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.
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