RE: Reading the Postmodern: Canadian Literature and Criticism after Modernism

“The Postmodern Impasse” and Guy Vanderhaeghe’s The Englishman's Boy

203 “tHe Postmodern imPasse” and guy vanderHaegHe’s ThE Englishman’s Boy JEnniFER blaiR … We are lucky once again, and the socius of “le texte” is bullshit. –Lisa Robertson The Weather In The Canadian Postmodern, Linda Hutcheon identifies what she sees as a productive “paradox” that characterizes the novels she terms “historiographic metafiction.” In Hutcheon’s words, such writing is “intensely, self-reflexively art, but is also grounded in historical, social, and political realities” (13). Unlike conventional historical novels, historiographic metafictions foreground “the processes of writing, reading, and interpreting ” (13) yet remain committed to the narration of the events of history and their attendant political consequences for men JEnniFER blaiR 204 and women. Two decades since the publication of Hutcheon’s influential text, one wonders if the productivity of this paradox was in fact realized or if it was reduced to a simple opposition between the writing of history and the self-reflexive interpretation and critique of this writing—in other words, two aspects of one and the same phenomenon: text. Scholars may have become skilful at identifying the discursive processes of history, and may successfully argue that the contradictions within these processes signal resistances to dominant ideological paradigms, but these arguments have succeeded at the expense of a critical acknowledgement of the social experiences and effects of history , as well as a fuller appreciation of the dynamics of the active processes of time and memory. In other words, criticism has lost those aspects of “the past,” of the passage of time, that are distinct from the textual, and, with them, the fundamental tension that lies at the heart of Hutcheon’s paradox. Rather than exploring the complexity of that crucial difference between text and lived experience, critics seem to have become caught up in a somewhat limited approach that assesses the relationship between “art” and “reality” only after reducing both to their discursive qualities and functions. To borrow a disturbingly apt phrase from Félix Guattari, we have arrived at “the postmodern impasse,” where “the socius is reducible to the facts of language” (111). Ofcourse,asliterarycritics,wewouldbethefirsttopointout that the “facts of language” are numerous—dense with intricacies of power and meaning that constitute, and have real consequencesfor ,“thesocius.”ButwhattroubledGuattarispecifically were the ways in which postmodernism understood these facts of language as being “reducible to binarizable and ‘digitizable’ signifying chains,” and he found fault with those postmodern theorists (Lyotard and Baudrillard in particular) “for whom the social and political have never been more than traps, or ‘semblances ’” (111). In other words, Guattari criticized postmodernists for their reduction of social life to a limited conception of “the PostModern IMPasse” 205 language. He also noted that “postmodernists have hardly said anythinginnovative”concerningthisparticularreductionofthe socius, or its origins, and he ultimately scolded them for failing to recognize (or admit) that in fact this manoeuvre had its roots in the modernist tradition, including especially all “the worst aspects of Anglo-Saxon systematization” that were part of this tradition (111). For Guattari, the postmodernists’ interest in the new communications and computer technologies was “hastily developed” and “poorly mastered” and, significantly, “put us far behind the phenomenological research that had preceded them” (111). In his summation, the “postmodern condition” amounted to “the paradigm of all submission and every sort of compromise with the existing status quo” (110), and he called for a “return to a basic truism […] that concrete social assemblages […] call into question much more than just linguistic performance: for example, ethological and ecological dimensions , as well as the economic semiotic components, aesthetic, corporeal and fantasmatic ones that are irreducible to the semiology of language” (111). In the wake of postmodernism, it can seem well beyond the boundaries of our discipline to allow such elements as the ecological and the corporeal into our critical field of vision. At the same time, however, there has been a significant emphasis on embodiment, perception, and the physical environment both in recent Canadian literature that addresses history and in literary criticism of Canadian historical texts old and new. Whether or not this can be considered an effort to navigate beyond the postmodern impasse, these texts focus on the physical world (including the physicality of the human body) and the affective impact of literature on both mind and body as part of their project of exploring the function and parameters of history (see, for instance, articles on Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by Lee...