Imagined Nations: Reflections on Media in Canadian Fiction (review)

W.H. Auden characterizes our species as an analogy-drawing animal ever in danger of treating analogies as identities. Of course we risk Auden's danger because we must: analogy is the only source of order in an open system, and we cannot endure chaos. Absent the arbitrary, self-contained systems of logic with their attendant certainty, human invention provides one lone (commonly reviled) alternative antidote to chaos, namely rhetoric - the 'antistrophe to dialectic' in Artistotle's definition. Through its long history as yin to logic's yang, rhetoric systematizes the arts of analogy (including those of 'persuasion' which seem to eclipse in stereotype the larger enterprise) and negotiates, or fails to negotiate, their myriad dangers, including the specific violation of decorum that perturbs Auden. Imagined Nations is, in many ways, an extended meditation on the dynamics and dangers of analogies, particularly those investing analogy with causality. David Williams's principal concern is the metonymy linking topoi intrinsic to various media (McLuhan's 'message') with dominant fictions of political identity; fictions nationalist and broadly psychosocial as well as literary. Proof-texts include extensive citations from media theorists, especially Anderson, Bhabha, Delbert, Innes, McLuhan, and Ong. His principle resource, however, is a clutch of Canadian novels exquisitely selected for the range of media they reference through narrative content or mimetic form: MacLeod's No Great Mischief; Johnston's The Colony of Unrequited Dreams; Aquin's Prochain episode; Findlay's The Butterfly Plague; Vanderhaeghe's The Englishman's Boy; Ondaatje's The English Patient (film and print versions); Gibson's Necromancer.

On this foundation Williams's adventurous study constructs with great wit and insight an intricate pattern of explication that evokes - without entirely resolving - a seemingly intransigent dilemma of analogy. One horn of the dilemma is our urgent need, evidently irresistible, to use the print medium to explicate other media, including (by a kind of myopic bait-and-switch) their role in artefacts of that explicator-medium itself (such as Canadian novels). This imperative, alas, trips tanglefooted over a rhetorical interrogative: what possible principle of decorum allows the explication of one medium using topoi exclusive to another? McLuhan was perhaps the first to confront this critical embarrassment head on, but Williams devotes his first three chapters to tracking its inflections in multiple versions from classical and humanist sources through Innes and Saussure to postmodern and deconstructionist icons. Symptomatically, the locution 'in other words,' with its oblique assumption of unproblematic identity in analogy, occurs with obtrusive frequency to summarize the gist of these citations, creating arrhythmic stutters in an otherwise elegant style. Both Williams's recognition of incipient dilemma and his determination to slip its massy bonds are thus implicit throughout, and surface explicitly in the justification he feels compelled to offer for his procedure: 'the novel is still the ideal genre to question the social epistemology of hypermedia and to slow their assault on nationally imagined communities ... the rise of novels increasingly concerned with media forms also suggests that the novel is a diagnostic tool that enables us to think about the social and political effects of new media.' Here any dangers implicated in assuming or asserting analogies among media undergo slippage to become refocused as an issue of appropriate 'genre,' and reformulated as a problem of analogy not among media but among diverse constellations of content within the single medium of print.

In embryo this is Williams's dilemma-fighting strategy. He necessarily accepts, because his topic requires it, McLuhan's conception that each medium has an intrinsic 'message,' a capacity to induce psychic and social change peculiar to itself; to instance, among other inductions, an idiosyncratic 'imagined nation.' Simultaneously, he must deny, or at least finesse, McLuhan's cognate principle that the content of the medium is indecorous with this message; indeed renders it opaque. Williams, in short, struggles with demons common to the print-addicted among us. As his subtitle promises, that struggle both informs and invites reflection. His methods - exploratory, tentative, even quizzical...