i love robertson davies again!

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

Tempest-Tost
by Robertson Davies

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

-----

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Such Is My Beloved
by Morley Callaghan

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

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

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

"It's not my point of view."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

i think i love you, margaret laurence

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

A Jest of God
by Margaret Laurence

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

Why can't she die and leave me alone?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Double Hook
by Sheila Watson

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

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

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

She opened the door.

Heinrich, she called. Heinrich.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sister Woman
by J. G. Sime

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

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

He laughed.

"Be articulate then," he said.

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

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

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

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

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

He sat and puffed.

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

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

And we both laughed.

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

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

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

Then I said, "Shall I try?"

"Do," he said.

He puffed, and I sat looking at him.

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

"The Woman's Question?" he inquired.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-----

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

-----

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

heartbreaking sketches of staggering genius

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.