Chapter One Regionalism: Concept, History and Critical Directions
Canadian literature, since its birth, has been obsessed with a persistent urge for self-definition and self-assertion, demanding domestic dissemination and external recognition. Not until recent decades did Canadian writers and critics become less harassed by a seemingly omnipresent sense of lack, a lack in a literary tradition and root that they can look back on. Writing in 1965, the world's renowned Canadian critic Northrop Frye conveyed his concern about the status of his nation's literature by making a lucid dichotomy between unity and identity. For Frye, identity involves what is "local and regional, rooted in the imagination and in the works of culture" (Bush Garden ii), whereas unity is "national in reference, international in perspective, and rooted in a political feeling" (Bush Garden ii). Frye saw that Canadian literature was not an autonomous world and that it should be studied as part of the Canadian life. Since the rise of nationalism in the 1960s, the self-constructive process of Canadian literature has never been separable from coherent cultural, political, and economic efforts. Given the subtle status of Canada—at one time the military outpost of the United Kingdom and an up-to-date economic colony of its southern neighbour, its literature has also been suffering from an identity crisis, which implies a so-called regional position in the sense that it is the peripheral, out on the perimeter, looking toward the center for its definition. At the center of the Canadian literary consciousness there lies a perplexity, as shown in the riddle posed by Frye in his Bush Garden: "Where is here?" (220)
A question as such inevitably relates the identity of Canadian literature to an interrogation of the geographic and cultural significance of Canada. As Frye noted, "the cultural counterpart that we call 'Canada' is really a federation not of provinces but of regions and communities" ("From Nationalism" 8). Similarly Robert Wilson writes:
It does seem, at least to many students of Canadian culture and literature, that Canada falls into regions, that Canadians tend to think of themselves in regional terms, that Canadian writers both follow regional obsessions and also think of themselves as, primarily, regional and that Canadianists, those who convert Canadian literature into an organized body of knowledge and teach it in the universities, also think in these terms, taking the regional diversions as convenient methodological and pedagogic tools, categories of analysis and quasi-natural bases for ourselves and for research. (49)
Indeed, regionalism has been a focus not only in the realm of literature, but it has demanded much attention from other fields of research as well, such as sociology, politics, economics, geography, and so on. And regionalism in Canadian literature seems an unavoidable question if conclusions of a certain magnitude are to be reached without the jeopardy of neglecting the geographic, historical and socio-temporal vein in the formation of the Canadian consciousness..
I. Regionalism in Canadian Literary History
Regionalism has been a term prevalent in institutional discourses in Canada and has played a very conspicuous role in Canadian literature. In effect, regionalism has its origin in the early history of Canadian literature. It can be said that in the pre-Confederation era, almost all writings, largely immature and imitative in essence, were regional by nature, ranging from exploration journals to travel literature and to chronicles and documentary records. As Arnason comments, the immigrants and garrison soldiers from the Great Britain "did not regard themselves as Canadians, but as Englishmen living in a new land. [Their] sense of history is the sense of history of the mother country, not of Canada" (54). Therefore, in the early writings in Canadian literature, Canada was invariably regarded as a remote region of the British Empire.
The main feature of literary regionalism during the pre-Confederation era is the settlers' response to the geographic features of the land. As Woodcock remarks, the birth of regionalism coincided with the settlers' encounter with the land of the New World, triggering a strong sense of "regionalism that to this day marks off the areas of Canada by history—the shared memory of experience—and geography" (Meeting 1). The year 1867 serves as an important divide in the political consciousness of Canadians. People's conception of what is Canada today was shaped by the dominant colonial ideology of centre and region. The outposts and colonies were regarded as the remotest regions of the British Empire. The writings from these outposts, reportorial in form, were considered to be sheer regional writings, the majority of which were concerned with the expression of exile. As W. H. New notes, the imitative literature during the pre-Confederation period "reflected what was understood to be […] fashionable elsewhere—in Paris, London, or later Boston and Philadelphia" (25). The writings of this period dealt with strictly local themes such as winter cold, scurvy, pneumonia, and a host of other settlement and exploitation issues. Naturally, confrontation with the Canadian wilderness and survival became the central themes of the writers. In fact, in the nineteenth century, most literary writings were regional in that they necessarily involved an obsessive delineation of the immigrant experience and the landscape. Their depiction of the environment was either so inimical and inclement as to demand a bare survival or so enchanting and untainted as to instill a romanticism in the vein of Canadian literature. Critics like Eli Mandel, Margaret Atwood, Laurie Ricou unanimously agree to the necessity of the depiction of the Canadian landscape at the inceptive stage of its literature. As Staines echoes this imperative drive in the inception of a national literature, "[t]he delineation of the landscape, however, was important since it was the necessary prelude to the development of a distinctive literature. The immensity and power of the unpopulated land remained for so long a dominant theme of Canadian literature; only after a confrontation with the landscape can the artists move to a confrontation with the land's inhabitants" (Crouched 261).
One of the few writers before Confederation who is of note is perhaps Susanna Moodie, who began the tradition of rejection and survival in environmental delineation central to the Canadian imagination. As an immigrant, Moodie was ill-prepared for her encounter with the Canadian wilderness which frustrated her hopes time and again. Her writings were strictly local and autobiographical, describing her experiences in the bush around Peterborough and in the town of Belleville. Her Roughing It in the Bush; or, Forest Life in Canada is a faithful record of her setbacks and hardships in battling against the weary and disheartening Canadian backwoods. And this book became the fountainhead of Margaret Atwood's collection of poems, The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970), which "in its own way has become as much of a classic as Roughing It" (Bennett and Brown 94). For Moodie, and for most of her contemporaries as well, Canada was a region, a colony, an adopted country which constantly reminded her of Britain, her mother country. In her time, Moodie served as a colonist-tourist-writer who reported back to Europe the struggles and confrontations that she had in the far-away region of Canada. The sense of Canada as a remote region far from the centre of civilization is rife in the novel. Her incompetence in the face of the Canadian wilderness reinforces the mood of geographic isolation and cultural alienation which are perhaps the reason why regional description has ever since been yoked with a negative association. And in her writing, Moodie becomes a pioneer settler trapped in the remote wilderness of Canada. In an almost irksome tone, the writer addresses the land dealers as "speculators in the folly and credulity of your fellow-men":
[They] prominently set forth all the good to be derived from a settlement in the Backwoods of Canada; while they carefully concealed the toil and hardship to be endured in order to secure these advantages. […] They talked of log houses to be raised in a single day, by the generous exertions of friends and neighbours, but they never ventured upon a picture of the disgusting scenes of riot and low debauchery exhibited during the raising, or upon a description of the dwellings when raised—dens of dirt and misery, which would, in many instances, be shamed by an English pig-sty […]. (132)
Contrary to Moodie, Catherine Parr Traill, her older sister of the Strickland family, was exhilarated by her immigrant experience despite the hardships and adversity. Her The Backwoods of Canada, written in the epistolary form, chronicles her pioneer tasks in the Canadian wilderness. In this book, often regarded as her pioneer memoirs, Traill provides a highly realistic representation of the uninhabitable landscape bordering upon personal accounts. Together with Moodie's writing, Traill's settlement narratives preceded the pioneer novel in the 1920s by such prairie authors as Martha Ostenso, F. P. Grove, and Robert Stead. Like her sister, Traill also dwelled on regional details in her writing, such as the botanical descriptions, life in the bush, and so on. Her The Female Emigrant's Guide, and Hints on Canadian Housekeeping even gives most detailed instructions on emigrant life. Traill even weaves local history into her books, giving her writing a remarkably "regional" flavour.
In truth, most writings in the pre-Confederation era were characterized with regional themes and the notion of region was clearly evident in these writings. The names are too numerous to mention. For instance, Thomas Haliburton's series of The Clockmaker appeared as serial publications titled "Recollections of Nova Scotia" in The Novascotian in 1835. The Bluenose dialect permeates the books so that they are dismissed by critics as "provincial, […] rapid, […] and much enlivened with dry humour" (qtd. in New History 63). In The Clockmaker, through the conversation between the Squire and Sam Slick, the Yankee pedlar from Connecticut, the reader senses a strong regional consciousness:
This place is as fertile as Illanoy or Ohio, as healthy as any part of the globe, and right alongside of the salt water; but the folks want three things—Industry, Enterprise, Economy. These Bluenoses don't know how to vally this location; only look at it, and see what a place for bisness it is: the centre of the Province; the natural capital of the Basin of Minas, and part of the Bay of Funday; the great thoroughfare to St. John, Canada, and the United States; the exports of lime, gypsum, freestone, and grindstone; the dykes—but it's no use talkin'; I wish we had it, that's all. (163)
Regional concerns continued with the nationalist pace of Canada. With the establishment of the Dominion of Canada on July 1, 1867, regional conflicts became stronger, despite the fact that a new nation had just emerged from a miscellany of former British colonies. By the British North America Act, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Canada, the latter of which now divided into Ontario and Quebec, were united, and in the course of the next fifty years, new territories were carved out and absorbed in the Dominion: the acquisition of Rupert's Land and the North-West Territories in 1869, followed by the creation of the province of Manitoba in 1870, the admission of British Columbia in 1871, and Prince Edward Island in 1873, and finally the entry of two newly created provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta in 1905. W. H. New comments on the consequent regional strife in the post-Confederation years:
In practice it not only shaped Canada territorially, it also shaped many of the regional and ethnic tensions which continue to challenge the language and structures of Canadian power. Much of Canadian history at this time is bound up with the events that defined the national from the (centralist) perspective of Ontario and Quebec; coincidentally these same events, in particular railway-building and the Riel Rebellion, invited future challenges to centralist ideas. (A History 79)
The social milieu necessarily influenced the literary vogue, and with the further political polarization between centrality and periphery, writers were involved in their endeavour to shape the regions of their own. Many writers drew on local and historical particulars for literary inspiration. Many historical happenings became literary prototypes. The building of the Canadian Pacific Railway, the frontier theme, the Riel Rebellion, and the Great Depression have found their way into Western Canadian fiction. For instance, many writings were based on the Riel Rebellion, such as J. E. Collins The Story of Louis Riel (1885) and Annette the Métis Spy (1887). The Canadian West and North found their literary spokesmen in Charles Mair, Chalres William Gordon ("Ralph Cornor"), Nellie McClung, Robert Service, whereas Duncan Campbell Scott, in his In the Village of Viger, wrote about French Canada in the form of sketches and stories, to which readers "as late as the 1960s responded conventionally" and dismissed as "local colour" (New A History 124). Stephen Leacock, on the other hand, captured true glimpses of a small town in Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912), a series of stories based on his childhood experiences in Orillia, Ontario. And in Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich (1914), he "exposes how urban bourgeois provincialism accepts the form of fads and institutions without even appreciating the substance" (New A History 127). The names relating to literary regionalism are too many to enumerate, but their writings all shared a realistic interest in personal experiences, local details and regional histories.
A prominent author who persistently drew on regional interest was Charles G. D. Roberts. As one of the Confederation poets who inherited the lyrical romantic tradition of their British counterparts, he eulogized in his poetry and short stories the tidal flats and marshes and the fertile farmlands along the Tantramar region in New Brunswick. He afforded the Canadian regionalist tradition a detailed "psychological" presentation of beasts, fish, birds, and insects. In his The Last Barrier and Other Stories, the animals and insects are endowed with human reasoning and feelings, often finding themselves at odds with the menaces of survival from natural forces and enemies. Local settings recur in the stories, such as Nictau Lake, the Little Tobique, Bald Mountain, and Mamozekel. Charles G. D. Roberts is today relegated to oblivion by critics in Canada and he is only remembered as a poet. However, his animal stories register as the most subtle of their kind in not only his regional concern but also in his universal expression of human morality through the animal analogies. It is worthy of note that Roberts' stories, unlike those allegorical stories of Aesop and Anderson, who employ animal figures for didactic and satirical purposes, depict the animals from an animal perspective. Sometimes, the narrator assumes the identity of an eagle or a salmon. As Lucas comments, Roberts "owes little or nothing directly to these authors," because he "describes the adventures of a wild […] beast, and […] describes them from the animal's own point of view" (vi). Furthermore, Roberts sketches his nearest surroundings from his childhood and youth with a strong regional and sentimental nostalgia. The Darwinist depiction of animals in such unique landscape of New Brunswick is not immune from the rigidly realistic influence. What is significant is that Roberts "attempts to write of universal forces, love, innocence, exile, death, and the impact on such human experience of the local, wild, frontier of eastern New Brunswick, […] by creating a fable and then transcends it by symbolically rendering his materials into a genuine Canadian myth" (Gold i). He writes not only from memory but mainly from imagination, an obsession with the Canadian wilderness, albeit his stories are accused of inaccuracy and discrepancy. His animal biographies such as in "The Last Barrier" and "The King of Mamozekel" truly mirror the indigenous life of New Brunswick. Such stories, therefore, should by no means be confined to a naturalist or zoological construction. These biobehavioural sketches, indeed, reveal an utterance of human truth, the way of life of the maritime people against nature, which is a "busy mingling of comedy and tragedy, of mirth and birth and death, which makes the sum of life […] in the pastures" (Roberts, "Little Tyrant" 53).
The period from around Confederation to the 1940s saw the emergence of Canada's own literature, more often than not expressed in a regional concern. However, as David Staines points out, Canadian literature "began in earnest in the twenties of this [20th] century" (Crouched 262). During the intervening years between the two world wars, there arose many classics of regional literature, mainly in the form of realistic farm novels by Prairie writers, such as Ostenso's Wild Geese (1925), Stead's Grain (1926), and Grove's Settlers of the Marsh (1925). Nevertheless, despite what some critics view as the national consciousness of many authors, the first few decades of the post-Confederation period was characterized by a dire deficiency in readership, which inevitably involved a lack of serious criticism. Speaking in 1987, John Metcalf, who crowned himself as the Canadian literary curmudgeon, argued that "it isn't petulance to deplore in a population of 26 million an audience of .00385%" (Freedom 21). Even worse, publication was also difficult within Canada. Many of the authors got their works published south of the border. D. C. Scott's In the Village of Viger came out in 1896 but was not published in Canada until 1945. After a research in the publication of the authors such as D. C. Scott, Francis Sherman, and Archibald Lampman, John Metcalf came to the conclusion that the circulation of these authors' works was rare. For example, he found that Archibald Lampman's Lyrics of Earth had only 500 copies in print in 1895 out of which "36 bound copies and 194 sets of sheets remained unsold in May 1899" (Freedom 72). D. C. Scott's In the Village of Viger got reprinted in Canada between 1945 and 1969, but it "gives us a total sales figure in Canada of 400 copies in seventy-three years" (Freedom 73). The inadequacy of literary readership and publication, and insubstantial criticism that went on for so long, no doubt, accounted in part for the evaluative degradation of Canadian regional literature. It is not surprising that a critic like John Metcalf would totally deny the existence of a Canadian literature in a country where out of its total population of 26 million "one in five Canadians is illiterate" (Freedom 21).
Canadian literary regionalism has prospered since the 1940s, particularly in accompaniment to the rise and culmination of the nationalist movement in literature. The core of these decades' political, economic, and cultural struggles was the proverbial Canadian issue of identity. Incidentally, for a young nation like Canada, the assertion of nationhood is as much a promotion of its regional value as against the British imperialism and the American capitalism. Northrop Frye writes:
Similarly, the question of Canadian identity, so far as it affects the creative imagination, is not a 'Canadian' question at all, but a regional question. An environment turned outward to the sea, like so much of Newfoundland, and one turned towards inland seas, like so much of the Maritimes, are an imaginative contrast: anyone who has been conditioned by one in his earliest years can hardly become conditioned by the other in the same way. Anyone brought up on the urban plain of southern Ontario or the gentle pays farmland along the south shore of the St. Lawrence may become fascinated by the great sprawling wilderness of Northern Ontario or Ungava, may move there and live with its people and become accepted as one of them, but if he paints or writes about it he will paint or write as an imaginative foreigner. (Bush Garden, Preface i, ii)
Due to the discontent of the various regions within Canada in the face of the cultural and economic annexation of the United States, people in the decades following Confederation felt an urgent need to express Canada as a political unity. Therefore, politicians and writers alike made huge efforts to establish a sense of Canadian nationalism by identifying through their writings a clearly common Canadian experience. For example, Hugh MacLennan's Barometer Rising (1941) and George Grant's Lament for a Nation (1965) are generally acknowledged as noble efforts to define what Woodcock terms the sense of "Canadianness" (George 9).
However, even these nationalist writings have to depend on regional particulars to voice the "Canadianness" they are after. Hugh MacLennan's Barometer Rising shows an example of the re-appropriation of regional history. For instance, in his book, he fictionalizes the Halifax explosion in 1917 while offering a regional as well as national understanding of the consequences of the First World War. Time and place are condensed in this epitomization of the Nova Scotian city. As the hero stands on top of a hill and surveys the oval peninsula, he sees the details of Halifax dim in the fading light, such as the Citadel in the centre of the city and the park in the south, the Northwest Arm inlet in the west, the Stream in the east, the Narrows at the northern end of town, and the lake-like Bedford Basin, which "bulges around the back of the town" (4-5). Furthermore, the hero significantly recalls the history of the land, remembering the Great Glacier that "had once packed, scraped, and riven this whole land […] [and] had gouged out the harbour and left as a legacy three drumlins" (4). It is only then that he realizes that he "had forgotten how good they [the sights in view] were" (4).
Not only is the explosion story based on an authentic event, but the characters in the novel and their names are real, too. The story is a retelling of the history of Colonel Geofffrey Wain and his family. As Hugo Mcpherson points out in the Introduction to the novel, the "original Wain, we learn, was a British N. C. O. who came to Halifax with Cornwallis in 1749. In successive generations the Wains became the city's leading family, but they never learned to think of the country as worthy of them" (xi). Despite the true-to-life sketching of Halifax and its history and geography that MacLennan knew so well, the story and characters take on a symbolic import. George Woodcock argues that this is a pioneer historical novel in Canadian literature because "it was the earliest novel to deal in copious and clearly recognizable detail with a specific Canadian city" (Introducing Hugh MacLennan 19). Commenting on the real names adopted in the novel, the author states in the "Foreword":
Nova Scotia family names have, nevertheless, been employed; to avoid them would have been too definite a loss. Since there is no great variety in Scottish given names, the combinations are inevitably repetitious. The characters are, it is hoped, true to their background, and nothing more. (n. pag.)
Apart from that, the author shrewdly arranges the story in countdown form, starting on the Sunday before the event and ending on the following Monday. Each chapter covers a day and the titles of the chapters are the days themselves. Within each chapter, the author again sets up the plot in chronological order, thus tracing the history of Halifax to an accuracy of hours, chronicling the national and regional allegory to the utmost degree of geographic and historical verity. MacLennan's adoption of local details is a perfect illustration of the inseparability of nationalism from regionalism despite the nationalists' overriding concern for a typical expression of "Canadianness" in their literature.
The blooming of regional literature together with nationalism was not a coincidence, as both were the result of political and cultural policies that were sought to erect an identity for Canadian literature, internally and externally. Critics generally stress the external facet of the impact of nationalism while ignoring the fact that internally there was a very meager source of readership. The prosperity of regionalism in Canada was in part a result of the internal popularization of Canadian literature. To a certain extent, Canadian literature in the late fifties was a marginalized and hence regional literature. Margaret Atwood writes about readership in the period:
On the average, there were about five novels by Canadians published in Canada per year, and sales were doing very well if they reached a thousand copies […]. [I]f you published anything of a serious literary nature, anything at all, you would get reviewed somewhere, and you would be read by the hard-core Canadian Literature audience, which had a shirting population of about two hundred ("Northrop Frye" 402)
The Federal government adopted a series of cultural policies to promote the Canadian identity. In 1957, by the Canada Council Act, the Canada Council for Arts was established in order to foster and promote the production and circulation of works in the arts. The Canada Council funded a great number of artists in promotion of Canadian writing and publishing. Canadian literature began to be studied in universities for the first time. In 1954, CBC initiated a literature programme titled "Anthology" and Robert Weaver, critic, editor, and anthologist, acted as the producer. In addition, CBC Radio also organized CBC Wednesday Night and Canada Reads, to which many writers contributed, among whom were Len Peterson, W. O. Mitchell, Lister Sinclair, and so on. Canada Reads also featured novel reading, including the works of Margaret Laurence, Robert Kroetsch, Margaret Atwood, Carol Shields, and very recently, Hubert Aquin, Guy Vanderhaeghe, and Miriam Toews. The publishing industry also thrived under the financial auspices of the federal and provincial governments. Governor General's Awards were set up to encourage writing. What seemed paradoxical in this national development, however, was that although people felt the need to free themselves from colonialism and regionalism, there was a stronger continuation of literature that focused on a regional articulation. In the 1970s, both Northrop Frye and E. K. Brown felt that regionalism was a negative influence on Canadian literature. E. K. Brown, for instance, feared that "[i]n the end … regionalist art will fail because it stresses the superficial and peculiar at the expense, at least, if not to be exclusion, of the fundamental and universal" ("Problem" 21). Despite the widespread anti-regionalist sentiment, there occurred a great diversification and ramification of Canadian literature. A dozen new publishing houses were established with an eye to promoting national and regional literature, ECW, Anansi (1967), Oberon (1967), and Coach House (1965-1975) being some of the most successful ones(1). Innovative and productive regional literary magazines mushroomed, such as tish, talon, Alphabet, Mainline, Quarry Magazine, grOnk, Weed, and the like, and many writers contributed to these magazines. This small press ephemera and the emergence of literary magazines helped Canadian literature thrive in regional units and some of them were exclusively dedicated to the literary activity of small communities and groups. As Bennett and Brown observe, in the twentieth century, when people "become more aware of the difficulties of history, […] region challenges period as a way of understanding the shape of Canadian literature" (3).
Thus, while nationalist enthusiasts were endeavouring to construct a new monolithic Canadian unity in literature, a much stronger regional undercurrent was also rapidly flowing and swelling. As Indian Canadianist M. F. Salat comments, this "regional-national dialectical opposition in regard to the search for identity is the fall out of the vastly varying regional differences in terms of both the geography and the topography of different regions as well as of socio-cultural milieus of the regions" (Canadian Novel 12). E. K. Brown thus lauded the virtues of regionalism:
Regionalist art may be expected to possess certain admirable virtues. One of these is accuracy, not merely accuracy of fact, but accuracy of tone; and throughout our literature there has been a disposition to force the note, to make life appear nobler or gayer or more intense than Canadian life really is in its typical expressions. It would help us towards cultural maturity if we had a set of novels, or sketches, or memoirs that described the life of Canadian towns and cities as it really is, works in which nothing would be presented that the author had not encountered in his own experience. It should also be acknowledged that a warm emotion for one's petit pays can lead to very charming art, as in Stephen Leacock's humorous transposition of an Ontario town in his Sunshine Sketches. ("Problem" 21)
Frye's remarks on regionalism, too, are based on a simplistic construction of Canadian literary history in that he relied on the imaginative powers of literary creation, as he wrote in the "Conclusion" to A Literary History of Canada, "[l]iterature is conscious mythology: as society develops, its mythical stories become structural principles of storytelling, its mythical concepts, sun-gods and the like, become habits of metaphorical thought" (Bush Garden 232). He implied that English Canadian literature was severed from a mythological continuity and had to refer to a Canadian coinage. True as he is in stating that, he has neglected the shaping force of the environmental, social, and cultural elements on Canadian regionalism. Contrary to the play of imagination and mythic creation in literature, reality has performed a very critical role in Canadian regional writing. In some cases, the realistic strain of Canadian regional literature can be so persistent and pervading that the literary works ooze an entire environmental determinism and existentialism, as in Sinclair Ross's As For Me and My House, F P. Grove's Settlers of the Marsh and Over Prairie Trails, so much so that when the latter's In Search of Myself, a novel which highly fictionalized his own self through realist presentation, came out in 1946, it eerily won him the following year the Governor General's Award for non-fiction.
With the culmination of nationalism in 1967, in which year Canada celebrated its centenary, Canadian literary regionalism began to be characterized with a promotion of regionality. This period went hand in hand with the prosperity of postmodernism and other poststructuralist theories in the 1980s that celebrated particularity, individuation, and marginalization. Nationalist overgeneralizations of typical Canadian themes encountered strong critical interrogation, particularly from politicians and writers with an intense interest in cultural diversity and regional disparity. Thus Margaret Atwood's Survival (1972) came under fierce attack for her ambitious attempt to seek a literary unity. In the book, Margaret Atwood writes:
[Canadian literature is] a map, a geography of the mind. Our literature is one such map, if we can learn to read it as our literature, as the product of who and where we have been. We need such a map desperately, we need to know about here, because here is where we live. For the members of a country or a culture, shared knowledge of their place, their here, is not a luxury but a necessity. (18-9)
In reaction to the political celebration of diversity and difference, critics began to appeal for a re-evaluation of regionalism and a re-discovery of the universal aesthetics of regional truths. Thus writers moved away from over-generalizing themes of the common Canadian experience by cultivating a sense of "indigeneity" (Ashcroft et al. 135). With an awareness of the nation as what Margaret Atwood terms the "home ground, foreign territory" (Surfacing 11), writers resorted to the cultural ancestry of their regions, taking a strong interest in the folktales, legends, and history of the aboriginal peoples or Métis in hopes of discovering a deep rootedness in the land. Rudy Wiebe stands as a literary pioneer who shapes his regional identity by exploring the local history of his region. For Wiebe, the abundance of the Canadian past remains unexplored, and the richness of history dwells in the land itself. Born near Fairholme in northern Saskatchewan, the writer was fascinated by the unique landscape and the tales of the buffalo-hunting Plains Cree. As he states in an interview, "it seemed to me that when I looked at the past of where I was at […] there was as much past there as anywhere else in the world" (Melnyk 205). By going into the culture of the First Nations peoples and the Métis, Wiebe constructs a regional epic that often draws upon the oral tradition of the aboriginal culture, providing a unique way of perceiving the region and the nation as well. For Wiebe, indigeneity occupies a central position in serious literature and it is a key element in the promotion of cultural diversity. For example, his The Temptations of Big Bear (1973), which chronicles the disintegration of the Cree nation in the process of Canada's nation building, is a magnificent manifestation of regional culture. Furthermore, his unabated interest in the regional led to another novel, The Scorched-Wood People (1977), in which he took up the famous Louis Riel Métis Uprising of 1885 again, providing a unique delineation of the cultural landscape of western Canada. Wiebe's The Temptations of Big Bear, like MacLennan's Barometer Rising, follows strictly chronological order, depicting in six chapters events from September 13, 1876 to January 17, 1888. Wiebe's writing of these novels is clearly a disruption of the nationalist imperative for a homogeneous Canadian unity. In fact, in the process of writing, the author made investigations into the history of the Indian tribes, historical documents, government archives, personal reminiscences and memoirs, newspapers, and interviews. For Wiebe, official records about Big Bear and Louis Riel are biased and tainted with a stance that mirrors the value system of the institution. In his artistic remolding of historical events, Wiebe resorts to his power of invention. The writer prefaces the novel with a declaration that all the real characters, dates, events are "products of a particular imagination" (n. pag.). Sometimes Wiebe even "has to create appropriate documents. Occasionally, this is rendered unavoidable because of an unfortunate gap in the historical evidence" (Keith, Art 67). In doing so, Wiebe embraces a new post-nationalist cultural identity of Canada through his regional articulation of cultural diversity. As Salat comments, Wiebe's reuse of local history is an act of "acknowledging and accepting the disowned indigenous cultural ancestry" (Rudy Wiebe 98). His defiance of the official records of Big Bear functions not to overthrow the dominant national ideology and provide "an alternative monologic vision" (Toorn 100), but to contribute to the polyglossia of literary discourse through a regional enunciation. By allowing for the play of the othered voice, regionalist literary text about suppressed history elevates the marginalized voices to an empowered station, posing a challenge to the political ethos of the centre, thus enacting a subversion of the notion of literary cosmpolitanism that governs the monologic hierarchy of pro-nationalist Canadian discourse.
The revival of regionalism in the 1980s and 1990s was revolutionary in that it brought about a reversal of literary centrism and ushered in a new age in which writers celebrated regional writing. The socio-political greenhouse that contributed to the rejuvenation of regionalism—indeed, regionalism had never before been enjoying a favourable reputation due to the concepts of parochialism and centrifugalism that were always coupled to it—was Canada's adoption of the multicultural policy in 1971. Furthermore, in 1988, the Parliament passed the Multiculturalism Act of Canada, with a view to promoting the multicultural heritage of Canada. The adoption of multicultural policies was originally aimed at invigorating the plural pulses of Canadian ethnic groups, and its impact was far-reaching and profound. Unlike the "melting-pot" situation of the United States, multiculturalism is a move further towards cultural pluralism that decentralizes the domination of unity, and it is a process of engaging diversity as different yet equal. This framework for the full and equal participation of minority groups and individuals through the removal of discriminatory, institutional, cultural and structural barriers served as a backup for regional polyphony in Canadian literature, at the heart of which, in the spirit of multiculturalism, is the ideology of unity within diversity and a recognition of diversity as the very Canadian identity. This belief in diversity further led to not only an autonomy of regional consciousnesses in literature but also a balkanization of the country into further regions that worked on ethnic division rather than geographic disparity. The multicultural policy brought about a splintering of Canada in sectionalized forms such as geography, race, sex orientation, rural and urban differences, and so on. Political and economic differences came to the fore in the wake of the nationalist frenzy in the 1970s. Such heterogeneous cultural celebrations eventually gave rise to a surge of separatist movements. Western alienation led to the founding of the Western Canada Concept, a separatist group headed by Douglas Christie, who aimed to achieve independence of the four western provinces "in the realization that reform in Canada [was] really impossible." Apart from Parti Quebecois, there emerged other separatist groups(2). In the literary scene, writers became more and more devoted to regional themes. Rudy Wiebe retained a continued interest in the local history of the Native peoples of the North. His The Mad Trapper (1980) chronicles the mystery of the sharpshooter Albert Johnson on Rat River. In this story, Albert Johnson becomes isolated from society and turns to violence and is in turn hunted by the Northern people. Wiebe's interest in the Franklin expedition is also seen in A Discovery of Strangers (1994), and Playing Dead: a Contemplation Concerning the Arctic (1989). Likewise, Jack Hodgins, born in 1938 in a small farming and logging town called Melville, on Vancouver Island, is dedicated to his birthplace. In his The Invention of the World (1977) and The Resurrection of Joseph Bourne (1979), Hodgins not only adumbrates the landscape of the beautiful Vancouver Island and the Comox Valley but also weaves history, tales and legends of the island into his literary fabrics so much so that Hodgins's novels are encircled in a strong halo of magic realism. His later novels, such as Innocent Cities (1990) and The Macken Charm (1995) continue to explore the local mystery of isolation and communication, thus linking local settings with cosmopolitan and universal scenes of humanity.
A recent novel of prominence which draws on regional themes is Miriam Toews' award-winning A Complicated Kindness (2004), set in East Village, a Mennonite community near Winnipeg. Written in first-person narrative, the novel is an autobiographical account of the author's own region. In the novel, Nomi Nickel, the adolescent protagonist, unfolds to the reader the falling apart of her family under the reign of religious fundamentalism and her own emotional crises due to the departure of her mother Trudie Nickel and her sister Tash. Under the oppressive rules of fundamentalism, Nomi's family are all excommunicated from the suffocating Mennonite community which Nomi describes as "the most embarrassing sub-sect of people to belong to if you're a teenager" (5). In spite of all this, Nomi is unable to flee the bleak town of East Village, which "is the name of the area in New York city that I would most love to inhabit" (5). The story presents a stifling atmosphere of geographic and spiritual isolation in East Village:
This town is so severe. And silent. It makes me crazy, the silence. I wonder if a person can die from it. The town office building has a giant filing cabinet full of death certificates that say choked to death on his own anger or suffocated from unexpressed feelings of unhappiness. Silentium. People here just can't wait to die, it seems. It's the main event. The only reason we're not all snuffed at birth is because that would reduce our suffering by a lifetime. (4-5)
The narrator tells us that she "would love to read the diary of a girl my age—a girl from the city. Or a textbook on urban planning. Or a New York City phone book." (6). The writer deliberately draws on her own biographical details to construct this fictional world in her story so that truth and fiction are perfectly wedded to resist a clear definition of the genre of the writing. Real place names occur in the novel, such as the Mennonite heritage village, a major tourist attraction in Canada. Indeed, Toews herself objects to the book being classified as a novel. Rather, she has "described it as a series of linked vignettes" ("Teacher's Guide"). Such a thorough adherence to regional particulars not only overthrows the boundary between fact and fiction but also defies traditional prejudice against region, enthroning it as the centre of literary artifice.
Indeed, the regionalist force seems to have been ever strengthening amidst the concomitant accusation of its limitedness in scope and lack of universal interest or significance. And contemporary writers who delight in rural settings and narration of the seemingly local events abound, such as David Adams Richards, Alistair MacLeod, Joan Clark, Gabrielle Roy, Guy Vanderhaeghe, Robert Kroetsch, Jane Urquhart, Sharon Butala, Robert Currie, Ken Mitchell, and so on. However, as Canadian literature moves on in the larger context of multiculturalism which celebrates diversity and difference rather than homogeneity and sameness, regionalism in literature will continue to blossom with the writers' concern for the universal themes of humanity through the microcosmic lens of region and community.
II. The Problems with Regionalism: Politics and Canonicity
Although general critical opinions towards regionalism have always been predominantly inclined towards an effacement of its local trivialities, the seemingly local, parochial, and provincial preference has been tenacious on the part of the writers. Such a divided stance concerning regionalism results, to some extent, from a difference in attitude towards the needs and objectives of Canadian literature itself, a not-so-rare phenomenon consequent upon the literary nascence and growth of a country like Canada that is finding itself wrestling with issues of (post-)colonialism, (post-)Confederalism, (post-)modernism, and the like. The politicization of literature inevitably subjected Canadian literature to self-definitive ambitions and aspirations. Critical assessment of Canadian literature and regional writing has always been conducted under a burden of political self-expressiveness and under the pretence of anti-imperialism and post-colonialism. A scan of the political scene that has been carrying on in Canada since the 1960s will reveal the weight of politicization of literary production in molding a nation's literature known as Canadian. The politicization of literary production not only found way into the institution of critical criteria but also into issues of canonicity. These necessitate the value judgment of regionalism against universalism, nationalism against internationalism, and further involves organized governmental and institutional efforts in literary and cultural mass production such as the small press phenomenon in the 1970s and mass media collaborations.
Canonicity works on the premises of artistic and literary maturity, which is in itself the source of much controversy in Canada. For David Staines, Canadian literature came of age in the 1920s, whereas John Metcalf, a somewhat cynic and poignant critic as well as poet and novelist, holds "most Canadian writing up until 1950" as "rubbish" (What 9), and furthermore, as he comments rather belligerently, the primary concern for the critics has been "'Canadian-ness' rather than quality" (What 9), and "[n]ot much has changed in the last forty years; one still hears in 1987 the same dreary tunes one hears in 1947" (What 10). To what extent does the validity of these remarks hold is another bone of contention; however, Metcalf is uttering a grain of truth about the politics of the literary text. Neither (inter-)nationalism nor regionalism was acquitted of the process of politicization. In effect, nationalism itself is a nation-wide regionalism as it strives to attain cosmopolitanism as embodied by great "central" literatures from New York, London and Paris. The basic innuendo of literary nationalism is that Canada is the margin, the periphery, the outskirts of culture and it must rid itself of its colonial status, a regional significance secondary to the centers of U.S. and Britain. Metcalf writes on the de-marginalization of Canada's regional/national literature:
The pros and cons of a Canadian literature have been dancing the same ritual dance for close to a hundred years: parochial against universal, nationalist against internationalist, sturdy modest Canadian against smarmy cosmopolitan with brilliantined hair. It is all rather tedious. And none of it, of course, has much to do with literature. In all these debates, the real subject is the politics of Canadian sovereignty. (What 9)
Frank Davey also argues that regionalism is not only an ideological form of response to the nation-state, but also should be "perceived as a production of the nation-state and as partly serving the nation-state's interests" ("Toward" 5).
Regionalism in Canada has been regarded as an impediment that fetters the development of national literature, and it is associated quite unfavourably with parochialism or provincialism, tinted with a rural, peripheral color, lacking in "cosmopolitan breadth" (MacMechan 237), and in "the outstanding achievements of human thought and genius" (Stevenson 4). As Pryse argues, "the cultural processes of canon and nation formation have combined to marginalize or suppress regionalist writing" (19). Hugh MacLennan, a literary pioneer of nationalist themes, lamented the hindrance of regionalism to Canadian literature: "[I]s Canadian society so undeveloped, so close to pioneer origin, so innocent that its problems and spiritual crises can have little significance for the rest of humanity? In brief, is Canadian literature doomed to lie half stagnant in the backwaters of regionalism?" ("Canada" 362) For MacLennan, the "obvious, and only, answer to this problem is for Canadian writers to stop writing regional novels, […] and permit themselves only universal themes, if they hope to reach a world audience and take their place in the branch cycle of American literature" ("Canada" 367). Obviously, MacLennan was far more concerned about the peripheral status of Canadian literature as a whole than about the regional variety within. Canadian writers, in the view of MacLennan, should refrain from local themes but adhere to themes of universal significance, the latter suggesting themes that no longer bear traces of the Canadian consciousness. MacLennan defined literary regionalism as "a theme which is derived solely from the locale of the story, in which costumes, dialect, characters, beliefs, prejudices, and folkways form the core of the whole book" ("Canada" 365). Nevertheless, in MacLennan's criteria, there are serious regional novels and those that are not. Basically, any novel that is derived from a locale is regional, but what distinguishes a serious novel from others is, according to MacLennan, "a source of conflict produced by a condition largely of local origin" ("Canada" 366). For MacLennan, this sort of regional novel is inevitable as a result of its "scientific approach to life, the approach which breaks down the whole into its component parts and studies them at leisure" ("Canada" 366). At the core of this type of regionalism is the novelist as sociologist who captures scenes of everyday life with his candid camera and unfolds before his viewer an unadulterated graphic representation of reality.
E. K. Brown, the first influential Canadian literary critic, also remarked in 1944 that regionalism was a force "which tells against the immediate growth of a national literature" ("On Canadian Poetry" 332), thus reducing regionalism to something that militated against a national uniformity in literature. He warned the public of "the dangers of regionalism," saying that "our literature may be expected to become emphatically regionalist" ("Problem" 16). E. K. Brown feared that political allegiance to Britain and economic penetration of the U. S. might render Canada vulnerable to the cultural annexation of both, particularly the latter. In social life, the study of literature and the assertion of Canada's literary selfhood were closely intertwined with efforts in other fields. Political campaigns were launched and cultural endeavours were made in order for Canada to emerge as a new nation. The affiliation of Newfoundland to Confederation in 1949 and the adoption of the Maple Leaf Flag in 1964 precipitated a nation-wide urge for Canada's identity. The pre-nationalist era of Canadian literature already saw the need to rid itself of what Northrop Frye termed the "garrison mentality" (Bush Garden 225). On the contrary, A. J. M. Smith, in examining the merits of Canadian books on poetry in the 1940s, scrutinized the quality of publication while challenging the pretension of a unifying Canadian voice in literature. Furthermore, Smith questioned the legitimacy of a preference for regional manifestations of a national literary diversity. He obliterated the boundaries between a national and a regional literature, and instead drew attention to the artistic values of literature, a set of standards that were believed to be capable of gauging the sympathetic and intelligent accomplishments of Canadian poets and story-tellers. According to Sutherland, these standards "must be rigorously enforced; all work printed will be examined to the best of our ability not in the light of a dubious nationalism or regionalism, not in obeisance to 'big Canadian names' or so-called national traditions, but in respect to that general cosmopolitan culture to which we all adhere" (353).
Controversies over the limitations of regionalism have plagued literary historians and have given rise to debates about the canonicity of regional writing. Regionalism is conventionally deemed to be virtually tantamount to literary transience, superficiality and triviality. However, with respect to the spatial continuum of regionalism, one has to ask the question whether local settings have legitimacy in literary creation. Does literature have to be set in a somehow important city such as Paris, London, or in a place with mass popularity and familiarity, or if neither, in a place with a bit of history, certainly not a new immigrant town rising out of the wilderness? Evidently, all literatures arise from a certain locality and the setting of a literary work does not in the least determine the value of the work. Geographic remoteness, for example, does not stand in the way of a literary work to becoming an artistic piece of universal significance. All literature is ontologically regional and no literature can transcend the place out of which it rises. James Joyce's Dubliners depicts the characters and events of a regional place as much as Willa Cather's O, Pioneers! does her own region. So do Jack Hodgins' The Invention of the World and Robert Currie's Night Games. In terms of spatiality, regionalism is endowed with a political and ideological ostentation that positions certain literary works on the circumference of that which is deemed central. The distinction of hinterland and heartland literatures only locates the writing itself within a framework of political power relationships. Furthermore, regionalism seems to be widening its sphere of action in recent time. Anthologies appear based on provincial boundaries rather than geographic distinctions. The substitution of political, economic, and ideological differentiation of regionalism further complicates the regionalism that traditionally worked on territorialization. Anthologization begins to assume a social, political, and historical pregnancy. The understanding of "Maritime" and "Prairie" literatures has shifted in abeyance from geographic sectionalism to political and provincial divisionism whose core question is identity, and anthologies of this kind are too numerous to mention(3).
The fear of the trivial and superficial nature of regional topics also pulls the subject into a quagmire of political ideology. William Faulkner was dedicated to his own region, the deep South, particularly in the imaginary county of Yoknapatawpha, just as was Stephen Leacock to his Mariposa, and Margaret Laurence to her Manawaka, etc. Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha is a microcosmic South, distressed with moral decay and anguish, abuse and violence, tragedy and squalor, thus rendering the entire novel a humanist concern for universal welfare and compassion. And so are the settings of Leacock, Laurence, and other writers. Stephen Leacock, for example, in his satirical Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town and Arcadian Adventures sketches an antithesis of a small Ontario town and a mechanized American city. The two regional places are contrasted in such a way that we perceive them not only as two places, but as two prototypes that present the Canadian and the American lives. Leacock ridicules the leisurely pace and indolence of the lack-lustre Mariposa people in contrast to the hustle and bustle of Plutoria. The caustic treatment of the human folly at Mariposa and Plutoria falls nothing short of a universal significance. The dramatic, pastoral, and idyllic jauntiness of Mariposa as against the materialistic ambition of Plutoria qualifies the work itself as a literary masterpiece. Stephen Leacock comes in the same literary strain with his Nova Scotian predecessors Thomas McCulloch and Thomas Haliburton, the latter of whom also satirizes the lack of energy and enterprise of the Bluenoses of Nova Scotia. However, it is remarkable that the writers themselves are self-consciously sarcastic. In other words, what lends their works a regional semblance is their parochial and provincial tone of voice or vision in narration rather than the temporal or geographic significance. As David Stouck argues, "Haliburton had a simple propagandistic motive for publishing The Clockmaker sketches: he wanted to arouse his countrymen to the need for agricultural and commercial reforms" (5). Leacock had about the same regional vision when he wrote Sunshine Sketches:
The rest of the world can erect its great monumental literary images all it wants, Leacock suggests, but look for a moment at what happens when we try to cast ourselves in such Great Moments. We end up looking foolish. And we know how foolish we look. Furthermore, we like ourselves for it all the same! (Hodgins 188)
Clearly, the problem with regionalism is not a question of literature itself, nor of literariness. Regionalism has been guised with a political coating that embodies systems of value in terms of colonial binary oppositions such as cosmopolitan and regional, profound and superficial, central and rural, pastoral and commercial, universal and provincial, nostalgic and prospective. Hence Northrop Frye is right in saying that regionalism stems from a "garrison mentality," if we employ the term in that derogatory sense. In more accurate terms, regionalism is a concept steeped in the muddy water of politics, ideology, history, and economy. Meanwhile, one should also bear in mind that regionalism, devoid of its political guise and emotional coloring, is exactly what some contemporary critics and writers are after. Therefore, all charges against regionalism heedless of its colonial mentality, political pregnancy, national or regional consciousness, would be extraneous and irrelevant. Geographic, historical, and social parameters and elements in Canadian literature should by no means be listed as the true hindrance to nationalism. And it is due to this that we see the validity of putting the problematic political, rather than geographic regionalism, into a larger context of colonialism and post-colonialism.
Furthermore, the concept of literary regionalism is constantly on the move, ramifying into a variety of side issues. The pre-Confederation and nationalist regionalisms are impregnated with colonial concerns, whereas the post-nationalist regionalism stresses difference, whether historical, social, political, or, in a single word: cultural. The significant yet insidious shift from unity to difference marks a new form of literary regionalism in Canadian literature. This change also entails a shift in focus from external regionalism to internal regionalism. The term external regionalism, or nationalistic regionalism, is used to mean the regionalism that attempts to enunciate Canada's post-colonial stance, and internal regionalism is used to suggest an introverted writing of the region, a transfer from reference to introspection and even to narcissism. Similarly, Frank Davey makes a distinction between visible and invisible regionalisms in his political study of literary regionalism. He argues that visible regionalisms are "those most frequently constructed in anthologies and criticism, and most successfully publicized and commodified as regionalism both outside and within the geographic areas they claim to regionalize" ("Toward" 5). For instance, Southern Ontario regionalism functions as a successful yet invisible regionalism, virtually passing itself as the "Canadian nationalism […], or as an internationalism" ("Toward" 6). Meanwhile, as Davey goes on to argue, "[r]egionalisms can also be internally successful without meeting similar external success. This usually occurs when the regionalism is more a self-production than a production of the nation state" ("Toward" 6). West Coast and Prairie regionalisms have been internally successful in constructing a distinctive regional literary edifice, but they have not had a considerable contribution to the building of an (inter-)national literary landmark. Davey gives some more examples of unsuccessful visible regional writers from British Columbia, such as Howard White, Gerry Gilbert, Peter Trower, Barry McKinnon, the reason for whose inability to achieve extra-regional fame is that they are "most self-consciously regional" ("Toward" 6).
With regard to the canonization of Canadian literature, critics convened several times with a view to solving the national/regional conflict, such as the conferences in Vancouver in 1956, in Fredericton in 1970, in Calgary in 1973, in Banff in 1978, and in Regina in 1979. Most notably, in 1978, the Calgary Conference on the Canadian Novel was held to appraise the literary performance of Canada's national literature. The participants of the conference were asked to choose "the most 'important' one hundred works of fiction," "the most important ten novels," and "the most important ten works of various genres" (Steele 150). Such an explicit canonization incurred the complaint of many critics. As Ronald Sutherland argues, such politicized manipulation "was an unfortunate and misguided gimmick and that the decision of ECW PRESS to publicize it further is a disservice to Canadian writing" (qtd. in Steele, 150-1). Nevertheless, there were two noticeable things on the ballot list, namely, most of the novels listed would be called regional according to our standard and the topic of regionalism was reconsidered by critics and writers from a perspective different from that of E. K. Brown and Northrop Frye. Eli Mandel proposed the question of "rethinking the values of regional writing in the light […] of contemporary achievement" ("Regional Novel" 105). Robert Kroetcsh came up with a list of the novels "I/We shouldn't/can't avoid" ("Contemporary" 16). Among them were "[t]he region as novelist[,] Sinclair Ross, Buckler, Grove: in the sense that they are written by place, by weather" ("Contemporary" 17). Although the Calgary Conference reeked of a banausic infamy of literary pragmatism and utilitarianism, critics, though only a few in number, started to give credit to a regionalism that had long been committed to negligence and dismissed as a malignant presence in the face of national literature.
If the voice for regionalism was only faint and inaudible in the 1970s and 1980s, by the mid-1990s there had already emerged a regional sonority that resounded with the particularity and difference of the regional as opposed to the orchestral symphony of miscellany. In spite of the further charges from critics like W. J. Keith of regionalism being too astray from mainstream Canadian literature, Canadian literature began to move on "from identity to hybridity" (Godard 209). As Herb Wyile writes in his 1996 article, "with the concept of the monolithic nation-state on the wane, and with artists and academics becoming increasingly anti-centric and sensitive to the importance of difference and particularity, the way is being paved for a revival of sorts for regionalism" ("Writing" 10). As a result, works celebrating regional literatures began to emerge as of the late 1980s. And critics start to focus on the writing of their own regions and find the aesthetic and literary values(4) previously suppressed by the nationalist discourse. The celebration of regional literary tradition and continuity has brought about numerous critical books on regional literature, as are exemplified in Janice Kulyk Keefer's Under Eastern Eyes: A Critical Reading of Maritime Fiction (1987), George Mylnk's The Literary History of Alberta (1998), and Robert Wardhaugh's Toward Defining the Prairies: Region, Culture and History (2001). Literary journals also play a more active role in promoting regionalism. Canadian Literature, a quarterly journal initiated by George Woodcock, himself a staunch regionalist, has devoted a series of issues to the subject of regionalism since the 1990s, covering Newfoundland literature, Northern literature, Maritime literature, and others. No wonder Eli Mandel announces that "the traditional framework of regions is no longer adequate as a basis for discussion of Canadian society for a simple reason. It no longer exists" ("Regional Novel" 120).
III. Regionalism and Critical Interrogation
One of the issues that engage critical attention is the persistence of realism in regional literature. In a regionalist text, geographic depictions are usually provided in great detail and historical events find their way into the text with a tremendous faithfulness and even the characters sometimes bear a strict semblance to reality. The persistence of realism in Canadian regional writing has evoked vehement critical interrogation as well as laudatory remarks. Many critics have mixed feelings about the prevalence of realism in Canadian literature. While bemoaning its stark faithfulness to reality and its artistic inadequacy in "documenting Canadian customs" (Henighan, "Writing" 33), most critics paradoxically acknowledge its inevitability considering the political, social, cultural, and regional circumstances of reality. Such a mood has had so profound an impact on the Canadian consciousness that it has given birth to a multitude of realisms based on different regions, such as urban realism, prairie realism, etc. The regionalist adherence to realism has been so strong that there also exists a naturalist and environmentalist touch in many regional novels such as those of Robert Stead, Sinclair Ross, Henry Kreisel, and Frederick Philip Grove. Writing in 1975, George Bowering blamed the dominant presence of realism on the "good old puritanism" (525) that arose from man's confrontation with the bitter environment and from his survival instinct in the face of the Canadian cold and wild. While accusing Canadian writers of their preference for the realistic mode of story-telling, Bowering admitted that realism was useful because it could reflect the "values and culture of the Canadian people" (526). He wrote:
So in frozen Prince Albert and Toronto Dominion the reviewers pick up a language-centred novel, sniff it, and say, this must have been fun to write, but it is frivolous. Or the university critics open a story about joining the seal herd, and set about fitting it into the theme of survival, or was that Canada as a northern people, or could this one be the garrison mentality? That is, if you can convince yourself that literature is really sociology, you can anabolize your Canadian citizenship. (526)
Eli Mandel also identifies two most distinguishing features of a regional writing, namely, accuracy in description, and the poetic power of the author in evoking the environmental forces in his work. Therefore, he feels the need to preserve realism and insists on "the presence of a limited and peculiar environment accurately described" ("Images" 47).
Obviously, as a result of the regionalist persistence in the realistic mode of representation, geographic elements become the soul of many regional writings. In a regionalist text, the writer tends to re-create the proximity and immediacy of the physical world he is in touch with, thus the spatiotemporal values of the region in his proxity and the folk ways of the people are fictionalized and condensed in the text. In effect, place asserts itself as a prototype in the regionalist text through which the author reveals his passions and sensibilities for his region. The region with which the author empathizes usually transforms into a symbolic place which recurs time and again in a constellation of his works so much so that the author identifies with the fictional place he creates. Examples of this abound. Mariposa recurs in Stephen Leacock's stories as an epitome of a small Ontario town where the inhabitants view the place just as important as any other big city in the world. The people of the town are extremely proud of their own accomplishments and see some of the buildings of Main Street as of "extraordinary importance" (14). To them, Mariposa possesses a vision far beyond the "shortsightedness which is seen in the cramped dimensions of Wall Street and Piccadilly. Missinaba Street is so wide that if you were to roll Jeff Thorpe's barber shop over on its face it wouldn't reach half way across" (14). As the author claims in the Preface to Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town:
Mariposa is not a real town. On the contrary, it is about seventy or eighty of them. You may find them all the way from Lake Superior to the sea, with the same square streets and the same maple trees and the same churches and hotels, and everywhere the sunshine of the land of hope. (x)
Likewise, Agassiz is a small Manitoba town that persists in Sandra Birdsell's novels as well as short stories. The fictional town of Agassiz is named after Lake Agassiz, a glacial lake south of Winnipeg near the town of Morris, Birdsell's birthplace. Birdsell depicts the town and its people in her novels and stories from the viewpoint of an insider and the choice of the place name rings a mythical resonance by the author's allusion to the prehistoric times of Lake Agassiz. In fact, aside from fictionalization of the place, real places also emerge in regional writing, such as Ken Mitchell's Moose Jaw, David Adams Richards' Mirimichi Valley, Ernest Buckler's Annapolis Valley, Lucy Maud Montgomery's Prince Edward Island, and so forth.
When Linda Hutcheon remarks on the rise of postmodernism in Canada in the seventies and eighties, she acknowledges simultaneously "the continued strong presence of traditional realist fiction by Morley Callaghan, Robertson Davies, Hugh MacLennan, W. O. Mitchell, and others" (Canadian Postmodern 1). Stanley Fogel shares Hutcheon's view by pronouncing that in Canadian literature metafiction is "almost completely absent" (8). George Bowering also notes in "Modernism Could Not Last Forever" the tenacity of realism and naturalism in Canadian fiction: "There have always been writers of other orders for the imagination, but our critical, pedagogical, and popular awards have been reserved for authors who seek to reproduce in words the lives of real Canadians in real Canadian settings" (524). For Bowering, modernism or realism is a quality inherent in second-rate regionalism. Furthermore, he labels writers such as Michael Ondaatje and Leonard Cohen, whom Linda Hutcheon and Robert Kroetsch esteem as postmodern writers sophisticated in skill and style, as "a few other post-realists" (525). Yet he goes on to say: "But a new realist, especially a woman or a regionalist, will be welcomed into the literary fold quickly, even on the basis of a book that is rather humble in the matter of art" (525). Fortunately enough, into this category that Bowering proposes many women writers could easily fit. Commenting on Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women, James Polk attributes the success of the short fiction to its very regionality, heaping laudatory remarks on her depiction of small-town Ontario and its "social myths from the bottom up" (102). For Polk, Munro's Jubilee is a hybrid of "Faulkner's Jefferson and Wuthering Heights" (103). Thus, Munro's universality is well achieved through her regional expression of the fictional town of Jubilee. Although her writing is predominantly realistic in nature, her work is not in the least lacking in artistry and sophistication. Miriam Toews' novel A Complicated Kindness (2004) stands as a perfect example of realist fiction, but the author's universal concern for humanity is in no way harmed by her regional expression through the small Mennonite community of East Village. Writing in 2005, Bowering again voiced his strong disapproval of realism in regional literature, regarding it as an "anachronism" (qtd. in Good) that he has battled most of his life. For Bowering, the existence of regionalism is a hindrance to Canada's advance on postmodernism. Commenting on the premises of the best writing, he holds that "[i]f you want to be a regional writer, the region has to be a mental creation, a consciousness of place, not an actual setting with any kind of objective reality" (Good). However, George Woodcock remains a staunch defendant of "Canadian realism," regarding it as "a distinctly local manifestation of the great tradition" (George 137). Denying the charges that Canadian realism is impoverished in creativity, Woodcock terms this Canadian variant of realism "neo-realism" (George 135), because it "depends on imagination as much as on invention, on creation as much as on observation" (George 136).
Whereas George Bowering deplores the prevalence of realism in art in Canada and advocates the rule of postmodernism, W. J. Keith is a major naysayer. The reasons for his reservations about postmodernist theories in the Canadian context are threefold: the opacity of the theory that leads to an obfuscation of meaning, the "clumsy inflexibility" resulting from the theory's emphasis on "labels and categories," the pomposity and "pedantic over-intellectualism" (Independent 95) that eliminates and diverts a textual focus. Keith interrogates the potency of postmodernism by arguing that "the post-modernist movement in literature represents not so much a discovery of new methods and approaches as a re-exploration—even re-colonization—of the terrain that has been identified and roughly charted long ago" (Independent 97). The indeterminacy of boundaries in postmodernist writing contributes to a somewhat ambiguous demarcation between modernism and postmodernism. Keith employs the major postmodern qualities to analyze fictions spanning a range of around 60 years from the 1920s to the 1980s and reveals the problematic establishment of postmodernism against modernism. For instance, Keith finds F. P. Grove's A Search for America (1927) a postmodernist exemplum. The fiction (even this label resists the exact categorization of the writing itself) stands as "an elusive, playful text, [a] product of the artist as trickster" (Independent 100). The boundary between fact and fiction is blurred and the author takes delight in flourishing its complexity of intertextuality. Into this category Keith also puts such novels as Robertson Davies' Fifth Business (1970), Howard O'Hagan's Tay John, W. O. Mitchell's Who Has Seen the Wind, and others. Based on his scrutiny of postmodernism, Keith concludes that postmodernism is inadequate for Canadian literature and that Canadian literature is still largely modernist. However, like George Bowering, he acknowledges that there "would certainly contain a post-modernist element" (Independent 106). And the final label that he attaches to the literature of the last generation or so is "late twentieth-century," as opposed to "early twentieth-century" literature, with a strong innuendo of modernist continuity.
Yet, in critical assessment of literary regionalism in Canada, postmodernism has surreptitiously and vicariously posed itself as a criterion for the maturity of a nation's literature, and regionalism in particular is deemed as an impediment to the growth of postmodernism because of its photographic realism. In spite of the dispute over postmodernism, there is further critical confusion over the presence of modernism in Canadian literature. For some critics, the existence of modernism is also problematic in Canada, which, in the common view, is all but a cultural backwater resistant, if not impervious, to unconventional thoughts and trends. As Charles G. D. Roberts observes, "[t]o Canada modernism has come more slowly and less violently than elsewhere" ("Note" 298). Louis Dudek also sympathizes with Roberts and suggests a belated staging of modernism in the Canadian literary scene: "As for modernism in Canada, it was finished before we got there. We never looked into the eye of the storm" (41). For Robert Kroetsch, modernism was or is nonexistent in Canada at all, as he asserts in a quite controversial manner:
Canadian literature evolved directly from Victorian into Postmodern. Morley Callaghan went to Paris and met the Modern writers; he, for Canada, experienced the real and symbolic encounter; he, heroically and successfully, resisted. The country that invented Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye did so by not ever being Modern. ("Canadian Issue" 1)
It is no sign of sagacity to pronounce a verdict on the contention, but what merits our attention is the controversial, paradoxical, and problematic nature of the relationship between Canadian literature and regionalism, in which the latter always performs the role of a latent subterranean under cutter, sabotaging the institutionalization of a monolithic literary pantisocracy of fixity, homogeneity, and finality.
Despite what George Bowering and W. J. Keith remark on the deficiency or irrelevancy of postmodernism in the Canadian context, one has to be wary of slipping into a tilted conservatism towards regionalism as strictly realistic, trivial, superficial, liminal, primitive, and outdated. This latter stigma of regionalism fails to accommodate the persistence, if not tenacity, of twenty-first century regionalism in Canada. Meanwhile, it is also a sign of flamboyant pageantry to assert the prevalence of postmodernism in the Canadian literary milieu. In reality, there is an intense continuity of photographic realism and transparency in new regionalist fictions. For instance, in Ken Mitchell's 2003 novel The Adventures of Donny Coyote(5), the fictional world of Moose Jaw is a truthful reflection of the small prairie town. Even real street and store names enter into Mitchell's book, such as Thunder Creek, Connaught Avenue, Thunderbird Viaduct, Cansave Recycling Depot, etc., making the novel almost a photographic representation of the real town, which, Donny Coyote, the Moose Jaw Superman or the chivalric Don Quixote in the 21st century, calls "a place of exile and a place of comfort, a place to gather his wits and resources before once again making a stand against the world's injustice and cruelty" (410). Besides, there are more novels in recent years that persist in the realist tradition, such as Tom Bentley's Blind Man's Drum (2002), Wayne Arthurson's Final Season (2002), Harold Johnson's Billy Tinker (2001), and Sandra Birdsell's Manitoba novels The Missing Child (1989), The Chrome Suite (1992), and The Russl?nder (2001). It is evident that realism still occupies a prominent position in the realm of regional literature in the 21st century. Such a strong persistence in realism in regional literature perhaps calls for a new critical perspective in the assessment of literary regionalism.
IV. Regionalism, Narcissism, and Heterogeneity
In interrogating the politics and ideology of the regionalist text, it is natural that the subject now should be subjected to fierce critical debate over its merits and demerits. Since the late 1980s, however, as the political focus on regions as a unity of homogeneity has been in part replaced by a more nuanced understanding of cultural and ethnic diversity, scholarship on literary regionalism has changed markedly, swerving from rejection to reserved reception. Critics are now reconceptualizing the character and nature of literary identity. The older notions of identity as a relatively stable expression of the nationhood of Canada is now gradually giving way to a new cognition of identity as flexible, diverse, and heterogeneous. This new adjustment of the critical stance with regard to literary regionalism is in answer to the changing demographic and socio-economic environment of present-day Canada. The contemporary regionalist emphasis on borders, cultural difference, heterogeneity, and anticentralism invites a vivisection of the organism of Canadian history, culture, geography, and politics as a totality.
The re-evaluation of literary regionalism comes at the time of the crisis of the nation-state. William Lawton, for example, notes "the shift in perspective […] away from the nation-state […] towards its constituent parts" (141-2). He outlines regionalism from its political, cultural and economic dimensions, and proposes that "new notions of regionalism should replace old" (136). This change in perspective challenges the authority of the centre and ushers in a new age which makes it possible for a reconsideration and reappraisal of regionalism in the 21st century. For example, in the literary arena, Robert Kroetsch is a devoted proponent of regionalism in Canada, and his eminence as both critic and writer reinforces to a great extent his strong espousal of regionalism. In his own works, Robert Kroetsch challenges the conventional notions of genre, style, composition, subjectivity. He delights in being a regional writer who is bestowed with "a local pride" ("On Being" 584). Don Precosky also responds to the nationalist ambition for literary internationalism by exposing poignantly the myths about Canadian literature. For instance, he questions what A. J. M. Smith calls "cosmopolitanism," saying that it "causes more problems than it solves" (Precosky). Meanwhile, he also rejects the prejudice against regionalism: "Regionalism does not necessarily lead to national disunity […] nor does it lead to bad writing" (Precosky).
In the context of Canada's multiculturalism, literary regionalism challenges the notion of order and hierarchy. Herb Wyile argues that the "shift of emphasis from cohesion and unity to diversity an [sic] differentiation suggests, especially in the case of Canada, the possibility of a renewed interest in regionalism" ("Regionalism, Post-nationalism" 267). It privileges the local medium of art such as dialect, folklore, legend, and promotes multiplicity in the genesis of textual meaning. It often prioritizes the overlooked or disowned local history and downgrades chronological linearity rather than contribute to a dominant "mainstream" historicity. In terms of spatiality, literary regionalism flouts the reign of centrality and celebrates the marginal and the peripheral, thus deposing the scepters of cultural homogeneity by fostering a carnival of pluralism and polyphony against the double dictatorship of unity and identity. In the light of culture, regionalism highlights the minority, the multiethnic, and the heterogeneous. The autonomy, closure, and self-sufficiency of a unifying art are reversed by regional concerns for particularity, openness, disparity, and fragmentation. In fact, by featuring the individual and the particular, regionalism is able to transcend the confines of a "regional" aesthetic and achieve universality.
Regionalism in the post-national context of Canada is characterized with fragmentation, disparity, and centrifugal forces. It celebrates a literature grounded in the particular locality of the text, the very marginal adumbration as a subversion of the "universal". As Linda Hutcheon holds, "[s]ince 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" (Canadian Postmodern 3). Hutcheon's ex-centicity of regionalism foregrounds not only the periphery but also the border, the frontier. She goes on to argue that the periphery is also "the place of possibility: Kroetsch's border town of Big Indian in What the Crow Said is deliberately set on the border of Alberta and Saskatchewan; Hodgins' Vancouver Island is self-consciously on the edge of the continent" (3). The decentralizing force of regionalist writing divides a body of national literature into a disparate yet symbiotic existence of regional literatures, such as those of British Columbia, the Prairies, the Maritimes, the North, Anglophone literature in Quebec, etc. The monolithic structure of value in favour of a universal, central, selfsame truth is thus deconstructed and there is an incremental localized sensibility towards literary writing. By emphasizing particularity, heterogeneity and disparity, regionalist writing institutes a redefinition of marginality previously relegated in literary importance. As Wolfgang Klooss analyses, regionalism is "a (de-)constructive form of poetics, pronouncing difference and otherness" (357).
Regionalist literature not only celebrates marginality but also revels in a self-referentiality in terms of the "where" of the literary text. Regionalist resistance to the spatial hegemony of metropolitics and hence the reconstruction of the literary cartography often exhibit a localization and individualization. The re-mapping of the rural geography or small-town landscape manifests a defiance of the spatial appropriation by the logic of centrality, thus resulting in an obsession with the subversive spatiality of local experience. Furthermore, new urban regionalism attempts to retell the neglected or silenced story of the neighbourhood, the community, or the street, legitimizing the marginalized narrative of the forgotten corners of the city. The "new spatiality implicit in the postmodern" of Frederic Jameson's cultural geography paves the way for a radical geography of some sort (418), and regions take on new meanings in postmodern "cultural politics of difference" (Soja and Hooper 189). Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion, for instance, brings to light the forgotten stories of the immigrant city builders of Toronto's landmarks such as Prince Edward Viaduct and the R.C. Harris Filtration Plant. His text therefore transforms into a subversive space in defiance of the master narrative of official urban history. Indeed, region has been reduced to the status of an Other, excluded from the discourse of the centre. Regionalism, however, takes pride in its marginality, the very otherness of the local experience. Therefore, regionalism is a narcissistic narrative instinct with spatial and historical self-referentiality and obsessive quest for identity.
The term narcissistic is employed here to suggest the self-conscious concern of regional literature as opposed to national and international literatures. Narcissistic writing of a region is an art that is concerned with its identification. It lays stress on regional literature not as a stylistically distinctive form of art, but as an art that is constantly riddled with a desire for the selfsame image of universality and authenticity. Narcissistic regionalism is a form of literature that is self-evidently and self-consciously "regional," not only regional in geography but also in history and ideology. One might call Canadian literature narcissistic, too, because Canadian literature is a national form of "regional" literature in comparison with the more known and established literatures of Britain, America, Russia, and so on.
The narcissism of regional literature is distinctively present in Prairie, Northern, and Maritime literatures in which the geography is apparently identifiable. Narcissistic regionalism deals with the land and the people that inhabit it and the form of narcissistic regionalism can be rigidly realistic due to its photographic self-referentiality. Regionalist narcissism often begins with a delineation of the land, the fauna and flora of the place, the climate, the people, and the folk ways. Works that come under this category are too numerous to mention: the small prairie towns in W. O. Mitchell's Who Has Seen the Wind, Sharon Butala's Country of the Heart (1984) and Real Life (2002), Sinclair Ross's As For Me and My House, the northern wilderness in Margaret Atwood's Surfacing, Aritha van Herk's Places from Ellesmere, the small cozy villages in B.C. in Ethel Wilson's Swamp Angel, to name only a few. Sandra Birdsell's The Missing Child offers a vivid view of the town of Agassiz, the prototype of a Manitoban town in peace. The detailed presentation of the town immediately reminds us of a typical town in Winnipeg, with its peaceful rivers and lakes and the concentration of different ethnic groups:
Like most of the towns near the centre of the valley, Agassiz stands apart from the river, allowing the banks of it to snake alongside the town's edges but never through its heart. A single street in the town, Ottawa Street, leads to the river, and at the other end of Ottawa where it joins Main, the J. P. Campbell house towers weathered, but still imperious […].
The connections in the valley are clear in the grid of roads that divide it into neat squares of ownership. Up the hills in the west, the squares of land sustain whole communites of Ukrainians; closer to the lake, Icelanders; to the south, French-speaking communities rub noses with colonies of black-clothed Hutterites and towns of German-speaking Mennonites. In the east, […] there was once a designated square for the remaining bands of Indians. The Métis, first cousins to every race in the valley, live everywhere. Those who have become French or English or Indian are invisible. The others wander through bushland, along the edges of the hills, or near the shore of the north waters like a child's aimless song. Closer to the fertile soil of the valley's centre are the Scottish and British settlers and in the centre of the basin is the town of Agassiz—its only distinction being that it's a town which has caught the overflow of all these different communities and is a mixture of almost the entire valley. (5-6)
Narcissistic regionalism is not only aware of the "where" in the writing itself, but also the "where" of and about the writing itself. New Brunswick writer David Adams Richards writes in his piece of regionalist manifesto: "[I]f people are backward because of regionalism, why especially not because of the time they lived in?" (73) The narcissism of regionalism is to define itself against the "mainstream," to enjoy the pleasures of regional textuality and have its share "in the world of human spirit" (Richards, 73). As Richards claims: "My work almost always contradicted their assumptions, and some of my characters stood as fodder against them. So it was natural that I was a regionalist, a New Brunswick writer" (78).
In the narcissistic narrative of regionalism, there is indeed a disruption of the traditional totalizing meta-narrative of centre and power. Regional writing flouts the repressive grand narratives of nation by attending to the particulars of the marginal. Place is thus endowed with an enchanting magic that often inexplicably binds the people to it. For instance, the Canadian wilderness gives out a special lustre of mystery and appeal. George Ryga's Ballad of a Stonepicker is a story about the lives of two brothers on a prairie farm in the 1940s and early 1950s. One of them forsakes the drudgery of farm life for a better life of education and the other stays behind, despite the fact that it takes him more than he gets from the soil. The small prairie farm becomes as important as the metropolitan centers elsewhere. The novel proves a rebellion against the grand narrative of the geographic centrality, as Jim's brother contemplates the farm and the world beyond it:
I met a guy once who told me parts of Australia were like that. I don't know about that. I've never been to Australia. Never been more than twenty miles from this house. Don't intend to go, either. There's enough to do and see right here. Besides, I'm too old.
[…] I've seen this blue haze on a hot day—the sun going low in the west and a blackbird flying against the evening light like it was shot from an arrow. You see a thing like that and you say to yourself there's some things in this world are all right. (10)
Likewise, in Ernest Buckler's The Mountain and the Valley, the North and South Mountains and the Annapolis Valley at Entremont remain an enigma for the young protagonist David Canaan, who entertains a dream to write but is unable to communicate with his family. The mountain is the Parnassus in the dreams of the young artist: "As they came close to the mountain, it was so exciting David is almost afraid. He almost wished there was some way he could save it. The second time was never as good" (21). As the day of his death approaches, he chooses to retreat to a lonely rural farm in Nova Scotia to contemplate the truth of life and at the end of the novel he dies on the mountain in the blizzard, still dreaming of becoming a great writer who will speak in his own way about his life and about the mountain and the valley of Nova Scotia.
Narcissistic regionalism in the post-national context takes a profound interest in the history of "the ex-centric" (Hutcheon Canadian Postmodern 3), with a focus on the silenced story of the periphery. The regionalist construction of its own narrative often exhibits a localization of historical textuality. In effect, regionalist writers often manifest a devotion to the subversive historicity of the local. Region therefore is able to tell its own story in opposition to the cultural imperialism of the centre. The received history of the nation is thus called into question with a foregrounding of differences in class, gender, and ethnicity. Through the deconstruction of the given history and the privileging of contingency and happenstances, the very historicity of the local narrative is ritualized. For example, one is easily reminded of Rudy Wiebe's stories of Louis Riel and Big Bear. Furthermore, in regionalist narrative, there is often a crossover between fact and fiction, between history and story. Local history merges into the story, and fact and fiction become interdependent in regionalist writing. The self-referential art of regionalism also relies in part on its oral tradition. In an interview, Rudy Wiebe called the composition of his oral tradition the "beer-parlour stories," whereas Robert Kroetsch integrates the stories at "the kitchen table" into his fiction (Neuman 231). The integration of orality manifests the regionalist disdain for the meta-narratives of nation and history as well as its attention to the unattended. Legends and folk tales challenge the monarchy of inherited history. By telling the silenced story of the marginal, regionalist writing engages in a narcissistic representation of itself. For instance, combining local history, folksongs, and folklore into a regionalist articulation, Alistair MacLeod's short stories serve as a perfect illustration of the regional subversion of the dominant discourse of homogeneity. Such an adoption of regional particulars is a desire for narcissistic auto-representation, a discursive disruption of the rules of centricity by crossing the border between history and fiction, and by challenging the dominance of the extra-textuality of the monolithic nation-state and internationalism in favour of a particularized and even individualized narrative.
In conclusion, literary regionalism has always been a dynamic concept that provokes heated critical debates, giving rise to a series of contentions such as identity, centrality, universality, and so forth. However, as time moves into a new age of multiculturalism that espouses difference and diversity, literary regionalism in Canada also needs to be reassessed within the framework of the larger social, political, and academic atmosphere. In truth, literature in Canada has never been divorced from political concerns. However, as the nationalist urge for a symbolic unity of the literary image of Canada fades, literature "works no longer in the service of the nation's identity within a Cold War competition between communism and capitalism" (Godard 211). Rather, diversity is proclaimed as the literary identity of Canada. Regionalism is a key component of this cosmos of heterogeneity in the realm of literature characterized by what Kroetsch terms "disunity as unity" (Lovely Treachery 21). Literary regionalism in Canada is thus able to capture region as a distinctive entity in contribution to the cultural kaleidoscope of the nation. Regional literature therefore should be understood as a major force in the composition of Canada's cultural hybridity. As Herb Wyile proposes, recognizing regionalism "as a potentially inclusive rather than necessarily exclusive term provides a possible solution to the often acrimonious debates about canonicity and the classification of writers in Canada" ("Regionalism, Postcolonialism" 155).
V. A Criticism of Criticism: Regionalism and Thematic Criticism
Literary criticism in Canada, since its establishment in the mid-nineteenth century, has evolved into another problem child. The most notorious of the problems is that, despite the worldwide influence of Canadian theorists like Northrop Frye and Marshall McLuhan, Canadian literary criticism has obstinately resisted any categorization in the complexity of the world's critical arena. On the one hand, John Moss observes that the "resources of English Canadian literary criticism are no longer adequate to the achievement of the literature" ("Bushed" 161), a paradoxical observation on the critical incompetence in his laudatory remarks on the merits of Canadian literature. On the other hand, John Metcalf lashes out scathing words against the status quo of Canadian criticism by remarking that "[t]here is no critical consensus in Canada about Canadian writing and very little critical writing worth the paper it's printed on" (Kicking 160). In effect, what John Moss means by the "resources of English Canadian literary criticism" is by and large the presence of thematic criticism that is felt to be dwindling under vehement attack since the late 1970s but unquestionably still a most important, if not prevalent, mode of discourse at present. W. J. Keith analyzes the critical situation in Canada as follows:
The same is true of a number of Canadianists, and all of those to whom I have spoken agree that they are conscious of a lowering of the intellectual temperature when they cross the boundary into Canadian studies. The standard of scholarship seems less rigorous, the level of criticism and commentary less disciplined and sophisticated; even the quality of writing appears slacker, less precise. Sad but, I am convinced, true—and I see no point in pretending that it isn't true. (Independent 64)
1. The Evolution of Thematic Criticism
It is difficult to pinpoint the origin of thematic criticism in Canadian literature, but critics believe that it prospered with the rise of the anti-American nationalist movement in the 1960s and culminated in the 1970s, resulting in a multitude of critical works that have ever since held prodigal sway in Canadian literary criticism. Furthermore, although thematic criticism is widely repudiated today as a deficient method of scholarship, literary regionalism has mainly been subject to thematic analysis all along and this critical approach still occupies a conspicuous position in academics today, despite the recent publication of a series of critical works that attempted critical alternatives. In effect, thematic criticism is deeply rooted in the soil of Canadian criticism although it appeared in a visible and massive form in the 1960s. The trajectory of literary criticism in Canada is reasonably traceable through the series of debates on the relationship between regionalism/nationalism and universalism. Post-confederation criticism in the nineteenth century in Canada was mainly directive in its controversy over the values of provincial, regional and universal literatures. Notwithstanding the dominant interest in the assertion of a distinctively national literature, critics felt the need to rely on the specific Canadian experience, which often found expression in regional features and geographic differences. For instance, William Douw Lighthall's 1889 anthology Songs of the Great Dominion was a thematic collection of poetry about the Canadian experience. In the Introduction, he was strongly against the relevance of "universal standards" to Canadian literature. Instead, he called on a regional emphasis in celebrating the greatness of the Canadian experience, and in transporting the reader to the Canadian clime itself rather than looking to Old Country. The Canadian greatness consisted, for Lighthall, in the topographical variety such as the "towering snow-capped Rockies," the "hoary Laurentians," "the Valley of the Saskatchewan," and the "four-thousand-mile panorama of noble rivers, wild forests, ocean-like prairies" (129).
Although early uses of theme as an instrument to expound the merits of Canadian writing existed in the nineteenth century, Northrop Frye is considered to be the one that sparkled this way of literary response into the identifiable form of thematic criticism. Frye's 1965 "Conclusion" to Carl F. Clink's A Literary History of Canada is regarded as the most influential proclamation of thematics in Canada. His thematic concern about Canadian literature is evidenced in his earlier writings as well, particularly in his Canada and Its Poetry, published by the Canadian Forum in 1943. Frye's "Conclusion" came not only as a literary pronouncement but also a cultural and social phenomenon that manifested the widespread concern about Canada's garrison mentality which Frye argued fomented the "Canadian imagination."
The 1970s saw the boom of thematic studies of Canadian literature, many of which drew on regional studies. The works that appeared in this period were Northrop Frye's The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination (1971), D. G. Jones's Butterfly on Rock: A Study of Themes and Images in Canadian Literature (1970), Margaret Atwood's Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1973), John Moss's Patterns of Isolation in English-Canadian Fiction (1974) and Sex and Violence in the Canadian Novel (1977). These works, in their cultivation of a dominant national consciousness, and in their quest for a distinctive "Canadian imagination" in continuity with international intellectualism, invariably went to local and regional particulars in hopes of discovering an indigenous character. John Moss, in his Patterns of Isolation in English-Canadian Fiction devoted one third of the total book to an examination of the geophysical imagination of Canadian regionalism. His conclusions on the patterns of isolation were also achieved on the basis of a number of regional novels. These included Maritime novels The Channel Shore, The Nymph and the Lamp, Prairie novels As For Me and My House, The Sacrifice, novels set in the British Columbia Interior such as The Double Hook and Swamp Angel, and so on. He observes in the Introduction:
Regionalism is an ambivalent term in Canadian literary circles. More often than not it is used in a pejorative sense. However, it seems to me that the patterns of isolation engendered by the proximity, the immediacy, of the physical world on the creative imagination provide a moral dimension in our regional fiction that elevates a number of works to the first rank of excellence. (8)
In addition to these nationalist works of thematic criticism which purported to assert a unifying literary identity out of a medley of regional themes, there also appeared a number of other influential works which were rooted in a regional interest, for example, Laurie Ricou's Vertical Man/Horizontal World: Man and Landscape in Canadian Prairie Fiction (1973), W. H. New's Articulating West (1972), Dick Harrison's Unnamed Country: The Struggle for a Canadian Prairie Fiction (1977). Most notably, there also appeared a series of editions under the title "Themes in Canadian Literature" aimed to explore regional thematic particulars, for example, David Arnason's Isolation in Canadian Literature (1975), Alice K. Hale and Sheila A. Brook's The Depression in Canadian Literature (1976), Michael O. Nowland's The Maritime Experience (1975), Terry Angus's The Prairie Experience (1975), John Stevens' Ontario Experience (1975) and Urban Experience (1975), Jack Hodgins' West Coast Experience (1975) and Frontier Experience (1975), the majority of which only obtained a limited regional popularity. These regionalist thematic studies of the varied Canadian experience owe as much to Northrop Frye's Bush Garden as to Edward McCourt's The Canadian West in Fiction, first published in 1949, which is the first book-length study of the Canadian West with a strong emphasis on regional uniqueness and difference. With the appearance of these regionalist thematic studies, there emerged a distinctive regionalist criticism which, instead of fortifying the reciprocity, continuity, and common vision of regional experiences oriented towards a national construct, began to accentuate the literary heritage and self-sufficiency of the thematic linearity of the regions, together with a further foregrounding of geophysical uniqueness and a cultural or psychological indigeneity stemming from it. In these regionalist thematic analyses, the anxiety about the literary ego of Canada is no longer an overriding concern. Critics initiated a less politicized mode of analysis, albeit its thematic focus still confined the critical vision in the range of sociology and history. Contrary to Margaret Atwood's desire for the "Canadian habit of mind" ("Eleven Years" 94) latent in the iconographic key patterns that constitute the synthetic entity of Canadian literature, regionalist critics diverted their attention to the disparity of regional themes, thus fostering a localized awareness. In practice, in opposition to the nationalists' summary of national themes, regionalist critics also aim to sift out a distinctive assemblage of themes that help establish the regional image. For instance, in prairie literary criticism such as Dick Harrison's Unnamed Country, the recurring themes often have to do with pioneering, psychic experiences with the prairie, farming images, etc. As Dick Harrison writes in the Preface, his study of the prairie fiction "may shed some light […] on the corresponding problem in other regional literature" (xiii). Indeed, for the regionalist critics, "the prairie is the great source of our fiction; it is the archetypal region of Canada" (Harrison, Unnamed Country xiii-xiv).
Thematic criticism continued in the 1980s and the 1990s and its influence is still palpable today. However, thematic criticism during the two decades veered from a more generalizing and totalizing discourse to address particularity and specificity, with more and more attention to individual writers and separate regions. There also appeared a combination of other modes of criticism in the realm of literary criticism. While thematic criticism has ceased to be all inclusive with its summary of themes and patterns that contribute to a national or regional identity, critics still adhere to the belief that the significance of the text arises from the thematic association it carries towards an imaginative representation of reality, particularly in the evaluation of regionalism. Gaile McGregor's The Wacousta Syndrome (1985) serves as an example of the persistence of thematic criticism. The World Authors Series published by Twayne Publishers in the 1980s also employed thematic criticism. For instance, in Patricia Morley's criticism of Margaret Laurence, her major interest was still the humanistic, sociological and historical aspects of the text and the entire book turned out to be an analysis of the characters and events of Laurence's fictions. She claimed in the Preface that "a combination of critical methods is employed to analyze aesthetic, textual, and historical problems" (7), which is indeed an equivocation of her critical position. Similarly, in Victor J. Ramraj's "analytical study" of Mordecai Richler, what engaged his interest was still Richler's delineation of human experience reflected in the "particular individuals, ideas, and places" in his novel (Preface n.pag.). The same is true of the publication of The Canadian Fiction Studies by ECW Press in the 1990s. The method of scholarship employed in the separate books is principally explicatory in its analysis of plot, characterization, and language. For instance, George Woodcock's study of Sinclair Ross is organized in terms of a succession of related images such as the main street, the wind and the rain, false fronts, etc., whereas Dick Harrison's study of W. O. Mitchell's Who Has Seen the Wind proves to be another organized survey of the "centrality of his [Mitchell's] themes" (Intimations 34), of the significance of the novel as "a microcosm of the larger world" (Intimations 37).
In addition to the critical works published on individual writers, there also appeared monograms on particular regional themes. The representative works of regional thematic criticism during these two decades are W. J. Keith's Literary Images of Ontario (1992), and Margaret Atwood's Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature (1995). Margaret Atwood's work is a collection of lectures given at Oxford University, aimed at revealing the nature of some of the "clusters of story and image relating to the Canadian North" such as the Franklin expedition, the Wendigo, and the Grey Owl syndrome (Strange Things 87), but also "of their longevity, of the varieties of ways in which they may be used by writers, and of their vitality" (Strange Things 114). What is worthy of special mention is that W. J. Keith is the first scholar to conduct a systematic and overall literary study of Ontario as a region. For him, Ontario is the region at centre and, as he argues, "[a]ny account of the literary images of Ontario must therefore, sooner or later, face up to the thorny question not only of regionalism but more particularly of regionalism in the contemporary world" (Literary Image 12). The subject matters that come under his critical scrutiny include such themes as landscapes and localities, history and sociology, etc. The critical approach employed in his book, again, is thematic in the sense that humanist and experiential concerns dominate the work and render it into another descriptive and interpretative body of criticism oriented towards a literary reflection of socio-historical variants. Apart from the works of Keith and Atwood, a most recent book that insists on thematic criticism as a necessary instrument for the expression of cultural assumptions and implicit and explicit ideologies through reading is Renée Hulan's Northern Experience and the Myths of Canadian Culture (2002). In his study of the literary representation of the North, Hulan says that his "study of the north is primarily thematic" (27), and that "such attempts tend to be self-fulfilling" (13), because literary criticism should conform to cultural ideology. Considering the lingering presence of thematic criticism, it is therefore safe to say that this critical methodology has not yet become extinct and may still remain an efficacious instrument for the investigation of literary works that function as a candid camera capturing true pictures of the regional Canadian experience.
2. Critical Receptions of Thematic Criticism
Critical opinions on the relevance of thematic criticism have been divided. However, oddly enough, it has been subject to vehement repudiation ever since its heyday in the 1970s not only by nationalists who were keen on establishing a Canadian criticism but also by regionalists that denied the monologic form of discourse brought by thematic criticism. In general, charges against thematic criticism centre on two aspects: its critical simplicity and methodological impertinency. Frank Davey's attack on thematic criticism has been the most influential in Canadian criticism not only because he was the first critic to renounce the dominating and exclusive power of thematic criticism but also his challenge of thematic criticism served the dual purpose of a craving for internationalism and regional idiosyncrasy(6). Indeed, as a Westerner, Frank Davey is strongly against the generalizing and totalizing tendencies of thematicism. His critique of Margaret Atwood's thematicism in Margaret Atwood: A Feminist Poetics enunciates his stance as a regionalist: "A decentralized literature like Canada's, in which geography transforms vision and individual writers see multiple and fluid realities in their own regions […], invites a critical approach that is "liquid" rather than "solid," responsive rather than programmatic" (161).
Although the counter discourse of regionalism against thematic criticism contributed to drawing critical attention back to literature itself, the invisible force that was warping the polemic direction of thematic criticism was still the politicized temper of Canadian criticism. While criticizing the extra-literary irrelevancy of referential criticism such as the evaluative criticism of E. K. Brown and A. J. M. Smith and the thematic criticism employed by Frye, Atwood, and Moss, Frank Davey expressed his aversion to "any cultural rationalizations and apologies" ("Surviving" 427), thus calling into question such nationalist catchphrases as "our imaginative life," "national being," and "cultural history" ("Surviving" 428). Instead, he wrote: "In regional literature too, Canada has a more than sufficient body of work for the study of a particular, intrinsically interesting literary phenomenon. In fact, it is not unfair to say that the bulk of Canadian literature is regional before it is national […]" ("Surviving" 435). Indeed, the confrontation between regionalism and thematic criticism lies in the regionalists' anxiety over the discursive dictatorship of nationalism that always slips into a practice which, in ignoring regional factors, results in "a possible prepossession with closed space in Southern Ontario writing and with the closing of space in Prairie writing" ("Surviving" 436). For instance, Margaret Atwood claims in her Survival:
[E]very country of culture has a single unifying and informing symbol at its core […]. The symbol, then—be it word, phrase, idea, image, or all of these—functions like a system of beliefs (it is a system of beliefs, though not always a formal one) which holds the country together and helps the people in it to co-operate for common ends. (31)
Davey's audacious challenge of thematic criticism in its prime time is in fact an embodiment of the ideological clash between two opposing fronts of thoughts during that period, namely, regionalism and nationalism. In fact, Frank Davey himself is an archetype of the Western system of values that emphasizes particularity, individuality, disparity, and heterogeneity, which altogether comprise a subversive discourse in opposition to the reductive mode of national thematic criticism. Davey's alternative to thematic criticism is one that attends "specifically to that ground from which all writing communicates and all themes spring: the form—style, structure, vocabulary, literary form, syntax—of the writing" ("Surviving" 433). Nonetheless, Davey's notion of the specifics of an autotelic text is fully immersed in his idiosyncratic Western conception of form as an individual element that subverts thematic criticism. As he observes in an interview with Elizabeth Komisar:
My message to you is that one never does escape oneself, that when one is writing a poem about shipwrecks one is still writing a poem about oneself. Every experience that one has, every activity that one undertakes is subjective, reflects upon oneself. And that is the secret of form; form always testifies whether it's to what you think it's testifying or to something else. And this is why I object to criticism that does not pay attention to form. (53)
Robert Lecker offers a unique reading of Frank Davey's "Surviving the Paraphrase" in connection with the poet-critic himself, who "made the West Coast […] the centre of his human universe" (208). Thus the article becomes not only a private act of self-expression but also the site of conflict between two schools of scholarship or movements. In essence, the regionalist opposition to thematic criticism transforms into a campaign against marginalization "by positing a noncentralist vision of recovery through form" (Lecker 213). A decade after his "Surviving the Paraphrase," Davey expounded his regionalist defence against thematics in Reading Canadian Reading:
I accused thematic criticism of concealing the ideological nature of its own positions […] beneath the guise of scholarly "objectivity." My own position was visibly polemical and ideological. It was the position of the writer […] whose politics contained deep suspicion of centralizing political theories that confer privilege narrowly and who sought open cultural structures that could accommodate and recognize numerous competing interests. (4)
Indeed, the regionalist antagonism to the humanism of thematics and recourse to "writing as writing" (Davey, "Surviving" 428) as an exterior and ultimate motive manifests the hidden politics of the regionalist subversive narrative that yearns for an egalitarian integration of the ex-centric into the social order.
Following Frank Davey's initiative, the anti-thematic current grew more boisterous and tempestuous. Eli Mandel also challenged Northrop Frye's centralist thematics: "It is time to dispense with the mythology that there is such a thing as 'the Canadian imagination' and to recognize the degree to which writing in this country is regional" ("Banff" 159). Tracing out the critical context in Canada in 1971, Mandel recognized three major modes of thematic criticism, namely, "sociological […] or historical criticism," "structual [sic] and interpretative criticism," and a criticism that concerns "itself with patterns of literary development," seeking to "define literary tradition or whatever may be discussed as distinctive in a national literature" (Context 4). For Mandel, the nationalist tendency to build up a Canadian identity through thematic and textual manipulation was "a national schizophrenia" (Contexts 3). Historically and sociologically, the regionalist anti-thematic narrative is grounded in the belief in individualism and centrifugalism fostered by a macrocosmic atmosphere of multiculturalism that seemed to have become the imperative of society by the 1970s. As E. D. Blodgett observed in 1982: "Canada is not a unified country in either a political or a cultural sense, and therefore to seek some common thread in its literatures is a vain enterprise indeed" (8). His proclamation of "literatures" rather than a distinctive Canadian literature no doubt attests to regional anxieties about the exclusivity and repressiveness of thematic criticism. Therefore, thematic criticism is repudiated for its totalitarian regime that blots out the voices of the circumference and silences regional and ethnic writing. The representational politics of thematic criticism serves a collective consciousness that strives for an international identity and at the same time frustrates and fractures the regional dreams of literary representation. Therefore, the regionalist rebellion against thematic criticism can be viewed as a post-national challenge of the transcendental signifieds of thematics in a centrifugal move towards a discourse of disparity, of margin and periphery.
Needless to say, even regionalist opposition to thematic criticism has never been immune from political and ideological invasions, because despite the obstreperous note of discord with nationalist thematic criticism, there indeed was also a dominance of thematic criticism in regionalism and by regionalists in the 1970s and 1980s, and its lingering fever is still felt to date. As Roy Miki remarks, thematic criticism still remains "alive and well in many Canadian classrooms and critical journals" (48). Furthermore, there have appeared a number of regionalist critics who seek to extract themes and motifs that are considered universals proceeding from the regional. Their critical practice, in lieu of constructing a national myth, is aimed at a regional abstraction of truths and universals that conduce to a literature nothing short of the magnitude of a national literature. Therefore, disillusioned by the monolithic identity which is "more illusory than real" (MacKendrick 277), the regionalist opponents of thematics have led their attention awry to the political undertones of thematic criticism, thus restricting their scope to a thematics that deals only with the abstraction of themes and images from a nationalist perspective. In essence, what the regionalists target at is the generalizing act of thematic criticism with regard to the alleged socio-historical themes of a literary text, and by doing so they neglect the interpretative and explicatory nature of this manner of criticism which in its own right incorporates not only extraliterary elements but also textual ingredients, in particular, plot analysis, with reference to the text itself as an autonomy.
On the other hand, non-regionalist critics also put up a strong resistance to thematic criticism, bringing the subject under harsh scrutiny in quest of a true aesthetics. Barry Cameron and Michael Dixon argued in their 1977 essay titled "Mandatory Subversive Manifesto: Canadian Criticism vs. Literary Criticism" that thematic criticism was too reductive and contextless:
Canadian authors may use these universal themes in characteristic ways that reveal a common cultural focus, but the existence and nature of such a focus can be determined only within a consistent series of comparative contexts. Particular themes must be situated within the total form of a particular work; that work within the author's canon; that canon within the national literature; that literature within the context of literature in general. Atwood, Moss, and Jones adopt a method contrary to this critical induction. Their approach treats the whole of Canadian literature, in effect, as a vast, uncontextualized commonplace book (or, to be modern, data-bank) from which isolated fragments are selected arbitrarily to support an individual deductive hypothesis of what the "Canadian consciousness" might be. (140-1)
W. J. Keith also observed at the 1978 Calgary Conference on the Canadian Novel that thematics was "a response to an almost Pavlovian preconditioned stimulus" (Independent 26). In fact, as the demand for literary internationalism arose, thematic criticism was subjected to severe interrogation with the passage of the nationalist age. And this challenge of thematics was further reinforced by the advent of a variety of other modes of discourse unknown to the theme analyzers. It seemed that after a nationwide craze for the cultural themes that were esteemed inherent in literature, critics and writers were able to re-evaluate their past with a certain amount of detachment. Most interestingly, John Moss, a name most often coupled to thematics, confessed in his Introduction to Future Indicative: Literary Theory and Canadian Literature: "If we learned nothing else from Canadian criticism of the 1970s, in retrospect we have surely learned to distrust generalizations imposed by context upon content, text upon culture" (1). No doubt, Moss's denial of his former scholarship evinces the particular ambivalence of Canadian criticism, which, after a hectic quest for national image, has come in head-on encounter with the issue of an intellectual equilibrium between literary regionalism, nationalism and internationalism(7) in an age of globalization. As Moss further remarked, "the reality […] is splendid proof that a cacophony of critics is at least as loud as a commune, and a lot more engaging" (Introduction 2).
Unlike the position of regionalist critics who set their minds on the subversion of the nationalist hegemony, non-regionalist critics question the very literariness of thematic study. For example, W. J. Keith argued that thematic criticism was ignorant of the artistry of literary works and was characterized with "an insensitivity to language in the way they write about literary works" (Independent 33). Rosmarin Heindenreich also attacked thematic criticism in his deconstructive study of literature in Postwar Novel in Canada: "Aesthetically, the thematic perspective has proved increasingly unsatisfactory since it tends to focus on the historical or psychological genesis of the text, rather than on the text itself and its effects" (1). The impact of thematic criticism also penetrated other critical discourses in Canada. As Russell Brown notes in "The Practice and Theory of Canadian Thematic Criticism: A Reconsideration," "even the postmodernist Kroetsch has been identified with thematicism" (661). Miki offers a study of Kroetsch's "Disunity as Unity: A Canadian Strategy," and concludes by viewing the author as a "post-thematic" critic (48). Brown also notes that Eli Mandel, David L. Clarke, and many other critics have all called attention to Kroetsch's thematics in his The Lovely Treachery of Words. Clarke's review of Kroetsch, for instance, reveals that the book is a "selection of postmodernist literary tropes and themes" (qtd. in Brown 661).
Critical dissent with the extra-literary, socio-historical ambitions of thematic criticism has necessitated an adjustment of the critical context in Canada and many critics have proposed their alternatives to thematic criticism. W. J. Keith drew attention to the method's inadequacy for stylistic subtlety, arguing that thematic criticism "belongs ultimately to the sociology of culture—which may be a legitimate object of study in itself but is no substitute for genuine literary criticism" (Independent 69). And Keith's "genuine criticism" is a return to the consideration of language and style. Keith was not alone in urging for a Canadian version of Anglo-American New Criticism; Frank Davey, Barry Cameron, and Michael Dixon also sympathized with Keith's standpoint and advocated a close reading of literature as an artistic autonomy and scholarship or "an autotelic analysis" (Davey Towards, 428). In respect to literary regionalism, however, Keith's model is a tactical evasion of the ideological, sociological, and historical considerations of a literary text, and he bypasses the opposition between the regional and the national, making the scrutiny of literature a process less "contaminated" by politics. Furthermore, as far as regionalism is concerned, Keith's critical method fails to address regionalism in its actuality due to its excessive and exclusive attention to stylistic elements and its ignorance of the fact that regionalism still remains primarily a sociological and historical category. By shunning the unavoidable aspects of sociology and history in regional literature, Keith is susceptible to a total negligence and elimination of regionalism itself, which again reinforces Keith's stance as a critic concerned about the "mainstream" literature of Canada. And in adopting a purely formalist position, Keith unwittingly assumes another stereotypical stance that tends to treat the literary text as an ahistorical and amoral receptacle of verbal accumulations
George Woodcock realized the inadequacy of the Canadian version of New Criticism as early as 1955, and he foresaw the need to adopt a polyphonic discourse on Canadian writing. For him, Canadian writing lacked a critic who, "when he emerges, […] will have to be something of a psychologist, something of a sociologist, something of a philosopher, something of a mythologist, besides having a developed consciousness of formal values and an imagination that is both creative and receptive" ("Views" 136). Woodcock was aware that a sociological and historical perspective of regionalism was still an indispensable instrument to perceive the truths of regionalism. As he further argued, the new critic will have to be concerned "with the peculiar nature of Canadian experience, what makes the temper of our life […] and how this regional pattern of living and thinking and reacting affects the work of Canadian writers" ("Views" 136).
Frank Davey's suggested list of theoretical alternatives in "Surviving the Paraphrase" was an answer to George Woodcock's call for new methods of scholarship against the dominance of "textual analysis" ("Views" 136). As regionalists, both critics enjoyed a celebration of regionalism(8), and both saw the complexity of the assessment of regional literature in favour of alternative theoretical discourses, but neither of them denied the centrality of regional subject matters in terms of their socio-historical import. For instance, Davey's proposed possibilities were such as historical criticism, analytical criticism, genre criticism, phenomenological criticism, and archetypal criticism, which were all intended to be substitutes for what Davey called the "bête boire evaluation" ("Surviving" 433). However, by 1988, Davey seemed to have gained a much stronger ground in opposition to all referential criticisms preoccupied with cultural identity. And he started to repudiate Northrop Frye's archetypal criticism for its international motivations and its tendency to construct a centralized Canada on the basis of "some specific myth or complex of myths" (Reading 12). Instead, he turned to endorse "idiosyncratic, 'local', discourses," based on the belief that "all human discourses are specific, idiosyncratic, limited, that they emerge […] from one's 'own cultural, geographic, historical context'" (Reading 22). Nevertheless, even Davey's regionalist interest predisposed him to another extreme of the ideological spectrum and succumbed the literary text to a secondary position in conformity to the demands of multiplicity and heteroglossia. As Miki argues, "[b]y such exclusion, much that may be of relevance to cultural processes in Canada will remain at the least marginalized, or at the worst suppressed through omission (our usual "Canadian" way of doing things!)" (38).
3. Textual Thematics and Contextual Thematics
It is important to note that while thematic criticism has been vehemently inveigled for its cultural hegemony, the kind of thematic scrutiny most often conducted by regionalists and in criticisms on individual writers has slipped away from critical censure. What has come under virulent attack is the generalizing rationale of thematic criticism, often manifested in such critics as Atwood, Moss, and Frye, whereas the interpretative and explicatory nature of the thematic criticism in the hands of other critics has been exempted from critical inspection. Thus there has been a literal misconception of thematic criticism as tantamount to theme extraction, whereas content-oriented analysis, namely, the analysis of the subject matter within the text itself, has been shut out from the range of thematic criticism. Frank Davey's initial attack on thematic criticism focused on its deficiency in the paraphrase of literature. As he pointed out in "Surviving the Paraphrase," "[t]he movement here is towards paraphrase—paraphrase of the culture and paraphrase of the literature" (429). Indeed, thematic criticism possesses not only an external referentiality, which treats the literary text as a body of signifers that point to an experiential body of signifieds, thus relying on the author's responsibility to discover the larger cultural, social, historical, and ideological context. Furthermore, most of the weaknesses of thematic criticism stem from its treatment of the literary text as an autonomy, an internal referentiality, which treats the literary text as an interplay of signifiers that constitute a relative textual closure despite their final experiential and humanistic standards,. Contrary to the external referentiality of thematic criticism, internal referentiality emphasizes the individual, psychological genesis of textual significance. In a word, internal referentiality treats the relationship between textual signifiers, such as the relationship between fictional characters, based on an experiential reasoning, whereas external referentiality treats the relationship between textual signifiers and social signifieds. It is evident that nationalist manipulation of thematic criticism falls into the latter pattern. Therefore, it seems more appropriate to term the thematic criticism of Margaret Atwood, John Moss, and Northrop Frye "contextual thematics" and the other kind of thematic criticism that focuses on textual analysis other than stylistic appreciation "textual thematics." This demarcation of the two different manners of thematic criticism—they are thematic because both concentrate on humanistic and socio-historical issues displayed in or by the literary text—may explicate Russell Brown's queer statement "while this critical approach largely disappeared, attacks on Canadian thematic criticism continued and became more public" ("Practice" 656).
While W. J. Keith is baffled by the exact definition of thematic criticism, Russell Brown offers his own definition. In fact, Brown becomes the first Canadian critic to attempt a definition of the term although it has been in use for more than half a century. As he remarks, "critical approaches developed outside of Canada have been called 'thematic' but do not resemble what has been referred to within Canada as thematic criticism" ("Practice" 670). For him, the term "thematic" largely depends on the Atwoodian influence from the title of her book Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, thus the connotation of the term is restricted to "cultural theme" only, rather than textual theme. Brown also argues that "[w]hat is called 'thematics' in Canada resembles, for example, what in America was called the 'myth and symbol school'" ("Practice" 670).
However, by turning his attention to the hidden political agenda behind cultural thematics, Brown fails to notice that thematic criticism in Canada is not only cultural but also textual, although it is characterized with a major political appropriation of themes. The following passage taken from John Moss's Sex and Violence in the Canadian Novel on Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women serves as a perfect illustration of his thematic paraphrasing of the content of the novel:
Her father was beheaded in a mill accident and her mother is sadly foolish about the realities of their life, both hapless victims of society, but Lois has in her a touch of the grandmother who warns Dick, "'do what you like with my gran'daughter […]. But you be careful. And you know what I mean.'" […] Lois fights the overwhelming odds with essential futile gestures. Knowing why she is picked up, she nevertheless insists on going home to change for the occasion, as if there were an occasion, and introduces Dick to her family, as if he were a proper escort. She plays out the rituals demanded by her struggling pride. Later she lashes out at him; and, again, when admonished about wearing a good dress for romping in the grass, she spits at him, ""I wanted to show you guys!"" When the boys drop them off, Lois calls out "'Thanks for the ride,'" hurling the words after them; savage and hurt at the same time. (59)
Thematic analysis is also present in Wilfred Cude's A Due Sense of Differences, which the author claims is an evaluative approach to Canadian literature with reference to other national literatures. In his analysis of Sinclair Ross's As For Me and My House, Cude's criticism turns out to be a sheer prosaic repetition of the story:
"A newcomer like Philip is an event," Mrs. Bentley proudly declares: "he's an aloof, strong, unknowable man." […] All Mrs. Bentley derives from this is a sense of gratification that her husband had placed her before either his vocation or his community. "I should count each town, I suppose," she complacently observes, "as a feather in my cap." Nonetheless, she cannot avoid the thought that "what is between us is precarious." […] Philip now makes a routine of shutting himself up in his study. "He's retreated again," Mrs. Bentley reports, "the door closed significantly." […] Philip now waits a while before coming to bed, to allow his wife time to fall asleep first. "He won't come out," Mrs. Bentley reports, "till I'm in bed long enough to be asleep." And Philip now wanders off morosely by himself, pointedly avoiding his wife. "Sometimes he slips away for a few hours," Mrs. Bentley reports, "we never ask each other questions." (52-53)
Distracted by the thematic extractions of Atwood, Moss, and Frye, Brown's criticism of thematics is evidently focused on the politics of literary analysis and misses the content- or text-based analyses of literature. Brown seems to be preoccupied with his interrogation of the cultural function of thematic criticism. He argues that themes participate in the construction of cultural and social value: "Readers do […] need to make connections between literary texts and the world that lies outside of books, and theme can help to bridge the gap between world and world" ("Practice" 674). For him, themes are "always already culturally marked, and that the critics' statements need to be understood as themselves part of a larger discourse" ("Practice" 675). True indeed, but Brown does not mention the possibility of subjective and idiosyncratic themes of a writer. Nor does he give heed to thematic enclosure within the regime of a literary text. For instance, Margaret Atwood's fictions are pervaded by the recurring theme of "descent into the underground,"(9) a relatively autonomous theme independent of the larger social and cultural context. Thus what Brown aims to interrogate in his critical project turns out to be the Canadian anomaly of surreptitiously ascribing political values to literary values. As regards the text-based thematic study of literature that is less politically or culturally oriented, Brown remains silent.
Based upon his cultural understanding of thematic criticism, Brown puts forward three kinds of thematics, namely, explicative thematics, comparative thematics, and corpus thematics. In his taxonomy, explicative thematics is a thematic approach to the text from which critics derive "thematic statements from their examination of smaller elements within the text" (676). In comparative thematics, which is grounded in the scholarship of comparative literature, critics "are engaged in the finding of one theme in many texts" ("Practice" 676). Comparative criticism, according to Brown, resembles archetypal criticism, and is a kind of universal thematics based on deductive processes. A third thematics in Brown's terminology is corpus thematics, which "looks like comparative thematics in that it is only interested in themes that exist in more than one text, but because it treats a specified and bounded body of texts as if they form a coherent whole, it also resembles explicative thematics" ("Practice" 676). But, as he points out, corpus thematics also adopts an inductive method. However, he further distinguishes cultural thematics as a derivative of corpus thematics, arguing that in Canada "cultural thematics is what has become known simply as 'thematic criticism" (677). Nevertheless, Brown's theory fails to reveal the nature of thematics in that his division is largely object-based. What makes the three kinds of thematics different from one another is not the nature of their methodologies, or how a text is examined, but the scale and scope of the object being studied. Furthermore, he states that the practice of comparative thematics is chiefly deductive. However, what comparative thematics does is to draw analogies between transnational literatures, and the very act of drawing analogy is an inductive process indeed. It is true that comparative thematicists aim to find "recurring literary or mythic figures" ("Practice" 676), such as the "Ulysses theme," the Quixote, Don Juan, and Faust themes; however, an understanding of the themes in the pre-existing texts is an inductive method. Besides, deduction itself does not fulfill the function of extracting recurrent themes in literary texts. It is only by induction that we say a theme is recurrent. A third drawback of Brown's theory is that despite his attempt to define what Canadian thematic criticism is, he does not come up with a clear elucidation of the nature of the method. In fact, while he argues that Canadian thematic criticism is different from the thematic criticism of other national literatures, he does not elaborate on their differences. His division is supposed to apply to any national literatures, including Canadian literature. Fourth, Brown's taxonomy of thematics adopts a dual standard. It is groundless to distinguish between explicative and corpus thematics based on the scope and range of the texts, for a quantitative difference does not affect the methodological nature of thematics at all. What's more important is that Brown separates comparative thematics out from the other two schools, calling it "universal thematics" ("Practice" 675). In fact, his understanding of comparative thematics is merely based on national differences. This deification of comparative thematics betrays his political unconscious in his study of scholarship in Canada. Furthermore, the distinction between comparative and corpus thematics is hardly convincing, for, according to Brown's standard, the difference between them only lies in whether these critical methods examine "one theme in many texts" or "themes that exist in more than one text" ("Practice" 675). And by way of further complicating his theory, he asserts that "whether or not corpus thematicists actually work inductively may be a matter of controversy" (676). In the term "cultural thematics," the notion of culture is rather a dubious and elusive term with a multitude of possibilities. In Canadian criticism, culture has been specifically related to a thing indicative of the Canadian identity, an implication of culture as a nation's literature different from the literatures of other nations. Besides, the study of the work of one author or works of several authors is not necessarily a cultural examination. Therefore, it is irrelevant to relate thematic criticism to a cultural process and neglect its textual focus, although the nationalist thematicists in the 1960s and 1970s approached literary texts with a predominant cultural intention.
By drawing upon Mandel's tripartite categorization mentioned earlier and Moss's distinction between "context" and "content," "text" and "culture" (Patterns 1), my division of thematic criticism into textual thematics and contextual thematics, different from Brown's quantitative and politically-minded division, is based on the orientation of thematic scholarship, a dichotomy, so to speak, built on the difference between the "inside" and the "outside" of a literary text. Furthermore, my division is in keeping with Sam Solecki's terminology of "content-oriented" criticism (22). However, I am also aware of the fact that even the boundary between "inside" and "outside" can be somewhat elusive, and that a literary text is inevitably informed by the writer's or reader's cultural, social, political, and ideological impulses. Thus my categorization only treats "textual thematics" as a textual analysis relatively independent of ultratextual themes. As the contents of different texts vary, textual thematics is usually text-specific. However, as themes can be extracted regardless of textual boundary, contextual thematics, or cultural thematics, is theme-specific. Nevertheless, textual thematics is also capable of excavating a theme or themes even within the relative closure of a text or texts, and the theme or themes can be humanistic, sociological in nature. But then again, the theme derived from textual thematics is free from the intervention of ultratextual forces, although the textual theme can be extraliterary(10) in itself. For example, the textual thematicist might easily find the theme of alienation in Sinclair Ross's story "The Painted Door." Such a humanistic theme is derived from content analysis within the textual and ideological confines of the short story. However, to pronounce the theme of alienation a typical Canadian or prairie theme would turn the critic into a contextual thematicist. Textual thematics, as an insular mode of analysis, is conducted within the larger framework provided by the text itself, with the critical focus on the factors given by the text, whereas contextual thematics, being an extroverted methodology receptive of extraliterary perspectives, not only deals with the interactions between the text and the larger world in addressing sociological issues, but also may examine the cultural themes existent in more than one work of an author or authors, regardless of their national, ethnic backgrounds. In contextual thematics, the critic often proceeds from outside the text itself and approaches the text with preconceived themes that he hopes to find their textual parallels, whereas in textual thematics, the critic refrains himself within the province of the literary text and rarely looks out, focusing on the events, plot, motif, etc. Evidently, in contextual criticism, the critic plays a dominant role, and the text often transforms into a receptacle of the critic's ideological desires and the political unconscious of the nation-state or region.
Contextual thematics, culturally appropriated by nationalists in Canada, is rather a Canadian anomaly stemming from excessive political anxieties. Both modes of thematic criticism in my division are explicative by Brown's standards but are nonetheless not equivalent to either of Russell's modes based on the degree of textual/thematic inclusivity. It has to be noted, however, within the contextual thematics camp, the critical practice can be not only nationally motivated but regionally motivated. Thus Laurence Ricou's Vertical Man/Horizontal World, which has often been exempted from critical censure, remains largely under the category of contextual thematics. The object of study for either contextual thematics or textual thematics is not restricted by the amount of texts involved, although usually textual thematics is based on a diminutive scale as a result of the specificity of content analysis. Contextual thematics is usually a macrocosmic study of literary text(s), whereas textual thematics is a microcosmic scrutiny with a relatively strict amount of textual reliance and closure, which most often results in plot discussion. In terms of their symptomatic variations, contextual thematics tends to be generalizing and totalizing with its extraction of social and cultural themes, either in a nationalistic or regionalistic way, whereas textual thematics is coupled to an accusation of superficiality, simplicity, specificity, and triviality.
It is interesting to note that although thematic criticism has come under fierce attack by scholars in Canada, there has been a common failure to "distinguish between different kinds of thematic practice […] in the Canadian critical dialogue" (Brown "Practice" 677). Scholars tend to concentrate on the criminality of contextual thematics in wringing cultural themes out of literary texts while neglecting the explicative and interpretative nature of textual thematics. Frank Davey was able to perceive the drawbacks of textual thematics. He complained about the prevalence of contextual thematics in literary studies and further disapproved of any critic who reduced a novel "to its declared themes and its plot outline" ("Surviving" 429). W. H. New, in defining thematic criticism as an approach "devoted to the identification of a work's prevalent themes or central ideas," also calls attention to the defects of textual thematics which is "indirectly rendered through often recurrent patterns of action, characterization, or imagery" (Encyclopedia 250).
No doubt, when we blame contextual thematicists for their politicized tendencies in distorting literary works, textual thematics, which has lurked in dark oblivion in the midst of the chaos of cultural politics, should also be the object of critical examination for its simplistic ways of treating literature. One thing we should be certain of is that both the political penetration of contextual thematics in Canada's national and regional literatures and the relative primitiveness and simplicity of textual thematics should be submitted to sober and disinterested critical interrogation. However, it is essential to note that to probe the relationship between thematic criticism and the literary text, and the relevance of thematic criticism to regionalism, one has to be sensible of the complexity of the history and status quo of Canadian literature and regionalism and the larger social, political, and geophysical situations of Canada as well, and one has to shy away from the peril of pronouncing pure aesthetic judgment pertaining to these issues on thin grounds reckless of the actual intellectual climate in contemporary Canadian literature as well as the content-themes dichotomy of thematic criticism in the vein of Canadian criticism.
Despite the bitter controversy over thematic criticism's political motivations and nationally biased stance, it is acknowledged that contextual thematics is also present in regional literary study. Although many regionalist critics have strongly objected to the employment of contextual thematics, contextual thematics has also been a major method which regionalist critics have perhaps wittingly used to abstract regional themes as a subversion of national consciousness. The dominance of contextual thematics, for that matter thematic criticism altogether, has been a natural necessity in the development of Canadian literature, as every literature has to confront its immediate social, economic, political, geographic, and historical surroundings. In the case of literary regionalism, themes become an essential part of literature itself. Such a thematic extraction is rooted not merely in political ambitions against nationalism but in terms of the regional features per se. In treating prairie writers such as Sinclair Ross, W. O. Mithcell and Martha Ostenso, for instance, it is utterly impossible not to give priority to the depiction of landscape and its influence on human psychology. As Saskatchewan writer Ken Mitchell observes, the theme of landscape is "an essential thing" (Interview). In terms of the creative process on the part of the writer, his writing is subject to the impact of the social vicissitudes. National or regional identities shape the writing process and to ignore the sociological fa?ade of such writing fails to reveal its actual significance. Sometimes, a theme or a group of themes can become the chief concern of a writer. For example, the Canadian cold and wild that are existent in many novels are objective realities that affect the so-called "Canadian experience." Survival, cold climate, alienation, and isolation are often obsessive themes in regional literature, and themes as such naturally entail a contextual reading. Not only are geographic and psychological themes evident in regional literature, but also social and historical themes such as the Great Depression theme that appear in many prairie novels. In reading W. O. Mitchell, in particular, critics would come to the conclusion without fail that the writer himself is first and foremost a prairie humanist who faithfully records the geography, history, morality of his region rather than, say, a stylist, postmodernist, Freudian analyst, or deconstructionist. Therefore, although we criticize contextual thematics for its totalizing and generalizing tendencies, the method itself cannot be dispensed with as a unique way, in its own right, of perceiving the truth of the literary text. As a method of literary scholarship, contextual thematics plays an irreplaceable role in the interpretation of literature from a macrocosmic perspective. While the thematicists of the 1970s may have been excessively concerned about the establishment of a national or regional identity by imposing patterns and formulae of the so-called "Canadian experience" or regional experience on the text itself, contextual thematics does not fail to be a relevant instrument when in proper use. Any pretension that claims literature as devoid of the impact of social, historical, economic, and cultural factors of the nation only reduces the literary text to a body of pure signifiers with no signified, and the treatment of literary text as a verbal autonomy severed from any external referentiality proves untenable.
With respect to textual thematics, it also remains a valid and indispensable way of assessing regional literature. The reasons are twofold. First, sociology is the primary concern for many regional writers. Their works still serve as a mirror to the world in which they dwell. The regional truths that the writer purports to convey lie hidden in the thematic significance of the work itself. To avoid a thematic analysis of the content is to evade the humanistic and sociological dimension of the work, which in most cases become the dominant value of the work. As W. J. Keith admits, "some authors clearly invite a greater thematic concern than others" (Independent 29). For example, Keith identifies Frederick Philip Grove as a novelist "peculiarly suited to the thematic approach. His main thematic preoccupations are easily listed: the pioneering theme; the conflict between generations; […] the inexorable pressure of Time; the contrast between 'vision' and reality, etc." (Independent 31). In regional literature, textual thematics seems all the more an effective method of examination. It has to be noted that these themes are based on content analysis and do not necessarily refer to cultural constructs of a region as in contextual thematics.
Second, the prevalence of realism in regional literature, to some extent, predisposes the use of thematic criticism. As George Bowering notes, "our critical, pedagogical, & popular awards have been reserved for authors who seek to reproduce in words the lives of real" ("Modernism" 524). In regional literature, realism seems to have become the most salient feature and it enjoys an enduring vitality. The vigor of realism exists not only in rural realism but also in urban realism. Thematic criticism suits realism in that realism works on a mimetic principle with the belief that art mirrors society. A realist work serves as a condensation of social phenomena including its characters, events, issues, and so forth. The realist writer records or sketches life in a miniaturizing way. Artistic modifications operate only within the limits of verifiable proportion so that its empirical effects do not violate the expectation of the reader who lives over the events in a way that strictly works on the rules of reality. Textual thematics hence performs the function of decompressing the miniaturized sequence of events provided in the realist text. By focusing on the textual details such as plot, subject matter, and so on, the thematicist addresses the concerns of the writer directly, with an attempt to abstract social morals and truths implied by the author. This is not to suggest that textual thematics is the only best way of criticism; as Hutcheon argues, "postmodernism merely does the same examining in a different way, challenging in the process the unexamined assumption that realism is the only convention that can undertake such an examination" (Canadian Postmodern 20). However, in Canadian regionalism, the sometimes-stark realism as in Sinclair Ross's stories precludes other approaches. Furthermore, as other theoretical approaches seek to expose their corresponding values in the work, textual thematics unveils the social mask of the text which the author wears on purpose as the masquerade of writing. As a result of the thematic transparency of a realist text, it invites an ideological and sociological unraveling of the thematic complexities of the text and a thematic analysis of the content will be of more relevance than other approaches.
The view that sees thematic criticism as a necessity in the postmodernist age of Canada is shared by many critics. At the Calgaray Conference on the Canadian Novel in 1978, Henry Kreisel, D. G. Jones, and Laurie Ricou all sympathized with thematic criticism despite the widespread discontent. For instance, Laurie Ricou argued for the relevancy of the thematic approach, saying that the novel, with "its origins in popular social contexts […] gives us […] the whole sense of an experience" (Steele 98)(11) Whereas Henry Kreisel, himself a regionalist critic, argued that "such attempts are essential for a national literature. It is essential for the creation of a consciousness to know what the overall shape, the overall pattern of the literature, of the life" (Steele 93)(12). Likewise, T. D. MacLulich argued on another occasion for thematic criticism from a Marxist stance. He observed that "all critical theories rest on assumptions that constitute an implicit ideology" (19), and the appeal for new theories is symptomatic of an intellectual daydream "to promote a purely 'literary' approach to Canadian writing" (19) at the cost of "neglecting an important political dimension of their subject" (18). MacLulich's words may sound scathing to the critical ear but, unfortunately, ring true to some extent:
I am asking how we should respond to the flashily dressed strangers who are offering to sell us a new suit of critical clothes, a suit woven from arguments that are so sophisticated and so dependent on specialized terminology so that they are all but incomprehensible to all but the most intelligent and highly trained observers. Should we exclaim "Me too" with the Emperor. Or should we cautiously inquire whether any suit made from such gossamer materials can really withstand the snow and cold of a Canadian winter? Perhaps we should stick with our old clothes, however reactionary and old-fogeyish they make us look, until we are certain that the new styles are appropriate for us. (18-19).
Furthermore, even the allegedly postmodernist writer and critic Robert Kroetsch, whom many critics hold as a paragon of postmodern criticism, cannot escape from the shadows of thematic criticism. Tiefensee remarks in her study of Kroetsch's deconstructive theory that his criticism "is considered to be not only exemplary of, but also largely responsible for, the advent of 'new new criticism' in Canada" (74). After a close investigation of Kroetsch and his critics, Tiefensee concludes that Kreotsch's criticism is "intensely thematic, with its theme and goal being that of all earlier Canadian criticism—the creation and affirmation of a Canadian identity in literature" (75).
Russell Brown has been a staunch proponent of thematic criticism, contextual thematics in particular. In an article titled "Critic, Culture, Text: Beyond Thematics," published in 1978, he made the comment that "critics are always ideological and they frequently tell their own stories as well as commenting on others" (155). In his 2001 article "The Practice and Theory of Canadian Thematic Criticism: A Reconsideration," he seemed to be reiterating the importance of thematic examination of literary texts and the interactions between the text and society. Indeed, despite his detailed analysis of the defects of contextual thematics, he feels the need to adopt such a methodology in the Canadian context. However, his remarks reveal the speaker, again, as a nationalist critic:
I therefore feel it would be a good idea if we could hold on to something like what Frye conceived of as a "Canadian imagination" — as well as to a Chinese imaginary, an Indian imaginary, a Nigerian one, and so forth. In this age of growing free trade and readjusted global hegemony, we need psychic space for national cultures like these because they generate narratives, images, and yes, themes—other than those being manufactured and distributed by global cultural industries. ("Practice" 669)
In conclusion, thematic criticism as a more traditional way of reading the text cannot be dispensed with if we take into account the social and literary circumstances of Canadian regionalism. The particularity of the regional experience and the relative transparency of realism, together with the socio-historical dimensions of humanism exhibited in regional writing, permit a thematic criticism that also aims at revealing the social unconscious of the text. From the point of view of the reader, thematic criticism serves hermeneutic and heuristic purposes based on textual analysis of the thematic elements such as plot, character, and so on. The establishment of themes in a text, far from being reductive, unifies the reading experience and erects a central significance that not only pins down the textual focus but also contextualizes the text within its spatiotemporal dimensions. As Rodolphe Gasché argues, theme is "an originary—a constituted unity or substance […], [and it] secures a work's unitary meaning, its' inner continuity" (262-3).
It is through the thematic approach to regionalism that particularity, specificity, heterogeneity of the regional writing process can be promoted. As David Staines observes, "we should not underestimate the importance of thematic criticism in the development of the selfhood of Canadian literature" (Beyond 80-1). In effect, not only is thematic criticism a historically valuable approach, recent decades also see its revival in the international climate, as there arises a "new concern with substance and meaning" (Trommler 6). Thomas Pavel also remarks:
By the mid-1980s, however, formalism, whether new-critical, semiotic, or poststructuralist, was under attack, and attention to the thematic content of the literary texts revived. […] Political criticism needed a more concrete grasp of literary content than narrative grammars, semiotic squares, and self-subverting meanings could offer. (124)
Although thematic criticism may be politically and ideologically appropriated, its relevance in the context of postnationalist Canadian regionalism remains unquestionable. At least, one should see "the relation between contextual narratologies and formal narrative poetics not as one of mutual exclusion, but as one of mutual nourishment" (Shen 165-66).
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(1)There also emerged a good number of other small regional presses dedicated to preserving and promoting the literature of their own regions, such as Turnstone (1975), established in Winnipeg to promote Manitoban literature, Breakwater in Newfoundland, Quarry (1965) in Kingston, Blackfish (1971) in Barnaby, Vehicule (1973) and Quadrant Editions (1980) in Montreal, Talonbooks (1967) and Very Stone House (1966) in Vancouver, Oolichan Books (1974) in Nanaimo, Hurtig (1967), NeWest (1977) and Longspoon (1980) in Edmonton, Sono Nis (1968) in Victoria (they moved to Winlaw in 2002), Black Moss (1969) in Winsor, Thistledown in Saskatoon, New Brunswick Chapbooks (1968), and so on. Some of the regional presses that appeared in this period had an ephemeral life, such as Vancouver-based Klanak (1958-1978), Rattlesnake (1961-1962), Periwinkle (1963-1964), Imago (1964-1974), and blewointment press (1967-1983), Ontario-based Alphabet (1960-1972), and Gryphon Press (1965-1972), Hawkshead (1958-1962), Toronto-based Aleph (1961), Isaacs Gallery (1962), Ganglia Press (1965-1988), Fleye Press (1966-1967), Weed/Flower (1965-1973), Montreal-based Delta Canada (1965-1972), and Poverty (1966-1972), Montreal-based First Statement (1943-1951), Toronto-based Contact (1952-1967), Emblem Books (1954-1962).
(2)In Alberta, there was a voice for the secession of Alberta from Canada and hence a "Republic of Alberta" <http://www.republicofalberta.com>, and in BC, the "Republic of Cascadia" <http://zapatopi.net/cascadia.html>, as well as the "Arcadian Commonwealth" that seeks independence of Alaska, British Columbia, Oregon, Washington, and Yukon <http://www.arcadiagov.org/frameset.htm>.
(3)For instance, Alberta Bound (1986), Boundless Alberta (1993), Saskatchewan Gold (1982), Sundog Highway: Writing from Saskatchewan (2000), Manitoba Stories (1981), Made in Manitoba (1990), Stories from Ontario (1974), Toronto Stories (1990), Montreal, Mon Amour (1989), You and Your Bright Ideas: New Montreal Writing (2001), West by Northwest: British Columbia Short Stories (1998), Vancouver Short Stories (1973), Stories from Atlantic Canada (1973), etc.
(4)It has to be noted that what I purport to argue is not to install absolute "aesthetic and literary values" in a supreme position. Aesthetic value is a variable thing always in flux with time and space. The aesthetic and literary values of a region are necessarily steeped in the political discourse that determines value judgements. As Terry Eagleton argues, the "'literary canon', […] has to be recognized as a construct, fashioned by particular people for particular reasons at a certain time. There is no such thing as a literary work or tradition which is valuable in itself" (401). Harold Bloom is dissatisfied with the critics' "flight from the aesthetic" (407) and hopes to restore artistic value to the throne of canonicity. However, many theorists question the legitimacy of absolute literary value. John Guillory admits the necessity of what he terms "evaluative judgements" (vii), but thinks that there is no absolute literary value and there are many other factors that influence the value of a work. The regionalist contention for national canonicity with an anticentric gesture is essentially political in nature. As Carole Gerson argues, national literary canons "are deceptively fluid entities" (46). In the Canadian context, the appraisal of the aesthetic values of a regionalist work is effected only within the framework of politics, for difference and particularity in the postnational era are essentially politically-driven notions.
(5)The discussion of the novel here is based on Ken Mitchell's typescript presented to me in July, 2003.
(6)An earlier objection to the study of themes, however, is seen in John Sutherland's response to Northrop Frye's Canada and Its Poetry in an article entitled "Old Dog Trait—An Extended Analysis," in which he expressed his doubt about Frye's illustration of the "native tradition" of Canadian poetry based on his analysis of the central theme in Canadian poetry. For instance, he interrogated the grounds of Frye's remarks that "[t]he theme which he calls the 'central theme' of Canadian poetry— 'the riddle of inexplicable death' is one of the greatest with which poetry can deal" (312). Therefore, he questioned "if there is a distinctive theme and mood in Canadian poetry" (312), by saying that Northrop Frye may jeopardize the reading of Canadian poetry by his "ignoring others [other aspects] of equal consequence" (312).
(7)John Metcalf serves as a spokesman for literary internationalism. As an immigrant from Britain, he is somewhat deluded by the lax and undemanding academia in Canada. Commenting on the jeopardy of thematic generalizations, he observed: "I don't think I stand anywhere in the CanLit Scheme. I haven't got a Garrison Mentality and I'm not at Stage Three or a Victim" (Kicking 8). He charged Canadian critics with the criminal inertia of "baying at the thematic moon" (Kicking 8). Nevertheless, he encountered disapproval from Sam Solecki, who, notwithstanding his acknowledgement of the deficiency of thematic criticism, accused him of adopting "extra-territorial" standards (22).
(8)George Woodcock is entitled to many labels: poet, critic, writer, and historian. However, he is perhaps best known as an anarchist worldwide. He was born in Winnipeg but grew up in Britain, and his socializing with the British literati such as George Orwell, T. S. Eliot, and Aldous Huxley helped shape his view of Canada and Canadian literature in connection to the world's context. He founded the journal Canadian Literature in 1959. His anarchist thoughts might have contributed a great deal to his regionalist stance on Canadian literature. As he argued in Odysseus Ever Returning, "Canadian literature […] emerged as a clearly defined regional literature" ("Views" 140). For him, "Canadian writers still belong within the greater tradition of Anglo-Saxon literature and have to establish a place there as individuals" ("Views" 141).
(9)For an examination of this recurring theme, see Ding Linpeng's "The Recurrent Theme of 'Descent into the Underground' in Margaret Atwood's Fictions," Foreign Literatures 1 (2002): 82-90.
(10)By "extraliterary," I refer to values conventionally thought to be outside of the text, particularly to values that are thought to be extraneous to literariness, or aesthetic values. In fact, as the term content covers a rather wide range of subject matter in the text, textual thematics thus is inclusive of formal considerations as well as non-literary concerns. Furthermore, one has to distinguish between textual themes and cultural themes in literary texts.
(11)This appeared as Laurie Ricou's untitled response to W. J. Keith's "The Thematic Approach to Canadian Fiction" in Taking Stock: The Calgary Conference on the Canadian Novel.
(12)Ibid. Henry Kreisel's untitled response.
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