Proving Its Worth

How do you review a reference work? Not by arguing with the information, unless you find a typo or a sheer misstatement. Rather, you review a reference work best by letting readers know who the book is meant for and what it offers in the way of enlightenment. So what does this Cambridge History of Canadian Literature, edited by Carol Ann Howells and Eva-Marie Kröller, offer the lay reader? Rather than poring over every entry and treating you to the he-said-she-said of my opinion of their opinions, I want to focus instead on two primary questions: what does the book’s structure tell you about its subject, and what does its style tell you about its intended audience?

One of the first items any reader encounters is a table of contents. This one underlines how the Cambridge History’s structure resembles that of Carl Klinck’s 1965 Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English. That book too is composed of essays by diverse hands, covering a series of topics arranged in chronological order. For all the Cambridge History’s editors’ assertions about the novelty of its content—their book “is situated in the context of newly defined discourses of nationhood, national culture, and literary production”—the fact remains that it is wedded to the idea of chronological sequence. Such a linearity of approach is not the only way of presenting history, especially in light of the post-modern theoretical methods that many of the essays reflect.

The editors’ contention that their work “offers … a nuanced reassessment of contemporary literary production in English and French together with a reconfiguring of the literature and national myths of earlier periods” is not always supported by the volume’s structure. Chronology inevitably drags teleology along in its wake, a phenomenon borne out by the focus upon particular texts at the expense of others. Known in current critical jargon as “privileging,” this bias, for example, accounts for the unique status that the book grants to eight writers from the second half of the 20th century. A chapter on four non-fiction writers, and a second one about a similar quartet of women writers sets Innis, McLuhan, Frye, Grant, Atwood, Gallant, Munro and Shields within a pantheon closed to others appearing in the history. Perhaps they all belong there, but what does this tell us about the book’s approach? Why not headline D.M.R. Bentley’s fine treatment of the Confederation Poets with the names of Roberts, Lampman, Carman and Scott rather than with the chronological title of “Post-Confederation poetry,” since they occupy most of the essay’s space? Wouldn’t this serve as a counterweight to the volume’s tilt toward the second half of the 20th century?

In other words, the very table of contents and the sheer weight of pagination seem to reflect the standard liberal, modernist myth of progress, implying that Canadian literature gets better, more readable, more relevant as it moves along historically. Does that really make for a “major reconfiguring of a national mythology”?

To pick a small example of the reconfiguring that never was, consider that this assessment devotes greater emphasis to the plays of George Elliott Clarke than to those of James Reaney. A matter of taste, one might comment, and therefore inarguable. Fair enough, but such an unspoken ranking inevitably downgrades the compelling theatricality of The Donnellys. That is, what is advertised as reconfiguration seems merely to reflect a shift in taste. How else to account for the solemnity of the notice given to David French’s “serious” plays, at the cost of ignoring (except for a misattributed mention of it in the opening chronology) French’s rollicking, reeling dissection of our colonial cringe in his Jitters? Shifts in taste make predicting a book’s future status as chancy as a flutter in pork bellies. What seems a safe bet is that a similar literary history a few decades from now will expose new shifts in taste, as any comparison of this volume with its many predecessors will show. Yet re-evaluation is not the same as reconfiguration.

To wax philosophical, Nietzsche, nearly a century and a half ago, wrecked any philosophical foundation for a pretense at “objective” history. In so doing, he acknowledged his era’s “consumptive historical fever” (“On the Use and Abuse of History for Life,” translated by Ian Johnston). That fever rages still. We cling to the illusion of completeness; we trust that a sufficient accumulation of facts will be transmuted into the definitive.

Consider if you will an earlier title, by one of the current editors. Eva-Marie Kröller’s The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature (2004) was selective in its topics and approaches; the title itself made no claims of continuity or significance. Such a format raises no false expectations. The volume works. A miscellany need not be systematic, and in fact the time for a systematic history of the literatures written and marketed in Canada has long past. A history differs from a companion, a realization that surfaces in the Cambridge History, but in an implicit rather than stated fashion. For example, generic chapters (novel, drama, poetry, exploration literature) stand alongside topical ones (the Centennial as a definer of national writing, Canada and the Great War, multiculturalism and globalization, transcultural life writing), and in turn upon linguistic ones (“Writing in French”). At times the train runs along one track, at times another. On one track, the official myth of multiculti; on the other, the competing and incompatible official myth of the two official languages, now completely outmoded in critical/political discourse west of the Rainy River.

I am suggesting instead that a reader, left to the very useful chronology opening the Cambridge History, could better profit from a format making no pretense at objectivity or completeness. A “Cambridge Companion: The Saga Continues” could focus on staple questions that underpin every aspect and era of our national literatures:

How did an audience for literature emerge from so unpromising a cultural environment? How was it created and re-created during successive periods? How does such an audience—assuming that it ever existed and still exists—reconstitute itself in the face of print culture’s current ailments? What linkages exist between commercial and belles-lettristic success? Do they tell us anything about our present-day situation? How outmoded is the modernist assumption of an incompatibility between the two?

When, if ever, does a distinctly Canadian voice begin to emerge? Why? What does that say about our definition of “Canadian”? In what sense can one even speak of national literatures in so regionalized a political formation as Canada?

In his chapter on graphic novels, Jean-Paul Gabilliet mentions the “problems that have chronically plagued the country’s culture as a whole.” He then lists “the daunting competition of inexpensive [foreign material], the limited domestic interest in … home-made cultural products, the difficulty for national producers of having to distance themselves from foreign models and formats, and finally, the insufficient size of the domestic market.” An extended exposition of this statement could have served as an organizing concept for this entire volume, at once engrossing and enlightening a general reader.

As we move on from the structural questions, what will you be reading as you pore over this thick volume? Think of the two excerpts I quoted a few paragraphs ago. What their terms tell us is that the volume’s entries largely reflect the way that the academy now chooses to view literature and literary production. Terms like “situated in the context,” “newly defined discourses” and “reconfiguring of the literature and national myths” alert you to what you are in for. This is confirmed by such passages within the book as “McCulloch’s writing is often heteroglossic, containing two or three simultaneous levels of discourse for ironic purposes. The irony is structural rather than verbal, resting on narratorial or authorial duplicity,” and “the self-referentiality of the Québécois novel is, moreover, becoming an increasingly marked trait, a sure sign of its autonomy and intertextual power.” There are enough sentences in this volume of the sort that I have quoted to convince you that you are grappling with heavy literary discourse.

This realization that you are reading a history written by academics for academics discloses how limited is the Cambridge History’s sense of audience. How incongruent this sort of historical writing appears when contrasted with such accessible and yet professional historical works as those of Viv Nelles, Robert Bothwell and Michael Bliss. Carl Berger’s history of history books, The Writing of Canadian History: Aspects of English Canadian Historical Writing since 1990 remains accessible to the common reader. Something has happened, this volume of literary history implicitly tells us, to the discussion of literary matters in the academy. Its audience is being narrowed. The discussion is now pitched toward peer approval rather than any general exposition. Aside from its implications for undergraduate instruction, such an approach necessarily limits the Cambridge History’s readership.

Still, lots of good reads are hard reads. Assuming that we understand why this book says what it says, and nonetheless accept its limitations, what can an inquiring reader expect to gain from it? What can you legitimately count on in the way of a deeper understanding of your nation’s literary experience?

Such a reader would be entitled to consistency of approach. David Perkins’s 1992 monograph Is Literary History Possible? does not provide an optimistic answer to the question its title poses. Perkins outlines two approaches to its subject, the narrative and the encyclopedic. Certainly the current “reconfiguring of the literature and national myths” suggests that the encyclopedic might be the best course to follow. That would produce a volume with a great number of entries, informing a reader about various authors, titles and trends within a nation’s literature, without imposing a single overview or ranking of the subjects. That is why I find that the Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature still works for me. (Disclosure: I wrote a few of its entries.)

Since its chronological arrangement implies that the Cambridge History has chosen the narrative approach, a reader has to ponder what gets mentioned in the narrative and who gets left out. For example, the History appears to strive for diversity and inclusivity as we now use such terms. Yet the objects claiming such chapter-length attention (contemporary aboriginal theatre, poetry, drama and the postmodern novel) at times strike me as trendy rather than compelling in their relevance. No consistency, for example, marks the treatment of popular, commercial writers. They are better off long dead. Thus Gilbert Parker’s historical potboilers like The Seats of the Mighty and The Trail of the Sword are justly mentioned. Their merchandising of a Canadian setting influenced subsequent packaging of the North. What then about present-day and near-present-day pop fictionists who chose national issues and settings: Arthur Hailey (In High Places), David Walker (Where the High Winds Blow) and Alan Sullivan (Three Came to Ville Marie)? Other beach reads will occur to you. Such writers are formulaic? More formulaic than James De Mille (A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder) or Marshall Saunders (Beautiful Joe)? Really?

What is so sacred about dead pop writers and so profane about living ones? Why do we have a chapter on a genre (the short story) in which Canadian writers have excelled (written by skilled literary historian, W.H. New) that resembles a purse seine in its gathering of titles? What about another of those four-author pieces mentioned above? Why do graphic novels merit a chapter and thriller fiction none? Just what are the criteria for inclusion in a literary history, and does the writ of such standards run anywhere beyond the walls of the senior common room?

All this aside, the persistent general reader can learn from this history. To pick two of my own favourites: Barbara Belyea’s account of the initial contact between oral Native and literate European cultures is an eye-opener. E.D. Blodgett’s chapter on the early literature if New France repays the effort spent in reading it, as it ties together a number of heterogeneous works and demonstrates its grasp of how theology shaped both colonizer and explorer accounts of this strange world they sought to remake in their own image. Readers will find their own favourites among the other sections.

“Readers”: the very word raises the question of just who reads a reference work such as this, in a time when googling will get you the basics and more about virtually anyone mentioned here. The internet will not kill the book, but it certainly has limited the usefulness of any reference volume. A no-brainer for any academic reading this: where do your students find the material that they crib? Book or web? You understand the problem here: any reference text now vies with very formidable competition for a reader’s interest. Such a text as this—and at such a price—needs to exert stronger claims than this Cambridge History of Canadian Literature does upon a lay reader’s attention.