- The Canadian Modernists Meet
The title of this collection of essays alludes both to a 1927 poem by F.R. Scott and a recent conference on modernism held at the University of Ottawa. The book itself is attractively produced with a cover plate of a satirical black line drawing of Scott. It is introduced by editor Dean Irvine, who draws our attention to the ironic 'contingencies of literary history.' When Scott first wrote 'The Canadian Authors Meet,' Canadian literary culture was feminized and the Canadian modernist poet was located on the periphery of international modernism. However, as Irvine reminds us, many of the major writers and critics of Scott's generation have now been marginalized and the canon recentred to open the way for multiple counter-narratives, or 'marginal modernisms,' principally the reaction against a masculinist literary culture and revisionary readings of the relations between Canadian and international modernisms. [End Page 540]
The reinstitutionalizing of early women writers is the subject of Wanda Campbell's study of poets Louise Morey Bowman and Katherine Hale, and of Anne Quéma's comparison of the experimental modernism of Elizabeth Smart's prose and Cecil Buller's engravings. Two essays, one on left-wing drama by Candida Rifkind and another on defining a modernist radio audience by Paul Tiessen, throw light upon Dorothy Livesay's career as an early modernist. Marilyn Rose's exposition of her experiences with the modernist archive when writing a biography of Anne Marriot ('archives are at best compromised sites, consisting of mediated experience') is a helpful introduction to anyone considering life writing.
This in an important book because it represents a return to the basic historical concerns of the late 1970s which have been displaced by three decades of European critical theory. A number of essays raise central questions about the nature of Canadian modernism and modernisms. Where is it located: after European and American modernism, or somehow between? How has it changed? And who are the individuals instrumental in the transmission of international modernism? The essays in this volume identify Samuel Beckett, André Breton, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Malcolm Lowry, and Ezra Pound as major influences of international modernism while Louis Dudek, Hugh Kenner, A.M. Klein, Dorothy Livesay, P.K. Page, Elizabeth Smart, A.J.M. Smith, and Sheila Watson are major transmitters.
If past narratives of Canadian modernism have been exclusionary, the essays collected here call these narratives into question. Tim Conley redates the beginnings of Canadian modernism to 1949 when Canada legalized sale of James Joyce's Ulysses. His discussion of the reception of Ulysses above the forty-second parallel suggests that 'Canada's modernism is not tertiary or "after" European and then American modernisms, but "between" them' because copies of Joyce's work were smuggled into Canada and then distributed to the United States. We may differ about dates, but this is an intriguing suggestion. It is supported by Tony Tremblay's essay on the ways in which Marshall McLuhan and Louis Dudek both reflected and transmitted Ezra Pound's cultural politics, one nationally and the other internationally. Tremblay also identifies Dudek's pioneering little presses and little magazines as extensions of Pound's 'Kulchur' dicta: 'It would not overstate the matter to say that our literary heritage is part of Dudek's creation, for he was the one who put the material structures in place that allowed our writers to speak and to develop the small but important later presses that further carried the project of defining Canada.'
Modernist approaches to architecture and the city include D.M.R. Bentley's exposition of 'the architexts' of A.M. Klein and F.R. Scott and Steven Cain's mapping of Raymond Souster's Toronto. Glenn Willmott's discussion of cosmopolitan modernism and Aboriginal discourse in Sheila [End Page 541] Watson's The Double Hook builds on Watson's understanding of Samuel Beckett's Godot to interpret the novel in opposition to canonical criticism: 'Rather than stripping away civilization to reveal a primitive essence, this novel strips away the primitive – or...