Reading Mavis Gallant's 1940s in the 1990s: ‘The Fenton Child’

NEIL BESNER Reading Mavis Gallant's 19405 in the 1990S: 'The Fenton Child' Fiction, like painting, consists entirely of more than meets the eye; otherwise it is not worth a second's consideration. Mavis Gallant (Mavis Gallant's 'The Moslem Wife' has more going on in it than five novels). Michael Ondaa~e I Mavis Gallant and Alice Mtmro both published their Selected Stories in 1996. These handsome volumes, one largely jet black, the other mostly cream whlte, seem to stand like magisterial bookends on a long shelf capable of accommodating Gallant's and Munro's previous work - including,between the two of them, some seventeen books of stories - and held up at either end by the twinned supports of two of our major readings of the short fiction written in Canada from 1950 on. Looking along that shelf would open a perspective not simply onto an immobile past - any vital sense of the past, and especially across the several eras as conflicted as these last fifty years, calls insistently for revision - but also onto the present, calling for a more current reading of the short story in Canada. Sucha reading could begin by generously bracketing 'Canada' in order to read 'story' among the most plural and indeterminate contexts we have ever had available to us. The old dualities, those twinned supports - binaries beginning with nation and region, geography and history, Europe and North America, realism and (post)modernism, theme and form, or substance and style - are no longer so inSistently with us. Because these dualities do not resonate as they once did, it now seems commonplace, but also distorted, to observe that the volumes at either end of that shelf represent two of the finest achievements of the modern Canadian story. The first commonplace dislocates Canada internationally. In this reading, throughout her career Gallant has represented 'Canada' in her fktion, when she does so at all, as absent from or ignorant of a larger vision of North American and Europe. Traditionally, that perspective was one assigned in Canada to the writer in exile, the expatriate, or the disaffected: Norman Levine in his short fiction, Mordecai Richler in some of his novels, among many others. (Gallant has remarked that she finds it UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 68, NUMBER 4, FALl ]999 MAVIS GALLANT'S 'THE FENTON CHILD' 899 revealing that 'expatriate' is often misspelled in Canadian newspapers as 'expatriot'; Home Truths, xii.) From this perspective, Gallant's 'Canadian' stories could be separated out and collected under a title such as that of her award-wirming book, Home Truths: Selected Canadian Stories (1981) - a title that points, misleadingly, to their national venue as their central theme. But for Gallant, the subject of Canadian identity, lost or otherwise, was always an invention , something that sounded 'tense and stormy and romantic' as she put it in a 1978 interview (Hancock, 26). To read Gallant's stories through this lens, understanding 'Europe' as the larger domain in which 'Canada' becomes almost precolonial, is to diminish and restrict both contexts. More significantly, this focus actually veils the kind of attention vital to reading Gallant'5 short fiction. A related argument could be made about the volume at the other end of the shelt but that is the opening of another discussion. A focus on Munro's loving attention to southwestern Ontario might lead to an exaltation of her writing as the finest regional achievement in Canadian short fiction, but that reading is equally distorting; under the counterpoint intensity of such a gaze, the bookshelf might crumble and collapse. It already has. Better to allow the spectra of long views, long bookshelves, and the majesty of two large volumes to fade out for the moment; better to look more closely at one book, one story. The fifty-two stories in Gallant's volume, representing much less than half of her published short fiction, have been arranged in nine sections. The first five represent decades, with the first and the last of these, 'The Thirties and Forties' and 'The Eighties and Nineties,' doing double duty. The last four sections collect some of Gallant's linked stories; the best-known of these groups, justly, is the Linnet...