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Reading for Contradiction in the Literature of Colonial Space HEATHER MURRAY I have been writing of cadence as though one merely had to hear its words and set them down. But that's not true, at least not in my experience. There is a check on one's pen which seems to take hold at the very moment that cadence declares itself. Words arrive, but words have also gone dead. To get at this complex experience we must begin from the hereness, the local nature of cadence. We never encounter cadence in the abstract; it is insistently here and now. Any man aspires to be at home where he lives, to celebrate communion with men on the earth around him, under the sky where he actually lives. And to speak from his own dwelling— however light or strong the inflections of that place—will make his words intelligible to men elsewhere, because authentic. In my case, then, cadence seeks the gestures of being a Canadian human: mutatis mutandi, the same is true for anyone here—an Israeli, an American, a Quebecker. But if we live in space which is radically in question for us, that makes our barest speaking a problem to itself. For voice does issue in part from civil space. And alienation in that space will enter and undercut our writing, make it recoil upon itself, become a problem to itself. The act of writing 'becomes a problem to itself when it raises a vicious circle: when to write necessarily involves something that seems to make writing impossible. Contradictions in our civil space are one thing that make this happen, and I am struck by the subtle connections people here have drawn between words and their own problematic public space . . . . To explore the obstructions to cadence is, for a Canadian, to explore the nature of colonial space . . . . DENNIS LEE,Cadence, Country, Silence: Writing in a Colonial Space (1974, 36) 72 orthrop Frye, in his "Conclusion" to the Literary History of Canada, assumes for a moment the persona of "rigid evaluator" to note the absence of "genuine classics" in the Canadian literary canon (1977, 2:333). This "fact" about Canadian literature does offer critics and readers one "advantage," however, for in Frye's opinion "[i]t is much easier to see what literature is trying to do when we are studying a literature that has not quite done it. If no Canadian author pulls us away from the Canadian context toward the centre of literary experience itself, then at every point we remain aware of his social and historical setting. The conception of what is literary has to be greatly broadened for such a literature . . . . Even when it is literature in its orthodox genres of poetry and fiction, it is more significantly studied as a part of Canadian life than as a part of an autonomous world of literature" (333-34). Ostensibly, Frye's project here is to outline a recommended direction for Canadian—or, more specifically, if implicitly, English-Canadian— literary criticism. This would be a criticism that welcomes the unconventional and unorthodox; we would "at every point remain aware of [the writer's] social and historical setting" while "greatly broadening]" the "conception ofwhat is literary." Here, as elsewhere in his writings on Canadian culture, Frye is accepting, encouraging—only momentarily, it would appear, the "rigid evaluator." As are somany of Frye's passages, this is a memorable one. (Omitted from the shortened quotation above is his observation that many Canadian writings—explorer journals, for example—"are as innocent of literary intention as a mating loon.") It seems to go directly, pithily, quotably, to the heart of things—to outline a state of affairs, solve a problem, suggest a direction. The conversational tone, however, permits a certain conceptual relaxation: and there is room here for some questions. Under what sort of criticism may Frye call the absence of "genuine classics" a "fact" rather than an opinion? And what is the relationship of thisjudgement to the concluding recommendation that we broaden our very conception of the literary? Frye says that "[i]t is much easier to see what literature is trying to do when we are studying a literature that has not quite done it." But what is this "it," anyway? Presumably we all know, already, "what literature is trying to do." Clearly, here we have two very different uses of the term "literature," to apply both to a specific body of works ("a literature that has not quite...

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