INTRODUCTION R2:D2

R2:D2 abbreviates "Reviews and Reflections: Dennis Duffy." My first four itens were written as sidebars to a brief history of Canadian literature for an Indian audience that never saw the light of day.

These brief reflections have, however, which is why I welcome comment on them now.

Depending on audience interest and participation, others may follow.

BRIEF REFLECTION: SUNSHINE SKETCHES

Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town like a magnifying lens used as a burning glass, remains Canadian literature’s finest social satire, minutely recreating a culture in which language has abandoned any connection with the reality it purports to describe. Leacock’s faux-pastoral, set within the fabled town of Mariposa has often been misread as a nostalgic evocation of small-town life at the turn of the twentieth century. The sketches are first found in the Montreal Daily Star in 1911; they appeared in book form in London (John Lane) a year later. Generations have colluded in concealing the series’ savageries behind a nostalgic veil. This misreading is partially supported by the text, since Leacock gravely muffles the force of his insight in the final sketch. Yet the force of the earlier chapters mitigates the author’s sellout to the literary equivalent of the small-town boosterism expressed in the conclusion.

We can measure the deflation of language and the force of the satire in three areas of Mariposan life: the social/commercial, the political and the religious. The hotelier Josh Smith plays a leading role in the first two areas, while the Reverend Dean Drone conveys the jaundiced portrayal of the final concern. The rhetoric of aw-shucks banality occludes Mr. Smith’s cunning and shrewdness; he deploys its rhetoric during his meteoric journey from outsider into the heart of Mariposan affairs. His hotel, the location of the series’ opening sketch enjoys an inflationary growth through malapropism—such as the misnaming of rathskeller with the neologism “rats’ cellar,” and “girl room” for “grill room”—while the fictive economy of the small town balloons through a similar cloaking of the ordinary in the language of the grandiose. But while the paper millions float away like kites whose strings have snapped, Josh Smith’s prominence within Mariposa abides.

This is because Leacock is saving him for a further deflationary linguistic excursion extending over Sketches X and XI and dealing with the absence of meaning in political discourse. Whatever flights the candidates’ political oratory may take, the election remains nothing more than a business-as-usual struggle for spoils between the Ins and the Outs. Leacock has already depicted a culture in which ethnic and religious associations have been blurred by a conformist mist of good-fellowship. Had Leacock’s satire concluded here, his audience could have dozed away in the reassurance that the familiar targets of rascally low cunning and self-aggrandizement in business and politics had been exposed yet again. Yet the narrator’s view shifts to another area, one more central to cultural coherence than even the above, when it pinpoints the irrelevance into which religious discourse has descended.

“The Marine Excursions of the Knights of Pythias,” perhaps the most-frequently anthologized of the Sketches features a decrepit excursion boat’s farcical sinking in three feet of water. Nothing particularly memorable in that, but the local reaction to it makes a mockery of providentialism, of any sense that a plan lies behind our miniscule destinies:

Strangest of all to think, in a case like this, of the people who were

left behind, or in some way or other prevented from going, and always

afterwards told of how they had escaped being on board the Mariposa

Belle that day!

Some of the instances were certainly extraordinary. Nivens, the lawyer,

escaped from being there merely by the fact that he was away in the

city.

Towers, the tailor, only escaped owing to the fact that, not intending

to go on the excursion he had stayed in bed till eight o'clock and so

had not gone. He narrated afterwards that waking up that morning

at half-past five, he had thought of the excursion and for some

unaccountable reason had felt glad that he was not going.

                              …

He said afterwards that when he heard the rumour of the accident

it seemed like the finger of Providence, and fell on his knees in

thankfulness.

This critique of providence is but one aspect of Leacock’s targeting of Christianity and the humanist culture that it has at once appropriated and shaped. This demolition takes place within a number of sketches revolving around the kindly but irrelevant Dean Drone. Devoid of understanding, absorbed in his readings of Classical poetry, he presides unwittingly over the dissolution of his church and the consignment of its material structures to the control of Josh Smith and the money-grubbing forces he leads. Too lengthy a process to describe here, this melting away of an ice-cream castle can be best conveyed in a brief rhetorical flight evidencing just how uncoupled from reality sacred discourse has become:

Everybody in Mariposa remembers the building of the church. First

of all they had demolished the little stone church to make way for the

newer Evidence. It seemed almost a sacrilege, as the Dean himself said,

to lay hands on it. Indeed it was at first proposed to take the stone of it and build it into a Sunday School, as a lesser testimony. Then,

when that provided impracticable, it was suggested that the stone be

reverently fashioned into a wall that should stand as a token. And when

even that could not be managed, the stone of the little church was

laid reverently into a stone pile; afterwards it was devoutly sold to a

building contractor, and, like so much else in life, was forgotten.

So sardonic a usage of “reverently” makes clear the extinction of any meaning to the term of  “reverence” itself. 

Leacock’s manipulation of the slightly obtuse narrator—the familiar rural clown of classic pastoral—who cannot discern the ironies apparent in the world he narrates, slackens in the final sketch. For there the narrator turns the tables on his audience and launches into a (largely unwarranted) panegyric on Mariposa and the pristine anti-metropolitan past that it represents. However warmly his audience may have responded to this nostalgic gesture, apotheosizing Mariposa limits the force of Leacock’s satire. Such is its force in the preceding chapters however, that Sunshine Sketches remains in the forefront of imaginative assessments of Canadian culture and its discontents.

BRIEF REFLECTION: "TANTRAMAR REVISITED"

Students of English literature from the Romantic period will easily recognize Sir Charles G. D. Roberts’ “Tantramar Revisited” (1883) as a “crisis lyric.” As in Wordsworth’s “Resolution and Independence” and Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight,” the crisis lyric offers a poet’s reflection upon a troubled or questioning moment in his life, concluding in a resolution or at least a temporary relief from the questions that have proven vexing.

That same student will also recognize some other principle at work here, something that distinguishes “Tantramar Revisited” from its notable predecessors and models. It may open in the fashion of Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” with the evocation of a time frame, but it concludes with far more skeptical assertion. This lyric presents a late Romantic viewpoint, one marked by a high degree of self-reflexiveness and emotional complexity. This outlook leads the speaker into a willed rather a spontaneous solution to the crisis driving the poem. While the poem in typical Romantic fashion maps the landscape  according to the poet’s own emotional contours, the view that emerges remains fundamentally disillusioned and provisional, rather than reassuringly definitive.

This brief commentary focuses on two of the poem’s features, its prosody and imagery, as a way of outlining its strengths as a lyric. Reading the poem slowly and aloud impresses you with its reliance upon a dactylic-spondaic phrase-rhythm (SUM mers and SUM mers HAVE COME//SUN shine and THUN der HAVE BEEN). These are the basic prosodic building blocks of the poem. Strung together in lengthy sequences, they compose a rhythm of ample reflection followed by pause, which parallels the development of the poem’s thought.

Examining the imagery discloses how lovingly the speaker focuses upon the distinctive features of the scene he views. Drying nets, tides, dykes, hay, barns, fishing boats: these elements remind us of a realistically-depicted painterly landscape in which the local details cohere into a setting convincing in its perspective as the viewer moves from distant to close-up detailing. The place names (Minudie, Tantramar, Westmoreland) serve also to ground the depiction within the scope of actuality.

But only the careless reader would conclude his examination at this point. Because the most prominent feature of all these details lies in their refusal to maintain the degree of separation that individuated being requires. Instead, the fishing nets hang in the barns like hay; the tide leaves its mark on the pastures. The poem’s very geographic setting—the intermixed marshland—militates against sharpness of definition. This low-density perspective, seen also in the seasonal light and its transformation throughout the lyric, parallels the speaker’s own tentativeness.

If we reduce the poem’s message to a prose statement, we can now understand that the reassurance that the troubled speaker sought to find in the fixity of what is viewed cannot be gained. Only in distance—temporal, spatial, emotional—can relief from psychic turmoil be attained. The “outer” world can present the troubled “inner” with an pattern of order and purpose only at the price of the speaker’s subjection of the outer to his own inner distortion and control. He has to stand back if he is to maintain the admittedly illusive vision of immutability.

Roberts re-orders Canadian space here in a highly sophisticated fashion, subjecting it at once to viewer control and at the same time admitting to the falsity of that conviction of control. The cultural implications of this viewpoint/point-of-view are enormous. The space now denoted by the term “Canada” has been denoted and established through centuries of Western European cultural and technological reshaping of that material. Yet the poem implies that all of this imposition, this overlay laid upon a territorial map, is sustainable only through reliance upon a willed conviction of actuality.

Lewis Carroll wrote of a professor who came up with a map that bore a 1:1 relationship with reality. Its only problem was that the map covered reality. Is Roberts implying to his readers that such a map is inescapable when we attempt to order experience, as does the speaker in this poem?

Seldom has a poet such as Roberts, one viewed as instrumental in promulgating the concept of a national literature, put forward an epistemology whose implications are so subversive to any nationalist ideology. For this reason alone, “Tantramare Revisited” requires a searching visitation from anyone investigating Canadian literature and its implications for a national consciousness.

The text of “Tantramar Revisited” can be found online at http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/1726.html

BRIEF REFLECTION : "WACOUSTA"

Published in 1832 to little acclaim, the creation of an unsuccessful writer who would die twenty years later of malnutrition, John Richardson’s Wacousta; or, The Prophecy; A Tale of the Canadas did not come into its own until the final quarter of the next century. Surviving as a children’s book, savaged by a number of abridgements, this first long fiction to appear from the pen of a native-born Canadian writer continues to interest critics and scholars, who continue to insist on its importance. Why?

Certainly not for its formal virtues. This recounting of the doom of a colonizing military family, trapped within the earthquake of  Native Canadian resistance to European imperial domination, is not a smoothly-finished product. Wacousta’s dialogue is stilted, stagey and verbose, its plot ultimately preposterous, its narrative a lurch between parallel melodramatic streams and episodes. Yet Wacousta, for all its ungainliness remains of significant historical interest. It created a century-long model for the imaginative projection of Canadian space and time, and for the exploitation of that model within the Anglo-American literary marketplace.

As constructed in Wacousta, the Canadian environment—cultural and material—is marked by three major attributes. It is exotic, indeterminate, and Gothic in nature. These attributes most engage the reading public when packaged within the formal medium of the historical novel as conceived by Sir Walter Scott, itself a perennially-popular genre in the literary marketplace.

To explain: locating the adventure narrative within a danger-filled, taxing wilderness environment implicitly defines Canadian space as an other to an increasingly urbanized European reading public living within a tightly controlled space. Canada thus occupies a position within the series of the numerous developing colonialized spaces whose geographic and biological features had come to absorb trans-Atlantic attention. That branding of uniqueness has proven an abiding asset when creating a metropolitan market for local materials.

The indeterminacy of such spaces arises not only from their unmapped or not-fully-mapped nature, but also from the economic systems functioning within such environments. Thus Wacousta reflects an imperial/commercial system in which whites and natives are not housed in discrete locations, but instead thrown together in roles at times adversarial, at times cooperative, in both peace and war. This was the case with the fur trade, the most productive of the enterprises driving the European penetration of the continent’s interior in the mid-Eighteenth century setting of the novel. It was a commercial and military world which John Richardson knew from his family’s occupation, and the trade’s reliance upon the interdependence of native and colonial cultures is reflected obliquely by the novel’s events. For no single racial side in Wacousta can be viewed without at least a glance at the other.

Within such a world of dramatic contrasts, appearances cloak the reality of past betrayals and intrigues, while vast engines of revenge and retribution appear to enmesh innocent and stalwart characters who stand horror-struck in the face of the apparently motiveless wickedness of their adversaries. For the ruined castle of Euro-Gothic, substitute the besieged wilderness stockade; for the corrupt aristocrat, the Satanically vital, fallen eponymous European of the novel. The disaster-strewn staples of Gothic convention determine the lurid, episodic course of this narrative.

Canada’s longest-ruling political leader, William Lyon Mackenzie King, characterized his country as having too much geography and not enough history. Wacousta imaginatively historicizes Canadian space. The 1763 native resistance movement widely (and erroneously) designated as “Pontiac’s Revolt” serves as Wacousta’s  theater of action. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century, dramatic historical events—often those set within the Anglo-French-American imperial struggles for control of what would eventually become Canadian space—serve as the setting for Canadian writers seeking to capture their share of the literary market.

Where are those gripping events that serve as fictional fodder to be found? In combat, personal and military, in the struggle that elicits heroic and exceptional behaviour from ordinary folk trapped within these global struggles. The Seven Years’ War insuring that British institutions would control a vast continent, the American Revolution whose refugees became the primal matter for English-Canadian settlement, the War of 1812 mythicized into a vindication of the onetime losers in the Revolutionary War: these became the staples of Canadian popular history and fiction alike, the building materials for the rise of a national consciousness that would flourish on the eve of the Great War.

However truncated a view of Canadian history this may now strike us as presenting (what happened to Canada’s aboriginal inhabitants?), such a concentration upon war’s alarms marked Canadian imaginative literary production. To put it another way, the popularity  of historical fiction throughout the metropolitan English-speaking world presented Canadian writers with an avenue for the exploitation of their own national material, and John Richardson had been the first to have blazed that trail. Whether subsequent writers deliberately followed Richardson and Wacousta is less important than the fact that his was the discovery that the historical novel could serve as the vehicle for projecting Canadian material into the imagination of a metropolitan readership. This achievement carves out a place for Wacousta in any catalogue of Canadian literary creation.

Note: a complete Wacousta can be found online at GOOGLE books:

 http://books.google.ca/books?id=96BEMRcvh74C&pg=PR46&lpg=PR46&dq=wacousta+text&source=bl&ots=ERAwP54EQ7&sig=Mq76D6mCKpaR9a0iFJKYo26FxKo&hl=en&ei=xrbUSqP2EIXgNcrekZQD&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CAoQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=wacousta%20text&f=false

BRIEF REFLECTION: MARSHALL McLUHAN

Marshall McLuhan (1911-80) did not teach us how to read. He taught us instead how to read ourselves reading. His was the best-known analysis of the consequences of the switch from oral/scribal to written/print to electronic culture in the West. At least two of his seminal writings, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964) gained a readership extending well beyond academic circles. As a kind of media guru, this Toronto professor of English’s image appeared in newspapers and magazines, and even in a Woody Allen movie (Annie Hall 1977) during the Sixties and Seventies. What conferred such popularity upon his often recondite, aphoristic and even enigmatic commentary?

We can best answer this by first examining the contours of the cultural paradigm he employed as the basis for his theories of cultural evolution. Oral cultures are characterized by immediacy and personal involvement in the transmission of information. Epic poetry and proverb alike, and the matter of religious ritual transmit a culture’s weltanschauung to its users over time and space. The culture lives through its bearers’ collective memory.

The scribal presents McLuhan with his next stage of communications development, where the appearance of written record diminishes memory’s centrality among the tiny literate elite. In a scribal culture, such people can—through the establishment of clerisies, secular and religious—exert a control over space and time that is less subject to corruption and mutation than that of the predecessor oral culture. The Platonic dialogues, with their encasement of oral discourse within a written framework represent the highest attainment of scribal culture, as do the Christian Gospels. Both accounts combine the endurance of the written with the immediacy of the oral, producing a mode of discourse marked by concreteness and subtlety within the interplay of the oral and the written.

Print culture—the next stage in McLuhan’s cultural progress/regress—codifies and solidifies information. At the same time, print culture inculcates a greater degree of individuation within its audience, who begin to assemble their own cultural machinery out of the plentitude of enduring printed sources now encompassing their culture. A devout convert to Roman Catholicism, McLuhan viewed the rise of print culture as central to Protestantism, whose habits of mind engendered systems of behaviour valuing  impersonality, objectivity and individualism over hierarchy and collective liturgies of social cohesion. In short, the post-Protestant culture of North America that McLuhan had so brilliantly examined in his first book-length publication, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (1951), a culture with which he maintained an ambivalent and critical relationship, reached its zenith in the print culture into which he had been born.

Yet in his own time—and here begins McLuhan’s elevation to media fame and attention—a new cultural expression was fast acquiring a hegemonic status: the electronic media. McLuhan never lived to witness the full-blown appearance of the internet and the personal inter-connectedness devices so prevalent in our present culture. Yet his investigations of the role played by film, recorded music, radio and television in his time convinced him that an era marked by the immediacy and personalization of orality had restored his culture’s discourse to a condition greatly resembling that of the seemingly vanished oral culture from which ours had long ago originated. McLuhan’s imagination (and his classroom practices) reflected a lifelong engagement with Joyce and the other high Modernists in literature. These writers and artists he viewed as the prophets of the coming electronic totality whose emergence he discerned and at once celebrated and feared.

Practitioners and controllers of the new media welcomed what they viewed as his endorsement of the cultural styles they were in the process of fabricating. His characteristically aphoristic mode of discourse—“The medium is the message”—rendered him all the more endearing, quotable and authoritative in their eyes. It is safe to say that no academic during the twentieth century’s Sixties and Seventies garnered the degree of attention that Marshall McLuhan commanded. In popular understanding down to this day, no other thinker is more closely associated with the attempt to foster a critical self-consciousness about our consumption of media-based imagery and the consequences of that practice to our understanding of experience.