Cultural Transfer and Condensation of Memory: Textual Displacement in Henry Kreisel's Short Stories

The capacity to represent, portray, characterize, and depict is not easily available to just any society; moreover, the "what" and "how" in the representation of "things," while allowing for considerable individual freedom, are circumscribed and socially regulated.

(Said 79)

In his provocative manner, Mordecai Richler once claimed that, outside of Canada, people found Canadian literature quite "boring" ("Foreword" 16). The statement is not surprising in itself with regard to Canadian literary history. What is more surprising is that it was made in 1970, after the "renaissance" of Canadian literature around the year 1967, a time in which Canada celebrated its centennial and was finally put on the world map. The British Times Literary Supplement dedicated a special issue to Canadian literature in 1973 and characterized the period as an "Elizabethan Age" (Sutherland 1295). The general context of multiculturalism with its various aspects (demographic, institutional, and symbolic) generated both new literatures and new perspectives on the "ethnic voice in Canadian writing" (Mandel) within the literary mosaic. Little by little, the "grammar of silence" (Kroetsch) of "ethnic" literatures was unveiled. However, in literature as in politics, multicultural consciousness was not created in one day. This article will look back on that "Elizabethan Age" and reconsider Henry Kreisel as a precursor for later evolutions in Canadian literature. In his own words: "I see myself primarily as probably one of the first people to bring to modern Canadian literature the experience of the immigrant" (Interview Cherniavsky 170). Elsewhere, he writes:

And yet, isn't my experience in some ways a typical 20th century experience? The pattern of displacement, of alienation, and then of the growing of new roots and integration into new communities is a pattern I share with millions of others. My experience is in a profound way a quintessential Canadian experience.

("Reflections" 2)

Indeed, Kreisel's trajectory and his literary voice prefigure later developments that took place in Canada. Famous – postmodern – Canadian migrant writers of today, like Michael Ondaatje, Neil Bissoondath, but also Régine Robin, inhabit a literary migrant space that was coconstructed by an earlier generation of writers.

On 16 May 1984 Kreisel was invited to the CBC Morningside radio show along with Bharati Mukherjee to discuss the immigrant experience in Canada (Kreisel and Mukherjee). Kreisel was born into a Jewish family in Vienna in 1922; he came to Canada as an "accidental immigrant" (Draper, title) and an interned "enemy alien." Mukherjee was born in Calcutta in 1940, had a wealthy, cosmopolitan upbringing, and has lived her adult life in Canada and the United States. She writes mostly about phenomena of migration, the status of new immigrants, and their feeling of alienation. Focussing largely on women's experience in postcolonial contexts, Mukherjee aims at showing the unity between the "first" and the "third" worlds. In both contexts women are treated as subordinates. One of her heroines, the young Hindu woman Jasmine, for instance, leaves India for the United States after her husband's murder, only to be raped in the supposedly "safe" West. She eventually returns to the subordinate position of a caregiver. Jasmine travels between the worlds, but her essential and tragic condition does not fundamentally change. Kreisel too is fascinated by fictional characters who cross continents and travel between the "old" and the "new" (though first) world. They often appear in pairs. They cannot escape their fatal condition either. If such a panel uniting Mukherjee and Kreisel was possible in 1984, it should be possible today to reread Kreisel's contribution as an important step in generating a diverse Canadian literature.

Accordingly, this article proposes a retrospective look at the gestation of a new literary production in Canada – cosmopolitan, migrant, diasporic – through the analysis of Kreisel's short stories. To this end, it acknowledges Karin Gürttler's groundbreaking work on Kreisel's novels, The Rich Man and The Betrayal, published respectively in 1948 and 1964 ("Exile Writer?"). Gürttler analyzes Kreisel's novels in terms of textual "structures of exile" ("Romane" 112). According to her, the exile situation and the experience of displacement profoundly shape Kreisel's...