Five-Part Invention: A History of Literary History in Canada by E. D. Blodgett (review)

Book Reviews E. D. Blodgett. Five-Part Invention: A History o f Literary History in Canada. Toronto: University ofToronto Press, 2003. $65:00 doth. At home in several literatures and languages, alert to theoretical and Clas­ sical contexts, E. D. Blodgett is uniquely qualified to write “a history of literary history in Canada,” as his subtitle has it. Knowing “that a compara­ tive history of literatures of Canada is practically impossible for a single author” (340 n. 58), he nonetheless takes on the daunting task of assessing sixty-one diverse literary histories, for he believes that “literary history in Canada, no matter how accomplished some of it has been in method and critical insight, is akin to the literary history of a federation that refuses to consider the usefulness and value of the federation” (18). Returning to that idea in his conclusion, he states: “If there has been a metahistorical purpose in my bringing the literary histories of Canada into a common compass, it has been to demonstrate the limits of autonomous perspec­ tives, no matter how valid in themselves” (297). His “common compass” has five aspects: English-Canadian, French-Canadian, First Nations, Inuit, and ethnic minorities. To Lawrence Lipking’s remark that “Literary history used to be impossible to write; lately it has been much harder” (1), Blodgett could respond, “especially in Canada.” Anyone interested in Canadian liter­ ary history will consult this book with interest, but because it has been so carelessly produced, it will not reach the audience that it deserves. Book Reviews | 161 Anyone inter­ ested in Cana­ dian literary his­ tory will consult this book with interest, but because it has been so care­ lessly produced, it will not reach the audience that it deserves. Because of my limitations, I will focus on English-Canadian literary history, but first I must say that the great virtue of this book is its atten­ tion to the other literary histories of Canada. Sounding like the Hugh MacLennan of “The Canadian Character,” Blodgett notes that both Englishand French-Canadian literary histories “represent the origins of Canada implicitly as defeat, if not a shared defeat,” and adds that “the tragedy of Canada is that its two dominant cultures have refused to recognize this element in the other” (63). He differs from MacLennan in at least two ways. First, he shows that history has an importance in French Canada that it does not have in English Canada, where the “recourse to ‘space’ ... so evident in anglophone history, implies an antipathy to time and his­ tory, which its practice bears out” (13). Second, he argues that there are more than two solitudes: “all writing that emerges from the minority lan­ guages and cultures of Canada constitutes its own solitude, and a history of Canadian culture is perforce a history of many solitudes” (224). With respect to the First Nations and Inuit, Blodgett argues that “it is difficult to distinguish between either of the two charter cultures, whose dispute is often at the expense of a third and generally unheard culture” (235). He also discusses the distinct and neglected perspectives of various regions and minorities. Blodgett describes his approach as follows: “Although my method tends to vary methodologically in response to individual texts, Hayden White’s understanding of history as a rhetorical mode of emplotment pre­ dominates” (20). For White, “the historical discourse should be viewed as a sign system which points in two directions simultaneously: first, toward the set of events it purports to describe and, second, toward the generic story form to which it tacitly likens the set in order to disclose its formal coherence considered as either a structure or aprocess" (106). Blodgett is better with the second direction: he is a shrewd reader of the ideological implications of the narrative and rhetorical features of literary histories, but he has trouble with the events of literary history that they purport to describe. From his opening paragraph, he is oddly diffident about such events, and so he writes that literary history is “in some ways even more moribund” than other history (3). His interests emerge when he argues “that literary history is in fact a variant of the Bildungsroman, particularly...