Rewriting Apocalypse in Canadian Fiction (review)

In 1926, Lionel Stevenson remarked on Canadian poets' indebtedness to the apocalyptic mode: 'The poetic mind, placed in the midst of natural grandeur, can scarcely avoid mysticism.' According to Marlene Goldman's Rewriting Apocalypse in Canadian Fiction, Canadian writers continue to find apocalyptic paradigms compelling. Goldman posits, however, that contemporary writers are confronted, not with nature's splendour, but with the traumatic complexities of post–Second World War urban society, which they address in prose narratives that function, not as a source of mystical vision, but as 'crisis literature' that challenges the key features of apocalyptic thinking and reveals the worldly workings of the oppressive political and social forces that perpetuate it.

Goldman's study is 'concerned with how Canadian authors rewrite the narrative of the apocalypse, which envisions the end of the world and the creation of a heavenly world reserved for God's chosen people.' Goldman is thus less interested in allusions to the Revelation of St John (though she clearly has intimate knowledge of the biblical text) than in a kind of apocalyptic logic played out in cultural narratives involving 'a transformative catastrophe and a subsequent revelation of ultimate truth' to a privileged few. In a sense, Goldman's study marries Linda Hutcheon's theories about Canadian postmodernism to Northrop Frye's myth criticism: contemporary Canadian authors, Goldman intimates, read the apocalypse narrative in an ironic mode; they do so in part because they present the 'ex-centric' perspective of 'history's beautiful losers,' the conventionally doomed 'non-elect' of the apocalypse myth.

While Rewriting Apocalypse's introduction initiates readers into the 'grammar' of apocalypse and skims a selection of Canadian narratives, the bulk of this study reads five canonical Canadian narratives of the 1980s and 1990s. In effect, Goldman looks to these texts to discover what apocalypse now means, after Auschwitz, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, after the catastrophic displacement of Native people and the internment of Japanese Canadians – and how the enduring myth of apocalypse is itself implicated in such acts of historical violence. In her chapter on Timothy Findley's Headhunter, then, she identifies historical and aesthetic references that present apocalypse as a plot that, like Findley's character Kurtz, has escaped the bounds of literature, damagingly shaping current human culture and behaviour. This plot, according to several texts Goldman examines, can also be countered therapeutically within literature itself. In the chapter on Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, Goldman's discussion is guided by Walter Benjamin's theories in its analysis of the novel's 'obsession with the fragment, allegory, and the view of apocalypse as an ongoing crisis.' The central chapter examines, not a novel, but a short story, Margaret Atwood's 'Hairball' from Wilderness Tips, which focuses on the 'gendered and cannibalistic nature of apocalyptic violence.' Goldman argues less than convincingly that the story's plot implicitly links the biblical Revelation narrative to the conquest of Native people by settler-invaders, a link suggested by Atwood's interest in the Wendigo myth. The story seems in many ways an odd choice, a slim substitute for the obvious Atwoodian apocalyptic text, the novel Oryx and Crake. In Thomas King's GreenGrass, Running Water Goldman perceives alternatives to destructive European apocalyptic views in the novel's Aboriginal aesthetics and ethics. And in her final chapter, Goldman astutely situates apocalyptic thinking in relation to trauma theory, highlighting Joy Kogawa's 'aesthetics and politics of melancholia' in Obasan.

Goldman's study is more useful for its insightful individual readings and observations on the continuing prevalence of apocalyptic topoi than for its generalizations about Canadian literature. While she is at pains to posit her texts as representative of Canadian postmodernism, Goldman does not adequately historicize specific postmodern moments or fully demonstrate the representativeness of these texts. Nor does she complicate Hutcheon's premise that Canadian postmodern writing is distinguished by 'ex-centric' perspectives. Could the unexamined notion of ex-centricity, or of a national literature, or even of postmodernism itself be implicated in apocalyptic logic...