Avant-Garde and Counter-Culture Made in Canada

“The country that invented Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye did so by not ever being Modern,” Canadian writer Robert Kroetsch famously asserted, observing that Canada’s literature “evolved directly from Victorian into Post-Modern” (quoted in Godard 1991, 121). Although Canada is generally acknowledged to have made great forays into developing postmodern literatures and visual arts, the Cana-dian Modern and, even more so, Canada’s avant-garde have remained overlooked and understudied until recently. The books under review contribute to a larger effort to research Canadian modernist and avant-garde expressions. Betts, Gifford, and Voyce collectively document the broad time span of Canadian avant-garde expressions, including the works of the mystical radicals in the 1910s, the Surrealists and Automatists from the 1920s to the 1960s, the Vorticists from the 1920s to the 1970s, and the Toronto Research Group from the 1970s to 1980s. They also document that Canadian writers like Elizabeth Smart and artists like Wyndham Lewis and Lawren Harris were involved in international networks. Moreover, the forces that shaped modernism and its avant-garde in other countries—the cataclysmic experiences of war and trauma, as well as the revolutions in technology, gender, and sexuality—were an integral part of the experience of Canadians in the early twentieth century. Canada was centrally involved in the First World War for four long years, unlike the United States, which entered only belatedly in 1917. In a young (post)colonial country, Canadian writers, artists, and activists experimented with their own variants of modernist and avant-garde articulations, which remained unrecognized during the twentieth century but have sparked a lively scholarly interest in the twenty-first.

Recent scholarship such as Glenn Willmott’s Unreal Country: Modernity in the Canadian Novel in English (2002) has located Canada’s modernity in a postcolonial wrestling with identity, as reflected in its literature. Likewise, Dean Irvine’s Editing Modernity: Women and Little-Magazine Cultures in Canada, 1916–1956 (2008) has revealed the early- and mid-twentieth-century world of avant-garde editing of little magazines to be a gendered world, with a predominance of women editors, and one in which Canadian women played a central role. Canada also contributed to physically embodied expressions of modernism, as seen in Maud Allan’s modern dance and in what Françoise Sullivan advocated in the Montreal Automatists’ manifesto as “the use of movement as a conduit for emotion” (Lindgren 2015, 531). The Cana-dian avant-garde emerged in a myriad of forms, including poetry, fiction, manifesto, performance, and visual art. At the centenary anniversary of both the First World War and of Dadaism, the time is ripe for considering the new scholarship asserting and advancing our understanding of Canada’s contributions to the avant-garde, as proposed in the three recent books discussed below.

Gregory Betts’s Avant-Garde Canadian Literature: The Early Manifestations (2013) locates Canada’s historical avant-garde in the so-called cosmic movement and creates a genealogy that is shown to evolve through salons, living rooms, cottages, parlours, and clubs. The book geographically situates the avant-garde in well-known Canadian locations such as the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto, of which Ernest Hemingway was a member (136), Hart House Theatre, and the Bon Echo Inn in northern Ontario. In reading about this diverse and colourful group of cosmic Canadians, one is reminded of their eponymous predecessors and contemporaries, like the Kosmiker in Berlin and Munich—gender-bending advocates of sexual liberation and secret circles who worshipped the sun and practised paganism. In Germany, as in Canada, the cosmic members’ goal was to collapse the boundaries of art...