comp this!: a comprehensive comprehensive blog

this blog's gonna roll

2007-09-23T22:39:00.000-03:00

done and DONE

2007-09-18T10:04:00.001-03:00

Your friendly neighbourhood blogger PASSED her comprehensive exam with flying colours!

Stay tuned for major changes between now and October 1...

fear and loathing in freddy beach

2007-09-06T16:49:00.000-03:00

Arg! I write my comprehensive exam in four days, sixteen hours, and ten minutes!

Help!

Does anyone have any advice for a terrified young Ph.D. candidate?

mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa

2007-08-30T15:02:00.000-03:00

In reading "Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial" by Thomas King, I realize now that my write up of Medicine River was nothing short of ignorant. In King's words:

Associational literature, most often, describes a Native community. While it may also describe a non-Native community, it avoids centring the story on the non-Native community or on a conflict between the two cultures, concentrating instead on the daily activities and intricacies of Native life and organizing the elements of plot along a rather flat narrative line that ignores the ubiquitous climaxes and resolutions that are so valued in non-Native literature. In addition to this flat narrative line, associational literature leans towards the group rather than the single, isolated character, creating a fiction that de-values heroes and villains in favour of the members of a community, a fiction which eschews judgments and conclusions.

The purpose of this, King explains, is two-fold: it's to allow white readers the experience of Native culture free of stereotyping, glamourizing, literary tourism, or pandering; but it's also to remind Native readers of their own culture as valuable, as representable in text, and as present and active rather than archaic and dead.

I now understand better the project of Medicine River, and can genuinely say I learned something useful today.

where is here? here is queer

2007-08-29T16:24:00.000-03:00

This book has been one I have gravitated towards, flipped through, and quoted from for many years, but until now I had not sat down to read the whole thing cover-to-cover. I feel like I should have years ago. I think this book at Atwood's Survival should have been handed to me at the start of my English degree with the words, "Read this or perish!" Seriously, how did I get this far without this book? Mysteries never cease...

Here Is Queer: Nationalisms, Sexualities, and the Literatures of Canada
by Peter Dickinson

In this book I contend that the identificatory lack upon which Canadian literary nationalism has historically been constructed -- the 'where' of Fry's 'here,' for example -- is in large part facilitated by, if not wholly dependent upon, a critical refusal to come to grips with the textual superabundance of a destabilizing and counter-normative sexuality. This counter-normative sexuality I am labeling 'queer,' a term that applies equally in this book to the erotic triangles foundin John Richardson's New World and those that resurface in Leonard Cohen's New Jerusalem; to the hyper-masculinity of Martin Allerdale Grainger's Woodsmen of the West and the feminist revisionism of Daphne Marlatt's Ana Historic, to the apparent sterility of Mrs. Bentley's prairie Horizon and the unexpected verdancy of Maude Laures's desert horizon; to the sexual dissimulation inherent in Pierre X. Magnant's admission 'une phobie d'impoussance' in Trou de mémoire and the sexual exhibitionism accompanying Claude's mantra of 'Chus t'un homme' at the end of Hosanna; to Duncan Campbell Scott's miscegenated Madonna and Tomson Highway's hybrid Trickster. This is not to say that 'here' is only or ever 'queer,' nor that resistance to a heteronormative nationalism is always or exclusively homosexual; what the range of texts discussed in this book does suggest, however, is that 'queer,' as a literary-critical category of an almost inevitable definitional elasticity, one whose inventory of sexual meanings has yet to be exhausted, challenges and upsets certain received national orthodoxies of writing in Canada.

If you want to play a really fun game, ask a first- or second- year literature student why they hate their CanLit classes. If they're feeling honest and you're not their professor, you might get what seemed to be an increasingly common complaint when I was hanging about with undergraduates at my former institution. That is, they all seem to feel CanLit is "a bit weird." Probe below that surface, with a student who is wavering between the immaturity of high school and the no-holds-barred free-for-all of residence sexuality, and you will come pretty close to the truth: "What's with all the weird sex?"

In Canadian Literature, I hold two truths to be self-evident: our protagonists fail, and our protagonists engage in alternative sexualities, both of the pro- and anti-social kinds (pro-social alternative sexuality being homosexuality, transsexuality, asexuality, and anti-social alternative sexuality involving violence, rape, and the damaging of other people). Often, the two occur together; more often, the one is a symbolic representation of the other. Off the top of my head and going through the CanLit selections of my undergraduate career, I can think of a woman having sex with a bear, about a million and a half rape scenes, hundreds of people coming of age and coming to terms with their sexuality, more weird group sex and necrophilia than one might expect, and a whole lot of transvestism as symbolic representation of self. No wonder our 19-year-old undergrads are so confused and scared.

Peter Dickinson goes beyond the surface readings of these texts to study the impact of the queer on the Canadian literary canon, and in the meantime asserts a necessity to challenge our assumptions about what national literature is. For generations we have insisted on seeing queer literature as outside Canadian experience somehow, when a quick flip through our canon shows that it has been there, ignored by critics, for ever. From the obvious triangulation of sexual desire in Wacousta (what else is it when your best friend's twin sister, the spitting image of him, is your sole sexual desire?) to the weird doubling of self in the Philip and Mrs. Bentley and their relationship with their "son" in As For Me and My House, alternative sexualities and male homosocial desire is prevalent in the literature of Canada. To argue that it is anyway outside the experience of Canada is increasingly ludicrous with ever passing year in Canadian literature -- here is, more and more as we become more aware as critics and scholars, queer.

My favourite chapter of this book is Dickinson's chapter on Tomson Highway, because I've always been intrigued by the way Highway constructs masculinity in his plays. In his first play, as Dickinson points out, the men are gone; in the second, they are immasculated. There is a level upon which colonized men are doubly colonized, because they feel that their power has first been robbed of them by the white men and then by the feminist interests of their own women. Dickinson takes on critics who have argued that Highway's plays are profoundly misogynist by pointing out that anywhere we see a trickster character, we must be careful not to take the plays at face value. Certainly, Highway attacks issues of misogyny in his theatre, but he does so without being complacent to those hurtful ideas. Furthermore, Dickinson touches on the two-spirited characters in Highway's plays, and explores the character of Big Joey as a figure of sexual attraction for both the male and female characters in the world of the Wasy Reserve. Importantly, by showing Nanabush as a campy/drag figure, Highway is making clear the place for the two-spirited, gay, or transgendered person in Aboriginal mythology, recreating the space that existed for such people before missionaries and colonizations destroyed the world on non-heteronormative sexuality.

staying with the burning rock for a little longer, here's Michael Winter

2007-08-21T16:25:00.000-03:00

The Big Why
by Michael Winter

What is integrity anyway, except constancy in character. And what if maintaining constancy is false. What if one assumes that the soul is not thoroughly unwavering. Why honour the man who does not change his opinion. Who does not alter his course. Who is methodical and predictable. Why praise the pattern. What if there is no accurate measure of a man's behaviour. A few things: the pulse of the world is always shifting between poles. I have become attached to the ontological. I believe in atheism and the power of the ontological. The reason I do not believe in God is because I am happy with this world. I believe in slim books. I believe in the shape a boat cuts through ice. Sometimes we need God. Our hunches are not intuitive, or they are a blend of nature and the absorption of cultural ways. The third is will to know a truth. This is my book, this will to know.

God, I love Michael Winter. He has a way of looking at the world and capturing all the confusion and fear and angst and joy and excitement in one of two sentences. In The Big Why, Winter leaves aside his usual literary persona of Gabriel English to create a historical fiction. This novel tells of the American painter Rockwell Kent and his decision, in 1914, to uproot his family from their comfortable New York and to transplant them in a Newfoundland fishing community called Brigus. Kent struggles to fit in in the small community, but seems to take as many steps forwards as he does back. When the first world war erupts in earnest, Kent's passion for German culture, his vegetarianism, his socialism and his pacifism all make him the perfect target for assumed anti-British sensibilities, and he is eventually run out of the country of Newfoundland as a German spy.

Rockwell Kent is a man of great passion, both in her art and in his life, but he is not someone who can direct that passion effectively, and the result is that he is left torn between the man he believes that he is and the man he would desperately like to be. Kent is a womanizer, and his desire for women leads him to cheat constantly on his wife, Kathleen. He justifies it to himself that he forewarned Kathleen that he could never be faithful, and for the most part Kathleen tolerates the affairs. Indeed, casual sexual encounters don't really bother Kathleen, though she seems to have married Kent with the expectation that he would grown out of that behaviour. For Kathleen, though, it is emotional betrayals that leave her shocked and speechless. The first occurs when Kent gets together with the woman he loves before Kathleen, Jenny, and they have a baby while Kent is married to Kathleen. The second comes when Kent takes up with the woman who is meant to be caring for their children while Kathleen is in the hospital in St. John's with a complicated pregnancy. This woman, Emily, was a friend of Kathleen's, and the betrayal is such that, for the first time, Kathleen calls Kent a burden. This is the beginning of the end of the marriage, and they eventually divorce. (Kent's affair with Emily also produces a love child, but nothing is learnt of that for many years later, and well after Kathleen's own death.) The bizarre thing about this painful and volatile relationship is that Kent repeatedly argues that he wants to be faithful -- that if he could be any other kind of man than the man he is, he would want to be a fully domesticated sort of person. He would want to be monogamous to Kathleen. His inability to be that man is troubling for him and leads him to constantly be split between the father and husband he ought to be and the womanizing man he actually is. Negotiating the male identity has always been a motif in the writing of Michael Winter, and here he retraces that idea with the very compelling tale of a man torn between two idealized selves, never quite capable of finding the balance or middle ground.

a little sojourn in newfoundland with lisa moore

2007-08-21T16:13:00.000-03:00

Alligator
by Lisa Moore

The brushed their teeth in filthy bathrooms with warped mirrors and naked light bulbs in mountain villages. The porcelain sinks had flares of rust and the drains went down into the earth and bubble up close by. She thought about the phrase, My husband. She said it to herself, This is my husband, Martin. She hated to say the word wife. It was not a word she could bring herself to say.

Husband, too, was questionable. It sounded stout, bifocaled, and involving of a cardigan.

There were things she would not do: she would not iron his shirts, she would not mow lawns or ever, ever, ever fake an orgasm or put her children in sailing or allow Martin to buy a motorcycle because she was afraid his head would get smashed in, though he wanted a motorcycle more than anything in the world, nor would she get fat or sleep on the couch or let the sun set on a fight or have an abortion or make meatloaf, although a recipe with orange rind and brown sugar had caught her eye.

She would not outright deny the motorcycle -- how could she -- but she would connive against it.

She would never freeze seven meals because she was going away and didn't want him to have to cook.

It frightenend her, what she had got into.

I can't lie. I really want to hang out with Lisa Moore. I have a crush on her in the grade six sense of the word, where all you want in the world is to be that person's best friend. I think we would get along well, but more than that I really want to hang out with the kind of person who can create the beauty that exists in her writing. Alligator is a triumphant novel about the
hidden connections between people and seems to suggest that the world is divided into those who follow their desires and those who do not. For the characters in Alligator, everyone is connected, from the brain-damaged side-show act who has put his head inside an alligator, to the girl in St. John's who is acting out for the love of two lost fathers, to the Russian mobster with the secret desire to go straight -- everyone is inter-related and inter-connected in intimate and important ways. As each life touches another, the text seems to ask us to consider our relationships with other people. When I first started studying English, a professor told me that the only way to make literature worth anything is to notice the hidden connections among things -- both within the world of the text and between the text and other cultural touchstones -- and Alligator is very much about the process of realizing one's place in society.

This is also a novel about roles and the parts we play. In the quote above, we see a woman struggling with the idea of being a woman with her own independent identity, and a wife as well. She fears being incapable of doing both those things successfully. In the end, feeling lost within the marriage, she divorces her husband, but when she comes to the end of her own life -- brought about through a heart condition and the stress of following her own dreams as a filmmaker in the years after her divorce -- she wants nothing more than to return to the connection she once shared with her ex-husband. For Madeline, this is the paradox that consumes her life, and in the end she dies because of an inability to find balance between the things she ought to do and the person she wants to be.

The most touching story in the novel though is the story of Colleen. Never having known her biological father, Colleen is raised by a step-father she loves unconditionally, but who dies when she is very young. Colleen begins an acting-out process of drinking, acting out, and promiscuity that places boundaries between herself and her mother than can no longer be crossed. From her mother's perspective, Beverly wants to love her daughter but fears that with all the punishing and court dates and disconnect she has forgotten how to mother. Colleen, for her part, cannot love, and she uses the love of others (like the sweet-tempered and kind-hearted Frank, who is also coping with the loss of a parent) for her own gain. When Colleen sleeps with Frank and then robs him, she changes his perception of the world and alters his life's trajectory; Frank ends up embroiled in the plot of a Russian mobster and nearly dies in a house fire. Colleen's inability to see the consequences of her actions is perhaps the greatest tragedy of the novel.

this is not a play about child abuse

2007-08-20T12:45:00.000-03:00

All Fall Down
by Wendy Lill

Hard to say. Interrogating children is a bit like chasing the shadows of butterflies. It can be that illusive. You're trying to find out if someone has caused them pain. But we all start collecting pain the minute we're born. All the physical hurts, the pain of abandonment, the assaults of noise and darkness. That's all layered in there too, interfering with the search.

As the title indicates, this is not a play about child abuse. Instead, All Fall Down is a play about hysteria and the ramifications of incorrect allegations of child sexual abuse. In the play, a loving day care worker, Annie Boland, is accused of sexually interfering with a four-year-old boy named Chad Brewer. But we never see Annie or Chad on-stage. Instead, though their voices are heard, this is a play about Chad's mother, Molly, and the parents of Chad's friend Rory, Emma and Ewan Grady, and the social worker who whips the town into a frenzy, Dr. Connors. The thrust of the play makes it clear from the beginning that Annie is innocent -- this isn't a mystery or a courtroom drama. This play works, instead, to illustrate the effects on parents in these situations and to show just how negative the wrong answers can be.

The roles in the play are clear. Molly is the accuser, Connors is the professional man who is supposed to fix everything, Ewan is the last stand-out against hysteria, and Emma is trapped -- she wants to believe that she is above the fear-mongering, like her husband, but can't shake the nagging doubts that such accusations plant in the mind. The fore-grounding of Ewan in the beginning of play and Emma at the end seems to suggest that though all of us watching might hope we could react like Ewan, we are all more likely to end up squarely in Emma territory. The question the play poses is this: is it even possible, in our current climate, to protect both the children involved and the adults accused? Can the truth remain safe?

There is no grey-area when it comes to the truth of the accusations. We are witnesses to the collapse of Molly's sanity, and we see her fabricate the allegations in order to have someone (a) listen to her and (b) blame someone else for her atrocious parenting. If she can blame Annie's hands for the fact that he son is out-of-control, she can find a place in the community again... And she can find a way for herself to deal with the reality that her son is closer to his daycare teacher than his own mother. The lies are fabricated to cover up exquisitely painful truths about her ability to mother her son, and they are sped along by Connors and his lack of understanding of the gentleness with which children's testimony must naturally be handled. As the children become more and more outrageous in their claims of abuse -- having discovered positive reinforcement for such harrowing claims -- the audience is left chilled as Connors does nothing to intervene. Even without a sympathetic portrait of Annie, the suggestions sound like the made-up play-lies of children in a one-up-man game (at one point, a little girl accuses Annie of making her pee on a peanut butter sandwich, and instead of laughing at the suggestion as play the community struggles to corroborate it). The audience is left disgusted by the inability of so many of the characters to find truth.

In the end, Ewan and Emma's marriage is ripped apart by the crisis, and the community doesn't find peace so much as it finds more people to accuse. This is our modern-day witch trial, and just as we didn't know how to protect the chastity of young girls and so flew to accusations of witchcraft, we now holler abuse in response to abnormal childhood development. The shaky conclusion of the play leaves no doubt in the reader's mind -- there is no positive conclusion to this situation.

i flat out did not understand this one, folks

2007-08-17T17:26:00.000-03:00

White Biting Dog
by Judith Thompson

Excuse me, could you call the projectionist, please? He's my Dad--I just have to talk to him for a second--I know--but the thing can run on its own, we both know that--besides, this is an emergency! Yeah! Thanks, thanks a lot...(peering) Dad? I can see the dustbeam but I can't see you oh there you are hi! Hi...It's me--no, no I'm not back, I'm not even in the Kirk, actually, I'm just--like this is gonna totally weird you out, but--I had to appear to you like this 'cause--in a couple of hours you're gonna hear that -- don't freak out--that I passed myself on and--like--I didn't want you to get too down about it so I thought I'd come and tell you myself that--it's not at all a bad thing. It's quite nice if you just give in to it. You know the feeling when you're falling asleep and ya jump awake 'cause you dreamt you slipped on a stair? Well it's like if you stayed in the slip--if you dove right down into it and held your breath til you came out the other end. I'm in the holding your breath part right now, so I'm not sure what's on the other end, but I feel like I'm so big I'd barely fit into the Kirk Community Centre-- it's weird, but... Dad? Dad? The main reason I came was to let you know that I didn't...kill myself 'cause I couldn't hack it or because the man I loved couldn't love me back, it was 'cause...I was invaded, Dad, Dad, filled by the worst evil...you ever imagined--I guess it happened when I fell in love, on account of I had to open my mouth so wide to let the love in that the evil came in, too...and living with it was just liked being skinned alive; worse pain even than your kidney stones, and we know how bad they were. Now the pain has stopped, and there's still the old Pony to give to my husband: 'cause he needs it, Dad, like a blood transfusion he needs it, and just like Mum would give you anything you needed, I'm gonna give myself to him. No, we didn't get papers, but he's my husband all right. His name is Cape Race, like the place, eh? Oh yeah, I told him about your mice and he was really impressed and uh--tell Wade there's a stereo store down here that's looking for someone and Mum--tell Mum not to go into the ditch about this 'cause I know they're gonna let me come visit--to--straighten her fingers and...give her alcohol rubs...Well...I have to finish my dive now...Oh Dad I'm so big now I'd never fit back on earth. Love...Pony.

Okay, I didn't get this play. Like at all. And now it's sitting on my shelf mocking me, which is totally unfair. I have reread it now way more times than I can justify with the study schedule I'm meant to be following. I just don't get it. And when I read on-line about how uproariously funny it is meant to be, I just feel more angry and confused that I started out feeling. So I kind of quit this play before I even sat down to write this blog post, which is unfair of course. I'm going to offer a plot summary and a clumsy stab at a discussion, and then I'm really going to quit this play (and pray there's no direct question about it on the exam). If you've read and loved or seen and understood White Biting Dog then please, please comment and explain it to me. Because I don't get it at all.

The basic story of the play is that a young man (named Cape Race), who has gone through a breakdown and a divorce, is in the act of attempting suicide when he sees a small white dog. The dog talks to him, and tells him that only through saving the life of his father, Glidden. Unfortunately, his father is convinced that without his wife, Lomia, he feels he has no reason to live -- but Lomia has taken off with a man named Pascal who is about Cape's age. Awkward! In the midst of all of this is a girl, Pony, who really is suicidal, but because she had a small white dog once she finds herself drawn into the plot to try and save Glidden -- in the meantime, she sort-of-but-not-really falls in love with Cape. The play ends with Glidden and Pony both dead because they loved Lomia and Cape either too much or in the wrong way or simply couldn't be loved back. (The quote above is the monologue Pony delivers before her suicide... It's perhaps better known in Canadian drama schools as 'ubiquitous monologue for young female actresses, usually delivered poorly and at an overwrought level of faux-motion.)

So that's the plot. I keep coming back to think about the fact that the protagonist changed his name to Cape Race. His mother named him Sonny at birth, which he bitterly claims shows that she hadn't thought of anything else to name him and so went for the obvious. Cape Race is the south-eastern-most point of Canada, being located at the very edge of the Avalon Peninsula in Newfoundland. It was allegedly so-named because the first visitors, the Portugese fishermen who worked seasonally in Newfoundland, were amazed by how barren it was -- Capa Raso, meaning Cape Bare. Cape choosing this for his name is interesting because he rejects the barrenness of his mother's chosen name for him and instead embraces it in its geographical form.

News telegraphed from the ocean on liners and boats to New York was transmitted with the byline "via Cape Race." (Thanks, Wikipedia!) Likewise, the character Cape Race is the vehicle by which much is transmitted in the play -- his parent rarely speak to one another, but instead communicate through him. Further, he is the conduit for the talking white dog. Cape is the means by which information is disseminated in the play.

it's a simple fact: nice girls rarely murder their parents

2007-08-17T16:11:00.000-03:00

Blood Relations
by Sharon Pollack

Gentlemen of the Jury!! I ask you to look at the defendant, Miss Lizzie Borden. I ask you to recall the nature of the crime of which she is accused. I ask you – do you believe Miss Lizzie Borden, the youngest daughter of a scion of our community, a recipient of the fullest amenities our society can bestow upon its most fortunate members, do you believe Miss Lizzie Borden capable of wielding the murder weapon – thirty-two blows, gentlemen, thirty-two blows – fracturing Abigail Borden’s skull, leaving her bloody and broken body in an upstairs bedroom, then, Miss Borden, with no hint of frenzy, hysteria, or trace of blood upon her person, engages in casual conversation with the maid, Bridget O’Sullivan, while awaiting her father’s return home, upon which, after sending Bridget to her attic room, Miss Borden deals thirteen more blows to the head of her father, and minutes later – in a state utterly compatible with that of a loving daughter upon discovery of murder most foul – Miss Borden calls for aid! Is this the aid we give her? Accusation of the most heinous and infamous of crimes? Do you believe Miss Lizzie Borden capable of these acts? I can tell you I do not!! I can tell you these acts of violence are acts of madness!! Gentlemen! If this gentlewoman is capable of such an act – I say to you – look to your daughters.

Lizzie Borden took an axe / And gave her mother forty whacks / When the job was nicely done / She gave her father forty-one.

That was the song I skipped to as a child. Before I knew who Lizzie Borden was, before I understood the circumstances that led her to kill and the gender biases that kept her out of prison, before I ever read Blood Relations by Sharon Pollock, and before I knew that Lizzie Borden was the O.J. Simpson of the 1800s (well, likely before O.J. Simpson, for that matter). As famous murders-who-clearly-did-it-but-didn't-serve-a-lick-of-time-for-their-heinous-crimes go, Lizzie belongs in the ranks of the finest. I can't imagine many hatchet murders go unsolved. But this play is not a simple bio piece about Lizzie Borden, nor does it try to excuse her crimes in any way. Sharon Pollock's Blood Relations is primarily a play about two things: gender and memory.

To start with, the gender issue is keenly felt through this play, but not in the heavy-handed manner of a Margaret Hollingsworth. Pollock paints a Lizzie Borden who is pushed into murder by the situation of unmarried women in her time. Lizzie's mother died in childbirth, and Lizzie's father had remarried. The stepmother, Abigail, had a brother (named Harry in this play but I don't think that was his name in real life). Knowing the precarious position of widows in American society at the time, Harry is focused on ensuring that as much property as possible is transferred into the name of his sister -- after all, in the absence of a will (and Mr. Borden had no will), his estate would default to his daughters. While Harry is looking out for his sister, Lizzie sees this in no uncertain terms as the wholesale vanquishing of her security. As an unmarried woman, she would be beholden to her father's estate to see her put right. Her fear is that she will not have enough money to be independent and will have to reside with her step-mother until she dies. In Pollock's telling of the events, this is what drives Lizzie to commit murder; fear for her own future and security, coupled with her terrible relationship with her step-mother, leads Lizzie to commit murder. But if the gender situation drives a powerless Lizzie to murder, it's also what keeps her out of prison. No one believed, or wanted to believe, that women -- especially good daughters from good families with good educations -- could be capable of murder. An inability to see women as human beings, and therefore as fallible, Pollock seems to suggest, resulted in a guilty woman going free.

The other major issue of the play is memory. None of the characters are real, even in the world of the play, except for Lizzie and The Actress. (The Actress is a depiction of Nance O'Neil, who rumour has it was carrying on a lesbian relationship with Lizzie, possibly for her own financial gain.) The Actress is desperate to know if Lizzie actually committed the murder, which leads to the conjuring up of the other characters through memory. The play implicates Lizzie, but Lizzie tries to use her memory of the events to attach blame to the family that drove her to it and the sister who raised her. Memory is powerful enough to cause pain, but perhaps not powerful enough to ascertain the truth.

This is an absolutely beautiful play, and I would love one day to see it performed.

yawning my way through radical feminist drama

2007-08-17T14:46:00.000-03:00

The Apple in the Eye
by Margaret Hollingsworth

Now you see my dear Gemma, I want you to understand that the gulf which divides us is simply due to a differing approach to the same problem. It may be solved quite simply by a slight adaptation on your part; it is a question of applying first order logic and a degree of systematization to your primary through processes, which will then reflect on...

OH MAN, I CAN'T BELIEVE HOW DIFFERENT MEN AND WOMEN ARE AND HOW MUCH MEN DON'T UNDERSTAND WOMEN. THANK GOD FOR THIS VERY EDGY PLAY. Okay, so I'm a little vehement. This, to me, though, is just a bad example of feminist literature -- where the relationship between man and women is so obviously flawed (at the fault of the male, of course) that any subtlety in the plot itself becomes impossible. In this play, we have Gemma, the stay-at-home something or other who seems to be a house wife disinterested in both house-keeping and being a wife, and Martin, a wooden and unloving professor of artificial intelligence (get it? he's smart, but he doesn't understand her, so his intelligence is artificial -- HOW REFRESHINGLY SUBTLE THAT IS). We are some how supposed to put aside the fact that she doesn't do anything all day except make the occasional pot of tea (which she moans about) to join the author in hating on Martin's desire to stay in bed on Sundays, his inability to connect with his wife, and his disinterest in her. Nevermind that she has been written as a boring, small, uninteresting character. We should side with her because she is a woman and her big bad husband occasional suggests that she might consider either cleaning the house or getting a job. What a monster.

Most infuriating is that even if Martin is a dick, he's always been a dick. Gemma repeats that marriage hasn't changed him. So she knew what she was signing up for, in other words. This isn't like 10 years down the road and the worm has turned. If she hates who he is, she always hated who he is. This begs the question: why did she marry him? If this were to open up into a greater question of people entering into marriages without understanding them or the limited options available to women at the time of the play's writing (1983), then fine. But the play instead shies away from universality or broader comment by focusing on the minutae and creating a Martin we are meant to hate (and his absense from the stage for the entire play merely strengthens the idea that we are meant to take Gemma at her word).

Part of why this play fails, in my opinion, is the heavy-handed use of symbolism. Gemma is questing after an apple for the duration of the play. Really, a play about gender relations that invokes imagery of an apple?! However did the playwright conceive of something so cutting edge and ground-breaking?!

Snore.

what do you call a sanctioned appropriation?

2007-08-14T16:24:00.000-03:00

The Book of Jessica
by Linda Griffiths, with Maria Campbell

I know who did. The people, the mentality that drove my ancestors out of their land... the same bloody family compact runs this country now. It feels like an unbroken line sometimes. I know I'm from the underneath because of the way I feel, because of the anger I feel. I feel like I'm shaking my fist at someone on top of me, and I look... I'm from the Canadian middle classes, who the hell am I shaking my fist at? Myself? Who is it I'm so angry at, that I feel has oppressed me? All I know is I'm there with my fist in the air, feeling like most modern people, angry at shadows and ghosts. You want to make it into a clean story about conquerors and oppression, but it's not as clean or as clear a story as you seem to think. Not for me. You say that if we understood our history, everything would be stronger. But it doesn't feel like that to me. We have to see in what way we're being conquered right now.

I watch an aging pride when I go to gatherings in Toronto. There's a community of about a thousand people, artists who stayed here instead of leaving, and all of them have fought a battle to break through every kind of snotty colonialism in order to free themselves to be fascinated by their own place. They haven't left their people, you would say, and they've paid for it because their own people often despise them for it. That's my community.

The Book of Jessica is a journey into the process of creating a play as a collaborative effort. Originally envisioned as a continuation of the story of Halfbreed, the play Jessica was a collaboration of Theatre Passe Muraille's Paul Thompson, Métis activist and writer Maria Campbell, and playwright/actor Linda Griffiths. The Book of Jessica, however, walks the reader through the process, culminating in the play itself which was more fully a product of Linda Griffith with input from Maria Campbell. This is a Canadian play mired in conflict, and Linda Griffith's telling of the troubles between herself, Campbell and Thompson is at times disarmingly honest -- none of the creators spoke to one another from many years after the original production of the play, and Campbell and Griffith quarrelled over aspects of the future and publication of the play.

In the preamble to the play, many interesting issues are raised. The most obvious issue that preoccupies the women in their discussions about the play is the issue of appropriation of voice. Linda Griffiths, who played the Maria Campbell-based character of Jessica in the original run, and indeed created the character herself, has constant feelings of discomfort about playing a Métis woman, worrying constantly about her ability to portray a culture to which she doubts her ability to access. In rehearsals, we learn, she and Campbell regularly hit walls -- Griffiths incapable of accessing the necessary experience, and Campbell angry about what Griffiths represents to her personally as a white woman. But Campbell's most important assertion is what resonates with Griffiths and carries through the play -- the character of Jessica is as much a product of white society as Native, which means that Griffiths is not appropriating a voice so much as she is channeling an alternate part of herself. Furthermore, Campbell reminds Griffith, the whites who came and oppressed the Aboriginal and Métis populations did so because they were evacuated from their own homelands by similar processes. Griffiths needed to channel her inner oppresses person in order to find the reality of Jessica. Interesting, Griffiths points out that the only audiences who had problems with a white woman portraying Jessica were the white liberal theatre critics. Perhaps the anger over appropriation is sometimes merely a cover for our discomfort over how similar we really are?

The play itself carried forward more of the themes of Halfbreed, though with more magic realism. Again, for me, the most interesting idea is that of the broken male members of the community. Sam, the Aboriginal male figure in the play, feels that he has been castrated by the white oppressors, and even though he is a sympathetic character and we are encouraged to like him (played by the lovable Graeme Greene), he too resorts to violence against women when he finally feels that he has lost his power in the home. This idea is one I would love to see studied more in masculinity theory, which unfortunately tends to be quite a white-centric movement.

the only word is startling

2007-08-14T11:50:00.000-03:00

Halfbreed
by Maria Campbell

One of these people was Eugene Steinhauer. He had nothing when he came to AA except the clothes on his back. He had lived on various skid rows and his family had given him up for a derelict. Now he was finding sobriety, as well as hope for himself, and a future as something more than just another drunken Indian. I admired him because he was the first Indian I had ever met who let white people know how he felt about them, not just by his attitude, but verbally as well. I'd hated those nameless, faceless white masses all my life, and he said all the things I had kept bottled up inside for so many years.

At this time, I felt Eugene could do no wrong. He was one of the "brothers" Cheechum had talked about. When, following his example, I too began to speak out, his attitude towards me changed. At the time I was hurt and discouraged because to me he was a special person, but it doesn't matter anymore. Since then I've met many Native leaders who have treated me the same and I've learned to accept it. I realize now that the system that fucked me up fucked up our men even worse. The missionaries had impressed upon us the feeling that women were a source of evil. This belief, combined with the ancient Indian recognition of the power of women, is still holding back the progress of our people today.

In Maria Campbell's autobiography, Halfbreed, her project is to show Métis life from the days of Riel through to the 1970s. In this striking book, Campbell forces the white reader to confront the results of cultural imperialism and policies such as the Indian Act, and demands that the reader look face-on at the resulting poverty and crisis of identity, self-hatred and pain. For Aboriginal and Métis readers, Campbell strikes out at the white structures of power, names and shames the oppressors, and puts forward a challenge to other Aboriginal and Métis women to tell their own stories. The purpose of Halfbreed, then, is twofold: white readers are shown the results of their cultural practices, and Aboriginal and Métis readers are given a literary history to write into and respond to.

The life Maria Campbell recounts in her novel is a difficult one. She moves from being a strong child swearing to her grandmother that she would never cower in front of white people, to a young teenager thrown into the role of mothering her brothers and sisters with the death of her own mother and living in constant fear that children's aid workers would separate her family, to a young wife living in a horribly violent marriage, to a prostitute and drug user living in Vancouver. When Campbell finally begins to clear her life up, she meets a man she loves, but her inability to be honest about her past and her shame at the life she has lived leads her to a mental breakdown. At the end of the novel, we are met with a politically active Maria Campbell, standing on her own two feet, raising her own children, and rebuilding a relationship with David. But we never again have the hopeful and potent Maria Campbell who opened the novel -- that wide-eyed childhood idealism is lost. That Campbell perseveres in spite of her loss of idealism is perhaps the most important lesson of the novel. To progress as a society, we must be able to see the situation as it really is but still maintain the will to try to change things anyway. That is Campbell's gift in this novel.

From the perspective of masculinity studies, this novel is an interesting one because Campbell is just as interested in Aboriginal and Métis men as she is in Aboriginal and Métis women. While the effects on women are perhaps more readily obvious through the cycle of victimhood they find themselves trapped within, the Native men who perpetrate these acts are not cast merely as one-dimensional villains. Campbell attributes her early maturation to the process of watching her father die inside as the family sank deeper and deeper into poverty. For Campbell, the real tragedy of these communities is that people have no reason to dream. A white child may grow up poor but be able to dream themselves out of it, Campbell argues, but a Métis child has had that ability to dream robbed from them. They can only imagine becoming a stereotypical 'drunken Indian,' as she terms it, or becoming the battered and abused wife of the same. With no prospects for fulfilling work and racism stopping advancement at every turn, Campbell's biggest wish for her people is to return to them the right and ability to dream of an alternate future. As one critic has dubbed it, this book is a call for an 'alterNative' approach to aboriginal identity and selfhood.

going, going, gone indian

2007-08-13T21:16:00.000-03:00

Gone Indian
by Robert Kroetsch

You open a new notebook to the first blank page, then notice he has brought along six of same, lest the dissertation should suddenly begin to write itself. A loafer. Not the ring-giver of old, not a leader of warriors, not a sound judge of good and evil. The eternal scrounging lazy unemployed bum of a graduate student --

You find the one notebook that is not quite new nor totally empty, raise it as if to close your -- and here I quote -- eloquent breasts therein: you bend your gaze to the first paragraph of the dissertation: "Christopher Columbus, not knowing that he has not come to the Indies, named the inhabitant of that new world --"

Then you read, aloud again, my own professorial comment: "Jeremy, my boy, you have used this same opening in two other failed, futile, rejected attempts at writing a dissertation. When will you begin?"

Imagine, if you will, that you are an American graduate student. You have been writing your dissertation for a cool nine years. You're a grad student in the 1970s, so you are by default male and by default having it off with all your undergraduate pupils. You're failing at everything, even teaching composition class, and your marriage is falling apart. Your stress is being quite handily symbolized through a frustrating case of impotence. You're a failure at the definitive checking-out-of-reality profession, and your personal life is in shambles. So you run. You run for the north, determined to 'go Indian' and live like your hero, Grey Owl, emulating the people you've been floundering around writing about for the last nine years. Along the way you cheat more on your wife, piss some people off, and die or possibly fake your own death.

And the only person left to interpret your story is your advisor.

Who is totally sleeping with your wife.

Just another day in grad school, ladies and gentlemen.

This is the story Kroetsch weaves for us in his novel, Gone Indian. The novel beautifully captures the strained advisor-advisee relationships that are so archetypal of the graduate school experience, and tells us in two voices the story of the last days Jeremy Sadness spends among the Aboriginal people of Alberta. We are given the story in tapes transcribed by the professor but told in Jeremy's voice, but we are also given Dr. Madham's interpretation of the events. All of this is sent to Jill Sunderman, who Jeremy had been carrying on with in Alberta, as a means of explaining the life and "death" of this man. Obviously, names are important here. "Madham" is the force that drives Jeremy north in his madness. "Sunderman" is the woman who divides Jeremy into his failed white self and his imagined but idealized "native" / Grey Owl-esque self. And Jeremy himself is names after Jeremy Bentham and lives a life in academia surveiling the world, to an extent that he must escape and discover an alternate world of his own.

But that's the novel, really. I wanted there to be discussion of what it is to appropriate a cultural identity for no reason other than to facilitate an escape from the self. In a way, the ambivalence of the ending reflects an ambivalence about this choice, I suppose. Carol, Jeremy's wife, is certain her husband is still alive; Madham is certain he is dead. The truth, really, lies somewhere in between -- Jeremy is certainly dead, but Jeremy's inner Grey Owl may well have survived the journey.

a chapter of our history we have tried in vain to suppress

2007-08-13T19:05:00.000-03:00

Obasan
by Joy Kogawa

What is this thing about chickens? When they are babies, they are yellow. Yellow like daffodils. Like Goldilocks' yellow hair. Like the yellow Easter chicks I lost somewhere. Yellow like the yellow pawns in the Yellow Peril game.

The Yellow Peril is a Somerville Game, Made in Canada. It was given to Stephen at Christmas. On the red and blue box cover is a picture of soldiers with bayonets and fists raised high looking out over a sea of burning ships and a sky full of planes. A game about war. Over a map of Japan are the words: The game that shows how a few brave defenders can withstand a very great number of enemies.

There are fifty small yellow pawns inside and three big blue checker kings. To be yellow in the Yellow Peril game is to be weak and small. Yellow is to be chicken. I am not yellow. I will not cry.

When the yellow chicks grow up they turn white. Chicken Little is a large Yellow Peril puff. One time Uncle stepped on a baby chick. One time, I remember, a white hen pecked yellow chicks to death, to death in our backyard.

In Joy Kogawa's Obasan, readers read about the experiences of Kogawa and her family in the Japanese Internment in Canada during World War Two. In our history, there are many events which we would rather pretend did not exist, because it damages our image of ourselves. For a country that clings to its image as a cultural mosaic where people are free to practice their own culture while integrating into Canadian life, the hysteria and racism against Canadian citizens of Japanese descent during the Second World War is unforgivable. Little studied in Canadian history (my textbook in first-year Canadian History class gave it a full two paragraphs) and often ignored, the Japanese Internment involved the imprisonment, relocation, exile, and pillaging of an entire group based solely on race. The Japanese who were interned were largely citizens, with the rest being naturalized Canadians. Canada sent people 'back' to Japan who had never set foot on its shores (and who, upon arriving in Japan as Canadian citizens, were promptly treated as enemy aliens). Our government tried to convince them it was for their own good and their own safety -- when government itself had stirred up the racialized hysteria that made such unthinkable acts somehow a rational choice. Obasan was the first novel to talk about the Japanese Internment in Canada, and the first novel to chronicle the experiences of the victims of internment, exile, dispersal, and so on.

What is most striking about Kogawa's project is that sh has created not merely a historical document, but a beautiful work of literature as well. Obasan is not a book to read because you ought to or because it is important; Obasan is a beautiful novel in its own right, and can be studied as a work of literature separate from its social function (if one were into that sort of thing, which your friendly blogger thinks is a really good way to miss the point of literature entirely). For example, one motif Kogawa carries through the novel is the motif of birds. The chickens are important, as in the quotation above, because they represent the protagonist, Naomi, and her discomfort within her own race and her experiences of racism. When chicks mature they become white; Naomi, for a period in her childhood, seems concerned that she too should turn white to be acceptable. While Naomi eventually learns to have pride in herself and her race, her brother Stephen never does. As the recipient of the Yellow Peril board game, he internalizes the discrimination and is more fully colonized than is his sister. Stephen seeks the acceptance of the white world, eventually partnering with a white woman and moving to Toronto. Stephen wants to forget the internment desperately. But Naomi is constantly reminded by the freedom of the birds around her all the freedom she lost in the internment camps. While she to tries to forget, she is ultimately incapable of doing so, and this novel becomes her great act of remembrance and memorialization.

Aunt Emily is the member of the family actively in search of closure for the victims of interment, and it is she who keeps the memory alive even when no one else wishes to hear it. In her youth, Naomi wants to ignore Emily's pleas -- after all, internment is how Naomi lost her father, and the anti-Japanese laws are what separated Naomi from her mother. For Naomi, a mere child during the ordeal, to forget the internment is to forget the pain of being wrenched away from her parents and grandparents. But when she realizes that Emily holds these secrets for the purposes of memorializing Naomi's parents, she learns to listen. Indeed, this is the central purpose of the text for Naomi -- to learn to listen to the older generation and to learn to embrace her own history, even those parts which may seem distasteful. Suddenly, to forget the internment would be to allow her parents to have died in vain, and once Naomi realizes that she can see the value in memory, however painful it might be. In Emily's diary, we read with crushing realism her loss of faith in the Canadian government as she moves from disbelief, to a sense that everything will be okay, to the absolute despair of being separated from her family with no guarantee of who she will ever be able to see again. This is the central message for the reader -- beyond the very important purpose of the text as a remembrance of past horrors, the novel is also a caution against blind faith in anything, but especially in man-made institutions. Obasan reminds us that the institutions we have are as fallible as we are.

raging against the machine, atwood-style

2007-08-12T10:31:00.000-03:00

Moral Disorder
by Margaret Atwood

Tess was evidently another of those unlucky pushovers, like the Last Duchess, and like Ophelia -- we'd studied Hamlet earlier. These girls were all similar. They were too trusting, they found themselves in the hands of the wrong men, they weren't up to things, they let themselves drift. They smiled too much. They were too eager to please. Then they got bumped off, one way or another. Nobody gave them any help.

Why did we have to study these hapless, annoying, dumb-bunny girls? I wondered. Who chose the books and poems that would be on the curriculum? What use would they be in our future lives? What exactly were we supposed to be learning from them? Maybe Bill was right. Maybe the whole things was a waste of time.

Upstairs, my parents were sleeping peacefully; they knew nothing of doomed love, of words spoken in anger, of fated separation. They were ignorant of the darker side of life -- of girls betrayed in forests, of girls falling into streams and singing till they drowned, or girls done away with for being too pleasant. All over the city, everyone was asleep, drifting on the vast blue sea of unconsciousness. Everyone except me.

In her most recent collection of linked short stories, Moral Disorder, Margaret Atwood develops the character of Nell. We meet Nell in girlhood as, at the age of eleven, she deals with her mother's pregnancy, and we follow Nell through schooling and romance, through raising her younger sister as her mother coped with what seems to be some sort of post-partum depression that goes on forever, through her unorthodox lifestyle that involves her with a married man, through her coping with her sister's mental illness, and finally to her dealing with the aging and death of her parents. Some of the stories are told in the first person and others in the third; frequently we are treated to the points-of-view of outside characters like a loving realtor or a confused stepchild. It takes a long time for the stories to link together, and as the collection nits and we realize 'I' and 'Nell' are one and the same, the collection begins to tell us something about identity and the ways in which we see ourselves. Interestingly, Nell is an 'I,' that is, she speaks from the first person point-of-view, only when she is in a position of care-giving. When she is her sister's caregiver, and then again later when she is caring for her parents. In those intermittent years, when Nell is involved with Tig and unsure of her place and stability and she ages alongside a married man, she is narrated for by an outside voice. The 'I' returns when the man's wife dies and Nell becomes more stable in her existence again. (What do we make of the need to kill off another woman here in order to find a place with a man?) Nell is able to tell her own story only when she is sure of her identity and comfortable with her role. Where things are shaky, she transitions to being told about rather than telling her own story.

Another motif that emerges, as discussed in the quote above, is the idea of the representation of women in literature and in public perception. Nell is, in her youth, fascinated by the way women fit or don't fit into the roles society determines. Her mother embarrasses her because she can't be bothered to knit for the new baby and because her own mental illness prevents her from carrying effectively for her new child. She becomes obsessed with the idea that with the sixties came the drop of the term 'adultery' -- but without adultery, she wonders, what is monogamy, and who is she? Nell wonders to herself, "I was haunted by a poem I read at the age of twenty, written by a well-known poet much older than myself. This poem claimed that all intellectual women had pimples on their bums. It was an absurd generalization, I realized; nevertheless, I worries about it." For Nell, more important than the truth of the poem is the perception that poem creates. It doesn't matter that she's pimple-free if everyone else believes otherwise. And fundamentally, that is what this book is about -- women, and the assumptions society (including other women) make about them.

a rollicking read, right when i needed it

2007-08-12T09:04:00.001-03:00

Medicine River
by Thomas King

My mother died on a Tuesday in the early evening. My clearest memory of her was that day the row-boat sank in Lake Pokagon. I remember my fear of sinking into that lake. James wouldn't let go of the side of the boat. I was sure we were going to die. And then my mother snorted as her short legs found the bottom. The lake wasn't deep at all, at least not there. It hardly came above James's chest, and it was warm. My mother shook her head. "Well, we ain't going to die today." And she laughed and told us to hold on to her hands.

As Harelna and I pulled the canoe along, I could feel the large round stones under my feet, could hear the hollow roll they made as they rocked beneath me, and I thought about my mother and James and me, laughing and walking through the mud and the water to shore. James was with her when she died. I should have been there, too.

The river swirled around us, sucking at our feet, flashing at our legs as we went. Harlen began singing a forty-niner, beating out the rhythm on the gunwales. And we brought the canoe back through the dark water and into the light.

Medicine River is a novel of memory and remembrance. King's first novel is indeed quite novel in form. Each chapter is an interweaving of a present-day story about Will, a photographer living in Medicine River near his mother's home reserve, and a story of the past, either about Will's mother or brother or his past life in Toronto. In the present-day, Will has come to Medicine River following the death of his mother. The events of this time help him to become closer to his mother through reminiscence, as well as helping him to realize the inauthenticity of his life in Toronto and the power of connection he has in Medicine River. This is a novel, then, not only about memory, but about finding one's place in the world. And it's not always happy. Will is knocked for six when his "girlfriend" starts to redefine her relationship with her baby's father -- but it reifies his definition of himself as a single man. This is the life he claims makes him happy, and it parallels his romantic life in Toronto where he was the other man in a relationship with a married woman and is eventually broken-hearted. What we learn about this, and what the over-arching message of the text seems to be, is that life occurs in circles and cycles, ever repeating. Will seems to be in Medicine River as a chance to sort out his life and get things right. With his friend Harlen Bigbear as a kind of spiritual guide, Will is able to find his way forward, for better or for worse.

For fans of Thomas King's later work, this book may be a bit of a surprise. It lacks the magic realism of a novel like Green Grass, Running Water. But the sweetness and the kindness of Thomas King is here in this early novel, replete with the humour that has made him so popular. This is a warm novel about memory and experience, but I don't really have anything ground-breaking to write about it. I enjoyed it thoroughly, but it is not as layered as some of his later works.

the last play i shall write about today, praise jesus / allah / santa / marks'n'spencers

2007-08-07T23:15:00.000-03:00

The Occupation of Heather Rose
by Wendy Lill

I would say, without a doubt, that the character of Heather Rose is the meatiest, most tantalizing, most desirable role for a young female actress working in Canada today. The Occupation of Heather Rose is a one-woman tour-de-force of voice that id demanding, draining, and one can only imagine, deeply fulfilling. The play has been remounted as a multi-person cast (and I want to say a film, but I could be fabricating that), but I can't imagine that's possible without losing the powerful sense of isolation the one-woman aspect of the play provides. In the end, that is what this play is really about -- how one deals with isolation, how one reaches their limit, and how one learns to go home again.

Heather Rose is a young white woman of middle class guilt stock who decides to pack up everything after nursing school and go to work of a reserve up norther. Heather is not prepared for anything -- not the isolation, not the health problems, not the problems with accessing resources, nor with her own resiliency (or lack thereof) in the face of trauma. For Heather, life is one big adventure and this is simply another challenge for her to overcome, like getting straight As or pleasing her parents.

Heather is isolated from the community right away when, immediately upon arriving, she expresses gratitude for the fact that this is a dry reserve. When every other white person working on the reserve is drunk most of the time, she loses friends before she even begins by being simply too sheltered to be able to view things accurately. Heather starts out full of a wide-eyed idealism, but before long she succumbs to the drink. Where at the play's opening she is disgusted by the people who have given up on the natives and refer to them as a "broken people," by the end she is one of the chorus of voices condemning them to a life of uncertainty and failure.

As Heather becomes increasingly isolated with her friends leaving and mail so slow from home, she turns more towards the bottle and to the man she previously thought of as so unsuited to herself. Hitting this 'rock bottom' allows Heather to see that she must return home. She can't understand why the natives don't want to hear about her Scottish history, and doesn't understand why no one cares about her or where she comes from. In her outburst she fails to realize how disposable her kind has been -- and in turn, how disposable she is proving herself to be. There is no point in getting to know her as experience dictates that she will be gone soon. The silence echos loudly from both sides.

queenie and mona all grown up

2007-08-07T22:21:00.000-03:00

Drag Queens on Trial
by Sky Gilbert

Praise the unabashedly queer narrative! If you want to see edgy and exciting theatre, the only place worth going is gay and lesbian theatre, which strives to push the boundaries of acceptability and is always willing to say something -- while still having a whole lot of fun. Sky Gilbert is no exception; in fact, I think he may have written the rules of queer theatre. And we are so lucky to have him writing in Canada, proudly carrying the monicker of our edgiest playwright.

The play opens with a quote from Capote, stating that "The [female] impersonator is in fact a man (truth) until he recreates himself as a woman (illusion) and, of the two, the illusion is truer." This play is all about truth and illusion and the creation of identity. Each of the drag queens in the play are charged with being, well, drag queens, and find themselves faced with the "truths" about their existence -- tales from their lives as men that replace the narratives they have woven about themselves as women. And while these narratives may be "truth" is it's most banal sense, they fail to replicate the truth of the existence of these women in their present form: and there lies the trouble of determining or insisting on drawing a line between truth and fiction. As Marlene contemplates whether or not she has been lying to the judge, she thinks about the years she spent living as a "non-person" before she could define herself as a drag queen. The "lies," if we really have to call them that, serve only to help forge an identity for someone out of the ashes of a confused and hurt child who cannot place themself in the world. She refuses to be crushed into the cringing, helpless and confused boy she was before the "lies" began, and as such she cannot let the judge define her reality.

And that is both the beauty and the central purpose of this play. The Drag Queens may be on trial, but it is all of us who are forced to consider the premium we choose to place of a factual reality that may not match up with a spiritual one. These women are all damaged inside; they talk about craving abuse, about needing to be harmed, about troubled childhoods and too much promiscuity. The question seems to be: who are we to take away the so-called "lies" that carve out survival?

the secret life of the guy they named the hospital after

2007-08-07T21:44:00.000-03:00

Doc
by Sharon Pollock

I drive past the Dr. Everett Chalmers Hospital in Fredericton almost every single day, and sometimes I go in to be poked or prodded or have my blood stolen from me, and every time I like to think and wonder about the man they named the hospital after. Who was he? What did he accomplish? What wonders did her perform for this community? Was he a kind man? A good man? (Was he pro-choice?) Reading Doc is an interesting experience for any resident of Fredericton because, as it turns out...

Dr. Everett Chalmers was kind of a dick.

See, Sharon Pollock was his daughter, and in this autobiographical play she tells the story of her parents' unhappy marriage, her mother's alcoholism, mental illness and infidelity, and her father's obsession with his work to the detriment of the entire family. This is a play about fathers who betray the trust of daughters, and of daughters left as the sole support for a disintegrating family unit. In this play, Pollock explores her father's addiction to work and his inability to accept his wife's alcoholism as an illness. She deals with her own feelings of betrayal and her father's feelings of alienation from her. In the play, Pollock's role is played by Catherine, who we see simultaneously as a child and as an adult. Catherine/Katie is putting together the pieces of her past from two perspectives, and looking to her father for answers.

Katie fears being like her mother, and Catherine wants to deny her connection to her father. In the end, though, both halves of this protagonist come to condemn the mother, Bob, as a weak woman who gave in to suicide and alcoholism. The central question of this play is Catherine trying to find out from her father if being worshipped by rural New Brunswick was worth the family torment -- and in the end, the answer seems to be yes, because by the end of the play Ev and Catherine are complicit in burning the suicide not of Ev's father and thereby silencing the voilce of all the troubled women around Ev. He finally supports and is supported by his daughter, and thereby seems to make some strides towards healing the familial rifts.

canada's first bilingual play

2007-08-07T19:03:00.000-03:00

Balconville
by David Fennario

What are we to make of a play about English and French Canada, where the English Canadians can't understand a word of French and the French Canadians are just happy that there are finally some anglos slumming in the Montreal tenements? Absurd but painfully, brutally realistic, Balconville offers us a slice of life of the problems that come when we try to bridge linguistic and cultural gaps in times of need. Balconville forces you to think: what if an angle walked in on the ladies at Gabrielle Lauzon's house in Les Belles-Soeurs? Is the situation becoming more or less positive as we lean over that cultural divide?

One of the key motifs in Beaconville is an emerging understanding between the anglophone and francophone characters that they have a shared heritage. When the elderly remark to one another that children usedto behave themselves, both English and French can remark, "Yes, I remember that too." They can share troubles about working conditions at the factory and the problems with encouraging collective action. Thibault is shocked to realize that English people, just like him, often balance two girlfriends at a time.

Fennario also works to expose the racism inherent in the new emerging separatist government. Paquette blames all his troubles on "the English and the Jews," claiming that unlike them, he has had to work for a living his whole life. Johnny tries to point out that everyone of their economic class does, even the English and Jews, but Paquette tries hard to avoid listening. Paquette also voices those who wish to take away linguistic rights for anglophones, asserting that English speakers should either learn French or get out of the province. But Johnny is not without paranoid nationalism, fearing that the union is run by separatists who want to keep anglophones out of office. The effect of these discussions is to show the fear and irrationality on both sides of the debate, but also to point out that injustices can be faced by both sides. After all, both groups are living in the slums. One group may shout "Fuck the Queen!" while the other shouts "Fuck Levesque!" But for these destitute people, Fennario seems to suggest, it's really the same fight.

the underbelly of the hero, the inferiority of the colony

2007-08-07T17:16:00.000-03:00

Billy Bishop Goes to War
by John Gray and Eric Peterson

At its heart of hearts, I don't believe that Billy Bishop Goes to War is really about Billy Bishop, or even about war, at all. Deep down at its fleshy core, this play is about Canadian inferiority and making a name for Canada on the world stage. In the end, the play's own history (the triumph of arriving on Broadway, the flop of being deeply misunderstood there) is a perfect echo of the theme of Canadian also-ran-ism that the play is really about.

When Billy arrives in England to fight, he describes his boat as filled "with dead horses and sick Canadians," looking like "a boat load of Balkan refugees." He describes the Canadians at war as "cannon fodder," and determines that it is because he is Canadian that he will never get a look in as a fighter pilot. Indeed, the recruiter agrees, asserting that "no one gets to be a pilot right away, for Christ's sake. Especially not bleeding Canadians!" The idea that we arrived in England to soak up bullets is distasteful to Billy, but he also accepts it fully because he can't imagine it any other way. Billy is a deeply colonized man. He doesn't doubt for one second that he is inferior to the British people around him, and there is certainly no sense that he could fight against the people who believe this to be true.

At war, Billy becomes increasingly homesick for Canada. In one of the songs in the play, he remembers Canada fondly, saying: "Nobody shoots no one in Canada, / Last battle was a long, long time ago. [...] Nobody starts no wars on Canada, / Where folks tend to wish each other well." He prays that when he dies he will die in Canada.

When he meets Lady St. Hellier, however, he becomes aware that his point of view is skewed. She sees that he is capable of more, and says to him that while soaking up bullets is acceptable behaviour in a Canadian, he is gifted, and therefore he "belongs to a much older and deeper tradition than Canada can ever hope to provide." She points out to him that he is hindered by his "colonial mentality," which seems determined to prove that those who think of Canadians as failures right. Because Billy has this guardian, he can move away from this point of view and become "someone" outside of the colonial context. There is a sense that Billy becomes practically British, in the end.

Through his heroic deeds, Billy becomes an inspiration to the colonial residents -- he is created to be held up as a figurehead -- and this is what gets him sent home in the end. That's the moral of the story here: we must throw off the shackles of colonial oppression, because only in so doing can we achieve real successes and, in Billy's case, survive the war.

canadian swashbuckling

2007-08-07T16:42:00.000-03:00

Zastrozzi
by George F. Walker

The first time I came across this play was in a drama classroom about a million years ago. I certainly didn't understand it then and I fear I may not understand it now, but I'm going to give it a "stab." It seems to me that if nothing else, this is one hell of a fun play to read. (I'm sure there's more to it. Really I am. But isn't it refreshing, once in a long while, to just have fun?)

Zastrozzi is a man who believes that the world is a fundamentally negative place filled with negative people doing negative things. As a result, he sees chaos as the natural order of the world and crime as the only action worth engaging in, and the only thing with any meaning. Throughout the play we are told that Zastrozzi has no weaknesses, and that he believes that mankind is weak and the world ugly, and "the only way to save them both is to destroy them." He is out to kill Verezzi, a stupid man who is the epitome of the flaky artistic type; he believes that his art is truth without the peskiness of reality, when really it's just bad. Verezzi believes that he himself is God, which sets the play up with the battle of good and evil in Verezzi and Zastrozzi. Except that good here is deeply ironic, and Verezzi has more in common with an old shoe than with the embodiment of God.

In the end, Zastrozzi, who has set out to kill "God" and prove the lack of God at the same time, he allows Victor to find God before he dies and therefore Zastrozzi doesn't kill God but instead reifies him. When he is face to face with Veressi, in the end, Zastrozzi lets him live, saying that he needs and opponent. When the two men symbolize God and Satan, they cannot kill each other, because each defines the other in turn. There is no one without the other, and each needs the other to exist.

One disturbing character in the play is Matilda, who is only happy and sexually fulfilled when she is being abused by someone as violently as possible. She accepts that Zastrozzi is a murderer, an abuser, and a rapist -- and it is those things that attract him to her, rather than acting as a deterrent or scaring her about him. There is one other female character in the play is Julia. Unlike the damaged Matilda, Julia demands complete rationality and kindness from people with whom she interacts. At the end of the play, though, both women are dead. Does it matter which path a woman follows in life and love, then, if she ends up murdered in the end?

blood, guts, and the real black donnellys

2007-08-07T16:15:00.000-03:00

The St. Nicholas Hotel, WM Donnelly Prop.: The Donnellys, Part II
by James Reaney

This is another chapter in the saga of the Donnellys, the family from Ireland who moved to southwestern Ontario only to be persecuted and eventually burned to death in a massive, unsolved massacre in 1880.

O, Canada!

The Donnellys are fated to death because of their stubbornness. They refused to join an anti-Protestant group. It basically burbles up from that point to a fever pitch of violence and trauma, and the legend ends in this installment with the death of Michael Donnelly which "left a stain on the floor no ordinary scrubbing brush can ever wash away." The play is a celebration of those who stand against the mass opinion; characters like Dr. Maguire, who refuses to berate the Donnellys but instead comments on their "intelligent faces" and denies the sources of prejudice. The kindness of Maguire is contrasted with the violent aspirations of Maggie's father who would rather see his daughter dead than married to the Donnelly with whom she has fallen in love.

The women of the Donnelly family are the most demonized. Because the Donnellys allow their women to develop their own identities, and because mother Donnelly really runs the family and guides the actions of her boys, the townspeople are most "afraid of an old woman." Carroll, a leader of the violent anti-Donnelly aggressors, claims, "She's a witch and we'll never get rid of any of them unless there's someone brave enough to just -- but there isn't." Anyone willing to kill her would be the St. Patrick of Biddulph, dricing the snakes out of their township.

When the Donnelly votes sway an election, the people become more obsessed with ending this troublesome family, and in the third act we have the climactic death of Mike Donnelly. But in this act we also learn why some people continue to side with the Donnellys. As farmhand Tom tells us, "Because they're brave, [...] they're handsome, [and...] when Pa here took the ax to mother and Bridget and Sarah and me who was the only family on the whole road with enough sand to take us in? So that's why I side with them." In this act the genuine fierceness, compassion, and love of the Donnellys comes through, which is what makes the conclusion so tragic.

The conclusion of the play contains its larger message:

"I told him what I tell you now -- to look straight ahead past this stupid life and death they've fastened on you -- just as long ago your father and me and out first-born walked up over the last hill in Ireland and saw what you will see now -- for the first time in our lives we saw freedom, we saw the sea."

the time we kicked political ass, and lost... but maybe in the long-run we won anyway

2007-08-07T15:36:00.000-03:00

1837: The Farmer's Revolt
by Rick Salutin and Theatre Passe Murraille

Ok, here's the thing. I'm a big nerd. A really, really, really big nerd. And I love nothing more than Canadian history. I'm pretty much in love with the War of 1812, can't read enough about the Conquest in 1760, and the Rebellion (no... Revolution!) of 1837 has always fascinated me. So I was stoked to read this play -- and in no way did it disappoint me. What a show! I would love to one-day see a production of it, because there's nothing quite so exciting to me as good theatre and good history coming together at once.

The best part about this play was reading Rick Salutin's production diary before reading the play. Because this play was a collective, it was interesting to read about the process of creating these characters and really making history come alive. The temptation to allow the rebels to win in the theatre version was something they really struggled with -- in the end they opted to stick closer to history than that, which is a shame, but it makes even more powerful the final line of the play. In response to the assertion that they rebels had lost, one of the condemned men at the gallows responds, "No! We haven't won yet!" The idea that the rebels who were hanged went out with that sense of positivity and pride is really what underscores the main project of this play, which is to celebrate our history and to find a way to revel in the progress even where it seems progress came too slowly.

To me, what is so interesting about the process behind this play is the near gender-less-ness of the characters. It seems that all the characters had been played by either gender, which I really like. In situations like military service, there was no public opportunity for women to work, but their labours at home have traditionally been what makes war possible. It was interesting to see this group of actors mount the production without regard for gender roles; it seems to bring to the forefront the role of women in wartime, and moves them from the private sphere, politicizing their acts. Remember that the woman who fed the rebels was in as much danger of persecution as the rebel fighters themselves. This is fitting way to deal with the situation without 'faking' history -- Mackenzie is Mackenzie, whether played by a woman or a man.

In the end, the project of this play is to make Canadian history interesting, exciting, and worth watching. I would certainly have to say that the mission is accomplished.

generational conflict in toronto's ex-pat newfoundlander community

2007-08-07T14:54:00.000-03:00

Leaving Home
by David French

Part of the Mercer cycle of plays, Leaving Home tells the story of Jacob Mercer's sons leaving home for the first time, highlighting a rift between the two men and revealing (a) Jacob's concern with his own masculinity and (b) the cultural alienation the whole family feels. The children are embarrassed that their parents speak and act differently than the parents of their friends. For Jacob and Mary and the other ex-pats in their world, the universe is divided into US and THEM -- Newfoundlanders vs. Canadians. While the children wish desperately for their parents to assimilate into the larger Toronto society, they find themselves pulled back into the cultural ghetto -- Billy has been trapped into marriage by the Jackson family women who are from the same part of Newfoundland as his parents, and is being dragged back into the same life pattern as his parents (forced to give up school, parenting at a young age, etc.). Even though it is determined that Kathy, the young lady, is not really pregnant, the marriage seems destined to go ahead.

Canada, in the play, is represented by Harold -- a mortician dressed all in grey who never speaks, never laughs, and yet seems to be in complete control. We are meant to see in him a stark contrast with Jacob and Mary -- especially Jacob -- who is boisterous, emotionally charged, and completely at a loss within his family. Because Jacob is not the head of this family. Indeed, that role belongs to Mary, and she and the boys wage war against Jacob's temper and stubbornness. In the end, it is the son Ben, not trapped by marriage and with all the opportunities of the world before him, who steps out for his independence. What are we to make of the fact that he escapes the family and becomes "Canadian" while his parents are left alone at the end of the play? We know that Ben must leave, and must find himself, but the shift that occurs is quite drastic and jarring. Ben rejects his parents. Yet we are left with them at the end of the play, and it is clear who we are supposed to side with; Jacob is not perfect, and we have seen his failures with his own sons, but we should also see our own weaknesses in him. Jacob is a man who doesn't know how to be a Newfoundlander outside of Newfoundland, and that tragedy leaves him incapable of sharing himself and his history with his boys before they walk away for good. Ben denies it all together, and Bill is forced into remaining connected to Newfoundland by his trapped marriage. The play is largely comic, but the end is anything but happy.

female community (or lack thereof) in quebec

2007-08-07T14:21:00.000-03:00

Les Belles-Soeurs
by Michel Tremblay

Sometimes, those of us with interests in gender studies want to see every place that is coded for a specific gender as positive -- for women, we reclaim the kitchens and parlors, and for men we celebrate the male-bonding of the hunting camp or the reclusive peace of the shed or workshop. But sometimes, a space is coded for a specific gender to the detriment of that group. This is the case in Les Belles-Soeurs, where the kitchen of Germaine Lauzon's Montreal tenement is certainly a female space, but could not really be considered a space for positive consideration of gender issues. The women in Les Belles-Soeurs are not supportive members of female community; for the most part, they hate each other, and are far more interested in cutting one another down than in providing support, friendship, and compassion.

Germaine Lauzon has won a million stamps for her collection of stamp books and is busy fantasizing about what to do with them. She invits all her female friends, neighbours, and family members over to her house to help her fill her stamp books -- but she has no intention of sharing. The women, for the most part, start out generous and willing to help. But before long they are stealing from one another and fighting to possess all the stamps themselves. The women are so mired in poverty and hopelessness that they can't imagine being happy for a woman who has gained so much by no effort at all. They would rather see all of them fail together than one succeed or emerge out of the ghetto. Gabrielle dislikes her son's education because she thinks he is coming to believe himself better than his roots. The contest seems to be: who is hurting most, and who has suffered more?

The question of options for women is key to the play -- and the answer to what choices ought women have is simply this: none. Everyone hates Pierrette because she dances at a club for money. No one feels sorry for her or wonders what drove her to this point; instead they condemn her. Likewise, Lise is pregnant and abortion is offered to her. Those who know she's considering it condemn her, and even those who don't know she's pregnant, like Rose, find themselves spewing about "unwed mothers" who are "a bunch of depraved sluts," condemned because the men of the group call them "cockteasers." (Aren't they the opposite?) Only the supposedly detestable Lisette and the whore Pierrette remain open-minded at all or considerate to these women. And in the end, this is the central sadness of the text: these women are without options, but they would still rather condemn one another than support each other for a better future.

if prison break was canadian and also if it didn't suck

2007-08-07T12:01:00.000-03:00

Fortune and Men's Eyes
by John Herbert

Fortune and Men's Eyes is one of the most important plays ever written in Canada, not only because it has been massively popular around the world, but because the play inspired the founding of the Fortune Society for Prison Reform. As far as international social impact goes, I can't imagine any Canadian play has had more. The play was inspired by Herbert's own experience in prison (he was beaten and robbed by a street gang, but when the police came the attackers told the officers that Herbert was gay and had sexually propositioned them, and Herbert was convicted of gross indecency).

Despite the import of this play for prison reformers everywhere, to me this is a play about gender. For a play from 1967, the characters here have remarkably fluid gender identities, in a way that even in 2007 we wouldn't see as acceptable in prime time. Mona and Queenie both choose to identify as female (Queenie is a more brashly drag performer, where Mona seems to embody womanliness in full as an identity), and the other prisoners accept this. The only person who insists on calling attention to genderlessness is the guard, who refers to Mona as 'it' and is disgusted by her choice to become another gender. Interestingly, the being female of Queenie and Mona is to different ends. Queenie does it for power -- she knows she can control the men in power at the prison by offering herself to them sexually. Mona, conversely, seems to be more comfortable in womanly skin than in trying to define herself as male, and though Mona finds herself regularly attacked and abused as a result, it is worth it to live her reality. All the characters in the play engage in homosexual sex -- it's the only sex on offer -- but only Mona makes it her identity, and this is why she is ultimately destroyed by the action of the play. It also seals her unhappiness, because Mona wants to be wanted for herself rather than for being the next best thing to a woman -- and within the prison walls, this ideal is basically impossible. Smitty, coming to prison from a tradition upbringing, wants Mona to be male, but eventually accepts her as a woman enough to make love to her.

Through Smitty we see the point of the play that gave the Fortune Society its inspiration -- the horrors of the prison system destroy an individual's identity in ways from which it can never be recovered. To become strong enough to survive the harsh prison world, Smitty must change from the caring man he is to a hard-nosed criminal. He is preparing for the discrimination he will receive when he tries to reintegrate into society with violence and pain. It is expected that he will reoffend. Smitty is destroyed over the course of the play, and the cruel man we see at the play's end bears no resemblance to the fearful boy we meet at the play's opening. That, in the end, is the central tragedy of Herbert's play.

ecstasy in canadian theatre

2007-08-07T11:22:00.000-03:00

Sorry for the protracted absence, loyal readers. I have been away reading an anthology of Canadian plays, and with the pace I was going I felt really unmotivated to stop and write after each play. So I've decided to do it this way instead -- I'm spending today writing two-paragraph review / summary / thematic inspection pieces on each of the plays I have read. Then tomorrow is the dawn of contemporary Canadian literature... hallelujah!

The Ecstasy of Rita Joe
by George Ryga

Rita Joe is a native woman standing accused of the greatest crime of the 1960s -- she has not successfully assimilated herself into white culture. The white people in positions of power who are pro-assimilation (the policeman, the magistrate) mistakenly believe that the only thing standing between aboriginal segregation and assimilation is a lack of linguistic fluency. As a result, Rita's rights and obligations under the law are never explained to her fully. The magistrate asks Rita repeatedly is she wants a lawyer, but never answers her repeated question of "what for?" Rita doesn't understand what is being asked of her, yet is expected to "speak for herself" in court because she understand English. The magistrate is unwilling to accept that there may be some problems in the vein of cultural literacy that hinder Rita's ability to defend herself in a court of law. She is not of that white tradition of law and therefore she needs a guide through the system, and this is repeatedly denied to her throughout the play.

Interestingly, there are those white people who condemn Rita not for her failure to assimilate into white culture, but for her desire to leave the reservation at all. Rita's priest is chief among those who believe that the only place for aboriginal people is on government-determined reserves. While the priest is a sympathetic voice, interested in the plight of the members of his flock and genuinely believing that the best place for all of them is together in a segregated community. What is interesting about this is that it places aboriginal people in an almost completely place-less situation. They are expected to either assimilate fully into white culture or remain in their government-sanctioned ghetto-reserves. There is no space for a native person who seeks to retain their culture and community but access the opportunities of larger cities. That space, it is made clear throughout this play, does not exist yet. In the end, Ryga's message seems to be that we need such a space if Canada is ever to get along amicably with her aboriginal people.

In the end, the play is a sympathetic one, but is problematic for one key reason: even the most sympathetic portrayal of minority issues cannot be exempt from problems of appropriation of voice. This is a problem not simply because Ryga is white, but because Rita Joe was originally played by a classically-trained white actress. This play itself was radical for Canada in 1967 because it probed a question and an issue we fear to talk about -- we don't want to believe there is racism in Canada, even today. But more alarming is the fact that it took until 1981 for The Ecstasy of Rita Joe to be performed by Native actors in all the Native roles. Until 1981, we were still essentially watching a "black-face" of the 49th parallel. Perhaps what is most thought-provoking about this play is not even the content, but the circumstances of its performances.

racism and redemption in fredericton, nb

2007-07-20T10:28:00.000-03:00

I am ashamed to say that I was not familiar with George Elliott Clarke before reading this poetry collection... but now I'm hooked! There is so much depth to this poetry that I'm excited to explore more of his writing, particularly his novel that explores the same story as this poetry does, called George and Rue. I love finding new writers to explore, and Clarke is a particularly awesome one because I've never read much from the Africadian literary movement. (Africadian being Canadians of black loyalist heritage whose original settlements were located in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.)

It's a big day for literature, or course, with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows launching at midnight. My guilty pleasure of the weekend will be reading and enjoying the last book of the series -- we can debate literary merit all day long, but there's no debating having a good time.

Execution Poems: The Black Acadian Tragedy of "George and Rue"
by George Elliott Clarke

Malignant English

Crown: I warrant you speak almost perfect English.

Rue: Should I utter pitted and cankered English?
Bad enough your laws are pitted and cankered.

Crown: Admit that, for a Negro, you speak our English well.

Rue: But, your alabaster, marble English isn't mine: I hurl
insolent daggers at it like an assassin assaulting a statue.

Crown: Your lordship, instruct this witness to speak civilly.

His Lordship: Accused, do your duty, as we must do ours.

Rue: My duty is to make narrative more telling,
Yours is to make malice more malicious.

Execution Poems by George Elliott Clarke tells the story of George and Rufus Hamilton, two Africadian men from Nova Scotia who were hanged in 1949 for the murder of a Fredericton taxi driver. The Hamilton brothers were cousins of Clarke, dead a decade before he was born, and in retelling their story through these poems Clarke weaves for us a story of family, cyclical violence, and racism. The art of this collection is Clarke's ability to create for the reader blurring lines between guilt and innocence, and right and wrong. For the most part, the reader wavers between being horrified by the crime and sympathetic to the perpetrator, shocked at the murder and sickened by the actions of law enforcement officials. As such, we are forced to confront ideas of socially constructed representations of innocence (white lawyers and judges) and guilt (black accused criminals). The effect is especially strong because Clarke acknowledges no awareness on the part of the system for the inherent racism it fosters. And in the end, blindness to this is Clarke's purpose. He never suggests that the crime doesn't occur, or that the Hamilton brothers are innocent, but he is careful to show the roots of violence, its motivations, and the assumptions of the court officials in the case.

An important issue in Clarke's retelling of the murder case and trial is language -- particularly the English language. As you can see in the excerpt above, the issue of "proper" English is a major one for the courts; how can a black man who commits crimes speak "white" English so effectively? In "Child Hood II," Rufus tells us about his desire to embrace the "secretly Negro authors" like Alexander Pushkin, who had Ethiopian heritage, and Alexandre Dumas, with Hatian origin; these authors who denied parts of their heritage to succeed in a white world are of particular interest to Rufus, and he is especially interested in the power of language for these men who have harnessed the dominant discourses of their times. He compares them with his own ability to express himself, referring to himself as "a poor-quality poet crafting hoodlum testimony, / my watery storytelling's cut with the dark rum of curses." He fears that he cannot fully defend himself or express his feelings about his actions because he lacks the proper words, but the book itself, written in the voice of him and his brother, shows that they have more power and aptitude in their English than the entire town of Fredericton. This comes across in the poem, "To Viscount Alexander of Tunis, Governor-General of Canada," where "A Citizen of the town of Fredricton NB," billing himself as "Anonamus," demands that the Governor General deny George's request for a stay of execution as "they is no different neggars & they both look a like in this cryme," and that "wee the peepul of Fredericton feel they must hang fore the bluddy homaside they did." Where it is amazing to the judge that two black men can speak "his" language, the good "white" residents of Fredericton, as they are represented by the writer of this letter.; The question Clarke asks us to consider is this: who owns and posesses the language? Does a white man with access to education and the birthright of the "mother tongue" automatically deserve to be seen as more capable than a black man, even when his ability is unquestionably superior? We are given two documents here: the letter, which represents the town, and the book of poetry itself, which represents the Hamilton brothers (because we are expressly told when their voices are being used). We question our own assumptions as a result of the juxtaposition and inversion of expectation.

Clarke also forces the reader to think critically about the roots of crime. We learn as we read the poems about the Hamilton brothers that they observed a lot of violence between their father and their mother; with their mother being partially Mi'kmaq, she becomes the target of racialized violence. "Pop" sees her as impure and worthy of his scorn, because "he thought her being mulatto / was mutilation." The boys are exposed to highly sexualized and disturbing violence as children, until one of the boys attacks his father and their mother dies of her injuries. They move from this life of violence into one of poverty, and Clarke seems to ask us: What did you expect them to do?

There's an interesting last note in the book, in a reproduction of the newspaper page announcing the completed execution of the Hamilton brothers:

In an article on dead poet W. B. Yeats in last week's Casket, we erroneously attributed to Mr. Yeats the book Cane, which was in fact written by the Negro American writer Jean Toomer. Yeats is, however, the author of the best-selling book The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats. We regret the error.

This is interesting because it is an example of appropriation of voice -- the writer of the article assumed the high modernist poetry he encountered was written by a white man, instead of by an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance. The black man's voice was papered over with a famous white poet. What do we make of this in relation to the issues of language and ability in the text? It's interesting that the paper was willing to deny poetic ability to a black writer, feeling more comfortable with assigning it to a famous white writer instead. Again, it's about the assumptions we make about ability based on someone's skin colour rather than our own experiences of ability. I wonder also if it's a gesture to retelling the story -- the Hamilton's have only ever been written about by white newspaper reporters and white historians, whereas Clarke is re-appropriating the story for the Africadian people.

viva la saint lawrence

2007-07-18T18:18:00.000-03:00

I'm taking a break from the anthology today due to the fact that it is quickly doing my head in. In the meantime, I'm going to tackle some of the other works from the poetry section of the list. Today, I'm looking at Charles Sangster, who is not a poet I am familiar with, but who published in 1856 the first Spenserian sonnet sequence in Canadian literary history. He was also one of the first poets to use obviously and undeniably Canadian images and subject matter as the backbone of his poetry. As bad as I am at (a) long poems and (b) colonial literature, I enjoyed this, and I think I've found a few things to say about it... Hopefully things I can process relatively quickly because I have a birthday party to get to. Yee haw!

The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay
by Charles Sangster

Quebec -- how regally it crowns the height!
The Titan Strength has here set up his throne;
Unmindful of the sanguinary fight,
The roar of cannon mingling with the maon
Of mutilated soldiers years agone,
That gave the place a glory and a name
Among the nations. France was heard to groan,
England rejoiced, but checked the proud acclaim, --
A brave young chief had fallen to vindicate her fame.

Fallen in the prime of his ambitious years,
As falls the young oak when the mountain blast
Rings like a clarion, and the tempest jeers
To see its pride to earth untimely cast.
So fell brave Wolfe, heroic to the last,
Amid the tempest and grim scorn of war,
While leering Fate with look triumphant passed,
Pleased with the slaughter and the horrid jar
That lured him hence to see how paled a hero's star.

This poem recounts a journey of the imagination from Kingston, Ontario and the St. Lawrence Seaway to the mouth of the Saguenay and Cape Eternity. The narrator of the poem is on a spiritual quest to be reunited with the woman he loves, known in the poem only as the Maiden. He is also on a pilgrimage to show his devotion to God, and indeed the reunion with the Maiden is a reunion with God as well, as the three seek to "prove / How unutterably deep and strong is Human Love" (that love being both between humans and of humans for God). The poem is also about embracing the creations of God -- the journey from the St. Lawrence to the Saguenay represents an internal journey from being controlled by a world of business, commerce, and the drive to possess, to the victorious act of shaking off those bonds and emerging free from the world of the material and ready for the world of the spiritual. Finally, the poem is about art, and the realization that the greatest art of all is God's creations of the natural world and of man. The narrator, over the course of the poem, comes to realize that nothing else can compare with God's design.

As the first narrative poem in Spenserian stanzas in the history of Canadian literature, the poem gets big points for effort, and though there re patches where the verse is rocky or rhythmically problematic, the overall effect is quite something. The impact is even more noteworthy when one considers that Sangster had almost no formal education beyond elementary schooling, and as such his poem is one of the beauty of Canada written by a Canadian everyman. This is not an academic telling, but rather a story that struck a talented but ordinary Canadian who was struck by the majesty of his country. This is not to say Sangster was ignorant (indeed, his poetry is filled with invocations of mythology, biblical allusion, and so on), but that his story is one of a Canadian man with a Canadian education telling a story of Canada. Such things are certainly worth celebrating.

One way the poetry is uneven, however, is in Sangster's compulsive romanticization of the Canadian landscape, especially in his descriptions of the Canadian Shield and other rocky geographies. His use of classical allusions and pastoral diction blunts and pasteurizes the rugged beauty of the landscapes he is trying to describe. The river "bubbles silver" and is "isle-enwoven." Even storms are signs of God's strength rather than violent, frightening experiences. This is all to add to the effect of the poem as an homage to God's creation, and while it's exquisitely as a pastoral it rings false to anyone who has been to this area of country and seen nothing that could be remarked upon as pastoral.

And interesting feature is how much Sangster draws on the history, both aboriginal (though heavily one-sides) and white, of the area he writes about. As in the example above, with Wolfe and Montcalm, the effect is one of chronicling a history and myth-making about place. Sangster is self-consciously creating a story of Canada, and the effect is a powerful one. It reminds us of the importance of this kind of documentation in the early days of Canadian literature, because the tradition had to first be built in order for it to be built upon.

An ancillary theme in the poem is that love, and especially the love of God, supersede art, as he writes: "The lips of Love / Make mellower music than a thousand strings / Of harps." God's creation, too, is more beautiful than anything man can create artistically, and even the poem we are reading pales in comparison to God's work; as devout as it is, and as much of a celebration as it represents, it is in "puny contrast" to the creation of God. Art does not reach us closer to God, but it allows us an opportunity to offer devotion to him and show awe of his creation. This is by far the most devout, Christian piece I have read thus far, and if startling in its lack of cynicism and its innocent optimism. Overall, even for the aggressively agnostic like myself, it was a welcom break from the hopeless cynicism of much of our national literature.

irving layton, the bitterest middle-class professor to ever hate middle-class professors

2007-07-17T18:25:00.000-03:00

Selected Poems from 15 Canadian Poets x3
by Irving Layton, edited by Gary Geddes

Look, the Lambs Are All Around Us!

Your figure, love,
curves itself
into a man's memory;
or to put it the way
a junior prof
at Mount Allison might,
Helen with her thick
absconding limbs
about the waist
of Paris
did no better.

Hell, my back's sunburnt
from so much love-making
in the open-air.
The Primate (somebody
made a monkey of him)
and the Sanhedrin
(long on the beard, short
on the brain)
send envoys to say
they don't approve.
You never see them, love.
You toss me in the air
with such abandon,
they take to their heels and run.
I tell you
each kiss of yours
is like a blow on the head!

What luck, what luck to be loved
by the one girl
in this Presbyterian
country
who knows how to give
a man pleasure.

Oh good. Irving Layton's here engaging in his most favourite pastime of academia-bashing. I basically hate Irving Layton on a level so deeply within my subconscious that the very mention of his name causes my gorge to rise. Okay, maybe nothing that bad, but I just find him so nauseatingly hypocritical that it's almost impossible for me to read his poetry. I'm at the point where I actually have to make a running start towards the book and hold on for dear life. Any excuse to be distracted away from Layton I take gladly. I've never admitted my hatred for him in a class as to dismiss Layton in an English classroom in a Canadian graduate school seems to be about the equivalent of walking up and down the bible belt yelling, "God loves gays! God is a woman! God is black! God approves of interracial marriages! God believes in evolution!"

The fact is, Layton was the world's most pompous hypocrite. He supposedly loathed academia and the middle classes, and resented the academization of Canadian poetry (in the above poem, note the image in the first stanza of the "junior prof / at Mount Allison" muddying a poetic image). Yet he was perfectly content to belly up to the trough at several Canadian universities, accepting comfortably middle class positions as a professor of English at York, Concordia, and other painfully bourgeois institutions. Oh dear, however did the poor flower survive? In "The Fertile Muck," he claims, "I have noticed / how my irregular footprint horrifies them," claiming for himself some kind of privileged outsider status, when really he was the beloved poet of academia and the popular public. He was about as much of an outsider as our other national hot-house orchid, David Adams Richards, in a Toronto cocktail party. Oh wait! Not an outsider at all.

He resented Canada and the puritanical roots of this country (see the last stanza in the above poem), yet never left here. I would have been okay with him bailing.

deja vu, Mr. Scott... deja vu

2007-07-17T17:18:00.000-03:00

Selected Poems from 15 Canadian Poets x3
by F.R. Scott, edited by Gary Geddes

Charity

A code of laws
Lies written
On this beggar's hand.

My small coin
Lengthens
The harsh sentence.

I know we did F. R. Scott in the not-so-distant past, but thanks to the magic of anthologies we are revisiting him. Yay! Scott once wrote that poetry is "the making of something new and true" and "an exploring of the frontiers inside and outside the world of man [....] a kind of umbilical contemplation." The connections among things, hidden and otherwise, are of particular importance to Scott. In the poem above, for example, Scott suggests that poverty is created by our political system, and that when we do the very human act of attempting to help a person in need, we are in reality reifying the system itself -- we prove that we are willing to step in and take the reins and we remove the demand from the system itself. To Scott, this idea is the worst form of complacency because it allows the system to continue on unhalted, when really we need to dismantle social orders and rebuild a socialist state.

New times were coming, according to Scott, and such new times accordingly required new music. As he writes in "Overture," "This is an hour / Of new beginnings, concepts warring for power, / Decay of systems -- the tissue of art is torn / With overtures of an era being born." Social changes are tearing the world apart -- this is from 1936, where answers to the depression cycled between absolute socialism and absolute market control. There is a violent image here of the world battling between forces, and it is poetry that must begin anew to tell the stories of a troubled time. Old forms lose their relevancy, and new forms must emerge. We are on the cusp, in this poem, of a "world crescendo" -- the world is about to hit a fever pitch, and the results will be earth-shattering.

If this is the future, what of the past? In "Laurentian Shield," Scott ignores the reality of native populations on the land in order to create an empty landscape that he describes as "Inarticulate, arctic, / Not written on by history, empty as paper." It is only through human history, then, that we give meaning to nature. Scott's overarching view is a humanist one; that is, development that harnesses human ingenuity is progressive. As long as advancement is human-oriented and socially just, it is movement forward. As Scott believes, "The future of man is my heaven."

lady miriam, i presume

2007-07-17T16:28:00.000-03:00

Selected Poems from 15 Canadian Poets x3
by Miriam Waddington, edited by Gary Geddes

Gossip

Professor Waddington will not be
joining the academic procession
she wrote a note to the Dean she
said that her gown was moth-eaten
and she had to stay home to tie up
the chrysanthemums or else they
would flop all over and kill the grass
and she would have to resod around
the flowerbeds a nuisance so she regrets
she will not be able to join the academic
procession if you ask me that woman has
a nerve she's not friendly and further-
more I hear she keeps late hours
looks at men what kind of example is that
for young girls all I can say is some
people are never satisfied

Miriam Waddington is concerned primarily with the interrogation of social norms. In the poem above, the nagging question we are left with is, who decides when a person should or should not be satisfied? Furthermore, the process of gossip is questioned. Who is the voice in the poem? It starts off in an official-sounding register, but by the fourth line of the poem the commentary is catty and back-biting in nature. And at the end of the poem, perhaps the voice shifts again -- who is determining Professor Waddington's level of satisfaction -- or is Waddington herself inserting that last line with a commentary on the gossips? Finally, of course, this poem is about gender roles. What are the challenges of being a woman maintaining a home and a career, and where is the breaking point? And the act of looking at students in a romantic, which especially for the period of this poem would have been perfectly acceptable (and the primary means of wife finding and wife swapping) for the male professors is fodder for critical gossip when engaged in by the female prof. The argument here is not that these actions are ever right, but why is it gossip for one and business as usual for another? Waddington's poetry is brilliant in its ability to force us to look differently at seemingly mundane situations.

Another such example is "My Lessons in the Jail," where Waddington asks us to think critically about the seemingly normal setting of an average prison. She writes that upon entering the jail one must "Salute their Christ to whom you cannot kneel." Waddington comments here upon compulsory faith and the flawed assumption that Canada is by definition a Christian nation. This national assumption marginalizes the other among the others -- that is, the non-Christians among the prison population. The poem is about Waddington's experiences as a social worker, and the "crown of thorns" she has chosen to wear in embarking upon a helping profession. As she leaves the prison, she writes: "Smile at the brute who runs the place / And memorize the banner, Christus Rex." With the focus on the "brutish" management of the jail, Waddington seems to ask if this is a Christian place at all -- without the banner, would you ever believe that God had touched this place?

She draws on her social work experience again in the poem "On My Birthday," where she questions her own ability to separate herself from her work. She refers to "the self I never was," commenting on the fact that her identity is embroiled in those she attempts to rescue. She suggests, considering her divorce, that "the woman from downward is never retrieved." That is, women are socially constructed to lose their identities in marriage, and in motherhood... and those who work outside the home, especially in a helping profession, lose themselves once again.

There is a fear of the future in Waddington's poetry. In "How I Spent the Year Listening to the Ten O'Clock News," she fears the violence and tragedy that seem forthcoming, but feels guilt at her choice not to have children, as she writes: "I have too much / to say thank / God I am too old / to bear children." For a woman of her generation to not desire children was akin to an admission of failure, and because she has the means she feels the obligation. But it's a scary obligation given the wars, tortures, and violence she documents through the poem. In "Ten Years and More," Waddington deals with the death of a spouse she had divorced, writing that she had written him a letter but "I was really saying / for the sake of our / youth and our love / I forgave him for / everything / and I was asking him / to forgive me too." How does one cope with a death and find closure when a divorce stands between the two people? There is a regret for the past here, for not having mended fences earlier, and Waddington seems to be trapped between regretting the past and fearing the future.

those poems are some purdy, ah'll reckon

2007-07-16T23:38:00.000-03:00

Selected Poems from 15 Canadian Poets x3
by Al Purdy, edited by Gary Geddes

from A Handful of Earth, for Rene Levesque

Go back a little:
[...]
those origins
in which children were born
in which we loved and hated
in which we built a place to stand on
and now must tear it down?
-- and here I ask all the oldest questions
of myself
the reasons for being alive
the way to spend this gift and thank the giver
but there is no way

[...]
I say to him now: my place is here
whether Cote des Neiges Avenue Christophe Colomb
Yonge Street Toronto Halifax or Vancouver
this place is where I stand
where all my mistakes were made
when I grew awkwardly and knew what I was
and that is Canadian or Canadien
it doesn't matter which to me

[...]
I have no other place to go

If ever there was a poet who could be trusted to stand up for Canada, to paint images of Canada how she is and how her people truly talk, to not cloak Canadian vistas in classical imagery of ancient Greece and Rome and England -- if ever there was a Canadian Poet, capital-C capital-P, that poet would be Al Purdy. For Purdy, art is rooted deeply in place and people and voice, and those three things are meant to be represented as truthfully and as accurately as a poet's hand can render. In the poem above, Purdy begs for the country not to be dismantled by selfish whims, because for him there is no other place on earth where he is himself. He is rooted in the landscape of this country in such a way that without it, he would cease to exist.

The importance of place comes through in all of Purdy's poems, perhaps most notably in "The Country North of Belleville," which is Purdy's elegy for the land he grew up in. (One thing I've noted: in Canadian literature, it seems to me that only male writers are nostalgic for the colonial period. It's almost as though there is a cultural memory for the women that reminds them of the impediments to their own craft had they existed in that time period. Just an observation). For Purdy, this land is "country of defeat," a place that can be neither farmed nor mined successfully. People make a go of the land in fits and starts, but the successes and failures conflate one another so regularly that watching the cycle of the land it becomes difficult to tell when the good times are happening. The real tragedy, though, for Purdy, is that "this is a land where the young / leave quickly / unwilling to know what their fathers know / or to think the words their mothers do not say." There is not future here for the younger generation, and the land will be abandoned, or is in the process of being abandoned, over time. If we wish to return to this place, "we must enquire the way / of strangers" because the cultural memory is lost as the children step back from the land. We lose not only farmers, but the act of farming.

In "Cariboo Horses," Purdy tackles the idea that that which is Canadian is fundamentally inferior. Our horses, he points out, may seem like "only horses," of nondescript Canadian stock, but they are the "lost relatives" of the horses who dragged stone for the pyramids and traversed Africa and Asia. The foreign horses may seem more glamorous, but our horses share that line through htme memory of the species. Likewise, we may be "only Canadians," be we share the promise of ever race of humans to walk before us, and we need to work to create and shape a mythology of our own. Our history should move us more than the stories of foreign shores, because our history is all we have to fall back on.

the earle of CanLit

2007-07-16T23:05:00.000-03:00

Selected Poems from 15 Canadian Poets x3
by Earle Birney, edited by Gary Geddes

from David

[...] And David taught me

How time on a knife-edge can pass with the guessing of fragments
Remembered from poets, the naming of strata beside one,
And matching stories from schooldays [...]

That day we chanced on the skull and the splayed white rib
Of a mountain goat underneath a cliff face, caught
On a rock. Around were the silken feathers of hawks.
And that was the first I knew that a goat could slip.

[...] Then grinning, he reached with his freckled wrist

And drew me up after. We set a new time for that climb.
That day returning we found a robin gyrating
In grass, wing-broken. I caught it to tame by David
Took it and killed it, and said, "Could you teach it to fly?"

In Earle Birney's poetry, a key theme is the imposition of man upon the natural world and the negative consequences of it. Birney claims to have felt like an outsider, observing the human condition from a privileged position within university halls and army barracks that made his insights on humans, and his empathy for the natural world, all the more poignant. In the example above, from "David," Birney has his narrator, Bob, learn an important lesson about will and desire. Bob wants the bird to live so that he might keep it as a pet -- it is his own selfish desire, and not the good of the animal, that is in question here. This lesson is tall the more important when David, critically wounded on the cliffside, asks Bob to push him over the edge so that he can die with dignity rather than live disfigured and in pain (should he be able to live at all). Bob wants David to hold on so that he doesn't have to make the life-or-death decision for his friend, but David forces Bob to face reality by reminding him of the robin with the broken wing. Is Bob trying to hold on to David for David's sake, or for his own? In the end, Bob pushes his friend over the edge, doing as David wanted, but knowing that he has killed David and his own youth in the process. A poignant poem, Birney asks us to question our motivations behind our actions, and also to remember that we are not individuals so importantly as we are members of a collectivity.

The idea of man and nature is revisited on "The Bear on the Delhi Road," where Birney watches two men trying to teach a bear to dance. The poem weaves together images of cruelty and beauty to create a very complicated image of the connection between man and nature. Though they do not wish the bear or the people around them any harm, by insisting on denying the bear's "wish forever to stay / only an ambling bear / four-footed in berries," the men are necessarily denying the bear's natural will and imposing a human desire upon him instead. The result in "no more joyous," but they have won a competition against nature.

Clear in both of these poems, as well as "Appeal to a Lady with a Diaper," is that Birney was troubled by contemporary society and misplaced values of decadence over substance. The bear and the robin have the potential to fall prey to the ever-changing will of man simply because they are of the natural world. Contemporary society devalues this for progress. Where progress is moral and socially just, Birney applauds it -- where it exists for its own sake, he cuts it to ribbons.

inclined to love klein

2007-07-15T16:54:00.000-03:00

Selected Poems from 15 Canadian Poets x3
by A. M. Klein, edited by Gary Geddes

Heirloom

My father bequeathed me no wide estates;
No keys and ledgers were my heritage;
Only some holy books with yahrzeit dates
Writ mournfully upon a blank front page -

Books of the Baal Shem Tov, and of his wonders;
Pamphlets upon the devil and his crew;
Prayers against road demons, witches, thunders;
And sundry other tomes for a good Jew.

Beautiful: though no pictures on them, save
The scorpion crawling on a printed track;
The Virgin floating on a scriptural wave,
Square letters twinkling in the Zodiac.

The snuff left on this page, now brown and old,
The tallow stains of midnight liturgy -
These are my coat of arms, and these unfold
My noble lineage, my proud ancestry!

And my tears, too, have stained this heirloomed ground,
When reading in these treatises some weird
Miracle, I turned a leaf and found
A white hair fallen from my father's beard.

A. M. Klein is a writer of culture, of collectivity, and of memory. In the poem above, Klein writes of heritage and of the paradox of connection between generations. He refers to common Jewish experience, referring to his lack of wide estates (the barring of Jews in Europe from land ownership), the importance of the learned tradition in Judaism, and the importance of the connection to his past. In "Heirloom," Klein is celebrating his faith and his family. The family Torah becomes his sacred ground; he is proud of his Jewish identity and celebrates his connection to his "noble lineage, his proud ancestry." Likewise, in his "Autobiographical" poem, he is conscious of the memory of tragedy in the collective sense of his people, and seeks to repossess and reappropriate a former term of abuse ("Jewboy") to make it instead a source of power and individual identification.

Klein also found community within the French Canadian tradition. He feels a connection to the Catholic nuns who nursed him through childhood illnesses in "For the Sisters of the Hotel Dieu," wherein he looks for memory outside his own tradition and connects compassionately with people. Medical care crosses the barriers of faith and allows for a more cosmopolitan view of social issues. In "Political Meeting," however, Klein begins to point out some of the problems with Quebecois society. The dependence upon religion he begins to see as a spectral and oppressive force over the people. Klein also sees French Nationalism as problematic in the post-WWII era; the thronging crowds emerge like those of Nazi Germany, and the focus of the poem is the scapegoating of groups like the Jews in Montreal as the source of all problems for Quebecois people. The meeting is an anti-conscription meeting, and the images of encroaching Nazism are cleverly juxtaposed against the people who don't want to go to war to fight against it. Klein suggests, as Gustafson did before him, that to deny the existence of horror is to partake in it. There is no individuality and no responsibility within the nationalist groups, and iin the last lines Klein reminds us of the roots of racism and anti-semitism in Quebec:

The whole street wears one face,
shadowed and grim; and in the darkness rises
the body-odor of race.

But Klein didn't hate Quebec; in "Montreal," we see him relish in the cosmopolitan nature of the meeting of cultures in the city; he sees himself as shaped by the city and seems to embrace the history of the place. He is ever aware that all the landholders are immigrants, and mentions aboriginal history as still present and alive to remind the reader of that fact. Klein refers to his place in Montreal as a "seignory," not only a reminder of French history but a commentary on his own appreciation for the place; again, his ancestors could not own land in Europe, so to be able to hold land is a reminder of the possibility and opportunity of Canada.

ralph gustafson: the bard of the eastern townships

2007-07-15T08:51:00.000-03:00

Selected Poems from 15 Canadian Poets x3
by Ralph Gustafson, edited by Gary Geddes

The Newspaper

That photo of the little Jew in the cap,
Back to the gun held by the Nazi
With splay feet aware of the camera,
The little boy his hands in the air,
I turn over, I don't want to see it.
As a member of the human race. I am
Civilized. I am happy. I flap the
Newspaper with the picture over
So that when it is picked up to be taken
Down cellar to be put with the trash
I won't see it. I am sensitive.
The little boy is dead. He went
Through death. The cap is his best one.
He has brown eyes. He does not
Understand. Putting your hands
Up in front of a carbine prevents
The bullet. He is with the others.
Some of them he knows, so
It is all right. I turn
The paper over, the picture face
Down.

In the poem above, Gustafson illustrates a keen eye for the satiric. He uses his poem to illustrate his disgust with those who turn away from tragedy and attempt to deny its existence. This so-called "sensitive" individual would rather shut his eyes to an atrocity than do anything to help. He is "civilized;" the death is okay because the Jewish boy didn't die alone. Gustafson makes clear in this poem that those who turned a blind eye to the holocaust helped to perpetrate it. In "State of Affairs," Gustafson is troubled by the cost of progress -- this, he writes, has become "a world of small boys with legs off." There must be sacrifice so that there might be progress -- in the end, the price is not worth the results. In another poem, "I Think of All Soft Limbs," Gustafson fears that "the trouble here is too / Much death for compassion." Contemporary society finds itself overwhelmed and desensitized by violence. Where we find our humanity, then, is in art -- in "At the Cafe at Night," he writes:

Let us refer to those two at the cafe
Sitting outside in the night, the electric
Bulb bare, the street past the chairs
Empty, they tolerate one another
Only because of Van Gogh's paint.

It is art that creates our relationships between people and therefore shapes our humanity.

But Ralph Gustafson also wrote of his home in Canada, where he saw unlimited possibilities for the future. While Europe was mired in horror and sadness, "here, all is a beginning." Canada represents promise, possibility, and chance in "In the Yukon." In Canada, the natural supercedes the physical, and the country celebrates the ceremony of the natural world. For Gustafson, this ends up as the ideal in comparison with Europe, where "kings [are] crowned / With weights of gold," but "you can't move." Where Europe is restrictive, Canada is freeing and open.

dorothy livesay: the most incredible woman in canadian literature

2007-07-15T00:40:00.000-03:00

Selected Poems from 15 Canadian Poets x3
by E. J. Pratt, edited by Gary Geddes

The Unquiet Bed

The woman I am
is not what you see
I'm not just bones
and crockery

the woman I am
knew love and hate
hating the chains
that parents make

longing that love
might set men free
yet hold them fast
in loyalty

the woman I am
is not what you see
move over love
make room for me

Asking the Canadian establishment to move over and make room was the life's work of Dorothy Livesay. He focus on the marginalized people in Canada from the 1920s to the 1990s makes her a unique figure because her career has spanned massive changes in the make-up of Canadian society, and the feminist lens through which she viewed the world enabled her poetry to be intensely socially conscious. Whether trying to illustrate the injustice of the internment of Japanese-Canadians (especially those who were naturalized Canadians or Canadian citizens) or fighting for a place for women's literature, Livesay's poetry is a beacon of social justice in the Canadian literary landscape.

In what I think is her best poem, "The Three Emilys," Livesay points out the challenges of being a mother, a writer, and a feminist. She starts off the poem with the smug standpoint that the titular Emilys -- Dickinson, Bronte and Carr -- "walk alone, uncomforted" because they were not able to have children. Livesay remarks that she has had the opportunity to do it "all" -- she has a family, and a career as a writer. But by the end of the poem, it is Livesay herself who is "uncomforted," because she feels that she has failed to give her all to her art as the Emilys were able to do. She determines, "the whole that I possess / is still much less" than what the Emilys achieved because she has not really balanced a career and a family so much as she has sacrificed both to achieve diminished success. For Livesay, the inability to live androgynously as the Emilys did has caused her conflict. She is a woman living in a world where women are supposedly capable of achieving everything, and yet she feels that she has failed at both tasks she set out to accomplish. Where at first she felt sorry for the Emilys, she is left feeling sorry for herself.

Livesay's interest in gender differenced culminates in her most anthologized poem, "Bartok and the Geranium," where man is the genius composer Bartok and woman is the mere geranium on his windowsill. But where Bartok is passion and flight, the geranium is compassion, nurturing, and love. Each takes on their roles, and it is only through the combination of both that perfection is reached. But in the end, the geranium gets the last laugh:

She's daylight
He is dark
She's heaven-held breath
He storms and crackles
Spits with hell's own spark.

Yet in this room, this moment now
These together breath and be:
She, essence of serenity,
He in a mad intensity
Soars beyond sight
Then hurls, lost Lucifer,
from heaven's height.

And when he's done, he's out:
She leans a lip upon the glass
And preens herself in light.

thirty-two short entries about canadian poetry

2007-07-14T23:04:00.000-03:00

We're hitting the anthology bus today, folks, which means lots of short entries about many different poets. I'm aiming to write about 2-3 paragraphs on each poet, short and sweet, with an aim to touch on the key stuff about each poet. I'm going to skip the intro to each one, too, because the entries will be so short. Without further ado, here's E. J. Pratt.

Selected Poems from 15 Canadian Poets x3
by E. J. Pratt, edited by Gary Geddes

Erosion

It took the sea a thousand years,
A thousand years to trace
The granite features of this cliff,
In crag and scarp and base.

It took the sea an hour one night,
And hour of storm to place
The sculpture of these granite seams
Upon a woman's face.

E. J. Pratt's poetry is very much about the power of nature over man and the de-naturalization of humanity. In the poem above, for example, Pratt illustrates the strength of the natural world -- the sea can, in a thousand years, reshape the land, and it takes a thousand years because of how strong the natural world is against its own elements. But in one worrisome night as a woman waits for her husband to return from the sea, the natural world can reshape a woman's face, carving wrinkles into it -- the human body cannot stand up to the punishment the natural world can provide. Humans are inherently weak in the face of natural challenges, but also are they weak against their own creations. Pratt seems concerned with the idea that man and machine can become one, and the power of industrialization was a clear preoccupation for Pratt. In "The Man and he Machine," Pratt personifies the machine as female, and has it intertwine itself with the male figure in the poem. He is able to "trace his kinship through her steel," and she in turn uses his body for her own gain. She in the controlling figure of the poem, and the man seems powerless in the face of her control.

Pratt also concerns himself deeply with human failure -- that is, hubris. In "The Titanic," human pride stands in the way of reasonable risk assessment. The man, arrogant and sure of the boat's prowess, is contrasted with the iceberg, which acts in a "casual and indeterminate" way that shows the power within its grasp. The iceberg assumes nothing of its own capability, and yet is changes history and world perceptions of progress. The human concern with luxury is also targeted in this poem; "lusciousness" protects men from "a surfeit of security," but that is in the end their downfall. In the final moments of the crash, men's last thought is for commerce and business. Pratt seems to suggest that man is ignorant of his submission to the laws of the natural world.

I want to end this post with a lovely quotation from Pratt:

A good poem is good because it is an unusual, imaginative, arresting was of writing English. We do no speak in poetry, except in rare moments; and if a poet writes so simply as to give the effect of spoken language, that effect is all the more startling and novel.

i'm thinking i don't understand a. j. m. smith

2007-07-11T17:05:00.000-03:00

I don't get this A. J. M. Smith fellow, I really don't. I see that his poetry is beautiful and basically formally perfect, but as far as an important poet of Canada I have to say I kind of fail to get why Smith is such a man of stature. Maybe it's because I'm coming off of Scott, who is so obviously a poet of Canada and Canadianness, and interested in the future of this country -- but I just don't have any patience right now for artistically perfect depictions of the Canadian wilderness. Frankly, it bores me pretty freaking quickly.

That said, I have to grow an opinion pretty quickly if I want to bang this out before heading for Transformers. I hear that they are robots in disguise. Potentially more than meets the eye. I'm not sure, and I'm trying not to buy into hype or anything, but it's what I've been hearing.

Selected Poems from Poets Between the Wars
by A. J. M. Smith, edited by Milton Wilson

Swift Current

This is a visible
and crystal wind:
no ragged edge,
no splash of foam,
no whirlpool's scar;
only
-- in the narrows,
sharpness cutting sharpness,
arrows of direction,
spears of speed.

I think my biggest problem with A. J. M. Smith is rooted in my biggest problem with how we classify writers as Canadian. Do we really get to lay claim to a writer simply because he was born here? If his writing is more about the Thames than the Rideau, is he still Canadian? These questions plagued me while reading Smith's poetry, because his is the writing of a poet looking beyond the borders of Canada and abroad for his poetic scope. He left Canada at the age of 24, never to return, and where other ex-pats spend their lives recreating their Canada in words, Smith seems to have had a far more cosmopolitan scope. Smith is a "pure poet" by his own monicker too, which makes it even more difficult for me to access his poetry -- I don't really have even a flying interest in poetry that exists only to be pretty or capture an emotion. I wouldn't read a novel that had nothing to say about social issues I care about, and I feel the same about poetry. Especially given the fire and power of Scott's social conscience. Frankly, I read Smith grudgingly, and feeling more than a little bored and alienated from the poetry.

I decided I needed to flesh out my understanding of Smith a bit, and looked him up in my trusty Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, which pointed out quite a bit of interesting things about Smith. He was an important figure shaping the modernist poetry movement in Montreal, editing the Literary Supplement to the McGill Daily at an integral time in that publication's growth. He and F. R. Scott co-founded The McGill Fortnightly Review which would go on to be a premier literary publication in Canada. Smith apparently through this tenure influenced Scott, as well as A. M. Klein and others. Smith went on to be one of the foremost anthologists of Canadian literature in his day, and though he became a naturalized American his impact on Canadian literature was felt through to the publication of his final Canadian anthology in 1974. And his criticism has been well represented in my own readings for these comprehensive examinations. According to this Oxford Companion,

"Smith's critical essays -- written in an easy, lucid, and sometimes poetic prose -- reassert his doctrines of intensity gained through discipline; the negative effects of colonialism, which Smith equated with parochialism; and his reiterated belief that a poem is not a description of an experience, it is in itself an experience."

So now I see why we need to remember Smith. His impact on Canadian literature was massive, as he influenced two poets (Scott and Klein) who went on to be two of the most influential poets of their own age, and furthermore through his anthologies and criticism he has created and maintained an excitement about the literature that this country has to offer.

I still don't much care for his poetry. I think the emergence of looser forms and more socially conscious verse has made his image-driven poetry seem, to me, quite quaint and out-moded. Smith viewed his own poetry as decorative or ornamental, and I'm not sure poetry like that is of much value to me (or to audiences in a post-WWII world). That said, I understand better now his place in the Canadian literary canon, and I understand the importance of understanding his work and the works that he influenced.

poetry with a social conscience

2007-07-11T12:08:00.000-03:00

I love F. R. Scott. He's such a delightfully cranky old man. He reminds me of the kind of writing in those old C. C. F. pamphlets from the early days of the party -- such hope for change, such excitement, and such powerful optimism. It's sad to think that we don't really have that same level of hopeful excitement in our political futures anymore.

This is a short one (there's only about twenty pages of poems in the assigned collection), but there will be a second entry later today on some other poems from the same collection (these ones by A. J. M. Smith.

Selected Poems from Poets Between the Wars
by F. R. Scott, edited by Milton Wilson

Efficiency: 1935

The efficiency of the capitalist system
Is rightly admired by important people.
Our huge steel mills
Operating at 25% capacity
Are the last word in organization.
The new grain elevators
Stored with superfluous wheat
Can load a grain-boat in two hours.
Marvelous card-sorting machines
Make it easy to keep track of the unemployed.
There is not one unnecessary worker
In these textile plants
That require a 75% tariff protection.
And when our closed shoe-factories re-open
They will produce more footwear that we can possibly buy.
So don't let us start experimenting with socialism
Which everyone knows means inefficiency and waste.

I think F. R. Scott is one of my favourite Canadian poets of all time, specifically because he marks for me the break in Canadian literature between the celebratory nation-building poetry of the confederation-era poets and the social consciousness of the modernists. F. R. Scott is very clear in his social mandate, but he also explores the Canadian landscape and is aware of the importance of building a literary and cultural legacy. But as you can see from the above poem, Scott's focus first and foremost was to push for and encourage social progress in Canada. Occasionally cynical and sarcastic, this drive carries through so much of Scott's work that the ultimate effect is one of hopeful excitement at the potential for change in such a young country as Canada.

Scott places the blame for failure to progress socially in Canada at the hands of politicians, seeing them as being either too bound to England, too concerned with their own finances, or too devoted to the goal of political longevity. In his "Ode to a Politician" he writes:

At school he learns the three Canadian things:
Obedience, loyalty and love of Kings.

To serve a country other than his own
Becomes for him the highest duty known,

To keep antiquity alive forever
The proper object of his young endeavour.

Young people, Scott suggests, go to school not to learn about the history of their own country, but instead to learn deference to England and to the social orders England constructed in Canada. To devote one's life to the protection of ancient ideals means that forward progress (especially the social progress Scott is interested in) is basically impossible. Likewise, he condemns the control of political structures by the wealthy in the same poem, pointing out that those who are successful in business rise to political power, and then try to run a country like a business. For Scott, this is and essentially flawed point-of-view, because it denies humanity. Indeed, the politician in "Ode to a Politician" comes to the conclusion that he should have done more for the poor, but it comes too late in his career and he can't make the difference he finally realizes he should have striven for: "Some glimmering concept of a juster state / Begins to trouble him -- but just too late." In the end, he becomes a British peer... he has sold out Canada to achieve abroad, an issue which troubled Scott.

Humanism is important to Scott. He writes in his poem "Eden" that Adam and Eve didn't fall from the Garden, but instead they chose wisdom over ignorance. This is positive to Scott because he values human possibility and doesn't believe anyone should willingly choose perfect ignorance over real wisdom and experience. He describes the so-called fall as Adam and Eve having "conquered the power of choice." Also, Eve is held up as the more active of the two. She seeks out the knowledge in the first place, and after the expulsion she tells Adam, "If we keep using this knowledge / I think we'll be back." Man can recreate Eden on earth; for Scott, the first step is social awareness and justice for all.

Scott is also concerned with other social issues, like racism and exploitation in Canada. Scott responds to the famous E. J. Pratt poem "The Last Spike" by asking,

Where are the coolies in your poem, Ned?
Where are the thousands from China who swung their picks with bare hands at forty below?

Between the first and the million other spikes they drove, and the dressed-up act of Donald Smith, who has sung their story?

Did they fare so well in the land they helped to unite? Did they get one of the 25,000,000 CPR acres?
Is all Canada has to say to them written in the Chinese Immigration Act?

This is an awareness, a challenge, and a conscience far ahead of its political time (consider that the apology for the Head Tax didn't come until 2006!).

More to come later today... Now I'm off to the gym!

malcolm's katie: or, women are possessions and don't you forget it

2007-07-10T10:56:00.000-03:00

I still don't like long poems. I think I get frustrated because deviations from the narrative line are so much harder to make sense of than in a novel. Maybe I'm just dopey. I've been reading the poetry of Isabella Valancy Crawford, however, and I like it quite a lot. She's very adept at capturing images for her readers and really taking time to construct a specific feeling of the colonial/confederation wilderness. Crawford has a real passion for landscape and even in her narrative long poem is fascinated by depicting the changing seasons.

Again, this entry may be on the short side as it is only one long poem and a few companion pieces.

Malcolm's Katie: A Love Story (and other poems)
by Isabella Valancy Crawford

The South Wind laid his moccasins aside,
Broke his gay calumet of flow'rs and cast
His useless wampum, beaded with cool dews,
Far from him, northward; his long, ruddy spear
Flung sunward, whence it came, and his soft locks
Of warm, fine haze grew silver as the birch.
His wigwam of green leaves began to shake.

In Isabella Valancy Crawford's famous long poem, Malcolm's Katie: A Love Story, the reader is introduced at the opening of the poem to Max and Katie, two young lovers secretly betrothed to each other. But Max is a poor labourer -- an axeman whose job is to fell the trees of the Canadian forest. Max is out logging many months at a time. Katie, conversely, is the daughter of a rich man (the Malcolm of the poem's title), and Max is convinced that Malcolm will never agree to the match. Katie promises Max that while he is away at the logging camp, she will convince her father to approve her marriage to Malcolm.

But Max has one last prediction before he leaves. He tells his beloved Katie that she is young, and that he is worried about her ability to commit to him. He predicts that a suitor will come while he is absent, and that this new suitor will test the extent to which Katie can really remain true to Max. This suitor does appear, and his name is Alfred. He knows Katie doesn't love him -- she tells him as much -- but he expresses to her that that doesn't really matter, because he is in love with her father's money and that love will find a way to conquer her doubts. Alfred engages in many manipulative techniques to attempt to secure the marriage -- saving Katie's life, telling Max that he is already betrothed to Katie, and even attempting to murder Max -- but in the end he is not successful and Max and Katie are united. Determining that Alfred is evil, Max kills him. Malcolm comes to support Katie's choice of a husband, and the first grandson is named Alfred in order to show that his evil can be conquered by love. That's the story of Malcolm's Katie in a nutshell, and now I want to talk about some of the interesting appropriations and commentaries that Crawford makes in the piece.

To start with, take a look at the passage I quoted at the opening of this blog entry. Note how Crawford appropriates aboriginal images as the "natural;" all the elements of the wilderness are coded native. The Winds are First Nations' Spirits, with the full gamut of wampum, wigwams, and moccasins. The mountains represent chiefs of the wilderness. Interestingly, though, the winter seems to be coded white. From the same section as the above quotation, we see:

"Esa! esa! shame upon you, Pale Face!
"Shame upon you, Moon of Evil Witches!
"Have you killed the happy, laughing Summer?
"Have you slain the mother of the flowers
"With your icy spells of might and magic?
"Wrapp'd her, mocking, in a rainbow blanket?
"Drown'd her in the frost mist of your anger?"

She later makes the analogy more obvious by referring to "Indian Summer" and contrasting that to "the cold Moon of Terror," whose whiteness is equated with Europeaness, elaborating on an attack on the Natives (Summer) by cruelty (Winter). What is interesting is that Crawford chooses to see this as a circular, cyclical relationship. She describes the summer as "always shot, and evermore returning," suggesting that there is no finality in death here -- does she mean that there will be an eventual reemergence of the native peoples, and that as summer returns so to do they? Later, this metaphor gets muddled. Winter weather is attributed to a North Wind Spirit, who is again appropriated from aboriginal custom, but he rails against the "White Squaw" of winter... Is she white as in European, or is she a Squaw (aboriginal) made of winter weather? But while the white man's place in this shifts, the elements as a whole remail native-tinged - for Crawford, to be aboriginal is to be of the land.

This interpretation highlighting the emergence of native peoples is supported by a passage wherein Max highlights some of the failures of Canada. He refers to:

A throne propp'd up with bleaching bones;
A country sav'd with smoking seas of blood;
A flag torn from the foe with wounds and death;
Or Commerce, with her housewife foot upon
Colossal bridge of slaughter'd savages.

Crawford here is making reference to the fact that Canada is built on the backs of dead aboriginal people. She highlights this in the poem in such an overt way that the message can't possibly be missed, and I feel like it must relate to the way she personifies the summer as native and the winter (or at least the killer of summer) as white.

Crawford also builds images in this poem of the rich experiencing progress only at the hands of the poor. For every blow of the axe in the wilderness, she writes, "Cities and palaces shall grow!" This is particularly poignant as it comes in the same section where Max is nearly killed by a falling tree -- Crawford seems intent on reminding us of the price of progress. Max is angry that gain for Katie's father has come relatively easily -- he needed only to come to the New World willing to work, and land was granted to him. Max works hard, but points out to Katie that it's hard to work for land you do not own. While hard work is valued in the colonies, the lack of free land places unexpected obstacles in Max's way.

I think, though, my major problem with this poem is that it supposes women as objects. Katie is Malcolm's until she is Max's -- for a while it seems as though she may be Alfred's -- but she is not her own person in any way. Though her will is ultimately met, it is only on (a) the good will of her father and (b) the cunning and strength of her fiance. This is a tale of the times, certainly, but Katie never seems opposed to this way of being in the world. Crawford is strong and bold enough to comment on the plight of the aboriginal population, but passes no judgement on the situation of women in the colony. I find this curious indeed.

I don't really think there's much point in commenting on the other poems here by Crawford -- the theme of nature-as-native is rehashed in the other poems, and for the most part they are otherwise rather quiet pastorals. Of these poems, Malcolm's Katie is clearly her most important work.

oh Acadia, you so fine / you so fine you blow my mind / Acadia clap clap Acadia

2007-07-07T08:00:00.000-03:00

This is the first time I have ever made it through The Rising Village, because I spent my undergraduate degree (and my M.A., if I'm honest) being afraid of long poems and avoiding them at all costs. I blame it on an early and prolonged exposure to Paradise Lost, personally. Anyway, I remember reading excerpts of The Deserted Village in my third year, and being struck by the bleakness of the imagery. Oliver Goldsmith wrote The Deserted Village in 1770 to comment on the horrific state of affairs in the abandoned villages across England -- he writes of the challenges of poverty and the sins of chasing wealth. Our Oliver Goldsmith wrote The Rising Village in response to his uncle's poem and in order to show the opportunities available across class lines in the new world -- particularly in his beloved Acadia (now Nova Scotia and New Brunswick). He didn't settle in Canada, and died in England in 1861, but his respect and passion for the emerging colony is palpable.

This is a short post, because (a) it's only one poem and (b) I want to take a moment to edit Oliver Goldsmith Sr.'s wikipedia entry, because it makes no mention of this Oliver Goldsmith and The Rising Village, which seems important.

The Rising Village
by Oliver Goldsmith

Happy Acadia! [....]

How pleasing and how glowing with delight
Are now thy budding hopes! How sweetly bright
They rise to view! How full of joy appear
The expectations of each future year!

[...]

While the poor peasant, whose laborious care
Scarce from the soil could right his scanty fare
Now in the peaceful arts of culture skilled,
Sees his wide barn with ample treasures filled;

[...]

Thy grateful thanks to Britain's care are due,
Her power protects, her smiles past hopes renew,
Her valour guards thee, and her councils guide,
Then may thy parent ever be thy pride!

I find the passage I have quoted above particularly noteworthy. All the lines come from the same stanza, though I have cut out some of the intervening lines. But the passage is so interesting to me because it seems to simultaneously rebuke and celebrate mother England. The poet says, essentially, that the peasant who could barely eek out a living in England finds life, liberty and riches in Acadia. He argues that Acadia has provided the new settler with budding hopes and joys and with the plenty and the opportunities for great success. But even thought peasants are likely only to find a future in the new world, Goldsmith makes it clear that they should be aware that they owe everything they have achieved to England. It is only through England's grace that the colonies exist undisturbed, and therefore -- regardless of the toil of those who work for their freedom from the oppressive ruling class system in England -- they could accomplish nothing without the hand of mother Britain. It seems like an awkward situation -- if you stay, you are beholden to England for your failures, but if you go, your successes belong to her as well. No wonder so many people wanted to run for the colonial hills!

Overall, the poem plaints a positive picture of Acadia and, by extension, Canada and the New World as well. Goldsmith is careful never to condemn England -- he paints just about the rosiest picture ever of the class system in the UK when he writes, "Majestic palaces in pomp display / The wealth and splendor of the regal sway; / While the low hamlet and the shepherd's cot, / In peace and freedom mark the peasant's lot." What a wonderful way of saying, "Stay where we put you!" But though he refuses to condemn England, that doesn't stop him from praising the new colony of Canada for it's difference from England -- Goldsmith has respect for the freedom and the options offered to colonists and his perception that Acadia is a significantly more democratic than was England. He is careful, too, to point out just how difficult the early experiences of the settlers had been -- he seems focused on illustrating how hard the settlers worked to "earn" their freedom from class struggle. At the end of the day, though, "The golden triumphant corn waves his head." The settlers have had success, and Goldsmith makes a point of explaining in the poem the process and work involved in clearing land. There's no doubt that he respects the hard graft of the settlers in the new colony.

There's a troubling discussion of the settlers "fending off" the aboriginal population. It's a product of (a) the time and (b) Goldsmith's privileged position as an officer of the British army, but for Goldsmith the greatest success of the settlers is their ability to survive the aboriginal attacks. He condemns the native people for believing that they "still retain possession of the soil," which belies a historical misunderstanding of the connection natives had to the land... And even if they had a possessive attitude, we know that no formal treaties were signed in the maritime provinces after the Royal Proclamation in 1763, so let's face it, the land really was their own. It's just interesting to be reminded of the political viewpoint of the period -- it seems so foreign to our own.

In relation to that, there is a celebration of the faith and devout Christianity of the settlers in the new land. In the Deserted Village, I believe (taxing my poor memory) that there is a section on the village chapel falling into disuse. The opposite is true in The Rising Village, where people who possess very little, as the settlers do, show gratitude for everything and believe all their blessings to be divined by God: "While, grateful for each blessing God has given, / In pious strains, they waft their thanks to Heaven." Settlers are pious because they know that "God alone can shelter him from harm." This is something worth celebrating, for Goldsmith, because it's impressive to him that the colonies, which he seems to fear could fall easily into religious disrepair, are really a bastion of faith and piety.

Acadia isn't perfect, however, and Goldsmith doesn't hesitate to point out the areas of colonial life that he has problems with. The doctor and the school teacher come under fire as being basically incompetent, but without enough competition for their jobs to encourage any kind of improvement. There is a sense that the colonies are a good place for the poor, but there isn't really any place for members of the professional classes, the middle classes, or the wealthy. The colonies are a place to go to work with your hands, it seems, and not your brain.

Finally, there's a really odd section in the middle where he outlines a failed love story. I don't understand the purpose of this. Is there a Flora and Albert in The Deserted Village? I am unsure, and will have to look it up later.

Anon and anon, my poetry loving peers.

canadian poetry is all the rage

2007-07-05T11:39:00.000-03:00

I needed a break from the bleakness of the modernist period, and so I shook off the modernist shackles and moved into poetry for a little bit. You deserve the truth, dear blog readers -- I'm not really very good with poetry. I kind of find it... annoying. I'm big on literature that says what it means, or that has a really developed sense of irony. I'm not really one for metaphors. I actually don't mind the stuff I've looked at for today's blog post. I find contemporary poetry royally irritating. But this is good -- I'm facing my literary fears and leaving behind novels for the next month while I work through all the poetry and drama on my list. I'll see you again, novels... On August 6th. Sigh.

Canadian Poetry: From the Beginnings Through the First World War
selected by Carole Gerson and Gwendolyn Davies

Instead of starting with a quote from the text as I usually do, I'm going to do a survey of the themes across this collection and use quotations from the different poets as appropriate. The text here is broken into two sections -- part one is Foundations, and part two is Continuations. Foundations is the colonial period, and Continuations is the confederation period leading into the moderns only so far as the immediate post-WWI period can be considered modernist in Canada.

The Foundations period is a time of celebrating Canada, and comparing Canada to England and America. Robert Hayman, for example, wrote of the comparisons between Newfoundland (where he was a governor) and England as early as 1628. Jonathan Odell spoke of leaving America and coming to Canada as the time he "renounced our native hostile shore" in his "Our Thirty-Ninth Wedding Anniversary" in 1810. The comparison to the homeland reminds the reader of the newness of Canada, and adds importance to the development of a national literature separate and apart from the poets' home countries.

The comparisons tend to focus on celebrating the freedom and the democratic spirit of Canada, as for example Alexander McLachlan writing "The Man Who Rose From Nothing" in 1874:

In other lands he's hardly knows,
For he's a product of our own;
Could grace a shanty or a throne,
The man who rose from nothing.

For most of the poets in this Foundations period, freedom is celebrated and preferable in comparison with the comforts of England -- better to be less comfortable but to own one's own land than to have creature comforts but live as a tenant. In the end, it seems, the real thing that Canada offers to immigrants is relative freedom compared to the oppressive circumstances of England / America.

Indeed, there seems to be a consciousness in the early poetry of Canada of the role of poets as nation-builders. For example, Griselda Tonge was a poet who lived from 1803-1825. She was the great-granddaughter of Deborah How Cottnam, an earlier Canadian poet, and she makes an effort in her own poetry to echo back to the work of her great-grandmother. She is on one hand simply acknowledging the good works of a family member, but she is also creating a Canadian cultural legacy, showing that there is a lineage to writing in Canada and creating a kind of literary dynasty.

Many of the celebratory poems were loosely-veiled or not-so-veiled forms of propaganda to encourage immigration to the new colonies. In 1750, the anonymous "Nova Scotia: A New Ballad" emerged to sing the praises of Nova Scotia and remind people that, in the new world:

No landlords are there the poor tenants to teaze,
No lawyers to bully, nor stewards to seize;
But each honest fellow's a landlord, and dares
To spend on himself the whole fruit of his cares.

This is clearly propaganda, but other celebratory poems are perhaps less overtly tools for the attraction of new immigrants. One example of such is the joyful "Annapolis-Royal" by Roger Viets, which was actually distributed in pamphlet form.

Towards the end of the Foundational period, a real social consciousness emerged from the poets. John Arthur Phillips, for example, focused on the plight of the female workers who were making less than their male counterparts (sound familiar?) in his "The Factory Girl" in 1873:

A man gets thrice the money,
But then "a man's a man,
And women surely can't expect
To earn as much as he can."
Of his hire the laborer's worthy,
Be that laborer who it may;
If a woman can do a man's work
She should have a man's full pay,
Not to be left to starve -- or sin --
On forty cents a day.

[...]

If she sins to escape her bondage
Is there room for wonder then.

There's also the anonymous "A Popular Creed" that satirizes the idea that money is what creates a good man, and that the worst crime a man can commit is the crime of poverty. Other emergent themes are not really surprising, because they echo from the literature of the period -- a deference to God, a focus on the natural world, natives as representatives of pre-White Canada, and a sense of optimism about the choices and options available to people through immigration. These themes in large part carry through to the poetry of the Continuations period, because Canadian poetry will likely always feature things like nature in some capacity, but there are shifts that occur.

First of all, there is a stronger sense of an emergent national identity, and with that comes the beginning of a questioning of the demands of the empire. For example, as William Wilfred Campbell argues in "The Lazarus of Empire" in 1899:

But lowest and last, with his area vast,
And horizon so servile and tame,
Sits the poor beggar Colonial
Who feeds on the crumbs of her fame.

[...]

How long, O how long, the dishonor,
The servile and suppliant place?
Are we Britons who batten upon her,
Or degenerate sons of the race?

Campbell is clearly concerned with the relationship to the empire, which is interestingly early in Canada's progress as a nation. This way of exploring the Canadian identity is supplemented by a fear of brain drain and the challenges of being loyal to Canada. Charles G.D. Roberts wrote of this phenomenon as early as 1886 in a poem called "The Poet Is Bidden to Manhattan Island." This poem about 19th Century brain drain ends with the narrator of the poem referring to the United States as "pastures new," and pointing out that a Canadian poet has "piped at home, where none could pay." In the US, then, there is financial support for poetry -- the Canadian poet must choose between staying at home to develop the Canadian poetic scene. There is a sense of responsibility in the artists in Canada in this period that they are creating a national art.

This development of Canadian poetry was really important to the works of Charles G.D. Roberts. In his poem "Aye!," for example, Roberts sets an Ode to Shelley in the Tantramar. New Brunswick is inserted into the canon, here, but furthermore the Canadian marshland is equated with Shelley -- both are considered poets in the writings of Roberts, which is an interesting idea and adds legitimacy to the burgeoning poetic scene of Canada.

Not all poets saw it this way. For Bliss Carman, for example, in his "The Ships of Saint John" from 1893, he depicts Canada as a "great nurse and mother." Canada, then, is something that gives you what you need to grown, but that you eventually must leave. In this poem, Carman makes it clear that dreams are something that you fulfill elsewhere, not in Canada. This is fitting for a writer who started in Canada but eventually settled down and became a professional writer in the United States. (In "Wild Geese," he revisits this theme by lusting and longing to be with the geese who fly south -- he views it as an exodus and longs to be a part of it.)

The other major theme that emerges, especially in the Confederation Poets, is a privileging of the rural over the urban. In "Among the Timothy," for example, Archibald Lampman contrasts the "blind grey streets" of the city with the "enchanted climes" of rural Canada. There is an emerging nostalgia for the natural world that develops as a response to the urbanization and industrialization of Canada.

I have no pretty way to end this post beyond saying that it's midnight and I'm tired. More poetry tomorrow, ladies and gentlemen.

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

2007-06-29T23:08:00.000-03:00

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

2007-06-28T14:30:00.000-03:00

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

2007-06-28T10:34:00.000-03:00

jake hersh, the self-hating canadian

2007-06-27T10:04:00.000-03:00

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

2007-06-23T19:18:00.000-03:00

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

2007-06-22T21:02:00.000-03:00

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!

2007-06-21T22:53:00.000-03:00

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

2007-06-20T20:36:00.000-03:00

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

2007-06-19T23:13:00.000-03:00

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

2007-06-18T17:07:00.000-03:00

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

2007-06-14T08:21:00.000-03:00

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

2007-06-06T21:09:00.000-03:00

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.

heartbreaking sketches of staggering genius

2007-06-05T17:56:00.000-03:00

Well, it's official. Wacousta is on hold for a little while. Everytime I pick it up, I seem to have a narcoleptic reaction that is completely involuntary -- and completely stunting progress on my comprehensives. So I'm putting Wacousta to the side. The bad part of that is that I now get to be constantly aware of the reality that COLONIAL CANLIT IS NOT AND NEVER WILL BE BEHIND ME, but the good part is that I get to move into some slightly more contemporary stuff as I excitedly plunge headfirst into..

THE CONFEDERATION PERIOD. DUN-DUN-Duuuuuuuuuuuuuun.

Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town
by Stephen Leacock

Now and then, too, you could have heard them singing the steamer -- the voices of the girls and the men blended into unison by the distance, rising and falling in long-drawn melody: "O, Can-a-da.... O, Can-a-da!"

You may talk as you will about the intoning choirs of your European cathedrals, but the sound of "O Canada," borne across the waters of a silent lake at evening is good enough for those of us who know Mariposa.

I think just as they were singing like this: "O, Can-a-da," that word went round that the boat was sinking.

-----

Suicide is a thing that ought not to be committed without very careful thought. It often involves serious consequences, and in some cases brings pain to others than oneself.

I don't say that there is no justification for it. There often is. Anybody who has listened to certain kinds of poetry, or heard certain kinds of performances upon the concertina, will admit that these are some lives which ought not to be continued, and that even suicide has its brighter aspects. But to commit suicide on grounds of love is at best a very dubious experiment.

If you haven't read Sunshine Sketches since high school, it is imperative that you go out now and pick up a copy -- it'll run you about $3.00 at a used bookstore, or you can check out your favourite local library -- and reread it. Sunshine Sketches is going on my list of "CanLit Ruined by High School English Classes," along with The Stone Angel, The Stone Diaries, and Each Man's Son. The fact is that there are some books which, no matter how brilliant, fifteen year olds will never really relate to. I read Sunshine Sketches in high school and thought it was a cuteish collection of short stories, and then I put it aside and moved on. THIS RESPONSE WAS INCORRECT. If I hadn't had to study for comps, I may never have picked it up again -- ever. And that would have been a great shame, because it was only in rereading it today that I discovered just how complex and beautiful this book really is.

I think that in Canada, there are two distinct traditions of literature: the rural story, and the small town story. Urban stories have increased in prominence as society has urbanized, but that took a long time to come. Indeed, the rural and the small town narratives spent a lot of time eulogizing their own existence -- it was a long time after the urbanization of Canada that anyone really wanted to read urban narratives (Richler went a long way to creating interest in urban narratives, but stories of the city set outside Montreal took longer again to emerge). Sunshine Sketches, obviously, emerges from the small town tradition. Other writers have straddled the worlds -- Alice Munro, for example. But the pure small town narrative, like Anne of Green Gables, for example, is notable because it makes the town itself a character in the text, and the joy of reading the novel or short story collection comes not only from befriending the characters, but getting to know the town itself. One knows Avonlea long before one ever steps foot on Prince Edward Island. Likewise, one knows Mariposa long before one ever goes searching for it north of Toronto.

Sunshine Sketches is very profoundly a eulogy for small town Canada, and in many ways -- especially in the last story -- Leacock is scolding those of us who have left small towns behind and promised to return, but never have. Leacock, throughout this collection of stories, places the reader in the position of the cityslicker who was born in Mariposa (or a town like it), but has moved to the city and built a life there that neglects or forgets the small town roots. For Leacock, the urbanization of Canada is not merely a process of movement, but it's a process of forgetting. The city, to Leacock, is a memory-less place that is filled with people who are denying their own heritage. This plays into the Canadian myth of rurality (I invented the shit out of that word) -- the idea that we have assumed ourselves to be a culture of rural people. This is a natural assumption rooted in, as we can see from our colonial literature, our history as settler people. Canada was founded on the farm and the homestead... It has just taken us a very long time to move beyond that image of ourselves towards a more urbanized sense of ourselves. The images we pimp as "Canadian" are always landscape images -- we have a tendency to deny the extent to which we are a nation of cities strung together by rural communities, and there is an extent to which the "soul" of Canadian seems to be supposed to live in the small towns.

To Leacock, the city is a soul-crushing place. As his narrator says at the end of the collection:

What? It feels nervous and strange to be coming here again after all these years? It must indeed. No, don't bother to look at the reflection of your face in the window-pane shadowed by the night outside. Nobody could tell you now after all these years. Your face has changed in these long years of money-getting in the city. Perhaps if you had come back now and again, just at odd times, it wouldn't have been so.

A finger is being pointed here at the reader, and through the reader at anyone who has moved away from their rural roots. Leacock is accusing Canada for forgetting the "true" Canada in the push to become as urban as possible. The quest for money leads many young people out of small towns like Mariposa and, if they never make the effort to remember their roots, they change beyond recognition. By extension, the urbanization of Canada has changed us, as a nation, for the worse; the past self of Canada -- the rural, hard-working, protestant self -- would never recognize the new, urban Canada. Leacock writes a cautionary tale here, and by sketching his little tales hides withing amusing anecdotes the memory of small town Canada. We befriend Mariposa, and we remember how important it is not to deny our history, however mythical, as a people.

sisters are doing it for themselves

2007-05-31T20:39:00.000-03:00

It has been a loooooooooong day, but this blog entry marks the completion of my second-last novel from the pre-Confederation period. This means that once I survive Wacousta (doubtful as it is whether or not this is even possible), I will be finished colonial canlit. WA-HOO! Not having to read any more of this stuff is, like, a major success in my mind. It also represents the first section of my comps list that I have successfully read in its allotted timeslot.

St. Ursula's Convent Or, the Nun of Canada, Containing Scenes From Real Life
[Colonial Lit is all about the catchy catch titles.]
by Julia Catherine Beckwith Hart

As Louisa I loved you far above a brother's affection, and trembled to indulge it. My love was pure, but I feared some happy mortal would snatch from me my beloved sister. As Adelaide, I love you with increased ardour. Judge, then, if possible, the extent of my affection. I fear not death, Adelaide. It is parting with you I dread. To see you snatched away from me, by the devouring waves, I cannot dwell on the idea!

My brother, my Dudley, said Adelaide, rest assured that your affection surpasses not mine. What could have sustained me, when the unexpected discovery deprived me of every known relative? What could then have consoled me, but my love for you.

[The book is entirely composed in this schlocky, syrupy, please-let-me-die manner, by the way.]

Some books are Great Books because they are true masterpieces. Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Jamaica Kincaid -- from all points in history and walks of life, we find literature that shapes the way people think, the way they view the world, and the way they make sense of their own place in history and society. Those books are great because they are texts that speak to the human condition. They are important books because they shape minds. Their power to influence, change, and inspire make them Great.

Other books are Great Books because they are historically important. They are landmark texts because they break new ground, change genres, or chronicle historically significant moments. These are books that we read because we should, because they are historical documents. These books don't have to change minds. They don't actually even have to be good. But we read them because they show us our progression as people, and we read them because they teach us where we have come from.

Part of the project of learning a field is that you have to read books from both the Great Books stacks -- the literary greats, and the historical greats. Most of the works in this colonial period are important for their historical place, but are also good works of literature in their own right. The Strickland sisters may not be scintillating to my tastes, but they craft a good narrative. Beckwith Hart's novel, however, is extremely important historically, being the first novel ever written by a person born in Canada. It's also awful. Just awful. Beckwith Hart was seventeen years old when she put pen to paper, and it shows in the most painful ways possible. Not only are there blatant incoherencies that should really have been caught by an editor (verb tense shifts, changing from third to first person, constant repetition of sentences, no normalcy in the choice between double quotation marks or single, missed words and spelling) -- or at least should have been caught by the editor of this edition and contemporized / normalized -- but the plot is really, really, really terrible. Really.

The problem for the novel rests in the fact that there is no conflict. Ever. Everything that seems like it could be a conflict is resolved by, "Everyone believes in God and therefore no one panics and deliverance arrives nearly immediately." That doesn't mean there aren't absolutely ridiculously bizarre circumstances evoked in the name of the quest for conflict. Shipwrecks, people getting shot, trapped inside mine shafts for no apparent reason, attacked by pirates, deaths, baby-swapping, incest -- it's all there. The best scene in the whole book is when Adelaide, the protagonist, discovers that she has been switched at birth with Lady Louisa -- but she was destined to marry Lady Louisa's brother, who is really her brother! Oh no! She announces it to the family, and Lady Louisa's brother says, basically, "That's okay, I was hotter for my sister anyway and now that she's not my biological sister we can be married!" And everyone rejoices at the romance of it all.

Jesus Christ.

Actually, he's a pretty major character in the novel, too; no one acts, because they are all too busy waiting for Jesus to fix things. I have no problem with people who choose to live their life in this way, but it sure as hell makes for especially boring fiction.

The other problem is that any conflicts that do arise tend to be told as stories -- told in the past tense by the person who is in peril in the story, SO YOU ALREADY KNOW HE'S OKAY AND THEREFORE THERE IS NO CONFLICT. Ugh, I am never going to get these hours back.

Fascinatingly, even though this book is written by a Canadian born in Canada, everyone still ends the novel running for England or France. No one wraps up the plot in Canada. There's talk of returning in the end, but no one actually does it. This returns me to my earlier question -- what makes Canada so easy to leave? Even people born here write narratives, in this time period at least, about getting the hell out. (I'm trademarking the term 'Get The Hell Out Narrative,' heretofore referred to as the GTHO Narrative.) And the thing is, the new Lady Louisa goes to England and retires to the country, so it's not like she's seeking an urban society that isn't available in Canada in this period. There's no reason to not return to Canada, but it just seems more natural -- even to a Canadian-born writer -- to set a happy ending in another country. Talk about self-loathing!

444444444444vvvvv90ty <--- this, for the record, is what Swift has to say about the novel.

I do want to point out what I think is very interesting about the colonial period of literature in Canada, and that is the gynocentrism of the period. Every writer of note here, with the exception of John Richardson, who wrote Wacousta, is a woman. There are clearly a lot of practical reasons for this -- men were primarily taken up with the outdoor work of settlement, whether that was the hands-on work of farming, or soldiering, or any of the other active roles assigned to men. One of the benefits of being banished to the indoors and the kitchen garden seems to be that it affords time to write. What's interesting though is that there seems to have been a market for women's writing in particular. The Strickland sisters had a brother, Samuel, who wrote a book much like Moodie's many years before Moodie did -- yet no one reads Samuel Strickland in second-year CanLit class. I can't think of a place I have seen him mentioned outside of books by the Strickland sisters. I don't know what to make of this feminized period in our literature, but I'm very sad to say that it comes to a sharp end as the Confederation period emerges.

Atwood believes that Canada has been historically a good place for women writers because, as a nation marginalized by the US and the UK, we have been more willing to accept marginalized writers or writers of marginalized backgrounds. If you think of the canonical Canadian writers, there's lots of "minor writers" (in the Deleuzian sense of writers who write from a place of reduced power in comparison with the hegemonic forces of a society): Cohen [Jewish], Atwood [woman], Richler [Jewish], Laurence [woman] -- not to say we don't have our own history of while male dominance, because we do (Davies, I'm looking in your direction, you old goat). But there seems to have always been a place at least somewhere in Canadian literature, moreso perhaps per capita than in the US or the UK, for "minor writers" to develop a voice. The preponderance of writing by female authors is perhaps indicative of this idea.

In the end, we all probably should read this book. But it's not very good. If you don't read it, I won't judge you for it. I kind of feel like reading this book should add a tiny gold star to my degree.

According to the guy who edited this book, those who dislike it simply don't understand it. Colour me confused then, but this book is one of the most incoherent things I have ever sat down to read. She claims to be encouraging "native genius" through her writing but sister, this ain't it. Reviewers at the time called this book "a reviewers misery," and I'm willing to agree that it is also a grad student's misery, too! According to one reviewer:

Had this not been the first native novel that ever appeared in Canada, no consideration could have induced us to give its title a place among our pages.

But hey, she's from Fredericton.

finally, proof you didn't have to be a giant bitch to be a strickland sister

2007-05-30T09:47:00.000-03:00

I'm floored by the difference between Catharine Parr Traill and her sister, Susanna Moodie. When I picked up this book I was fully expecting Roughing it in the Bush 2: Rougher, Bushier, and With More Hatred for the Indians. I was pleasantly surprised to find such a different voice in this text... But let me get to the blog entry with haste, because I have to get to the gym so that I can go and see Shrek the Third having accomplished much and with zero guilt. Hot.

The Backwoods of Canada: Being Letters from the Wife of and Emigrant Officer, Illustrative of the Domestic Economy of British America
[you can tell it's a bestseller, with that catchy title]
by Catharine Parr Traill (the non-bitchy Strickland sister)

... they complain that their wives are always pining for home, and lamenting that ever they crossed the seas. This seems to be the general complaint with all classes; the women are discontented and unhappy. Few enter with their whole heart into a settler's life. They miss the little domestic comforts they had been used to enjoy; they regret the friends and relations they left in the old country; and they cannot endure the loneliness of the backwoods.

This prospect does not discourage me: I know I shall find plenty of occupation within-doors, and I have sources of enjoyment when I walk abroad that will keep me from being dull. Besides, have I not a right to be cheerful and contented for the sake of my beloved partner? The change is not greater for me than him; and if for his sake I have voluntarily left home, and friends, and country, shall I therefore sadden him by useless regrets?

But I shall very soon be put to the test.

Catharine Parr Traill is Susanna Moodie's younger sister, and like Moodie, Traill married a half-pay officer and moved across the world to try her hand at starting a brand new life with her husband. Like Moodie, she and her husband cleared a patch of land, started a family, and were poor as dirt in the new country. Like Moodie, Traill was a permanent resident of Canada, and was eventually buried in her new land -- like Moodie, she never found her way back to England.

That's about where the similarities end, however, because where Moodie retains a subtle disdain for Canada throughout her narrative, and seems to sit constantly in judgement of the people and things around her, Traill has a child-like openness and excitement for all that her new country has to offer.

The difference in the two is evident from the opening. Where Moodie starts her narrative in England, which allows for her to constantly be looking backwards to her original home and allows for a constant hearkening back, Traill begins her narrative en route to Canada. At the opening of Traill's text, she is eager to touch Newfoundland and move into her new home -- she is looking towards a new future. This subtle choice of whether to start the narrative in England or heading for Canada colours the whole thrust of the text, and determines whether the narrative will be forward-moving or looking backwards. This means that Traill's narrative is significantly more positive-seeming for the reader, who instead of reading about the author's regrets, gets a more hopeful narrative.

The narrative is also more hopeful because it is a series of letters home that refer to things people are writing to her. Moodie feels extremely isolated in the bush and is angry at how everyone back in England, she believes, has forsaken her. She sees it as natural that everyone forgets about the poor, disadvantaged emigrant. Traill, conversely, shows through her text that a connection to home can be retained, no matter how infrequent -- and this from the poorer sister, the one who couldn't send letters except with people travelling to New York who could get the letters onto the boats at no charge. For Traill, it is important to convey to her readers that all of home is not lost in coming abroad. Also, through her nature sketches, botanical research, and home taxidermy, she proves not only that England's influence is needed in the colonies, but also that Canada has something to teach and send back to the mother country. Traill takes steps here to create a Canadian identity and find Canadian-ness both as opposed to and in relation to England and the United States.

Traill also finds an important connection to the land. Where Moodie says that her major connection to the land is that she has buried her children there, and thus she connects to the land through life, Traill's connection is more creative. Traill names the plants of the new world -- calling herself a "fairy godmother" -- and thus her closest connection to Canada is through life and creation. It's no wonder she remains more positive than does her sister!

In short, Traill avoids standing in judgement against people. For example, where Moodie condemned the Logging Bee as a time and place for debauchery and drunkenness at her own expense, Traill embraces the event. She doesn't condemn the drinking, but instead understands the needs of people who work hard and expend a lot of energy. She doesn't begrudge the efforts it takes to feed the group, but instead enjoys and revels in the company and the novelty of the experience. Finally, instead of looking at all that isn't done at the end of the bee (although she does comment that she didn't know what went into building a house at first!), she is grateful for the work of her friends. Traill's positive attitude and lack of judgement make the text, overall, significantly more enjoyable to read than Moodie's narrative.

That isn't to say the book isn't without issues. In the depiction of Aboriginal people, Traill is most impressed by those who have become Europeanized and Christianized -- and indeed, Traill sees this in all the First Nations who surround her, which suggests that Traill is making a trope out of these people to support her own philosophy. Traill, throughout the narrative, tries to show the balance that can be struck between what the old and the new worlds have to offer. Where Moodie saw the "half-breeds" as embodying the worst of all possible worlds, for Traill they are the embodiment of the success that comes from standing half-way between the old and the new worlds, and they show her that the success of Canada is in European immigrants adopting those Aboriginal skills that are useful. This is certainly problematic (and somewhat userous), but it's at least a more problematic and troubled reading of the situation than Moodie's own.

a rough experience through the bush, indeed

2007-05-28T19:29:00.000-03:00

Dear Dr. E----- P-----. Consider this my official confession that, though I sat diligently in your second-year literature class, I read very few of the assigned texts. I could likely find a reason why that was your fault, but that would be fairly disingenuous. I was just kind of more interested in teaching than in keeping up in your class. As a result, my A- in your class is the only A- that I'm actually mad about because I could probably have worked a lot harder. For instance, you assigned Roughing It in the Bush. I opted to not read it, and look at how that bit me in the ass -- now I have to read the freaking thing in two days. So I apologize (a) for making you think I was paying attention in your class, and (b) for shooting myself in the goddamn foot for not taking any notes on this book. Sheesh. Kinda wishing I had been a better student in your CanLit class, because looking at my comps list I really could have at least had an idea of some of these if I wanted to.

Roughing It in the Bush
by Susanna Moodie

Reader! It is not my intention to trouble you with the sequel of our history. I have given you a faithful picture of life in the backwoods of Canada, and I leave you to draw your own conclusions. To the poor, industrious working man it presents many advantages; to the poor gentleman, none! The former works hard, puts up with coarse, scanty fare, and submits with a good grace, to hardships that would kill a domesticated animal at home. Thus he becomes independent, inasmuch as the land that he has cleared finds him in the common necessaries of life; but it seldom, if ever, in remote situations, accomplishes more than this. The gentleman can neither work so hard, live so coarsely, nor endure so many privations as his poorer but more fortunate neighbour. [...] Difficulties increase, debts grow upon him, he struggles in vain to extricate himself, and finally sees his family sink into hopeless ruin.

If these sketches should prove the means of deterring one family from sinking their property, and shipwrecking all their hopes, by going to reside in the backwoods of Canada, I shall consider myself amply repaid for revealing the secrets of the prison-house, and feel that I have not toiled and suffered in the wilderness in vain.

Based on the title, you may be expecting a titillating romp through some sort of lesbian dreamworld -- such is not the case. Instead, Susanna Moodie has created a memoir that simultaneously celebrates and completely trashes all that is Canada. On the one hand, Moodie seems to be very proud of her own achievements in coming to Canada and finding strengths and skills she could not have imagined cultivating in England. On the other hand, she tells of pain, torment, suffering, and struggle, and begs people to stay in England if that is where they more naturally belong. Indeed, Moodie seems ambivalent towards Canada -- likely because, unlike the other writers I have explored so far in the colonial period, Moodie was Canadian for keeps. There was no turning back and no changing the mind for Moodie. She knew her family could not return, and that Canada was officially her new home. Where Brooke and Jameson were both merely passing through, trying Canada as a lark with a concrete exit strategy, Moodie is a true pioneer, having to make the best of Canada for the good of her family. Furthermore, though having emerged from the same or similar class of society as Brooke and Jameson, the latter retained their socio-economic status where Moodie had to experience absolute destitution (which in my opinion nuances and layers her writing and discussions of the different people in England). Finally, of course, Jameson and Brooke were urban women (even when there isn't much to write home about it terms of urbanity), where Moodie, of course, roughed it in the bush.

I think part of what is so interesting in this book is that Moodie is ambivalent on not only Canada, but on herself, the people around her, and even her husband. Most interesting is her ideas about feminism and the abilities of women. In stark contrast to the unabashedly feminist Anna Jameson, Moodie doesn't seem to know where she herself stands on the rights and responsibilities of women. She pays very little attention to social structures and sociopolitical matters, and indeed fully leaves the political matters to be written about by her (deathly dull, boring, and insufferable) husband who is given over to writing about three or four chapters on the specific political climate of Canada. As a result, we never get to know what Moodie herself thinks of the way women are treated in Aboriginal society, which is a shame because those observations are what offered so much insight into the views of women's issues for both Jameson and Brooke.

Moodie clearly views women as the weaker sex, and says as much regularly. But it is not merely her overt references to her own weakness and the weakness of other women. Sometimes such overt discussions of feminine failure cloak more progressive actualities -- speech being one thing, and act another. Not so for Mrs. Moodie. Most telling is the fact that she is constantly surprised by her own capabilities. She never believes she can do anything before she sets out. Whether the task at hand is milking a cow, navigating a canoe, gifting a stranger with food, or making financial decisions, Moodie is always likely to assume failure. The ridiculous thing, though, is that, in comparison with her husband, Moodie is a successful Bushwoman. It is the choices of her husband that lead to the economic ruin of the family, and it is not her husband's hard work but rather her letter to the lieutenant-governor that secures the full-time military post that saves them from the bush. Moodie has every reason, by about page 300 at least, to believe in herself and have faith in her own strength. But she continues to berate her sex and look down upon her own options, choices, and abilities. Moreover, she is shocked by her every success, and complacent with her every failure. Though her husband leaves her regularly, by the end of the book, to tend to the farm alone, she does not see it as work she is suited to, and fears failure at every turn. She tends to put this down to her femininity, which she fears is lost among the people of the bush.

One interesting social observation Moodie shares in the text is her perceptions of the Chippewa people -- this contrasts so intensely with Jameson's experience that it is worthy of note. Where Jameson was charmed and delighted by the Chippewa, Moodie is disgusted. She sees them as ugly, stupid, and unpleasant, and while she makes friends with some eventually, it is with a constant reminder of her own superiority to them. Jameson, conversely, found devoted friendships among the Chippewa, who she really seemed to see as her equals. Where Moodie focuses long sections on the appearance of the Chippewa, as though she can't quite believe how ugly she finds them to be, Jameson felt no such need. This is interesting especially as Moodie was closer in social status to the Chippewa than was Jameson by their respective points in the narrative -- it seems as though Moodie is desperate to draw a line between her own poverty and the poverty of the Aboriginal people, and define the latter group as a definite other in comparison with her own family.

Another point where Moodie shows her biases is in her discussion of the charivari. This barbarous custom is a way of punishing "disgraceful" marriages, but it's also a clear form of racialized violence -- in Moodie's account, a young black man is killed by a mob for marrying a white woman, and it is all taken as good fun by the community -- regrets are uttered, but no one is ever prosecuted for the crime. Moodie has an outward show of outrage at the custom, but this outrage is undercut by the fact that she prefaces the story by telling the reader she will turn to lighter things. She seems to tell the story with an eye to local colour, but the result is instead quite horrifying indeed.

In the end, I was surprised by how readable I found Moodie's account of bush life. A better writer than Jameson, I think -- Jameson is very much a journalist and gives lots of details, but Moodie is careful to ensure that every chapter (save those written by her husband) includes lots of interest building up to a major conflict, which gives fuel to the reader than Jameson fails to offer. In the end, I think it's a book every Canadian should probably read once... If only to be grateful for how far we have come!

Incidentally, if you want to "rough it" in the area where Susanna Moodie did, there's now a spa not far from her original farmstead. My Mum and I have both been there and can attest to its awesomeness -- certainly better than Moodie's accommodations, I assure you!

working 9 to 5, what a way to make a living

2007-05-25T10:23:00.000-03:00

Just a note to say... I'm canning the clocking in / clocking out aspect of studying for my comps. I'm making myself insane, and really I'm reading more than eight hors a day but just not in single large chunks. Trying to fit everything in to a specific clocking in or clocking out is really just making me more anxious than is necessary.

i've had just about enough of pre-confed canlit, and it only took two books to get me here

2007-05-24T21:55:00.001-03:00

Really, I've had an assful of the whole colonial period of literature. I'm glad I'm starting out the summer with this stuff, because I think reading these books while being eaten by mosquitos would make me certifiably insane. Forseriously, has anyone -- ANYONE -- ever read one of these books for pleasure since about 1910? Argh. This is all such a far cry from my ultra contemporary pop culture studies interests.

Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada
by Anna Brownell Jameson

But when I hear some men declare that they cannot endure to see women eat, and others speak of brilliant health and strength in young girls as being rude and vulgar, with various notions of the same kind too grossly absurd and perverted even for ridicule, I cannot wonder at any nonsensical affectations I meet with in my own sex.

[On alcohol.] But all their taxes, and prohibitions, and excise laws, will do little good, unless they facilitate the means of education. In society, the same evening, the appearance of a very young, very pretty, sad looking creature with her first baby at her side, completed the impression of disgust and affright with which the continual spectacle of this vile habit strikes me since I have been in this country.

Anna Brownell Jameson was a feminist and a challenger of the status quo. According to her biography, Jameson came to Canada in 1836 at the behest of her estranged husband, who was the attorney general of Upper Canada and was hoping to become Vice-Chancellor. He needed his wife to come to Canada in order to show a steady domestic force at home to improve his chances at gaining the post; she, conversely, came to Canada with the intention of putting together an amicable divorce settlement so that she could live comfortably in England separated from her husband. Jameson never had any intention of staying in Canada, and conceptualized her travel memoir en route to Canada as a means of passing her time as she came to an arrangement with her husband.

The book itself is a series of sketches, and is about 300 pages too long. The first 150 pages or so, the Winter Studies section, is deathly, painfully boring. Jameson is essentially trapped in her Toronto home, without friends -- she comments that everyone uses the winter to do their visiting, but that she doesn't know anyone to visit. As a result, she talks endlessly about the lack of society in Toronto, and the few visitors who come by, but she's not particularly insightful in this section. She does have some interesting discussions of gender and social issues in these pages. For example, on witnessing a fire in Toronto and hearing someone approve of the idea because it will allow for new construction of brick housing, Jameson is disgusting, and comments on the folly of any government or social structure that depends on the pain of one to create benefit for another. These glimmers are interesting, but without any plot on connectivity to these sketches -- not even a discussion of her personal life, the people she meets, the friend she is writing to and so on -- it is hard to connect to the text. Where Brooke wrote a timeless love story that said little, Jameson says much without offering any common ground of connection.

The second section, however, dealing with Jameson's summer rambles, is the real meat of the book. There are two major flaws with this section -- it, too, just runs far too long, and again, we miss key information to string the sketches together. While this section is generally held together as a simple travel narrative where Jameson goes about exploring the wilds of Canada with her various friends and guides, there is never any reason for why the trip occurs. Even the expression of simple curiosity would help, but instead the reader is left occasionally wondering why a wealthy woman from England would even attempt such a hazardous journey.

There is a lot of good in this section. Interesting to me was the focus on Aboriginal people in this book -- very different from the background characters in Brooke's novel, for Jameson the Aboriginals are the driving force of her curiosity and the learning she accomplishes. Jameson writes of the Native people she encounters with far more compassion and far less judgement than does Brooke. Where Brooke's characters assert that the British bear no responsibility for the alcoholism among the Native population, Jameson holds the British to task for the situation and recounts stories of Aboriginals being involuntarily drugged with drink in order to ensure that they will trade more loosely their furs and goods. This is not to say that Jameson is without her prejudices -- she is struck by the "dirtiness" and "smell" of the Native populations -- but interestingly enough Jameson is aware of her prejudices and is certain that she is in the wrong for making some of her assumptions. She absolutely comes across as percieving herself as superior to the Aboriginal population, but she's certainly aware of the problems in her own perceptions.

Jameson is a social reformer and a feminist, and as such her view of Canadian society is fascinating because she sees both the positive and negative in the new world. She is neither fully engrossed with the world, nor is she disgusted by it like Brooke seems to be. This, for once, is not at least a tale of how to get the hell out of Canada. Indeed, though Jameson never intended to stay in North America, she actually expresses sadness and disappointment in not being able to stay. For Jameson, too, the wilderness is not to be feared so much as it is to be appreciated, and she encourages other women to take on the challenges and adventures that she has.

As much as one would love to read more about the personal relationship between Jameson and her husband, it's obvious why it's not there. On the whole, it's a more interesting text by far than Brooke's novel... But a plot really wouldn't go amiss. I'm not such a fan of the non-fiction these days, it seems.

how to escape canada without really trying

2007-05-22T22:15:00.000-03:00

Back to the books today -- hopefully the nice weather will stick around as my reading is far more productive when I can sit out on the balcony reading my colonial literature and imagining I'm reading anything else...

The History of Emily Montague
by Frances Brooke

Idleness is the reigning passion here.

... in all respects naturally inferior to the Europeans ...

The general moral character of the Canadians: they are simple and hospitable, yet extremely attentive to interest, where it does not interfere with that laziness which is their governing passion.

... the uncultivated wilds of Canada, the seat of barbarism and ignorance ...

Who knew that the first novel ever written in Canada -- nay, in North America -- was the work of a woman? Frances Brooke wrote The History of Emily Montague in 1769, between the conquest of Quebec and the American Revolutionary War. It's an interesting snapshot, then, of a peaceful lull in the early life of a besieged colony.

The plot of the story is a straightforward one. Ed Rivers, a hopeful man seeking fortune in British North America, encounters the beautiful parentless Emily Montague upon his arrival in Quebec. It's a simple story -- boy meets girl, but girl is betrothed to well-appointed but boring suitor. Girl realizes charms of boy, and takes first opportunity to end engagement with suitor. Boy can't reveal how much he cares for girl because he lacks the fortune to make her his wife. Girl thinks boy intends to marry another. All is eventually settled and the couple seem destined to find happiness together, when WHAM -- boy's mother takes ill, and boy and girl are swept back to England where they cannot marry as they do not have the wealth to make it work in England like they could in the colonies. Family in England bands together to make it possible for the couple to wed, and just as they are settling in to a life of wedded bliss and meager means, it is revealed that girl's long-lost father is a bajillionaire, pleased by the match, and willing to hand over his vast fortune to boy in order that he may look after girl.

Really, it could have been written by Jane Austen, and the novel itself does not depend upon Canada at all for its story, themes, or characters. Canada is mere backdrop in this novel, and the Natives and Quebecois are equally wooden set pieces. The book could have been set anywhere, but that it is set in Canada is interesting for the commentary that is provided about the early life of the colony. Of note, however, is the fact that the characters themselves really comment very little on the fact that they are in Canada -- other than tangential commentary on the weather and the rudeness of the Quebecois women. Interestingly, though, Brooke seems to be aware of the interest of her readers in the culture of Canada, and so she creates the character of William Fermor, father to Emily Montague's best friend Bell, whose voice is only heard through his letters back to England about the comings and goings of Canadians. It's interesting in that these letters add nearly nothing to the plot -- we seem instead to have two narratives: a plot that could occur anywhere, be it an English country manor or the wilds of Quebec, and a narrative that is exclusively about life in Canada, almost completely unrelated to the primary narrative of the text.

I think an interesting factor here is that, while everyone in the novel talks about finding peace and happiness eventually in the Canadian wilderness, no one stays in Canada. By the end of the novel, every single character has funked off back to England to stay permanently. Indeed, the last 100 pages or so of the novel take place entirely in England, and in those last hundred pages I think the experience of colonial life in Canada is mentioned maybe five times. So as exciting as it is to read the first novel set in Canada and featuring Canadians actually written by a writer living in Canada, it's disappointing to see just how little of an impact the Canadian experience has on the characters in the novel, and it's frustrating to see that the rich experiences of a new place are treated basically as a mere backdrop to the events of the novel.

That's not to say that Frances Brooke doesn't do some very interesting things in this novel. Brooke is actually a very contemporary thinker in a lot of ways, and uses the lives and loves of her characters to argue for a number of positive and progressive ideas, including:

education for women
the right of women to choose their own spouses
the importance of marriage being for love rather than circumstance or arrangement
equality within the married home
allowing Quebecois to retain their religion and language

And actually, the list goes on from there. Even more interesting is that because this is an epistolary novel (a novel-in-letters), the reader is exposed to the viewpoints of people of varying gender, class, and so on -- and these progressive beliefs are universally espoused by the characters. Indeed, the young husbands are the most active proponants of the proto-feminist ideals in the text, such as the right of women to be educated (and even the assertion that it is only socialization that keeps young women ignorant in comparison to young men). While this is a very positive thing, it is unfortunate that these views are often brought about only through contrasting with the Native populations in negative and stereotypical ways -- instead of seeing the strength in Native women's right to choose the chief of her people, for example, Brooke's Bell sees only weakness in their inability to choose their own husbands. This when women's sufferage was not even to be hinted at in England, and certainly not in Canada! Brooke is so eager to make the point of who is the better at domestic life (the white, British colonists) that she misses the subtle strengths of alternate political systems (the Aboriginal social structure that seems more focused on equality).

In short, Brooke's novel is interesting in some ways and certainly has a lot to say about the gender relations of its time. As a Canadian novel, however -- well, all but about 50 pages of it could have occured anywhere else but here, and as such it seems odd to consider it a work of Canadian literature. Like much of the literature of this period, it's in many ways a book about escaping Canada, not about settling here. Does Brooke's 5 years in Quebec make her one novel about this place Canadian? At times, the depictions of Canada are heart-warming and show a real connection to the place, but in the end the novel doesn't need Canada to survive. Canadian culture, however, may need this novel. I wonder at our willingness to grasp onto early examples of CanCon... Even unflattering ones where Canada is merely a stand-in for any miserable place that may be escaped by young lovers.

never again shall i be accused of pomo-phobia

2007-05-17T11:43:00.000-03:00

A week filled with such action and yet so little progress. I'll admit outright that The Canadian Postmodern took me way, way longer to read than I was anticipating -- I constantly had to go back and reread sections that I thought I understood, because it took me twenty pages to figure out just how much I didn't understand! But it's also been a week of the increasingly more important (TM). I had an interesting day yesterday sitting in on the pre-trial motions for Dr. Morgentaler's lawsuit against the province, and with house guests coming this weekend my head has been anywhere but in my books. Bad Brenna! But I'm just trying to take this one step at a time and not get overwhelmed by it...

The Canadian Postmoder: A Study of Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction
by Linda Hutcheon

Postmodernism, as I see it, is more paradoxical and problematic, as witnessed perhaps by the continuing debates on its definition. It both sets up and subverts the powers and conventions of art. It uses and abuses them in order to suggest that we question both the modernist autonomy and any realist notion of transparent reference. In other words, the postmodern novel is neither self-sufficiently art nor a simple mirror to or window onto the world outside. Yet in another sense, as we shall see, it exploits the power of both concepts of the function of art.

I'm both excited and nervous about saying this, but I think I finally get postmodernity. And, since my master's thesis focused on postmodern novels (though not on their postmodernity in and of itself), I'm embarrassed to make this discovery after year one of my Ph.D. But, all of that just goes to show that Hutcheon's text is a book I should have read years ago, and as much as it was a bit of an intellectual decathalon to get through it, I'm pleased to have done so.

Hutcheon's basic premise is to lay out the characteristics of postmodern fiction and to explore the ways Canadian novels from the 70s and 80s (especially) embody these ideas. She also touches on issues like the prominence of female writing in this period (something I was once-upon-a-time-ago going to do my doctoral thesis on) and its connection to the postmodern.

Postmodernism, to Hutcheon's eye, represents a loss of faith in the realist narrative tradition in Canada. Realist fiction is an act of mimesis -- the real exists somewhere "out there," and the book is an approximation of the so-called "real." This draws a distinct line between what is real and what is fiction. Also, realism asserts that there are certain "universal truths," but postmodernism tries to question the ground those truths rely on. There is no "universal" because "universal" has traditionally really meant white, male, central Canadian, heterosexual, and so on. This separation is one of the key things postmodern fiction teases and plays with, through the use of historical documents, autobiography, and through the narrator-as-character / narrator-as-reader-proxy, where the narrator (or occasionally, other figure) is granted the opportunity to interact with the reader of the novel and with the text itself.

Indeed, for Hutcheon, that is what seperates the postmodern from the modern: postmodern fiction demands a reader work hard. The reader makes the meaning in a postmodern novel, rather than the author leading the reader to a predetermined point. This isn't to say that the author doesn't construct a story, but more that the reader is left to put the pieces together in the end. Rather than a predetermined conclusion, the reader's own connections are equally important to "plot."

Hutcheon quotes Susan Swan, who wrote, "To be from Canada is to feel as women feel -- cut off from the base of power." This, Hutcheon suggests, is why postmodern literature has been so embraced by Canadian writers. Just as women sought to interrogate male-created universals, Canadian writers have sought to interrogate American- and British-created universals. Hutcheon argues that Canadians are not baggage-less, as some have argued, but instead the baggage is different, and as we have learned to address our own history through narratives we are learning also to interrogate our own assumptions and our own "universals." This historic powerlessness, also, has made Canada a more welcoming place for women writers to assert their own challenges to expected norms, because Canada as a whole is doing the same thing.

In its metafiction and self-referentiality, however, Canadian writing does not deny the realist tradition. Instead, through the use of parody, it tends to poke fun at the assertions of universality inherent to realism, without abandoning the form entirely. Nor is the narrative denied because, as Jameson has argued, narrative is the way humans make sense of the world. Instead, Canadian writing subverts from within rather than from without, to try to better a tradition rather than upend it.

from "Gold Man" by Elizabeth Brewster

2007-05-12T07:27:00.000-03:00

I come from a country
of slow and diffident words
of broken rhythms
of unsaid feelings.

Next time I am born
I intend to come
from a different country.

survival of the bleakest

2007-05-12T06:10:00.000-03:00

Survival
by Margaret Atwood

Certainly, Canadian authors spend a disproportionate amount of time making sure that their heroes die or fail. [... Even] when Canadian writers are writing clumsy or manipulated endings, they are much less likely to manipulate in a positive than in a negative direction: that is, the author is less likely to produce a sudden inheritance from a rich old uncle or the surprising news that his hero is really the son of a count than he is to conjure up an unexpected natural disaster or an out-of-control car, tree, or minor character so that the protagonist may achieve a satisfactory failure. Why should this be so? Could it be that Canadians have a will to lose which is as strong and pervasive as the Americans' will to win?

You might decide at this point that most Canadian authors with any pretensions to seriousness are neurotic or morbid, and settle down instead for a good read with Anne of Green Gables (though it's about an orphan...). But if the coincidence intrigues you -- so many writers in such a small country, and all with the same neurosis -- then I will offer you a theory.

Throughout my undergraduate education, I sat through class after class after class of depressing Canadian literature. I think it was second or third year where my schedule was such that, in one day, I had a class on The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence in Canadian Literature, followed by Earle Birney's David in The Canadian Long Poem, and then I wrapped up the day with an evening class on immigrant novels, that day featuring Obasan by Joy Kogawa. By the time I got home that night all I could wonder was, "Why does studying three works of CanLit in one day result in the need for a bottle or two of Prozac? Why are we so depressing?"

It was exciting, then, for me to pick up Margaret Atwood's 1972 sensation and discover that other people were thinking it, too. The interesting thing about academic study of CanLit is that in the second year of an undergraduate degree, everyone is willing to say that our literature has a depressive streak running through it, but by the upper levels people stop talking about it. Mention that a book is kind of on the dark side in a graduate class and you might as well have said, "I like it!" Reader response, you know, is the lowest form of criticism. It's enough to give a girl a complex -- I know this bleak world view was here yesterday -- so it was great to find out that the Smartest Woman in Canada (TM), Maggie Atwood, had the same questions for the CanLit canon in 1972 that I was mulling over in a windowless classroom in 2002.

The theory of why that Atwood offers us in Survival is really quite a simple one: Canadians are victims, in various stages of victimitude, and as a result our literature is equally about victims. "Let us suppose," she starts, "for he sake of argument, that Canada as a whole is a victim, or an 'oppressed minority,' or 'exploited.' Let us suppose in short that Canada is a colony." Not what you'd call a shocking revelation -- in all my readings so far, and in all my commentaries, I've talked about the ways in which Canada has been colonized: literally (by England) and figuratively (by America). Atwood suggests that if you "stick a pin in Canadian literature at random, nine times out of ten you'll hit a victim." And she's right. Sometimes they are victims of abstract concepts, like poverty or isolation. Sometimes they are literally victims of physical attack. Often, they are victims of domineering family members (especially grandparents, who populate the CanLit landscape as angry, cruel, beaten people). I've been sitting here since early this morning, combing my CanLit shelves, search for victimless books and I can't think of one. Life of Pi? Victim of a shipwreck. Fall On Your Knees? Rape victim, incest victim, victim of wartime atrocities, victim of a horrific marriage, and more. David Adams Richards has never written a character in his life who isn't a victim of Ontario, either a victim of its oppression of the maritimes or a victim of its way of life. Even my favourite character in all of CanLit, Michael Winter's Gabriel English, is a victim of himself, caught up in his own neuroses and lack of self worth in comparing himself to the rest of Canada, and Canada to the US.

If you can think of a relatively major work of Canadian literature that doesn't centre on victimhood and victimization, I would love to know it.

Atwood is clear as to why this sense exists -- we Canadians have been locked in a Victor/Victim cycle for a very long time. Settlers were victimized by the land upon arrival here, so they in turn victimized the native inhabitants. As society grew, we became victims of England's will, only ever gaining as much power as she saw fit. In return, English Canada victimized French Canada, and French Canada victimized women (right to vote in 1940, for Christ's sake [literally!]). In the modern day, we are victims of cultural colonialism, absorbed as we are in American news and entertainment. (Now, on Entertainment Tonight: Canada! 2 1/2 minutes on Sarah Polley followed by 19 1/2 minutes on Paris Hilton's jail cell -- how will she decorate?) It's no accident that survival has emerged as the central theme across the Canadian canon. We survived the wilderness, we survived enough to become an autonomous nation, and now we are struggling to survive as America's Attic. Our literature is rooted in that reality.

Atwood points out that even our heroes are heroes because they were first victims. Louis Riel, Adam Dollard, the Newfoundland Regiment in WWI -- our heroes fall. Even things that are successes, Atwood points out, eventually devolve into failure: we held back the Americans in 1812 and they took over culturally and financial anyway; Sir John A. MacDonald stitched the country together with a railroad and it fell apart regardless.

What is interesting is the way that, as a victim culture, we have come to revere the institutions of law and order on a cultural level. Atwood asks us to think of any other country that uses a policeman as its national symbol, and where Americans seek Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, we are guaranteed the right to Life, Liberty and Security of the Person -- the latter certain to be enacted through the guiding principles of Peace, Order, and Good Government. Rebellions in Canada have never become Revolutions not necessarily because Canadians didn't support the ideas the rebels stood for, but because Canadians in general -- on a social level -- do not support the act of rebellion, full stop.

I would love to use Survival to teach a CanLit course some day. Atwood breaks the text into twelve chapters, each with an accompanying reading list. I think a great full year CanLit survey could see semester one (CanLit: Survival to 1970) following Atwood's ideas, reading some of the novels she suggests, and then semester two (1970-present) uses those ideas as a jumping off point to see what has changed and what has stayed the same in the years that have passed -- years that have been an important flourishing for Canadian Literature. On the whole, I freaking love this book -- if you have even a passing interest in Canadian literature, it's an easy and enlightening look at our own history and culture.

how to embrace the wilderness and influence people

2007-05-11T11:09:00.000-03:00

I'm sitting in my study carrel at Harriet Irving Library wishing the thunderstorm would start already because the air is so thick right now. It's fitting, then, that I've just finished a book about embracing the wilderness in Canadian literature -- Jones is certain that wilderness must enter the garrison to allow the garrison to breathe new life; I think a thunderstorm could do the same thing for Fredericton today.

Butterfly on Rock
by D. G. Jones

The evidence of our literature, and also of our history, would indicate that we are a people who have tried to live primarily on the basis of faith rather than belief. We have persistently placed our confidence in principles, doctrines, rules, rather than in ourselves or in the spontaneous processes of nature. And only too often we carry this faith, or these faiths, as a burden; we do not altogether believe in the doctrine or tradition we live by.

This text, I have to say, is immensely readable -- it was a nice change from Contexts in Canadian Criticism, which was a little bit dry. Jones' primary argument is that literature in Canada has moved from a garrisoned, insular mentality that feared the world of the outside, to a literature that seeks out the wilderness outside the garrison in order to give the garrison a new life. Furthermore, in that stepping out of the garrison and into the wilderness, literature in Canada has sought to accept nature on nature's own terms -- death, violence, and all -- in order to find peace. For the literature of a people consumed by their identity with the land, this is crucial; peace must necessarily be found in nature's death grasp, because only when we cease to fear the wilderness can we embrace its wonders.

In the above quote, Jones argues that this path taken by our literature has at times stood in opposition to the developing social order in Canada. To embrace the chaotic natural world and to place your fate solely in her hands is necessarily to turn your back on the established order -- the church, the town hall, the military all oppose the freedom and randomness of the natural order. As society tried to stay stagnant, literature opened the garrison up to the wilderness and allowed the one force to challenge the other. In the end, a kind of balance has been reached between the two forces that embraces the good in both opportunities. In an established society that ignores the natural, there are basically two gods: the Church, and technology. As Jones argues:

Within society they could choose between the conventional Christian idealism and the newer secular idealism inspired by technology. One was increasingly moribund,* the other increasingly dynamic, but each tended to do violence to human nature and to eliminate all spontaneous joy in life.

Part of the problem with idealism is that it assumes a potential perfection. If we have an idealized idea of something, anything, then we are saying that that item is or can be perfect. Jones argues that life in a colony is hard, it is exhausting, but it is never perfect. A Canadian settler loses much in striving for any ideal, especially one constructed out and way in Rome or London or New York. The spontaneous joy that is missing can re-enter the experience by allowing the natural world back in. Nature is only spontaneous; she acts, reacts, and responds not based on deliberative thought, order from Rome, or developed invention. Nature acts on instinct which is by nature spontaneous. Within the garrison ruled by Church and technology there can be no spontaneity -- but our literature can allow the wilderness entry into the garrison, thereby allowing for the experience of spontaneity. This is the time of the Confederation Poets, who emerged from a garrison culture that oppressed them, and were the first to step into the wilderness to uncover the alternatives to the status quo.

In the end, Jones argues, the key to surviving Canada is making peace with nature. To live in fear of the wilderness in a country like Canada is to only life a partial life. He suggests, "Our love of the world, and our communion with the world, issues from our recognition that it is both our victim and our executioner. He who would have it otherwise remains consciously or unconsciously the alienated man." To be one with Canada, then, requires making the choice to accept nature on her terms -- she can be our victim, and give us the food we eat, the skins we wear, and the materials we construct our homes with. But in one unfortunate winter storm or unexpected spring thaw or unadulterated summer heat wave, she can be our executioner. Indeed, for the early settlers, she was more executioner than victim; today, perhaps, the tide has turned. But to live with nature is to respect her; it is to accept her gifts and fear her wrath in equal measure.

We need to understand the wilderness, Jones argues, by ceasing to love broad universals ("I love the freedom of this country, I love the vastness of it"), to instead embrace "the evanescent and mortal particulars" of Canadian life. Don't love the abstract, Jones warns, because the abstract eventually falls away. We have to love the particular and the concrete, the things that create the idea of the abstract.

But where does all this discussion of the wilderness leave contemporary writers? Can we really say that Douglas Coupland goes out in search of a wilderness to allow into the garrison? Jones tackles the idea of contemporary (for him, so post-1960s) English-Canadian writing as follows:

They have set out to take an inventory of the world by scarcely uttered, the world of the excluded or ignored. It would comprehend whatever is crude, whatever is lonely, whatever has failed, whatever inhabits the silence of the deserted streets, the open highways, the abandoned farms. It is the wilderness of experience that does not conform to the cultural maps of the history books, sermons, political speeches, slick magazines and ads. And it is the wilderness of language in with the official voices of the culture fail to articulate the meaning or the actual sensation of living and tend to become gibberish.

So in that sense, Coupland is a writer of the wilderness. It could be said that the crude, the lonely, the failed, and the silent have always made up the characters whose stories he seeks to tell. This is an idea I'm interested to hear any one's thoughts on -- to what extent can we still talk about the wilderness as a touchstone of contemporary Canadian literature? To me, it all boils down to one question: are we colonial, or are we post-colonial? Because as long as we remain a colonial society, we will be forever locked within our garrisons, desperate for our literature to grant us access to the wilderness that will breathe new life into our experiences.

* Totally had to look this up. It means at the point of death, or losing vitality.

concern over time lines

2007-05-09T17:47:00.000-03:00

I seem to be only making it through about 100 pages of theory a day. This is pretty good for me, as far as theory is concerned, because I'm very very slow when it comes to non-fiction. And it takes time to make notes, and try to digest what I'm reading. But I'm still worried about how I'm going to get through all this criticism.

I think things will pick up when I get into the fiction again. Indeed, I know it will. But I still have my concerns.

day two through three of contexts of canadian criticism

2007-05-09T15:08:00.000-03:00

Contexts of Canadian Criticism
edited by Eli Mandel

We were born saying "No" to the Enlightenment and "No" to the American Revolution, and for a century and a half we have regularly indulged in outbursts of anti-American feeling and rejected the best that American thought and society has had to offer us.

Ouch. Feel damned, much? That's from William Kilbourn's article in this collection, "The Writing of Canadian Literature," but it echoes the ideas I talked about in my last posting and the ideas that dominate this book. Half the articles want to define Canada in terms of the US, half want to stop defining Canada in terms of the US, and the rest are pretty sure we're all just the retarded cousin of the US anyway so what's the point?

It's a little depressing.

I'm not afraid to say that I'm patriotic, and while I'm in no way unwilling to admit that America has some incredible accomplishments and beautiful history (Boston, I'm looking at you), I'm very proud of the literature that has emerged in Canada -- certainly no other country has experienced the express maturity that Canadian lit has in the last hundred years. Milton Wilson claims a certain parochialness for Canadian readers, arguing that we demand from our writers (especially our poets) "tamaracks and totempoles" -- that is, we judge our poets by how much Canadiana they can cram into a lyric poem. I don't think this observation is bad, but I'm also hard-pressed to see it as in some way "wrong." Canada is a young country, and as sick as we all are of CBC specials determining our identity, we are too young and of a history too peaceful to have forged a concrete identity (if such a thing can ever exist) as yet. It's normal and natural to look to our writers to, as many critics in this collection state, myth-make for us.

We don't have a Revolution to bind us together, and we don't have a shared goal of the pursuit of happiness. We instead have an act of Parliament and the promise of peace, order, and good government; of life, liberty, and security of the person. Our past is not romantic unless we turn to the personal and the experiential to make it so. This is the role of literature in a young country.

That's not to say it's the only function of national literature, especially not in contemporary, cosmopolitan (!) Canada, but at the time this collection was put together (1971), Canada had just turned 100 and culturally we still didn't know where to hang our hats. The literature since 1967 in this country has taken remarkable strides to be less self-consciously Canadian (a book can be set on the prairies without the very existance of the characters on the land being a struggle, now, and with out constantly evoking images of conquest and rape, for example -- this wasn't possible in Margaret Lawrence's day, and we have come a long way in a very short space of time). Writers no longer feel compelled to write of the wilderness that none of us experience or to explain their desire to set a text in St. Andrews when Cape Cod could do just as well. There is an acceptance, finally, that literature happens here -- that stories worth telling happen here -- and they don't necessarily have to be cloaked in mythic symbols of the epic struggle against wilderness. They can just be stories.

Northrop Frye has often noted that the literature of a country is only as mature as its society. In the 1960s, as Canada was just starting to come into itself as an independent nation (remember we didn't have our own patriated constitution until 1982, for god's sake), Frye remarked, "The Canadian poet, though he might be youger than Eliot or Yeats, writes in an environment for which it would be difficult to find a counterpart in England without going back to a period prior to the age of Chaucer." And he didn't mean my cat, Chaucer, he meant circa 1300 Chaucer. Frye refers here to the fact that pre-Chaucerian society was similar to Canada in that England, from 1066 on, was forging an identity for itself. Chaucer was such a huge literary figure for England because he was part of that nation's myth-making -- an act still in progress over two hundred years after 1066.

So, like, timeline wise, everyone needs to cut Canada some freaking slack.

and so it begins

2007-05-07T21:12:00.000-03:00

Well, rather abysmal day one progress, it must be said. Due to having to run the car in to the shop and running errands and so on I somehow only managed to read for about four very scattered hours, one of them sitting in a McDonald's and one in a Speedy Muffler. I've only made it about a third of the way in to my first text -- not good at all -- and as it is I keep falling asleep mid-page. It seems I have forgotten how to study in all these exam-free years. I can tell this is going to be a challenge.

I thought I ought to blog my work day before I become too tired to make sense.

Contexts of Canadian Criticism
edited by Eli Mandel

This country is something that must be chosen -- it is so easy to leave -- and if we do choose it we are still choosing a violent duality.

Okay, that quote is really from Margaret Atwood, but Mandel quotes it in his introduction and I think it's an apt summation of the beginning sections of this collection of foundational critical texts outlining the context of Canadian literature and literary criticism. Canadian literature tends to found itself upon rifts -- upon the things which divide us. English / French. East / West. Wilderness / Civilization. Canadians are paranoid schizophrenics, defining themselves constantly in terms of an other.

"Well now, I can't say what New Brunswickers are, but let me tell you all the ways we aren't like Central Canadians!" (Yeah, Central Canadians can drive! Ba-dum-ching!)

In terms of literature, this tends to manifest itself in an impossibility of knowing what we want to read as Canadians -- historically, the result has been that we read whatever America and Britain tell us is good. In the first essay in this collection, E. K. Brown points out that a pair of positive reviews from New York tend to mean more in the grand scheme of literary sales than the universal lauding of every literary journal from Vancouver to St. John's. So why is this? Brown points to three factors that stifle literary expression in Canada -- economic realities in Canada, the colonial mindset, and frontier mentality.

Economic problems have always stood in between Canadian novelists and a living wage. The problem has historically been a mere numbers game -- in the 1960s, the Canadian population sat at 12 million (incidentally, at that time this was the same as the population of New England). Add to this the fact that, in the 60s, 1/3 of the population spoke and read predominantly in French, and the total possible market for English-Canadian literature shrinks to 8 million people. If you're a bookseller in Vancouver and the only distributor of CanLit is in Toronto, and you have to pay to ship the books out to BC, do you take a risk on the new Marian Engels -- which you will have to work to promote -- or do you buy up the LA Times bestseller list and ride the publicity wave for those novels?

More importantly, Brown argues, is the reality that Canadians see Canada as a second-rate nation. Quoting Hugh McLennan ("everything in this country is second-rate" -- even you, Hughie?), he points to the literature of the pre-1960s as being painfully anti-Canadian. Callaghan's novels were set in a Toronto never called Toronto so it could be easily mistaken for Chicago, for example. Furthermore, Canadians at this time were stuck between a desire for independence finally from Britain and a certainty that if Britain would just re-adopt us everything would be okay. Canadians then (and, I would argue, now) were stymied: are we colonial or post-colonial? And which do we desire to be? Dependent people, Brown suggests, cannot create great art.

Finally, the mindset of the frontier -- a desire for practicality above all else -- devalues the role of art in society. Canadians were so used to perceiving ourselves in terms of the work of nation-building, and so used to interpreting the world through a Puritanical lens, that art becomes merely diversion. The value of art is only in terms of its ability to render an escape from a day's labour; literature is not a means of understanding or interpreting the world, then, but instead a place to hide from it. It's the Da Vinci Code-ization of national literature, essentially.

Reading this book has so far been extremely frustrating. It is so steeped in its reality as a text from 1971 that it is occasionally maddening to pursue. Everytime a writer says that there has never been a Canadian author of note in the US since the creator of Sam Slick, I just want to scream, "Wait 20 years! You're going to be SO WRONG! Even OPRAH wants us!" But some of the arguments -- especially the idea of validation for our art coming from the US ("Look! CNN's talkin' 'bout Little Mosque on the Prairie Again!") -- are so painfully eternal that I wonder if we'll ever break out from under them.

I also had this little brain wave/fart earlier this afternoon:

In the introduction to this text, Eli Mandel points out that both Marshall McLuhan and T.S. Eliot believed that every piece of art created changes the way in which art is created, but further that any new art wholly transforms the entire body of art, because the old art is potentially viewed through the filter of the new art.

This led me to a new realization.

Canonicity is irrelevant.

Be it resolved that comic books are, to all intents and purposes, non-canonical. But if all art alters the art that came before, comic books act upon the literature of the canon as much -- nay, more, because of a wider field of current readership -- than does good Billy S (William Shakespeare). The keepers of the canon may seek to push comic books out and away as much as they can, but insodoing they are defining themselves in the light of comic books -- they are defining themselves in terms of comic books by saying, "Everything that is, we are not."

Comic books are already canonical, because the canon (a) cannot exist without the lens of comic books in contemporary life, and (b) because the canon seeks to define itself on comic books' own terms.

Ergo, the canon is irrelevant.

... make that 3!

2007-05-06T22:17:00.000-03:00

I also need a third book that somehow slipped my mind.

Highway, Tomson. Rose.

... remains missing in action.

... and then there were two ...

2007-05-06T19:45:00.000-03:00

I am now left with only two books outstanding from my comprehensive list -- everything else has been either successful tracked down and purchased, procured from the library, or are en route to me from various used bookstores dotted across the country -- and one big Amazon order, too.

The last two contenders are...

Johnston, Wayne. Custodian of Paradise.
Ondaatje, Michael. The Cinnamon Peeler.

(but that's only because I'm being really stubborn about not paying full price for either of them and because the UNB library doesn't have either book at the Fredericton location -- though both are in Saint John, which may require a quick drive down at some point.)

... and when I get the rest of the books delivered, I'll post another picture with all the books in one place (daunting!). As it is, I'm going to get a good night's sleep and get ready to start my first day of reading tomorrow.

And if you want to keep me honest about my goal to spend 40 hours a week (minimum) studying, you can log in to http://compthis.tickspot.com using the e-mail address compthis@gmail.com and the password bydsjdpb (isn't that easy to remember?). I'll be using this site to log my hours, track my progress, and stick to my 40 hour / week goal -- so feel free to harass me if I let the side down.

updated want list

2007-04-27T11:21:00.000-03:00

Here's the updated list of books I need -- again, if anyone would like a small amount of cash and a large amount of gratitude to get rid of any of these titles, I would be thrilled to adopt them from you. This list has changed since the last one due to a Chapters order falling through so please do read over it again!

Roberts, Charles G.D. The Last Barrier and Other Stories.
Sime, J.G. Sister Woman.
Atwood, Margaret. Moral Disorder.
Campbell, Maria. Halfbreed.
Johnston, Wayne. Custodian of Paradise.
Kroetsch, Robert. Gone Indian.
Goldsmith, Oliver. The Rising Village.
Sangster, Charles. The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay.
Crawford, Isabella Valency. Malcolm's Katie.
Johnson, E. Pauline. Flint and Feather.
Clarke, George Elliot. Execution Poems.
Ondaatje, Michael. The Cinnamon Peeler.
Campbell, Maria and Linda Griffiths. The Book of Jessica.
Clark, Sally. Moo.
Highway, Tomson. Rose.
Lil, Wendy. All Fall Down.
Mojica, Monica. Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots.
Thompson, Judith. White Biting Dog.

schedule of events

2007-04-27T10:07:00.000-03:00

I think I've mapped out my schedule of readings. This is what I'm working with, having pushed my start date back to May 7th in response to a need for more time off, quite frankly. Right now I'm hoping to follow this schedule doing about 40 - 50 hours / week of readings -- that may not be realistic, but it's my hope that I won't have to read for 70 hours a week. If I can do eight to ten hours of reading five days a week, I'm hoping I will be able to both make it through my reading list in a timely fashion.

Why do I have a sinking, "famous last words" feeling about the whole thing...?

May 7 - May 19: Criticism

May 21 - June 2: Colonial Prose

June 4 - June 13: Confederation Prose

June 14 - June 30: Modern Prose

July 2 - July 21: Poetry

July 23 - July 31: Drama

August 1 - August 18: Contemporary Prose

August 20 - August 31: Criticism

getting there

2007-04-22T07:56:00.000-03:00

Two on-line orders later, and though my credit card may now have a sprain I've only got twenty more texts to track down. If you happen to have any of these lying around that you would part with for a little cash and a lot of gratitude, please drop me a comment or a line.

Hart Beckwith, Julia. St. Ursula's Convent.
Roberts, Charles G.D. The Last Barrier and Other Stories.
Sime, J.G. Sister Woman
Atwood, Margaret. Moral Disorder.
~~Findley, Timothy. Spadework.~~
Johnston, Wayne. The Custodian of Paradise.
Kogawa, Joyce. Obasan.
Wilson, Milton (ed). Poets Between the Wars.
Goldsmith, Oliver. The Rising Village.
Crawford, Isabella Valency. Malcolm's Katie.
Johnson, E. Pauline. Flint and Feather.
Clarke, George Elliot. Execution Poem.
Campbell, Maria and Linda Griffiths. The Book of Jessica.
Clark, Sally. Moo.
Mojica, Monique. Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots.
Thompson, Judith. White Biting Dog.
Hutcheon, Linda. The Canadian Postmodern.
Jones, D.G. Butterfly on a Rock.
Kertzer, Jonathan. Worrying the Nation: Imagining a National Literature in English Canada.
Mandel, Eli (ed). Contexts of Canadian Criticism.

Oh man, that list feels long! As Will Farrell would say, this list is like a fifteen-year-old girl but not hot.