Unruly Penelopes and the Ghosts: Narratives of English Canada ed. by Eva Darias-Beautell (review)

Eva Darias-Beautell’s introduction to this collection establishes its focus on the cultural work done by Canadian literature and criticism since the nationalist moment of the early 1970s. It also proposes that the Penelopean act of sustained, simultaneous weaving and unweaving offers a fitting metaphor for that work – which was, simultaneously, to produce and deconstruct a literary tradition no less recognizable for being plural, transnational, and pointedly critical of dominant narratives.

Most of the chapters might indeed be seen, as Darias-Beautell suggests, as analyzing the unweaving and weaving work of literary and critical projects. Coral-Ann Howells highlights the pressures to assemble and dismantle tradition in composing a Canadian literary history. Surveying histories published since Atwood’s Survival, she sees them simultaneously interrogating and reconstructing a manifold national narrative; some of them, she observes, show the strain of these contradictory efforts. Smaro Kamboureli finds fault lines in a recent series of calls to establish Asian-Canadian area studies; once established, she cautions, area studies may reproduce the same canonizing gestures they intend to contradict. Noting that the later calls cite earlier ones, apparently without noticing their problematic values and mistaken histories, Kamboureli encourages scholars to “read [one another] closely.”

Other chapters direct attention to the Penelopean projects of select literary texts. Ana María Fraile discusses how certain novels problematize Canadian and African-Canadian national identities, respectively, by undercutting multiculturalism’s supposed colour-blindness and by describing evolving mixed-race subjectivities. Belén Martín-Lucas discusses how speculative fictions reimagine the positions that normative visions of Canadianness allot to racialized women citizens, by re-envisioning trans-national feminist subjects as queer mutants with the power to shed their skins. Richard Cavell observes in Jane Rule’s writing an alternative, queer model of collectivity to that offered by national “cultural memory” – a model that is partial and present rather than total and perpetual, affective and local rather than statist, and focused by the particular intimacies of mourning rather than official memories. Michèle Lacombe surveys Indigenous literary theory in Canada, indicating its communal, synthesizing, and decolonizing values and its resistant conversation with Western theory. She reads stories by Indigenous writers, annotating their intertextual engagement with each other and with Indigenous theory.

These chapters repeatedly emphasize literature’s efforts to produce communities and subjectivities that resist the nation. Darias-Beautell’s own chapter, indeed, reads works set in Vancouver for how they resist dominant municipal, not national, narratives; the texts work to block officially sanctioned Vancouver views. They assert experiences of locality that emphasize the particular, the affective, the embodied, and often the officially forgotten: a set of values, all of them resistant to grand narratives, that recalls those emphasized in other chapters. This emphasis seems quite true to Canadian literature and criticism since the 1970s. Indeed, it justifies Darias-Beautell’s argument – made before, by others, but not recently made so decisively as here – that such concerted opposition to tradition and dominant narrative constitutes precisely the Canadian Literature tradition of the late twentieth century. This emphasis does, however, make for a revised myth. Penelope spent her nights furtively unweaving her weaving, in an effort at delay and evasion. Canadian literary criticism has made the steady dismantling of its nominally national frame its daytime business for decades.

One standout chapter in this collection – and they are all valuable – suggests what might be lost if the communities in which citizens voluntarily engage contract too far, becoming too particular. María Jesús Hernéaz Lerena theorizes the intimate rhetorical modes of confession and journal-writing that make up the narrative fabric of Michael Crummey’s River Thieves. She illuminates how Crummey deploys these private modes to unravel the epic plot of historical record, opposing its “elevated objectivity.” Importantly, Hernéaz Lerena shows that when private confessions preclude public testimony – as in the inquiry into the murder of Newfoundland’s Beothuk imagined by Crummey – they prevent the communal...