The Sum and the Parts

The Sum and the Parts A few years ago literary theorist Linda Hutcheon introduced her book Splitting Images: Contemporary Canadian Ironies with the essay "As Canadian as ... Possible ... under the Circumstances," first delivered as the 1989 Robarts Lecture in Canadian Studies at York University. Hutcheon's essay title comes from a piece in The Canadian Fornm asking us to ponder how we might complete the phrase "as Canadian as..." rather than "as American as...."1 Acknowledging that literatures other than ours are bathed in irony but also that irony is only one of several English-Canadian ways of being, Hutcheon nevertheless argues persuasively for thedistinctiveness ofCanadian irony- from irony rhetorical to irony humorous, selfdeprecating , self-protective, elitist, corrective, corrosive and specific to good oldfashioned romantic irony. Irony Postmodern, in the end, is a close relative of Irony Canadian; the more affirmative kind (see also Hutcheon's book A Theory of Parody) is not marginal so much as liminal, defined as that "open space" where "novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise."2 For her it is captured in Robert Kroetsch's playful reading of Haliburton's Sam Slick: "an early manifestation of the Canadian personality. The man who exploits social hierarchy by being falsely named into it wants also to be free of it. He wants to have a system that gives him identity and stature, but he wants to be free ofthat system. This man is surely ready to enter into the Canadian Confederation.''3 One could argue that Canada continues to be defined as a country where, it sometimes seems, the whole is less than the sum of the parts. Hutcheon chooses not to encompass Quebec writers, but in my opinion (and although they might disagree) her typology of irony at least partly applies to works such as Monique Larue's La Demarche du crabe, Monique Proulx's Aurores Montreales, Ying Chen's Les Lettres chinoises, Nancy Huston's Instruments des tenebres, France Daigle's I953 and-most recently-Lise Bisonnette's Quittes et Doubles. The main difference lies in a greater emphasis on psychoanalysis in the work of contemporary French-language writers ofboth sexes, and a different theoretical vocabulary - one emphasizing "americanite" and "transculture" - on the part of their critics. Postmodem architecture seems to have influenced Hutcheon's understanding of "verbal and visual ironies." While allusions to Leonard Cohen's film "I Am a Hotel" leap to mind more readily in relation to her work than to his, Christopher Thomas's article "Canadian Castles" in this issue, not unlike Kroetsch discussing the "American" Sam Slick, revisits the "British" and "Franco-Scots" styles oftumof -the-century Canadian public architecture to talk about the "imagined community " that is Canada, among other things. Ralph Matthews's equally provocative piece on the concept ofCanadian Studies, on the other hand, argues for a focus on the "distinctive" or "unique" nature ofCanada from a social science standpoint as the bestbasis for constituting the discipline ofCanadian Studies. It must be admitted thatCanadian Studiesjournalsand programmes (at least in my experience) have been more attuned to the humanities' focus on subjectivity than to the social sciences' Journal ofCanadian Studies 3 preoccupation with empirical truth, perhaps to our detriment. Certainly the difficulty ofreconciling poetry and politics (let alone the scientific method) is at times evident in the life and work of F.R. Scott no less than in that of Duncan Campbell Scott before him, although Allen Mills here effectively reclaims the mixed inheritance of F.R. Scott's thought. Other articles in this issue speak to the historian's and the social scientist's efforts to make sense of conflicting theories and conflicting data. Such healthy conflict is, of course, by no means restricted to academe. As we slouch towards the federal election and possibly a referendum after that, the fact that clashing views ofreality need not undermine civility was evident in Wenjack Theatre at Trent University today, hosting Rex Murphy's final pre-election edition of the CBC programme "Cross-Country Check-up." At one moderately raucous point in the debate the esteemed Mr. Murphy joked, if memory serves me right, that the audience was "rampant with apathy," an observation that falls somewhere between...