Introduction

JOURNAL OF CANADIAN STUDIES Editor Associate Editor Editorial Committee Managing Editor Business Manager French Language Advisor Editorial Board Introduction JOHN WADLAND MICHAEL PETERMAN HARVEY McCUE JAMES PAGE JAMES STRUTHERS ARLENE DAVIS MARGARET PEARCE TERENCE MELLORS GERARD BERGERON DAVID CAMERON WALLACE CLEMENT FRANCOIS-MARC GAGNON FERNAND HARVEY RALPH HEINTZMAN MARGARET LAURENCE JACQUES MONET, S.J. W.F.W. NEVILLE PIERRE SAVARD DONALD V. SMILEY DENIS SMITH T.H.B. SYMONS W.E. TAYLOR DONALD F. THEALL CLARA THOMAS MELVILLE H. WATKINS ALAN WILSON REVUE D'ETUDES CANADIENNES Directeur Directeur adjoint Comite executif Gerante de la redaction Administration Conseiller de languefran<;aise Comite de redaction "Western Aspects I Regard sur l'Ouest" is the second in a series of regional issues currently being undertaken by the Journal of Canadian Studies. While it is but one of many avenues of investigation the Journal's editors have included in their long-range plans, the series, which began with "Northern Aspects/Regards sur le Nord" (Summer 1981) and which will appear at regular intervals in the future, recognizes and celebrates the significant place the idea of regionalism has come to play in Canadian studies today. In a country so geographically, economically, and culturally diverse it could not have been otherwise , though, as William Westfall has noted in his article "On the Concept of Region in Canadian History and Literature,'' such recognition was slow in coming.I The "new regionalism," as he calls it, emerged aggressively to challenge the old nationalist school of Canadian history and its disapprobation of regional study as parochial, unprofessional and folksy. So successfully has the challenge been met that it can now be seen in Journal ofCanadian Studies 3 Westfall's words as " the cornerstone of a new way of interpreting Canada and Canadian culture ." Articles, books, special issues of academic journals, and courses in regional studies at both the undergraduate and graduate levels in Canadian universities attest to the growing interest in the revisionalist possibilities of the ''new regionalism.'' Such enthusiasm is not without qualification. Using the geographer's distinction between formal and functional regions, Professor Westfall is careful to emphasize the limitations inherent in any attempt to define region in exclusively geographical (environmental) or economic (metropolitanhinterland ) terms. In either case apparently valid assumptions and apparently solid data become less supportable the closer the scholar looks at his material and the more he has access to other approaches and disciplines. In dealing with regions , Westfall argues, there are no "immutable structures." Clear borders fade. The old West continually gives way to the new. The more precise a scholar's focus becomes the greater complexity he is likely to find. What seemed static and measureable turns out to be evolving and complicated. And always scholars in Canadian studies must struggle with the difficulties to be faced in attempting to interpret with sufficient clarity material from related disciplines so as to make effective use of such perceptions in their own work. Border crossing of this kind is easier said than done. Too often in Canadian studies programs and research it serves only to inspire Iip-service. Something of the challenge facing new regionalists in Western Canadian studies is both apparent and implicit in the articles collected for this issue. Several relate directly to the foregoing remarks. Doug Francis's essay, "Changing Images of the West,'' while offering a wideranging historiographical survey of prairie studies, calls attention to the images of reality one can locate in "the secondary literature" of the West. These images transcend "the decisions of politicians , the intricate workings of the economy, and the daily activities of the people" and are located ''in the mind.'' While Francis studies changing images from Kelsey to Mandel, Howard and Tamara Palmer look closely at the implications 4 of change in their study of the new Alberta of oil, gas, urban growth and the Heritage Fund. Their analysis reveals an insecure, protectionist province ' 'more similar socially to Ontario than ever before'' yet caught up ''like its right-wing Republican cousin in the United States [in] a version of that peculiarly western brand of political assumptions whose origins are to be found not only in conservatism, but also in nineteenthcentury populism.'' The two articles offer a frame of sorts for the issue, albeit from historical perspectives. On the one hand historians reach out for images, approaching the borderland of literature and aesthetics. On the other they engage courageously with the present, using the difficult ground of the last ten years to better understand Alberta's past. Within the frame there are rewards aplenty. Alan Artibise continues his work on western urban development in offering what is at once a ''synthetic overview'' of the scene from the 1870s to the 1960s and a concentrated look at the ways in which the old civic elites gave up their power to corporate capitalistic forces and provincial control . David Smith interestingly compares, much to Saskatchewan's favour, the ways in which Alberta and Saskatchewan have engaged in their inevitably parallel jubilees and celebrations. Ken Andrews also concentrates on Saskatchewan, examining the complexity and confusion at the heart of that province's politics in the late 1930s as both the Conservatives and the Social Credit party sought to offer progressive alternatives to the CCF. In a more biographical view, Allen Mills has written an engrossing study of J.S. Woodsworth who was ''in many respects a jumble of contradictions," not, as received opinion would have it, a man of "practical resolve" and consistent principle. Of a greater literary interest are the remaining papers. David Jones examines the country life ideal, ''the rural myth, or way of seeing the world," as spawned and developed by the western agrarian press in the early decades of this century. He shows the ways in which ''this transnational ideology'' served rural Canadian and American (continued on page 158) Revue d'etudes canadiennes (continued from page 4) audiences equally well and related effectively to many reform movements of the period. The paper effectively links figures like Woodsworth and Nellie Mcclung to a side of Frederick Philip Grove too often overlooked by scholars pursuing his dark philosophy and still-darker origins. This Grove led his high school students into the field to study nature at first hand, mounted collections of insects for analysis, and even judged at agricultural club fairs. By contrast, Clara Thomas, so long a central figure in Margaret Laurence criticism, pushes the perimeters outward in investigating the influence of the English novelist, Joyce Cary, especially upon Laurence's The Stone Angel. The final two essays belong in some sense to the frame I suggested earlier. Laurence Ricou, whose book, Vertical Man/Horizontal World: Man and Landscape in Canadian Prairie Fiction (1973), concentrated upon the Henry Kreisel-inspired notion of "the imperative of setting" in western writing, ventures further into "The Bewildering Prairie" (the title of his book's last chapter) to compare the serious whimsy and/or whimsical seriousness of Robert Kroetsch's Badlands and American writer Tom Robbins's Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. In 1973 Ricou had indicated that "Kroetsch articulates a new comprehension of the prairie landscape, both embracing the destructive nullity of his environment and defying it with a comic ebullience which celebrates man and life." In this new essay, he confronts a West which has ''more recently" become a mystery to itself. Badlands becomes on one level at least a testing of regional definition, but overall it is a novel in which Kroetsch plays seriously (there are no answers to the questions Kroetsch asks nor ways of winning the games he plays) with many elements - including the psychological , the aesthetic, and the environmental. In such a fictional world there are no certainties. While some of the solid ground of Henry Kreisel's ideas, precisely realized in certain of Sinclair Ross's and Grove's stories, suggest themselves at times in Kroetsch's 158 novels like Badlands, that terra firma always gives way. Robert Lecker's deft and precise consideration of Kroetsch's aesthetics, appropriately entitled "Bordering On," helps to explain the way "private, geographic and archetypal" emphases constantly intermesh in Kroetsch's poetry, thus deliberately blurring focus for the struggling reader. Studies of this sort provide us with a necessary purchase and perspective. Kroetsch, like Eli Mandel, is a self-conscious writer, a new regionalist in the sense of concern and generation. As such both Kroetsch and Mandel aim to deprive readers of the old securities to be found in t~e work of earlier western writers. Following the call of both Professors Westfall and Francis, historians who seek to enter the worlds of such writers face challenges of a new and demanding kind. The worlds of Kroetsch and Mandel, worlds, apparently, in which the fiction will help to make us real, are minefields of danger for literary critics themselves . When Professor Francis was asked how he saw historians responding to such writers, he replied in a way that helps to define our dilemma as contemporary students of regionalism within the larger interdisciplinarity of Canadian studies: I have not dealt [in the essay itself] with your legitimate question as to how contemporary historians react to the literary perceptions of Kroetsch and Mandel, because I am not aware of any reaction. Both groups seem to work in different spheres, almost unaffected by each other, unfortunately. The challenge is, thus, still very much before us. The essays that constitute this volume help us to recognize at least some of the borders we face and must try to cross. MICHAEL PETERMAN NOTES 1. Journal ofCanadian Studies 15 (Summer 1980), pp. 3-15. Revue d 'etudes canadiennes ...