An Interview with Prof. Linda Hutcheon:
(The following interview was conducted on
September 6 at her office in the University of Toronto. This is part of the research project
financed by Nihon Gakujutsu Shinkou-kai
[Japan Society for the Promotion of Science], with the project title: "The
State of English Studies in the Canadian Academy.")
Tetsuo Koga: The first question should be the one
which I'm most interested in, that is, how was your summer?
Linda Hutcheon: (laugh)
My summer was great. My summer was a busy one because
this year I'm the president of the Modern Language Association, and, basically,
I have the job here, plus another job in New York City. So I've spent a lot of time going
between the two. It's been crazy.
It's usually busy at this time of year, but it's been busier for me this
year. But it's also been an especially interesting time for me, especially as a
Canadian having more access to an American academic world through the MLA. I'll be glad when it's over, but it's
been interesting.
T.K.: Thank you. Since I've left Canada for the last time
in 1993, you've promised me to write a new book on irony, which appeared now as
Irony's Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (Routledge,
1994). Could you explain the general idea of the book?
L.H.: What I tried to do in that book was this:
since I'd written a book earlier on parody and on how parody works [A Theory of
Parody: The Teaching of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (Routledge,
1985; U of Illinois P, 2000)], it
struck me that I had never done the same with how irony works within parody but
also how irony works in the general culture; since
many people feel that postmodernism is such a very ironic culture, I felt that
I really had to work on this. So
what I tried to do in that book was to look at basically how irony works---this
sounds very simple but it actually is very complicated, because people have
written on this for centuries, from the earliest possible writers through to
the present, everyone, so covering that research alone was a massive job. But it was fascinating because people
both agreed with each other and didn't--radically, and it was the disagreements
that interested me most. So I was
looking at how you could talk about a full range of things people call
"irony" which ranges in tone from gentle teasing to that absolutely
nasty, cynical tone; you know,
there's a whole range of things between those extremes that people call
"irony." What I tried to
do was to sort out the different functions of irony and then to look at
examples in contemporary culture where irony has caused problems, because it's
difficult to use in an art-form as a rhetorical device: you say one thing and
you mean another. And when people
don't get it, you're in trouble. So
say a politician, for example, uses irony, assuming that you know the context
in which it is being used. And then
it turns up on the evening news out of that context; people think you're saying
the opposite of what you mean. It has become a very tricky, a very politically
difficult form of rhetoric. And
people tend not to use it for that reason.
So I looked at various things from museum exhibits to books and films; I
looked at various art-forms where irony has been a problematic issue. We had a particularly good example here
at the Royal Ontario Museum: there was an exhibit, now years ago, perhaps ten
years ago, about Africa. And the
curator used irony in setting up the exhibit and was misunderstood; this
created a great difficulty in the black community in Toronto, but also in the
museum community as well. So it
became the final chapter in the book, a kind of test-case in looking at irony
in a social context and how it was used.
So that's the sort of things I was interested in that book on irony.
T.K.: So, this should be a further development of
the idea of "de-naturalization," which is one of the key concepts in
your second book on postmodernism, A Politics of Postmodernism [Routledge, 1989].
L.H.: Right.
It comes out of that thinking.
You're right.
T.K.: Well, actually, I'm going to have another
interview with Richard Poirier. He is my former teacher. And he's developing
the idea called glinguistic
skepticism," in the American context from Emerson on to other
pragmatists. And I have a sense
that your argument of irony and parody, which is a kind of postmodern strategy
to de-stabilize, de- naturalize, and de-authenticate
the "given" of our culture and history, can be related to the way in
which those pragmatists use language as a weapon for their subversive
intention. Indeed, I have an impression
that your critical strategy and your literary orientation may have a close
parallel to that type of thinking among pragmatists. . . . oh,
yes, since I have sent you a questionnaire, let's begin with the question
number one. [1. (on nationalism) How do you define the Canadian
"national identity," which may have been formed during the centennial
years from its birth as the Dominion of Canada in 1864? Or do you define the contemporary
Canadian peculiarities differently from the one of broader historical or
political perspectives? In short,
where do you find your social/political/cultural identity? And do you think that "global
culture" and international politics are the stronger features to define
the Canadian identity than others?]
Well, these are quite a bunch of questions. How do you react to these?
L.H.: I don't know you have realized you had
asked in your first question "the" question for the Canadians:
Canadians are famous, or infamous, which is the better term, for always having
a crisis over national identity.
And I think part of the reason is our colonial history, coming out of
the British tradition, obviously, and the French, and always having that split
from the beginning. But secondly,
our worries come from living so close to the United States. The United States
is a major power for you too, I know that. But for us, being so close
physically, and having been so for our entire existence, it is very hard for
Canadians. I mean, it's a joke in
Canada that we're always trying to discover what being Canadian means. And the
answer usually is: at least, we're not American. In other words, it's very hard to
define. If you push most Canadians,
probably they will be never be able to come up with a
single definition. But if they did, they would point to Canada's multi-cultural
heritage. In another words, they'd
define Canada in terms of diversity, so that the idea of a Canadian
"national identity" becomes a paradox. But we began this nation with
the history of French, English, and native peoples, and that tri-partite
division was there from the very start; then came successive waves of
immigrations, first from Scotland and Ireland and Britain, but then
increasingly from other parts of Europe and other parts of the world, lots
through the British Commonwealth, of course. So that, today, I think, people would
define Canadian identity in terms of diversity, which I guess many Americans
would also define their country as too.
But the difference, I think, probably, is that their country's a hundred
years older than ours. Canadians
don't have that strong sense of national identity that Americans have---that
really strong sense of Americanness. Canadians don't
have the equivalent sense of Canadianness. And I think many people see it as a
problem, for the country. As I see
it, but perhaps I'm just too postmodern, this is a positive. I think it's important that we define
ourselves in terms of diversity----that's the only thing that unites us: we're
all different. I don't have a
problem with that, you know. But I
know a lot of people do. We may be
one of the most postmodern nations in the world, because there's no single
ethnic identity to the country, no single racial identity. I suspect it's
different for you, than it is for me.
My family came to Canada from Italy; my husband's family came from
Scotland and Ireland. So, you know,
given this family, we've only been here for a couple of generations. Canada's still a new country; it has a
very new feeling about it.
T.K.: This should be most keenly felt during this
week, which celebrates a centennial of Ontario province. My second question is related to
politics [2. (on the relation between literature and
politics) Do you agree with the opinion that the contemporary Canadian
priorities like the multi-culturalism or ecological
consciousness can be cutting-edge to solve problems, and hence can become
laudable features of Canadian mentality?
Especially as the one who teaches youngsters at university, do you
endorse such an opinion which advances gpolitically correct" attitudes toward the
disadvantaged minorities? In the year of millennial doomsday consciousness, do
you find any alternative thinking other than the humanistic ones, which might
suggest different attitude toward life and people? (In Japan, the new
nationalism, which is coupled with the right-wing politics, has revived; a
sense of apocalyptic closure may be felt among its people who suffer a series
of recent incidents like AUM terrorism, teenage horror-movie crimes, and other
pervert crimes committed by "hikikomori "
or social withdrawals.) ]. But
before moving on to the second cluster of questions, let's talk about Margaret
Atwood for a while, since we've just had an article in the National Post, its
Monday edition of this week, about a new book by Atwood [The Blind Assassin (MaClelland & Stewart, 2000)].
L.H.: And we might consider too the fact that The
New York Times has run a negative review of the book. Well, it was very funny for me because
the Globe & Mail, another Canadian newspaper had just brought out a very
positive review. That was on
Saturday. And on Sunday, I picked up The New York Times, and, wow, there's a
very negative review. But I don't think it's a national issue. I think writers have the right to like
what they like, and that review was written by another writer. I also suspect Atwood's is a very
Canadian novel, in its historical and political context. And Americans are traditionally not
terribly interested in Canadian themes.
So, I'm wondering if that may be a part of it; I don't know. The novels by Margaret Atwood that have
been biggest hits in the United States have been the more general ones, the
least Canadian, in some ways; maybe that makes sense, you know. So, I don't know. That's part of it. But I don't think she cares that she had
a bad review in The New York Times.
I do think that Canadians do look to the United States culturally a
lot. You know, I was saying earlier
that we cannot avoid it. . .
T.K.: Atwood, on the other hand, defended herself
in a TV interview, that her politics had nothing to do with her writing.
L.H.: But her subject matter is Canadian. So it's less her politics than her
nationality that is at issue, I agree.
She does keep---you saw the interview--- her literary work separate from
her activist politics, particularly, her work with PEN and other organizations;
these activities are very different from her writings, although she is a
politically engaged writer. I think
that's more important than. . .
(A voice of my colleague, Prof. Takayoshi Fujiki): Is she generally called a "political
animal"?
L.H.: Yes, she is--in her life--but I don't know
in her writing. Her writing is
broadly feminist, and in that sense, yes, I suppose she is political.
T.K.: That phrase of "a political
animal," by the way, reminds me of my former attempt to characterize her
political stance as that of the victims, where she had an "animal" in
her mind when referring to the marginalized people[Tetsuo Koga,
"Postmodernism in Canadian Writings: A Brief Survey," Jinbun Kenkyu: Studies in the
Humanities, 45.4 (Osaka City U., 1993)]. So, she is, as you said, strongly on
the side of the Canadian, or more broadly, on the side of underprivileged,
facing toward the bigger neighbor.
And this also brings me to the episode of another TV interview with Noam Chomsky.
He, like my teacher Richard Poirier, and of course, Norman Mailer, may
be called a "renegade" within the American academic establishment,
which may hit a slightly different parallel than that of Atwood.
L.H.: And this is very American, not Canadian. I
think--this may sound very unkind but--many Americans just think Canada is
another region of the United States, when in fact we're very different. There's
a very different ethos---for lack of a better word, a very different sense of
the individual in relation to the nation in Canada. The United States is built on the theory
of the importance of the individual, of the idea that the nation is the
collection of individuals, but that the individual is the core of freedom and
democracy. Canada was not founded that way. Canada was founded with notions of
community and society being dominant. And all of our founding documents read
differently than the American ones.
It's much more what Charles Tayler called
"communitarian." That's
why we still have, you know, a national health care, rather than an individual
health care. Our universities are
still the state universities, not private universities. It's a very different
world. And Canadians feel that
distinction very strongly.
Americans, I don't think, understand it, most of them. They just see us
as a sort of like them. But I think there are profound differences that I feel
as a Canadian.
T.K.: This indeed induces us to rethink our first
question. And our second question was,
er, . . .
L.H.: It is interesting because of what you say
about Japan and apocalyptic thinking.
This seems much less so here in Canada. I've been fascinated by this. There's much less of it. I don't know if it's because of the new
millennium, the start of a new era, or what. I don't know why. I don't know whether
it's just because the economy's been doing well. Or is it that the people don't get
apocalyptic, traditionally? Should
we be worrying about the new electronic global world? But the mood in Canada, if I read the
press especially, is more one of hope and optimism. So I think it's very interesting
what you describe as the differences in the apocalyptic social mood...
T.K.:
Especially in Japan and also in Germany, there's been an undercurrent of
a right-wing, very nationalistic sentiment. . .
L.H.: Right-wing politics are all over the world
right now, I'm afraid. You're right about that, but it's not always linked to
the nationalist in a simple way. To return to the earlier part of your question
about politically correct attitudes: part of what we have witnessed in Canada,
and certainly in the United States, in the last, say, twenty or thirty years,
is the expansion of, for example, within the university, both what we study in
English departments and who studies it. Because when I think to when I was an undergraduate,
in the late sixties, women were just starting to go to university in large
numbers. They had started in the
forties and in the fifties, but in the sixties more and more women were going
to universities. But our class was
pretty well all white and European in origin. And what we've seen over the years is
the expansion of this---in a city like Toronto which is very multi-cultural,
it's evident, but it's happening all over the world---; we're seeing the
expansion of those who study literature and therefore those who teach
literature. So now the women are
not students; oh, almost all my teachers were men, right? So, now, women teach,
and all the teachers are no longer white Anglo-Saxon men. My
colleagues in this hallway
include a Chinese-born woman, a West Indian woman, , and next to me is
an African-Canadian man-- that's been the major change in the demographics of
who studies literature and therefore who ends up going to graduate school and
teaching literature. So I think
that's a big difference--and, if I add to that other kinds of once
disadvantaged minorities--not just race and gender, but issues of class--you
know, people from the working classes are now coming to universities. My family is a working class and I was
certainly the first in my family to go to university. So that's a change. You know, you no longer had to be rich
to go to universities in the sixties.
You could get all kinds of scholarships and financial aid when your
family was poor. So, that's been a
shift. And increasingly, we become
aware of other differences--like physical disabilities. Working in this building here, I'm
always aware that people who, for example, have to use a wheelchair, might well
ask, "how am I supposed to get to her
office?" You know, you've got stairs to climb to find me here! We're now conscious of these things
because these are also the realities for our students. And we're trying to make
a society in which things are equal for everyone, on everyday level as well as
in their studies. I think that's a
good thing. I confess that the term "politically correct" always
bothers me, because it is made to sound like a negative, when I think it's only
been a positive. Yes, there have
been extremes. We can all agree on
that. But the general sensitivity
to differences has been part of Canadian multi- cultural reality for a long
time. And in Toronto, I think,
you're more aware than you might be if you live in a smaller town, you know, or
in the country where everybody has known everybody forever. Here it's very different. It's such a big and complex city, and if
you ride in a subway, you get some sense of the racial mix of the city, and
it's very extreme. The United
Nations has called it the most multi-cultural city in the world. And sometimes it feels that way, you
know.
T.K.: In the paper a couple of days ago, it said
that the Canadian universities are trying to recruit the American
students. Budgetwise. From all over the
world. This makes it a big
change. And the sense is that this
orientation can make an exemplum for other countries, in terms of education,
culture, and so forth, since we're now getting into the global village,
interconnected not only by the Internet but also by the actual moves of
people. We're not just digitally so
but actually getting closer and closer.
Anyway, your talk has already covered almost all of my inquiries, actually
answered our third question in advance [3. (on
literary and cultural values) How do you define the cultural influences of the
United States in Canadian academies? In more specific terms, do you find any
different style of academic discourse among Canadian intellectuals than the one
you find among those counterparts in the United States? In
the English-speaking provinces, which cultural force is more prevalent, the
British or the American? (In
Japan the case has been predominantly American while it had been British before
the WWII.) ]. . . Here I'd like to
address, especially, to your academic background or to your intellectual
tradition. Since your teacher, Northrop Frye, had also been a typical Canadian
intellectual. . .
L.H.: Well, let me answer some of these
questions, since there are so many of them there. One thing in particular struck me, and I
want to go back to where we talked about Atwood. One of the interesting things for me in
the last few years--- since the North American Free Trade Agreement between
Canada and the United States---is the issue of culture, which Canadians hang on
to as part of their self-definition.
Since the 1970s, the Canadian government has quite deliberately put a
lot of money into supporting Canadian literature, Canadian drama, Canadian
film, and so on in an attempt to build up "Canadian" culture. However, Americans tend to think that
the culture is a purely economic issue.
So they want all culture to be open to American business interests, and
make Canadians play according to the same capitalist rules--no subsidies for
the arts, etc... And Canadians say,
no, no, no: it's not an economic issue but a cultural one. But they don't understand. I guess I can see why-- I mean, when you
think about what "culture" means in the United States, yes there is a
(wonderful) high art culture, but what dominates is mass culture or popular
culture, and this is media-driven increasingly. That's why they don't understand why we
want to hold on to our particular Canadian culture. But it's often all we have
to define ourselves by. So that's
part of what's going on here. But
you don't see this kind of resistance so much in the universities-- maybe since
many of my colleagues are American, many more (including myself) went to
schools in the United States.
There's much more intellectual than economic gfree trade." In fact, I did an article for PMLA with
that title ["Academic Free Trade? One Canadian's View of the MLA"
(PMLA,114 [May 1999]). That might give you a sense of where I
stand on this subject of the double influence of the British and the American
on Canada. The origins, of course,
of our educational system are in the British system; therefore of those who
ended up teaching in Canadian universities early on, most were British. But increasingly there has been a strong
American influence, so that Canada has ended up being a funny mix of the
two. I like to see it as taking the
better of the two systems. You can
clearly see in Canadian education a mixing of the American and the British
systems, or perhaps the European system, more generally. The curious thing, I guess, for us is
what's going to happen in the future---with what I was saying earlier about
globalization and the challenge of electronic technology. If we no longer teach in a classroom,
but on-line, then that's going to change, and change radically, our sense of
institutional and national culture--for teachers and students. So, I guess, we have to wait and
see---we have no crystal ball. But
I'm very interested in all these things, and I guess it should be interesting
for all of us. You are absolutely right about the fact that, like Japan, Canada
has undergone a strong American influence since the War. I think our cultures are very similar in
that respect, in feeling that kind of influence. Now, between the electronic media and
popular culture, it's as if there have been successive waves of American
culture hitting us--and it's hard to push them back. . .
T.K.: It's part of the global
Americanization. But the French do
react to the Dysneylandization of the whole world.
L.H.: Yes, at least the French in France. But Quebec is another question. In some ways, the most Americo-centric, Americo-philic
place in Canada is Quebec. It
has always had a strong love relationship with the U.S... It's as if, if the
province were to become independent, America would be its greatest supporter. I don't know about that. (laugh) You know,
there's a strong sense in Quebec of attachment to America---much less suspicion
than its English counterpart shows.
But yours is an interesting question. Answering it goes some way toward
dealing with your next question--about postmodernism. [4. (on
criticism). As a theorist of postmodernism, how do you define your stance in
the history of the literary and cultural criticism? And in what way do you see
other critical practices of post-colonial or new historicist, or of other
orientations? Do you find any
strong critical disagreements about its "method"?] For me, as a
Canadian, thinking about the postmodernism as a Canadian--which I can't help
doing, because I AM Canadian--it always struck me that Canada was in some ways
a very postmodern nation: in its fragmentation, in its diversity, in its
complex history, its multiple and often conflicting histories--of the original
settlers of Canada and the aboriginal people before them, and then all the
immigrant groups which came subsequently. On the topic of one of the things you
asked about (cultural criticism and the rise of the post-colonial and the new
historicist work), I think, that all these changes, for me at least, have
marked a positive and inevitable step in going beyond the postmodern--in other
words, to return not just to questioning history but to using history, as it
might be argued the new historicists do. The post-colonial is a little more
complicated because it involves going back to a very complex history, which is
not just the nation's own history: postcolonial nations can never simply go
back to a time before Empire came.
But these nations define themselves in terms of the very complex act of
thinking backwards and forwards at the same time. One of the things I've been working on
in the last few years is theorizing literary history: I've been coordinating
two very large projects on comparative literary history. And the interest for me is in how
literary history is being written TODAY.
The United States, like Canada today, has to deal with the issue of
demographic diversity when deciding how to write about America and American
literary history. So I've been
investigating how different nations have been writing their literary histories
and how different groups within the nation--you know, women, natives--how they
write. For instance, what form is
American or Canadian women's literary history taking today? One thing that
fascinated me---and probably this that won't surprise you---is that we are
using old and familiar models, not new ones. In the West, literary history started to
be written as a serious academic discipline in the nineteenth century in
Germany--and even today its structure bears all the marks of German idealistic
philosophy. So its structure is
that of a teleology--moving from origin through to
maturity to an apotheosis---you know, the telos, the
heights--and that is usually seen as existing in the present, where the person
is writing from, today. So you get a straightforward teleological history--but
the problem is that this is one of the historical models that postmodernism has
been challenging or questioning. And yet, when post-colonial historians go to
write the literary history of their countries, they still use that old and
challenged model (that once excluded precisely them!). Perhaps they haven't rethought the
model, though, because it still has some legitimizing strength today, some
residual power. But what
increasingly interests me is the fact that we aren't developing new models yet,
despite globalization, despite diaspora: people are
not living in national communities any more as they did a hundred years ago;
nations aren't built on single languages and single ethnicities today. Despite
these changes, we still seem to want to work with an old form of literary
history. So I think much new work
still has to be done in that literary field. That's why I've been working with my
colleagues here to think about different new models.
T.K.: Well, since you have brought up the issue
of post-colonial criticism, I've been thinking again about Atwood's The Blind
Assassin, which details the Irish immigrants' background in Toronto. In fact, I've got a sense that at last
Canadian writers had begun to review their history.
L.H.: Oh, yes, but I have to say that's been a
constant for a long time in Canadian writing. There have been so many books that have
been about historical issues from the very start. I mean, Rudy Wiebe's
novels looked at the history of the native and Metis
peoples, and Joy Kogawa looked at the role, during
the War, of Japanese Canadians. Michael Ondaatje, you know, and the South Asian
Canadian writer, Rohinton Mistry,
has written about other historical and current experiences of race and ethnicity. Not all Canadian writers have been
Anglo-Saxon, after all. Many are
immigrants to Canada and so the history of the immigrant past of Canada has
been made part of the living history of the present for a long time now. In fact, some of the earliest Canadian
works, say, those of Susanna Moodie, were about
moving from England to the wilds of Canada. So even our earliest literature is about
dealing with history, with how people from outside of Canada survive this
bizarre place: you know, for them, Canada was a very difficult, very rugged
wilderness. And now the equivalent
theme is more about how to integrate different histories and cultures into a
"Canadian" society, perhaps, but the historical past remains constant
theme in Canadian writing---and an important one.
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