Keepers of The Code: English-Canadian Literary Anthologies and the Representation of Nation by Robert Lecker (review)

I am probably the wrong person to review Robert Lecker’s new book on English-Canadian literary anthologies. I do teach English-Canadian literature and have done so going on a dozen years now. But I don’t use anthologies—never have—which, I suppose, is another way of saying that I have made myself into an anthologist, picking and choosing which texts I think worthy enough or useful enough for inclusion in my classes. Yet I have fond memories of those Canadian anthologies I used as an undergraduate at McGill: Brown, Bennett, and Cookes’s An Anthology of Canadian Literature in English and Lecker’s own two-volume Canadian Poetry (with Jack David) are still on my shelf, much consulted—and indeed, photocopied—over the years. These texts helped invent Canadian Literature for me; they made it a real thing that I could hold in my hand, and I probably wouldn’t be doing what I do now if it weren’t for them.

So why have I denied my own students the same privilege? Arrogance plays a part, I suppose: editors don’t seem to like the same stuff as I do, and I want my students to get my version of CanLit, which I would like to pretend is a superior one. But my version has a problem, which Lecker’s Keepers of the Code has helped me see. Namely, it deconstructs avant la lettre, as it were, any received tradition of Canadian Literature in English. It therefore withholds a narrative of development and influence, a national mythology the contestation of which is the duty and, indeed, great joy of every student who goes beyond the introductory level. In effect, my canon of Canadian literature is, at times, only accidentally so; my course-pack is an assortment of oppositional, alternative, and idiosyncratic texts, not an anthology. Like a parent with no rules, I haven’t given my young ones anything to rebel against. Then again, if you knew my students, you wouldn’t presume that any such desire to question authority actually exists on their part. But, still, I wonder if I haven’t made a mistake.

Of course, it is a lot harder these days to “hold Canadian literature in your hand.” The anthologies have swelled in size and spawned multiple volumes and are now more conveniently pulled behind you in a wagon than carried in hand. But even as these anthologies have become lengthier and more inclusive, their authority has necessarily declined in this period of automatic contestation and in the context of globalization and the consequent disintegration of the nation state and its ideological supports, including a national literary tradition. It is more than possible that my own reluctance to endorse that tradition by way of a standard anthology in my classroom is a symptom of this very problem.

So it seems to me that Lecker’s critical history of Canadian literary anthologies comes at a crucial time, even if it does not fully come to terms with the crisis at the core of its topic. Keepers of the Code: English-Canadian Literary Anthologies and the Representation of Nation pursues, with much success, it must be said, a single broad thesis: “national literature anthologies mediate between critical values, material realities, and pedagogical goals. They act as matrixes that display the tensions, doubts, and ideals attached to crucial historical moments in the cultures that produce them” (8). More crucially, Canadian anthologists themselves, argues Lecker, figure themselves, intentionally or not, “as culture keepers, as secular agents vested with the responsibility of transmitting national archetypes and tropes” (11). Hence “the code,” about which the reader will hear a great deal, is the underlying logic of an anthological act predicated on the assumption “that identity and culture are linked, that their job is to reinforce this connection, and that only by repeating the...