Patterns in Isolation: Three Versions of Canadian Literature and Society

Review article Patterns in Isolation: Three Versions ofCanadian Literature and Society ZAILIG POLLOCK Paul Cappon (ed.), In Our Own House: Social Perspectives on Canadian Literature. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1978. 208 pp. $5.95. John Moss, Sex and Violence in the Canadian Novel: The Ancestral Present. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1977. 326 pp. $6.95. Ronald Sutherland, The New Hero: Essays in Comparative Quebec/Canadian Literature. Toronto: MacMillan of Canada, 1977, 118 pp. $6.95. The three books under review are all responses to the new Canadian literature of the last fifteen years or so. Moss focusses on the English Canadian novel, and Sutherland on a wide range of literature in English Canada and Quebec, and, although Cappon and his fellow contributors deal with English Canadian literature from its beginnings to the present day, their main concern, too, is what has been happening in recent years. Understandably, there is considerable overlap in the works discussed, and the expected names - Atwood, Laurence, Davies, Richler, Ross, and so forth - crop up again and again. But the conclusions which the three books arrive at are so totally at odds, that one almost wonders if it is a single literature which is under discussion. To paraphrase the title of Moss's earlier study, the three books seem to be formulating patterns in isolation from each other. In the case of Moss and Sutherland, this isolation is part of a larger isolation, from the scholarly community as a whole, both Canadian and international. The isolation of In Our Own House has a different cause; Cappon and his fellow contributors deliberately turn their backs on the dominant liberal approach to Canadian literature and society which they see as essentially barren. Sex and Violence in the Canadian Novel and 114 The New Hero are clearly representative of the tradition they oppose. One may have doubts about the alternative tradition Cappon proposes, but one need not accept his point of view to feel that books like Moss's and Sutherland's have little contribution to make to a genuinely fruitful tradition of Canadian literary criticism in the sense of a shared, cumulative enterprise. Moss and Sutherland present different ideas about what is specifically Canadian in Canadian literature and in the society of which it is an expression . They observe certain facts about recent Canadian literature and formulate theories to explain them. But in both cases we feel that, although the original observations may be correct, and the theories not necessarily implausible, too much is left out: Moss and Sutherland do not take a broad enough view of the territory. Before turning to their specific arguments, I would like to point to what would seem to be areas of immediate relevance to any account of the Canadianness of Canadian literature, which Moss and Sutherland, formulating their patterns in isolation, have seriously neglected. Most obviously, Moss and Sutherland, though literary critics themselves, virtually ignore the substantial body of Canadian literary criticism which has grown up over the last few years. They do nod in their colleagues' direction: they both list the standard critical texts in their bibliographies; Moss surveys Canadian criticism in a page and a half at the end of his book; and Sutherland begins his book with a reference to the proliferation of studies in his particular area of interest, comparative Canadian literature . In fact, however, Moss and Sutherland never really take into account the critical discussions which have been generated by many of the works they discuss. This is especially disturbing in Moss's case since, as he informs us, he was a founding editor of the Journal of Canadian Fiction. In his role of editor he presumably considers Canadian literary criticism worth encouraging. Why, then, in his role of critic, does he feel free to ignore it? Sutherland is somewhat better in this respect, in that he at least does cite his colleagues occasionally. But he has much more to say about his own previous Revue d'etudes canadiennes Vol. 14, No. I (Printemps JCJ7CJ .~jJrin~) book than he does about all the other books he cites combined. There is, in fact, no sense of critical debate in The New Hero. One wonders if the indifference...