Dominant Impressions: Essays on the Canadian Short Story

The Language of the Law: The Cases of Morley Callaghan

The Language of theLaw: The Cases of Morley Callaghan GARYBOIRE IIS DISCUSSION HASTWO DISCRETE, yet intersecting, points of departure. I want to consider, first, MorleyCallaghan as an experimental short story writer—more specifically, a postcolonial writer intensely aware of his own resistant activity within a well-established colonialist genre. I want to consider, in other words, Callaghan's radical experimentations with both the language and genre of the short story form. Second, I want to consider how this experimentation intersects with what proved to be Callaghan's lifelong boredom and fascination—his fear and temptation, if you will—with the language of law. In the interests ofclarity, I want to concentrate here, furthermore, on the cluster of stories published between 1925 and 1928—the years during which Callaghan attended Osgoode Law School, corresponded with Ernest Hemingway in Paris, and began drafting the first of his many short "legal fictions." My argument, in a nutshell, is that figures of law permeate manyof the works of Morley Callaghan, and that these figures function not simply as an image of authority or as an emblem of socially sanctioned force. Rather, law (its imagery, vocabulary, rituals, and institutions) functions in Callaghan as a type of social "genre," one made up of multivalent foundational "languages," which, in turn, are sedimented throughout his oeuvre. These legal languages come to represent a variety of delimitations, for in Callaghan the law is not only always and already an ass, but usually a protean site of authoritarian desire. By continually invoking this site in a variety of his short stories Callaghan uses the story genre to construct a meticulous, ongoing counterT 76 discourse, a deliberate demystification of authority's chameleon-like forms and strategies. As literary "case histories," the stories come to be, not simply poignant vignettes or tales, but powerful—anarchic—interrogations of both inherited "genres" and imposed "languages." To adapt a comment made in a different context by W. H. New, Callaghan's "open, broken forms of the short story... constitute a generic opportunity for authentic speech"(x). That Callaghan was aware of himself as an anticolonial writer is evident from a number of sources. Most obvious, of course, is the highly stylized self-portrait in That Summer in Paris (1963), where he continually declares his literary independence from everything and everyone with the exception of Sherwood Anderson. This kind of aggressive constructed independence , a public persona of anarchic freedom, gains an interesting twist when we consider three additional statements made, respectively, in 1928, 1938, and 1964. Each corroborates Callaghan's stated need to achieve artistic independence; but each also discloses his evident sympathy with writing that self-consciously breaks away from colonial traditions. The first is from Callaghan's 1928 letter to Raymond Knister on the publication of the latter's Canadian Short Stories (1928). The anthology enraged Callaghan because, along with his own story "Last Spring They Came Over" (which I will discuss later), it also included works by Scott, Roberts, and Parker. In a fit of pique, Callaghan rebuked Knister for his colonialist conservatism: Today I got a copy of the Canadian stories. I read the Introduction and then I read D. C. Scott's story in the book. What is the matter with you? Though it will come as a relief to many schoolmarms throughout the country to learn that the venerable Duncan is a great writer, since they have always suspected it, you know better. Then whydo you do it?Are you thinking of retiring definitely? Youhad a chance to point the wayin that introduction, and you merely arrived at the old values that have been accepted here for the past fifty years;id est, Duncan C. Scott, G. D. Roberts and Gilbert Parker are great prose writers. (Letter to RaymondKnister,August 15, 1928) Callaghan's passionate interest in breaking away from what he saw as outworn colonial styles—the sketch, folktale, humorous anecdote, exemplum , or animal fable—reappears ten years later in an obscure Saturday Night review (interestingly entitled "Honesty of Purpose"). Commenting on C. R. Allen's Tales of New Zealanders, Callaghan remarked, from a Canadian point of view this collection of New Zealand stories has a special interest... are [New Zealanders] still writing colonial literature, or have they got something of their own? The fine thing to be said about most 77 of these stories is that the authors of them are obviously seeing the people against...