Canadian in the End?

CASIE HERMANSSON Canadian in the End? In a post-Survival (1972) update in 1985,Margaret Atwood armounced to an audience at Princeton, 'yes, Virginia, there is a Canadian Literature' (Atwood, 'After Survival,' 135). Yet, another fourteen years later, what constitutes ICanadian' is still a dominant critical question. Geographically and demographically speaking, there have always been very good reasons for Margaret Atwood to conclude, as she does elsewhere, that 'Canadian' is a kind of overdetermined nebula: The adjective 'Canadian' may resemble nothing so much as a photograph of a spiral nebula: a dense cluster of bright specks at the middle, where you might say the object as a whole is more or less located, and then some other specks, further out, that revolve eccentrically in the same gravitational field. ('Introduction ,' xiv) Accordingly, debate over what is 'Canadian' about 'Canadian shortstories' has raged for some time already, to the point where the value of the question is itself interrogated. But Atwood's feigned despair as an anthologist over 'pin[ning] such a thing down' (,Introduction,' xiii) is also a boast, and not at all an atypical one. It is a theme among anthologists of Canadian writing that such writing is multiple, varied, diverse, ranging, prolific, elusive. Indeed, it is often difficult to define it as 'short story,' since this may deny Canadiarmess its inherent pluralities. A similar note of pride is detectable in the comments of Frank Davey when discussing the subversiveness of the Canadian 'short story': An examination of the Canadian short story requires a much more pluralistic and eclectic view of the story, and a more 'generous' sense of its generic language, than that which accompanied the development ofthe Anglo-American short story. It requires a non-hierarchical conception of story that, far from separating it, as Beachcroft argued for the AnglO-American story, from parable, fable, legend, anecdote and essay, sees it as continuously sharing unstable codesystems with them. (Davey,lO-11) In short, Canadian short fiction is Canadian because of these factors. It is Canadian because each provides another example of the writing that resists UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 68, NUMBER 4, FALL 1999 808 CASlE HERMANSSON encapsulation, that must be included in any definition of Canadian but which does not offer such definition itself. Perhaps the short story is a Canadian form par excellence precisely because not one can be said to exemplify 'the Canadian short story.' Furthermore, short stories are generally received within a broader intertextual frame containing other literary works. That is, short stories are not published alone. Since to be diverse means to be multiple, short stories create a relational identity ('diversity') in a way that is inherently intertextual . While intertextuality cannotbe claimed for Canadianshort fiction only, I would like nonetheless to speculate that Canadian short fiction actively performs its relationship with otherness, and that this may be a 'Canadian' feature. In her introduction to Canadian Jewish Short Stories (1990), Miriam Waddington commented that 'the awareness of otherness' is 'an important national character' of Canadians.1 In overtly performing the possibility of otherness, certain Canadian short fictions demonstrate an awareness that they are not alone, and are thus participating in a larger narrative of alterity, diversity, and shifting identity construction. And if the spaces between stories thereby construct 'Canadian' - because this is the placeless place of relational identity, of being diverse because of being always in relation to another intertext - then the ends (and possibly the beginnings) ofshort stories may be charged with this possibility of otherness. There are good generic reasons why short stories especiallyshould demonstrate such awareness; they are 'social' in that they appear with others. Further, Canadian short story anthologists argue that diversity is a necessary trait, and that diversity has come to approximate 'identity' in Canadian collections..4 In the foreword to the Hutcheon and Bowering 1992 collection, Likely Stories: A Postmodern Sampler, Linda Hutcheon argues a political motive for the anthology's diverSity, in addition to its generic givenness: This collection is a 'sampler' in other ways too, though. It does not - because it cannot - represent all the postmodern short stories written in Canada; it merely samples from them. Its very variety implicitly acts as a (postrnodem) refusal...