Postmodernism in Canadian Writings
Postmodernism _i_n _C_a_n_a_d_i_a_n _W_r_i_t_i_n_gs: A Brief Survey
TetsuoKoga
The major issues in contemporary Canadian writings overlap and strengthen
the notion of "postmodernism," whose very ideological identity
can now be defined as a kind of complicitous (re)appropriation of
some of modernist ideals, such as a hegemonic universalism or an untolerant
discourse of formal purity, in a subversive or deconstructionist
manner.1The issues, for instance, of feminism in the writings of Margaret
Atwood (1939-), of historio- graphic metafiction in George Bowering
(1935-), or of boundary literature in Robert Kroetsch (1927-),
do indeed show part of the complicated aspects of postmodern writings
in Canada. They tend, in general, to approach both the highly manipulative,
over-self- conscious or self-reflexive mode of metafiction and
the nascent, rather straightforward narrative mode. Here in this brief
survey, I intend to show the various aspects of Canadian postmodern
writings while focusing on three major writers. I also intend to sketch
some of the most exciting theoretical issues in the postmodern represen- tation,
namely: various subject constructions in gender and ethnicity,
highly manipulative temporal reversals, and the problematic
extinction of generic borders in writing. It is now a clich_e to regard
any canon formation as a highly manipulative act to establish the maker's
hegemony over the past literatures. Especially in the English writings
of British and American origins, the force toward the canonicity, even
within the seemingly non-canonical works, not to say the more established
ones, appear so fierce that literary historians can hardly exercise their
own arbitrary preferences over some texts. And it becomes much harder,
I think, to place the certain canonical texts over the others in
this postmodern age of literary chaos or polevalent diversity. In
the case of "Canadian" literature, whose national designation
has yet been rather ambiguous in asserting its own identity, formerly
designated as a colonial "Commonwealth" literature, the
issue of canon may necessarily become an entangled one. One might ask,
how can it be possible to become a canonical writer when the notion
of any collective canonicity is in jeopardy? Hence appears the
question of Canadian "mosaic," or cultural disparagement,
and of the wholesale ethnic and gender issues. Here we cannot
go into any larger argument of more specific cultural / political
implications, like those related to the issue of "silent revolutions"
in French Quebec or in Native Indian reservations. Hence we
inevitably limit our discussion to the very "canonical"
literary phenomena, which may still, I hope, address to the broader
issue of boundary crossing or inter-subjecivity in fiction.
First let me start by sketching some of the fundamental issues in
the postmodern Canada. There has been a primary "colonial"
writings, which can be defined in terms of invaders-natives or the
oppressor-oppressed relationship, as can be known from the earlier
history of Canada.2 Now in the postmodern (periodically, post-1960)
Canada, the history of immigration has made the nation one vast country
of multi-culturalism, whose federal polity can be described as a rather
detached construct or "Oz," as its present Prime Minister
has described of Ottawa.3 Hence so-called "Canadian" literature
includes not just the works by those of Canadian-born but
also by those who have lived before the nation existed (before
1867), and those non-Canadians who have yet contributed
to Canada, or vice-versa, those Canadian-born writers who are now
in exile but whose works still speak to Canadian cultural
contexts. Especially in the decade of the 1960s when there was almost
a militant cultural nationalism in Canada, the works of most younger
contemporary writers have made their first appearance. Atwood's
first book of poetry, Double Persephone, appeared in 1961. Bowering's
Sticks & Stones appeared in 1963. Though himself a little older
in the generation but a late starter, Kroetsh's But We Are Exiled first
appeared in 1965. Other younger writers like Michel Ondaatje (1943-)
and B. P. Nichol (1944-) definitively started their career in the
60s. But older and more established ones like Mavis Gallant (1922-),
Eli Mandel (1922-) and Alice Munro (1931-) started publishing their major
works during the 60s and 70s. And more ethnic minority writers like
Joy Kogawa (1935-) and Rudy Wiebe (1934-) also started publishing in
the 60s.
Now the question of national identity among these writers has more to
do with the postmodern cultural condition rather than with each writer's
individual literary orientation. As is generally perceived today
that "the postmodern 'different'. . . is starting to replace the
humanist 'universal' as a prime cultural value" (Hutcheon, Canadian
ix), the typical Canadian situation of forming any universal canon of
national literature during the 60s is itself a contradictory idea. In
other words, the very "double" identity among the Canadians
has made its literary expressions conceivably more ambiguous in form
and content. As a renowned literary critic once declared almost two
decades ago, "the famous Canadian problem of identity may seem
a rationalized, self-pitying or made-up problem to those who have never
had to meet it, or have never understood that it was there to be met"
(Frye, Bush i). Or more recently it is still asserted that "instead
of lamenting our state and status of bewailing our fate in the name
of some sort of a collective cultural inferiority complex, what if we
made a virtue out of our fence-sitting, bet-hedging sense of the
difficult doubleness of being Canadian yet North American, of being Canadian
yet part of a multinational, global political economy?" (Hutcheon,
Splitting vii) The last quoted view of Linda Hutcheon, whose more general
theory of postmodernism and irony we follow throughout as a definitive
guide, finally enables us to see the more internal conflicts
within each artist who has yet to face the double feature of the Canadian
postmodernism, or the conflict between the "international"
mode of representation and the "Canadian" locus or subject-matter.
I Victimized Feminism in Atwood
In a key essay in her controversial book on Canadian literature,
Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972), Atwood
makes clear her literary / political standpoint, especially on the
point of what she calls "the victim position":
Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that Canada as a whole is a victim, or an "oppressed minority,"or "exploited." Let us suppose in short that Canada is a colony. A partial definition of a colony is that it is a place from which a profit ismade, but not by the people who live there: the major profitfroma colony is made in the centre of the empire. That'swhat coloniesare for, to make money for the "mother country," and that's what--- since the days ofRome and, more recently, of the Thirteen Colonies --- they have always been for. Of course there are cultural side-effects which are oftenidentified as "the colonial mentality," and it is these which are examinedhere; but the one root cause for them is economic.
If Canada is a collective victim, it should pay some attention
to the Basic Victim Positions. . . . (35-36)
And those propositions of "Basic Victim Positions" are: (1) Position
One: To deny that fact that you are a victim. (2) Position Two: To acknowledge
the fact that you are a victim, but to explain this as an act of Fate,
the Will of God, the dictates of Biology(in the case of women, for instance),
the necessity decreed by History, or Economics, or the Unconscious,
or any other large general powerful idea. (3) Position Three: To acknowledge
the fact that you are a victim but to refuse to accept the assumption
that the role is inevitable. (4) Position Four: To be a creative non-victim.
[(5) A Position Five, for mystics] (Survival 36-39) These model positions, as
Atwood herself admits, are "devised" in order to be "a
helpful method of approaching our literature" since she
"found a superabundance of victims in Canadian literature"
(39).
A specific example of Position Two may be given in her treatment
of "animals," both in the chapter three "Animal Victims"
of Survival and in her poems on animals. She contends that Canadian stories
about animals are almost always "failure stories" and this
is "because the stories are told from the point of view of the
animal," while "English animals are about 'social relations,'
American ones are about people killing animals" [that is, from the
hunter's viewpoint] (Survival 74: italics original). This line of argument
goes on to include the following suggestive remarks:
. . . in Canada it is the nation as a whole that joins in animal- salvation
campaigns such as the protest over the slaughter of baby seals and
the movement to protect the wolf. This could - mistakenly,
I think - be seen as national guilt: Canadaafter all was founded
on the fur trade,and an animal cannotpainlessly separated
from its skin. From the animal point ofview,Canadians are as bad
as the slave trade or the Inquisition . .] But it is much more
likely that Canadians themselves feel threatened and nearly extinct
as a nation, and suffer also fromlife-denying experience
as individuals -the culturethreatens the 'animal' within
them - and that theiridentification withanimals is the expression
of a deep-seated cultural fear. . . . (79)
In addition, there should surely be "a point at which seeing
yourself as a victimized animal - naming your condition, as the crucial
step from the ignorance of Position One through the knowledge of
Position Two to the self-respect of Position Three can become the need
to see yourself as a victimized animal, and at that point you will be
locked into Position Two, unable to go any further" (Survival
81). These observations need not be called "postmodern"
though, they do invoke a situation where the colonial history of Canada
has moved into a stage of so-called post-colonialism, where the
animal writings can be seen as a symptom of redeeming the experience
of victims in a way of parodic / ironic internalizaion or self-conscious
victimization of subjectivity.
Here we cite two brief instances of "animal poems" by Atwood
herself in order to show that this victimization of animals is
indeed a self-reflexive mirror for the marginalized people in Canada.
The two poems "A night in the Royal Ontario Museum" and "Elegy
for the Giant Tortoises" (both in The Animals in That Country, 1968),
are typical in showing how the mental state of the speaker is that of
a defeated or lost victim:
Who locked me
into this crazed man-made
stone brain
where the weathered
totempole jabs a blunt
finger at the byzantine
mosaic dome
Under that ornate
golden cranium I wander
among fragments of gods, tarnished
coins, embalmed gestures
chronologically arranged,
looking for the EXIT sign . . .
(Animals 20)
Later in the poem, through a dizzy over-selfconsciousness reflected in
those art objects or historical gatherings, appears a confessional
statement of defeated sentiment: "I am dragged to the mind's /
deadened, the roar of the bone- / yard, I am lost / among the mastodons
/ and beyond" (21). This "crazed man-made / stone brain"
of museum, suggesting both anthropocentricism and sexism, may then be
read as another construct of modernist technology whose "wastes
of geology" has surely impoverished any idea of human intellect
or creative imagination. The other poem of the elegy for the tortoises
may express the better documentation for this sense of defeatedness, since
in it we find the speaker's avowed pronouncement to "specialize"
in "a meditation / upon the giant tortoises / withering
finally on a remote island":
I concentrate in subway stations,
in parks, I can't quite see them,
they move to the peripheries of my eyes
(Animals 23)
The tortoises, as an instance of extinctive species toward history and
museums, can arguably be speculated as a specimen of phantasma- goric
images of marginalized or defeated people, who are indeed "plodding
past me in a straggling line / awkward without water / their small
heads pondering from side to side . . . ," finally requiring
a elegy from the speaker ("the relics of what we have destroyed,
/ our holy and obsolete symbols"). This interpretation might seem
too arbitrary to those who only confine their existence in the poem;
the broader paradigm of The Animals in That Country may convince one that
"In that country the animals / have the faces of people"
("The Animals in That Country"), and the vice-versa is also true.
Atwood in fiction may be more comprehensive in tracing what we call her
victimized feminism. One of her latest novels, The Handmaid's
Tale (1985), has after fifteen sections of forty-six chapters
an appendix named "Historical Notes," which is a parodic report
of an academic convention (the Gileadean [formerly, U.S.A.] Research
Association), including an talk by Prof. Pieixoto:"Problems of Authentication
in Reference to The Handmaid's Tale." This kind of self-reference,
which undermines the status of realism in fiction, even questions
the narrative mode itself, since it is also reported that this "tale"
(or "document" as Prof. Pieixoto hesitatingly
refers) was originally transcribed from the "tapes" hidden
in a footlocker of the "'safe house' on the Underground
Femaleroad during our period, and our author may have been kept hidden
in, for instance, the attic or cellar there for some weeks or months,
during which she would have had the opportunity to make the recording"
(Handmaid's 285). Hence this fantastic story of a theocratic fascist
Gileadean regime in the twentieth-first century, exploiting the idea
of gender and institution, becomes a parodic satire on the contemporary
society and culture in the western advanced nations. The question
of women's victimization (or rather, their complicity in their own victimization)
surfaces as a central issue through the narrative of one Offred (an
escaped "handmaiden" or official mistress), joining other
issues like fundamentalist fanaticism, mercantile sloganeerism, and,
of course, putative fascism. Here we have no space to probe into the
subtle rhetoric of the narrative but to see part of the author's commentary
in the appendix:
In this connection a few comments upon the crack female control
agency known as the "Aunts" is perhapsin order.Judd---according
to the Limpkin material---was of the opinion fromtheoutset that the
best and most cost-effective way to controlwomen for reproductive
and other purposes was through women themselves.For this there were
many historical precedents; in fact,noempire imposed by force
or otherwise has ever been withoutthisfeature: control of the indigenous
by members of their own group.In the case of Gilead, there were
many women willingto serve as Aunts, either because of a genuine
beliefin what they called "traditional values,"
or forthe benefits they might thereby acquire. When power is
scarce, a little of it is tempting.There was, too, a negative inducement:
childless or infertile orolder women who were not married could
take servicein the Aunts and thereby escape redundancy, and consequent
shipment tothe infamous Colonies, which were composed of portablepopulationsused
mainly as expendable toxic cleanup squads, though iflucky you could
be assigned to less hazardous tasks, such as cotton pickingandfruit
harvesting. (Handmaid's 290)
In this brief quotation we recognize some postmodern or subversively
reappropriating moments: some colonizing idea is stated of the
"control of the indigenous by members of their own group,"
which is precisely the logic of colonizing not only of the indigenous natives
but also of any marginalized group, whether of women, religious
minorities, or slaves. Furthermore, the question of abortion
and other related issues of female biology are also stated quite literally
yet implicating a larger metaphoricity (i.e. ideological manipulation
of natural selection). Mercantile jargons ("cost-effective,"
"inducement," "service," "shipment," "portable,"
"expendable") suggest the idea of complicitous reappropriation
of capitalist economy. The whole scheme of the novel as a self-reflexive
retelling of some nightmarish phantasmagoria (suggestively,
half of the chapters are entitled "night," besides "nap"
to the chapter five) strengthens the language of the novel, which is
actually a prose-poem. Yet all these devices of fiction contribute
to the reconstruction of a speaking voice or a narrative subject ("I"
in the novel) quite feasibly that of a victimized female. We
may now explore this victimized subject in the context of the decomposed
subjectivity theorized in the works of Roland Barthes, Jacque Derrida,
Michel Foucault, and others, who advocate the cult of demised author.
II Metafictional Language Game in Bowering
George Bowering's poetic and fictional experiments show another
dimension of Canadian postmodernism. Himself strongly influenced
by several American poets (W. C. Williams, Louis Zukofsky, Robert
Duncan, Gertrude Stein. and more pointedly, Charles Olson of the
Black Mountain School), he started as a lyric confessionalist yet
highly self-conscious metafictionist. A typical metafictional (that
is, reconstructing a narrative from another narrative) tendency in
his works may appear both in a book-length poem "George, Vancouver"
(1970) and in a novel Burning Water (1980), the latter being a later
revision of the former. Here we confine our argument to the poem, which
is based, as noted, on the book Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific
[Ocean] & round the World [1790-95] (1801) by a pioneering
explorer named George Vancouver (who "methodically filled in the
details and mapped, named, and described many of the intricate waterways,
islands, and headlands of the British Columbia,Washington, and Alaska
coast" [Literary History 48]). And it becomes indeed a "chronicle"
of three "Georges" ---Bowering, Vancouver, and King George
the third who ordered his expedition. That is to say, there exists
already a metafictional trick in this seemingly historical narrative
which tries to reconstruct Captain Vancouver's hazardous exploration.
The poem starts as follows:
To chart this land
hanging over ten thousand inlets
& a distant mind of as many narrows,
an impossible thing---
(5)
Prosaic descriptive statements of his expedition continue:
Captain Vancouver found that the "river" was just an inlet,
& so it was renamed Cook's Inlet.
(7)
But Vancouver sailed thru the detritus
of Columbus & Fraser,
missing both. . . .
. . . Vancouver sailed by. . . .
(9)
On entering this inlet, I, George,
sail beneath a suspended bridge
invisible in the fog. . .
(14)
However, a few self-questioning statements may interrupt the narrative and complicate the identiy of George Vancouver:
Does anyone by the name of Vancouver
live in Vancouver?
(11)
I keep losing sight of the subject,
Captain Vancouver seems lost in the poem.
(15)
This is done in contrast to the inevitable description of his biographic data
("Born June 22, 1757 / when the sun is / farthest north where
the sea is, / George Vancouver. /. . . / Vancouver, unmarried, died
over his work, / a hyperthyroid, though some / blamed consumption"
[18]) and even a gross chart of "A LIST OF VESSELS ON THE N.
W. COAST OF AMERICA IN THE YEAR 1792" (20-21). Now with his report
of his job as a coast explorer and representive of the British interests,
and later with the journal entry by his botanist Menzies, the narrative
of the poem becomes at times both archaic and contemporary (one journal
entry reads a sentence like " Difeafes. All ficknefs in the ribs
& sides. . ." [28]; elsewhere appears a phrase like "a
few jeep roads" [34]), plain reportage style (e. g. "About
noon, 17th of June, 1792 / they entered another narrow area / winding
northward forty miles / . . . Latitude 50ﾟ52' North & / Longitude
235ﾟ18' East." [22]), anecdotal or essayistic ("His name
was Apostolos Valerianos, / a Greek, & a liar. . . " [33]) and
even orthodoxly theological ("The North West Passage / is the waterway /
to the Kingdom of God, / the New Jerusalem . . ." [31]) or severely
satiric ("The Catholic King was doomed from the start / to obstinate
rocks & contrary winds. . . " [31]), and other various discourses.
Through all these conscious manipulations or "language game" (each
smaller narrative within the poem seems exchangable in place and time,
almost creating an illusion of reading a SF story) appears the final resolution
of the whole poem:
Let us say
this is as far as I, George,
have travelled,
the line
obscured still, the coast
I mean, touched, sighted,
mapped to some extent, the islands
noted. . . .
(39)
We, the readers, are now told that "this" much that has been
said "is as far as I, George" (here we include the author
George Bowering ) could reach in this poem. Though "the line"
(or border of "the coast / I mean") may be "obscured
still," he has finally "touched, sighted, / mapped to some
extent" the geography of the British Columbia and of the
poem as well. All these poetic materials are here referred to, in
the last stanza, as "what lies in the mind," which, as the
poet now concludes, is "the fancy of the British king / gone like
fish odor / into the life-giving fog of that coast" (39). The
implications of this last line may well be that of the mignling of the
exploring spirit with the native geography, which has elsewhere been
cogently but more realistically described as:
Totem poles
falling in the rain, like Spaniards
in the South, never seen by
land eyes, carry no sail,
the coal underneath, no human bones,
Asiatic footsteps melted into the
Japanese current, gone home, as
Vancouver, to die early,
to be passed over in favor
of another man, another voyager,
but always re-encountered,
in the names, Japanese & lonely.
(35)<p>
III Boundary Consciousness in Kroetsch
In this last portion of the paper, we present a very brief sketch of Robert
Kroetsch's novel Gone Indian (1973) and, hopefully, define the nature of
boundary consciousness in Kroetsch. According to Robert R. Wilson
who writes on Kroetsch inDictionaryofLiterary Biography (DLB), "Kroetsch's
novels indicate a continuing experimentation with narrative form,
an exploration of the possibilities of voice in narrative, a complex
shifting of narrative levels and types of discourse, a playful undermining
of such literary conventions as plot and character, and a flexible use
of different narrative models drawn from American, European, and South
American literatures" and yet his work is "grounded, always and
un- equivocally, within a national context of Canadian themes and within
an international context of self-conscious literariness" (DLB 242). As
to this general description of his works, we may stress that Kroetsch
(who is also known as one of the founding editors of a postmodernist
journal Boundary 2) is the writer of boundary consciousness
unsurpassed even by most of the American boundary- crossing writers,
in poetry, like the radical beatniks (Allen Ginsberg or William
Burroughs) or the subversive confessionalists (Robert Lowell or Adrianne
Rich), or even the recent experimental- ists like the Language Poets.4
The notion of boundary or border to Kroetsch has started early.5 And
here in Gone Indian, the final novel of his Alberta "triptych"
(the other two are But We Are Exiles [1965] and The Words of My Roaring
[1966]), it appears ever more distinctively in its plot and narrative.
The narrator, who is a Canadian Professor named Mark Madham teaching
English literature at State University of New York at Binghamton, transcribes
from the tapes sent by his American student named Jeremy Sadness, who
was encouraged by Madham to apply for a position at University of Alberta
but, having an inescapable fantasy of transforming his own identity
into Grey Owl or a self-made ideal Indian, disappeared with his former
love's mother (Bea Sunderman) into the wilderness and the Indian
winter carnival in Notikeewin. Now the whole narrative of the novel
is enclosed in Professor's reply toward the letter of inquiry written
by Jeremy's former love Jill Sunderman. This narrative device of
mediating a direct experience, while becoming a parody of scholarly
report, is itself a part of the more complicate strategies of the
novel. In the opening letter, the narrator Madham says to Miss Sunderman:
"I am transcribing a few passages from those same tapes, simply
that you might better appreciate the kind of rascal you found yourself involved
with. It is my own opinion that everything he says can be taken at
face value" (2), which is already discouraging the reader from
having any "suspension of disbelief." Later on in the same opening
letter, he then starts talking about his own frolicking and eventual
love-making with Jeremy's wife Carol in the buffalo zoo, instead
of properly answering Sunderman's inquiry. Here again we witness
already a conscious parody of the narrative form itself. And the final
intent of this kind of narrative is intensified by the fact that
his tape recorder "was discovered hanging by its strap from
a bolt on a timber 144 feet directly above the surface of the Cree
River" (151), apparently confirming the death of Jeremy and Bea.
However, there exist two contradictory interpretations on this conclusive
accident: one Madham's confirming view ("I am certain that
Jeremy and Bea were killed." 150) and the other Carol's alternative
view of possibility ("Carol, unfortunately,persists in the notion
that her husband faked the two deaths." 150). The latter possible
story, finally denied, gives way to the romantic escapade in the last
passages "And they rode away seeking NOTHING. They sought NOTHING.
They would FLEE everything. THEY DID NOT KNOW WHERE THEY WERE GOING. .
. . They leap. They leap from the iron path. From the spanning bridge. From
the closing lights. Together they fall, clinging to nothing but each
other's regret, spilling down the sudden sluice, the dark incurious
flume, their eyes alive to the nail-point snow, their tongues unhinged
in the whistling night. They are lovers. They do not even scream as they
fall." 156-58).
Though the narrative progression above seemsstraightforward, the
narrative voice and its commentary are never simple, parodying almost
all types of discourse, as we have noted. The extinction of generic border
between the oral narrative and the written commentary is then an indication
of how Kroetsch as a writer of fiction exploiting the
form in a language of academic / theoretical commentary.
We may further define his postmodern play in the narrative
more paradoxically in his own self-critical words.
Notes
[The author of this paper wishes to express thanks to the Canadian Embassy
in Tokyo for giving him the Faculty Enrichment Grant, which made his
research in Canada possible. However, he cannot help but regret that
this brief survey does not fully reflect his research activity in Canada
nor allowing him to present any fuller bibliography because of
the scarcity of writing space in this institutional bulletin.---T.K.]
1. I have profited much from Linda Hutcheon's view ofpostmodernism, which
mainly sees its ideological complicity in subverting most of the modernist
cult of formalism and organicism. Here I would like to express my gratitude
to her for her kindness and help during my research at University of
Toronto in the summer of 1993.
2. According to Literary History of Canada (1965) and W. J. Keith's Canadian
Literature in English (1985), major "colonial" (that is, before
1949) writings in Canada comprise the literature by
"explorers" in the seventeenth century, then by various "settlers"
in the region of Newfoundland (1715-1880), The Maritime Provinces (1720-1815),
and The Canadas (1763-1812), all of which are further developed into
the literatures of two distinctive features: transplanting
of traditions from their mother country and founding new native "Wacousta
Syndrome," to borrow the phrase from one of the excellent studies
on Canadian culture.
3. In "Campbell Vows Reforms to End 'Bad Politics'" (Toronto
Star, Tuesday August 10, 1993, A1): "'At best, for many Canadians,
Ottawa is Oz. At worst, Ottawa is Canada's forbidden city---a place
Canadians are not let into,' Campbell said in a major policy speech during
a four-day tour of her home province."
4. These instances of comparison are made on the degree of boundary consciousness
in proportion to the total of each writer's other preoccupations
(e. g. anti-establishment protest, mystical escapism, sense of crisis,
gender difference, linguistic deconstruction). 5. According to his biography,
he was first made conscious of his marginalized background through his
birth (in a rural Alberta farm) and upbringing (because of his allergy,
his job as a family member was confined to the garden which he
called a borderland where traditional male and female activities
overlapped); then this sentiment was intensified during his adolescence
through his education both in Canada and the United States (Univ. of
Alberta, Middlebury College in Vermont, and Univ. of Iowa) and later
through teaching at several universities (State University of New York
at Binghamton, University of Calgary, University of Manitoba); but
most importantly, through his job in riverboats and US Air Force as
an information guide from 1948 to 1954 (See his Alberta).
Works Cited
Atwood, Margaret. The Animals in That Country. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1968.
----------------. The Handmaid's Tale. Toronto: McClelland-Bantam, 1985.
----------------. Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. Toronto: Ananci, 1972.
Bowering, George. George, Vancouver: A Discovery Poem. Toronto: Weed/Flower P, 1970.
----------------. Burning Water. Don Mills, Ont.: General Publishing, 1980.
Frye, Northrop. The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination. Toronto: Ananci, 1971.
Hutcheon, Linda. The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction.Toronto: OxfordUP,1988. ---------------. Splitting Images: Contemporary Canadian Ironies. Toronto: Routledge, 1989.
Keith, W. J. Canadian Literature in English. London and New York: Longman, 1985.
Klinck, Carl F. et al. Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1965.
Kroetsch, Robert. Alberta. Toronto: Macmillan, 1968.
----------------. Gone Indian. Toronto: New Press, 1973.
McGregor, Gaile. The Wacousta Syndrome: Explorations in the Canadian Landscape. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1985.
New, William H. et. al. eds. Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol.53: Canadian Writers Since 1960, First Series.
Detroit: Gale / Bruccoli Clark, 1986.
The following are the cento of some of her introductory yet incisive observations on the postmodern Canadian literature, whose polemics, I hope, will be focused and given another dimension in my treatment of three writers below:
Since the periphery or the margin might also describe Canada's perceived position in international terms, perhaps the postmodern ex-centric is very much a part of the identity of the nation. In postmodernism, though, the centre and the periphery do not simply change places. Nor is the margin conceived of only as a place of transgression. The periphery is also the frontier, the place of possibility: Kroetsch's border town of Big Indian in What the Crow Said is deliberately on the border of Alberta and Saskatchewan; Hodgins' Vancouver Island is self-consciously on the edge of the continent. . . . (Canadian 3)
. . . the ironies and contradictions of postmodernism are the most apt mode of expression for what Kroetsch has called the 'total ambiguity that is so essentially Canadian: be it in terms of two solitudes, the bush garden, Jungian opposites.' The postmodern irony that refuses resolution of contraries---except in the most provisional of terms---would appear to be a useful framework in which to discuss, for example, the obsessive dualities in the work of Margaret Atwood (body/mind; female/male; nature/culture; instinct/reason; time/space; lyric poetry/prose narrative) or the echoing doubling of (and within) characters and plots in the novels of Kroetsch. . . . (Canadian 4)
. . . Canadian writers have first had to deconstruct British social and literary myths in order to redefine their colonial history. . . Through the use of parody they have also contested the canonical myths and forms of European and American literatures . . . . (Canadian 6)
The 1960s saw the 'inscription' into history of those previously silenced ex-centrics: those defined by differences in class, gender, race, ethnic group, and sexual preferences. And the seventies and eighties have seen their 'inscription' into fiction, in forms that vary from the 'historicity' of the Native peoples and Metis (in the fiction of Wiebe) to the 'metaphoricity' of the freaks in Quarrington's Home Game or the novels of Kroetsch. . . . (Canadian 11)
In the sixties the buzz-word of culture was (paradoxically) the 'natural', the authentic: flower power, rock music, sexual desire, communes, 'hanging loose'---all were manifestations of the 'natural'. What postmodernist has done is show how the 'natural' is in fact the 'constructed', the made, the social. In addition, it is never free from an intimate relation with power. . . .
(Canadian 12)
. . . The textuality of history matches that of literature: that is, the only way we can know the past today is through its traces, its texts. . . (Canadian 14)
. . . Perhaps too there is a suggestion of the inevitable complicity of creativity with destruction in the irony of the very concept of the war artist. . . . (Canadian 16)
In postmodernist literature this has meant a turning to those forms that can accentuate difference, especially in the face of mass culture that tends to homogenize or obliterate anything that does not seem to fit. . . . (Canadian 18)