The Parable of a Village in Decline: Duncan Campbell Scott’s In the Village of Viger and the Politics of Community

In against the romance of community, Miranda Joseph argues that the discourse of “[c]ommunity is almost always invoked as an unequivocal good, an indicator of a high quality of life, a life of human understanding, caring, selflessness, belonging.… [It] has connoted cherished ideals of cooperation, equality, and communion” (xxxiii). As Joseph also observes, however, the discourse of identity politics of the 1980s and 1990s critiqued the underpinnings of national and other incarnations of community; it lay bare the real racism, sexism, and violence that were simultaneously perpetuated and obscured by affirmative attitudes about various communities and their peculiar manifestations. Yet, as she notes, in spite of the critical trajectory that denounced the “romance” enveloping notions of community, “a celebratory discourse” around it “relentlessly returns” (viii). In attempting to address the logic of its persistence, she suggests that capitalism is often complicit:

Capitalism and, more generally, modernity depend on and generate the discourse of community to legitimate social hierarchies.[…] While identity is often named as the bond among community members, it is a false name in that communal participants are not identical and many of those to whom an identity is attributed do not participate in communal activities. I argue that communal subjectivity is constituted not by identity but rather through practices of production and consumption.

(viii)

Such idealization about a “utopian state of human relatedness” averts the penetrating gaze that would expose real inequities. More than a cursory glance would reveal that “communal subjectivity” is not necessarily founded in the “human caring and understanding” that others habitually ascribe to it but, rather, in those practices of consumption.

Indebted to Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City and his discussions of romantic anti-urbanism, Joseph shows how the “romance of community” is often determined, even driven, by these nostalgic impulses: that is, the idealization of a country life, (dis)located temporally from a present moment of discontent and geographically from a heavily industrialized city-centre. “Community” is thus invoked as a model of positive human interaction, from which tenuous ethical values are generated and are held in opposition to the economic pursuits generated by modernity. So Joseph asserts:

[T]he discourse of community positions community as the defining other of modernity, of capitalism. This discourse includes a Romantic narrative of community as prior in time to “society,” locating community as a long-lost past for which we yearn nostalgically from our current fallen state of alienation, bureaucratization, rationality. It distinguishes community from society spatially, as local, involving face-to-face relations, where capital is global and faceless; community is all about boundaries between us and them, boundaries that are naturalized through reference to place or race or culture or identity, while capital would seem to denature, crossing all borders and making everything, everyone, equivalent.

(1)

Community is thus endowed with a sense of nostalgia and alleged to be resistant to, rather than complicit with, capitalism. Conversely, the latter is characterized as a destructive entity that disables genuine human interaction and undermines identity.

The nostalgia for community, which Joseph sees as characteristic of critical thought, also marks some of the literary criticism of Duncan Campbell Scott’s In the Village of Viger. Recent criticism determines the book to be an achievement for its sophisticated, complex, and realistic rendering of this small village located in Quebec (see, for example, New 47). The criticism more contemporary to the collection’s initial date of publication, however, valued its pastoral elements and regarded the community depicted therein as being eroded by the compounded influences of the city, modernity, and industrialization.¹ But even then, Scott’s peers perceived his sketches to be realistic. After having read the 1945 edition of the stories, Harold Bring, an associate of Scott, wrote to say on 9 July 1947, that “[y]ou educate me in the comprehension of the French Canadian.”² From its initial publication in 1896 to more recent articles, moreover, the reception of In the Village of Viger quite consistently showcases Viger and its traditional...