Stephen Marche Flies Over CanLit

Flying over fields of CanLitStephen Marche’s polemic on the dea(r)th of Canadian Literature reads at times like the musings of the Manhattan ad executive as he soars over the Iowan countryside, commenting on the folksy ways of the people 30,000 feet below. As his argument jets between Atwood, Ondaatje, and Munro, the rest of CanLit receives a flyover. We learn that Lampman, Moodie, and Johnson were all “intensely marginal” and “not particularly good,” that “Despite the fact that Munro won the Nobel Prize, Atwood will always be the iconic Canadian writer, like the Mounties or Anne of Green Gables,” and that Ondaatje is “perhaps the first post-nationalist Canadian writer … Canadian in his preoccupations and in his instincts—He too looks for the victim to cherish and obsesses over settings.” Broad strokes indeed; Marche’s analysis offers the kind of sweeping generalizations that come with breathing rarefied air. Back here on planet Earth, however, things are a little more complex and messy.For Marche,“The ‘imaginative problem’ of Canadian literature is always the setting,” particularly “the relationship between the city, with all its metropolitan pressures, and the wild, with its vastness.” Northrop Frye couldn’t have put it better. Actually, “Where is here?” is better. Marche’s argument revives the thematic criticism of the 1970s that sought to identify an organizing theme to explain all of Canadian writing—a kind of Da Vinci Code for narratives about stoic farmers staring into snowbanks. Thematic criticism came in a variety of flavours: Frye defined CanLit by a garrison mentality, Atwood by the theme of survival, McGregor by the Wacousta syndrome (no one actually knows what that one is). My favourite—the Coach’s Corner theme, in which all of CanLit is characterized by competition between Don Cherry fascism on one hand and Ron McLean liberalism on the other—never really caught on.Thematic criticism has been largely out of fashion since Frank Davey dismissed its core principles in his famous “Surviving the Paraphrase.” Marche’s dredging up of the thematic criticism of the ’70s is like the brief resurgent popularity of second-hand Mohair coats. It seems like a good idea at the time but it never really fits right and it smells like old man. It does however empower you to say things like:

Survival, Frye’s essays, The Double Hook, Bear, A Bird in the House, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz—they are the most Canadian works exactly because they are so concentrated on the relationship between the city, with all its metropolitan pressures, and the wild, with its infinite vastness. And this Canadian in-betweenness, inevitably, almost organically, produces a willful marginality.

Thematic criticism is always a bit of a tautological exercise: you pick a theme, find the books that discuss that theme, and then show that they are the most Canadian books, because they match your given theme. Unfortunately thematic criticism tends to exclude more literature than it manages to explain. Furthermore, when making the thematic case, it usually helps to choose books that actually match your theme. In what ways are The Double Hook or The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz “concentrated on” a tension between city and wilderness? Duddy is a decidedly Montreal novel whereas The Double Hook is set in some dreary, unnamed town where the closest thing to “metropolitan pressure” is an old lady fishing on everyone else’s land. Even Bear, perhaps the definitive feminist-back-to-nature text, discusses the city only briefly; history, desire, and language are the novel’s primary concerns, not a sublime relationship to the land. Marche’s thematic argument is the stuff of hung over, all-nighter essays in CanLit undergrad courses and not a compelling appraisal of Canada’s literature.Marche sets his cross hairs primarily on the CanLit establishment: octogenarian neckbeards in fisherman’s sweaters. Yet he extends his polemic to focus on other writers, particularly “the hyphenated literatures and regional literatures” of recent years. These writers take up the insatiable Canadian thirst for “panvictimology” by producing literature that is rated according to the spurious qualities of “Whose voice has not spoken? Who has suffered most?” Marche explains that despite “drawing from a multicultural and multiregional reality of dizzying complexity, that second wave retained the core principles of the earlier, whiter, English Canadian literary tropes.” Marche never lets the evidence or facts get in the way of a good argument, so we’re left wondering who his examples are of this multicultural literature that replicates the themes of first-generation CanLit. How do the themes or core principles of Dionne Brand’s long poetry mimic those of EJ Pratt’s? Does the confessional structure of Austin Clarke’s The Polished Hoe render it a facsimile of Morley Callaghan’s Such is My Beloved? Is Rohinton Mistry’s short story cycle, Tales of Firozsha Baag, merely a curried Lives of Girls and Women? This is the trouble with thematic criticism: it creates a kind of tunnel vision that reduces a diverse, uneven, and exciting group of writing into boring, predictable repetitions of a singular theme.In addition to Marche’s evidentiary problems, his term “panvictimology” resonates, quite unfortunately, with Harold Bloom’s notion of the ‘school of resentment.’ Of course, Marche doesn’t believe, with Bloom, that a cabal of leftists, feminists, and critical race theorists are conspiring to undermine the study of serious literature and force undergrads to debate the phallocentrism inherent in “I can has cheezburger?” Rather, for Marche, panvictimology is the “conflation of historical suffering with righteousness and the development of those hierarchies of suffering into hierarchies of value”; it structures Canadian political sentiment and “is the most enduring legacy of Canadian literature.” In place of national ghosts or myths, Canada has only victims (of American hegemony, English colonization, the Toronto Maple Leafs, etc.). Yet his transposition of this panvictomology onto hyphenated, multicultural, and immigrant literature reeks of an unbearable whiteness of being (Canadian) that robs those literatures of their appropriate historical and cultural contexts. Tessa McWatt’s Out of My Skin does not valourize black and indigenous victimhood but rather identifies subtle links between structures of race in colonial Guyana and multicultural Montreal. Anand Mahadevan’s The Strike is not a portrayal of immigrant victimhood but an examination of the links between desire, sexuality, migration, and nationalism. Examples like these are countless.Many of Marche’s claims rehash what critics have said before. One of his central points, that “Canadian literature, in the sense of a literature shaped by the Canadian nation and shaping the nation, is over” was observed some years ago by Davey. Davey writes that in many contemporary novels:

neither the text nor its protagonists inhabit any social geography that can be called ‘Canada.’ They inhabit a post-national space, in which sites are as interchangeable as postcards, in which discourses are transnational, and in which political issues are constructed on non-national … ideological grounds.

Similarly, Jonathan Kertzer’s Worrying the Nation begins with the assertion that “The object of theoretical inquiry in Canadian literary studies—Canada—no longer functions as it once did.”  DMR Bentley, worrying about the state of the Canadian long poem (someone has to!), attributes Canada’s demise to a political climate in which “regionalism, separatism, and globalization are working alongside multiculturalism, self-help therapies, and a host of minority and individual rights movements to reduce the Canadian nation to bite-sized chunks in the global soup of neo-conservatism.” Read Bentley in the voice of Don Cherry and add “You kids out there” for added effect. These eulogies for the nation and its culture go back as far as Pierre Berton’s 1967: The Last Good Year and George Grant’s Lament for a Nation. Marche therefore finds himself re-treading much of the ground of the turtle-necked CanLit establishment he rails against.Sylvia Söderlind has expertly shown how these critical anxieties about the end of Canada and Canadian nationalism are rearticulated as a celebration of Canadian post-nationalism. In “Ghost-National Arguments,” she rightly critiques this celebration of Canadian post-nationalism as a “preposterous … ‘Canada first’ movement,” preposterous in the sense that these arguments put first what ought to come last. Söderlind shows how the lamentation in the 1970s over Canada’s national belatedness is transformed into a celebration of its being “first past the post of the outdated notion of nation.” Söderlind explains that the critical desire to see “Canada somehow compensating for its lack of a well-defined national literary history … has undergone a McLuhanesque flip; Canada has gone from running to catch up with the world to having already reached whatever place the whole world is aiming at.” Rather than being late to the party to announce our nationhood, Canada is actually the first to recognize the eroding economic, political, and cultural realities of the nation and to embrace its post-nationality. The party sucked anyway so who cares if we weren’t invited! As goes the nation, so goes the literature, and this new articulation of Canadian post-nationalism realigns Canadian Literature as a global literature. And the winner of the National Book Award is ...Yet Marche goes further than the proponents of the “Canada first movement,” offering instead a kind of ‘Canada-never’ argument: “Canadian literature is anti-AmeriCanLiterature which is also an offshoot of AmeriCanLiterature.” Marche performs this role of the Canadian writer as wannabe American in another piece where he describes the pain of moving from Brooklyn to Toronto, particularly in discovering that “Brooklyn is so, so young and Toronto is so, so old.” If Marche is right that Canadians suffer from a “colonial mentality,” then surely he is the colonized subject who returns from the centre of power to the hinterlands of Toronto with a new sophistication and a new distaste for home. The prodigal son aims to wow Toronto Star readers with a description of his gentrified Park Slope neighbourhood where writing is a “youthful activity … the kind of thing that 32-year-old men who go to work by skateboard do.” Of all his dismissals of the facts, calling a 32-year-old greying hipster on a skateboard “youthful” is perhaps Marche’s most egregious.In this earlier piece, Marche offers another series of dazzling generalizations that roughly accord with his thematic point of view: “Innovation, whether in language or form, is a dirty word”; “Setting is everything in Canadian fiction. Plots don’t matter much”; “The characters are mostly the same: The only thing that changes is the location.” He then proceeds to recognize a series of Canadian writers that defy all of these generalizations, including Heather O’Neill, Sheila Heti, David Bezmogis, and Yann Martel, but explains that they mostly found their success outside of Canada and “tend to be Brooklynish.” Yet if this exciting field of emerging Brooklynish-Canadian writing includes anyone concerned with innovation, plot, and character then we can add to the list: Robertson Davies, Robert Kroetsch, Nalo Hopkinson, Jeff Lemaire, Dionne Brand, Suzette Mayr, Michael Redhill, Richard Wagamese, Mariko and Jillian Tamaki, Julie Doucette, Zoe Whittall, and Esi Edugyan (to name only a few). Robertson Davies, at least, already has the hipster beard (biographers have yet to comment on his skateboarding prowess).Reading Marche’s lament for CanLit, one can’t help but think that perhaps Marche suffers from his own panvictimology, and that when he poses the questions, “Whose voice has not spoken? Who has suffered most?” his answer is, of course, him. Yet in many ways, he is right, and in this respect his central argument is both compelling and correct. Canadian Literature proper has become (and has always been, I would suggest) a structure of institutional power that props up established writers at the expense of those who do not fit institutional definitions. For instance, see the relative obscurity in which Austin Clarke toiled for years and the institutional shock, the collective furrowed brows, that greeted his winning the Giller Prize. See also John Barber’s absurd article in The Globe and Mail which asks—without the slightest hint of irony—“Are Canadian Writers ‘Canadian’ enough?” Even John Metcalf’s boorish, scotch-fuelled critical diatribes about the aesthetic incompetence of Ann-Marie McDonald and MG Vassanji bespeak a critic never invited to the cool CanLit parties (for reasons now apparent).Marche cites Pasha Malla as one of the prospective writers that may give us a new CanLit. Perhaps one sign of the Canadian writing to come can be found in Malla’s short story “Being Like Bulls.” The story is set in post-apocalyptic Niagara Falls (which seems to be an improvement on pre-apocalyptic Niagara Falls), where environmental destruction and the erosion of civil society have left the falls carrion for American resource corporations. The town is abandoned aside from the few workers and a population of CHUD-like beings, who hide in the shadows (again, an improvement on present circumstances). The protagonist, Paul, inherits his family’s gift shop, “Canada _old Souvenirs” (the “G” in the sign had flaked away), and is faced with the dilemma of what to do with this mausoleum of Canada’s past, full of Skylon Tower erasers, Terry Fox wigs, Niagara Falls snow globes, Leonard Cohen urinal pucks, and beaver press-on tattoos.Paul chooses to destroy the relics of the past by turning his inheritance into a space for transformation and change. He charges his willing customers a small fee to smash and destroy these relics of the past. The burden of history is offloaded through the cathartic act of swinging a bat, and out of the destruction of inherited national tchotchkes, these Canadians create something new and relevant to their times. This is not an act of forgetting or nostalgia, but one of reinvention. The nation has changed, is constantly changing, and no author or story is “Canadian enough.” Our cultural openness, our capacity for transformation, and our ability to trash and reinvent the “greatest hotel on earth” make Canadian culture and identity ever-changing and exciting.While Marche’s argument is wrong, I think his conclusion is right: stilted, boring, institutional notions of Canadian Literature need to give way to the unexpected and surprising forms of Canadian writing produced by little-known writers in this country. The popularity of national literacy programming, like Canada Reads, and the national celebration that greeted Alice Munro’s winning the Nobel Prize suggests that Canadian literature, in the sense of a literature that shapes and is shaped by national interests, remains alive and vitally important. This is particularly critical at a time when our government is set on reducing historical consciousness to little more than the worship of iconography and cosplay re-enactments of the War of 1812.The challenge for Canadian writers and critics alike is not to shore up and preserve the literary relics of the past, not to try and import Brooklyn into Toronto, and not to offer breathless words of worship whenever Leonard Cohen or Margaret Atwood’s name arises. Rather, the challenge is to see that Canadian identity’s constant evolution, and Canada’s ability to speak in multiple, disharmonious, and clashing voices, are the most salient signs of who Canadians are. These are the things that reflect the best of our writing.Paul Barrett is a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English and Cultural Studies McMaster University. He is the author of Blackening Canada: Diaspora, Race, Multiculturalism (University of Toronto Press).