Sui Ungenerous

Sui Ungenerous In 1985 W.J. Keith began his Canadian Literature in English (Longman, 1985) by declaring that "the Canadian literary tradition is now sufficiently established that it can bediscussed in relation to the literatures ofBritain and the United States withoutembarrassment and without any nagging sense ofcultural inferiority" (4). "TheexistenceofaCanadian tradition," headded,"has sometimes been asserted, sometimes questioned, but rarely traced with any care," the only "partial exception" being The Literary History ofCanada (U ofT Press, 1965, enlarged 1976). Cultural maturation and literary productivity were such that for Keith the "whole concept of tradition," a discussable literary tradition, was no longer questionable. A more recent book by author and editorJohnMetcalfoffers a conspicuous challenge to that notion. What Is a CanadianLiterature? (RedKitePress, 1988) is an attack upon the entire enterprise of tradition-building or canon-making amongst academics at Canadian universities. The tradition underconstruction for Metcalf, already constructed - is a gameof"dubious academicand nationalist ends,""the virtual invention ofourliteraturebyacademics" (43-44). Despitesuch invention, "Noone in the lackadaisical worldofCanadian literary studies batted an eyelid. No one seems to notice, no one seems tocare thatour literature is being raised on a foundation of ignorance, incompetence, self-deception, and lies" (87-88). Metcalfexplains that he is properly positioned to offerthis evaluation, having arrived in Canada in the very year that modernism began to make its presence felt here. He states his case as a proposition: That 'modernism' in fiction did not really arrive in Canada until, roughly speaking, the publicationofHugh Hood's story collectionFlying a Red Kite in 1962. Thatthe prose written in Canada priorto this - apart from a few isolated and atypicalexamples - was grimly bad thenand is now unbearable. (7) Roughly speaking, indeed! Such modernist myopia and critical posturing is disheartening, especially in one who claims to care so much about literature as literature and literatureas an activity inCanada. Overthe past four decades a great deal ofwork has been undertaken not to invent or fabricate a tradition but to try to understand and measure the eYolution ofliterary undertaking in Canada and to reclaim and recover that literary past, weaknesses, warts, and all. Ithas been the work ofmany people and ofseveral generations ofscholars, research often funded throughgovernment initiative, particularly by meansoftheSocial Sciences and Humanities Research Council, but always undercompetitive circumstances. Such work, it needs to be said, stems more from the interest and commitment of scholars than from governmental dreams ofshapinga national identity. It stems from the kind ofdesire expressed by Hugh Hood's Matt Goderich in A Swing in the Garden(1975) to pursue"the recoverable pastofUpperCanada."Itsterns from thediscovery that Canadians were in theearlydecadesofthiscentury "educated Joumal of Canadian Studies Vol. L4, No. 2 (E1i 1989 Summu) 3 for the wrong place,"1 and thus deprived ofthe chance to measure what theirown country had to show for its early years. In the field ofCanadian literatureand culture much ofthat recovery work has been uneven, as pioneering work often is. Some of it has been imitative of American tendencies to thematizeaspects ofnational identity. Someofithas been morechauvinistic than analytical; some underresearchedand hurried; some, alas, poorly written. But it has been driven by a powerful cultural energy, an energy that has responded to neglect, Canada's own neglect of its cultural and literary evolution. Tradition in this sense is not a matter ofdirect influence, as Metcalf seems to claim. Neither is it T.S. Eliot's "arbitrary construct" of an exclusive "Tradition" in which, to borrow Terry Eagleton's phrase, "all poetry may be literature but only some poetry is Literature."2 It is rather a record ofliterary and cultural activity evolving outofa difficult anddelimitingcolonial origin. Melville, Poeand Hawthorne werea long time in emergingsouth ofthe border, as serious students ofAmerican literature realize. When they did emerge it was within an identifiable context, out ofa particular set ofcultural and temporal conditions. In a 198 l interviewJohn Metcalftold GeoffHancock: "It's inconceivable to me that you can havea large, powerful, allegedly civilized country which teaches the literatures oftwocountries [Britain and the United States] rather than its own. I just find that mind-boggling."3 Metcalfs generosity here is clouded, however, by the millennial significance he grants to 1962. Canada should teach its own literature - surely, literatures! - but only the...