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Bell & Howell Information and Learning 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 USA Ul\.ll.. 800-521-0600 Dialogic Regional Voices: A Study of Selected Contemporary Atlantic-Canadian Fiction by Edwin James Balsam A thesis submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English Memorial University of Newfoundland August 1998 St. John's Newfoundland Abstract This study examines several contemporary Atlantic­ Canadian novels, including Various Persons Named Kevin O'Brien, by Alden Nowlan, Middlewatch and Penumbra, by Susan Kerslake, Lives of Short Duration and others, by David Adams Richards, and The Afterlife of George Cartwright, by John Steffler. Based on the cultural and political theories of Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and others, it suggests that these novels employ a dialogic paradigm of relations to counter monologic paradigms that underrate Atlantic Canada and its cultures. As dialogic regional voices, they go further than those of writers such as Thomas Raddall, Charles Bruce, and Ernest Buckler to depict the interaction of conflicting ideological voices. One of their central features is a critique of oppressive hierarchies, especially those associated with national culturalism and exploitative capitalism, whose classificatory schemes misrepresent Atlantic Canada and its literature. Read as counterdiscourses, the novels of Nowlan, Kerslake, Richards, Steffler, and others subvert these hierarchies and argue for a regional hermeneutic that focuses on diversity, plurality, and egalitarianism. To do so, they represent conflicting multiple ideological voices ii to show how no one position can accurately represent another; they oppose nationalist systems based on unitarian principles, especially those that attempt to homogenize Canada's regional cultures; and they see the natural world as an ecosystemic environment conducive to dialogic human relationships. In these novels, the regional ethos is no longer parochially limited; it becomes the site of political antagonisms and universal themes usually associated with national literatures . Through their characters, these novels articulate a new subject position for Atlantic Canada that debunks ultra-regionalist and nationalist stereotypes . Characters are depicted primarily as human beings in opposition to other roles and positions constructed for them by demeaning political or capitalist systems. When read through this alternative hermeneutic, Atlantic Canada and its literature are less subjected to extraneous evaluative schema and can be reassessed according to criteria established within both their own and other cultural and political horizons. iii Acknowledgements In order to research and write this dissertation, I had to rely on the help of a number of people. My wife, Trudy, and my parents, William and Melvie, provided encouragement through difficult periods. Their emotional support is greatly appreciated . The advice of my supervisory committee was also indispensable. Dr. Jerry Varsava, Professor Ronald Wallace, and Dr. Larry Mathews kept me on track when I occasionally strayed from my intended course. Their suggestions on revisions and the restructuring of various chapters certainly improved the quality of my work. To them and to others who have also helped me in diverse ways, I express my sincere gratitude. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract ..... .......................................... ii Acknowledgements ........................................ i v Chapter 1- Introduction ............................ .... 1 1.1 The Nationalist Paradigm ....................... 9 1.2 The Regionalist Paradigm ...................... 15 1 . 3 The Deconstructive Critics .................... 28 1.4 Dialogic Regional Voices ....... .............. 33 Chapter 2 - Theorizing Political Tensions: Nation and Region ........................................ 4 2 2.1 Constructing a Bakhtinian Methodology .......... 43 2.2 Laclau and Mouffe's Theory of Political Agency. 56 2.3 National/Regional Impasses and Resolutions ..... 63 2.4 Conscripting Postcolonial Theory ............... 77 Chapter 3 - "Writing the World:" Various Persons Named Kevin 0 'Brien ................................. 89 3.1 Nowlan's Metafictional Memoir .................. 93 Chapter 4 - Searching for Language: Middlewatch and Penumbra ..................................... 13 9 v 4.1 Middlewatch's Semiotics of Life ....... ....... 144 4.2 Penumbra's Political Geographies ........ ..... 171 Chapter 5 - David Adams Richards and the Politics of Representation ....... ....................... 188 5.1 Critical Oppositions and Richards' Response .. 190 5.2 Richards' Regional Voices and Hierarchical Resistance ....... ................ ........ 203 Chapter 6 -John Steffler's Dialogized Hybridity ....... 250 6.1 Steffler's Early Work ..... ... ............ .. 255 6 . 2 The Afterlife of George Cartwright : Harmonious Mergers .. ................................... 2 59 6.3 Random Passage as Corroborating Narrative ..... 282 Chapter 7- Conclusion .. ... .. .. ....... ........ .. .. 299 Works Cited ... .......... ...................... .... 3 14 vi Chapter One Introduction The contemporary Atlantic-Canadian novel is part of a regional literature that has become the site of a debate between nationalist and regionalist critics. This debate is aver the representatian of Atlantic-Canadian lite~at~re and the authority to ascribe it a value. It involves both the politics of identity and cultural values and can be succinctly described by a statement about general ideological debates made by Pierre Bourdieu in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1984) : What is at stake in the struggles about the meaning of the social world is power over the classificatory schemes and systems which are the basis of the representations of the groups and therefore of their mobilization and demobilization. (479) What is at stake in the debate between nationalists and regionalists is the imprimatur to assert a paradigm of relations which can be used to define not only the literature of a region, but that of Canada itself. Each group wishes to convert its paradigm of relations into a classificatory scheme for evaluating regional literatures. Because neither group has yet established unquestionable control in this area, the Atlantic-Canadian novel has come under the simultaneous application of two major conflicting aesthetics, and the result has been an obfuscation of its polemical and subversive nature. 2 Critics such as E. K. Brown in the 1940s, thematic critics such as Northrop Frye in the 1970s, and T. D. MacLulich and W. J. Keith in the 1980s and 1990s have contributed in various ways to the development of a nationalist aesthetic.: They have done so either by emphasizing the unity of Canada's regions over their diversity or by criticizing regionalist aesthetics for its perceived parochialism and its failure to complement national or universal standards of literary excellence. Although Keith and other critics such as Robert Lecker are more receptive to regionalist writing than are their nationalist predecessors, they still equate regionalism with nihilistic fragmentation and nationalism with meaningful holism. As Lecker, for example, says in his most recent book, Making It Real: The Canonization of English-Canadian Literature (1995), If one objects to any formulation of the nation as an entity that can be described - that is worth describing - then one has to fall back on a pluralist vision of the country that sees it as a conglomeration of competing forces and centres of power. This is the view endorsed by much contemporary Canadian theory. But if one promotes this view, there is no reason to describe the conglomeration as Canadian, and no need to speak to the Canadian public (or students) about it. (9; Lecker's italics) The implication here is that a regionalist paradigm precludes any notion of national unity at all, even 3 political unity. Regionalist critics, such as George Woodcock, Eli Mandel, W. H. New, and E. D. Blodgett, and Atlantic critics, such as Janice Kulyk