I Just Love Ethel Wilson: A Reparative Reading of The Innocent Traveller

In his critical biography of ethel wilson, David Stouck gathers evidence from Wilson’s letters and her public statements to conclude that “the life or death of a character was often of less importance to Wilson than the placement of a comma or the choosing of a word” (190). This statement has haunted me since I reviewed this book in 2004. Stouck describes how Wilson might delete characters, or add chapters, at the suggestion of her editor, but argued passionately to defend her diction, her punctuation, the structure of “the English sentence,” as she wrote it.¹ What does it mean to be this kind of fiction writer? The practice of close reading assumes that every writer pays attention to every detail, yet anyone who has ever had anything published knows that this assumption is a bit disingenuous: editors have their preferences, and often writers (at least this writer) decide to cut their losses and submit to them. Novels like Wilson’s are rightly viewed in the light of contemporary theory as collaborations among editors, readers, and writers, and certainly Stouck offers ample evidence that editors, particularly John Gray of Macmillan, were instrumental in shaping Wilson’s career and her fiction. This is especially true of my favourite Wilson novel, The Innocent Traveller, a book she struggled with for nineteen years, under the guidance of several different editors.² Yet Robert Weaver told David Stouck that “An editor … felt more freedom to remove a character from Ethel Wilson’s work than a comma” (Biography 121). So how did she reconcile this willingness to change the big things in her writing with her refusal to even consider changing the punctuation, the vocabulary, the rhythm of her sentences, the things that seem so trivial to the lay reader? What is it about the details of Wilson’s writing, her style, as most critics have designated it, that she felt so compelled to defend?

These kinds of questions about an individual writer seem to me to gain urgency from being placed in the context of recent discussions about the discipline of English. A commentary published in November 2012 by Albert Braz (in University Affairs) laments that even professors of English literature don’t seem to value the literariness of literature any more. Listening to us, he says, it is difficult to believe that we love literature; we justify our discipline in terms of job skills or declare that new media or literary theory should be the focus of our curricula. We should love literature, he says, and we should teach that love to our students; we should call on that love to defend our profession from those who consider our work arcane or trivial. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick also advocates a practice of loving literature by suggesting that the entire tradition of critical reading inspired by Marx and Freud is “paranoid” (126) and asking if there isn’t something we can do with texts other than repeatedly demonstrating their complicity with the oppressive forces of capitalism, if to only comfort and nurture ourselves as readers and scholars. She advocates a form of “reparative” reading (128) that could emerge not from paranoia but from “the depressive position” (128), a reading practice of repair and reparation that would allow us to rediscover what we can love about texts.³ Braz and Sedgwick give me the licence to say that I love Wilson’s writing; I love her description of the British Columbian landscape and her wisely aphoristic statements about community, about death and the passage of time, but also I am simply in awe of her sentences—their rhythm, their balance, their variety, and their sound. Wilson’s sentences please me, for me they call up an involuntary laugh, demand to be said over and over, to be felt on the pulses and sung through the veins. They almost convince me of David Abram’s analysis of language as a “profoundly carnal phenomenon” (74), whose joys are comprised wholly of “the way they feel in the mouth or roll off the tongue” (75). I...