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FIvE “A PAPIER mâCHé ROCk”: WAyNE JOHNSTON AND REJECTINg REgIONALISm While I have argued that the debate over Pratt’s authenticity can be attributed to the cultural climate of the 1970s in Newfoundland and the rest of Canada, a similar debate has emerged much more recently around the work of Wayne Johnston. Johnston was born and raised in the small community of Goulds, just outside St. John’s. He moved to Toronto in his early thirties. Though he has lived in Toronto since 1989, he continues to write primarily Newfoundland -centred books. He has become one of Newfoundland’s best-known writers, with novels such as The Divine Ryans (1990), The Navigator of New York (2002), and A World Elsewhere (2011). Johnston’s 1998 novel, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, is his most popular work, and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and was a runner-up on CBC’s Canada Reads. The novel has been strongly criticized, however, for its fictionalization of Joey Smallwood, the province’s first premier and the man who brought Newfoundland into Confederation. For those who remember Smallwood the man, Rex Murphy writes, Johnston’s rendering amounts to a “pastework substitute” (49). In his review article in Newfoundland Studies, historian Stuart Pierson concurs, but extends the paste-and-paper imagery to Johnston’s depiction of the island itself, which he lambastes for being full of factual inaccuracies: “his settings, as in the theatre, where a papier mâché rock can stand for any island in the world, do not carry with them, by themselves, any numinous significance” (“Johnston’s” 283). Such concerns are rooted in the same old anxieties about the “real” Newfoundland that characterized the Pratt debates of the 1970s, anxieties about the survival of Newfoundland culture and about representing regional and national identities, particularly in diasporic contexts. Pierson opens his article with an anecdote about James Joyce and the fact that the famous writer of 8 5 8 6 i s t h e n e w f o u n d l a n d e r “a u t h e n t i c ” i n d i a s p o r a ? the Irish diaspora wrote to his aunt in Dublin to confirm details about the city as he completed Ulysses. Pierson then goes on for two pages simply listing the geographical and historical errors in Colony: a house on Blackhead Road cannot look out on the harbour from the front and on the Atlantic from the back, Harbour Drive did not yet exist in the 1920s, the girls’ and boys’ schools Bishop Spencer and Bishop Feild did not back on to each other, et cetera (“Johnston’s” 283–84). While Pierson does not say so directly, the comparison with Joyce suggests that to him the problem with Johnston’s work is not simply sloppiness but failure to maintain an appropriate regard for the authenticity of place in diaspora. In her article for Essays on Canadian Writing ’s special issue on Newfoundland literature, Danielle Fuller feels compelled to ask the question: Is Johnston a “Newfoundland writer”? “Johnston, born and raised in Newfoundland,” she writes, “has lived in Toronto since 1989 and rejected the ‘regional writer’ label explicitly in an interview with TickleAce editor Bruce Porter. [...] For the purposes of this essay, Johnston [is a writer] with an intimate knowledge of Newfoundland who [has] written extensively about it” (“Strange” 47). While I read Fuller’s question as a cautious attempt to avoid classifying Johnston in the essentialist terms of a native informant, the way in which she frames her query as a question of diasporic identity is telling. Unlike Pierson, Fuller recognizes that geographical inaccuracies serve particular aesthetic functions in this work of fiction, yet Johnston’s dislocation still puts his identity as a Newfoundland writer into question. For Fuller, a “Newfoundland writer” is a “regional writer,” and while in her book Writing the Everyday: Women’s Textual Communities in Atlantic Canada (2004) she carefully differentiates between various definitions and forms of literary regionalism, here the term is left unexamined, raising questions about the connections between markers of identity and regionalism as a concept and practice. In the interview with Porter to which Fuller refers, Johnston does not reject a Newfoundland identity per se, but rather rejects the concept of considering literature in “regional” terms as too “self-contained” (“Time” 27). In this chapter, I show how Johnston’s work exceeds the limitations of traditional regionalism as he...

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