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Chapter Three: Homologies
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
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45 Chapter Three Homologies That birds and crocodiles are each other’s closest living relatives was a consensus view long before the advent of DNA sequencing, as [was] the conclusion that reptiles (including birds) are more closely related to mammals than they are to amphibians. – Harry W. Greene, “Improving Taxonomy for Us and the Other Fishes” (738) Don McKay writes flight as both biological phenomenon and literary metaphor while acknowledging the value of attending to place and its inhabitants. The resistance to “nature” has in many ways led criticism and theory of the past thirty years or so to misplace, misunderstand, and misrepresent much literature being published in Canada. A study with a strong focus on birds and birding in the poetry of Don McKay, for example, might be construed as thematic, and thematic criticism is precisely what faced the most resistance, in Canadian literature circles, in the wake of Frank Davey’s “Surviving the Paraphrase.” Bound up in Davey’s position, though, is another term meant to reinforce the notion that Canadian literature and criticism were disproportionately concerned with nature. Focusing on D. G. Jones and his critical study of “themes and images in Canadian literature,” Butterfly on Rock (1970), Davey identifies a “fallacy of literary determinism ”and calls into question the extent to which an author’s work can—and should—be explained by “reference to the geography and climate of the country, to western intellectual history, to his culture’s religious heritage” (6); one might reasonably add ecology and botany to this list of influences. While I share Davey’s distrust of reducing literary meaning to determinism, literary and otherwise, I remain unconvinced that literature can escape it altogether. Davey posits Frye’s “reference to the ‘bleak northern sky’ and to the St. Lawrence River’s swallowing of travellers into‘an alien continent’”as 46 • Chapter Three geographic determinism,which ignores authors’freedom to select influences (“Surviving”6).As regards characterizing and analyzing national literatures, I agree that geographic considerations alone limit more than they enable. But I disagree with Davey’s suggestion that place—and by extension specific considerations of biotic and abiotic inhabitants of place—does not influence the production of a text in some way(s). And not only rural, wild places, but urban, suburban, cosmopolitan places shape authors’ world views, aesthetic choices, and, dare I say it, themes. As I demonstrate in my reading of McKay’s species specificity, knowledge of place provides precise language for making precise metaphors, even metaphors that enact anthropocentrism with varying degrees of sophistication. Influence, as a sub-branch of determinism , takes many forms, including historical and contemporary literature , geographic location, and local species of flora and fauna. In his study of the Confederation group of Canadian poets, D. M. R. Bentley argues for American naturalist John Burroughs’s influence on the group, particularly on Charles G. D. Roberts, Archibald Lampman, and Bliss Carman. Bentley credits “a synchronicity born of both environmental similarities [between New England and New Brunswick] and of Burroughs’s influence on the Confederation group” as causing “a great many flora and fauna of New England”—which Burroughs himself describes in such pieces as “Nature and the Poets” and “Birds and Poets”—to appear as potentially rich materials in the Canadian poets’ work (148). Bentley finds much support for his thesis in At the Mermaid Inn, a weekly column Wilfred Campbell, D. C. Scott, and Lampman wrote for the Toronto Globe (1892–93). If the synchronicity Bentley refers to suggests that the Confederation Poets were influenced more by American writing than by other Canadian writing1— Campbell’s column for 16 July 1892, for example, fails to mention any Canadian writers—it also points to an early instance of a bioregion taking precedence, even if unconsciously, over political regions. Indeed, as Bentley notes in introducing Burroughs as a key influence, the commingling of political and bioregional forces is in keeping with the commonalities “of … scenery, climate, atmosphere, flora, and fauna” between “the northeastern states, the Maritime provinces, and the southeastern portions of central Canada”(147). Despite the way this part of Bentley’s argument avoids clarifying the problem of the group’s “geographical diversity” (5), in Bentley’s estimation,2 the Confederation group’s turn to the specific, local environment as material for their poetry enables an outward-reaching engagement with literature and thought beyond the local. Considering the dearth of Canadian guide...