Introducing Canadian Writers

Reviews Introducing Canadian Writers ARNOLD E. DAVIDSON David Stouck. Major Canadian Authors: A Critical Introduction Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press 1984. 308. illus. $22.95 Anyone who has taught Canadian texts in an American setting knows many stories that will be properly appreciated only north of the border. My favourite is of an American English major impressed by the wonderful names that Margaret Laurence could dream up - not so much 'Manawaka' as 'Manitoba.' To dispel such innocent ignorance David Stouck has written and University of Nebraska Press has published this book. In assessing seventeen individual authors, Stouck introduces his readers to the main currents of Canada's literary and social history during the past two hundred years and even to some elementary facts of Canadian geography. All in all, from Thomas Haliburton to Alice Munro, from Nova Scotia to Vancouver Island, the book capably covers the basic ground of its being. Yet some questions of coverage inevitably arise: why just seventeen writers? why these seventeen? Is not Frances Brooke or John Richardson a better startingpoint than Thomas Haliburton? IfArchibald Lampman and E.J. Pratt come in, can A.J.M. Smith and F.R. Scott be mentioned only in passing? Can Sheila Watson be relegated to the appendix briefly listing seventy-five 'Other Canadian Writers' when more perhaps hangs from The Double Hook than from any other single work of Canadian fiction? Other oversights could also be argued and other reviewers will no doubt argue them. The point is that any compilation of 'major authors' is largely arbitrary and subjective, and thus open to question. It might also be observed that the 'two principal criteria for choosing important writers' noted in the Preface - 'either they have produced a body of work of consistently high quality or they have written at least one major piece regarded as an undisputable classic in the canon ofCanadian literature' - are simply two ways of saying 'important writer.' And another limiting consideration is also at work: 'Talented younger writers such as Michael Ondaalje ... [and] Margaret Atwood' are omitted 'because they are in mid-career and perhaps have not yet published theirmost significantand lasting works.' Butsince partofthe problem ofchoosing is that Canadian literature 'is relatively young and does not number several UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 54, NUMBER 2, WINTER 1984/85 218 ARNOLD E. DAVIDSON authors of international renown,' can we really exclude Atwood, the most internationally renowned of Canada's authors, as being too young? Questions of canonization are also necessarily implicitin the separate chapters. Thus the discussion of Susanna Moodie briefly notes the differences between this early writer, with her 'grimlyantiheroic' narrative of 'herfailure to adapt to the life of the backwoods,' and her sister, Catharine Parr TrailI, who also wrote on the trials of pionering but was 'exhilarated by her subject and makes emigration an attractive prospect.' Other Canadian critics and writers (with the notable exception of Margaret Laurence in The Diviners) have also tended to see Susanna as the more paradigmatic of the two and RoughingIt in the Bush as an early authentically Canadian work. But what we then have is a definition supported by a text and a text chosen according to a definition. There is something inescapably circular in the concept of a historical canon, in tracing out the origins of a national literature in the texts of that literature's retrospectively postulated originating. Consequently , when Stouck concludes the same chapter by contrasting the nineteenthcentury American fictional hero's and heroine's commitment to a I dream of improvement' with their Canadian counterparts who 'brood on inevitable failure and defeat,' the statement is more a matter of literary definition than of historical fact. Finally, Major Canadian Authors does not escape a different problem: how to conjoin francophone and anglophone writings or how to keep them apart. It is a problem either way. Can the critic limit discussion to the literature best known, conveniently overlook the presence of a whole separate literature, and therefore advance no real claims on the n~tionallevel? Or do any such claims constitute a forced marriage within the critical text that trades on some observable parallels (or differences) between the two literatures but oversimplifies...