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12. The Artialisation of Landscape in Jane Urquhart’s The Whirlpool
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199 No land ever primarily exists as landscape. The transformation of the former into the latter requires all the elaboration of art. – Alain Roger, Court traité du paysage1 Jane Urquhart features prominently among the Canadian writers who have attracted considerable attention beyond the orbit of the English-reading world, as evinced by the several international awards her books have garnered and the publication in 2010 of Resurgence in Jane Urquhart’s Oeuvre, a comprehensive volume of essays by European and Canadian scholars addressing the subtle craft of a writing that appeals to scholarly and popular audiences in equal measures, yet for very different reasons. With five of her seven novels to date currently available in French, Urquhart has been contributing to the global diffusion of an image of Canada whose history and geography she has never ceased to explore since The Whirlpool was first published in 1986. With the exception of Changing Heaven—a testimony to her lifelong admiration for the Brontës—Urquhart’s novels are all set in Ontario and record the overwhelming influence of lakes and forests on characters surrounded by the brooding presence of the North American continent. Their plots frequently feature local artist figures coexisting, no matter how uneasily, with more accomplished peers: Patrick, The Whirlpool’s poet, fails to distract his paramour from Browning’s verse. In 12 The Artialisation of Landscape in Jane Urquhart’s The Whirlpool Claire Omhovère 200 SPACE, PLACE, AND CIRCULATION The Underpainter, the china painter who serves as another avatar of the Canadian artist becomes acquainted with Rockwell Kent, the well-known American painter. Subsequent works similarly pair fictional and historical figures, such as the dancer Aidan Lanighan and the orator D’Arcy McGee in Away, the sculptors Klara and Walter Allward in The Stone Carvers, or Jerome and Robert Smithson, respectively the photographer and the land artist in A Map of Glass. Beyond differences in terms of plot and period, these novels recurrently feature the type of characters for which Philippe Hamon has coined the phrase “personages porte-regards” (172), namely perceptual focalizers funnelling the reader’s apprehension of the depicted landscape (landscape writing being a type of representation in which vision and voice have always been mutually dependent). Urquhart’s fiction is indeed characterized by its thorough examination of the cultural mediations through which a given culture bonds with its environment and develops the affective ties geographers identify as “topophilia” (Tuan 4). In her writing, she has never ceased to reflect upon the contribution of the visual arts to the formation of an intimacy between her characters and their surroundings as the perception of landscape requires an eye educated to discriminate form in indifferent space (Didi-Huberman 119). Accordingly, landscape writing in Urquhart’s novels is less concerned with the recording of visual impressions than with the laying bare of the aesthetic transactions through which a portion of space becomes invested with the interest, the value lying between or inter individuals, for example, justifying its being viewed and appreciated as landscape . Alain Roger has borrowed from Montaigne the concept of “artialisation ” to refer to this very process in his critique of the naturalist assumption that painters and writers plainly depict what they see. Roger’s Court traité du paysage argues that landscape is a wholly artificial construct sustained by the twofold process of an artialisation in situ resulting from direct interventions upon space (as, for instance, with the introduction of gardens and architecture ), as well as an artialisation in visu (Roger 14) that occurs indirectly through the mediation of a gaze trained to regard certain compositions as more pleasing than others. The Whirlpool occupies a special place in Urquhart’s ongoing preoccupation with landscape insofar as it calls for a reflection upon the mutual dependency of artialisation in situ and artialisation in visu. The novel enhances the problematic overlay of nature and culture through frequent references to the cultural prisms that screen external space even as they mediate its appreciation as landscape. Such is already the case in the prologue [3.93.173.205] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 03:15 GMT) The Artialisation of Landscape in The Whirlpool CLAIRE OMHOVÈRE 201 devoted to the last days Browning spent in Venice before his death in his son’s palazzo in December 1889: Empty Gothic and Renaissance palaces floated on either side of him like soiled pink dreams. Like sunsets with dirty faces, he mused, and then, pleased with the phrase, he reached into his jacket...