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9. Portraits of the Artist in Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For and Madeleine Thien’s Certainty
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
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151 In Alice Munro’s short story cycle Lives of Girls and Women, the fledgling writer Del Jordan carefully writes down her neighbour’s address as “Mr. Benjamin Thomas Poole, The Flats Road, Jubilee, Wawanash County, Ontario , Canada, North America, The Western Hemisphere, The World, The Solar System” only to be baffled by his unexpected question “Where is that in relation to Heaven?” (9). Del was self-consciously imitating Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s Künstlerroman Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in which he fashioned himself as: “Stephen Dedalus, Class of Elements , Clongowes Wood College, Sallins, County Kildare, Ireland, Europe, The World, The Universe” (15–16). Munro’s small-town characters and their idiosyncrasies thus gave the lie and a Canadian twist to James Joyce’s sophisticated European author-in-the-making, taking up in the process the nagging question of the relation between writer and society, or, in Northrop Frye’s celebrated formulation, “where is here?” (The Bush Garden 220).1 This issue has plagued writers throughout much of the twentieth century and it is surely even more pressing at the onset of the twenty-first century . The ethics of art surfaced as an urgent topic as the West strove to make sense of its own increasing violence during the last century, and came to the fore in the writings of theorists like Theodor Adorno, with his famous 1949 dictum that it is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz (162). Within Canada, there has been no scarcity of answers to what might be the role of the artist in our globalized world. For First Nations writers such as Jeannette 9 Portraits of the Artist in Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For and Madeleine Thien’s Certainty Pilar Cuder-Domínguez 152 DIALOGISM, POLYPHONY, VOICE Armstrong, a Native writer is above all an activist who is writing from within and for his or her own community. She strongly feels that “the first step in decolonizing the Native in print is to make space for Native people to write about themselves” (Anderson, “Reclaiming” 49). Marie Annharte Baker concurs and suggests that in using a borrowed language (the colonizer ’s) a Native writer should question it otherwise “this writer is only passing on oppression to the reader or listener—we are hearing the ‘colonized Native’ voice” (61). Others are less assertive. Marlene NourbeSe Philip sees herself as torn between two simultaneously censoring and mentoring figures whose voices she has problematically internalized. One is male, white, and Oxford educated while the other is female, old, black, and wise (1). For Philip, “bridging the split that these two archetypes represent is a difficult process,” and yet “their dialogue is essential” (1). Bridges and dialogues are often invoked by writers attempting to work across ethnicities and races. One can cite Janice Kulyk Keefer, who conceptualizes writing the immigrant experience as building a bridge: It’s a bridge ... in which mobility vies with stability, a bridge over which people are constantly passing, jostling with one another and stopping to exchange opinions or interpretations of the view. This kind of bridge points as much to the intractable chasm it was built to span as to the fact that a means of crossing that chasm now exists; it also insists on its own constructedness, the immense labour it takes to build and maintain it. Anyone who talks about bridging the differences in immigrant experience must acknowledge at the outset that bridge and chasm are interdependent terms, and that their interrelation is one characterized by dramatic tensions. (101) Canadian authors may occasionally provide in their work evidence of their own (sometimes conflicted) views on authorship that is perhaps even more significant than the one voiced in essays and interviews. Like Munro above, both Margaret Atwood and Jane Urquhart have excelled at depicting artists in their fiction, whether successful, thwarted, or in the making. From Surfacing’s fairy-tale illustrator to travel journalist Rennie in Bodily Harm, Elaine’s successful retrospective exhibitions of paintings in Cat’s Eye, or quilt-making Grace Marks in Alias Grace, Atwood’s focus on the dynamics and politics of art making is surely unsurpassed on the Canadian cultural scene and perhaps on the international scene, too. Urquhart’s interest in art under many guises has also informed much of her writing, from the Brontë [54.81.185.66] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 07:41 GMT) Portraits of the Artist PILAR CUDER-DOMÍNGUEZ 153 intertexts in Changing...