Carol Shields and the Extra-ordinary (review)

Carol Shields’s fiction – like her essays, poetry, and drama – was for a long time in Canada alternately assailed or celebrated for its attention to the ordinary, the domestic, and the mundane. (The question of Shields’s career-long attention to female figures, interestingly – although this is of course intimately bound up with the first issue – has received somewhat less scrutiny. That has begun and will continue to change.) As its title attests, this striking collection of essays by critics from both sides of the Atlantic takes up for the first time, and from an unprecedented series of perspectives – theoretical, archival, generic, cryptofictional – the issue of what the ‘ordinary’ and the prosaic might signify in Shields’s work; and in doing so, this book has at long last put to rest the silly notion that the ordinary in Shields is either unworthy of attention (hers or ours) or numinous beyond our understanding.

The fundamental significance of the ‘extra-ordinary’ here, suggestively, comes from Heidegger’s ‘The Origin of the Work of Art,’ which prefaces Jones and Dvořák’s ‘Introduction.’ Heidegger comments, ‘At bottom, the ordinary is not ordinary: it is extra-ordinary.’ It is just this sense of the ordinary housing the extraordinary that these essays variously explore. The collection is organized into three sections: the first, ‘Essaying/ Assaying Genre: Biography, Archive, Short Story, Novel’ collects five essays that take up Shields’s often-remarked explorations of the boundaries between genres (Shields’s first novel, Small Ceremonies, for example, gives us a protagonist, Judith Gill, who is herself a biographer, writing on Susanna Moodie, the subject of Shields’s master’s thesis at the University of Ottawa.) These essays constitute the most thoroughgoing work we have to date on the subject of genre in Shields’s work: Christl Verduyn’s piece on Shields as essayist, like Catherine Hobbs’s on the Shields Fonds in Library and Archives Canada, in Ottawa (complete with a generous sampling of illustrations of texts, correspondence, and photographs from the fonds), give us exciting new ways to consider Shields’s artful intermingling of the fictional with a wide array of sources and resources.

The second section, ‘Margins of Otherness: Reflection, Subjectivity, Embodiment,’ collects the work of another five critics, who approach Shields through the dynamics of narrative perspective – always a rich venue in Shields’s work (Lorna Irvine, Patricia-Léa Paillot); the re-use of myth in her fiction (Héliane Ventura); the ‘Prosaics of Collaboration and Correspondence’ (co-editor Jones); and the functions of ‘Reflection and Convergence’ (Ellen Levy). Like the essays in the first section, all of these pieces provide intriguing new doorways into all of Shields’s writing.

The closing section gives us three more new approaches to Shields: Marta Dvořák’s cogently argued piece on ‘Writing as Performance,’ Lorraine York’s trenchant exploration of Shields’s literary celebrity, and Aretha Van Herk’s playfully serious invention of a Shields reader, ‘Grit Savon’ – all significances intentional – bring home again the extraordinary versatility in Shields’s work. And, after this collection, one hopes, in its reception.

The collection is prefaced twice, actually; once by Jones and Dvořák, and once by Shields herself, who contributed a hitherto unpublished address at Harvard (1997), ‘A View from the Edge of the Edge,’ in which she ranges, in that deceptively simple, conversational, and altogether wry and extra-ordinary idiom that is hers alone, among the platitudes and attitudes that have attended her own writing, Canadian writing, and Canadian women’s writing for so long. Variously and thoughtfully, this collection summarily dispels much of this cultural cheer-mongering for good. Shields’s readers will be grateful.