Wacousta. Based on the Novel by John Richardson (review)

What they've done to Wacousta over the decades, you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy. Slimmed to the point of anorexia by successive abridgments, it ballooned to its original length with Douglas Cronk's 1990 restoration, and two more full-length editions followed. Now the text is shrinking again as it undergoes a personality change. For Heather Kirk's 'rewriting' turns the creaky story into a 'great read' and 'a balanced account of the Pontiac Uprising.' Why?

Name any other Canadian text that has endured a shrink-wrapping and makeover on this scale. Is Wacousta read for its streamlined story? For its politically correct vision of life in the wild? For its stylistic graces? Or does it still get read by academics and their students because it remains all of a piece, at times turgid, always overblown in its rhetoric and absurd in its plotting but here before us nonetheless. That is, Wacousta offers an obsessive expression of an early Canadian writer's attempt to extract popular imaginative appeal from a Canadian temporal (1764) and spatial (the Great Lakes frontier) location. That is why it remains of interest; not because it delivers a story of universal appeal that only needs few of its rhetorical rough spots – its 'wordy, abstract prose style' – smoothed over to turn it into Oprah material.

Whatever a current audience might find off-putting – that is, much of the novel's plotting, characterization, style, and theme – is part of its actuality. John Richardson – with breathtaking insouciance – termed his work 'a tale of sad reality.' Even if Heather Kirk's version could have escaped the use of anachronism – 'I am the most highly-motivated man in the fort'; 'told him to shut up'; 'am I going to be raped?'; 'yanked up her skirt'; 'sadistic sexual excitement' – a problem would still remain: the problem raised by a refusal to experience a text on its own terms. How can such a demurral add anything to our understanding or appreciation of a national literature? Whether the naughty bits are political or sexual in nature, bowdlerizing them never works.

Nahum Tate rewrote King Lear because an audience existed for Shakespeare in the first place. Has that sort of committed popular audience ever existed for a creature like Wacousta, whose author groused that he might as well have published it in Kamchatka for all the enthusiasm it aroused among local readers? What did Wacousta do to attract this sort of attention?

Yet this travesty of a rewrite does indicate the power and significance that the original still retains: you neuter a stallion, not a hack. Obviously something about Wacousta's very otherness sticks in the craw of today's tastemakers. Obviously a children's writer like Kirk wants Richardson cleaned up, his boots shined or better yet replaced with sandals, his shaggy threat to good taste scrubbed into respectability or at least readability. I find it very reassuring to think that this is so, for it bespeaks the liveliness of Richardson's imagination and the wisdom of his enduring folly.

Meanwhile, never confuse this horse chestnut with a chestnut horse.