Updating Critical Spaces: Margaret Laurence and her Work

Since I live and teach in the United States, I have ample opportunity to note the relative obscurity here of Canada's renowned writer, Margaret Laurence. While the work of other Canadian writers—Michael Ondaatje, Margaret Atwood, Yann Martel, Alice Munro, Rohinton Mistry, Carol Shields, to name a few—is reviewed by major publications, taught frequently in university, and even high school, courses, and sold in bookstores throughout the country, the major novels of Margaret Laurence remain insistently Canadian because it is in Canada that their main readership resides. True, the author's early critical work on Somali poetry and prose, her two early novels situated in Africa, This Side Jordan and The Prophet's Camel Bell, plus her collection of short stories, The Tomorrow-Tamer, also about Africa, while they are acknowledged to be of real significance by scholars of African literature and by such distinguished African writers as Chinua Achebe have, even in Canada, hardly received the attention they deserve in a literary climate that has for at least the past decade focused much of its attention on cultural studies. In many ways, Laurence is an ideal candidate for the cultural studies curriculum, and it is important that several recent publications attempt to place her in this arena. Christian Riegel's Challenging Territory: The Writing of Margaret Laurence undertakes to fill in some of the blanks in Laurence criticism, emphasizing in particular the political vision of feminist, postmodernist, and postcolonialist theorists. Two reissued volumes, Long Drums and Cannons: Nigerian Dramatists and Novelists, 1952–1966, and Heart of a Stranger, both edited by long-time Laurence scholar Nora Foster Stovel, pick up on various postcolonial issues that, it is fair to say, have been overshadowed among many Canadian and European critics by attention to Laurence's famous Manawaka cycle of novels and short stories

My own study of the novelist, Critical Spaces: Margaret Laurence and Janet Frame, split as it is between the Canadian Laurence and the New Zealander Janet Frame, was published in 1995 and attempted to track the tendencies of the criticism devoted to each of these major writers. Roughly speaking, I follow the trajectory of work on Laurence, beginning with the sensitive studies done by Laurence's friend, Clara Thomas, through the interviews with the author during the 1960s. These interviews are often concentrated on narrative themes and archetypes, although by the late 1960s and early 1970s, many critics and reviewers began to attend to the politics of nationalism, finding in Laurence's work certain approaches designed to speak particularly to Canadians. Some psychoanalytic commentary was also being used to elucidate the extraordinarily persuasive characters Laurence has created and to investigate the milieu—Manawaka—that she has so notably given to fiction. Narratological theories, never a prominent trend, nevertheless illuminated some of Laurence's techniques in creating perspective and voice. By the 1980s, a plethora of theoretical approaches to the writer's work ranged from studies in intertextuality, to comparative literature, to language phenomena, and, of course, to the now-dominating field of feminist studies. Laurence's work lends itself to feminist literary theory, with its attention to women writers, strong female characters, feminist political issues, and the exigencies of gender roles. Some critics in the 1980s were also taking Laurence's African work seriously, paying attention to the effects of imperialism on native populations and to the emerging field of postcolonial studies. In 1980, Jane Leney published "Prospero and Caliban in Laurence's African Fiction" in The Journal of Canadian Fiction, and, in the same issue, Patricia Morley presented "Canada, Africa, Canada," an essay analyzing the impact of Laurence's African career on her Canadian fiction. Barbara Godard's 1990 "Caliban's Revolt: The Discourse of the (M)other" connects postmodernism and postcolonialism, giving its feminist analysis a broadly political stance, and Fiona Sparrow's Into Africa with Margaret Laurence (1992) emphasizes the generic variety of Laurence's African work, though she argues that much of it was unduly influenced by Mannoni's 1951 study, Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization.

Indeed, when I wrote in Critical...