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

Bowering, Postmodernism, and Canadian Nationalism: A Short Sad Book

297 bowering, Postmodernism, and Canadian nationaLism: a shorT sad Book JaSon WiEnS Canadian literature will not understand this novel. –George Bowering A Short Sad Book In conversation with Alan Twigg in 1988, George Bowering remarked that nobody writes about his 1977 novel A Short Sad Book and that “everybody is writing articles now on Burning Water.” Indeed, the later novel has received more critical attention both in Canada and abroad.1 This is not surprising, 1 See, for instance, Edward Lobb’s “Imagining History: The Romantic Background of George Bowering’s Burning Water” (112–128), Carla Visser’s “Historicity in Historical Fiction: Burning Water and The Temptations of Big Bear” (90–111), J.A. Wainwright’s “Post-Kingdom Come! Exile and Empire in George Bowering’s Burning Water” (87–95), and W.F. Garrett-Petts’s “Novelist as Radical Pedagogue: George Bowering and Postmodern Reading Strategies” (554–572). Garrett-Petts’s essay is illustrative of the tendency to privilege the later novels; while he begins his essay by contesting T.D. JaSon WiEnS 298 perhaps, since Burning Water received the Governor General’s Award for Fiction in 1980, and its reprinting by General Publishing as part of its New Press Canadian Classics series ensured a longer print run for it than that of Talonbooks’s run for A Short Sad Book. Moreover, Burning Water was the first in a trilogy that also includes Caprice (1987) and Shoot! (1994), which could further account for the discrepancy in critical attention.2 And so it should also not surprise us that Linda Hutcheon discusses Burning Water rather than A Short Sad Book in The Canadian Postmodern as exemplary of historiographic metafiction. Since the publication of her landmark study Hutcheon has come under fire from some quarters for advancing a tame or politically defused postmodernism, whether in terms of the critical framing of a postmodern canon (by Lorraine Weir, who suggests Hutcheon encourages readers to “learn politely to perform as autonomous subjects in the parlour game of liberal postmodernism ” [182]) or in terms of the texts she advances as representative of that postmodern canon itself (by Christian Bök, who argues that Hutcheon “radicalize(s) the many, formalistically conservative, texts at the expense of the few, formalistically progressive , texts” [8]).3 While Hutcheon has nothing to say about A Short Sad Book in that study, she does note that in Burning Water “[g]radually the controlling and obtrusive narrative voice is silenced and the story for a while appears to tell itself, just as in the ‘good old MacLulich’s argument that Canadian postmodernism as exemplified by texts such as A Short Sad Book and Burning Water might predict the death of a national tradition, “crushed by the weight of excessive self-consciousness” (MacLulich253),Garrett-Pettsproceedstoignoretheearliertextandinstead focuses on Burning Water and Caprice. 2 Ian Rae points out that A Short Sad Book is also a part of a trilogy of sorts, along with Curious (1973) and Autobiology (1972) (138). However, those three texts are tied together through their shared experimental prose style, and all three texts share a similar critical neglect. 3 [See Bök’s “Getting Ready to Have Been Postmodern” in this volume (page 87) for an amplification of these views.] BowerIng, PostModernIsM, and canadIan natIonaLIsM 299 days’ of the realist novel for which the narrator has earlier been yearning” (62). Yet Hutcheon still sees enough self-reflexivity in that text, calling attention to the presence of both author and reader, that the realist illusion or Barthes’s “effect of the real” is sufficiently qualified. But certainly A Short Sad Book provides a more extreme version of what Hutcheon praises as postmodern in Burning Water, with respect to narrative self-reflexivity as well as other elements she identifies as postmodern, including parody and the challenge to notions of linguistic transparency. Furthermore, in A Short Sad Book the obtrusive narrator is never silenced, not even by his wife: My favourite place in Alberta (oh this new pen is getting broken in nicely) is Drumheller (my wife will hate that one because she hates this novel she says I’m getting too far removed from my readers with all this obscure self-absorption. What do you think dear friend) although I have been there only once. (58) In John Moss’s view, Burning Water has none of the “genuine contempt for convention” (24) of A Short Sad Book, which might be offered...