Le Chien d’or / The Golden Dog: A Legend of Quebec by William Kirby (review)

An 1,100-page paperback, measuring four pounds on a bathroom scale, breathes life into a dead metaphor. Yet Mary Jane Edwards’s definitive edition of William Kirby’s historical novel set in New France’s final years is in fact a weighty tome in more than a literal sense. This twelfth and final product of the Centre for Editing Early Canadian Texts not only concludes a distinguished scholarly effort but also makes available a reliable text of a significant nineteenth-century novel.

The cultural and political significance of The Golden Dog far outweighs its minimal belletristic graces. The novel remains of interest to literary and intellectual historians because it marks the local discovery that the Matter of Canada was ripe for fictional exploitation. After Kirby’s achievement, it became clear that a romantically conceived early colonial Canada could furnish settings for one of the nineteenth century’s most popular (and enduring) forms, the historical novel. The bestseller success of Gilbert Parker’s 1896 The Seats of the Mighty, for example, came out of the Kirby novel, which Parker at once read, promoted, and lifted from. The effort that finds Joseph Boyden creating his The Orenda in our day in some sense originates in Kirby’s work, which attempted to narrate national destiny in an explicit way that John Richardson’s 1832 Wacousta did not.

As Edwards’s lengthy introduction states, Kirby “created for the Dominion of Canada a national identity that recognized the First Nations, but that was fundamentally bi-cultural, Christian, conservative, European, imperial, and northern.” I would take exception to the term created (the writings and careers of Thomas D’arcy McGee and the Canada First movement had played major roles in this identity formation) and note that the First Nations’ role in this novel is quite minor. Yet any student of the period would have to grant the force of her remarks, in that The Golden Dog granted an imaginative and narrative shape to that vision of Canada that Edwards articulates. That is, the novel told a story about our national destiny, a creation more powerful in its effect on audiences than any political theorizing can ever be.

I would also point out that The Golden Dog filled another crying need in Canada’s story: that of imposing continuity on diversity. Matthew’s Gospel opens with a genealogy asserting Jesus’s niche within an ongoing scriptural and prophetic tradition and then proceeds to link the events in its subject’s life to scriptural precedent. Epic narrative’s heroic subject has to stand at the apex of a continuous process: the revelations of Muhammad and of Joseph Smith never break with the past. They fulfill it.

Thus, faced with the violent displacement of the corrupt, outmoded French regime by a more virtuous successor state, Kirby’s narrative voice smoothes over the rupture. It asserts that a spirit of loyalty transforms regime change into the fulfillment of a national destiny. If these cultural shadow-plays are now witnessed only from across a vast gap between Kirby’s vision and what Edwards terms elsewhere “the feminist, multi-cultural, multiracial, regionalized, and in many ways republicanized country that now occupies the northern half of North America,” then that is all the more reason to restore the text of a novel that had been abridged and altered to the point of mutilation, from its own time up to ours. All paleontologists want that skeletal dinosaur they are seeking to display to be articulated in as complete a fashion as possible. This the editor has accomplished in her fully restored and annotated version of The Golden Dog, an achievement honouring both her and the Centre for Editing Early Canadian Texts.