RADICAL PRIVACY

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE MODERN CANADIAN SHORT STORY

By

LARRY FROLICK

Integrated Studies Project

submitted to Dr. Raphael Foshay

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts – Integrated Studies

Athabasca, Alberta

October, 2012

Table of Contents

Abstract………………………………………………………………… 3

Introduction…………………………………………………………….. 4

1. Condition Replaces Identity: Harvor, Munro, Valgardson………….. 7

2. No as Fashion: Gallant, Spencer, Garner…………………………….. 11

3. No as Politics: Atwood, Laurence, Moore…………………………… 15

4. What Happens After: Lowry, Levine, Kreiner……………………….. 17

5. Conclusion: The Critical Response…………………………………... 22

After Notes………………………………………………………………. 28

Bibliography…………………………………………………………….. 30

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ABSTRACT

The Modern short story is commonly regarded as the highest literary achievement of Canada’s postwar generation. Its central theme of liberation in refusal distinguishes it from European and American antecedents. The classic example pits a protagonist against the demands and temptations of domestic society in a quest for radical privacy — setting the writer against writing itself. But what happens after? The immediacy and transparency of the genre has recently found favour with a new generation of 21st Century writers, whose explorations of today’s Impossible World continue to demonstrate a hard-won formal mastery.

Authors discussed: Margaret Atwood, Mikhail Bakhtin, Paul Carlucci, Mavis Gallant, Hugh Garner, Wayne Grady, Elizabeth Harvor, Ernest Hemingway, Dean Irvine, Philip Kreiner, Margaret Laurence, Norman Levine, Malcolm Lowry, Brian Moore, Alice Munro, Viktor Shklovsky, Elizabeth Spencer, and W. D. Valgardson.

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Introduction

Fifty years ago the short story blossomed into this country’s dominant artistic form, easily outshining theatre, painting and architecture. Evidence for its sudden elevation are not hard to find. The genre was already a successful export item before 1960. Mavis

Gallant’s one hundred published stories in The New Yorker began with “Madeline’s

Birthday” in 1951, while Norman Levine’s work made the leap from obscure British literary journals to Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, with his first story collection, One Way

Ticket, published in London in 1961. Hugh Garner’s Best Stories, which won the 1963

Governor-General’s Award, alerted the reading public to a gathering storm of resident writers who now pushed the form to its radical limits. Their newly confident stories all began with a decisive no — no to family, no to community, and no to the compromises our traditional history upheld as worthy of emulation and adoption. The social protest of earlier literary works turned inward, and searched for a self-celebration independent of class, power, and locality.

The best of these stories transcend the local completely, and reach for a cool detachment epitomized by the word modern, taking us beyond the brushstrokes of literary technique and narrative detail, and deep into those heightened perspectives of reality that 5 exist only in art. Applying it to art generally, Russian Formalist critics of the early 20th

Century call this strategy defamiliarization.1 It is harder to achieve in literature than in painting, because it requires a freely complicit audience or it does not happen at all.

Following Magritte, a painting by Warhol confronts and confounds the peripatetic viewer with a claim that the soup can is only a soup can, refuting the familiar. Short stories (and, by extension, readers) cannot deny themselves so easily. The trick is to do it in five thousand words, to do it using the commonplace universals of our ephemeral experiences in mass society, to get it published by a shrinking list of periodicals as television relentlessly takes over audiences, and to make it worthwhile enough for increasingly distracted readers to commit their scant leisure time to the connoisseurship of an eminently private literary form.

As these stories reveal, the post-war era in Canada was shockingly different from the interwar decades that preceded it. Speedier and emotionally jarring. The gloomy

Depression notwithstanding, the 1930’s were the last decade of languid social time, an element we encounter as an absolute force of nature in the works of Somerset Maugham,

Frederick Grove, Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. In 1931 the weekend edition of the Toronto Star arrived at the door as a fat addendum to 200,000 paid weekly subscribers (an astounding readership, given a country of 10 million with one-third jobless),2 and it featured dozens of serialized adventure stories and exotic illustrated articles that might take readers a week to finish. Mayfair Magazine, published by

Maclean-Hunter in Toronto, recounted the monthly triumphs of Canada’s surprisingly large leisure class at polo, European travel, and socially appropriate marriages throughout 6 the 1930’s. Everyone had time for dancing on Saturday and reading about it on Monday.

After the War, nobody did.3

The appeal of Modern Canadian stories lies precisely in their compressed energy and formal qualities of accelerated feeling — a ringing kaleidoscope of mixed emotions that were not this and not that, but something insistently different. The razzle-dazzle of an accelerating age soon found its voice, as nervous energy replaced muscle power, and tense inner dialogues amusing dinner conversation. The dilemma faced by the student of this movement is whether to invent a critical language appropriate to describe these new literary sensations and outcomes, or redefine overused terms like “Modern.” We will examine this question more fully, but clearly the Canadian writers under review thought of themselves as “Modern” in a distinctly novel way. One only has to watch archival film footage showing the clipped performance swagger of writers at Toronto’s Bohemian

Embassy in the 1950’s, (including a young Margaret Atwood), to understand that their stark, post-war postures of bantering, irony, and free association were all part of a brave collective experiment at streamlined urbanity. If these writers were not seeing psychiatrists themselves, or using pot or prescribed mood-drugs, or living in ranch houses with large picture windows and Scandinavian furniture, or going on transcontinental road trips in an air-conditioned Comet or Strato Chief, they certainly understood the implications of these things: The past was an postulation, and everything was open to improvement.

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1. Condition Replaces Identity: Harvor, Munro, Valgardson

Three stories by Alice Munro, Elizabeth Harvor and W.D. Valgardson 4 show this electric dazzle at play, and raise questions about the broader social significance of this literary movement as a radicalizing force. Elizabeth Harvor had “Heart Trouble” published in

The New Yorker in 1979. The heroine Maria has a complex, undiagnosed medical problem; and she seeks a cure, taking us breathlessly through the subterranean world of

New Age practitioners, faded denim monks whose scientific tests and clinical offices do not disguise the essentially primitive nature of all holistic treatment, the laying on of hands and the awkward faith of the resisting, newly secularized patient. Maria ends her pilgrimage stripped of illusions, standing naked like a camp prisoner before her ultimate interrogator:

‘That’s right. Cry,’ he says. ‘But I cry easily. Always have.’ ‘But do you cry right? Do you cry with your body? Or are you just crying up in your head?’ ‘I cry as quietly as I can, usually.’

This doctor tells Maria she must be tired of being so good all the time, and, as if accepting a wedding vow, Maria ends her story in sacrificial acquiescence: “I do.” Her intimate self is exposed to the overwhelming diagnostic power of a new Gothic Age, to its specialized techniques and mystifying orders of causality; and she accepts the mirrored gaze of its long, unmarked institutional corridors as her condition. Her private fears of cancer express a nameless guilt at not measuring up, at being marked defective by the glossy eugenic standards of a heartless clinical culture. Diagnosis has replaced identity as technique has replaced history. 8

Are these authors responding to each other’s work? Alice Munro’s “Thanks for the Ride” was published in the Tamarack Review twenty years earlier (1957). It is narrated by an aloof and college-bound teenage boy who is pressured by his crude cousin into picking up two small town young women — “pigs” the cousin calls them in the vernacular of that era — for a drinking party in the bush. The hero emerges from his privileged stupor when the girl, Lois, goes home to change her clothes before their debased “date.” He is obliged to meet her smarmy mother, a harridan who artlessly probes him about his prospects, as if he were a proper suitor, not a stranger who cares less if he gets lucky that night:

‘Do your folks have a summer cottage up here?’ I said no, and Lois came in, wearing a dress of yellow-green stuff — stiff and shiny like Christmas wrappings—high-heeled shoes, rhinestones, and a lot of dark powder over her freckles. Her mother was excited.

Despite her frippery, however, Lois is also flat, unexcited. Lois could care less, too; at least this is what Munro fools us into believing. Then the author hits us with her firebomb: the boy returns from their passionate love-making in a derelict barn, aglow.

Lois turns out to be a “mystic of love,” someone who goes “very far with the act of love,” who surrenders herself completely. The pair must return to the real world in a few minutes, brooding to the end of their trip — he, anxious at his coming loss, and she, bitter; both knowing nothing else is possible, knowing the futility of it. It is a knockout story; its power derives from ancient agricultural myth. Lois is what the Greeks called the

Kore, a fertility maiden, in a world that does not heed the sexual power of virgins anymore.5 It is quietly abandoning the old seasonal cycles of sowing and harvest festivals.

The new woman at the centre of technical society is the specimen. Lois resists speculation, analysis, proudly immune at her core. The gormless narrator knows he 9 cannot have her because he belongs to it, the new order, and is compromised by society’s calculated indifference to the mystery of life.

She is Eurydice; he is the rest of us, any number of failed quest Heroes; their story is a descent into Hell in southwestern Ontario.

With W.D. Valgardson’s story, “A Matter of Balance,” (1982) we arrive at the thematic edge of the classic Canadian Modern story. At first reading it seems a conventional action story, a plot-twist in the vein of “The Most Dangerous Game”

(1924). A lone day-climber in British Columbia spots a pair of outlaw bikers following him on a remote trail; if he fails to outwit them they will rob and likely kill him.

Equipped with technical shoes and a climbing rope, he makes a dangerous manoeuvre on a sheer rock face, whereupon the inexperienced bikers charge him, only to realize their dreadful miscalculation. The three are stuck on the rock for a long minute. Then the hero uses his rope to pull himself back up, and leaves his attackers desperately clinging for their lives to tiny handholds below him. The image recalls Christ and the Two Thieves, underscored by one biker begging him for aid while the other threatens gang retribution:

‘You bastard,’ the blond man screamed. Get us out of here. If you don’t, our friends will come. They’ll get us out. Then we’ll start looking for you. There’s thousands of us. We’ll find you.’

The hero carefully weighs his options and concludes he must leave them to their fate, knowing they will soon weaken and conveniently fall to their deaths without further effort on his part. “No,” is all he says to them, then walks back “the way he had come.”

This final no marks the end of a certain type of writing in this country; with it, technique reverses history. This hero refuses his own sacrifice, finding his moral compass in the calculations of the technically astute. It’s the last line of the doomed blond biker 10 that leaps from the story: There’s thousands of us. Valgardson is not talking about outlaw bikers here; it is a whole generation that now rejects gallantry for expedience and character for self-justification. The biker’s line is chilling because the doomed outlaws innocently still expect this educated dude to be better than them; but he isn’t. The technical climber is one of those same vengeful, amoral thousands himself. The wilderness has nothing to do with rocks or moral heights; the Bush is now internal.

The author’s theme of a morally flat universe extends to fiction itself. In rejecting the special martyrdom of the spiritually superior, Valgardson’s character leads us directly out of literature’s high province of the sacred. Munro and Harvor make it easy for readers to uphold their stories as moral standards because they confirm fiction’s traditional role as a mediator of hierarchies of consciousness. Much as we might like to meet a pure Lois or Maria in real life, however, they can only exist on the unattainably far shore of our literary consciousness. Conversely, we have all met people who foolishly demand that life follow books and that people stay true to character; but Valgardson shows us a new type of invasive anti-character, first seen in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862), those nihilists who take revenge on their own despised dreams of happiness. Like the rock climber, Turgenev’s foil, the love-interest Anna Odintsova, coldly rejects the romantic role assigned by the conventions of her plot. Her would-be lover dies while she handily survives — as real people so often do — alone in epicurean consolation. They are both, the unpunished Canadian technical climber and the remorseless Russian social climber, story-killers.

We will see how this anti-character ends the Modern Canadian tradition for good in the early 1980’s with Philip Kreiner’s provocative work. But for three decades this 11 genre took pride in its unyielding stance against the easy way out, beginning with the work of Mavis Gallant and Elizabeth Spencer.

2. No as Fashion: Gallant, Spencer, Garner

Mavis Gallant left Montreal for Paris in 1950; Elizabeth Spencer left the American South for Montreal in 1963. Two queens cannot occupy the same chess square. However, the two married couples of Gallant’s “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street” (1963) and

Spencer’s “I, Maureen” (circa 1979) do occupy the same square; they are back home but different.

Gallant’s marrieds, Peter and Sheilah Frazier, are upper-class peacocks returned to Toronto after an unsuccessful quest abroad to parlay a small inheritance into a comfortable foreign sinecure with staff. Post-war colonialists, they are play-acting their way through the rapidly metastasizing cultural life of the 1960’s — but completely, with that same astonishing excess of style that we might imagine Canadian actors must do, playing British fops in drawing room comedies at the Shaw Festival, then pursuing equally frivolous and accident-prone lives offstage. The Fraziers excel at being silly fulltime, as their “wren-like” children, little soldiers armed with curiously “nasal and flat”

Canadian accents, pointedly recognize.

Reversing the usual theme of abandonment, it is the haplessly innocent parents who have been rendered homeless. Their kids are just fine, secure in this new domestic order. All their parents have to show for their fading dreams of cosmopolitan ease is

Sheilah’s Balenciaga dress, the touchstone of their lonely desire for a stylish escape. But something stands in the way of their redemption, and Peter dares not mention her name aloud. Agnes Brusens, a young woman from the cold Canadian prairies, a spectre of their 12 imminent future — practical, efficient, technically trained — easily outmatches Peter’s raffish gamesmanship in Europe with her sheer tenacity, her rock-bottom will-to-survive.

Agnes crushes his dream of a life based on acting the part:

He is there. He has taken the morning that belongs to Agnes, he is up before the others and he knows everything. There is nothing he doesn’t know. He could keep the morning, if he wanted to, but what can Peter do with the start of a summer day? Sheilah is here, it is a true Sunday morning, with its dimness and headache and remorse and regrets, and this is life. He says, ‘We have the Balenciaga,’ He touches Sheilah’s hand.

Peter lets Agnes have this tragic new morning all to herself: he doesn’t want it anyhow.

Gallant’s story is prescient because couture and the giddy high life did disappear forever.

People in upscale Toronto and Montreal in the 1960’s fell like the Fraziers, more flamboyant than their shaky styles would sustain; and, judging from the success of the television series Mad Men, people would love to live that way again, drinking martinis at lunch and still wearing little dresses late on a Sunday morning, if only they were not forced to be productive at “something or other” like the diligent termagant, Agnes.

Do Canadian writers read each other’s work, and steal ideas the way fashion designers and interior decorators appropriate their rivals’ hot looks? Written a decade later in the 1970’s, Elizabeth Spencer’s “I, Maureen” gives us another upper-class couple in Montreal, and breaks them apart to examine their inner workings.

Spencer’s heroine Maureen Partham is a plain girl from an ordinary working family; her upper-class Westmount husband Denis unaccountably falls madly in love with her. One ordinary day the neighbour’s kids are throwing bottles, testing their own boundaries, and one of the glittering missiles succeeds in breaking Maureen’s perceptual boundary completely, and knocks her from her orbit. She leaves Denis, preferring a lowly 13 shop assistant’s job she might have got in the first place, if none of this fancy-pants daydream had happened. Her illumination resonates with the turning point of L’Etranger by Albert Camus, (1942) where the hero is overcome by the brilliant sunlight on the beach before spontaneously shooting the Arab. (Spencer has acknowledged the influence of Camus on her work in interviews.6 It is apparent that Maureen has summoned the brilliant piercing light into her core. Her illumination was willed into being. The heroine takes Accident as Sign.

The difference between Modern Canadian stories and the Continental

Bildungsroman is to be found in the unsteady rapture with which our unsung heroes greet their hard-bargained, empyrean deliverances. They get drunk on their toasts to the epiphanic no. Having given up everything to reclaim themselves, the characters become blinking ciphers, signalling the obverse landscape of the winter mind, as Maureen’s psychiatrist confirms:

“You chose the other side of the coin, the other side of yourself…. All you want is to be with it, calmly, like a lover.’

I was crying before I knew it, tears of relief. …The truth is always dangerous, so in agreeing to what I felt, he was letting me in for danger. But it was all that was left to try.

Hugh Garner’s 1976 story “The Legs of the Lame” follows the last working day of an itinerant faith healer from the Maritimes, who, like so many Canadian musical “acts” of the era, suddenly decides to pack it in for good on the eve of public success. While his character, Clay Burridge, is incorruptible, this evangelist God-business is not:

I thought of Clay Burridge driving east on the 401 freeway in his Cadillac, wearing his cowboy get-up, on his way back to Bridgewater, Nova Scotia, and oblivion. A young man who’d had a million dollars in his grasp and had thrown it away.

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Fashion is not a word that tops the list of critical theories, but Garner’s attention to

Burridge’s stylish wardrobe suggests that his hero has decided to dress himself in the same cool no as these other fictional characters. Wayne Grady, editor of the Penguin collections from which these stories are taken, repeatedly uses the standard terms of alienation in his introduction, phrases like “self-imposed exile,” (266-2, 462-2),

“perpetual refugee,” “lack of identity, absence of place,” (528-2), “homeless” (412-2), and ‘fear of being displaced” (420-1). Grady notes, too, the premature deaths of writers

Raymond Knister, Malcolm Lowry, Hubert Acquin — and Frederick Philip Grove, who died twice, faking it the first time by leaving a false suicide note for his young widow to find. Faking death in the search for a new self is as radical as it gets, but it is not something Hemingway would have done.

Without exception Canadian Modern characters like Garner’s Clay Burridge handily survive their condition because they embrace radical privacy as a defence to society’s main drives. It was easy for our less scrupulous national commentators to wring, from the surface notes of these rhapsodies of inner escape, a false confession of

Canadian literature’s passive acquiescence, if not despair, at its characters’ failure to make it big in the public parade. All the media shills need to do is cut and paste a few choice phrases from Grady’s careful introductions to create that classic shibboleth of anti- libertarian propaganda, the voiceless Canadian stumblebum, the would-be artist who never quite gets it and dies broke, curled up on the kitchen floor, watched for signs of life by a hungry cat named Trotsky (or Cassandra). They conflate getting it with making it, ignoring a key distinction. An example of this patronizing attitude prevalent among our establishment media can be found in a review by Toronto Star critic Nathan Cohen, who 15 contemptuously dismissed the premiere of The Ecstasy of Rita Joe as “a non-production of a non-play,” one of the few Canadian plays to become a permanent fixture of our national repertoire in the forty years since.7 Cohen ignored or rejected the play’s central insight: that shabby personal circumstances do not preclude catharsis in life or in art.

While the conventional alienated Canadian loser is a feature of such patronizing reviews and Government-financed film productions, she does not exist in our Modern stories, nor has she ever existed in them. If anyone is depicted as a loser in our literature, it is the privileged rich, dead to life’s possibilities for inspired self-transformation. Garner, master of the gritty Yonge Street scene, almost certainly had Don Shebib’s maudlin road film,

Goin’ Down the Road, (1970) in his crosshairs when he dashed off “The Legs of the

Lame” in 1974. Garner’s alternative Maritimer is hip, competent; he instinctively knows too much about the temptations of the corporate world and its machinations and turns his back on Big Smoke, a Paul knocked from his Cadillac by a new religion called personal truth. The political dimensions of this revelatory fiction will be explored next.

3. No as Politics: Atwood, Laurence, Moore

The two Margarets, Atwood and Laurence, are the most overtly political of the dozen storywriters under review. In Atwood’s “The Man from Mars” another plain young woman attracts a suitor, but now she is the privileged one and he the pathetic outsider — such an odd outsider she thinks him a child at first, a midget with bulging eyes. The weirdo’s obsession with her is the only interesting thing about her life. Christine does not have to study hard at University, nor do anything at all. She knows Papa will fix her up with a cushy government job when she graduates. Atwood went to Victoria College in the late 1950’s and she must have known many women like Christine, who were still 16 around in the 1970’s, in their Kitten sweaters and Glen Tartan skorts, hemmed to the requisite one inch below the knee by their “little dressmakers,” and looking blandly over at the wan boys in law school next door.

Her story takes a radical turn after Christine realizes the little man’s fixed attention is that of entomologist: she is one of his widening collection of female specimens. Deported from Canada for “collecting” a senior nun in Montreal, the little man disappears into the front pages of 1960’s history:

As the years were used up and the war began to fill the newspapers and magazines, she realized which eastern country he had actually been from. …Obsessively she bought the magazines and poured over the available photographs, dead villagers, soldiers on the march, colour blowups of frightened or angry faces, spies being executed… once or twice she thought she could recognize him but it was no use, they all looked like him.

What we expected from this story was a chrysalis heroine, someone who would burst into a dewy creature with translucent wings; what we get is an artefact of mass culture, a spectator who confuses her breeze of media images for real life. Christine is not a person but a type; Atwood uses her to warn that if we fail to say no, loud and hard, we risk being buried alive by Canada’s technical society into a dry carapace of our denied selves.

Similarly, in “A Gourdful of Glory,” (1963), Margaret Laurence exposes the threatening dead mask of the white colonial class, still clinging on in Ghana during that country’s liberation, by taking the perspective of a local stallholder in the market who fends off the blandishments of an expatriate lady customer:

Mammii Ama snatched back the calabash, at the same time thrusting the coins into the woman’s hand. ‘You no go buy from Mammii Ama! You go somewhere. You no come heah. I no need for you money.’ She felt a terrible pang as she realized what had happened. She had parted with twelve shillings. She must be going mad. But she would not turn back now. She 17

took another belligerent step, and the yellow menacing skull retreated a little more.

Unlike Mammii Ama, however, Atwood’s character Christine cannot muster the courage to say no to tainted coin. The word for this failure in the 1960’s phraseology is co-opt, from the Latin cooptare, “to choose as a member of one’s tribe,” so, to neutralize political opposition. It is not a word in general use today. The world of the Canadian

Modern story was purer. Unshakeable to the end, characters like Burridge and Maureen

Partham refuse to be co-opted. And no target was off limits.

In Brian Moore’s hysterically funny story, “Uncle T,” published in 1960, a new husband defiantly says no to his wife after she makes it plain she wants him to reject his dream of moving to New York from Canada and take a job with his impossibly shady uncle in the lowest rung of the publishing business, the vanity press. As usual, Moore works like a party magician, using a series of exploding balloons, each scene bigger and more improbable than the last, leaving us gasping for air — and reminding us that of all the political institutions in this country, it is conventional marriage that most threatens our expanding souls by robbing us of our sense of fun.

4. What Happens After: Lowry, Levine, Kreiner

Malcolm Lowry and Norman Levine are the big guns of Canadian Modernism. They are very different writers but they are both writers’ writers. Lowry’s “The Forest Path in the

Spring” (1961) accomplishes its task of losing the reader inside its rhythms and moods as symphonic music does, by putting us into a deep state. Allusions to the hero’s vocation as a former jazz musician and composer are underscored by repetitive references to the overpowering North Pacific surf that threatens the couple’s tiny cabin on a remote British

Colombia beach. Lowry wrote the story to a few pieces of music, possibly jazz, but, 18 judging from the story’s cadences and discordant interludes, more Berg than Bach. Its elemental drama derives from the pseudo-documentary style of the film Man of Arran

(1934), now set in coastal Canada; and, as with Archibald Belaney, who took the guise of

Grey Owl, Lowry’s protagonists are educated Englishmen supremely aware of their rustic pantomime, deposing raw life into high art under the authority of a self-conscious Nature.

Lowry’s beachcombers contend with an imminent sky from season to season, fetching water in leaky buckets and enduring the primal world as given. Otherwise nothing much happens in this story of 30,000 words. The history of civilization is recounted from Adam and Eve to World War II. The dilemma of the individual and society is reconciled in the contrast between a life-giving freshwater brook and the pounding grey ocean. And a young marriage survives its transmutation into the ideals of pure fiction:

If we had progressed, I thought, it was as if to a region where such words as spring, water, houses, trees, vines, laurels, mountains, wolves, bay, roses, beach, islands, forests, tides and deer and snow and fire had realized their true being, or had their source: and as these words on a page once stood merely to what they symbolized, so did the reality we knew now stand to something else beyond that symbolized or reflected: it was as if we were clothed in a kind of reality which before we saw only at a distance…

The attentive reader will note the double colon; the sentence itself runs another five lines.

Lowry is marking the changes in heightened consciousness he and his wife realize after they turn their backs on conventional society. Once the no is said conclusively, the drama becomes wholly internalized. Even an account of a near-attack by a hungry cougar is an occasion for wonder, enlarged perception, not panic.

Like Lowry, Norman Levine was not long living in Canada; but he went the other way, choosing an English beach, St. Ives in Cornwall, for his first domicile as an 19 expatriate writer. While on the surface it appears to be written in the plainest and most undecorated prose of all his contemporaries, the astonishing dexterity of Levine’s work continues to elude critical analysis. In stories like “Because of the War,” (circa 1982) his realism derives from external polish, the accumulation of bright energies accruing to discrete things that fix an off-kilter environment, a technique where words become near invisible, and avoid calling attention to themselves:

I like Canadian winters. But after two weeks in Toronto I didn’t want to go out. I would only leave this room to walk to the corner store and buy two packs of cigarillos. And mail my letters. Then I would go to Ziggy’s supermarket. The neat piles of fruit and vegetables, such lovely colours, And in sizes I wasn’t used to. The cheeses from all over. The different bread, bagel, salami, hot dogs — what abundance…. I like a foreign city. But there was something here that made me uneasy every time I went out.

Levine does not need wildcats or wind-swept passion to tell a good story: the mundane and a few extra periods will do just fine. How does he do it? Levine’s story shows him working hard against his own writing, stripping it down, stripping it clean while he writes: “I like Canadian winters” becomes “I like a foreign city.” Toronto becomes foreign to this expatriate, untranslatable, decorative, flat with substituted life — like those films where the hero wakes to find his cheery wife strangely ajar, and oppressed by the feeling her refrigerator holds a sinister surprise. What does this unreality want with him?

The narrator is already an inner exile.

In Levine’s work we see how Modernity’s glossy innocence gives rise to fantasies of revolt, slaughter and flight. Forget the Loises, Marias and Maureens, we have been

Good long enough. Now an entire city pursues its own frantic consumption, for Toronto never said no to anything with cash. The narrator takes off from it as fast as he can. He jumps into a cab on Yonge Street and just goes. And he does not take us with him. 20

Levine’s famously cold exile in Britain is his oeuvre’s coda: he has said no to us, rejecting the fine array of imported meats and winter vegetables, the hallmarks of our urban grace.

Apart from the fact that Philip Kreiner (b. 1950) had his 1983 collection, People

Like Us in a Place Like This, short-listed for the Governor-General’s Award, his work received scant critical attention, perhaps because when it appeared in the early 1980’s the work announced the end of the Modern Canadian story and everything it represented. The title piece, “People Like Us in a Place Like This,” accomplishes this task with shocking dexterity.

Set in Little Whale River on Hudson Bay (probably the real Whale Cove in

Nunavut) the story takes us to the edge of Modernity’s technical power, and beyond it.

The white people in this Subarctic community, teachers and nurses and an anthropologist, are not doing well. One has obsessively installed large spotlights and humidifiers in his unit to create a mechanical life-support system; the others get drunk nightly and hurl slurred accusations at each other. The problem is the 1980’s: they have no place left to go. The Native people despise them. Rolfing and colonic irrigations have failed to cure them. The hippy thing did not work out. They frighten each other. And worse, they frighten themselves.

The anthropologist narrator explains these harsh facts, but his confessional is directed not to the reader but to an unseen, unheard, and very basic God:

I call these people “end-of-the-line-people.” Maybe I’m an end-of-the-line person myself. That’s why I understand these places so well. …I’m looking for the place where there is no end to the end. So far I’ve always been disappointed by what I’ve found. They always repeat themselves. Little Whale River, Tikal, Timbuktoo. They’re all the same to me.

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I’m not talking about anthropology anymore. I’m talking about staying alive.

The narrator discloses that he wants to see a historical site up the coast where fur traders were killed by local people. Now Kreiner pushes his story completely out of the

Modernist mode. The Native guides Willy and Josie grudgingly accept the narrator’s presence in their canoes, and head out — only to take him straight back into the night scene of the old massacre. Suddenly the narrator is their captive, and is chased across the wild beach by a strange white man charged with the dirty work of killing him, because the Indians refuse to sully their hands with his despised alien blood. If this was only a bad dream caused by bush-fever, his companions act otherwise, giving him knowing looks of taut menace over the morning campfire.

Willy has the last words in the story:

“Don’t tell lies about us,” pauses, and then says, “Too bad you don’t understand.”

What Kreiner does here is allow the story’s end to be told without the narrator, and lets a minor character flaunt that fact at the reader. The narrator was indeed killed off in the middle of his story, just as he feared would happen. Now it goes on without him: Don’t tell lies about us. The minor characters have said no to their narrator, denied his authority, and ended his existence. It is an astonishing display of post-modern gamesmanship; and with it, the story of the Modern Canadian short story also comes to an end.8 In the end the Canadian short story became a warning label, affixed to a bottle of private experiences and perceptions, protecting its contents from public misuse.

* * *

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5. Conclusion: The Critical Response

How are we to understand the fate of the Modern short story in post-war Canada? As an organic process of material culture, the outcome of economic and sociological factors when a newly empowered middle-class had its moment in the sun? It is tempting, especially when its history so neatly follows the fortunes of the post war economic expansion.

In “Spectres of Modernism,” an essay published in Canadian Literature in 2011, critic Dean Irvine grapples with the wider cultural implications of the demise of

Modernism itself. Modernism, as he argues, shares with rejected Marxism “coincident histories,” and a renewed existence as “spectres of mourning.” 9 Irvine longs for the literary genre’s resurrection in critical Recognition, reminding us (i.e., exhorting us to act the claque) that “any expectation of international recognition of Canadian modernism needs to correspond with a renewed and sustained interest in modernist studies in

Canada.” 10

The failure of Marxism as an organized political agenda is historical, of course, and rooted in specific events which Marxists themselves signally failed to acknowledge, let alone overcome. 11 But Literary Modernism — which this writer dates to the Great

War’s finale with Richard Aldington’s Modernist circle in Britain and its interest in the strict economy of the Japanese haiku; in Italy with Filippo Marinetti’s Futurists and their theories of animatism and the cult of hygienic violence; and in Russia with Viktor

Shklovsky and the promotion of an autonomous Formalism in defiance of all sociological speculation — has its own genealogy. The international drive behind these local cultural forces spontaneously reseeded itself in American readership through the vanguard of 23

Hemingway and Fitzgerald and conclusively reached our Dominion soon after World

War II. 12

Modernism is not a form; it is an effect. It aims first and foremost at arresting our minds, at removing us to a state of inner suspension. Like State propaganda,

Modernism’s nihilistic power serves the needs of a society whose accumulating cultural capital formation threatens mass consumption, and public tastes must be outmoded efficiently and routinely. The chicken-or-egg question of whether Modernism was promoted by modernist art or was merely appropriated by it is, of course, an unanswerable conundrum; but this writer tends to agree with McLuhan that the motor car and the electric street light brought us to Picasso, not the other way around.

Some years ago this writer was privileged to visit an Edwardian house owned by three elderly sisters, the furnishings of which had been left wholly intact since the Great

War. The dark brown wallpaper, the brass and tin Britannica decorations, the imperial ticking of the mahogany grandfather clock, the bound sermons by forgotten churchmen and gold-leafed volumes of Wordsworth and Kipling — none of these items on their own conveyed the sheer power and cumulative effect of the entire mass. Edwardians accumulated such exhorting objects, and added them to their store of knowledge. The

Great War ended a world of sovereign things; the radical step taken by Eliot and Co. was to label this culture detritus. Darwin provided the theory that undermined this civilization in 1859; Wilfred Owen provided its eulogy in 1918, leaving his readers “to be content with what we spoiled” in his poem “Strange Meeting” (1918). Modernism is the child of atrocity, and requires forgetting above all else. 24

From this perspective, it can be said Modernism took seed in Canada in the

1950’s and 1960’s through the short story, and through interior-decorating and couture as well, as these stories confirm. These three art-forms, the short story, New Look couture, and Nordic design lent themselves to appropriation by the Modernist impulse because they fed its appetite for characterless narratives. It is the rejection of a given character that is central to their common theme of self-liberation, and it is a new theme for world literature. The driver of this jittery impulse is evolutionary theory, which not only says we evolved in the past, but insists we must continue to evolve if we are to survive. The proof of this theory lies in the Great War, with Europe in ruins and 20 million dead in the aftermath epidemic. To cling to our so-called historical roots is to risk extinction; and our collective jitteriness predates the highly-convincing atomic bomb by a full generation, as is evidenced in the works of Fitzgerald, Dreiser and especially Henry Miller, whose characters are left to confront Western society’s grand failure alone, and unappreciated.

Parallel to the ascent of self-identification in the Modernist movement is a growing critical awareness of the priem, a tactic or device, which, according to Jakobson and Russian Formalism,13 is so utterly embedded within the core matrices of the art- discipline that it enjoys its own independent existence, beyond form or content. In this view defamiliarization is a priem, a concretized device unique to art. The life of the object emerges, as Mikhail Bakhtin says, from our deepening awareness of the frames of landscape and cultural settings: “The real movement shifts to the background.”14 Bakhtin discovers in close readings of Goethe (1749 -1832) and Pushkin (1799-1837) that the world of the Enlightenment was suddenly transformed as form came alive; and that this heightened consciousness of the frame’s autonomy first appeared in such literary works. 25

Hemingway’s celebrated Modernist masterpiece “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”

(1926) is entirely constructed around a tableau of ritual defamilarization: the characters at the Spanish zinc café become strangers to themselves, happily unable to see their failures in the nightly triumph of its surface sheen: their universal fate is divided among the many. Never mind that these shimmering rites of alcoholic divestiture allow the room to come alive for the drinkers surviving them — to what extent was Margaret Atwood and her peers under the similar influence of those illuminated furniture showrooms in Eaton’s

College, or the eerie immanence of the domestic Period Rooms at the Royal Ontario

Museum? What post war Canadian writer was not influenced by them? The peripatetic flaneur is not a product of French culture, but of urban culture; and, as these Modern stories confirm, the spectre we seek is the anonymous shopper, adrift in the City’s streets.

Thirty years after Philip Kreiner’s coup de grace of the Modernist story in 1983, the genre is alive again, resurrected by a new generation of writers despite competition from blogs and social media dispatches. Paul Carlucci (b. 1981) grew up in Deep River,

Ontario. His collection of short stories is being published by Oberon, the same house that published Kreiner thirty years ago. “Over the Road” (2012) 15 is a love-triangle that takes us back to Kreiner’s rude Subarctic margins — but today, if there is an inside, a centre,

Carlucci’s characters will never find it.

Carlucci’s hero Jamie is a restrained white youth who wants to escape his dying hometown of Goose Bay, Labrador. (The author worked as newspaper reporter in

Labrador.) Jamie’s rival Sean is a Métis in flight from his reserve; he must escape the

Goose if he is to survive a bad end. Terri-Lynn, the part-time teenage prostitute and would-be enchantress, dreams a dream of escape for the two rivals while high on bad 26 coke. The action revolves around an abandoned film theatre, where Terri-Lynn seduces

Jamie over tattered bits of King Kong footage she illuminates in the ruined projection booth with her Zippo lighter. The American Era is over; the Cold War troops who kept the town going in the 1960’s are long gone. All that remains are the fragile echoes of a lost civilization’s epic myth:

The square lit up with the image of a giant gorilla pulling a pterodactyl out of the sky.

“He’s saving her,” Terri-Lynn whispered. “Look.”

They were up on a cliff-side somewhere, and there was a woman sheltered under Kong’s feet. Jamie drank the rum. Terri-Lynn found another film strip. In that one, there was a horde of natives, their faces painted in swaths of bone white, their bodies dressed in reeds and bushes, the girl in the middle of them, being escorted, a sacrifice to Kong.

“They don’t know he loves her,” Terri-Lynn said. “Isn’t this great?”

Terri-Lynn naturally casts Sean the Métis drug dealer as “her savage” Kong, but Sean does not need her to remind him of his coming ritual doom. It is left to Jamie to realize the only road out of town is sinister, the one thing mysteriously left intact in an otherwise ruined landscape. The road has the malevolent power to destroy everything and everyone, and it reminds Jamie — now fleeing with a pregnant Terri-Lynn in the car he has stolen from her gangster father — that he cannot escape it. The road will see him die as the town has died, damning him for daring to look at it, for his impious consciousness:

She squeezed his hand and kissed his cheek. Jamie imagined them overturned in the bushes, trapped in the car. He imagined the engine on fire, not a siren for miles. Terri-Lynn lit a smoke and looked out the window.

“Suppose,” she said, “there weren’t no baby, Jamie. How much would you still love me?”

27

Looking, or not looking: this is the impossible choice Modernism’s shadow has brought us to, thirty years later. Carlucci’s desperadoes show us their tough “street creds” are only private fictions meant to hide them from the dangers of a hostile environment. The story can be read as a parody of social media — by opposing a girl, who fashions private fantasies from film fragments, to a solitary highway charged with endlessly tragic mirages, it identifies the dark threat in the autonomous currency of global Power.

There is nothing left to say no to. The world has become Impossible.16

With its echoes of knightly quests and lost relics,17 Carlucci’s “Over the Road” looks back to the Modernist canon. His characters confront their wholesale abandonment to pitiless fact without heroic resolution or Romantic ardour. We have gone far beyond that misty realm now. Happily for us, however, Canadian writers show they are meeting the fearful risks of our latest adventure,18 by daring us to look forward at the world we once knew.

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AFTER NOTES

1 According to Viktor Shklovsky in Art as Technique (1917), defamiliarization is salvational: “The process of ‘algebrization,’ the over-automatization of an object, permits the greatest economy of perceptive effort.” The danger in modern industrial efficiency is that one’s life under such habituated conditions becomes increasingly unconscious, unlived: “Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.” http://www.vahidnab.com/defam.htm

2 Statistics Canada, (Canada, Bureau of the Census, Unemployment Vol. VI (Ottawa 1931), 1,267.

3 A number of radical innovations associated with Modern Canadian society were promoted by such domestic publications before WWII. These include: government- financed mass housing schemes, mood-elevating drugs like Benzedrine, and clinical psychology as a necessary household science. Such innovations derived from industrial war-technology: mass barracks for soldiers, pep pills for fighting troops, aptitude tests for raw recruits.

4 All Canadian stories identified here as Modern are from the two Penguin editions edited by Wayne Grady: The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories, Penguin, Toronto: 1980; and Penguin Book of Modern Canadian Short Stories, Penguin, Toronto: 1982).

5 In The White Goddess, Robert Graves promoted the controversial view that Greeks worshipped a triple goddess composed of a virgin, mother, and crone before the Dorian invasion. Whether his theory is accurate or not, the Civic Museum in Lipari contains scores of clay female statuettes labelled Kore found in ancient Greek colonist farmers’ fields, some bearing an eerie resemblance to Barbie dolls

6 Influence of Camus on Spencer: http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2417/the-art- of-fiction-no-110-elizabeth-spencer September 12, 2012

7 Nathan Cohen, Toronto Star, November 30, 1967, page 30.

8 The 1983 publication date of Kreiner’s story is contemporaneous with the florescence of social restructurings in this country that announced the end of the post-war industrial boom economy: a sharp recession in 1981-82 as interest rates spiked to 24%; widespread middle-class use of cocaine and other street drugs after a Time cover story July 6, 1981 (http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19810706,00.html); the introduction of the iconic Mario Brothers video game in 1983; the introduction of CD’s, commercially available October, 1982; the mass success of inferior but cheaper VHS home video format over the Beta format in 1981; and the introduction in August 1982 of the 29

Commodore 64, the best-selling home computer in history with 17 million units sold in North America. These events mark the emergence of an individual new to history — the self-programmer like Carlucci’s Terri-Lynn, a character who can replay, fast-forward, edit or dissolve her own meta-culture at will through digital technology.

9, 10 Dean Irvine, “Spectres of Modernism” http://canlit.ca/editorials/21210%22, September 12, 2012. Canadian literary criticism itself can be read as a Victorian quest for Recognition, beginning with Northrop Frye’s apologetic literary essays in The Bush Garden (1971).

11 When Jacques Ellul, writing before 1965, argues that propaganda “no longer obeys an ideology” and that the propagandist “cannot be a believer in the ideology he must use” to advance the State’s agenda (p. 196), he did not foresee a world of millions of such self- propagandists who can create their own campaigns effortlessly and hourly through social media of YouTube and Facebook. Increasingly, as this writer and others have argued, the State must rely on the periodic and ritual militarization of public space to get its own message heard over this competing din. See, for example, David Harvey, “Social Justice, Postmodernism, and the City,” in Readings in Urban Theory, edited by S. Fainstein and S. Campbell, Blackwell Publishers: Oxford, 1996, at p. 419.

12 Spontaneous development in this context simply means beyond the agency of existing local interest groups. For example, anthropologist David Graeber, writing about Athenian Greece, argues that the arrival of money culture in the 4th Century BCE precipitated Classical philosophy and its “insoluble” moral dilemmas. See Debt / The First 5000 Years, (Melville House, 2011) p. 197. The shock “event” of the 20th Century that catalysed similarly radical social changes was industrialized warfare. The “event” of the 19th Century was Darwinian evolutionary theory (1859). Canadian short story writers, like Greek philosophers, arose to the new conditions of their post-war era and hardly existed as a viable caste before that date. The English Modernist, writer Richard Aldington, founded his social criticism on horrific experiences as an officer in the trenches; eventually his stance of resistance led to self-exile, a fate he shared with the rootless Canadian and former Lancaster bomber pilot, Norman Levine, a generation later. The “event’ that gave rise to the spectrum of social effects we label Postmodern is computer culture, which denies human-centred meaning in favour of data. Because it is produces data faster than we can process it, digital technology creates a shadow world engulfed by illimitable Sign. Literary critic Terry Eagleton would disagree; in his view absolutes still rule Postmodern society: “Markets are relativizing, pragmatizing…. But to prop them up… legitimate them, you may need some much more absolute values,” quoted in “Religion for radicals: an interview with Terry Eagleton.” http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2009/09/17/religion-for-radicals-an-interview-with-terry-eagleton/ April 27, 2012.

13 Roman Jakobson, Oveishaya Russkaya Poeziya (Recent Russian poetry), 1921.

14 M.M. Bakhtin, Speech genres and other late essays, 1986, 30, 147.

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15 Paul Carlucci, “Over the Road,” prepublication manuscript, 2012.

16,17 The “Impossible relic” referred to here is, of course, Modern Canada, founded on our close-quarters resistance to the protocols of Power. Surrounded by nation-states founded on revolutionary principles, Canada sailed through the tumultuous 1960’s in a charmed state of high-mindedness, confident of its superior civic resolution. While the Situationists in Paris almost succeeded in toppling the State, and the Weathermen, SDS, and Black Panthers were keen to do the same in America, political rebellion in this country confined itself to two minor outbreaks. A street protest in Toronto’s Yorkville Village in the summer of 1967 ended in arrests and extensive media coverage by local film crews, anxious to show that things were hotly cool up here, too. In Quebec the militant students went a little further, burning a computer facility in Sir George Williams University and scattering its punch-cards to the wind. Meanwhile the FLQ launched its bomb campaign against mailboxes bearing the Royal Coat of Arms, again, an attack on History itself. Paul Rose’s insurrection was aimed at the dithering FLQ itself, not Federal Canada; patently, neither kidnapping victim was a member of the Canadian establishment.

17 “Our latest adventure” reconciles us to existence without right to social resistance. All revolutions have failed in Canada except private ones. The radical social ambitions of the Lower Canada and Upper Canada Rebellions of 1837 proved abortive, as did those succeeding them: Louis Riel’s North-West Rebellion of 1885; the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919; the Regina Unemployed Workers Trek of 1935; the FLQ insurrections of 1970.These inevitably ended in clubbed heads, deportation, camp internments, prison and public hangings. Street protest, if not politics itself, must take the form of antic theatre today because the republican persona has died a historical death.

Bibliography

Bakhtin, M.M. Speech genres and other late essays. University of Texas Press: Austin, 1986.

Carlucci, Paul. “Over the Road.” Prepublication ms, Descant, Summer Issue, Toronto: 2012.

Ellul, Jacques. Propaganda / The Formation of Men’s Attitudes. Vintage, New York: 1973.

Fainstein, Susan, and Campbell, Scott. (ed.) Readings in Urban Theory. Blackwell Publishers, Oxford:1996

Grady, Wayne. (ed.) The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories. Penguin Books, Markham: 1980.

Grady, Wayne. (ed.) The Penguin Book of Modern Canadian Short Stories. Penguin Books, Markham: 1982. 31

Kreiner, Philip. People Like Us in a Place Like This. Oberon, Toronto: 1983.