In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

A TRADING SHOP SO CROOKED A MAN COULD JUMP THROUGH THE CRACKS” COUNTING THE COST OF FRED STENSON’S TRADE IN THE HUDSON’S BAY COMPANY ARCHIVE KATHLEEN VENEMA This chapter argues that in his 2000 novel, The Trade, Fred Stenson both breaks new literary ground and creates—from the past he reads and the past he imagines—a narrative so dependent on Gothic form that it raises unsettling questions about the ethics of historical fiction. Early in the novel, the narrator figures the epistemological act on which the text is based, the act of reading allusive, recalcitrant, sometimes irrelevant, often formidably dull documents for the past they record and the future they promise.“Having been on this side of the Atlantic for only two years,” the narrator explains, [the Governor] knew less about the country’s sources of beaver than most of the men he governed.… The Governor pointed his finger and tapped inside an eggshaped space [on the map] … The problem … was two-fold. First, it was into that space that his Bow River Expedition was about to probe,and second,it was blank.… [L]ater by candlelight, the Governor continued to search the post journals, letters and account books.… The candles guttered. The handwriting blotted and blurred, and all he found with which to jab himself awake were occasional entries where the… Indians brought sudden abundances of beaver … from the south. On these rare prosperous days, his hopes lightly rested. Later still, the young Governor slept across his work … and dreamt of the uncharted southwest … where… every beaver lodge crawled inside with life-stuffed skins. (Stenson 2000, 12–13) Like its “Governor,” who reads for all-important beaver in the documents available to him, Stenson’s novel reads official and unofficial fur-trade documents , extant letters and lost letters, decipherable post journals and account books blurred beyond legibility, archived texts and imagined texts, for the 3 “ 4 A U S A B L E PA S T ? N E W Q U E S T I O N S, N E W D I R E C T I O N S ways they record, shape, define, and limit what is known and what might be dreamed about Canada’s fur-trading past.1 More than two centuries of fur trading in northern North America left a profound mark on the economic, cultural, social, and political constitution of what became the Canadian Northwest. Despite its significance, however, the fur trade has only rarely been represented in Canadian literature,2 perhaps, paradoxically, because it exists for posterity as such a daunting textual record. In 1974, for instance, the records of the Hudson’s Bay Company (hereafter “the HBC” or “the Company”), a remarkable 4,293 linear feet of documents, fifty tons in all, were transferred from London to their new home at the Manitoba Provincial Archives (“Hudson’s Bay Company Archives for Manitoba” 1973). Numerous additional volumes documenting the fur trade exist elsewhere as well, principally at Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa, but also in archives throughout Canada. Histories of the fur trade abound, moreover, as do biographies of its major and minor figures.3 “Paradoxically,” says Jennifer S.H. Brown,“the geographical remoteness of the traders from each other is precisely what now facilitates studying them as a group; lacking other means, they communicated through letters and post journals, and many of the documents they intended for each other and for their employers survive .… Their literacy thus became a vehicle for maintaining the community and now aids the study of it” (Brown 1980, xii). The sheer stunning textualization of the fur trade, then, offers an extraordinary resource for a writer intrigued by questions of—among others— meaning, memory, and history; the power of the archive; the epistemological, ontological, and rhetorical force of documentation; hierarchical systems of governance; the colonization of resources; the emergence of Métis ethnicity (Brown 1980; Ens 1996; Friesen 1988), and the ethics of mercantilist profitmaking in a hunting-and-gathering world. Appropriate, perhaps, to the massive and massively documented history that he takes on, and unlike historiographical fiction that, in Linda Hutcheon’s words, “problematizes the very possibility of historical knowledge” (1988c, 106), Stenson’s novel explicitly proposes an alternate version of a knowable past.“Far from skeptically absenting itself from the field of historical representation ,”Katherine Durnin explains,“Stenson’s realist historical novel makes its own statements about historical truths that ask not to be dismissed as so much postmodern play...

Share