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THE ORANGE DEVIL THOMAS SCOTT AND THE CANADIAN HISTORICAL NOVEL ALBERT BRAZ We are the descendants of Cain because we too live in a world where some of us are cast out[...]. Some lose. —Regina M. Schwartz, The Curse of Cain (1997) The extraordinary resurgence of the historical novel since the 1970s is often attributed to contemporary writers’ desire to recover lost or elided stories, particularly those of peripheral groups. It supposedly reflects authors’ conscious attempt to expand the number of narratives in a society, to bring into light that which has been suppressed. Implicit in such an overtly revisionist project is the assumption that the new historical novel is inherently democratic . As Herb Wyile writes in Speculative Fictions: Contemporary Canadian Novelists and the Writing of History, the postmodern historical novel is designed to provide a fuller picture of a nation’s past by focusing, not on the “official national history,” but “on what has been left out of that history or on what that history has served to override” (2002, 34). The reality may be more complex, though. The idea that today’s historical novel is more inclusive than its predecessors is certainly called into question by the recent literary portrayals of Thomas Scott, the Ontario Orangeman controversially executed by Louis Riel’s government at Red River in 1870. It may well be true, as Margaret Atwood maintains, that for writers of her generation, the “lure of the Canadian past ... has been partly the lure of the unmentionable—the mysterious, the buried, the forgotten, the discarded, the taboo”(1998, 19).Yet, as has been noted by many observers from Ernest Renan to Atwood herself, for both individuals and groups, “forgetting can be just as convenient as remembering” (Atwood 1998, 7; Renan [1882] 1990, 11). In this chapter, I will contend that wilful forgetting remains essential to the contemporary Canadian historical 39 40 A U S A B L E PA S T ? N E W Q U E S T I O N S, N E W D I R E C T I O N S novel. Focusing on literary representations of Scott since the early 1870s, and building on Regina Schwartz’s thesis that our world is marked by “metaphysical scarcity” (1997, 33), be it of divine love or human ways of seeing, I will argue that today we do not necessarily have a greater variety of narratives than we did in the past but merely different ones. The reasons why contemporary novelists decide to travel to the past in their work are complex, especially when the celebration of collective memory occurs at a time reportedly marked by a serious “mistrust of history” (Rimstead 2003, 3). In her collection of essays, On Histories and Stories, the English novelist A.S. Byatt provides a compelling if untypical explanation for the phenomenon . Byatt agrees that one of the central motivations for producing historical novels is “the political desire to write the histories of the marginalised, the forgotten, the unrecorded.” At the same time, she states that a key reason why so many writers have “taken” to the historical novel is that “we have in some sense been forbidden to think about history” (Byatt [2000] 2002, 11). That is, the conflation of the factual and the fictive that pervades postmodern critical discourse has led fiction writers to explore that which supposedly no longer exists as a separate category, the historical (Braz 2003a, 16). E.L. Doctorow , in contrast, ascribes the flowering of the historical novel in the United States to writers’ desire for authority. The New York author maintains that, in post-industrial democracies, novelists “need not be taken seriously because [their] work is a taste of young people, women, intellectuals, and other pampered minorities, and, lacking any real currency, is not part of the relevant business of the nation” (Doctorow 1983, 22). Aware that they lack “the power to do harm,”unlike their counterparts in less technologically advanced countries , those writers strive to attain some “sort of authority” by producing historical fiction (Doctorow 1983, 21, 23). In short, for Doctorow, the attempt by contemporary historical novelists to disguise the fact the worlds they create are invented, as opposed to discovered, is not merely an aesthetic decision but a reflection of their search for legitimacy. Ironically, this search may be futile if, as Harold Bloom maintains, the historical novel has been “permanently devalued” and is “no longer available for canonization” (1994, 21). Another significant impulse behind the writing of much...

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