Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future: Recent Generations of Canadian Women Writing (review)

Written at the dawn of a new millennium, ‘in a world of risk whose future is at best uncertain,’ Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future examines how recent women’s writing in both Quebec and English Canada uses different types of ‘archaeology’ (memory work, alternative histories) in order to confront the past and present, in their narratives, and imagine the future. While in the work of Margaret Atwood, Madeleine Ouellette-Michalska, and Daphne Marlatt, McPherson analyzes the breaking down of the opposition between history and fiction and the need to foreground women’s unwritten history (introduction); in her reading of Quebec writers Madeleine Gagnon, Diane-Monique Daviau and Geneviève Amyot, and Canadian Betsy Warland, she explains how these writers forge a new language of grief that takes writing as its ultimate consolation, returning and reconnecting the griever to the larger community (chapter 1). A lengthy discussion of the inadequacies and the redemptive possibilities of memory in three novels by Louis Dupré, Joy Kogawa, and Anne Michaels respectively (chapter 2) is followed by an in-depth and exhaustive reading of the apocalyptic vision in the oeuvre of Marie-Clair Blais (chapter 3) and an exploration of how Nicole Brossard’s Baroque d’aube challenges the frontiers of ‘reality,’ suggesting ‘unprecedented ways of beginning to conceive of a future.’ McPherson concludes that these Canadian and Québécois women writers share a number of themes and preoccupations surrounding the question of writing, memory, the loss of the mother figure, the link between past and present, and the fear of an uncertain and increasingly violent future.

Despite its detailed and thoughtful analyses and its solid – albeit under-exploited – theoretical framework (Michel Foucault and feminist critics Catherine Keller and Lee Quinby), Archaeologies of an Uncertain Future leaves the reader unsatisfied on several accounts. Although the book purports in the introduction to contribute to rethinking the literatures of the Americas in the way that they ‘embrace national pluralisms, recognize permeable and shifting borders, and promote cross-cultural identities’ and to ‘considering Quebecois and Canadian literatures together’ (which the author argues is less common in today’s critical landscape), it does not end up pursuing either of these endeavours in ways that would have contributed to the overall project. While it may be true that recent work by women authors in both Canada and Quebec has made effective use of historiographic meta-fiction to ‘recount the losses, secrets, absences and gaps in women’s stories,’ no doubt the same is true for contemporary fiction by women from elsewhere in the English-speaking world and beyond. An attempt to define what is specifically Canadian about the way in which history is used in these texts – such as references to Canadian historical events or to events in Canadian literary history – would have been a welcome addition, the absence of which leads to generalizations and oversimplifications in the analysis of Madeleine Ouellette-Michalska’s La Maison Trestler when compared to the work of Daphne Marlatt and Margaret Atwood: the motivation to remember and recount in the Québécois text is as much part of the Quebec national project of collective imagining as is it a desire to rewrite women’s history. The lack of historical context and the grouping together of both canonical (Joy Kogawa’s Obasan) and more recent lesser known texts (Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces) lends an awkwardness to this otherwise thoughtful and carefully written study. McPherson’s best moments come when she turns her attention to what she knows best (and what she has studied for a number of years): Québécois authors Marie-Claire Blais and Nicole Brossard. Her detailed analysis of the postmodern territories of these writers in which the ‘political and the personal are interimplicated,’ ‘violence and excess threaten human and planetary survival and generations struggle against the forces of degeneration’ captures the ‘consciousness of an imperilled future,’ which is central to these texts and to...