well, i know one marsh i have no intention of settling on

PRAIRIE LITERATURE IS DEPRESSING AND I DON'T WANT TO READ ANOTHER BOOK SET IN ALBERTA, SASKATCHEWAN, OR MANITOBA, EVER, SO HELP ME GOD. There, I said it. The modernist period is bleak enough without throwing the ever-cheerful and upbeat prairie narrative into the mix. I get it, you're without hope, hopeless, devoid of hope. I promise to never, ever accuse a resident of the Canadian prairies of being in possession of hope. I got that. Now I am utterly hopeless too, thanks to your positive outlook on the universe. Good lord. I have only ever been to Winnipeg and a brief stop in Calgary once -- are the rural prairies as bleak and tragic as these books make it out to be? I'll have to visit one day to find out.

Settlers of the Marsh
by Frederick Philip Grove (nee Felix Paul Greve)

In this country there was a way out for him who was young and strong. In Sweden it had seemed to him as if his and everybody's fate had been fixed from all eternity. He could not win out because he had to overcome, not only his own poverty, but that of all his ancestors to boot. . . .

-----

"Well," he said, "people here think more of their machinery than of their houses; more of their farms than of their lives. The house is merely a piece of the farm, a place to sleep in while you are not at work. I want a house of which the farm is a part, the place where what is needed in the house is grown. These people here, when they get anywhere, are rich at best. Their life has slipped by; they have never lived. Especially the women."

Oh dear. What a troubling book this has been. I'm going to start with a run down of the plot, and then I'll talk about what some of my problems with the book are, and then I'll touch on some of the thematic or formal issues in the text.

Settlers of the Marsh tells the story of Niels Lindstedt, a Swedish immigrant to the Canadian prairie intent on making his way in the new world. He had been held back by the poverty of his parents back in Sweden even after their death, and rather than fighting against class distinctions he opted to make a fresh break. Niels worked hard in Canada and built up an enviable homestead on the sweat of his own brow, owing nothing and incurring no debt. Over this time, he falls in love with the neighbour girl, a woman named Ellen. He doesn't speak to Ellen for years, but after her father dies he begins to develop a friendship with her. Eventually, he speaks of marriage, but she tells him that she can never marry because of a promise she made to her mother -- her mother was dreadfully brutalized and regularly raped by her father, and she raised Ellen to be capable of being completely independent of men. So Ellen tells Neils that she can only ever be a sister to him, not a wife. Neils flips out and doesn't speak to her for like 13 years. (Bear in mind, please, that this is his supposed best friend who has just revealed to him her most horrific and painful experience of witnessing her mother being raped by her father... His response is to whine about how shitty his lot is and head for the hills.) In this thirteen years, Neils accidentally sleeps with a female acquaintance, the widow Mrs. Vogel. In his chaste and innocent world view, he believes that having sex with this woman means that he has to marry her, so he does. Eventually, he realizes that he has married the town whore. Oops! The relationship deteriorates over time and eventually she cheats on him out in the open in order to make a fool of him to other people in the community -- but he gets the last laugh when he shots her to death (and then kills his favourite horse)! Take that, bitch! Oh, and then he goes to prison for ten years. BUT AT THE VERY END, he meets up with Ellen again, and she apologizes for causing his downfall, and they don't kiss, but they reach an understanding. Let me tell you, after all the tragedy, it's extremely satisfying to see nothing happen. Lovely.

So, yeah. I have a lot of problems with the book as a whole, mostly with the depiction of women in the text. Depictions of women here are extremely ambivalent. The independent woman in the text, Ellen, is only strong and independent because she is damaged. Her desire to not rely on men is pathological and is seen as a weakness. That she doesn't want to depend upon Neils actually keeps him distant from her because he doesn't know how to interact with her. In the end, she is punished for her independence -- because she didn't marry Neils, but couldn't marry anyone else because of her love for Neils, she never has children, and we learn at the end of the novel that children were all she really wanted. Why is Ellen punished in this way? All she does is respond to the trauma of her childhood by making a promise she doesn't fully understand to her dying mother. That bitch! Her independence makes Neils fear her
and stunts her ability to grow as a person. Perhaps the caution here is one against her extreme response, but it is hard to imagine what her response then ought to have been, if not an extreme one.

And then there's Clara Vogel, the town whore. Listen, I'm not going to say she's perfect or anything, and she certainly does some despicable things, but it seems to me that the punishment (death by shotgun) doesn't really fit the crime here. It's interesting that when the case goes to trial, Neils really should be sentenced to death, and refuses to give the judge anything that could be considered a mitigating factor in the case. The trial, then, never hears about the things Clara Vogel did within the marriage. Instead, the judgement is based upon the fact that Clara Vogel was a prostitute before she was a wife -- killing a wife gets you the death penalty, but killing a prostitute-turned-wife gets you only ten years. Violent people take note: it totally pays to marry a former whore.

I don't get what the message is here, especially because the real tragedy here is that Clara actually loved Neils, until he withdrew from her. Re-reading the narrative, he withdraws before she does, and her increasingly destructive behaviour is really a response to his chill at his own realization that he has married the wrong woman... for him. Neils is plagued by a major flaw throughout the text: he is unable to communicate. Because he can't express his real feelings to anyone, he is always stuck where he doesn't want to be. Had he expressed his desires to Ellen earlier, he would have had time to pursue another woman before falling so deeply in love with her. Had he expressed to Clara that his desire to marry her was out of guilt, she would have refused the marriage and Neils would have learned a little something about the world's oldest profession. Neils is punished, sort of, in that he goes to prison -- but he ends up with the woman he wanted all along, and where Ellen is denied children, Neils already has a surrogate son in his farmhand, Bobby. So does Neil really pay, in the end, compared to the cost to the women characters who are no more to blame? A product of the times, perhaps, but certainly more overtly troubling gendering going on here than is some of the other books of the period. It's especially interesting because the female characters are exceptionally real -- unlike Cohen, who shies away from multi-dimensional women, or Klein, who just omits the women -- and their realness makes the resulting outcomes all the more upsetting.

Interestingly, the stand-by-your-man types, like Mrs. Lund, are ridiculed for their naiveté and weakness. Women on the prairies, it seems, just can't win for losing.

I think, overall, to me anyway, this is a book about the importance of action and forthrightness. Neils lack of action in approaching Ellen and his lack of forthrightness in dealing with his wife is ultimately his undoing. Characters like Bobby, who know what they want and act upon it, are the real victors in this story. Everyone else has lesser degrees of loss. I think Neils loses the least, compared to what Ellen and Clara both must give up... But he still loses 10 years in prison and suffers through the same horrible marriage as Clara (though he doesn't end up with a bloody death... basically, anyone in the book who doesn't get shot is at least a bit of a winner). Sticktoitiveness is also valued here -- another reason why Bobby is so successful, and perhaps that willingness to work is what shelters Neils from more overt failure.

On a final note, this. . . . book . . . . uses. . . . way too many. . . . ellipses. I can't figure why he ends nearly every thought with one. . . . All I could think about was an evocation of the vastness of the prairie. . . . but . . . . I feel. . . . that's a st. . . .retch.

i'm officially not surprised by anything canlit has to offer me

I think it's not a good sign that really, reading Beautiful Losers, nothing even remotely surprises or shocks me anymore. Not the sex, not the drugs, not the iv-holy-water usage, not the pedophiles, not the bestiality, not the wife-swapping, not the racism, not the sexuality-switching, not the violence, nothing. Thanks, Canadian Literature, I am now officially broken inside. Awesome. Seriously, though, this book smacks of the 1960s. Quebec Separatists, needle drugs, wild sex, and poets as 'cool.' Man, imagine how the 2000s will be remembered in Canada... Moderate politics, pharmaceutical abuse, condoms in classrooms, and poets as 'poor.' I kind of feel like we got ripped off, fellow 20-somethings. That said, I probably could have comfortably lived without readings Cohen's treatise on the hotness factor of thirteen year old Aboriginal rape victims. When you find out your wife was gang raped at 13, your first thought should probably never be, "Oh, man, yeah, if I met her when she was 13 I totally would have raped her." Because that's not creepy at all.

Beautiful Losers
by Leonard Cohen

What is most original in a man's nature is often that which is most desperate. Thus new systems are forced on the world by men who simply cannot bear the pain of living with what is. Creators care nothing for their systems except that they be unique. If Hitler had been born in Nazi Germany, he wouldn't have been content to enjoy the atmosphere. If an unpublished poet discovers one of his own images in the work of another writer it gives him no comfort, for his allegiance is not to the image or its progress in the public domain, his allegiance is to the notion that he is not bound to the world as given, that he can escape from the painful arrangement of things as they are. Jesus probably designed his system so that it would fail in the hands of other men, that is the way with the greatest creators: they guarantee the desperate power of their own originality by projecting their systems into an abrasive future.

-----

Never stare too long at an empty glass of milk. I don't like what's happening to Montreal architecture. What happened to the tents? I would like to accuse the Church. I accuse the Roman Catholic Church of Quebec of ruining my sex life and of shoving my member up a relic box meant for a finger. I accuse the R. C. C. of Q. of making me commit queer horrible acts with F., another victim of the system, I accuse the Church of killing Indians, I accuse the Church of refusing to let Edith go down on me properly, I accuse the Church of covering Edith with red grease and of depriving Catherine Tekakwitha of red grease, I accuse the Church of haunting automobiles and of causing pimples, I accuse the Church of building green masturbation toilets, I accuse the Church of squashing Mohawk dances and of not collecting folk songs, I accuse the Church of stealing my sun tan and promoting dandruff, I accuse the Church of sending people with dirty toenails into streetcars where they work against Science, I accuse the Church of female circumcision in French Canada.

First things first, this book deals with a fictionalized account of a real person, so for interest's sake I've included her wikipedia page here. She's a blessed and venerated, but not a saint (I think)! And a virgin! And an Aboriginal Canadian! The more you know...

So, if you can't tell well enough from the excerpts above, Beautiful Losers is a deeply weird novel. One of the best-known experimental novels in Canada, it is perhaps best remembered as an exemplification of what the sixties was supposedly all about -- this book quite literally is sex, drugs, and free love. If you read this novel through to the end, however, you may also think something else -- like, did Fight Club just completely rip off the entire concept of itself from this book, or what? Chuckie P., I would love to sit down and talk to you about this one day.

Anyway, be that as it may, Beautiful Losers is essentially a novel about a love triangle. We have our primary narrator, who is a nameless professor of history. He is focused on a life long study of a dying-out tribe of Aboriginal people, whom he refers to only as A----- (all through the book, I was wondering if this tribe is borrowed a little from the Beothuks... though Cohen's tribe here is largely wiped out earlier than an Beothuks and located in a different geographical place, myths like the red body paint and the conflict with neighbouring tribes, as well as the extinction, seems borrowed from the history of the Beothuk people). Our narrator is married to Edith, one of the last living members of the A----- tribe. He married her at 16 and at 24 she was crushed to death in an elevator shaft in an apparent suicide. Finally, the Edith and our narrator are both involved sexually with F. F. grew up in an orphanage with our narrator and claims to have made Edith beautiful and cured her acne. He engages sexually with both members of the couple apparently in an attempt to liberate them from their genitalia. It's all very weird. Anyway, those are basically the only three characters. The book is structured in three parts. The nameless professor narrates the first book, which describes his relationships with Edith and with F., as well as documenting his research on the A-----, particularly Catherine Tekakwitha, with whom he is obsessed. The second book is a letter written to the nameless professor by F. from inside a mental institution where he ends up after he attempts to blow up a statue of Victoria in a bid to rally separatist support. Finally, the third book is an epilogue told in the third person, and this is where things get especially odd, because here all there main characters seems to morph and blend into one another leaving the novel almost completely unresolved by the end.

Beautiful Losers is, I think, at its core a novel about selfhood and identity. The nameless professor is shaped by external forces. He studies the A----- people so that he can be the foremost expert on something, and he studies history so that he has a past to cling to (because, being an orphan raised in an orphanage, he lacks knowledge of his own history). His marriage to Edith is really an elaborate way of getting close to Catherine Tekakwitha, whose life trajectory exactly mirrors Edith's from a rape at 13 to death at 24 -- in this way, he further embraces the history he wants to call his identity, and further slips into the role he has chose for himself. He allows F. to shape him and teach him, and even molds his sexuality to match and suit F.'s whim. He even allows F. to take his wife for his own sexual partner, and when his involves himself sexually with F. the act is referred to often as masturbation -- the line between the nameless professor and F. is intentionally blurred so that, when we finish the novel we can't really distinguish which character was essentially which , or even if there were ever two separate men there at all. F., too, can accept and wear any given identity, which is symbolized by his photographic memory which absorbs and assimilates everything with the nameless professor requires years of education to properly retain. F. becomes the professor as much as the professor becomes F. Though F. is dominant in the relationship, the transformation that occurs by the end of the third book is by no means unilateral.

The identity issue is further developed through the backdrop of Quebecois nationalism and separatism. When the nameless professor asks F. what all the fuss is about, F. proclaims that the Quebecois in favour of Separatism believe that they are being treated like black people in America. This is a reference of course to the sentiment behind the book by Pierre Vallieres titles Nègres blancs d'Amérique, or White Niggers of America, which was being penned while Cohen was writing Beautiful Losers. The sentiment behind this idea is that les maudits anglais spent their lives degrading and denying the good things in life to French Canadians, who required a civil rights movement like that undertaken by African Americans in the United States. Beautiful Losers takes place at the start of the events that would lead up to the October Crisis of 1970, and the backdrop is important because it, like the events of the text, hinges upon identity. As separatists kick against Canada and seek their identities in a new world order, so the nameless professor is left to deal with the deaths of F. and Edith and establish his own identity in the meantime. His inability to do so -- indicated by the final book which contains a confusing melding of the three main characters which is ultimately and inevitably doomed -- is perhaps a commentary on the future of the separatist movement.

Interesting to note that of Cohen, Klein, and Richler, all writing during the lead up to the FLQ actions or separatist fervour in some capacity or another, only Cohen tackles the issue head-on and uses it as a backdrop for his novel (though Richler does make passing references to the political situation). Just a little thing I wanted to point out.

God is alive. Magic is afoot.

good work, canadian literature

jake hersh, the self-hating canadian

Only I, in choosing which Mordecai Richler to read for my comprehensive exams, would manage to pick the one that happens to be 500 pages long. However, I don't regret it -- it was an incredibly fast and good read, and it reminded me of all the things I used to love about Richler's writing. Funny, bawdy, and poignant, St. Urbain's Horseman is required reading for anyone who love The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (and Duddy, his father, and all the gang from St. Urbain St. make appearances in the novel from time to time). When I first started reading Canadian Literature, I used to feel really ripped off when it wasn't actually set in Canada, but this book, set largely among the expat community in London, reminded me that in setting a book elsewhere we can often get a better look at who we are.

Incidentally, who's the idiot at McClelland and Stewart who decided that all Richler covers should be set in Comic Sans? It looks so painfully amateur compared to the usually very classy Emblem Edition covers of other Canadian classics.

St. Urbain's Horseman
by Mordecai Richler

"Everybody leaves this cold country. Joey; now you," and she told him a story that Baruch had brought back from his travels, a tale told to him by a Spanish sailor. "You know how this country got its name? It was written on a map by the Conquistadors in Peru. On their map of the Americas, one of them wrote on the uncharted space over the Great Lakes, 'Acqui esta nada.' It was shortened to acqui nada. Or Canada."

-----

At ease in Canada. The homeland he shed with such soaring enthusiasm twelve years earlier. Thousands of miles of wheat, indifference, and self-apology, it had seemed. And no more.

Jake recalled standing with Luke at the ship's rail, afloat on champagne, euphoric, as Quebec City receded and they headed into the St. Lawrence and the sea.

"I say! I say! I say!" Jake had demanded, "what's beginning to happen in Toronto?"

"Exciting things."

"And Montreal?"

"It's changing."

Tomorrow country then, tomorrow country now. And yet -- and yet -- he felt increasingly claimed by it, especially in the autumn, the Laurentian season, and the last time he had sailed the tranquil St. Lawrence into swells and the sea, it was with a sense of loss, even deprivation, and melancholy, that he had watched the clifftop towns drift past. Each one unknown to him.

Circles completed, he thought.

-----

He assumed, based on his education and sour experience, that nothing Canadian was quite good enough.

In St. Urbain's Horseman, Mordecai Richler does a wonderful job of writing about the expatriot experience. Jake Hersh is a filmmaker who, with moderate success in CBC teledramas behind him, begins to set his sights farther. For Jake, nothing Canadian can really be any good -- he's tired of being a big fish in a small pond, and he believes that Canada will never be anything more than a small pond. Having been barred entry to the United States, Jake, following the example of his best friend and sometimes rival Luke, decides that England is the place for him to be. So Jake goes to London and finds some success both financial and professional -- but he also befriends a loser with a chip on his shoulder and ends up embroiled in a sex scandal. For Jake, going to London helps him realize the positives of being Canadian, and indeed his experience as an expat is what solidifies his own individual Canadian identity.

St. Urbain's Horseman also follows a similar trajectory to The Second Scroll by A.M. Klein, in that it tackles the issue of Zionism and involves a quest for a relative. In Jake's case, he is searching for his cousin, Joey Hersh. Everyone in the Hersh family seems to have a different perception of who Joey is or was: some see him as a snake who abandoned his mother and siblings, others see him as a hero for his war service; some see him as a criminal and a gambler, other see him as a risk-taker and a brave man. Jake believe strongly in his cousin, and believes that his cousin is in South America hunting Josef Mengele. (The novel takes place in the 1960s primarily, though much of the action is in flashback. The novel ends in 1967.) Like Klein's Canadian Journalist, Jake is a Canadian Filmmaker who likewise travels all over to find his cousin; like Klein's character, Jake is continually just missing his cousin. Indeed, Joey is frequently close enough to touch -- Jake finds that Joey has been living in London, telling people he is visiting Jake, and charging things to Jake's account at Herrod's -- all the time never making direct contact with his cousin. Like The Second Scroll, the quest for family is wrapped up in the quest for Zion, and like The Second Scroll the sought-after figure is killed with symbolic timing. In the case of St. Urbain's Horseman, the news of Joey's death comes with Israel's victory in the Arab-Israeli War.

To contrast with Klein's novel, however, Jake's relationship to the state of Israel is much more conflicted than Klein's narrator. Likewise, Jake's relationship to his own Jewish heritage is conflicted -- almost as conflicted as his relationship to Canada. Jake really doesn't know who he is. He identifies himself, loudly and proudly, as a Jew and as a Canadian. But he doesn't like or respect Canada, and though he misses it, he can't ever really return. Likewise, Jake is proud of his Jewish heritage on the one hand, and he is disgusted by anti-Semitism and finds heroes in those Jews who stood up against the Germans (and in his cousin, who he believes is doing good in the world by seeking out Mengele for destruction). But he is conflicted about traditions -- he has married a shiksa and had children by her, he doesn't keep kosher, he resents his mother's imposition when she visits to "help," and he doesn't believe in the mourning period he is expected to observe after the death of his father. When it comes to Israel, Jake feels a near-constant guilt at his feelings of worry for the Arab children dying as a result of Israeli actions, and feels empathy towards the Palestinians who feel invaded. For Jake, there can be no outlet for these feelings, because they are fundamentally anti-social within his community. (Indeed, the idea of Jewish community is one that conflicts Jake as well, as he doesn't feel the sense of community for the St. Urbain St. people that he feels like he is supposed to.)

Of note, in this novel, is the role of women here. Richler has often been wrapped on the knuckles for his depictions of women, but it seems to me that in St. Urbain's Horseman, the female characters are of an inimitable strength. For example, Nancy, Jake's wife, at first seems to be a long-suffering woman, dealing silently with her husband's sexual scandal. But as soon as the trial is over, she questions him herself, and she is the only character to challenge his assertion that he is a filmmaker. She points out to him that he has only ever made one film, and she challenges him to get back to filmmaking. It is only through her insistence that he picks up Luke's play and gets his career and life back on track after the trial ends. Richler give Nancy the leading role in the family -- she is the one keeping things together emotionally and financially when Jake would rather roll over and forget about real life. Nancy commands the family, even though she is hated by Jake's mother and resented by his father. The family could not stay together without her.

One thing I do wonder about and am not quite sure what to make of is the use of repetition in this book. In many ways, this is a book about memory. The trial is all about people's remembering and misremembering, as is the legacy of Joey. Richler repeats events in the book, slightly differently each time, with the effect of deja vu for the reader. I think it's a commentary on the unreliability of memory and the subjectivity of time -- but I'm not really sure what else to do with this weird and unexpected use of repetition. It's funny how it is invoked in the text, because it is so sporadically used that it made me wonder if I was repeating pages, or if I had read the book before -- it was only once this had happened four or five times that I realized it was a deliberate device and not the result of my absent-minded skipping ahead in the text before reading it. Beyond a critique of memory and time, I'm not 100% sure what to do with this motif.

a canadian pentateuch

God, I really love A.M. Klein, and every time I read him again I am reminded of what a special and unique way he had with words. His descriptive turns are like nothing else, and the way he evokes emotion is truly his own. While, like all modernists, he expects you to come to his text with a wide range of knowledge, he is also an understanding teacher, and will guide you to discover what you need to know. There is no one else quite like A.M. Klein in the entire Canadian literary canon, and each chance I have to pick up something by him is something really special. In this novella, Klein's longest work, the memory of the poet echoes throughout, as he takes us on a history of not only his Uncle Melech, but of his people, too...

The Second Scroll
by A. M. Klein

His antipathy to the dialect, I am afraid, stemmed also from a nonintellectual source: his gratitude to the land of his adoption. This land hadn't given him much, mainly because he hadn't been a taker, but it had give him -- this was no cliche to my father -- freedom. Whenever one of his Ratno compatriots took it in his mind to run down Canada and its capitalismus, my father would withdraw a coin from his pocket and point to the image thereon engraved: "See this man, this is King George V. He looks like Czar Nicholas II. They are cousins. They wear the same beards. They have similar faces. But they one is to the other like day is to night. Nikolai might be a kapora for this one. After Nikolaichek you shouldn't even so much as whisper a complaint about this country!" This patriotism, it is to be admitted, was essentially pragmatic; it never did reach the fervour of his Canadian friend Cohen the cabinet-maker, the Cohen who had carved the ferocious lions guarding and upholding the Decalogue in front of the Ark of the Covenant in the Chevra Thillim, the martial Cohen who always bore on his person a Union Jack fringed with tzitzith and who threatened at the slightest provocation to fight the South African War over again; but it was none the less a loyalty solidly grounded, and one that was not likely to be impressed by a pilpul that drew all its examples, not from Canada, but from the Russia he had abandoned.

-----

The evening's game had amused me greatly. After all I was looking for neither Operation X nor Plan D, but only for my mother's brother -- and the evening had ended with a quasi-friendship, both of us at last quaffing it down with Canadian V.O. As an abbreviation, he said, for vodka. He then bade me good night, Americano.

"I am not an American. I'm a Canadian."

"Is there a difference? Isn't Canada the forty-ninth state?"

"On the contrary. The States are our eleventh province!"

His laughter -- the gall of the Canuck! the utter absurdity! -- rang throughout the corridor.

The Second Scroll is the story of a Jewish-Canadian journalist in search of his only living relative, Uncle Melech, who he has recently received a letter from after decades of silence. The journey is twofold -- not only is the journalist questing for his uncle, but he is also tasked with finding the contemporary Hebrew poetry of Israel and translating it for a Canadian audience. These two quests operate in tandem to make this a story of Jewish identity in the post-Holocaust world. The journey takes place in 1949, with Israel newly founded and the horrors of the Holocaust (of which Uncle Melech is a survivor).

Uncle Melech is set up to be read as a Messianic figure. His full name is Melech (King) Davidson (Son of David) -- Uncle Melech then represents the messianic condition, being humanity in its purest state. For Melech, this is not somethine he comes by easily. After witnessing the horrors of Russia in 1917, he denounces his faith, certain that no God could allow such horrific things to happen without reprieve. He flees to Poland, where he is eventually swept into Hitler's ghettos and then the concentration camp. In a horrific scene, Melech and his fellow prisoners must perform music for the Nazi guards, who give the musicians time to become entranced by the music before shooting them all dead. Melech discovers that he is still alive, however, trapped beneath a pile of bodies. The Nazi soldiers, intending to bury the prisoners properly the next day, only cover the mass grave in a layer of soil, enabling Melech to escape overnight. He is overwhelmed by the sense that he was spared so that he may absorb the pain and sorrow of all the dead who lay upon him, and rediscovers his faith in God. He is left, however, to journey the dessert in search of Israel... Which he gets to, but he dies there a martyr in a terrorist attack.

All the while, Melech's nephew, the Canadian journalist, is two steps behind his uncle. He searches for him agonizingly, getting tantalizingly close and then snatched away. The journalist doesn't even know what Melech looks like. When he asked for a picture in childhood, his mother informed him that their faith forbid photographs because it contravenes the second commandment. In his journey to find his uncle, he is given a photograph of him -- but the photo had been doubly exposed and the face is indistinguishable. Finally, when he comes face-to-face with his uncle after Melech's death, his face is so horrifically burnt that there are not features to see. Melech's face, then, becomes the impossible goal of the quest, and even in death his nephew is denied the opportunity to recognize his uncle.

The book is structured to follow the pentateuch -- that is, the first five books of the Hebrew bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. The events in the novella mirror those of the biblical books of the same name. In Genesis, we are told of the origins of Melech, his history, and also the beginning of the journalist's fascination with this uncle he has never known or seen. In Exodus, just as Moses rose and led the Jews, the nephew is given the letter by Uncle Melech, and is led on his own journey to discover him (he is also, in this book, vested with the task of discovering and translating the poetry of the new Israel). In Leviticus, where in the bible the laws of Judaism are revealed, the nephew finds a letter by Melech that challenged Christianity and the images of the Sistine Chapel, and asserts the ways in which God will rescue his chosen people. In Numbers, just as the Jews wander the desert for forty years, so Melech must wander from Casablanca to Israel, tasked with the goal of helping the Moroccan Jews (a damaged, abused and downtrodden people) to emigrate to Israel. Finally, in Deuteronomy, just as Moses glimpses the promised land momentarily before his death, Melech is martyred just before he would have been able to hold his only living relative in Israel. (It is also in Deuteronomy that Melech's nephew finds the literature of Israel -- doubly interesting considering the biblical Deuteronomy is composed of a series of Moses' speeches).

There's clearly a lot going on in this novella. In only 100 pages, Klein evokes the history of the Jewish people from biblical times to the emergence of the state of Israel. Certainly no small feat. What is most fascinating to a Canadianist (or at least this one), however, is the fact that Klein interweaves all of this with Canada -- the narrator is constantly asserting his Canadianess, his Canadian identity, and reveling in the different that necessarily creates.

I'm not fully sure what to make of this novella, yet, but I would recommend it to just about anyone.

thanks, canlit, now i'm completely fucking depressed

I've said it before and I'll say it again: The only thing more uplifting than Canadian Literature is Canadian Literature set during the depression. On the prairies. In a drought. Sweet. Sinclair Ross, if I wasn't really confident that you're dead I would hunt you down and kick your ass from Manitoba to Alberta and back again. Seriously, what the hell. This book made me so mad I had to force myself to keep reading... But this is all for the discussion section, not the intro! So I will end the intro here by saying that I can't wait to finish this blog post and go and watch a movie, and pretend that As For Me and My House never, ever happened to me. Because this isn't a book you read. This is a book you endure.

As For Me and My House
by Sinclair Ross

It's still the same -- to keep from him that I know. Somehow it's so important that my shoulder doesn't even hut. There's a high wind, and the rain beats down in hissing scuds against the windows. Like one of the clinks of drip from the ceiling into the pail, as sudden and clear and cold and meaningless, it comes into my mind that what has happened is adultery -- that he's been unfaithful to me, that I have a right now to be free.

But I just sit here numb and still, with a kind of dread that I won't be able to keep from him, that when he looks at me again he'll see I know. I don't know why it's that way. You'd think I couldn't stand him near me, that I'd be crying and storming now, saying the bitterest things I knew. But instead I'm uneasy, afraid, as if I were the guilty one. My rights as a wife somehow don't matter. Like another clink I know I can't be free.

-----

As to Judith -- she was there, that was all. I know I'm right. The man I see in the pulpit every Sunday isn't Philip. Not the real Philip. However staidly and prosily he lives he's still the artist. He's racked still with the passion of the artist, for seeking, creating, adventuring. That's why it happened. He's restless, cramped. Horizon's too small for him. There's not adventure here among the little false fronts -- no more than there is with a woman he's been married to for twelve years.

Cheery stuff, huh? WOO! As For Me and My House tells the story of Philip Bentley, a small town preacher on the prairies during the depression. The story is told in the first person, through the character of Mrs. Bentley, the devoted wife of Philip, whose first name is never granted to us. Mrs. Bentley's entire identity is wrapped up in Philip -- hence her namelessness -- and her existence is based around making him feel worthwhile. The crux of the conflict in this novel is that Philip and Mrs. Bentley are atheists... Or at least, they don't believe in the Christian message, though the extent to which they deny or question God seems to shift throughout the book. As a result, Philip fears he is a hypocrite, and takes his rage and discomfort out on his wife, who is the only person who knows his secret. The fact is, Philip is a failure. He became a preacher because he failed in his dream to become an artist (a dream his father had failed at before him, with the same end result), he has failed to keep up his art in any meaningful way, and he fails regularly at the role he has taken on, that of the small-town preacher. Mrs. Bentley regularly wishes that Philip could come up with a sermon that could provide the least amount of comfort to people, but he can't, because he's not just a bad preacher, he's a bad liar. He can't tell people what they need to hear for comfort, because he doesn't believe it himself. As a result, he fails not only his wife and himself, but he fails every town he preaches in. He never remains the minister for more than four years in any community.

What makes this novel so hard to read for me, I think, is the fact that Ross really does write quite effectively from the perspective of a woman -- but it is the stereotypical 1930s woman whose perspective she has. That is, despite her own abilities and options, she endures him because it is her duty. But even though I understand that that would be the normal result for the time period, I desperately wanted to see more of a struggle on her part to keep things together. We have her perspective here, and I wanted it to be used to challenge the ideas and assumptions of the time -- but while minor things become battlegrounds (the town doesn't think she should do heavy work, but Philip is useless at it, and she resents her banishment to the kitchen occasionally), the major issues are never even remotely called in to question. And there are incidences, such as his affair as above, that stress her out tremendously, but the resolution she always comes to is a focus on what is best for him, not for her.

The fact is that Mrs. Bentley is trapped in an emotionally abusive relationship, where she lives on tenderhooks, never knowing what Philip's mood will be. She judges his affection and emotion by how distant his touch is on her arm -- and this is the only emotional connection the two really share. He is not in tune with her to the degree that she is with him, because while her survival depends on his emotional health, he in turn seems to consider himself an island. Mrs. Bentley allows herself to be the blame for everything because the son she tried to bear him was stillborn twelve years previously -- she seems to feel that her inability to produce the son he so desperately wanted is what stifled his creativity, in the end. He allows himself to blame her, too, but he believes she doesn't know it. But the emotional gaslighting that Philip engages in not only forces Mrs. Bentley to remain in the relationship, but it destroys her ability to objectively view situations. So when Philip cheats on her -- and when she has the money set aside to leave him, and no children to potentially damage -- she can't leave, and stays by him convinced that what would destroy the marriage would be her mentioning his affair (_not_ the affair itself, which he of course couldn't help because of his artistic passions). And when the affair results in a child, the mother of the child is handily killed off (again, this is placed at the feet of Mrs. Bentley, because she determined that she and Philip should move away and the mother dies of grief or something equally stupid), and Mrs. Bentley selflessly adopts the child.

The whole thing is kind of sick.

The problem here is not with the writing of the novel. It's a well-written book, and it contains some passages of real beauty. The problem here is Ross' unwillingness to challenge received notions of what womanhood is, and as such the character of Mrs. Bentley becomes quite an infuriating one to read. Her choices are maddening and inexplicable at times, and her long-suffering nature is cute for about ten seconds before I wants to strangle her. The other problem is that there is no hope in this novel; until the last pages, there seems to be not a glimmer of a chance that either Philip or Mrs. Bentley will find happiness. Philip even quashes Mrs. Bentley's only real friendship by accusing her of an affair with her confidant, Paul. And while it appears clear that Paul would love to take Mrs. Bentley away from this life, it's equally clear that she would never let that happen. She has a resigned contentedness in her misery that is so frustrating, because it destroys any chance at true happiness or resolution for the characters. Even when they save up enough money, and the harlot is dead, and they have the baby, and they're ready to move out of town... I don't think any reader would really believe that they successfully make a go of their new life, because nothing has really changed. They still don't communicate, she is still at the whim of his emotions, and he clearly loves the new baby more than he loves her. Where is the hope here?

The message of this novel seems to be: don't be an atheistic minister on the prairies during the depression. And I'm pretty sure I knew that already anyway.

i love robertson davies again!

I spent most of this year hating the sight of Bob Davies and wishing I could go back in time and put a giant axe in the back of his skull. The Rebel Angels made me extremely angry because Davies' view of women was so archaic and, frankly, dangerous. Furthermore, his elitism about the academy was maddening and his smug attitude of anti-postmodernity. His disgust with visible minorities, homosexuals, and so on... It was all so sickening and I really thought I would never be able to go back to the time when I loved Davies. Such a time wasn't really so long ago. I remember reading Fifth Business in high school and being mesmerized by his power, and needing to immediately read the rest of the Deptford Trilogy. But Tempest-Tost really rekindled that early love for his work. I still have problems with a lot of what Davies did in The Rebel Angels, but I was pleasantly surprised to find, in this novel, a much more equitable and realistic depiction of women; furthermore, Tempest-Tost is just a fantastically told story, and it's outside of the academy (which Davies is frankly way too close to to be able to write about it effectively). But on with the show!

Tempest-Tost
by Robertson Davies

"They are sacrificing to our Canadian God," said Solly. "We all believe that if we fret and abuse ourselves sufficiently, Providence will take pity and smile upon anything we attempt. A light heart, or a consciousness of desert, attracts ill luck. You have been away from your native land too long. You have forgotten our folkways. Listen to that gang over there; they are scanning the heavens and hoping aloud that it won't rain tomorrow. That is to placate the Mean Old Man in the Sky, and persuade him to be kind to us. We are devil-worshippers, we Canadians, half in love with easeful Death. We flog ourselves endlessly, as a kind of spiritual purification. Now, what about some chow mein?"

-----

"Still, I don't suppose a preacher would know a really valuable book if he saw one. They'll go for the concordances and commentaries of the Gospels. Do you suppose Val would let us look through what's left?"

"Freddy, my innocent poppet, there won't be anything left. They'll strip the shelves. Anything free has an irresistible fascination. Free books to preachers will be like free booze to politicians; they'll scoop the lot, without regard for quality. You mark my words."

Freddy recognized the truth of what he said. She herself was a victim of that lust for books which rages in the breast like a demon, and which cannot be stilled save by the frequent and plentiful acquisition of books. This passion is more common, and more powerful, than most people suppose. Book lovers are thought by unbookish people to be gentle and unworldly, and perhaps a few of them are so. But there are others who will lie and scheme and steal to get books as wildly and unconscionably as the dope-taker in pursuit of his drug. They may not want the books to read immediately, or at all; they want them to possess, to range on their shelves, to have at command. They want books as it was once thought the Turk wanted concubines -- not to be hastily deflowered, but to be kept at their master's call, and enjoyed more often in thought than in reality. Solly was in a measure a victim of this unscrupulous passion, but Freddy was wholly in the grip of it.

Tempest-Tost is book one of Davies second trilogy, known as the Salterton Trilogy for the name of the town where the action occurs. Salterton is, essentially, a caricature of Kingston, Ontario. It is a town so strangled by its mixed loyalties to the university, the military, and the family compact that it finds itself stagnant and unable to achieve the heights of perfection it imagines itself to have already conquered. For the residents of Salterton, and the students and professors of Waverly (Queen's), there is simply no other place on earth in which to live. Davies does a masterful job of capturing the sense of a town that thinks it's a city -- the snobbish Waverly students who look down on the Townies among them seem to have walked out of the halls of Queen's and into the pages of Tempest-Tost without a second glance, and the town's obsession with rank, social order, and birth belie the preoccupations of any good former stronghold of the family compact. As with anything Davies "satirizes," he really doesn't at all. Davies writes of what he knows and loves, and pokes at it gently before finally giving it his overall seal of approval; Kingston, wrapped in the cloak of Salterton, receives the same treatment that University of Toronto and Davies' own home town receive in others of his novels.

But this is a novel about small town amateur theatrics, and the residents of Salterton come together in this novel to mount a production of The Tempest. The main characters are Freddy Webster, a 14-year-old vintner and collector of antiquarian books; Griselda (or Gristle), her sister and the focus of lust for all the young (and not-so-young) men of Salterton; Solly and Roger, her two main suitors; and Hector, a 40-year-old suicidal math teacher who thinks he has a shot at Griselda. There are many more characters, like Nell, the president of the dramatic society; Val, the big-city director who regrets ever setting foot in Salterton; and Tom, the gardener responsible for the new found theatrical grounds. Altogether, the characters are some of Davies most diverse combination of backgrounds and histories, and while the characters all still have the Davies trademark of thinking and talking like 40-year-old English Professors from the University of Toronto, he has done a much better job here of fleshing out the backgrounds of each of these characters.

On the whole, Tempest-Tost seems to be about image and appropriateness. There are two plotlines in the novel -- the mounting of the play, and the quest for Griselda. In both stories the reader is confronted regularly with characters and individuals who must do battle between what is right and what is appropriate. For example, Hector's love for Griselda is inappropriate; he is more than twice her age and she is a wealthy heiress. The miscasting of this love affair is constantly played up by Davies, who shows Hector moving in increasingly more ridiculous and socially gauche ways to try and gain the love and admiration of Griselda. When he loses all hope and attempts suicide, he fails at that too, and again we are reminded of the incongruousness of his affections and the inappropriateness of his response. Everyone in the novel is governed by propriety. Solly, charged with the care of his mother, is constantly fearful of what she might think of his actions. Tom, the gardener, fears reproach for Freddy's precocious interest in wine. Nell cannot breath for fear that she will do something to insult someone whose help she will need in future productions, and furthermore is constricted by her concerns that the play will not be considered seemly. Davies, in Tempest-Tost, is having a gentle poke at the obsession with propriety and right-thinking that stereotypically characterizes the Eastern Ontario experience; he chortles at a society that still believes itself to be wrapped up in the expectation of the family compact, the demands of which may be changed at any time. The happiest characters in the novel seem to be those, like Freddy and Roger, who don't really care about the contentment of the townsfolks. Interestingly, though Davies allows them to be happy, he denies them their goals -- Freddy's wine bottles are destroyed in Hector's suicide attempt, and Roger is denied the love of Griselda. It is okay, and even necessary, to kick against the norms sometimes, Davies is suggesting, but it is not the path to the goals you seek. For Saltertonians, some level of conformity will always be required.

Something occurred to me as I was reading through Tempest-Tost. All the books I have read so far by the moderns -- and that's four, because I've tackled a very enviable one per day this week -- anyway, every single book features at least one (and sometimes more) character charged with the care of his or her mother. And in every case, the caretaker must sacrifice something of him or her self in order to properly care for the mother figure. Watson's characters gave up freedom, opportunity and love, Laurence's Rachel and Davies' Solly gave up university educations, Davies' Hector and Callaghan's Stephen give up financial security to support the mother they each left behind... And so on and so forth with these massive and shifting sacrifices. This made me wonder what the hell is going on. Such a run of books about mothers demanding massive sacrifices from their children, both male and female. I wonder if maybe the mother figure is representative, then, of something larger. I know this is far-fetched and vaguely retarded... But I wonder if it's not possible that these demanding maternal figures symbolize Canada. For the modernist Canadian writers, they felt a responsibility to Canada because they were writing the identity of an emerging country's literature. There really was no Canadian literature or identity before the work of the modernists. So there's a responsibility to stay at home and write the stories of this emerging nation in lieu of the more exciting temptations from south of the border or across the ocean. Canada, then, becomes the demanding mother figure, ordering sacrifice, threatening to languish and die if abandoned by her children. Without them, she knows, she is of little use -- they are the key to her future, and she holds tight to them. If I'm right here, then there's a resentment in all of these depictions about the expectations of the motherland and the desire to do the right thing even in the face of missed opportunity. Or I could be crazy! But it's something to think about, anyway.

oh, dead white men, how i've missed you so

Well, I've committed a fatal error as I work through the novels of the modernist period in Canadian Literature -- I read the only two women writers first, which means that I have to muddle through the rest of these mostly-dead and not-quite-dead old white dudes for the next ten days. It's not that I mind that they're white guys -- that's kind of my area of expertise, as it happens -- but that the lack of diversity in CanLit well into the 1950s and 1960s is, frankly, a huge embarrassment for us as a society. We really cleaned up our acts into the 1970s and beyond, and I'm excited to check out the diverse range of writers on my contemporary list, but we really can't pat ourselves on the backs too terribly much when we have so many years with so little progress. It's funny how women and immigrants dominated the colonial period, and then things basically went downhill from there. Oh, Canada. At least good old Morley Callaghan is near to throw me a prostitute or two to really keep things lively.

Such Is My Beloved
by Morley Callaghan

"Of course, I know they often deceived me. I tried not to be foolish about the matter. They continually deceived me. I see that now. They often hurt me. But it doesn't matter if they wounded my self-respect or my pride a thousand times, does it? They were streetwalkers, Charlie, but they made me think about prostitution."

"If you don't mind me saying it, Father, I disagree with you to a certain extent about these girls," Charlie said. "In the perfectly organized state there would be no streetwalkers. If the state had proper control of the means of production and the means of livelihood, it's never necessary for a woman to go on the streets. No healthy woman of her own accord would ever do such work. It's too damned degrading. But if in the ideal state there were still women who were streetwalkers out of laziness or a refusal to work steadily then they would be kicked out or interned somewhere for laziness, or as non-producers. Then they'd have to work or starve. Your mistake is seeing this as a religious problem. It's really an economic problem. Do you see, Father?" Charlie said, like a lecturer.

"I know, and in a way you're right, but not entirely. I knew a woman who thought all these women were feeble-minded. All you would have to do would be to sterilize the feeble-minded, and in a couple of generations everything would be rosy for the strong-minded ones, who would all be highly moral. It's a point of view."

"It's not my point of view."

"No. I've been trying to see it in this way. I wouldn't say it to everybody, Charlie, but I know many respectable women in the parish enjoying marriages of convenience and I know they're just as low on the scale as these girls. I mean when you think of the girls hunting around the streets here and the young men and the married men going to them because of their secret passion and their lust, it looks almost as if the girls, even here in my own parish, were in some way doing good -- in a way, had a spiritual value. These girls were taking on themselves all these mean secret passions, and in the daytime those people who had gone to them at night seemed to be leading respectable and good lives. Those girls never suspected the sacrifice of their souls that they offer every day."

In Such Is My Beloved, Morley Callaghan tells the story of Father Stephen Dowling, a young Catholic priest whose parish is in a bustling protestant city. Stephen is a good priest, but finds himself occasionally too interested in preaching about social ills and problems for the tight-laced members of his established parish. He is somewhat of a renegade in his sermon topics about the "inevitable separation between Christianity and the bourgeois world" when people really want to gather on Sundays to hear about love, hope, and charity. For Stephen, though, the world is his congregation, and all the ills of society are his to mend. Open, idealistic, and innocent, Stephen approaches his work whole-heartedly and without any sense of cynicism or skepticism.

All of this means, of course, that when Stephen is doing his rounds one day and comes upon two young prostitutes, he is helpless to control his desire to change their lives. Midge and Ronnie, victims of family circumstances that pushed them out from parental restraint early, and victims of the Great Depression's lack of job prospects for the unskilled, find themselves without any opportunities beyond what they can gain from selling themselves. They cling to Stephen, then, not as a way out of their situation necessarily (since it is the only imaginable life for them), but they see him instead as a protection from sin, and his money is something that will make the world a little easier for them. Stephen's naivety and desire to help all of God's creatures places him, however, in a situation that could be perceived as impropriety by the outside world, as he visits the girls in a hotel room almost every night to bring them gifts. In the end, the all-seeing eye of the Church is brought to bear on Stephen and the girls are arrested and sent out of town. Stephen is obsessed by the idea that he has let the girls down by not being able to save them or help them, or even keep them in the city where he could watch out for them. As a result, Stephen loses his mind to grief and confusion, and finds himself in a mental hospital. In the end, he makes a deal with God, and concludes that he has sacrificed his own sanity for a promise from God that he would look out for Ronnie and Midge, and any young girls like them who need His assistance in the world.

The novel comments on the problem of celibacy in the Catholic Church. A man without sexual desire would not be accepted for the priesthood, it is said, because that indicates that no sacrifice is made on the part of the man seeking to give his life to God. If he isn't interested in sexuality, then the denial of it is not a gift freely given to God. However, when young men are plagued by temptation, there is no outlet for them to even discuss, let alone act on, their desires. Callaghan seems unsure of the sustainability of such a system -- one can't help but wonder if, had this novel been written a few decades later, if this would not have opened the door for a discussion of homosexual practices in seminary or dangerously deviant and criminal sexual acts among the priesthood. Callaghan seems desperate to make a point about something as he raises the issue of celibacy and temptation over and over again, but perhaps as a symptom of the novel's age and time, whatever he wants to say here never fully emerges.

Fundamentally, this is a novel about sacrifice and obedience, and when to follow which calling. Stephen sees Ronnie and Midge as two women who sacrifice their own souls in order to absorb the sin and degradation of the otherwise respectable men who use their services. But, Stephen is aware, if the two women had obeyed the laws of man and God, they would not be selling their bodies and would not be in a position to sacrifice their souls at all. Likewise, Stephen sacrifices his sanity for the protection of the women (or at least, so he believes), but if he had obeyed the order to stay away from the women he would never have lost his sanity in the first place. The question of what is harder, to obey or to sacrifice, rises many times in the novel. The consensus across all individual events in the story is that it is much easier for someone to sacrifice for a cause they believe in than to obey an order that they don't -- this ties in with the overall thrust towards social change in the novel. There's a very left-wing sensibility in the novel, and a merging of communist ideas with Catholic ones to complete a sense that society should be more interested in helping the common man. This is especially interesting given the fact that the novel was written and set during the depression. For Callaghan, it would be easier for everyone to sacrifice their own comfort to help their fellow men than it ought to be for people to obey a social order that they don't believe in or agree with. It seems to Callaghan to be unthinkable for people to accept the need as it stands.

One interesting thing about this novel (and, I gather from the criticism I have read, this is true of much of Callaghan's work) is the fact that it is specifically non-Canadian in its setting. Callaghan, of course, had an extremely cosmopolitan outlook on life and literature, having been a colleague of Hemingway and a travelling companion of Joyce. For Callaghan, as for many of the writers of this period, the literary realm lay outside -- far outside -- the borders of the 49th parallel and three vast oceans. As a result, the city in question in this novel feels like Toronto to me, but it is very overtly and intentionally an any-city. Callaghan locates the city only in the Eastern portion of North America, and by the weather we can ascertain that it is North, but the novel neither declares itself Canadian nor does it attempt to appropriate an American voice. Unlike Watson and Laurence, Callaghan seems to shy away from nationalizing his literature, and instead turns his stories outward. Where Watson and Laurence had very Canadian stories to tell, the universality yet obvious denial of Toronto-ness of the setting of this novel make it seem as though Callaghan is denying that there are any Canadian tales to tell. Even the history of the two prostitutes -- Midge from Montreal and Ronnie from Detroit -- denies any opportunity to localize the story.

In the end, on a purely reader-response level, I think this is a really fantastic novel of the human experience, and certainly is worth a read. The views of women seem problematic (the sin of sexuality absorbs his into invisibility for him and criminal prosecution for her, somehow), but they are of their period and it's not something we can apologize away. Read Morley Callaghan, revel in the leftist rhetoric, and reject the views of women. It's the easiest way to read him for pleasure.

i think i love you, margaret laurence

The Canadian education system has been doing a disservice to the memory of Margaret Laurence for such a long time. In Grade 12, we hand kids a copy of The Stone Angel and ask them to connect with the story of an 80 year old woman on the brink of death. Then, when they can't understand how to make that connection, we make them feel as stupid as possible about it. The kids get the sense that Margaret Laurence either (a) sucks donkey balls or (b) is way, way, way above anything they could hope to understand. And so, for anyone who, like me, is a product of the Mike Harris Ontario Educational Curriculum, Margaret Laurence is yet another example of "terrible" Canadian Literature, never to be read again. But it's all such a crime, because Margaret Laurence's novels are an absolute treasure, and if we just asked young people to read one of her books that focus on people at a relatable life stage, the relationship to Margaret Laurence would be completely different indeed.

A Jest of God
by Margaret Laurence

Sitting beside my bedroom window, in the darkness, I smoke and look at the stars, points of icy light in the hot July black of the sky. If only she wouldn't question me. If only I could stop myself from answering. Why can't she ever sleep and leave me alone? Or die.

Why can't she die and leave me alone?

And if she did, it would leave me alone, all right, completely. Would that be any better? I don't mean it, anyway. I couldn't really mean that. Of course we have our ups and downs, she and I. But as for wishing anything bad to happen --

You mean it all right, Rachel. Not every minute, not every day, even. But right now, you mean it. Mean. I am. I never knew it, not really. Is everyone? Probably, but what possible difference can that make? I do care about her. Surely, I love her as much as most parents love their children. I mean, of course, as much as most children love their parents.

In A Jest of God, Rachel Cameron is a 34-year-old woman -- a virgin and a repressed school teacher -- charged with the care and maintenance of her mother and fearful that life is passing her by. Rachel has given up a lot to care for her mother. She had to quit college to look after her mother, and the passive aggressive control that Mrs. Cameron asserts keeps Rachel fearful of romantic relationships and connections to men in general. As a result, Rachel has no connections outside of the world of her mother's control, and seems (at the books opening) to have regressed into the world of the child, under the thumb of a parent. For Rachel, too, if doesn't help that her sister has fulfilled her mother's dreams and has had four children with a stable husband. But Rachel's sister has also moved away, and hasn't visited their mother in seven years. The responsibility for the aging parent, then, falls only to Rachel, and at the opening of the novel it becomes deeply apparent that the weight of this responsibility is too much for Rachel to bear alone.

A chance encounter with a former schoolmate, however, changes everything for Rachel -- Nick asks her out on a date and she is suddenly brought into the world of women. She understands, suddenly, what it means to be connected to another person for reasons other than guilt and responsibility. And though Nick asks her to "take care of" birth control she doesn't, not because she actively wants to be pregnant so much as because she wants the full experience of womanhood. Rachel feels cheated by all the little things she has missed, including the horrors of waiting for her period and the discomfort of dealing with lateness. Eventually, the inevitable happens -- Rachel believes herself to be pregnant, and at one month late, she goes to the doctor to deal with the situation.

But for Rachel, the irony never seems to cease. The pregnancy she hopes and fears that she carries turns out to be a tumour on her uterus -- and when she has to go to the city to have the tumour removed, the small town of Manawaka determines that she has gone for an abortion. The only thing Rachel really desires in motherhood, and she is left with an entire town thinking she destroyed her only chance at that. The tragedy for Rachel is that she really believes that this was her only chance at biological parenthood, but the success is that she begins to see her teaching responsibility as a kind of transient motherhood, and learns to see all parenthood as transient in some way.

The narrative arc of the novel concerns Rachel's growth. Rachel begins the novel in a childlike position. She cows to her mother's whim. She is constantly controlled by her mother's passive aggressive comments about where she should or shouldn't go and who she should or shouldn't see. Even her social life is dominated by the needs and desires of her mother's bridge game, where Rachel becomes a server, cook and cleaner to her mother and her elderly friends. Though Rachel works and earns the money that keeps the family afloat, she is not able to shake off the domination of her mother in her daily life. Rachel is a 34-year-old child, trapped in the role of the dutiful daughter in spite of her role as both caretaker and breadwinner. And the means of control exerted by Rachel's mother is the most damaging thing of all, because it is not overt. Rachel's mother never says that she cannot go out, but instead comments that she could become ill or die while Rachel is out having a coffee or buying cigarettes. She never condemns Rachel's choice of friends, but instead makes quiet comments about what is appropriate or right. And Rachel lives in fear of her mother seeing her step out of place by entering a Tabernacle or talking too long with an inappropriate person. Rachel is controlled not by what her mother says, but by what her mother fails to say, which is perhaps a more troubling form since it cannot be directly challenged.

But when Rachel meets up with Nick, it is as though a 34-year-old woman has been flung directly into her teenage years. Rachel begins to lie to her mother, fabricate where she is going. She leaves in the middle of a bridge game one evening, leaving her mother and her friends to serve themselves. She leaves her mother to put herself to bed often. She goes out for hours without saying where she is. In short, Rachel begins to test the boundaries as she never dared to do when she was a teenager, and begins to challenge her mother in different ways. Though she still apologizes for her actions, and feels responsible for avoiding any pain or discomfort to her mother, she is at least beginning to exercise her own will.

After the tumour discover and subsequent surgery, however, Rachel seems to finally move into adulthood and take for herself the role of caregiver that has been bestowed upon her. She makes the choice to move to British Columbia for a new job, and to take her mother with her -- cleverly, to be closer to her sister to allow the two women to share the responsibility of an aging parent instead of shouldering the burden on her own. At this stage, Rachel learns to ignore the passive aggressive control her mother attempts to display. At one point her mother suggests that being a caregiver must be a burden for Rachel, and she agrees with her mother. When her mother is shocked by this, Rachel can think only, "I am the mother now." This is the crux of the novel -- at its core A Jest of God is a novel of growth, and the tale of a woman who becomes a teenager, and then an adult, all in one summer at the age of thirty-four. A beautiful and memorable book, this should be mandatory reading for anyone who has ever been a child.

i still don't think i know what the double hook is

Back in the saddle today. Having admitted to myself that I wasn't going to finish the confed writers in time, I have again moved periods and stepped into the modernist period in Canadian literature. For a PoMo gal like myself, modernist fiction sometimes feels like eating the flavour pouch separate from the ramen, and then drinking a glass of boiling water. The elements are all present, but you know for certain it could all be so much more. Also, your throat gets scalded and your blood pressure spikes. That is to say I kinda of don't like a lot of modernist fiction -- and today's book is a good example of why -- but it's nice to be in a more forward-thinking time at least.

The Double Hook
by Sheila Watson

She lit the lamp. She shook the pot of potatoes on the stove and looked under the cloth that covered them. The woodbox was almost empty.

Dear God, she cried. Then she stopped short. Afraid that he might come.

Father of the fatherless. Judge of widows. Death. And after death she feared the judgment.

She opened the door.

Heinrich, she called. Heinrich.

All round the animals waited. The plate on the table. The knife. The fork. The kettle boiling on the stove.

Dear God, she said. The country. The wilderness. Nothing. Nothing but old women waiting.

Cheery stuff, folks! Let us all embrace our inner fearful old woman and sit down to read some Canadian Literature. It will be an uplifting experience, of course! How can it not be one -- our national literature is a freaking laugh riot! (One has to wonder, are all national literatures this much of a freaking downer? Is it kind of like how we don't ever see the Oscar going to a comedy -- to be a classic in any field you have to depress the everloving shit out of someone? Do Western societies not value humour as art? Anybody? Anybody? Bueller?)

But on to the book of the moment itself, and enough with my bellyaching. The Double Hook is a book I picked up because, honestly, it's like 120 pages and I really needed to finish a whole book today to feel like I was back on track for good. But it's also a great launch point into modernist lit. It is a story of Cariboo country, British Columbia, a place where Sheila Watson had been a teacher during the Great Depression -- a place where, like much of rural Canada, the depression of the 1930s was not so different from the economy of the 20s or the 40s... or the 80s -- and a place where options and choices are hard to come by. That is, in my opinion, the real crux of the conflict in Watson's novel. No one can get out -- and when they try, they are slingshotted back in -- except for the dead. But I'm getting ahead of myself here; a quick run down of the plot may be in order.

At that heart of the novel is James Potter, who lives with his mother and sister in a small rural community. The characters in the book are limited by the space around them, and consist of:

- James, his mother, and his sister, Greta
- James' brother William, his wife Ara
- Widow Wagner, her son Heinrich, and her daughter Lenchen (who is carrying James' child, but this is denied fiercely by Greta)
- Felix Prosper, who Lenchen seeks out for help and perhaps a husband
- Felix's estranged wife Angel and her children, who now live with Theophil
- Kip, who seems to be infatuated with Lenchen, and wants to rescue her from her situation with James and raise her child as his own

So things are a little incestuous, and in this way Watson does a really good job of evoking the closed-in sense of rural life. These are the good rural people, and they seem to find themselves contrasted with the lascivious townsfolk (who own bordellos, banks, and bars, and who swindle the honest-but-misguided country folk out of their money). Indeed, the city / country dichotomy is the only fault I have with the book that isn't down to my obtuseness -- I think the construction here is entirely too heavy-handed and obvious for an otherwise subtle and nuanced novel such as this.

Anyway, the book opens with the characters in a tizzy over whether or not old Mrs. Potter is dead -- people have seen her out and about with Coyote and they are sure she is off to her death at any moment. Greta swears up and down her mother is asleep in bed -- but it is soon revealed that her mother died that morning and she had not told anyone (there is a magic realism to the unrevealed but assumer reality that everyone who has seen Mrs. Potter with Coyote that day has seen her spirit only) (also, the appropriation of Coyote is especially interesting given that there are not aboriginal characters in the novel... I still don't know what to make of this). Once her death has been realized, James in confronted by the reality of Lenchen's pregnancy. In a rage he hits his sister and Lenchen and goes to the barn, where Kip offers to take responsibility for Lenchen -- James blinds him for his troubles, and takes off for the town.

Lenchen seeks asylum with Felix, thinking she can be his wife since his wife is gone. Greta, left alone and battered in the house with her dead mother, commits suicide by burning the house to the ground.

That basically takes you to part two, and I don't want to ruin the book by giving away any more of it than that, but I think you have a general sense of the bleakness and the desperation of the characters in this novel. They are limited for choice, and there is really no 'out' available to any of them, except Greta, who choses death. The back of the novel says that, "here, among the hills of Cariboo country, men and women are caught on the double hook of existence, unaware that the flight from danger and the search for glory are both part of the same journey." Ok, I really didn't get that from this book. Until I read that (once I was done the book, like a good English major), I thought the double hook was that the characters are limited both physically (by space and lack of physical options) and metaphorically (by their own ability to see a way out, like the way Greta's only escape was death).

Someone else needs to read this and tell me why I'm so dumb.

feminism, femininity, and turn-of-the-century canada

I have been silent lo this last week because, frankly, I haven't been getting work done. But I have, however, been having a really good time -- which in the end is possibly more important for now. I'll have to get the lead out this weekend, but until then I'm enjoying having family in town and also reading two books, both of which I highly recommend to all known readers of this blog (and which local readers can borrow from me at will). One book is Lamb, by Christopher Moore. Lamb tells the tale of Biff, Christ's childhood pal, and the 'lost years' of Christ's life in the bible (birth to 30? 6 to 36? something like that) and attempts to humourously document where Christ's teachings had emerged from by the time Christ reappears in the bible. Moore sends Christ and Biff on a quest to find the three wise men, and in the process learn about Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and possibly more faith systems but this is as far as I am in the book. It's sort of a beautiful idea of religious devotion through synthesis -- and it's freaking hilarious -- and if you liked Life of Pi you will fall for Lamb.

The other book that has me enamoured right now is Cracked, by the amazing Dr. Drew Pinsky. Dr. Drew is a board-certified physician and addiction medicine specialist (Loveline listeners, are you playing the home game?) and in this book he talks about not only the difficult and sometimes thankless work of treating addicts in a major psychiatric hospital in Los Angeles, but also his own battles with his emotional and psychological health. Pinsky wants to save everyone, and struggles not to take on the pain of his patients himself. The book explores the societal causes and ramifications of addiction, and deals heavily with examinations of childhood traumas and family patterns of addiction that lead to this sort of cyclical reexamination of the trauma. I don't buy into everything Drew is selling here -- it would be hard to come out of Carleton believing as strongly as he does in psychoanalytic therapy -- but the exploration is truly fascinating to read, and it examines a population many of us will never know or understand in real life. Pinsky discusses the failures of addiction medicine as much as the successes, and the difficulty in treating addicts is enlightening.

But now, it's back to the Confederation period, with a text that can only be described as incredible...

Sister Woman
by J. G. Sime

"You women don't know what you want," he said.

"Perhaps not," I said, "but you be sure we won't be happy till we get it."

He laughed.

"Be articulate then," he said.

"Did you ever try," I said to him, "to be articulate? It's not so easy as it sounds."

"You talk plenty, anyway," said he, "you women."

"Yes," I said, "that's the way we're learning to be articulate."

"It's a wearing way," he said, "for other people."

"Granted," said I. "But it's the only way. You have to talk to find out what you think, when you're a woman. Besides that, if we didn't tell you men, and keep on telling you, you'd never find out anything was wrong with us."

He sat and puffed.

"Don't think," I said apologetically, "I'm complaining. I'm not. I think you men are patient -- wonderfully, extraordinarily patient -- with us. But--"

"Now," he said, "for the grievance!"

And we both laughed.

"Suppose," he said, after a bit, "suppose you try and be articulate yourself. For me -- just for my benefit. I hate to have you women discontented -- it makes a world that's not worth living in. And more than that, I hate to see you with a private grievance of your own -- oh, yes, you have one sometimes! Stop being antagonistic. Be articulate and tell me. Perhaps it's something I can fix. Perhaps," he said hopefully, "it's something I would like to fix..."

"Perhaps," he said, "it's yours already, only you don't know it."

"You're very nice," I answered him. "You really are." And then I said: "It's not so easy!"

Then I said, "Shall I try?"

"Do," he said.

He puffed, and I sat looking at him.

"Well," I said, after a long pause for consideration, "I'll -- I'll skirt the question if you like."

"The Woman's Question?" he inquired.

"The woman's and the man's," I said. "It's the same thing. There's no difference."

... and that is the prologue to Sister Woman, a short story cycle written in Montreal at the turn of the twentieth century. Sister Woman is primarily about working class women during the first world war -- these are stories of girls employed in munitions factories, and as maids and cooks, seamstresses... and prostitutes. J.G. Sime shies away from no dark corners of the world of poor, primarily immigrant, women in Canada during the war. And that is what is so startling about this text; every few pages, I found myself checking and rechecking the publication date. In 1919, it would have been ballsy enough to write about working women period. Their stories simply wouldn't have been considered interesting beyond the purpose of war effort propaganda. It's radical enough to read about women earning independent wages in the factories. Add to that the fact that Sime explores the personal lives of these characters and exposes women who are working in the sex trade, who are contemplating abortion, who choose to be single parents rather than put a child up for adoption, who are carrying on affairs -- Sime writes frankly about the sexual and emotional lives of these women, and does so so overtly that you have to keep telling yourself, "No, this is not a Carol Shields book!"

Sime herself was a magnificent figure. A British immigrant, she had been employed by an ob/gyn in the UK as a receptionist, where she met a young medical student. She fell in love with him and followed him to Canada to work for him. He was married and a major figure of the Montreal establishment, but together they carried on what Sime calls an "irregular union" -- she was his mistress, but not in the traditional sense of the word, because Sime was a strong woman earning her own pay cheque and maintaining her own place of residence. She didn't rely on him for financial support. For 1907, it can only have been described as a modern relationship. In Sister Woman, Sime draws on this interest in "irregular unions" and explores the changing face of sexuality and relationships. She explores a psuedo-common-law set up, lots of mistresses, and many many women who choose to remain single rather than seek out a partner. All of these would have been surprising portrayals in 1919,when the book was published, and show just how forward-thinking Sime was.

Interestingly, though Sime explores working class women in factory and wage slave environments (especially the retail workers who are earning $7 / week and paying $10 / month to rent a squalid room from their employers), she doesn't condemn the experiences of these people. There's a sense that this is simply the way it has to be, and Sime is an observer rather than a critic. This can be a sticking point for a contemporary reader. There's no doubt that Sime sees the situation as negative -- she paints a picture in one story of a shop girl who has aged out of her position and now cannot even stretch her pay cheque to cover her expenses. But though there is injustice, there is no impetus to change.

Also, although these stories are all passionately and obsessively gynocentric -- there are very few men in the stories at all, and those who do appear tend to be hidden and shadowy figures rather than people who dominate the situations -- there is a question of whether these women can sustain society alone. Many of these stories were penned during wartime, when women really were the backbone of the economy in Canada. Sime seems unclear as to whether or not there is any chance for women to sustain this way of life. There is a crushing loneliness in this book -- the women in "irregular unions" know they can never have the stability of marriage, nor can they ever have children, and the freedom becomes less important than the loneliness as time goes by. Sime thinks women are strong enough to lead the economy, but seems concerned about the emotional and psychological cost of these choices in the long run. There is a maternal feminist bent to the period, and the childless Sime seems plagued by the question of whether or not a woman without children can possibly be living up to her full potential. One woman in the text feels this so keenly that she buys a child -- such is the desperation of the mothering instinct.

In this end, this book is important because it documents the lives of the invisible, but more importantly because it is really damn good. If you haven't read Sister Woman -- and I dare say few of us have -- you're missing out on a brilliant work of feminist and Canadian literature from a time period many of us would not think was fertile ground for such work.

dead white guy writes depressing stories about dead animals, news at eleven

Without even commenting on the content of this book, this one was a really, really painful read. Why? Well, ask the good people at New Canadian Library in the 1950s, who felt that the best way to set a text was with negligible margins and the tiniest font it is humanly possible to read without a magnifying glass. It's unlike anything else I've experienced. The text seems to be constructed with the end goal of causing migraines. I don't understand what I did to deserve this book, but here it is.

On the upside, the Sens are destined to lose tonight (down by two at the end of the first and playing away... good freaking luck, you masters of choking!) so at least something is right with the world. Senators status quo is, and always has been, the choke.

The Last Barrier and Other Stories
by Charles G.D. Roberts

For nature, though she works out almost all her ends by tragedy, is ceaselessly attentive to conceal the red marks of her violence.

-----

As he lay gasping and struggling on the hot pebbles, which scorched off the delicate bloom from his tender skin, a tall shape stooped over him, and a great hand, its fingers as long as his whole body, picked him up. He heard a vague reverberation, which was the voice of the shape saying, "A poor little beggar of a salmon -- but not badly hooked! He'll be none the worse, and perhaps none the wiser!" Then, with what seemed to him terrible and deadly violence, but what was really the most careful delicacy that the big hand was capable of, the hook was removed from his jaw, and he was tossed back into the water. Dizzy and half-stunned, he turned over on his back, head downward, and for a moment or two he was at the mercy of the current. Then, recovering from the shock, he righted himself, and swam frantically...

-----

Then, as he perceived that the porcupine had not seemed to notice them, the boy's hunting instinct revived. He stopped, set down the tin dinner pain, and picked up a stone.

"No, you don't, Jimmy!" intervened the girl, with mixed emotions of kindliness and caution, as she grabbed his wrists and dragged him along.

"Why, Sis?" protested the boy, hanging back, and looking over his shoulder longingly. "Jest let me fling a stone at him!"

"No!" said his sister, with decision. "He ain't a-hurtin' us, an' he's mindin' his own business."

If you really like becoming emotionally attached to characters for a page or two before they are killed in horrific and graphic ways before your very eyes, this is the collection for you. Charles G.D. Roberts pioneered the literary form known at the realist animal story. Unlike what we are used to in stories with animals as protagonists, the audience for this collection is clearly an adult one. These stories are not targeted at children. Furthermore, the animal characters in this text do not speak and they do not moralize. Roberts' animal heroes are not allegories for larger human society. They don't serve a human thematic or teach a human lesson. Instead, they are "simply" animals, if you will. They think and behave as do animals. They act out of instinct, rather than reason -- and Roberts does an exceedingly good job of describing what I imagine it must be like to act purely on instinct, not understanding why but feeling drawn to act regardless. Interestingly, though, Roberts does not leave his animals devoid of emotion. The animals feel familial loyalty, they experience fear, they have moments of great joy, they stumble over frustrations, and so on. Roberts does an interesting job of weaving together the idea that animals do not experience the world as do humans with the idea that animals can feel profoundly. In the end he creates extremely rich characters who never speak a word and scarcely understand why they act as they do.

So there are some very good points to this text. It was nice to see animals so richly characterized without anthropomorphism, and I think these stories really show Roberts' love for the Fredericton and Tantramar regions of New Brunswick and the animals he met on his walks here. That said, it's a violent and depressing collection of short stories. In Roberts' zeal to create naturalistic depictions of animal life, he forgets one of the hallmarks of fiction writing -- hope. For the first few stories, it's very easy to connect to the characters and find an attachment to the animal heroes. You care very much about them because they are beautifully created and sensitively drawn. And then they die. A lot. All of them. And by the third or fourth story, you no longer want to allow yourself to connect to the animal heroes who you know are going to die. And because the animals are not allegorical and the stories are not moralistic, much of the slaughter seems painfully unnecessary. You want to see good rewarded and evil punished, but there is no good and evil. So instead, personable creatures perish just as do the unpersonable. And while it's true to the reality of life in nature, it denies the reader a certain amount of hope or connection that keeps the reader connected to the text.

If there is an overarching theme to the narratives included in this collection, I think Roberts wants the reader to see the intricate connections between humans and the animal world, and between animals themselves. Throughout the text, the characters are saved by their relation to one another -- an accidental porcupine saves a hive full of bees, a fisherman sends a salmon on his way, a lynx knocks over a carnivorous plant and saves the insects inside, and so on. The accidental relationships between things is important to Roberts.

And echoing yesterday's post, there is a strong anti-urbanization note to this collection. The whole thing seems to be a comment on how we have lost our touch with the natural world, and the detailed sketches seem to be a means for Roberts to revisit the rural childhood he himself eventually left behind. More overtly, though, is an entire story devoted to the horrors of a child moving to Boston, whoring it up, and moving back to a small town to die in childbirth, leaving her tiny bastard to the care of her grandparents. The grandfather, so fixated on not allowing the child to make the mistakes of her mother, fakes an accident and nearly kills himself to manipulate her into staying in the rural community and not following her heart to the big city. It's a disturbing story, but it makes clear the suspicious nature with which Roberts eyes the urban world.