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Bakhtin Reads De Milk: Canadian Literature, Postmodernism, and the Theory ofDialogism RICHARD CAVELL x\. number of Canadian critics—Frank Davey, Bruce Powe, and Paul Stuewe among them—have recently argued that Canadian criticism has reached an impasse. While the thematic criticism which has characterized writing on Canadian literature is acknowledged to have played a necessary part in the articulation of a Canadian literary identity, that criticism has been unable to respond adequately to the formal nature of the texts about which it seeks to speak (as Russell Brown, among others, has argued). As a solution to this impasse, these critics have proposed a re-orientation towards formalism—towards "literature as language and . . . writing as writing," as Davey puts it in Surviving the Paraphrase (1983, 12). This movement towards formalism (in the widest sense) is to be applauded; however, it has tended, in practice, to valorize contemporary works (works which Davey refers to as "post-modern" [8-9]) as comprising the category most amenable to such formalist readings. The implications of these studies, then, are canonical, and the methodological impasse remains. This impasse can only be overcome through methodologies responsive to the formal and historical nature of Canadian literature as a whole. One such methodology is provided by Mikhail Bakhtin's interrelated theories of dialogism, heteroglossia, and carnivalization,1 which can successfully accommodate the determining factors of Canadian literature. I focus on James De Mille's 1869 novel, The Dodge Club (hereafter TDG), for a number of reasons. First of all, it is a decidedly non-canonical novel, its re-issue in 1981 having occasioned no critical interest beyond the introduction by Gwendolyn Davies, and this despite the fact that De Mille is ranked as one of our most important novelists on the basis of A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888). Secondly, the formal awareness displayed by TDC—and this is a hallmark of De Mille's fiction, as Carole Gerson has demonstrated—reminds us that Bakhtin's theories, for all their apparent contemporaneity, derive not from a reading of modernA 206 ist and postmodernist fiction, but from his study of nineteenth-century fiction, primarily Dostoevsky, which he saw as the literary heir of a Menippean tradition going back to Rabelais and beyond. Third, in its Old World/New World configuration, TDC alerts us to the way in which the concepts of monologism and dialogism apply to the relationship which any work of Canadian literature must express to the European literary tradition (as I have suggested elsewhere, with reference to A. M. Klein). In these terms, the monologism of the established literary tradition would be contested by the literature of the New World, or of the colony, if you will, in a dialogical encounter which subverts the temporal, authoritative elements of that traditional literature.2 I am reminded, in this context, of Milton Wilson's witty yet pertinent comment that "one of the advantages of a [literature ] less than a hundred years old is that all the things that couldn't happen when they should have happened keep happening all the time" (qtd. in Frye 1977, 45). And, finally, TDC affords me a point of departure for the suggestion that Canadian literature, by reason of the formal concerns deriving from its historical moment, is essentially postmodern. In what follows, then, I want to expand the term "postmodernism," both to counter a trend I see in Canadian criticism to valorize contemporary writing as that most worthy of our critical attention, and to suggest that the term "postmodernist " is highly suited to the historical moment and formal concerns of Canadian literature. Historically, Canada is part of what Dennis Duffy has described as "a Judaeo-Christian, world-imperial structure, one of whose final waves crashed sodeafeningly on these shores." In that word "final" can be heard at once the end of European political and cultural hegemony and the beginning of postmodernism, which is characterized by a condition of otherness .3 As Paul Ricoeur observes in History and Truth, at the time when we acknowledge the end of a sort of cultural monopoly, be it illusory or real, we are threatened with the destruction of our own discovery. Suddenly it becomes possible that there are just others, that we ourselves are an ' 'other" among others. All meaning and every goal having disappeared, it becomes possible to wander through civilizations as if through vestiges and ruins. (1965, 278) This otherness, this heterogeneity, this sense that culture is not intrinsic but eclectic, is at...

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