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Letters in Canada 1996 Fiction AJAY HEBLE While the diversity in nature and scope of the novels and short story collections published in 1996 by established writers (not to mention the sheer volume of texts submitted for review: indeed I'm continuing to receive shipments of books even as I write) has led me to approach the task ofwriting this review-essaywith a certaindegreeofcritical trepidation, and while the difficulty of grouping these texts or categorizing them according to routine or superficial generalizations has made me struggle to find an appropriate way to begin to discuss them, I want, in fact, to begin with one word, 'representations,' one which Raymond Williams might have called a keyword. For the complex intersectionsbetweenthe political and cultural meanings of this term, I think, should give us some sense ofwhat's at stake in many of the texts under consideration here: their interest in probing the relations between language and social realities, their attempt to interrogate the ways in which dominant models of knowledge production have worked to consolidate and legitimize common-sense notions ofidentity and history, and their insistence that we pay rigorous attention to the way representations construct meaning, and with the question of whose interests these representations serve. Many of these texts, in other words, are concerned with the production of knowledge, with how, why, and for whom knowledge is produced, maintained, legitimized, and distributed. Some, indeed several, authors turn to the past to open up questions around what Fredric Jameson, in The Political Unconscious, has called the larger 'problem of representation, and most particularly of the representation of History.' Says Jameson, 'this is essentially a narrative problem, a question of the adequacy of any storytelling framework in which History might be represented.' If, for some of the texts under consideration, inadequacy is almost inevitable (in various ways they suggest the impossibility of reconstructing the past with unfailing accuracy) how, then, does one represent history? It is interesting to note that some of the most accomplished of the texts submitted for review are concerned with this very predicament. UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 67, NUMBER I, WINTER 1997/8 2 LEITERS IN CANADA 1996 Perhaps the most compelling of these is Guy Vanderhaeghe's extraordinary novel, The Englishman's Boy (McClelland and Stewart, 344, $27.50). Ambitious in its scope and disturbing in its revelations, the novel very adroitly weaves together two disparate narrative strands: the Cypress Hills massacre of 1873 where a group of bootleggers and wolf hunters clashed with the Assiniboine Indians, and the film industry of 1920S Hollywood, where HarryVincent, a fledgling young Canadianscenarist,is hired bybigtime studio-owner and producer Damon Ira Chance to track down an elusive and enigmatic former actor in Westerns, Shorty McAdoo. Chance, we're told, wants to make pictures rooted in American history and American experience, just as his hero, D.W. Griffiths, did, and he's convinced that McAdoo's'authentic' pastwill provide the basis for the epic on the American West that he desires to make. Wanting to elaborate on the codes of historical representation inaugurated by Griffiths - a filmmaker who 'argued that the motion-picture camera would end conflicting interpretations of the past' - Chance tells Harry, 'there'll come a day when the public won't swallow our stories unless they believe them to be real. Everybody wants the real thing.' Chance's vision of 'the real,' however, turns out to be based not on an objective record of events which somehow speak for 'themselves (or even on Shorty'S own account of the past), but on a process of selection, ordering, and evaluation: history, rather than being something that one simply finds, is something that's produced, and in Chance's case - as we see when he insists that Harry change the ending of the script to reflect the psychology and resentment ofthe defeated Indians - its telling is motivated by hatred and racism. Farfrom putting an end to conflictinginterpretations ofthe past, then, Chance's own unsettling obsession with history leadsboth Harry and Shorty to want to disassociate themselves from the film. Vanderhaeghe's novel is certainly one of the most absorbing books that I have read for this essay. Margaret...

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