Nicholas Bradley

Published in The Bull Calf Review 5.2 (2015). Posted here with permission.

Gregory Betts
Avant-Garde Canadian Literature: The Early Manifestations
University of Toronto Press, 2013.

Robert Lecker
Keepers of the Code: English-Canadian Literary Anthologies and the Representation of Nation
University of Toronto Press, 2013.

The body of literary works deemed worthy of scholarly examination is not timeless, nor did it come spontaneously into being. Canons are historical creations, and despite the ecclesiastical overtones of the term, they are not divinely sanctioned but subject instead to whim and human imperfection. The notion that Canadian literature constitutes a legitimate field deserving of institutional recognition arose relatively recently, while the national literature itself can be said to have existed, according to the strictest definition, only since the late nineteenth century, even if the transformation of three colonies into four provinces in 1867 was not an absolute beginning. “The first necessity is a decision as to the existence and nature of any distinctive Canadian quality,” wrote Lionel Stevenson in Appraisals of Canadian Literature (1926); “most people have categorically denied to Canadian literature any distinctive traits at all.” Despite the brevity of the endeavour, Canadian literary studies have witnessed dramatic shifts in taste and politics. The writing of many of Stevenson’s authors now seems quaint or trivial. Much of it has been forgotten, or nearly so. George Frederick Cameron, Robert Norwood, Tom MacInnes, Frederick George Scott, Annie C. Dalton, Douglas Durkin, Archie McKishnie, and “the famous Captain Jack Crawford,” who was, Stevenson proposed, “British Columbia’s first poet”: the names survive in footnotes alone.

Stevenson concluded his Appraisals on a note of optimism, and even suggested that greater accomplishments awaited: “Considering the social and economic history of the country, we have no reason to be ashamed of the bulk and quality of its literature heretofore, and on the basis of what is already achieved, we are justified in hoping that Canada will be recognised as a genuine contributor to the literature of the world.” The innocence and caution can be excused; Stevenson, born in 1902, was in his early twenties when his book was published. As Canadian literary studies became professionalized, and as the appreciative efforts of the amateur were displaced by specialized commentaries, new conceptions of the subject emerged. The first issue of Canadian Literature, the field’s leading journal, was published in 1959. Stevenson was by then a distinguished professor at Duke University; his Darwin among the Poets (1932) had a wider reach than Appraisals of Canadian Literature. The “quarterly of criticism and review,” edited by George Woodcock at the University of British Columbia, was eclectic. The articles in the first dozen issues — from Summer 1959 to Spring 1962 — concentrated on nearly twenty authors, only a minority of whom were considered in more than one essay: John Richardson, the perpetrator of Wacousta; Frederick Philip Grove, the duplicitous Manitoban; Stephen Leacock, the venerable humorist; Hugh MacLennan, the eminent novelist; and Robertson Davies, the author of the Salterton trilogy of novels. (Fifth Business [1970] was yet to come.) The sensation of Canadian Literature was the English writer Malcolm Lowry, whose life and works were prominent topics; Woodcock evidently thought that Dollarton’s most notorious resident could be brought plausibly into the Canadian fold. Some of the authors in question had by 1959 already passed into literary history. Bliss Carman died in 1929, Ralph Connor in 1937, Leacock in 1944, Duncan Campbell Scott in 1947, and Grove in 1948. Lowry met his wretched end in 1957. Others were alive, including Anne Wilkinson (d. 1961), A. M. Klein (d. 1972), Catherine Anthony Clark (d. 1977), and Gabrielle Roy (d. 1983). The lives and careers of MacLennan (d. 1990), Northrop Frye (d. 1991), Davies (d. 1995), Wilfred Watson (d. 1998), Brian Moore (d. 1999), Margaret Avison (d. 2007), and Jay Macpherson (d. 2012) extended well beyond the 1950s, and Phyllis Webb (b. 1927) is with us still. Only Richardson (d. 1852) was a truly distant figure.

As the names and dates suggest, Canadian Literature was catholic in its definition of the field and highly attentive to contemporary authors. If Canadian literary studies in the twenty-first century suffer from “terminal ‘presentism,’” the symptoms have long been evident. Following its own paradigm, Canadian Literature engaged in the decades after 1959 in a nearly continual reinterpretation of the object of inquiry. The recent past is little different. In the period from issue 180 (Spring 2004), when Laurie Ricou succeeded Eva-Marie Kröller as editor, to issue 219 (Winter 2013), articles in the journal examined an astonishing range of authors. Some were recurring subjects: Margaret Atwood, Dionne Brand, George Elliott Clarke, Alice Munro, Mordecai Richler, Eden Robinson, Carol Shields, Guy Vanderhaeghe. And après eux, le déluge: dozens of writers who were addressed only once or twice. Among them are canonical names (Emily Carr, E. J. Pratt, Sinclair Ross, D. C. Scott, F. R. Scott), emergent authors (Larissa Lai, Trish Salah), and writers whose significance now seems primarily historical (Agnes Maule Machar, Mazo de la Roche). The list contains the genuinely popular and the virtually unknown; their works represent the primary genres. Few readers, even experts, will be conversant with every author and every book. The equivalent issues of Studies in Canadian Literature, a younger but comparable journal, tell a similar tale: tremendous diversity marks the contents. Whereas Canadian Literature tends toward the contemporary and the Pacific, Studies in Canadian Literature, based at the University of New Brunswick, veers toward the historical and the Atlantic, and neither journal is in truth synonymous with the field as a whole. Nonetheless their pages suggest the restless nature of Canadian literary studies past and present. The field is characterized by a ceaseless search for new topics, works, and methods — a search for itself.

***

Lively studies by Robert Lecker and Gregory Betts illuminate the history and constitution of Canadian literature. Betts offers an enthusiastic account of obscure experimentalists; Lecker chronicles the conservative tendencies of anthologists. Their works, dissimilar in many regards, converge in challenging orthodox narratives of the development of a Canadian literary tradition.

In Keepers of the Code Lecker analyzes the presiding spirit of anthologies of Canadian literature: a nationalist impulse that leads anthologists to foreground writing that appears to reflect and sanction the experience of the country and its citizens. He contends that “a governing feature of the conventional literary history — embodied in the English-Canadian canon — is an emphasis on realism and mimesis, mainly because the literature has always been seen as a vehicle through which authors bore witness to the country. In this context, mimetic literature was a kind of testimony; it provided evidence that the country was real” (303-04). Readers will note here the allusion to Lecker’s Making It Real: The Canonization of English-Canadian Literature (1995), to which book the present volume is a companion. Keepers of the Code is a comprehensive study — the first, Lecker notes, of its kind (3) — in which are examined anthologies and anthologists from 1837 to 2010. It begins with the seminal compendia of John Simpson (1837), Edward Hartley Dewart (1864), Susan Frances Harrison (1887), and William Douw Lighthall (1889), and surveys the twentieth century, in which collections of Canadian poetry and fiction proliferated. It concludes with contemporary anthologies prepared by academic critics (Donna Bennett and Russell Brown, Smaro Kamboureli, Cynthia Sugars and Laura Moss) and by creative writers themselves (Jane Urquhart, Carmine Starnino). The assessment of the ideological and practical conditions under which anthologists have laboured is convincing. As Lecker has shown in the past, “Can. Lit.” is, if not exactly a falsehood, undeniably an invention.

The book’s title refers to the view that anthologists are tethered to a nation-building imperative: “the idea of effectively collecting the best of the nation’s literature has been a dream shared by influential anthologists in English Canada from the mid-nineteenth century to the present” (3). The “code” that anthologists keep is composed of the “archetypes, symbols, and metaphors that appear again and again in anthologies of English-Canadian literature” (3). (The echo of Frye’s The Great Code is clear.) Such books “are never innocent collections; they are intensely self-conscious literary constructions with their own literary mechanisms and architecture” (3-4). Lecker is himself an anthologist, and his reflections (334-41) on publishing Open Country: Canadian Literature in English (2007) are among the book’s most revealing passages. They confirm his assertion that the anthologist cannot escape the burden of nationalism: “I found that in many ways, I, too, was a keeper of the code” (21). Detailed attention to the literary past is another strength of Lecker’s analysis: “Although Canadian history courses had been introduced successfully into elementary schools, high schools, and universities by 1918,” he writes, “the teaching of Canadian literature did not gain the same footing” (109-10). John Daniel Logan (with Donald G. French, Highways of Canadian Literature, 1924) and Vernon B. Rhodenizer (A Handbook of Canadian Literature, 1930) at Acadia University taught Canadian literature before 1920, as did Alexander Crawford at the University of Manitoba (110), but it was not until the 1920s (and after) that a strong need arose for “anthologies designed for classroom use” (110). A profound change came with “the widespread introduction of Canadian literature as a curricular topic during the 1960s and 1970s” (222). Anthologies were suddenly ubiquitous.

In Lecker’s judgement anthologies exert tremendous force. Many cultural and commercial institutions shape the literary sphere, but “the main textual vehicle for transmitting cultural capital is the teaching anthology” (320), versions of which “are used to teach national literatures and to acquaint students with national values” (7). The nationalist project, however, is destined to fail, for anthologies can never mirror the unruly nation without distortion:

Paradoxically, national literature anthologies underline the fact that nations are plural and unstable, unmappable in any form. … National literature anthologies are naturally conflicted and in doubt. So they should be; nations are naturally conflicted and in doubt. The challenge is to read these anthologies through the anxieties that haunt them. This can be a mobilizing cultural experience for students who are encouraged to explore the nature of these anxieties as they emerge in the anthologies they use. (8)

But maps are not flawed because they simplify and schematize the places to which they are guides, and anthologies surely can have a heuristic function. An anthology moreover is not necessarily used as the anthologist intended. “Mimesis is the means by which critics affirm that the subject of their inquiry is real,” Lecker claims: “The tendency of critics and teachers is to support mimesis at the expense of the experimental, the marginal, the postmodern, the self-reflexive” (5). Yet a course that concentrates on the “experimental, … marginal, … postmodern, [and] self-reflexive” writing that is found in many anthologies is not the same as one that plods through works of realist fiction from Confederation to the Nobel moment. The study of literature is not a straightforward matter of indoctrination. It would be odd indeed to teach the poetry of Al Purdy without reference to Canada; but it is almost equally unlikely that “At the Quinte Hotel” could be taught without reference to Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats.” Even the most resolutely national poets cross borders with allegiance and allusion.

Not all writers crave the anthologist’s imprimatur. In Avant-Garde Canadian Literature Betts provides a richly detailed portrait of three movements or groups: “The Cosmic Canadians,” “Canadian Surrealism: The Automatists,” and “Canadian Vorticism.” They are, in the author’s phrase, “three nodes of early Canadian avant-garde writing” (24). A fascinating work of scholarship, the book is an affront to the persistent belief that Canadian literature of the early twentieth century is a dreary subject. Betts has shown that in fact it is hardly comprehended. His scope may appear narrow, but he demonstrates that his experimental writers — “from Lawren Harris to Claude Gauvreau to Marshall McLuhan” (12-13), and including Bertram Brooker, on whose oeuvre Betts is an authority — were not parochial. They were savvy and ambitious, and international in outlook: “The early avant-garde in Canada responded to the arrival of foreign cultural models at first by learning and imitating but eventually by translating cultural practices into the Canadian context” (245). Betts resists “the tendency in Canadian criticism … to assume that early twentieth-century writing was entirely imitative, or else to ignore the international context from which Canadian authors worked” (245). He proposes another model to explain the reactions of Canadian writers to fashions and innovations abroad: “Accepting that the early Canadian avant-gardists produced something original through imitation … is a position more in keeping with contemporary theories of postmodernism, post-structuralism, and … translation studies” (245). Intriguing connections are drawn between Canadians and avant-gardists elsewhere: McLuhan’s “devotion to [Wyndham] Lewis,” for example, “can be registered in his 1954 tribute to the publication of Blast. McLuhan’s second book, the seventeen-page manifesto COUNTERBLAST, was intended to be an acknowledgment and commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of Lewis’s avant-garde magazine. Though the time lag between the parallel projects suggests Canada’s paradoxical behind-the-curve avant-gardism, McLuhan did try to update Lewis’s model to the ‘new media of communication’ as well as to the Canadian context” (220).

Betts is less concerned with coteries than with common proclivities and interests. The Cosmic Canadians did not exist as such: “The idea of a movement called ‘Cosmic Canadians’ in fact collects a broad and diverse network of mystical modernists from across Canada” (10). Some cities — Vancouver, for instance — have played an outsized role in the history of experimental writing in Canada, but the avant-garde, according to Betts, originated not on the peripheries of the country but at its centre, in the territory that would become associated with such decidedly mainstream authors as Purdy and Munro:

The first node of Canadian aesthetic avant-garde activity began in small-town Ontario at the turn of the century — in a period and geography that too many scholars hasten over, tripping to reach the urban promontory of modernism. Though there were substantial precursors to the moment, and certainly diverse coexistent influences, the landmark publication that begat the Cosmic Canadians was Dr Richard Maurice Bucke’s 1901 treatise Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind. (86)

Unexpected names crop up. Venturing toward the border between literature and anthropology, Betts places Edward Sapir among the Cosmic Canadians: Sapir “lived in Canada from 1910 to 1925 during the early years of Cosmic Canadian activity” (246-47). Betts presents him as a significant cultural presence, a literary figure as well as a linguist and anthropologist: “Rather than translate the languages of Canada’s First Nations into the aesthetic conventions of the target language as per convention, Sapir sought to preserve the complex cultural patterns of customs and beliefs that informed their speech. During Sapir’s time in Canada, he also published widely in the popular press on a diverse array of topics and concerns, including publishing a book of poems in 1917 called Dreams and Gibes” (247). Betts’s remarks bring to mind a comment about the breadth of Sapir’s knowledge made by Robert Bringhurst in A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World (1999): “If Boas knew nothing about the work of Pound and his colleagues, it is also true that Pound, though he was born in Shoshone country [Hailey, Idaho Territory] and advocated study of all the world’s poetry, knew nothing about the work on which Boas, Bunzel, Sapir, Swanton and their colleagues were engaged. Only Sapir, it seems — and in his own way Roman Jakobson — formed a conscious link between these worlds.” Although Avant-Garde Canadian Literature is focused on the first half of the twentieth century, it establishes ties between “the early manifestations” and later developments. In his examination of Canadian surrealism, for instance, Betts provides an overview of its contemporary incarnations. He observes that “The English poet Michael Bullock moved to Canada in 1968 and became an active member of the West Coast Surrealists throughout their tenure” (187). The definitive record of surrealism in British Columbia remains to be written, but on this matter as on others Betts has made notable advances. Avant-Garde Canadian Literature is an admirable and welcome contribution to the history and interpretation of literature in this country.

***

The tempest over Rita Dove’s Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry (2011), from which Allen Ginsberg and Sylvia Plath were omitted, attests to the power of anthologies to rankle and to vex. “No century in the evolution of poetry in English ever had 175 poets worth reading,” wrote Helen Vendler in her evaluation of the anthology in The New York Review of Books; “so why are we being asked to sample so many poets of little or no lasting value?” Not everyone will agree on what deserves laurels, and on what will endure. A reward of reading the studies by Lecker and Betts is the salutary realization that Canadian writing is vaster and stranger than is often acknowledged. What we do not know about Canadian literature could fill books. Future attempts to discern the literary past and its effects on the present will be obliged to account for the uncertainty and dissonance that have invariably accompanied the efforts of canonizers to define and delimit the field.

Notes