Mapping Jouissance: Insights from a Case Study in the Schizophrenia of Canadian Drama

Mapping Jouissance: Insights from a Case Study in the Schizophrenia of Canadian Drama GREGORY J. REID To read is to compare. —George Steiner, What Is Comparative Literature? In The Map and the Garden, John Vernon identifies two forms of schizophrenia that together frame the most common features of twentieth-century literature and culture: one the alienation of division, compartmentalization, separation (themap);the other, the absence ofdistinctions , the compulsion to see the world as inseparable, natural, erotic, and always whole (the garden).1 Vernon's contrast of "map" and "garden " shows a striking potential to absorb various contrastive analyses of English Canadian and Québécois literatures, including the double-axis hypothesis highlighted by Jean-Charles Falardeau (1959) in which English Canadian literature is seen to operate on a horizontal axis (individuals in relation to each other and society) in contrast to the vertical axis (of man in relation to the cosmos) of Québécois writing;2 Clara Thomas's characterization ofEnglish Canadian literature as masculine, linear, and Protestant formed under the image ofRobinson Crusoe in opposition to the cyclical, feminine, and Catholic perspectives of a French Canadian writingdominatedbythe feble ofthe "Precious Kingdom" (1972);3 Philip Stratford'sstylistic analysis ofthe typical Canadian novelas outwardlooking and preoccupied with realism and historical perspective in contrast to the inward looking, subjective, and deeply coded roman québécois (1986);4 andMcLuhanesquespeculationsonEnglishCanadianliterate/visualstylistics cast in reliefagainst Québécois orality (1990).5 The map/garden axis also seems receptive to SylviaSöderlind's"at-homedness"thesis,whichcontrasts 291 292Comparative Drama the "absolute, almost sacred, identity between name and thing, language and territory" in the Québécois novel in contrast to the English Canadian novel in which "language becomes a plastic, though tough and resistant material"thatis separable fromtheterritoryitun-names andnames.6Noticeably , studies ofthe novel have dominated comparative studies of English Canadian and Québécoisliteratures.7 In addition to the numerous, most obvious reasonswhythere has been apaucityofresearch comparingEnglishCanadian andQuébécois drama— the language barrier, the dominance ofnovel and film, lack ofawareness ofCanadian theater—we can add the opposition ofpostmodern criticism togeneralization (asriskingtotalizationoressentialism) andtobinaryanalyses (as rigid, biased, and exclusionary). Vernon's schizophrenias of map and garden resistthe tendencyto exclude difference and alterity or to privilege a centrist or structuralist tradition. Relative to the garden, the map is a minorform,butAnglo-American societies happen to perceive it as dominant and central. Binary contrasts of English Canada and Quebec seem typically to apply the privileged signifiers of traditional Western culture (and the map) to English Canada—masculine over feminine, realist over religious, objective over subjective, individualistic over collective—but in Vernon's analysis, garden and map are not opposites, are not mutually exclusive , because the garden includes and infuses all, including the map. ThoughVernon bases The Garden and theMap on the work ofnovelistWilliam Burroughs andpoetTheodore Roethke.both ofwhom have been diagnosed as schizophrenic, the playwrights whose work I wish to consider—David Fennario and Michel Tremblay—strike me as models of mental health. What I wish to isolate in this comparison are differences of style, at once the most pervasive and the most inscrutable element of any writer's work. At the same time, I take to heart Raymond Williams's claim concerning sociocultural change that "the actual alternative to the received and produced fixed forms is not silence: not the absence, the unconscious,whichbourgeois culture has mythicized.. .. What really changes is something quite general, over a wide range, and the description thatoften fits the change bestis theliteraryterm 'style'."8 Canadian comparativists who have pointed to the similarity between Québécois and Canadianliteratureshave donesobyemphasizingthematics or shared patterns of mythology.9 In addition to being the mark of cul- Gregory J. Reid293 tural difference and change, I take style to be no less than a writer's unique choice and arrangement ofwords and therefore as the ultimate difference between and amongwriters. In the case ofa playwrightwe must also consider the complementarity and/or incongruity among the script, the production , and the performance of a play. While style may be personal in writing, it becomes collective in the theater, and it is also determined by sociocultural context and, in addition, by the semiautonomous history of art...