West of Eden: Essays on Canadian Prairie Literature (review)

Like other collections of essays about, and anthologies of work by, writers based in the Canadian West, West of Eden assumes that Canada has distinct and definable regions with characteristics that shape cultural production. Dennis Cooley’s “The Critical Reception of Prairie Literature, from Grove to Keahey” reminds us, at the beginning of this volume, that this view has a long history in Western Canada. In the larger critical discourse, however, literary regionalism has often been treated as problematic— scorned as sentimental or nostalgic, criticized as romantic. And, as Pamela Banting observes, it has also been thought guilty of “essentializing … the notion of place” (60). The modernists marginalized regional writers for their attachment to a realism of small details or for privileging particularity and eccentricity over the larger topics and perspectives that the newly “international” literary scene demanded. As modernism waned, regionalism was sometimes seen as an aspect of postmodernism (after all, regions resisted the centre) or as a kind of postcolonialism (the regional was opposed to the international and the global)—but by many it came to be viewed as even more out of date, wedded to a pre-modern realism and to passé ideas such as environmental determinism while continuing modernism’s fetishizing of the “authentic.” Nonetheless, as this book attests, regional writing, region as a concept, and critical discussions of regional cultures have endured.

In “Deconstructing the Politics of Location: The Problem of Setting in Prairie Fiction and Non-Fiction,” Banting, uncomfortable with the idea of literary region (“I would question whether literary works are or ever were regional” (63), wants to emphasize the material qualities of place— “the lived, scientific, and literary evidence” (52)—as a way of distancing herself from “identity politics” (49) while defining a literature of location, one that opposes theory’s tendencies to become “placeless or global” (50). In contrast, Cooley, presuming that regional literature does exist, re-affirms the idea of prairie as imaginative space. Taken together these critics suggest the poles that today define all treatments of “region”—as experienced or imagined, as shaping or shaped, as constructing or constructed.

Cooley’s survey, a fine starting point for anyone wanting a readable overview of the ways Canadian prairie literature has been approached, shows the tensions that have inhabited (and inhibited) regionalism in the Canadian prairies. A way of escaping the binds can be found, Cooley feels, in the critical and literary work of Robert Kroetsch. Although assertions such as “We don’t describe what’s there, we make what is there” (39) have reinforced Kroetsch’s reputation as a “through-and-through international postmodernist” who has rejected “the long tradition of representational writing,” we should also recognize a “local and referential Kroetsch” who “aligns himself with the recurring story of prairie criticism,” which is “the need for an authentic, indigenous writing that, freed from the dictates of foreign and inappropriate models, reflects our place to ourselves” (40). Cooley suggests that a poetics of orality allows Kroetsch to hold these apparently opposed positions, a way of thinking about the region that grows out of the way prairie critics have, since the 1970s, mostly viewed regional language and literature as “systems of invention” arising from place rather than simply seeking to represent place (42).

It would have been nice if this sense of authors in conversation with one another and with the larger problematics of writing about the prairie and its culture had continued throughout the book. Sue Sorensen says, in her introduction, that the collection resulted from “a general call for papers on prairie literature” and that (despite the word “literature” in this volume’s title) she also “hoped to see some work in popular culture, and … essays with a pedagogical bent.” She knew what resulted might be a miscellany but feels that that the outcome is “less miscellaneous than I expected” (21). That may be, but it is still more miscellaneous than I, as its reader, would have preferred. What we have, after Cooley’s and Banting’s stage...