Under Eastern Eyes: A Critical Reading of Maritime Fiction by Janice Kulyk Keefer, and: Dancing on the Shore: A Celebration of Life at Annapolis Basin by Harold Horwood (review)

148 LEITERS IN CANADA 1987 seriously enough to earn the right to include them in its gallery of portraits. (BART TESTA) Janice Kulyk Kee'fer. Under Eastern Eyes: A Critical Reading ofMaritime Fiction University of Toronto Press. 299. $30.00; $14.95 paper Harold Horwood. Dancing on the Shore: A Celebration of Life at Annapolis Basin. Foreword by Farley Mowat McClelland and Stewart. 219. $19.95 Janice Kulyk Keefer has written Under Eastern Eyes: A Critical Reading of Maritime Fiction in order 'to scratch the initials of Maritime writers on the consciousness of "national" (ie, Toronto-based) critics' who have largely ignored their existence. In her 'Polemical Introduction' she attacks the , 'mystique of nationalism and its corollary, anti-regionalism' as expressed by such literary critics as E.K. Brown, Hugo McPherson, Ronald Sutherland, John Metcalf, and Northrop Frye, or such historians as Donald Creighton and Frank Underhill. When Frye, defining the way this country has been perceived by our imaginative writers, announces that '~anada has, for all practical purposes, no Atlantic seaboard,' he places himselfwiththe historians ofthe 'transcontinental' or 'Laurentian' school which emerged in the 1940S and 1950S and saw Canada exclusively as an expression of east-west trade routes running through the port cities of Montreal and Toronto along the great inland river systems. In addition, the pressing need to create for Canada a distinctive ethos thatwould tie its inhabitants together and fence out British and American interlopers ignores the powerful divisions and disparitie$ between the regions. Keefer argues that 'we must conceive of Canadian literature in a pluralist sense ... as a variety of ways of experiencing and articulating a shared world.' Keefer defines in her introduction and elaborates in subsequent chapters on specific texts the ways in which she believes Maritime fiction deviates from perceived national paradigms, current critical and literary fashions, or cliched representations of the region. Because Maritime fiction is 'overwhelmingly representational,' concerned with the reality and significance of the accessible world, it is often dismissed in the current vogue for metafiction, mythopoesis, and fabulation. The precondition of this kind of engagement with social and economic realities is 'a strong historical awareness' which, 'perhaps to compensate for the sheer dolefulness ofits history,' has 'favoured the development ofthe historical romance over the historical novel.' Keefer finds the 'prevailing stereotype of all-pervasive Maritime political conservatism' exploded by the developmentof a 'literary tradition in which one finds radical conservatives HUMANITIES 149 like Haliburton cheekby jowl with moderate liberals like Howe, and such idiosyncratically opposed world views as those maintained by Milton Acorn and Alden Nowlan.' Because the region is characterized by an evenness of climate and geography, its literature does not reflect Frye's 'Garrison Mentality,' that supposed Canadian terror in the face of an overwhelmingly hostile natural world; 'nature for the Maritime writer is humanized, accessible, inexhaustibly rich or resistant, but never annihilating .' In consequence the idyllis a favoured Maritime mode, butin some of the best writers it is treated subversively, as 'temporarily selfdelightingbut never self-sustaining,' or, as inthe fiction ofAlden Nowlan and David Adams Richards, abandoned to reveal the misery of isolation and poverty. Because the region has largely escaped urbanization and industrialization, its literature has not, like much of Canadian fiction, moved from examination of the small community to consideration of the larger society; it remains fixed on the backwoods, the enclosed farming valley, or the lost island. The writers' dilemma, whether to stay in such locales or leave for more varied and sophisticated cultural centres, often finds expression within their texts, becoming one of the major paradigms of Maritime fiction. Keefer concludes with a chapter that has little connection with herbasic thesis, in which the representation offemales in Maritime fiction as largely anti-literature or -literacy is set against the excellent fiction recently produced by women writers in the region. While it seems very odd that anyone seeKing to define the literary characteristics of a region would confine herself to one genre even if, as Keefer argues, 'it is in novels, short stories and narratives that the voice of Maritimers has most often and most compellingly been heard,' her readings of individual texts are intelligent and the paradigms she delineates are certainly present...