Unreal Country: Modernity in the Canadian Novel in English 9780773570344

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Unreal Country

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Unreal Country: Modernity in the Canadian Novel in English Glenn Willmott

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

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© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2002 isbn 0-7735-2396-0 Legal deposit fourth quarter 2002 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec

Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Funding has also been received from the Office of Research Services, Queen’s University. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp).

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data Willmott, Glen, 1963– Unreal country: modernity in the Canadian novel in English Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-7735-2396-0 1. Canadian fiction (English) – 20th century – History and criticism. 2. Modernism (Literature) – Canada. I. Title. ps8187.w54 2002 c813′.509112 c2002-900805-0 pr9193.2.w54 2002

This book was typeset by Dynagram Inc. in 10/13 Palatino.

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Contents

Acknowledgments / vii Introduction: A Utopia of the Common Type / 3 1 Genre: Modernism and the Bildungsroman / 15 2 Style: The Disfiguring of Development / 66 3 Gender: The Feminization of History / 102 4 Region: The Invisible City and the Abstract Empire / 144 Conclusion: A Withdrawal of Fortune / 196 Notes / 201 Index / 233

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Acknowledgments

This project has benefited from many stages and kinds of help. It was fostered at Dalhousie University and completed under the auspices of Queen’s University. I would like to thank more students and colleagues at these and other institutions than I can name here, but especially, for their much appreciated encouragement and critical advice, Professors Paul Stevens, Tracy Ware, Sylvia Söderlind, Mark Jones, Donna Bennett, and Russell Brown. Most of this book has been tested out in small doses on conference audiences, to whom I am also grateful for their patience and responses. Many thanks are due my supportive editor, Roger Martin, and incredibly hardworking manuscript reviewers, whose thoughtful and detailed editorial suggestions have been invaluable to the substantial improvement, indeed the proper realization within my own limitations, of this text. I have also been fortunate to have had the excellent research assistance of Andrea Cole, Stephen Ross, Joanne Saul, and Shannon Smyrl. To the considerable personal and professional support, and fine readerly and scholarly advice of Professor Yaël Schlick of Queen’s, the following pages are especially indebted. I am grateful to Queen’s for the financial support of the Office of Research Services and its Advisory Research Committee Grant, and special thanks are due the Government of Canada for a Research Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Portions of chapter 4 have appeared in the American Review of Canadian Studies and in Canadian Literature. Permission was kindly given to reproduce artwork of Lawren Harris by Mrs James H. Knox, and of Bertran Brooker by Mrs Phyllis Brooker Smith.

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Unreal Country

“Oh no, my dear, there are no disenchantments, merely progressions and styles of possession. To exist is to be spell-bound.” – Robert Coover

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introduction

A Utopia of the Common Type

If Canada has always been an imagined community, it has never been one with a communal imagination. The nation was and remains profoundly unsettled, its debts undying, its accounts unclosed. The global flows of capital, technologies, institutions, desires, bodies, and labour that have streamed into, out of, and across the upper half of the continent, have continuously pushed and pulled, torn apart and sutured again its borders and seams, creating new worlds within and transfiguring others. A chronically incomplete project. Indeed, the authenticity, and in this sense origin, of the Canadian nation is more likely to be felt with political expectation than with nostalgia; our public newsmedia regularly await that act of legislation (or act of violence) that will settle our differences (and not abolish them), allowing a collective (at last, collective) sigh of relief. This anticipatory nationalism has always been worried by a metanationalist discourse of uneven worlds, unbalanced scales of justice, and other solitudes. So that wherever this master narrative of a virtual nation refuses to collapse for us into some more specifically ethnic or regional romance of primordialist origins, we are understandably tempted to acknowledge instead the long history of a postnationalism, which is to say, an anachronistic nationalism that is not one, that is postmodern avant la lettre.1 For in its endemic consolidations, disunifications, and mercurial transformations, Canada has always been subject to what Arjun Appadurai has called the postmodern “modernity at large.”2 The “at large” denotes both ubiquity and disorganization, marking a definitive difference from the more systematic and distinctly centre/periphery formations of modernity in the past. It is a condition Appadurai locates firmly in the last two decades of the twentieth century, rather than in

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the longer history of the Canadian state or of modernity itself. Only in these decades have unpredictable directions of mass migration, media distribution, and capitalist markets and investments led to the deterritorialized, fluid, interpenetrative and volatile cultural landscapes in which we strive to find our place and identity today. Appadurai’s seemingly impossible task, as an ethnographer of this postmodernity of place and identity, is to respond to a “conundrum”: “What is the nature of locality as a lived experience in a globalized, deterritorialized world?”(52). But the same question confronts other humanities and social sciences, which must always delimit a place of inquiry in the world. We might as well ask: What is the nature of Canadian locality (site, region, nation, travel) as a lived experience in a globalized, deterritorialized world? What is a Montreal literature? What is a Vancouver Island literature? What is a Canadian literature? What is a Canadian-Caribbean literature? The answer to such questions, for the present study, throws us back into the specificity of modern as opposed to postmodern histories. But before making that move, Appadurai’s own answer will prove useful to us, because it allows us the same uncanny glimpse of an anachronistically postmodern, modern Canada as does his question. He casts his anchor in the subjective element, specifically in the “fact that the imagination has now acquired a singular new power in social life”: The imagination – expressed in dreams, songs, fantasies, myths, and stories – has always been part of the repertoire of every society, in some culturally organized way. But there is a peculiar new force to the imagination in social life today. More persons in more parts of the world consider a wider set of possible lives than they ever did before. One important source of this change is the mass media, which present a rich, ever-changing store of possible lives, some of which enter the lived imaginations of ordinary people more successfully than others. Important also are contacts with, news of, and rumors about others in one’s social neighborhood who have become inhabitants of these faraway worlds. The importance of media is not so much as direct sources of new images and scenarios for life possibilities but as semiotic diacritics of great power, which also inflect social contact with the metropolitan world facilitated by other channels. (53)

The global village imagined here is a kind of giant factory of representations of possible lives – a factory with no foundation in order or owner, whose fantastic productions come from anywhere and invade everywhere. Like viruses carried by the disembedded global markets

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and technologies themselves, a disorganized host of always already mutated fantasies flow unpredictably around the world, taking hold, burrowing in somewhere, to give rise to new organisms, new ecosystems of identity and place. Individual, local, regional, national lives are infected and inflected by equally ephemeral worlds elsewhere. I say this is an uncanny answer, because it is precisely this intrusion of a global modernity into the imagination of life possibilities that is charted out again and again in the texts considered in this study, in the self-bewildering narratives of modern Canadian novels. And it is charted out, not merely reflexively, as literary reflections of a historical condition, but actively and deliberatively, as attempts to think towards some adequate feeling of social recognition and belonging. In this context, we may suddenly see that the old antinomy that had loomed above the work of fiction for modern Canadian writers – the titanic contest of realism and romance – is not an antinomy at all, but a superficial image, a screen through which we may see their necessary (if antagonistic) interaction and transfiguration relative to an obscured, third term. For romance, in this context, will no longer signify the ethically structured cosmos, and the heroic role in it, illuminated by Northrop Frye. Rather, romance will be the foundational, while merely formal, generic vehicle (even as others are superimposed or ironically disposed in relation to it) called upon to register precisely this more disorganized, global flow of deterritorialized fantasies, of indeterminate and heterogeneous imaginations. Put another way, the new romance will register the primacy of the (contingent) event over the (cosmogenetic) world, rather than the other way around. By the same proposition, realism too is turned inside out. The conventional function of realism, to register the interrelations and values of a given, secular world, or “what is,” is eroded by the uneven and unstable, slash-and-burn transvaluations of a material life subject to the unpredictable synapses of global economy, media, and mobility. A self-ironicizing realism is now required in order to register these unevenly signifying events, which mark the shifting social limits and vectors of global flows themselves; it is required, however ephemerally and paradoxically self-consciously, as a provisional ground for the imagination “at large.” The third formal term, which in the following work I will argue lies obscured behind these inverted shells of romance and realism alike, belongs to modernism. For Appadurai’s world is also unlike Canada in the first half of the twentieth century. The flow of media images has not yet accelerated to

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a postmodern hurricane, and the migrations of peoples have remained slow, producing a global “inflection” of local experience that may be measured upon the clock of seasons in a life, as opposed to the hourly news. The mysteries and contradictions of global time and space are still felt to be relatively stable, or chronologically systematic – I am tempted to say imperial – for the ambiguously local worlds and ambivalently indigenous subjects of the modern nation. In Canada, the medium that conveys this (in advance of electronic media, and overwhelming the emergence of radio or cinema) is essentially print, and the channels we see for it in Canadian fiction are primarily family libraries, local newspapers, schools, and churches. These print channels must reach across vast geographic distances even within Canada and are themselves nested in media of transportation such as ship and rail. It is “modernity at large” as a globally unstable, uneven space – yet in slow motion, when compared to today’s experience of dizzying cultural and material development. Underdeveloped, too, is a specialized market for innovative high art, specifically, the consumption of an oppositional aesthetic (or, with Walter Benjamin’s caveat, merely an aesthetic opposition) positioned against a popular culture, its taste, values, and manners. For this reason, I will suggest, the break that marks modernism as a transnational artistic practice is not immediately visible in Canada as a break toward a new genre (hence new market), but rather as a break within – an exhaustion and turning inside out, as I suggest above – existing Canadian nineteenth-century genres (and markets), toward another kind of practice that is selffractured, radically incomplete, and experimental in the best modernist tradition. At the same time, Appadurai’s notion of “possible lives” arising as events in global flows, gives us the key to the more specific nineteenth-century genre that, I will soon argue, carries the burden of meaning for Canadians in the modern age. The purpose of this book is to propose a coherent frame of reference for modern Canadian fiction in English. In so doing, I shall consider various artistic strategies particular to this fiction under the rubric of modernism and periodize them within the boundaries of a national history. It might well occur to the reader to wonder at these broad brushstrokes. Why not allow Canadian literatures to remain relatively free of such categories, no doubt abstract and partial, of nation, period, and style? I will address separate parts of this question in the chapter to follow, but wish to make Sweeney’s plea at the outset: “I

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gotta use words when I talk to you.” These are words with a political history, whose complexities and contradictions of usage, rehearsed by Raymond Williams in his 1983 Keywords, have since become, especially from postcolonial and postnational perspectives that see themselves as postmodernist, more contentious still.3 But I need these words to make particular literary authors and works, now largely approached without a modernist frame of reference, increasingly legible and, I hope, understood in a new way as pressing upon contemporary concerns. Recently, the continuing usefulness of modernism as an important category of literary history has been affirmed institutionally in the founding of the Modernist Studies Association and the New Modernisms Conference, where the very contentiousness of the category has been re-understood as a part of the many-voiced dialogue and many-historied dialectic proper to its interpretive power. Something of this spirit is intelligible in Brian Trehearne’s recent, meticulous argument for a modernist frame of reference in Canadian poetry which reconciles the latter with a particularist historicization of texts and their production.4 As for the benighted category of the nation, even this has been subjected to a challenging exploration by Jon Kertzer, here balancing a proper understanding of the category as a shifting, historical, institutional, and ideological entity, with the theoretical proposition that it remains an “inescapable” framework for Canadian literary history.5 Such diverse studies share, with my own, an assumption that “modern” and “national” categories are not fixed templates, but signs for more complex and conflicted historical structures, having local and dialectical relationships to specific practice and place. Any particularity requires a frame of reference and scale of measurement to be legible, and a synthetic, if never utterly totalized, historical view if it is to cross the abysses of space and time and remain meaningful to us. In a provisional but pragmatic way, with respect to Canadian modernism, that is what I hope here to introduce. Much of what follows will depend upon a more controversial assumption, already hinted at above. This is the allowance, suggested to me in the course of this study and consistent with my earlier work on Marshall McLuhan, that formalist experimentation need not be thought of as stuck up – that is, stuck to one end of a dichotomy between high culture and popular culture. Canonical modernism is normally associated with the alienation of a critical art culture from a commodifying popular culture. But a radical approach to form – generally an idealistic artistic response to the exhaustion or

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reification of literary institutions and conventions – is just as evidently possible, though perhaps not so easy to see, in the calculated dérèglement and disfigurement of existing forms as in their replacement by other and novel ones.6 What I have in mind, and hope to illuminate in the chapters ahead, is not merely variation within a genre, nor yet its subversion, for these are transhistorical characteristics of literary form. It is something closer to an excessive elasticization of form, deliberately to the point of some instructive incoherence, at which point its reader is forced to concede new textual principles for its comprehension. It is the attempt to develop, to create, rather than address, the reader of a modernist text. In a society in which the onset and pace of modernization have been felt across a widely dispersed population and in relatively recent urban centres, and in a society which lacks the high culture of an aristocratic elite identified with the land and its history – in such a society, the institutions of popular culture may well be felt to be the most appropriate media of new, collective, and artistic self-reflection. This is what happened in Canada. This is the sort of art culture portrayed in Making Culture, Maria Tippett’s history of English-Canadian culture in the first half of this century – an art culture growing out of a vigorous if volatile ferment of ad hoc, local, and amateur means and media from which the professionalization of art production only precariously emerged – until the government intervention that would follow the 1949 Massey Commission prepared the way for highcultural and counter-cultural movements of more recent decades.7 In the literature of the first half of the modern century, the spirits of the popular and the avant-garde have not yet parted company. A necessary identification between popular culture and art production is the anxious theme of two ambitious and complex novels that will provide, in these opening pages, an immediate starting point for my readings to follow. Of the course of the book and the chapters ahead, the reader will find a brief overview at the end of this Introduction. A witty exchange from Sara Jeannette Duncan’s first novel, the underappreciated but subtle and brilliant A Daughter of Today (1894), has inspired the title of this chapter.8 It is a bildungsroman and kunstlerroman of a young woman who pursues first a formal education in painting, and then a self-taught career in literature. Although she is a small-town Midwestern American placed at the centre of an international novel (and so, at a metatextual level, she is the fictional projec-

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tion of a Canadian author addressed to a more popular market and medium beyond Canada), Duncan’s protagonist and her problems translate the ambiguous situation of Canadian cultural production described above into the more cosmopolitan discourses of New versus Old Worlds and of feminism versus patriarchy. Elfrida Bell is an individualistic New Woman whose persistent idealism leads to a feminist struggle with, and critique of, her society. Her problem as an artist is that she desires to write both as a form of individual expression and as a form of social integration – for she sees, from the exclusions of a woman’s perspective, and contrary to the anti-social pretensions of modernism, that the one form cannot have meaning without the other. Her difficulty, in other words, is to make her writing meaningful both for herself and for others, without compromising one for the other. For in this novel, art and literature are circumscribed by male authority. Individual genius never manages simply to transcend, but seems forced to recognize its image in the mirror of a still masculinist world. The modernist avant-garde, hostile to all that is “bourgeois” and committed only to what is “original” in style, is represented in this novel by the world of painting, centrally French painting of the fin de siècle. An alternative image of modernism, which is inextricably bound to all that is “bourgeois” in its dependency upon a larger and more anonymous, commercial mass market, is the world of writing. Writing is also seen to demand what is “original,” but specifically and merely, in the sense of the novel, the new consumer product. Thus modern painting is seen as an extremely inward, self-expressive project whose development and values are defined within the horizons of the atelier and its “bohemian” micro-culture of artists and disciples. The move to writing and to literature is seen to be much more dependent upon a ground of experience outside art, in a larger horizon of culture and society. That is to say, the painter need only express him or herself and be authorized by a counter-culture that is aestheticist in its indifference and hostility to the bourgeois world (that is, in this novel, to everyone else). The writer, however, must express some external reality, and be authorized by it, or by a literary institution mediated by it. This problem with writing and print is suggested by the male artist hero when Elfrida confesses her ambition to him and he indulges in subtle mockery in the form of a pun. She says: “‘When my best, my real best, sees the life of common – ’ ‘Type,’ he suggested. ‘Type,’ she

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repeated unsmilingly, ’I shall be so insatiate for criticism – I ought to say praise …› The male painter and the female writer both believe in an elitist aestheticism but, while the male painter creates the unique canvas for a salon showing, the female writer creates the mechanically reproduced text for a much wider – and, if the text is to be viable and sell, bourgeois – audience. But writing that sees the life of common type, i.e., print, is ambiguously writing of the common type, i.e., bourgeois.9 Here we see Duncan, with characteristic irony, reflecting through the figure of the male artist the male modernist figuration of bourgeois, mass culture as feminine. It is indeed the conservative and elitist nature of this male artist that causes him finally to reject Elfrida and wish to destroy her. When Elfrida joins a theatre troupe in order to experience the lives of lower class and prostituting women (an uncanny reflection, perhaps, of the bourgeois writer) and the male painter goes to watch her perform, he sees that, like an artist of some common “type,” she is available to be scrutinized and desired by the common people of the theatre crowd – and he cannot bear his admiration and desire for her being mirrored in theirs.10 While writing, like painting, has its own modernist-elite culture, therefore, its values and authority are ambiguated by the nature of print as a mechanical medium without “aura” and of publishing as a commercial medium available to and largely dependent upon bourgeois and mass culture.11 Writing, in this sense, involves Duncan’s protagonist not only implicitly, in a private or inward journey of development, but in an emphatically public and socially conflicted, outward journey of development that causes her to confront and cross borders of nation and class and sex in the work of writing, which had remained outside the frame in the work of painting. Elfrida, as the Duncan scholar Misao Dean has pointed out, shares this problem with her author. Dean observes that Elfrida’s attempt to mediate radical art and popular success is schematized in the novel, as a conflict between national types – the conventional British and the individualistic American – which implies a Canadian perspective, appropriate to Duncan, caught between the two.12 But if the modernist scholar Lionel Trilling is right, this perspective may in a sense be exemplary, rather than idiosyncratic. Trilling brought attention – in the post-war period, which saw both the canonization of high modernist literature and a great boom in public higher education – to the apparent paradox that anti-social literature had come to be institutionalized, assimilated to modern, bourgeois education.13 Such ad-

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versarial forms of expression – perhaps in exemplary fashion, that paradoxical irony like Duncan’s, which distances the modernist sensibility from its modernity while denying escape from it – may be further understood from the historical perspective afforded by the Marxist critic, Fredric Jameson. Jameson argues that modernism ironically but logically expresses a desire that is dialectical, with opposing but interdependent facets, rather than unified. It may well cry out, in utopian fashion, for values lost in a past or future world beyond reification, beyond the treatment of what is human as inert or abstract, as mere rationale of and matter for progress and profit. This is the modernist idealism marked in Elfrida’s fantasy world of “Bohemia,” in which art and life are identical and transcend the petty materialist values and patriarchal constraints of bourgeois society. But in order for her idealism to make this cry, it also retreats in conservative fashion into an aestheticism proper to the neutralizing compartmentalization of bourgeois modernity itself. This is the modernist horizon marked by Duncan in the masculinist avant-garde and in the degradation of Elfrida’s liberal ideals to the status mere of egoism.14 Duncan’s feminism is entangled in this modernist double-bind, just as Elfrida’s writing is at war with it, to imagine and to realize in art the fusion of such a utopian desire with the medium of a “common type.” This, I would suggest, is also the general and founding precondition of the modern Canadian novelist and novel, whose medium is a national culture in which the specialized borderline between high and popular art has not yet been instituted; that is, a culture lacking those fortified borderlines – produced by the specialization and reifying compartmentalization of activities and interests under modern life – between the art audience and the popular audience, between the languages and means of art, and the languages and means of popular consumption.15 This problem is also the explicit and unresolvable theme – leading also, interestingly in the light of my argument in the next chapter, to a failure of form – of the rambling, naturalistic novel by J.G. Sime, Our Little Life: A Novel of Today (1921).16 It is set in downtown Montreal, and is about a cosmopolitan-educated but impoverished young writer, Robert Fulton, who gradually reads sections of the manuscript of his “Canada book” to an illiterate and poor seamstress, Miss McGee, his neighbour and companion. Early in the novel, at Robert’s first reading, Miss McGee senses the tremendously seductive value of Robert’s work – having the uniqueness of being written specifically about “her,” that

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is, addressed to her sensibility and condition as a Canadian – but she also senses a contradiction between this value and the cosmopolitan, “high art” language in which it is realized. “Had Robert been able to say what his Paper said in burning personal words, the one half of Miss McGee would have risen and cast the other half from it and answered him in words as burning as his own. It was Robert’s method that got between him and his listener. It was the technicality of his writing – the literary form in which he chose to en-wrap his thought – that put Miss McGee off. She had never been taught the use of specialized tools like that – she didn’t understand; how could she?”17 The signal distinctions projected here upon genre are simultaneously between the personal and the technical, and between the common and the specialized. Like Duncan, Sime disfigures her popular genre – a proletarian romance – in order to try to resolve these distinctions. While such a technical and specialized work of art, in this novel’s fictional world, has no audience, it does set the key to a narrative register which, for the reader, competes ambiguously with the easier coherence and progress of naturalist facts and sexual plots. The technical and specialized developments of literature exemplified in the quotation above are what enable, for example, what the next chapter will find emblematic: the psychoanalytic abstraction of an emergent, fluid interiority – of the deeply personal, as a metaphor for the obscurely collective – which has, as yet, no new words with which to name itself and its powerful desires. So it is that to Miss McGee, “It didn’t matter that he said” (but it does to some implied or hypothetical, unreal reader!) that: ‹in Canada’s atmosphere there is something young; something of that awakening self-consciousness and ambition and vague sense of latent power that exercises a fascination over many of us. It is the spirit of aroused egoism walking abroad, but just as the first conscious manifestations of the ego in himself are fascinating to the individual, so Canadian life is fascinating to those who come to it in something of a kindred spirit.’ … She hadn’t the slightest idea what all that was about.”18 Why we do, but don’t – why we are asked to divide our allegiance between knowing and not knowing, self-knowledge and mystery, words and lack of words – is what “all that,” and this book, are about. Unreal Country is divided into chapters which explore what I consider, at least in a preliminary gesture, four of the most basic dimensions for interpretation of the modern Canadian novel written in

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English. Of course there are more, but I hope that these will provide a useful introductory landscape to be refined or redrawn by others. My plan is not to unfold my thesis from beginning to end, but to present a primary argument in chapter 1 to illuminate the persistent background against which differences in the interests of writers of the period may be explored and categorized. It also functions as a baseline of narrative form, upon which rest the other dimensions of form and content highlighted in the subsequent chapters. Chapter 1 is devoted to the modern Canadian allegory of the nation as youth, and the significance of the bildungsroman as the narrative form and genre demanded by it. This genre, I suggest, has a special development in Canada which can be understood as a non-canonical form of modernism arising from a postcolonial rather than a metropolitan sensibility – one basic to Canadian nationalism (and, paradoxically, imperialism, about which more in chapter 4) in the first half of the twentieth century. This thesis is not intended to have a complicated relationship to the matter of subsequent chapters, but is intended only to justify my working assumptions in those chapters about the relevance of generic patterns of self-development and modernist discontinuities in narrative style. The meaning of style as such, specifically in relation to expressionism, is pursued in chapter 2. Here I focus on two novels, by Bertram Brooker and Sinclair Ross, and in so doing make a shift in method from an argument based upon a broad survey, which I use in chapter 1 to introduce my thesis and indicate its scope, to the series of closer readings, which allow more substantial arguments and open up a greater diversity of discourses, in my remaining chapters. In chapter 3 I turn my attention to novels by Frederick Philip Grove, Martha Ostenso, and Ethel Wilson, in order to explore a signal formal and conceptual trope in novels by men as well as women: the feminine coding of historical time. In chapter 4 I explore another important mode of difference insisted upon in these modern novels, that of region and regionalism. Here I examine Nova Scotian novels by Thomas Raddall, Ernest Buckler, and Alice Jones. Another relevant dimension of modern literature is the encoding of racial difference, lucid and thorough study of which has already been presented by Terrence Craig in the modern period chapters of his Racial Attitudes in English-Canadian Fiction, 1905– 1980.19 Craig’s analysis illuminates the conflict between a conservative racism that is dominant, and a liberal understanding that is

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gradually gaining popular (and literary canonical) status with the influx of immigrant populations over the first half of the century. Rather than repeat his analysis here, I would like chapter 4, which employs concepts of economic class and imperialist ideology, to complement it. There remains, moreover, the great question of aboriginal representation in Canadian modernism, a question that goes to the core of and exposes the limits to my exploration of a national modernity history and theory. My focus here on the novel, however, is not adequate to the demands of this question; I prefer to take it up in a study to follow this one. I wish also to note that despite the more selective method of the latter chapters, I have endeavoured to extend my range of reference in order to explain and justify their selection from a larger field. In a concluding chapter, I attempt briefly to suggest what the limits of all these modernist tendencies might be in fiction of the more recent period, and so to acknowledge the point at which postmodernism makes its unmistakable difference felt.

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one

Genre: Modernism and the Bildungsroman

Readers of modern Canadian novels have sometimes wrestled with the feeling that, while occasional works have distinctive qualities or concerns, any view toward a common denominator in the modern Canadian novel as such exposes something rather shameful – whether a too-studious colonialism, conservatism, or conventionalism, some kind of generalized limitation pressing in upon it – which might form a negative ground for distinctive works, but not a more general, active, formally innovative ground in literary history. But such feelings can provide us with our starting point, too, if we spring them into dialectical relationship with other texts. The following night-thoughts, for example, bothered a prominent literary critic, mid-century: If the multi-generational family history is a formulaic genre in England and the United States … why not in Canada? Why has our novel confined itself to the span of a single life? Is it, rather improperly, I think, a concentration on the individual at the expense of social continuity? But perhaps it sees beyond the individual, not in time, but in space – in the labyrinths of society … But alas, it is just as hard to find a community type of story, in which the social framework is dominant and individuals suppressed to their relative statures. This must be why there is so little urban fiction, and instead, everywhere we look, a tendency to isolate the human unit for study in narratives that plant him on a farm or take him almost solitary into the woods, or most often, into a small town which simply allows playing up the individual while employing a manageable background and ready-made types for relief – the small town as foil. And what about other kinds of social identity, other than community? … Hmmm. Consciousness of racial identity is blurry. National identity, no better. There is regionalism, of course, but …

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one utterly indifferent to history, political or social or economic or otherwise. It’s just the regionality of individual experience. Always the return to the individual … the individual as the medium through which we experience time and space and others. Must we believe that the modern novel in Canada flows from deep conviction that life only matters as it surges through the individual soul? This is what worried William Arthur Deacon, pre-eminent journalist and literary critic for the Globe and Mail, when he attempted in 1936 to sum up the particular modernism toward which the Canadian novel had turned since the nineteenth century.1 I call them “night-thoughts” because, despite the apparent ineluctability of his conclusions, he could not abide them. While anxious that Canadian writers might be prejudicially indifferent to the supra-individualist shapes of modernity, he clung to the view, expressed in the same essay, that modern Canadian writing was perfectly catholic and heterogeneous, both in form and content – both “free from any joint preconception about life in general and their country in particular,” and “free to apply whatever [aesthetic] treatment the case requires,” without conforming to existing conventions. Therefore, despite the common denominator of a novel obsessed with the narration of individual development and experience, Deacon was able to “rejoice” that the Canadian novel had come of age “without the possibility of a common denominator”! The whole question of the representation of the individual as a determining form, so brilliantly perceived, he thus awkwardly displaces into the individuality of indeterminate style: thank goodness the formulaic novels that “preach” to us are gone, and the experimental ones, which “demonstrate” what “is,” have arrived. True enough to a degree, but … what about this persistent individual, this figure which, however twisted or distorted by such experimentation, remains itself enough to digest it all again, to embody it?

youth One look at the four novels that are Deacon’s exemplars – Mazo de la Roche’s Jalna, Frederick Philip Grove’s A Search for America, Laura Goodman Salverson’s The Lord of the Silver Dragon, and Morley Callaghan’s Strange Fugitive, all published between 1927 and 1928 – reveals a further common factor. Not only do they all centre on individual lives but they gravitate to the period of youth, to the making of lives, and of individuality as such, by the young. Every

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one of the four narratives introduces its protagonist at a moment of transition between youth and maturity, when a decisive place and function in the world must be chosen, and each one plots his or her ambivalent and problematic striving towards it. In Jalna, Alayne undergoes her development to maturity in a transition from city to country, while her estranged husband, Eden, undergoes his maturity in the reverse direction (which sends him, at last to the wilderness). A Search for America begins, “I was twenty-four years old when one day,” as its protagonist, Philip, sets out to look for a new home and life possibilities in the New World, ultimately settling on the life of a teacher and writer in Western Canada at the novel’s conclusion. The protagonist of The Lord of the Silver Dragon, a historical romance that novelizes the epic life of Leif Ericsson, at first seems remote from the modern angst which motivates and ambiguates the youthful identities of Eden, Alayne, and Philip. But even this novel initiates its plot in the generation gap between a faltering, impotent king and his more vital but unproven son, who strives to define his own value as he strives to “right” his culture through conquest. In Strange Fugitive, the restless young Harry turns to crime to find his fortunes; it is the story of a fatal spiral of unsatisfied desire for the legitimation, by his world, of his individual worth. For the protagonists of any of these novels, neither childhood nor adulthood is afforded much narrative space. In the latter two, our heroes die early deaths. The individual life. The transition from youth to maturity. It is clear to what genre these narrative constraints belong. The brilliance of Deacon’s insight is to have revealed this primal form of the modern Canadian novel in English: the bildungsroman. Within and without the canon, however constructed, it appears a veritable obsession from turn-of-the-century to mid-century novels of individual development, experienced as transitions from youth to maturity (or their failure), as travels and educations (or their failure), or as the making of chosen careers (or their failure): The Imperialist (Lorne and Advena), Anne of Green Gables (Anne), Whiteoaks of Jalna (Finch), Possession (Derek), Settlers of the Marsh (Niels), Wild Geese (Lind), White Narcissus (Richard), Rockbound (David), Strange Fugitive (Harry), Such Is My Beloved (Dowling), Waste Heritage (Matt), Deep Hollow Creek (Stella), Roger Sudden (Roger), Barometer Rising (Penelope), Two Solitudes (Paul), Who Has Seen the Wind (Brian), As For Me and My House (I), By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (I), In

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Search of Myself (I), Hetty Dorval (Frankie), The Nymph and the Lamp (Isabel), The Mountain and the Valley (David) … and so on. To spell out but a few of these: Ernest Buckler’s David moves from an ambivalently pastoral identity to an intransigently alienated one, always producing a zero sum out of his contradictory relationships alternately with rustic and modern people, with the book of nature, and with the schoolbook. Thomas Raddall’s Isabel moves from the city to the wilderness to the country to the wilderness again, learning both how to empower herself in the modern world and why she must opt out of it. Hugh MacLennan’s Penelope, the only character in the novel who is not a fixed type but who develops, is virtually the same as Isabel. So is Mazo de la Roche’s Alayne, though she sees opting out as just as problematic, since the elemental man who awaits her (like Derek in Possession) is not as affirmatively romanticized as he is in Raddall or MacLennan. Raymond Knister’s Richard describes the period of his own life after having left the family farm as Goethean wanderjahre and lehrjahre; his return to and second escape from his rural home comprise the ultimate twists and turns of this process. In Martha Ostenso’s romance, the narrative of the failure of the patriarchal Caleb’s self-development works dialectically to produce an antithetical narrative of the young Lind’s growth of consciousness – from her initial fear of the existential truths represented by the “lonely” “cold passion” of the wild geese, to her ultimate affirmation of it. On the last page, the appearance of the birds in flight “marked the beginning and the end of the period of growth.”2 Sara Jeannette Duncan’s Lorne and Advena both struggle – as antetypes of the bildungsroman protagonists in the period to follow – to reconcile inner ideals with an outer social reality, as they strive to define their place in a newly postcolonial, newly modernizing world. All this is a far cry from the adult world of a century earlier, of lives whose mature forms are pre-determined and must simply be lived through – the settlement labours of the Traill and Moodie families, or the martial contests of Richardson’s Wacousta and de Haldimar – in which, various as they are, youth is not a sign of individuality, of the vertigo of freedom and choice, but of uncanny doublings, dialectics, and repetitions originating in a parental type. But then the parent is so clearly the empire, the youth so clearly the colonist who bears the empire within her, within him. From Confederation onward, the land is perceived not as an old colony but as a young nation, and its role within the empire, or out of it, a matter of perennial uncertainty and

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debate. This is the historical and cultural transition I mean to indicate throughout this book in my use of the term, postcolonial, and further nuances I might allow it are discussed in the “Modernism” section of this chapter, below. It is the transition marked by Duncan’s The Imperialist, a novel that acknowledges the emerging breakdown of traditional boundaries of class, religions, politics, and ethnicity in an individualism proper to open-ended modernity: “Any process of blending implies confusion to begin with; we are here at the making of a nation.”3 This postcolonial passage towards a nationhood waiting to be made, waiting to be defined – in The Imperialist, it is encoded in the generation gap, in the metaphor of youth, a metaphor pervasive in Canadian culture and its literature for another halfcentury, until it exhausts itself in the Nietzschean indeterminacy of MacLennan’s Neil in Barometer Rising. Neil no longer believes “the myth that this was a young man’s country,” but, in a kind of second childhood, he surrenders himself – his individual formation, his freedom – to “the still-hidden forces which were doomed to shape humanity” in the century to come.4 Whenever Canadian literature is summed up in the early twentieth century, one of the central metaphors is youth: the youth of a literature (primitive, naïve, but free, open to invention and development) is correlated with the youth of its nation.

nat i o n The nation as youth metaphor pervades the popular culture of postcolonial Canada, which everywhere prophesies the need for, and looks for signs of the maturity of, a “national consciousness” and self-awareness: “The young nation has a soul, which is striving to be articulate.”5 No wonder if these signs and articulations are sought in literature and the arts, as the expression of a young and wandering, collective protagonist. She makes her debut in a literary anthology of 1889 – “Canada, Eldest Daughter of the Empire, is the Empire’s completest type! She is the full-grown of the family, – the one first come of age and gone out into life as a nation …”6 – but she is everywhere to be seen in the period of popular, Romantic nationalism that followed the Great War. The guiding model of the “family” has disappeared, and there is an increased sense of an indeterminate freedom and uncertainty in her “coming of age”: “On the surface though Canada be prosaic and commonplace, there is deep down in the

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nation’s heart a capacity for the ideal … When Canadians figure their country to themselves, they call up no cypher of population, no symbol of territory, no statistic of trade, but the image of a woman, young and fair, with the flush of sunrise on her face.” Thus observed Archibald MacMechan, navigating the “headwaters” of Canadian literature in 1924, who nevertheless concludes his book by admitting that he expects very little of this ephemeral, transitional literature to last, to “be saved from the wreck.”7 This sense of transition persists well into the 1940s – which was still, according to A.J.M. Smith, “only now ceasing to be colonial” – in the achievement of a national bildung narrated by Desmond Pacey: “The process by which a country becomes increasingly civilized is, like the growth of a child toward mental and emotional maturity, a progress toward greater self-awareness … [that is,] the intelligent and purposive comprehension of one’s nature and circumstances, of one’s strengths and weaknesses, the understanding of one’s past which makes possible the informed direction of one’s future. Literature is to the nation what memory coupled with intelligence is to the person.” 8 But there is an ambivalence and instability in the closure of this transition, in the outcome of a self-consciousness which remains unwritten. The national allegory of youth engages a narrative, but cannot close it. “It seems inevitable, at this particular moment in our history, that there should be an increasing preoccupation with the national ego, for we desire to know, not only of what stuff we are made, but the destiny to which we are born.” It is an anxious time, with a future rosy only to the naïve. “We are still adolescent, with the faults and virtues of youth”: At the very beginning of things we are likewise just beginning to lay the foundation stones of a national literature and art … In the first place our literature is marked by simplicity and sincerity, the eagerness and genuineness of youth … Pippa, the Canadian poet [playing on Browning’s Pippa, and perhaps the great expectations of Dicken’s Pip], gazes for ever into the roseate morn … In all that concerns us we are in the pioneer stage … [T]here is a will to explore and invent … Our literature, as well as our art, must take the road.9

This open-endedness is emphasized by another anthologist, who rehearses Pierce’s paradigm of youth in national and literary formation:

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“Canada is a young country, and in general the spirit of its literature is the spirit of youth. Youth is characterized by simplicity, sincerity, eagerness, romanticism, idealism, optimism, courage, and the spirit of adventure, and all of these qualities are found in Canadian literature. The attitude of youth toward convention is often inconsistent, and this is true also of the spirit of Canadian literature.”10 The coming to self-awareness in a youthful quest for selfunderstanding is the nationalist theme for the first anthology specifically devoted to Canadian prose fiction. And here the sense of a post-traditional individualism and its instability over time is most forceful: “Only by being self-contained and true to our individuality could we have attained to an indigenous literature … The Wilds are grim, yes, the Barrens may claim your life; bad men and wild animals abound. But yet there is youth, health, virtue, above all, luck.” 11 These wilds and barrens are, of course, not just the troublesome facts of life on a frontier, but projections of a more general, modern consciousness, as the authors of The Kindred of the Wild and Wild Animals I Have Known recognized.12 Barrens, youth, chance: it is the same world which confronts and defeats the idealism of Duncan’s Lorne, the world of instability and risk in a materialistic culture of business-minded individuals and their pragmatically defined common causes. The indeterminate future of Lorne’s lost illusions, as for the chancy future of his young nation, was a broadly based sensibility merely echoed by Duncan in the memorable closure of The Imperialist: “Here, for Lorne and for his country, we lose the thread of destiny.”13 Modern Canadian literary commentary is studded with phrases that herald “intellectual development,” the “growth of consciousness” into a “consciousness of our own,” and the “self-conscious society” which questions and reveals its own “ego.”14 This narrative of bildung, which links literary to national history reflected the dominant values and perceived function of culture itself, as primarily educational. This was partly due, says cultural historian Maria Tippett, to the kind of nationalist literary criticism articulated above, which implicitly cast writers and artists in the role of educative models or explicatory guides. But this was only one source: “A variety of circumstances were in fact giving the cultural producer that function. The decline of traditional religion … was one; the need to fit immigrants into their new society was another; a continuing urge to stimulate national feeling was a third;

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and there was also a feeling that art could teach people to cope with urbanization and mechanization.”15 It was into this milieu that the bildungsroman, the novel of education, emerged as a primary form.

bildungsroman The determining problematic of the bildungsroman, both in form and content, has long been an evident common concern of the modern Canadian novel: a dialectic of the actual and the ideal. Its archetypal form may be found in the Hegelian dialectic which underwrites Goethe’s novel about the coming of age – in love, art, and business – of Wilhelm Meister. The bildungsroman has been studied according to a range of generic definitions. At one extreme is the very specific genre novel of the idealistic or passionate young bourgeois male touring society in order, by mastering his talents and resources and by testing his aspirations against its moral ambiguities and spiritual ambivalences, to take a meaningful position within it. This genre emphasizes the literal “apprenticeship” of an individualistic youth to the patriarchal powers and duties of his world, and takes Wilhelm Meister closely as its model.16 This novel’s fluid, unpredictable, arbitrary, digressive, yet teleologically authorized narrative follows a pattern of ideals passionately expressed in action, then deconstructed in real experience, releasing new desires and new ideals, and so on, in the wandering but contingent freedom of a young bourgeois life. When we see this form in postcolonial Canada, we find the representation of the “ideal” inescapably in the light of a transfigured imperialism (discussed further in chapter 4), and the “actual” or “real” marked by Canadian historical particularities – regions, races, classes, genders, languages – to which the new ideals must adapt or correspond. For Canadian fiction, as Philip Child says in his retrospective view of it in 1938, the real and the “distinctively and characteristically Canadian” are the same thing; realism is a descent into Canadian national particularity and the effort to realize or renovate the realm of inherited ideals and values therein. Child expresses all this in an epigram drawn from Goethe himself, which echoes the realist problematic of Wilhelm Meister: “What we have inherited from our forefathers we must earn over again for ourselves if we would truly possess it.”17 I take Duncan to be the original writer of this form in Canada, of which The Imperialist is the archetype. Not only Duncan but Canadian writers for half a century after her continue to feel the need to

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insist upon an element of idealism, and its language of romance, in modern realist fiction. Indeed, realism is understood, from Duncan and Roberts to Salverson, Grove, and Callaghan, not to oppose romance, but to absorb it.18 As I suggested in my introduction, this absorption may be thought of as a kind of turning-inside-out of realism and romance alike, where realism must always register an incomplete reality, and romance an historicized wish, and therefore to mark the production of a new formal practice. It is here, at the gap between imagined values and real experience – “here,” as Duncan says, “at the making of a nation” – that formal experimentation will originate, as the writer (and his or her protagonist) tries to “earn” the authority of romance “over again” as a real, independent development, “for ourselves.” In the postcolonial bildungsroman, then, an isometry of nation and narration authorizes the figure of the individual as a determining form, and authorizes his or her transition from youth to maturity as a determining paradigm, to carry, to plot out, and to resolve if possible this existential anxiety attending the making of a home, a belonging. I am arguing that this genre, while certainly not definitive or all-inclusive even for the novel alone, is yet a dominant one, whose analysis reveals much about the structures of feeling and interest in Canadian modernity.19 It is this egocentric form, with its paradigm of youth, which underwrites the projection – necessarily transcending the impersonal detachment of conventional modern naturalism and realism alike – of a new and self-conflicted, “imagined community.” 20 But does that seem out of place in a Western literary world that had discovered and apparently exhausted the bildungsroman genre a full century ago? Is the “sense of a beginning” which attends a new nationhood strong enough alone to produce such a dominant literary imagination? Does the mere notion of political nationhood invade so readily and completely the nooks and crannies of everyday life? In a country whose national liberation was confined, in its transformative benefits, nearly exclusively to the British society which had ruled it as a colony, and whose political responsibility to the Imperial centre remained a matter for indecision and dispute from the time of Confederation well into the 1920s, this can hardly seem plausible. But there was a much deeper and more immediate sense of a beginning to which postcolonial nationhood hitched itself. This was the dawning recognition of its subjection to a global modernity.

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Confederation itself was coincident in Canada, not with a social revolution but with an industrial revolution, by which I mean not only the new National Policy of trade protection (enacted actively to encourage manufacturing, hence to hasten the development of a local market and capital accumulation) but also the new technologization and capitalist structuring of agriculture (enabling, for example, the specialization and industrialization of wheat-growing for the wheat boom at the beginning of the century), which resulted in what I will later call the “invisible city” in the country – a modern industrial history represented archetypally by Grove in The Master of the Mill, but casting its anti-pastoral shadow on nearly every rural fiction of the century.21 It is important to remember that English Canada as a whole never had a pre-modern rural society, but developed from a premodern resource economy to a modernized agricultural and industrial one. Rural settlement was based mostly on systems of credit, rather than ownership. Although fish and furs had ceased to drive the Canadian economy, at the end of the nineteenth century the leading exports (and raison d’être in the imperial and world economies) were still extracted resources – especially timber products. However, the first two decades of this century saw the explosive growth of modern agriculture, industrial manufacturing, and foreign capital investment. The face of society also changed, in both town and country, in a new urbanization of life. The major cities doubled or grew ten times in size, a new wave of non-English-speaking immigrants poured into the nation’s “vertical mosaic” in the country as well as the city, and ethnic and class differences intensified. Although the modern age brought increases in affluence and freedom to many – including women, who achieved rights to higher education and suffrage – and to all who challenged traditions by exploring newly realized religious, social, and sexual roles and values, its economic base was to reveal its volatility in the Depression of the thirties, and the political world its volatility in two world wars.22 For better or worse, the period felt the definitive experience of modernity, in which “all that is solid melts into air.”23 It is this new experience, devoid of a culture that would explain it, which fell under the sign of the new “nation” – as novels explicitly concerned with Canadian national identity as varied as Duncan’s The Imperialist, Salverson’s The Viking Heart, and MacLennan’s Two Solitudes testify. The same experience presented itself to Continental Europeans at the beginning of the nineteenth century and originally expressed itself,

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argues Franco Moretti, in the form of the bildungsroman. The bildungsroman is the “symbolic form” by which a modernizing society, through the conceptual lens of “youth,” attempts to attach a meaning to its new and bewildering self, to grow into the mastery of selfconsciousness. The subjectivity of the bourgeois individual, who must make his or her own way in the world and is relatively free to do so, becomes the point of intersection for the forces of motivation and change in a post-traditional world: Already in Meister’s case, “apprenticeship” is no longer the slow and predictable progress towards one’s father’s work, but rather an uncertain exploration of social space, which the nineteenth century – through travel and adventure, wandering and getting lost, “Bohême” and “parvenir” – will underline countless times. It is a necessary exploration: in dismantling the continuity between generations, as is well known, the new and destabilizing forces of capitalism impose a hitherto unknown mobility. But it is also a yearned for exploration, since the selfsame process gives rise to unexpected hopes, thereby generating an interiority not only fuller than before, but also – as Hegel clearly saw, even though he deplored it – perennially dissatisfied and restless.

It is this image of youth as a figure of mobility and restlessness which focalizes for a society its own, new modernity – as “a bewitching and risky process full of ’great expectations’ and ’lost illusions,› as “a ’permanent revolution’ that perceives the experience piled up in tradition as a useless dead-weight, and therefore can no longer feel represented by maturity, and still less by old age.” In this respect, youth stands for “dynamism and instability,” and is “the sign of a world that seeks its meaning in the future rather than in the past.” But for Moretti there is a second dimension to the notion of youth, which sets limits upon the first: youth is brief, it comes of age, it comes to an end. If the first dimension plots the potential formlessness of modernity, threatening to disintegrate the novel itself, the most plastic of forms, entirely, the second dimension plots a formal closure in the limits and ends of an individual life and subjectivity. The bildungsroman, which plots modernity in “youth,” is intrinsically contradictory, he concludes, for it is caught in form and content between “dynamism and limits, restlessness and the ‘sense of an ending.›24 It is easy to see the very same principles at work in the modern Canadian novel. What I have called its archetype, The Imperialist,

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dispenses with the past as a determining force in its first sentence – which introduces the devastating parody of the Mother Country and its exhausted icon reduced to a kind of impotent myth, a shade who, like Homer’s Tiresias, becomes substantial only when she drinks the lifeblood of the marketplace: “It would have been idle to inquire into the antecedents, or even the circumstances, of old Mother Beggarlegs.” Her occupation was clear; she presided like a venerable stooping hawk, over a stall in the covered part of the Elgin market-place … She came, it was understood, with the dawn; with the night she vanished, spending the interval on a not improbable broomstick … She belonged to the group of odd characters, rarer now than they used to be, etched upon the vague consciousness of small towns as in a way mysterious and uncanny; some said that Mother Beggarlegs was connected with the aristocracy and some that she had been “let off” being hanged. The alternative was allowed full swing, but in any case it was clear that such persons contributed little to the common good, and, being reticent, were not entertaining. So you bought your gingerbread …25

Despite an incredible range of conjecture on the part of her contemporary critics, Duncan really leaves little room for doubt that this figure of the obsolescent parent – like the Family Compact, an image alternatively noble or criminal, in activity reduced or denuded (anatomically exposed, as the narrator puts it) to commerce and trifles, and not only belonging to a forgotten past but, because of “a hasty conclusion,” removed from the future – is a parody of Victoria’s Empire. “It is hard to invest Mother Beggarlegs with importance, but the date helps me … she was a person to be reckoned with on the twenty-fourth of May.” The first action of the novel, the young protagonist Lorne’s interaction with Mother Beggarlegs, allegorizes the narrative of lost illusions to come: “He asked her sociably one day, in the act of purchase, why the gilt was generally off her gingerbread. He had been looking long, as a matter of fact, for gingerbread with the gilt on it, being accustomed to the phrase on the lips of his father in connection with small profits. Mother Beggarlegs, so unaccustomed to politeness [from the children] that she could not instantly recognize it, answered him with an imprecation, at which he, no doubt, retreated, suddenly thrown on the defensive, hurling the usual taunt.”26 The disillusionment of his “active sympathy” for others, his desire for their welfare, is played

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out in the narrative that follows, as he fails to realize his ideals first in England, when he takes part in an effort to sell the ideals represented by preferential imperial trade to English politicians, and then at home, when as a parliamentary candidate he tries to sell the same ideals to the people of his local region. But the contradiction between a charitable Lorne Murchison and the stingy Mother is not Duncan’s ultimate focus here. It is rather, with Duncan’s characteristic irony, a contradiction internalized in Lorne himself, who after all can only articulate his charitability, in this passage, in the language of profit and loss, of surplus value – the language of commerce and materialism which, as the narrator here explicitly observes and as his patronym Murchison (and he is a merchant’s son) more generally suggests, is his inescapable inheritance. It is this internal contradiction, not his ideals or his business canniness alone, which specially qualifies him for his entry into politics. Lorne is originally singled out for a political career by his performance in the court of law, when he demonstrates his ability to conceal a pragmatic truth (of what works for him, to survive, to prosper) beneath the aestheticized projection of an idealist truth (of an essential structure, an alleged story to be revealed). In the defence of his client, Lorne constructs a fiction that is no more true, but more attractive, than his opponent’s fiction: The fact that the defence was quite as extraordinarily indebted to circumstantial evidence as the prosecution in no way detracted from the character of Lorne’s personal triumph; rather, indeed, in the popular view … enhanced it … You saw the plot at once as he constructed it … The cunning net unwove itself, delicately and deliberately, to tangle round the lady. There was in it that superiority in the art of legerdemain, of mere calm, astonishing manipulation, so applauded in regions where romance has not yet been quite trampled down by reason. Lorne scored; he scored in face of probability, expectation, fact; it was the very climax and coruscation of score. He scored not only by the cards he held but by the beautiful way he played them.27

The effect of this passage, read attentively, is to deconstruct any truth value connected with Lorne’s success, and to emphasize instead the (tendentially Nietzschean) will of his art, of his aestheticized game. His idealism becomes a mere rhetorical vehicle for the same art, the passage quoted continuing: “His nature came into this, his gravity and gentleness, his sympathy, his young angry irony.” The point is

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not to show that he is one thing or the other, but, in his youthful innocence and indeterminacy, both things at once. He is the man of the marketplace, who must obsessively “score” against his opponent in the game, who becomes – in a mise-en-abyme worthy of that mobile idealist Julien Sorel – the double of that rival, as he does both of the rhetorician in law whom he bests, and of the card-playing gambler he defeats. But he is also the man of the higher passions, who must believe in the social justice of his ends, in his taking a place prepared for him by society. A young man born of a small town bourgeoisie, he must make his own way in life; he will travel to the metropolitan centres and to the rural peripheries, in Canada, England, and America; he will leave business, learn the law, enter politics, without settling in any of them; he will fall in love and lose it. In the end he will achieve nothing certain, but he embodies the youth driven by modern – and paradigmatically postcolonial – mobility and restlessness, its desire and promise, as well as the youth driven by the sense of an ending, of arrival, of destiny.28 In The Imperialist, Lorne’s experience of modernity corresponds to that of his sister and parallel protagonist, Advena. She is a New Woman in all but name, having prepared for herself a career in education rather than in marriage and devoted herself to liberal discourses of modern literature and ideas. The importance of the Advena narrative is that it parallels Lorne’s in its struggle to realize, in the private sphere of love, the idealism, and the freedom to project this idealism, which Lorne struggles to realize in the public sphere of politics. Except … it has a happy ending. Her narrative follows the “classical” bildungsroman structure, which Moretti analyses in Wilhelm Meister and Pride and Prejudice, in which the protagonist (and her lover) must wander in the wilderness of their own “pride” and “prejudice” before submitting to the legitimation of their society. This last must come from without – in this case, from the plotting of a Dr Drummond – but be internalized for their own good, in a sacrifice of their ideals (and mobility and restlessness) to their happiness (and stability and security). Despite initial appearances, this compromise does not leave Advena’s case much less ambivalent than Lorne’s, because she has pursued a development in the public sphere (unlike, say, Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet) which remains untranslated into the private one.29 Both Lorne and Advena, forced by necessity into a world in which they must make their own way, develop from this mobility an interi-

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ority that is free to project ideal selves unsatisfied by the past and present way of the world, and to which they cling until compromise forces their hand. Thus in Freudian fashion do they learn, as does their nation, the reality principle of the pragmatic ego, which must endlessly work to integrate the democratic talents and drives of a pleasure principle beyond good and evil with the super-ego of an internalized imperialism, to achieve a secure, if less romantic, good. In this move, imperialism – to extend an argument made by Ajay Heble, and to anticipate my own discussion in chapter 4 – is detached from the duration of history to become an aesthetics of individual limits, and is absorbed into a liberal view of the nation as an art form.30 “The shuttles fly, weaving the will of the nations, with a skein for ever dipped again; and he goes forth to his share in the task among those by whose hand and direction the pattern and the colours will be made.”31 Not an altogether sanguine image, considering that “those” refers, most immediately, to the Nietzschean lawyer who first exploited Lorne’s idealism for pragmatic ends.

compromise The classical bildungsroman narrative is one trajectory of this form in modern Canadian fiction. It provides a relatively evident narrative structure for the protagonist of L.M. Montgomery’s Anne series, whose development turns on the excess of her imagination, the excess of her desire, and her play with words, which must ultimately be compromised to the practical aims of a more normalized social integration. It is less evident, perhaps, as the underlying structure of F.P. Grove’s Settlers of the Marsh, in which the young immigrant Niels comes to the Western frontier to build an ideal world for himself and to marry according to his dreams but, as these devolve into a grotesque parody of themselves, learns that they can only be realized by submitting them to negotiation and refashioning. Unlike Niels’s first employer, Amundsen – or unlike his avatars, Caleb Gare in Martha Ostenso’s Wild Geese or Hetty Dorval in Ethel Wilson’s Hetty Dorval – Niels learns that legitimation comes not from within but from without, in the eyes of the community (which are mediated, significantly, by the transcending gaze of the unnamed “warden” at this novel’s conclusion). This moral closure, which insists that an individualistically lived and unpredictably plotted life reveal a retrospective teleology toward social integration and compromise, similarly informs the

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contradictory sense of narrative development for Derek in Possession, Penelope in Barometer Rising, Lind in Wild Geese, and Stella in Deep Hollow Creek. Such normative closures belong, Moretti indicates, to one of the two competing plot forms that together structure a bildungsroman narrative. The other and contradictory one is transformative, driven by the limitlessness of modern possibility. In Settlers of the Marsh, it is the vision of pure external mobility and internal restlessness which is Niels’s paradoxical passion – paradoxical because it both drives him forward in the plot of his own destruction, and drives him toward the deeper senses of social responsibility and physical achievement which transcend that destruction. This mobility and restlessness is exposed at the naked heart of Niels’s development, when he is rejected by Ellen: “A new dream rose: a longing to leave and to go to the very margin of civilization, there to clear a new place; and when it was cleared and people began to settle about it, to move on once more, again to the very edge of pioneerdom, and to start it all over anew … That way his enormous strength would still have meaning. Woman would have no place in his life.”32 This is the mobility and restlessness narrative which is closed off by the warden’s retrospective plotting of Niels’s life, when he assimilates Niels’s story, and hence Niels himself, to a transcending social condition: “It was the warden who made him think, remember about the past. It was the warden who slowly, slowly made him see that he was not an outcast … It was the warden who told him that he, too, placed in the same circumstances, might and probably would have acted as Niels had acted.” The warden also mediates the transcending power of others, particularly women, in Niels’s life. When Niels returns from the prison to his farm, and discovers it being taken care of by Mrs Lind, he grasps the significance of her work and presence for him only through the words of the warden, which remind him that she, with others, is his only “human” source of legitimation, and that in granting it she has allowed his own work to go on.33 Hugh MacLennan has forged similarly classical bildungsroman narratives in Barometer Rising and Two Solitudes, both of which end in a marriage or union of youths defined by their independence, indirection, mobility, and restlessness – distinct versions, that is, which correspond to the different aspects of Canadian modernity with which MacLennan is concerned. While in Two Solitudes the protagonists could exchange sexes and tell the same story about negotiations

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between French and English modernities, in Barometer Rising the story is specifically about negotiations between male and female modernities, in both cases against the background of waning traditions. Of the two, the latter struggles the hardest to reach a compromise between the authenticity of individual self-development and the authority – finally expressed as necessity – of social integration. The focus of its narrative development is Penelope – not Neil, who remains essentially unchanged, a type of pure modern vitality, to the end. Penelope grows up in a world that hopes for nothing more for her than domestic bliss; against these expectations she asserts her independence and pursues a college education, and then a professional career. But as a result of her experiences with Neil, Angus Murray, and the explosion that signifies the birth of modernity (an omen akin to the rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem), she is led to sacrifice this liberal independence, which she learns to perceive as illusory, as a mere projection of the alienation belonging to the post-traditional machinery of life. Penelope had begun to feel, at the height of her autonomy, “how helpless her existence had been [referring to her life path] in the current of forces she had been able neither to predict nor control.” At the end she realizes that she can only keep her “integrity” by submitting herself to social bonds – like those that arise naturally in response to the explosion – which counteract her complicity with the volatility of the very modernity she has internalized and which appears to her as her own and others’ destiny. “To force one’s self on into the darkness, to keep one’s integrity as one moved – this was all that mattered because this was all there was left.” The first half of the imperative depends on that modern mobility and restlessness, but the second half depends on resistance to it, on the achievement of a self and a selfknowledge that will struggle against the disintegrative or explosive world of coming transformations. Against the threat of this loss of self, in a move that consolidates the formation of her ego through the self-compromises of a reality principle, she submits herself like a “prisoner” to Neil, and takes on the parenting of their child. But the compromise remains fragile, forged in “darkness,” before the internal contradictions of a modern indeterminacy which can only be repressed, not erased, for others. Neil recognizes this: “Penny had changed. It was difficult to grasp just how she had changed, but something alien had taken root in her mind and whatever it was, it was all her own. She had no intention of sharing it with him.” It is the

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same alien and ineradicable interiority that Penelope recognizes in Neil: “She looked sideways as they passed one of the emergency street lights just installed, and saw Neil’s profile clearly etched for a second; then it merged with the darkness again, and she was left with the impression of a man who seemed strange and unknown.”34 The narrative closure offers the marriage of two unknowns, two solitudes. Penelope is a woman freed from the feminine domestic sphere as well as the masculine professional sphere, and like Wilhelm Meister, only so that she may choose her traditional place as a consequence of this freedom. She is able return, like Ulysses, to her feminine home place only after wandering between the masculine Scylla and Charybdis of technologized war and dehumanized technology. But it is only a contingent choice. It expresses, as the “pressure rises,” an outer contradiction that has been internalized and repressed.35 The “inevitability” she feels in the darkness with Neil and her child is modern, not traditional; it is defined by the unpredictable flux and forces of modern history, whose novel anxiety will always be that, “In a minute there is time / For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.”36 The same ambivalence of pragmatic compromise, rather than synthesis or reconciliation, determines the closure of Two Solitudes, whose marriage of “oil and alcohol” is perversely founded on the beginning – not the end – of a war which offers the allegorically feminized nation the “first irrevocable steps toward becoming herself, knowing against her will that she was not unique but like all the others, alone with history, with science, with the future.”37 We find ourselves far from the peaceable kingdom.

no compromise The other trajectory of the bildungsroman in modern Canadian fiction, perhaps the more typical, is modelled not on the variations upon Advena’s comedic plot form charted above, but on Lorne’s more inconclusive, tendentially tragic one. It simply tips the balance between the two contradictory impulses of the genre, of mobility versus limits, of restlessness versus fulfillment, in modern “youth.” The same author can go either way. For example, while the transgressive desires of de la Roche’s Possession are finally domesticated within conventional class and racial boundaries, in her Jalna these desires and the impossibility of satisfying them remain dominant, leading to the disintegration of class boundaries and marriages, and an inconclusive

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ending in which all the developing characters retreat into the solitude of a failed reality principle and the persistence of the drive for pleasure. In the latter novel, as the lovers separate, the centenarian grandmother, who like Tiresias observes all from a passive distance close to death, demands the erotic touch that will allow her merely to survive, to go on: The sky loomed black above. Beneath her the solid earth, which had borne her up so long, swayed with her, as though it would like to throw her off into space. She blinked. She fumbled for something, she knew not what. She was frightened … She gathered her wits about her. “Somebody,” she said thickly, “somebody kiss me – quick!” … From [Pheasant’s] hug she gathered new vitality. Her arms grew strong. She pressed Pheasant’s young body to her and planted warm kisses on her face. “Ha,” she murmured, “that’s good!” and again – “Ha!”38

So ends a novel with no sense of an ending, allowing its author to continue the narrative in a series of novels – most often exploring the bildung of a character introduced in the first – which has no necessary closure. Similar self-development novels, in which the mobilityrestlessness plot is unable to cast up a teleology that will make retrospective sense of it and so must end as arbitrarily as The Imperialist, are found in as diverse novels as Ernest Buckler’s The Mountain and the Valley and Howard O’Hagan’s Tay John. The protagonists of both these modern bildungs, Tay John and David Canaan, are characterized by a marked, individual difference with respect to their places of origin, which allows them to mediate between a local-traditional and a larger, modern-world space. Contradictorily, both strive to represent a community of others, as their icon or hero, by means of this individuating and compromising difference. Both fail. And fail not only as men, but as symbols, remaining ironized and fragmented to the bitter end. In all such tales, youth never realizes maturity; it either skips over maturity to senility, or it is cut off in its prime. Such an inconclusive bildungsroman is Irene Baird’s Waste Heritage. It is about a new generation of youth without a future, and about social bonds and integrations at all levels – political, social, and romantic – which cannot be realized for them. A solitary, amputated pugilist, in a moment of identification with the younger protagonist, asks the question which defines the novel’s narrative interest: ‹There go a

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coupla real nice boys. They got nothin’, no jobs, no homes, no place to belong in. What’s goin’ to become of them in the end?’ He glared into the maze of bluebottles and because he was lonely again and sad he shouted angrily, ‘That’s what I want someone should tell me. What’s goin’ to become of boys like that in the end?› His question never gets answered. Matt Striker, the protagonist, ends up committing a murder that will send him to prison for life or to his death; his simple-minded companion commits suicide. Like The Imperialist, Waste Heritage is a political novel about a young man who devotes himself to an idealistic social cause that fails to realize its goals, as well as his own. Although recognized for its sympathetic treatment of Left politics in the thirties, it is not – despite Robin Mathews’s powerful but, I think, overcompensatory defence of it as such – a Leftist romance.39 The collective experience is nearly always portrayed as one that threatens either spiritually, by the “organization” (in the submission of individual self-knowledge and meaning to obscure, collective mechanisms) represented by the diabolically rationalist Hep, or physically, by the ever-present possibility of a “riot” (in the seduction of individual self-consciousness to violent crowd emotion) represented by the incendiary Laban. Profoundly ambivalent about the collectivized social world to which he attaches himself, the protagonist vacillates between integration into the organization and preservation of his own freedom of mind and values. The strain between their contradictory demands ultimately unleashes itself in violence against a policeman, a symbol to him of the authority not only of the normative society and government which have abandoned him, but also of the organization which opposes it. Hep tries to convince him that “organization” and self-sacrifice (not to seek work, not to seek love) is the only way, though deferred, of fulfilling the desires and passions that drive Matt’s restless wanderings.40 This reality principle self-destructs, unable to repress the indeterminate passion and imagination of possibility that is all that is left to the desolated youth. Another well-known political novel – in these respects only, remarkably similar – is Earle Birney’s retrospective Down the Long Table (1955), whose protagonist moves through a series of radical Left activist affiliations only to find himself alienated from the social forces of both Right and Left. Nor is this narrative of self-destructive lost illusions restricted to the political novel. The same indeterminate form of bildung is narrated by Morley Callaghan in the business world of Strange Fugitive

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and the theological world of Such Is My Beloved. In these, what Larry McDonald has called Callaghan’s “pessimistic” rather than redemptive vision, rooted in his early and deep absorption by Freudian, Nietzschean, and other currents of modern thought, affects the representation of individual development in an exemplary, almost schematic way.41 The protagonist of Strange Fugitive (1928), Callaghan’s first novel, is Harry Trotter, a young, married man whose need for the world to reflect his value to him, and the failure of the world to do so, drives him to a life of escalating aggressivity. His need for mastery, for a mirror in the world which is subjected to and recognizes his value and identity, draws him into an upward spiral of material success, social notoriety, and sexual power, which is also a downward spiral of violent crime, alienation from and betrayal of others, and sexual ennui. As in The Imperialist and Waste Heritage, social integration demands a historical space and role for the hero, but it is a space and role whose logic and identity elude him. Harry fulfills the modern dream of becoming a “somebody” when he was a “nobody,” but the grounds for that identity continually expand beyond his control. His mastery of ever larger spaces, from the checkers board to the lumber yard to the metropolitan crime organization, never casts back a stable or adequate image of his power or meaning. After assassinating the head of a rival gang, Cosantino, Harry feels a growing identification with him, which he represses even as it fascinates him, until he attends the dead man’s funeral: “At the open grave he shuddered and wouldn’t look at the casket, and standing there bareheaded, he kept his thoughts on the old Irish names on the tombstones, but the softly-weeping [Italian] women elbowing him, annoyed him, and he looked down the long valley at aristocratic vaults like Greek temples and the whole world seemed to become quietly unimportant and he felt sad and sorry for Cosantino and himself.42 The transience of his sense of mastery, coupled with his identification with the victim of his own aggressivity, leads not to a new selfconsciousness, but to a simple reassertion of his need to master a larger space and image than that provided by Cosantino: On the way back from the cemetery he was depressed … He leaned over to one side in the taxi and closed his eyes. He thought of the crowd in the cemetery and longed to surround himself with people who would respect him and look up to him, more influential and stronger than Cosantino, himself in the centre of a crowd, at the head of a long table, a political banquet, a party, the

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biggest party ever thrown in the city, everybody there, ward heelers, big guys, Johnston, the dukes in politics, women and wine and whiskey and food, slabs of it, gobs of it, truck loads of beer, champagne. He opened his eyes and sat up straight. The idea excited him.43

But since Harry is locked in what Jacques Lacan calls the mirror stage of an imaginary ego, as the alternating rival and master of his world, he is not able to negotiate his way into this higher historical realm of criminal power, whose corporate banality lies beyond his understanding. For it is a realm that, ironically, just like the more lawful civilization he left behind, cannot tolerate the unpredictable and uncompromising egocentricity of players like Harry. In the modern setting of Strange Fugitive, as in other bildungsromans whose plots are dominated by the mobility-restlessness impulse and its inconclusive teleology, no form of success or social identity is ever legitimated. It is always projected and deferred into an abstract future, or into the mere principle of transformation that might approach such a future. This “withdrawal of legitimation” from the world around the would-be hero reflects, says Moretti, a crisis in self-representation that comes with modernity.44 So it is that the withdrawal of legitimation from Harry’s world is signified not only by the restless seriality of the plot, but by the figure in which it becomes a fixed image, his estranged wife Vera. It is Vera’s imperfectly satisfied image of Harry, and his need to display his value to her, which starts the plot rolling from the first sentence of the novel. It is her image which haunts him – as the closest thing to a superego he has, in a world without authorities to legitimate him – to its very end. Not the actual Vera, that is, for she remains opaque to him. What he desires is an imaginary Vera, the reflection of his value, which she ultimately presents to him by acknowledging her love for him, even after what he has become, just before his death. Indeed, death functions to close off the narrative at this moment of recognition, to fix, in the only way possible to him, Harry’s image of himself. Death and the imaginary Vera are the same final mirror with which he narcissistically merges. In the climactic telephone call with Vera, Harry wants her to speak to him without his having to speak to her, to leave his own words behind and “become one again” with her, simply “to listen to her.” Indifferent to her own desires for his input, however, he “didn’t want to give any explanations”: “He wasn’t ready for explanations. Explanations had nothing whatever to do with his reason for

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phoning her. Satisfied in his own mind, he felt better. He was sad but not so lonely.” There is no “explanation” for who Harry is or for how Harry develops, apart from the restless and transformative logic of deferred legitimation, whose ideal is ultimately projected upon the unfortunate Vera. His imaginary mastery of and merger with Vera is achieved only with death: before Harry walks out into the night that he knows awaits him with fatal bullets, he “mechanically” thinks, ‹I’m going out to see Vera,› but knows, upon reflection, that “He didn’t expect to see Vera tonight.” 45 With this transient satisfaction, informed only by death, the narrative ends, leaving whoever isn’t dead outside its logic, betrayed by it. Like other protagonists of this kind of bildungsroman, Harry never matures, but remains stuck in a youth whose end is abrupt and unfulfilled. He is just the same as Lorne Murchison and Matt Striker, but more impoverished by his particular class and social experience of Canadian urban modernity, so that instead of their (collective) Imperialist nationalism or Socialist politics, he has only his (estranged) wife to legitimate him. In the later novel which became central to his reputation, Such Is My Beloved (1934), Callaghan offers another version of the bildungsroman driven by a mobility-restlessness plot, just as uncompromising. Legitimation here has its figure in a spiritual object of love, a God who fails to reflect an image of love into the narrative structure of the protagonist’s life, which for Father Dowling is his vocation in the Church. Dowling, like his other avatars in modern Canadian fiction, is a young man at the height of his powers to dream and act, yet he fails adequately to recreate the ideals in reality which motivate and justify him psychologically, and he fails to find legitimation for himself or his ideals reflected back from the world around him – and is not able to develop beyond these failures. His fate in the spiritual world is simply the counterpart to death in Harry’s materialistic world: he goes mad. But Such Is My Beloved is a more sympathetic novel than Strange Fugitive because its discontents are defined by eros rather than aggressivity. This allows a virtual legitimation to be offered to the priest by Midge and Ronnie, the prostitutes with whom he becomes spiritually and sensually obsessed. The two women return Dowling’s love, and legitimize it in the context of his spiritual work, insofar as his work is self-defined. But they are delegitimated themselves, with respect both to the Church and to the larger, bourgeois society which, in Dowling’s parish, the Church partly comprises. Their love and his remain virtual because it is never realizable

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(the prostitutes are discouraged from entering the church to which Dowling attracts them) or never even representable in legitimate terms (it is a problem for the priest that any demonstration of spiritual love might be interpretable as sensual love). While Ronnie and Midge disappear into silence at the end, Dowling finds his legitimating language in the biblical Song of Songs, which, divorced from the Church, becomes a kind of displacement of legitimation into the “mad” autonomy of art. The latter has no form for the protagonist, whose own “commentary” on it remains unfinished (and, judging by his “few” moments of clarity in the asylum, likely will remain so). The spiritual restlessness of the protagonist, and the necessary mobility of the prostitutes, also yields an incomplete narrative, one without a clear teleology for the agonistic youth and his development: “’It must be all to some purpose,› Dowling reflects at the end; ‹It must be worth while, even my madness. It has some meaning, some end.’ And in that quiet room, he wondered where the two girls were and what had become of them; they were among the living, they were moving among those who slowly passed before him, all those restless souls the world over who were struggling and dying and finding no peace …” 46 But whatever meaning is there, in that restless, moving world, is not legitimated by any world outside the modern autonomy of Dowling’s – and perhaps Callaghan’s – art, into which this drive toward an impossible maturity is ambivalently displaced.47 This serves to remind us, in an unexpected way, of the razor’s edge which separates the influence of the transformative plot form from the persistently driving force of the other, toward compromise. I have been hoping to demonstrate that modern Canadian fiction in English is remarkably coherent, both in relation to itself as a symmetrical body of literature, and to the modernity of its time and place. While this might seem unsurprising, it has never been taken for granted. Canadian critics have traditionally been wary of totalizing gestures, and that wariness has been greatest with respect to the modern period. Often seen as a lingering afterlife of Victorian literature or as an ambivalent precursor of postmodern literature, this period has always seemed a “transitional phase,” as John Moss once put it, “which vigourously resists definition.”48 It is hardly a surprise to find, as Frank Davey does in his survey of current scholarly article publishing, that criticism typically restricts its domain of authority to individual authors and works, and allows only supplementary attention to cultural discourses and histories that might relate them

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together and to the collective dimensions of their own, present worlds.49 This practice is laudable in preserving the specificity, and so the adequacy, of our constructions of individual and local cultural contexts for literary expression. It is deplorable if reduced to auteurism or regionalism, since true specificity lays equal claim to particular and general elements of experience. What is general needs to be theorized – put into words, as I said at the outset – in order for what is particular to open itself up to meaningful interpretation. Because the coherence of modern Canadian fiction in English is bound up with the narrative forms and signifiers of youth and a postcolonial independence, and these with the experience of social and economic modernity, this literature is not only modern, but tends toward a coherent modernism. This is a leap, admittedly. The bildungsroman that Moretti describes is still a nineteenth-century genre, modern but not conventionally modernist in form. But that earlier bildungsroman still takes as its domain of action a circumscribed and self-sufficient national space in which all things are continuous and connected by some form of social logic, and of which the protagonist is a kind of roving metonym with undecided valence.50 The national space of the Canadian bildungsroman is a world apart from this. It is ineluctably, as we shall see, a globalized space – neither self-sufficient nor internally continuous and connected. And when a protagonist goes in search of his or her meaning within it, narrative logic and characterization become vulnerable to formal distortions that mark those gaps in modern experience which, though real, have no way of being encoded into realist romance. Hence the distortions of modernism. “There are only two things in the world,” says Weird Beard in Don DeLillo’s Libra: “Things that are true. And things that are truer than true.”51

modernism A working definition of modernism, if it is to be free from foreseeable contestation, is a difficult task. Many of the most memorable, specific characteristics of modernist texts – such as stream of consciousness in prose, or free verse in poetry – hardly hold true across the range of canonical texts; nor do they restrict their usage to the modern period. The paramount, more general characteristic of modernist aesthetics is undoubtedly its experimentalist drive to innovation and novelty. But how can one clearly distinguish modernist

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innovation from literary change and experiment in other periods? In his carefully considered introduction to Modernist Fiction (1992), Randall Stevenson admits the inadequacy of defining modernism thus (unless one is satisfied to define it either by its sheer amount of innovation, and so in quantitative rather than qualitative terms, or by its sheer degree of innovation, as more transformative or subversive of tradition than previous literatures).52 With such sliding scales, how to distinguish modernist from other modern period aesthetics, or from romantic or medieval aesthetics, becomes a real problem. The problem also belongs to the characterization of any literary movement, where the goal is to define it in aesthetic terms only. For this study, I will assume that modernism applies to the intersection of certain innovative aesthetic characteristics with a certain period of social and technological development, and has its meaning in the relationship between the two. This intersection of form and history I explore in greatest depth in chapter 4, where I focus on a particular region. The historical period I refer to as modern – as opposed to usages relating it to the Renaissance or the Enlightenment, for example – is that more recent one for most societies, in which a society is completely structured by capitalist material development together with its effects of class structure, hegemonic liberalism, urbanization, globalization, and, importantly for modernism, the penetration of commodification and mechanization into the depths of material language, in the mass media technologies of print, posters, telegraph, amplification, and later, projection and broadcast technologies. Modernism responds with aesthetic innovation and self-reflexivity to a sweeping degradation of public language to the utilities of the marketplace, to a consumer culture, which is unique to this context – unprecedented in a society’s history and conversation with itself. In responding with innovative forms of language to a new kind of duplicity in language itself, one contaminated by the stresses and transvaluations of a modern age, modernism allows an incoherence of meaning into its works that is novel, that speaks to new anxieties about the reconciliation of bases of thought, feeling, and communication external to and internal to the self, in history and in nature. This incoherence, or, if you like, ambiguity, addresses itself to a distinction between the mechanical as opposed to human value of words and usage – or to what Stevenson calls the “keeping alive and open in human terms” of an undegraded, unroutinized, and unreified experience of space and time, of life itself.53

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Herein I will take it that modernist form is recognized where, in a context of historical modernization, the form of a work both (1) acts to reveal the inadequacy of conventional forms of representation to communicate the values Stevenson describes, by disorienting us in time and space, including the time and space of language in its reading, and (2) acts to create a formal, aesthetic experience of space and time, not only a concept or image, which is new – a new reading experience – and which indicates these values. The latter should not be understood as “ideas” about space and time in themselves, but as an infinite range of experiential effects, as of colour, of speech, of processes of reflection or choice, of relationships with nature, of the body, of historical possibility … of anything that might be significant but obsolescent or overlooked by the perceptual motors of modern life. Modernism tends to be eccentric or oppositional to the modern world with which it is consubstantial: it may be considered, as Stevenson affirms with Jameson, as a kind of compensatory formation in which subversive desire may be expressed, but contained in normal, specialized spheres of production and consumption. I emphasize the reading experience because, as anticipated in my introduction, the formal effects I will ascribe to Canadian works as modernist act to create an innovative experience of incoherence for the reader, typically without the openly alternative or aggressive relationship to conventional form characteristic of canonical texts. Canadian authors, lacking an elite market at home and disconnected from those abroad, devise their works to able to “pass” through the production and distribution mechanisms of a more popular print marketplace. Modernist effects, and the desire called forth from them for a significant perception that is neither credulous nor degraded, but human and historical – as Ezra Pound put it, “I want a new civilization”54 – are evidenced not necessarily in unique, newly invented forms of text, but in newly invented forms of construal which these texts, when read, are programmed to demand. In the remainder of this chapter, I want to look at some alternative perspectives on modernism and to develop from these my view of its usefulness to the discussion of form in the modern Canadian novel. There seems to be little question that modernism as it is conventionally understood, which is to say canonical Anglo-American modernism, is bound up with Canadian poetics, and that it is a concept with increasing descriptive power for Canadian literary history. There are two main reasons for this. On the one hand, a powerful

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body of recent critical theory partly defines both Canadian postmodern and postcolonial writing according to their attempt to break away, in politics and in form, from canonical Anglo-American modernism (usually a break for the better).55 On the other hand, there are critics who see the same modernist aesthetic hard at work (usually with some time lag) in Canadian postmodern writing itself.56 In what follows I don’t want to contest the undeniable power of normalized forms of modernism. I want rather to indicate the basic shape and dimensions of a Canadian modernism which has yet to be teased out of their shadow. What kind of modernism is this? Answers have succeeded to the extent that modernism has been recognized to be a monster with many heads. In particular, modernism need not be limited for Canadian literary-critical purposes to models provided by an AngloAmerican canon or by its formalist critical orthodoxy. A salutary move has been to circumscribe or define Canadian modernism in a non-canonical way – usually in order to accommodate it, at least partly but paradoxically, to its old enemies, realism and romanticism.57 Even so, the ghost which haunts the definition of any modernism is that of modernity itself – the historical period or condition whose specific structure of events and structuration of experience (especially metropolitan, technological, and mass life) is usually taken to be a formative ground for canonical modernist aesthetics. For if we wish to account for a modernist style that is not canonical, we will have to ask questions about the reference of modernism itself to some kind of “modern” experience and history which is itself unconventional. For sure, literary history depends on all kinds of threads of influence, but what kind of experiential authenticity lies behind literary influence? What lies, for example, behind the mere importing of styles by eclectic authors from modern centres elsewhere, to be imposed upon local and native subjects? Whatever claims to inherent validity may be made for styles, it is the case in Canadian literary history that modern novelists in English have themselves consistently debated and justified style according to its adequacy to a history and place.58 Such a tradition begins with Sara Jeannette Duncan’s attacks on formulaic romances, and her insistence upon a realism that is true to Canadian social realities. She does not argue for a realism naïvely reduced to a kind of materialistic or photographic objectivity and shorn of the idealist forms of romance. This too she attacks, regarding it as a

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colonial ideology: “The conclusion is usually, I believe, that, owing to the obscure operation of some natural law, [literature] is not indigenous to our country – that Canada, like the Congo State and other districts known to us chiefly through the pen of the explorer, must contribute to literature objectively.” Alternatively, Duncan prefers an imaginative literature, modelled on romance, but true to the ironies and specificities of Canadian reality. Its resources can be seen as equally “metaphysical, scientific and economic,” held together by a realism that is pragmatic – for “the practical spirit of the age” demands the “adaptation of method to matter” in a fiction which, uncannily like the new nation, is “a law unto itself.”59 A modern Canadian literature will reconcile the exploration document with the idealist romance, Canada as history with Canada as idea. Gilbert Parker, Stephen Leacock, Frederick Philip Grove, and others echo this compromise strategy in the years to come, seeking to justify modernist realism in terms of an improved historicism, rather than an eschewed idealism. In 1938 Philip Child summarizes this line of thought: “By realism I do not mean a morbid concern with the sordid and tragic aspects of life, though these, too, should not be veiled, but simply the attempt of the sincere novelist to distil in literature something distinctively and characteristically Canadian.”60 The modernism evoked here is a pragmatic rather than transcendental realism, something close to what Ezra Pound meant in the same year with the term he borrowed from anthropology and turned into his own prescriptive aesthetic – paideuma: “the tangle or complex of the inrooted ideas” of a period and place, “the gristly roots of ideas that are in action.”61 But what is the paideuma of a postcolonial nation, in that uncertain moment as it emerges, as Child says, “from pioneer youth into adulthood”? On our way to an answer, one obstacle must be overcome or we get nowhere. We must undo any assumptions which, drawing on a later configuration of global history, oppose modernism to postcoloniality. For only then can we bring a description of literary modernism that is postcolonial, and a description of historical modernity, into relationship. This task has barely been approached, even in general terms, so powerful has been the postcolonialist alignment with a postmodern period transcending and all but severed from the modern.62 The periodizing alignment of postcolonial conditions with postmodern history has quite naturally been suggested by the momentous global transformations toward national autonomy both

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within and away from European imperialism which followed World War II and came to completion in the early 1960s, and by the attendant flourishing of newly national literatures. But this periodization is not applicable to the postcolonial social and economic experiences of many other parts of the world, including much of North and South America.63 In Canada, if we take as an origin the “imagined community” of nationhood and nationalism promoted by Confederation – and even, as a more precise referent point, the conclusion of the war in South Africa, and the same nationalism emerging more skeptical of its compatibility with British imperialism64 – then it is apparent that the first Canadian postcolonial experience (leaving room for other colonial and postcolonial histories within the boundaries of a national history) begins in close synchrony with the fin-desiècle origins of modernity as well as modernism in Anglo-American culture. Hence the simple need for a theoretical discourse concerning modernity which aligns rather than opposes modernist expression with postcolonial experience.65 Such a historical sensibility has only begun to be imagined, and this book can only give a groping introduction to it, as a horizon for its interpretive practice. In order to grasp most directly the unconventionality of such a modernist sensibility and its suggestiveness for Canadian literature, it might be helpful to view it at first as a sort of extrapolation from the norm, as it appears in Fredric Jameson’s discussion of modernist formalism in “Modernism and Imperialism.”66 Here we step outside the limits of Canadian literature for a substantial space, in order to sketch in a theoretical horizon for modernism within which this study may be placed, before returning to the matter of a Canadian modernism in the next section, “Everyday Expressionism.” Jameson argues generally that traces of imperialism reveal themselves in modernism most powerfully not in content, but in form. To explain this he posits the historical thesis that the life of the modern metropolis (the urban-centred world of the imperial nation), and the logic which structures its individual and social experience, cannot be understood apart from that life’s coordination with its colonial frontiers. Your world and what you are depends on what you can hardly visualize – an other life so far away from you that you can hardly imagine, as you step on the electric tram, that you depend on it. Canonical modernist formalism, he then proposes, arises from the need to invent a kind of desperately artificial closure in representation for the partial or limited experience of a metropolitan world –

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one whose mimetic or realist closure in representation would require the explicit evocation of that unthinkably distant, other, exploited world upon which its life – the very structure of metropolitan life – intimately depends. To draw a simple analogy: if for the modern individual there are some pieces of the puzzle of life that are out of sight, the remaining pieces will have to fit together in a rather innovative, unconventional, perhaps not “realistic” way. While this thesis is illustrated selectively, if suggestively, in Jameson’s analysis of E.M. Forster’s Howards End, it is greatly extended and clarified by Edward Said, who similarly ascribes the retreat of distances, in a spatial order, from content to form in literary modernism, to the repression of the colonized periphery from representation in metropolitan life.67 What is useful for our purposes is that Jameson also asks the question whether there might be a type of alternative, regional modernity that is both metropolitan and colonial. Here we should find a sensibility whose roots entangle historical conditions which – differing from the everyday experience of imperial culture, the ground of canonical modernism – are not rendered invisible to each other. Here might arise a modernism whose distance from conventional realism is informed as much by the compensatory craft of an idiosyncratic style as by the objective experience of a whole, compressed system of metropolitan-regional differences and conflicts. This would, he says, be “a kind of exceptional situation, one of overlap and coexistence between these two incommensurable realities which are those of lord and bondsman altogether, those of the metropolis and the colony simultaneously,” “a national situation which reproduces the appearance of First World social reality and social relationships – perhaps through the coincidence of its language with the imperial language – but whose underlying structure is in fact much closer to that of the Third World or of colonized daily life” (60). Does this sound familiar? Such a national situation Jameson finds in modern colonial Ireland. While there may be no doubt that modernism, as Malcolm Bradbury says, is an “art of cities,” it is not so easy here to distinguish the cosmopolitan experience of the city from its conventional contrasts in rural and otherwise peripheral regions.68 For example, the Dublin of James Joyce’s Ulysses is surrounded by and still rooted in a rather intimate, local, and rural society, even while subjected to and permeated by a metropolitan empire. Ulysses may be regarded as an attempt – less antagonistic to realist space than might at first be imagined – to piece together in a lived experience the actual juxtapositions

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of this contradictory setting. “In Ulysses space does not have to be made symbolic in order to achieve closure and meaning: its closure is objective, endowed by the colonial situation itself – whence the nonpoetic, nonstylistic nature of Joyce’s language” (61). Because this intimate, local culture maps out its world largely according to spoken and heard and overheard experiences, the modernist style of Ulysses may be considered the result, not of formalist aestheticization, but of an unconventional realism, one faithful to the “linguisticality” – in which everything is already encountered as a story – of the smalltown, colonial space.69 Thus Jameson’s argument recuperates Ulysses and its colonial modernism for an aesthetics of realism, without denying its difficult form – however disfigured this form might appear to the imperial eye of literary convention.70 An essential point of this recuperation is the category of experience, and specifically, the way the representation of experience is anchored in a (perhaps unusual or unrealistic) aesthetic subjectivity … in a version of the self, in other words, to which things happen, to which signs and images of what happens are more or less adequately, truthfully, fitted. This is exceptional: the formalist transcendence signalled by T.S. Eliot’s “impersonal” ideal of the poet as catalyst, is here dissolved back into a subjective insistence upon the location of experience in a bodily feeling, talking, and hearing.71 This experience has the historical depth of its intimate space, and only this intimacy can frame and organize, in a pragmatic sense, the crowd of facts and details that might have belonged to a conventional realism. The “oral” world is a world of facts that are not only always being told, but always being heard, responded to, felt, and interpreted. What might first appear as a bewildering poetry of concepts and percepts, ordered by the aesthetic autonomy of a “mythic” method, in truth has its order and continuity from within, in a tissue of subjective response, will, and desire which, like Frankenstein’s creature, demands an apparently monstrous empathy and recognition on the part of the reader. Another way of thinking about the authority of experience is in terms of style. The analogy is commonly drawn between modernist literary style and cubist formalism in painting, which aims for a transcending objectivity with respect to multiple perspectives and phenomena. Below I will suggest thinking about modernist style through the alternative example of expressionism, whose authenticity is very differently grounded in a form (or deformation) irreduc-

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ible to the logic of perspectives and juxtapositions. The aesthetic principles of expressionism are less visualizable. It can be understood as a break away from realism if we think of realism in visual terms, if we suppose realism to transcend subjectivity with a kind of impersonal gaze. But expressionism may be understood in continuity with realism if we suppose that realism may submit such a gaze (and all the other senses dwelling and meeting in subjectivity, giving it a practical form at the intersections of an ongoing experience) to mimesis first. The latter analogy, rather than those of a more “impersonal” formalism or realism, best describes what Jameson finds in the postcolonial modernism of Ulysses – the representation of a subjectivity not at all confined to Stephen Dedalus’s “ineluctable modality of the visible,” not merely observing or portraying its peripheral modernity, but with the insistent if partial freedom of a narrative voice, hearing it and feeling it, drinking it in and digesting it, laughing it away and crying it out.72 The “exceptional situation” described for Ireland is, after all and ironically, an unexceptional one in modern history. The paradoxical description Jameson gives to it above, as simultaneously an experience of the colonizer and the colonized, the metropolis and the periphery, is also at the heart of nationalist traditions of political economy and philosophy in Canada – those inspired, for example, by Harold Innis and George Grant. Beyond Ireland or Canada, the general phenomenon of a colonial or postcolonial modernity giving rise to an ambivalent, alternative modernism has been explored in a Marxist literary study by Neil Larsen, which draws its examples from transnational, though especially Latin American, arts in the twentieth century. Larsen shows how colonial and postcolonial regions of the world are split between the unreconcilable but overlapping social forms and experiences of a metropolis and a periphery, and how artists have developed unusual forms of modernism – including, suggestively, magic realism – that “mediate” these two experiences. Both these Marxist critics, then, are concerned to describe manifestations of modernism at the regional peripheries of metropolitan imperialism, and hence at the margins of canonical Anglo-American modernism, in which the representation of the individual experience, even as it circles within the horizons of a region, inevitably encounters and incorporates signs of the global developments of modernity which invade its horizons and contradictorily transgress and constitute the logic of its local space. It is a regionalism – to anticipate the pages

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ahead – in crisis with its cosmopolitan supplement, a regionalism of untenable regions, unpredictable in time and discontinuous in space, and of similarly disunified protagonists. But Larsen defuses the positive political charge which might have seemed essential were we left only with the example of Ulysses, for he shows that the breakdown of a metropolitan opposition between modernism and realism in a mediating, “regional” style can mystify as easily as it can reveal, and is often politically ambivalent.73 An example of what Larsen means by this ambivalence, touching upon the example of Ulysses, is the view offered by Edward Said of another Irish modernist on the periphery of empire, W.B. Yeats. In Yeats’s writing, argues Said, a historicizing discourse of local and transformational experience comes together with an aestheticizing discourse of transcendent and authoritarian order.74 Even such regional experiences as the “linguisticality” of a place can be aestheticized (that is, resolved into forms of art kept compartmentally apart from forms of social interaction, as objects rather than practices) if submitted to the rule of more powerful forms, real or ideal, beyond them. “Those masterful images because complete,” acknowledges the retrospective poet, thinking of his Celtic figures, “Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?” With Larsen’s caution in mind, we may now ask: In a modern Canada whose history is at once metropolitan and colonial, developing and underdeveloped, what kind of “peripheral modernism” will we find, and how determined by realism, and with what political responses to its own, newly national condition?

d e m o t i c o r e v e r y d ay e x p r e s s i o n i s m Franco Moretti sees the European bildungsroman disappearing by the end of the nineteenth century, giving way to the more impersonal or collective narrative aesthetics of modernist psychological realism, social realism, and formalism. But this is not quite right; not every thread of modernism unties itself from the narrative of youthful transformation and the aesthetic of individual experience. This last is the warp thread of expressionism. All expressionism grows out of the presumed authority of an interior, subjective, and markedly individual mediation of that which it seeks to represent. It expresses the tension between that authority and the world that lies beyond its ken. In Regression and Apocalypse: Studies in North American Literary Expressionism, Sherrill Grace translates this tension into a description of ex-

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pressionism that is suggestive for this study, because it charts out an area of overlap between modernist formalism and the aesthetics of realism and romance. I have already hinted at the usefulness of comparing some of the features of a peripheral modernism, by analogy, to those of expressionist painting. Here I will go further, and suggest the appropriateness of thinking about this modernism as a genre of expressionism itself. Grace reminds us that expressionism is always driven by formal abstraction, but that this abstraction is always, literally, an abstraction from something. Expressionism thus moves anxiously between two worlds – the natural and historical world whose concealed, inner sense it seeks to express, and the transcendental world of an essential self whose authority and coherence provide the similarly concealed, inner form needed for that expression. The first impulse is “empathic”: in its desire to affirm and preserve the external world, it recognizes realist aesthetic values. The second impulse is transcendental: in its desire to destroy or escape the external world, it recognizes formalist aesthetic values. Therefore, while expressionism is “fundamentally informed by a rejection of realism” as mimesis – as a materialist description of the world’s physical and sociological surfaces – it “none the less contains within it extremes of representation and iconic abstraction,” balanced in a “functional tension” which “leans more toward ’empathy’ here or abstraction there, towards representation in this work or semantic and syntactic abstraction in that.”75 Expressionism depends on the authority not only of an individual subjectivity that mediates experience, in other words, but of an experience that is recognizable, however abstracted from the real. It is this recognition, not reality itself, that paradoxically requires the unreal distortions of expressionist abstraction. Hence the title of this book, with Eliot’s city echoing through it. At first sight, the avant-gardist history of expressionism, bound up as it is with revolutionary social and political convulsions in modern Europe, would seem to make it an unlikely model for the more conventional Canadian writing considered thus far, whose social culture might appear comparatively self-satisfied, and historical context comparatively tame. But appearances can be deceiving. The revolutionary impulse in expressionism is important to Grace, who describes expressionism in a way that decentres it from the clichés of merely personal self-expression and emotionally distorted form. She sees the aesthetic of revolt in its drive to represent a self that will produce

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authentic subjective distances: (1) from a conservative dimension of present social life, (2) from the superficial realism of this conservative life’s self-representation, and (3) from the reifying materialism of its self-understanding. Seen this way, expressionism reveals its continuity with the bildungsroman genre, of which all three of these distancings are also and already definitive. In the bildungsroman, however, these revolutionary impulses are turned inward, their contradictions with the bourgeois social structure interiorized in the individually manageable realms of self-development and everyday experience. One might expect this interiorization actually to contradict the expressionist purpose, which Richard Murphy finds definitive, to disrupt and forestall that staging of an ideal, aestheticized form of selfhood which is the purpose of the bildungsroman (16–17).76 It will be my assumption, however, that under the stresses of modernity specific to this study, the one purpose may lead to the other – for the bildung, the idealized staging to its own undoing – and be encoded for the reader in a third kind of fictional process, neither viably conventional nor avant-gardist.77 Again, the bildungsroman projects a form of compromise, a narrative “reality principle” whereby the individual youth, as a focalization of all that is modern, can be socialized, his or her ego secured in the face of a delegitimated historical world78 – secured reasonably and satisfactorily if the “classical” plot succeeds, as for Advena; or fantastically and tentatively if the “transformative” plot holds sway, as for Lorne. In either case, the negativity of revolt is displaced away from collective structures (as is so markedly the case with the fickle democratic politics in The Imperialist or the oppressive collectivist politics in Waste Heritage) to the individual agon with its personal triumph or its defeat. Nowhere is this sublimation of revolutionary energy so apparent as when it is displaced into the figure of a sexuality repressed by society – as in the many protagonists of Mazo de la Roche, both male and female, whose Blakean sensualities burn up the normal fabric of whatever society surrounds them. No matter if this society is a family farm (Jalna) or a factory town (Delight). What matters is everyday life. The feminist power of de la Roche’s characters is not directed toward any specific institutional violence and concrete historical change, but toward a psychological violence against the patriarchal authority already internalized in an abstract but explicitly and repetitively oppressive superego that is universal to her romance world. This sublimation of a modern historical crisis – in this instance

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the post-Victorian battle of the sexes – into the realm of every day life, determines as well the popular form of the typical modern Canadian novel as realist romance, which is “empathic” and liberal, rather than elitist and revolutionary, within its bourgeois commercial and consumer culture. This popular form and its sublimation of historical crisis belongs to a what I call – in a paradoxical phrase meant to register not a coherent aesthetic movement but the fallout of an unresolved tension in form and content – an everyday expressionism. Indeed, to point more emphatically toward the formal aspects of this literary practice, whose formative languages and markets remain within the still-undifferentiated horizons in Canada of what modernists elsewhere deride as conventional culture as opposed to authentic art, I would suggest the complementary expression “demotic expressionism.” Demotic or everyday expressionism is what befalls the bildungsroman when the ethnic and national horizon of its journey of youth – which in the nineteenth-century genre defined the limits, powers, and values available to everyday experience – dissolves, and everyday experience gives way to the unpredictable and discontinuous horizons of a global history. This search by a mobile and restless youth for the meaning of maturity, this introjected compromise or coming to terms with modernity, had always depended upon a legible everyday world. Individual experience could always be interpreted and negotiated according to a monolinguistic and monocultural symbolic order: individuals, not society, were the source of uncertainty, plotting, surprise. But the bildungsroman in Canada does not provide that kind of legible horizon for individual experience. Its everyday life comes from a nation growing out of a global world, not a global world growing out of a nation. It is characterized by the kind of contradictory spaces – in which here and elsewhere have become intimately entangled, and in which two and other solitudes lead intimate yet parallel lives – that Jameson and Larsen find in regions on the colonized peripheries of the world’s empire-driven modernity. It has been anticipated, I believe, in the elegant theoretical proposition of Stephen Slemon in defence of a postcolonial analysis relevant to Canada: What perhaps marks a genuine difference in the contestatory activity of Second- and Third-World post-colonial writing … is that the illusion of a stable self/other, here/there binary division has never been available to SecondWorld writers, and that as a result the sites of figural contestation between

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oppressor and oppressed, colonizer and colonized, have been taken inward and internalized in Second-World post-colonial textual practice. By this I mean that the ambivalence of literary resistance itself is the “always already” condition of Second-World settler and post-colonial literary writing, for in the white literatures of Australia, or New Zealand, or Canada, or southern Africa, anti-colonialist resistance has never been directed at an object or a discursive structure which can be seen purely external to the self. The SecondWorld writer, the Second-World text, that is, has always been complicit in colonialism’s territorial appropriation of land, and voice, and agency, and this has been their inescapable condition even at those moments when they have promulgated their most strident and most spectacular figures of postcolonial resistance. In the Second World, anti-colonialist resistances in literature must necessarily cut across the individual subject, and as they do so they also, necessarily, contribute towards that theoretically rigorous understanding of textual resistance which post-colonial critical theory is only now learning how to recognize. This ambivalence of emplacement is the condition of their possibility; it has been since the beginning; and it is therefore scarcely surprising that the ambivalent, the mediated, the conditional, and the radically compromised literatures of this undefinable Second World have an enormous amount yet to tell to “theory” about the nature of literary resistance.79

Slemon echoes the contradictions suggested by Jameson and Larsen, and emphasizes the presence in this kind of postcolonial writing both of genuine resistance to an external status quo, and of inescapable compromise to it, at the level of the individual, its formation and selfunderstanding. Caught in a tension between the indigenous and alien signs of its postcolonial world, the everyday life of the bildungsroman requires a new kind of distortion when it comes to represent that individual life, a newly added twist to accommodate its partial otherness – its anxiety of lost horizons. This is exactly the kind of tension expressed in modern expressionism, whose unpredictably individual and anti-conventional distortions of realist empathy are required to go beyond the incomplete logic offered by its immediate world – of surfaces and fragments, of skins and masks and tongues – both to escape it and to imagine what holds it all together. The pull between the contradictory senses of immediacy and alienation defines form and feeling in expressionist space. Grace quotes the art theorist most influential to expressionist discourse, Wilhelm Worringer: “Whereas the precondition for the urge to empathy is a happy pantheistic relationship of confidence

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between man and the phenomena of the external world, the urge to abstraction is the outcome of a great inner unrest inspired in man by the phenomena of the outside world; in a religious respect it corresponds to a strongly transcendental tinge to all notions. We might describe this state as an immense spiritual dread of space.”80 We should note that in Appadurai’s vision of postmodernity, discussed at the outset of this book, the untrustworthiness of any stable ground of immediacy in a lived experience of all space as fluvial undoes this tension, or must displace it elsewhere. We will see that this spatial anxiety is specifically endemic, however, to worlds caught in the tensions of a postcolonial modernity. The more one moves away from the empathic aesthetic toward a transcendence of form or spirit, the closer one approaches the high modernist metaphysics of experience as alienation, and leaves any sense of experience as history behind. For me these two alternatives are exemplified in Sheila Watson’s Deep Hollow Creek, written in the 1930s, and The Double Hook, written in the 1950s. While similar in setting, the most striking contrast between the two novels is the absence from the second of the young woman protagonist whose subjectivity and narrative of development through experience mediates the world of the first. The Double Hook, as Grace tells us, represents an empathy which transcends the experience of a central character or subjectivity. It lacks both the unifying experience of a protagonist and the unifying reflection of a conventional narrator.81 It also lacks history. Deep Hollow Creek on the other hand is a palimpsest of postcolonial lives and cultures – a rural settler society which has overwritten an original Native society, and which is itself being overwritten by a metropolitan capitalist society – and the medium of the palimpsest is the protagonist’s individual experience, which becomes legible to us, and to her, as a particular growth of consciousness.82 In The Double Hook these layers disappear, and legibility is displaced into a form which is distorted in order to bridge the gap not to individual knowledge but to revolutionary emotion – eschewing the individual irony of (demotic) everyday expressionism for the (avant-gardist) revolutionary expressionism of collective tragedy. The latter type of sacrifice, the sacrifice of an empathy with individual experience – and particularly where it objectively signifies the presence of larger and partially occulted histories in everyday life – is too great for expressionism proper to be able to normalize itself in English-speaking Canada. Where the European expressionists might

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have assumed a common ground of everyday experience for their work, assumed a zeitgeist, most modern Canadian writers of fiction felt the need to write that ground explicitly into their work. In midcentury the writer could not, as Hugh MacLennan put it, “as British and American writers do, take his background values for granted, for the simple reason that the reading public [Canadian or not] had no notion what they were.” Because the Canadian public “took the Canadian scene for granted but had never defined its particular essence,” Canada was “virtually an uncharacterized country,” even to itself. For MacLennan, this meant the necessity of providing social and historical “background” for settings, characters, and scenes – or even allowing background to be “the most essential part of the book.” It also meant supplementing individual experience with research.83 The modern Canadian bildungsroman tends thus to internalize, in the authority of a realist narrative voice or protagonist figure, an expressionist tension between empathy and alienation, between the intimate pull of immediate space and the dread of expanding space. It is a compulsion, and perhaps in these terms justifiable to Deacon, to make personal sense out of a new nation in a new age. Of course it is also a limitation – far from innocent, whether compromising or not, and no less interesting for the social imagination it may release than for that it may obscure.84 The resulting distortion of form is exemplified for the bildungsroman, in The Imperialist. While Lorne’s ideal is to unify both the logic of his regional space (as its representative in the national parliament) and the logic of his national space (as its representative in England, promoting a globally rationalized imperial economy), these spaces undo the coherence of the plot of development and ultimately betray him. Like the region of Deep Hollow Creek, this region is a palimpsest of layers, each one overwriting and obscuring the last. Duncan lures the unsuspecting reader into the cliché community of the place, only in order, ironically, to deconstruct our sense of its unity at every turn. Her technique is to shift perspective in unexpected ways. The description of present-day Elgin begins with the narrative focused, in a kind of close-up, on the musings of an Elgin minister and a shopkeeper standing in front of the latter’s store door on Main Street: “We’ve seen changes, Mr. Murchison. Aye. We’ve seen changes.”85 The narrator expends some affectionate mockery, of the Leacock variety, on the immodest modesty of the town’s growth seen from this perspective:

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It was a prospect of moderate commercial activity they looked out upon, a street of mellow shop-fronts, on both sides, of varying height and importance, wearing that air of marking a period, a definite stop in growth, that so often co-exists with quite a reasonable degree of activity and independence in colonial towns. One might almost say, standing there in the door at Murchison’s, where the line of legitimate enterprise had been overpassed and where its intention had been none too sanguine – on the one hand in the faded and pretentious red brick building with the false third story, occupied by Cleary, which must have been let at a loss to dry-goods or anything else; on the other hand in the solid ’Gregory block,’ opposite the market, where rents were as certain as the dividends of the Bank of British North America.86

This quaint town, as seen by two of its bourgeois fathers (material and spiritual), offers a familiar image of eternal small-townness, never to risk the urban blight of a three-story skyscraper. “Change” seems to have come and gone with the efforts of the two men, having establishing the comforts of civilization without having helplessly kept on changing. It knew where to stop, far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife. It is no surprise that the two men, “considering the changes in Elgin from the store door, did so at their leisure,” since “Main Street expressed the idea that, for the purpose of growing and doing business, it had always found the days long enough.” If we are over-sensitive, the intrusion of a semiotics based on property rents rather than property use might disturb our sense of pastoral a little, and if we have noticed that Duncan marks the character-limited and location-limited perspective of this description of Elgin three times, some suspicion might be aroused. If not, the description continues in the same tone, before this jarring interruption and shift in perspective: As a matter of fact, Elgin had begun as the centre of “trading” for the farmers of Fox County, and had soon over-supplied that limit in demand; so that when other interests added themselves to the activity of the town there was still plenty of room for the business they brought. Main Street was really, therefore, not a fair index; nobody in Elgin would have admitted it. Its appearance and demeanour would never have suggested that it was now the chief artery of a thriving manufacturing town, with a collegiate institute, eleven churches, two newspapers, and an asylum for the deaf and dumb, to say nothing of a fire department unsurpassed for organization

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and achievement in the Province of Ontario. Only at twelve noon it might be partly realized, when the prolonged “toots” of seven factory whistles at once let off, so to speak, the hour.

Four sentences suffice to overturn completely the foregoing regional idyll, which remains only as a collective fantasy, an ideological self-image that “nobody” would admit to – at least nobody of the bourgeois class perspective focalized earlier. There is an evident imcompatibility between the desire to mythologize, as Clara Thomas describes it, the social culture of the Small Town and that of the Nation-Builder.87 For in this passage, through a turn in the narrative perspective, “Main Street” is suddenly seen as an island of preindustrial nostalgia in a thoroughly urbanized and modernized region. The “institute” will train students (Lorne and Advena are two of them) – of the right class (Lorne’s country friend Elmore hasn’t the capital to go on to higher education) – for a social mobility that uproots them from any necessary connection to traditional roles or place. Eleven churches baffle our original sense of the minister’s authority, and the authority of his creed, in this community, while the asylum and the fire department offer ironically competing images of useful community institutions. But there is no fire today, the deaf and dumb are removed from public view, and religious differences are mute in the scene that remains. Nor do the seven factories, along with their working-class suburbs, send their population into the streets to meet the gaze of the two men during their leisure hours. But the new perspective is not simply an improvement upon the earlier, for suddenly the whole space defies us. We can hardly imagine how seven factories, eleven churches, etc., will become meaningful in the narrative space of our protagonist’s life. And yet here they are, and so they must. When Lorne becomes a political candidate for the town and county, it is this total space – and more – with which he must struggle to identify, to represent. He does not start off very well. When we first see Lorne in the same town centre, he has emerged from his law offices and immersed himself in the market square. The market is introduced from a perspective detached from Lorne, as “a scene of activity but not excitement, or in any sense of joy.” The causes for a dearth of passion and joy are dwelt upon in increasingly morbid terms. The farmers who come there are exhausted and impoverished, nearly living skeletons, hounded by the spectre of mortgage foreclosures and

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driven by what little passion flows through their veins to harsh competition for material exchange and gain. And what does the upwardly mobile young lawyer see? Duncan’s irony is relentless and almost ghoulish: “The spectacle never failed to cheer him; he was uniformly in gayer spirits, better satisfied with life” on market days, when a “sense of kinship surged in his heart.” In a grotesquery of bourgeois opportunism projected as pastoral, he feels “these were his people, [and] this his lot as well as theirs.” They represent a “whole world” which “invited his eyes, offering him a great piece of luck to look through,” an “opportunity” and “conviction of resource” which nearly causes him to burst out laughing among them. And this fantasy is the basis of his nationalist imperialism: “A tenderness seized him for the farmers of Fox County, a throb of enthusiasm for the idea they represented, which had become for him suddenly moving and pictorial. At that moment his country came subjectively into his possession; great and helpless it came … He held this microcosm of it, as one might say, in his hand and looked at it ardently; then he took his way across the road.”88 Pocketing such goods, he certainly gets the better of the deal. Moreover, this whole perspective is gender-coded: the marketplace is the domain of rural women, who sell the farm goods to the town women who buy them. These “twisted and unlovely” countryfolk are typified in two minor characters: Mrs. Crow, the “frail-looking” but perceptively “acid” farmer’s wife who satirizes Lorne’s social success (seeing the young lawyer not in connection with the imperial idea but with property law), and Old Mother Beggarlegs, a ghostly legend of the marketplace who presides over the beginning of the novel. The feminization of countryfolk as a kind of stunted, capitalistic underclass is not unique to Duncan, but appears in other Canadian novels of the time – such as Joanna Wood’s The Untempered Wind (1894), which brings the sexual and economic obsessions of naturalism to the Niagara countryside. It is this femme fatale – primitively self-interested, ancient and unlovely, but wise, like Rider Haggard’s archetypal “She” – that Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar view as a patriarchal feminization of a threatening modern world. And it is this femme fatale which Lorne must seduce with his imperialist dream if he is to make something of his country and himself. But if it were simply a matter of satirizing Lorne’s ideals and displaying the grisly materialist underside of life, the narrative would have a straightforward legibility which, in fact, it does not. On the

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one hand, ideals have power. When Lorne brings his ideals before the very same farmers, “at the late fall fairs and in the lonely schoolhouses, his talk [is] so trenchant, so vivid and pictorial, that the gathered farmers [listen] with open mouths, like children, pathetically used with life, to a grown-up fairy tale.”89 The same rhetorical power qualifies him to report on the progress of imperialist negotiations with Britian earlier in the novel, and so to participate in the aesthetic work of creating the imagined community of a new nation. On the other hand, even this power, like the narrative perspective, ultimately escapes his agency as it is coopted and abandoned by a chain of other characters with their own limited uncertain powers.90 Narrative agencies, like the narrative perspectives to which they correspond, fail to offer a coherent space of experience, and tend toward modernist fragmentation. It is one of the subtleties of the narrative that the central romance plot, that of Lorne’s political success, depends not only on the unification of his own regional space but on parallel developments in spaces remote from him. Indeed, it depends upon a dimly but insistently recalled background plot centred on Lord Wallingham, the politician whose idealistic fervour and rhetorical power are simultaneously forwarding the imperialist cause to “the mandarinate of Great Britain.” Even more dimly seen, behind Wallingham, are the British factory workers who in the end, “declaring stolidly in the bye-elections against any favour to colonial produce at [their] expense,” betray “the great idea. 91 These spaces, as well as that of the ruling national government in Ottawa whose legitimation is also necessary to the protagonist, are utterly beyond Lorne’s immediate world. When in disconnected background developments, the British government proves impervious to Wallingham’s imperialist “idea,” and British workers reject it, and Laurier ceases to find it politically expedient, these obscure legitimations are withdrawn, and Lorne’s regional space, and with it the logic of his narrative development within it, remains incoherent. The most startling incoherence wrought by this modern spatiality is the unexpected intrusion of the Native people of the region at the end – who throughout had been relegated to an insignificant background – to signify the plot’s turning point. A too simple understanding of Duncan’s racism can actually obscure their significance. With the country people generally for Lorne, and the town people generally for his opponent, it is the Native vote that comes to decide Lorne’s election success or failure. Significantly, the Native people are

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associated with the same marketplace at the centre of town which I just described,92 so that the Native person emerges at the end of the novel as an avatar of that other fallen sovereign of the marketplace, the moribund imperial power feminized in the figure of the Victorian Mother Beggarlegs, who inspires Lorne’s ideals as well as resentment at the outset of the novel. This convergence of Native and female types subtly completes the savage half of the “She” paradigm, as a figure for the repressed and “othered” fears of modernity. Duncan emphasizes the assimilation of these Native people to rural Canada as we see it in the marketplace – that is, in class position (the bottom) and cultural values (proud and materialistic). These people’s entry into the narrative at the eleventh hour offers yet another intrusion of a hidden, larger space – this time, significantly, that of an empire which is dead, which is nothing less than an uncanny mirror image of the moribund empire that Lorne himself is trying to revive. Empire wants to see its history as forward progress, not as cyclical fate. As in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and de la Roche’s Possession, the aboriginal here stands for the degenerate modernity internal to imperialism itself, just as his or her assimilation stands as a pathetic parody of the modern social integration projected by Lorne’s bildung.93 Lorne could not have wanted the paradoxical, defeated agency of the Indian for his own, but did he not ask for it?94 The Imperialist, then, is a bildungsroman that has plots, but no plot. It has perspectives, but no perspective.95 It recontains its problems, ultimately, in the sense of exhaustion of development generic to the bildungsroman, which tells us that for Advena and Lorne, while there may be anything or everything left to do, there is nothing left to learn. Ironically, however, while the realist narrative fails to deliver any durable values to the practical young protagonists and their egocentric society – or in metafictional terms, to confer any stable meaning upon its own realist details, agencies, and perspectives, so that it is a tendentially meaningless text – it does manage to legitimate its own value in its anchoring of irreconcilable plots and perspectives in the subjective but practical experience supposed to be available to Duncan’s protagonists. Thus the narrative space is caught between, on the one hand, an empathic use of realist plot and perspective, which develops a sense of regional unity through the figure of a (literally representative) developing youth, and, on the other hand, a modernist distortion of this use of plot and perspective and of the agency of development itself, in the

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abstraction of regional into larger spaces with fluid and unpredictable proportions. So it is that an expressionist “dread of space” asserts itself against and within a desire for realism. What happens to realist space and perspectival style here is, to borrow Mark Taylor’s expressionist vocabulary, a kind of “disfiguring.” Taylor describes disfiguring as a modernist aesthetic falling “between abstraction and figuration”: “In this interstitial site, figure is neither erased nor absolutized but is used with and against itself to figure that which eludes figuring. Torn figures mark the trace of something else, something other that almost emerges in the cracks of faulty images.”96 For Taylor, referring to an iconology of spiritual transcendence that is common in expressionism, this “something else” is metaphysical and theological. For my purposes, which apply themselves to the everyday expressionism of the Canadian bildungsroman, this “something else” is secular. It refers to the global historicity “unfigurable” in modern individual experience. At the modern periphery described by Jameson and Larsen, the internal contradictions of this historicity are objectively present, and are able to find their realist expression in the internalized contradictions of an individual narrative of the genre described by Moretti. The unfigurable but empathically available logic of the one, the global, permeates and disfigures the demotic representation of the other, what we want to call our own.97

disfiguring development Disfiguring affects the coherence of every aspect of form – of narrative space, narrative perspective, plot structure, characterization, and genre. In expressionism proper, Grace shows how characters, plots, and settings have a volatile realism, their logical coherences always open and vulnerable to dialogic intervention and fragmentation from the dark, irrepressible substratum of a “something else” both within and beyond them.98 In the everyday expressionism of the Canadian bildungsroman, as I have tried to suggest above, the revolutionary edge of this dialogic vulnerability is turned inward and internalized – without synthesis – in the psychological form either of a compromise, demanding repression or sublimation, or of a self-destruction, demanding madness or regression.99 In this respect, it echoes the aestheticism and decadence which Brian Trehearne has shown dominates poetry of the same period.100 As in fiction, poetry parts

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company with the “impersonal” style of canonical modernism in its persistent effort either, in aestheticism, to sublimate the desire for coherent objective experience in the subjective autonomy of art, or, in decadence, to reproduce that experience in the individual autonomy of an everyday life. But in postcolonial fiction, the specifically “empathic” form of this introjected disfiguring preserves the signs of global history at war in immediate experience, and so cannot help but see and preserve in its own realism the distorted residues of an imperialist romance. The typical romance of this bildungsroman is driven by the ideals and desires of a naïve or unformed individual who gradually finds his or her voice and authenticity as a result of ironic encounters with others and their already constituted discourses within the confines of a regional place. If these ideals and desires often fail to be realized or even sublimated in a closure of narrative development, it is because the spaces in which the development takes place are the kind of modern peripheral spaces that Jameson sees in Joyce’s Dublin. There are no secrets here; everyone and everything is transparent to the oral and physical immediacy of the other. But at the same time that the more rustic, provincial, or conservative community space is objectively close-knit and thus available in its totality to individual experience (a few anecdotes will interpolate a whole portrait of Leacock’s small town, for example, or of Callaghan’s urban parish), the space is also a conflicted and heterogeneous one, in which beings and signs from very different orders of value and meaning confront one another, whether to contest or accommodate each other. This sense of the implosion and volatility – the vulnerability – of modern Canadian local space is reflected first and foremost in the favoured setting of the modern novel, which, despite the unprecedented growth of cities after the turn of the century and the urban experience and culture of authors, is not the city. Rather it is the small town which most frequently serves to express the imaginative needs of these narratives of development, occupying as it does a perfect middle ground, an archetypal space of transition between the country and the city, the traditional and the modern, the past and the future. Whether we look to the immigrant settlements of Martha Ostenso and Frederick Philip Grove, the rural-colonized farm properties of Raymond Knister and Mazo de la Roche, or the urban architecture of Hugh MacLennan and Morley Callaghan, all manifest for direct material or discursive experience an objectively discontinuous social

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world which is determined by a world beyond the local. In the prairies of Grove’s Settlers of the Marsh, pioneers bring a variety of incompatible languages and values to a world structured ultimately by the technics and values of individual expansion and development, rather than of social unity. In the Ontario of de la Roche’s Jalna, a parrot from colonial India shouts out abuses in Hindi while Canadian Native Indians labour on the estate. The parrot is an avatar of the senile colonial matriarch who brought him from India and who is a kind of libidinal-aggressive authority overlooking the unpredictable, posttraditional independence and amorality of characters and events of the narrative, in place of an absent super-ego. In the Ontario of de la Roche’s Possession, a hero obsessed with the sensual and independent spirit of a young Native woman defies social conventions of class and race to wed her, even though their marriage ultimately disrupts the economy of his farm and destroys his social integration. On the one hand, she is the sign of an otherness that is oppressed by racism and class exploitation, and remains within and without the local space, coming and going according to a pattern of needs and desires that may be wholly or partly or only marginally assimilated: its logic lies outside the immediate experience of the protagonist. As such she is the positive figuration of a global and other presence oppressed and repressed by the normalizing space of imperialism. On the other hand, as such she is yet an “imaginary Indian,” a primitivist externalization, as in Heart of Darkness, of the dominant culture’s own internal modernity – so that as soon as she is assimilated, she is disfigured into a nightmarish avatar of its own materialism, mobility, and selfinterest. With the closing of the class and racial gaps into which modern difference had been displaced, only the Nietzschean eros and aggressivity of a Freudian discontent remain. Bertram Brooker presents a similar modernist space and typology, but reverses its genders, in Think of the Earth, in which a Nietzschean man, a colonial wanderer, enters a small town as an amoral and violent threat, but ends up marrying the minister’s daughter. In the Halifax of MacLennan’s Barometer Rising, modernity is an explosion in which all that is solid melts into air – its modern city a product of global and military history, in which French and Norwegian ships collide, Scottish and English classes become blurred, and American liberal education may be married to British imperial capital to produce, as in the small-town of The Imperialist, a post-traditional and barely coherent, brave new world. In all of these novels, it is the objective

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presence either of (a) colonized peoples suppressed from the global development that defines life in their region, of (b) discontinuous immigrant cultures coherent with each other only in relation to an externally defined abstraction, or of (c) persons and things whose function is explicitly anchored in the global world outside the region, that forces the self going in search of authentic self-consciousness – of a subjectivity or individual mapping true to its regional place – to confront at every step of the way a world both there and not there, a claim to identity both empowering and alienating. These novels disfigure the nineteenth-century British realism which they inherit because narrative form and style must conform to this divided and conflicted sense of progress. The Brontë or Dickens novel can use the bildungsroman form to take a tour of the interrelated parts of an intricate social system as coherent and ineluctable as a machine. It is this view of social space as a closed system which for Georg Lukács justified realism as the only valid political aesthetic. In a colonial or postcolonial space, however, the objective surfaces of the world do not offer a conventionally realist logic of coherence because what holds them together lies partly beyond them, and what is immediate to them in space is only partial, the contested incoherence of a frontier. We should not be surprised if what we typically find in modern Canadian novels is a character development whose coherence is more obscure, marked by more sudden or surprising character transformations and looser, more unpredictable or episodic plots. In the classical bildungroman, individual time is determined by and conforms to its space, the locus from which it seeks the closure of meaning and produces the structure of plot. In these novels, individual time and space do not coincide as such. The plot is open to sudden interventions, in action or discourse, from beyond the spot-lit space of the character’s local situation and continual renegotiations with it. It is this “elsewhere” that is so difficult to think about, but which is marked by the unmotivated explosion in Barometer Rising and its ambivalent, contingent value to the plot of national romance; or by the mysterious power of the senile colonialist matriarch in Jalna, whose imminent death (and centenary birthday celebration) provides the narrative frame of the novel, but whose control of the narrative events and characters remains implicit; or by the doubled subjectivity and duplicitous causality of For Me and My House, discussed further in chapter 2. The plot disfigured by an elsewhere is also marked by the

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ellipses in voice in Settlers of the Marsh, ellipses which mark gaps in subjective or intersubjective logic which need to be filled in by the closure of subjective formation (comprising self-understanding and understanding of others) which is the telos of its narrative romance. This filling-in always comes unexpectedly from without – from the reader him- or herself, inevitably, until the gap is closed first in lyrical form when Niels shoots his horses in a parallel action to shooting his prostitute-wife, revealing a hidden coherence between the rejected, urban world of aestheticism that she represents and the local, frontier world represented in his own life and work; the same gap is then closed in narrative form when this lyrical action (akin to madness) displaces him to the federal prison, in whose explicitly metropolitan setting only, ironically, can the final self-revelation be effected which returns him properly to his frontier life and work. A typical symptom of this vulnerability to unforeseen interventions in narrative logic is the disfiguring of the protagonist him- or herself. I mean here a kind of threat to reading comprehension, both of a lack of continuity in a protagonist’s character (suddenness, explosiveness, fickleness, randomness) and, more subtly, of a lack of continuity in the formal representation of the protagonist at the centre of his or her own formation. With regard to the latter, for example, it is incredible from a formalist point of view that in Jalna, Barometer Rising, and The Nymph and the Lamp, we aren’t made to realize until half-way through the novel that the women are the developing characters in the novel, surrounded by romance types. (The reverse is arguably true in Wild Geese, in which the absent centre, whose development and difference from a typage only become clear gradually and indirectly, is the patriarchal Caleb Gare.) All these protagonists are “disfigured” by a dialogic narrative of formation which demands a narrative subjectivity that threatens to displace the continuity of the protagonist’s representation in conventional realist voice and space. In summary, then, the disfiguring of the bildungsroman, in what I have called the demotic expressionism of a Canadian modernism, is a mode of experimenting with forms and conventions which does not belong to the innovation of new, alternative genres of textual organization, reading practices, and literary markets, which is the way, in metropolitan cultures, canonical modernist enterprises have usually called for recognition. In the disfiguring effects I will discuss in the following chapters, the modernist artist’s compression and conflict of senses and sense never re-organizes itself around the cool, still centre

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of an autonomous, specialized language of art or tradition, but, evidently feeling too distant, too out of touch with these, remains embodied in the pragmatic elasticity of the individual experience and voice, and committed to the languages of those who will recognize it, as to an uncertain fate. Disfiguring implies the twisting, turning, stretching, tearing, and rending of existing genres. The “make it new” of modernism is achieved in an internalized mode of radical challenge to the senses: in the monstrosity of style rather than form, where form must be mastered in order to pass the gates of recognition, to hold to the thread of recognition from the beginning, while style disfigures it, in the unreal country of a new world.

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Style: The Disfiguring of Development

A closer look at two exemplary novels will help to illuminate the aesthetics of disfiguring, and the way disfiguring works to produce the everyday expressionism of the modernist Canadian bildungsroman, its sense of an “unreal country.”

e m pa t h y f o r e v i l : t h i n k o f t h e e a r t h The first novel to win the Governor General’s Award for Fiction was Bertram Brooker’s Think of the Earth, in 1936.1 By this time, Brooker was established in cultural circles as an avant-garde painter and a writer on modern art. His artistic development to that point had been rather unusual, for he began his career in the late 1920s as a pioneer of non-representational abstraction, then moved steadily towards realism, so that by the mid-1930s he was immersed in portraits, nudes, and still-lives of everyday objects–solitary trees, wooden fences, groceries from the corner store, discarded shoes and socks – at the same time that he continued to produce more stylized, formal abstractions. This reverse trajectory to canonical modernism, the regrounding of painterly abstraction in the objective forms from which it has been abstracted, echoes the transvaluing rapprochement of realism and formalism we have already seen in postcolonial literature, and points toward the empathic imperative encoded by his novel – to draw back from imagined ideals and “think of the earth.” Although the novel has been read as a literary expression of Brooker’s painterly abstraction, it is better understood as an ironic deconstruction of that aesthetic idealism in the existential language of the bildungsroman, the

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narrative of individual development.2 The novel uses the disfiguring aesthetic of everyday expressionism explicitly to sublimate the destructive presence and authority of modernism – of modernity as an aesthetic as well as social experience. Hence, for a start, the embedding of a demandingly philosophical novel in the demotic genre of popular romance. Did you think that boy-meets-girl-in-Winnipeg would be dull? Not when the boy is Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, planning another murder, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, preaching the superman beyond good and evil, and Baudelaire’s poet, fatally seduced by what is unsightly or oppressed – all rolled into one unholy trinity that has escaped from the modern metropolis and arrived, incarnate, in a small town on the prairies. The narrative begins soon after the protagonist Geoffrey Tavistock’s arrival in Poplar Plains, just when the townspeople have begun to talk about him and compare what they know and imagine about him. Where has he come from? On the one hand, Tavistock is always represented as a wanderer (symbolically, he currently lives in a railway car) whose restlessness has transcended identification with any national home. All the characters share the estrangement felt by Laura Macaulay, the heroine in love with him, when she realizes “how strange he really was to her – how much of his life had been lived apart from her, in countries unfamiliar to her, and among people she would never meet” (222). “What made him come to this country?” her father, Canon Macaulay asks. “That I can’t tell you,” another character replies: “He don’t seem to care where he is, or how he earns a living” (24–5). What he does care about is a fantasy life that is nearly pathological. He is consumed by the ideal of himself representing others – all others, everywhere – as a sort of second incarnation, an individual representation of whatever truth lies hidden in the world of modern life, to the extent that his very self and its coherence is distorted or effaced. As a result he is a problematic protagonist, often barely legible to the reader. He is fickle in his emotions, thoughts, and decisions. He is unpredictable in his actions. But he always responds with exceptional empathy to his environment, entering into and comforting the suffering of lives repressed from the bourgeois decorum of the British town – of non-anglophone immigrants and métis, of the sick, of the impoverished and lower class. He does so because he believes in one world soul (60–1) and the need for a sign to reveal its logic and mediate its lives.

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This “religious mania” is only a symptom of a deeper problem in Tavistock’s identity. He is an actor, and has the gift of entering into other lives and “becoming” them. Because he sees his world as a world of suffering (I will discuss why shortly), he responds “intuitively to tragedy” around him, “becoming a sufferer himself” (32). There is no clear distinction between such acting, when he is playing at being someone or something else than he is, and an ostensible reality, in which he is merely himself. There is no legible “himself,” apart from the mysterious individuality that expresses these desires, abilities, and ideals. With a “precise English accent” that testifies as much to his vocation as to his origins, “there was something strange about him – something unusually forceful. There was a penetrating quality in his voice, for one thing, and a very dramatic way of talking – almost as though he were playing a role on the stage and knew all his speeches in advance” (5, 6). Thus he is both strange, an abstraction to everyone, and familiar, an empathic or penetrating presence. Gawthorp, a minor character, looks into his eyes and feels “as though the two of them had known each other all their lives,” and intimately so, “more than what you might call a brotherly look” (127). Laura feels the same way. “I thought you said he was unusual,” the Canon says. “Yes … Very. But – it was what I expected – somehow. I feel as though I have known somebody like him before. But I know I haven’t. So it must be – I must have expected it – or made it up” (90). Tavistock represents the expression of, and a social bonding determined by, something uncannily recognized, some apparently foreign element hidden in everyone. Its ambivalent coherence is signified by the restlessness evoked by his mobility in a world space: “I am one of those – that Keats speaks of,” he explains in a phrase that is repeated throughout the novel, “one of those ‘to whom the miseries of the world are misery, and will not let them rest› (62). And so he can rest in no place and nobody, and is driven to traverse and embody more and more alterities. “He could not remember a time when his mind had been free of voices” which “sounded in his ear like his own voice” (33). These miseries and voices of others are explicitly linked to the global modernity produced by imperialist history. The voices grew in Tavistock “through his brief career on the London stage, beginning with a walking-on part in Irving’s production of The Inferno [i.e., as one of Dante’s miserable voices!] – through the years of touring in the provinces and in Africa – and was now firmly fixed” (33). Although

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born in England, Tavistock is consistently associated with a global space signified by his travels, and especially – during formative years preceding his move to Canada – with Africa. Like Wilhelm Meister, he was an actor in a travelling theatre company, but with a wider geographical territory. The company was “stranded” in South Africa during its violent repossession by the British Empire in the Boer War, and this is the only setting and period that is developed into a separate narrative (and insistently, from multiple points of view) apart from the main narrative in present-day Poplar Plains. A curious spatial contiguity or mirroring is thus established between Canada and South Africa, and specifically between the nation at peace in 1907 and the colony at war in 1899–1902. Other African and imperialist signifiers play across this spatial connection: David Livingstone Linklater, the old gold-prospector dying in the wilderness, afflicted with a “religious mania” that has transformed material into spiritual fanaticism, is an avatar of that other materialistic “Livingstone,” Conrad’s Mr Kurtz. To the Kurtzian Linklater, Tavistock plays an empathic Marlowe (and Stanley), one who will attend his last days and words, and recognize in him a terrible double of himself. For example, when Tavistock delivers one of his Nietzschean discourses in Linklater’s presence, and in the language of Kurtzian “ideas” and “light,” the madman affirms the discourse as his apocalyptic own. In the darkness of the latter’s decrepit cabin, the Canon argues with Tavistock: “We all have our own ideas, I suppose, and –” “Ideas, ideas!” Tavistock exclaims. “There is only the one truth – the way, the truth and the light! And in the light there is no evil.” The Canon feels the eyes staring through the gloom at him, and hears the voice repeating, in a prophetic accent: “There is no evil!” Linklater sends a wagging finger above his head. “Be ye therefore perfect!” he mutters, nodding his chin heavily on his breast. (61)

The Kurtzian type is also reflected in other characters, like the “chap in Africa who had what he called an illumination,” a “terrific experience – that was the word he used – ’terrific,› that revealed him to be “like any ordinary, simple person” – a simplicity that, like Kurtz’s, is beyond the ability of the teller to explicate, beyond the moral logic of language (283–4, cf. 285). Tavistock himself appears costumed as a gentleman-adventurer, wearing a khaki shirt, breeches, high-laced boots, and Norfolk jacket consistent

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with the cliché frontiersman costume of the British Empire around the world, including that of the highly publicized Scouts in the Boer War.3 It is in South Africa that he comes under the influence of an actress who plays a femme-fatale Lady Macbeth to his vacillating Hamlet, and teaches him that “a man who can’t kill is only half a man” – a truth that in the South African context becomes a lesson of imperialism, and which he now seeks to reveal in a postcolonial Canadian setting (101).4 A violently contested Africa thus functions as a synecdoche and type for a modern condition brooded upon throughout the novel. This is the sense that the world is unified by the experience, both as victim and perpetrator, of violent and immiserating crime. The desire to recognize some ethical logic to justify this experience, to create an exemplary ego fitted to it, is what drives the protagonist toward his form of religious mania. For he wants to be its incarnation and sign – just as Christ once was to an earlier age, but is now unable to, since, according to the protagonist, Christ has not committed a crime. Crime transcends both choice and will to become here a human condition, a structure and essence, which means that the individual will suffer not only from the affliction of crime, but from the awareness of an inevitable complicity in its production. Christ bore the guilt, at most, of temptation to crime, of the choice implicit in temptation; Brooker represents the need for a new exemplary ego – really a new image of the superego, a modern law internalizable as an individual principle – that will make sense of the world as such, and reduce psychological suffering by transvaluing the world’s “misery” beyond good and evil. If our complicity with crime is essential – even when our will and choice are against it – then we need to readjust ourselves psychologically or spiritually to affirm that crime, and cease to think of it in the realm of ethical choice. Hence the symbolic project of an innocent murder, an exemplary crime to be accepted and affirmed rather than repressed, that will have “an historic quality,” proving to “the whole world – that there can be no evil” (230, 244). The modern self requires an image not only of the martyr, but of the murderer too, in dialectical resolution. The catch is, for Tavistock, that if this law transcends his will, he cannot take any action to represent it. He longs rather to be its instrument. ‹The lightning is innocent when it strikes,› he tells the Canon: “Man must be like that – the pure instrument of the world’s unity!” (193). “Once he stopped thinking – once he was utterly self-

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less – the miracle of innocence would make him its instrument; and though, in his mind, it had the appearance of murder – now – it would be transfigured, he knew it would, in the moment of achievement. In a mysterious way, that he could not understand or predict, but in somehing like the way that Christ’s crucifixion had become the symbol of atonement, this act of his would become the symbol of guiltlessness” (210). Theological language signifies the element of faith, but this is closer to a secular and Nietzschean commitment than a Christian one, characterized in the same passage as “the superhuman driving out the human.” Ultimately, he does not depend on an idea of an external God, but seeks to surrender himself to some kind of collective spirit he sees motivating his world. One character has an ironic view of this fallen deity and its vulgar transactions: ‹I think he believes God is responsible for everything – you know what I mean – for sin, and – all kinds of evil – and death. One time he said something about an ‘act of God.’ You know, like on a bill of lading” (139). But Tavistock’s own view is more abstract than practical, imagining only the symbolic need to be “empty of all resolve, innocent of desire, and free to obey – to obey whom? But the questioning voice needed no answer. His heart was filled with the fervour that had always answered his doubts. What does it matter whether God sends down his Son from a heaven beyond the world, or whether he ascends through the world in Son after Son for ever?” (210). To obey whom? – this is the practical, “earthly” question which haunts the protagonist in his search for an adequate superego, and which he here leaves unanswered. Tavistock’s global empathy corresponds, in a mirror image, to the very global logic that produces misery. It depends on it for its meaning. Throughout the narrative it is uncertain, to the reader as well as to the protagonist, whether his ideal is to negate and transform or to justify and preserve that misery. He promises only to redeem it, to become an individual incarnation of its meaning, its logic. Paradoxically, he can only imagine this meaning or logic in an inward, abstract vision that contradicts his outward empathy. Throughout the narrative he vacillates between a self-effacing empathy for whatever is around him, and a self-absorbed abstraction that cuts him off from what is around him as it seeks an image of totality: He began to feel free of the place – free to dream again. For days there had been a cleared, uncluttered space growing in his mind. It was a space he

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could enter, shutting himself in from the world. He seemed to be standing at the brink of a limitless, pale gulf. As he became accustomed to the strange sensation, the space took the form of a sphere. He looked into its depths with a profound curiosity, as though recognizing the description of a promised land. Its vast emptiness, its purity, its shining transparency fascinated him. He felt himself drawn into it, treading its unsubstantial blueness timidly … He felt himself in the presence of invisible powers, capable of performing any miracle … ‘It is possible!’ rang out a voice, reverberating around him like a tolled bell. (31–2)

This is the imagination that Ann Davis recognizes to be analogous to Brooker’s painterly abstractions.5 But it is also, in its spherical form, blue medium, and its modern sense of existential power in a void (the voice is Goethe’s Faust, that echoed by Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov), an image of the unified transoceanic and global order pursued by the logic of imperialism – here internalized, transcoded into a mobile aesthetic for the modern individual. The inward vision paradoxically both frees Tavistock from his particular place and projects an image of a hidden meaning and logic that includes it and belongs to the larger world he wanders. His need to repress the immediate experience of this place to achieve the security and empowerment of this totalizing vision exemplifies Jameson’s thesis discussed above, that the abstracting formalist reaction to realism is an aesthetic compensation for a logic of the whole which is unavailable to or suppressed by a metropolitan modernity founded on its historical imperialism. But Brooker does not let us, or his protagonist, remain too comfortable with that aestheticizing vision. It conveys Tavistock to the edge of a pathological solipsism, in which his own reality – or existential possibility – becomes the structure and sign of the reality of the world around him, and the arbiter of its creation and destruction. The voice that rings out “It is possible!” also “brought him out of his daydream. He knew the words. They were Faust’s. He was accustomed to this trick of his memory, jolting him with old phrases he had forgotten, as though spoken by a voice in his ear. He dramatized everything that happened to him. It was a strain in his nature” (32). The voice which at first seemed to emanate from his abstract vision, a transcendent voice “to obey,” turns out to be his own making, or remaking – a bit of writing he has dramatized from within, rather than a spoken word

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from without, present in itself. The shock of recognizing his epiphany as a performance, an aesthetic simulation of transcendence, jolts him out of his “dream” into reality. It was only art, after all. The absolute form of such aesthetic abstraction and its solipsism is music – the most purely non-representational art, often evoked as a principle of literary formalism, and translated by Brooker into his best-known abstract painting, Sounds Assembling (1928) – and music as such expresses the solipsistic tendencies of two other characters: Laura, who plays piano, and her suitor Harry Anderson, who sings. The two are superficially matched by their shared education in the city, their scorn of a philistine bourgeoisie and their pleasure in a selfenclosed experience of art. Laura is initially characterized by her “eager eyes and an elusive smile which betrayed the inward ecstasies she fed on,” just like the inwardly ecstatic Tavistock, and moreover, the “rich, strange thoughts cours[ing] in her mind, coming on rare occasion to utterance, perhaps at twilight in the garden, or late at night” similarly isolate her from the conventional language and understanding of others (5, 65). For like Tavistock, her inward ecstasies take her far from the pleasures of conventional morality: “She had a terrific sense of suffering – she could face evil – she could create it under her fingers and fill the room with it – beauty, too, of course” (236). Harry is akin to her as a modern and an aesthete: “They were among the few young people in the town who had been outside and seen something of the world. Because he was an artist and of her own generation she had talked more freely to him than to anyone else. For a while she had believed that on both sides their companionship was simply a relation between two musicians, clinging desperately to the atmosphere of high emotion associated with their art, in spite of the hackneyed, commonplace tastes of almost everyone else in the town. But she had soon discovered how shallow he was. All he had was a voice. Even his acquired manners became crudely transparent after a few meetings” (69). Beneath this aestheticist surface lurks something much more disturbing, an aggressive belief in a selfish world in which moral “hypocrisy” conceals “desires and impulses … which everyone equally would like to indulge if only they could ’get away with it’ in secret” (68–9). This egocentric vision is realized when Harry sexually assaults Laura – in a canoe, which precipitates his death by drowning – the central event of the novel. In this Harry reveals himself, despite himself, to be his father’s son. Beneath his aestheticism is the same

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egocentric brutality of the metropolitan capitalist. Speaking to the Canon and his doctor friend, Harry’s father, Clem, reveals himself to be the type of a mobile transvaluer of people and place: “Canon, soon you’ll have one less crook in this town to worry about. I’m sellin’ up – lock, stock, and barrel” … “Moving up to Edmonton, Clem, eh?” the doctor said, in a tone that aimed at being cordial. “Yup!” Anderson replied, dragging the cigar from his mouth and puffing smoke over his head. “It’s a hoodooed town, this is, and I’m through with it. It’s cost me plenty, believe me. But right now is a darned good time to clean up.” He stuck the cigar back into the corner of his mouth and sucked it in, teetering to and fro on his toes and heels with an arrogant swagger. “Things is boomin’ for a bit, just now,” he grinned, “and yours truly is goin’ to get his while the goin’ is good. But you watch her slide again. This bloody boom – excuse me, Canon – is just a flash in the pan. She’ll slide again – sure as God made little apples! When they close down them pits out there – you’ll see.” He thrust out his jaw, so that the cigar performed a half-circle in the air and remained tilted at a rakish angle, while he glanced insolently from one to the other. “Let ’em stay here as likes it,” he blared loudly, in his professional auctioneer’s voice, swerving his eyes into their corners to see if he was being overheard. “I’m off!” (14–15)

Behind the singing voice of Harry, the artist, is the auctioneering voice of Clem, the speculative investor. His brutality is not only social. One of the investments he must convert to capital will deprive a struggling métis character, Jack Jukes, of his land and ruin him. “’Well,’ he blared, ‘that’s his funeral, ain’t it? I’m gettin’ out – lock, stock and barrel – with everything I can lay my hands on› (135). His is the school of bloody instruction, already seen in South Africa, revealed here on the Canadian frontier. Although Harry is unambiguously a villain throughout, he too is a double of Tavistock, known for the seductive power of his voice and revealing a solipsistic, aesthetic self-justification that allows him to eschew moral values and consequently to express himself in a supposedly innocent crime. But while Harry has no real belief in Laura’s autonomous value – no empathy for a world outside his Nietzschean abstraction of it – Tavistock struggles with it. He is caught between his abstract sense of the same truth of the world, and the empathic

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feeling which allows him to experience it vicariously, in the real suffering of others. He too has come close to violence toward Laura, whom he knows he loves – indeed, close to murdering her. He implicates all others, those he loves and those he hates, in an antagonistic empathy identical to that of the archetypal modernist whose physiognomy he strangely shares, Charles Baudelaire.6 But he has not murdered her, as he has not murdered several other characters, because he cannot accept his own will as the basis for such significant action. The victim must be complicit in the global “will” transcending them both: “Are you the man?” he asks one of his potential victims, his hands poised, like Abraham, for the terrible act (256, 260). His empathy prevents him from conflating his own will (and vision) with the will of another, requiring the authority of dialogue. It is this unending negotiation, in a dialectical oscillation between empathy and abstraction, which prevents him ever from realizing, embodied in a single individual, the new and exemplary ego that is his world-historical ideal. This dialectic also demands the disfiguring of a coherent representation of character. As noted earlier, Tavistock is spontaneous and unpredictable in his feelings and decisions, and evasive or contradictory in his actions. Moreover, although he is the protagonist, he never does anything to advance the plot. His narrative interest lies in the sense he and all the other characters have that he is just about to do something, and in their difficulty in visualizing what that will be. In a curious disfiguring of the plot proper to its dialectical imperatives, it is Laura rather than the protagonist who commits the closest thing to Tavistock’s idea of an “innocent crime,” in the murder of Harry Anderson, and it is the métis Jack Jukes who symbolically murders Linklater – who, in an allegory of European-First Nations historical crimes, had exploited his abilities as a guide to search for gold only to betray him, spending the income himself (and likely sharing with Clem Anderson, significantly a silent partner). In a pattern typical of the Canadian bildungsroman, it is not the male protagonist who is the primary developing character, but his female counterpart. The novel describes Laura’s transition from an alignment with Harry to an alignment with Tavistock as a transition toward maturity – a maturity that will ultimately enable her to gain an ironic distance from Tavistock even in her love for him, producing the only narrative perspective in the novel that has any purchase on the closure of its protagonist’s psychological plot.

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Maturity in Think of the Earth is defined as becoming aware of and learning to live the criminal logic which implicates all of its characters in different ways, and which Tavistock alone attempts throughout to raise to consciousness and rationalize according to an individual reality principle. Laura “has grown up” and knows “what it’s like to be a woman now” because, with her ambiguously innocent killing of Harry, she “[has] his life on [her] conscience” (187, 179–80). It is a rather iconoclastic criterion for maturity. At this point she is also able to see her own solipsism reflexively in Tavistock, when he is “talking, as she often did, in a sort of dream” (178). She has escaped this dream, and worries that Tavistock will not. She is able to see him as incomplete and “sick,” but capable like her of being “saved – restored to a normal, happy outlook,” for “in spite of these swift turns of mood, which made him almost a different person at different moments, to be reckoned with in a new way whenever he veered, she had a vivid sense of him as one man, a man who could be made whole again” (268, 184). The sickness is figured not only in terms of the inward dreaminess of Tavistock’s and others’ aesthetic solipsisms, but in the (also blue) watery depths upon which Tavistock nightly rows his boat and into which Harry disappears. His boat is named Sigrid, after the legendary Nordic imperialist and femme fatale (a double here of the South African Clara), and represents his continued, restless voyaging into the heart of darkness. But Laura fears that Tavistock’s empathy will destroy him. When he begins to dive for Harry in an attempt to rescue him, she sees Harry as a kind of dangerous double of Tavistock who no longer has a name, and who will pull him toward his own solipsistic death, oblivious in the closed medium of his own psyche: “[You] started diving – for him. I was afraid all the time you would find him – and he might grab you – and drag you down.” … “Fancy,” she said, in a dreamy voice, “fancy facing death so suddenly – and then – even more suddenly – beginning to live!” “That is just what I felt,” he said tenderly, “when you looked at me that first time. But while I was diving – while I was actually under the water – groping about in those weeds – I wondered what sort of a fool I was.” (221)

The necessary therapy is not the result of Laura’s revelation, however, but of Tavistock’s encounter with a performance of his own symbolic ideal in the action of another, Jack Jukes. Jukes, whose name

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sounds like and is actually confused with “Duke” – a nickname given to Tavistock – acts as a double for Tavistock in a climactic scene in which Tavistock wanders toward Linklater’s cabin expecting the longed-for murder finally to take place at his hands, but finds Jukes committing the act in his place. The scene realizes for Tavistock the ideal of an “innocent” murder which he had long contemplated, but reveals to him that only Jukes – not an abstract individual that he could embody – could make it signify as such. He now acknowledges his ideal to be a world-historical sign of that truth, to be a kind of second Christ, as a mania. ‹As soon as I saw – what I saw – the perfection of everything – the harmony of good and evil – I knew that God never had any need to send a Son to this earth because of its sins. There was no need for Christ – or any new Christs,› and rather: “In a flash he had understood all murders – all deaths. He accepted death as the dark master of life. He accepted everything. He accepted the earth” (289). He is purged of his “long grieving” and is “eager to love” (290). The lesson of this closure is obscured by the disfiguring of any final image or event or character state by the insistence of its own dialectical structure. Reconciled on the one hand to a modern struggle of races and classes, individuals and empires, whose abstract truth transcends the (sane) consciousness of any individual reality principle, but negating on the other hand the solipsistic modernism which underwrites the psychology elemental to that struggle, Tavistock attains what Laura has called, in Brooker’s outrageously simple phrase, a normal, happy outlook. Tavistock is a character disfigured both by the Whitmanish empathy that allows him to contain multitudes and by the dialectical abstraction that alienates him – in a form of constant, restless movement both geographically outward and psychically inward – from any conventionally stable sign of identity. It is tempting to see him as an avatar of the violence and fragmentation conventional to the modern world, invading the more peaceable garden of a pre-modern periphery, but – as my discussions of Laura and Harry have already suggested – this is not so. The protagonist is of a piece with his setting, and the disfiguring of his characterization is continuous with the disfiguring of his narrative time and space. I have already described the spatial superimposition of colonial South Africa and postcolonial Canada that implies a world of global equivalences in the creative and destructive progress of imperialist civilization. This superimposition is marked in several ways as the product of a logic of modernization.

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First of all, what Tavistock remembers most about South Africa is not the war, which remains in the background, but the landscape of industrialization that is tainted by its blood. Thinking of the Macbethian Clara – “the memory of her whisper – ‘Give me the daggers’ – could chill his blood even now” – “brought to mind his final memory of Johannesburg … The sun was setting behind a stormy pile of clouds drifting like smoke throught the sky, and as the train pulled out between mountainous mine-dumps the last glow of the sunken sun splashed the great heaps of slag with blood-colour. It made him think of an inferno from which he had escaped at last” (38–9). Pitts too remembers above all the “huge mine-dumps, standing like mountains at the edges of the stark, angular town” (102). It is this image of a modernized Africa, not a primitivist one, that is metonymically feminized in the seductive Clara – conforming to the “She” type of a modernist femme fatale to which I will give extended attention in the next chapter, a figure which is the result of an uncanny displacement of patriarchal anxiety regarding the volatility of its own modernity. It is to escape her “spell” that Tavistock leaves Africa, and like Marlowe, similarly darkened by the bloody glow of an imperial dusk, that he adopts the posture of a Buddhist asceticism: “I wanted to root out of myself every vestige of desire that a man can have. I was bound I wouldn’t will anything” (38, 103). Will and desire are thus metonymically linked to the will and desire that define the modernization of the colony and its substratum of narcissistic aggressivity. In Canada and in his abstract ideal of a symbolic redemption for the suffering and misery produced by this world of will, Tavistock seeks to perform the Schopenhauerian alternative: its profane and compassionate representation.7 Poplar Plains, which echoes Portage la Prairie, Brooker’s first home when his family immigrated from England in 1905, might at first seem an unlikely further circle for this artist of the global inferno. But Poplar Plains is also characterized by an ambivalent modernization uncannily reflecting the African one. Just as Johannesburg is stark and angular, so is Poplar Plains “plumb and square,” its buildings “packed together” in “severely rectangular blocks,” both towns expressing their origins in a logic of development that is abstract and universal, rather than particular to their place. The mountainous mine-dumps that overlook Johannesburg like Dante’s titans are to be found in the grain elevators overlooking Poplar Plains. Tavistock sees these also in the red light of dusk, standing “one be-

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hind the other, towering above everything else in the town,” as “their tall red sides caught the light of the western-moving sun” (35, 34). These elevators hold the eastern-moving grain of the wheat boom, and are linked to the growth of the town around the railway (one railroad, and a second railroad on the way). Agriculture is merely the starting point for this development. Already, a nearby farm has been “torn up with steam shovels, and turned into a huge gravel pit” where Tavistock, apparently gravitating to mines, works as a timekeeper (4). The pits belong to the same imagery of the inferno from which Tavistock had thought to escape (in Poplar Plains he fantasizes moving on to the mountains). Its workers are Galician immigrants dwelling in a slum on the far side of the town’s railway tracks, in a poverty close to destitution and productive of crime. The significant gods of their lives are indicated by the fate of their “queer church,” which is “dwarfed to mushroom size by the towering elevators” (35). To these immiserated sufferers in the pits, Tavistock is a sort of empathetic Dante. While he is indifferent to conventional racism and sympathetic to the sick and the oppressed, his job, ironically, is to represent them according to the abstract and dehumanizing logic of numbers basic to the industry: “Every day, in the pits, he called out the numbers of the undersized, surly-looking men who lived in [a] jumble of tin and tar-paper. He had seen them at night, in their black shirts and overalls, hoeing at the back of [their] patchwork hutches. Did they suffer? he wondered” (35). These industrial labourers, who only have time to grow their food at night, are not dissimilar to the wealthier folk of the town, all of whom Tavistock darkly compares to prairie farmers “bent by need and greed over the grim monotony of the land,” with solipsistic “heads bent” and “eyes never lifted from interminable furrows” (36).8 Apart from the symbolic associations that link Canadian characters like the Canon and Linklater to a colonial African paradigm, there are also the real associations which link characters like Tavistock’s friend, Pitts and the police chief, Kitson. Pitts – his name resonating with both industrial landscapes and their infernal aspect – is the third party in an old love triangle involving Clara and Tavistock. When Tavistock reveals to Laura that he knows Pitts from Africa, she exclaims at the coincidence of their meeting in Poplar Plains. ‹Not much of one, I’m afraid,› he replies: “He was thinking that he and Pitts had both drifted there. They were drifters – for different reasons – but both drifters” (80). Meeting people in another part of the world

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is no coincidence if the characters are defined by their mobility and restlessness (which are abstract; the particular needs, the hopes or fears, being individual or, in the case of the Galician, Slavic, and Scandinavian immigrant groups, historically and culturally specific) and if the places they move to and from are themselves defined by the opportunities created by the creative and destructive progress of a global economy. It is no coincidence because Tavistock and Pitts are at home in a space made coherent by a global rather than a regional unity. This coincidental logic extends to Tavistock’s alliance with Laura. He meets her in the same place he first meets Pitts, in the Kurtzian Linklater’s cabin: “Here she was in this out-of-the-way shack, where Pitts, too, like a ghost out of the past, had come back into his life. For a moment he had a feeling of fate hanging over the house” (78). When she refers to his presence on the lake at her moment of crisis with Harry as “another strange meeting,” he denies it: “No … This is not so strange” (164). This sense of a contingent meaning involving Tavistock with Laura, along with the coincidence of Jukes’s performance of Tavistock’s “murder” of the already dead Linklater, will eventually deconstruct the metaphysical abstraction of his solipsistic vision – its inward sphere “crushed like an egg-shell” – and produce a more dialogic, existential aesthetic, one that can’t be fixed according to a unifying “reason” (78, 282). While Laura represents a sort of earthy love – “life could not be lived,” she learns from both Tavistock’s love and Harry’s death, “without touching people” – Jukes represents a kind of historical revenge, or the significance of historical injustice, that turns the protagonist’s vision outwards to the historical contingency of meaning (228). Jukes is a local métis whose excellent skills as a guide are obsolete, and who has turned to farming. However, this assimilation has been frustrated by the dispossession of his land, and a long interview with Kitson, the chief of police – a racist veteran of the South African war – reveals to Jukes that the law will not protect him. It is the vision of Jukes with his hands at David Livingstone Linklater’s throat that prompts Tavistock’s ultimate revelation: “I’m like a blind man seeing the earth for the first time” (283). If Tavistock is heterogeneous, incomplete, and unpredictable as a character, the same may be said for Poplar Plains. The story of Poplar Plains’s modernization is told in the opening pages of the novel, through the perspective of a character, the Canon, who “lament[s] the changes” and nostalgizes memories of the period of his youth which

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“grow glamorous with the passing of time” (4). As a young man he was a wilderness missionary, another “David Livingstone,” sent out from the East to serve the “breeds and Indians, who had settled in a scattered village there not many years before” – not at an indigeneous settlement site, but at a fort, a point in the system of east-west travel and trade. In the space of one generation “the place had changed beyond belief.” Ironically, however, the Canon’s youth is a causal element in the same logical chain of development that has brought the more recent changes, as well as their new, would be missionary, Tavistock. These changes have included a diversification of immigrant peoples and languages, a new division of bourgeois and dispossessed classes, and an economic life driven by cycles of boom and bust. Though the Canon glamorizes his youth as a period of stable pastoral experience, in which he felt his church at the centre of a peaceable kingdom of Cree, métis, and white people who “all knew each other and called each other by their first names,” it is clear that this imagined community was defined more significantly by its transformation of social life than by its metaphysical telos, and has performed necessary work in the process of imperialist expansion, socializing an indigeneous people to the production logic of white civilization. It is important that the Canon reflect upon the town’s development and his own place in it, at the very opening of the novel, because the Canon is the primary target of Tavistock’s Nietzschean revelations, of a modernism which asks the Canon to affirm his own criminal complicity in deference to a new image of innocence and communal unity. His struggle with this modernist ideology is thus immediately joined to his struggle to understand the meaning of his own, “civilizing,” past. In a grotesquely symbolic image, he places the buffalo hoof he uses as a paper-weight “squarely on top of the papers” on which he has unsuccessfully struggled with Tavistock’s words, and stands “pressing on it and shaking his head” (5). The extinct buffalo, a conventional symbol of the vanished, indigeneous sovereignty of the people he has guided toward assimilation, is the cynical totem that remains to him in order to master, and tacitly affirm, Tavistock’s – like Clem Anderson’s – unpeaceable challenge. The town, a shifting patchwork from the very beginning of the interests of a global imperial economy, the needs of globally mobile groups and individuals, and the ideals of restless imaginations – those as different as the Canon, Laura, and Tavistock – produces its own ceaseless and unpredictable

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expansions and extinctions, imagined communities and margins. The essence of Poplar Plains will always be imagined by someone arriving, for good or ill, from without.9 All of these matters depend upon style. Think of the Earth is a novel in which the coherence of the characterization of the protagonist, of the plot, and of the setting are transcended and disfigured by an aesthetic imperative divided between the truth of an immediate world and the truth of a global abstraction. It is an agon of coincidence, whose logic always transcends and even transforms the individual as well as the space and time that gives him or her meaning. Such an agon requires the continuous dialogic flux of empathy – as the protagonist never ceases, “restlessly,” to discover – in order to track, to clock, to see, to hear, to feel, and in short, to represent. Paradoxically, however, the same representation requires a form of authentic abstraction from the seductive or illusory coherence of the immediate – a form that will itself appear aestheticist or expressionistic. Mere realism reveals nothing in this novel. There is no world in itself, or character in itself, distinct from psychologies that create it or destroy it. The identities of character and place are tensed and torn by an ongoing contest of imaginations – or of what Tavistock and Faust call possibilities – and imaginations contingent upon others, backed by force and numbers. The world is a projection, but a contingent one. Thus, Brooker’s “everyday expressionism,” in which he anchors this expressionist imperative in the dialogic empathy of realism – a realism that in syntactical style looks conventional, but in the development of narrative space and time, and of characterization – looks incoherent or unrealistically exaggerated. The project of the novel as a bildungsroman is to find a place for the truth of this madness in a mature individual ego. As this is only achieved by submitting one’s libidinal love and empathy to the abstract superego of a modernizing history – in which, deconstructing the dichotomy of civilization and discontent, there “is no evil,” for ethical contradictions are “the nature of God” (281, 288) – the resulting maturity effects a self-divided compromise, as love learns to seek what is transiently and contingently local, and art the transcending forms of the suffering of the local from within and from without.

fatal a b s t rac ti on : a s f o r m e a n d m y h o u s e It is hard not to think of Sinclair Ross’s novel about a pianist and a painter-preacher on the prairies as a grimly playful sequel to Think

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of the Earth. Published five years later in 1941, As For Me and My House articulates the same everyday expressionist vision and an even more liminal form of compromise. Its protagonist is the female pianist rather than the male painter-preacher, and the style and form of the narrative shifts to a generic diary, into the closed circle of the woman’s first-person perspective. The two characters, Mr and Mrs Philip Bentley, are young, recently educated in the metropolis, but without independent means and so necessarily mobile – eking out a living on the prairies of the Depression years – and haunted by restless dreams of life-changing possibilities. Though married and embarked on domestic and public careers, neither one is satisfied, both remain incomplete. The novel conforms to a genre of bildungsroman typical to the representation of female development, which I will discuss further in the next chapter, in which the narrative of individual development takes place as the negation of a conventional one that has driven the ego to a destructive crisis, rather than constructing and securing it. The plot is psychological and fundamentally libidinal, as the estranged Mrs Bentley attempts to secure her own desire and sense of self by gaining and preserving mastery over those of her cynical husband, Philip. While this desire is figured centrally as a sexual one, sexual desire is only one figuration in a metonymic chain that extends to other aspects of their social and private lives, such as a cultural desire for the fixed home or “house” of the title, a parental desire for children, and particularly an empathic desire belonging to art. Mrs Bentley’s desire to master Philip and his desires leads to the sort of imaginary transitivity that Lacan would predict in this situation, in which Mrs Bentley seeks the image of herself in Philip as in a mirror – and so submits herself to the pursuit of mastery not only of his desires, which she takes over as, or translates into, her own, but of the interpretation and signification of the desiring self he displays to her. This narrative structure has a peculiar effect on the genre, because it results in a diaristic form in which the explicit characterization and locus of plot development belong to Philip, but the implicit characterization and locus of plot development belong to a narrator who does not name herself, who effaces herself behind “Philip,” the mask of a discourse motivated by and named for her husband. We are increasingly led to reject this “Philip” as a superficial or unuseful guide to the logic of the novel, and to depend on the writerly and readerly focalization of what critics have come to call “Mrs Bentley.” Only in the

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latter, disfigured by the disintegration and transgression of boundaries of the named self and the generic narrative of the self – and not in the alternately banal and inscrutable Philip, – can we seek the coherence of the novel’s narrative development. To this end, the space of the narrative, across which such agonistic reflections of self and other are tirelessly played out, provides a map and a key. The intersection of open or wild natural spaces and enclosing or built social spaces – psychological and geographical – has long been recognized at the heart of the novel’s conflicting paradigms. Robert Kroetsch has articulated this as a prairie vs. town, or more wittily, “horse vs. house” conflict. Frank Davey has taken this binary paradigm a further and crucial step by indicating a third spatial paradigm in conflict with both, and ultimately transcending them. This is a “music/art/university/concert tour/Europe” paradigm belonging to the space of a mobile and global spatial logic not always compatible with the “house” of local and individual civilization. Davey makes the necessary discrimination between the culture of the small town and that of the city. Only the global culture is properly metropolitan, and the metropolitan undermines rather than reinforces the sense of closure and stability of the local society. While the small town is named Horizon for this closure, the city remains without a name, and without specified location. But it sends to the small town, authorities over its religion (Philip) and education (Paul), who are alien and incompatible with it and who threaten to disturb or transform its coherence – as do economic interests with invade the town by other means, offering new opportunities or difficulties (interests that are mostly silent in the novel, Davey notes, but figured in Judith’s commercial courses, Mrs Bentley’s mail-order catalogue and her daily budgeting, and the depressed agricultural-industrial base that produces and reproduces, in a series of indebted salaried positions, the Bentleys’ lack of means). In the end, it is this supra-regional spatial order that imposes its teleology on the narrative development of the metropolitan-educated characters and the closure of the plot. When the Bentleys move to the city and its life of “art, book, and word,” it is not so much the prison-house of a particular social order – another “horizon” – with which they make their pact, but the unpredictable flux of a subtending economic determination that is universal and placeless, its particular identity irrelevant, so nameless. Beyond the space of the small town, beyond the horizons that enable a conventional realist perspective and a fixed taxonomic map,

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are the nameless abstractions both of wild nature and of global history – the one “disguised” as the other’s invasive, dessicating, blinding “wind.”10 The two are considered together from the vertiginous perspective of the ranch, from which frightening but invigorating liminal point, looking out on old barrens and new towns alike, the characters are able to perceive the identity of modern historical cycles of development and desertification, and timeless natural cycles of growth and decay.11 Ross’s antimodernist idealization of the rugged, iconoclastic life of the ranch paradoxically harmonizes with the closure that allows them to escape their interminable Horizons towards an idealized metropolis. The disfiguring of spatial representation in the novel is seen selfreflexively in the mirror of Philip’s drawing and painting. This is conventionally expressionistic, according to Taylor: “torn” between the immediately objective and the elusively abstract. In an inwardlooking trance in which “reality as the rest of us know it disappears,” Philip the painter “pierces this workaday reality of ours, half scales it off, sees hidden behind it another … He tries to solve it, give it expression, and doesn’t quite succeed” (133). Mrs Bentley describes his townscapes and landscapes as expressionistic projections of psychological states hidden in the place or the artist or both. The “false fronts” of the buildings of Main Street, which she describes as objective symbols of the flimsy and vain psychological masks worn by all the characters, are not ridiculed in Philip’s drawings of the small towns they live in, but are “understood and pitied” as extensions of the ineluctable psychology of the place, and as such, “stricken with a look of self-awareness and futility” (7). One townscape is almost anthropomorphic, and clearly uses the dramatic contrasts in lighting and stylistic simplification of visual expressionism: “The solitary street lamp, pitted feebly and uselessly against the overhanging darkness. A little false-fronted store, still and blank and white – another – another – in retreating steplike sequence – a stairway into the night. The insolent patch of the store is unabashed by the loom of darkness over it. The dark windows are like sockets of unlidded eyes, letting more of the night gape through. Farther on is a single figure, bent low, hurrying, almost away. One second more and the little street will be deserted” (23). The description is strikingly like the expressionistically rendered small towns painted by Lawren Harris in Ontario Hill Town (1926) and Miners’ Houses, Glace Bay (1925), exhibited in 1926, whose desolate

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streets and stark buildings are similarly poised between the looming darkness of a surrounding sky and the interior darknesses gaping from its windows. Just as the spirit of these townscapes is continuous with the stark, somber drama of Harris’s Arctic landscapes, so is Philip’s vision continuous from his own townscapes to his landscapes drawn and painted at the ranch. The same desolation pervades them both, a kind of underlying, mystical presence: “Just the hills, the driftwood logs, and stunted trees – but brooding over and pervading everything the same conviction of approaching dissolution,” portrayed with “the same strength and fatalism” in every landscape (132, 134). The landscape here also cannot fail to remind us of the sense of agonistic violence and tendentially morbid fatalism attributed to Harris and the Group of Seven during their exhibitions of the 1920s, and expressed by their young contemporary, the poet A.J.M. Smith, as a world of “strength / broken by strength.”12 The same vision is yet again to be found in Philip’s representation of people, which tends – like expressionism – toward the simplification, exaggeration, and distortion of caricature. Both people and places are “distorted” and “intensified.” A sketch of his congregation in Horizon reveals a study in progressive abstraction, with expressionist portraiture at one end and a kind of abstract expressionism at the other, in which the underlying emotional violence of others, his subject, fades into his own, his style: “Seven faces in the first row – ugly, wretched faces, big-mouthed, meaneyed – alike, yet each with a sharp, aggressive individuality – the caricature of a pew, and the likenesses of seven people. Seven faces more in the second row – just the tops of them. Seven faces in the third – seven in the fourth – just the tops of them. Seven until they merged – brief, hard pencil flecks, nothing more, but each fleck relentless, a repetition of the fleck in front of it, of the seven faces in the front row, of all that he saw there contemptible and mean” (23– 4). Here the earlier “steplike sequence” of town buildings and the repetitions of logs and stumps are mirrored in the symmetrical rows, not of identical people, but of people revealing an abstract identity with the increasing stylization of Philip’s emotional insight. A transitive interiority is the key both to Philip’s expressionist art and to the everyday expressionism of Ross’s narrative perspective, in which Mrs Bentley, Philip Bentley, and an authorial Ross, as well as a generalized modern ego, are represented in a continuum admitting no easy separations.

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Lawren S. Harris (1885–1970), Miners’ Houses, Glace Bay, c. 1925. Oil on canvas, 107.3 × 127.0 cm; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Bequest of Charles S. Band, Toronto, 1970

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Frederick H. Varley (1881–1969), Open Window, c. 1933. Oil on canvas, 101.6 × 109.2 cm; collection of Hart House, University of Toronto

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Bertram Brooker (1888–1955), Evolution, c. 1929. Oil on canvas, 76.5 × 61.3 cm; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Purchased 1969

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Bertram Brooker (1888–1955), Realization (Crime and Punishment), 1930. Pen and ink on paper, 38.1 × 27.6 cm (paper), Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.

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What allows this abstraction of interior space and subsequent disfiguring of objective space – as a world of “half scaled off” and “distorted” surfaces – becomes clear only with the “everyday” realist framework that represents this disfiguring as an objective and immediate, rather than aesthetically autonomous form. Philip flees from this empathic quality in his own work, wanting to separate what he sees from what he knows and feels: “In art, memories and associations don’t count. A good way to test a picture is to turn it upside down. That knocks all the sentiment out of it, leaves you with just the design and form” (202). If Philip tries to reverse and erase himself in the medium of his art, to reveal what is true and valuable to him, so Mrs Bentley tries to reverse and erase herself in Philip, and Ross – or the author function represented by Ross – in Mrs Bentley. Philip’s inability to do this – to separate abstraction from empathy, formalism from realism – explains the increasing failure he attributes to his work. The failure is understandable, because, like Harris in his small-town paintings, he is seeking aesthetic unity from a place whose surfaces are local and peripheral but whose experiences are determined by a global and metropolitan world. In an analogous development, Mrs Bentley desires a child of her own as a sign of the mastery she seeks through Philip, but must remake such a child out of the orphaned children – first Steve, then Philip Jr – of others. In moving immediately to the city, she means not only to purify their own identities as metropolitans, but never to allow their child to recognize its peripheral origins in the small-town and the farm-labouring class of the natural mother. Only the metropolitanized Bentleys can give the child, though ironically in the abstraction of repetition, “opportunity and a name” (204). The source of this abstraction, in social or aesthetic form, is a modernist principle of self-development, creation out of an aesthetically autonomous, inward void similar to Brooker’s blue sphere: “It’s always when a man turns away from this common-sense world around him,” says Philip, “that he begins to create, when he looks into a void, and has to give it life and form” (148). Just so, the second Philip is not a repetition of the first Philip’s characterological identity, but of his – or any modern’s – abstract possibility. The second Philip is actually the model for the first Philip, an abstraction offered as a mask: “He doesn’t look like Philip yet, but Philip I’ll swear is starting to look like him. It’s in the eyes, a stillness, a freshness, a vacancy of beginning” (216). Mrs Bentley is the only one who succeeds in turning

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her object of desire upside down, draining it of its original history and associations and retaining only its significant form, to produce her truth. It is this transitive “vacancy of beginning” that characterizes the nameless, placeless iterability of the globalizing modern space described by Davey. And this, not Philip, is the ultimate object of a mastery that demands, finally and paradoxically, a submission – to the coups de dés of characterology and spatial movement, to bourgeois rather than bohemian horizons. For this reason, it is moot whether Mrs Bentley is a reliable narrator. Mrs Bentley’s perspective – a nameless, placeless metropolitan development, conforming to Brooker’s musical paradigm of art as abstract and solipsistic – is the producer of its own and the only puissant individual truth, a compromise whereby the ego can find itself only in submission to the mirror of another, an abstraction of the self as mere power and possibility. In antimodernist fashion, this modern alterity and the compromise it demands are feminized – but also aestheticized, reduced to the solipsistic logic of aesthetic autonomy. A deeper and competing truth, the masculinized one, remains unreconciled to this modernism and aesthetic compromise, beyond internalization and mastery by the ego – and in the latter’s narrative development here, beyond the mastery of Mrs Bentley. This is the uncompromising plot focused on Steve, which disfigures the meaning and closure of the plot focused on Judith. While the narrative is evasive and ambiguous in its construction of Philip’s sexual desire for Judith – a mystery plot which begins mediated by Mrs Bentley’s fearful projections and ends mediated by her aggressive ones – it is relatively straightforward, if trivializing, about his sexual desire for Steve. It appears to be love at first sight: Philip came out of the house. Critically for a minute he and Steve looked each other over. Philip’s eyes were narrowed a little, his mouth relaxed and absent, as if his vision just then were taking all his energies of concentration. He didn’t see either Paul or me. We waited without a word till they were finished. I turned then to look at Steve again myself. Something in Philip’s expression made me. And this time I saw an ominously good-looking boy. (54)

Ominously good-looking? After Steve tells a story, with rather heavyhanded sexual imagery, about horse-riding, Philip invites him to “come for a ride” with him in the car sometime, and Mrs Bentley, not

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insensible to this cliché pick-up, feels “vaguely threatened” (56). But since she is powerless to intervene in Philip’s homosexual and homosocial world (the world of the id symbolized by horses, and their lovers, throughout the novel), Mrs Bentley must displace this into a heterosexual form she can manipulate, psychologically and actually.13 This works, but only as a “false front.” The homosocial desire represented by Steve is never exorcized by this abstracting perspective, but remains external to it, a power of seduction and motivation lodged in an immediacy that is intransigent, untranslatable, a physical absolute. Even Philip’s power over Steve is transitory, as Steve eventually disappears from view into his own, incompletely represented plot. The coherence of Steve’s story and his relationship to Philip belong to a realist perspective that subtends and appears subordinated to the fictionalist perspective that organizes the self-consciousness of the narrative ego. To think of the earth, in this case, is to think outside the abstraction of modern life – beyond the transcendental adversary projected here as always, by a fearful Mrs Bentley, into the “wind, the plaintive way it whined” – to think toward a transgressive and uncompromising empathy, here with the disfiguring raison d’être, within and beyond the horizon of her perspective, of the drifting dispossession of the immigrant railway labourer whose volatility of name, place, parentage, and development uncannily mirrors even as it threatens to undo the protagonist’s own narrative of formation. Brooker was able to figure the same, new ideal of empathic abstraction in the genre of a conventional comic romance, in which the heterosexual love relationship can be distinguished as a private and individual space apart from history yet function as a model and medium for social normalization. Indeed, femininity itself is a sign of this idealized difference. All the characters with power over the society and history depicted in his novel, as well as with power over the plot that focalizes it, are men. Women apart from Laura are silent or unseen. Ross portrays a similar Nietzschean modernity and postcolonial disfiguring of interior and exterior space, but by making the spaces of love and femininity continuous with and even central to, rather than distinct and different from, this modern condition, he disintegrates Brooker’s liminal form of conventional compromise. In Brooker’s compromise, the protagonist learns to reconcile a (violent and criminal) abstract truth in his world experience with a (loving and redemptive) empathic representation of its flux and contingency. Between abstraction and empathy in his “mapping” of the world

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around him, arises the need for mature submission to a dialogic reciprocity conventionalized in the demotic genre of realist romance and under the heterosexual paradigm of its plot and closure. In Ross’s novel, however, the latter paradigm is merely another vehicle for the introverted imperialist contest of solipsistic egos. Love is never at stake, only mastery – a pathetic mastery, since the desire for it arises not from malice or selfishness but from a fragile hold upon both the psychological and material welfare of the self. Reciprocity with the reader is also evaded, as the conventional realism that mediates different perspectives and affirms the bond of a genre between author and reader is made impossible. While Brooker’s narrative is structured by multiple perspectives that revolve through dialogue after dialogue, Ross’s narrative is structured as a monologue, whose dialogues only rarely break its surface before sinking back into interiority and silence, trailing unasked questions and misunderstood answers in their wake. Unsurprisingly, if the heterosexual model of self and other simply reflects the alienated agon of self and society, then femininity will not offer an alternative code to modernity, but on the contrary, will present its image in a mirror of sexual difference. In As For Me and My House, all the powerful figures are women. Femininity both encodes and enforces the bourgeois culture and laws by which Horizon lives. Men in Horizon, apart from Philip and Paul, the social misfits of the main plot, are barely ever seen, more rarely heard. Men rather than women represent what is marginal to the making of their modern world. Real men, so to speak, run with the wolves – like El Greco with the coyotes, or Laura (!) with the horses – and when they do, they disappear from the horizons of plot and representation. In Ross’s antimodernist vision, the modern ego has successfully internalized the local contradictions of that imperialist history represented by Brooker into a psychodrama of sexual desire and objectification, in which the nameless and placeless logic of modern production and reproduction is introverted as a femininized superego, a law of the metropolitan mother. What is beyond this power of abstraction is queer and threatening and infertile. Empathy is real; it is there, vaguely threatening on the horizon, but it produces nothing. The world it represents is torn between an introverted imperialism in the abstract and a suffering sterility in the immediate. It wants, with the abstracting forces of a global modernity it aestheticizes, to keep turning things upside down

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– but it can’t; despite itself, it won’t. So maturity is trivialized either as will or as representation, as a feminine compromise or a masculine closet. Mrs Bentley never develops, she only succeeds. Philip does develop, but only towards failure, in despair of his art and of realizing himself as an artist. At the end he remains within Mrs Bentley’s horizon: she takes ultimate authority over his name and his productivity, as she does over his perspective throughout. The last sentence of the novel marks the closure of abstraction formally as well, as Philip’s question – usually Philip has been the one to assert the power of silence over Mrs Bentley’s questions – goes unanswered in dialogue, the empathic moment now safely beyond the horizon of her internal monologue. Dialogue here is rendered as absurd as in Paul’s final plea to Mrs Bentley – which takes the form of a “nonsense riddle” – and as easily, though for the lover painfully, dismissed. In her last moments with Paul, walking in farm fields outside Horizon, she retreats to silence and the new sense of abstract power she feels from it: “I kept silent … It seemed strange that I now should make another suffer who had suffered so much that way myself.”14 His love, like the dessicated rural place itself, is a remnant of the immediate but meaningless. “We came home leaving it there” (208–9). The same can be said for any closure of meaning or realist effect in Ross’s style. It embraces realism and regionalism only to represent the abstraction which, to give it any meaning, must undo its essence and disfigure it into a dialectic of being and nothingness, an agon of creation and destruction of the real, the immediate, the personal, the local, the authentic and original, ex nihilo. Both Brooker and Ross lament for their nation, in this sense, the loss of an originary or determining past that is local to the Canadian place or private to the Canadian individual. They tell stories of individual development that begin with the loss of a past of one’s own, and explore, without any satisfying sense of an ending, a polarity of alternative origins. Protagonists and their focalization of narrative space and time are caught, stretched, doubled, and deformed between the mirror of a sympathetic but suffering contingency of a modern here and now, and the mirror of a powerful but alienated abstraction of a transcending modern history. Ross’s protagonist looks finally to the latter, Brooker’s to the former, but neither escapes the disfiguring of this contradictory type of bildung. They are like the Bentleys’ grotesquely shaped dog – like most other characters an orphan, and a parody of youth at the point of maturity –

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who Philip names El Greco “because El Greco was an artist who had a way of painting people long and lean as if they’d all been put on the rack and stretched considerably” (107).

the country as unfinished business El Greco is an exemplary expressionist, and the secularization of his style – the religious iconography of his transcendental disfiguring – is apparent in his translation to the figure of a decidedly earthly “brute” and into the paradigm of an aggressively horizontal and profane and miserable, rather than vertical and sacred and beatific, abstraction. This difference between El Greco and Philip Bentley has been illustrated by Barbara Godard, who compares El Greco’s The Burial of Count Orgaz with Philip’s sketch of his congregation, described above. Both tend to move from a more realist lower picture plane to a more abstractly expressive upper picture plane, but as Godard points out, for El Greco the movement of abstraction encodes the transcendental nature of a divine being liberated from mortal time. For Philip the same abstraction encodes something historical and social and earthly, even bestial, however it transcends the individual who recognizes it. The significance of El Greco generally to the forms and concerns of As For Me and My House has been thoroughly analysed by Godard – while not, as here, in terms of expressionism as a coherent modernist aesthetic, yet in terms fundamental to it, as an aesthetic Ross shares with “other Canadian writers … trying to find a mode which will allow [them] to combine realism with idealism.”15 Interestingly, El Greco’s work has been used to illustrate the same expressionist tension between realism and idealism, between empathy and abstraction, in the modernism of Canadian painting itself. Ann Davis finds the same movement of realist to formalist aesthetics from lower to upper picture planes in The Burial of Count Orgaz as in Lawren Harris’s From the North Shore, Lake Superior (1923). In the latter, “the careful application evident below the horizon is gradually changed so that the paint on the brown cloud-like forms at the upper edge is loosely scrubbed in.”16 For Harris, this abstraction similarly encodes a metaphysical ideal, for it represents the logic of his post-traditional mysticism. The same disfiguring expressionism, often held in a tension between a realist foreground and abstraction beyond the horizon (as well as similar modern mystical influences) can be found in the painting of other Canadian modernists – across the varied styles and subject matter, for

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example, of Paul Nash’s Void (1918), Frank Johnston’s Fire-swept, Algoma (1920), J.E.H. MacDonald’s Rain in the Mountains (1924), A.Y. Jackson’s Kispayaks Village (1927), F.H. Varley’s The Open Window (1932), Emily Carr’s Above the Gravel Pit (1937), and Bertram Brooker’s The Cloud (1942).17 Brooker was interested in El Greco as one of a few visionary artists who appeared to work backwards from the representation of a transcendental logic to that of immediate forms.18 Brooker, while caught in the same expressionist double bind, felt first the formalist pull of abstraction, then increasingly in his painterly development, the realist pull of an empathic aesthetic. In his abstractions of the 1920s, such as Sounds Assembling (1928), Alleluiah (1929), and Evolution (1929), objects are simple in themselves: elemental rods, peaks, circles, and fluids of homogeneous colour and texture. What is complex, and what he has avowed he was seeking to represent in them, is both the spatial relationships between objects and the continuity and movement of spatial relationships beyond or behind the immediate spaces of the composition.19 Forms not only explode beyond or from beyond the frame, they pass into and out of different recessive depths and occultations within the frame. There is no single source of Cartesian coordinates in these heterogeneous and volative spaces; the sources are many and interconnected. Prefiguring the transcendence of solipsistic perspectives by a disfiguring global empathy in Think of the Earth, Brooker himself translated this spatial aesthetic into the form of an early novel he had planned to write, in which “the ’moving out’ will be more impersonal, will be suggested by the cyclings of lives rather than of individual thoughts. I should like to suggest the opposition of streams and circular circumferences.”20 The cycling narrative structure and transient closure of the published novel also correspond, in their commitment to an unstable temporality in all things, to the “formlessness” of an “infinite flux of being” that Brooker struggled to represent in the static medium of paint – usually by suggesting conflicts of movements and creations between forms and spaces, which imply that even the structured forms are as transient as the fluids that penetrate and escape them. This is particularly evident where, as is typical, the more structured forms tend to figural representation – for example, the trees in Green Movement, the mountains in Endless Dawn, and the hand in The Finite Wrestling with the Infinite (all 1927).21 It is this disfiguring of familiar representational forms by fluidity and by extrinsic spatial logics that marks Brooker’s distance from the canonical,

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formalist abstraction of European cubism and constructivism. It suggests why the landscapes of Canadian modernist painters, like the socialscapes of novels such as Think of the Earth and As For Me and My House, suffer the contortions of modernist form while re-inscribing that form within the anxiety and flux of a dialogic perception of their immediate world. They share an empathic reciprocity, whose revelation of an existential world prior to what I’ve called its authentic abstraction can only be encoded at the intersubjective horizons of a realist perspective. Brooker’s interest in disfiguring perspectives in writing and painting is partly a historical one. The unity of the work of art – of what and how it represents – is for him a political issue belonging to the postcolonial ambivalences of the new nation described in the previous chapter. In a 1931 article, Brooker defended the social function of art as the only means of producing and reproducing a sense of social unity in a secular age: Those who complain the loudest about the chaotic condition of modern society do not seem to realize that rules and laws, by means of which they expect to terrorize the masses into decency, are of little effect unless they have behind them something more than dressed-up authority … The arrogance of the individual is the source of social chaos, and since religion in its orthodox and systematized forms has lost its power to curb that arrogance (has indeed contributed to it), the power of art is alone left in the world as a unifying influence … Art, then, serving as the inspiration to all kinds of positive conduct (in contrast to the negative spur induced by rules and laws), and considered as a unifying force in modern life, can be seen as an important socially-practical measure.22

Art, argues Brooker, informs individual development in the only socially unifying way still possible to a post-traditional society, and should be a fundamental form of education. But what kind of art will allow people to “experience the unity,” as he puts it, of a posttraditional society? Art which takes over from religion must also be post-traditional, and authorize itself according to values held to be intrinsic to, not to transcend, its time and place. Rather, as Brooker and the Group of Seven frequently averred, art must be true to the “here and now.” Defining the “here and now” is not so simple.

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For these artists – and in the manifesto by Fred Housser, A Canadian Art Movement: The Story of the Group of Seven (1926), which deeply influenced their popular and institutional reception – the “here and now” typically became a land-based nationalism.23 Although this ideology seems to have been exorcized from art today, it is still familiar to beer advertisements: the real rocks and real sky of a rugged or ragged, soaring or brooding experience with which the Canadian, an awkward hybrid of the ascetic European “North” and the liberal American “New World,” immediately identifies. The contradictions of this nationalist aesthetic were never clearly resolved. Is this “land,” this Canadian nature, historical, or is it timeless – revealing the world as a changing flux or as a stable form? Is Canadian nature a reflection of its actual society, or of an alternative, but also intrinsically Canadian, social ideal? Though Brooker affirmed a nationalist politics for art, and affirmed the value of nature as perhaps an ideal medium for its expression, he was also critical of the simplified, homogenizing nationalism he saw to be popular, and with which influential artists like Lawren Harris aligned themselves. Despite his ideal that art should “crystallize into harmonious and unified wholes the experiences of people living at a certain time and in certain conditions,” Brooker did not take this time to be stable or these conditions to be consistent. In Canada, on the contrary, he saw a nation defined by an historical moment that was incoherent in space and undirected in time. He saw a land “not unified geographically,” a population “not unified racially,” a history “failing to unify for us our past,” and a “disruption of the settling process” of this history by “mechanization.”24 What kind of art would represent this national experience as a “unified whole”? Anticipating minimalist aesthetics and Marshall McLuhan’s axiom that “the medium is the message,” Brooker saw art as a “pure receptacle,” “actually empty” of any fixed immediate content. Instead, its frames and horizons dissolve into a “space palpitating with life in which something – anything may happen,” and what happens “varie[s] with each beholder.” This formalist and contingent view of art is similar to his formalist and contingent view of the Canadian nation, expressed above, in that it assumes a “whole” form without essential contents. The new nation is similarly a space of life not yet determined, a youthful space of limits and possibilities from which a direction, and a consciousness of the whole, must be created. It is the

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role of art, not to reflect a national consciousness, but to create it, and thus to define the nation itself. The expression of a nation is distinct from any transparent realism or symbolism, any model of reflection that relies on a national form taken to be external to the artist and essential to his or her place – as does, for example, Lawren Harris’s nationalism of a transcendental North. While Harris fixed upon one kind of Canadian content as the sign of a national essence, homogenizing the here and now in an increasingly distant and abstract object, Brooker went in the opposite direction, painting and writing about a diverse range of objects and lives, increasingly everyday and immediate. These were often conventional to art – trees, still lives, and nudes – but also familiar to modern everyday life. His still lifes of fruit and vegetables retain the paper wrappings and bags from his corner grocery. A pair of boots as worn out as Van Gogh’s do not belong to a peasant, but to a pair of skis – whose poles, in the claustrophobic closet-like space of Ski Poles (1936), reach out beyond the frame. The same is true of the Portrait of Morley Callaghan (1932) and Phyllis (1934), whose inwardly huddled subjects look searchingly outwards, but with eyes more vulnerable than piercing, and with hands poised for a task which depends upon what they will see. The sense of contest or negotiation between intrinsic and extrinsic spaces and sources of perspective, upon which the spatial experiments of his earlier abstractions are based, is also the basis of his paintings of landscapes and nudes in Figures in Landscape (1931), The St. Lawrence (1931), Fawn Bay (1936), and self-reflexively in Pygmalion’s Miracle (1940). The same disfiguring aesthetic informs his expressionistic drawings for Crime and Punishment in 1930, in which faces are superimposed over other bodies or objects and spaces to suggest their subjective reality, but are criss-crossed by perspectival lines and object contours extended within and beyond them, and beyond the frame, by these other objects themselves. They illustrate Raskolnikov’s agon of empathy and abstraction, his consciousness of his own violence and the suffering of others, and suggest in the incomplete closure of perspective, the contingency of both his transcending powers and immediate horizons. As such they could serve as illustrations for Brooker’s own modern and Canadian response to Crime and Punishment in Think of the Earth. The “here and now” in all of these works is an unfinished business, a world in the making – not ex nihilo, as another new horizon, but in

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medias res. The form of “national consciousness” intended by them, that image of social unity which should follow from modern art, appears to insist only on a kind of empathy for and consciousness of the vulnerability of nature and volatility of everyday life submitted to the modern fate of a world beyond its here and a history beyond its now. It is an art both abstract from any particular region, race, class, and past, and in dialogue with them. The Canadian modernist must seek in his or her style not to transcend but to express “the experience of the great masses,” wanting not to reflect it in some stabilizing way, but to seek “more of it – a larger sense of it – a more intense absorption of it” than appears on the immediate surface.25 In the context of a global modernity in art and society alike, art will express and can inform the deeper, unfinished business of nationhood itself. For the affirmative Brooker, this is its social function and meaning. For the more uncompromising Ross, it is its social stigma and fate. Between the two perspectives lies the full range of compromises between experimental and demotic forms in the everyday expressionism of a Canadian modernism.

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three

Gender: The Feminization of History

The preceding chapters should have both (a) illuminated the bildungsroman, as a narrative of self-formation, to have provided the central generic conventions for the “unreal” experimentalism of a Canadian modernism, which I suggested is born out of a deconstructed binary of realism and romance, and (b) shown how looking at the particular figuring and disfiguring of this genre’s elements in a given text can provide a kind of x-ray of powerful historical stresses and strains, claims and conflicts on a national scale, into which its unsuspecting reader is drawn. Yet this argument was not intended to reveal a prescripted, universal Canadian modernity as the end point of interpretation; only as a starting point. It goes without saying that every text grows out of a distinct historical site and social positioning, and an irreducibly individual sensibility, and so will create something unique with which to seduce, as well as to worry, its own world and ours. And this is where we find our interest (perhaps our very hope!) as readers. Between the national and the uniquely individual scales, however, are a number of important levels, which remain “slow” enough in Canadian historical development to be periodized, and thus contribute distinct dimensions to the approach I am laying out. In the next two chapters, I will address two of these. On the one hand, it is to be expected that historical conditions of self-development in modern Canada were not symmetrical for men and women, and that narratives of self-formation would be differently gendered. In the present chapter, I will explore how the gendering of bildungsroman elements in Canadian novels is typically distinct when it comes to male and female characters, and moreover, when they are handled by male and

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female writers. It is not meant to be a universal description, but only one large pattern of gender politics, which happens to be revealed when texts are approached from the starting point of the generic assumptions produced by my argument so far. The same goes for the encoding of region, to which I turn in the chapter following. Approaching the climax of Ethel Wilson’s Hetty Dorval (1947), we find the young female protagonist “armed” for “battle if necessary” with the seductive powers and worldly experience – and especially the freedom of impenetrability – of the older woman who is her femme fatale. She decides: “If Hetty should look at me with her gentle unrevealing look and keep silent, and, presently, rise and leave me and shut a door between us, then it would be plain that Hetty remained the Hetty of Shanghai and of Lytton and of how many more places, and that Menace was still her true name.”1 The “Menace” is abstracted from the mere Hetty, taking on the timeless mythic proportions of the wandering Adversary who comes, as Job 6.7 tells us, “from going to and fro on the earth, and from walking up and down on it.” Because the Menace is also, to the rural youth who falls for her, a figure of the cosmopolitan and the modern, her power, her seductiveness, and her danger are suggestively allegorical of the ambivalences of modernity itself for the individual choosing his or her path in the world. This allegory, which projects the modern in the figure of the woman – and particularly as a femme fatale – is not unique to Wilson or to Canadian tradition, but as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gilbar have shown, is typical to both popular modern and high modernist writing of men across literatures in English in the early twentieth century. The inscrutable, threatening, seductive Menace is similar to the image of the “Mona Lisa” which W.B. Yeats places at the opening of his Oxford Book of Modern Verse, in ambivalently aweful terms borrowed from Walter Pater, as a “symbol of the modern idea”: “She is older than the rocks among which she sits; / Like the Vampire, / She has been dead many times, / And learned the secrets of the grave; / And has been a diver in deep seas, / And keeps their fallen day about her; / And trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; / And, as Leda, / Was the mother of Helen of Troy, / And, as St Anne, / Was the mother of Mary; / And all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes …” As a “symbol of the modern idea,” Gilbert and Gubar argue, this goes beyond Yeats’s practice of locating “history’s turning points in the bodies of such mythic heroines as Leda, Helen,

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and Mary,” and outrightly “introduces and defines the canon of the new with an evocation of female priority and primacy that, at least covertly, figures history itself as feminine.” The high modernist figure has its popular correlative, they argue, in the exotic, alternative history and power represented by Rider Haggard’s great anti-heroine, “She.” Both femmes fatales express the anxiety of men in perceiving a newly emergent independence of women in history and culture. “Perhaps inevitably,” they claim, “Yeats felt impelled to link the idea of the ‘modern’ with an image of the femme fatale, and in particular with a representation of Her mysterious energies that emphasizes their historicity.” In this light, one grasps how the femme fatale not only can become for male authors, the “personification of everything negative that linked sex, ownership, and money,” as Bram Dijkstra has shown (351), a kind of displaced figure for the motors of modern history itself, but also can be appropriated as such by women, to figure the corresponding, liberating qualities of individual independence and self-determination, which Virginia Allen has suggested explains the positive value the femme fatale persona enjoyed among them (3–4, 190–1).2 Whether in fantasy or in formal experimentation, conventional language must be disfigured in order to recontain this new other, and this otherness of the new. Male-defined modernism, Gilbert and Gubar persuasively suggest, originates “in a recognition that, as Yeats puts it in an elliptical prose meditation on the ‘Mona Lisa,’ ‘Somewhere … da Vinci’s sitter had private reality like that of the Dark Lady among the women Shakespeare had imagined, but because that private soul is always behind our knowledge, though always hidden it must be the sole source of pain, stupefaction, evil.›3 This impenetrability of independence – an independence which channels through an individual figure the unpredictable nature of a post-traditional world, and thus is the source of a violent historicity – is the quality of the modernist femme fatale which returns us to Wilson’s Menace. The latter is more than a figure of modernity, of chameleonic adaptability, of jaded wisdom, and of cosmopolitan experience. She is also a figure of historicity, of the seductive forces that draw the young protagonist into the narrative action of her journey – through a series of significant encounters, initially sympathetic and ultimately antagonistic – toward adulthood and her own, independent sense of self and value in the world. Historicity, in this case, refers to the liberal opportunity and change which conditions, for the modern woman,

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an historically new and creative life apart from the assumptions of patriarchal tradition, of the past. Hetty represents the mobility and restlessness attached to modern historicity, as well as its creative and destructive power in the young woman’s development. It is from such a perspective that I interpret Gilbert and Gubar’s strikingly abstract claim, that “history itself” could be figured in modern literature as “feminine.” It is a claim which in the first instance attaches to content. In its simplest sense, such a figuration of history is simply a gender-coding of signs of the past. But it is more than that, too, for it is not the past in itself that is cause for anxiety, but specifically the simultaneity of the past, its common denominator in a merciless historicity continuous with the modern present, where it demands in a new way the recognition of an existential consciousness. Signs of the past are feminized because history as such, in the post-traditional world realized by a globally extensive capitalism and imperialism, becomes visible as a threat to social security and values, including, at least tendentially, those of patriarchy. So it is that the past haunts the modern present, not because it determines, but because it predicts nothing but its failure. It is the mere historicity of history – the power and forms of transformation which transcend or transgress the individual – that a modern male anxiety projects as feminine. History becomes a sign of this historicity. Woman becomes its paradigmatic figure. As we shall see, however, the projection of a female character as such opens up the possibility that historicity will be signified not only by a feminized historical content but also by a feminized narrative action and structure. The signs of change, as well as the logic of change, are implicated. In the modern Canadian novel, men and women writers have both contributed to this dominant logic of gender, of what and how sexual differences signify: the tendency to feminize history itself, to project the possibilities and anxieties attached to the individual life in a historical world – the thrilling but scary fate, so to speak, of historical contingency – in the form of a woman. This is the role of the women I have discussed in the previous chapter, who repeatedly interrupt, as empathic vehicles of immediacy and contingency in narrative time, the abstract, internalizing, essentially non-narrative male consciousnesses (about which more anon) of Think of the Earth and As for Me and My House. In the latter novels, moreover, each woman stands for temporality to the extent that the temporality of narrative development itself reverts to her, and subsumes his story

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as a partial representation of her own – whether toward progressive or circular ends. The narrative form of each story is thus twisted in opposing directions: this way, by a plot or “telling” in which the woman is an antagonist and remains an obstacle or corrective to the imaginary developmental narrative of the man; and the other way, by one in which she becomes the protagonist, insofar as that very counter-imaginary project assumes a developing form and meaning for itself, transcending that of the man. When the twist is stronger in the former plot direction, the woman remains an unstable figure who, with the ineluctable power and unpredictable mysteries of history projected into her, appears as a femme fatale. As such she is neither developed (as in a bildungsroman) nor absorbed or negated (as in romance) but, as an object of desire and fear, an image of self-development and self-destruction, remains an image of libidinal energy who continues to haunt the compromising sublimations of narrative closure. It is the answer to the question of how gender matters in men’s novels that will concern me first, before I return to how it gets answered in novels by women.

h i s t o r y a pa r t : s o l i p s i s m a n d a e s t h e t i c i s m This tension between the female bildung and the femme fatale, in what I have called the feminization of history, requires some new reference points in modernist critique to explain, but an initial illustration – with your disbelief in suspense, if necessary – will help suggest where I am heading with it. Its structure is nowhere clearer, because it is doubled, than in the complementary symbolic roles of the two women in Settlers of the Marsh, who, I will assert, both function as femmes fatales to its male bildungsroman protagonist. Ellen and Clara both become images of obsession to Niels, both of which drive him to different kinds of self-destructive despair – the first by rejecting his possession of her in love, and the second by rejecting his possession of her in work. Ellen, an earnest farmer, represents to Niels the image of a traditional past that has dispossessed him, and which he wishes to master by repossessing it in his own narrative of development. When Ellen counters him with the oppressive underside to this image, she breaks the continuity of this past for both herself and Niels. Unable to realize an alternative present or future, she drops out of the narrative altogether. Clara, an urban decadent, offers the image of a modern present to which Niels feels fated instead, and which

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nihilistically parodies the patriarchal solipsism of the former, traditional image by realizing the social violence of its multiplication – as in a mirror, in the ongoing contest between two wills desparate to live in the secure, magic circle of their dreams, whatever the costs to others. Both images of Ellen and Clara reflect a dimension of Niels’s own imaginary, self-creating independence. Clara reflects, in her independent artistic and sexual life, Niels’s individualistic passion – the raw, sensual energy which drives his work and answers only to himself, flowing from some inner source apart from the constraints and values of his society. Ellen reflects, in her independent pioneer life, his individualistic consciousness, the bad faith that allows him to see himself as a thing apart – self-sufficient and whole. For Clara, the autonomy of an aesthetic self-development does not work. For Ellen, the autonomy of an economic self-development does not work. For Niels, who has dreamily scripted for himself an elaborate fantasy of the future, the two failures merge together into the autonomous aestheticization of an economic development – which does not work either. This poses problems for the comic closure of the narrative, which for Niels risks undoing not by the tragic (of which more later) but by the absurd. The novel ends unconvincingly, with the negation of Clara, symbolically and bodily, and the uniting of Niels with Ellen. Ellen is seen suddenly and mysteriously to have developed into a new self-understanding and vision of life, not represented by – and thus cryptically outside – the given narrative logic and structure; while Clara’s development has not only to be cut off, but its narrative logic divorced from meaning for herself and swallowed into the meaning of Niels’s development. Niels’s development then culminates with Ellen’s in a vision of love without independent passion, and of work without independent goals. But the memory of Clara’s independent development of meaning cannot be exorcized so easily, nor the future of Ellen’s so conjured, and the women remain markers of an ideological gap: a duration of meaningful time – of some temporal and social logic unassimilable to that of Niels – beyond the horizon of the closure. In Settlers of the Marsh, Think of the Earth, and As for Me and My House, the man is the protagonist in a romance of self-development whose creativity borders on aestheticist solipsism, while the woman is a figure of the more powerfully enabling and limiting, and more abstract and unknowable, transformative historical world – a post-traditional recognition of historicity that both seduces and makes possible such independent

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development for the self, and records the social fallout consequently fated for the self and for others. What this means in specific terms will be clarified as we take a closer look at bildungsroman novels by Grove, Ostenso, and Wilson, but it will be evident that the relationship between gender, narrative development, aestheticist romance, and modern historicity is complex and requires some preliminary theoretical exploration. The problem with all those men is their conscious or unconscious withdrawal into the aesthetic coherence of a vision. This is a solipsistic dream world in which all value comes from a self-circumscribed independence of imagination, without answering to the practical logic of a reality principle which negotiates compromises with others, or more generally, with the unpredictable and unmasterable contingencies of life. This defining problem allies them – as E.D. Blodgett has observed in the case of Grove’s male protagonists – with the aestheticist values heroized in one of the scriptural texts of modern decadence, Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s influential narrative poem of 1894, Axël.4 This gothic representation of an ascetic aristocrat scornful of the bourgeois vulgarization of life – who commits suicide together with his love, because life itself could not possibly but vulgarize the ideal visions offered by imagination alone – has been wryly presented by Edmund Wilson as an archetype of modernism, specifically one which illuminates its tendentially conservative aestheticism, in Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930.5 Wilson’s conclusions turn out to be especially significant for the context of a Canadian literature which lies outside the sphere of his European canon, when he compares this archetypally modernist, aestheticist reaction to modern history with an archetypally (avant la lettre) antimodernist reaction that he identifies as its complement as well as antithesis. While the figure of Axël represents the former, the figure of Rimbaud, the poet himself, represents the latter. Both, argues Wilson, attempt independence from a specifically modern life: If one chooses the first of these, the way of Axel, one shuts oneself up in one’s own private world, cultivating one’s private fantasies, encouraging one’s private manias, ultimately preferring one’s absurdest chimeras to the most astonishing contemporary realities, ultimately mistaking one’s chimeras for realities. If one chooses the second, the way of Rimbaud, one tries to leave the twentieth century behind – to find the good life in some country where modern manufacturing methods and modern democratic institutions do not present any problems to the artist because they haven’t yet arrived. (227)

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Wilson does admire the revolutionary possibilities for perception and understanding that aestheticist formalism offers to modernist developments in literature. But in Axël, he satirizes what he sees as its great limitation: its tendency to a solipsism ironically coherent with the relativistic, individualistic modernity it repudiates. The way of Rimbaud, moreover, is in this sense also ironic, for if, like Rimbaud – who gave up poetry for a Conradesque career as an African trader – we pursue the antimodernist alternative, we still “carry with us in our own minds and habits the civilization of machinery, trade, democratic education and standardisation to the Africas and Asias to which we flee, even if we do not find them there before us” (231). It is my key point here that Wilson’s recognition of a bond of identity between these aestheticist and antimodernist figures offers an insightful perspective upon the solipsistic, frontier visionaries of Canadian fiction – where the two figures are not only common character types, but are often combined into one. In Think of the Earth and Settlers of the Marsh, the two figures merge in a male protagonist, the visionary man of action. In As for Me and My House, figures of Axël and Rimbaud may be seen wedded to each other in the weaker, withdrawing artist Philip and the arguably stronger, developing narrator whose project Philip is. In The Imperialist, the complementary figures find prototypes in the aesthetic idealist and the pragmatic realist contradictions of both Lorne and Advena. Such prototypes are even more starkly presented in a contemporary (unpublished) novel by Duncan Campbell Scott. This untitled novel deserves a closer look, because its Axël and Rimbaud figures define the character typology of an allegorical romance of the new nation.6 Scott uses a cast of British, English-Canadian and French-Canadian characters (the United States is also represented, but indirectly and all the more insidiously, by an expatriot, Americanized English Canadian) and uses a contrast between old and new generations to map out the logic of transition from colonial to national identity and values. Nearly all of the characters – certainly all the characters who affect the narrative development – are defined by an essential, personal obsession that demands withdrawal into imaginative worlds of their own and blinds them to the passage of time and to the cares of others. Of these types, there are two kinds represented in the novel. There is a “spiritual” type of family, the Underwoods, whose father is a reclusive clergyman devoted to scriptural exegesis and to the afterlife of souls, but negligent and impotent in the world of life itself. His son is Orc to this Old Nobodaddy, and in his destructive, creative freedom,

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learns to liberate his own imagination – but only from the solipsism of a doctrinal labyrinth, into the solipsism of a self-serving and anarchic irony. This, naturally, is the Americanized character. His sister is a similarly fallen spirit – but she has fallen into art. She is a pianist with rare genius, although consumptive and without strength to live long in the world. She lives utterly inside her music. Thus while the spirit of the colonial generation is defined by an Old World moralism and conformism, that of the new generation is defined by rebellious irony and aestheticism. The spiritually typed Underwoods are complemented, in Scott’s character system, by a materially typed family, the Applegarths, whose father is a capitalist entrepreneur oblivious or indifferent to anything outside the growth of his business. His (bastard) son is working-class, and becomes a rebellious labour organizer and (amazingly) Conservative politician, driven in all things by a single-minded antipathy toward his father. His sister is a sentimental domestic type, whose life is absorbed in an unrealistic fantasy of devotion to a young Englishman who does not care for her. This dual structure of spiritual and material types is filled out, for the national allegory, by an English family, the Shortreeds, and a French-Canadian family, the Godcheres, whose secondary statuses are marked by the use of a single character to denote each of the older and newer generations – the latter both marked by self-serving, sensual passions, the first in art, the second in love. This is the character system. The narrative dimension of Scott’s allegory is complex; suffice it to say that the dissolute passions of the Old World are exorcized, the rebellion of the New rejected, and an independent but virtuous development affirmed for the young nation. Canada, we are asked to conclude, will preserve and revive the British spirit better than modern Britain itself (in the figure of the young female Applegarth and her titled child). In this closure, Scott expresses a common antimodernist view of the Empire’s frontier as the leading edge, rather than the outer limit, of imperialist civilization (discussed further in chapter 4). Such conservatism is supposed also to be congenial to a humble French Canada, whose ambition (in the figure of old Godchere) is simply to tend its own cultural garden. But to achieve all this, we are warned, Canada must recognize the limitations of its materialistic and self-centred past (in the figure of old Applegarth) and look to a more creative and socially responsible future (in the figure of his son). The latter will purify itself of evil influences – American individualism (the young male Underwood) and French-Canadian resentment

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(the young female Godchere) – and recognize its dependence upon an aesthetic idealism (the young female Underwood) whose purity and self-sacrifice will inspire it. Nowhere more compulsively than in this novel do we find an insistence: (1) upon solipsism – that of a selfabsorbing and self-blinding imaginative world which is either conventional or creative, either practical or fantastic – as the defining trait of every Canadian type; (2) upon aestheticism as an exemplary discourse for this solipsism; and (3) upon self-destruction by it and liberation from it as the iron logic of narrative development, which unmasks the unexpected identity of those whose visions are expressed in the individualistic development of external (Rimbaud) as opposed to internal (Axël) worlds. It is the confrontation between such a type or types and a history transcending their knowledge and power – from which they ironically take their form, and which they cannot escape – that finds in sexual difference the objective correlative of its plot, and in the femme fatale its antagonist and narrative perspective. In Scott’s novel, it is significant that the femme fatale, the passionate, seductive French-Canadian woman, is also a kind of sybil, prematurely aged by a worldly knowledge and a circumspect maturity not grasped by her friends. She is the only one with insight into what will develop over time, and the only one to act on that basis. Both in the sense that she recognizes the limitations to her friends’ ideals, and that she acts on the basis of negotiation between her own desires and the contingencies of her situation, she is a realist. No male character is allowed this degree of authority by the narrative. However, because she is overly passionate and self-serving, her realism must be appropriated by the “awakened” English-Canadian woman – very much in the manner that Clara’s realism is appropriated, narratologically, by the reformed Niels in Settlers of the Marsh – before it may serve as a proper guide to the future. Nor can it be accidental that this realist function passes here from one woman to another – for a male character is presented in the same capacity, only to be negated by the narrative development. The young male Underwood, whose irony serves as a secular decoding of the bourgeois and religious moralities around him, and who initially promises to be the centre of a bildungsroman, unexpectedly vanishes from the narrative as soon as he fails to seduce this same English-Canadian woman. His symbolic marriage to Canadian everyday life thus going awry, he seeks his fortunes in the United States, and whatever his shadowy bildung therein, remains forever outside the narrative logic of the

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Canadian allegory. It is she who ultimately takes over the narrative perspective, from which point she summarizes the problems of her solipsistic friends (and of her own past), and looks, metonymically for them all, beyond the “retreating mists” toward the “sunshine” of what lies ahead (315). This daughter of industry doesn’t have a fixed or clear allegorical meaning, a typage; her role in the character system is different. It is from her perspective that the Axëls of the story, the impassioned visionaries, may be seen in a continuum with the impassioned businessman, the Rimbaud – and the antisocial nature of both surpassed. Only her perspective develops into a new form, renouncing its older form as a fantasy while accepting its consequences as her fate. Only her perspective affords closure, for no lovers come together happily at the end, and no careers are stabilized. It is an individual psychology, a maturity that matters. To her belongs the logic of the bildungsroman plot: its realist perspective, its appropriative retrospection and its ambivalent compromise. In this way, the very historicity of the world of Scott’s novel is unmistakably feminized. Afforded by the woman, only, is any view in the narrative of determining powers and desires beyond the individual power of creation – especially that of the individual man – which reveal his or her historicity. As such, she herself cannot assume the fixed viewpoint of a stable social system or tradition, but takes the more fluid viewpoint of a historical position which must find itself first, must itself undergo a developmental narrative. Thus disfigured between actor and concept, she is the personification of the transcending mutability of secular modernity; she who reveals history to the individual life. In return for exacting the fate of his or her contingency and responsibility, she offers the realist compromise of the present as an ongoing project, and a momentary closure. Even the other feminine figuring of history, the French-Canadian femme fatale, must live on: she attempts suicide but fails, for she is fated to continue to “live against [her] will,” and promises to “keep track” of the other woman (296) – the outward projection, perhaps, of a harrassing existential possibility – the repressed echo of a self-consciousness that has taken mature, if uncomfortable form.

th e f em m e fata le a n d h e r d ou bl e : grove Such a femme fatale is only partly anticipated in Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s Axël. The original Axël encounters a woman who represents

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– in her desire to seduce him and to use his arcane powers for worldly ends – the intrusion of history into an independent male imagination. This intrusion is appropriated by Axël and displaced into the most liminal form of life – a deliberate and symbolic act of death. The double suicide of the pair is a sign of their recognition of an autonomous ideal – an ideal thus realized as soon as it is “expressed” – in the staging of a death transcending their life. The woman is the historical and sensual ground upon which the man’s absurdly abstracted ideal can be expressed and hence realized. This is precisely how Axël’s female counterpart is characterized by E.D. Blodgett in his far-reaching analysis of aestheticism in Grove’s work. Blodgett has recognized Axël’s exemplary correspondence to – and likely deliberate intertextual recoding in – the protagonist of The Yoke of Life (1930), Len Sterner, whom he calls the archetype of the Grove hero.7 Sterner represents not only the “Rimbaud” type of a “patriarchal, pioneering male” but paradoxically as well, the “Axël” type of a solitarily transcendental, “symbolic purity not of this earth” (114). In this narrowly focused, uncompromising bildungsroman, the hero develops from the naïve innocence of the one to the more profound and Nietzschean innocence of the latter. Wilson correlated the two conflicting types as complementary figures of a modernism in flight from modern history. But while for Wilson they remain distinct alternatives, here in Grove’s Canadian setting we find them refocused into a single (if disfigured) image, at the meeting place of processes of modernization and of a peripheralized frontier – at the hinge point of uneven development basic to any postcolonialist agon. Indeed, the male modernist gender system I have been discussing, and the troubled, historical sense which is its distinctive Canadian twist, is interestingly revealed across the range of Grove’s work. Blodgett shows that for Grove, the role of male characters is to act as solipsistic centres of creative power, and of female characters “to lead men into the human and temporal world.” This means that women will act as comic “blocking figures” in plots of male development, but – unlike values or objects that can be decisively overcome – the author “doesn’t want to get rid” of them, and they can only “endure” (138, 148). Women suffer more and, knowing more by circumspection and experience, they are wiser. While on the one hand they lack the desire for ideals beyond what is given or empowered by the machinations of history, on the other hand they afford the only narrative perspective upon the transformation of the fictional world

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by such desires and their developments. They are the only ones in whom historical changes, even the most intimate, may be realized. For this reason, the figures of Axël and Rimbaud require a representational supplement, which will be coded historical and feminine. As Blodgett puts it, the “male presence, dominant as it may be” in Grove’s novels, may not be “the necessary presence” (138). Len Sterner’s counterpart, Lydia, is a woman impelled, like him, to grow away from her roots in a small farming community, towards a greater knowledge of and freedom in the world. But while Len is driven by inchoate desires for the realization of his imaginative powers, she is driven by more commonplace fantasies. Only in her ultimate love for Len does she recognize an ideal abstract from her given world, though it is an ideal that merely mediates and supplements the expression of his own. In the end, as with the original Axël, her value is partly as a medium – as Echo to Narcissus – in which death will have, outside itself, significant form. But she is more than that, because, while she can lead a visionary character into the historical world, she cannot so easily be led out of it, without betraying the very narrative form that has articulated her. As a character, perhaps, she can die out of it (like Clara); but as an independent narrative development and perspective (also like Clara), she must “endure” in that particular narrative logic which remains constructed outside the subjective world of the man, as a realist supplement. Blodgett has shown this supplementary logic to turn the text towards a naturalistic style of realism, to conflict with the aestheticist style of his psychological form of romance. The conflict is exemplified in Grove’s two novels with female protagonists, his German novels. The first of these, Fanny Essler (1905), satirizes the Neuromantik aestheticism of his day, using the perspective of a female bildungsroman.8 Both here and in The Master Mason’s House (1906), the female protagonist is the engine of narrative development, while the men are rigid types who appear as obstacles to be transcended.9 It is a mark of Grove’s conservatism that although the men are always transcended as characters, the world from which they take their form never is, and the female protagonist must find her place in it or die. This is the narrative pattern, Blodgett observes, of Grove’s Canadian novels as well, in which the womens’ function remains the same but the focus shifts (perhaps with covert empathy for a “brutality” resistant to changes in the power of sexual and class difference) to the fate of the men. To the extent that these male figures are not transcended by a (female) narra-

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tive development alternative to them – in which women would bring not only a destructive irony to patriarchal society but a new vision of it – Blodgett calls these novels “frustrated” comedies (147). But the Canadian novels differ from the German ones – as he demonstrates in The Yoke of Life – by representing male protagonists as paradoxically obstinate. That is, they are not only rigid types resistant to change, but active, Rimbaud-like visionaries, driven by their own, intensely inward imagination of change. They are not resistant to history as a process of history-making – processes in Settlers of the Marsh and The Master of the Mill (1944) are, as those of the pioneer and the manufacturer, exemplary – but resistant to a historical self-consciousness or representation of themselves as such, as historical creatures in their very role as creators. Thus the feminization of history is not simply the figuration of an external antagonist or obstacle, but a projection in the mirror of sexual difference – most forcefully in the guise, of a Lydia or Clara, of an urban femme fatale – of the continuum between the antimodernist male protagonist and the degraded and ennuyant life of modernity which, in antimodernist convention, is his feminized nemesis. So it is that Grove’s women always die because they reflect and reveal a hidden identity of the man. In Settlers of the Marsh, Clara is an Axël – dandified, ennuyée, passionate, and withdrawn – in whom Niels sees an aestheticized reflection of the passionate and solipsistic fantasies that condition his own life as a settler and which implicitly mock the patriarchal grandeur of his historical contribution. Such a fantasy can only remain pure for him in the image of a pre-modern frontier to which he continually escapes and, ironically, from which he continually flees. It is a flight from modernization which is a flight from himself. His Rimbaud figuration is revealed when, looking like “one insane” or “one who communed with different worlds,” “A new dream rose: a longing to leave and to go to the very margin of civilization, there to clear a new place; and when it was cleared and people began to settle about it, to move on once more, again to the very edge of pioneerdom, and to start it all over anew … That way his enormous strength would still have meaning. Woman would have no place in his life.” (139) This geographical and gender distinction negates itself, however, in the narrative development immediately following: Niels goes to town, there marries Clara, and there makes “a place in his life” for “woman.” While his dream of autonomy is perversely fulfilled in

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their subsequent estrangement, its gender distinction is lost, for it echoes rather than contrasts Clara’s independent aesthetic life and Ellen’s independent economic life, both of which are articulated as forms of idealized withdrawal from existing historical powers. Niels’s only and brutal response to the unbearable echoes of Narcissus is to shatter the reflection closest to him. It is not inappropriate that he should be cured of his dream in a modern prison, which is closer to the city than he has ever come, and where he learns to read “real books” and to study and write examinations in the arts and sciences. With sly innovation, then, the convention of a ritual withdrawal from society to the disaccommodating wilderness is by Grove futuristically reversed: the protagonist undergoes his period of isolation and revelation through a sojourn in modern civilization, before returning to the frontier.10 The same is true for The Yoke of Life. It is not the nature of the wilderness which threatens, but the seductive and powerful historicity, the developmental logic within the man. The woman is at once liberated to it, and ironically appropriated by it, as its sign. It now appears that we must relate the feminization of history to a more familiar modernist trope, the feminization of modernity – a convention common to art and popular culture which thrived in North American and European societies from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. This has been influentially explored by historians such as Jackson Lears and Peter Filene, and by literary critics such as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, and Andreas Huyssen, who reveal across a range of cultural artefacts, how the structural experience of modernity as a set of cultural values and demands – particularly as it threatens the secure meaning of male authority and power – is feminized, and in that feminized figure, resisted by a correspondingly masculinized figure of an outsider, real or transcendental. Huyssen explores how a masculinity which feels it cannot escape modern history withdraws into an aesthetic consciousness that transcends the life of modern mass culture, even as (paradoxically) it is bound to it. Such a consciousness finds its type in the representative modernism of Gustave Flaubert, which is bound to the representative modernity of Emma Bovary, and whose implied authorial consciousness is free ironically to identify with Emma in style indirect libre, and tell her story.11 About his kinship with Flaubert in this light, Grove is explicit. In a German essay on Flaubert published in 1904, he insists upon one

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thing: Flaubert’s exemplary renunciation of life for art, of living for writing. Specifically, the artist must exchange a life actually lived in history for an art that is “the greatest record of history”: “The artist collects the life of his times and bottles it up, to borrow an image from Flaubert. But he himself may not drink from these bottles. He is either an ascetic or only half an artist – inevitably” (9). Grove’s views had not changed by 1931, when he published his essay “Apologia Pro Vita et Opere Suo” in Canada, and affirmed the same role for himself as an artist: “Metaphorically speaking, I live in the wilderness and cannot take part in the activities of my fellows” (192). He also defines himself in terms now canonically modernist. He is skeptical of the term “realism,” and prefers to align himself with the new “classicists” who “repudiate” the romanticism of the Victorian age and its literary styles. Against the easy romantic moralism that structures narrative conflicts around the opposition of right and wrong, he champions an ambivalent, relativistic style that structures significant conflicts around oppositions in which both sides are right, or wrong: “Life swarms with conflicts; in a sense it is conflict; and in every conflict both sides are right, for both sides are human” (195). This picture of a world characterized by the mystery and violence of post-traditional human difference, when stripped of any generic and moral simplification that “softens matters down for a debilitated taste,” is what Grove calls “tragic.” It is insistently masculinized: “Tragedy is the proper food for men with masculine tastes; and so, by the way, is comedy, taking the word in its strictest sense which excludes both irony and humour. The mixture of the two is the food of a feministic civilization: the tear in the eye and a smile on the lip; and the reader divines that, in spite of its antics, the present age is trying to rid itself of the apotheosis of the ‘eternally feminine› (195). Against this masculine outsider who must walk on the brink of life, where he continually “gropes for the stars,” is the vision of a “femininistic civilization” which offers answers as easy and superficially satisfying as its commodified amusements. “What,” Grove asks, “could we [tragic artists] have in common with those whose dream is of the next movie-ticket or a more expensive radio set?” (193). Dreams to bottle, but not to consume. This interest in the feminization of modern culture – as the reflex of modern history itself in the form of a mass society, a consumer economy, and a technologization of everyday life – was not only common to male modernism but was especially powerful, Huyssen

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shows, in the fin-de-siècle Germany of Grove’s formative years and beginnings as an artist (49–51). This modernity is also figured as a femme fatale, whose archetype emerges in the machine-woman of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) – a cyborg “vamp” who embodies both the seductive and frightening power over men and the need for control by men of a twentieth-century world that seems “other” to them (71). Such a figure takes technological change to be the most meaningful metonym for modern experience as a whole (which, in Metropolis, ranges widely across economic, sexual, communal, private, religious, and aesthetic forms of experience and expression), and reflects the urban and industrial focus of Lang’s concerns. It is a femme fatale closely related to the anthropomorphization and feminization of the “mill” in Grove’s The Master of the Mill. Like the cyborg in Metropolis, Grove’s mill is the projection of a modern history that threatens to overpower, in the figure of a mysteriously seductive and destructive other, its own patriarchal creators. A different metonym – still technological, in Marshall McLuhan’s sense – is at the centre of Settlers of the Marsh: the machinery of the book. The book-woman, Clara, is a vamp whose desires for books and for men are interchangeable to the extent that both come and go serially in her private life. Her withdrawal into the sensual bookworld of a room of her own is juxtaposed in the novel with the male protagonist’s relatively unlettered, inarticulate development of the land – and becomes a symbol of withdrawal into uncompromising independence that is equally her and his modern fate. It is Clara’s virginal alter ego, Ellen, who reveals this to Niels in her final confession, spoken as if for all of them: “The bush hides,” she says. “It shelters, protects. It has served me well … But sometimes I wish I had a vista through it, out on the plains, to the horizon. I want to see wide, open, level spaces” (262). Thus Ellen introduces her discovery that she needs others – Niels and children – not only to depend upon, but to be depended on, in a submission to wider experiences of life than independence can satisfy. Similar to Clara is Lydia in The Yoke of Life, a prostitute-vamp identified with urban as opposed to frontier life. She is linked not to the machine or to the book but to money – “I want lots of money!” – as a medium for the same overpowering desire for independence; again, independence from a limiting or oppressive patriarchy (159, 161). One might think such a gender system characterizes only the more gothic, romance narratives by Grove, and that a documentary-style

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book like Over Prairie Trails (1922), with its male protagonist travelling and retravelling a lonely landscape between a sterile place of work and a welcoming wife and child at home, shares nothing with this paradigm.12 On closer examination, it is apparent that the operative metonym in this case is distance. It is a physical separation that is imposed by the independent initiatives of the woman and enabled by a modern fluidity of space that Grove feels he must apologize for, in the first sentences of the book: “A few years ago it so happened that my work – teaching school – kept me during the week in a small country town in the centre of one of the prairie provinces while my family – wife and little daughter – lived in the southern fringe of the great northern timber expanse, not very far from the western shore of a great lake. My wife – like the plucky little woman she is – in order to round off my far-from-imperial income had made up her mind to look after a rural school that boasted of something like a residence. I procured a buggy and horse and went ‘home’ on Fridays.” (xiii) The first sentence establishes the author as the worker, his wife as the homemaker. The town is significant as the place where he works; he says nothing of his residence there, five days a week. Conversely, the frontier is significant as the place where his wife and daughter “lived.” One must wonder what they would be doing there, and Grove squirms around his answer in the next sentence, when he admits that his wife, too, works – apparently in the same capacity, though “to look after” a school casts a vaguely domestic light over an indefinite activity. Between two spaces stretches the distance that is the narrative origin as well as realist matter of the novel. While the first space is naturalized by its demands upon the man, the second is emphatically represented as a whim of the individual woman, an independence of spirit (“plucky little woman” that she is) and an economic power that must be apologized for as an imposition (“made up her mind”) of her personality. The distance is thus feminized, as the creation of the woman, and specifically of her modern assertion of liberal power over her life. The figure of a “femme fatale” is here a repressed, but necessary origin of the narrative problem, at once an antagonistic and seductive distance for the man to overcome. The kind of feminized distance represented in Over Prairie Trails is enabled in actuality by a growing independence of the individual in the increasingly migratory space of a modern society. The narrative logic of a male journey aims simultaneously to exorcize and to appropriate such distances to masculine understanding and control.

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The male narrator’s anxiety about who defines this distance is given immediately, in his need to set off “home” in quotation marks. Is “home” in his location, or in hers? Thus at first, he marks it as an object of uncertainty, a tentative claim. By the end of the book, however, his last sentence is able to appropriate this word as it has appropriated the distance to which it belongs; it is his to decide upon. As J.J. Healy has insightfully shown, Grove uses writing and marriage as complementary means to appropriate a sense of “home.”13 He conquers his distances, literal and symbolic, by writing them – as Healy demonstrates, by transcending them with an “understanding” enabled by writing – which means filling in feminine distance (its disorienting displacement of a patriarchal position) with a masculine, “tragic” consciousness. In this way even in Over Prairie Trails Grove conforms to the model of Flaubert, both appropriating and transcending an anxiously feminized modernity. But for Grove, there is more to the meaning of gender than even Huyssen’s model suggests. I return to Grove’s example of Flaubert, who provides the “point of departure” for his conclusions about art: “The artist is a guardian of life; art is the greatest record of history. That is precisely why I personally consider ‘historical’ literature hybrid. Great art which captures present-day life is already historical for that very reason. The artist collects the life of his times and bottles it up, to borrow an image from Flaubert. But he himself may not drink from these bottles.”14 Grove is interested from the beginning in representing his world as a historical object. I wish to argue here that modernity as an experience of historicity is at the centre of Grove’s concerns, and perhaps the definitive influence upon his modernist approach to style. What appears threatening to his protagonists, and is projected in their femmes fatales, is not so much a set of “modern” beliefs or institutions – in which case, as for Len in The Yoke of Life, they could simply be rejected, in series, by an uncompromising will to antithesis. It is, rather, an empty form, a temporal form, a historicity of modernity – which Len, like a parody of Hegel’s dialectic, or of Marx and Engel’s prophecy that all that is solid should melt into air, lives until he negates life itself. It is no surprise that Grove should wish to project a figure of this historicist experience in fiction, in order to master it. For he does the same in his writing about himself and about art. In seeking to justify his present identity according to his past, he needs to view the past, and history generally, in the first instance as an aesthetic:

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The world of facts is unknown to us. The world of our interpretations is known … Our past, as we see it, no matter whether it be the past of an individual or of a nation or a race, does not consist in facts at all but in such fictions as have become necessary through that which followed … This is important in history, no doubt; but it is most important in autobiography. For the man who decides to live a conscious life – not that kind of life which modern masses lead and which is a continual search for sensations and a continual flight from insight and from judgement and interpretation – it is all-important that he arrive at such a view of his own past as does not involve a condemnation of self. (74–5)

The man who has renounced “life” – solitary and ascetic, apart from the “modern masses” – finds himself in the best position to renounce, in the “world of facts,” the prior reality of his own history as it is conditioned outside himself, and his creativity and judgment. Where one’s own past becomes an individual interpretation freed from the determining forces of a prior reality, history itself is seen as no more than an individual art. Just so, says Grove, does the causality of history undo and reverse itself in the truer power of the individual imagination, in which paradoxically, “the future influence[s] the past.” Here, it is not only the subjectivist aim “to justify, not [a man’s] past, but his present” – it may actually require “a condemnation of an historical past.” But, as with Grove’s protagonists, this does not come easily. For he acknowledges that, “illogical as it is,” facts of the past are the ongoing supplement, and historiography the persistent narrative medium, of a present which would transcend or “condemn” it. The double bind comes with the need to justify an internal authority of the self in the external form of a narrative development in the world – the contradiction for Grove, between the truth of the artist and the truth of a work of art. All fiction is fated to be “historical fiction,” while all history is freed to be fiction. Here is where his gender codes take root. His men figure the latter, his women the former. If, for the individual, facts are transcended by interpretation, then, for his or her society, the act of interpretation is transcended again by facts. These transcending facts, if not directly representable, are reflected in the ongoing failure and reassertion of interpretation that is the experience of the higher interpretive imagination of the “tragic” realist – and that finds its generic form in the Hegelian dialectic of the bildungsroman. A transcending world of facts may be imagined as that historical world, and the shape of historical time, which is brought to

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bear on the individual as others live their interpretations, their understandings of their past and hence themselves, among themselves in the present. Hence to be true in art is not romantically to free interpretation in and for itself, but to represent the “tragedy” of interpretation as a historical process, as it interacts with the disorienting and destructive violence of an external historical world. Only in this way can one transcend and be true to, as Grove claims to do in his art and his life (76), the contest of individual wills – and interpretations – which produces the “strife” of modern life. There is a history of suffering over which our “interpretations” have grown like “scar tissue.” It is something which both subtends and transcends them – simply in experience, in what Grove calls his “failure” in life (76). He has failed to find his place in a world created by others’ interpretative imaginations, and has found his place in the margins of that world – outside that “life” over which they have historical power – in the interpretative imagination of this history itself. It is a historically conditioned withdrawal from history – a paradox he describes as a withdrawal from “life,” that can only recognize itself in the mirror of “life.” For the “independent and spontaneous” image we have of ourselves is “as little of our making as the image we see in the mirror is of the mirror’s making or assembling” (81). History sounds her Echo to his own Narcissus. As an artist, he feels he must turn his mirror to both, answering for the other – for himself.15

men about development The tension we see in Grove between a liberating historicization of women and a limiting feminization of history – between a female bildung and a femme fatale – in stories about the development of men is characteristic of the period. For male novelists, the result tends unfortunately toward a sexist fatalism, because their male protagonists always tend to want to preserve the significance of gender difference by aiming toward some meaning withdrawn from the historical world figured in women. This powerful narrative withdrawal may then be grasped as one formal structure by which the “sacrifice” of women and feminine-coded history is reproduced, as Donna Palmateer Pennee has demonstrated, by a patriarchal Canadian modernism.16 In Grove, this masculinized alternative can be articulated as an aestheticist withdrawal of the fantastic kind imagined in The Yoke of Life,

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or a withdrawal of a more mundane kind, into the traditional life imagined at the end of Settlers of the Marsh. Either case implies a conservative disengagement from history as a mode of development and change. In the novels of Hugh MacLennan, which are normally understood to be more romantic, more idealistic and less fatalistic than those of Grove, the same pattern nevertheless holds. In Barometer Rising, Penelope embodies both the individualistic freedom and the technological entrapment realized by her modern education and career.17 Her own narrative of development figures as the probable type of the one the hero, Neil, should have followed, if he had not been derailed by the World War, losing himself and his senses. Neil’s return is not complete until he has transcended the self-vindication that obsesses him, and through which single lens he perceives himself and the world around him. Thus Neil’s development is initially, alternative to Penelope’s, unconcerned with his bildung, his development with respect to the present conditions of society around him. Rather it is focused on a duel with the past, in which he and his antagonist represent rigid types to be revealed on the one hand, exorcized on the other. He does not develop, he negates. And developing by negation, he remains solipsistically insensitive to anything but a typology of the characters around him, insofar as they belong to his plot. This plot is cut off, however, by the intrusion of historical forces around him – the Halifax explosion. The catastrophe to the city demands that Neil work not for himself but for others, when his whole character development moves in a different direction according to a new pattern. The same rupture to typology is reflected in other and even minor characters, who all respond, however conservative or cynical as initial types, with necessary liberalism to the demands of the moment. For Neil, the explosion produces a grotesque image of his antagonist’s destruction, so exceeding Neil’s own possible agency and understanding that it trivializes the duel itself, and leaves him sobered and faint with pathos, rather than triumphant (202). The technological and social development of the world around Neil is represented metonymically by the explosion and by Penelope, both figures of the self-developing modernity which disfigures the narrative time and characterology of his internalized romance. Penelope is his fate, and one he acknowledges at the end – as his Homeric telos, his “Wise Penelope” (219) – even as he sees she transcends his idea of her, for she “had changed” and “something alien had taken root in her mind and whatever it was, it was all her own” (199). So, in her, he

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comes home to the strange. And the strange is the mutable, the historical, signified by her white hair. Neil picks up the thread of Penelope’s modern development narrative as such, and weaves it into his own: “He was entering the future, he was identifying himself with the stillhidden forces which were doomed to shape humanity as certainly as the tiny states of Europe had shaped the past” (218). By internalizing this fate, which defines her otherness, as his own, he tries to recontain (feminized) historicity within the forms of his (masculinized) visionary romance of an ideal nation, and to recontain the (feminized) bildungsroman development of an individual type within the (masculinized) epic development of a metonymic hero. Like Grove’s Niels, this Neil is a Rimbaud revealed to be an Axël. MacLennan allows us to see outside Neil’s vision to the gulfs of ethical and epistemological darkness that separate post-traditional individuals from each other and their future (for herself, 215; for Neil, 216, 217), through the perspective of Penelope. Symbolically older and wiser, ruined for history by history itself, she recognizes that the modern “future” would be “epitomized by the events of the last few days,” the material and social fallout of the explosion crisis (215). But she is limited precisely by her unadulterated fatalism. Because she represents such historicity, she cannot “make” anything of it, or provide closure to the man’s narrative: “Nothing seems to matter,” she says; “I don’t want to do anything” – unless it is negative, “to get away from Halifax and everyone connected with it” (210–11). Her reunion with Neil is similarly negative, where she emphasizes not her desire for, but her “inevitable” bondage to Neil and their offspring (215). She is to be a “prisoner of his maleness” – in other words, to the futuristic dynamism (214) that drives him visionarily if naïvely to “fight indefinitely to achieve a human significance in an age where the products of human ingenuity [such as his and Penelope’s own warship (20)] make mockery of the men who had created them” (216). Married to this mockery as to the yoke of life itself, they go on, that is all – the dreamer leading the blind.18 Other modern Canadian novels also develop women as historically contingent characters – and specifically as figures representing the power and threat of social history itself which, as femmes fatales, must be recontained by the closure of a masculine narrative development. Such a pattern appears in a novel as early as James De Mille’s A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888), in which the femme fatale, Layelah, is also the only fully independent character

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apart from the protagonist, and a social reformer in her own society.19 The protagonist finds he must both use her power, and free himself of it, to achieve mastery of the uncanny, inverted world in which he finds himself. A similar social reformer woman, leading the male protagonist into history, is found in another early popular romance, Ralph Connor’s The Man from Glengarry (1901), in which she appears as a minister’s wife preaching the Social Gospel.20 While this figure is purely virtuous, she shares her typological function with the novel’s individualistic femme fatale, a young city woman. The former educates and civilizes the wild, young protagonist, selecting him out from his fellow woodsmen as marked for greater spiritual things; the latter seduces him out of the backwoods into metropolitan life and material success. The narrative closes with his marriage to a third woman who combines the youth and worldliness of the femme fatale with the Christian self-sacrifice and activism of the minister’s wife. Here, the recontainment of a feminized historicity is effected by an insistence upon patriarchal agency in the economic and political world, which is ensured by the clear separation of male and female spheres of life. The male protagonist is important because of his masculine energy and power, which, once it comes out of its shell and recognizes its historicity and its being in the wider world, from a sentimental point of view, can turn upon and shape that history and world – but paradoxically, with the unsentimental supplement that a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do. A young woman schoolteacher who represents social change and civilizing ideals is also the catalyst of change in the protagonist of Frank Parker Day’s Rockbound (1928).21 I will discuss this novel further in the next chapter, and here focus on its gender system. The hero is a young man who rises to power as a rigid type of the muscular hero in a rough world of clan competition among Nova Scotian fishermen. When the young schoolteacher appears, the hero’s traditional wife – the product of an arranged marriage in which she has been exchanged for a share of fish – is dead, and he is ready to be seduced by a new set of desires and ideals. These lead him away from the life of the fishing settlement to the solitary, bookish (he is now literate) life of a lighthouse-keeper. Here he embraces, ultimately together with the young schoolteacher as his new wife, a life of isolation from society. This perversely socialized withdrawal from society is, as we have seen in other instances, aestheticized: the barren rock upon which the lighthouse stands is impossibly turned into a garden, a “magic of the

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Tempest” which insists on transcending reality, in the final sentence, as “a way of gold, full of flowers, not of this earth, but like to those with which mediaeval painters adorned their foregrounds” (292). The use of the woman to figure the coupling of a narcissistic aestheticism and self-development is also explicit in the femmes fatales of Raymond Knister’s White Narcissus (1929) and Howard O’Hagan’s Tay John (1939).22 In Knister’s novel she is an Axël figure for the protagonist: a woman solipsistically immersed in books (24) and music (59), whose “part in his life … had been of a strong growth with his ambition and his bent for expression. And when those had taken him to the city against his will” – she becomes here a sort of projection of an internal, desiring, developing otherness – “where he had slaved and managed until his first books came out, and at the same time he had obtained a foothold in the advertising field, he still thought of no other woman” (75). Complementary to this figure is O’Hagan’s Ardith Aeriola, another “She” who sums up every trope of the feminization of modern historicity. With a “foreign” sounding name, and a life that reaches across wildernesses and cities, nations, and continents, she is “a woman mature beyond her years” and yet still defined by the “restless” “dreams” of youth. To the narrator, Denham, “whatever she did she did in her own right. She was a figure. She made her place. She stood for something – something vague, something not quite to be defined, like a woman on a barricade thrown across the street.” Her figuration of the power of a seductive but threatening historicity is suggested not only by her past life of restless self-transformation, but by the social transformation she brings to the novel’s frontier setting. For she comes to the Canadian West as a Rimbaud figure of the modern frontier, specifically an emanation of the railway – which stood in the minds of its political engineers of the late nineteenth century, and in Canadian legend since, as the binding form of economic and social development for the new nation, for modernization from sea to sea. Of this historical development, she represents an avant-gardist edge, a sign and a lure, cast forward: “It was there in that sculptured city [of New York], in that outpost of man in time, in that white tombstone of the future, that she met the Canadian man of railways. He sent her west” (194–7). When, however, she meets her unexpected reflection in Tay John, the wildernessborn and Native-raised protagonist, the two of them leave their respective, failed self-developments behind – that is, the (feminized) modern and the (masculinized) traditional figures of historical power

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and change – to withdraw into solitude, culminating in death. Their narcissistic fate is represented, in a final image, by the hero’s travelling blindly in circles in a blizzard, while the woman, dead, stares like a cyclops out of one dark eye. In this, O’Hagan recreates the very plot and pattern of gender and historicity illuminated by Blodgett in The Yoke of Life. A final example may be drawn from Such Is My Beloved, where history is again similarly feminized, and which shows us another consequent problem in the relationship of form to ideology. When Ronnie and Midge disappear from the narrative just before the end of this novel, their loss is a necessary precondition to the ultimate revelations of the male protagonist, whom they have led into a social history conflicting with his orthodox Christian vision. Powerless to fit the real to the ideal or to adapt the ideal to the real, and unwilling to compromise his perception of either, he withdraws into madness. The women’s disappearance is a final sign of this powerlessness. This is what they finally represent, not the “sinfulness” indicated by the Bishop when chastising Father Dowling: “Let us say in the beginning when you went to visit those girls you were moved by a kind of divine love. But can’t you see how you were drawn into their lives, how you were sucked in and immersed in their lives so your single besetting worry became the comfort and life of those streetwalkers? It became a purely human love, if I may put it in that way. I mean the quality of your interest changed completely.” “Do you mean, Your Grace, that I came to love them for themselves?” “Yes, so that they themselves were more important than the sinfulness they represented. Let me see how I ought to put it …” Becoming intensely interested, the Bishop leaned forward, anxious to probe into the matter and discover the nature of this love, to see it objectively as a philosophical problem. “Yes, I did grow to love them for themselves,” Father Dowling said. (157)

The conflict between empathy with what is particular to a (dialogic) situation and its abstraction into (monologic) general significance, as in Think of the Earth, is one of the central themes of the novel. Here too, it is also a formal problem of the narrative perspective and structure, for while the women are represented “for themselves,” this representation itself is for the narrative development of another, for the protagonist. The women’s aesthetic independence as historicized

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characters resists the author’s closure just as it resists the Bishop’s moralism. So, at the end the police simply take the women away, with all the suddenness of a deus ex machina. They fall back into their fated history, and out of representation. It is different when the doctors take Dowling away. When the protagonist withdraws from their history, he withdraws from his own. He is removed to the confines of a hospital – which means, synecdochally, a withdrawal from his engagement not only with the women, but with the everyday life of his society altogether. Yet, though he is no longer “among the living” like the women, he does not vanish from the narrative; appropriately and conversely, rather, he remains imprisoned by ideals that can express themselves, through his obsession with the poetic and sensual Song of Songs, in the autonomy of art (172). For the women characters who lead him into history, the tension between the female bildungsroman, a historicity that is for themselves, and the femme fatale, a historicity that is for the protagonist, is so strong as to render this masculinized closure, and its aesthetic turn, of muted significance. The explanation for this pattern in men’s writing may be rooted, as I started by suggesting, in a feminization of historicity that itself belongs to a feminization of modernity conventional to a transnational male antimodernism. Why historicity should be the focal point of this antimodernist sensibility, one can only speculate. But it is not surprising in light of simple historical reasons I have already introduced. That is to say, the experience of modernity in Canada, whether in country or city, East or West, is one of uneven development as a colonial and postcolonial society. This experience focuses perception on “modernity” as the peripheral becoming of modernity, not its ideal product (for example, in metropolitan views of the end of nature, the technologization of life, or the totalization of war). What is certain about modernity is not what it is and imposes, but what it does and destabililizes – its powers of transformation, ringing changes upon every register of possibility, opportunity, and vulnerability in the development of local and individual life. We may expect this experience to translate, in Canada, a conventional feminization of modernity by men into the particular figure and problematic formal consequences described. However, we might also expect that women will not express the gender of this experience in the same way, though using the same generic form of the bildungsroman, and even that of the elsewhere conventionally masculine “voyage out.”

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e m pa t h y f o r t h e f e m m e f a t a l e : ostenso and wilson It should not seem remarkable that women also write both male and female bildungsromans – with femmes fatales and without. It is perhaps more remarkable that in this writing, the feminization of history expressed by antimodernist male authors also takes a central place. Appearing as a similar icon of historicity, she will be seen leading women, as often as men, into the temporal bondages and liberations of the modern condition. Certainly, there are important novels by women that are not concerned with evoking a figure of the seducer into history; or, if they are, do not feminize it. These are novels that have no plot-driving relationship between the protagonist and a woman character, usually because the plotdriving relationship is with a man: Laura Goodman Salverson’s The Viking Heart (for Elizabeth, with Balder), Irene Baird’s Waste Heritage (for Matt, with Hep), Gwethalyn Graham’s Earth and High Heaven (for Erica, with Marc), Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (for “I,” with her lover), and one novella in Ethel Wilson’s diptych, The Equations of Love (for Lilly in “Lilly’s Story,” with Yow). Even in such texts, however, when the protagonists are women in a bildungsroman, the narrative itself can embody a historical experience of the freedom and fate offered by modern forms of development. Hence the bildungsroman protagonist takes over in narrative focalization what is figured in the femme fatale, as in Mazo de la Roche’s Delight and Wilson’s “Lilly’s Story.” Otherwise, and more simply, powerful women figures do function as icons of a seductive, fatal historicity for protagonists in a number of important works of fiction by women. Nowhere is this more striking, perhaps, than in de la Roche’s first novel, Possession,23 which manages to compress into a single femme fatale a double “return of the repressed”: Fawnie is a young Native woman who becomes the wife of a young man from the city – a man who has inherited the Ontario farm on which she and her family seasonally labour. She represents two sides of the same Canadian coin in this novel: both the cruel immiseration of her Native culture under the progress of modern White society (as a racially oppressed outcast) and, in the bourgeois domination of the same society, the reified ennui of White culture itself (as an acquisitive, egocentric housewife). As with the

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femmes fatales discussed above, she too is a tendential protagonist, whose narrative of development threatens to overwhelm in significance that of the protagonist who is to learn from her. To him she is a metonymic figure for the “land” (263), but as such she represents its material history, not a simply natural essence. It is this material history – and its power to transform the protagonist’s own life, both as an entrepreneurial farmer and as a father to an Indian child among Indian relations – whose “possession,” of him as well as by him, the protagonist must at the end own up to, when he submits to her (288). Such a “possession” by history is also feminized in an exemplary fashion – for a male protagonist in Wilson’s “Tuesday and Wednesday,” half of The Equations of Love (Mort’s plot-driving relationships are all with women, especially the wife he regards as his femme fatale, Myrtle) and Martha Ostenso’s The Dark Dawn – and for female protagonists in Wilson’s Hetty Dorval and Ostenso’s Wild Geese. In this penultimate portion of the chapter, I will look at what happens for these canonical modern women writers when women lead men into history, and when women lead women. Martha Ostenso was born in Norway in 1900 and lived most of her life in the United States. Her formative years, however – the years of her youth, education, early adulthood, and first work experience as a rural schoolteacher and a city journalist – were spent in Manitoba, and her first novel, Wild Geese (1925), which draws upon this experience, has assumed an important place in Canadian literary history for its contribution to traditions of prairie realism and feminism.24 In it a modern young schoolteacher finds herself witness to the oppressive patriarchy of a farmer over his farming family, and to the growing volatility of a resistant young daughter and a fearful wife which threatens his mastery. In this novel, we find the figure of a woman leading a woman “into history,” in contrast to the male and masculinist narratives already described. However, a needful context for this view is to be found in Ostenso’s second novel, The Dark Dawn (1926), in which the gender relations of Wild Geese are reversed.25 In The Dark Dawn the same historical type as Caleb Gare or Niels Lindstedt – a tyrannous, egocentric farmer obsessed with the development of his farm – merges with the figure of a femme fatale in the character of Hattie Murker, an ambitious farm-owning widow. The conventional type of a submissive wife is translated, here, into a submissive brother, Bert Murker. The type of youth who, like Judith, at first submits, then carries on a war of ressentiment, then finally

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liberates herself from the tyrant is in this novel not a daughter, but a young man, Lucian Dorrit, who foolishly marries Hattie. Hattie is essentially selfish, and willing to say so: “I wanted children to grow up and have this land after me. I wanted to have something to look forward to in the future. I had a right to want it. And when Luce Dorrit came to me, I took him. That’s the truth and I don’t care who knows it!” (90). Indeed, Lucian is so much an object in her field of utilitarian mastery, rather than an independent being, that he sees himself as a tool in her world “just as much as [her] threshing machine,” while she sees him as a kind of farm animal that needs “breaking” (224–5). Her selfishness is driven by a powerful will which appears to Lucian as “brutal,” “unconscionable,” and “fanatical” (186). But here is the twist: the same will is what seduced Lucian to her. She has a kind of radically individualistic power, an apparent freedom from her surroundings, that appeals to the young, individualistic youth. When the novel opens, Lucian has been away working on other farms, and is on his way home with the expectation of leaving again immediately to expand his horizons in the life of the city. His desire is indifferent to a sense of community, and rather full of the excitement of individual mobility and transformation that he has recently discovered as a migrant labourer, as a seller of his own labour power in the capitalist marketplace. “[It] had taken hold of Lucian Dorrit’s heart, a kind of mighty hunger for things invisible that somehow softened his yearning to be back home again. Try as he might, he could not have named it. Once upon the open road, he knew that he was feeding it. He knew there was joy in placing his feet upon the dusty, whitish way that spilled itself into countless eccentric deviations where his eyes followed it, onward and beyond, to the very rim of the earth” (6). This image of a will to consume experience upon experience, driven by desire without a determinate object and feeding a new sense of individual power, finds its echo in Hattie’s individualistic will – though Lucian does not realize it until too late. Her uncanny reflection of himself, of this newly aroused will in himself, seduces him. She offers the mysterious, ineffable image of individual power whose “bold angles” and whose “something new” defy and transcend the horizons to which she is confined. It is an image to “drown” oneself in: On each return from [town] on those cold winter evenings, with an unspeakable bitterness gnawing at his thoughts, he almost welcomed the

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warm physical intoxication which Hattie brought to him. She would meet him at the door, her shadow sprawling on the white wall behind her, the lamp on the table making bold angles of warm yellow and greyish violet on the sloping ceiling. Hattie’s shoulders would be square and stiff, her neck a white rigidity above the plain gingham of her dress, her eyes smouldering, sullen and warm. She was a deep mystery to Lucian. From the first he had known vaguely that his emotion toward her was not love. She was a sensation in which he had drowned all other thought and feeling. She was something new, delicious, strange, bounteous. He was humbled even in the moment that he was stirred by her presence. She was unapproachable in her dignity even when the rigid set of her shoulders was a deliberate challenge to him. She was a remarkable woman and his indignation rose at the thought of the mean souls who pretended to hold her in contempt. (94)

But the price of such power is a kind of solipsism we are, by now, well familiar with: “He moved in a fantastic dream. The dream, rather, moved about him. He looked at Hattie and saw her going about her daily tasks in a world that had all the outward appearances of reality but none of the inner substance of it” (92). Hattie’s individualism has the autonomous reality of a self-enclosed dream. That this is but a reflection – a figuration and feminization – of the transcending, fatal power of the whole market system into which his adulthood has thrust his own dreaming self is clear from the imaginary agon of transitive desire, of possession and mastery, subtending their mutual seduction: “Hattie stood up just then, her shoulders very erect, and looked down at Lucian … It was that hard, invincible line of her shoulders that had tormented Lucian first, that had made him want to possess her. He knew now, with sudden, startling, cruel certainty, that he had never possessed her, that it had been but a false moment of excitement, and that she would never be possessed by anyone, much less by him” (100). For this ineffable experience, Hattie is but an avatar: “The relentless, pitiless force that directs the life of every human being had taken hold of Lucian Dorrit” (91). He is not able to escape this force until the end of the novel, when Hattie’s death leaves him free to join the woman artist he loves, in the city Hattie has so well prepared him for. Is The Dark Dawn, then, a misogynist novel, in the tradition of male writing already discussed? Hattie’s demonization is mitigated by the fact that the very meaning of her ambition, in the context of her patriarchal society, is designated by the novel as the

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effect of an anxiety that belongs to the tendentially dispossessed woman, rather than as the effect of a self-confidence belonging to the traditional rights of men. Her “right to want” what men have is thus revealed to be a historically new form of desire, appropriate to a historically new means of pursuing it. In Wild Geese, a gentler remaking of this image of the femme fatale is contrasted to the image of the individualistic tyrant. The young female schoolteacher, Lind Archer, is a catalyst introduced into the Gare household which allows its static and oppressively patriarchal structure of relationships to break apart, liberating individuals to choose or define new relationships. Lind enters the world of the Gares as a figure of historical possibility who threatens the patriarchal Caleb Gare’s egocentric control over their lives. As such she not only represents a certain historicity as the “content” of her character – in that she represents the opportunities for self-development offered by an urban and modern education, a self-supporting career, and an independent private life – but she enacts it as “form,” in that her resistance to Gare’s power and her own seductive power over the young Judith Gare, is the origin of the narrative logic that drives the daughter and the mother to affirm and enact their own resistances to Gare, and to transform the life of the family. This function of the young, beautiful schoolteacher is marked above all by her metonymic role in an epiphany, in which she is associated with a global space and knowledge, and a modern individual sense of it, which invades the mind and body of the young Judith at the beginning of the novel. It has all the sexuality of an annunciation, but a modern and secular one. In a secret place in the forest, beside a spring, “Jude” removes all her clothes and lies supine: “Here was something forbiddenly beautiful, secret as one’s own body. And there was something beyond this. She could feel it in the freeness of the air, in the depth of the earth. Under the body there were, she had been taught, eight thousand miles of earth. On the other side, what? Above her body there were leagues and leagues of air, leading like wings – to what? The marvellous confusion and complexity of all the world had singled her out from the rest of the Gares. She was no longer one of them. Lind Archer had come and her delicate fingers had sprung a secret lock in Jude’s being. She had opened like a tight bud” (53). Representing the “freedom” of an abstract world – abstract because defined more by a logic of spatial extension and possibility than by any fixed contents – accessible to her new, “strangely free”

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individuality, and beyond her local region and family, the “Teacher” with the “dainty hands and soft, laughing eyes” activates the logic of narrative development that will turn this character’s self-destructive ressentiment against her father into an active liberation from him. The same logic works to transform Judith’s mother’s submission into resistance and liberation. It is not only what the female schoolteacher represents of the modern world, then, but the abstract form of desire she calls forth from it, that allows the narrative to develop towards its anti-conservative closure. This is a historicity that binds the individual to the perception of a transcending, total economy, and thus to a logic of choices, of desires and decisions, and which transcends any local imagination of mastery over change, over time. Jude will do and become what she is able to do and become, according to the possibilities suggested neither by the utilitarian Caleb Gare nor by the young rural lover who wishes to be her saviour; but by an abstraction of possibility transcending both and settling into no concrete object within her horizons. “Was it Sven she wanted now that she was so strangely free? Judith looked straight about her through the network of white birch and saw the bulbous white country that a cloud made against the blue. Something beyond Sven, perhaps … Freedom, freedom” (53). But Wild Geese is not simply a romance of modernization in an oppressively traditional world, with the logic of development of the former heriocally feminized. For one thing, Lind Archer is not the only representative of the modern metropolis elsewhere; the other is male, and his significance is more ambivalent. Mark Jordan is the son of Caleb Gare’s wife, Amelia, born out of wedlock, orphaned, and ignorant of his true parents – whom he believes to be city people like himself. He appears as a gentleman farmer in the region, dressed in an urban-commodified parody of country clothing, out for a rest cure from the neuroses of city life. He has a narrative function as a pawn in the main plot involving Gare’s control of his wife and family, but his function as an individualized character is only important in the romantic sub-plot, where he is an alter-ego for Lind. Unlike the empathetic Lind, Mark never really identifies with the rural region. To her fateful sense of “dread,” his response is sanguine and naïve: “But it doesn’t touch us, Lind. We don’t belong to it. We have each other” – and even by the end of the novel, he has not discovered his true origins (169). His statement is but an expression of his larger withdrawal into himself, for he was “always so alone – beached on a

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desert island” until Lind appeared. It is not mere loneliness, but the sign of a solipsistic tendency within which he now wants to include Lind – as is evident in the scene in which he meets her at her schoolhouse after hours, and finds himself playing a game with himself, tossing a piece of chalk onto the blackboard ledge beneath an image he has childishly scrawled and labelled “Teacher”: This he did several times, stepping back a few paces farther each time. Lind watched the game for a while half-amusedly. Then she was conscious of a faint irritation. He apparently had forgotten she was there. His restlessness shut her out … He turned to her so suddenly that she started. “Let’s walk,” he said. “What’s the matter?” “Nothing,” she answered … “I really don’t want to walk now that you have decided upon it for me so peremptorily. But I’ll use you as a means to control my temper, and go with you. You are terribly used to having your own way, I can see that. As if you were the only person on earth.” “I always was – until you came, Lind.” (76–7)

Mark is the urban double of the rural patriarch, with the same egocentric assumption of a dreamlike and solipsistic, imaginary mastery, and the same unconscious aggressivity in his game. It is one with the transcending alienation – and with the autonomy of modern aesthetic experience expressed in Brooker’s blue colour fields in Think of the Earth – of Caleb Gare’s own dreamlike, ineffable vision of his field of mastery: “While he was raptly considering the tender field of flax – now in blue flower – Amelia did not exist to him. There was a transcendent power in the blue field of flax that lifted a man above the petty artifices of birth, life, and death. It was more exacting, even, than an invisible God. It demanded not only the good in him, but the evil, and the indifference” (119). The underlying modernity of both Mark’s and Caleb Gare’s alienation from the humanizing reciprocity of social relations, and of their reification of an aestheticized, autonomous realm of activity (agriculture and love), undoes the dichotomy of modernity and tradition which seems so easily available as an interpretive code for the critique of patriarchy thus set forth. Both these Axël figures, when measured in this way, appear equally modern. Placed in relation, then, to both Mark and Caleb Gare, Lind is the model of an alternatively modern development. This alternative is not given to her as a result of her sexual difference. Hattie Murker,

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Ostenso’s antagonistic figure of the independent woman in her subsequent novel, merely represents a fusion of the modern will-topower in Caleb Gare with the modern solipsism of desire in Mark. Lind is the only character in Wild Geese who is afforded a perspective that can perceive the self-destructive futility of the inevitable competition between the solipsistic visionaries normal to modern development, and who can seek her independence in a world of compromises beyond their horizons. It is to this perspective that her seduction of Judith into narrative action moves – away from the repetition of egoism and ressentiment to which her father draws her defiantly free will and desire. While The Dark Dawn offers a structural complement to Wild Geese, it lacks the character system to represent this alternative modernity, and so fails to provide a meaningful closure. Only the narrative structure of a woman leading a woman into history will yield, in Ostenso’s first novel, a transfiguration of the femme fatale into a figure of desire for historical power and engagement with others that is empathic rather than abstract. Such a transfiguration is the subject of Ethel Wilson’s bildungsroman of a girl in transition to young womanhood, Hetty Dorval. The girl, Frankie, is innocent and sensitive, raised in a close-knit family in the country. The older woman who both fascinates and troubles her, Hetty, is sensuous and egocentric, raised as an orphan in the British colonies in China, and a restless world-traveller. As Northrop Frye has observed, the title refers not to the protagonist, but to the older, independent woman with whom she develops a fragmentary yet highly charged, passionate and transgressive relationship, and upon whom her growth to maturity will depend. Thus the development of the rural girl, her bildung, bears not her own name, but the name of the cosmopolitan woman with whom her story is identified. This confusion of identities is reflected in the gracefully disfigured form of the novel. Its first-person narrator, Frankie, denies her role as a protagonist at the same time that she evades the same formal significance for Hetty, so that the narrative moves in an ambiguous space without a stable protagonist: “This is not a story of me … but of the places and ways known to me in which Hetty Dorval has appeared,” while conversely “it is not even Hetty Dorval’s whole story because to this day I do not know Hetty’s whole story and she does not tell” (67).

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Beneath her compellingly beautiful surface, Hetty is a “terra incognita” defended by “silence and withdrawal” (85). But this ambiguity of identity is not Hetty’s alone; it is reflected as in a hall of mirrors in the other women of the novel: Frankie, whose formation is still in process; Hetty’s mother, who keeps her identity concealed from Hetty for the duration of the novel, and in whom Frankie sees reflected an aged Hetty (88); and Frankie’s mother, who reveals a sympathetic understanding of Hetty (63), and who – in an unavoidably symbolic gesture of identification – moves into Hetty’s house when Hetty is gone, so that like Hetty she can enjoy the freedom and independence of its remote location and barren landscape (55–6). Hetty herself represents a transgressive desire, both in her relations with a series of men (which upset other lives) and in her relations with Frankie. This desire is associated both with her global migrancy (her freedom from the constraints of any particular community) and her solipsism. Because other people do not have much reality for Hetty, she can do with them what she will – pleasurably or harmfully. The global migrancy and the solipsism are interconnected in the image of a person for whom it is not precisely others who do not exist, but the social contexts of others beyond their phenomenal appearance as individuals: “Nobody existed for her as an individual who had ties or responsibilities and a life of his or her own. People only existed when they came within her vision” (34). This condition does have political and historical roots, however, revealed in the end, for she is the child of a degenerate Empire symbolized in the transient liaison in Hong Kong between an upper-class father, who will not recognize her, and a lower-class mother, whom she will not recognize. Her solipsism is an imperialism reduced to the individual, while her eroticism and aestheticism (she seems to value only beauty, pleasure, and a modern skepticism) are its empire, built upon the passing moment. Indeed, her bond with Frankie is based upon the epiphany of such a moment, realized in the shared sight of a flight of wild geese. It represents flight and freedom to the women, and is immediately translated into an erotic moment (24–5) which persists as the basis of their relationship (30). This erotic relationship is ultimately exorcized (in a curious climax in Frankie’s bed), and the female empowerment Hetty represents turned against its own destructive effects, so that Frankie emerges as a figure of the bildung of compromise – independent, but responsible for the society in which she lives.

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If it were simply a matter of Frankie’s conquering this femme fatale in order to attain a normal womanhood, then this novel would be deeply conservative – that is, both antifeminist and antimodernist. But the compromise is not so simple, because of the identification of Hetty on a sympathetic rather than antipathetic basis with other women in the novel, an identification which persists to its very closure. Such sympathy is possible because Hetty is revealed to have a mother and a past from which she has never been independent, and in turn a present and future from which she suffers fear and, at the conclusion that brings us to the outbreak of World War II, probable harm. To be sure, Hetty sums up and epitomizes the convergent Axël and Rimbaud qualities of the visionary solipsist and the historical powers of the femme fatale discussed so far. She does so, however, not as an ideal antagonist to be destroyed, but as a historical condition to be demystified. Her image as an ideal is marked everywhere in the text as a false front behind which some unrepresentable aspect of her life lies concealed, and marked by the text in the self-reflexively subjective construction of her identity according to fragments gathered by the narrator. For others she is a femme fatale, a feminization of the troubling experience of modern historicity. We never know what she is for herself, though we are from the beginning directed to the existence of this distinction and to its concealment from us. As a result, Hetty functions neither as a femme fatale, nor as a realist character with her own history or even bildung, but as the invasively circulating sign of a femme fatale. This sign is produced by the intersection of (1) the power of a modernity abstract from the local place or even nation – a power whose liberating and inventive aspects are exemplary in the opportunities of development available to modern woman and, in a significant parallel, to postcolonial society, with (2) the reification of values and goals in the liberal individualist world of that very modernity, a levelling of values which circles back to its modernist solution in morbid aestheticism. This figure becomes a self-reflexive sign which functions in the development of Frankie as the protagonist of her bildungsroman. Here again, in the telos to Frankie’s development, is the alternatively modern perspective that we found in Ostenso’s Lind Archer, one which perceives the fatal and self-destructive life of the solipsistic visionary and seeks her independence through compromises with the past and with the desires of others. Only here, the perspective is further modernized. It is unmoored from the realist character as individual or as type, and

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attached instead to a structural moment of the narrative voice as it undertakes its self-reflexive phenomenology of individual identity. Here again, but in the form of a fully realized modernism, we find the femme fatale as a figure of empathic rather than abstract desire for historical power and engagement with others – which only the narrative structure of a woman leading a woman into history, in these disfigured Canadian formations, will yield.26

women about development If the questions and contradictions of a modern nation can be mediated by the figure of a developing individual, does it matter if that figure is a boy or a girl? Literary history, which reflects the history of patriarchy and its transformations, leaves little ambiguity on that score. Sexual difference is one of the fundamental ways by which literature has organized its paradigmatic images and values, and plotted its motivations and problems. Ever since the study of the female bildungsroman thematized by Elizabeth Abel et al in their collection of essays, The Voyage In, the bildungsroman genre has been recognized to conform to striking differences in form and concerns when devoted to either male or female protagonists.27 It may be recalled from chapter 1 that what I refer to as the female bildungsroman has also been called the novel of female development or self-development, as against a narrower, male-centred comprehension of the genre. This approach is influentially promoted by Susan Fraiman in Unbecoming Women (1993).28 Fraiman offers an ideological critique of the genre as it has been defined, with Goethe’s novel taken as an origin, to valorize patriarchy together with a bourgeois Enlightenment view of social order and progress. Across a range of female fictions of development, all of which must unfold at a certain distance from this ideology and subject matter, she finds no alternative, unifying generic pattern. Other relevant studies of novels of female self-development by Nina Auerbach, Gail David, and Penny Brown also avoid the term bildungsroman – although Brown notes that the novels of the modern period move “closer” to the “criteria of the male novel” because of modern changes in public life for women (6), and draws up a concluding list of comparisons with the male form (220–4).29 The genre is also addressed qua bildungsroman by Esther Kleinbord Labovitz.30 All of these studies, more limited in scope than Fraiman’s, claim to find significant generic patterns. Yet none of these seem easily applicable to Canadian

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examples. Interestingly, Brown’s signal finding is that novels of female development represent interactions between self and society that are more negative and defeated than dialectical and triumphant. A good example of this might be Duncan’s fin-de-siècle novel, A Daughter of Today. But it does not seem to hold true as a general pattern in Canada, and this may be an indication that, as I suggest at the end of this chapter, such novels tend closer to the male form in affirming and giving aesthetic form to the expression of an (imperialist) ideology of liberal progress – but do so by virtue of their more challenging appropriation of the semic indeterminacy of the new national society. How do gender differences affect the modernist Canadian narrative of development? How does this affect the metonymy of nation and youth upon which the genre depends? The title of The Voyage In marks an influential difference between male and female fictions of development: while the former depends upon a narrative of excursions and associations constructed in the public sphere – a mature voyaging “out” – the latter more often depends upon a narrative of withdrawals and associations constructed in the private sphere – a mature voyaging “in.” Such contrasting narrative patterns are easily understood in the context of a patriarchal society in which the development of women is grounded within the limits of domesticity, which, if transcended, do not typically open a way into the social world defined by men. Hence the young woman who faces an uncertain future in modern society can either – to return to Moretti’s categories – take her place in a compromise narrative, in which the protagonist explores a sequence of households and intimacies, like Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice or Jane in Jane Eyre, before settling down to the psychological marriage which best reflects and expresses herself; or she remains unsatisfied and misplaced in an uncompromising narrative, in which she is driven into madness or withdrawal by the impossibility of the same process, like Catherine in Wuthering Heights or Gwendolyn in Daniel Deronda. The limitations placed on a bildung in either case give rise to a third possibility, which constitutes a second important difference between male and female bildungsromans. Because marriage has not typically offered as rich a field of imaginative or real possibilities to the representation of women’s selfdevelopment as have the patriarchal institutions of education and business, the women’s “voyage in” is not necessarily synchronized with the early youth of the male narrative with its anxiety of transition from the dependency of childhood to the independence of the

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career. Rather, it just as often sees the transition from childhood to marriage as a continuum of dependency, and represents its original moment of anxiety and self-development in later youth, when this continuum is broken by disillusionment and rebellion or reconstruction. This has been called the narrative of “awakening,” after the eponymous novel by Kate Chopin. Inwardness and awakening are impulses of self-development that define the narrative dimensions of the Anglo-American female bildungsroman. Surprisingly, these patterns do not impose themselves in the modern Canadian genre. The “awakening” pattern is almost entirely absent, so that an exception like Ethel Wilson’s The Swamp Angel appears unusual.31 Dominant, rather, are narratives of youth in transitions from a youthful innocence to a marriage or career that defines the closure of their development. Also surprisingly, among these the voyage “in” is not so clearly a differentiating pattern. Among novels by women, domestic or withdrawing inwardness is the constitutive pattern of Sara Jeannette Duncan’s The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib (1893),32 in which a newlywed in colonial India learns, through the demands of a strange, new everyday life, to outgrow her innocence and take on a more reflective and worldly wisdom; and of Duncan’s Cousin Cinderella, in which the same process is occasioned by a young woman’s choice between Canadian and British suitors. It is also the limiting pattern of L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908),33 whose child protagonist learns to adapt her free imagination to the constraints of the more conservative social culture around her; as it is of Martha Ostenso’s Wild Geese, whose Lind develops a darker wisdom, and whose Judith learns to free her imagination and power of self-development, both within the limits of a social context still conditioned for women by marriage and patriarchy. Even these latter examples are ambiguous, however. While it is true that Lind’s transformation is an inward one, symbolized by the existential cries of the geese in flight, it is produced by an outward agency that is defiant of patriarchal values and transformative of others. Judith, while her transformation does not imply a future alternative to domesticity, is yet defined by the negation of her mother’s experience of domesticity and by the vindication of human bonds (with George) which the mother has created outside its patriarchal authority. The compromise plot tendency is thus affirmed, but left too unrealized to deliver its conservative message. A similar ambiguity of closure haunts Montgomery’s Anne, whose integration into her

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social world is apparently allowed by the pleasure-giving function of her imagination, which always seems to balance, rather than compromise, its independence – and it is the swing of this balance that propels the serial form of her narrative. Finally, even Duncan’s novels, if conservative in themselves, take their place beside such novels as her A Daughter of Today, which offers the example of a female bildungsroman that manipulates and rejects the female form of the genre, and wryly adapts the male form. In this kunstlerroman (which I discussed in my introduction), a young protagonist travels from America to France and England, passes through different schools, lives in different cities, works in different jobs, and decides between different men – and, finding nothing to satisfy or realize an uncompromising sense both of her own autonomy and the autonomy of art, comes to ruin. This last novel belongs with those significant, modern Canadian narratives that do not follow the generic gender distinction, but – however inward their concerns – offer as an example the figure of a young woman voyaging “out.” All the above women novelists produced at least one such female bildungsroman narrative. Its archetype in the work of Mazo de la Roche is Delight (1926), whose protagonist immigrates to a small factory town region in Ontario to work as an independent woman (in town and on the farm) – with no thought of marriage, but preferring to keep her “delight” to herself.34 Sheila Watson’s Deep Hollow Creek (c.1930s) similarly records the reflections and experiences of a young woman who travels to an edge of civilization (in the British Columbian interior) to pursue work as a schoolteacher – not only with no thought of marriage, but with no such plot implicating her, as she learns to preserve her independence and respect her community with a consciousness of values more complicated by modernist inclusivity than driven by Freudian, narcissistic delight.35 The latter is developed in more psychological detail, however, in Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (1945), whose protagonist travels across North America and assumes various dependent and independent positions in her social world, and moves from youth to maturity, while driven by a sensibility of love totalized beyond the personal to the mythical scale of a worldview.36 These three novels could not be further apart in style and temperment, but are alike in narrating the development of maturity in, and the place-taking in modern society of, independent young women, through experience in both private and public spheres. The

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most prolific in this genre must be Ethel Wilson, who returned to the female bildungsroman in narrative after narrative: Hetty Dorval, “Lilly’s Story,” The Innocent Traveller, and The Swamp Angel. These narratives all explore women’s self-development in the pursuit of independent lives or careers and the experience of voyaging “out” to different geographical places and social milieus. I think such narratives reflect more than the merely different historical possibilities for women in English and American as opposed to Canadian societies. The relative lack of retrospective “awakenings” and the preponderance of voyagings “out” certainly suggest not only the expanding opportunities open to women in the public sphere in the first half of the century – opportunities linked to effects of modernization common to Anglo-American experience and similarly reflected in its literature – but suggest also the conditions of a postcolonial culture in which women are still caught up in a discourse of the imperial frontier, its heavy demands for travel and labour, and its creative process of developing rather than preserving civilization.37 It is perhaps the sense that these demands and this process are oppressive as much as liberating, and overwhelm as much as they empower otherness – that they are a part of what Grove meant by the “yoke of life” – which has allowed the extroversion and linear development of the Canadian female bildungsroman to enter into the fictional domain of men. A few, but among the most influential of writers, Hugh MacLennan with Barometer Rising, Frederick Philip Grove with his two German novels, and Thomas Raddall with The Nymph and the Lamp, have felt the need to write female bildungsromans – and, in short, have been forced to consider the woman the way their fellow women writers did, as an awesome historical creature rather than a self-evident romance ideal, and to see and feel their country through her.

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four

Region: The Invisible City and the Abstract Empire

The overwhelming apprehension of a regionalist challenge to the imagination of a national culture or literature is exemplified in an essay by Robert Kroetsch entitled “Disunity as Unity: A Canadian Strategy,” which remained powerful enough since his speaking it at a conference in 1985 to have been reprinted over a decade later in New Contexts of Canadian Literature: Where the impulse in the US is usually to define oneself as American, the Canadian, like a work of postmodern architecture, is always quoting his many sources. Our sense of region resists our national sense. I hear myself saying, I’m from western Canada. Or, beyond that – because I was born in Alberta and now live in Manitoba – people ask me, seriously, if I think of myself as an Albertan or a Manitoban. We maintain ethnic customs long after they’ve disappeared in the country of origin. We define ourselves, often, as the cliché has it, by explaining to Americans that we aren’t British, to the British that we aren’t Americans. It may be that we survive by being skilful shape-changers. But more to the point, we survive by working with a low level of self-definition and national definition. We insist on staying multiple, and by that strategy we accommodate to our climate, our economic situation, and our neighbours.

In this “multiple” image – by which he defines Canadian culture and the literature which expresses it – Kroetsch detects postmodernist resistances to the “metanarratives” which are supposed to be shared and assumed by traditional nationhood, and a preference for the always contested and contestatory stories and authorities produced by a rather “polyphonic” nationhood.1 The sorts of multiplicities most

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important to him inhere in regional differences, and the roots of these reach well into the early decades of transformative immigration, migration and economic developments in this century. What the relationship is between regional differences in literature, merely, and the sort of regional specificity that may be recognized as an informing principle in literature and hence constitutive of generic regionalism, is an impossible question satisfactorily to answer. David M. Jordan in his study New World Regionalism observes that regionalism has been variously defined (1) by its content and aim in the representation of “local colour,” (2) by the significance of such locales to its plot developments, (3) by its evocation of the unique spirit of a place, (4) by its native author’s rendering of the experience of a place, and (5) by the politics of marginal development and cultural conflict which circumscribe certain kinds of places in a modernizing world.2 Few of these definitions are exclusive, but none are able to synthesize the others without reaching a level of abstraction which – in a twist proper to the paradox of a particularist category – betrays the location of meaning in the precisely different regional conditions and representations of a literature. Rather than staking a claim on one or another of these definitions, it is perhaps more useful to attend to different uses of regionalism – as effects of writing – and ask how they are rooted in particular regions. My initial aim will be, not to provide categories in which to group and define uniquely regional differences, but rather to provide some transregional categories relevant to the self-definition of regions of the Canadian modern period – those of city and country, frontier and empire – as initial axes along which regional and regionalist differences may be charted and understood. My approach will be to explore one such regional literature – Nova Scotian novels of the modern Maritimes – and to conclude with a larger and more speculative view of others in relation to it.

the country and the city A starting point in this endeavour is the recognition that “regionalism” rarely describes, and usually implies a contrast to, the realm of the modern city. This may be a modern connotation, for Jordan argues that, in modern regionalism especially, the figure of the region tends to be opposed to that of a centralizing modern society, and in properly modernist writing this dichotomy becomes a kind of politicized pathetic fallacy of an anxiously modern, psychological condition of an

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individual subjectivity regarding its outer social world. Jordan’s development of this model, in which the opposition of regional and metropolitan worlds is regarded instead as their contestatory interaction, assumes the kind of copenetration of regional and non-regional conditions that in my first chapter I suggested led to a form of peripheral modernism – in Canada characterized by the literary experiments of what I called an everyday expressionism. From this perspective, one would expect to find an autonomous regionalism (that which refers us to some idealized autonomous world apart) in escapist literature which, even in the form of a selective, antimodernist realism, is akin to degraded romance; while a critical regionalism should be distinguished which records in symbolic form the particular struggle in a place between its uniqueness and autonomy and its dependent, modern development. We should not be surprised to find invisible cities, so to speak, in unlikely places. This idea of regionalism takes us to the heart of the fiction considered in this study, one of whose most outwardly striking features (and this takes us back to the concerns of William Arthur Deacon cited at the beginning of this book) is the virtual absence of urban settings and the preponderance of rural and wilderness settings in Canadian fiction written between 1900 and 1960.3 It would be a great mistake to perceive in this, however, as Deacon almost did, an absence of representation of the lives and concerns engendered by modernity in Canada. Rather, as I will attempt to show in the two readings of novels which follow, both the rural countryside and the wilderness frontier provide settings that throw the invisible machinery and machinations of modern life into unique perspective. The most self-conscious rendering of this perspective in a Canadian novel is Ernest Buckler’s The Mountain and the Valley (1952), which is a paradoxical variation on the “great expectations,” country-to-city narrative, in which the aspiring protagonist never manages to leave the country.4 David Canaan – super-sensitive, ironic, and vain – is unable physically and emotionally to abandon the unself-conscious, ruraltraditional roots from which his modern individuality has severed itself.5 The narrative follows his development from childhood, through the world-adventurer, city-professional, and artist identities he fantasizes for himself beyond the borders of his rural community. In a paradoxical ending, he dies just as he dreams of becoming a world-class novelist, of writing the truth of a world-space, upon the model of E.M. Forster. He praises Forster’s novels for “the absolute truth of what the

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author said about whatever people he dealt with (though he himself had never known anyone like them, actually)” (244–5). But as David remains on his farm, his dream remains unwritten. He is caught in the double pull – or double repulsion – of city and country. For him the city is an intolerably mean and lonely place whose society is founded on the inauthenticity of the commodity; the country is an intolerably static and laborious place whose society is founded on a poverty of self-reflection. “He could neither leave nor stay. He was neither one thing nor the other” (171). In the end he dies in the forest atop his mountain, in the wilderness frontier of his property. All of Buckler’s descriptions of his rural protagonist as an individual personality show him to have acquired (mostly it seems through books) a modern relativity of the self estranged from any identity essentialized or naturalized by a rural way of life and its traditions. Rather, he is a born actor: if he fits into his world, it is because he copies it, mimics it, while he himself seems to have “no face of his own” (123). But this ironically leads him to become, in the world he never leaves, a permanent “stranger” (275). In a world of personalities who accept themselves unthinkingly as what they are, and their world as what it is, David struggles with an existentialist identity, condemned to self-reflective freedom, to his own negations. Indeed the consciousness of nothingness forms the most explicit paradigm of imagery in the novel, in both David’s mind and his experience: it is the indifferent background against which selves and things are arbitrarily fixed and named, and against which each moment in time renews itself as an absolutely empty moment free for change. This existential time is central to modernist subjectivity: as John Tomlinson has explained, the existential “realisation of individual freedom” may be seen as a “cultural fate” of “self-development,” which mirrors the social and historical, “structural process of economic development.”6 But if existential self-development figures strongly forth in the subjectivity of David Canaan, where do we find figured a corresponding socioeconomic development in a narrative in which the hero never leaves the family farm, never lays eyes on a factory or a city street? Buckler’s own answer to this problem is to emphasize the invasive, transforming ontological power of writing and print. Coming from beyond the mountain to the valley, the book is the emissary of the city. The word is its invisible commodity, disseminating the seeds of self-consciousness, freedom, social alienation, and violence. Though Marshall McLuhan and Benedict Anderson have written influentially

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about the historical meeting of print technology and capitalism as the causal ground of a modern social imagination (a consideration I will return to later on), not all the blame for David’s paradoxical fate can be attributed to having read too many books. Even accepting such influences of modern print, the riddle still remains: how can we make sense of a modernist hero (or anti-hero) figured as a farmer who actively avoids the modernizing world? Moreover, this modernist riddle is not unusual to Canadian fiction; nor is the modernist paradigm limited to misfit protagonists such as David. There are whole “invisible cities” in the alienated countrysides of novelists as various as Watson, Grove, Ostenso, Knister, de la Roche, and Blais, amidst the efflorescence of both popular and literary-canonized modern fiction which has a rural setting shaping its themes and narratives. I want to suggest that such invisible cities are not the expressionist product of writers turned inward, moodily immersed in psychological dramas that they project upon a setting akin to a hostile or indifferent nature (as if the rural were continuous, in fact or significance, with the wilderness setting). They are rather the realist product of writers trying to express a modern Canadian rural experience in terms of a social whole which encompasses the self, others, and the artificial and natural space that knits them together. If there is truth to the general recognition of modernism as an “art of cities,” then a tradition of rural Canadian writing has established its continuity with this urban truth, rather than in nostalgic or pastoral alternatives.7 Towards this thesis I will proceed through a series of theoretical horizons, extending my discussion in chapter 1 from the question of postcolonial modernity in general, to its particularity in a region and period, to a novel which, in its unique way, expresses it.

uneven development In his book-length essay on what it means to be modern, All That Is Solid Melts into Air, Marshall Berman provides an immediately useful way of talking about the “modern” by distinguishing three broad critical categories: modernity, modernism, and modernization. Modernization refers to the objective, world-historical processes – primarily socio-economic processes of capitalist development, but also, for instance, technological revolutions – which are the material basis of modern life and its modes of change. Modernism refers to the whole range of more subjective, human responses to modernization – how

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modern people have made sense of themselves and of their modernizing world. This includes “modernism” in the narrower sense of a literary intellectual and aesthetic movement. Modernity is an overarching term that refers to the ongoing interplay and synthesis of modernization and modernism in what Berman calls the holistic “experience” of modern life.8 I will use Berman’s dialectic of modernization and modernism as a starting point in thinking about Canadian literary regions, because it immediately suggests that if we wish to characterize a given nation’s literary modernisms, we should study that nation’s particular patterns of modernization; for it is a postcolonial truth that modernization does not happen everywhere the same way, but can itself, in modern times, bifurcate into the modern experiences of a developing empire and those of its underdeveloped or exploititively developed, dependent states (and in levels upon levels of bifurcation, in subregions, classes, races, sexes). So, if we want to try to recognize the particular character of modernism in a Canadian literary imagination, we should take a look at the Canadian modernization which is its objective ground.9 To do this, the concept of modernization must at least (a) be specified theoretically as an asymmetical experience of regions determined by a postcolonial world history, and (b) be specified historically for a Canadian national context. A new school of Marxist geography, influentially represented by David Harvey, Neil Smith, and Derek Gregory, has abandoned a model of modernization as a linear progress of development (or static underdevelopment) happening everywhere in the world at merely different rates or times, and has instead theorized a contradictory, “uneven development” both within and between regions in a global geography. Of these theorists, Smith will be the most important here, because he has focused on the need, very new to Marxism and geography alike, to think of nature in general, and the country in particular, as spaces that are not doomed to obsolescence in a modernizing ascendency of city over country. On the contrary, modern capitalism requires the production of nature, and of the country, as “underdeveloped” regions, as external and internal frontiers in its imperialist expansion. A closer look at Smith’s theorization of geographic space will yield terminology useful to us in approaching my second specification, bringing us to “dependency theory” – a dominant tradition in Canadian political economics which studies Canada’s own “uneven

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development” from a partly pre-modern, colonial society structured by British capital to a fully modern, postcolonial one structured by American capital. Smith has argued that the Marxist cliché of the modernizing drive toward mastery over nature obscures the fact that nature is something produced by modernization, not something independent and antithetical to it.10 It is a theoretical argument which denies the cliché antithesis between nature and progress, and reveals the physical space and body of nature to be a structural category of modern experience. Simply, capitalist development requires not only a constant movement of change and exchange, transmuting all things into exchange value, but a realm of absolutes, and “absolute spaces” – distinct physical forms and locations according to which differential values can be produced. Contrary to Berman’s modernism, all that is solid does not melt into air. There is a “fix” in the movement of capital which depends upon the production of nature as a field of more or less developed, artificially absolute spaces. For Smith, capitalist modernization does not act in a linear narrative of progress, but in a kind of see-saw, in which the development of one space demands the underdevelopment of another, a non-linear progress between “relative” spaces – for example, between empire and colony, or town and farm. This he calls the spatial “differentiation” of modernization.11 However, there is another tendency of modernization, a contradictory one: this is spatial “equalization,” the tendency for underdeveloped regions “fixed” by foreign capital to accumulate and develop and modernize anyway. This contradictory tendency arises from the ineluctable interests of capital to produce newer and larger markets wherever it can, leading to the development of production even in underdeveloped, local economies. An absolute space “fixed” in a form of underdevelopment subservient to a world market is also contradictorily “unfixed” by its new, structural fate as a local market, then local site of development of production and its attendant capital accumulation. The experience of what Smith calls the “equalization” of modern spaces under capitalism – the familiar, cultural effect of imperialism – is for David Harvey the formative ground of aesthetic modernism. For Harvey, modernism tries to represent the minimalist or ideogrammic, “compression” and “pulverization” of traditional, absolute spaces into modern, relative space as a subjectively grasped logic – as a cognitive aesthetic or map.12 This yields reference points for what Tomlinson called the language of self-development (in rela-

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tion to economic development) and it represents the new freedoms and possibilities open to the individual in the world of relative space. But to explore this modernism in regional terms requires that I back up in order to rejoin Smith from another angle. Where does all this artifice of space, in differentiation or in equalization, come from? What structures the “relative space” of regions? David Harvey has argued that this structure is controlled between regions, by cities. Cities are not one pole of a dichotomy between developing regions; cities organize the relational structure itself, so that “urbanization” is a meta-regional phenomenon, belonging as much to relative space everywhere as to absolute space in cities themselves. In a further step, Harvey takes “urbanization” beyond its material referent, to refer to a spatial process not only in capital but in consciousness. The important feature of this otherwise familiar, deterministic ideological model, as Derek Gregory has shown, is that “urbanization of consciousness” is seen not merely to reflect the absolute space of urban modernity, but to mediate the relative space of a larger geography whose structure depends upon urban space, but whose development and experience is marginal and different (399). At these spatial margins, which in a human geography might as easily be the subordinate regional space of a rural economy, as the subordinate social space of women, one might expect the attempt to produce an “urbanized” aesthetic map to be particularly conflicted. In short, a colonized modernism – in which, as a we saw Jameson describe it earler, “the truth of [one’s] experience no longer coincides with the place in which it takes place,” is bound to produce what Gregory calls “cartographic anxiety” (6) whereby its mappings will both render the contradictory, juxtaposed “compression” and “pulverization” of spaces in their “urbanized,” modern relation, as in a cubist painting or a montagist poem, and question the authority of its own “relative space” aesthetic to speak for the still produced and lived differences in regions of absolute space.13 This can translate into an anxiety in modern fiction, for example, somehow to hold to the aesthetics of both formalist and realist genres, an anxiety which it is tempting to recognize in Canadian fiction even to the present. It is a problem that we shall see underlies the dilemma of Buckler’s novel, which critics have always recognized as stylistically modernist – comparable, for example, to Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase or cinematic montage14 – but seemingly without urban modernist concerns (i.e., as a version of pastoral, or as a study of

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individual psychology in relation to nature or to a romantic creativity).15 Like his fictive hero, in The Mountain and the Valley Buckler draws and redraws his maps of identity and place, but is never able to settle them, to provide the authoritative moment, mood, or meaning, that would allow them the closure of speaking for, by imposing ordered meaning upon, his represented, regional experience. This self-contradicting modernism brings us back to the contradictory aspect of regional space suggested by Smith and prepares us to look at its Canadian context. Smith tells us that any “relative space” within a modern imperialist economy will itself struggle with the contradictory processes and pressures both of “differentiation” and “equalization.” So while the modern city produces the country as a differential and underdeveloped space, at the same time the city produces the country as a potential double of itself, yielding the experience of what I above called a rural “invisible city.” The modern countryside is simultaneously both fixed and fragmented, underdeveloped and urbanized. Such a contradictory picture of modernization corresponds well to recent revisions of Canadian dependency theory by political economists who have objected to the romanticized image of Canada as an underdeveloped colony akin to the Third World, and illuminated the indigenous capitalist social and material forms of modern Canadian development.16 Canadian society was from the beginning, argues Leo Panitch, primarily constituted by free wage labour and by individual production – including agricultural production – for commodity exchange, not for subsistence within a pre-market local economy.17 Modern Canada thus provides a specific instance of the contradiction in differentiation and equalization theorized by Smith. Though Canada industrialized life in the cities more slowly than did the United States, it nevertheless tendentially industrialized its rural modes of life. From this viewpoint we can see that the Canadian rural landscape is no Eden of premodern farmers ready to quit the land for the seductions of the city. Those farmers are already living in an invisible city, with its modern modes of production and class-social structure. The grounding experience of modernity I propose to look for in modern Canadian fiction is, therefore, not that of the dichotomy between or movement from the country to the town or city – the dichotomy of rural versus urban – but the deconstruction of that dichotomy or movement in what Smith calls the subtle “urbanisation” of the countryside itself. And this will clearly bring us closer to answering

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the question with which I began. For we should not be surprised if a modern Canadian rural narrative fails to offer a pastoral alternative to modernity, but rather ironically and uncannily repeats it – and in so doing, expresses a particularly Canadian literary modernism.

the invisible city: buckler This modernism and its ground is nowhere more self-consciously present than in Ernest Buckler’s 1952 novel, The Mountain and the Valley, which is a bildungsroman of the development of a failed artist (writer) in the Annapolis Valley farming region of Nova Scotia. The publication date is important, for the rural regions of the Maritimes (like those of Quebec) modernized much later than those of Ontario or the Prairie provinces. The latter shifted from a colonialbased social-economy of subsistence to a postcolonial one of exchange in the early decades of this century – yielding the modern anti-pastorals of writers like Grove and Ostenso in the West, and Duncan and Knister in Ontario. Buckler’s novel – the periodization of whose narrative mirrors his own life experience as a youth after the First World War, and as an adult after the Second – fits into a later (Maritime) moment in an asymmetrical Canadian modernity, into its later “urbanisation of the countryside.” Readers have always remarked on Buckler’s nostalgia for a premodern as opposed to modern country life. Buckler’s fictional descriptions of David’s pre- and post-war Annapolis Valley society conform well to the economic history of the region. Up to Second World War the rural Maritimes lagged behind Ontario and the West in modern economic development, not only in industry but in agriculture. For example, a large proportion of the farms were “only marginally integrated into the [commercial] market,” with “a considerable proportion of farm produce … still then consumed on the farm.”18 Produce sold off the farm went primarily to export markets (the vestiges of colonial mercantilism) rather than to the development of a local market. Their economic production was based largely on production for exports and subsistence, rather than commodity exchange. Underlining this fact was the need of Maritime farmers to periodically sell off their land for timber. In 1941 forestry products accounted for “over 10% of all farm revenues in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.”19 Such historical factors are built into Buckler’s imaginary world. The dependence on timber sales and home-consumed

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produce in a subsistence-based economy becomes a symbolic counter against new forms of social and individual existence brought about by an exchange-based economy. The former is the world Buckler tirelessly nostalgizes as humane and co-dependent, if somewhat ignorant: “As always when [David’s parents] worked together, their thoughts fed quietly in small circles, keeping the perimeter of each other’s presence always in sight. They felt that bondage so much freer than freedom that neither wandered far enough to tauten the cord. They were on the cliff, but the cord between them was like the cord between climbers, so that neither thought of falling” (91). This co-dependence is expressed explicitly in opposition to social economies of exchange, as in the gift of cured pork that David’s parents give to his sister, juxtaposed with that of the engagement ring bought for her by her urbanized boyfriend – one is a communal labour of love, the other an individual lover’s mere purchase (206–11). Similarly, although the tea canister with the family’s cash always seems nearly empty, the family never feels want because they produce primarily their own means of subsistence, and can barter labour or surplus produce with neighbours without engaging in commercial exchange: The money for butter and eggs was taken up in trade. The pig and most of the vegetables went into the cellar. If Joseph [the father] worked for a neighbour he was paid back in work. Yet, somehow, they were never caught helpless by any need that barter couldn’t arrange for. They didn’t sell off land to make ends meet, as some did. One piece of timber, yes (and that night the lid of the canister would scarcely close, and all the neighbours came in to see the hundred-dollar bill); but all that money had gone into the new house … They made over and they made do. But they never watched a cent … The bills were never folded in the canister; nor the denominations separate. There didn’t seem to be any system of balance whatsoever. (125)

Exchange value and its whole system of accounting, of acknowledging abstract exchange value, is supposed to be happily avoided in this pre-modern, more co-dependent way of rural life. A precisely contrary way of life is drawn in the portrait of Old Man Wright, the eccentric recluse in Buckler’s memoir Ox Bells and Fireflies, who is shown to have lost his fiancée to another man and withdrawn from his community because he is obsessed with his money and his

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accountbook.20 Curiously, the story Buckler tells of Old Man Wright centres on the need for this “odd one” to interact with others when he goes to the store to buy writing books, “scribblers,” in which he keeps his accounts. His obsession with paper and pencil offers an uncanny reflection of the writer, rather than the accountant. This may explain why, in The Mountain and the Valley, the avatar of Old Man Wright is Old Herb Hennessey, who appears to David as a portent of David’s own alienation and death (65–6). The pre-modern world of subsistence, before the rule of exchange value, is the basis of Buckler’s pastoral vision of social harmony and cyclical unchangingness. This is expressed in what are supposed to be the unconscious contents of the father’s mind, as he and David follow an ox around his field, pulling rocks: “The night we moved into the new house all the neighbours came and it was like between brothers with all of us. We are all together here. I stroll across the field any time of the day I like. I go see how Willis is getting along with his wagon shed; but the time I lose doesn’t make a gap in my work. This is my land. It is there when I come home from town. In town their faces go stiff, hurrying after their eyes. They plant a shrub in their back yard, trying to make a space of it. They lift up things in the stores and ask the price … [But on my land, that] rock there is one my father rolled out, and my son’s sons will look at these rocks I am rolling out today. Someone of my own name will always live in my house” (157). But this pastoral is ironic because our protagonist, David, is simultaneously thinking about how much he hates the unreflective, conservative life of the farm, expressed for him by the slow, stupid steps of the oxen which he must follow, “no revolt in [their feet] against the gall of the yoke straps,” “their eyes [seeing] only the ground” (158). As opposed to this static monotony, David at this early point in the narrative idealizes the city, in which “there’d be movement, and something to feed your mind all the time,” some use for “learning” and “thought” besides “liftin’ and luggin› (162–3). However, once this modern “movement” does come to his rural space, David no longer idealizes it: His neighbours had changed, as the village had changed. The road was paved now. There were cars and radios. A bus line passed the door. There was a railway line along the river … And the people lost their wholeness, the valid stamp of the indigenous. Their clothes were so accentuate a copy of the clothes outside they proclaimed

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themselves as copy, except to the wearers. In their speech (freckled with current phrases of jocularity copied from the radio), and finally in themselves, they became dilute. They were not transmuted from the imperfect thing into the real, but veined with the shaly amalgam of replica. (229)

Modern change and movement means change and movement defined by the pathways of commodity exchange, by the circulation of pre-fab ideas and things, and “finally” individual identities themselves (as Baudrillardian simulacra), from the “outside.” It means the equalization of the rural space with the urban, both material and psychological, a universalization of modern life across the unevenly developed spaces of city and country. And as Buckler suggests, the penetration by the “outside” of absolute spaces makes all spaces relative, a copy of something always somewhere else.21 But the narrative irony is that although David loathes the copy, he himself, a modernist existential hero, can never locate an original, for nothing is essential or natural to him. He can never simply be; he must always choose to be; so that a self-conscious part of him must always remain estranged as an outsider to the role he chooses to play, the face he chooses to wear. In this he is akin to the city people who stop him on the road in their car: He knew they were city people the way they spoke to each other …. He knew how they did it, because he could do it exactly the same way …. The musical languor of her voice made her questions all sound like statements. She kept speaking for the man, as his mother would never have done for his father; though it was plain that for the man, she was only an annexation. These were city people. They didn’t seem to permeate each other all the time, like his mother and father did. They were merely sitting there side by side. (167–8)

The urbanized world is one in which the co-dependence and coexistence of the subsistence-based social-economy has fractured into isolate, independent selves who can only annex, rather than permeate each other. Their speech involves not reciprocity – the tonality of questioning which implies the incomplete, the need for the other – but only token exchange, in the tonality of statement. David identifies with this independence at the same time that he is saddened by it. For unlike the more equal, co-operative relationship between his father and mother, David’s own relationship to his

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ostensible fiancée, Effie, is exploitative and, as Margery Fee has noted, is based upon the exchangeability of Effie in his imagination with other women.22 The violence of this substitutional logic is figured in terms of a language, in which the woman has become a sign, but this in turn may be related less to the deconstructive qualities of a language than to the more particular experience of modernization of a rural social and economic life (for which Buckler uses the synecdoche of a language), whereby the woman partner has become a subordinate form of (exchangeable) labour.23 In this respect, David may be viewed as a premature version of the manipulative, commerce-driven patriarchs we find in the fiction of Ostenso or Grove, except that he cannot tolerate himself as such. Yet David differs from Buckler’s urbanized people, like those in the car, because he is aware of his inauthenticity, of the need for him to have chosen his identity and his space. This defines his modernism. The narrative moves forward on the question of what identity and space David will choose, among so many imaginary identities offered him through his books and learning; with the subtle narrative closure that in the end, he chooses to go “back to the land” without ever having left it. Throughout the narrative, Buckler insists on David’s modernist perception of time specifically as the narrative time of development, as novelistic self-development, as opposed to the static or cyclical, lyric time of the pre-modern countryside.24 I should emphasize that the latter, pastoral time is not seen by Buckler as an essential feature of the countryside, but as a pre-modern order projected upon it. The same countryside and nature we see as a unifying, static plenitude from the father’s or mother’s point-of-view, we often see as an alien, existential emptiness from the younger generation’s points-of-view or that of the impersonal narration. In the latter, the pastoral vision is projected “as if,” in a rhetoric of seeming. This is most evident in David’s last journey up the mountain: He thought of the fields. Unseen, they no longer seemed bare. He thought of the people in the valley. Now they were out of sight, his own face moved kindredly among them. They were pliant in his mind’s eye to whatever aspect he cast them in … He could think of anything now. Everything seemed to be an aspect of something else. There seemed to be a thread of similarity running through the whole world. A shape could be like a sound; a feeling like a shape; a smell the shadow of a touch … His senses seemed to run together.

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He looked at the high blue sky and he heard again the first sound of his father’s sleighbells coming home from town … (287)

The pastoral life is a fictional projection which threads together the seemingly fuller fields and the seemingly more kindred people; its synaesthetic unity allows the blue sky to conjure a memory of the homecoming father of the family land. But compare this to the exactly contrary urban disunity and alienation (recalling the city people who fail to become part of each other) which can be projected in seeming upon the country landscape: “The sky was cold and lonely and had no breath in its blue lips, and the broken fingers of the trees couldn’t reach up to touch it. The sun crept cold into the cores of the trees. The whole afternoon seemed full of all the things that lived without feeling or breath: the mateless sun and the memoryless trees and the tired road and the bruised sky and the chill breeze that was the breath of all the dead things in the world, moving bare as a ghost among the withered leaves” (269). This morbid vision of the urbanized Anna near the end of the novel is echoed at the beginning in our first image of David. He is looking out the window of his farm house: He stood absolutely still. He was not quiet with thought or interest. It was simply that any impulse to movement receded before the compulsion of the emptiness: to suspend the moment and prolong it, exactly as it was, in a kind of spell … “What are you looking at, child?” [his grandmother] asked again. “Nothing,” he said. (14–15)

It is this projection of radical nothingness, as opposed to self-evident fullness, which separates David’s consciousness from others, which alienates him as a modernist individual.25 An image of this separation and emptiness is also given in the book that David receives one blizzardy Christmas – Robinson Crusoe – which Buckler immediately translates into David’s own, island-like, subjective experience: as he read Crusoe, “it was as if the cable of time had been broken and [he and the others] were all magically marooned until its strands were spliced together again” (74). The figure of Robinson Crusoe signifies an experience of social separation and the breaking of normalized or naturalized time, of being marooned from others and from what one normally is or does. But

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the exotic space is significant as well – in that its narrative depicts the sort of cultural mastery that David later attributes to Forster, the ability of the writer to transcend his or her location, or absolute space, and to write in the universalizing language – the standard English and form of print, those of the English novel which David has imported from outside – of a relative world space. Robinson Crusoe, like the other imperialist explorer-adventure tales in which the young hero finds fantasy role models (for example, the life of a sailor, 141–2), narrates a global experience.26 Such an experience is realized by David’s alter ego and best friend (who has moved to the city) – but in an ironic, negative way – when he goes off to the (supposedly exotic, foreign adventure of the) war, in which he dies. The war is another modern, equalizing experience of relative over absolute spaces, and David’s friend, the novel’s type of the fully urbanized individual, is described as “perfect for a war.” For him, the war’s danger permeates “everyone and everything all the time,” making “the strange faces as absorbing as the familiar”; he is an exact copy, David’s sister realizes, of “the heroes in the silly magazine stories that no one [!] really believed in” (237–8). David himself fantasizes his participation in the war through the writing of a soldier’s story in first person – a story he later burns because he feels it is a bad copy of his friend’s and others’ real experience. David struggles with the same fatal attraction to the “life of common type” as does Duncan’s “daughter of today,” though his sense of its Crusoe-like deprivals is much more complete. For David, writing is the form of movement and mastery, of the translation and equalization of a relative world space, that war is for his friend. Writing, the medium of David’s own modernization through books and learning, becomes an expression of an imperialist fantasy, in which he wishes to “capture and conquer” (195) his world: “All the faces there were everywhere else in the world, at every time, waited for him to give the thought to exactly how each of them was. (What about the Englishman or the Frenchman or the Micmac who might have stood on this very spot exactly how long ago?)” (295).27 And as David imagines a swarm of voices, from everywhere in the world, speaking all at once, he concludes: “I know how it is with everything. I will put it down and they will see that I know” (298). “They,” presumably, are a universal audience, and anywhere but at home – unable to barter for his word, only to buy. His fantasy of social belonging, a fully modern

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one which disintegrates the absolute spaces of local societies into individualistic identities able to translate themselves into those of relative spaces, depends upon the mediation of print and its now world-empires-based economy.28 While writing a story of travel and separation in the war, David not only fantasizes the social form of his modern relativization in the equalizing medium of print, but more fundamentally reflects his own experience of alienation in his own, rural Countryside. The “invisible city” at home takes shape in David’s imagination, at the very height of his immersion in his writing about the distant battlefield, so that the two spaces overlap, become equalized. He morbidly contemplates: “How you could love the land’s face and the day’s face, but how they never loved you back; the sun would come out brighter than usual the day your father died, and the wind would cut, as blind and relentless as ever, the night your brother was lost in the woods … How, though you cut open his flesh you still couldn’t penetrate the skin of separateness each man walked around in … How this place had aged, with change … How the knitted warmth between its people had ravelled, until each was almost as alone in his own distraction now as the city people were” (261, Buckler’s ellipses). In his modernist experience of his rural home, David has become a metaphysical Robinson Crusoe, an individual marooned in the printed word as the existential currency of a relative rather than absolute space. (He does not value writing unless it can achieve the quality of publication; of what little he composes, he preserves nothing.) His English language is not that of his rural home, nor that of any other absolute space, but one belonging to a standardized and modern system of publication and dissemination. His language, which is his modernity and in which he roots himself, is not his own. This is why, when “at the thought of telling these things exactly [and] all the voices came close about him … he went out into them until there was no inside left. He saw at last how you could become the thing you told” (298). He loses himself and gains the world. No longer belonging to the individual type, the social existence, or the particular language of his parents’ colonial-based, communal-subsistence mode of life, but unable to accept as authentic those of the urban-based, individualexchange-value mode of life, David finds himself in postcolonial limbo.29 And this is the point of Buckler’s novel: the modern freedom of self-development has led his hero to see the intolerability of the socio-economic development in which this very self-development is

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grounded. It arises from his peculiar historical identity as an “urbanized” countryperson, one who must always look Janus-faced in two mirrors: that of the differentiated underdevelopment and that the equalizing development of his Canadian, postcolonial modernizing landscape and social space. David is not an eccentric; he is an exemplar of Canadian historical change, the focalization of a whole new economic class and its regional experience. In 1937 Buckler published a fragment of a novel-in-process which appears to be a psychological portrait of David (having a similar existentialist perception and the same name). The style is dense and self-reflexive, and the imagery gives no hint of a setting – suggesting perhaps Buckler’s initial grappling with modern consciousness as a psychological entity in itself. This impression seems reversed by Buckler’s claim, two years later, to be thinking of writing a “farm” novel. Six years later still, in 1946, Buckler expressed his desire to write a novel about the war, suggesting to a publisher that he already had three unpublished short stories about the war which had received editorial praise. Alan Young has recognized in the latter stories “the barely formed ‘foetus’ of The Mountain and the Valley,” in which Buckler himself said the main theme of the future novel was embodied, and all of which were reshaped to be included in it.30 I hope to have provided here the outline of a Canadian historical situation which can explain how a modernist psychological portrait could grow into a farm novel, which could grow into a war novel, which could grow into a novel about the curious and contradictory copenetration of all of these aspects in a modern Canadian existence. It should also explain why David’s unifying project as a writer – in which, in this novel it is profoundly revealed, the pastoral and the imperial impulses are as inextricable in the text as they are in history – should be viewed with full irony, as what Buckler himself has called his hero’s “final transport of self-deception” (qtd. in Young 203). David’s modernist self-consciousness, as well as the print-capitalist medium in which it dreams of expressing itself (and in Buckler’s case it does), is condemned to know itself the producer only of fictions of seeming, of relative rather than absolute truths, voices, and identities. David’s only truth can be in Buckler’s creation of him as a copy of himself, another seeming original. It is the self-conscious copy we are left to read, the novel so self-conscious of its modernist contradiction with itself that, in narrating the failure of a novel, it nearly refuses to become a novel itself. His postcolonial verbal commodity

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undermines itself: it expresses a self-defeated nostalgia for the absolute value, not of life in the marginal country, finally, but of the life of the language he finds he has traded for it: “One must write to sell to live, even if it’s only so that one may live to write” (qtd 199).

the modern frontier In turning from the rural countryside to the wilderness frontier, we find ourselves in the favourite landscape of the antimodernist writer, the primitive and archaic barrens at the margins of society. In American culture, this setting has its archetype in the generic Western, which though it may have regionalist roots, is primarily significant for its abstraction into contemporary myth. While Canadians have produced and consumed Westerns, the generic abstraction has never been able to assert itself as what Kroetsch called a “shared” story or “metanarrative” in Canadian culture, even in the Prairies. This may be because Canadian frontiers, whether East, North, or West, developed differently in the nineteenth century, both from each other and from their American counterpart.31 Modern writing about frontiers in Canada – by Western writers like O’Hagan, Grove, Stead, Ostenso, and Nellie McClung, or by Eastern writers such as Thomas Raddall, Frank Parker Day, and Susan Jones – tends toward regionally specific historical, social, and geographical detail which is not reducible to the Western myth, even while it does so in order to negotiate similarly antimodernist desires. Where antimodernism fails to find a mythic form, it continues to grind its signs and figures between the realism of a historically colonial or dependent region and the romance of an independent way of life. It becomes a disfigured regionalism of the tendentially modernist, antirealist kind I have wished to show, with respect to pastoral myth, in The Mountain and the Valley. So it is that antimodernism is available, perhaps earlier in Canadian than in American regionalism, as an experimental resource. This is not surprising, perhaps, where antimodernism and the modernity it sees as its enemy are coeval with the postcolonial self-fashioning and self-contesting of the new Canadian nation – a nation whose origins in military conquest are repressed rather than nostalgized, and whose memory stares out at its frontiers, and beyond, looking for some extra detail, looking for some special turn of events, looking for something else. In the novel to be examined shortly, not only antimodernist values but the Western genre itself are disfigured in such a

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way as will suggest that this something else belongs not to an originary aggressivity of the frontier but to a more sentimental conquest, one that arises out of a particular confluence of ideas and images in modern Maritime experience. In her West of Everything,32 Jane Tompkins argues that the generic Western in American popular culture arises at the turn of the twentieth century primarily as the reaction of a disempowered male mass culture to the growth of a commercially and socially powerful women’s culture throughout the previous century. To the latter’s social-activist and moralistic, sentimental fiction genre, the Western comes as a resentful, often corrosively nihilistic answer.33 It expresses the frustration in an individual experience of disempowerment for men created by the capitalist modernization of its own patriarchy. This has been illuminated by the cultural historians Jackson Lears and Peter Filene, who have identified as a crisis in masculinity in America the difficulty modern men increasingly had in finding an objective correlative in their own experience for definitions and ideals of “manliness” at the turn of the modern century. The movement towards female equality, says Filene, “posed a threat because men had depended upon women not only to tend the home, but to mask the ambivalences inside manliness … When this development joined with their growing difficulty in satisfying the patriarchal ideals of work and success in the public sphere, middle-class men asked with even more confusion: ‘How was a man to be manly in the twentieth century?›34 The First World War appeared to provide an answer in its propaganda rhetoric, but one that quickly turned hollow in the pseudo-manliness of a chaotic, alienating, mechanical war “without heroism or heroes,” fought only for “grand illusions” (138). The persistent answer lay no longer in a social reality but in an abstract ideal, in modes of nostalgia and backlash which preserved “manly” mastery by defining it as a mere ideal, waning under the real modern social powers of women and women’s culture. Ironically, then, while one might have expected men to identify themselves with modernity, they in fact saw themselves disappearing into it – and blamed this loss of self upon a “feminization” of society that was part and parcel of modernity. The American historian Jackson Lears, in his study of this modernist crisis in masculinity, attributes its masculinist reaction to the feminization of culture to a conservative critique of modernity as “over-civilization.”35 Lears calls this reaction “antimodernist” because of its nostalgic idealization of worlds characterized by a

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masculine, “martial ideal” of physical action and honour, contrary to the supposedly feminine vanities of commercial profits and pleasures. The concept can be confusing when translated from historical to literary discourse, in which literary modernism is itself usually understood to be an ambivalent response to historical and cultural modernism, and can thus embody “antimodernist” values. Indeed, the antimodernist “feminization” of modern culture in canonical modernism has been the focus of those influential feminist reinterpretations of European modernism cited in the previous chapter – by Andreas Huyssen, for whom Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary is a paradoxical archetype of the femininization of modern (bourgeois and tendentially mass) culture as well as of an appropriative male modernist style, and of Anglo-American modernism by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, for whom Rider Haggard’s She identifies a similar female archetype in a femme fatale figure common to modernists from Joseph Conrad to W.B. Yeats. The distance between literary modernism and antimodernism is not that of the contrast implicit in the prefix, then, but that of the position they take as literature with respect to the modernity they view with discontent: the latter remaining powerfully just within its forms and functions, the other venturing beyond. But the line is a razor’s edge, as we shall see, because literary modernism is a constitutive tendency within a literary aesthetic which is suspicious, as antimodernism is, of established beliefs and conventions that hold society together, and so, suspicious even of words themselves. By also insisting on a renewed simplicity and transparency in signification, purified of the abstractions of metaphysical sentiment and authorized by the violent and fragile life of the thing itself, antimodernism walks a thin line between the conventions of realism and a challenge to conventional form. As such it provides a useful additional term for the understanding of fiction which falls on neither side of the canonical divide between the anticonventional aesthetics of modernism and conventional realism (especially in modern Canadian literature, which tends typically to a dysfunctional form of romance). Antimodernism is that element of literary modernism that would, with a turn of the screw, recontain modern discontent, formal and thematic, in the accessibility of generic and popular forms. Both Filene and Lears recognize in the American Western genre a powerful symptom of a self-destroying and self-destructing masculinist modernity. And Tompkins suggests how, against a perceived

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feminization of culture produced by the massive movement of women out of the home into public life and their domination of a modern, Christian popular culture, modern men invent a newly masculine culture epitomized in the Western. This reactionary culture is indifferent to homes or churches, to contemporary Christian values, and to the inspiration of the latter by a pastoral experience of nature; and it is hostile to women’s sociality, to womanly words, and to the popular culture and ideals of mass civilization. Some of the definitive motifs of the American Western can also be found translated to the Canadian East, where there have been corresponding historical interactions of modernity and antimodernism – particularly the interaction gendered into “the war of the words” (to use Gilbert and Gubar’s phrase) initiated by a similarly male antimodernist reaction to a supposedly feminized modernity. The way that power over words is represented differently for men and women is evident, for example, in the contrast between two novels central to Maritime literary history. In Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, the schoolchildren are given a composition assignment which requires them, as Anne’s friend puts it, “to write a story out of our own heads!” This friend is immediately discouraged: “It’s easy for you because you have an imagination,” she tells the oddball, literary Anne, “but what would you do if you had been born without one?” (208). Up to this point, the same exchange could just as easily have come out of Buckler’s The Mountain and the Valley, with Anne’s role replaced by the similarly oddball and literary David. What could never have come out of Buckler’s narrative is the trusting confession of her friend, “I wish my imagination was as good as yours,” and Anne’s response to it: “It would be if you’d only cultivate it … I’ve just thought of a plan, Diana. Let you and I have a story club all our own and write stories for practice” (210). And indeed, the story club grows to include six girls – “no boys were allowed in it” – who write write a story every week, read it to each other, and discuss it. The contrast between David and Anne, though both set apart from others by their transcending imaginations, reflects the larger, culturalhistorical contrast between men’s and women’s words in modern Eastern Canada. In her seminal study, Gwendolyn Davies has shown how, just as in the United States, the increasing presence of women’s literature in Canadian Maritime popular culture developed alongside a strong women’s culture of (mainly Christian-based) social activism.36 From

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1880 to 1920, writing was not only a mirror of women’s collective entry into the public sphere, it was a mechanism of collectivization itself which mirrored the social ideals of the activists. So it is that for Anne, words are a mechanism for disalienation in her world, and her “story club,” while literally true to the women’s “study clubs” which gradually became vehicles for social action, also more generally allegorizes the social culture of women’s writing, as opposed to David Canaan’s individualism (for David, social community is silent, or expresses itself in a wordless music). By the early twentieth-century, there is good reason to believe that men in Eastern Canada might feel threatened by a kind of abstract “story club” permeating public culture, a new and collective power in women’s words. Recent scholarship and republication has illuminated the centrality of woman writers – primarily of the social-problem genre, such as J.G. Sime and Lily Dougall – in Canadian fiction at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.37 Certainly by the twenties and thirties, as Carole Gerson has shown, a nation-wide “story club” was evident in women’s literary publication, award recognition, and eventually majority membership in the Canadian Authors’ Association – a “story club” which a male cultural hierarchy wished to devalue and to suppress from a canon that would transcend sentimental, popular culture. The Maritimes, while themselves contributing fewer woman writers than other national regions, were no exception to this transformation in the gender of cultural production and consumption, along with its tensions.38 Men appear to have responded to this alternative, women’s writing culture in Canada much as they did in the States, with a masculinist antimodernism that gendered an “over-civilized” and sentimental modernity as feminine, and erected at its fictional, primitive frontier the lonely figure of an authentic man. In the Maritimes alone, this can be seen in canonical novels as diverse as James De Mille’s A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888), Frank Parker Day’s Rockbound (1928), Raddall’s Roger Sudden (1945), Buckler’s The Mountain and the Valley (1952), and Hugh MacLennan’s Barometer Rising (1941). And Tompkins’s model, which grounds the Western in an American cultural history following the Civil War, may be translated East in modern Canadian fiction to illuminate the similar imaginary frontier that belongs to a slightly later experience of social modernization for the Canadian Maritimes in the years following the First World War. This Eastern frontier is exemplified in Thomas Raddall’s 1950 novel

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about 1920s Maritime life, The Nymph and the Lamp, which romanticizes a primitive edge of the continent just as symbolically distant from the mythic, civilized “East” as is the mythic “West.”39 Here, the frontier is the sea, and its primitivist heroes those who work the sea. While “big sky country” thus shifts locations – from the hostile, arid desert to the cruel, expansive ocean – the heroic types and conflicts of this sea adventure genre remain much the same.40 Strong, silent, cynical, individualistic men devote themselves to an absurd cult of action and work, root themselves in landscapes of isolation, suffering, and death, exert a violent mastery over themselves and their natural environment, love and hate other men more profoundly than other women, and reject the illusory social and aesthetic values of an emasculated, modern mass civilization.41 But on Raddall’s frontier – even more so than for the selfproblematizing world of Joseph Conrad, whom he admired – none of this quite works out.

the transcendence of empire: raddall Thomas Raddall, born in England in 1903 and raised in Nova Scotia, was not only a successful popular historical novelist but a regional historian and an influential activist in the preservation of local cultural history.42 The historian Ian McKay has argued that Raddall’s series of popular historical novels set in different periods of Nova Scotia’s colonial and postcolonial development (of which The Nymph and the Lamp is the best known), and his activities in cultural preservation, belong to two dimensions of an antimodernist project in the region to construct the discourse of an authentic “Folk” identity prior and alternative to modern civilization. This is not a pastoral Folk belonging to a peaceful countryside, but a more aggressive Folk belonging to a rugged frontier of wilderness and open sea, who represent the “individualism” and “virile dynamism” of a masculine drive at the heart of the business and military activities of empire.43 Popular imperialism in the first half of the century shares with the ideology of the Western this antimodernist vision of the twentieth century as a modernity gone wrong, a capitalist culture of the frontier that is degraded by a mass culture of the civilized world, that follows on its heels and feeds on its labours. Popular imperialism of the postcolonial period – abstract from simple British patriotism, and with the ethnic and historiographic transcodability that unites narrative fiction as otherwise diverse as Ralph Connor’s

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British-centred The Man from Glengarry (1901), Laura Goodman Salverson’s Scandinavian-centred The Viking Heart (1923),44 and Pauline Johnson’s Native-centred collection of her stories, The Shagganappi (1913)45 – is as definitive a mythological discourse of the frontier in modern Canadian culture as is the Western in modern American culture. Where the two antimodernist discourses intersect, as in The Nymph and the Lamp, a closer analysis will illuminate the similarities and differences between them. The first pages of The Nymph and the Lamp evoke the setting where most of the action will take place, the tiny and desertified “sandy speck” of Marina Island, “in the North Atlantic eighty miles from the nearest land.” Marina is a “lonely outpost” far from life and civilization, dreaded as “a desolate place” by men of the land, and by men of the sea as the “scene of many wrecks,” for it is a legendary ocean graveyard. The motifs of the place – death, desertification, and marginality from social order – suggest that, in the North Atlantic of all places, something like an American Western might play itself out. Its legendary hero is Matthew Carney, who appears, like John Wayne rising out of the desert in the opening sequence of Stagecoach, as an extension of the starkly reductive, desertified landscape: “men spoke of [him] as ’Carney – you know, Carney of Marina,’ as if he were a part of the place like one of the wild ponies on the dunes” (11). Unlike the restless, pleasure-seeking young men and women of his modern world to whom he is contrasted, Carney is taciturn and ascetic, a loner whose minimal society is with other loners brought together only transiently by “a kind of cult” of their work. The latter is the spiritually rather than economically defined work of radio operators before the advent of commercial or public radio, when the highly specialized technology and its fragile, global network demanded a monastic ascesis and homosociality. Always working in a room or ship cabin, these “ops” work alone, moving from post to post around the world, drifters devoted to their specialized work and practical knowledge. They are “a band of men, most of them young, set apart from the rest of mankind by a curious knowledge” alien to, and tight-lipped before, the chatter of modern, commercial society (17). In this work and its curiously abstract, global frontier, a masculinized discontent expressing faith only in its existential vitality – as opposed to an ostensibly feminized civilization with faith in moral knowledge – comes to define the protagonists and setting of The Nymph and the Lamp just as they define the marginal, stripped-

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down heroes and deserts of the generic West. There are differences, of course, which upon closer examination suggest a significant difference between otherwise homologous Canadian and American antimodernist cultures. The novel involves three main charactes: Matthew Carney, Isabel Jardine, and Gregory Skane. Carney and Skane are the two rugged radio-operators who vie for Isabel’s love. These men have many similarities. They are both married to their work, known both for the high speed at which they can bang out the dits and dashes of the wireless key, and for their honourable reluctance to provoke the showdowns between operators which prove it (167–9). They are both taciturn and inward, figured as ascetics withdrawn in body and word from normal social life (21, 25–6, 121, 143). These similarities bind them to the nature and technology of the Marina setting itself. Its nature is figured as a kind of petrification of the desolate infinitude of the sea into waves of desolate sand (72, 107), in which humans wander on the edge of madness or death (11–12, 110, 191–2). Like the un-Romantic nature of the Western, this nature is adversarial rather than sympathetic (153), and explicitly contrasts the sentimental domesticity (74, 85) and materialism (32, 56) of modern North American society. This modern society is periodized as post-World-War-One, and as the historian Ian McKay has noticed – commenting on Raddall’s work in his study of the antimodernist fabulation of Folk culture in modern Nova Scotia – it is insistently portrayed in the “feminized” and “overcivilized” terms of antimodernist reaction described by Lears and Filene.46 For example, the novel opens with Carney’s first trip ashore in Halifax since before the war, and records the way everything in the “world” had changed (14). Though Raddall acknowledges the change in pace and technology of public life, his feminizing imagery is obsessive. He describes women’s new clothing and cosmetics in detail, only noting with disapproval men’s emasculating lack of beards. He figures the activity and anxiety of the public space as a crowd of women shoppers, saying nothing of men (15–16). Carney’s own head office, which used to be an unadorned building full of men in easy camaraderie, is discovered to have been divided up into rooms overseen by secretaries who mediate the men’s attention and contact (17). His new, postwar boss is a type of the feminized and modernized man: “His gleaming black hair was neatly brushed and there was a carnation in his buttonhole. There was a touch of the sea

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about him, faint and remote, as if it has not lasted long and as if a good deal of office air had intervened. He had the look of a man who for years had enjoyed good meals, steam heat, a soft bed, and the embraces of a satisfactory wife” (18). He is soft, dandified, domesticated, and superficial. At the same time he represents a mechanistic and commercialized mass culture, with its destruction of a more human and masculine one, for he has eradicated men’s social interactions from the workplace in order to put the principle of efficiency foremost: “It had taken him some time to clear out the old easygoing atmosphere and put the office on what he called a proper business footing. The old days were gone. There were so many operators now, and so many more important things than personnel. ‘Find out what they want,’ he had told the girls, ‘and get them out as quickly as you can› (17). As his name suggests, the feminized and modernized Mr Hurd is a type, one of the crowd. The two other city characters drawn with any substance, Miss Benson and Mrs Paradee, are individualists who express the same superficiality of character, emotion, and communication with others (41–2, 46). Echoing for all these characters the transition between the prewar and postwar gender of modernity, the “improved modern” voice of postwar radio technology has changed the “hoarse bass” of Marina’s signal to a “shrill treble,” which, as Skane grumbles, “has made a eunuch of us” (14). In the extreme symbolic geography of this novel, the city becomes a synecdoche for the whole continent that lies behind it. The city is the gateway to a modernity figured as land itself, as an American or Americanizing element in which all is soluble and nothing remains itself: “the scrabble for cash that could not buy security, the frantic pleasures that could not give content, the pulpit-thumpings that could not summon virtue, the Temperance Acts that killed temperance, the syncopated noise that was not music, the imbecile daubs that were not art, the lavatory scrawls that were not literature, the flickering Californications that were not drama” (321). And so on, a mind-revolving homogenization of capitalism, decadence, popularcultural Americanization (Black and White), Group of Seven modernism, and the social gospel and temperance politics associated with women – a whole “dim bulk of land” that slips away, as Isabel takes her final view of it on her way to Marina, “like a shadow, an illusion after all” (321). Those who pass through or remain on the city’s continental side, like Skane and Hurd, are the villains of Raddall’s

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romance, while those who pass through to, and are able to remain on, its other side – the side lacking the terra firma even of the frontier, the side more real, not as a place, but as a nearly metaphysical, marine perspective – the side east of everything – become its heroes. Nature stands for a clean slate, as do the men who choose it, like Carney and Skane, because they consciously reject that modern society. They are both men who have lost youthful ideals, have seen through human illusions to a cynical or absurdist truth, have distanced themselves from women as well as the love and morality that women represent, and have embraced only their physical work in relative solitude (12, 22, 25, 28, 32, 49, 103, 113). They choose a world, as Tompkins says of the film cowboy, “without God, without ideas, without institutions, without what is commonly recognized as culture, a world of men and things, where male adults in the prime of life find ultimate meaning in doing their best together on the job” (37). The role of technology is a key to this value in the physical world and its nature. One might be surprised that Raddall’s antimodernist heroes would be figured as radio operators, as men bound to modern technology. But Raddall insistently dates this technology as prewar, and shows it to be so crude that no special knowledge is required for it, and no belief in progress embodied in it. It is operated by instinct, as an extension of the physical body. Carney cannot understand the technical books about radio (23), and says that “once you’ve got the feel of it, you’re simply part of the machine. The stuff comes in on the aerials and runs right down to your fingertips” (197). But the thematic significance of Marina’s radio is that it combines the technological primitivism of the Western, in which the only authentic value inheres in the work of a physical world and its mastery, with the ideology of communication of the Western, which Tompkins describes as “at heart antilanguage,” by which she means that “doing, not talking, is what it values”: “Westerns distrust language. Time and again they set up situations whose message is that words are weak and misleading, only actions count; words are immaterial, only actions are real.” And this opposition to language belongs to the larger paradigm of antimodernism in the Western, in which there are “two choices: either you can remain in a world of illusions, by which is understood religion, culture, and class distinctions, a world of fancy words and pretty actions, of ’manners for the parlor and the ball room, and … womanly tricks for courting’; or you can face life as it really is – blood, death, a cold wind blowing, and a gun in the hand” (48–50).

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Both Carney and Skane, like Western heroes, are men of few words (26, 121, 191). When called upon to justify their actions – actions violent or sympathetic, whether shooting ducks beyond what can be eaten, collecting human bones from the dunes, swimming in the dangerously cold sea, or playing Chopin études upon the piano – they can only say they were for “something to do” (122, 134, 145, 141; and repeated throughout). But they must communicate with each other, just as the Western must communicate to its audience: the antimodernist Western is paradoxical in positing a language that dislikes itself. Tompkins notes how Western heroes speak a kind of “minimalist” language which uses understatement, epigrams, and ellipses in a “desperate shorthand” that attempts “to communicate without using words” (51). The ultimate truth is always communicated in action, which, if it has a language, is the bang-bang of the guns. It is this minimalist language of the Western which Raddall is able to conflate with the primitive technology of the Marina radio operators, who speak in a language (and a purely functional one) of literally explosive dots and dashes. This is figured explicitly in Raddall’s portrait of the young operator “in the barren cell” of his radio room, who begins “to talk in dots and dashes” when Isabel sees the men at work for the first time: “Isabel, standing on the greasy floor, was startled by a terrific sound as sharp, as deafening as rifle shots, and the little engine room was lit by a rapid succession of bright violet flashes that sprang, like the sound, from the revolving brass spark-studs at the end of the generator shaft. Involuntarily she shrank against [Carney’s] stalwart form” (107–8). The violence and abbreviation of the language, and its distance from the degraded languages of modern civilization, make it a kind of transcending anti-language which seems to restore a lost brotherhood: “For a space you were part of another world, the real, actual living world of men and ships and ports … Whistling, growling, squealing, moaning, here were the voices of men transmuted through their finger tips, issuing in dots and dashes, speaking twenty languages in one clear universal code” (193). The dots and dashes have little meaning beyond safe navigation; they represent the mute mastery of a physical world by men. Its least meaningful function is phatic, merely a sign of desire for contact with the signal “CQ” (13), while its most meaningful is “SOS,” a sign whose value is also ultimately physical, rather than significative (194–6). The radio operators use their dots and dashes as the cowboys do their guns, to communicate authentically at the margins of a world whose language is trivialized.

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This antimodernist ideal of technology as a minimalist language which bonds men together without their interpellation (the term Louis Althusser has used to describe induction into the ideological discourse of a modern society) by any determining system of goals or beliefs, suggests a correlation with the art of fiction writing – insofar as this can suppose a technical autonomy from social function or didactic ends.47 Fiction writing is a techne, or, as Raddall often emphasized, a “craft” above all. In a postwar address to the Canadian Authors’ Association, he speaks of the importance of craft above subject matter or saleability, complaining that too many “young writers of today … are absorbed in talk of ’markets’ and so few of them are honestly concerned with the quality of the goods they have to sell.” The commercialization of the craft of fiction is to blame for writing that Raddall finds “lacking in honest workmanship,” and his somewhat paradoxical advice is to aim simply for “good workmanship” and to avoid advice from others – lest it contaminate the individual observation and experience of life upon which this craft depends.48 The ideal reflects the modernist desire for the return of art to the formal values of a premodern techne, often nostalgically attributed to artisanal guilds, expressed by such influential writers as G.K. Chesterton, F.R. Leavis, Ezra Pound, and W.B. Yeats. Raddall articulates this ideal more fully in his essay “The Literary Art” several years later, in which he defends realism from moralism and censorship by defining it in terms of craft rather than content.49 Like guns in the Western or radio telegraphy in Raddall’s own antimodernist imagination, such writing is a kind of existential technology, for it is a craft that has no fixed method or theory, no idea of “Art in the abstract,” only the fidelity to inclusive reflection exemplified by Stendhal and Joseph Conrad (140). It is a realist ideal that distrust, just as antimodernist technology and language generally distrust, its own engagement in transparent value and meaning, even as it capitalizes upon it. Perhaps this technical aesthetic, like the gun in the technology of the Western, offers the image of a modern form of power fantastically free of the social determinations of modernity itself – that is, a way of imaginatively wresting modern power away from the changing beliefs and goals of its (feminized) social history and reinscribing it in the naked physicality of a (masculinized) self. The value of this realist ideal to Raddall is evident when we turn from the imagery of The Nymph and the Lamp to its narrative structure and style, which disfigure its own generic transparency in two fundamental

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ways: (1) the narrative introduces as the ostensible protagonist and perspective of narrative focalization a character who later recedes into the background, giving way to a protagonist who was initially introduced, from that perspective, as a mere type; and (2) it encodes a wealth of realist detail with values that initially signify alternatives – good vs. bad, tradition vs. progress, nature vs. city, masculine vs. feminine – but which in the end merge together, rendering the closure ambiguous and its narrative realism ultimately illegible. The novel is able to do so because it violates the antimodernism of the formulaic Western in ways specific, I will suggest, not to the geography of the Eastern setting, but to the particularity of its Canadian historical experience. Of the instability of the plot, we get an ironic prefiguration at the beginning of the novel when Carney and Isabel first meet in the city, and end up discussing movie Westerns. Carney doesn’t like Westerns because they seem to him like “Marina in a nightmare” – the nightmare being the hero-heroinevillain plot that is ironically to become his own. “You’d be surprised,” he tells Isabel: “When you step off the beach at Marina on a summer’s day you might be in the heart of Arizona, or wherever they film those things. The biggest dunes are by the shore and they shut off the view of the sea in a good many places … And there you are, riding a half-wild pony amongst the dunes, with nothing in sight but grass and sand, just like those movie chaps. We even use Western saddles and stirrups, brought all the way from the prairie. You can stick on the ponies better in the kind of going you find out there. In fact, all we lack is the fancy clothes and the pistols – and a villain after the girl, of course” (50–1). But Marina turns out to lack neither the guns nor the villain. It rather confirms Isabel’s ironic observation in reply, that in real life, “the man who looks like a hero usually turns out to be the villain” – for this is exactly what happens. The plot is easily summarized. Carney and Isabel meet in the city, fall in love, and return to live at Carney’s radio station on Marina. Unexpectedly, Carney gradually and silently estranges himself from Isabel. Meanwhile Isabel falls in love with Carney’s friend and colleague, Skane. Her affair with Skane progresses until she and Skane are one day confronted in their dalliance in the dunes by a rifle-toting, jealous girl who ends up shooting Isabel. Surviving, Isabel leaves Marina to recuperate in the city; but instead of returning to Marina, she goes back to her hometown in Nova Scotian farm country, where she discovers a businessified and modernized country life to which she brings her city experience, and in which she prospers. At the end of the novel,

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Skane searches her out and proposes to her, offering to take her to Montreal where he has found work in the new commercial radio industry. At this meeting, Isabel realizes both that Skane has now embraced the modern civilization which he had once rejected – if only for Nietzschean reasons consistent with his skeptical individualism – and that he has betrayed his bond to Carney, for it turns out that Carney has not been losing his love for Isabel, but has been trying to protect her from the disappointment that he has steadily been going blind. Isabel spurns Skane and returns to Carney on Marina, where the lovers happily reunite. From this summary three points should be noted. First, the whole narrative episode in the countryside serves to undermine any kind of pastoral ideal of the return to a simpler community or a more sympathetic natural order. The critique of modernity and the city is extended to the country which, again since after the war, is only a kind of invisible city in its social problems and changes, and is shown to be dangerously dependent upon a barely understood, capitalist world economy (256–7, 263, 269–70).50 This narrative development serves to eradicate any hint of simple nature-romanticism that might have attached to the Marina setting, and rather to strengthen the sense of Marina’s authenticity as liminal to geography and cultivation, truly east of everything. Second, Skane, at first offered as a double of Carney (21, 121), turns out to be his antagonist.51 He becomes the villain in this antimodernist romance when he attempts to seduce Isabel by becoming citified – abandoning Carney as friend and colleague to bond instead, on a pure business footing, with Mr. Hurd. In leaving Marina for the depths of the continent – that is, for Montreal, the cosmopolitan and financial centre of the nation – Skane betrays both the man and the nature which signify his masculine authenticity at the outer limits of a trivialized, femininized world (287, 296, 303, 308–9). Third, and most important, Isabel, rather than either of the two men, is the protagonist of the story. It is her rejection of the city, her encounter with Marina, her rejection of the country, and her return to Marina which structure the plot and the development of its meanings. This centrality is marked symbolically too, for Marina shares its name with the Shakespearean heroine recalled in T.S. Eliot’s eponymous poem of 1930.52 Isabel’s escape from a depraved city, her wandering and return to Carney and the sea, and her identification in the novel’s title with an underwater “nymph” all mark her as a figure of this other Marina, the woman who is born at sea (hence her name)

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and lost at sea, and who wanders through misfortune until she is united with her father and a husband at the end of Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Whereas in the play, Marina represents the endurance of conventional feminine virtues of chastity, grace, and sympathy, in Eliot’s “Marina” she represents a metaphysical object of desire beyond such practical values, and beyond even physical place or verbal representation. In the poem, transcendence is sought from the familiar world of pleasure and aggressivity – a world that, like Raddall’s depraved city, has “become unsubstantial” from the perspective of the sea – and the transcendence is sought in a fragmentary imagery of elemental nature and the “daughter,” Marina, who represents it. Here the feminine figure fuses with a marine imagery to produce the sense of a place beyond place, a place “calling through the fog,” which alone is authentic to the lyric angst of the poem’s speaker, the lost patriarch, Marina’s father. Eliot’s contrast of an actual mortal on terra firma with a metaphysical being in Marina – representable only in the broken syntax of memory and sensory fragments of a nautical ascesis – resonates not only with the antimodernist geography of Raddall’s novel, but with the darker symbolism of his title, which figures Isabel as a beautiful spirit at the bottom of the sea who offers drowned sailors a paradisal, if ambivalently watery, afterlife. Isabel, like the nymph, does not signify men’s struggle with modernity but their defeat by it. As Carney explains: “When the ship went down or the fight was lost, when there was no hope left, a man could let himself sink and feel that all would be well” (327). And in his blindness and isolation from modern life and work, relieved only by the invisible presence of the woman working in his place, this is what happens. To be sure, the narrative and symbolic centrality of Isabel as a modern woman significantly reverses the gender paradigm of antimodernism and its generic Western – especially when merged with the development of Skane’s narrative and symbolic betrayal, for while the heterosexual bond brings closure to the generic romance, the corresponding male bond is never restored. But this reversal also curiously reframes the very same paradigm. Isabel’s position within the dichotomized existences delineated in the novel is problematic because unfixed – developing itself but ultimately developing and transforming them as well. She begins as a disillusioned typist in the city. Though she is marked as modern in her business activities and

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values (18, 20, 35) and her over-civilized softness (36, 111), she is also ironic about these activities, as she is about modern city life, sexuality, and materialism (29, 32, 35, 85). She too, like the men, is characterized as taciturn (38). When she moves to Marina she is a cook to the men – for “something to do” – but she also learns, and for the same apparently arbitrary reasons – to ride horses and to operate the radio until she achieves official proficiency. In the latter accomplishments she discovers a kind of masculinity within – and this is guided by Skane, whose masculinity asserts itself as a pleasure principle indifferent to social forms and conventions. This masculinity, antisocial in Skane, is in Isabel conformable to her subsequent development as a modern, independent woman. When she leaves Marina, instead of becoming a servile typist again, she becomes a considerable businesswoman. Her final return to Marina is based upon her rejection of both modern male and modern female gender roles, for with the blind Carney she plans to share the conventionally masculine work of the radio at the same time as undertaking the conventionally feminine work of caring for Carney, raising a family, and being a school teacher to the Marina children. But in this closure, the gender of modernization is again feminized, and the narrative seems to have circled back into the shadow of its own target of antimodernist critique.

abstract imperialism The narrative focus upon the woman protagonist, and its romance closure, decentres the generic Western from its masculine, individualist, or elitist topos and forces it to integrate a fuller social space, domestic as well as public, into its abiding concerns and its closure. I think this ambivalent feminism arises in part from a kind of antimodernism that is Canadian rather than American, and which implies a different idealism or nostalgia about the frontier. For in modern Canadian culture, antimodernism is intersected with the still powerful ideology of imperialism – an ideology that in its postcolonial afterlife is abstract from its British centre and has been translated into a more geographically and linguistically flexible form congenial to a new nationalism, and one typically projected in a myth – unified by a broad notion of race if not by ethnicity, language, or European political history – of the North. The archetypal literary statement of such abstracted imperialism is Salverson’s The Viking Heart, in which the archaic, wandering and warring spirit of the Vikings is unified with a

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Canadian spirit that crosses racial and linguistic boundaries and expresses itself in the quotidian triumphs of small businessmen and popular artists. It is an abstract imperialism expressed by Raddall himself in historical novels, like Roger Sudden, which see the origins of a modern, liberal individualism – one, by the way, available to women – in the racial superiority and imperialist economic structure of the British conquest of North America.53 He expresses it in the very title of The Nymph and the Lamp, which applies a Scandinavian myth (and if Peter Friesen is right, an English intertext54) to a Nova Scotian topos, as well as in the novel’s discourse – in the Nordic pastiche which characterizes, for example, the central male character, a blond giant who reads nothing but English Romantic poets and Old Norse myths and sagas (109). But the North is not a new unifying myth for Raddall; it is only another ingredient of the more abstract imperialism his pastiche style implies. It is this abstract imperialism that allows Raddall to valorize British imperialist conquest in the trilogy of which Roger Sudden is a part, at the same time that he affirms his vision as “anti-British,” and, regarding his literary influences, is able to claim that he “always admired Kipling … but never thought much of his imperialism.”55 The Canadian writer here rejects imperialism as patriotism, that is, as a political allegiance to England as king and country. It is internalized instead as a metaphysical frontier of imperialist values – a paradoxically liberal code for the individual which promises that conservative and hierarchical social values will spring from the heart, not from history.56 In this context, Isabel’s activities as a relatively independent businesswoman are not to be devalued for their part in an overcivilized modernity, but valorized just as are the entrepreneurship and industry of the Folk heroes in his other novels – as authentic expressions of an individual autonomy unanswerable to society’s myriad political and ideological demands, be they colonial or modern, but in a moment of crisis and revelation, responsive to its inner, hierarchical, and paternalistic nature.57 From such an autonomous bildung, his narratives paradoxically imply that one’s fate to live for others, or for another, must be learned and affirmed. What I have here called an abstract imperialism contributes to a Canadian difference from the antimodernism of the American Western, because it continues to valorize a conservative and hierarchical notion of individual subjection to a community. This is a subjection easily represented to the individual in the domestic paradigm of a

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traditional family, and is indeed centrally encoded in the archetypal discourse of empire as a global family a mature paternal or mother country and immature, subservient daughter colonies abroad – thus mediating social and political values through individual and domestic ones. This is important because imperialism depends upon a subordinate form of modernization which is colonial, and which develops its social space according to more conservative, communal models in tune with economic production for an external and metropolitan centre of power rather than a regional and self-defining one. It is why some form of conservative community is always implied in the imperialist ideal, whose hierarchy is applicable to both colonists and aboriginal peoples. When this form of imperialism is abstracted into the everyday and self-serving modernity that is the fate of the new nation, it must find a new image of the frontier – one which continues to justify modernity as a periphery at which individual freedom finds its meaning and power in ostensible subjection to values transcending individual authority. Hence the paradoxical attempt by Raddall to masculinize, for the rugged individualism of his antimodernist genre, the sentimental and civilizing mission of his novel’s closure – an attempt effected on the one hand by generic paradigms which undercut the value of the realist world of the closure, and on the other by a morbid romance allegory attached to the closure itself, which implies a meaningful resolution only beyond history and existential life. Isabel is confirmed in her domesticity, but only once she is removed from the marriage laws and private property which underwrite the degraded escapism of tending the private sphere of one’s own garden – the fantasy that initially soothed Isabel’s and Carney’s needs for “protection from the world,” but which they quickly both rejected (74).58 Hence, also, but conversely, Isabel is allowed to work, but only once she is removed from the defining scene of work – the production and consumption economy of the city and the land she finally leaves behind. The same can be said for the abstracted affirmation of regionalism, which finds its authentic locus paradoxically bound to, but only in the watery margin of, the land of an authentic, frontier Folk. From the turn of the twentieth century forward, the Maritimes had a retarded postcolonial development in Canada, and a more persistent social ideology of traditional community. Uneven development on this postcolonial frontier meant that community life and its values were not effectively replaced by modern society – only limited,

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contested, and increasingly, by Raddall’s time, rendered dysfunctional.59 This may be the reason, as Janice Kulyk Keefer suggests, that Maritime writers, however ironic they may be in expressing the alienations of modern society, have tended to affirm the haunting presence and value of community for the individual seeking meaning, good or bad, in the modern world (34, 36). In this context, the narrative encoded in gender relations might well reflect the anxiety of a larger paradox belonging to the frontiers of Canadian modernity itself, as this modernity is shown to need a regional and historical mythopoesis to reconcile its dependence upon both postcolonial imperialist and national individualist dimensions of its economic and social life.60 It is tempting to see Isabel and Marina alike as figures of the existential condition of the liberal individual, whose story of submission to a form of civilization defined from within – from the heart of the individual character, from the privacy of the domestic space and feminine body, from the autonomous spirit of the regional Folk – is an abstract solution to the real crisis of the meaning, not only of masculinity but of individualism itself, in the newly postcolonial nation in which these are still felt to be defined from without. When Isabel says to Carney, “I’m not ‘women’ … I’m me,” she might as well be speaking for all the characters who have chosen life on Marina – herself and Carney and Skane – for she is expressing an anxiety about identity and purpose that determines the actions of all of the main characters (89). The distinct kind of postcolonial frontier implied by this regional history is consistent with the distinct kind of frontier mythologized by antimodernist imperialism in general. The different masculinist ambivalence that attaches to the latter is revealed in an exemplary instance in Robert MacDonald’s study of the international Boy Scout Movement. MacDonald shows how the Scout Movement drew upon an originally American “frontier” ideal of adventure, manliness, and freedom from over-civilization – including its cowboy-like costume (32), but put its antimodernism to work for popular imperialist purposes. Unlike the American antimodernism typified in the ethos of the generic Western, the imperialist antimodernism of the Scouts was directed towards what its founder called “good citizenship” (6, 244–6). This ideal aimed for a renewal of community, for the restoration of strong social order to a degraded civilization (17ff). The Scouts represented a renewed masculine social power and morality established symbolically outside the

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borders of its feminized, fallen civilization – in order to restore authentic power and meaning within its borders. The modern imperialist frontier was understood, symbolically and in practice, to impose good society not only on others, but on its own (8–9, 13–14). Hence, says MacDonald, Scouting was founded on a “tension” between the adventurous and escapist rejection of contemporary society, and the moralistic affirmation of its values of domesticity, community, and citizenship (6). This tension is evident, for example, in Pauline Johnson’s The Shagganappi, a collection of juvenile stories she dedicated to the Boy Scouts. The stories valorize the rugged, daring, wise otherness of their First Nations or métis heroes against the relative complacency or softness of their White friends, but assimilate this otherness to an ideal of masculine youth and liberalindividualist morality consistent with the self-justifying power of the conquering and settling society.61 The same tension, with the same assimilation of the Native to a value of the White, is expressed by Raddall in his characterization of his own literary formation as a fascinated but ambivalent response to movie and magazine Westerns: “For me the first real people in print were Buffalo Bill and Jim Hawkins. But there was no real humor in Buffalo Bill – a downright sort of man to whom the only good Injuns were the dead ones.” Initially entranced by Westerns, Raddall came to prefer the “old wellbeaten path” of his soldier father’s library, which led him from British adventure fiction of the sea and Norse myths, to the colonial fiction of Rudyard Kipling and a “ten volume history of Britain and the Empire” that in 1964 Raddall believed “still [stood] up as an example of history as it should be written.”62 It is the virtue of such British imperialist literature, perhaps, that only the bad Injuns must be dead. The good ones, like the wilderness guides and informers in texts such as Raddall’s own Roger Sudden, remain models of a primitive vitality subjected to a paternalistic reality principle in the work of civilization – assimilated thus like women, as imaginary margins, to the symbolic needs of modern development.63 Imperialism posits an antimodernist frontier which frees the individual from the determining form and power of his or her modern society, not as the freedom of a manly individualism, but as the freedom of a restored paternalism in individual experience. It is this masculine experience which, in The Nymph and the Lamp, can be projected in the figure of a woman searching for purpose and place – searching both for power over and empowerment by something beyond her.

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Raddall’s novel constructs a generic American Western world in an Eastern Canadian setting, particularly as it valorizes a masculine frontier against an ostensibly feminine civilization. However, as with the Western Canadian appropriation of this genre surveyed by Davidson, Raddall’s appropriation of it is playful and ultimately transgressive. Raddall’s narrative diverges from the generic Western because it sends a female protagonist on an iconoclastic path through both these alternatives, and because it sees both collapse for want of individual self-sacrifice to higher ideals which belong to the values of love and community (for example, the self-seeking degradations of Mr Hurd, Miss Benson, Mrs Paradee, and finally Skane). However, the community beyond the couple, barely noticed by the plot so far, remains an abstract value, and the closure founders upon them. This is partly because the union of lovers in the romance closure, with its resolution in the heterosexual bond as opposed to the homosocial bond of its generic Western discourse, figures this bond in the symbolic escape from civilization and allegorical escape from life, and so figures love more as an aesthetic than a social value. The return to Marina, which closes the romance, with its allegorical death by drowning (Carney entering darkness, purposelessness, and reunion with his “nymph”) affirms rather what Bruce MacDonald has identified as the novel’s nihilistic “rejection of the world,” which is tempered, if at all, more by an indeterminate sense of the value of everyday intimacies in the face of mortality, than by any consistent idealism (168). But in its nihilism, the novel’s closure has clear literary antecedents in the genealogy of modernism suggested by Edmund Wilson, which I discussed in the previous chapter: the double suicide that marks an aestheticist transcendence of historical life at the end of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s Axël (1890), which Blodgett traced, in the Canadian context, to such modernist fiction as Frederick Philip Grove’s The Yoke of Life (1930) – in which a degraded civilization is spurned and an alternative social bond affirmed in a love outside life itself, that is, in a representative death. The transcendental value of this romance resolution is underscored by the irony of its realist elaboration, in which the heterosexual union signifies not the transformation or transcendence of the historical world but its reproduction, specifically in a family and a larger communal change for Marina, for whose children Isabel intends to provide an elementary education, giving them a chance to read and to learn about life possibilities beyond Marina (317–8). Indeed, her

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mission is to “civilize” Marina away from its primitive, violent way of life (320). Thus the assimilation of modern feminism to an antimodernist nostalgia for a man’s world, or a man’s modernity, turns out to express a paradoxical desire and produce a paradoxical narrative, for its closure is forced to identify its antimodernist critique with the projection of a softened femininity (in Isabel) and a softened modernity (in Marina) which merely set the clock ticking again toward that over-civilization which was its ostensible antithesis. Hence, realism defeats all but the moment of desire implicit in the romance ending; it defeats itself, affirming its abstraction into the nihilistic allegory of death by drowning. Either way, in the bond of love or the reproduction of life, the frontier distinct from modern civilization vanishes, and so does the feminist bildung which discovered it. Thus the novel’s closure circles back to modify its own, antimodernist reaction against women’s words by affirming them, if ambivalently and paradoxically, as a self-consuming medium through which to express a masculinist critique of a feminized modernity. While such an affirmation is not, obviously, a radically feminist one, it does reflect the dominant feminism of the pre-modern period before the war nostalgized by Raddall: the “maternal feminism” described by Davies, which wanted not to transgress the feminine values of the domestic sphere, but transgressively to extend its boundaries into public life (234).64 Michèle Lacombe has discussed the transgressive function of feminine and domestic space in Raddall’s fiction, and noted its powerlessness to effect actual change in its realist worlds.65 For Isabel, the liberal feminist assertion of herself in the public sphere throughout the narrative certainly does change her, but it also negates the possibility or even meaning of change for her society. Hence this discourse of a historical feminism – in which the power and freedom of women is mediated by rather than opposed to patriarchal definitions of femininity and its limits – functions, as does Raddall’s historical realism in the interests of romance more generally, as a means rather than an end. This is consistent with what I above called an abstract imperialist value of community, in which the lost paternalistic identity of manhood must rediscover the love inscribed in women and women’s words, not sentimentally for love in itself, but for the purpose it imposes on, thereby reinstating, male and patriarchal power.66 To this end, then, Isabel merely learns what the innocent Carney knew all along. Something to do is as meaningless to the solipsist as it

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is illusory to the sentimentalist. Isabel, in her feminist role as what Helen Buss calls “the Canadian heroine of consciousness,” will give “blind patriarchy” a “guiding hand.” But the reader’s hope that this might lead to a “new order” beyond patriarchal discourse is held in suspense, Buss tells us, by the antithesis which defines the generic heroine of the realist romance: her role in romance as a spiritual absolute, versus her role in the realist novel in the critical inquiry into absolutes.67 And indeed here, it is only by valorizing, not a realistically represented nostalgic past or feminist movement, but a transcending moment of desire at the origin of these, free of history itself (in which Isabel’s industry, public and private, might lead to better things than, under the contraints of historical fiction, we know it can) that this novel can express a fixed value, an ideal. This moment of desire and its realist elaboration is feminized – why? Perhaps one must imagine the feminine part of oneself – as Raddall claims he does, to be able to write with intuition about others, male or female68 – in order to call into being that masculinity which is the object of desire. We are again reminded of Eliot’s “Marina,” which conflates the drama of Pericles’s reunion with his daughter and the drama of Hercules’s separation from his daughter in her death, and leaves the contradictory imagery – with the soul of the man, and with the very existence of the woman – in indeterminate, sensual suspense. It is the psychodrama of a lost father in search of a lost daughter in search of him/herself: where imperialism has ceased to correspond to regional or national identity, but continues to haunt the memory and morality of modernization, it is antimodernism seeking not to escape the world of sentiment, but fatally to master it all, once again. If we now simply substitute, in this aesthetic formula, the world of sentiment with the similarly “feminized” world of the city, we may recognize the very same trick we saw Buckler playing, in the border regions of modernism.

the regi onalist ideologeme We are now ready to consider what it is that Raddall’s and Buckler’s novels, despite remarkable differences in form and content, have in common with respect to their uses of regionalism. I have tried to show in the foregoing analyses how, on a formal level in which narrative structure, perspective, character, imagery, and theme are intertwined, both novels employ a regionalist register of the narrative to valorize some unique or autonomous identity of the past or present place,

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which works paradoxically against the romance (local-colourist) and even realist (historicist) strategies intended to guide or unify our understanding of the text; hence the disfiguring effects proper to what I have spoken of as peripheral modernism. Obviously enough, such strategic disfiguring is not itself a mark of the region under consideration, but of the tensions of city and country, frontier and empire cultures which play across the modern nation and decisively develop its regional boundaries. Against the axes of these tensions, however, the shape of a common concern may now be distinguished, and some tentative regionalist distinctions offered. I have used the word “concern” rather than “theme,” to indicate a tendency of thought and feeling which informs both the formal and thematic elements of the novels just considered. Here it is useful to introduce and to adapt to my purposes, in place of an overly vague “concern,” the more awkward but here indispensable term coined by Fredric Jameson, “ideologeme.” Jameson uses this term to refer to the signifying elements which loosely make up the discourse of ideological expression circumscribed by a particular historical class – a discourse which subtends and informs the novels produced by it. Class discourse is a kind of ideological grab-bag, from which the novelist more or less consciously borrows the “minimal units” of both content and form: “The ideologeme is an amphibious formation, whose essential structural characteristic may be described as its possibility to manifest itself either as a pseudoidea – a conceptual or belief system, an abstract value, an opinion or prejudice – or as a protonarrative, a kind of ultimate class fantasy about the “collective characters” which are the classes in opposition. This duality means that the basic requirement for the full description of the ideologeme is already given in advance: as a construct it must be susceptible to both a conceptual description and a narrative manifestation all at once.” The ideologeme is a “historically determinate conceptual or semic” root which can branch out “variously in the form of a ‘value system’ or ‘philosophical concept,’ or in the form of a protonarrative, a private or collective narrative fantasy.”69 I find it useful here to extend the use of this “amphibious” notion by distinguishing elements – that is, ideologemes – proper to such modern experience in a particular historical region. For the disfiguring tendencies of The Mountain and the Valley and The Nymph and the Lamp seem to have a common root deeper than genre, structure, style, or theme, which tugs at them all.

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This element is, most simply put, a pervasive yet inexplicable sense of loss. In The Mountain and the Valley, the sense of loss is projected through images of a regional past (David’s pastoral nostalgia) and a childhood past (David’s pre-adolescent feeling of oneness in family and community), but also through a plot structure which itemizes the protagonist’s accumulated social ruptures and losses in his local world (symbolized through the sexual plot of the generic romance, by Effie, the sweetheart he loves, abuses and loses to a death both significant and enigmatic to him), and by a narrative style that presents images and events and words themselves only to insist compulsively, repetitively, on the truth of things which is lost to them – which are lost, indeed, even as a result of them, of their seeming mastery. But to the precise degree that a sense of loss pervades both form and content in the novel, it fails to emerge anywhere as an explanation: the inadequacy of language does not explain the development of David’s relationship with Effie or the decline of communal culture, any more than the latter explain each other or the inadequacy of language. The sense of loss is not authorized by a transparent realist account of regional community, or by an uncontradictory generic structure of romance, or by any other formal or substantial location. It resonates without an explicitly marked centre or origin, refusing final interpretation. In The Nymph and the Lamp, a sense of loss is projected through images of a regional past (of seafaring Folk) and a patriarchal past (when men were men), but also through a plot structure of generic romance (Carney’s loss of Isabel, which turns into a story about Isabel’s regional wandering, or loss and finding of herself – to restore Carney) and a narrative style which combines a mythic register with a historicist register in such a way as to dislocate closure (ultimately, what is lost and why it is valuable) from either. Is what is lost a communal sentimental past, or an individualistic antimodernist past, or a regional cultural past? Or is what is lost a generic authority for historical romance, or is it a stylistic one for myth or for realism? Like Buckler’s novel, Raddall’s seizes on all sorts of nostalgic losses, only to look restlessly beyond them, undercutting the explanatory power of his motivating elements by adducing what does not fit. I have already discussed the historical basis which could explain, behind these two novels, this sense of loss: the social and economic place of the Maritimes in the uneven development of modern Canada. The nineteenth century saw the Maritimes as the premier colony and a key sea

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port, not only in the theatres of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century military empires but in a highly developed coastal trading and cultural region continuous with New England, extending to the Caribbean in one direction and to Europe in the other. This northsouth axis of development was broken, not immediately by American independence, but by the increasing desire for a Canadian national development competitive with it, whose effective mechanism became, upon entering the twentieth century, the agricultural-industrial boom in Ontario and the West. While the Maritimes did not experience a decline, they became a peripheral rather than central location in the economic growth structure of the new nation. Correspondingly, it is not surprising that the more profoundly and anachronistically imperialist roots of Maritime society should haunt the search for values in modern experience as they do in these two novels, in Raddall’s ghost stories and historical romances, or in Barometer Rising – as opposed, on the one hand, to the aestheticized, decorative, and impuissant quality in which imperialism is remembered in The Imperialist or in Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, and on the other hand, to the still active, contemporary relevance it suggests to fiction of the Prairies. While the historical basis for a sense of loss – of economic and social centrality in a larger world – is arguably present across Canadian fiction, it produces a dominant ideologeme in the novels of the Maritimes, where that loss was most keenly felt.

d e p r i va l a n d d i s c l o s u r e : maritime fiction The ideologemic form of this “sense of loss” has been nicely defined in the work of the Maritime philosopher George Grant as the “intimation of deprival.” The phrase is meant paradoxically to suggest, not only the loss of what is good (the ethical sense of deprival rather than mere absence), but the specifically modern loss of any public language or system of meaning to locate or define what was good (the intimation rather than image, understanding, or idea). Grant saw deprival as a specifically Canadian sensibility in the 1960s, at precisely the time when Canada as a whole, like the Maritimes earlier, saw itself increasingly peripheral to the culture and economy of the powerful world without. His description of the experience of deprival and its “intimation” eerily fits the protagonists and plots and

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styles of Maritime novels such as The Mountain and the Valley, The Nymph and the Lamp, and Barometer Rising. Think of David, or Isabel and Carney, or Penelope and Neil, as exempla: We can hold in our minds the enormous benefits of technological society, but we cannot so easily hold the ways it may have deprived us, because technique is ourselves. All descriptions or definitions of technique which place it outside ourselves hide from us what it is. This applies to the simplest accounts which describe technological advance as new machines or inventions as well as to the more sophisticated which include within their understanding the whole hierarchy of interdependent organisations and their methods. Technique comes forth from and is sustained in our vision of ourselves as creative freedom, making ourselves, and conquering the chances of an indifferent world. It is difficult to think whether we are deprived of anything essential to our happiness, just because the coming to be of the technological society has stripped us above all of the very systems of meaning which disclosed the highest purposes of man, and in terms of which, therefore, we could judge whether an absence of something was in fact a deprival.70

Grant’s ideologeme of deprival moves easily between the represented experience and the problem of representation itself – from correspondence with the represented, fictional problems of our protagonists, to the representational, formal problems of their authors. In order to expand our view of novels ruled by the ideologeme of deprival, while staying close within the region of modern Nova Scotia, I wish now to consider three lesser known novels written earlier in the century. Rockbound (1928), by Frank Parker Day, is remarkable for the elements it shares with the later The Nymph and the Lamp. It is about a young fisherman who comes to a remote Nova Scotian island settlement – in isolation, primitive conditions, and familiarity with death, similar to Marina – in order to claim his rightful inheritance from a crafty ancestral rival. While the main plot thus involves a literal restoration of lost lands, we discover embedded in it the mythic plot of a symbolic restoration of justice and fertility to a harsh country. The latter is brought about by a newly returned, wandering father figure. In short, we have here a revival, perhaps inspired by Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), of the myth of the Fisher King.71 As I discussed in the previous chapter, the sexual subplot is the gradual coming together, hampered by a protracted misunderstanding and

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separation, of the protagonist and a young schoolteacher who is also new to the island. The closure finds the pair united but even further removed from the land and isolated from others, on a lighthouse rock. As in Raddall’s novel, the resolution is difficult to interpret because of contradictory stylistic elements – again, a mythic discourse (here, Biblical allegory and medieval romance) and a realist discourse (here, naturalism). The regionalism of the novel provides an anchor for the antimodernist discourse of primitive frontier authenticity – what the 1973 book jacket calls an “isolated, primitive world stripped of all sophistication, a world in which man is brought face to face with the timeless problems of humanity,” populated by the violent but courageous, immoral but basically good, “natural man.” But this antimodernist regionalism is on the one hand ambiguated by the protagonist’s union with a schoolteacher from the shore who has been busy modernizing education on the island, and on the other hand transcended by a mythic discourse which leaves any image of society and region behind, when the lighthouse rock is envisaged, in the last sentence of the novel, as an idealist and aesthetic creation. At the moment the pair of lovers are left alone there, they turn along a “turfy path”: “But it was no turfy path: it was a way of gold, full of flowers, not of this earth, but like to those with which mediaeval painters adorned their foregrounds.”72 At the last moment, as in Raddall’s novel, regionalism becomes a mere vehicle for an explicitly metaphysical plot; one, moreover, in which modernity is unexpectedly affirmed, both in content, in the isolation of the sentimental, literate couple rather than the more primitive, male group, and in form, in the cosmopolitan field of discourses which is ultimately and emphatically, self-reflexively marked in the fantasy of the rock as a painted paradise. Hence neither of the two deprival plots – of the land that must be reclaimed, of the woman who must be recovered – is satisfactorily resolved. For the resolution demands that both be abstracted from their relationship to the regional community which gave them, in the naturalist discourse of this novel, their meaning. Again, a sense of loss persists, without object or location, as a hazy afterimage of the text. We find deprival operative in yet another, very different novel from an earlier date and by a successful Nova Scotian woman author, Alice Jones. In turns sublime, ridiculous, fascinating, and offensive, the international novel Bubbles We Buy (1903) is a buried treasure of Canadian fiction.73 The plot involves a Canadian “alienist” (that is, a psychiatrist)

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with an American artist couple, both painters – a neuraesthenic man whose melancholia is turning to madness, who is his patient, and a strong-charactered, grieving woman whom he will love. This sexual plot, along with its interesting national-allegorical possibilities, is complicated by an elaborate historical subplot which reaches back to the dark secrets of the Canadian’s grandfather, a regional patriarch and colonial entrepreneur whose material and spiritual legacy must be exorcized in order for the present to free itself from the past. The latter plot is again based on the recovery of a lost inheritance, both in wealth and in land, by a wandering child returning home. And again, the Fisher King myth is suggested by the idealization of the disenfranchised protagonist and by the chain of absent or corrupt fathers whom he comes back to his regional home to replace. Loss is signified literally in the inheritance, but also metonymically in the regional home, and by extension in the identity of the Canadian protagonist who must name himself, historically and legally, in order to claim it. For the Canadian protagonist, regional and historical layers are revealed in an archeology of the self, and articulated in the character system of the sexual plot through thematic discourses of art (fin-desiècle symbolism and aestheticism) and psychology (neuraesthenia and trauma). For the American protagonist, the woman painter, the ideologeme appears without such a historical dimension; she seeks to recover her mental stability and powers as an artist following her husband’s estranged life and death. A discourse of national types plays across both plots, framed by the premise that the poorer Canadian will be the wealthier American’s right conscience and consciousness, once the American has exorcized her past alliance with whatever the mad husband represents (presumably a sort of anticommunal introversion, a self-development rather too free of the status quo) and the Canadian has exorcized the injustice in his colonialist past. This colonialist past is represented both as a history of violence and selfishness, which marks the extraordinary liberalism of the novel, and as a history of decadent miscegenation, which marks its racist conservatism (an imperialist contradiction also found in Duncan’s novels).74 Indeed, as Bubbles We Buy negotiates its various losses – the death of a husband, the absence of a father, and the disenfranchisement of a son – it emplots various symbolic origins of deprival (including nostalgia for a Maritime regional country, nostalgia for a Northern racial purity, nostalgia for a colonial economy of secure and expanding wealth, and nostalgia for some past or inaccessi-

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ble form of individual identity and sanity) without being able to provide any plausible synthesis, any adequate object. The needs to recollect, to recover, and to restitute variously express an ideologeme of deprival which remains outside the reference of the text and which enters the text, not only in these plot trajectories and themes, but within competing realist and romance generic styles. Bubbles We Buy is formally interesting as a novel that slides between the realist description of national, class, racial, and professional types and national and regional settings – description which attempts to signify a historical truth through the coherence and significance of quotidian detail – and the romance description either of more mysterious, obscured, or “lost” mental states (of the visionary artist husband, revealed in his painting) or past and exotic lives (of the adventurous patriarch and his secret passions and supernatural antagonists). The romance mode strives to signify a more universal truth through idealized characters and mythical plots free from historical plausibility. As I have argued before, this chiasmus reflects a general EnglishCanadian sense, beginning at the turn of the twentieth century, of the confluence of the (realist) transvaluing processes of modern life and the (romance) utopian insistence of a new nationhood. What this novel and others reveal is the modern Maritime novelist’s particular need to focalize the deprivals of this confluence. Their novels place less emphasis than do novels of central or Western Canada, on what new powers or possibilities this confluence brings to this historical life individually or collectively, and hence they provide an especially displaced or degraded utopian register that leaves the present out of focus. It is more important in these novels to express a sense of loss than to locate the object of loss or to repair it. At the centre of the modern Maritime novel is a mysterious black hole – like the deadly swamp which draws all things into its fatally monotonous green labyrinths, grey horizons, and dark depths that is the setting of Susan Carleton’s novel, The Micmac (1904) – from which stories and ideas are endlessly generated, but whose meaning is no more than intimated.75 Regionalism in this context is not a matter merely for content or theme, but motivates at a more fundamental level the iteration of desire for an impossible or forbidden past, the past life made possible by wealth and significance in an eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury global empire, focalized through a regional landscape and sometimes, as in The Micmac, its Native people. This political unconscious is as evasive as it is pervasive, compulsively searching the past

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for a nostalgia that belongs to the present. It is surely the language of the capitalist moderns, rather than the primitive wilderness and its indigeneous people, that undoes the value of English words in a purely ecstatic exchange at the close of The Micmac: “I’m going to speak English. You dearest, loveliest, bravest person in all the world” – his eyes found hers in the twilight. “Is that plain?” he demanded. “Yes – no, it’s coloured!” she retorted hastily. But he took no notice. “I’ve got everything I don’t deserve, and I’m going to marry you.” He held her gravely now, as, through the quiet, the far-off loon called vainly. “Well?” he asked, very low. “Well,” said Molly Kilgore, after the Micmac fashion that means all things. The rose of dawn was on her face as, out of the east, the loon’s mate answered him. (234)

Here what is lost and found is designated in the plot by the uniting of the lovers, and in theme by the “calling” and “mating” of protagonists who know and understand the regional landscape and its Native people more intimately and sympathetically than do the novel’s other characters, thus offering a sign of its renewal. But evasion underlies this finding: the denial of the English language that would interpret what is found in any absolute or conventional way, and the assertion of an alternative language that would transvalue its meaning (the meaning of the region, the meaning of the protagonists) into the ineffable intimation of “all things.” History and region are evoked only to undergo the alchemy of a modernist flight from the reified definition of both realist observation, abandoned at the outset, and romance ideals, breezily if curiously abstracted into empty genre, at the end. “Well” nicely expresses both the ultimate desirability and the unnameability of what these regionalist urbanites have found, beneath the uneasy layers of each other and their world, to carry on with.

out of other regions While an ideologeme of deprival thus produces in the Maritimes a language of loss and a writing of disclosure, we may see quite different emphases in the writing of other Canadian regions. The greatest contrast here is with the writing of the Prairies, several important examples of which I have already discussed: Think of the Earth, As For

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Me and My House, Settlers of the Marsh, and Wild Geese. In these and novels such as Robert Stead’s Dry Water (1935),76 while the setting and its texture of signs is woven from a kindred form of the invisible city – the urbanized countryside proper to the history and colonial origins of modern Canadian agricultural settlement and expansion – and a kindred form of abstracted imperialism at the frontier, the concerns are different. These narratives are not typically spun out of secret selves, places, or pasts, and are not permeated with lost figures or properties that must be recollected, recovered, or restituted toward a narrative and symbolic closure. Instead of the Maritime language of loss and writing of disclosure that I have suggested expresses a regional ideologeme of deprival, which is a writing that intends and pretends to speak for what is original and silent, hidden, lost and inarticulate in others in a place, in the Prairies I would suggest (with a backward look now to chapter 2) that we find a language of will and representation, and a writing of contestation, which is a writing that intends to speak against what is original and (not silent or hidden but) already spoken and instituted by others. For example, while David Canaan and Niels Lindstedt both impose fantasy visions of their mastery upon their worlds, the Maritimer’s vision fails because it cannot recuperate an idealist reality which is inexpressible, while the Westerner’s vision fails because it cannot shape a material reality which is also shaped by others. This difference makes itself evident in the visionary fantasies of other Prairie men I have discussed: Tavistock, Gare, and Philip Bentley. There are few absent or lost father figures, and the protagonists rarely follow a narrative trajectory towards a renovated father figure themselves (and when they do, as with Philip Bentley, it can be deeply parodic). Restoration of a nostalgic value or authority, like its recollection, is not a central motif. Contrary to Maritime writing, the past is rarely a force external to the individual which must be reckoned with – so that if it does appear it is usually as an element of character interiority rather than plot, as in Grove’s characters. History is already discursive, not to be revealed but negotiated. (Significantly, for example, while the presence of Native people is represented in and symbolically integral to most modern Canadian novels from coast to coast, it is virtually absent from modern novels on the Prairies. This tendency is reversed when the Prairies become the source for an historical palimpsest and layering of plots, beginning with Margaret Laurence and still continuing today.) All of this is easily comprehended in the context of the

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social history which informed modern Prairie lives – with its much more recent, mostly postcolonial economic and multiethnic social development, its north-south axis with the United States, and its relative lack of a strong English institutional culture. In this context, the fundamental idea or story of experience appears not to arise from the deprivals of an emergent modernity but, amidst competing interests and languages of actual creation, from this modernity’s actual and psychological violence. A corresponding ideologeme of dualism between wills and representations – between the will to “glory” and the “darkness” and “fear” which eternally accompany and resist it – is symbolized by what Sheila Watson called the “double hook.” The continuity of father figures of the Fisher King myth is replaced, in Prairie writing, by the discontinuities which break through the horizon in the figures of antipatriarchal women – Judith and Lind, Judith and Laura, Ellen Amundsen, and of course, the “old lady” herself: “If God had come into the valley, come holding out the long finger of salvation, moaning in the darkness, thundering down the gap at the lake head, skimming across the water, drying up the blue signature like blottingpaper, asking where, asking why, defying an answer, she would have thrown her line against the rebuke; she would have caught a piece of mud and looked it over; she would have drawn a line with the barb when the fire of righteousness baked the bottom.”77 This is essentially the discursive relationship between the protagonist and his or her world in most Prairie novels, contrasting directly with those of the Maritimes. Having argued the case for an ideologeme of deprival characteristic of modern Maritime fiction, and suggested as a contrast an ideologeme of the double hook in modern Prairie fiction, it is tempting to go on and map out all the “regions” of the Canadian novel. But neither is this the aim of this book, nor would it illustrate the significance of regionalism as I would like to present it. Regions are always constructs, ideas that focus a certain historical or geographical interest. I have looked at Nova Scotian novels in order to bring into focus a historical idea proper to one dimension of modern Maritime life. There are no doubt other dimensions of interest, which might construct the region differently, or even draw different borderlines and employ different rubrics. Nova Scotian novels may have a unique interest apart from the Maritimes, and Cape Breton novels may have a unique regional interest apart from these. Conversely, Maritime

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fiction may have a regional interest together with other parts of North America – for example, together with Quebec, which experienced a comparable marginality to the Ontario-Prairies development of the modern period, or together with the New England States, whose families, businesses, and cultural institutions had long been interlinked. In whatever definition of region applies, the notion of a regionalist ideologeme – a mode of explanation and storytelling which attaches to the significance of a particular place, and subtends the widest variety of plots and themes and styles – is a useful place for an historicizing criticism to begin.

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A Withdrawal of Fortune

If this book succeeds, it is not in order to set in place for you a new system to classify Canadian writing. It is rather to persuade you that the historical, formal, and theoretical discourses I have posed as axes of reference are themselves illuminating and allow us to see and talk about this writing in a new way – one whose conclusions can remain open to debate. The book grows out of my feeling for what seemed the neglected depths, not of individual works, but of Canadian modernism as such; and from my need to find some language, however provisional, to render them. To that end I have argued that the range and variety of the modern Canadian novel in English may usefully be organized and understood in relation to a generic centre, which is a particular development of the bildungsroman genre as a form of postcolonial modernism. In relation to this generic centre – which becomes a background assumption that justifies my approach to reading novels in the middle chapters of this book – differences among individual styles, regional representations, and gender significations, to name but a few classes of variables, are productively compared or contrasted. While these lineaments of a Canadian modernism are distinct and rooted in the shape and range of Canadian experience, they need not be thought of as unique: their uniqueness consists in the particular configuration they make in one period of a changing and conflicted literary history, in each literary work thereof. Is there an end to modernism? We cannot look, of course, for a clear break that signals the end of one cultural logic and the beginning of another, but we can identify – here necessarily tentatively, at the horizon of this study – a set of roughly contemporaneous markers whereby the transition asserts itself. Thus the end of a modernist

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period can be identified, from a later perspective, insofar as modernism itself is successively traversed by some new and transformative sensibility. For us, the sixties are such a period of transition, out of which a new kind of modern novel emerges that no longer grounds itself in the newly national sense of what I have called an “unreal country.” The purpose of the new novel is not, as in the modern period, to mix together as in a chemical experiment, the known elements of a New World history and experience, as well as the known elements of genre and style, in order to arrive at an as yet unknown or unrecognized solution. Its purpose is more often, rather, to seek hidden elements and combinations themselves, of a chemistry that has already come to pass. This change, which in its insistence upon structuralist rather than teleological concerns may be called postmodern, is registered most unapologetically in the appearance of bildungsromans whose narrative trajectories no longer depend upon the unity of the novel form, but can be broken down into the relatively autonomous units of short story sequences – as in works by Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, and Clark Blaise. An epigraph in the latter’s A North American Education is the most succinct expression of this change I have encountered, because it is cast as an injunction against the utopian ruling principle of the older English-Canadian modernism. It is from Blaise Pascal: “We do not rest satisfied with the present. We anticipate the future as too slow in coming, as if in order to hasten its course; or we recall the past, to stop its too rapid flight. So imprudent are we that we wander in the times which are not ours, and do not think of the only one which belongs to us; and so idle are we that we dream of those times which are no more, and thoughtlessly overlook that which alone exists.”1 If modern novels were once recipes for the future – or to put it in a less contentious way, for the possible – the newer novels are recipes for the present, for what is. There is nothing idealistic in the Warholian Pop chemistry with which Margaret Atwood introduces the social-textual satire of her first novel, The Edible Woman (1969) – advice from The Joy of Cooking on the making of Puff Pastry. Like her next two novels, Surfacing (1972) and Lady Oracle (1976), this is the awakening narrative of a woman learning to recognize and to feel the need creatively to respond to the social text of a masculinist culture which has so far shaped her life and understanding of herself. The drive of these novels is analytical – where am I, and how did I get here? – rather

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than ethical – what can I do, and where am I going? Closure is achieved in the articulation, usually ritualized or self-consciously literary or symbolic, of a new consciousness of the ideological signs and discourses that structure a society. Indeed, the awakening narrative, which had earlier been a rarity, becomes an important generic form for the female development novels of Margaret Atwood and Margaret Laurence – but also, and more subtly, for male “awakenings” such as Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers (1966), Timothy Findley’s The Wars (1977), and Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen (1998), which look back upon the development of male lives that have reached a fatal crisis. This structuralist rather than teleological pattern of meaning is exemplified in Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1981), in which the discovery of the recognition and telling of the child’s historical experience – not its meaning, which is relatively simple – is the hermeneutic problem of the text. “There is a silence that cannot speak,” its epigraph begins, and concludes: “If I could follow the stream down and down to the hidden voice, would I come at last to the freeing word? I ask the night sky but the silence is steadfast. There is no reply.”2 The secret of Obasan and the secret of Obasan’s popularity is in large part its timely assumption of a history whose structure is mysterious or unknown and which produces the painful logic which governs a present individual life, independent of any logic beyond it. The same quality is seen in a very different but similarly popular novel, Robertson Davies’s Fifth Business (1970), in which the protagonist’s structurally rather than individually meaningful part in the plot is announced in the title and explained in the epigraph (“Fifth Business” is a theatre term used for a character who is neither “Hero nor Heroine, Confidante nor Villain,” but is “nonetheless essential to bring about the Recognition or the dénouement”).3 In such a narrative, the developmental quandaries and progressive drive of the generic bildungsroman are displaced by strategies of recognition, revelation, and counter-representation.4 What I have called a utopian logic, which plots towards what it is possible to do, gives way to a more selfreflexive archeology, which plots – with the paradoxical double movement characterized in Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners (1974) as the river that runs both ways, “ahead into the past, and back into the future”5 – towards what it is possible to have done. “Let the world be smashed: that was the way things were bound to go,” says the heroine at the end of Marian Engel’s ursaphilic awakening narrative, Bear

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(1976), for though “she remembered guilt, and a dream she had had where her mother made her write letters of apology to the Indians for having had to do with a bear,” she also “remembered the claw that had healed guilt,” and “felt strong and pure,” and knew that “the bear was safe.”6 The individual life narrative no longer incessantly scans the limiting horizon, but seeks to “divine” the hidden currents underground, to dig into the refuse of its own “nuisance grounds.” The same archeological structuralism drives the tragic genres and metafictional styles of historical novels as various as Peter Such’s Riverrun (1973), Rudy Wiebe’s The Temptations of Big Bear (1973), Robert Kroetsch’s The Studhorse Man (1970) and Badlands (1975), Timothy Findley’s The Wars and Famous Last Words (1981), and Wayne Johnston’s The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (1998), as well as Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers. Whether Wilfrid Laurier and Hugh MacLennan were right that the future should belong to Canada, appears moot: the country is real enough, and it weighs on us. Its past is not immediately the past regulated by the British, the French, or the Native Peoples, but a past regulated and overseen by its own nation state. “It is tempting to explain my obsession with writing about the Beothuk,” says Peter Such in his preface to a novel about the extinction of a people: “Let me just say it is a kind of debt I owe.”7 History in the novel can no longer be treated simply either as a resource or as an ideal, from which the narrator is distanced by the newly felt possibilities and freedoms and alienations produced by modern social change. History which appears no longer as an “inheritance” (to recall Philip Child’s citation of Goethe) but as your own doing, which is to say your own society’s doing, weighs more heavily and immediately upon narrative voice: “Somebody said lift that bale,” quotes Cohen in his epigraph from Ray Charles singing “Ol’ Man River,” in a novel whose subject is the seventeenth-century Iroquois martyr, Catherine Tekakwitha.8 In all those historical novels by men, as in those by women such as Susan Swan’s The Biggest Modern Woman of the World (1983) and Sky Lee’s Disappearing Moon Cafe (1989), gender too is no longer so easily available as a figurative resource or ideal, and often becomes caught in the same self-reflexive or archeological labyrinths. On the one hand, the metonymy of individual and society which decides the historicity of the bildungsroman is displaced into the many-threaded lives of the social novel (which William Arthur Deacon had once missed), and is lost from the consciousness of the postmodern writer

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(which he had never predicted): “Never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one,” announces the epigraph to Michael Ondaatje’s first novel, In The Skin of a Lion (1987).9 On the other hand, the historical violence and power once projected in the femme fatale, moves inward, especially into the narrative voice, which sees itself as the anxiously self-conscious performer of a historical act. “The spaces between the perceiver and the thing perceived can … be closed with a shout of recognition,” Findley tells “you” and the “female archivist” at the end of The Wars, but “one form of a shout is a shot. Nothing so completely verifies our perception of a thing as our killing of it.”10 The trickster-writer takes over. That is: to play at the limits of these structural labyrinths; to feel where, for gender as for region, Appadurai’s flows take over, the excessive no longer experienced as intrusive but normative, sexual, and local identities no longer experienced as (unreal) uneven worlds, but as (unreal) totalizing events. The diverse protagonists, I would suggest, of Ann Carson’s “novel in verse,” Autobiography of Red (1998), of Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen (1998), and of Barbara Gowdy’s The White Bone (1998), all have this in common. Though the older modernism may appear naïve or even dangerous from a postmodern perspective, it may have something to say to us that only the uncanny distance between two modern worlds will admit. Another epigraph from Pascal in A North American Education seems hardly to resonate today: “So we never live, but we hope to live; and, as we are always preparing to be happy, it is inevitable we should never be so.” The epigraph addresses a complacent idealism – like the new nationalism of the sixties and seventies – where there is today no such complacency. It is difficult indeed to see the Canadian world, so used by now to a cynical or lamenting or merely instrumental view of a national culture, a national government, or national economy that it cannot help but be ironic even at its most optimistic, as a world that is “always preparing to be happy.” If anything, it’s the reverse. If anything, it’s the sense of inevitable unhappiness – if not for oneself, yet for someone significant, for somewhere significant – that has become a cliché, and so perhaps has exhausted its critical force. However, some memory of a literature that has sought the seeds of possibility in a world it thought it knew may yet illuminate, even in the darkening shadows of national and postnational history today, a new horizon to which to turn the historicist imagination that is original to the novel, wondering how we can prepare to be happy.

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Notes

in troduction 1 Non-English words and phrases that have been assimilated to the discourse of Anglophone literary studies will not be italicized in this study. 2 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 3 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: HarperCollins, 1988), 208–9, 213–14. 4 Brian Trehearne, The Montreal Forties: Modernist Poetry in Transition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). 5 Jonathan Kertzer, Worrying the Nation: Imagining a National Literature in English Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998). 6 An example of such is attributed to African-American modernism and described as “deformation of mastery” and “mastery of form,” by Houston A. Baker, Jr. in Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 7 Maria Tippett, Making Culture: English-Canadian Institutions and the Arts before the Massey Commission (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990). 8 Sara Jeannette Duncan, A Daughter of Today, (1894; Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1988). 9 I follow here Elfrida’s understanding of common as bourgeois, which is not the rubric of an ownership class but of a larger, degraded mass culture. An additional irony must be registered, in that the male painter is an aristocrat, and presumably does have a class-inflected understanding of common as not only bourgeois but lower class. 10 Duncan, A Daughter of Today, 125, 205–6.

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11 The anxious intersection of material and aesthetic cultures for Elfrida is indicated in one scene, for example, when “an idea came to her that she thought worth keeping, and she thrust her hand into her pocket for paper and pencil. She drew out a crumpled oblong scrap and wrote on the back of it … Before it had been only the cheque of the Illustrated Age for a fortnight’s work, now it was the record of something valuable” (Duncan, A Daughter of Today, 211). 12 Misao Dean, Introduction to Duncan, A Daughter of Today, iv–v, xii. 13 Lionel Trilling, “On the Modern Element in Modern Literature” (1961), in Beyond Culture: Essays in Literature and Learning (New York: Viking, 1965). 14 This is a cumulative argument in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 1981). For a theoretical conclusion to it, see 287ff. 15 Hence, incidentally, the first national movement in Canadian literature might be considered that which brought writers together to fight, from the mid-nineteenth century to the culminating formation of the Canadian Authors’ Association in 1921, not for aesthetic principles, but for property rights over their work. For a succinct account of the formation of the caa, see Clara Thomas and John Lennox, William Arthur Deacon: A Canadian Literary Life (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), 20–2. 16 J.G. Sime, Our Little Life: A Novel of To-Day (1921; Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1994). 17 Ibid., 34–5. 18 Ibid., 34. 19 Terrence Craig, Racial Attitudes in English-Canadian Fiction, 1905–1980 (Waterloo, on: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1987). chapter one 1 William Arthur Deacon, “The Canadian Novel Turns the Corner” (1936), in Canadian Novelists and the Novel, ed. Douglas Daymond and Leslie Monkman (Ottawa: Borealis, 1981), 125–32. Emphasized phrases in the preceding paragraph are quotations. 2 Martha Ostenso, Wild Geese (1925; Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1961), 239. 3 Sara Jeannette Duncan, The Imperialist (1904; Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1990), 49. 4 Hugh MacLennan, Barometer Rising (1941; Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1989), 217–18. 5 Archibald MacMechan, Headwaters of Canadian Literature (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1924), 14.

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6 W.D. Lighthall, Songs of the Great Dominion: Voices from the Forests and Waters, the Settlements and Cities of Canada (London: Walter Scott, 1889), xxi. 7 MacMechan, Headwaters, 2. 8 A.J.M. Smith, Book of Canadian Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1943), 5; Desmond Pacey, A Book of Canadian Stories (Toronto: Ryerson, 1947). 9 Lorne Pierce, An Outline of Canadian Literature (Toronto: Ryerson, 1927), 233, 237, 238–9, 239–40. 10 V.B. Rhodenizer, A Handbook of Canadian Literature (Ottawa: Graphic Publishing Ltd., 1930), 263–4. 11 Raymond Knister, Canadian Short Stories (Toronto: Macmillan, 1928), xiii. 12 See E.T. Seton, Wild Animals I Have Known (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1898), 12–13, and C.G.D. Roberts, The Kindred of the Wild (Boston: L.C. Page, 1902). An indication of the range and insistence of Seton’s modern concerns, including the influence of Nietzschean ideas, is given in the survey of the many prefaces he wrote for his books by Lorraine McMullen in “The Multifaceted Prefaces of Ernest Thompson Seton,” in Prefaces and Literary Manifestoes, ed. E.D. Blodgett and A.G. Purdy (Edmonton: Research Institute for Comparative Literature, University of Alberta, 1990), 82–9. 13 Duncan, The Imperialist, 309. 14 Lionel Stevenson, Appraisals of Canadian Literature (Toronto: Macmillan, 1926), xii; Knister, xviii, xi; Pierce, 236, 233. 15 Tippett, Making Culture: English-Canadian Institutions and the Arts before the Massey Commission (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 49. 16 It has been influentially studied by Susanne Howe in Wilhelm Meister and his English Kinsmen: Apprentices to Life (1930; New York: A.M.S., 1966), Jerome Buckley in Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), and Randolph Shaffner in The Apprenticeship Novel: A Study of the ’Bildungsroman’ as a Regulative Type in Western Literature with a Focus on Three Classic Representatives by Goethe, Maugham, and Mann (New York: Peter Lang, 1984). At another extreme is the generic novel of self-development, which takes the journey of a protagonist from youth to maturity and self-realization, through conflict with social context and experience, more generally as its model. While the bildungsroman is commonly understood in terms at least as broad as this, the study of novels of female self-development have tended to reject the term bildungsroman because of its usage to refer to the specifically bourgeois male form. More is said about this problem in chapter 3. As will be seen, I will draw upon Franco Moretti’s description of the genre, which, finding not only Wilhelm Meister but Pride and Prejudice as original types,

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belongs to the latter camp. It may be noted here that while Moretti addresses both British and Continental forms, the pattern he describes for the Continental, rather than the British, has proven appropriate for this study. 17 Philip Child, “Fiction” (1938), in Canadian Novelists and the Novel, ed. by Douglas Daymond and Leslie Monkman (Ottawa: Borealis, 1981), 158. 18 Duncan, who defends realism and mocks conventional romance, nevertheless defends the value of the “remarkable” in romance against the “deification of the commonplace” in realism, and insists that writers be free of a false and narrowing opposition (“[An Algonquin Maiden: Romance and Realism],” Canadian Novelists, Daymond and Monkman, 82). Roberts introduces the modern “animal story” as a “psychological romance constructed on a framework of natural science” (Introduction to The Kindred of the Wild, Daymond and Monkman, 95). Salverson, whose The Viking Heart was and is valued for its realism, inserts a metacommentary in that novel to justify protagonists who are idealists, “not as yet smitten with the modernism which renders gladly enough unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s but denies unto God that which is God’s”: “They were still children enough to think that the noblest aim in life is to see and seek the lovelier side of natural existence, and so they still read and loved the old books. They had much to learn! Meanwhile they went on in the dimness of their light doing what seemed good and acceptable” (169). When Grove defines realism, he rejects the photographic metaphor of objectivity and asserts the primacy of a subjective expressionism and its authorization through the real world of the “not-I,” so that while the realist subjectivity is “an indispensable medium through which we see things,” a medium of “emotional response to the outside world and to life,” it must not abstract itself from mediation by the real, else it “ceases to be a realist who speaks through things and human figures” and “becomes the pedant who points his moral, be it with an ever so magic wand” (“Realism in Literature,” Daymond and Monkman, 140). Callaghan sums up his realist-idealist aesthetic in a nice chiasmus: “Cézanne’s apples. The appleness of apples. Yet just apples” (That Summer in Paris [1963; New York: Dell, 1964], 145). 19 To Marxist readers, this analysis reveals itself to be an example of what Fredric Jameson has called the register of a “national allegory” proper to modern narrative, according to which the private story of an individual is to be read in “transcoded” relationship to the public story of a society. His most contentious argument for this is in “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” in Social Text 5.1–2 (1986): 65–88. But the key concepts of this article – notably allegory and structuralist dialectics –

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20

21 22

23

24 25 26 27 28

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are unfortunately not spelled out in this article but elsewhere, in The Political Unconscious. My own generic claims, however, are less general than Jameson’s, and depend on more limited historical and literary arguments; in this way I hope to have met in good faith the influential critique of Jameson’s “national allegory” concept by Aijaz Ahmad (1987; reprinted as chapter 3 of In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures [New York: Verso, 1992]). That being said, it seems probable to me that the “structural” concept of nation (as of genre or allegory!) deployed herein remains justifiable (pace Ahmad) and consistent with Jameson’s own. The last phrase is Benedict Anderson’s, to describe the origin and coherence of the “nation” as an imaginary projection rather than a thing in itself. See Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 1983, rev. ed. 1991). F.P. Grove, The Master of the Mill (1944; Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1961). See Ramsay Cook, “The Triumphs and Trials of Materialism, 1900–1945,” in The Illustrated History of Canada, ed. by Craig Brown (Toronto: Lester, 1991), 379–97. The phrase is borrowed from Marx by Marshall Berman to describe the definitive experience of modernity (further discussed in chapter 4); this phrase and description have been applied to Canadian modernity by historian Ian McKay, in The Challenge of Modernity: A Reader on PostConfederation Canada (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1992). Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (London: Verso, 1987), 4–6. Duncan, The Imperialist, 7. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 96. So it is that regarding the English-Canadian national allegory of transition as youth, Jon Kertzer has argued, quoting Benedict Anderson, that if Lorne embodies that “magic of nationalism to turn chance into destiny,” he also reveals that history can push the other way, turning “destiny into chance” (“Destiny into Chance: S.J. Duncan’s The Imperialist and the Perils of Nation Building,” Studies in Canadian Literature 24.2 [1999]: 1–34). See also this chapter’s note 90. I follow Clara Thomas’s reading of the closure of the Advena narrative as a compromise, in “Canadian Social Mythologies in The Imperialist,” in Thomas Tausky, ed., The Imperialist: A Critical Edition (Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1996), 364. That such a compromise can co-exist with the sort of generic disfiguring according to which Elizabeth Köster sees Advena as a more radical sort of heroine, may be explained as

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31 32 33 34 35

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an effect of the definitive form and tensions of the bildungsroman genre itself (see Köster, ‹Was This The Course of Conduct That She Had Marked Out For Herself’: Advena as Self-Constructed Romantic Heroine,” in Tausky, ed., A Critical Edition, 456–65). Heble argues that Duncan’s narrative style insists, at least in part, upon a self-conscious “imagination” which, at the horizon of a coherent realism, marks its own fiction-making process as a work of abstraction informed by an authority and ideals whose legibility is explicitly external to the world of the protagonist, and belongs to Duncan. This, says Heble, reflects an imperialist perspective, and produces a homogenizing or “centralizing” vision of nationhood. I take this to be the effect of what I call in chapter 4 an “abstract imperialism,” in the representation of the narrator. See ‹This Little Outpost of Empire’: Sara Jeannette Duncan and the Decolonization of Canada,” in Tausky, ed., A Critical Edition, 412–14. Frank Davey interestingly extends such an argument, suggesting that this very perspective tends toward, and at the end of the novel reveals, a rule of fate that denies logic and meaning to narration mediated – as in the bildungsroman genre and thus disfigured – by the thought and action of the protagonist. See “The Narrative Politics of The Imperialist,” in Tausky, ed., A Critical Edition, 422–37. Duncan, The Imperialist, 309. F.P. Grove, Settlers of the Marsh (1925; Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1989), 139. Ibid., 236; see also 244. Hugh MacLennan, Barometer Rising (1941; Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1989), 15, 215, 214, 199, 214 respectively. Moretti suggests that this compromise form of internalizing contradiction can only work if abstract truths (social conditions belonging to collective life, but not directly represented by any person or event) are filtered out of the experience of everyday life, where they are either displaced into “personalizations” subject to dialogic exchange and mastery, or replaced by the metaphysical sense of a strange and transcending necessity (54; see 64–73). For Moretti’s corpus, it is the social conditions created by the French Revolution which are repressed in the bildungsroman. In MacLennan’s work, as critics have amply shown, the capitalist class history of Canadian modernity is always repressed or displaced into “personalized” cultural differences in men’s and women’s, French and English experience of it; or it is replaced by the sense of fate that Neil, like Penelope, chooses for himself: “In returning home he knew that he was doing more than coming back to familiar surroundings. For better or worse he was entering the future, he

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36 37 38 39 40 41

42 43 44

45 46 47 48

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was identifying himself with the still-hidden forces which were doomed to shape humanity as certainly as the tiny states of Europe had shaped the past” (MacLennan, Barometer Rising, 218). T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1917), in The Waste Land and Other Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1990), 5. Hugh MacLennan, Two Solitudes (1945; Toronto: Macmillan, 1978), 412. Mazo de la Roche, Jalna (1927; Montreal: Macmillan, 1945), 297. See Robin Mathews, “Waste Heritage: The Effect of Class on Literary Structure,” Studies in Canadian Literature 6.1 (1981), 65–81. Irene Baird, Waste Heritage (1939; Toronto: Macmillan, 1973), 222. Larry McDonald, “The Civilized Ego and Its Discontents: A New Approach to Callaghan,” in The Callaghan Symposium, ed. David Staines (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1981), 77–94. Morley Callaghan, Strange Fugitive (New York: Scribner, 1928), 203. Ibid., 204. Moretti, The Way of the World, 83. Moretti’s work ranges across the nineteenth century and emphasizes the Romantic period, in which a sense of modernity as he describes it flourishes. His discussion is thus focused a century earlier than my own, which correlates his description of modernity to this later, broad period in Canadian history. Callaghan, Strange Fugitive, 258–9, 262. Morley Callaghan, Such Is My Beloved (1934; Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1989), 171–2. McDonald argues that this displacement into an aestheticism is characteristic of Callaghan’s later novels (see “The Civilized Ego,” 93). Moss, John. “Introduction” to The Canadian Novel, vol. III: Modern Times (Toronto: nc Press, 1982), 7. To date, the most thorough-going reflection on this problem of period coherence is Dennis Duffy’s review and critique of a “linear” model of literary “progress,” in “Losing the Line: The Field of Our Modernism” (Essays on Canadian Writing 39: 164–90) (165). Duffy reviews the judgments of a number of writers and critics to the effect that this literary progress has not been linear and teleologically coherent, but marked by absences (especially the absence of modernism) and a heterogeneity that cannot be circumscribed by period or tradition. He suggests that modernism itself is heterogeneous, and describes modernism in Canadian fiction as a disparate “dialogue” with romanticism “marked by localism and sportive variance,” in which romanticism is “questioned and played with, at times repudiated, at times hesitantly affirmed” (167–8). An alternative form of periodization has taken the notion of a canon, rather than a tradition, for its framework, and this has allowed a model of structural

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51 52 53 54 55

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differences to replace one of aesthetic identity. For example, in “Conflicted Vision: A Consideration of Canon and Genre in English-Canadian Literature” (in Canadian Canons: Essays in Literary Value, ed. Robert Lecker [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991], 131–49), Donna Bennett argues that modern fiction is shaped by a contest between prairie realism and urban realism in the emergence of a Canadian canon. The argument is brilliantly persuasive in its illumination of two paradigmatic modern realist forms, but less persuasive in presenting them as theoretically exclusive and institutionally opposed (for example, the urban Callaghan’s Strange Fugitive is surely closer to the naturalistic fatalism of what she calls prairie fiction, while the prairie Salverson’s The Viking Heart is closer to the didactic social criticism of what she calls urban realism). The modern canon has also been divided into a contest between male and female writers, and in various ways. In “The Canon between the Wars: Field-Notes of a Feminist Literary Archeologist” (also in Lecker, Canadian Canons, 46–56), Carole Gerson has argued that a range of literary expression growing out of women’s conventional social realism and romance was excluded from an emerging male modernist canon that wanted to counter-define its aesthetics and ideology against it. In a contrasting view, which includes writing in French but is not closely historicized, Barbara Godard has argued that an emerging female modernism was suppressed from a male canon with a more conservative aesthetic until the 1960s, when men appropriated its value (“Ex-centriques, Eccentric, Avant-Garde: Women and Modernism in the Literatures of Canada,” Room of One’s Own 84: 57–75). Frank Davey, “English-Canadian Literature Periodicals,” in his Canadian Literary Power (Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1994), 108ff. Moretti argues that where this is no longer true in the development of the English bildungsroman, as in George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, which try to represent the experiences of a mass society, the genre itself disintegrates before the need for a more modernist representational mode which abandons its egocentricity to depict truths of collective life, since it cannot find adequate representation in the experience of youth (227–8). Don DeLillo, Libra (1988; Toronto: Penguin, 1989), 266. Randall Stevenson, Modernist Fiction: An Introduction (Lexington KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1992), 4–5. Ibid., 15. Qtd. in Stevenson, Modernist Fiction, 6. This has been influentially affirmed by critics as otherwise diverse as Linda Hutcheon, Frank Davey, and Stephen Slemon. On the construction

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57 58 59

60

61

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of Canadian postmodernism in relation to cosmopolitan forms of modernism, see the survey of critical positions offered by Davey (including his own) in “Contesting ‘Post(-)modernism,› in Canadian Literary Power, 245–93. The construction of Canadian postcolonial writing in relation to cosmopolitan forms of modernism and postmodernism is critiqued by Larry McDonald in “I Looked for It and There It Was – Gone: History in Postmodern Criticism” in a special issue of Essays on Canadian WritingFall 1995, 56: 37–50) devoted to postcolonial theory. McDonald complains that any Canadian form or expression of modernity and modernism has been absent from such constructions (and the special issue includes essays on modern writers that begin to redress this absence). Influential theorists he considers are Linda Hutcheon and Robert Kroetsch; others are Robin Mathews, whose earlier Canadian Literature: Surrender or Revolution criticizes Morley Callaghan for the neo-colonialism of his modernist aesthetic and affiliations, and Stephen Slemon, in his “Modernism’s Last Post,” in Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism, ed. Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1990), 1–11. For example, see Shirley Neuman, “After Modernism: English-Canadian Poetry since 1960,” in Studies on Canadian Literature: Introductory and Critical Essays, ed. by Arnold E. Davidson (New York: Modern Language Association, 1990), 54–73. Godard has argued in “Ex-centriques” (note 48 above) that modernism is to be found in a self-reflexive aesthetics of women’s writing which challenged male realist aesthetics up to the sixties (so that modernism itself was excluded from Canadian canonization until men could later authorize and valorize it). This definition of modernism has been stretched to include a broad, anti-conventional or self-reflexive aesthetic in twentieth-century writing, which blurs its boundaries with both realist and postmodernist aesthetics. For examples see this chapter’s note 48. For examples, see Canadian Novelists by Daymond and Monkman. Duncan, “[An Algonquin Maiden: Romance and Realism],” 81; “[New Directions in Fiction],” Daymond and Monkman, Canadian Novelists 91; “Outworn Literary Method,” Daymond and Monkman, 88. For example, Bertram Brooker’s Think of the Earth is not “realistic in the ordinary sense … and yet currents of thought and culture which are universal are sifted through the prism of a Canadian environment.” Philip Child, “Fiction,” (1938; in Daymond and Monkman, Canadian Novelists 154–8), 155–6. Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur (1938; New York: New Directions, 1968), 57–8.

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62 See McDonald, this chapter’s note 55. 63 These other experiences include, under the rubric of so-called “settlercolony postcolonialism,” less oppressive histories – histories incommensurable in degrees of racism and its immiseration – which I take to be postcolonialist insofar as they similarly derive from hierarchical structures of uneven development between empire and colony, between colonizers and colonized (categories which postcolonial writing shows typically co-exist and interpenetrate each other). The inclusion of such a category within postcolonial studies has not been universally accepted; a valuable theoretical defence of it may be found in Diana Brydon’s “Introduction: Reading Postcoloniality, Reading Canada” (Essays on Canadian Writing [Fall 1995] 56: 1–19), 9–13. 64 For representations of this skepticism in connection with the South African War, see The Imperialist, 100, 222, and Duncan’s Cousin Cinderella (1908; Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1994), 3–4. 65 In the United States, if we allow a kinship between postcolonial and postslavery discourses, such can be found in Houston Baker’s study of the aesthetic ideology of Harlem Renaissance modernism, periodized from its origin in the end of slavery to the beginnings of the postmodern period civil rights movements (noted above); and perhaps analogously in the conceptualizations of non-canonical, masculine and feminine “antimodernisms” by Jackson Lears (No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture 1880–1920, New York: Pantheon, 1981), Jane Tompkins (West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns, New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), Bonnie Scott (The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gilbar (No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, 3 vol., New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988, 1989), wherever these have postcolonial dimensions – in Canada, for example, in the poetry and fiction of the Iroquois feminist writer, E. Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake. 66 In Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature by Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and Edward Said (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 43–66. 67 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993), 186–90. 68 Malcolm Bradbury, in Bradbury and James McFarlane, eds., Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890–1930 (London: Penguin, 1991), 96. 69 Russell Brown has explored an interesting Canadian parallel: the same regrounding of a modernist poetic in the realist linguisticality of a historical space may be seen in Marshall McLuhan’s and Robert Kroetsch’s roots in the context of political and social strife which found expression in William

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Aberhart’s Western regionalism – a regrounding Brown identifies as postmodernist. See “The Prairie Postmodern; or, How Bible Bill Brought Postmodernism to Canada,” paper presented to the Association of Canadian Studies in the United States, Seattle, wa, Nov. 1995; publication forthcoming. The centrality of poetry to modernist thought is indicated, for example, by Lionel Trilling’s view of Sigmund Freud: “The great contribution he has made to our understanding of literature does not arise from what he says about literature itself but from what he says about the nature of the human mind: he showed us that poetry is indigenous to the very constitution of the mind; he saw the mind as being, in the greater part of its tendency, exactly a poetry-making faculty” (“Freud: Within and Beyond Culture,” [Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning (London: Secker and Warburg, 1966), 89–118], 92). T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” The Sacred Wood (1920; London: Methuen, 1976), 47–59. James Joyce, Ulysses (1922; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 42; cf. Leopold Bloom’s senses, 57. For example, while Jameson is able to celebrate the greater realism of a colonial modernism in the “linguisticality” of Joyce’s Ulysses because it does not need to exclude or mystify the logic of everyday life, in a compensatory formalism, by aestheticizing the experience of this life; Larsen is able to criticize, in the similarly “oral” modernism of Juan Rulfo’s El llano en llamas – in which the representation of an oral culture similarly mediates modernist and realist aesthetics under the pressure of a postcolonial modernity – for its aestheticizing of life in just this way. In the latter novel, he claims, actual orality is translated, not into a representation of intersubjective practice, but into a representation of subjective expression, into an image of local orality whose destination is neither oral nor local, but submitted to the “museum” of what a hegemonic national culture constructs as a kind of nostalgia for its own, now alienated difference. Here aestheticization compensates not for an absent historical experience, which is indeed compressed into the contradictory space of the modern periphery, but for an absent historical agency, which is reified into experience as such. See Neil Larsen, Modernism and Hegemony: A Materialist Critique of Aesthetic Agencies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990). The theory of overlap or introjection between modernism and realism discussed by Jameson and Larsen is not entirely new, as Larsen notes, since it is a component of the Latin American critical tradition of modernist theory occasioned by magic realism (52).

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74 Said, Culture and Imperialism, 220–38; see also his view of Joyce as a “decolonizing” writer, and a reading of Ulysses which amplifies and extends that of Jameson, 188, 189, 211. 75 Grace, Regression and Apocalypse: Studies in North American Literary Expressionism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 231. 76 Richard Murphy, Theorizing the Avant-Garde: Modernism, Expressionism, and the Problem of Postmodernity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 77 This may not be surprising, since, as Marc Redfield has argued, the very definition of the bildungsroman – caught self-reflexively between the defining authority of unifying, abstract features and the defining quality of differing, referential particulars – is an unresolvable tension mirrored in Grace’s definition of expressionism, and perhaps displaced into such objective forms from literary criticism. The present study does not escape this critique. See his Phantom Formations: Aesthetic Ideology and the Bildungsroman (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 1996), 43. 78 Moretti, The Way of the World, 11; and see 52–4. 79 Stephen Slemon, “Unsettling the Empire: Resistance Theory for the Second World,” 228–39 in Ajay Heble, Donna Palmateer Pennee, and J. R. Struthers, eds., New Contexts of Canadian Criticism (Peterborough, on: Broadview, 1997): 237–8. 80 Qtd. in Grace, Regression and Apocalypse, 32. 81 Ibid., Grace, 203–4, 209. 82 See my “The Nature of Modernism in Deep Hollow Creek,” Canadian Literature 146 (1995): 30–50. 83 Hugh MacLennan, “Where Is My Potted Palm,” (1952) in Daymond and Monkman, Canadian Novelists, 187–8. 84 Donna Palmateer Pennee has argued that a canonized English-Canadian modernism is based on the repressive or oppressive “sacrifice” of a feminine-coded counter-history to patriarchal narratives of Canadian cultural identity and maturity (“Canadian Letters, Dead Referents: Reconsidering the Critical Construction of The Double Hook,” Essays on Canadian Writing 51–2 [1993–94]: 233–57). 85 Duncan, The Imperialist, 19. 86 Ibid., 23–4. 87 Thomas, “Canadian Social Mythologies in The Imperialist.” 88 Duncan, The Imperialist, 80–2. 89 Ibid., 258. 90 Lorne’s problem is similar to that of the heroine of A Daughter of Today: his aesthetic talents can always be appropriated to the interests of

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power-seeking, rather than morally driven, other men. Women in The Imperialist remain powerless before such developments, but like the lower-class Mrs Crow or like Lorne’s condescended-to younger sister Stella, they view the plots of men with an ironic eye. 91 Duncan, The Imperialist, 298, 254–5. 92 “On market-days he slid easily, unless you looked twice, into what the Express continues to call the farming community. Invariably, if you did look twice, you would note that his stiff felt hat was an inch taller in the crown than those worn generally by the farming community, the pathetic assertion, perhaps, of an old sovereignty; invariably, too, his coat and trousers betrayed a form within, which, in the effort at adaptation, had become high-shouldered and lank of leg. And the brown skin was there to be noticed, though you might pass it by, and the high cheek-bones and the liquidly muddy eye. He had taken on the sign of civilization at the level which he occupied; the farming community had lent him its look of shrewdness in small bargains and its rakish sophistication in garments.” (278–9). 93 The feminization of this underside of modernity raises the question of distortion of form in the novel’s parallel bildung narrative – that of Lorne’s sister. The realist problematic is not here one of focalizing an outer world, in the values created by a region, but an inner world, in the values cultivated by modern knowledge and print: “She had taken a definite line, and she pursued it, preoccupied” (46). Like Elfrida, the protagonist of Duncan’s earlier bildungsroman, A Daughter of Today, Advena is attracted to a fin-desiècle Orientalist view of the unreality of all material life and its productions, and the purely subjective and aestheticized value of its ideals (i.e., her notion of Buddhism, 211). In the narrative closure to her courtly romance with a rather like-minded young man, and the intellectual if comical problems of their ascetically “unreal” love, the sudden and unrealistic lapse back into degraded romance – signalled by the plot’s simply being solved by the agency of a third party, and by the fact that nothing of Advena is narrated beyond this displaced solution, not even the closuring reunion itself – may perhaps be explained as a formal alternative to allowing the novel to suffer disfiguration to its realist space and perspective at the impasse achieved by this transcendental aestheticism, an aestheticism that has been brought about by the failure of the feminist ideals represented in Advena’s education and independent interiority to find any objective correlative in the patriarchal world of practical commerce and bourgeois mobility. (Our expectation that she might do so in continuing as a collegiate instructor is vitiated by the stunted, conservative portrait Duncan draws of such a career

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in A Daughter of Today – itself based on her own experience of dissatisfaction with the limitations of such work, which impelled her to embark on her career as a journalist.) Duncan’s feminism, mirrored in the impotent satire of such minor characters as Mrs Crow, is essentially disintegrative; it achieves the ironic relativization of values proper to liberal modernism, but it does not produce new values resistant to its own modernity. Its utopian ideal is either self-reflexively aestheticized, as in A Daughter of Today, or sentimentally degraded, as in The Imperialist. It is possible thus to see a similar tension in The Imperialist alone, in the irreconcilable narrative developments of Advena and Lorne – and a complementariness between degraded romance and experimental modernism which recent critics have found intrinsic to the modernist dissatisfaction with realism. In A Daughter of Today, the narrative possibilities are merely reversed for the two sexes, so that the heroine’s narrative has its closure in metafictional rather than realist form (as she finds her and her ironic art’s legitimation in the utopian or metafictional aestheticist perspective of her story as such, rather than in the bourgeois society of her realist space), while the complementary, male artist’s narrative has its closure in a sell-out. Lorne’s imperialism is tied to a contemporary discourse of racial purity. Duncan may be ironizing this view, without providing an alternative paradigm of racial tolerance or equality, by depicting it as the worst aspect of his idealism, one expressed misogynistically at the climax of his final political address: “And this Republic,” he says of America, “this Republic that menaces our national life with commercial extinction, what past has she that is comparable? The daughter who left the old stock to be the light woman among nations, welcoming all comers, mingling her pure blood, polluting her lofty ideals until it is hard indeed to recognize the features and the aims of her honourable youth...” (267). Not only does the narrator feel the need to interrupt (it is Duncan’s ellipsis) Lorne’s projection of the bildung which is counter to his own and to distance herself with an apology for the “intemperance of his figure,” we are also aware of her contrasting affirmation of the nation as a “blending” and weaving together of different, changing elements (49, 309). That the novel also has audiences but no audience, as Thomas Tausky has brilliantly illuminated (in his critical edition of it, noted above), is a parallel effect of the structural tensions I describe hereafter. Mark C. Taylor, Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 9. This is consistent with David Jordan’s claim that modernist regionalism constructs regionality as the reflection of an individual subjectivity, in

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New World Regionalism: Literature in the Americas (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), see 54. 98 See Grace, Regression and Apocalypse, 61–3. 99 Grace recognizes this when she suggests that, while Canadian fiction is not typically revolutionary, its expressionism tends to a regressive empathy (234). 100 Brian Trehearne, Aestheticism and the Canadian Modernists: Aspects of a Poetic Influence (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989), see 12–14. chapter two 1 Bertram Brooker, Think of the Earth (1936; Toronto: Brown Bear Press, 2000). 2 See Ann Davis, The Logic of Ecstasy: Canadian Mystical Painting 1920–1940 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 70, 160. 3 See illustrations 3, 5, 7, and 8 in Robert H. MacDonald, Sons of the Empire: The Frontier and the Boy Scout Movement 1890–1918 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993). 4 The significance of the intertextual figures of Raskolnikov and Hamlet should not be underestimated. In the thirties and forties, Brooker produced series of drawings based on Crime and Punishment and Hamlet; the other text that he produced such a series for is about a global wanderer, which reflects themes of crime and suspended action: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. 5 Davis, The Logic of Ecstasy, 160. 6 Tavistock resembles Baudelaire (especially the bust of Baudelaire by French sculptor Raymond Duchamp-Villon, which Brooker admired and which influenced his paintings; see Dennis Reid, Bertram Brooker [Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1979], 11–12): “His bare head was slender and flattened at the back, but his face widened in a remarkable way at the temples and sloped sharply to a narrow, jutting chin. His eyes were unusually large, greyish-brown in colour, shot with green. They were extremely mobile and betrayed the slightest change in his thoughts. His wide mouth was set very low in his face, the lips full, but drawn at the corners (Think of the Earth, 30–1). 7 Brooker’s identification with such an artistic ideal is suggested by a caricature of him drawn by Arthur Lismer c. 1930, in which Brooker is shown seated in a lotus position on a pedestal entitled “The Man What God Forgot.” Half of him is in the figure of an angel, with a halo; the

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other half in the figure of a devil, with a tail. One eye is dark and dramatic, the other calm and bright. Brooker’s sense of the importance of these immigrant labourers is suggested by an earlier version of the novel in which he planned “the influx of laborers to the G.T.P. [railway]” to “open the story, because it makes the town conscious of itself”; and in which the climax is staged as a conflict between Tavistock and the railway boss (“Plot Elements,” for “The Bread of Carefulness” [working title], mss 16: 7.4). In an earlier, unfinished novel with the same setting and similar plot elements, entitled “Sons of the Soil,” the protagonist who arrives in “St Mary’s la Prairie” is a Galician immigrant (mss 16: 3.3). Brooker could expect references to the Galicians to suggest not only a racial politics but anachronistically a class politics as well. In the period the novel was written, Canadian Galicians were the victims of a “red scare” which associated them with the spread of communism after the Bolshevik Revolution. See Craig, Racial Attitudes, 16–17. All manuscript references are to the Bertram Brooker Collection, Elizabeth Dafoe Library, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg. This process is satirized in another early, unpublished draft of a novel by Brooker, entitled “West is West,” in which a naïve, pretentious, optimistic young British immigrant comes to “St Mary’s la Prairie”: “To Canada – that was his halt – aca nada as the Spaniards had it, aca nada – ‘here is nothing.’ Swift is the change of time, my Spaniards. CANADA – ‘here is everything,’ that is today’s talk” (mss 16: 3.1). Frank Davey, Canadian Literary Power (Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1994), 139, 141, 143, 148–9. Sinclair Ross, As for Me and My House (1941; Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1989), 127, 131, 132. Though they may now be hardly noticed as a recurrent cliché, the desolate elements of Group of Seven landscape paintings – such as fire-burnt forest settings and foregrounded solitary dead trees – were considered just as ugly or disturbing as the townscapes described above, by contemporary viewers. Significantly, these reactions are in turn parallel to the shocked public response to war paintings by later Group members, which A.Y. Jackson said in 1919 unsentimentally presented “just the stark naked fact that war is here, bereft of all glory, and that its aftermath is misery and filth.” War painting was conceived as an origin of the Group’s later, modernist work in Canada. Arthur Lismer sought, in 1920, to force the Canadian public out of the “shelter” provided by conventional art “from the disturbance of thought brought about by visits to art galleries and War Records exhibitions.” Numerous critics’ responses, positive and negative,

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to the violence and morbidity of the Group’s war, landscape, and townscape paintings are collected and contextualized in the excellent exhibition catalogue produced by Charles C. Hill, The Group of Seven: Art for a Nation (Toronto: National Gallery of Canada and McClelland & Stewart, 1995). Smith’s “The Lonely Land” (1926–36) may be found in his Poems: New and Collected (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1967): 50–1. Important discussions of the homosexual element in As for Me and My House are to be found in Keath Fraser’s As for Me and My Body: A Memoir of Sinclair Ross (Don Mills, on: ecw, 1997) and Valerie Raoul’s “Straight or Bent: Textual/Sexual T(ri)angles in As for Me and My House,” Canadian Literature 156 (1998): 13–28. The riddle, which Mrs Bentley rightly recognizes as a “nonsense riddle in Alice in Wonderland,” is Paul’s way of encoding his sense of the immediate scene – crows flying above harvested fields – with his anguished but impotent desire to connect words with effect, with productivity in their relationship. “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?” he asks, and responds, mostly to himself, “there was a time when all pens scratched” (208). Barbara Godard, “El Greco in Canada: Sinclair Ross’s As For Me and My House” (Mosaic 14.2: 55–72), 67. Davis, The Logic of Ecstasy ix. I am tempted to add to this list the portraits of Prudence Heward, to the extent that, as a 1948 review observed, “her subjects look out of their frames wondering, and a little afraid. They strike one strongly as people living in a world which they cannot quite comprehend” (qtd. in Barbara Meadowcroft, Painting Friends: The Beaver Hall Women Painters [Montreal: Véhicule, 1999]). The same impression has powerfully affected me, except that the portraits I’ve seen suggest a wondering without the suggestion of naivety, and rather more defiance than fear. For an excellent discussion of the relationships specifically between painting and writing, see Sherrill Grace, “A Northern Modernism, 1920–32: Canadian Painting and Literature,” Literary Criterion 19.3–4 [1984]: 105–24. See Davis, The Logic of Ecstasy, 75. Brooker recorded that he “was searching for the means of conveying the recession of objects in space – the movement of curves swinging around out of reach of the eye – and of the spatial relations between the objects in the composition” (from an address at Hart House, Toronto, 1949; published in his Sounds Assembling, Birk Sproxton, ed. [Winnipeg: Turnstone, 1980], 36; qtd here from Davis, The Logic of Ecstasy 26). Brooker qtd in Davis, ibid., 155.

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21 Ibid., 75. Davis analyses these paintings in these terms, 76–8, 157. Citing a poem written by Brooker in 1927, she also shows that his ideal of individual compromise with a transcending, fluid power reconciling good and evil is one he developed in association with his painting (78). 22 Brooker, “Nudes and Prudes” (1931), in Documents in Canadian Art, ed. Douglas Fetherling (Peterborough, on: Broadview, 1987), 72–3. 23 The “here and now” aesthetic, and its roots in American existentialism (Whitman) and transcendentalism (Emerson), are discussed by Ann Davis, 49ff. She quotes Housser making the connection between the particularity of historial situation and a national geography: “For Canada to find a true racial expression of herself through art, a complete break with European traditions was necessary; a new type of artist was required … a deep-rooted love of the country’s natural environment … a love of our own landscape, soil and air.” 24 Brooker qtd in Davis, The Logic of Ecstasy, 164. In addition to these limits to the representation of a unified national experience, art itself was limited in Canada by “a population too small to provide an adequate audience,” and within such an audience, “a general conception of art” founded on an antiquated and elitist, European “connoisseurship” rather than a new and socially practical, “national consciousness.” 25 Brooker qtd in Davis, The Logic of Ecstasy, 74. Brooker felt that the representation of nature was something everyone could share – and so considered Bliss Carman and Walt Whitman together as exemplary democratic poets. Brooker too put nature in the front window. chapter three 1 Ethel Wilson, Hetty Dorval (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1990), 85–6. 2 Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Virginia M. Allen, The Femme Fatale: Erotic Icon (Troy, ny: Whitston, 1983). 3 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (Yeats qtd.), No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Vol. 2, Sexchanges (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 1989), 4, 5, 46. 4 E.D. Blodgett, “Alias Grove: Variations in Disguise,” in Blodgett, ed., Configurations: Essays on the Canadian Literatures (Downsview, on: ecw, 1982), 112–53. 5 Edmund Wilson, Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870– 1930 (1931; London: Fontana, 1984). 6 D.C. Scott, Untitled Novel, ca. 1905 (Moonbeam ON: Penumbra, 1979).

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Frederick Philip Grove, The Yoke of Life (Toronto: Macmillan, 1930). Grove, Fanny Essler (Ottawa: Oberon, 1984). Grove, The Master Mason’s House (Ottawa: Oberon, 1976). This is consistent with his polemical view of the city in Canada as the source of tradition and the country of the avant-garde: “In Canada, the fundamentally new things, a new attitude towards life and its mysteries, arise in the country, not in the city. In contradistinction to older countries, the city stands here for the conservative tendencies: the country is in a cultural revolt; the city tries to impose upon it some semblance of cultural continuity” (“Apologia Pro Vita et Opere Suo” [192–7 in Paul Hjartarson, ed., A Stranger to My Time: Essays by and about Frederick Philip Grove (Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1986)], 197). Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington, in: Indiana University Press, 1986), 45. In this case, the death of Flaubert’s Emma suggests a double suicide akin to the death of Axël’s and Len Sterner’s women, as the exorcism of a projected quality of the male self. Grove, Over Prairie Trails (1922; Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1957). J.J. Healy, “Grove and the Matter of Germany: the Warkentin Letters and the Art of Liminal Disengagement” (89–105 in Hjartarson, ed.), 103–5. Grove, “Flaubert’s Theories of Artistic Excellence” (3–10 in Hjartarson, ed., A Stranger to My Tune), 9. This male writing process, even its characterization in terms of Wilson’s Axel figure, is directly expressed by John Glassco’s Preface to his novella triptych, The Fatal Woman (the composition of the first two novellas dated 1934–46, the third 1964; published in Toronto: Anansi, 1974). Fascinated by the figure of the femme fatale, says Glassco, and influenced by the Decadent movement, he “decided to write books utterly divorced from reality, stories where nothing happened” (ii). No matter how many times he rewrote first one and then another of the femme fatale stories in the 1930s and 40s, however, there was “still too much movement.” Glassco identifies himself with Wilson’s Axel, wanting to “stand outside of history, economics, literary fashions and all the hurly-burly of the facts of life” in a realm of “pure illusion” (iv), but he justifies the stance by turning it back into process, into narrative: one in which the writer does not “stand” outside life, but “like a minor Orpheus,” enters his fantasy realm “in the hope of bringing some of it back to earth,” where it might be recognized as “uncomfortably close to reality” after all (iii). To express the contradiction between the aestheticist vision and its narrative supplement in writing, Glassco rejects the novel, and chooses the form that will “make

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his trip as short as possible” (and still be a trip!), the novella. With the novel is rejected the realist style and character development strategies of the bildungsroman – although the “trip” is tied to a coming-of-age figure in each novella. Glassco barely escapes the generic field of the present study, into the avant-garde. This applies not only to his triplicate novella form, but to his Preface as well, which ironically defends his aestheticism while giving an impartial, historicizing account of it. Donna Palmateer Pennee, “Canadian Letters, Dead Referents: Reconsidering the Critical Construction of The Double Hook,” Essays on Canadian Writing 51–2 [1993–94]: 234–5. Hugh MacLennan, Barometer Rising (1941; Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1989). A Homeric image of limiting vision is given to Penelope, who undergoes an eye operation during in the aftermath of the explosion (171–4). James De Mille, A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888; Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1969). Ralph Connor, The Man from Glengarry (1901; Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1967). Frank Parker Day, Rockbound (1928; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973). Raymond Knister, White Narcissus (1929; Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1990). Howard O’Hagan, Tay John (1939; Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1989). Mazo de la Roche, Possession (Toronto: Macmillan, 1923). Martha Ostenso, Wild Geese (1925; Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1971). Ostenso, The Dark Dawn (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Co., 1926). It is tempting to think that what I have called empathic as opposed to abstract desire in the libidinal register of these narratives as national allegories is consistent with Irene Gammel’s fascinating and more specific comparison of the figuration of eros as pleasure as opposed to displeasure, and their relationship to the constructedness of nationalism in Canadian literature, in ‹My Secret Garden’: Dis/Pleasure in L.M. Montgomery and F.P. Grove,” English Studies in Canada 25 [1999]: 39–65). Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland, eds. The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development. (Hanover, nh: University Press of New England, 1983). Susan Fraiman, Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and the Novel of Development (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). Nina Auerbach, Romantic Imprisonment: Women and Other Glorified Outcasts (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); Gail David, Female Heroism

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in the Pastoral (New York: Garland, 1991); Penny Brown, The Poison at the Source: The Female Novel of Self-Development in the Early Twentieth Century (London: Macmillan, 1992). Esther Kleinbord Labovitz, The Myth of the Heroine: The Female Bildungsroman in the Twentieth Century (2nd ed., New York: Peter Lang, 1988). Another “awakening” narrative, Shackles by Madge MacBeth (Ottawa: Graphic, 1926), unexpectedly supports my claim. In this novel, the heroine suppresses her awakening, choosing to sacrifice her independent career as a writer for her sense of duty to an almost grotesquely, intolerable husband. Sara Jeannette Duncan, The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib (1893; Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1986). L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables (1908; New York: Bantam, 1976). de la Roche, Delight (1926; Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1961). Sheila Watson, Deep Hollow Creek (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1992). Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (London: HarperCollins, 1991). This may suggest why, for instance, the rural or frontier “schoolteacher” figure who appears as a tertiary figure or minor type of the Western in American literature, appears more centrally as a type of protagonist, as she is for Ostenso and Watson, and for male writers such as Raddall – her primal importance as a modern, liberal medium even for Canadian men testified to in Robert Harris’s painting, A Meeting of the School Trustees (1885). The seductive, femininized book itself is the subject of George Reid’s painting of a boy reading in a hayloft, entitled Forbidden Fruit (1899). chapter four

1 Robert Kroetsch in Ajay Heble, Donna Palmateer Pennee, and J.R. (Tim) Struthers, eds., New Contexts of Canadian Criticism (Peterborough ON: Broadview, 1997), 360. 2 David M. Jordan, New World Regionalism: Literature in the Americas (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 8–10. 3 The centrality of rural fiction – often referred to, in light of its dominant regional form, as Prairie realism – has already been recognized as perhaps the central genre of modern English-Canadian fiction between the wars. For example, in his entry “Novels in English 1920 to 1940” in the recent Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature (2nd ed., Eugene Benson and William Toye, eds., Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1997), Donald Stephens names the West and particularly the Prairies as the “dominant setting” of the period

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(817); while Cal Smiley’s previous entry, “1900–1920,” acknowledges the centrality of regional, “local-colour” writing in general (816). Peter Rider has suggested that the “agrarian ideal” is a staple of twentieth-century Canadian culture and literature, and noted that “by the 1920s some novelists were beginning to question the agrarian ideal, but some were not” (Introduction [vi–xix] to The Magpie, by Douglas Durkin [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974], xiii). Although all kinds of rural literature were popular during this period, it was this latter range of novelists (let us say, agrarian ironists) who became canonized in the sixties and after, as regional writers of modernist or postmodernist interest (Donna Bennett, “Conflicted Vision: a Consideration of Canon and Genre in English-Canadian Literature,” 131–49 in Canadian Canons: Essays in Literary Value, ed. Robert Lecker [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991], 148). The novelty of my argument is to deny a prevailing view that the anti-pastoral irony in this modern rural realism is to be located in a vision of Nature as a metaphysical order and ahistorical fate, as the “’timeless’ existence” of “an essentially indifferent universe, in which personal effectiveness is unlikely and social ideals largely unreachable” (Bennett, “Conflicted Vision,” 146). I will argue, rather, that Nature is merely another metaphor, a screen upon which a particularly modern and Canadian, historical fate is self-consciously or self-reflexively projected. I also wish to argue against, in Buckler criticism specifically, the location of irony in the figure of the aspiring Artist, and the tension between an individualistic ideal and relapse into a common type – versions of which motif are to be found in Marilyn Chapman, “The Progress of David’s Imagination,” Studies in Canadian Literature 3 (1978), 186–98; Warren Tallman, “Wolf in the Snow,” Ernest Buckler, ed. Gregory Cook (Toronto: McGrawHill Ryerson, 1972); J.A. Wainwright, “Fern Hill Revisited: Isolation and Death in The Mountain and the Valley,” Studies in Canadian Literature 7 (1982), 63–89; and D.J. Dooley, “Style and Communication in The Mountain and the Valley,” Dalhousie Review 57 (1977–78), 671–83. I wish to build upon Bruce F. MacDonald’s crucial insight that for Buckler, artistic isolation is merely a figure for the “common condition” of modern, spiritual isolation; see his “Word-Shapes, Time and the Theme of Isolation in The Mountain and the Valley,” Studies in Canadian Literature 1 (1976), 194–209. 4 Ernest Buckler, The Mountain and the Valley (1952; Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1982). For readers of this publisher’s 1989 edition, there is a six-page pagination difference between the two throughout; so that, for example, p. 10 of the latter is p. 16 of the former. 5 For two decades following the 1970 edition of The Mountain and the Valley, critics debated whether this narrative represents an ultimate

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8 9

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communal fabric, or an ultimate individual alienation. Claude Bissell’s Introduction to that edition emphasizes the former, and it sparked a series of articles emphasizing the latter or negotiating paradoxically between the two (beginning with Douglas Barber, “David Canaan: The Failing Heart,” Studies in Canadian Literature 1 [1976], 64–75). My own analysis tends toward the latter, and is in keeping with Janice Kulyk Keefer’s thesis that while “there has been no significant shift in Maritime writing from ’communal’ to ’social’ foci there has been a change in the imaginative portrayal of community – predictably, from that rockbound conviction of the primacy and solidarity of community one finds in nineteenth-century Maritime fiction to recent perceptions that crisis or decay is the bottom line of communal life”; see her Under Eastern Eyes: A Critical Reading of Maritime Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), 34. John Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism: A Critical Introduction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981). Derek Gregory, Geographical Imaginations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 209. Gregory relies on Malcolm Bradbury’s argument for the urban determination of modernism in “The Cities of Modernism,” found in Bradbury and James McFarlane, eds., Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890– 1930 (Toronto: Penguin, 1991), 96–104. The claim is a conventional one, which Bradbury explicates and surveys for the purposes of a reference book. The definitive critical study of such nostalgic and pastoral alternatives to a contemporary consciousness in literature is Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973). Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982). My interpretive approach here as elsewhere in this study is deterministic, but I hope not vulgarly so, for it aims to illuminate only one set of meanings which make up the literary work in question, and this considered as a complex and personal response to, not a simple and general reflection of, the world beyond literature. Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1984). This way of seeing the production of regional difference reflects the familiar, postcolonial double bind originally expressed by Albert Memmi, whereby the colonized identity can only affirm a difference which is defined in advance as contrary to the identity of the colonizer, since in general the frame of reference for a regional or indigenous identity can never again be withdrawn from its horizons in an (imperialist-produced) world

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12 13

14 15

16

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Notes to pages 150–2

history. See “The Two Answers of the Colonized,” The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957; Boston: Beacon, 1967), 119–41. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989). In Fredric Jameson’s view, modernist formalism is an attempt to translate the global imperialist condition of relative space, which can appear “absent” to the local experience of absolute space, into “the very syntax of poetic language itself” in order to provide the mapping of absolute space with its missing coherence. References are to Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 1991), 411. Laurence Ricou, “David Canaan and Buckler’s Style in The Mountain and the Valley,” Dalhousie Review 57 (1977–78), 684–96. In A History of Canadian Literature (New York: New Amsterdam, 1989), W.H. New captures perfectly the paradoxical (seemingly contentless) modernism of Buckler’s style, which in The Mountain and the Valley adapts “the image of a patchwork quilt to the interrupted narrative,” but admits its interests to lie “as much in Canaan’s limited society, in regional detail, as in the independence of literary form” (172–3). Political economists do not agree upon the criteria which should define the transition from a pre-modern (pre-capitalist) to a modern (capitalist) economy; on this matter, see essays collected in T.H. Aston and C.H.E. Philpin, eds., The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985). But Panitch’s perspective, which I rely on below, is consistent not only with the new geography discussed above, but with influential economic theorists who have studied rural Canada, such as Dorothy Smith in her work on the class structure of farm family work (see note 23 below), Anthony Winson in his work on regional agriculture, and C.B. Macpherson in his work on political ideology in rural Alberta, Democracy in Alberta: The Theory and Practice of a Quasi-Party System (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1953). The modern class transformation of rural regions is given a useful overview in Anthony Winson, The Intimate Commodity: Food and the Development of the Agro-Industrial Complex in Canada (Toronto: Garamond Press, 1992), 89–92. “Dependency and Class in Canadian Political Economy,” Perspectives on Canadian Economic Development: Class, Staples, Gender, and Elites, ed. Gordon Laxer (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1991), 267–94. “Canada,” Panitch says, “was a society where exchange value predominated” in both City and Country; so that for example, “the growth to cities and industries in

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18

19 20 21

22 23

24

25 26

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Ontario after 1850 took place in terms of a symbiotic relationship with the agricultural staples hinterland” (274). This affected the social structure of rural regions, where “the independent commodity producers on the land were a transitional class to the proletariat in that, unlike serfs and slaves, their transition to wage labour was based on a direct shift to formally capitalist class relations due to the pressures to which they were subject as competitive individual producers in the market” (275). Anthony Winson, “The Uneven Development of Rural Economy in Canada: The Maritimes and Ontario,” (Gorsebrook Research Institute for Atlantic Canada Studies, Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, ns, Working Paper 6–85, 1985), 15–16. Winson, “Uneven Development,” 14. Buckler, Ox Bells and Fireflies (1968; Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1974), 251–63. The same “equalising” urbanisation of the rural, its alienations, emptinesses, and copies, is described in Ox Bells and Fireflies, 298–300. The shift from an experience of absolute to relative space is also explicit, when Buckler contrasts post-war to pre-war Valley life: “Eyes drove no hard bargains with themselves or with the eyes of anyone else. When you walked down the road and talked to each other you made each other solid as places” (87). Margery Fee, “Ernest Buckler’s The Mountain and the Valley and ’That Dangerous Supplement,› Ariel 19 (1988), 71–80; see 74. On the modern transition of rural farm women from co-operative domestic managers to subordinate labourers, see Dorothy E. Smith, “Women’s Inequality and the Family” (156–95 in Inequality: Essays on the Political Economy of Social Welfare, ed. Allan Moscovitch and Glenn Drover [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981]), 159–67. Lyric time is figured as literally lyric in the father’s monologue, quoted above, which is presented to the reader as a translation of “feelings” that are “not word-shaped, like David’s,” from the “notes” which make “a tune in him.” We know this is an unconscious lyrical pattern because we are told there is “no page in his mind or heart where their tracery [is] legible to himself” (156). This existentialist reading is conventional in criticism of the novel, and was first stated influentially by Warren Tallman in “Wolf in the Snow.” The fantasy identity of the worldly wanderer and writer provides the central figure in Buckler’s The Cruelest Month (1963; Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1977). Paul Creed, born in Vancouver, is described as “an expatriate,” having “worked at a weather station in Alaska,” “been a timekeeper

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28

29

30

31 32 33

34

Notes to pages 159–63

in the Labrador mine fields” and “an oil rigger in the Caribbean,” and “taught solid geometry” in Nigeria (10). He reputedly “knows everything,” and “could reproduce the whole bloody Encyclopaedia Britannica if he had to” (16). Despite his realization of the global (and imperialist) mobility and knowledge dreamed of by David, this hero abandons his wanderings for a place in the Annapolis Valley, and fails to write his experience. True to the ironic self-reflexivity of Buckler’s narrative, it gives no thought to “exactly how” the Englishman or the Frenchman or the Micmac who earlier defined David’s space “was.” This relationship of language and economic media to imperialist modernization is usefully theorized by sociologist Anthony Giddens, who describes them as “disembedding mechanisms” which replace local forms of knowledge and value with externally structured forms, as part of the larger process by which absolute spaces become reproduced as relative spaces in a modern society. See Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), 17–18. This historicist thesis tries to offer a structural counterpart to Margery Fee’s poststructuralist thesis that “Buckler’s suspicion that the invocation of presence, the attempt at transparently perfect writing, is impossible, means that the only model that he could write about his ’people’ is one that shows a writer failing to write such a novel. Anything else would be deceptive” (79). Alan R. Young, “The Genesis of Ernest Buckler’s The Mountain and the Valley” (195–205 in The Canadian Novel, Vol.II, Modern Times, ed. John Moss [Toronto: nc Press, 1982]), 196. See Arnold E. Davidson, Coyote Country: Fictions of the Canadian West (Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 1994), 5–7. Jane Tompkins, West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). The discourse of “sentiment” in American culture is illuminated by Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Avon, 1977). My own application of this term to Raddall’s text will not be entirely consistent with the actual historical culture of this discourse, to which his antimodernism reacts – but refers to the values of affective community and of religious transcendence by which it is typically recognized. Peter Filene, Him/Her/Self: Sex Roles in Modern America, 2nd Ed (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 93. The “wane of opportunity,” in a business world increasingly monopolized, bureaucratized, and defensive of its elite, frustrated a manliness based on economic success. Moreover,

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37

38

39 40

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even a manliness defined by less materialistic and more traditional values of “honest” and “manly” work found itself undercut by a corporatized and bureaucratized middle-class world that measured production as a corporate rather than individual achievement. Thus men “held jobs that gave them less fulfillment by traditional standards of character and also less by the newer standards of materialism” (74). This double insecurity of masculine gender was strained further by the vociferous feminist critique of a male culture held responsible, in its “misrule,” for a degenerate modernity, and by a corresponding movement towards empowerment of women outside the domestic sphere. T.J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981). Gwendolyn Davies, “The Literary ’New Woman’ and Social Activism in Maritime Literature, 1880–1920,” in Separate Spheres: Women’s Worlds in the 19th-Century Maritimes, ed. Janet Guildford and Suzanne Morton (Fredericton, nb: Acadiensis, 1994), 233–50. The social activist and Christian-moralist foundations of this public writing culture are important, because they partly explain the continuity between Eastern Canadian and American women’s cultures (but also the education of Maritime women in American colleges). Women’s writing culture in this larger sense, beyond the “literary ‘New Woman,› and as it is connected to Christian movements and institutions, to modernization, and to social change, is also documented in a study of Nova Scotian women’s diaries and letters by Margaret Conrad, Toni Laidlaw and Donna Smyth, eds., No Place Like Home: Diaries and Letters of Nova Scotia Women 1771–1938 (Halifax: Formac, 1988). On the national scale, see Carole Gerson, “The Canon between the Wars: Field-Notes of a Feminist Literary Archeologist” (46–56 in Lecker, ed., Canadian Canons), 54–5; on the regional scale, see her “The Literary Culture of Atlantic Women between the Wars,” in Myth and Milieu: Atlantic Literature and Culture, 1918–1939, ed. Gwendolyn Davies (Fredericton, nb: Acadiensis, 1993), 62–70. Thomas Raddall, The Nymph and the Lamp (1950; Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1963). Popular novels and stories of the sea were also written during the first half of the century by Nova Scotian authors F.W. Wallace and Colin McKay. It should be remembered that these authors, like Raddall, published mainly with central Canadian and international periodicals and presses; their literature was not regional in the market sense.

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41 Raddall has expressed his belief in this topos as a regional identity, outside his fiction. Of Nova Scotia he averred: “Life here is not easy, it is a struggle that demands a man’s utmost and will take no less; we live on a rocky shore in the cold embrace of Mother Sea, whose whims are sometimes kind but often cruel; but we Nova Scotians do not take our pleasures sadly for all that” (“The Literary Tradition in Nova Scotia: An Address to the Canadian Authors’ Association Meeting at Halifax, July 5th, 1949,” Archives, Killam Memorial Library, Dalhousie University, 6–7). 42 Raddall estimated that by 1972 he had sold nearly two and a half million books, of which over six hundred thousand were The Nymph and the Lamp, in Canada, Britain and the United States. See Ian McKay, “History and the Tourist Gaze: The Politics of Commemoration in Nova Scotia, 1935–1964” (102–38 in Acadiensis 22.2 (1993)], 116. 43 McKay, “The Tourist Gaze,” 121. See also his discussion in The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 223–4. 44 Laura Goodman Salverson, The Viking Heart (1923; Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1975). 45 Pauline Johnson, The Shagganappi (Toronto: Ryerson, 1913). 46 See McKay, The Quest of the Folk, 255. 47 On interpellation, see Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review, 1971), 170ff. 48 Thomas Raddall, “Remarks by Thomas H. Raddall to Canadian Authors’ Association at Hart House, Toronto, June 29th, 1946,” Archives, Killam Memorial Library, Dalhousie University, 2–3. 49 Thomas Raddall, “The Literary Art,” Dalhousie Review 34.2 (1954), 138–46. 50 On Maritime modernization similarly reflected in other writers, see the extraordinary work by Christopher J. Armstrong, “Cultural Studies and New Developments in Atlantic Canada,” presented to the Atlantic Canada Workshop, Queen’s University, October 16, 1999; as well as Erik Kristiansen’s contribution to Daniel Samson, ed., Contested Countryside: Rural Workers and Modern Society in Atlantic Canada, 1800–1950 (Fredericton, nb: Acadiensis, 1994), 225–56. 51 There are hints of this reversal in the generic Western and romance sign that he is dark, as opposed to Carney’s blond (103, 12), and in the antimodernist sign that his voice is a more feminine tenor as opposed to Carney’s baritone (139). 52 T.S. Eliot, “Marina” (1930), in Selected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 103–4. Despite the conservatism of Raddall’s own literary style, it is not unlikely that he knew Eliot’s poetry. His published remarks on mod-

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56

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ernist writing (see Diana Austin, “Helping to Turn the Tide: An Interview with Thomas H. Raddall,” Studies in Canadian Literature 11.1 [1986], 108– 39; and “The Literary Art,” 142) and the contents of his personal library (Archives, Dalhousie University) testify to a serious interest in the experimental styles of writers such as James Joyce, William Faulkner, Joseph Conrad, and Ernest Hemingway. Thomas Raddall, Roger Sudden (1944, 1945; Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1972). Peter Friesen, “Jane Eyre’s Conservative Cousin: The Nymph and the Lamp,” Studies in Canadian Literature 15.2 (1990), 160–73. Qtd in Austin, “Helping to Turn the Tide,” 123, 118. For a persuasive description of the “monologic” discourse of British imperialist history, as against that of its “losers,” in Raddall’s historical fiction, see Chris Ferns, “Look Who’s Talking: Walter Scott, Thomas Raddall, and the Voices of the Colonized,” Ariel 26.4 (1995), 49–67; see 65. For a historical account of the roots of what I’ve called abstract imperialism, see Carl Berger’s The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism1867–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970). Such an internalization or abstraction of imperialism from an objective correlative in past or present history is also powerfully suggested by David Creelman’s reading of the ideological tensions and historical horizons of Raddall’s fiction, in “Conservative Solutions: The Early Historical Fiction of Thomas Raddall,” Studies in Canadian Literature 20.1 (1995), 127–49. Creelman concludes for example that in Roger Sudden, while the author “presents the conservative/hierarchical English colony of Halifax as undefeated,” the protagonist “is constructed through a series of negations and at the end of the text he emerges as an unstable vacuous figure; an empty hole into which the romance structure threatens to collapse” (146). And this Creelman relates to a “defining tension” in Maritime modernity, reflected in the novel by “the celebration of a conservative value system … fused with a modernist anxiety about the failure of conventional signifying practices and the instability of traditional social structures” (147). The principle of liberal abstraction which I suggest translates this imperialist discourse into a compromise form with such modern conditions, is so powerful that in 1942, despite Raddall’s explicit racial prejudices, Malcolm Ross could see in his historical fiction the “discovery of ourselves as a nation, as a people, as Canadian, British, French, American, Semitic, Nordic, Asian, African, Slavic – we were each of these, and yet more than any one of these. We were – or at least we were becoming – ourselves” (qtd in Alan R. Young, ed., Time and Place: The Life and Works of Thomas H. Raddall [Fredericton, nb: Acadiensis, 1991], 36).

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57 On the characteristic tension between loyalist values and self-interested entrepreneurial values in Raddall’s historical fiction, see Elizabeth Waterston, “Thomas Raddall, Historical Fiction, and the Canadian Romance” (11–24 in Young, Time and Place), 16–19. 58 ‹You thought – we both thought that love in a bungalow by the Arm [in Halifax] or even a flat in Montreal would be nothing less than heaven. But all the time I knew it couldn’t work. It simply couldn’t. You’d never be happy … in what you called a madhouse that day I first talked to you. For it is mad, all of it.’ She gave her head a backward toss, a gesture that rejected not merely Halifax but the whole frenzied continent” (85). 59 On the continuing and complex relationships between traditionally communal and modernizing capitalist social forms in the Maritime region, see Samson’s Afterword to Contested Countryside, 257–72. 60 A historical account of the Canadian “frontier” as a combination of these elements is given by Kenneth D. McRae, “Fragment Cultures and the Frontier,” The Frontier Thesis and the Canadas: The Debate on the Impact of the Canadian Environment, ed. Michael S. Cross (Toronto: Copp Clark, 1970), 172–9. 61 Significantly, the book is prefaced by Ernest Thompson Seton, the Boy Scout schismatic whose non-militaristic internationalism and idealization of an Indian rather than a Colonist identity, Macdonald tells us, were incompatible with the militarism and patriotism of the more influential Scout models offered by the British Robert Baden-Powell and the American Daniel Beard (see Robert H. Macdonald, Sons of the Empire: The Frontier and the Boy Scout Morement 1890–1918 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993). 13, 140–2). 62 Thomas Raddall, “The Literary Tradition in Nova Scotia,” 3; “A Boy’s Reading and a Man’s Writing: An Address to the Young People’s Section, Canadian Library Association, at Their Conference in Halifax, June 10, 1964,” Archives, Killam Memorial Library, Dalhousie University, 2–4. 63 For descriptions of this symbolic function of the “Indian” in Raddall, see Waterston, “Thomas Raddall,” 14–15 and Barry Moody, “The Novelist as Historian: The Nova Scotia Identity in the Novels of Thomas H. Raddall” (140–53 in Young, ed., Time and Place), 143–4. 64 Perhaps it does so, in part, in the image of the Folk, which I have suggested assumes similar values of an abstracted or internalized imperialism in the figure of a postcolonial common man. For as Michèle Lacombe has observed, Raddall’s representation of the domestic and private spheres of women can serve a social-critical function consistent with his populist rep-

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65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74

75 76 77

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resentation of Folk in the public sphere. See her “Gender in the Fiction of Thomas H. Raddall” (87–97 in Young, ed., Time and Place), 91. Lacombe, “Gender,” 91. Bruce MacDonald has identified the absence of the father, and the desire to belong and to be given purpose, as central to Raddall’s fiction (172). Helen M. Buss, “The Nymph and the Lamp and the Canadian Heroine of Consciousness” (43–59 in Young, ed., Time and Place), 55, 44. See interview with Austin, “Helping to Turn the Tide,” 113. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 87, 115. George Grant, “A Platitude,” 137–43 in Technology and Empire: Perspectives on North America (Toronto: Anansi, 1969), 137. See T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1940, 1990): 42, 48n424. Frank Parker Day, Rockbound, (1928; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), 292. Alice Jones, Bubbles We Buy (Toronto: William Briggs, 1903). The novel villainizes Blacks and Hispanics. Alice Jones’s subsequent Gabriel Praed’s Castle (Boston: Herbert B. Turner and Co., 1904) villainizes Jews. Susan Carleton (Jones), The Micmac, or The Ribboned Way (New York: Henry Holt, 1904). Robert Stead, Dry Water: A Novel of Western Canada (Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1983). The novel was written in 1935. Sheila Watson, The Double Hook (1959; Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1989), 12. conclusion

1 Clark Blaise, A North American Education: A Book of Short Fiction (1973; Don Mills, on: General Publ. Co., 1974), 39. 2 Joy Kogawa, Obasan (1981; Toronto: Penguin, 1983), n.p. 3 Robertson Davies, Fifth Business (1970; Toronto: Penguin, 1977), 5. 4 The emptiness of the bildungsroman form in Fifth Business is announced right at the start, when the character narrator prefaces his life story, from childhood to retirement age, with the claim that “A boy is a man in miniature, and though he may sometimes exhibit notable virtue, as well as characteristics that seem to be charming because they are childlike, he is also a schemer, self-seeker, traitor, Judas, crook, and villain – in short, a man. Oh, these autobiographies in which the writer postures and simpers as a David Copperfield or a Huck Finn! False, false as harlots’ oaths!” (15).

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Margaret Laurence, The Diviners (1974; Toronto: Bantam, 1975), 453. Marian Engel, Bear (1976; Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1982), 139–40. Peter Such, Riverrun (Toronto: Irwin, 1973), ix. Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers (1966; Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1991), n.p. 9 John Berger qtd in Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion (1987; Toronto: Penguin, 1988), n.p. 10 Timothy Findley, The Wars (1977; Toronto: Penguin, 1978), 191. 5 6 7 8

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Index

Abel, Elizabeth, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland (eds.): The Voyage In, 139 aboriginal peoples, 14, 179; métis figures of, 67, 74– 5, 80–1, 181; representation of, 53, 58–9, 62, 75, 81, 126, 129–30, 181, 191–3, 199, 230n63 aestheticism, 9–11, 60–4, 73, 82, 110–14, 122, 126, 137–8, 190, 213n93, 219n15 alienation, 7, 18, 31–5, 52– 4, 63, 77, 94, 135, 147–8, 155, 158–63, 180, 199, 223n5, 225n21 Allen, Virginia, 104 Anderson, Benedict, 147–8, 205n28; imagined community, 3, 23, 58, 81 antimodernism, 162–7, 175, 177, 189 Appadurai, Arjun, 3–6, 53, 200 Atwood, Margaret, 197–8 avant-gardism, 8, 9, 50, 66, 219n10 Baird, Irene: Waste Heritage, 17, 33–5, 50, 129 Baker, Houston A. (Jr.), 201n6, 210n65 Baudelaire, Charles, 67, 75

Baudrillard, Jean, 156 Benjamin, Walter, 6 Bennett, Donna, 208n48, 222n3 Berman, Marshall, 148–50 bildungsroman, 8, 13, 17– 18, 22–39, 48–51, 102, 106, 143, 196, 203n16, 212n77 Birney, Earle, 34 Blais, Marie-Claire, 148 Blaise, Clark: A North American Education, 197, 200 Blodgett, E.D., 108, 114–15, 127, 182 Boy Scouts (movement), 180–1, 230n61 Bradbury, Malcolm, 45, 223n7 Brooker, Bertram: Think of the Earth, 62, 66–82, 91– 101, 107, 109, 127, 135, 192, 209n60; illus. 89–90. Brown, Penny, 139–40 Brown, Russell, 210n69 Brydon, Diana, 210n63 Buckler, Ernest, 184; The Cruelest Month, 225n26; The Mountain and the Valley, 18, 33, 146–8, 151–62, 165–6, 185–8, 193; Ox Bells and Fireflies, 154–5, 225n21 Buss, Helen, 184

Callaghan, Morley, 23, 61, 204n18, 209n55; Strange Fugitive, 16–17, 34–7; Such Is My Beloved, 17, 35–8, 61, 127–8 Canadian Authors’ Association, 166, 173, 202n15 capitalism, 40, 148, 161–3, 167; figures of, 27, 110, 131–2, 154–5, 157, 170, 175, 192; global, 78–80, 105; global vs. regional, 53, 148–54, 224n16; national, 4, 24, 152, 224n17 Carleton (Jones), Susan, 162, 191–2 Carman, Bliss, 218n25 Carr, Emily, 97 Carson, Ann, 200 Chesterton, G.K., 173 Child, Philip, 22, 43, 199, 209n60 class, 18, 22, 32, 40, 101, 149, 185, 224n16, 225n17; representation of bourgeois, 37, 201n9; representation of working, 56–7, 67, 110, 137, 216n8; represented relations of, 62, 77, 114, 191, 206n35 Chopin, Kate, 141 Craig, Terrence, 13–14 Creelman, David, 229n56 Cohen, Leonard, 198–9

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234 colonialism, 15, 20, 43; representation of, 63, 79, 190 colonial society, 18, 23, 44– 7, 51, 128, 153, 179 Confederation (1867), 18, 23–4, 44 Connor, Ralph, 125, 168 Conrad, Joseph, 164, 167, 173, 229n52; Heart of Darkness, 59, 62, 69 consumerism, 117 cubism, 46, 98, 151 Davey, Frank, 38, 84, 92, 206n30, 208n55 Davidson, Arnold E., 182, 226n31 Davies, Gwendolyn, 165, 183 Davies, Robertson, 198, 231n4 Davis, Ann, 72, 96 Day, Frank Parker, 162; Rockbound, 17, 125–6, 166, 188–9 Deacon, William Arthur, 15–17, 54, 146 Dean, Misao, 10 Defoe, Daniel: Robinson Crusoe, 158–60 de la Roche, Mazo, 61, 148; Delight, 50, 129, 142; Jalna, 16–18, 32–3, 50, 62–4; Possession, 17–18, 30–2, 59, 62, 129–30; Whiteoaks of Jalna, 17 De Mille, James, 124–5, 166 Depression (economic), 24, 83 deterritorialization, 4 Dijkstra, Bram, 104 disfiguring (defined), 60, 64–5 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 67, 72, 100; illus. 90 Dougall, Lily, 166 Duffy, Dennis, 207n48 Duncan, Sara Jeannette, 23, 42–3, 141, 153, 190, 204n18; A Daughter of Today, 8–11, 140, 142, 159,

Unreal Country 213n93; The Imperialist, 17–35, 50, 54–62, 109, 187 Eliot, T. S., 32, 46, 49, 175–6, 184, 188, 228n52 empire, 6, 51, 143, 150; British, 18–19, 23, 59, 110, 137; economy of British, 24, 27, 54. See also imperialism Engel, Marian, 198–9 expressionism, 46–51, 60, 82, 85–6, 96, 100, 148, 212n77; demotic, 51–4 (defined), 60, 66–7, 83, 101, 146 existentialist themes, 18, 23, 78, 80, 105, 147, 161, 168, 218n23. See also Nietzschean figures Faulkner, William, 229n52 Fee, Margery, 157, 226n29 feminism, 9, 11, 50, 130, 183–4, 213n93, 227n34 femme fatale (figure), 57, 70, 76, 78, 103–6, 111–39, 164, 219n15 Filene, Peter, 116, 163–4, 169, 226n34 Findley, Timothy, 198–9 Flaubert, Gustave, 116–7, 120, 164, 219n11 Forster, E. M., 146–7, 159; Howards End, 45 Fraiman, Susan, 139 French Canada (representation of), 110–12 Freudian psychology, 29, 35, 62 Friesen, Peter, 178 Frye, Northrop, 5, 136 Gallant, Mavis, 197 Gammel, Irene, 220n26 gender, 22, 57, 102–6, 115, 122, 149, 199–200 Gerson, Carole, 166, 208n48, 227n38 Giddens, Anthony, 226n28

Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar, 57, 103–5, 116, 164–5 Glassco, John, 219n15 globalization, 4–6, 40, 47, 51, 54, 60–3, 72, 80, 84–5, 92, 94, 159–60 Godard, Barbara, 96, 208n48, 209n56 Goethe, J.W. von, 18, 22, 72, 199; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 22, 25, 28, 32, 69, 139 Gowdy, Barbara, 200 Grace, Sherrill, 48–50, 52, 60, 212n77, 217n17 Graham, Gwethalyn, 129 Grant, George, 47, 187–8 Gregory, Derek, 149–51 Group of Seven (painters), 86, 97–8, 170, 216n12. See also Harris, Lawren; Housser, Fred; Varley, F.H. Grove, Frederick Philip, 23, 61, 112–22, 143, 148, 153, 157, 162, 193, 204n18; Fanny Essler and The Master Mason’s House, 114–15, 143; In Search of Myself, 17–18; The Master of the Mill, 24, 115, 118; Over Prairie Trails, 119– 20; A Search for America, 16–17; Settlers of the Marsh, 17, 29, 62, 64, 106–11, 115–18, 123–4, 193–4; The Yoke of Life, 113–18, 122, 127, 182 Haggard, Rider: She, 57, 59, 78, 104, 126, 164 Harris, Lawren, 85–6, 91, 96, 99–100; illus. 87 Harvey, David, 149–51 Healy, J.J., 120 Heble, Ajay, 29, 206n30 Hegel, G.W.F., 25; existential dialectic, 22, 120–1 Hemingway, Ernest, 229n52 Heward, Prudence, 217n17

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The Disfiguring of Development Highway, Tomson, 198, 200 Housser, Fred, 99, 218n23 Hutcheon, Linda, 208n55 Huyssen, Andreas, 116–20, 164 immigrants, 14, 24, 145; representation of, 61, 63, 67, 79, 81, 93, 216n8. See also migration imperialism, 29, 94, 137, 140, 161, 167, 181, 184; Canadian, 13, 22, 37, 57–8, 177–81; global, 44–7, 61–2, 69–72, 77, 81, 105, 149–52, 159. See also empire individualism, 15–16, 21 Innis, Harold, 47 Jackson, A.Y., 216n12 Jameson, Fredric: dialectics of, 11, 41, 204n19; on ideologemes, 185; on modernism and imperialism, 44–6, 51–2, 60–1, 72, 151, 211n73, 224n13 Johnson, Pauline (Tekahionwake), 168, 181, 210n65 Johnston, Wayne, 199 Jones, Alice, 189–91, 231n74 Jones, Susan. See Carleton, Susan Jordan, David M., 145–6, 214n97 Joyce, James, 212n74, 229n52; Ulysses, 45–8, 61 Keefer, Janice Kulyk, 180, 223n5 Kertzer, Jonathan, 7, 205n28 Kipling, Rudyard, 178, 181 Knister, Raymond, 21; White Narcissus, 17–18, 61, 126, 148, 153 Kogawa, Joy, 198 Köster, Elizabeth, 205n29 Kroetsch, Robert, 84, 144, 162, 199, 210n69 kunstlerroman, 8

Lacanian psychology, 36, 83 Lacombe, Michèle, 183, 230n64 Lang, Fritz, 118 Larsen, Neil, 47–8, 51–2, 60, 211n73 Laurence, Margaret, 193, 198 Leacock, Stephen, 61, 187 Lears, T. Jackson, 116, 163– 4, 169 Leavis, F.R., 173 Lee, Sky, 199 liberalism: American, 62, 99; vs. conservatism, 123, 190, 214n93, 221n37; ideology of, 40, 51; independent self of, 31, 119, 178; progress, 140 Lismer, Arthur, 215n7, 216n12 Lukács, Georg, 63 MacBeth, Madge, 221n31 McClung, Nellie, 162 MacDonald, Bruce, 182, 222n3, 231n66 McDonald, Larry, 35, 207n47, 209n55 MacDonald, Robert, 180–1 McKay, Ian, 167, 169, 205n23 MacLennan, Hugh, 54, 61, 206n35; Barometer Rising, 17–19, 30–1, 62–4, 123–4, 143, 166, 187–8, 199; Two Solitudes, 17, 24, 30–2 McLuhan, Marshall, 7, 99, 118, 147–8, 210n69 MacMechan, Archibald, 19–20 Massey Commission (1949), 8 Mathews, Robin, 34 media, 4–6, 40. See also print Memmi, Albert, 223n11 métis. See aboriginal peoples migration, 4, 6, 119, 137, 145. See also immigrants Mitchell, W. O., 17

235

modernism: Canadian, 5–8, 13, 148–51, 197; cosmopolitan, 10–11, 13; defined, 39–41; postcolonial, 13, 41–8 modernization, 148–53. See also capitalism, urbanization Montgomery, L. M., 17, 29, 141–2, 165–6 Moodie, Susanna, 18 Moretti, Franco, 24–5, 28, 30, 36, 48, 60, 140, 206n35, 208n50 Moss, John, 38 Munro, Alice, 197 Murphy, Richard, 50 nation (idea of), 6–7, 29 nationalism, 3, 13, 19–22, 37, 44, 99, 177, 220n26 Native peoples. See aboriginal peoples naturalism, 12, 23, 57, 114, 189, 208n48 Neuman, Shirley, 209n56 New, W. H., 224n15 New Woman, 9, 28 Nietzschean figures, 19, 27, 29, 35, 62, 67, 69, 71, 74, 81, 93, 113, 175, 203n12. See also existentialist themes O’Hagan, Howard, 162; Tay John, 33, 126–7 Ostenso, Martha, 61, 148, 153, 157, 162; The Dark Dawn, 130–3, 136; Wild Geese, 17–18, 29–30, 64, 130, 133–8, 141, 193–4, 221n37 Pacey, Desmond, 20 Panitch, Leo, 152, 224n16, 224n17 patriarchy (representation of), 9, 11, 18, 50, 57, 78, 105–7, 115, 118–20, 125, 130–5, 139–40, 157, 163, 183–4, 194, 212n84, 213n93

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Pennee, Donna Palmateer, 122, 212n84 Pierce, Lorne, 20 popular culture, 7–8 postcolonial critique, 7, 51–2, 209n55, 223n11 postcoloniality (historical condition), 13, 18–19, 28, 39, 43–4, 47, 53, 63, 70, 77, 113, 128, 138, 143, 148–9, 153, 160–2, 177– 80, 194, 210n63 postcolonial writing, 23, 42, 66, 93, 161–2, 197. See also modernism (postcolonial) postmodernism, 7, 14, 42, 144, 197–200, 209n55, 222n3; as form of modernity, 3, 53 postnationalism, 3, 7, 200 Pound, Ezra, 41, 43, 173 print, 6, 10, 40, 147–8, 159– 61, 213n93

Richardson, John: Wacousta, 18 Roberts, C.G.D., 23; Kindred of the Wild, 21, 204n18 romance, 49, 50, 58, 118, 171, 182, 185–6, 189; antimodernist, 175; in Canada, 5, 43; historical, 187; ideology of, 23, 43; imperialist, 61; nationalist, 3, 63, 124; popular, 67, 117, 146; proletarian, 12, 34; psychological, 114; vs. realism, 5, 23, 102, 114, 162, 179, 182– 3, 191, 204n18; realist, 39, 51, 94, 184; women in, 54, 106, 143, 177 romanticism, 42, 207n48 Ross, Malcolm, 229n56 Ross, Sinclair: As For Me and My House, 17, 63, 82– 98, 101, 107–9, 193–4

Taylor, Mark, 60, 85 Thomas, Clara, 56, 205n29 Tippett, Maria, 8, 21–2 Tomlinson, John, 147, 150–1 Tompkins, Jane, 163–6, 171–2 tragedy, 53, 117, 120–2, 199 Traill, Catherine Parr, 18 Trehearne, Brian, 7, 60 Trilling, Lionel, 10, 211n70

race, 101, 149, 177–8, 191, 216n8 racial differences, 13, 22, 32, 77 racism, 13–14, 58, 62, 79, 80, 129, 178, 190, 210n63, 214n94, 231n74 Raddall, Thomas, 162, 180– 1, 184; The Nymph and the Lamp, 18, 64, 143, 167–88, 221n37; Roger Sudden, 17, 166, 178, 181, 229n56 realism, 42, 45–54, 59–66, 72, 84, 91–5, 100, 117–21, 146, 151, 173–4, 189, 221n3; and expressionism, 82, 98; and regionalism, 185–6; women in, 130, 138. See also romance (realist) (vs. realism) Redfield, Marc, 212n77 regionalism, 15–16, 39, 47– 8, 56–61, 95, 101, 144–95, 200, 211n69, 214n97 reification, 8, 11, 40, 135, 138 religious themes, 19, 37–8, 56, 84

Said, Edward, 45, 48 Salverson, Laura Goodman, 23; The Lord of the Silver Dragon, 16–17; The Viking Heart, 24, 129, 168, 177–8, 204n18 Schopenhauer, A., 78. See also existentialist themes Scott, Duncan Campbell, 109–12 Seton, E.T., 230n61; Wild Animals I Have Known, 21 Shakespeare, William, 175– 6 Sime, J.G., 11–12, 166 Slemon, Stephen, 51–2, 208n55 Smart, Elizabeth: By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, 17, 129, 142 Smith, A.J.M., 20, 86 Smith, Neil, 149–52 Stead, Robert, 162, 193 Stevenson, Randall, 40–1 structuralism, 197–9 Such, Peter, 199 Swan, Susan, 199

War: First World War, 163, 166, 169; South African, 44, 69–70, 80, 210n64; and writing, 161 Watson, Sheila, 148; Deep Hollow Creek, 17, 30, 53– 4, 142, 221n37; The Double Hook, 53, 194 Western (genre), 162–73, 180–1, 221n37 Whitman, Walt, 218n23, 218n25 Wiebe, Rudy, 199 Williams, Raymond, 7, 223n7 Wilson, Edmund, 108–9, 113, 182 Wilson, Ethel, 143; The Equations of Love, 129–30; Hetty Dorval, 18, 29, 103, 130, 136–9; The Swamp Angel, 141 Wood, Joanna: The Untempered Wind, 57 Worringer, Wilhelm, 52–3

Tausky, Thomas, 214n95

urban fiction, 15 urbanization 24, 40, 56, 61, 149–53, 193; as metropolitan modernity, 37, 44, 72, 84–5, 91, 116, 118, 133–5, 145–8, 155–6, 179. See also modernization Varley, F.H.: illus. 88 Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Comte de: Axël, 108, 112–13, 182

Yeats, W. B., 48, 103–4, 164, 173 Young, Alan, 161