Coral Ann Howells and Eva-Marie Kröller, eds. - The Cambridge History of Canadian Literature

Coral Ann Howells and Eva-Marie Kröller, eds.

The Cambridge History of Canadian Literature

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009; xlvii + 753 pp. ISBN 978-0-521-86876-1

Jonathan F. Vance,

A History of Canadian Culture

Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford University Press, 2009; xi + 500 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-541909-2

To those who approach the subject with an agnostic lack of enthusiasm, it may seem that Canada's intellectuals spent many decades agonising over the failure of their country to develop a distinctive literature, sometimes bemoaning their cultural inadequacy over several volumes. Canada, it was mournfully proclaimed, had produced no Shakespeare. Indeed, so continued the self-flagellation, this may even have been a Good Thing. Canada was so intellectually derivative, a mere branch-plant constantly apologising to overseas headquarters for its very existence, that Hamlet, Premier of New Brunswick could not possibly have represented a universalised expression of the human condition. Then, suddenly, before you could say 'Margaret Atwood' (never mind 'Gabrielle Roy'), Canadian writers were everywhere, and EngLit classrooms the world over were conjuring the streets of Winnipeg rather than the battlements of Elsinore. Even in its editorship, the Cambridge History of Canadian Literature reflects a new confidence in the integrity of its subject. Eva-Marie Kröller teaches in Vancouver, but she was born in Germany. Coral Ann Howells is a Queenslander who spent her career at the University of Reading in England. The study of Canadian literature is no longer a process confined to the contemplation of the maple leaf self-inserted into a transcontinental navel. The editors are sensible but I do not think it would be a good idea to mention to them Ko-Ko's distaste for 'that singular anomaly, the lady novelist'.
Forgive me if I warble with the surprised delight of a perpetual philistine, but the volume they have produced is quite simply a delight. Their Introduction is followed by 31 essays, grouped in five sections, four of them loosely defined by periods of time, and the last focusing on French Canada. This arrangement cleverly finesses one of the central enigmas of all such studies: nationalists are inclined to proclaim that Canada has one literature which happens to be written in two different languages. Despite its overall air of good sense, a whiff of postmodernism hangs over the editors' attitude to this all-embracing approach. 'Canadian literary history now begins to look more like a multi-plot novel with different beginnings and different narrative imperatives, as formerly marginalized voices and suppressed histories are assuming their proper place within a restructured and increasingly diversified literary tradition.' (p. 5) Got that? You pays your money and your choice takes you. So far as biculturalism is concerned, developments in French are pegged alongside those in English throughout the entire volume, with the three specific essays of Part Five (on francophone poetry drama and fiction) highlighting rather than segregating the themes. Quotations in French are translated in footnotes. I queried one of these, where F-X. Garneau's 'éloge', in reference to Montcalm's defeated army in 1759, is given 'elegy', where the context seems to suggest 'eulogy' or 'praise' (p. 110), and French poetry generally suffers when it is dragged through the vocabulary of a nation of shopkeepers. Although pre-Confederation Maritimers do not need translation, there was a time when orthodoxy insisted that nineteenth-century writers such as Thomas McCulloch and T.C. Haliburton should be regarded as Nova Scotians, since their colony had yet to join the Dominion of Canada. In an exercise of retrospective multiculturalism, they are all part of the CanLit story here.
Confronted with the reviewer's responsibility to sample the individual chapters, I can only say, like Ko-Ko but with more positive intent: it really doesn't matter whom you put upon the list, for every chapter is excellent on its own terms. The collection gets off to a notably intriguing start, with Barbara Belyea's examination of the relationship between Native societies and French colonisers: if literary criticism is about the examination of written text, is it possible to discuss the cultures of pre-literate peoples? I am not going to tell you what she says because that would spoil it, but it is well worth reading for subtlety of analysis. There was a time when the words Cambridge History on a spine struck terror into mere readers, and the invocation to Abandon Hope seemed to hover over the very Contents List. One of the charms of this book is that nobody seems ready to bawl you out if you wander around the chapters, taking them out of order. Is that postmodernism, or am I thinking of deconstruction? So I mention Michael Peterman, on the popular culture of Victorian periodicals, Susan Fisher's wide-ranging essay on the Great War, Adrian Fowler on the poet E.J. Pratt (not, let me stress, the long-serving teenage bard of Private Eye), W.H. New on the short story, Robert Thacker on Atwood, Gallant, Munro and Shields, Teresa Gilbert on 'ghost stories' (anywhere else we would say 'historical fiction'), and Alfred Hornung on 'transcultural' writing, the contributions to Canadian literature by writers from distant countries and contrasting cultures. The editors both contribute a chapter: Howells on signs of cultural change after the second world war; Kröller taking 1967, the centennial year of Confederation, as an opportunity for stock-taking the role of the book in Canada. Marshall McLuhan is perhaps the Canadian intellectual who has had the greatest global impact (the index does not mention Ignatieff). In a model exercise in compressed good sense, David Staines locates McLuhan against the background of Harold A. Innis, and alongside George M. Grant and Northrop Frye, stressing that they constitute an inter-related group of four specialists in non-fiction. It is an essay that can stand as emblematic of the entire book. As a 750-page hardback, the book is weighty enough, but somehow it is a pleasure to handle, a sturdy but friendly artefact.
Jonathan Vance's A History of Canadian Culture is wide-ranging, fast-moving and great fun. Each of his seventeen chapters is split into short sub-sections, so that the bedtime reader is lured deeper into the delectable definitional mire of a national culture for Canada. Vance begins with aboriginal carving and moves back and forth through painting, writing, libraries, theatre (high and low) to architecture, the Massey Commission, television and even the future. The book is generously illustrated, although its black and white reproduction occasionally does scant justice to the originals. Naturally, being Canada, a great deal of the cultural activity has come from immigrants. Perhaps a more perplexing issue, and one that Vance tackles head on, is how to handle emigrants – painters who moved to Paris, writers who fled to New York. Often they were successful, but generally because they ceased to be particularly Canadian and won their spurs by assimilating. But it can be argued that for an artefact to be part of Canadian culture, there must be some kind of relationship with Canadian society and values, good or bad. Take the case of Paul Peel, who was probably the first Canadian artist to paint nudes. And very disturbing they can be too, for he specialised in rear views of children: Vance illustrates one unsavoury example, The Modest Model, in which a bearded painter tries to coax a shy naked boy out from behind his easel. But Peel was turning this stuff out in France around 1890. It would have been hard to persuade models to pose naked in Canada at that time, and difficult to imagine the end product on display in clerical Montreal or joyless Toronto. No wonder the Group of Seven mainly painted trees. And even the trees usually had their leaves on. Vance is to be congratulated on a mad project spectacularly executed.