Pink Snow: Homotextual Possibilities in Canadian Fiction (review)

A very welcome addition to the burgeoning field of Canadian sexuality studies, Terry Goldie's Pink Snow first calls to mind another, recent entry, Peter Dickinson's Here Is Queer. In his 1999 examination of lesbian and gay homotexts, Dickinson answers Northrop Frye's ironically decisive 'Where is here?' by suggesting that Canadian literature has always exhibited - or, paradoxically, concealed - a surfeit of queer desire. Goldie's analysis shares with Dickinson many of the same authors, such as Richardson, Symons, and Findley, but differs in its sole focus on male authors.

Goldie fully embraces the tenets of queer theory to explore works which do not necessarily evince obvious homosexual thematics and whose authors are not homosexual. The distinction is important, especially since Goldie's deeply deconstructive approach, grounded as it is in queer theory, allows him to move beyond those texts that may demonstrate an elementary and obvious homosexual subtext. Pink Snow, then, is a book more about the vicissitudes of desire than it is about homosexuality per se.

With 'homotextual,' Goldie writes that he is using the gay-identified term to demonstrate that it is at once useful but limiting in its grounding in gay thematic studies. Useful, because in his position as a gay studies (or minoritizing) critic, Goldie finds that 'what I read enfranchises both resistant and complicit readings,' and that his present work's aim of questioning that very position serves to further gay socio-cultural understanding. Limiting, because in order to avoid textual games in which homosexuality is reduced to 'Look! There's one!' Goldie, like the influential critic Judith Butler (on whom he greatly relies), wants to 'find a way of textualizing sexuality without making simplistic claims about embodiment and without completely removing the material which lies behind the text.'

Despite some reservations I have about the deconstructive taxonomy employed by Goldie, the book is nevertheless admirable. Pink Snow is deeply infused with a thoroughgoing attention to homosexual history and antecedents, revealing not that a tradition of Canadian gay literature is being created but that it has always existed; it is simply that critics in this country have always ignored homosexual presence. From John Richardson's Wacousta through to Timothy Findley's The Wars, Canadian criticism has been particularly adept at avoiding what we now see as rather obvious. Goldie revisits these novels, in addition to Sinclair Ross's As for Me and My House, Ernest Buckler's The Mountain and the Valley, and Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers, in an effort to recast parts of the canon as necessarily and primarily homotextual.

The surprises here are W.O. Mitchell's Who Has Seen the Wind and Robertson Davies's Fifth Business. With the former, Goldie suggests that the relations between the males derive from a kind of Platonism, 'associations built on mutual desire, for companionship and for the study of the systems of the world.' Goldie brilliantly mines the text in an incisive reading of the socially condemnatory context of 1947's conservative Canadian climate.

With a not dissimilar critical verve, Goldie tackles the problematic use of the word 'queer' in Davies's novel as a springboard to discussing how Davies's rather evident homophobia collides with his seeming veneration of lesbianism, in so far as the latter might provide heterosexual men with a measure of titillation. The trope of homosexuality in Davies, nevertheless, might best be understood when examined as otherness. As with Mitchell's, Davies's ideal worlds consist of 'male life without the restrictions imposed by marriage' - and so, the ideal world here is not necessarily homosexual but is definitely homosocial.

The other authors Goldie assesses are perhaps more familiar to us in that they are resolutely out: Scott Symons, David Watmough, Shyam Selvadurai, Tomson Highway, Peter McGehee, Stan Persky, Sky Gilbert, and Dennis Denisoff. And because many of the works of these authors are more contemporary, Goldie engages the important work of cross-cultural understanding, especially as he demonstrates how homosexuality in these novels is interwoven with immigration, colonialism, nationalism, class...