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The Fiction of Mavis Gallant : a Post-Modern Perspective Shri R. G

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The Fiction of Mavis Gallant : a Post-Modern Perspective Shri R. G Synopsis of the proposed Ph.D. thesis entitled The Fiction of Mavis Gallant : A Post-Modern Perspective by : Shri R. G. Chavan Professor, Bharti Vidyapeeth College of Engineering, Near Chitranagari, Kolhapur. Research Guide Dr. P. A. Attar Professor & Head, Department of English, Shivaji University, Kolhapur. Chapter I Introduction 1 I. I. Changing Contours of Canadian Literature Canadian fiction published in the early phase of the 20th century reflected high quality work and the improvement was not only seen in the quality of craftsmanship but also in the increased degree of originality In fiction, late nineteenth Century authors were canonized for their ability to appropriate Canadian materials to the form of the European national historical romance. A Legend of Quebec consolidated the myth that English Canada’s literary identity was to be forged by moulding French Canada’s colourful history and distinctive society to popular forms of English and American fiction. Canadian best-sellers during the last decades of the nineteenth century were facile romances of French Canada, like Gilbert Parker’s Seats of the Mighty (1896), and quaint stories of rural French Canadian life modeled on American local colour fiction. Many of Canada’s strongest First Nations authors are women, among them Ruby Slipperjack, Joan Crate and Lee Maracle, and some of their most compelling writing is autobiographical, such as Maria Campbell’s Halforeed (1973). The work of native writers has recently become available in two important anthologies, viz. All My Relations (1990) edited by the native writer, Thomas King, and An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English (1992), co-edited by Daniel David Moses and Terry Goldie. 2 Concern about the presence of First Nations people in Canadian life and literature had already been raised in Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners (1974), one of the most important Canadian novels of the past twenty years. Ironically, as critics of the 1970s attempted to delineate and delimit uniquely Canadian literary themes and approaches, such as survival (Margaret Atwood’s Survival), a mythic relationship with the land (Northrop Frye’s The Bush garden and D.G. Jone’s Butterfly on Rock) or the bicultural inheritance (Ronald Sutherland’s Second Image), their generalizations were being deconstructed by the authors themselves, who opened Canadian writing to unexpected, problematic narrative and thematic concerns. The easy manoeuvring among traditional and innovative forms of novel, story criticism and poetry now typical of many authors, including Robert Kroetsch (for an example of his work, see What the Crow Said) Michael Ondaaje, Margaret Atwood and George Bowering, indicates an increasing flexibility of genre and narrative stance. New literary ideologies have been accompanied by new social ideologies. In historical fiction, the ironic questioning of Timothy Findley’s The Wars (1977) has replaced the earnest nationalism of earlier authors. Jay Kogawa’s account of the treatment of Japanese Canadians in her award-winning poetic novel, Obasan (1981), swiftly integrated the historical tragedy of one group of Canada’s non-white immigrants into the country’s literary consciousness. 3 During 1950s and sixties the most provocative as well as one of the most brilliant Canadian poets, Layton took as his mission the demolition of the Anglo-Canadian complacency with powerful lyrics celebrating intellectual and physical passion, as in the final stanza of “Whatever Else Poetry is Freedom.” Frances Brooke wrote the first ever Canadian novel, The History of Emily Montague (1769) and established a pattern of defensive writing that continued for more than a century. Her work set the stone rolling for the rich bulk of Canadian function that was to follow. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that she also laid the foundation of the Canadian women’s fiction, which later on was perfected by Margaret Atwood, Margaret Lawrence, Audrey Thomas Mavis Gallant and others. Much Canadian fiction between 1960 and 1973 demonstrated a continuity with the past. It was academic, sometimes arcane, usually middle class in its affirmation and rejection of values, and it was concerned with the psychic isolation that recurs so frequently as a motif in modern literature. The short story was, in the 1960s, possibly under the influence of film, reborn as an exciting art form. Inevitably, as there were over 1,100 stories by over 550 authors published in Canadian periodicals between 1960 and 1973, many were written to formula or with little artistic control. To list the practitioners that reviewers found the most successful is to 4 list the chief prose writers of the period; Atwood, Blaise, Mat Cohen, Elliott, Gallant, Garner, Godfrey, Helwig (for The Streets of summer, 1969), Hood, Laurence, Levine, Lowry, MacEwen, Metcalf, Munro, Newman, Nowlan, Richler, Rule, Smith, Thomas, Wiebe. The work of Mavis Gallant can be seen in this context also, questioning the enclosures caused by marriage and family and providing assertions of independent identity. Beside her struggles to control style and create character, various other books might seem slight. With talents like Godfrey’s and Atwood’s Laurence’s and Butler’s Gallant’s Kroetsch’s and Wiebe’s, Munro’s and Matt Cohen’s, Canadian fiction in 1973 was still developing. But these writers and their contemporaries, during the preceding decade, had already produced some intellectually sharp and stylistically adept short stories and novels. Northrop Frye remarks on “the colossal verbal explosion that has taken place in Canada since 1960”. And indeed, quantitatively, there has been an extraordinary upswing in literary production, fostered by many circumstances, including cheaper printing processes, public subsidies to publishing, and a kind of creative upsurge, in some way connected with the rising up of national pride, without which these mechanical forms of assistance would have been useless. In most areas of writing the growth has been both qualitative and quantitative. A fresh sureness of voice and touch has appeared in poetry, where a surprisingly high proportion of the hundreds of new 5 books – often by new poets – that have appeared each year have been distinctive in both tone and accomplishment. With a new sense of the past as myth as well as fact, the historians and biographers during the past decade and a half have been mapping out all the neglected reaches of the record of Canada as a cluster of regions and peoples rather than as a nation in the older European sense. Drama has moved out of the restricting field of radio, and plays that are both actable on stage and publishable as books have appeared with astonishing frequency over the past decade. Finally, criticism has achieved the kind of maturity and subtlety which is one of the signs of a literature’s coming of age. In fiction alone the situation has been different. There are not more books, but those that are published in the 1970’s are surprisingly better in quality than all except a few novels of past decades, and their variety of approach has increased phenomenally. Some fourteen hundred volumes of fiction were published by Canadians between 1880 and 1920, an average of thirty-five a year. Between 1920 and 1940, according to Desmond Pacey, writing in the same History, the annual average of Canadian works of fiction remained almost exactly the same, with seven hundred books appearing over twenty years. Between 1940 and 1960, according to figures presented by Hugo McPherson, there appears to have been an actual drop in publication figures, since he counts up only 570 works of fiction appearing over two decades, but he did not count 6 books published by Canadians abroad, so that the annual figure can probably be taken as very near to the thirty-five that had prevailed so consistently between 1880 and 1940. Spot checks of two years during this period revealed figures of thirty-five and forty respectively, bringing us curiously close to that average of thirty-five volumes per year which prevailed between 1880 and 1940. Yet despite the fact that no greater numbers of novels are being published by Canadians now than in 1890 or 1930 or 1950 and although far smaller areas on bookstore shelves are now occupied by works of fiction, there is no evidence that in Canada the novel is a dying or even a sickly genre; on the contrary, the novel and the short story both occupy positions of prestige in the 1970s, among both critics and scholars, which no kind of Canadian fiction occupied in earlier decades. The great change which has happened, while the number of books of fiction published in Canada remains so constant over almost a century, is that the quality of craftsmanship has improved and the degree of original creation has increased steadily, decade by decade, since the 1920s. As Northrop Frye remarked of the period between 1880 and 1920, “not all the fiction is romance, but nearly all of it is formula-writing.” Of Canadian fiction in the 1970s, it can be said that, while romance in a somewhat different form does indeed exist, only a small proportion of the books that is published can be regarded as formula writing, which survives 7 mainly in the curious subculture represented by nurse romances, inferior crime novels, and soft porn. Realism as ordinarily defined (in terms of either Godwin’s “Things as they are” or Zola’s naturalism or the Marxists’ social realism) had not played a very significant role in Canadian fiction. Where an important novelist such as Frederick Philip Grove or Morley Callaghan or Hugh Mac Lennan or Mordecai Richler – has used techniques generally regarded as “realist, “ the realism has almost always turned out to be one of the secondary elements in what is primarily a moral drama (Grove), a homiletic parable (Callaghan), an imaginative gloss on history (MacLennan), or a satire (Richler) which uses fantasy as much as realism to gain its ends.
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