Unruly Penelopes and the Ghosts: Narratives of English Canada

ONE: Rewriting Tradition: Literature, History, and Changing Narratives in English Canada since the 1970s

O N E Rewriting Tradition: Literature, History, and Changing Narratives in English Canada since the 1970s Coral Ann Howells Nothing begins when it begins and nothing’s over when it’s over, and everything needs a preface: a preface, a postscript, a chart of simultaneous events. History is a construct.... Still, there are definitive moments... —Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride To establish a context for this historical analysis of changes in literary discourse in English Canada over the past forty years, what better place to begin than with Margaret Atwood’s deconstruction of the traditional image of history as an authoritative and objective account of the past? This most representative writer of the Anglo-Canadian literary establishment is responding to debates over historiography and the implications of a postmodern distrust of the “grand narratives” of history, religion, and nation (Lyotard xxiv). At the same time, The Robber Bride addresses specific issues raised by the ideological shifts that have altered the terms of debate about Canadian identity and heritage. In what has become a contested terrain, the narrative dynamics of history have changed, thus opening the way for new formulations and a restructuring of tradition. However, this relativization of the absolute authority of history does not deny its value as a “construct” (a verbal artifact and explanatory device), for history does establish “definitive moments, moments we use as references” 1 9 2 0 C o r a l A n n H o w e l l s (Robber Bride 4) in our attempts to articulate patterns of recurrence and change across time. Atwood’s quotation provides the frame for my critical inquiry into reshaping the category of Canadianness since the 1970s, a period of immensely widened literary and cultural parameters and a new era of national self-consciousness. Arguably literary histories provide a series of such “definitive moments” in the nation’s cultural history, representing both a story of heritage and a stock-taking in the present. At the same time, like any form of historiography, the stories they tell, as Hayden White observed, are inevitably shaped “in response to imperatives that are generally extrahistorical, ideological, aesthetic, or mythical in nature” (48). As Atwood’s medieval military historian suggests with her talk of “a preface, a postscript, and a chart of simultaneous events,” questions of context are crucial, for they determine not only the frame of reference for a particular history but also its theoretical assumptions and methodology , which in turn condition the choice of what materials are included as significant and what are marginalized or excluded. As every decade since the 1970s has been marked by changes in Canada’s literary, cultural, and political contexts, my discussion, though it privileges literary histories as encoders of the nation’s image, will offer a necessarily limited selection of these, while it will also include anthologies and seminal meta-critical texts about CanLit. Together these chart the changes over decades, as they offer new perspectives on nationalism, historiography, canon debates, gender and ethnicity, post-colonialism, multiculturalism, and globalization. It may be noted that the most pressing challenge faced by literary historians and critics at the present time is how to situate the diversity of the contemporary Canadian literary scene (composed as it is of multiple narratives with different constructions of cultural memory, different affiliations and loyalties) in relation to four centuries of writing in Canada and to indigenous oral traditions before and after European contact. Clearly the elements of any historical narrative need to be realigned, as “emergent ” discourses displace the formerly “dominant” discourse, provoking the need to take into account what is “residual” (“unsettled remains” as Sugars and Turcotte call them), using history itself to tell a different story about the relation between the present and the past.1 Thinking about the revisionist impulse in literary histories shown through their responses to shifts in national ideology and to new works produced over the past forty years, we find there is a certain correspondence between the trajectory of the Canadian texts discussed in this collection and the genre’s own shape changes. This is no accident, for there are major questions to be addressed which resonate through this collection. These include such questions as: When did diasporic and Aboriginal writ- R e w r i t i n g T r a d i t i o n 2 1 ing become visible as distinctive components of Canadian literature, and...