Unruly Penelopes and the Ghosts: Narratives of English Canada

INTRODUCTION: Why Penelopes? How Unruly? Which Ghosts? Narratives of English Canada

I N TROD U C T I O N Why Penelopes? How Unruly? Which Ghosts? Narratives of English Canada Eva Darias-Beautell In “Notes from the Cultural Field: Canadian Literature from Identity to Commodity,” Barbara Godard interrogates the changing paradigms in Canadian literary discourses between the 1950s and the 1990s, a period of immense transformation not only in the spatial composition of the social imaginary of the nation (extending its territory within and beyond Canada ), but also in the conditions of possibility for articulating a consensual notion of communal identity. Probing Northrop Frye’s famous diagnosis of the national culture as a paradox and a riddle, in the question “Where is here?” (“Conclusion” 338), Godard sets out to analyze the differences between “here” and “there,” “now” and “then,” with the intention of elucidating the extent and impact of the transformations that the second half of the twentieth century has introduced into the literary and cultural fields. “To a certain extent, nothing has changed,” she writes, alluding to the continuity of the nation as the major narrative frame for thinking the literary and of identity as the centre of critical practice, “though literature serves to mobilize the claims of many groups for inclusion in a more broadly imagined community reconfiguring the nation” (248). From a different, larger perspective, however, Godard continues, “everything has changed under the material conditions produced by the rise of a distinctively transnational capitalism” (248). It is to the complex logic of relations produced by these diverse signifying systems that critical attention should turn, “rather than 1 2 e v a D a r i a s - b e a u t e l l parse the allegories through which the nation’s culture is expressed and its identity discerned” (270). Writing in 2000, and providing a shrewd commentary on the material, political, historical, and institutional conditions of production of Canadian literature at that time, Godard advances the constituents of an effective critical discourse for the twenty-first century. This collection of essays is the result of a three-year international research project on contemporary Canadian fiction and criticism, with the participation of scholars from Spain, Canada, and the UK. Under the title “Penelope’s Embroidery: Literary Tradition, Cultural Identities and Theoretical Discourses in the Anglo-Canadian Fiction of the Late 20th Century,” the project proposed to explore the possibilities of innovative approaches to the cultural and literary contexts of English Canada over the last forty years. We took the nationalist movement of the 1960s and ’70s as a starting point, when the supposed absence or weakness of a national sense became the touchstone for official discourses about cultural identity . In those years, I believed, that metaphor of lack provided the nation, somehow paradoxically, with the distinctive elements it was looking for and contributed to the creation of an oxymoronic sense of tradition that had, to some extent, survived to the end of the century. “The difficulty of celebrating the nation as a function of dismissing it,” writes Robert Lecker in this context, “creates a potent paradox that is eminently Canadian” (10). In the following decades, however, critics, artists, and writers repeatedly questioned such a fragile and centralizing model of national identity by reading the nation from the new perspectives that had thrived within the discourses of alternative social and theoretical paradigms such as multiculturalism , environmentalism, cultural studies, queer theory, feminism, or post-colonialism.1 I could, in fact, suggest that the artistic and cultural flowering which Canada is experiencing at the beginning of the twentyfirst century is, to a great extent, based on the dismantling, from the above perspectives, of the few images constructed only forty years ago to represent the nation. Moreover, an immense and promising field of literary creativity is taking place as a result of a constant process of questioning of, and resistance to, official modes of national belonging. The project’s starting point was thus a questioning of the rhetoric of absence mentioned above as well as the current validity of certain tropes of supposed national identification. I argued for the existence of a plural and fluid Canadian narrative tradition, created ironically through a process of deconstruction of those official discourses and from the new perspectives opened by the literary and cultural theories of the 1980s and ’90s. The chronological frame was tentatively and only implicitly located between 1972, when Margaret Atwood’s Survival was published, and the mid-2000s, i...