents of their ages, many of the stories that now seem essential to Canadian literature had to begin at the margins and overcome some substantial form of aesthetic or social resistance before they could claim a central position in the country’s literary history. Talking to Graeme Gibson in 1972, when she was only at the beginning stages of her career, 41 years before she would win the Nobel Prize, and 29 years before she would write “Family Furnishings,” the young Alice Munro was already explicit and forceful on this point; and when she describes her “alienated” childhood, growing up in a place where reading was viewed as a “time-waster” and writing as “a very meaningless, useless type of work,” she sounds exactly like the narrator she would invent decades later (246). In no uncertain terms, she tells Gibson: “I always realized that I had a different view of the world, and one that would bring me great trouble and ridicule if it were exposed” (246). This is why I think the last line of the story is so important to any study of the history of Canadian literature. It may seem like a simple statement, but that declaration—“This is what I wanted … this was how I wanted my life to be”—can be read as a profound expression of aesthetic agency. It is the record of an important decision being made, a clear choice. Munro’s narrator, like Munro herself, and like a great many of the artists we will encounter in this survey, is, by definition, a troublemaker, a self-conscious agent of change. For reasons that are difficult to understand, she has selected the short story as the best vehicle for advancing her project, and she is clearly not writing journalism or a novel or a poem or a broad cultural essay. Though she is fully aware of the difficult social conditions she is facing and simultaneously creating, and though she understands that the birth of her writing career will require at least the partial destruction of the aesthetic and social codes she grew up with, she is ready to take up the task at hand. In what follows, we will see the relationship between social resistance and aesthetic agency take on many forms. Though ideologies, literary fashions, regional identities,

430   Literary Periods and Genres and real social and political conditions change continuously through two centuries of history, Canadian short-fiction writers working in English have often positioned themselves at the earliest cutting edges of these changes and, in many cases, their work has helped direct and focus those cultural discourses into the future. The question of genre classification may be consistently troubling, but it is also consistently important, and though I will not attempt to offer any easy explanation for why this has happened, it is simply true that the supposedly marginalized form of the short story has been consistently central to the major aesthetic and cultural shiftings of Canadian literature. From the colonial to the contemporary period, short-story writers have played essential rather than complementary roles in the formation of the canon and the society it represents. Munro’s Nobel Prize may represent a kind of symbolic mile-marker on this continuum, but it is worth noting that, internationally speaking, the best-known Canadian writers in English have almost always been short-story writers. This process began long before there even was a notion of “Canada.” In the pre-Confederation colonial period, as the culture of the book and the printing industry were still in the earliest stages of their development, short-fiction writers were already using their work to change and reshape the social structures that defined their lives. As Gerald Lynch and many others have already demonstrated, leading public intellectuals working in this period often aligned their writing—and the work they did as newspaper editors, printing-press operators, politicians, lawyers, and religious or educational leaders—with clearly articulated political, cultural, and economic agendas that they wished to advance (“Introduction” 1). For example, in his “day jobs” as a Presbyterian minister, renowned naturalist, committed educator, social reformer, and theologian, Thomas McCulloch worked tirelessly to change what he saw as the lazy, backward culture he discovered when he departed from Scotland and landed in Nova Scotia in 1803. A  sworn champion of liberal education, McCulloch devoted his entire professional career to the construction of real brick-and-mortar cultural institutions that would project his values and his vision for a better future for his adopted colony and home. He founded the Pictou Academy in 1816 and became the first president of Dalhousie University in 1836, yet it could be argued that he achieved his greatest successes and his most lasting influence when he cast off his official designations and began to craft short stories and publish them as letters to the editor in the Acadian Recorder from 1821–1823. Normally writing under the name of his most celebrated character, Mephibosheth Stepsure—a physically lame, but socially surefooted chronicler of life in a then typical Nova Scotia village—McCulloch was able to blatantly critique his fellow citizens and call for the sort of social change he desired. Messages that would have seemed arrogant, didactic, and boring coming from a respected community leader, or from the pulpit of a Presbyterian minister like his self-reflexive caricature, “Parson Drone,” became more palatable when they were delivered in the dialect-laden, plain-speaking voice of a true character from the local community. Stepsure’s comic recountings of all his neighbours’ mistakes, their lapses in judgment, and their financial failures attracted a massive readership that McCulloch could never have matched through his official capacities. The “Stepsure Letters” created what might be called the first large-scale short-fiction

The Canadian Short Story in English    431 audience in English-Canadian literary history, but it is important to remember that McCulloch was writing a stinging cultural critique and that he purposely positioned his character as an outsider, a marginalized individual who did not follow the conventions of the age. Though his controversial criticisms were not easily absorbed, Stepsure’s calls for more industry and less sloth, more frugality and less debt, more modesty and less high-class finery, more sobriety and less rambunctious drinking found a delighted and receptive community of readers. Issues of the Acadian Recorder that contained these letters sold out quickly and swept through the colony (Dvorak 56). In a similar way, when Joseph Howe purchased The Novascotian in 1827, he too understood that short stories attracted attention and focused concentration on social issues much more effectively than most of the editorial content he could generate for his new publication. Raised in a United Empire Loyalist family that had fled from Massachusetts after the revolution, Howe was, above all else, a patriotic Nova Scotian, and he lived most of his adult life in perpetual fear of a possible American annexation of his colony. From 1828 to 1829, he traveled all across Nova Scotia to write and publish a set of travel sketches, the “Western” and “Eastern Rambles.” Howe used these portraits not only to provide local content and to grow the colony-wide readership for his newspaper, but also as a means of building a shared pride and, in very real terms, a shared financial and political investment in a community that, Howe felt, desperately needed to assert its political and economic autonomy if it was ever going to hold off encroachments from the steadily expanding republic to the south. In 1835, when the Novascotian published the first series of Thomas Chandler Haliburton’s The Clockmaker; or The Sayings and Doings of Sam Slick, of Slickville—published in book form by Joseph Howe in 1836—the pattern repeated again. Haliburton, like McCulloch, had held many different official positions of power and influence in the colony. At turns a historian, a lawyer, a judge, and a politician, he, like Howe, was fiercely loyal to Britain and deeply concerned about the relationship between Nova Scotia the United States. Though Haliburton’s world-famous character, Sam Slick, was the classic troublemaking outsider—a fast-talking American traveling salesman who made enormous profits by peddling cheaply made clocks to gullible “Bluenoses” who couldn’t afford them—the message embedded in all these stories, and indeed even in Sam’s most oft-quoted sayings and send-ups, called upon colonial Nova Scotians to be more industrious and to value the full economic potential of their lands and harbours. In a strange mix of fear and grudging respect, Haliburton believed that the only way for the colony to change so that it could defend itself against the likes of Sam Slick (and the encroaching march of American influence he represented) was to actually follow that American example more closely and to become more industrious and more entrepreneurial. In these three early Nova Scotian examples, we see short stories that are almost called into being by what their authors viewed as pressing social, cultural, or political needs. McCulloch, Howe, and Haliburton were motivated not only by what they saw as a conspicuous absence in the print culture of their colony, but also by a pressing cultural and political urgency, and they took it upon themselves to write into that void. There was no

432   Literary Periods and Genres tradition of widely published colonial short fiction before Stepsure, or the “Rambles,” or Sam Slick, but revealingly, a new kind of literature, a short story imbedded in a very different kind of social space, could be clearly identified after their work became widely known. Today many critics see McCulloch and Haliburton as the originators of a uniquely North American style of satire and humour writing that would later include Mark Twain and Stephen Leacock. In the same way, Howe’s success as a writer and publisher and his reputation as a defender of the common good led directly to his long and varied career in politics. As a journalist and a politician, Howe famously fought off libel charges and championed freedom of the press in Nova Scotia in 1835. He also established the first colonial responsible government in the entire British Empire in 1848, served as premier of Nova Scotia from 1860 to 1863, and mounted a passionate campaign against Confederation from 1865 to 1867. These are significant achievements for a figure who clearly used short fiction, and even allowed himself to be cast as a comic caricature in Haliburton’s internationally bestselling work, in order to advance his particular causes.2 In the period after 1867, three more short-fiction writers made similar choices and used their aesthetic agency in different ways to set the course for what could be considered, for the first time in history, an official Canadian literature. At the same time as the young country was developing the basic political institutions of its government, Charles G.D. Roberts, Duncan Campbell Scott, and, later, Leacock, produced a series of short stories that helped establish the dominant Anglophone cultural infrastructure of the nation. In the process, they invented many of the most recognizable, sometimes clichéd, and, today, often the most controversial signature elements of the Canadian literature of the period. Though Roberts is most often remembered, along with Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman, and Scott, as a Confederation poet, current scholars have focused much more on his short fiction, specifically his animal stories, and have identified many proto-environmentalist elements in these texts. In Roberts’s stories, like Ernest Thompson Seton’s, animals are active characters in the narrative, and their perspective is often presented as equivalent to any human interpretation of the events in the plot. In well-known stories such as “Do Seek Their Meat from God,” the human and animal points of view are juxtaposed or combined on equal terms, and some contemporary critics have recognized early ecocritical insights in Roberts’s portrayal of the natural world (Whalen 174–76). Originally published in major international magazines, and collected for the first time in the volume Earth’s Enigmas in 1895, Roberts’s animal stories were certainly aimed at British and American audiences, and they are often credited with inventing the entire genre, or at least the still-recognizable international brand of Canadian nature writing. Like the paintings of the Group of Seven in the visual arts, Roberts’s stories influenced the way modern Canadian culture as a whole eventually came to understand its uniquely humanistic and often redemptive or romantic relationship with the environment. In institutional terms, Roberts’s influence over the newly minted concept of “Canadian” literature would be difficult to overstate. Throughout a career in which he published more than 40 volumes of poetry, prose, and fiction, his writing was always closely aligned with patriotic causes, and he continually argued that Canada needed to stand separate from Britain and the United States in order to forge its

The Canadian Short Story in English    433 own creative culture. Though he moved to New York in 1897 and then lived in Europe until returning to Canada in 1925, Roberts is regularly described as Canada’s first man of letters, or at least as its first cultural nationalist. Scott’s In the Village of Viger (1896) holds a similarly influential position in the history of Canadian literature. Just as Roberts established a Canadian vision of nature that still appeals to national and international audiences, Scott was instrumental in establishing the iconic setting and subject matter of the traditional Canadian small town, struggling against the forces of encroaching urbanism and modernity. In Scott’s hands, Viger, a small Quebec community with its own language and a long history, its own particular blend of custom, family structure, and tradition, could stand in for all the rooted, Old-World communities of an earlier time that were experiencing or about to experience the extreme disruptions and the space/time collapses of the early twentieth century. Lynch sees Scott as the originator of the Canadian short-story cycle, and he identifies him as one of the earliest practitioners of a romantically tinged Canadian regional realism that would go on to become another dominant mode of fiction (The One and the Many 33). Scott, like so many writers in this period, was keenly aware of the fact that he was living through an age of rapid cultural change, and though his portraits of Viger are certainly nostalgic and often wistful, they also contain within their own plots evidence of future developments and a knowledge of what will come. Traditional economic centres, like the grist mill, are closing down, and characters within the stories can already predict their own altered futures. Like Haliburton and McCulloch, Scott’s aesthetic agency was also connected to the very real social power he wielded as an agent of the state. As an artist, Scott could record the complex ambivalences of his society, and in his writing he could try to negotiate the nuanced tensions of social change; as a career civil servant in charge of developing and often delivering the assimilationist policies of the Department of Indian Affairs, however, there was no ambiguity or ambivalence when Scott acted as the real-world instrument of this change. This makes it difficult for contemporary critics to reconcile Scott’s sincere sadness or his humanist discomfort with the loss of a traditional way of life with his almost 30-year career as a bureaucrat who endorsed and actively advanced the mission of the residential school system. Obviously, in Scott’s divided perspective, one traditional way of life—the lost experience of the villagers of Viger—deserved to be mourned and memorialized, while another set of traditional values, those belonging to Aboriginal people, did not merit the same protection. By far the most significant story collection of the post-Confederation period is Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912). Blending a gentler, more self-deprecating, and forgiving brand of humour with a still-protective but not quite so romantic vision of small-town life, Leacock managed to bring together the most palatable elements of McCulloch, Haliburton, and Scott. In these stories, the familiar narrative strategy of using a “local voice,” usually speaking from a comfortable first-person perspective and conversationally addressing the reader as “you,” is employed to recount the regular humorous plots of small-town life. The narrator displays an obvious intelligence, a clear compassion, and an affectionate intimacy for all the characters involved,

434   Literary Periods and Genres no matter how wrong-headed their actions may be. Though there is a consistent, mild critique of hubris or hapless arrogance, Leacock’s stories never venture into the kind of reproving satirical social commentary that marked Haliburton’s most divisive and controversial sketches, and though Leacock purposely referenced McCulloch’s creation of Parson Drone in the depiction of his own character, Rev. Dean Drone, Leacock’s narrators do not normally bring forth the kind of stinging judgments that Mephibosheth Stepsure delivered. Instead, though the same danger of urbanization that threatens Viger looms over Leacock’s Mariposa, in these stories, the small town is often brought into comical, but ultimately favourable and forgivable comparison with the big city. The precise tone of Leacock’s narratives, their instantly recognizable settings and ensembles of characters, and the way they balance social insight with gentle comic observation has gone on to become the signature mode of Canadian humour for more than a century. Today, radio programs like the CBC’s Vinyl Cafe with Stuart McLean and television series like CTV’s immensely popular Corner Gas continue to work in the same way and to explore the same themes. Leacock’s insight—that middle-class urban readers often prefer fictions of the seemingly simplified small town to representations of the complex cities in which they actually live—is almost as true today as it was then.3 The sketches continue to be taught in every early Canadian literature class, and the Stephen Leacock Medal, recognizing the year’s best work of Canadian humour, continues to be presented every year. Through the early and middle decades of the twentieth century, the pace of short fiction production in Canada increased dramatically, but the form of cultural change followed the same pattern, as new writers purposely defined themselves against what had come before and used their stories to remake a new Canadian literature that better corresponded to their ideas of a new Canadian society. As a version of Canadian modernism dawned in the 1920s and 1930s, short-fiction writers such as Morley Callaghan fled from what they saw as the fixation on nature, the nostalgia, and the backward rural conservatism that writers like Leacock and the previous generation had helped to establish. Born and raised in Toronto, Callaghan was one of English Canada’s first explicitly urban short-fiction writers, and he was not interested in “sunshine sketches” or little towns. Instead, Callaghan worked as a journalist, covering the stories of an increasingly globalized and depersonalized modern city, and his fiction developed the lean and unadorned prose style of newspaper writing. His stories, collected in A Native Argosy (1929) and Now that April’s Here (1936), probed the deep psychological turmoil of individual characters and often grappled with the struggles of interpersonal relationships or basic connection in the midst of the city’s cold and impersonal settings. Themes of meaninglessness, desperation, or impending financial ruin, brought on by the Depression, run through many of the narratives. Like his contemporary Raymond Knister—a fine short-fiction writer and the first anthologist of Canadian Short Stories (1928)—Callaghan looked away from North America and Britain and toward continental Europe for his major influences. He moved to Paris in 1929 to fully embrace the cosmopolitan aesthetic of the lost generation; he was a member of Gertrude Stein’s famous Montparnasse salon and socialized regularly with Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Callaghan despised the

The Canadian Short Story in English    435 British, provincial character of the new Canada, and his fiction moved toward liberal humanist positions that could not comfortably coexist with the conservative traditionalist values already dominant in the canon. Callaghan’s social role extended far beyond his fiction; especially in his later years, he spent decades working as a journalist, a television and radio broadcaster, and an advocate for the Canadian Writers’ Union. The other great modernist short-story writer of the period, Sinclair Ross, followed a completely different path in his life and work. Born and raised in Saskatchewan, Ross’s work, with its intense focus on the isolated individual, living in the now iconic, even clichéd, prairie homestead, surrounded by infinite miles of barren landscape, established most of the signature elements of the aesthetic movement that critic Colin Hill has characterized as “modern realism.” Lyrical and psychologically sophisticated, Ross’s stories, many of them published in the 1930s and 1940s in Queen’s Quarterly, turned away from wider verisimilar examinations of Canada or of Canadian culture as a whole in favour of more inward-looking dissections of the modern individual’s struggles with frustrated sexual desire, suffocating loneliness, and oppressive social hypocrisy. A  homosexual writer who lived with his domineering mother well into adulthood and worked in a bank for 43 years, Ross had no desire to follow in the very public footsteps of Haliburton, Leacock, or Callaghan, but his work did reshape the canon in many significant ways. His focus on style and the status of the individual located within the specific social contours of the “home” landscape showed many other Canadian writers that literature from a specific, seemingly marginalized, geography—the Prairies, the West Coast, the Maritimes, or the North—could take its place in the national tradition. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the most significant female writers in the Canadian tradition focused their work primarily in the genres of poetry, the novel, or nonfiction prose. Writers as diverse as Susanna Moodie, Catharine Parr Traill, Isabella Valancy Crawford, Sara Jeannette Duncan, L.M. Montgomery, and Nellie McClung certainly possessed the aesthetic agency and overt desire to trigger the kind of social transformations I have been following in this chronology, but in most cases, they did not use the short story as the primary literary vehicle for their writing. In their anthologies, Aspiring Women: Short Stories by Canadian Women, 1880–1900 (1993) and New Women: Short Stories by Canadian Women, 1900–1920 (1991), Sandra Campbell and Lorraine McMullen show us that leading female writers of this period produced a wide array of short fiction, participated in the same debates, and often published their work in many of the same journals as their male colleagues; it was not until the mid-twentieth century, however, that leading female writers claimed the short story as their preferred, primary genre of publication. This singular decision made by several different women at approximately the same time fundamentally reset the trajectory of Canadian literature and, in significant ways, reordered the primary gender concerns of the genre. The list of Canadian women who began publishing in the 1950s and 1960s reads like a “who’s who” of the contemporary canon. From Sheila Watson to Margaret Laurence, to Mavis Gallant, to Munro and Margaret Atwood, there is no question that the most remarkable international accomplishments of the contemporary Canadian short story date from this period and often come from this group of women.

436   Literary Periods and Genres Watson published very few stories in her life, but her Oedipus cycle, originally appearing in the mid- to late 1950s, is considered by many to be the peak mythopoetic achievement of high modernist prose writing in Canada (Irvine 116). Stylistically sophisticated and blending a range of theoretical, aesthetic, and local concerns, Watson’s recasting of the Oedipus characters and her resetting of this classical myth within the recognizable geography of New Westminster, British Columbia, brought into the Canadian canon the same kind of modern experimentation that had already marked world literature in Joyce’s Ulysses or Eliot’s The Wasteland decades earlier. In a different but related way, Laurence’s short fiction—especially the juxtaposition of her African stories collected in The Tomorrow-Tamer (1963) with her iconic Manitoba collection A Bird in the House (1970)—also displays a dual awareness of Canadian fiction’s simultaneous positioning in global and local contexts. As the wife of a British engineer, Laurence had lived in Somaliland and Ghana in the early 1950s, and in her first stories of Africa, readers see a writer grappling with massive social differences between the First and Third Worlds and trying to come to terms with her own privileged position as a liberal North American woman living in a different social world, governed by completely different cultural forces. In the Manitoba (Manawaka) stories in A Bird in the House, the concentration moves in the opposite direction, and Laurence uses a global perspective to consider the ways that characters interpret events in their local communities. No matter how small or far away they are from the world centres of power and conflict, the small town Laurence created and the iconic characters she populated it with were forced continually to contend with broader social forces beyond their control. Laurence’s portrayals of one family moving through their experience of the world wars, the Depression, and the shifting definitions of gender and social power were so widely anthologized in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s that they became fixtures in educational curricula, literally “required reading” for thousands of students enrolled in Canadian high schools and universities. This large-scale institutionalization of Canadian fiction was unprecedented, and as Laurence’s work moved from the margin to the centre of the canon, she became the first iconic figurehead for the rise of a clearly identifiable “CanLit.” Mavis Gallant’s career in short fiction could not be more different from Laurence’s. Between 1951 and 1995, she published 116 stories in The New Yorker and enjoyed an international reputation that almost no other female writer in the world could approach. However, unlike Munro or Laurence or Atwood, Gallant had almost no interest in the cultural infrastructure of Canadian literature, and perhaps because of this, her stories were never given the same exposure, were never anthologized or taught to the same levels as her contemporaries, and, at least so far, they have never dominated the canon or entered into the broader awareness of Canadian culture in the same way. After an early career working as a journalist for the Montreal Standard from 1944 to 1950, Gallant moved to Paris to begin what would turn out to be one of the twentieth century’s most successful and most private writing careers. Living by herself in the same apartment for more than 50 years, she wrote stories that were deeply committed to exploring both the dignity and the sadness of modern individuality. Gallant’s fiction presents its readers with densely detailed social worlds governed by a complex web of intersecting forces

The Canadian Short Story in English    437 that seem always to isolate people from each other, rather than bringing them together. Characters often occupy two or three different subject positions at the same time, and their conflicting relationships with history, wealth, family, or politics force them to keep secrets from each other or to harbour deep, often unfulfilled hopes and desires. As one moves through these stories, whether they explore the conflicted urban texture of Linnet Muir’s 1920s Montreal (Home Truths [1981]), or chronicle hundreds of European lives torn apart by the aftermath of war and forced migration, we see a steady stream of fiercely intelligent characters trying to find some order, some autonomy, or some fragile sense of control or secure meaning in a social world that offers very little opportunity for such certainty. Though they followed very different patterns, the careers of Atwood and Munro will always be linked in the history of Canadian literature and the broader record of world literature. In fact, the global impact of their writing is so far-reaching that it cannot be separated from the discussion of the national significance of their work. Atwood and Munro matter differently inside Canadian literature precisely because they matter so substantially outside the country, where the vast majority of their readers live. When Munro was awarded her Nobel Prize, she famously celebrated with Atwood, and the photograph of the two old friends clinking champagne glasses together circulated around the planet. To think that these two women—now universally recognized as two of the most influential feminist artists of the second half of the twentieth century—both initiated their creative projects against the austere background and harsh cultural conditions of a starkly conservative 1960s Ontario that was still utterly dominated by colonial and patriarchal power structures, shows exactly how much Canadian literature and Canadian society have changed and how powerfully effective these two examples of troublemaking aesthetic agency have been. Spanning almost 50  years and 14 collections, Munro’s stories, packed with dense detail, and ordered around complex narrative structures, monitored and explored the full social consequences of these changes. As we have seen in “Family Furnishings,” the best Munro stories often sweep dramatically backward and forward through narrative time, juxtaposing beginnings, endings, and key turning points, so that readers experience the same disorienting feelings, the same profound shiftings, that marked particular moments in history. In the decades that ran between the publication of “Walker Brothers Cowboy,” the opening story in Munro’s first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), through to “Dear Life,” the closing story of fading memory and old age in her most recent book, Dear Life (2012), the entire social universe of middle-class women was transformed and, along the way, Munro’s artful narratives explored every significant valence and tremor of those fluctuations, not just for Canadians, but for a wider world moving though the same dramatic reorderings of basic power structures and domestic life. In a different way, Atwood’s stories, collected in nine different volumes, tend toward more dramatic experiments with the genre conventions of the fairy tale, the horror story, or the speculation of science fiction. Though an Atwood story rarely slows down long enough to saturate a scene with the kind of detail we find in

438   Literary Periods and Genres Munro, her short fictions remain very interested in the flow of time, and often, as in Bluebeard’s Egg (1983), they feature dramatic feminist rereadings of historical or literary figures and narratives. While Munro mingles the recent past and the present to show that one can never be fully separated from the other, Atwood’s work seems to move ahead of the larger cultural zeitgeist. Certainly, no writer in the world embraces the role of the troublemaking public intellectual more passionately than Atwood, and no other writer harnesses her aesthetic agency to direct social change in a more explicit way, leading cultural debate rather than following it. This forward-looking commitment in her work was demonstrated again in 2014 when Atwood became the first artist in the world to contribute a story to a project called “The Future Library.” Addressing herself to an audience that does not yet exist and to a population that will come to her writing only long after she is dead, Atwood agreed to give this organization a brand new piece that will remain a secret for a century and will be published only in 2114 (Medley). At the same time as Gallant, Munro, and Atwood were restructuring the Canadian canon to bring the shifting experiences of late-twentieth century women into sharper fictional focus, many male writers embarked on a project to redefine dominant modes of masculinity and to explore the shifting codes of gender relationships from the other side. In Norman Levine’s work, much like Gallant’s, aesthetic concerns come to the foreground again as a purposely exiled writer—Levine was born and raised in Ottawa’s Jewish community, but lived in St. Ives, Cornwall, for 30  years—considers Canada from a psychological distance and reflects on the status of the male artist in a broader world that no longer has much concern for his work or the stylistic commitments that inform his writing. A  similar feeling of isolation, male powerlessness, and dislocation recurs in the peripatetic early short fiction of Clark Blaise. Born in Fargo, North Dakota, to francophone Canadian parents who could never settle in one part of North America, Blaise spent his childhood in constant motion, traveling over the linguistic, cultural, and international borders that divide French and English, North and South, rural and urban, Black and White, Canadian and American, and his early stories, collected in A North American Education (1973) and Tribal Justice (1974), are almost overwhelmed by feelings of insecurity and uncertainty mixed with a deep longing for the stable home place. Geographical certainty and stability are not lacking in the early fiction of Jack Hodgins or Guy Vanderhaeghe, but the male characters we encounter in these stories are still profoundly disoriented. In Hodgins’s Spit Delaney’s Island (1976), and especially in its signature story, “Separating,” the main character struggles to come to terms with the loss of his job, the disintegration of his family, and the end of his traditional role as a husband and father. Cut off from all of his former fixed references, the protagonist is left in a cultural vacuum, and he is forced to reinvent himself in new ways. The same sort of transition often recurs in Vanderhaeghe’s aptly titled Man Descending (1982) and The Trouble with Heroes and Other Stories (1983). Here, although male characters may be intelligent, insightful, and self-deprecating in their humour, they are also fully aware of their failings and their plummeting social status. They know the world is changing and

The Canadian Short Story in English    439 that gender roles are being reconstituted, but their reactions to these changes are often self-destructive and lead to violent, often pitiful, confrontations. In the internationally acclaimed stories written by my father, Alistair MacLeod, The Lost Salt Gift of Blood (1976) and As Birds Bring Forth the Sun (1986), the changing definitions of labour in the second half of the twentieth century inform many of the central conflicts. Male protagonists, like the miner who narrates “The Closing Down of Summer,” work in fields that require them to travel great physical, emotional, and psychological distances, away from their homes, their family lives, and their marriages, and this dislocation wears heavily on all the characters who must share in it. In a similar way, the transition from physical work to more intellectual service-economy employment recurs in stories, such as “The Boat,” that chronicle the great personal loss and the strained family relationships that result when shifting economic forces reorder lives and compel characters to make difficult, ambivalent choices between traditional communal structures that may limit autonomy and more modern models of individuality that may maximize autonomy but leave protagonists longing for the community that has been left behind. Though Hodgins, Vanderhaege, and MacLeod began their careers at roughly the same time and examined similar social concerns, and sometimes even wrote in similar modes, the first stories they produced are most often studied not for their literary concerns or their technical attributes, but rather as central texts in the canons of regionalist short fiction from Vancouver Island, the Prairies, and Cape Breton. This kind of critical classification and this mode of anthologizing and studying a short story based on a shared geographic experience or a “sense of place” expanded exponentially during the 1970s and 1980s as the nationalist goals of a pan-Canadian literature were greeted with suspicion by editors and scholars in different parts of the country. Though it operated in similar metaphysical ways, and offered a similar promise of an intimate imagined community, regionalism often took the place of nationalism as a core political commitment in these alternative canonical debates, and short fiction, because it could be easily anthologized, distributed, and presented in local classrooms, often played a key role in representing and teaching regionalist identities. The critique of nationalist culture, and the state bureaucracy that explicitly supported it, took on a different form and a different tone in the work of the writer, mentor, editor, and anthologist, John Metcalf. Born and educated in Britain, Metcalf migrated to Canada in the 1960s and quickly became a polarizing, but structurally unavoidable figure in the contemporary history of the short story. As a member of the Montreal Story Tellers Fiction Performance Group, along with Blaise, Hugh Hood, Ray Fraser, and Ray Smith, Metcalf pushed for the professionalization of literary readings and personally edited more than a dozen anthologies of Canadian short fiction. Committed to what he saw as pure literary values and the highest aesthetic principles, and constantly critical of the sociologically guided, government subsidized, politically correct choices he saw in many other volumes, Metcalf, often working with his friend and collaborator, Leon Rooke, initiated a series of “anthology wars” that continued for decades as competing versions of the Canadian short-fiction canon were presented in every new volume

440   Literary Periods and Genres (Lecker).4 This argument reached an apex with the publication of the 696-page Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories, edited by Jane Urquhart, in 2007. When the book was released, a minor media storm erupted as defenders and critics weighed in over the selection of writers and the stories that had been included or omitted from the grand reference text. Two national literary magazines, New Quarterly and Canadian Notes and Queries, published paired special issues, a Salon des Refusés, that presented an alternative listing of 20 other writers that other editors believed should have been included in the collection. This was a strange and revealing moment in Canadian literary history, not because the debate was particularly insightful or because it reached any decisive conclusions, but because it revealed the country’s unique passion for the short story (Good). Outside Canada, arguments over short fiction selections are rarely considered national news. As one set of writers takes over the canonical function of another, new versions and new visions of Canada are introduced. Contemporary authors, like their earliest counterparts, continue to write their stories into the gaps of the literary record, and, in the process, their fictions help us come to terms with the real social world. It is hard to imagine the current landscape of Canadian literature without the contributions of Rohinton Mistry, but when he rose out of the University of Toronto’s campus literary scene to release his first collection, Tales from Firozsha Baag, in 1987, there were very few role models for him to follow, and the experience of Indian immigrants, so central to Canadian culture today, had not yet found its first widely read expression. In his Tales, Mistry demonstrated that stories that chronicle experiences taking place entirely outside Canada—in a crowded apartment building in (Bombay) Mumbai—are actually structurally integral to contemporary Canadian experience and the two worlds cannot be separated. On a stylistic front, other writers worked against the restrictions of aesthetic conservatism. When they first appeared, the wildly experimental multimedia performances of the stories found in Diane Schoemperlen’s Forms of Devotion (1998) were completely unprecedented, while the postmodern drive, the restless language play, the searing sentences, and the sometimes controversial subject matter found in stories by Gowdy, Glover, Jarman, Gartner, and Lyon continued to push the boundaries of how a Canadian short story functioned and what sorts of questions it could pose. When Lisa Moore, Michael Winter, and Jessica Grant, along with several others, emerged from the creative writing classes of Memorial University in Newfoundland to cast themselves as the Burning Rock Collective, this was another clear act of critical self-fashioning, and it was obvious that these writers, like Lynn Coady working out of similar conditions in Nova Scotia, were committed to charting a new, less traditional, and more overtly contemporary course for Atlantic-Canadian regional identity. In less than a generation, the social and literary character of the country, as well as the cultural institutions available to Canadian writers, has been almost entirely reimagined. Stories that once seemed strange because they did not come out of any recognizable literary tradition have now been absorbed into standard reading lists. Ivan E. Coyote, for example, did not have a vast library of texts that explored the experience of growing

The Canadian Short Story in English    441 up queer in Whitehorse in the Yukon Territories in the 1970s and 1980s, but the same cannot be said for writers growing up in the 2010s and 2020s. Coyote’s short fiction (published in both serial and book form), spoken-word performances, community organization work, and consistent political activism have all provided the sort of example, as well as the real cultural infrastructure, that earlier was conspicuously absent. In a similar way, Indigenous short-story writers such as Eden Robinson, Richard Van Camp, and Thomas King have used linguistic play, humour, and dark satire in their stories to open up and explore the most tragic, violent, and painful events of contemporary and historical Aboriginal experience. Once again, we see that these projects, initiated in short fiction and then carried over into many different forums, create new possibilities for dialogue and new cultural spaces that did not exist before these writers came along. Though they were only published in book form in 1993, King’s stories “Borders” and “One Good Story, That One” went on to become two of the most anthologized and most often discussed and studied short fictions in all of Canadian literature. Like Laurence’s stories a generation before, the prominence of King’s fiction in the contemporary CanLit classroom resonated outward and translated directly into the broader culture. And like the first influential short-fiction writers from the colonial period, King used his profile as a writer to advance his political vision when he ran for federal office as a New Democratic Party candidate in 2008. He also worked as a radio producer/broadcaster on the CBC’s The Dead Dog Café Comedy Hour from 1997 to 2000, and became the first person of Indigenous descent to deliver the celebrated Massey Lectures (held annually at the University of Toronto). Speaking to the entire country in a series of five nationally broadcast lectures entitled The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative (2003), King, always filtering his commentary through a trickster persona, took on the position of a leading public intellectual presenting his argument as an act of Aboriginal oral storytelling. In the same way, when Robinson used the Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper, to voice her people’s opposition to the Enbridge Northern Pipeline moving through Haisla territory, it was clear that her status as a respected political spokesperson for the community flowed directly from her achievements as a fiction writer. As I hope this strange sequencing of varied writers and works from so many different eras has demonstrated, the current state of the Canadian short story is directly connected to the history of the Canadian short story, and the artistic achievements of contemporary short-fiction writers often draw on the resources of a real-world cultural infrastructure that has been built up over a long period of time. This infrastructure is more developed in Canada than it is in other countries, and it takes many forms, extending up from the grassroots level of local and provincial granting agencies and mentorship programs, through the national network of university and college workshops and the Canada Council, to the highest professional levels of publication. At the very top of the industry, individual stories by Canadians are regularly published in major magazines and literary journals around the world, including The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Esquire, Atlantic Monthly, McSweeney’s, Zoetrope, and Granta, while at home, dozens of active literary quarterlies—some of them, like the Fiddlehead, operating since the 1940s—continue to publish new and established short-fiction writers every year. This

442   Literary Periods and Genres national network of small regional magazines, where, as Levine once observed, “we all begin,” is perhaps contemporary Canadian literature’s most valuable asset, and it continues to feed the entire system with new work from new or already established writers (13). Each year The Journey Prize Anthology surveys these journals and awards a substantial $10,000 prize to the one piece of short fiction that jurors consider to be the best of the previous 12 months. Similarly, the Writers’ Union of Canada gives the annual $10,000 Danuta Gleed Literary Award to the country’s best first collection of stories, and, every other year, the Writers’ Trust of Canada administers the Bronwen Wallace Award to grant $5,000 to the best unpublished story written by a developing writer under the age of 35. The long-running CBC literary awards, founded by the legendary Robert Weaver in 1979, is flooded with submissions every year, and its winners earn $6,000, as well as a publication contract, and a massive surge in their media profiles. It is important to note that these are regular recurring investments, and they are fully and exclusively dedicated to the development of Canadian short fiction. Beyond the journals, a radiating network of impressive small presses supports the next stage of publication. Initiated by Metcalf, Oberon continues to publish its anthology series The Best Canadian Short Stories, while Jarman edits the complementary annual Coming Attractions collections. Other well-respected houses, such as Biblioasis, Coach House, Coteau, NeWest, Invisible, ECW, Insomniac, Turnstone, and Arsenal Pulp, are all committed to bringing out new catalogues almost every season that regularly feature the best new collections produced by writers who are either advancing or just beginning their careers. The venerable House of Anansi maintains its own special short-fiction imprint, Astoria, and, perhaps because of the excitement caused by Munro’s great victory, other larger internationally owned presses, such as Random House, HarperCollins, and Knopf, are now slightly more willing to at least take a chance on short fiction. The literary prize culture in Canada is also uniquely supportive of short fiction. During a period in which the Booker Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and many other internationally juried competitions refuse to even consider short-fiction collections for their highest honours, in Canada, short-story collections regularly make it to at least the short list for most of the major awards, and collections regularly receive national reviews in major newspapers and widespread media attention. In 2013, when Coady’s Hellgoing won the $50,000 Giller Prize, it became the fourth collection in the 19-year history of the award to take home Canada’s most lucrative prize. Just a year earlier, in 2012, Tamas Dobozy’s linked stories examining the Red Army’s march into Budapest in 1944, Siege 13, won the Roger’s Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and was short-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. In 2011, D.W. Wilson’s piece, “The Lost Roads,” a story that earlier had been included in The Journey Prize Anthology, went on to win £15,000, the world’s richest prize for a single short story, when it beat out thousands of other entries to win the BBC’s National Short Story Award. And in 2013, Eliza Robertson’s “We Walked on the Water” pulled off a similar victory when it was awarded the International Commonwealth Short Story Prize. These are major international achievements for an entire new generation of young writers. Though it is objectively true that the commercial returns on short stories continue to lag

The Canadian Short Story in English    443 far behind those of novels, in critical and scholarly terms, short fiction receives almost equivalent attention in Canadian academic journals and conferences, and almost no one in the fields of Canadian arts and letters would ever dare to characterize the writing of short fiction as a “minor” developmental stage for the great novelist-in-training. Any survey of literary history can only pause rather than conclude. And if this assemblage of writers and works shows us anything, it is that change is the only consistent feature of the canon. When the Mariposa Belle hilariously sank into the muddy water of Lake Wissanotti in Leacock’s everywhere anthologized story “The Marine Excursion of the Knights of Pythias” (1912), I don’t imagine that Leacock or any his contemporaries could have imagined that the same story, like the Mariposa Belle itself, would resurface exactly a century later to take its place in a brave new literary world that in 2013 boasted a prominent anthology of “Canadian Zombie Fiction,” entitled Dead North (Moreno-Garcia). There is no central organizing principle reaching from the beginnings to the current moment of Canadian short fiction, and new writers are already departing from the current tradition in order to initiate the next one. Raymond Carver once said that, at its best, short fiction is “a bringing of the news from one world to another,” and for two centuries, I think this is what has happened in Canadian literature. As one world has given way to the next, short-fiction writers have been there, minding the gaps, aesthetically alert to the changes, and eager to lead the way into the next phase. It feels, perhaps, as if we are entering again into a new cycle of conclusions and beginnings, cemeteries and nativity scenes. Munro, the world’s “master of the contemporary short story” (“Alice Munro”), has formally announced that she will never write again and we know, sadly, that there will never be another story by Gallant or MacLeod. Yet even as these important creative careers come to a close, we know also that the short story, especially in Canada, continues to attract new voices and that these new innovative writers—people like Christie and Robertson and Wilson and Lee and Selecky—as well as Deborah Willis, Rebecca Rosenblum, and Andrew Hood—will form the tradition of the future. None of this is new, of course. All the “big names” of Canadian literature were once unknown, and all the stories that now fill the anthologies were once just vague notions in the heads of uncertain people. All short-fiction writers begin, like the narrator of “Family Furnishings,” breathing their own air for the first time. They hear the cries of the crowd, the heartbeats full of sorrow, the lovely formal waves of inhuman assent and lamentation, and then they make it their job, their work, to grab this story out of the air.

Notes 1. For a range of introductions to Canadian short stories in English, see Lynch, Thacker, Gadpaille, Nischik, and New. For a selection of theoretical examinations of the short-story form, see May, Lohafer, Lohafer and Clarey, and Pâtea. 2. In “Slick’s Letter,” published as an introduction to the first collection of the Clockmaker sketches, the fictional character, Sam Slick, directly addresses Howe, the real publisher of the volume, and accuses him of “scandalous” behaviour (v). Slick (Haliburton) writes: “It

444   Literary Periods and Genres warn’t the part of a gentleman for to’go a pump me arter that fashion, and then go right off and blart it out in print” (v). 3. Vinyl Cafe is a long-running weekly variety radio program, hosted by writer and comedian Stuart McLean for the CBC. The show launched in 1994 and blends musical performances with oral retellings of McLean’s “Dave and Morley” short stories. McLean’s stories, collected in many different Vinyl Cafe volumes, have won the Leacock Medal for Humour three times. Corner Gas was a landmark Canadian television series that ran from 2004 to 2009 on CTV. Created by comedian Brett Butt, the program drew an average of more than a million viewers per episode and went on to win six Gemini Awards. The program focused on the daily struggles of a recurring comic cast of characters from the fictional town of Dog River, Saskatchewan. Butt played the role of Leroy, the owner of the only gas station for 60 kilometres in any direction. 4. For more on Metcalf ’s work as a writer, editor, and anthologist, as well as his conflicted relationship with the official institutions of Canadian literature, see his “literary memoirs,” An Aesthetic Underground and Shut Up He Explained.

Works Cited Alexis, André. Despair and Other Stories of Ottawa. 1994. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2007. Print. “Alice Munro—Facts.” The Nobel Prize in Literature 2013. Nobelprize.org. Web. Accessed 9 Dec. 2014. Atwood, Margaret. Bluebeard’s Egg. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1983. Print. ———. “Introduction.” The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English. Ed. Margaret Atwood and Robert Weaver. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1997. xi–xv. Print. Bezmozgis, David. Natasha and Other Stories. 2004. Toronto: HarperPerennial, 2005. Print. Blaise, Clark. A North American Education. Toronto: Doubleday, 1973. Print. ———. Tribal Justice. Toronto: Doubleday, 1974. Print. Callaghan, Morley. A Native Argosy. New York: Scribner’s, 1929. Print. ———. Now That April’s Here. New York: Random House, 1936. Print. Campbell, Sandra, and Lorraine McMullen, eds. Aspiring Women: Short Stories by Canadian Women, 1880–1900. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 1993. Print. ———. New Women: Short Stories by Canadian Women, 1900–1920. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 1991. Print. Campbell, Wanda. “Of Kings and Cabbages: Short Stories by Early Canadian Women.” Lynch and Robbeson 17–27. Carver, Raymond. “The Art of Fiction 76.” Paris Review 88 (1983). The Paris Review. Web. Accessed 26 Nov 2014. Christie, Michael. The Beggar’s Garden. Toronto: HarperCollins, 2011. Print. Coady, Lynn. Hellgoing. Toronto: Anansi, 2013. Print. ———. Play the Monster Blind. Toronto: Doubleday, 2000. Print. Cox, Alisa. Alice Munro. Tavistock: Northern House, 2004. Print. Coyote, Ivan E. Missed Her. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp, 2010. Print. Dobozy, Tamas. Siege 13: Stories. Toronto: Thomas Allen, 2012. Print.

The Canadian Short Story in English    445 Dvorak, Marta. “Migrations, Multiple Allegiances and Satirical Traditions:  From Frances Brooke to Thomas Chandler Haliburton.” The Cambridge History of Canadian Literature. Ed. Coral Ann Howells and Eva-Marie Kröller. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. 47–67. Print. Gadpaille, Michelle. The Canadian Short Story. Don Mills, ON: Oxford UP, 1988. Print. Gallant, Mavis. The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant. New York: Random House, 1996. Print. ———. From the Fifteenth District: A Novella and Eight Short Stories. London: Jonathan Cape, 1980. Print. ———. Home Truths: Selected Canadian Stories. Toronto: Macmillan, 1981. Print. Gartner, Zsuzsi. All the Anxious Girls on Earth. Toronto: Key Porter, 1999. Print. Gaston, Bill. Gargoyles. Toronto: Anansi, 2006. Print. Gibson, Graeme. “Alice Munro.” Eleven Canadian Novelists Interviewed by Graeme Gibson. Toronto: Anansi, 1973. 236–64. Print. Glover, Douglas. Savage Love. Fredericton: Goose Lane, 2013. Print. Good, Alex. “Literati Get Short over Short Stories: Did Anyone See This Coming.” Toronto Star 10 Aug. 2008. The Toronto Star. Web. Accessed 20 Nov. 2014. Gowdy, Barbara. We So Seldom Look on Love. Toronto: Somerville House, 1992. Print. Grant, Jessica. Making Light of Tragedy. Erin, ON: Porcupine’s Quill, 2004. Print. Haliburton, Thomas Chandler. 1836. The Clockmaker; or, The Sayings and Doings of Samuel Slick, of Slickville. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2007. Print. Hill, Colin. Modern Realism in English-Canadian Fiction. Toronto:  U of Toronto P, 2012. Print. Hodgins, Jack. Spit Delaney’s Island: Selected Stories. Toronto: Macmillan, 1976. Print. Hood, Andrew. The Cloaca. Halifax, NS: Invisible, 2012. Print. Howe, Joseph. Western and Eastern Rambles: Travel Sketches of Nova Scotia. Ed. M.G. Parks. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1973. Print. Irvine, Dean. “Oedipus and Anti-Oedipus, Myth and Counter Myth in Sheila Watson’s Short Fiction.” Lynch and Robbeson 115–27. Jarman, Mark Anthony. 19 Knives. Toronto: Anansi, 2000. Print. Kamboureli, Smaro, and Robert Zacharias, eds. Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2012. Print. King, Thomas. One Good Story, That One: Stories. Toronto: HarperCollins, 1993. Print. ———. The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative. Toronto: Anansi, 2003. Print Knister, Raymond, ed. Canadian Short Stories. Toronto: Macmillan, 1928. Print. Laurence, Margaret. A Bird in the House. 1970. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1989. Print. ———. The Tomorrow-Tamer. 1963. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1993. Print. Leacock, Stephen. Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. 1912. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2011. Print. Lecker, Robert. Keepers of the Code:  English-Canadian Literary Anthologies and the Representation of the Nation. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2013. Print. Lee, Rebecca. Bobcat and Other Stories. Toronto: Penguin, 2012. Print. Levine, Norman. By a Frozen River: The Short Stories of Norman Levine. Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 2002. Print. ———. “We All Begin in a Little Magazine.” Encounter Oct. 1972. Encounter. Web. Accessed 17 Dec 2014. Lohafer, Susan. Coming to Terms with the Short Story. Baton Rouge:  Louisiana State UP, 1983. Print.

446   Literary Periods and Genres Lohafer, Susan, and Jo Ellyn Clarey, eds. Short Story Theory at a Crossroads. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1989. Print. Lynch, Gerald. “Introduction.” Lynch and Robbeson 1–8. ———. The One and the Many: English Canadian Short Story Cycles. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2001. Print. Lynch, Gerald, and Angela Arnold Robbeson, eds. Dominant Impressions:  Essays on the Canadian Short Story. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 1999. Print. Lyon, Annabel. Oxygen. Erin, ON: Porcupine’s Quill, 2000. Print. MacLeod, Alistair. As Birds Bring Forth the Sun. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1986. Print. ———. The Lost Salt Gift of Blood. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1976. Print. Malla, Pasha. The Withdrawal Method. Toronto: Anansi, 2008. Print. May, Charles E., ed. The New Short Story Theories. Athens: Ohio UP, 1994. Print. McCulloch, Thomas. The Mephibosheth Stepsure Letters. Ed. Gwendolyn Davies. Ottawa: Carleton UP, 1990. Print. Medley, Mark. “Margaret Atwood’s Next Project Is Due in the 22nd Century.” Globe and Mail 5 Sept. 2014. The Globe and Mail. Web. Accessed 20 Nov. 2014. Metcalf, John. An Aesthetic Underground:  A  Literary Memoir. Toronto:  Thomas Allen, 2003. Print. ———. Kicking against the Pricks. Downsview, ON: ECW, 1982. Print. ———. Shut Up He Explained: A Literary Memoir. Emeryville, ON: Biblioasis, 2007. Print. ———, ed. Sixteen by Twelve: Short Stories by Canadian Writers. Toronto: Ryerson, 1970. Print. Metcalf, John, and Leon Rooke, eds. The Macmillan Anthology. Toronto:  Macmillan, 1988. Print. ———, eds. The New Press Anthology:  Best Canadian Short Fiction. Toronto:  General, 1984. Print. ———, eds. The Second Macmillan Anthology. Toronto: Macmillan, 1989. Print. ———, eds. The Third Macmillan Anthology. Toronto: Macmillan, 1990. Print. Mistry, Rohinton. Tales from Firozsha Baag. 1987. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1997. Print. Moore, Lisa. Open. Toronto: Anansi, 2002. Print. Moreno-Garcia, Sylvia, ed. Dead North: Canadian Zombie Fiction. Toronto: Exile Editions, 2013. Print. Munro, Alice. “Dear Life.” Dear Life: Stories. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2012. Print. ———. “Family Furnishings.” Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2001. Print. ———. “Walker Brothers Cowboy.” Dance of the Happy Shades. Toronto: Ryerson, 1968. Print. Nischik, Reingard, ed. The Canadian Short Story:  Interpretations. Rochester, NY:  Camden, 2007. Print. New, W.H. A History of Canadian Literature. 2nd ed. Montreal: McGill-Queens UP, 2003. Print. ———. Dreams of Speech and Violence: The Art of the Short Story in Canada and New Zealand. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1987. Print. ———. “The Short Story.” The Cambridge History of Canadian Literature. Ed. Coral Ann Howells and Eva-Marie Kröller. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. 381–401. Print. Pâtea, Viorica. Short Story Theories: A Twenty-First-Century Perspective. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. Accessed 27 Nov. 2014. Roberts, Charles George Douglas. Earth’s Enigmas. Boston and New York: Lamson, Wolffe, 1895. Print. Robertson, Eliza. Wallflowers. Toronto: Penguin, 2014. Print.

The Canadian Short Story in English    447 Robinson, Eden. Traplines. Toronto: Knopf, 1996. Print. ———. “Why the First Nations Transparency Act Is an Insult to My People.” Globe and Mail. 7 Aug. 2014. The Globe and Mail. Web. Accessed 20 Nov. 2014. Rosenblum, Rebecca. Once: Stories. Emeryville, ON: Biblioasis, 2008. Print. Ross, Sinclair. The Lamp at Noon and Other Stories. Toronto:  McClelland and Stewart, 1968. Print. “The Salon des Refusés.” New Quarterly:  Canadian Writers and Writing 107 (2008): 34–183. Print. Schoemperlen, Diane. Forms of Devotion. Toronto: HarperCollins, 1998. Print. Scott, Duncan Campbell. In the Village of Viger. 1896. Toronto:  McClelland and Stewart, 2008. Print. Selecky, Sarah. This Cake Is for the Party. Toronto: Thomas Allen, 2010. Print. Sullivan, Rosemary, ed. The Oxford Book of Stories by Canadian Women in English. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1999. Print. Sugars, Cynthia, and Laura Moss, eds. Canadian Literature in English: Texts and Contexts. 2 vols. Toronto: Pearson-Penguin, 2009. Print. Thacker, Robert. “Short Fiction.” The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature. Ed. Eva-Marie Kröller. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. Print. Thien, Madeleine. Simple Recipes. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2001. Print. Urquhart, Jane, ed. The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories. Toronto: Penguin, 2007. Print. Vanderhaeghe, Guy. Man Descending. Toronto: Macmillan, 1982. Print. ———. The Trouble with Heroes and Other Stories. Ottawa: Borealis, 1983. Print. Watson, Sheila. Five Stories. Toronto: Coach House, 1984. Print. Whalen, Terry. “Charles G.D. Roberts.” Canadian Writers and Their Works: Fiction Series, Vol 2. Ed. Robert Lecker, Jack David and Ellen Quigley. Toronto: ECW P, 1989. 159–217. Print. Willis, Deborah. Vanishing and Other Stories. Toronto: Penguin, 2009. Print. Wilson, D.W. Once You Break a Knuckle. Toronto: Hamish Hamilton, 2011, Print. Winter, Michael. One Last Good Look. Erin, ON: Porcupine’s Quill, 1999. Print.

Chapter 24

Th e E nglish-Canadia n Nov e l Counter-Memory and the Claims of History, 1950–2000 Cynthia Sugars

To sum up the body of work represented by the post-1950 novel in twentieth-century Canada is next to impossible, but if there is a recognizable thread that runs through much of this work, it is a concern with eclipsed or forgotten local histories. In the wave of cultural nationalism that marked the decades after World War II, Canadian authors and artists struggled to give voice to Canadian experience and history, sometimes by championing, often by critiquing, the sacred cows of Canadian mainstream culture and politics. This led to a strong “counter-memorial” tradition in Canadian fiction, which is still present today.1 In the 1970s, Michel Foucault’s conceptualization of “counter-memory” and “counter-history” was extremely influential, contributing to discourses of historical revisioning and memorial recovery (writing and remembering “against the grain”) in a range of cultural contexts.2 This “turn” was part of the postmodern and postcolonial ethos of the period, but in Canada this turn to historical revision and/or recuperation took a number of particular forms. In many cases, this sense of lack or absence led to a recuperation of history from above and below. As Robert Kroestch expressed it in his 1983 essay “On Being an Alberta Writer,” “Even abandonment gives us memory” (329), which in the latter half of the twentieth century proved, after a fashion, to be true. Dennis Lee would refer to this as the particular “cadence” that marked Canadian voicelessness, what he termed the “civil inauthenticity” that characterizes Canadians’ occupation of “colonial space” (471, 475). What he was arguing, in effect, was that Canadian artists needed to confront their colonial conditioning head-on and find a way to speak through what had in some ways been a self-imposed silence. Among many writers of the postwar generation, there was a sense of having been disinherited, a perception that was fostered, in turn, by the growing anti-colonial or postcolonial awareness that marked the postwar period more generally. Canadians, it

The English-Canadian Novel   449 was felt, had been suffering from an unconsciously sanctioned cultural and historical amnesia. “The authorized history,” Robert Kroetsch writes, “was betraying us” (“On Being” 329). Depending on who you were, this might be attributed to an internalized colonial mindset, or to the overt colonization by the Canadian state of its internal “others.” The experience of cultural inauthenticity and amnesia was thus felt by authors emerging from the Canadian mainstream—writers such as Margaret Atwood, Al Purdy, Margaret Laurence, and Robertson Davies—who turned to Canadian localities and histories in their attempt to mythologize or “story” Canadian experience. It was also felt by many authors who viewed themselves as outside the Canadian mainstream due to ethnicity, race, or sexual identity, particularly Indigenous authors. These writers would use the newfound freedom of the post-1960s era to recuperate lost or forgotten histories. This took place through a variety of rhetorical moves, including a series of recognizable tropes: the revival of forgotten or symbolic ancestors, evocations of memory and trauma, self-reflexive historical fiction, or metaphors of ghosts and haunting. From Timothy Findley’s story of a homosexual soldier during World War I, to Maria Campbell’s account of the history and contemporary social conditions of the prairie Métis, to Michael Ondaatje’s novel of the immigrant working-class communities who built modern-day Toronto, to Joy Kogawa’s groundbreaking work about the Japanese internment, the historical turn would in many ways revolutionize Canadian writing—some would say for the better, others for the worse. But one thing was certain: never again would a single story (of Canada) be told as though it were the only one.3

Canadian Fiction and the Massey Commission: The 1950s The economic affluence, burgeoning population, and growing interest in fostering a “national” culture which followed close on the heels of World War II would have an enormous influence on Canadian cultural activity in the later decades of the twentieth century. Culture, education, and media—three areas that until then had received relatively little sustaining support from government infrastructures—were becoming areas that governmental officials, dealing with the rising socioeconomic demands following the war, could not ignore. As Maria Tippett explains, “an interest in fostering cultural life [became] a principal objective of the cultural producers, politicians, and bureaucrats increasingly preoccupied with the task of post-war reconstruction” (xi). Post-secondary education, for one, was in need of expansion and refurbishment to meet the demands for trained professionals. Television, the new media that would spark the groundbreaking work of Canadian cultural studies theorist Marshall McLuhan, was becoming a fixture in most Canadian homes. A well-educated Canadian population of book readers, theatre-goers, and film enthusiasts was on the rise—a population interested in culture and history—and the Liberal government of the time was threatened by the rival CCF

450   Literary Periods and Genres party (the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, which would later become folded into the federal New Democratic Party), which “had a policy for dealing with these and related matters and was clearly appealing to the artistic and intellectual community so obviously in existence across the country” (Tippett 182). By the late 1940s, discussions were afoot, at a federal level, to establish a coherent policy concerned with the cultural field. In 1949, the Canadian government struck a Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences to determine the state of the arts and sciences in Canadian society. The committee was chaired by Vincent Massey, who in 1952 would become the first Canadian-born Governor General. Chapter 15 of the published Report (1951) concerns the topic of “Literature” in Canada and states that literature has lagged behind that of the other arts. The Massey Commission Report also noted the desperate situation of the teaching of Canadian content in Canadian schools and universities. In response, it recommended the creation of the National Library (1952) and the Canada Council for the Arts (1957) as state-supported measures to foster and protect the arts in Canada. Part of this growing commitment to the promotion and protection of Canadian culture is evident in the formation of the New Canadian Library (NCL) Series (1958) by the major publishing firm McClelland and Stewart. Founded by Jack McClelland and Malcolm Ross, the NCL was the first paperback series dedicated to Canadian writing, and it made available many Canadian works that might otherwise have remained out of print at the time. Its key role in the dissemination of Canadian literature, however, was in making available inexpensive fiction paperbacks that could be used in school and university classrooms, and, indeed, in its consolidation of what would come to be identified as an institutionalized Canadian literary “canon.” The Massey Report initiated a movement of institutionalized cultural nationalism that would gain ground over the ensuing decade, motivated by a sense that Canadian artists, with the right cultural-economic encouragement, could contribute to national identity. This notion of the integral connection between the arts and national consolidation was not a new phenomenon, as many of the chapters in this book demonstrate (see, for example, the Introduction to this volume and Chapter 2 by Adam Carter). Indeed, the literary discourse of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is rife with commentary that makes overt links between a national literature and national “maturity” or “greatness.” What was new, however, was a federal institutional apparatus that would identify as its mission the consolidation of national cultural identity in the face of a perceived sense of impinging cultural amnesia and erosion. The Commission’s motivation, one might argue, was preservative as much as future-oriented. As Richard Stursberg describes it in The Canadian Encyclopedia, the commission’s work was pursued against the backdrop of a major transition in Canadian cultural affairs. Although the country’s prewar cultural life was primarily focused on amateur, community-oriented, voluntary activities, the commission foresaw that these activities were giving way to a more urban, impersonal and national orientation; the overall character of the final report is a strange mixture of

The English-Canadian Novel   451 mourning for an age that was rapidly passing and of excitement at the new era of professional “mass culture” that lay ahead.

Arguably, the Massey Commission was fueled by a wishful notion of cultural nationalism. As Alan Filewod has argued in his extended analysis of the Massey legacy, the Commission “assumed a deference to cultural, historical, and traditional authority” (57) that had never really taken hold in Canada, a “mixture of ethnocentric essentialism and cultural pluralism” (38). The optimistic patriotism that flourished following the Massey Commission initiatives was thus accompanied, at the same time, by a critique of the social definitions of the new national (and international) polity. Hugh MacLennan’s The Watch That Ends the Night (1959) is paradigmatic of the sense of disillusionment that pervades many Canadian literary works of the period. An elegy for “the Canada that might have been,” as Nick Mount describes it, the novel is a lament for the failure of the leftist political idealism of the 1930s which followed in the wake of World War II. Numerous novels of the period, informed by the modernist skepticism of the era, explore the personal and moral ramifications of social and religious strictures as these prejudices impinge on people in microcosmic Canadian settings. This concern was complemented by an interest in local and regional histories and narratives. Many important regionalist novels of the period were published during this time—for example, Hugh MacLennan’s Each Man’s Son (1951), Ernest Buckler’s The Mountain and the Valley (1952), and Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook (1959)—while others focused on the oppressive provinciality of Canadian small towns (for example, Robertson Davies’s “Salterton Trilogy”:  Tempest-Tost [1951], Leaven of Malice [1954], and A Mixture of Frailties [1958]). Morley Callaghan’s writings are emblematic of this focus on social conservatism and postwar small-mindedness. His 1951 The Loved and the Lost features a protagonist, Peggy Sanderson, who experiences moral censure because of her friendship with Black musicians in a Montreal nightclub. The novel tells a story of complex race relations, charting Peggy’s and others’ ruination in an era before the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Ethel Wilson’s 1954 Swamp Angel has a similar focus on a female protagonist’s attempts to escape the strictures of bourgeois, male-dominated social norms. The protagonist, Maggie Lloyd, leaves her husband in Vancouver and moves to the interior of British Columbia, where she gets a job in a wilderness lodge and comes to a sense of reconciliation with herself and her past. In response to the continuing assimilationist policies of the period, authors consider the experiences of immigrant and minority communities as they attempt to adapt to Canadian social expectations. The novels of this period attend to microcosms of Canadian society, from regional locations to urban ones, often with a specific social dilemma at their core. World War II had shown people the horrors to which racism and intolerance could lead, and this sensibility informs many of the postwar novels that consider the experience of Canadian immigrants struggling to balance their experiences and identities in Canadian society. Adele Wiseman’s majestic 1956 novel The Sacrifice (1956), which won the Governor General’s Award for fiction, focuses on new and established Jewish settlers in what is a couched version of the Canadian prairie city

452   Literary Periods and Genres of Winnipeg. The novel offers various meditations on exile, both spiritual and physical, in its portrayal of Abraham and his family who, having fled the Nazi pogroms in the Ukraine, negotiate the trials of establishing themselves in a new world. Through its consideration of cultural conflict, spiritual torment, ethnic intolerance, and ambivalent justice, the novel offers a profound treatment of the trauma of emigration and exile, and the difficult choice posed for immigrants between the retention of traditions and assimilation into the newly forming Canadian society. John Marlyn’s 1957 social realist novel, Under the Ribs of Death, charts the life and career of a Hungarian immigrant in Winnipeg, Sandor Hunyadi, who, in seeking social mobility, rejects his identity and assimilates into the English-Canadian mainstream. Renaming himself Alex Hunter, Sandor becomes an aggressive capitalist whom the novel dooms to financial but not entirely personal failure. In the end, Sandor has achieved a sense of tenuous belonging in Canada, largely through the support of his family. Mordecai Richler’s widely celebrated 1959 novel The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz combines a treatment of the Jewish community in Montreal with a response to the consumerist ethos of the post–World War II era. Richler’s work is known for its acerbic and humorous social satire, and this novel is no exception. With charisma and flair, the protagonist, Duddy Kravitz, seeks to become a self-made capitalist and achieves his goal without realizing the losses he has incurred in the process. The ambivalent moral vision of the novel, which has readers siding with and against the memorable protagonist, places this work at the end of the 1950s era, before the more overtly leftist social consciousness of the 1960s had taken hold. One might make a similar assessment of Brian Moore’s The Luck of Ginger Coffey (1960), which offers a piercing critique of Canadian society through the eyes of Irish immigrants in working-class Montreal. This critique of social conformity and spiritual desolation reaches its apex in what is often considered the emblematic Canadian modernist novel of the period, Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook (1959). There is no question that Watson’s novel stands out for its application of modernist techniques and themes to a Canadian setting. Set in the Cariboo region of the interior of British Columbia, the novel engages with key modernist dilemmas: spiritual alienation, distance from tradition, and the quest for redemption. In pared down, symbolist style reminiscent of the writing of William Faulkner, the story takes place under the watchful eyes of the Indigenous spirit “Coyote,” who observes as the people in Nineveh move from social and moral disintegration toward spiritual transformation. The recognizably “local” setting of the novel, paired with identifiable modernist techniques, demonstrated the extent to which authors of the time were committed to writing Canadian fiction that would be attuned to international developments in the arts while modifying some of these approaches for a Canadian context. As Colin Hill has argued, “the usual dichotomy between realism and modernism” (13), or as Glen Willmott argues, between “realism and romance” (5), is not easily applicable to Canadian novels of this period, which exemplify an innovative modern aesthetic that seeks “to represent their contemporary environment” (Hill 41). This documentary impulse to represent “the familiar, actual conditions of Canadian life” (40) is an interest that would continue into the decades that followed.

The English-Canadian Novel   453

Counterculture Histories: The 1960s and 1970s The anti-establishment, indeed anti-imperial, sentiments that were characteristic of the modernist period took hold in the subsequent decades of the 1960s and 1970s. This emancipatory spirit found expression in many of the prominent social movements of the period:  the women’s movement, civil rights engagements, Indigenous activism, environmental critiques, and anti-war protests. In Canada, this is also a period associated with a vigorous resurgence in cultural nationalism as the prosperity of the postwar era combined with increased national-cultural support networks in the years leading up to Canada’s centennial in 1967. The sense of vitality and optimism that informed the 1960s was fueled, in turn, by a growing postcolonial consciousness, which meant that “Canada” as a subject had acquired popular cachet, and Canadian artists were gaining avid local and international audiences. Willmott has identified the beginnings of “postcolonial” experience in Canada with the fin-de-siècle and Anglo-American modernist movements, which followed soon after the establishment of the Canadian state (44). While Canadians had experienced similar nationalist enthusiasm at numerous points in their history, both in the late nineteenth century following Confederation and in the modernist period in the 1920s and 1930s, there was something unique about the form these questions would take in the late 1960s, marked by a kind of “history in the making” spirit that would find expression in many of the national and cultural institutions of the time. In 1965, after some controversy, Canada’s maple-leaf flag became official (before this the British red ensign had been used), a symbolic shift that represented a change in Canada’s sense of itself as an internationally autonomous nation. Some of the major federal institutions were introduced during this period: the Official Languages Act in 1969; the Multicultural Ministry, created in 1972 (resulting in the Multiculturalism Act of 1988); the establishment of “O Canada” as the official National Anthem (finalized in 1980 after extensive parliamentary negotiations in the 1960s and 1970s). This period also saw the creation of influential Canadian cultural institutions, such as the National Arts Centre in Ottawa (1969) and The Writers’ Union of Canada (1973), not to mention a range of regional theatres, art galleries, museums, and cultural centres across the country. As never before, expressions of Canadian cultural identity had a cross-national (though not necessarily “unifying”) dimension, which reached a height in 1967 when Canada celebrated the 100th anniversary of Confederation and launched Expo ’67 in Montreal. The fervour was felt across the country, though Quebec was experiencing a nationalist movement of its own (the “Quiet Revolution”), which saw the introduction of indépendantiste ideologies and policies and culminated in the founding of the Parti Québécois and the election of René Lévesque as provincial premier in 1976.4 The discourse of the day, English and French, was infused with the liberatory and revolutionary rhetoric that characterized the 1960s and 1970s more generally. For many, it was felt that

454   Literary Periods and Genres Canadians would be able to assert their place internationally as sophisticated and au courant. Canadian artists were foremost in the push for this revitalization of Canadian culture. Ironically, the fervour of Canadian cultural expression at this time, aided by many of the institutions and policies established by the Massey Commission, resulted in a widespread awareness among Canadian artists of the silences and erasures that had gone into the formulation of a Canadian national identity. This sense of historical erasure was twofold: many Canadian writers of this generation would express regret about the ways that Canadians had been deprived of local knowledge about the places they inhabited; others would denounce the ways the constitution of a homogenous “White” national identity had been accomplished at the expense of intra-national “others” whose voices did not contribute to the national metanarrative. The drive to convey something “authentic” of Canadian experience—in literature, theatre, music, film, and television—only highlighted the internalized sense of inferiority or secondariness that had plagued writers for generations before. Hugh MacLennan’s famous essay, “Boy Meets Girl in Winnipeg and Who Cares” (1960), is one such expression of the sensation, both internally within Canada and externally in the cosmopolitan centres of cultural and economic power, that Canadian experience was insignificant. But this cultural revolution would not be possible, poet and critic Dennis Lee observed in “Cadence, Country, Silence” (1973), until Canadian culture had managed to shed its inferiority complex and had come out from under the shadow of the United States. Writing in response to his experience reading George Grant’s essays in the 1960s, in which Grant identified the characteristic colonized nature of Canadian culture, Lee expressed his sense that Canadians needed to take hold of their distinctive “way of being” in the world that would distinguish them from American and British cultural influences. Postcolonial critic Stephen Slemon would later conceptualize this in terms of the “ambivalence of emplacement” that marks Canada’s predicament of being part of the “second world” (148). Lee’s attempt to revive the silenced ghosts of Canada’s suppressed past is evident in his seminal long poem Civil Elegies (1968), but this turn to local Canadian histories would infuse much of the writing of this period. Lee’s sentiments were echoed by many authors at this time. Margaret Laurence’s 1970 essay “A Place to Stand On,” for example, insists on the need for Canadian writers to understand their “background and [their] past, sometimes even a more distant past which one has not personally experienced” (313), a sentiment that she would put into effect in her fiction. Robert Kroetsch likewise gave voice to this sense of existential displacement. Thinking of his experience as a young writer in the 1950s, he remembers the astonishment he felt when he realized that he “was living in the midst of story material. And this is surely a problem for a people who seldom see images of themselves in literature or art: we fail to recognize the connection between art and life. … Knowledge becomes, for us, knowledge of someone else” (“Moment” 4). Perhaps the most well-known expression of this sense of many Canadians’ alienation from their culture and past was expressed by Margaret Atwood in the early 1970s. In 1972, Atwood, who had already established herself as a leading literary figure in Canada

The English-Canadian Novel   455 (having published poetry and fiction throughout the 1960s, winning the Governor General’s Award for her poetry collection, The Circle Game, in 1967), published her literary and educational “manifesto” Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. Intended for use in the Canadian school system, Atwood addressed the dilemma that had been identified earlier in the 1950s: a situation in which Canadians knew a great deal about the art and literature of other countries (namely Britain and the United States), but very little about their own. “We need to know about here,” Atwood wrote, “because here is where we live” (19). For Atwood, the teaching of Canadian literature was “a political act” (14), and Survival became part of the widespread “decolonizing” effort that was sweeping Canada cultural circles at the time. Survival has since been criticized for its oversimplified account of Canadian literature, but it is important to remember that Atwood was writing at a time when there was a dearth of educational and scholarly material on Canadian literature, and few people in the educational system who were trained in the field. Indeed, as a recognized area of study (which would in turn train subsequent generations of artists and educators), Canadian literature did not become established until the 1960s and 1970s.5 Canadian writers leapt in to fill the breach, much as they had been doing for the previous decade. The dynamic blend of aesthetic experimentation and cultural momentum during this period helped to initiate the unparalleled growth of a national literary scene. With the foundation of such publishing collectives as Anansi Press (1967) and Coach House Books (1965), Canadian authors were creating venues for their work. Initially produced out of the basement of a house on Spadina Avenue in Toronto, Anansi helped launch the careers of such prominent Canadians as Matt Cohen (Korsoniloff, 1969), Graeme Gibson (Five Legs, 1969), and Michael Ondaatje (The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, 1970), as well as publishing important critical work such as Northrop Frye’s study of Canadian writing, The Bush Garden (1971), and Atwood’s Survival (1972). Other significant literary presses to emerge during this period were Oberon (1966), Talonbooks (1967), Black Moss Press (1969), and Brick Books (1975), in conjunction with an explosion of little magazines such as Prism (1959), TISH (1961), Open Letter (1965), West Coast Review (1966), Malahat Review (1967), ellipse (1969), Books in Canada (1971), Exile (1971), Descant (1971), Canadian Fiction Magazine (1971), The Antigonish Review (1971), event (1971), Capilano Review (1972), and CV/II (1975). Robertson Davies’s novels of this period continued in the spirit of his earlier work. Though traditional in style, his novels fit the social iconoclasm and countercultural spirit of the age, committed as they are to exposing the provincialism and intolerance of conventional Canadian social mores. Davies’s public persona as a grand old man of Canadian letters has sometimes distracted critics from recognizing the more incisive and archly critical aspects of his work, which is committed to unsettling the philistinism and conformity with which he feared Canadian society had become permeated. As part of the “Southern Ontario Gothic” tradition, Davies was committed to countering strictly rationalist interpretations of human experience, and devoted much of his writing career to exploring the gothic depths of small-town Ontario communities at the turn of the century. In many ways, this represented Davies’s own attempt to

456   Literary Periods and Genres decolonize Canadian literature, which he felt had for too long been labouring under the weight of a debilitating anglophilia, marked, in particular, by a stereotype of English straight-laced pretentiousness. In the 1960s, Davies became heavily influenced by the psychological writings of Carl Jung. This interest informs the novels that constitute “The Deptford Trilogy”—Fifth Business (1970), The Manticore (1972), and World of Wonders (1975)—which use unconscious archetypes as an important unifying theme. The first of these, Fifth Business, solidified Davies’s international reputation and is heralded as one of the best Canadian novels of the era. It tells the story of Dunstan Ramsay, a retired schoolmaster, who, after narrowly missing being struck by a rock hidden inside a snowball when he was a child, becomes obsessed with the fate of the woman who is hit, Mary Dempster. As a result of the accident, Mary gives birth prematurely to a son, who achieves success as a world-famous magician named Magnus Eisengrim. The novel takes us through the gothic underside of Canadian small towns, culminating in the discovery of the original snowball thrower, found floating in Toronto harbour with the stone from the fateful snowball clenched between his teeth. The subsequent novel in the trilogy, The Manticore, which includes an extended Jungian analysis of one of its characters, won Davies the Governor General’s Award. In the third book, World of Wonders, Ramsay is writing the biography of Eisengrim and thereby learns the story of his life, from his sexual abuse in a two-bit carnival to his career as a brilliant master of illusion. The genius of the trilogy is the way its central characters are indelibly affected by a seemingly ordinary yet catalyzing event. Davies’s lifelong interest in Canadian gothicism, evident in his collection of humorous ghost stories, High Spirits (1982), sets Canadian narrow-mindedness alongside mystical and supernatural esoterica as a way of cultivating the uncanny in the Canadian cultural imaginary. The interconnection between the rational and the invisible, truth and deception, life and art, achieved its most extended treatment in “The Cornish Trilogy,” which includes The Rebel Angels (1981), What’s Bred in the Bone (1985), and The Lyre of Orpheus (1988). Like “The Deptford Trilogy,” these novels are replete with arcane knowledge and are concerned with themes of reality and illusion, particularly in relation to the role of art and the writing of biography. The Rebel Angels is a satire on university life and its associated intellectual and erotic obsessions. In What’s Bred in the Bone and The Lyre of Orpheus, the boundary between this world and the next is transgressed as contending spirits preside over the events in the storylines, a motif that appears again in Davies’s Murther and Walking Spirits (1991) and The Cunning Man (1994). In the former, the dead protagonist, Connor Gilmartin, finds himself in the afterlife attending a film festival that shows movies about his ancestors. The novel stages Gilmartin’s confrontation with his forebears in an elaborately framed ghost story in which a ghost is haunted by the local New World history that he has been in denial of. For Davies, this denial of gothic cultural presence and inheritance was central to the sense of deficiency that was plaguing Canadian culture. The novel thus represents a coming to terms with the historical and the local as a lifting of societal repression, a process that was thought necessary, as Lee had argued in the 1970s, for overcoming colonial and cultural insecurity.

The English-Canadian Novel   457 Mordecai Richler, whose reputation as one of the most piercing critics of Canadian society had been steadily growing since the 1950s, published his award-winning novel, St. Urbain’s Horseman, in 1971. Like many of his writings from this period, the novel is a social satire that offers a sendup of 1960s hypocrisies, cultural elitism, Canadian insecurities, and Jewish identity, but it is also an affectionate rendition of local terrain, the landscape around the “Main” in inner-city Anglo-Montreal. The hero, Jake Hersh, who was a minor character in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, tries to flee his embarrassing Jewish-Canadian origins by transplanting himself in England, very much like Richler did in the 1950s and 1960s (and indeed, as does the protagonist of Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners). In the process, Jake remains obsessed with his childhood past on St. Urbain Street in Montreal, particularly with the larger-than-life figure of his cousin Joey, the legendary “Horseman” of the title, who fought in the Spanish Civil War. On trial for a sexual scandal at London’s Old Bailey, Jake reviews his seemingly lacklustre life alongside that of his idolized cousin. In this case, however, the moral vacuum that closes the ending of Duddy Kravitz is replaced by Jake’s affirmation of himself as a minor hero in his way, constituted by a mix of multiple histories, aspirations, and identities. Social analysis meets overt postcolonial critique in Austin Clarke’s novels from the 1960s and 1970s. Born in Barbados in 1934, Clarke immigrated to Canada in 1955 to attend the University of Toronto. By the early 1960s, having abandoned his university studies, Clarke turned his attention to writing full-time. Most of his works, through his characteristic ironic tone, consider the unequal colonial relations between the Caribbean and North America, underscoring the belief of many West Indian people, living under colonial social structures, that success and prosperity are possible only in North America or England. In The Survivors of the Crossing (1964), set in Barbados, word of the ease and prosperity of life in Canada lead to disillusionment and unrest among workers in a cane field who enact a strike with disastrous consequences. In 1967, Clarke published the first novel in his trilogy about Caribbean immigrants in Toronto, The Meeting Point (1967), followed a few years later by Storm of Fortune (1973) and The Bigger Light (1975). This “Toronto” trilogy deals with the disillusionment of immigrants in Canada who are subject to exploitation and duplicity. Clarke was thus a seminal figure in telling some of the silenced stories that cut through the ideals of Canadian national unity, civility, and multiculturalism. His novels are psychologically honest and unsettling, offering uncomfortable studies of disillusionment, told with detachment and irony. A move toward experimentation (in both style and content) is evident in much of the writing of this period, an approach that is in keeping with the iconoclastic and counterculture spirit of the 1960s and 1970s generally. This is the period when we see the rise of the postmodern novel, which would take off in the decades to follow. Experimental in style and subversive in content, these works aimed to shake up conventional norms and established views of Canadian culture and national history. One of the most notorious novels to come out of this radicalized spirit was Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers (1966), a stylistic tour de force that is narrated by two idiosyncratic characters, both of whom are obsessed with a nineteenth-century Mohawk saint, Kateri Tekakwitha. The novel is

458   Literary Periods and Genres emblematic of 1960s experimentalism and its attack on accepted proprieties and conventions, particularly sexual ones, yet its misogynistic overtones and indulgent exploitation of Indigenous cultures make it a troubling text from a contemporary postcolonial and feminist perspective. Other noteworthy postmodern novels to appear in this period include Graeme Gibson’s Five Legs (1969), Robert Kroetsch’s The Studhorse Man (1969) and Badlands (1975), Dave Godfrey’s The New Ancestors (1970), Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter (1976), and Jack Hodgins’s The Invention of the World (1977). Kroetsch, who has long been synonymous with metafictional postmodernism in Canada, is a widely acclaimed novelist, critic, and poet, but it is also his association with the existential “particulars of place” (“Moment” 7), particularly the landscape and locality of the Canadian prairies, that has constituted a distinctive element of his writing. The Studhorse Man and Badlands remain two of his most popular novels. Postmodern in style yet resolutely Canadian in setting, The Studhorse Man follows the elliptical and picaresque travels of Hazard Lepage, who is seeking to start a new line of studhorses from his prized stallion Poseidon. Roughly mapped atop the journeys of Odysseus, Hazard travels across Alberta in an eventful and ambivalent quest, which culminates in an ironic success when his horse “fathers” the line of mare’s urine that will be used in the making of birth control pills (a major new contraceptive first introduced in North America in the 1960s). Badlands, also set in Alberta, traces an exuberant paleontologist’s quest along the Red Deer River, framed, through a metafictional twist, by a series of notebooks in his daughter’s possession that offer only fragmented details of the mission. One of the best-loved postmodern novels from this period is Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter (1976), the story of innovative jazz musician Buddy Bolden, told in a style that mimics jazz effects of fragmentation, riff, and syncopation, through a series of interviews, remembrances, poetry, songs, vignettes, all interspersed with photographs by E.J. Bellocq, who is a secondary character in the book. The novel is animated by a sense of melancholy about Bolden as an agonized genius, setting it apart from some of the more playful postmodern texts that would follow in the 1980s and 1990s, such as George Bowering’s Burning Water (1980) and Douglas Coupland’s Generation X (1991). One of the most important and oft-cited postmodern novels from this period, also an example of “history from below,” is Timothy Findley’s The Wars (1977). Set during World War I, the novel tells the story of Robert Ross, who, like many soldiers, suffers the soul-destroying effects of the rampant destruction and questionable morality of wartime operations. The narrative metafictional device of the novel (told in the second person) renders the story of Ross from a distance and relays a fragmentary narrative told from a contemporary (1970s) perspective. The effect is to unsettle the authority of the historical thread, which, in combination with Ross’s homosexuality, results in an alternative Canadian war narrative. The novel thus marked a radical intervention in Canadian World War I discourse, which had long heralded the war as a foundational and proud moment in the constitution of Canadian national identity and maturity. Findley’s narrative subverts this story from within. This theme of “history from below” took a unique form in Findley’s allegorical novel Not Wanted on the Voyage (1984), told

The English-Canadian Novel   459 from the perspective of a blind cat that has stowed away on Noah’s ark. The tyranny enacted by Noah’s adherence to self-serving and oppressive “Christian” laws is countered by the perspectives of others on the ark who question his authority, from his wife, Mrs. Noyes, to their cross-dressing “daughter-in-law,” Lucy/Lucifer, who initiates a rebellion on board the ship. A quintessential postmodern novel of the period, the work undertakes a critical subversion of a patriarchal cultural metanarrative (the story of Noah’s Ark standing in for the Bible more generally). The feminist perspective of Not Wanted on the Voyage is part of the broader feminist ethos of the time, following in the wake of the women’s movement (second-wave feminism) in the 1960s. In the United States, the National Organization for Women (NOW) became established in 1966, with popular feminist spokesperson Gloria Steinem and others campaigning for women’s rights across North America. In Canada, the important women’s magazine Chatelaine emerged in 1957 under the editorship of Doris Anderson; the magazine invited articles on feminist topics and was a significant forum for women’s issues.6 Texts such as Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) and Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1968) articulated the disjunction between the so-called “freedom” of twentieth-century America and women’s experience of being continually secondary to their male counterparts. Even though this period is often referred to in terms of the “sexual revolution,” largely because of the loosening of sexual mores as a result of the birth control pill, the “revolution” did not substantially change the status of women in male-female relationships or in professional contexts. Many women were still conditioned to view marriage as the culmination of life experience, a fantasy that flew in the face of realistic expectations. Canadian writers such as Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood, and Alice Munro write piercing critiques of the ways in which romantic illusions can destroy the women and men who are caught up in them. As Rosemary Sullivan notes in her biography of Atwood, “no one seemed to notice at the time that the one area that had hardly changed at all was sexual politics” (193). Canadian women writers of the period contextualized some of these issues in recognizably Canadian contexts, so that the representation of local experience and histories became overlaid with a feminist consciousness. Margaret Atwood’s work in this period is replete with exposures of the condescending double standard of the era, evident in such works as The Edible Woman (1969), Surfacing (1972), and Lady Oracle (1976). The Edible Woman contains a humorous critique of sexual double-standards and consumer society—including the consumption of women’s bodies and identities—through its protagonist Marian MacAlpin, who refuses materialist values and marriage by engaging in willed anorexia. This and Atwood’s subsequent novels earned her the reputation as a notable feminist writer and social commentator, though her tongue-in-cheek comments also took the women’s movement to task for its sometimes myopic intolerance of any but a woman-centred agenda. Surfacing is perhaps Atwood’s most important novel of this early period, addressing some of the major issues of late 1960s Canada as the protagonist journeys into the Quebec wilderness—and, internally, into her personal past—to search for her lost father. It is a groundbreaking novel for its skeptical engagement with such ideological developments as Canadian nationalism, anti-Americanism, the Quiet

460   Literary Periods and Genres Revolution in Quebec, the sexual revolution, and environmentalism, simultaneously empathizing with these burgeoning movements and examining them with a critical eye. Lady Oracle similarly satirizes many of the fashionable topics of the day (sexual mores, women’s lib, women’s body image, the peace movement), but its importance in Atwood’s oeuvre rests in its self-conscious satire of the gothic genre. The novel’s protagonist, Joan Foster, fakes her own death and lives under a false identity, writing under the pseudonym of an author of cheap gothic romances. The novel engages with the theme of illusion and disguise—comparable to Davies’s work but from a feminist perspective—in part as a way of exploring how women are forced by social norms and expectations to “fashion” and contort themselves according to a series of contrived plot lines. Jane Rule’s Desert of the Heart (1964), Audrey Thomas’s Mrs. Blood (1970), Marian Engel’s Bear (1976), Carol Shields’s The Box Garden (1977), and Aritha van Herk’s Judith (1978) stand out as five of the most powerful feminist novels of the period. Bear, in particular, is a radical and sexually explicit novel that relates the story of a timid and sexually repressed woman, Lou, who embarks on a voyage of self-discovery while on a research trip in an isolated spot in northern Ontario. There she discovers a domesticated bear with which she has a sexual relationship. Like Atwood’s The Edible Woman, the novel charts a consciousness-raising interior journey as Lou recognizes the social narratives that have consigned her to a subordinate position in mainstream society. One of the most well-loved and prolific woman writers of this period is Margaret Laurence, who published her best novels in the 1960s and early 1970s: The Stone Angel (1964), A Jest of God (1966), The Fire-Dwellers (1969), and The Diviners (1974). Like Davies, Laurence is committed to overturning the debilitating effects of Canadian small-town mores and insecurities. The Stone Angel, set in the fictional town of Manawaka, Manitoba, is a story told in retrospect by an aged woman, Hagar Shipley, who realizes, too late, the stifled emotional and social world that has held her back from forming close relationships with those she loves, a theme that is picked up in Laurence’s A Jest of God. The Diviners broadens this focus into a consideration of societal prejudices as they apply to the working classes and Indigenous peoples. In this novel, the protagonist, Morag Gunn, is raised, after her parents die, by the town’s garbage collector, a man named Christie Logan, who is one of the most memorable of Laurence’s characters. Christie tells Morag grand stories about her heritage in order to give her a sense of personal and cultural pride, yet Morag wants to flee the embarrassment of her lowly Manitoba origins. Although she falls in love with a local Métis man, Jules Tonnerre, she marries an overbearing and patronizing English professor, with whom she moves to England in order to escape her “colonial” identity. In the course of the novel, Morag discovers that her “real” home is in Canada, the land of Christie Logan, and she returns, eventually living as a single mother, raising a daughter she has had with Jules. The novel is notable for its engagement with local history on the Canadian prairies and for its exposé of the living conditions of the Métis. Influenced by Maria Campbell’s groundbreaking autobiography Halfbreed (1973), which dealt with the plight of the Métis in western Canada, Laurence’s novel is an early non-Indigenous text that considers the after-effects of European colonialism on Canada’s Indigenous

The English-Canadian Novel   461 people, a topic that before the mid-1960s had been largely ignored in official Canadian national constructions. Prior to The Diviners, the history of the Métis had been the subject of Rudy Wiebe’s important novel from 1973, The Temptations of Big Bear, a historical fiction set in the late 1800s that relays the story of Cree Chief Big Bear, the last to hold out against the pressures by Canadian officials to sign away Indigenous territory on the prairies. Big Bear, as the novel powerfully illustrates, is put in an impossible moral situation: to let his people starve in the present or to sign away their future. Filtered through the consciousness of Big Bear, the novel is an epic work that considers a legacy of violence and loss that is sobering to this day. The Temptations of Big Bear was followed a few years later by Wiebe’s The Scorched-Wood People (1977), another historical novel that focuses on Métis history and the resistance led by Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont in the late 1800s.7 Wiebe’s and Laurence’s interest in Indigenous histories was not a coincidence, as it emerged out of the Indigenous rights movement (comparable to the Civil Rights movement) that was sweeping North America in the 1960s and 1970s. The American Indian Movement (AIM) was formed in 1968 and rallied around the cause of land rights, police brutality, and the vote. The movement’s activities reached their culmination in 1973 when a standoff between Indigenous people and police took place at Wounded Knee, South Dakota (the location of a previous massacre of Indigenous peoples in 1890). This movement spread across the border to Canada, where, in 1960, Aboriginal people finally won the right to vote in federal elections without losing their status rights, though First Nations women, under the Indian Act, still lost their Indian status if they married a non-Indigenous man (a law that was finally repealed in 1985). In Canada, the National Indian Council was formed in 1961, later followed by the National Indian Brotherhood (a precursor of today’s Assembly of First Nations). In the midst of this wave of political activity, the federal government, under Pierre Trudeau, introduced its controversial “White Paper” in 1969, which aimed to replace the Indian Act and relieve government responsibility for Aboriginal peoples. The White Paper called for the end of treaties, claiming that this would mean equality for Aboriginal peoples, but it was interpreted by many as a move toward assimilation. In 1969, Cree activist Harold Cardinal published his exposé, The Unjust Society, which explored the hypocrisy of government treatment of Canadian Indigenous people and resulted in the withdrawal of the White Paper in 1971. In the midst of this very public political activism and historical reassessment, it is not surprising that the early 1970s saw a surge of writing by Indigenous authors, many of whom quickly gained mainstream attention. In 1973, Campbell’s autobiography, Halfbreed, was a radical intervention for its explicit treatment of the ways Indigenous people (specifically Métis communities in Manitoba and Saskatchewan) had been oppressed for generations in Canada, thereby testing Trudeau’s myth of Canada as the “just society” and the reputation of Canada as an inclusive multicultural nation. Halfbreed was also an important text for its subversion of the stereotypes about Aboriginal people that had been propagated for so long by White authors and

462   Literary Periods and Genres anthropologists. Many Indigenous-authored works of this period show the influence of Campbell’s courageous work. Lee Maracle’s Bobbi Lee: Indian Rebel (1975), about an Indigenous woman’s growth toward political consciousness, tells a similar tale of hardship and self-acceptance, while Basil Johnston’s Moose Meat and Wild Rice (1978) is a humorous set of interconnected tales about life on the Moose Meat Point Reserve. These works were a prelude to what would become a significant body of Indigenous-authored art and literature in Canada in the decades to follow.8

The Postcolonial Postmodern: The 1980s and 1990s By the 1980s and 1990s, the revival of historical and local subjects that had predominated in the 1960s and 1970s gave way, in literature, to an even more consciously politicized, and internationalized, postcolonial consciousness. Canadian critic Linda Hutcheon’s important study of Canadian writing, The Canadian Postmodern (1988), explored the rise of what she terms “historiographic metafiction” in Canadian writing at this time (13). However, a number of critics have highlighted the conservative nature of these works. The two most prominent of these are Frank Davey and Herb Wyile. Davey’s 1993 study Post-National Arguments faults contemporary Canadian fiction with its failure to engage with the political and social realities of modern-day Canada. Focusing on the form and discursive strategies in post-centennial Canadian writing, Davey argues that the novels are ultimately romantic in nature, evincing a move toward containment, harmony, and universality over an active engagement with Canadian social and political conflicts. This argument may seem odd in view of the rising interest in postcolonial politics during this time period, and Davey’s alignment of the “political” with direct social activism and an engagement with political process, and the “national” with public policy and debate, risks obscuring the cultural politics that is at the heart of many of these works. Indeed, Davey takes issue with the turn to “particular constituenc[ies]” (265) in these works as a sign of their “postnational” positioning, yet the ethos of the post-1960s era had certainly turned to intranational politics and sociocultural diversity as an opening up of the national to a broader purview. Nevertheless, the turn to the past in many of these novels in a sense confirms the very move away from the present that Davey highlights. Wyile’s 2002 study, Speculative Fictions, makes a somewhat complementary argument through his identification of a conservative shift in post-1990 Canadian historical writing toward referential and recuperative forms of historiography. As Wyile sees it, the experimental self-consciousness of earlier novels, which Hutcheon had identified in The Canadian Postmodern, was being set aside. Perhaps, as Ajay Heble argues, this is because of a growing “commitment to ethically-inflected models” that question the political efficacy of postmodern skepticism (172), though one could also argue that the colonial nostalgia that is evident in many of these fictions strives to enact a form of

The English-Canadian Novel   463 reparation or atonement for imperialist atrocities, making the postcolonial intervention of these novels questionable.9 These arguments are open to debate, yet it is certainly difficult to overestimate the immense impact of the postcolonial turn on contemporary Canadian writing. With the publication of Edward Said’s monumental study, Orientalism, in 1978, cultural scholarship shifted from the thematic criticism of the 1970s into more overtly postcolonial and diasporic approaches. Many novels of this period combine the technical innovation of the preceding period with an emphasis on heterogeneous voices within the nation as a way of countering or reimagining the narratives of national origin, inheritance, foundation, and self-definition that dominated in the 1960s and 1970s. With the introduction of the Canadian Multicultural Act in 1988, there was increased attention to experiences outside the national mainstream, but which were still rooted within Canadian locations (an emphasis that would shift into the more transnational focus of the twenty-first century, evident in such Canadian novels as Yann Martel’s Life of Pi [2001], David Bergen’s The Time in Between [2005], Madeleine Thien’s Certainty [2006], Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes [2007], Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues [2011], and Sean Michaels’s Us Conductors [2014]). One sees a major shift from the expressly “bicultural” formulations of the nation in the postwar period toward a broader sense of the heterogeneity of Canadian society, marked as it was by a growing critical interest in questions of ethnicity and diaspora, as explored in Smaro Kamboureli’s important study of diasporic Canadian writing, Scandalous Bodies (2000). Attention to alternative histories that had been forgotten or obfuscated within the metanarratives of institutionalized national history became of central concern in many of these works. Perhaps the most well-known and influential novel of the 1980s is Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1981), which tells the story of the internment of Japanese Canadians during World War II. Obasan has probably been the single most influential novel in Canadian literary history for its impact on the nation’s reassessment of its recorded past. The novel takes the form of an extended memory recuperation, as Naomi’s Aunt Emily tries to bring the family (and the Canadian government) to a recollection of what occurred during those years. For Naomi, this involves piecing her fragmented memories, dreams, and repressions of that period into a storyline that recovers a silenced history, emblematized through the proud silence of Naomi’s elderly aunt, Obasan. The novel was groundbreaking for its treatment of a little spoken of event in Canada’s past, and it was instrumental in the Japanese Redress Movement and the ensuing settlement and government apology to Japanese Canadians in 1988. Michael Ondaatje’s well-loved novel, In the Skin of a Lion (1987), likewise tells a story of early twentieth-century Canada from a non-mainstream perspective. Set in the 1920s–40s during the building of the city of Toronto, the novel focuses on the experiences of the city’s immigrants as the forgotten founders of Canada’s largest metropolis. The novel uses significant postmodern techniques, such as archival sources, photographs, and flashbacks, to relay its central message about the instability of official historical narratives. A compelling character from In the Skin of a Lion, a thief named Caravaggio, went on to become a main character in Ondaatje’s Booker Prize–winning

464   Literary Periods and Genres novel, The English Patient (1992), a few years later. The English Patient, which moves from a Canadian setting to a global purview during World War II, emblematizes a form of postcolonial consciousness in its focus on the displaced, amnesiac, and mutilated figure at the novel’s centre who defies traditional nation-based categorization. The novel is imbued with a profound melancholy in its depiction of a disparate collection of people who are all outsiders to the forces of history, sheltering in a bombed-out villa in Italy as they care for the mysterious “English patient” in their midst. M.G. Vassanji’s 1991 novel No New Land is also an important work for its focus on a diasporic community of East African immigrants living in a high rise in Toronto’s Don Mills neighbourhood. Vassanji recounts the experiences of a central character in the community, Nurdin Lalani, as he interacts with the people in his immediate community and attempts to negotiate the sometimes unintelligible requirements of the Canadian city, particularly after he is accused of sexual assault. Like many of the novels written in the previous decades, including works by Austin Clarke, Vassanji’s novel focuses on the “in-between” lives of people in the interstices of Canadian cities. A continued interest in alternative histories and genealogies forms the basis of many novels from this period. Sky Lee’s 1990 novel Disappearing Moon Cafe is a beautifully written account of four generations of a Chinese-Canadian family in Vancouver’s Chinatown. Tracing their “Canadian” ancestry back to the building of the transcontinental railway in the late 1800s, the novel’s family is haunted by a web of secrets, particularly as these are enacted by the generations of women. This theme is also evident in Hiromi Goto’s Chorus of Mushrooms (1994), about generational differences within a Japanese-Canadian family on the prairies, and Wayson Choy’s The Jade Peony (1995), which charts the transgenerational experiences of a Chinese-Canadian family in Vancouver, highlighting the antagonisms between Chinese and Japanese Canadians in Vancouver during World War II. If Obasan (1981) is one of the most well-known postcolonial novels of this period, Margaret Atwood’s groundbreaking The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) is surely the most famous feminist work. A winner of the Governor General’s Award and short-listed for the Booker Prize, the novel catapulted Atwood into international prominence. Set in a futuristic United States, the novel launches a devastating critique of fundamentalist totalitarianism and the oppression of women. In its bleak dystopian vision, women are forced into slavery as “handmaids” in order to produce children for the governing elite. The novel is clearly a condemnation of the threat of absolutist and misogynistic dictatorships worldwide. Accounts of social conformity and totalitarianism, especially as these impact women, are central to many of Atwood’s subsequent novels, including Cat’s Eye (1988) and The Robber Bride (1993). The former, partially set during the postwar period, charts the horrific machinations that take place among schoolgirls in the 1950s; The Robber Bride tackles similar territory as a group of four women living in 1980s Toronto experience shared trauma at the hands of an ingenious femme fatale. Both novels are examples of Atwood’s ambivalent engagement with some of the prescriptive elements of liberal feminism. Atwood’s most successful novel of the 1990s is probably Alias Grace (1996), a historical fiction that tells the story of a young servant

The English-Canadian Novel   465 woman, Grace Marks, based on a real-life counterpart in the nineteenth century who was accused and imprisoned for murder. In a sense, the novel looks back to Atwood’s 1970 retelling of Canadian pioneer Susanna Moodie (in her 1970 poetry collection The Journals of Susanna Moodie), by turning to another famous Canadian “foremother” whose response to Canada is characterized by what Atwood terms the “schizophrenia” that characterizes Canadian settler experience (Journals 62). Carol Shields’s extraordinary feminist transgenerational novel from this period, The Stone Diaries (1993), covers a panorama of twentieth-century North America. Taking the form of a postmodern, fictional autobiography of Daisy Goodwill, the novel follows the minute history of Daisy’s life through a series of postmodern vignettes, flashbacks, witness statements, and photographs. The novel is a fine example of Shields’s interest in “dailiness,” which takes the form of a postmodern humanism that explores the redemptive quality of lived, day-to-day human lives. In this sense, there is a recuperative impetus in the novel’s focus on the quotidian details of domestic life, another version of history from below. This approach is evident in Shields’s subsequent novels, including Larry’s Party (1997), which tells the story of an “ordinary” man, Larry Weller, who is made “extraordinary” in the course of the author-narrator’s attention to him. As is evident from many of these works, the 1980s and 1990s are the period of Canadian writing that witnessed an explosion in the genre of the historical novel. Not only do these works reveal a postmodern consciousness in underscoring the relativity of grand metanarratives and the gaps within official histories, but they also exhibit a postcolonial intervention in their attempt to tell a different kind of story. In the process, they offer insight into the constructed nature of national histories. There are innumerable examples of historical novels from this period that accomplish this important cultural work, many of them looking back to the exploration or settlement periods of Canadian history. The list is too long for me to consider these novels individually, but the sheer number of these works attests to the explosion of historical fiction during this period. Consider the following list, far from exhaustive, of Canadian historical novels: George Bowering’s Burning Water (1980), Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1981), Timothy Findley’s Famous Last Words (1981), Susan Swan’s The Biggest Modern Woman of the World (1983), Brian Moore’s Black Robe (1985), Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion (1987), Daphne Marlatt’s Ana Historic (1988), Mordecai Richler’s Solomon Gursky Was Here (1989), Sky Lee’s Disappearing Moon Cafe (1990), Jack Hodgins’s Innocent Cities (1990) and Broken Ground (1999), Margaret Sweatman’s Fox (1991) and When Alice Lay Down with Peter (2001), John Steffler’s The Afterlife of George Cartwright (1992), Bernice Morgan’s Random Passage (1992), Jane Urquhart’s Away (1993) and The Stone Carvers (2001), Rudy Wiebe’s A Discovery of Strangers (1994), M.G. Vassanji’s The Book of Secrets (1994), Wayson Choy’s The Jade Peony (1995), Thomas Wharton’s Icefields (1995), Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996), Gail Anderson-Dargatz’s The Cure for Death by Lightning (1996), Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces (1996), Guy Vanderhaeghe’s The Englishman’s Boy (1996), Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees (1996), Wayne Johnston’s The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (1998), Robert Kroetsch’s The Man from the Creeks (1998), Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon (1999), Alistair MacLeod’s No Great

466   Literary Periods and Genres Mischief (1999), Fred Stenson’s The Trade (2000), Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road (2001), Michael Crummey’s River Thieves (2001), Richard Wright’s Clara Callan (2001), Austin Clarke’s The Polished Hoe (2002), and Douglas Glover’s Elle (2003). Many of these works look back to the colonial period in Canadian history to reimagine or “write back” to this era in Canada’s past. This is literally the case in Steffler’s The Afterlife of George Cartwright (1992), in which the protagonist, based on real-life explorer/trader George Cartwright on the Labrador Coast, attempts to rewrite his journal from the perspective of hindsight. Cartwright’s trading operations with the local Inuit community was marked by flagrant colonial arrogance and recklessness. The novel takes the form of a series of diary entries, as Cartwright’s ghost, in a purgatorial “afterlife,” is condemned to review his past and rewrite his diaries in the process of coming to terms with the destructiveness of the imperial enterprise he participated in. Jane Urquhart’s immensely popular 1993 novel Away focuses on a family of Irish immigrants to Canada in the early nineteenth century and traces the generations of the family as they attempt to assimilate into the forging of the emergent nation. Wayne Johnston’s The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (1998) takes as its subject the entrance of the colony of Newfoundland into Confederation under the leadership of Joey Smallwood. The novel sparked intense controversy in the popular press for its fictionalized rendition of Smallwood, initiating a series of critical discussions about the role and ethics of historical fiction. Notably, the list of Canadian historical novels contains very few works by Indigenous authors, who show less interest in revisiting the colonial period, in part because they do not recognize the arrival of Europeans as a “beginning” for Indigenous cultures in North America. As Thomas King writes in his critical essay “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial,” the term postcolonial “assumes that the starting point for [literary] discussion is the advent of Europeans” and that “the struggle between guardian and ward is the catalyst for contemporary Native literature” (185). Moreover, the representation of Canada as a “postcolonial” state—if one interprets the “post” to mean that colonialism has been superseded—is problematic for Indigenous people who feel that they continue under colonial conditions in Canada into the current era. The explosion of writing by Indigenous authors in the 1980s and 1990s, therefore, is less concerned with colonial history than it is with present cultural and social realities. Thus many works by Indigenous authors overtly (or implicitly) call into question the presumed postcolonial ethos of the contemporary period, which still sees entrenched social, educational, economic, and political inequities between Canada’s Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations. Beatrice Culleton Mosionier’s In Search of April Raintree (1983) tells the disturbing story of two Métis sisters who are separated by Canadian social services and live very different lives as a result. The novel, loosely based on Mosionier’s autobiography, is a denunciation of the continued discrimination and violence experienced by Canada’s Aboriginal people. Jeannette Armstrong’s 1985 novel Slash tells the story of an Okanagan man’s difficult journey through youth into adulthood as he experiences prison, spiritual healing, and Indigenous activism, ultimately reaching a position of personal pride and empowerment. A  similar story, about an

The English-Canadian Novel   467 Anishinaabe man named Garnet Raven, is relayed in Richard Wagamese’s Keeper ’n Me (1994). Lee Maracle’s Ravensong (1993) is a coming-of-age story about a young Salish girl who is caught between the White world where she attends high school and her home on the local reserve. As a flu outbreak is killing the people around her, she must negotiate the contradictions between settler values and her community’s traditional ways. Certainly the most well-known Indigenous-authored novel from this period is Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water (1993), which offers a humorous take on the coexistence of traditional and contemporary Indigenous life. A satirical and postmodern work, Green Grass covers a gamut of topics, from Hollywood representations of “Indians,” to European colonialization of the Americas, to early Canadian ideas about Indigenous people, to Sun Dance ceremonies, to Indigenous creation stories. The novel traverses a range of historical moments and cultural phenomena that bear on the history of Indigenous peoples in North America, including a revision of key colonialist narratives, offering not so much a revision of the past as an assertion of Indigenous presence (and parodic intervention) in the here and now. In the process, it takes its protagonist, Lionel Red Dog, through a journey of personal and cultural acceptance as he recognizes the importance of his community to his sense of self and well-being. A similar trajectory of cultural-historical reclamation and self-acceptance is charted in King’s subsequent novels Truth and Bright Water (1999) and The Back of the Turtle (2014). This period also saw the publication of Tomson Highway’s fine magic-realist novel Kiss of the Fur Queen (1998), which tells the story of two Cree brothers, both artists, who experience sexual abuse as children in residential school. Their lives take different directions in adulthood, but both suffer the after-effects of this history, which they can overcome only by confronting the trauma together and embracing the Cree spiritual traditions that were stolen from them in childhood. The counter-memorial impetus that has informed Canadian literature since the 1950s has played an important role in opening up Canadian culture to a broad range of social and historical perspectives. Canadian literature has expanded its focus since the post-Massey era, but the concern with social justice, cultural critique, local histories, and counter-memories has been a constant over the last few decades. This is a testament not to the repetitive or cyclic nature of Canadian writing, but rather to an unfinished project of liberatory politics and sociocultural critique, which authors and readers deem important to understanding not just their emplacement as Canadians, but also their habitation of Canadian space within a globalized context of multiple and shifting identities and locations.

Notes 1. See Chapter 41 by Renée Hulan in this volume for a complementary discussion of the ways theories of historiography have played out in Canadian literature and criticism. In order to avoid overlap, I intentionally have not provided extended discussion of the post-1990 literary works that Hulan highlights in her chapter.

468   Literary Periods and Genres 2. See, for example, The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972) and Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (1977). 3. This, of course, is a paraphrase of the epigraph from John Berger that opens Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion. 4. See Chapter 22 by David Leahy in this volume for a discussion of Québécois writings about this period. 5. See my introduction to Home-Work for a history of the institutionalization of Canadian literature as a subject in Canadian universities. 6. See Chapter 19 by Faye Hammill and Michelle Smith for more on Canadian mainstream magazines, including Chatelaine. 7. For an extended discussion of Métis history and literature, see Chapter  7 by Emma LaRocque in this volume. 8. These and other works are discussed in more detail by LaRocque, Dewar, Reder, and Emberley in this volume (see Chapters 7, 8, 9, and 11). 9. This can, for instance, be argued about John Steffler’s novel The Afterlife of George Cartwright. See Sugars, “Impossible” for a discussion of this novel.

Works Cited Armstrong, Jeannette. Slash. Penticton, BC: Theytus, 1985. Print. Atwood, Margaret. Alias Grace. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1996. Print. ———. Cat’s Eye. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1988. Print. ———. The Edible Woman. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1969. Print. ———. The Handmaid’s Tale. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1985. Print. ———. The Journals of Susanna Moodie. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1970. Print. ———. Lady Oracle. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1976. Print. ———. The Robber Bride. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1993. Print. ———. Surfacing. 1972. Toronto: NCL, 1994. Print. ———. Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. Toronto: Anansi, 1972. Print. Callaghan, Morley. The Loved and the Lost. Toronto: Macmillan, 1951. Print. Campbell, Maria. Halfbreed. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1973. Print. Choy, Wayson. The Jade Peony. Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1995. Print. Clarke, Austin. The Bigger Light. Boston: Little, Brown, 1975. Print. ———. The Meeting Point. Toronto: Macmillan, 1967. Print. ———. Storm of Fortune. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973. Print. ———. The Survivors of the Crossing. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1964. Print. Cohen, Leonard. Beautiful Losers. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1966. Print. Culleton, Beatrice Mosionier. In Search of April Raintree. Winnipeg: Pemmican, 1983. Print. Davey, Frank. Post-National Arguments: The Politics of the Anglophone-Canadian Novel since 1967. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1993. Print. Davies, Robertson. Fifth Business. Toronto: Macmillan, 1970. Print. ———. High Spirits: A Collection of Ghost Stories. Toronto: Penguin, 1982. Print. ———. The Lyre of Orpheus. Toronto: Macmillan, 1988. Print. ———. The Manticore. Toronto: Macmillan, 1972. Print. ———. Murther and Walking Spirits. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1991. Print. ———. The Rebel Angels. Toronto: Macmillan, 1981. Print.

The English-Canadian Novel   469 ———. What’s Bred in the Bone. Toronto: Macmillan, 1985. Print. ———. World of Wonders. Toronto: Macmillan, 1975. Print. Engel, Marian. Bear. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1976. Print. Filewod, Alan. “The Theatrical Federalism of Vincent Massey.” Performing Canada: The Nation Enacted in the Imagined Theatre. Kamloops: Textual Studies in Canada, 2002. 35–57. Print. Findley, Timothy. Not Wanted on the Voyage. Markham, ON: Viking, 1984. Print. ———. The Wars. Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1977. Print. Goto, Hiromi. Chorus of Mushrooms. Edmonton: NeWest, 1994. Print. Heble, Ajay. Review of Speculative Fictions, by Herb Wyile. English Studies in Canada 30.2 (2004): 170–72. Print. Highway, Tomson. Kiss of the Fur Queen. Toronto: Doubleday, 1998. Print. Hill, Colin. Modern Realism in English-Canadian Fiction. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2012. Print. Hutcheon, Linda. The Canadian Postmodern:  A  Study of Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1988. Print. Johnston, Basil. Moose Meat and Wild Rice. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1978. Print. Johnston, Wayne. The Colony of Unrequited Dreams. New York: Doubleday, 1998. Print. Kamboureli, Smaro. Scandalous Bodies:  Diasporic Literature in English Canada. Toronto: Oxford UP, 2000. Print. King, Thomas. The Back of the Turtle. Toronto: HarperCollins, 2014. Print. ———. “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial.” 1990. Unhomely States:  Theorizing English-Canadian Postcolonialism. Ed. Cynthia Sugars. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2004. 83–90. Print. ———. Green Grass, Running Water. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993. Print. ———. Truth and Bright Water. Toronto: HarperFlamingo, 1999. Print. Kogawa, Joy. Obasan. Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dennys, 1981. Print. Kroetsch, Robert. Badlands. Toronto: New Press, 1975. Print. ———. “The Moment of the Discovery of America Continues.” The Lovely Treachery of Words: Essays Selected and New. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1989. 1–20. Print. ———. “On Being an Alberta Writer.” 1983. Canadian Literature in English: Texts and Contexts. Vol. II. Ed. Laura Moss and Cynthia Sugars. Toronto: Pearson/Penguin, 2009. 327–331. Print. ———. The Studhorse Man. Toronto: Macmillan, 1969. Print. Laurence, Margaret. The Diviners. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1974. Print. ———. “A Place to Stand On.” 1970. Canadian Literature in English: Texts and Contexts. Vol. II. Ed. Laura Moss and Cynthia Sugars. Toronto: Pearson/Penguin, 2009. 313–16. Print. Lee, Dennis. “Cadence, Country, Silence: Writing in Colonial Space.” 1973. Canadian Literature in English: Texts and Contexts. Vol. II. Ed. Laura Moss and Cynthia Sugars. Toronto: Pearson/ Penguin, 2009. 470–76. Print. Lee, Sky. Disappearing Moon Cafe. Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1990. Print. MacDonald, Ann-Marie. Fall on Your Knees. Toronto: Knopf, 1996. Print. MacLennan, Hugh. “Boy Meets Girl in Winnipeg and Who Cares?” Scotchman’s Return and Other Essays. Toronto: Macmillan, 1960. 113–24. Print. ———. The Watch That Ends the Night. New York: Scribner’s, 1959. Print. Maracle, Lee. Bobbi Lee: Indian Rebel. Richmond, BC: LSM, 1975. Print. ———. Ravensong. Vancouver: Press Gang, 1993. Print. Marlyn, John. Under the Ribs of Death. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1957. Print. Moore, Brian. The Luck of Ginger Coffey. Boston: Little, Brown, 1960. Print. Mount, Nick. “On Hugh MacLennan’s Watch.” Walrus July/Aug. 2009. Online version. Web. Accessed 28 Dec. 2014.

470   Literary Periods and Genres Ondaatje, Michael. Coming Through Slaughter. Toronto: Anansi, 1976. Print. ———. The English Patient. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1992. Print. ———. In the Skin of a Lion. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1987. Print. Richler, Mordecai. The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. London: André Deutsch, 1959. Print. ———. St. Urbain’s Horseman. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1971. Print. Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters & Sciences Report. Ottawa: King’s Printer, 1951. Library and Archives of Canada. http://www.collectionscanada. gc.ca/2/5/h5-430-e.html. Web Accessed . 3 Dec. 2013. Shields, Carol. Larry’s Party. New York: Random House, 1997. Print. ———. The Stone Diaries. New York: Random House, 1993. Print. Slemon, Stephen. “Unsettling the Empire:  Resistance Theory for the Second World.” 1990. Unhomely States:  Theorizing English-Canadian Postcolonialism. Ed. Cynthia Sugars. Peterborough: Broadview, 2004. 139–50. Print. Steffler, John. The Afterlife of George Cartwright. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1992. Print. Stursberg, Richard. “Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences.” The Canadian Encyclopedia. Online edition. Web. Accessed 30 Dec. 2014. Sugars, Cynthia. Canadian Gothic: Literature, History, and the Spectre of Self-Invention. Cardiff: U of Wales P, 2014. Print. Gothic Literary Studies Series. ———, ed. Home-Work:  Postcolonialism, Pedagogy, and Canadian Literature. Ottawa:  U of Ottawa P, 2004. Print. ———. “The Impossible Afterlife of George Cartwright:  Settler Melancholy and Postcolonial Desire.” Special “Haunting” issue of The University of Toronto Quarterly 75.2 (2006): 693–717. Print. Sullivan, Rosemary. The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood Starting Out. Toronto: HarperFlamingo, 1998. Print. Tippett, Maria. Making Culture: English-Canadian Institutions and the Arts before the Massey Commission. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1990. Print. Urquhart, Jane. Away. 1993. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1997. Print. Vassanji, M.G. No New Land. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1991. Print. Wagamese, Richard. Keeper ’n Me. Toronto: Doubleday, 1994. Print. Watson, Sheila. The Double Hook. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1989. Print. Wiebe, Rudy. The Temptations of Big Bear. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1973. Print. Willmott, Glenn. Unreal Country:  Modernity in the Canadian Novel in English. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2002. Print. Wilson, Ethel. Swamp Angel. Toronto: Macmillan, 1954. Print. Wiseman, Adele. The Sacrifice. Toronto: Macmillan, 1956. Print. Wyile, Herb. Speculative Fictions: Contemporary Canadian Novelists and the Writing of History. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2002. Print.

Chapter 25

F racture M e c ha ni c s Canadian Poetry since 1960 Tanis MacDonald

Reading practices are not just embodied but are determined by ideology, culture and history. They are codifications and decodifications. … I wanted a poetry that refused erasure. That clamoured. Quería, e quero, unha poesía incomenstíbel. Non consumidora. Que nos deixa pensar. I wanted, and want, a poetry that could not simply be consumed. Not a consumer poetry. I wanted a poetry that lets us think. Erín Moure, “Crossing,” My Beloved Wager (251–52)

Since 1960, poetry written and published in Canada has been touched not only by fierce debates about style, but also by poetry’s position in cultural politics, including its potential to refuse easy consumption of the lyric, to resist frameworks produced and supported by the nation-state, and to investigate the possibilities of a public poetics. The quotation above, from Erín Moure’s 2009 collection of essays, My Beloved Wager: Essays from a Writing Practice, functions as a marker of Moure’s 30 years as a poet and a critic of poetry’s place in Canadian literary culture, demonstrating her challenges to reading and writing practices and her resistance to poetry as a consumable genre. Moure has long been a linchpin figure in Canadian poetry, a poet who has consistently troubled the divisions between now and then, between working-class poetry and feminist poetry, between languages, between national and international modes, and between poetics and politics. Her call for a clamorous poetry that demands thought, a poetry that cannot be erased, effaced, or glossed over as culturally irrelevant, is wrought from her decades in the culture wars of Canadian poetry and stands as a statement of her poetics, and more broadly as a statement that takes the temperature of Canadian poetry in the second decade of the twenty-first century. To use the term “culture wars” to refer to the development of Canadian poetry since 1960 may seem like hyperbole, but the last five decades in Canadian poetry have seen significant changes and an equal, if not opposite, reaction to each of these changes in the

472   Literary Periods and Genres cultural positions of Canadian literature in general, and Canadian poetry in particular. The movement from a moderately conservative postwar modernism into a thematic criticism that became famously (and often reductively) popular could be considered a “growing pain” for Canadian literature, not only in the development of the Canadian literary canon, but also because for some writers and critics, thematic criticism was a growing pain in the sides of those who wished for a more culturally nuanced and politically expansive Canadian literary criticism.1 Thematic criticism emphasized Canada’s coldness, wildness, loneliness, and other survivorist/frontier aspects as fundamental to the development of a national literature. Northrop Frye’s “Conclusion” to editor Carl F. Klinck’s Literary History of Canada (1965), with its emphasis on the “garrison mentality” in Canadian literature—that is, the tendency to erect a protecting fortress around the community to protect it from the invading forces of monstrous nature—is often cited as the first articulation of Canadian literature’s “conscious mythology” (Frye 832), or what came to be known as thematic criticism in Canada. Frye would later develop his ideas of Canadian themes in The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination (1971) and would expand on the function of the mythopoeic in Canadian literature with an emphasis on poetry. However, it is Margaret Atwood’s Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972) that captured the public imagination most thoroughly, and was read by more members of the general public (as opposed to Frye’s more scholarly audience). To be fair to Atwood, Survival was written partly to introduce high-school teachers to contexts and methods in the teaching of Canadian texts and also partly as a fundraising effort for the then-cash-strapped House of Anansi Press. The book was not intended as a grand theory of Canada so much as a guidebook, but the combination of colloquial approachable writing and the strong appeal of Atwood’s heavily gothicizied “victim positions” fostered both true believers and outraged opposition. In the years following, as other critics weighed in on thematic criticism as culturally affirming, politically limiting, and everything in between (in critical studies such as D.G. Jones’s 1970 Butterfly on Rock, John Moss’s 1974 Patterns of Isolation, Robin Mathews’s 1978 Canadian Literature: Surrender or Revolution, and Frank Davey’s 1983 Surviving the Paraphrase, among others), thematic criticism remained a kind of watermark: a stain or pattern that not everyone liked, but one that had lasting cultural potency. Other political issues, and other aesthetics, would come to prominence after 1980, but the force of thematic criticism from the mid-1960s well into the 1980s cannot be denied, particularly for the ways in which thematic criticism stood as a literary version of the cultural nationalism of that era. There is, however, a certain ironic elegance to the fact that essays that railed against the cultural and pedagogical limitations of thematic criticism, like W.J. Keith’s “Blight in the Bush Garden,” became, in their turn, as common and uncontroversial as thematic criticism itself. Poetry’s role in fomenting this critical debate was deeply influential, despite the fact that prose fiction is nearly always placed in the centre of discussions of thematic criticism. For one thing, poetry could be considered its catalyst. D.M.R. Bentley has pointed out that Frye’s identification of nature’s terrifying force as written in Canadian literature “was based, not on an extensive knowledge of the field, but principally on the limited

Canadian Poetry since 1960    473 sample of poetry that he encountered in A.J.M. Smith’s Book of Canadian Poetry (1943), an anthology with a strong modernist bias,” as well as on the individual books of poetry that Frye reviewed for many years for the University of Toronto Quarterly (Bentley 4). Additionally, poetry anthologies of the era would prove to be highly influential in fostering thematic criticism as well as defying it, depending upon the point of view of each collection’s editors. So, considering Moure’s call at the close of the first decade of the twenty-first century for a clamorous, transnational, multipronged, thinking poetry in Canada and elsewhere, a consideration of poetic perspective in the years immediately before Frye’s intervention would be helpful to frame the issues to which Moure is speaking. For that purpose, I offer the following excerpt from Eli Mandel’s 1961 preface to an anthology of new poets, Poetry 62, which shows a number of surprising connections with Moure’s statement, as well as a remarkable resistance to the cultural nationalism that would have been nascent at the time of composition: A lively poetry shatters limitations. It refuses to be contained by officialdom (even by the most insidious officialdom of all:  the orthodoxies of selection, reputation, respectability and success) for the simple reason that its life is change. And the present character of Canadian poetry is, above all, its liveliness … it leaves no impression that its energy is being dissipated in diversity. If anything, the opposite: one senses in it a gathering of forces for the performance of some unprecedented and enormously significant drama of the mind. Such vitality demands elbow room. (Mandel 199)

Mandel’s preface to Poetry 62 chalk-marks the beginning of a fraught conversation about poetry in Canada since 1960, and it hungers for a more expansive aesthetics that would accompany that elbow room: inclusion, approbation, and readership. Certainly these two statements by Mandel and Moure are not intended to be equivalent; more than 40 years lie between their dates of composition, and one was written as a preface to a moderately conventional anthology of new poets, while the other appears in an essay discussing poetics and process. However, the similarities are striking. Both poets assert a vital poetics of refusal over passive lyricism, and both poets maintain a healthy suspicion about history as an oppressive force on poetry. While we can acknowledge that what Mandel wrote in 1961 may seem a little creaky today, there is no denying that his assertion of the need for poetic “elbow room” stands at odds with the burgeoning “officialdom” of thematic criticism and Frygian mythopoeics that were to become so powerful in the 1960s and the 1970s. In thinking about more than 50 years of Canadian poetry, its traditions, innovations, criticisms, and technologies, with its fierce factions beset by endless debates about definitions, redefinitions, and rejections right up to current negotiations about poetic publics, Mandel’s insistence on poetry as that which “refuses to be contained by officialdom” retains its vigour. The parameters and processes of literary “officialdom” as it would be played out in the late 1960s around the centenary of Canadian Confederation would come to include the canonization process (itself an often egregious process of “representing” the nation

474   Literary Periods and Genres through texts), regional snobbery, racism, sexism, and classism, as well as machinations of “unofficial officialdom” that emerge from the kind of cultural jostling in which elbows may be used aggressively. Mandel’s understanding that poetry is driven by the “unprecedented” constitutes poetry as a cultural force, even though that “gathering of forces” may not always be benign. It is important to recall Mandel’s legacy as a poet-critic who would win the Governor General’s Award for Poetry for his 1967 collection An Idiot Joy. For decades a professor at the University of Alberta and York University, Mandel wrote extensively about being Jewish and about being from Saskatchewan in poems such as “Pictures in an Institution” and “For Elie Weisel.” Mandel remained a kind of deliberate outsider, a position not equivalent to, but not far from, the kind of identity that British-Canadian critic Lynette Hunter claims in her 1996 text Outsider Notes: a Canadian identity that defines national belonging in a provisional, highly mediated sense. So Mandel’s observation that “vitality demands elbow room” is given extra credence by the fact that he is of the literary community and not of it; of the critical community and yet not situated in the centre of it; and of the Canadian milieu but not a central figure in the discourse of cultural nationalism. Both statements by Moure and Mandel, when offered in this context, may be read as a summation of the generation of poets that came before them; however, to favour a view of Canadian poetry as moulded by inherited traditions and to adhere strictly to a genealogical model of literary history only reproduces a history that honours linearity over concerns of innovation, politics, style, argument, and dissemination, to name only a few of the complicating factors in describing a history of Canadian poetry since 1960. Pauline Butling and Susan Rudy’s Writing in Our Time: Canada’s Radical Poetries in English (2005) provides a thorough and generous chronology of this period, and I will not attempt to reproduce it here. In the spirit of considering a broader and more flexible matrix, this chapter will not consider poetry written in Canada since 1960 solely through a genealogical model. It will offer as ballast the idea of rhizomatic proliferation, following Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s definition of a rhizome in A Thousand Plateaus as an anti-genealogy that resists unity, just as thought itself resists unity (15). In terms of its connections and its tendency toward heterogeneity despite cultural nationalism’s interest in unifying Canadian culture, Canadian poetry performs rhizomatically in that it “ceaselessly establishes connection between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences and social struggles” and engages with a “whole micropolitics of the social field” (Deleuze and Guattari 7). Keeping such micropolitics in mind, I will offer rhizomatic “cuttings,” sample texts from proliferating Canadian poetry rhizomes from 1960 to the present, with the aim of showing the roots and demonstrating the reach of these verdant poetic texts. Rhizomatic action of Canadian poetry since 1960 is best likened to a shatter pattern, in which the impact of one text creates cracks that extend to other areas of thought, intentionally or unintentionally. The cuttings from Canadian poetry that I will discuss will show how texts reach into the reading community and with their impact, create significant radial breakage in thought and culture, poetic cracks issuing from and extending outward from the point of collision—the breaking meeting the breakable in order to challenge the tensile

Canadian Poetry since 1960    475 strength of the Canadian poetic canon. A shatter pattern demonstrates a model of crack propagation, but in fracture mechanics and in Canadian poetry, it is the kinetic energy of the falling object that makes breakage and its widening circumference unpredictable, and ironically, prolific. These sample cuttings exemplify the action of Mandel’s “gathering of forces,” the sweep of ideas, texts, and events that makes Canadian poetry the sinuous intellectual argument that it is today.

Disturbing from Within: Reading CanPo in CanLit During my graduate study, a professor told me about attending a conference on Irish poetry in the 1980s. When the keynote speaker completed his talk on Yeats’s “Easter 1916” during the conference dinner, the question-and-answer session began politely enough, but within a few minutes, the questions from the floor had become very aggressive, and the answers from the speaker grew belligerent as other academics stood up to argue, building into shouted accusations about who was a traitor, who was betraying Irish culture with their interpretations, and who by God would answer for it right here and now. Bread rolls and whiskey glasses flew. Conference participants either joined in or ducked beneath the dining-room tables, splattered with flying whiskey. My professor finished: “And that’s why I’m in Irish Studies! Because in Irish Studies, people still argue about poetry like their lives depend on it.” A similar claim could be made about Canadian poetry. The publication, awards, politics, and arguments that have made and broken and remade Canadian poetry since 1960 are fascinating subjects for poets, for scholars, and for publishers, even as (or especially because) large segments of the Canadian reading public ignore poetry as an esoteric or even meaningless genre. But even though fiction may be more widely read than poetry, it is not necessarily better understood, and poetry in Canadian culture has the status of a passion: something with which readers fight and something for which readers fight. In thinking toward a history of Canadian poetry since 1960, major factors to consider are the ways in which poetry can and must be differentiated from the wider study of Canadian literature. Considering poetry as a textual entity that is separate from prose, with its own distinct publics and energies, as well as its own politics, is important, not the least because poetry’s fundamental function as a challenge to quotidian thought is forgotten too frequently in debates about which poetry practices a more nuanced politics. Poetry’s catalyst qualities do not mean, of course, that poetry is ideology-free, but it is no coincidence that a primary metaphor used by critics and reviewers in Canadian poetry in the 1960s was the explosion, a metaphor that suggests that poetry can be read as both dynamite and bedrock: that which explodes and that which is exploded. In her preface to Trans.Can.Lit, Smaro Kamboureli notes that “CanLit is both firmly entangled with [the] national imaginary and capable of resisting it. The body

476   Literary Periods and Genres literary does not always have a symmetrical relationship to the body politic; the literary is inflected and infected by the political in oblique and manifest ways, at the same time that it asserts its unassimilability” (viii). Kamboureli’s portrait of CanLit as paradoxically positioned is absolutely necessary to consider in Canadian literary study post-1960, as is her assertion that “CanLit is a troubling sign” (ix). If there is a multifarious and disturbing many-armed creature called CanLit, then we must also invest in the troubling existence of another creature called CanPo, and the idea that the two creatures share characteristics with similar, though not identical, interests. CanPo, like CanLit, is “never fully released from the various ways it is anchored, it can disturb and alter the conditions that affect it” (Kamboureli ix). However, I suggest that CanLit’s “early fantasies of homogeneity” (viii) manifest in CanPo differently and persist in the present as long-standing fantasies of individual freedoms and functional political communities that are sometimes usurped by hegemony. This fantasy fosters other observable differences within the CanLit/CanPo dynamic. Where Kamboureli observes that CanLit is “precarious” (viii), CanPo is overtly pugnacious and perpetually ready to argue. Where CanLit is made “nervous” through its “preoccupation with its own formation” (viii), CanPo is significantly nervy about its defiance of the same. And where Kamboureli warns that CanLit is “never fully harmonized” with public debate (viii), I suggest that CanPo has been intentionally, declaratively, open-endedly engaged with public debate: all part of the dubious luxury of being a lesser-read genre than the novel, a (usually) less-profitable publishing venture, and a genre whose various forms and anti-forms emphasize an ongoing interest in language, aporia, and power. It would not be too much to say that Canadian poetry has often been the catalyst for CanLit’s lack of harmony with public debate; there are subversive novels, to be sure, but fomenting a lack of harmony is poetry’s special cultural provenance. However, it is absolutely true that Canadian poetry can and does suffer from the “feigned plenitude” about which Kamboureli cautions, particularly a feigned plenitude of community, when “occlusion and repression” mask the ideologies by which communities are formed (ix). While rhizomatic structure is useful for thinking about how Canadian poetry is anchored in multitudinous approaches and traditions, we can also consider how those “anchors” function as offshoots that have rooted a discourse—perhaps permanently, perhaps temporarily. Their lively precarity becomes significant to our reading of them as likely components of an uncontrollable, ephemeral, text-dissolving, canon-challenging chaos, or as “floating anchors.” But to return to the metaphor of the explosion in Canadian poetry since 1960, if CanLit is “an unimaginable community,” to transpose Benedict Anderson’s formulation, and instead must be considered “a community constituted in excess of the knowledge of itself, always transitioning” (Kamboureli x), then we could say that CanPo is doubly in excess of the knowledge of itself, and is not so much always transitioning as it is always breaking and remaking through its appeal to various publics. In Louis Dudek and Michael Gnarowski’s iconic 1967 collection, The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada, the editors note that from the early 1960s, Canadian poetry “abandoned the position of intense exclusiveness typical of modern poetry and gave

Canadian Poetry since 1960    477 vent to open rage and revolt” (231). With this shift, Canadian poetry found a reading and writing public. In his 1993 Introduction to Canadian Poetry, George Woodcock makes no bones about it. Calling his chapter on the era “The Explosive Sixties,” Woodcock notes that the era, whether buoyed by or hobbled by thematic criticism, also had the effect of “exploding” the academic approach taken by Frye and other critics to offer poetry as a grassroots art practiced by poets like Milton Acorn, Al Purdy, and Alden Nowlan, calling them working-class messengers, and noting that D.G. Jones called these writers nonconformists who brought their “wilderness of experience” to bear upon a “wilderness of language” (Jones 166; qtd. in Woodcock 113). From our vantage point in the twenty-first century, Woodcock’s quotation of Frye’s phrase about Canadian literary production in the early 1970s—“a colossal verbal explosion” (Frye 318; qtd. in Woodcock 127)—can seem oddly ironic, especially since Woodcock wanted to appropriate the metaphor of the explosion as a cultural break-out moment for a developing political aesthetic among Canada’s working class. Woodcock is not alone in his sense that poetry acquired additional cultural traction in this era, nor is his idea merely a product of untrammelled 1960s optimism. Joel Deshaye’s 2013 study on Canadian poetic celebrity from 1955 to 1980 notes that, even with the attendant irony that may lurk in the phrase “Canadian poetic celebrity,” Irving Layton, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Leonard Cohen, and Michael Ondaatje, based on their frequent appearances in Canadian public media, were undeniably and consistently offered to the non-academic Canadian public as living markers of Canadian poetic culture. But ironic or not, the metaphor of the explosion was everywhere in Canadian poetry in the 1960s. Dudek and Gnarowski end their anthology with Raymond Souster’s preface to New Wave Canada: The New Explosion in Canadian Poetry, published by Contact Press in 1966, firmly establishing the metaphor of the explosion—in technique, in volume, in availability—as the dominant rhetoric of poetic production in 1960s Canada. Such an explosion has not yet ended, principally because while the shatter patterns described by Canadian poetry since 1960 are not undirected in themselves, neither are they in lock-step with the inevitably historicized process of canonization. It would be a misuse of the metaphor to suggest that one shatter pattern leads to another in an imitation of linear progression, though without a doubt, chronology makes a tempting principle of organization, as well as one that cannot be avoided completely. History, as Hayden White warns us, is written as a narrative, and in that moment of narration, history becomes more than a combination of events and experience through the gapfilling of narrative and, at the same time, less than that combination because narrative favours a completed and organized limited timeline over the chaos of reality. But White goes on to note that narrativization—considering history as a construct and acknowledgment of narrative gaps as much as events and experience—counteracts the official narrative to the point where we must question “what kind of notion of reality authorizes this construction of a narrative account of reality in which continuity rather than discontinuity governs the articulation of the discourse” (White 10). Noting, tongue only partly in cheek, that “the plot of a historical narrative is always an embarrassment and has to be presented as ‘found’ in the events rather than put here by narrative techniques,”

478   Literary Periods and Genres White’s directive that an insistence on “coherence … leaves no room left for human agency” (White 21), we arrive back at Mandel’s need for “elbow room” and Moure’s aim for “poetry that lets us think”: poetry whose investment in strategic incoherence, prolific rhizomes, and fractured remakings leaves room for possibility.

Yield Stress: Cracks Toward a Fracture Theory of Poetry I have argued in “The Counter-Public in Pain” that the history and development of Canadian poetry can be usefully read as a series of gestures of making and unmaking: for example, the proposal of a certain aesthetic or poetic approach as Canadian in either tone or approach, and a near-simultaneous refusal of that same gesture on the basis of its limitations or its provenance. Critics have even produced arguments that manage to make and unmake simultaneously, as with the now-infamous example of A.J.M. Smith’s preface, written for the 1936 anthology New Provinces, which was not published until Michael Gnarowski championed its case for inclusion in Canadian Literature in the spring of 1965. The preface had been rejected for the anthology by E.J. Pratt because he considered Smith’s preface too incendiary in its attack on the previous generation of poets and its promotion of a poetry in keeping with the principles of international modernism. The degree to which we can read this “Rejected Preface” as an “unmaking” moment that has been triumphantly restored to its “rightful” position of a rhetoric of making, as Gnarowski and Dudek do in their introduction to the piece in The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada (26), is subject to the degree to which we can do exactly the opposite: that is, read “A Rejected Preface” as a gesture that “unmakes” Pratt’s aesthetic decision to exclude it from New Provinces, while appearing uncontested 30 years after its composition as a newly discovered gem of criticism, with the author now touted as “modest and overly reticent,” as though the very writing itself was bashful about its forward-looking ideas and needed to be chivvied out by the bold new attitudes of the 1960s. The inclusion of Smith’s preface in an anthology charting the road to the bold experiments of the 1960s seems to suggest that Pratt objected, primly, to Smith’s version of modernism, but Pratt could just as easily have objected to Smith’s cruel characterization of “soft-headed” poets as inappropriate for an introduction of a poetry anthology. Whatever the case, the 1965 repatriation of the preface indicates that what was rejected by the “makers” in the 1930s and what was inherited by the unmaking makers of the 1960s were sometimes the same thing. Canadian poetry’s pugnacious dissonance, its always dissatisfied publics, and its chaotic excesses have kept the genre conscious of its own shifting, multilevel platforms of inclusion and exclusion. The politics of a poet’s self-location, definition of publics and/ or community, and views on the dynamics of poetry as an outlier genre that can be and often is co-opted by middlebrow culture are constant concerns for poets and critics

Canadian Poetry since 1960    479 alike. One of the unfortunate aspects of this constant conversation is that differences become normalized and depoliticized in a way that Daniel Coleman has noted as part of a Canadian culture of “white civility” via the work of David Theo Goldberg: “The more open to difference liberal modernity declares itself, the more dismissive of difference it becomes and the more closed it seeks to make the circle of acceptability” (qtd. in Coleman 13). Coleman’s device of reparation, “wry civility … the sense of remaining ironically aware of the pretentiousness of the civility that we nonetheless aspire to, and also of the pretentiousness in trying to be self-aware” (43), can be applied to Canadian poetry in a manner as wry as that which Coleman describes. It cannot be denied that factions, silos, gender divides, cliques, old grudges, and prejudices are rife in the Canadian poetry scene. Poetry factions—both ongoing and historical—are so dominant in Canada that it is impossible to discuss the last few decades of Canadian poetic production without acknowledging that these tensions are makers and breakers of movements in Canadian poetry. However, these tensions are also vivid demonstrations that poetry is alive and well in Canada, working on the ancient medical principle that if the patient is complaining, the patient is going to live. To say so is not to belittle the nuances, the politics, and the intensities of such arguments, for they have moulded what we read, who we read, and how we write about poetry. Whatever position people take in the poetry wars—aggressor, defender, aggressive defender, passive-aggressive defender, passive consciousness, conscientious-of-my-own-skin objector, or claiming to be uncategorizable—we must acknowledge that each position is a battle position that nods toward the outline of wry civility.

Making by Breaking: Exploding Poetries As is evident from other chapters in this volume, the urge to forge tradition, and to control it, did not begin in the 1960s in Canadian poetry, but that decade saw the confluence of a number of factors that would swell to make the 1960s and 1970s the canon-building period that has been so impossible to ignore in the study of Canadian literature.2 One catalyst was the move away from a poetic “school of social realism” and its accompanying didactic criticism in the 1940s and 1950s (Dudek and Gnarowski 156), encouraged in part by recommendations of The Massey Report: A Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, 1949–1951, which favoured the conscious and deliberate formation of a designated and pedagogically promoted national literature, as well as the formation of the Canada Council for the Arts. When the Canada Council was established in 1957, its mandate was “to foster and promote the study and enjoyment of, and the production of works in the arts, humanities and social sciences” (Bronson 24). Reading series, small publishing houses, theatres, and literary magazines all benefited from the mandate of the Canada Council in this period, as did writers

480   Literary Periods and Genres themselves, but the Canada Council alone did not create the explosion in poetry:  it merely supplied the financial and rhetorical gunpowder. A hotly contested, but insistent locality blossomed among poets reading and publishing their work, and this locality fostered, in turn, a growing interest in working-class writers as purveyors of “people’s poetry.” What Woodcock references as working-class poetries, written by those who “set out to take an inventory of a world but scarcely uttered, the world of the excluded and ignored” (Woodcock 113), will return in the 1980s and 1990s, when feminist, postcolonialist, and First Nations writing all asserted a desperate need for voices to speak experiences of another sort. But for Woodcock, as for many new readers of poetry in the era of burgeoning cultural nationalism, the kind of locality used by the working-class poets spoke to an old tradition central to many cultures—that of the poet as powerful speaker of inevitable realities and philosophical truth rooted in the hard necessities of quotidian life, the “maker” of Celtic tradition. This poet as maker is at once of the people and outside the people’s mentality: not superior but marked by the responsibility to say the sometimes unpopular truth. The concept of the “people’s poet” gained ground over the decades to include—among other initiatives—the appointment of poets laureate for various cities and communities, and the creation of a “People’s Poetry Award” established in memory of Milton Acorn in 1987 to counter what proponents believed to be the cultural snobbery of the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, sparked by Acorn’s fury that his 1969 collection I’ve Tasted My Blood was passed over for the prestigious poetry award. However, it must be noted that Al Purdy’s The Cariboo Horses won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry in 1966, and this honour did much to make working-class and insistently local poetry a staple of the “explosive” 1960s Canadian poetry scene. Sam Solecki’s designation of Purdy as “the last Canadian poet,” along with Rob Winger’s more recent reconsideration of Purdy as a Gramscian “organic intellectual,” suggest that Purdy was more than just a poet; he was a transitional figure between postwar modernism and explosive working-class poetry, someone who both benefited from and challenged thematic criticism, who wrote and published poetry for the better part of five decades, and whose tender and roughened place in the Canadian public imagination retains legendary proportions. The Cariboo Horses is a book that foregrounds its class (“Hockey Players,” “Homemade Beer,” “Homo Canadensis,” “Bums and Brakies”), as well as mocking both the poet’s privileged position and the ironies of CanPo’s hothouse politics (“Thank God I’m Normal,” “A Power”). Locality is central—whether the speaker is traveling across the country (“Transient,” “In the Wilderness,” “The Madwoman on the Train”) to the West Coast (“Mountain Lions in Stanley Park”) or northern British Columbia (“The Cariboo Horses,” “Old Settler’s Song”) or rooting the poems in Roblin Mills near Ameliasburgh, the town in Prince Edward County in eastern Ontario where Purdy lived for many years (“Music on a Tombstone,” “Roblin’s Mills,” “The Country North of Belleville”). Many poems, too, feature a wry look at love and married life, set against the wandering spirit and insistent locality of the other poems, not as a simple “home is best” sentimentalism, but as an offhand and often erotic interrogation of the domestic through a working-class masculine sensibility. In this, we can see the success

Canadian Poetry since 1960    481 of both Purdy’s voice and rural politics as he returns again and again to the value of place in wild and domestic spaces. While we can hardly say that Purdy’s The Cariboo Horses sprang from cultural nationalism as thematic criticism, if only for the simple fact that Purdy and Frye were writing their respective works concurrently and both were published in 1965, Purdy’s collection offers a way to read thematic criticism as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Thematic criticism was, in some ways, a double-edged sword; no matter how much we may chafe at its limitations (which are many) and its politics (which are conservative), it enabled poets like Purdy, who won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry. Who can say if Purdy would have had the long and illustrious career that he did without the influence of thematic criticism to underscore the negotiation of loneliness and displacement, to honour the bravery of leaving the “garrison” to traverse the wide open space of the prairies, and to affirm the value of the local as a microcosm for the national. As Winger notes, it should come as no surprise to us, if we do read Purdy as Canada’s poetic “organic intellectual,” that Purdy, in his 1977 essay “The Cartography of Myself,” takes up the theory to offer a self-reflexive reading of thematic criticism, the self as map: “It is a cartography of feeling and sensibility,” Purdy writes of Canada, “and I think the man who is not affected at all by this map of himself that is his country of origin, that man is emotionally crippled” (qtd. in Winger). Purdy was not alone in this kind of thinking, and the parameters and possibilities of locality, class, and what Dennis Lee would come to call Canadian “cadence” in poetry were explored by poets all over the country for the next two decades. In many ways, this exploration—or perhaps more pertinently, the cultural furrows cut by such exploration—survives in contemporary work by more experimental poets using urban vernaculars: Wayde Compton and Stuart Ross, among many others. Purdy published more than 30 collections of verse, winning the Governor General’s Award for Poetry again in 1986 for his Collected Poems, and he also contributed to the public conversation about “Canadian identity” and anti-imperialism with his essay anthology The New Romans: Candid Canadian Opinions of the United States (1968). This particular conversation could be said to originate with religious scholar, philosopher, and outspoken pundit George Grant, who, having railed against American cultural imperialism in Lament for a Nation (1965), asserted prideful (and mindful) cultural nationalism as an absolute necessity for Canadian citizens. Grant, long regarded as the spiritual father of Canadian Studies programs throughout Canada and Europe, contributed heavily to canonizing impulses in Canadian universities by emphasizing a strategy of anti-imperialism as a challenge to the perpetually ominous “defeat of Canadian nationalism” suggested by the subtitle of Lament for a Nation (35). It would be a mistake, however, to equate the leading poets of this decade with a totalizing conservative cultural nationalism and anti-experimentalism. Anti-imperialism, thematic criticism, and working-class poetry all connote a kind of conservatism in Canadian poetry, but this was not politically true of all poets of the era. The often-ethereal work of Gwendolyn MacEwen alluded to Eastern cultures and suggested transnationalism rather than cultural nationalism. Writers who were to become leading

482   Literary Periods and Genres figures in Canadian literary identity on an international level in the 1980s and 1990s, Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen, and Michael Ondaatje, were, in the 1960s and 1970s, the cool educated young poets with the challenging aesthetics: each of them in their own ways part hippie, part philosopher, part daring fool. On the West Coast, a more experimental tradition was emerging with TISH (the magazine and the movement) from University of British Columbia professor Warren Tallman’s introduction of the American Black Mountain poets to his students through the work of Robert Creeley and Charles Olson. TISH began publishing in 1961 and received a huge boost in national and international reputation from the Vancouver Poetry Conference held at the University of British Columbia from 24 July to 16 August 1963. The 1970s also marked the beginning of the association of poets called the Four Horsemen, the sound poetry ensemble made up of bpNichol, Steve McCaffery, Paul Dutton, and Rafael Barreto-Rivera, whose international reputation must be kept in mind when we think about Canada’s avant-garde tradition in poetry. The Four Horsemen’s electrifying and eclectic vocal performances sought to demonstrate the ways that poetry—and language itself—is physical, bodily effort and experience. Nichol’s prodigious written output includes concrete and visual poetry, poetry cartoons, poem sequences like “The True Eventual Story of Billy the Kid,” and prose-poems like “Selected Organs.” His multivolume lifelong poem The Martyrology—an examination of poetry, language, grief, and love, read through Nichol’s own contemporary take on the “lives of the saints”—remains an unparalleled poetic achievement in Canada. Nichol established (with Steve McCaffrey) the Toronto Research Group, a partnership devoted to producing serious parody of literary and critical forms through the practice of “’pataphysics [sic], the science of the perpetually open” (Toronto Research Group 7). Nichol was a giant figure in Canadian poetry, in addition to being a collaborator with and mentor to many in the writing community, and his early death at the age of 43 in 1988 remains a loss that is still painful for many in various poetic communities. While the establishment of Coach House Press in 1965 in Toronto has proven to be a major milestone in its publication of poets whose reputations soared (Michael Ondaatje, David McFadden, Christopher Dewdney, Nicole Brossard, bpNichol), it would be remiss to gloss over the impact of Canada Council funding that allowed for the growth of small presses and literary magazines in smaller centres throughout Canada in the late 1960s to mid-1970s. The year 1975 alone saw the start-up of three foundational small presses (Brick Books in London, Ontario; Coteau Books in Saskatoon; Turnstone Press in Winnipeg) and three literary magazines that emphasized publication of women writers or regional work (Contemporary Verse II in Winnipeg; Dandelion in Calgary; and Room of One’s Own in Vancouver). The fact that an institution such as the Canada Council, which may well have been established as part of a broader nationalist and canonizing impulse, can lend itself to a set of literary interventions that are more imbued with a spirit of heterogeneity and dissonance is an important marker of the contradictory ways that culture can work. Literary journals in particular, or “little magazines,” parsed by Dudek and Gnarowski as “a form of semi-private publication which aims at public success and eventual victory over whatever is established in literary taste” (203),

Canadian Poetry since 1960    483 contributed to the explosion of poets, and many journals—and their online progeny and challengers, e-zines, blogs, and literary websites—continue to function as “proselytizing agent[s]‌” and unapologetic “subject[s] of acrid debate” (204). Frank Davey’s characterization of a literary journal in his 1962 article “Anything But Reluctant: Canada’s Little Magazines” as an entity that “reflects the presence of a group of writers of similar interests who are meeting, arguing, fighting, writing, almost every day—a group charged with literary energy that seems to keep continually overflowing into and out of their mimeographed pages” (Davey 223) seems to be first and foremost a description of TISH, but his account also describes the many instances of just such intense collaboration at small presses and literary journals across Canada: the energy of argument given to the creation of an exciting product offered to a growing reading community. The rhetoric of cultural nationalism yielded a number of anthologies that shaped the teaching of Canadian poetry in high schools and universities, designed as modules of pedagogical lift-off and as ways of corralling the poets, positioning them as builders of cultural nationalism rather than a loose collection of artistic idiosyncracies. Two anthologies—out of the many available—are the New Canadian Library’s Poets of Contemporary Canada: 1960–1970, edited by Eli Mandel and published in 1972, and the iconic 15 Canadian Poets, edited by Gary Geddes and Phyllis Bruce and published in 1970. The balance of personae and styles may be viewed as somewhat limited, particularly considering that the poets represented include few writers of colour and no First Nations writers, but within the limiting/freeing duality of literary cultural nationalism, the anthologies aim to maintain a delicate, though highly negotiated, balance in terms of gender, region, age, and style. Earle Birney’s detached professorial gaze exists alongside Margaret Avison’s Christian ecstasies; Irving Layton’s Dionysian verse is published next to Margaret Atwood’s fierce and ironic gender politics; Leonard Cohen’s earnest lust next to Gwendolyn MacEwen’s exotic mysticism; George Bowering’s TISH-forged experiments sit next to Michael Ondaatje’s wry nightmares; bill bissett’s lower-case language frolics with Al Purdy’s working-class prophecies. The urgency of asserting “contemporary” Canada is still fresh in these anthologies, and though they offer a particular view of Canadian poetry, there is much to be said for how the anthologies promote a genuine delight in the profusion and variety of the poetries. Parallel to the anthologies of the 1970s, it is easy to read the earnest treatises of this era, like D.G. Jones’s Butterfly on Rock (1970) and Margaret Atwood’s Survival (1972), as wholesale subscriptions to cultural nationalism; it is even easier to consider ourselves more advanced readers and critics who are no longer ruled by such totalizing ideas, but such scoffing is self-indulgent at best and possibly dangerous, for every era has its totalizing cultural voices, and few of us are immune to those forces. That said, no poetry book was more earnest or more exemplary of this era than Dennis Lee’s lugubrious but strangely vital Civil Elegies. First published in 1968, and again in 1972 (as Civil Elegies and Other Poems) when it won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, the text represents a personal inquiry into national political definition. The poem locates the urban centre of discourse in a Canadian city (Toronto), one rife with a bartered and murderous history of “losers and quislings” (38), pointing directly to the despair of that silence as part

484   Literary Periods and Genres of what Lee calls the Canadian “cadence.” Civil Elegies became a rallying cry to write the local in urban centres, to examine the politics of angst and exclusion, to challenge governmental policy, and to experience history in the quotidian. In the four decades that have passed since its publication, Dennis Lee’s book has been touted as a poetic appeal to re-enliven the conditions of Canadian citizenship. From the text’s original 1968 appearance, to its revision and republication in 1972, to its 1994 reprint, reviewers have praised Lee’s “candour” and “compelling desperation” (Schroeder 104), as well as his “technical mastery” of both “colloquial and intellectual” language (Fetherling 37). Critical reception of the text has sometimes quibbled with Lee’s terms and with the specifics of his Grantian perspective, but critics have generally agreed that the text captures the zeitgeist of early 1970s nationalism, focusing upon Lee’s declaration that in Canada “good men do not matter to history” (Civil 28), swiftly followed by his impassioned plea for “a saner version of integrity” (50). This desire for integrity is most often read as Lee’s lamenting the “humiliations of imperial necessity” that have resulted in “the deft emasculation of a country by the Liberal party of Canada” (Civil 42). Integrity, for Lee’s speaker, is intrinsic to the definition of corporeal citizenship throughout Civil Elegies, in which “appetite … presses outward through the living will of the body” and defiant people who desire a just society “take the world full force on their nerve ends, leaving the / bloody impress of their bodies face forward in time” (Civil 39). As a book that is not only eloquent about a particularly vexed era in Canadian poetry and Canadian politics, but also a signpost that has been read, contested, and rewritten by other poets, Lee’s Civil Elegies mourned the loss of a particular style of political naiveté, but in true elegiac fashion, it fostered pastures new and necessary in Canadian poetry.

Breaking the Making: Mapping the Cracks Though cultural nationalism can be justifiably accused of being reductive, racist, sexist, and deeply conservative, despite its initial claims to venture beyond the social realism of poetry before 1960, the “explosion” of poetry from 1960 to 1975 had unexpected benefits in the ways it pushed writers to define or reject thematic parameters of Canadian literature. As the 1970s became the 1980s, the politics of poetry switched to examining the conditions for citizenship as they existed within Canada. If Dennis Lee’s “Cadence, Country, Silence” was the essay that raised questions about what the Canadian “cadence” sounded like, then answers came thick and fast in a wide range of voices that asked questions not so much about nationality or regionality, but rather about cultural and political subjectivity within the nation, positing nations within a nation and using the discourses of feminism, postcolonialism, and Marxist theory to do so. The question could no longer be one that sought to consolidate the nation’s voice as a unified entity; more urgent questions surfaced about forms of subjectivity and power differentials, and the period

Canadian Poetry since 1960    485 of 1975 to 1995 (and many would say, beyond) saw many poets from feminist, diasporic, and First Nations communities beginning to write poetry in which the primary force was the rejection of the terms by which they were being read as merely representational voices or limited textual citizens, and not as artists with vibrant communities and traditions of their own. These rhizomes of poetic resistance proceeded from Lee’s Civil Elegies the way cracks proceed from the centre of impact, not as part of the force of impact, but as cracks that point out different weaknesses in the pane of glass (or in this case, in the unified idea of cultural nationalism). Such patterns can be found in fiction as well, for a national literature—at its best a conversation that is often heated—thrives on contention and cannot be contained to a single perspective, but the swift exchange and textual variance of poetry make it especially suited to political argument and to challenging the limitations of previous forms or perspectives. The political demand for more female voices in poetry found purchase in the “Women and Words/Les femmes et les mots” conference, held in Vancouver from 30 June to 3 July 1983, with the aim of claiming space for women’s writing about which cultural nationalism had not dreamed, let alone accounted. The event inspired the foundation of West Coast Women and Words, an organization with a mandate to “support and encourage women writers, publishers, teachers and others who communicate through the written word” (Holmlund and Youngberg 236), and the 1985 publication In the Feminine (Dybikowski), essays about and from the conference. Further publications promoting and discussing women’s and feminist poetry followed, including the very influential Language in Her Eye: Views on Writing and Gender by Canadian Women Writing in English (1990), edited by Libby Scheier, Sarah Sheard, and Eleanor Wachtel. In the 1980s and 1990s, feminist poets such as Erín Moure, Di Brandt, Daphne Marlatt, Betsy Warland, Rhea Tregebov, and Lola Lemire Tostevin were writing poetry that interrogated the gendered politics of writing and of publishing in Canada, while searching for a feminist poetics, language that could speak the conditions of female experience and female perspective. As a cutting from one of the feminist rhizomes that grew from this period, Erín Moure’s 1988 book Furious is a resistance rhizome par excellence, a landmark text for feminist and lesbian poetics in Canada. Moure, who changed the accents in her name from Erin Mouré to Erín Moure in 2007 to reflect her heritage and translation poetics, writes Furious as a poetic manifesto. Like Civil Elegies, Furious is a text that speaks to the political frustrations and poetic inquiries of its era, and like Civil Elegies, Furious was awarded the Governor General’s Award for Poetry. Unlike Civil Elegies, the speaker(s) of Furious eschew oracular speech for a demotic but nonetheless demanding view of female experience: in the family, at work, in relationships with other women, in global politics. Moure’s investigations into the language of female citizenship have been her most fervent poetic project for the past 30 years. In Furious, she explores the desire to “inhabit freely the civic house of memory I am kept out of ” (91); in O Cidadán (2002), Moure declares the language of female citizenship to dwell outside the parameters of everyday speech, and invites the “semantic pandemonium” (n.pag.) that would constitute the language of the active female citizen.

486   Literary Periods and Genres While their styles are very different and their concerns are not political parallels, both Lee and Moure employ a rigorous poetics to speak of the vicissitudes of citizenry in late twentieth-century Canada, and Moure’s contention that “a citizen uncorks uncertainty’s mien” (O Cidadán 4) is presaged by Lee’s ghosts “brooding over the city” (27). The conditions of material production are significant to this rhizomatic cutting, since Moure’s association with House of Anansi Press, the publishing house founded by Dennis Lee and Dave Godfrey in 1967, began in 1979 with the publication of Empire, York Street, and she has published several other books with the press since, including The Unmemntioable in 2012. Moure uses the figure of the fury to expand the possibilities for legitimate love and legitimate subjectivity outside the “imprisoning outline” of patriarchy. The central image in Furious is that of a female figure who is “terribly, terrifyingly alive” in desire; language functions through a “rapport with rage” (“my existence” 216–17), and Moure calls up the anger and the tenderness of the furies to offer a female figure driven by perspicacity rather than by rage. Compare Moure’s comments on language use and culture from her prose poems, “The Acts,” with Lee’s contention that “To explore the obstructions to cadence is, for a Canadian, to explore the nature of colonial space” (“Cadence” 154): It’s the way people use language makes me furious. The ones who reject the colloquial & common culture. The ones who laud on the other hand the common & denigrate the intellect, as if we are not thinking. The ones who play between the two, as if culture were a strong wind blowing in the path of honour. It takes us nowhere & makes me furious, that’s all. (Furious 86)

From Lee’s Grantian perspective, Canada is colonized by American imperialism; from Moure’s feminist perspective, the culture is colonized by the status quo of gender, class, and language. The politics of these poetics are not ideologically equivalent, but neither are they rhetorically disparate, with their shared concerns about colloquial language, not to mention their appeal to the buried intellect, their reflection on the misuse of honour, and their furious understanding of cultural stasis. Concerns about Canada’s colonial past and its hegemonic White culture were another resistance rhizome that saw growth in the 1980s and 1990s. The “Writing Thru Race” conference, held in Vancouver over Canada Day weekend in 1994, 11 years after the “Women and Words/Les femmes et les mots” conference, sought to claim space for diasporic writing in Canada that was not European in origin. The “Writing Thru Race” conference created a media sensation by not allowing White conference participants to register for or attend the conference and so neatly pointed out the central point of writing through race: that it is different from writing about race, and different from writing through the dominant culture. As early as the 1970s, but gathering pace and cultural momentum well into 1990s and beyond, poets such Roy Kiyooka, Claire Harris, Fred Wah, M. NourbeSe Philip, Roy Miki, Cyril Dabydeen, Lillian Allen, George Elliott Clarke, and Dionne Brand produced works that spoke back against hegemonic White culture and a limited view

Canadian Poetry since 1960    487 of Canadian history that often effaced violence and other forms of racism against diasporic communities. After Parliament passed the Canadian Multiculturalism Act in 1988, many anthologies of the time picked up on the rhetoric of “honouring diversity,” but offering a variety of voices was not enough to push back against the single-minded officialdom of the emerging Canadian canon. There is certainly irony to be read here in untamable, radicalized, exploding poetry being co-opted into literary respectability while still in the midst of its own explosive development. As Smaro Kamboureli notes in her introduction to the 1996 anthology, Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Literature, the notion of “discovering” Canada inevitably “calls forth the spectre of the past, the nostalgic reply of other geographies” to produce, and reproduce, “a history haunted by dissonance” (1). She goes on to observe with irony that even in an anthology of works produced by poets from diasporic backgrounds, “inclusion is synonymous with exclusion” (2). Poetry written by people with diasporic histories represents more important cracks in the shatter pattern of Canadian poetry, and may be viewed as particularly rhizomatic due to its connection to the social struggles of visible and/or ethnic minorities in Canada, enacting Deleuze and Guattari’s “principle of asignifying rupture” (7) as it works “against the oversignifying breaks separating structure or cutting across a single structure” (9). As a cutting that emphasizes the texture and roar of such asignifying rupture, Dionne Brand’s Land to Light On (1997), with its declarative politics of activist burnout, the weariness of returning to the citizenship debate, and frustration with the strictures of the nationalist stance, marks a turn toward the global politics and its “history of harm” (Land 45) that become the matrix of thought for Brand’s later work. In her 2008 keynote address as the Ralph Gustafson Chair of Poetry at Malaspina College (now Vancouver Island University) in Nanaimo, British Columbia, published under the title A Perfect Kind of Speech, Brand notes that she believes in “poetry’s job in tending to the wrecked and brutalized consciousness of oppressed peoples,” and acknowledges that the “ubiquitous occupation of coloniality” has been her guiding subject since she began writing poetry as part of her social justice work in the 1970s (Perfect 18–20). Moreover, Brand declared in an interview with journalist Michael Oliveira that “poetry is the least commoditized art … yet its reach is incredibly great” (Oliveira n.pag.). She has long been admired in Canadian literature, not only for the lyricism of her poetry and the multi-genre output of her writing career, but also for the ferocity of her politics—a politics that she, at one point in her career, was certain would keep her work from ever being awarded major poetry prizes. However, Brand won both the Governor General’s Award for Poetry for Land to Light On in 1997, as well as the Griffin Prize for Ossuaries in 2011. Land to Light On offers a discussion about the conditions of citizenship that is not very far from Moure’s consideration of the exclusive “civic house of memory” (Furious 91), and offers a different take on Dennis Lee’s definition of “good stateless men and women” who “go down in civil fury” (Civil 38). The text’s appeal to a heterogeneous multiplicity of citizens who have fought in the cultural wars in Canada is a cautionary reminder of what it can mean to sacrifice the self for meaning: “the body bleeds only water and fear when you survive / the death of your politics” (Land 15). Brand is responding to

488   Literary Periods and Genres the vestiges of cultural nationalism when she writes “maybe this wide country stretches your life out to a thinness / just trying to take it in, trying to calculate what you must do” (43), but unquestionably, her response is predicated on the way that cultural nationalism excludes diasporic peoples. Brand’s delineation of the “history of harm” is axiomatic to reading Land to Light On, and her admonition of how nationalist history flings aside lives like detritus is important to reading the tone her defiance takes: “Paper / dies, flesh melts, leaving stockings and their useless vanity / in graves, bodies lie still across foolish borders” (48). Brand’s most defiant statement in the book is perhaps this: “it’s too much to hold up, what I / really want to say is, I don’t want no fucking country, here /or there or all the way back” (43). She brings to her work a clear political understanding that “to / sweep this stretch of land up around your feet and … guess / at the fall of words” (43) may be a critical position, but it is a position that neither satisfies the questions nor portrays the lived experiences of diasporic peoples as they persist in a Canadian history of harm. “I’m giving up on land to light on, and why not, / I can’t perfect my own shadow, my violent sorrow” (48), writes Brand, reminding readers that nations are never made without violence, and that violence does not drain away when the nation-defining “battles” are won, something also trenchantly observed, and most deftly challenged, in poetry by First Nations and Métis poets who saw a surge in publication in the 1980s and 1990s. Marilyn Dumont, Gregory Scofield, Duncan Mercredi, Jeannette Armstrong, Lee Maracle, Daniel David Moses, Louise Halfe, and Marie Annharte Baker, among others, produced poetry that drew sharp and necessary attention to the ways that the history of Indigenous peoples in Canada were effaced by cultural nationalism, and indeed, by governmental rhetoric and by the social astigmatism of White culture. Brand’s “history of harm” can also be found, poignantly and defiantly, in the work of First Nations poets, and in groundbreaking anthologies of First Nations poetry, such as Jeannette Armstrong and Lally Grauer’s Native Poetry in Canada: A Contemporary Anthology (2001).3

Making a Break for It: Public Poetics in the Digital Age The changes in digital technology since 2005 have facilitated another kind of explosion in Canadian poetry, one proceeding from the dramatically increased ability of writers to communicate swiftly and cheaply with one another and to create and avail themselves of opportunities to publish in e-form, to disseminate work, opinions, and preferences instantaneously and without cost, to collaborate with colleagues all over the world, to plan conferences and events, and to share materials as momentarily diverting as tweets and as important as archival documentation or full manuscripts of new work. The recent rise of social media, blogging, and online journals has only intensified poetic debates about style, coteries, and poetic communities, even as they facilitate the formation of allegiances through these same devices. Sina Queyras’s work with

Canadian Poetry since 1960    489 her blog-turned-online-journal Lemon Hound, titled after her electronic persona and her 2006 book of the same name, is an excellent case of a poet-critic working at the leading edge of the digital and collaborative poetry explosion in Canada.4 Part of the explosiveness of the current era has to do with debates—sometimes inflammatory, sometimes cool—about the politics of style and form, along with equally volatile questions of gender, race, class, and coteries, particularly as these factors influence readership, reviewing, and publication. Although tension is maintained in some ways between practitioners of more traditional lyric poetry and practitioners of the experimental anti-lyric, it is perhaps more important to consider the ways that alliances and antipathies between Canadian poetries and poets themselves tend to transcend such a simple structure. George Murray’s bookninja.com blog, maintained from 2003 to 2011, was also an early influential site for discussion and collaboration. Murray’s posting titled “From One, Many” on 5 April 2011 at NewPoetry.ca that he was “sick of borders … sick of the various poetries and poets I read and admire fighting and carping about each other instead of collaborating constructively” was intended to mark a new spirit of collaboration and discussion, although it remains to be seen whether or not such a collective spirit can be—or even should be—forged.5 In this maelstrom of dissemination and talk, bolstered by a prodigious amount of work by publications such as Christian Bök’s Griffin Prize–winning (and subsequent bestselling) book of poetry Eunoia (2001), and Kate Eichhorn and Heather Milne’s Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women’s Poetry and Poetics (2009), as well as such projects as Margaret Christakos’s critical-creative Influency Salons, experimental poetries have taken up a position of particular resonance. Bök has been a very public champion of the avant-garde as a force in Canadian poetry, and besides his own writing, his service has included the editorship of Ground Works: Avant Garde For Thee (2002), and a variety of speaking engagements in which he has argued eloquently for the history (and the future) of the avant-garde in Canadian poetry alongside or even mixed with the lyric mode. This includes “The Cage Match of Canadian Poetry,” a discussion event held at Calgary’s Mount Royal University on 26 November 2009, in which Bök and Carmine Starnino, billed as “heavyweights of Canadian poetry” (Maylor), engaged in a conversation in which, to extend the cage match metaphor, an intellectual smackdown could take place between lyric and experimental poetries, the latter favouring procedure and interrogation of language over the lyric’s direct appeal to affect. Certainly experimental poetries have a long history in Canada, as Gregory Betts points out in his Avant-Garde Canadian Literature: The Early Manifestations (2013), but the act of acknowledging their force as a counter-tradition or perhaps a force in the shatter pattern formation is new enough that the critical positions its proponents hold are still, to a greater or lesser extent, battle positions. But reading the work of Lisa Robertson, Margaret Christakos, a. rawlings, Rachel Zolf, Jon Paul Fiorentino, derek beaulieu, Nathalie Stephens, Jeff Derksen, Erín Moure, and Sina Queyras should be enough to convince most readers that experimental poetries do not necessarily entirely eschew the lyric mode. Moure has written often that although she has argued for decades for a more consciously political poetics and for greater experimentation with form and syntax, she could never go

490   Literary Periods and Genres without the lyric in her poetry, although the lyric is not its driving force. Under the various names of language poetry, radical poetry, conceptual poetry, and experimental poetry, the forward-looking poetries in the digital age in Canada have been those which challenge tradition, while reveling in the kinds of freedoms and the kinds of publics offered by various forms of e-distribution. As my final cutting, I wish to offer conceptual poet derek beaulieu’s “Prose of the Trans-Canada” as a text that challenges nearly everything about poetry and its distribution, and as a text that draws readers’ attention to the forces of tradition and innovation in Canadian poetry in the digital age. Measuring 16 inches by 52 inches in its original form, this visual poem is constructed from the application of Letraset symbols—letters, numbers, blank-speech balloons, punctuation marks, ampersands, stars, and asterisks, among other things—in a series of whorls and riverine patterns in which—with the exception of the word “Letraset” and the names of various fonts embedded into the text (“WINDSOR BOLD,” “24 pt. TIMES BOLD,” “Helvetica Light”)—the letters never form recognizable words. The patterns suggest both chaos and order, and the piece’s witty title contradicts from the very start, bearing more of a resemblance to Nichol’s visual poems than any kind of prose. The allusive title refers to Blaise Cendrars’s 1913 work “Prose of the Trans-Siberian” (Barwin), and of course also refers to the Trans-Canada Highway, that dividing and unifying structure that suggests motion and stasis. Additionally, the title alludes to another institution, the TransCanada Institute (2007–2013) at the University of Guelph, “an interdisciplinary research environment whose primary goal is to initiate, facilitate, and produce collaborative research on the institutional and disciplinary structures, methodologies, pedagogies and contexts that shape the production and study of Canadian literature and culture in Canada, as well as globally” (TransCanada website). “Prose of the Trans-Canada” uses 1970s technology to produce sweeps and dips that arc into imaginary cartographies, and also swirl into tightly wound circles and eddies. It is at once a readable and unreadable text; it imitates a landscape through the use of what Nichol called “The Complete Works”—that is, every letter and symbol on the manual typewriter (Nichol 12)—but it does not offer a reading of said landscape. It suggests canonicity and nationalism—ways to read a literary geography—while offering clues only on the level of the letter. In the digital age, “Prose of the Trans-Canada” is not easily “shareable” or easily purchased; Geof Huth’s account of purchasing and framing the piece in its original size is absolutely an account of “an extravagant act in recognition of the value of poetry in a life” (Huth). However, its bulk is still transmittable on the Internet, appearing in both Huth’s and Barwin’s online articles, and popped up as the cover image for the Poetic Publics conference program at Mount Allison University in September 2012, a conference in which the intersections of practice, publics, and politics of the digital age of Canadian poetry were the primary issues. Gary Barwin’s descriptions of “Prose of the Trans-Canada” are intriguing in the ways they combine anatomy and writing with geographical methodology: “A Mercator projection of the cerebral cortex-like folds of writing. A  cloud-town view of the not-flatland of the alphabet freed from the governance of the invisible hand.” It comes as no surprise at all to hear that like many other experimental poets, beaulieu favours

Canadian Poetry since 1960    491 the conceptual but includes the lyric, or as he puts it in his interview with Barwin: “I aim to create moments of lyric sensitivity with the juxtaposition of serifs and ascenders within the field-covering mass.” He goes on to quote Nichol from Book V of The Martyrology and suggests that “Prose of the Trans-Canada” is best read as one way to enact Nichol’s wish for “every(all at(toge(forever)ther) once)thing” (n.pag.) or, as the back cover of Please, No More Poetry puts it, beaulieu’s poetry “may be understood as a practice that forces readers to reconsider what they think they know.” Reconsidering everything we know, about poetry, about Canadian literature, and about how to read their intersections, accidents, and growth, is the everyday practice of readers of contemporary Canadian poetry. The legacy of making and breaking poetry to rebuild and review Canadian culture may be an exhausting one, but its intricacies offer the elbow room sought at least since 1960. Not knowing the future, and not subscribing to a single history, is a position that allows for thought and for exploration. As Canadian poet Lisa Robertson notes in her 2012 book of essays, Nilling, “Doubt complicates. Even repudiation is a doubling” (51).

Notes 1. See Chapter 1 by Frank Davey on Canadian literary criticism in this volume. 2. See Chapter 24 by Cynthia Sugars on Canadian fiction writers’ turn to history in the cultural nationalist period. 3. See Chapter 7 by Emma LaRocque and Chapter 8 by Jonathan Dewar for expanded discussions of First Nations and Métis poets. 4. See also Chapter 27 by Kate Eichhorn on digital media in this volume. 5. Lorraine York makes a similar argument about contemporary Canadian authors in her contribution (Chapter 4) to this volume.

Works Cited Armstrong, Jeannette C., and Lally Grauer, eds. Native Poetry in Canada:  A  Contemporary Anthology. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2001. Print. Atwood, Margaret. Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. Concord, ON: Anansi Press, 1972. Print. Barwin, Gary. “derek beaulieu’s Prose of the Trans-Canada: a 1:1 scale road map of language.” Jacket 2. 9 May 2013. www.jacket2.org. Web. Accessed 15 June 2013. beaulieu, derek. Moments Café #8: Prose of the Trans-Canada. Toronto: BookThug, 2012. Print. ———. Please, No More Poetry:  The Poetry of derek beaulieu. Ed. Kit Dobson. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2013. Print. Bentley, D.M.R. “Rummagings 5: Northrop Frye’s ‘Garrison Mentality.’ ” Canadian Poetry 58 (2006): 4–6. Print. Betts, Gregory. Avant-Garde Canadian Literature:  The Early Manifestations. Toronto:  U of Toronto P, 2013. Print. Bök, Christian. Eunoia. Toronto: Coach House, 2001. Print.

492   Literary Periods and Genres ———, ed. Ground Works: Avant-Garde for Thee. Toronto: Anansi, 2002. Print. Brand, Dionne. Land to Light On. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1997. Print. ———. A Perfect Kind of Speech. Nanaimo: Institute for Coastal Research, 2008. Print. Bronson, A.A., ed. From Sea to Shining Sea:  Artist-Initiated Activity in Canada, 1939–1987. Toronto: Power Plant, 1987. Print. Butling, Pauline, and Susan Rudy. Writing in Our Time: Canada’s Radical Poetries in English (1957–2003). Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2005. Print. Coleman, Daniel. White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2004. Print. Davey, Frank. “Anything But Reluctant:  Canada’s Little Magazines.” Canadian Literature 13 (1962). Rpt. in Dudek and Gnarowski 222–27. Print. ———. Surviving the Paraphrase: Eleven Essays on Canadian Literature. Winnipeg: Turnstone, 1983. Print. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. London: Athlone, 1988. Print. Deshaye, Joel. The Metaphor of Celebrity: Canadian Poetry and the Public, 1955–1980. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2013. Print. Dudek, Louis, and Michael Gnarowski, eds. The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada: Essential Articles on Contemporary Poetry in English. Toronto: Ryerson, 1967. Print. Dybikowski, Anne, ed. In the Feminine:  Women and Words/Les femmes et les mots. Edmonton: Longspoon, 1985. Print. Eichhorn, Kate, and Heather Milne, eds. Prismatic Publics:  Innovative Canadian Women’s Poetry and Poetics. Toronto: Coach House, 2009. Print. Fetherling, Doug. “A Poet-Publisher with a Voice Like No One Else’s.” Review of Civil Elegies and Other Poems, by Dennis Lee. Saturday Night 87.6 (1972): 37. Print. Frye, Northrop. The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination. Concord, ON: Anansi, 1971. Print. ———. “Conclusion.” Literary History of Canada:  Canadian Literature in English. Ed. Carl F. Klinck. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1965. 821–49. Print. ———. “Conclusion.” Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English. 2nd ed. Vol. 3. Ed. Carl F. Klinck. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1976. 318–32. Print. 3 vols. ———. The Educated Imagination. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1964. Print. Geddes, Gary, and Phyllis Bruce. 15 Canadian Poets. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1970. Print. Grant, George. Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1965. Holmlund, Mona, and Gail Youngberg, eds. Inspiring Women:  A  Celebration of Herstory. Saskatoon: Coteau, 2003. Print. Hunter, Lynette. Outsider Notes: Feminist Approaches to Nation State Ideology, Writers/Readers and Publishing. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1996. Print. Huth, Geof. “What Comes in through Your Eyes Leaves by Your Teeth.” dbqp: visualizing poetics. www.dbqp.blogspot.ca. Web. Accessed 24 Apr. 2013. Jones, D.G. Butterfly on Rock: A Study of Themes and Images in Canadian Literature. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1970. Print. Kamboureli, Smaro, ed. Making a Difference:  Canadian Multicultural Literature. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1996. Print. ———. “Preface.” Trans.Can.Lit:  Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature. Ed. Smaro Kamboureli and Roy Miki. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2007. vii-xv. Print.

Canadian Poetry since 1960    493 Keith, W.J. “Blight in the Bush Garden: Twenty Years of ‘CanLit.’ ” Essays on Canadian Writing 71 (2000): 71–78. Print. Lee, Dennis. “Cadence, Country, Silence: Writing in Colonial Space.” Boundary 2: A Journal of Postmodern Literature 3 (1974): 151–68. Print. ———. Civil Elegies and Other Poems. 1972. Toronto: Anansi, 1994. Print. MacDonald, Tanis. “The Counter-Public in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of Canadian Poetry.” Public Poetics: Critical Issues in Canadian Poetry and Poetics. Ed. Bart Vautour, Erin Wunker, Travis Mason, and Christl Verduyn. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2015. 51–64. Print. Mandel, Eli. An Idiot Joy. Edmonton: Hurtig, 1967. Print. ———, ed. Poets of Contemporary Canada:  1960–1970. Toronto:  McClelland and Stewart, 1972. Print. ———. “Preface to Poetry 62.” Poetry 62. Toronto: Ryerson, 1961. Rpt. in Dudek and Gnarowski. 199–200. Print. Mathews, Robin. Canadian Literature: Surrender or Revolution. Toronto: Steel Rail, 1978. Print. Maylor, Micheline. “Introduction: The Cage Match of Canadian Poetry: Carmine Starnino and Christian Bök in Conversation.” The Centennial Reader. June 2012. www.centennialreader. ca. Web. Accessed 21 May 2013. Moure, Erín (Erin Mouré). Furious. Toronto: Anansi, 1988. Print. ———. “Crossing Borders with a Galician Book of Poetry:  Translating a Realist Poet.” My Beloved Wager: Essays from a Writing Practice. Edmonton: NeWest, 2009. 245–59. Print. ———. O Cidadán. Toronto, Anansi, 2002. Print. ———. The Unmemntioable. Toronto: Anansi, 2012. Print. Moss, John. Patterns of Isolation in English Canadian Fiction. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1974. Print. Murray, George. “From One, Many.” NewPoetry. 5 Apr. 2011. www.newPoetry.ca. Web. Accessed 23 May 2013.Nichol, bp. The Alphabet Game: A bpNichol Reader. Ed. Darren Wershler-Henry and Lori Emerson. Toronto: Coach House, 2007. Print. Oliveira, Michael. “Griffin Poetry Prize Shortlister Dionne Brand Has No Fear for Poetry’s Future.” Kitchener Record 5 Apr. 2011. Web. Accessed 23 May 2013. Purdy, Alfred. The Cariboo Horses. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1965. Print. ———. “The Cartography of Myself ” (1977). Starting from Ameliasburgh: The Collected Prose of Al Purdy. Ed. Sam Solecki. Madeira Park, BC: Harbour, 1995. 15–18. Print. ———, ed. The New Romans: Candid Canadian Opinions of the U.S. Edmonton: M. G. Hurtig, 1968. Print. Queyras, Sina. Lemon Hound. Toronto: Coach House, 2006. Print. ———, ed. Lemon Hound. www.lemonhound.com. Web. Accessed 20 June 2015. Robertson, Lisa. Nilling: Prose Essays. Toronto: BookThug, 2012. Print. Scheier, Libby, Sarah Sheard, and Eleanor Wachtel, eds. Language in Her Eye: Views on Writing and Gender by Canadian Women Writing in English. Toronto: ECW P, 1990. Print. Schroeder, Andreas. “Difficult Sanities.” Review of Civil Elegies and Other Poems, by Dennis Lee. Canadian Literature 55 (Winter 1973): 102–105. Print. Smith, A.J.M. “A Rejected Preface.” Canadian Literature 24 (1965). Rpt. in Dudek and Gnarowski 38–41. Print. Solecki, Sam. The Last Canadian Poet: An Essay on Al Purdy. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1999. Print.

494   Literary Periods and Genres Toronto Research Group [bpNichol and Steve McCaffrey]. “Introduction:  Canadian ‘Pataphysics.” Open Letter 4.6–7 (1980–81): 7–8. Print. TransCanada Institute. “The Institute.” www.uoguelph.ca/transcanadas/institute. Web. Accessed 16 July 2013. White, Hayden. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987. Print. Winger, Rob. “The People’s Poet: Al Purdy as Organic Intellectual.” Lemon Hound 4. 24 Apr. 2013. Web. Accessed 26 Apr. 2014. Woodcock, George. George Woodcock’s Introduction to Canadian Poetry. Toronto:  ECW P, 1993. Print.

Chapter 26

Humou r and I rony i n Qué bec Women’ s W ri t i ng , 1970– 2 010 Taking the Pulse of a Resistance Lucie Joubert

It is often said that humour is a social indicator: a filter that helps us to make sense of the concerns of the time, to keep our worries at bay, and to laugh despite the vicissitudes of existence. In Québec, the frequent use of humour in media and entertainment (innumerable comedy shows, and comedians in radio, television, and advertisements) has the effect of substantially weakening the contradictory and critical potential of humour in favour of a laugh that is more gratuitous and guaranteed, and less rooted in protest or demands. However, there is a place where the mind is called upon to search for a new order of things, to expose and denounce folly and vice. This place is often the literary text. That is where the author can—between the relatively confidential pages of her novel or short story—go even further in challenging the social order and provide an alternative to the sometimes very conservative consensual humour that prevails on stage and on the air. The author of a literary text, less obsessed by the need to provoke an immediate laugh, a laugh-out-loud, thigh-slapping laugh, builds another form of complicity with the readers. Through the means of expression she uses to present her reading of the world, a writer creates a universe that is sometimes absurd, sometimes light, sometimes outright satirical. This reading, ironic and humorous, is always deeply rooted in a social and gendered perspective. To Genette’s canonical questions, who sees? who speaks?, we must add, in humour, who mocks? Where is the insolence coming from? It is an important question. In addition to bringing the author, whom we pronounced dead in the 1970s, back to life, it forces us to take the author’s sex and gender into account. Studies that address the production and reception of humour from a gendered perspective were very rare in Québec, if not entirely nonexistent, until the mid-1970s: the audience or humorist

496   Literary Periods and Genres is interpreted as a non-gendered individual. Furthermore, “Pleureuse de profession, candidate brillante à l’état de victim,” says Suzanne Lamy, “la femme a excellé dans la plainte” (81) [“Professional mourner, brilliant candidate for victimhood, women have excelled in complaining”]. Women were not seen as being capable of using humour. Opting instead to laugh, or at least to smile, therefore implies ipso facto a radical shift in perspective. Furthermore, because women have always been a favourite target of satirists (Stora-Sandor, L’humour 79), this shift is coupled with an important symbolic power: women authors—hidden behind their narratives—become agents, producers of humour and irony, as opposed to their victims. This shift in perspective gives the reading of women’s humour and irony1 a new dimension: while the automatic subversion we long granted these genres (Barreca 8; Joubert, Le carquois 19; Stora-Sandor, “Le rire” 172–82; Walker 44) is now contested by Zwagerman (5), the fact remains that the author’s sometimes mocking, sometimes caustic view of society remains marked by her or his gender, either in the words themselves or in the pact the author establishes with her or his readers. The following analysis of selected texts, covering the period from the 1970s to the present day, will show the wide range of examples of Québec women’s humour and irony, as well as the revealing (in the photographic sense of the term) nature of the targeted subjects and narrative forms used. From a socio-gendered and chronological perspective, this chapter will take an approach that extends beyond the texts themselves to the authors’ vision of an ever-changing society, of which they are a part, but which they also observe from afar so as to better expose its shortcomings.

The 1970s: Irony, Humour, and Feminism, or the Difficult Marriage between Distance and Militancy The Quiet Revolution (Révolution tranquille) laid the groundwork for the great years of militant and literary feminism in Québec. During this pivotal period, the power of the Catholic Church began to erode and a willingness to resist anglophone dominance emerged. At the same time, women began to mobilize, and this would allow them to free themselves from patriarchal authority. In the 1960s, more and more women were already using irony and humour to express resistance to patriarchal institutions. Without necessarily being labeled as feminist, these texts shared the same goals. They questioned the various symbols of patriarchal ideology by attacking institutions: the clergy, by far the main target, was criticized for its interference in conjugal affairs; medicine (practiced mainly by men) was criticized for its tendency to label women as insane and its undue power over women’s bodies and

Humour and Irony in Québec Women’s Writing    497 minds; the education system was attacked for its marginalization of women; and marriage, as an institution of alienation, was scorned for keeping women in a state of servitude (Joubert, Le carquois 79–150). While some texts timidly and sporadically targeted men as individuals, it was not until the following decade that more resolutely feminist works emerged and began attacking these institutions more directly, an initiative that was not without risk. The 1970s indeed marked a time of immense feminist upheaval, inspiring more ideological works. Some phrases from landmark texts almost became slogans: “Écrire: je suis une femme est plein de consequences” or “J’ai tué le ventre et je l’écris” by Nicole Brossard (L’Amèr 53, 27) [“To write: I am a woman is heavy with consequences” or “I have murdered the womb and I write it”]; these statements crystallized the struggle against patriarchy and the affirmation of a feminine identity. While essential, such works are too closely connected to the fight for women’s emancipation and are therefore unable to keep the object of their denunciation at a distance. Yet we know that to succeed, humour needs this distance, which is generally impossible in militancy. It is no doubt for this reason that there are so few works that combine feminism and humour from Québec in the 1970s. Still, one major text, L’Euguélionne by Louky Bersianik, published in 1976, successfully combines irony and denunciation—not without difficulty, however. This novel tells the story of an alien who is staying on Earth and appears shocked at the strange behaviours and customs she observes. All of her comments serve to denounce the abuse of power to which women are subjected, the sources of their alienation, and their powerlessness to influence the course of things. The novel comes off as being a bit didactic. Lori Saint-Martin (129–44) appropriately describes the often burdensome link between parody and the book’s insistent feminist struggle. However, this fundamental text remains significant because it is the first work to clearly associate humour and feminism and to address serious social issues with an (apparent) lightness. It takes the most pervasive patriarchal ideas and mocks them in an ironic dialogue, a “counter-melody,” as Linda Hutcheon puts it (468), calling them into question. The text is composed of numbered verses, which constitutes an additional parodic irony, challenging the authority of the Bible. According to the author herself, “the entire text is numbered like in the Civil Code or the Old and New Testament. It’s one big mockery” (Smith 64). In the following exchange, Zazie, who is loosely based on the character from Raymond Queneau’s Zazie dans le métro, has a conversation with a scientist named St. Siegfried, who bears a striking resemblance to Sigmund Freud. Bersianik's little Zazie, just like her French counterpart, is a mischievous girl who feigns naiveté to manipulate adults who get in her way. Her interest lies in the fact that, for one of the first times in Québec literature—even today, examples remain uncommon in Québec—a girl (and a young one in this case) is granted freedom of action and speech. The following exchange between Zazie and St. Siegfried debunks the penis-envy theory: ― Mais, tu ne trouves pas ça pratique le petit robinet de Jojo?

498   Literary Periods and Genres 642. ― Robinet, mon cul, dit Zazie, j’peux faire pipi sans ça, alors, j’vois pas pourquoi j’aurais en plus de la tuyauterie. À quoi ça me servirait? Et puis, msieu, toujours entre nous, moi aussi j’ai des choses qu’il a pas le frangin. Croyez-le ou non, quand i’s’fourre les doigts dans le nez, c’est pas moi qui lui envierais son p’tit robinet, comme vous dites, parce que moi, meussieu, j’mets bien mes doigts quelque part mais c’est pas dans mon nez, ça, j’vous l’garantis sur mesure! Même que c’est dans ce “quelque part” que je cache mes billes! Toujours entre nous, ç’pas? Des fois que vous auriez envie vous aussi d’avoir une cachette dans ce genre-là, tout ce que je peux vous dire, céxé vachement bath! Des rires fusèrent de partout. Mais St. Siegfried n’était pas convaincu et voulait amener l’enfant à des aveux complets. ― Tu veux dire, petite Zazie, que tu n’as jamais, jamais, eu envie de posséder la p’tite chose de ton p’tit frère? ― Ça m’arrive des fois, dit l’enfant, nostalgique. ― Tiens, tu vois bien, dit le Maître. Et quand cela t’arrive-t-il? 643. ― C’est toujours quand ma mère m’oblige à faire la vaisselle que ça me prend c’tt’envie-là. Parce que lui alors, y’a toujours congé. Vous trouvez ça juste, vous? (Bersianik 216–17) [― But, you don’t find it practical, Jojo’s little weiner? 642. ― Weiner my ass, said Zazie, I can go pee without that, so I don’t see why I’d need the extra piping. What good would it do me? And mister, still between you and me, I also have things that he doesn’t, my little brother. Believe it or not, when he sticks his fingers in his nose, I don’t envy his little wiener, as you say, because mister, I put my fingers someplace else and it’s not my nose, I guarantee you that! I can even hide things in this “someplace”! Still between you and me, right? Sometimes, when you wish you had a hiding place like that too, all I can tell you is that it’s really great! Laughter filled the air. But St. Siegfried wasn’t convinced and wanted to get a full confession out of the child. ― You mean to say, little Zazie, that you never, never, wish you had a little thing like your brother? ― Sometimes, said the child, nostalgic. ― There, you see, said the Master. And when does this happen? 643. ― It’s always when my mother makes me do the dishes that I wish I had one. Because he never has to do housework. Do you think that’s fair?]

Little Zazie (whose name, Zazie, evokes the “weiner”—zizi—she is deprived of) formulates in her naiveté a deceptively innocent response to the aberrations of psychoanalysis, which sees women as lacking or incomplete. This text remains unique in Québec women’s literary history from the 1970s due to its use of parody. Works by women in Québec that explore this ironic form are very rare. A hypothesis to explain this near absence could be that parody generally attacks works that we feel are important. Secondary texts are not often parodied because the fun of deciphering the parody is precisely in “recognizing” the original text and establishing links between it and the parodied text. Women were pressured in the 1970s to construct a literature that represented them and, as a result, they may not have wanted to return to founding texts, which either did not have a place for them or represented them poorly. They wanted something else.

Humour and Irony in Québec Women’s Writing    499 During this same period, many works emerged that were less resolutely feminist, but still engaged the large debates from a distance. These authors, whom we may call peri-feminists because they echo women’s struggles without officially self-identifying as militants, are just as important because their irony draws attention to other aspects of women’s condition. Their approach is more domestic than the theoretical reflection underlying L’Euguélionne, but it is equally important. These texts are part of an ironic tradition that Stora-Sandor terms “house-wife novels”: “complaintes pathético-comiques, alliant l’auto-dérision et l’ironie plus ou moins acérée contre la société” (“Flux” 133) [“pathetic-comic complaints, combining sharp self-mockery and irony against society”]. In Michèle Mailhot’s works, domesticity—particularly the long road to escaping social subordination—is embodied in Judith’s journey in Veuillez agréer … (1975). In the novel, a woman is humiliated by an adulterous husband, and the narrator accompanies her in her journey toward autonomy. In the following excerpt, Judith realizes that she has been cheated on for the thousandth time: ― Mais Claude, je t’avais dit n’importe qui, sauf la gardienne. … Il me semble qu’il en restait encore assez. ― Si tu étais restée à la maison, comme tu aurais dû, il n’y aurait pas eu de gardienne. Voilà pour la sorteuse. … Il fallait quand même payer ces trois mois de loyer pour résilier le bail-bail manqué. Claude refusa de régler la note avec ces mots ineffables, ces trois petits mots qui font trois tours et ne s’en vont jamais: ― Ça t’apprendra. Judith paya à même les allocations familiales. De ce jour, elle commença vraiment à apprendre. (45–46) [― But Claude, I told you anyone but the babysitter. … It seems to me that there were still plenty left. ― If you had stayed home, like you were supposed to, there wouldn’t have been a babysitter. There you go. … I would still have to pay the three months’ rent to cancel the lease. Claude refused to pay for it with those ineffable words, those three little words that keep coming back and never go away: ― That’ll teach you. Judith paid it herself. From that day on, she really started to learn.]

This excerpt is representative of a trend among peri-feminists in their use of irony as a writing strategy: an everyday situation is accompanied by a warning. Judith, who is “start[ing] to learn,” announces her desire to refuse the status quo (in this case conjugal) and rejects her status as a housewife. A similar revolt, less explosive because it takes place in the private sphere, forms the cornerstone of Madeleine Ferron’s collection of short stories, Le chemin des dames (1977). The author focuses on heroines who, mostly in a domestic context, fight for their emancipation with whatever means they have at hand. In the short story “La tricheuse” (55–66), Elise feigns insanity to escape her domestic

500   Literary Periods and Genres duties, passing them off to her daughter-in-law. An ironic wink in itself (we know just how quickly traditional medicine accused women of insanity), this claiming of the margin is the symptom of a greater alienation that places the character in a paradoxical position: to find time for herself, Elise must remove herself from “normal” life. The 1970s were also a period of unprecedented enthusiasm for women’s theatre.2 Acting companies composed exclusively of women, as ephemeral as they were powerful, used theatre to question power structures and to shake down patriarchy in collective productions: the Théâtre des Cuisines presented Môman travaille pas, a trop d’ouvrage! (1976), the Théâtre de Ma blonde est au boutte presented Eh! qu’mon chum est platte (a play written by André Boulanger and Sylvie Prégent), and Élizabeth Bourget wrote Bernadette et Juliette ou la vie c’est comme la vaisselle, c’est toujours à recommencer (1979). While these three plays set the stage for a new space for dialogue, Denise Boucher made headlines with Les fées ont soif (1979). This play, featuring three stereotypical female figures—wife/mother, whore, and virgin—was banned from publication, and performances were suspended for a time. While Québec may have been free from the religious subjugation of the 1960s, it was still not acceptable for the Virgin, with a normally functioning body, to make fun of her menstruation—“Madame, utilisez Tantax!” (95) [“Ladies, use Tantax!”]—or to complain that the moisture on her statue was giving her rheumatism. But the confrontation with censorship, which was thought to be a thing of the past, only reinforced the symbolic impact of this play, making the combination of tragedy and humour in the script all the more effective: the prostitute wishes to get rid of her body, which she finds cumbersome, but cannot because she likes cheesecake too much (99), and the wife provides this terrible yet effective response: “Avant de m’marier, quand j’sortais avec lui, il me disait, si tu me quittes, je te tue. Et moi, la dinde, qui craignait de le perdre, je lui disais: si tu me quittes, je me tue. La mort, c’était rien que pour moi” (127–28) [“Before getting married, when I was going out with him, he told me, if you leave me, I’ll kill you. And silly me, turkey, worried that I’d lose him, said: if you leave me, I’ll kill myself. Death was only for me”]. The play ends with the actresses repeating the verb imagine over and over, like an invitation, to think of a world in which women are granted their rightful place.

The 1980s: What Are We Laughing At? According to feminism’s detractors, the 1980s sounded the death knell of radical politics to initiate a return to individualism. The liberatory rhetoric of the 1970s gave way to a false sense of socio-sexual equality. It was in this decade, however, and in the wake of the surge in theatre mentioned in the previous section, that the troupe Les Folles Alliées, founded in 1980, emerged with a clear and official commitment to feminist humour. While it was not a very strategic choice, according to one of the members, Lucie Godbout (47), it was an important one and proved successful in the end. Among other works, the troupe wrote, produced, and performed two plays that were very clearly feminist:  Enfin duchesses! (1983) is first and foremost a satire of the Québec Carnival and, more specifically, of the

Humour and Irony in Québec Women’s Writing    501 crowning of the carnival queen. The “Brigades Roses,” a feminist terrorist group, takes control of the event. They are successful, and the Carnival organizers get a dose of their own medicine. The feminists reverse power relations and treat the paternalistic organizers with the same condescension that they had shown the aspiring duchesses. In their second play, Mademoiselle Autobody (1985), the troupe targets pornography. This time, the “Brigades Roses” sabotage the opening of a Sex Complex in the village of Pompomville, where they have opened a garage to carry out their non-traditional business. The strategy used by the Folles Alliées is both simple and effective. The distancing occurs in the dramatic use of code-switching and cross-dressing:  in both plays, the same actresses play the “Brigades Roses” and their misogynist opponents—the organizers of the beauty contest in the first one, and the corrupt investors in the second. This minimizes the charge against men to instead condemn a behaviour. Therefore, when Maurice, the promoter, says to one of the garage girls, “Mademoiselle Brigitte, oublions que vous êtes une femme et on va parler affaires” (68) [“Mademoiselle Brigitte, let’s forget that you are a woman and we’ll talk business”], the remark, which says a lot about the relationship between women and money, takes on another meaning when we know that it is a woman beneath the jacket and tie. The distance created enables the audience (men in particular) to separate itself from the characters, rendered harmless by their caricatures. The text, ironic in its stand against misogyny, moves toward humour, fulfilling part of the Folles Alliées’ mandate: to provoke a reflection on feminist issues without alienating the men in the audience. While the Folles Alliées were active on stage, new authors were emerging in literary fiction. These authors were not necessarily targeting pure and simple patriarchy or women’s progress, but rather the general reluctance of society to embrace this progress.3 The most striking treatment of women’s long march toward emancipation can be found in the novel Maryse by Francine Noël. A favourite among readers in 1983, the novel tells the story of Maryse, a young arts student in the 1970s at a university that bears a striking resemblance to the University of Québec in Montreal. Noël’s portrait of society conjures a certain nostalgia for many critics (Joubert, “La lecture” 274–84), but it is especially rich in the contradictions it exposes: the socialist display of Maryse’s lover, Michel, who is a staunch defender of the proletariat, but ashamed of the humble origins of his partner; the false poet, Oubedon, who is incapable of producing poetry without his graduate muse; the hypocrisy of a professor, and former priest, who is enthusiastically supervising a semiotic analysis of Penthouse magazine. This array of characters could serve as a backdrop to a satire, and the ironic style, which, according to Sophie Duval and Marc Martinez, is based on “l’art du topos” (137), accompanies the main character in her identity quest. Symbolically, the carnivalesque poet foils Maryse’s own literary endeavours; the muse forces her to redefine her role in her relationship; the Penthouse magazines lying around the apartment force her to face the uneasiness they cause her; while the leftists, namely her lover, paradoxically lead her to accept the authenticity of her origins. In addition to Maryse, several other female characters were the focus of Québec authors in the 1980s. Les aventures de Pomme Douly (1988), by Suzanne Jacob, features an eccentric main character. Pomme Douly is in fact the symbolic sister of Flore Cocon

502   Literary Periods and Genres (1978), from another of Jacob’s novels, but she differs in her desire to embrace her extravagance (contrary to Flore, who falls into madness because she is unable to accept her incongruity). The ludic aspect of this novel is the omnipresent narrator who, instead of presenting Pomme from a distance, joins her (textually): Pomme Douly était tranquille même si l’homme qui lui collait aux talons tôt ce matin-là, un inconnu, avait poussé quelques sifflants soupirs personnels. Elle était tranquille pour deux grandes raisons. D’abord la brise n’était pas assez forte pour soulever sa jupe. Ensuite, Pomme portait des dessous propres et elle était certaine d’avoir éteint la plaque électrique. Certains matins, toute chose a ses raisons. (29) [Pomme Douly was relaxed even if the man following her around earlier that morning, a stranger, had let out a few whistles. She was relaxed for two reasons. First, the breeze wasn’t strong enough to lift her skirt. Second, Pomme was wearing clean underwear and she was sure that she had turned off the burner. Some mornings, everything has its reasons.]

As noted by Lucie Lequin, what makes us laugh in this novel is “le rapport insolite entre l’objet et l’émotion” (260) [“the unusual relationship between object and emotion”] within a dialogue that is neither protesting nor demanding. This novel falls under what Lori Saint-Martin calls metafeminism, to avoid the weighted connotation of a term like “postfeminism.” It is a new stance, which says “oui, au féminisme dans la vie, non à l’asservissement de l’écriture à une cause” (238) [“yes, to feminism in life, no to the enslavement of writing to a cause”]. With Pomme Douly, an invitation to dare to be eccentric as a means of self-affirmation and breaking free from stereotypes is evident in the freedom of thought and movement of the female character. Questions relating to women’s condition remain very present in the literature of the 1980s, but they are implicitly woven into narratives that move away from the more scripted experiences of the previous decade. The great feminist struggles in Québec did not end all inequalities, nor did they bring solutions to the factors contributing to women’s condition. Madeleine Ferron, quoted above, introduced a character in her 1977 short story “L’avancement” called Valérie Bellerose, who forces herself to be twice as efficient as a man and work beyond her abilities in order to be accepted in the working world. Symbolic of some women’s disillusionment with the demands of the labour market (the ever-present double standard), the story helps to put work back into perspective: emancipation through work for women, yes, but not at any price. Furthermore, in the context of a widening gap between writing and militancy, there is a shift away from irony toward a humour that flirts with the absurd, as seen in Suzanne Jacob’s works or in the multifaceted humour of Monique Proulx’s fiction. Proulx made a dramatic entrance into literature with her first collection of short stories, Sans cœur et sans reproche (1983), which secured her a place in the tradition of Québec literary irony and humour. Her short story “Samedi soir,” among others, addresses, in a carnivalesque prose that is rare among women writers, the question of menstruation:

Humour and Irony in Québec Women’s Writing    503 Ce qu’il y a d’agaçant, c’est que la fille [sur la boîte de tampons] te regarde avec un air épanoui et supérieur, comme si tu étais la dernière des imbéciles. Le pied droit juché sur le siège des toilettes, tu essaies de te concentrer. Ils disent qu’il n’y a rien de plus facile: ils ont fait de petits dessins bleus et blancs avec des lettres et des chiffres pour te montrer où sont tous tes orifices, pour s’assurer que tu ne vas pas t’enfoncer le tampon dans le nombril. … Le cinquième tampon, mystérieusement, finit par trouver sa place. Tu te laves les mains, tu achèves de te poudrer le bouton rouge qui a sinistrement pris naissance sur le bout de ton nez, et tu sors, victorieuse, de la salle de bains, plus femme que jamais. (33–34) [What’s annoying is that the girl (on the box of tampons) looks at you with an expression of pride and authority, as if you were a complete idiot. With your right foot perched on the toilet seat, you try to concentrate. They say that it couldn’t be easier: there are even little blue and white drawings with letters and numbers to show you where all your orifices are, to ensure that you won’t stick the tampon in your belly button. … Somehow, the fifth tampon finds its place. You wash your hands, you finish off by powdering the red pimple that has ominously appeared on the end of your nose, and you leave the bathroom victoriously, more woman than ever.]

Symbolically, however, this short story is more about male victory. In the text, male dominance is personified by the masculine ils who explain to the young girl how to use the tampon, and by the handsome man who leaves her at a discotheque for her friend after an unexpected sexual encounter (which suspiciously resembles rape) that was painful because of the above-mentioned tampon. It is clear that the humour and irony in these works, even when free of ideological implication, are very rarely gratuitous. This is especially true of Proulx’s work, which, even when carnivalesque, provokes a smile that is often linked to a disillusionment with the world’s shortcomings, a sentiment that pervades her entire oeuvre. In her first novel, Le sexe des étoiles (1987), we smile at the discouragement of young Camille, who sees her superior intelligence as a handicap hindering her conquest of the best-looking boy in class. Similarly, we give a forced laugh with Marie-Pierre, the transsexual who used to be a reputable scientist: the character learns the harsh reality of a woman’s life when science turns its back on her after her sex change. Despite her light and mocking style, Proulx brings up fundamental questions about women’s relationship to knowledge.

The 1990s: The (False) Certainty of Satire The sense of sadness that underlies many contemporary authors’ humour and replaces the ironic certainty of more radically feminist texts stems from a melancholy that is more common to the 1990s. According to Marie-Claude Lambotte, humour and melancholy are “les deux faces d’une même certitude, l’un n’officiant pas sans l’autre” (108)

504   Literary Periods and Genres [“two sides of the same certainty; you cannot have one without the other”]. She goes further to say that [l]‌’humour ressemblerait ainsi à une sorte de démence (Wahnsinn) appelée à transformer la mélancolie de l’impuissance en une plaisanterie moqueuse, par la fonction d’un Moi parodique (parodischen Ich) auquel reviendrait la tâche de traiter la petitesse du monde à l’échelle de l’infini. Le rire se déclenche alors, empli à la fois de douleur et de grandeur, attestant, par là même, la profonde gravité des humoristes. (109) [Humour would thus resemble a sort of dementia (Wahnsinn) called upon to transform the melancholy of helplessness into a mocking joke, through the use of a parodic Me (parodischen Ich), which has the task of addressing the shortcomings of the world on an infinite scale. The laugh, full of both pain and greatness, is then triggered, consequently testifying to the deep seriousness of humorists.]

If this is true for both sexes, it takes on another dimension among women authors. For these writers, “addressing the shortcomings of the world” in a world that remains reluctant to grant women their rightful place is to declare a keen sense of powerlessness. Even if we have come a long way thanks to the feminist struggles of the previous decades, the melancholy in some women’s humour stems from an acute awareness of lingering dissatisfaction, failed aspirations, or lost illusions. According to Evelyne Ledoux-Beaugrand,4 this disillusionment is due to the necessary but painful transition from second-wave feminist writing, a product of the great feminist rallies and mobilizations, to a writing emerging from the successors of that generation.5 These successors restore ties with the maternal and paternal figures that the previous feminists had replaced with that of the “sister.” This new style of writing, in the words of Ledoux-Beaugrand herself, is elaborated on remains, that is, on the mourning of the sisterhood (lateral axis) in order to focus on personal and familial legacies (vertical axis). The struggle for emancipation will fade to make room for more personal questions. In more humorous texts, this break with the sisterhood takes the form of a melancholic and satirical statement on social space, rooted in the question of our relationship to the often masculine “other.” It is not, strictly speaking, a writing of reconciliation—far from it, as we will see. Satire is rather a portrait of society, which we create in order to expose its shortcomings. Authors such as Hélène Monette and Monique LaRue use it without succumbing to the ferocity of a pure satirist who, “mû par son désir de totalité et sa fougue militante, cherche toujours une nouvelle preuve pour alimenter son réquisitoire” (247) [“driven by his desire to reach totality and his fierce militancy, is always looking for new evidence for his indictment”], and without participating in an uncompromising initiative like feminist satire, at least as defined by Gloria Kaufman and Mary Blakely: Feminist satire, like other satire, is didactic and often overtly so. No matter how pessimistic it sounds, it seeks to improve us by demonstrating—through devices of irony, of exaggeration, of sarcasm and wit—our human folly. It exposes realities not merely out of love for truth but also out of desire for reform. Whether or not reforms are

Humour and Irony in Québec Women’s Writing    505 achieved, they are implicit deals. In this sense, feminist satire, like feminist humor, is founded on hope and predicated on a stance of nonacceptance. (14)

Monette and LaRue do not fully take on this didactic role. On the contrary, even if satire is supposed to be a lesson (according to Nabokov), their respective satires lack authority and hint at bittersweet and humble defeat, subsumed in the smile they provoke in the reader. If their texts are still authoritative, it is in the critiques they offer. Crimes et chatouillements (2000), by Hélène Monette, is without question the emblematic work of a smile-provoking satirical melancholy. With a title that establishes an intertextual and parodic link with Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, the collection of stories addresses the relationship between women and men in the form of a trial against a hypothetical crime—not a marital crime but a crime of marriage—because the root of the conflict here is the duration of the marriage. On trial are a couple, obviously, and their determination to wipe out love. The detailed table of contents divides the collection into three parts: Presumption, Premeditation, and Hearing Adjourned. Monette uses judicial proceedings as a framework, examining the actions of the two important witnesses in this case, a man and a woman with multiple first names, but who find their respective essences summarized in the names Prince Charming and Princess Plastic, described in the text as “Un gars, une fille”: Un gars qui boit, boit. Une fille qui boit, s’enfarge. Un gars malade est souffrant. Une fille malade est une fille. Une fille triste est psychopathe ou au moins alcoolique et paranoïaque. Un gars a du chagrin, il en a gros sur le cœur. … Un gars parle, une fille fabule. Un gars s’exprime, une fille rush. Un gars discute, une fille se tait. (48) [A guy who drinks, drinks. A girl who drinks, stumbles. A guy who’s sick suffers. A girl who’s sick is a girl. A girls who’s sad is a psychopath or at least alcoholic and paranoid. A guy who’s grieving has a heavy heart. … A guy talks, a girl fantasizes. A guy expresses himself, a girl rushes. A guy discusses, a girl keeps quiet.]

Monette exposes the double standard in her description of biased societal interpretations of male and female behaviour. The alternation from one character to the other supports the narrator’s exasperation with the stereotyping of women in comparison with masculine self-assurance and importance. For her: insignificance, superficiality, mental instability; for him: interesting ideas, real discussion, strength of character. There is one constant throughout all of the stories in this collection: the girl who waits, the girl who suffers. The text “À table” is a particularly good example of this: (19h05) Fondue au fromage, vin blanc, croûtons, salade César avec pour une fois, des anchois et des câpres. (19h30) Les bougies oranges [sic] disposées au centre. (19h35) La vie vaut la peine d’être vécue. … (21h38) Les bougies s’allument comme par désenchantement. (21h41) Le repas se mange tout seul. La solitude se dévore elle-même. Toute seule. Pas besoin d’insister. …

506   Literary Periods and Genres (2h57) Salut mon salaud. (2h58) Salut vieille grébiche. … (10h15) Au petit matin, il faut tout de même gratter le chaudron. (34–35) [(7:05) Cheese fondue, white wine, croutons, Caesar salad for once with anchovies and capers. (7:30) Orange candles arranged at the centre. (7:35) Life is worth living. … (9:38) The candles are lit, as if through disillusionment. (9:41) The meal is eaten alone. Loneliness consumes her. All alone. No need to emphasize it. … (2:57) Hello you bastard. (2:58) Hello you old bag. … (10:15) In the morning, you still have to scrape the pot.]

This satiric portrait of painful emotional fluctuation is a warning to girls. The narrator gauges female and male behaviours, but mostly despairs for the character who is still too often a victim of her feelings. According to Dustin Griffin, because the satirist paints a portrait and does not really tell a story, she is rarely required to complete the picture and offer a meaningful conclusion (97). This work also leaves us to our own thoughts: Do we recognize ourselves in this portrait of a girl in waiting? The response may scare us a little. A similar creation of reader discomfort occurs with La gloire de Cassiodore (2002) by Monique LaRue, which offers a passionate satire of life in a Québec CEGEP.6 By choosing a “cible clairement identifiable” (Duval and Martinez 182) [“clearly identifiable target”], and isolating the object being critiqued to “rassembler en un même tableau une brillante collection de types satiriques” (Hodgart 18) [“group together in one portrait a brilliant collection of satirical characters”], LaRue exposes flaws in the world of education. The effectiveness of her satire is evident in the portraits she paints of her colleagues, but also in what appears in the novel to be her main rhetorical technique: murderous details that expose and denounce characters’ weaknesses: Depuis quelques années, il enseignait alternativement Le Misanthrope et Dom Juan pour déjouer les revendeurs de travaux. Mais avec le “Net” on ne pouvait plus dépister les copieurs. Le système tremblait sur ses assises dans l’indifférence générale. (29) … À ce moment-là il ouvrit le rétroprojecteur pour y placer un transparent reproduisant le portrait du liseur de Chardin qu’il commentait en simplifiant horriblement ce qu’en dit Georges Steiner. Mais il manqua de courage et sauta la question de l’intériorité. Chardin, Steiner, c’était trop pour ce matin. La vie de l’enseignant est faite de ces lâchetés secrètes et de ces victoires sans juges. (43) [For a few years now, he has been teaching alternately Le Misanthrope and Dom Juan to discourage students from selling their work. But with the “Net” you can no longer detect plagiarists. The system was shaken to its foundations in general indifference. … At that moment, he turned on the overhead projector to show a slide with a portrait of de Chardin, whom he was commenting on by horribly simplifying the words of Georges Steiner. But he lacked courage and just skipped the question entirely.

Humour and Irony in Québec Women’s Writing    507 Chardin, Steiner, it was too much for this morning. A teacher’s life is full of this secret cowardice and unacknowledged victories.]

As a CEGEP professor herself, LaRue shows a certain degree of courage by daring to paint such an unflattering picture of the motivations of those who gravitate to this world (motivations that may also be her own, or which we prefer not to see in ourselves). Her position, as both judge and the one being judged, affects the reception of the satire: we still see an important criticism of the education system, but we also feel an acute concern for the future. The victorious distance between the satirist and the object being denounced gives way to a melancholic, powerless observation. This is far from the triumphalism of the satirist and the moralizing attitude of the author who takes it upon herself to critique the shortcomings of the world she observes. This is a more paradoxical satire, according to the meaning Monique Yaari gives to the word, that is, a satire that exhibits a “penchant vers l’irrésolution, le relatif ” [“penchant for indecision, relativity”] likely to offer the reader “une vision ambivalente de l’univers même, une sorte de jugement suspendu sur l’ultime nature des choses” (50–57) [“an ambivalent view of the world, a sort of suspended judgment on the ultimate nature of things”] rather than the sharp judgments that generally characterize satire.

And Now? It remains difficult, if not impossible, to measure the current production of Québec women writers because of the still limited number of works that use humour or irony and because not enough time has passed to make it possible to place works on a continuum. Furthermore, the growing phenomenon of what is now referred to as “Québec Chick Lit” is muddying the waters a bit. This new trend among bestsellers is artificially swelling the ranks of women’s so-called humorous—or even ironic—works because it revives a conservatism that gives the overall impression of a return to stereotypes that women’s ironic writing has avoided until now.7 It seems there is now a division between these popular books and more literary works.8 Written as an alternative to the growing number of Chick Lit novels while at the same time flirting with them, Nadine Bismuth’s Scrapbook is presented as a parody of “autofiction,”9 and raises interesting questions. The novel tells the story of a young woman trying to cope with the challenges of publishing, which is reminiscent of Bismuth herself. The text plays with and revives overused stereotypes of feminine seduction—a short skirt, a sway of the hips—as the narrator is “scotchée devant son ordinateur” (77) [“glued to her computer”] waiting for emails from her secret lover. The strategy here lies in the author’s subtle form of parody: Is this really a story about a woman who lives only for her lover—if so, we are a long way from the fight for women’s independence!—or, on the contrary, is parody being used to point out the absurdity of the situation? Like a tightrope walker, this text plays on the fine line separating the two interpretations. While

508   Literary Periods and Genres it remains a secret, it is precisely this uncertainty that keeps things interesting for the reader. There is cause for concern, however, that the humour, and especially the parody, may miss its target. The reader may only see in this novel a sexier and increasingly popular (not just in Québec) version of the traditional fairy tale, whose interest from an aesthetic or feminist point of view is inversely proportional to the number of pages! A recent novel that has gained attention because of its melancholic humour is MarieRenée Lavoie’s La petite et le vieux (2010), which recounts through the voice of its young narrator the life of a dysfunctional family—that functions nonetheless. A tour de force if there ever was one, this novel succeeds, through humour, in presenting a family that borders on oxymoron: a fully functioning alcoholic father, a non-authoritative matriarchal mother, a rundown neighborhood full of hidden wonders. The melancholy arises from the constant tension between the precarious situation of this Québécois family and the happiness that it succeeds in persevering in spite of adversity. The brutal scene in which the narrator is almost raped gives us a good idea of the melancholic humour that can arise from tragedy in spite of the situation. During the attack, the young girl is “complètement accaparée par mon envie de ne pas mourir. J’avais peur, infiniment peur. C’est tout. Je ne comprenais pas. Mais je n’aurais pas eu moins peur si j’avais compris” (106) [“completely consumed by my desire to live. I was scared, so scared. That is all. I didn’t understand. But I wouldn’t have been less scared if I had understood”]. She is rescued in extremis by a drug-addict neighbour, who attacks the rapist with his rifle, in a scene that propels the tragedy not toward comedy, but at least toward a happy outcome. The young narrator is still lying on the ground: J’étais condamnée à mourir—ou pire, à vivre—fermée comme une chaise pliante. Une forme de suicide par implosion. On avait d’ailleurs commencé à me veiller, j’entendais qu’on mâchouillait des prières. ― … maudit Saint-Cibolaque d’ost … de Christie de Viarge de Saint-Sacra … Le vieux grincheux marmonnait en reprenant son souffle. Il m’a désuicidée. Cette voix éraillée qui écorchait vif tous les saints du ciel m’est apparue à ce moment si belle, si rassurante que j’ai ravalé un sanglot de bonheur. L’histoire finirait bien. Roger était là. 10 (107) [I was going to die—or worse, live—folded up like a garden chair. A form of suicide by implosion. Then he was trying to wake me up, I could hear him muttering prayers. ― … Damn Saint-Cibolaque d’ost … de christie de Viarge de Saint-Sacra … The grumpy old man mumbled while trying to catch his breath. He unsuicided me. This rasping voice that was skinning alive all the saints in heaven sounded so beautiful to me in that moment, so reassuring that I choked back tears of happiness. The story would have a happy ending. Roger was there.]

The happy ending doesn’t change the gravity of the incident: the narrator is scarred for life, after having experienced “une perte pure de naïveté non renouvelable” (110) [“a non-renewable loss of innocence”]. This loss, however, at the heart of all melancholy, is subsumed by a resilience that pervades the novel. Should this be seen as a metaphor

Humour and Irony in Québec Women’s Writing    509 of a woman’s condition in which she finds the strength in these determinants (here the risk of rape that all women fear) to assert herself despite the circumstances? It is hard to say from this one novel. The fact remains that in this case, irony and humour allow the author to address a very serious topic and to demonstrate the omnipresence of sexual assault as a mode of domination. As we have seen, works by Québec women authors who use irony and its variants (humour, parody, satire) may not be common, even today, but they carry a symbolic weight not only because of the themes and strategies they offer, but also because of the challenges they continue to pose to theoretical works on the topic and the pact they establish with their readers. It may be clearer after this overview why there is a lack of references to works by Québec women authors in monographs and anthologies on humour and irony. This account of the paradoxical or tentative forms of irony in Québec women’s writing suggests that these authors do not see themselves as neutral to the so-called “universal” modes of writing associated with humour. It seems that Québec female writers are reluctant to celebrate, even through parody, the founding texts that excluded them, just as they have difficulty granting themselves the authority to use satire, and impose, with the certainty it requires, a critique of society. Humour and irony, and subsequently parody and satire, come from a place of victory. The melancholy that runs through these women’s texts, even those that are comic, indicates an unfinished tentativeness; perhaps it is this paradox that makes irony and its variants in Québec women’s writing so intriguing. Translated by Katelyn Sylvester

Notes 1. In any reflection on irony and humour, we must distinguish between the two terms. I have already (often) given my preferred definition, and I reformulate it here because it remains, in my opinion, relevant: irony is a weapon, it attacks; humour is a shield, it protects. 2. This phenomenon is not limited to Québec women’s writing, but because the stage is a more directly public space than the book, female playwrights occupy a space that, until then, had been reserved for men’s voices. 3. It should be noted, even if only tangentially related to literature, that during the 1980s Suzanne Jacob and Hélène Pedneault, themselves authors, wrote humour columns in the Gazette des femmes and La Vie en rose, respectively. These columns served to compensate for the “bad news” on women’s condition. They are further proof that feminist lucidity often pairs well with humour (Joubert, L’humour 89–139). 4. Ledoux-Beaugrand does not refer specifically to humorous or ironic works, but her assumptions are closely related to my own. 5. Not necessarily by age, but by textual position. 6. The CEGEP only exists in Québec: it is a two-year program between high school and university. The satire remains effective even for the reader who is not familiar with the CEGEP system because it is a teaching establishment, a microcosm of the world of education. 7. These novels essentially tell the story of young women in search of their prince charming; after a series of upsets, the heroine finds the right guy and gets married (or not if she is

510   Literary Periods and Genres “anti-conformist”). You just have to be patient—350 pages, in most cases—for everything to work out. For in-depth analyses of the phenomenon, see Ferriss and Young; Taylor; and C.Smith. 8. I am very aware that this remains open for debate; however, my reading of Chick Lit, until now, leads me to believe that the humour and irony used are not challenging the social order, as is the case in the other works cited. On the contrary, Chick Lit renews this order and presents it as a certainty that we must come to terms with—with humour of course. 9. Autofiction differs from the autobiographical novel in that the author states her intention to tell her story. 10. A note for the uninformed reader that most Québec swear words are inspired by the Catholic Church. The grumpy old man is controlling his “swearing” (viarge instead of vierge, Saint-Cibolaque instead of Saint-Ciboire) because the narrator’s mother had expressly asked him to watch his language in front of her children. Even in this tragic situation, he respects the mother’s wishes, which creates, despite the circumstances, a comic effect.

Works Cited Barreca, Regina, ed. Last Laughs: Perspectives on Women and Comedy. New York: Gordon and Breach, 1988. Print. Bersianik, Louky. L’Euguélionne. Montréal: La Presse, 1976. Print. Bismuth, Nadine. Scrapbook. Montréal: Boréal, 2004. Print. Boucher, Denise. Les fées ont soif. Montréal: Éditions Intermède, 1979. Print. Boulanger, André, and Sylvie Prégent. Eh! qu’mon chum est platte! Montréal:  Leméac, 1989. Print. Bourget, Élizabeth. Bernadette et Juliette ou la vie c’est comme la vaisselle, c’est toujours à recommencer. Montréal: VLB, 1979. Print. Brossard, Nicole. L’Amèr ou le chapitre effrité. Montréal: Typo no 22, 1988. Print. ———. These Our Mothers, or, The Disintegrating Chapter. Trans. Barbara Godard. Toronto: Coach House, 1983. Print. Duval, Sophie, and Marc Martinez. La satire. Paris: Armand Colin, 2000. Print. Ferriss, Suzanne, and Mallory Young. Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print. Ferron, Madeleine. Le chemin des dames. 1977. Montréal: Bibliothèque québécoise, 1994. Print. Les Folles Alliées. Enfin duchesses! Québec: Folles Alliées, 1983. Print. ———. Mademoiselle Autobody. Québec: Folles Alliées, 1985. Print. Godbout, Lucie. Les dessous des Folles Alliées: Un livre affriolant. Montréal: remue-ménage, 1993. Print. Griffin, Dustin. Satire: A Critical Reintroduction. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1994. Print. Hodgart, Matthew. La satire. Trans. Pierre Frédéric. Paris: Hachette, 1969. Print. Hutcheon, Linda. “Ironie et parodie: Stratégie et structure.” Trans. Philippe Hamon. Poétique 36 (1978): 467–77. Print. Jacob, Suzanne. Flore Cocon. Montréal: Parti pris, 1978. Print. ———. Les aventures de Pomme Douly. Montréal: Boréal, 1988. Print. Joubert, Lucie. Le carquois de velours:  L’ironie au féminin dans la littérature québécoise, 1960–1980. Montréal: L’Hexagone, 1998. Print.

Humour and Irony in Québec Women’s Writing    511 ———. L’humour du sexe. Le rire des filles. Montréal: Triptyque, 2001. Print. ———. “La lecture de Maryse:  du portrait social à la prise de parole.” Voix et images 53 (1993): 273–84. Print. Kaufman, Gloria, and Mary Kay Blakely. Pulling Our Own Strings: Feminist Humor and Satire. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980. Print. Lambotte, Marie-Claude. Esthétique de la mélancolie. Paris: Aubier, 1984. Print. Lamy, Suzanne. D’elles. Montréal: L’Hexagone, 1979. Print. LaRue, Monique. La gloire de Cassiodore. Montréal: Boréal, 2002. Print. Lavoie, Marie-Renée. La petite et le vieux. Montréal: XYZ éditeur, 2010. Print. Ledoux-Beaugrand, Evelyne. Imaginaires de la filiation: Héritage et mélancolie dans la littérature contemporaine des femmes, Montréal: XYZ, 2013. Print. Lequin, Lucie. “L’éloge du fortuit dans Les aventures de Pomme Douly.” Voix et Images 62 (1996): 258–65. Print. Mailhot, Michèle. Veuillez agréer. … Montréal: La Presse, 1975. Print. Monette, Hélène. Crimes et chatouillements. Montréal: Boréal Compact, 2000. Print. Noël, Francine. Maryse. Pref. Lise Gauvin. Montréal: VLB, 1983. Print. Proulx, Monique. Sans cœur et sans reproche. Montréal: Québec-Amérique, 1983. Print. ———. Le sexe des étoiles. Montréal: Québec-Amérique, 1987. Print. Queneau, Raymond. Zazie dans le métro. Paris: Gallimard jeunesse, 2008. Print. Saint-Martin, Lori. Contre-voix: Essais de critique au féminin. Québec: Nuit blanche, 1997. Print. Smith, Caroline J. Cosmopolitan Culture and Consumerism in Chick Lit. New York: Routledge, 2008. Print. Smith, Donald, “Louky Bersianik et la mythologie du futur: de la théorie-fiction à l’émergence de la femme positive.” Lettres québécoises (27) 1982: 61–69. Print. Stora-Sandor, Judith. “Flux et reflux: L’humour post-féministe des années 80 dans les romans d’Erica Jong, d’Alison Lurie et de Fay Weldon.” Humoresques 11 (2000): 133–50. Print. ———. L’humour juif dans la littérature: De Job à Woody Allen. Paris: PUF, 1984. Print. ———. “Le rire minoritaire.” Mutations 131 (1992): 172–82. Print. Taylor, Anthea. Single Women in Popular Culture:  The Limits of Postfeminism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Print. Le Théâtre des Cuisines. Môman travaille pas, a trop d’ouvrage! Montréal:  remue-ménage, 1976. Print. Walker, Nancy A. Feminist Alternatives:  Irony and Fantasy in the Contemporary Novel by Women. Jackson: UP of Mississipi, 1990. Print. Yaari, Monique. Ironie paradoxale et ironie poétique: Vers une théorie de l’ironie moderne sur les traces de Gide dans Paludes. Birmingham: Summa Publications, 1988. Print. Zwagerman, Sean. Wit’s End:  Women’s Humor as Rhetorical and Performative Strategy. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2010. Print.

Chapter 27

The Digita l T u rn i n Canadian and Qu é bé c oi s Literat u re Kate Eichhorn

Although it is possible to trace the beginnings of digital literature in Canada and Québec to the early 1960s, official recognition of digital literature happened only recently. In 2011, the Canada Council for the Arts introduced a long-anticipated change to the funding structure of its Writing and Publishing section. Finally, “writing that uses technology to present literature in an innovative manner and (or) explores forms of literature outside the conventions of the novel, short story or poem” would be eligible for funding under the category of “exploratory writing.”1 Previously, writers producing work for the screen rather than the page were eligible to apply for funding from the Canada Council, but only to the extent that they could make a case for their work under another category, such as “media arts.” However, the Canada Council’s somewhat belated decision to recognize digital literature by no means reflects the temporality of Canadian and Québécois contributions to the development of digital literature over the past 50 years. Indeed, some of the world’s earliest experiments in digital literature were carried out by Canadian and Québécois writers, artists, and creative engineers. The arts council’s long-standing oversight was not caused by the absence of a digital literature tradition, but rather by the fact that digital literature is both difficult to define and difficult to contain within a national literary framework. First, there is a problem with the category of “digital literature” itself. Over the past 50 years, what is now most often referred to as “digital literature” has also appeared under various other labels, including computational literature, computer literature, hypertext literature, electronic literature, and new media literature. Beyond the nomenclature, however, there are broader definitional problems. Some critics maintain that digital literature refers to literature that is not only “born digital” but also meant to be read or accessed on a computer or digital device. This definition, however, excludes writing that is computer-generated but still intended or able to circulate in a print-based form. For

The Digital Turn in Canadian and Québécois Literature    513 the purposes of this discussion, three broadly defined iterations of digital literature will be considered. The first category, machine-generated writing, includes forms of writing that use algorithms, databases, search engines, text-generating programs, and translation software to produce texts that may or may not ever be published as printed books. The second category includes screen-based literature, as well as the more recent development of augmented reality works. This category includes texts that can only be read or experienced on the screen or in a virtual environment. The final category includes digital translations and adaptations. This category encompasses an entire range of texts that have been digitized either as part of the development of digital archives and electronic editions or as attempts to reimagine a printed text in an interactive digital format. While these parameters are by no means fixed, given the fact that we are considering what one might describe as digital incunabula, these broad categories at the very least provide a preliminary map of a literary field under development. Complicating the aforementioned definitional problems posed by digital literature is the question of the nation. Canadian literature is typically defined as Canadian on the basis of the author’s citizenship status and/or place of residence. More broadly, Canadian literature is defined as any literature originating in Canada or Québec—a definition that frequently points back to the publishers’ location, as well as the author’s location. In the case of digital literature, this poses another set of problems that are by no means easily resolved. Many of the individuals involved in the production of digital literature are more inclined to identify as programmers or engineers or artists than as authors. Even more challenging, however, is the fact that at least some digital works are “authored” by search engines or computer programs rather than people, making the question of citizenship and residence a moot point. In addition, the production of digital literature frequently entails collaboration, including collaborations across international borders, further complicating attempts to determine precisely where a specific work originates and with whom. Finally, there is the issue of publishing itself. Digital literature is often self-published online and only rarely formally published and distributed by Canada- or Québec-based publishing houses and distributors. For all these reasons, determining which digital works are Canadian per se is a difficult and sometimes impossible task. Ultimately, these dilemmas point to the fact that digital literature not only brings us beyond the book but also beyond the categories we continue to rely on to theorize literature, posing a challenge to the presuppositions at the centre of “Canadian literature” itself.

Machine-Generated Writing When La Machine à écrire appeared in 1964, the result of an experiment carried out by a young Québécois engineer and linguist named Jean Baudot on a newly installed computer at the Université de Montréal, few readers had yet imagined the possibility of computer-generated writing. Indeed, La Machine à écrire was one of the

514   Literary Periods and Genres first electronically produced texts in the world and may indeed have been the first book-length publication of machine-generated poetry. While other early experiments in electronic writing continue to be cited as milestones in the history of digital literature, Baudot’s experiment slipped into obscurity. Perhaps this is simply because La Machine à écrire was entirely before its time—a text barely legible in an era when computers still looked like church organs and occupied the space of an entire room. Or perhaps it is because La Machine à écrire was so clearly the product of an earlier era. Remarkably, La Machine à écrire, a groundbreaking experiment in digital literature published by a Montréal-based press, Les Éditions du jour, was published as a book with uncut pages. For readers fortunate enough to locate a copy of this obscure book today, its uncut pages appear to place it in a much earlier period of book production—an era before the introduction of automated page trimming. Yet, by the time Baudot’s pioneering text was published in the 1960s, the uncut page was already passé. La Machine à écrire’s uncut pages are not the only thing that place the book in the past rather than future. While the book’s existence owes much to Québec’s rapid modernization in the 1960s as the region poured resources into everything new and innovative, the book’s 630-word lexicon was culled from Mon livre de français—a standard issue fourth-grade grammar book in Québec schools, produced by the Frères du Sacré-coeur. The result is a text randomly composed by a computer, yet resonant with the language of a region still structured by constraints imposed by the wilderness, the weather, and the church: La fourrure tirera parfois une ombre. Le plaisir coupable prie, puisque l’assistant ne renferme pas la fourrure facile. Le four veille. Une vache et la tribu bavarde joueront comme le mois. La ville profonde abritera une neige soyeuse. Lorsqu’un bouquet jouit, l’hiver et le pain traversent la cadence malsaine. (Baudot, “From The Writing Machine” 79) [Sometimes fur will have a shadow. Guilty pleasure prays, since the assistant does not conceal the easy fur. The oven ages. A cow and gossiping folk will play like the month. The overwhelming city will shelter silken snow. When a bouquet climaxes, winter and bread traverse unhealthy cadence.]

One of the most unusual features of La Machine à écrire, however, is the inclusion of ten one- to seven-page endorsements praising Baudot’s invention. The endorsers include everyone from 1960s Québécois celebrities, such as folksinger Félix Leclerc, cartoonist Normand Hudon, and philosopher and actor Doris Lussier, to Oulipo founder Raymond Queneau. While all of the endorsers praise Baudot, he himself never claimed to be a poet or even a writer. The publication was issued as a venture “operated and programmed by” Jean Baudot. The author photograph on the inside front cover does not picture Baudot but rather the computer that produced the poems that appear in La Machine à écrire;

The Digital Turn in Canadian and Québécois Literature    515 the caption beneath the photograph reads as follows:  “L’AUTEUR, L’ORDINATEUR ÉLECTRONIQUE LGP-30 QUI COMPOSA LES PHRASES AUTOMATIQUES DE CE RECUEIL. …” (Baudot, La machine) [“The author, the LGP-30 electronic computer who automatically composed the phrases in this collection. …”]. Over 40  years later, two poet/programmers, both born after the publication of Baudot’s pioneering work, published Apostrophe (2006), another groundbreaking experiment in digital literature—once again, authored by, or at least co-authored with, a machine. Apostrophe was produced by the Apostrophe Engine, which was launched on 28 April 2001 on a private web server, where it remained for the first five years. As Wershler and Kennedy explain on the Apostrophe Engine’s now public website, The home page of the Apostrophe Engine site presents the full text of a poem called “apostrophe,” written by Bill in 1993. In this digital version of the poem, each line is now a hyperlink. When a reader/writer clicks on a line, it is submitted to a search engine, which then returns a list of. Web pages, as in any search. The Apostrophe Engine then spawns five virtual robots that work their way through the list, collecting phrases beginning with “you are” and ending in a period. The robots stop after collecting a set number of phrases or working through a limited number of pages, whichever happens first. (Apostrophe Engine)

However, the Apostrophe Engine does more than collect phrases beginning with “you are.” Wershler and Kennedy’s engine is also designed to edit the phrases collected by the robots (e.g., by stripping away most HTML tags) and to compile the phrases into a new poem. While the Apostrophe Engine’s lexicon is infinitely larger than Baudot’s highly restricted lexicon borrowed from the Frères du Sacré-coeur, the poems produced by the Apostrophe Engine are similarly disjunctive and quirky, as exemplified in the following passage: you are bad advice foisted on some love-sick puppy … you are an axiom proved false … you are the cruelest month … you are an error in grammar identified by the latest in word processing technology … you are flown to your destination on Delta Airlines … you are the book in the spirit machine. … (Wershler and Kennedy, “Apostrophe: Working Notes” 54)

This is just one of the thousands, even millions, of variations that the Apostrophe Engine has spawned since its inception. As Wershler and Kennedy explain, “At any given time, the online version of ‘apostrophe’ is potentially as large as the. Web itself ” (Apostrophe Engine). Wershler and Kennedy’s authorless poem, subject to infinite mutation—and the 2006 book featuring poems produced by the engine—proved both groundbreaking and highly controversial. Apostrophe was the first Canadian book of poetry written by a search engine and the first Canadian book of poetry to hold a Creative Commons license. However, when it was submitted to the Canada Council for the Arts

516   Literary Periods and Genres for consideration as a contender for the 2006 Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry, its innovation and machine-generated status proved troubling. As Christian Bök, one of the original members of the poetry jury, explained in an interview, when he discovered that Wershler and Kennedy’s Apostrophe was not among the submissions he had received, he contacted the Canada Council to inquire about the book’s status. According to Bök, the representative at the Canada Council “seemed to be intimating that the office couldn’t decide whether or not the work was actually a legitimate book of poetry” (123). While Bök was later dismissed from the jury, allegedly on the basis of the fact that his inquiry about Apostrophe had demonstrated bias, the question of why Apostrophe never made it onto the eligible book list, despite having been submitted by the publisher, remains unclear. While machine-generated writing and other aspects of digital literature may appear to be the exclusive domain of creative engineers and poets who moonlight as programmers, since the late 1990s a myriad of readily available online tools, from search engines (e.g., Google) to open-access translation programs (e.g., Babelfish) to text-generators (e.g., Lewis LaCook’s Flash Poetry Generator), have enabled a growing contingent of writers to engage with machines. One early example of a book produced using an open-access text generator is Erín Moure’s Pillage Laud. Originally issued in a self-published limited edition of 26 spiral-bound copies in 1997, Pillage Laud is one of Moure’s least-known works. In 2012, however, Pillage Laud was re-released by BookThug’s Department of Reissue, which puts rare and out-of-print books back into circulation. In an interview carried out on the occasion of Pillage Laud’s re-release and first perfect-bound edition, Moure explained her intentions for the experiment and the book. In 1997, Moure discovered Mac Prose, a computer program that randomly generates sentences. Moure wondered what would happen if instead of using the word as the unit of composition, she used the sentence and, more specifically, the sentences generated by a computer program. Pillage Laud, the result of Moure’s foray into computer-generated writing, is, by the poet’s own account, “a pillaging and a praising … it selects from pages of computer generated sentences to create lesbian love poems—or sex poems, depending on what point you are at in the narrative” (Moure, “Book Thug”). Moure’s process is best understood as a collaboration between a poet and a machine. After the machine generated two to three pages of text, she would highlight the phrases that appealed to her and then go back through and compile the phrases in the order they were generated to produce poems as peculiar as they are passionate: Leather between a vocable and my vocation: the poem. If devotion shall verge the obvious vagina to whom is this speaking machine hastening? (Pillage 81)

As Moure insists, collaborating with a machine to produce love or sex poems has its advantages, since “there are no clichés.” As she explains, “to have clichés you need culture, but Mac Prose is a computer program; it has no culture so it is incapable of generating a cliché” (Moure, “Book Thug”).

The Digital Turn in Canadian and Québécois Literature    517 Since the late 1990s, other Canadian and Québécois poets have also turned to readily available text-generating machines to produce new poetic works. While some of the tools deployed by poets, such as Moure’s use of Mac Prose, were programmed with the intention of generating short fictions or poems, other tools include familiar search and translation functions. “The Louise Labé Poems,” which appear in the first section of Angela Carr’s Ropewalk (2006), for example, are composed of lines produced by the automatic translation function on the poet’s web browser. Subject to the constraints imposed by a translating machine, the Petrarchan conventions of romantic love expressed in Labé’s sonnets assume a parodic tone. If, as Moure claims, the machine cannot generate a cliché, can it translate one? Notably, Carr, who is also a translator, turned to the automatic translation function on her web browser for play rather than accuracy, hence inscribing unintended desires into the technology in question. From programmers producing poetry-generating machines to poets redeploying tools designed for information retrieval, generation, and translation, machine-generated literary works raise at least a few analogous questions. Most notably, these texts each call into question who or what the author and translator is, thereby enacting one of the questions at the centre of poststructuralist literary criticism on the level of a radical poetic intervention.

Screen-Based Literatures and Beyond By the late 1960s, a small group of innovative writers were beginning to contemplate how the shift from page to screen might transform poetry. While poet and critic Lionel Kearns’s work in the 1960s was not produced for the screen, as Jim Andrews observes, it was nevertheless “startlingly prescient concerning digital poetics.” Influenced by media theorists, such as Marshall McLuhan and his encounters with an emerging new media arts movement in the 1960s, Kearns’s early works, including “Electropoet” and “Kinetic Poem,” reflect a simultaneous fascination with and skepticism about the new media arts. Despite his skepticism, however, what Kearns realized early on—but did not necessarily execute in his own early poems—was the possibility that sooner or later poems would increasingly be put into motion with the use of new technologies. To encounter a realization of Kearns’s projection for poetry in the late twentieth century, one only needs to move forward to the early 1980s. By then, Kearns’s friend and colleague bpNichol was among the poets beginning to explore the possibility of using computers to animate poems. Nichol’s earliest experiments in digital poetry, carried out on an Apple IIe computer using Apple BASIC programming language, appear in First Screening: Computer Poems (1984), a suite of a dozen programmed “kinetic poems.” Despite the fact that the poems were produced for the screen, in a pre-Internet era, the distribution of Nichol’s poems still required a material analogue—subsequently, First Screening was released in 100 numbered and signed copies and consisted of printed matter and a floppy disk. Nichol’s poems, which may appear deceptively simple to the

518   Literary Periods and Genres modern reader/viewer, included poems in motion, like “SELF-REFLEXIVE NO. 1,” a short poem that features two columns of flashing text—in one, the words “DREAM YOU LOST,” and in the other, “TOSS ALL NIGHT”—somewhat like encountering a Jenny Holzer billboard or text-based projection, but within the intimate confines of one’s own computer screen rather than in a public square or exhibition space, Nichol’s digital poems in motion convey a single message in a condensed textual gesture, in this case a programmed movement. If Nichol’s First Screening remains one of his more obscure collections, it is due to the fact that the Apple IIe would prove far less enduring than the codex. By 1992, less than a decade after First Screening’s release, a student at the University of Calgary was already attempting to put Nichol’s work back into circulation by recreating it in a HyperCard version. By 2004, however, this version of First Screening had also become nearly impossible to access, and efforts were under way to migrate the suite of poems to the web. As the creators of the current version, or the collection of versions available online, observe, “We’ve learned much about bpNichol’s First Screening and how the destiny of digital writing usually remains the responsibility of the digital writers themselves [but] this project illustrates that work can indeed survive the obsolescence of technologies if others are still interested in the work and the artist has provided what is required to implement the work using later technologies” (Andrews et al.). As suggested, digital literature not only has a different temporality and relationship to technologies of reproduction and distribution than literature produced for the page, but it also resists any simple attribution to a single author. First Screening may have been created by Nichol, but today the work—or the ghosts of the work originally produced by Nichol—points to a much larger collaborative effort, one that exceeds the author’s original intentions and any media that Nichol encountered in his lifetime. One might conclude that in the case of digital literature, a work’s survival is contingent on its ability to be rewritten and recoded over time, suggesting that the survival of digital literature is contingent upon the undoing of established notions of authorship, creation, and copyright. To the extent that digital literature is highly collaborative and time sensitive, it may be seen to share more in common with the production of film and multimedia visual art projects than print-based forms of literature. As a result, it is not surprising that while some digital literature is associated with known writers, such as Nichol, the realm of digital literature also overlaps with other artistic media. As an example, one might consider the HorizonZero site, a bilingual online digital arts journal initiated by The Banff New Media Institute in the early 2000s. Indeed, despite the fact that the initiative is more often associated with the development and promotion of new media art, its inaugural issue focused on a single word: “Write.” As project director Daniel Canty mused in his opening contribution in 2002, “Words—bread crumbs for the labyrinth of the Internet—reveal the architectures of online information, but also underlie them: the reading and writing of code are necessary skills for speaking to the machine, and making the machine speak back to us in our own language. … Why then might we not term the Word—in its written incarnation as code, and its

The Digital Turn in Canadian and Québécois Literature    519 reincarnation as multimedia content—the very ‘soul of the. Web’?” Canty’s editorial reminds the reader/viewer that on the web, writing is always present, even if it is not necessarily visible, blurring the line between art, cinema, and writing in ways previously unimagined. As a result, any discussion of Canadian and Québécois digital literature cannot overlook works by new media artists, including works that may be first and foremost intended for circulation in the space of the gallery. Artist Michelle Gay has used her “Poemitron,” which shares a logic similar to Wershler and Kennedy’s Apostrophe Engine, to produce a number of installation works. As Gay explains, “The ‘Poemitron’ functions something like a ‘dialogue-with-computer,’ creating entropic-like texts that begin with a selected passage and morph into something previously unimagined.” Context rather than content or mode of production, then, places Gay’s works in the category of art rather than literature. Similarly, Jason Lewis, a British-born new media artist now based in Montréal, produces text-based works for both galleries and other public spaces. TextOrgan, for example, is a text-generating program developed for use in conjunction with a DJ. As Lewis explains, “By collaborating beforehand, the DJ and the TextOrganist can choose a selection of texts and discuss what sort of mood or themes they want [to] develop in the set. When the set begins, the two embark on a[n]‌improvisational duet, each reacting to what the other is throwing into the media environment. The DJ plays his decks, and the TextOrganist uses the MIDI keyboard and a mouse to play the text” (Lewis, TextOrgan). By contrast, J.R. Carpenter, a Canadian writer and new media artist currently based in the United Kingdom, started her career as a visual artist but subsequently found herself producing works under the category of “electronic literature.” Most of her literary contributions, however, cross literary and artistic boundaries, often bringing text, sound, and images into dialogue on the screen. Further troubling the line between literature and art, print and projection, book and gallery space are Caitlin Fisher’s experiments with augmented reality. Fisher’s early works, including These Waves of Girls—a hypermedia novella that won the Electronic Literature Organization’s 2001 award for fiction—took the form of an interactive screen-based fiction. In These Waves of Girls, the navigation of Fisher’s text- and image-based montages replicates the elusive nature of memory itself. More recently, however, her experiments have moved beyond the screen and back to the physical book, but not to the book as most readers know it. With augmented reality, graphics, sounds, haptics, and smells can be integrated into the narrative as the virtual overlays the real. In Fisher’s augmented reality poem Requiem, digital images and sounds are superimposed. By holding a marked card up to a webcam, readers trigger the narrative’s beginning. Unlike virtual reality, which simply replaces the real with a simulation, in augmented reality real objects, physical actions, and experiences become part of the narrative. In the case of Fisher’s most recent works, then, it is no longer possible to distinguish between literature produced for the page and the screen. In augmented reality poetry and fiction, both page and screen are clearly outdated models for understanding the media through which literary works might be transmitted and encountered.

520   Literary Periods and Genres

Digital Translations and Adaptations In 1992, filmmaker and media artist Adriene Jenik approached Québécoise poet and novelist Nicole Brossard with a proposal to adapt her 1987 novel Le Désert mauve (Mauve Desert) to the screen. The intent was to produce a film capturing the novel’s already deeply cinematic qualities. As the project developed, Jenik found herself engaged in a new media “translation” rather than a cinematic adaptation. Mauve Desert: A CD-ROM Translation was released in 1997 when CD-ROMs were more likely to be associated with Encyclopaedia Britannica than literature. Reviews of Jenik’s media translation of Brossard’s novel, however, emphasized the innovative territory of her new work. In a 1997 review in Fuse Magazine, David McIntosh observes that by adopting the “CD-ROM format,” Jenik’s translation of Brossard’s novel is “neither a game nor a mathematical puzzle, but rather an invitation to navigation and discovery” (38). Significantly, McIntosh makes a strong case for the need to appreciate Jenik’s translation as a distinct art object: “Mauve Desert, the CD-ROM and the novel, constitutes two related and overlapping but distinct art objects which resonate with the poetics and sensuality of translation, expanding the potential for collaborative creative resistance in an age of digital dislocation” (38). As was the case with Nichol’s early digital poems, the screen life of Jenik’s media translation of Brossard’s novel would prove short-lived. Indeed, by the early years of the new millennium, Jenik’s translation of Brossard’s novel, which was self-published and designed for a 1997 Mac operating system, had already become obsolete. Jenik’s pioneering work is now accessible only to the extent that one can find an appropriate operating system from the era in which the work was produced—a condition that once again highlights the surprisingly ephemeral nature of digital literature and reminds us that such works may be more resonant with the repertoire of live performance than the imagined durability of inscription and the archive. The same year that Jenik released her digital translation of Mauve Desert, Brossard’s English-language publisher, Coach House Books, initiated an ambitious digitization project. As part of the press’s resurrection, Coach House Books proposed to put its entire frontlist online for free. The initiative, led by poet, publisher, and web developer Damian Lopes, unfolded over a five-year period and eventually resulted in an archive of over 70 online books, covering every title published by the press between 1997 and 2002. While some of these online books function as mirrors of their printed counterparts, others circulated as distinct literary works or were designed exclusively for the web. Mark Sutherland’s Code X, for example, which promises to transform your computer into a “sound poetry organ,” is an interactive visual and sound experiment steered by the reader. First conceptualized in 1999, Code X was published in CD ROM format in 2002, then launched as an interactive website in 2009 (accessible through the Coach House Books Online Archives). In addition to digitizing its frontlist, Coach House Books created digital versions of some of its most well-known past publications, including Steve

The Digital Turn in Canadian and Québécois Literature    521 McCaffery’s 1970 Carnival Panel I and Carnival Panel II. Originally designed as a book that must be destroyed to be read (in the first panel, McCaffery offers the following instructions to his readers: “In order to destroy this book please tear each page carefully along the perforation”), the electronic versions of Carnival offered the reader an opportunity to rediscover McCaffery’s book, now a valued antiquarian find, but without facing the readers’ original dilemma—to destroy the book and experience the book in its complete form, or to keep the book intact and only experience its individual pages. In addition to providing a way to experience Carnival in all its intended iterations, the site included drafts and outtakes from the original work, never before put into public circulation, and hence offered readers both a digital translation and an archive of the book’s development.2 In the end, Coach House Books’ ambitious digitization project would prove unsustainable. While the Canada Council briefly provided funds for publishers to engage in such initiatives, low interest from other publishers resulted in the termination of the program. Ironically, less than a decade later, the practice of placing at least part of a press’s frontlist online has become a standard practice, even for small publishers. The innovation displayed in Coach House Books’ early experiment, however, is not necessarily a guiding principle for most of these initiatives, which are designed to respond to a growing demand for books readable on digital devices, such as Kindles, rather than to a genuine desire to reimagine and reinvigorate the reading experience by translating printed books to the screen. Nevertheless, Coach House Books’ online archive of its pioneering digitization project serves as a reminder of some of the forms that digital books could have taken had their development remained in the hands of artists, writers, and creative engineers, rather than the commercial book industry.

Reviews and Little Magazines in the Age of Social Media In addition to the proliferation of machine-generated literature, screen-based literature, and digital translations, the digital turn has also had a profound effect on review culture and the little magazine. While personal websites and blogs and more recently social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, were initially ignored as legitimate review and distribution venues, the impact of these social media platforms is now difficult to ignore. Among other impacts, the use of social media has resulted in an unprecedented internationalizing of Canadian and Québécois literatures. After all, while even established English-language literary journals, such as Open Letter or the Capilano Review, have only ever gained limited circulation outside Canada, many author blogs and online review venues with a Canadian connection have had audiences outside Canada from the outset.

522   Literary Periods and Genres Sina Queyras started Lemon Hound, a blog and online review site, in 2005. For the next decade, the blog featured writing and reviews by both Canadian and US writers. Joyland: A Hub for Short Fiction, the brainchild of Brian Joseph Davis and Emily Schultz, was incubated in Toronto but only fully realized after the writers moved to New York. Canadian writers and their works are highly visible on Joyland, but only as much as writers and works from other locations. Indeed, contributions to the site are organized more or less by point of geographic origin, but on Joyland, Toronto, New York, Vancouver, San Francisco, and Montreal are all given equal billing. Compared to print-based literary magazines, whose titles frequently reference specific Canadian geographies or stereotypical aspects of the Canadian landscape (e.g., The Capilano Review, Prairie Fire, Fiddlehead, Lichen, and so on), Joyland appears to serve as a gesture beyond both the constraints of the nation and its pastoral trappings—the site’s starting place is not the nation, after all, but a series of urban locations across North America. Alongside the unbinding of the review and literary journal from specific “Canadian institutions,” such as the Globe and Mail and CBC, social media platforms enable writers to forge literary communities based on aesthetics rather than geography. Today, a poet from Toronto may feel more deeply connected to writers in New York or San Francisco than to poets hanging out at the city’s long-standing Artbar Reading Series in Toronto. Of course, just as certain digital literary works have already proven far more ephemeral than anticipated—often becoming inaccessible before they are even widely known—it is difficult to anticipate how enduring these digital footprints of literary production and circulation will prove in the long term, and consequently, what impact they will have on the type of critical and historical literary criticism generated about Canadian and Québécois literatures, writers, and publishers in the twenty-first century.

Notes 1. Full details appear on the Canada Council for the Arts website under the guidelines for Grants for Professional Writers (http://www.canadacouncil.ca/en/writing-andpublishing/find-grants-and-prizes/grants/grants-for-professional-writers-creativewriting). 2. The electronic version of Steve McCaffery’s Carnival is available on the Coach House Books Online Editions Archive, http://archives.chbooks.com/online_books/carnival/ index.html.

Works Cited Andrews, Jim. “About Lionel.” On Lionel Kearns. 2004. http://www.vispo.com/kearns/about. htm. Web. Accessed 10 Feb. 2014. ———, et al. “Introduction.” First Screening: Computer Poems, bpNichol, 1984. Mar. 2007. http:// vispo.com/bp/introduction.htm. Web. Accessed 10 Feb. 2014.

The Digital Turn in Canadian and Québécois Literature    523 The Apostrophe Engine. Operated by Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler. Intelligent Machines Co-Operative. http://www.apostropheengine.ca; http://web.archive.org/ web/20071103010843/http://www.apostropheengine.ca/howitworks.php. Web. Accessed 10 Feb. 2014. Baudot, Jean. La machine à écrire. Montréal: Les Éditions du Jour, 1964. Print. ———. “From The Writing Machine.” Trans. Angela Carr. Capilano Review 3.20 (2013): 78–83. Print. Bök, Christian. “The Politics of Poetics:  Christian Bök on Success, Recognition, Jury Duty, and the Governor General’s Awards.” Interview by Owen Percy. Open Letter 13.3 (2007): 113–31. Print. Canada Council for the Arts. “Grants for Professional Writers: Creative Writers.” http://canadacouncil.ca/council/grants/find-a-grant/grants/grants-for-professional-writers-creativewriting. Web. Accessed 5 May 2015. Canty, Daniel. “Binomes Read/Write.” HorizonZero 1 (August 2002). http://www.horizonzero. ca/textsite/write.php?tlang=0&is=1&file=0. Web. Accessed 10 Feb. 2014. Carpenter, J.R. Artist website. Luckysoap & Co. http://luckysoap.com. Web. Accessed 10 Feb. 2014. Carr, Angela. Ropewalk. Montreal: Snare Books, 2006. Print. Coach House Books. Online Editions. http://www.chbooks.com/online. Web. Accessed 10 Feb. 2014. Gay, Michelle. “The Poemitron Artware Description.” Artist website. http://www.michellegay. com/PDF/MGay_poemitronInfo_2009.pdf. Web. Accessed 10 Feb. 2014. Fisher, Caitlin. These Waves of Girls. 2001. http://www.yorku.ca/caitlin/waves. Web. Accessed 10 Feb. 2014. Jenik, Adriene. Mauve Desert: A CD-ROM Translation (1992–1997). http://www.adrienejenik. net/mauvedesert.html. Web. Accessed 10 Feb. 2014. Joyland:  A  Hub for Short Fiction. Online journal. http://www.joylandmagazine.com. Web. Accessed 10 Feb. 2014. Lemon Hound. Blog. http://lemonhound.com. Web. Accessed 10 Feb. 2014. Lewis, Jason. TextOrgan. http://www.thethoughtshop.com/works/torgan/torgan.htm. Web. Accessed 10 Feb. 2014. McCaffery, Steve. Carnival, First Panel, 1967–1970. Toronto: Coach House, 1970. Print. ———. Carnival. Coach House Books Online Editions Archive. http://archives.chbooks.com/ online_books/carnival/index.html. Web. Accessed 10 Feb. 2014. McIntosh, David. “Driving Mauve Desert:  Borrowing, Translation, and Navigation in Hypertext.” Fuse Magazine 20.5 (Nov. 1997): 34–38. Print. Moure, Erín. “The BookThug Interview: Erín Moure, Author of Pillage Laud.” BookThug. 2011. http://www.bookthug.ca/erin-moure-interview.php. Web. Accessed 10 Feb. 2014. ———. Pillage Laud. Toronto: Moveable Type, 1999. Print. Sutherland, W. Mark. Code X. Coach House Books Online Editions Archive. http://archives. chbooks.com/online_books/code_x/ . Web. Accessed 6 May 2015. Wershler-Henry, Darren, and Bill Kennedy. “Apostrophe: Working Notes, v. 3. October 2001.” UbuWeb, “Object 10:  CyberPoetics.” Winter 2002. 49–60. http://www.ubu.com/papers/ object.html. Web. Accessed 10 Feb. 2014. ———. Apostrophe. Toronto: ECW P, 2006. Print.

Pa rt  I V

I N T R A- NAT IONA L P E R SP E C T I V E S A N D T R A DI T ION S

Chapter 28

Diasp oric Ci t i z e nsh i p and De-Format i ons of Citizensh i p Lily Cho

Citizenship does not come from nowhere, and yet its process of emergence remains strangely obscure. Diaspora makes this process visible. Specifically, it reminds us that there is a process of becoming attendant upon citizenship. As I will discuss through Étienne Balibar’s concept of the “citizen subject,” an inquiry into the formation of citizenship necessarily requires an engagement with the contradictions of citizenship’s promise of equality and its failure to fulfill that promise. Diasporic literature illuminates the uneasy and contradictory processes of citizenship’s formation. I  have previously argued that diasporic citizenship is a mode of reading that demands a recognition of the dissonance between diaspora and citizenship, which reveals some contradictions in Canadian literature.1 In this chapter, I will look at the constitution of this dissonance in terms of the conditions of citizenship’s emergence. I suggest that diaspora de-forms citizenship by foregrounding, and complicating, citizenship’s emergence. Diasporic literature turns the discussion of the relationship between literature and citizenship away from pedagogical questions and toward those of the formation of citizenship itself. The connection between Canadian literature and citizenship has been understood largely as a pedagogical question. Within this understanding, literature can represent a nation, and one learns to be a citizen partly through engagement with a national literature. Donna Pennee’s essay “Literary Citizenship” has been particularly important for clarifying the pedagogical function of Canadian literature for citizenship. In this essay, Pennee suggests: national literary studies, understood as a process, provide for a kind of literary citizenship as a form of cultural and civic participation and cultural and civic legitimation in the social imaginary. Literary studies organized under the rubric of the

528    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions national create a space to ask civic questions of state policies and inherited notions of nationalism. (81)

For Pennee, the study of national literature can provide the ground for questioning the nation itself. In particular, such a study could bring to light the colonial histories attendant upon the establishment of the nation. Indeed, Pennee foregrounds issues of colonialism and postcolonialism in her consideration of pedagogy, national literature, and citizenship. She identifies postcolonialism as a “methodological hinge” that opens up the relation between national literature and citizenship: National literary cultural expression has been both a source of and a response to colonization: as such, postcolonial literary studies are necessarily a methodological hinge between what is possibly the end of a malign cultural nationalism and the beginning of a perhaps more benign globalization. This methodological hinge opens a door onto the possibility that citizenship can be critically acculturated in a university literature classroom. (76)

For Pennee, postcolonial literary studies refuses the nationalism that might be attendant upon studying Canadian literature and opens up the possibility of the university classroom as a space where students learn to engage critically with the idea of Canadian citizenship. I want to pause on Pennee’s emphasis on the adverb critically in her description of being “acculturated” in the classroom. Pennee’s reliance on this descriptor gets to the heart of the mandate of many university literature classrooms. Professors of literature do not simply want students to learn by rote. The university literature classroom is not a place for mechanical or habitual learning. It is a place for active, questioning, and restless engagement. Pennee does not suggest that students will become assimilated into Canadian citizenship by studying Canadian literature. The Canadian literary classroom is nothing like the controversial study guide for new Canadian citizens, Discover Canada: The Rights and Responsibilities of Citizenship, produced by the Department of Citizenship and Immigration. New citizens must memorize material and are examined on their knowledge of the country as it is represented in the guide.2 Thus, Pennee qualifies the acculturation that would happen in a university classroom. For her, “citizenship can be critically acculturated” (76). In part, Pennee draws her emphasis on the “critical” from Smaro Kamboureli’s and Len Findlay’s work on the idea of “critical citizenship”: Literary studies that continue to work in methodologically specific ways with the category of the national offer forms of political and historical knowledge as forms of civic education; they offer a means of developing what several postcolonial literary scholars, among them Smaro Kamboureli and Len Findlay, have been calling a critical citizenship, produced through a critical comparative approach to both minoritized and majoritized discourses within the Canadian nation-state. (Pennee 77–78)

Diasporic Citizenship and De-Formations of Citizenship    529 This emphasis on the critical reveals an uneasiness with citizenship itself. One does not learn to be a citizen. One learns to be critical, and to be a critical citizen. This emphasis on the critical suggests that the de facto position of the citizen might be an unquestioning, indeed, uncritical one. Citizenship, unqualified, might actually work against the kind of spirited engagement that Pennee, Kamboureli, and Findlay call for. This uneasiness with unqualified citizenship lies in the way in which citizenship itself does not seem to be enough. Citizenship is problematic. One might already be a citizen of a particular nation, but to simply stop there might lead to merely accepting—or, in Pennee’s phrasing, becoming acculturated—to the nation. There is a sense that one must learn how to be a critical citizen even, or especially, when one is already a citizen. Findlay argues, Engaged and critical citizenship should start inside universities but not stop there or prove separable from the rest of life. The critical citizenry that looks to the political and cultural history of English as a world language and “family” of literatures must see or be taught to see in this living archive, and in its old and new technological modalities and mediations, the endlessly artful masking of “the violence of production” (Caygill 389), the endlessly adroit yet oppressive management of the meanings of class, race, and gender, the endless silencing and mockery imposed or undertaken in the name of humane ideals and moral universals. (322–23)

Findlay suggests that critical citizenship does indeed have a starting point: the university classroom. Perhaps it may even begin before that, but he nonetheless makes a clear argument for the necessary role of education in the process of becoming a critical citizen. Similarly, Pennee emphasizes critical citizenship as a process: “it’s how we get from identity to identifying with that is crucial, from a state of being to a process of being and of becoming, a process that includes the processes of being citizens, of being interventionist diplomats” (80). Pennee’s suggestion that critical citizens are like “interventionist diplomats” signals the importance of moving from simply being a citizen to that of becoming. She suggests that engagement with Canadian literature should destabilize the certainties of nation and citizenship. To move from a state of being a citizen to one of becoming involves, at some level, unlearning citizenship. That is, critical citizenship demands unlearning that which consolidates the citizen, and undoing the work of that consolidation. This undoing is the objective when Findlay asks critical citizens to intervene against “the endless silencing and mockery imposed or undertaken in the name of humane ideals and moral universals” (325); or when Kamboureli proposes that “[n]‌egative pedagogy thematizes not only the object of knowledge, but also the method of learning and unlearning inherited truths” (25); or when Pennee suggests that “it is imperative that we are acculturated by the literature and not the other way around” (82). These exhortations suggest that there is something coercive or oppressive about citizenship that critical citizenship must undo. In addition to the pedagogical, another major direction in the discussions of the relationship between literature and citizenship emerges in what I think of as a turn to

530    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions cultural citizenship in recent Canadian literary criticism. The term “cultural citizenship” comes from anthropology and Renato Rosaldo’s thinking on US Chicano communities and, not coincidentally, from issues of pedagogy. Noting that the term “cultural citizenship” is a “deliberate oxymoron,” Rosaldo nonetheless proposes: Cultural citizenship refers to the right to be different and to belong in a participatory democratic sense. It claims that, in a democracy, social justice calls for equity among all citizens, even when such differences as race, religion, class, gender, or sexual orientation potentially could be used to make certain peoples less equal or inferior to others. (402)

Rosaldo’s discussion of cultural citizenship focuses on the pressure that culture puts on citizenship, and the ways in which culture works against citizenship. In Canadian literary criticism, the discussion of cultural citizenship examines the ways in which Canadian literary texts engage in this cultural work of contesting citizenship. Aloys Fleischmann and Nancy van Styvendale suggest that there are “narratives of citizenship” that could “be understood as political formations” (xvi). For example, Diana Brydon argues that Dionne Brand practices an “affective citizenship” in Inventory that “is attentive to embodied political subjects and capable of challenging dominant imaginaries on a terrain that they have successfully claimed as their own: the emotional registers of the political” (“Dionne” 991). Brydon’s analysis situates cultural interventions—in this case, Brand’s poetry—as a form of articulating, or re-articulating, citizenship. For example, Brydon suggests that Brand “rearticulates local, national, and global citizenship through the kind of dissonant, non-identitarian, ‘comprehensive and planetary humanism’ ” (999). Similarly, Lianne Moyes’s discussion of Erín Moure’s O Cidadán posits that literature can contribute to “the project of reconceptualizing and reworking citizenship” (111). For Moyes, O Cidadán engages in “citizenship as acts of resistance, an act of border-crossing” (127). Moyes argues that this resistance can be read in terms of Moure’s “refusing the prevailing codes of intelligibility that legitimize and regulate” citizenship in order to “[l]‌ocat[e] the affect of citizenship in the relations between citizens rather than the relations between citizen and state” (128). Working partly through Judith Butler’s thinking on materiality, Moyes carefully illustrates the ways in which Moure enables citizenship to materialize differently. For Moyes, Moure tells us a different story of citizenship and how it matters. Moyes’s analysis reverberates with David Chariandy’s argument for the ways in which Black Canadian writers “re-script their belonging as implied or directly represented by the official discourses and institutions of the nation-state” (329). Chariandy suggests that Black Canadian literature participates in a “re-storying” of citizenship that highlights the role of belonging in relation to issues of citizenship (329). Again, in this examination, literature is a cultural corrective to citizenship. Although not explicitly concerned with pedagogy, these discussions of cultural citizenship, the re-scripting or re-storying of citizenship, focus on subject formation and, specifically, the formation of national subjects. I  noted that the term “cultural

Diasporic Citizenship and De-Formations of Citizenship    531 citizenship” comes from an anthropological discussion on pedagogy partly because discussions of cultural citizenship, in their emphasis on the formation of national subjects, carry some trace of this pedagogical impulse. Fleischmann and van Styvendale make this concern with subject formation explicit when they suggest: An engaged “literary citizen” should be aware that the act of reading is dually constitutive: the subject is brought into being as citizen through the codes this subject encounters and apprehends; yet at the same time, the act of reading brings the subject into being as a reader. (xvii)

And then again, with phrasing that echoes Pennee and Findlay, Fleischmann and van Styvendale write:  “We ask how these [narratives of citizenship] make and remake the nation-state and its (non-)citizens” (xv). In their explorations of the making and unmaking of citizenship, both the pedagogical aspect of citizenship and literature and the cultural one turn upon some discussion of the formation of national subjects. Critical citizenship breaks apart the oppressions of citizenship and remakes it in order to produce what Findlay terms “forms of useful knowledge,” which, ideally, will allow for a “lifetime of engaged and critical citizenship and development of new solidarities” (322). However, this call for critical citizenship situates citizenship as a state that already exists. One can undo or unmake the citizen, but one is always already a citizen. Non-citizens might be critical of citizenship, they might eventually become citizens, but they cannot unmake or undo a state that they do not yet inhabit. But what comes before the citizen? What precedes citizenship? The process of citizenship’s emergence is not at all obvious. Formal or legal citizenship may seem clear-cut. One is, or is not, a citizen of a particular nation, and despite the loosening of the term— “citizens” of a hockey team or “unbounded citizenship”—I am in agreement with Brydon and note that it is still very much a term that needs to be understood in connection with the nation.3 While citizenship is very much bound to the nation-state, the process of becoming a citizen is overlaid with the iconography of birth. One acquires citizenship through birthplace (jus soli), the nationality of one’s parents (jus sanguinis), or naturalization, which, as Ayelet Shachar notes, also “reflects the iconography of lineage” and derives etymologically from the nasci, Latin for “to be born” (128–29). Does this iconography suggest that citizenship is preceded by some sort of fetal or nascent state of being? Perhaps not. But the persistence of this iconography should not be overlooked, and it indicates the role of the family in the formation of citizenship. In thinking about what comes before the citizen, I want to differentiate between the acquisition of citizenship by an individual subject and the emergence of citizenship within a nation-state. In the preceding discussions of critical citizenship, the emphasis is on the individual’s engagement with the world he or she inhabits. In turning to the emergence of citizenship itself, I suggest an engagement with the formation of citizenship. Instead of examining the formation of national subjects, I am interested in the formation of citizenship itself. Balibar’s thinking is particularly useful here. In “Citizen Subject,” Balibar responds to a question posed by Jean-Luc Nancy: Who comes after the

532    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions subject? As Balibar points out, the form of Nancy’s question carefully forces his respondents to eliminate the possibility of a non-subject as an answer. In asking who, not what, comes after the subject, Nancy asks his respondents (Balibar among them) to consider who, and not what, the subject is. “The question is not about the subjectum but about the subjectus, he who is subjected” (Balibar 38). Here, Balibar recalls a crucial doubleness in the idea of the subject that has been lost in translation from Latin to French (and English). The contemporary use of the word subject (or sujet) collapses two distinct entities in Latin: the subjectum and the subjectus. The former is substantive and the latter adjectival. The former indicates the representation of the people, and the latter refers to being subjected. Balibar demonstrates that recovering this difference enables an understanding of the antinomies of freedom and equality in contemporary citizenship: The idea of the rights of the citizen, at the very moment of his emergence, thus institutes an historical figure that is no longer the subjectus, and not yet the subjectum. But from the beginning, in the way it is formulated and put into practice, this figure exceeds its own institution. (46)

Prior to the French Republic’s 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, citizens were subjects of the king of France. They were subjectus. With the rise of the Republic, the “citizen is the subject, the citizen is always a supposed subject” (Balibar 45). Balibar calls this transition the “citizen’s becoming-a-subject (devenir-sujet)” (45). The citizen is not yet subjectum. This process of becoming clarifies the contradictions of citizenship (man versus citizen, subject of legislative power versus legislative subject, and so on). Balibar’s “devenir-sujet” reveals the issue of equality as a central and unresolved problem for citizenship. Moving through an examination of the contradictions of the 1789 Declaration, Balibar highlights the tensions between formal or symbolic equality, in which man “is reputed to be equivalent to every individual in his capacity as citizen,” and “real” equality, in which “citizenship will not exist unless the conditions of all individuals are equal, or at least equivalent” (46). Thus, the devenir-sujet points to this continuing tension between reputed equality and the conditions for that equality. Balibar’s focus on becoming, and the unfinished process of becoming because of the inequalities of citizenship, illuminates the way in which the formation of citizenship is bound to issues of subjectivity and equality. For Balibar, the citizen comes after the subject. But the subject is not yet a citizen. In the spirit of the exchange between Balibar and Nancy, let me ask, who comes before citizenship? And, specifically, who comes before Canadian citizenship? Balibar’s thinking suggests an incomplete process of subject formation in relation to citizenship. While the conditions of inequality are still present (and they are), we are in the realm of the devenir-suject. We are between subjectus and subjectum. The preceding discussion of critical citizenship and cultural citizenship takes the fact of citizenship as a given. However, as Balibar’s intervention suggests, recovering the unfinished

Diasporic Citizenship and De-Formations of Citizenship    533 process of subject formation shows that it is more productive to think of citizenship as incomplete. To think about who comes before citizenship is to think about this incompleteness. I want to suggest that it is not just any subject, but rather the diasporic subject who comes before citizenship. The citizen comes after the subject only when the subject has become subjectum—when the conditions for equality have been achieved. But, as Engin Isin observes, citizenship is dependent upon inequality: “citizenship and its alterity always emerged simultaneously in a dialogical manner and constituted each other. Women were not simply excluded from ancient Greek citizenship, but were constituted by it. Similarly, slaves were not simply excluded from citizenship, but made citizenship possible by their very formation” (4). Given this dependency upon inequality, and given Balibar’s not unreasonable point that citizenship can only be achieved when the conditions for equality have been established, citizenship is always in the process of de-formation. Every time citizenship comes close to formation, it is de-formed by the tensions of inequality, and of the incomplete transformation from subjectus to subjectum. The question of who comes before citizenship is thus one that points to the perpetual process of de-formation that citizenship undergoes. Every claim to its completion is also a claim that depends upon exclusion and inequality. Diaspora illuminates the complexity of this process of citizenship’s emergence. It does not take citizenship’s emergence for granted. On the contrary, it highlights the problems attendant upon its emergence. The fact of diaspora puts into question the completeness of citizenship. Diaspora suggests that the connection to an “elsewhere” is ever present, even when citizenship might have seemingly been achieved. Diaspora tears away at citizenship. Achieving citizenship should be the culmination of the consolidation of national subjectivity, but diaspora puts that consolidation into question. The diasporic subject comes before citizenship not because Canada is a nation of immigrants (a platitude that often serves to erase the unequal conditions of arrival) but because diasporic subjects perfectly inhabit that space between subjectus and subjectum. They are devenir-sujet. They are no longer formally subjected to the power of the nations from which they have departed, but they are also not yet representative of the Canadian people. The reminders of their incomplete becoming are littered everywhere in everyday forms of discrimination. For example, recent headlines in the national media serve as potent reminders of the ways in which Chinese Canadians are not yet subjectum. On 13 July 2011 the Globe and Mail published an article with the headline, “Chinese-Canadians Reluctant to Join Military, Study Finds.” Steve Chase, the author of the article, expounds on a study by the Canadian Department of National Defence lamenting the difficulty of recruiting Chinese Canadians into military service. Chase points out that Chinese Canadians are the fastest growing visible minority group in Canada and yet, he suggests, they are disproportionately shunning participation in the Canadian military. Lest there be any confusion about the relationship between the military and citizenship, only the day before, the Globe published an opinion piece by David Bercuson, the director of the Centre for Strategic and Military Studies at the University of Calgary, entitled “The

534    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions Military Is a Central Actor in Canada’s Story.” He opens by clearly linking the participation and support for citizenship and the Canadian Forces:  It is entirely appropriate that the Canadian military play an important role in Canadian citizenship ceremonies and in all other manner of public celebrations in Canada from the welcome of foreign leaders, to major national sports celebrations, and even to provincial and civic ceremonious occasions. Such participation not only reflects historical reality, it also signifies that the Canadian Forces are a central institution of Canadian government, because the defence of the nation is key to both Canadian governance and independence.

Taken together, these articles strongly suggest that Chinese Canadians are somehow singularly lacking in a sense of patriotic duty. That is, their lack of participation in this central institution of Canadian governance signals their failure as citizens. Similarly, in November 2010, Maclean’s published an article entitled “Too Asian?” subsequently retitled as “The Enrollment Controversy,” which suggested that Canadian universities, and the University of Toronto in particular, might be enrolling too many Asian-Canadian students, thus allowing for a kind of ethnic ghettoization to become established on university campuses: “Diversity has enriched these schools, but it has also put them at risk of being increasingly fractured along ethnic lines. It’s a superficial form of multiculturalism that is expressed in the main through segregated, self-selecting, discrete communities” (Findlay and Kohler 80). While these instances are symptomatic of the dominant culture’s unease with cultural difference and citizenship, Canadian diasporic literature offers a glimpse into the ways in which diaspora de-forms citizenship. One way it does so is by attending to that fundamental unit of citizenship, the family. In her writing on citizenship, Ayelet Shachar notes that the iconography of birth, and thus familial relation, overlays all contemporary forms of citizenship acquisition. Recall that in Canada one can become a citizen by birth on Canadian soil (jus soli), by birth to Canadian parents (jus sanguinis), or through naturalization, which, as I have already noted, is itself grounded in metaphors of birth. In order to understand the power of the relationship between birth, family, and citizenship, it is helpful to look at the origins of jus soli citizenship. Examining jus soli citizenship requires a turn to an early seventeenth-century British legal case known as Calvin’s Case. It is widely recognized that Calvin’s Case is the earliest, most influential theoretical articulation by an English court of what came to be known as the common-law jus soli principle, according to which a person’s membership status was vested at birth and was based on place of birth. (Shachar 114)

Decided in 1608, the case involved a young Scottish child by the name of Robert Calvin. He had a claim to a landed estate in London. However, if he were to be classified as “alien born,” he would have lost his claim to the estate. The court, which included “all the important English judges of the day,” decided in Calvin’s favour (Shachar 114). They

Diasporic Citizenship and De-Formations of Citizenship    535 did so because, the justices reasoned, Robert Calvin was born within the King’s realm, as the King’s dominion extended to Scotland at the time of Calvin’s birth. Citing the Calvin decision, Shachar observes: The jus soli principle finds its historical roots in the feudal system of medieval England, in which “ligeance” and “true and faithful obedience” to the sovereign were owed by a subject from birth: “for as soon as he is born he oweth by birth-right ligeance and obedience to his Sovereign.” (114)

Contemporary citizenship is rooted in a form of subjectivity that is clearly subjectus, or being subject to a sovereign power. Shachar observes that contemporary citizenship demands allegiance to the state rather than to the sovereign: “In its modern guise, jus soli no longer refers to the connection between a monarch and his or her subjects. Instead, it refers to the political relationship between governments and their citizens” (115). Even though contemporary citizenship does not seem to emphasize subjectivity under a monarchical power, given that Canada is a constitutional monarchy, I would suggest that this relationship of subjection remains in place. Indeed, as a recent case in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice affirms, Canadian citizenship still hinges upon allegiance to the British monarchy. In McAteer et al. v. Attorney General of Canada, Justice Morgan dismissed an application by Michael McAteer, Simone E.A. Topey, and Dror Bar-Natan that claimed the oath of citizenship that new citizens must take violates their rights to freedom of expression, religion, and equality rights as protected by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The oath makes clear the necessity of ligeance: I swear (or affirm) that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, Queen of Canada, Her Heirs and Successors, and that I will faithfully observe the laws of Canada and fulfill my duties as a Canadian citizen.

Even though governments may not explicitly call for ligeance and true and faithful obedience, as the Canadian oath of citizenship reveals, Canadian citizens are still very much subjectus. Keeping in mind that this is an oath required of new—that is, naturalized—citizens, it becomes even clearer how diaspora—people who come from elsewhere and must be “reborn” into Canada—illuminates the incomplete process of subject formation in contemporary citizenship. In being born, or reborn, into citizenship, the importance of the family unit comes into particular relief. One can be born into citizenship by virtue of blood and soil, or reborn by virtue of symbolic blood and soil (the ritual of the oath and the experience of being “landed”). Diasporic literature throws the family into question and puts it under pressure again and again. For example, there are paper families—families living under assumed identities using paper documents—in the writing of Wayson Choy’s Paper Shadows and Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill. Relatedly, both Shani Mootoo’s Valmiki’s Daughter and Shyam Selvadurai’s The Hungry Ghosts take up the intersection of queer

536    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions desire and the family by calling for a more expansive understanding of the idea of family. Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For and David Chariandy’s Soucouyant attend to the making and unmaking of family through the complications of memory and the space of the city. Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl and Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring follow the transformation of the diasporic family by remaking myth. These works are not necessarily the basis for the consolidation of the national subject. On the contrary, they form the basis for its de-formation. Diasporic Canadian literature does not undo citizenship. Rather, it actively engages with it through explicit references to state legislation and through a rigorous outlining of the costs of exclusion and assimilation. In using the hyphenated term de-form, I want to emphasize how diasporic literature underscores the unfinished process of citizenship. Citizenship is not a fait accompli. It is fraught with the tensions of the desire for equality and the reality of inequality that Balibar sees as being at the centre of the subject’s incomplete transformation from subjectus to subjectum. Moreover, in de-forming citizenship, these writers recollect the potential monstrosity of the “anti-human” that, as Susan Maslan argues, lies at the inception of contemporary citizenship. Maslan proposes that modern citizenship attempts to resolve a foundational divide between the “human” and the “citizen” upon which the early modern models of citizenship depend: “If we think that ‘human’ and ‘citizen’ are or should be corresponding and harmoniously continuous categories it is because we think in the wake of the 1789 Déclaration. In the early modern political imagination, to be a citizen meant to cease to be human” (372). To cease to be human is to be non-human. If citizenship might not be compatible with humanity, its humanity might be retrieved in its de-formation. I have suggested that diaspora comes before citizenship, but not as a way of outlining citizenship’s origins in a foreign elsewhere. Rather, I want to ground Canadian citizenship by looking at the unfinished process of its formation. It is not just that diaspora and citizenship are dissonant, but rather that this dissonance signals the necessary de-forming of the latter through the work of the former. Citizenship needs diaspora as much as diaspora needs citizenship.

Notes 1. See Cho, “Diasporic Citizenship:  Contradictions and Possibilities for Canadian Literature.” 2. Jennifer Henderson and Pauline Wakeham note that Discover Canada’s treatment of Ukrainian and Japanese internment during World War II shows how “[k]‌nowledge of these state-inflicted group injuries, and Canada’s proclaimed regret for them, now forms part of the hegemonic understanding of Canada” (3). Julie Rak notes that Discover Canada places far more emphasis on what citizens are expected to do for their country and locates a major site of that responsibility in military service in a new section on the responsibilities of Canadian citizenship: “This section in particular reflects neoliberal attitudes about active citizenship, and it represents a change in thinking about citizenship as an institution. Canada is no longer presented, as it had been in the guide A Look at Canada (1995),

Diasporic Citizenship and De-Formations of Citizenship    537 as a nonviolent nation of peacekeepers or a country that encourages environmental protection and sustainable development, except for the injunction that citizens are expected to do their part for the environment. Instead, Canada’s military history is treated in some detail” (9). 3. Brydon proposes, “citizenship should not be disaggregated in analysis from the institutions that exercise regulative power, most especially the state … but also the university and other pre-existing public institutions, many of which, in Canada, depend upon the state” (“Metamorphoses” 10).

Works Cited Balibar, Étienne. “Citizen Subject.” Who Comes after the Subject? Ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy. New York: Routledge, 1991. 33–57. Print. Brand, Dionne. What We All Long For. Toronto: Vintage, 2005. Print. Bercuson, David. “The Military Is a Central Actor in Canada’s Story.” Globe and Mail 12 July1 2011: A7. Web. Accessed 2 June 2014. Brydon, Diana. “Dionne Brand’s Global Intimacies:  Practising Affective Citizenship.” University of Toronto Quarterly 76.3 (2007): 990–1006. Print. ———. “Metamorphoses of a Discipline:  Rethinking Canadian Literature” Trans.Can. Lit: Re-Situating the Study of Canadian Literature. Ed. Smaro Kamboureli and Roy Miki. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2007. 1–16. Print. Chariandy, David. “Black Canadas and the Question of Diasporic Citizenship.” Narratives of Citizenship:  Indigenous and Diasporic Peoples Unsettle the Nation-State. Ed. Aloys Fleischmann, Nancy van Styvendale, and Cody McCarroll. Edmonton: U of Alberta P, 2011. 323–46. Print. ———. Soucouyant. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp, 2007. Print. Chase, Steve. “Chinese Canadians Reluctant to Join Military, Study Finds.” Globe and Mail 13 June 2011: A5. Web. Accessed 2 June 2014. Cho, Lily. “Diasporic Citizenship: Contradictions and Possibilities for Canadian Literature.” Trans.Can.Lit: Re-Situating the Study of Canadian Literature. Ed. Smaro Kamboureli and Roy Miki. Waterloo. ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2007. 93–110. Print. Choy, Wayson. Paper Shadows. Toronto: Penguin, 2005. Print. Department of Citizenship and Immigration Canada. Discover Canada:  The Rights and Responsibilities of Citizenship. Ottawa: Minister of Public Works and Government Services, 2012. http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/pdf/pub/discover.pdf. Web. Accessed 1 Oct. 2013. Findlay, Len. “Always Indigenize:  The Radical Humanities in the Postcolonial Canadian University.” ARIEL 31.1–2 (2000): 307–26. Print. Findlay, Stephanie, and Nicholas Kohler. “The Enrollment Controversy.” Maclean’s 10 Nov. 2010: 76–81. Web. Accessed 2 June 2014. Fleischmann, Aloys, and Nancy van Styvendale. “Introduction.” Narratives of Citizenship: Indigenous and Diasporic Peoples Unsettle the Nation-State. Ed. Aloys Fleischmann, Nancy van Styvendale, and Cody McCarroll. Edmonton: U of Alberta P, 2011. xi–xlv. Print. Henderson, Jennifer, and Pauline Wakeham. “Colonial Reckoning, National Reconciliation?: Aboriginal Peoples and the Culture of Redress in Canada.” English Studies in Canada 35.1 (2009): 1–26. Print. Hopkinson, Nalo. Brown Girl in the Ring. New York: Grand Central, 1998. Print.

538    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions Isin, Engin. Being Political:  Genealogies of Citizenship. Minneapolis:  U of Minnesota P, 2002. Print. Kamboureli, Smaro. Scandalous Bodies:  Diasporic Literature in English Canada. Don Mills, ON: Oxford UP, 2000. Print. Lai, Larissa. Salt Fish Girl. 2002. 2nd ed. Toronto: Thomas Allen, 2012. Print. Maslan, Susan. “The Anti-Human: Man and Citizen before the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.” SAQ: South Atlantic Quarterly 103.2–3 (2004): 357–74. Print. Moyes, Lianne. “Acts of Citizenship: Erin Mouré’s O Cidadán and the Limits of Worldliness.” Trans.Can.Lit: Re-Situating the Study of Canadian Literature. Ed. Smaro Kamboureli and Roy Miki. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2007. 111–28. Print. Mootoo, Shani. Valmiki’s Daughter. Toronto: Anansi, 2009. Print. McAteer et  al. v.  Attorney General of Canada, 2013 ONSC 5895 (CanLII). http://canlii.ca/t/ g0n32. Web. Accessed 1 Oct. 2013. Pennee, Donna. “Literary Citizenship:  Culture (Un)Bounded, Culture (Re)Distributed.” Home-Work:  Postcolonialism, Pedagogy, and Canadian Literature. Ed. Cynthia Sugars. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 2004. 75–85. Print. Rak, Julie. “Insecure Citizenship:  Michael Ignatieff, Memoir, Canada.” Biography 33.1 (2010): 1–23. Print. Rosaldo, Renato. “Further Inflections:  Toward Ethnographies of the Future.” Cultural Anthropology 9.3 (1994): 402–11. Print. Selvadurai, Shyam. The Hungry Ghosts. Toronto: Doubleday, 2013. Print. Shachar, Ayelet. The Birthright Lottery:  Citizenship and Global Inequality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2009. Print. Wah, Fred. Diamond Grill. Edmonton: NeWest, 1996. Print.

Chapter 29

Bl ack Cana dia n Literatu re Fieldwork and “Post-Race” David Chariandy

Fieldwork Although “Black Canadian literature” (or “African Canadian literature”)1 is now an established term in both academic and public discourse, it is also one, like “Asian Canadian literature” and “First Nations literature,” that has experienced a protracted and complicated emergence.2 Certainly, the historic reluctance of Canada to officially recognize Blacks, among other racial minorities, as both unique and essential agents within the national cultural landscape has played a major role here. Yet other factors, too, have delayed the widespread acknowledgment of “Black Canadian literature,” so named. In contrast with the United States, in which people of African descent have long been singularly powerful focalizers of nationwide laws and debates on “race,” Canada is home to a Black population that, although indisputably significant, is smaller proportionally and likely more culturally fractured,3 while other racial minorities, particularly Asian Canadians and First Nations peoples, have functioned both as major targets of, and prominent critical contributors to, the historically heterogeneous Canadian discourse on “race.”4 Moreover, when academic critics like Rinaldo Walcott and George Elliott Clarke began prominently discussing Black Canadian culture and literature during the early 1990s, they confronted a cultural and theoretical terrain at once enabling and limiting. These critics drew from the robust debates on Black culture that had developed for decades within US, Caribbean, African, and British contexts, but they did not always receive corresponding interest, from the African diaspora, in Canadian texts and contexts as such. These critics witnessed, in Canada, readerships, critical communities, and publishing venues increasingly receptive to isolated examples of “multicultural” diversity, but they observed, at the same time, considerable resistance to critical

540    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions articulations of racial minority experience and culture. Finally, Walcott and Clarke each negotiated, in their separate ways, the discourses of postmodernism and postcolonialism, both offering new theoretical frameworks for emergent literatures broadly speaking, though providing few incentives toward the careful delineation of the local histories and cultural politics informing (or enabled by) Black Canadian literature specifically. These critical challenges for the field have only heightened today, as we enter a perhaps even more contradictory era for Black political and cultural representation, both locally and globally. In the first place, the sociocultural coordinates and political economies of literature around the world are undergoing unprecedented change; and now, more than ever, talk of literature couched in the ostensibly old “modern” identities of race and nation may, for some, appear limited and/or unfashionable when compared with the new theoretical fluencies charting the global, the cosmopolitan, or the virtual. At the same time, recent years have also witnessed the alarming resurgence of the exclusionary politics of race, with many state-aligned groups within the Americas and Europe boldly stoking pro-White and/or anti-immigrant sentiments, often explicitly targeting Black migrants and the Black sub/urban poor (among other racial and ethnic minorities, of course). Moreover, the steadily widening wealth gap between the historic haves and have nots, the discrepant policing and incarceration of the racially privileged and stigmatized, and the ongoing barriers faced by many minorities to adequate housing, fair employment, and both social and educational services, have all helped to reproduce today the suffering and injustice often naively attributed to times past. All the same, the last five years have given us new forms of awareness and activism regarding Black struggle, as well as previously unimaginable, if also deeply duplicitous, breakthroughs of specifically Black political and cultural representation. Clearly, the election of Barack Obama provides a globally prominent and frequently cynically advertised example of the aforementioned; but here in Canada, and, of course, under notably different terms, thoughtful and talented authors like Austin Clarke, Dionne Brand, George Elliott Clarke, and Lawrence Hill have each drawn precious attention to Black histories and experiences. Hill’s novel, The Book of Negroes (2007), offers a particularly spectacular case in point, having reportedly sold over 600,000 copies in Canada alone, easily making it among the widest read works of Canadian literary fiction of the past two decades. Certainly, the extraordinary commercial success of The Book of Negroes raises complicated questions regarding the “capital” today of certain Black narratives and forms within shifting cultural marketplaces (national and global), while also providing a crucial opportunity for the critical discussion of Black Canadian culture and experience across a variety of publics. Within this contradictory environment, the specifically academic discussion of Black Canadian literature has both expanded and consolidated, with some scholars suggesting that it has emerged, among comparable literary formations, into its own distinctive “discipline” or “institution” (see, for instance, Coleman and Goellnicht).5 As these critics remind us, talk of institutions must be offered cautiously, mindful of the diminishing support for all literary studies today, the specific and in fact ongoing challenges articulated by many contemporary Black Canadian writers,6 as well as the potential pitfalls or

Black Canadian Literature    541 blindness of institutionalization itself under the aegis of multicultural governmentality and neoliberalism.7 Nevertheless, precious if ultimately unguaranteed footholds within the academy have indeed been established for ongoing study and debate, with several scholars alluding to two main critical trends or “schools” comprising Black Canadian literary studies—schools that, here, may be named “roots” and “routes.” The “roots” school may be understood as primarily challenging the assumption that Canada’s Black cultural legacies are solely the result of relative newcomers, specifically those who arrived in Canada after the policies restricting the immigration of non-Whites were lifted in 1967. In the path-breaking scholarship of George Elliott Clarke, but also in crucial work by Wayde Compton, Karina Vernon, Winfried Siemerling, and others, the full 200-year archive of Black writing is unearthed and brought to light but, as importantly, is critically articulated with urgent debates regarding cultural politics and social activism at national and regional scales, as well as the underlying grammars of cultural citizenship. In contrast, the “routes” school may be understood as primarily emphasizing the transnational migrations and identifications of Black Canadians of all historical periods, but with notable emphasis on the writings of recent immigrants and post-immigrants, now a major presence in many Canadian cities, and whose complicated attachments to “elsewhere” perhaps exhibit greater cultural and technological mobilization today. In the foundational scholarship by Rinaldo Walcott, most notably, but also in work by Michael Bucknor, Andrea Davis, Diana Brydon, Daniel Coleman, David Chariandy, and others, Black Canadian literature and culture offer an opportunity to explore migrant subjectivity, extra-national identifications and social movements, and the broader relevance of new and radical theories of diaspora under conditions of heightened globalization. It is important to acknowledge that such talk of “roots” and “routes” does not begin to encompass the full variety and creativity of Black Canadian literary criticism, even when we restrict ourselves, as here, to the English Canadian academy. Clarke and Walcott—the two most authoritative figures of the “roots” and “routes” schools, respectively—have each routinely exceeded, in their own writings, the positions that other scholars sometimes reductively ascribe to them;8 and critics like Andrea Davis have convincingly demonstrated not only the considerable overlap between “roots” and “routes,” but, more interestingly, how these two critical trends or schools are mutually constitutive (see “Black Canadian Literature as Diaspora Transgression”). Moreover, the work of many other important academic critics are especially difficult to locate within such a binary: for example, the crucial institution-building work of long-time researchers and mentors such as Afua Cooper and Leslie Sanders;9 the innovative work on Black Canadian literature accomplished by scholars with footholds in other disciplines and academic contexts, such as Cecil Foster, Sharon Morgan Bedford, Katherine McKittrick, and Peter Hudson; and the rigorous “discourse analyses” of Black representation (encompassing the works of both Black and non-Black writers) by path-breaking critics such as Jade Ferguson and Phanuel Antwi. Moreover, this brief outline focusing specifically on the occasions and tenor of recent academic criticism cannot pay due respect to the essential work of critics, activists, and general facilitators of literary debate who reach beyond the academy, particularly M. NourbeSe Philip, but also Harold Head,

542    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions Ann Wallace, M.  Nigel Thomas, Horace Goddard, Ayanna Black, Makeda Silvera, Sylvia Hamilton, Maxine Tynes, Lillian Allen, Amatoritsero Ede, Kevan Anthony Cameron, Valerie Mason-John, Althea Prince, and, notably today, Donna Bailey Nurse. Nevertheless, if talk of these two schools has, at the very least, provided critics with a convenient means of signaling at least two distinctive critical “occasions” of Black Canadian literature as a field, perhaps a third such occasion may now be ventured through a suitably cautious invocation of the term “post-race.” As Wayde Compton astutely notes, the term “post-race” is “clearly in use … yet remains under-defined,” and reflects a wide variety of seemingly irreconcilable meanings and political desires (After Canaan 203). However, one dominant meaning or connotation for “post-race” is that “we” (often of the nation) have finally reached a moment when racism is over, and when race, as a social or cultural category, is at best meaningless. This chapter will not survey the enormous body of research that concludes differently.10 Nor will this chapter attempt to provide either a deeper genealogy of “post-race” as a utopian ideal, or an analysis of its sinister work as an ideology.11 Instead, this chapter explores the simple but crucial fact that Canada, possibly above all other national sites of the African diaspora, has for centuries been imagined as a site beyond the evils of racism specifically directed toward Blacks—a fact that the two major schools of Black Canadian criticism, as well as Black Canadian literature itself, have always critically confronted. Arguably, what we may now call “post-race” has been the third fundamental occasion (or agon) of the field of Black Canadian literature—a circumstance that may help to make the field of heightened global relevance today at the dawn of a newly complicated era for the cultural politics of race (see Chariandy, “Post-Race,” and Nurse, “The New Black”).12

Post-Racial Roots Perhaps the easiest way to begin appreciating both the reflection and critique of “post-race” in Black Canadian literature is to revisit a basic falsehood that the “roots” school of Black Canadian studies has effectively challenged: that Canada is “post-racial” in the very specific sense (pertaining only to people of African descent) that it possesses no meaningful Black historical presence. This falsehood is notably articulated by J.S. Woodsworth, who, in Strangers within Our Gates (1909), his turn-of-the-century analysis of the pros and cons of different immigrant minority groups, expresses concern about the “hordes” of East and South Asians “swarming” in upon the people of Canada (107–71), but thereafter writes, “we may be thankful that we have no ‘negro problem’ in Canada” (191). Of course, this comment from an otherwise admirable founder of the Canadian welfare state is doubly damning not only because it discounts Black presence in Canada, but because it automatically casts it as a “problem.” And against this specific falsehood, the work of the leading “roots” literary critic, George Elliott Clarke, has been both wholly indispensable and indicative. In his broader effort to draw attention to the almost 400 years of documented Black presence in the lands that are, or would become,

Black Canadian Literature    543 Canada, Clarke has done more than any other critic to bring to light the 200-year archive of Black writing, beginning with the life narratives of John Marrant (1785), David George (1793), and Boston King (1798), and including thousands of texts stretching to the present. As Clarke’s two major critical monographs on Black Canadian literature illustrate, Clarke’s interests and accomplishments in recuperating Black Canadian writing are wide ranging (see Odysseys Home and Directions Home). However, Clarke has also demonstrated his special interest in the legacies of Black Maritime or, as he terms it, “Africadian” literatures (see, for instance, Fire on the Water, volumes 1 and 2). And joining Clarke in excavating a rich and long-standing regional presence of Black writing in Canada is Wayde Compton, who has focused on Black British Columbia (see Bluesprint, 2002), and Karina Vernon, whose work focuses on the Black Prairies. Notably, while Clarke, Compton, and Vernon have each brought specific attentions or biases to their recovery work (as all critics do), they also together represent a Black Canadian presence at once integral to the Canadian cultural landscape but also vulnerable to forgetting and/or violent erasure. Clarke, for instance, has repeatedly explained that his “foundational philosophical reference is the Canadian ‘Red Tory’ writer George Grant … whose romantic adoration of Canadian sovereignty and nationalism, Lament for a Nation (1965), has helped shape [his] thinking about cultural particularity” (Odysseys 13). Clarke’s unique application of what he sees as “Grantian” anti-modern conservatism and nationalism to the task of framing Black Canadian writing is likely informed by Clarke’s own identification, as an “Africadian,” with the political legacies of Black Loyalism, and by the broader regional influence of Maritime anti-modernism.13 But it is worth noting that in aligning his Black “roots” project with the work of George Grant, Clarke is not only attempting to find adequate critical terms for representing Black Canadian particularity, but also indirectly suggesting that Black Canadian culture, far from a “problem” fundamentally alien to the Canadian political and cultural landscape, in fact powerfully affirms what Ian Angus understands as the discourse of English Canadian left-nationalism (see A Border Within 27–40). At the same time, Africadia, for Clarke, is haunted by the ghost of Africville, a historic community of Blacks neglected by civic officials for decades, then abruptly and forcibly dispersed from this ancestral land in the name of social planning. Other major “roots” critics appear to excavate and re-present a Black Canadian cultural presence at once part of, and besieged within, the Canadian cultural landscape. For Compton, Black British Columbia suggests the benefits of “owning and exploring oblique kinds of blackness” situated both at the periphery of the African diaspora (After Canaan 13), and also within the context of broader interethnic West Coast social justice struggles; yet Black British Columbia, for Compton, finds a major site of its historical identity in Hogan’s Alley, an interethnic community in East Vancouver comprised significantly of Blacks that was destroyed in order to build a freeway. For Vernon, Black presence on the Prairies suggests, among other things, an opportunity to explore the complex intersection of Black struggle with Indigenous cultural politics; yet Black prairie presence also stands perpetually in danger of becoming, in Vernon’s words, an “Atlantis” in local cultural memory.14 Clarke, Compton, and Vernon each

544    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions site/sight Black cultural presence by emphasizing regional identity, and by creating literary anthologies. Yet other notable cases of recuperating and reimagining the “roots” of Black Canadian presence have focused on particular historical figures, most notably Marie Joseph Angélique, a slave accused and executed in 1734 for the apparent arson of her mistress’s home in Montreal and for the subsequent destruction of part of Montreal. Most notably, Angélique has been the subject of Afua Cooper’s major historical treatment entitled The Hanging of Angélique (2006), as well as Lorena Gale’s celebrated play Angélique (2000). The second basic falsehood that the “roots” school of criticism has effectively contested is that the Blacks who arrived in Canada from the late eighteenth century onward, and particularly from the United States during the era of slavery, experienced a type of “post-racial” condition in that they encountered here no meaningful discrimination. There is little need to review the voluminous research that has thoroughly challenged the myth that Canada was for these Black migrants an unqualified haven or “promised land,” notwithstanding Canada’s distinctive laws, political economy, and colonial settlement histories vis-à-vis the United States. As dozens of historians and cultural critics have pointed out, Canada possesses its own abundantly clear legacies of slavery, antiBlack violence or “lynching,” segregation, and other social evils of direct consequence to Blacks (see Antwi; G.E. Clarke; Cooper; Ferguson; and Winks). However, it is important to note the conflicting sources and attendant cultural politics at work within the broader imagining of Canada as historically “post-racial” in this specific sense. In the first place, the idea of Canada as a space of freedom or exception from American slavery, but also from Jim Crow as well as the violent backlash against the US desegregation and Civil Rights movement, is an unobtrusive yet crucial contributor to Canadian national and British colonial identity. Particularly instructive here is Daniel Coleman’s analysis, in White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada, of how, in nineteenthcentury British Canadian or “Loyalist” literature, Black characters, like their Aboriginal counterparts, “are not primarily characters in and for themselves” (71), but rather serve to promote “the Loyalist claim that true liberty can be found only under the British constitution” (70), or to demonstrate “British Canadian enlightenment in contrast to American hypocrisy” (70). Two recent “Heritage Minute” films offer further indications of how contemporary Canadian identity may also be invested in the idea that Blacks historically received better treatment in Canada than in the United States.15 The Heritage Minute films were broadcast on Canadian television channels for the purpose of promoting greater awareness of key individuals or moments in Canadian history. And in 2012, an Ipsos Reid poll revealed that the Heritage Minute that tied for first place in audience popularity was of Jackie Robinson, the Black baseball player who would famously break the colour barrier in the US Major Leagues, but who is depicted in the film as first winning acceptance and support from Canadians as a member of the Montreal Royals. Another notable Heritage Minute focuses on the underground railway, and ends with a Black man and woman, newly smuggled into Canada by White benefactors, enthusiastically voicing these lines: “We’re free.” / “Yes pa, we’s in Canada.” However, in this particular imagining of

Black Canadian Literature    545 the Underground Railway, the Black woman almost ruins the entire operation through her apparent inability to control her emotions, and the effect is to award all meaningful agency in the film to the White benefactors, not to the Blacks themselves, who, historically speaking, played fully crucial and active roles in the operational logistics of the Railway. Of course, the moral courage and outright heroism of certain Whites within Canada in historically sheltering and supporting fugitive Blacks from the United States must be affirmed and celebrated; and these individuals and groups may very well have held fast to the belief that Canada was, or at least ought to be, different from the United States regarding slavery and anti-Black violence or discrimination. However, such beliefs and necessarily companion actions must be distinguished from the ways in which the ideal of Canada as “post-racial” also has arisen and persisted, not through any demonstrably genuine concern for persecuted minorities and refugees (past and present), but through efforts at bolstering a fragile national identity by either ignorantly or cynically proclaiming its moral superiority and “civility” vis-à-vis its powerful Imperial rival to the south. At the same time, it is crucial to acknowledge that the myth of Canada as something we may now call “post-racial” has also been articulated by a long line of Black freedom seekers and intellectuals who had little investment in either creating or sustaining self-flattering notions of Canadian identity. In his 1967 CBC Massey Lecture entitled “Conscious for Change,” Martin Luther King, Jr., states, “Canada is not merely a neighbor to [US] Negroes. Deep in our history of struggle for freedom Canada was the north star. The Negro slave, denied education, de-humanized, imprisoned on cruel plantations, knew that far to the north a land existed where a fugitive slave if he survived the horrors of the journey could find freedom.”16 Even the sharp-tongued Malcolm X, otherwise canny to the global pervasiveness of racism, could nevertheless quip that “Mississippi is anywhere south of the Canadian border,” thereby contesting the hypocrisy of some US Northerners in attributing racial atrocities solely to the South, yet drawing a newly questionable line at around the 49th parallel (The Autobiography 417). But the dream of Canada as “post-racial” is often most movingly represented in the writings of nineteenth-century Black émigrés themselves. In the Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb (1849), for instance, Canada is a “land of liberty” and “sweet land of rest” (Bibb 11). In Mary Ann Shadd’s A Plea for Emigration (1852), Canada is repeatedly described as a place of splendid and universal colour blindness, where, for instance, “prejudice of colour has no existence whatever” (60). Shadd goes even further in her fully post-racial imagining of Canada by suggesting, however dubiously, that Blacks themselves are to blame for the importation of any racist values into Canada—for instance, by forming Black churches and thus “pertinaciously refusing overtures of religious fellowship from the whites” (61). Regardless, Shadd also, at one point, manages to imagine Canada as something radically post-post-racial, and writes “[t]‌his nation knows no one color above another, but being composed of all colors, it is evidently a colored nation” (109). But perhaps the narrative of Josiah Henson represents the arrival in “post-racial Canada” in most vivid and emblematic terms. As Henson recalls, “my first impulse was to throw myself on the ground, and giving way to the riotous exultation of my feelings, to execute sundry antics which excited the astonishment of those who were

546    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions looking on” (58–59). When an onlooking “gentleman” spots these antics, Henson recovers just enough to explain, “I was free” (59). Obviously, these nineteenth-century articulations of “post-racial” Canada indicate decidedly complex and difficult circumstances. Whatever truth may be present (or strikingly absent) in these celebrations of Canada by Bibb, Shadd, and Henson, one must appreciate, first and foremost, that these celebrations come from individuals who understood intimately the now almost unfathomable terrors and despair caused by slavery and its profoundly far-reaching political and ideological regime. That any land could be imagined as one of blessed freedom is itself a victory of the imagination under the most crushing circumstances. More prosaically, but perhaps as crucially, one must recognize the rhetorical contexts and functionality of these statements. Shadd’s Plea for Emigration is, of course, precisely that, a plea—one that would be compromised significantly had Shadd actually begun to acknowledge and enumerate the various kinds of discrimination or hardship that Blacks arriving in Canada might encounter. Moreover, these statements are also highly mediated, both psychologically and discursively. It would have been psychologically difficult for newly arrived Blacks, especially intellectual leaders, to immediately acknowledge and proclaim to others desperate for a modicum of hope a wide variety of new hardships; and it would, equally, have been no easy task for Blacks to find the discursive space and freedom to have published, or else publish themselves without repercussions, any even measured critique of their newly adopted state. And yet nineteenth-century Blacks like Samuel Ringgold Ward did, in fact, both voice and publish uncompromised critiques of, as Ward put it, “Canadian Negro Hate” (1852). If Henry Bibb could in one moment proclaim Canada a place of blessed “liberty” and “rest,” he also did not hesitate to identify and boldly condemn “Colorphobia” in Canada.17 Still other representations of anti-Black discrimination and violence in Canada during the nineteenth century can be found in the work of White writers such as Susanna Moodie, who, in the now canonical book Roughing It in the Bush (1852), describes the apparent lynching of a Black man (Moodie 221–22; see also Ferguson and Antwi). As Wayde Compton puts it in After Canaan, “for the blacks who fled to Canada, the spectacular allegory [of freedom] hardened into cold prosody upon arrival, and for those who had been enslaved in Canada, the allegory was an empty sign from the very start” (15, 16). The “cold prosody” of arrival in Canada may in fact be one of the major tropes of contemporary Black Canadian writing. This is readily observed in Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes (2007), narrated by Aminata, a young woman who is abducted from her village in Africa and enslaved in America. The title of the novel comes from a historic British military ledger, in which were written the names of about 3,000 Black Loyalists afforded passage from Manhattan to Nova Scotia; and the hopes attending this passage to Canada are very clearly articulated in the novel—although, most notably, in the voice of a White supporter of the migration scheme named Colonel Baker. Speaking to Aminata, Baker states that “ ‘Nova Scotia is a British colony, untouched and unsullied by the Americans,’ ” and he insists that “ ‘Nova Scotia, Miss [Aminata] Diallo, will be your promised land’ ” (286). Aminata in turn asks if “ ‘in this place you call Nova Scotia … will

Black Canadian Literature    547 we be free?’ ” (286), and Baker responds, “ ‘Entirely. You will be as free as any Loyalist. … There will be plenty for everyone in the vastness of Nova Scotia’ ” (286). In The Book of Negroes, Aminata uses her hard-won literacy in English, as well as her enduring African identity as a “Djeli,” to inscribe the names of Blacks into the ledger, thus literally writing freedom both for herself and others. However, upon arriving in Nova Scotia, Aminata soon discovers that the promised freedom is nowhere to be found. She is promptly told in a coffee house that “ ‘We don’t serve niggers’ ” (313); she reads an advertisement in a local paper for a “Negro Wench,” a slave, who has run away (321); and she learns of Blacks who, out of mortal desperation, indenture themselves to Whites, thus entering a new condition of servitude to avoid freezing or starving to death (334). After witnessing a White mob killing Blacks and threatening to raid and burn down a Black settlement (339+), as well as experiencing the abduction of her own daughter, Aminata ends up using her literacy to help pen a letter drawing the attention of authorities to the horrific treatment of Blacks: “The poor friendless Slaves have no more protection by the Laws of the Colony … than the mere Cattle or brute Beasts” (353). This effort proves fruitless; and, eventually, Aminata and other newly arrived “Loyalists” risk yet another journey, this time for an African home in an upstart colony in Sierra Leone (356). The circumstances Hill represents are historically accurate, but their symbolic value is no less striking. In The Book of Negroes, the story of Black arrival in the “promised land” of Canada very quickly transforms into a narrative of “exodus” from a site of persecution and bondage by another name. Navigating between the dream and delusion of “post-racial” Canada is not only a thematic frequently explored in Black Canadian literature, but also a formal project encoded in the very language of Black Canadian writing itself, as the mere titles of books such as Cecil Foster’s A Place Called Heaven (1996), George Elliott Clarke’s Eyeing the North Star (1997), and Wayde Compton’s After Canaan (2010) only begin to suggest. And no sufficient understanding of Black Canadian literature can be achieved without some appreciation of the degree to which Black Canadian writers, but especially poets, have inventively “signified” the notion of Canada as a site beyond the legacies of racial injustice, and have exposed deeper and difficult historical truths through concertedly innovative language and literary form. In his multi-genre long poem Whylah Falls (1990), for instance, George Elliott Clarke opens with a preface that invokes the pastoral space of Africadia by referencing the anti-Black violence infamously borne by the flora of the American South: Founded in 1783 by African-American Loyalists seeking Liberty, Justice, and Beauty, Whylah Falls is a village in Jarvis Country, Nova Scotia. Wrecked by country blues and warped by constant tears, it is a snowy, northern Mississippi, with blood spattered, not on magnolias, but on pines, lilacs, and wild roses. (n. pag.)

Wayde Compton, in 49th Parallel Psalm (1999), also finds himself confronting a difficult formal challenge in charting the historical migration, in 1858, of a community of Blacks from San Francisco to Vancouver Island—the latter described as “a place

548    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions which has unfolded to us[,]‌in our darkest hour, the prospect of a bright future” (45). 49th Parallel Psalm details how the dreams of freedom for these Blacks were often bitterly compromised: how their desires to vote, to freely enter British Columbia establishments, and even to volunteer for military service, were all frustrated. Yet the high accomplishment of the book is its study in the poetic forms of Black yearning and experience: its recruiting of contemporary West Coast avant-garde poetics, but also African diasporic cultural forms and epistemologies, including Haitian vodou cosmology, in order to adequately explore and “recall” the historic dream and delusion of a Western Canadian “Canaan.” Although the focus of this section has largely been upon how the historical “roots” of the Canadian post-racial have been recuperated and critiqued by contemporary writers, it is important to acknowledge that nineteenth-century Black writers themselves have offered both a representation and critique of this ideal. Martin Delany’s Blake, Or the Huts of America (1859–1862) is a particularly powerful case in point. Blake is a novel of archetypal importance: it is a contender for being the first Black Canadian novel, since it was possibly completed after Delany’s arrival in Chatham, Canada, in 1856. The novel, which was not published in book form until 1970, but was first partly serialized in The Anglo-African Magazine, features a Black hero who is both a witness and, most notably, an active opponent of racism and slavery. Most significant is how Canada itself figures in the book. In Chapter 33, entitled “Happy Greeting,” a character named Andy expresses great joy at having arrived in Canada, and frames his appreciation through a set of questions: “ ‘Is dis Canada? Is dis de good ole British soil we hear so much ‘bout way down in Missierppi,’ exclaimed Andy. ‘Is dis free groun’? De lan’ whar black folks is free! Thang God a’mighty for dis privilege!’ ” The narrator then describes a scene strikingly similar to Henson’s, in which Andy “fell upon his hands and knees and kissed the earth” (152). The narrator agrees that Andy achieved a precious measure of “freedom”; however, the narrator also offers this important qualification: Poor fellow! He little knew the unnatural feelings and course pursued towards his race by many Canadians. … He little knew that while according to fundamental British Law and constitutional rights, all persons are equal in the realm, yet by a systematic course of policy and artifice, his race with few exceptions in some parts, excepting the Eastern Province, is excluded from the enjoyment and practical exercise of every right, except mere suffrage-voting—even to those of sitting on a jury as its own peer, and the exercise of military duty. … He knew not that some of high intelligence and educational attainments of his race … were really excluded from and practically denied their rights, and that there was no authority known to the colony to give redress and make restitution on the petition or application of these representative men of his race. … It had never entered the mind of poor Andy, that in going to Canada in search of freedom, he was then in a country where privileges were denied him which are common to the slave in every Southern state—the right of going into the gallery of a public building. … [Had Andy known such things,] [a]‌n emotion of unutterable indignation would swell the heart of the determined slave, and almost compel him to curse the country of his adoption. (153)

Black Canadian Literature    549 While Blake is striking in openly describing the litany of ills that a Black could expect to find in Canada, the passage is additionally striking for the specific feelings it represents. Post-racial Canada appears to have the unique ability to produce twinned affective states: first, what Josiah Henson describes as the “riotous exultation of … feelings” (58–59); and second, what Martin Delany describes as “unutterable indignation” (153).

Post-Racial Routes As can be expected, the ideal of Canada as a “post-racial” space is also represented and critically interrogated in Black Canadian literature set in more recent times, and most often discussed by, or identified with, the “routes” school of criticism. Of great illustrative importance here is Austin Clarke, widely acknowledged to be the father of contemporary Black Canadian writing, whose fiction, beginning with the novel The Meeting Point (1967), has addressed almost 50 continuous years of a rapidly changing Canada, particularly with respect to the question of “race.” The Meeting Point can lay claim to being the first Black Canadian novel both actually published in Canada and elaborately representing Canada itself; it is also the first book of the Toronto Trilogy, which focuses on a group of working-class “West Indians” who arrive in Toronto just before the policies restricting non-White immigration to Canada were lifted in 1967. If Toronto is now an internationally recognized site in the Black Atlantic for being, among other things, a diasporic capital (if not the diasporic capital) of African Caribbean culture and writing, Clarke’s Trilogy reminds us that this was not always the case. The Meeting Point, in particular, draws attention to the often extreme isolation and vulnerability felt by newly arrived Blacks in a city of always great ethnic but less obvious racial diversity, and particularly of the hardships felt by the Black female domestic workers Bernice, Dots, and Estelle. Yet Clarke’s novel is also striking in the ways that it draws critical attention, often through humour, to the decidedly “post-racial” assumptions about Canada possessed by some of the characters. Near the end of The Meeting Point, there is a scene in which Dots and Bernice pass a demonstration on the streets of Toronto for equality. This is the mid-1960s, and the Civil Rights movement in the United States is in full swing. The demonstrators hold placards earnestly proclaiming “CANADA IS NOT ALABAMA and END RACE PREJUDICE NOW and BLACK EQUALS WHITE and NEGROES ARE PEOPLE” (304). Dots and Bernice observe that most of the demonstrators are women, but that the Blacks were “holding down their heads as if they thought they should not be seen” (304). At the same time, the leaders of the demonstration include “a tall black man, proud as a prince” and also “a Jewish man … [openly] holding hands with a black woman” (304–05). While Dots finds the demonstration inspiring, and voices a willingness to join them, Bernice expresses disdain for the entire scene. “ ‘[T]‌hese niggers in Canada!’ ” Bernice exclaims, “ ‘Well, they don’t know how lucky they are!’ ” (305). Bernice elaborates further, explaining to Dots that “ ‘this is Canada, dear, not America. You and me, we is West Indians, not American Negroes. We are not in that mess’ ” (306).

550    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions Bernice then rather feebly adds that protests over racism have nothing to do with her because, in the West Indies, where she and Dots grew up, “ ‘nobody don’t worry over things like colour’ ” (306). Recognizing the patent falsehood of this last statement, Dots quickly becomes, in the narrator’s words, “fed up with Bernice’s dishonesty,” and promptly ends the conversation (306). Of course, only by migrating away from her birthplace can Bernice come to forget (if, indeed, she actually does) that racism (and shadism) is there endemic. But of crucial importance here is how Bernice articulates her new home of Canada as post-racial not simply because, in her words, Canada is not the United States (a common assumption, as we have seen, in post-racial discourse), but, just as crucially, because Bernice understands herself as “West Indian.” Here, the condition of diaspora does not solely, as some might hope, facilitate new and mutually beneficial identifications among historically persecuted minorities while loosening calcified notions of ethnicity and cultural identity (see Paul Gilroy, for instance). Instead, the condition of diaspora creates a newly imagined sense of “home,” while producing a very particular form of post-racial ideology that contributes directly to a renewal and/or production of racism: “ ‘these niggers in Canada.’ ” For the reader, Bernice’s comments are all the more ironic because she has been unable to consciously appreciate what we, as readers of The Meeting Point, have consistently been shown: that the socially and economically vulnerable working-class Black Caribbean émigrés in Canada face many difficult obstacles in Canada, both overt and subtle, because of their “race.” All of the characters in the novel seem to appreciate this to some degree. When Estelle, another main character in the novel, arrives in Canada having just been called an “Aunt Jemima,” she is promptly told by Dots not to expect respectful or equal treatment from Whites: “ ‘you just come and you got a lot to learn and unlearn. … You weren’t born here’ ” (83). Bernice herself is able to announce in one week that “ ‘I happy as hell in Canada,’ ” though a week earlier she had complained, “ ‘Canada, Mississippi, Alabama, South Africa, God they is the same thing … [a]‌s far as a black person is concerned’ ” (131). Even in her coolest moods, Bernice will admit that “ ‘[e]very day, there’s something to remind you that you wasn’t born here, that you don’t belong here’ ” (150). However, being “born here,” or not, appears not to be the determining issue for the main characters. One major Black character of the Trilogy is Henry, who is a born and bred Canadian, and who, in the second novel of the Trilogy, suffers a worse fate through the subtle forces of racialization. Moreover, The Meeting Point itself very deliberately shows how the émigrés are subject to the terms of Black exploitation and oppression that one might, like Bernice, very wishfully ascribe to other spaces and historical moments. Estelle becomes the secret lover of her employer, a situation that is explicitly connected in the novel to the historic and fundamentally unequal power relationship of some Black slaves or housemaids with their White male owners or employers; and Estelle’s relationship, while complex, nevertheless results in her near death as a result of a necessarily secret and unprofessional abortion. Estelle’s life-threatening situation coincides with another historically loaded situation concerning Henry, who, again, is actually born in Canada. Henry is savagely attacked by a pack of police officers who,

Black Canadian Literature    551 acting unofficially, and in a way reminiscent of a lynch mob, “beat him professionally” and “without a murmur” and “quickly” (341). When Dots learns of Henry’s beating, she immediately comments that “ ‘I never knew that this place was so blasted cruel’ ” (346); yet, ironically, Bernice is the one who witnesses, firsthand, though at a distance, Henry’s beating. For Bernice, the beating appears “too real; and too much of a dream at the same time” (341), and when she immediately after discovers Estelle’s life-threatening situation as a result of the botched abortion, she manages to take Estelle to the hospital, but seems unable to process the situation: “Events and people now ceased to mean anything to Bernice. There was no recognition of reality” (344). It is perhaps no accident that Bernice experiences the violence suffered by both Estelle and Henry as something at once “too real; and too much of a dream,” something that appears, afterward, to prompt a fundamental epistemological crisis. Possibly, for those like Bernice, the unexpected return of the historic violence against Blacks in post-racial Canada can only appear in phantasmagoric or “uncanny” terms; further, in these terms, there is room for a richer comparative analysis of Black Canadian writings that similarly represent spectral or ghostly hauntings of Black cultural legacies within an only superficially quiet Canada. In any event, later books of the Toronto Trilogy continue to represent characters that appear to be haunted by the legacies of race that they are unable to adequately recognize or articulate. This is a major theme in Storm of Fortune (1973), the second book of the Toronto Trilogy, in which Henry, a Black character born in Canada, struggles to tell his friend Boysie about the “ ‘kind o’ history and sociology,’ ” apparently about racialization, that his partner, a sympathetic academic, could not begin to understand (282). Henry confesses to being visited by all sorts of violent fantasies and feelings regarding the treatment he receives from others, including his partner, on the basis of his race: “ ‘This thing, man,’ ” he attempts to explain, “ ‘This thing does some funny things to a man’s mind, Boysie. I am talking about the effects, man, the effects’ ” (282). Though unable to communicate adequately to his close friend either the “thing” or “effects” of racism, Henry does manage to convey to Boysie that only by writing poetry can he control his feelings and compose his thoughts. However, by the end of Storm of Fortune, Henry has committed suicide. Boysie emerges as the central character of the third and final volume of the Trilogy, entitled The Bigger Light (1975). Here, Boysie seems to have succeeded at overcoming many of the economic obstacles that plagued Henry. If Boysie is not really the “ ‘goddamn white man’ ” that Henry once accused his friend of becoming (Storm 282), Boysie has certainly become materially comfortable, consciously distanced from other Blacks, and “conservative” in both outward appearance and attitudes. However, Boysie also appears haunted by fundamental but also inexpressible feelings of unease and restlessness. Despite having materially “arrived” in Canada, Boysie still cannot help feeling “unsettled,” and the last volume of the Trilogy concludes with Boysie rather abruptly abandoning stability in Canada for the “Bigger Light” of America. As such, the first trilogy of novels about Black life in Canada ends with a provocative reversal of an emancipatory flight from the United States to Canada. An author who has frequently explored the disquieting “haunts” and “affects” of Black diasporic histories in the superficial quiet of Canada (and elsewhere) is Dionne Brand.

552    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions Of course, Brand’s work also consistently represents the fully blatant acts of violence that continue to be committed against Blacks and other historically disenfranchised peoples throughout the ostensibly “civilized” world, as demonstrated in her book-length poem Thirsty (2002), about the shooting of an unarmed Black man in Toronto, or by her poetry sequence Inventory (2006), which chronicles the ongoing legacies of war and exploitation against the poor and marginalized. Nevertheless, Brand also frequently represents Black characters who are haunted and unsettled by powerful intimations of the histories of suffering that they may, at first, have imagined they have escaped. Such unsettling affect is prominent in all of Brand’s major prose works, including her first novel In Another Place Not Here (1997), in which the main character, Verlia, is sent away from her birthplace in the Caribbean to live with her aunt and uncle in the small city of Sudbury, Canada. Upon her arrival, Verlia’s uncle and aunt offer the youth a now typical post-racial narrative: “ ‘Anybody can make it in this country,’ ” they say, “ ‘Is a new country, it have plenty opportunity. Don’t let nobody tell you different. … Look, it is easy—you can imagine yourself out of your skin and no one will notice. … Don’t bring any of that Blackness here, we’re ordinary people, we have to convince them that we’re ordinary’ ” (141–42). Crucially, Verlia also hopes to escape aspects of her past in coming to Canada. She “wants to be awake here, waking into her new life. She has no more time for back there, she wants it gone” (134–35); and she “wants to run. … [from a] grief that does not end or begin and is wide wide and haunts” (147). As is often the case for speakers in Brand’s work, Verlia is deeply distrustful of those who are uncritically nostalgic about their birthplaces and racial origins: “She [Verlia] hated what she already knew. Her people, gathered in barber shops and tailor shops and basement parties reminiscing, make her weak. She smells their seduction, it’s the kind of seduction that soothes the body going home on the train, insulates it from the place of now and what to do about” (182). But if Verlia consciously rejects both the post-racial narrative offered by her Canadian aunt and uncle, and the “seduction” of a romanticized ethnicity promoted by “her people,” she is unable to escape a haunting grief that appears to afflict both her and her kin unconsciously. The novel’s narrator speaks of a “nightmare” that continually visits Verlia, one that produces insomnia and a feeling she is “unable to shake,” but one that also appears more substantial than a mere dream: “after [the nightmare] she felt pointed out, out of her self and always visible as if she could not walk about any more without being noticed. Although she could not remember the nightmare, it lay over her like a skin” (146). Notably, this unremembered nightmare appears to constitute Verlia in physio-racial terms, and Verlia recognizes that “her family and the people who lived all around” have experienced the same—that the nightmare creates in them a range of physical and psychological “hurts” like limps, sores, irrational and self-destructive impulses, the sources of which they “could not remember but made excuses for” (146–47). This nightmare seems to threaten to consume and defeat her kin, but, for Verlia, a reflection upon the nightmare actually helps unsettle her from the passivity encouraged by both “her people” and her uncle and aunt. Immediately after reflecting upon the returning nightmare, Verlia joins “The Movement,” a transnational social justice network that

Black Canadian Literature    553 allows her to address historical injustices against her kin and others by, paradoxically, experiencing “[c]‌omradeship chosen, friendship that was not chance or biology” (192). This yearning for terms of comradeship and friendship beyond the often restrictive claims of kinship, race, and especially nation is a consistent feature of Brand’s writings. For instance, in Brand’s poem “Land to Light On” (1997), the speaker explicitly concludes: … what I really want to say is, I don’t want no fucking country, here or there and all the way back, I don’t like it, none of it, easy as that. I’m giving up on land to light on, and why not, I can’t perfect my own shadow, my violent sorrow, my individual wrists. (48)

Such wariness toward the ideas of “country” or “land” or “nation” is also abundantly clear in Brand’s prose meditation entitled A Map to the Door of No Return (2002). The title of this work quite literally alludes to the doors to historic slave castles in Africa, those passageways “where our ancestors departed one world for another, the Old World for the New”—“The place where all names were forgotten and all beginnings recast. … the end of traceable beginnings. … a place emptied of beginnings … a site of belonging or unbelonging” (5–6). And, as this definition of “the door” indicates, the thesis of Map is that the diasporic condition of Blacks in the New World is defined primarily not by the persistence or reclamation of ancestral traditions, but by the catastrophic cultural and social ruptures caused by slavery. Having been abducted from their homelands, and both violently and systematically disenfranchised in the New World, Blacks of the diaspora cannot, or, perhaps more accurately, ought not to, comfortably proclaim national or ethnic origins. The speaker articulates a degree of sympathy for those “in the Diaspora [who] long so for nation—some continuous thread of biological or communal association, some bloodline or legacy which will cement our rights in the place we live” (67). The speaker furthermore states that it is tempting to “try to enter this nation of Canada. It is even more tempting to see that desire as a rightful thing” (68). But the speaker ultimately argues that all articulations of national origin run the risk of making “people cling to the most narrow of definitions of culture and identity, and deploy the most banal characteristics as exemplary” (72). “National identity” in general, the speaker concludes, “is a dance of artificiality” (72); and this applies equally to state-aligned identities and the “mirror/image-image/mirror” of immigrant or ‘ethnic’ identity” (69). Notably, Black identity is likewise critiqued in Map. The speaker questions those who entertain the “[t]‌he romance … of the place beyond the door, the Africa of our origins” (22), and she points out that “[w]hat is called Black culture, including aesthetic tastes and sensibilities, is used daily as a creative backdrop to multinational markets” (51). Rinaldo Walcott has argued that Brand’s work exhibits “a particular politics of Diaspora constituted through the circulation and networks of Black sensibilities forged by a commitment to a Left politics. … [N]ot an ethnicity etched in the crevices of bounded nations,

554    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions blood, and tribe, it is an ethnicity announced in the practice and identificatory moments of political acts and utterances” (Walcott, “Rhetorics” 18). And, as such, Brand’s work is not only essential to the field of Black Canadian literature, but simultaneously poses a radical challenge to its underpinning political categories. Brand’s work does not sit easily within Canada; yet it also, at times, directly confronts the ideologies, like “post-race,” that comprise the Canadian political landscape. One final concern that might briefly be mentioned is how the notion of “post-race” is being refracted or rejected by recent “second-generation” Black immigrants, specifically those children (and now grandchildren) of the waves of “first-generation” Blacks who were able to immigrate to Canada after the nation’s racially exclusionary policies were lifted in the 1960s. Arguably, this specific and increasingly prominent second-generation immigrant subject confronts a newly powerful constellation of post-racial discourse comprising not only the old historic sense of Canada as a site of “post-race” (operative, as we have seen, since the late eighteenth century), but also the following more recent assumptions: (1) that the problem of race has largely been eliminated since the official instituting of procedural liberalism or “colour blindedness” with respect to Canadian laws and policies; (2) that official multicultural policy, since 1988, has successfully, and perhaps even exorbitantly, promoted ethnic “accommodation” and celebration; and (3) that the undeniable presence of racial minorities within Canadian urban and suburban locales, and, to an increasing degree, within mainstream American and Canadian cultural representation, now makes concerted critical thought on the question of “race” largely irrelevant. How then are Black second-generation writers reacting to this newly powerful and multifaceted message, supported equally by public doxa, corporate power, and official state representation, that Canada has now triumphantly moved beyond the “old” question of race, especially if, as recent sociological research suggests, this “second generation” may, at times, believe not only that race continues to matter, but that it matters more than their parents are willing to admit?18 In Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For (2005), the young urban protagonists are all visible minority and “second-generation” subjects—“born in the city [Toronto] from people born elsewhere” (20)19—and they collectively share a sense that joining what their parents describe as “regular Canadian life” is not really possible: “The crucial piece, of course [as the narrator explains], was that they weren’t the required race” (47). In Brand’s novel, these youths of Black, but also Asian and “mixed” racial heritage, forge friendships as outsiders in order to both navigate and artistically re-envision a city at once brightly cosmopolitan and hauntingly diasporic. Other Black writers, including members of the “second generation” themselves, such as fiction writers Andre Alexis (Despair, and Other Stories of Ottawa [1994] and Childhood [1998]),20 Esi Edugyan (The Second Life of Samuel Tyne [2004] and Half-Blood Blues [2011]), and David Chariandy (Soucouyant [2007]), as well as published playwrights such as Andrew Moodie (Riot [1998]), and published spoken-word artists such as Motion (Motion in Poetry [2002]), each offer indications of how Black Canadian writers, whether second-generation or not, but coming to voice in a time of great contradiction regarding matters of “race,” are reading, writing, performing, and sometimes demurring from this question.

Black Canadian Literature    555

Post-Racial Theory and Criticism By way of a conclusion, one could suggest that Black Canadian literature exhibits a constitutive critical relationship with “post-race” not only because Canada, for centuries, has been imagined as a site beyond the legacies of racism, but also because Black Canadian literature, as an academic field, while able to draw upon over two hundred years of writing and cultural activism, has nevertheless been articulated largely within a broad “mood” that has entered the metropolitan academy since the late 1980s, and which has accompanied arguments, on the part of many notable critics, that progressive cultural politics must now move beyond an ostensibly crude cultural politics of race, and, for some, beyond the category of race itself. The source of this mood is undoubtedly complex, and would involve, at times, a woeful forgetting of the often sophisticated terms of “old” social justice struggles, as well as the frightening success of both neoconservatism and neoliberalism in distorting and outright destroying the critical debate on “race” throughout society as a whole, including within the academy. Yet it is equally clear that many deeply informed critics and cultural workers, mindful of the ways in which “race” is commercialized and unethically politicized today, have articulated the need to rethink many received assumptions about “race-work” with respect to today’s rapidly changing institutions, disciplinary formations, and critical discourses (see, in Canada, the work of Roy Miki). From the specific perspective of Black Canadian studies, one particularly well-known statement regarding these emerging critical challenges was provided by the late Stuart Hall, who, in his now classic essay “New Ethnicities,” argued that there was (or needed to be) a decisive “shift” in Black (British) politics from an old “struggle to come into [official] representation,” characterized by the willingness, borne out of desperation, to support any superficially non-perjorative case of Black representation, to a “politics of representation” that involved recognizing that the category “black” (especially in the age of Thatcher) ultimately “has no guarantees in nature” as to its aesthetic or political significance (443). In his essay, Hall declared that we are now in a moment defined by “the politics of the end of the essential black subject,” a moment when we, as critics and cultural producers, are “plunged headlong into the maelstrom of a continuously contingent, un-guaranteed, political argument and debate” (444). Hall concludes that we must now, regarding matters of race, “grow up and leave the age of critical innocence” (448). Hall was extremely careful not to allow his statements, made in what he would later describe as an “unguarded moment” (“What Is This ‘Black’ ” 477), to be misunderstood as a blithe dismissal of the category of “race”—a wholesale abandonment of its precious archive of meanings and tactics. If Hall insists that there can be no guarantees in “race,” he nevertheless argues that, in the concept, there is clearly “something to be won” (“What Is This ‘Black’ ” 477); and a critical cultural politics, for Hall, is not waged by discarding the notion of ethnicity or “race,” but by finding new answers “inside the notion of ethnicity itself ” (“New Ethnicities” 447). However, Hall’s Black British colleague, Paul

556    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions Gilroy, appears to arrive at different conclusions in The Black Atlantic (1993). Gilroy’s work has had a uniquely powerful, if also complicated, effect on the rise of Black Canadian cultural criticism. In the first place, The Black Atlantic argued, in part, for an analysis of Black cultures that paid attention to the complex “diasporic” circulations of Black culture beyond the United States; and the book thereby helped scholars articulate both the importance of “Black Canadian” culture and literature, even as Gilroy himself seemed unconcerned, in this book, with Canada itself (see Walcott, Black Like Who). At the same time, The Black Atlantic was profoundly critical of “cultural nationalism” of any sort, a posture that, for George Elliott Clarke especially, seemed to radically undercut efforts to invoke or justify the field of Black Canadian studies (see Clarke, Odysseys Home). And Gilroy’s critique of the ostensibly “modern” categories of not only nation but also “race” in The Black Atlantic took a still more surprising turn in his subsequent book, indicatively titled Against Race (2002). Here, Gilroy suggested that “raciology,” “the lore that brings the virtual realities of ‘race’ to dismal and destructive life” (11), “cannot be readily re-signified or de-signified, and to imagine that its dangerous meanings can be easily re-articulated into benign, democratic forms would be to exaggerate the power of critical and oppositional interests” (12). Gilroy nods briefly to “Black” traditions and cultures—those “modern countercultures formed by long and brutal experiences of racialized subordination through slavery and colonialism and since”—but he argues that these cultures, and the political lessons that they might have offered, “are already being transformed beyond recognition by the uneven effects of globalization and planetary commerce in blackness” (13). Pointedly, Gilroy is here not promoting a new, strategic, or non-essentialist notion of race, as he did in The Black Atlantic. In Against Race, Gilroy is challenging all hope that “race,” however provisionally and cautiously articulated, can benefit cultural analysis or social justice. In turn, Gilroy proposes that critics must now try to imagine a new “nonracial humanism” (17), but one somehow distinguished from the “unreliable charts supplied by covertly race-coded liberal or even socialist humanisms” (18). It must be understood, most clearly, that Gilroy never denies the ongoing power of racism in the contemporary world—quite the opposite. However, an irony is clear. Having profoundly rejuvenated and influenced Black studies globally, Gilroy here appears to advocate a particular type of post-racial cultural politics. Gilroy is not by any means the first critic sufficiently informed about the persistent evils of racism to either trouble or question the category of “race” in progressive cultural politics, or else to observe, as Dionne Brand has previously, that Black culture “is used daily as creative backdrop to multinational markets” (Map 51). And, of course, similarly challenging questions must be directed toward Black Canadian literature, which, although demonstrating as an academic field very little “marketability” of the sort enjoyed by some Black cultural forms or texts, nevertheless must negotiate its space and identity within an increasingly squeezed and corporatized academy that is at times willing to accommodate superficial forms of “difference,” but that proves reluctant to respond adequately to the deeper ethical demands of Black art. Critics of Black Canadian literature must be prepared to ask difficult questions regarding the politics and ethics of their fieldwork today. Yet the fact is that asking such difficult questions is

Black Canadian Literature    557 already a notable, if not fully constitutive, feature of Black Canadian literary criticism, perhaps because the very newness and vulnerability of the field has continually forced its critics into heightened self-reflexivity about the ends of the work they do, both theoretically and practically. At the very least, the field of Black Canadian literature might serve as a warning to certain critics and theorists. Obviously, Black Canadian literature cannot be reduced to the question of “post-race.” However, Black Canadian literature does provide a uniquely robust and long-standing archive of writing regarding both the enduring dream and plain delusion of arriving somewhere beyond the legacies of race.

Notes 1. Currently, there appears to be no widespread consensus, among critics and writers, on which is the appropriate term: either “Black Canadian” or “African Canadian.” However, certain critics have stated a preference for one term over the other. 2. See, for instance, Goellnicht, Lee, and Reder. 3. For George Elliott Clarke, the cultural heterogeneity of Black Canada is plain fact. “African Canada,” he writes, “is a conglomeration of many cultures, a spectrum of ethnicities” (Odysseys 14); and the resulting “polyconsciousness” is, for Clarke, understandable “within the [broader] Canadian contexts of regional, ethnic, and linguistic ‘Balkanization’ ” (Odysseys 40, 28). Additionally, Clarke suggests that “[t]‌he variegated composition of the African-Canadian polity marks an imposing difference from the more homogeneous African-American ‘nation’ ” (Odysseys 49). Other critics, such as Diana Brydon, David Chariandy, and Barbara Godard, have argued that Black Canadian writing both is, and ought to be read as, culturally and socially heterogeneous; and Rinaldo Walcott emphasizes the normative approach by arguing that “[a] grammar for black needs to occupy a number of different kinds of positions, social and cultural identities, and political utterances” (Black 156). 4. Enoch Padolsky joins other critics in arguing that “racial” discourse in Canada was not historically established through a Black/White binary as it has been (until recently) in the United States. As he argues: the Canadian Black community, unlike that of the United States, has not been large enough historically to determine the broader nature of Canadian race relations. Instead these have been based on shifting “race” lines reflected in the historical changes in Canadian racial ideology, immigration policies, and successive discriminatory practices against a variety of groups: Aboriginals, southern and eastern Europeans, Jews, Chinese, Japanese, South Asians, as well as Blacks and others. (134) For Padolsky, “Canadian definitions of ‘race’ now and in the past can be seen to be much more multi-ethnic and multi-racial in their orientation than in the United States” (134–35). 5. Coleman and Goellnicht argue that there has been “an efflorescence of publication, research, and debate by and about the productions of racialized authors and artists previously unparalleled in Canadian cultural discourse” (15). They attribute this efflorescence in critical discourse to different factors, including the heady and controversial anti-racism

558    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions protests of the 1980s and 1990s, as well as specific initiatives such as the “Writing Thru Race” conference in 1994. Their conclusion is that “categories” such as African Canadian, Asian Canadian, and Native Canadian have become “institutions” (1) in that “[t]‌he traditions they define have emerged as disciplinary objects of knowledge” (2). This is a strikingly different position from the one offered 30  years ago by Lorris Elliott, one of the earliest academics to devote serious research to Black Canadian literature. Elliott then could argue, most convincingly, that “the creative output of Blacks in Canada is yet to be recognized, made available and properly assessed” (2). 6. Many Black writers interviewed in H.  Nigel Thomas’s important anthology Why We Write: Conversations with African Canadian Poets and Novelists (2006) express considerable fears for the future of Black writing in Canada. Austin Clarke, for instance, articulates his fear about something like market saturation, pointing out that his own relatively early success with big presses might have caused certain publishers to be reluctant to take on other Black writers—“[w]‌e already have Austin Clarke,” as Clarke himself cynically puts it (34). Cecil Foster notes that state support for publishing has dried up, imperiling emerging writers (113); and George Elliott Clarke agrees, acknowledging that there is “general contraction in the publishing industry in Canada,” but noting that although some Black writers are becoming more prominent, the actual number of “books [of poetry] by Black authors has certainly not gone up” (43). Afua Cooper laments the fact that “we have no Black publishers” (86), and M. NourbeSe Philip describes this apparent situation as nothing less than a “tragedy” (208). Among the interviewees, only Lawrence Hill suggests (after considerable qualifications) that “[i]t’s somewhat easier now [for Black writers] than let’s say twenty years ago” (145), but he also suggests that this is at least partly because publishers have “seen that books exploring the minority experience can sell” (146). However, a bit later in the book, Suzette Mayr appears to suggest that only particular forms of “minority experience” are likely to be deemed sellable and/or broadly consumable. Mayr refers to a student who considered some of her writing difficult to grasp or appreciate because, ironically enough, it was about Black people born here, and not about “a first-generation immigrant from somewhere else” (175). 7. See Ashok Mathur, “Transubracination: How Writers of Colour Became CanLit.” 8. In his recent book Directions Home, Clarke responds to critics whom he feels simplify his approach to African Canadian literature. In Black Like Who?, Walcott convincingly demonstrates that critical excavations and analyses of the historical “roots” of Blacks in Canada reveal their constitutive transnational “routes.” 9. Leslie Sanders founded York University’s pioneering Centre for the Study of Black Cultures in Canada; Afua Cooper is the current James Robinson Johnston Chair in Black Canadian Studies at Dalhousie University. 10. Recently, Brandeis University’s Institute on Assets and Social Policy released a report which indicated that in the years from 1984 to 2009, the wealth gap between White and African-American families has almost tripled due to public policies and systemic practices, and that this trend applies not only to the Black working poor, but also, to a lesser extent, to educated middle-class Blacks. “The gap presents an opportunity denied for many African American households and assures racial economic inequality for the next generation,” states Tatjana Meschede, a coauthor of the brief (see http://www.brandeis.edu/ now/2013/february/wealthgap.html and http://iasp.brandeis.edu/pdfs/Author/shapirothomas-m/racialwealthgapbrief.pdf). In Canada, a different report appears to reveal a dismally comparable and equally growing gap between Canadian Whites and Canadian

Black Canadian Literature    559 racial minorities in terms of their affective attachment to Canada. This report, by sociologists Jeffrey Reitz and Rupa Banerjee, uses data from a landmark Ethnic Diversity Survey, and it indicates, perhaps counterintuitively to some, that racial minority immigrants actually arrive in Canada with a greater willingness to express strong feelings of belonging to Canada than their White counterparts. However, the children of racial minority immigrants across the board express significantly weaker feelings of belonging to Canada than their parents, in sharp contrast with the children of White immigrants, who feel increasingly “more Canadian” than their parents. This waning of belonging among the children of racial minority immigrants is most dramatic among those self-identifying as Black. According to the survey, Black immigrants are, in fact, most likely, among all other ethnic groups, White or non-White, to articulate strong feelings of belonging to Canada. However, the children of Black immigrants, born and raised in Canada, end up the least likely, among all other ethnic groups, to articulate strong feelings of belonging. As Reitz and Banerjee note in their published report, this apparent decline of racial minority belonging to Canada among second-generation racial minority immigrants overlaps discomfortingly with the emergence of official Canadian multiculturalism, a policy and social ideal that one might imagine would progressively increase the sense of belonging and cultural citizenship among visible minorities. 11. This truly is the work of another paper. However, my thesis in a nutshell is that post-racial discourse exhibits at least three distinctive features: (1) it appropriates the language, imagery, and affect of deeply admirable activist legacies (e.g., the work of Martin Luther King, Jr.), but it does so in a necessarily distorted and often deliberately cynical way; (2) it functions through specific semiological and psychoanalytic processes (e.g., Roland Barthes’s “myth” and Slavoj Zizek’s “fetishistic disavowal”) in convincing us that necessarily racialized representation actually means that race no longer matters; (3) it functions not only to distract us from ongoing processes of racialization, but, as worryingly, to distract us from persisting and emergent social hierarchies based on gender, ethnicity, religion, and class. 12. My research and evolving thought on the connection between Black Canadian literature and “post-race” has been presented at several academic conferences over the past five years, but was first publicly delivered and recorded in a position paper entitled “Post-Race and Fieldwork” that was presented at “The Future of Canadian Literature” conference held at the University of British Columbia on October 1–2, 2009. At this conference, I stated the following: “I think that the field of Black Canadian literature, among other emergent racialized fields in and around Canadian literature, will prove of greater significance, not less, in an era of post-race.” See also my 2009 review essay on George Elliott Clarke, “Post-Race and Fieldwork.” Donna Bailey Nurse has also connected the terms “Black Canadian literature” and “post-race” using different textual references in a piece entitled “The New Black,” published in the National Post on 3 February 2012. 13. See Leslie Sanders, “Anti/Modern Spaces:  African Canadians in Nova Scotia,” and Maureen Moynagh, “Africville, an Imagined Community.” At the same time, it is important to see that Clarke is not solely a Grantian; he has also emphasized the overall heterogeneity of Black Canadian culture, and he has convincingly demonstrated, too, how other thinkers—as different as Frantz Fanon, Pierre Trudeau, and Malcolm X—have had a major influence upon his work. (See note 3. See also the Introduction to Clarke’s Directions Home.) 14. Karina Vernon is presently working on an anthology of Black Prairie Literature entitled Black Atlantis: Black Prairie Literature and Orature.

560    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions 15. See the Historica Canada website (historicacanada.ca) for a complete list of the Heritage Minute films. The website also includes the Ipsos Reid poll that I cite here. 16. King’s language in the Massey Lecture is worth reprinting in fuller terms: Canada is not merely a neighbor to Negroes. Deep in our history of struggle for freedom Canada was the north star. The Negro slave, denied education, de-humanized, imprisoned on cruel plantations, knew that far to the north a land existed where a fugitive slave if he survived the horrors of the journey could find freedom. The legendary underground railroad started in the south and ended in Canada. The freedom road links us together. Our spirituals, now so widely admired around the world, were often codes. We sang of “heaven” that awaited us and the slave masters listened in innocence, not realizing that we were not speaking of the hereafter. Heaven was the word for Canada and the Negro sang of the hope that his escape on the underground railroad would carry him there. One of our spirituals, Follow the Drinking Gourd, in its disguised lyrics contained directions for escape. The gourd was the big dipper, and the north star to which its handle pointed gave the celestial map that directed the flight to the Canadian border. So standing today in Canada I am linked with the history of my people and its unity with your past. 17. See Bibb’s editorial in the 21 May 1851 issue of Voice of the Fugitive, entitled “Colorphobia in Canada.” I am grateful to Dr. Afua Cooper for drawing my attention to the immediately aforementioned articles by Ward and Bibb. 18. See note 10 regarding the report by sociologists Jeffrey Reitz and Rupa Banerjee. 19. A possible exception is Carla, who is of African descent, though apparently not automatically recognized as such. 20. Andre Alexis was actually born in Trinidad, but was raised in Canada from a very young age.

Works Cited Alexis, Andre. Childhood. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1998. Print. ———. Despair, and Other Stories of Ottawa. Toronto: Coach House, 1994. Print. Angus, Ian. A Border Within:  National Identity, Cultural Plurality, and Wilderness. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1997. Print. Antwi, Phanuel. Hidden Signs, Haunting Shadows: Literary Currencies of Blackness in Upper Canadian Texts. Diss. McMaster University 2011. Open Access Dissertations and Theses. Paper 6331. http://digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca/opendissertations/6331. Bibb, Henry. Narrative of the Life and Adventure of Henry Bibb, an American Slave. 1849. Intro. Lucius C. Matlack. New York: Dover, 2005. Print. Brand, Dionne. In Another Place Not Here. Toronto: Vintage, 1997. Print. ———. Inventory. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2006. Print. ———. Land to Light On. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1997. Print. ———. A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging. Toronto: Vintage, 2002. Print. ———. Thirsty. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2002. Print. ———. What We All Long For. Toronto: Vintage, 2005. Print.

Black Canadian Literature    561 Brydon, Diana. “Black Canadas: Rethinking Canadian and Diasporic Cultural Studies.” Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses. 43 (2001): 101–17. Print. Chariandy, David. “Canada in Us Now: Locating the Criticism of Black Canadian Writing.” Essays on Canadian Writing 75 (Winter 2002): 196–216. Print. ———. “ ‘The Fiction of Belonging’: On Second-Generation Black Writing in Canada.” Callaloo 30.3 (2007): 818–29. Print. ———. “Post-Race and Fieldwork.” The Future of Canadian Literature. Canadian Literature. University of British Columbia. 1–2 Oct. 2009. Conference presentation. ———. “Post-Race and Fieldwork.” Essays on Canadian Writing 84 (Fall 2009): 200–12. Print. ———. Soucouyant. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp, 2007. Print. Clarke, Austin. The Meeting Point. 1967. Toronto: Vintage, 1998. Print. ———. Storm of Fortune. 1973. Toronto: Vintage, 1998. Print. ———. The Bigger Light. 1975. Toronto: Vintage, 1998. Print. Clarke, George Elliott. Directions Home:  Approaches to African-Canadian Literature. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2010. Print. ———. Eyeing the North Star: Directions in African Canadian Literature. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1997. Print. ———, ed. Fire on the Water: An Anthology of Black Nova Scotian Writing. 2 vols. Lawrencetown Beach, NS: Pottersfield, 1991–92. Print. ———. Odysseys Home:  Mapping African-Canadian Literature. Toronto:  U of Toronto P, 2002. Print. ———. Whylah Falls. Vancouver: Polestar, 1990. Print. Coleman, Daniel. White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2006. Print. Coleman, Daniel, and Donald Goellnicht, eds. “Race.” Essays on Canadian Writing 75 (Winter 2002): 1–29. Print. Compton, Wayde. 49th Parallel Psalm. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1999. Print. ———. After Canaan:  Essays on Race, Writing, and Region. Vancouver:  Arsenal Pulp, 2010. Print. ———. Bluesprint: Black British Columbian Literature and Orature. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp, 2002. Print. ———. Performance Bond. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp, 2005. Print. Cooper, Afua. The Hanging of Angélique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montréal. Toronto: Harper Perennial, 2006. Print. Davis, Andrea. “Black Canadian Literature as Diaspora Transgression:  The Second Life of Samuel Tyne.” Topia 17 (2007): 31–49. Print. Delany, Martin R. Blake: or The Huts of America. Boston: Beacon, 1970. Print. Edugyan, Esi. Half-Blood Blues. Toronto: Thomas Allen, 2011. Print. ———. The Second Life of Samuel Tyne. Toronto: Knopf, 2004. Print. Elliott, Lorris. The Bibliography of Literary Writings by Blacks in Canada. Toronto: Williams-Wallace, 1986. Print. Ferguson, Jade. From Dixie to the Dominion: Violence, Race, and the Time of Capital. Diss. Cornell University, 2009. Print. Foster, Cecil. A Place Called Heaven. Toronto: HarperCollins, 1996. Print. ———. Where Race Does Not Matter: The New Spirit of Modernity. Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2005. Print. Gale, Lorena. Angélique. Toronto: Playwrights Canada, 2000. Print.

562    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions Gilroy, Paul. Against Race:  Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002. Print. ———. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993. Print. Godard, Barbara. “Writing Resistance: Black Women’s Writing in Canada.” Intersexions: Issues of Race and Gender in Canadian Women’s Writing. Ed. Barbara Godard and Coomi S. Vevaina. New Delhi: Creative, 1996. 106–15. Print. Goellnicht, Donald. “A Long Labour:  The Protracted Birth of Asian Canadian Literature.” Essays on Canadian Writing 72 (2000): 1–41. Print. Grant, George. Lament for a Nation. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1965. Print. Hall, Stuart. “New Ethnicities.” Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. Ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen. New York: Routledge, 1996. 442–51. Print. ———. “What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?” Hall 468–78. Henson, Josiah. Autobiography of Josiah Henson. Intro. Robin Winks. Mineola, NY:  Dover, 2003. Print. Hill, Lawrence. The Book of Negroes. Toronto: HarperCollins, 2007. Print. King, Martin Luther. “Conscious for Change.” The Lost Massey Lectures: Recovered Classics from Five Great Thinkers. Toronto: Anansi, 2007. Print. Lee, Christopher. “The Lateness of Asian Canadian Studies.” Amerasia Journal 33.2 (2007): 1–17. Print. Malcolm X, with the assistance of Alex Haley. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. New York: Grove, 1965. Print. Mathur, Ashok. “Transubracination:  How Writers of Colour Became CanLit.” Trans.Can. Lit:  Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature. Ed. Smaro Kamboureli and Roy Miki. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2007. 141–51. Print. McKittrick, Katherine. Demonic Grounds:  Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2006. Print. Motion (Wendy Brathwaite). Motion in Poetry. Toronto: Women’s P, 2002. Print. Moynagh, Maureen. “Africville, an Imagined Community.” Canadian Literature 157 (1998): 14–34. Print. Moodie, Andrew. Riot. Winnipeg: Scirocco, 1998. Print. Moodie, Susanna. Roughing It in the Bush. 1852. Toronto: New Canadian Library, 2007. Print. Nurse, Donna Bailey. What’s a Black Critic to Do? Toronto: Insomniac, 2003. Print. ———. What’s a Black Critic to Do? II:  Interviews, Profiles, and Reviews of Black Writers. Toronto: Insomniac, 2011. Print. ———. “The New Black.” National Post. 3 Feb. 2012. Online version. http://arts.nationalpost. com/2012/02/03/the-new-black/. Web. Accessed 25 June 2015. Padolsky, Enoch. “Ethnicity and Race: Canadian Minority Writing at a Crossroads.” Literary Pluralities. Ed. Christl Verduyn. Toronto: Broadview, 1998. 19–36. Print. Philip, M. NourbeSe. Frontiers: Essays and Writings. Toronto: Mercury, 1996. Print. ———. A Genealogy of Resistance. Toronto: Mercury, 1999. Print. Reder, Deanna. “Preface.” Troubling Tricksters: Revisioning Critical Conversations. Ed. Deanna Reder and Linda M. Morra. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2010. vii–ix. Print. Reitz, Jeffrey G., and Rupa Banerjee. “Racial Inequality, Social Cohesion and Policy Issues in Canada.” Belonging? Diversity, Recognition and Shared Citizenship in Canada. Ed. Keith Banting, et al. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2007. 489–545. Print.

Black Canadian Literature    563 Sanders, Leslie. “Anti/Modern Spaces: African Canadians in Nova Scotia.” Floating the Border. Ed. Nurjehan Aziz. Toronto: TSAR, 1999. 106–21. Print. ———. Fierce Departures:  The Poetry of Dionne Brand. Waterloo, ON:  Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2009. Print. Shadd, Mary Ann. A Plea for Emigration or Notes of Canada West, in Its Moral, Social and Political Aspect:  With Suggestions Respecting Mexico, West Indies and Vancouver Island, for the Information of Colored Emigrants in 1852. Ed. Richard Almonte. Toronto: Mercury, 1998. Print. Thomas, H. Nigel. Why We Write: Conversations with African Canadian Poets and Novelists. Toronto: TSAR, 2006. Print. Vernon, Karina. “The First Black Prairie Novel: Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance’s Autobiography and the Repression of Prairie Blackness.” Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d’études canadiennes 45.2 (2011): 31–57. Print. Walcott, Rinaldo. Black Like Who? 2nd ed. Toronto: Insomniac, 2003. Print. ———. “Rhetorics of Blackness, Rhetorics of Belonging: The Politics of Representation in Black Canadian Expressive Culture.” Canadian Review of American Studies 29.2 (1999): 1–24. Print. Ward, Samuel Ringgold. “Canadian Negro Hate.” October 1852. The Black Abolitionist Papers, Volume II: Canada 1830–1865. Ed. C. Peter Ripley et al. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1965. 224–37. Print. Winks, Robin. The Blacks in Canada. 2nd ed. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2000. Print. Woodsworth, J.S. Strangers within Our Gates: or, Coming Canadians. Toronto: F. C. Stephenson, 1909. Print.

Chapter 30

(East and S ou t h e ast ) Asian Ca na dia n Literat u re The Strange and the Familiar Eleanor Ty

I feel like a burglar as I read, breaking into a private house only to discover it’s my childhood house filled with corners and rooms I’ve never seen. Joy Kogawa, Obasan (1981)

East and Southeast Asian Canadians: A Brief Historical Overview Asian Canadian literature is both familiar and unfamiliar, about the self and about the other, set in recognizable Canadian landscapes and in more exotic, “Oriental,” imaginary homelands (Rushdie). Like Naomi, who reads her Aunt Emily’s journals in Obasan, we find ourselves exploring a past or landscape that is vibrant, new, yet identifiable and infused with nostalgia. Many of the works that we categorize as “Asian Canadian” contain hybrid sensibilities and knowledge, produced by authors who may have had a Western or Anglo-American education, but who self-identify as, or who have been racialized as, other and non-White. Though they share with each other the category of “Asian Canadian,” the works are as “heterogenous” (Lowe, “Heterogeneity”)

(East and Southeast) Asian Canadian Literature    565 and as diverse as the backgrounds of the authors who may be first-, second-, or third-generation Asian Canadians. “Asian Canadian” is a useful umbrella term that has been adopted for subjects who claim or have ancestors who claim originary affiliations with East, South, and Southeast Asia. This chapter will discuss the works of East and Southeast Asian Canadians, a group that now comprises more than 11 percent of the Canadian population, according to the census in 2006 (Statistics Canada). Asian immigrants, beginning with the Chinese who came to British Columbia initially for the Gold Rush, and then to work on the transcontinental railways, have been present in Canada since the mid-nineteenth century.1 The first wave of sojourners, mainly male labourers from China, then Japan, and then India, settled on the west coast of Canada and worked building the transcontinental railroad, in mining, lumber, fishing, and agricultural industries. While the Chinese and Japanese workers were initially valued because they were docile, hard-working, and an inexpensive source of labour for menial work, they were also seen as “undesirable and unassimilable immigrants because of many alleged cultural and social peculiarities” by British Canadians (Peter Li 30). When the supply of workers exceeded the demand in the late nineteenth century, efforts were made to curtail their immigration through head taxes and the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923, which was not repealed until 1947. Japanese in Canada also experienced racism, but they were feared for their superior abilities, rather than looked down upon. For Japanese Canadians, the most overt expression of racism was the internment, dispersal, and segregation of Japanese Canadians during World War II, for which reparations were not formally made until 1988.2 In 1967, the points system, which judges immigrants on qualifications such as language and skill, was established as a basis for Canadian immigration. The pattern of immigration changed from this moment onward, from mainly British and European to Asian immigrants. Filipino Canadians, who are now the third-largest group of Asian Canadians (after the Chinese and South Asians), and who were in 2011 Canada’s “top source of immigrants” (Friesen), benefited from this and other changes to the immigration laws and came first as professionals in the 1960s and 1970s; then many came as domestic workers in the 1980s and 1990s (see Coloma et al. 9–11). Though Canadians of Vietnamese ethnic origin represent less than 1 percent of the total Canadian population, this community grew faster than the overall population between 1996 and 2001 (Statistics Canada, “Vietnamese Community”). Vietnamese Canadians, Cambodians, Laotians, and ethnic Chinese from Vietnam (Hoa) began arriving in Canada in the mid-1970s following the end of the Vietnam War, many of them as refugees or “boat people” because they came to Canada and the United States via refugee camps in Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Hong Kong. By the first decade of the twenty-first century, the top three sending countries to Canada were from Asia: China, the Philippines, and India.

566    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions

Asian Canadian Literature and Culture Literature produced by Asian Canadians can be said to have begun with the Eaton sisters, Edith Maude (1865–1914) and Winnifred (1875–1954), who, under the pseudonyms of Sui Sin Far and Onoto Watanna, wrote popular fiction and articles at the beginning of the twentieth century (see Doyle). Born to Chinese and English parents, the sisters have traditionally been read by critics as “good” (Edith) and “bad” (Winnifred) sisters (see Hattori 229). Julia Lee writes, Edith is lionized as the resistant subject because she self-identified as Chinese at the height of anti-Chinese prejudice and wrote sympathetically about the Chinese in a series of journalistic pieces and short stories dating from the early twentieth century. Her younger sister is vilified as complicit in racist ideology for taking on a Japanese persona, claiming to be the daughter of a Japanese aristocrat, and penning numerous romantic novels and short stories set in Japan, about which she claimed to be an expert. (Lee 81)

Both were responding to constructions of China and Japan in the period. Dominika Ferens traces the sisters’ ethnographic writing to two Orientalist discursive traditions— missionary and travel writing—and shows how these types of writing influenced the moralistic tone of Edith’s stories and Winnifred’s exotic narratives (see Ferens 19ff). Edith Eaton was one of the first Asian Canadians to engage “directly with the anti-Oriental racism of the Canadian state” (Beauregard, “Emergence” 53), while Winnifred’s novel Japanese Nightingale (1901) sold some 200,000 copies and was made into a Broadway play and silent film (Birchall xv). Guy Beauregard notes that the origins of “Asian Canadian” is “tied to what has become known as the Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop” in the late 1960s and early 1970s (Beauregard, “Emergence” 53), while Christopher Lee locates the production of the anthology Inalienable Rice, a joint effort of “the (Japanese Canadian) Powell Street Revue and the Chinese Canadian Writers Workshop,” as the moment when “a sense of Asian Canadian culture” took hold because the work “combined social activism with literary production in an unprecedented manner” (Christopher Lee, par. 2). As Donald Goellnicht notes, Asian Canadian literature had a “protracted birth” compared to Asian American literature, which grew out of the political climate of the anti–Vietnam War movement and the Black Power movement in the United States (Goellnicht, “Labour” 6). Poet and cultural critic Roy Miki points out that “the existence of Asian in Canadian has always been a disturbance—a disarticulation that had to be managed originally as the ‘Asiatic,’ as the ‘Oriental,’ and subsequently as a sign of the multicultural, as the ‘Visible Minority,’ in order to sustain the figure of the citizen as the end of assimilation” (IN FLUX 55). Literature by writers of Asian descent

(East and Southeast) Asian Canadian Literature    567 emerged in the 1980s and was studied as “postcolonial, Canadian, and multicultural” literatures. By the 1990s, Asian Canadian writers were employing diverse forms of self-expression: fiction, memoirs, poems, plays, films, and popular forms, such as science fiction and graphic novels.

Depictions of Immigrant Life in Canada before 1950: Fiction, Nonfictional Prose, and Film Most of the narratives of the early lives of Chinese and Japanese Canadians are historiographic accounts that have been researched and pieced together by writers in the late twentieth century who are relating events that occurred before they were born, writing stories based on social history, cultural geography, immigration records, and/or census statistics.3 The narratives reflect the cultural conditions, beliefs, and ideologies of the late twentieth century as much as the values of turn-of-the-century China and Canada. Novelists, biographers, and filmmakers, such as Sky Lee, Denise Chong, Richard Fung, and Wayson Choy, are aware of the possibilities and the limitations of historical writing, how events and data can be interpreted in various ways, and their works exhibit a number of the qualities that Linda Hutcheon associates with postmodern painting and historical narrative in fiction—namely, that an author’s relationship to the past often entails an “ironic dialogue,” a “critical reworking” rather than a “nostalgic return” (4). Sky Lee’s Disappearing Moon Cafe (1990), which traces the lives of four generations of women from the Wong family from 1892 to the late 1980s, is set in a fictional café, which, as Daniel Martin notes, acts as “a site of resistance to any ideologically upheld celebration of Chinese-Canadian history that exhibits the past within contemporary architectural heritage” (85). Instead, the café, like the novel, is a reminder of the ghosts—the Chinese labourers, Chinatown spaces, the Benevolent associations, and the women—that existed outside Vancouver public history. For Martin, the “spectres from the past emerge in the gaps between historical narrative and the facticity of historical events. Ethnic spectres also haunt the linear, progressional logic of official historical narratives. … they represent the possibility of imagining alternative narratives of historical knowledge” (90). Lee, like the playwrights Winston Kam and Richard Fung, rewrites the past according to what might have been, interspersing facts, “such as the Chinese Benevolent Association’s retrieval of the bones of deceased Chinese railway labourers from the 1890s to 1930s, the threat of various Chinese Exclusion Acts … and the Janet Smith murder case” (Martin 95), with the fictional happy reunion of Kae and Hermia as “free women” in Hong Kong (Lee 210). Similarly, Richard Fung’s video Dirty Laundry (1996) reworks history to include a story about homosocial bonds between “bachelor” Chinese workers in the late

568    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions nineteenth century, who were often married men separated from their wives and children in China. Fung’s video reveals history as a palimpsestic relationship between official discourse and the overwritten secrets that need to be uncovered or broken into. On a trip across the Canadian Rockies, Roger Kwong, a contemporary Chinese Canadian man, travels on the railway tracks originally laid by nineteenth-century Chinese workers, including his grandfather. Accidentally breaking the glass frame holding the photograph of his great-grandfather, he discovers another photograph underneath the first, showing his ancestor holding the hand of another man. As Lisa Lowe writes, The uncovering of the hidden image of love between men discloses ‘dirty laundry’ beneath the purified history of the long heroic labourer. … Roger discovers that such hiddenness, the explicit removal of attachments between men from the public realm of the visual, has itself a history that is inseparable … from the singular history that frames a particular image of Chinese immigrant labour in Canada. … Dirty Laundry offers an alternative mode of inquiry:  break the frame to interpret the residues. (“Break the Frame” 79)

In The Concubine’s Children (1994), Denise Chong discovers a wealth of secrets about her family as she attempts to recuperate the story of her maternal grandmother, the beautiful “concubine” Leong May-ying, who was brought over as third wife to her grandfather Chan Sam in 1924, and ended up working as a teahouse waitress and a prostitute, supporting not only her husband and her children in Canada, but also her husband’s second wife and his two daughters back in China. The “autoethnography” becomes “a vindication of her grandmother’s troubled life on behalf of her mother” (Ty, Politics 36, 51). Through interviews and research, Chong pieces together her mother’s early life, which was, until then, unknown to her. Her mother revealed the unhappiness of her childhood, telling Chong that she “grew up within the walls of rooming houses, smoke-filled mah-jongg parlors and dank alleyways” (Chong 218), that she grew up with a mother (Chong’s grandmother) who “was having affairs with men, drinking and gambling” (219). By providing us with details of her grandmother’s life and the ways her mother endured the terror, loneliness, isolation, and shame of her childhood in a largely male-dominated Chinatown, Chong fills in the gap in our cultural and historical memory about the lives of immigrant women during this early period of West Coast expansion and settlement, at the same time as she enables us to have an affective response to a sex worker, a woman who is usually “othered” in society (see Ty, Politics 34). These seemingly disparate stories of the accounts of early Chinese Canadians who lived during the Exclusionary years of 1885–19454 are linked by the way in which secrets surface in the telling of old histories. The secret stories uncovered by subsequent generations are often those that were deemed too shameful to tell one’s children or grandchildren. The fact that they are not revealed until the end of one’s life shows the depth of their effect on the bearer of secrets. The social and historical conditions in which many early Chinese, and later Japanese Canadians, were forced to live propelled them to do, live, and perform acts that were contrary to what they deemed morally acceptable

(East and Southeast) Asian Canadian Literature    569 behaviour. Their silence about their early lives indicates the sense of self-abnegation and humiliation for the indignation they often had to suffer. While some instances of repressed memory and trauma, for example in Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1981) and Kerri Sakamoto’s The Electrical Field (1998), can be read as instances of what Cynthia Sugars and Gerry Turcotte call “haunting” and the “postcolonial gothic” (Chap.  1), or what Marlene Goldman calls “haunting” and “dispossession” (Introduction),5 I am reluctant to use the gothic, ghosts, or haunting as an overarching trope for Asian Canadian literature. In relation to Euro-Canadians who may have “fears of territorial illegitimacy, anxiety about forgotten or occluded histories, resentment towards flawed or complicit ancestors, assertions of Aboriginal priority” (Sugars and Turcotte ix), Asian Canadians have functioned as the postcolonial ghosts, the Yellow Peril spectres, the invisible others, and the unclean Orientals for almost a century (1865–1965) in Canada (see Ty, Politics, Introduction). In addition, if one may generalize, ghosts and spirits are often viewed differently by Asian cultures. The tradition of ancestor veneration, including setting up an altar in the home, and giving offerings of food and money at the cemeteries, is still practiced by many diasporic Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese peoples. In parts of the Philippines (the Visayas), the benevolent spirits of the land were originally ancestors. There are vengeful and malevolent ghosts, of course, but family members who have died sometimes hang around in one’s kitchen and give advice, as Grandmama does for Sek-Lung, Third Brother in Wayson Choy’s 1995 novel The Jade Peony (151, 157). Ghosts and hauntings may or may not express “the legacy of the settler-invaders’ long-standing desire to lay claim to a Canadian genius loci or spirit of the nation and to come to terms with Canada’s past” in Asian Canadian literature (Goldman 5). Wayson Choy’s memoir Paper Shadows (1999) begins with the discovery of a shocking secret about his origins. After the launch of his first book, The Jade Peony (1995), a linked collection of short stories that won the Trillium and the Vancouver Book Award in 1995, Choy received a phone call from a woman who claimed that she saw his “real mother” (Paper Shadows 4), whom Choy believed had died 18 years earlier. At 57, Choy discovered that he had been adopted, and the memoir is both a retrospective and an attempt to recount the search for his biological family. Paper Shadows describes the childhood and youth of Choy Way Sun as he grows up in a working-class neighbourhood in Vancouver’s old Chinatown. Details, such as his mother playing mah-jong (35), the family’s excursion to the Chinese opera at the Sing Kew Theatre, a warehouse at 544 Shanghai Alley (46), and their efforts at selling war bonds (57) reveal the quotidian life of Chinese Canadians as they attempt to hold on to Chinese culture at the same time as they make efforts at becoming Canadian. Choy’s memoir and the story of “Jung-Sum Second Brother” (Part Two) in The Jade Peony are two of the first Chinese Canadian homosexual growing-up narratives, as there are hints of the development of a gay and artistic subjectivity early on in these boys’ childhoods (see Ty, Politics 128–29). In Paper Shadows, Choy writes about how he would “play-act Cantonese opera” for his father at three years old by putting lipstick on his cheeks and rouge on his forehead, ending up resembling “a scruffy clown more than a warrior” (62). His father wonders “why a boy dresses up like that” (63). But there

570    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions are also other scenes that fill in gaps in official Canadian history, as in his account of the participation of Chinese Canadian young men in World War II. While Choy does not find exactly what he was looking for at the end of the memoir, he learns of the way “Chinatown children were bought and sold” before 1945 (282). The confluence of restrictive immigration laws, patrilineage, and Chinese traditions of kinship facilitated and led to these secrets and practices of days “long gone” (282).

World War II and After In contrast to the Chinatown stories of Wayson Choy, Denise Chong, and Sky Lee, Judy Fong Bates’s short stories and novel are about the isolation of living as the only Chinese family in small-town Ontario in the middle of the twentieth century, before the changes to the Immigration Act in 1967. China Dog and Other Tales from a Chinese Laundry (1997) and Midnight at the Dragon Café (2004) tell stories of Chinese immigrants who deal with inter-racial as well as intra-cultural conflicts. In “Eat Bitter,” Hua Fan, who works long hours at his uncle’s laundry, hates being taunted with “Ching, Ching, China-man” every time he goes into town. He thinks, “He was sick of always ingratiating himself to these white devils. Again he reminded himself. This is not my real life. In his mind he saw himself back in the village, dressed like a gentleman in fine clothes as he presided over the operations of his teahouse, chatting with a few select customers, amazing them with stories about the Gold Mountain” (China Dog 51). His attitude is typical of the early sojourners who believed that their stay in Canada was temporary, and that their home was back in China. In Dragon Café, young Su-Jen sees her mother saddened by the nostalgic recollections of the vibrant city of Hong Kong, which she had to leave behind in order to move to a town “so quiet you can hear the dead” (18). Su-Jen later comes to understand the sacrifices of first-generation immigrants, the many small-town restaurant owners in non-urban centres who constitute the end of what Lily Cho calls the “old diaspora,” the indentured labourers and workers who arrived before the “ ‘new’ ones of jet-fuelled transnational mobility” (Cho, Eating 11). Su-Jen observes her parents’ repetitive and claustrophobic existence, their “small” world in the restaurant, as she grows up in the 1950s and 1960s, listening to stories from the Bible at church and her father’s stories about the Chinese emperor at home (47, 61). These works by Fong Bates vividly illustrate the tensions not only between Asian and European Canadians, but also between first-generation and “1.5-generation” Chinese immigrants (those who arrived before their teen years), as they struggled with their desires to assimilate and yet maintain their cultural traditions. Perhaps the best-known Asian Canadian novelist is Joy Kogawa, whose novel Obasan is an example of the way art can mobilize public opinion and influence government policy. First published in 1981, it was one of the first accounts of the internment and dispersal of Japanese Canadians during World War II. Told from the point of view of a schoolteacher who revisits and reconstructs the painful memories of her childhood

(East and Southeast) Asian Canadian Literature    571 experiences, the narrative depicts the abjection, loss of home, family, and community of Japanese Canadians. Its vivid characterization, evocative language, and poetic imagery of silence, stones, and water contribute to its richness and theme of racial injustice. It has been read as an example of autobiographical narrative, postmodern metafiction, and ethnic writing that employs commonly used motifs of speech, silence, and food (see Shirley Lim; Goellnicht, “Father”; Cheung; and Sau-ling Wong, Chap. 1). Manina Jones reads the novel as an example of a “documentary-collage,” which “revises both the concept of a documentary history … and the formal model of historical realism … by focusing on the material documentation of history and story, refusing to see either as simply ‘pre-textual’ events unconditioned by specific, contextualized ‘tellings’ ” (122). By assembling stories and questioning evidence, Kogawa rewrites history and recounts the suffering and confusion of Japanese Canadians in World War II. The National Association of Japanese Canadians credits Kogawa and Obasan for helping the Japanese Canadian community break the silence, begin the healing process, and attain redress in 1989 (see the “National Association of Japanese Canadians” webpage).

Asian Canadian Fiction about Post-1967 Experiences One “bestseller” of the 1980s was Evelyn Lau’s Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid (1989), which was translated into a dozen languages and made into a CBC television movie entitled The Diary of Evelyn Lau (1993), starring Korean Canadian Sandra Oh. Chronicling her life on the streets as a prostitute and drug user, Lau’s Runaway is a grim, raw account, written in the first person, of Lau’s rejection of her parents’ Chinese immigrant values, her escape from the pressures of school and family into the streets of Vancouver, her many encounters with middle-aged men with “rough, salivating mouths and pouches of fat” (Runaway 165), her sessions with therapists and probation officers, and her struggle to write between 1986 and 1988. The book caused some anxiety in the Asian Canadian community because of its negative depiction of a Chinese family. According to Lien Chao, “Lau’s prose is characterized by a single Freudian psychoanalytical drama—the Oedipal paradigm” (157). For Chao, Lau attains “sovereignty” as the autobiographical narrator “at the expense of her parents’ subjectivity” and Lau’s “illustration of her parents’ general lack of ability to fit into Canadian society is simplified” through her depiction of her parents “as the perpetual cultural Other” (163). But in her book Ingratitude (2011), Erin Khuê Ninh locates the source of Chinese American (including Canadian) daughters’ rebellious attitudes in the material and economic aspirations of their immigrant parents. Ninh writes, “Second-generation children become viable capital investments, raised to enter the lucrative math-and science-based professional fields now open to them, in order to repay their parents’ suffering with prestigious consumer goods” (17). Unlike Chao, Ninh places the blame of daughters’ disobedience and suffering on the

572    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions immigrant parents, who often threaten them with the “discourse of disownment” and banishment (101). Lau is the author of six books of poetry, short essays, and three works of fiction, but none of the books has achieved as wide a reading audience as her first. In the mid-1990s, two strong feminist, queer writers and activists published their first novels. Japanese Canadian Hiromi Goto and Chinese Canadian Larissa Lai, born within a year of each other, reshaped the genre of the immigrant or ethnic bildungsroman by using multiple narrators, weaving folk tales and magic realism with contemporary narratives about growing up as second-generation (or 1.5-generation) immigrants in Canada. Their second novels, published in the early 2000s, both employed science fiction and fantasy to critique twentieth-century global capitalism and the “Orientalizing” (Said 49) of Asian women in North America, and presented positive representations of lesbian relationships. They were influenced by the second wave feminist movements of the 1980s, as well as the discourses on race, multiculturalism, and visible minorities of the late 1980s. In 1990, a coalition of visual and video artists, performers, and writers worked together to produce Yellow Peril Reconsidered under Paul Wong, to which Larissa Lai contributed. A touring exhibition that included photos, essays, installation art, video work, and artist biographies by 25 Asian Canadians, this project was meant to reflect an Asian New-World consciousness and was accompanied by a 72-page publication. A few years later, The Racial Minority Rights Committee, chaired by Roy Miki, worked with First Nations and racial minorities to bring together 180 writers, critics, and cultural workers at the “Writing Thru Race” conference 30 June–3 July 1994 in Vancouver.6 The event was criticized by the media as an instance of “reverse discrimination” and was debated in Parliament because it excluded White writers, but it contributed to “major shifts of awareness,” according to poet Fred Wah, about the exclusion of people of colour in the arts community (“Interview”). One writer who is outspoken about the exclusion of people of colour from dominant Euro-Canadian culture is Hiromi Goto, whose novel Chorus of Mushrooms (1994) foregrounds “the links between language and identity; between cultural silencing and personal silence within three generations of a Japanese-Canadian family” (Sturgess 19). The three female protagonists all embark on journeys that enable them to develop their emotional, social, and sexual identities, and they use food as a way to reconnect them with their Japanese culture. Multi-layered and rich, the novel has invited numerous interpretations. Charlotte Sturgess reads the novel as a feminist rewriting of Sinclair Ross’s As for Me and My House (Sturgess 21)7 as Naoe, the grandmother, comments on her immobility and the “constant wind” and “pit of dust” of the prairies at the beginning of the novel (Chorus 14, 15). The novel raises a number of issues about the treatment of the aged, about the link between food and ethnicity, and is a fine example of postmodern fiction as it plays with fantasy and reality, uses multiple points of view, and incorporates playful dialogues, grocery lists, signs, anecdotes, and newspaper articles into its narrative. While the novel shows examples of “sad immigrant stories” (102), it ends positively with the assertion, “You know you can change the story” (220). While her first novel ends optimistically, her second novel, The Kappa Child (2001), is darker. It explores “abject experiences that accompany … alienation and dislocation,

(East and Southeast) Asian Canadian Literature    573 and the exposure to racial prejudice that results from the characters’ diasporic movements” (Almeida 48). As Wendy Pearson notes, the hardships of immigrant life on the Canadian prairies are “counterpointed within the novel, primarily by the protagonist’s childhood obsession with Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie. The deliberate comparison between Laura’s hardy, hearty pioneer life and the narrator’s is almost purely ironic, suggesting to the reader that in the end, it is the Wilder novels … which are really a fantasy of pioneer life” (Pearson, “Saturating”). In this novel, which won the 2001 Tiptree Award for a work that “explores gender roles in science fiction and fantasy” (Pearson, “Saturating”), the protagonist has a close bodily encounter with a mysterious stranger who may be a kappa, a mischievous water sprite from Japanese folklore. Her subsequent unusual “pregnancy” suggests the second-generation immigrant’s sense of non-belonging, as her protagonist embodies a “state of corporeal anomaly by harboring another body, that of a strange creature, within her own” (Ty, Unfastened 111). The protagonist, who wears pajamas all the time, believing that she is “not a beautiful Asian” (Goto, Kappa 51), undergoes a slow transformation and learns that life is “richer and fuller than she has allowed herself to believe” (Pearson, “Saturating”). Larissa Lai writes that the identity politics movements of the late 1980s and 1990s in Canada “were largely focused on foregrounding historical violence against people of colour and First Nations people in Canada, and in pondering strategies for the construction of ‘empowered’ identities for marginalized people within the context of the nation state” (“Future Asians” 168).8 According to Lai, Artemis Wong, the protagonist of When Fox Is a Thousand, “is a product of my thinking through what happens to young Asian Canadian women in the absence of a radical community-based identity politic” (Lai, “Future Asians” 168). When Fox Is a Thousand (1995) uses a mythic fox who has inhabited the body of a ninth-century Chinese poetess as a trickster figure but also as “the novel’s tour guide” (Morris 70), to enable the adopteé Artemis to reconnect with her culture and also to propel her toward her lesbian relationship with her Chinese Canadian friend, Diane. In Salt Fish Girl (2002), “Lai depicts a society at the apocalyptic end of late capitalism in which individual bodies are pitted against a consumerism that commodifies everything that crosses its path” (Tara Lee, “Mutant” 94). The novel is set in the futuristic world of Serendipity in 2044 where the smelly protagonist, Miranda Ching, bonds with rebellious female worker clones. At the same time, there are parallels between this dystopian world and the nineteenth-century segment set in South China in the early 1900s. Lai explains that in this novel, she wanted to think about “origins” and how “people who come from histories of travel and migration” make sense of the world (Lai, “Future” 171, 170). A dual temporal and geographical setting is also used by Lydia Kwa in This Place Called Absence (2000), which links the first phase of global migration, roughly 1870–1918, with that of the late twentieth century. The protagonist Wu Lan Lim is a Singaporean-born clinical psychologist who finds herself researching the lives of ah-ku women, who were brought from China to work in brothels in Singapore in the late nineteenth century. Two of these women become friends and discover their love for each other. Goellnicht says, “the insistence on producing female protagonists with agency,

574    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions however limited[,]‌ … calls into question the masculine root notion of ‘diaspora’ as a scattering of seeds from the father or the father-land” (“Forays” 160). The use of multiple locations, multiple story lines, and fragmented narratives is adroitly used in Madeleine Thien’s Certainty (2007), which features characters from Sandakan (North Borneo), Vancouver (Canada), and Ysbrechtum (The Netherlands), who share experiences of loss, trauma, and mourning. While the novel begins in Canada with the recent death of Gail, a radio documentary producer, it jumps back in time to recount the childhood experiences of Gail’s father in Borneo, and also describes Gail’s trip to Holland as she seeks answers to her family’s mysteries. The novel demonstrates how “human desires and longings and economic and political aspirations cross existing national borders, as well as the ways travel, new methods of technology, and patterns of migration influence and construct new affiliations and ways of belonging” (Ty, “Little Daily” 46). Her second novel, Dogs at the Perimeter (2011), explores the horrific effects of the Cambodian genocide on Asian Canadian survivors some 30 years after. Like Thien’s novels, a number of recent works show close transnational connections between countries in Asia and North America and reveal the strong presence of “other” histories in the lives of contemporary diasporic people. While in a coma from a car accident in Alberta, the heroine of Darcy Tamayose’s Odori (2007) hears her great-grandmother’s stories from Okinawa, and discovers what happened to her mother and her mother’s twin sister during World War II. In Miguel Syjuco’s postmodern novel Illustrado (2008), which won the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2008, a character by the name of Miguel Syjuco attempts to solve the mystery of the death of a Filipino author who lived in New York. In the process of collecting information from interviews, e-mails, newspaper articles, and novels, he pieces together a history of four generations of one family, recounting events from the Philippine-American war at the turn of the last century to the present. Physician and writer Vincent Lam’s Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures (2005) is a collection of linked stories in which, as Cynthia Sugars points out, Lam seeks to “ ‘de-gothicize’ the common portrayals of … emergency room gore, medical school pranks, or morbid fantasy, while, at the same time, infusing this world with gothic potential by probing the irrational, bewildering, and mutually vulnerable side of medical practice” (“Keeping” 252). The stories follow four characters from their medical-school days to their careers and social lives as physicians, revealing the humour, moral dilemmas, and tensions of people in the medical professions. In contrast, his second work, The Headmaster’s Wager (2012), set in the past and inspired by his grandfather’s life, is about a wa kiu (overseas Chinese) family on the eve of the Tet offensive in Vietnam in 1966. In recent years, Asian Canadians have increasingly used popular genres to tell their stories. Mariko and Jillian Tamaki’s Skim (2008), a graphic novel about a slightly overweight biracial Japanese Canadian tenth-grade girl, explores marginalization, bullying, teenage sexuality and development—including queer sexuality, depression, and suicide—through visual and verbal techniques such as irony, understatement, light and dark imagery, extreme close-ups, and variation in panel sizes. Using the form of the

(East and Southeast) Asian Canadian Literature    575 diary, Tamaki captures the eccentric and hyper-dramatic vicissitudes of teen lives in the 1990s in Toronto in a sensitive and humorous way. Collectively, these novels reveal not only the rich variety of subject matter and subgenres of Asian Canadian fiction but also the way the changing demographics of the group shift and add to the development of the field.

Poetry A number of Asian Canadian writers were inspired by new American and avant-garde poetic movements in Canada before they identified themselves as “Asian Canadian.” In the 1960s and early 1970s, before race-based collections such as Inalienable Rice (ed. Gunn et al.), Many-Mouthed Birds (ed. Bennett Lee and Jim Wong-Chu), and Swallowing Clouds (ed. Andy Quan and Jim Wong-Chu), Fred Wah and Roy Kiyooka had already published books of poetry, namely, Wah’s volumes that deal with landscape—Lardeau (1965), Mountain (1967), Among (1972), Tree (1972)—and Kiyooka’s Stoned Gloves (1970), a photo-essay that “uncovers the exploitation of Japanese labour that is the dark underside of the global capitalism celebrated at Expo ’70 in Osaka” (Goellnicht, “Asian Kanadian”). Their works in the 1980s and 1990s continue to question and resist easy ethnic labels, but they become more situated. Joanne Saul reads Kiyooka’s Mothertalk (1997) and Wah’s Diamond Grill (1996) as “biotexts,” a term that captures the “tension generated by the impulse to write one’s self into place, while at the same time recognizing that the complex nodes of belonging—and not belonging—are inextricably linked to ethnic, national, cultural, and gendered subjectivity” (260). Saul writes, “Just as Kiyooka needs to articulate the way he and his family were constructed by the Canadian state during World War II, Wah must describe the impact of Canadian immigration laws on Chinese-Canadians, and the continuing pressure to conform to a system predicated upon racist stereotypes” (263). Diamond Grill, a collection of prose poems, won the Howard O’Hagan Award for short fiction and is the “text that now stamps him as ‘Asian Canadian’ ” (Goellnicht, “Asian Kanadian”). He was named Canada’s fifth Parliamentary Poet Laureate in 2011, and is recognized as “one of the most innovative, engaged, and politically astute writers and critics to have emerged from western Canada in the second half of the twentieth century” (Rudy, Fred Wah). Roy Miki, a well-known cultural activist, critic, editor, professor, and poet, published Surrender in 2001, which went on to win the 2002 Governor General’s Award for English poetry. Like the poems in his earlier collections, Surrender deals with issues of race, postmodernism, and politics. Miki plays with words and intertextual allusions, teasing and challenging readers to become aware of the way in which historical events and racial politics echo in today’s society. Kit Dobson notes that Surrender “offers its readers an opportunity to interrogate the function of subjectivity in the face of contemporary global displacements of the self ” (162). Its “disruptive poetic practices highlight ways in which social change might derive from thinking about the subject differently,

576    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions understanding its locatedness not as a limitation but as a mobile node in a series of politically dissenting bodies” (174). Miki’s essay collections, Broken Entries: Race, Subjectivity, Writing (1998) and IN FLUX (2011), reveal his strong commitment to First Nations, people of colour, issues of race, and particularly, Japanese Canadians and collective action. Another poet who is a cultural activist, passionate about feminist issues, race, collective resistance, and the environment, is Rita Wong, whose book forage (2007) was the winner of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize in 2008 and was selected as the Poetry Winner of CBC’s “Canada Reads.”9 This collection has become a seminal work of ecocritical poetics. Heather Milne notes how it “sifts through the fragments of contemporary global culture, critically engaging with the legacies of colonialism, the exploitation of workers in developing nations, global capitalism and environmental degradation,” paying “particular attention to their impact on women” (185). The poem “nervous organism,” for example, critiques genetic modification by splicing words: “jellyfish potato / jellypo fishtato / glow in the pork toys” (Rita Wong 20). Milne considers the work a radical intervention that interrogates “contemporary scientific, economic and political discourses that have been used to reinforce social norms and relations of power” (184).

Drama and Theatre Nina Lee Aquino’s two-volume Love + Relasianships is the first collection of contemporary Asian Canadian drama. It contains representative plays by R.A. Shiomi, Marty Chan, Betty Quan, Nina Lee Aquino and Nadine Villasin, Marjorie Chan, Leon Aureus, and others. The collection features works dating from the 1980s onward, which coincides with the development of “Asian Canadian” cultural identity and activism. Before that, performances of plays in Chinese or Japanese were transplantations of “traditional theatrical forms from places of origin” (Xiaoping Li, “Performing” 11). Like the novels set before World War II, many of the contemporary plays re-envision the past. Winston Kam’s Bachelor Man (first prod. 1987), set in Toronto’s Chinatown in 1929, suggests “new ways of viewing Chinese ‘bachelor’ societies as homosocial spaces” (Goellnicht, “Kai-Dai” 225). Other plays consider the consequences of historical events on contemporary Asian Canadians. Mitch Miyagawa’s The Plum Tree (first prod. 2002)  depicts an encounter between a German immigrant woman who possesses a berry farm near Mission, British Columbia, and a Japanese Canadian man whose family owned the farm before World War II. The play sympathetically presents Frieda’s immigrant life, her nostalgia for her home in Miessen, the family’s struggles to keep the berry farm, as well as the sansei George’s attempt to repossess the property and find justice for his family. Ironically, the ending alludes to the possibility of an even earlier owner of the farmland, the Indigenous people of the region. In Toronto, the Carlos Bulosan Theatre (CBT), which was founded as a workshop by activists in 1982, encourages playwrights, actors, and artists to create and perform new and innovative work on issues that affect the Filipino Canadian community. The CBT collective produced Miss Orient(ed) (first prod. 2003), a play about young women in a

(East and Southeast) Asian Canadian Literature    577 beauty pageant, which raised questions about Filipino Canadian women’s identities in a wry and humorous way. Written by Nina Aquino and Nadine Villasin, it has been staged in Toronto and Montreal in 2003 and 2005. The CBT has also produced People Power (2008) and In the Shadow of Elephants (2013), both set in the Philippines, the former during the “non-violent, spontaneous uprising that toppled the brutal Marcos dictatorship” and the latter representing people’s resistance to colonialism during the occupation of the country by the Spaniards, Americans, and Japanese soldiers, respectively (Knowles 135). Also based in Toronto is the Fu-Gen Asian Canadian Theatre Company, founded in 2002, which is a company dedicated to the production of new and established works by Asian North American playwrights. Its productions include Leon Aureus’s Banana Boys (2005), adapted from Terry Woo’s novel of the same title, Catherine Hernandez’s Singkil (2007), and David Yee’s Lady in the Red Dress (2009). As Adrienne Wong notes, the “only Vancouver theatre company mandated to produce work by and for Asian Canadians is the Vancouver Asian Canadian Theatre,” founded in 2000, which “still sits on the margins of Vancouver’s broader theatre community” (30). However, there is a thriving Asian Canadian cultural scene in Vancouver, with organizations and events such as the Vancouver Asian Heritage Month, the Powell Street Festival, Centre A, and the Asian Film Festival (see Xiaoping Li, “Performing” 23). The tension between the need to focus on identity-based cultural work and the need to collaborate with other culturally diverse artists is one that many Asian Canadian artists experience. Asian Canadian literature is a vibrant and still developing area, and the flexibility and range of its themes, forms, and topics mean that it can be read not only as postcolonial, diasporic, Canadian, Asian Canadian, and minority literature, but also through different generic and cultural lenses, such as feminist, queer, urban, life-writing, science fiction, young adult, transnational, diasporic, and global literatures.

Notes 1. See the works of Lisa Mar, Peter Li, and Ken Adachi for the histories of Asian Canadians. 2. For an account of the work leading up to the redress, see Miki, Redress. 3. The exception to this is Wayson Choy, who was born in Vancouver’s Chinatown in 1939 and whose works include a memoir, Paper Shadows: A Chinatown Childhood, and whose novels include autobiographical elements. 4. In Brokering Belonging, Lisa Rose Mar discusses the ways some Chinese leaders in Canada were able to act as intermediaries between the Chinese and Anglo worlds of North American’s West Coast during the Exclusion era between 1885 and 1945. 5. Sugars and Turcotte suggest that in many Canadian works, “there is an aura of unresolved and unbroachable ‘guilt,’ as though the colonial/historical foundations of the nation have not been thoroughly assimilated” (ix). They explain, “When the uncanny is combined with the Gothic, elements of the supernatural, the monstrous, or the paranormal are foregrounded” (ix). 6. For an account of the debates surrounding this conference, see Xiaoping Li 47–49; and Ty and Verduyn 8.

578    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions 7. For a discussion of Sinclair Ross’s novel, see Chapter 37 by Alison Calder in this volume. 8. See Lai’s Slanting I, Imagining We for her more extended discussion of Asian Canadian writing of the 1980s and 1990s. 9. “Canada Reads” is an annual “battle of the books” competition organized by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The program usually airs on CBC Radio in both French and English. Five Canadian personalities champion five different books, and a panel votes out the books until only one remains.

Works Cited Adachi, Ken. The Enemy That Never Was:  A  History of the Japanese Canadians. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1976. Print. Almeida, Sandra R. “Strangers in the Night:  Hiromi Goto’s Abject Bodies and Hopeful Monsters.” Contemporary Women’s Writing 3.1 (June 2009): 47–63. Print. Aquino, Nina, ed. Love + Relasianships: A Collection of Contemporary Asian-Canadian Drama. 2 vols. Toronto: Playwrights Canada, 2009. Print. Bates, Judy Fong. China Dog and Other Tales from a Chinese Laundry. Toronto: Sister Vision, 1997. Print. ———. Midnight at the Dragon Café. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2004. Print. Beauregard, Guy. “The Emergence of ‘Asian Canadian Literature’: Can Lit’s Obscene Supplement?” Essays on Canadian Writing 67 (1999): 53–75. Print. Birchall, Diana. Onoto Watanna:  The Story of Winnifred Eaton. Urbana:  U of Illinois P, 2001. Print. Chao, Lien. Beyond Silence: Chinese Canadian Literature in English. Toronto: TSAR, 1997. Print. Chao, Lien, and Jim Wong-Chu, eds. Strike the Wok: An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Canadian Fiction. Toronto: TSAR, 2003. Print. Cheung, King-kok. Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa. New York: Cornell UP, 1993. Print. Chong, Denise. The Concubine’s Children. Toronto: Penguin, 1994. Print. Cho, Lily. Eating Chinese: Culture on the Menu in Small Town Canada. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2010. Print. Choy, Wayson. The Jade Peony. Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1995. Print. ———. Paper Shadows: A Chinatown Childhood. Toronto: Penguin, 1999. Print. Coloma, Roland Sintos, Bonnie McElhinny, Ethel Tungohan, John Paul C. Catungal, and Lisa M.  Davidson, eds. Filipinos in Canada:  Disturbing Invisibility. Toronto:  U of Toronto P, 2012. Print. Dobson, Kit. “Transnational Subjectivities: Roy Miki’s Surrender and Global Displacements.” Studies in Canadian Literature 32.2 (2007): 162–76. Print. Doyle, James. “Sui Sin Far and Onoto Watanna:  Two Early Chinese-Canadian Authors.” Canadian Literature 140 (1994): 50–58. Print. Eaton, Winnifred. A Japanese Nightingale. 1901. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1902. Print. Ferens, Dominika. Edith and Winnifred Eaton: Chinatown Missions and Japanese Romances. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2002. Print. Friesen, Joe. “The Philippines Now Canada’s Top Source of Immigrants.” Globe and Mail 18 March 2011. Web. Accessed 15 Jan. 2013.

(East and Southeast) Asian Canadian Literature    579 Fung, Richard, dir. Dirty Laundry. Perf. Jo Alcampo, Andy Quan, T.H. Xia. Toronto: V-Tape, 1996. Video. Goellnicht, Donald C. “Asian Kanadian, Eh?” Canadian Literature 199 (2008): 71–99. Print. ———. “Father Land/or Mother Tongue:  The Divided Female Subject in Kogawa’s Obasan and Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior.” Redefining Autobiography in Twentieth Century Women’s Fiction: An Essay Collection. Ed. Janice Morgan, Collette T. Hall, Carol L. Snyder. Foreword by Molly Hite. New York: Garland, 1991. 119–34. Print. ———. “‘Forays into Acts of Transformation’: Queering Chinese-Diasporic Fiction.” Culture, Identity, Commodity:  Diasporic Chinese Literatures in English. Ed. Tseen Khoo and Kam Louie. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens UP, 2005. 153–82. Print. ———. “A Long Labour:  The Protracted Birth of Asian Canadian Literature.” Essays on Canadian Writing 72 (2000): 1–41. Print. Goldman, Marlene. Dispossession:  Haunting in Canadian Fiction. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens UP, 2012. Print. Goto, Hiromi. Chorus of Mushrooms. Edmonton: NeWest, 1994. Print. ———. The Kappa Child. Calgary: Red Deer P, 2001. Print. Gunn, Sean, Garrick Chu, Paul Yee, Ken Shikaze, Linda Hoffman, and Rick Shiomi, eds. Inalienable Rice:  A  Chinese and Japanese Canadian Anthology. Vancouver:  Intermedia, 1979. Print. Hattori, Tomo. “Model Minority Discourse and Asian American Jouis-Sense.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 11.2 (1999): 228–47. Print. Hernandez, Catherine. Singkil. Toronto: Playwrights Canada, 2009. Print. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988. Print. In the Shadow of Elephants. By Carlos Bulosan Theatre Collective. Dir. Karen Ancheta. Perf. Leon Aureus, Aura Carcueva, Belinda Corpuz, Nicco Lorenzo Garcia, Jennifer Maramba, and Victoria Marie Sawal. The Music Gallery, Toronto. 27–29 June 2013. Performance. Jones, Manina. The Art of Difference: “Documentary-Collage” and English-Canadian Writing. Theory/Culture Series. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1993. Print. Kam, Winston Christopher. Bachelor Man. Love + Relasianships: A Collection of Contemporary Asian-Canadian Drama. Vol. 1. Ed. Nina Lee Aquino. Toronto: Playwrights Canada, 2009. 65–110. Print. Kiyooka, Roy. Mothertalk:  Life Stories of Mary Kiyoshi Kiyooka. Ed. Daphne Marlatt. Edmonton: NeWest, 1997. Print. ———. Pacific Windows: Collected Poems. Ed. Roy Miki. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1997. Print. ———. Stoned Gloves. Toronto: Coach House, 1970. Print. Knowles, Ric. “The CBT Collective: Toward a Filipino Canadian Dramaturgy.” Asian Canadian Theatre. Ed. Nina Lee Aquino and Ric Knowles. Toronto:  Playwrights Canada, 2011. 130–47. Print. Kobayashi, Tamai. Quixotic Erotic. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp, 2003. Print. Kogawa, Joy. Obasan. Toronto: Penguin, 1981. Print. Kwa, Lydia. This Place Called Absence. Winnipeg: Turnstone, 2000. Print. Lai, Larissa. “Future Asians: Migrant Speculations, Repressed History and Cyborg Hope.” West Coast Line 38.2 (Fall 2004): 168–93. Print. ———. Salt Fish Girl. Toronto: Thomas Allen, 2002. Print.

580    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions Lai, Larissa. Slanting I, Imagining We: Asian Canadian Literary Production in the 1980s and 1990s. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2014. Print. ———. When Fox Is a Thousand. Vancouver: Press Gang, 1995. Print. Lau, Evelyn. Other Women. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 1996. Print. ———. Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid. Toronto: HarperCollins, 1989. Print. Lam, Vincent. Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures. Toronto: Random House, 2005. Print. ———. The Headmaster’s Wager. Toronto: Random House, 2012. Print. Lee, Bennett, and Jim Wong-Chu. Many Mouthed Birds:  Contemporary Writing by Chinese Canadians. Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1991. Print. Lee, Christopher. “Enacting the Asian Canadian.” Canadian Literature 199 (2008): 28–44. Web. Accessed 28 June 2011. Lee, Helen, and Kerri Sakamoto. Like Mangoes in July:  The Work of Richard Fung. Toronto: Insomniac, 2002. Print. Lee, Julia H. Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African and Asian American Literatures, 1896–1937. New York: New York UP, 2011. Print. Lee, Sky. Disappearing Moon Cafe. Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1990. Print. Lee, Tara. “Mutant Bodies in Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl: Challenging the Alliance Between Science and Capital.” West Coast Line 38 (2004): 94–109. Print. Li, Peter S. Chinese in Canada. 2nd ed. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1998. Print. Li, Xiaoping. Asian Canadian Cultural Activism. Vancouver:  U of British Columbia P, 2007. Print. ———. “Performing Asian Canadian:  The Theatrical Dimension of a Grassroots Activism.” Asian Canadian Theatre. Ed. Nina Lee Aquino and Ric Knowles. New Essays on Canadian Theatre. Vol. I. Toronto: Playwrights Canada, 2011. 11–28. Print. Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. “Japanese American Women’s Life Stories:  Maternality in Monica Stone’s Nisei Daughter and Joy Kogawa’s Obasan.” Feminist Studies 16.2 (1990): 288–312. Print. Lowe, Lisa. “Break the Frame.” Like Mangoes in July: The Work of Richard Fung. Ed. Helen Lee and Kerri Sakamoto. Toronto: Insomniac, 2002. 8–79. Print. ———. “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity:  Marking Asian American Differences.” Diaspora 1.1 (1991): 24–43. Print. Mar, Lisa R. “Asian Canada: An ‘Alternate Asian America’?” Asian Pacific America Collective History Project. 2005. Web. Accessed 15 June 2010. ———. Brokering Belonging:  Chinese in Canada’s Exclusion Era, 1885–1945. Toronto:  U of Toronto P, 2010. Print. Martin, Daniel. “Ghostly Foundations:  Multicultural Space and Vancouver’s Chinatown in Sky Lee’s Disappearing Moon Cafe.” Studies in Canadian Literature 29.1 (2004): 85–105. Web. Accessed 27 Feb. 2013. Miki, Roy. Broken Entries: Race, Subjectivity, Writing. Toronto: Mercury, 1998. Print. ———. IN FLUX. Edmonton: NeWest, 2011. Print. ———. Redress: Inside the Japanese Canadian Call for Justice. Vancouver: Raincoast, 2004. Print. ———. Surrender. Toronto: Mercury, 2001. Print. Milne, Heather. “Beyond Inter/ Disciplinarity:  Feminist Cultural Studies and Innovative Poetics: Disciplinary Dislocations.” TOPIA 25 (2011): 182–89. Web. Accessed 21 May 2013. Miyagawa, Mitch. The Plum Tree. Love +Relasianships:  A  Collection of Contemporary Asian-Canadian Drama. Vol. 1. Ed. Nina Lee Aquino. Toronto: Playwrights Canada, 2009. 239–79. Print.

(East and Southeast) Asian Canadian Literature    581 Morris, Robyn. “Re-visioning Representations of Difference in Larissa Lai’s When Fox Is a Thousand and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner.” West Coast Line: A Journal of Contemporary Writing and Criticism 38.2 (2004): 69–86. Web. Accessed 22 Jan. 2009. National Association of Japanese Canadians. “Joy Kogawa.” www.najc.ca. 2005. Web. Accessed 6 May 2013. Ninh, Erin Khuê. Ingratitude:  The Debt-Bound Daughter in Asian American Literature. New York: New York UP, 2011. Print. Pearson, Wendy. “Saturating the Present with the Past: Hiromi Goto’s The Kappa Child.” www. strangehorizons.com. 6 January 2003. Web. Accessed 23 Feb. 2005. People Power. By Carlos Bulosan Theatre Collective. Dir. Nina Lee Aquino. Perf. Leon Aureus, Rose Cortez, Nicco Lorenzo Garcia, Christine Mangosing, and Nadine Villasin. Carlos Bulosan Theatre Collective. Theatre Passe Muraille, Toronto. 12 Apr. 2008–11 May 2008. Performance. Quan, Andy, and Jim Wong-Chu, eds. Swallowing Clouds: An Anthology of Chinese-Canadian Poetry. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp, 1999. Print. Rudy, Susan, comp. The Fred Wah Digital Archive. http://www.fredwah.ca/. Web. Accessed 17 May 2013. Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands:  Essays and Criticism 1981–1991. London:  Granta, 1991. Print. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979. Print. Sakamoto, Kerri. The Electrical Field. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 1998. Print. Saul, Joanne. “Displacement and Self-Representation:  Theorizing Contemporary Canadian Biotexts.” Biography 24.1 (2001): 259–72. Print. Statistics Canada. “Population by Selected Ethnic Origin, by Province and Territory (2006 Census).” 28 July 2009. Web. Accessed 14 Jan. 2013. Statistics Canada. “The Vietnamese Community in Canada.” 2006. Web. Accessed 9 Feb. 2013. Sturgess, Charlotte. Redefining the Subject:  Sites of Play in Canadian Women’s Writing. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003. Print. Sugars, Cynthia. “Keeping the Gothic at (Sick) Bay:  Reading the Transferences in Vincent Lam’s Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures.” Sugars and Turcotte 251–75. Print. Sugars, Cynthia, and Gerry Turcotte, eds. Unsettled Remains:  Canadian Literature and the Postcolonial Gothic. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2009. Print. Syjuco, Miguel. Illustrado. 2008. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2010. Print. Tamaki, Mariko, and Jillian Tamaki. Skim. Toronto: Anansi, 2008. Print. Tamayose, Darcy. Odori: A Novel. Toronto: Cormorant, 2007. Print. Thien, Madeleine. Certainty. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2007. Print. ———. Dogs at the Perimeter. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2011. Print. Ty, Eleanor. “‘Little Daily Miracles’:  Global Desires, Haunted Memories, and Modern Technologies in Madeleine Thien’s Certainty.” Moving Migration: Narrative Transformations in Asian American Literature. Ed. Johanna C.  Kardux and Doris Einsiedel. Berlin:  LIT Verlag, 2010. 45–80. Print. ———. The Politics of the Visible in Asian North American Narratives. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2004. Print. ———. Unfastened:  Globality and Asian North American Narratives. Minneapolis:  U of Minnesota P, 2010. Print. Ty, Eleanor, and Verduyn, Christl, eds. Asian Canadian Writing beyond Autoethnography. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2008. Print.

582    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions Wah, Fred. Among. Toronto: Coach House, 1972. Print. ———. Diamond Grill. Edmonton: NeWest, 1996. Print. ———. “An Interview with Fred Wah.” With Margery Fee and Sneja Gunew. Canadian Literature (2000). www.canlit.ca. Web. Accessed 8 May 2013. ———. Lardeau. Toronto: Island P, 1965. Print. ———. Mountain. Buffalo: Audit P, 1967. Print. ———. Tree. Vancouver: Vancouver Community P, 1972. Print. Wong, Adrienne. “Is There An Asian Canadian Theatre in Vancouver?” Asian Canadian Theatre. Ed. Nina Lee Aquino and Ric Knowles. Toronto:  Playwrights Canada, 2011. 29–32. Print. Wong, Paul, ed. Yellow Peril Reconsidered. Vancouver: On Edge, 1990. Print. Wong, Rita. forage. Gibsons, BC: Nightwood, 2007. Print. Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia Wong. Reading Asian American Literature:  From Necessity to Extravagance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993. Print. Woo, Terry. Banana Boys. Toronto: Cormorant, 2005. Print. Yee, David. Lady in the Red Dress. Toronto: Playwrights Canada, 2010. Print.

Chapter 31

Sou th Asian C a na dia n “ Geo graphies of Voi c e ” Flagging New Critical Mappings Mariam Pirbhai

South Asians have been settling in and “mapping” Canada for the last century. This is particularly true of the province of British Columbia, whose lumber industry and agricultural sector have relied on Punjabi labour and enterprise since the late nineteenth century.1 Yet, in the national imaginary, the South Asian presence is perceived as a post-1960s phenomenon, when Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s Liberal government exercised a major policy shift in looking to the “Third World,” over Europe and Britain, as Canada’s primary immigration source. Indeed, the Trudeau years brought about the influx of a more diverse group of migrants from the Indian subcontinent and the diaspora (mainly East Africa and the Caribbean), and with them, their stories. However, critical attention to individual authors or to a body of writing defined by an identifiable subset of thematic concerns and preoccupations did not appear until multiculturalism, enacted as official state policy in 1971, bolstered such discussions.2 In the decades that followed, writers of South Asian ancestry (the majority of them poets such as Himani Bannerjee, Rienzi Crusz, Cyril Dabydeen, Surjeet Kalsey, and Suniti Namjoshi) would become a more visible part of the literary landscape. A modest canon of novelists, with which this chapter is concerned, emerged in the 1990s, and continues to be dominated by this first generation of pioneers: namely, Anita Rau Badami, Rohinton Mistry, Shani Mootoo, Michael Ondaatje, Shyam Selvadurai, and M.G. Vassanji. With the exception of Michael Ondaatje, fictional works produced by this group are said to “record and depend on pre-Canadian experience” (McGifford vii), as they are located both spatially and imaginatively “elsewhere.” In an important anthology devoted to writing by this diaspora, The Geography of Voice: Canadian Literature of the South Asian Diaspora (1992), Diane McGifford attempts to expand the terms of critical engagement by selecting works that “depict the distinctiveness of the ‘in Canada’ South Asian immigrant experience” (viii).3 It is worth revisiting this anthology’s

584    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions central objective two decades hence: that is, to read South Asian Canadian fiction not only for its “pre-” or “non-Canadian” settings and preoccupations, but also for its “in Canada” experience. In so doing, however, this chapter also sets out to problematize or move beyond such geographic and discursive delineations, which potentially constrain our reading practices and pedagogies. Indeed, the seemingly impermeable division between Canada and its diasporic “elsewheres” continues to be reflected in the publishing industry’s penchant for sweeping historical or “foreign” settings in the marketing of what Graham Huggan has aptly termed the “postcolonial exotic.”4 Moreover, the “immigrant experience” as the sole locus of interest beyond the homeland bears its own inherent assumptions, and forecloses the complex ways in which such writing is socially and critically engaged with local issues and concerns. In other words, these delineated cartographies do little to re-route, if you will, South Asian Canadian geographies beyond tired old multiculturalist paradigms predicated on a dominant Euro-Canadian mainstream and its marginalized racial and cultural others. Rajini Srikanth makes a similar observation regarding the United States, where the outward-looking or historically situated “postcolonial” writer preempts discussions of what these writers might have to say about minority communities in the United States, or “the reality within the nation-state” (South Asian American 42). In this chapter, my aim is to provide a survey of fiction by canonical and lesser-known figures who provide complex configurations of the “in Canada” experience by what is now a multigenerational literary community,5 while also inviting a re-reading of South Asian Canadian fiction otherwise thought to be overdetermined by purportedly “non-Canadian” preoccupations and settings. The specific works I will discuss are Anita Rau Badami’s Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? (2007), Farzana Doctor’s Stealing Nasreen (2007), Tariq Malik’s Chanting Denied Shores: The Komagata Maru Narratives (2011), Rohinton Mistry’s Tales from Firozsha Baag (1987), Shani Mootoo’s He Drown She in the Sea (2005), Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost (2001), Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy (1994), and M.G. Vassanji’s No New Land (1991).

Centennial Identities: South Asian Canadian Historiographic Fiction Diasporic communities often turn to the genre of historiographic fiction to reclaim and record oral and written histories of arrival and settlement in the new land. Much of this retelling involves a careful excavation of the official records of migration, including passenger lists, conditions in ports of embarkation and disembarkation, details of the voyage itself, and so on. The interplay of private and public accounts, individual and collective memory, as well as the oral and written, combine to produce a chronicle that strives to make sense of migration histories as they

South Asian Canadian “Geographies of Voice”    585 affect individuals and their communities for generations to come. Perhaps the exemplary Canadian work of this genre is Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, a multi-generational saga that “articulate[s]‌the silence” (Willis)6 surrounding Japanese internment in Canada during World War II. Thus far, Punjabis in British Columbia have been particularly active in record-keeping and memorializing what is, for them, their historical significance as the longest settled South Asian community in North America. However, as Sadhu Binning points out, literary production in the form of theatre and poetry in the vernacular has not encouraged a readership beyond the Punjabi-Canadian community.7 Anita Rau Badami’s Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? (2007) and Tariq Malik’s Chanting Denied Shores:  The Komagata Maru Narratives (2011) are the first “novel-length” attempts to memorialize one hundred years of South Asian presence in Canada.8 To this end, they look to the watershed event of the Komagata Maru, which holds considerable meaning for the descendants of Canada’s earliest South Asian settlers. Referred to euphemistically in national annals as an “incident,” a brief summary of its history is warranted here. The Komagata Maru is the name of the Japanese ship commissioned by a Sikh entrepreneur, in 1914, to transport a large number of South Asians (376 mainly Punjabi males) from Hong Kong to Canada, in a direct challenge to the recently implemented Continuous Passage act. Passed under Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s government in 1908, this was a historic piece of legislation designed with the Indian subaltern in mind. As its name suggests, it required prospective immigrants to take an “uninterrupted journey” from their point of origin to Canada at a time when there was no such direct passage from the Indian subcontinent. Once they arrived in Vancouver’s Burrard Inlet, the passengers of the Komagata Maru were condemned for violating Dominion law. Over the course of several months of debate and altercation over the passengers’ legal right, as imperial subjects, to claim residency on Crown colony, the men were eventually ordered to return home. Sadly, the ordeal did not end there: upon their disembarkation in Calcutta, awaiting troops opened fire on the returning passengers. Several lost their lives, some faced imprisonment, and many remain unaccounted for. On March 2012, British Columbia’s Simon Fraser University inaugurated the country’s first digital archive dedicated to the Komagata Maru, breaking the tendency to downgrade the event to historical irrelevance in Canadian national annals.9 Published in 2011, Malik’s Chanting Denied Shores serves as a literary antecedent to the archive: it comprises a rich compendium of source material, including colonial documents, communications, and propaganda; biographies and oral testimony; police records and court transcripts; interviews and poetry.10 Humanizing the event from a range of perspectives, Malik animates the archive in fascinating ways. For instance, his portrait of the enigmatic William Charles Hopkinson, the head inspector of Immigration, determined to subdue seditious activities perpetrated by the passengers or their allies on shore, reveals Hopkinson’s double life as a counterintelligence agent who kept his own “Anglo-Indian” background a well-guarded secret. The novel also uncovers the little-known fact that North America was an important site for revolutionary activity devoted to Indian

586    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions sovereignty; in other words, the novel confirms the Punjabi-Canadian community’s long-held view of the far-reaching implications of this event, well beyond Vancouver shores. Malik’s novel is as focused on the local as it is on the global geographies of the Komagata Maru. The novel provides a detailed portrait of the burgeoning colonial city of Vancouver at the turn of the century, capturing the city with a naturalist’s eye that is also driven by a revisionist impulse to draw back into the frame those cast out of earlier representations: To our east lay the Kitsilano municipality of public servants, small businesses and tradesmen, its houses arrayed in a grid that stretched down all the way to the waterfront and its sprawling local Indian Reserve. … Tucked close to the Indian Reserve, the railway yards and the waterfront was the communal centre of all Hindu activity in our area, the Sikh Temple. Clustered around this temple was a small community of South Indians, the Indian Mission, and the area known collectively as Hindutown. (117)

The reference to an established “Hindutown” underscores the extent to which the Komagata Maru merely exacerbated a climate of increasing hostility toward “Oriental” settlers. As historian Hugh Johnston writes in his seminal historical study of this event, “It would take two and half years for Indian immigration to gain strength, but by the autumn of 1906 it had become, in the eyes of British Columbians, an invasion” (The Voyage 3). The revisionist impulse is sustained in Malik’s insertion of denigrating and sensationalist news clippings from the era, now re-read and re-interpreted from the passengers’ perspectives: Gurbaksh chooses this opportune moment to hold up a copy of the Vancouver Province for them all to examine. “… Boat loads of Hindus on way to Vancouver and Hindu Invasion of Canada. They are now officially calling it an invasion of Canada! …” “Read some more, yaar. Come on read on; tell us more when this invasion will take place. Where are these so called invaders, and is there any Ravan or Halaku or even a Changez Khan amongst them?” (66)

Malik’s emphasis on the “sprawling Indian Reserve,” highlighted in the earlier excerpt, coupled with the Dominion’s portrait of the migrants as “invaders,” throws the entire imperial enterprise into problematic focus. Through its postcolonial sensibility, the narrative prompts the more fundamental question at the root of the issue: that is, the Crown colonies’ right to control and arbitrate the settlement of Indigenous land. Anita Rau Badami’s Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? is an epic saga that recounts contemporary Indian history from the perspective of a Punjabi-Sikh family split between India and Canada, establishing a parallel chronology of the history of Sikh

South Asian Canadian “Geographies of Voice”    587 arrival and settlement in Canada across the breathtaking span of a near century. Much like the descendants of Indian indentured labourers in the nineteenth century, for whom the ship voyage marks the symbolic genesis of a diasporic community, here, too, it is the ship that functions as “a central organising symbol” (Gilroy 4) for South Asian Canadian migration history.11 For these early migrants, the “ship as chronotope”12 was necessarily steeped not only in the economies but also the itinerant anxieties, inequities, and betrayals of Empire. In Badami’s novel this is poignantly captured in the legacy of thwarted migrant dreams passed on from father to child—a legacy that is emblematized in the evocation of the ship. One of three central female characters bitterly recalls her father’s experience as a passenger on the Komagata Maru: “She hated this ship that had caused the disappointment clogging her father’s heart, that had snatched his dreams away and turned him into a barren-eyed man with no desire to do more than lie on his cot” (11). Effectively rendered as an extended prologue in Badami’s text, the story of the Komagata Maru serves as mythological ur-text for a community awakened by dreams of “Abroad”: “There was no doubt that Abroad caused magic to occur: … The advertisement, placed by a logging company in Canada, invited strong men to come and work in the company’s forests and mills” (15). However, the ironic emphasis on “magic” turns the meta-text into a cautionary tale against the kinds of compulsions—personal, spiritual, material—that transform dreams of promised lands into real sites of embattlement and conflict. In this vein, the Komagata Maru is shown to be but one of several watershed events that holds significance for the Sikh-Canadian population specifically, including the 1947 Partition, which effectively halved the Punjab state; the separatist movement for the Sikh state of Khalistan; the 1984 massacre, at Indira Gandhi’s behest, at the sacred “Golden Temple” at Amritsar; and the 1985 bombing of Air India Flight 182 traveling from Montreal to New Delhi, which took the lives of 329 passengers, 280 of whom were Canadian citizens of Indian descent.13 While one critic has found that the novel’s rendering of Sikh history through “a series of disasters is ultimately reductive” (Chakraborty 117), Badami’s threading of Punjabi/Sikh and Canadian geographies within a near-century framework nonetheless does the important work of challenging essentialist distinctions between “pre-Canadian” and “Canadian” settings, histories, and identities. Badami’s and Malik’s personal migration histories reveal the extent to which the South Asian diaspora in Canada cannot be anchored to a singular catalyst for, or mythology of, migration. (Badami was born in southern India and emigrated to Canada in the early 1990s; Tariq Malik was born in Pakistan and lived in Kuwait for several decades before settling in Vancouver in the 1990s). Yet, in memorializing the centennial presence of South Asians in Canada, their works attest to the meta-textual currency of the Komagata Maru as a mythopoetic suture across an otherwise fractured and multilayered diaspora: that is, as a means of “articulating the silence” of South Asian migration histories along a shared trajectory of albeit discontinuous journeys.14

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Interpellated Geographies of the Present: Sri Lankan Transnational(s) M.G. Vassanji speaks of a generation of writers emerging from the colonies who “tell stories of those societies” as its “historians and mythmakers” (“Canadian Writer”).15 However, Vassanji breaks the hegemony of hyphenation by quickly adding that the stories of elsewhere do not merely “accompany those who have arrived here” but are also the stories of “entire communities … of those who are already here. … And that puts a whole new dimension or shade to the question of who we really are” (Vassanji, emphasis added). Vassanji’s conflation of stories of “elsewhere” with stories of “here” is another kind of challenge to the delineated view of South Asian Canadian writing within apposite geoscapes and ethnoscapes. The diasporic and transnational have offered productive ways of articulating the porous and multilayered nature of identities working within and against new global economies and geopolitical realities. In this section, my focus will be on Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy and Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, two works whose “foreign” settings draw attention to the authors’ and their characters’ diasporic and transnational networks.16 Both novels are concerned with the war that besieged Sri Lanka for approximately three decades and officially ended in 2009, a war that involved the Sinhala majority government as well as separatist Tamil groups, the largest of which is the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). As such, these novels might seem to have little to do with Canada, and the stories of “those who are already here.” However, when read in light of the fact that one of the by-products of the Sri Lankan war has been the creation, in Canada, of “the largest Tamil diaspora in the world” (Wayland 7), the transnational—as aesthetic or thematic concern—prompts different kinds of evaluative assessments about these works’ respective engagements with the war, as well as their particular mappings of Sri Lanka/n identities in the Canadian context. Set during the war’s outbreak, Funny Boy charts, in the “queer” coming-of-age story of protagonist Arjie Chelvaratnam, the traumatic trajectories that have propelled thousands of Tamils to Canada and elsewhere. While each story cycle captures mounting ethnic and political tensions as a backdrop to quotidian affairs, the final chapter, entitled “Riot Journal: An Epilogue,” assumes a greater degree of realism in its reference to “Black July,” the grim day in the summer of 1983 that marked the beginning of the anti-Tamil pogrom and the outbreak of full-scale civil war. The Chelvaratnams, an affluent Tamil family comfortably ensconced in Colombo, become targets of the mob riots that erupt on “Black July.” With its multiple references to Canada as the prospective site of refuge, the novel culminates in the promise of migration at a time when Canada historically provided asylum to thousands of Tamil refugees.17 Arjie’s realization that theirs is going to be a journey of refugeehood borne out of violence, dispossession, and war elicits a full range of emotions—relief, disbelief, anxiety, betrayal, rage, grief, mourning. Moreover, Arjie’s realization that the family’s status

South Asian Canadian “Geographies of Voice”    589 stands to be diminished in the new land reminds us that even victimhood is experienced in incongruent ways: “I don’t think that we ever imagined we would go abroad under these circumstances, as penniless refugees … to be in a foreign country, living off the charity of somebody I hardly know, is terrible” (Selvadurai 309). In this regard, Funny Boy captures diasporic subjectivity through a series of personal impressions presented as “affective mappings,” to borrow Jonathan Flatley’s phrase, rather than literal mappings of voyages and journeys. As a story concerned with Arjie’s private ruminations on displacement and dispossession, Funny Boy’s “melancholic concern with loss creates the mediating structure that enables the slogan—‘The personal is political’ ” (Flatley 3). As a deeply internalized meditation that simultaneously chronicles real trajectories of refugeehood, the novel implicitly draws our attention to a diasporic community striving to come to terms with the narrative of loss and betrayal from which it is borne across. The Chelvaratnam story evokes the diaspora’s “cultural and metaphysical markers of a shared migration history, which has set in motion a distinct [diasporic] imaginary” (Pirbhai 21); the novel thus sets the groundwork for a new chronicle of arrival in which Canada figures as a tangible presence of refuge and, as Arjie’s anxieties suggest, a site for continued struggle. Though published during the war years, Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost obfuscates historical specificity, an aesthetic choice that has sparked as much controversy as it has speculation about the kinds of ethics underlying the text.18 The title character Anil’s self-fashioned identity as a transnational or global citizen, flitting, by virtue of her diplomatic passport, across otherwise fiercely protected borders, also contrasts radically with materialist or historically grounded readings of transnational subjectivities. As Sarah V. Wayland notes, transnational Tamil and Sri Lankan communities in Canada have turned their condition into material sites of agency in various ways, including “trans-state networks of communication, travel, political support, [and] material assistance” (2).19 (Funny Boy alludes to these networks in the statement made about Arjie’s Canadian relatives who “seem to know more about it [the conflict] than we do. It seems that there are demonstrations in Canada and England and India against the Sri Lankan government” [Selvadurai 302]). I would suggest that the question embedded in the title’s double entendre—whose ghost might this be?—calls into question the ethical stance of both character and text. While Anil’s quest as a UN forensics expert is to solve the murder of a high-ranking state official, she is, herself, an enigma to be deciphered. For one, her biography consists of a sketchy series of arbitrary statements that demand some level of deduction. With a vague Sinhalese background, disjointed memories of her life in the United States, a British passport, and no home base to speak of, Anil’s indeterminacy is so paradoxically complete that she becomes almost ephemeral in her presence, the veritable ghost at the novel’s core. The contrasting “immateriality” of Anil’s subject position thus produces an underlying metaphor of the spectral, which figuratively conflates Anil with her object of inquiry—the murdered body, or “body politic” of which it is an extension. Both bodies serve as metonyms for “unresolved memory traces and occluded histories” (Sugars and Turcotte vii), which defer closure in a way that is in keeping with Ondaatje’s signature

590    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions postmodernist aesthetic. Moreover, one might say that the interpellation of Anil with the lifeless body that haunts her prompts a series of “exorcisms,” which Anil channels through willful acts of separation between her Sri Lanka years and post–Sri Lanka identity, or between her emotional and professional (scientific) investment in the war. This is epitomized in her final declarative statement to leave Sri Lanka behind because “there was no wish in her to be here anymore” (283). However, the closing image of Anil ironically points to the impossibility of such metaphysical exorcisms: “She walked away from the skeleton and paced up and down the hold listening to his voice again. Listening to everything again” (284). Unlike Arjie, for whom the story of dispossession is paradoxically the vehicle for self-possession, if only through affective registers of betrayal and reconciliation, Anil’s narrative works through a poetics of detachments and unmoorings that seem to leave her in anxious possession of his/story, one she bears like a perpetual haunting of “the nation/subject from without and within” (Sugars and Turcotte vii). Yet, in Anil there is a tentative movement from narrative indeterminacy to a consolidation of past and present selves, which implicitly transforms Anil’s hauntings into possible sites of interconnection and engagement. Recalling the conflation of Vassanji’s “stories,” we might imagine that Anil’s “voices” are carried over in the multiple spaces she occupies, turning seemingly antagonistic or antithetical states, like haunted selves, into interpellated geographies of self, community, and nation. Each of these texts thus exposes the interplay between national and extra-national bodies that house, however uncomfortably, transnational subjects, making stories of “elsewhere” inescapably “the stories of those who are already here.”

Sub/Urban South Asian Mappings of the Canadian City Drawing on Michel de Certau’s poetics of space—specifically, the movement of the city-dweller across the cityscape as “ ‘akin to the word when it is spoken’ ”—John McLeod suggests that London has been transformed by “the wanderings of those who tour the city [and] write new scripts of city-space” (Postcolonial London 9). It is difficult not to see in Canada’s cities similar kinds of poetic and spatial scriptings. However, while Canada’s population is a largely urbanized one, “Canadian critical mythmaking” has tended toward metaphors of the rural. Douglas Ivison and Justin D. Edwards contend that it is not representations of urbanity that are lacking, but rather “a failure to engage with the urban in Canadian writing” (Downtown Canada 8). Representations of the urban must necessarily also grapple with the Canadian metropolis, which, like “postcolonial London,” is a quintessentially migrant, hybrid space. This is of course typified in Toronto, which has been dubbed by the United Nations as the most “multicultural city in the world.”20

South Asian Canadian “Geographies of Voice”    591 Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion is a much-celebrated novel for its excavation of the buried histories of migrant labour that underlie, literally and figuratively, Toronto’s metropolitan infrastructure. The novel’s early twentieth-century setting speaks of the labour mythologies of “Macedonians and Greeks, heading for the killing floor and railway yards and bakeries” (127), which connect both city dweller and city space in ways that are otherwise invisible or unacknowledged. M.G. Vassanji’s No New Land 21 and Farzana Doctor’s Stealing Nasreen22 similarly focus on the kinds of insights that migrant labour provides regarding the invisible economies and subterranean bridges that connect metropolitan populations. However, these novels also speak of a new wave of urban settlers and a new breed of émigrés: those “visible minorities” who yearn for the opportunity to contribute to the city that greets them with cold disregard for their education and skills, or displaces their dreams of immigrant success onto subsequent generations—their children. Both phenomena are epitomized, in Stealing Nasreen, through the character of Shaffiq Paperwala, an accountant from Bombay working as a janitor in a Toronto hospital: “The Canada he sees up close today is not as wondrous as the one he had imagined from afar. Maybe for his daughters it will be different and they will have opportunities that he cannot have himself ” (Doctor 72). Published almost two decades apart, these novels confirm that South Asian Canadian writers have played, and continue to play, a vital role in bringing Toronto into critical focus in new and interesting ways.23 Vassanji’s No New Land examines the life of Nurdin Lalani, a man of moderate means and faith who metamorphoses into a twice-born minority (first, as an Indian minority in his native Tanzania; then, as an immigrant in Canada). Finding himself charged with sexual assault by a young White woman, Nurdin exists, much like his Rosecliffe Park apartment dwelling, on the city fringes, “in a state just this side of dissolution” (2). In contrast, the title character of Doctor’s Stealing Nasreen is securely ensconced in metropolitan life as a practising psychotherapist in a Toronto medical facility. However, a constellation of events puts Nasreen in the orbit of a newly arrived immigrant family (the Paperwalas) from Mumbai. The family patriarch, Shaffiq, is strikingly reminiscent of Vassanji’s Nurdin: both characters inhabit the city fringes, serving as a peon in its underground economy until full-time employment presents itself as menial labour incommensurate with their experience or credentials. In reading No New Land as a purely “immigrant” novel, critics have tended to reproduce McGifford’s oppositional geography of “pre-Canadian” versus “Canadian” experience. For instance, Rocio G. Davis has spoken of the spatial and imaginative mappings found in No New Land, though her emphasis on the diasporic tensions between the “settings of the immigrants’ old world past and new world present [Dar es Salaam and Toronto]” is a predictable one (“Mappings” 28). Martin Genetsch similarly proposes a “deixis of ‘there’ and ‘here’ in order to reflect the double encoding of Canadian immigrant literature” (Texture x), and examines multiculturalist engagements with “questions of race and ethnicity, difference and assimilation” (xi). Vassanji’s and Doctor’s readings of the western metropolis unravel, from the inside out, spatial encodings that over-rely on multiculturalist tropes of racial alterity. For example, Nurdin’s purported rape victim turns out to be a Portuguese girl, another kind of minority. Ironically, an immigration

592    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions lawyer convinces the girl’s family to drop the assault charges by promising his professional services to the family, many of whom are “illegals.” Exposing illegal immigration practices within the nexus of the Euro-Canadian populace further challenges a national identity rendered in the racialized binary of preferred versus undesirable citizens, first-world versus third-world émigrés, haves and have nots. In Stealing Nasreen, Shaffiq Paperwala similarly complicates racially encoded metropolitan mappings, given the highly globalized nature of both the inner and outer city spaces in which he lives. His most radically transformative encounters are ironically with “others” of his own ethnic and cultural background. Quite literally, Shaffiq’s two main habitations—domestic (home/culture) and public (work/world) space—collide in his coincidental discovery that his wife Salma is giving private Gujarati lessons (from their home) to Nasreen, the woman whose downtown office he cleans. He also learns that both he and his wife have been projecting their unfulfilled desires onto Nasreen: Shaffiq through an envious fascination with Nasreen’s self-assuredness as a second-generation South Asian, and Salma in terms of a transgressive lesbian desire. Like the plaster goddess at the entrance of Rosecliffe Park who is interchangeably referred to as “Aphrodite or Lakshmi” (Vassanji 71), Nurdin, too, awakens to the syncretic confluences that govern and narrow the distance between the metropolis’ city-scapes and its inhabitants. A poetics of spatial decoding is apparent in the structural circularity of a text that opens to the image of the Lalanis living on a “curve” at the city’s edge (1), and closes with the image of the inner and the outer harmonizing in contrapuntal synchrony: “the CN Tower peeping over the curtain of shadowy trees blinked its cryptic message at Nurdin Lalani. Behind him in the kitchen his wife’s wooden ladle thudded familiarly on her Zanzibari saucepan” (206). In both novels, then, the conventional view of the metropolis as a spatially delineated geography that consists of the inner city (symbolized by the iconic CN Tower) and its fringe-dwelling ghettoes (the “upright [global] village” [60]) quickly dissolves in the revelation that both inside and outside are highly syncretic, globalized spaces in perpetual states of socioeconomic interdependence and human interaction, both as “catalyst and object” of transformation (Davis 28).

Garden Tales: Re-Routing/Rooting the “South Asian Canadian” Diaspora For the “diasporic” South Asian,24 the migration westward (to Europe or North America) from the Indian subcontinent is seen to bring about a complete transformation of self. Salman Rushdie’s memorable opening line, in The Satanic Verses, about the metaphysical rebirth of London-bound émigrés captures this sentiment par excellence: “ ‘To be born again,’ sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the Heavens, ‘first you have to die. … To land upon the bosomy earth, first you have to fly’ ” (Rushdie 3).25 The

South Asian Canadian “Geographies of Voice”    593 implication, of course, is that emigration is the catalyst for a new subjecthood created in the space of the diaspora. As powerful as this image may be, it precludes the possibility that the South Asian migrant is an a priori diasporic being who is not so much reborn as re-routed (and re-rooted) in the journey westward.26 Indeed, if the Indian subcontinent or “homeland” is, in and of itself, a diasporic space, the journey westward merely produces a relative (rather than a radical) transformation of self, one that is part of a continuum of “elsewheres” rather than a discontinuous hyper-reality of “here” and “there.” The final section of this chapter provides a comparative reading of Rohinton Mistry’s Tales from Firoszha Baag (1987) and Shani Mootoo’s He Drown She in the Sea (2005).27 As Mistry and Mootoo’s oeuvres (and biographies) reveal, the South Asian diaspora in Canada is, itself, a collection of diasporas formed not only in the colonial or postcolonial moment, but also in the pre-colonial period, as an integral aspect of South Asia’s internal ethno-cultural histories. Rohinton Mistry, who emigrated to Canada from India in 1970, writes almost exclusively of the Parsi community as an “Indian diaspora [that] is over thirteen hundred years old” (Bharucha 58), but continues to feel “a sense of unease in [India] the adopted homeland” (59). Mootoo, who immigrated to Canada from Trinidad in 1981, calls attention to the Indo-Caribbean diaspora formed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He Drown She in the Sea provides a clear account of this history: “the Indians had come as indentured laborers, armed with the promise, the guarantee even, of a return trip to India, or, if they chose, after the completion of their indentureship, a parcel of land, gratis” (Mootoo 260). Mistry’s and Mootoo’s characters thus belong to older diasporic communities before they ever find themselves, like Mootoo’s protagonist Harry St. George, among “fellow” diasporic South Asians in Canada from places such as “India, Sri Lanka, Fiji, and … East Africa” (284). As such, Mistry’s and Mootoo’s diasporic characters disrupt, in strikingly similar ways, Rushdie’s poetics of migration insofar as North America/the western metropolis is imagined as part of a fluid continuum of journeys, rather than as the experiential locus of diasporic experience or nascent migrant subjectivities. A collection of 11 stories, Mistry’s Tales from Firozsha Baag coheres in the form of a frame-tale narrated, for the most part, by Nariman Hansotia, a resident of a Parsi residential compound known as the Baag (the Farsi word for “garden”).28 In the final story, “Swimming Lessons,” the frame-tale is fully realized in the character of Kersi, who, in attempting to relate his immigrant experience in Canada, has written stories mainly “about Parsis and Bombay” (Mistry 245; emphasis in original). Any clear separation between object and subject, teller and tale, inside and outside, India and Canada are thus artfully collapsed. This produces what several critics have noted to be the poetics of hybridity underpinning life both within and beyond the Baag; however, the emphasis on British and American influences on “postcolonial identities” (Heble 53) generally frames such discussions.29 Shifting our focus to India, not simply as the contact zone between East and West but also as the “diasporic” context, reorients the frame of discussion to reveal different kinds of routes and roots. Mistry seems to prompt such reorientations from the outset, in the titular reference to the garden, or Baag. As the literal and figurative structural device housing the collection/

594    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions collective, the Baag is a quintessential diasporic space of (self-)enclosure, the compound walls symptomatic of both the ghettoizing tendency of the state and the diasporic community’s desire for cultural self-preservation therein. Like all gardens, however, this is an enclosed space only in the most paradoxical sense, since its residents live in seemingly heightened states of organic inter-relation. This is captured in the way stories circulate across the various buildings that make up the complex: “The events were talked about for days afterward, the stories spreading first in C Block, then through A and B” (Mistry 99). The etymology of baag (or bagh) as a Farsi word long since “naturalized” in South Asian languages such as Urdu brings home this point. As a polysemic signifier, the Baag immediately destabilizes the diaspora and, by extension, the nation-state as regulated spaces of enclosure and cultural purity. Hence, even though the Baag residents try to minimize their potential contamination by the outside world, their stories continually expose the creolizing impact of past and present encounters, much as the “red glow from the Ambica Saris neon display outside Firozsha Baag [floats] eerily over the compound wall” (31). The Baag also challenges us to think beyond the “framing narratives,” if you will, of Western hermeneutics. Specifically, the Baag calls attention to Quranic rather than Biblical allusion, where heaven or paradise is conceptualized as a garden based on Islamic principles of architecture and design.30 Structurally, the Baag appears to be loosely fashioned after the geometric schema of the Islamic garden, with its residential “blocks” looking upon an internal courtyard or common space: “In Firozsha Baag, behind the three buildings, or blocks, as they were called, were spacious yards shared by all three blocks” (80). The Islamic allusion brings the metaphor full circle, rooting Mistry’s characters within the Parsi diaspora’s particular mythology of migration, as a community fleeing Persia during the era of Islamic conquest. However, in Mistry’s garden the highly structured principles of the garden are somewhat askew. For one, there are “three” versus “four” blocks, an asymmetrical counterpoint to the four equidistant quadrants that form the Islamic garden. Moreover, the Baag’s courtyard is described as the compound’s “squalid underbelly” (81), rather than a space of beauty and serenity. Thus, both in form and function, the Baag reinforces the tension between containment and contamination, between regulation and chaos, that characterizes diasporic space. Significantly, it is in the “squalid underbelly”—the site of unregulated chaos—that creative potential is generated, for it is here that the “seed” of an idea takes root in the “fecund mind” (80) of the Baag’s younger generation. As several critics have pointed out, garden metaphors evoke a Caribbean poetics of hybridity or creolization that is central to Shani Mootoo’s celebrated first novel, Cereus Blooms at Night.31 In her second novel He Drown She in the Sea, the garden metaphor reappears in the character of Harry St. George, a Caribbean émigré who becomes a successful landscape designer in a coastal British Columbia township. However, we see very little of Harry’s occupation as a gardener/landscaper in the Canadian context; rather, Harry is consumed by a dream-like preoccupation with both the island and the woman (named Rose) left behind. In fact, the bulk of Harry’s narrative is set in the quasi-fictional island of Guanagaspar, a thinly veiled Trinidad,32 in the form of flashbacks of Harry’s youth around the time of the United States’ military occupation

South Asian Canadian “Geographies of Voice”    595 of Trinidad during World War II. These flashbacks establish early on that Harry is an “Indo-Guanagasparian” (Mootoo 71), as the son of ethnic Indian parents. While the world is focused on the war, the Indo-Guanagasparian community is shown to be in a state of considerable transformation as a steadily growing socioeconomic force on the island. This is epitomized in references such as the “All India Members Only Club” (223) or the “Desi Radio Hour” (116), and most forcefully in the rival character of Shem Bihar, a lawyer climbing the political ranks, much to the satisfaction of the “Indian business and religious communities” (252). Much like Mistry’s Tales, in Guanagaspar the “diaspora” is also a site of hybridity that is pushed beyond the frames of representation. For one, we learn that Harry’s father was an orphan raised by an elderly Afro-Caribbean couple, while Harry’s mother Dolly was ostracized from her family for marrying someone “who could not have been more unlike the Indian men of Central” (91). Consequently, Harry’s identity is anchored within intersecting diasporic trajectories: the Indian and the African. His primary male influence, his surrogate grandfather Uncle Mako, teaches Harry to read the “sea” in terms of the historic meta-narrative of the Atlantic Slave Trade. Similarly, Harry’s mother Dolly reminds her son of the Indian diaspora’s own historic journey across the “Black Water” (178) or kala pani.33 Harry’s engagement in an ambitious “water-garden project” thus metonymically conveys a diasporic sensibility that is paradoxically rooted in the respective sea voyages of enslaved Africans across the Middle Passage and Indian indentured labourers across the kala pani. As both Mistry’s and Mootoo’s texts reveal, then, the journey westward brings a priori diasporic subjectivities into further relief, such that North America is but one destination along a continuum of journeys—ancestral, individual, metaphysical—and gardens, like diasporas, always enter the “frame” of a new-found geography bearing roots … and routes. * * * In this chapter, I have followed McGifford’s classification of South Asian Canadian fictions insofar as they might fall into two distinct categories:  fictions focused entirely on “non-Canadian” settings and those concerned with the “in Canada experience.” However, contrary to readings of the “in Canada experience” as one that is overly determined by cultural outsidership and racial alterity, I have argued that these works insist on new kinds of spatial and cultural mappings to accommodate the already hybridized geographies of the local—as city, suburb, nation. Conversely, I have featured works that typify what might be defined as historically situated “postcolonial” contexts and preoccupations that seem to have little to do with “the stories of those who are already here.” However, the manifest “presences” (aesthetic, affective, syncretic, historical, physical, diasporic, metaphysical) found in these works point to the interpellated geographies in which character and author are routed/rooted, be they in the form of intersecting colonial or diasporic histories, as discomfiting habitations of mind, or as material sites of agency and realpolitik. In other words, when such fictions are approached against the grain of antiquated cartographies, they alert us to new critical mappings that permit these “geographies of voice” a liberty of space, movement, relevance, and presence.

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Notes 1. India is the primary source country for new immigrants settling in Toronto. The 2006 census reveals that South Asians are now the largest ethnic group in the country, having surpassed Canadians of Chinese ancestry. Ontario, the country’s most populous province, is home to a staggering 62 percent of the South Asian community, which certainly accounts for the predominance of works set in Toronto and its environs. 2. The Multiculturalism Act was also implemented by Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s Liberal government. See “Canadian Multiculturalism: An Inclusive Citizenship.” http://www.cic.gc.ca/ english/multiculturalism/citizenship.asp. 3. The major innovation of this anthology, then, is McGifford’s reading of South Asian Canadian identities as diasporic, rather than restricted to migratory trajectories between the Indian subcontinent and North America. In all other ways, the anthology reflects the multiculturalist preoccupation with minority discourse and identity politics. 4. Graham Huggan defines the postcolonial exotic as a “semiotic circuit in which the signs of oppositionality are continually recoded”; as a product of the “contemporary alterity industry”; or as a “self-critical unveiling of the imperialist power-politics that lurks behind aesthetic diversion” (Introduction 32). 5. Farzana Doctor, Gurjinder Basran, Priscila Uppal, Ranj Dhaliwal, and Randy Boyagoda are just a few among a steadily growing list of novelists who are second-generation South Asian Canadians. 6. I am borrowing this term from Gary Willis’s “Speaking the Silence: Joy Kogawa’s Obasan.” 7. Sadhu Binning notes that though it remains to be seen how new generations of writers will build on earlier traditions, “Punjabi-Canadian literature is restricted to the immediate and evolving concerns of the Punjabi community. This is their strength as well as their weakness” (283). 8. Unlike Malik, whose two works of fiction to date have received little critical attention, Anita Rau Badami has enjoyed considerable celebrity in Canada. Her debut novel, Tamarind Mem (1996), was a commercial darling, and was soon followed by the critically acclaimed The Hero’s Walk (2000), which won the Regional Commonwealth Writer’s Prize and was long-listed for the Orange Fiction Prize. Tariq Malik is the author of two works of fiction: Rainsongs of Kotli (Toronto: TSAR, 2004) and Chanting Denied Shores:  The Komagata Maru Narratives (Calgary:  Bayeux, 2011). Bayeux Arts was founded by an Indian couple in 1994, to “recognize” the value in “books that other publishers often shy away from publishing.” See http://www.bayeux.com/AboutUs.aspx. The Toronto-based press TSAR published Malik’s first work of fiction. M.G. Vassanji and his wife Nurjehan Aziz founded TSAR Publications in 1985 as an offshoot of the literary magazine known as Toronto South Asian Review (established in 1981). TSAR’s mandate is to promote “multicultural” Canadian literature by new and established authors. TSAR has published works by Samuel Selvon, Cyril Dabydeen, Meena Alexander, Olive Senior, Rana Bose, Lien Chao, and others. The press has also published landmark scholarship and anthologies, including McGifford’s The Geography of Voice:  South Asian Canadian Literature, Arun Mukherjee’s Postcolonialism: My Living, and Nurjehan Aziz’s three-volume anthology, Her Mother’s Ashes: Stories by South Asian Women in Canada and the United States. 9. Simon Fraser University’s Komagata Maru archive is available at http://www.komagatamarujourney.ca.

South Asian Canadian “Geographies of Voice”    597 10. Indeed, Malik has unearthed little-known details about the event, the most striking of which is the story of several passengers who jumped ship on the return voyage to Hong Kong, found a passage to San Francisco, traveled north to Calgary, and then walked the Trans-Canada railway line westward to Vancouver. 11. See Mariam Pirbhai, Mythologies of Migration. As I argue in this study, the descendants of indentured labourers who settled in the former British colonies during the nineteenth century draw on a shared migration history that includes the sense of spiritual fraternity (jahaji-hood) formed as early as the sea voyage. Interestingly, the Komagata Maru was renamed the Guru Nanak Jahaj, signifying another kind of fraternity borne out of migration. (Jahaj is translated as “ship” in Hindi; jahaji as “shipmate.”) 12. See Paul Gilroy’s discussion of the ship as a “chronotope” for the transatlantic slave trade, and the resultant emergence of new transnational identities. 13. Air India Flight 182’s bombing is considered Canada’s worst terror attack. The main suspects were Sikh separatists associated with the Babbar Khalsa group. Bharati Mukherjee’s short story “The Management of Grief,” in her collection The Middleman and Other Stories (1988), and, more recently, Padma Viswanathan’s novel The Ever After of Ashwin Rao (2014) are two notable fictional representations of this tragedy. 14. I use the term “discontinuous journey” as it appears in my introduction to the special South Asian Canadian literature issue of Studies in Canadian Literature, to refer to the South Asian diaspora in Canada as a product of multiple and more often than not “discontinuous” waves of migration from the Indian subcontinent and its globally scattered diasporas. This special issue, titled “South Asian Canadian Literature: A Centennial Journey,” commemorates the Komagata Maru’s centennial history as the symbolic marker of the one-hundred year presence of South Asians in Canada. The introduction provides the first sustained critical reading of South Asian Canadian literature since the field’s inception in the late 1980s and 1990s; in this vein, the issue includes a range of articles that illustrate the breadth of this diaspora as well as the development of its ever-growing literary archives. See Pirbhai, “Introduction.” 15. This address was given at the annual congress held by the Canadian Federation for the Social Sciences and Humanities in 2004 and subsequently published in the journal Canadian Literature in 2006. 16. Funny Boy is Selvadurai’s debut novel. He has since published two novels, Cinnamon Gardens (1998) and Hungry Ghosts (2013); Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost is one of two works by the author to be set in his native Sri Lanka (the other being the fictional memoir Running in the Family [1982]). 17. Amaranth Amarasingam estimates that in Canada, the Tamil population now stands close to 200,000, most of whom sought asylum during the period between 1984 and 1992. However, it is important to note that a governmental policy sympathetic to Tamil claims for refugeehood changed under the conservative Harper government, which has not only been denounced by human rights groups for denying asylum seekers refuge, but also for deeming the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) a terrorist organization in 2006. 18. The novel has come under attack for its reductive representations of Sri Lankan culture, history, and politics. See, for instance, Ranjini Mendis’s compelling indictment of the novel in her book review (published in Chimo, the official newsletter for the Canadian chapter of ACLALS, the Association of Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies [Fall 2000 issue]). See also Sam Knowles’s reading of the novel’s specifically “transnational ethics” in “Sri Lankan ‘Gates of Fire.’ ” I am not of the view that the novel proposes an ethical stance

598    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions vis-à-vis Sri Lankan politics, so much as it operates within a poststructuralist engagement with truth, power, and representation, and in this way remains consistent with Ondaatje’s other works. 19. As Sarah Wayland reminds us, the Liberal and Canadian Alliance Party were at loggerheads over Prime Minister Paul Martin’s public appearance, in 2000, at a Tamil New Year celebration that the Conservative Party deemed a “fundraising event for terrorists”; this is consistent with the current conservative Harper government’s incitement of post–9/11 anxieties about immigration and terrorism. 20. This includes what is known as the Greater Toronto Area, the outlying suburbs of Toronto. A  2001 Statistics Canada census reveals that “43.7  percent of the population in the Toronto Census Metropolitan Area was foreign born, higher than any of the most diverse American cities” (Wayland 13). 21. Moyez (M.G.) Vassanji is a prolific novelist. His repertoire includes The Gunny Sack (1989), The Book of Secrets (1994), Amrika (1999), The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (2003), The Assassin’s Song (2007), and most recently The Magic of Saida (2012). 22. Stealing Nasreen is Farzana Doctor’s debut novel. Doctor has been named CBC’s “Ten Canadian Women Writers You Need to Read Now”; she has been nominated for numerous national awards, including the Lambda Literary and Rainbow Award (2012), for her novel Six Meters of Pavement. South/Asian lesbian identities form a central narrative concern in each of Doctor’s works. 23. For instance, Homer in Flight (1997), by Trinidad-born Rabindranath Maharaj, is a quintessential immigrant story set in Toronto and its suburban sprawl, as is his more recent work The Amazing Absorbing Boy (2010). Selvadurai’s most recent novel, Hungry Ghosts (2013), captures both the “the bookstores and cafés of Toronto’s bohemian heart” (Medley) and the “no-man’s land of Scarborough, or any of those inner-ring suburbs” also inhabited by Rabindranath’s bewildered male protagonists. Doctor’s second novel, aptly titled Six Meters of Pavement (2011), is set in Little Portugal, one of Toronto’s oldest Latin neighbourhoods. 24. The South Asian diaspora in Canada largely consists of immigrants from the Indian subcontinent and those of South Asian origin from East Africa and the Caribbean. Writers of South Asian origin in Canada are quite evenly represented by each group. Michael Ondaatje, Shyam Selvadurai, Rohinton Mistry, and Anita Rau Badami are the most internationally recognized among the first group. The latter group includes such notable figures as Cyril Dabydeen, Neil Bissoondath, Shani Mootoo, and M.G. Vassanji. 25. The Satanic Verses follows the lives of Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta, whose immigrant stories begin with a literal free-fall from an exploding Air India plane, into the equally discombobulating arms of a “Proper London” (Rushdie 3). 26. Here I am drawing on the homonym routes/roots as a central paradigm in Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. As Gilroy suggests, the diaspora, as a transcontinental or transgeographic phenomenon, calls attention to the extent to which “roots” invariably signal “routes” (e.g., circulation, exchange, cultural flows, the syncretic, the transcultural), thus conveying a way out of essentialism. 27. Mistry is best known for his award-winning novels Such a Long Journey (1991), A Fine Balance (1995), and Family Matters (2005), all of which focus on watershed moments in Indian history as they are experienced by a Parsi minority community settled in Mumbai. His debut work, Tales from Firozsha Baag (1987), is unique insofar as it provides a dual setting that includes Toronto and Mumbai, though here, too, the Parsi perspective and

South Asian Canadian “Geographies of Voice”    599 the Indian setting dominate. Similarly, Mootoo is best known for her first novel, Cereus Blooms at Night (1996), set in the fictitious tropical island setting of Lantanacamara that is nonetheless rooted in the Caribbean landscape and plantation history. Her third novel, Valmiki’s Daughter (2008), is entirely set in contemporary Trinidad. Her second novel He Drown She in the Sea (2005) and her most recent novel Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab (2014) provide a dual setting that includes Canada and the Caribbean. Mootoo’s debut short story collection, Out on Main Street (1993), is the only one of her works, to date, to explicitly thematize the immigrant experience in Canada. 28. The titular significance of the baag as central metaphor was sadly compromised by the release of this collection, in the United States, under the revised title Swimming Lessons and Other Stories. 29. In her article “Interrogating Multiculturalism:  Double Diaspora, Nation, and Re-Narration in Rohinton Mistry’s Canadian Tales,” Sharmani Patricia Gabriel provides several examples of the cross-cultural influences that determine life in the Baag. See also Heble, “ ‘A Foreign Presence in the Stall’: Towards a Poetics of Cultural Hybridity in Rohinton Mistry’s Migration Stories.” 30. See D. Fairchild Ruggles, Islamic Gardens and Landscapes. 31. Creolization, as it is rooted in Caribbean cultural theories, is beyond the purview of this brief discussion. Isabel Hoving’s ecocritical reading of Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night helpfully elucidates how the garden metaphor cannot be separated from the history of the plantation system and colonial discursive practice. See also Supriya M. Nair’s Pathologies of Paradise: Caribbean Detours, which examines the garden metaphor as a recurring motif in Caribbean literature. See also my conversation with Mootoo on this and other subjects in “On Moving Forward Toward the Un/Familiar: An Interview with Shani Mootoo,” in the aforementioned special issue of Studies in Canadian Literature, “South Asian Canadian Literature: A Centennial Journey.” 32. Mootoo’s work has moved from magic realism to high realism in her first three novels: from the magical realist, mythical setting of Lantanacamara in Cereus Blooms at Night, to the quasi-surrealist setting of Guanagaspar, to the high realism of Valmiki’s Daughter. 33. The kala pani, like the aforementioned sense of fraternity or jahaji-hood formed in the sea voyage from the Indian subcontinent to the colonies, has come to be one of the central paradigms, or what I term the “vocabularies of indenture” (20), for the Indian indentured labour diaspora. Since the majority of those recruited were Hindus, the kala pani’s symbolism as a break from the sacred motherland and subsequent loss of caste is particularly resonant for the descendants of this diaspora. See Pirbhai, Mythologies of Migration.

Works Cited Amarasingam, Amarnath. “Religion and Ethnicity among Sri Lankan Tamil Youth in Ontario.” Canadian Ethnic Studies 40.2 (2008): 149–69. Proquest. Badami, Anita Rau. Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? Toronto: Vintage, 2007. Print. Bayeux Arts. http://www.bayeux.com/AboutUs.aspx. Web. Accessed 26 June 2015.Bharucha, Nilufer E. “Imagining the Parsi Diaspora:  Narratives on the Wings of Fire.” Shifting Continents/Colliding Cultures:  Diaspora Writing of the Indian Subcontinent. Ed. Ralph J. Crane and Radhika Mohanram. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000. 55–82.

600    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions Binning, Sadhu. “Punjabi-Canadian Literature:  A  Brief Introduction.” Journal of Punjab Studies 13.1–2 (2006): 279–85. Print. “Canadian Multiculturalism: An Inclusive Citizenship.” Citizenship and Immigration Canada. http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/multiculturalism/citizenship.asp. Web. Accessed 26 June 2015.Chakraborty, Paulomi. “Disasters Canadian and Indian.” Rev. of Can You Hear the Night Bird Call?, by Anita Rau Badami. Canadian Literature 196 (2008): 114–17. Proquest. Davis, Rocio G. “Mappings of Space and Imagination: The Multicultural City in M. G. Vassanji’s Uhuru Street and No New Land.” Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 8.1–2 (2001): 27–44. Print. Doctor, Farzana. Stealing Nasreen. Toronto: INNANA, 2007. Print. Flatley, Jonathan. Affective Mapping:  Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism. Harvard: Harvard UP, 2008. Print. Gabriel, Sharmani Patricia. “Interrogating Multiculturalism:  Double Diaspora, Nation, and Re-Narration in Rohinton Mistry’s Canadian Tales.” Canadian Literature 181 (2004): 27–41. Print. Genetsch, Martin. Textures of Identity: The Fiction of M. G. Vassanji, Neil Bissoondath, and Rohinton Mistry. Toronto: TSAR, 2007. Print. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic:  Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992. Print. Heble, Ajay. “ ‘A Foreign Presence in the Stall’:  Towards a Poetics of Cultural Hybridity in Rohinton Mistry’s Migration Stories.” Canadian Literature 137 (1993): 51–61. Print. Hoving, Isabel. “Moving the Caribbean Landscape: Cereus Blooms at Night as a Re-Imagination of the Caribbean Environment.” Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture. Ed. Elizabeth M.  Deloughery, Renée K.  Gosson, and George B.  Handley. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2005. 154–68. Print. Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic:  Marketing the Margins. London:  Routledge, 2001. Print. Ivison, Douglas, and Justin D.  Edwards. Downtown Canada:  Writing Canadian Cities. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2005. Print. Johnston, Hugh. The Voyage of the Komagata Maru: The Sikh Challenge to Canada’s Colour Bar. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 1989. Print. Knowles, Sam. “Sri Lankan ‘Gates of Fire’:  Michael Ondaatje’s Transnational Literature, from Running in the Family to Anil’s Ghost.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 45 (3): 429–41. Print. Komagata Maru: Continuing the Journey. http://www.komagatamarujourney.ca. Simon Fraser University. March 2011. Web. Accessed 26 June 2015.Malik, Tariq. Chanting Denied Shores: The Komagata Maru Narratives. Calgary: Bayeux, 2011. Print. McGifford, Diane. The Geography of Voice: Canadian Literature of the South Asian Diaspora. Toronto: TSAR, 1992. Print. McLeod, John. Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis. London: Routledge, 2004. Print. Medley, Mark. Review of The Hungry Ghosts, by Shyam Selvadurai. National Post 13 April 2012. http://arts.nationalpost.com/2013/04/12/shyam-selvadurai/ Accessed May 2, 2013. Web. Accessed 26 June 2015. Mendis, Ranjini. Review of Anil’s Ghost, by Michael Ondaatje. Chimo (Fall 2000): n. pag. Print. Mistry, Rohinton. Tales from Firozsha Baag. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1987. Print. Mootoo, Shani. Cereus Blooms at Night. Vancouver: Press Gang, 1996. Print. ———. He Drown She in the Sea. New York: Grove, 2005. Print.

South Asian Canadian “Geographies of Voice”    601 ———. Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab. Toronto: Doubleday, 2014. Print. ———. “On Moving Forward Toward the Un/Familiar:  An Interview with Shani Mootoo.” By Mariam Pirbhai. South Asian Canadian Literature. Spec. issue of Studies in Canadian Literature 40.1 (2015). Print. Nair, Supriya M. Pathologies of Paradise: Caribbean Detours. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2013. Print. Ondaatje, Michael. Anil’s Ghost. New York: Vintage, 2001. Print. ———. In the Skin of a Lion. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1987. Print. Pirbhai, Mariam. Mythologies of Migration, Vocabularies of Indenture:  The Novels of the South Asian Diaspora in Africa, the Caribbean and Asia-Pacific. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2009. Print. ———. “Introduction: South Asian Canadian Literature: A Centennial Journey.” South Asian Canadian Literature. Spec. issue of Studies in Canadian Literature 40.1 (2015). Print. Ruggles, D.  Fairchild. Islamic Gardens and Landscapes. Philadelphia:  U of Pennsylvania P, 2008. Print. Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses. London: Viking, 1988. Print. Selvadurai, Shyam. Funny Boy. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1994. Print. ———. The Hungry Ghosts. Toronto: Doubleday, 2013. Print. Srikanth, Rajini. The World Next Door:  South Asian American Literature and the Idea of America. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2004. Print. Statistics Canada. “2006 Census: Immigration in Canada. A Portrait of the Foreign-Born Population, 2006 Census: Findings.” http://www12.statcan.ca/census-recensement/2006/ as-sa/97-557/index-eng.cfm. Accessed March 17, 2013. Web. Accessed 26 June 2015. Sugars, Cynthia, and Gerry Turcotte, eds. Unsettled Remains:  Canadian Literature and the Postcolonial Gothic. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2009. Print. Vassanji, M.G. “Am I a Canadian Writer?” Canadian Literature 190 (2006): 7–14. Proquest. ———. No New Land. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1991. Print. Viswanathan, Padma. The Ever After of Ashwin Rao. Toronto: Random House, 2014. Print. Wayland, Sarah V. “Immigration and Transnational Political Ties: Croatians and Sri Lankan Tamils in Canada.” Canadian Ethnic Studies 35.2 (2003): 61–85. Proquest. Willis, Gary. “Speaking the Silence: Joy Kogawa’s Obasan.” Studies in Canadian Literature 12.2 (1987): n. pag. http://journals.hil.unb.ca/index.php/SCL/article/view/8069/9126. Accessed March 17, 2013. Web. Accessed 26 June 2015.

Chapter 32

You Say You’ v e OD ’ d on Leonard  C oh e n Canadian Jewish Writing and the Mainstream Norman Ravvin

Tradition in the Making Canadian Jewish literature began as part of an international tradition—that of the Yiddish literary world of early twentieth-century eastern Europe. The first important and well-read Jewish writing in Canada was by Yiddish poets, prose writers, and journalists born in Poland and Russia, who brought varied backgrounds and influences to Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, and, to a lesser extent, small centres like Vancouver and Calgary.1 Many had religious educations but had abandoned their parents’ observance for new ideological and aesthetic movements. To earn a living in Canada they became educators and workaday journalists in the Yiddish press, day-school teachers, and garment labourers. Before World War II, hardly a one of these was a full-time professional writer. Rather, on the model of their US counterparts, they did wage labour by day and wrote and read by night.2 Europe remained a central theme in their work, often in contrast with new Canadian possibilities. A telling early example of such experience is found in Yaacov Zipper’s “Der ershter frimargn / That First Morning,” where a newcomer is chided by his “slim blond uncle” over his instinctive urge to carry his passport. As “ ‘long as you have a house to live in,’ ” the established Canadian Jew tells his green nephew, “ ‘you’re a resident, and no one has the right to stop you and ask you questions. Here—that’s the kind of country it is—as long as you don’t bother anyone it is no one’s business who you are’ ” (83). Zipper signals a newfound ennui alongside this affirmative claim, as an established local brings home to the newcomer a sense of anonymity—a new kind of exile—presented by Canadian security. Yiddish writers expressed this ennui well into the postwar era, as they continued to write about Europe,

Canadian Jewish Writing and the Mainstream    603 their true intellectual and even emotional home. Rokhl Korn’s poetry is among the most powerful of such work, most notably her poem “Fun yener zayt lid / On the Other Side of the Poem,” in which she mines resonant memories of her youthful Galician rural life: On the other side of the poem there is an orchard, and in the orchard, a house with a roof of straw, and three pine trees, three watchmen who never speak, standing guard. (524)

In Chava Rosenfarb’s story “The Greenhorn,” a Holocaust survivor carries European memories freighted with a different kind of sadness, which includes the loss of his wife during the war, movement through displaced person camps, and, finally, a rough reception among postwar Jews in a Montreal garment factory. For Rosenfarb’s protagonist, Baruch, postwar Jewish Canadian life presents its own incomprehensible customs and codes, along with dismissive attitudes regarding a survivor’s losses. On a shop floor off Montreal’s Jewish Main, among Jewish labourers and supervisors, Rosenfarb’s main character encounters language that “sounds like Polish Yiddish, but the words are incomprehensible” (75). While the past—Europe—remains an inescapable phantom, the New World offers its own peculiar punch in the gut.3 English-language Jewish writing enters the mainstream in the person of A.M. Klein, whose early notable publications were American—in major magazines like Poetry and via the Jewish Publication Society of America—but who placed his first youthful poems in such Montreal-based venues as the Canadian Jewish Chronicle and the Canadian Forum in Toronto. Klein was raised off Montreal’s Main by Yiddish-speaking, observant, European-born parents striving to find a New World foothold. But in his early poems, recent European events are, for the most part, a marginal theme. Rather, Klein addresses the Jewish past through retellings of Bible stories or through the development of a kind of Jewish heraldic past using language influenced by traditional English poetry. A good example of this appears in “Mattathias,” from 1928: Of scabrous heart and of deportment sleek, and reeking like an incense superfine, The Hebrew renegade laid hold the swine And raised it as a flattery to the Greek … His dagger flashed, truly a lightning streak; The blood gushed from the swine-heart which, in fine, Did the Lord’s altar all incarnadine. … (72)

Other early poems in a similar vein focus on the prophet Nehemiah, on Job and Ecclesiastes. Klein knew and loved Jewish literature in Yiddish and Hebrew, but by the early 1930s he was writing like T.S. Eliot, whether the echoes were meant as paean or lampoon. In

604    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions “Soirée of Velvel Kleinburger” he presents Jewish Montreal in the style of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: In back-room dens of delicatessen stores, In curtained parlours of garrulous barber-shops, While the rest of the world most comfortably snores On mattresses, or on more fleshly props, My brother Velvel vigils in the night, Not as he did last night with two French whores, But with a deck of cards that once were white. (183)

Modernism’s heroes—especially James Joyce—were what Europe had to offer a young Jewish poet striking out from home in the immigrant neighbourhood to join the literary coteries of McGill University. One must wait until the postwar moment—1948 to be exact, when Canada changed its established “None Is Too Many” approach to Jewish immigration—for a Europe-focused novel in English by a Canadian Jew. This is Henry Kreisel’s The Rich Man, a fine young man’s novel brought out by the country’s leading mainstream publisher, McClelland and Stewart. The Rich Man opens in Toronto in 1935, in the neighbourhoods surrounding Spadina Avenue, which were inhabited by Jewish garment workers and up-and-comers. But its action quickly moves to Vienna. Kreisel had the unusual fortune of having been born in the Austrian capital, though his family, as he put it in a 1980 interview, had roots further east: My family was an Eastern European family. My mother was born in Poland and my father was born in Rumania. … I don’t come from an assimilated Austrian or German family but from a very strong Yiddish family and my roots emotionally go back to Eastern Europe, in the shtetl. (qtd. in Ravvin, “Introduction” 5)

It is with sympathy and knowledge of his European youth and ancestral inheritance that Kreisel proceeds to offer a varied catalogue of Jewish types, which include an Old-World yiddishe mame, synagogue-going men, women devoted to the customary domestic rituals of middle-class Jewish life, and the new Jewish types created by secularization and politicization, all of this underwritten by the short period of emancipation experienced by Jews in central Europe from the turn of the century until the early 1930s. In particular, Kreisel depicts the politically astute Albert, a bookseller who views the rise of fascism with great alarm, and his wife Shaendl, who is a scandal in her family because of her independent, cosmopolitan ways. It is telling that a late 1940s Canadian Jewish novel, published by a mainstream house, dedicates its first fifteen pages to Toronto, with the rest of it being a European narrative from the perspective of a Canadian Jewish traveler.4 It would seem that in both the mind of the author, as well as from the perspective of the publisher willing to bring out the book, the real Jewish story was across the ocean.

Canadian Jewish Writing and the Mainstream    605 Kreisel is the first major contributor to Canadian Jewish writing in English whose subject is largely focused on a European subject. The key novelists who follow—A.M. Klein, Mordecai Richler, and Adele Wiseman—inherited Europe in an entirely different way from Kreisel, and it is their example that influenced Canadian writing from the 1950s forward.5 Richler, though by far the most influential in critical and popular terms, may be said, on the subject of Europe, to be the most idiosyncratic and uncompromising of the three. Old-Worldisms come in for satiric fun in his work, and Europe is a grey ghost in the memory of increasingly assimilated Canadian Jewish families. Based on the facts of his own grandfather’s emigration from Poland, Richler tells the story of a European’s arrival in Canada as a kind of stand-up routine, in an early passage of his breakthrough 1959 novel The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz: Where Duddy Kravitz sprung from the boys grew up dirty and sad, spiky also, like grass beside the railroad tracks. He might have been born in Lodz, but forty-eight years earlier his grandfather had bought a steerage passage to Halifax. Duddy might have been born in Toronto, that’s where his grandfather was bound for, but Simcha Kravitz’s CPR ticket took him only as far as the Bonaventure Station in Montreal, and he never did get to Toronto. (46)

It’s all uphill, or sideways from here, depending on one’s capabilities, one’s willingness to cast off Old-World European customs, and one’s ability to get with the Canadian program of postwar assimilation, which promises prosperity. In a way not entirely unlike his Yiddish literary forebears, Richler loved to lampoon, but it was literary modernism that moved him as a young writer, not his own east European ancestry.6 In a memoiristic piece set in 1953, in which Richler retells the ticket switch he fictionalizes in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, he depicts his own return to “Montreal from a two year stay in Europe” (“The Street” 15). At his grandmother’s house on Jeanne Mance, in the heart of the old Jewish neighbourhood, the following scene says it all: A Yiddish newspaper fluttering on her massive lap, black bootlaces unravelled, my grandmother was ensconced in a kitchen chair on the balcony, seemingly rooted there, attended by sons and daughters, fortified by grandchildren. “How is it for the Jews in Europe?” she asked me. A direct question from an old lady with a wart turned like a screw in her cheek and in an instant I was shorn of all my desperately acquired sophistication; my New Statesman outlook, my shaky knowledge of wines and European capitals; the life I had made for myself beyond the ghetto. “I don’t know,” I said, my shame mixed with resentment at being reclaimed so quickly. “I didn’t meet many.” Leaning against their shiny new cars, yawning on the balcony steps with hands thrust into their trouser pockets or munching watermelon, pinging seeds into saucers, my uncles reproached me for not having been to Israel. (Richler, “The Street” 15–16)

606    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions Not 10 years after the war had devastated European Jewish life, the would-be writer has fashioned himself as an English cosmopolite. He is neither a recognizable Canadian type, nor a representative voice of conventional Jewish postwar experience. He has cut himself free, and the “old lady,” it seems, can see this from a mile off. Klein and Wiseman offer a less provocative, in some ways archetypal, view of Europe after the Holocaust. Although they publish their novels in the 1950s, when the Yiddish word churbn (catastrophe) would have been used to account for the German destruction of European Jewish life, it is the Holocaust that haunts them. Both choose to focus, in part, on an earlier and more straightforward kind of European massacre: the pogrom.7 A lower tech, more intimate form of killing, with numbers of dead the average reader can grasp, the pogroms that erupted after the 1881 assassination of the Russian Czar, and followed, intermittently, into the post-revolutionary period, were a part of both writers’ Ukrainian ancestry. Klein’s depiction in The Second Scroll of a post–World War I pogrom in Ratno, the area of the Ukraine where he was born, must have been informed by family stories and letters from intimates who remained overseas. News of the slaughter arrives, in the novel, by way of a letter: That night as from my bed I eavesdropped on the conversation of my father and mother, I learned the details of Uncle Melech’s letter—of how the Balachovtzes, driving ahead of the fleeing Bolsheviks, had entered Ratno, and of how, summoning to their ranks the peasants of the region—yesterday’s friends and neighbours—they had robbed and pillaged and murdered.8 (Second Scroll 21)

These scenes serve as readerly preparation for what, later in the novel, is an early example of Holocaust fiction, which presents a Nazi massacre in the same part of Ukraine. In this, Klein’s strategy is a familiar one: Jewish churbanim (catastrophes) exist as a litany of suffering that is linked to the promise of messianic redemption. “Out of the furnace there issued smoke,” as Klein’s narrator puts it, “out of the smoke a people descended.” Put more directly, there was “fashioned Aught from Naught,” as the declaration of the new State of Israel followed the European catastrophe (Second Scroll 38). For many postwar Jews, this equation affirmed what they took as an acceptable interpretation of historical events. Europe was a graveyard, but Israel presented all the requisite fresh possibilities. Wiseman’s 1956 novel, The Sacrifice, won the Governor General’s Award for fiction, at the time the country’s premiere literary prize, and may have been influenced by Klein’s approach to history and collective identity. It highlights, early in its narrative, a Ukrainian pogrom, in what is the lone extended section of the book set in eastern Europe. The events of the pogrom are described by a survivor: “In the town the peasants and the townspeople are preparing for their Easter. They are beginning to be restless. The church bells ring more often, and the priests call them for meetings. Suddenly, from nowhere, a troop of cossacks appears. It is quartered in a neighboring village, but the cossacks wander about everywhere in

Canadian Jewish Writing and the Mainstream    607 the town. The goyim look at the Jews. The Jews start to look at each other. The air becomes harder to breathe. At night I crawl into my root cellar and bury my valuables, some here, some there, as my mother used to do. Everything that is small enough is hidden away. Other Jews that I know slip silently out of town, those that have a stronger premonition. … “For three nights and days the church bells ring, and for three nights and days we hide. First of all the townsfolk lead the cossacks to the grocer’s. The house is dark. They start to shout up at the Jews. They have been told that the families are hiding there.” (55–56)

Unlike Klein’s novel, The Sacrifice does not specify the locale of this three-day-long pogrom. And aside from those days, the novel is set on Canadian ground. Wiseman mines the hardscrabble, and, to an extent, darkly comic lives of newcomers and established Jews in a lightly veiled version of her native Winnipeg. Though details of climate, social life and landscape are suggestive of the Canadian prairie city, Wiseman does not overplay her hand in this direction, as if editorial direction convinced her that American readers might be happy to mistake her setting for Cincinnati or Minneapolis, a cold urban North American anywhere. Key to Wiseman’s thematic decisions is her perception, as a young writer, of Europe as a place of grotesque lynching, audacious peasant cruelty, and, ultimately, flight. Canada, where Jews become strivers or fail to overcome their Old-World habits, is the scene of instruction regarding postwar Jewish identity. In the mid-1960s, Richler was crowned by the critic George Woodcock as “the most important of the younger generation of Canadian fiction writers,” and his take on Jewish Europe took on a kind of unavoidable lead role: what good fortune it was, his work implied, to have fled the unbearable past of our ancestors, taking any old ticket to any place available, rather than stay behind to be murdered (Woodcock vii). The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, published first in London in 1959, ushered in the 1960s, a decade in which Jewish Canadian writers forgot about Europe. Leonard Cohen’s mid-1960s work, in particular the poetry collection Flowers for Hitler (1964) and the novel Beautiful Losers (1966), presents a partial exception to this rule. In them there is no presentation of grim historical events from the European Jewish past, but Cohen muses over “Cadres of SS [who] waken in our minds.” “For a while,” he writes, “we resist the silver-black cars / rolling in slow parade through the brain,” but the “leader’s vast design, the tilt of his chin / seem excessively familiar to minds at peace” (“Hitler” 125). Europe itself—its Jewish past and culture—makes a rare appearance in Beautiful Losers, in the person of a “filthy coreligionist, bearded, shifty, and smelling of low Romanian cuisine, who visited the factory every second month begging on behalf of an obscure Yiddish physical-therapy university” (152). This is a shaliach, the kind of religious emissary who is shuffled off, shamefully, by Montrealers in flight from the nearly forgotten and objectionable past. Cohen’s compatriot Irving Layton made more of Europe in his mid-career work than did Cohen, but the title of his 1981 volume, Europe and Other Bad News, conveys the

608    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions tenor of his approach. In preface after preface to volumes that appeared in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Layton reiterates the fact that [t]‌hings have been done to human beings by other human beings for which no other century or epoch can offer any parallel. Beside the mass slaughters, crimes, cynical treacheries, perversions, and unheard-of cruelties of the Nazis and Bolsheviks, the carnage and razings commanded by an Atilla or Crassus appear relatively mild, decorous affairs. … (Layton, “Foreword,” Balls xxi)

European anti-Semitism came to the fore in Layton’s work in the middle 1970s, most notably in his collection For My Brother Jesus (1976). In lightly farcical poems, Layton visits medieval cathedrals and chats up the altar pieces, calling Jesus “brother Jeshu,” in his effort to reclaim Jesus as part of Jewish heritage (“Incident at the Cathedral” 72). Layton and Cohen found poetic inspiration and personal respite in their time spent in Greece, but this had little to do with the poet’s urge to turn his European ancestry to creative ends. Layton’s repeated claim, in poem after poem, and in one provocative foreword after another, is that European heritage must be viewed as a fiasco, ending in massacre. Nowhere in Layton is there an appreciative or informed word about the life Jews left behind upon coming to the New World. This was quite simply out of his range. In this, Layton reveals himself to be more conventional in his choice of what might be called pillars of ethnic identity—the keystones of a broad cultural identification. Like many in this period, he shifts his attention toward the new Jewish state and advises his sons, in a poem entitled “For My Sons, Max and David,” to become “gunners in the Israeli Air Force” (152). The mid-1970s were a fertile period for Matt Cohen, a writer whose career developed in the late 1960s independent-press ferment in Toronto. His critical and popular audience grew with the appearance of a suite of novels set north of Kingston, Ontario, where he moved from Toronto. Published between 1974 and 1981, The Disinherited, The Colours of War, The Sweet Second Summer of Kitty Malone, and Flowers of Darkness came to be known as Cohen’s Salem Quartet, after the name he gave to the countryside where they take place. In the work Cohen published after these, he shifted his attention to Jewish European themes in three novels that spanned Jewish history from fourteenth-century Spanish conversos through tales of Holocaust survivors in contemporary Canada. Cohen addressed the reception of these works in his posthumous memoir, Typing: A Life in 26 Keys, where he admitted that had he “known the reception they would have in Canada, I certainly would have been afraid to publish them” (202). The Spanish Doctor (1984), Nadine (1986) and Emotional Arithmetic (1990) should be recognized as books that lead a return, among Jewish writers in Canada, to a careful consideration of Europe. Though they maintain the characterization of Europe as a place of Jewish catastrophe and traumatic history, they engage with European lives and history in a way that other writers in previous decades had not done. Matt Cohen was frustrated with his novels’ reception, and felt that the criticism they received was meant to drive him back to his Salem mode, away from European and Jewish investigations. Following a particularly bad review

Canadian Jewish Writing and the Mainstream    609 of The Spanish Doctor, The Globe and Mail, presumably out of editorial guilt feelings, offered Cohen a full page in its Saturday Books section to account for his writerly motivations. The Spanish Doctor provided, Cohen wrote, “the most harrowing experience of my writing life. I travelled to Europe five times, learned passable French, mediocre Spanish and enough Italian to survive train stations …” (“The Birth” B7). Even though the book’s setting is medieval Spain, it forced Cohen to ask himself again and again what it meant that he was “a Jew at so many removes from [his] origins,” that he is “unable even to list them, let alone understand them” (B7). Historical fiction, for him, reflected contemporary Jewish identity. The return to Europe exemplified by Cohen’s work on The Spanish Doctor—via travel, research, immersion in language, and creative imaginings—became de rigueur in the 1990s with the end of the Soviet empire. This coincided with the full flowering of Holocaust Studies, and writers began to make their way back to ancestral places, whether to imagine them as the places they might have been before the Germans destroyed them, or to present them as they appeared to an outsider’s post-Soviet eye. This movement among younger writers appears most clearly through a review of short stories published in the 1980s and 1990s, by figures such as Cary Fagan, Robyn Sarah, Tom Wayman, and Elaine Kalman Naves, as well as the poetic and critical work of Ken Sherman. Fagan’s “Nora by the Sea” buries concerns with Jewish identity in Europe beneath a more overt presentation of family drama and sexual awakening; Sarah’s story, “A Minor Incident,” examines a postwar Montreal childhood in the shadow of the still inchoate project of addressing and understanding the events of World War II; Elaine Kalman Naves’s memoiristic piece “Hair” follows a young girl’s Hungarian ancestral story to Canada, where the legacy of Holocaust memories is played out in a suburban scenario devoid of connection to a European past; while Tom Wayman, in the vein of earlier work by Klein and Wiseman, reaches back to a story of early twentieth-century violence, which continues to haunt a family whose Ukrainian Jewish identity fades on the streets of Toronto.9 These trends were similarly expressed in 1996 in Anne Michaels’s sensationally successful first novel Fugitive Pieces. Though the novel, influenced by the example set in Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of the Lion, mines Toronto’s cultural and archaeological landscape, Michaels begins in Europe at what must seem to readers to be a flourish out of a fantasy novel, but is in fact a historical site. This is the Polish ruin at Biskupin, not far from modern-day Poznan, where an Iron Age island community built itself a palisaded town wholly of wood, which was ultimately consumed by rising flood waters and was preserved, forgotten, until it was uncovered shortly before World War II. Michaels’s young protagonist, Jakob Beer, is a Jewish Pole fleeing the Germans, who rises “from the marshy ground” of Biskupin like a kind of latter day golem (5). Her novel becomes a venue for Jakob’s elegiac poetry, dedicated to his sister, who was murdered by the Germans. This balancing act—between Canadian and European material, Jewish Canadian identity and its European foundation—links Michaels’s work with the earliest English-language Jewish Canadian literature, beginning with Klein and Kreisel. Writers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have maintained the literary challenge of balancing North American experience vis-à-vis European history.

610    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions Lilian Nattel’s 1999 novel, The River Midnight, excises Canada entirely, making use of late nineteenth-century Manhattan as its site of North American Jewish life. But the bulk of Nattel’s novel takes place in a fictional Polish shtetl she calls Blaszka, on the Vistula not far from the actual and ancient city of Płock. Nattel acknowledges in an author’s note that, though her parents and grandparents were Polish born, and her great-grandparents “most likely came from a shtetl somewhere,” who they were and what their shtetl experience was is “a mystery” to her (399). Her depiction of Blaszka is strongly infused by the feminist goal of retelling shtetl history from the point of view of female characters. More recently, Nancy Richler’s novel The Imposter Bride reached a wide audience by tipping the balance back toward a Canadian setting—in this case, Montreal in the post–World War II era, when Canadian Jews found new opportunities, but when, too, a final wave of European Jewish immigration followed Canada’s willingness to allow Jewish Holocaust survivors into the country. Richler’s narrative turns on the arrival of one of these survivors, and in this way recovers fictional ground that writers such as Irving Layton and Henry Kreisel ventured into in the 1950s and 1960s.10 Haunting Richler’ s character is prewar life in Krakow’s courtyards, so that Poland, though less overtly a thematic presence than in Fugitive Pieces and The River Midnight, remains a dramatic motif. Some 65 years after the publication of Kreisel’s groundbreaking The Rich Man, The Imposter Bride confirms a Canadian Jewish literary tradition that straddles North American and European themes.

Jewish Canadian Writing Today: A Polemical View Toward a Poetics of Response In the United States, for a number of decades beginning in the 1950s, the Jewish contribution to mainstream literary life was influential, even central to the overall tradition. In Canada the literary landscape is considerably different. Key writers gained substantial audiences, but in only a few cases was their impact such that they helped shape the mainstream tradition. Irving Layton, through his influence on Leonard Cohen and many younger poets, presented himself as a personality to be reckoned with, both as a cultural critic and a writer of finely wrought poems on aesthetic and historical themes. The early example of Klein, Kreisel, Wiseman, and Richler inaugurated what would come to be thought of as a multicultural literature, a stream of Canadian urban writing that introduced a counter-tradition to the established English- and French-language canons (the role of Kreisel and Wiseman in this is largely forgotten). George Woodcock, founding editor of Canadian Literature, the first major academic journal dedicated to the subject, pointed to Richler’s importance on this front in the introduction he contributed to the 1966 paperback reprint of Richler’s second novel, Son of a Smaller Hero. The reprint in

Canadian Jewish Writing and the Mainstream    611 McClelland and Stewart’s New Canadian Library reflected the process of canonization that had attached itself to Richler, along with the influence of Richler’s chosen mode of address with regard to Canadian identity. Woodcock begins by quoting a passage from early in the novel: “The ghetto of Montreal has no real walls and no true dimensions. The walls are the habit of atavism and the dimensions are an illusion. But the ghetto exists all the same” (vii). For Woodcock, this view of ethnicity and the mainstream had a universal relevance, reaching well beyond the specifics of postwar Jewish Montreal. According to Woodcock, Richler’s novel was in its narrowest sense, the account of an attempt by a Jewish youth in Montreal to escape from the mental bonds of the ghetto and, having passed through the feared and desired world of the Goyim, to realize his true self in the freedom which he believes exists beyond the invisible walls. Turning by turning, the vistas open. (Woodcock vii)

A politically astute chronicler of cultural shifts in postwar Canada, Woodcock avoids the kind of reflexive assimilationist ethic found in the reception of Canadian Jewish writing that ignores the particulars of Jewish history and imaginative life. Rather, what Woodcock values, which he rightly recognizes in Richler’s fiction, is an individual ethic of self-realization and creative freedom. This ethic, Woodcock suggests, is applicable and relevant to the Canadian scene writ large: Jewish writers have … revealed with peculiar force and sensitivity the tensions that are characteristic of Canadian life, and particularly of Canadian urban life. This, it seems evident, is because the themes of which they treat with such a complex heritage of experience, the themes of isolation and division, are also the themes from which it is difficult for any writer in Canada to escape. It might be a metaphorical exaggeration to describe Canada as a land of invisible ghettos, but certainly it is, both historically and geographically, a country of minorities that have never achieved assimilation. (vii–viii)

This proto-multicultural concern—an expression of an idea about Canadian identity that was not yet in vogue—helped place Richler’s work at the forefront of what Canadian literature would become in the next decades:  a tradition of writing by newcomers, whether they be first-generation Canadian Jews, the children of Japanese interned during the war, or, more recently, storytellers whose material derives from South Asia and other parts of what was once the far-flung British Empire. Richler—a rugged satirist of Canada, whether he was far away in London or at home in Westmount—proved useful to critics like Woodcock as a vanguard figure for a new Canadian literature. With the rise of CanLit in the 1960s, his work spoke to a number of universalizing tendencies in Canadian criticism. Warren Tallman, a key figure in Canadian criticism, characterized Duddy, in a 1960 review, as “one of the truer travelers through the chaos of our North America world.” Tallman recognized in Richler’s work not the influence of Jewish novelists, but that of Brian Moore’s early novel The Feast of

612    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions Lupercal (Tallman 62). Writing in the summer of 1966, W.H. New, who would become among the most influential canonizers of contemporary Canadian literature, discusses The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz alongside Hugh MacLennan’s The Watch That Ends the Night. New highlights the importance of Duddy’s unwillingness to “accept an order that is established by race or religion or duty or family,” and celebrates “Duddy’s unorthodox but vigorous apprenticeship to an identity all his own” (22–23). One can easily see how Henry Kreisel’s The Rich Man, with its narrative of an immigrant’s return to the Old World to grapple with its imminent disaster, could not be read with the same upbeat and freeing view. It runs, essentially, in the opposite direction, toward entrapment and responsibility to the past. The Rich Man highlights its affiliations with European language and culture as Kreisel’s protagonist, Jacob Grossman, continues to speak most clearly and comfortably in Yiddish after some 30 years working as a presser off Toronto’s Spadina Avenue. No other Canadian Jewish writer, not even Leonard Cohen, received the canonizing treatment offered to Mordecai Richler. Rather, the relationship between Jewish writing and the Canadian canon can be seen, from most other perspectives, as tenuous. The darkest, most troubling, and certainly the most poorly received depiction of this relationship came from Matt Cohen in his posthumous memoir Typing: A Life in 26 Keys (2000): Many of those writers now considered to be our greatest—Robertson Davies, Timothy Findley, Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro—gained unprecedented audiences, sales, international recognition, and most of all a dominant place in the Canadian public imagination. All of them were writing out of a conservative, small-town, restrained, Protestant tradition that found a tremendous echo of self-recognition across the country. These writers were, in effect, writing the secret diaries of their readers, finding words and images for their experiences. But for writers of a slightly younger generation, for example the offbeat, very unconservative, unProtestant, unrestrained offspring of a completely different cultural and religious tradition, which I happened to be, no such echo was to be found. (157–58)

Here Cohen indirectly returns to the subject of the reception of his Jewish-themed books by Canadian reviewers and readers, setting it within the context of a larger CanLit milieu and its “cultural and religious” roots. His views received prickly responses from Margaret Atwood and long-time journalistic voice Robert Fulford. Calling Typing a “work of revenge,” Fulford does not offer any argument to counter Cohen’s sense, however bitter, that Jewish writing uniformly struggled to enter the mainstream. Instead, Fulford offers the not so convincing rejoinder that when he started his career, the leading figures in Canadian literature included Mordecai Richler, Leonard Cohen and Irving Layton, none of them a notorious Protestant; the year before Matt Cohen’s first book appeared, the Governor General’s judges awarded the fiction prize to Richler and the poetry prize to Leonard Cohen. (Fulford)

Though the snafu concerning Matt Cohen’s Typing is largely forgotten, a footnote among footnotes in Canadian literary history, it raises some crucial questions regarding the role of

Canadian Jewish Writing and the Mainstream    613 Jewish writers and culture in the Canadian mainstream. With hindsight, we might ask: Is there, as Matt Cohen asserted, an unavoidable divide between Jewish Canadian writing and its mainstream counterpart? Is there still an absence of suitable reviewing and publishing venues that might receive Jewish writers’ work in a sensitive and sensible manner? What position of influence or visibility has it retained alongside the mainstream tradition? And finally, how important are questions related to Jewish identity, particularly in the work of major figures like Leonard Cohen, Irving Layton, and more recent figures? The rise and fall and then rise once more of interest in A.M. Klein’s work is linked to such challenges of reception. Though Klein’s poetry and his lone novel, The Second Scroll, have attained canonical critical status, it is arguable that they have gained no popular audience beyond writers, especially poets, who view Klein’s polyglot language and experiments with form as guiding models.11 This, surely, is a curious position for a major figure—a guiding canonical voice without a mainstream audience. In the 1990s, a major undertaking by the University of Toronto Press, associated with a group of scholars called the A.M. Klein Research and Publication Committee, embarked on a series of scholarly editions of Klein’s work, including collections of his unpublished fiction and notebooks, which were deposited by his family at the National Archives of Canada following Klein’s death. More recently, there has been a low-key but meaningful return to Klein’s work by Montreal-based critics and translators, who recognize him as a kind of prophetic visionary of the multilingual and multicultural Montreal of today. The most convincing version of this remaking of Klein appears in Sherry Simon’s lively book, Translating Montreal: Episodes in the Life of a Divided City, in which Klein is envisioned as a boulevardier ahead of his time, crossing town and languages in ways that would only become common in the culture decades later. Leonard Cohen has contributed to this resurfacing of Klein by way of certain nostalgic references to his poetic predecessor. The best example of this appears on Cohen’s 2004 album Dear Heather, in which the song “To a Teacher” is dedicated to Klein. In it, Cohen sings, “Let me cry beside you, Teacher.” In the early 1960s Cohen published a poem titled “Song for Abraham Klein,” which does not imply a mentor-teacher relationship so much as Cohen’s sadness at Klein’s self-imposed silence:12 The weary psalmist paused His instrument beside. Departed was the Sabbath And the Sabbath Bride. The table was decayed, The candles black and cold. The bread he sang so beautifully, That bread was mould. (67)

But by the time Cohen was publishing his early verse in the second half of the 1950s, he was working in a modernist and lyrical mode that did not reflect the influence of Klein’s more traditional poetry; Cohen’s entrée into the publishing world was engineered by his

614    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions professor at McGill, the poet Louis Dudek, a very different kind of poet from Klein; and the journals that printed Cohen’s early poems—among them the Tamarack Review and Queen’s Quarterly—were run by figures of influence from the Ontario literary establishment, such as Robert Weaver and Robert Fulford. As early as 1958, Cohen was making it known that he was performing his poetry to guitar accompaniment after the model of folk, country music, and the campfire songs he encountered during a stint as a counselor at a camp in the Laurentian Mountains north of Montreal. Klein’s silence was complete by the mid-1950s, and he had withdrawn from the venues where Cohen might have encountered him as a developing poet. Like Layton, Klein represented the possibility of a Jewish poetic voice in the Canadian mainstream, though Cohen would look for stylistic exemplars from this own generation, especially among American poets, novelists, and songwriters. Cohen—the Canadian Jewish writer with the greatest name recognition, even if that is largely thanks to musical success—has been refashioning his literary and cultural roots in recent years. Inevitably, his moves toward and away from points of influence contribute to a redefinition of his position in a Canadian Jewish tradition, and to a redefinition of the tradition itself. In his 2006 collection Book of Longing, Cohen includes a surprising manifesto, under the title “Something from the Early Seventies,” separating himself from the downtown New York music and art scene that helped launched him on his career as a singer and songwriter. He sets his sights on Nico, who sang with the Velvet Underground and was associated with Andy Warhol’s Factory. Nico, Cohen explains, knew what I was doing. She knew who I was. And I long for her still. I will pick my way back through the boredom and irrelevance of the last few decades and tell you of a time when I was truly alive. … … I was in New York at a curtain time, in a certain place; actually it was The Chelsea Hotel. This clever art dealer, call him Ahab, possessed the sad misimpression that I  would enjoy coming in and going out through a grimy lobby heaped and hung with the fashionable excrement of the ambitious hustlers in the studios above. … That’s the hotel he put me in. He thought I was one of them. Also Dylan Thomas sailed out from that lobby to pierce his eye on a rose-thorn. … It can be quickly divined I am no friend of the age. (126–27)

This artist’s credo points forward and backward in time, aiming for a return but also a repudiation of aspects of the period in which Cohen’s musical celebrity and influence took shape. Against an archetypal American backdrop, Cohen shifts the focus of his influence to an idiosyncratic German-born chanteuse, as if to bury his key influences as far from home as possible. Until the appearance of more recent international careers, like that of Anne Michaels, Cohen stood out among Jewish Canadian writers for the extent of his audience outside Canada. His early literary pursuits and success are marked by his Montreal Jewish upbringing, his McGill education, and certain senior figures, like Layton and Klein, who proved that it was not impossible to be a Jewish Canadian poet in the 1940s and 1950s.

Canadian Jewish Writing and the Mainstream    615 Cohen’s early books do not bear a heavy influence of any particular school or mentor, though they are at home in his formative Montreal milieu. But American pop cultural and political influence was strongly in evidence by the mid-1960s, with the publication of Cohen’s second novel Beautiful Losers (1966). The book begins with a coded epigram: “Somebody said lift that bale,” attributed to “RAY CHARLES singing ‘Ol’ Man River.’ ” The composers of “Showboat,” the Broadway show from which the song hails, were, like Cohen, composers with Jewish ancestry in search of a mainstream American audience. At the novel’s end—arguably among the strangest in Canadian literature—the narrator’s spiritual search ends with a bizarre pop spectacle, as he is transformed, before the shooting galleries of the Main,13 into a movie of Ray Charles. … The moon occupied one lens of his sunglasses, and he laid out his piano keys across a shelf of the sky … as though they were truly the row of giant fishes to feed a hungry multitude. (Beautiful 242)

Critics and readers have reached no consensus on the meaning of this pop apotheosis—which seems to suggest that the height of the miraculous, circa 1966, is to be transformed into a black American rhythm and blues singer. It was at this stage of his career that Cohen considered refashioning himself as a singer-songwriter: I felt I could go to Nashville and make a record there. I was familiar with that music and liked it, and I had written some songs … and I borrowed money to go there. On my way to Nashville I stopped through New York and heard Judy Collins, Phil Ochs and Tim Buckley, Bob Dylan. I’d never heard these singers before, and of course they spoke to my heart. (Cullman)

Cohen continued to return to Montreal, while his touring took him around the world, but the context of his musical success, and the mode of much of his musical and literary expression, were deeply and richly American. In the late 1960s and 1970s Cohen’s influential voice developed at a remove from the rise of Canada’s national literature, though he did share, with other major writers, the support of Jack McClelland. Unlike Klein, his idealism is focused not on his home city of Montreal, but on musical forms and styles based in black and urban American culture. The European past—so important to figures like Kreisel, Wiseman, and Klein—has faded almost entirely from view. Poems like “The Genius,” from The Spice-Box of Earth, and the Holocaust-related poems in Flowers for Hitler do not return to Europe and the events of the war. Rather, they investigate stereotypes of Jews, the status of Nazi leaders in popular culture, and, as Cohen suggests in “Hitler,” the way that these figures “waken in our minds” as modern bogeymen (125). Unlike his compatriot, Irving Layton, Cohen’s goal has rarely been to provoke his Canadian audience using Jewish themes, although certain books, like The Energy of Slaves and Book of Mercy, seemed designed to evade a popular audience entirely. While returning periodically to Jewish thematic material, and to the acknowledgment of guides such as Layton or

616    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions Klein, Cohen’s career floats free of conventional Canadian Jewish literary concerns. His career represents the antithesis of what the early Yiddish writers brought with them from Poland—a self-enclosed, ethnically based literature whose texts created a web of intertextual influence and reference. * * * The picture this chapter provides is of a tradition characterized by disjuncture. Rather than enforce an unrealistic or formulaic relationship upon distinct careers and oeuvres, or downplay the irreparable break between Yiddish- and English-language writing, or smooth over the unpredictable relationship between Jewish writers and the mainstream, it highlights points of difference and change. Over time, a disjointed quality has taken hold as a status quo. Prior to and for a short time after World War II, a network of Yiddish writers, modeling themselves on Polish and American literary communities, were held together by a set of institutions and venues. But the dissolution of this literary community was assured by the post–World War II rush to assimilation, by the abandonment of Yiddish, and by the urge to join mainstream suburban Canadian life. Irving Layton devoted a remarkable amount of energy to the denigration of these arriviste tendencies, though his poetic goal was not to highlight the forms of Jewish identity and language that were being left behind. One way to view post–World War II Jewish English-language writing in Canada is by highlighting the idiosyncrasy of major figures—Klein’s varied treatment of Jewish themes and ultimate silence; the relatively small, though in ways unique output of Wiseman and Kreisel; Leonard Cohen’s drive toward American influences. Each writer’s oeuvre tells us about a particular time and place. The guidebook for this approach—a kind of critical-visionary case study of how to address Canadian Jewish history, identity, and creative struggle—is Eli Mandel’s poetry collection Out of Place (1977). In it, Mandel, a poet and critic, makes overt the issues by which readers and literary historians might examine Canadian Jewish writing. Out of Place is evocative of the poet’s personal history, the geographical particularities of his native Saskatchewan, and the Jewish historical narratives that inform the poetic responses he chooses to address these concerns. Building on his youth in Estevan, as well as on his grandfather’s long-time role as the farmer-rabbi at Hirsch, a nearby Jewish farming colony, Mandel presents a landscape redolent with Old-World custom, postwar abandonment of these ways, alongside the pictographs of the neighbouring native bands. “Riel was hung,” he tells us, “in streets I walked on every day” (15). But the notion of recovery, of creative reconstitution of the past, is compromised by “the endless treachery / that is remembering” (19). Mandel’s poetic response is distinctly diffident and troubling, but it is a thoroughly workable one: whatever has been hidden here remains of speech the town lives in its syntax we are ghosts (14)

Canadian Jewish Writing and the Mainstream    617 Departure from south Saskatchewan—the need to abandon the Jewish prairie landscape for youthful dreams of literature—is part of Mandel’s critical and poetic vision, as he recalls … my red-bearded Hebrew teacher slashes my knuckles for a thought I think of English poetry the text mysterious … (27)

Out of Place is scrupulously attentive to the particular—to where Hebrew grave markers and Assiniboine pictographs merge in the landscape’s “graffiti”—although the distinctive place it recalls is a part of a broader continuity, which Mandel calls “the Jewish exodus from shtetl to the plains” (14–15). The approach taken in Out of Place runs contrary to the mythologizing strategies of Cohen’s Beautiful Losers, in which a black American icon oversees a pop apotheosis on Montreal’s Main. Cohen’s genius placed Jewish narratives as secret shadows behind the mainstream cultural story. Mandel presents an idiosyncratic and contrasting vein of Canadian literary searching. His map points down little-known roadways, along rivers of memory set upon a landscape so particular one might read Out of Place in order to plan a tour of its landmarks.

Notes Author’s Note:  This chapter’s title derives from the most evocative lyrical reference to Leonard Cohen, in Lloyd Cole’s 1984 song, “Speedboat”:  “Some say that they OD’d on Leonard Cohen, / Well, I can see that river whenever I think about them.” So much lurks here—the impact of Cohen’s music on young writers; the “river,” possibly the iconic St. Lawrence from “Suzanne”; but more important for this essay, the notion of “OD’ing” on Cohen, of a surplus of him, which, certainly, is a major source of difficulty in any effort to assess the overall tradition of post–World War II Canadian Jewish literature. 1. Calgary’s Yiddish heritage remains unexamined by scholars. The city had, beginning in 1928, a thriving Peretz Shul, on the model of the Yiddish folk schools in larger Canadian cities. The major Yiddish poet and playwright Peretz Hershbein lived in Calgary after his marriage to the Calgary-raised, Russian-born poet Esther Shumiatcher. The major Yiddish anthologist and ideologue Chaim Zhitlovsky died in Calgary in 1943, following a public talk. 2. The archetypal US example of this kind of divided life is the leading poet Mani Leyb, a skilled bootmaker in the Ukraine, who worked in shoe factories in New York City. 3. Rosenfarb and Korn were part of the influx of Holocaust survivors allowed entrance to Canada following the 1948 decision by Canadian government bureaucrats to re-initiate Jewish emigration to the country. Korn arrived in 1948; Rosenfarb in 1950. Both settled in Montreal. 4. This balance is repeated in A.M. Klein’s 1951 novel The Second Scroll, where the first chapter is dedicated to a loving Montreal childhood, while the remainder of the novel takes place in Europe, North Africa, and Israel. The possibility of a novel like Kreisel’s being a portrait

618    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions of Jewish Canada was promoted by his supportive editor at McClelland and Stewart, Sybil Hutchinson. In a 1948 letter to Kreisel, she urges: “Quite frankly, we are desperate for a novel this fall.” 5. Kreisel’s background differs greatly from the others. Raised in Vienna, his family left Austria for England with the rise of Hitler, but he was interned there as an “enemy alien.” He and his father were then transferred to an internment camp in New Brunswick, where Kreisel found, among other internees, intellectual guides, and decided to stay on in Canada after his release to pursue an academic and creative career in Toronto and later Edmonton. 6. For the most brutal example of this, see Richler’s evisceration of A.M. Klein and his Yiddish language compatriots in Solomon Gursky Was Here. 7. The Russian word pogrom means, simply, devastation. 8. Among the many specialized terms from Jewish history and texts in The Second Scroll is the reference to Balachovtzes, nationalist Ukrainian forces led by Bulak Balachowicz, who perpetrated pogroms as part of their anti-Soviet activities. 9. This selection of work presented itself to me unpredictably as I gathered short stories for the anthology Not Quite Mainstream: Canadian Jewish Short Stories (2001). Though my goals sent me in pursuit of good stories representative of a range of Canadian Jewish experience, history, and literary approaches, the outcome of the collection proved that stories of European return and recovery had become central to writers’ interests by the 1980s and after. 10. Layton’s unusual but moving foray into this material is his short story “Mrs. Polinov,” collected in his 1961 volume The Swinging Flesh, but which first appeared in Cid Corman’s influential little magazine, Origin. Kreisel’s second and final novel, The Betrayal (1961), is a book on these themes set in an underwritten, cold Canadian clime: Edmonton. 11. In After the Mountain: The A. M. Klein Rebook Project, 34 poets, most of them young, contributed work inspired by Klein’s poem “The Mountain” (see Camlot). 12. In the early 1950s, Klein suffered a breakdown, gave up writing, and retreated into silence until his death in 1972. 13. The Main, also known as St. Lawrence Boulevard, and, in more recent parlance, Boulevard Saint-Laurent, was Montreal’s Jewish main street and immigrant corridor of greatest note. It is memorialized in Richler’s work, and remains, to generations of Jewish Montrealers who remember earlier decades, the spine of Jewish daily life. Cohen’s return to it late in his novel suggests its pull, even in a literary context that is focused on themes other than the Jewish past.

Works Cited Camlot, Jason, ed. After the Mountain:  The A.  M. Klein Reboot Project. Montreal:  Synapse, 2011. Print. Cohen, Leonard. Beautiful Losers. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1966. Print. ———. “The Genius.” The Spice-Box of Earth. Toronto:  McClelland and Stewart, 1961. 78–79. Print. ———. “Hitler.” Flowers for Hitler. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1964. 125. Print. ———. “Something from the Early Seventies.” Book of Longing. Toronto:  McClelland and Stewart, 125–27. Print.

Canadian Jewish Writing and the Mainstream    619 ———. “Song for Abraham Klein.” The Spice-Box of Earth. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1961. 67. Print. ———. “To a Teacher.” Dear Heather. Columbia Records. 2004. Print. Cohen, Matt. “The Birth of The Spanish Doctor.” Globe and Mail 22 Sept. 1984: B7. Print. ———. The Colours of War. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1977. Print. ———. The Disinherited. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1974. Print. ———. Emotional Arithmetic. Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dennys, 1990. Print. ———. Flowers of Darkness. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1981. Print. ———. Nadine. Toronto: Penguin, 1986. Print. ———. The Spanish Doctor. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1984. Print. ———. The Sweet Second Summer of Kitty Malone. Toronto:  McClelland and Stewart, 1979. Print. ———. Typing: A Life in 26 Keys. Toronto: Random House, 2000. Print. Cole, Lloyd, and the Commotions. “Speedboat.” Rattlesnakes. Polydor, 1984. LP. Cullman, Brian. “Sincerely, L. Cohen.” www.webheights.net. Web. Accessed 26 May 2013. Fagan, Cary. Nora by the Sea. Toronto: Shaw Street P, 1988. Print. Fulford, Robert. “Typing: A Life in 26 Keys by Matt Cohen.” National Post 10 Oct. 2000. http:// www.robertfulford.com/MattCohen.html. Web. Accessed 18 Feb. 2014. Hutchinson, Sybil. Letter to Henry Kreisel. 8 Apr. 1948. Personal copy. Kalman Naves, Elaine. “Hair.” Saturday Night May 1998: 79–80. Print. Klein, A.M. “Mattathias.” Complete Poems: Part One, 1926–1934. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1990. 72–73. Print. ———. The Second Scroll. 1951. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. 1969. Print. ———. “Soirée of Velvel Kleinburger.” Complete Poems 183–86. Korn, Rokhl. “Fun yener zayt lid / On the Other Side of the Poem.” The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse. Ed. Irving Howe et al. New York: Viking, 1987. 524. Print. Kreisel, Henry. The Rich Man. 1948. Calgary: Red Deer P, 2006. Print. Layton, Irving. Europe and Other Bad News. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1981. Print. ———. “Foreword.” Balls for a One-Armed Juggler. Toronto:  McClelland and Stewart, 1963. xviii-xxii. Print. ———. “For My Sons, Max and David.” Irving Layton: Selected Poems 1945–89: A Wild Peculiar Joy. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1989. 151–52. Print. ———. “Incident at the Cathedral.” For My Brother Jesus. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1976. 72. Print. MacLennan, Hugh. 1959. The Watch That Ends the Night. Montreal:  McGill-Queen’s UP, 2009. Print. Mandel, Eli. Out of Place. Erin, ON: Press Porcépic, 1977. Print. Michaels, Anne. Fugitive Pieces. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1996. Print. Moore, Brian. The Feast of Lupercal. London: André Deutsch, 1958. Print. Nattel, Lilian. The River Midnight. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999. Print. New, William H. “The Apprenticeship of Discovery.” Canadian Literature 29 (1966): 18–33. Print. Ravvin, Norman. “Introduction.” The Rich Man, by Henry Kreisel. Calgary: Red Deer P, 2006. 3–10. Print. ———, ed. Not Quite Mainstream: Canadian Jewish Short Stories. Calgary: Red Deer P, 2001. Print. Richler, Mordecai. The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. 1959. Toronto:  McClelland and Stewart, 1989. Print.

620    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions Richler, Mordecai. Solomon Gursky Was Here. Toronto: Viking, 1989. Print. ———. “The Street.” The Street. 1969. Toronto: Penguin, 1985. 15–33. Print. Richler, Nancy. The Imposter Bride. Toronto: HarperCollins, 2012. Print. Rosenfarb, Chava. “The Greenhorn.” Ravvin, Not Quite Mainstream 75–86. Sarah, Robyn. “A Minor Incident.” A Nice Gazebo. Montreal: Véhicule, 1992. 68–80. Print. Simon, Sherry. Translating Montreal:  Episodes in the Life of a Divided City. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2006. Print. Tallman, Warren. “Richler and the Faithless City.” Canadian Literature 3 (1960): 62–64. Print. Wayman, Tom. “The Murder.” Ravvin, Not Quite Mainstream 177–93. Wiseman, Adele. The Sacrifice. New York: Viking, 1956. Print. Woodcock, George. “Introduction.” Son of a Smaller Hero, by Mordecai Richler. 1955. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1965. vii–xii. Print. Zipper, Yaacov. “Der ershter frimargn/That First Morning.” The Far Side of the River: Selected Stories. Ed. Mervin Butovsky and Ode Garfinkle. Oakville: Mosaic, 1985. 83–87. Print.

Chapter 33

F or Bet ter or for Worse Revisiting Écriture migrante in Québec Marie Carrière and Catherine Khordoc

Introduction In our current period of ever increasing and intensifying global flow and movement, where does migrant writing, an anglicized version of the more commonly termed notion of écriture migrante in French, fit in Québec’s contemporary literature? What is migrant writing’s relation to the transcultural, postcolonial, and transnational paradigms that have either paralleled or ensued from its literary figurations and critical conceptions? After all that has been said and written—and much has been said and written—about the literary production of immigrant writers in Québec, such concepts as hybridity, métissage, interculturalism, and more recently, flânerie, nomadism, and globalization are still used to tackle the social and aesthetic dimensions of écriture migrante. Critics have been exploring these terms, just as they have been trying to redefine them, refute them, or substitute them. Within the past decade, the notion of écriture migrante itself has been subjected to serious critique insofar as its own suppositions, claims, and usefulness are concerned. On the one hand, Québec’s literary discourse can certainly be seen to have by now moved away from applying biographical details to migrancy as a mode of writing, or, at the very least, it has adopted a highly suspicious stance in relation to the value and relevance of the migratory as a literary phenomenon. On the other hand, sustained focus on transcultural and transnational paradigms and practices, arguably infused (avowedly or not) by postcolonial thought, reveals a continued fascination with migrancy, as does recent comparative study into migrant literature from France and the francophone world more broadly. The inherent, if not necessary, transience of the concept of écriture migrante poses difficulties in any attempt at pinning down the state of current contemporary Québécois literature. The very irreducibility of the literary (happily) eludes the strictness of labels as well as the politics and desires behind critical tendencies and gestures of categorization.

622    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions But what begs the question nonetheless is whether Québécois literature can be understood and fully imagined without this notion of the migrant coming into play. In addition to the question of whether a writer is still or ever really “migrant,” conversely we could consider whether Québec’s written cultures have perhaps always been already migrant—historically and aesthetically—despite the truism and easy closure that such a position may well entail.1 Pierre Nepveu suggests that it is precisely because, in the 1960s, Québécois literature defined itself through notions of exile and the absent nation that écriture migrante holds such currency in Québec’s literary context (Écologie 200–01). If the national project was inherent to much of the writing published in the 1960s, it would appear that in these early years of the twenty-first century, many authors, immigrant or not, are interested in exploring and traversing national borders. Hence, the ongoing interest in migrancy lies not only with so-called migrant writers, but with writers in general. In fact, there is a noticeable trend of a younger generation of writers in Québec, such as Nicolas Dickner and Dominique Fortier, who are also expanding borders in and through their writing. This chapter sets out to trace the emergence of Québécois migrant voices, particularly though not exclusively from the 1980s onward, and the sustained critical interest they have raised. It also assesses the critical discourse that has informed the construction of écriture migrante into an identifiable category, determined its reception and validation, and drawn attention to its pitfalls. We therefore begin with a brief survey of écriture migrante in Québec, both as a form of literary production and of critical construction. We then examine some of the criticisms that a particularly enthusiastic and ideologically driven reception of écriture migrante has elicited. Finally, we consider the current replay of migrant writing in Québec’s literary discourse, namely in relation to postcolonial and transnational frameworks.

A 30-Year Itch Literary writing by immigrants is nothing new, of course, neither for Canada nor for Québec. One could argue that settlers and immigrants have been writing in Québec since colonization. Yet Sherry Simon and David Leahy identify 1983 as a key year for the beginning of a conscious engagement on the part of Québécois literary critics with écriture migrante. They point to 1983 mainly because it was the year when Régine Robin published La Québécoite, translated into English under the title of The Wanderer, a ground-breaking novel written almost entirely in the conditional mode, exploring different modes of integration and alienation for the migrant subject in Montreal. It was also in this year that the now defunct cultural magazine Vice versa was created. Vice versa, which published contributions in three languages (French, English, and Italian), was founded by Italian-Québécois writers and intellectuals, who proclaimed the magazine to be transcultural. Open to all who were interested in contributing to the exchange of ideas and debates that unfolded in the magazine, Vice versa invited intellectuals

Revisiting Écriture migrante in Québec   623 originally from Québec, as well as immigrants from other parts of the world, to participate actively throughout its 13-year run.2 Robin’s La Québécoite was an important text, calling attention explicitly to issues of alienation and integration, the loss of traditions, and cultural and geographical reference points, and the necessity to create new ones. La Québécoite was one of many migrant texts (fictional, dramatic, poetic, nonfiction) that were published throughout the 1980s and 1990s, such as Dany Laferrière’s Comment faire l’amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer (1985), Marco Micone’s Gens du silence (1982), Mona Latif-Ghattas’s Le double conte de l’exil (1990), Émile Ollivier’s Passages (1991), Ying Chen’s Les lettres chinoises (1993), Sergio Kokis’s Le pavillon des miroirs (1994), and Nadine Ltaif ’s Les métamorphoses d’Ishtar (1987), to name but a few authors and works. Thus, as works were being published by authors of widely varying origins, such as Italy, Greece, China, Japan, Brazil, Haiti, Lebanon, and Egypt, it became imperative that this growing body of literature receive due attention in critical studies and in university and CEGEP classrooms.3 Interestingly, the term “ethnic writing,” or for that matter “diasporic writing,” has not had as much resonance in Québec as it has had in English Canada. In a modern Québec that took over a century to shed the cultural, indeed ethnic, nationalism enforced by its clerical-conservative history, it is possible to speculate that the fear of being charged with racist overtones turned critics away from discussing ethnicity in literature in overt terms. Furthermore, the adjective migrant is preferred to immigrant, as the pioneering work of Nepveu initially proposed, as the term migrant appeared to place less importance on the sociological phenomenon of immigration, and more emphasis on the aesthetic qualities of literary works characterized by movement and drifting (Écologie 233–34). There is also far less emphasis in Québec than in English Canada on hyphenated groupings of writers according to their origins. Though there are occasional references to “Italo-Québécois” or “Haitian-Québécois” writers, it has not been the trend to categorize them in this way, perhaps again due to the reluctance to refer to ethnic and racial groups per se in criticism. The point of écriture migrante as a critical category has been to allow the study of forms of writing that thematize notions of exile and migration, of belonging and identity, without necessarily enclosing them in a ghetto cordoned off from the mainstream Québécois literary corpus. Robert Berrouët-Oriol, to whom Nepveu attributes the origin of the term écriture migrante, and coauthor Robert Fournier, describe migrant writing as a micro-corpus of works written by migrant subjects, insisting that they are part and parcel of Québécois literature. Indeed, very early on, Québécois critics have been sensitive to the ghettoizing effect of migrant writing as an object of study. Two influential works are notable in this respect in that they treat migrant writing alongside Québécois writers. Pierre Nepveu’s L’écologie du réel (1988) and Simon Harel’s Le voleur de parcours (1989) both made literary history, in a way, by considering migrant writing as one component of contemporary Québécois writing, rather than a corpus that somehow falls outside Québec’s national literature. For the most part, then, migrant writing has been integrated into the literary history of Québec. The Histoire de la littérature québécoise (2007), edited by Michel Biron, François

624    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions Dumont, and Élisabeth Nardout-Lafarge, devotes a chapter to écriture migrante in a larger section focusing on the decentring of literature since the 1980s. The well-known and respected literary historian Clément Moisan has also written or co-written two monographs dealing exclusively with migrant writing. With Renate Hildebrand, he published Ces étrangers du dedans: Une histoire de l’écriture migrante au Québec (1937– 1997), the time frame in the title indicating unambiguously the fact that migrant writing is not a recent phenomenon. In this study, the authors examine how migrant writing, in all its variations over the course of the twentieth century, has modified and transformed Québec’s literary institution and its system of production, circulation, and reception (14–15). A few years later, Moisan felt the need to develop his reflections further, publishing a second single-authored volume, Écritures migrantes et identités culturelles (2008). Alongside the growing popularity of écriture migrante in the academy, as illustrated by the number of articles, book-length studies, conference papers, book reviews, university courses, theses, and research papers, some controversies emerged. The now infamous “Affaire LaRue” was triggered in 1996 by the publication (based on a lecture she had given at the Université de Montréal) by well-known author Monique LaRue of a booklet entitled L’arpenteur et le navigateur (1996). LaRue invents an exchange between herself and a fictional author who is lamenting the fact that so many immigrant writers have received a disproportionate number of literary awards. After all, who are these authors, this writer asks, who are getting so much attention but whose works “n’ont rien à voir avec ce qu’on a toujours appelé la littérature québécoise, des œuvres qui ne s’inscrivent d’aucune manière dans son histoire, dans la logique de son développement, qui ne poursuivent pas sa recherche d’identité . …” (8) [“have nothing to do with what we have always called Québécois literature, works which do not in any way integrate into Québec’s history, the logic of its development, that do not pursue its search for identity …”].4 The polemic was launched when Ghila B. Sroka, editor of La tribune juive, wrote an editorial equating LaRue’s apparent criticism of immigrant writers’ place in Québec’s literary tradition with ethnic cleansing. This strongly worded article sparked a debate among Québec intellectuals. On the one hand, some felt that the musings of LaRue’s fictional author did not reflect LaRue’s personal convictions but had been used as a rhetorical device to pose questions about what it means to be a Québécois writer and how contemporary Québécois literature should be defined. On the other hand, there were those who believed that by simply raising the question, LaRue was clearly excluding immigrant writers from a nationalist conception of Québécois literature. The debate continued for several months, fueling articles, editorials, and letters published in La tribune juive and Le Devoir, among other publications. LaRue herself remained mostly silent throughout the controversy, but eventually reconciled with Sroka.5 The debate was productive in that it prompted reflection on what the label “Québécois literature” encompasses, and it did so in a way that was more accessible to the general public than were academic monographs on the topic. Indeed, does Québécois literature need to reflect Québécois society? Québécois preoccupations? Québecois geography or history? The point, of course, is that writing by any author in Québec, regardless of origin, birthplace, or language, may or may not have anything to

Revisiting Écriture migrante in Québec   625 do with Québec per se. The questions of how we define a national corpus are, for the most part, institutional. Hence, quite apart from aesthetic and poetic considerations, migrant writing in Québec has certainly generated reflection and debate on what constitutes a national canon.

Une Appellation Contrôlée Despite efforts by Berrouët-Oriol and Nepveu to propose a two-dimensional idea of écriture migrante, the projection of two isolated literatures, one Québécois and the other migrant, remains a concern for a number of critics and writers. One could argue that even today the problem of ghettoization haunts the discourse of literary migrancy in Québec, and attacks aimed at the notion of migrant writing in Québec have mounted and multiplied. Ching Selao has even wondered whether the criticism that is directed against the all too enthusiastic reception of migrant writing has itself perhaps become a normative position required of any critic interested in literary migrancy (52). Be that as it may, in a 2007 article, Gilles Dupuis troublingly observes that écriture migrante has remained “une littérature de seconde zone,” a hasty and thus problematic textbook addition to the national canonical literature of Québec (138). Such cloistering evidently applies a troubling centre/margin binary to writing and culture, but it can also lead to a warped picture of Québécois letters and literary history. For instance, migrant literature is often and rightly held up as having dislodged Québécois writing from its ideological strongholds, namely nationalist and identity politics. As Marc Angenot argued at the end of the 1990s, “en raison du poids de l’ethnocentrisme sur la vie québécoise, rien ne peut arriver de mieux dans notre production littéraire que l’intrusion d’une littérature immigrante, une littérature qui ne soit pas “d’ici”—je veux dire pas au sens que les nationalistes donnent à cet adverbe” (246) [“given the weight of ethnocentrism in Québécois society, nothing better could happen in our literary production than the intrusion of an immigrant literature, a literature that is not from ‘here’—in the sense of the word as Québécois nationalists understand it”]. However, it is not migrant writing alone that has knocked Québécois literature loose from its ethnocentric ties. One must also take into account the work done in this regard by avant-garde and experimental production generally, and that of surrealism, feminism, and the counterculture in particular.6 If it is therefore accurate to point out with Dominique Garant that writers bearing the mark of écrivain de souche7 have in turn contributed to shredding homogenous narratives to pieces in Québec (32), it is also important to consider that migrant literature shares much in common with the aforementioned avant-garde poetics, as it does with several other facets that characterize Québécois literature today: urban space, nomadism, and multiplicity; francophone américanité; history and memory; and intimate (personal) forms of writing and subjectivity. To pit the non-migrant against the migrant—particularly in terms of the eradication of ethnocentric and nationalist ideologies, but also in terms of other motifs and

626    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions formal aspects in literature—is to misrepresent Québec literary history and the work of those who have shaped it. Literary histories, as we have already indicated, are at stake in this examination of écriture migrante. In terms of their histories of migrant writing, the aforementioned Moisan and Daniel Chartier point out that the distinction of a body of literature produced by immigrant writers does not exclude them from the champ littéraire or field of Québec literature overall but, as Chartier argues, forces a necessary revision of the very ways literary history is understood (81). “Une appellation contrôlée, mais dans un certain sens incontrôlable,” concedes Moisan about the slippery implications of the term écriture migrante, looking back on the question in 2008 (“Pour une poétique” 71). Moisan goes as far as to call écriture migrante a genre, albeit a constantly changing one, and advocates the usefulness of the category and its resistance to simple binaries: “elle ne sépare pas les écrivains d’une littérature donnée en écrivains immigrants et en écrivains de souche, ces derniers pouvant être migrants au même titre que les autres” (72) [“it does not separate the writers of a given literature into immigrant writers and native writers, as the latter might be just as much migrants as the others”]. Despite these careful nuances, the danger of labeling and categorizing writers and their work, to serve either the ends of literary history or the desire to compartmentalize the multiple components of a given literary space, keeps rearing its ugly head. The reductive effect on the writer, whether born in Québec or elsewhere, has plagued Québécois migratory discourse. Such authors as Joël Des Rosiers, David Homel, Fulvio Caccia, Gilberto Flores Patiño, and Neil Bissoondath have eloquently addressed the harm that rubrical recuperation can bestow on their writing and its reception.8 As Lise Gauvin recalls, although among the first to apply the concept of migrancy to writing, Haitian-born author Émile Ollivier was also one of the first to express his desire to break out of its mould: “Je me sens, avec cette épithète, réduit à ma singularité d’immigrant, cantonné dans une condition minoritaire” (qtd. in Gauvin, Aventuriers 218) [“I feel as if, with this epithet, I am reduced to my singularity as an immigrant, confined to the condition of a minority”]. Generally, the 1990s and early 2000s saw much denigration on the part of writers of the “immigrant,” “migrant,” and “ethnic” labels. The arbitrariness of both ethnic and national identities is even the main theme of Laferrière’s self-reflexive novel, Je suis un écrivain japonais (2008), as the labels commonly attached to the writer-narrator shatter under the weight of the text’s playful but adamant refusal of them. As the utterance of the novel’s title indicates, the narrator rejects any other identity than the one his reader may choose to give him at the time of reading: “ ‘Êtes-vous un écrivain haïtien, caribéen ou francophone?,’ je répondis que je prenais la nationalité de mon lecteur. Ce qui veut dire que quand un Japonais me lit, je deviens immédiatement un écrivain japonais” (30–31) [“ ‘Are you a Haitian writer, a Caribbean writer or a French language writer?’ I answered without hesitation: I take on my reader’s nationality. Which means that when a Japanese person reads me, I  immediately become a Japanese writer” (Laferrière, trans. David Homel, 31–32)]. Yet the rejection of the appellation of écrivain migrant is not always unequivocal. Novelist and essayist Naïm Kattan sees both the usefulness but also the transience of

Revisiting Écriture migrante in Québec   627 the term migrant writer:  “Pour l’écrivain venu d’ailleurs, la qualification d’écrivain migrant est une phase transitoire, une étape appelée à disparaître” (23) [“For the writer who comes from elsewhere, the qualification of migrant writer is a transitory phase, a steppingstone that will disappear”]. Playwright and novelist Abla Farhoud claims for herself a belonging to any category that could be relevant to her writing: “Les gens qualifient mon écriture de québécoise et ils ont raison … , mon écriture est québécoise. Les Québécois disent que j’ai une écriture orientale et ils ont raison … , je suis orientale” (“Immigrant” 46) [“People qualify my writing as Québécois, and they are right … my writing is Québécois. Quebeckers say that my writing is very Middle Eastern, and they are right … , I am Middle Eastern”]. The new millennium has given way to yet more outwardly polemical attacks in as far as écriture migrante is concerned. These are not so much in line with the aforementioned Affaire LaRue as with the scathing analysis by Simon Harel and others of the identity politics underlying the institutionalization and too often uncritical celebration of migrant writing in Québec. As Catherine Mavrikakis and Martine Delvaux pointedly argue in a 2003 article: Il y aurait au Québec une espèce de “pastorale des bons sentiments. “ L’écriture de l’étranger est dans une certaine critique, d’avance acclamée, aimée. Elle permettrait intrinsèquement le métissage des cultures et viendrait permettre à la littérature québécoise de retrouver un souffle qu’elle n’a plus. La littérature québécoise deviendrait la terre d’hospitalité par excellence. (76) [There is some kind of “pastoral of good feelings” in Québec. There is a certain critical perspective that acclaims, that loves, the writing of foreigners. This perspective would foster the métissage or mixing of cultures and would allow Québécois literature to find new momentum, which it needs. Québécois literature would become the ultimate land of hospitality.]

This comment echoes novelist and theorist Régine Robin’s own warnings against “la tentation du ghetto, y compris d’un ghetto chic, celui de l’altérité sympathique” (“Postface” 215) [“the temptation of the ghetto, including a trendy ghetto, that of a likable alterity”]. Criticisms of migrant writing, or at least of its reception and critical treatment, are not without a certain element of fatigue either, as a 2006 article by François Paré reveals. This fatigue resembles the affronts that postcolonialism has come to bear in anglophone critical discourse, especially in terms of the theoretical redundancies and predictability that James Procter sums up as “the passage of the postcolonial into the realm of the mundane, the clichéd, the everyday” (62). For his part, Paré finds the overall subject of migrant writing “usé jusqu’à la corde” [“worn down to threads”] and predictable (135). Or, at least this was the case for Paré until the appearance of two welcome critical contributions: Daniel Castillo Durante’s Les dépouilles de l’altérité (2004), a study into functioning modes of stereotype in contemporary culture and its degradation of the migrant other, and Harel’s Les passages obligés de l’écriture migrante (2005). For his part, Harel is firm in his belief that, although the idea of connecting literary discourse to immigrant

628    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions culture was highly original at its inception in the 1970s, this is no longer the case today (Les passages 72). Les passages obligés de l’écriture migrante expands on Harel’s earlier article, “Une littérature des communautés culturelles made in Québec.” At the time of its publication in 2002, this essay presented an innovative and necessary examination of the reduction of écriture migrante to identity-related stereotyping and normative acclaim. The essentialism that tended to underline too often the reception of migrant writing, the naïve accolades of deterriorialization, and the potentially vacuous, complacent reconfigurations of Québécois culture in the process irk Harel to no end. In this state of affairs, he sees “une reconfiguration narrative qui offre à la société d’accueil le modèle complaisant de l’utopie” (“Une littérature” 72) [“a narrative reconfiguration providing the host society with a smug model of utopia”]. In light of the “euphoric” embrace of notions of movement, semantic hybridity, transculturalism, and cosmopolitanism eagerly associated with migrant writing, Harel argues that écriture migrante has come to serve as a reassuring ideology that is just as regressive as, if not a mere inversion of, Québec’s traditional discourse of national identity and belonging: “L’écriture migrante devient un fait de discours. Pour cette raison, elle acquiert une valeur générique et devient, dans le pire des cas, une doxa rassurante” (60) [“Migrant writing becomes a discursive fact. For this reason, it acquires a generic value and becomes, in a worst-case scenario, a reassuring doxa”]. Further, through the inscription of migrant writing “dans un moule idéologique dominant” (64) [“in a dominant ideological mode”], issues of conflict, exile, and trauma, which many migrant writers certainly grapple with in their writing, are ignored or erased. Finally, that literature is not inherently in the service of community affirmation is a fact too often forgotten when migrant writing is in question, Harel argues: “On oublie trop souvent que ces auteurs écrivent! … La littérature ne peut souscrire à l’idée réductrice d’une relation instrumentale de l’individualité et du collectif ” (68–69) [“Too often we forget that these writers write! … Literature cannot subscribe to the reductive notion of an instrumental relationship between individuality and collectivity”]. This type of criticism is not merely a reality-check on the indulgence of those blindly benevolent views of pluralism deplored by Harel, nor does it sink into mere pessimism. It is a new rapport with place that the critic sets out to theorize, and which, according to him, the heady mist of postmodern nowhereness and the celebration of marginality have neglected. Harel proposes the idea of habitability, a notion of open and diverse situadedness, which he relates to his own redefined notion of the Greek term oikos, setting out to transgress banal, isolating, and convenient notions of multiculturalism or deterritorialization.9 Sense of place, to put it simply, allows for the recognition and analysis of an immigrant subject’s relation to conflict, culture shock, trauma, time, and space, which Harel traces again in Robin’s La Québécoite, and also in Antonio D’Alfonso’s L’autre rivage (1987): “contre une perspective qui mettrait l’accent de manière univoque sur la marginalisation subversive de l’écriture migrante … la notion d’oikos vise à interroger le lieu non dans sa fixité, mais à partir des tourments, des appels, des quêtes et des rejets qui lui sont liés” (Les passages 117) [“against a perspective that would emphasize unequivocally the subversive marginalization of migrant writing … the notion of oikos

Revisiting Écriture migrante in Québec   629 seeks to question the notion of place not in its fixity but in the torments, the calls, the quests and the rejections that are associated with it”]. Turning to writers’ voices for a moment, we can read Kattan’s statement, “[l]‌e migrant n’est ni un errant ni un nomade” (11) [“the migrant is neither a wanderer nor a nomad”], as a similar plea for situated space. Alternatively, and despite its sardonic tone, the longing for a home, and the painful awareness of being unable to get beyond the status of linguistic and social outcast, are poignantly represented by Flora Balzano’s Soigne ta chute (1992): “J’ai de la peine parce que je ne serai jamais québécoise. Voilà. On ne devient pas québécoise. On ne devient rien. Jamais. Que de plus en plus vieux, de plus en plus mou” (33) [“I am saddened because I will never be Québécoise. There. You do not become Québécoise. You don’t become anything. Ever. The older you get, the weaker you are”]. The fragmented narratives of the text recount the profoundly personal difficulties of exile, acculturation, childhood traumas, and addiction, and remain far from a celebratory poetics of movement or the pastorale of good feeling critiqued by Mavrikakis and Delvaux. It is also important to note similar interventions by Nepveu and others where the notion of transculture is concerned, often (though not exclusively) in connection to migrant literary practices. Studies of transculture have often acknowledged its terminological origins, which stem from ethnologist Fernando Ortiz, and have linked it to ideas of cultural difference and métissage, but also of welcomed impurity and incompleteness.10 Yet not all perspectives on transculture are identical or unanimous. For Moisan and Hildebrand, transculture is (and to our minds too simplistically) considered a “resultant” (209) and actual historical literary state into which Québec has successfully moved, namely due to those transmutations that migrant writings have exercised on Québécois literature. Here, transculture appears as a coherent rebalancing “point d’arrivée” (Moisan, “Pour une poétique” 73) [“point of arrival”]. For Nepveu, however, the transcultural is a forever unfinished process: “un processus infini, inachevable, de liaisons à même une série tout aussi infinie de ruptures” (“Qu’est-ce” 19) [“an infinitely ongoing, incomplete process of links within a series of equally infinite ruptures”]. For his part, Harel applies his accusations of trite exoticism equally to certain critical takes on transculture. Notably, it is the “massive institutionalization” of the transcultural, he argues, that has rendered banal and commonplace the notion of migrant writing in Québec (Les passages 72). Meanwhile, Harel also sets out to recover transculture’s “saving grace,” particularly as a socially specific concept that allows for a conflictual rather than a plainly reconciliatory poetics. What counts is the promise and the process, rather than the fait accompli, of cultural and social transformation, which Harel traces at the heart of the theories and practices of the aforementioned Italian-Québécois writers associated with Vice versa.11 Nevertheless, a problematic aspect of écriture migrante as a concept remains its implied constitution as one coherent literary corpus. Arguably, it takes a certain amount of willingness to lump together authors as diverse and as different from one another, not just culturally but also aesthetically, as Aki Shimazaki, Marco Micone, and Monique Bosco. Perhaps more forcibly than others, feminist critics have been especially sensitive

630    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions to this sort of reductive pooling. In the case of women writers in particular, this supposed parity and sameness conflate, as Chantal Maillé reminds us, “toutes les femmes marginalisées en une seule et même catégorie” (3)  [“all marginalized women in one single category”]. Indeed, migrant women’s voices have been tantamount in rejecting supposedly universal suppositions about women writers and Québec literary feminism, especially when the latter is devoid of race or class analysis as well as the consequences of colonization and civil conflict.12 Such works as Farhoud’s postmodern play on Lebanon’s civil war, Jeux de patience (1997), or Marie-Célie Agnant’s reflection on the history of slavery from the subaltern points of views of several generations of women in Le livre d’Emma (2002), have shed new light on a more expansive idea of écriture au féminin in Québec and its multiple guises and new directions. Yet the baby has not been thrown out with the bathwater, as critics continue to pay serious attention to écriture migrante. Selao perhaps says it best in the conclusion of her review of Harel’s Les passages obligés: “En somme, l’à-propos de la critique de la fascination démesurée et de l’exotisation des écritures migrantes ne devrait pas, à mon sens, faire oublier que, pour plusieurs, le plaisir et la douleur éprouvés à la lecture des textes migrants ne suit en rien une mode ou un phénomène de passage” (52) [“In sum, the appropriate critique of the inordinate fascination with and exoticization of migrant writing should not, in my view, erase the fact that, for many, the pleasure and the pain in reading migrant texts have nothing to do with fashion or a passing trend.”]. The point is well taken, and this is the case for many, it seems. The question for critics, then, is how to broach migrant writing, for better or for worse, as a phenomenon in Québec and francophone letters today, without reducing it to the biographical, ethnic, or immigrant identity of a particular author, or to normative grids of interpretation and expectation. For Pierre Halen, the migrant or immigrant aperture is useful primarily for aesthetic reasons, which in turn can highlight the international and even “universal”—let us say, preferably, global—relevance of these authors whom we characterize as migrant (43). In their introduction to a special journal issue on écriture migrante in French, Marianne Bessy and Catherine Khordoc insist on the “scriptural” practices of migrant writers, not only as a point of redress of biographical and sociological readings, but as the very point of literary interest itself. “C’est l’écriture même qui se trouve qualifiée de l’adjectif,” they argue, “et non pas l’écrivain” (2) [“It is the writing that is modified by the adjective, not the writer”]. In fact, like Nepveu and a few others before them, Bessy and Khordoc remind us that migrancy can very well define the writing practice of a non-immigrant author such as Francine Noël, known for her exploration of cultural, geographical, and formal blending in her fiction, as in Babel, prise deux (1990) or La conjuration des bâtards (1999). Finally, the move toward a more inclusive or integral outlook for Québécois literature, or toward new perspectives on situated spaces, does not leave the idea of motion, nomadism, flânerie, or even migrancy behind, but opens up new forms of textual movement such as “destinerrance” or “enracinerrance.”13 In addition to the idea of writerly practice, migrant writing has also recently begun to yield to more aesthetically focused and expansive notions and approaches to literary texts, such as Gauvin’s idea

Revisiting Écriture migrante in Québec   631 of “scénographies de la migrance” [“scenography of migrancy”] in Québécois literature (Gauvin, “Filiations” 109). Recalling Nepveu’s idea of “mort et naissance de la littérature québécoise” [“death and birth of Québécois literature”], the configuration of the aesthetic rather than institutional aspects of Québec’s literature as “post-québécoise” has in turn quietly emerged (Halen 43). Related to this, Dupuis’s proposed term of transmigrance concerns “aussi bien l’autochtone que l’étranger, le soi et l’autre” (Dupuis, “Redessiner” 144) [“the native as much as the foreigner, the self and the other”], in keeping with the widened and aesthetic focus favoured by Bessy and Khordoc.

Of Post and Trans This field of critical meandering that we have sketched so far leaves us with the appeal, if not the continued vagueness, of the post and the trans within Québec’s literary discourse. Theories and methodologies stemming in particular from the postcolonial and the transnational are certainly not new to the critical landscape of Québec. However, they may not have received their fullest consideration. This is particularly the case with postcolonialism, at least in terms of migrant writing. We would like to conclude by examining the concepts of postcolonialism and transnationalism as they apply to Québécois literature. We do so, not so much to underline the transience of écriture migrante as a concept, term, or practice, but rather to examine its full relevance to a widened, indeed plural, understanding of contemporary Québécois literature. If notions of migrancy and, as we have also seen, of transculture have had their heyday in Québec, the same cannot be said of postcolonial theory. As a concept applied to Québécois literature, postcolonialism rouses a certain amount of critical anxiety and dubiousness. As Marie Carrière has written elsewhere:  Whether in regards to terminology, history or methodology, postcolonialism is undoubtedly a difficult topic to contend with in a Québécois and Canadian context. Canada’s history as a whole demands a double, if not a multiple, perspective on any notion of the postcolonial. If this discourse has not impacted critical literary discourse in Québec as it has in English Canada (or in the rest of the francophone world) since the second half of the 1990s, the connection between migration and postcolonialism in literature should nonetheless command our attention. (“La pensée” 49)

And to some, though not a considerable, extent, postcolonial theory has commanded the attention of studies on Québec, even though again, critics are often uncomfortable about applying unrelated or “borrowed” epistemological grids to Québec’s specificities (Desroches 1). In a special issue edited by Vincent Desroches for the US journal Québec Studies, the question of what might render Québécois literature postcolonial is placed front and centre. Desroches, and a few others before and after him,14 argue in favour of

632    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions finding theoretical convergences with postcolonial approaches that can render productive, rather than purely idiosyncratic, readings of Québec in its cultural, literary, and political grappling with alterity and language, or its treatment of history, memory, and conflict. Québec’s internal cultural specificities stem in great part from its existence as a North American linguistic minority that contains in turn several sets of minorities—anglophone, European, Haitian, Middle Eastern, Asian—and with them various historical, colonial, and postcolonial legacies. Herein lies, we would argue, the potential productiveness of a postcolonial approach to Québécois cultural production. As Harel has indicated, like the redeemable qualities of transculture, much postcolonial theory focuses on the concrete, historicized context of authors and their work. This emphasis challenges those critical accolades of the migrant that tend to revert to universalism and exotic otherness.15 In terms of écriture migrante, working with postcolonial theories of dialogism and dissonance, and of hybridity (Homi Bhabha) and subaltern affect (Gayatri Spivak), can take texts beyond culturalist categories or trite notions of happy pluralism and reconciliation. As Carrière writes: “ce n’est pas une hybridité convenable excluant le conflit, la dissonance et la désappartenance qui se voudrait utile. Une posture postcoloniale … met en forme diverses nuances tant de la conflictualité que de la différence” (“La pensée” 54) [“a politically correct notion of hybridity that excludes conflict, dissonance, and exclusion will not be useful. A postcolonial positioning … gives shape to diverse nuances of conflict as well as difference”]. To cite a few examples, works such as Agnant’s Le livre d’Emma (2002) on slavery in Europe and the Caribbean, Laferrière’s Le cri des oiseaux fous (2000) on the Duvalier dictatorships, and Aki Shimazaki’s historical pentalogy, Les poids des secrets (2000–2005), featuring the lives of Japanese women,16 are, in many respects, forms of écriture migrante. They can also lend themselves to very productive readings, infused by postcolonial perspectives. Metafictional processes of historiography in Agnant, affective responses to war, exile and mourning in Shimazaki, concrete challenges of abuse and powerlessness in Laferrière, and an individual’s power of agency in the work of all three authors come to mind. Postcolonial readings of these texts may well help avoid their problematic ahistorical regrouping under a named but meaningless rubric. They can reveal a better, if not more accurate, understanding of these authors’ fictionalized worlds and, more generally, of the complex aesthetic, ethical, and social dimensions of écriture migrante. Perhaps most relevant is the relation of écriture migrante to the postcolonial when the latter is considered primarily as a mode of literary practice and a form of critical reading. As such, Cecily Devereux argues that “[t]‌here is of course a distinction to be made between the ‘postcolonial’ as a historical term with reference to nation-states and their literatures and ‘post-colonial theory’ as a critical practice” (179). Methodological overlaps, as well as theoretical cross-fertilizations, can only expand our ideas about the literary and its relation to the formal, political, and personal landscapes of Québec’s writers, as well as the convergences and divergences of their works with other literatures, notably with those of Canada and the rest of the francophone world. As we mentioned earlier,

Revisiting Écriture migrante in Québec   633 the notion of écriture migrante has not, by all accounts, been put to rest. A relatively new and fertile tendency seems to be its comparative study, particularly with other francophone literatures, which in turn currently prompt vivid conceptual debates around ideas of postcoloniality alongside the question of a littérature-monde and transnational paradigms.17 In Québec as well as in France, there is still resistance to postcolonial and transnational approaches to literature. Although there is an increasing interest in these critical frameworks, many of them have emerged via francophone studies in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Germany,18 while in France, critics have been cautious, if not reluctant, about exploring diasporic and postcolonial literatures.19 Essay collections adopting transnational approaches to francophone literature, such as those edited by Hargreaves, Forsdick and Murphy, or Gafaïti, Lorcin and Troyansky, are fostering innovative exchanges and debates surrounding the “nature, shape and evolution of French-language literary studies” (“Introduction” 1). Referring mainly to the literatures of francophone authors from Africa and the Caribbean, or of diasporic authors living in France, they are complicating, in a productive way, theoretical and critical perspectives on francophone, French, and postcolonial studies. Though included, albeit to a lesser extent, in the “ ‘becoming-transnational’ of French Studies” (Lionnet, qtd. in Hargreaves et al., “Introduction” 2), Québécois literary studies has much to contribute and learn from these interrogations, in part because institutional and critical discourses in Québec have already made significant progress in distancing themselves from the need for legitimization from France, while at the same time, comparative approaches within Frenchlanguage literary and cultural studies provide new perspectives through which critical perceptions and reading methodologies can be diversified and enriched. For instance, the Québécois notion of écriture migrante is only just beginning to garner attention in French circles, and much can be learned through the different positions developing in France and through Québec’s relatively longer engagement with this question.20 Furthermore, reading across national or cultural borders also brings to the surface the tensions that underlie the concept of configuring national corpuses, especially during a period characterized by the mobility of individuals and the constant hybridization and renegotiation of identities. As Michael Brophy and Mary Gallagher state in the introduction to their 2011 La migrance à l’oeuvre: repérages esthétiques, éthiques et politiques: “En effet, tant en position minoritaire au Québec qu’en situation postcoloniale dans la France métropolitaine, la question d’une littérature nationale, avec son noyau et ses marges plus ou moins clairement délimités, s’avère problématique, et cela en raison des grands mouvements migratoires qui, participant d’une condition de plus en plus planétarisée, en dynamitent les présupposés” (x) [“Indeed, whether in terms of the minority position of Québec or the postcolonial situation in France, the issue of a national literature, with its core and its margins more or less well-defined, is problematic, because the major migratory movements, participating in an increasingly planetary condition, torpedo its presuppositions”]. Finally, although postcolonial and, more recently, transnational approaches to literary studies have generated interest in the anglophone world and, to a lesser degree, in

634    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions the francophone sphere, such approaches to Québécois literature could motivate a shift in critical perspective. Without eliminating the importance of taking into account historical and political contexts as they present themselves in the works of various authors, postcolonial and transnational readings allow for the study of Québécois (and other francophone texts) texts in parallel, without having to revert to distinctions of “migrant” or de souche writing. If earlier we asked what the literary works of immigrant authors such as Aki Shimazaki, Marco Micone, and Monique Bosco may share on an aesthetic level, we could also suggest that border-crossing novels by Daniel Castillo Durante and Nicolas Dickner could be read together, regardless of the fact that the former immigrated to Québec while the other is a native Québécois writer.21 If, in particular, a transnational approach might be viewed with some suspicion by those scholars or intellectuals concerned with the risk of blurring or diluting Québec’s literature as a national literature, it is precisely this approach that questions the nation, its boundaries, and its limits, and that could contribute to redefining the existence, and in fact confirming the effervescence, of Québécois literature.

Notes 1. Stating that Canada and Québec are inherently migrant indeed consists of an easy truism. However, although not the topic of the present study, the notion of migrancy as applied to the Americas’ Indigenous peoples insofar as post-contact, and often coerced, displacement is concerned can in turn lead to a richer understanding of Aboriginal, Métis, and First Nations cultural production. For a twenty-first-century anthology on Aboriginal Literature in Québec, see Gatti. 2. Fulvia Caccia and Lamberto Tassinari also published Quêtes in 1983, a volume of texts by Italo-Québécois writers. 3. CEGEPs, or Collèges d’enseignement général et professionnel, were established in Québec in 1967 as a way of making postsecondary education, both in terms of vocational training and preparation for university studies, more accessible. 4. Translations are our own unless otherwise stated. 5. For more about the debate, see Moisan and Hildebrand 294–300; and Vautier, “L’affaire LaRue.” 6. Briefly, we could reference here the collective of poets and visual artists of Refus global among the surrealists in the late 1940s; the experimental, radical feminist movement of the 1970s and early 1980s; and the countercultural voices, namely in poetry, of those same two decades. 7. This phrase refers to Québécois authors of French origin, who are born and raised in Québec. Literally, the expression translates as “old-root” Quebecker. 8. See Giguère 20, and her book overall for her interviews with these authors. 9. English Canada has seen its share of criticism, by authors such as Dionne Brand, Neil Bissoondath, and numerous literary critics, of the politics of multiculturalism for its lack of a relational ethic and its emphasis on ethnic and race categories. As Smaro Kamboureli writes in Scandalous Bodies: “By legitimizing cultural diversity, the Canadian Multiculturalism Act strives to lay the ground for an ‘ideal’ community [in which]

Revisiting Écriture migrante in Québec   635 differences are granted nominal positions. Diversity is respected and supported only insofar as it is presumed to articulate subjects rehearsing collective identifications that are determined categorically and not relationally” (112). 10. For discussions of transculture in the context of Québécois literature, see Nepveu in “Qu’est-ce que la transculture?”; Harel in Les passages obligés; Moisan and Hildebrand; and Vautier, “Les métarécits.” 11. According to Harel, what distinguishes their work from the exotic presuppositions associated with écriture migrante is as much the divergences between and specificities of different authors’ inscriptions of migrancy as their self-conscious resistance to any form of ghettoization, communitarianism, and ethnicization (Les passages 74). 12. See Verduyn; Lequin; and Carrière, “L’échec d’une éthique.” 13. With reference to Derrida’s well-known theory of différance, Robin still characterizes her writing as one of “destinerrance” (“Poétiques” 209), preserving the tension between wandering and arriving within the same concept. She also refers to Jean-Claude Charles’s expression of “enracinerrance” (210) to describe writing that is simultaneously of location and dislocation. 14. See Chanady; Harel, “Une littérature” and Les passages; Lequin and Mavrikakis; and Vautier, “Les métarécits.” Gauvin, in Aventuriers et sédentaires, opts for the term péricolonialisme instead. 15. See Les passages obligés 21–22, and “Une littérature” 65. 16. Shimazaki’s pentalogy consists of the following novels:  Tsubaki, Hamaguri, Tsubame, Wasurenagusa, and Hotaru. 17. See Hargreaves et al. 18. See, among others, Hargreaves et al.; Gafaïti et al.; and Dumontet and Zipfel. 19. Although outside the scope of this chapter, it is worth noting that a recent manifesto, and its book-length counterpart, Pour une litterature monde (2007), signed by 27 francophone writers from all parts of the French-speaking world, has contributed an important critique of the traditional centre-periphery relationship between France and la Francophonie. There are of course scholars in France working on these questions. See, for instance, Albert; and Mazauric. 20. See Dumontet and Zipfel; and Mathis-Moser and Mertz-Baumgartner. 21. An example of such “transmigrant” readings, as Gilles Dupuis names the effects of cultural transfers across the writings of both migrant and “non-migrant” writers, is his study of Sergio Kokis and Pierre Samson. See Dupuis, “Migration et transmigrations.”

Works Cited Agnant, Marie-Célie. Le livre d’Emma. Montréal: Éditions du Remue-ménage, 2002. Print. Albert, Christiane. L’immigration dans le roman francophone contemporain. Paris: Karthala, 2005. Print. Angenot, Marc. “Littérature et nationalisme.” L’identitaire et le littéraire dans les Amériques. Ed. Bernard Andrès and Zilà Bernd. Québec: Éditions Nota Bene, 1999. 243–47. Print. Balzano, Flora. Soigne ta chute. Montreal: XYZ, 1992. Print. Berrouët-Oriol, Robert, and Robert Fournier. “L’émergence des écritures migrantes et métisses au Québec.” Québec Studies 14 (1992): 7–22. Print.

636    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions Bessy, Marianne, and Catherine Khordoc. “Introduction. Plaidoyer pour l’analyse des pratiques scripturales de la migrance dans les littératures contemporaines en français.” Nouvelles études francophones 27.1 (2012): 1–18. Print. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. Print. Biron, Michel, François Dumont, and Élisabeth Nardout-Lafarge. Histoire de la littérature québécoise. Montréal: Boréal, 2007. Print. Bosco, Monique. Babel-Opéra. Saint-Laurent, Québec: Trois, 1989. Print. Brophy, Michael, and Mary Gallagher. “Chemin faisant … ” La migrance à l’oeuvre: Repérages esthétiques, éthiques et politiques. Ed. Michael Brophy and Mary Gallagher. Bern: Peter Lang, 2011. ix–xix. Print. Carrière, Marie. “L’échec d’une éthiques: L’ingratitude de Ying Chen.” Lire du fragment: Analyses et procédés littéraires. Québec: Éditions Nota Bene, 2008. 173–91. Print. ———. “La pensée postcoloniale: Considérations critiques, esthétiques et éthiques.” Zeitschrift für Kanada-Studien 32.1 (2012): 49–64. Print. Castillo Durante, Daniel. Les dépouilles de l’altérité. Montréal: XYZ éditeur, 2004. Print. Chanady, Amaryll. “Rereading Québécois Literature in a Postcolonial Context.” Québec Studies 35 (2003): 31–44. Print. Chartier, Daniel. “De l’écriture migrante à l’immigration littéraire: Perspectives conceptuelles et historiques sur la littérature au Québec.” Écriture migrante/Migrant Writing. Ed. Danielle Dumontet and Frank Zipfel. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2008. 79–86. Print. Chen, Ying. L’ingratitude. Montréal: Leméac, 1995. Print. ———. Les lettres chinoises. Montréal: Leméac, 1993. Print. ———. La mémoire de l’eau. Montréal: Leméac, 1992. Print. ———. Quatre mille marches. Montréal: Boréal, 2004. Print. D’Alfonso, Antonio. L’autre rivage. Montréal: Le Noroît, 1987. Print. Desroches, Vincent. “Présentation: En quoi la littérature québécoise est-elle postcoloniale?” Québec Studies 35 (2003): 3–11. Print. Devereux, Cecily. “Are We There Yet? Reading the ‘Post-Colonial’ and The Imperialist in Canada.” Is Canada Postcolonial? Unsettling Canadian Literature. Ed. Laura Moss. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2003. 177–89. Print. Dickner, Nicolas. Nikolski. Montréal: Alto, 2007. Print. Dumontet, Danielle, and Frank Zipfel, eds. Écriture migrante/Migrant Writing. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2008. Print. Dupuis, Gilles. “Migration et transmigrations littéraires au Québec:  L’exemple brésilien.” TRANS. Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften 15 (2003): n. pag. http://www.inst.at/ trans/15Nr/05_11/dupuis15.htm. Web. Accessed 21 Feb. 2014. ———. “Redessiner la cartographie des écritures migrantes.” Globe:  Revue internationale d’études québécoises 10.1 (2007): 137–46. Print. Farhoud, Abla. “Immigrant un jour, immigrant toujours ou comment décoller une étiquette ou se décoller de l’étiquette.” D’autres rêves:  Les écritures migrantes au Québec. Actes du Séminaire International du CISQ à Venise (15–16 octobre 1999). Ed. Anne De Vaucher-Gravili and Pan Bouyoucas. Venise: Supernova, 2000. 45–58. Print. ———. Jeux de patience. Montréal: VLB éditeur, 1997. Print. Fortier, Dominique. Les larmes de saint Laurent. Montréal: Alto, 2010. Print. Garant, Dominique. “Juste une polémique?” Spirale 228 (2009): 32–34. Print. Gafaïti, Hafid, Patricia M.E. Lorcin, and David G. Troyansky, eds. Transnational Spaces and Identities in the Francophone World. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2009. Print.

Revisiting Écriture migrante in Québec   637 Gatti, Maurizio. Littérature amérindienne du Québec. Montréal:  Éditions Hurtubise, 2004. Print. Gauvin, Lise. Aventuriers et sédentaires:  Parcours du roman québécois. Paris:  Honoré Champion, 2012. Print. ———. “Filiations et filatures: Modalités et usages de la parole chez deux écrivains migrants, Micone et Pasquali.” Dumontet and Zipfel 109–22. Giguère, Suzanne. Passeurs culturels:  Une littérature en mutation. Québec:  Les Éditions de l’IQRC/Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2001. Print. Halen, Pierre. “À propos des modalités d’insertion des littératures dites de l’immigration ou migrants dans le système littéraire francophone.” Dumontet and Zipfel 37–48. Harel, Simon. “Une littérature des communautés culturelles made in Québec?” Globe: Revue internationale d’études québécoises 5.2 (2002): 55–77. Print. ———. Les passages obligés de l’écriture migrante. Montréal: XYZ éditeur, 2005. Print. ———. Le voleur de parcours: Identité et cosmopolitisme dans la littérature québécoise contemporaine. Longueuil, QC: Le Préambule, 1989. Print. Hargreaves, Alex, Charles Forsdick, and David Murphy. “Introduction:  What Does Littérature-Monde Mean for French, Francophone and Postcolonial Studies?” Hargreaves et al., Transnational French Studies 1–11. ———, eds. Transnational French Studies: Postcolonialism and Littérature-Monde. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2010. Print. Kamboureli, Smaro. Scandalous Bodies:  Diasporic Literature in English Canada. Toronto: Oxford UP, 2000. Print. Kattan, Naïm. L’écrivain migrant:  Essai sur des cités et des hommes. Montréal:  Éditions Hurtubise, 2001. Print. Kokis, Sergio. Le pavillon des miroirs. Montréal: XYZ, 1994. Print. Laferrière, Dany. Comment faire l’amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer. Montréal: VLB, 1985. Print. ———. Le cri des oiseaux fous. Montréal: Lanctôt, 2000. Print. ———. I Am a Japanese Writer. Trans. David Homel. Vancouver:  Douglas and McIntyre, 2010. Print. ———. Je suis un écrivain japonais. Montréal: Boréal, 2008. Print. LaRue, Monique. L’arpenteur et le navigateur. Montréal: CÉTUQ, 1996. Print. Latif-Ghattas, Mona. Le double conte de l’exil. Montréal: Boréal, 1990. Print. Lequin, Lucie. “Écrivaines migrantes et éthique.” D’autres rêves:  Les écritures migrantes au Québec. Actes du Séminaire International du CISQ à Venise (15–16 octobre 1999). Ed. Anne De Vaucher-Gravili and Pan Bouyoucas. Venise: Supernova, 2000. 113–41. Print. Lequin, Lucie, and Catherine Mavrikakis. “La francophonie comme cacophonie.” La francophonie sans frontière: Une nouvelle cartographie de l’imaginaire féminin. Ed. Lucie Lequin and Catherine Mavrikakis. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001. 13–22. Print. Ltaif, Nadine. Les métamorphoses d’Ishtar. Montréal: Guernica, 1987. Print. Maillé, Chantal. “Migrations: Femmes, mouvement et ‘refondation’ du féminisme.” Recherches féministes 15.2 (2002): 1–8. Print. Mathis-Moser, Ursula, and Birgit Mertz-Baumgartner, eds. La littérature ‘française’ contemporaine. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2007. Print. Mavrikakis, Catherine, and Martine Delvaux. “Quelques mots sur l’éthique et la littérature.” Dalhousie French Studies 64 (2003). 75–86. Print. Mazauric, Catherine. Mobilités d’Afrique en Europe:  Récits et figures de l’aventure. Paris: Karthala, 2012. Print.

638    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions Micone, Marco. Gens du silence. Montréal: Québec Amérique, 1982. Print. Moisan, Clément. Écritures migrantes et identités culturelles. Québec: Nota Bene, 2008. Print. ———. “Pour une poétique historique de l’écriture migrante.” Dumontet and Zipfel 69–77. Moisan, Clément, and Renate Hildebrand. Ces étrangers du dedans: Une histoire de l’écriture migrante au Québec (1937–1997). Québec: Nota Bene, 2001. Print. Nepveu, Pierre. L’écologie du réel: Mort et naissance de la littérature québécoise contemporaine. Montréal: Boréal, 1988. Print. ———. “Qu’est-ce que la transculture?” Paragraphes 2 (1989): 15–31. Print. Noël, Francine. Babel, prise deux ou Nous avons tous découvert l’Amérique. Montréal: VLB, 1990. Print. ———. La conjuration des bâtards. Montréal: Leméac, 1999. Print. Ollivier, Émile. Passages. Montréal: L’Hexagone, 1991. Print. Paré, François. “Le passeur désenchanté.” Voix et Images 32.1 (2006): 135–40. Print. Procter, James. “The Postcolonial Everyday.” New Formations 58 (2006): 62–80. Print. Robin, Régine. “Poétiques de la ville, déambulations et nouveaux flâneurs.” Dumontet and Zipfel 201–16. ———. “Postface. De nouveaux jardins aux sentiers qui bifurquent.” La Québécoite. Montréal: Typo, 1993. 207–24. Print. ———. La Québécoite. Montréal: Typo, 1993. Print. Selao, Ching. “En finir avec les écritures migrantes?” Spirale 205 (2005): 51–52. Print. Shimazaki, Aki. Hamaguri. Montréal: Leméac, 2000. Print. ———. Hotaru. Montréal: Leméac; Arles: Actes Sud, 2004. Print. ———. Tsubaki. Paris: Actes Sud, 2005. Print. ———. Tsubame. Montréal: Leméac, 2001. Print. ———. Wasurenagusa. Montréal: Leméac, 2003. Print. Simon, Sherry, and David Leahy. “La recherche au Québec portant sur l’écriture ethnique.” Ethnicity and Culture in Canada: The Research Landscape. Ed. J.W. Berry and J.A. Laponce. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1994. 387–409. Print. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana:  U of Illinois P, 1988. 271–313. Print. Sroka, Ghila B. “De LaRue à la poubelle.” La tribune juive 14.3 (March 1997): 4–5. Print. Vautier, Marie. “ ‘L’Affaire LaRue’: Literature, Society, and l’Écriture Migrante in Contemporary Quebec.” Art as an Early-Warning System. Ed. Ludgard De Decker. Victoria:  Centre for Studies in Religion and Society, 2000. 21–57. Print. ———. “Les métarécits, le postmodernisme et le mythe postcolonial au Québec: Un point de vue de la ‘marge.’ ” Études littéraires 27.1 (1994): 43–61. Print. Verduyn, Christl. “Écriture et migration au féminin au Québec: De mère en fille.” Multi-culture, multi-écriture: La voix migrante au féminin en France et au Canada. Ed. Lucie Lequin et Maïr Verthuy. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996. 131–44. Print.

Chapter 34

On the P oet i c s of Arab-Ca na dia n L iteratu re i n Fre nc h and Eng l i sh Elizabeth Dahab

Une littérature mineure n’est pas celle d’une langue mineure, plutôt celle qu’une minorité fait dans une langue majeure. [A minor literature is not that of a minor language; rather, it is a literature a minority produces in a major language.] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka. Pour une littérature mineure (29)

Arab-Canadian literature emerged in the 1970s, produced by first-generation Christian, Jewish, and Muslim immigrants who identify as Arabs and have their origins directly or indirectly in the Arab states and their roots in the Arabic language and culture. About 65 percent of Arab-Canadian writing is produced in French, and 20 percent in English, the remainder being written in Arabic, thereby obeying twice over the definition given by Deleuze and Guattari of a littérature mineure. The very fact that a large percentage is produced in French denotes its embedment in North American francophonie, with its heightened likelihood of breaking new frontiers. Indeed, Arab-Canadian literature can be said to have enriched the Québécois cultural context where it was born, infusing that locus with memorial vestiges of the countries forever left behind.1 Arab-Canadian literature in French and English can be divided, for the sake of categorization, into roughly three phases: an early one in the 1970s and 1980s, a second circa the late 1980s to the mid- to late 1990s, and a third from the late 1990s into the new millennium, with the aftermath of 9/11 having played a significant role. The first phase can broadly be qualified by nostalgia, reconstruction, and longing, where recollections of the native country form the epicentre of texts; the second by remembrance

640    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions of trauma/war, witness-bearing, and, at times, reconciliation with the past; and the third by transcendence, resolution, opposition, or self-remarginalization. Sometimes, by virtue of a productivity spanning several decades, some of the writers may belong to two phases at once, as in the case of Naim Kattan, for instance. In all three phases, works of Arab writers in Canada are marked by a reflexivity characteristic of postmodern literature: by a dislocated and disjointed style (essentially a language that mirrors internal distance), the melancholy of the initial departure, and a sense of estrangement. Linguistic exile, or the dispossession of one’s native tongue in favour of an elected host language, is at stake here. Kattan aptly defines the interplay between utterances and linguistic dispossession in the context of the evolution of the concept of exile in both Islam and Judaism: L’exil n’est plus une relation avec l’espace mais une expression de la division de l’être, du conflit entre réel et conscience, acte et théâtralité. L’exil est intériorisé. Il devient une dimension de l’être. Et d’abord l’exil de la parole. (La Mémoire 63) [Exile is no longer a relationship to space but an expression of the division of the Self, of the conflict between reality and consciousness. Exile is internalized. It becomes a dimension of being. And first and foremost exile of the spoken word.]2

This profound statement by the Iraqi-Québécois writer engages issues related to the choice of language as a means of literary expression for the writer who is exiled both from his origins and from his means of expression, namely the spoken word, or, more precisely, the written word. Language is the key issue here, yet how is this chosen means of expression used to negotiate absence from the country of origin? In other words, how is this country remembered, evoked, fantasized, recreated, or forsaken?

Phase One: The Country Left Behind: Real, Mythical, Recalled, Juxtaposed The vision of the country of origin from the vantage point of exile is not a uniform one among Québécois-Canadian writers of Arab origins. This vision can be akin to feelings of nostalgia or resentment, but in either case, the memory of the abandoned country constitutes what a critic has aptly dubbed the “massive referent,” le “référent massif,” permeating the pages of that literature (Berrouët-Oriol and Fournier 17). Moreover, liberated as they are from the sociopolitical exigencies of their countries of origin, the writers find themselves seeking refuge in their cultural and religious heritage, which they attempt to revive. For instance, there are luminous remembrances of the homeland in this early phase of Arab-Canadian writing. This can be said of Vasco Varoujean’s 1972 collection of short stories, Le Moulin du diable, which evokes in exquisite detail and with

On the Poetics of Arab-Canadian Literature    641 great endearment happy recollections of his childhood in Késsab, an Armenian village in Syria. Some writers are more drawn to the daily realities of their new life in the host country, juxtaposed with those of their earlier personal history. Thus, a contrapuntal awareness of the native and host countries operates in their recollections, much in keeping with Edward Said’s insight in Reflections on Exile, that “for an exile, habits of life, expression, and activity in the new environment inevitably occur against the memory of these things in another environment. Hence, both the old and the new environments are vivid, actual, occurring together contrapuntally” (186). This contrapuntal recollection is well portrayed in this early phase of Arab-Canadian literature in Andrée Dahan’s novel, Le Printemps peut attendre (1985), in which Maya, the protagonist, suffers from a massive loss of self-esteem as an unpopular substitute teacher in a Québec polyvalente. In her native Egypt, she was a highly valued educator. Throughout the novel, Maya juxtaposes contrasting moments of school life in the two countries, with disparate effects, as an unsettling schism opens up between her self-perception and the gaze of others: Elle était venue vers eux innocente de la culture et du prestige qui la revêtaient comme une robe toute simple. … Et alors, on lui avait reproché ses teintes criardes, ses formes somptueuses, presque excentriques. … Elle ne comprenait pas qu’un regard étranger décidât d’elle autrement. … L’évidence n’était plus la même et elle en était ébranlée. (Le Printemps 22) [She came to them unaware, rich with the culture and prestige that enveloped her as a simple dress, a bit outdated. … They criticized her clothing for its gaudy colors, its sumptuous and nearly eccentric shapes. … She did not realize, she did not understand that a foreign gaze perceived her differently. … Reality was no longer the same. … She began to doubt herself. (qtd. in Dahab, Voices in the Desert 32)]3

In the context of the need to salvage vestiges of memory from the rubble of dire personal histories, of note in this early phase is Nadia Ghalem’s 1981 novel, Les Jardins de cristal, in which Chafia, the protagonist who escaped from Algiers to Paris, evokes Algeria and the then relatively recent trauma of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962) through the prism of mental illness, a trope that becomes more prominent in texts produced in the next two phases. This novel takes the shape of a letter the narrator/protagonist writes to her mother in order to exorcize her past and to confront her mother with the hatred she experienced growing up—“Il y a dans ma gorge des éclats de crystal qui blessent les chairs” (Les Jardins 13) [“In my throat there are shards of crystal that hurt my flesh”]—a metaphorical image of childhood unhappiness surviving into adulthood. Toward the end of the novel, Chafia’s mental illness is a harbinger of new hope, perhaps a pathetic one, namely that of connecting with other survivors of mental trauma (138–39). While Dahan’s and Ghalem’s protagonists harbour vivid imagery and recollections of a homeland they left as adults, images of a home country abandoned at an earlier age can, in contradistinction, be more vague and elusive in works marked by the presence of

642    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions absence, in which vestiges of memory are painstakingly conjured. Such is the case with the late Anne-Marie Alonzo, who left Egypt at the tender age of 11, becoming paraplegic shortly after due to a car crash near Montreal. In Ecoute, Sultane (1987) and Le Livre des ruptures (1988), Alonzo evokes a mythical Egypt, where fragments of images—of sandy beaches, her mother’s face, and the German grade-school she attended—emerge haphazardly. Hers is an effort to reconstruct a native land with, at her disposal, fading childhood memories, beginning with the evoked long train ride from Halifax to Montreal. In a telling passage of Le Livre des ruptures (1988), Alonzo laments the continuous feelings of departure and loss she associates with her native Alexandria, especially the “face” of it, an image she fails to see distinctly: Je suis partie Je pars et partirai encore Alexandrie n’a plus de visage. Mais tant de rides qu’elle s’écroule lente délaissée. (104) [I left I am leaving and I will leave again Alexandria no longer has a face. But so many wrinkles that it crumbles down, slowly abandoned].

The “many wrinkles” of faceless Alexandria are exacerbated by the paralysis Alonzo expresses in L’Immobile (1990), in which she explores themes of movement, separation, death, and harrowing physical pain. Thus her physical state of immobility acquired in her host country is grafted onto the temporal distance that separates her from her homeland; it is associated with her status as a writer condemned to sit eternally: “Assise, noble pharaonne. Scribe accroupie faisant sa marque au stylet” (19) [“sitting down, noble Pharaoh. Crouched scribe leaving his mark with a stylus”]. This image works as a visual allegorical representation of Alonzo’s identity as a transnational writer. Moreover, in Droite et de profil (1984), Alonzo expresses the sense of hybridity and alienation she experienced in her native Alexandria before her move to Québec, where she encountered parallel alienation. As a Christian with multiple components in the makeup of her cultural background, living in a Muslim country and educated in a German-language school, Alonzo felt like a stranger “at home,” a reality shared by other Arab-Canadian writers, who, having already belonged to ethnic minorities in their countries of origin, found themselves extra-territorialized and estranged anew in their host country, twice or thrice removed from the mainstream: as Alonzo laments, “toujours étrangère marquée là-bas comme ici” (Droite 5) [“Always a foreigner, marked over there just like here”]. Likewise, in her collection of poems entitled Entre les fleuves (1991), Nadine Ltaif juxtaposes the Nile and the Saint Lawrence rivers. Various images, as well as snatches of historical moments belonging to the two countries, are superimposed. The author tries to trace for herself a space between the two rivers, where the weight of alienation is more bearable, and where she can more easily succeed in her search for words and for roots: “That is my exile / That which was not only forced by war / But which stems out of

On the Poetics of Arab-Canadian Literature    643 entangled roots” (qtd. in Dahab, Voices in the Desert 107).4 The “entangled roots” at issue here speak of her former alienation from the mainstream in the country of origin, in this case, both Egypt and Lebanon, by virtue of being a francophone Christian of Syrian origin, a theme that comes up again. Thus, Mona Latif-Ghattas’s Nicolas, le fils du Nil (1985) sheds light on the drawbacks of the ethnic mix typical of the Mediterranean basin. Written in Canada but first published in Egypt, the story is sung from atop a minaret, a suggestive image of the predominance of Islam in this once Christian country. The narrator tells the story of her family: her father, Nicolas, and her mother, Jo, both “children of the Nile.” Through these characters, she recalls the last Egyptian king, Farouk (1936–1952), and the first president, Nasser (1953–1970), and the ethnic exclusions that happened in the 1960s under the latter’s rule. Thus Nicolas, the protagonist, whose personal and professional life and identity are deeply rooted in the soil of Egypt (and whose mother belongs to an old Egyptian family), is suddenly excluded and branded a foreigner because of the Syrian nationality of his father. The exiles that ensue from that ostracism mark once more the family history of exile and the author-narrator’s own subsequent immigration. Undoubtedly, in this early phase of Arab-Canadian writing, it is Kattan who draws the most vividly endearing portraits of his life in his native Iraq. His 1975 Adieu, Babylone (the first volume of a semi-autobiographical trilogy written between 1975 and 1983 after years of silence) purposefully and avowedly strives to defy forgetfulness (“l’oubli,” which he equates with absence and death) by salvaging memory, thus challenging death (Allard, “Entrevue” 27). The English translation, Farewell Babylon (2005), subtitled in the American edition Coming of Age in Jewish Baghdad (2007), constitutes a landmark that inscribes the beginnings, intentions, method, and lifelong project of Kattan-the-novelist, who left his native Iraq for France in 1947, then moved to Canada in 1954, making him thrice an exile. The trilogy as a whole mirrors the author’s personal trajectory. The first volume, Adieu, Babylone, is an account of a 12-year-old boy growing up in Baghdad between 1940 and 1947 as part of the Jewish community that constituted roughly 30 percent of the population (approximately 700,000 in 1947). In the book, the reader encounters an array of scenes that make up the fabric of the narrator’s adolescence. The reader also witnesses the protagonist’s pride in his Judeo-Islamic heritage, his conviction of his predestination as a writer, his literary debut, and his ardent love of Arabic literature, which he mastered better than most of his Muslim peers: “My passion for our own literature, rather than being weakened at the prospect of leaving, was rekindled” (176).5 Adieu, Babylone tells the story of the end of a Jewish community in Baghdad, a community that began some 2,500 years ago when Nebuchadnezzar brought Jewish prisoners from Jerusalem. When given the choice of return a few generations later, their descendants opted to remain in Babylon. They came to be known as the Babylonian Jews, contributing to world Judaism by writing the Talmud and enduring the test of time all the way up to post-war Iraq, where they had been well-integrated citizens alongside other ethnic communities, such as Kurds and Armenians. However, they were forced to leave after the formation of the state of Israel in 1948. The book concludes with a farewell scene, with Kattan’s family

644    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions (whom he would not meet again until 1952, in Israel) at a bus station, heading to Beirut, then to Marseille by boat, never to return to Babylon: “these faces looking at me, moving away from me, which I saw through the window of the bus—they were Iraq. All that remained of it for me” (217). Adieu, Babylone grafts a collective exile, that of the Babylonian Jews, onto a personal one, the author’s multiple exiles, and provides his personal answer to the negotiation of absence in his life. But why not “Farewell, Baghdad” instead of “Farewell, Babylon” as a title for the first volume of the trilogy? When asked about this in a 1985 interview by Jacques Allard, Kattan is very clear in his attempt to negotiate absence: “Ce n’était pas Adieu, Bagdad parce que Bagdad continue, l’Irak continue. Mais Babylone … est terminé” (“Entrevue” 16) [“It was not Farewell, Baghdad because Baghdad continues, Irak continues. But Babylon … has ended”]. In the preface to the 2005 English edition of Farewell, Babylon, Kattan writes from the vantage point of retrospection, three decades later: “Farewell, Babylon is not a work of nostalgia, nor is it one of resentment” (8). He explains that what he fears most is absence: “J’ai beaucoup vécu dans l’absence” (Allard, “Entrevue” 27) [“I have lived a lot in absence”]. In a sense, Adieu, Babylone is an application of ideas Kattan had developed in his very first publication, an essay entitled Le Réel et le théâtral (1970), which has the double merit of having been awarded the prestigious Prix France-Canada (1971) and having provided the first landmark of Arab-Canadian literature as a distinct body of writing. It was published in Montreal in 1970, then in Paris the following year, and soon after in 1972, in Toronto, in an English translation. In this essay, Kattan outlines an idea he continued to cultivate for three decades, namely, that his two countries, Iraq and Canada, do not overlap. His presence in the world is one he claims to define at every step, away from “le confort des certitudes” (Le Réel et le théâtral 188) [“the comfort of certitudes” (Reality and Theatre 142)]. Speaking of his life as an intellectual who left his native Iraq to settle in Montreal several decades earlier, Kattan advances the notion of “alternation in continuity” [“l’alternance dans la continuité”], a notion akin to creation, instead of the more prevalent construct of hybridity (188). Thus, at the conclusion of Reality and Theatre, he defines his place in the diaspora, negotiating absence and leaving a trail of literary endeavours as fiction writer and essayist, a stance he maintained throughout his writing career: Mes deux univers ne se superposent pas. Ils se continuent, se prolongent dans le mouvement de la vie. J’ai opté pour une langue que j’invente à chaque moment. J’ai choisi un lieu que je dote de ma présence en y inscrivant mon invention. (Le Réel et le théâtral 188) [My two universes are not superimposed, they continue each other, prolong one another in the movement that is life. … I have opted for a language I invent at every moment. I chose a place I endow with my presence by inscribing my invention upon it. (Reality and Theatre 142)]

The reconnection to roots, bridging the two first phases of Arab-Canadian literature, is exemplified par excellence by Tunisian writer, Ontario-based Hédi Bouraoui’s first

On the Poetics of Arab-Canadian Literature    645 four novels,6 namely, Bangkok Blues (1994), La Pharaone (1998), Retour à Thyna (1996), and Ainsi parle la tour CN (1999). These have been dubbed a “literature of cities” or literature of urbanity, in that they portray at once an exotic yet familiar return “to other roots,” respectively to Bangkok, Cairo, Thyna/Sfax (Tunisia), and finally, to Bouraoui’s beloved hometown, Toronto. Ainsi parle la tour CN, with the somewhat Nietzschean title, a “timely and uncannily prophetic, as well as disturbing” complex novel (Sabiston 89–90), features that super-tower as a narrator evoking its origins, on which is grafted the history of the complex multicultural mosaic of those who have helped it reach the sky, as well as those who still manage to keep it turning. In this work, the autobiographical component, unlike Kattan’s trilogy, is not overly explicit (Sabiston 89). The main narrative is set against the backdrop of the bold act of an Aboriginal man, Peter Deloon, who throws himself safely from atop the tower, and subsequently loses his job as a result. The CN Tower, reminiscent of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, intervenes, with her injunctions, as a harbinger of reconciliation, hope, and understanding, in favour of the Canadian cultural mosaic, a collage of roots, distant and more immediate.

Phase Two: Wartime, Witness-Bearing, Double Exiles Whereas Kattan’s autobiographical début novel recaps his first years in his native Iraq with a hue of endearment and longing, this is not necessarily the case for some of his counterparts in the late 1980s and 1990s. In fact, this second phase can be generally portrayed as an attempt to come to terms with and collectively bear witness to traumas encountered in the homeland, from the bloody dictatorship of Nasser’s regime in Egypt in the 1950s and 1960s (1952–1970) to the ravages of the civil war in Lebanon (1975–1990).7 This theme is interspersed with texts dealing with integration in the host country. In this category belong works by Saad Elkhadem, who can legitimately be considered the first producer in Canada of Arab novellas in English, by virtue of the fact that the publication of his work in Canada was invariably and simultaneously cast in bilingual editions (Arabic/English), with Elkhadem sometimes being his own translator, much in the tradition of Samuel Beckett. Elkhadem’s Flying Egyptian trilogy (1990–1992) is a metafictional work in the form of a soliloquy by a nameless protagonist/writer/narrator. Through a variety of self-reflexive devices, the trilogy tells a story that portrays at once a dual experience of immigration and artistic creation. Exile and immigration are nested in a cluster of ambivalent feelings toward both the new and the old country. Elkhadem manages to express the predicament of Egyptian immigrants to Canada who fled en masse to Québec after the debacle of the 1967 Arab-Israeli Six-Day War, hoping to find peace and stability. Instead, soon after landing, they anxiously witnessed the separatist unrest culminating in the 1970 October Crisis. Trudeau’s declaration of the War Measures Act, countering the Québec

646    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions Liberation Front’s acts of terrorism, reawakened painful memories of Nasser’s ruthless military regime. As the protagonist-narrator of Canadian Adventures of the Flying Egyptian (1990) writes, “We arrived in 67, leaving Egypt humiliated and beaten and in ruins, and came to rich, lovely, joyful Canada … and right away, brother, in the same year political disturbances started, followed by assassination, sabotage, suspension of the rule of law and mass arrest, without a hint or warning …” (35). The lexical fields, “humiliated/ beaten/in ruins” versus “rich/lovely/joyful,” tell of a contrapuntal awareness exacerbated by hope and the vagaries of history, creating a simultaneous transnational awareness of disparate events with disparate affects. When the narrator finally succeeds in leaving Egypt for Canada, he lands during the centennial celebration of 1967, a celebration countered by the demoralizing effects of the 1967 military defeat of the Egyptians, who felt betrayed by Nasser, with the complicit deceitfulness of the media, falsely claiming victory for the Egyptian army. In the last volume of the trilogy, Crash Landing of the Flying Egyptian (1992), the protagonist mulls over the reasons for his immigration to Canada:  sexual and religious oppression, poverty, and inflation in “the land of nonexistent opportunities,” as he qualifies a homeland marked by regular “disappearances” of anyone suspected of criticism of the 1952 revolution leader, Nasser, who “rubbed the noses of the whole population in the mud to instill in them the basics of true dignity” (16, 14). After recounting the ordeal of finding a host country, the narrator of the Flying Egyptian trilogy, who, like many of his countrymen, did not speak French, strongly evokes the predicament of Egyptian immigrants at a time when French became the only official language of Québec: “And they hated us in Montréal. We can’t speak it. We don’t want to speak it” (Canadian Adventures 35). Many Egyptians relocated to the United States or Western Canada (linguistically more congenial) after the issuance of the Québec 101 linguistic law, fearing that Québec would separate, leaving them “sitting between two chairs, without any right to either” (Crash Landing 15). Says a Greek character in Crash Landing, expressing the ethos of that era: “Foreigners in Québec are afraid of becoming French, the Francophones themselves are afraid of becoming Canadian, and the Canadians are afraid of becoming American” (29). The antihero/writer of the Flying Egyptian trilogy provides continuity with the type of characters featured in Elkhadem’s works—characters who, when dealing with their native country, attempt “to defeat the feeling of isolation” that overwhelms them “in a country [Egypt] that had become alien to [them]” (Elkhadem, One Night 11). Marwan Hassan’s work shares features of Elkhadem’s writings insofar as both authors write from the exilic perspective of critical distance, with transnational protagonists. However, in Hassan’s 1989 novellas (The Confusion of Stones and Intelligence), this time it is Canada and Lebanon that constitute the major settings between which the protagonist goes back and forth in an effort to forge a modicum of space transcending the violence, whether physical or psychological, encountered in both countries alternatively. Confusion of Stones features as its main protagonist a Palestinian refugee peasant by the name of Azlam, who leaves his war-ravaged village in Lebanon to go to Beirut, and then to Canada, in order to live with a lone surviving family member, an uncle who is bitter and callous. Azlam is surrounded by stones, symbolic figures of his new cold

On the Poetics of Arab-Canadian Literature    647 environment. Likewise, in Intelligence we are in the presence of a third-generation Canadian protagonist, Abourezk, who is coming back to Canada after visiting his ancestral homeland, Lebanon. He is suspected of drug trafficking by Montreal policemen upon his return, and he is equally suspected by undercover detectives in Lebanon before his departure, in what constitutes an allegorical stance of the precarious conditions of expatriates/immigrants both in the homeland and the host country. Says Abourezk about the latter: “They think we undermine their civilization. … I am not ashamed to say I am an Arab” (Intelligence 115). The fact that the Lebanon-based protagonist of Confusion of Stones is actually a Palestinian refugee not only foregrounds the Palestinian diaspora in Lebanon but also, in so doing, to quote Sylvia Terzian, “problematizes the hyphenated categories, Lebanese-Canadian and Arab-Canadian” (66). It also shows how the idea of cultural dislocation inherent to the notion of hybridity and its related construct diaspora are associated with the very properties of exile. Hassan’s 1991 novel, The Memory Garden of Miguel Carranza, the first full-fledged anglophone novel of Arab-Canadian writing, carries the theme of dislocation a step further, escalating it to a poignant allegory of Canadian “Everyday Arabness” (Gana 22), wherein a neurosurgical operation is performed on a young protagonist to obliterate haunting memories of a prior existence elsewhere, namely war-torn Lebanon of the 1980s. While Hassan and Elkhadem have portrayed transnational protagonists straddling different cultural backgrounds, on the francophone front, Abla Farhoud is admittedly the first Arab-Canadian writer to have dramatized the communal experience of exile (Forsyth 817), and more specifically the horrors of the civil war in Lebanon (1975–1990), in plays marked by the collective value of utterances qualified by Deleuze and Guattari as one of the main characteristics of minor literatures. Of note here is Farhoud’s 1997 play Jeux de patience, in which the protagonist, Mariam (the Mother), leaves war-torn Lebanon of the 1980s to live with her cousin, a successful Québécois writer by the dual name of Monique/Kaokab, who is given to playing Solitaire when suffering from writer’s block. Monique/Kaokab emigrated from Lebanon 30 years before and has practically forgotten her Arabic, except for some obsolete expressions that amuse her cousin Mariam. The third character, Samira (who also functions as an incarnation of living memory), is the ghost of Mariam’s 16-year-old daughter who occupies the entire theatre (on and offstage). Samira died two months earlier on the streets of Beirut. It is not clear at the outset whether her death was voluntary or accidental. The crux of the action, centred on the two cousins, consists of an attempt to grieve and to remember, in a series of flashbacks between the two countries. Monique/Kaokab must understand, remember, and write the tragedy of her niece and her native country in order to remain alive. She seeks to “write the invisible” and expresses her urgency to bear witness. Throughout the play, she repeats the same line, with variations: “Je ne veux pas mourir avant d’avoir écrit. Je ne veux pas mourir avant d’avoir compris” [“I do not want to die before writing. I do not want to die before understanding”]. Since her cousin’s arrival, Monique/Kaokab has suffered from acute writer’s block, partially caused by Mariam’s constant challenging of her suffering in the safety of her well-to-do Montréal home, away from bombs and destruction. At the end of the play, the writer achieves understanding, when it becomes

648    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions clear, in the process of recording her niece’s story, that the young girl who “loved life too much,” like Antigone before her, refused to compromise, to live a living death, and to die “piece by piece, eaten away by fate” (68). No specific country is mentioned. Farhoud’s intention is an indictment of global violence, even as the event at the backdrop of the play is the Lebanese civil war (1975–1990), which dispersed thousands of people. Karen Malpede describes Farhoud’s endeavour as part of the “witnessing project,” or “witnessing imagination,” that characterizes the new theatre of the twenty-first century. This view is corroborated by Farhoud’s dedication of the play: J’offre cette pièce à toutes celles et à tous ceux qui ont perdu leur enfant, leur pays, leurs rêves … aux oublié-e-s et à tous ceux et celles qui essaient d’oublier. A ceux qui affrontent chaque jour, chaque instant, le silence de la mort. (Jeux de patience n. pag.) [I offer this play to all those who have lost their child, their country, their dreams, … to the forgotten ones and to all those who are trying to forget. To those who face every day, every moment, the silence of death.]

The need to bear witness and to achieve ego integrity is also characterized by Dounia, the protagonist-narrator of Farhoud’s first novel, the very title of which, Le Bonheur a la queue glissante (1998), consists of a syntactic calque of an Arabic proverb on the elusive nature of happiness: “happiness has a slippery tail.” Dounia is a 75-year-old illiterate Lebanese immigrant woman who has lived in Montréal some 40 years, but speaks only Arabic. She narrates her life to her daughter Myriam, in what becomes a project of self-revelation. Myriam writes her mother’s memoirs, as the writer Monique/Kaokab in Jeux de patience writes Samira’s story for her cousin Mariam (Samira’s mother) who could not do it herself. The orality of the transmitted testimonial colours this vibrant narrative, which, in the words of Kattan, “gives us the impression of transcribing an oral tale enriched with proverbs and sayings … thus casting a fresh and novel gaze on Canada, on Québec whose customs and politics [the old woman] tries, in her own way, to understand” (Kattan, “Les Ecrivains” 190). The narrative is punctuated with reflections on human nature, interspersed with parables and proverbs. No fewer than 65 proverbs enrich it, which accounts for the lexicon at the end of the novel listing some of those proverbs in both French and Arabic. To mention but two: “Si jeunesse revenait un jour, je lui raconterais ce que vieillesse a fait de moi …” (11) [“If youth came back to me some day, I would tell her what old age has made of me”]; and “Celui qui souffre s’accroche aux cordes du vent” (33, 170) [“He who suffers will even hang on the ropes of the wind”]. Farhoud is unique in that she uses five registers of language: Québécois slang (joual), standard French, colloquial French, English, colloquial Lebanese-Arabic, and classical Arabic. She is the first Arab-Canadian writer to infuse her works with transliterated Arabic phrases when representing Lebanese characters; she glosses the Arabic by having the character repeat herself in French; otherwise, a footnote gives the meaning of the Arabic expression. Sometimes, an Arabic word occurs in context and is not translated. By so doing, Farhoud partakes in linguistic strategies to “other” the French language—strategies used by postcolonial francophone African writers in their quest

On the Poetics of Arab-Canadian Literature    649 for national identity. The narrative strategies of this prolific writer continue to evolve through phase three, where the political becomes more virulent.

Phase Three: Transcendence, Remarginalization, Politicization The literature of urbanity that characterizes this phase of Arab-Canadian writing focuses on the city, particularly Montreal, as a locus of transnationality, as one sees in the work of Bouraoui, Kattan, and Hage. In this stage, marked by transcendence and self-marginalization, some writers co-opt the image of the dangerous “other” and give it back in the form of deranged, underground protagonists, as in the case of Rawi Hage. Moreover, at the start of the new millennium, decades after the writers originally settled in the host country, we witness a shift from issues concerning immigration and assimilation to themes of transnationality, with an emphasis on the human condition, even when events are portrayed against the backdrop of war or acts of terrorism. Undoubtedly there is a stark denunciation of the evils of war, but this does not always constitute the central motif of the texts. It could easily have been replaced by another calamity in which the inner beasts of man are let loose under the guise of legitimate action. In this phase of Arab-Canadian writing, war becomes a trope engaging the interplay between memory and exile, and between displacement and inclusion. The self becomes the battleground, as madness and metaphorical exile haunt the protagonists. Such is the case with Lebanese writer Wajdi Mouawad, who views the stage as a “lieu de consolation impitoyable” (Incendies 6) [“place of stark consolation”], a place where a “prise de parole” (Mouawad, Littoral 6) is registered in a fashion that places Mouawad’s dramaturgy in the newly founded tradition of the théâtre engagé of contemporary Québec (Vais). Noteworthy is his 2005 Incendies [Scorched], the second volume of a tetralogy devoted to the ravages of war on individuals and collectivities alike (the mark of the political), the grafting of individual quests onto national histories (the collective value of utterances), and the search for redemption through love and solidarity. In Incendies, the Montreal protagonist, Nawal, who has just died, entrusts her twins, in her will, with the task of unfolding the mystery of their birth in her native Lebanon. As they go on a transnational quest for their origins, Jeanne and Simon, two normal Québécois youngsters, slowly unfold the mystery of their birth and their mother’s past in war-torn Lebanon of the 1970s and 1980s. As a member of the Resistance, Nawal was imprisoned in the Kfar Ryat prison, the fictional equivalent of the historical Khiam prison that closed in 2000 after Israel withdrew its forces from Southern Lebanon. In prison, Nawal was repeatedly raped by a torturer who fatefully turned out to be her own son, born out of wedlock when she was 14, whom she had lost when, as a newborn, he was forcefully taken away from her and sent to an orphanage. The legacy Nawal leaves to her children born of incest is to “[c]‌asser le fil” (29, 89) [“to break the thread”] of misery,

650    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions hatred, violence, and ignorance, the blights of Nawal’s childhood. The recurring aphorism, “l’enfance est un couteau planté dans la gorge” (26) [“childhood is a knife thrust in the throat”], hardly metaphorical in this context, suggests the unfortunate reality of violent punishments to which parents and governments alike sometimes subject their children. When Jeanne and Simon return to Montréal with their mission accomplished, they have redeemed their mother’s torturous past, and re-traveled her transnational trajectory. The play is thus about resilience, the possibility of luminous beginnings emerging from evil endings, and the intersection of the collective and the personal. As in Farhoud’s Jeux de patience, Mouawad’s orphaned characters break the silence and bear witness on multiple levels, both personal and collective. Both Lebanese playwrights refer to historical incidents, including, in Incendies, key episodes of the Lebanese civil war, such as the 1975 bus attack on Palestinian workers in Beirut, and, under fictional names (Kfar Riad and Kfar Matra), the 1982 Sabra and Shatilla massacre in Southern Lebanon, a dire episode of the war. No ethnic or religious affiliation is given. If both Farhoud and Mouawad deal with the ravages of war, Mouawad differs in that his plays exude linguistic humour expressed in the vernacular. Profanities of all sorts crop up in long strings of typical Québécois slang, producing linguistically comedic effects. Scatological language is often juxtaposed with a language infused with a puissant “souffle littéraire” or “literary breath” (Arsenault 4). But it seems that the theme of war implicit in Farhoud’s pre-2000 works becomes more explicit and virulent a decade later,8 with the self becoming the battleground as madness and metaphorical exile haunt the protagonists. Noteworthy in this respect is her 2005 novel, Le Fou d’Omar, containing six dramatic monologues consisting of personal diaries written by four characters. Here the Lebanese civil war and the related Palestinian question, latent in her earlier drama and fiction, become much more explicit through the diaries of Radwan, the severely mentally deranged protagonist. Referring to the massacre conducted by Israel in Southern Lebanon on two Palestinian refugee camps (presumably Sabra and Shatilla), in which 1,700 people were killed, Radwan addresses Ariel Sharon: “S’il n’y avait que toi de charognard, on n’en serait pas là. 1982. Sabra et Shatilla, ce n’était pas assez. Ça ne t’a pas suffi. Du sang. Encore du sang. Et le peuple israelien t’a élu. Je hais le genre humain” (60) [“If you were the only butcher, we would not be here. 1982. Sabra and Shatilla, that was not enough. Blood. More blood. And the Israeli people have elected you. I hate the human species”]. Moreover, Radwan launches a three-page indictment of the violence against the Palestinians with the help of “God of the universe, Bush … son of Bush the Great” (60), of the silence the rest of the world keeps in this regard, and of the fact that the victims of the Holocaust became in turn executioners. “Deux poids deux mesures” (62) [“double standards”] is the expression used by Radwan to indict the “political correctness” of the media when covering the Middle East in favour of Israel and the United States. Moreover, he delivers a political diatribe against American foreign policy and the post–9/11 backlashes he perceives as a means to further a preexistent imperialist agenda. One is led to wonder what compelled Farhoud who, in her previous work, never openly refers to precise sides of political conflicts, to suddenly make such open statements in this novel. Does the fact that the

On the Poetics of Arab-Canadian Literature    651 protagonist is mentally ill provide an outlet for thoughts that would not otherwise have been expressed? Interestingly enough, in this novel, mental illness is likened to the vagaries of the Lebanese civil war: for 15 years, every time it subsided, like Radwan’s illness, it would suddenly flare up again and resume the havoc, as we learn from the diaries of Omar, Radwan’s widowed father and the sole guardian of his schizophrenic son. However, unlike war raids, during which intense solidarity flourishes between people facing a common invader, psychotic attacks leave a family burdened with shame, isolated from the community, and alienated from the dispossessed family member (159). Omar asserts: “J’ai connu guerre et folie, et à un souffle de la mort, je choisirais la guerre, si je pouvais encore choisir, sans l’ombre d’un doute” (158) [“I have known both war and mental illness, and on the brink of death, if I were to choose again, I would choose war, without the shadow of a doubt”]. This statement brings home the idea that metaphorical exile and self-dispossession, the lot of unfortunate individuals everywhere, could be as damaging as man-made calamities. In this later phase, Farhoud transcends the attributes associated with ethnic experience and war trauma, tackling issues with universal resonance. This applies to her 2001 novel, Splendide solitude, the diary of an unnamed newly divorced Montreal woman dealing with her plight, and Les Rues de l’alligator (2003), a play portraying Sonia Bélanger and her community of poets, again on the streets of Montréal. In both works, we witness old-stock Québécois characters facing similar dilemmas to those of their immigrant counterparts in Farhoud’s earlier works, namely solitude, fear of aging, and failed aspirations. This is also true of her recent novel, Le Sourire de la petite juive (2011), capturing short portraits of inhabitants of Hutchinson Street in Montreal, interspersed with the diary of Hinda Rochel, a rebellious adolescent Hassidic girl, who lends the novel its title, with its distant reminiscence of the Holocaust. If Montreal is the welcoming setting of Farhoud’s work in this phase, it is also the friendly setting for much of Kattan’s fiction and the site of his characters’ familiar world. Shems, the protagonist of Kattan’s novel L’Anniversaire (2000), speaks of Montreal as his beloved city, one he invented and cherishes (111), where “la familiarité des rues, des magasins, pour ne pas parler des visages, m’évite tout effort de découverte ou de reconnaissance” (131) [“the familiarity of the streets, stores, even the faces, spares [him] any effort of discovery or recognition”]. Likewise, Gabriel, the protagonist of Le Gardien de mon frère (2003), is comforted upon his return to Montreal, “where everything seemed familiar” (33), and Daniel, the protagonist of “Une ville à vivre” [“A City for Life”] in the 2005 collection, Je regarde les femmes, endows Montreal with everything meaningful in his life: “Pour lui, les rues de Montréal débordaient de vie” (268) [“For him, the streets of Montréal overflowed with life”]. In a chapter entitled “Le Roman de la métropole” in Le Roman du Québec (2000), Allard mentions Naïm Kattan as one of the neo-Québécois writers who “gives Montréal a new humanity” (131), a view that is indeed accurate. This positive view of Montréal does not apply to Anglo-Québécois novelist Rawi Hage, winner of the 2008 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for his début novel De Niro’s Game (2006).9 In his second novel, Cockroach (2008), the main antagonist is

652    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions the setting itself, Montréal, with the unrelenting cold weather of “this city with its case of chronic snow” (17). Here a deranged nameless protagonist, who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, has escaped war-torn Beirut to seek refuge in Montréal. Though he is in a different country, his experience remains strangely similar, for Hage’s poetic verve is at work, “transforming the bustling metropolis into an alien topography of menial jobs, mysterious accents, insect infestations, and class hostilities” (Redekop). The rapprochement is between a city under siege, Beirut, and a city where one is a despised minority, Montréal. This minority becomes under siege and as vulnerable as any population living in a war zone. The coping mechanisms would be the same: mere means of survival in an otherwise unbearable existence. If the unpredictability of warfare is likened to mental illness by Farhoud in Le Fou d’Omar, Cockroach “exposes a world so otherworldly to most Canadians as to be near-unimaginable” (Redekop). Indeed, Hage conveys a sample of the hardships of daily life, not in Beirut, but in some of Montreal’s struggling communities. He brings into collision the opposing layers of stereotype and reality by portraying the despair and violence experienced by some, mostly members of a marginalized anglophone enclave of Iranians living in the 1990s in the vicinity of the student ghetto near McGill University, in a Montreal unfamiliar to those who connect it solely with beauty, charm, and culture. As one of the characters points out, “Montréal, this happy romantic city, has an ugly side to it, my friend. One of the largest military-industrial complexes in North America is right here” (281). The novel marks a first for Arab-Canadian literature: the transvergence10 of interest between members of two different ethnic minorities (Arab and Iranian) demonstrates that the boundaries separating various Canadian “third solitudes” are no longer absolute. Moreover, the humanity of the protagonist is ambiguous (half human and half insect), as suggested by the title. In fact, in Cockroach we are in the presence of an immigrant claiming his right to possess the earth, the imperialism of insecthood, so to speak! The whole narrative, with its overarching cockroach trope, can be construed as an allegory of a post–9/11 global society marked by increased distrust of the Muslim other. In Cockroach, we are well past the oppositional tortured individual trying either to understand or assimilate. We are also past the agonizing recollections of the not-sobeloved homeland typical of Elkhadem’s nightmarish social stories or the mythical recollections of Alonzo. We are past the search for one’s roots typical of Mouawad’s work. And if Elkhadem’s and Hassan’s characters bear their wounds as obstacles to normalcy, Hage’s protagonists, whether “back home” or in Montreal, exalt their perverse singularities and celebrate them. With its deep concern for the misery and unemployment among various immigrant groups in Montreal (Sakr 349), Hage’s novel heralds a new era in Arab-Canadian literature. His writing brings the exilic paradigm to a new level of estrangement, in what is perhaps a true poetics of inversion. If Cockroach maps a geography of despair in a Montreal otherwise known for its francophone cultural splendour, Carnival (2012), Hage’s latest novel, likewise offers a compassionate stance toward the down-and-out, but it does so more intensely and in a more focused manner than its

On the Poetics of Arab-Canadian Literature    653 predecessor. Carnival continues the global positioning trope of chaos with its unnamed location in North America—perhaps Toronto, New York, or any large urban setting with a civilized veneer, hiding in its bosom—literally or figuratively so—ferocious animals and a dog-eat-dog mentality. Since the 1970s, Arab-Canadian literature in French and English has been rich and varied. An unfolding tradition stretches from Kattan’s and Elkhadem’s fiction in the 1970s, through the 1980s, with Marwan Hassan’s first English novels, to Ghattas’s and Dahan’s rich work, as well as Farhoud’s, Hassan’s, and Mouawad’s compelling oeuvres, all the way to Rawi Hage’s contributions in the new millennium. Though they are writing from the vantage point of geographical distance, the writers who have forged Arab-Canadian literature are ontologically linked. They share multifaceted dimensions of exile, broadly understood as cultural, geographical, physical, and psychological displacement. Perhaps the most salient attributes they have in common are ones pointed out by Deleuze and Guattari as prime features of minor literatures (29–31), namely, the mark of the political and the collective value of utterances, wherein the writer speaks on behalf of a group of individuals with the same collective unconscious and awareness, and wherein, in so doing, the writing becomes charged and tainted with an inevitable political substratum.

Notes 1. See my Voices of Exile for a detailed study of this literature. 2. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from the French are mine. 3. Translated by Sharon Hathaway. On the writing of Ghattas, Dahan, and Ltaif in this early phase of francophone Arab-Canadian writing, see Lequin, “Quelques mouvements” 128–44, 134, 135, 136. Also see Lequin and Verthuy. 4. Translated by Shérif Ltaif. 5. The quotations from this novel are from the 2005 Raincoast Books edition, translated by Sheila Fischman. 6. L’Icônaison (1985) is actually the very first prose title by Bouraoui, but as it belongs to a hybrid genre of poem-novel, it deserves a classification of its own. 7. An exception to this pattern is Ghattas’s Les Filles de Sophie Barat (1999), a magnificent autobiographical account of her school life at the Sacré Coeur Cairo branch, a convent dedicated to the education of girls, where Ghattas spent luminous years, the entirety of her grade school education: “Ce lieu est bien à moi. C’est mon Egypte personnelle, ma mémoire. Mon Bonheur d’enfant, mon bagne, ma plus grande liberté” (23). [“This place is truly mine. It is my personal Egypt, my memory. My childhood happiness, my prison, my biggest freedom.”] 8. This is also true of Andrée Dahan in her 2005 Chants de la terre morte, a collection of poems dedicated to the continuing sufferings of the Palestinians at the hands of Israel. 9. For a full analysis of Cockroach, see Dahab, “The Arab Canadian Novel and the Rise of Rawi Hage.” 10. This is a word of my own invention. It is meant to signify a blend between “convergence” and a crossing over to other ethnic groups.

654    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions

Works Cited Allard, Jacques. “Entrevue avec Naïm Kattan.” Voix et Images 11.1 (1985): 10–32. Print. ———. Le Roman du Québec:  Histoire, Perspectives, Lectures. Montréal:  Québec-Amérique, 2000. Print. Alonzo, Anne-Marie. Bleus de mine. Ville St-Laurent: Éditions du Noroît, 1985. Print. ———. Droite et de profil. Montréal: Lèvres urbaines 7, 1984. Print. ———. Ecoute, Sultane. Montréal: Éditions de l’Hexagone, 1987. Print. ———. L’Immobile. Montréal: Éditions de L’Hexagone, 1990. Print. ———. Le Livre des ruptures. Montréal: Éditions de l’Hexagone, 1988. Print. Arsenault, Michel. “Solidarity of the Shaken: Wajdi Mouawad’s Theatre of War.” Walrus 31 Dec. 2006:  1–6. http://www.walrusmagazine.com/print/art-solidarity-of-the-shaken/. Web. Accessed 31 Dec. 2011. Berrouët-Oriol, Robert, and Robert Fournier. “L’Émergence des écritures migrantes et métisses au Québec.” Litté Réalité: Une revue d’écrits originaux/A Journal of Creative and Original Writing 3.2 (1991): 9–35. Print. Bouraoui, Hédi. Ainsi parle la tour CN. Vanier, ON: Éditions Interligne, 1999. Print. ———. Bangkok Blues. Ottawa: Éditions du Vermillon, 1994. Print. ———. L’Icônaison. Sherbrooke: Éditions Naaman, 1985. Print. ———. La Pharaone. Tunis: L’Or du temps, 1998. Print. ———. Retour à Thyna. Tunis: L’or du temps, 1996. Print. Dahab, F. Elizabeth. “The Arab Canadian Novel and the Rise of Rawi Hage.” The Edinburgh Companion to the Arab Novel in English. Ed. Nouri Gana. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2013. 269–98. Print. ———. “Visages de la francophonie: Du politique, du littéraire, du sociologique.” Postcolonial Literatures: Theory and Practice. Ed. Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek and Sneja Gunew. Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 22.3–4 (1995): 693–705. Print. ———. Voices in the Desert. An Anthology of Arabic-Canadian Women Writers. Toronto: Guernica, 2002. Print. ———. Voices of Exile in Contemporary Canadian Francophone Literature. 2009. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2011. Print. ———. “Representations: Memoirs, Autobiographies, Biographies: Canadian-Francophone.” Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures. Ed. Suad Joseph. Brill Online Reference Works, 2012.http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopedia-of-women-and-islamiccultures/representations-memoirs-autobiographies-biographiescanadian-francophone-EWICCOM_001440. Web. Accessed 10 July 2014. Dahan, Andrée. Chants de la terre morte: Poèmes. Laval, QC: Éditions Trois, 2005. Print. ———. Le Printemps peut attendre. Montréal: Quinze, 1985. Print. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Kafka. Pour une littérature Mineure. Paris:  Éditions de Minuit, 1975. Print. Elkhadem, Saad. Canadian Adventures of the Flying Egyptian. Trans. Saad El Gabalawy. Fredericton: York Press, 1990. Print. ———. Chronicle of the Flying Egyptian in Canada. Trans. Saad El Gabalawy. Fredericton: York Press, 1991. Print. ———. Crash Landing of the Flying Egyptian. Trans. Saad El Gabalawy. Fredericton: York Press, 1992. Print.

On the Poetics of Arab-Canadian Literature    655 ———. One Night in Cairo: An Egyptian Micronovel with Footnotes. Trans. Saad Elkhadem. Fredericton: York Press, 2001. Print. Farhoud, Abla. Le Bonheur a la queue glissante. Montréal: L’Hexagone, 1998. Print. ———. Le Fou d’Omar. Montréal: VLB éditeur, 2005. Print. ———. Jeux de patience. Montréal: VLB éditeur, 1997. Print. ———. Les Rues de l’alligator. Montréal: VLB éditeur, 2003. Print. ———. Le Sourire de la petite juive. Montréal. VLB éditeur, 2011. Print. ———. Splendide solitude. Montréal: L’Hexagone, 2001. Print. Forsyth, Louise. “Resistance to Exile by Girls and Women:  Two Plays by Abla Farhoud.” Modern Drama 48.4 (2005): 800–18. Print. Gana, Nouri. “Everyday Arabness: The Poethics of Arab Canadian Literature and Culture.” CR: The New Centennial Review 9.2 (2009): 21–44. Print. Ghalem, Nadia. Les Jardins de cristal. Québec: Hurtubise, 1981. Print. Hage, Rawi. Carnival. Toronto: Anansi, 2012. Print. ———. Cockroach. New York: Norton, 2008. Print. ———. De Niro’s Game. Toronto: Anansi, 2006. Print. Harel, Simon. “La Parole orpheline de l’écrivain migrant.” Montréal imaginaire: Ville et littérature. Montréal: Fides, 1992. 373–418. Print. Hassan, Marwan. The Confusion of Stones:  Two Novellas. Dunvegan, ON:  Cormorant, 1989. Print. ———. The Memory Garden of Miguel Carranza. Dunvegan, ON: Cormorant, 1991. Print. Kattan, Naim. Adieu Babylone. 1975. Montréal: Leméac, 1986. Print. ———. L’Anniversaire. Montréal: Québec-Amérique, 2000. Print. ———. “L’Anniversaire ou l’hommage raconté.” Écrivain du passage. D’où je viens, où je vais. Saluts:  Hommages et lectures. Ed. Jacques Allard. Montréal:  Hurtubise HMH, 2002. 151–55. Print. ———. “Les Écrivains immigrants et les autres.” International Journal of Canadian Studies/ Revue internationale d’études canadiennes 18 (1998): 185–91. Print. ———. Farewell, Babylon. Trans. Sheila Fischman. Vancouver: Raincoast, 2005. Print. ———. Farewell Babylon: Coming of Age in Jewish Baghdad. Boston: David Godine, 2007. Print. ———. La Fiancée promise. Montréal: Hurtubise HMH, 1983. Print. ———. Les Fruits arrachés. Montréal: Hurtubise HMH, 1977. Print. ———. Le Gardien de mon frère. Montréal: Hurtubise HMH, 2003. Print. ———. Je regarde les femmes. Montréal: Hurtubise HMH, 2005. Print. ———. La Mémoire et la promesse. Montréal: Hurtubise HMH, 1978. Print. ———. Reality and Theatre. Trans. Alan Brown. Toronto: Anansi, 1972. Print. ———. Le Réel et le théatral. Montréal: Hurtubise HMH, 1970. Print. Latif-Ghattas, Mona. Les Filles de Sophie Barat. Montréal: Leméac, 1999. Print. ———. Nicolas, le fils du Nil. Cairo: Elias Publishing, 1985. Print. Lequin, Lucie. “Quand le monde arabe traverse l’Atlantique.” Multi-Culture, multi-écriture: La voix migrante au féminin en France et au Canada. Ed. Lucie Lequin and Maïr Verthuy. Paris/ Montréal: L’Harmattan, 1996. 209–19. Print. ———. “Quelques mouvements de la transculture.” Essays on Canadian Writing 57 (Winter 1995): 128–44. Print. Lequin, Lucie, and Maïr Verthuy, eds. Multi-Culture, Multi-Ecriture:  La voix migrante au féminin en France et au Canada. Paris/Montréal: L’Harmattan, 1996. Print. Ltaif, Nadine. Entre les fleuves. Montréal: Guernica, 1991. Print.

656    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions Malpede, Karen. “Theatre at 2000: A Witnessing Project.” The Year 2000: Essays on the End. Ed. Charles Strozier and Michael Flynn. New York: New York UP, 1997. 299–308. Print. Mouawad, Wajdi. Forests (Forêts). Trans. Linda Gaboriau. Toronto:  Playwrights Canada, 2009. Print. ———. Forêts. Montréal/Paris: Leméac/Actes Sud-Papiers, 2006. Print. ———. Incendies. Montréal/Paris: Leméac/Actes Sud-Papiers, 2003. Print. ———. Littoral. Montréal/Paris: Leméac/Actes Sud-Papiers, 1999. Print. Redekop, Corey. Review of Cockroach, by Rawi Hage. Shelf Monkey:  Book Reviews from a Literate Primate. Sept. 2008. http://shelf-monkey.blogspot.com/2008/09/cockroach-byrawi-hage-review.html. Web. Accessed 4 June 2014. Sabiston, Elizabeth. The Muse Strikes Back: Female Narratology in the Novels of Hédi Bouraoui. Sudbury, ON: Human Sciences Monograph Series, 2005. Print. Said, Edward. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA:  Harvard UP, 2000. 173–86. Print. Sakr, Rita. “Imaginative Migrations: An Interview with the Lebanese-Canadian Writer Rawi Hage.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47.3 (2011): 343–51. Print. Terzian, Sylvia. “Arab Pluralities and Transnationality: ‘A Crisis of Diasporic Consciousness’ in Arab North-American Fiction.” Diss. Wilfrid Laurier University, 2012. Print. Vais, Michel. “Les Nouveaux visages de l’engagement.” Jeu 94 (2000): 120–34. Print. Varoujean, Vasco. Le Moulin du diable. Ottawa: Le Cercle du Livre de France, 1972. Print.

Chapter 35

“People Are Ma de of Pl ac e s ” Perspectives on Region in Atlantic-Canadian Literature Tony Tremblay

To speak of “Atlantic Canada” as a spatial and imaginative entity, one must first consider the complex nature of federation: consider, specifically, the interplay of power and dependency, of centre and margins, and the psychological effects of yearning for an autonomy that is as tenuous and insistent as the larger order that opposes it.1 Maritime union, Québec separation, and Western secession should be viewed in that light. Those movements are not anomalous, as federalist voices would have us believe, but rather are characteristic of federation. To organize power in any form, observed Homi K. Bhabha, is to mobilize the forces of its overthrow. All federations, then, by circumstance of formation, development, and incessant meddling, are uneven and imperfect things. So it is with the federation of Canadian provinces and territories, more properly thought of (and more accurately referred to) as a confederation of regions. That tensions would come to characterize a formation spread over such an immense geographic area was inevitable—as inevitable as the narratives that would be circulated to naturalize the alliance in the minds of citizens. In Canada, those narratives are a kind of glue holding the regions together, a pliable nationalism whose most powerful resins are an amalgam of quasi-subsidized medical care, misremembered histories of order and good government, vague ethnic attachments, a now-deceased celebrity prime minister,2 a national sport played mostly elsewhere, and a social contract under threat by ever-eroding wealth transfers. That the Canadian federation remains intact at all is quite remarkable, likely as much a feature of Canadians’ desire not to cause a fuss as their stubbornness to remain independent of the clutches of their ravenous southern neighbour.

658    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions That Canadians define themselves as “not American,” however, is the height of irony for a people thoroughly and irrevocably Americanized:  they subsist on American food, television, film, music, news, and sports, and they move increasingly to the beat of American absolutes, the latest a troubling fundamentalism in religion and politics. Despite this, the loose confederation of regions persists, and, aside from occasional separatist outbursts across the country, Canada continues to defy the larger political entropy and logic of balkanization. However, to equate this resilience of form with the fact that Canadians are politically indifferent or too comfortably middle aged—desiring sameness over the disruptions of renovation—is to miscalculate the tensions that both define and threaten its tenuous equilibrium. If Canada were a novel, it would still be a work in progress, its length of time in draft the result of self-doubt and a fetish for accommodation. From the moment when Jacques Cartier laid claim to the New World at Penouille Point (Gaspé, Québec) on his first voyage in July 1534—“fix[ing] a shield with three fleurs-de-lys in relief, and above it a wooden board … where was written Long Live the King of France” (26)—the east coast of what would later become Canada has been in the grips of exactly this provisionality: overwritten, that is, by narratives that have sought to claim or position the region as liminal, both emergent and dependent space. Settled but never fully formed, matured but never fully independent, “Atlantic Canada” is the adult child who has never left home. As a transitional space forever proximate to the more powerful parentage of empire and nation, “Atlantic Canada” is thus a palimpsest of the imaginative constructions of outsiders as much as the productions of native-born writers and critics. As such, the region’s denotation in larger narratives of federation has determined its use-value: what people inside and outside the region think of it, and, in a more fundamental Marxian sense, how it has been constructed to meet their needs. In this chapter I will identify how “region,” as both physical territory and imaginative space, has been constructed in Atlantic-Canadian literature. To do this, I will describe some of the dominant expressions of region in the literature and criticism of Atlantic Canada. Those expressions evince elemental and material conditions of landscape, domesticity, and work that are especially evident in the place-based mythologies of the pioneering builders and Confederation-era writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I will also consider how post-Confederation Atlantic-Canadian authors have perceived and addressed the politics of region in their work. Examining what might be termed a “critical poetics of the Atlantic” is particularly useful for observing the challenges to the presumptions of regionalism in the work of East Coast authors such as Frank Parker Day, Antonine Maillet, John Steffler, Lynn Coady, and Wayne Johnston. This chapter, then, will follow the various and often competing ways that both “region” and “regionalism” have been inscribed in the critical and imaginative works of Atlantic-Canadian writers. What this treatment will show is that, far from being reified in the literature and criticism of the East, “region” continues to be the ground for negotiating the area’s shifting relationships with powerful federations of empire, nation, and, today, postnationalism.3

Perspectives on Region in Atlantic-Canadian Literature    659

Constructing Absence and Plenitude to Create Imaginative Space: Commodifying the East Coast of British North America “Use-value,” writes Henri Lefebvre, is as important a determinant of spatial relations as it is of labour—and is manifest in “the circulation and exchange of signs (language, discourse)” (100). Consequently, all designations of “space” function like commodities in the organization of class, in resource control, and in imperial (or federal) authority. To embrace place subjectively, to map territory remotely, or merely to seek landfall on behalf of others is to be bound up in a political economy of utility and exchange. Such was the complicity of the first visitors and settlers to the east coast of British North America. None came without the apparatus and larger needs of his society (they all were male), whether those were John Cabot’s “arms of the Holy Father and those of the King of England” (qtd. in Vigneras 219) or Cartier’s disappointment that Labrador “was the lande that God allotted to Caine” (qtd. in New 56). John Rut’s descriptions of Newfoundland during his 1527 voyage are especially typical: the land he saw “all wildernesse and mountaines and woods, [with] no naturall ground but all mosse, and no inhabitation nor no people” (qtd. in Biggar 104–05). For Rut, speaking unwittingly for the whole symbolic complex of empire behind him, Newfoundland first had to be written before it had any use-value—and for it to be written, he had to unwrite it, effectively emptying it of meaning it may already have had (and to which he, coming from another worldview, was completely oblivious). First contact, then, was essentially discursive, but discursive in an important way: the tropes of that discourse were actually prefigured in European history. The Atlantic region’s first name is illustrative: “Acadia” derived from Arcadia—its Greek root from Arcas, the hunter—and its Renaissance usage connoting both a wilderness unspoiled and, from that, a pastoral felicity. When discovered, Acadia was therefore exactly what it was supposed to be: remote, as Rut and Cartier represented it, and pristine, as Robert Hayman would describe it in Quodlibets (1628). “The Air in Newfoundland is wholesome, good,” wrote Hayman, “The Waters, very rich, both salt and fresh; / The Earth more rich, you know it no less” (12). In the imaginative work of generations of subsequent settlers, the region was represented as holding this dual promise of elemental bounty and limitless potential. The Loyalist Colonel Gabriel Ludlow, newly arrived in New Brunswick with the 1780s wave of post-revolutionary American idealists, was still drawing on the same tropes, expressing the need for expansive government assistance if the Loyalists were to “exist in an uncultivated country” (qtd. in Condon 67), by which he meant promising, remote, and desirable. His defense of the Loyalist motto—Spem Reduxit, or Hope Restored—reflected this.

660    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions The full imaginative tendering of the region for its exchange value did not occur until 1806, however, when Napoleon enacted his Berlin Decree, which implemented a continental embargo against British trade. One effect was the blockade of Eastern European (mostly Baltic) wood supplies to Britain, a serious blow to the country’s timber-dependent Royal Navy. Britain immediately looked to its colonies for wood supply, thereby initiating the most sustained period of growth and resource development in Atlantic-Canadian history. What was an empty (or discursively emptied) land of vague promise became a space of plenitude and industry, the needs of which occupied the minds of the region’s literary artists of the period. Jonathan Odell, Oliver Goldsmith, and Joseph Howe wrote familiarly about an Atlantic Canada that modeled the Edenic, but did so with the conviction of native-born settlers of the New World who were deeply invested in what Ian McKay later termed its “rising liberal order” (Rebels 57–60). Howe echoed Hayman almost exactly a full 200 years later in his posthumously published long poem of 1874, Acadia: “Where does the Sun its richest radiance shed? / Where are the choicest gifts of Nature spread?” (5). The answer, of course, is Nova Scotia, which Howe positioned as part of a larger catchment of “rising villages” (the term is Goldsmith’s) whose utility to the empires of Britain and France was no longer measured in settlement but in resources and the political considerations of sovereignty that resource plenitude brings. To understand the sketches of Thomas McCulloch and T.C. Haliburton, the region’s preeminent writers of the pre-Confederation era, is thus to consider the larger challenges of resource wealth afflicting and ultimately changing the region from the Loyalist utopia it was for Edward Winslow and John Wentworth to the rising liberal state of laissez-faire reciprocity and responsible government, both presaging nationhood. The social satires of McCulloch and Haliburton—most fully evident in the chidings of McCulloch’s Mephibosheth Stepsure (The Letters of Mephibosheth Stepsure [1820–23]) and Haliburton’s Sam Slick (The Clockmaker; or, The Sayings and Doings of Samuel Slick of Slickville [1836])—correspondingly cast Easterners in a narrative of personal and community development: preoccupied with negotiating the terms of boundaries, good and bad conduct, a fast-growing and often itinerant (and unruly) labour class, immigrant arrival and out-migration, and an ever-assertive American neighbour, whose revoking of reciprocity agreements in 1866 provided a pressing reason for Atlantic Canada to invoke its own border identity. For McCulloch, that identity was necessarily bound up in the thrift and good management of the cautious Stepsure; for Haliburton, in the ambition and cunning of the peddler Slick; and for Howe, in the practical politics of universal education, the surest means to “liberal” self-reliance. If citizens, Howe wrote, “are educated they will not be without the means of raising money, of making roads, of forwarding enterprise and regulating matters of trade” (qtd. in Beck 28). The literature of the period, written mostly by well-educated and well-intentioned Tories, was thus a literature of liberal proselytizing. It turned development into fetish. What is important to understand is that McCulloch, Howe, and Haliburton were inventing the region just as Rut, Cabot, and Cartier had done. Each in his era was reading region against the larger complex of empire through which he spoke: some petitioning

Perspectives on Region in Atlantic-Canadian Literature    661 for a continuance of the Loyalist utopia (that indivisibility of constitution and state modeled on what was thought to be the perfection of Britain), others negotiating for more openness to the republicanism emerging from France and America. Yet again, the region, as imagined and represented, was liminal, both emergent and dependent space. Responsible government may indeed have accelerated its swerve from the monarchy toward Confederation (representing a much softer landing than revolution), but not to the extent that it gave the region any definable or independent autonomy. Atlantic Canada was still a synecdoche for empire, suggested McCulloch in “Letter XVI” of The Letters of Mephibosheth Stepsure, Maritimers a “decent sort … if they had only good management” (131). The path to decolonization would only arrive with Confederation, and then emerge most forcefully when promises of Confederation prosperity did not materialize.

Confederation as Fault-Line: Troping Remorse, Want, and Blame in a Have-Less Region When the region formally joined Confederation,4 an alliance entered into reluctantly and with conditions, the rationale for doing so was mostly reactionary, undertaken to extend a long era of prosperity but also, and more shrewdly (even cynically), to partake of a westward moving mean that gravitated toward centralized wealth and urban concentrations of power that would quickly turn the region to penury. A common perception of the time compared Atlantic Canada to a grand old hotel whose windows faced the ocean while the rest of the country accelerated rapidly west. Intuiting this shift in fortunes, the region’s Confederation poets and their literary heirs adopted tones of lamentation and nostalgia that elegized the utopias, or at least the promised utopias, of the past. For Charles G.D. Roberts, the most representative of the group, that sense of the fading idyll had a twofold effect on his work and the work of three generations of Atlantic-Canadian writers who followed him. First, it forced upon him the necessity of developing an original Atlantic-Canadian trope: the emotive register of mutability. Second, it enabled him to perfect a formal apparatus to address that condition: the presentation of place with documentary-like fidelity. The latter, of course, stems from the former. When something is lost or fading, the artist redoubles the effort to preserve it, if only by imagined facsimile. Roberts, a place-based nationalist at heart, combines both in his poem “The Tantramar Revisited” (1886), the most important poem to come out of the region in the nineteenth century. Its elongated Ovidian metres and epic address carrying the weight of ponderousness and sorrow, the poem presents a detailed catalogue of closely observed and intimately held topological features of place before finally distancing itself from the landscape the speaker holds so dear. Adopting the Romantic impulse to recollect from afar, the speaker turns his back

662    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions on his cherished home, fearing that change has made it unrecognizable. The final lines of the poem are well known to readers of Canadian literature: Yet will I stay my steps and not go down to the  marsh-land,— Muse and recall far off, rather remember than see,— Lest on too close sight I miss the darling illusion, Spy at their task even here the hands of chance and  change. (58)

The poem turns emotionally on the words “even here,” their inference suggesting a new position—and a new psychic condition—for Atlantic Canadians. No longer at the centre of the North-Atlantic colonial experiment, Roberts’s region is now folklore, placed in the rearview mirror of imperial history and positioned deliberately on the periphery of a Canada expanding in the opposite direction. “Even here,” the poem intimates, all that was promised, that was willed to withstand the vicissitudes of modernity and change, is now lost. As critic David Creelman states with lyric flair, the result was “a culture of memory unleavened by dream” (216). At best, the region might become the conscience of the nation, the place where founding myths were formed. In reality, with the Maritime Rights Movement of the 1920s and the fierce political battles that attended the Newfoundland referendum debates in 1948, it would take another direction, testing the boundaries of federal orthodoxy and perfecting a spirited opposition to centralisms that the powerful misunderstood as grievance. Affixed rather haphazardly to a strange new alliance of distant territories (an unwelcome arranged marriage), the region’s peculiar makeup of historical agency and social exclusion was captured expertly in the figure of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne, also orphaned and adrift, who is as indigent, mouthy, and occasionally self-aggrandizing as the region itself would have to become. To repeat Bhabha on the will of the subaltern: to organize power in any form is to mobilize the forces of its overthrow. Atlantic-Canadian literature, accordingly, shifted from being unconsciously political (an organ for the dominant ideological systems of Empire) to consciously activist, speaking directly to the forces of its marginalization. In doing so, writers adopted strategies that anticipated Antonio Gramsci’s “war of position” (168), Wayne Johnston’s Baltimore’s Mansion (1999) a late example of the literary force and artistry of that form of address. In that memoir of his family’s opposition to Newfoundland joining Confederation, Johnston weighs the consequences of trading one national history for another, concluding that a united Canada leaves citizens of former colonies without countries of their own. In a game-cum-parlour trick between father and son that captures the family’s animus for a confederate Newfoundland, a young Wayne is asked to respond rapidly to a series of questions his father poses, each about Newfoundland history. When Joey Smallwood’s name surfaces—Smallwood the premier who brought Newfoundland into Confederation—the game becomes especially animated. Wayne’s father asks, “Could you do him justice in a single sentence?” to which Wayne replies, “Death by hanging,”

Perspectives on Region in Atlantic-Canadian Literature    663 thereby eliciting thunderous applause from the anti-Confederates who visit their home (66). What developed after Roberts was a poetics of resistance that replayed similar responses to the region’s loss of status and authority, and which was particularly resonant for subsequent generations of Canadians who arrived as equally powerless immigrants, who suffered the delusions of two world wars, and who, despite the horrors of aggressive nationalisms, rallied to the paternalistic persuasions of Canada or its regions as political entities. In the East, the post-Roberts hybrid of place-based loyalty, descriptive fidelity, and enervating disappointment was especially cogent, advanced by Hugh MacLennan, Elizabeth Brewster, Ernest Buckler, Kay Smith, Charles Bruce, David Adams Richards, Wayne Curtis, and Alistair MacLeod. Of that mid-twentieth-century generation, Buckler’s The Mountain and the Valley (1952) is the most poignant of the literary records of loss, its protagonist, David Canaan, a symbol of promise extinguished. (Buckler’s Ox Bells and Fireflies [1968] and Curtis’s River Stories [2000] are the region’s best examples of the post-Roberts mastery of place-based loyalty and descriptive fidelity.) Like Roberts’s speaker in “The Tantramar Revisited,” and like the region from which he emerges, Buckler’s David, precocious and idealistic preserver of the narratives of place, is stifled and eventually undone by change, unable to adapt because of a sensibility that is agrarian, rural, and communal, as opposed to industrial, urban, and individualist. Social shifts toward the latter—with a corresponding loss of the British ideal (what critic Janice Kulyk Keefer calls “the agrarian gospel” [17])—are represented by the mid-century generation as tantamount to the rise of “democratic Tyranny” (Odell 111) that the Loyalists feared, and which Buckler captures with weighty symbolic effect at the end of his novel: A big American company had bought these farms solely for their timber. The company had no interest in the houses or the fields. The people had moved to town. The houses just stood there. Their doors were open and their windows broken out by hunters. The walls were still upright; but the kitchen floors sagged toward the cellar, the plaster had warped and crumbled. (247)

Alistair MacLeod later picks up and underscores the point with a good dose of irony in the novel No Great Mischief (1999) when his own main character observes the slogan on a young Toronto woman’s T-shirt. It reads, “ ‘Living in the past is not living up to our potential’ ” (60), an aphorism carefully attuned to what has become the Maritime condition. “Our,” in this case, means a modern progressive “Canada”—a Canada, in fact, that looks a lot like America—while “the past” denotes the iconic golden age within which Eastern Canadians supposedly still wallow. In a complex exogenous turn (in fact, a fascinating cultural operation that warrants much more extensive study5), the macro-economic plight of the Atlantic region becomes mapped onto its citizens, with predictably negative results. Not only had the Maritime condition already become an infirmity to be treated (in 1926 the Duncan Commission was the first of many federal initiatives to find “ ‘practical solutions’ ” to regional disparity [Savoie 37]), but Atlantic Canadians are increasingly blamed for being

664    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions agents of their own economic predicament. As one commentator from Montreal put it, “the Maritime provinces were like a housewife who having married for money which failed to materialize ‘neglected her housework, went down to the seashore … watched the ships go by and pouted’ ” (qtd. in Forbes 59). What this view distorted, of course, was that it was the Canadians (Upper and Lower) who profited from this arranged marriage, not the Maritimers. It distorted, as well, that geopolitical forces such as the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 had radically altered the already fragile timber economy in Atlantic Canada, especially when original-growth timber from British Columbia started making its way through the canal to flood the North Atlantic market. That seemingly distant development took 30 percent off the price of sawn lumber and eliminated 50 percent of sawmill jobs in the region (Creelman 10), effectively ending the timber boom that had started in 1806. Despite these supra-regional geopolitical factors, the myth of deficiency, however distorted, was compelling, and it gained imaginative traction in the 1920s when writers such as Madge Macbeth began the pan-Canadian habit of generalizing regional differences across the country. Her main character in The Land of Afternoon is fully invested in these generalizations, stating that when he thought of the West he thought “of a rugged people who were still alive to the practical advancement of idealism, divorced from stultifying subservience to convention” (351, emphasis added), the latter observation a clear reference to (and swipe at) Easterners. Historian Margaret Conrad identifies the same myth of deficiency informing political scientist Barry Cooper’s more contemporary thought, citing his “Alberta” argument that “[Atlantic Canada’s] stagnation and decadence remain the most prominent features of pre-modern communal life to have survived into the present” (3). Westerners, of course, were not the only ones invested in these generalizations. As Ian McKay has noted in his invaluable work on intra-regional myth making, Maritimers were also perpetrators of notions that consigned want and inadequacy—manifest as anti-modern essentialism (purity, rusticity, innocence, and quaintness [Quest 30–31])— to their own people. The aim, argued McKay, was to turn the impoverished Maritime landscape into therapeutic space, making of it a “romantic antithesis to everything [cultural producers] disliked about modern urban and industrial life” (Quest 4). Thus was born, from the pens of Frank Parker Day and Helen Creighton, the idea of the Maritime “folk,” that rugged but friendly breed of Easterner who is quick with a saw, speaks with an old-world twang, and charms tourists with song, superstition, and lore. Day’s Rockbound (1928) hones these stereotypes of a rugged conservatism to near perfection. Weaving a dark social romance out of the competition between an uncompromising fisherman, Uriah Jung, the rich king of Rockbound, and his upstart relation, the novel plays with exaggerations of character, locale, and adventure, creating a narrative landscape that is as fantastic as it is irresistible. And though Day’s representation of the region was fiercely opposed by locals, his portrayals won wide popular appeal. From the 1930s forward, similar characterizations of the region’s people provided the shorthand that enabled outsiders to assume monocultural uniformity in the East, and gave insiders a direct path to intelligibility. What better way to speak to a remote audience than in the

Perspectives on Region in Atlantic-Canadian Literature    665 cultural apparatus of their assumptions, especially when those assumptions appeared “to be self-evidently true” (McKay, Quest 31)? The consequence for Buckler’s David Canaan and characters like him was that they were read through a new kind of interpretive filter that was selectively self-fulfilling. Buckler’s David, in other words, was interpreted against preconceived notions of the region, and was therefore viewed as being weak and deficient (Deacon; Tallman 12–14; Jones 23–25), an intellectual misfit on a landscape better suited to characters like Day’s Uriah. By contrast to the rugged seascapes that Day had created, David’s surroundings were flat—so flat, concluded first reviewer Stuart Keate, that “[n]‌othing much exciting happens on the Canaan farm” (5). In his reluctance to adapt to a changing rural demographic that claims his brother and sister, David is assumed to embody the wider socioeconomic belief (challenged by historians Buckner; Alexander; Sager and Panting) that the inability of the region to industrialize after the loss of the wooden hull and whitepine timber economy resulted in its decline. Weakness and defeat thus become the unchallenged tropes that dominate popular thinking about the region. Correspondingly, a “stultifying subservience to convention” (considered either as Old-World charm or the malaise of dependency) becomes a defining characteristic of the region and its people. Atlantic Canadians, the myth suggests, just cannot muster the gumption to get up and get moving, to push against history. No longer stewards of enterprise, they are increasingly represented as burdensome to the rest of the federation.6 Better, the myth implies, that they be taken off programs of equalization and support and fend for themselves in a free market, laissez-faire Canada. Better, in other words, that they become republican. Not surprisingly, the next generation of Atlantic-Canadian writers began to challenge these myths of malaise and deficiency. Newfoundland’s Percy Janes was the first, his House of Hate (1970) a stark and vivid treatment of violence as both social and familial inheritance. Alistair MacLeod followed in two masterful collections of short stories, The Lost Salt Gift of Blood (1976) and As Birds Bring Forth the Sun (1986), each collection bringing readers closer to the realities of physical labour and structural impoverishment as an extension of global market forces. Buttressed by mesmerizing and melodious prose, each MacLeod story is a fully realized history that captures, often painfully, the tolls that compromise, hardship, and limitation place on individuals who live on the edges of empire and economic systems. What young characters in each story learn is that only fellowship and blood make the disappointments tolerable: “I guess your people have been on the coal over there for a long time?” asks the voice beside me. “Yes,” I say, “since 1873.” “Son of a bitch,” he says, after a pause, “it seems to bust your balls and it’s bound to break your heart.” (“The Vastness of the Dark” 51)

David Adams Richards extended this form of address, mapping the psychological terrain of powerlessness and disdain. His New Brunswick in novels such as Lives of Short

666    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions Duration (1981) and Road to the Stilt House (1985) manifests the effects of inferiority and ennui, but as the trickle-down of social policies (like Confederation and growth-pole economics) that create inequity. The social disorder, class violence, and family disruption that follow continue Roberts’s registers of “chance and change,” but amplify them for an age when disparities and assumptions of deficiency have become normative. Perhaps not surprisingly, critics occupying positions of institutional privilege reacted strongly to Richards’s depictions, observing, like Donna Pennee, how difficult it is to “evaluate yet another novel on yet another northern New Brunswick mill town” (41). Reviewers like Pennee made it clear which literary treatments were acceptable to central-Canadian readers and which were not, erecting their own psychological screens to protect themselves from the social realism they were observing. It is within this context—this dialectic between the assumption of deficiency and the hard edge of literary response—that disparaging comments about fictional (and real) characters from the region must be read.

Troping the Tropes: Atlantic Canada Writes Back Viewed broadly, the literary rebuttal, if it can be called that, was neither swift nor regularized. Rather, it took the form of three distinct modes of address. First, the myth of deficiency elicited the gradual development of a deeply humanist impulse in the contemporary literature of the region. Writers such as Alden Nowlan, Milton Acorn, Fred Cogswell, Helen Porter, Mary Dalton, Sheldon Currie, and Bernice Morgan addressed the forces that objectified their people by putting those people under the microscope, exposing their vulnerabilities and raising their nobility as a means of contesting the generalizations being advanced as social truth. Representational realism, what critic Danielle Fuller calls “a mapping of social relations” (30), became a way to foreground the Atlantic-Canadian persona for readers who might otherwise bend to generalizations about the region. For Keefer, the strategy enabled others to “ ‘see’ ” (7), and by seeing, to undo the thin characterization that made dismissal easy. Strategies of “thick” citizenship—strategies that Creelman says “attempted to articulate the vexed assumptions of their home” (216)—were therefore widely deployed by Atlantic-Canadian writers. Alden Nowlan’s creations are the most arresting of this mode of address. His characterizations of “The Bull Moose,” “The Mysterious Naked Man,” “Warren Pryor,” “Daughter of Zion,” and “The Shack Dwellers” are deeply realized expressions of pain, foible, and self-loathing—and powerfully illustrate, as Creelman suggests, “that the individual subject is essentially trapped within a deterministic social structure” (24), thus a condition, not an anomaly, of a system that creates inequities. Who would suspect, asks Nowlan in “Daughter of Zion,” that the bag lady with “the bloodless lips, the

Perspectives on Region in Atlantic-Canadian Literature    667 ugly knot of salt-coloured hair,” was kissed by Christ “in a tent by the river” as “the Holy Ghost … spoke through her mouth / the language they speak in heaven” (12)? Who would guess, asks Nowlan in another poem, that on a street where “even the dogs / would rather fight / than eat”—where in nine months, the poet has “never once heard / a gentle word spoken”—that “gentle words are whispered / and harsh words shouted” (“Britain Street” 17)? For Nowlan and many of the writers of his generation, the way to answer to the presumptions of backwardness and deficiency was to push representational realism to its emotive limits. Only empathy could pierce the hard shell of disdain. As Sheldon Currie’s Margaret says at the end of The Glace Bay Miners’ Museum (1995), “[t]‌he big meetings all took place in Montreal. Nobody knew what was going on. There wasn’t enough money, we got seven dollars a week to live on” (123). Her point is clear: How, she is asking, is this kind of social structure our fault? How are people expected to live in a place where absentee managers downplay the lives of locals against the demands of outsiders (read “shareholders”)? The outcome, she concludes, is always predetermined; the system of inequity prevails, unjust though it may be, because inequity is part of the profit formula. In a bizarre twist on Nowlan’s tactic of emotive intimacy, Margaret puts the body parts of her dead kin into pickling jars, opening a museum in which they are on display. This is the price of coal, she asserts; this is the cost of working in unsafe and bootleg mines. If Nowlan’s attempt was to cultivate empathy, Margaret’s is to revile tourists and assail the fraudulent notion of the region’s Old-World charm offering a balm of “therapeutic” space. Lynn Coady’s fiction would embellish this kind of irony, portraying the “strange heaven” that is the post-idyllic East Coast. Viewed as a place of the bizarre and absurd, her region is often perceived through the eyes of young women from “cuckoo’s nest” families (Strange Heaven 133), their dysfunction the dominant local colour of place. Murdeena, the young female protagonist in “Jesus Christ, Murdeena” from Coady’s 2001 collection Play the Monster Blind, is typical. Though nearly perfect—“as a baby she never cried. As a child, never talked back. As a teenager, never sullen” (76)—she is surrounded by siblings who skirt the law and erode her sense of decency: “Martin had driven drunk and had to go to AA or face jail, and Cora had gotten pregnant and then married and then divorced, and Alistair had failed grade nine” (76). Even her mother, whom she affectionately calls “mother” (the formality of its usage considered pretentious), chafes against her refinements, “ram[ming] a taunt, red fist into a swollen mound of bread dough [and saying] ‘Will you take your “mothers” and stuff them up your hole, please, dear’ ” (76). Teenage pregnancy, psychiatric instability, senility, incarceration, and the incessant surveillance of community mores and judgment turn Coady’s landscapes into carnivalesque spaces in which characters literally take on the roles assigned to them by outsiders—but do so in pantomimes for heightened comic effect. As Coady describes in her introduction to Victory Meat, the purpose of such pantomime is to render both the disdain for and the fetishization of the region absurd, thus getting the last laugh on the upper Canadians (2). Much less colourful, but equally sophisticated, was the effort made in AtlanticCanadian literature to think through larger ecologies of association between Easterners

668    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions and the resources, predominantly animals and land, upon which they were historically dependent. This second response to the myth of deficiency has its roots in the animal stories of Margaret Marshall Saunders and Charles G.D. Roberts, is shaped conceptually in the work of New Brunswick poet A.G. Bailey, and later appears as a fully developed theory of eco-poetics in the work of John Thompson, Don Domanski, Harold Horwood, M. Travis Lane, Harry Thurston, Allan Cooper, and John Steffler. Conceived of by Bailey as an openness to apposite proportion—expressed theoretically in his work on ethnohistory and metaphorically in the line “Let whales wake and sleep in their / own water, / the muskrat in his” (18)—the ecological notions of context and proportion have direct application to larger iterations of federation (human/animal, government/individual, federal/regional) that all marginalized, resource-dependent people encounter. Responding, albeit less provocatively than Currie and Coady, to absentee efforts to commodify the East Coast as “Canada’s Ocean Playground” and other such touristic themepark designations, the impulse to eco-poetics is restorative in two important ways: first, it seeks to reclaim the power of local definition and perception in order to counter what D.M.R. Bentley describes as the forces of “denatured uniformity … that threaten to obliterate [culture’s] unique, local, regional, and national characteristics” (15); and, second, it locates in natural spaces a richness and diversity of life that refutes the postindustrial presumption of pastoral decay. In initiating a much more expansive (and at the same time focused) consideration of the biome, Atlantic-Canadian eco-poetics examines the processes by which animals, as the acted upon, both replay and recover from the dramas of economic colonization, which is not to suggest that the region’s eco-poets are anthropocentric, but that their understanding of history and marginalization opens them to particular sensitivities to both environments and ecologies within environments. Alistair MacLeod’s animals are illustrative, his horses and dogs eliciting strong feelings of fidelity on the basis of loyalty, perseverance, and vulnerability. “It was in those dogs,” he writes, “to care too much and to try too hard” (57), the consequence of which is to be shot, drowned, and abandoned to historical memory—each fate admitting them to the Atlantic fraternity. The larger point is that, like humans, animals warrant agency and the greater democracy (care, respect, and unknowability) that agency brings. MacLeod’s conjoining of the animal and human signals, ultimately, a moral necessity informing encroachment, a necessity that becomes obvious when equivalency is granted to the other. Eco-poetics, then, educates perception by imposing what David Abram terms “reciprocity” (56), the post-imperial realization that will and sentience are not solely actions of the dominant. As Merleau-Ponty explains, “to listen to the forest is also, primordially, to feel oneself listened to by the forest, just as to gaze … is to feel oneself exposed and visible” (153). New Brunswick poet M. Travis Lane has explored this reciprocity, particularly the gaze of oceans and rivers, in a body of work that seeks to decentre the ego, thereby raising to the level of human perception a multitude of forces that this perception normally subordinates. In the early poem “Colonial,” she invokes Robert Frost, a kindred spirit among Atlantic-Canadian poets, to define what, beyond the human ego, is right proportion: “Our little bells ring steadily; / beyond them drones / the deaf Atlantic sponging us,

Perspectives on Region in Atlantic-Canadian Literature    669 / dot on a dull map, from our sight” (10). Next to such presence, she writes, “[w]‌e have our meaning in the clay” as “frost / crack[s] the gravestones, antlers / [rot] among the epitaphs” (10). For Lane, decay is nature’s project, but it is a regenerative one for rebuffing the colonial trope that the land is “innocent, romantic, or pure” (Lynes xiii). We must inhabit wilderness and the world differently and with less ambition, she writes in “About the Size of It”: Better he should go mousely; creep flat as a dry leaf; write on snow calligraphy of his own diary doings; claim only a single errand run; report: one nut. (53)

That this form of address to the delimiting tropes of want, stagnation, and blame would be pioneered in a region that has been acted-upon, objectified, disenfranchised, and made dependent is no accident: in thinking through the complex ethics of encroachment, Atlantic-Canadian eco-poets seek to change the terms of the country’s broader ecology. Nor was the third literary response to the myth of deficiency accidental. That response more narrowly conceived of the localisms by which region was comprised. And much like the first two modes of address, this response was both reactionary and restorative. Rooted in a pan-regional distrust of large structures of centralized governance—and with an abundance of post-Confederation economic evidence to support that distrust (the uneven distribution of Senate seats, crown corporations, federal bureaucracies, and financial headquarters)—some of the region’s most vulnerable constituencies organized culturally to assert their identities, if only for themselves. Taking place in an environment in which publishing houses, national magazines, cultural media, and other instruments of avowal were clustered in distant urban centres in Ontario and Québec, this retraction to the local found fertile ground in areas of the region where language and traditional culture were threatened by the erasures of nationalist and global liberal orders. New Brunswick’s Acadian Renaissance continues to be the most robust example of this subregional response to the myth of deficiency. Fermented in a vortex of student protest, language politics, and the frenetic outgrowth of cultural infrastructure from the newly erected Université de Moncton (1963), this grassroots movement modeled a comprehensive program of community self-reliance that took responsibility for self-definition away from distant media and cultural producers and put it in the hands of locals. Since its beginnings in the early 1970s, the movement has literally remade Acadian identity in the world, turning resilience into a form of cultural resistance (in French, résistance means both resilience and resistance). Acadian writers such as Antonine Maillet, Herménégilde Chiasson, Rose Després, Serge Patrice Thibodeau, and Dyane Léger have acquired international followings, eclipsing Canada for a world readership. Maillet’s

670    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions monumental achievement of imagining an entire history for her people, a history set down in the groundbreaking novel of repatriation Pélagie-la-Charrette (1979), stands as the region’s modern exemplar of Northrop Frye’s well-known thesis of the disjunction of identity and unity: that while “[i]‌dentity is local and regional, rooted in the imagination and in works of culture[,] unity is national in reference, international in perspective, and rooted in a political feeling” (Bush Garden ii). Without “a political feeling” of full and equal partnership in the federation, the Acadian cultural community (and, by extension, the region from which it comes) has therefore enacted the paradox of Canada. To quote Frye again, it has enacted the fact that Canada, as conceived and evolved, works unevenly at best:  “the conception of Canada doesn’t really make all that much sense. ‘Canada’ is a political entity; the cultural counterpart that we call ‘Canada’ is really a federation not of provinces but of regions and communities” (“From Nationalism” 8). “The question of Canadian identity,” Frye concludes elsewhere, “[is thus] a regional question” (Bush Garden i–ii). And indeed it is, evidenced by the increasing balkanization of Atlantic Canada in the work of George Elliott Clarke and Maxine Tynes to map the subcultural geography of Africadia; of Leo McKay, Jr., and Lynn Coady to chart the industrial subcultures of working-class Nova Scotia; of Rita Joe and Lorne Simon to construct Aboriginal canvases radically different from those of settlers; and of the manifold efforts of Newfoundland’s Burning Rock Collective (Lisa Moore, Michael Crummey, Jessica Grant, Michael Winter, Edward Riche) to alter readers’ knowledge of outport culture and urban affinities. Whether Clarke’s sound experiments in Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues (1983) or Steffler’s chastening of the appetitive George Cartwright in The Afterlife of George Cartwright (1992), the effort of these dissonant witnesses has been to complicate history—to make it, learns Steffler’s Cartwright, “less limited [and] less predictable” (284). For Frye, this strategic localism—a tactic that has always been considered “provincial” in the Canadian lexicon (see note 5)—is key to the country’s coming of age, for “the more specific the setting of literature, the more universal its communicating power” (“The Teacher” 7). New Brunswick’s Acadian writers are a case in point, as are other Atlantic-Canadian “textual communities” whose “writing [of] the everyday,” qualifies Fuller, “is an epistemological project” undertaken to both identify and validate “unarticulated stories and knowledges” (8). In the literature of the region today, similar interiorities and assumptions about “the provincial” are being explored in an effort to reassert the primacy of place and community in the human experience. Partly fueling this work is the desire to fend off the persuasions of globalization that threaten to erase assertions of the local that writers fought so hard to legitimize. Critic Herb Wyile sees this effort as literally reshaping Atlantic-Canadian literature, thus fully realizing the political power of both its history and its unique response to federation. To further deflect the region from the “austere book-keeper’s world of neo-liberal economics,” its literary class, he suggests, must continue to inhabit “the local,” but in ways “much more nuanced and less consoling” (240)—in ways that examine the discordant notes of regional bigotry and racism while also celebrating the franchise of rootedness and fealty to place that Atlantic Canadians

Perspectives on Region in Atlantic-Canadian Literature    671 exhibit. In the end, the advice of one of MacLeod’s characters is both the most sage and, yet, the most problematic: “I believe you should always look after your own blood” (58), a principle that focuses the effort but invokes the tribalism that always makes the local that much harder to defend against presumptions of the parochial. The future direction of Atlantic-Canadian literature will likely follow the renewed sense of agency and frustration—Creelman calls it “anxiety” (11)—that Easterners feel. Clearly evident in the region is an unprecedented skepticism about all levels of government, from municipal to federal. Along with that is a vocal resistance to what is perceived as a paternalistic liberal order (called out by the region’s intellectuals as an overt neoliberalism7) that seeks consensus in bringing Atlantic Canadians into various compacts with hegemonic forces that have never served them well. Danny Williams, Newfoundland’s former premier (2003–10) and champion, understood this perfectly in battling corporate Québec over future hydroelectric development. Nova Scotia and New Brunswick voters followed suit, dismissing their most recent governments for misdeeds, backroom deals, and half truths. It was the first time since Confederation that both provincial governments fell after only one term. With rapid dismantling of the transportation infrastructures in the region—train service has diminished to the sporadic, the symbolism of which reminds Maritimers that the most important condition they placed on entering Confederation is now almost gone—the mood in Atlantic Canada is the equivalent of that which fueled talk of Maritime Union in the 1920s. Add to this dynamic the fact that western Canadians, abetted by Bay Street sympathizers like New Brunswick’s former premier Frank McKenna (1987–97), are becoming increasingly tight-fisted and intolerant of equalization, and the conditions are ripe for a literature of much more vocal protest. “Writing alone cannot solve the inequalities engendered by economic systems,” says Fuller, “nor will it put cod back into the Atlantic Ocean or reopen the coal mines. But as an activity that emerges from, and demands, a community of readers and listeners, writing challenges the ideologies of privatization and individualism by putting words to shared experiences” (29). As postcolonial literatures around the world have shown, it will be the artists, not the politicians, who create the world that citizens desire.

Notes 1. Concerning the title of this chapter, see Elizabeth Brewster’s poem “Where I Come From.” 2. I am referring to the very popular Pierre Elliott Trudeau (1919–2000), who was prime minister of Canada from 1968 to 1979, and again from 1980 to 1984. 3. This chapter provides a broad-based understanding of regional representation and collective identity in Eastern-Canadian literature. Governed by an intention to explore the “regional” in that literature, I adopt the term “Atlantic Canada” to denote a territory that includes Newfoundland as well as the Maritime provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island. Because each province shares similarities of geography, ethnicity, federalism, resource dependency, and economic history, it is useful to think of the four as constituting a region—separate, for example, from the Prairies or Québec. At the same time, however, each province is quite unique and possesses its own diversity of

672    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions subcultures (Acadie, Cape Breton, Labrador). The most unique of the four Atlantic provinces is Newfoundland, which warrants its own chapter in this collection. For a fuller understanding of that province’s literature, see Chapter 36 in this volume by Paul Chafe. 4. In 1867, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia joined Ontario and Québec to form the Dominion of Canada, popularly known as Confederation. Prince Edward Island entered Confederation in 1873, and Newfoundland, by a small majority vote, in 1949. 5. Some of this work has been done as part of a reconsideration of regionalism in Canada. See, for example, E.R. Forbes’s Challenging the Regional Stereotype (Fredericton, NB: Acadiensis, 1989); James Bickerton’s Nova Scotia, Ottawa, and the Politics of Regional Development (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1990); Ian McKay’s The Quest of the Folk; W.H. New’s Borderlands (Vancouver:  U of British Columbia P, 1998); Christian Riegel and Herb Wyile’s A Sense of Place (Edmonton/Kamloops: U of Alberta P & Textual Studies in Canada, 1998); and Donald Savoie’s Visiting Grandchildren. What is needed, however, is a much deeper consideration of the founding cultural myths of Canada, particularly those myths that ascribe agency or inferiority to the country’s colonial character. What was the effect and what is the residue, for example, of statements made by foreign-born (yet pioneering) critics such as E.K. Brown, who twinned Puritanism and regionalism in Canada? He declared that regionalism was “a stage through which it may be well for us to pass, as a discipline and purgation” because regionalism “stresses the superficial and the peculiar at the expense … of the fundamental and universal” (25). To what extent did views like that—views that used “Atlantic” as a stand-in for “region,” and then denigrated the regional—colour the ways in which the constituent parts of the federation were equated with superficiality, purgation, and deficiency? And to what extent was that an ideological operation, “the silencing of that subversive regional voice … a phenomenon of Canadian historiography” (Keefer 24)? 6. It is worth pointing out that the tone and language of these characterizations of Maritime enervation and malaise are disturbingly similar to what we would recognize today as racism. Archaeologist Alfredo González-Ruibal asserts that this tone and language form the essential rhetoric of neoliberalism. His description of the characterization of the Gumuz of the Sudan/Ethiopia borderlands will thus be familiar to people who know the rhetoric of uneven federalism in Canada: “The journalist Alan Moorehead … tells that the land of the Gumuz ‘is a country of conical grass huts and oppressive heat that creates a sort of woolliness in the mind, and of long, slow, uneventful days that have stunted human ambition from prehistoric times’ ” (126). 7. See, for example, Boudreau et al.

Works Cited Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. New York: Vintage, 1997. Print. Alexander, David. “Economic Growth in the Atlantic Region, 1880–1940.” Acadiensis 8.1 (1978): 47–76. Print. Bailey, A.G. “The Muskrat and the Whale.” Thanks for a Drowned Island. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1973. Print. Beck, J.  Murray, ed. Joseph Howe:  Voice of Nova Scotia. The Carleton Library 20. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1964. Print.

Perspectives on Region in Atlantic-Canadian Literature    673 Bentley, D.M.R. The Gay]Grey Moose: Essays on the Ecologies and Mythologies of Canadian Poetry, 1690–1990. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 1992. Print. Bhabha, Homi K. “Unsatisfied:  Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism.” Text and Nation:  Cross-Disciplinary Essays on Cultural and National Identities. Ed. Laura Garcia-Moreno and Peter C. Pfeiffer. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1996. 191–207. Print. Biggar, H.P. The Precursors of Jacques Cartier. Ottawa: Government Printing Bureau, 1911. Print. Boudreau, Michael, Peter Toner, and Tony Tremblay, eds. Exploring the Dimensions of Self-Sufficiency for New Brunswick. Fredericton:  New Brunswick and Atlantic Studies Research Centre, 2009. Print. Brewster, Elizabeth. “Where I  Come From.” Collected Poems of Elizabeth Brewster 2. Ottawa: Oberon, 2004. 127. Print. Brown, E.K. On Canadian Poetry. 1943. Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1973. Print. Buckler, Ernest. The Mountain and the Valley. 1952. Toronto:  McClelland and Stewart, 1989. Print. ———. Ox Bells and Fireflies. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1968. Print. Buckner, Phillip A. “The Maritimes and Confederation:  A  Reassessment.” The Causes of Canadian Confederation. Ed. Ged Martin. Fredericton, NB: Acadiensis, 1990. 86–113. Print. Cartier, Jacques. The Voyages of Jacques Cartier. Intro. Ramsay Cook. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1993. Print. Clarke, George Elliott. Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues. Porter’s Lake, NS: Pottersfield, 1983. Print. Coady, Lynn. “Jesus Christ, Murdeena.” Play the Monster Blind: Stories. Toronto: Vintage, 2001. 65–85. Print. ———. Strange Heaven. Fredericton, NB: Goose Lane, 1998. Print. ———, ed. Victory Meat: New Fiction from Atlantic Canada. Toronto: Anchor, 2003. Print. Condon, Ann G. The Envy of the American States:  The Loyalist Dream for New Brunswick. Fredericton, NB: New Ireland, 1984. Print. Conrad, Margaret. “History Does Matter.” Literary Review of Canada 16.8 (Oct. 2008): 3–5. Print. Creelman, David. Setting in the East:  Maritime Realist Fiction. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2003. Print. Currie, Sheldon. The Glace Bay Miners’ Museum. Wreck Cove, CB: Breton Books, 1995. Print. Curtis, Wayne. River Stories. Halifax, NS: Nimbus, 2000. Print. Day, Frank Parker. Rockbound. 1928. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1989. Print. Deacon, William Arthur. “Every Little Movement Has a Meaning All Its Own.” Globe and Mail 29 Nov. 1952: n. pag. Print. Forbes, E.R. “In Search of a Post-Confederation Maritime Historiography, 1900–1967.” Challenging the Regional Stereotype:  Essays on the 20th Century Maritimes. Fredericton, NB: Acadiensis, 1989. 48–66. Print. Frye, Northrop. “From Nationalism to Regionalism:  The Maturing of Canadian Culture. Robert Fulford Talks with Northrop Frye.” Aurora: New Canadian Writing 1980. Ed. Morris Wolfe. Toronto: Doubleday, 1980. 5–15. Print. ———. “Preface.” The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination. Toronto: Anansi, 1971. i–x. Print. ———. “The Teacher of Humanities in Twentieth-Century Canada.” Grad Post 2 Nov. 1978: 5–7. Print.

674    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions Fuller, Danielle. Writing the Everyday:  Women’s Textual Communities in Atlantic Canada. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2004. Print. González-Ruibal, Alfredo. “Vernacular Cosmopolitanism:  An Archaeological Critique of Universalistic Reason.” Cosmopolitan Archaeologies. Ed. Lynn Meskell. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2009. 113–39. Print. Gramsci, Antonio. Prison Notebooks. Vol. 3. Trans. J.A. Buttigieg. New York: Columbia UP, 2007. Print. Hayman, Robert. “79.” Quodlibets. 1628. Literature in Canada. Vol. 1. Ed. Douglas Daymond and Leslie Monkman. Toronto: Gage, 1978. 12–13. Print. Howe, Joseph. Poems and Essays. Ed. M.G. Parks. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1973. Print. Janes, Percy. House of Hate. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1970. Print. Johnston, Wayne. Baltimore’s Mansion: A Memoir. Toronto: Knopf, 1999. Print. Jones, D.G. Butterfly on Rock. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1970. Print. Keate, Stuart. “Good Earth, Good People.” New York Times Book Review 26 Oct. 1952: 5. Print. Keefer, Janice Kulyk. Under Eastern Eyes. A Critical Reading of Maritime Fiction. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1987. Print. Lane, M. Travis. “Colonial” and “About the Size of It.” The Crisp Day Closing on My Hand: The Poetry of M. Travis Lane. Ed. Jeanette Lynes. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2007. 10, 53. Print. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Print. Lynes, Jeanette, ed. Introduction. The Crisp Day Closing on My Hand: The Poetry of M. Travis Lane. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2007. ix-xvi. Print. Macbeth, Madge (pseud. Gilbert Knox). The Land of Afternoon. Ottawa: Graphic, 1924. Print. MacLeod, Alistair. As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1986. Print. ———. The Lost Salt Gift of Blood. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1976. Print. ———. No Great Mischief. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1999. Print. ———. “The Vastness of the Dark.” The Lost Salt Gift of Blood 24–51. Maillet, Antonine. Pélagie-la-Charrette. Montréal: Leméac Éditeur, 1979. Print. McCulloch, Thomas. “Letter XVI” (27 April 1822). The Stepsure Letters. Ed. Malcolm Ross. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1960. 123–31. Print. McKay, Ian. The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1994. Print. ———. Rebels, Reds, Radicals: Rethinking Canada’s Left History. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2005. Print. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge, 2002. Print. New, W.H. Land Sliding: Imagining Space, Presence, and Power in Canadian Writing. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1997. Print. Nowlan, Alden. “Daughter of Zion” and “Britain Street.” Bread, Wine and Salt. Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1967. 12, 17. Print. Odell, Jonathan. “On Our Thirty-Ninth Wedding-Day.” The Loyal Verses of Joseph Stansbury and Doctor Jonathan Odell; Relating to the American Revolution. Ed. Winthrop Sargent. Albany, ON: J. Munsell, 1860. 111–12. Print. Pacey, Desmond, ed. Selected Poems of Charles G. D. Roberts. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1974. 9–12. Print.

Perspectives on Region in Atlantic-Canadian Literature    675 Pennee, Donna. “Still More Social Realism: Richards’s Miramichi.” Rev. of Nights Below Station Street, by David Adams Richards. Essays on Canadian Writing 41 (1990): 41–45. Print. Richards, David Adams. Lives of Short Duration. Ottawa: Oberon, 1981. Print. ———. Road to the Stilt House. Ottawa: Oberon, 1985. Print. Roberts, Charles G.D. “The Tantramar Revisited.” In Divers Tones. Boston: D. Lothrop, 1886. 53–58. Print. Sager, Eric W., and Gerald E.  Panting. Maritime Capital:  The Shipping Industry in Atlantic Canada, 1820–1914. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1990. Print. Savoie, Donald. Visiting Grandchildren: Economic Development in the Maritimes. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2006. Print. Steffler, John. The Afterlife of George Cartwright. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1992. Print. Tallman, Warren. “Wolf in the Snow, Part I:  Four Windows on to Landscapes.” Canadian Literature 5 (1960): 7–20. Print. Vigneras, L.A. “The Cape Breton Landfall: 1494 or 1497 (Note on a Letter from John Day).” Canadian Historical Review 38.3 (1957): 219–28. Print. Wyile, Herb. Anne of Tim Hortons:  Globalization and the Reshaping of Atlantic-Canadian Literature. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2011. Print.

Chapter 36

“If I Were a Ru g g e d Beau t y … ” Contemporary Newfoundland Fiction Paul Chafe

I did not solve the paradox of Newfoundland or fathom the effect on me of its peculiar beauty. … Perhaps only an artist can measure up to such a place or come to terms with the impossibility of doing so. Wayne Johnston, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (552)

Any attempt at a broad-scope examination of Newfoundland literature is in some way a response to or an extension of Patrick O’Flaherty’s The Rock Observed:  Studies in the Literature of Newfoundland (1979). Creating a simple continuation of O’Flaherty’s seminal survey of Newfoundland literature would be impossible today. O’Flaherty was writing in the 1970s and therefore in the midst of what Sandra Gwyn termed the “Newfoundland renaissance” (38), and while he does examine much of Newfoundland’s literature up to 1979, over half the text is a survey not of creative writing but of literary responses to Newfoundland in the form of reports by settlers, explorers, missionaries, patentees, and historians. O’Flaherty dedicates only three chapters solely to the examination of creative writing: a chapter on poet E.J. Pratt, a chapter on novelist Margaret Duley, and an overview chapter on some contemporary writers in which he has little to discuss beyond the works of Harold Horwood, Percy Janes, and Ray Guy. Since the publication of The Rock Observed, Newfoundland has enjoyed at least one more literary revival—an increase in literary production so large that a text purporting to do what O’Flaherty did in 1979 would number in the thousands of pages. As Larry Mathews notes in his introduction to the Spring 2004 issue of Essays on Canadian Writing dedicated to “The Literature of Newfoundland,” a quarter-century after the publication of The Rock Observed, an update to O’Flaherty’s chapter on “Some Writers in the New Newfoundland” would “need to discuss more than a dozen fiction writers,”

Contemporary Newfoundland Fiction    677 among them, Michael Crummey, Wayne Johnston, Lisa Moore, Bernice Morgan, and Michael Winter (1). A decade after Mathews’s assertion that a whole new book would likely need to be written to cover a narrowed field of just 10 representative texts from 10 authors who have published in the 25 years since The Rock Observed, it must be said that Mathews’s hypothetical text would already be horribly outdated: his “Top Ten” list does not include the works of authors who have since risen to national and international prominence, among them Edward Riche, Jessica Grant, Russell Wangersky, Joel Thomas Hynes, and Kathleen Winter. In many instances, the representative texts Mathews has selected for each author stand no longer as proper reflections of each author’s oeuvre. Moore’s short-story collection, Open (2002), is still wonderful, but she has since become the award-winning novelist of Alligator (2005), February (2010), and Caught (2013). Michael Winter has matured as an author, and it is unlikely anyone would select This All Happened (2000) as his representative text given the option between The Big Why (2004), The Architects Are Here (2007), The Death of Donna Whalen (2010), and Minister without Portfolio (2013). Moreover, it would be extremely difficult to craft a critical lens that would examine meaningfully the range of texts now defined as “Newfoundland literature.” In truth, this very concept is more troubled than solidified by growing literary production. Both non-Newfoundland and Newfoundland-born authors take the island and its occupants as their subject and produce diverse depictions of Newfoundland existence: rural or urban; nostalgic and romantic or cynically realist; beleaguered by the past or unfettered and open to any possibility or interpretation. Newfoundland writing has expanded to such a degree that a student of literature can now focus on any particular era, area, or author and—equipped with the proper literary theories—produce any sort of valid reading. One need only conduct a preliminary perusal of recent publications on Newfoundland fiction to understand the variety that can no longer be contained by the heading “Newfoundland literature.” Jennifer Bowering Delisle’s The Newfoundland Diaspora: Mapping the Literature of Out-Migration (2013), Herb Wyile’s “February Is the Cruelest Month: Neoliberalism and the Economy of Mourning in Lisa Moore’s February” (Newfoundland and Labrador Studies, 2010), and Mareike Neuhaus’s “Inventions of Sexuality in Kathleen Winter’s Annabel” (Studies in Canadian Literature, 2012) give evidence to the possibilities and benefits of reading Newfoundland literature through a particular lens.

“The People of the Womb-Cove”? This chapter will limit itself to recent Newfoundland fiction and its self-reflective, often meta-fictive, preoccupation with writing about this particular place. Mathews discusses the “range of fiction about Newfoundland published in the last fifteen years,” examining texts that focus on historical issues of identity (such as Johnston’s fictionalization of Newfoundland premier Joseph R. Smallwood in The Colony of Unrequited Dreams) and

678    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions juxtaposing them with literature that “seems to belong to a different literary culture” (10, 14). Urban-centric novels by Moore, Grant, Paul Bowdring, and others have outgrown “the issues of collective identity” examined in the historical fictions, Mathews writes; they possess protagonists “not bedeviled by the past” (12, 14). Mathews mentions several reviews of Moore’s Open (2002) to demonstrate how more attention is paid—by author and critic—to the characters and plot rather than place. Citing Kjeld Haraldsen’s review in Books in Canada, Mathews notes how place is inevitably a part of Moore’s fiction, but that her stories remain “[s]‌ite specific without being regionally straightjacketed” (14). Still, the one-sided relationship between person and place is at the core of the more successful Newfoundland novels, especially The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (1998). Most of Johnston’s work is undeniably “Newfoundland fiction”—The Story of Bobby O’Malley (1985), The Time of Their Lives (1987), The Divine Ryans (1990), The Custodian of Paradise (2006), and The Son of a Certain Woman (2013) all contain characters dealing with uniquely Newfoundland surroundings, tradition, and history. But in The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, Johnston purposefully launches his characters into an (often metafictional) examination of Newfoundland culture and identity. Johnston delivers his narrative through the perspectives of two dueling narrators: the fictionalized Joe Smallwood, who turns to industrialization to modernize Newfoundland, and the entirely fictional Sheilagh Fielding, a nemesis and love interest of Smallwood, whose acerbic realism and regionalist romanticism counter Smallwood’s desire to change Newfoundland through her preoccupation with the island’s past and an unrealized future that does not include confederation with Canada.1 Nearing the end of a life that has seen Newfoundlanders “become the only people in history to voluntarily give up self-government after having won it,” Fielding turns to a romantic and mythical underwriting of history, refashioning Newfoundlanders’ right to an island they seem to have declared themselves unfit to claim (R. Gwyn 445). The final lines of the novel merge islanders with the island in an attempt to replace the moment when Newfoundlanders declared themselves unworthy of their land with a new mythology of Newfoundlanders as one with the land: … the northern night, the barrens, the bogs, the rocks and ponds and hills of Newfoundland. The Straits of Belle Isle, from the island side of which I have seen the coast of Labrador. These things, finally, primarily, are Newfoundland. From a mind divesting itself of images, those of the land would be the last to go. We are a people on whose minds these images have been imprinted. We are a people in whose bodies old sea-seeking rivers roar with blood. (562)

In this dreamy depiction of mythical Newfoundlanders can be detected a desperation akin to Smallwood’s frantic attempts at industrialization, a dire need to connect islander to island. A  peculiar post-Confederation (perhaps postcolonial) panic has gripped Fielding, who finds herself in the same predicament as Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, caught in a storm that “irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned” (Benjamin 258). This storm of progress threatens to erase all markers

Contemporary Newfoundland Fiction    679 of the Newfoundland she loves. “The past is literally another country now,” she writes to Joe shortly after Confederation; the nation of Newfoundland has ceased to exist, and Fielding fears that it may be lost in memory as well (Johnston 3). The legitimacy of her fear is supported by O’Flaherty, who claims “there are few monuments or memorials” to Newfoundland’s pre-Confederation existence “because it was focused primarily upon the sea, and the sea does not show the marks of human industry” (“Looking” 4). Seeing, as O’Flaherty does, “the frailty of human effort, however heroic” (4), Fielding strives to preserve her Newfoundland by placing it within Newfoundlanders, “in whose bodies old sea-seeking rivers roar with blood.” Fielding’s and Smallwood’s meditative relations with the land find an echo in the colonial penetrations of John Peyton and David Buchan in Michael Crummey’s River Thieves (2001), a fictionalization of actual expeditions by European settlers to make contact with a dwindling population of Beothuk Indians, Newfoundland’s original inhabitants. In particular, Peyton’s voyages into Newfoundland’s interior provide Crummey’s protagonist with many moments of self-reflection as the young man retreats to the wild to work the land and forge himself: “The immersion in work was a divestment of his own, a conscious withdrawal from his father” (163). As the son of a man legendary in his cruelty to the Beothuk (the real John Peyton, Sr., is rumoured to have beaten a Beothuk man to death), Peyton carries his share of colonial guilt, and his expeditions to make contact with the Beothuk are journeys of self-creation in which he hopes to undo the evils of his father and foster a link between European settlers and their adoptive home that does not have the shame of genocide at its core. The characters of Patrick Kavanagh’s Gaff Topsails (1996) have much more than a passing connection to the land. Kavanagh’s novel focuses on a single day in a fictional Irish Catholic Newfoundland outport community, yet, as Mathews notes, the events of this day comprise “a microcosm of outport society” and, by extension, Newfoundland culture and identity (17). Several characters are scarred by previous battles with rock and ice, while others spend the day encompassing Kavanagh’s narrative examining the ocean and the land that surrounds their community. Kavanagh steps outside the single day of the novel to detail the history of the community’s founding father, a man who literally fell in love with his new island home and fathered a race attuned to the rhythms of the land. Tomas Croft, an Irish castaway on board an English ship that “discovers” Newfoundland a decade before John Cabot (whose 1497 arrival in Newfoundland is celebrated as “Discovery Day”), abandons the vessel, forges a home for himself on the island, and literally consummates his relationship with Newfoundland when he is moved to distraction by a field of blueberries: The wind roars. He hears so many sounds that he can hear nothing at all. His blood flows madly. In a frenzy he tears open his breeches and he bursts out hard. With both hands he seizes himself and at once his whole body convulses and makes spasms. For the span of one breath, milky ribbons of his seed hang suspended before his eyes, and in the next instant are vaporized by the wind and scattered in a pearly steaming mist westward across the field of voluptuous blue. (111)

680    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions Though he is relieved of his isolation by the legendary Irish princess Sheila nGira who bears him “ten russet daughters” and eventually “a society born of his own loins,” the descendants of Tomas Croft seem more a product of his earlier consummation with the land (125, 127). These people live in a “womb-cove” and live their lives to a rhythm that echoes “the touch of the sea upon the land” (139). For three young boys in the novel’s narrative present, the quest to penetrate a passing iceberg becomes a journey of self-discovery. For the younger sibling of one of those boys, the land is eroticized through his sexual awakening. Each character’s evolving identity is either reflected in the land or waiting to be carved from it. Kavanagh chooses as the day of his narrative 24 June 1948, which, aside from being both the feast of St. John the Baptist and Discovery Day, in that year sat between the two referenda of June 3 and July 22 that would decide Newfoundland’s fate as semi-independent nation or Canadian province.2 As in Johnston’s novel, every event in Gaff Topsails is imbued with a particular poignancy, for soon, to paraphrase Fielding, the past will be another country. Once again, island and identity appear indissolubly and naturally linked. Yet, so many of these characters are left unfulfilled at the end of their narratives. They feel out of place and no closer to understanding the land from which they take their identity. Johnston’s Smallwood is left uncharacteristically speechless at the end of The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, destined to be perpetually baffled by the island and what it could be (or could have been). Fielding is wounded and heartbroken and lost to her nostalgic depictions of barrens, bogs, rocks, and ponds. Crummey’s Newfoundlanders and Europeans fail in their attempts to save the Beothuk and are left at novel’s end with only regret and an understanding that the core, originary chapters of human existence on their island have been lost to history. Even Kavanagh’s outporters, romantically and sometimes eerily in tune with their island, are left uneasy as darkness consumes the day of their narrative, carrying with it an uncertain future. The self-loathing of Riche’s Dave Purcell in Rare Birds (1997) is amplified by the protagonist’s seeming inability to succeed in his homeland. Voyages outside his restaurant into the untamed wilderness prove Dave to be seriously deficient in the survival skills that first enabled his forebears to settle the island. Weather and isolation conspire against Dave’s success and make him bitter. Unlike Smallwood or Fielding, Dave has no desire to rekindle or preserve an affinity for the island. Unlike Crummey’s Peyton, he has no need to somehow right the wrongs and revive his relationship with the land. Interestingly, it is through a scheme hatched with his neighbour, Phonse Murphy, in which he falsifies the natural world around him (by reporting the sighting of a possibly extinct bird), that Dave finds financial success. By the novel’s end, Dave has seemingly accepted uncertainty as the only certainty in his life as an island restaurateur, and Phonse, the only character in Rare Birds who seems to have a true affinity with the island, appears to have died in an explosion at sea. The problem in conducting an examination of contemporary Newfoundland literature, then, appears to be that so much of what can be considered the best in that category completely deconstructs the notion of a literature that is definitively “Newfoundland.” As Mathews puts it, “Neither Moore nor her characters are interested in explicit discussion of Newfoundland identity,” nor do they bear the trace of the “island-wide inferiority

Contemporary Newfoundland Fiction    681 complex” or tragic past that marks so much of Newfoundland’s fiction (14). The works of Moore, Riche, and Kenneth J. Harvey are either fierce in their rejection or restructuring of established Newfoundland archetypes, or radical in their complete indifference to them. The modern Newfoundlander of these texts is more often urban and, like Riche’s melancholy restaurateur in Rare Birds, has very little attachment to the land, has no affinity with the rugged and romantic history, and is decidedly uninterested in defining himself as an extension or modernized version of the valorized Newfoundland fisherman and survivalist.

“Nothing But Story” Recent novels like Riche’s The Nine Planets (2004), Bernice Morgan’s Cloud of Bone (2007), and Michael Winter’s Minister without Portfolio (2013) contain images and instances that appear to be direct reactions to the egoistic claiming of place by characters in the novels of Johnston and Kavanagh. Riche’s The Nine Planets seems to indicate that the relationship between people and place in Newfoundland may be a desperately one-sided romance. Without the buffer of a character like Alphonse Murphy or a likewise likable figure, The Nine Planets is a narrative of untempered cynicism and sarcasm. It is apparent very early that the focus of the novel’s derisive humour is the assumed affinity between Newfoundlanders and their homeland. In a less-than-deferential homage to Kavanagh’s merger of Newfoundland identity and landscape, Riche begins his narrative with an image that does not evoke connection to the land but rather failure to press permanently this identity onto the island. Alighting from his car to the front lawn of a St. John’s community college, protagonist Marty Devereux must step carefully to avoid the oozing dyes of melted snow sculptures: A milky fluid was seeping from the expansive lawn of the vocational college, on which a number of snow sculptures—relics of a winter carnival—were surrendering to March drizzle. A Viking, Leif Ericson no doubt, was guarding the place with a sword blunt and soft as a stick of butter. His helmet was shy a horn. The same raggedy gales that had carried him to Newfoundland a thousand years earlier were now his undoing. To Leif ’s right a wedge once representing the old tricolour of the island, the standard of wishful thinking, resembled a melting block of Neapolitan ice cream.3 The opaque effluent pooling on the parking lot was pigmented, too. It had been necessary to dye the snow white. (1)

It is worth noting that Marty “danced a jig” to dodge the oncoming slime, an obvious response to R.J. Needham’s claim that Newfoundlanders are a musical people who “break into poesy when they feel like it” (qtd. in O’Flaherty, “Looking” 9) or Sandra Gwyn’s examinations into “Newfcult” which reveal an entertainer struggling to emerge from every Newfoundlander, or countless other literary renderings of Newfoundlanders

682    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions as quaint and quirky people. Marty, the vice principal of the private school he helped create, once worked “writing and proofing copy for the Newfoundland Department of Tourism” (Riche 19) and is thus the perfect protagonist to lampoon such romantic and touristic notions of Newfoundland. The above passage deflates the notions espoused by Kavanagh in Gaff Topsails. The powerful phallic images of icebergs, lighthouses, and long-standing trees that invigorate Kavanagh’s villagers are replaced by Riche with the flaccid sword and gelded horns of a melting monument to the island’s founding father. Tomas Croft’s purposeful ride ashore and passionate penetration of the island are replaced by the passive nature of Leif ’s arrival: the raggedy gales carried Leif to the island, he did not propel himself. The idea of the sculptures “surrendering to March drizzle” counteracts Kavanagh’s Croft finding succour in Newfoundland’s unsettled landscape and reminds the readers of another national surrender that seems to negate even the romantic notion of owning the island. The fact that the snow had to be dyed white recalls for readers, as did enterprising engineer Phonse in Rare Birds, that the machine is already in the garden. The exhaust from thousands of cars blackens the snow used for these ice sculptures and seems to indicate that the time for any natural merger between man and island has long passed. Most important, the tricolour flag, which seemed to appear of its own accord in Kavanagh’s narrative (in the refracted light of windows, the clothes flapping on a clothesline), is in The Nine Planets a pathetic attempt at branding identity onto a landscape that easily removes it. The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, despite containing moments of peril when Smallwood nearly dies of exposure in the Newfoundland wilderness or almost plunges into the frigid Atlantic beneath the icepans he is attempting to negotiate, concludes with Fielding’s praise of “the barrens, the bogs, the rocks and ponds and hills of Newfoundland” (562). In Riche’s work, the land is adversarial rather than admirable. In Rare Birds, Dave’s attempt to move through the Newfoundland outdoors is hilariously pathetic, a comedic version of the same resistance faced by Peyton and Buchan as they attempt to penetrate the Newfoundland interior in River Thieves. Riche forsakes this humour in The Nine Planets as he reveals just how dangerous this rugged country can be: Marty suddenly wanted to … ask Rex whether he missed their parents. They had died in a highway accident fourteen years earlier. Based on the skid marks—two abrupt black crescents—the police concluded that their father may have swerved to avoid something, an approaching vehicle drifting into their lane or an animal, or perhaps nodded off and lost control of the vehicle. On that moonless night the car left the road at 130 km/h and smashed into a boulder the size of a house, an “erratic,” a random geological hazard, dumped there by a receding glacier. (94)

Marty finds it difficult to be charmed by the harsh, harrowing yet beautiful landscape carved by rock, ice, and sea, because he has felt firsthand what this decidedly unromantic landscape can do to the people who move through it. Though he is rendered permanently cynical by his past failures and tragedies, Marty’s contemptuous insights are still thought-provoking (if not a little discomfiting), as when

Contemporary Newfoundland Fiction    683 he deconstructs one of the most overused oxymoronic descriptions of Newfoundland landscape, coming this time from the mouth of a visiting actress shooting a film in an undeveloped area of Newfoundland: “Set’s a reproduction eighteenth-century fishing village. So primitive! I don’t know how your ancestors survived. It’s really just fantastic. And the landscape! That harsh, rugged beauty.” “Rugged beauty”? No wonder they needed writers. If I were a rugged beauty would you blow me? thought Marty. (180)

Marty would balk at what he would term Fielding’s “retarding nostalgia,” and upon hearing more and more of it, he considers leaving the island for western cities without history, where the occupants look forward, not backward (252). As Marty puts it, threatening to shatter one of the bedrocks of popular Newfoundland identity, “To live in the oldest part of the New World was to miss the point” (252). Marty’s disdain for valorization of Newfoundland’s rough and rural history is not groundless. Professionally and personally invested in his private school, Marty has been a victim of the “quiet bigotry” of mainland Canadians, whom he claims “enjoyed the yokels’ singing and dancing, their antic faux-Irish chimping, could stomach them as toothless ghosts, the stoic rickety sea-serfs of yesteryear, but no self-respecting Canuck would think of sending their child to a ‘Newfie’ school” (147). The backward glance at half-created Newfoundlanders who laughed in the face of tragedy and made homes in an inhospitable country fuels the idea of Newfoundlanders as people who are at heart “still savages, born devils on whose nature nurture never stuck” (147). The continued revitalizing of such tropes can prove an infuriating impediment for professionals like Marty striving to be taken seriously: “They loved a funny Newfie on the mainland” (93). Fielding is perched atop her isolated section shack on the night Newfoundland votes to join Canada. A train blasts past her tiny shelter, the conductor constantly blowing his whistle and calling “We won” to Fielding as he passes her. As the train disappears and the land returns to darkness and silence, Fielding notes, “Something abiding, something prevailing, was restored” (Johnston 562). For Fielding, it is the barrens and rocks and bogs, not the miracle of a train traversing them, which somehow captures the Newfoundland essence that is lost on this night. The entrepreneurs, industrialists, and investors of The Nine Planets would argue that Fielding, like the Newfoundlanders who boast of living in the oldest part of the New World, has missed the point. In a speech that could have come from one of the unrepentant capitalists in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, a leading member of a controversial undertaking to develop the untouched area of Perroqueet Downs outside Riche’s St. John’s justifies his stance. He preaches that it is the active utilization of the land, not a passive appreciation of it or glorification of those islanders who have struggled with it in the past, that is the only Newfoundland tradition: “You know, Marty,” said Hayden, “you know what I hate the most? It’s when they refer to the Downs as ‘unspoiled,’ as though building there, like making use of it,

684    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions letting people live in it, would spoil it. That’s such bullshit, Marty, ’cause this place is about commerce. They didn’t cross the pond in leaky boats for a theatre festival or to watch whales, they came to this place to make money, to kill whales and sell their fat. North America is about capitalism, and it got its start here, right here. Money means vitality, money means movement. That’s our lost tradition, Marty, not running the fucking goat. There should be a fucking museum. Men have been doing business in Newfoundland for five hundred years. We’ve traded with Lisbon and London and Havana and Genoa from the get-go, and there are those who would have us all gamekeepers and actors. Build, baby, or wait tables.” (141)

Despite the obvious fundamental differences between Hayden’s and Fielding’s understanding of Newfoundland and Newfoundlanders, both are concerned that their notion of Newfoundland will be consumed by a more popular perception. Most of the protagonists in the novels studied here are not concerned with a notion so arbitrary as loss but with the possible loss of their idea of Newfoundland within a larger, less personal history. There is an anxiety shared by Fielding and Smallwood in The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, by John Peyton, Jr., in River Thieves, and by several other protagonists that popular sentiment and the passage of time will conspire against them and their efforts to reshape and maintain a strong Newfoundland identity not tied to defeatism or backwardness. Smallwood believes that he must act quickly before the self-deprecation he sees in his father and in other Newfoundlanders he visits during his tour of the island with the Amulree Commission becomes too rooted. He believes that he must work immediately to attract the money and industry of other developed nations so that his “great small nation” may grow along with the others. Fielding sees in Smallwood’s industrialization the paving-over of her St. John’s of cobblestone roads and her Newfoundland of unspoiled wilderness. She commits her life to ceaseless writing, deriding those who would demean Newfoundland as they alter it and preserving on paper a Newfoundland that has disappeared in her lifetime. Peyton, the son of a man who played a prominent role in the extermination of the Beothuk, feels the pressure to somehow repair before the damage done by his father and others becomes permanent. His overzealousness to make contact with the Beothuk and begin a healing process for both settlers and natives turns Peyton into a kidnapper and his father’s collaborator in two more murders. Every action of the outporters in Gaff Topsails is charged with a particular relevance, as it represents certain traditions and beliefs imperiled by this change of national identity. At the end of the narrative, the members of the community stay as long as possible beside the weakening bonfire, clinging to the remnants of the day, singing together the “Ode to Newfoundland,” and collectively admitting, yet refusing to acknowledge the uncertainty in the growing darkness: By the time the verse is finished the people crouch close within the cocoon of light and heat. A chill shivers their backs. Something cold lurks behind them in the dark, something terrible and dangerous. They know it, and they shift closer to the dying fire. They watch the white smoke rising into the sky, rising towards the far reaches

Contemporary Newfoundland Fiction    685 of the stars, and during the short time that is left in this night they will continue to pretend. Together they will make believe that the monster is only a fable, only a fancy, that it is not really there at all. (433)

It is this fear that drives many of these narratives: the fear of today washing away and leaving no trace, while being replaced by an uncertain and unhomely tomorrow. This fear is reified in Morgan’s historical fiction, Cloud of Bone (2007). The novel connects the narratives of three people involved in events that have shaped Newfoundland’s collective identity: a Newfoundland soldier from World War II, a modern-day anthropologist whose studies have led her to the island, and Shanawdithit, the last Beothuk and therefore the last native Newfoundlander. Morgan’s novel covers many recycled Newfoundland narratives: the wartime sacrifices made by Newfoundlanders for a distant and detached colonial ally, the loss of both a race of people and a wholly different understanding of the island with the eradication of the Beothuk, and the more recent though oft-repeated tale of a social scientist from outside Newfoundland discovering treasures overlooked by locals who, to paraphrase philosopher F.L. Jackson, did not know they were standing on a cultural goldmine until the anthropologists told them so. The soldier’s narrative, which is itself a reaction to a history that will record him as a deserter, contains Shanawdithit’s story, apparently told to the young soldier by the ghost of the girl, still angry at the European “dogmen” who callously colonized her country. The anthropologist’s accidental discovery of a skull sends her on a hunt that connects the narratives and mollifies Shanawdithit’s tortured soul. The title of this novel seems to indicate the collective murkiness of these histories and the impossibility of ever seeing them clearly. Moreover, the final paragraph in which the soldier is reunited with the skull, and through it with the stories of Shanawdithit, represents a disappearance of these narratives rather than a clarification of them. As Kyle Holloway, now an aged veteran, seeks to reunite the skull of the Beothuk girl with the rest of her remains somewhere in St. John’s South Side Hills, he reflects on the impossibility of permanence in Newfoundland: “Soon there’ll be nothing. Grass will grow over the railway station, over Water Street. Kyle wonders if they will just let the harbour silt up once the town is gone. The government will want to maintain what they call a presence. … One Coast Guard station should do the trick, five people in all of Newfoundland—not Newfoundlanders, of course” (441). The culmination of the narrative sees both Holloway and Shanawdithit, as well as the solutions to their personal mysteries, consumed by an indifferent, relatively unaffected island: They move forward, snow still falling, her voice and the snow all around, enclosing them in a white cave that is filled with nothing but story. Then they are pitching and falling, tumbling together, spinning downward into the ravine. The snow has stopped. Here is the green valley, the little stream, the moss that long ago covered the army truck and its driver, covered the broken beer bottles and knives, the rifles and rusting torpedoes, covered the spears and arrows, the

686    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions shards of bone, the broken skulls of men and women and small children. Moss, given time, will cover everything. (442)

On first reading, this paragraph may seem to be another romantic ending to another historical Newfoundland fiction: not a companion piece necessarily, but a companion conclusion to Johnston’s The Colony of Unrequited Dreams. At the end of Morgan’s novel, person and place are merged, made forever indistinguishable, forever a part of the other. Though in its own way as romantic as Johnston’s conclusion, Morgan’s final words do not offer the hope of a sustained Newfoundland identity. Johnston’s conclusion, which includes the assertion that Newfoundlanders “are a people” on whose communal minds the images of the land have been indelibly imprinted, offers permanence to both island and islanders. Newfoundlanders, being so in tune with the land around them, will continue to exist as long as the land remains. The land will exist forever as “Newfoundland” as long as there are Newfoundlanders to believe in it. Morgan’s conclusion is not so hopeful. “Newfoundland” as it is imagined is “nothing but story.” The land is not so much a constant as it is a constantly self-regenerating entity. The island has endured human endeavours and follies by many races and generations of natives and settlers and has remained largely untamed, consuming the remnants of human industry rather than being marked by them. Holloway’s thoughts on the eventual disappearance of Water Street, a main St. John’s thoroughfare, are echoed in the work of Johnston and others, whose description of massive potholes and the penetration of wilderness into the city reveal the fragility of even the most certain footholds of civilization on the island. The moss does not become one with the evidence of human effort and interference. It covers it. Through Fielding’s conflation of person and place, the land is imbued with the life of its inhabitants, while the people (inasmuch as Johnston’s Newfoundlanders are “a people”) are offered a part of the land’s intransience. Whether Johnston shares the sentiments of his narrator is unclear, but perhaps Fielding’s poetic copulation of island and islander is the eponymous unrequited dream. There is no doubt as to the impossibility of a reciprocal romance between Newfoundland and Newfoundlander at the end of Cloud of Bone. All life, or all least all evidence of a life lived, will be consumed by the land. O’Flaherty is only half right, it seems—given time, the land, like the sea, will erase all signs of human industry.

“An Acre of Land in His Head That Was His Land” With so many narratives and so many representations of Newfoundland, the Newfoundland experience, the culture, and the people, Newfoundland has become a more contested space than ever before. Yet each novel produced by Moore, Harvey, or

Contemporary Newfoundland Fiction    687 Hynes is invariably labeled as “Newfoundland literature,” the term indicating that these books contain, above all else, enough images of the landscape, instances of the dialect, and reflections on the history to provide a sufficient portal into that particular world. That Johnston’s novel drew the ire of several critics who attacked the author for his geographical and historical inaccuracies reveals Newfoundland to be a much contested space, even in the realm of fiction.4 Novelists who take as their subject the people, places, and history of Newfoundland still must work to demonstrate which Newfoundland they are reflecting. This obligation, indebtedness, or responsibility to setting is obviously felt by the authors who take Newfoundland as their subject. This is revealed in Ken Pittman’s 2007 documentary Speaking Volumes: A Literary Roar from the Rock. In the film, Johnston, discussing The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, admits that he uses setting “as an extension of how characters live and see their destinies.” This seems to explain the mindsets and motivations of both Fielding and Smallwood in Johnston’s novel. The landscape is bleak, desolate, forsaken by many, difficult to work, but permanent. Born into this landscape, these characters must remain undaunted by its formidability, accept it as a birthright no one else wanted, and strive to make it great—that is, they must work tirelessly so that both Newfoundland and Newfoundlanders achieve a potential beyond that expected of them. Only through this effort can these characters fulfill a destiny in which their achievements are coupled with the endurance of the land itself. Michael Winter’s Minister without Portfolio (2013) provides readers with several meta-fictive moments in which both the protagonist and his creator seem to be wondering what it means to imagine Newfoundland. The novel begins with Henry Hayward being dumped by his girlfriend Nora Power and realizing, via his friend, that he needs to get out of Newfoundland: “You’re through with Nora now you need to break your relationship with the land. The land is her land or it’s your land together and you can’t walk it any more alone” (9). Following a couple of jobs and a couple of tragedies abroad, Henry finds himself again in Newfoundland, where he conducts a realistic examination of his own romanticizing of the situation: He knew why he was leaving work but he wasn’t sure why he returned to Newfoundland. Home. It held a gravity, some kind of atmospheric orbit that spiralled him towards the centre whenever he exhausted things out there in the world. Jesus I sound like a salmon. Like a lot of Newfoundlanders, though, he pictured an acre of land in his head that was his land. The picture has no location, it’s a floating acre with a perforated edge like a postage stamp that hovers slightly above the land, though there is, of course, a view of the Atlantic. He understands this image to be romantic and unrealistic, and yet sometimes in foreign beds, rather than imagining a woman to keep him unlonely, he will think of this two hundred by two hundred view. (61)

Henry achieves in these lines a self-realization that it takes Fielding an entire novel (or two, if one considers the pseudo-sequel The Custodian of Paradise [2006]) to even

688    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions begin contemplating. Reflecting on her Newfoundland of barrens and bogs at the end of The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, Fielding demonstrates what Mathews has termed “flashes of what might be called naïve Romanticism” (8). Yet in dealing with the history of her island, romanticism fails her, and she relies on biting sarcasm. Her “Condensed History of Newfoundland” contains an alternative, certainly unromantic version of the “Ode to Newfoundland” and passages from Quodlibets, a “corrective” history that Fielding claims to have discovered. Portrayed in both instances is a harsh, inhospitable Newfoundland that defies romanticization. Fielding’s concept of Newfoundland alters, depending on whose ideas she is arguing, whose ego she is deflating, or which ignorance she is combating. Yet Fielding’s love of Newfoundland remains constant, whether it is expressed through her warts-and-all depictions of its history, her cynicism toward others she feels do not appreciate it as she does, or through her final moments of idyll and idealism. As Mathews puts it, “Fielding never gives up or sells out, and she remains for Smallwood a constant beacon of personal integrity” (9). Smallwood realizes late that his love and respect for Fielding has been as much a motivating force in his life as his determination to turn Newfoundland into a success. He loves her love of Newfoundland, as evidenced in their train ride across the island, during which Fielding finally sees the western half of the province: “It was not the country we were passing through that kept distracting me, but Fielding seeing Newfoundland for the first time at the age of sixty” (Johnston 550). Smallwood, who as a boy moved from house to house, who as a young man left, then rediscovered, traversed, and circumnavigated the island, who as a man, no matter how powerful, felt ill at ease among other politicians and officials, finally finds a home in Fielding’s love of Newfoundland. As with most of the novels mentioned here, the constant is not the place itself, but a desire to continually rediscover it. Contemporary Newfoundland literature provides readers not with a rock to observe, but with a fertile soil to be endlessly excavated.

Notes 1. The 22 July 1948 referendum saw Newfoundlanders and Labradorians choose confederation with Canada over responsible government by the slimmest of margins. It remains even today a sensitive topic. As historian James K. Hiller notes, “The entry of Newfoundland and Labrador into the Canadian Confederation in 1949 remains a controversial and emotional subject. … The central question for debate has been whether Newfoundland’s entry into confederation was the result of conspiracy, sharp practice and possible fraud” (139). Historian Jeff A. Webb reports that several modern-day Newfoundlanders believe the referendum was “rigged” and “most Newfoundlanders did not choose union with Canada” (171). 2. As Adrian Fowler notes in his analysis of Gaff Topsails, the feast of St. John the Baptist is known as Discovery Day in Newfoundland “because it celebrates the so-called discovery of the island in 1497” (72). The city of St. John’s, the capital of Newfoundland and Labrador, is named in commemoration of the saint and the day. The day in 1948 that constitutes the

Contemporary Newfoundland Fiction    689 narrative present of Gaff Topsails, falling between two referenda on Confederation with Canada, “therefore merges two mythologically significant occasions—the one recalling the origins of modern Newfoundland society in its settlement by white Europeans, the other marking a momentous change in that society’s sense of itself ” (72). 3. According to the Encyclopedia of Newfoundland and Labrador, the pink, white, and green “Tricolour” flag first appeared in 1843. It was never adopted officially as the Newfoundland flag but has often been attached to anti-Confederate and Newfoundland nationalist movements (ENL 2:197–98). It has become something of a sentimental and commercial favorite in recent years, appearing on the popular “Republic of Newfoundland” T-shirts. 4. Passionate criticisms of The Colony of Unrequited Dreams by Rex Murphy (“Alas, Joey Smallwood Was Larger Than Fiction,” Globe and Mail, 3 October 1998) and Stuart Pierson (Newfoundland and Labrador Studies) seem to ignore the fact that Johnston’s work is a novel and attack his unfaithful depictions of Smallwood and his times. Pierson goes so far as to claim that Johnston’s novel carries Smallwood “with it as a kind of hostage” (288) and scolds Johnston for altering Newfoundland’s geography so roads that run parallel now intersect and Corner Brook lies southwest of Stephenville.

Works Cited Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1968. Print. Crummey, Michael. River Thieves. Toronto: Doubleday, 2001. Print. Delisle, Jennifer Bowering. The Newfoundland Diaspora:  Mapping the Literature of Out-Migration. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2013. Print. Encyclopedia of Newfoundland and Labrador. Vol. 2. Ed. J.R. Smallwood. St. John’s: Newfoundland Book, 1984. Print. Fowler, Adrian. “Patrick Kavanagh’s Gaff Topsails and the Myth of the Old Outport.” Essays on Canadian Writing 82 (Spring 2004): 71–92. Print. Gwyn, Richard. Smallwood:  The Unlikely Revolutionary. Toronto:  McClelland and Stewart, 1999. Print. Gwyn, Sandra. “The Newfoundland Renaissance.” Saturday Night (April 1976): 38–45. Print. Hiller, James K. “Introduction:  Confederation.” Newfoundland Studies 14.2 (1998): 139–40. Print. Jackson, F.L. Surviving Confederation. St. John’s: Cuff, 1986. Print. Johnston, Wayne. The Colony of Unrequited Dreams. Toronto: Knopf, 1998. Print. ———. The Custodian of Paradise. Toronto: Knopf, 2006. Print. ———. The Divine Ryans. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1990. Print. ———. The Son of a Certain Woman. Toronto: Knopf, 2013. Print. ———. The Story of Bobby O’Malley. Toronto: HarperCollins, 1985. Print. ———. The Time of Their Lives. Ottawa: Oberon, 1987. Print. Kavanagh, Patrick. Gaff Topsails. Toronto: Viking, 1996. Print. Neuhaus, Mareike. “Inventions of Sexuality in Kathleen Winter’s Annabel.” Studies in Canadian Literature 37.1 (2012): 123–40. Print. Mathews, Lawrence. “Report from the Country of No Country.” Essays on Canadian Writing 82 (2004): 1–20. Print.

690    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions Moore, Lisa. Alligator. Toronto: Anansi, 2005. Print. ———. Caught. Toronto: Anansi, 2013. Print. ———. February. Toronto: Anansi, 2010. Print. ———. Open. Toronto: Anansi, 2002. Print. Morgan, Bernice. Cloud of Bone. Toronto: Knopf, 2007. Print. Murphy, Rex. “Alas, Joey Smallwood Was Larger Than Fiction.” Rev. of The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, by Wayne Johnston. Points of View. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2003. 48–50. O’Flaherty, Patrick. “Looking Backwards:  The Milieu of the Old Newfoundland Outports.” Journal of Canadian Studies 10 (1975): 3–9. Print. ———. The Rock Observed: Studies in the Literature of Newfoundland. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1979. Print. Pierson, Stuart. “Johnston’s Smallwood.” Newfoundland Studies 14.2 (1998): 282–300. Print. Pittman, Ken. Speaking Volumes:  A  Literary Roar from the Rock. Best Boy Productions. 2007. Film. Riche, Edward. The Nine Planets. Toronto: Viking, 2004. Print. ———. Rare Birds. Toronto: Doubleday, 1997. Print. Webb, Jeff A. “Confederation, Conspiracy and Choice: A Discussion.” Newfoundland Studies 14.2 (1998): 169–87. Print. Winter, Kathleen. Annabel. Toronto: Anansi, 2010. Print. Winter, Michael. The Architects Are Here. Toronto: Viking, 2007. Print. ———. The Big Why. Toronto: Anansi, 2004. Print. ———. The Death of Donna Whalen. Toronto: Hamish Hamiliton, 2010. Print. ———. Minister without Portfolio. Toronto: Hamish Hamilton, 2013. Print. ———. This All Happened. Toronto: Anansi, 2000. Print. Wyile, Herb. “February Is the Cruelest Month: Neoliberalism and the Economy of Mourning in Lisa Moore’s February.” Newfoundland and Labrador Studies 25.1 (2010): 55–71. Print.

Chapter 37

Retracing Pra i ri e Literatu re Alison Calder

As a field of study, Canadian prairie literature developed extremely quickly. Motivated primarily by resistance to models of Canadian literature that centred on southern Ontario and that marginalized so-called regional literature, prairie writers and critics in the 1970s and 1980s worked to construct a prairie literary genealogy, to provide a context for understanding contemporary prairie writing, and to catalyze future literary production.1 They were tremendously successful, building regional publishing houses, compiling regional anthologies, ensuring that “prairie literature” gained a spot in university curricula, and generally writing back against a national literary culture that overlooked them.2 But were they too successful in constructing a literary canon anchored in a particular time and place? Now, Alberta’s financial clout has changed national political structures forever and Saskatchewan is going through a well-publicized “Saskaboom”; prairie populations are increasingly mobile, urban, and online; changing immigration patterns have made the idea of “settlement” increasingly complex: almost all of the conditions under which the field was established have been transformed. The concept of “nation” has itself changed as a category for literary analysis. Contemporary writing from the prairies is increasingly distant from the ideas of regional “authenticity” promoted by the critics of the 1970s and 1980s. Can the idea of Canadian prairie literature be still relevant—and if so, how?

Why Retrace Prairie Literary History? While writing from the prairies has always been diverse and multifaceted, critical thinking about prairie literature has been remarkably cohesive.3 Cultural expression has taken place for thousands of years on the prairies, in the storytelling, dance, song, textiles, architecture, and visual art of the Aboriginal peoples who first lived in

692    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions this place. The advent of writing, therefore, is extremely recent, with Henry Kelsey’s 1693 “Now Reader Read …” commonly held as the earliest example. Although Kelsey wrote in a specific historical context and for a particular audience—his poem is a report to his employer on the economic prospects of the region—the ways in which he represents the prairie environment resonate strikingly with many twentieth-century conceptions of it as an environment so extreme that it can hardly be believed by outsiders. As he reports: Now Reader Read, for I am well assur’d Thou dost not know the hardships I endur’d In this same desert where Ever that I have been Nor wilt thou me believe without that thou had seen The Emynent Dangers that did often me attend (1–5)

Recalling Kelsey’s words may seem idiosyncratic, but this turn to exploration is appropriate, as the rhetoric of exploration and discovery underlies some of the most significant statements by prairie critics. Though the physical landscape of the region itself has changed radically since Kelsey’s time—it is worth keeping in mind that the prairie ecosystem is one of the most altered environments in the world—the rhetorical frameworks through which it has been viewed remain quite consistent. Prairie realism, a mode of fiction that depicted the harsh life on isolated prairie farms, came to dominate popular conceptions of what prairie life itself was like. These novels emphasized the extremity of the prairie environment, showing the physical and spiritual destruction of people and ultimately depicting the human encounter with the land as a failure. Frederick Philip Grove’s 1925 novel Settlers of the Marsh, which features an isolated and peculiar protagonist who struggles both to subdue the land and to battle the forces of modernity that he sees as threatening to corrupt his settlement, represents this view. As for Me and My House, a 1941 novel by Sinclair Ross, came to define the genre. The book’s unnamed narrator portrays the small town of Horizon as a close-minded, puritanical prison in which culture cannot flourish, while the farmers who live in the surrounding area pursue their crops dumbly in the face of environmental catastrophe. These novels influenced popular opinion about the region, cementing impressions in readers’ minds of the region being damaged, backward, and utterly peculiar.4 Against this pessimistic background, Robert Kroetsch’s foundational article “The Moment of the Discovery of America Continues” (1989)5 urges prairie writers to return to what he sees as the originary moment of encounter between the writer and the prairie environment, becoming contemporary Columbuses: It is the paradox of Columbus’s perceptual moment that it cannot end. The moment of the discovery of America continues. Its re-enactment becomes our terrifying test of greatness; we demand to hear again and always the cry into mystery, into an opening. We demand, of the risking eye, new geographies. And the search that was once the test of sailor and horse and canoe is now the test of the poet. (12)

Retracing Prairie Literature    693 Inherent in this model of writer as explorer is the idea of conflict with both the environment and with the language available to express it. This “terrifying test of greatness” is seen to take place on both physical and spiritual levels: one battle is to survive the environment and make it produce goods and crops, and the other battle is against the alienation and angst that the prairie environment is often imagined to produce.6 Kroetsch’s novels bear out these conflicts, often parodically. The Studhorse Man (1969) features dueling protagonists: Hazard Lepage, who seeks to establish a breed of horses and so claim a place in history; and Demeter Proudfoot, the narrator, who tries to write down the story. Between them, the characters rampage through Western civilization, from Homer’s Odyssey to Edmonton’s landmarks, seeking to revise and rediscover contemporary Alberta. In Badlands (1975), these competing figures of explorer and author come together in the character of William Dawe, who leads a 1916 paleontological expedition into Alberta’s Badlands, seeking the remains of an as-yet-undiscovered dinosaur that might bear his name. At the same time, he keeps an incomplete and biased journal that constructs his explorations in only the most flattering terms. Dawe’s exploits are further called into question through the interventions of his daughter, who suggests an alternative history even as she relies on the journals to help her find her “real” father. In these and other novels, Kroetsch seeks “new geographies” that would allow a redefinition of prairie space. However, the writer-as-Columbus model is obviously also inherently colonizing. In the terms with which the field of prairie criticism has developed, the texts that have been valued have generally been ones that centre on the struggles of a White male protagonist. In addition to the motifs of exploration and discovery, these struggles to settle the prairie in land and language are also articulated in a critical focus on settlement, through the related notions of place-making or home-making. These concepts dominate much prairie criticism, as in Deborah Keahey’s Making It Home (1998), which opens by equating “home” with “the home place” and “the homestead” (4).7 Though Keahey goes on to complicate that notion, suggesting the possibility of different kinds of homes, her work retains the fundamental “homemaking” trope, in which each writer is examined through the lens of settlement: there is an assumed struggle, and the work achieves critical value according to how this struggle is articulated. Conventional conceptions of prairie literature, and of the region in general, focus on the idea of absence: the absence of trees and hills, but also the absence of literary community and antecedents. Diane Dufva Quantic’s remark that “when a writer tries to describe a place with only two seasons and no rain, even the words dry up” (71) is characteristic of a critical model that equates the region with emptiness. As Colin Hill points out, this perception of the absence of a regional literary culture is exacerbated by the habit of reading prairie realist texts as though their isolated protagonists are stand-ins for the authors themselves (Modern Realism 81). However, “the myth of the isolated prairie writer” was also strategically employed by the writers and critics of the 1970s and 1980s as they sought to clear rhetorical space for themselves. Reading the essays in an anthology like Trace: Prairie Writers on Writing (1986), one is struck both by the enthusiasm and excitement of the contributors, and by their sense that they were largely creating in a vacuum, with few significant literary precedents. The literary history of

694    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions the region was seen as following a progressive model, with earlier writing recognized as necessary in some ways, but valuable primarily for its ability to provide a foundation for new and innovative forms. Laurie Ricou’s 1973 assessment that earlier “minor” writers merit attention “if only to provide one measure for the achievement of later writers” (65) is representative of this stance. Strategically, making space for prairie writing on the Canadian literary scene meant developing a story of literary origins that erased much of what had come before and presented the writing of the 1970s and 1980s as the point of departure for a new and authentic mode of regional representation. Naturally, history repeats itself. Dissatisfied with the model of prairie writing that emerged from the critical work in the 1970s and 1980s, and also with nostalgic images in popular culture of the prairie as a timeless, rural space, some writers from within the region have offered the suggestion that the region is now “post-prairie.” Jon Paul Fiorentino writes in the introduction to Post-Prairie:  An Anthology of New Poetry (2005), which he edited with Robert Kroetsch, that “we soon discovered that the prairie was absent, or perhaps the prairie had become unrecognizably present in this new work” (9). Characterizing the new voices as coming from a place that is “less unified, more urban, technologically adept, and theoretically informed” (9)  than traditional “prairie” writing, Fiorentino goes on to ask, “where, specifically in hell, did the prairie get to? I think it’s still here/there but the poets are elsewhere, or hiding, or resisting” (9). It becomes clear that what these poets are “resisting” is the way in which prairie poetry has become equated with a particular aesthetic and historical moment. Pointing out that academic discourse has now assigned canonical value to the rebellious prairie poetics of the 1970s and 1980s, Fiorentino argues that “the championing of prairie poetry as a rural domain needs to be troubled” (11). He describes the new poetry thus: “increasingly urban, the post-prairie poem is both a response to the homesteads of the past and a socio-economic reality which reflects the death of the family farm and the establishment of a more cosmopolitan landscape. Now there exists pothole-ridden streets, urban tenements, and images of gentrified homes” (11). I agree with Fiorentino that it is helpful to revisit restrictive ideas of prairie writing, but I am also struck by the ways in which his call for newness echoes some of the same ideas seen in the manifestos of the previous generation. Where they located ideas of “true” prairie representation in versions of the farm and the small town, here those ideas are located in the city, which is constructed as the home of technology, theory, and contemporary poetics. If the previous generation of writers and critics largely turned their backs on the city in favour of concentrating on representations of the rural, then we might see the “post-prairie” idea doing the same thing, only in reverse. In Anne of Tim Hortons (2011), Herb Wyile writes about similar issues of regional presentation in the context of Atlantic-Canadian writing, describing how the idea of folk culture— “fiddling, fishing and farming”—has been conventionally used to define the region, and how writers now strive against that model. The danger in rejecting folk culture entirely, Wyile cautions, is that one may then develop an idea of the region that goes too far the other way, excluding folk activities from serious consideration and “leaving little space for a genuine engagement with the place of such activities in life on the East Coast.

Retracing Prairie Literature    695 Indeed, what contemporary Atlantic-Canadian literature makes clear is that fiddles and shopping malls, lobster boats, and satellite dishes can and do happily and unselfconsciously coexist” (25). If readers of prairie writing continue to adopt a regional model that maintains a line between the rural and the urban, then the exclusions of the past will inevitably be replicated, though the terms of that exclusion will have changed. Fiorentino’s remark that the prairie appears “absent” or “unrecognizably present” in new prairie writing suggests a regional model that is based on rupture rather than continuity: the social processes by which we moved from a rural past to an urban present are hidden. As Wyile points out, these social processes, responsive to and generated by economics, politics, and space, are motivated from both inside and outside the region (8–9). These processes are not characterized by sharp ruptures, but by gradual shifts that can go unnoticed, so that the means by which they happen may be masked. Thus, the present-day prairie can appear to have little connection to the past. However, the work of the writers themselves exposes these processes: we can see how things change but also how they stay the same. Recognizing how the dynamics of the past continue to shape the present is particularly important when it comes to attempts to decolonize the region. If the difficulty that we need to address is that the critical models of “prairie writing” have not changed to reflect the writing itself, then one solution might be to reread earlier texts from a different perspective, seeking what they can tell us about how we got from there to here. Understanding the processes behind getting from “prairie” to “post-prairie” requires a new starting point for developing a critical framework for looking at writing from the region. What if, instead of starting from a position that sees the prairie as inherently lacking, we adopt, as Frances W. Kaye suggests in Goodlands (2011), a perspective “of sufficiency, not deficiency” (5), applied to both environment and literature? In Writing in Dust (2010), Jenny Kerber points out the power of origin stories to shape understandings of the world, urging readers to “listen for different stories of the prairie” (5). What if we re-evaluate the origin stories of prairie literature? Writing from the prairies has always been more complicated than critical models have allowed.8 Freed from some of the constraints of the earlier critics, who were forced to justify the existence of their writings and to make a field from scratch, we might now be in a position to re-evaluate the literary history of the prairies and to develop a new, more flexible genealogy that is not located in one particular historical moment or mode of expression, and that can expand to admit members of diverse communities. Reopening the canon, which has narrowed perilously, is an archival project that requires not only a rereading of canonical texts, but also an excavation of texts currently languishing in stacks and special collections, and a reconceiving of the critical frameworks through which we approach these texts. Instead of a model of regional writing that proposes a rupture with the past, we may begin with one that accentuates connections, integrating the complexities posited by new writing while also acknowledging that those complications may have been present in different forms in prairie writing all along. In this way, previously masked connections to the region’s literary history are revealed, and the relevance of the past to understanding the present becomes clear.

696    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions

What Might We Find?: A Reading Lesson in Reverse A broad reading of prairie literature suggests a number of possibilities for further consideration.9 As there are far too many directions to tackle in one chapter, I will start short discussions of three areas: writing by women, representation of and by Aboriginal peoples, and depiction of the prairie environment. While the prairie has traditionally been conceived of as a White, male space, even a preliminary rereading of non-canonical texts suggests that gender, race, and landscape are all represented in more complicated ways than canonical interpretations allow. Certainly, one is struck by the central position of women authors in articulating larger political and social issues of their day. Aritha van Herk, in “Appropriations, the Salvation Army, and a Wager” (1991), points to the ways in which focusing only on canonical texts by male authors has led to a dismissal of the work of female authors like Nellie McClung. Many writers have noted that the Canadian West in general has long been figured as a masculine space, with women appearing only as secondary figures. As S. Leigh Matthews suggests, historically “the predominant Prairie Woman image is inherently the dependent [sic] of a prairie farmer” (31), an image that effaces the centrality of women to the prairie region and denies them agency. This subordination is replicated in the evaluation of prairie literature by many critics of the 1970s and 1980s, who established a literary tradition that largely celebrated male modernist and postmodernist writers (with a few notable exceptions such as Martha Ostenso and Margaret Laurence). One theme that emerges in writing by many women is a focus on women’s bodies as politically contested sites, not only as tropes for the land. As Annette Kolodny has demonstrated, the widespread use of “an image system of a feminine landscape” constructed the North American landscape as a female body awaiting male courtship, cultivation, and/or domination. This image system served political purposes, she writes, as it “was for a time both usefully and societally adaptive: it brought successive generations of immigrants to strange shores and then propelled them across a vast uncharted terrain” (177). While a feminized rhetoric of landscape may have eased the way for immigration and settlement, as Kolodny argues, in prairie writing the female characters themselves are often depicted as existing in an uneasy relation to the state. This unease is particularly shown in depictions of pregnancy, childbirth, and maternal and infant mortality. Representations of pregnant and/or dead women are widespread: even the comic opening of Grain (1926) by Robert Stead invokes a woman who “had been rewarded for her contribution to the state—the third in as many years—with a bed under six feet of frozen clay” (8). It is not unexpected that issues of motherhood and maternity would be linked to questions of building the “proper” nation, as critics such as Cecily Devereux have explained.10 In The Foreigner by Ralph Connor (1909), Mrs. French performs her role as the good White “mother” even though she has no children of her own, schooling

Retracing Prairie Literature    697 Slavic immigrants in Winnipeg’s “Little Russia” in how to be good parents and allowing children to assimilate properly into “Canadian” society. She replaces Kalman and Irma’s unsuitable, immoral, Slavic stepmother Paulina, and her intervention ultimately enables Kalman to become a good match for Marjorie, as he is transformed into the ideal “Canadian foreigner” (175). Likewise, much of Sowing Seeds in Danny (1908), by Nellie McClung, displays the education of Mrs. Francis by Camilla Rose in how to be a good mother, just as Pearl Watson educates the (suggestively named) Motherwells in the Christian virtues of compassion and charity. Both of these texts do obvious political work around what they construct as good citizenship. Not so obvious is the political work done by representations of maternity in Frederick Philip Grove’s Settlers of the Marsh (1925), in which Clara and Ellen must learn how to be properly maternal for the good of the new country. Clara proves unredeemable—Niels thinks that “he did not want children out of this woman!” (134)—but Ellen ultimately accepts the role of mother, stating to Niels that “I know now that it is my destiny and my greatest need to have children, children” (219). Despite the text’s focus on children, little critical attention has been paid to the intentional miscarriages that Ellen’s mother endures, which are caused by the physical labour associated with settlement and described by her neighbour as a routine part of settler women’s lives. Here, we see female characters actively seeking to control their own bodies, though this control may remain entangled with state ideology in diverse ways. An explicit treatment of abortion occurs in Flos Jewell Williams’s New Furrows (1926), where it is linked to ideas of nation. When the Belgian immigrant Henri Fourchette calls his wife a “murderess,” he is upbraided by his British-Canadian neighbour: “How do you know that you are not the murderer, making her work in the fields in her condition? We do not do that in this country. What right have you to impose more childbearing on her anyway, if she doesn’t want any more children?” (62). The Viking Heart (1923) by Laura Goodman Salverson features a difficult birth scene, “a battle where the valor displayed might have honored any military field” (53). This military trope is literalized later in the novel when the baby, now grown, joins the army and dies for Canada, in the process instilling a sense of affective citizenship in his immigrant mother, who realizes at the novel’s end that she now loves Canada and that it is her true home (325). National anxieties about proper citizenship are often played out in the family, as “unsuitable” immigrant parents die or are otherwise removed so that “proper” parents can raise good prairie citizens, as in The House (1955) by Barbara Villy Cormack. These concerns with pregnancy and motherhood are seen in later texts as well: in addition to the well-known early examples of Amelia and Judith Gare in Martha Ostenso’s Wild Geese (1925) and Sinclair Ross’s Mrs. Bentley in As for Me and My House (1941), other key examples are the unwanted pregnancy that challenges Lina Astley’s ability to farm in Christine van der Mark’s In Due Season (1947), the false pregnancy that Rachel experiences in Margaret Laurence’s A Jest of God (1966), the graphic death of Mercy Stone during childbirth at the opening of Carol Shields’s The Stone Diaries (1993), the magic realist pregnancy of the unnamed protagonist in Hiromi Goto’s The Kappa Child (2001), the fantastic conceptions in Margaret Sweatman’s When Alice Lay Down with Peter (2001), and the comic pregnancies in Miriam Toews’s A Boy

698    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions of Good Breeding (1998). While these novels may diverge wildly in all manner of ways, they resolutely present women’s bodies as sites of political and spatial negotiations. Another aspect of prairie literature that becomes more complicated through reading broadly is representation of and by Aboriginal peoples. It can be argued that the field of prairie literature was founded on the trope of the absent Indian. Early prairie writers continually invoke the “vanishing Indian” narrative, as Connor does in The Foreigner when he writes that the frontier, represented by the Métis character Mackenzie, “must now disappear in the wake of the red man and the buffalo before the railroad and the settler” (130). We see this motif in more recent writings as well, as in Robert Kroetsch’s “Stone Hammer Poem” (1976), where the stone hammer he finds in his family’s field is both a cryptic reminder of an unknown and vanished Aboriginal past, and the source of his poetic inspiration. Most canonical prairie texts are set on land that has already been cleared for agriculture and there are few, if any, opportunities for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal characters to interact. Exceptions might be scenes involving named characters such as Malcolm, Ellen’s transient suitor in Wild Geese, and Moses Lefthand, the character in W.O. Mitchell’s short story “The Princess and the Wild Ones” (1961) who gives up his Indian status so that he and his son, Lazarus, can become Canadian citizens. As Moses says, “The Lefthands are Canadian just like other people. One hundred per cent altogether Canadian” (161). At other times, Aboriginal presence is suggested obliquely, as in Mitchell’s Who Has Seen the Wind (1947), where the streets are named “Blackfoot” and “Riel.” Here, Old Ben’s poor, White family occupies a marginal position that is very close to that of the Métis Tonnere family in Laurence’s Manawaka writings; it is interesting to consider depictions of the Young Ben alongside those of Piquette Tonnerre in Laurence’s short story “The Loons” (1970). While both the Ben and Tonnerre families live on the margins of their towns, and both families are constructed as the town disgraces, the texts’ treatment of the two children is very different. In “The Loons,” the narrator, Vanessa, is explicitly disappointed that Piquette does not fit into the romanticized child of Nature role that Vanessa associates with “Indians.” In Who Has Seen the Wind, on the other hand, the Young Ben does occupy that romantic role, to the extent of being the embodiment of the mysterious “Something” that is associated with the prairie. The Young Ben survives his story, but Piquette dies in hers, suggesting that while both characters fill a necessary function in prairie narratives as outsiders against whom the protagonist can define him- or herself, the trope of the “vanishing Indian” means that there are still significant differences in their narrative possibilities. Notable exceptions to the absence of Aboriginal peoples in canonical prairie texts are presented in the work of Rudy Wiebe, particularly in The Temptations of Big Bear (1973) and The Scorched Wood People (1977).11 In attempting to represent Aboriginal cultural perspectives sympathetically, these novels position Aboriginal political resistance within a larger critique of Canadian state power and participate in an important questioning of the colonial frameworks inside of which Western Canadian history has been conventionally written and understood. We also see a move toward greater representation of Aboriginal people in Margaret Laurence’s 1974 novel The Diviners, in which the Scots-Canadian protagonist, Morag Gunn, has a long-standing relationship

Retracing Prairie Literature    699 with Jules Tonnerre, a Métis man, which results in the birth of their daughter, Pique. Though Laurence’s treatment of Jules and Pique is sympathetic, and the novel overtly critiques the racism that these characters experience, they still function in some way as tools through which Morag is able to indigenize herself, and Pique comes to represent metaphorically the possibilities of an ideal European-Aboriginal union. While Aboriginal presence is generally effaced or occluded in canonical texts, Aboriginal characters feature in surprising ways in works outside the canon. While these appearances seem idiosyncratic taken in isolation, when combined these Aboriginal characters seem to haunt the prairie imagination, as Warren Cariou suggests, returning inevitably though the texts attempt to suppress them: This reflects a widespread and perhaps growing anxiety suffered by settlers regarding the legitimacy of their claims to belonging on what they call “their” land. This fear can be described in Freudian terms as a kind of neocolonial uncanny, a lurking sense that the places settlers call home are not really theirs, and a sense that their current legitimacy as owners or renters in a capitalist land market might well be predicated upon theft, fraud, violence, and other injustices in the past. (727–28)

Daniel Coleman describes such “hauntings” as a manifestation of the “spectral, fantasmatic history” articulated by Slavoj Zizek, and locates them within an ongoing national narrative that seeks to produce Canada as a space of White, English privilege (28). This narrative, which Coleman calls “white civility,” “simultaneously demands that settlers mourn the violence that established their presence in North America and requires that this violence be redeployed to quarantine that uncivil past from the civil present” (34). Thus, in prairie texts, we see a repeated introduction of Aboriginal characters who seem to be created only in order to perform their disappearance. In Salverson’s The Viking Heart (1923), Indian Joe makes a living by “interpret[ing] his idea of the white man’s expression of joy”: mimicking “white man’s” laughter (129). When Katrine’s little daughter drowns, Old Joe recovers the body, then vanishes from the novel, to be briefly recalled later only by the discovery of “an old and very evil looking pipe” (253). Aboriginal characters are entirely absent from the prairie setting of Francis Cecil Whitehouse’s Plain Folks (1926) until just before the novel’s end, when Long and Peggy travel to Ontario on their honeymoon and encounter an Ojibway guide, John Monegge, who disappears two pages later. Not only can Monegge correct errors in Longfellow’s “Hiawatha,” but “he could speak English and French and a dozen Indian dialects. He could play, thanks to Christian Island instruction, every instrument in a brass band. And he died some two years later of tuberculosis in a Toronto hospital, as the price of his education” (296). Love in Manitoba (1911), by E.A. Wharton Gill, presents readers with two villains: old Black Hawk, a vicious Sioux who is “outcast from his tribe” (308); and Roland Vale, a lazy cad from England who attempts to seduce and then to rape the novel’s heroine. Vale is discovered dead, and the novel’s hero is charged with his murder. Fortunately, the novel ends with the courtroom revelation that the murderer is really Black Hawk, who promptly dies, leaving the way clear for the hero and heroine to wed and proper

700    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions community order to be restored. One of the most psychoanalytically fraught cases of the Indian ex machina appears in Bertram Brooker’s Think of the Earth (1936), in which the novel’s protagonist becomes convinced that he must become a murderer for the greater good. When he arrives at the home of the man he has decided to strangle, however, he looks in the window to see that the man is already being strangled—by Jack Jukes, “a breed.” The experience of seeing “his own act, being enacted by another” (277) cures the protagonist of his delusion. Breaking with this tradition, Christine van der Mark’s novel In Due Season treats relations with Aboriginal people completely differently. Van der Mark moves her protagonist, Lina Astley, from a failing farm in southern Alberta to a homestead in Peace River country, where she and family settle on a bush farm in a pre-existing Métis community, and must negotiate relationships of mutual dependence with their Métis neighbours. The fact that Lina’s children are able to speak Cree (which is not translated for the reader) becomes a crucial plot point at the novel’s climax. In Due Season is remarkable for its representation of the possibilities for cross-cultural community formation—possibilities that are tragically ended owing to Lina’s own racism. Of course, the most significant absence in conceptions of literary regionalism is the dearth of works by Aboriginal writers themselves, especially before the 1990s. Popular opinion might hold that this absence is because there are relatively few texts by Aboriginal writers, but as is shown by the publication of Manitowapow: Aboriginal Writings from the Land of Water (2011), edited by Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair and Warren Cariou, a vast trove of still unrecognized work exists. The kind of intense archival research represented in Manitowapow shows the challenge of retrieving these texts, many of which were previously unpublished, published in odd places or in compromised forms, or were not recognized as “literary.” The idea of prairie literature has also proven elastic enough to embrace writing by previously marginalized non-British immigrant communities—one thinks of the centrality of work by Mennonite writers such as Rudy Wiebe, David Bergen, Armin Wiebe, Patrick Friesen, Sandra Birdsell, Di Brandt, and Miriam Toews, to name a few. However, the inclusion of these writers has not challenged the colonial framework that has formed the basis for understanding prairie literature, as the Mennonite experiences depicted in these texts are generally understood in terms of settlement and homemaking, and as facets of a generalized Canadian multicuturalism. Furthermore, the critical desire to situate Mennonite texts within a particular settlement framework may lead to simplification of historical narratives. Analyzing novels as diverse as Rudy Wiebe’s The Blue Mountains of China (1970) and Miriam Toews’s A Complicated Kindness (2004), Rob Zacharias suggests that Canadian Mennonite experience is consistently retold in terms of a Russian Mennonite migration to Canada in the 1920s, despite the historical and present-day variety of Mennonite migration journeys, and the extensive internationalism of Mennonite communities. Di Brandt challenges this homemaking narrative in her essay “This land that I love, this wide wide prairie” (2001), pointing out that Mennonite immigrants were victims of forced displacement, but were also the beneficiaries of the forced displacement of Aboriginal peoples.

Retracing Prairie Literature    701 It is productive to think about ways in which notions of race intersect with understandings of settlement. This project has been undertaken by contemporary prairie authors such as Hiromi Goto in The Kappa Child (2001) and Esi Edugyan in The Second Life of Samuel Tyne (2004), both of whom work from a postcolonial perspective to challenge the ways in which immigration and settlement have been represented in conventional prairie writing. Goto’s novel uses Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books as an intertext to connect her Japanese-Canadian protagonist’s settlement experience to a larger critique of patriarchy, environmental exploitation, and colonial expansion. In Edugyan’s work, Samuel Tyne and his wife, originally from Ghana, move from Calgary to a small Alberta town with their daughters. Once there, they experience veiled and ambiguous (but still evident) racism from their new “friends,” and their attempts to claim space in this new town, and even to properly inhabit their house, are thoroughly compromised by the novel’s end. These works by Goto and Edugyan point to the inadequacies of the heroic settlement narrative, but are in some ways still within the conventional settlement framework, and so remain relatively accessible to traditional conceptions of prairie literary regionalism. Given that the foundations of critical and popular conceptions of prairie literature are so firmly entrenched in the ideas and values of Eurocentric colonial culture—in “the moment of the discovery of America” (Kroetsch 12)—it will be a huge task to negotiate understandings of prairie literature that can include notions of both region and indigeneity, and perhaps a productive conflict will always be the best result possible. While developing a model of literary regionalism that admits texts by Aboriginal writers remains a major challenge for scholars working in the field, the creative works of Aboriginal writers themselves demonstrate a wide range of significant spatial engagements. Thomas King’s novels Medicine River (1989), Green Grass, Running Water (1993), and Truth and Bright Water (1999), for example, insistently position diverse aspects of contemporary Aboriginal culture at the intersection of place and representation. It is impossible, for example, to think of the dam in Green Grass, Running Water as a physical object within the text (that is, as something made of concrete) without also being aware of the ways in which it is repeatedly and consistently constructed within environmental, religious, and political narratives. The project of “famous Indian artist” Monroe Swimmer, in Truth and Bright Water, to paint Aboriginal people into artworks that exclude them echoes the parodic revision of Western movies in Green Grass, Running Water; both concepts work against narratives of cultural and topographic dispossession. In a different genre, James Tyman’s autobiography Inside Out (1995) represents an Indigenous experience that illustrates some of the ways that race is spatialized in prairie communities, as White and Aboriginal urban groups may occupy the same site simultaneously, but with few points of connection between them. Marvin Francis’s satiric long poem City Treaty (2002) engages with globalization, neoliberalism, and narratives of cultural identity as he interrogates the possibilities of Winnipeg as Indigenous space. In his poetry collection Singing Home the Bones (1995), Gregory Scofield writes his Métis ancestors into the regional history that erased them, while he reanimates significant public figures like Louis Riel in Louis: The Heretic Poems (2011). In Blue Marrow (1998),

702    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions Louise Halfe represents the painful work required to bring settler and Indigenous histories into conversation when her narrator describes the experience of attending her White husband’s family reunion, where hundreds of his relatives gather, each bringing “a book they’ve lovingly compiled” that tells “the history of their migration” until “they are scattered throughout Turtle Island” (61). Her children, she writes, “are not yet aware of how this affects their lives.” The poem links the valorization of the settlement experience to an ongoing process of colonization that persists both in agricultural landscape and in pioneer narrative: Later, driving home, I weave a story for my children—how their great-grandma rode sidesaddle, waving her .22 in the air trying to scare those relatives away. I tell them how my relatives lived around the fort, starving and freezing, waiting for diluted spirits and handouts from my husband’s family. I tell them how my little children died wrapped in smallpox blankets. My breath won’t come anymore. I stare at the wheat fields. (61–62)

The difficulty that Halfe’s narrator has in countering the celebratory settlement narratives at her husband’s family reunion can be read as a representation-in-miniature of the difficulties inherent in indigenizing conceptions of regional writing. This will be an ongoing project for years to come. The prairie region has always been defined by its landscape, and the effects of environmental determinism on perceptions of the region’s literature have been well documented. Many writers within the region maintain an engagement with the local environment, although this engagement takes diverse forms that defy simple categorization, and the environments that are represented can also vary widely. As Robert Kroetsch writes in his foreword to Scratching the Surface (2008), prairie artists “have undergone transformations in their lives and in their concepts, and those transformations are responsive to the continuing transformation of the prairie itself. Landscape and artist are involved in an exchange that is one of elaborating complexities” (7). While it may be tempting to think of these complexities as a recent phenomenon, literary representations of the prairie environment have always been much more diverse than scholarly concentration on agricultural rural experience has led readers to believe. Jenny Kerber points out that even very canonical texts, such as Robert Stead’s Grain (1926) and W.O. Mitchell’s Who Has Seen the Wind (1947), go beyond traditional ideas of the prairie as wasteland or Eden, presenting a regional model that exists as “a set of spaces functioning in dynamic relationship with human agents” (33). This “set of spaces” can be thought of both geographically, with the space of the small town against the space offered by the city, for example, or historically, with the space of the past against the

Retracing Prairie Literature    703 space of the present. Often, these historical and geographic sets will overlap, as different “times” exist in different places: in a novel like Grove’s Settlers of the Marsh (1925), characters travel between the town, which is characterized by modern technology, communication, and commerce, and Niels Lindstedt’s farm, where horses still pull the plow and “modern” ideas are shunned. The figure of the region as a set of spaces becomes particularly interesting when a place is revealed to be composed of different but simultaneous spaces, as in Chandra Mayor’s novel Cherry (2004). Here, the unnamed protagonist, enmeshed in a world of skinhead gangs, articulates a version of Winnipeg that is unrecognized by—and perhaps unrecognizable to—the middle-class writers of the indignant letters to the editor that the novel also includes. Both the protagonist and the letter-writer occupy the same places, but do so in entirely different ways. James Tyman’s autobiography Inside Out does much the same thing, as he describes Saskatoon in terms of racialized spaces: the same place can have different meanings for an Aboriginal person than it does for a non-Aboriginal one because of the ways in which it is constructed and understood in different contexts. The overlaps, contradictions, and erasures made visible by such representations highlight the ways in which regional space is, as Herb Wyile suggests, “socially produced” (21). Conventional models of prairie writing, such as those that Fiorentino writes against in Post-Prairie, often locate the prairie region in a timeless rural and agricultural past. While there has been a lack of critical attention to urban writing in Canada in general, this is changing in recent scholarship.12 Discussing urban realist texts especially, Colin Hill describes how overlooking urban prairie writing creates a misreading of the field generally:  “without its urban counterpart, prairie regionalism becomes a regionalist anomaly on the Canadian literary landscape, and it can easily be concluded that rural representation and realism go hand in hand” (Modern 187). While conventional readings of many prairie texts stress the ways in which these texts depict separations between rural and urban settings, many of these same texts can be read to produce the opposite conclusion: that there is continual interaction between rural and urban environments within the region and beyond, and that these rural and urban environments are depicted as existing in relationship. Furthermore, we often see that even the inhabitants of isolated prairie farms are enmeshed in global political and economic webs, as characters go to war, debate the morality of profiting through wartime grain price increases, speculate on the stock market, immigrate and/or migrate in response to employment opportunities, and so on.13 These texts anticipate Sandra Birdsell’s 2010 novel Waiting for Joe, which connects environmental issues, globalization, poverty, and displacement in the prairie region today. The novel’s protagonists, Laurie and Joe, attempt to leave their unemployment and debts behind them as they travel from Winnipeg to seek employment in Fort McMurray’s oil sands, but their stolen motorhome breaks down, trapping them in a Regina Walmart parking lot. That the characters see Canada’s biggest and most unethical deliberate environmental disaster, the Alberta tar sands, as possible salvation, suggests the bankruptcy of North American consumer culture. A similarly complicated regional landscape is seen in Annette Lapointe’s 2006 novel Stolen, which presents a postmodern prairie that is virtual as well as actual, full of

704    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions “information, but also stuff ” (18).14 The protagonist, Rowan, lives in a small town on the outskirts of Saskatoon, where he occupies a space that is both local and global: He’s discovered there are two worlds out here. The one he recognized first is scattered, nearly empty. One person every two miles, hunkered in the prairie, close and surrounded by the rusting hulks of machinery and the shells of mobile homes. Thinly connected by wires and never filled. The world he found more recently is crowded. When Rowan was a teenager, the universe shrank to the size of a fifteen-inch monitor, and it’s impossibly full. (18)

Though Rowan distinguishes between where he lives (the prairie) and where he does things (online), the novel continually represents the impact of the global economy on local space. The Internet allows Rowan, a thief, to make a living by reselling “old books, machine parts, dinnerware, used clothes. Processors and RAM sticks. Glass and oxidized metal and plastic. Chemicals in vials and pails. Not all of it’s wanted in Canada or the U.S., but it’s all currency somewhere. Raw and contaminated metal breaks down in the trees around [Rowan’s] house” (18). Thus, the regional and the global are connected, as the “contaminated metal” finds a local resting spot. Rather than depicting a post-prairie region, these texts show us a landscape that is all too familiar. Strategic attempts by critics and writers in the 1970s and 1980s to establish prairie writing as a legitimate field succeeded spectacularly. However, this success came at the cost of a foreshortened literary history, a restrictive definition of “authentic” prairie writing, and a gradual widening of the gap between prairie literary scholarship and the writing itself. Prairie writers don’t have to write about particular things. They don’t have to think of themselves as prairie writers, nor do they need to be thought of that way. But getting rid of “prairie” entirely as an organizing category makes sense only if we define “prairie” in the narrowest, most conservative and regressive ways possible. And why would we do that? The writing itself insists on multiplicity and variety. Why not look for that, instead? Conceptualizing prairie literary history in terms of continuity instead of rupture allows us to see both the gains that have been made in decolonizing this space, and the challenges that yet remain. Daniel Coleman points to the importance of recognizing that although we may be able to critique the shortcomings of past critics and scholars, “we in the present are as likely to be blind to similar exclusions and unevennesses as were past Canadians” (239). If we believe that we have left the operations of the past behind, we will fail to recognize them in the present. But if we approach the history of writing from the prairie provinces with optimism, expecting to find abundance rather than lack, we may be rewarded. The prairie isn’t obsolete: in fact, we may be just beginning to uncover it.

Notes 1. The first book-length study of Canadian prairie writing, Edward McCourt’s The Canadian West in Fiction, had been published in 1949, but it was not until the next generation of critics that the notion of “prairie literature” picked up momentum and critical weight.

Retracing Prairie Literature    705 2. See Milz for interviews with some of the prairie movers and shakers of this period. 3. See Wiens and Warder for a discussion of the effects of this coherence in relation to notions of prairie poetry. 4. See Calder, “Reassessing Prairie Realism,” for an extended discussion of the impact of prairie realism on readers and critics. 5. An earlier version of this essay was published in Open Letter in 1983. 6. See Ricou, Vertical Man, Horizontal World, for an assessment of the prairie landscape’s alienating potential. 7. In Looking Back, S. Leigh Matthews points out the ways in which the idea of the homestead is actually composed by the two competing concepts of “home” (the house and family) and “stead” (the farm and the need to break the land). The conflict between these two aspects is a prominent theme in many prairie novels. 8. In “Edward McCourt and the Prairie Myth,” Colin Hill suggests that this division between creative writing and critical analysis may appear even when the same person is writing both the criticism and the literature. 9. “for Rudy Wiebe,/ a reading lesson in reverse” is the dedication to In Visible Ink by Aritha van Herk. 10. See Devereux, Growing a Race, for example. 11. Later books by Wiebe continue his involvement with Aboriginal characters and issues, including A Discovery of Strangers and A Stolen Life: The Journey of a Cree Woman, by Rudy Wiebe and Yvonne Johnson. 12. See Edwards and Ivison for further discussion of this trend. 13. See, for example, Douglas Durkin’s The Magpie, which treats the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike and the stock market crash; Dry Water by Robert Stead, which portrays the effects of the 1929 stock market crash on various characters in rural and urban Manitoba; Edward McCourt’s Music at the Close (1947), which describes (among other things) prairie unemployment, urban life, and the 1931 attack by Mounted Police on striking coal miners in Estevan. 14. See Calder, “The Importance of Place,” for a longer discussion of Stolen.

Works Cited Birdsell, Sandra. Waiting for Joe. Toronto: Vintage, 2011. Print. Brandt, Di. “This Land That I Love, This Wide Wide Prairie.” Fresh Tracks: Writing the Western Landscape. Ed. Pamela Banting. Vancouver: Polestar, 2001. 232–38. Print. Brooker, Bertram. Think of the Earth. Toronto: Thomas Nelson, 1936. Print. Calder, Alison. “The Importance of Place:  or, Why We’re Not Post-Prairie.” Place and Replace. Ed. Leah Morton, Esyllt Jones, and Adele Perry. Winnipeg: U of Manitoba P, 2013. 169–78. Print. ———. “ ‘The Nearest Approach to a Desert’: Implications of Environmental Determinism in the Criticism of Canadian Prairie Writing.” Prairie Forum 23.2 (1998): 171–82. Print. ———. “Reassessing Prairie Realism.” A Sense of Place: Re-Evaluating Regionalism in Canadian and American Writing. Ed. Christian Riegel and Herb Wyile. Textual Studies in Canada 9 (1997): 51–60. Print. Cariou, Warren. “Haunted Prairie:  Aboriginal ‘Ghosts’ and the Spectres of Settlement.” University of Toronto Quarterly 75.2 (2006): 727–34. Print.

706    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions Coleman, Daniel. White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2006. Print. Connor, Ralph. The Foreigner. Toronto: Westminster, 1909. Print. Cormack, Barbara Villy. The House. Toronto: Ryerson, 1955. Print. Devereux, Cecily. Growing a Race:  Nellie L.  McClung and the Fiction of Eugenic Feminism. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2005. Print. Edugyan, Esi. The Second Life of Samuel Tyne. Toronto: Knopf, 2004. Print. Edwards, Justin, and Douglas Ivison, eds. Downtown Canada:  Writing Canadian Cities. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2005. Print. Fiorentino, Jon Paul, and Robert Kroetsch, eds. Post-Prairie:  An Anthology of New Poetry. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2005. Print. Francis, Marvin. City Treaty. Winnipeg: Turnstone, 2002. Print. Gill, E.A. Wharton. Love in Manitoba. Toronto: Musson, 1911. Print. Goto, Hiromi. The Kappa Child. Red Deer, AB: Red Deer, 2001. Print. Grove, Frederick Philip. Settlers of the Marsh. 1925. Ed. Alison Calder. Ottawa:  Tecumseh, 2006. Print. Halfe, Louise. Blue Marrow. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1998. Print. Hill, Colin. “Edward McCourt and the Prairie Myth.” Journal of Canadian Studies 44.3 (2010): 53–74. Print. ———. Modern Realism in English-Canadian Fiction. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2012. Print. Kaye, Frances W. Goodlands:  A  Meditation and History on the Great Plains. Edmonton: Athabasca UP, 2011. Print. Keahey, Deborah. Making It Home:  Place in Canadian Prairie Literature. Winnipeg:  U of Manitoba P, 1998. Print. Kelsey, Henry. “Now Reader Read …” Early Long Poems in Canada. Ed. D.M.R. Bentley. London, ON: Canadian Poetry P, 1993. 5–7. Print. Kerber, Jenny. Writing in Dust: Reading the Prairie Environmentally. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2010. Print. King, Thomas. Green Grass, Running Water. Toronto: Houghton Mifflin, 1993. Print. ———. Medicine River. Toronto: Viking Canada, 1989. Print. ———. Truth and Bright Water. Toronto: HarperFlamingo, 1999. Print. Kolodny, Annette. “Unearthing Herstory:  An Introduction.” The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1996. 170–81. Print. Kroetsch, Robert. Badlands. 1975. Toronto: Stoddart, 1999. Print. ———. “Foreword.” Scratching the Surface: The Post-Prairie Landscape. Winnipeg: Plug In ICA, 2008. 6–7. Print. ———. “The Moment of the Discovery of America Continues.” The Lovely Treachery of Words. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1989. 1–20. Print. ———. “Stone Hammer Poem.” Completed Field Notes. Edmonton:  U of Alberta P, 2000. 3–8. Print. ———. The Studhorse Man. 1969. Edmonton: U of Alberta P, 2004. Print. Lapointe, Annette. Stolen. Vancouver: Anvil, 2007. Print. Laurence, Margaret. The Diviners. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1974. Print. ———. A Jest of God. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1966. Print. ———. “The Loons.” A Bird in the House and Other Stories. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2010. Print.

Retracing Prairie Literature    707 Matthews, S.  Leigh. Looking Back:  Canadian Women’s Prairie Memoirs and Intersections of Culture, History, and Identity. Calgary: U of Calgary P, 2010. Print. Mayor, Chandra. Cherry. Montreal: Conundrum, 2004. Print. McClung, Nellie. Sowing Seeds in Danny. 1908. Teddington: The Echo Library, 2008. Print. McCourt, Edward. The Canadian West in Fiction. Toronto: Ryerson, 1949. Print. ———. Music at the Close. 1947. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1966. Print. Milz, Sabine. “Is Canadian Literature Still ‘National’? Twenty-First-Century Canadian Literature in Spatial Perspective.” Studies in Canadian Literature 35.1 (2010): 5–39. Print. Mitchell, W.O. “The Princess and the Wild Ones.” Jake and the Kid. Toronto: Macmillan, 1961. 158–71. Print. ———. Who Has Seen the Wind. Toronto: Macmillan, 1947. Print. Ostenso, Martha. Wild Geese. 1925. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2008. Print. Quantic, Diane Dufva. “The Unifying Thread: Connecting Place and Language in Great Plains Literature.” American Studies 32.1 (1991): 67–83. Print. Ricou, Laurie. Vertical Man/Horizontal World: Man and Landscape in Canadian Prairie Fiction. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 1973. Print. Ross, Sinclair. As for Me and My House. 1941. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1989. Print. Salverson, Laura Goodman. The Viking Heart. 1923. Toronto:  McClelland and Stewart, 1975. Print. Scofield, Gregory. Louis: The Heretic Poems. Gibsons, BC: Nightwood, 2011. Print. ———. Singing Home the Bones. Vancouver: Raincoast, 2005. Print. Shields, Carol. The Stone Diaries. Toronto: Random House, 1993. Print. Sinclair, Niigaanwewidam James, and Warren Cariou, eds. Manitowapow: Aboriginal Writings from the Land of Water. Winnipeg: Highwater, 2011. Print. Sproxton, Birk, ed. Trace: Prairie Writers on Writing. Winnipeg: Turnstone, 1986. Print. Stead, Robert. Grain. 1926. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1993. Print. Sweatman, Margaret. When Alice Lay Down with Peter. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2001. Print. Toews, Miriam. A Boy of Good Breeding. Toronto: Stoddart, 1998. Print. ———. A Complicated Kindness. Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2004. Print. Tyman, James. Inside Out: An Autobiography of a Native Canadian. Saskatoon: Fifth House, 1995. Print. van der Mark, Christine. In Due Season. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1947. Print. van Herk, Aritha. “Appropriations, the Salvation Army, and a Wager.” In Visible Ink: CryptoFrictions. Edmonton: NeWest, 1991. 85–98. Print. Warder, Kristen. “(Un)Settling the Prairies: Queering Regionalist Literature and the Prairie Social Landscape in Shane Rhodes’s The Wireless Room.” Studies in Canadian Literature 32.2 (2007): 118–31. Print. Whitehouse, Francis Cecil. Plain Folks:  A  Story of the Canadian Prairies. Ottawa:  Graphic Publishers, 1926. Print. Wiebe, Rudy. The Blue Mountains of China. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1970. Print. ———. A Discovery of Strangers. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 1995. Print. ———. The Scorched-Wood People. 1977. Markham, ON: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 2004. Print. ———. The Temptations of Big Bear. 1973. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 1999. Print. Wiebe, Rudy, and Yvonne Johnson. Stolen Life: The Journey of a Cree Woman. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 1999. Print.

708    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions Wiens, Jason. “The Prairies as Cosmopolitan Space: Recent ‘Prairie’ Poetry.” Toward Defining the Prairies: Region, Culture, and History. Ed. Robert Wardhaugh. Winnipeg: U of Manitoba P, 2001. 151–64. Print. Williams, Flos Jewell. New Furrows: The Story of a Belgian Immigrant Girl’s Life in the Alberta Foothills. Ottawa: Graphic Publishers, 1926. Print. Wyile, Herb. Anne of Tim Hortons:  Globalization and the Reshaping of Atlantic-Canadian Literature. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2011. Print. Zacharias, Rob. Rewriting the Break Event: Mennonites and Migration in Canadian Literature. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba P, 2013. Print.

Chapter 38

Canadian Li t e rat u re on the Pacif i c  C oast Nicholas Bradley

An auspicious moment in Canadian letters occurred in 1963 when W.H. New and George Woodcock met “under unprepossessing circumstances” at the University of British Columbia (New, “George”). Woodcock was the editor of Canadian Literature, a scholarly journal that had been founded with the heady ambition of “throw[ing] a concentrated light on a field that has never been illuminated systematically by any previous periodical” (“Editorial” 3).1 Although most of his books on Canadian subjects were yet to be written, he was already a distinguished author. New, however, was not then a celebrated critic: the occasion of the meeting was the oral examination of his M.A. thesis. “[W]‌hen it came to George’s turn to ask me a question,” New later wrote, the line of inquiry was unexpected: “ ‘Can you think of any Canadian Utopias?’ ” (“George”). New was confounded: “I thrashed around for awhile, thinking about Acadia, making the best of things, and the land that God gave Cain, and finally said ‘No.’ ” His examiner was equally stumped: “Woodcock replied, ‘Neither can I.’ It was the beginning of our friendship.”2 The humour in this anecdote consists in its ironies. A seemingly poor answer was in fact a good response, bafflement contained wisdom, and peril turned to good fortune. Surely it is also ironic that neither Woodcock nor New, at least in this telling, suggested that Utopia lay close at hand. The lush, forested campus at Point Grey is bordered by Burrard Inlet and the Strait of Georgia. The Point, in Earle Birney’s “Dusk on English Bay,” is a “long tamed whale” (David 30); the image paradoxically evokes the essential wildness of the place, for even a tamed whale remains inhumanly strange. Such coastal landscapes have often been considered versions of paradise. Teacher or student could have remembered the wistful conclusion of Emily Carr’s The Book of Small (1942), which gives a halcyon view of a city across the Strait from the mainland: Victoria’s inner land being higher than her shore, every aspect is lovely, North, South, East and West—blue sea, purple hills, snow-capped Olympic mountains bounding

710    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions her southern horizon, little bays and beaches heaped with storm-tossed drift, pine trees everywhere, oak and maple in plenty. (Complete 192)

A passage from Ethel Wilson’s The Innocent Traveller (1949) could also have come to mind, with its hint of a psalm: Vancouver people going home from work in the late afternoon who chance to look upwards, see the sea-gulls flying out to sea singly, and in twos, threes, and companies, through the changing skies of evening. … Only a wind disturbs them, and when a west wind blows furiously in from the sea on a bright evening, the sea-gulls, caught in its power, fly high, and higher, wheel, negotiate, gather and disperse. There is an exultation communicated to the evening watcher who lifts his eyes to the mysterious sight. (252–53)

But perhaps Woodcock and New were too canny to propose the Pacific as a Canadian Utopia, to confuse the fanciful with the real.3 If coastal landscapes have been rendered in pastoral terms, moreover, or thought to permit even fleeting exhilaration, as in Wilson’s novel, they have also caused confusion and terror; the zephyr is not the only wind that blows. When Birney wrote in “Pacific Door” of “the bleak and forever capacious tombs of the sea,” he suggested, in addition to the squally dangers faced by European navigators, a natural hostility that persists beneath the veneer of civilization (Strait 37). I will return to Woodcock and New, but in attending first to the contradictions of the West Coast, in trying to catch a glimpse of the literary Pacific, I will let the suggestive question linger: “Can you think of any Canadian Utopias?” In what follows, an essay that ambles by design, my aim is to suggest that a literary region is constituted not by a fixed group of authors or works, but instead by a manner of reading. Many writers have called the coast their home and have made it their subject and setting, but to read from a regional point of view is perhaps above all to acknowledge that no single vista encompasses everything. The nature of a literary region is intricate and often puzzling. Although it is possible to discern patterns among literary encounters with places, the appearance of order may prove evanescent. The poetic imperative in Birney’s “Gulf of Georgia”—“wash your mind of its landness”—serves as a useful spur to students of the Pacific (Strait 36). What would it mean to read with a coastal mind? Well, as another poet said, “Begin, ephebe” (Stevens 329).

Over the Border The Pacific Coast is a limit, a terminus. Or it is a threshold, a point of departures and arrivals.4 It begins at the Continental Divide, west of which rivers run toward the Pacific. Along that ragged line in the Rocky Mountains, the West and the West beyond the West split and cleave.5 Or the Pacific begins instead when the Coast Mountains and the

Canadian Literature on the Pacific Coast    711 northern reaches of the Cascade Range are crossed, and the dry country is abandoned for the wet. Or does the coastal region start where the water meets the land? There the border between liquid and solid changes constantly with the waves and is muddled by deltas, estuaries, and tidal flats. In Daphne Marlatt’s Steveston (1974), a volume of poetry named for a fishing village (now part of Greater Vancouver’s urban expanse), geography (as river, floodplain) and history (as immigration, internment) commingle in such in-between landscapes. And perchance Pacific Canada truly commences when the international border is crossed—from the north, in Alaska, or from the south, in Washington. If physical geography leaves beginnings and endings ambiguous, the political border attempts to simplify location and identity, neatly dividing here from there, us from them.6 The western extremity of British Columbia, from southern Vancouver Island to the border with southeastern Alaska, is delineated by the Pacific Ocean. Even when the coastline becomes American, north of Prince Rupert and south of Ketchikan, the border is never very far from the water.7 Canada’s western coast falls within British Columbia, yet the province and the region are not synonymous. Littoral zones are narrow, but the inland point at which the coast recedes from the literary imagination is not absolute. And although shores, mountains, forests, and faults appear to characterize the variegated region, geography is inconsistent. Victoria lies, for instance, in the rain shadow of the Olympic Mountains across the watery border in Washington; despite the regional stereotype, the city receives relatively little precipitation. The language of landscape and natural phenomena lends itself to figurative purposes, but regional writing assumes many forms and modes. Forests can be sites of labour, idylls, or meeting-places of history and legend. Tides alternately conceal and reveal; fissures indicate the cataclysmic movement of glaciers and rock. Places can be known by name, code, and means of encounter; they can be identified precisely; they can elude, unsettle, and wear disguises. Without geography there is no regional writing, but if the literature of the Pacific is thought to include only novels written within sight of the water, or only poems about the taste of salt in the air, then the category is restricted to the point of triviality. The simultaneous coherence and diversity of a regional literature come into view when disparate works are juxtaposed. Martin Allerdale Grainger’s Woodsmen of the West (1908) and Roderick Haig-Brown’s Timber (1942) are sylvan novels that reflect the enormous importance to the province of the logging industry, whereas the poetry in Marlatt’s Vancouver Poems (1972; a new edition, Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now, was published in 2013), Michael Turner’s Kingsway (1995), Meredith Quartermain’s Vancouver Walking (2005), and W.H. New’s YVR (2011) depicts intensely urban experiences. Wilderness adjacent to the city has been paradisal, as in Malcolm Lowry’s “The Forest Path to the Spring” (in Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place, 1961), and macabre, as in Timothy Taylor’s Stanley Park (2001). Writers have cloaked places and events. In Waste Heritage (1939), for example, Irene Baird, under the sway of John Steinbeck, provided a fictional account of labour disputes but renamed Vancouver (“Aschelon”) and Victoria (“Gath”) to signal correspondences between contemporary events and biblical narratives. Other works of fiction, such as Bill Gaston’s Sointula (2004)

712    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions and Matthew Hooton’s Deloume Road (2010), immerse themselves in actual locations. Places on occasion escape their seekers:  in Lowry’s October Ferry to Gabriola (1970), Ethan and Jacqueline Llewelyn never reach their insular destination. Physical characteristics can provide apt images. The titles of Audrey Thomas’s Intertidal Life (1984), Robert Bringhurst’s Bergschrund (1975), and Don McKay’s Strike/Slip (2006) refer to facets of shores, glaciers, and fault zones, respectively. Sites and sights can rattle observers, violently disrupting expectations, as in Birney’s “Alaska Passage” (a poem collected in Rag & Bone Shop, 1971), or bringing to light aspects of the region’s odious past, as in Garry Thomas Morse’s Discovery Passages (2011). The title of Rainshadow: Stories from Vancouver Island (1982), edited by Ron Smith and Stephen Guppy, illustrates the use of geographical particularity to assert local distinctiveness. But anthologists have emphasized time as well as place; the title of New: West Coast (1977), a compendium of poetry edited by Fred Candelaria, announces a break with the past. The West Coast has also been conceived as a convergence of worlds—notably of East Asia and North America. Thus coastal literature includes novels that portray experiences in Vancouver’s Chinatown, among them SKY Lee’s Disappearing Moon Cafe (1990) and Wayson Choy’s The Jade Peony (1995), and poetry that draws, even obliquely, on Japanese literary forms, such as Phyllis Webb’s Naked Poems (1965) and Fred Wah’s Limestone Lakes Utaniki (1989). The vast Coast resists categorization. Vancouver Island alone is larger in area than Belgium (but smaller than Switzerland). Much of the Coast is sparsely populated, and it is tempting to borrow Thoreau’s words to suggest that “The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild” (239). Yet Vancouver, the largest city in British Columbia, is a metropolis of well over two million inhabitants. It has been the centre of the province’s literary world, with only Victoria, the capital, able to claim a similar role. The Colony of Vancouver Island was established in 1849 and the Colony of British Columbia in 1858; they were united in 1866. British Columbia joined Confederation as the sixth province of the Dominion of Canada in 1871, the year in which Carr was born in Victoria. The literature of the Coast is much older than these events, however, and older still than Captain Cook’s account of the voyage that brought the Resolution and Discovery to the North Pacific in 1778. By some measures it is as old as memory and tells of an altogether different time. “The people, many years ago before this world was changed, were not as people are now; in some ways, they were smarter than we are”: so begins an Upper Chehalis story, related by Jonas Secena in 1926, about the flooding of the world (Adamson 2). An inclusive view of coastal literature would countenance the oral and written repertories of the many languages that have flourished in the region. More than 30 Indigenous languages, and many more dialects, are spoken in British Columbia. On the Coast these include Kwak̓wala (Kwakiutl), X̱aad Kil/X̱aaydaa Kil (Haida), Łingít (Tlingit), Sm̓algya̱x (Coast Tsimshian), SENĆOŦEN (Northern Straits Salish), Nuxalk (Bella Coola), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh sníchim (Squamish), and Hul’q’umi’num’ (Halkomelem); inland they include Ktunaxa (Kootenay), Tsilhqot’in (Chilcotin), and Secwepemctsín (Shuswap).8 Each has a rich oral literary tradition. The history of meetings of oral literatures and written forms is complex and entangled with various missions civilisatrices (religious, economic, legal, academic). Reading regionally in the broadest sense thus requires translation, an educated ear, and a willingness to venture into the corpus of ethnographic documents in which

Canadian Literature on the Pacific Coast    713 oral works have been recorded in print—documents of the contemporary period as well as of the classical age of Americanist anthropology.9 Books as different from each other as E. Pauline Johnson’s Legends of Vancouver (1911), Harry Robinson’s Write It on Your Heart: The Epic World of an Okanagan Storyteller (1989, 2004), and Robert Bringhurst’s A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World (1999, 2011) can claim crucial importance in a coastal literary history. The languages recently introduced to the West Coast through trade, colonization, and immigration are also numerous. In origin they are primarily European (English, Spanish, French, Russian), East Asian (Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean), South Asian (Punjabi, Urdu, Hindi), and Southeast Asian (Tagalog). Chinook Jargon, a pidgin or creole, served in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a lingua franca and supplied countless regional toponyms:  Boston (“American”), Cultus (“bad”), Siwash (“Indian”), Skookumchuck (“strong [i.e., ‘fast’] water”).10 Linguistic diversity means that the names of places are frequently plural, sometimes contested, and often misapplied.11 In Victoria a shopping mall is called Tillicum—“friend” in Chinook Jargon—and a part of town is named Esquimalt, from the Lekwungen/Northern Straits Salish for “place of gradually shoaling water.”12 (The name is occasionally mistaken by visitors for “Eskimo.”) Such names are at once features of daily life and markers of a local history characterized by displacement and exchange. The regional idiom includes saltchuck and spar tree, tyee and tide line: the vocabulary reflects historical, cultural, economic, and geographical conditions, which are rarely if ever simple or congruent. A curriculum for coming to terms with the West Coast would consequently be eclectic. It would include oral narratives told in many languages; records of explorers and colonists who traveled by land and river, such as Alexander Mackenzie and Simon Fraser, and by sea, such as George Vancouver, Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra, and Alessandro Malaspina; tales of gold rushes and other economic frenzies; bureaucratic and personal documents of the colonial era; and the works of writers who have retold the past as farce, parody, or tragedy, and who have envisioned the future.13 It would involve studying the language of recent treaties and the legal and traditional codes in conflict in Delgamuukw v. British Columbia, and listening to the Gitxsan adaawk (sacred narratives), the Wet’suwet’en kungax (traditional songs), and the decisions of the courts.14 It would entail, too, hearing the poetry of the topographical surveyor in A.O. Wheeler’s The Selkirk Range (1905): “The day previous we had been passing between steep slopes, covered by brulé and windfall, with here and there a belt of dark green timber, rising in shoulders to the bare snow-clad summits” (19). This course of study would be discomfiting as well as edifying, and would never end.15

Borderlands “Canadian literature” is a designation nearly as capacious as Birney’s ocean. In principle it comprehends works spoken and written in many languages, and spans time and space, from the pre-Columbian era to the present, and, in the psalmic phrasing of Dominion,

714    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions from sea to sea—and indeed to the third sea. The literature of any of Canada’s constituent regions is by definition a narrower field. The scope of literary activity on the Pacific is sizeable nonetheless. Acquiring a rich sense of the region may depend less on which works are read than on how they are analyzed—less on pinning the region down, as if the reader were a lepidopterist, and more on cocking an ear to catch the resonances of local languages. The raised ear may detect the invention intrinsic to portrayals of places. Ethel Wilson’s transmogrification in Swamp Angel (1954) of Lac Le Jeune, southwest of Kamloops, into Three Loon Lake suggests that experience, geography, and rendition are intertwined but not identical. The novel’s landscapes are versions of the lakes-and-rivers country that Wilson knew well. The Interior, as her Maggie Lloyd discovers, is accessible from Vancouver yet distant. It throws the coast into relief, and offers succour to those in flight from the city; setting and symbol merge in one of the region’s essential novels. In The Resurrection of Joseph Bourne (1979), by Jack Hodgins, the fictive domain is both like and unlike the remote settlements on which it is based: “Port Annie, like other towns on the northwest coast of Vancouver Island, was full of people whose past was none of your business and whose reasons for being here had to be respected in silence” (3). Hodgins uses several related phrases to suggest the extremity of his landscape: “the ragged green edge of the world” (20), “the edge of the world” (27), “a few buildings perched on the edge of nothing” (34). Beyond the fringe is “the endless desolate Pacific” (21). The setting is secluded and peculiar, yet typical; to its residents it is home. Port Annie feels the effect of “an Alaskan earthquake” akin to the Good Friday Earthquake and the accompanying tsunami of 1964, a detail that ties the town to place and time (3). The novel, however, includes a note that asserts the author’s vital role: “Though Port Annie shares some of its geography and a little of its history with actual towns in the northern region of Vancouver Island, it is a product of the imagination” (n. pag.).16 Location in the literary sense is a confluence of the real and the fictional, and the reader must listen for their mutual inflections. To talk of “setting” may be to diminish the profound, and profoundly variable, importance of locale to regional writing. W.H. New has suggested that “for a lot of people looking in from the outside, B.C. is a setting which confirms expectations in their own minds, expectations born elsewhere, while for writers who write in B.C., the place constitutes not just a setting but also a way of seeing” (“Piece” 4). Young Charlie MacIntosh, one of the narrators in Hodgins’s Broken Ground (1998), describes Portuguese Creek in 1922 as a waste land:  Tall snags, black stumps, fallen tangles of brush left behind by loggers. That was just about all this place had been when we moved out to Vancouver Island after the War. For three years my dad had been clearing land. Everyone else had been doing the same. Tall donkey-piles of charred roots smouldered in every field, curled about with thin blue ribbons of smoke. The air was thick with the taste of burning pitch. (11)

Another of the novel’s narrators, Matthew Pearson, provides a more nuanced view of Vancouver Island, picturing it as a land of opportunity and barbarity both:

Canadian Literature on the Pacific Coast    715 When we first set eyes on this logged-off stretch of second-growth timber we were expected to turn into farms, some of us were taken with the extravagant beauty of the green Pacific world—snow-peaked mountains, thick underbrush high as your waist, salt water so close you could smell it. But we had come from every corner of this wide dominion and a few of us were scared off right away by the unexpected. Forest fires, mountain lions, and rain. Some of us, on the other hand, were so pleased with the distance we’d put behind us that it took a while to see this place would kill us with the sort of work it required. (17)

The different perspectives, contradictory and complementary, exist at once. Portuguese Creek is neither heaven nor netherworld, neither fantasy nor nightmare. And it is all of these. “Can you think of any Canadian Utopias?” Not really. “Desolation” and “Deception” are regional place names that suggest exploratory frustrations and disappointments.17 The landscapes and seascapes of the West Coast have been a nearly constant source of attraction for writers, who have made the green, fluent mundo, to adapt another phrase of Wallace Stevens’s, a subject of celebration and contemplation (351). Although British Columbia in general and the Coast in particular have been cast as an earthly paradise, a fear of banishment or ruination often breaks the pastoral spell.18 Expulsion from the garden is a biblical theme, but regional writers have used the motif to treat of a range of secular matters—such as destruction of the wilderness—as well as spiritual affairs. In The Resurrection of Joseph Bourne, Hodgins explores the sense of community that emerges in isolated settings, but characters worry about “the final eviction”—the dissolution of community and the loss of their autonomous world (27). The title of a later collection of stories, Damage Done by the Storm (2004), hints at the persistence of Hodgins’s preoccupation with risk. In Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1981), a nightmarish vision of forced departure suggests that for Japanese Canadians during the Second World War the coast was an irrecoverable site of loss: We are leaving the B.C. coast—rain, cloud, mist—an air overladen with weeping. Behind us lies a salty sea within which swim our drowning specks of memory—our small waterlogged eulogies. We are going down to the middle of the earth with pick-axe eyes, tunnelling by train to the Interior, carried along by the momentum of the expulsion into the waiting wilderness. (119)

In Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach (2000), Kitamaat Village—“ ‘Kitamaat’ is a Tsimshian word that means people of the falling snow”—is the locus of the personal tragedies of the novel’s protagonist, Lisamarie Hill, and the cultural devastation inflicted by colonialism on the Haisla nation (4). Despite the pax at its etymological heart, the Pacific is rarely peaceful. To risk a gross generalization, the literature of the West Coast frequently probes the gulf between that which is desired and that which can be attained. A fluid sense of place is needed to contemplate a literary realm that includes newcomers and temporary residents as well as lifelong inhabitants. Alice Munro lived in British Columbia early in her literary career. She left Ontario for Vancouver in the last days of

716    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions 1951, moved to Victoria in 1963, and returned to Ontario in 1973.19 Stories from throughout her body of work register and reflect this period.20 P.K. Page lived in Victoria from 1944 to 1946, not entirely happily, and returned in 1964 (see Djwa 99–107, 199–208). On her second arrival the Coast appeared, she wrote in her journal, “a green world and wet. All the leaves and grasses soft and the whole rinsed in milk—mountain, forest, water and [sea]gull”—a land flowing with milk and honey, or at least a foggy one (qtd. in Djwa 199).21 Although Page’s poetry does not evince a strong regional sensibility in the manner of Hodgins’s or Wilson’s fiction, her mentoring of other writers made her an influential local presence until her death in 2010. If the border between the Coast and Canada is transected by writers’ lives, so too is the international border that bifurcates the Pacific Northwest (sometimes called Cascadia—an appellation that accentuates connection but elides difference). Observers of British Columbia’s literature have often noted the arbitrariness of the border in view of longitudinal climatic and topographical continuities (see Pritchard, “Shapes” 48, 51–53; Ricou, Arbutus 8–40; New, Borderlands 30). Authors from Canada and the United States have made excursions into the other country, but not always invisibly. In Richard Hugo’s “The Anacortes-Sydney Run,” a poem concerning a passage by ferry, the misspelled Canadian name is an outsider’s error.22 “Maps,” Hugo wrote, “are hard to read” (74). Crossing the border means shifting from one lexicon to another; the distinctions between province and state, reserve and reservation, southwest and northwest are critical, even if, as Hugo’s poem suggests, birds and fish take no heed of the political boundary. That border itself is convoluted in places. Southern Vancouver Island and some neighbouring islands lie south of the forty-ninth parallel; like certain other parts of Canada, they lurk below the line of latitude that is a metonym for the divide between countries. And of course authors routinely disregard the border in their works. Patrick deWitt was born on Vancouver Island, but The Sisters Brothers (2011), his celebrated second novel, makes no mention of Canada. The picaresque Western begins in Oregon City in 1851, the year after California became the thirty-first state in the Union; I am hard-pressed to see that it matters to the novel that in the same year James Douglas became the governor of Vancouver Island. The difficulty of classifying authors and their works according to region is well illustrated by Earle Birney and his most notorious poem, “David,” which was published in the Canadian Forum in 1941 and included the following year in his first collection, David and Other Poems (1942). It tells the story of Bob and David, two young men in the mountains. During their attempt on “the Finger,” a testing spire, David suffers a moment of carelessness or ill luck and falls, injuring himself gravely. Unwilling to endure the wait for rescuers and to live with paralysis, he begs Bob to push him from the ledge. Bob complies, and then continues to descend the mountain. “David” lends itself to allegorical interpretation, but if its themes are plainly evident, its relations to geography and biography are thorny, and illuminatingly so. The poem is set in the Rocky Mountains. Birney names several extant mountains, including Assiniboine, Sundance, and Inglismaldie, and refers to “the surging bloom / Of incredible dawn in the Rockies” (David 5–6). The approximate location is unambiguous, even if some elements of the landscape are invented, such as Mount Gleam. Birney

Canadian Literature on the Pacific Coast    717 worked and climbed mountains in the Rockies, and the first lines of the poem appear to draw upon his experiences: David and I that summer cut trails on the Survey, All week in the valley for wages, in air that was steeped In the wail of mosquitoes, but over the sunalive weekends We climbed. … (1)

In milieu and biographical basis the poem seems to have little to do with the West Coast. Yet “David” was partly inspired by an incident that involved students whom Birney had known when he attended the University of British Columbia. In September 1927, David Cunningham Warden died as a consequence of an accident in the Coast Mountains—near Granite Falls, on the northern arm of Burrard Inlet, not far from Vancouver.23 “Even in the agony of his last hours,” it was reported in the Ubyssey, the campus newspaper for which Warden, like Birney, had worked, “he remained as we have always known him, gallant and considerate” (“Ave”). Birney’s poem is not entirely explained by these historical details, but neither can it be understood in context without reference to his time in Vancouver. Long after the poem was first published, Birney was unequivocal in claiming that “David” was not veiled autobiography, but instead a fictional work. He noted that his creation extended to setting: “I preserved geographical names only when the names had the sound and sense I wanted” (Cow 16). When “David” was published in the Canadian Forum three decades earlier, it included a comparable “Warning to sticklers”: “In the interests of fiction, I have renamed several mountains more appropriately and moved others around a bit” (“David” 274). Birney evidently felt licensed to make the landscape suit his artistic aims. An immensely ambitious author, he wrote that in “David” he “wasn’t trying for a mere piece of regionalism” (Cow 30). In writing the poem, he drew on his knowledge of different mountain ranges, and conflated his own experiences with actual and imagined events (see Cow 16, 19, 20, 30–31). The poem belongs to no single place. “David” is speckled with the technical terms of geology and mountainous terrain: “scree,” “shale,” “arête,” “slate,” “strata,” “col,” “outthrust,” “scarp.” The mountains are “the Cambrian waves” transformed into stone (David 4), “a frozen ocean of rock” (2). Birney describes (in Bob’s voice) the evidence therein of ancient life: There it was too that David Taught me to read the scroll of coral in limestone And the beetle-seal in the shale of ghostly trilobites, Letters delivered to man from the Cambrian waves. (4)

Birney’s metaphors render the landscape legible. When Don McKay writes in The Shell of the Tortoise (2011) and Paradoxides (2012) about the Cambrian period, trilobites, and related geological topics, he, like Birney, understands fossils to be missives from a

718    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions prehistoric age. And he recognizes, in a passage from Deactivated West 100 (2005), that geology collapses the distance between the Rockies and the Coast: When I walk along the deactivated logging road that borders Loss Creek at the south end of Vancouver Island, I am also walking along a seam in the planet known as the Loss Creek-Leech River Fault. On the south side of the creek lies the bunched mafic muscle of the Crescent Terrane, a seamount formed from volcanoes erupting under the ocean, then carried by its underlying plate into a collision with North America. Most of B.C. is formed by such exotic terranes—twenty of them—crashing into the continental plate, and the Crescent Terrane is simply, at forty million years ago, the most recent. Before all these immigrants landed, the continent ended, and the Pacific began, at Calgary. (60)

The years that McKay spent on the West Coast were pivotal in the development of his geopoetic (and otherwise ecological) imagination. Like Birney, however, he is a writer of many places, and indeed of the Atlantic as well as the Pacific, as his eastward relocation and fascination with the fossils of Newfoundland demonstrate.24 At least some of the works of both authors belong to the regional literature of the Pacific, yet they show the region itself to be mutable; it changes over the long course of geological time and is reimagined continually in the brief duration of human lives. If the literary history of the region records varying ideas about the nature of the place, it also reveals an array of aesthetic tendencies. Audrey Alexandra Brown, born in Nanaimo in 1904, was Birney’s exact contemporary. Her poetry is remembered, if it is remembered at all, as minor verse, florid and belatedly romantic in a period of emergent modern styles.25 Although even the title of A Dryad in Nanaimo (1931) may today seem risible, the volume belongs indisputably to the history of literary activity in the region. Brown’s sensibilities compelled her to look beyond Vancouver Island for suitable subjects and a fittingly elevated style. “The Reed” is typically derivative: “The reed yet grows by the stream / In the shepherdess-land of pleasant Arcady” (9). On occasion, however, her poetry admits her awareness of her immediate surroundings and a struggle to reconcile them with the Romantic and Georgian tropes that she favoured. Changing tastes have made Brown’s poetry notable principally for historical reasons, but studies of a regional literary culture may well acknowledge the discrepancies between the stylistic diversity of a historical moment and what is later remembered of that time.

Beyond a Boundary I have suggested that literature on the West Coast has existed for millennia, or since time immemorial; and even written literature in English has a centuries-long history here. The literary region as an object of study, however, is relatively new. Yet it has been graced by the attention of perceptive and provocative critics, only a few of whom I can

Canadian Literature on the Pacific Coast    719 name in these pages.26 The prolific George Woodcock wrote several books on the cultures of British Columbia, including The Doukhobors (1968, with Ivan Avakumovic), a noteworthy study. As the editor of Canadian Literature, he played a significant role in the local literary culture as well as the national; the journal has been a crucial venue for studies of the region, despite (or in addition to) its broad mandate and the international outlook that Woodcock fostered. The first issue, in 1959, began, after a brief editorial, with a reflective essay by Roderick Haig-Brown written “on the shores of the Pacific Ocean” (9). Allan Pritchard’s important analyses focus on themes in the literature of British Columbia, often in explicit or implicit contrast to those examined elsewhere in Canadian writing by Northrop Frye, Margaret Atwood, and other critics concerned to identify overarching patterns.27 His approach is of its time, but his insights are of lasting value. W.H. New’s examinations of western Canadian literature form part of his wide-ranging investigation of the literature of Canada and the Commonwealth; regionally relevant observations are found throughout his extensive oeuvre. In writing about British Columbia he has attended characteristically to multiplicity, irony, and junctures of history and literary form. His changing views of literature in the province may be observed by reading together “A Piece of the Continent, a Part of the Main” (1985) and “Writing Here” (2005): both are major critical surveys. In the latter he suggests, in my view with great acuity, that “our claim upon place, on what we severally call the reality of position, is like an ice floe, always in motion, or potential motion, its fixity only ever illusory, its character imagined by the range of alternatives that it already anticipates and embodies” (5–6). Laurie Ricou’s The Arbutus/Madrone Files (2002) and Salal (2007) are to date the most sustained explorations of the literature of the Pacific Northwest; like New’s Borderlands (1998), they examine Canadian writing in light of its relations to American literature. Ricou has in addition written several articles that remain essential.28 His criticism is seminal, germinative—I use the agrarian metaphors with his native Brandon, Manitoba, in mind—and his scholarship and teaching have shaped the conception of the field qua field (on teaching see Ricou, “Out”). Julie Cruikshank is an anthropologist, not a literary critic, but Do Glaciers Listen? (2005) is a vital, searching study of the northern borderlands—the Saint Elias Mountains, “the craggy mountain spine where Canada and the United States meet at their least-known boundary” (3)—and of intersections of history, anthropology, and literary studies. J. Edward Chamberlin’s “Klahowya Tillicum: Coming Home to the Stories and Songs of the West Coast” (2012) is a triumph of coastal studies—a recent essay but an instant landmark. Among its lessons is the proposition that the West Coast is an occasion as much as a place, an opportunity to learn to read newly, with sensitivity to environment, genre, and voice alike: “Tracking is a form of reading, mostly between the lines; and we all know the natural world must be read as well as listened to. The listening required is not straightforward, however, and the West Coast is one place where we can learn the right habits” (113). The Coast’s attentive critics would of course have no subject without the contributions of regional publishers and other institutions. Publishers in British Columbia have been located in small towns as well as in cities, but the industry as a whole has

720    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions centred on Vancouver. A list of significant regional presses would include Douglas and McIntyre, Harbour, Talonbooks, Nightwood, Oolichan, Barbarian, Sono Nis, and many others besides. The three oldest universities in the province—the University of British Columbia, the University of Victoria, and Simon Fraser University—have been home to numerous writers, and their libraries are repositories of regional archives. Literary journals have provided writers venues for publication and have disseminated new writing. Such magazines have been variously (and sometimes simultaneously) local, national, and international in their orientation. Some have been tied to educational institutions, such as the Malahat Review (University of Victoria), Prism International (University of British Columbia), West Coast Review (later West Coast Line) (Simon Fraser University), and Event (Douglas College), while others have eschewed academic affiliations. I have tried in this chapter to suggest the breadth and diversity of the literature of the West Coast as a way of remaining faithful to literary history, and of showing that critical attention to local matters does not necessarily lead to insularity or parochialism. The literature of the Pacific Coast, like the region itself, teaches and sings of borders and crossings, of strangeness and familiarity; readers will hear the known and the unknown in conversation. The constant is the place itself, perpetually changing as it may be. The literature of the West Coast is tied to the region’s characteristic landscapes: the coastline, where fjords carve the mainland and innumerable islands punctuate the sea; the massive volcanoes and steep peaks of the coastal ranges, where at great heights it is always winter; the arid hills and plateaus, in muted browns and greens, of the inland regions across the mountains; the lush, superfoliate, superabundant temperate rainforests in which the totemic Douglas-firs, cedars, and hemlocks grow; and the Pacific Ocean, the source and sine qua non of the region’s distinctiveness. The literary West Coast is also composed of the Chinatowns of Vancouver and Victoria, the fishing communities of Campbell River and Prince Rupert, the internment camps at Slocan and New Denver, the leper colony of D’Arcy Island, and the reserves and residential schools across the province. Like all regions, the West Coast contains multitudes. To be dedicated to them and willing to listen to their wisdom and contrariness alike is a condition to which regionalist critics may aspire.

Notes 1. Woodcock was the first editor of Canadian Literature (Djwa, Professing 317, 433n28). Sandra Djwa has called Roy Daniells the “prime mover” in the establishment of the journal (310). 2. The events are recounted in New, “George.” Woodcock’s fascination with the North American West was already evident in his Ravens and Prophets (1952). New’s thesis concerned the fiction of Frederick Niven, who lived for a time in Nelson, British Columbia (see New, “Piece” 19); New’s criticism spans several national literatures, but a local interest has long been evident. “Cain” alludes to Jacques Cartier, but Malcolm Lowry’s fiction is also pertinent (see New, Land 55–57, 62–63; “Piece” 22).

Canadian Literature on the Pacific Coast    721 3. Woodcock wrote in Ravens and Prophets of Victoria’s “central stagnation, a core of emptiness which becomes evident upon very short acquaintance” (243). 4. Vancouver is the Terminal City. In 1885 the transcontinental railway was completed, which made, E.J. Pratt wrote in Towards the Last Spike (1952), “the whistles from the steam out-crow / The Fraser” (Selected 204). See New, “Writing” 22. The metaphor of the “gateway” to Asia has been persistent and often pernicious; see New, “On” 4; Land 210–11. 5. “The West beyond the West”: the phrase provides the title of Jean Barman’s History of British Columbia, to which readers of this chapter are referred for historical information. Carr described Victoria and “her Island setting” as “Western as West can be before earth’s gentle rounding pulls West east again” (192). 6. See New, “On” 5, 7; Chamberlin, If 1–4. 7. Although British Columbia is the westernmost province, the inland Alaska-Yukon boundary is farther west than the Pacific Coast, which is not strictly Canada’s westernmost limit. Prince George, in the Interior, is nearly as far west (122.7°) as Victoria and Vancouver (123.3°, 123.1°), yet its distance by highway from coastal Prince Rupert (130.4°) is over 700 kilometres; both cities are comparably northern (53.9°, 54.2°). Whitehorse (135°) is much farther west still. (All figures are approximate.) 8. I have followed the orthography of the First Peoples’ Language Map of British Columbia (maps.fphlcc.ca). The names in parentheses are common but not necessarily preferred. 9. See Bringhurst, e.g., 76–84, 264, 329–37; and Ricou, “Writing” 110–11. Ricou proposes that “Franz Boas, for all the limitations now evident in his work, may in his seeking for the equality of peoples, and in his commitment to understanding in the field, be the ultimate B.C. writer” (110). On the literary importance of anthropological and ethnopoetic studies, see Ricou, “Dumb” 45–47. I use the phrase “classical age” in view of accounts such as The Golden Age of American Anthropology (1960), edited by Margaret Mead and Ruth L. Bunzel. 10. See Chamberlin, “Klahowya” 99–102. Opinions vary on the appropriate classification of Chinook Jargon (Lang 2–7, 43, 100–103). Chinook Jargon differs from Chinookan, a group of languages from the lower Columbia River region in Washington and Oregon. 11. On Musqueam and Squamish names in Vancouver, see New, “Writing” 21; Land 210. Lee Henderson’s The Man Game (2008), a novel, memorably portrays the mixing of languages and names in colonial Vancouver. 12. See Akrigg and Akrigg 76; Walbran 171. 13. On colonial documents, see Pritchard, “Shapes” 54–58. On rewritings, see Pritchard, “Shapes” 57–59, 69n52; Ricou, “Writing” 109–10. Notable examples of engagements of colonial history include Frank Davey’s The Clallam, or Old Glory in Juan de Fuca (1973), George Bowering’s Burning Water (1980), and Daphne Marlatt’s Ana Historic (1988). Malaspina’s Italian name was given as “Alexandro” in the Spanish of his time. 14. The Delgamuukw case was tried in British Columbia from 1987 to 1990. The decision rendered in 1991 by Allan McEachern, which gave little credence to Aboriginal title and oral traditions, is a fascinating if unpalatable document. In 1997 the Supreme Court of Canada allowed in part an appeal and ordered a retrial; the decision was in some ways conservative, but its recognition of the significance of oral traditions has had wide implications. On the trial in British Columbia, see Cruikshank, “Invention”; on Delgamuukw in a literary context, see Chamberlin, “ ‘corn’ ” 79–80, 87; If 1, 18–21, 146–47. “Treaties”: e.g., agreements between the provincial government and the Nisga’a, Tsawwassen, Maa-Nulth, Yale, and

722    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions Tla’amin First Nations. The ruling of the Supreme Court of Canada in Tsilhqot’in Nation v. British Columbia (2014) is highly pertinent. 15. See Bringhurst 258–59, 264; Chamberlin, Living 15–22. Robin Skelton, as editor of the Malahat Review (from 1967 to 1983), and Robert Bringhurst, as commentator on and translator of Indigenous oral literatures, have been especially influential in envisaging the West Coast as a region distinguished by meetings of Indigenous and colonial traditions and languages. 16. Port Alice is a plausible counterpart. Port Alberni suffered considerable damage from the tsunami, but it is far south of Port Alice (White 215–16). Although northern communities including Zeballos, Winter Harbour, and Port McNeill were affected (212, 214), Port Alice saw “Little damage” (214). 17. E.g., Desolation Sound in British Columbia and Deception Pass (a strait) and Mount Deception, both in Washington. “Disappointments”: deception and the French déception are normally faux amis. 18. See Pritchard, “West” (1984), esp.  36, 49–50; “Shapes” 62–64; cf. Justine Brown’s “Nowherelands.” 19. See Thacker 10, 114, 119, 125. Munro left Victoria in 1972 and spent time in Toronto and Nelson, British Columbia, before moving to London, Ontario. 20. Examples include “The Moons of Jupiter,” collected in the volume of that name (1982), “Cortes Island,” in The Love of a Good Woman (1998), and “Post and Beam” and “What Is Remembered,” in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001). Munro later spent winters in Comox, British Columbia. 21. Page traveled by train from Ottawa to Vancouver. The brackets were added by Djwa. 22. Sidney, British Columbia, is named after Sidney Island, which was named in 1859 by Captain George Richards of the Plumper for Frederick W.  Sidney, a naval surveyor (Akrigg and Akrigg 243; Walbran 457–58). Anacortes, on Fidalgo Island, is in the state of Washington. On Hugo’s spelling, see Ricou, Arbutus 24. The poem appeared in Hugo’s Death of the Kapowsin Tavern (1965). 23. See Birney, Cow 18; Cameron 191. “Granite Falls”:  Cameron 509. “Northern arm”:  i.e., Indian Arm. 24. McKay moved to British Columbia in 1996. At the time of this writing, he resides in Newfoundland. 25. Cf. New, “Writing” 7. For a partial reappraisal of Brown’s poetry, see Blank. 26. On the history of regionalist criticism in British Columbia, see Ricou, “Writing.” 27. On thematic criticism, see Pritchard, “West” (1984) 36; Ricou, “Writing” 111–12. 28. On Ricou’s arrival in British Columbia in 1978 and his subsequent encounters with local literature, see Ricou, “Dumb” 47; “Writing” 113–14; and Arbutus 1, 7–14.

Works Cited Adamson, Thelma, ed. Folk-Tales of the Coast Salish. 1934. Lincoln: Bison-U of Nebraska P, 2009. Print. Akrigg, G.P.V., and Helen B. Akrigg. British Columbia Place Names. 1986. 3rd ed. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 1997. Print. “Ave Atqua Vale [sic].” Ubyssey [Vancouver] 28 Sept. 1927: 1. Print.

Canadian Literature on the Pacific Coast    723 Barman, Jean. The West beyond the West: A History of British Columbia. 1991. 3rd ed. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2007. Print. Birney, Earle. The Cow Jumped over the Moon:  The Writing and Reading of Poetry. [Toronto]: Holt, 1972. Print. ———. “David.” Canadian Forum Dec. 1941: 274–76. Print. ———. David and Other Poems. Toronto: Ryerson, 1942. Print. ———. The Strait of Anian: Selected Poems. Toronto: Ryerson, 1948. Print. Blank, G. Kim. “The Forgotten Dryad of Canadian Poetry: Audrey Alexandra Brown.” Arc Poetry Magazine 58 (2007): 112–24. Print. Bringhurst, Robert. Everywhere Being Is Dancing:  Twenty Pieces of Thinking. Kentville, NS: Gaspereau, 2007. Print. Brown, Audrey Alexandra. A Dryad in Nanaimo. Toronto: Macmillan, 1931. Print. Brown, Justine. “Nowherelands:  Utopian Communities in B.C. Fiction.” BC Studies 109 (1996): 5–28. Print. Cameron, Elspeth. Earle Birney: A Life. Toronto: Viking, 1994. Print. Carr, Emily. The Complete Writings of Emily Carr. Vancouver:  Douglas and McIntyre, 1997. Print. Chamberlin, J. Edward. “ ‘The corn people have a song too. It is very good’: On Beauty, Truth, and Goodness.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 21.3 (2009): 66–89. Print. ———. If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground. Toronto: Knopf, 2003. Print. ———. “Klahowya Tillicum: Coming Home to the Stories and Songs of the West Coast.” Journal of Canadian Studies 46.2 (2012): 99–121. Print. ———. Living Language and Dead Reckoning:  Navigating Oral and Written Traditions. Vancouver: Ronsdale, 2006. Print. Cruikshank, Julie. Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 2005. Print. ———. “Invention of Anthropology in British Columbia’s Supreme Court: Oral Tradition as Evidence in Delgamuukw v. B.C.” BC Studies 95 (1992): 25–42. Print. Djwa, Sandra. Journey with No Maps: A Life of P.K. Page. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2012. Print. ———. Professing English: A Life of Roy Daniells. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2002. Print. “Editorial.” Canadian Literature 1 (1959): 3–4. Print. Haig-Brown, Roderick. “The Writer in Isolation: A Surprised Exploration of a Given Subject.” Canadian Literature 1 (1959): 5–12. Print. Hodgins, Jack. Broken Ground: A Novel. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1998. Print. ———. The Resurrection of Joseph Bourne, or A Word or Two on Those Port Annie Miracles. Toronto: Macmillan, 1979. Print. Hugo, Richard. Making Certain It Goes On:  The Collected Poems of Richard Hugo. 1984. New York: Norton, 2007. Print. Kogawa, Joy. Obasan. 1981. Toronto: Penguin, 1983. Print. Lang, George. Making Wawa: The Genesis of Chinook Jargon. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 2008. Print. Marlatt, Daphne. Steveston. Photographs by Robert Minden. Vancouver:  Talonbooks, 1974. Print. McKay, Don. Deactivated West 100. Kentville, NS: Gaspereau, 2005. Print.

724    Intra-National Perspectives and Traditions New, W.H. Borderlands: How We Talk about Canada. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 1998. Print. ———. “George Woodcock, Canadian Critic.” Canadian Literature (n.d.): n. pag. Web. Accessed 18 Mar. 2013. ———. Land Sliding: Imagining Space, Presence, and Power in Canadian Writing. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1997. Print. ———. “On the Border.” Editorial. Canadian Literature 144 (1995): 4–7. Print. ———. “A Piece of the Continent, a Part of the Main: Some Comments on B.C. Literature.” BC Studies 67 (1985): 3–28. Print. ———. “Writing Here.” BC Studies 147 (2005): 3–25. Print. Pratt, E.J. Selected Poems. Ed. Sandra Djwa, W.J. Keith, and Zailig Pollock. Toronto:  U of Toronto P, 2000. Print. Pritchard, Allan. “The Shapes of History in British Columbia Writing.” BC Studies 93 (1992): 48–69. Print. ———. “West of the Great Divide:  Man and Nature in the Literature of British Columbia.” Canadian Literature 102 (1984): 36–53. Print. ———. “West of the Great Divide: A View of the Literature of British Columbia.” Canadian Literature 94 (1982): 96–112. Print. Ricou, Laurie. The Arbutus/Madrone Files: Reading the Pacific Northwest. Edmonton: NeWest, 2002. Print. ———. “Dumb Talk: Echoes of the Indigenous Voice in the Literature of British Columbia.” BC Studies 65 (1985): 34–47. Print. ———. “Out of the Field Guide:  Teaching Habitat Studies.” The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place. Ed. Tom Lynch, Cheryll Glotfelty, and Karla Armbruster. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2012. 347–64. Print. ———. Salal: Listening for the Northwest Understory. Edmonton: NeWest, 2007. Print. ———. “The Writing of British Columbia Writing.” BC Studies 100 (1993–94): 106–20. Print. Robinson, Eden. Monkey Beach. Toronto: Knopf, 2000. Print. Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poetry and Prose. Ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson. New York: Library of America, 1997. Print. Thacker, Robert. Alice Munro:  Writing Her Lives:  A  Biography. Toronto:  McClelland and Stewart, 2005. Print. Thoreau, Henry David. “Walking.” 1862. Collected Essays and Poems. Ed. Elizabeth Hall Witherell. New York: Library of America, 2001. 225–55. Print. Walbran, John T. British Columbia Coast Names [1592–1906, to Which Are Added a Few Names in Adjacent United States Territory]: Their Origin and History. 1909. Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1971. Print. Wheeler, A.O. The Selkirk Range. Vol. 1. Ottawa: Government Printing Bureau, 1905. Print. White, W.R.H. “The Alaska Earthquake—Its Effect in Canada.” Canadian Geographical Journal 72.6 (June 1966): 210–19. Print. Wilson, Ethel. The Innocent Traveller. 1949. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2008. Print. ———. Swamp Angel. Toronto: Macmillan, 1954. Print. Woodcock, George. Ravens and Prophets: An Account of Journeys in British Columbia, Alberta and Southern Alaska. London: Wingate, 1952. Print.

Pa rt  V

C R I T IC A L FIELDS AND NEW DI R E C T ION S

Chapter 39

E c o criticism i n C a na da Pamela Banting

In his influential essay “The Moment of the Discovery of America Continues,” Robert Kroetsch writes that Canadians whose ancestors were not native to this continent are still in the process of discovering who, what, when, and where is here: “We had, and still have, difficulty finding names for the elements and characteristics of this landscape. The human response to this landscape is so new and ill-defined and complex that our writers come back, uneasily but compulsively, to landscape writing” (5). The Canadian condition is such that “Knowledge becomes, for us, knowledge of someone else,” he writes, “We become a kind of perversion—and witness our universities—a society that is reluctant to study images of itself ” (4). Of course, it is not the “human” but the non-Indigenous Canadian response to this land that is even now still new and ill-defined. In ecological terms, we are still learning—or failing to learn—the plants, animals, weather patterns, watersheds, and bioregions that early European “explorers” of other people’s territories that we now call Canada claimed to have discovered over 500 years ago. Even our own home places remain elusive to a great many of us. One year, in conjunction with our reading of Sharon Butala’s literary nonfiction The Perfection of the Morning: An Apprenticeship in Nature (1994), I took my fourth-year summer-session Nature Writing and Environmental Literature class on a field trip to Nose Hill Park, a vast remnant of natural grass prairie within the city of Calgary. Butala’s narrative is about her process of learning the history, terrain, flora, and fauna of her new husband’s ranch in southwestern Saskatchewan, and my students and I were visiting the prairie at its peak. Dozens of wildflowers and shrubs were in full bloom. At one point a student pointed to a flowering shrub and asked me to identify it. She was pointing to a wild rose, one of the most ubiquitous and beautiful prairie wildflowers. The wild rose also happens to be the official floral emblem of the province of Alberta: its image and the slogan “Wild Rose Country” are imprinted on vehicle license plates. But my former student is far from unique in her unfamiliarity with our regional vegetation. Many Canadians today fail to see, hear, smell, or address themselves to the land. Beyond its utilitarian worth as resource, property, recreation, or view, many Canadians are in effect blind and deaf to the land. In a vein similar to that of Kroetsch’s

728    Critical Fields and New Directions essay, postcolonial literary critic J. Edward Chamberlin relays the powerful and important question of a Gitksan man from northwestern British Columbia to non-Indigenous Canadians: “If this is your land, where are your stories?” If we have stories, then why can’t we remember, tell, sing, or perform them? Why can we not even recognize them as such? In place of stories rooted in the land and our experiences in it, we produce and consume a steady diet of fragmented, commercially manufactured, and media-disseminated images of “the” Canadian identity: the hockey stick, the beer bottle or can, the toque, the little mosque on the prairie, the canoe, the call of the loon, poutine, and maple syrup. While each of these icons has its charms, they are tokens, not totems. In the section of his essay where Kroetsch writes that “We feel a profound ambiguity about the past—about both its contained stories and its modes of perception” (5), he is referring both to the non-Indigenous Canadian writer’s unease in the face of the powerful European and American literary traditions, nations with whom we share a language but not a geography, and to the ambiguity and discomfort about our past, incurred by the fact that our homes are on First Nations’ land and, at least in the west, the land of the buffalo to whom he refers in the opening pages of his essay. Ironically or not, given that this disconnection is intrinsic to our literary tradition, as a body of work non-Indigenous Canadian literature can be read as a sort of graph of and testament to the process of attempting to come to terms with our home on Native land. From the journals of the earliest “explorers,” as we like to call them—fur-trade company employees, surveyors, cartographers, and resource assessors—through nineteenth-century Canadian nature poets’ aestheticizations—even aesthetic appropriations—of Canadian landscapes during the period of the majority of the treaty negotiations1 to contemporary takes on the natural world from an environmental standpoint, Canadian literature is extraordinarily susceptible to ecocritical analysis.

Definitions, Parameters, and Borders In her introduction to the groundbreaking American anthology The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (1996), a gathering of mostly previously published articles which, compiled, announced the emergence of the new field of ecological literary criticism in the United States, co-editor Cheryll Glotfelty defines ecocriticism quite simply and usefully as “the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment” (xviii). While this open, commodious, and functional definition has sufficed to generate a burgeoning, important, and exciting new field within literary studies, a significant number of ecocritics have expressed concern that her definition lacks precision. In an article entitled “Ecocriticism: Some Emerging Trends,” prominent American ecocritic Lawrence Buell expresses dismay that the field has what he sees as such a vague definition. He mentions that Nirmal Selvamony in India and Ursula Heise in the United States share his point about definitional imprecision, quoting Heise’s remark that “ecocriticism has imposed itself as convenient shorthand” for environmental

Ecocriticism in Canada   729 criticism, literary-environmental studies, literary ecology, literary environmentalism, and green cultural studies (Buell 88). He worries that Glotfelty’s definition fails to demarcate the work of ecocritics from that of “other environmentally oriented humanists who would resist being called ecocritics however relevant their work seems to those who do.” After noting at the outset the problematics of naming and defining the field, Buell describes what he sees as its evolution, beginning with its origins in two “epicentres,” British Romanticism and American nature writing in the 1990s, and its first two waves. Presumably he is writing as an Americanist for other Americanists, but given the title of his article, it is conspicuous that he cites only three Canadian-authored texts, none of which is on Canadian literature and all of which were published in the United States. Moreover, his location of the origins of ecocriticism in what he calls the “epicentres” of the United States and Britain are what those of us who live in Canada—or, as he refers to those of us who live in English-speaking postcolonial countries, without specification or distinction as to nation, “the Anglophone diaspora” (92)—would call the imperial centres. Even given the spatial limitations of an article, it is surprising that an ecocritic would overlook the entire body of ecocritical scholarship in the country north of the forty-ninth parallel, the earth, water, and air mass from which many Americans believe their bad weather and some of their fossil fuel originates. Clearly, demarcations of our critical practices along national lines still supersede commonalities of interlinked climate, weather, watersheds, flora, and fauna, despite the migratory, territorial, and transgressive impulses and imperatives of wolves, grizzly bears, numerous species of birds, purple loosestrife, and carbon, to name a few. Buell quotes Heise’s “charge” that “most ecocritics remain focused on particular national archives” (107), even while doing pretty much the same thing in his own article. A desirable definitional precision within the field might take the form of amending his title “Ecocriticism: Some Emerging Trends” by appending the words “British and American” in front of the word “ecocriticism” or the words “in Britain and America” after the word “trends.” Though he says he regrets “the skimpiness of my treatment here of ecocritical work outside the English-speaking world” (107) and professes that he does not mean “to make this essay sound like a sunny, much less imperial, narrative of environmental criticism’s inexorable advance,” one might hope for critical acknowledgment rather than denial of the imperial stance his article does assume or, conversely, some acknowledgment that our shared watersheds, bioregions, weather systems, plants, animals, oil pipelines, and other factors are important to the field of ecocriticism. Instead, Buell gives more attention, skimpy though it is, to ecocriticism in the non-adjacent country of India than to Canada.2 That being said, the complexities involved in discerning ecocritics from “other environmentally oriented humanists who would resist being called ecocritics however relevant their work seems to those who do” (88), are genuine, as will become evident in the Canadian context as well.

730    Critical Fields and New Directions

Antecedents of Ecocriticism in Canada For the most part, I  do not share Buell’s and others’ definitional anxiety regarding ecocriticism in general because, to my perception, Glotfelty’s 1996 definition (quoted above) and Buell’s own 1995 definition, namely, “the study of the relation between literature and environment conducted in a spirit of commitment to environmental praxis” (Environmental Imagination 430), have been very productive in generating an entire new, growing, and important field. Like postcolonial ecocritic Susie O’Brien, I think there is “a substantial body of what might be called ‘Canadian ecocriticism’ lurking under names other than ‘Canadian’ or ‘ecocritical’ ” (“Nature’s Nation,” n. pag.). In the specifically Canadian context, although there was a gap of approximately 15 years between the climax of regionalism (circa 1980) and the beginnings of ecocriticism in Canada (circa 1995), there are threads of theoretical continuity between the literary and critical regionalism of the 1970s and the nature writing, environmental literature, and ecocriticism of the late 1990s to the present. While the focus of regionalism in Canada was by no means expressly environmental in the current sense of the term, nevertheless there are commonalities between that precursor work on the literature of place and region as exemplified, for instance, by Macmillan’s Themes in Canadian Literature series edited by David Arnason and the criticism of Margaret Atwood, Northrop Frye, Dick Harrison, Doug Jones, Robert Kroetsch, Laurie Ricou, Robert Thacker, and Rudy Wiebe, to name a few, and contemporary ecocritical and bioregional work. In her article “Eruptions of Postmodernity: The Postcolonial and Ecological,” Linda Hutcheon configures Northrop Frye himself as a kind of proto-ecocritic. She writes: “In 1977, Frye wrote about the guilt that Canadians felt vis-à-vis their history in relation to the Native peoples” and “linked this guilt to the ecological guilt that was another product of the ‘colonial mentality’ that allowed the exploitation of nature in Canada” (159). In her article “Regionalism and Urbanism,” Janice Fiamengo summarizes various definitions of regionalism. She writes: In the simplest definition, regional literature portrays regional experience, using “the details of real-world geography” to assert the value of the particular. Regionalism examines the impact of a distinctive terrain, topography, and climate upon the people who experience them, sometimes suggesting quasi-mystical explanations for the force of geography. … Contemporary literary scholars usually extend the meaning of region to include not only geography but also social, historical, economic, and cultural dynamics, casting a broad net over the experience of place and acknowledging differences within regions. (242)

If one brackets the larger project of regionalism’s overarching search for the paradigmatic Canadian identity that would yoke together or transcend disparate regional identities, then a great deal of that previous work might be viewed as contiguous with, though by no means identical to, bioregionalism, a subcategory of ecocriticism.3

Ecocriticism in Canada   731 The waxing of regionalism in the 1970s and early 1980s stirred new feelings of national identity and pride in our literatures and hometowns, and then waned as feminism, gender and queer studies, cultural studies, postmodernism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, multiculturalism, and other fascinating and transformative “-isms” and studies took the academy by storm. At that time, regionalism came under suspicion for its potential to gloss over difference and heterogeneity in the name of perceptions of shared experience rooted in geography and climate (and perhaps, at that time of theoretical ferment, also because it was not foreign and exotic but “homely”). Although Buell does not mention it in his schema of first- and second-wave ecocriticism (but in her Introduction to The Ecocriticism Reader, Glotfelty does), the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) arose in 1992 out of the Western Literature Association (Glotfelty xviii), which one might categorize as an association dedicated to examination of a broadly regional literature and which had itself previously emerged out of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association. Similarly, in the Canadian context, regionalism prepared the ground for the subsequent reception of ecocriticism. Bioregionalism, however, goes beyond regionalism’s humanist explorations of geography as constitutive of personal and collective cultural identity to offer a more specific and productive analysis of place rooted in attention to, among other things, what there is in our area to eat and drink, how we are caring for or destroying the earth beneath our feet and the water and air all around us, and what the lives of the plant and animal companions of our district are like. Those of us who were lucky enough as children regularly to explore the natural world may have inserted into the spaces between our official locations (our street address, village, city, province, nation, universe) some version of the following: the swamp where the frogs and polliwogs live; the enormous anthill at the edge of the bush; the game trail along the riverbank; the place across the train tracks where Native families camp for the summer. Bioregionalism aims to restore a sense of that intensely lived-world, which tends to get over-written by jurisdictional and political designations, by encouraging us to become, for instance, residents of the tallgrass prairie, Cascadia or Laurentia, areas of distinct assemblages of plants and animals with dynamic but clear topographic and climatic boundaries. In offering a more-than-representational approach to texts, bioregional criticism attempts to encounter the materiality of the natural world from a grounded, ecologically sensitive framework. Literature plays an important role in nurturing bioregional consciousness by “helping people reimagine the places where they live and their relations to those places, as well as reflecting the unique bioregional character of specific communities” (Lynch et al. 4). Learning the flowers, the sources of one’s energy and drinking water, how to grow food, the habits of bees and pine beetles, what is causing caribou populations to crash and also how that might affect local people’s livelihoods and cultural practices, and what literature has been written about one’s local watershed offers compelling, if partial, forms of resistance and resilience in the face of the environmental destruction incurred by development, industrialization, and globalization. However, there appears to be a problem of nomenclature associated with allying ecocriticism in any way with regionalism. For some critics, the mere mention of the words

732    Critical Fields and New Directions region or regionalism seems to elicit a teleological concern—a concern that ecocritics’ interest in the natural world may signal a doubly regressive, nostalgic return to simpler times (as if times or places were ever simple to the people living in them), as well as a threat to critical-theoretical progress or, as neoliberal parlance would have it, a failure to be perceived to be “moving forward.” In her article “Where Has ‘Real’ Nature Gone, Anyway?:  Ecocriticism, Canadian Writing and the Lures of the Virtual,” Eva Darias Beautell views the decade of the 1980s as marking a turn from regionalism to urban multiculturalism and raises the question as to whether following that shift “the ascent of ecocriticism in the 1990s might be interpreted as a conservative move towards the recuperation of the unified national metaphor the country’s association with the wilderness seemed, at least for some, to provide” (82). She suggests that Canadian ecocriticism may indicate a return to a naïve notion of the real as demonstrated by an interest in writing about the natural world, and she worries that ecocritics view nature from a lapsed poststructuralist or pre-poststructuralist perspective. Similarly, in her article “Articulating a World of Difference: Ecocriticism, Postcolonialism and Globalization,” O’Brien observes that ecocritics arguably prefer “to focus on realist texts, or those which seem to promise the kind of connection between word and world which contemporary literary criticism seems to deny” (144).4 One might respond that poststructuralist critiques of realism argue that it offers no more and no less unfettered access to the real than any other artistic convention or style. Given the concern about the stakes of and for representation in the work of Buell, Darias Beautell, O’Brien, and others, it seems as if, like the words region and regionalism, the word nature triggers associations of naïvete, innocence, nostalgia, conservatism, and the world before theory (though of course there has always been theory). Clearly these words give some critics uneasy feelings of déjà lu. However, this may pertain more to simple word associations than to actual contemporary Canadian ecocritical practices. In the case of Darias Beautell’s article, it may derive in part from the particular critics and writers on whose work she chooses to focus in her own article. She very rightly credits the pioneering work of nineteenth-century Canadian literature specialist D.M.R. Bentley in reading Canadian poetry in terms of ecology as far back as 1980 and cites a 1998 essay of his entitled “The Absence of Neoconservatism and Ecocriticism in Canadian Literary Studies.” In that essay, Bentley writes:  “What possible connection can there be between ecocriticism—the study of ‘the relation between literature and the environment … in a spirit of commitment to environmental praxis’—and the bundle of economic and social policies that have come to be known as neoconservatism and, mutatis mutandis, neoliberalism and neosocialism” (n. pag.).5 Moreover, one might view the turn from regionalism to urban multiculturalism not as a turn at all but as engagement with one of the categories within regionalism’s already existing investigations of immigrant experience. For instance, alongside such volumes in the Macmillan Themes in Canadian Literature series as The Frontier Experience, The Maritime Experience, and Isolation in Canadian Literature is one entitled The Immigrant Experience. As I have argued elsewhere (“Abandoning the Fort”), the almost entirely unexamined assumption that experiences which take place in urban settings

Ecocriticism in Canada   733 are somehow not located in any region or bioregion is problematic: cities are places too. Cities have their own distinct environmental engagements with the geophysical, geographical world (as, for example, the extreme flooding in Calgary and to a lesser extent Toronto in 2013 illustrated so well). To assume that urban immigrants are not also “settlers” with all that this term implies, and that the experiences of immigrants to urban areas are so unrelated to those of immigrants to rural ones as to require an entirely separate critical approach, is as suspect as the corollary that critical theory on race, class, gender, ethnicity, sexual preference, and physical ability has no purchase for literary texts that take place in villages and towns and on farms, ranches, and reservations. Nevertheless, the aforementioned essays of Darias Beautell, O’Brien, and Bentley illustrate that the site of origins, as well as the proper object of Canadian ecocriticism, may well be complex, fraught, and possibly definitional. While regionalism in the Canadian context takes primarily a thematic approach to literature that emerged in part out of a combination of New Criticism and Frygian theory and criticism, and while it pre-dates the explosion of critical theory of the 1980s as European texts began to be translated and available in North America, as the words and the logic suggest, there are strong points of connection among regionalism, bioregionalism, and ecocriticism.6 Although some American ecocritics have bemoaned, while others have celebrated, the fact that in general French poststructuralist theory has not infiltrated American ecocriticism—competing claims that may both be mere wishful thinking—in Canada the thorough immersion in such theories in most arts disciplines beginning in the 1980s and continuing into the present has meant that there has been relatively little naïve realist analysis of literary representations of images of nature in Canadian ecocritical scholarship per se.7 Credit may be due to the presence of Québec, the French fact within, rather than regarded chauvinistically as a foreign influence from without, as in the American context. The exhilarating literary experimentation coming out of that province at that time, together with bracing debates about independent nationhood and policies of official bilingualism such that especially younger scholars from across Canada had the opportunity to acquire fluency in French, may have combined to short-circuit much of the xenophobia at the root of what has sometimes been colloquially referred to south of the border as French “psycho-babble.” O’Brien’s response to The Ecocriticism Reader includes the following observation, sparked by her reading of a summary passage in an article by SueEllen Campbell on poststructuralist theory in relation to ecocriticism: “On its own, this obviously exaggerated image of the opposition between ecology and deconstruction gives the impression of ecocriticism [in the US context] as founded on a slightly paranoid defence of American authenticity against the denaturing threat of Continental theory” (“Nature’s Nation,” n. pag.). I would also credit postcolonial theory and critique—and most Canadianists since the 1980s and 1990s have adopted to varying degrees a postcolonial stance toward the study of our country’s literature—with deflecting or diverting us from the worst excesses of reduction of our literature to reflections of a singular national character and with laying the groundwork for international comparative perspectives that are useful in examining nature writing and environmental literature from simultaneously local, bioregional, national, and global points of view.

734    Critical Fields and New Directions O’Brien’s own postcolonial ecocriticism and comparative analyses are good examples of the best of this work, along with Chamberlin’s work on the questionable categories of nomads and settlers in his book If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? (2003). Along with regionalism, another creative and critical focus beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s that is relevant to excavating the roots of ecocriticism in Canada, though not in any causal sense, is the intense interest of that period and beyond in the Canadian long poem. The long poem, often the poem of the archaeology of place, is in many cases bioregional, even when not environmental as such. Many long poems are deep maps of local and regional history and geography. Moreover, the long poem is often also a space for the investigation and documentation of the processes of translating place into language and language into place along with a concomitant interrogation of modes and methods of such representation. This process is evident in such early Canadian long poems as Charles Sangster’s The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay (1856) and Joseph Howe’s Acadia (1874), among others. More recently, in addition to Kroetsch’s Seed Catalogue (1977), such long poems of place as Don McKay’s Long Sault (1975), Fred Wah’s Lardeau (1965), Tree (1972), Mountain (1967), and Pictograms from the Interior of B.C. (1975), Daphne Marlatt’s long poems Vancouver Poems (1972) and Steveston (1974), and many others came to greater critical attention in this period.8 While it is possible, then, as Buell demonstrates, to write about emerging patterns in ecocriticism without incorporating Canadian ecocriticism, it would be more difficult to write about Canadian ecocriticism without mentioning the American context, first because many Canadian ecocritics are enthusiastically engaged with both nations’ literatures and ecocritical scholarship, and second because the Canada-US border plays an important role in environmental issues and their discursive framing. In her article “Nature Trafficking: Writing and Environment in the Western Canada-US Borderlands,” Jenny Kerber explores the intersection between ecocriticism and border studies and the complex and, as she describes it, “sometimes uneasy relationship between nationalism and transnational environmental issues”: Although arguments for ecological continuity between the two nations can be compelling, Canadians have tended to regard them with suspicion, either because they threaten to open the door to American appropriation of Canada’s natural resources—especially fresh water, for example—or because they idealize Canada as a more innocent, less ecologically compromised world that offers intrepid travellers a route “back to nature.” In response to these concerns, scholars working in both Canada and the United States have begun to think about how borderlands complicate exclusive emphases on either nation or physical geography. (203)

It would be difficult to find a Canadian ecocritic who is not familiar with a significant number of the major texts in American nature writing, environmental literature, and ecocriticism, and most of us are committed members of both the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) and the Association for Literature, the Environment and Culture in Canada/Association pour la littérature, l’environnement et

Ecocriticism in Canada   735 la culture au Canada (ALECC). The complexities of nation and narration with respect to nature demand that, as Canadians, we have it both ways.

Critical Apparatus and Infrastructure A new literary and critical-theoretical field does not originate solely in the form of ideas, schools, or movements, but comes into being as a function of associations, conferences, new courses, university programs, writers’ festivals, journals and magazines, and book publishing initiatives, and other forms of institutional and non-institutional apparatus. In order to illustrate some of the transborder influences and intertwinings, as well as the apparatus through which the field has evolved, in this section I will of necessity draw upon my own experiences as a significant player in the development of the field. Having referred earlier to some of the contestatory elements in the short history of ecocriticism, the anecdotal account is intended to demonstrate some of the joint collaborative developments in ecocriticism that cross both national borders and the literary and critical-theoretical divide. These elements can be narrated most straightforwardly and clearly in the first person. For parallel first-person accounts of the formation of ALECC, I urge the reader to see Kerber’s “Nature Trafficking” and Lisa Szabo-Jones’s essay “Appendix: Taking Flight,” both in Ella Soper and Nicholas Bradley’s Greening the Maple: Canadian Ecocriticism in Context (2013). I first heard the word ecocriticism uttered at a slough in London, Ontario, in the early 1990s. It was during a conversation with a colleague, Dorothy Nielsen, at the University of Western Ontario, whose research at the time was on American nature poet W.S. Merwin. Then, in July 1994, I attended the “Writing the Land” Conference in Eastend, Saskatchewan, organized by Saskatchewan writers Sharon Butala and Terry Jordan. The “Writing the Land” Conference—staged almost entirely outdoors in the town famous for its dinosaur finds and for having been the childhood home for five years of American writer Wallace Stegner and the adult home of Butala herself—was an important gathering of both Canadians and Americans: lyric poets; cowboy-, rancher- and farmer-poets; fiction and nonfiction writers; range ecologists; western historians; journalists; one Jungian therapist; and six English professors. Together we discussed, compared, and celebrated our various approaches to writing the western landscape. After “Writing the Land” I went home and read all the books I could find by the conference panelists and tried unsuccessfully to resist the urge to create an anthology of new western-Canadian writing about the natural world. The result was Fresh Tracks: Writing the Western Landscape (1998), possibly the first anthology with a specific focus on nature writing and environmental literature in Canada.9 Contrary to any notion that ecocritics prefer their nature unmediated by representation, the works in this collection explore representation via the myriad ways in which humans both imprint and are imprinted by the land, geography, and places. As the title implies, the

736    Critical Fields and New Directions poems, short fiction, and creative nonfiction essays in Fresh Tracks illuminate the ways in which both our psyches and our flesh become “writing” surfaces for the forces of nature and how that imprinting is transferred from our sensory experiences, bodily motions, and emotions onto the written page and into the spoken air. As the image of tracks suggests, the book’s entire focus is on methods and surfaces of representation: animal tracks, maps, borders and fences, oral storytelling, historical documents, graffiti, vernacular and scientific nomenclature, and so on. Other nature writing and environmental literature anthologies followed, including Barbara Grinder, Valerie Haig-Brown, and Kevin Van Tighem’s Voices in the Wind: A Waterton-Glacier Anthology (2000), which emerged out of three transborder workshops for Canadian and American nature writers, environmental journalists, and book and magazine publishers that Grinder organized in, alternately, Waterton Lakes National Park in Canada and Glacier National Park in the United States. Environmental lawyer David Boyd edited Northern Wild: Best Contemporary Canadian Nature Writing (2001), Seán Virgo edited The Eye in the Thicket: Essays at a Natural History (2002), poet and ecocritic Adam Dickinson and poet and scientist Madhur Anand co-edited Regreen: New Canadian Ecological Poetry (2009), and Pam Chamberlain edited Country Roads: Memoirs from Rural Canada (2010). Nancy Holmes’s comprehensive anthology of Canadian nature poetry for classroom instruction and general reading pleasure alike, Open Wide a Wilderness: Canadian Nature Poems (2009), with an extensive introduction by poet Don McKay, was the first environmentally reflexive literary anthology to be published by a university press. In addition, some of the contributions to various mountain literature anthologies associated with the Banff Centre for Mountain Culture and the Banff Centre Press—for example, Extreme Landscape:  The Lure of Mountain Spaces (2002), edited by Bernadette McDonald, and Rock, Paper, Fire: The Best of Mountain and Wilderness Writing (2013), edited by Marni Jackson and Tony Whittome—along with Colleen Skidmore’s historical anthology This Wild Spirit:  Women in the Rocky Mountains of Canada (2006)—contain pieces of nature writing and environmental literature about mountain spaces and places. In 1995, I discovered an issue of the American nature writing magazine Orion. The editorial to that issue mentioned the listserv of an association devoted to ecocriticism. I subscribed to the listserv, joined the association, and organized a panel of Canadian nature and environmental writers for the second biennial ASLE Conference, held in Missoula, Montana, in 1997. In 2003 I was invited to run for election and was elected as the first non-American to serve on ASLE’s Executive Council (2003–05). As of September 2005, there were 55 Canadian members of ASLE. While ASLE had been and continues to be very supportive of international participation, 10 years after the first ASLE conference, getting a Canadian plenary speaker onto the conference program continued to be an elusive prospect. Accordingly, after my three-year term on the Executive Council, trying, among other things, to more fully integrate ASLE as a North American rather than more or less exclusively an American association, in April 2005, with a view to forming a parallel Canadian association, I set up a listserv as a way of attracting a core group of Canadian ecocritics. The listserv grew rapidly.10 Using it, I organized a

Ecocriticism in Canada   737 roundtable discussion of what turned out to be about 30 Canadian members of ASLE (almost all of the Canadians attending the conference that year) at the ASLE Conference in Eugene, Oregon, in June 2005 to discuss the idea of forming an ASLE-Canada. There were similar organizations in Australia/New Zealand, India, Japan, Korea, the United Kingdom, and Europe, as well as ASLE caucuses devoted to the teaching of rhetoric and composition, and diversity. While we met with some strenuous, heartfelt resistance at that meeting from one prominent spokesperson from ASLE, the general consensus at that initial meeting was that we wanted to raise the profile of Canadian nature writing, environmental literature, and ecocriticism in Canada and elsewhere; to pique general interest in and smooth the way for ecocritical projects at each of the undergraduate, graduate, postdoctoral, and faculty levels in Canadian institutions; to support graduate studies and creative work within the field and generate teaching, research, and writer-in-residence positions; to encourage the development of courses in nature writing and environmental literature; and to create a magazine or a journal in the field. We wanted to foster nature writing, environmental literature, and ecocritical scholarship alike by welcoming both writers and academics under a single umbrella organization. Most important, we wanted to educate Canadians about ways in which our literature can help us understand and address current and future environmental crises. In 2007, having reached a certain critical mass of listserv subscribers, we drafted a constitution and elected the first Executive Council of the Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada (ALECC).11 Lisa Szabo-Jones, Ella Soper, Michael Pereira, and later Paul Huebener created a website (http://www.alecc.ca) and edited an electronic newsmagazine, The Goose, for us. In the words of Szabo-Jones, each issue of The Goose contains the Regional Feature, a section called “Edge Effects,” and book reviews (539), and profiles “both Canadian bioregional writings and Canadian environmental and academic networks,” thus reinforcing perhaps “what may be a futile tendency: to identify a distinctly Canadian ecocritical thought, distinguishable from other national traditions” (536). For her, the journal’s primarily Canadian emphasis, grassroots origin, and cosmopolitan reach allow it to serve “as a forum to counter broad cultural assumptions about North America” (532) and “an effective means of disrupting boundaries while drawing attention to specific physical places” (540). A landmark event for both ALECC and ASLE took place in 2009 when ASLE held its first and only conference to date outside the United States—at the University of Victoria.12 In the words of Canadian ecocritic Simon C. Estok:A substantial boost to the brand value of Canadian ecocriticism came in June 2009, when, for the first time, the American branch of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE-US) held its biennial conference in Victoria, with a host of powerful Canadian names topping the list of plenary and keynote speakers. Ecocriticism, now a teenager, has grown very diverse. Although a clear and disproportionate imbalance weighing heavily towards celebrating American landscapes, American literature, and American ecocriticism remains in much scholarship throughout the world, a distinct Canadian ecocriticism has emerged. (78)

738    Critical Fields and New Directions ASLE had been listening to our arguments: at the 2009 ASLE Conference not only did we have the chance to hear Canadian plenary speakers, co-organized by American ecocritic Dan Philippon and Canadian ecocritic Richard Pickard, the entire conference came to Canada. Our desire for greater Canadian content and involvement in ASLE and greater collaboration between countries came to pass. The theme was “Island Time: The Fate of Place in a Wired, Warming World,” and this first ASLE conference outside the United States was a milestone as the largest, most successful conference in terms of numbers of delegates (600+) to that point in time. It was also around this time that some ASLE members adopted the more specific acronym of ASLE-US, a modest but meaningful and widely appreciated gesture. In 2010 ALECC held its own first biennial conference, “The Ecological Community,” at Cape Breton University in Sydney, Nova Scotia. This was followed in 2012 by the “Space + Memory  =  Place Conference” at the University of British Columbia (Okanagan), Okanagan College in Kelowna, and the En’owkin Centre, Penticton Indian Reserve, Penticton; and the “Culture, Justice and Environment Conference” in 2014 at Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Ontario. Although not devoted exclusively to Canadian literature but more broadly to North American literature and culture, the biennial “Under Western Skies” conferences at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta, have also been important international venues for sharing ecocritical literary, artistic, and interdisciplinary work.13 On the book-publishing front, Wilfrid Laurier University Press was quick to recognize the opportunity represented by the new field of ecocriticism in Canada and to institute both a Laurier Poetry Series and an Environmental Humanities Series. Most of the selected volumes in the former series are by poets whose work pertains to the natural world. Especially notable books in the Environmental Humanities series to date include Holmes’s poetry anthology Open Wide a Wilderness (2009); Kerber’s Writing in Dust:  Reading the Prairie Environmentally (2010); Travis V. Mason’s Ornithologies of Desire: Ecocritical Essays, Avian Poetics and Don McKay (2013); Robert Boschman and Mario Trono’s Found in Alberta: Environmental Themes for the Anthropocene (2014); and Liza Piper and Lisa Szabo-Jones’s Sustaining the West: Cultural Responses to Canadian Environments (2015). It is noteworthy that all four critical texts incorporate inter- and multidisciplinary methods and perspectives. These texts showcase some of the most nuanced, important, and engaging work being done in Canadian literary ecocriticism and cultural studies. Boschman’s article, “Bum Steer: Adulterant E. coli and the Nature-Culture Dichotomy,” in Found in Alberta, is an excellent example of interdisciplinary narrative scholarship combining research in science, agriculture, and theory with a harrowing first-person account of his own family’s exposure to the bacteria. Other Canadian university presses and journals have begun to publish ecocriticism as well. Nicholas Bradley and Ella Soper edited the Canadian ecocriticism reader, Greening the Maple: Canadian Ecocriticism in Context (2013) for the University of Calgary Press. McGill-Queen’s University Press published Thinking with Water (2013), edited by Cecilia Chen, Janine MacLeod, and Astrida Neimanis, and has several other manuscripts in process. And I guest-edited a special

Ecocriticism in Canada   739 issue of the journal Studies in Canadian Literature on “Canadian Literary Ecologies” (2014).14 As any reader of Canadian literature knows, so much of Canadian literature is potentially open to ecocritical analysis that any attempt even merely to list writers whose work is of particular relevance to ecocriticism would be well beyond the scope of the present chapter. An anecdote may serve to illustrate my claim. One evening several years ago, a prominent American novelist was scheduled to give a reading at the Banff Centre for the Arts. She began by informing us that she was not going to read from any of her books because she had been commissioned to write an article about nature and landscape in North American literature and had been stymied by her inability to think of any relevant Canadian texts. She declared she would read what she had written of her article so far and that if members of the audience could think of any Canadian books about the natural world, audience members should write down the titles for her on scraps of paper during her talk and then pass them to her during her book signing. At this point, the entire audience burst into sudden uproarious laughter. When the laughter subsided, someone kindly explained to the author that this was an impossible task due to the plethora of such texts in Canada. That being said, it is worth mentioning that there has been something of a modest ecocritical industry dedicated to the rich and challenging poetry and prose of Don McKay, Tim Lilburn, and Jan Zwicky. Notable works on McKay, for instance, include poet-critic Brian Bartlett’s anthology of McKay criticism, Don McKay: Essays on His Works (2006), and Mason’s Ornithologies of Desire: Ecocritical Essays, Avian Poetics, and Don McKay. Bartlett’s article “The Grass is Epic: Tim Lilburn’s Moosewood Sandhills” (1995) and Kerber’s chapter “Unsettling the Prairie:  The Ecological Poetries of Tim Lilburn, Louise Halfe, and Madeline Coopsammy” in her book Writing in Dust (2010) are two noteworthy excursions into Lilburn’s work. Mark Dickinson and Clare Goulet’s edited volume, Lyric Ecology: An Appreciation of the Work of Jan Zwicky (2010), is the first book devoted exclusively to that poet’s work. See also the special issue of the journal Canadian Poetry on “Ecocriticism and Contemporary Canadian Poetry” (2004).15 It is worth mentioning, too, the influence of the Nature Writing and Wilderness Thought Colloquium organized and led by McKay, Lilburn, and Zwicky at St. Peter’s Abbey near Muenster, Saskatchewan, in 1999, which attracted a diverse group of writers, ecocritics, a dancer/choreographer, visual artists, a curator, and a scientist whose work engages with environmental concerns. If it is true that there has been a general tendency in American ecocriticism to concentrate on the memoir, beginning with Henry David Thoreau’s Walden up to the present, in Canada the genre that seems to have attracted the greatest amount of attention from ecocritics has been poetry—lyric and long poem, traditional and experimental. In addition to the work of McKay, Lilburn, and Zwicky, a number of other Canadian writers of different genres have also attracted significant ecocritical scrutiny. The realistic wild animal stories of Ernest Thompson Seton and Charles G.D. Roberts and the nonfiction of naturalists such as Grey Owl (aka Archie Belaney), Andy Russell, Farley Mowat, and Harry Thurston, and that of former park wardens Sid Marty and Karsten

740    Critical Fields and New Directions Heuer, are earning a place in the ecocritical canon, if there can be said to be one in such a new field. In addition to the aforementioned poets, the work of poets Don Domanski, Jon Whyte, Philip Kevin Paul, Elizabeth Philips (Torch River, 2007), Di Brandt (Now You Care, 2003), Anne Simpson, Brian Bartlett, Olive Senior, Sue Goyette (Ocean, 2013), Gregory Scofield, Clea Roberts (Here Is Where We Disembark, 2010), Sharon Thesen, Angela Rawlings, and Mathew Henderson (The Lease, 2012, about working on oil rigs), to select a few names almost at random, repays serious ecocritical attention. Robert Bringhurst’s nonfiction—A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World (1999) and his essay collections, The Tree of Meaning: Thirteen Talks (2006) and Everywhere Being Is Dancing: Twenty Pieces of Thinking (2007)—are important for thinking about the relationship between the materiality of the world and that of language. Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing (1972) and her recent post-apocalyptic trilogy, especially the first volume, Oryx and Crake (2003), have been much discussed and are often taught from an ecocritical perspective. Novels of place, such as Margaret Laurence’s Manawaka series and David Adams Richards’s novels about the Miramichi, would repay reconsideration, not just as regional but as bioregional narratives. Geography, geology, and setting take on fresh significance when rethought from an ecocritical perspective. In Thomas Wharton’s novel Icefields (1995), the glacier is the primary fictional actant, moving the plot along in the way human protagonists usually do. Ecocritics are also alert to the fact that the urban settings of a number of texts—such as Alissa York’s novel Fauna (2010), which takes place in Toronto—can have a surprising amount to do with relationships between people and wild animals. Representations of animals and experiments with writing from the points of view of other animals include Fred Bodsworth’s novel Last of the Curlews (1955), Barbara Gowdy’s novel about elephants, The White Bone (1998), and Marty’s nonfiction The Black Grizzly of Whiskey Creek (2008), parts of which are written as if from the points of view of the bears involved in a series of bear-human encounters during the summer of 1980. Marian Engel’s ever-provocative novel Bear (1976), York’s settlement novel Effigy (2007), and Colin McAdam’s novel about chimpanzees, A Beautiful Truth (2013), are just a few examples of Canadian novels that explore questions surrounding the representation of more-than-human animals. Wallace Stegner’s autobiography, Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Prairie Frontier (1955), has not been given much attention by Canadian ecocritics (possibly because of his American citizenship, despite spending his formative years in southern Saskatchewan, and the fact that many university courses are demarcated by national boundaries), though the book has been very influential for some of our most important western-Canadian writers such as Robert Kroetsch and Rudy Wiebe. It is also an important precursor of such books as Sharon Butala’s memoir, The Perfection of the Morning: An Apprenticeship in Nature (1994), Warren Cariou’s memoir about growing up in Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan, Lake of the Prairies: A Story of Belonging (2002), Trevor Herriot’s River in a Dry Land: A Prairie Passage (2000), about his successive forays on foot into the land along the Qu’Appelle River Valley, Birk Sproxton’s account of growing up in Flin Flon, Manitoba, Phantom Lake: North of 54 (2005), and many others too numerous to mention.

Ecocriticism in Canada   741 In order to give a sense of how a range of Canadian nature writing and environmental literature might come together in a university course in ecocriticism, allow me to construct the syllabus for an imaginary special topics course on trees, forests, logging, and tree planting. Of course there are countless ways of approaching such a course, but we could choose to be playfully provocative and title the course “How to Hug a Tree: An Ecocritical Approach to Trees in Canadian Literature” or something along those lines. We could structure the course on the model of tree rings, moving gradually outward from early texts to contemporary ones. Suppose we assign some of the following as our core texts, for instance, extracts from “explorer” diaries that refer specifically to forests and trees; Isabella Valancy Crawford’s long poem “Malcolm’s Katie; A  Love Story” (1884), and Susanna Moodie’s reflections in her settlement account on the oppressiveness of the forest cover around her cabin and the dangers of forest fires; Margaret Atwood’s poem “The Progressive Insanities of a Pioneer” and Earle Birney’s “Bushed”; Harry Robinson’s oral story “You Think It’s a Stump, But That’s My Grandfather” from his book with Wendy Wickwire, Nature Power: In the Spirit of an Okanagan Storyteller (1992); John Vaillant’s nonfiction The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness and Greed (2005); Charlotte Gill’s nonfiction Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe (2011); Barbara Klar’s poetry collection Cypress (2008), which was written during her years as a tree planter; any number of poems by Don Domanski from his book All Our Wonder Unavenged (2007); Andrew Nikiforuk’s nonfiction Empire of the Beetle: How Human Folly and a Tiny Bug Are Killing North America’s Great Forests (2011); a collaborative, experimental work by poets Stephen Collis and Jordan Scott with Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species and the forces of nature entitled Decomp (2013); Pearl Luke’s novel about a young woman coming to terms with her relationships and her sexuality while working as a fire-tower lookout, Burning Ground (2000); representations of the bush in Joseph Boyden’s war novel, Three Day Road (2005); representations of the contrast between life in the bush versus life in residential school in Richard Wagamese’s novel Indian Horse (2012); Edward Burtynsky’s photographs of the tar sands in what once was boreal forest; and The Friends of Meager Fortune (2007), a novel about logging by David Adams Richards. The subject index of Holmes’s poetry anthology Open Wide a Wilderness conveniently contains categories such as forests, logging, woodcutting, ecohistory/ecological succession, fungi, lichen, plants, seasons, and trees (which are categorized by species). Such an array of texts would allow one to investigate whether trees have a history and, if so, how that history is reflected in Canadian orature and literature; how we have both exploited and appreciated trees and forests; trees and ecological spirituality; the ecological effects of fire, fire suppression, and climate change; trees and carbon; and how we can address the ideologies of instrumentalism and resourcism so as to begin to see the trees again, and not just the forest as an assemblage of products. Such a course would also allow for interrogation of the classic bumper sticker “Are you an environmentalist, or do you work for a living?” and the figure of the so-called “tree hugger” by exploring representations across diverse genres of work and labour in the bush—the

742    Critical Fields and New Directions clearings of settler agriculture, logging, fire-tower observation and fire fighting, tree planting, scientific work—and of the proper relations with trees as ancestors, as in Robinson’s story. In the words of Charlotte Gill, Some people think planting trees is as boring and crazy making as stuffing envelopes or as climbing a StairMaster. I love my job for exactly the opposite reason, because it is so full of things. There are so many living creatures to touch and smell and look at in the field that it’s often a little intoxicating. A setting so full of all-enveloping sensations that it just sweeps you up and spirits you away, like Vegas does to gamblers or Mount Everest to climbers. … So that you just can’t believe all the things you saw or all the living beings that brushed past your skin. (87)

Science and scientists—currently under siege in Canada by the forces of neoliberal governmentality16—have played a crucial role in educating Canadian ecocritics about ecological principles and issues, and some of them are also writers. At least two generations of Canadians have been raised on episodes of David Suzuki’s long-running CBC television program The Nature of Things. Not only has Suzuki, a geneticist, hosted the program for over 35 years and published numerous books, his lifelong activism on behalf of the natural world is truly exemplary.17 Essays such as those collected in The Wheatgrass Mechanism: Science and Imagination in the Western Canadian Landscape (1990) and Landscapes of the Interior: Re-Explorations of Nature and the Human Spirit (1996) by range ecologist and nonfiction writer Don Gayton, and Home Place: Essays on Ecology (1990) and Earth Alive: Essays on Ecology (2006) by the late botanist and ecologist Stan Rowe have deepened our bioregional consciousness. References to the late environmental studies professor John A. Livingston’s Rogue Primate: An Exploration of Human Domestication show up regularly as footnotes to articles on environmental literature. Poets and prose writers alike are discovering the work of the Irish-Canadian botanist with a poetic soul Diana Beresford-Kroeger through her books such as The Global Forest: Forty Ways Trees Can Save Us (2010). Environmental journalists whose books are scientifically informed and which in turn inform and guide the work of Canadian ecocritics include Andrew Nikiforuk, Alanna Mitchell, Terry Glavin, and Wade Davis. Nature poets whose work is significantly informed by science include Madhur Anand, Mari-Lou Rowley, Adam Dickinson, Christopher Dewdney, Don McKay, and Jan Conn. Finally, no account of ecocriticism in Canada would be complete without alluding to the fact that writers and some visual artists have contributed to the development of ecocriticism in Canada. Examples would include the many eco-arts installations and community-based literary, visual arts, and performance works that have emerged in the Kelowna area under the inspiration of Nancy Holmes and Denise Kenney and other faculty and students in Creative and Critical Studies at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan.18 From 2007 to 2012, the visually stunning journal Lake: A Journal of Arts and Environment published eight issues before suspending publication due to lack of adequate financial support.19

Ecocriticism in Canada   743

Future Directions and Critical Challenges As Canada speeds full throttle into an uncertain future that may be governed more by anthropogenic climate change than by any elected political party, it is difficult to predict the directions that ecocriticism will take in Canada, but it is possible to gesture toward some existing latencies within the field and potential trajectories for exploration. To begin with, a more thorough analysis than I am able to offer here of the commonalities and differences between regionalism and ecocriticism might be undertaken that would give the new discipline a more extensive root system. Second, several graduates of professor emeritus Laurie Ricou’s course on Habitat Studies at the University of British Columbia have themselves become ecocritics (Szabo-Jones, Mason, Huebener, Sonnet L’Abbé, and others), and one might anticipate that the approach to texts they developed in conjunction with their professor will shape not only Canadian ecocritical theory and practice but also ecocritical pedagogy.20 Mason’s seriously playful elaboration, in Ornithologies of Desire, of the figure of the “birder-critic” with binoculars to his eyes and field guide in his backpack, responding to the poetry of the “birder-poet” Don McKay, may encourage others examining texts relevant to specific works of naturewriting to experiment with notions of the ecocritic as, for instance, geologist, fisher, gardener, tree planter, or roughneck—not as ways of relapsing into realist notions of the relationship between book and world as one of unmediated transparency and access to the real but rather as explorations of the very screens of representation that inform and condition our responses to world and text alike. Wild nature is always already textual or inscriptive, as poet Gary Snyder argues in his essay “Tawny Grammar.”21 In 1994, UnderCurrents: Journal of Critical Environmental Studies published an issue devoted to queerness and nature. The same journal issued a call for submissions for an issue on queer ecologies to celebrate the 20-year anniversary of the previous issue. Topics include feminism and ecofeminism, queer geography and spatial politics, queer ecological fictions, queer theories and activism, ecosexuality, and much more.22 Though only the editors and one other contributor are Canadian, and the book is not about Canadian nature writing, environmental literature, or ecocriticism, Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire (2010), edited by Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson, deserves mention here because it is an important landmark anthology of queer eco-theory. As the most recent ecocritical anthologies attest, ecocriticism in Canada seems to be moving in the direction of inter-, trans- and multidisciplinary methodologies. Nevertheless, there are potentially productive intersections and cross-connections that have only just begun to be instigated. The field of animal studies, for example, is usually regarded by its practitioners as a field more or less separate from ecocriticism: the majority of the work in animal studies worldwide has had little environmental inflection to date. Scholars in this field have tended to focus on the conditions of domestic animals’ lives, animal abuse, and animal rights. However, art historian and animal studies scholar

744    Critical Fields and New Directions Keri Cronin’s book Manufacturing National Park Nature: Photography, Ecology, and the Wilderness Industry of Jasper National Park (2011) deals with representations of wild animals in Canadian visual culture. A number of Canadian literature specialists have published work on texts about animals, but not all of that work takes an ecocritical or an animal studies approach.23 For example, the proceedings of the University of Ottawa’s 2005 Canadian Literature Symposium on “The Animals in This Country,” Other Selves: Animals in the Canadian Literary Imagination (2007), edited by Janice Fiamengo, includes articles by scholars who identify primarily as ecocritics and others who identify primarily as Canadianists. Although not an ecocritical text per se, Canadian theorist Nicole Shukin’s Animal Capital:  Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times (2009) is essential reading for any ecocritic working on animals and animality.24 Opportunities for cross-fertilization exist among critical examinations of literary representations of animals, animal studies, and ecocriticism. Another major gap in Canadian ecocriticism is the relative absence so far of a substantial body of ecocritical scholarship on texts by First Nations writers, and there are few specifically ecocritical articles from Indigenous perspectives. An exception within the first category is Cheryl Lousley’s article “ ‘Hosanna Da, Our Home on Natives’ Land’: Environmental Justice and Democracy in Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water,” which examines the novel in terms of water politics, dams, and activism. Ecocritics studying literature about immigration, multiculturalism, and ethnicity might wish to examine the positionality of settlers who came to Canada since the 1960s vis-àvis the fact that not just the tar sands and diamond mines but also substantial tracts of urban real estate are located on treaty lands. However, in another example of ecocriticism being carried out under other auspices, work being done in Indigenous studies in Canada that explores environmental connections—such as essays in Neal McLeod’s anthology Indigenous Poetics in Canada (2014)—has radical potential to expand the scope of ecocriticism. Keavy Martin’s Stories in a New Skin:  Approaches to Inuit Literature (2012), published in the University of Manitoba Press series Contemporary Studies on the North and categorized as Aboriginal Studies and Literary Criticism, ought also to be an influential text for Canadian ecocritical scholarship. Similarly, texts such as Centering Anishinaabeg Studies: Understanding the World through Stories (2013), edited by Jill Doerfler, Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark, and Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair, and Sinclair and Cariou’s literary anthology Manitowapow: Aboriginal Writings from the Land of Water (2011) challenge Canadian ecocritics to think more deeply about understanding the natural world through Indigenous literature, languages, orality, and cultural practices. As industries situated in Canada gear up for even higher rates of extraction and consumption of “resources” and national and transnational transportation of their products, common causes are emerging. As Tara Williamson writes: As neo-liberal and conservative agendas push forward legislation that favours corporate interest over the interest of everyday Canadians, Settlers will slowly begin to pay attention. Their sleeps will start to become more restless as they realize that they are NOT, in fact, entitled to their “own” land. When their water also becomes unsafe

Ecocriticism in Canada   745 to drink, when their children cannot afford to be educated, and when the “democracy” they cling to so desperately starts to fail, they will realize that something is terribly wrong. (n. pag.)

Engagement with First Nations orature, literature, and theory about the natural world must begin to question to what extent existing ecocritical theories and practices are imbued with “settler” ideology, investments, and blindspots and in what ways those colonial assumptions may be addressed. As Sinclair and the late Renate Eigenbrod write in “What We Do, What We Are: Responsible, Ethical, and Indigenous-Centered Literary Criticisms of Indigenous Literatures,” the Introduction to their special issue of the Canadian Journal of Native Studies, “A non-Native critic may perform responsible, ethical and Indigenous-centered criticism if he or she is able ‘to work through’ (in the sense of LaCapra’s trauma theory) that difference as constituting not only cultural illiteracy but also complicity in the history of colonialism” (9). One component of that working through might include asking how, for instance, an examination of Indigenous place-thought stands to profoundly complicate and even deconstruct non-Indigenous thought about place and space, region and bioregion, territory and land. As Vanessa Watts writes, “[Indigenous] Place-Thought is based upon the premise that land is alive and thinking and that humans and non-humans derive agency through the extensions of these thoughts” (21). In this sense, she argues, habitats and ecosystems are better understood as societies, rather than as abstract spaces outside culture (23). Moreover, what does it mean to deep-map a watershed if the land’s traditional ownership and contemporary Indigenous occupants are not taken into account in the process? How might the incorporation of Indigenous thought, stories, poems, and texts about specific more-than-human animals—such as the wolverines, coyotes, and deer in Harry Robinson’s Write It on Your Heart: The Epic World of an Okanagan Storyteller (1989)—challenge non-Indigenous ecocritical work on texts about those same animals? How does the Cree notion of seasonal and cyclical time, such as that delineated in Cree-Métis poet Gregory Scofield’s series “Twelve Moons and the Dream,” which traces the Goose Moon, the Hatching Moon, the Flying-Up Moon, and the other months,25 radically reconfigure the differently teleological non-Indigenous sense of time? If, as Armand Garnet Ruffo argues, Aboriginal healing practices can be interpolated into the reading and interpretation of Indigenous-authored texts, then might research on healing be brought to bear in the reception of texts about ecological restoration and even re-wilding? In the broadest of terms, we must question how the barely emergent field of ecocriticism in Canada can enter into a process of decolonization. In terms of energy issues and climate change, theoretical work in nuclear criticism, petrocultures, risk criticism, and disaster studies is becoming ever more applicable for ecocritical analysis of texts and films about mining extraction, chemical spills, extreme flooding, drought, and other forms of ecological catastrophe. See, for instance, Jon Gordon’s foundational analysis of discursive constructions of Canada’s oil and gas imaginary in our literature and media (“Rethinking Bitumen”) and Anita Girvan’s research on the metaphor of the carbon footprint and the cultural politics of climate

746    Critical Fields and New Directions change (“Atmospheric Alienation”). Richard Pickard’s research—such as his chapter in Liza Piper and Lisa Szabo-Jones’s Sustaining the West, “Whatever Else Climate Change Is Freedom: Frontier Mythologies, the Carbon Imaginary, and British Columbia Coastal Forestry Novels”—looks at forest company comments about climate change and what British Columbia forestry fiction can tell us about the ideology behind those statements. While I am not suggesting here that Canadian ecocritics are about to abandon literary texts, many of the literary texts and discourses we examine require that we learn from disciplines such as biology, botany, climate studies, ecology, entomology, epidemiology, ethnology, ecology, forestry, toxicology, and others as-needed; increasingly, Canadian ecocritics are adopting the methods of the bricoleur. The Manifesto Series of the Victoria-based publisher Rocky Mountain Books, a series of small books about such topics as bees, beavers, salmon, wolves, water, the effects of vacation homes on community, Indigenous water rights, fracking, oil, and other ecologically important topics are good starting points for interdisciplinary work of this kind.26 Insofar as it would appear that under neoliberal ideology and global trade, Canada is coming to be seen once again by our politicians, industries, and some institutions as a mere source of raw resources for rapid exploitation and liquidation and Canadians as latter-day hewers of wood and drawers of oil and water, more literary works and critical examinations of work, labour, and social class in relation to the environment may come to the fore over the next few years. Although ecocritics are paying more attention to literary nonfiction than has ever been the case in Canadian literary criticism, including, as we have seen above, literary texts by naturalists, scientists, park wardens, mountain climbers, botanists, and birders who are also writers, clearly neither environmental literature nor ecocriticism is all about wilderness. For example, environmental studies professor and queer theorist Catriona Sandilands’s cultural studies article “A Flâneur in the Forest: Strolling Point Pelee with Walter Benjamin” charts a day trip to Point Pelee National Park in southern Ontario, thereby bringing parks and tourism under an ecocritical lens. So much previous ecocritical analysis in literature, as in environmental advocacy, has focused on wild places and threatened or polluted spaces that we have overlooked the fact that another axis of location—temporality—is also under threat, and from many of the same forces. In his book Timing Canada: The Shifting Politics in Time in Canadian Literary Culture, Paul Huebener demonstrates that even our notion of time, which we often conceive of as wholly natural, as the given, is culturally conditioned: we live within a mix of contested and threatened temporalities. Time is indeed running out for many species: literary narratives of extinction or extirpation are becoming so prevalent that they verge on becoming a subgenre. A modest sampling of narratives of extirpation or extinction might include Fred Bodsworth’s novel Last of the Curlews (1955); Atwood’s post-apocalyptic trilogy; Karsten Heuer’s Being Caribou: Five Months on Foot with an Arctic Herd (2006); Trevor Herriot’s Grass, Sky, Song: Promise and Peril in the World of Grassland Birds (2009); Grey Owl’s Pilgrims of the Wild (1935), about the plight of the beaver in the early twentieth century; Charlie Russell’s Grizzly Heart: Living Without Fear Among the Brown Bears of Kamchatka

Ecocriticism in Canada   747 (2002) and Spirit Bear: Encounters with the White Bear of the Western Rainforest (1994); J.B. MacKinnon’s The Once and Future World: Nature As It Was, As It Is, As It Could Be (2013); and others. In criticism, see Cynthia Sugars’s “ ‘Drawn from Nature’: Katherine Govier’s Audubon and the Trauma of Extinction” and Ella Soper’s “Reading The White Bone as a Sentimental Animal Story,” both in Fiamengo’s Other Selves: Animals in the Canadian Literary Imagination (2007), as well as Soper’s “The Fate of the Oolichan: Prospects of Eco-Cultural Restoration in Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach” (2009). A significant number of ecocritics are involved in and exploring processes and methodologies of collaboration and community-based practices, inspired by the urge to elude disciplinary isolation and to explore other forms of knowledge and knowledge creation, to counter neoliberal privileging of isolate individualism, to redistribute agency (including across the species line), and to engage more fully with issues and communities at large. Activist involvement in issues pertaining to water and First Nations’ land rights, the aforementioned eco-arts projects being directed by Canadian literature and visual arts faculty at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan, and the various eco-arts projects of Beth Carruthers in British Columbia—such as the Songbird Project27—Marlene Creates in Newfoundland, and Jessica Marion Barr in Ontario are leading the way in connecting art practice in several disciplines with ecological imperatives and community outreach. In her review of the Canadian and international anthology, The Enpipe Line: 70,000 Kilometers of Poetry Written in Resistance to the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipelines Proposal (2012), Laura Moss states that it “illustrates the branch of Canadian poetry that has swung away from the individual act of writing about nature to a kind of collaborative activism possible through poetry crowdsourcing” (n. pag.). Canadian ecocritics are foraging for new theoretical approaches and methodological practices in order to understand shifting and endangered ecosystems and for a vocabulary more efficacious, one hopes, than pleas to politicians and industrialists to take into account the futures of our children and grandchildren.28 Under the current neoliberal regime, ethical appeals on behalf of future generations and even the most basic, fundamental terms can be made to sound plaintively out of date. What is the meaning of “the land” or, for that matter, of “Wild Rose Country” in a province at least 21 percent of which is slated for bitumen mining over the next couple of decades? How does the fact that “the land,” at least in Alberta, is already everywhere as punctured as a pin cushion by drilling activity and traversed in all directions by oil and gas pipelines affect how we understand the term “nature writing”?29 If he were alive, what might Canada’s premier poet of the intersection of nature and technology, E.J. Pratt, author of the well-known epic poem “Towards the Last Spike” (1952), say about the effects of the practice of horizontal hydraulic fracturing or about plans for large-scale carbon sequestration in the Canadian Shield, a land formation he represented as an animate force in his poem? What is “water” that can be ignited as it pours straight from one’s kitchen tap, as sometimes happens following “fracking”? What is the river’s own message when it floods a city right up to the doorsteps of corporate headquarters in downtown Calgary, or when torrential downpours in Toronto flood the streets and result in at least one snake riding the city’s

748    Critical Fields and New Directions subway system? Will realistic wild animal stories still be written and published? Will they end tragically with a hunter’s bullet or as a natural predator’s kill,30 will they just come to a halt with the dead wolf piled in a heap of other shot or poisoned carcasses, or will the life of the waterbird or the moose end with drowning in a toxic tailings pond? In the words of Nishnaabeg writer, professor, and activist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson: Extraction and assimilation go together. Colonialism and capitalism are based on extracting and assimilating. My land is seen as a resource. My relatives in the plant and animal worlds are seen as resources. My culture and knowledge is a resource. My body is a resource and my children are a resource because they are the potential to grow, maintain, and uphold the extraction-assimilation system. The act of extraction removes all of the relationships that give whatever is being extracted meaning. (emphasis added, Simpson n. pag.)

We urgently need alternative languages, ethics, and practices of ecological relationship—including an urban land ethic—for a country with a scant and fast-eroding notion of our collective place in transnational, national, bioregional, and local spaces and time. These are just some of the kinds of questions and problems that the emergent field of ecocriticism in Canada attempts to address.

Notes 1. See my essay “Abandoning the Fort” for a description of the course I taught on Nature and the Poetry of the Confederation Period in which we questioned whether poetry can constitute a kind of aesthetic land grab. 2. Like Susie O’Brien, who in her article “Nature’s Nation” foregrounds her initial “twinge of patriotic crankiness” at noticing that The Ecocriticism Reader contained only one essay by a Canadian and her lack of mollification by co-editor Glotfelty’s promise that in the future the field would become more international, I cannot help but notice the Canadian lacunae in Buell’s article. In his article “An Ecocritical Reading, Slightly Queer, of As for Me and My House,” Canadian ecocritic abroad Simon Estok, who teaches in South Korea, also records his annoyance at the lack of Canadian content in The Ecocriticism Reader (90). By comparison, there are four articles by Canadians in Lynch, Glotfelty, and Armbruster’s international The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology and Place (the articles by Harry Vandervlist, Norah Bowman-Broz, Laurie Ricou, and Anne Milne) and four articles by Canadians in Laird Christensen, Mark C. Long, and Fred Waage’s Teaching North American Environmental Literature (the articles by Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, Pamela Banting, Alanna F. Bondar, and Bob Henderson). 3. In terms of environmental thought and ecological restoration practices, bioregionalism is coterminous with regionalism, but it was not until more recently that bioregionalism has been taken up by literary critics. See the introduction to and Glotfelty’s interview article in The Bioregional Imagination (ed. Lynch et al.). 4. The ecocritic whom O’Brien cites as having a marked preference for realism is, ironically, Lawrence Buell.

Ecocriticism in Canada   749 5. Readers will recognize that the quotation within Bentley’s quotation is, interestingly enough, Buell’s 1995 definition of ecocriticism. 6. The careers of esteemed Canadian literature critics Laurie Ricou and W.H. New have spanned the development of all three fields:  regionalism, bioregionalism, and ecocriticism. See, for instance, New’s Land Sliding: Imagining Space, Presence, and Power in Canadian Writing (1997) and Ricou’s book of narrative scholarship, Salal: Listening for the Northwest Understory (2007). Both of these recently retired professors have been influential teachers of a younger generation of ecocritics such as Travis Mason, Paul Huebener, and Lisa Szabo-Jones, to name a few. See the special issue of Canadian Literature devoted to Laurie Ricou’s Habitat Studies course, issue 218 (2013). 7. O’Brien suggests that “With its thematic emphasis, Atwood’s thesis [in her 1972 literary critical work Survival] might be seen to fit into what Glotfelty describes as the ‘first phase’ in the development of ecocriticism, which analyzes ‘images of nature’ in literature” (n. pag.). Indeed, 1970s regionalist criticism, including but not confined to Atwood’s text, was broadly focused on such images. 8. My book Body Inc.: A Theory of Translation Poetics (1995) examines how several of the long poems of each of Robert Kroetsch, Fred Wah, and Daphne Marlatt develop what I call a “translation poetics,” a poetics that incorporates rather than excludes our physical locations and our bodies’ material differences. 9. Additional inspiration for creating Fresh Tracks came from my discovery in August that year of a new anthology entitled Northern Lights:  A  Selection of New Writing from the American West (1994), edited by Deborah Clow and Donald Snow. 10. As of this writing, the ALECC listserv has grown from the original eight subscribers in April 2005 to over 384. It is worth mentioning that Rebecca Raglon had set up an ecolit listserv a few years prior to 2005. However, after it was repeatedly hacked the listserv was discontinued. 11. In the formal sense, then, ecocriticism in Canada is about six to eight years old as of this writing. ALECC presidents to date include, in sequence, Pamela Banting 2007–09, Richard Pickard 2010, Cate Sandilands 2011, Keri Cronin 2012, Rob Boschman 2013, Jodey Castricano 2014, and Astrida Neimanis 2015. 12. It is noteworthy that in 2007 the University of Victoria’s English Department initiated a unique ecocritical and bioregional M.A. Concentration in the Literatures of the West Coast. For information, see http://www.uvic.ca/humanities/english/graduate/specialconcentrations/literatures-of-the-west-coast.php. 13. Related conferences include the “Writing Home: Science, Literature, and the Aesthetics of Place” Conference, held at Green College, University of British Columbia, in 2006, and the “Green Words/Green Worlds:  Environmental Literatures and Politics in Canada” Conference, held at York University in 2011. 14. To view the table of contents of this issue, see http://journals.hil.unb.ca/index.php/SCL/ issue/view/1728. 15. In addition to the 1998 special issue of Canadian Poetry, the 2004 special issue, guest-edited by Deborah C. Bowen, features the work of several important Canadian ecocritics writing about the work of Dennis Lee, Don McKay, Jan Zwicky, Lorna Crozier, Tim Lilburn, Jeff Derksen, Peter Culley, Sid Marty, Peter Christensen, and Jon Whyte. See http://canadianpoetry.org/2011/06/23/volume-no-55-fallwinter-2004-2/. 16. See Chris Turner, The War on Science: Muzzled Scientists and Wilful Blindness in Stephen Harper’s Canada (2013).

750    Critical Fields and New Directions 17. For a short summary of Dr. David Suzuki’s work on behalf of the environment, see http:// www.davidsuzuki.org/david/. 18. The Eco-Art Incubator is a SSHRC-funded research initiative at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan campus, under which the principal investigators—Nancy Holmes and Denise Kenney—offer specific technical and theoretical support, and provide a platform for students and artists to work, as well as access to artist-friendly resources for conservation and ecological initiatives. Student artists from visual arts, media arts, creative writing, and performance are linked with community artists, ecologists, activists, and scientists through a comprehensive series of Okanagan-based resources and projects. The Eco-Art Incubator has supported or organized over 20 projects in the past two years: Bee Line, a film about bees (2013); The Plant Intelligence Project (2013); Poets in Their Places, a film about poetry and the Okanagan (in production); Dig Your Neighbourhood (2013 and 2014); Social Potluck, a performance (2012); Vivarium: An Eco Art Workshop (2012); Mount Rose Lookout, a forest gallery (2012); art events for Bishop Wild Bird Sanctuary in Coldstream, British Columbia (2012); Scale in Sight, a sculpture and sound experience of Okanagan landscape (2012); Green Space, a play (2012); House at the End of the Road, a play (2011); Three Sheets to the Wind, a hammock installation about ecology and interdependence (2012); Daylighting the Classroom (2013–14), work with Kelowna middle-school students on learning outside the classroom walls; New Monaco: A Documentary, a five-year project documenting a new business and residential development in Peachland, British Columbia, from pre-shovel to developed community; People on the Pipeline, a project in response to the Northern Gateway pipeline project (ongoing); and The Pollinator Garden, a rain/dryland/pollinator garden pilot project with scientists, gardeners, and designers (ongoing). For further information, see http://www.ecoartincubator.com/. 19. The editors of Lake were Sharon Thesen, Nancy Holmes, Briar Craig, and Gary Pearson. 20. See Ricou’s essay about his course in The Bioregional Imagination (ed. Lynch et al.), and see the special “Borders and Bioregions” issue of Canadian Literature 218 (2013) for essays by some of his former students about his Habitat Studies courses. 21. See The Practice of the Wild: Essays by Gary Snyder (1990). See also my article “Magic is Afoot: Hoof Marks, Paw Prints and the Problem of Writing Wildly” in Tom Tyler and Manuela Rossini, eds., Animal Encounters (2009). 22. UnderCurrents is located at http://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index.php/currents/issue/ current. 23. American environmental historian Ralph H. Lutts has written and edited, respectively, two very good books on the realistic wild animal story, both of which contain a great deal of Canadian content: The Nature Fakers: Wildlife, Science and Sentiment (1990) and The Wild Animal Story (1998). 24. Of course, one need not “be” an ecocritic in order to do ecocritical research. 25. See Scofield’s book Love Medicine and One Song (1997). Some of the poems from this series are also reprinted in Fresh Tracks. 26. For a comprehensive list of the books in the Manifesto Series, see http://www.rmbooks. com/rmb_manifestos.php. 27. See the website for the Songbird Project: http://www.songbirdproject.ca. 28. For a stringent critique of the mandate and efficacy of ecocriticism in the face of global climate change and whether we should be writing books and articles or instead be “up and doing,” see the Introduction by William Major and Andrew McMurry to their special issue of the Journal of Ecocriticism.

Ecocriticism in Canada   751 29. As of 2014, according to the Canadian Encyclopedia online, Alberta was traversed by approximately 105,850 kilometres of oil and gas pipelines. See http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/pipeline/. 30. In his “Note to the Reader” at the beginning of his realistic wild animal stories collected in Wild Animals I Have Known, Ernest Thompson Seton writes that “The life of a wild animal always has a tragic end” (14).

Works Cited Anand, Madhur, and Adam Dickinson, eds. Regreen:  New Canadian Ecological Poetry. Sudbury, ON: Your Scrivener P, 2009. Print. Banting, Pamela. “Abandoning the Fort:  Cultural Difference and Biodiversity in Canadian Literature and Criticism.” Teaching North American Environmental Literature. MLA Options for Teaching Series. Ed. Laird Christensen, Mark C.  Long, and Fred Waage. New York: Modern Language Association, 2008. 112–25. Print. ———, ed. Fresh Tracks: Writing the Western Landscape. Victoria: Polestar, 1998. Print. Banting, Pamela, Cynthia Sugars, and Herb Wyile, eds. Canadian Literary Ecologies. Spec. issue of Studies in Canadian Literature 39.1 (2014). Print. Bartlett, Brian, ed. Don McKay: Essays on His Works. Toronto: Guernica, 2006. Print. Bentley, D.M.R. “The Absence of Neoconservatism and Ecocriticism in Canadian Literary Studies.” Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews 42 (1998): 5–15. http://canadianpoetry.org/volumes/vol42/preface.htm. Web. Accessed 15 Feb. 2014. Boschman, Robert. “Bum Steer: Adulterant E. coli and the Nature-Culture Dichotomy.” Found in Alberta: Environmental Themes for the Anthropocene. Ed. Robert Boschman and Mario Trono. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2014. 47–66. Print. Boyd, David, ed. Northern Wild:  Best Contemporary Canadian Nature Writing. Vancouver: Greystone/David Suzuki Foundation, 2001. Print. Buell, Lawrence. “Ecocriticism: Some Emerging Trends.” Qui Parle 19.2 (2011): 87–115. Print. ———. The Environmental Imagination:  Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, MA: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 1995. Print. Butala, Sharon. The Perfection of the Morning: An Apprenticeship in Nature. Toronto: Harper Collins, 1994. Print. Chamberlain, Pam. Country Roads:  Memoirs from Rural Canada. Halifax, NS:  Nimbus, 2010. Print. Chamberlin, J. Edward. If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?: Finding Common Ground. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2003. Print. Chen, Cecilia, Janine MacLeod, and Astrida Neimanis, eds. Thinking with Water. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2013. Print. Darias Beautell, Eva. “Where Has ‘Real’ Nature Gone, Anyway?:  Ecocriticism, Canadian Writing and the Lures of the Virtual.” Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 56 (2008): 81–98. Print. Dickinson, Mark, and Clare Goulet, eds. Lyric Ecology: An Appreciation of the Work of Jan Zwicky. Toronto: Cormorant, 2010. Print. Estok, Simon C. “An Ecocritical Reading, Slightly Queer, of As for Me and My House.” Journal of Canadian Studies 44.3 (2010): 75–95. Print.

752    Critical Fields and New Directions Fiamengo, Janice, ed. Other Selves: Animals in the Canadian Literary Imagination. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 2007. Print. ———. “Regionalism and Urbanism.” The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature. Ed. Eva-Marie Kröller. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. 241–62. Print. Gill, Charlotte. Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe. Vancouver: David Suzuki Foundation/Greystone Books, 2011. Print. Girvan, Anita. “Atmospheric Alienation, Carbon Tracking, and Geo-Techno Agency.” CTheory. net (2010): n. pag. http://www3.csj.ualberta.ca/imaginations/?p=3547. Web. Accessed 24 Feb. 2014. Glotfelty, Cheryll. “Introduction:  Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis.” The Ecocriticism Reader:  Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm. Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 1996. xv–xxxvii. Print. Gordon, Jon. “Rethinking Bitumen: From ‘Bullshit’ to a ‘Matter of Concern’.” Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies 3.2 (2012): n. pag. http://www3.csj.ualberta.ca/ imaginations/?p=3547. Web. Accessed 24 Feb. 2014. Grinder, Barbara, Valerie Haig-Brown, and Kevin Van Tighem, eds. Voices in the Wind: A Waterton-Glacier Anthology. Waterton, AB: Waterton Natural History Association, 2000. Print. Holmes, Nancy, ed. Open Wide a Wilderness:  Canadian Nature Poems. Intro. Don McKay. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2009. Print. Howe, Joseph. “Acadia.” Poems and Essays. Montreal: J. Lovell, 1874. 5–40. Print. Huebener, Paul. Timing Canada: The Shifting Politics in Time in Canadian Literary Culture. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2015. Print. Hutcheon, Linda. “Eruptions of Postmodernity:  The Postcolonial and Ecological.” Essays on Canadian Writing 51–52 (1993):  146–63. https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/9419/1/0012.pdf. Web. Accessed 18 Feb. 2014. Jackson, Marni, and Tony Whittome, eds. Rock, Paper, Fire:  The Best of Mountain and Wilderness Writing. Intro. Charlotte Gill. Banff, AB: Banff Centre P, 2013. Print. Kerber, Jenny. “Nature Trafficking:  Writing and Environment in the Western Canada-US Borderlands.” Soper and Bradley 199–225. Print. ———. Writing in Dust: Reading the Prairie Environmentally. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2010. Print. Kroetsch, Robert. “The Moment of the Discovery of America Continues.” The Lovely Treachery of Words: Essays Selected and New. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1989. 1–20. Print. ———. Seed Catalogue. 1977. Winnipeg: Turnstone, 1979. Print. Lousley, Cheryl. “ ‘Hosanna Da, Our Home on Natives’ Land’:  Environmental Justice and Democracy in Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water.” Essays on Canadian Writing 81 (2004): 17–44. Print. Lynch, Tom, Cheryll Glotfelty, and Karla Armbruster, eds. The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2012. 1–29. Print. Major, William, and Andrew McMurry. “Introduction:  The Function of Ecocriticism; or, Ecocriticism, What Is It Good For?” Journal of Ecocriticism 4.2 (2012): 1–7. http://ojs.unbc. ca/index.php/joe/article/view/281/422. Web. Accessed 8 Aug. 2013. Marlatt, Daphne. Steveston. Photographs Robert Minden. Edmonton: Longspoon, 1984. Print. ———. Vancouver Poems. Toronto: Coach House, 1972. Print. Mason, Travis V. Ornithologies of Desire: Ecocritical Essays, Avian Poetics, and Don McKay. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2013. Print.

Ecocriticism in Canada   753 McDonald, Bernadette, ed. Extreme Landscape:  The Lure of Mountain Spaces. Washington, DC:  National Geographic Adventure P; Banff, AB:  Banff Centre for Mountain Culture, 2002. Print. McKay, Don. Long Sault. London, ON: Applegarth Follies, 1975. Print. Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona, and Bruce Erickson, eds. Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2010. Print. Moss, Laura. “Pipelines, Decomposition and Poetic Activism.” Canadian Literature 218 (2013):  140–43. http://canlit.ca/reviews/pipelines_decomposition_and_poetic_activism. Web. Accessed 2 Mar. 2014. O’Brien, Susie. “Articulating a World of Difference:  Ecocriticism, Postcolonialism and Globalization.” Canadian Literature 170–171 (2001): 140–58. Print. ———. “Nature’s Nation, National Natures?:  Reading Ecocriticism in a Canadian Context.” Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews 42 (1998): n. pag. http://www.uwo.ca/english/canadianpoetry/cpjrn/vol42/vol42index.htm. Web. Accessed 19 July 2013. Pickard, Richard. “Whatever Else Climate Change Is Freedom:  Frontier Mythologies, the Carbon Imaginary, and British Columbia Coastal Forestry Novels.” Piper and Szabo-Jones. 175–92. Piper, Liza, and Lisa Szabo-Jones, eds. Sustaining the West: Cultural Responses to Canadian Environments. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2015. Print. Environmental Humanities Series. Ricou, Laurie. “Out of the Field Guide: Teaching Habitat Studies.” Lynch et al. 347–64. Ruffo, Armand Garnet. “Exposing the Poison, Staunching the Wound: Applying Aboriginal Healing Theory to Literary Analysis.” Canadian Journal of Native Studies 29.1–2 (2009): 91–110. Print. Sandilands, Catriona. “A Flâneur in the Forest: Strolling Point Pelee with Walter Benjamin.” Topia 3 (2000): 37–57. http://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index.php/topia/article/viewFile/75/69. Web. Accessed 5 Mar. 2014. Sangster, Charles. The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay, and Other Poems. Kingston, ON: John Creighton and John Duff, 1856. Print. Seton, Ernest Thompson. Wild Animals I  Have Known. 1898. Afterword David Arnason. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1991. Print. Simpson, Leanne. “Dancing the World into Being:  A  Conversation with Idle No More’s Leanne Simpson.” With Naomi Klein. Yes! Magazine. 5 Mar. 2013. http://www.yesmagazine.org/peace-justice/dancing-the-world-into-being-a-conversation-with-idle-nomore-leanne-simpson. Web. Accessed 2 Mar. 2014. Sinclair, Niigonwedom James, and Renate Eigenbrod. “What We Do, What We Are:  Responsible, Ethical, and Indigenous-Centered Literary Criticisms of Indigenous Literatures.” Canadian Journal of Native Studies 29.1–2 (2009): 1–14. Print. Skidmore, Colleen, ed. This Wild Spirit:  Women in the Rocky Mountains of Canada. Edmonton: U of Alberta P, 2006. Print. Soper, Ella. “The Fate of the Oolichan: Prospects of Eco-Cultural Restoration in Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 44.2 (June 2009): 15–33. Print. Soper, Ella, and Nicholas Bradley, eds. Greening the Maple; Canadian Ecocriticism in Context. Calgary: U of Calgary P, 2013. Print. Energy, Ecology, and the Environment 7. Szabo-Jones, Lisa. “Appendix: Taking Flight: From Little Grey Birds to The Goose.” Soper and Bradley 531–46.

754    Critical Fields and New Directions Virgo, Seán, ed. The Eye in the Thicket: Essays at a Natural History. Saskatoon, SK: Thistledown, 2002. Print. Wah, Fred. Lardeau. Toronto: Island P, 1965. Print. ———. Mountain. Buffalo: Audit East/West, 1967. Print. ———. Pictograms from the Interior of B.C. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1975. Print. ———. Tree. Vancouver: Vancouver Community P, 1972. Print. Watts, Vanessa. “Indigenous Place-Thought and Agency Amongst Humans and Non-Humans (First Woman and Sky Woman Go on a European World Tour!).” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 2.1 (2013): 20–34. Print. Williamson, Tara. “We Are All Treaty People.” Decolonization:  Indigeneity, Education and Society. 24 Dec. 2012. http://decolonization.wordpress.com/2012/12/24/we-are-all-treatypeople/. Blog. Web. Accessed 1 Aug. 2013.

Chapter 40

Canadia n P ostc ol on ia l i sms Diana Brydon and Bruno Cornellier

This chapter addresses two separate but interrelated dimensions of Canadian postcolonialisms in two locations: English-Canada and Québec. First, can a place be found for English Canada and Québec within postcolonial models, and if so, how do these locations require alterations within the currently dominant models, and what do they contribute to an understanding of these literatures? Second, what contributions have Canadian critics made to the postcolonial field in general?

Canada, Québec, and the Postcolonial: Where Do They Fit? First, where Canada and Québec fit within postcolonial models has been a matter of contention, for both the postcolonial field and for Canadian studies through the late twentieth century and beyond. Paul Martin specifically invokes the postcolonial term “sanctioned ignorance,” borrowed from Gayatri Spivak, to address the general lack of dialogue between anglophone and francophone Canadian scholars seeking to understand Canada’s postcoloniality (xvii–xxviii). Critics argue about whether the postcolonial is an identity category or a matter of methodology, a temporal marker that leaves Western teleologies unchanged, or whether it offers a more thorough challenge to the time-space assumptions behind hegemonic knowledge constructions. Is it a “problematic,” that is, “an epistemological-ideological framework, a specific and determinate line of sight or way of seeing,” as Neil Lazarus argues (326)? Or is it all of these things and more, depending on the context of address? Canadian Stephen Slemon speaks for many in concluding that postcolonial is “an omnibus term for

756    Critical Fields and New Directions what was always an unruly and disruptive set of scholarly practices,” one devoted, nonetheless, “to the possibility of real and equitable social change” (“Afterword” 700)  through requiring attentiveness to “subaltern knowledges” (701). Although the title question of Laura Moss’s collection, Is Canada Postcolonial? (2003), asks an identity-based question, the answers offered within the anthology span the full range of this debate. Canada and Québec were founded as colonies, based on the dispossession of colonized Native peoples. Furthermore, as Sourayan Mookerjea, Imre Szeman, and Gail Faurschou note, Canadian cultural studies must attend to what it means to be “between empires” (1). Yet postcolonial critique is only one of several ways to address this situation. Early studies of Canadian literature recognized the historical fact that Canada was a colony, and often made value judgments and formed theories based on this acknowledgment. Such work can usefully be analyzed from a postcolonial perspective, but without incorporating an element of critique or an effort to decolonize, it cannot be described as postcolonial. Early studies of Commonwealth literature in English included Canada within the implied frame of a nation-state’s progress from colony to nation, but assumed the eventual disappearance or assimilation of Indigenous peoples. W.D. Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin’s The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (1989) employed the postcolonial to describe the entire range of writing from the first encounters of the colonized with the colonizers; however, after the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), Canada (along with other settler colonies designated “White” in their power structures) was gradually dropped from the field of mainstream postcolonial concern. For those who believe that Africa and India must set the postcolonial norm, settler colonies (especially North American ones but also those termed, by some, the White dominions of the Commonwealth) do not fit the paradigm. Scholars remain divided as to whether the paradigm itself should therefore be changed to acknowledge the differences within it, or whether instead several new fields (settler colonial studies, critical Whiteness studies, Indigenous studies, diaspora studies) should be established to address the particular specifics of the Canadian situation. Are these new fields usefully understood within the postcolonial mandate (which we understand as a decolonizing agenda that addresses epistemic as well as physical violence), or are they more profitably considered outside the postcolonial category? Versions of this question shape the national and international debates about Canadian relations to the postcolonial. At the same time, many Canadian scholars were contributing to the developing study of formerly colonized nations and their cultures elsewhere. That work was often shaped by the problematics of the Canadian situation and, in turn, often led back to new insights into the specific nature of the Canadian colonial experience. Prominent early examples include the work of W.H. New, J.E. (Ted) Chamberlin, J.E. (Jack) Healy, and the Australian-born John Matthews.

Canadian Postcolonialisms   757

Canadian Contributions to Postcolonial Studies: How Does Location Matter? Second, Canadian contributions to postcolonial studies more generally (rather than to postcolonial readings of Canada or Québec specifically) have been little studied as arising from their location within this particular kind of colonized space and its global interactions. This is only partly an argument about the development of settler colonial studies within the Canadian literatures (which will be discussed later in this chapter). Here we signal an evolving attention to the ways in which Canadian studies of colonized literatures elsewhere may have been shaped in interaction with sensitivities to the particularities of colonial realities experienced within Canada. An awareness that in Canada and Québec the vexed relation between colonizer and colonized was mediated historically through immigrant colonial figures, United Empire loyalists of different races, escaped slaves, and shifting alliances with Indigenous peoples may have created an enhanced awareness of the heterogeneous identities, power relations, and internal colonialisms within countries in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. We may be past the days of searching for a distinctively Canadian literary perspective, and it seems doubtful that we could identify a Canadian school of postcolonial critique. Mainstream postcolonial theory has been criticized as the production of diasporic intellectuals who have carved a space for themselves within the academic institutions of the First World (see Dirlik). Given the mobility of academics within this system, it might seem fruitless to argue that Canadian thinking about the postcolonial has been shaped in possibly discernible ways by the peculiarities of Canada’s location, historically and now, within global systems of domination and exchange and its own history of what is increasingly being recognized as genocide. Yet to conceive of Canadian contributions to postcolonial studies as owing something to the Canadian contexts of these critics has become more thinkable in the early twenty-first century. For example, Ato Quayson begins his introduction to The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature by suggesting that “Dewart’s opening words to Selections from Canadian Poets [in 1864] had a peculiar resonance for many parts of the colonial world” (1). Is it Quayson’s location in Canada that enables such an insight, or does it come from what he calls the “changing historical frame” (1) for understanding postcolonial literature? Whatever the reason, this 2012 introduction identifies five genres of “Colonial space-making” (16), including the “context of settler colonialism” (18) among them. Nonetheless, while the postcolonial remains a useful category for work seeking to address and redress the legacies of colonialism, it is increasingly recognized as inadequate for describing the differently situated responses to that legacy from around the world or for understanding the ways in which ideas travel, deterritorialize, and

758    Critical Fields and New Directions reterritorialize. Several of the key terms of postcolonial studies have been elaborated or questioned by Canadian-based scholars: allegory and magic realism (Slemon); autoethnography (Ty and Verduyn); Black Atlantic (Campbell; Clarke; Siemerling: Walcott); book history (Brouillette); creolity (Bongie); diaspora (Burman; Cho; Kamboureli; Ty); difference (Emberley); mapping (McKittrick); national allegory (Szeman); partition (Didur; Hubel; Kamra); primitivism (Victor Li); colonial representations (Goldie); realism (Carter; Moss); resistance (Jefferess; Slemon); the “will to improve” (Tania Murray Li); reconciliation (McGonegal); the terms of literary comparison and cultural history (Chamberlin); orality (Gingell); otherness (Fee; LaRocque); “white civility” (Coleman); literacy (ten Kortenaar); marginality (Soderlind; Gunew); the “postcolonial gothic” (Sugars and Turcotte); subjectivity (Varadharajan); and translation (St. Pierre and Simon). With the rise to prominence, in particular, of the Latin American decolonial school associated with Walter Mignolo, and with an increased awareness of what Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih call “the creolization of theory” in their book of that title, more space has been created to recognize the ways in which Canadian criticism and theorizing arise in dialogue with the problematics of Canadian history and place. Canada and Québec, each somewhat differently, also inherit “the antinomies of the Enlightenment,” forcing the question: “Is it the Enlightenment or is it decolonization that is unfinished, or are both unfinished in mutually correlated ways?” (Shohat and Stam 17). Because critics in English Canada and Québec wrestle with these questions as they play out within particular linguistic, cultural, political, and social contexts, the remainder of this chapter begins with a discussion of English Canada and concludes with Québec.

English-Canadian Definitional Debates Engagements with postcolonial theory in English Canada arose from three separate but sometimes overlapping traditions: work within the Australian/Canadian comparison (an early version of the settler colonial approach associated with the influential Queen’s University professor J.P Matthews and his students); Commonwealth literary studies (associated with The Empire Writes Back and, in Canada, with the work of W.H. New); and the dissident (yet influential because metropolitan based) criticism that became the hegemonic postcolonialism derived from Edward Said’s Orientalism, and linked with the work of Homi K. Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. These categories are not absolute. Throughout the late twentieth century into the twenty-first, critics often worked across these fields or contributed to specific nation- or area-based studies within African, Asian, Caribbean, or South Pacific groupings.

Canadian Postcolonialisms   759 How both Canada and the postcolonial are understood, from what position in time and place, has influenced the arguments made about their relation. Is the postcolonial a homogenizing discourse, or one devoted to the disciplined valuing of difference? Is it suspicious of the nation, or does it valorize national belonging? It has been used in all these ways. Stephan Larsen cites W.H. New’s caution “against easy assertions about national distinctiveness in literature” (New, Among Worlds 2–3) as critical of nation-based literary studies in general, and therefore as advocating a position contrary to that taken by Ashcroft et al., who argue that “The development of national literatures and criticism is fundamental to the whole enterprise of post-colonial studies” (Ashcroft et al. 17; Larsen 88). Yet New has devoted his entire career to advancing Canadian literary studies in dialogue with that of other formerly colonized countries. At the time of his writing Among Worlds, easy arguments about national distinctiveness were hegemonic and needed to be challenged so that more complex understandings of how national imaginaries were formed could be articulated, perhaps especially in relation to shared participations in modernist innovations. As a result, later critics, more interested in differences than commonalities, tended to see a homogenizing discourse. We would argue for a more nuanced view of the book’s situated claims, viewing Among Worlds as an intervention in both Canadian and international debates of its time. For some, the postcolonial emerged in the 1980s as a more politically correct version of what used to be described as the Third World, or the developing (or modernizing) nations (see Lazarus). For many of these, it involved a rejection of the politics of anti-colonialism in favour of adopting psychoanalytic or discursive analyses of colonial discourse (see Parry), Others stressed the postcolonial as the project of an immigrant elite who were making new careers for themselves in the First World (see Dirlik). For some, it was an implicitly racialized category, with no room for White privilege except as its absolute other (see Loomba, below). For some, the distinction between colonials (European and eventually creolized settlers in a settler colony) and the Indigenous colonized took precedence, so that “postcolonial” could only properly be used to describe Canada’s Indigenous peoples, and not those settlers who eventually achieved self-government from colonial rule while failing to honour the treaties with Canada’s First Nations (see Hutcheon). Many of these reasons implicitly connect the postcolonial to forms of victimization that should be contested. As Ania Loomba argues, “No matter what their differences with the mother country, white populations here [in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand] were not subject to the genocide, economic exploitation, cultural decimation and political exclusion felt by indigenous peoples or by other colonies” (14). Postcolonial critics of Canadian literature do not entirely dispute this claim, although they may wish to nuance it in recognition of the difficulties successive waves of immigrants had fled and the changing nature of “Whiteness” over the years, but they also base their belief in the value of a postcolonial critique of Canadian literature on other grounds. Brydon and Tiffin begin Decolonising Fictions (1993) with their belief that “the comparative study of the postcolonial literatures in English should be grounded in the differences of their alternative perspectives on the world,” derived, in part, from their

760    Critical Fields and New Directions different experiences of colonialism (7). Their argument for bringing a postcolonial attention to the settler colonial cultures of Australia and Canada, set in dialogue with the creolizing Caribbean, was more widely accepted within Commonwealth literary studies than within what came to be thought of as postcolonial studies proper, even though their book attempted to bridge the gap between these two approaches through their title metaphor of “decolonising fictions.” Other early attentions to Canadian settler colonialism appeared in Stephen Slemon’s 1990 and Alan Lawson’s 1991 attempts to label this formation a “second world,” and in Diana Brydon’s “Introduction” to her 1995 special issue of Essays in Canadian Writing, in which a longer but discontinuous tradition of reading Canada through a postcolonial lens is identified. The same year, Daiva Stasiulis and Nira Yuval-Davis published their influential feminist book, Unsettling Settler Societies: Articulations of Gender, Race, Ethnicity and Class. Settler colonial studies has taken new forms in the twenty-first century, moving beyond both the English-speaking world (sometimes termed the “Anglosphere”) and the White Commonwealth dominions of the old British empire. Mainstream incorporation of settler colonies within global postcolonial studies came with Gillian Whitlock’s inclusion of a chapter on “Settler Subjects” within her book, The Intimate Empire, and the inclusion of Anna Johnston and Alan Lawson’s entry,” Settler Colonies,” in Henry Schwarz and Sangeeta Ray’s A Companion to Postcolonial Studies. In this anthology, a separate chapter (by Jace Weaver) addressed “Indigenousness and Indigeneity.” In more recent studies, the need for settler colonies to come to terms with their invasion and theft of Indigenous lands and their denial of Indigenous worldviews has come to shape the focus of the field (Coombes; Cornellier; Findlay; McGonegal). Much of the impetus for the new settler studies has come from Australia (Veracini; Whitlock; Wolfe) and such Indigenous engagements with colonization as those of Maori theorist Linda Tuhiwai Smith. In recent years, anthologies by Caroline Elkins and Susan Pederson (2005) and Fiona Bateman and Lionel Pilkington (2011) are extending the analysis of settler colonies to describe many different types of colonial displacement and settlement from around the globe. These new contexts challenge understandings both of the range and scope of postcoloniality and of the nature of Canadian settler colonialism. Looking back on the history of Canadian literature, Richard Lane concludes his short study: “the postcolonial paradigm has led to an explosion of texts that ‘rewrite’ and ‘write-back-against’ colonial notions of history. This has occurred in new works of literature, but it has also led to a renewed understanding of the canon” (n. pag.). George Elliott Clarke describes himself as trained as a postcolonialist and willing to accept the name. For him, it describes “an ongoing process of complex interchanges between ex-empires and the territories they annexed, exploited, conquered, settled, and then were either expelled from, or permitted to exit quietly, while leaving behind the treasure—and time-bomb—of their eccentricities (laws, faiths, ideologies, arts, and customs)” (Directions 8). In an updated definition, which takes account of the continuity between imperialism and Empire, Mark McCutcheon argues that “a postcolonial perspective recognises: the hegemonic power of cultural production as a tool of empire; the adoption of imperial structures and strategies by transnational conglomerates; and the

Canadian Postcolonialisms   761 constant, increasing pressure by US corporate lobby groups to liberalise trade with (i.e., exploit) Canadian everything from cultural products (viewed by corporate lobbyists as multi-platform intellectual property), to healthcare (viewed as a market, not a public service), to water (viewed as a commodity, not a human right)” (9). Such an expanded definition, while not universally accepted, marks the shift beyond an early concern with colonial discourse in textual studies toward engagements with most of the major issues of the present.

Institutions and People in English-Canadian Postcolonialism In Canada as elsewhere, the field in general is characterized by ambivalence about the institutionalization of an approach that identified its beginnings within resistance to colonialism. Arun Mukherjee speaks for many with this concern in her Postcolonialism: My Living (1998), as does Thomas King in addressing the issue from a North American Indigenous perspective (1990). With the publication of Russell Smith’s satirical novel, Muriella Pent (2005), postcolonial studies in Canada may be seen to have reached the point where it has moved from a marginalized to a mainstream position, established enough that it can be satirized for the pleasure of a certain recognition. The postcolonial literature class, in which the novel’s two young protagonists fail to meet, becomes a running joke within the story until the misapprehensions that have separated them are finally resolved through heated disagreement about Homi Bhabha and shared feelings about Edward Said. How did Canadians come to this point, where the hipness of the postcolonial began to mutate into a naturalized familiarity? Who were the agents who helped institute this change? And can one identify similar moments in the literary study of Québec? This is one of the mandates of this coauthored chapter. Founded in 1973, the Canadian Association of Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (CACLALS) has functioned as the leading organization for scholars working within the anglophone postcolonial field, meeting once a year at the Canadian Congress run by the Canadian Federation for the Social Sciences and Humanities, hosting occasional conferences on its own and publishing the proceedings. In recent years, CACLALS has supplemented its attention to African, Caribbean, Pacific, and South Asian studies by including more attention to diaspora studies, and since 2000 running a highly successful Aboriginal Roundtable at the annual Congress. The academic journal ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, founded in 1970 and published out of the University of Calgary, quickly became a venue for publishing work from around the globe, initially within the context of Commonwealth literary studies and eventually within the postcolonial field. ARIEL regularly organized special issues on dimensions of the postcolonial, often co-edited by Canadian scholars. These include two volumes of a special topic issue in 1995, “Postcolonialism and Its Discontents” (McCallum; Slemon; Srivastava), and a series of postcolonial engagements

762    Critical Fields and New Directions with other fields:  “Postcolonialism, Children, and Their Literature” (1997); “China and Postcolonialism” (1997); “Queerly Postcolonial” (1999); “Law, Literature and Postcoloniality” (2004); “Postcoloniality and Politics” (2005); “Postcolonial Hauntings” (2006); “Reading African Writing: Fifty Years after Things Fall Apart” (2008); and a special 40th anniversary issue, “Thinking through Postcoloniality” (2009). World Literature Written in English (WLWE) was founded by the Division of the Modern Language Association of America devoted to English Literature other than British and American, and was based in the United States under the editorship of Joseph Jones before moving to Canada in 1979, where it was edited by G.D. Killam (1979–1989) and Diana Brydon (1989–1993) before moving briefly to Singapore and then to its current home under the new name of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, edited by Janet Wilson and Chris Ringrose at the University of Northampton. The academic journal Canadian Literature was founded by George Woodcock in 1959 to serve the newly institutionalized field of Canadian literature. Its editorial and reviews policies, especially under editor W.H. New (assistant editor since 1965; full editor from 1977–1995), often placed the Canadian within the broader Commonwealth field, as did New’s influential survey, Among Worlds:  An Introduction to Modern Commonwealth and South African Fiction (1975). The Danish-based, Australian-edited journal Kunapipi included yearly reviews of English-language publications prepared by editors based in different countries from around the Commonwealth, including Canada, before its Australian-born editor, Anna Rutherford, retired and the journal moved to Australia under a new editor. The Internet-based open-access postcolonial journal, Postcolonial Text, was founded in Canada in 2002 by Ranjini Mendis and John Willinsky, with an international editorial board. It moved to the University of Paris XIII, Sorbonne City, the home of its new editor, Chantal Zabus (who completed some of her graduate work in Canada), in 2013. The two-volume Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English, edited by Eugene Benson and L.W. Conolly (1994; revised in 2005) was an early marker of the turn from Commonwealth to postcolonial and one of the first attempts to provide a scholarly resource for research within the field. Begun as a Commonwealth resource, it changed its title and its mandate during the course of its preparation to address the growing global interest in postcolonial theory and literatures. Although the editorial board had hoped to publish with a Canadian publisher, the size and expense of the project proved prohibitive, and the global publisher Routledge was selected instead. Later, Routledge also commissioned Diana Brydon’s five-volume anthology, Postcolonialism:  Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies (2000), with a global audience in mind. Following in the tradition begun by Benson and Conolly, Ato Quayson is the most recent Canadian-based scholar to bring together another group of scholars from around the world to revisit the field in the two-volume The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature (2012). Nonetheless, despite this earlier history of Canadian engagement, it was not until 1995 that a special issue of a Canadian literary journal was devoted to Canadian literature in the context of postcolonialism (Testing the Limits: Postcolonial Theories and

Canadian Postcolonialisms   763 Canadian Literature in Essays on Canadian Writing, ed. Diana Brydon). Later special issues considered Canada in different postcolonial and globalizing contexts. For example, in 2001, Neil Besner and Sergio Bellei published a special issue of the Brazilian journal, Ilha do Desterro, on “Postcolonial Cultures in Contact: Bras(z)il/Canada(á),” and Susie O’Brien and Imre Szeman co-edited a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly on “Anglophone Literatures in Global Contexts,” which addressed the growing debate between postcolonial and globalization studies. In 2002, the University of Ottawa devoted its yearly conference on aspects of Canadian literature to Canadian postcolonialism (Sugars, Home-Work). In 2004, the University of Toronto Quarterly published a special Postcolonialism issue, guest edited by Chelva Kanaganayakam. A special issue of the Journal of West Indian Literature on Caribbean-Canadian Writing appeared in 2005 (Bucknor and Coleman). The British-based postcolonial journal Interventions published a Canadian-edited special issue on “Postcolonial Intimacies” in 2013 (Antwi et al.). As this brief and partial institutional history suggests, in English-speaking Canada, both Canadian literature and Commonwealth literary studies entered the academy at approximately the same time, in the mid- to late 1970s, and were often taught and researched by the same group of people. Some of this overlap is explained in Barbara Godard’s retrospective interview with Smaro Kamboureli, “The Critic, Institutional Culture, and Canadian Literature” (2008), which serves in lieu of an introduction to a selection of Godard’s essays. In the interview, Godard remembers how her generation saw their “era of liberation struggles” providing parallels between “Africa and Canada’s situation as a political colony of England, and economic colony of the US, and colonialist power within its borders in relation with Quebec and aboriginal peoples” (20). She links these interests to feminism and the turn to theory. In her 1987 essay, “Structuralism/ Post-Structuralism: Language, Reality, and Canadian Literature,” Godard notes that “To be a Canadian, as to be a woman, is to inhabit a colonial space” (Godard 82). Godard’s activist engagement throughout her long and influential career was complemented by Linda Hutcheon’s formalist interest in Canadian postmodernism, which eventually turned to dimensions of postcolonial theorizing, and by Dawne McCance’s investigations in 1996 into the ethical address of a turn to the “posts,” which never mentioned postcolonialism specifically, yet which in its interest in “an unrepresentable something that might allow us to think differently than we presently think” (Posts 19) did address concerns similar to those elaborated by Gayatri Spivak. Critics working in postcolonial studies in Canada contribute to the entire range of work in the field: to studies in the work of a single author, nation, or region; to reconfigurations of aesthetic categories such as genre and value; to reconsidering colonial histories; and to interdisciplinary and social engagements with critical race, gender, globalization, human rights, Indigenous, and translation studies, as well as to educational, curricular, and pedagogical considerations. Important figures whose critical work spanned the Commonwealth and Canadian focus of literary attention, and which gradually came to embrace a closer dialogue with theory, include Ian Adam (editor of ARIEL, 1980–1989), J.E. Chamberlin, Frank Davey,

764    Critical Fields and New Directions Gwendolyn Davies, Stan Dragland, J.J. Healy, Patrick Holland, Barbara Godard, G.D. Killam, Robert McDougall, John Matthews, Robin Mathews, Pat Merivale, John Moss, W.H. New. Roger Simon, Rowland Smith, Tom Tausky (editor of the journal Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada, issues 1–12, 1989–1994), Clara Thomas, and R.E. Watters. Later generations include Pius Adesanmi, Jacqui Alexander, Phanuel Antwi, Stella Algoo-Baksh, Veronica Austen, John Ball, Pamela Banting, Nancy Batty, Guy Beauregard, Jennifer Blair, Donna Bennett, Neil Besner, Gary Boire, Chris Bracken, Alice Brittain, Diana Brydon, Jenny Burman, Kofi Campbell, Warren Cariou, Sarah Casteel, Richard Cavell, David Chariandy, Lily Cho, Romita Choudhury, Daniel Coleman, Bruno Cornellier, Cherry Clayton, Roland Sintos Coloma, Jill Didur, George Elliott Clarke, Uzoma Esonwanne, Carrie Dawson, Peter Dickinson, Renate Eigenbrod, Julia Emberley, Margery Fee, Alan Filewod, Carole Gerson, Susan Gingell, Don Goellnicht, Marlene Goldman, Derek Gregory, Sneja Gunew, Anna Guttman, Simon Harel, Heike Harting, Ajay Heble, Jennifer Henderson, Kelly Hewson, Paul Hjartarson, Gugu Hlongwanne, Helen Hoy, Teresa Hubel, Linda Hutcheon, David Jefferess, Rosemary Jolly, Manina Jones, Clara Joseph, Smaro Kamboureli, Sukeshi Kamra, Chelva Kanaganayakam, Yatta Kanu, Ric Knowles, Eva-Marie Kröller, Terry Goldie, Michele Lacombe, Dorothy Lane, Judith Leggatt, Victor Li, Oliver Lovesey, Erin Manning, Pamela McCallum, Mark McCutcheon, Katherine McKittrick, Ian MacLaren, Pavan Malreddy, Paul Martin, Jody Mason, Travis Mason, Ashok Mathur, Laura Moss, Lianne Moyes, Maureen Moynagh, Arun Mukherjee, Nima Naghibi, Susie O’Brien, Taiwo Adetunji Osinubi, Uma Parameswaran, Donna Palmateer Pennee, Ato Quayson, Julie Rak, Victor Ramraj, Sherene Razack, Wendy Robbins (Keitner), Leslie Sanders, Winfried Siemerling, Sherry Simon, Stephen Slemon, Heather Smyth, Heather Snell, Sylvia Söderlind, Sue Spearey, Aruna Srivastava, Cynthia Sugars, Imre Szeman, Craig Tapping, Patrick Taylor, Neil ten Kortenaar, Nigel Thomas, Lee Briscoe Thompson, Gerry Turcotte, Eleanor Ty, Asha Varadharajan, Marie Vautier, Brenda (Carr) Vellino, Christl Verduyn, Karina Vernon, Kerry Vincent, Pauline Wakeham, Rinaldo Walcott, John Willinksy, Glenn Willmott, Herb Wyile, and Heather Zwicker. The length of this list, which is far from complete, shows how extensive work in this field has been, and how it continues to grow in importance. Many creative writers, even when they may question certain aspects of the field, have also contributed significantly to the development of postcolonial thinking in Canada. Among these have been such influential figures as Dionne Brand, George Elliott Clarke, Jeff Derksen, Hiromi Goto, Robert Kroetsch, Larissa Lai, Roy Miki, Marlene NourbeSe Philip, and Aritha van Herk. Although certain Indigenous thinkers such as Thomas King and Lee Maracle expressed doubts that postcolonial work could be relevant to their concerns, others have begun to engage more directly with the field (Battiste; Sakej Henderson; Suzack). Cynthia Sugars’s anthology of twentieth-century criticism, Unhomely States:  Theorizing English-Canadian Postcolonialism (2004), places Canadian literature in Commonwealth and postcolonial contexts, providing a sound introduction to the history and range of the field and some of the influential voices within it. A partner anthology, Home-Work: Postcolonialism, Pedagogy, and Canadian Literature (2004),

Canadian Postcolonialisms   765 includes a broader range of contemporary perspectives on this dimension of the now established field. Sugars’s two-volume teaching anthology, co-edited with Laura Moss, Canadian Literature in English: Texts and Contexts (2009), further enables the teaching of Canadian literature through postcolonial perspectives focused on such issues as colonial discourse, anti-colonial resistance, the history and legacies of slavery, and other dimensions of race relations within the Empire and after its demise. Earlier postcolonial teaching anthologies were compiled by W.H. New (Four Hemispheres 1971) and Victor Ramraj (Concert of Voices 1995). A significant number of the professors hired to teach the first wave of baby boomers in the late 1960s were from various parts of the Commonwealth. Although hired to teach canonical English or American literature, they retained an interest in the literature of their home countries, and as the field of English literary studies opened to consider writing from these other parts of the globe, these figures were well placed to contribute to their analysis and their contextualization. Later generations of students were able to specialize in postcolonial theory and the work of writers from specific locations and to be hired in that capacity. Canadians based overseas are also making significant contributions to postcolonial studies. Among these are Guy Beauregard (Taiwan), Lynette Hunter (UK and then the US), Marta Dvorak (France), Gillian Roberts (UK), Joanne Tompkins (Australia), and Adam Shoemaker (Australia). The postcolonial, by definition, has always been a transnational and global field that offers alternatives to homogenizing forms of universality. Diverse perspectives from within various English-Canadian and Québec contexts are making their own particular contributions to how and why postcolonial questions matter within the changing contexts of the twenty-first century.

Québec, la Francophonie, and the Postcolonial Question Settler colonialism constitutes one of the principal points of contention in debates about Canada’s place in the postcolonial world. The doubly complex coloniality of francophone Québec, with one foot on each side of the colonizer/colonized divide, reveals an additional set of tensions and ambivalences in relation to ideas of (de)colonization, empire, and settlement. As such, new modalities for postcolonial studies sporadically emerge in Québec, and with them a certain reticence toward the field itself. At the beginning of the 1960s, chronic and persistent socioeconomic inequalities between the province’s French-speaking majority and the British/Anglo-Canadian elite gave rise to a modernist and secular neo-nationalism associated with the rejection of a Catholic and traditionalist idéologie de survivance that was blamed for supporting French-Canadian subjection to British-Canadian hegemony. It is at this historical juncture that a Québécois identity, thereafter articulated to a bounded territory and a

766    Critical Fields and New Directions statist-nationalist project, was claimed and imagined in order to replace what was perceived by many to be the doubly colonial moniker “French Canadian.” Even though not everyone in Québec is francophone and/or of European descent, to be Québécois remains to this day a linguistically inflected collective project whose historical memory and cultural precedence is legally and institutionally upheld as a national anchor by the state. In such a context, and despite the ambivalent (and sometimes resentful) Québécois relationship with France, it is hardly surprising that literary and academic responses to the notion of the postcolonial in Québec would share with the French/ Parisian intellectual milieu some similar hesitancies. We mentioned earlier how postcolonial studies has been recently criticized—often by its own proponents—for its Eurocentric bias, especially when it comes to the generalizing ambitions of the field and its inattention to the specificities of localities, histories, and traditions—an omission that cannot simply be explained by indexing a colonial legacy. The field has been responding to this critique, particularly in its current interactions with globalization studies, critical race studies, American ethnic studies, and eco-criticism. As Vincent Desroches, Jean-Marc Moura, Eloise Brière, Mary Jean Green, Anne Donaday and H. Adlai Murdoch, and others have argued, the resistance to postcolonialism in the specific context of France also stems from an understanding of the field as a specifically Anglo-American critical institution trying to impose its own discourse on an environment that is ill-suited for what is often (mis)perceived as the field’s celebration of multiculturalism, cultural relativism, and communautarisme, thus clashing with the “universal” values of human rights, freedom, and equality upheld by the French republican ideal. Yet, are these French metropolitan accusations about the field’s Anglo-centric bias sufficient to explain the tenacious marginality of postcolonial studies in French-speaking Québec? Without a doubt, what is at the very least a temporally defined notion of the “postcolonial” commonly appears in the social science curriculum and scholarship in Québec’s French-language universities, for instance when referring to the “era” of postcolonialism or to nation-states emerging after decolonization, such as postcolonial Pakistan or Senegal. Most interesting for our purposes, however, are the curricula of literature departments in the major francophone universities in Québec, which often offer courses in Littératures de la Francophonie (most often from Maghreb or the Caribbean) in lieu of postcolonial or Commonwealth literature. In his work on the French Atlantic, Bill Marshall explains that in the colonial divide opposing the centre (or metropolis) to the periphery (or colony), “ ‘Francophone’ is simply the ‘other’ to ‘French’ ” (9). As such, if courses in Littératures de la Francophonie or Autres littératures du monde undoubtedly present Québec university students with opportunities to do colonial discourse analysis about the postcolonial spaces of Francophonie, one may in turn wonder what becomes of the postcolonial status of Québec once these literatures, as part of Littérature française and/or Littérature québécoise programs, are located not only as the “other” to French, but also as the “other” to Québec. As Eloise Brière explains, France needs la Francophonie internationally, but not domestically. This is “reflected in the marginal impact of postcolonial studies on literary

Canadian Postcolonialisms   767 debates in France” (152). She argues that next to their challenge to “universal” republican values, postcolonial studies continue to be viewed with skepticism because the deconstruction of colonial binarisms challenges France’s place as the centre of its peripheries, as well as the role of French metropolitan writers, intellectuals, and cultural institutions as the arbiters of a littérature de qualité. Interestingly, however, Brière also suggests that Québec, as a former French colony, has its own set of interests in the maintenance of a postcolonial Francophonie, considering that it offers Québec a chance to play an important international role in the francophone political arena, as well as “garnering the status of government within the main francophone cultural and technical agency, l’Agence de coopération culturelle et technique” (153). In addition, la Francophonie provides Québec with an important pool of French-speaking immigrants, especially since the province gained increased control of its immigration policies in the 1990s. Hence, these “[l]‌inks to the other francophone nations were crucial for Quebec, in order to validate its intent to become a nation” (153). And yet, as University of Ottawa sociologist Abdoulaye Gueye explains, the “international” or postcolonial idea of the “francophone” likewise means very little domestically in Québec. Once it is conflated with a historically and politically specific experience of being francophone within the triptych franco/anglo/allophone, the category of “francophone” tends to exclude French speakers whose lineage is neither de souche or Western European (Swiss, French, Belgian), with very material effects, for instance, on African and Caribbean francophone immigrants’ sense of belonging to Québec society. Hence, for this Québec, de souche or pure laine, to claim la Francophonie, it must first decolonize the concept, or rather draw a distinction between the sociopolitical space that is Québec and the international and racialized spaces of postcolonial Francophonie.

Race, Whiteness, and Indigeneity: Is Québec Postcolonial? Under such considerations, it is hardly surprising that what remains to this day the most substantial academic attempt to answer the question “Is Québec postcolonial?” comes from a 2003 special issue of Québec Studies, an American-based journal published by the American Council for Québec Studies. In her contribution to this issue, Amaryll Chanady argues that it may be this complex status of Quebec as colonial/postcolonial/colonized that explains a possible reticence to Anglo-American postcolonial and colonial discourse analysis. Whereas a society with well-entrenched cultural institutions and global cultural hegemony can afford to reflect critically on itself, a society that feels threatened by its marginality in a global context may feel a greater need for legitimation by celebrating its literary accomplishments and establishing an autonomous tradition in literary criticism. (par. 7)

768    Critical Fields and New Directions This, of course, begs the question of the currency of this discourse about the marginality of Franco-Québécois in their relationship with Western hegemonic forces, but also in relation to the “peripherality” of the colonized in relation to metropolis and Empire. As Vincent Desroches asks in his introduction to this special issue: “Il ne fait aucun doute que les Canadiens français, puis les Québécois ont subi une oppression coloniale, explicite par exemple dans le rapport Durham. Mais peut-on parler du Québec actuel comme d’une colonie?” (par.15) [“There is no doubt that French Canadians, and later Québécois, experienced colonial oppression, and quite explicitly so, for instance, in the Durham Report. But is it accurate to describe contemporary Québec as a colony?]. In that regard, much has been written about the literature of resistance and decolonization produced in the long 1960s by francophone writers, artists, and intellectuals in Québec. This political context has been particularly well documented by historian Sean Mills in The Empire Within (2010), his recent book on postcolonial thought and political activism in 1960s Montreal (see also Austin). These authors, he explains, found in the struggles of others (the Cuban Revolution, “Third World” decolonization, and the American Black Power movement) useful analogies that allowed them to make sense of, and take action against, their own colonization. The theoretical and critical work of Frantz Fanon, Jacques Berque, and Albert Memmi were particularly inspirational for this young generation of writers, poets, and activists. Most influential among them were those associated with the socialist journal Parti Pris (1963–68), such as Pierre Maheu, Jean-Marc Piotte, Hubert Aquin, Jacques Renaud, Gaston Miron, and Paul Chamberland. It is in this context that the paradigm of the Québécois as a “white nigger” emerged in popular consciousness, most notably in Pierre Vallières’s book-length manifesto/autobiography Nègres blancs d’Amérique (1967) and Michèle Lalonde’s poem “Speak White” (1968). Such hyperbolic racial metaphors can also be likened to earlier efforts, most famously by Le Devoir editorialist André Laurendeau in the late 1950s, to define former conservative Premier Maurice Duplessis,1 as well as the French-Canadian political and bourgeois elite, as “rois nègres” in a British colonial system. That being said, while these analogies drawn from elsewhere were tactically useful—and a source of genuine transnational empathy—for a galvanized left nationalist movement, the local reality of Black Montrealers, the gendered oppressions of women, and the discrimination and colonization suffered by Indigenous people at the hands of both English and French Canadians, were generally occluded from these discourses—a situation, at least in terms of its gender component, that is typical of many decolonization or revolutionary movements. From the mid-1980s onward, and once writers and intellectuals definitively moved away from the colonial hyperboles and racial metaphors of the radical 1960s, new concepts were needed in order to “make sense” of a culturally and ethnically pluralized Québec, as well as a literary field with an important corpus of texts, today part of the literary canon, written by authors of immigrant origins, among them Régine Robin, Dany Laferrière, or Sergio Kokis. Hence, discourses akin to Fanonian forms of nationalism that called for the decolonization of Québec’s “white niggers” (Vallières) were replaced by notions such as transculture, Robert Berrouët-Oriol and Robert Fournier’s

Canadian Postcolonialisms   769 description of écriture migrante, or François Paré’s influential transnational concept of littératures exigües.2 In addition, many still attempt to resolve Québec’s postcolonial status in terms of it being “distinctly” and “inauthentically postcolonial” (Richards par.3), a “postcolonialisme de consensus” in a plural and métissé post-settler Québec (Vautier, “Les pays” par. 27), or, according to Lise Gauvin, the postcolonialism of a pericolonial literature—in other words, a literature that is neither colonial nor postcolonial, and rather peripheral to the space of the colony as well as the space of Empire. What is often left behind in these conversations is the structural nature of the colonization of Indigenous people in Québec. Indeed, if First Nations’ experiences of colonization or marginalization is almost always sympathetically mentioned or considered in these attempts to interrogate Québec from the point of view of a qualified or locally renovated version postcolonial studies, it is nonetheless the Franco-Québécois as “New World” post-settlers and post-Europeans, and their peripheral location outside the imperial or metropolitan spaces of Europe, that remain the principal object of inquiry for many of these scholars. In that regard, a shift is starting to be felt in recent scholarship about Québec in the humanities and social sciences, for instance in the work of academics such as Daniel Salée, Sandra Hobbs, Sirma Bilge, or Darryl Leroux, to name just a few, who have recently started, prior and since the 2007 Bouchard-Taylor Commission3 on accommodation practices and cultural differences in Québec, to interrogate more forcefully settler colonialism, settler nationalism, and/or the gendered politics of race and immigration from a local perspective. Until then, however, the appeal of postcolonial notions of métissage, creolization, migration, and reterritorialization had dominated postcolonial conversations in Québec, often at the expense of the strongly territorialized and non-migrant Indigeneity of many First Nations peoples and communities—not to mention the persisting colonial dispossession of the Indigenous lands upon which the postcolonial production of justice, self, and identity for the métissé settler or for the migrant writer is performed and made possible. Robert Schwartzwald’s penetrating analysis of the state of intellectual debates about postcolonialism in Québec is perhaps to this day the most thorough attempt to “make sense” of the nation’s ambivalence in the face of a notion—the postcolonial—that cannot be fully aggregated to Québec, all the while recognizing that critical engagements with colonialism are something that we simply cannot leave behind. Like many of his contemporaries, Schwartzwald refuses to define—and condemn—Québec as a colonial-settler culture in a strict sense, while also acknowledging the limits of a residual Québécois anti-colonial paradigm, which too often ignores the voices of non-White and non-francophone immigrants, Indigenous peoples, and gendered “others.” Against the “hospitality” of a postcolonial paradigm that cannot fully appreciate Québec’s peculiarity as a “small nation,” Schwartzwald proposes instead the alternative dynamics of a transculturalism that would allow us to recognize new modalities of citizenship and belonging in the light of competing allegiances, while not losing sight of “a majority for whom the nation remains an important ontological marker” (Schwartzwald, last par.). One of the possible limits of such attempts to reconcile Québec with a critical recognition of its colonial legacy—in other words, with attempts to acknowledge the historical

770    Critical Fields and New Directions reality of Québec as a settler colony, but as not simply that—is that these discourses present settler colonialism as a fait accompli; they tend to naturalize it and leave it behind, if not simply to “let go,” faced with settler colonialism’s unavoidability as a historical fact. In addition to the complex play between minority-hood and the Québécois francophone majority’s inherent right as a foundational and cultural majority—a back-and-forth movement that cannot be afforded to the peripheral minority of “the rest” of French Canada outside Québec—it is also the “Whiteness” of the Québec national reference that must henceforth be written out of the nation’s coloniality—a Whiteness that otherwise allows the dominant group to gesture effortlessly toward the West and/or the European sphere of conceptual dominance. This leaves us with a somewhat inescapable impression that the classically defined historical trajectory from French settlers to French-Canadian British subjects to Québécois seems to imply that modern Québécois are not colonizers, but were colonizers, and that there isn’t much that can be done about the past, other than moving forward with more critical awareness and intercultural sensibility. In that respect, even former Université de Sherbrooke literary scholar Winfried Siemerling’s groundbreaking attempt to rethink contemporary (North) American Studies by reading comparatively the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, Gerald Vizenor, and Charles Taylor in conversation, among other North American locales, with Québec and the colonial politics of language, shies away from any robust critical interactions with the contemporary reality of settler colonialism in a Québécois context, other than to succinctly acknowledge its legacy. In another academically significant case, such acknowledgment took the form of an apology in Erin Manning’s Ephemeral Territories (2003), when she states in her preface that by having occluded Native presence from her genealogy of Canadian and Québécois concepts of “home” and identity, she risks becoming herself complicit in “rewriting a history fraught with exclusions” (Manning ix). Yet, as we comment on this perceived lacuna in the otherwise significant contributions of these critical scholars, it is worth insisting that our objective here is not to pit different scholarships in conflict with each other, nor to simply accuse these critics of neglect. Instead—and this may be where the peculiar localities we are writing from may be most critically illuminating—our critical conversation with this work and that of others in the field is an invitation to contemplate in which innovative directions these local critical insights and debates about the “postcolonial” might lead us, once they pass the stage of sincere acknowledgment and begin to be robustly put into conversation with an Indigenous critique of civil rights, statehood, and sovereignty, but also with a reinvigorating critique of postcolonial studies themselves in Canada and Québec.

Notes Diana Brydon wishes to thank the Canada Research Chairs program, whose funding partially supported this research, and her research assistants Katie Thorsteinson and Sameera Abdulrehman for their help. Bruno Cornellier wishes to thank the Fonds québécois de

la recherche sur la société et la culture (FQRSC) and its postdoctoral fellowship

Canadian Postcolonialisms   771 program, as well as the Centre for Globalization and Cultural Studies (University of Manitoba) and the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University for their institutional support.

1. Maurice Duplessis was the leader of the right-wing provincial party, the Union Nationale, and the premier of Québec from 1936 to 1939 and 1944 to 1959. His successive governments are associated with what historians and political commentators have called la grande noirceur. This term refers to an era characterized by the close ties developed and encouraged by Duplessis’s administration between the state and an authoritative catholic clergy, as well as by anti-modernism, corruption, and economic and political complicity with the anglophone business elite. 2. For further discussion of transcultural contexts in Québec, see Chapter 33 in this volume by Marie Carrière and Catherine Khordoc on Écriture migrante, and Chapter 34 by Elizabeth Dahab on Arab-Canadian writing. 3. The Commission de consultation sur les pratiques d’accommodement reliées aux différences culturelles, presided by sociologist Gérard Bouchard and philosopher Charles Taylor, was created in February 2007 by then Liberal Premier Jean Charest. The role of the Commission was to examine questions related to what right-wing populist politicians (such as Mario Dumont) and media outlets (most influentially those owned by the media conglomerate Quebecor) publicized as the so-called “unreasonable accommodations” granted to religious or cultural minorities in Québec. Bouchard and Taylor published their Report in May 2008. The Report and its recommendations were almost immediately shelved by the Liberal government, and later by the newly elected Parti Québécois (PQ). Under Premier Pauline Marois’s leadership, the PQ introduced, in 2013, the very divisive and hotly debated Bill 60 (better known as the Québec Charter of Values). If passed, this Bill would forbid employees of the public sector and all representatives of the State from wearing visible (or “ostentatious”) religious symbols, such as kippas or hijabs. The Charter became a principal stake of the provincial election campaign, launched (and lost) by Marois on 6 March 2014.

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Chapter 41

Re ading Histori o g ra ph y and Historic a l Fi c t i on in T wen t i et h Centu ry  C a na da Renée Hulan

The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature (1997) devoted 10 pages to “Historical Writing,” separated into two articles, one about writing in English and the other about writing in French. J.M. Bumsted opened “Historical Writing in English” with this assertion: “Virtually all historians who have written about Canada could agree that history is a branch of literature. How often that agreement has been translated into works of literature is, however, another matter” (534). For Bumsted, “literariness” meant “good writing,” which led him to assess the literary value of selected works of Canadian historical writing, which he organized into five categories: promotional history, the compiling tradition, the participant historians, the skilled amateur, and the essay. Echoing Northrop Frye’s observation in his “Conclusion” to the Literary History of Canada that early writing in Canada was “innocent of literary intention” (334), Bumsted observed that for the authors of historical accounts designed to attract settlement, “literary merit was not a principal concern,” nor was it for the compilers, participants, and amateurs, and literary success did not guarantee good historical writing. In Thomas Chandler Haliburton’s two-volume An Historical and Statistical Account of Nova Scotia (1829), for example, there was “less evidence of the stylist than of the compiler” (535). The historical method suggested by Bumsted’s assessment of literary quality envisioned the historian collecting information about the past, then “writing it up,” with writing as an activity separate from interpretation, even though this image of the historian’s craft was being contested and revised at the time. The Oxford Companion appeared in the midst of intense debates about Canadian history that exercised Canadian scholars in the 1990s, and although Bumsted acknowledged changes in the historical profession since the 1960s, the article was too brief to address the impact of the linguistic turn on the writing of history, nor

Reading Historiography and Historical Fiction    781 did it include historical fiction or histories that borrow fictional techniques. One of the goals of this chapter is to bring discussion of the writing of history and fiction together in order to trace the contours of that particular cultural moment. In his survey, The Historical Novel (2010), Jerome de Groot challenges the reader to “[v]‌isit a bookshop or book website and the Historical Fiction section, in itself a relatively new marketing innovation, will be groaning under the weight of new work published by authors from across the world, and in numerous styles” (1). What de Groot observes in the global marketplace is true in Canada:  the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the new millennium have seen a distinct turn to the historical. Indeed, when de Groot considers the potential of historical fiction to undermine national identity and myth, he finds ready examples in Australia, Ireland, and the United States, and lists various titles of works written in English that would also fit his analysis (140). While the trend toward the historical seems to be a cultural phenomenon that transcends national boundaries, one of its most striking characteristics is the tendency to view it as peculiar to a particular nation. In Canada, historical knowledge was presented as a particularly “Canadian” problem, arising from the weakness of national unity and lack of identity. Reading late twentieth-century Canadian historiography and historical fiction, however, reveals competing, and often contradictory, arguments characterizing the state of Canadian history. In these discussions, Canadians suffer either the domination of a master narrative in need of unsettling or the total lack of a unifying narrative.1 The issues of national identity and belonging that this debate raises were not restricted to Canada but were echoed throughout the English-speaking world, especially in the former British Empire. As colonized peoples the world over called for recognition and redress, the pressure on nations to deal with the past intensified. The chorus of the formerly voiceless members of these societies arising, if not “from below,” at least from silence, had been scarcely heard when it came under attack within a manufactured crisis in historical knowledge. For some commentators, including some historians devoted to studying the nation, the perceived fragmentation of “history” created by emerging voices was enough to threaten national identity, if not history itself. These characterizations created the “rupture,” in the sense given this term by Michel de Certeau, between past and present that makes history possible (see also LaCapra, Lowenthal). With each reference to a “return,” “renewal,” or “revival,” this rupture was reopened, reminding readers of the distinction between the present and the past. The prevalent language of “return” in that discourse suggested that nations needed to recollect the collective memories that were being actively repressed when, ironically, the arguments that history had been repressed and forgotten coincided with a rise in historical novels by prominent authors of literary fiction. The political agenda driving the perceived crisis was not particularly Canadian either, as around the world, according to Marlene Shore, “privately funded institutes, backed by substantial donations from entrepreneurs and business elites, attempt[ed] in a number of countries to promote the revival of a so-called national history and to educate the public about civics and citizenship” (4). Nevertheless, in each nation, the problem was

782    Critical Fields and New Directions given a historical explanation. In Canada, the crisis in historical knowledge resonated with the question of national unity, and the belief that knowledge of the nation’s history engenders civic responsibility and good citizenship was sharpened on this political uncertainty. The perceived crisis in historical knowledge was constructed from evidence that suggested schools were failing to educate the nation’s youth. Surveys that showed the poor performance of young people received extensive coverage in the media. There were objections from various quarters: some viewed the questions asked as arbitrary; some wished it reflected the diversity of Canada; some questioned the methodology of the surveys. From 1997 on, the Globe and Mail published the results of polls testing Canadians’ knowledge of history. In 2000, the Globe ran a week-long series on “The Death of History” in which Ray Conlogue identified the corporate interests behind initiatives to improve Canadians’ knowledge of the past. “Most of Canada’s CEOs are of the generation that went to school in the 1950s, when a Cold War era attempt to resurrect Great Man history was underway,” wrote Conlogue, and these individuals were worried that, without “a coherent heroes-and-all narrative,” Canada will not inspire young people to become the sort of leaders they are (R5). Tom Axworthy, the head of Historica, was cited as identifying “a class-based anxiety” behind the endowment of historical foundations like Historica and the Dominion Institute.2 Both organizations, which later merged in 2009, were founded and funded by corporate citizens who, as the Globe and Mail noted, “have never endowed a university chair in history” (R1). In 2001, the annual poll compared what Canadians know about their national history to what Americans know. Among the questions asked was “When was Confederation?” In his regular opinion piece for the Globe and Mail, Rex Murphy japed facetiously: “If we cannot get the primal fact right, what hope is there for any of us? Confederation occurred in 1949” (A13).3 The appearance of Jack Granatstein’s Who Killed Canadian History? in 1998 incited a moral panic that filled Canadian newspapers. Although its flawed arguments and incendiary rhetoric have been widely discredited—Robert Fulford called the book an “intemperate tract”—it is undeniable that the book made a significant impact on Canadian history and historiography. It earned Granatstein extensive media attention, making him arguably the most recognizable historian in the country, and it kept the cause of national history in the public eye as he lobbied for funding for major projects such as the construction of a new War Museum in Ottawa. Like its Australian forerunner, The Killing of History:  How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past (1996) by Keith Windschuttle, Granatstein’s essay became a touchstone for those who believed that national history had been neglected and abandoned by historians interested in the particular, but these criticisms had been circulating in the historical profession for a long time. In the 1991 Creighton lecture, Michael Bliss had first raised this issue when he criticized specialization in the historical profession and held it responsible for the “constitutional and political malaise” following the failure of the Meech Lake Accord (5). As Nicole Neatby and Peter Hodgins note in Settling and Unsettling Memories, Bliss and Granatstein both “warned, although in different ways, of the imminent death of a unifying Canadian national memory” (10; see also Soderstrom). Bliss has been lumped

Reading Historiography and Historical Fiction    783 in with Granatstein, especially by literary scholars (see Blair et al.), because both historians suggest that “the downplaying of the country’s successes at overcoming obstacles and at moving towards national reconciliation in the past can only lead to a fracturing of the nation in the present” (Neatby and Hodgins 10); yet, as Neatby and Hodgins recognize, how they arrived at this conclusion differs considerably. Bliss worried that historians were too concerned with specific topics, and that by devoting all their attention to “private realms of experience,” they were producing history that was “specialized, fragmented, and in both substance and audience appeal, privatized” (9); Granatstein targeted the subject matter studied in social and feminist history, which he characterized disparagingly as history of the “housemaid’s knee,” and called for a unified national history, based on the study of military and political topics, to replace what Ramsay Cook termed “limited identities” and J.M.S. Careless had further developed as an approach to historical research. The “sundering” of Canada, according to Bliss, was reflected in the increasing specialization of historical writing. History had become too narrowly focused, “privatized” in his view, to contribute to the public debate of larger issues. What Granatstein crudely depicted as a threat to the nation, Bliss presented as an opportunity to enliven civic engagement. For Bliss, the hidden histories of those who had been left out, which he called the “finest achievement” of Canadian historiography, could contribute to a more inclusive, coherent national history. Such a history could help Canadians grapple with the constitutional crisis, which was after all a real crisis, not a manufactured one.4 Academic historians responded by providing the historical context that media reports lacked. “Who Killed Canadian History? A View from the Trenches” by A.B. McKillop provided an overview of historical scholarship in Canada framed within the changing historical profession. Several historians had also outlined the changes that had taken place in the discipline of history and how they were reflected in the teaching of history. For example, Chad Gaffield’s “The Blossoming of Canadian Historical Research” further reflected on the state of historical education in Canada since the 1960s, noting that “just as university departments began to take Canadian history seriously, school systems began to replace history courses with more contemporarily oriented social studies classes” (89). Indeed, the social studies curriculum was a main target of the conservative backlash. In the meantime, historical education itself had changed. Drawing on his university teaching experience, Gaffield pointed out how actively engaging students in work on both primary and secondary sources can prevent research-intensive programs from becoming “privatized.” In contrast, teaching based only on the narratives in secondary sources, as advocated during the crisis, undermines original research because “students are encouraged to think so much like their predecessors that they become less able to push the frontier to a new place” (97). The industrial model of education, whereby students are expected to leave school carrying a prescribed body of knowledge, was definitely at odds with the practice of history, yet the spectre of citizenship remained as reflected in the focus on “young people.” For Timothy J. Stanley, correctives to the nationalist arguments shared the view that “the key function of both public school and undergraduate history teaching is citizenship education” (“Why” 87). In “Why I Killed

784    Critical Fields and New Directions Canadian History: Towards an Anti-Racist History of Canada,” Stanley argued that the English-Canadian “grand narrative” of the nation, which was “more of a cultural artifact than a serious history,” perpetuated racism by positioning historical actors in relation to the national story (82–83). This story “emphasizes an inevitable, largely peaceful, and natural progress to the current configurations of the nation-state, taking Confederation as its key organizational turning point and celebrating modern Canada as the place that redeems the evils of the past and the rest of the world” (83). The history curriculum based on nation-building acts as a hermeneutics, a guide to the interpretation of the past that leads inexorably toward the present. Undermining this linear conception of history, twentieth-century historiography revealed that history can be cyclical:  Ken Osborne identified recurring concerns about the education of young people in the 1960s and 1990s; Marlene Shore stressed the continuity of debates in the Canadian Historical Review. While these reconstructed historical contexts suggested that historical time was more like a wheel than an arrow, writers like Granatstein continued to impose a break with the past in order to assert the uniqueness of the present. In addition to their thoughtful participation in the public debate, historians have usefully historicized the crisis itself. Ken Osborne’s “Revisiting the History Classroom” reminded readers that What Culture? What Heritage? by A.B. Hodgetts had drawn similar conclusions about students’ historical knowledge in 1968. From the 1920s to the 1960s, school children were taught a narrative history devoted to nation building, yet Hodgetts found their knowledge of Canadian history to be poor. As Osborne pointed out in “ ‘Our History Syllabus Has Us Gasping,” this was the latest in a series of five distinct “crises” in history education (404). By 1967, as Shore’s survey of the Canadian Historical Review reveals, “it was apparent that the traditional mission for historians of new nations such as Canada—to chronicle a national history—had come to an end”; indeed, according to Shore, “there never was a golden age when all historians of Canada were devoted to constructing a national chronicle, nor was there agreement on the fundamentals of that narrative” so that “[w]‌hat currently looks like fragmentation may turn out to be rather a renewed diversity of approaches” (22). As early as 1969, J.M.S. Careless published “Limited Identities in Canada,” which expanded on the term coined by Ramsay Cook a few years earlier to describe the tendency to focus on particular groups rather than national life. In English Canada, both historians explained, Canadians had a stronger sense of regional and local than national identity. Canadian history, they implied, would provide the “shared awning” sheltering these identities. The expansion of history courses and research in the 1960s led to a flourishing of historical research and writing on new historical subjects. The study of “limited identities” brought attention to groups of people, notably Aboriginal people, women, and working-class people, all historical agents who had been neglected. The 1990s was an especially prolific decade, and the social history of women, regions, and Aboriginal peoples flourished in the work of historians like Olive Dickason, Constance Backhouse, Cecilia Morgan, and Ian MacKay, among others, including those cited above. As historians worked to give voice to history’s voiceless, and in some instances to set the record straight, their work necessarily exposed the exclusions and oversights in the master narrative of Canadian nation building. But the proliferation

Reading Historiography and Historical Fiction    785 of carefully focused studies of the past also brought concerns, like those expressed by Bliss, that Canadian history was becoming too fragmented. Stanley’s question, posed in the title of his 2006 essay “Whose Public? Whose Memory?” captured the central issue in the debates of the 1990s. The real problem was an identity crisis among powerful people whose ability to influence the public’s understanding of history declined as the nationalist history appeared to be losing its grip on the past. As Canadian historical research was expanding, especially with the new contributions to the history of women, Aboriginal peoples, and the working class, historical method and theory were gradually absorbing and challenging the insights of postmodernist theory. Although Canadian historiography written in French shows the influence of continental philosophy, especially French historiography, Canadian historians working in English were less explicit in their use of theory. According to Neatby and Hodgins, the study of “collective memory” took hold in English Canada in the mid-1990s, several years after Quebec (11; see also Richard Cavell’s Chapter 3 in this volume for a discussion of cultural memory in a Canadian literary context). Although sometimes used interchangeably, “public history” and “collective memory” remain distinct social phenomena. Public history, nurtured as it is by government agencies and officials as well as members of the public, retains the sense of a civic activity, whereas collective memory holds the possibility of spontaneity. This mode of inquiry, indebted to Pierre Nora’s seven-volume Lieux de mémoire, continues to gain ground in Canadian historiography and literary criticism, and though it may be too soon to tell, this might signal the rapprochement of French and English historiography. In the 1960s, “the influence of the Annales school helped turn historians to the everyday life of communities,” especially in Québec (Shore 43).5 Outside Québec, the influence of the Annalistes was subdued, and the rejection of concepts such as mentalité closed off new channels of theoretical inquiry. Like the generation of geographers Cole Harris describes in New Histories for Old, historians trained prior to the 1960s were resistant to theory and slow to give up “the prospect of a careful, rigorous, and, as far as possible, quantitative empiricism” (250). The strict empirical focus of Anglo-American historiography and the exclusion of alternative theories led to the characterization of Canadian historiography as theoretically outmoded. Canadian history written in English was, and to a large extent remains, firmly attached to the empirical tradition of Anglo-American historiography, an attachment that would later enable the postmodernist critique of nineteenth-century historicism found in Hayden White’s Metahistory. By ignoring the challenges to historicism, Metahistory presented a view of “capital H” History as essentially unchanged since the nineteenth century. This critique remained in place despite innovations like microhistory, which came to prominence with the English translation of The Cheese and the Worms by Carlo Ginzberg in 1980 and the publication of The Return of Martin Guerre by Natalie Zemon Davis in 1983. Sometimes categorized as a postmodernist for her creative use of fiction in her work on early modern culture, both in documents and in film, Davis acknowledges the insights of literary theory, and like most contemporary historians, she assimilates these insights while practicing a method of careful assembly and critique

786    Critical Fields and New Directions of archival material (see also Evans; Davis; Tosh). In “Who Owns History? History in the Profession,” Davis maintained that historians should continue to uphold the standards of interpretation developed by the historical profession (see Evans; Himmelfarb; Jenkins; Munslow; Zagorin). As Davis’s title suggests, who owns the past is a recurring question in these discussions. On this issue, Canadian author Margaret Atwood was categorical: “The past no longer belongs to those who once lived in it; the past belongs to those who claim it, and are willing to explore it, and to infuse it with meaning for those alive today. The past belongs to us, because we are the ones who need it” (1516). Atwood made this statement at the end of “In Search of Alias Grace,” the 1996 Bronfman lecture delivered at the University of Ottawa and published by the University of Ottawa Press a year later. The lecture also served as the centrepiece of the 1998 American Historical Review Forum, “Histories and Historical Fiction,” which seemed to promise to reunite history and fiction as “historical siblings” who “sprang from a common parentage of story tellers” (Woodward in Ellison et al. 58). As the “revival of narrative” in late twentieth-century historiography suggests, history and fiction were rediscovering this common ground (see Burke, Stone). The linguistic turn had encouraged historians to abandon the realist techniques found in nineteenth-century historiography, but the postmodern view of “H”istory as merely another form of narrative prevented literary scholars from acknowledging these fundamental changes. Literary critics continued to apply the postmodernist view of history to their practice and to imagine “H”istory as an internally coherent discourse, often a “grand narrative” justifying unequal power relations, essentially treating it as unchanged since the nineteenth century, even though historians had long since moved on. Indeed, postmodern thought was undergoing serious scrutiny in the historical profession, generating debates such as the exchange between Keith Jenkins and Perez Zagorin in the pages of History and Theory (see also Jenkins’s Re-Thinking) and assimilating the linguistic turn while moving away from its more radical philosophical implications (see Ankersmit; Burke; Davis). In Canada, historians such as Adele Perry have since argued that postmodern and postcolonial literary theory could teach historians to read their sources differently, more critically and consciously, but cautioned that literary scholars too often “conflate the literary and the social” (147). For Perry, historians might approach the past through text, but “the past itself is not literally a text” (147). The postmodern insight could be accommodated by historical method in this way, providing a way of reading resistantly and skeptically. In the 1990s, as the scions of the corporate world were wringing their hands over the lack of knowledge and interest that Canadians had in their own history, historical novels by Canadian authors, including Margaret Atwood, Mordecai Richler, Guy Vanderhaeghe, Wayne Johnston, and Anne Michaels, were filling the bestseller lists. The public debate about historical education that narrowly defined history as a set of facts Canadians were supposed to know and students were supposed to learn in history classes virtually ignored the growing popularity and proliferation of historical novels in contemporary Canada. The exclusion from these debates of historical fiction, the arts, and public history allowed proponents of national history to lament the loss of historical

Reading Historiography and Historical Fiction    787 knowledge at a moment when it was actually flourishing. It seems that rather than preserve historical memory, nationalists were seeking to repress knowledge of the past so that “Canada” would be always poised on the verge of coming of age, always just about to shed its ignorance and innocence for knowing and experience. In redeploying this old trope, proponents of nationalist history were not seeking “a symbolic universe in which various contesting groups could shelter under a shared awning” (Lerner 202); instead, what they wanted was the unified narrative that would suppress, rather than accommodate, difference. Literary criticism, in contrast, had paid close attention to the differences represented in historical fiction, and had revealed, as Dennis Duffy puts it, that the historical novel is “a vehicle for the imaginative representation of nationalist ideologies” (Sounding v). In the nineteenth century, Duffy noted, reviewers and critics praised writers who appreciated the excitement and adventure to be found in stories of early Canada. It could be argued that, from that early period on, historicized criticism has been continuously practiced by Canadian literary scholars, especially by those studying early Canada, with recent contributions such as ReCalling Early Canada: Reading the Political in Literary and Cultural Production (2005) and National Plots: Historical Fiction and Changing Ideas of Canada (2010) bringing awareness of postcolonial theory to the field. In “Literary History as Microhistory” (2004), Heather Murray observed that Canadian literary criticism had become generally “historical in its orientation” (405), despite having yet to engage in a discussion of historical method. The History of the Book in Canada project exemplifies literary microhistory with its short, detailed articles focused on particular moments in book history. In light of Bliss’s call for a broad-based response to the constitutional dilemma, Murray’s exploration of literary history as microhistory might have seemed out of step with the historians seeking an expanded sense of social and national inclusivity, were it not for the fact that literary scholarship, with its thematic and theoretical arguments, had not succumbed to the narrowing focus on empiricism seen in the historical profession. By the mid-twentieth century, literary critics looked to writers who departed from the idealism of the nineteenth century in favour of the more skeptical approach to inherited histories that reached its high point in the postmodern period. The study of contemporary Canadian literature generated four monographs devoted to historical novels: Sounding the Iceberg (1986) by Dennis Duffy, The Canadian Postmodern (1988) by Linda Hutcheon, Framing Truths (1992) by Martin Kuester, and Speculative Fictions (2002) by Herb Wyile. Duffy’s Sounding the Iceberg (1986) was the first book to trace the persistence of the Canadian historical novel from the popular romance form of the late nineteenth century to the postmodern period. According to Duffy, Canadian historical fiction entered the literary mainstream in the 1970s despite the “barriers to critical appreciation of the genre” (i–ii). Writing before the resurgence of the historical novel in the mid-1990s, Duffy placed the genre in historical context and identified “the culmination of the course of the Canadian historical novel” in Rudy Wiebe’s The Temptations of Big Bear (1973). Duffy refers to the ways in which The Temptations of Big Bear depicts the historically marginalized Cree people in the story by treating them, not as symbols

788    Critical Fields and New Directions or abstractions, but as individuals with individual characteristics and perspectives (72), marking “the return to the chronicle of magnificence [and] the celebration of the truly remarkable persons and deeds” (74). Shortly after Duffy’s study was published, Linda Hutcheon’s The Canadian Postmodern (1988) transformed the study of historical fiction by introducing and explicating historiographic metafiction. Canadian historical fiction written in the 1970s and 1980s yielded several suitable examples:  Rudy Wiebe’s The Temptations of Big Bear (1973), Timothy Findley’s The Wars (1977) and Famous Last Words (1981), George Bowering’s Burning Water (1980), and Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion (1987) all nicely illustrated postmodern techniques. Findley’s The Wars and Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion, for example, contain an overt metatextual structure that incorporates historical sources, such as archival photographs and newspaper articles, in order to highlight the frustrating inaccessibility of historical documents. These techniques, which created “fiction that is intensely, self-reflexively art,” distinguished historiographic metafiction from realist historical fiction similarly “grounded in historical, social, and political realities” (13). Whereas Duffy had situated each literary work in Canadian history and literary history, Hutcheon’s application of literary theory, as reviews of The Canadian Postmodern pointed out, was ahistorical (see Findlay; McDonald; Pennee). This choice is not surprising given that Hutcheon accepted White’s claim that history was a form of fiction, not a mode of inquiry: “History was redefined as a poetic construct. To write history was to narrate, to reconstruct by means of selection and interpretation. … History began to be seen as being made by its writers, even if the events seemed to speak for themselves” (209). Hutcheon placed “historiographic metafiction” at the centre of literary postmodernism in Canada, and literary critics quickly embraced a critical vocabulary that served to explain the devices writers were employing to achieve a self-conscious effect, including the representation of writing, researching, and recording in historical fiction. This approach is evident, for example, in the metafictional framing of Findley’s The Wars (1977) and Bowering’s Burning Water (1980), in which a researcher is attempting to piece together the story that the reader is reading. The novels of Robert Kroetsch, named “Mr. Canadian Postmodern” by Hutcheon (160), epitomized the parodic and playful postmodern style. For Hutcheon, the characteristically ambivalent attitude toward history in The Words of My Roaring (1966), The Studhorse Man (1969), and Badlands (1975), and the deep distrust of historical narrative and knowledge in Gone Indian (1973) and What the Crow Said (1978), as well as Kroetsch’s critical arguments, constituted “the most obvious challenges to canonical notions of a literature of certainty, comfort, stability, and security” (183). The impulse behind Kroetsch’s rejection of authority, including the authority of historical representation, emerged from the alienation produced by narratives of Canadian history that excluded prairie experience, and Hutcheon locates Kroestch’s most direct response to the marginalization of the prairies in Canadian history, not in the novels, but in his poetry, especially his long poem Seed Catalogue (1977). In Seed Catalogue, Kroetsch imagines history as absence, a narrative of places, people, and things that are not part of the speaker’s prairie world, leading to the poem’s central question, without a literary

Reading Historiography and Historical Fiction    789 past, “How do you grow a poet?” The poem is the answer. From the words in the farmer’s seed catalogue, the voices of the people, and the land itself, a poetry emerges to defy history’s exclusions. As the postmodern moment was reaching its height with the appearance of The Canadian Postmodern in 1988, Alice Munro published her short story “Meneseteung” in The New Yorker, a story that performs the historiographic skepticism that characterized the postmodern take on history, though as both Shelley Hulan and Tracy Ware have observed, “Meneseteung” witnesses Munro’s long-standing engagement with the past of the region she has lived in most of her life, especially the history of the nineteenth century. As the story begins, the narrator pores over an old book of poems entitled Offerings, pondering the author’s photo and imagining the woman it depicts. Looking through the book, the narrator constructs from the list of titles and sketchy notes the story of their author, Almeda Roth, a story set in a time remote from the narrator’s though in the same place that, as Hulan notes, “embroiders significantly upon the sparse archival record” (5). The woman’s hat causes the narrator to “see artistic intentions, or at least a shy and stubborn eccentricity,” but the narrator registers uncertainty about this interpretation: “From the waist up, she looks like a young nobleman of another century. But perhaps it was the fashion” (51). By contrasting the narrator’s tentative statements with the judgmental tone of excerpts from the local paper, the Vidette, Munro creates a strong sense of historical difference: the anonymous journalist stands for the respectable people of the town, their cruelty and self-righteousness, while the more sympathetic narrator stands apart looking back at them. It is the history of the community these upright citizens belong to that concerns Munro, according to Hulan, and the questions that remain unasked reveal her narrators’ complicity in excluding the history of those they have dispossessed, especially African-Canadian and First Nations history. While the narrator’s equivocations and questions in “Meneseteung” create uncertainty, which leads to a skeptical view of narrative meaning, they also mimic the process of historical inquiry, which is perhaps why Magdalene Redekop has called the story “mock-history” rather than historiographic metafiction. The endless possibilities make the recovery of the past particularly complex, uncertain, and intriguing. In The Tumble of Reason: Alice Munro’s Discourse of Absence (1994), Ajay Heble explains that Munro “forces us to recognize the extent to which meaning itself depends on and is determined by traces of absent and potential levels of signification” (7). Meaning derives from the absence of other possible meanings, rather than being present at each moment of utterance. The narrator will not allow “names, dates, and other factual details” or “figures and events from the past” to “speak for themselves” (170), and while metafictional techniques point to the story’s construction, as Heble argues, Munro also looks “outside the boundaries of her fiction and into the world of material reality” (Heble 14). In “Meneseteung,” Munro insists that the past is unknowable by adding lines in which the narrator undercuts the compelling reconstruction of Almeda’s life: “And they may get it wrong, after all. I may have got it wrong. I don’t know if she ever took laudanum. Many ladies did. I don’t know if she ever made grape jelly” (73). Almeda’s life can be imagined, though not known, in the material reality of

790    Critical Fields and New Directions women like her, and while “Meneseteung” offers this reticence about historical recovery, it also expresses the profound desire to know the past. A year after the first version of “Meneseteung” was published in The New  Yorker, Mordecai Richler’s Solomon Gursky Was Here (1989) marked the shift from the highly self-conscious style of historiographic metafiction Hutcheon defined in The Canadian Postmodern to a new form of historical novel. Richler’s satirical epic places Jewish characters on the doomed Franklin expedition and thus at the heart of Canadian myth-making in order to subvert the racist narratives of Canadian nation building. The novel’s intertextuality is not laid bare, as in postmodern historical fiction; rather, the parody is deeply embedded in the narrative structure and sardonic tone of the omniscient narrator with occasional sections providing more overt parody. Solomon Gursky Was Here was also one of the first novels to include an author’s note acknowledging sources used in the text: “I have leaned heavily on James H. Gray’s Red Lights on the Prairie and Booze for western history, and on Bernard Epp’s More Tales of the Townships,” Richler wrote, and readers of Arctic history could see that he had “dug deeply into Franklin, M’Clure, Back, Richardson and the rest on the doomed expedition” (558). For the reader familiar with the narratives of Arctic exploration, the novel’s intertextuality is one of the qualities that makes it so enjoyable, and a source of its humour, but its style departed from the reflexivity of postmodern historical fictions. “Postmodern literature,” Hutcheon explained, “often turns the act of reading into a self-conscious and active performance, and does so by itself enacting or performing what it expounds” (22). In contrast, even though Moses Berger’s research constructs the Gursky family history, the novel is not overtly self-conscious, allowing the reader to piece together the clues without drawing signposts to them. In Speculative Fictions (2002), Herb Wyile identified this new form of historical novel characterized by an attention to historical reconstruction and verisimilitude. In the 1990s, a long list of historical fictions had appeared that demonstrated this interest in revising historical narratives through a reliance on historical detail, including bestsellers such as Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1995), Wayne Johnston’s Colony of Unrequited Dreams (1998), Jane Urquhart’s Away (1993), and Guy Vanderhaeghe’s The Englishman’s Boy (1996), which Wyile analyzes. In The Afterlife of George Cartwright (1992), John Steffler imagines his subject re-evaluating his life as he haunts the English countryside, adding to the account presented in Cartwright’s journal of his years spent in Labrador (Wyile 174–75). As Cartwright looks back at his life as an explorer, hunter, and colonizer, he gradually recognizes the moral and spiritual blindness that allowed him to destroy so much while he was alive (R. Hulan, “Afterword” 274). The novel, which, Steffler notes, reproduces much of Cartwright’s journal “more or less verbatim,” shapes his account into a cautionary tale for the present age (268). A similar approach is evident in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996), which draws on the coverage of the case of murderess Grace Marks in nineteenth-century newspapers and other documents. As Atwood describes in “In Search of Alias Grace,” the historical novel fills in the “gaps” in historical records and imagines the voices in the margins of those records, as Rudy Wiebe does in his novels. These novels construct an edifice of verifiable historical

Reading Historiography and Historical Fiction    791 detail that functions as historical realism, authenticating the truth of the social phenomena recorded and explored through the author’s interpretation. In the new millennium, historical fiction is redeploying realism as it continues to embrace skepticism, though sometimes in the interest, not of destabilizing metanarratives, but of reviving them. Reading historical novels published in the 1990s, Wyile perceived a difference in the style of historical representation: “These novels come across as less profoundly sceptical about historiography, less concerned with fracturing and interrogating retrospection, and largely, if somewhat ambivalently, rooted in historical verisimilitude and an engagement with (rather than abandonment or disruption of) the historical record” (263). In addition to historical fiction based on events in the founding of the Canadian nation, these novelists were also looking beyond the national history. A good example of this shift in historical subject and representation is Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces (1996), which imagines historical events surrounding the Holocaust from the point of view of ordinary, private lives, without the conventional postmodern depiction of the writer looking back to a beginning. The novel begins with formative events, shaping narrative time through archaeological excavation and piecing together remembered events as it moves forward in time. The excavation of the young boy Jakob, the living body pulled from the earth in Biskupin, reverses the archaeological order of things. When Jakob emerges from the mud, in a graphic reversal of interment, he is nothing more than skeletal remains with memories. Bereft of everything, Jakob is in a state of becoming. “No one is born just once,” he narrates, “… I squirmed from the marshy ground like Tollund Man, Grauballe Man, like the boy they uprooted in Franz Josef Street while they were repairing the road, six hundred cockleshell beads around his neck, a helmet of mud. Dripping with the prune-coloured juices of the peat-sweating bog. Afterbirth of earth” (5). Athos, the archaeologist who finds him, is adept at reading the trace of life left in the soil, but cannot interpret the meaning of this strange specimen, and Jakob’s own long silence through their years in Greece and later in Canada prevents him from explaining. Fugitive Pieces stimulated debate about the redemptive potential of narrative, especially trauma narrative and postmemory. The novel reads like a prose poem that resists realism, evoking rather than describing the horror, and as Adrienne Kertzer’s powerful autobiographical response warns, Michaels therefore “risks adopting a narrative strategy that tends, not surprisingly, to distract and console many readers with the ‘beauty’ of her story, the pleasure of her intensely woven language” (203). Like a newborn, Jakob must acquire language and with it a sense of being. Athos provides both with his stories. Athos and Jakob are spared from the Holocaust, freeing them to have ordinary deaths, one of “natural causes,” the other in a car crash. The ordinariness of their deaths makes the death of the countless others extraordinary. These “others,” when mentioned, are never counted, as if the author rejects entirely an empirical approach to this history. Thus, Michaels resists the tendency to privilege the individual survivor over the many dead that Kertzer also cautions against; instead, Michaels’s preference for evocation of feeling and her attempt to imagine the individual, personal story through the memories of the characters not only rejects empiricism but contains a powerful critique of the perfection of technique. Against the technical proficiency of mechanized death, Michaels

792    Critical Fields and New Directions sets human pursuits: music, poetry, cooking. Jakob’s story ends in silence, his consciousness no longer accessible to the reader or to his admirer, Ben. With Jakob’s death, the novel does not end but becomes the occasion for a new story, that of Ben, the generation to come, who also reads traces. Those who disappear, including the central character, are memories evoked, rather than characters developed in the narrative. The novel thus memorializes the dead without turning their deaths into statistics or fictionalized scenes of suffering. In this way, Fugitive Pieces conveys historical truth through poetic language that testifies to the unrepresentability of the Holocaust, without abandoning historical representation. In the commercial marketing of literature, “fiction” refers almost exclusively to novels, and as a result, historical novels have come to stand for historical fiction even though the literary expression of historical consciousness can take many forms, including a growing number of fictional memoirs, such as Wayne Johnston’s Baltimore’s Mansion (1999) and Alice Munro’s The View from Castle Rock (2007). By recalling that fiction encompasses drama, poetry, and prose fiction, as well as works like Fugitive Pieces that blend genres, literary scholarship can resist this narrowing of literary experience in the marketplace. Many of the historical fictions from the post-1990 period are making, rather than revising, history. First Nations and Aboriginal authors are making history by writing about the past in a variety of genres; for example, the residential school memoir is the most culturally significant genre in contemporary Canadian literature (see Chapter 7 by Jonathan Dewar in this volume). In poetry by Jeannette Armstrong, Marilyn Dumont, and Armand Garnet Ruffo, the colonial history of Canada is revealed in the continuation of internal colonization, and the historical writing by historians and other academics on First Nations history has expanded rapidly (Brown and Vibert; Brownlie and Korinek; Dion; Shoemaker; Simpson and Ladner). Significantly, only a few authors of Aboriginal heritage, such as Joseph Boyden in his World War I novel Three Day Road (2005), have embraced the historical novel. As Thomas King has noted, contemporary authors resist the legacy of exclusion and misrepresentation of First Nations in historical writing by choosing to set their novels in the present as a way of reclaiming voice (King xii). In these and other works, First Nations and Aboriginal authors derive a sense of continuity with the past by looking to oral traditions. Another prominent author who is making history, George Elliott Clarke, in his collection of essays Directions Home (2012), describes having a “scholarly epiphany” in 1990 when he came across The Book of the Bible against Slavery by John William Robertson in the Public Archives of Nova Scotia (Directions 3). The moment started him on a path toward documenting and imagining the past of a people who were considered “supposedly too poor to even have a history” (Odysseys 6). Throughout his bibliographic, critical, and review essays, Clarke calls upon Canadians to fight cultural amnesia by diving into those archives and reinterpreting their contents. With Odysseys Home and Directions Home, as well as in poetic works from Whylah Falls (1990) to Beatrice Chancy (1999), Clarke is quite literally making history by reconstructing the lives of African Canadians in Nova Scotia. The poems in Whylah Falls narrate the fictionalized stories of an Africadian community in Depression-era Nova Scotia. In Beatrice Chancy, Clarke adapts the famous

Reading Historiography and Historical Fiction    793 story of Beatrice Cenci, setting it in Nova Scotia. The rape of Beatrice, the daughter of the slave-owning Chancy and his slave Sable Mama, by her father recalls the violent depredations suffered by African Canadians. In both works, and in others, Clarke brings his encounter with neglected archives to a literary audience, making a history where one has not been written. Clarke’s own mapping of the field is now the subject of criticism that he analyzes in the introduction to his most recent collection. At first he concedes that “championing a historically anchored African-Canadian literature” was out of step with times when “local cultures were supposed to disappear in the wake of ‘borderless’ economic expansion” (Directions 5–6). After all, sophisticated cultural critics were nodding knowingly as globalization did away with the nation-state, but Clarke blasts back at the poststructuralists whose beliefs make them unable to “articulate materially their (historical and cultural) existence” (Directions 6). Clarke’s works may be appropriated in the service of theoretical arguments, but works such as Whylah Falls offer “a rich site of history from which new voices speak” (Wells 71), and his body of critical work recuperates texts from archival obscurity, rescues authors from oblivion, and writes a neglected past into existence. Maureen Moynagh compares what Clarke achieves in his opera Beatrice Chancy to Toni Morrison’s “re-memory” work in Beloved, staging the history of slavery for a nation that does not wish to remember and deploying the family romance as the ideal structure for exposing the nation’s intimacy and complicity with the racial and sexual violence of exploitation (110). Amanda Montague argues that Clarke’s adaptation of the Cenci story, whose suppression by the church intrigued and inspired Percy Shelley, relocates the layers of forgetting and silence in Canada’s history of slavery, so the “process of textual recreation and reinterpretation” in Beatrice Chancy “is also part of Clarke’s narrative effort to rebuild and reclaim an archive of Africadian identity within Canada’s discourse of nationhood” (138). In “Must We Burn Haliburton?,” Clarke reassesses Thomas Chandler Haliburton’s writing and finds, neither stylist or compiler, but the harmful effects of racism exceeding any possible literary or historical merit (Odysseys). In his critical and creative work, Clarke has shaped and is reshaping Canadian literary history and historiography (see R. Hulan, “Historical”). In addition to the appearance of new historiography and new forms of the historical novel, renewed interest in the colonial archive can be observed across the full spectrum of literary expression. Canadian writers, Atwood says, have always been interested in the “digging up of buried things,” and the past fascinates with “the lure of the unmentionable—the mysterious, the buried, the forgotten, the discarded, the taboo” (“In Search” 19–20). The Canadian past is often imagined as something repressed, even within its own historiography, as Cynthia Sugars argues, drawing on Freud’s unheimlich to describe the “inexpressible unhomeliness” and feeling of unbelonging that characterizes the literature written by settlers and immigrants who articulate the “in-betweenness” of diasporic, immigrant, and settler identities, and, as the work of Aboriginal writers and historians affirms, the nation is only one lens with which to view historical experience. In the contestation and deconstruction of foundational narratives taking place in historical fiction and historiography—rather than the return to the national narrative imagined in the late twentieth-century crisis—lies the real potential

794    Critical Fields and New Directions for historiography and historical fiction to reconstitute Canada. Contemporary historians and writers are actively engaged in recovering the histories that were or could be forgotten, and their complementary efforts are providing the way towards a more inclusive society than a national narrative could ever hope to achieve.

Notes 1. The subject of this chapter and many of its main points are discussed at greater length in R. Hulan, Canadian Historical Writing: Reading the Remains. 2. Now merged under the title Historica Canada (see www.historicacanada.ca), these charitable organizations were founded by members of the private sector to promote Canadian history. 3. Murphy’s point here is that not all provinces entered Confederation in 1867, though this is the “correct answer” on the history quiz. Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949, thus by citing that date, Murphy is making a joke by placing the once marginal “have not” province at the center of national history. 4. In 1992, Canadians were debating the Charlottetown Accord, which was an attempt to resolve the constitutional impasse created when the Constitution was repatriated in 1982 and after the Meech Lake Accord of 1987 was not ratified by all provinces. 5. In the early twentieth century, this movement in French historiography, led by Lucien Febvre and Fernand Braudel, founded the journal Annales d’histoire économique et sociale.

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796    Critical Fields and New Directions Heble, Ajay. The Tumble of Reason: Alice Munro’s Discourse of Absence. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1994. Print. Himmelfarb, Gertrude. “Postmodernist History.” Reconstructing History:  The Emergence of a New Historical Society. Ed. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn. New York: Routledge, 1999. 71–93. Print. Hodgetts, A.B. What Culture? What Heritage? A  Study of Civic Education in Canada. Toronto: O.I.S.E., 1968. Print. Hulan, Renée. “Afterword.” The Afterlife of George Cartwright. 1992. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1999. 271–76. Print. ———. Canadian Historical Writing: Reading the Remains. New York: Palgrave, 2014. Print. ———. “Historical Method in Canadian Literary Studies: Some Recent Examples.” Acadiensis 34.2 (2005): 130–45. Print. Hulan, Shelley. “Yours to Recover: Mound Burial in Alice Munro’s ‘What Do You Want to Know For?’ ” Canadian Literature and Cultural Memory. Ed. Cynthia Sugars and Eleanor Ty. Toronto: Oxford UP, 2014. 260–73. Print. Hutcheon, Linda. “Historiographic Metafiction.” The Canadian Postmodern:  A  Study of Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1988. 61–77. Print. Jenkins, Keith. “A Postmodern Reply to Perez Zagorin.” History and Theory 39 (2000): 181–200. Print. ———. Re-Thinking History. London: Routledge, 1991. Print. Johnston, Wayne. Baltimore’s Mansion. Toronto: Knopf, 1999. Print. ———. The Colony of Unrequited Dreams. Toronto: Knopf, 1998. Print. Kertzer, Adrienne. “Fugitive Pieces: Listening to a Holocaust Survivor’s Child.” English Studies in Canada 26.2 (2000): 193–217. Print. King, Thomas. “Introduction.” All My Relations:  An Anthology of Contemporary Canadian Native Fiction. Ed. Thomas King. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1990. ix–xvi. Print. Kroetsch, Robert. Badlands. 1975. Toronto: Stoddart, 1999. Print. ———. Gone Indian. 1973. Toronto: Stoddart, 1999. Print. ———. Seed Catalogue: A Poem. 1977. Calgary: Red Deer P, 2004. Print. ———. Studhorse Man. 1969. Markham, ON: Paperjacks, 1977. Print. ———. What the Crow Said. 1978. Edmonton: U of Alberta P, 1998. Print. ———. The Words of My Roaring. 1966. Markham, ON: Paperjacks, 1977. Print. Kuester, Martin. Framing Truths:  Parodic Structures in Contemporary English-Canadian Historical Novels. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1992. Print. LaCapra, Dominick. History and Reading: Tocqueville, Foucault, French Studies. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2000. Print. Lamonde, Yvan, Patricia Lockhart Fleming, and Fiona A. Black, eds. History of the Book in Canada. 3 vols. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2005. Print. Lerner, Gerda. Why History Matters: Life and Thought. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. Print. Lowenthal, David. The Past Is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985. Print. MacKay, Ian. “After Canada:  On Amnesia and Apocalypse in the Contemporary Crisis.” Acadiensis 28.1 (1998): 76–97. Print. McDonald, Larry. “Postmodernism, Canadian Style.” Rev. of The Canadian Postmodern, by Linda Hutcheon. Canadian Forum Oct. 1989: 29–30. Print. McKillop, A.B. “Who Killed Canadian History? A  View from the Trenches.” Canadian Historical Review 80.2 (1999): 269–99. Print. Michaels, Anne. Fugitive Pieces. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1996. Print.

Reading Historiography and Historical Fiction    797 Montague, Amanda. “Rewriting Violent Histories:  Transcultural Adaptation in Beatrice Chancy.” Pivato 135–50. Morgan, Cecilia. Public Men and Virtuous Women: The Gendered Languages of Religion and Politics in Upper Canada, 1791–1850. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1996. Print. Morton, Desmond. “A Call to Meet Crucial Need to Teach History.” Canadian Speeches 12.1 (1998): 42–46. Print. Moynagh, Maureen. “ ‘This history’s only good for anger’: Gender and Cultural Memory in Beatrice Chancey.” Pivato 91–133. Munro, Alice. “Meneseteung.” Friend of My Youth. Toronto: Penguin, 1990. 50–73. Print. ———. “Meneseteung.” The New Yorker 11 Jan. 1988: 28–38. Print. ———. The View from Castle Rock. Toronto: Penguin, 2007. Print. Munslow, Alun. Deconstructing History. London: Routledge, 1997. Print. Murphy, Rex. “O Brother, Who Art Thou?” Globe and Mail 30 June 2001: A13. Print. Murray, Heather. “Literary History as Microhistory.” Home-Work: Postcolonialism, Pedagogy, and Canadian Literature. Ed. Cynthia Sugars. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 2004. 405–22. Print. Neatby, Nicole, and Peter Hodgins, eds. Settling and Unsettling Memories: Essays in Canadian Public History. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2012. Print. Ondaatje, Michael. In the Skin of a Lion. 1987. Toronto: Vintage, 1996. Print. Osborne, Ken. “ ‘Our History Syllabus Has Us Gasping’: History in Canadian Schools–Past, Present, and Future.” Canadian Historical Review 81.3 (2000): 404–35. Print. ———. “Revisiting the History Classroom.” The Beaver Aug. 1999: 6–7. Print. Passmore, Kevin. “Poststructuralism and History.” Writing History:  Theory and Practice. Ed. Stefan Berger, Heiko Feldner, and Kevin Passmore. London:  Hodder Arnold, 2003. 118–40. Print. Pennee, Donna Palmateer. “A Postmodern Engagement?” Rev. of The Canadian Postmodern, by Linda Hutcheon. Essays on Canadian Writing 41 (1990): 109–15. Print. Perry, Adele. “The Historian and the Theorist Revisited.” Histoire sociale/Social History 33.65 (2000): 145–51. Print. Pivato, Joseph, ed. Africadian Atlantic:  Essays on George Elliott Clarke. Toronto:  Guernica, 2012. Print. Richler, Mordecai. Solomon Gursky Was Here. Toronto: Viking, 1989. Print. Sandwell, Ruth W., ed. To the Past:  History Education, Public Memory, and Citizenship in Canada. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2006. Print. Shoemaker, Nancy, ed. Clearing a Path:  Theorizing the Past in Native American Studies. New York: Routledge, 2002. Print. Shore, Marlene. The Contested Past:  Reading Canada’s History. Toronto:  U of Toronto P, 2002. Print. Simpson, Leanne, and Kiera L. Ladner, eds. This Is an Honour Song: Twenty Years since the Blockades. Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring, 2010. Print. Soderstrom, Mary. “Our Vanished Past:  English-Canadian Literature Makes Too Little of Canadian History.” Quill & Quire Sept. 1999: 74. Print. Stanley, Timothy J. “Whose Public? Whose Memory? Racisms, Grand Narratives and Canadian History.” Sandwell 32–49. ———. “Why I Killed Canadian History: Towards an Anti-Racist History in Canada.” Histoire sociale/Social History 33.65 (May 2000): 79–103. Print. Steffler, John. The Afterlife of George Cartwright. 1992. Toronto:  McClelland and Stewart, 1999. Print.

798    Critical Fields and New Directions Stone, Lawrence. “The Revival of Narrative:  Reflections on a New Old History.” Past and Present 85 (1979): 3–24. Print. Sugars, Cynthia. “Introduction:  Unhomely States.” Unhomely States:  Theorizing English-Canadian Postcolonialism. Ed. Cynthia Sugars. Peterborough, ON:  Broadview, 2004. xiii–xxv. Print. Sugars, Cynthia, and Gerry Turcotte, eds. “Introduction:  Canadian Literature and the Postcolonial Gothic.” Unsettled Remains: Canadian Literature and the Postcolonial Gothic. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2009. vii–xxvi. Print. Tosh, John, ed. Historians on History. Harlow: Longman, 2000. Print. ———. The Pursuit of History:  Aims, Methods, and New Directions in the Study of Modern History. 3rd ed. Harlow: Longman, 1999. Print. Urquhart, Jane. Away. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1993. Print. Vanderhaeghe, Guy. The Englishman’s Boy. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1996. Print. Ware, Tracy. “ ‘And They Might Get It Wrong, After All’: Reading Alice Munro’s ‘Meneseteung.’ ” National Plots: Historical Fiction and Changing Ideas of Canada. Ed. Andrea Cabajsky and Brett Josef Grubisic. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2010. 67–79. Print. Wells, Dorothy. “A Rose Grows in Whylah Falls:  Transplanted Traditions in George Elliott Clarke’s ‘Africadia.’ ” Canadian Literature 155 (1997): 56–73. Print. White, Hayden. Metahistory:  The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1973. Print. Wiebe, Rudy. The Temptations of Big Bear. 1973. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1995. Print. Windschuttle, Keith. The Killing of History:  How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past. New York: Free P, 1996. Print. Wyile, Herb. Speculative Fictions: Contemporary Canadian Novelists and the Writing of History. Montreal: McGill-Queens UP, 2002. Print. Zagorin, Perez. “Rejoinder to a Postmodernist.” History and Theory 39 (2000): 201–09. Print.

Chapter 42

Canadian B o ok H i story Eli MacLaren

Bibliography, the parent discipline of book history, is sometimes dismissed as the tedious task of listing the books that you have consulted, a task subordinate to the real work of thinking and writing about literature. Keeping track of your sources, in fact, is only the beginning of the matter. Bibliography is the study of the material form of texts—the key phrase, material form, suggesting both the physical objects (the books) that contain a given text, and the shaping of them by societal factors such as technology, modes of business, economic regulations, or various reading practices. The premise of bibliography, like that of book history, is that there is inevitably some relation between the material form of a text and its meaning; thus, in order to interpret a work of literature well, both in one’s own reading of it and in gauging its broader cultural-historical significance, it is important to know something about how it has been published and received. Contrary to popular belief, not all copies of a work are the same, and sometimes the variation has a surprising, if not pivotal, effect on interpretation. In accurately recording the edition that you have used and the page that you have quoted, you are acknowledging this problem. Furthermore, not everyone is equally positioned to write or read a book: the degree of education and self-reflection that people enjoy through books is affected by a host of forces, from price and format to censorship, the maintenance of libraries, and the subsidization of local publishing. In its broadest sense, bibliography undertakes to note and to explain the historical peculiarities of books and their social causes and effects. In doing so, it offers much to the study of literature, especially to a class of literature like Canadian, which explicitly defines itself in relation to a given society. Bibliography is an old discipline that has grown into several intertwined branches: enumerative, analytical, descriptive, textual, and historical (Howard-Hill). Enumerative bibliography is the listing of books. Its character is extensive, its purpose comprehensive. An enumerative bibliography aims to compile metadata—basic information such as author, title, publisher, and date—about all of the works within its parameters. A simple example is the list of works cited in this chapter; at the other end of the spectrum, there is Amicus, the online union catalogue of Library and

800    Critical Fields and New Directions Archives Canada, which attempts to list all of the books held by Canadian university and public libraries. Enumerative bibliography has an epistemological significance, for it allows us to know what we know: it is the organized response not only to the daily increasing welter of published information but also to the oblivion into which this all too quickly slips. Reginald Watters’s Check List of Canadian Literature (1959) was a landmark achievement because it identified over twelve thousand books by Canadian writers, many of which were not only long out of print but had never been published in Canada in the first place. In doing so, it enabled the collection, study, teaching, and re-publication of them by the next generation. A.S.P. Woodhouse, chair of what was then the Humanities Research Council of Canada, which commissioned the project with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, indicated its value in his foreword: “Dr. Watters’ work is the indispensable instrument for further exploration in the Canadian field, and for the writing of the literary history of Canada now being planned” (v). The publication of the Literary History of Canada (1965), edited by Carl F. Klinck and others, fulfilled the promise of Watters’s labours, but we should not rest easy with this happy tale, for Library and Archives Canada, which took up his bibliographical burden, now faces the daunting task of recording Canadian cultural production, not only in print but also in electronic media, despite severe cutbacks suffered under Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government. The vitality of Canadian literature as a field depends on enumerative bibliographical work, past and ongoing. Even with printed books, ascertaining metadata is often more difficult than simply glancing at the title page. Authors use pseudonyms or change their names as their career progresses or by marrying. (Gostwick Roberts, Dorothy Roberts, and Dorothy Leisner, for example, were one and the same poet.) A company boasting to be the publisher may in fact merely be the regional distributor (as George N. Morang of Toronto was for Rudyard Kipling). Pirates routinely conceal or fake the place and date of publication. (The erotic novel, Lesbia, maîtresse d’école, ostensibly printed in Montreal in 1907, was in all likelihood published only in Paris [Bernier 148].) Even the title of a work can vary from edition to edition or from front cover to title page (as in the case of R.M. Ballantyne’s The Young Fur Traders/Snowflakes and Sunbeams). Then there is the text of the book itself, which is unsettlingly mutable. In response to these problems, more intensive and focused strains of bibliography have been developed. Analytical bibliography is the examination of a book for evidence of the process of manufacture. By comparing the elements of different copies—title page, collation (folding and gathering of the printed sheets), type, binding, and so on—it is possible to discover much about the printing and publishing of the work, such as the phases of entire re-typesetting or minor correction through which it passed. Setting the type afresh from start to finish yields a new edition of the work, while altering only a small part results in a new issue (if the change is ostentatious, such as a new title page) or state (if it is subtle, such as the unobtrusive correction of errors in page numbering). Analytical bibliography can reveal the chronological or genetic relation of one edition to the next, the

Canadian Book History    801 variation in general cost and quality over the course of publication, or the latent dependence of a publisher in one country upon a publisher in another for the provision of copies. In the absence of a publisher’s archive, we can nevertheless learn a great deal about publication from the books themselves. Descriptive bibliography follows from analytical: it is the systematic compiling of analytical observations, item by item, into a reference work, synthesizing them with further information (print run, date of publication, retail price, point of sale) gleaned from secondary sources such as archives or newspaper advertisements. Marie Tremaine’s Bibliography of Canadian Imprints 1751–1800 (1952), supplemented by Patricia Lockhart Fleming and Sandra Alston, remains the exemplary Canadian descriptive bibliography. Beginning with the first known document printed in what is now Canada—a prospectus, dated 1751 (by inference), for the Halifax Gazette, the first issue of which was published on 23 March 1752—it provides the title, the collational formula, the number of pages, and the leaf dimensions of hundreds of broadsides, newspapers, and books from the eighteenth century, adding invaluable secondary information in the notes. It is from Tremaine, for example, that we learn that one of Canada’s earliest poets, Thomas Cary, paid the Quebec printer, William Brown, £4 18s. 3d. to print his long poem, Abram’s Plains (1789), which he then sold by subscription for 2s. 6d. per copy (272, no. 585). These facts are important to analyzing the historical configuration of authorship: Cary’s actions set a predecent of self-publication that Canadian poets would follow for the next two hundred years. Whereas descriptive bibliography focuses on what is sometimes termed the paratext (any auxiliary apparatus of the book, such as title page, table of contents, index, or dust jacket), textual bibliography plunges into the text proper, hunting through different copies for variants in the words and punctuation. The end of textual bibliography is often the preparation of a scholarly edition, which not only presents what the editor deems to be the most authoritative text but also lists all of the variants so that readers can see the possibilities for a passage and judge for themselves which is best. A good scholarly edition is based on the knowledge of how prior editions of the work were published. It transparently discusses its goal. (To capture the last version revised by the author no longer goes without saying, but it remains a favourite.) It also discloses its principles (such as whether or not historical punctuation and spelling have been routinely modernized). In 1988 Carl Ballstadt restored what appears to be the better reading of a key passage of Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush. Moodie was unable to return to England to see the first edition (London:  Richard Bentley, 1852)  through the press; final editing and probably proofreading thus devolved to her friend, John Bruce. By contrast, Moodie was closely involved in the Canadian re-publication of her book two decades later (Toronto:  Hunter, Rose, 1871)  (Ballstadt xxix, xxxvi). Thanks partly to Margaret Atwood’s recuperation of it in The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), one of the best-known sketches in the book is “Brian, the Still-Hunter,” Moodie’s sympathetic portrait of an agnostic who struggles unsuccessfully against suicide. It begins with the enigmatic Brian entering Susanna’s pioneer cabin brusquely, strangely speaking first not

802    Critical Fields and New Directions to her but to his animal companions. Ballstadt documented the following variant in this passage: He stood at the side of the huge hearth, silently smoking, his eyes bent on the fire, and now and then he patted the heads of his dogs, reproving their exuberant expressions of attachment, with—“Down, Music; down, Chance!” (186) 186.14 [1871] Music] Musie [1852] (661)

As the textual note indicates, whereas the 1852 edition has a dog named “Musie,” the revised 1871 edition emends this to “Music.” The emendation enriches the character at the centre of this sketch. In emphasizing his affinity for the arts, it deepens the portrait of Brian as a cultured gentleman, which in turn deepens the problem of his fatal unhappiness. The more refined he is, the more he aligns with another high-born atheist whose self-caused exile from hearth and home fascinated Moodie’s Victorian audience—Lord Byron. Through Brian, Moodie, an inspired Christian, explores atheism as a privileged, tragic choice to isolate oneself from animal, human, and divine comfort. In this case, blithely reprinting the first edition would impoverish this characterization. Although a number of outstanding scholarly editions of Canadian literature have been published in recent years (e.g., Thompson; Back; Richardson; Crawford; Kirby), most of the corpus has not yet benefited from textual study, with the consequence that errors and omissions abound. Historical bibliography refers to the study of printing, publishing, and the associated practices of bookmaking at various times in the past. Admittedly, it overlaps with the approaches described above, but whereas analytical bibliography foregrounds physical books, historical bibliography moves beyond them in an effort to grasp all of the human and mechanical activity that went into their production. Philip Gaskell’s A New Introduction to Bibliography condenses great amounts of historical bibliography into a single, indispensable handbook to understanding book production from 1450 to 1950. In Canada, George Parker has done more than any other in describing how the patterns of the Canadian book trade have changed over time, affecting the general conditions of authorship, publishing, and reading. In truth, historical bibliography has become difficult to demarcate, for it has merged into book history. The history of the book is less a branch than a renaissance of bibliography—perhaps even an ambush of it. It is at once a continuation of prior scholarship on the publication and reception of books, and a burgeoning new line of inquiry that has been grafting itself with economics, cultural studies, social history, and media studies since, roughly, Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin’s influential L’Apparition du livre was translated into English in 1976. The rise of personal computers and the Internet has prompted new inquiry into the consequences of technology (physical form) upon content; meanwhile, academic interest in power and the formation of culture has flourished under the influence of contemporary critical theory. Book history is a big tent, and this is one reason for its popularity: any consideration of the existence of texts through time qualifies for inclusion. If the central question remains bibliographical—how are ideas determined

Canadian Book History    803 and disseminated by the vessels and agents that carry them?—book history has tended to focus less on the textual object (as Adams and Barker propose) and more on the people making and using it (following Darnton). However, to define oneself as a book historian but not a bibliographer, or vice versa, would be short-sighted. Leslie Howsam conceives of book history as an interdisciplinary triangle bringing history, literature, and bibliography into fruitful conflict. In his essay on the coming of print culture to New Zealand, D.F. McKenzie both reconstructs in fine-grained detail the printing of a crucial document—the Treaty of Waitangi (1840)—and theorizes the ideological horizons of the people involved in this event and the culturally inflected meaning that they drew from it. His progressive approach, which he designated “the sociology of texts” (334), is taken by many as a model of book history at its best. The major contours of the history of the book in Canada are growing clearer, although many topics of debate and uncertainty remain. There was no printing press in New France. Attempts to acquire one, such as that by the Quebec Jesuits in 1665, met resistance from authorities in France, who favoured the centralization of publishing in Paris for political and religious reasons. Books from Europe did circulate in the colony, and great feats were undertaken with pen and ink, such as the publication of ordinances, but in general local authorship, publishing, and literacy were obstructed until the mid-eighteenth century because of the centrist and mercantilist policies of the French monarchy (Melançon 46–48). When publishing did establish itself in Canada under British rule, its primary forms were the newspaper, the government document, the religious book (first for missions and then also for churches), and the school book. These were frequently interdependent, especially the first two: the government needed a printing office (which received the designation of King’s/Queen’s Printer) to promulgate its laws and regulations, and the printing offices depended on these steady contracts. The Halifax Gazette (1752–66), for example, contained the proclamations and session laws of Nova Scotia (Tremaine 600). Pierre-Édouard Desbarats worked as a translator at the likewise semi-official Quebec Gazette (1764–1874) before acquiring his own printing office in 1798, where he printed the statutes of Lower Canada from then until 1822, as well as three newspapers, including the Quebec Mercury (1805–63); his son, George-Paschal, was the Queen’s Printer of the Province of Canada from 1841 to 1864 (Galarneau 88; Macdonald 323). The spread of print culture to the West followed the same pattern: William Coldwell founded the Nor’Wester, the first newspaper on the Prairies, in 1859, and both he and his employee, Patrick Gammie Laurie, became government printers (Distad 64; Gallichan and Beaulieu 333–34). The forms above overlapped in religious publishing, too: the Christian Guardian (1829–1925), one of the most successful Canadian magazines, was long a mainstay of the Methodist Book and Publishing House. These forms, unlike the novel or the poetry collection, flourished in Canada because their publication served a Canadian audience directly and exclusively: congregations could be depended on to purchase the denominational magazines of the national church, residents of a city needed local news and advertisements, and children needed politically appropriate textbooks.

804    Critical Fields and New Directions The great fact of the nineteenth-century Canadian book trade was American piracy. The US Copyright Act of 1790 explicitly permitted the free reprinting of any book originally published in Britain or in any other foreign country. For the next one hundred years, American printing flourished on the manufacture of cheap editions of European works, especially British ones, which required no translation; American type- and papermaking, bookselling, publishing, and reading all increased dramatically, to the extent that, whereas the American book market had been a fraction of the British at the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was ten times the size by century’s end. Charles Dickens inveighed against the piracy of his writings in the United States, but he could do little to stop it. The US Copyright Act of 1891 greatly curtailed the unauthorized reprinting of foreign authors, but it was not until the United States signed and implemented the Berne Convention in 1988/89 that all traces of the policy vanished from American law. The upshot for Canada was that cheap books containing the best of European thought could be had readily from south of the border. Britain could, and did, prevent unauthorized reprinting on Canadian soil, but it could not stop the importation of American reprints along the border stretching from one ocean to another. The availability of cheap books was of great benefit to Canadian literacy; at the same time, it fatally undermined the publishing of general trade books. Thomas Chandler Haliburton’s The Clockmaker (1836–40) exemplifies the basic problem. Haliburton began writing his sketches in 1835 for the Novascotian, Joseph Howe’s Halifax newspaper, his purpose being to use the character of Sam Slick, the cunning Yankee clock salesman, to shame his fellow colonials into greater industrial self-reliance. The popularity of these “Recollections of Nova Scotia” emboldened Howe to publish them as a book, and in the winter of 1836–37 he printed the first edition of The Clockmaker (first series). He soon learned that no copyright—local, imperial, or international—protected his venture: before the year 1837 was out, the piracy had begun. The experienced London publisher, Richard Bentley, not only reprinted the work, seizing the British copyright for himself, but enticed the author into his stable for the publication of the sequels (1838, 1840). Carey, Lea, and Blanchard of Philadelphia produced the first of innumerable American reprints, followed by Benjamin B. Mussey of Boston. Worst of all for Howe, all of these unauthorized editions were soon available in Halifax (Panofsky, “Thomas Chandler” 352–53). Thus, in proportion to the author’s rising fame, what began as a local publication was appropriated by more seasoned book publishers abroad, who quickly cut the neophyte, Howe, out of the commercial success. Whereas a local newspaper could assume a certain primacy in the local market, a general trade book had no natural advantage against foreign editions. In 1886 Britain extended fully equal copyright to books first published in Canada, but the United States, unwilling to cede the North American advantage, did not do the same until well into the twentieth century. John Richardson’s Wacousta (1832), Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush (1852), William Kirby’s Le Chien d’or/The Golden Dog (1877), Sara Jeannette Duncan’s A Social Departure (1890), Ralph Connor’s Black Rock (1898)—the list of Canadian literary works that were pirated in the United States, to the renown of their authors but the detriment of their original publishers, is a roll call of the canon. Ultimately, aspiring

Canadian Book History    805 Canadian booksellers adapted to the disadvantages of US copyright law by positioning themselves as distributors (“agents”) for American publishers; Canadian authors, meanwhile, gravitated to those same publishers, who were increasingly centered in New York (MacLaren 3–14). Thus it should not come as any surprise that David Thompson could not find a publisher in Montreal in 1850, despite the marvelous insights of his manuscript into the culture of early Canada, or that Sinclair Ross’s masterpiece, As for Me and My House, was originally published in New York in 1941. In the twentieth century, state sponsorship of the arts changed the footing of the Canadian book trade. The Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters, and Sciences (the Massey Commission, 1949–51) recommended public intervention in culture for the sake of Canadian sovereignty and identity, a message that resonated with a public that had been galvanized by World War II and was entering an era of unprecedented economic prosperity (Litt 38). The Massey Commission led to the expansion of universities with federal-government funding, the establishment of a national library (1952/53, now Library and Archives Canada), and the creation of the Canada Council for the Arts (1957) (Litt 38–40; McCormick 424). These material developments amplified each other, gradually expanding and deepening the culture of writing, publishing, and reading Canadian books. Leonard Cohen was one of the first recipients of a Canada Council writer’s grant, and he used the money to move to Greece, buy a house, and write The Spice-Box of Earth, published by McClelland and Stewart in 1961 (Nadel 217). Dorothy Livesay was a beneficiary of the Council’s writer-in-residence program, launched in 1965: between that year and 1980, she had four positions across the country (Earle 115). The publisher Jack McClelland and the professor Malcolm Ross cooperated to launch the New Canadian Library in 1958, the paperback reprint series that has succeeded more than any other in bringing Canadian literature back into print for use in high schools and universities (Friskney 43). One of the first works that they repatriated was As for Me and My House. Direct public investment in book publishing increased as well. The near-bankruptcy of McClelland and Stewart in 1971 prompted an emergency loan of a million dollars from the Ontario government immediately, and in the longer term new policies from the Canada Council and its provincial equivalents. The Canadian Book Publishing Development Program (1979), followed by the Book Publishing Industry Development Plan (1986), offered general operating grants to publishers, adding to the project-specific funding that had been available before (Litt 43; Vincent and MacLaren 75). The public funding of the Canadian book trade in the twentieth century can take much of the credit for the renaissance of Canadian literature at this time. Again, complacency would be a grave mistake, for recent reductions to this funding have cut deeply into the infrastructure of culture, leading more than one expert to wonder whether Canadian literary publishing has a future (MacSkimming 385). The material conditions of literary authorship, publishing, and reading have evolved in this country and continue to do so. The history sketched above owes itself to many scholarly efforts, pioneering and recent. Knowledge of the material conditions of Canadian literary production, like any field of knowledge, has improved as lone research initiatives have evolved into

806    Critical Fields and New Directions institutional research structures and communities of scholarship. Lorne Pierce, editor at the Ryerson Press from 1920 to 1960, deserves credit as an early contributor to the field through his works of literary history (such as the ambitious but short-lived series, the Makers of Canadian Literature, ca. 1922–25), his prodigious collecting of primary material on Canadian writers (now the massive Lorne and Edith Pierce Collection of Canadiana at Queen’s University), and his founding of the Bibliographical Society of Canada (BSC) in 1946 (Campbell 213, 314, 391). This last venture led, in 1962, to the establishment of a scholarly journal, the Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada, which over the decades has become a major storehouse of studies in Canadian book history. The Groupe de recherche sur l’édition littéraire au Québec (GRÉLQ) was founded at the Université de Sherbrooke in 1982. A busy hub of Quebec book history, it achieved the three-volume Histoire de l’édition littéraire au Québec au XXe siècle in 2010 (directed by Jacques Michon) and has founded the online scholarly journal Mémoires du livre/Studies in Book Culture (2009–). (The acronym now stands for “Groupe de recherches et d’études sur le livre au Québec.”) In the 1990s, members of the BSC and GRÉLQ came together to spearhead the History of the Book in Canada, a bilingual research initiative funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The project saw dozens of researchers at universities across the country collaborate to produce a three-volume Canadian national history of the book on the model of Henri-Jean Martin, Roger Chartier, and Jean-Pierre Vivet’s Histoire de l’édition française. Edited by Patricia Lockhart Fleming, Yvan Lamonde, Gilles Gallichan, Fiona Black, Carole Gerson, and Jacques Michon, with Bertrum Macdonald directing five auxiliary databases, History of the Book in Canada has become the point of departure for contemporary research in the field. To return to the principal argument, two final examples will press the central importance of bibliographical methods to the field of Canadian literature. First, consider Samuel de Champlain, whose books were published in order to legitimate his New-World adventures in the eyes of French aristocrats. His colonial enterprise required their political and financial support, and his narrative of the founding of modern Canada’s earliest enduring European settlement and of the French alliance with the First Nations should be interpreted accordingly. For example, the lurid description of the torture of the Iroquois captive after the Battle of Lake Champlain in 1609 may have some basis in fact, but it is overlaid with the explorer’s artful presentation of himself to his intended audience, the French court. Champlain demonstrates that he is capable of extending government on Christian principles to the wilderness across the Atlantic Ocean: Cependant les nostres allumerent vn feu, & comme il fut bien embrasé ils prindrent chacun vn tizon, & faisoient brusler ce pauure miserable peu à peu pour luy faire souffrir plus de tourmens. Ils le laissoient quelques fois, luy iettāt de l’eau sur le dos: puis luy arracherēt les ongles, & luy mirent du feu sur les extremitez des doigts & de son membre … Ils me sollicitoyent fort de prendre du feu pour faire de mesme eux. Ie leur remonstrois que nous n’vsions point de ces cruautez, & que nous les

Canadian Book History    807 faisions mourir tout d’vn coup, & que s’ils vouloyent que ie luy donnasse vn coup d’arquebuze, i’en serois content. Ils dirēt que non, & qu’il ne sentiroit point de mal. Ie m’en allay d’auec eux comme fasché de voir tant de cruautez qu’ils exercoiēt sur ce corps. Comme ils virent que ie n’en estois contant, ils m’appelerent & me dirent que ie luy donnasse vn coup d’arquebuse: ce que ie fis, sans qu’il en vist rien; & luy fis passer tous les tourmens qu’il deuoit souffrir, d’vn coup, plustost que de le voir tyranniser. [Meanwhile our Indians kindled a fire, and when it was well lighted, each took a brand and burned this poor wretch a little at a time in order to make him suffer the greater torment. Sometimes they would leave off, throwing water on his back. Then they tore out his nails and applied fire to the ends of his fingers and to his membrum virile. … They begged me repeatedly to take fire and do like them. I pointed out to them that we did not commit such cruelties, but that we killed people outright, and that if they wished me to shoot him with the arquebus, I should be glad to do so. They said no; for he would not feel any pain. I went away from them as if angry at seeing them practise so much cruelty on his body. When they saw that I was not pleased, they called me back and told me to give him a shot with the arquebus. I did so, without his perceiving anything, and with one shot caused him to escape all the tortures he would have suffered rather than see him brutally treated]. (Champlain, Works 101–03)

In his calm insistence (“as if angry”) on a merciful execution, Champlain proves himself worthy to be the royal governor of the region, an appointment that he largely obtained in 1612 but that he constantly had to fight to maintain amidst the intrigues of the French court not to mention the rivalry of Spain and England (Trudel 191). When Les Voyages du Sieur de Champlain was published in January 1613, it was dedicated to the 11-year-old Louis XIII and his mother, the queen regent. Besides Champlain’s maps and drawings, the first edition contained sumptuous fold-out engravings of the Seven Wonders of the World: the Statue of Zeus at Olympus (see Figure 42.1), the Colossus of Rhodes, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Walls of Babylon, the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, the Lighthouse of Alexandria, and the Great Pyramid of Giza (Champlain, Voyages). At first these scenes seem to have little relevance to establishing a colony on the St. Lawrence River, and they are generally omitted from modern editions, including the otherwise admirable bilingual edition quoted above; in fact, however, they illustrate vividly the texture of power into which this work was born. Champlain strove to persuade a European Renaissance court interested in the divine right of kings and in the modern rebirth of classical grandeur that the nascent colony would be a glorious possession if administered nobly, as he proposed to do. A fortified settlement at Quebec would proclaim the eminence of France to the ages no less than the Olympian sculpture did that of Greece. The accounts contained within the book—from Champlain’s foiling of the treachery of his subordinates mere days after founding the colony, to his correction of the Natives’ savagery in peace and war—should not be construed without reference to the rhetorical aim of publication: his own promotion under the French monarch informed his record of Canada. Inspecting the first edition drives home this point. Second, consider the matter of Alice Munro and genre. Two questions frequently come up: What factors made her a master of the short story? And why did she never

808    Critical Fields and New Directions

Figure 42.1  Statue of Zeus. Engraving from Samuel de Champlain, Les Voyages du Sieur de Champlain (Paris: chez Jean Berjon, 1613).

write a novel (apart from Lives of Girls and Women [1971], which sits uneasily under this label)? There are aesthetic answers. The poetic density of her writing is such that it could hardly be improved through extension. Its layering of double meanings upon everyday expressions is already portentous, its allusions seemingly bottomless, its allegorical alignment of threads of plot wonderfully resonant, and brevity only intensifies these effects. There are also material answers. Munro initially felt great pressure to become a novelist, even after her first book of stories, Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), had won a Governor General’s award. Two career-forming events in the mid1970s, however, prevented this from ever occurring. First, while a writer-in-residence at the University of Western Ontario, she met Douglas Gibson, editor at the Macmillan Company of Canada: “Every publisher I had met had assured me that I would have to grow up and write novels before I could be taken seriously as a writer … Doug changed that. He was absolutely the first person in Canadian publishing who made me feel that

Canadian Book History    809 there was no need to apologize for being a short story writer, and that a book of short stories could be published and promoted as major fiction” (qtd. in Panofsky, Literary Legacy 253). Second, she hired Virginia Barber, a New York literary agent, who began to place her stories in high-paying American magazines. On 14 March 1977, the New Yorker published its first Munro story, “Royal Beatings,” in return for a payment to the author of “between two and three thousand dollars” (Thacker 325). The following year, Munro signed a “first-reading agreement” with the magazine that offered her even greater incentives, and since then she has seen some 50 stories published in it (11). Sending stories to Barber for individual publication and then arranging them into collections with Gibson—this two-phase process, oriented to both magazine and book, became Munro’s winning formula after she hammered it out with Who Do You Think You Are? (1978). (For a detailed account of the complicated publishing history of this book, see Hoy.) Apprehending it readies us to interpret her subsequent work as artistically unified at two levels—story and book. The Progress of Love (1986), for example, is not only a variety of brilliant stand-alone stories but also a composite whole, a great cycle centred on a single theme (love as a dynamic inheritance with multigenerational consequences). In light of her publishing history, it is not quite right to call Munro a master of the short story: more fully, her books should be read as whole collections with subtly intertwined parts. Whether it is called bibliography or book history, investigating the publishing and reception of books makes a valuable contribution to literary studies. Bibliography has an attractive empirical quality. It can be established, independent of the investigator, what the first edition of a book contained as against later ones, or how much money an author received from a publishing contract, and such information is of great benefit to subsequent theoretical treatments of the text in question. Perhaps because of this empiricism, bibliography enables a sensible handling of the restless concept at the heart of Canadian literature—the category of the nation. In attending to the diverse material factors that shape texts, from the intimate experience of place to the vagaries of international law, book historians reach beyond the nation without erasing it. Book history is also a cultural studies solution to the aesthetic impasse. Whose poetry is the best—Isabella Valancy Crawford’s, P.K. Page’s, or Dionne Brand’s? Understanding the peculiarities of their work in functional relation with their different material circumstances opens a way past the quandary of vaunting one at the expense of the others. Finally, the history of the book teaches us what to do to support literature. We must do more than strive to be solitary genius-creators. Rather, we must be all of the diverse players in the literary-economic system: writers, editors, literary agents, patrons, publishers, copyeditors, typesetters, designers, advertisers, printers, prize jurors, literary event organizers, booksellers, librarians, reviewers, teachers, students, collectors, book-buyers, and readers.

Works Cited Adams, Thomas R., and Nicolas Barker. “A New Model for the Study of the Book.” A Potencie of Life: Books in Society. London: British Library, 1993. 5–43. Print.

810    Critical Fields and New Directions Atwood, Margaret. The Journals of Susanna Moodie. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1970. Print. Back, George. Arctic Artist:  The Journal and Paintings of George Back, Midshipman with Franklin, 1819–1822. Ed. C. Stuart Houston and I.S. MacLaren. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1994. Print. Ballantyne, Robert Michael. Snowflakes and Sunbeams; or, The Young Fur Fraders. London: T. Nelson, 1856. Print. Copy examined: McGill Library, Rare Books and Special Collections (call no. Lande-Arkin Canadiana, call no. PZ7 B23Yo 1856). Ballstadt, Carl. Introduction. Roughing It in the Bush; or, Life in Canada, by Susanna Moodie. Centre for Editing Early Canadian Texts 5. Ottawa: Carleton UP, 1988. xvii–lx. Print. Bernier, Marc André. “Lesbia in Montreal: Publishing Hoaxes and Erotic Novels.” Fleming and Lamonde 2:146–48. Campbell, Sandra. Both Hands: A Life of Lorne Pierce of Ryerson Press. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2013. Print. Champlain, Samuel de. Les Voyages du Sieur de Champlain. Paris:  chez Jean Berjon, 1613. Print. Copy examined: McGill Library, Rare Books and Special Collections (call no. Cutter 510, C35). ———. The Works of Samuel de Champlain. Vol. 2, 1608–1613. Trans. John Squair and J. Home Cameron. 1925. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1971. The Champlain Society. Web. Accessed 16 May 2014. Crawford, Isabella Valancy. Malcolm’s Katie:  A  Love Story. Ed. D.M.R. Bentley. London, ON: Canadian Poetry P, 1987. Print. Darnton, Robert. “What Is the History of Books?” Daedalus 111.3 (1982): 65–83. Rpt. in The Book History Reader. Ed. David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery. London:  Routledge, 2002. 9–26. Print. Distad, Merrill. “Print and the Settlement of the West.” Fleming and Lamonde 2:62–71. Duncan, Sara Jeannette. A Social Departure: How Orthodocia and I Went Round the World by Ourselves. Illus. F.H. Townsend. London: Chatto and Windus, 1890. Print. Earle, Nancy. “The Canada Council for the Arts Writer-in-Residence Program.” Fleming and Lamonde 115–16. Febvre, Lucien, and Henri-Jean Martin. The Coming of the Book:  The Impact of Printing, 1450–1800. Trans. David Gerard. London: NLB, 1976. Print. Trans. of L’Apparition du livre. Paris: A. Michel, 1958. Fleming, Patricia Lockhart, and Sandra Alston. Early Canadian Printing: A Supplement to Marie Tremaine’s “A Bibliography of Canadian Imprints 1751–1800.” Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1999. McGill University Library. Web. Accessed 29 May 2014. Fleming, Patricia Lockhart, and Yvan Lamonde, eds. History of the Book in Canada. 3 vols. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2004–07. Print. Friskney, Janet B. New Canadian Library:  The Ross-McClelland Years, 1952–1978. Studies in Book and Print Culture. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2007. Print. Galarneau, Claude. “The Desbarats Dynasty in Quebec and Ontario.” Fleming and Lamonde 2:87–88. Gallichan, Gilles, and Frédéric Roussel Beaulieu. “Printers for Government.” Fleming and Lamonde 2:331–34. Gaskell, Philip. A New Introduction to Bibliography. Oxford: Clarendon, 1972. Print. Howard-Hill, T.H. “Why Bibliography Matters.” A Companion to the History of the Book. Ed. Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose. Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture 48. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007. 9–20. Print.

Canadian Book History    811 Howsam, Leslie. Old Books and New Histories: An Orientation to Studies in Book and Print Culture. Studies in Book and Print Culture. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2006. Print. Hoy, Helen. “  ‘Rose and Janet’:  Alice Munro’s Metafiction.” Canadian Literature 121 (1989): 59–83. Print. Kirby, William. Le Chien d’or/The Golden Dog: A Legend of Quebec. Ed. Mary Jane Edwards. Centre for Editing Early Canadian Texts 12. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2012. Print. Klinck, Carl F., ed. Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1965. Print. Litt, Paul. “The State and the Book.” Fleming and Lamonde 3:34–44. Macdonald, Bertrum. “Governments as Printers.” Fleming and Lamonde 2:323–31. MacLaren, Eli. Dominion and Agency:  Copyright and the Structuring of the Canadian Book Trade, 1867–1918. Studies in Book and Print Culture. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2011. Print. MacSkimming, Roy. The Perilous Trade:  Book Publishing in Canada, 1946–2006. Rev. ed. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2007. Print. Martin, Henri-Jean, Roger Chartier, and Jean-Pierre Vivet, eds. 4 vols. Histoire de l’édition française. Paris: Promodis, 1982–86. Print. McCormick, Paul. “National Library of Canada.” Fleming and Lamonde 3:424–27. McKenzie, D.F. “The Sociology of a Text: Orality, Literacy and Print in Early New Zealand.” The Library 6th ser. 6.4 (1984): 333–65. Oxford Journals. Web. Accessed 30 Nov. 2010. Melançon, François. “The Book in New France.” Fleming and Lamonde 1:45–55. Michon, Jacques, ed. Histoire de l’édition littéraire au Québec au XXe siècle. 3 vols. Saint-Laurent, QC: Fides, 1999–2010. Print. Moodie, Susanna. Roughing It in the Bush; or, Life in Canada. Ed. Carl Ballstadt. Centre for Editing Early Canadian Texts 5. Ottawa: Carleton UP, 1988. Print. Munro, Alice. Dance of the Happy Shades. Toronto: Ryerson, 1968. Print. ———. Lives of Girls and Women. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1971. Print. ———. The Progress of Love. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1986. Print. ———. Who Do You Think You Are? Toronto: Macmillan, 1978. Print. Nadel, Ira B. “Cohen, Leonard.” Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada. Ed. William H. New. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2002. 216–19. Print. Panofsky, Ruth. The Literary Legacy of the Macmillan Company of Canada: Making Books and Mapping Culture. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2012. Print. ———. “Thomas Chandler Haliburton’s The Clockmaker.” Fleming and Lamonde 1:352–54. Parker, George L. The Beginnings of the Book Trade in Canada. Toronto:  U of Toronto P, 1985. Print. Richardson, John. Wacousta; or, The Prophecy:  A  Tale of the Canadas. Ed. Douglas Cronk. Centre for Editing Early Canadian Texts 4. Ottawa: Carleton UP, 1987. Print. Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences. Report. Ottawa: King’s Printers, 1951. Print. Thacker, Robert. Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives: A Biography. Rev. ed. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2011. Print. Thompson, David. The Writings of David Thompson, Vol. 1:  The Travels:  1850 Version. Ed. William E. Moreau. Publications of the Champlain Society. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2009. Print. Tremaine, Marie. A Bibliography of Canadian Imprints 1751–1800. 1952. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1999. McGill University Library. Web. Accessed 29 May 2014. See also Fleming and Alston.

812    Critical Fields and New Directions Trudel, Marcel. “Champlain, Samuel de.” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Vol. 1: 1000–1700. 1966. Ed. George W. Brown, Marcel Trudel, and André Vachon. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1979. 186–99. Print. Vincent, Josée, and Eli MacLaren. “Book Policies and Copyright in Canada and Quebec: Defending National Cultures.” Canadian Literature 204 (2010): 63–82. Print. Watters, Reginald Eyre. A Check List of Canadian Literature and Background Materials, 1628–1950. Toronto: U Toronto P, 1959. Print. Woodhouse, A.S.P. Foreword. Watters v.

Chapter 43

Canadian Au to / bio gra ph y Life Writing, Biography, and Memoir Julie Rak

The study of autobiography, biography, and other forms of writing about one’s life have come a long way since George Woodcock proclaimed in The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature in 1983 that in Canada “a very high proportion [of biographies and memoirs] tell of uninteresting lives … in uninteresting ways” (58). This was, he thought, a fault of the genre itself, which he believed attracted good writers but also people he called “amateurs.” Thirty years later, it is now possible to see the thousands of biographies and memoirs produced in Canada as something more than amateur productions punctuated by some mildly better writing. It is also possible to understand the work of autobiography and biography more widely, bringing into view a range of works by and about people who have lived in Canada, including diaries, letters, travel accounts, graphic memoirs and biography, oral histories, prison narratives, online writing such as blogs, and even personal films or television documentaries. Today, neither the production nor the study of life writing in Canada could be called uninteresting. In this chapter, I will examine some of the development of a critical approach to life writing, biography, and memoir in Canada in French and English, with a view to understanding what “life writing” is, what some of the issues connected to the production and study of this kind of writing is about, and what directions the study of Canadian auto/biography has taken since Woodcock’s original entry about it for the Oxford Companion. To begin, it is necessary to think about nomenclature because, unlike the study of other genres such as poetry or the novel, there is not complete agreement about what to call this kind of nonfiction writing. Autobiography is a Greek word for “self life writing.” This term came into use during the Romantic period: it first appeared in an English publication in 1797, although it may have been circulating before then (Smith and Watson 1–2). Although other terms, most notably memoir, confession, or life, were used by writers who produced works about their own lives before this time, autobiography became

814    Critical Fields and New Directions known as the most important term for what Philippe Lejeune in “The Autobiographical Pact” has called a retrospective prose narrative about one’s own life which records the writer’s personality, not just historical events (Lejeune 4). Biography as a term is older than autobiography, and in common usage it has always meant “life writing,” that is, the process of writing the story of another person’s life. Even though these words are used interchangeably in some library catalogue systems and bookstores, the popular distinction between these kinds of writing holds. Most readers know that autobiography and biography are not the same thing. But scholars of autobiography have recognized since the 1980s that many published autobiographies are what Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson have called “intersubjective.” That is, they are not just records of one person’s life, but often are about the lives of others. The reader’s subjectivity is included in this process of meaning-making (Smith and Watson 16). The study of autobiography more generally took up “auto/biography” as a way to express this relationship (Rak, “Introduction” 15–17). For example, Walter Gretzky’s Gretzky: From Backyard Rink to the Stanley Cup (1985) is a story about Walter’s son Wayne Gretzky, and how he became a hockey star. But it is also an account of Walter’s own life and his pivotal role in shaping Wayne for greatness. Is Gretzky’s book an autobiography or a biography? It is both things at once, and so it is auto/biography. But the problem of terminology does not end there. Until very recently, “memoir” described a life story not focused on a person’s life, but on the writer’s memory of or relationship to a major event, such as a war or a mass exile. Memoir also could describe a life in relation to others when other lives are of great importance to the writer, such as the writer’s spouse or parents. Now, memoir as a term has largely replaced the term autobiography in its common usage, although scholars still discuss its generic differences (Rak, Boom! 4–6). And finally, as Marlene Kadar suggested in 1992 based on work by Evelyn Hinz and Donald Winslow, “life writing” as a term can be used to describe unpublished ephemera written about a life, such as letters or diaries. It also can name what Kadar has called a feminist critical practice of reading for gaps and silences, creating narratives from the kinds of writing (often by women and others without much privilege) that do not exhibit the traditional characteristics of published autobiography (Kadar 4–6). Most critics of auto/biography, especially those who work within literary fields, use the term life writing to describe all writing about a life (one’s own or another’s) in the holistic sense Kadar intended, although they tend to include published autobiographies and biographies in this wider sense of the word as well. Scholars use the terms auto/biography and life writing to describe what they study in the broadest terms they can, while narrower terms such as confession or life narrative are used when necessary. But outside the field of specialists, terms like memoir, biography, and autobiography circulate freely, and the scholarly terms are unknown. For the purposes of this chapter, auto/biography and life writing describe what scholars generally study, and terms such as biography, diary, or memoir describe specific types of writing as they are commonly understood by experts and non-experts alike. One of the reasons that questions of nomenclature are not completely settled has to do with the unclear literary status of life writing in Canada and elsewhere. Woodcock’s

Canadian Auto/biography   815 suspicion of biography and memoir as the possible domain of the amateur is widely shared, particularly by professional authors and journalists who see life writing as an encroachment on the territory of the novel. For example, George Fetherling’s 2001 rant against creative nonfiction, a term for life writing that is thought to be more “literary” than journalism or travel narrative, has to do with his belief that such writing is narcissistic and written only for profit. Life writing, according to Fetherling, does not make for good literature (vii). The same is true for literary studies, which posits a hierarchy of objects for study that most often places the novel at the top of the literary food chain, but with some links reserved for poetry, drama, and short fiction, especially if it is of very high quality. When Canadian literature is mentioned as a cultural institution or as an area of scholarship, most often nonfictional writing of any kind goes unmentioned, unless it contains the kind of depth and complexity that a novel might have. Nonfiction such as travel writing, diaries, or letters also appears in such discussions when the time period (such as the eighteenth century) is too early for the production of fiction. This is why Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush (1852), which technically could be seen as a memoir about settlement, is in the English Canadian literature canon, but it is rarely if ever discussed as life writing. It is also why travel accounts and diaries rarely appear in survey courses about Canadian literature, unless the focus is on earlier periods of colonial history. Northrop Frye famously described Canadian literature in his 1965 “Conclusion” to the first edition of Carl F. Klinck’s Literary History of Canada as a literature that had not yet produced a great, or classic, author because he thought that the true genres of literature were fiction and poetry. These genres, he writes, had not produced any great classics by 1965 (821). Although Frye generously says that the editors of the first edition of the Literary History of Canada “have asked for chapters on political, historical, religious, scholarly, philosophical, scientific, and other non-literary writing, to show how the verbal imagination operates as a ferment in all cultural life,” he does not see these genres of writing as part of Canadian literature itself (822). They map the country, but do not lift it into literary greatness. Only fiction and poetry, as imaginative genres, can do that. Many critics of Canadian literature have agreed with Frye’s reasoning, without thinking about why life writing is often characterized as something merely descriptive and not part of the imaginative world. Critical approaches that have genre as their focus usually accord nonfiction a minor status because the categorization of literary knowledge is most commonly organized by historical period, region, language, and then sometimes with reference to identity categories such as gender or ethnicity. But bringing genre into view as a category of knowing has two effects that can change how we understand Canadian literature itself. First, not prioritizing historical period or region brings into view how and why certain kinds of writing are received, circulated, and read. This approach also allows us to understand how memoir, for example, has different generic qualities from the novel because, most notably, authors of memoirs can be sued for what they write, and novelists cannot. This quality of memoir writing profoundly affects what is written and how it is read. Genres are not just formal categorizations for literary objects: they are social in that they organize knowledge and make it intelligible, and they make certain kinds of knowledge

816    Critical Fields and New Directions possible, while excluding other kinds. Genres limit, name, and make possible different kinds of flows of power and knowledge. Who gets to use a genre, and why a writer might do so, is a political question, as the significant critical discourse about women’s diary writing in Canada has often pointed out.1 Amateur writers, including female pioneers, elders in Aboriginal groups, missionaries, soldiers, explorers, survivors of trauma, and recent immigrants are just some of the people in Canada who have used life writing genres such as memoirs, diaries, letters, court testimony, or records of oral stories, either because other forms of literary expression are closed to them, or because life writing lets them create public selves and public histories against the grain of received thinking about who they are. Thinking about genre can help politicize how we understand writing like this to work, without having to resort to ideas about quality or complexity as a justification for thinking about what such people have to say. Second, thinking generically about Canadian literature can help destabilize “the literary” as a category. This can change what we know about the field of production and reception for writing in Canada. For example, life writing has been a means of expression for many people without access to print literacy or for those who are part of living oral traditions. The same is true for travel narratives and journalism, both important nonfictional genres of writing in Canada that have often not received much attention from literary critics. But looking at these kinds of representations as part of genres of life writing links them to their contexts. Studying the accounts of contact between Aboriginal and European people in The Jesuit Relations (1632–1679), Roy Miki’s Broken Entries (1998), about the Japanese-Canadian redress movement, the “autofiction” experiments of francophone writers such as Nelly Arcan who want to create new, hybrid forms of auto/biography, or Chester Brown’s “comic strip biography” of Louis Riel (2003) provides us with firsthand accounts of an event and how the event felt for the writer. But they are not just historical evidence either. The way that people tell their life stories, to whom they tell them, and under what conditions they are received create complex narratives that can widen our understanding of what the literary actually is, and who gets to participate in that discourse. Life writing, broadly understood, can provide us with a more complex story about what Canada is and how it got to be this way. It has the potential to change, too, what we think Canadian literature is about, and who gets to tell its stories. What, then, is auto/biography or life writing? What does it look like in the Canadian context, and how has it been understood? There are several issues connected to auto/ biography and its study that do make it different from the study of fiction or poetry. One concerns the importance of genre as an organizing principle that generates certain kinds of knowledge, as I discussed earlier. Another is about the truth claims in this kind of writing. Unlike fiction, drama, or poetry, life writing in all its forms is dependent on some acceptance of truth claims. Philippe Lejeune has most famously described the process of understanding life writing as an autobiographical “pact” between the reader, who is about to read a narrative, and its author. The pact is an informal “deal” between reader and author that the life story is true and is about a real person. This is determined by a correspondence between the author in real life, the name of the author on the title page, and the identity of the first-person pronouns within the narrative itself. If any of

Canadian Auto/biography   817 these elements do not match, the work is fictional and is not autobiography, biography, or a diary (Lejeune, “The Autobiographical Pact” 10–11). For example, Frederick Philip Grove, a major Canadian novelist, published the autobiography In Search of Myself in 1946. This autobiography was so well received that it won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Nonfiction. However, years later it was discovered that Grove had not only faked most of the details of his autobiography, but that he also had faked his own identity. Grove’s identity in the world, the name on the front cover of In Search of Myself, and the events ascribed to the “I” of the text did not match. The autobiographical pact fails in spectacular fashion in his case. It is why In Search of Myself cannot be read as an autobiography in the strict sense today. The same could be said of other works by Canadian autobiographers who turned out to be someone other than who they claimed to be. An interesting example of this kind of hoaxing is Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, an African American journalist and silent film star actually named Sylvester Long. Long Lance claimed during the 1920s and 1930s to be an American Cherokee and later said that he was a Blood Indian chief from a reserve near Calgary, partly to avoid the segregated life he had been forced to lead in the United States. He falsified his own best-selling memoir, Long Lance (1928), claiming that he had learned to hunt bison on the North American plains with his tribe. When the truth about his identity came to light and the extent of his deception became known, Long Lance committed suicide. In another example of autobiographical hoaxing, Grey Owl, the name used by best-selling nature writer Archie Belaney, turned out not to be a mixed-race Aboriginal person as he had claimed. While his stories about life in the wilderness and his support for conservation are still technically true, his account of his origins was part of the autobiographical pact that gained him a loyal following. That part of the pact was broken when his true identity was revealed. It is true that truth claims are important for the production of autobiography and biography, as Susanna Egan and others have pointed out (Egan 2–4). But it is important as well not to apply too stringently what Leigh Gilmore has called “jurisdictional” ideas about truth claims (695–96). Anyone who writes the story of his or her life uses fictional devices to tell the story to some extent, if only because one cannot remember the circumstances of one’s birth. We all have to rely on the accounts of others, genetic tests, documents, or speculation to fill in the gaps. A life story of any kind is a complex narrative about what is included and what is left out, what is known and what is imagined, an operation that makes many of these stories look fictional, even though they usually are not. Generally, as Lejeune himself has said, the “autobiographical pact” should not be applied too rigorously, since readers are often willing to suspend some aspects of disbelief in order to enjoy the story, or because they want to acquire other kinds of knowledge about a person (Lejeune, “The Autobiographical Pact (bis)” 119). For example, early assessments of John Glassco’s Memoirs of Montparnasse (1970) about his adventures in Paris during the 1920s sometimes focused more on small inconsistencies than on what Glassco’s narrative is actually about. The stories by Archie Belaney, which he published during the 1930s about the need for environmental conservation, still should be read on their own merits, even if their author is in fact British in origin. As

818    Critical Fields and New Directions Deena Rymhs has pointed out, prison narratives by Aboriginal people often provide a side of the story that the criminal justice systems of Canada would not admit as evidence (Rymhs 49–50). And work by Gabriele Helms and Susanna Egan on narratives by the Canadian children of Holocaust survivors show that these texts often represent ways to tell the stories of trauma that their parents lived with and yet could not tell to their own children (Egan and Helms 31–52). Another example, Playing with Fire (2009), is a hockey memoir by former hockey star Theoren Fleury, written in collaboration with Kirstie McClellan Day. But it is also about Fleury’s personal struggles with violence, drugs, and alcohol because he had been molested by one of his coaches and was too ashamed and scared to tell anyone. Since the coach was already being prosecuted by another one of his victims when the memoir was published, Fleury’s memoir serves as a way for him to break his own silence and shame about what happened, and to support the ongoing legal proceedings against his molester. Therefore, truth claims do matter when we read and analyze memoirs, diaries, biographies, and letters because there is an ethical set of decisions that authors make when they represent their lives or those of others. It is possible to be sued for writing a memoir or a biography, but not for writing a work of fiction, which is a practical difference between nonfiction and fiction. Having said this, critics of auto/biography often examine why a memoirist chooses to tell the truth about events, how she or he decides to do this, and how truth claims affect our reading of the auto/biographical work. These factors are particularly important when we read much of the auto/biographical work by Aboriginal authors in Canada, because many auto/biographical works of this kind have been written by activists or people seeking political change. From the publication of the first book by an Aboriginal person, The Life, Letters and Speeches of Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh, Or, G. Copway, Chief of the Ojibway Nation by George Copway (Mississaugas Ojibwe) in 1847, to other books by Aboriginal authors about their experiences, published autobiographies and biographies were (at first) non-Native forms of life writing that Aboriginal writers have used, sometimes in a hybrid manner with other kinds of storytelling, to create important forms of witness.2 Sometimes they are meant to further the cause of social justice for Aboriginal people, as Copway himself intended when he used his life writing to advocate for Aboriginal land rights. More contemporary examples of this kind of writing include Antony Apakark Thrasher’s (Inuvialuit) Skid Row Eskimo of 1976, an exposé of the systemic racism in Canada that led Thrasher away from a traditional life of hunting, fishing, and trapping to experiences at residential school, problems with forced assimilation, struggles with addictions, prison time, and finally to his later life as an activist. Maria Campbell’s (Métis) autobiography Halfbreed of 1973 takes up a similar critique of discrimination against Aboriginal people, particularly the Métis. It is a call for justice for others through the telling of her own life story. Other stories about residential school experiences, including Indian School Days (1988) by Basil Johnston (Ojibwe), Geniesh: An Indian Girlhood (1973) by Jane Willis (Cree), My Name is Masak (1976) by Alice French (Inuvialuit), Life among the Qallunaat (1978, 2015) by Minnie Aodla Freeman (Inuit), Song of Rita Joe (1996) by Rita Joe (Mi’kmaw), or the “Share Your Truth” statements mentioned in the Truth and Reconciliation

Canadian Auto/biography   819 Commission of Canada: Interim Report on the Residential Schools in Canada (TRC), also seek to recount the experiences of residential school life in an effort to show readers what it was like to endure these institutions, and to seek justice for the wrongs done to Aboriginal people through the residential schools.3 This kind of writing exhibits qualities of “testimony,” a type of writing that is sometimes legal, and sometimes literary, and sometimes (but not always) a hybrid of Western and non-Western traditions of witnessing and storytelling. Testimony uses personal experiences as a way to obtain awareness of an injustice in the public sphere. In the Canadian context, testimony often provides information about a group that was previously not part of the national Canadian story, as in the case of residential school narratives. But the form is used not just by Aboriginal authors. It has also been used by Doukhobor people, a Russian-speaking religious group with a primarily oral culture, who came to Canada in 1899 and experienced significant problems with Canadian political authorities (Rak, Negotiated 1–12). Roy Miki used the testimony form in Redress (2004), his companion account to Broken Entries about the Japanese-Canadian fight for a Canadian government apology and for restitution. Eva Brewster’s memoir of the Holocaust, titled Progeny of Light, Vanished in Darkness (1994), Velma Demerson’s account of her 1939 imprisonment in a Toronto women’s prison called Incorrigible (2004), or narratives about incest such as In My Father’s House (1987) by Sylvia Fraser or Elly Danica’s Don’t: A Woman’s Word (1989) could also be called testimonies because, unlike the subgenre of the confession, they are meant to tell readers about a personally traumatic event in order to put it into a public context. In the case of testimony, private events are understood to indicate larger social problems. Another important aspect of the study of auto/biography has to do with the intersection in many autobiographical texts between identity, memory, and experience. As Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson discuss in Reading Autobiography, none of these key categories of knowing is naturalized or opaque. Identity is something that they suggest can be constructed in narrative, while the ideas of memory and experience are not just givens, but are ideas with a history, politics, and language of their own. Memoirists and biographers have often explored and even critiqued what memory is and what experience means (Smith and Watson 20–61). Before the mid-1980s, issues about identity, memory, and experience are important aspects of memoirs by established Canadian writers, including Dorothy Livesay’s Right Hand Left Hand: A True Life of the Thirties (1977), George Bowering’s Autobiology (1972), Gabrielle Roy’s La Detresse et l’enchantement (1984), and Earle Birney’s Down the Long Table (1955). Canadian visual artists also published important works of autobiography, among them Emily Carr, whose Klee Wyck (1941) won the Governor General’s Literary Award for nonfiction the year it was published, and William Kurelek, who published Someone with Me in 1980. Rosemary Sullivan, Sandra Djwa, Charlotte Gray, Peter C. Newman, Leon Edel, and many others also explore these issues in literary and historical biography.4 But by the mid-1980s, other kinds of life writing in Canada about aspects of identity began to make an appearance. The advent of feminist movements during the 1960s and 1970s meant that magazines like Fireweed:  A  Feminist Quarterly of Writing Politics and Culture, founded in 1975 by the Fireweed feminist collective, or Herizons, which began in 1979,

820    Critical Fields and New Directions became places to publish auto/biographical work by, for, and about women. Important feminist presses helped to create an audience for feminist auto/biographical writing and to build the careers of feminists who wrote nonfiction, including Press Gang Publishers, founded in 1970, The Women’s Press, founded in 1972, Sister Vision, founded in 1985, and Second Story Press, founded in 1988. The passing of the Multiculturalism Act in 1988 made official a government policy that had been in place for more than a decade. Government grants helped ethnic-minority writers and/or writers of colour to publish stories about immigrant experience. Many of these accounts were and are widely read. The result, from the 1980s onward, was the publication of a range of auto/biographical texts about issues connected to gender identity, ethnicity, immigration, and race. Established writers began to publish texts that experimented with hybrid forms of life writing as they commented on issues to do with immigration and displacement, such as Michael Ondaatje’s controversial memoir about his family in Sri Lanka, Running in the Family (1982); Austin Clarke’s sardonic memoir of childhood in colonial Barbados, Growing Up Stupid under the Union Jack (1980); Dionne Brand’s essays about the complexities of diasporic history and belonging in the collections Bread Out of Stone (1994) and A Map to the Door of No Return (2001); Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill (1996), a multi-generic text about immigration and racial identity, which he calls a “biotext”; Roy Kiyooka’s mothertalk (1997), a memoir about his life and the life of his Japanese-Canadian mother whose language he did not speak; Wayson Choy’s Paper Shadows: A Chinatown Childhood (1999); Evelyn Lau’s memoir Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid (1989); Myrna Kostash’s The Doomed Bridegroom (1998), a memoir about love and desire in Ukraine and Canada; Warren Cariou’s Lake of the Prairies: A Story of Belonging (2002), about his discovery of his Métis family heritage. This period also saw experiments with hybrid forms of feminist life writing in French, such as Nicole Brossard’s Journal intime (1984), published in English as Intimate Journal (2004), Nelly Arcan’s experiments in autofiction, a form that uses fictional and nonfictional conventions, in Putain (2001), translated in 2004 as Whore, or Mary Meigs’s experiments with autobiographical form in Lily Briscoe: A Self-Portrait (1981). This more experimental autobiographical writing joined other accounts of anti-race activism and politics, such as Rosemary Brown’s Being Brown: A Very Public Life (1989), in contesting the more harmonious narratives about multiculturalism in Canada, and in exploring connections between gender identity and language itself. Critical studies connecting the idea of testimony to life writing or life narrative—a term often used for works in media other than print—include the collection Tracing the Autobiographical (2005) by Marlene Kadar, Linda Warley, Jeanne Perreault, and Susanna Egan, which focuses on non-traditional and politicized forms of life writing and representation; Eva Karpinski’s Borrowed Tongues: Life Writing, Migration and Translation (2012); and Sarah Brophy’s Witnessing AIDS: Writing, Testimony, and the Work of Mourning (2004). The upsurge in auto/biographical writing in Canada since the 1980s and its rebranding as “creative nonfiction” has gained it new audiences and new recognition in the form of anthologies, awards, and prizes. In recent years, anthologies of Canadian nonfiction writing in English have begun to proliferate, including the Vintage Book of Canadian

Canadian Auto/biography   821 Memoirs (2001), Cabin Fever: The Best New Canadian Nonfiction (2009), and Slice Me Some Truth: An Anthology of Canadian Creative Nonfiction (2011). Major Canadian literary figures like Margaret Laurence and Timothy Findley published memoirs about their writing lives:  Laurence’s Dance on the Earth, a feminist account of her public life, appeared in 1989, and Findley’s Inside Memory:  Pages from a Writer’s Workbook appeared in 1990. The venerable Governor General’s Literary Awards for nonfiction (a category once dominated by history books) are now with more regularity awarded to memoirists and biographers. The Writer’s Trust of Canada awards the Hilary Weston Prize for Nonfiction each year, and the CBC has a nonfiction category in its “Canada Writes” contest. The Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Nonfiction, awarded since 2000, has made Canadian readers more aware of memoirs and biographies by figures such as Carol Shields, Wayne Johnston, Rudy Wiebe, and Richard Gwyn. In 2012, CBC Radio’s popular contest Canada Reads featured nonfiction texts, which helped to turn Carmen Aguirre’s memoir of her radical childhood and young adulthood in South America, Something Fierce (2011), into a national bestseller. Partly as a result of the American and British versions of what is often called “the memoir boom” during the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first, Canadian memoirs, biographies, travel narratives, and personal essays are more visible in the public sphere and more widely read than ever before. In addition to avant-garde experiments with auto/biographical forms, there are popular forms of life writing in Canada as well. The word “popular” should be understood in two senses. It describes what is widely known and liked, but it also describes the kind of writing non-professional writers have produced about their lives, whether these forms were created for their own use, or for others to read. Memoirs by sports celebrities such as Wayne Gretzky’s Gretzky: An Autobiography (1990), hockey commentator Don Cherry’s Don Cherry’s Hockey Stories and Stuff (2008), pop music and queer icon Carole Pope’s Anti-Diva (2001), and alternative musician Dave Bidini’s On a Cold Road: Tales of Adventures in Canadian Rock (1998) are popular because they make use of the celebrity status of their authors, and they promise inside knowledge about the life of a star in the entertainment industries. Memoirs by politicians such as Sheila Copps, Michael Ignatieff, Judy LaMarsh, and Pierre Trudeau,5 as well as biographies of major political figures such as prime ministers or premiers, combine the interest in merging public and private lives that is part of celebrity discourse with the promise of a “behind the scenes” look at important historical moments. There are best-selling confessional forms of popular writing as well, such as Margaret Trudeau’s tell-all memoir Beyond Reason (1979) about her life with Pierre Trudeau and her misadventures with the members of the Rolling Stones; Drunk Mom (2013), a memoir by Jowita Bydlowska about her struggle with alcohol addiction; and Charlotte Gill’s Eating Dirt (2011), a memoir about her life as a tree planter. But other kinds of life writing are far removed from public life. Some of this writing, such as death notices (McNeill 187–205) or letters, is created for specific readers and not for the general public. These kinds of texts require different reading strategies than those used for published books. Some of these forms, such as diaries, have been used

822    Critical Fields and New Directions by women who would not have had the chance to have their writing published (Buss 37–82). The majority of diaries written in Canada, for instance, will never be known because, as Philippe Lejeune has pointed out, diaries are not written for an audience, but are to the future self, which may or may not read them. They are records of a writing process rather than a product, and so they are elliptical, repetitive, focused only on what the author wants to write about. Diaries are the traces, not the representation, of a life process (“Diary as Antifiction” 202–03). As Christl Verduyn has pointed out in the case of editing Edna Staebler’s hundreds of diary volumes, it becomes very difficult to turn these texts into something that others can read (Verduyn 3–6). In other cases, as in Kathryn Carter’s collection The Small Details of Life (2002), unpublished diaries by female authors can show the complexity of ordinary women’s lives. Diaries that are collected in archives, such as war diaries, never saw publication but can be read by researchers. But some diaries are published because their authors become public figures and because the diaries themselves make compelling reading, as was the case for Louis Riel, William Lyon Mackenzie King, Emily Carr, Marian Engel, and L.M. Montgomery. Montgomery’s diaries, for instance, revealed a very different person from the sunny and optimistic author of Anne of Green Gables (1908), because Montgomery poured her struggles with depression and frustrations about her marriage and her writing career into her personal diary. Peter Pitseolak (Inuit), a sculptor and photographer, published two versions of his diary—which he kept in Inuktituk syllabics—as memoirs. The first of these was People From Our Side: A Life Story with Photographs (1993), which combined the forms of diary, interview, photo-essay, and story to record Pitseolak’s life and the social history of the people from Cape Dorset as they entered a time of intense cultural and economic transition. Many aspects of the study of auto/biography in Canada can be used to examine graphic memoirs (sometimes called autobiographical comics), one of the most significant emerging subgenres of Canadian life writing. The analysis of graphic memoir includes a consideration of genre, the status of truth claims, and a framework that includes issues related to identity, memory, and experience. But the visual component of graphic memoirs and their position within the larger genre of the graphic novel and of comics means that other strategies for analysis are important, too. Gillian Whitlock has called this combination of analytical techniques for words and images “autographics” in order to combine the concerns of auto/biography analysis with the conventions of comic and graphic novel design (965). Graphic memoir in Canada includes Chester Brown’s well-known Louis Riel: A Comic Strip Biography (2003), which retells the story of the Red River Rebellions. Brown has also published Paying for It (2011), a controversial memoir about his activities as a “john” who hires prostitutes. Other notable graphic memoirs in Canada include the semi-autobiographical It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken (2003) by Seth; Julie Doucet’s My New York Diary (2009) about her sojourn in New York with a controlling boyfriend; Bernice Eisenstein’s I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors (2007); Sarah Leavitt’s memoir about her mother’s struggle with Alzheimer’s, entitled Tangles (2010); David Alexander Robertson and Scott Henderson’s 7 Generations:  A  Plains Cree Saga (2012); and Guy Delisle’s Chroniques de Jerusalem (2011), translated as Jerusalem in English in 2012.

Canadian Auto/biography   823 Chroniques de Jerusalem is a travelogue and memoir about Delisle’s time in that city to assist the organization Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders). Creative works of nonfiction in the form of biography, memoirs, graphic memoirs, and even personal documentaries, such as Sarah Polley’s film The Stories We Tell (2012) or the growing importance of personal narratives online (Poletti and Rak 1–3), are now an important way to create statements within and against the national imaginary of Canada. Life writing is an important way for Canadians to work out what their lives mean, how to represent them, and even whether “Canada,” as it is understood today, includes them. Its enduring popularity indicates that it remains important to Canadian readers as well. Scholarly research about life writing in Canada has also widened its view of what constitutes “life” and “writing” since George Woodcock dismissed most of the work he evaluated in 1983, even as experiments in nonfiction genres have gained public visibility and popularity. All this creative activity deserves scholarly analysis in its own right. Studying a genre as a social formation is one way to take the work of life writing seriously, and to understand the lives—whether notorious, ordinary, beautiful, or inspiring—of Canadians through the stories they tell. As John Frow has said, “that is why genre matters: it is central to human meaning-making and to the social struggle over meanings” (10). And that is why the genre of nonfiction should matter to the critical practice of Canadian literature as well.

Notes 1. Commentators who have written about Canadian women’s diaries include Christl Verduyn in Must Write: Edna Staebler’s Diaries, Kathryn Carter in The Small Details of Life: Twenty Diaries by Women in Canada, 1830–1996, and Helen Buss in Mapping Ourselves: Women’s Autobiography in English. 2. For another perspective on Copway’s autobiography, see Chapter 9 on Indigenous autobiography in this volume by Deanna Reder. 3. See Jonathan Dewar’s Chapter 8 on Indigenous responses to the residential school legacy in this volume. 4. For examples of contemporary biography in Canada, see Rosemary Sullivan’s Shadowmaker:  The Life of Gwendolyn MacEwan (1995) and The Red Shoes:  Margaret Atwood Starting Out (1999); Sandra Djwa’s The Politics of the Imagination: A Life of F. R. Scott (1987) and A Journey with No Maps: A Life of P. K. Page (2012); Charlotte Gray’s Sisters in the Wilderness: The Lives of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill (1999); Peter C. Newman’s Izzy: The Passionate Life and Turbulent Times of Izzy Asper, Canada’s Media Mogul (1987); and Leon Edel’s Henry James: A Life (1987). 5. Sheila Copps was an influential and outspoken Liberal politician in Ontario and at the federal level from 1977 to 2004. Her first memoir, Nobody’s Baby (1986), was a bestseller in Canada. Michael Ignatieff is an academic, media figure, politician, novelist, and memoirist who was the leader of the federal Liberal Party from 2009 to 2011. In 1963, Judy LaMarsh, a Liberal Member of Parliament, became the second woman in Canada to hold a cabinet post. Pierre Trudeau, author of Memoirs (1993), was a Liberal Member of Parliament and the prime minister of Canada from 1968 to 1979, and from 1980 to 1984.

824    Critical Fields and New Directions

Works Cited Bidini, Dave. On a Cold Road: Adventures in Canadian Rock. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1998. Print. Buss, Helen. Mapping Our Selves: Canadian Women’s Autobiography. Montreal: McGill-Queens UP, 1993. Print. Carter, Kathryn, ed. The Small Details of Life:  Women’s Diaries in Canada, 1830–1996. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2002. Print. Cherry, Don. Don Cherry’s Hockey Stories and Stuff. Victoria: Anchor Canada, 2008. Print. Egan, Susanna. Burdens of Proof:  Faith, Doubt and Identity in Autobiography. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2011. Print. Egan, Susanna, and Gabriele Helms. “Generations of the Holocaust in Canadian Auto/biography.” Rak, Auto/biography 31–52. Fetherling, George. “Preface.” The Vintage Book of Canadian Memoirs. Ed. George Fetherling. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2001. vii. Print. Frow, John. Genre. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print. Frye, Northrop. “Conclusion.” Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English. Ed. Carl F. Klinck. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1965. 821–49. Print. Gilmore, Leigh. “Jurisdictions:  I, Rigoberta Menchú, The Kiss, and Scandalous Self-Representation in the Age of Memoir and Trauma.” Signs 28.2 (2003): 695–718. Print. Gretzky, Wayne. From the Backyard Rink to the Stanley Cup. Toronto:  HarperCollins, 1985. Print. ———. Gretzky: an Autobiography. Toronto: HarperCollins, 1990. Print. Kadar, Marlene. “Coming to Terms: Life Writing from Genre to Critical Practice.” Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice. Ed. Marlene Kadar. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1992. 3–16. Print. Lejeune, Philippe. “The Autobiographical Pact.” Lejeune, On Autobiography 3–30. ———. “The Autobiographical Pact (bis).” Lejeune, On Autobiography 119–37. ———. “The Diary as Antifiction.” On Diary. Ed. Jeremy Popkin and Julie Rak. Trans. Katherine Durnin. Honolulu: U of Hawaii P, 2012. 201–10. Print. ———. On Autobiography. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Trans. Kathleen Leary. Minneapolis:  U of Minnesota P, 1989. Print. Long Lance, Chief Buffalo Child. Long Lance. London: Faber, 1928. Print. McNeill, Laurie. “Writing Lives in Death: Canadian Death Notices as Auto/biography.” Rak, Auto/biography 187–205. Miki, Roy. Broken Entries: Race, Subjectivity, Writing. Toronto: Mercury, 1998. Print. Poletti, Anna, and Julie Rak, eds. Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2014. Print. Pope, Carole. Anti Diva. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2001. Print. Rak, Julie, ed. Auto/biography in Canada: Critical Directions. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2005. Print. ———. Boom! Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2013. Print. ———. “Introduction: Widening the Field.” Rak, Auto/biography 1–29. ———. Negotiated Memory: Doukhobor Autobiographical Discourse. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 2004. Print.

Canadian Auto/biography   825 Rymhs, Deena. From the Iron House:  Imprisonment in First Nations Writing. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2008. Print. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography:  A  Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010. Print. Staebler, Edna. Must Write: Edna Staebler’s Diaries. Ed. Christl Verduyn. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2005. Print. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada: Interim Report. Winnipeg: TRC, 2012. http:// www.trc.ca/websites/trcinstitution/index.php?p=580. Web. Accessed 11 May 2015. Verduyn, Christl. “Introduction.” Staebler 3–6. Whitlock, Gillian. “Autographics: The Seeing ‘I’ of the Comics.” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (2006): 965–79. Print. Woodcock, George. “Biographies and Memoirs in English.” The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature. 1st ed. Ed. William Toye. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1997. 58–63. Print.

Chapter 44

Canadian Ch i l dre n’ s L iteratu re i n E ng l i sh Deirdre Baker

Canadian children’s literature comprises most elements relevant to Canadian literature for adults, but generally does so in works of shorter span, greater transparency, and often, more abundant visual richness. “Children’s literature” spans a readership whose physical and mental growth encompasses everything from the newborn (or even the not yet born, as many a parent-to-be reads aloud to a baby in utero) through to the late adolescent, the “young adult” or “new adult.” That this is a literature identified by the age or stage of growth of those who read it or for whom it is written, rather than by whom it is written, brings a range of questions and complexities into the scholarship and criticism surrounding it. Theoretical discussions ranging from Jacqueline Rose’s groundbreaking The Case of Peter Pan or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (1984) to Perry Nodelman’s The Hidden Adult (2008), among others, examine questions about the social, historical, and cultural constructions of the child in children’s literature, as well as its troubled, asymmetrical relationship of adult writer and child reader, adult writer and child character, and sometimes, child writer and adult reader. What is children’s literature? Does it really exist? The study of children’s literature has been and is greatly inflected by its role in education and librarianship, areas associated less with academic analysis and more with building literary acumen and knowledge in the young: indeed, in librarianship the study of Canadian children’s literature first found its champions. In 1962 Sheila Egoff became Canada’s first tenured professor of children’s literature when she joined the University of British Columbia’s School of Librarianship;1 in 1967 she published the first full-length critical study of Canadian children’s books, The Republic of Childhood: A Critical Guide to Canadian Children’s Literature in English. Egoff presents a “literary evaluation of the Canadian children’s books of this generation” (5) with gusto and unrelenting standards of literary quality. “Is there something about Canadian experience that makes writers contrived and stilted?” she wonders in her chapter on fantasy (85). “The dominant impression left by all Canadian mystery-adventures is that anything is good enough for

Canadian Children’s Literature in English    827 a child reader,” she grumbles (182). “By and large, Canadian historical fiction for children is a succession of failures,” she says dismally, “… our writers fill their pages with irrelevancies and snippets of lore” (98). She remarks that “not many children’s books have lasted longer than one generation” (154), and in general, “the most striking thing about Canadian children’s books is their paucity” (11). About a quarter of a century later, The New Republic of Childhood: A Critical Guide to Canadian Children’s Literature in English (1990), by Egoff and Judith Saltman, maps a much more abundantly populated literary landscape. Over half a century later, Picturing Canada: A History of Canadian Illustrated Books and Publishing (2010) by Gail Edwards and Judith Saltman; A Guide to Canadian Children’s Books by Deirdre Baker and Ken Setterington (2003); and the Canadian Children’s Book Centre’s Our Choice (1976–2008) and Best Books for Kids and Teens (2008+) are testament to ever-growing abundance, variety, and quality. The very year that Egoff ’s first study was published, Canada’s landmark children’s presses began to come into being with the establishment of Tundra Books by children’s editor May Cutler. In the next 20 years there followed Scholastic Canada (1970), Breakwater Books (1973), Kids Can Press (1973), Annick Press (1976), Firefly Books (1977), Groundwood Books (1978), Nimbus Publishing (1978), Pemmican Publishing (1980), Theytus Books (1980), Orca Book Publishers (1984), and Second Story Press (1988)—in addition to recently or newly created children’s lists in Canada’s main literary publishing houses. Many of these publishers were motivated by a desire to see Canada and Canadian experience reflected in libraries and bookstores that were (and still are) dominated by books imported from Britain and the United States. “The new publishers were committed to addressing issues of Canadian identity, multiculturalism, feminism and children’s rights,” note Edwards and Saltman (78). They tried to be attentive to racial, sexual, ethnic, and familial diversity; the voices of the marginalized, un- and under-represented; and the representation of geographical and cultural settings throughout all of Canada. All contributed to and altered the culture, and even the possibilities for expression, of Canada’s children’s writers, illustrators, young people, and makers of literary criticism. “Paucity” is a term no longer associated with Canadian children’s literature, and in great part, Canadian children’s and young adult books are no longer accurately reflected by Egoff ’s original gloomy descriptors, but are richly varied, vibrant, internationally and nationally relevant, and acclaimed.

“Early” Canadian Children’s Books and Their Legacies The best-known early Canadian children’s books tended to focus on the Canadian outdoors. Catharine Parr Traill’s British-published Canadian Crusoes: A Tale of the Rice Lake Plains (1852)—a Robinsonade of resourceful, cooperative, and religiously confident young people who survive winter in Ontario’s “backwoods”—Ernest Thompson

828    Critical Fields and New Directions Seton’s American-published Two Little Savages (1903), and Seton’s animal biographies Wild Animals I Have Known (1898) were being read well through the twentieth century.2 The first Canadian-published children’s magazines both have flora-inspired titles (The Snowdrop, or Juvenile Magazine [1847–53] and The Maple Leaf [1852–54]), and even a text as British as Young Canada’s Nursery Rhymes (1890) is notable for its references to Canadian flora and climate. This first Canadian nursery rhyme book diverges from the text from which it is adapted, Young England’s Nursery Rhymes (1887), only in that it contains fewer rhymes and emends one line of the British text: “in the month of February when green leaves begin to spring” becomes “in the merry month of May when green leaves begin to spring” (66). In addition to these works, Victorian material set in Canada encompasses many boys’ adventure stories in which Canadian flora, fauna, climate, and outdoor living figure largely—stories of British settlement, exploration, the fur trade and imperial enterprise, including works by Captain Frederick Marryat (The Settlers in Canada [1844]), R.M. Ballantyne (Snowflakes and Sunbeams; or, The Young Fur Traders [1856], and others), G.A. Henty (With Wolfe in Canada [1887] and others) and the prolific Nova Scotian, James Macdonald Oxley, who published some three hundred stories (Up among the Ice-Floes [1890] and The Young Woodsman, or, Life in the Forests of Canada [1895] are only two of a multitude of titles). These Victorian productions left their legacy in Canadian children’s books published since the flowering of Canada’s children’s publishers in the 1970s. Shirley Woods’s Kit (1999), Black Nell (2000), and other titles display a rare return to the realistic animal biography form pioneered by Seton; Martine Leavitt’s Blue Mountain (2014), based on her naturalist father’s notes on years of observing Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep, is a literary hybrid of the anthropomorphized animal tale and Seton’s realistic account of animal behaviour and habitat. Traill’s survival story Canadian Crusoes, itself influenced by Victorian adventure stories, can be seen as a Canadian progenitor for novels such as Farley Mowat’s Lost in the Barrens (1956), Jan Truss’s Jasmin (1982), and Tim WynneJones’s The Maestro (1995), which also explore situations of outdoor survival in Canadian settings. In Truss’s and Wynne-Jones’s novels, however, adolescents are not “lost” in the backwoods: they seek the wilderness as a haven from dysfunctional or abusive families. The backwoods offers psychological protection, even while it makes physical demands, providing a place of growth and formation—as it does for Traill’s characters—but also a means to survive the psychic wilderness that is the protagonist’s family. The psychological and familial issues made popular in American young adult novels in the late twentieth century thus find their expression in Canadian works that hark back to elements in Traill’s mid-Victorian story. The Victorian Young Canada’s Nursery Rhymes has as its literary descendant one of Canadian children’s literature’s most nationally decisive works: Dennis Lee’s Alligator Pie, with illustrations by Frank Newfeld (1974). Lee composed his poems expressly to create a body of children’s rhymes reflecting Canadian place names, flora, fauna, climate, and sensibilities—in contrast to traditional British nursery rhymes, which at the time were Canadian children’s only nursery fare. Mississauga rattlesnakes, Kamloops, Trois Rivières, ookpiks, and many such explicit Canadian signifiers are pervasive in Lee’s

Canadian Children’s Literature in English    829 nonsense verse; Newfeld augments these with visual Canadianisms, such as the image of a Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman on the book’s cover. Lee is affectionately hailed as “Canada’s Father Goose” and Alligator Pie is now a national classic. It provided a model for identifiably Canadian nonsense verse and schoolyard rhymes by Robert Heidbreder, Sheree Fitch, Loris Lesynski, David Booth, Susan Musgrave, Bill New, and perhaps most arcanely, wittily, and nationalistically, Kevin Major’s Eh? to Zed:  A  Canadian Abecedarium (2000). The Canadian multiculturalism missing from Alligator Pie finds expression in works such as Bounce Me, Tickle Me, Hug Me:  Lap Rhymes and Play Rhymes from Around the World (1998), containing rhymes that Sandra Carpenter-Davis and Celia Lottridge collected and adapted from contributions by new Canadians in an urban Mother Goose program.3 Shared and diverse cultural allusions thus contest and enrich each other as Canada’s nursery rhymes pass from distinctly colonial expressions, through a geographically Canadian emphasis in the 1970s, and into an acknowledgment and celebration of the multi-ethnic cultural traditions of urban Canada at the turn into the twenty-first century. The Victorian boys’ adventure stories by Ballantyne, Marryat, and Henty, so popular with children throughout Britain and the British colonies well into the twentieth century, also pass a literary legacy on to Canada’s current writers for the young. The “new worlds” of Victorian exploration, seafaring, and derring-do are reiterated and reinterpreted in the stories of Iain Lawrence, first in “The High Seas Trilogy”—The Wreckers (1998), The Smugglers (1999), and The Buccaneers (2001)—and then again in “The Curse of the Jolly Stone Trilogy”—The Convicts (2005), The Cannibals (2005), and The Castaways (2007)—as well as in other titles. A sailor and former lightkeeper, Lawrence brings psychological and technical realism into eventful tales of historical fiction, composites of high drama, gruesome horror, and adolescent enterprise that play off Ballantyne and also Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883). In B for Buster (2004), Lawrence brings the period forward to World War II, critiquing the triumphalist survivor adventure story through the terrified “Kak,” a boy from Kakabeka, Ontario, who becomes a wireless operator on a Canadian bomber. In Lawrence’s work, physical courage and resourcefulness are second to the stories’ concern for the boys’ inner growth and conflicting loyalties in the face of adult unreliability. Kenneth Oppel’s Silverwing series (comprising Silverwing [1997], Sunwing [1999], Firewing [2002], and a prequel, Darkwing [2007]) is an innovative hybrid of the tropes of the Western epic and Seton’s naturalistic animal stories, but owes as much to Victorian imperialist stories of exploration and conquest in its action, suspense, and themes. Oppel’s little hero, Shade, is a silverwing bat, and the story combines factual aspects of bat behaviour and communication with epic travels that associate Shade, his feisty female companion Marina, and his bat colony with Spanish conquistadors and the triumphant destruction of an Indigenous South American religious site. Oppel’s perspective (all in “black-and-white bats’ view”) and visual imagery, along with the stories’ grand, intergenerational themes, transform this hybrid animal/adventure/epic into a distinctive form of its own. Nineteenth-century adventure stories play a more straightforward role in Oppel’s subsequent trilogy, the steampunk fantasies Airborn (2004),

830    Critical Fields and New Directions Skybreaker (2005) and Starclimber (2008): here Matt Cruse, cabin boy on a luxury airship, deals with pirates and new species, with the help of a clever investigator and natural historian, Kate. Like the Silverwing stories, these are suspenseful, quickly paced adventures with pervasive, airy imagery; unlike the Victorian stories of which they are reminiscent, they feature a strong female friend and sidekick.

Montgomery and Her Legacy The themes and styles of early publications by Traill, Seton, Ballantyne, and others may have been passed on directly or mediated via intervening texts, but the influence of L.M. Montgomery, the writer most formative to Canadian children’s literature, is transparently direct. Such was (and is) the popularity of Anne of Green Gables (1908) and all of Montgomery’s novels that they have become synonymous with Canadian children’s literature globally (although for some, Prince Edward Island is so dream-like that Anne is thought to be a fantasy4), but as Benjamin Lefebvre demonstrates in Volume 2 of The L.M. Montgomery Reader (2014), within the realm of Canadian literary criticism up until and into the 1970s, there was a persistent “ambiguity regarding whether Montgomery’s fiction was intended for adults or children” (13). For decades it was dismissed as beneath “adult critical standards” and “marred by ‘dishonesty’ ” as fiction for children (13).5 As late as 1978, John Sorfleet claims, in Twentieth-Century Children’s Writers, that “at times, L.M. Montgomery’s work challenges conventional opinion about what makes a children’s book” (qtd. in Lefebvre 2: 25). McClelland and Stewart’s New Canadian Library editions of Emily of New Moon, Emily Climbs, Emily’s Quest, and Anne of Green Gables, published between 1989 and 1992, further associate the stories with adult fiction by including afterwords by four distinguished writers of “adult” literature: Alice Munro, Jane Urquhart, P.K. Page, and Margaret Atwood. For the most part, however, Montgomery’s novels were read as children’s books; gradually she became the subject of sustained literary study, the first of Canada’s children’s writers to do so. Interest in her work has been dramatically spurred and shaped by the release of biographical material: Mollie Gillen’s biography The Wheel of Things and Terence Macartney-Filgate’s CBC documentary Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Road to Green Gables (both in 1975); The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery (1985), edited by Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston; and, most recently, The Complete Journals of L.M. Montgomery (2012–2013), also edited by Rubio and Waterston. Over the past decades, Montgomery studies have engaged a wide range of topics and approaches, and in addition to a seemingly ever-expanding place in popular culture and literary criticism, her work has generated some of Canada’s first authorized fan fiction for children—Before Green Gables (2008), Budge Wilson’s prequel to Anne of Green Gables, and Maud, a biographical young adult novel fictionalizing the experiences of the adolescent Montgomery, by Melanie Fishbane, forthcoming in 2016.

Canadian Children’s Literature in English    831 These two works point toward Montgomery’s deepest, most multifaceted literary legacy, which lies in the influence she has had on Canada’s current writers of fiction—on authors such as Munro, Urquhart, Page, and Atwood mentioned earlier, but even more on the children’s writers who have come into their own around and since the 1970s. “Well, she just showed us all how it was done, didn’t she?” says Marthe Jocelyn, author of Mable Riley: A Reliable Record of Peril, Humdrum and Romance (2005) (qtd. in Baker 12). Both Kit Pearson and Kenneth Oppel recall that reading Emily of New Moon (1923) gave them courage and assurance as budding writers (Baker 12; Meyer 274), and Jean Little reflects, “How she influenced my writing was perhaps in her insight into the agonizing emotion you feel as a child. She took these seriously, clearly remembering the despairs and exultations of childhood” (qtd. in Baker 29). Bernice Thurman Hunter, Carol Matas, Julie Johnston, Tim Wynne-Jones, and Mary Sheppard respond to Montgomery with “a mixture of homage and contention, of celebratory affirmation and aggressive revision” (Meyer 274) in stories that sometimes explicitly mention, and sometimes silently echo, elements of Montgomery’s.6 But while influenced by Montgomery, these writers are equally defined by changed and changing values, trends, and possibilities for children’s fiction in post-1970s Canada, as well as by their own originality of style, vision, and form. In great part, their work sets forth the characteristics, styles, and concerns that have come to define today’s Canadian fiction for children.

Reconfigurations of Family The realistic children’s or young adult novel (of which Anne of Green Gables is one) is an expansive, welcoming form in its capacity to absorb and express changing values and ideology. Indeed, it is a preferred form for most of Canada’s writers of children’s fiction, who in the latter part of the twentieth century and up to the present, explore regionality, diversity, Canada’s founding stories, and a multiplicity of other themes, often through the representation of the child or adolescent in relation to family—however that family may be constituted. Writers such as Jean Little, Kit Pearson, Tim Wynne-Jones, Ruby Slipperjack, and others manipulate this form with distinctive literary styles, and in stories that range from contemporary realism to historical fiction, and in which precisely realized regional settings impinge upon character, action, and family. They explore diversity through characters whose racial, ethnic, physical, sexual, and/or familial qualities expand the narrow envelope of the dominant European-originated White Canadian—sometimes within Canada, sometimes ranging out into parts of the world far distant from a Canadian setting. Most robustly, perhaps, Canada’s children’s writers expand, refresh, or reinscribe Canada’s founding stories, sometimes challenging accounts of familiar historical events through children’s voices, sometimes bringing to light stories and histories fundamental to families or small communities, or overlooked by sanctioned national narratives. Often, these three elements intertwine inextricably,

832    Critical Fields and New Directions sharpened and illuminated by stylistic features, literary strategies, and narrative voices artfully combined. Family is a consistent matrix in works by Jean Little, now considered a matriarch of Canadian children’s literature, and the author of poetry, memoir, early readers, picture books, and many novels. In her first novel, Mine for Keeps (1962), Little transformed the representation of the physically handicapped child protagonist in children’s literature—from a sentimental, Victorian model of sickliness and saintliness, to that of a robust, realistic child struggling with emotions, fears, faults, and strengths within the context of family and friends. Little strikes an energetic balance between the practical needs that her main character, Sally, experiences because of her motor difficulties (she has cerebral palsy) and qualities of character that mature as she moves from timidity and self-absorption to confidence, friendship, and contented pet-ownership (a recurrent theme for Little, who herself always has multiple pets and uses a seeing-eye dog). Little’s intense recollection of the “agonizing emotion” of childhood (the very quality she notes in Montgomery) and her sympathetic, practical portrayal of children with various difficulties—whether physical, mental, or emotional—are the hallmarks of her fiction, amply evident in stories that range considerably in situation and historical setting: in From Anna (1972), a new German immigrant finally succeeds in a class for the vision-impaired in Toronto in the 1930s; in Mama’s Going to Buy You a Mockingbird (1984), a boy survives the grief of losing his father to cancer; and in Orphan at My Door: The Home Child Diary of Victoria Cope, Guelph, Ontario, 1897 (2001) and Brothers Far From Home: The World War I Diary of Eliza Bates, Uxbridge, Ontario, 1916 (2003), with their self-explanatory titles, Little revises and gently critiques the romantic characterization and nationalist ideology in novels by Montgomery. Even in responding so explicitly to themes originating with Montgomery, Little’s attentiveness to physical impairment comes into play: in the latter title, she presents a protagonist whose visual problems are quietly and matter-of-factly enfolded within the narrative. Like Little’s, Kit Pearson’s domestic novels emphasize children’s adaptability, strength, and vital inner life—along with their orneriness, selfishness, and other mildly negative passions—in the context of family and family decisions. In The Guests of War Trilogy (comprising The Sky is Falling [1989], Looking at the Moon [1991] and The Lights Go On Again [1993]), Norah and her little brother are evacuated from Britain to be war guests of an elderly widow and her middle-aged daughter in Toronto; at the end of the war, having assimilated to their Canadian family and its ways, they must return to Britain. Pearson’s plot echoes elements of Emily of New Moon, but her characters are firmly located in Toronto and Muskoka in the 1940s, and in Norah, particularly, a feeling of powerlessness produces a messy commingling of resentment and imagination, anger and love, that the story treats with sympathy. Pearson’s style is accessible and straightforward; there is a transparency to the expression of the emotional and psychological stakes in these works that has made them exceptionally popular. Pearson’s more recent The Whole Truth (2011) and And Nothing But the Truth (2012), set on one of British Columbia’s Gulf Islands in the 1930s, manifest similar qualities (in terms of historical fictionality, style, and allusions to Emily of New Moon), but it is Awake and Dreaming (1996) that shows

Canadian Children’s Literature in English    833 her most complex ideas. Here, emotionally and physically deprived Theo suddenly, magically finds herself an adopted member of a large, perfect family—then reawakens to normal life to find that her “dream” has been the creative, consoling work of Cecily, a deceased writer who has been drawn to the imaginative, nurture-starved girl. Ultimately, “Pearson projects an ideal model of literary influence” (Meyers 276); there is no easy resolution to Theo’s situation, and she remains at the mercy of her neglectful mother, but through the creative nourishment that Cecily provides, Theo now sees her childhood, and even her powerlessness, as “material” for art she will create as an adult. The domestic novels of Sarah Ellis—The Baby Project (1986), Out of the Blue (1994), Odd Man Out (2006), That Fatal Night, The Titanic Diary of Dorothy Wilton, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1912 (2011), Outside In (2014), and others—revolve around a sharply focused change or discovery by the protagonist in the context of family. In The Baby Project, Jessica has a new baby sister who dies of SIDS; in Odd Man Out, in the context of his extended family, Kip learns that his now deceased father was mentally ill; in That Fatal Night, Dorothy writes about surviving the Titanic’s sinking after a visit to her grandparents. Even in the midst of portraying sorrow, heartbreak, and emotional confusion, Ellis’s prose is witty, poetic, and allusive; through play with words, she comically critiques popular and material culture, at the same time deepening characterization and enhancing possibilities for meaning within that culture. In a moment of Canadian intertextuality, Jessica, protagonist of The Baby Project, sings “ ‘Alligator Pie, Alligator Pie, if I don’t get some …’ ” “ ‘I won’t zip up my fly,’ ” finishes her hyper-adolescent brother (69), making his interests known; from downstairs, the tenant’s invention of a country-andwestern song points out the banal conventions of the form while recasting household chores, and also foreshadowing the death that is to come: “Like two socks from the dryer / We used to stick together, / But you left me for another / And I’m living cling-free …” (85). Ellis revises material and popular culture most dramatically in Outside In, in which the protagonist meets a girl living with her “found family” off the grid in the middle of urban Vancouver. The family’s alternative uses for objects retrieved from dumpsters and elsewhere, their discussion-heavy games of Monopoly (“ ‘Eight, take a chance. … Redistribute all property equally and stop charging rents’ ” [129]), and many other alternative modes and practices show the transformation of the material and social world through imagination. In Ellis’s novels, no object is without its language, its alternate use; families are affiliative, nuclear, single-parent, or extended to grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. Loss, neglect, illness, and family—especially sisters—figure in Julie Johnston’s Hero of Lesser Causes (1992), Adam and Eve and Pinch-Me (1994), In Spite of Killer Bees (2001), A Very Fine Line (2006), and other novels. In Hero of Lesser Causes, set in the 1950s, Keely struggles to be a triumphant “hero of lesser causes” in helping her brother Patrick, paralyzed by polio, emerge from grief. His incarceration in a wheelchair has made him truculent, surly, and desperate, and Keely is equally desperate: her adolescent desire for heroics is matched by a capacity for looking a fool—a capacity that helps bring about Patrick’s redemption. In In Spite of Killer Bees, three parentless sisters, whose relationship is testy at best, must convince an alienated aunt to move into the house they have

834    Critical Fields and New Directions inherited from their grandfather. Johnston’s dry humour and unsentimental exploration of sibling bonds is deepened by the metaphorical and literal role that food and house play in this story; indeed, female familial bonds are a consistent source of vivifying, constructive friction and nourishment in most of Johnston’s works. Like Pearson (or Montgomery), Alan Cumyn follows his protagonist through multiple volumes in his “Owen Skye” books—The Secret Life of Owen Skye (2002), After Sylvia (2004), and Deer Dear Sylvia (2008). The middle of three brothers growing up in a dilapidated house in the country, Owen struggles to express his admiration for Sylvia, a fellow classmate with whom he is in love—“a girl, of all things” (Secret Life 42). Household and male-female relationships are central here, explored within the matrix of Owen’s (and his brothers’) abundant imaginations, which transform the influence of 1960s pop culture into something rich, strange, and peculiar to the Skye brothers—whose family super-heroes include “Doom Monkey the Unpredictable” and “The Bogman’s Wife,” font of feminine knowledge. Cumyn focalizes the first two volumes through Owen, passing back and forth between free indirect discourse and a third-person limited narrator so rapidly that Owen’s own labile sense of identity becomes the very texture of the story. Elements of the children’s play and fantasy function both practically and metaphorically in plot and theme—as does Owen’s father’s job as a house insurance salesman. All three volumes are funny, serious, and deeply poetic—not least of them the epistolary final book, Deer Dear Sylvia, in which Owen’s letters to Sylvia illustrate and enact manifold possibilities and limitations in literary expression, reflecting outward to the creative activity of the author himself. At the same time, Owen’s letters point toward the regeneration and procreation of family, gesturing to a future in which Owen and Sylvia may themselves become parents. In his young adult novel Tilt (2011), Cumyn enhances the complexities of family and parenthood yet further: 16-year-old Stan, overwhelmed by his (completely normal) involuntary and frequent sexual excitement, is terrified he will reduplicate the actions of his deadbeat father, who sired Stan and his sister, then took off to father yet another son, whose mother he has now left. Cumyn portrays configurations and reconfigurations of family, siblings, half-siblings, and first love with a lucid intensity expressive of Stan’s heightened state of anxiety and desire. Like Cumyn, Tim Wynne-Jones is also the author of middle grade and young adult fiction in which family or quest for family is central. His autobiographically informed domestic novels, Rex Zero and the End of the World (2006), Rex Zero, King of Nothing (2007), and Rex Zero, The Great Pretender (2009), focus on a large family of new immigrants to Ottawa from Britain in the context of the Cold War. Plot and metaphor intertwine repeatedly as Rex Zero schemes with his friends to confront what seems to be serious adult incompetence during the Cuban missile crisis. The potentially tragic absurdity of the political situation is heightened by Wynne-Jones’s pervasive skill with comic absurdity: Rex’s sister, Annie Oakley, is convinced that every nun’s habit hides a Russian spy, which makes for some highly dramatic moments, as do the Norton-Norton family’s dinner conversations, in which ellipses and elisions in the conversation of six children, two parents, and a new boyfriend point out the hilarious, but very real, hazards of domestic (and political) miscommunication. Literary allusiveness, precisely

Canadian Children’s Literature in English    835 realized settings, and plots intricate in both psychology and logic characterize all of Wynne-Jones’s work—whether short stories, picture books, domestic novels, or psychological thrillers for young adults, such as The Boy in the Burning House (2000), The Uninvited (2009), and Blink and Caution (2011). In an unusual move, Wynne-Jones narrates part of Blink and Caution as an address to the second person, a “you” that is Blink but which also arrests and implicates the reader; ultimately, it seems that it is Blink’s grandfather narrating Blink’s part in this mystery-cum-thriller, underscoring and complicating its drive as a family story. Fathers and stepfathers, inheritances and family, houses and forests figure largely in most of Wynne-Jones’s intensely regional young adult novels. House and forest figure as unevenly balanced poles in Ruby Slipperjack’s Little Voice (2001), written for the Coteau Books series “In the Same Boat,” created to “celebrate the diverse cultures of our country” (jacket copy). Indeed, for the most part, Canada’s First Nations writers have turned to picture books in writing children’s literature, and Slipperjack’s novels are some of the few for middle grade and young adult readers. Slipperjack explores house and forest, family and formation in the growth of her Ojibwa protagonist, Ray, in the late 1970s. Here, town and bush, not shelter and wilderness, are juxtaposed: Ray spends winters with her mother and siblings in a small town in northern Ontario, and summers with her grandmother, who lives in a cabin far out in the bush, fishes and sets traps for food, and serves as a medicine woman. In a memorable image of bodily sustenance, Slipperjack confronts and interprets the two cultures and places that have formed her protagonist: “ ‘Look!’ ” Ray’s grandmother says, showing her a cloth spread with “moose nose, ash-baked potatoes, some pemmican, canned corn, fried fish, wild carrot bunches, bannock, a jar of blueberry jam, and a pound of butter.” “ ‘Which of these do you have in town and which do you have in the bush?’ ” her Grandma asks. “ ‘When you put them all together, what you get is—you!’ ” To her Grandma, Ray looks as if she is ready to say, “ ‘Hey, You! All You Lousy, No-Good People of This Land, Hear What I Have To Say!!!’ ” (89). Slipperjack shows Ray to be nourished and formed by both traditional and contemporary culture, something that makes her not just a strong girl, but a potential Ojibwa leader and activist. Slipperjack’s story accesses conventions of the bildungsroman—like Emily of New Moon, Ray is established in her calling at the end, a “strong, young, green-eyed medicine woman”—but in a non-confrontational, quietly humorous style that engages the very Ojibwa ways that Ray’s Grandma embodies. Whichever way Ray chooses—whether to return to town, her mother and siblings, or to stay and learn from her grandmother—she remains within the context of her family and people. In the works of Polly Horvath, family situations are often dramatic, comic, and extreme, and family configurations are alternately bizarre, poignant, and grimly practical. The stark juxtaposition of the comic and the terrible occurs repeatedly in The Canning Season (2003), Everything on a Waffle (2001), and The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane (2007). Horvath’s renditions of the adopted orphan story express pathos in startling, gothic humour, where occasions of violence and dismemberment come to be objective correlatives for loss and grief experienced by abandoned daughters—even ones who are over 80 years old. In The Canning Season, Ratchet is sent by her neglectful

836    Critical Fields and New Directions mother to spend the summer with her twin aunts, Tilly and Penpen, well into their eighties. Not long after, an abandoned child, Harper, is left on their doorstep by her unofficial foster mother, who mistakes Tilly and Penpen’s house on the remote Maine coast for a home for unwanted children. Tilly and Penpen take in both girls, “comforting” them with the story of their own mother’s suicide by a home-made guillotine decades ago, which they narrate little by little when the girls are particularly distressed by their mothers’ rejection. “ ‘I’m thinking [Harper] must feel so exposed, us seeing her dumped,’ ” says Penpen. “ ‘I ought to tell her about finding Mother’s head. … I just hate to think of that child wandering around the property feeling so alone’ ” (163). The bald, offhand, and seemingly brutal comments of Horvath’s characters convey truths so terrible they elicit shocked laughter, but Horvath’s dark humour provides a measured counterpoint to the consolation she portrays, even in the context of loss.

Historical Fictions and Founding Stories The impulse for diversity expressed by children’s literature publishers in the 1970s extends into the realm of historical fiction set around events considered formative to Canadian history and identity. In 2001, Scholastic Canada established the Dear Canada series for girls (inspired by the successful Dear America series in the United States): each volume is a fictional diary written by a 12-year-old girl involved in one of Canada’s founding moments or movements. Subjects for this series are chosen for their perceived national importance and with attention to the needs and demands of school curricula. Scholastic enlisted some of Canada’s most notable children’s authors to write the books (currently 33, with two volumes of short stories); these include, among others, Jean Little, Sarah Ellis, Kit Pearson, Carol Matas, Julie Lawson, Janet McNaughton, and the mother of Canadian historical fiction for the young, Janet Lunn. The series engages events such as the Halifax Explosion, the 1812 War, World Wars I and II, the battle on the Plains of Abraham, the sinking of the Titanic, and the internment of the Japanese during World War II; a counterpart series for boys, I Am Canada (the implications of title and gender are difficult to overlook), offers slimmer volumes involving the same or similar moments in Canadian history by writers such as Hugh Brewster, John Wilson, Paul Yee, and others. The restrictions of form and subject matter exercised in the Dear Canada and I Am Canada series help illuminate the plasticity of historical fiction released from, or unhindered by, the series format. The Dear Canada diaries of Sarah Ellis (That Fatal Night [2011]) and Julie Lawson (No Safe Harbour [2006]) show that a clever author can overcome inhibiting conventions through a variety of literary strategies—retrospect, embedded poetry and drama, or suddenly discovered letters in these cases. Canadian historical fiction for children that is written free of these restrictions tends to show more

Canadian Children’s Literature in English    837 vivacious authorial style and is able to engage historical events or situations that have not yet become established in Canada’s national narrative for children. Janet Lunn helped give Canadian children’s historical fiction a firm footing with her three novels that centre around an island near the northeast shore of Lake Ontario—The Root Cellar (1981), Shadow in Hawthorn Bay (1986), and The Hollow Tree (1997), each tracing a distinct occasion of immigration and settlement in Canada. In a discussion of Shadow in Hawthorn Bay in Home Words: Discourses of Children’s Literature in Canada (2008), Mavis Reimer claims that the “most valued story in English-language Canadian children’s literature is a narrative in which the central child character, pushed out of an originary home by the decisions or behaviour of powerful adults, journeys to an alien place and, after a series of vicissitudes that occupy most of the tale, chooses to claim the unfamiliar space as a new home” (1). This narrative pattern certainly holds true for all three of these novels by Lunn: Phoebe Olcott flees to Canada with United Empire Loyalists in the 1770s (Hollow Tree); Mary Urquhart is a refugee of the Scottish clearances in 1815 (Hawthorn Bay); and Rose Larkin is an immigrant from the contemporary United States, come to live with descendants of United Empire Loyalists in Ontario (Root Cellar). In all three stories, children lose their immediate families, take long journeys on foot, and, ultimately, accept a place in an extended or affiliate family in Canada. In The Root Cellar, the first of the three to be written, Lunn uses time travel to emphasize the intergenerational strata of Canada’s American immigrants; through the root cellar, Rose is transported back to the time of the American Civil War, where she makes friends with Susan and Will, descendants of United Empire Loyalists whose arrival is described in The Hollow Tree. Will’s hybrid American/Canadian national identity leads him to join up and fight with the North until, after much suffering, he recognizes that despite his family origins, an American war is not “his” war. Autobiography and fiction come together powerfully in Shirley Sterling’s My Name is Seepeetza (1992), Canada’s first memoir of a survivor of an Indian residential school to be written for children. A fictionalized journal based on Sterling’s memories, this is the account of Seepeetza, a member of British Columbia’s Nlakapamux Interior Salish First Nation, and her experiences during one year of Indian residential school in 1958–59. Sterling makes explicit her rejection of Montgomery as a model in Seepeetza’s negative opinion of Anne of Green Gables: instead, Seepeetza becomes the creator of her own story in her secret journal, which counters the cultural and physical impositions of the school where she is incarcerated. Through the interplay of Seepeetza’s comments on school events and her lengthy, frequent recollections of her family, her home, and her family’s traditions and habits, Seepeetza imaginatively imports family and Nlakapamux culture into the deprived and depriving environment of the school. The restrained, non-judgmental voice of the child accessed by Sterling (whose real Nlakapamux name was Seepeetza) and the story’s historical underpinnings give this work exceptional power and depth. Sterling’s account has been followed by a number of memoirs for children that pertain to Indian residential schools, among them Arctic Stories, by Michael Arvaarluk Kusugak, illustrated by Vladyana Krykorka (1998); Fatty Legs (2010) and A Stranger at Home (2011), by Christy Jordan-Fenton and Margaret Pokiak-Fenton,

838    Critical Fields and New Directions illustrated by Liz Amini-Holmes; and As Long as Rivers Flow, by Larry Loyie with Constance Brissenden, illustrated by Heather Holmlund (2002). Family and community are at the centre of Christopher Paul Curtis’s two historical novels, Elijah of Buxton (2007) and The Madman of Piney Woods (2014), both of which take place in Buxton, Ontario, the town that began as a settlement of slaves who managed to escape successfully from the United States. Both stories treat the effects and aftermath of American slavery and the Civil War: in Elijah of Buxton, set in the 1850s, Elijah is the first child born into freedom in Buxton, but finds himself across the border trying to retrieve some stolen goods; in The Madman of Piney Woods, set in 1901, Benji becomes involved with a solitary, traumatized survivor of the American Civil War. In both stories, Curtis uses a first-person narration to track the boys’ growth from practical jokers and buffoons within their families, to young people who exert courage and good sense, growing into maturity without losing boyish vivacity. Poetry, humour, and a sober eye for human suffering combine in Curtis’s style; he moves through slapstick comedy to grave seriousness, evoking place and culture with quick, vivid language. When Elijah collects the mail for Buxton’s population of escaped slaves, he knows what’s in a letter just from the way it looks: “If the letter was writ fancy, like this one was, with swirlingness and curlycues and such nonsense it only meant one thing: A friendly white person was writing to let you know somebody was dead” (187). Thus Curtis illustrates the solidarity and affection among the community: Elijah delivers it in the company of eight women, all respectful in Sunday clothes and bearing food. “It felt like a whole slew of soldiers was ringing that parlour with swords drawed and waren’t no sorrow so powerful it could bust through,” he says, offering a vision of a particular past that has necessarily generated its own healing culture and customs (200). Elijah’s singular first-person narrative has the energy and sweep of an oral story, emphasizing the foundational role of personal, local, and communal history. Moving between China and Canada in his settings, Paul Yee effectively conjures his own literary form in merging regional-historical specificity with the structure, tone, and less time-bound motifs of traditional Chinese folk and ghost stories. In Tales from Gold Mountain, illustrated by Simon Ng (1989), and Dead Man’s Gold, illustrated by Harvey Chan (2002), Yee sets his stories in the historical context of Canada’s treatment of Chinese labourers and its policies toward Chinese immigrants. In “The Memory Stone” in Dead Man’s Gold, a jade pendant in Vancouver’s Chinatown museum gives rise to a story of betrayed love that could be from any era; indeed the characters’ names—Willow, Ox, and Blossom—suggest a certain earthy timelessness, although the setting depends on Vancouver specifically. Similarly, a story set in the coal mines of Cumberland, Vancouver Island (“Digging Deep” in Dead Man’s Gold), pivots on a young man’s fear of marriage, a sentiment not restricted to a particular historical moment. Human frailties figure decisively; moral reprisals are straightforward; plots depend on duty, loyalty, respect, and tradition. The stories are not spurred by notions of good and evil, but rather memorialize human longing and affection, remorse or contentment. A logger’s respect for the forest’s beauty leads him to devote life and afterlife to save a tree on British Columbia’s coast; two ghostly lovers are together at last, walking the seawall

Canadian Children’s Literature in English    839 near Vancouver’s Immigration Building’s former location; a loving son shows the ghost of his hard-working father how to enjoy the new country during his afterlife, by car. Often, Yee’s characters are absorbed, bodily, into the Canadian landscape, a concrete metaphor for the fundamental place that Chinese immigrants, both past and present, have had and still have in Canada and its founding stories. The diaphanous inconclusivity of ghostly presence suggests a tenuous but persistent questioning of what constitutes belonging. Yee again anatomizes the question of belonging in stories set in contemporary urban Canada in What Happened This Summer (2006), exploring the permutations of intergenerational immigrant relationships and the points of both friction and strength in contemporary Canadian, urban cultural hybridity. Regionality—in style, place, and historical incident—figures largely in Brian Doyle’s many works of historical fiction set in Ottawa and in Québec’s Gatineau valley. Uncle Ronald (1996), Angel Square (1984), Mary Ann Alice (2001), and Boy O’Boy (2003), among others, are all set at significant historic moments for their communities: a rebellion against government taxation in 1895 (Uncle Ronald); the end of World War II (Angel Square; Boy O’Boy); and the flooding of the Gatineau Valley by the construction of a dam in 1928 (Mary Ann Alice). In each, the protagonist undergoes a significant change of situation and understanding that is reflected, both literally and metaphorically, in the changes in the community around her or him. The asymmetry of the power relations between adult and child, between business or government and working-class people, provides the energetic heart of each story, whether the young protagonist is a victim of physical or sexual abuse, or a witness to racist violence or economic injustice. Doyle’s family background of Irish Canadian oral storytelling is everywhere apparent—in vivid visual comedy; earthy, direct language; and pungent, script-like dialogue. Through comic juxtaposition and plays on words, Doyle suffuses his stories with pathos and Bakhtinian burlesque, showing in the working person’s, or child’s, subversion of authoritarian language a reversal of power that is often both sorrowful and comic. Although Deborah Ellis writes of the contemporary world, her works are also vitally dependent on political and social situations and moments, whether recent or current. As a social activist for the plight of children and women, she takes the realistic “domestic” novel into some of today’s most arduous living situations, all the time remaining focused on children’s courage, generosity, and vulnerability in the face of extreme want and violence. The inner life of the child, so marked in Montgomery, in Ellis’s work shines out all the more as her child characters exercise physical and moral courage under the direst of circumstances. In The Breadwinner (2000) and its sequel Parvana’s Journey (2002), Ellis presents Parvana, a girl who must disguise herself as a boy, first in the city of Kabul under the Taliban regime, and then traveling the war-torn country in search of her mother and siblings. Mud City (2003) depicts Shauzia, Parvana’s friend from Kabul, having fled Afghanistan and its war and now living in a refugee camp near Peshawar, Pakistan. The children of The Breadwinner stories and Ellis’s Cocalero novels (I am a Taxi [2006] and Sacred Leaf [2007], stories of a boy working in an illegal cocaine operation in Bolivia), like many of her works, emphasize a global population, silently asserting Canada’s responsibility in the world. Ellis’s style is quick and unembellished; her stories

840    Critical Fields and New Directions are full of suspense and danger, but she always emphasizes the hope for a vibrant, meaningful life that pulls the child forward. Her novels cover a range of situations abroad and in Canada (homelessness; children with parents in prison, or surviving parents who die of AIDS; a child with leprosy); her works of nonfiction present interviews with children in situations of difficulty and/or conflict (Palestinian and Israeli children; First Nations children; children of Kabul). Through the work of Ellis and others who have followed in her footsteps, such as Eric Walters and Sharon McKay, Canada’s formative or “founding stories” for young readers incorporate a global spectrum of engagement. Because of the vital role that children’s literature plays in education, discussions of children’s books are often dominated by interest in content. Canadian children’s literature has itself been constituted around an interest in content, as early Canadian children’s books and later the ideals of the publishers of the 1970s demonstrate. Emphasis on diversity, regionality, and founding stories—overlapping categories, to be sure, which cover a multiplicity of diversities—is testament to the desire for literature that reflects or opens windows onto Canadian children’s experience. But Canadian literature is not restricted to Canadian content, as Deborah Ellis, Oppel, and Lawrence show; it is as much through style, sensibility, and literary indebtedness that Canadian writers for children reflect cultural values and practices, as through the explicit deployment of Canadian markers. Many writers of Canadian children’s fiction not discussed here—Rachna Gilmore, Hiromi Goto, Marthe Jocelyn, Arthur Slade, Mariko and Jillian Tamaki, among them—similarly reward close scrutiny and critical engagement. While the burst of nationalist sentiment and motivation in the late twentieth century generated an abundance of nationally oriented literary works for children, by the second decade of the twenty-first century, Canadian children’s writers and artists, and their publishers, have economic and artistic reasons to look outward to international readers and markets.7 In this greater orientation outward, distinctly Canadian content may subside a little in Canadian literature for children, but Canada’s children’s writers continue to champion values asserted by the publishers first established in the 1970s: regional specificity, cultural variety, and diverse families.

Notes 1. See Edwards and Saltman, “Chronology of Children’s Print History” in Picturing Canada: A History of Canadian Children’s Illustrated Books and Publishing, for this and other dates relating to print history. 2. See Egoff and Saltman, Chapter 11, and Edwards and Saltman, Chapters 2 and 3, for fuller accounts of early Canadian children’s books. 3. The Parent-Child Mother Goose Program is a group program that fosters the sharing of oral nursery rhymes, songs, and stories between parents and their babies or young children. It reaches out to low-income and isolated families, particularly welcoming newcomers. See http://parentchildmothergoose.com. 4. In the Seal editions of Montgomery’s novels, an advertisement on the flyleaf assures readers: “It Really Does Exist: the magical land of rolling green hills and azure sea made

Canadian Children’s Literature in English    841 famous by L.M. Montgomery’s novels … exists in a very real way on Prince Edward Island in Canada.” 5. See Lefebvre’s “Introduction” to both The L.M. Montgomery Reader, Volume I: A Life in Print and Volume II: A Critical Heritage, for a thorough and succinct history of the critical and popular heritage of Montgomery’s work. My own précis here is entirely indebted to Lefebvre’s comprehensive account. 6. For a fuller discussion of these authors’ explicit and implicit acknowledgment of the influence, both negative and positive, of Montgomery and her writing, see Meyer, “L.M. Montgomery’s Influence on Canadian Children’s Literature” and Baker, “L.M. Montgomery at her Finest and Funniest.” 7. See Edwards and Saltman 211–25.

Works Cited Baker, Deirdre. “L.M. Montgomery at Her Finest and Funniest: How Montgomery Has Kept Us Laughing for a Hundred Years.” Helen E. Stubbs Memorial Lecture 21. Toronto: Toronto Public Library, 2009. Print. Baker, Deirdre, and Ken Setterington. A Guide to Canadian Children’s Books. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2003. Print. Ballantyne, R.M. Snowflakes and Sunbeams:  or, The Young Fur Traders. London:  Thomas Nelson, 1856. Print. Canadian Children’s Book Centre. Our Choice. 1976–2008. Web. Accessed 28 Dec. 2014. Canadian Children’s Book Centre. Best Books for Kids and Teens. 2008+. Web. Accessed 28 Dec. 2014. Carpenter-Davis, Sarah, and Celia Lottridge. Bounce Me, Tickle Me, Hug Me: Lap Rhymes and Play Rhymes from Around the World. Toronto: Anansi, 1998. Print. Cumyn, Alan. After Sylvia. Toronto: Groundwood, 2004. Print. ———. Dear Sylvia. Toronto: Groundwood, 2008. Print. ———. The Secret Life of Owen Skye. Toronto: Groundwood, 2002. Print. ———. Tilt. Toronto: Groundwood, 2011. Print. Curtis, Christopher Paul. Elijah of Buxton. Toronto: Scholastic, 2007. Print. ———. The Madman of Piney Woods. Toronto: Scholastic, 2014. Print. Doyle, Brian. Angel Square. Toronto: Groundwood, 1984. Print. ———. Boy O’Boy. Toronto: Groundwood, 2003. Print. ———. Mary Ann Alice. Toronto: Groundwood, 2001. Print. ———. Uncle Ronald. Toronto: Groundwood, 1996. Print. Edwards, Gail, and Judith Saltman. Picturing Canada:  A  History of Canadian Children’s Illustrated Books and Publishing. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2010. Print. Egoff, Sheila. The Republic of Childhood: A Critical Guide to Canadian Children’s Literature in English. 1967. 2nd ed. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1975. Print. Egoff, Sheila, and Judith Saltman. The New Republic of Childhood: A Critical Guide to Canadian Children’s Literature in English. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1990. Print. Ellis, Deborah. The Breadwinner. Toronto: Groundwood, 2000. Print. ———. I am a Taxi. Toronto: Groundwood, 2006. Print. ———. Mud City. Toronto: Groundwood, 2003. Print. ———. Parvana’s Journey. Toronto: Groundwood, 2002. Print.

842    Critical Fields and New Directions Ellis, Deborah. Sacred Leaf. Toronto: Groundwood, 2007. Print. Ellis, Sarah. The Baby Project. 1986. Toronto: Groundwood, 1994. Print. ———. Odd Man Out. Toronto: Groundwood, 2006. Print. ———. Out of the Blue. Toronto: Groundwood, 1994. Print. ———. Outside In. Toronto: Groundwood, 2014. Print. ———. That Fatal Night:  The Titanic Diary of Dorothy Wilton, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1912. Toronto: Scholastic, 2011. Print. Fishbane, Melanie. Maud. Toronto: Penguin, 2016. Print. Gillen, Mollie. The Wheel of Things: A Biography of L.M. Montgomery, Author of Anne of Green Gables. Don Mills, ON: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1975. Print. Henty, G.A. With Wolfe in Canada, or, The Winning of a Continent. London: Blackie and Son, 1887. Print. Horvath, Polly. The Canning Season. Toronto: Groundwood, 2003. Print. ———. The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane. Toronto: Groundwood, 2007. Print. ———. Everything on a Waffle. Toronto: Groundwood, 2001. Print. ———. Mr and Mrs Bunny: Detectives Extraordinaire! Toronto: Groundwood, 2012. Print. Jocelyn, Marthe. Mable Riley:  A  Reliable Record of Peril, Humdrum and Romance. Toronto: Tundra, 2005. Print. Johnston, Julie. Adam and Eve and Pinch-Me. Toronto: Tundra, 1994. Print. ———. Hero of Lesser Causes. Toronto: Tundra, 1992. Print. ———. In Spite of Killer Bees. Toronto: Tundra, 2001. Print. ———. A Very Fine Line. Toronto: Tundra, 2006. Print. Jordan-Fenton, Christy, and Margaret Pokiak-Fenton. Fatty Legs. Toronto: Annick, 2010. Print. ———. A Stranger at Home. Toronto: Annick, 2011. Print. Kusugak, Michael Arvaarluk. Arctic Stories. Illus. Vladyana Krykorka. Toronto:  Annick, 1998. Print. Lawrence, Iain. B for Buster. New York: Delacorte, 2004. Print. ———. The Buccaneers. New York: Delacorte, 2001. Print. ———. The Cannibals. New York: Delacorte, 2005. Print. ———. The Castaways. New York: Delacorte, 2007. Print. ———. The Convicts. New York: Delacorte, 2005. Print. ———. The Smugglers. New York: Delacorte, 1999. Print. ———. The Wreckers. New York: Delacorte, 1998. Print. Lawson, Julie. No Safe Harbour: The Halifax Explosion Diary of Charlotte Blackburn, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1917. Toronto: Scholastic, 2006. Print. Leavitt, Martine. Blue Mountain. Toronto: Groundwood, 2014. Print. Ledwell, Jane, and Jean Mitchell, eds. Anne around the World:  L.M. Montgomery and Her Classic. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2013. Print. Lefebvre, Benjamin, ed. The L.M. Montgomery Reader. 2 vols. Toronto:  U of Toronto P, 2013–14. Print. Lee, Dennis. Alligator Pie. Illus. Frank Newfeld. 1974. Toronto: HarperCollins, 2012. Print. Little, Jean. Brothers Far from Home: The World War I Diary of Eliza Bates, Uxbridge, Ontario, 1916. Toronto: Scholastic, 2003. Print. ———. From Anna. 1972. Toronto: Scholastic, 2012. Print. ———. Mama’s Going to Buy You a Mockingbird. 1984. Toronto: Penguin, 2013. Print. ———. Mine for Keeps. 1962. Toronto: Penguin, 2008. Print.

Canadian Children’s Literature in English    843 ———. Orphan at My Door: The Home Child Diary of Victoria Cope, Guelph, Ontario, 1897. Toronto: Scholastic, 2001. Print. Loyie, Larry, and Constance Brissenden. As Long as Rivers Flow. Illus. Heather D. Holmlund. Toronto: Groundwood, 2002. Print. Lunn, Janet. The Hollow Tree. Toronto: Knopf, 1997. Print. ———. The Root Cellar. 1981. Toronto: Seal, 2001. Print. ———. Shadow in Hawthorn Bay. 1986. Toronto: Seal, 2001. Print. Macartney-Filgate, Terence, dir. Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Road to Green Gables. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1975. Film. Major, Kevin. Eh? To Zed: A Canadian Abecedarium. Red Deer: Red Deer P, 2000. Print. The Maple Leaf: A Juvenile Monthly Magazine. Montreal: printed for E.H. Lay, 1852–1854. Print. Marryat, Frederick. The Settlers in Canada; Written for Young People. London:  Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1844. Print. Meyer, Susan. “L.M. Montgomery’s Influence on Canadian Children’s Literature.” Ledwell and Mitchell 262–80. Print. Montgomery, L.M. Anne of Green Gables. 1908. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1992. Print. ———. The Complete Journals of L.M. Montgomery. Ed. Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston. 2 vols. Toronto: Oxford UP, 2012–2013. Print. ———. Emily Climbs. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1989. Print. ———. Emily of New Moon. 1923. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1989. Print. ———. Emily of New Moon. 1923. Toronto: Seal, 1998. Print. ———. Emily’s Quest. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1989. Print. ———. The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery. Ed. Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston. 5 vols. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1985. Print. Mowat, Farley. Lost in the Barrens. 1956. Toronto: Emblem, 2009. Print. Nodelman, Perry. The Hidden Adult:  Defining Children’s Literature. Baltimore, MD:  Johns Hopkins UP, 2008. Print. Oppel, Kenneth. Airborn. Toronto: HarperCollins, 2004. Print. ———. Darkwing. Toronto: HarperCollins, 2007. Print. ———. Firewing. Toronto: HarperCollins, 2002. Print. ———. Silverwing. Toronto: HarperCollins, 1997. Print. ———. Skybreaker. Toronto: HarperCollins, 2005. Print. ———. Starclimber. Toronto: HarperCollins, 2008. Print. ———. Sunwing. Toronto: HarperCollins, 1999. Print. Oxley, James Macdonald. The Young Woodsman, or Life in the Forests of Canada. London: Thomas Nelson, 1895. Print. ———. Up among the Ice-Floes. Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1890. Print. Parent-Child Mother Goose Program. http://parentchildmothergoose.com. Web. Accessed 25 June 2015. Pearson, Kathleen [Kit]. Awake and Dreaming. 1996. Toronto: Penguin, 2007. Print. ———. The Lights Go On Again. 1993. Toronto: Penguin, 2014. Print. ———. Looking at the Moon. 1991. Toronto: Penguin, 2014. Print. ———. And Nothing but the Truth. Toronto: HarperCollins, 2012. Print. ———. The Sky Is Falling. 1989. Toronto: Puffin, 2014. Print. ———. The Whole Truth. Toronto: HarperCollins, 2011. Print.

844    Critical Fields and New Directions Reimer, Mavis, ed. Home Words:  Discourses of Children’s Literature in Canada. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2008. Print. ———. “Homing and Unhoming: The Ideological Work of Canadian Children’s Literature.” Reimer, Home Words 1–25. Rose, Jacqueline. The Case of Peter Pan or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction. London: Macmillan, 1984. Print. Saltman, Judith. Modern Canadian Children’s Books. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1987. Print. Seton, Ernest Thompson. Two Little Savages: Being the Adventures of Two Boys Who Lived as Indians and What They Learned. 1903. New York: Doubleday, 1911. Print. ———. Wild Animals I  Have Known:  Being the Personal Histories of Lobo, Silverspot, Raggylug, Bingo, The Springfield Fox, The Pacing Mustang, Wully and Redruff. 1898. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2009. Print. Slipperjack, Ruby. Little Voice. Regina: Coteau, 2001. Print. The Snowdrop, or Juvenile Magazine. Montreal: Lovell and Gibson; Toronto: Scobie and Balfour, 1847–1850; Montreal: R.W. Lay, 1850–1853. Print. Sterling, Shirley. My Name Is Seepeetza. Toronto: Groundwood, 1992. Print. Stevenson, Robert Louis. Treasure Island. 1883. London: Penguin. 2008. Print. Traill, Catharine Parr. Canadian Crusoes: A Tale of the Rice Lake Plains. 1852. Ottawa: Carleton UP, 1986. Print. Truss, Jan. Jasmin. Toronto: Groundwood, 1982. Print. Wilson, Budge. Before Green Gables. Toronto: Penguin, 2008. Print. Woods, Shirley. Kit. Toronto: Groundwood, 1999. Print. ———. Black Nell. Toronto: Groundwood, 2000. Print. Wynne-Jones, Tim. Blink and Caution. Cambridge, MA: Candlewick, 2011. Print. ———. The Boy in the Burning House. Toronto: Groundwood, 2000. Print. ———. The Maestro. Toronto: Groundwood, 1995. Print. ———. Rex Zero and the End of the World. Toronto: Groundwood, 2006. Print. ———. Rex Zero, The Great Pretender. Toronto: Groundwood, 2009. Print. ———. Rex Zero, King of Nothing. Toronto: Groundwood, 2007. Print. ———. The Uninvited. Cambridge, MA: Candlewick, 2009. Print. Yee, Paul. Dead Man’s Gold. Illus. Harvey Chan. Toronto: Groundwood, 2002. Print. ———. Tales from Gold Mountain. Illus. Simon Ng. Toronto: Groundwood, 1989. Print. ———. What Happened This Summer. Vancouver: Tradewind Books, 2006. Print. Young Canada’s Nursery Rhymes. 1890. Toronto: Key Porter, 2002. Print. Young England’s Nursery Rhymes. London: Frederick Warne, 1887. Print.

Chapter 45

Canadian Fe mi ni st L iterary Cri t i c i sm and Theory i n t h e “Sec ond Wav e ” Cecily Devereux

The academic feminist literary criticism and theory that burgeoned in Canada in the last three decades of the twentieth century represent a crucial moment in Canadian literary history, both for the texts produced during this period and for the ways in which this body of works altered Canadian literary history itself. Beginning in the 1970s, in the wake of the raised consciousness that was one effect of the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM), or the “second wave” of global feminism, and in the context of growing numbers of women working in Canadian colleges and universities, academic feminists in Canada turned their attention to the structural matters underpinning what had become powerfully evident was a system of gender inequality that, while broadly cultural, was also operating specifically and in some ways uniquely in the academy. Some of these matters pertained to institutional forms of social unevenness along gender lines, such as pay inequality, preferences for hiring and promoting men, administrations top-heavy with men, and a systemic tendency to overload women with low-level administration and service or non-specialized teaching. Other factors could be understood to arise from structural histories—of curricula, course materials, texts, and, in literature departments in Canada, literary canons and, crucially, language itself. Working to map the problematic histories underpinning gender inequality as it was insistently affirmed across cultural registers in the last quarter of the twentieth century in Canada, feminist criticism and theory began in the 1970s to work to identify and to dismantle the structures within which gender inequality was reproduced in the academy and in the larger social space that the academy could be seen to reflect and to reproduce. As Suzanne Lamy and Irène Pagès describe the work of academic feminist theory in their preface to the 1983 anthology Féminité, Subversion, Écriture, “S’affirmant comme

846    Critical Fields and New Directions mode d’expression autonome, les écritures au féminin1 dérangent, remettent en question l’ordre établi, l’institution et par là même, l’université. Ainsi sont-elles politiques et subversives” (5) [“Asserting themselves as an independent mode of expression, writings in the feminine disrupt, challenge the established order, the institution, and, thereby, the university. Thus they are political and subversive”].2 In the impetus to change the workplace and to destabilize and displace patriarchal discourse as a seemingly natural and fixed system of producing meaning, academic feminist literary theory and criticism in Canada should be understood to be integral to the range of feminist social engagement and activism that developed through the late twentieth century in Canada and globally. It is important to keep the category’s foundational principles of activism in mind, given the extent to which academic feminist literary criticism and theory are sometimes seen to be indexical of elitist “ivory tower” ideologies pertaining only to an institution that, as Jane Gallop has observed, can appear to be “marginal to power and values in … society” (3). As Gallop suggests, the “academicization” (4) of feminism since the late 1970s represents from some perspectives a co-opting of broader, more generally relevant feminist concepts by a small group of specialists: this is the perception of academic feminism as what Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente calls “women’s studies rubbish.”3 But Canadian academic feminist literary criticism, which emerged not only in the context of a broader movement for social change in Canada and globally but in relation to the emergence of feminist literary theory and criticism across national and cultural locations, represented a vital force in the overall work of feminism in the second wave. This was a radically new critical feminism, confronting in language, literature, the discipline, the institution, and its apparatuses what had not been taken on before, and in doing so creating a new feminist discourse, a space in language and culture for the affirmation of gendered subjectivity and agency, and a future for the continued political work of countering and subverting gender inequality in the university and in Canadian society.

Feminism in the 1960s and 1970s: The Social and Political Context Feminism of the late twentieth century is often referred to as the “second wave” of feminism because it is perceived to be the second coherent and sustained modern transnational movement by women to counter gender inequality as a principle of social structure. The “first wave” is the name usually given to the period of activism that began to take shape in the 1880s in many national contexts and that focused on a range of institutional practices impeding women’s ability to achieve full citizenship in the context of the rise of nationalism in the period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.4 The first “wave” of feminist politics in this context began to recede after the 1920s, in part because some of the conditions that were the focus of feminist activism had been

Canadian Feminist Literary Criticism and Theory    847 addressed through the enfranchisement of some women. The Dominion Elections Act of 1920 granted many women in Canada the vote, although it cannot be said to have granted woman suffrage across the category of gender since it did not include Indigenous women, who could not vote in Canada until 1960. Nonetheless, in Canada of the 1920s, the vote was considered by many to have been won for women and this, along with the economic depression of the 1930s and World War II, shifted attention to social concerns other than gender. The years following the end of World War II are characterized in Canada, as elsewhere, by an impetus to affirm gender difference and to re-establish prewar ideas of femininity and masculinity in the home and the workplace: this is thus sometimes seen as a period without feminism. Although that is not necessarily the case, it is true that feminism is less evident in the public sphere until it emerges in a re-energized form in the early 1960s, as it does in part precisely in reaction to the insistent social construction of women with reference to an ideology of domesticity (Messer-Davidow 158). In 1961 President John F. Kennedy established the President’s Commission on the Status of Women in the United States, undertaking to navigate between constituencies divided between desires to preserve “traditional roles in the home and family” (Lewis) and objections to the ways in which the social disposition to want women to stay home hampered them in the workplace. These competing questions also guided American feminist Betty Friedan’s groundbreaking 1963 book The Feminine Mystique, which called upon women to question their experience of forms of patriarchal oppression in everyday life. Friedan’s work is an important element in the development of consciousness-raising, in feminism a process of coming to recognize the ways in which gender inequality shapes the condition of being female and in which women internalize gender inequality as necessary and inevitable. Consciousness-raising underpins the mobilization of the late 1960s feminist slogan “the personal is the political” and the idea of the internalization of oppression as a social problem to be countered by activism and discourse.5 As such, it would shape feminism in North America in the 1960s, establishing a foundation for feminist criticism and theory based in the experience of gender inequality and the analysis of its causes. The 1960s were a period of intensely focused organization for feminists in North America, as elsewhere, around political and social questions of gender inequality. The National Organization for Women (NOW) was formed in the United States in 1966 with a mandate to “bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society … , exercising all the privileges and responsibilities thereof in truly equal partnership with men” (“National Organization for Women’s 1966 Statement of Purpose”). In the same year, the Fédération des femmes du Québec (FFQ) was organized under the leadership of Thérèse Casgrain, first woman head of a political party in Québec and founder of the Québec branch of the Voice of Women, a movement dedicated to world peace (“Marie Thérèse”). The FFQ, which brought together representatives of women’s groups in Québec (“Milestones … 1960s”), undertook to unite women and women’s associations to coordinate their activities in the area of social activism for the collective good of women.6 Also in the same year in Québec, the Cercles d’économie domestique and the Union catholique des femmes rurales merged to form the Association féminine

848    Critical Fields and New Directions d’éducation et d’action sociale (AFEAS) (“Milestones … 1960s”), and, in Toronto, the Committee for the Equality of Women in Canada (CEWC) was founded to “pursue the rights of women in Canada” (“Milestones … 1960s”). The CEWC “immediately beg[an] a campaign for a Royal Commission on the Status of Women” (“Milestones … 1960s”), something that had first been suggested in 1963 by Judy LaMarsh, newly appointed Minister of National Health and Welfare in the administration of Prime Minister Lester Pearson (“Royal Commission”). The Royal Commission on the Status of Women in Canada (RCSW) was established in 1967 by the Liberal government of Lester Pearson.7 In 1970, the Report of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women was tabled in the House of Commons and the first national conference in Canada on the women’s movement was held in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan (“Milestones … 1960s”). In 1971, “[t]‌hose feminists who had been central in lobbying the government to create the commission formed the National Ad Hoc Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC)” (“Royal Commission”), still the “largest umbrella organization of women’s groups in Canada” (Anderson). The organization of these women’s groups through the 1960s and into the 1970s is comprehensible in part as an effect not only of consciousness-raising but of increasing numbers of women in the workplace in Canada and in the United States. Joan Sangster notes a “rapidly changing female labour force” in Canada where “the number of wage-earning women, most significantly those with families,” was quickly rising: “in 1941, just fewer than 4 per cent of married women worked outside the home, but by 1961, this was 22 per cent, and by the time of the RCSW, 30 per cent” (Sangster 139). Concomitantly increasing numbers of women are apparent in the Canadian academic workplace. According to a 1998 study, “The Status of Women Faculty in Canadian Universities” (Ornstein, Stewart, and Drakich), in 1957 the number of women holding full-time faculty positions in Canada was 524. By 1967, the number of female full-time faculty in Canadian universities had increased to 2,233, a roughly fourfold increase (4.26): this increase is the most dramatic over nearly four decades in the second half of the twentieth century. Nearly 20 years later, in 1979, female full-time faculty were 4,372, more or less doubling (1.96) the 1967 number. In 1988, that number increased to 6,345. In 1994, the last figures shown in the 1998 “Status of Women Faculty” report, 8,268 held full-time faculty positions in Canada, nearly 16 times as many as in 1957.

The Rise of Academic Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism in the 1970s and 1980s Ellen Messer-Davidow has observed that “[p]‌recipitating the formation of second-wave feminism was the sexual politics that occurred in the very same arenas where women

Canadian Feminist Literary Criticism and Theory    849 were acquiring social-change skills” (158). In the broad social context, this work entailed activism focused on pay equity, employment equity, and affirmative action and on problems of sexism and sexual harassment in the workplace, as well as maternity leave, job protection while having babies, and other matters relating to reproductive rights. In the academic context, it meant all these things, as well as other structural matters. As Lamy and Pagès suggest in their 1983 anthology, cited above, it meant an interrogation of the university itself as a location for teaching, research, and learning. In the context of the study of language and literature, moreover, it meant “the literary academy,” what Gallop described in 1992 as “at once a discursive field, a pedagogical apparatus, a place of employment, a site of cultural reproduction, [and] an agency of cultural regulation” (3). Addressing gender inequality in literature was thus understood to be work that was also institutional and social. By the late 1970s, female academics teaching in language and literature departments in North America had begun to focus on the question of how the patriarchal structure of the university was reproduced at the level of curriculum and course content. As Shirley Neuman suggested in 1983, it was possible “for a student to meet the requirements for a degree in English literature without ever having studied a woman writer” (136).8 Neuman’s department at the University of Alberta was at that time 80 percent male and 20 percent female (Neuman, “Women” 138), statistically comparable along gender lines to most Canadian institutions, as the 1998 “Status of Women Faculty” report demonstrates (Ornstein, Stewart, and Drakich). Alert to the conditions of gender inequality in the workplace and increasingly aware of the extent to which university teaching reproduced the male-dominated system in which it had been developed through the twentieth century, feminist literary scholars in Canada and elsewhere began to turn to the problems of literary studies’ reproduction of patriarchal history and politics. Feminist literary criticism and theory began to take shape across a range of approaches, including the representation of women in literary and cultural texts; the recovery or recuperation of women writers excluded or banished from the canon of Canadian literature as it was affirmed in anthologies, literary histories, and classrooms; an energetic attention to contemporary Canadian women writers; a consideration of the ways in which the experience of gender is encoded in and shapes both writing and the responses to writing; a consideration of women’s writing as a practice or technology of gender; a problematizing of language as a sign system within which meaning is always already determined along the axis of male dominance and thus as a patriarchal apparatus (what Audre Lorde famously referred to as “the master’s house” [Lorde 110]); a consideration of gender as a category that intersects with other categories of identity such as race, sexuality, ability, class, ethnicity, religion, and age; the exposing of the structural and systemic nature of patriarchy in everyday life; the mobilization of feminist criticism as a form of activism with the goal of producing social change; and the critical analysis of feminist literary theory and criticism itself, as a discourse subject to inequalities across multiple registers. Feminism in Canada, as elsewhere, struggled through the 1980s and into the 1990s to avoid reproducing hierarchies of race, class, and sexuality, and many debates in this period focused on feminism itself as a discourse that did not represent all women equally.

850    Critical Fields and New Directions In tracing the history of academic feminist literary criticism of the 1970s and 1980s in Canada, it is important to remember that during this period, as Julia Emberley has pointed out, “Native women, struggling for self-determination from Canadian colonial interests, challenged the validity of feminist theories and practices” (xv). First Nations and Métis women in Canada, while working for Indigenous women’s rights in this period, may not have identified as feminists or within a feminist movement that often failed to recognize or address the nature of Indigenous women’s concerns or that sometimes offered a kind of inclusion that is only a partial and sometimes a profoundly inadequate solution to long historical oversight. While this is the case, it is also true that Indigenous women and Indigenous women’s politics of gender have significantly shaped feminism in Canada, precisely by drawing attention to the ways in which the categories of gender and nation are unstable and contingent and by reaffirming the need for a kind of decolonization that Keavy Martin has recently suggested requires “the academy to … radically shift its understanding about the nature and the location of knowledge” (4). In consequence of the recognition that gender and gender inequality are experienced in radically different ways, by the early 1990s it was usual in Canada, as in other international contexts, to refer not to feminism as a monolithic politics but to feminisms, a range of approaches to gender inequality across multiple registers of identity, theories, and critical practices. Identity politics shaped feminisms across categories formed around the embodied experience of social hierarchies within the broad category of gender. For example, woman of colour feminism emerged in this country, as elsewhere, as a crucial discursive location for the production of anti-racist feminist politics, as well as for the foundational countering of oppression based on gender and race.9 Along different but comparable lines, although queer theory would not take clear shape in the academic context until the early 1990s, lesbian feminism emerged in the 1970s and 1980s in Canada as a critical practice attentive to questions of the experience of gender and sexuality and to the problem of language’s heteronormativity. Rooted in social and political activism and in the responses of female academics to inequality in the workplace, Canadian feminist literary criticism and theory began to emerge in small feminist magazines, formed primarily by collectives of feminists working across a range of categories, including but not limited to the academic and the literary. During this period of the 1970s and 1980s, several feminist periodicals made their first appearance in Canada. Influential magazines of this period include Branching Out in Edmonton in 1973 (ending production in 1980),10 Room of One’s Own in Vancouver in 1975,11 Fireweed: A Feminist Quarterly of Writing, Politics, Art and Culture in Toronto in 1978,12 Broadside: A Feminist Review in Toronto in 1979 (ending production in 1989),13 and Herizons: Women’s News + Feminist Views in 1979 in Winnipeg.14 These magazines—three of which are still published—circulated both inside and outside the academic context and provided an important space for the discussion of women’s literary and cultural texts.15 As feminism gained ground

Canadian Feminist Literary Criticism and Theory    851 in the academy and as women’s studies courses and programs began to take shape and courses in women’s writing began to proliferate,16 these magazines were joined by more specifically academic journals. In 1975, responding to a growing need “to find reading materials for students as well as journals that would publish the emerging scholarship,” Donna Smyth and Margaret Conrad of Acadia University in Nova Scotia founded Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture, and Social Justice (“Atlantis, Journal History”). First published at Acadia, the journal moved in 1980 to Mount St. Vincent University in Halifax, location of the first department of Women’s Studies in Canada (“Atlantis, Journal History”). The Canadian Women’s Studies Association was founded in 1982 (“History of WGSRF”) and the journal Canadian Woman Studies appeared in the same year. In 1981, the journal Tessera was established “as a result of conversations among its founding editors, Barbara Godard, Daphne Marlatt, Kathy Mezei, and Gail Scott at a York University conference on feminist literary theory in Canada. Their goal was to foster the development of new modes of writing both creative and critical texts which was being pioneered in Quebec” (“Tessera [journal]”). Tessera began publishing out of Simon Fraser University and Stong College at York University in 1984 (“Tessera [journal]”). The first feminist academic journal in Canada dedicated to literary analysis, and a vital force in the development of feminist theory and criticism in English and French in this country, Tessera ceased publication in 2005.17 While Canadian feminist academics also published their work in non-Canadian feminist periodicals and, in increasing numbers through the 1980s and 1990s, in “mainstream” academic journals, it is clear that prior to the 1980s there was very little existing space in Canadian academic criticism for a feminist critique of literary and cultural texts, and that many feminists in this country consequently undertook, of necessity, to create their own space for the presentation, publication, and circulation of critical and theoretical writing.18 Periodicals are one aspect of this work. Feminist-organized conferences and sessions at conferences are another, and such events and the publications they generated represent a significant part of the process of changing the contours and the gender hierarchies of Canadian universities and a crucial location for the formation of feminist literary discourse and community in Canada.

Feminist Critical Anthologies in Canada in the 1980s Jane Gallop has suggested that academic feminist literary theory and criticism in the United States emerged in and through anthologies. In her 1992 book, Around 1981: Academic Feminist Literary Theory, Gallop considers the shaping of the area through “anthologies of American academic literary criticism published from 1972 to 1987” (10). In Canada, in more or less the same period, anthologies likewise

852    Critical Fields and New Directions emerged as a defining genre of—or forum for—academic feminist literary criticism and theory. In the early 1980s, a cluster of important anthologies appeared in Canada, mostly resulting from conferences that were themselves signal events in the development of critical feminism in this country. The earliest of these in conception is Gynocritics/La gynocritique: Feminist Approaches to Writing by Canadian and Québécoise Women/Approches féministes à l’écriture des canadiennes et québécoise. Edited by Tessera co-founder Barbara Godard and published in 1987 by ECW Press in Toronto, this volume gathered a selection of papers originally presented “at the Dialogue Conference held in October 1981 at York University—one of the first conferences on literary criticism to be held in Canada” (Godard, “Introduction” i).19 Godard’s contributions to the volume included an important account of Canadian feminist theory and criticism to 1986, “Mapmaking: A Survey of Feminist Criticism,” and a 115-page bibliography of feminist criticism in Canada and Québec, as well as an introductory essay. The volume is in principle and in many parts bilingual: its introduction and bibliography appear in both French and English, and it includes papers written in both French and English (although not all translated) with headnotes in the other language. Emerging from the 1981 conference, Gynocritics/La gynocritique was preceded into print by other significant anthologies in French and English, volumes that likewise affirmed the flourishing of feminist theory and criticism in Canada and concomitantly strongly suggested that Canada was emerging as a key location for the development of feminist theory and criticism globally. Canada, officially bilingual only after 1969 but home to French and English settler cultures since the eighteenth century, was a location in which the feminist theory that had been developing in the intellectual context of psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, Marxism, and post-1968 revolutionary thinking in France found deep connections, and Québec feminists such as Annie Leclerc and Madeleine Gagnon emerged as strong voices in what were often characterized as the “new French feminisms.”20 In 1983, the volume Féminité, Subversion, Écriture focused critical attention on several influential Québec feminists, including Chantal Chawaf, France Théoret, and Louky Bersianik. Like Gynocritics/La gynocritique, it foregrounded the convergences of Québec with French feminist writing of the period. In the feminine: women and words/les femmes et les mots, the conference proceedings of a 1983 Vancouver conference (“Women and Words/Les femmes et les mots”), was published in 1985. Edited by a collective—Ann Dybikowski, Victoria Freeman, Daphne Marlatt, Barbara Pulling, and Betsy Warland—the volume was published by Longspoon Press in the Department of English at the University of Alberta. The conference is noted in the introduction to the volume as having “brought together over 1,000 anglophone and francophone women involved in traditional and alternative forms of literary activity” (9), an extraordinary number that serves as powerful evidence of the extent of the desire for such literary activity at that moment. The volume is in English but includes a significant number of texts by francophone feminists in translation. It also foregrounds “double colonization” (51) as a problem in Canada

Canadian Feminist Literary Criticism and Theory    853 for First Nations and Métis women, and for women of colour. Important works by Indigenous women—Beth Cuthand, Jeannette C. Armstrong, and Beth Brant— appear in this anthology. A Mazing Space: Writing Canadian Women Writing, edited by Shirley Neuman and Smaro Kamboureli, was published in 1986, also by Longspoon, in conjunction with Edmonton-based NeWest Press. Not the result or the proceedings of a conference per se, the volume was nonetheless conceived in the wake of the same “Women and Words/ Les femmes et les mots” conference as In the feminine. Neuman and Kamboureli attest to the importance of this conference in their introduction: The 1983 conference … attended by editors and publishers, teachers and librarians, oral historians and performers as well as writers in many genres and media, was the first public feminist forum to foster [a]‌multicultural interchange [among women writers from a variety of linguistic, social, and national backgrounds, among poets, novelists, dramatists, nonfiction writers, critics, theorists]. That interchange produced among its participants a communal sense of a women’s culture in Canada that drew its strength from its plurality. The writing of Canadian women registers that plurality, a plurality which also informs the essays about writing in this collection. (ix)

The essays in the volume are written in English, but the volume includes writing by francophone feminists in translation. Francophone feminists also produced two later anthologies in the 1980s:  in 1987, the volume L’Emergence d’une culture au féminin, edited by Marisa Zavalloni and published in Montreal, and in 1988, the volume La théorie, un dimanche, also published in Montreal. Important publications based on feminist work in the 1980s appeared in the early 1990s: these volumes include Telling It: Women and Language across Cultures (Press Gang, 1991), edited by Sky Lee, Daphne Marlatt, Lee Maracle, and Betsy Warland and based on a conference organized by Marlatt in 1988, and Re(Dis)covering Our Foremothers: Nineteenth-Century Canadian Women Writers (University of Ottawa Press, 1990), edited by Lorraine McMullen and based on a conference held in Ottawa, also in 1988. Canadian critical feminist anthologies of the 1980s were important because, as Gallop has shown was the case in the United States, they worked to establish a historical canon of women’s writing in Canada and to give shape to the emergent area of academic feminist literary criticism and theory. Less ephemeral than the print periodical, these print volumes can be seen to have established solid ground for the communication and circulation of feminist ideas in the Canadian academy. The struggle to find space for women in literary studies and forums for the publication of feminist writing was neither quick nor easy, and these records of women’s achievements in weighty print constituted powerful signs of social and institutional change. Simultaneously records of the recent past and visions of the near future, these anthologies are, moreover, peculiarly appropriate for feminist criticism and theory which, in Canada, as elsewhere, is situated precisely along this temporality.

854    Critical Fields and New Directions

Feminist Criticism, Feminist Theory: The Canadian Context The difference between academic feminist literary “criticism” and “theory” in the 1970s and 1980s is often characterized not only as a matter of what Godard suggests is the “primacy of social action” in the one and an attention to language in the other (iii) but as a national distinction. Gallop notes the focus in American feminist literary academic culture on the “difference between French and American feminism” (3); Domna C. Stanton notes what she calls “the Franco-American Dis-Connection” (335) between theories grounded in deconstruction and psychoanalysis, on the one hand (French), and critical practices grounded in canonical and historical revision through a critique of the ways in which the politics of gender determine cultural production, on the other (American). These differences resonated somewhat differently in the Canadian context. In her introduction to Gynocritics/La gynocritique, Godard draws attention to the ways in which “the divergent traditions which shape the literary criticism written by English and French feminists are reflected in the criticism written in Canada and Quebec” (iii). That is, English-Canadian feminist criticism could be seen to be shaped by Anglo-American criticism, and Québec feminist criticism by French feminist theory. However, while it is usual in Canada, as elsewhere, to see feminist theory emerging from France and feminist criticism from an Anglo-American context, it is also the case, as Canadian feminist writings of this period demonstrate, that the distinction between the two is less rigid than, for example, male-dominated theory anthologies produced in the 1980s and 1990s might suggest or, for that matter, than many feminists maintained at the time. By and large, feminist criticism—or feminist literary criticism—is a term used to designate practices of reading gender in and in relation to literary and cultural texts; feminist theory (or feminist literary theory), in contrast, refers less to the analysis of texts per se than to the formulation of a discourse of analysis in which the significance of gender in the production of meaning in language and culture is foregrounded and problematized. Both criticism and theory, as the work of the second wave so clearly demonstrates, undertake foundational and systemic change with regard to the ways women write and the ways their writing is read. Both are thus engaged with the problem of language as a patriarchal apparatus; both share the goal of achieving gender equality. Although, as Victoria Walker notes in the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory, the “particular adaptation of French and early American feminism” in the “political and social context” of Québec resulted in the “specificity” of Québec feminism in relation to the two major nationally situated streams (50), it is also possible to see that both Québec and Canadian academic feminist criticism developed practices that drew on French theories of écriture féminine, or what Ann Rosalind Jones translated in 1981 as “writing the body,” and American (and British) critical models of reading women’s writing. This writing in the Québec context is usually referred to as l’écriture au féminin and in the Anglophone context as “writing in the feminine,” terms that mark both a

Canadian Feminist Literary Criticism and Theory    855 connection to French feminism and a difference from it. The dual and convergent adaptations in French and English are possible in the Canadian context precisely because of the intercultural dialogue created in such forums as bilingual conferences and their publications and as periodicals such as Tessera, where both Québec and Canadian academic feminism can be seen to be undertaking important and influential work between and across the major nationally identified feminisms of the period. These practices are often characterized not only by an engagement with language as a system in which gender oppression is encoded and reproduced, but by their negotiation of criticism and theory, theory and fiction, and criticism and creative writing: feminist writings of this period in both French and English frequently undertake what Walker suggests is a kind of creative boundary-blurring along the lines of genre as well as of language (50).21 For example, although the “fiction/theory” fostered by Tessera in particular is seen to have had its origins in Québec and in particular in the work of influential feminist writer Nicole Brossard,22 a similar and related creative and dynamic critical feminism is generated in the work of anglophone writers (“Tessera, publishing feminist theory”). Bilingual writer and Tessera co-founder Gail Scott is a writer positioned importantly between anglophone and francophone feminisms: her work is central to this period of academic feminist criticism and theory between Canada and Québec.23 Daphne Marlatt, Betsy Warland, Erín Moure, Lola Lemire Tostevin, Dionne Brand, Di Brandt, and M. NourbeSe Philip are among the many women in the second wave in Canada producing a comparably experimental anglophone cross-genre writing “in the feminine.”24 Although Scott suggests in 1989 that Québec feminism of the 1970s and 1980s began to develop an “energetic fusion between feminism … and revolt in language and form” (38) earlier than was the case in English Canada, it is clear that during the decade of the 1980s both Québec and Canadian academic feminism had begun to forge a new discourse of plurality, bilingualism, and revolution in language that blurred the boundaries not only between criticism and theory but between theory and fiction, and criticism and creative writing: much of the feminist writing of this period is poetic as well as critical, anthologized as creative work as often as it is taken up as critical feminism. Thus, as Godard points out, the “divergent traditions” (French/English, theory/criticism) not only produced continuities with the dominant national feminisms of the period but importantly, and uniquely, resulted in “new directions” in feminist writing in Canada and Québec (iii), both of which she sees to be “pointing towards some crossing of boundaries as they also begin to bring [the] question of language to the foreground, both the nature of the linguistic experiments of women writers and the question of [an] elusive critical language” (iii) that was directed at restructuring institutional and social space. In addition to fiction/theory and other creative feminist criticism, a stream of Canadian academic feminist literary criticism and theory also developed in the 1980s with a focus on the historical problem of the canon, on the nature of women’s writing in patriarchy, and on the relationship of this writing to the literary institution and to the university as a place for teaching, learning, and research. As one form of feminist activism for social change in the period of the second wave, academic feminist literary criticism and theory undertook to reshape literary history along the axis of gender and

856    Critical Fields and New Directions to develop new and revisionary practices of reading and writing that would themselves work against patriarchal hierarchies and systemic practices of affirming and reproducing gender inequality. This work by critics such as Gwen Davies, Carole Gerson, Smaro Kamboureli, Carrie MacMillan, Lorraine McMullen, Shirley Neuman, Barbara Godard, and many others challenged Canadian literary history, foregrounding and countering the androcentric bias of the canon and turning attention to absent or forgotten women writers and the problematic terms of exclusion.25 By the 1970s, the English-Canadian literary canon, developed through the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth in anthologies of poetry, school readers, and surveys of Canadian literature, was predominantly male. This was true despite the significant foundational work of women writers, including Frances Brooke, who produced the first novel of Canada (The History of Emily Montague, 1769); Julia Catherine Beckwith Hart, who wrote the first novel published in Canada by a Canadian-born writer (St. Ursula’s Convent, or The Nun of Canada, 1824); Margaret Marshall Saunders, who wrote the first Canadian book to sell over a million copies (Beautiful Joe, 1893); and L.M. Montgomery, who published the first Canadian book—and one of only a few works of fiction internationally—to remain in constant print for a century after its publication (Anne of Green Gables, 1908). In addition to exposing the patriarchal biases of literary representation and the canon, feminist criticism of the second wave began to draw insistent attention to buried or overlooked histories of women’s writing, to turn to the work of women who had been well-known and popular writers in their own moments, and to unearth others whose writing had been ignored. This critical project characterizes much of the feminist literary criticism that emerged in Canada through the later 1980s and into the 1990s. By the last decade of the twentieth century, beginning with the 1990 publication of the first feminist historical study of women’s writing in Canada, Re(Dis)covering Our Foremothers: Nineteenth-Century Canadian Women Writers, edited by Lorraine McMullen, the critical project of literary recovery had been well established as an important branch of the work of feminism in Canada.26

Aftermath and Afterlife: The Turn to Postfeminism and the “Third Wave” In the early 1990s, reports were circulating in academic and other contexts of the “death” of feminism. It is possible, however, to see the period of the so-called “third wave” or of “postfeminism” less as a sign of feminism in ruins than of a generational and cultural shift and an expansion along multiple lines, and thus to understand that the work begun by so many women in Canadian universities in the 1970s has continued through the quarter century since the waning of the “second wave.” Although women’s and gender studies programs and departments are well established at Canadian universities, and although the numbers of women in the academic workplace continue slowly to rise,27

Canadian Feminist Literary Criticism and Theory    857 the conditions motivating feminism’s work for equality along gender lines persist, academic feminist writing and activism have continued to develop in response to these conditions, and the work begun with such energy and breadth in the second wave is still evident, not only in the significantly changed structure of the academy as a place for working and learning but in its current shaping by feminist scholars. Between the 1970s and the early 1990s, academic feminist literary criticism and theory emerged as an area in the Canadian academy and as a critical practice that undertook to oppose and displace patriarchal discourse through its resistance to traditional boundaries of genre, language, and meaning. In the Canadian context, academic feminism engaged with the emerging practices of critical feminism in other contexts, uniquely and radically moving the theoretical focus on language across linguistic boundaries. It began slowly to recognize the need in Canada for what Julia Emberley calls a “feminism of decolonization” (4). It may be difficult to remember now how profoundly resistant the academic institution was in the 1970s and 1980s to feminism—to the hiring of five English professors at the University of Alberta,28 to the inclusion of feminist criticism that was not “French feminism” in anthologies of theory, to the acknowledgment that the standards of canonicity that excluded women did so on the basis of a self-replicating system of gender hierarchy. While conditions of inequality persist across institutional and social registers that include the university, the fact that the conditions that led to academic women’s radical activism in language and social space have receded from the cultural foreground is a compelling sign of the changes effected through the work of the second wave.

Notes 1. The term les écritures au féminin refers to writing by women as well as, more specifically, to the category of feminist writing in Québec that in the 1970s and 1980s engaged with the theories of language, writing, and gender central to the development of feminist theory in France and often characterized with reference to French theory as l’écriture féminine (see Walker 50). The term les écritures au féminin is usually translated as “writing in the feminine,” the term l’écriture féminine as “writing the body,” following Ann Rosalind Jones’s influential essay in Feminist Studies in 1981. 2. This and all translations in the chapter are my own. Many thanks to Marie Carrière for her help and advice. 3. Margaret Wente uses this term in her back-cover blurb for the 2001 book Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture, edited by Paul Nathanson and Katherine K. Young (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP). 4. E. J. Hobsbawm suggests that the “non-traditional classes and strata … growing in the urbanizing societies of developed countries, and the unprecedented migrations which distributed a multiple diaspora of peoples across the globe” in part explain the “friction” that would take shape as competing nationalisms at the end of the nineteenth century, in relation to which so much localized and nationally specific politics of gender identity and gender roles began to develop (109): women should stay home to generate the future “race”; women should not vote or participate in public activity, but should

858    Critical Fields and New Directions focus on childbearing and the work of the home. Thus feminism of this period, like the anti-feminism of this period, is typically nationally specific, while sharing characteristics across national locations. 5. The phrase “the personal is the political” was used by New York feminist Carol Hanisch in a 1969 essay of the same name (http://www.carolhanisch.org/CHwritings/PIP.html). Hanisch was the originator of the famous 1968 Atlantic City protest against the Miss America pageant (see http://carolhanisch.org). 6. “La Fédération des femmes du Québec a été fondée en 1966, à l’initiative de Madame Thérèse Casgrain, pour défendre les intérêts et les droits des femmes par la lutte collective. L’objectif de départ: regrouper, sans distinction de race, d’origine ethnique, de couleur ou de croyance, des femmes et des associations pour coordonner leurs activités dans le domaine de l’action sociale” (“Historique”) [“The Federation of Women of Quebec was founded in 1966, on the initiative of Madame Thérèse Casgrain, to defend the interests and the rights of women through collective struggle. The original goal: to bring together, regardless of race, ethnicity, colour or creed, women and women’s organizations, in order to coordinate their activities in the field of social action”]. 7. “[M]‌andated to inquire into and report upon the status of women in Canada, and to recommend what steps might be taken by the Federal Government to ensure for women equal opportunities with men in all aspects of Canadian society, having regard for the distribution of legislative powers under the constitution of Canada, particularly with reference to federal statutes, regulations and policies that concern or affect the rights and activities of women” (“Royal Commission”), the commission “h[eld] hearings in [14] communities in all ten provinces, m[et] 890 witnesses, and receive[d] 468 briefs and 1,000 letters” (“Milestones … 1960s”). 8. Debates in the Canadian academy about gender in English courses were renewed in 2013 when University of Toronto instructor David Gilmour was reported across Canadian and international media as “not interested” in teaching books by women (“David Gilmour ‘Not Interested’ in Teaching on Women Authors,” CBC.ca, Sep. 25, 2013. http://www.cbc.ca/news/ canada/toronto/david-gilmour-not-interested-in-teaching-on-women-authors-1.1868197). Gilmour’s argument was that he could only teach texts which he felt “passionate” about, and that those texts were by men, suggesting, as second-wave feminists had done, that the experience of gender determines the relationship of a reader to a text. 9. Examples of anti-racist feminisms in late twentieth-century Canada are numerous. See, for example, Makeda Silvera, ed., The Other Woman: Women of Colour in Contemporary Canadian Literature (1994) and Piece of My Heart: A Lesbian-of-Colour Anthology (1991). Later in the decade, the anthology Scratching the Surface: Canadian Anti-Racist Feminist Thought, edited by Enakshi Dua and Angela Robinson, was published by the Women’s Press (1999). 10. “Published in Edmonton from 1973 to 1980, Branching Out was a professional quality magazine produced by volunteers with a mandate to publish literature, art and feminist analysis by Canadian women”: see Tessa Jordan, “Branching Out, 1973–1980: Canadian Second-Wave Feminism, Periodical Publishing and Cultural Politics,” Dissertation, University of Alberta, 2011 (https://era.library.ualberta.ca/public/view/item/uuid:89bb1197-0f19-417daa9c-f40d99630c01/). 11. Now called simply Room, the magazine continues to publish. See their website (http:// www.roommagazine.com) as well as “Room (magazine),” Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Room).

Canadian Feminist Literary Criticism and Theory    859 12. See “Fireweed (periodical),” Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fireweed_ (periodical)). 13. See the Broadside history and archives at http://www.broadsidefeminist.com. 14. See Herizons FAQ at http://www.herizons.ca/faq. 15. Herizons, Fireweed, and Room of One’s Own, now simply Room, are still in circulation in 2014. 16. According to Renee Bondy, “The first credit course in women’s studies was offered at the University of Toronto in 1970, and the first degree-granting program was at the University of British Columbia in 1971, a year after San Diego University established the first women’s studies program in North America.” 17. See “Tessera, publishing feminist theory and innovative writings by Canadian and Quebec women.” York University Library. 18. For example, as I have noted elsewhere, in the 20 years before 1989, only a dozen dissertations on Canadian women writers (or designated that way in the ProQuest dissertations database) were completed in Canadian universities; in the 20 years after 1990, that number rises to 94 (see Devereux, “Rediscovering”). 19. The Dialogue Conference program is reproduced in Gynocritics/La gynocritique 359–61. 20. New French Feminisms: An Anthology, edited by Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, was published in 1981. Undertaking to bring the ideas of feminists working in France to an English-speaking readership, the volume included the work of Québec writers Annie Leclerc and Madeleine Gagnon, whose writing was published in France and who cowrote, with Hélène Cixous, the 1978 volume La venue à l’écriture. Both Leclerc and Gagnon are included among the “new French feminisms” identified by Marks and Courtivron. 21. Walker writes: out of l’écriture féminine [writing the body] and social activism is born “l’écriture au féminin” [“writing in the feminine”]. Building on the experimental writing of the 1960s and 1970s, Quebec feminist writings fuse the practices of writing and theorizing, thereby blurring the generic boundaries between poetry, prose, fiction, criticism, and theory. (50) Walker outlines a “community of women readers and writers in dialogue” in Québec (50–51) working across “generic boundaries” to produce a creative and dynamic critical feminism that is at once like, embedded within, and separate from nationally situated “French feminism”—thus its separate entry in the 1993 Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory (Walker, “Feminist Criticism, Quebec” 50–52). 22. Québec writer Nicole Brossard produced some of the most widely read and influential texts of the second wave in Canada, including Le Désert mauve (Montreal: L’Hexagone) (translated as The Mauve Desert) in 1987 and These Our Mothers; or, The Disintegrating Chapter, translated by Barbara Godard (Toronto: Coach House), in 1983. Her works in French and in English translation established the category of fiction/theory that would be central to writing in the feminine in the 1980s and early 1990s. Brossard was a co-founder of the magazines La Barre du jour and La Nouvelle barre du jour, which published feminist writing of the period. 23. Gail Scott, also a founder of the French language magazine Spirale and a participant in a writing group that included influential Québec feminists Nicole Brossard, France Théoret, Louise Dupré, Louise Cotnoir, and Louky Bersianik, has produced a body of work that crosses genres and language, as well as traversing and bringing

860    Critical Fields and New Directions into productive union French and English traditions. Her 1989 essay collection Spaces like Stairs is one important example of the engagement across critical traditions, as is Daphne Marlatt’s 1984 “Musing with Mothertongue,” only one of Marlatt’s many influential feminist texts. In this essay, Marlatt challenges the operation of language as inescapably patriarchal and androcentric, claiming it to be “like the mother’s body” (54): “we are truly contained within the body of our mothertongue” (55). In this gesture, the text marks a strong connection to the work begun in France in the 1970s, notably that of Hélène Cixous in her influential 1975 essay “La Rire de la Méduse” (published in translation in 1976 in the American feminist journal Signs): in this essay, Cixous theorizes the maternal as a site of power and resistance for women against patriarchal and phallocentric language. 24. See, for example, Daphne Marlatt, Touch to My Tongue (Edmonton: Longspoon, 1984); Betsy Warland, open is broken (Edmonton: Longspoon, 1984) and, with Marlatt, Double Negative (gynergy/Ragweed Press, 1988); Erín Moure, Domestic Fuel (Toronto: Anansi, 1985) and WSW (Montreal: Véhicule, 1989); and M. NourbeSe Philip, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (Havana, Cuba:  Casa de las Américas, 1988). On Canadian women’s poetry and criticism of this period, see Marie Carrière, Writing in the Feminine in French and English Canada: A Question of Ethics (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2002), and Susan Rudy and Pauline Butling, Writing in Our Time: Canada’s Radical Poetries in English (1957–2003) (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2005). 25. See, for instance, Carole Gerson, “The Canon between the Wars: Field-Notes of a Feminist Literary Archaeologist,” in Canadian Canons: Essays in Literary Value, ed. Robert Lecker (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1991) 46–56 and “Anthologies and the Canon of Early Canadian Women Writers,” in Re(Dis)covering Our Foremothers: Nineteenth-Century Canadian Women Writers, ed. Lorraine McMullen (Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 1990) 55–76. See also essays by MacMillan and McMullen in Re(Dis)covering, as well as essays by Godard and Davies in Gynocritics/La gynocritique and by Neuman and Kamboureli in A Mazing Space. These scholars also produced and many of them continue to produce a substantial body of work outside of these early essays. 26. Key texts produced after 1990 include Misao Dean’s Practising Femininity: Domestic Realism and the Performance of Gender in Early Canadian Fiction (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1998); Marie Carrière’s Writing in the Feminine in French and English Canada: A Question of Ethics (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2002); Faye Hammill’s Literary Culture and Female Authorship in Canada:  1760–2000 (Amsterdam:  Rodopi, 2003); Jennifer Chambers’s Diversity and Change in Early Canadian Women’s Writing (Newcastle:  Cambridge Scholars, 2008); Janice Fiamengo’s The Woman’s Page: Journalism and Rhetoric in Early Canada (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2008); and Carole Gerson’s Canadian Women in Print, 1750–1918 (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2012). Many other monographs published in this period focus on questions of particular women’s writing and literary communities and events in Canada. The period of the 1990s also shows a significant rise in the number of dissertations produced in Canadian universities engaging with women’s writing in Canada. 27. See Cecily Devereux, “What to Expect” 90, 104. 28. See Jo-Ann Wallace, “ ‘Fit and Qualified’: The Equity Debate at the University of Alberta,” in Beyond Political Correctness: Toward the Inclusive University, ed. Stephen Richer and Lorna Weir (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1995) 136–64.

Canadian Feminist Literary Criticism and Theory    861

Works Cited Anderson, Doris. “National Action Committee on the Status of Women.” The Canadian Encyclopedia. Web. Accessed 24 June 2013. “Atlantis, Journal History.” Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture and Social Justice. Web. Accessed 12 Aug. 2014. Bondy, Renee. “Women’s Studies: Is It Time to Change Course?” Herizons (Fall 2010). http:// www.herizons.ca/node/439. Web. Accessed 12 Aug. 2014. Brooke, Frances. The History of Emily Montague. London: J. Dodsley, 1769. Print. Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” 1975. Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1.4 (1976): 875–93. Print. Devereux, Cecily. “Rediscovering Re(Dis)covering: Back to the Second-Wave Feminist Future.” Home Ground and Foreign Territory:  Essays on Early Canadian Literature. Ed. Janice Fiamengo. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 2014. 67–88. Print. ———. “What to Expect When You’re Not Expecting, or, What Having a Uterus or Even Just Looking Like You Have One Means for Women in the Academy.” Not Drowning but Waving: Women, Feminism and the Liberal Arts. Ed. Susan Brown, Jeanne Perreault, Jo-Ann Wallace, and Heather Zwicker. Edmonton: U of Alberta P, 2011. 87–106. Print. Dybikowski, Ann, Victoria Freeman, Daphne Marlatt, Barbara Pulling, and Betsy Warland, eds. In the feminine: women and words/les femmes et les mots. Conference proceedings 1983. Edmonton: Longspoon, 1985. Print. ———. “Introduction.” Dybikowski et al. 9–10. Emberley, Julia V. Thresholds of Difference:  Feminist Critique, Native Women’s Writings, Postcolonial Theory. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1993. Print. Gallop, Jane. Around 1981:  Academic Feminist Literary Theory. New  York:  Routledge, 1992. Print. Godard, Barbara. “Bibliography of Feminist Criticism in Canada and Quebec.” Godard 231–50. Print. ———, ed. Gynocritics/La gynocritique:  Feminist Approaches to Writing by Canadian and Québécoise Women/Approches féministes à l’écriture des canadiennes et québécoises. Toronto: ECW P, 1987. Print. ———. “Introduction.” Godard i–xxiv. ———. “Mapmaking: A Survey of Feminist Criticism.” Godard 1–30. Hart, Julia Catherine Beckwith. St. Ursula’s Convent, or The Nun of Canada. Kingston, ON: Hugh C. Thomson, 1824. Print. “Historique.” Fédération des femmes du Québec. Web. Accessed 24 June 2013. “History of WGSRF [Women’s and Gender Studies et Recherches Féministes].” Women’s and Gender Studies et Recherches Féministes. www.wgsrf.com. Web. Accessed 12 Aug. 2014. Hobsbawm, E.J. Nations and Nationalism since 1780:  Programme, Myth, Reality. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. Print. Jones, Ann Rosalind. “Writing the Body:  Toward an Understanding of L’écriture feminine.” Feminist Studies 7.2 (1981): 247–63. Print. Lamy, Suzanne, and Irène Pagès, eds. Féminité, Subversion, Écriture. Quebec:  Éditions du remuee-ménage, 1983. Print. Lewis, Jone Johnson. “President’s Commission on the Status of Women.” About.com. womenshistory.about.com. Web. Accessed 27 June 2013.

862    Critical Fields and New Directions Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Berkeley: Crossing Press, 1984. 110–14. Print. “Marie Thérèse (Forget) Casgrain.” Archived—Celebrating Women’s Achievements. Library and Archives Canada. collectionscanada.gc.ca. Web. Accessed 24 June 2013. Marks, Elaine, and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds. New French Feminisms:  An Anthology. New York: Schocken, 1981. Print. Marlatt, Daphne. “Musing with Mothertongue.” Room of One’s Own 8.4 (1984): 53–56. Print. Martin, Keavy. Stories in a New Skin: Approaches to Inuit Literature. Winnipeg: U of Manitoba P, 2012. Print. Messer-Davidow, Ellen. “Feminist Theory and Criticism. 1.  From Movement Critique to Discourse Analysis.” Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory: The Johns Hopkins Guide. Ed. Michael Groden, Martin Kreiswirth, and Imre Szeman. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2012. 158–63. Print. “Milestones in Canadian Women’s History: The 1960s.” PAR-L. unb.ca/PAR-L. Web. Accessed 20 June 2013. “Milestones in Canadian Women’s History: The 1970s.” PAR-L. unb.ca/PAR-L. Web. Accessed 20 June 2013. Montgomery, L.M. Anne of Green Gables. Boston: L. C. Page, 1908. Print. “The National Organization for Women’s 1966 Statement of Purpose.” National Organization for Women. Now.org. Web. Accessed 24 June 2013. Neuman, Shirley. “Women, Words, and the Literary Canon.” Dybikowski et al. 136–42. Neuman, Shirley, and Smaro Kamboureli, eds. A Mazing Space:  Writing Canadian Women Writing. Edmonton: Longspoon/NeWest, 1986. Print. ———. “Preface.” Neuman and Kamboureli ix–xi. Ornstein, Michael, Penni Stewart, and Janice Drakich. “The Status of Women Faculty in Canadian Universities.” Education Quarterly Review 5.2 (1998). Statistics Canada—Catalogue no. 81-003 5.2. 9–29. Statistics Canada. Statscan.gc.ca. Web. Accessed 19 June 2013. “The Royal Commission on the Status of Women.” Canada’s Human Rights History. Historyofrights.com. Web. Accessed 20 June 2013. Sangster, Joan. “Invoking Experience as Evidence.” CHR Forum. Canadian Historical Review 92.1 (2011): 135–61. Print. Saunders, Marshall (Margaret). Beautiful Joe:  An Autobiography. Philadelphia:  Griffith and Rowland, 1893. Print. Scott, Gail. Spaces like Stairs: Essays. Toronto: Women’s P, 1989. Print. Stanton, Domna C. “Language and Revolution:  The Franco-American Dis-Connection. The Future of Difference.” Feminist Literary Theory: A Reader. 2nd ed. Ed. Mary Eagleton. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. 335–37. Print. “Tessera, publishing feminist theory and innovative writings by Canadian and Quebec women.” York University Library. Web. Accessed 12 Aug. 2014. “Tessera (journal).” Archeion: Archives Association of Ontario. Web. Accessed 12 Aug. 2013. Walker, Victoria. “Feminist Criticism, Quebec.” Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory: Approaches, Scholars, Terms. Ed. Irena R. Makaryk. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1993. 50–52. Print.

Chapter 46

Gay and L e sbia n L iteratu re i n C a na da Terry Goldie and Lee Frew

The title of this chapter should be immediately questionable at both ends. First, nothing before the middle of the twentieth century could accurately be called “gay” or “lesbian.” There are various texts that flirt with the homoerotic, some more flirtatious than others, and many that clearly pursue the homosocial, particularly those that depict societies in which only one gender has a central presence. More of the latter are about men than are about women, but there are examples of each gender. Then, at the end of twentieth century, the category goes the other way, quite beyond the limitations of denotative categories such as “gay and lesbian.” The most obvious example would be literature by those who identify as transsexual or transgendered, but there are many other possibilities. One could use one of the acronyms, such as LGBT or the more extensive LGBTTIQQ2SA, which means “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transsexual, Transgender, Intersex, Queer, Questioning, Two-Spirited and Allies.” This latter term has been called “the alphabet soup” of sexualities. No doubt the term most often adopted by the latest crop of writers of the sexual diversities is “queer.” As people working in the field, we have often found the need to explore the definitions of “queer.” As Terry Goldie explains in his introduction to Queersexlife: A quick perusal of the OED suggests the base of the word. The earliest example comes from 1508:  “Heir cumis our awin queir Clerk.” In other words, “queer” as strange or slightly off. Then from 1561, “A Quire bird is one that came lately out of prison.” 1740 provides “Instead of returning the good Guinea again, they used to give a Queer One.”1 The earliest usage that specifies a homosexual meaning is from 1922, noted as coming from the delightfully named The Practical Value of Scientific Study of Juvenile Delinquents (Children’s Bureau, U.S. Dept. of Labor): “A young man, easily ascertainable to be unusually fine in other characteristics, is probably ‘queer’ in sex tendency.” (9–10)

864    Critical Fields and New Directions Today, however, the meaning tends to be either political or purposefully ambiguous. In the former mode, it reflects the rhetoric of groups such as Queer Nation:  “We’re here. We’re queer. And we’re not going shopping.” In the latter, it suggests the multiple gaps pursued by queer theory and also the refusal to accept a simple identity by people who are part of the alphabet soup. Of course a category such as “questioning,” as we expressed it at the outset of this chapter, could include almost anyone. Thus in the present instance we shall emphasize “gay and lesbian,” until a point at the end of the twentieth century when “queer” takes over to a degree that it must be accommodated. In this respect, we employ the terminology used in the full-length critical overviews of gay and lesbian Canadian literature currently available, Peter Dickinson’s Here Is Queer: Nationalisms, Sexualities, and the Literatures of Canada (1999); Goldie’s Pink Snow: Homotextual Possibilities in Canadian Fiction (2003); and Scott Rayter, Donald W. McLeod, and Maureen FitzGerald’s Queer CanLit: Canadian Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered (LGBT) Literature in English: An Exhibition (2008). But given this is Canada, the second problem of the chapter’s title to address is the bilingual nation. This chapter is about literature in English, which constitutes one of the two main literatures in Canada that remain largely distinct. Among the gay and lesbian authors, some francophones have become familiar names in Canada but most not. This does not correlate with their importance in Québec literature. Thus Émile Nelligan has always been regarded as central to the development of francophone culture in Canada, and now his poetry is often considered to be at least homoerotic if not homosexual, but he remains little known in anglophone Canada. On the other hand, many of Michel Tremblay’s plays, including the overtly homosexual Hosanna, have been almost as influential in translation as they were in their original French. It is interesting, however, that the primary exception to the usual “two solitudes” rule, for Canadian literature in general, is part of lesbian culture. There have been various anglophone Canadian writers who have known a great deal about francophone literature, such as the poet F.R. Scott, but their knowledge has seldom had much influence on the rest of anglophone Canada. But the rise of lesbian feminism in the late 1960s and early 1970s seems to have provided an opportunity for a highly productive crossover. Thus anglophone writers such as Daphne Marlatt and Gail Scott and francophones such as Nicole Brossard and Louky Bersianik read each others’ texts and promoted them widely. Besides numerous conferences and other events, there were many translations and even a journal, Tessera, which both extended the reach of feminist theory throughout Canada and increased the awareness of the other literature. The long-time editor of Tessera, Barbara Godard, was indefatigable in promoting this sharing, but it went beyond even her constant efforts. Even if unilingual, a Canadian lesbian feminist poet from the period 1970–2000 had a bicultural awareness that has never been a part of any other Canadian literary community. The beginning of “gay and lesbian literature” in Canada is of course impossible to pinpoint, as there are various homoerotic glimmers long before the term becomes appropriate. Generally, John Richardson’s 1832 wilderness romance Wacousta, or The Prophesy: A Tale of the Canadas, written well before Canadian Confederation, is

Gay and Lesbian Literature in Canada    865 given as some kind of starting point, not least because of its status in Canadian literature and criticism, but also because of the sexuality of the gothic romance. There is no overt homosexuality in Wacousta, but the novel is full of various bits of homoeroticism, from extravagant demonstrations of affection to extensive portraits of male beauty. As Goldie’s Pink Snow asserts, this could be ascribed to the esteem for male friendship so often expressed in the nineteenth century, which need have nothing to do with male-male sexual activity, and yet, as George Haggerty suggests in Men in Love, what the period would have called “the sodomite” is always lurking in the wings. Indeed, following a number of critics who acknowledge male-male attraction in Wacousta, Peter Dickinson opens his study Here Is Queer by examining the triangulation of male homosocial desire in Richardson’s novel. He argues that “readerly/writerly panic is induced as much by a terror of the unknown nature of same-sex and mixed-race attachments as it is by the unknowable in nature itself ” (13). Set as it is in the Canadian wilderness at a point “where national, social, and sexual conventions have not yet been stabilized” (15), “sexually suspect” forms of Old-World desire on the part of the novel’s characters are barred from resuming in the New, and the sentimental romance of Sir Walter Scott that Richardson mimics “becomes ‘inverted’ gothicism” (14). L. Chris Fox extends the reading of homosociality in Wacousta to female-female bonds that, while not suggesting “an originary lesbian moment within Canada’s literary canon” (6), do present a challenge to “The patriarchal structures of old-world society” and gesture toward an alternative “community that includes strong female and native influences” (24). On the women’s side, a logical start might be L.M. Montgomery. As Laura Robinson notes, “By constructing a world where women’s love for each other is a source of power and fulfillment, and then emphasizing the inevitability of marriage, Montgomery’s [Anne of Green Gables] novels underscore the fact that, at the turn of the twentieth century, heterosexuality was compulsory” (13). Montgomery’s own journals show an interest in female-female affection and also a rather self-conscious rejection of the idea that she might be “a lesbian.” So, as in the case of the earlier Richardson, the homoerotics are clear but the homosexual is not. The other possibilities are troubled in other ways. Establishing the first Canadian lesbian poet, for instance, introduces a different conundrum. There can be no doubt that Elsa Gidlow was a lesbian, and her On a Grey Thread (1923) has often been cited as the first North American publication of a book of lesbian poetry. Still, given that she was born in England and spent only childhood and adolescence in Canada before moving to the United States at 21, as a writer she seems irrelevant to anything that might be called Canadian, although her autobiography, Elsa, I Come with My Songs, published in 1986, has a number of references to her Canadian experience. Recognizing Dorothy Livesay as the “first” major Canadian poet who is lesbian might be quibbled for a different reason. Although her status in the canon has been comparatively certain since the publication of her highly regarded first book of poetry, Green Pitcher (1928), it was not until quite late in her life that “she actively participated in and celebrated lesbian relationship” (Gingell 2). While most would say that her concern for gender and sexuality was clear from an early point, she turned to lesbian love poetry

866    Critical Fields and New Directions much later, in Feeling the Worlds (1984), after “The Secret Doctrine of Women” and “The Enchanted Isle: A Dialogue,” published in 1979, “had obliquely introduced female lovers” (Thompson 108). A number of critics have observed that the lesbian poetics of Feeling the Worlds (1984) is crucial to Livesay’s developing feminist vision. Susan Gingell observes, for instance, that by “living out and articulating a lesbian subjectivity,” Livesay “pushed even further to expand the semantic space for women” within the limitations of patriarchal discourse (19). The first male who can be said to have published “gay poetry” is Frank Oliver Call, also the first poet featured in Seminal: The Anthology of Canada’s Gay Male Poets (2007), edited by John Barton and Billeh Nickerson. His presence in the tradition in Canada is not large, however, and he is usually noted for his tentatively modernist blending of conventional forms with free verse in his Acanthus and Wild Grape (1920), a collection that also takes up a homoerotic theme. More noteworthy is probably Patrick Anderson. The history of Canadian poetry is of course controversial, as different strands seem more influential to different people, but most would probably see developments in Montreal during World War II to be the beginnings of modern poetry in Canada. Anderson and F.R. Scott founded a magazine called Preview that featured many of the poets who created these beginnings, such as A.J.M. Smith, A.M. Klein, and P.K. Page. Early in this period, John Sutherland, editor of the rival magazine, First Statement, wrote a review of Anderson’s poetry that suggested “some sexual experience of a kind not normal” (4). Given the homophobia of the time, his position as a teacher at a private boys’ school, and his marriage to a woman, this episode was calamitous for Anderson, who threatened to sue and succeeded in obliging Sutherland to print a retraction. Born in England, Anderson’s arrival in Canada in 1940 was the result of his leftist pacifism in the years leading to World War II, first while he studied at Oxford University and then while at Columbia University on a Commonwealth Fellowship. In Canada, as well as his endeavours with Preview, he was part of more explicitly radical and political activities, such as his support of the Labour Progressive Party (the reorganized Communist Party of Canada after its banning in 1940), and his founding and editing of its “cultural magazine” En Masse in 1945. Whether it was his position as an immigrant, as a member of what might be called the harder left, or his sexuality, he never fit the Canadian scene and went back and forth to Britain often, before moving from Canada finally in 1949 during his protracted divorce. The dissolution of his marriage, as Robert Druce explains, resulted from Anderson’s “increasing acceptance of his own homosexual leanings; a cast of thought which he had for some time been strongly hinting at in his verse” (244). Druce sees such leanings in the poems “Y.M.C.A. Montreal” and “Drinker” from the early 1940s, but he also suggests that “the sensuousness and the recurrent homosexual undertones are to be discovered throughout Anderson’s writing, both in verse and prose” (246). Anderson’s life and career might be defined by two books: Eros: An Anthology of Male Friendship (1961), written with his lover at the time, Alistair Sutherland, and his last book, Return to Canada: Selected Poems, published in 1977. Regardless of place of birth and his later life spent in England, and “the sustained marginalization of [his] work from the aggressively masculinist and heterosexist canon

Gay and Lesbian Literature in Canada    867 of Canadian literature” (Dickinson 75), Anderson probably deserves acknowledgment as the first significant Canadian gay poet. There is an element linking a number of male poets from this period that ran counter to the virile nationalism that appealed to many Canadian critics of the day. As noted above, although First Statement and Preview had small circulations, they were largely responsible for the formation of a modernist poetic canon in Canada. While the former magazine favoured, as a putatively anti-colonial stance, a connection to “native” practitioners of American modernism, under Anderson’s editorship the poets featured in Preview were considered more “cosmopolitan” in being influenced by the British modernists of the 1930s, a distinction that Barton observes “could become further tainted with queer inflections, particularly when ‘native’ became allied with ‘masculine’ ” (16). This would fit Robert Finch and John Glassco, two writers from Anderson’s generation who are often included among gay male writers. Born in the United States to British parents, Finch was raised in Toronto from the age of nine and eventually became one of the poets published in A.J.M. Smith’s landmark New Provinces in 1936. Although the influential Smith assessed Finch’s work as “illustrat[ing] excellently a quality that has not previously appeared in Canadian literature, a quality that may be called dandyism” (qtd. in Trehearne 12, emphasis in original), Finch was later attacked for this very quality, in 1946, upon winning his first of two Governor General’s Awards for Poetry. Subsequently, his “critical reputation has dwindled to the point where he has been excluded from virtually all the contemporary major anthologies of Canadian poetry and literature” (Gingell-Beckmann 157). On the other hand, Glassco is often cited for many reasons, from his manufactured autobiography Memoirs of Montparnasse (1970) to his position as arguably Canada’s only successful author of literary pornography. His homosexual experience seems without doubt, although he is probably more accurately labeled a sexual libertine, and once again his writing has had little influence. In his examination of Glassco’s memoir, Richard Dellamora is unequivocal: “he and his book were elected for marginalization by their queerness. In the contest over the definition of Canadian identify that is one part of the modernist project in Canada, it was Glassco’s grace to fail to become a national subject” (257, emphasis in original). Thus, while sexual orientation no doubt limited the influence of these poets in Canadian literature, there seems also to have been a stylistic disconnection that no doubt has kept them from wider recognition. bill bissett is probably better known because of his aesthetic unorthodoxy than for the significance of his considerable body of poetry. Both Don Precosky and Ryan J. Cox give accounts of a political scandal in the late 1970s sometimes now referred to as the “bissett Affair,” the unsuccessful attempt on the part of a small cadre of Members of Parliament to shame the government into reviewing its arts funding policies by condemning the Canada Council of the Arts and denouncing bissett’s work as pornographic. The target of their fury seems to have been bissett’s regular use of profanity, sexual imagery, and non-standardized spelling, rather than homosexuality. Most of his work does not present queer themes, but some poems are quite explicit, such as “eet me alive,” “my first job,” and “my father in his bed room th morning i left.” When bissett and his publisher eventually filed suit against eight MPs for libel and infringement of copyright laws, one of

868    Critical Fields and New Directions the latter then sought, again unsuccessfully, for Parliament to agree to pay for any of the judgments that might have been made against him and his co-defendants. Although the irony of the situation in which the MP, “who had been complaining about bissett’s access to public funds, was seeking assurance of access to those funds to give them to bissett should the poet win his suit” (Precosky 26) might seem amusing in retrospect, the bisset Affair serves as an ominous reminder of the readiness of at least some government representatives to participate in censorship. Perhaps no less damaging, even if less sinister, is bissett’s reception by academic critics, who with few exceptions have “unconsciously condescend[ed] to bissett because of his apparent artlessness” (Precosky 18). While categorizing him as a “visionary” or “shaman” “grants him a rebel status that explains his more extravagant experiments,” Precosky argues that such an appraisal assumes “ad lib qualities” (16) of his poetry that would deny his “painstaking process of writing, editing, and selecting” and does little to explain his prodigious output (17). As demonstrated by the parliamentary furor it raised, “bissett’s work represents a challenge and a threat to an established view of aesthetics and art” (Cox 154), the complexity of which presents a difficulty to academic study based on such values. As in the case of many of the above authors, geography as a form of literary categorization is a problem in any citation of Daryl Hine. His birth and education were Canadian, and his first book publication was in Louis Dudek’s McGill Poetry Series, often noted as the source of Leonard Cohen’s first book of poetry. Hines, however, moved to the United States for graduate school and afterward can be called “an American academic.” Throughout his career, his residency and his publisher were American, and he was for 10 years the editor of Poetry Magazine. Still, like so many exiles, his last years show some recognition of his origins, with a number of Canadian publications and a short-listing for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry in 2010. Many literary historians have called Edward A. Lacey’s The Forms of Loss (1965) the first book of gay poetry published in Canada, but both his wandering expatriatism and his alcoholism contributed to his very slight presence in Canadian literature until both his writing and his life were brought to the fore in books by the poet Fraser Sutherland, The Collected Poems and Translations of Edward A. Lacey (2000) and Lost Passport: The Life and Words of Edward Lacey (2011). There seems to have been no fiction earlier than the mid-twentieth century that could be called “gay” or “lesbian.” Pink Snow examines various works that could be seen as in some way potentially “homotextual,” but otherwise could not be called a gay novel or even a gay short story. Thus, while Sinclair Ross’s homosexuality was revealed late in his life, his novel, As for Me And My House (1941), one of the most famous works in the Canadian canon, would require a very strong homotextual reading to suggest that its author was gay. Discussions of the novel tend to focus on the narrator, identified only as Mrs. Bentley, who quite unreliably describes her life in a small prairie town in the 1930s and her equally bleak marriage to an apostate minister, Philip. Her obsession with gender and the relentlessly melancholic atmosphere she portrays, along with the text’s canonical status, Ross’s later outing, and the more overtly homosexual elements of his other texts, all invite queer readings of this novel.

Gay and Lesbian Literature in Canada    869 The first gay novelist to make what might be called a homosexual impact is Scott Symons. His Place d’Armes (1967) was published, not inadvertently, in the year of Canada’s centennial. The cover blurb states “SCOTT SYMONS is his own Canadian allegory, with all great-grandparents here by Confederation, a grandfather and father who wrote on Canada.” One might question whether these grandparents would have appreciated the wild sexual freedom of the novel: “from this land spurting seed in our gathering mouthfulfilling with that first citric precision of spermblurt followed by the glut of man splashed in throat and gullet, spermspurt in nostril flaring wide” (40). Place d’Armes is the relentlessly polemical story of an Anglo-Canadian named Hugh who leaves his wife, children, and career to camp out in Montreal to write a novel and buy sex from the young Montreal hustlers Yvon and Pierrot. Needless to say, the book was a cause célèbre, for being both “sexually prurient and nationally seditious” (Dickinson 81), but it has had limited impact in Canada. Dickinson suggests that the “blatantly homophobic construction of Place d’Armes’s protagonist—and, by extension its author—as monstrous” in the early reviews of the novel accounts for its subsequent absence from critical studies of Canadian literary postmodernism (81). Christopher Elson makes a bolder claim by observing of critics that it is “unsurprising that extremely idiosyncratic and original work like Symons’ would lie outside of their assumptions and pass through their methodological and ideological nets” (13). While these explanations may help explain Symons’s exclusion from the canon, the bewildering narrative structure of the novel (composed of at least five overlapping narratives, some of which are distinguished by changes in font), its misogynistic homoeroticism, Symon’s unusual and dated political ideology, and his limited output after relocating to Morocco in 1971 are all likely contributing factors as well. David Watmough is the first Canadian author with an extensive gay oeuvre. Like so many others noted above, he was born and grew up in England, but most of his work was written and published in Canada, where he has lived since 1960. He has written a number of plays, but his most extensive production has been thinly veiled autobiographical fiction, the stories of “Davey Bryant.” Again, it seems somewhat surprising that his books have received so little attention. In Pink Snow, Goldie suggests that one possible problem is that the clarity of the prose and the simplicity of the bourgeois life he describes limited the appeal. Perhaps his publications were simply too early, before the American novelists Edmund White and David Leavitt created a mainstream gay market. The works of Jane Rule, meanwhile, can be said to have created a Canadian lesbian mainstream, one that eventually ranged far beyond Canada. Rule was born and educated in the United States but moved to Canada in 1956 and remained until her death in 2007. Her Desert of the Heart (1964) seemed to fulfill many needs. One of the first lesbian novels published in hard cover, Desert of the Heart focuses on the relationship between Evelyn, a university professor establishing a residency in Reno, Nevada, in order to get a divorce that she feels guilty about seeking, and Ann, a younger and free-spirited bisexual woman. While offering many of the elements found in traditional lesbian pulp fiction, the novel is literate, with the added treat of a potentially happy ending. In her reading of the ways in which the text writes back to Christian and psychoanalytic discourses that

870    Critical Fields and New Directions position homosexuality as unnatural, Gillian Spraggs describes it as “an ambitious novel, at once a polemical challenge to received wisdom, a reformed primer of lesbian images, an effort at a paradigmatic encoding of lesbian experience” (128). Although it was originally rejected many times, after its publication it reached a wide circulation and established Rule as a respected author, a status that continued throughout her many novels and memoirs. Rule also used her notoriety to speak out when the situation demanded it, and “beginning most visibly with her contributions to The Body Politic in 1976, she participated in public debates about sexuality, gender, censorship, children’s sexuality, and pornography, for example, that have been central to feminist and gay and lesbian politics” (Schuster 39). Starting in 1979, Rule began contributing a regular column for the embattled Toronto-based gay liberationist newspaper, which at the time was “fighting obscenity charges because of articles on man/boy love” (35), and she contributed to 52 of the 135 issues of The Body Politic by the time of its final issue in 1987 (224). It is interesting that the most prominent Canadian lesbian author of the twentieth century is an almost exact contemporary of the most successful Canadian gay male author, Timothy Findley. Findley began his career as an actor but turned to writing fiction in the mid-1960s. His third novel, The Wars, published in 1977, was an immediate success. The story of Robert Ross, apparently named for the Canadian lover of Oscar Wilde, offers a highly creative exploration of masculinity during World War I, focusing on the family and sexual concerns of a rich young Canadian in Britain and France. Findley’s later novels sometimes showed similar interest in various aspects of gay culture, as in the character of Lucy in his version of Noah’s flood, Not Wanted on the Voyage (1984), who as Lucifer in drag disrupts patriarchal dualisms and the hierarchies imposed by Noah and Yaweh, or the dystopian exploration of AIDS, Headhunter (1993). While Findley continued to be a presence in Canadian literature until his death, however, none of his other works had the impact of The Wars. Findley is also similar to Rule in the public life he led with his partner, William Whitehead. Jane Rule remained a resolutely lesbian figure and was always considered in that context. Findley’s homosexuality was never hidden. There were various instances in the 1960s and 1970s when his prominent mention of Whitehead created a bit of a furor as Canadian society was hesitant to accept a gay celebrity who proclaimed the nature of his life so overtly. Still, Findley was never relegated to the “gay” category, and he was as prominent and central to the public face of Canadian literature as Margaret Laurence or Margaret Atwood. Findley’s writing is probably too diffuse to call it all “gay literature.” In 1994 Carol Roberts stated that Findley “refuses to be called a homosexual writer and opposes the labelling of any group in society, whether based on gender, colour, nationality, or sexual orientation” (105). However, the combination of his prominence and his openness about his sexual orientation make his career a notable stage in the place of gay culture in Canadian life. It seems an essential part of the present chapter to separate “gay and lesbian literature” such as Findley’s and Rule’s from the burgeoning gay and lesbian mass market, particularly in crime fiction. Thus Lauren Wright Douglas and Katherine Forrest are but two among many Canadian-born writers who have published a number of novels featuring

Gay and Lesbian Literature in Canada    871 a lesbian detective or policewoman. These might be contrasted with, for example, the Canadian writer Daphne Marlatt, mentioned above for her connection to the Québec lesbian feminists. Her novel Ana Historic (1988) is a very challenging read, but its combination of Canadian history and feminist awakening in a poetic prose that breaks all laws of genre has had a major impact. She created what might be called, in a very literal way, “lesbian writing,” which goes beyond écriture feminine in an attempt to create a form of language invested with a female sexual community. Every Canadian lesbian writer and most Canadian writers regard it as an essential and even triumphant work. When combined with Marlatt’s extensive poetic oeuvre and her diligent support of the writing community, especially of women but also of young people of both genders, she could be claimed to be one of the most important lesbian authors that Canada has produced. Whereas her works are certainly not as widely read as those of Jane Rule or Ann-Marie MacDonald, her influence in Canada has been immeasurable. Ann-Marie MacDonald made her mark as an actress long before the production of Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) in 1988 established her as a playwright. Since then, her novel Fall on Your Knees (1996) made her one of Canada’s best-known authors, and it was even selected for promotion by the television personality Oprah Winfrey, one of the largest influences on book sales in English in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. MacDonald’s work is innovative in ways that seem to appeal to a much wider market than did earlier lesbian writers in Canada. Atef Laouyene discusses how MacDonald’s use of Gothic generic conventions “gestures towards the failure of two myths: maintaining a pure, patriarchal genealogy and constructing a national identity based on a totalizing, exclusionary ideology” (141). MacDonald offers a sensitive treatment of the incestuous rapes at the centre of the novel: a controlling patriarch is unable to protect his children from his own urges, which he refuses to face. When his daughters prove to be what he would consider “sexual deviants,” the effect is too shattering for him even to accept it into his consciousness, and it triggers his own deviant response. MacDonald’s novel is not “lesbian” in a narrow sense, but it explores various aspects of gender and sexual ambiguity. The same might be said for Emma Donaghue, who has more recently enjoyed considerable international success. Although born and educated in Ireland and England, most of her books have been published since she moved to Canada in 1998. Her novels emphasize lesbian characters, but once again usually as part of an exploration of diverse gender and sexual expressions, often in the Victorian period or earlier. Her most popular novel to date, Room (2010), about a small boy who is the child of a young woman and the old man who abducted and imprisoned her, is certainly about sexual deviance, but not in a way that reflects any of the usual concerns of gay and lesbian literature. Regardless of various evaluative comments made earlier, particularly those about Rule, Marlatt, MacDonald, and Donoghue, Dionne Brand is probably the most prominent lesbian writer in Canada today. While this might not be the case outside the country, in Canada she likely is the most immediately recognized name of these five authors. Born in Trinidad but having spent most of her adult life in Canada, it seems Brand is most often categorized as a “Black” rather than a “lesbian” writer, despite the fact that

872    Critical Fields and New Directions any such categorization of her complex and multilayered work is reductive. Indeed, she writes eloquently about this need to place her in one box or another in her essay “Bread Out of Stone.” Eloquence is a general feature of Brand’s writing and her success as a poet, novelist, and essayist is no doubt a result of the extreme care of her craft. Anyone who is familiar with her work will note the power of her phrases, most notably in her poetry, such as No Language Is Neutral, but also in her prose. Her book Ossuaries won the Griffin Poetry Award for 2010, but all of her publications have received wide acclaim. Her novel, What We All Long For (2005), an example of her many representations of the multiple ethnicities that are part of Canadian urban life, has been widely read and won the City of Toronto book award. Various authors explore the intersection of race and sexual diversity. Among those who have received the greatest praise is Wayson Choy, though while he is known to be gay, his works make few references to homosexuality. Even in his memoir Paper Shadows (1999), homosexuality is a hint rather than the central concern featured in many gay autobiographies. He represents one of the many authors who make no secret of an identity—sexual, ethnic, or otherwise—but choose not to make it central to their writing. Thus it is much easier to label Choy as “Chinese-Canadian” than as “gay.” A closer fit to the topic of the present chapter is Shani Mootoo, whose Cereus Blooms at Night (1996) portrays sexual disarray in various forms in Lantanacamara, a fictional place that seems to represent Trinidad. As with MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees, Mootoo’s novel employs the postcolonial gothic mode to “queery” the violence and legacies of colonial history. However, perhaps the most successful of these authors, after Brand, is Shyam Selvadurai. His Funny Boy (1994), a bildungsroman about growing up gay in Sri Lanka, has been an international bestseller and is ubiquitous on university and college syllabi. Funny Boy has no Canadian subject matter, but Selvadurai’s latest novel, The Hungry Ghosts (2013), which has received universally positive reviews, at last portrays a gay Sri Lankan’s Toronto experience. The above authors represent racial tensions produced in a society ruled by a White hegemony, but those tensions are all in some sense about immigration. The opposite but similarly racist phenomenon is confronted by gay and lesbian writers of the First Nations. They often call themselves “two-spirited,” which historically referred to someone who was in some way transgendered but today is applied to gays and lesbians and ultimately anyone who is a part of the sexual diversities. One Indigenous author who has had success as a playwright but is better known for his poetry is Daniel David Moses. While Moses touches on gay issues in only a few poems, his overall oeuvre has a resonance and a poetic precision that make his work particularly worthy of note. Like Findley and Choy, rather than being identified as a gay writer, he is an important writer who is gay. The Indigenous poet who has offered the most explicit representations of sexual experience, however, is Gregory Scofield, whose best-known collection is Singing Home the Bones (2005). Scofield is a particularly interesting example in that his work is both poetic and intertextual and also committed to explorations of homosexuality, Métis issues, and the underside of street life. The combination has made him arguably Canada’s primary poet of Native life, praised for his expression both of traditional

Gay and Lesbian Literature in Canada    873 concerns such as language and spirituality, and the contemporary problems associated with poverty and disenfranchisement. The most prominent among gay and lesbian writers of the First Nations is probably Tomson Highway. For many years he was best known for his writing for the theatre, primarily the linked plays The Rez Sisters (1986), Dry Lips Ought to Move to Kapuskasing (1989), and Rose (1999). While these are vital and imaginative portrayals of reservation life, and include queer characters, Highway is probably better represented by his novel Kiss of the Fur Queen (1998), which is a fictional representation of his and his brother’s experience in residential school and how this affected the sexuality of First Nations men. Regardless of Tomson Highway and Michel Tremblay, the theatre has not been the primary venue for gay and lesbian literature. Even the overtly gay problem play came rather late in Canada, despite the fact that theatre has often been associated with gay culture. American playwright Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band, in 1968, was not the first gay play to succeed off-Broadway, but it was probably the first to create an impact on American theatre. This makes it especially noteworthy that Canadian John Herbert’s Fortune and Men’s Eyes first appeared in an off-Broadway production in 1967. Drawing from Herbert’s experience, the play assesses the corrupting power dynamics of a Canadian youth prison by candidly staging criminalized homosexuality, abusive authority, and sexual violence. A number of Canadians were involved in workshopping and attempting to get Fortune and Men’s Eyes staged in Canada, including at the Stratford Festival, but ultimately all companies were afraid of the repercussions. Although it initially proved too controversial to perform publicly in Canada, eventually Nathan Cohen, the Toronto theatre critic, was able to find a New York producer who would stage it. David Rothenberg’s Actors Playhouse production quickly raised awareness of the need for prison reform, and Rothenberg became a founding member of the Fortune Society, a charitable organization focused mainly on providing community re-entry and rehabilitation services to released prisoners. The play has had a long life since its New York premiere, both in many published versions and in many productions around the world. While Herbert could not be said to be a significant playwright, his play is a significant part of both gay literature and Canadian theatre. Gay and lesbian theatre in Canadian is undoubtedly centered at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, the most long-standing and largest queer theatre in the world, and one of many theatres in Toronto committed to a polemical dramaturgy devoted to one identity. Created by playwright and director Sky Gilbert, the 2004 mission statement of Buddies gives some sense of its purpose: a. Queer, referring to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered identity—encapsulates the core of our organization. Buddies is committed to representing the LGBT community by supporting LGBT artists and by telling LGBT stories. b. Queer, referring to anything outside of the norm—represents the nature of the work presented at 12 Alexander St. Buddies in Bad Times Theatre is dedicated to

874    Critical Fields and New Directions work that is different, outside the mainstream, and challenging in both content and form. (“Buddies” 5) Whereas the productions have offered much more variety than this suggests, it is an interesting synopsis of Gilbert’s own view. For him, sexual diversity is not simply a fact that requires accommodation by the mainstream, as in the acceptance of gay marriage, but rather “queer” as a challenge, something that disrupts any kind of bourgeois comfort. When Gilbert confronts something that has come to be called “homonormativity,” a homosexuality that fits and is acceptable, his anger is untamable. He is credited with something like 40 plays and novels, each of which flies resolutely in the face of anything that could be called the establishment. The other gay playwrights who are probably the best known are very different. Brad Fraser has written plays that have very much entered the mainstream of North American theatre, particularly Unidentified Human Remains and the Nature of Love (1989) and Poor Superman (1994), which present intricate views of contemporary urban life, particularly but not only gay. Each of these plays has had at least 10 professional productions in a variety of theatres in Canada and the United States. Daniel MacIvor has found a similar popularity but with a different type of play and a different kind of theatre. Many of his plays are autobiographical, and a number are one-man shows that he first performed. His da da kamera company was a favourite with all theatre people, regardless of his sexual orientation. Arguably, these playwrights offer a good overview of three approaches to possibilities in gay theatre, from Gilbert’s confrontation of the straight world, to Fraser’s depiction of the modern gay life, to MacIvor’s intense introspective analysis of gay anxieties. In the twenty-first century, the earlier radicalism of Canadian queer theatre might seem a bit tame. Today, the queer edge has pushed a variety of boundaries. Nina Arsenault’s Silicone Diaries (2009) is a transsexual autobiography in the form of a one-woman show, but its emphasis on an exploration of plastic surgery far beyond gender reassignment proved sometimes challenging to its audiences. Ivan E. Coyote is still young, born in 1969, but has been performing since 1992 and has published nine books. Coyote’s gender expression, on stage and elsewhere, is male, but she continues to use the female pronoun on her website, and from her various public comments, she is more interested in being accepted as a human who crosses the divide than in being accepted as male. In a recent interview she said, “I have a fairly masculine presence, so in schools I use ‘she’ because I want to present as wide a spectrum as possible of what a female-assigned person or she person can look like” (Scrivener). This contrasts with the singer Rae Spoon, who has often worked with Coyote but who prefers to be referred to as “they” (Scrivener). So it is more than possible that the destabilizing of sexuality and gender that presented such a fear to the earliest Canadian societies mentioned at the beginning of this chapter has now reached an extreme, where the categories no longer fit. Perhaps we should be using some terms associated with a pie chart, so someone could be categorized by the percentage of society that is associated with his or her—or their—gender and sexuality.

Gay and Lesbian Literature in Canada    875 Or perhaps, as suggested by many of the people discussed in this chapter, categories are no longer of much value.

Note 1. The 1508 reference is from William Dunbar, The flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie; the 1561 from John Awdelay, The fraternitye of vacabondes; and the 1740 from Ordinary of Newgate, his Account III 15/1.

Works Cited Barton, John. Introduction. Seminal:  The Anthology of Canada’s Gay Male Poets. Ed. John Barton and Billeh Nickerson. Vancouver: Arsenal, 2007. Print. “Buddies in Bad Times Theatre Board Handbook.” 1st ed. Sept. 2010. Toronto Arts Foundation Creative Trust Research Fellowship. Web. Accessed 28 Oct. 2013.Cox, Ryan J. “HP Sauce and the Hate Literature of Pop Art: bill bissett in the House of Commons.” English Studies in Canada 37.3–4 (2011): 147–62. Print. Dellamora, Richard. “Queering Modernism: A Canadian in Paris.” Essays on Canadian Writing 60 (1996): 256–73. Print. Dickinson, Peter. Here Is Queer:  Nationalisms, Sexualities, and the Literatures of Canada. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1999. Print. Donaghue, Emma. Room. Toronto: Harper, 2010. Print. Druce, Robert. “A Visiting Distance:  Patrick Anderson, Poet, Autobiographer, and Exile.” The Rhetoric of Canadian Writing. Ed. Conny Steenman-Marcusse. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002. Print. Elson, Christopher. Introduction. Dear Reader: Selected Scott Symons. Ed. Christopher Elson. Toronto: Gutter, 1998. Print. Findley, Timothy. Headhunter. Toronto: Harper, 1993. Print. Fox, L.  Chris. “Geometries of Nation-Building:  Triangulating Female Homosociality in Richardson’s Wacousta.” Studies in Canadian Literature 27.2 (2002): 5–28. Print. Gingell, Susan. “Claiming Positive Semantic Space for Women: The Poetry of Dorothy Livesay.” Essays on Canadian Writing 74 (2001): 1–24. Print. Gingell-Beckmann, Susan. “Against an Anabasis of Grace:  A  Retrospective Review of the Poems of Robert Finch.” Essays on Canadian Writing 23 (1982): 157–62. Print. Glassco, John. Memoirs of Montparnasse. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1970. Print. Goldie, Terry. Pink Snow:  Homotextual Possibilities in Canadian Fiction. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2003. Print. ———. Queersexlife:  Autobiographical Notes on Sexuality, Gender and Identity. Vancouver: Arsenal, 2008. Print. Haggerty, George E. Men in Love:  Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Columbia UP, 1999. Print. Lacey, Edward A. The Forms of Loss. Toronto: n.p., 1965. Print. Laouyene, Atef. “Canadian Gothic and the Work of Ghosting in Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees.” Unsettled Remains:  Canadian Literature and the Postcolonial Gothic. Ed. Cynthia Sugars and Gerry Turcotte. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2009. Print.

876    Critical Fields and New Directions Precosky, Don. “bill bissett:  controversies and definitions.” Canadian Poetry 27 (1990): 15–29. Print. Rayter, Scott, Donald W.  McLeod, and Maureen FitzGerald, eds. Queer CanLit:  Canadian Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered (LGBT) Literature in English:  An Exhibition. Toronto: Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, 2008. Print. Roberts, Carol. Timothy Findley: Stories from a Life. Toronto: ECW, 1994. Print. Robinson, Laura. “Bosom Friends:  Lesbian Desire in L.M. Montgomery’s Anne Books.” Canadian Literature 180 (2004): 12–28. Print. Schuster, Marilyn R. Passionate Communities: Reading Lesbian Resistance in Jane Rule’s Fiction. New York: New York UP, 1999. Print. Scrivener, Leslie. “The Realm between ‘He’ and ‘She.’ ” Toronto Star. thestar.com, 27 Apr. 2013. Web. Accessed 25 Oct. 2013. Spraggs, Gillian. “Hell and the Mirror:  A  Reading of Desert of the Heart.” New Lesbian Criticism: Literary and Cultural Readings. Ed. Sally Munt. New York: Columbia UP, 1992. 115–31. Print. Sutherland, John. “The Writing of Patrick Anderson.” First Statement 1.19 (1943): 3–6. Print. Symons, Scott. Combat Journal for Place d’Armes: A Personal Narrative. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1967. Print. Thompson, Lee Briscoe. Dorothy Livesay. Boston: Twayne, 1987. Print. Trehearne, Brian. “Finch’s Early Poetry and the Dandy Manner.” Canadian Poetry 18 (1986): 11–34. Print.

Chapter 47

Survival of th e Fi t t e st CanLit and Disability Sally Chivers

There is a vital reason to think about disability as central within Canadian literature: its absolute ubiquity. In the sweeping survey of CanLit presented in Margaret Atwood’s influential work of thematic criticism, Survival (1972), for example, disability is pervasive. This prevalence is typical not only of the Canadian literary record but of literary representation generally. Disability is an ever present and almost always ignored presence (LeGier). This chapter begins by bringing a disability lens to Atwood’s influential focus on the concept of survival, which is predicated on a discourse of victimhood, particularly to its implications of physical and mental fitness.1 Atwood’s Survival invites a critical disability reading because it clearly invokes a fit national body, depends on neurosis for a model, and privileges the non-victim. Atwood’s outline of emblematic “victim positions” offers a useful perspective on pre-1972 CanLit, but its focus too easily leads to a stereotype that is dreaded within disability studies: that of the “supercrip,”2 a figure who overcomes his disability (and he is usually male) in heroic, if not literary, fashion. As Atwood reveals, there are shades of this ominous superhero throughout CanLit, and he haunts Canadian popular culture. Accompanying him in the literature that Atwood surveys is a series of characters “paralyzed” by anxieties associated with their location in Canada, each of which she associates with her “victim positions.” Atwood’s now famous victim positions entail denial (position one), externalized blame (position two), angry refusal (position three), and moving from victim to non-victim creatively (position four). While she describes positions one and two as static, she proposes that a country, minority group, or individual can move from position three to four by repudiating the victim role. Specifically, Position Four is a position not for victims but for those who have never been victims at all, or for ex-victims: those who have been able to move into it from Position Three because the external and/or the internal causes of victimization have been removed.

878    Critical Fields and New Directions (In an oppressed society, of course, you can’t become an ex-victim—insofar as you are connected with your society—until the entire society’s position has been changed). (38)

A disabled character, then, might move from Position Three by conquering an inaccessible environment, proving himself able despite obstacles, or by refusing to be stymied by barriers to his full access—in effect “overcoming” his disability, or at least his disabled status. For example, he might, like the Canadian hero Terry Fox, run excessive amounts daily in order to show the world that he is not going to be defeated by circumstance or public opinion. That would place him in Position Four, where “creative activity of all kinds becomes possible … and you are able to accept your own experience for what it is, rather than having to distort it to make it correspond with others’ versions of it” (38–39). That is, once a disabled character has overcome his “handicap,” he can write from his own more acceptable experience rather than be limited by his inability to access the normative centre. This conception matches a social model of disability, wherein disadvantage is imposed upon disabled people through oppressive social and physical structures. Although one might take issue with Atwood’s overstated claim that Canadians as a national group have been psychically debilitated, her delineation of the pattern of survival in Canadian literature, pre-1972, shows a prescient understanding of how disability has been conceived and limited socially, placing an imbalanced burden on the individual to make up for social defects in the treatment of a particular set of people who reside on the margins. However, more recent Canadian literature pushes this view even further, showing that an “overcoming” of disability is not necessary for the creative possibilities that Atwood praises. Moving forward from Survival, with its perspective on Canadian literary disability as either victim or hero, and expanding on existing scholarship on disability in CanLit, I  argue that millennial Canadian fiction, such as works by Ann-Marie MacDonald, Rohinton Mistry, and Guy Vanderhaeghe, resonates with disability scholar Robert McRuer’s politicized critically disabled approach, which he calls “crip theory,” reclaiming the term crip from its offensive usage as the root of cripple. In these Canadian authors’ works, “crips” are creative victims (rather than Atwood’s creative non-victims). That is, they remain “in an oppressed society,” as Atwood puts it, but they still engage in “creative activity of all kinds,” not despite their oppression but because of it. Unlike the supercrip, they don’t have to “overcome” adversity to do so (Survival 38). This chapter will demonstrate a path to “cripping CanLit”—that is, to re-reading the “canon” as replete with as yet unread crip culture that firmly locates disability at the centre.

Atwood: “What Is Lacking” The first epigraph of Atwood’s Survival expresses fear of the incomplete body, as though the deviation from a normative physical frame is somehow detrimental to—instead of vital to—artistic production.3 She quotes “The Body of This Death” by the Québec

Survival of the Fittest    879 poet Hector Saint-Denys Garneau: “We shall unjoint our limbs / and set them in a row for listing / To see what is lacking …” (n. pag.). Throughout Survival, Atwood focuses on the “skeleton of Canadian literature” and hopes to help readers “see how the bones fit together,” minus flesh (40). To explain her concept of survival, she characterizes the nation of Canada as a sick patient who will never live well but just might survive, in some weakened state: “Canadians are forever taking the national pulse like doctors at a sickbed: the aim is not to see whether the patient will live well but simply whether he will live at all” (33). She expresses this apparently reassuring maxim in decidedly pathologizing terms: “Naming your own condition, your own disease, is not necessarily the same as acquiescing in it. Diagnosis is the first step” (42). Similarly, Atwood pinpoints how Earle Birney, in his poem “Transcontinental” (1945), characterizes nature as an ill old woman, “covered with scars, scum and other evidences of disease,” who needs to be cleaned up by “man” (60). Atwood states, “You may not like the disease-and-cure terminology, but at least it’s revealing; the power is no longer with Nature, Birney indicates, it’s with man” (61). For Atwood, figuring out what plagues Canada is the first step to becoming a creative non-victim, which she defines as being free of an oppressed society and accepting one’s experience for what it is. At best, she suggests, Canadians just might be able to cure themselves. Even more than illness, Atwood continually draws on disability terms to explain how characters figuratively internalize obstacles to survival: Sometimes fear of these obstacles becomes itself the obstacle, and a character is paralyzed by terror (either of what he thinks is threatening him from the outside, or of elements in his own nature that threaten him from within). It may even be life itself that he fears; and when life becomes a threat to life, you have a moderately vicious circle. If a man feels he can survive only by amputating himself, turning himself into a cripple or a eunuch, what price survival? (33, emphasis added)

Speaking of Stuart Hall’s reliance on disability metaphors to refer to the negative forces of colonialism, Chris Ewart explains, “Although language itself often creates inadequacies through its own terms—especially in the context of expressing ‘inexpressible atrocities’—words surely can accommodate expression without relying on the worn out prosthetics of disability for cachet” (152). While illness and disability are quite separate states, they share social roots and oppressions, as Atwood’s discourse demonstrates. In her formulation, transformations, via amputation, produce a lesser body—one that “is lacking,” to use the language of her epigraph. Thus, the process of survival, of illness and/ or disabilities, marks Canadians, who subsequently must overcome adversity in order to maintain flexible creativity. Indeed, when Atwood, tongue-in-cheek, outlines a list of “capsule Canadian plots” that demonstrate the nation’s apparent fixation on survival, she explains that “some contain crippled successes (the character does more than survive, but is mutilated in the process)” (33, emphasis added). Throughout Survival, the idea of mutilation haunts not only characters within CanLit but, at least metaphorically, also its authors. Atwood describes as mutilated Canadian

880    Critical Fields and New Directions authors who are cut off from their audiences and cultural traditions: “If your arm or leg has been cut off you are a cripple, if your tongue has been cut off you are a mute, if part of your brain has been removed you are an idiot or an amnesiac, if your balls have been cut off you are a eunuch or a castrato” (184, emphasis original). The question, then, for these “mutilated” artists—harmed by their distance from clear cultural traditions—becomes whether to choose “lack” or exile: “stay in the culture and be crippled as an artist; or escape into nothing” (189). As she explains, this is an especially difficult choice because “Given that the Canadian artist is frozen, paralyzed, does flight unfreeze him?” (190). She does not pose the possibility of “crippling” as a transformation into creative energies that could forward a new kind of national art, but that possibility has since been posed within disability scholarship.

Disability in Canadian Literature: Showcasing the Norms, Normals, and Normates Prominent examples of disability in Canadian literature preceding Atwood’s Survival emphasize fit male bodies and use disability as a trope to explain moral character. Ralph Connor’s The Sky Pilot (1899) features free-spirited and brave Gwen, who is crushed beneath a bronco and threatened with a fate worse than death: living with a physical disability. She bears her pain heroically, holding onto hope for a cure and then conceding that she must do what good she can from her seat, which takes the form of helping to civilize her community. Morley Callaghan’s Such Is My Beloved (1934) presents a youthful clergyman, Father Stephen Dowling, who sacrifices his sanity in order to save the souls of two prostitutes, consigning himself to an “insane asylum” almost as though he has been infected by the “feeble-mindedness” of the prostitutes. In As for Me and My House (1941), Peter Lawson, “a boy who limps” (37), is a minor character who dies, functioning as a symbol of the stultifying atmosphere of the prairies in the 1930s. These examples show the ways in which disability representation in early and modern Canadian literature frequently rests on the idea of a White able male norm, a figure that Rosemarie Garland Thomson has labeled the “normate,”4 in comparison to which all other characters are found wanting. In other examples of disability representation in Canadian literature, disabled figures advance the plot in ways that show the limits of victimhood and the moral shortcomings of their own or other characters. For the most part, the only way to move from victimhood is to overcome, deny, or vanquish disability, especially from the White Canadian mainstream. Connor’s The Foreigner (1909) features “foreignness” as a type of deficit, particularly in the form of a Galician woman, Paulina Koval, who has a cognitive disability. Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Emily trilogy (1923–1927) features Cousin Jimmy,

Survival of the Fittest    881 who has a head injury for which the narrative compensates by making him identify closely with Emily, offering her a shield from a world that misunderstands her. In addition, Montgomery portrays a series of characters with physical disabilities that signal their moral deficiencies: Mrs. Kent, Mr. Morrison, and Dean Priest. Ethel Wilson’s Love and Salt Water (1956) presents a main character with facial anomalies caused by an accident that she survives. Unusually, Ellen’s face only becomes a problem within the novel in relation to other characters, resonating well with the social model of disability, which situates the flaws associated with disability in the environment rather than the individual. Mordecai Richler’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959) features Virgil, disabled by a tragic accident, whose resulting paralysis facilitates the main character’s transformation from avaricious to generous to avaricious again.

Survival’s Disabilities In Survival, Atwood discusses one of the most notable instances of Canadian disability poetry at length: “David,” by Earle Birney. This canonical long poem was published in 1942 in a collection that won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry. David and the poem’s narrator, Bob, hike and climb the Rocky Mountains, displaying stereotypical youthful vigour and indulging in the splendid Canadian wilderness. When Bob loses himself momentarily in the splendour of the “glistening wedge of the giant Assiniboine” (VII.92), he also loses his foothold. David steadies Bob but himself plummets “fifty impossible feet,” landing awkwardly, gravely injured, on a ledge far below (VIII.101). Instead of celebrating the luck of not falling 600 feet further, Bob is dismayed to find David still alive. David implores Bob to finish the fall, preferring death over life in “a wheelchair” (VIII.133). Atwood observes the shift from nature-as-indifferent to natureas-hostile that results from David’s fall, recognizing the fall to be from grace as well as from physical fitness (56–58). She focuses on the moment as “murder-by-Nature” (114), rather than a rejection of disability. From a critical disability perspective, this moment illuminates the social view that unless these young fit male bodies can conquer nature, life is not worth living for them, and they ought to be sacrificed for their own and the greater good. In addition to the physically disabled, anxious and thwarted characters pervade Atwood’s literary survey. An epigraph to her chapter on “Animal Victims” quotes Graeme Gibson: “Do you know why I asked for a dog like Queenie? I did you know, I especially asked for a poor little handicapped dog that nobody wanted …” (72). Atwood explains how Canadian authors transform from seeing themselves as “victimized animals” to the “need to see” themselves in that way, which results in being locked in a victim position (81, emphasis original). In Gibson’s Five Legs (1969), a “mutant waterbuffalo” with five legs joins a woman’s collection of “warped animals,” which eventually includes protagonist Felix Oswald, whom she perceives as “a cripple, a victim and a freak” (81). Felix’s sympathy for animals makes him a failure and a victim, since he will

882    Critical Fields and New Directions not exterminate them (82). In Gibson’s Communion (1971), Felix continues his identification with ailing animals, whom he longs to free rather than euthanize, but he accidentally causes the painful death of an ill husky. Atwood describes Felix as “paralyzed” by accidentally killing a child, as he had accidentally killed the dog (83). As she explains it, “Felix’s sexual, emotional and practical paralyses are all correlatives of never having accepted any role but that of victim” (84). His victim position relates directly to his neurosis. She characterizes the narrator of her own poem, “The Progressive Insanities of a Pioneer” (1968), as “insane by the end of the poem,” noting that he may have been so at its beginning, an expected result for a settler who “attempts to impose this kind of order by a suppression of everything ‘curved,’ ” since doing so “may itself be a form of madness” (124). In “Family Portrait: Masks of the Bear,” Atwood characterizes what she calls the “middle generation” (135), the group between grandparents and children in Canadian narrative, as “somehow crippled” by their combination of a Protestant work ethic with a lack of the faith that might bolster it (136). She also notes the “insane murderer” (155) of Adele Wiseman’s The Sacrifice, who lives in a mental institution by the close of the novel. Following the pattern of disability representation of its time, Atwood’s concept of survival rests on an “ableist” conception of the whole body—of character and of author—that can only be mutilated. Further, Atwood posits Canada as a “state of mind, as the space you inhabit not just with your body but with your head” (18). This conceptualization leads to a continual invocation of psychic discomfort in which being “insane” is somehow meaningful to being Canadian. As Atwood puts it, “A person who is ‘here’ but would rather be somewhere else is an exile or a prisoner; a person who is ‘here’ but thinks he is somewhere else is insane” (18, emphasis original). Unlike “the excitement and sense of adventure” of the American Frontier or the “smugness and/or sense of security” of the British Island, to Atwood in the early 1970s Canadian survival “generates … an almost intolerable anxiety” (33). She bases her victim position theory on the idea that it is a remarkable coincidence that “so many writers in such a small country” share “the same neurosis” (35, emphasis original). Canada, in the literary imagination explored throughout Survival, creates psychic discomfort in its citizens and even, by her statement, mental disability. And yet, Canada is also a place where “neurotic” people reside and, in a different framework, could perhaps thrive.

Disability Studies, CanLit, and Crip Potential Moving from this perhaps classic and still highly relevant perspective of the CanLit “non-victim,” I propose that more recent Canadian literature shows a new perspective on the possibilities of survival that is even more resonant for contemporary disability studies. A  disability studies framework is useful in evaluating CanLit and so, too, is

Survival of the Fittest    883 CanLit useful to a disability studies framework. Indeed, many late twentieth-century works suggest that so-called victims can remain “victims” or even become “ex-victims” within the oppressive society that deems them as such. Contemporary Canadian literary representations suggest that even highly pathologized and potentially oppressed characters can accept their experience as highly generative of creative production and social intervention. While Atwood’s 1970s vision of the “cripple” is decidedly negative, recent scholars of disability have reclaimed a version of that term. Like Alice Munro’s Del Jordan, who, Atwood explains, “chooses to write from the centre of her own experience, not from the periphery of someone else’s, and she sees her act of creation as an act of redemption also” (193), crip theory is “founded on the belief that crip experiences and epistemologies should be central to our efforts to counter neoliberalism and access alternative ways of being” (McRuer 41). Nicole Markotić explains the need for this perspective well in her article on Birney’s treatment of disability in “David,” when she captures what happens in the absence of a crip approach: In such “legends,” disabled characters do not get to speak from a disability activism standpoint, but maintain their representational status as spectres of the able-bodied. In other words, they are characters speaking about disability from and for an able-bodied point-of-view but propped up (on metaphorical ability-crutches) for show as disability authority. Readers and viewers, then, can “learn” that how disabled characters interpret their own bodies is in exact (and perfect) alignment with how the hierarchy of ability persistently construes problem bodies. (18)

The cultural approach to disability arises from challenges to other ways of conceiving disability. In particular, scholars work against a medical model of disability, which perceives a flawed physicality to result in a condition that must be treated or otherwise eliminated. Thus, the medical model, like Atwood’s view of Canada as an ailing nation, has the primary goal of curing people with disabilities, even those living with “conditions” that are chronic or permanent. Tacitly, a companion goal—if cure fails—is the elimination of disability, through active or passive forms of eugenics, such as pushing David over the ledge. Disability activists and scholars mount their resistance to the medical model, which locates the disability in the individual and which valorizes normalcy, through what is commonly known as the social model of disability. The location of disability moves from the individual to social structures, physical and attitudinal. Thus, social model proponents suggest that changing the fabrication of environments can mitigate disability. The most common example used to explain the social model is the prevalence of staircases, where ramps would enable many physically disabled people better physical access to buildings without impairing the access of those with normative mobility. The choice to build stairs rather than ramps is arbitrary, but seems natural. Thus, social model proponents aim to normalize disabled people, or at least aim for full inclusion, through the removal of social and physical barriers.

884    Critical Fields and New Directions A cultural model of disability goes further by thinking about the interaction between the individual and the environment, making the disabled body central. For cultural model theorists, context is pivotal to disability agency. While the stairs/ramps example is useful, it valorizes the centrality of certain types of disabilities over others as worthy of inclusion. Moving beyond that, cultural model theorists aver that an oppressive society, as Atwood calls it, could be highly generative of cultural expression on the part of disabled figures because disabled people share a culture and history of oppression. Emerging from the cultural model, the concept of the crip becomes clearest in Robert McRuer’s Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (2006), in which he combines critical disability studies with queer theory to assert the materiality and cultural resonances of disability experience and expression. Combining disability and queerness in a critical conflation that propels cultural inquiry, to crip (as a verb) is to embrace a fluidity of structure in order to maintain a critical disability consciousness. Rather than charting the locations of disability as formed by social oppression, as a response to a hostile physical and social world, a crip approach starts from the site of disability in order to destabilize a persistent reliance on identity politics and to imagine not just survival, but survival in a world newly accessible because of alternative structures. As Maria Truchan-Tataryn explains, “A Canadian context particularly crystallizes the imperative of Disability Studies in light of Canadian traditional ideologies of diversity and multiculturalism” (4). Thus, literary works that interrogate those traditional ideologies while sketching out a version of crip culture offer rich ground for rethinking some basic tenets of CanLit. For example, in Timothy Findley’s Not Wanted on the Voyage (1984), Mottyl, the blind cat that narrates key sections of the novel, offers an alternative view to the dominant eugenic system governing the novel’s world. A set of “ape” children represent an undesired animalistic side of humanity from Doctor Noyes’s perspective, and desired diversity from Mrs. Noyes’s. They are also configured in terms of disability; Lotte’s “mental age … had been gauged as ‘anywhere between two and nil’ ” by Noah Noyes (148, emphasis original). The Noah figure in this revision of the biblical ark story fears that he might be flawed genetically. Doctor Noyes believes he has eradicated his own son who was a “ ‘Lotte-child’ ” (162) and whom Mrs. Noyes tellingly named Adam. Doctor Noyes deliberately marries his son Japeth off to a woman who has an ape-sister so that if Japeth’s offspring should be ape-like, “ ‘the blame for future Lottes and Adams’ ” (165) cannot be traced back to Noyes’s flawed blood. That sister, Lotte, comes on the ark at Mrs. Noyes’s insistence, but is quickly killed. When Noyes’s other daughter-in-law Hannah (not Lotte’s sister), pregnant by Doctor Noyes, gives birth to her own “ape” child on the ark, Hannah screams out in “horror of what it was in which she had invested all her ambition and all her secret love” (341) and expeditiously buries the baby at sea. The novel uses the cat’s narrative perspective to reveal binaristic thought, such as Doctor Noyes’s, to be deeply flawed in comparison to the multiplicity embraced by Mrs. Noyes. Humans must either accept or fear that “ape-like” qualities might reside in themselves. Similarly, in Tomson Highway’s play The Rez Sisters (first performed in 1986), Zhaboonigan Peterson is both a character with a mental disability and a survivor of

Survival of the Fittest    885 sexual assault. The combination makes a plain political statement about colonialism. In somewhat of a disability cliché, Zhaboonigan’s afflictions offer her deeper sight, so that she is one of the characters who can see the Indigenous trickster spirit Nanabush. Through that device, Zhaboonigan becomes a character who must be considered seriously and not dismissed as merely defective. What is more, though her main function is to highlight the loving qualities of a central character, the quarrelsome Emily Dictionary, Zhaboonigan is fully integrated into the lives of the Rez, rather than segregated into an institution. The crip potential in Not Wanted on the Voyage and The Rez Sisters lies in their embrace of disability as a key component of diversity and in their focus beyond physical disabilities. Published and performed not long after the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982) included both physical and mental disability under Equality Rights, the works demonstrate both an inclusivity and a means by which disability within the literary record can critique dominant ideological positions. However, these characters remain on the margins, working as metaphors rather than voices for a crip perspective.

Cripping Millennial CanLit Canadian literary critics who take on disability in their analyses often do so to make claims about other forms of diversity and discrimination (Truchan-Tataryn; Ewart; Carstairs and Kruth). This, in part, is due to the at times limiting nationalist frame of the field. As Truchan-Tataryn succinctly puts it, “Seeing disability differently helps us see difference differently” (5). So, disability often serves as a metaphor on which to rest the forms of difference of which Canadians like to be so proud. Truchan-Tataryn explains one potential for Canadian literary criticism in relation to disability studies: Canada and Canadian literature provide an arena to negotiate harmony amid diversity rather than neutralizing otherness into a British power status that Daniel Coleman calls “White civility.” Since disabled experience has been omitted from this fluid process of negotiating Canadian identity, its introduction will unfetter our conceptions and negotiations of difference, revealing more clearly the forms of interlocking systems of oppression that prevent socio-political equality. (19)

However, it is also worth considering disability in Canadian literature in its own right, as its own form of difference or being, particularly in a set of millennial Canadian novels in which disability centrally drives the plot without making a clear moral statement or becoming a metaphor for national strengths or weaknesses. In MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees (1996), despite her dogged perseverance against the odds, and, to some extent, her physical feats beyond the extraordinary, the central disabled character Lily is no super crip. She fully inhabits her “little leg,” made smaller by polio, rather than overcoming it to be a hero. She is, however, fully crip in that she

886    Critical Fields and New Directions puts disability and queer perspectives at the centre of her family story, which accounts for cultural and material aspects of disabled experience. Through her portrayal of Lily, MacDonald draws on deeply held, internalized beliefs associated with disabled figures, against which disability studies has fought and against which Lily persists. Lily is the ultimate survivor in Fall on Your Knees, in part because the narrative portrays her as surviving a potential drowning. Through a childish misunderstanding of religious ritual, her older sister Frances takes the newborn infants (Lily and her twin brother Ambrose) to the creek to perform a pseudo-baptism that she believes will save them. The immersion in the creek claims the life of Ambrose and gives Lily polio, transforming her into a post-polio survivor with a limp. Not only has Lily survived, readers discover on the final page of the book that Lily is the main narrator of the novel: she tells Frances’s estranged son, Anthony/Aloysius, “ ‘Here, dear … sit down and have a cuppa tea till I tell you about your mother’ ” (566). In this way, Lily exceeds her “representational status as [spectre] of the able-bodied,” to adapt Markotić’s words, and instead puts her own crip experience and epistemology at the generative centre. Lily’s version of the family tale showcases overlapping ways in which other characters read, misinterpret, and gain meaning from her, enacting what David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder call “narrative prosthesis.”5 Other characters expect Lily’s leg to propel her life story in a particular direction, but instead the limp contributes more to character development (of characters other than Lily) than to plot. The novel highlights contrasting perspectives on Lily’s limp through her sisters, Mercedes and Frances, who due to an incestuous twist are also her aunts. Mercedes believes that Lily is a miracle in the Catholic sense: The baby lies limp but alert in Mercedes’ arms while James feeds her milk from a dropper. He says, ‘She’s going to be fine. It’s a miracle.’ I am holding a miracle, thinks Mercedes. (175)

More important, Mercedes contradictorily believes that another miracle is needed to cure Lily of that which makes her miraculous in the first place, so as Mercedes increases her religious devotion, she focuses her fanatic energies on Lily: At this rate, Lily will be able to go to Lourdes when she’s fourteen. That’s a good age for a cure. The brink of womanhood. Think of how perfectly lovely Lily would be without her affliction. (171)

This response to Lily demonstrates the paradoxical ramifications of a spiritual model of disability, wherein her limp at once has great symbolic potential and nonetheless ought to be eliminated. Frances rejects the spiritual model that Mercedes imposes on Lily. When Mercedes tells herself that infant Lily is a miracle, Frances mutters under her breath, “There is so something wrong with her” (176). Frances also rejects the idea that Lily is especially fragile: “James has got permission to keep Lily out of school. She is crippled. It makes

Survival of the Fittest    887 sense that she would be delicate. Everyone assumes she is—everyone but Frances” (194). Nonetheless, Frances is keenly aware that Lily’s limp makes her different and that Lily inhabits a world not built to accommodate her. Frances tries to teach Lily the social context of her disability through malicious interpretations of disability in the children’s literature and film the girls are surrounded by, such as Pollyanna and What Katy Did (198). She appropriates Lily’s perspective in a letter to Lillian Gish, writing, It would mean so much to me because I am a crippled girl and have spent all my life in a wheelchair. … I wish I could run and play like the other children, but at least I am glad that Daddy dear can wheel me to the picture house so I can see you. (202–03)

She also directly mocks Lily: Frances runs in a crazy limp out of the garden, down the bank and right straight splash through the creek, waving her arms, doing her impression of Lily—“Fwances come on, come on Fwances!” laughing, limping all the way back to the house. Lily follows slowly. Frances can’t help it, Lily knows that. (218)

And Frances speaks to Lily harshly, justifying her own addiction to whisky (that numbs the pain otherwise induced by her sex work) by explaining, “ ‘What if we couldn’t have afforded a doctor? They’d’ve cut your leg off ’ ” (183–84). Whisky-fueled as her actions may be, Frances expresses a feeling of responsibility to look after Lily, though she does not share Mercedes’s view that Lily needs to be cured: Frances starts to make money. … It’s for Lily. Not for a “cure”—Frances does not subscribe to Mercedes’ devout yearnings. In fact, Frances is unsure why she is sure the money is for Lily. She is putting it away “just in case.” In case what? In case. (293)

Lily gives Frances purpose. Frances doesn’t pity Lily; rather, she feels personally guilty for causing the polio, but she does feel that Lily will need her help because of her disability, and she uses that apparent need to justify a set of troubling choices. Lily rejects the various models of disability that are imposed upon her, especially those that are tied to cure and spiritual redemption: Lily has promised herself, her little leg, that—number one—she will never let it be cut off. And—number two—she will never let it be obliterated by a miracle. The idea of betraying so valiant a limb, which has carried and marched beyond the call of duty. To say, here is your reward: to cease to be—to become, instead, a false twin for the good leg. Her bad leg is special because it is so strong. Lily has learned, however, that to others it is special because it is weak. (377)

She situates a new sense of self, and a new life for the family story, in her “little leg,” using it as the source for moving away from the family into a new domestic space. Throughout the novel, the external perspective on Lily remains full of stereotyped judgment, to the

888    Critical Fields and New Directions extent that when she appears in New York to see Doc Rose, women in the apartment building declare, “ ‘That red-haired devil who ruined our Miss Rose has come back to life as a shrunk-down raggedy cripple’ ” and “[h]‌ostility is replaced by curiosity,” as she “makes her lopsided way in a wake of whispers and one giggle followed by the sound of a slap” (540–41). Until the narrator brings us into her interior world, Lily remains an almost caricatured figure of evil or pity. But, described variously as “the crippled girl with the sea-green eyes” (407) with an “unmistakeable clanking entrance” (406), Lily’s experience as a “lame girl” (395, 541) gives her a perspective from which to understand other disabled characters. She can relate to the veterans parading through her hometown and draws on them to theorize her own disability experience, developing her own sense of what crip culture might be: Lily is not repelled by the veterans. She feels badly for them, they’ve been terribly hurt, but pity is a poison unction. Lily has experienced pity but she didn’t know what to call it, she only knew it made her terribly afraid. As if she had disappeared and become a ghost. Having experienced her own disappearance, she is conscious of how important it is for people to be seen, so when she looks at them—even the blind one—she also looks for them, just in case they too have got lost and need finding. (300, emphasis original)

She has a unique connection with another veteran, Mr. McIsaac, who has a limp in the same leg as hers. He “has stopped drinking” because of Lily, telling her “she has healed him. He tells her she has ‘the gift’ ” (300). Thus, there are hints in the novel of the possibility of a disability community coming together through crip experience to tell their own stories and understand their shared experience as culturally and socially valuable. In The Englishman’s Boy (1996), Harry Vincent tells his own tale, refracted in multiple ways, transforming the version that erstwhile cowboy Shorty McAdoo relates to him and juxtaposing it with an imagined early Hollywood version, including, among other things, a crip tale of Wylie, a cognitively disabled cowboy. Vincent’s congenital limp notably does not symbolize his moral flaws nor dramatically affect the plot. Through his portrayal of Vincent, Vanderhaeghe both defies and meets the typical assumptions of what limping might signify in a literary character. Vincent is a survivor in The Englishman’s Boy in that he relates the tale. Not only is he, like Lily, the narrator of most of the novel, but also for much of the novel the reader is aware that, in the 1950s, he is typing a manuscript of his experience of 1920s Hollywood. As with Lily, Vincent’s narration does not situate him as a projection of pity for an able-bodied readership. Indeed, Vincent’s ability to tell a story is central to the plot of The Englishman’s Boy, which rewrites the Cypress Hills massacre for Hollywood and for Canadian literature. Neither of Vincent’s versions focuses on his limp, but whenever his limp appears, it becomes a measure of other characters’ interpretations, as Nadine LeGier has pointed out. The matter-of-factness of Vincent’s limp and its cause alternate with key moments when the novel makes much of this physical difference, described as Vincent’s “only uncommon feature” (7). He faces childhood discrimination, but he has not had to go

Survival of the Fittest    889 to war, so he feels that his “bum leg … probably saved [his] life” (33). In one key moment, as Vincent attempts to extract the story of the Cypress Hills Massacre from a reluctant source, he proves that he is not a member of the police force: “it’s customary to hire cops with two good legs. You saw me cross the bar” (55). His limp makes him trustworthy and an odd combination of visible and invisible. His distinctive walk makes an influential Hollywood producer, Ira Dame Chance, notice Vincent—“I had a feeling about you. I used to watch you crossing the road” (20)—resulting in the commission to write an all-American mythological film. A spurned prostitute uses Vincent’s limp as a way to understand his rejection of her, though readers are privy to his perspective of her as undesirable (248). Vincent weaves into his tale other disabled characters who reside on the margins of The Englishman’s Boy: Vincent’s mother, who lives in an institution; the cowboy brothers “simple Wylie” and Miles, who is badly injured on a stunt shoot. From Vincent’s perspective, readers witness these characters as requiring care in a system that does not guarantee it to them. Through his financial support, his mother is able to live at the Mount of Olives Rest Home. Shorty McAdoo looks after Wylie, who devotedly cares for Miles, even after his death. Like Lily’s story, Vincent’s reveals the need for disabled characters to band together. In A Fine Balance (1995), Om and Ishvar negotiate a world hostile to their economic plight by transforming themselves into the ultimate crip survivors, making their economic way by performing disability on the streets that have rejected them. Through Om and Ishvar, Mistry demonstrates disability to be deeply tied to class and especially wealth. Members of the untouchable Chamvaar caste who are lucky enough to learn a trade and become tailors, the uncle and nephew move to Bombay and find employment with Dina, whose own eyesight has been harmed by her work in the trade. During India’s state of emergency, Om and Ishvar are criminalized for having lived in a now beautified area, and they are both forcibly sterilized: Om is castrated, and Ishvar also becomes an amputee due to effects of the operation. Rather than lose their capacity to work, as Dina had, the tailors use their new bodies for economic gain, becoming street beggars like Shankar, whom they initially noticed on their way into Bombay, “slumped upon a small wooden platform fitted with castors, which raised him four inches off the ground. His fingers and thumbs were missing, and his legs were amputated almost to the buttocks” (8). Even before amputation, when Ishvar injures his ankle at a work camp, he learns the intricacies of negotiating the physical world with a disability: “he seated himself gingerly on the platform, crossed his legs, and began rolling, using his hands the way Shankar did. It was not as easy as it looked, he discovered” (470). Shankar’s Beggarmaster carefully selects disabled workers from the labour camps who appear unable to work any longer, including Om and Ishvar, post-operation. While their former friend Maneck is so appalled by their appearance and apparent plight that he commits suicide, Om and Ishvar continue unabashed, seemingly grateful for the ongoing economic opportunities. They remain friends with their former employer Dina, who hosts them often and to whom they bring great pleasure. With Dina and with Shankar, Om and Ishvar create different crip communities. These are not presented as ideal worlds, so that Mistry’s depiction can be read as an ironic commentary on inclusion of diversity and on lower

890    Critical Fields and New Directions caste bodies’ exploitation for work. However, like that of Lily and Harry Vincent, the treatment of Om and Ishvar reveals other characters’ prejudices alongside a seeming affinity among disabled characters.

Conclusion Disability pervades Canadian literature. As such, and given Canada’s self-identity as a diverse country with multicultural ideals, disability in the Canadian literary and literary critical record offers an intriguing means by which to track cultural treatment of difference. A critical disability approach shows the ways in which Margaret Atwood’s Survival offers the potential for disability interpretation, but also traffics stereotypes of disability typical of a mainstream view. Drawing on pre-1972 Canadian literature, she finds the central figure of the supercrip, without naming him as such, and reads other figures in his shadow. The literary record shores up this dominant trope, as well as a set of metaphorical anxieties that characterize Canada as a young and never quite arriving nation. However, coincident with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, a shift begins toward a perspective of disability as part of the diversity that Canadian society embraces. Unfortunately, this means that disability also suffers from the same problems as Canadian multiculturalism, whose embrace has never quite lived up to its ideals. Examples from millennial Canadian literature, published in the mid-1990s, reveal a further shift toward representing crips as what Atwood might have called creative victims. These characters tell their own stories, instead of simply matching cultural scripts about their disabilities imposed by other characters. Rather than objects of pity that make other characters feel strong and useful, they are fully realized central characters who reveal the pity of other characters to be shallow and damaging. These novels offer a way to think of disability as central, embodied, and always deeply contextual. Using disability as a frame through which to read these novels allows for the imagining of new ways to conceive of lived disability within Canada and also new ways to think about disability as a form of diversity that Canadian literary critics have yet to fully embrace and explore.

Notes 1. Thinking of a disabled character as a “victim” is troubling, and disability studies scholars desire to move to a new set of terms, but a number of the “victims” that Atwood relies on to explain her model throughout the book have disabilities. In part, I invoke the term here to demonstrate the distance traversed since Atwood’s first sustained glance at Canadian literature. 2. For more on the figure of the supercrip, see Clare. 3. For more about the “ideal-body-now-flawed,” especially in relation to Canadian literature, see Markotić.

Survival of the Fittest    891 4. The term normate implies the normativity that a supposedly normal social figure wields. Thomson outlines the characteristics of this figure, such as White, male, protestant, and athletic. 5. Narrative prosthesis is a process by which a disability exists within a narrative in order to move the plot along, or prop it up, rather than existing in its own right (see Mitchell and Snyder).

Works Cited Atwood, Margaret. Survival. Toronto: Anansi, 1972. Print. Birney, Earle. “David.” David and Other Poems. Toronto: Ryerson, 1942. Print. Callaghan, Morley. Such Is My Beloved. Toronto: MacMillan, 1934. Print. Carstairs, Catherine, and Sydney Kruth. “Disability and Citizenship in the Life and Fiction of Jean Little.” Histoire sociale/Social History 45.90 (2012): 339–59. Print. Clare, Eli. Exile and Pride:  Disability, Queerness, and Liberation. New  York:  South End, 1999. Print. Connor, Ralph. The Foreigner, A  Tale of Saskatchewan. London:  Hodder & Stoughton, 1909. Print. ———. The Sky Pilot: A Tale of the Foothills. Toronto: Westminster, 1899. Print. Ewart, Chris. “Terms of DisAppropriation.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 4.2 (2010): 147–62. Print. Findley, Timothy. Not Wanted on the Voyage. Markham, ON: Viking, 1984. Print. Gibson, Graeme. Five Legs. Toronto: Anansi, 1969. Print. Highway, Tomson. The Rez Sisters: A Play in Two Acts. Saskatoon: Fifth House, 1992. LeGier, Nadine. “ ‘You Saw Me Cross the Bar’.” Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en littérature canadienne 35.1 (2010): 243–55. Print. MacDonald, Ann-Marie. Fall on Your Knees. 1996. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2010. Print. Markotić, Nicole. “Icarus, Gods, and the ‘Lesson’ of Disability.” Journal of Literary Disability 1.1 (2007): 13–20. Print. McRuer, Robert. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York: New York UP, 2006. Print. Mistry, Rohinton. A Fine Balance. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1995. Print. Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2000. Print. Montgomery, Lucy Maud. Emily Climbs. New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1925. Print. ———. Emily of New Moon. New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1923. Print. ———. Emily’s Quest. New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1927. Print. Richler, Mordecai. The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. London: André Deutsch, 1959. Print. Ross, Sinclair. As for Me and My House. New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1941. Print. Thomson, Rosemarie Garland. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. Print. Truchan-Tataryn, Maria. (In)Visible Images:  Seeing Disability in Canadian Literature, 1823–1974. Saarbrücken: Lambert Academic Publishing, 2011. Print. Vanderhaeghe, Guy. The Englishman’s Boy. New York: Picador, 1998. Print. Wilson, Ethel. Love and Salt Water. 1956. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2013. Print.

Chapter 48

Canadian Li t e rat u re in the Neoli be ra l  E ra Herb Wyile

Perhaps the dominant fact about late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Canadian literature is its increasingly globalized and transnational character. The work of writers such as Dionne Brand, David Chariandy, Rawi Hage, Rohinton Mistry, Madeleine Thien, and many others has transformed Canadian literature and has compelled critics to reconceptualize that literature as transcultural, transnational, and even postnational. This shift reflects broader trends of population flows, diasporic identification, and advances in global trade and in information and communications technologies that have compressed the world and have reshaped traditional notions of national and cultural identity. As many critics have noted, however, these broader developments, typically lumped under the rubric of globalization, to a great degree have been driven by and framed within the discourse of neoliberalism, a celebratory repackaging of freemarket values that has reconfigured the political and economic landscape around the world. Promoting (selective) deregulation, the diminution of social programs, liberalized trade, and (selectively) reduced government intervention in the economy, neoliberal advocates have been hugely successful in transforming the interests of capital into a kind of common-sense consensus that has been widely embraced. Neoliberals have also effectively hijacked the idea of globalization, strategically conflating the increasing global flow of goods, ideas, people, and cultural influences with a neoliberal regime that, as Jim McGuigan argues, “has exerted market reasoning over all practices and colonised the everyday life of late modernity” (8). Although much attention has been given to Canadian literature in the context of globalization, relatively little attention has been given to the impact of neoliberalism on Canadian literature. Neoliberal thinking has considerable implications for Canadian literature, and it is imperative to recognize the impact of neoliberalism as a discourse and a foundation for policy that has strategically entwined itself with the broader trend of globalization. The aim of this chapter, consequently, is to examine the emerging engagement with neoliberal globalization itself in the work of writers such as Jeff Derksen, Rita Wong, Wendy Lill, and others, but also to

Canadian Literature in the Neoliberal Era    893 consider the implications of the influence of neoliberalism on the broader infrastructure in which Canadian literature is produced. One of the major developments in Canadian literary studies in the late twentieth century has been a shift from a postcolonial focus that dominated the latter quarter of the century to a view of Canadian literature as transnational and postnational. The growing preoccupation with transnationalism and diasporic studies reflects skepticism about Canadian identity and cultural nationalism as exclusive and hegemonic, as well as skepticism about discourses of multiculturalism as superficial, assimilationist, and ultimately co-opting. Indeed, as Yasmeen Abu-Laban and Christina Gabriel have influentially argued, multiculturalism policy has increasingly been neoliberalized, with diversity reframed as something less to be addressed in order to ensure equality and social harmony than “something that can be consumed (products of ‘ethnic culture’) or a feature to be capitalized upon and marketed” (173). Multicultural nationalism, Kit Dobson contends, has effectively merged with neoliberal economics, and, rather than offering “an effective means of defending Canada against capitalism,” instead becomes a strategy of commodification, “one that profits from images of diversity, rendering multicultural literary products susceptible to appropriation by a nation that promotes itself through those visions of inclusion” (116). As Dobson’s comments suggest, one of the central narratives of globalization has been the celebration of international cultural circulation and transaction—a kind of global exposure and mixing that, at least superficially, appears both salutary and progressive—that masks a deeper and more problematic integration into the structures of multinational capital. In this, as in many other ways, celebratory narratives of globalization as a beneficial opening up, a productive mobility and desire for exchange, serve as cover stories for neoliberal imperatives and policy choices that are far less democratic and beneficial. As Sabine Milz argues, “[l]‌iterary studies of globalization have tended to confine globalization to a certain set of people (immigrants, exiles, cosmopolitans), locales (metropolitan and postcolonial places), authors (postcolonial and ethnic minority authors), and textual contents (transnationality, diaspora, cultural hybridity, as represented in writing)” (“Materialist” 242). What needs to be added to this picture, Milz contends, is recognition of “the material realities of literary globalization … and materialist analyses of the intersections of the literary and the neoliberal” (38). In subtle and not-so-subtle ways, neoliberal thinking has substantially changed the landscape in which Canadian literature is written, published, and promoted, and thus a crucial priority for thinking about Canadian literature in the twenty-first century is not so much to disentangle neoliberal thinking from more celebratory narratives of globalization as to highlight how it threads through them in ways that sustain them, on the one hand, but compromise and even contradict them, on the other. A growing number of literary critics in Canada, most notably Milz, Jeff Derksen, and Imre Szeman, are coming to recognize the ways in which neoliberalism has become a significant factor informing the conditions of and around contemporary Canadian literature; a crucial task at this point, however, is to recognize the ways in which Canadian writers themselves are starting to address neoliberalism in their creative work.

894    Critical Fields and New Directions One of the difficulties of dealing with neoliberalism is that it is, unsurprisingly, a highly contested concept. At least some argue that neoliberalism has become a kind of catch-all term, a lightning rod for critiques of phenomena as wide-ranging as neo-imperialism, environmental degradation, and consumer capitalism. However, many others argue for the viability and even the necessity of the term as a kind of fulcrum for understanding ideological and policy continuities across these various fields. While the term “is reductive, sacrificing attention to internal complexities and geo-historical specificity,” as Stuart Hall concedes, “naming neo-liberalism is politically necessary to give the resistance to its onward march content, focus and a cutting edge” (706). As David Harvey, among others, contends, neoliberalism has ascended to the status of a kind of international common sense (3), and its prescriptions inform decisions about an increasingly dizzying array of walks of life, from labour relations to social programs, to environmental policy, to publishing. It has reshaped the way in which governments operate, how we see our occupational lives, how we think, and even how we see ourselves. Thus an understanding of neoliberalism—however provisional and debatable—is central to an understanding of what Canadian writers increasingly have to contend with. Neoliberalism has a genealogy and history too complex to convey in short order, but its ascendancy is typically situated as a response on the part of capital to the end of the decades-long postwar boom in the 1970s and, some argue, was accelerated by the end of the Cold War (see Lanchester 16). Various business and academic interests engaged in a systematic campaign to promote and consolidate a series of changes that have fundamentally reshaped most capitalist democracies, including liberalized trade, reduced taxation, increasing privatization of formerly public institutions, decreased government intervention in the economy, a combination of deregulation and business-friendly re-regulation, and, in broader terms, the scaling back of the welfare-state infrastructure built up through much of the twentieth century. These ideas were “peddled relentlessly through free-market think tanks, through the financial community and business organizations, and through the elite and mainstream media” (Peck 5). At the same time, though, it is important to recognize that neoliberalism is not simply some confidence trick and that its appeal can be attributed at least in part to the fact that many were readily amenable to its prescriptions. As Helga Leitner et al. contend, neoliberalism’s ascendancy “was not inexorable, foreordained by its natural superiority as a body of thought.” Instead, it “coalesced out of contestations of Fordism with which it resonated,” not just on the part of capitalists and neoconservatives, but also disaffected clients of the welfare state and residents of the Eastern bloc “tired of state control” (7). Neoliberal globalization has proven to be so seductive and resilient, it must be recognized, because it is rooted in principles that, at least superficially, seem attractive and beneficial (low taxes, low prices, less government waste, and so on). Moreover, neoliberalism, as Harvey has argued, has succeeded in part because its advocates have cleverly deployed a strategic and euphemistic discourse that situates its imperatives and its accomplishments in a positive light (119)—the by-now familiar battery of terms such as mobility, efficiency, austerity, restructuring, downsizing, and so on.

Canadian Literature in the Neoliberal Era    895 However, for critics of neoliberalism, a recurring refrain has been that there is a significant disparity between the often utopian portraits of neoliberal advocates and the outcomes of what critics term “actually existing neoliberalism.” Neoliberalism has had a pronounced and orchestrated impact on governance and on public discourse over the last few decades, and its promotion of fiscal imperatives and profitability, critics argue, has permeated both public and private life. It has certainly reconfigured conceptions of what governments are for and whom they are there to serve, increasingly conflating the interests of the nation with the interests of powerful business leaders, as well as reconfiguring individuals from people and citizens to taxpayers, consumers, clients, and entrepreneurs. A  central charge against neoliberalism—whose self-proclaimed principal accomplishment is the generation of wealth—is that it routinely intensifies economic and social inequality; “the evidence,” Susan George charges, “shows that the most unequal societies are also unequivocally the most neoliberal and the most dysfunctional from myriad points of view” (96). Indeed, many see neoliberal deregulation and obsession with profit as the primary cause of the 2007–2008 global financial crisis, whose repercussions continue to reverberate around the world (see, for instance, George, Lanchester, and Peck). If one of the hazards of dealing with neoliberalism is the conceptual diffuseness and disputability of the term, that difficulty unsurprisingly extends to the prospect of identifying neoliberalism as a concern of Canadian writers. In some cases, it requires a kind of consensus about what constitutes neoliberalism and its repercussions, but in other cases—most notably, the work of West Coast poet Jeff Derksen—neoliberalism is a much more visible concern. While it might be said that only a few writers visibly highlight neoliberalism as a central concern of their writing, if we identify neoliberalism with the palette of ideological propensities and policy choices described earlier, it is arguably the case that, as neoliberalism increasingly makes its mark on Canadian society, it has also started to become a preoccupation of Canadian writers as well, who contend with it to varying degrees and in different ways. Lisa Moore’s 2009 novel February, for instance, is principally a narrative about mourning and recovery, addressing one of the most traumatic moments in the history of Newfoundland and Labrador, the sinking of the mobile drilling rig the Ocean Ranger in 1982, a calamity that claimed 84 lives. While concentrating on the subjective emotional trajectory of a widow of one of the dead rig workers as she responds to and recovers from the disaster, Moore also casts a wider net by addressing questions of worker safety, of corporate public relations, and of commodification that have been central preoccupations in critiques of neoliberalism. Moore’s protagonist Helen O’Mara becomes obsessed with safety in the wake of the loss of her husband Cal, as well as with the chain of failures that led to the sinking of the ostensibly unsinkable rig. She is appalled by the companies’ attempt to massage the public’s reaction after the disaster, and subsequently attends a conference sponsored by the oil companies, where she is infuriated by their coercive insistence on the calculated risk of economic development: “They asked the public to consider the overall good to be achieved when we do take risks. They spoke in that back-assed way and what they meant was: If you don’t do the job, we’ll give it

896    Critical Fields and New Directions to someone who will” (118). Although its primary storyline is set in the 1980s, Moore’s novel foregrounds an emergent neoliberal discourse and tracks it to a present that has been rocked by the global financial crisis. In this contemporary, framing narrative, a number of scenes foreground Moore’s awareness of and implicit critique of neoliberal prescriptions. In one instance, Jane Downey, pregnant from a holiday fling with Helen’s son John, seeks refuge with her father, only to be spurned and chastised that such personal irresponsibility is somehow to blame for the global economic crisis that is shrinking his investment portfolio (89). Elsewhere, in a lovely inside joke, Jane, whose master’s research deals with the homeless, interviews a homeless man who advocates outsourcing to Africa those industries whose toxins collect over the years in the lungs and blood and bowels and turn into full-blown cancer when most of the population turns, statistically speaking, fifty-five years old. Many Africans weren’t going to make it to fifty-five, was the logic of this completely insane litigator-turned-street-person. He had grabbed her breast and squeezed it hard, twice, like you’d toot a horn. (123–24)

It is hard not to see this scene as a gesture to the notorious “Summers memo”; Lawrence Summers, economic advisor to Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and one of the principal advocates of neoliberal structural adjustment programs in the 1990s, as top economic advisor at the World Bank signed off on a memo advocating the exportation of toxic waste to Third World countries since people there already had lower life expectancy (“Let Them Eat Pollution” 66), an extreme but nonetheless telling example of neoliberal rationality in action. Thus, while February is primarily a study of mourning and recovery, in these and other ways, it also tracks how neoliberal values impinge upon both occupational and human relations.1 In Canada, the impact of neoliberal policy measures was palpably felt in the form of austerity campaigns conducted at the provincial level in the 1990s, particularly under Michael Harris’s Conservative government in Ontario, and at the federal level under Liberal finance minister Paul Martin. While these campaigns were carried out in the name of the by-now-familiar “fiscal discipline,” their social consequences were by no means evenly apportioned. This element of neoliberal policy prescriptions is central to Nova Scotia playwright (and former MP for Dartmouth) Wendy Lill in her 1998 play Corker. Lill’s protagonist Merit is an ambitious civil servant facilitating a series of cutbacks and privatizations when she is confronted with the consequences of these manoeuvres in the form of Corker, a mentally challenged young man whose life has been further shaken up by impending changes to increasingly financially strapped and understaffed social services. Highlighting a combination of cutbacks to the public sector and the privatization of social services, the play offers an example of what Pat Armstrong points to as “the privatization of responsibility” (187), in which “what is public in the sense of shared responsibility and services is not only increasingly narrowly defined but it is also increasingly penetrated by private for-profit business and practices” (198). By dint of Corker’s persistent attachment to Merit, she comes to see firsthand

Canadian Literature in the Neoliberal Era    897 the repercussions of slashing a social safety net she had so insouciantly dismissed as a taxpayer-funded luxury, as Corker’s future group home is about to be taken over by a US firm that specializes in corrections facilities. Over the course of the play, Lill highlights the gap between a political elite preoccupied with attending to the needs of business and those on the receiving end of their righteous austerity, or (as an outraged social worker in the play puts it) “at the mercy of the assholes with the red pencils” (103).2 A less representational and even more militant engagement with neoliberalism and its effects is evident in West Coast poet Rita Wong’s forage (2007). While varied in form and not conventional lyric poems, the pieces in this collection might best be described as the “cry of a nervous organism” (20), a phrase from Northrop Frye that provides the title for one of Wong’s poems. As Christine Kim contends, the poems in forage, which reflect a wide array of concerns such as Wong’s Chinese heritage, violence against women, and the legacy of colonialism in Canada, stress how “global struggle against contemporary capitalism has deep historical roots” (Kim 172–73). Globalization, then, is not the only concern in the collection, but it is a recurring one, and it is a globalization that is infused with neoliberal thinking and its emphasis on finance, profitability, and the liberalization of trade. Over the course of the collection, Wong draws attention to the hidden consequences of such a global economy, particularly for the environment, the unsuspecting consumer, and those in the so-called developing world. A number of poems in the collection, for instance, are preoccupied with genetic engineering, the quality of food, and the increasing exposure of consumers to dangerous levels of toxins, the result of an increasingly industrialized approach to agriculture dominated by large multinational corporations preoccupied with profitability. The poem “nervous organism,” for instance, through a kind of verbal splicing, in which words are “phonetically modified” (Butling 328), questions the wisdom of transgenic foods, referring to a series of genetic modifications intended to enhance agricultural production: “jellyfish potato / jellypo fishtato / glow in the pork toys” (20). Here Wong points, presumably, to experiments in which potatoes have been modified using a gene from jellyfish so that they glow when they need watering; likewise, jellyfish genes have been inserted into pigs so that they glow and are more easily discernible in dark conditions. Wong questions the hubristic instrumentality with which we treat other organisms, improvement of the production cycle taking precedence over a more respectful attitude toward nature. A number of the poems in forage prompt readers to consider their location in a globalized economy whose benefits and risks are unevenly distributed. The prose poem “perverse subsidies,” for instance, points to the suppressed carnage that “subsidizes” contemporary consumer culture, including the hidden costs of an economy predicated on the consumption of oil: fill my car, our streets, with the corpses of iraqi civilians, the ghost of ken saro-wiwa, the bones of displaced caribou. it will clatter down the graveyard that masquerades as a highway. (21)

898    Critical Fields and New Directions The poem “sort by day, burn by night” points to the impact both on the environment and on peasant labourers in China of the process of disemboweling computers to recycle their components: circuit boards most profitable & most dangerous if you live in guiyu village, one of the hundred thousand people who “liberate recyclable metals” into canals & rivers, turning them into acid sludge. (46)

Highlighting how the cheapness of consumer goods, heralded as one of the greatest benefits of globalization, is a precarious illusion, Wong concludes the poem by stressing that the suppressed hazards of production and consumption are a global problem: what if your Pentium got dumped in guiyu village? your garbage, someone else’s cancer? economy of scale shrinks us all global whether here or there collapses cancer consumes en-masse. (47)

G.J. Paton contends that “the logic of neo-liberalism is antagonistic to that of ecological sustainability” (109), and, in a similar vein, as the ending of “sort by day, burn by night” reflects, forage connects such concerns as consumer consumption and environmental degradation to a free-market model of the economy and, more implicitly, to the neoliberal ideology underpinning it. Similar notes are struck in Sybil Unrest, a collaborative long poem by Wong and West Coast writer Larissa Lai. Initially sparked in 2003, Sybil Unrest is “a back and forth conversation conducted by email over the course of several months” (126) into which the two “attempt to reinject questions of gender, race and class, as well as geography, movement, power and hope” (127). These questions, I would argue, contend with what can be seen as signature features of the age of neoliberalism: corporate domination, consumer capitalism, the apotheosis of the free market, and the attendant erosion of democracy. Sybil Unrest also engages in the important work of stressing the environmental consequences of such a regime, a connection nicely captured in an early sequence: trickle down eco anomie bears and curses bulls and purses blink an i

Canadian Literature in the Neoliberal Era    899 swerve on the roadmap too destruction sadomarketism. (11)

While the compressed syntax and dense word-play of Sybil Unrest make it a challenging read, they also give it a complex texture that weaves connections between different dimensions of what we might describe as neoliberal democracy. One early passage, for instance, plays on various nursery rhymes and questions the equation of free-market ideology and political democracy: this little piggy loves the free market economy in the guise of democracy cries we we we all the way to the bank. (16)

Sybil Unrest forges links between the world of international finance, free trade, and neoliberal economics and such key environmental issues as the toxic impact of industry on the environment, the degradation of food sources, and the apocalyptic potential of climate change. A key sequence underscores the way in which neoliberalism encourages the displacement of environmental concerns by economic ones: going through the notions economists pantomime the pollution of oceans the razing of old growth on spreadsheets. (60)

Pointing to the pivotal role of transnational bodies in enforcing a neoliberal agenda, Lai and Wong wittily and allusively underscore the link between neoliberal imperatives and continuing environmental deterioration: manned by the world bunk those 3-piece suited heels gash & smother earth the bleak small inherit the dearth none left but the roaches global swarming encroaches. (9)

Here, Lai and Wong make the key point that the dire environmental consequences of a free-market neoliberal agenda are likely to be borne largely by the underprivileged. Sybil Unrest is, to be sure, often elliptical and cryptic, but it is also cleverly allusive and imaginatively witty. It serves a cautionary function in pointing to how, in order to gain traction in addressing environmental issues, it is important to be

900    Critical Fields and New Directions aware of the larger ideological picture in which those issues have been increasingly financialized. If it might be said that, for all the writers discussed so far, an argument needs to be made that what they are writing about can (at least in part) be referred to as neoliberalism, that is certainly not the case with Stephen Collis’s long poem “Dear Common: Ya Basta!,” which addresses many of the same concerns as do Lai and Wong, but much more explicitly sets its sights on neoliberalism as a political, economic, and ideological regime. Discontinuous and semantically elusive, “Dear Common: Ya Basta!” contends with privatization, deregulation, and enclosure as central manifestations of the neoliberal era and as the primary mechanisms of a kind of global neocolonialism. Largely hortatory in tone, the poem obliquely gestures to the need for resistance and to an international solidarity emerging in response to the circumscription of territory, resources, and freedom under late capitalism. we are heavy with doubt and direction land evictions to smashing unions enclosure’s wet genetic dreams genetic coding and thoughts of freedom I own that smirk so pay up buddy deregulation so they may profit. (16)

In response to such containment and curtailment, “Dear Common: Ya Basta!” seems to urge a resistance to the monadic, consumerist isolation that the neoliberal emphasis on individuality cultivates—“calls against singleness and / idle leisure” (19)—and promotes instead a global embrace of social justice: “and if we are sold only singleness then / channel others unending rage” (19). That neoliberalism is at the core of Collis’s vision of this global struggle is reflected in his use of prosopopeia in the poem’s anaphoristic finale, cued by the lines “For this I append here / Neoliberalism’s Song.” This appendix of 22 lines, each beginning with the word “Privatize”—with each line indented further so that the poem slopes (appropriately) to the right—is an incisive inventory of neoliberalism’s incursions, from creative production—“Privatize poems for lyric subjects”—to science—“Privatize this gene I  admire its coding”—to freedom of movement—“Privatize mobility and we’ll all stay put” (20). In this fashion, “Dear Common: Ya Basta!” inscribes a resistance to the final imperative of “Neoliberalism’s Song”: “Privatize words to shut us up.” Collis’s poem appeared in a special issue of West Coast Line entitled Poetry and the Long Neoliberal Moment, edited by poet and critic Jeff Derksen, in whose work—creative and critical—can be seen the most sustained focus on neoliberalism in Canadian literature. In collections such as Dwell (1993) and Transnational Muscle Cars (2003), as well as in the critical pieces collected in Annihilated Time (2009), Derksen articulates and (more important) rearticulates the many ways in which our subjectivities have been shaped and circumscribed in “the long neoliberal moment.” One of the founders of the Kootenay School of Writing, which has had a pronounced impact on contemporary

Canadian Literature in the Neoliberal Era    901 Canadian poetics, Derksen has engaged in perhaps the most sustained commentary on neoliberalism and its implications for writing in Canada.3 But Derksen’s consciousness of the pervasive power of neoliberal thinking in our present late-capitalist age also informs his own poetry, particularly Transnational Muscle Cars. Although Derksen’s work has not received as much attention as it deserves, those few critics who have engaged with his poetry point to the influence of poststructuralist poetics, particularly the work of the Language poets, evident in the preoccupation in Derksen’s work with the materiality of language, with linguistic play, and with resisting a kind of mimetic, lyric immediacy. The result is that Derksen’s work is not as amenable to semantic interpretation as that of most of his contemporaries on the Canadian literary scene. Most readers are likely to find a book like Transnational Muscle Cars enigmatic, discontinuous, fragmented, even confusing. At the same time, though, to the degree that the poems in the collection lend themselves to a semantic reading, they engage with various dimensions of neoliberal globalization. In his introduction to Annihilated Time, Derksen argues that “[t]‌he cultural logic of globalization—the imposition of neoliberalism’s ideology of economic growth as progress—an ideology that slyly folds social good into market expansion but produces a remarkably uneven expansion of a particular form of economic accumulation over the face of the globe, has also generated cultural engagement, resistance, and opposition from its own cauldron of contradictions” (10). Here Derksen is addressing the work of others, but the description of a kind of counter-neoliberal cultural production aptly applies to his own work as well. While the poems in Transnational Muscle Cars traverse a wide array of interests, concerns, and states of mind, it is fair to say that a central preoccupation of the collection is the political, economic, social, and existential dimensions of neoliberalism.4 This preoccupation is evoked in different ways in the collection, reflecting a number of characteristic strategies on Derksen’s part. Writing about the importance of affect in the long poem “Happy Locally, Sad Geopolitically,” Jennifer Blair contends that Derksen “engages in a kind of exploratory poetic flâneurism” (75), a description that nicely applies to other poems in the collection such as “Jerk” and “ ‘What to Do about Globalism,’ ” which likewise suggest an “ ‘ambling’ [through] a culture engulfed in negative emotion—misery, despair, and, as the title indicates, sadness—which generates not from individual experience but rather from social and economic conditions” (Blair 77). We could well call them Civil Elegies for our commodified, postindustrial, post-Fordist, neoliberal times.5 A sequence from “Jerk” nicely conveys the texture of these alienated musings: these days I’m yearning not for a little outside to call homeland, although I like good design too and do feel that “workers” (morphed “multitude”) also live outside of quotation marks in this “the highest stage”—

902    Critical Fields and New Directions but now I’m wanting transformation rather than “structural adjustment” to go with the primitive accumulation and worn contradictions. Not more of these natural facts (“globalization is”). (9–10)

As Derksen observes in Annihilated Time, neoliberalism “attempts to map aspects of neoclassical economics onto our social and cultural lives, to take an economic philosophy of private ownership, self-interest, and market logic and raise it to a status of ‘common sense’ ” (15). In this passage from “Jerk,” as elsewhere in Transnational Muscle Cars, Derksen sets out to disrupt this consensus, drawing attention to the material and psychic seductions and violence of neoliberal globalization. His disaffected speakers muse about transnational capitalism, free trade, commodity culture, and a neo-imperial order devoted to enforcing the reign of the free market. For instance, many critics of neoliberalism point to its cultivation of a culture of competitive individualism, an insight succinctly conveyed in “Happy Locally, Sad Geopolitically”: To vote, think only of yourself in relation to yourself, others are fucked so fuck them (also helpful for the workplace). (22)

As Nick Couldry puts it, “neoliberal politics inevitably generates conflicts between freedom and control, because its notion of freedom … is purely individualist and makes no reference either to people’s socially oriented goals or to the conditions of social cooperation necessary for any meaningful notion of freedom” (66). One of the more distinctive aspects of Transnational Muscle Cars is the inclusion of a number of poems, such as “But Could I Make a Living from It,” “Social Facts Are Vertical,” and “Compression,” that consist of a sequence of short observations, declarations, mottos, or quotations (usually one to three lines). Although superficially random and discontinuous, these poems share recurring motifs and devices and routinely speak to the distinguishing features of neoliberal globalization, such as the intensification of social and economic inequality, a privileging of financial and economic considerations above all else, the commodification of almost all walks of life, and the collapsing of personal identity with patterns of consumption. At times, these observations bespeak the disaffected, alienated sensibility of the longer poems like “Jerk,” but they also take the form of wry observations, seemingly earnest declarations, sardonically conveyed mottos, and unattributed quotations, many of which foreground and question the verities of neoliberalism. One of the routine injunctions of neoliberal thinkers is that workers need to be flexible, a euphemism for giving up occupational stability and hard-won gains in

Canadian Literature in the Neoliberal Era    903 the workplace, a tension nicely captured in a sardonic declaration from “Nobody Likes You”: “A proud yet flexible and disposable worker” (27). A good example of Derksen’s deployment of unattributed quotations is a line from “Compression”: “For those who embrace the free flow of goods around the world, these are disquieting times” (106). The sentence comes from a 3 May 2002 column by John Ibbitson in the Globe and Mail responding to George Bush’s protectionist moves on softwood lumber and steel imports from Canada, but decontextualized in Derksen’s poem, it hovers as an ironized proclamation of the ostensibly inherent value and virtue of free trade. Another quotation nicely isolates and deconstructs one of the clarion calls of neoliberalism, the necessity of “productivity” and “efficiency,” which here is exposed as accelerated exploitation of labour: “The problem of getting workers to work harder for lower pay is inherently difficult” (73). Although Derksen’s writing is dense, discontinuous, highly allusive, and often enigmatic, requiring a great deal of engagement on the part of readers, it regularly and cleverly evokes the different ways in which “the processes of globalization, despite their deep and troubled history, have joined with the economically based philosophy of neoliberalism to rewrite the texture of daily life in a sweeping and very uneven manner throughout the world” (Derksen, Annihilated 10). That approach, however, as Derksen has conveyed in both his critical and his creative work, is itself a response to the pervasive values of neoliberalism and a strategy for finding ways to highlight and “disarticulate” its assumptions. In a neoliberal milieu in which cultural production has become perhaps fatally entwined with the chain of commodification, in other words, accessibility is problematized, almost equating to a vulnerability to co-optation. Although the opacity and hyper-referentiality of Derksen’s work may limit its appeal, one of the outcomes of an encounter with his work is that the very concept of “appeal” is troubled—revealed as part of a larger order in which cultural production has been caught up in the cycle of commodity production. As mentioned earlier, one of the rejoinders that critics of neoliberalism routinely face is that the term is amorphous, used as a catch-all for those who want to engage in critiquing neo-imperial politics, consumer culture, transnational capitalism, and so on, and the same complaint might be directed at my reading of the work of the writers above. But as those critics have underlined, and as these writers do, there are important continuities between all of those things, which makes neoliberalism a highly necessary concept for understanding the ideological links that have been forged between these dominant elements of contemporary society, whether it is the emphasis on commodification in popular culture, the pushing of free-market principles as a kind of new imperial politics, or the strengthening of multinational corporations through neoliberal deregulation and reregulation. “If neoliberalism is also the social and cultural wing of globalization that saturates social relations,” Derksen stresses, “then an alternative or countering role for cultural production has to be formulated within this framework” (Annihilated 253). But as this brief survey of examples shows, that countering role takes various forms and is evident to varying degrees.

904    Critical Fields and New Directions This variation is in no small part due to the way in which the publishing scene itself increasingly has been permeated by neoliberal values and imperatives. The publishing industry in Canada has come to be dominated by the domestic arms of major multinational corporations with hugely advantageous economies of scale and a global reach, reshaping what kind of writing gets promoted and how. These “multinational publishers (which are for the most part subdivisions of even larger multimedia corporations),” Milz argues, “function as agents of a standardized culture of bestselling, internationally marketable star authors, products, and spectacles” (“Materialist” 180). The production of culture, furthermore, increasingly has been framed within a cultural industrial model in which the works of writers and artists have come to be seen as products and commodities like any others. In the last few decades, under the influence of neoliberal thinking, there has been a movement toward “a strengthening of the marketand consumer-based aspects of the cultural industries and a downplaying of cultural objectives and citizen-based concerns” (Milz, “Is Canadian?” 21). Consequently, Milz argues, “[t]‌he space of national literature has become noticeably commercialized in this neo-liberal climate, which … has made it more difficult for small- and mid-sized publishers to compete for readers and expand market reach” (21). In this light, at first glance it would seem that those works most critical of the neoliberal order tend to be disseminated by publishers on the margins of a literary infrastructure increasingly dominated by neoliberal values; Lai and Wong’s more experimental and militant verse, for instance, was published by two small alternative presses. However, both Derksen’s formally challenging, counter-neoliberal Transnational Muscle Cars and Lill’s more conventionally naturalistic Corker were published by Talonbooks, a long-standing and substantial West Coast press. Furthermore, while Moore’s February—published by Canada’s largest surviving independent press, Anansi—is principally concerned with the Ocean Ranger disaster and the process of mourning, it nonetheless engages to a considerable degree with the moral, economic, and social ramifications of a neoliberal mindset. As Milz and Dobson argue, in taking stock of contemporary Canadian literature it is important to attend to the globalized, neoliberal milieu in which the much-heralded transnational, cosmopolitan, multicultural Canadian literature is increasingly being commodified. Indeed, many of the “postcolonial and ethnic minority authors” Milz describes as being privileged in narratives of globalization are also engaged in contesting comfortably commodified versions of multicultural nationalism, including not only Lai and Wong, but also writers like Hage, Brand, Roy Miki, and others. As Derksen contends in “National Literatures in the Shadow of Neoliberalism,” the “tools of criticism and the forms of creative knowledge that were forged in the critiques of the nation can be scaled up and brought into the present both for and against the state in neoliberalism” (63). Writers who engage with neoliberalism, especially explicitly, are still a small minority in Canadian literature, and it is difficult to say whether the prevailing conditions will serve to foster such resistance and critique or suppress it—or, indeed, both. What I think is safe to say is that the contours of neoliberalism as I have described it here

Canadian Literature in the Neoliberal Era    905 will continue to shape the conditions in which Canadian writers live and work for the foreseeable future.

Notes 1. My analysis of Moore’s novel here is developed in more detail in “February Is the Cruelest Month:  Neoliberalism and the Economy of Mourning in Lisa Moore’s February” in Newfoundland and Labrador Studies 25.1 (2010): 55–71. 2. For more on Corker, see my discussion of the play in Anne of Tim Hortons: Globalization and the Reshaping of Atlantic-Canadian Literature (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2011), 89–93. 3. See especially Derksen’s chapter “National Literatures in the Shadow of Neoliberalism” in Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies. 4. Some of the ideas in my discussion of Derksen here are developed in a full-length article, “ ‘I questioned authority and the question won’: Transnational Muscle Cars and the Neoliberal Order,” in Canadian Literature 216 (2013): 67–83. 5. Dennis Lee’s 1972 long poem Civil Elegies is seen as a pivotal Canadian literary meditation on living in space colonized by the United States.

Works Cited Abu-Laban, Yasmeen, and Christina Gabriel. Selling Diversity: Immigration, Multiculturalism, Employment Equity, and Globalization. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2002. Print. Armstrong, Pat. “Neoliberalism in Action:  Canadian Perspectives.” Neoliberalism and Everyday Life. Ed. Susan Braedley and Meg Luxton. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2010. 184–201. Print. Blair, Jennifer. “Ambling in the Streets of Affect:  Jeff Derksen’s ‘Happy Locally, Sad Geopolitically.’ ” Open Letter 14.3 (2010): 74–91. Print. Butling, Pauline. “Re:  Reading the Postmodern:  ‘Mess is Lore.’  ” Re:Reading The Postmodern:  Canadian Literature and Criticism After Modernism. Ed. Robert Stacey. Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 2010. 313–39. Print. Collis, Stephen. “Dear Common: Ya Basta!” Poetry and the Long Neoliberal Moment. Spec. issue of West Coast Line 40.3 (2006): 12–20. Print. Couldry, Nick. Why Voice Matters:  Culture and Politics after Neoliberalism. London:  Sage, 2010. Print. Derksen, Jeff. Annihilated Time: Poetry and Other Politics. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2009. Print. ———. Dwell. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1993. Print. ———. “National Literatures in the Shadow of Neoliberalism.” Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies. Ed. Smaro Kamboureli and Robert Zacharias. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2012. 37–63. Print. ———. Transnational Muscle Cars. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2003. Print. Dobson, Kit. Transnational Canadas: Anglo-Canadian Literature and Globalization. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2009. Print. George, Susan. Whose Crisis, Whose Future? Towards a Greener, Fairer, Richer World. Cambridge: Polity, 2010. Print.

906    Critical Fields and New Directions Hall, Stuart. “The Neo-Liberal Revolution.” Cultural Studies 25.6 (2011): 705–28. Print. Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. Print. Ibbitson, John. “Traders Turned Wall-Builders.” Globe and Mail 3 May 2002: A13. Print. Kim, Christine. “Resuscitations in Rita Wong’s forage:  Globalization, Ecologies, and Value Chains.” Open Letter 13.9 (2009): 166–73. Print. Lai, Larissa, and Rita Wong. Sybil Unrest. Burnaby, BC: LINE Books, 2008. Print. Lanchester, John. I.O.U.:  Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2010. Print. Leitner, Helga, Eric S. Sheppard, Kristin Sziarto, and Anant Maringanti. “Contesting Urban Futures: Decentering Neoliberalism.” Contesting Neoliberalism: Urban Frontiers. Ed. Helga Leitner, Jamie Peck, and Eric S. Sheppard. New York: Guilford, 2007. 1–25. Print. “Let Them Eat Pollution.” The Economist 8 Feb. 1992: 66. Print. Lill, Wendy. Corker. Burnaby: Talonbooks, 1998. Print. McGuigan, Jim. Cool Capitalism. London: Pluto Press, 2009. Print. Milz, Sabine. “Is Canadian Literature Still ‘National’? Twenty-First-Century Canadian Literature in Spatial Perspective.” Studies in Canadian Literature 35.1 (2010): 5–39. Print. ———. “A Materialist Study of Canadian Literary Culture at a Time of Neoliberal Globalization.” (2004). Open Access Dissertations and Theses. Paper 1579. http://digitalcommons.mcmaster. ca/opendissertations/1579. Web. Accessed 25 June 2015. Moore, Lisa. February. Toronto: Anansi, 2009. Print. Paton, G.J. Seeking Sustainability:  On the Prospect of an Ecological Liberalism. London: Routledge, 2011. Print. Peck, Jamie. Constructions of Neoliberal Reason. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. Print. wong, rita. forage. Gibsons, BC: Nightwood Editions, 2007. Print.

Index

Abbas, Akbar, 122 Abdulrehman, Sameera, 770 L’Abeille canadienne (newspaper), 246 Aboriginal Healing Foundation (AHF), 152–154, 158, 166nn9–10 Aboriginal literature, 150–169. See also Indigenous literatures; specific authors healing movements, 153–154 historical context, 152–153 prairie literature, 696–698 reconciliation in, 160–165 Residential School writing, 154–157 Abram, David, 668 Abram’s Plains: A Poem (Cary), 278–280 “The Absence of Neoconservatism and Ecocriticism in Canadian Literary Studies” (Bentley), 732 Abu-Laban, Yasmeen, 893 Acadia (Howe), 734 Acadian National Congress (1881), 243 Acadian Renaissance, 669 Acadius; or, Love in a Calm (Dryden), 371 Acanthus and Wild Grape (Call), 316, 866 Acker, Kathy, 81 Ackerman, Marianne, 380 Acoose, Janice, 140 Acorn, Milton, 324, 477, 480, 666 L’actualité (magazine), 354 Adaawk (sacred narratives), 713 Adam, Ian, 763 Adam and Eve and Pinch-Me (Johnston), 833 Adams, Charlie, 206n20 Adams, Howard, 134, 135, 179 Adams, James, 74 Adams, Thomas R., 803 Adderson, Caroline, 64, 67, 68 Addison, Robert, 277 Adesanmi, Pius, 764

Adieu, Babylone (Kattan), 643, 644 “Adonais” (Shelley), 288 The Advantages of Emigration to Canada (Cattermole), 283 Aeneid (Dryden), 278 Aesthetic agency, 433, 435 Aestheticism and the Canadian Modernists (Trehearne), 326 Affaire LaRue, 624, 627 L’Affaire Tartuffe; or, the Garrison Officers Rehearse Molière (Ackerman), 380 Affective citizenship, 530 Affect theory, 8 L’Afficheur hurle (Chamberland), 407 Africadian literatures, 543 African Canadians. See Black Canadian literature After Canaan (Compton), 546, 547 The Afterlife of George Cartwright (Steffler), 465, 466, 670, 790 After Sylvia (Cumyn), 834 Against Race (Gilroy), 556 The Age of Arousal (Griffiths), 381 Agnant, Marie-Célie, 630, 632 Aguirre, Carmen, 88, 821 Ahenakew, Edward, 170, 172, 176–178, 184, 186n14 Ainsi parle la tour CN (Bouraoui), 645 Airborn (Oppel), 829 Air India bombing (2007), 75n5 Akiwenzie-Damm, Kateri, 140, 144n5 “Alaska Passage” (Birney), 712 Alexander, Jacqui, 764 Alexie, Robert Arthur, 160, 164 Alexis, André, 428, 554 Alfred, Taiaiake, 162, 163 Algerian War of Independence (1954–62), 641 Algoo-Baksh, Stella, 764

908   Index Alias Grace (Atwood), 464, 465, 790 Allard, Jacques, 644, 651 Allemang, John, 72 Allen, Lillian, 99, 486, 542 Alligator (Moore), 677 Alligator Pie (Lee), 828, 829 Allison, Susan, 274n2 All My Relations (King), 138 All Our Wonder Unavenged (Domanski), 741 All the Anxious Girls on Earth (Gartner), 428 Allward, Walter, 69 Almighty Voice and His Wife (Moses), 379 Alonzo, Anne-Marie, 642 Alphabet: A Semiannual Devoted to the Iconography of the Imagination (Reaney), 397 The Already Dead: The New Time of Politics, Culture, and Illness (Cazdyn), 121 Alston, Sandra, 801 Alternative theatre movement, 389, 390 A.M. Klein Research and Publication Committee, 613 Amand, Charles, 248 L’Amélanchier (Ferron), 407, 408, 412 American Council for Québec Studies, 767 American Indian Movement (AIM), 211, 461 American Revolution (1775–83), 242 Amini-Holmes, Liz, 838 Amnesty International, 222n2 Among (Wah), 575 Among the Millet (Lampman), 300 Among Worlds: An Introduction to Modern Commonwealth and South African Fiction (New), 759, 762 Anahareo, 179 Ana Historic (Marlatt), 465, 871 Analytical bibliography, 800 Anand, Madhur, 736, 742 Anansi Press, 455 An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English (Moses & Goldie), 138, 194 Anatomy of Criticism (Frye), 21, 325 Ancestor veneration, 569 Les Anciens Canadiens (Gaspé), 249, 297 Andersen, Hans Christian, 382 Anderson, Benedict, 46, 50, 59, 380, 476

Anderson, Doris, 459 Anderson, Janice, 327 Anderson, Patrick, 322, 323, 326, 866, 867 Anderson-Dargatz, Gail, 465 And Nothing But the Truth (Pearson), 832 Andrès, Bernard, 243, 244 Angéline de Montbrun (Conan), 249 Angélique (Gale), 544 Angélique, Marie Joseph, 544 Angel Square (Doyle), 839 Angel Wing Splash Pattern (Van Camp), 206n22 Angenot, Marc, 625 Angers, François-Réal, 247, 248 Angilirq, Paul Apak, 206n21 Anglican Church, 166n6 The Anglo-African Magazine, 548 Anglo-American modernism, 314 L’Anglomanie ou Le Dîner à l’anglaise (Quesnel), 247 Angus, Ian, 56, 117, 121, 543 Anil’s Ghost (Ondaatje), 584, 588, 589 Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times (Shukin), 744 Anishinaabe Christians, 170 Anne of Green Gables (Montgomery), 307, 339, 822, 830, 837, 865 Anne of Tim Hortons: Globalization and the Reshaping of Atlantic-Canadian Literature (Wyile), 93, 694 Annick Press, 827 Annihilated Time: Poetry and Other Politics (Derksen), 94, 900–902 L’Anniversaire (Kattan), 651 Anti-Americanism, 459 Anti–anti-Semitism, 404 Anti-Diva (Pope), 821 Anti-experimentalism, 481 The Antigonish Review (magazine), 455 Anti-imperialism, 211, 481 Anti-modernism, 339 Anti-multiculturalism, 33 Anti-Semitism, 608 Anti-slavery movement, 266 Antwi, Phanuel, 541, 764 “Anything But Reluctant: Canada’s Little Magazines” (Davey), 483

Index   909 Apess, William, 173, 174 Apostrophe (Baudot), 515, 516 Apostrophe Engine (Wershler & Kennedy), 515, 519 L’Apparition du livre (Martin), 802 Appel à  la justice de l’État (du Calvet), 246 “Appendix: Taking Flight” (Szabo-Jones), 735 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 296 Appraisals of Canadian Literature (Stevenson), 7 The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (Richler), 452, 457, 605, 607, 612, 881 April Raintree (Mosionier), 135, 136, 139, 140, 466 Aquin, Hubert, 404, 406, 407, 412, 768 Aquino, Nina Lee, 576, 577 Arab-Canadian literature, 639–656 country left behind motifs, 640–645 politicization in, 649–653 transcendence in, 649–653 wartime motifs, 645–649 Arab-Israeli Six-Day War (1967), 645 Ararat (film), 74 The Arbutus/Madrone Files (Ricou), 719 Arcan, Nelly, 816, 820 Archibald, Joann, 183 The Architects Are Here (Winter), 677 Archive for Our Times: Previously Uncollected and Unpublished Poems of Dorothy Livesay (ed. Irvine), 327 Arctic Dreams and Nightmares (Ipellie), 194 Arctic Stories (Kusugak), 837 ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature (journal), 761 Arigato, Tokyo (MacIvor), 381 Armstrong, Jeannette C., 154, 210, 211, 214, 220, 466, 488, 792, 853 Armstrong, Pat, 896 Arnason, David, 730 Arnold, Matthew, 1, 3, 286, 287 Arnott, Joanne, 137 Around 1981: Academic Feminist Literary Theory (Gallop), 851 L’arpenteur et le navigateur (LaRue), 624 Arsenault, Nina, 874 Artbar Reading Series, 522 Arthur Sutherland International Players, 373

“Articulating a World of Difference: Ecocriticism, Postcolonialism and Globalization” (O’Brien), 732 “Artifice of Absorption” (Bernstein), 29 The Art of Memory (Yates), 68 As Birds Bring Forth the Sun (MacLeod), 439, 665 Ascend as the Sun (Voaden), 373 As for Me and My House (Ross), 315, 338, 572, 692, 697, 805, 868, 880 Ashcroft, W.D., 756 Asian Canadian literature, 564–582. See also South Asian Canadian literature culture and, 566–567 drama, 575–576 historical overview, 564–565 immigrant life depicted in, 567–570 poetry, 575–576 post-1967 experiences, 571–575 World War II and, 570–571 “As It Was in the Beginning” (Johnson), 302 As Long as Rivers Flow (Loyie), 838 Aspiring Women: Short Stories by Canadian Women, 1880–1900 (eds. Campbell & McMullen), 435 Assembly of First Nations (AFN), 152, 461 Assmann, Aleida, 64, 67, 75 Assmann, Jan, 64, 67 Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures (ACQL), 19, 22 Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada (ALECC), 734, 737, 738 Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE), 731, 734, 737, 738 Atala (pseud. Léonise Valois), 251 Atanarjuat (film), 199 Atlantic-Canadian literature, 657–690 Confederation and, 661–666 fiction, 676–690 imaginative space in, 659–661 regionalism and, 657–675 tropes in, 666–671 Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture, and Social Justice (journal), 851 Atlas Shrugged (Rand), 683 At My Heart’s Core (Davies), 260, 374

910   Index “At the Cedars” (Scott), 301 At the Full and Change of the Moon (Brand), 465 “At the Mermaid Inn” (Campbell), 303 Atwood, Margaret, 4, 18, 21, 23, 32, 57, 81, 82, 87, 88, 260, 273, 325, 340, 397, 429, 435, 437, 438, 449, 454, 455, 459, 460, 464, 465, 472, 482, 483, 612, 719, 730, 740, 741, 746, 786, 790, 801, 830, 831, 877 “Audubon and the Trauma of Extinction” (Sugars), 747 Augmented reality works, 513, 519 Aureus, Leon, 576, 577 Austen, Veronica, 764 Austerity campaigns, 896 Authors Inc (Glass), 81 Autobiographies, 813–825, 837 Indigenous, 170–190 Auto/biography in Canada: Critical Directions (Rak), 121 Autobiology (Bowering), 819 L’autre rivage (D’Alfonso), 628 Avakumovic, Ivan, 719 L’avalée des avalés (Ducharme), 413 Avant-Garde Canadian Literature: The Early Manifestations (Betts), 489 Avant-garde poetics, 548 Avataq Cultural Institute, 206n13 “Ave! An Ode for the Shelley Centenary” (Roberts), 287, 288, 299 L’Avenir (newspaper), 250 Les aventures de Pomme Douly (Jacobs), 501 Avison, Margaret, 323–326, 483 Awake and Dreaming (Pearson), 832 Away (Urquhart), 465, 466, 790 Axworthy, Tom, 782 Babel, prise deux (Noël), 630 Babylonian Jews, 643, 644 The Baby Project (Ellis), 833 Bachelor Man (Kam), 576 Backhouse, Constance, 784 The Back of the Turtle (King), 467 Back to the World (blog), 86 The Backwoods of Canada (Traill), 269, 284 Badami, Anita Rau, 583–587 Badlands (Kroetsch), 458, 693, 788

La Bagarre (Bessette), 411 Bagdad Saloon (Walker), 377 Bailey, A.G., 668 Baird, Irene, 340, 343, 711 Baker, Deirdre, 11, 826, 827 Baker, Marie Annharte, 102, 488 Balibar, Étienne, 527, 532, 536 Ball, John, 764 “Ballad Stanzas” (Moore), 282–284 Ballantyne, R.M., 800, 828 Ballstadt, Carl, 801, 802 Baltimore’s Mansion (Johnston), 662, 792 Balzano, Flora, 629 Banana Boys (Aureus), 577 Banff Centre for Mountain Culture, 108n5, 736 Banff Centre for the Arts, 739 Banff Centre Press, 736 Banff New Media Institute, 518 Banff Springs, 361, 362 Bangkok Blues (Bouraoui), 645 Bannerji, Himani, 117, 583 Banting, Pamela, 11, 727, 764 Barbeau, Marius, 235 Barber, John, 85, 86 Barber, Virginia, 809 Barker, Nicolas, 803 Barnard, Leslie Gordon, 359 Barnard, Margaret, 359 Bar-Natan, Dror, 535 Barr, Jessica Marion, 747 Barr, Robert, 306 La Barre du jour (periodical), 406 Barreto-Rivera, Rafael, 482 Barry, Robertine, 252 Barrymore, Lionel, 305 Bartlett, Brian, 739, 740 Barton, John, 866 Bart-Riedstra, Carolynn, 387 Barwin, Gary, 490 Basic Black with Pearls (Weinzweig), 70 Basque, Maurice, 252 Bateman, Fiona, 760 Bates, Judy Fong, 570 Bates, Michael, 387 Battle of Lake Champlain (1609), 806 Batty, Nancy, 764 Baudelaire, Charles, 251

Index   911 Baudot, Jean, 513–515 Baudrillard, Jean, 112, 115 Bayley, Cornwall, 280 Bear (Engel), 460 Beatrice Chancy (Clarke), 792 Beattie, Munro, 6 Beaty, Bart, 121 Beauchemin, Yves, 411 beaulieu, derek, 489–491 Beaulieu, Victor-Lévy, 408–411, 413 Beauregard, Guy, 566, 764, 765 Beautell, Eva Darias, 732, 733 Beautiful Losers (Cohen), 457, 607, 615, 617 A Beautiful Truth (McAdam), 740 Becker, Tilman, 70 Beckett, Samuel, 645 Beckwith, John, 397 Bédard, Pierre-Stanislas, 245 Bedford, Sharon Morgan, 541 Before Green Gables (Wilson), 830 Before Tomorrow (film), 206n21 The Beggar’s Garden (Christie), 428 “The Beginnings of a Canadian Literature” (Roberts), 297 Bégon, Élisabeth, 246 Being Brown: A Very Public Life (Brown), 820 Being Caribou: Five Months on Foot with an Arctic Herd (Heuer), 746 Belaney, Archie. See Grey Owl “Belated” (Campbell), 304 Belleau, André, 406, 413 Bellei, Sergio, 763 Belle Moral (MacDonald), 381 “Belles lettres,” 246 Les Belles Soeurs (Tremblay), 376, 406 Belliveau, George, 390 Beloved (Morrison), 793 Benjamin, Walter, 123n2 Bennett, Donna, 18, 764 Benson, Eugene, 7, 762 Bentley, D.M.R., 10, 27, 47, 51, 61nn3–4, 61n6, 273, 277, 296, 297, 299, 306, 308, 326, 472, 668, 732, 733 Bentley, Richard, 804 Bercuson, David, 533 Beresford-Kroeger, Diana, 742 Bergen, David, 463, 700

Berger, Carl, 48 Berger, Moses, 790 Bergschrund (Bringhurst), 712 Bergson, Henri, 112 Berland, Jody, 118 Bernadette et Juliette ou la vie c’est comme la vaisselle, c’est toujours à recommencer (Bourget), 500 Berne Convention in 1988/89, 804 Bernstein, Charles, 29 Berque, Jacques, 768 Berrouët-Oriol, Robert, 623, 625, 768 Bersianik, Louky, 95, 497, 852, 864 Berton, Pierre, 81 Besner, Neil, 763, 764 Bessette, Gérard, 406, 411 Bessy, Marianne, 630, 631 Best Books for Kids and Teens (Canadian Children’s Book Centre), 827 The Best Canadian Short Stories (Oberon Press), 442 The Best Laid Plans (Fallis), 87 Better That Way (Bouvier), 138 Betts, Gregory, 314, 327, 489 Beyond Mozambique (Walker), 377 Beyond Reason (Trudeau), 821 Bezmozgis, David, 80, 82, 85, 428 B for Buster (Lawrence), 829 Bhabha, Homi, 50, 380, 632, 657, 758, 761 Bhatia, Nandi, 221 The Bias of Communication (Innis), 115 Bibaud, Adèle, 249 Bibaud, Michel, 248 Bibb, Henry, 546 Biblioasis, 442 Bibliographical Society of Canada (BSC), 806 Bibliography of Canadian Imprints 1751–1800 (Tremaine), 801 La Bibliothèque canadienne (periodical), 248 Biculturalism, 386 Bidini, Dave, 821 The Bigger Light (Clarke), 457, 551 The Biggest Modern Woman of the World (Swan), 465 The Big Why (Winter), 677 Bilge, Sirma, 769 Bilingualism, 388

912   Index Billy Bishop Goes to War (Gray), 378 Binning, Sadhu, 585 Biographies, 813–825 Bioregionalism, 731 “Biotexts,” 575 Bird, Louis, 234 A Bird in the House (Laurence), 436 Birdsell, Sandra, 700, 703 Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, 111, 122n1 Birney, Earle, 324–326, 328, 483, 709, 710, 712, 716–718, 741, 819, 879, 881, 883 Biron, Michel, 244, 409, 410, 623 Bismuth, Nadine, 507 bissett, bill, 483, 867, 868 Bissoondath, Neil, 626 Black, Ayanna, 542 Black, Fiona, 806 The Black Atlantic (Gilroy), 556 Blackburn, Grace, 343 Black Canadian literature, 539–563 fieldwork, 539–542 post-racial roots, 542–549 post-racial routes, 549–554 post-racial theory and criticism, 555–557 Black Canadians, 792, 793 The Black Grizzly of Whiskey Creek (Marty), 740 Black Loyalists, 5, 546 Black Moss Press, 455 Black Nell (Woods), 828 Black Power movement, 768 Black Robe (Moore), 465 Black Rock (Gordon), 305, 804 Blaeser, Kimberly, 167n18 Blair, Jennifer, 764, 901 Blais, Marie-Claire, 406, 413 Blaise, Clark, 438, 439 Blake, Or the Huts of America (Delany), 548, 549 Blake, William, 303 Blakely, Mary, 504 “Blight in the Bush Garden” (Keith), 472 Blink and Caution (Wynne-Jones), 835 Bliss, Michael, 782, 783, 785, 787 Blodgett, E.D., 7, 27, 31, 34n4, 242 Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures (Lam), 574

“The Blossoming of Canadian Historical Research” (Gaffield), 783 Bluebeard’s Egg (Atwood), 438 Blueberry Clouds (Bouvier), 138 Blue Marrow (Halfe), 142, 701 Blue Mountain (Leavitt), 828 The Blue Mountains of China (Wiebe), 700 Boas, Franz, 195, 235, 239n3 “The Boat” (MacLeod), 439 The Boatman (Macpherson), 324 Bobbi Lee: Indian Rebel (Maracle), 170, 182, 211, 462 Bobcat and Other Stories (Lee), 428 Bociurkiw, Marusya, 121 Bodega y Quadra, Juan Francisco de la, 713 Bodin, Jean, 48 Bodsworth, Fred, 364, 740, 746 “The Body of This Death” (Garneau), 878 The Body Politic (Rule), 870 Bogle Corbet; or, the Emigrants (Galt), 283 Boire, Gary, 32, 764 Bök, Christian, 32, 33, 80, 489, 516 Bonenfant, Joseph, 413 Bongie, Chris, 758 Le Bonheur a la queue glissante (Farhoud), 648 Booker Prize, 442 Bookninja.com blog, 489 The Book of Canadian Poetry (Smith), 52, 53, 322, 323, 473 A Book of Canadian Prose and Verse (Broadus & Broadus), 7 The Book of Jessica (Campbell), 135, 170, 378 Book of Longing (Cohen), 614 Book of Mercy (Cohen), 615 The Book of Negroes (Hill), 463, 540, 546, 547 The Book of Secrets (Vassanji), 465 The Book of Small (Carr), 709 The Book of the Bible against Slavery (Robertson), 792 Book Publishing Industry Development Plan, 805 Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country: Traveling through the Land of My Ancestors (Erdrich), 184 Books in Canada (magazine), 455, 678 BookThug, 516

Index   913 Boom!: Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market (Rak), 121 Booth, David, 829 Booze (Gray), 790 Borderlands (New), 719 “Borders” (King), 441 Borrowed Tongues: Life Writing, Migration and Translation (Karpinski), 820 Boschman, Robert, 738 Bosco, Monique, 629, 634 Bouchard-Taylor Commission, 769 Boucher, Denise, 500 Boucherville, Georges Boucher de, 248 Boulanger, André, 500 Bounce Me, Tickle Me, Hug Me: Lap Rhymes and Play Rhymes from Around the World (Carpenter-Davis & Lottridge), 829 Bouraoui, Hédi, 644, 645, 649 Bourassa, Napoléon, 249 Bourdieu, Pierre, 26, 83, 340 Bourget, Élizabeth, 500 Bourget, Monseigneur, 250 Bourinot, George, 49 Bouvier, Rita, 129, 137, 138 Bowdring, Paul, 678 Bowering, George, 24, 325, 458, 465, 483, 788, 819 Bowman, Louise Morey, 316 The Box Garden (Shields), 460 Boyd, David, 736 Boyden, Joseph, 80, 144n12, 161, 163, 164, 214, 466, 741, 792 The Boy in the Burning House (Wynne-Jones), 835 “Boy Meets Girl in Winnipeg and Who Cares” (MacLennan), 454 Boy O’Boy (Doyle), 839 A Boy of Good Breeding (Toews), 697–698 The Boys in the Band (Crowley), 873 Bracken, Chris, 764 Bradley, Nicholas, 7, 11, 709, 735, 738 Brady, James, 182 Branching Out (magazine), 850 Brand, Dionne, 33, 82, 93, 99–102, 105, 107, 465, 486–488, 530, 536, 540, 551–554, 556, 764, 809, 820, 855, 871, 872, 892, 904 Brandenberger, Albert, 393 Brandt, Di, 327, 485, 700, 740, 855

Brant, Beth, 853 Brault, Jacques, 403, 406 Braz, Albert, 252 Bread Out of Stone (Brand), 820 The Breadwinner (Ellis), 839 Breakwater Books, 827 Brewster, Elizabeth, 663 Brewster, Eva, 819 Brewster, Hugh, 836 Brick Books, 455, 482 Brière, Eloise, 766, 767 “Brigades Roses,” 501 Briggs, Jean, 205n3 Bringhurst, Robert, 712, 713, 740 Brissenden, Constance, 838 British American Register, 245 Brittain, Alice, 764 Broadside: A Feminist Review (magazine), 850 Broadus, Edmund and Eleanor, 7 Broadview Press, 307 Brock, Peggy, 185n3 Broken Entries: Race, Subjectivity, Writing (Miki), 576, 816, 819 Broken Gods (Williams), 343, 344 Broken Ground (Hodgins), 465, 714 Bronson, A.A., 35n6 Bronwen Wallace Award, 442 Brooker, Bertram, 700 Brophy, Michael, 633 Brophy, Sarah, 820 Brossard, Nicole, 93, 94–99, 107, 412, 482, 497, 520, 820, 855, 864 Brothers Far From Home: The World War I Diary of Eliza Bates, Uxbridge, Ontario, 1916 (Little), 832 Brothers in Arms (Denison), 373 Brouillette, Sarah, 121, 758 Brown, Audrey Alexandra, 341, 718 Brown, Chester, 816, 822 Brown, E.K., 300, 301, 325, 337, 338 Brown, Jennifer S.H., 10, 132, 133, 177, 227, 234 Brown, Rosemary, 820 Brown, Russell, 18 Brown, William, 243, 801 Brown Girl in the Ring (Hopkinson), 536 Browning, Robert, 286 Bruce, Charles, 663

914   Index Bruce, Eva, 359 Bruce, Phyllis, 483 Bruchesi, Paul, 407 Brumble, H. David, 231 Brundige, Lorraine, 177, 178 Brydon, Diana, 11, 32, 93, 530, 541, 755, 759, 760, 762–764, 770 The Buccaneers (Lawrence), 829 Buchan, David, 679 Buck, Ruth M., 178 Buckler, Ernest, 315, 451, 663, 665 Buckner, Vanessa Lee, 222n5 Bucknor, Michael, 541 Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, 379, 873 Buell, Lawrence, 728–731, 734 Buitenhuis, Peter, 34n1 “The Bull Moose” (Nowlan), 666 Bumsted, J.M., 60n1, 387, 780 Burke, Edmund, 57 Burman, Jenny, 758, 764 Burning Ground (Luke), 741 Burning Rock Collective, 440, 670 Burning Water (Bowering), 458, 465, 788 Burns, Martha, 397 Burtynsky, Edward, 741 Burwell, Adam Hood, 280 “Bushed” (Birney), 741 The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination (Frye), 54, 455, 472 Buss, Helen, 262 The Busy Man’s Magazine, 353, 355 Butala, Sharon, 727, 735, 740 “But Could I Make a Living from It” (Derksen), 902 Butler, Judith, 530 Butling, Pauline, 474 “The Butterfly” (Smith), 323 Butterfly on Rock: A Study of Themes and Images in Canadian Literature (Jones), 21, 57, 472, 483 Bydlowska, Jowita, 821 Byers, Michele, 121 By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (Smart), 315, 340 Byron, Lord, 251, 371 By the Aurelian Wall and Other Elegies (Carman), 303

Cabajsky, Andrea, 10, 242 Cabin Fever: The Best New Canadian Nonfiction (anthology), 821 Cabot, John, 659, 679 Caccia, Fulvio, 626 “Cadence, Country, Silence” (Lee), 454, 484 Cahier de roses et de civilisation (Brossard), 96 Calder, Alison, 11, 691 Call, Frank Oliver, 316, 866 Callaghan, Morley, 34n5, 338, 339, 345, 434, 435, 451, 880 Calvin, Robert, 534, 535 Calvin’s Case (1608), 534 Cambodians, 565 The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature (Quayson), 757, 762 Cambron, Micheline, 407, 410 Cameron, Anne, 222n6 Cameron, Barry, 22 Cameron, Elspeth, 326 Cameron, Kevan Anthony, 542 Campbell, Douglas, 387 Campbell, Grace, 341 Campbell, Kofi, 758, 764 Campbell, Maria, 134, 135, 138–140, 151, 154, 163, 170–172, 177, 178–182, 184, 185, 211, 298, 301, 303, 304, 378, 449, 460, 461, 818 Campbell, Sandra, 435 Campbell, SueEllen, 733 Campbell, William Wilfred, 296, 303, 304, 337 Canada and Its Americas: Transnational Navigations (Siemerling & Casteel), 33 “Canada and Its Poetry” (Frye), 53, 54 Canada Council for the Arts, 84, 89n5, 324, 441, 450, 479, 480, 512, 515, 516, 521, 805, 867 Canada Reads competition, 87, 88, 89n1, 206n25 Canadian Adventures of the Flying Egyptian (Elkhadem), 646 Canadian Anthology (Watters), 18 Canadian Association of Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (CACLALS), 761 Canadian Association of Cultural Studies, 118, 122 Canadian Authors Association, 315, 319, 328, 345

Index   915 “The Canadian Authors Meet” (Scott), 317, 320, 341 Canadian Ballads (McGee), 284 “A Canadian Boat Song” (Moore), 282–284 Canadian Book Publishing Development Program, 805 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 404 Canadian Canons: Essays in Literary Value (Lecker), 27 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982), 535, 885 Canadian Children’s Book Centre, 827 Canadian Cinemas (eds. Beaty & Straw), 121 Canadian Crusoes: A Tale of the Rice Lake Plains (Traill), 827, 828 Canadian Cultural Poesis: Essays on Canadian Culture (Sherbert, Gérin, & Petty), 120–121 Canadian Cultural Studies: A Reader (eds. Mookerjea, Szeman, & Faurschou), 117, 122 The Canadian Encyclopedia, 450 Canadian Federation for the Social Sciences and Humanities, 761 Canadian Fiction Magazine, 455 Canadian Forum, 319, 320, 323, 329, 603, 716, 717 Canadian Historical Review, 784 Canadian Home Journal, 352, 353, 355, 359 Canadian Homes and Gardens, 353, 355 The Canadian Identity (Morton), 49 Canadian Jewish Chronicle, 603 Canadian Journal of Native Studies, 745 Canadian Literary Power (Davey), 27 Canadian Literature (journal), 18, 21, 22, 478, 709 Canadian Literature: Surrender or Revolution (Mathews), 472 Canadian Literature in English (Keith), 7, 18 Canadian Literature in English: Texts and Contexts (Sugars & Moss), 327, 765 Canadian Magazine, 353, 355 Canadian Mercury, 319 The Canadian Modernists Meet (Irvine), 327 Canadian Museum of History, 73 Canadian Museum of Human Rights, 74 Canadian National Railway, 392

Canadian Pacific, 353, 361, 362 Canadian “Pataphysics (Toronto Research Group), 24 Canadian Place Theatre, 394, 395 Canadian Poetry (journal), 739 Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews (journal), 326 Canadian Poetry 1920 to 1960 (Trehearne), 327 Canadian Poetry Magazine, 319, 321, 328 Canadian Poetry Press, 307 The Canadian Postmodern (Hutcheon), 25, 462, 787–789 The Canadian Settler’s Guide (Traill), 270 Canadian Short Stories (Knister), 434 Canadian Woman Studies (journal), 851 Canadian Women in Print 1750–1918 (Gerson), 10, 27 Canadian Women’s Press Club, 345 Canadian Women’s Studies Association, 851 Canadian Writers’ Union, 435 Canadian Youth Hostel Association (CYH), 364 “Canadian Zombie Fiction” anthology, 443 Le Canadien (periodical), 245 Le Canadien, La Minerve (newspaper), 246 Candelaria, Fred, 712 The Cannibals (Lawrence), 829 The Canning Season (Horvath), 835 Les Cantouques (Godin), 407 Canty, Daniel, 518 Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? (Badami), 584–586 Capilano Review (magazine), 455, 521 Capitalism, 898, 903 Cardinal, Harold, 134, 179, 461 Careless, J.M.S., 783, 784 The Cariboo Horses (Purdy), 480, 481 Cariou, Warren, 80, 82, 85, 137, 138, 699, 700, 740, 744, 764, 820 Carlos Bulosan Theatre (CBT), 576 Carman, Bliss, 2, 287, 288, 296, 300–304, 306, 315, 317, 321, 328, 432 Carmichael, Franklin, 341 Carnival (Hage), 652 Carnival Panel I (McCaffery), 521 Carnival Panel II (McCaffery), 521 Carpenter, J.R., 519

916   Index Carpenter-Davis, Sandra, 829 Carr, Angela, 517 Carr, Emily, 709, 819, 822 Carried Away on the Crest of a Wave (Yee), 381 Carrier, Roch, 413 Carrière, Marie, 3, 10, 621, 631, 632 Carruthers, Beth, 747 Carson, Anne, 33 Carter, Adam, 5, 9, 41, 450, 758 Carter, Kathryn, 822 Cartier, Jacques, 47, 230, 233, 244, 658, 659 Cartwright, George, 466, 790 Carver, Raymond, 443 Cary, Thomas, 245, 278–280, 801 The Case of Peter Pan or The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (Rose), 826 “The Case of the Missing Face” (Kenner), 52 Casgrain, Henri-Raymond, 247, 249 Casgrain, Thérèse, 847 The Cashier (Roy), 341 Le Cassé (Renaud), 406 The Castaways (Lawrence), 829 Casteel, Sarah, 33, 764 Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics (Razack), 119 The Catcher in the Rye (Salinger), 277 Cather, Willa, 338, 347 Catholic Church, 496 Cat’s Eye (Atwood), 464 Cattermole, William, 283 Caught (Moore), 677 Cavell, Richard, 5, 9, 64, 764 Cazdyn, Eric, 121 Celebrity authorship, 80–91 Cendrars, Blaise, 490 Censorship, 868 Centennial Commission, 375, 376 The Centennial Play (Davies et al.), 376 Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), 122n1 Centering Anishinaabeg Studies: Understanding the World through Stories (eds. Doerfler et al.), 744 Centre for Editing Early Canadian Texts, 307 Centre for Globalization and Cultural Studies, 771 A Century of Sonnets (Lampman), 300

Cerberus (Souster, Dudek, & Layton), 323 Cereus Blooms at Night (Mootoo), 594, 872 Certainty (Thien), 463, 574 Césaire, Aimé, 404 Ces étrangers du dedans: Une histoire de l’écriture migrante au Québec (1937–1997) (Moisan & Hildebrand), 624 Chafe, Paul, 11, 676 Chafe, Wallace, 233 Chakravorty, Dipesh, 213 Chamberlain, Pam, 736 Chamberland, Paul, 403, 404, 406, 407, 409, 768 Chamberlin, J. Edward, 719, 728, 734, 756, 758, 763 Champlain, Samuel de, 73, 244, 806, 807 Chan, Harvey, 838 Chan, Marjorie, 576 Chan, Marty, 576 Chanady, Amaryll, 767 Chansons populaires du Canada (Gagnon), 250 Chanting Denied Shores: The Komagata Maru Narratives (Malik), 584, 585 Chao, Lien, 571 Chapman, E.J., 277 Charbonneau, Jean, 251 Chariandy, David, 10, 71, 80, 82, 530, 536, 539, 541, 554, 764, 892 Charland, Maurice, 118 Charlebois, Robert, 407, 410 Charles et Eva (Marmette), 249 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Nonfiction, 821 Charlevoix, Pierre-François-Xavier de, 244 Charron, François, 409 Charter of Rights and Freedoms, 890 Chartier, Daniel, 626 Chartier, Roger, 806 Chase, Steve, 533 Chateaubriand, François-René de, 248 Le Château de Beaumanoir (Rousseau), 249 Chateau Frontenac, 361 Chatelaine (magazine), 353–356, 358–361, 459 Chatterjee, Partha, 380 Chauveau, P.-J.-O., 249 Chawaf, Chantal, 852

Index   917 Check List of Canadian Literature (Watters), 800 The Cheese and the Worms (Ginzberg), 785 Le chemin des dames (Ferron), 499 Chen, Cecilia, 738 Chen, Ying, 623 Cherry (Mayor), 703 Cherry, Don, 821 Chevalier, Henri-Émile, 248 Chiasson, Herménégilde, 669 Chick Lit novels, 507 Chiefly Indian (Pennier), 179 Le Chien d’or/The Golden Dog (Kirby), 804 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (Byron), 371 Childhood (Alexis), 554 Childhood and Society (Erickson), 60n1 Children’s literature, 826–844 “early” children’s books, 827–830 family reconfigurations in, 831–836 historical fictions, 836–840 Montgomery’s influence, 830–831 “China and Postcolonialism” (ARIEL), 762 China Dog and Other Tales from a Chinese Laundry (Bates), 570 Chinese Canadians, 533 Chinese Immigration Act of 1923 (Canada), 565 Chivers, Sally, 11, 877 Cho, Lily, 5, 10, 34n4, 120, 527, 758, 764 Chomsky, Noam, 111 Chong, Denise, 567, 568, 570 Chorus of Mushrooms (Goto), 464, 572 Choudhury, Romita, 764 Choy, Wayson, 464, 465, 535, 567, 569, 570, 712, 820, 872 Christakos, Margaret, 103, 489 Christian Guardian, 803 Christianity, 285, 287, 305 Christie, Michael, 428 Chroniques de Jerusalem (Delisle), 822–823 The Circle Game (Atwood), 455 Citizenship, 527–538, 782 “Citizen Subject” (Balibar), 531 City Hall Street (Souster), 323 City Treaty (Francis), 701 Civic responsibility, 782 Civil Elegies (Lee), 454, 483–485, 901

Civil Rights Movement, 378, 451, 544, 549 CIV/n (magazine), 324 Cixous, Hélène, 95 Clah, Arthur Wellington, 185n3 Clara Callan (Wright), 466 Clark, David L., 29 Clarke, Austin, 99, 457, 464, 466, 540, 549, 820 Clarke, George Elliott, 486, 539–543, 547, 549, 556, 670, 758, 760, 764, 792, 793 Clayton, Cherry, 764 Clements, Marie, 132, 210, 214, 216 Climate, 42–46, 745 The Clockmaker (Massicotte), 381 The Clockmaker; or The Sayings and Doings of Sam Slick, of Slickville (Haliburton), 431, 660, 804 “The Closing Down of Summer” (MacLeod), 439 Cloud of Bone (Morgan), 681, 685, 686 Coach House Press, 87, 442, 455, 482, 520, 521 Coady, Lynn, 85, 428, 440, 442, 658, 667, 668, 670 Cocalero (Ellis), 839 Cocking, George, 370, 371 Cockroach (Hage), 651, 652 Cocteau, Jean, 377, 382 Code X (Sutherland), 520 The Cod Fisheries: The History of an International Economy (Innis), 115 Cogswell, Fred, 5, 666 Cohen, Leonard, 81, 325, 457, 477, 482, 483, 607, 613, 805, 868 Cohen, Matt, 455, 608, 609, 612–617 Cohen, Nathan, 873 Cohn, Norman, 206n21 Le Coin du feu (periodical), 251 Colas et Colinette ou le Bailli dupé (Quesnel), 247 Coldwell, William, 803 Coleman, Daniel, 10, 27, 31, 52, 59, 60, 479, 541, 544, 699, 704, 758, 764 Collected Poems (Purdy), 481 The Collected Poems and Translations of Edward A. Lacey, 868 Collective memory, 785 Collins, Aileen, 324 Collins, W.E., 325

918   Index Collis, Stephen, 741, 900 Coloma, Roland Sintos, 764 “Colonial” (Lane), 668 Colonialism, 318, 528 The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (Johnston), 465, 466, 676–678, 680, 682, 684, 686–688, 790 Colours in the Dark (Reaney), 395, 396 The Colours of War (Cohen), 608 Columbus, Christopher, 229 Come Walk with Me (Mosionier), 135, 182 Coming of Age in Jewish Baghdad (Kattan), 643 Coming Through Slaughter (Ondaatje), 458 Comment faire l’amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer (Laferrière), 623 Committee for the Equality of Women in Canada (CEWC), 848 Commodification, 904 Common Front strikes (1970s), 414 Communion (Gibson), 882 The Communist Manifesto (Marx & Engels), 93 A Companion to Postcolonial Studies (Schwarz & Ray), 760 The Compleat Gentleman (Gailhard), 43 The Complete Journals of L.M. Montgomery (eds. Rubio & Waterston), 830 Complete Poems (Klein), 327 Complete Poems (Pratt), 327 A Complicated Kindness (Toews), 700 “Compression” (Derksen), 902, 903 Compton, Wayde, 541–543, 546, 547 Conan, Laure, 249, 252 The Concubine’s Children (Chong), 568 “The Confederation Group of Poets” (literary group), 315 Confederation Period, 61n6, 243, 295–313, 371 Confessions of an Immigrant’s Daughter (Salverson), 344 Les Confitures de coings et autres textes (Ferron), 407 The Confusion of Stones (Hassan), 646, 647 La conjuration des bâtards (Noël), 630 Conlogue, Ray, 782 Conn, Jan, 742 Connerton, Paul, 68, 74, 75n8 Connor, Ralph, 52, 260, 295, 305, 696, 698, 804, 880

Conolly, L.W., 762 The Conquest of Canada; or, the Siege of Quebec (Cocking), 370 Conrad, Joseph, 285 Conrad, Margaret, 72, 664, 851 “Conscious for Change” (King), 545 Conservative Party, 388 Conspicuous consumption, 361 Constitutional Act of 1791 (Canada), 245, 247, 280 Consumer culture, 903 Contact (magazine), 324 Contact Press, 324, 477 Contact zones, 229 “Contemporary Poetry” (Smith), 317 Contemporary Verse (magazine), 322, 323, 328 Contexts of Canadian Criticism (Mandel), 326 The Convicts (Lawrence), 829 Cook, Ramsay, 230, 783, 784 Coombes, Annie E., 760 Cooper, Afua, 99, 541, 544 Cooper, Allan, 668 Cooper, Barry, 664 Cooper, James Fenimore, 248 Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, 450 Copps, Sheila, 821 Copway, George, 170, 172, 173–176, 184, 818 Copyright Act of 1875 (Canada), 305 Corker (Lill), 896, 904 Cormack, Barbara Villy, 697 Corman, Cid, 324 Cornellier, Bruno, 11, 755, 760, 764, 770 Corner Gas (television show), 434 Corntassel, Jeff, 162 The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane (Horvath), 835 Cosmopolitanism, 295–313, 540 Coteau Books, 482, 835 Cotnoir, Louise, 95 Couldry, Nick, 902 Coulter, John, 374 Counterculture histories, 453–462 Counter-history, 448 Counter-memory, 448 “The Counter-Public in Pain” (MacDonald), 478

Index   919 Country Roads: Memoirs from Rural Canada (Chamberlain), 736 Coupland, Douglas, 458 Le Courier du Canada (newspaper), 250 Cours d’histoire du Canada (Ferland), 250 Cox, Ryan J., 867 Coyote, Ivan E., 428, 440, 441, 874 Coyote City (Moses), 379 The Crackwalker (Thompson), 381 Craig, Mary Coad, 343, 344 “Crash” (Brand), 105 Crash Landing of the Flying Egyptian (Elkhadem), 646 Crawford, Isabella Valancy, 281, 304, 372, 435, 741, 809 Crawley, Alan, 322 Creates, Marlene, 747 Creative nonfiction, 815, 820 Creative Writing in Canada (Pacey), 342, 345, 347 Creeley, Robert, 324, 482 Creelman, David, 84, 662, 666, 671 Cree Michif language, 143 Creighton, Helen, 664 Crémazie, Octave, 247, 250, 251, 297 Creolization, 594, 758, 760 Le cri des oiseaux fous (Laferrière), 632 Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky), 505 Crimes et chatouillements (Monette), 505 Criminals in Love (Walker), 377 Crip theory, 878, 883 Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (McRuer), 884 “The Critic, Institutional Culture, and Canadian Literature” (Godard), 763 Critical citizenship, 528, 531 Crocker, Stephen, 120 Croft, Tomas, 680, 682 Cronin, J. Keri, 122, 744 Crosby, Alfred W., 282 Crosstalk: Canadian and Global Imaginaries in Dialogue (Brydon & Dvorak), 32, 93 Crowded Out! and Other Sketches (Harrison), 304 Crowley, Mart, 873 Cruikshank, Julie, 238, 719 Crummey, Michael, 466, 670, 677, 679, 680

Crusz, Rienzi, 583 “A Cry from an Indian Wife” (Johnson), 301 “Cry Me a River, White Boy” (Taylor), 160 Cultural citizenship, 530, 531 Cultural elitism, 457 Cultural exceptionalism, 65 Cultural Grammars of Nation: Diaspora and Indigeneity in Canada (Kim, McCall, & Singer), 32, 33, 66 Cultural identity, 550 Cultural memory, 64–79 fictions of remembering, 67–72 nationalizing memory, 72–75 Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination (Assmann), 67 Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives (Assmann), 67 Cultural model of disability, 884 Cultural nationalism, 481, 483, 484, 488 Cultural Spaces and the Cultural Studies and Environmental Humanities series, 118 Cultural studies, 110–125 in exploration genre, 232–235 national character and, 42–46 “Culture and the National Will” (Frye), 53, 55 Culture wars, 29, 471 Cumberland, F.B., 48 Cumyn, Alan, 834 Cunningham, Louis Arthur, 359 The Cunning Man (Davies), 456 The Cure for Death by Lightning (Anderson-Dargatz), 465 Currie, Sheldon, 666–668 Curry, Bill, 72 “The Curse of the Jolly Stone Trilogy” (Lawrence), 829 Curtis, Christopher Paul, 838 Curtis, Wayne, 663 Curzon, Sarah Anne, 371 The Custodian of Paradise (Johnston), 678, 687 Cuthand, Beth, 853 Cuthand, Stan, 186n13 Cutler, May, 827 Cvetkovich, Ann, 70 CV/II (magazine), 455

920   Index Cyber-Marx (Dyer-Witheford), 122 Cypress (Klar), 741 Dabydeen, Cyril, 486, 583 Dahab, Elizabeth, 3, 10, 639 Dahan, Andrée, 641, 653 Dahlie, Hallvard, 34n1 D’Alembert, Jean, 44, 45 D’Alfonso, Antonio, 628 Dalhousie University, 430 Dalton, Mary, 666 Daly, Richard, 171, 183 Damage Done by the Storm (Hodgins), 715 D’Amour P.Q. (Godbout), 413 Dance of the Happy Shades (Munro), 437, 808 Dance on the Earth (Laurence), 821 Dandelion (journal), 24 Danica, Elly, 819 Daniells, Roy, 6 The Danish Play (Mills), 381 Dante, 232 Dantin, Louis, 251 Danuta Gleed Literary Award, 442 Danyluk, Stephanie, 179 The Dark Weaver (Salverson), 343 Darkwing (Oppel), 829 Darwin, Charles, 285, 741 Das kulturelle Gedächtnis (Assmann), 67 “Daughter of Zion” (Nowlan), 666 Daughters of Copper Woman (Cameron), 222n6 Daunt, Achilles, 284 Davey, Frank, 5, 9, 17, 35n11, 58, 61n8, 325, 326, 380, 462, 472, 483, 763 David (Birney), 328, 329, 717, 881, 883 David and Other Poems (Birney), 324, 716 Davies, Alan, 33 Davies, Gwendolyn, 764, 856 Davies, Ioan, 118, 120 Davies, Julie A., 140 Davies, Robertson, 260, 373, 376, 397, 449, 451, 455, 456, 460 Davin, Nicholas Flood, 61n3 Davis, Andrea, 541 Davis, Brian Joseph, 522 Davis, Miles, 382 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 785, 786

Davis, Rocio G., 591 Davis, Ronald, 329 Davis, Wade, 742 Dawson, Carrie, 764 Day, Frank Parker, 658, 664 Day, Kirstie McClellan, 818 Day, Margaret, 322 Day and Night (Livesay), 321 Deacon, W.A., 339, 346 Deactivated West 100 (McKay), 718 The Dead Dog Café Comedy Hour (radio program), 441 Dead Man’s Gold (Yee), 838 Dead North (Moreno-Garcia), 443 Dear America series, 836 Dear Canada series, 836 “Dear Common: Ya Basta!” (Collis), 900 Dear Heather (Cohen), 613 Dear Life (Munro), 437 The Death of Donna Whalen (Winter), 677 “The Death of the Subject” (McCaffery), 26 De Certeau, Michel, 590, 781 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (France), 532, 536 Declaratory Act of 1778 (Canada), 280 Decolonising Fictions (Brydon & Tiffin), 759 Decolonization, 30, 133, 220, 404, 410, 758, 768, 850, 857 Decomp (Collis & Scott), 741 Deer, Beatrice, 206n18 Deer Dear Sylvia (Cumyn), 834 Defamiliarization, 212, 217 Defamiliarizing the Aboriginal (Emberley), 222n2 Defoe, Daniel, 60, 232 De Groot, Jerome, 781 Delany, Martin, 548, 549 De la Roche, Mazo, 81, 339, 343, 359, 373 Deleuze, Gilles, 116, 474, 487, 639, 647, 653 Delight (de la Roche), 339 DeLillo, Don, 81 Delisle, Guy, 822, 823 Delisle, Jennifer Bowering, 677 Dellamora, Richard, 867 Deloume Road (Hooton), 712 Delvaux, Martine, 627, 629 Demain les dieux naîtront (Chamberland), 409

Index   921 De Maistre, Joseph, 114 Demers, Modeste, 252 Demerson, Velma, 819 De Mille, James, 305 Dene Cultural Institute, 227 De Niro’s Game (Hage), 651 Denison, Frederick, 284 Denison, Merrill, 372 Dennie, Joseph, 281 DePasquale, Paul, 186n12 Les dépouilles de l’altérité (Durante), 627 Deregulation, 892, 903 “Der ershter frimargn / That First Morning” (Zipper), 602 Derksen, Jeff, 92, 94, 489, 764, 892, 893, 895, 900–904 Le dernier des martyrs (Fréchette), 252 Derrida, Jacques, 212 Desbarats, George-Paschal, 803 Desbarats, Pierre-Édouard, 803 Descant (magazine), 455 Descriptive bibliography, 801 The Deserted Village (Goldsmith), 279 Le Désert mauve (Brossard), 520 Desert of the Heart (Rule), 460, 869 Deshaye, Joel, 81, 327, 477 Desjardins, Henry, 251 Despair, and Other Stories of Ottawa (Alexis), 428, 554 Després, Rose, 669 Des Rivières, Marie-José, 359 Desroches, Vincent, 631, 766, 768 Des Rosiers, Joël, 626 La Detresse et l’enchantement (Roy), 819 Devereux, Cecily, 5, 11, 20, 632, 696, 845 Devil in Deerskins (Anahareo), 179 Le Devoir (periodical), 624 Dewar, Jonathan, 10, 150, 792 Dewar, Kenneth, 66 Dewart, Edward Hartley, 3, 7, 50, 51, 61n3 Dewdney, Christopher, 482, 742 DeWitt, Patrick, 85, 716 Dialogues (Lahontan), 244 Diamond Grill (Wah), 535, 575, 820 Diaries, 822 The Diary of Evelyn Lau (film), 571

Diasporic literature, 527–538, 623, 893 Asian Canadian literature, 564–582 South Asian Canadian literature, 592–595 Dickason, Olive, 784 Dickens, Charles, 804 Dickinson, Adam, 736, 742 Dickinson, Emily, 323 Dickinson, Mark, 739 Dickinson, Peter, 764, 864, 865, 869 Dickner, Nicolas, 622, 634 Diderot, Denis, 44, 45 Didur, Jill, 758, 764 Digital age literature, 512–523 machine-generated writing, 513–517 screen-based literature, 517–519 social media and, 521–522 translations and adaptations, 520–521 Dimić, Milan, 26 Directions Home (Clarke), 792 Dirty Laundry (Fung), 567 Disability, 877–891 in Atwood’s writing, 878–882 “crip potential” and, 882–885 as trope, 880–881 Disappearing Moon Cafe (Lee), 464, 465, 567, 712 Disaster studies, 745 Discover Canada: The Rights and Responsibilities of Citizenship (study guide), 528 A Discovery of Strangers (Wiebe), 465 Discovery Passage (Morse), 712 The Disinherited (Cohen), 608 Dispossession, 217, 590 “Disunity as Unity: A Canadian Strategy” (Kroetsch), 29 The Diviners (Laurence), 260, 457, 460, 461, 698 The Divine Ryans (Johnston), 678 Division of the Modern Language Association of America, 762 Dixon, Michael, 22 Djwa, Sandra, 326, 327, 819 Dk/Some Letters of Ezra Pound (Dudek), 326 Dobozy, Tamas, 442 Dobson, Kit, 31, 33, 93, 121, 122, 575, 893, 904 Doctor, Farzana, 584, 591

922   Index Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières), 823 “The Documentary Poem: A Canadian Genre” (Livesay), 329 Dodd, Mead, and Company, 340 Doerfler, Jill, 744 Do Glaciers Listen? (Cruikshank), 719 Dogs at the Perimeter (Thien), 71, 574 Domanski, Don, 668, 740, 741 Dominion Drama Festival (DDF), 374, 388 Dominion Elections Act of 1920 (Canada), 847 Dominion Institute, 782 Donaday, Anne, 766 Donaghue, Emma, 871 Donaldson, Bryce, 179 Don Cherry’s Hockey Stories and Stuff (Cherry), 821 Don McKay: Essays on His Work (Bartlett), 739 Don Messer’s Jubilee (Gray), 379 Donne, John, 323 The Donnellys (Reaney), 376, 395 Don Quichotte de la démanche (Beaulieu), 409, 413 Don’t: A Woman’s Word (Danica), 819 The Doomed Bridegroom (Kotash), 820 Dorais, Louis-Jacques, 205n5 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, 576 “Do Seek Their Meat from God” (Roberts), 432 Dostoevsky, 505 “Double colonization,” 852 Le double conte de l’exil (Latif-Ghattas), 623 The Double Hook (Watson), 316, 451, 452 Doucet, Julie, 822 Douglas, James, 716 Douglas, Lauren Wright, 870 Douglas and McIntyre (publisher), 83, 84, 720 The Doukhobors (Woodcock & Avakumovic), 719 Doutre, Joseph, 248 “Dover Beach” (Arnold), 289 Down the Long Table (Birney), 819 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 306 Doyle, Brian, 839 Doyle, James, 327 Dragland, Stan, 301, 327, 764 Drag Queens on Trial (Gilbert), 379

Drama, 369–385 Asian Canadian, 576–577 Stratford Festival, 386–402 Le Drapeau de Carillon (Crémazie), 250–251 The Drawer Boy (Healey), 379 “‘Drawn from Nature’ ” (Sugars), 747 Dream Tapestries (Bowman), 316 “DREAM YOU LOST” (Nichol), 518 The Drift of Pinions (Pickthall), 304 “Drinker” (Anderson), 866 Droite et de profil (Alonzo), 642 Druce, Robert, 866 Drummond, William Henry, 47 Drunk Mom (Bydlowska), 821 A Dryad in Nanaimo (Brown), 718 Dryden, John, 371 Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing (Highway), 154, 155, 379, 873 Dubé, Marcel, 406 Dubois, Jacques, 26 Du Bois, W.E.B., 770 Dub poetry, 99 Du Calvet, Pierre, 246 Ducharme, Réjean, 406, 413 The Duchess (Griffiths), 381 Dudek, Louis, 322–324, 326, 347, 476–478, 482, 614, 868 Duffy, Dennis, 34n1, 787 Du fond de mon arrière-cuisine (Ferron), 407 Duley, Margaret, 676 Dumas, Alexandre, 254n18 The Dumbfounding (Avison), 323 Dumont, Dawn, 185 Dumont, Fernand, 406 Dumont, François, 244, 623 Dumont, Gabriel, 130, 461 Dumont, Marilyn, 129, 132, 134, 136, 137, 142, 143, 488, 792 Dumont-Smith, Claudette, 166n12 Dunbar, John, 270 Duncan, Sara Jeannette, 2, 4, 260, 298, 306, 338, 435, 804 Duncan, William, 185n3 Duncan Commission, 663 Duplessis, Maurice, 95, 107n3, 403, 768 Dupuis, Gilles, 625 Dupuy, Michel, 29

Index   923 Durante, Daniel Castillo, 627, 634 Durham, John George Lambton, First Earl of, 243, 248 Durham Report (1839), 242, 247, 248 Durkin, Douglas, 345 Dutton, Paul, 482 Duval, Sophie, 501 Duval-Thibault, Anna-Marie, 251 Duvernay, Ludger, 246 Du Veuzit, Max, 359 Dvořák, Marta, 32, 93, 765 Dwell (Derksen), 900 Dybikowski, Ann, 852 Dyer, Gwyn, 58 Dyer-Witheford, Nick, 122 Dymond, Greig, 120 Each Man’s Son (MacLennan), 451 Early Canadian literature, 10 Earth Alive: Essays on Ecology (Rowe), 742 Earth and High Heaven (Graham), 339, 343, 346 Earth’s Enigmas (Roberts), 432 Earth Song (Voaden), 373 “Easter 1916” (Yeats), 475 The Easter Egg (Reaney), 395 Eastern European settlers, 5 “Easter Wings” (Herbert), 323 East of Berlin (Moscovitch), 381 East of the City (Dudek), 323 “Eat Bitter” (Fan), 570 Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe (Gill), 741, 821 Eaton, Edith Maude, 566 Eaton, Winnifred, 566 Éclats de la pierre noire d’oú rejaillet ma vie (Chamberland), 409 “Eclectic Detachment: Aspects of Identity in Canadian Poetry” (Smith), 329 Ecocriticism, 727–754 antecedents of, 730–735 definitions, 728–729 future directions of, 743–748 infrastructure for, 735–742 “Ecocriticism: Some Emerging Trends” (Buell), 728, 729

The Ecocriticism Reader (Glotfelty), 731, 733 The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (anthology), 728 Ecofeminism, 743 L’Écologie du réel (Nepveu), 409, 411, 623 Eco-poetics, 668, 669 Ecosexuality, 743 Ecoute, Sultane (Alonzo), 642 Écriture féminine, 95, 854, 871 Écriture migrante, 10, 621–638, 769 Écritures migrantes et identités culturelles (Moisan), 624 The Ecstasy of Rita Joe (Ryga), 376, 379, 395 ECW Press, 852 Ede, Amatoritsero, 542 Edel, Leon, 317, 819 Edgar, Pelham, 341 The Edible Woman (Atwood), 459, 460 Editing Modernity: Women and Little-Magazine Cultures in Canada, 1916–1956 (Irvine), 327, 347 Éditions du Boréal, 406 Éditions Parti pris, 406 “Editors, Ghosts, and Amanuenses” (Brumble), 231 The Educated Imagination (Frye), 55 Edugyan, Esi, 80, 85, 89n3, 463, 554, 701 Edwards, Gail, 827 Edwards, Justin D., 590 Edwards, Mary Jane, 18 Edwardson, Ryan, 395 “Eet me alive” (bissett), 867 Effigy (York), 740 Egan, Susanna, 817, 818 Egoff, Sheila, 826, 827 “Ego-histoire,” 66 Egoyan, Atom, 82 Eh! qu’mon chum est platte (Boulanger & Prégent), 500 Eh? to Zed: A Canadian Abecedarium (Major), 829 Eichhorn, Kate, 10, 489, 512 Eigenbrod, Renate, 745, 764 1837: The Farmers’ Revolt (Salutin), 376 Eisenstein, Bernice, 822 Ekstein, Modris, 66 The Electrical Field (Sakamoto), 569

924   Index “Electropoet” (Kearns), 517 Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (Gray), 282, 301 Elements of Political Science (Leacock), 307 Elijah of Buxton (Curtis), 838 Eliot, T.S., 52, 314, 318, 329, 338, 436, 603 Élisa (pseud. Marie-Anne Routhier), 251 Elkhadem, Saad, 645–647, 652, 653 Elkins, Caroline, 760 Elle (Glover), 466 ellipse (magazine), 455 Ellis, Deborah, 839, 840 Ellis, Sarah, 833, 836 Elsa, I Come with My Songs (Gidlow), 865 Emberley, Julia, 10, 209, 758, 764, 850, 857 “Embracing Forgiveness” (Wagamese), 159 The Embroidered Tent (Fowler), 273 L’Emergence d’une culture au féminin (ed. Zavalloni), 853 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 111, 297, 298 The Emigrant (McLachlan), 283 “The Emigration of the Fairies” (Hunter-Duvar), 285 Émile Nelligan et son oeuvre (Nelligan), 251 Emily Climbs (Montgomery), 830 Emily of New Moon (Munro), 307, 341, 830, 831 Emily’s Quest (Montgomery), 830 Emmet, Robert, 281 Emotional Arithmetic (Cohen), 608 Empire, York Street (Moure), 486 Empire and Communications (Innis), 115 Empire of the Beetle: How Human Folly and a Tiny Bug Are Killing North America’s Great Forests (Nikiforuk), 741 The Empire Within (Mills), 768 The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (Ashcroft, Griffiths, & Tiffin), 273, 756, 758 Empress of Britain (ship), 361 Enbridge Northern Pipeline, 441 “The Enchanted Isle: A Dialogue” (Livesay), 866 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 520 Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory (Walker), 854 Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada (ed. New), 7

Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English (eds. Benson & Conolly), 762 Encyclopédie (Diderot & D’Alembert), 44, 45 The Energy of Slaves (Cohen), 615 Enfin duchesses! (play), 500 Engel, Marian, 460, 740, 822 Engels, Friedrich, 93 English, James F., 88 The Englishman’s Boy (Vanderhaeghe), 465, 790, 888, 889 The English Patient (Ondaatje), 464 Enlightenment, 43, 45, 243, 244, 758 En Masse (magazine), 866 En Mexico (Dudek), 323 En’owkin Centre, Penticton Indian Reserve, 108n5, 738 The Enpipe Line: 70,000 Kilometers of Poetry Written in Resistance to the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipelines Proposal (anthology), 747 Entre les fleuves (Ltaif), 642 Enumerative bibliography, 799, 800 Ephemeral Territories (Manning), 770 Episkenew, Jo-Ann, 142, 162, 164, 171, 187n17, 212 Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems (Moore), 282 Epp, Bernard, 790 Erdrich, Heid E., 174–176 Erdrich, Louise, 172, 184 Erickson, Bruce, 743 Erickson, Erik, 60n1 Ericson, Leif, 229 Erni, John Nguyet, 122 Eros: An Anthology of Male Friendship (Anderson), 866 “Eruptions of Postmodernity: The Postcolonial and Ecological” (Hutcheon), 730 Esonwanne, Uzoma, 764 “Essay on Man” (Pope), 173 Essays, Controversies, Poems (ed. Waddington), 326 Essays on Canadian Writing (journal), 676, 760 Estok, Simon C., 737 Éthel et le térroriste (Jasmin), 404 “Ethnic writing,” 623

Index   925 Ethnopoetics of the Minority Voice: An Introduction to the Politics of Dialogism and Difference in Metis Literature (Jannetta), 139 “The Ethos of Censorship in English-Canadian Literature: An Ontopornosophical Approach” (Weir), 23 Études littéraires (periodical), 406 L’Euguélionne (Bersianik), 497, 499 Eunoia (Bök), 489 Europe (Dudek), 323 Europe and Other Bad News (Cohen), 607–608 “Europeanization,” 65 Evangelicalism, 266 Evangeline (Longfellow), 252 L’Évangéline (newspaper), 252 Evans, James, 131 Event (magazine), 455, 720 Events and Signals (Scott), 323 Even-Zohar, Itamar, 26 Everson, R.G., 316 Everything on a Waffle (Horvath), 835 Everywhere Being Is Dancing: Twenty Pieces of Thinking (Bringhurst), 740 Evolution and Ethics (Huxley), 282 The Evolution of Canadian Literature (Edwards), 18 Ewart, Chris, 879 The Exalted Company of Roadside Martyrs (Cariou), 138 Exalted Subjects: Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in Canada (Thobani), 119 Exile, 645, 647 Exile (magazine), 455 “The Exploding Porcupine” (Kroetsch), 26 Les Exploits d’Iberville (Rousseau), 249 Exploration genre, 227–241 audience for, 230–231 contact narratives as history, 228–229, 237–239 language and culture in, 232–235 literary influences, 231–232 Expressway (Queyras), 93, 104, 107 Extreme Landscape: The Lure of Mountain Spaces (ed. McDonald), 736

Eyeing the North Star (Clarke), 547 The Eye in the Thicket: Essays at a Natural History (ed. Virgo), 736 The Eye of the Needle (Scott), 323 The Fable of the Goats (Pratt), 317 The Face and the Mask (Barr), 306 Factory Theatre, 375 Fagan, Cary, 609 Fagan, Kristina, 179 Falardeau, Jean-Charles, 406 Falcon, Pierre, 143 Falk, Gathie, 35n6 Fallis, Terry, 87 Fall on Your Knees (MacDonald), 465, 871, 872, 885, 886 Family Compact, 376, 388 “Family Furnishings” (Munro), 426–429, 437, 443 “Family Portrait: Masks of the Bear” (Atwood), 882 Famous Last Words (Findley), 465, 788 Fanon, Frantz, 404, 768 Far, Sui Sin, 566 Farewell Babylon (Kattan), 643 Farhoud, Abla, 627, 630, 647, 648, 650–653 The Farm Show (Johns & Thompson), 379 Farrar, Straus & Giroux (publisher), 86 Farrell-Racette, Sherry, 135 The Far Shore (Wieland), 121 “The Fate of the Oolichan: Prospects of Eco-Cultural Restoration in Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach” (Soper), 747 “La Fatigue culturelle du Canada français” (Aquin), 404 Fatty Legs (Jordan-Fenton & Pokiak-Fenton), 837 Faulkner, William, 452 Fauna (York), 740 Faurschou, Gail, 117, 756 Fearful Symmetry (Reaney), 325 The Feast of Lupercal (Moore), 611–612 February (Moore), 677, 895, 896, 904 “February Is the Cruelest Month: Neoliberalism and the Economy of Mourning in Lisa Moore’s February” (Wyile), 677 Febvre, Lucien, 802

926   Index Fédération des femmes du Québec (FFQ), 847 Fee, Margery, 758, 764 Feeling Canadian: Television, Nationalism, and Affect (Bociurkiw), 121 Feeling the Worlds (Livesay), 866 Les fées ont soif (Boucher), 500 The Feminine Mystique (Friedan), 459, 847 Femininity, 265 Feminism, 263, 371, 414, 459, 484, 486, 629, 731, 743, 819 Feminist literature, 845–862. See also Women’s writing academic theory and criticism, 848–851, 854–856 anthologies, 851–853 feminist theory, 273 poetry, 471 postfeminism and, 856–857 “second wave” feminism and, 846–848 Féminité, Subversion, Écriture (anthology), 845, 852 Ferens, Dominika, 566 Ferguson, Jade, 541 Ferland, Abbé, 250 Ferne, Doris, 322 Ferron, Jacques, 406–408, 410, 412 Ferron, Madeleine, 499, 502 Fetherling, George, 815 Fiamengo, Janice, 10, 260, 730, 744, 747 Les Fiancés de 1812 (Doutre), 248 Fiction, 448–470. See also specific authors Atlantic-Canadian, 676–690 counterculture histories, 453–462 Massey Commission and, 449–452 postmodernism, 462–467 Fielding, Sheilagh, 678–680, 683, 684, 686–688 15 Canadian Poets (eds. Geddes & Bruce), 483 Fifth Business (Davies), 456 Filewod, Alan, 389, 390, 395, 397, 451, 764 Filipino Canadians, 565, 576, 577 La Fille du brigand (L’Écuyer), 248 Finch, Robert, 320, 322, 867 Finding Our Way: Rethinking Ethnocultural Ways in Canada (Kymlicka), 66 Findlay, Len, 118, 528, 529, 531, 760 Findley, Timothy, 33, 69, 397, 449, 458, 465, 788, 821, 870, 884

A Fine Balance (Mistry), 889 Fiorentino, Jon Paul, 489, 694, 695, 703 The Fire-Dwellers (Laurence), 460 Firefly Books, 827 Fireweed: A Feminist Quarterly of Writing, Politics, Art and Culture, 819, 850 Fireweed feminist collective, 819 Firewing (Oppel), 829 First Nations, 47, 48, 132, 165n1, 211, 228, 370, 485, 576, 744, 745, 792, 850, 853. See also Indigenous literatures and Aboriginal literature First Person Plural (McCall), 171 First Screening: Computer Poems (Nichol), 517, 518 First Stage: The Making of the Stratford Festival (Patterson), 387 First Statement (magazine), 322, 866, 867 First Statement 1942–1945: An Assessment and an Index (Fisher), 326 First Statement Press, 322 Firth, Malcolm, 70 Fishbane, Melanie, 830 Fisher, Caitlin, 519 Fisher, John, 375 Fisher, Neil, 326 Fitch, Sheree, 829 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 338, 434 FitzGerald, Maureen, 864 Five Legs (Gibson), 458, 881 Five-Part Invention: A History of Literary History in Canada (Blodgett), 7, 27, 31 Flamand, Rita, 143n2 “A Flâneur in the Forest: Strolling Point Pelee with Walter Benjamin” (Sandilands), 746 “Flarf ” procedure, 105, 108n8 Flash Poetry Generator, 516 Flatley, Jonathan, 589 Fleischmann, Aloys, 530, 531 Fleming, Patricia Lockhart, 801, 806 Fleury, Theoren, 818 Flisfeder, Matthew, 121 Flore Cocon (Jacobs), 501–502 Flower, Archibald, 392 Flowers for Hitler (Cohen), 607, 615 Flowers of Darkness (Cohen), 608 Floyd, Janet, 273 Flying Egyptian trilogy (Elkhadem), 645, 646

Index   927 Folger, Napatsi, 207n28 Les Folles Alliées (troupe), 500, 501 Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la société et la culture (FQRSC), 770 Fontaine, Phil, 153 forage (Wong), 94, 576, 897 Foran, Charles, 84 The Foreigner (Connor), 696, 698, 880 “For Elie Weisel” (Mandel), 474 “The Forest Path to the Spring” (Lowry), 711 For Joshua: An Ojibway Father Teaches His Son (Wagamese), 184 Forms of Devotion (Schoemperlen), 440 The Forms of Loss (Lacey), 868 For My Brother Jesus (Layton), 608 “For My Sons, Max and David” (Layton), 608 “For Play and Entrance: The Contemporary Canadian Long Poem” (Kroetsch), 24 Forrest, Katherine, 870 Forsdick, Charles, 633 For Those Who Come After (Krupat), 171 Fortier, Dominique, 622 Fortune, My Foe (Davies), 373 Fortune and Men’s Eyes (Herbert), 376, 395, 873 49th Parallel Psalm (Compton), 547, 548 Forum: Canadian Life and Letters (Stevens), 326 Foster, Cecil, 541, 547 Foucault, Michel, 117, 213, 448 Le Fou d’Omar (Farhoud), 650, 652 Found in Alberta: Environmental Themes for the Anthropocene (Boschman & Trono), 738 Fournier, Robert, 768 Fowke, Edith, 6 Fowler, Marian, 273 Fox (Sweatman), 465 Fox, L. Chris, 865 Fox, Terry, 878 Le Foyer canadien (journal), 249 Framing narratives, 594 Framing Truths (Kuester), 787 Francis, Daniel, 302 Francis, Marvin, 701 Francis, Wynne, 326 Frankfurt School, 111, 118 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, 442

Fraser, Blair, 355 Fraser, Brad, 874 Fraser, Brendan, 186n13 Fraser, Ray, 439 Fraser, Simon, 230, 231, 235–237, 713 Fraser, Sylvia, 819 Frazer, George James, 232 Fréchette, Louis-Honoré, 246, 247, 251, 252, 284, 297 Freeman, Mini (Minnie) Aodla, 194, 205n10, 818 Freeman, Victoria, 852 French, Alice, 818 French, Donald, 7 French, William, 34n1 French-Canadian literature, 242–259 1763–1837, 243–247 1837–1900, 247–253 Révolution tranquille and, 403–425 French Canadians, 244, 280 French exceptionalism, 70 French language, 404, 410, 646 French Revolution (1787–99), 242 Frères du Sacré-coeur, 514 Fresh Tracks: Writing the Western Landscape (Banting), 735, 736 Freud, Sigmund, 213, 214 Frew, Lee, 11, 863 Friedan, Betty, 459, 847 The Friends of Meager Fortune (Richards), 741 Friesen, Joe, 72, 75n3 Friesen, Patrick, 700 Friskney, Janet B., 82 Frobisher, Martin, 233 “The Frog Song” (Charlebois), 407 From Anna (Little), 832 From the Iron House (Rymhs), 171 Frost, Robert, 668 Frow, John, 823 Frye, Northrop, 1, 5, 6, 9, 17, 18, 20–23, 32, 35n9, 51–59, 298, 325, 326, 337, 338, 340, 376, 380, 397, 455, 472, 473, 481, 670, 719, 730, 780, 815, 897 “Frye Island, N.B. Canada” (Carman), 288 Frygian theory and criticism, 733 Fu-Gen Asian Canadian Theatre Company, 577

928   Index Fugitive Pieces (Michaels), 465, 609, 610, 791, 792 Fulford, Robert, 612, 614, 782 Fulford, Tim, 173, 174 Fuller, Danielle, 84, 87, 666, 671 Fung, Richard, 567, 568 Funny Boy (Selvadurai), 584, 588, 589, 872 Funny Little Stories: Memoir 1 (Wolvengrey), 185 “Fun yener zayt lid / On the Other Side of the Poem” (Korn), 603 Furious (Moure), 485 The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History (Innis), 115 Fuse Magazine, 520 Future Indicative (Moss), 17 “Future Indicative” conference, 25 “The Future Library” project, 438 Gabriel, Christina, 893 Gafaiti, Hafid, 633 Gaffield, Chad, 783 Gaff Topsails (Kavanagh), 679, 680, 682, 684 Gagnon, Ernest, 250 Gagnon, Madeleine, 852 Gailhard, John, 43 Gale, Lorena, 544 Gallagher, Mary, 633 Gallant, Mavis, 435, 436 Gallays, François, 408 Gallichan, Gilles, 806 Gallop, Jane, 846, 851, 854 Galt, John, 283 Gandhi, Indira, 587 Garant, Dominique, 625 Garden metaphor, 594 Le Gardien de mon frère (Kattan), 651 Garfield, Louise, 35n6 Gargoyles (Gaston), 428 Garneau, Alfred, 247, 249–251, 254n21 Garneau, François-Xavier, 243 Garneau, Hector Saint-Denys, 403, 879 Garnier School, 155 Gartner, Zsuzsi, 85, 428, 440 Gascon, Jean, 388 Gaskell, Philip, 802 Gaspé, Philippe Aubert de, 247, 249, 297

Gaspereau Press, 83, 84 Gaston, Bill, 428, 711 The Gathering: Stories for the Medicine Wheel (Scofield), 136 Gathering Strength: Canada’s Aboriginal Action Plan (1998), 154 Gauvin, Lise, 626, 630, 769 Gauvreau, Claude, 406 Gay, Michelle, 519 Gay and lesbian literature, 863–876 The Gay]Grey Moose (Bentley), 27 Gayton, Don, 742 La Gazette littéraire de Montréal, 243, 245, 246 Gedalof, Robin, 172 Geddes, Gary, 34n1, 327, 483 Geistesgeschichte, 47 Gélinas, Gratien, 373 Gellner, Ernest, 380 Gender and queer studies, 731. See also Gay and lesbian literature “General Grant” (Arnold), 1 Generation X (Coupland), 458 Genetsch, Martin, 591 Geniesh: An Indian Girlhood (Willis), 179, 818 “The Genius” (Cohen), 615 Gens du silence (Micone), 623 The Geography of Voice: Canadian Literature of the South Asian Diaspora (McGifford), 583 George, David, 543 George, Susan, 895 Gérin, Annie, 120 Gérin-Lajoie, Antoine, 249, 252 Gerson, Carole, 10, 27, 82, 302, 327, 337, 365, 764, 806, 856 Ghalem, Nadia, 641 Ghettoization, 625 Gibbons, Velma, 222n5 Gibbs, Philip, 359 Gibson, Douglas, 808 Gibson, Graeme, 429, 455, 458, 881, 882 Gidlow, Elsa, 865 Gilbert, Sky, 379, 873, 874 Gill, Charlotte, 741, 742, 821 Gill, E.A. Wharton, 699 Gillen, Mollie, 830 Giller Awards, 88, 89n2

Index   929 Gillespie, Ethel, 359 Gilmore, Leigh, 817 Gilmore, Rachna, 840 Gilmore, Thomas, 243 Gilroy, Paul, 123n1, 556 Gingell, Susan, 31, 758, 764, 866 Ginzberg, Carlo, 785 Giraud, Marcel, 179 The Girl in the Goldfish Bowl (Panych), 381 Giroux, Amélie, 252 Girvan, Anita, 745 Gissing, George, 381 Giving Canada a Literary History (Klinck), 20 The Glace Bay Miners’ Museum (Currie), 667 Le Glaneur (periodical), 251 Glass, Loren, 81 Glassco, John, 317, 326, 328, 817, 867 Glavin, Terry, 742 The Global Forest: Forty Ways Trees Can Save Us (Beresford-Kroeger), 742 Globalization, 93, 621, 703, 892, 897, 898, 901, 902 La gloire de Cassiodore (LaRue), 506 Glotfelty, Cheryll, 728–731 Glover, Douglas, 428, 440, 466 Gnarowski, Michael, 34n1, 326, 347, 476–478, 482 God and the Indian (Taylor), 160 Godard, Barbara, 17, 20, 25, 31, 34n4, 35n9, 96, 327, 763, 764, 851, 852, 855, 856, 864 Godbout, Jacques, 406, 407, 413 Godbout, Lucie, 500 Goddard, Horace, 542 Godfrey, Dave, 34n1, 458, 486 Godin, Gérald, 406, 407 Godless But Loyal to Heaven (Van Camp), 206n22 “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial” (King), 466 Goellnicht, Donald, 566, 573, 764 Goldberg, David Theo, 479 The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (Frazer), 232 The Golden Dog (Kirby), 305, 307 The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness and Greed (Vaillant), 741 Goldie, Terry, 11, 758, 764, 863–865 Goldman, Jonathan, 81

Goldman, Marlene, 764 Goldsmith, Oliver, 279, 280, 660 Goldwater, Anne-France, 88 Gone Indian (Kroetsch), 788 Goodlands (Kaye), 695 The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy (Sandilands), 122 Goodness (Redhill), 381 Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) (MacDonald), 871 The Goose (magazine), 737 Gordon, C.G., 284 Gordon, Charles, 305 Gordon, Jon, 745 Gordon Residential School, 165n5 Gothicism, 456 Goto, Hiromi, 464, 572, 697, 701, 764, 840 Go to Sleep, World (Souster), 323 Goulet, Clare, 739 Govier, Katherine, 747 Gowdy, Barbara, 428, 440, 740 Goyette, Sue, 740 Graham, Gwethalyn, 339, 343, 346 Grain (Stead), 696, 702 Grainger, Martin Allerdale, 711 Gramsci, Antonio, 662 Gramsci’s Politics of Language: Engaging the Bakhtin Circle and the Frankfurt School (Ives), 121 Granatstein, J.L., 66, 326, 782–784 Grandpré, Pierre de, 406 Grant, George, 56, 111, 114–117, 120, 454, 481, 543 Grant, Jessica, 440, 670, 677, 678 Graphic memoir, 822 Grass, Sky, Song: Promise and Peril in the World of Grassland Birds (Herriot), 746 “The Grass is Epic: Tim Lilburn’s Moosewood Sandhills” (Bartlett), 739 Grauer, Lally, 488 “The Grave-Tree” (Carman), 303 Gray, Beryl, 301, 359, 379 Gray, Charlotte, 819 Gray, James H., 790 Gray, John, 378 Gray, Thomas, 282

930   Index Green, Mary Jean, 766 Green girl dreams Mountains (Dumont), 137 Green Grass, Running Water (King), 260, 467, 701, 744 “The Greenhorn” (Rosenfarb), 603 Greening the Maple: Canadian Ecocriticism in Context (Soper & Bradley), 735, 738 The Green Pitcher (Livesay), 320, 865 Gregory, Derek, 764 Gretzky: An Autobiography (Gretzky), 821 Gretzky: From Backyard Rink to the Stanley Cup (Gretzky), 814 Gretzky, Walter, 814 Gretzky, Wayne, 814, 821 Grey, Janice, 207n29 Grey Owl (aka Archie Belaney), 739, 746, 817 Griffin, Dustin, 506 Griffiths, Gareth, 756 Griffiths, Linda, 170, 378, 381 Grinder, Barbara, 736 Grizzly Heart: Living Without Fear Among the Brown Bears of Kamchatka (Russell), 746 Groome, Margaret, 389 Gross, Paul, 397 Groundwood Books, 827 Ground Works: Avant Garde For Thee (ed. Bök), 489 Groupe de recherche sur l’édition littéraire au Québec (GRÉLQ), 806 Group of Seven, 372 Grove, Frederick Philip, 315, 337, 339, 692, 697, 703, 817 Growing Up DeGrassi: Television, Identity and Youth Cultures (Byers), 121 Growing Up Stupid under the Union Jack (Clarke), 820 The Guardians (Pyper), 397 Guattari, Félix, 474, 487, 639, 647, 653 La Guerre, Yes Sir! (Carrier), 413 The Guests of War Trilogy (Pearson), 832 Gueye, Abdoulaye, 767 Guibord, Joseph, 250 A Guide to Canadian Children’s Books (Baker & Setterington), 827 Guinness, Alec, 387 “Gulf of Georgia” (Birney), 710 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 232

Gunew, Sneja, 758, 764 Guppy, Stephen, 712 Gurdjeff, Georgi, 382 Guthrie, Tyrone, 387, 390, 394, 396, 397 Guttman, Anna, 764 Guy, Ray, 676 Gwyn, Richard, 821 Gwyn, Sandra, 676, 681 Gynocritics/La gynocritique: Feminist Approaches to Writing by Canadian and Québécoise Women/Approches féministes à l’écriture des canadiennes et québécoise (ed. Godard), 20, 852, 854 Habermas, Jürgen, 26 Habitability, 628 Hage, Rawi, 80, 649, 651–653, 892, 904 Haggerty, George, 865 Haig-Brown, Roderick, 711, 719 Haig-Brown, Valerie, 736 Halbwachs, Maurice, 64 Halen, Pierre, 630 Half-Blood Blues (Edugyan), 89n3, 463, 554 Halfbreed (Campbell), 134, 135, 138, 154, 170, 171, 179, 185, 460, 461, 818 Halfe, Louise, 142, 144n15, 488, 702 Haliburton, R.G., 1 Haliburton, Thomas Chandler, 306, 431–433, 660, 780, 793, 804 Halifax Gazette, 803 Hall, Charles Francis, 233 Hall, Stuart, 118, 123n1, 555, 894 Hamilton, Sylvia, 542 Hamish Hamilton Canada, 85 Hammill, Faye, 10, 81, 352 The Handmaid’s Tale (Atwood), 464 Hands of History (Todd), 183 The Hanging of Angélique (Cooper), 544 Hanrahan, Heidi, 185n2 “Happy Locally, Sad Geopolitically” (Derksen), 901, 902 Haraldsen, Kjeld, 678 Hardt, Michael, 31 Harel, Simon, 623, 627–630, 632, 764 Hargreaves, Alex, 633 Harlem Duet (Sears), 381 Harman, Graham, 116

Index   931 Harman, James, 364 Harper, Stephen, 74, 160, 369, 371, 800 HarperCollins, 442 Harris, Claire, 486 Harris, Cole, 785 Harris, Michael, 896 Harrison, Dick, 730 Harrison, Susan Frances, 304 Hart, Julia Catherine Beckwith, 856 Hart House Theatre, 388 Harting, Heike, 764 Harvey, David, 93, 894 Harvey, Kenneth J., 681, 686 Hassan, Marwan, 646, 647, 652, 653 Hath Not a Jew … (Klein), 324 “Haunting,” 569 Hayakawa, S.I., 290 Hayman, John G., 43, 45 Hayman, Robert, 659 Head, Harold, 541 Headhunter (Findley), 870 The Headmaster’s Wager (Lam), 574 Headwaters of Canadian Literature (MacMechan), 7 Healey, Michael, 379, 382 Healy, J.E. (Jack), 756 Hearne, Samuel, 230 The Heart of a Woman (Hensley), 304 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 285 “Heat” (Lampman), 300, 304 Heavysege, Charles, 297 Hébert, Anne, 411 Heble, Ajay, 462, 764, 789 He Drown She in the Sea (Mootoo), 584, 593, 594 Heidbreder, Robert, 829 Heidegger, Martin, 24, 115 Heidsieck, Charles, 362 Heise, Ursula, 728, 729 Hellenism, 286 Hellgoing (Coady), 442 Helms, Gabriele, 818 Hemingway, Ernest, 338, 434 Henderson, Jennifer, 31, 273, 764 Henderson, Mathew, 740 Henderson, Scott, 822 Hendry, Tom, 394

Hennepin, Louis, 244 Henrik Ibsen on the Necessity of Producing Norwegian Theatre (Palmer), 377 Henry V (Shakespeare), 371 Hensley, Sophia Almon, 304 Henson, Josiah, 545, 546, 549 Henty, G.A., 828 Herbert, George, 323 Herbert, John, 376, 395, 873 Les Herbes rouges (periodical), 406 Herder, Johann Gottfried Von, 45–48, 50 Here Is Queer: Nationalisms, Sexualities, and the Literatures of Canada (Dickinson), 864, 865 Herizons: Women’s News + Feminist Views (magazine), 819, 850 Hernandez, Catherine, 577 Hero of Lesser Causes (Johnston), 833 Herriot, Trevor, 740, 746 “He Scarcely Resembles the Real Man” (Fraser), 186n13 Heti, Sheila, 80, 83, 85–88 Heuer, Karsten, 740, 746 Hewson, Kelly, 764 “Hiawatha” (Longfellow), 277, 699 The Hidden Adult (Nodelman), 826 The Hidden Room (Dragland), 327 Hiemstra, Mary, 274n2 Higher Criticism, 285 The Higher Hill (Campbell), 341, 342 “The Higher Pantheism” (Tennyson), 287 High Spirits (Davies), 456 Highway, Tomson, 154–157, 172, 379, 467, 873, 884 Highways of Canadian Literature (Logan & French), 7 Hilary Weston Prize for Nonfiction, 821 Hilberg, Raul, 75n6 Hildebrand, Renate, 624, 629 Hill, Colin, 315, 316, 327, 338, 435, 452, 693, 703 Hill, Lawrence, 463, 540, 546, 547 Hill-Land (Voaden), 373 Hill-Tout, Charles, 235 Hine, Daryl, 868 Hinz, Evelyn, 814 Hirsch, Marianne, 68, 71, 75n6, 76n9, 76n12 His Greatness (MacIvor), 381

932   Index Histoire (Garneau), 249 Histoire de la littérature canadienne (Lareau), 250 Histoire de la littérature québécoise (Biron et al.), 411, 623 Histoire de la Nouvelle France (Charlevoix), 244 Histoire de l’édition française (eds. Martin, Chartier, & Vivet), 806 Histoire de l’édition littéraire au Québec au XXe siècle (ed. Michon), 806 Histoire du Canada depuis sa découverte jusqu’à nos jours (Garneau), 243, 247 Historica, 782 An Historical and Statistical Account of Nova Scotia (Haliburton), 780 Historical bibliography, 802 The Historical Novel (de Groot), 781 Historiographic fiction, 584–587, 780–798 children’s literature, 836–840 History and Theory (Jenkins & Zagorin), 786 A History of Canadian Literature (New), 7 The History of Emily Montague (Brooke), 856 A History of Forgetting (Adderson), 64, 68, 71 History of New France (Membertou), 233 History of the Book in Canada (eds. Fleming et al), 27, 806 History of the Book in Canada project, 787 A History of the Canadian Pacific Railway (Innis), 115 History of the Village of Small Huts (Hollingsworth), 382 Hjartarson, Paul, 764 Hladki, Janice, 35n6 Hlongwanne, Gugu, 764 Hobbs, Ray, 72 Hobbs, Sandra, 769 Hobsbawm, Eric, 59, 380 Hodgetts, A.B., 784 Hodgins, Jack, 26, 356, 438, 439, 458, 465, 714–716, 783, 785 Hodgins, Peter, 782 Hoggart, Richard, 123n1 Holbert, Cornelia, 179 Holland, Patrick, 764 Hollingsworth, Michael, 382 The Hollow Tree (Lunn), 837

Holmes, Nancy, 736, 738, 741, 742 Holmlund, Heather, 838 Holocaust, 74, 606, 609, 791, 792, 818, 819 Homel, David, 626 Home Place: Essays on Ecology (Rowe), 742 Homer, 229 Home-Work: Postcolonialism, Pedagogy, and Canadian Literature (Sugars), 764–765 L’Homme rapaillé (Miron), 407, 413 Homosexual, lesbian, and queer politics, 410. See also Gay and lesbian literature Hood, Andrew, 443 Hood, Hugh, 439 Hooton, Matthew, 712 Hope Deferred (Davies), 373 Hopkinson, Nalo, 536 Hopkinson, William Charles, 585 HorizonZero site, 518 The Hornbooks of Rita K (Kroetsch), 94 Horsburgh, Amelia, 179, 274n3 Horvath, Polly, 835, 836 Horwood, Harold, 668, 676 Hosanna (Tremblay), 864 The House (Cormack), 697 Householder, Johanna, 35n6 House of Anansi Press, 86, 442, 472, 486 The House of Difference: Cultural Politics and National Identity in Canada (Mackey), 119 House of Hate (Janes), 665 “House-wife novels,” 499 Hovey, Richard, 302 Howard O’Hagan Award, 575 Howe, Joseph, 431, 432, 660, 734, 804 Howe, Nicholas, 390 Howsam, Leslie, 803 How Should a Person Be? (Heti), 86 How to Play: The Theatre of James Reaney (Parker), 396 Hoy, Helen, 764 Hoyt, Charles, 329 Hubel, Teresa, 221, 758, 764 Hudon, Normand, 514 Hudson, Peter, 541 Hudson’s Bay Company, 130, 235 Huebener, Paul, 737, 743, 746 Huggan, Graham, 205n2, 584

Index   933 Hughes, Isabelle, 343, 345–347 Hugo, Richard, 716 Huguenin, Anne-Marie, 356, 358 Hulan, Renée, 11, 780 Hulan, Shelley, 789 Humanism, 32, 556 Humanities Research Council of Canada, 800 Hume, David, 41, 44, 45 Humour feminism and, 496–500 satire, 503–507 in women’s writing, 495–511 Huneault, Kristina, 327 The Hungry Ghosts (Selvadurai), 535, 872 Hunter, Bernice Thurman, 831 Hunter, Lynette, 24, 32, 474, 765 Hunter-Duvar, John, 285, 286 The Huron Chief, and Other Poems (Kidd), 283 Huston, James, 246 Huston, Nancy, 33 Hutcheon, Linda, 24, 58, 462, 497, 567, 730, 763, 764, 787, 788, 790 Hutner, Gordon, 338 Huxley, Thomas, 282 Huyssen, Andreas, 64 Hybridity, 141, 408, 594, 595, 621 Hynes, Joel Thomas, 677, 687 I am a Taxi (Ellis), 839 I Am Yours (Thompson), 381 “I and I: Phyllis Webb’s ‘I Daniel’” (Scobie), 24 Ibbitson, John, 73, 903 Icefields (Wharton), 465, 740 Idealism, 114 Ideas for a Philosophy of History of Mankind (Herder), 46 Identity and Justice (Angus), 121 Identity politics, 410, 573, 850 An Idiot Joy (Mandel), 474 If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? (Chamberlin), 734 Igloolik Isuma Productions, 206n21 Ignatieff, Michael, 821 I Knew Two Metis Women (Scofield), 137 Il était un fois dans l’Est (Tremblay), 413 Ilha do Desterro (journal), 763 Illustrado (Syjuco), 574

Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (Anderson), 46, 59 Imagining Resistance: Visual Culture and Activism in Canada (Cronin & Robertson), 122 Immigration, 99, 554, 565, 583, 592, 645, 646, 697, 700, 713 Immigration Act (1967), 570 L’Immobile (Alonzo), 642 L’Impartial (newspaper), 252 Imperialism, 371, 386, 486 The Imperialist (Duncan), 306 “The Imperial Spirit” (Smith), 284 The Imposter Bride (Richler), 610 Inalienable Rice (Powell Street Revue), 566, 575 In Another Place Not Here (Brand), 552 Incendies (Mouawad), 649, 650 The Inconvenient Indian (King), 163 Indian Horse (Wagamese), 160, 741 Indian Residential Schools, 150-169, 165n2, 837 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement (IRSSA), 5, 154 Indian School Days (Johnston), 155, 164, 183, 818 “Indian Summer” (Campbell), 303 Indigenous autobiography, 10, 170-190 Indigenous languages, 712 Indigenous literatures, 127–223 Aboriginal writing and reconciliation, 150–169 autobiographies, 170–190 decolonization and, 210–212 exploration genre, 227–241 gay and lesbian literature, 872 Inuit, 10, 191–208, 211 Metis literature, 129–149 prairie literature, 696–698 shadow stories, 214–220 women’s writing, 209–223 Indigenous Methodologies (Kovach), 185 Indigenous Poetics in Canada (McLeod), 744 Indigenous Storywork: Educating the Heart, Mind, Body and Spirit (Archibald), 183 Indigenous uncanny, 212–214, 221 Indigenous women’s writing, 10, 850 In Divers Tones (Roberts), 287, 299

934   Index Individualism, 500, 902 Individuality, 436 Indo-Caribbean diaspora, 593 In Due Season (Van der Mark), 343, 347, 697, 700 Industrial model of education, 783 Inexpressible Island (Young), 381 L’Influence d’un livre (Gaspé), 247, 248 Influency Salon (Christakos), 103 In Flux: Transnational Shifts in Asian Canadian Writing (Miki), 93, 576 Inglis, John, 283 In Memoriam (Tennyson), 287 In My Father’s House (Fraser), 819 Innis, Harold, 111, 115–117, 120 Innocent Cities (Hodgins), 465 The Innocent Traveller (Wilson), 710 “In Search of Alias Grace” (Atwood), 786, 790 In Search of April Raintree (Mosionier), 135, 136, 139, 140, 466 In Search of Myself (Grove), 817 Inside Memory: Pages from a Writer’s Workbook (Findley), 821 Inside Out (Tyman), 701, 703 Inspiritation, 285–291 In Spite of Killer Bees (Johnston), 833 Intelligence (Hassan), 646 L’Intendant Bigot (Marmette), 249 Intercultural memory, 66 International Commonwealth Short Story Prize, 442 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, 442 Internationalization, 388 Internment, 565 Intertidal Life (Thomas), 712 Interventions (journal), 763 Interviewing Inuit Elders (Laugrand, Oosten, & Kublu), 192 “In the Country Churchyard” (Scott), 301 In the Feminine (Dybikowski), 485 In the feminine: women and words/les femmes et les mots conference, 852 In The Midst of Alarms (Barr), 306 In the Shadow of Elephants (CBT), 577 In the Shadow of Evil (Mosionier), 135

In the Skin of a Lion (Ondaatje), 81, 463, 465, 591, 609, 788 In the Village of Viger (Scott), 301, 433 The Intimate Empire (Whitlock), 265, 760 Intimate Journal (Brossard), 820 Introduction to Canadian Poetry (Woodcock), 477 Inuit literature, 10, 191–208, 211 The Invention of the World (Hodgins), 458 “Inventions of Sexuality in Kathleen Winter’s Annabel” (Neuhaus), 677 Inventory (Brand), 93, 99, 100, 102, 107, 530, 552 Ipellie, Alootook, 194, 206n12 Irish Rebellion of 1798, 281 Irony, 509 Irvine, Dean, 10, 327, 328, 347 Irwin, William Arthur, 356 Isaac, Elisapie, 206n19 Is Canada Postcolonial? (Moss), 32, 756 Isidore of Seville, 43 Isin, Engin, 533 Islamic garden, 594 Isuma, 205n3 “Italian Multiculturalism” (Davey), 35n11 It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken (Seth), 822 It’s All True (Sherman), 381 Ives, Peter, 121 I’ve Tasted My Blood (Acorn), 480 Ivison, Douglas, 590 I Walk in Two Worlds (Brass), 176 I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors (Eisenstein), 822 Jackson, Marni, 736 Jacob, Suzanne, 501, 502 Jacques, Edna, 359 Jacques et Marie (Bourassa), 249 The Jade Peony (Choy), 464, 465, 569, 712 Jaffe, Aaron, 81 Jalna (de la Roche), 339, 343 James, Thomas, 229 Jameson, Anna Brownell, 261, 267, 268 Jameson, Fredric, 25, 64, 112 Jameson, Robert, 267 Janes, Percy, 665, 676 Jannetta, Armando, 139 Japanese-Canadian redress movement, 816

Index   935 Japanese Canadians, 568, 570, 576, 819 Japanese internment, 585 Japanese Nightingale (Winnifred), 566 Japanese Redress Movement, 463 Les Jardins de cristal (Ghalem), 641 Jarman, Mark Anthony, 428, 440 Jasmin (Truss), 828 Jasmin, Claude, 404 Jaunière, Claude, 359 Jautard, Valentin, 245 Jay, Martin, 405 Jay, Paul, 93 Jean Rivard, économiste (Gérin-Lajoie), 249 Jean-Rivard, le défricheur (Gérin-Lajoie), 249 Jefferess, David, 758, 764 Jenik, Adriene, 520 Jenkins, Keith, 786 Jenness, Diamond, 235 Je regarde les femmes (Kattan), 651 “Jerk” (Derksen), 901, 902 Jerome, Joseph K., 306 Jerusalem (Delisle), 822 Jessica (Campbell/Griffiths), 378 A Jest of God (Laurence), 460, 697 “Je suis cubain / yankee no je suis nègre je lave les planchers dans un / bordel du Texas je suis Québécois” (Chamberland), 404 Je suis un écrivain japonais (Laferrière), 626 The Jesuit Relations, 816 Jesuits’ Reasons Unreasonable (Huxley), 283 Jeux de patience (Farhoud), 630, 647, 648, 650 Jewish Canadian literature, 602–620 poetics of response in, 610–616 tradition in, 602–610 Jewish Canadians, 5 Jewish immigration, 604, 610 Jewish Publication Society of America, 603 Jocelyn, Marthe, 831, 840 Johns, Ted, 379 Johnson, E. Pauline, 81, 220, 296, 301, 302, 713 Johnson, Fran, 222n5 Johnson, J.W ., 42, 48 Johnson, Kendall, 185n2 Johnson, Yvonne, 170 Johnston, Anna, 760 Johnston, Basil, 154–157, 161, 164, 183, 462, 818 Johnston, Hugh, 586

Johnston, Julie, 831, 833, 834 Johnston, Wayne, 465, 466, 658, 662, 676–678, 680, 681, 686, 687, 786, 790, 792, 821 Jolliet, Louis, 244 Jolly, Rosemary, 764 Jones, Ann Rosalind, 854 Jones, D.G., 21, 23, 57, 472, 477, 483 Jones, Doug, 730 Jones, Joseph, 762 Jones, Manina, 571, 764 Jones, Peter, 173 Jordan, Gilbert Paul, 222n5 Jordan, Philip, 216 Jordan, Terry, 735 Jordan-Fenton, Christy, 837 Joseph, Clara, 764 Joubert, Lucie, 10, 495 Journal du voyage de M. Saint-Luc de La Corne (Saint-Luc), 246 Journal intime (Brossard), 820 Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 762 Journal of West Indian Literature, 763 The Journals of Knud Rasmussen (film), 199, 206n21 The Journals of Susanna Moodie (Moodie), 260, 465, 801 The Journey Prize Anthology, 442 Joyce, James, 112, 338, 436, 604 Joyland: A Hub for Short Fiction (blog), 522 Joy of Apex (Folger), 203 Judith (Van Herk), 460 Julien, Pauline, 409 Julius Caesar (Shakespeare), 289 Jung, Carl, 456 “Jung-Sum Second Brother” (Choy), 569 Kadar, Marlene, 814, 820 Kalingo, Adamie, 194 Kalm, Pehr, 242 Kalsey, Surjeet, 583 Kam, Winston, 567, 576 Kamboureli, Smaro, 28, 32, 33, 81, 93, 94, 121, 463, 475, 476, 487, 528, 529, 758, 763, 764, 853, 856 Kamra, Sukeshi, 758, 764 Kanaganayakam, Chelva, 763, 764 Kane, Margo, 144n5

936   Index Kane, Paul, 133, 230 Kant, Immanuel, 45, 56 Kanu, Yatta, 764 The Kappa Child (Goto), 572, 697, 701 Karpinski, Eva, 820 Karr, Clarence, 89n4 Kattan, Naïm, 626, 629, 640, 643–645, 649, 651, 653 Kaufman, Gloria, 504 Kavanagh, Patrick, 679–682 Kaye, Frances W., 695 Keahey, Deborah, 693 Kearns, Lionel, 517 Keate, Stuart, 665 Keats, John, 288–290, 303 Keefer, Janice Kulyk, 663, 666 Keeper ‘n Me (Wagamese), 159, 467 Keith, W.J., 7, 472 Kelly, Peggy Lynn, 327 Kelsey, Henry, 692 Kennedy, Bill, 515, 516, 519 Kennedy, Dan, 155 Kennedy, John F., 847 Kennedy, Leo, 317, 319, 320 Kenner, Hugh, 52, 53, 57 Kenney, Denise, 742 “Kensington Gardens” (Arnold), 287 Kepler, Johannes, 381 Kerber, Jenny, 177, 695, 702, 734, 735, 738, 739 Kertzer, Adrienne, 791 Kertzer, Jonathan, 2, 47, 58 Key Porter Books, 89n3 Khordoc, Catherine, 3, 10, 621, 630, 631 Kidd, Adam, 280, 283 Kids Can Press, 827 Killam, G.D., 762, 764 The Killdeer and Other Plays (Reaney), 396, 398 The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past (Windschuttle), 782 Kim, Christine, 32, 33, 66, 897 Kinch, Martin, 394 “Kinetic Poem” (Kearns), 517 Kinew, Wab, 164 King, Boston, 543 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 545

King, Thomas, 163, 172, 260, 428, 441, 466, 467, 701, 761, 764, 792 Kingsway (Turner), 711 Kipling, Rudyard, 800 Kirby, William, 284, 305, 804 Kiss of the Fur Queen (Highway), 156, 467, 873 Kit (Woods), 828 Kiyooka, Roy, 486, 575, 820 “Klahowya Tillicum: Coming Home to the Stories and Songs of the West Coast” (Chamberlin), 719 Klar, Barbara, 741 Klein, A.M., 67, 68, 74, 317, 320, 322, 324, 327, 328, 603, 605–607, 610, 613, 866 Klinck, Carl F., 5–7, 17, 18, 20, 26, 337, 472, 800, 815 Klippenstein, Frieda Esau, 10, 227 Knelman, Martin, 379 Knister, Raymond, 328, 346, 359, 434 Knopf Canada, 89n3 Knowles, Richard, 66, 387, 388, 395, 398, 764 Kogawa, Joy, 65, 71, 72, 449, 463, 465, 564, 569–571, 585, 715 Kokis, Sergio, 623, 768 Kolodny, Annette, 696 Komagata Maru incident (1914), 585–587 The Komagata Maru Incident (Pollock), 377 Kootenay School of Writing (KSW), 103, 900 Korinek, Valerie, 359 Korn, Rokhl, 603 Kostash, Myrna, 820 Kovach, Margaret, 184 Kovar, Émile, 254n23 Koyczan, Shane, 80 Kreisel, Henry, 604, 605, 610, 612, 616 Krieghoff, Cornelius, 47 Kristeva, Julia, 92 Kroetsch, Robert, 23, 24, 26, 29, 34n5, 58, 94, 325, 448–449, 454, 458, 465, 692–694, 698, 702, 727, 728, 730, 734, 740, 764, 788 Kroker, Arthur, 123n3 Kröller, Eva-Marie, 359, 764 Krotz, Sarah, 205n2 Kruger, Loren, 389 Krupat, Arnold, 171, 172 Krykorka, Vladyana, 837 Kublu, Alexina, 192

Index   937 Kudluk, Tumasi, 194 Kuester, Martin, 787 Kungax (traditional songs), 713 Kunuk, Zacharias, 195, 206n21 Kurelek, William, 819 Kusugak, Michael Arvaarluk, 194, 837 Kuttainen, Victoria, 365 Kwa, Lydia, 573 Kwong, Roger, 568 Kymlicka, Will, 66, 75n3, 296 Labadie, Louis, 245 Labyrinths of Voice (Kroetsch, Neuman, & Wilson), 24 Lacey, Edward A., 868 Lacombe, Michele, 764 Lacombe, Patrice, 249 Laconics (Ross), 316 LaCook, Lewis, 516 Lady in the Red Dress (Yee), 577 Lady Oracle (Atwood), 459 Laferrière, Dany, 623, 632, 768 Lafitau, Joseph-François, 244 LaForme, Harry, 166n12 Lahontan, Baron de, 244 Lai, Larissa, 80, 95, 536, 572, 573, 764, 898–900, 904 Lake: A Journal of Arts and Environment, 742 Lake of the Prairies: A Story of Belonging (Cariou), 138, 740, 820 Lalonde, Michèle, 404, 406, 407, 768 Lam, Vincent, 574 LaMarsh, Judy, 375, 821, 848 Lambotte, Marie-Claude, 503 Lament for a Nation (Grant), 56, 481, 543 Lamonde, Yvan, 254n25, 806 Lampman, Archibald, 4, 281, 284, 287, 295, 296, 299–301, 303, 304, 308, 432 Lamy, Suzanne, 496, 845, 849 The Land of Afternoon (Macbeth), 664 Landscapes of the Interior: Re-Explorations of Nature and the Human Spirit (Gayton), 742 Land to Light On (Brand), 487, 488, 553 Lane, Dorothy, 764 Lane, M. Travis, 668, 669 Lane, Richard, 760

Langevin, André, 411 Langevin, Gilbert, 412 Langton, Anne, 263, 264 Language, 713. See also French language in exploration genre, 232–235 Michif language, 131, 143n2 Language in Her Eye: Views on Writing and Gender by Canadian Women Writing in English (ed. Scheier), 25, 485 Laotians, 565 Lapointe, Annette, 703 Lardeau (Wah), 575, 734 Lareau, Edmond, 250 LaRocque, Emma, 10, 129, 153, 162, 163, 758 Larocque, Gilbert, 411 Larry’s Party (Shields), 465 Larsen, Stephan, 759 LaRue, F.-A.-H, 249 LaRue, Monique, 504–507, 624 Last of the Curlews (Bodsworth), 740, 746 The Last of the Mohicans (Cooper), 248 Latif-Ghattas, Mona, 623, 643, 653 Lau, Evelyn, 571, 820 Laugrand, Frédéric, 192 Laura Secord: The Heroine of 1812 (Curzon), 371 Laurence, Elsie Fry, 359 Laurence, Margaret, 82, 260, 340, 435, 436, 449, 454, 457, 459–461, 696–698, 740, 821 Laurendeau, André, 768 Laurendeau, Marc, 405 Laurie, Patrick Gammie, 803 Laurier, Wilfrid, 73, 295, 585 Lavallée, Calixa, 251 La Vérendrye, Pierre de, 244 Lavoie, Marie-Renée, 508 “Law, Literature and Postcoloniality” (ARIEL), 762 Lawrence, Iain, 829, 840 Lawson, Alan, 760 Lawson, Julie, 836 Layton, Irving, 81, 322–326, 329, 477, 483, 607, 608, 610, 613, 615, 616 Lazarus, Neil, 755 Lea, Graham, 390 Leacock, Stephen, 81, 87, 295, 307, 432–434, 443 Leahy, David, 10, 403, 622

938   Index Leaven of Malice (Davies), 451 Leaves of Grass (Whitman), 277 Leavisite New Criticism, 112 Leavitt, David, 869 Leavitt, Martine, 828 Leavitt, Sarah, 822 Leblanc, Daniel, 73 Lecker, Robert, 27, 33, 327 Leclerc, Annie, 852 Leclerc, Félix, 514 L’Écuyer, Eugène, 248 Ledoux-Beaugrand, Evelyne, 504 Lee, Alvin, 395 Lee, Bennett, 575 Lee, Christopher, 566 Lee, Dennis, 51, 325, 448, 454, 481, 483–487, 828, 829 Lee, Julia, 566 Lee, Katja, 81 Lee, Rebecca, 428 Lee, Sky, 464, 465, 567, 570, 712, 853 Lefebvre, Benjamin, 830 Lefebvre, Henri, 659 Legacy of Hope Foundation, 152 Légendes canadiennes (Casgrain), 250 Legends of Vancouver (Johnson), 302, 713 Léger, Dyane, 669 Leggatt, Judith, 764 Leisner, Dorothy, 800 Leitch, Adelaide, 387 Leitner, Helga, 894 Lejeune, Philippe, 814, 816, 817, 822 Lemire, Maurice, 247, 410 Lemon Hound (blog), 103, 489, 522 Lennox, Naomi, 346 Lepage, Robert, 381 Lequin, Lucie, 502 Leroux, Darryl, 769 Lesbian feminism, 864 Lesbian literature. See Gay and lesbian literature Lescarbot, Marc, 233, 244, 370 The Lesser Blessed (Van Camp), 206n22 Lesynski, Loris, 829 The Letters of John Sutherland (ed. Whiteman), 326

The Letters of Mephibosheth Stepsure (McCulloch), 660, 661 Les lettres chinoises (Chen), 623 Lévesque, René, 453 Levine, Norman, 438, 442 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 117 Lewis, Jason, 519 LGBT. See Gay and lesbian literature Li, Tania Murray, 758 Li, Victor, 758, 764 Liberalized trade, 892 Liberal modernity, 114 Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), 588 Liberté (periodical), 406 Libeskind, Daniel, 76n15 Lieux de mémoire, 65, 70 Lieux de mémoire (Nora), 785 The Life, Letters and Speeches of Kah-gega-gah-bowh, Or, G. Copway, Chief of the Ojibway Nation (Copway), 170, 173, 818 Life Among the Qallunaat (Freeman), 194, 818 Life in the Clearings versus the Bush (Moodie), 272 Life of Pi (Martel), 463 Lighthall, William Douw, 4, 7, 284, 298 The Lights Go On Again (Pearson), 832 Lilburn, Tim, 739 Lill, Wendy, 892, 896, 904 Lily Briscoe: A Self-Portrait (Meigs), 820 Limestone Lakes Utaniki (Wah), 712 “Limited Identities in Canada” (Careless), 784 “Lines Written Many Miles from Grasmere” (Queyras), 105 Lion in the Streets (Thompson), 381 Lionnet, Françoise, 758 Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now (Marlatt), 711 Literary Celebrity in Canada (York), 27, 81 “Literary Citizenship” (Pennee), 527 Literary histories, 5–7 Literary History (Frye), 18 Literary History of Canada (Klinck), 5, 7, 17, 20, 55, 58, 337, 338, 340, 345, 472, 780, 800, 815 Literary journals, 482 Literary Lapses (Leacock), 307 Literary Movement of 1860, 249 Literary nationalism, 242

Index   939 Literature in Canada (journal), 17 Little, Jean, 831, 832, 836 Littlechild, Wilton, 154 Little House on the Prairie (Wilder), 573, 701 The Little Magazine in Canada (Norris), 326 Little Voice (Slipperjack), 835 Livesay, Dorothy, 319–322, 326, 329, 340, 359, 805, 819, 865, 866 Lives of Girls and Women (Munro), 808 Lives of Short Duration (Richards), 665–666 Livingston, John A., 742 Le livre d’Emma (Agnant), 630, 632 Le Livre des ruptures (Alonzo), 642 The L.M. Montgomery Reader (Lefebvre), 830 Locke, John, 114 Logan, J.D., 7 Lola Starr Builds Her Dream House (Gilbert), 379 “The Lonely Land” (Smith), 318 Long, Anne, 35n6 Long, Sylvester, 817 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 252, 277, 699 Long Lance (Long), 817 Long Lance, Chief Buffalo Child, 817 Longmore, George, 280 Long Sault (McKay), 734 Longspoon Press, 852 Looking at the Moon (Pearson), 832 Loomba, Ania, 759 “The Loons” (Laurence), 698 Lorcin, Patricia M.E., 633 Lorde, Audre, 849 Loring, Kevin, 157, 160 Lorne and Edith Pierce Collection of Canadian, 806 Lost in the Barrens (Mowat), 828 Lost Passport: The Life and Words of Edward Lacey (Sutherland), 868 The Lost Salt Gift of Blood (MacLeod), 439, 665 Lottridge, Celia, 829 Louis: The Heretic Poems (Scofield), 137, 701 Louis Dudek and Raymond Souster (Davey), 326 “Louise Chawinikisique” (Boucherville), 248 “The Louise Labé Poems” (Carr), 517 Louis Riel: A Comic Strip Biography (Brown), 822

Lousley, Cheryl, 744 Love and Salt Water (Wilson), 881 The Loved and the Lost (Callaghan), 451 Love in Manitoba (Gill), 699 Love + Relasianships (Aquino), 576 Lovesey, Oliver, 764 Lowe, Lisa, 568 Lowry, Malcolm, 711, 712 Low Tide on Grand Pré (Carman), 303, 304 Loyie, Larry, 838 Ltaif, Nadine, 623, 642 Lucas, Alec, 6 The Luck of Ginger Coffey (Moore), 452 Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Road to Green Gables (documentary), 830 Ludlow, Gabriel, 659 Luke, Pearl, 741 Lundy, Randy, 156 Lunn, Janet, 836, 837 Lussier, Doris, 514 Lutz, John S., 229, 231, 238 Lynch, Gerald, 430 Lyon, Annabel, 85, 428, 440 The Lyre of Orpheus (Davies), 397, 456 Lyric Ecology: An Appreciation of the Work of Jan Zwicky (eds. Dickinson & Goulet), 739 Lyrics of Earth (Lampman), 287 Mable Riley: A Reliable Record of Peril, Humdrum and Romance (Jocelyn), 831 MacAlpin, Marian, 459 Macartney-Filgate, Terence, 830 Macbeth, Madge, 343, 345, 359 MacDonald, Ann-Marie, 381, 465, 871, 872, 878, 885, 886 Macdonald, Bertrum, 806 Macdonald, John A., 73, 133, 137, 295 MacDonald, Tanis, 10, 471 Macdougall, Brenda, 179 MacEwen, Gwendolyn, 477, 481, 483 La Machine à écrire (Baudot), 513–514 Machine-generated writing, 513–517 MacIvor, Daniel, 381, 874 MacKay, Ian, 784 Mackay, J., 280 Mackenzie, Alexander, 227, 235, 713

940   Index Mackenzie, William Lyon, 376, 822 Mackey, Eva, 119 Mackie, Ellen Evelyn, 359 MacKinnon, J.B., 747 MacLachlan, Sarah, 86 MacLaren, Eli, 11, 295, 305, 799 MacLaren, I.S., 230, 231, 298, 764 Maclean-Hunter Publishing, 353 Maclean’s, 352–356, 359, 364 MacLennan, Hugh, 34n1, 315, 326, 337, 342, 343, 451, 454, 612, 663 MacLeod, Alexander, 426 MacLeod, Alistair, 439, 466, 663, 665, 668, 671 MacLeod, Janine, 738 Maclulich, T.D., 22 MacMechan, Archibald, 7 MacMillan, Carrie, 856 Macmillan Company of Canada, 808 MacPhail, Andrew, 341 Macpherson, Jay, 324, 325 Mac Prose, 516, 517 Maddin, Guy, 121 Mademoiselle Autobody (play), 501 The Madman of Piney Woods (Curtis), 838 The Maestro (Wynne-Jones), 828 Magali (pseud. Jeanne Philbert), 359, 365n10 Magazines, 352–368 circulation, pricing, and audience, 353–356 editors and authors, 356–359 key titles, 352–353 travel and leisure themes, 360–364 Maggie and Pierre (Griffiths), 378 Magic Baking Powder, 353 The Magic House and Other Poems (Scott), 300, 301 Magic Weapons (McKegney), 155, 157, 164, 171 Maheu, Pierre, 768 Mailhot, Michèle, 499 Maillé, Chantal, 630 Maillet, Antonine, 658, 669 Mair, Charles, 297, 371 Major, André, 406 Major, Kevin, 829 Major, Leon, 376 Majzels, Robert, 96 Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Literature (anthology), 487

Making It Home (Keahey), 693 The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada (eds. Dudek & Gnarowski), 326, 347, 476, 478 Malahat Review (magazine), 455, 720 Malaspina, Alessandro, 713 Malcolm’s Katie (Crawford), 281, 741 Malcolm X, 404, 545 Malik, Tariq, 584–587 Malisch, Sherrie, 5 Malla, Pasha, 428 Malpede, Karen, 648 Malreddy, Pavan, 764 Mama’s Going to Buy You a Mockingbird (Little), 832 Man, Paul de, 61n7 The Man Child (Blackburn), 343 Mandel, Eli, 35n9, 324–326, 473, 474, 478, 483, 616, 617 Man Descending (Vanderhaeghe), 438 Mandler, Peter, 60n1 The Man from Glengarry (Connor/ Gordon), 305 The Man from the Creeks (Kroetsch), 465 The Man in the Blue Suit (Sinclair), 373 Manitoba Act of 1870, 130, 144n8 Manitowapow: Aboriginal Writings from the Land of Water (eds. Sinclair & Cariou), 700, 744 Manning, Erin, 764, 770 The Manticore (Davies), 456 Manufacturing National Park Nature: Photography, Ecology, and the Wilderness Industry of Jasper National Park (Cronin), 744 Many Moods (Pratt), 317 Many-Mouthed Birds (eds. Lee & Wong-Chu), 575 The Maple Leaf (magazine), 828 A Map to the Door of No Return (Brand), 553, 820 Maracle, Lee, 102, 144n5, 170, 182, 210, 211, 214, 462, 467, 488, 764, 853 Marchand, Josephine, 251, 252 Marco Polo, 229 Marcotte, Gilles, 406 Marginalization, 769 Marie de l’Incarnation, 242, 246

Index   941 Marie-Louise (pseud. Marie-Louise Lalonde), 251 “The Marine Excursion of the Knights of Pythias” (Leacock), 443 Marion Bridge (MacIvor), 381 Maritime Rights Movement, 662 Markotić, Nicole, 883 Marlatt, Daphne, 20, 24, 96, 465, 485, 711, 734, 851–853, 855, 864, 871 Marlyn, John, 452 Marmette, Joseph, 249 Marrant, John, 543 Marriott, Anne, 321, 322, 340 Marryat, Captain Frederick, 828 Marshall, Bill, 766 Marshall, David, 87 Marshall, Joyce, 343, 345, 346 Marsh Hay (Denison), 372 Martel, Yann, 33, 191, 463 Martin, Claire, 406 Martin, Daniel, 567 Martin, Geoff, 81 Martin, Henri-Jean, 802, 806 Martin, Keavy, 10, 172, 191, 744, 850 Martin, Paul, 755, 764, 896 Martin, Sandra, 75n3 Martinez, Marc, 501 Marty, Sid, 739, 740 The Martyrology (Nichol), 26, 482, 491 Marx, Karl, 93 Marxism, 116, 414, 484, 852 Mary Ann Alice (Doyle), 839 Maryse (Noël), 501 Masculinity, 265, 359, 480, 503, 870 Maslan, Susan, 536 Mason, Jody, 764 Mason, Travis, 738, 739, 743, 764 Mason-John, Valerie, 542 Massey, Vincent, 49, 56, 387–389, 450 Massey Commission, 337, 374, 454, 805 The Massey Report: A Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, 1949–1951, 479 Massicotte, Édouard-Zotique, 251 Massicotte, Stephen, 381 Matas, Carol, 831, 836 Maternity, 697

Mathews, Larry, 676–678, 680, 688 Mathews, Robin, 472, 764 Mathieu, Jocelyne, 359 Mathur, Ashok, 28, 764 “Mattathias” (Klein), 603 Matthews, John, 756, 764 Matthews, J.P, 758 Matthews, S. Leigh, 696 Mauve Desert: A CD-ROM Translation (Brossard), 520 Mavrikakis, Catherine, 627, 629 May, Cedric, 409 Le May, Pamphile, 251 Mayfair (magazine), 353–356, 358, 361 Mayor, Chandra, 703 A Mazing Space: Writing Canadian Women Writing (eds. Neuman & Kamboureli), 853 McAdam, Colin, 740 McArthur, Peter, 304 McAteer, Michael, 535 McCaffery, Steve, 24, 26, 32, 33, 482 McCall, Sophie, 33, 66, 171, 521 McCallum, Pamela, 764 McCance, Dawne, 763 McClelland, Jack, 82, 341, 450, 615, 805 McClelland and Stewart (publisher), 87, 450, 604, 611, 805, 830 McClung, Nellie, 342, 359, 435, 696, 697 McCulloch, Thomas, 430–434, 660, 661 McCutcheon, Mark, 760, 764 McDonald, Bernadette, 736 McDougall, Robert, 764 McFadden, David, 482 McGee, C.E., 50, 51, 59, 60, 61n3, 394 McGee, Thomas D’Arcy, 3, 4, 49, 284 McGifford, Diane, 583, 591, 595 The McGill Daily Literary Supplement, 317 McGill Fortnightly Review, 317–319, 322, 328 The McGill Movement (Stevens), 326 McGill-Queen’s University Press, 738 McGill University, 317, 604 McGlynn, Áine, 122 McGonegal, Julie, 758, 760 McGregor, Gaile, 58 McGregor, Hannah, 359 McGuigan, Jim, 892

942   Index McInnes, J. Campbell, 392 McIntosh, David, 520 McKay, Don, 712, 717, 734, 736, 739, 742, 743 McKay, Ian, 660, 664 McKay, Leo, Jr., 670 McKay, Sharon, 840 McKegney, 153, 155, 157, 164 McKegney, Sam, 171 McKenna, Frank, 671 McKenzie, D.F., 803 McKillop, A.B., 783 McKittrick, Katherine, 541, 758, 764 McLachlan, Alexander, 283 McLaren, Floris, 322 McLay, Catherine, 18 McLeod, Donald W., 864 McLeod, John, 590 McLeod, Neal, 179, 744 McLuhan, Marshall, 34n1, 111–113, 115–118, 397, 407, 449, 517 McMullen, Lorraine, 273, 435, 853, 856 McNaughton, Janet, 836 McNeil, Florence, 325 McNicoll, Susan, 390 McPherson, Hugo, 34n1 McRobbie, Angela, 123n1 McRuer, Robert, 878, 884 The Mechanical Bride (McLuhan), 112 Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), 823 Medicine River (King), 701 Meech Lake Accord, 782 The Meeting Point (Clarke), 457, 549, 550 Meigs, Mary, 820 Les Mélanges religieux (newspaper), 250 Melbourne, Lord, 248 Membertou (Mik’maq chief), 233 Memmi, Albert, 404, 768 Mémoires du livre/Studies in Book Culture (journal), 806 Memoirs, 813–825. See also Autobiographies Memoirs of Montparnasse (Glassco), 817, 867 Memorial University, 440 The Memory Garden of Miguel Carranza (Hassan), 647 Mendis, Ranjini, 762 “Meneseteung” (Munro), 789, 790

Men in Love (Haggerty), 865 Mennonites, 700 Mercredi, Duncan, 132, 144n5, 488 Merivale, Pat, 764 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 24, 668 “Merlin and the Gleam” (Tennyson), 287 Merwin, W.S., 735 Mesplet, Fleury, 243, 245, 253n2 Messenger, Cynthia, 327 Messer-Davidow, Ellen, 848 Metafeminism, 502 Metahistory (White), 785 The Metal and the Flower (Page), 324 Les métamorphoses d’Ishtar (Ltaif), 623 Metcalf, John, 439 Method for the Easy Comprehension of History (Bodin), 48 Methodist Book and Publishing House, 803 Métis, 211, 461, 850, 853 Le Métis (newspaper), 252 Métis literature, 10, 129–149 aesthetics of, 139–143 definitional issues, 131–134 historical context, 129–131 Métis National Council, 132 Mezei, Kathy, 20, 96, 851 Mézière, Henri-Antoine, 246 Michaels, Anne, 465, 609, 614, 786, 791 Michaels, Sean, 463 Michif language, 131, 143n2 Michon, Jacques, 806 Micone, Marco, 623, 629, 634 The Middle Stories (Heti), 86 Midnight at the Dragon Café (Bates), 570 Mighton, John, 381 Mignolo, Walter, 758 La migrance à  l’oeuvre: repérages esthétiques, éthiques et politiques (Brophy & Gallagher), 633 Miki, Roy, 28, 32, 35n9, 93, 94, 486, 555, 566, 572, 575, 576, 764, 816, 819, 904 Mik’maq, 230 Military trope, 697 Miller, Joseph Dana, 304 Millett, Kate, 459 Milloy, John, 152 Mills, Sean, 768

Index   943 Mills, Sonja, 381 Milne, Heather, 489, 576 Milton, John, 232 Milz, Sabine, 893, 904 Mine for Keeps (Little), 832 Minister without Portfolio (Winter), 677, 681, 687 Miron, Gaston, 403, 406, 407, 409, 411, 413, 768 Missed Her (Coyote), 428 Miss Orient(ed) (CBT), 576 Mistry, Rohinton, 440, 583, 584, 593, 595, 878, 889, 892 Mitchell, Alanna, 742 Mitchell, David T., 886 Mitchell, W.O., 359, 376, 698, 702 A Mixture of Frailties (Davies), 451 Miyagawa, Mitch, 576 The Mocassin Maker (Johnson), 302 The Modern Century (Frye), 54, 380 Modernism, 10, 52, 53, 298, 314, 339, 604 beginnings of, 316–319 critical scholarship, 325–327 poetry, 314–336 publishing of, 319–325 women’s fiction, 337–351 Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity (Jaffe), 81 Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity (Goldman), 81 Modern Language Association, 24 Modern Realism in English-Canadian Fiction (Hill), 316 “Modern-realist movement,” 338 Modern Times (Moss), 326 Moisan, Clément, 624, 626, 629 Moiseiwitsch, Tanya, 387 “Mom, We’ve Been Discovered” (Dene Cultural Institute), 227 Môman travaille pas, a trop d’ouvrage! (play), 500 “The Moment of the Discovery of America Continues” (Kroetsch), 692, 727 Mondo Canuck: A Canadian Pop Culture Odyssey (Pevere & Dymond), 120 Monette, Hélène, 504, 505 Le Moniteur acadien (newspaper), 252

Monkey Beach (Robinson), 157, 210, 217–221, 715 Monkman, Les, 34n4 Mon livre de français (Frères du Sacré-coeur), 514 “Monologues and Dialogues” (Pratt), 316 La Monongahéla (Rousseau), 249 Monroe, Harriet, 317, 322, 323 Monsieur Melville (Beaulieu), 409 Montague, Amanda, 793 Montesquieu, 44, 45, 48, 244 Montgomery, Lucy Maud, 81, 295, 307, 339, 341, 359, 435, 662, 822, 830–831, 856, 865, 880, 881 Montigny, Louvigny de, 251 The Montreal Forties: Modernist Poetry in Transition (Trehearne), 327 Montreal Group, 317–319 “Montreal Poets of the Forties” (Francis), 326 Montreal Story Tellers Fiction Performance Group, 439 The Monument (Wagner), 381 Moodie, Andrew, 554 Moodie, John, 271 Moodie, Susanna, 260, 261, 270–273, 274n3, 374, 435, 465, 546, 741, 801, 802, 804, 815 Mookerjea, Sourayan, 117, 119, 756 Moonlight and Common Day (Bowman), 316 The Moon of Letting Go (Van Camp), 206n22 “Moonset” (Johnson), 220 Moore, Brian, 34n1, 452, 465, 611 Moore, Dora Mavor, 374, 375 Moore, H. Napier, 356, 360, 361 Moore, Lisa, 80, 82, 428, 440, 670, 677, 678, 681, 686, 895 Moore, Mavor, 396 Moore, Robyn, 179 Moore, Thomas, 281–283, 285 Moose Meat and Wild Rice (Johnston), 462 Mootoo, Shani, 535, 583, 584, 593, 594, 872 Moran, Joe, 81 More Tales of the Townships (Epp), 790 Morgan, Bernice, 465, 666, 677, 681, 685 Morgan, Cecilia, 784 Morin, Marie, 246 Morley, Jane Brewin, 166n12 Morrison, Thelma, 387

944   Index Morrison, Toni, 793 Morse, Garry Thomas, 712 Morton, W.L., 49, 57 Moscovitch, Hannah, 381 Moses, Daniel David, 379, 488, 872 Mosionier, Beatrice Culleton, 134, 135, 139, 140, 161, 182, 466 Moss, John, 17, 57, 326, 472, 764 Moss, Laura, 32, 81, 327, 747, 756, 758, 764, 765 Mothertalk (Kiyooka), 575, 820 Motion (artist), 554 Motion in Poetry (Motion), 554 Mouawad, Wajdi, 649, 650, 652, 653 Le Moulin du diable (Varoujean), 640 Mount, Nick, 89n4, 302, 451 Mountain (Wah), 575, 734 The Mountain and the Valley (Buckler), 315, 451, 663 Mount Royal University, 738 Moura, Jean-Marc, 766 Moure, Erín, 24, 96, 471, 473, 474, 478, 485, 486, 489, 516, 517, 530, 855 Mowat, Farley, 81, 739, 828 Moyes, Lianne, 530, 764 Moyles, R.G., 327 Moynagh, Maureen, 764, 793 Mrs. Blood (Thomas), 460 Mud City (Ellis), 839 Muir, Linnet, 437 Mukherjee, Arun, 761, 764 Mulroney, Brian, 72, 73, 75n5 Multiculturalism, 27–29, 75, 731, 732, 820, 829, 890, 893, 904 Multiculturalism Act of 1988, 27–28, 74, 463, 487, 820 Multiculturalism and Social Cohesion: Potentials and Challenges of Diversity (Reitz), 66 Multicultural Ministry, 453 Multiplicity, 625 Munro, Alice, 80, 86, 88, 206n24, 303, 307, 340, 397, 426–429, 435, 437, 438, 443, 459, 715, 789, 792, 807–809, 830, 831, 883 Murakami, Sachiko, 94 Murchison, Lorne, 306 Murdoch, H. Adlai, 766 Muriella Pent (Smith), 761

Murphy, Arthur, 376 Murphy, David, 633 Murphy, Rex, 782 Murray, George, 489 Murray, Heather, 787 Murther and Walking Spirits (Davies), 456 Muscular Christianity, 305 Musgrave, Susan, 829 Mussey, Benjamin B., 804 “Must We Burn Haliburton?” (Clarke), 793 Mutability, 661 My Ántonia (Cather), 347 My Beloved Wager: Essays from a Writing Practice (Moure), 471 “My father in his bed room th morning i left” (bissett), 867 “My first job” (bissett), 867 My Name is Masak (French), 818 My Name is Seepeetza (Sterling), 183, 837 My New York Diary (Doucet), 822 My People the Bloods (Mountain Horse), 176 “The Mysterious Naked Man” (Nowlan), 666 Myth and Memory: Stories of Indigenous-European Contact (Lutz), 229 Myth-making, 790 Myth of deficiency, 669 Mythopoeics, 325, 398, 473 My Tribe the Crees (Dion), 176 My Winnipeg (Maddin), 121 Nadine (Cohen), 608 Naghibi, Nima, 764 Naked Poems (Webb), 712 Namjoshi, Suniti, 583 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 531 Napoleonic Wars (1799–1815), 242 Nappaaluk, Salomé Mitiarjuk, 194, 206n14 Nardout-Lafarge, Élisabeth, 244, 623 Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb (Bibb), 545 Narrative prosthesis, 886 Natasha and Other Stories (Bezmozgis), 428 Nathan, James, 164 National Arts Centre, 388, 453 National Association of Japanese Canadians, 571

Index   945 National character culture and, 42–46 ends of, 57–60 national literature and, 47–57 National Home Monthly, 353, 355 National Indian Brotherhood, 461 National Indian Council, 461 Nationalist culture, 439 “National Literatures in the Shadow of Neoliberalism” (Derksen), 904 National Organization for Women (NOW), 459, 847 National Plots: Historical Fiction and Changing Ideas of Canada (eds. Cabajsky & Grubisic), 787 National unity, 782 A Native Argosy (Callaghan), 434 Native Literature in Canada (Petrone), 173 Native Poetry in Canada: A Contemporary Anthology (Grauer), 488 Native writers. See Indigenous literatures Native Writers and Canadian Literature (New), 138 NATO, 387 Nattel, Lilian, 610 Natural History (Pliny), 42 The Nature of Things (television program), 742 Nature Power: In the Spirit of an Okanagan Storyteller (Wickwire), 741 “Nature Trafficking: Writing and Environment in the Western Canada-US Borderlands” (Kerber), 734, 735 Naves, Elaine Kalman, 609 Neatby, Nicole, 782, 783, 785 Needham, R.J., 681 Nègres blancs d’amérique: Autobiographie précoce d’un “terroriste” québécois (Vallières), 406, 407, 768 Negri, Antonio, 31 Neige Noire (Aquin), 407 Neilson, John, 245 Neimanis, Astrida, 738 Nelligan, Émile, 251, 254n23, 284, 864 Nemat, Marina, 88 Neoliberalism, 732, 742, 746, 747, 892–906 Neosocialism, 732

Nepveu, Pierre, 403, 409–413, 622, 623, 625, 629, 631 “nervous organism” (wong), 897 Neuhaus, Mareike, 677 Neuman, Shirley, 24, 849, 853, 856 Never Swim Alone (MacIvor), 381 New: West Coast (ed. Candelaria), 712 New, W.H., 7, 58, 612, 709–711, 714, 719, 756, 758, 759, 762, 764, 765, 829 New Age shamanism, 178 The New Ancestors (Godfrey), 458 New Canadian Library (NCL), 82, 339, 341, 450, 483, 611, 830 New Criticism, 733 New Democratic Party, 450 The New Era (newspaper), 49 NeWest Press, 853 “New Ethnicities” (Hall), 555 Newfeld, Frank, 828, 829 Newfoundland, 676–690. See also Atlantic-Canadian literature The Newfoundland Diaspora: Mapping the Literature of Out-Migration (Delisle), 677 Newfoundland Verse (Pratt), 316 New Furrows (Williams), 343, 344, 697 New Histories for Old (Harris), 785 A New Introduction to Bibliography (Gaskell), 802 Newlove, John, 325 Newman, Peter C., 819 New media arts movement, 517 The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English (eds. Atwood & Weaver), 429 “New Paths” (Scott), 314 The New Peoples: Being and Becoming Métis in North America (Peterson & Brown), 132 New Play Society, 373, 374 “New Poems for Old” (Scott), 320 New Provinces (periodical), 321, 328, 339, 478, 867 New Provinces: Poems of Several Authors (eds. Scott et al.), 320 The New Republic of Childhood: A Critical Guide to Canadian Children’s Literature in English (Egoff & Saltman), 827 The New Romans: Candid Canadian Opinions of the United States (Purdy), 481

946   Index New romanticism, 329 News of the Phoenix (Smith), 323 Newsweek, 354 New Wave Canada: The New Explosion in Canadian Poetry (eds. Dudek & Gnarowski), 477 New Women: Short Stories by Canadian Women, 1900–1920 (eds. Campbell & McMullen), 435 Ng, Simon, 838 Nichol, bp, 24, 26, 482, 490, 491, 517, 518, 520 Nickerson, Billeh, 866 Nicks, Joan, 120 Nicol, Eric, 376 Nicolas, le fils du Nil (Latif-Ghattas), 643 Nielsen, Dorothy, 735 Nikiforuk, Andrew, 741, 742 Nikpayuk, Daniel, 195 Nilling (Robertson), 491 Nimbus Publishing, 827 The Nine Planets (Riche), 681–683 19 Knives (Jarman), 428 Ninety-Two Resolutions (1834), 248 Ninh, Erin Khuê, 571 Nischik, Reingard M., 327 Nobody Cries at Bingo (Dumont), 185 “Nobody Likes You” (Derksen), 903 Nodelman, Perry, 826 Noël, Francine, 501, 630 No Great Mischief (MacLeod), 466, 663 Noland, Jack, 164 No Language Is Neutral (Brand), 872 Nomadism, 621, 625, 630 No New Land (Vassanji), 464, 584, 591 Nora, Pierre, 65, 66, 70, 785 Norris, Ken, 326 Norris, Malcolm, 182 A North American Education (Blaise), 438 North American Free Trade Agreement, 73 Northern Review (magazine), 322 Northern Review 1945–1956: A History and an Index (Vanneste), 326 Northern Wild: Best Contemporary Canadian Nature Writing (ed. Boyd), 736 North of Empire (Berland), 118 North of Intention (McCaffery), 32 Northwest Rebellion (1885), 130, 301

No Safe Harbour (Lawson), 836 Notebook of Roses and Civilization (Brossard), 93, 96, 107 Not Wanted on the Voyage (Findley), 458, 459, 870, 884, 885 Le Nouveau monde (newspaper), 250 “La Nouvelle trahison des clercs” (Trudeau), 404 Nowlan, Alden, 477, 666, 667 Now that April’s Here (Callaghan), 434 La Nuit (Ferron), 407 Nungak, Zebedee, 205n11 Nurse, Donna Bailey, 542 Obasan (Kogawa), 65, 71, 72, 463–465, 564, 569–571, 585, 715 Oberon (publisher), 455 O’Brien, Edward, 262, 263, 265 O’Brien, Mary (Gapper), 262 O’Brien, Susie, 120, 730, 732–734, 763, 764 “O Canada” (national anthem), 251, 453 Ocean Ranger disaster (1982), 895, 904 O Cidadàn (Moure), 24, 485, 530 October Ferry to Gabriola (Lowry), 712 O.D. on Paradise (Griffiths), 378 Odd Man Out (Ellis), 833 The Odd Women (Gissing), 381 “Ode for the Keats Centenary” (Scott), 287, 289 Odell, Jonathan, 660 “Ode to the West Wind” (Shelley), 288 Odori (Tamayose), 574 Odyssey (Homer), 229, 693 Odysseys Home (Clarke), 792 À l’oeuvre et à l’épreuve (Angers), 249 Oeuvres complètes (Crémazie), 247 O’Flaherty, Patrick, 676, 679, 686 “Of National Characters” (Hume), 41, 44 O’Grady, Standish, 283 Oh, Sandra, 571 Ohmann, Richard, 354 Oka crisis, 153 Okanagan College, 738 Old Spookses’ Pass, Malcolm’s Katie, and Other Poems (Crawford), 304 Oliveira, Michael, 487 Ollivier, Émile, 623, 626 Olson, Charles, 24

Index   947 Omishoosh (Ojibwe elder), 234 Omushkego Oral History Project, 234 On a Cold Road: Tales of Adventures in Canadian Rock (Bidini), 821 On a Grey Thread (Gidlow), 865 “On Being an Alberta Writer” (Kroetsch), 448 On Being Canadian (Massey), 49, 56 On Canadian Poetry (Brown), 300 The Once and Future World: Nature As It Was, As It Is, As It Could Be (MacKinnon), 747 Ondaatje, Michael, 26, 81, 82, 85, 87, 88, 449, 455, 458, 463, 465, 477, 482, 483, 583, 584, 588, 589, 591, 609, 788, 820 One Book One Community movement, 87, 89n6 One Good Story, That One (King), 428, 441 On Location: Canada’s Television Industry in a Global Market (Tinic), 121 “The Onondaga Madonna” (Scott), 301 Ontario Arts Council, 84 Oosten, Jarich, 192 Open (Moore), 428, 677, 678 Open Country (Lecker), 327 The Opening Act: Canadian Theatre History, 1945–1953 (McNicoll), 390 Open Letter (magazine), 455, 521 Open Wide a Wilderness: Canadian Nature Poems (Holmes), 736, 738, 741 O Pioneers! (Cather), 347 Oppel, Kenneth, 829, 831, 840 Orca Book Publishers, 827 L’Ordre: Union catholique (newspaper), 250 The Orenda (Boyden), 163 Orientalism (Said), 463, 756, 758 Origin of Species (Darwin), 741 Orion (magazine), 736 Orion and Other Poems (Roberts), 295–297, 299 Ornithologies of Desire: Ecocritical Essays, Avian Poetics, and Don McKay (Mason), 738, 739, 743 Orphan at My Door: The Home Child Diary of Victoria Cope, Guelph, Ontario, 1897 (Little), 832 Ortiz, Fernando, 629 Oryx and Crake (Atwood), 740 Osborne, Ken, 784

Osinubi, Taiwo Adetunji, 764 Ostenso, Martha, 339, 340, 343, 345, 359, 696, 697 Other Selves: Animals in the Canadian Literary Imagination (ed. Fiamengo), 744, 747 “The Ottawa Valley” (Campbell), 303 Ouellette, Fernand, 406 Our Canadian Literature (Watson & Pierce), 7 Our Choice (Canadian Children’s Book Centre), 827 Our History Syllabus Has Us Gasping (Osborne), 784 Our Little Life: A Novel of Today (Sime), 343, 345 Our Nature—Our Voices (Thomas), 18 Out of Place (Mandel), 616, 617 Out of the Blue (Ellis), 833 Outside In (Ellis), 833 Outsider Notes (Hunter), 24, 474 Overlaid (Davies), 373 Overture (Scott), 323 Owen, Charlie George, 234 Ox Bells and Fireflies (Buckler), 663 The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature (eds. Benson & Toye), 7, 780, 813 Oxley, James Macdonald, 828 Oxygen (Lyon), 428 Pacey, Desmond, 6, 7, 325, 337–340, 342, 345, 347 Pacific Coast literature, 709–724 Page, L.C., 307 Page, P.K., 322–325, 327, 329, 340, 716, 809, 830, 831, 866 Pagès, Irène, 845, 849 Pain, Hilda, 358 Painted Fires (McClung), 342 Palace of the End (Thompson), 381 Palmer, John, 377, 394 Pantheism, 285 Panych, Morris, 381 Paper Shadows: A Chinatown Childhood (Choy), 535, 569, 820, 872 Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada (journal), 806 Paper Stays Put (Gedalof), 172 Papineau, Louis-Joseph, 246, 248

948   Index Papiyahtak (Bouvier), 138 Paradis, Suzanne, 406 Paradoxides (McKay), 717 Parameswaran, Uma, 764 Paré, François, 627, 769 Parent, Étienne, 246 Parker, George, 802 Parker, Gerald, 396 Parker, Gilbert, 305 Parkin, George, 49 Parody, 509 “Particularism,” 378 Parti Pris (journal), 406, 768 Partridge, Taqralik, 10, 191, 193–195 Partz, Felix, 35n6 Parvana’s Journey (Ellis), 839 Passages (Ollivier), 623 Les passages obligés de l’écriture migrante (Harel), 627, 628, 630 Patiño, Gilberto Flores, 626 Paton, G.J., 898 Patriarchy, 496, 849, 856 Patriote uprisings (1837–38), 242 Patterns of Isolation (Moss), 57, 472 Patterson, Tom, 387, 393, 394 Paul, Philip Kevin, 740 Le pavillon des miroirs (Kokis), 623 Paying for It (Brown), 822 Le Pays (newspaper), 250 Pearls and Pebbles (Traill), 270 Pearson, Kit, 831–833, 836 Pearson, Lester, 848 Pearson, Wendy, 573 Pederson, Susan, 760 Peel, Edmund, 265 Peel, Lucy (Meek), 265 Pélagie-la-Charrette (Maillet), 670 Pelletier, Jacques, 409, 410, 414 Pemmican Publishing, 827 Pendakis, Andrew, 3, 9, 110 Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories (ed. Urquhart), 440 Pennee, Donna Palmateer, 32, 527–529, 531, 666, 764 Pennier, Henry, 179 The People and the Word: Reading Native Nonfiction (Warrior), 171

People From Our Side: A Life Story with Photographs (Pitseolak), 822 People Power (CBT), 577 Pereira, Michael, 737 The Perfection of the Morning: An Apprenticeship in Nature (Butala), 727, 740 A Perfect Kind of Speech (Brand), 487 Periodicals. See Magazines Perreault, Jeanne, 820 Perry, Adele, 786 Persian Letters (Montesquieu), 244 “Perverse subsidies” (Wong), 897 Peterson, Jacqueline, 132, 133 Petitclair, Pierre, 252 La petite et le vieux (Lavoie), 508 Petrocultures, 745 Petrone, Penny, 173 Petty, Sheila, 120 Pevere, Geoff, 120 Peyton, John, 679, 684 Phantom Lake: North of 54 (Sproxton), 740 La Pharaone (Bouraoui), 645 Philip, Marlene NourbeSe, 99, 486, 541, 764, 855 Philippon, Dan, 738 Philips, Elizabeth, 740 Philistinism, 373 Pickard, Richard, 738, 746 Pickthall, Marjorie, 305, 341 Pickton, Robert, 216, 222n5 Pictograms from the Interior of B.C. (Wah), 734 The Pictorial Review (periodical), 340 Pictou Academy, 430 “Pictures in an Institution” (Mandel), 474 Picturing Canada: A History of Canadian Illustrated Books and Publishing (Edwards & Saltman), 827 “A Piece of the Continent, a Part of the Main” (New), 719 Pierce, Lorne, 7, 321, 341, 806 Pierre and His People (Parker), 305 Pilgrims of the Wild (Grey Owl), 746 Pilkington, Lionel, 760 Pillage Laud (Moure), 516 Pink Snow: Homotextual Possibilities in Canadian Fiction (Goldie), 864, 865, 868, 869

Index   949 Pintal, Lorraine, 405 Piotte, Jean-Marc, 768 Piper, Liza, 738, 746 “The Pipes of Pan” (Roberts), 286, 287 Piracy, 804 Pirbhai, Mariam, 10, 583 Pitseolak, Peter, 822 Pitt, David, 34n1 Pittman, Ken, 687 A Place Called Heaven (Foster), 547 Place d’Armes (Symons), 869 “A Place to Stand On” (Laurence), 454 Plain Folks (Whitehouse), 699 Plan B (Healey), 382 Plato, 114 Playing with Fire (Fleury), 818 Plays. See Drama Play the Monster Blind (Coady), 428, 667 A Plea for Emigration (Shadd), 545, 546 Pliny, 42, 43 The Plum Tree (Miyagawa), 576 “Poemitron” (Gay), 519 Poems (Klein), 324 Poems New and Collected (Smith), 318 “Poems Relating to America” (Moore), 282 Poésies religieuses et politiques (Riel), 252 A Poetics of Postmodernism (Hutcheon), 24 Poetics of resistance, 663 Poetics of response, 610–616 “A Poet Past and Future” (Anderson), 326 Poetry. See also specific poets after globalization, 92–109 Asian Canadian, 575–576 British influences, 277–294 in digital age, 488–491 explosive, 479–484 fracture theory of, 478–479 inspiritation in, 285–291 modernist, 314–336 since 1960, 471–494 transplantation motif, 281–285 Poetry (periodical), 323 Poetry 62 (anthology), 473 “Poetry and Progress” (Scott), 290 Poetry and the Long Neoliberal Moment (ed. Derksen), 900 Poetry Magazine, 868

Poets of Contemporary Canada: 1960–1970 (ed. Mandel), 483 Pogrom, 606 Les poids des secrets (Shimazaki), 632 Point, Steven, 183 Point Bolton, Rena, 171, 172, 182–184 Pokiak-Fenton, Margaret, 837 The Polished Hoe (Clarke), 466 The Political Life of Sensation (Panagia), 121 The Politics of Postmodernism (Hutcheon), 25 Polley, Sarah, 823 Pollock, Sharon, 377 Pollock, Zailig, 327 Polybius, 42 Poor Superman (Fraser), 874 Pop Can: Popular Culture in Canada (eds. Van Luven & Walton), 120 Pope, Alexander, 173, 279 Pope, Carole, 821 Popular Culture: A User’s Guide (O’Brien & Szeman), 120 Popular History of the Dominion of Canada (Tuttle), 49 Porcupines and China Dolls (Alexie), 160, 164 Porter, Helen, 666 The Portfolio (periodical), 281 “The Portrait of the Artist as Landscape” (Klein), 324 “The Portrait of the Poet as Zero” (Klein), 324 Poseidonius, 42 “Postcolonial Hauntings” (ARIEL), 762 Postcolonialism, 462–467, 484, 528, 540, 569, 595, 631–634, 731, 733, 734, 755–779 definitional issues, 758–765 institutions and people in, 761–765 literature, 30–33 Québec and, 755–756, 765–770 Postcolonialism: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies (ed. Brydon), 762 Postcolonialism: My Living (Mukherjee), 761 “Postcolonialism, Children, and Their Literature” (ARIEL), 762 “Postcoloniality and Politics” (ARIEL), 762 Postcolonial Text (journal), 762 Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (Brouillette), 121 Postfeminism, 856–857

950   Index Postmemory, 68 Postmodernism, 23–25, 34n5, 458, 462–467, 540, 590, 731, 788 Post-National Arguments (Davey), 58, 462 Postnationalism, 658 Post-Prairie: An Anthology of New Poetry (eds. Fiorentino & Kroetsch), 694 Poststructuralism, 29, 111, 731, 733, 852 “The Potato Harvest” (Roberts), 299 Potvin, John, 359 Pound, Ezra, 302, 314 Pour la patrie (Tardivel), 250 Poussière sur la ville (Langevin), 411 Prairie literature, 691–708 by Aboriginal peoples, 698–702 historical overview, 691–695 by women, 696–698 Pratt, E.J., 34n1, 300, 316, 317, 319, 320, 344, 478, 676, 747 Pratt, Mary Louise, 229 Precosky, Don, 326, 867, 868 “Preface to an Uncollected Anthology” (Frye), 54 Prégent, Sylvie, 500 Presbyterian Church, 166n6 Presently Tomorrow (Marshall), 343, 346 President’s Commission on the Status of Women (U.S.), 847 Press Gang Publishers, 820 Preview (magazine), 866, 867 Prince, Althea, 542 “The Princess and the Wild Ones” (Mitchell), 698 Le Printemps peut attendre (Dahan), 641 Prior to Meaning: The Protosemantic and Poetics (McCaffery), 32 Prism (magazine), 455 Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women’s Poetry and Poetics (eds. Eichhorn & Milne), 489 Prism International (magazine), 720 Prisoner of Tehran (Nemat), 88 Prison of Grass (Adams), 135, 179 Pritchard, Allan, 719 Prix France-Canada, 644 Prizing Literature (Roberts), 83

“The Problem of a Canadian Literature” (Brown), 338 Prochain épisode (Aquin), 412 Procter, James, 627 Producing Canadian Literature (eds. Dobson & Kamboureli), 121 Progeny of Light, Vanished in Darkness (Brewster), 819 “The Progressive Insanities of a Pioneer” (Atwood), 741, 882 The Progress of Love (Munro), 809 “Prose of the Trans-Canada” (beaulieu), 490 “Prose of the Trans-Siberian” (Barwin), 490 Proud (Healey), 382 Proulx, Monique, 502, 503 Proulx-Turner, Sharron, 137 Provincialism, 455 Pseudonymous authorship, 246 Pulling, Barbara, 852 Purdy, Al, 324, 325, 449, 477, 480, 481, 483 Putain (Arcan), 820 Pyper, Andrew, 397 Quan, Andy, 575 Quan, Betty, 576 Quantic, Diane Dufva, 693 Quartermain, Meredith, 711 Quayson, Ato, 757, 762, 764 Québec Chick Lit, 507 digital age literature in, 512–523 Écriture migrante in, 621–638 eighteenth and nineteenth century writing in, 242–259 feminism, 845, 847, 852–855, 857–860 postcolonialism and, 755–756, 765–770 Révolution tranquille in, 403–425 women’s humour writing in, 495–511 Québec français (periodical), 406 Quebec Gazette/La Gazette de Québec, 243, 245, 803 Quebec Magazine/Le Magasin de Québec, 245 Quebec Mercury, 245, 278, 282, 803 La Québécoite (Robin), 622, 623, 628 Québec Studies (journal), 631, 767 Queen’s Quarterly, 614

Index   951 Queer CanLit: Canadian Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered (LGBT) Literature in English: An Exhibition (Rayter, McLeod, & FitzGerald), 864 Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire (eds. Sandilands & Erickson), 743 Queer geography, 743 “Queerly Postcolonial” (ARIEL), 762 Queer Nation, 864 Queersexlife (Goldie), 863 Queneau, Raymond, 497, 514 Quesnel, Joseph, 246, 247 Queyras, Sina, 93, 102–107, 488, 489, 522 Qulitalik, Pauloosie, 206n21 Quodlibets (Hayman), 659, 688 Rabinovitch, Jack, 89n2 Raby, Augustin, 245 Racialization, 550 Racial Minority Rights Committee, 572 Racism, 565, 793, 818 Rackham, Michele, 327 Raddall, Thomas, 339 Radio-Canada, 403 Radisson, Pierre-Esprit, 244 Rae, Ian, 5, 10, 375, 386 Rainshadow: Stories from Vancouver Island (eds. Smith & Guppy), 712 Rak, Julie, 11, 121, 764, 813 Ramona and the White Slaves (Walker), 377 Ramraj, Victor, 764, 765 Ramsey, Jarold, 237 Rand, Ayn, 683 Random House, 442 Random Passage (Morgan), 465 Rare Birds (Riche), 680–682 Rashley, R.E., 325 Rational Geomancy: The Kids of the Book-Machine (Toronto Research Group), 24 Ravensong (Maracle), 210, 211, 214, 216, 217, 221, 467 Ravvin, Norman, 10, 602 Rawlings, Angela, 489, 740 Ray, Sangeeta, 760 Rayter, Scott, 864 Razack, Sherene, 119, 764 “Reading African Writing: Fifty Years after

Things Fall Apart” (ARIEL), 762 Reading Autobiography (Smith & Watson), 819 Reading Beyond the Book (Fuller & Sedo), 87 Reading Canadian Reading (Davey), 22 Reading Hebron (Sherman), 381 Readings from the Labyrinth (Marlatt), 24 “Reading The White Bone as a Sentimental Animal Story” (Soper), 747 Realism, 243, 692, 703 A Really Good Brown Girl (Dumont), 137 Reaney, James, 325, 376, 377, 395–398 The Rebel Angels (Davies), 456 Rebuild (Murakami), 94 ReCalling Early Canada: Reading the Political in Literary and Cultural Production (eds. Blair et al.), 787 Recherches sociographiques (periodical), 406 Reciprocity, 668 Recollections of an Assiniboine Chief (Kennedy), 155 Reconciliation, 150, 160–165 Re(Dis)covering Our Foremothers: Nineteenth-Century Canadian Women Writers (ed. McMullen), 273, 853, 856 La Recueil littéraire (periodical), 251 Red: A Haida Manga (Yahgulanaas), 204 Redbird, Duke, 144n5 A Red Carpet for the Sun (Layton), 324 Redekop, Magdalene, 789 Reder, Deanna, 10, 170 The Red Heart (Reaney), 395, 396 Redhill, Michael, 381 Red Lights on the Prairie (Gray), 790 Red Power movement, 171 Redress (Miki), 819 Red River Resistance, 135, 254n24, 822 Red River Settlement, 130 Rée, Jonathan, 60n1 Le Réel et le théâtral (Kattan), 644 Reflections on Exile (Said), 641 Reflections on the Revolution in France (Burke), 57 Regionalism, 700, 730, 731, 733 “Regionalism and Urbanism” (Fiamengo), 730 Regreen: New Canadian Ecological Poetry (eds. Dickinson & Anand), 736 Reid, Barbara, 387

952   Index Reimer, Mavis, 837 Reitz, Jeffrey G., 66 Renaud, Jacques, 406, 768 Répertoire national (newspaper), 246 Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP Report), 152, 153 Report of the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences (1951), 374 Report on the Affairs of British North America (Durham), 248 Representational realism, 666 Representational violence, 210, 211 The Republic of Childhood: A Critical Guide to Canadian Children’s Literature in English (Egoff), 826 Requiem (Fisher), 519 Research Institute for Comparative Literature, 26 Research Is Ceremony (Wilson), 185 Response, Responsibility, and Renewal (AHF), 158, 159 The Resurrection of Joseph Bourne (Hodgins), 714, 715 Retour à Thyna (Bouraoui), 645 The Return of Martin Guerre (Davis), 785 Return to Canada: Selected Poems (Anderson), 866 Les Révélations du crime (Angers), 247, 248 Révolution tranquille (Québec), 403–425 La Revue canadienne, 247, 249 La Revue Moderne, 353–356, 359, 360, 362 La Revue Populaire, 352, 353, 355, 358, 359 Rex Zero, King of Nothing (Wynne-Jones), 834 Rex Zero, The Great Pretender (Wynne-Jones), 834 Rex Zero and the End of the World (Wynne-Jones), 834 The Rez Sisters (Highway), 154, 155, 379, 873, 884, 885 “Ribboned the Sky” (Halfe), 142 Ricard, François, 410 Richard, Jean-Jules, 411 Richard, Maurice, 73 Richard and Judy Book Club, 87, 89n6 Richard III (Shakespeare), 386 Richards, David Adams, 663, 665, 740, 741 Richards, Earl Jeffery, 43, 45

Richards, Irene, 222n5 Richardson, John, 804, 864, 865 Riche, Edward, 670, 677, 680–683 Richler, Mordecai, 315, 452, 457, 465, 605, 612, 786, 790, 881 Richler, Nancy, 610, 611 The Rich Man (Kreisel), 604, 610, 612 Ricou, Laurence (Laurie), 23, 694, 719, 730, 743 Riedstra, Lutzen, 387 Riel (Coulter), 374 Riel, Louis, 135–137, 140, 143, 243, 251, 252, 461, 701, 816, 822 Riel Resistances, 182 Rifkind, Candida, 327 Right Hand Left Hand: A True Life of the Thirties (Livesay), 819 Rimbaud, Arthur, 251 Ringrose, Chris, 762 Riot (Moodie), 554 The Rising Village (Goldsmith), 280 Rita Joe, 670, 818 Rittenhouse, Jessie B., 297 Rivard, Adjutor, 252 River in a Dry Land: A Prairie Passage (Herriot), 740 The River Midnight (Richler), 610 River Stories (Curtis), 663 River Thieves (Crummey), 466, 679, 682, 684 Road to the Stilt House (Richards), 666 The Robber Bride (Atwood), 464 Robbins, Bruce, 296 Robbins, Wendy, 764 Roberts, Carol, 870 Roberts, Charles G.D., 2, 53, 286–289, 295–301, 303, 315, 321, 359, 432, 433, 661–663, 668, 739 Roberts, Clea, 740 Roberts, Dorothy, 800 Roberts, Gillian, 83, 765 Roberts, Gostwick, 800 Roberts, Sarah Ellen, 274n2 Robertson, David Alexander, 822 Robertson, Eliza, 428–429, 442 Robertson, John William, 792 Robertson, Kirsty, 122 Robertson, Lisa, 33, 489, 491 Robin, Régine, 622, 623, 627, 628, 768 Robins, John, 7

Index   953 Robinson, Eden, 157, 210, 217–219, 428, 441, 715 Robinson, Harry, 234, 713, 741, 745 Robinson, Jackie, 544 Robinson, Laura, 307, 865 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 232 Rochefort, Christiane, 342 Rock, Paper, Fire: The Best of Mountain and Wilderness Writing (eds. Jackson & Whittome), 736 Rock and Roll (Gray), 379 Rockbound (Day), 664 Rockefeller Foundation, 800 The Rocking Chair and Other Poems (Klein), 324 The Rock Observed: Studies in the Literature of Newfoundland (O’Flaherty), 676, 677 Rocks (Voaden), 373 Rocky Mountain Books, 746 Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, 731 Rogers Media, 354 Roger’s Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, 442 Rogue Primate: An Exploration of Human Domestication (Livingston), 742 Le Roman du Québec (Allard), 651 Romantic Indians: Native Americans, British Literature and Transatlantic Culture, 1756–1830 (Fulford), 173 Romanticism, 52, 104, 175, 248, 249, 290, 299, 302, 315, 318, 321, 328, 338, 371, 405, 661, 688, 729, 813 Rooke, Leon, 439 Room (Donaghue), 871 A Room of One’s Own (Woolf), 95, 850 Roosevelt, Theodore, 300 The Root Cellar (Lunn), 837 Ropewalk (Carr), 517 Rosaldo, Renato, 530 Rose (Highway), 873 Rose, Jacqueline, 826 Rosenblum, Rebecca, 443 Rosenfarb, Chava, 603 Ross, Ian, 144n5 Ross, Malcolm, 298, 337, 339, 450, 805 Ross, Robert, 69, 70 Ross, Sinclair, 26, 315, 338, 435, 572, 692, 697, 805, 868

Ross, W.W.E., 316, 328 Roth, Philip, 81 Rothenberg, David, 873 Roughing It in the Bush (Moodie), 270, 272, 273, 546, 801, 804, 815 Rousseau, Edmond, 249 Routhier, Adolphe-Basile, 251 Routledge (publisher), 762 Rowe, Stan, 742 Rowley, Mari-Lou, 742 Roy, Camille, 7 Roy, Gabrielle, 339, 341, 343, 345, 346, 407, 819 Royal, Joseph, 252 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP), 210 Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters, and Sciences, 337, 387, 450, 805 Royal Commission on Publications, 355 Royal Commission on the Status of Women, 848 Royal Society of Canada, 341 Rubio, Mary, 308, 830 Ruddick, Bruce, 322 Rudy, Susan, 28, 474 Les Rues de l’alligator (Farhoud), 651 Ruffo, Armand Garnet, 140, 161, 167n20, 745, 792 Rule, Jane, 460, 869–871 The Rules of Joy (Reaney), 396 Runaway (Munro), 397 Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid (Lau), 571, 820 Running in the Family (Ondaatje), 820 Rushdie, Salman, 592, 593 Russell, Andy, 739 Russell, Charlie, 746 Rut, John, 659 Rutherford, Anna, 762 Ryerson Chap-Book Series, 328 Ryerson Press, 341 Ryga, George, 376, 395 Rymhs, Deena, 171, 818 Sabra and Shatilla massacre (Lebanon, 1982), 650 Sacktown Rag (Walker), 377 Sacred Leaf (Ellis), 839

954   Index The Sacrifice (Wiseman), 451, 606, 607, 882 Said, Edward, 463, 641, 756, 761 St. Laurent, Louis, 388 St. Urbain’s Horseman (Richler), 457 St. Ursula’s Convent, or The Nun of Canada (Hart), 856 The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay (Sangster), 281, 285, 734 Saint-Luc de La Corne, Luc de, 246 Saint-Martin, Lori, 497, 502 Saint-Vallier, Monseigneur, 244 Sakamoto, Kerri, 569 Salal (Ricou), 719 Salée, Daniel, 769 Salinger, J.D., 277 Salt Fish Girl (Lai), 536, 573 Saltman, Judith, 827 Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues (Clarke), 670 Salut Galarneau! (Godbout), 406, 407 Salverson, Laura Goodman, 339, 340, 343, 359, 697, 699 “Samedi soir” (Proulx), 502 Sanaaq (Nappaaluk), 194 Sanders, Byrne Hope, 356, 358 Sanders, Leslie, 541, 764 Sanderson, Peggy, 451 Sandilands, Catriona, 122, 743, 746 Sangster, Charles, 277, 281, 284, 285, 734 Sangster, Joan, 848 Sans cœur et sans reproche (Proulx), 502 Sapir, Edward, 235 Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics (Carman), 302 Sarah, Robyn, 609 Sargint, William, 392 Sartre, 53 Sasquatch, 219 The Sasquatch at Home (Robinson), 218, 219 The Satanic Verses (Rushdie), 592 Satire, 503–507, 509 Saul, Joanne, 575 Saunders, Margaret Marshall, 668, 856 Savage Love (Glover), 428 Savoie, Chantal, 359 Scandalous Bodies (Kamboureli), 463 “A Scene at Lake Manitou” (Scott), 301 Scheier, Libby, 485

Schlegel, Friedrich, 56 Schoemperlen, Diane, 440 “The Scholar Gypsy” (Arnold), 287 Scholastic Canada, 827, 836 Schultz, Emily, 522 Schwartz, Louis, 319–320 Schwartzwald, Robert, 769 Schwarz, Henry, 760 Schwarz, Roberto, 117 Science and Madness (Walker), 377 Scientific Americans (Mighton), 381 Scobie, Stephen, 24, 26 Scofield, Gregory, 102, 134, 136, 137, 185, 488, 701, 740, 745, 872 The Scorched Wood People (Wiebe), 461, 698 Scott, Duncan Campbell, 287, 289, 290, 296, 298, 300, 301, 303, 308, 315, 319, 320, 432, 433 Scott, F.R., 303, 314, 317, 318, 322, 323, 325, 328, 337, 407, 864, 866 Scott, Frank, 341 Scott, Gail, 20, 33, 95, 96, 851, 855, 864 Scott, Janet Erskine, 359 Scott, Jordan, 741 Scott, Walter, 865 Scrapbook (Bismuth), 507 Scratching the Surface (Kroetsch), 702 Screen-based literature, 513 “Sea of Faith” (Roberts), 289 The Searching Image (Dudek), 323 Search Me: Autobiography—The Black Country—Canada and Spain (Anderson), 326 Sears, Djanet, 381 The Seasons (Thomson), 277 The Seats of the Mighty (Parker), 305 Secena, Jonas, 712 Second Image (Sutherland), 19 The Second Life of Samuel Tyne (Edugyan), 89n3, 554, 701 The Second Scroll (Klein), 67, 74, 324, 606 Second Story Press, 820, 827 Second wave feminism, 845, 846–848 “The Secret Doctrine of Women” (Livesay), 866 The Secret Life of Owen Skye (Cumyn), 834 Sedo, DeNel Rehberg, 87

Index   955 Seed Catalogue (Kroetsch), 734, 788 Selao, Ching, 625 Selecky, Sarah, 428 Selected Essays and Criticism (Dudek), 326 The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery (eds. Rubio & Waterston), 830 “Selected Organs” (Nichol), 482 Selections from Canadian Poets (Dewart), 3, 7, 50, 757 Self-identity, 890 “SELF-REFLEXIVE NO. 1” (Nichol), 518 The Selkirk Range (Wheeler), 713 Sellars, Bev, 183 Selvadurai, Shyam, 80, 535, 583, 584, 588, 872 Selvamony, Nirmal, 728 Seminal: The Anthology of Canada’s Gay Male Poets (eds. Barton & Nickerson), 866 Senior, Olive, 740 The Sentimentalists (Skibsrud), 83, 85 “Separating” (Hodgins), 438 Serpent’s Tooth (Hughes), 343, 346 Seton, Ernest Thompson, 299, 302, 432, 739, 828 Setterington, Ken, 827 Settlement Agreement (2007), 158 Settlement narratives, 260–276 critical reception of, 272–273 journal letters as, 261–267 transformed self rendered through, 267–272 Settler Feminism and Race Making in Canada (Henderson), 31, 273 Settlers of the Marsh (Grove), 342, 692, 697, 703 Settling and Unsettling Memories (eds. Neatby & Hodgins), 782 7 Generations: A Plains Cree Saga (Robertson & Henderson), 822 70 Canadian Poets (ed. Geddes), 327 Le sexe des étoiles (Proulx), 503 Sexual Politics (Millett), 459 Shachar, Ayelet, 531, 534 “The Shack Dwellers” (Nowlan), 666 Shackles (Macbeth), 343, 345, 346 Shadd, Mary Ann, 545, 546 Shadow in Hawthorn Bay (Lunn), 837 The Shagganappi (Johnson), 302 Shakespeare, William, 371, 386, 391, 398

Shakespeare’s Shrine: The Bard’s Birthplace and the Invention of Stratford-Upon-Avon (Thomas), 391 Sharpe, Lucy, 262 Shaw, Neufville, 322 Sheard, Sarah, 485 Sheila nGira (Irish legend), 680 Shelley, P.B., 286, 288, 289, 303 “Shelley” (Carman), 287–289 The Shell of the Tortoise (McKay), 717 Sheppard, Mary, 831 Sherbert, Garry, 120 Sherman, Jason, 381 Sherman, Ken, 609 Shields, Carol, 81, 340, 460, 465, 697, 821 Shifting the Ground of Canadian Literary Studies (eds. Kamboureli & Zacharias), 94 Shih, Shu-mei, 758 Shimazaki, Aki, 629, 632, 634 Shiomi, R.A., 576 Shoemaker, Adam, 765 Shore, Marlene, 781, 784 A Short History of Night (Mighton), 381 Short stories, 426–447 The Shrouding (Kennedy), 319 Shukin, Nicole, 744 Siculus, Diodorus, 42 Siege 13 (Dobozy), 442 Siemerling, Winfried, 33, 541, 758, 764, 770 Signposts (Livesay), 320 Sikh-Canadian, 587 “Silhouette” (Johnson), 302 Silicone Diaries (Arsenault), 874 Silvera, Makeda, 542 Silverwing (Oppel), 829, 830 Simcoe, Elizabeth, 261 Sime, Jessie Georgina, 343, 345 Simon, Lorne, 670 Simon, Roger, 764 Simon, Sherry, 613, 622, 758, 764 Simon Fraser University, 585, 720 Simple Recipes (Thien), 428 Simpson, Anne, 740 Simpson, David, 56 Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake, 748 Simpson, Wallis, 381

956   Index Sinclair, Lister, 373 Sinclair, Murray, 154 Sinclair, Niigaanwewidam James, 144n13, 700, 744, 745 Sing, Pamela, 131, 182 Singer, Melina Baum, 33 Singing Home the Bones (Scofield), 137, 701, 872 Singkil (Hernandez), 577 Sirois, Antoine, 406 The Sisters Brothers (deWitt), 716 Sister Vision Press, 99, 820 Sister Woman (Sime), 343, 345 Skibsrud, Johanna, 80, 83–85 Skidmore, Colleen, 736 Skid Row Eskimo (Thrasher), 818 Skim (Tamaki), 574 Skrbis, Zlatko, 296 Skybreaker (Oppel), 829 The Sky is Falling (Pearson), 832 The Sky Pilot (Connor/Gordon), 305, 880 Slade, Arthur, 840 Slash (Armstrong), 154, 466 Slemon, Stephen, 29, 454, 758, 760, 764 Slice Me Some Truth: An Anthology of Canadian Creative Nonfiction, 821 Slings and Arrows (television show), 397 Slipperjack, Ruby, 831, 835 Slippery Pastimes: Reading the Popular in Canadian Culture (eds. Nicks & Sloniowski), 120 Sloan, Johanne, 121 Sloniowski, Jeannette, 120 The Small Details of Life (Carter), 822 Smallwood, Joseph R., 662, 677–679, 682, 684, 687, 688 Smart, Elizabeth, 315, 340 Smith, A.J.M., 7, 52, 53, 303, 314, 317, 318, 320, 322, 323, 325, 328, 329, 337, 473, 478, 866, 867 Smith, Goldwin, 3 Smith, Kay, 663 Smith, Linda Tuhiwai, 760 Smith, Michelle, 10, 352, 359 Smith, Ray, 439 Smith, Ron, 712 Smith, Rowland, 764 Smith, Russell, 761

Smith, Sidonie, 814, 819 Smith, Valerie, 71 Smith, William Wye, 284 The Smugglers (Lawrence), 829 Smyth, Donna, 851 Smyth, Heather, 764 Snell, Heather, 764 Snyder, Gary, 743 Snyder, Sharon L., 886 Social Darwinism, 48 A Social Departure: How Orthodocia and I Went Round the World by Ourselves (Duncan), 306, 804 “Social Facts Are Vertical” (Derksen), 902 Social justice, 552 The Social Life of Stories (Cruikshank), 238 Social media, 521–522 Social model, 883 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, 806 Social violence, 210 Söderlind, Sylvia, 47, 758, 764 Soigne ta chute (Balzano), 629 Sointula (Gaston), 711 “Soirée of Velvel Kleinburger” (Klein), 604 Les Soirées canadiennes (journal), 249 Solecki, Sam, 480 Solomon Gursky Was Here (Richler), 465, 790 Someone with Me (Kurelek), 819 Something Fierce (Aguirre), 88, 821 Songbird Project, 747 “Song for Abraham Klein” (Cohen), 613 Song of Rita Joe (Rita Joe), 818 Songs of the Common Day (Roberts), 299 Songs of the Great Dominion (Lighthall), 4, 7, 284, 298 Sonnets (Ross), 316 The Son of a Certain Woman (Johnston), 678 Son of a Smaller Hero (Richler), 610 Sontag, Susan, 111 Soper, Ella, 735, 737, 738, 747 Sorfleet, John, 830 Sorisio, Carolyn, 185n2 “Sort by day, burn by night” (Wong), 898 A Sort of Ecstasy (Smith), 323 Soucouyant (Chariandy), 71, 536, 554 Sounding Differences (Williamson), 28

Index   957 Sounding the Iceberg (Duffy), 787 Le Sourire de la petite juive (Farhoud), 651 Souster, Raymond, 322, 323, 329, 477 South Asian Canadian literature, 583–601 diasporic literature, 592–595 historiographic fiction, 584–587 Sri Lankan transnationals, 588–590 urban motifs, 590–592 South Atlantic Quarterly, 763 “Southern Ontario Gothic” tradition, 455 Sowing Seeds in Danny (McClung), 697 Spadework (Findley), 397 The Spanish Doctor (Cohen), 608, 609 Spatial politics, 743 Speaking Volumes: A Literary Roar from the Rock (Pittman), 687 Speak White! (Lalonde), 404, 407 Spearey, Sue, 764 Le Spectateur canadien (newspaper), 246 Speculative Fictions (Wyile), 462, 787, 790 Spengler, Oswald, 112, 115 Sperlin, O.B., 239n3 The Spice-Box of Earth (Cohen), 615, 805 Spirit Bear: Encounters with the White Bear of the Western Rainforest (Russell), 747 The Spirit of the Laws (Montesquieu), 44 Spiritualism, 285 Spit Delaney’s Island (Hodgins), 438 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 94, 632, 755, 758, 763 Splendide solitude (Farhoud), 651 Spoon, Rae, 874 Spraggs, Gillian, 870 Sproxton, Birk, 740 Srikanth, Rajini, 584 Sri Lankan transnationals, 588–590 Srivastava, Aruna, 28, 764 Sroka, Ghila B., 624 Stacey, Jackie, 123n1 Staebler, Edna, 822 Stanley, Timothy J., 783–785 Stanley Park (Taylor), 711 Stanton, Domna C., 854 Star Authors (Moran), 81 Starclimber (Oppel), 830 Stark, Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik, 744 Starnino, Carmine, 489

Stasiulis, Daiva, 760 State capitalism, 114 “The Status of Women Faculty in Canadian Universities” (Ornstein, Stewart, and Drakich), 848 Stead, Robert, 359, 696, 702 Stealing Nasreen (Doctor), 584, 591, 592 Steeves, Andrew, 83 Steffler, John, 465, 466, 658, 668, 670, 790 Steffler, Margaret, 304 Stegner, Wallace, 740 Stein, Gertrude, 434 Steinbeck, John, 338, 711 Steinem, Gloria, 459 Stenson, Fred, 466 Stephens, Nathalie, 489 “Stepsure Letters” (McCulloch), 430–431 Sterling, Shirley, 183, 837 Stevens, Peter, 326 Stevens, Wallace, 302 Stevenson, Lionel, 4, 7 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 829 Stevenson, Winona, 177 Steveston (Marlatt), 711, 734 Stewart, Frances (Browne), 266, 267 Still Life and Other Verse (Pratt), 317 Stock, Brian, 390–392, 397 Stolen (Lapointe), 703 Stolen Life (Johnson & Wiebe), 170 Stó:lō Nation, 183–185, 238 The Stone Angel (Laurence), 460 The Stone Carvers (Urquhart), 68, 69, 465 Stoned Gloves (Kiyooka), 575 The Stone Diaries (Shields), 465, 697 “Stone Hammer Poem” (Kroetsch), 698 Stora-Sandor, 499 Stories in a New Skin: Approaches to Inuit Literature (Martin), 172, 744 Stories of the Road Allowance People (Campbell), 135 The Stories We Tell (film), 823 Storm of Fortune (Clarke), 457, 551 Story, Norah, 244, 245 A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World (Bringhurst), 713, 740 The Story of an Affinity (Lampman), 281

958   Index The Story of Bobby O’Malley (Johnston), 678 Stouck, David, 273 Strabo, 42 A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (De Mille), 305 A Stranger at Home (Jordan-Fenton & Pokiak-Fenton), 837 Strangers within Our Gates (Woodsworth), 542 Stratford Chamber of Commerce, 392 Stratford Festival, 375, 386–402 The Stratford Festival: 1953–1957 (Massey), 389 The Stratford Festival Story, 1953–1962 (Massey), 389 Stratford Shakespearean Festival of Canada, 386 Straw, Will, 118, 121 Strickland, Samuel, 270 Strike/Slip (McKay), 712 Stringer, Arthur, 316 Strong-Boag, Veronica, 302 “Structuralism/ Post-Structuralism: Language, Reality, and Canadian Literature” (Godard), 763 Stuart, Ross, 395 The Studhorse Man (Kroetsch), 458, 693, 788 Studies in Canadian Literature (journal), 22, 739 Sturgess, Charlotte, 572 Stursberg, Richard, 450 Such Creatures (Thompson), 381 Such Is My Beloved (Callaghan), 880 Sue, Eugène, 254n18 Sugars, Cynthia, 1, 10, 32, 327, 448, 569, 574, 747, 758, 764, 765, 793 Suknaski, Andrew, 325 Sullivan, Allan, 284 Sullivan, Gary, 108n8 Sullivan, Rosemary, 459, 819 Sulte, Benjamin, 284 Summers, Lawrence, 896 The Sun and the Moon (Reaney), 396 Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (Leacock), 307, 433 Sunwing (Oppel), 829 “Supercrip,” 877 Surfacing (Atwood), 459, 740 Surrender (Miki), 575

Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (Atwood), 18, 21, 32, 57, 455, 472, 483, 877–880, 890 Survival poetry, 136 Survivance, 216 Surviving the Paraphrase (Davey), 61n8, 472 The Survivors of the Crossing (Clarke), 457 Sustaining the West: Cultural Responses to Canadian Environments (eds. Piper & Szabo-Jones), 738, 746 Sutherland, Alistair, 866 Sutherland, Fraser, 868 Sutherland, John, 322, 324, 326, 866 Sutherland, Mark, 520 Sutherland, Ronald, 19 Suttles, Wayne, 238 Suzuki, David, 742 Swallowing Clouds (eds. Quan & Wong-Chu), 575 Swamp Angel (Wilson), 451, 714 Swan, Susan, 465 Sweatman, Margaret, 465, 697 The Sweet Second Summer of Kitty Malone (Cohen), 608 Swift, Jonathan, 232 Swiss Sonata (Graham), 343 Sybil Unrest (Wong & Lai), 898, 899 Syjuco, Miguel, 574 Sylvester, Katelyn, 509 The Symbolic, the Sublime, and Slavoj Zizek’s Theory of Film (Flisfeder), 121 Symons, Scott, 869 “Symphonic Expressionism” (Voaden), 373 Szabo-Jones, Lisa, 735, 737, 738, 743, 746 Szeman, Imre, 3, 9, 110, 117, 120, 756, 758, 763, 764, 893 Taché, Joseph-Charles, 249 Taking Back Our Spirits (Episkenew), 164, 171 Tales from Firozsha Baag (Mistry), 440, 584, 593 Tales from Gold Mountain (Yee), 838 Tallman, Warren, 482, 611 Talonbooks, 455, 720, 904 Tamaki, Jillian, 574, 575, 840 Tamarack Review, 614 Tamayose, Darcy, 574

Index   959 Tangles (Leavitt), 822 “The Tantramar Revisited” (Roberts), 288, 661, 663 Tapping, Craig, 764 Tardivel, Jules-Paul, 250 Tarragon Theatre, 375, 395 Tausky, Tom, 764 “Tawny Grammar” (Snyder), 743 Taylor, Charles, 770 Taylor, Drew Hayden, 144n5, 160 Taylor, Patrick, 764 Techno-utopianism, 113 Tecumseh (Mair), 371 Tecumseh Press, 307 Teit, James, 235, 236, 239n3 Telling It: Women and Language across Cultures (eds. Lee et al.), 853 Tempest-Tost (Davies), 451 The Temptations of Big Bear (Wiebe), 461, 698, 787, 788 “Tending to Ourselves” (Sinclair), 144n13 Ten Kortenaar, Neil, 758, 764 Ten Lost Years (Toronto Workshop Productions), 377 Tennyson, 286, 287, 299 A Tent for April (Anderson), 323 La Terre paternelle (Lacombe), 249 Terre Québec (Chamberland), 407 Térroiriste ideology, 408 Terzian, Sylvia, 647 Tessera (journal), 95, 851, 855, 864 The Testimonial Uncanny: Indigenous Storytelling, Knowledge, and Reparative Practices (Emberley), 213 Testimony, 819 Testing the Limits: Postcolonial Theories and Canadian Literature (ed. Brydon), 762–763 Text-generating programs, 513 TextOrgan (Lewis), 519 Textual bibliography, 801 Textual community, 390, 394 Thacker, Robert, 730 That Fatal Night, The Titanic Diary of Dorothy Wilton, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 1912 (Ellis), 833, 836 that tongued belonging (Dumont), 137

Theatre Albert, 393, 394 Le Théâtre de Neptune en la Nouvelle-France (Lescarbot), 244, 370 Théàtre de société (periodical), 247 Le Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, 388 Theatre of the Film Noir (Walker), 377 Theatre Passe Muraille, 375, 376 Theatrical literature. See Drama Thematicism, 29 Théoret, France, 95, 852 The Theory of the Leisure Class (Veblen), 361 Theosophy, 285 Theriault, Yves, 376 Thesen, Sharon, 740 “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (Benjamin), 123n2 These Waves of Girls (Fisher), 519 Thevet, Andre, 233 They Called Me Number One (Sellars), 183 Theytus Books, 108n5, 827 Thibodeau, Serge Patrice, 669 Thien, Madeleine, 71, 80, 428, 463, 574, 892 “Things I Don’t Really Understand about Myself ” (Nichol), 24 “Thinking through Postcoloniality” (ARIEL), 762 Thinking with Water (eds. Chen, MacLeod, & Neimanis), 738 Think of the Earth (Brooker), 700 Thirsty (Brand), 552 This All Happened (Winter), 677 This Cake Is for the Party (Selecky), 428 This Is for You, Anna (play), 379 This Place Called Absence (Kwa), 573 This Wild Spirit: Women in the Rocky Mountains of Canada (Skidmore), 736 Thobani, Sunera, 119 Thomas, Audrey, 26, 460, 712 Thomas, Clara, 18, 34n3, 764 Thomas, Julia, 391 Thomas, M. Nigel, 542, 764 Thompson, David, 230, 235, 805 Thompson, Elizabeth, 260 Thompson, John, 668 Thompson, Judith, 380 Thompson, Lee Briscoe, 764 Thompson, Paul, 378, 379, 381

960   Index Thomson, James, 277 Thomson, Rosemarie Garland, 880 Thomson, Tom, 303 Thoreau, Henry David, 739 Thornapple Tree (Campbell), 341 Thorsteinson, Katie, 770 A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze & Guattari), 474 Thrasher, Antony Apakark, 818 Three Day Road (Boyden), 214, 466, 741, 792 The Three Desks (Reaney), 395 The Thrill (Thompson), 381 Through Black Spruce (Boyden), 164 Thunder through My Veins: Memories of a Métis Childhood (Scofield), 136, 185 Thurston, Harry, 668, 739 Ticknor (Anansi), 86 Tiffin, Helen, 756, 759 Tilt (Cumyn), 834 Timber (Haig-Brown), 711 Time (magazine), 354 Time in Ambush (Hughes), 346 The Time in Between (Bergen), 463 The Time of Their Lives (Johnston), 678 Timing Canada: The Shifting Politics in Time in Canadian Literary Culture (Huebener), 746 The Tin Flute (Roy), 339, 341, 343, 346 Tinic, Serra, 121 “Tintern Abbey” (Wordsworth), 288 Tippett, Maria, 449 TISH (magazine), 455, 482 The Titanic (Pratt), 317 “To a Sky Lark” (Shelley), 288 Todd, Loretta, 183 Toews, Miriam, 697, 700 The Tomorrow-Tamer (Laurence), 436 Tompkins, Joanne, 765 Too Much Happiness (Munro), 80 Topey, Simone E.A., 535 Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 118 Toronto Free Theatre, 375 Toronto Research Group, 24, 482 The Toronto Star, 21 Toronto Trilogy, 551 Toronto Workshop Productions, 377

“TOSS ALL NIGHT” (Nichol), 518 Tostevin, Lola Lemire, 485, 855 Towards a View of Canadian Letters: Selected Critical Essays 1928–1971 (Smith), 326 Towards the Last Spike (Pratt), 317, 747 Toye, William, 7 Toynbee, Arthur, 115 Trace: Prairie Writers on Writing (anthology), 693 Tracing the Autobiographical (eds. Kadar et al), 820 The Trade (Stenson), 466 Trade policy, 280 Traill, Catharine Parr, 260, 261, 266, 269, 270, 273, 283–285, 374, 435, 827, 828 Trans-Canada Highway, 490 TransCanada Institute, 8, 93, 121, 490 Trans.Can.Lit: Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature (eds. Kamboureli & Miki), 32, 94, 475 Transcendentalism, 285 Transcendentalists, 338 Transculture, 629 Transformer (character), 231 Translating Montreal: Episodes in the Life of a Divided City (Simon), 613 Transnational Canadas (Dobson), 31, 33, 93 Transnationalism, 631–634, 893 Transnationalism, Activism, Art (eds. Dobson & McGlynn), 122 Transnational Muscle Cars (Derksen), 94, 900–902, 904 Transnational-nationalism, 81 Transplantation motif, 281–285 Traplines (Robinson), 428 Trasov, Vincent, 35n6 Trauma, 69, 574, 641 Treasure Island (Stevenson), 829 Treaty of Paris (1763), 242 Treaty of Waitangi (1840), 803 Tree (Wah), 575, 734 The Tree of Meaning: Thirteen Talks (Bringhurst), 740 Tregebov, Rhea, 485 Trehearne, Brian, 326–328 Tremaine, Marie, 801 Tremblay, Ernest, 251

Index   961 Tremblay, Michel, 376, 406, 411, 413, 864, 873 Tremblay, Rémi, 251 Tremblay, Tony, 11, 657 Tribal Justice (Blaise), 438 La tribune juive (periodical), 624 “La tricheuse” (Ferron), 499 Trickster (character), 231 The Triumphs of Eugène Valmont (Barr), 306 Trono, Mario, 738 The Trouble with Heroes and Other Stories (Vanderhaeghe), 438 Troyansky, David G., 633 Truchan-Tataryn, Maria, 884, 885 Trudeau, Margaret, 821 Trudeau, Pierre Elliot, 112, 378, 404, 461, 583, 645, 821 “The True Eventual Story of Billy the Kid” (Nichol), 482 “The True North Strong and Free” (Berger), 48 The Trumpets of Summer (Atwood), 397 Truss, Jan, 828 Truth, 150 The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative (King), 441 Truth and Bright Water (King), 467, 701 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), 5, 10, 74, 75, 152, 154, 159, 164, 210, 212, 818–819 The Truth Teller (newspaper), 248 The Tumble of Reason: Alice Munro’s Discourse of Absence (Heble), 789 Tundra Books, 827 Turcotte, Gerry, 569, 758, 764 Turgeon, Laurier, 228 Turnbull, Gael, 324, 397 Turner, Michael, 711 Turnstone Press, 482 Tuttle, Charles R., 49 Twain, Mark, 432 Twelve Letters to a Small Town (Reaney), 397 “Twelve Moons and the Dream” (Scofield), 745 Twentieth-Century Children’s Writers (Sorfleet), 830 Twenty-Four Poems (Dudek), 323 Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West (Strickland), 270 The Two Decanters (Craig), 343, 344

Two Little Savages (Seton), 828 Two Solitudes (MacLennan), 338, 342 “The Two Voices” (Tennyson), 287 Ty, Eleanor, 10, 564, 758, 764 Tyman, James, 701, 703 Tynes, Maxine, 542, 670 Typing: A Life in 26 Keys (Cohen), 608, 612 Ukraine, 606 Ukrainian-Canadian Congress, 74 Ukrainian Jewish identity, 609 Ulrikab, Abraham, 172 Ulysses (Joyce), 436 “Unbounded citizenship,” 531 Uncle Ronald (Doyle), 839 UnderCurrents: Journal of Critical Environmental Studies, 743 Underground Railway, 544 Under the Ribs of Death (Marlyn), 452 Une de perdue, deux de trou-vées (Boucherville), 248 Une Saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel (Blais), 413 Un feu dans l’amiante (Richard), 411 Unheroic North (Denison), 373 “Unhiding the Hidden” (Kroetsch), 29 Unhomely States: Theorizing English-Canadian Postcolonialism (Sugars), 32, 764 Unidentified Human Remains and the Nature of Love (Fraser), 874 The Uninvited (Wynne-Jones), 835 Union Bill of 1822, 248 United Church of Canada, 166n6 United Nations, 387 United States American Revolution (1775–83), 242 Copyright Act of 1790, 804 Copyright Act of 1891, 804 Unit Five (Dudek et al.), 323 “Unitrinianism,” 303 Universalism, 70 Universality of technology, 115 Université de Moncton, 669 University of British Columbia, 720, 738, 742 University of Calgary Press, 738 University of Guelph, 8 University of Manitoba Press, 744 University of Toronto, 325

962   Index University of Toronto Press, 613 University of Toronto Quarterly, 763 University of Victoria, 720, 737 The Unjust Society (Cardinal), 134, 179, 461 The Unmemntioable (Moure), 486 The Unnatural and Accidental Women (Clements), 210, 214, 216, 217, 221 Unreal Country: Modernity in the Canadian Novel in English (Willmott), 327 “The Unreturning” (Carman), 304 Unsettling Settler Societies: Articulations of Gender, Race, Ethnicity and Class (eds. Stasiulis & Yuval-Davis), 760 Updike, John, 81 “The Upper Canadian” (Reaney), 395 Urban Inuk (documentary), 199 Urbanization, 434 Urban space, 625 Urquhart, Jane, 68, 69, 73, 76n10, 440, 465, 466, 790, 830, 831 Us Conductors (Michaels), 463 Usmiani, Renate, 389 Vadeboncoeur, Pierre, 404, 409 Vaillant, John, 741 “Le Vaisseau d’or” (Nelligan), 284 Vallières, Pierre, 406, 407, 409, 768 Valmiki’s Daughter (Mootoo), 535 Van Camp, Richard, 206n22, 441 Vance, Jonathan, 305, 306 Vancouver, George, 713 Vancouver Island, 712, 714 Vancouver Poems (Marlatt), 711, 734 Vancouver Poetry Conference, 482 Vancouver Walking (Quartermain), 711 Vanderhaeghe, Guy, 438, 439, 465, 786, 790, 878, 888 Van der Mark, Christine, 343, 347, 697, 700 Van Herk, Aritha, 24, 460, 696, 764 Vanier, Denis, 412 Van Luven, Lynne, 120 Vanneste, Hilda M.C., 326 Van Styvendale, Nancy, 530, 531 Van Tighem, Kevin, 736 Varadharajan, Asha, 758, 764 Varoujean, Vasco, 640 Vassanji, M.G., 464, 465, 583, 584, 588, 591

Vautier, Marie, 764 Veblen, Thorstein, 361 Vellino, Brenda (Carr), 764 Veracini, Lorenzo, 760 Verduyn, Christl, 758, 764, 822 Vermette, Katherena, 132 Vernon, Karina, 541, 543, 764 Verrette, Michel, 254n25 Vertical Man/Horizontal World (Ricou), 23, 347 A Very Fine Line (Johnston), 833 Veuillez agréer … (Mailhot), 499 Vice versa (magazine), 622 Victimhood, 880 Victim positions, 877 Victorianism, 34n5, 315, 318, 328, 392, 405 Victory Meat (Coady), 667 Vietnamese Canadians, 565 The View from Castle Rock (Munro), 80, 792 Vigneault, Gilles, 409 The Viking Heart (Salverson), 339, 344, 697, 699 Villasin, Nadine, 576, 577 Vincent, Kerry, 764 Vintage Book of Canadian Memoirs (anthology), 820–821 Vinyl Cafe with Stuart McLean (radio program), 434 Virgo, Seán, 736 Vivet, Jean-Pierre, 806 Vizenor, Gerald, 163, 216, 770 Voaden, Herman, 372, 373 Voice of Women, 847 Voices in the Wind: A Waterton-Glacier Anthology (eds. Grinder, Haig-Brown, & Van Tighem), 736 Voices of the Plains Cree (Ahenakew), 176 Voix et Images du pays (periodical), 406 Le voleur de parcours (Harel), 623 Voltaire, 244 Les Voyages du Sieur de Champlain (Champlain), 807 Wachtel, Eleanor, 485 Wacousta, or The Prophesy: A Tale of the Canadas (Richardson), 804, 864, 865 Wacousta Syndrome (McGregor), 58

Index   963 Waddington, Miriam, 322, 326 Wagamese, Richard, 157, 158–160, 184, 467, 741 Wagner, Colleen, 381 Wagner, Vit, 85 Wah, Fred, 28, 486, 535, 572, 575, 712, 734, 820 Waiting for Joe (Birdsell), 703 Wakefield, Edward Gibbon, 282 Wakeham, Pauline, 764 Walcott, Rinaldo, 539–541, 553, 758, 764 Walden (Thoreau), 739 Walker, Cheryl, 173 Walker, Craig, 10, 369 Walker, George F., 377 Walker, Kathryn, 296 Walker, Victoria, 854 Walking since Daybreak: A Story of Eastern Europe, World War II, and the Heart of Our Century (Ekstein), 66 “A Walk to Dummer” (Moodie), 271 Wallace, Ann, 542 Wallace, Robert, 378, 389 Wallflowers (Robertson), 429 Walsh (Pollock), 377 Walters, Eric, 840 Walton, Priscilla, 120 The Wanderer (Robin), 622 Wanderings of an Artist (Kane), 230 Wangersky, Russell, 677 “Wanted—Canadian Criticism” (Smith), 320 Ward, Samuel Ringgold, 546 Warden, David Cunningham, 717 Ware, Tracy, 10, 295, 789 Warland, Betsy, 485, 852, 853, 855 Warley, Linda, 820 War Measures Act, 645 War of 1812, 369 The War of 1812 (Hollingsworth), 382 “Warren Pryor” (Nowlan), 666 Warrior, Robert, 171 The Wars (Findley), 69, 458, 788, 870 Wasserman, Jerry, 157 Waste Heritage (Baird), 340, 343, 711 The Wasteland (Eliot), 436 Watanna, Onoto, 566 The Watch That Ends the Night (MacLennan), 451, 612 Waterston, Elizabeth, 308, 830

Watmough, David, 869 Watson, Albert, 7 Watson, Julia, 814, 819 Watson, Sheila, 26, 315, 435, 436, 451, 452 Watters, Reginald, 18, 764, 800 Watts, Vanessa, 745 Wayland, Sarah V., 589 Wayman, Tom, 609 Weale, Josh, 390 Weaver, Jace, 760 Weaver, Robert, 442, 614 Webb, Phyllis, 324, 325, 712 Weetaluktuk, Jobie, 206n21 Weingarten, J.A., 10, 314 Weinzweig, Helen, 70 Weir, Lorraine, 23, 25 Wente, Margaret, 846 Wentworth, John, 660 Wershler, Darren, 121, 515, 516, 519 Wesley, Saylesh, 185 We So Seldom Look on Love (Gowdy), 428 West Coast Review (magazine), 455, 720 West Coast Women and Words, 485 Western Home Monthly, 353, 359 Western Literature Association, 731 “We Walked on the Water” (Robertson), 442 Wharton, Edith, 337 Wharton, Thomas, 465, 740 What America Reads (Hutner), 338 What Culture? What Heritage? (Osborne), 784 What Happened This Summer (Yee), 839 What History Teaches (Nichol), 26 What Lies Before Us (Panych), 381 What’s Bred in the Bone (Davies), 456 What the Crow Said (Kroetsch), 788 What We All Long For (Brand), 99, 536, 554, 872 “What We Do, What We Are: Responsible, Ethical, and Indigenous-Centered Literary Criticisms of Indigenous Literatures” (Sinclair & Eigenbrod), 745 The Wheatgrass Mechanism: Science and Imagination in the Western Canadian Landscape (anthology), 742 Wheeler, A.O., 713 Wheeler, Jordan, 144n5 The Wheel of Things (Gillen), 830

964   Index When Alice Lay Down with Peter (Sweatman), 465, 697 When Fox Is a Thousand (Lai), 573 When the Other Is Me: Native Resistance Discourse, 1850–1990 (LaRocque), 142, 153 When We Are Young (Souster), 323 “Where Has ‘Real’ Nature Gone, Anyway?: Ecocriticism, Canadian Writing and the Lures of the Virtual” (Beautell), 732 Where the Blood Mixes (Loring), 157, 160 Whispering in Shadows (Armstrong), 210, 214, 220, 221 White, Edmund, 869 White, Hayden, 477, 478, 785 White Biting Dog (Thompson), 381 The White Bone (Gowdy), 740 The White Centre (Anderson), 323 White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada (Coleman), 10, 27, 31, 52, 59, 544 Whitehead, Anne, 71 Whitehead, William, 870 Whitehouse, Francis Cecil, 699 Whiteoaks (de la Roche), 373 Whitlock, Gillian, 265, 266, 760, 822 Whitman, Walt, 277 Whittaker, Herbert, 387 Whittome, Tony, 736 Who Do You Think You Are? (Munro), 86, 809 Who Has Seen the Wind (Mitchell), 698, 702 Who Killed Canadian History? (Granatstein), 66, 782 “Who Killed Canadian History? A View from the Trenches” (McKillop), 783 Who Killed the Canadian Military? (Granatstein), 66 The Whole Truth (Pearson), 832 Whore (Arcan), 820 “Whose Public? Whose Memory?” (Stanley), 785 “Why I Killed Canadian History: Towards an Anti-Racist History of Canada” (Stanley), 783–784 Whylah Falls (Clarke), 792, 793 Whyte, Jon, 740 Wickwire, Wendy, 234, 237, 741 Wiebe, Armin, 700

Wiebe, Rudy, 26, 170, 461, 465, 698, 700, 730, 740, 787, 788, 790, 821 Wieland, Joyce, 121 Wild Animals I Have Known (Seton), 828 Wilder, Laura Ingalls, 573, 701 Wild Geese (Ostenso), 339, 340, 343, 345, 697, 698 Wiles of Girlhood (Arnott), 137 Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 307, 738 Wilkinson, Anne, 322, 340 Williams, Danny, 671 Williams, Flos Jewell, 343, 344, 697 Williams, Raymond, 118 Williams, Tennessee, 381 Williamson, Janice, 28 Williamson, Tara, 744 Willinsky, John, 762, 764 Willis, Deborah, 443 Willis, Jane, 179, 818 Willmott, Glenn, 7, 327, 452, 764 Wilson, Budge, 830 Wilson, Daniel, 277 Wilson, D.W., 442 Wilson, Ethel, 451, 710, 714, 716, 881 Wilson, Janet, 762 Wilson, John, 836 Wilson, Marie, 154 Wilson, Milton, 34n1 Wilson, Robert, 24 Wilson, Shawn, 184 A Windigo Tale (film), 161, 162 The Wind Our Enemy (Marriott), 321 Windschuttle, Keith, 782 Windsor Forest (Cary), 279 Winfrey, Oprah, 871 Winger, Rob, 480 Winona; or, the Foster-Sisters (Crawford), 304 Winquist, Martin, 179 Winslow, Donald, 814 Winslow, Edward, 660 Winter, Kathleen, 677 Winter, Michael, 440, 670, 677, 681, 687 Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (Jameson), 267–269 Winter Sun (Avison), 323, 324 Wiseman, Adele, 451, 605–607, 610, 616, 882 The Witching of Elspie (Scott), 301

Index   965 The Withdrawal Method (Malla), 428 Witnessing AIDS: Writing, Testimony, and the Work of Mourning (Brophy), 820 Wolfe, Patrick, 760 Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Prairie Frontier (Stegner), 740 Wolvengrey, Arok, 185 The Woman’s Page (Fiamengo), 10 Women, Celebrity and Literary Culture Between the Wars (Hammill), 81 “Women and Words/Les femmes et les mots” conference, 485, 486 Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM), 845 The Women’s Press, 820 Women’s writing humour in, 495–511 Indigenous literatures, 209–223 maternity, 697 modernism, 337–351 prairie literature, 696–698 satire, 503–507 Wong, Adrienne, 577 Wong, Paul, 572 Wong, Rita, 94, 576, 892, 897–900, 904 Wong-Chu, Jim, 575 Woo, Terry, 577 Wood, James, 86 The Woodcarver’s Wife and Other Poems (Pickthall), 304 Woodcock, George, 17, 21, 301, 477, 480, 607, 610, 611, 709, 710, 719, 762, 813, 814, 823 Woodhouse, A.S.P., 800 Woods, Shirley, 828 Woodsmen of the West (Grainger), 711 Woodsworth, J.S., 542 Woodward, Ian, 296 Woolf, Virginia, 80, 95, 338 The Words of My Roaring (Kroetsch), 788 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 105 Wordsworth, William, 286 Working-class poetry, 471, 481 World Bank, 896 World Literature Written in English (WLWE), 762 World of Wonders (Davies), 456 Worrying the Nation: Imagining a National Literature in English Canada (Kertzer), 47

Worth, Irene, 387 The Wreckers (Lawrence), 829 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 382 Wright, Richard, 466 Write It on Your Heart: The Epic World of an Okanagan Storyteller (Robinson), 713, 745 Writers’ Trust of Canada, 442, 821 Writers’ Union of Canada, 442, 453 “Writing Here” (New), 719 Writing in Dust: Reading the Prairie Environmentally (Kerber), 695, 738, 739 Writing in Our Time: Canada’s Radical Poetries in English (Butling & Rudy), 474 Writing the Circle (eds. Perreault & Vance), 138 “Writing the Land” Conference, 735 Writing the Pioneer Woman (Floyd), 273 “Writing Thru Race” conference, 486, 572 “Written on Passing Deadman’s Island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence” (Moore), 284 Wunker, Erin, 9, 92 Wyile, Herb, 5, 11, 92, 93, 462, 592, 670, 677, 694, 695, 764, 787, 790, 791 Wynne-Jones, Tim, 828, 831, 834, 835 Xweliqwiya: The Life of a Sto:lo Matriarch (Point Bolton), 171, 183, 184 Yaari, Monique, 507 Yates, Frances, 68 Yates, Richard, 306 Yeats, William Butler, 475 Yee, David, 381, 577 Yee, Paul, 836, 838, 839 Yellow Peril Reconsidered (Wong), 572 Yiddish poets, prose writers, and journalists, 602 “Y.M.C.A. Montreal” (Anderson), 866 York, Alissa, 740 York, Lorraine, 9, 27, 80, 327 Young, David, 381 Young, Robert, 60 Young Canada’s Nursery Rhymes, 828 Young England’s Nursery Rhymes, 828 The Younger American Poets (Rittenhouse), 297 The Young Fur Traders/Snowflakes and Sunbeams (Ballantyne), 800

966   Index “You Think It’s a Stump, But That’s My Grandfather” (Robinson), 741 Yuval-Davis, Nira, 760 YVR (New), 711 Zabus, Chantal, 762 Zacharias, Robert, 94 Zagorin, Perez, 786 Zastrozzi (Walker), 377

Zavalloni, Marisa, 853 Zazie dans le métro (Queneau), 497 Zemans, Joyce, 29 Zipper, Yaacov, 602 Zizek, Slavoj, 699 Zolf, Rachel, 489 Zong! (Philip), 99 Zontal, Jorge, 35n6 Zwicker, Heather, 764 Zwicky, Jan, 739