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IMAGINING VANCOUVERS BURNING WATER, ANA HISTORIC, AND THE LITERARY (UN)SETTLING OF THE PACIFIC COAST OWEN PERCY Although they (re)write historical periods separated by nearly a century, George Bowering’s Burning Water and Daphne Marlatt’s Ana Historic participate in similar post-structural and postmodern dialogues as experimental projects that implicate their readers in the histories they (re)create. The most immediate connection between the novels is evident in their mutual desire to address the thin and fading “facts” of British Columbian history—colonization , settlement, mercantilism, environmental exploitation—in ways that disrupt the possibility of an objective, coherent, and comprehensive masterhistory for the province and its people. Additionally, the narratives of both novels are so self-conscious of their historical project(ion)s that they dispense with the pretense of narrative objectivity. Marlatt’s Annie and Bowering’s unnamed (though self-referential) writer discover, acknowledge, and exemplify the fragmented and polyvocal nature of the impossible entity known as history both within and outside of their respective narratives. It is difficult to underestimate the contributions each of these works have made to historigraphy , historical writing, and the novel in Canada when perusing the critics who have paid due attention to them: Pamela Banting, Dennis Cooley, Frank Davey, Stan Dragland, Linda Hutcheon, Jonathan Kertzer, Robert Kroetsch, Eva-Marie Kröller, Marie Vautier, Herb Wyile, and Heather Zwicker, to name but a few. Throughout the multiple and varied analyses of these books, Bowering ’s historiographical play is alternately celebrated, lambasted, cheered, and jeered, and his writing discussed alongside that of Melville and Rilke. Marlatt’s feminist gaze is similarly praised and critiqued, built up and torn down—her protagonists aligned with Emma Bovary and Susanna Moodie, and her writing with Nicole Brossard’s and Mary Shelley’s. But is Ana Historic a“fiction of fiction” as Davey has suggested (1997, 130), or is it “the novel as translation” as Banting has proposed (1991, 125)? Has Bowering’s depiction of First 183 184 L I T E R A R Y H I S TO R I E S, R E G I O N A L C O N T E X T S Nations peoples “successfully challenged and subverted the discourse of the ruler” (Kröller 1992, 84) and “undercut racist stereotypes” (Knutson 1989, 68), or are “Bowering’s Indians … just a motley assortment of clichés rather than well-rounded characters” (Kuester 1990, 106) that “perpetuat[e] a long tradition of Eurocentric caricature of indigenous peoples” (Wyile 2002, 49)? The fact that multiple and incongruous answers to all of these questions still exist within the canon of criticism surrounding the novels suggests that they remain, if not two of the most significant contributions to Canadian historiographic metafiction in the last thirty years, then certainly major landmarks in the genre, and specifically in West Coast Canadian literature. These two historical novels follow in the footsteps of much late twentieth-century historical writing, their narratives and critical reception alike broadly confirming Dominick LaCapra’s remarks that “the very idea of a ‘total history’” (1985, 10) has either been“shifted in the direction of a more problematic general history or radically contested in the name of a ‘splintered’ or decentered history” (1985, 118). Where Bowering and Marlatt begin to differ from their literary predecessors—and why they are still of interest to the study of Canadian historical fiction today—lies in the progressive integration of experimental narrative techniques into the processes of their texts, which thus emphasize and enact the impossibility of any kind of authoritative or all-inclusive history for Canada’s Pacific Coast. Burning Water can be read as a meditation on the relationship between “fact” and imagination, with George Vancouver at the helm of his “fact factory ” (Bowering [1980] 1994, 186) ship, deciding arbitrarily what might constitute “acceptable facts” to his particular empirical world view. Marlatt’s Annie, upon eschewing her history professor husband’s version of history, muses that “i’m no longer doing my part looking for missing pieces. at least not missing facts. not when there are missing persons in all this rubble”(1988, 134). As the forms of these works begin to echo their contents, the concept of history itself becomes disrupted (suffering from what Jonathan Kertzer calls “disruptive anxiety” [1998, 117]), thereby disrupting notions of any dominant or total Canadian historical narrative. The back cover of Marlatt’s first edition suggests that Ana Historic is“the story of Annie, a contemporary, who becomes obsessed with...

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