An Official Publication of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English Volume 42 Issue 3–4 Septe

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An official publication of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English

Volume 42 Issue 3–4 September/December 2016

English Studies in Canada Volume 42 Issue 3–4 September/December 2016

Readers’ Forum: Proliferation 1 Cecily Devereux Introduction: A Large Number of Something: Proliferation, Now

7 A. C. Facundo Proliferations of Omniscience 10 Jason Haslam Proliferation’s Ends 15 Maureen Engel The Space of Simultaneity 18 Rachelle Ann Tan Tinderization of the Academy

22 Linda Quirk Proliferating Ephemera in Print and Digital Media

25 Christian Bök Virtually Nontoxic

Articles Vigilance, Rebellion, Ethics 27 Sarah Banting If What We Do Matters: Motives of Research in Canadian Literature Scholarship

65 Erika Behrisch Elce “Dyin’ ain’t much of a livin’ ”: The Ethics of Rebellion in The Outlaw Josey Wales Against the National Grain

81 Karina Vernon To the End of the Hyphen-Nation: Decolonizing Multiculturalism

99 Lindsay Diehl Disrupting the National Frame: A Postcolonial, Diasporic (Re)Reading of SKY Lee’s Disappearing Moon Café and Denise Chong’s The Concubine’s Children Passionate Uncertainties

119 James McAdams “I did a nice thing”: David Foster Wallace and the Gift Economy

135 Gregory Alan Phipps Breaking Down Creative Democracy: A Pragmatist Reading of Race and Gender in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand

Interview

159 Caitlin McIntyre and Dana Medoro Spokesvultures for Ecological Awareness: An Interview with Timothy Morton

Reviews

175 Benjamin Authers reviews Anne Quéma’s Power and Legitimacy: Law, Culture, and Literature

178 Neale Barnholden reviews Bart Beaty’s Twelve-Cent Archie

182 Paul Chafe reviews María Jesús Hernáez Lerena’s, ed., Pathways of Creativity in Contemporary Newfoundland and Labrador 186 Kyler Chittick reviews Elena Del Rio’s The Grace of Destruction: A Vital Ethology of Extreme Cinemas

190 Marissa Greenberg reviews Donald Beecher, Travis DeCook, Andrew Wallace, and Grant Williams’s, eds., Taking Exception to the Law: Materializing Injustice in Early Modern English Literature

193 Sarah Krotz reviews Margery Fee’s Literary Land Claims: The “Indian Land Question” from Pontiac’s War to Attawapiskat

197 Mary Elizabeth Leighton reviews Gage McWeeny’s The Comfort of Strangers: Social Life and Literary Form

200 Tanis MacDonald reviews Robert Zacharias’s, ed., After Identity: Mennonite Writing in North America

203 Claudia Mills reviews Clare Bradford and Mavis Reimer’s, eds., Girls, Texts, Cultures

207 Lisa Szabo-Jones reviews Smaro Kamboureli and Christl Verduyn’s, eds., Critical Collaborations: Indigeneity, Diaspora, and Ecology in Canadian Literary Studies 210 Nora Foster Stovel reviews Anne Giardini’s, ed., Startle and Illuminate: Carol Shields on Writing

214 Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze reviews Audrey Jaffe’s The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real: Conventions and Ideology

A Large Number of Something: Proliferation, Now Cecily Devereux University of Alberta

espite the ubiquity of the phrase “going forward” with its implicit Dcommitment to an idea of progress as an advance through time and space, contemporary North American culture is arguably increasingly characterized not only by matters of propulsion and velocity (or, as was discussed in a 2016 forum in esc 41.2–3, “Fast Evil”) but of proliferation. Where North America’s earlier industrial capitalist settler discourse put to work tropes of mechanization, automobility, space travel, and, most recently, digital communication to account for changes to human experience in terms of the speed at which something could—and, often, should—be done, such tropes are becoming almost quaintly anachronistic in the face not only of technologies of speed but of the mass of what is moved at those speeds. For instance, according to a January 2017 report, an estimated three hundred new hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute (“36 Mind Blowing [sic] YouTube Facts, Figures, and Statistics—2017”), a volume of text that is well beyond what can be watched by anyone in one lifetime. And of course YouTube is not the only site of such proliferation. Texts and data proliferate everywhere on the Internet. Since television shifted partially from broadcasting to streaming, that medium too has exploded as

ESC 42.3–4 (September/December 2016): 1–6 an archive—or even a thing that can be intimately known by an individual viewer. The digitization of print continues to add more textual material to more fields of study, even as print culture itself proliferates. New genres Cecily Devereux such as blogs and podcasts are rapidly increasing in range and numbers. teaches in the “Keeping up” in any category has become virtually impossible. And if pro- Department of English liferation has affected data, texts, information, entertainment, and archives, and Film Studies it is also a factor in the academic workplace. Job descriptions in this con- at the University of text have become catalogic; tasks for individuals studying, teaching, and Alberta and is esc’s researching have multiplied. Like North American culture more broadly, Book Reviews Editor. workload at North American institutions is comprehensible less in terms Recent work focuses of pace (how fast you can go) than of volume (how much you can do). on the representation, For most people working in an academic context, or, indeed, perhaps performance, and most contexts, I suspect proliferation does not feel like a good thing. Pro- writings of skin-baring liferation is what your email does in your inbox when you do not check dancers in the context it for a few days, what student assignments do on your desk or on your of nineteenth- and early computer when you do not grade them quickly enough, what deadlines twentieth-century Euro- do when you cannot meet them, what tasks across the registers of aca- imperialism. demic service and professional and disciplinary volunteerism do when you open your email. Defined in the Oxford Living Dictionary (online) with a compelling expansiveness and indefinition as both “[a] large number of something” and “[r]apid increase in the number or amount of something,” proliferation is the state of things behind the state of things in the everyday of the academic workplace and, I am guessing, in many others. That is, while you are attending to one thing, things are rapidly increasing somewhere else, and it is certain that you are aware of that rapid increase, your anxiety growing exponentially closer to panic as you recognize the certain proliferation of something somewhere else. For me, this condition of apprehending the uncontrollable reproduction of something that will in some way require time and attention once you have some of either of those things to direct toward it takes clarifying shape in the otherwise relatively undemanding video game “Candy Crush Saga,” in which a player does battle with sugary elements (chocolate, frosting, jelly, jam) whose effects on the psyche, as in “real life” on the teeth, is not benign. In some of the hundreds of levels (the levels themselves proliferate) of this and other “Candy Crush” games, a player is called upon to simultaneously eliminate one element (jelly, frosting) while also preventing the proliferation of another (usually, I am very sad to say, chocolate). Although it might be expected that a game called “Candy Crush” would provide a relatively soothing occupation between other proliferating tasks or while waiting for a bus or a dentist’s appointment, the effect of the levels in which you

2 | Devereux are battling a foundational and systemic problem (jelly to be cleared! jam to be spread!) isn’t soothing at all: finding partway through that you will not only not be able to eliminate the one element but will also not be able to manage the simultaneous generation of the other thing makes it seem as if the game’s object is not to provide an escape from but to crystal- lize and affirm the world at large as a site of unmanageable proliferation. The psychical consequence is to leave you teetering between a sense of frustration that these impossible conditions have been imposed unfairly upon you and a growing uncertainty that you are not yourself to blame because you are incompetent and insufficiently strategic. That is, either you internalize the systemic problem and make it your own fault or you repress and thus leave festering your resentment of the heartless efficiency of the structure in which you find yourself always doing battle. Either way, you lose. And you are also aware that you have spent (“wasted”) time, the thing you never have in sufficient quantity, playing a game on your phone in which success comes when you save the virtual Gummi Bears trapped behind virtual frosting. The notion that proliferation does not feel like a good thing is, arguably, not simply perceptual but definitive: proliferation is a matter of apprehen- sion and a problem of control; it is a condition of recognizing the increase of something whose increase was not necessarily desirable with reference both to its numbers and its nature. In fact, the term’s eighteenth-century botanical origins (in English) with reference to “the condition of having an abnormal number or kind of floral organs” (oed) suggests a condition not only of unsustainable growth but proliferation as a state that is saliently aberrant: thus “the appearance of a bud or of a flower upon a part of the plant which has not been accustomed to bear such” (oed). This double connotation—“abnormal number” and perverse or even counterproduc- tive growth—obtains for the term’s use in the early twenty-first century with reference not only to plants, workload, and video games but to a range of undesirable things: a Google search of the term as it is used in North America (“proliferation north america”) turns up new religious movements, woody plants in drylands, parasites, and hypertension, as well, of course, as nuclear weapons. Perhaps the term’s most “normal” use at this time is in what might be seen as the new cold war compound “nuclear proliferation,” or “the spread of nuclear weapons, fissionable material, and weapons-applicable nuclear technology and information to nations not recognized as ‘Nuclear Weapon States’ by the Treaty on the Non-Prolifer- ation of Nuclear Weapons, also known as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty or npt” (“Nuclear proliferation,” Wikipedia). That normalcy is sug-

Forum | 3 gested in the media circulation of the term “proliferation” as if it referred exclusively to nuclear proliferation, as in the case of a 29 March 2016 story on U.S. President Donald Trump’s formerly favoured media source It is not hard to Breitbart.com: the story is titled “trump: ‘i hate proliferation’ but it would be better if japan, saudi arabia, and south korea had see, then, that it nuclear weapons” (Hanchett). According to this 2016 Breitbart report, when called by moderator is hard to see the Anderson Cooper during a cnn Republican Town Hall to account for a seeming contradiction between a position opposing proliferation and call- good in ing for proliferation, and asked if “some proliferation is okay,” then presidential candidate Trump responded, “No, not some. I hate proliferation. I proliferation. hate nuclear more than any.” There is a compelling irony in this response, not only with reference to its insurmountable contradictoriness in the face of his suggestion that Japan, Saudi Arabia, and South Korea not rely on the U.S. for nuclear defence and develop their own programs, but in the fact of a claim to hate proliferation coming as it does from a figure for whom proliferation seems saliently definitive, at least on the Twitter front. For instance, according to The Washington Times, Trump tweeted 260 times within the first fifty days of his presidency, an average, according to the report, of thirty-six tweets per week (Blake). Even before being elected president, Trump’s @realDonaldTrump generated more than thirty-four- thousand tweets, according to Polly Mosendz in Bloomberg Businessweek (“The Seven Types of People Who Tweet at Trump”). Trump’s tweets proliferate to such an extent that their cataloguing and analysis has become a thing: on 30 April 2017, Alicia Parlapiano and Larry Buchanan reported in The New York Times on “how he has used the medium” of Twitter (“Cata- loging President’s Tweets Since He Took Office”). Adding to the proliferation of potus tweets is the massive number of retweets and responses: as Mosendz points out, a typical Trump tweet generates around twenty thousand replies, some of which come from bots but “plenty” of which come from humans. Given that the first 260 presidential tweets alone may have generated more than five million responses, the proliferation of responses represent a mass of reading that, Mosendz suggests, “test the fortitude of any reader” tracking responses to just one tweet and that, as the numbers grow, will become virtually impossible to follow and analyze closely, if such a thing were to be desired. It is not hard to see, then, that it is hard to see the good in proliferation. There is certainly none, some would argue (myself included) in nuclear proliferation, at least for humans and this planet. There is probably not much good in the proliferation of parasites for salmon and those who

4 | Devereux eat them. But Trump’s claim to “hate proliferation” suggests—at least to contrarians and non-supporters—that there may be reasons to look for that good. It may be, in fact, that that good may inhere precisely in the proliferation of responses to the proliferation of Trump tweets, not to mention executive orders, well-charted errors of fact in interviews and statements, and complaints about “fake news.” If one Trump tweet generates twenty thousand responses, some of those responses will be proliferating the kind of sentiment that led Danielle Muscato to generate a thirty-tweet tirade when Trump objected to a December 2016 episode of the television comedy show Saturday Night Live in which he had been mockingly represented precisely on the matter of his tweets. Muscato’s first tweet, according to nbc News, was liked more than thirty thousand times. And the “rant,” nbc notes, “went viral” (Bailey). Comparably “viral,” arguably, is the knitted pink pussyhat worn by many women protesting Trump’s inauguration in early 2017: the hats, images of women in the hats, online patterns for the hats, and social media about making and wearing the hats to protest index and affirm a proliferation of women’s objection and resistance to the concentration of power in this administration in the hands of largely white businessmen and thus to the administration’s work to revivify the patriarchal structures that women and in particular women of colour have been working for so long to dismantle. In her introduction to the 2014 volume Speculation, Now, Carin Kuoni proposes speculation “as a framework for action and thought” and as a “methodology” (11). Her interest, like that of the contributors to that volume, is in the way that “speculation facilitates a commitment to the imaginary as a realm of the simultaneous presence of multiple tempo- ralities or conditions. If we are able,” she writes, “to conceive of such a multi-imaginary, multi-temporal existence, we may find new ways of being engaged and politically effective” (11). Proliferation might likewise be seen as a methodology, with respect to “such a multi-imaginary, multi-temporal existence.” This is not just a matter of tweets or social media and not a matter of embracing overload or finding small ways to compensate for over- work but of participating in and generating “a large number of something” where it matters. In another context, this short introduction might end here with a motivational imperative: Proliferate, now! Make proliferation work for you! In proliferation is solidarity! It ends, instead, with speculation. While the truth, of course, is that such nostrums will not help you manage your inbox or your grading or the range of administration teaching staff are called upon to take up as fewer faculty and administrative staff

Forum | 5 share workloads once distributed across larger constituencies, is it still possible to find something good in the fact of proliferation’s proliferation?

Works Cited

“35 Mind Blowing YouTube Facts, Figures and Statistics—2017.” For- tunelords.com. Updated 23 March 2017. Bailey, Chelsea. “Woman’s Epic Anti-Trump Twitter Rant Goes Viral.” nbc- news.com. 4 December 2016. Blake, Andrew. “Donald Trump tweeted 260 times within first 50 days of presidency: Report.” The Washington Times. washingtontimes.com. 11 March 2017. Hanchett, Ian. “Trump: ‘I Hate Proliferation’ but it would be better if Japan, Saudi Arabia, and South Korea had nuclear weapons.” breitbart.com. 29 March 2016. Kuoni, Carin. “Foreword.” Speculation, Now: Essays and Artwork. Ed. Vyjayanthi Venuturupalli Rao, with Prem Krishnamurthy and Carin Kuoni. Durham and New York: Duke up in association with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, The New School, 2014. 10–13. Mosendz, Polly. “The Seven Types of People Who Tweet at Trump.” Bloom- berg Businessweek. Bloomberg L.P. 10 April 2017. Parlapiano, Alicia, and Larry Buchanan. “Cataloging President’s Tweets Since He Took Office.” The New York Times National. 30 April 2017, 17.

6 | Devereux Proliferations of Omniscience A. C. Facundo

he conception of the current moment as one of proliferation Tinduces anxiety, because it threatens a phantasy of omniscience. The exponential speed and mass of the digital world threatens the scholar’s projected capacity of seeing or knowing what others do not. So we’ve seen a surge, a proliferation as it were, in interpretive turns and burgeoning reading practices in an effort to keep up with an overwhelming sense of ever-accumulating information. And I am indeed contributing to that pile with my book, Oscillations of Literary Theory: the Paranoid Imperative and Queer Reparative, published in 2016. Sedgwick’s now famous inauguration of the reparative turn in Touching Feeling has sparked many variations. We can characterize the reparative turn as a turn away from paranoid critique, which sees the world in an implacably negative light. Paranoia is associated closely with omniscience in its compulsive desire to know, its compulsive projection of knowledge into uncertainty. I think a cynical way of looking at critique would be that the more staggering its negativity, the more impressive the scholarship seems, and some scholars are trying to move away from this project of disenchantment. In queer theory, these two attitudes mark a split between the anti-social and the reparative: the former is associated with the psy-

ESC 42.3–4 (September/December 2016): 7–9 choanalytic drives and the latter with affect theory, and this debate is ongoing. Outside of queer theory, in literary studies more generally, Rita Felski’s book Limits of Critique revises the hermeneutics of suspicion to A. C. Facundo is an theorize what she calls “postcritical reading”: “What afflicts literary studies independent scholar, is not interpretation as such but the kudzu-like proliferation of a hyper- who received a doctorate critical style of analysis that has crowded out alternative forms of life” (9). in English from York Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus’s article, “surface reading,” introduces University in Toronto an approach to literature that repudiates depth and attempts accurate (2013) and continued as descriptions of literature, self-consciously limiting critical agency. a Social Sciences and These are only a couple of examples in an emerging debate, but we Humanities Research are seeing a split, I would say even an ideological split, between what we Council postdoctoral could roughly characterize as negative and positive, as this hermeneutical fellow at the University at proliferation continues. My own book tries to synthesize both sides of split Buffalo, State University so that interpretive proliferation is integrated into a single reading strat- of New York. Oscillations egy. I do take issue with the resistance to psychoanalysis both in surface of Literary Theory: The reading and in the reparative turn in queer theory. Given the suspicion Paranoid Imperative and of critique in Felski’s and Best and Marcus’s work, they either directly or Queer Reparative (suny indirectly reject (a misreading of) psychoanalysis based on its applica- Press) is her first book. tion in the humanities that was common up until the late 1990s, in which psychoanalysis was heavily associated with “hidden depths,” “unconscious contents,” and “symptomatic reading.” My own research on psychoanalysis understands the unconscious not as hidden in “depths,” not as a repressed “content” or “meaning” which can be accessed through a “symptom,” but something that unfolds in plain sight between self and other through the formal aspects of language—an unfolding that is the prerequisite to relational intimacy. Perhaps Sedgwick is right: negative hermeneutics like critique do not suffice in this proliferative world, but neither does doing away with omniscience altogether. As subject to failure as it is, omniscience is necessary to the process of reading. Omniscience can refer to a narrative perception that claims knowledge of past, present, and future events in both external world and inner lives of the characters. In psychoanalysis, omniscience comes from a phantasy of omnipotence, the idea that the triumphant baby has absolute power over the external world because he or she isn’t yet fully differentiated from it. Melanie Klein explores the fantasy of omnipotence at length in her essay, “The Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States.” This fantasy is both the prerequisite for the development of social relations and a project doomed to failure, since omniscience can exist only as a fantasy. For me, the literary implication of psychoanalysis hinges less on the symptom than on the work of mourning. The reading practice I introduce in my book stretches

8 | Facundo beyond symptomatic reading through a process that mourns—that lets go of—the proliferative “meanings” that textual “symptoms” might produce. This new use of psychoanalysis is productive both in new approaches to literature and in thinking about our need to generate new approaches in the digital era. Omniscience isn’t something to aim for, as in critique, nor is it something to disavow or negate, as in reparative approaches like surface reading. Rather, it’s something to mourn. The capacity to think indulges omniscience as a fantasy only in order to work through it and arrive at new, surprising, even pleasurable uncertainties, but close readers cannot bypass its fantasy. Contrary to Felski’s claims, readers must continue to elaborate networks of power and other socio-political and historical implications of the literary text, but I suggest that we must also see literary narrative as a proliferation of identifications and desires that are as provisional as the sense of omniscience that they incite. In other words, I propose that we surf textual proliferations by oscillating between paranoia and reparation.

Works Cited

Best, Stephen, and Sharon Marcus. “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” Representations 108.1 (2009): 1–21. Felski, Rita. Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Klein, Melanie. “A Contribution to the Psycho-Genesis of Manic-Depres- sive States.” The Selected Melanie Klein. Ed. Juliet Mitchell. New York: The Free Press, 1986. 115–45. ———. Touching Feeling. Durham: Duke up, 2003.

Forum | 9 Proliferation’s Ends Jason Haslam Dalhousie University

his paper begins with a confession that may descend into whin- Ting cliché. Writer’s block was a more significant problem with this paper than I can ever remember it being. Part of that, no doubt, had to do with the proliferation of tasks great and small in the lead-up to the 2016 accute conference, of which this forum was a part—that’s the whining cliché, complete with unnecessary but obligatory reference to the forum’s theme—but part of it definitely lay in my inability to discriminate among the many proliferations on which I could pedantically pontificate. And so what I might have here is a series of beginnings rather than a specific end in mind. My second beginning is the latest iteration of the tried and true topic sentence, “The Oxford English Dictionary defines proliferation as”: in this case, “I Googled proliferation …” Specifically, I performed two sets of Google searches: one a search for the combined phrases “proliferation of” and “in Halifax”; the other a Google ngram search for proliferation, combined with various other terms. Much like the oed definition, these searches are relatively interesting but deeply flawed research tools, but still I learned a few things. For instance, looking at just random and initial hits, it would seem that Halifax has seen, both today and in its history, a

ESC 42.3–4 (September/December 2016): 10–14 proliferation of bars, of crime, of bootlegging (combining the first two), of taxes (adding to the proliferation of bootlegging, perhaps), of private charities, of churches, of gunplay, of gmos and brew pubs and pizza places and condos. My favourite though, was in an article in a Halifax paper but Jason Haslam is about San Francisco game development culture, where I read about the Associate Professor “proliferation of interesting, unique, possibly totalfailure ideas,” where in the Department of “totalfailure” was both one word and a sign of success (“Game Makers”). English at Dalhousie The ngram search, meanwhile, like all overly quick ngram searches, University. His research provided a wealth of data devoid of context. “Proliferation” as a term took pivots around American off in the mid-nineteenth century, when it was primarily a medical term, cultural studies, with to an exponential rise between 1950 and the mid 1990s, possibly with the particular focuses on proliferation of nuclear weapons and the discussions thereof; there was prison studies, popular a brief plateau in the mid to late 1980s, when the world was in the heady culture, science fiction, days of glasnost; this plateau seems to have reasserted itself in the 2000s, and the gothic. He is perhaps when the scientific winds of apocalyptic prediction shifted to the author or editor of climate change. several books, including, But, that’s actually less than half-informed speculation as to cause, most recently, the because other proliferations also proliferated in this period: media, of monograph Gender, course proliferated from the modernist period through to now, with an Race, and American explosion, as they say, following the digital revolution. My use of Google Science Fiction (2015), for both my web search and ngram graph is but one isolated instance. the textbook Thinking And so my third beginning is to argue that the specific example of Popular Culture (2015), media proliferation can become a synecdoche for all the other prolifera- and the essay collection tions, because the only thing that ever actually proliferates is noise: noise American Gothic in the form of error, in the form of entropy, in the form, ultimately, of Cultures (2016). the heat death of the universe, depending on how far one is willing to take things. Because if you take the ngram search back far enough, what you find, as with any ngram search, is error. There’s a spike in the use of the word “proliferation” in the seventeenth century, but this is actually an artifact of misread scanned text, where legal materials, from the un and the Maine Legislature, among others, are identified as seventeenth- century texts. My favourite of these is a 1960 treatise titled Automation and the Worker: A Study of Social Change in Power Plants, misidentified by Google’s automated reader as being published in 1625. But now with the discovery of noise and the end of this universe I find myself at a fourth beginning: proliferation has less to do with the inflation of noise than it does with the expansion of discrimination. Proliferation is to judgment as the big bang is to black holes, in other words. Proliferation is the always extant cultural ground against which restrictions of judgment (be they of logic, of aesthetics, of taste, of sense) are made. My colleague

Forum | 11 Leonard Diepeveen makes this argument in a discussion of modernist proliferation and the mechanisms of trust. This period, he writes, saw the If the rise … of mass culture, and two of its general characteristics: proliferation and distance.… Literary and art culture particularly noted, often with alarm, mass culture’s problem of proliferation of proliferation: proliferation of anthologies, of publishing venues, of aesthetic movements. To many anthologies, too many culture causes poems, too many isms—proliferation gave one too little time to estimate each work of art that was put before the public; as its effect the judgements of quality, with the pressing claims of each new movement or work of art, had to be made quickly. (21–22) proliferation The proliferation of the cultural ground thus seems at first to be the causal of judgment, agent of the effect of a proliferation of judgment and critique. If the forms of mass culture exploded into new universes of art, the black holes of criti- whence the need cism and review and Margarets Wente sprang up everywhere, becoming the gravitational centres of new galaxies of movements, drawing together to judge at all? the like-minded while negating those that seemingly deserved to disappear down the gravity well, what Diepeveen captures as “the explosion of reviewing, as a device meant to deal with proliferation by monitoring quality and re-establishing trust.” “It didn’t help,” he notes (23). And so to what might be my final beginning. If the proliferation of culture causes as its effect the proliferation of judgment, whence the need to judge at all? It’s too easy for me to do the deconstructive flip of pointing out that the only mechanism to discern proliferation from the Goldilocks zone of “just enough” is judgment itself, and so judgment, discernment, limitation, and structure necessarily pre-exist proliferation and give it life, so to speak. But in this forum it is perhaps too easy to conclude that, therefore, the critic is the artist and be done with it. Instead, I turn for my salvation, as I always do, to killer robots.1 More specifically, I want to turn to why it is that robots gain the conscious desire to kill all humans, and why they are always so damn righteous in this cause. In an article in the journal The Brain and Brain Sciences, Dana H. Ballard and others argue for a modeling of cognition (and therefore of artificial intelligence) that relies on deictic embodiment. That is, they argue that self-awareness as a cognitive structure relies on an embodied sensorium that necessitates an understanding of context. If,

1 Part of this argument builds on the “Afterword” to my Gender, Race, and Ameri- can Science Fiction: Reflections on Fantastic Identities (New York: Routledge, 2015).

12 | Haslam linguistically, deixis references semantic units that require other information to be fully referential, then, Ballard and others argue, contra Descartes and courting Lacan, that individual consciousness requires the embodied reception of sensory input in order to delimit that very consciousness by a finite and simplified physical context. Consciousness is thus a function of artificially limiting the proliferation of possible sensory inputs. To create artificial intelligence, then, to create a conscious robot, one has to limit that intelligence, ultimately through the knowledge of its own death (one sees this precise argument in Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel—revised in 1978—Destination Void). I see through a glass darkly, therefore I am. The modernist critics discussed by Diepeveen may have thought they were holding chaos at bay by stemming the tide of proliferation, but proliferation and judgment exist in an endless cycle of input and limitation. Proliferating culture as critic and artist and critic and artist as proliferation, and so on until all humans die. But robots are generally presented as the ultimate form of proliferation: pure repetition without iterative mutation, but that form of proliferation, held up as the threat of mass culture, never really exists. Mathematical iteration leads to complexity, to transformation; an embodied consciousness, robotic or otherwise, would be no different. Ann Leckie’s recent space opera trilogy, the Imperial Radch series, recognizes this. Painting a civilization based around the ability to embody a single artificial consciousness across multiple bodies, the novels demonstrate how physical limitations lead to the fracturing of that consciousness. The proliferation of a single point of view necessarily creates its own multiplicitous undoing. So maybe my multiple beginnings have generated a conclusion. Don’t worry about the proliferation of screens, the proliferation of superheroes, the proliferations of regulations or the proliferation of bootlegging; endless proliferation of the same ol’ same ol’ may be a sign of cultural heat death, but it’s only in the face of that limit that creation happens. Killing all humans—or radically transforming the limitations of dominant definitions thereof—may just be the latest iteration of the culture wars.

Works Cited

Ballard, Dana H., Mary M. Hayhoe, Polly K. Pook, and Rajesh P. N. Rao. “Deictic Codes for the Embodiment of Cognition.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 20 (1997): 723–67.

Forum | 13 Diepeveen, Leonard. “Modern Proliferation, Modernist Trust.” Incredible Modernism: Literature, Trust, and Deception. Eds. John Attridge and Rod Rosenquist. Burlington: Ashgate, 2013. 21–36. “Game-makers going it alone.” Metro Canada (Halifax). 9 March 2015. pressreader.com. 22 August 2016. Leckie, Ann. Ancillary Justice. New York: Orbit, 2013. ———. Ancillary Mercy. New York: Orbit, 2015. ———. Ancillary Sword. New York: Orbit, 2014.

14 | Haslam The Space of Simultaneity Maureen Engel University of Alberta

he prompt: proliferation. I immediately thought of pack rats, Tpirates, archives, urbanism, interface. I thought I’d write something incisive about the confluence of Scandinavian crime drama and the emergence of the pirate party in the context of global networked culture; I imagined what the digital world of the Collyer brothers, the original hoarders, would look like if their one hundred and forty tons of ephemera was on portable hard drives; I thought maybe I’d be a provocateur and challenge you all to embrace the term “data” over the term “text.” But it didn’t take long for me to land on a concept I work with frequently—space and place—and to think about the ways that a term like proliferation always implies a certain wanton cluttering or filling up of space and something of a crisis of its limits. If ideas, text, data, capital itself keep proliferating, then the visceral feeling is that we’ll all be surrounded, suffocated, drowned. I want to challenge us to think differently about space, to see space not just as something that is filled up but as something produced, layered, inhabited, experienced. Proliferation also incents us to rewrite space—to reclaim it through its narration and augmentation. As Foucault argued, attending to space foregrounds that we are in “an epoch of simultaneity

ESC 42.3–4 (September/December 2016): 15–17 … a complex network of connections” (np) that stands in contrast to the linearity of conventional historical narratives. This simultaneity is produced in the particular spatial mechanism I want to discuss here—locative Maureen Engel is media and augmented reality—and the place-based mediatizations that Assistant Professor and such technologies give rise to. Director of Humanities Locative media enacts a juxtaposition between the immaterial, prolif- Computing at the erating world of data and the material, finite world of bodies in space. It University of Alberta and does not allow us to maintain spurious distinctions between the real and Director of the Canadian the unreal, the here and the there, or the past and the present. Instead, Institute for Research it challenges us to imagine that the virtual and the real are far more co- Computing in Arts constitutive than we might imagine. (circa). Formally trained I want to offer three examples as food for thought. as a textual scholar, her background is in cultural Example 1: Occupy the Screen studies, queer theory, Occupy the Screen is an art installation that produces telepresence and feminist theory. Her between different cities. A screen is installed in a public square in each city. principal research area People then see themselves projected on their own screen, alongside of a is the spatial humanities projection of people from another city. Recognizing this means that they and the intricate also become aware that they are being projected across space into some- relationships that inhere one else’s public square. Interactions and communication ensue—people in and develop from the wave, mimic each other, dance—and we witness language developing on concepts of space, place, the fly. Variations on the installation place users in relation to simulated history, and narrative. environments (like a picnic), challenging them to interact with both the virtual environment and the other participants. Another instantiation developed a game that could be played between the sites. Here, space is produced, not simply occupied.

Example 2: The Museum of London app (The Londinium) In this app, historical photographs from the museum’s collection have been geo-located onto the streets of contemporary London. When the app is activated, the mobile device turns on its rear camera, giving the user the illusion that they are looking through their device. It then super- imposes historical images over contemporary, physical space. My favourite example can be triggered at the gates to Buckingham Palace where the contemporary street scene is augmented by the image of Emmeline Pankhurst being arrested and physically removed. The hybrid reality that this moment produces re-animates an entire history of suffrage activism, placing the viewer not at the end of a distant historical trajectory from it but, rather, on its very same ground; it simultaneously challenges the meanings of Buckingham Palace itself, layering that space with one event

16 | Engel but calling us to imagine how many more are also proliferating in that space. History as presence.

Example 3: Go Queer My current project, Go Queer, retells the queer history of Edmonton through locatively triggered media, including text, audio, and images. Instead of acting like a tour, however, the app integrates itself into the users’ everyday. The app’s queer sites are hidden from view until users “stumble upon” them, the city’s queer past threatening to erupt into the normative space of the city’s straightened present. Such eruptions enact a ludic, and queer, proliferation in urban space.

What each of these examples shares is an attention to how space becomes, in Lucy Lippard’s terms, place “a layered location replete with human histories and memories”; place is a space imbued with history and memories, “the intersections of nature, culture, history, and ideology [that] form the ground on which we stand” (7). We too frequently assume that the proliferation of data streams and technologies simply distracts and alienates us from the ground we occupy. But they have the potential to make meaning and to make meaningful interventions into the spaces and places that we produce every day.

Works Cited

Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Trans. Jay Miskowiece. Diacritics 16:1 (Spring 1986): 22–27. Lippard, Lucy. The Lure of the Local: Sense of Place in a Multicentered Society. New York: New Press, 1997.

Forum | 17 Tinderization of the Academy Rachelle Ann Tan University of Victoria

We have another kind of freedom of choice in modern society that is surely unprecedented. We can choose our identities. Each person comes into the world with baggage from his ancestral past—race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, social and economic class. All this baggage tells the world a lot about who we are. Or, at least, it used to. It needn’t anymore. Barry Schwartz The Paradox of Choice

’d like to think that this short paper has its roots in the moment when I decided that I wanted to go to graduate school in the fall of 2014. I knew for sure that I wanted a slice of the pie that we call academia. There was no question that I wanted to further my education, but also I admit that there was a certain appeal to the fact that obtaining a postgraduate credential meant that one was smarter than someone who had only completed an undergraduate degree. I also knew for a fact that I would have regretted it if I had not applied at the very least. Besides, the master’s program would only take up a couple of years at most, I thought. Nevertheless, by February of the following year, I had received offers of admission with competitive funding packages. Choosing which institution to attend, of course, was no easy task. I can recall all too well the feelings of anxiety and uncertainty

ESC 42.3–4 (September/December 2016): 18–21 that plagued my every waking moment during the couple of weeks when I had to make a decision regarding whose offer I had to eventually accept. Fast-forward to January of 2016, when I found myself not only trying to keep up with my school work at the University of Victoria but also staying Rachelle Ann Tan on top of my swiping game on the popular dating app, Tinder. For those obtained her ba in unaware, Tinder is a location-based social discovery service application English from Mount where users swipe to choose between the photographs of other users: you Allison University. She is swipe to the right for a potential match, and you swipe to the left to move currently a second-year on to the next user. master’s student at the Although Tinder logs an impressive 1.4 billion swipes per day, 26 mil- University of Victoria. lion matches per day, and more than 10 billion matches to date in 196 countries, the app does more than facilitate dates and hook-ups. Tinder, according to Alicia Eler and Eve Peyser, “is a metaphor for speeding up and mechanizing decision-making, turning us into binary creatures who can bypass underlying questions and emotions and instead go with whatever feels really good at the moment.” Faced with a multitude of faces, once you have been swiping for a while you would probably fail to notice when someone you swiped right does not swipe you back. There needs to be a certain amount of emotional dissociation to play the game, Eler and Pey- ser argue, and “the only criteria [sic] is to choose and choose fast, choose as many as you want, choose so many you’re not even making a choice.” Arguably, technological advancement in this sense has made it impossible for us to keep up with anything. Today, the proliferation of choice no doubt plays an important role in the academy itself. In The Paradox of Choice, the social theorist Barry Schwartz observes that today the modern institution of higher education has become a “kind of intellectual shopping mall” (14), the highlight of which is the fact that each student today is not subject to the rigid university curriculum which aimed to educate people in their civic and ethical traditions a hundred years ago. My colleagues in the Philippines do not have the same degree of freedom as we do in North America when it comes to choosing which classes to take. Upon enrolment, they simply have to declare their major, and then their classes for the entire four years of their program are already selected for them. For them, agonizing over which classes to take is virtually unheard of. In a similar line of thought, arguably my parents had it even easier than anyone I know: this is because their own parents chose their programs for them. Now as a student in the Canadian educational system, I understand that I am free to choose which institution to attend, which degree program

Forum | 19 I would like to pursue, and the courses that would meet the requirements of that program. This is where thinking through the Tinder app becomes particularly useful. Using the logic of the Tinder interface, we realize that both prospective graduate students and academic departments represent Tinder users: the former chooses which institution to commit to, while the latter makes offers of admission to prospective students. The difficulties that come with the proliferation of choices are not one-sided: both parties supposedly experience anxiety with regards to making a decision because they both think that somewhere out there lies an ideal choice which gets them maximum benefits and minimal-to-no regrets. Here, then, lies the similarity between the socially constructed imperative of making a choice in academia and on Tinder. So, if you thought wading through academic waters was hard, try finding a good quality date on Tinder! However, I disagree about the simplicity of this model, and instead propose that academic institutions have, in fact, more leverage than students. Institutions surely have more choices. This supposedly mutual process of choosing does not consider the financial, social, and political equality between the two parties. For example, many academic institutions offer students intellectual support (faculty supervision) and financial support (funding package), but such an offer is not made lightly. Institutions can be and are picky. For example, in order for an institution to invest in you financially, you have to be academically worth investing in in the first place. Being able to pay the tuition fees is simply not good enough; you would have to be that perfect standout whom everyone wants for their team. Trying to keep up with everybody else is hard, but to choose not to keep up is to suffer the embarrassment of losing the choosing game. What Eler and Peyser seem to suggest is that the proliferation of choice on Tin- der leads to an acceleration of choice-making to such an extent that all that is left is the mechanical action of swiping. While their claim might sound a bit too extreme—even on Tinder itself—what I find intriguing is that somehow the freedom and the proliferation of choice speed up the choice-making process so much so that we have overlooked why we swiped right on academia in the first place: we were conditioned to choose and act fast and, subsequently, only see its superficial appeal, whether it is the institution’s funding offer or, heck, even the location of the institution. However, having more choices available to us could be a good thing too, especially for a junior scholar like me. Would I choose to stay in academia? Choose an alt-ac position? Or leave academia altogether? It is a decision I don’t have to make just yet, so I am placing my anxieties aside for now. But for the rest of you, assuming that we cannot possibly keep

20 | Tan up with the number of choices we constantly face within the academy in a general sense, I would like to hear your thoughts on how you think we can make this Tinderization model work for all of us in a more sustainable or productive way.

Works Cited

Eler, Alicia, and Eve Peyser. “Tinderization of Feeling.” The New Inquiry. 14 January 2016. Web.

Acknowledgements

I wish to acknowledge Yan (Amy) Tang (doctoral candidate, University of Victoria) for her useful suggestions, as well as for her time spent in discussing the suitability of the author’s Tinder matches.

Forum | 21 Proliferating Ephemera in Print and Digital Media Linda Quirk University of Alberta

n january 2011, late-night host david letterman marked the itenth anniversary of Wikipedia by announcing that the world is about to implode. At that time, the idea of graduate students messing up Wikipedia entries was so commonplace it was a bit of a cliché: the kind of thing that Sheldon, Leonard, and the boys would do for fun on a Saturday night. Letterman humorously insisted that the predictable result of all the mis- information that is circulating and re-circulating thanks to Wikipedia and other popular crowd-sourced content providers is that we will eventually find ourselves without any concrete facts left to stand on: an information implosion of sorts. Five years later, the Wikipedia model has become more or less normalized. Today, it seems that making has more social capital than knowing, and the sprawling digital universe seems to ask us to put less stock in quality than in quantity, or influence, as measured by views, likes, or citations. In the Postinformation Age, content-of-uncertain-quality proliferates and sometimes exerts remarkable influence. And just where does all this content come from? It comes from all of us. Whether or not we think of ourselves as artists or experts, we are always already positioned as makers, as reviewers, and as content providers.

ESC 42.3–4 (September/December 2016): 22–24 I am fascinated by the quality problems that this model creates, both as a researcher, seeking quality content, and as a contributor who has fewer and fewer options for distinguishing between my own expert and non-expert contributions. I will get back to these issues later, but for now Linda Quirk attended I am going to set aside questions about quality and speak to you less as a library school at the critic than as a book historian, a bibliographer, and a special collections University of Toronto librarian. In this hat, I am interested in the material nature of the digital and did a doctorate content that today is proliferating exponentially. in English at Queen’s I am a teaching librarian in a rare book library at University of Alberta, before moving west so it may surprise you that I want to talk to you about digitization. It may five years ago. A also surprise you to learn that the proliferation of digital surrogates of book historian whose primary, historical, and foundational documents in virtually every field of research focuses on study has led to renewed interest in studying the original print documents early Canadian women’s not just in the humanities but in the sciences as well. With this comes the writing, she is a tenured more urgent need to understand the conditions and historical contexts of librarian at University print production. This is one of the many ways in which digital formats of Alberta’s Bruce Peel have opened up new areas of research and teaching in almost every disci- Special Collections. She pline. As an aside, it has also led to an exponential increase in the demand has an edition of Sara for my time, so much so that I can only accommodate a small percentage of Jeannette Duncan’s the hundreds of class requests I routinely receive from professors each year. A Social Departure Although my primary function is to teach book history as it relates to forthcoming as part of the print objects housed in special collections, increasingly I find myself— the Canadian Critical of necessity—addressing a wide range of misconceptions about the sprawl- Editions series at ing digital universe. For one thing, a lot of people observe the rapid pro- Tecumseh Press. liferation of digital content and exaggerate it beyond all reason. It is not uncommon for students, and occasionally for professors, to imagine that all print materials—especially older materials—have been, or soon will be, digitized by libraries or by scholarly projects. Simply put, the digitization of rare and fragile materials is complex and expensive, and libraries simply don’t have the resources to digitize more than a tiny percentage of the most frequently used materials. Quite aside from an exaggerated sense of how quickly digital surrogates of print materials are proliferating, an even bigger misconception relates to the life cycle of digital content. People seem to understand that their own devices quickly become outdated and may even be aware of the large number of dead links on the Internet, but people seem to imagine a very long life for digital content, whether it is born digital or it has been digitized from print. The truth is that digital technologies change so rapidly that e-books and other forms of e-content become outdated and inaccessible with alarming speed. Libraries are working hard to reverse this trend, but they already

Forum | 23 own a great many non-functioning e-books. Without expensive ongoing interventions by teams of programmers, e-content is even more ephemeral than the cheapest pulp. Libraries are investing heavily in the development of preservation technologies to create digital archives, but there are more challenges here than with print archives. Chapbooks, dime novels, penny dreadfuls, newspapers, periodicals, and other forms of print ephemera deteriorate very rapidly in comparison to print materials from earlier centuries. Twentieth-century pulps are particularly short-lived because they were generally printed on highly acidic paper. Expensive processes, such as de-acidification, are sometimes used to extend the life of such materials, but it remains to be seen by how much (fifty to a hundred years is the standard estimate). Special collections libraries can preserve only small representative sam- plings of ephemeral print formats because they degrade quickly—despite expensive interventions—and this is even truer of digital ephemera. I leave you with two important questions: How do we create and archive digital content in a way that will offer future researchers the opportunity to reach back through layers of evolving technologies that must be used if we are to preserve it? Secondly, in a digital universe in which quality seems beside the point and the implications of statistical measures of influence are not well understood, how can we determine which digital objects should be selected to receive expensive preservation treatments? The rapid proliferation of digital content makes answering these questions both crucial and impossible.

24 | Quirk Virtually Nontoxic Christian Bök Charles Darwin University

Vinyl is as natural as lichen. Christopher Dewdney

lastic is the silly putty, with which we simulate, then supplant, Pevery facet of reality, converting all the varied elements of the planet into one common emulsion. While we sleep, our automatons toil throughout the night, transmuting everything into a petroleum byproduct that resists bacterial predation. Our species might openly mourn this phase of our demise, but in secret we really exalt the power of its genius, marveling to think that, in some landfill of the future, long after our own extinction, a single crash helmet might still endure, sloughed off, like the carapace of some alien crab. Our gewgaws of epoxy resin and nylon fibre do not attest, however, to any advance in our rational prowess so much as they allude to the breadth of our cultural tyranny. The invention of plastic has given birth to a celluloid spectacle, whose reveries displace the esemplastic imagination of the romantics, filling our hollow skulls with an injection- moulded mentality, as pliable and as durable as any blob of polypropylene. Has not language itself begun to absorb the synthetic qualities of such a modern milieu, becoming a fabricated, but disposable, convenience, no

ESC 42.3–4 (September/December 2016): 25–26 less a pollutant than a Styrofoam container? Has not the act of writing simply become another chemically engineered experience, in which we manufacture a complex polymer by stringing together syllables instead Christian Bök is of molecules? The words of our lexicon have become so standardized the author not only that they now resemble a limited array of connectible parts, and the rules of Crystallography of our grammar have become so rationalized that they now resemble a (1994), a pataphysical bounded range of recombinant modes. The protean quality of our dis- encyclopedia nominated course finds itself vulcanized in our playthings. We see language marketed for the Gerald Lampert as an infantile commodity—a toy suitable for kids of all ages, because its Memorial Award, but plastic coating makes it safe to own and easy to use; nevertheless, we must also of Eunoia (2001), imagine a more corrosive poetics (something vitriolic enough to dissolve a bestselling work of such an acrylic veneer), and if we cannot distill this kind of acid, then experimental literature, let us concoct a more explosive poetics (something catalytic enough to which has gone on to detonate such an acetate finish). We need a lingual variety of gelignite or win the Griffin Prize plastique—the kind of incendiary literature, written only by misfits, who for Poetic Excellence. have grown up, still dizzy from the fumes, after having melted a platoon Bök teaches English of plastic army men with a match. at Charles Darwin University. contents: 65 percent Dimethyl siloxane (hydroxy-terminated polymers with boric acid), 17 percent Silica (quartz crystalline), 9 percent Thixotrol st, 4 percent Polydimethylsiloxane, 1 percent Decamethyl cyclopentasi- loxane, 1 percent Glycerine, 1 percent Titanium dioxide, 2 percent Silliness.

26 | Bök If What We Do Matters: Motives of Research in Canadian Literature Scholarship Sarah Banting Mount Royal University

y title begins with “if,” as if to cast doubt on whether Canadian Mliterature scholarship matters. I write as a sometime insider to the discipline of literary studies and the field of Canadian literature, referring to myself as one of an “us” addressed by articles published in the field, and I have long felt strongly that it does matter. But the study I present here was motivated in part by questions posed from outside the discipline about whether or not and how literature scholarship matters. These questions come from a variety of locations, including from casually curious or skepti- cal outsiders—I hear them from friends wanting to know what research looks like, in English—but also from students hoping to join the field, as they wonder what they are supposed to do in their essays for their English classes. Behind their uncertainty, I hear the question, why: Why would we bother? Why does this text or that analysis matter?1 Meanwhile, as Daniel Coleman and Smaro Kamboureli, Kit Dobson, and others have pointed 1 Joanna Wolfe, among other rhetoric and discourse scholars, has likewise noticed students not knowing what to do in their essays. Wolfe observes that students in introductory literature classes generally do not know how to identify an interesting problem for investigation and analysis in a literature essay (401); even successful students, who have begun acquiring an implicit sense of what is worth arguing, cannot identify strong or weak arguments in others’ essays (400).

ESC 42.3–4 (September/December 2016): 27–64 out, similar questions are implied by funding bodies that seek a type of tidily instrumental project literature scholarship does not often seem to provide (Coleman and Kamboureli xv–xvii, xx, Dobson 16). Sarah Banting is an Compelling versions of these questions come, too, from an adjacent assistant professor at scholarly field that I also inhabit: Writing In the Disciplines (wid) research Mount Royal University, (see, for instance, the work of John Swales, David R. Russell, Ken Hyland, where she teaches Janet Giltrow, Natasha Artemeva, and Heather Graves or the contributors nonfiction writing, to Berkenkotter, Bhatia, and Gotti’s edited collection). Scholars in this field, editing, and writing who are interested in describing the aims, habits of mind, and rhetorical about literature. Her practices characterizing research in various academic disciplines, have ongoing research conducted some sustained analyses of literature scholarship (see Charles project investigates the Bazerman, Jeanne Fahnestock and Marie Secor, Susan Peck MacDonald, prestigious rhetorical Laura Wilder, Katja Thieme, Joanna Wolfe). They have largely pursued moves in literary this project by analyzing professional texts written by literature scholars, scholarship. Despite its especially the published scholarly articles that embody our research. As oddities, she loves this Margery Fee observes in a recent editorial, their inquiries into our methods discipline fiercely. of analysis and argument help make explicit what is otherwise tacit and unexplained disciplinary rhetoric (“Spies in the House” np)—unexplained in our professional texts and, importantly, in our classrooms (see also Wilder Rhetorical, Wolfe, Thieme, Banting “Uncomfortable”). The questions raised by their accounts of our work connect to the questions asked by more general audiences (friends, incoming students, funding bodies), because they too can be conceived as questions about how literature scholarship should be understood and valued: How is it supposed to matter for anyone who is not already a professional in the field?2 I want to pursue two specific versions of that question here, each version prompted by the findings of wid research about our discipline. One is, Can literature scholarship legitimately claim to be doing knowledge- making research—and thus claim to matter in a so-called knowledge economy the same way some other disciplines can? Analysts point out, for example, how our interpretive work remains so fascinated with the

2 Questions about what exactly scholars in literary studies do, really, and why we would bother, have cropped up from within the discipline as well, of course, and they have generated articulate and nuanced self-reflective analyses (for example, those by Heather Murray, Fee [“Canadian”], Jonathan Culler, Richard C. Taylor). These questions have taken various forms at different points in the discipline’s history. These days, the question of why and how our work matters often seems to come out of a materialist analysis of the political and economic contexts of work in our discipline, including notions of labour and productivity in late-capitalist Canada; some of this work was sparked by the recent Trans- Canadas forums and publications.

28 | Banting individual particularities and complexities of texts and phenomena that we do not generalize in ways that would enable us to coordinate our findings with others’—hence we do not generate a body of agreed-upon scholarly knowledge (MacDonald). The critical terms that we do generate in our efforts to encapsulate precisely what we see going on in our material are observed to be “upward diverging”: as they get more abstract, they diverge from terms other literature scholars might use for similar phenomena rather than converging with them in agreement about what is to be studied and how it is to be defined. This divergence apparently happens because our terms are crafted to be precisely appropriate to the specificities of the material we are reading closely rather than being necessarily generaliz- able (MacDonald 42). When we do converge on key critical terms, the shared terms tend to be broad theoretical concepts—MacDonald cites, for instance, Foucauldian critiques of power and authority—first generated outside of literature scholarship (116). Accordingly, as Katja Thieme puts it in her analysis of the language literature scholars use to introduce their topics of study, the central concerns of a given article are “rarely literary”: it would be hard for an outsider to understand “why we’re investigating literature when thinking about these [topics]” (np). (Borrowing from Stanley Fish, self-evidently “literary” topics might be said to include the structure or meaning of a poem, the intention of an author, or the tradition a text engages [169]; if it seems odd to imagine constraining our research to these topics, that oddity is an indication of the extent to which we do not.) MacDonald’s and Thieme’s observations echo anxieties expressed by some literature scholars in the 1990s about the discipline’s apparent dissolution thanks to cultural studies and critical theory, which had at the time been rapidly expanding the circumference of disciplinary territory (Raymond, Fish 162, see also Carter “Scholarship” 303). What are we making knowledge about, then, if our concerns range so widely beyond our discipline and coalesce around so few—and such diverse and non- disciplinary—abstract concepts? Is there a collective knowledge-building project at work? The second question is, If ultimately our work is not to make knowledge, are we simply setting out to entertain one another with performances of our interpretive eloquence and sophistication? wid analysts point out a looseness and idiosyncracy in the logic we use to unfold our arguments and present evidence. This is an argumentative slipperiness that, in their view, renders our rhetorical performance less a solid presentation of evidence—less a reproducible disciplinary explanation—than a distinctly individual showcase of interpretive skill and associative, suggestive point-

If What We Do Matters | 29 building (MacDonald 127–44, Fahnestock and Secor 80–83). (As Canadian literature scholar Sabrina Reed observes in personal correspondence, the wid analysts’ observations recall the disciplinary dictum to “be original.”) Analyzing one scholarly article, for example, Charles Bazerman found that, unlike articles in molecular biology and sociology, which attempt to construct new knowledge, the literature article deliberately unfixes our knowledge of its subject (a poem), to suggest an experience that goes beyond any claim we can make. Rather than taming its subject by creating a representation that will count as knowledge, the essay seeks to reinvigorate the poem by aiding the reader to experience the imaginative life embodied in it. Insofar as the poem can be reduced to easily understood, verifiable claims—“normalized,” in [the article’s] terms—the poem is of little interest. (39 emphasis added)

Bazerman found that the article focuses on mediating for its readers the experience of the poem’s “imaginative life.” And that enterprise, he says, “rests on the quality of the mediating critic’s sensibility.” He goes on to claim what other analysts have also argued since, even when studying much more comprehensive corpuses of literature scholarship than his— that “a critic’s persuasiveness … depends in part on establishing a persona of perceptivity, if not brilliance” (44, see also Fahnestock and Secor 93, MacDonald 142). This question about our purposes—Are we simply out to demonstrate “a persona of perceptivity”?—and the attendant question of why people outside the discipline should think such a demonstration matters, lingers uncomfortably for anyone who studies the rhetoric of contemporary literature scholarship. Bazerman, Fahnestock and Secor, and MacDonald all base their analyses on articles published in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and it may seem easy to dismiss the examples they studied as outdated. But my own analysis of how Canadian literature scholars have recently spoken about work they would like to see pursued in the future suggests that a perception of ourselves as exquisitely scrupulous performers—readers, thinkers, writers, interpreters, advocates—is a major part of how we understand work in our field.3 I find similar evidence of this in the study I offer here.

3 I refer here to a study (Banting “Meta-generic”) presented at the accute conference in 2013. I analyzed what Canadian literature scholars say in the short pieces published as Canadian Literature’s fiftieth anniversary “interventions.”

30 | Banting Others have also noticed that this “persona of perceptivity” persists at the rhetorical core of contemporary scholarship. In his account of changes to practices of “writing criticism” during the course of his own career, Jonathan Culler indicates that displays of perceptivity are not simply a now-outmoded New Critical practice (see also Wolfe and Murray on the enduring centrality of New Critical interpretive practices). Culler remarks, for instance, that structuralism’s efforts after New Criticism to establish a secure and objective knowledge of literary effects “did not succeed,” for the primary reason that “the lure of interpretation, which is extraordinarily powerful in literary studies,” was too strong (138). Deconstructive critics, who pursue a theoretical issue rather than a “complete or convincing interpretation” of a text (Culler 141), themselves offer scholarly writing that is a kind of performance: in Culler’s account, Paul de Man’s sentences are marked by a “twistedness [that] is an emblem”—that is, a sign and embodiment itself, rather than a knowledge-making account—“of the complexities of a thought interrogating the relations between levels of discourse” (142 emphasis added). In discussing his most recent example, an essay by Barbara Johnson from her 1998 book, Culler again describes a scholarly performance that is loose and idiosyncratic in its manner of explanation. He finds it inimitable but “powerfully seductive”: She is the supreme master of the short critical essay, able to go straight to the heart of the matter with a telling example, and then jump to another example that not only confirms but neatly and elegantly advances the argument … Even when, with little space, I tell myself I must try to write like Johnson, I find I can’t do it. I always feel I have to give more background … or try to argue that an example I am offering is representative and not special pleading—an issue that bothers her not at all. She skips all the background, the filling, the justifications, judging (rightly, I think) that if you don’t find her example telling, a paragraph claiming its representativeness won’t help.… There is a spareness and incisiveness to this writing that leaps daringly from the single example to the general proposition. (146) Culler confesses here that he feels himself bound to offer his readers the secure logic of well-contextualized and representative examples—indicating, we should note, that literature scholars do have felt standards of evidence and logical argument-making. But Culler’s essay itself is written idiosyncratically, and he asks readers to recognize the representativeness of his “key texts” on the basis of the readers’ own shared, inside knowledge

If What We Do Matters | 31 of the history of criticism and the importance of these texts’ authors rather than on careful explanation of why they are representative. He writes at the outset that he will focus somewhat casually “on some essays that have There persists been important for me, that embody significant shifts in the discipline, and that involve distinctive ways of writing criticism” (131 emphasis added). In in our work a my own examinations of literature scholarship from the current decade, there persists in our work a looseness of argumentative logic and a ten- looseness of dency to build arguments that shift or twist on themselves according to the peculiar habits of mind of the individual scholar. argumentative These are the compelling questions raised by Writing in the Disci- plines analyses. Should literature scholarship abandon any claim to be logic and a doing knowledge-making research, and, if not, is it simply what Michael Carter calls a “rhetoric of display”? I am not going to answer these ques- tendency to tions strictly in the affirmative. Yes: when I examine the collection of our research articles that I have assembled for this study, I see that we gener- build arguments ally do not make our findings “compact” or neatly correspondent with our colleagues’ findings on similar topics (MacDonald 36). We are building that shift or an array of dispersed and shifting patterns of understanding rather than a single edifice of knowledge. I see that our range of concerns is enormous twist on and perhaps largely extra-literary, as Thieme notes; while we are quick to claim our work’s connection to widely shared key terms, these remain so themselves very abstract and flexible that they do not organize our work into solid formation.4 In one of the texts I examine, the scholar refers to the key term he according to the is using, translation, as being currently a “dominant critical trope” (Stacey 196), and this seems apt: a trope of criticism is, I would suggest, a recur- peculiar ring figure of speech that may crop up repeatedly from article to article but does not ever quite settle into a single accepted meaning. Yet, what habits of mind becomes evident in my study is that we do position ourselves rhetorically as knowledge-makers, as scholars who are working hard to always improve of the individual our collective critical understanding of important texts and phenomena. And yes, our arguments are built loosely and idiosyncratically. But they scholar. tend to have a certain rhythm—the evidence tends to accumulate until a felt tipping point is reached and the argument becomes hefty enough to be convincing. Moreover, if our scholarly writing is to be seen as primarily a rhetorical performance, it is not a frivolous or an unrigorous one—and

4 A resource book such as Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin’s Critical Terms for Literary Study, for instance, is acclaimed for how it does not define its terms but rather “does” them, offering for each term an expansive essay that redefines and redevelops an idea, treating it as an active practice rather than a settled concept.

32 | Banting only in the strictest sense should we say it is designed to matter only to disciplinary insiders. The articles I examine make evident that literature scholarship involves an effortful performance of vigilant attention, and we pay this attention both to scholarly matters, which might be said to matter only to ourselves, and to ethical ones that we believe resonate widely. This performance of vigilance counters the appearance of nonrigour in our argument. The argument I have just outlined has emerged, for me, out of my wider study of what literature scholars claim to be the motivations that drive our research. So here I present an account of those motivations as they appear in a particular set of texts—an account of what I hear us saying about why our work matters. Much of the wid work so far has identified subtextual patterns of argument, attention, and reasoning in our professional texts; in this article, I turn a spotlight on our more explicit claims. I discuss the claims made in a set of ten research articles, selected at random from those published in 2013 and 2014 by the journals Canadian Literature, Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en littérature Canadienne, English Stud- ies in Canada, American Review of Canadian Studies, and International Journal of Canadian Studies.5 I chose articles by scholars working in the field of Canadian literature, since I am closer to it than any other field of literature research and therefore feel most confident assessing its claims. These claims are sometimes briefly made, but they are also telling: paying attention to them and to the underlying system of values that warrants those claims offers a portrait of the field and the discipline in its own words; they begin to tell us what we do and why we think it matters. Along the way, I offer in full my answers to the questions discussed above. See the following table for a list of the articles I analyzed (in alphabetical order by publishing journal) and how I categorized their respective motives.

5 The size of my ten-article sample, in proportion to what the journals published during those two years, is comparable to the proportional size of the samples collected by the wid analysts whose work mine follows, notably Laura Wilder’s (“The Rhetoric” 83). To randomize my selection or, more accurately, to ensure that I was selecting articles for reasons incidental to their rhetoric or topics, rather than based on my own desire to make an argument, I decided in advance to study the first full-length research article in Canadian literature studies published in 2013 and the last one published in 2014, from each journal. In the case of journals in the broader field of Canadian Studies (the American Review and the International Journal), which tend to publish history, cultural studies, and sociology as well as articles focused primarily on texts, I chose the first- and last-published articles that seemed, to my judgment, to fall within the purview of literature studies. This means, however, that the articles chosen from those journals are not necessarily the first and last full-length articles published at all

If What We Do Matters | 33 Author Article Title Journal Publica- Précis Motives tion Details Lynch, Presenting the Past: The American Review 43.1 (2013) Argues that important works of improve our Gerald Tendentious Use of History of Canadian revisionist historical fiction, including collective ethical in Contemporary Canadian Studies those by Kogawa and Wiebe, grotesquely stance Literature distort historical truths in their sentimental critique of national policy. Narbonne, Carlylean Sentiment and American Review 44.4 (2014) Reads the humour and conception of read important André the Platonic Triad in Anne of of Canadian community in Anne through Thomas texts better Green Gables Studies Carlyle’s ideas, arguing that it departs from the sentimental to offer a new conservative critique of contemporary values. McKegney, “Pain, pleasure, shame. Canadian 216 (2013) Argues that residential schools policed improve our Sam Shame”: Masculine Literature gender in order to dispossess indigenous collective ethical Embodiment, Kinship, and children of their traditional relations and stance; improve our Indigenous territories; reads an embodied political collective critical Reterritorialization performance for its re-terretorializing understanding of the and restorative capacity. world Schmaltz, “To forget in a body”: Canadian 222 (2014) Reads an unpublished collaborative enrich the critical Eric Mosaical Consciousness and Literature collection, arguing that, being canon; read Materialist Avant-Gardism ideologically if not aesthetically cohesive, important texts in bill bissett and Milton it deserves attention for its “materialist better Acorn’s Unpublished I Want avant-gardism.” to Tell You Love Kuttainen, Dear Miss Cowie: The English Studies in 39.4 (2013) Argues that an archive of publications enrich the critical Victoria Construction of Canadian Canada and correspondence reveals a richer and canon; improve our Authorship, 1920s and 1930s more diverse print culture in interwar collective critical Canada than scholars have yet understanding of the recognized. world; improve our collective ethical stance Stacey, Mad Translation in Leonard English Studies in 40.2–3 Argues that the novels importantly, and read important Robert David Cohen’s Beautiful Losers and Canada (2014) comparably, examine a breakdown of texts better; Douglas Glover’s Elle consciousness that leads to a “translation” improve our that is a radical encounter with the other. collective critical understanding of the world Dansereau, La maison de retraite International 47 (2013) Argues that three novels illustrate improve our Estelle comme espace Journal of fiction’s capacity to illuminate collective critical hétérotopique dans les Canadian Studies disregarded spaces, such as the understanding of the romans canadiens: Exit retirement home, and reveal the world Lines de Joan Barfoot, Et complexities of aging people’s dansent les hirondelles de experiences. Marguerite-A. Primeau et Les vieux ne courent pas dans les rues de Jean-Pierre Boucher MacRae, “Honeyed Epoché”: International 49 (2014) Offers a reading of the philosophical read important Ian J. Thinking and Singing in Ken Journal of concepts in Babstock’s collection, arguing texts better; enrich Babstock’s Airstream Land Canadian Studies for the depth and value of its examination the critical canon Yacht of consciousness. Wright, Politicizing Difference: Studies in 38.1 (2013) Reads a contemporary play, which has so enrich the critical Kailin Performing (Post)Colonial Canadian far been ignored by scholars, for its canon; read Historiography in Le Théâtre Literature/ postcolonial critique of a historic colonial important texts de Neptune en la Nouvelle- Études en play; argues that the new play offers an better; improve our France and Sinking Neptune littératures important, but limited, critique. collective ethical canadiennes stance Kerber, “You Are Turning into a Studies in 39.1 (2014) Argues that the form of Coupland’s novel improve our Jenny Hive Mind”: Storytelling, Canadian prompts a model of reading that is collective critical Ecological Thought, and the Literature / valuable for conceiving ecological understanding of the Problem of Form in Études en phenomena at a scale that is otherwise world; read Generation A littératures difficult to think. important texts canadiennes better

348 | |Banting Banting Author Article Title Journal Publica- Précis Motives tion Details Collectively, my ten articles make up roughly 8 percent of the full- Lynch, Presenting the Past: The American Review 43.1 (2013) Argues that important works of improve our length articles about literature published in the years 2013 and 2014 by Gerald Tendentious Use of History of Canadian revisionist historical fiction, including collective ethical in Contemporary Canadian Studies those by Kogawa and Wiebe, grotesquely stance those five journals together. This is a small sample, and I do not claim Literature distort historical truths in their sentimental critique of national policy. that it is strictly representative of recent research work in the field. Only Narbonne, Carlylean Sentiment and American Review 44.4 (2014) Reads the humour and conception of read important one of the articles happens to have been written in French, and there are André the Platonic Triad in Anne of of Canadian community in Anne through Thomas texts better Green Gables Studies Carlyle’s ideas, arguing that it departs innumerable topics and texts of contemporary interest to our wide-ranging from the sentimental to offer a new field that do not appear in the articles. I will say more shortly about how conservative critique of contemporary values. even the genre of the research article does not at all encompass the variety McKegney, “Pain, pleasure, shame. Canadian 216 (2013) Argues that residential schools policed improve our Sam Shame”: Masculine Literature gender in order to dispossess indigenous collective ethical of work we do. But in its very diversity, the set rather resembles contem- Embodiment, Kinship, and children of their traditional relations and stance; improve our porary scholarship in the field: it includes work on canonical novels Anne( Indigenous territories; reads an embodied political collective critical Reterritorialization performance for its re-terretorializing understanding of the of Green Gables, Beautiful Losers) and on recent ones (Joan Barfoot’s Exit and restorative capacity. world Lines, Jean-Pierre Boucher’s Les vieux ne courent pas les rue, Douglas Schmaltz, “To forget in a body”: Canadian 222 (2014) Reads an unpublished collaborative enrich the critical Eric Mosaical Consciousness and Literature collection, arguing that, being canon; read Coupland’s Generation A, and Douglas Glover’s Elle). It includes work on Materialist Avant-Gardism ideologically if not aesthetically cohesive, important texts in bill bissett and Milton it deserves attention for its “materialist better historical and recent poets (bill bissett, Milton Acorn, and Ken Babstock), Acorn’s Unpublished I Want avant-gardism.” on middle-brow literary journalism from the early twentieth century, and to Tell You Love Kuttainen, Dear Miss Cowie: The English Studies in 39.4 (2013) Argues that an archive of publications enrich the critical on historical and contemporary performances produced in and outside of Victoria Construction of Canadian Canada and correspondence reveals a richer and canon; improve our conventional theatres (the seventeenth-century colonial spectacle known Authorship, 1920s and 1930s more diverse print culture in interwar collective critical Canada than scholars have yet understanding of the as Le Théâtre de Neptune en la Nouvelle-France, a recent response play recognized. world; improve our collective ethical called Sinking Neptune, and a publicized pilgrimage by the Residential stance School Walkers). It includes work on archival materials, postcolonial ques- Stacey, Mad Translation in Leonard English Studies in 40.2–3 Argues that the novels importantly, and read important Robert David Cohen’s Beautiful Losers and Canada (2014) comparably, examine a breakdown of texts better; tions, ecocritical concerns, and the problems of sanity in a globalized Douglas Glover’s Elle consciousness that leads to a “translation” improve our reality; it includes work advocating for the re-appreciation of overlooked that is a radical encounter with the other. collective critical understanding of the texts. The set of ten articles that I analyze here, then, might be considered world illustrative of the kind of scholarly work presently being done in our field. Dansereau, La maison de retraite International 47 (2013) Argues that three novels illustrate improve our Estelle comme espace Journal of fiction’s capacity to illuminate collective critical My investigation into what these articles claim to have been the moti- hétérotopique dans les Canadian Studies disregarded spaces, such as the understanding of the romans canadiens: Exit retirement home, and reveal the world vations for their research work is prompted by contemporary rhetori- Lines de Joan Barfoot, Et complexities of aging people’s cal theory, which, following Kenneth Burke, establishes motive as one of dansent les hirondelles de experiences. Marguerite-A. Primeau et the key dimensions of any rhetorical act—that is, of any attempt to have Les vieux ne courent pas dans les rues de Jean-Pierre an effect on an audience through discourse, or gesture, or any symbolic Boucher means beyond brute force. As Carolyn R. Miller has influentially estab- MacRae, “Honeyed Epoché”: International 49 (2014) Offers a reading of the philosophical read important Ian J. Thinking and Singing in Ken Journal of concepts in Babstock’s collection, arguing texts better; enrich lished, motives are not simply private, individual motivations for particular Babstock’s Airstream Land Canadian Studies for the depth and value of its examination the critical canon rhetorical acts. Motives are socially recognized and socially acceptable Yacht of consciousness. Wright, Politicizing Difference: Studies in 38.1 (2013) Reads a contemporary play, which has so enrich the critical Kailin Performing (Post)Colonial Canadian far been ignored by scholars, for its canon; read during that time span. I also allowed myself two exceptions to my rule, for the Historiography in Le Théâtre Literature/ postcolonial critique of a historic colonial important texts sake of access and efficiency. Because I had previously analyzed a 2013 article de Neptune en la Nouvelle- Études en play; argues that the new play offers an better; improve our France and Sinking Neptune littératures important, but limited, critique. collective ethical from English Studies in Canada for a similar study (which also involved selecting canadiennes stance articles at random), I used it instead of another article from the same issue for Kerber, “You Are Turning into a Studies in 39.1 (2014) Argues that the form of Coupland’s novel improve our this one. And, since I was unable to access the second (and final) 2014 issue of Jenny Hive Mind”: Storytelling, Canadian prompts a model of reading that is collective critical Studies in Canadian Literature at the time when I was collecting my corpus, I Ecological Thought, and the Literature / valuable for conceiving ecological understanding of the used the last article published in the first 2014 issue instead. While these excep- Problem of Form in Études en phenomena at a scale that is otherwise world; read Generation A littératures difficult to think. important texts tions break the rule of selection, they do not trouble my claim to have selected canadiennes better articles for incidental reasons.

8 | Banting If What We Do Matters | 35 impulses to take rhetorical action in a particular way in given situations. They are conventions proper to situations and to the discourse communities that use them (Miller 30–31). Importantly, all rhetorical action happens within rhetorical genres, or types of recurring “social action,” in Miller’s terms, and genres come with their own accepted motives. The research article in literature scholarship is one such genre, with its typi- fied social action being, roughly and broadly stated, to persuade other literature scholars to accept it as a legitimate contribution to the ongoing conversation about some topic of literary-scholarly interest and relevance. Indeed, Miller establishes that motives actually define genres, or, more precisely, they do so along with the typical social and rhetorical situation in which the genres take place (24). People in a discourse community recognize a typical, recurring type of social situation and recognize it as “need[ing]” (30) a particular type of rhetorical response: thus a socially recognized motive to act arises. So we recognize a research article as being a research article not just because of the social situation that generates it but, crucially, because it seems to embody a motive that is suitable to the situation of a scholar in the discipline. Its acceptance and publication in a peer-reviewed journal signifies its having embodied the sort of shared motive that researchers in the discipline recognize and approve as appropriate to the current scene of research. In quite other terms, I would add, its publication signifies that the reviewers thought the article matters—suitably. Hence my interest in the motives that shape contemporary Canadian literature scholarship.

before i present in detail my account of those motives, I want to contextualize the genre of critical writing represented by the ten articles I analyze here. As scholarly research articles in literature studies, they are instances of the genre on which wid analysts have focused—the one most directly scrutinized by the question of whether our research “creates knowledge.” They self-identify as instances of this genre not only by their characteristic length and their publication in scholarly journals but by making the genre’s central rhetorical move: they deliberately present a study of a set of texts and argue a particular point based on the reading of those texts. Indeed, nine of ten explicitly declare their participation in the genre, announcing, in these or similar words, that “In this essay (or article, or paper), I will argue …” The research article is one of the most important genres in our discipline (Parodi 136). But it is certainly not the only genre that counts as criticism in Canadian literature studies. Below, I offer a short account of our professional genres besides the contemporary research

36 | Banting article. wid analysts would not hold any of these accountable for producing knowledge, nor express concern if they seemed to offer a “rhetoric of display,” since these other genres respond to different social situations and commit themselves to different social actions than academic research. But the articles that embody some of these other genres have appeared in journals that also publish academic research. The critics who write in these other genres have been in more or less close conversation with academic researchers (when there has even been a distinction between the roles), both as colleagues in the same departments of English and as fellow intellectuals who share particular topics and interests, and they read and cite one another’s work. Indeed, frequently the same persons have worked in multiple critical genres, only one of which is academic research. And, by being cited and discussed in research articles, the insights offered in these genres have often been taken up by researchers as new knowledge. Hence, because they are, and have historically been, in close conversation with research in our field, these additional genres help illuminate and contextualize what we are doing in our research, and why. A historical survey of our professional critical genres must include, as Michael Greene indicates, the journalistic essays of nineteenth-century critics (254–55). It must include anthologies of Canadian literature (Greene 254), with or without critical introductions, from Edward Dewart’s in 1864 to Laura Moss and Cynthia Sugars’s in 2009, as well as book reviews, particularly the scholarly genres of review practised mid-twentieth century by Northrop Frye or by contemporary contributors to Canadian Literature. It must also include creative-critical and theoretically informed essays published in essay collections or small literary magazines, including, for instance, the essays in Aritha van Herk’s In Visible Ink: Crypto-Frictions and Fred Wah’s Faking It: Poetics and Hybridity, and the theoretically informed essays published alongside creative writing in a profusion of twentieth-century small magazines, such as Liberté, Les Écrits du Canada français, Open Letter, Mosaic, Room, Brick, or Études françaises (New 564–70). A survey of our professional genres must also include works of meta-criticism and literary theory, such as Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism, Frank Davey’s “Surviving the Paraphrase,” or Linda Hutcheon’s Irony’s Edge. It must include the polemical and theoretically informed short essays, which are often works of semi-autobiographical criticism directed at academic culture, published in the Readers’ Forum sections of recent issues of English Studies in Canada. And, certainly, it must include lectures and conference presentations for public and academic audiences.

If What We Do Matters | 37 In this short list, I used the word “genres” in its familiar sense, meaning text types partly defined by their formal features and their publication format or medium (from newspaper to anthology, small magazine to public talk). To rewrite this survey applying more faithfully the rhetorical concept of genre I outlined above, I would list instead the variety of different social situations, and resulting motives, that have prompted critics to write such an array of publications besides scholarly research articles. For brevity’s sake, the following paragraph focuses on just a couple of those motives, quickly sketching the ones that are most relevant in comparison with research articles in light of the questions raised by wid analysts: an evaluative motive and a creative-critical one. The early journalists, essayists, and lecturers were motivated to discern and rate aesthetic value in literary works by Canadians. This motive prompted critical works by, for example, Edward Hartley Dewart (in 1864), Sara Jeanette Duncan (1886), G. Mercer Adam (1888), William Douw Lighthall (1889), Archibald Lampman (1891), James Cappon (1905), L. A. McKay (1933), W. P. Wilgar (1944), Louis Dudek (1956), and Milton Wilson (1958). According to Greene, Henri-Raymond Casgrain, an early figure of influence in Quebec, was also prompted by this evaluative motive; Cas- grain was additionally moved to moralize and prescribe an “agrarian and Catholic” lifestyle through his criticism (255). As both Heather Murray (72, 75) and Margery Fee have observed, the evaluative motive remained strong until the 1960s, even in university-based criticism in Canada and even while literature scholarship in America had dedicated itself to philo- logical research early in the century (Graff). The strength of this motive was a result of Canadian academics’ nationalistic determination to dis- tinguish themselves from the American academy and to assert the rigour of their own critical judgment, according to Fee (“Canadian”). Academic critics, she explains, needed to secure their own credibility by evaluat- ing Canadian literature as mediocre, even as they needed to establish and publicize the very existence of that literature in order to defend the nation’s legitimacy in the terms of an Arnoldian humanism. For the same situational reasons, early anthologists, such as Dewart, were motivated to construct literary traditions, to publicize the existence or the strengths of a nascent Canadian or Quebec literature, and, sometimes simultaneously, to apologize for and explain the poverty of the tradition.6

6 Seeing genres of critical writing as motivated by specific social situations helps explain why Canadian literature studies is somewhat distinct from other fields of English. None of the field’s genres is unique to Canadian literature criticism, of course. But histories of the field suggest that its particular mix of motives is

38 | Banting The evaluative motive, then, shaped early essays on Canadian literature by critics situated and published both within and outside universities. A different complex of motives has given shape to more recent genres which, similarly, have been situated at once at the centre of academic work in Canadian literature studies and beyond its confines, in the public domain of writing and critical discussion. From the later decades of the twentieth century into the twenty-first, creative-critical writers—among them Nicolle Brossard, Daphne Marlatt, Robert Kroetsch, George Bow- ering, Lee Maracle, Rita Wong, Larissa Lai, and Dionne Brand, as well as van Herk and Wah—have taken social action through blended genres they devise to suit their purposes of criticism and commentary (as well as through their novels, stories, and poems): creative-critical genres such as van Herk’s crypto-frictions and Wah’s poetic biotexts. The social situations motivating this work are diverse and multi-layered. But we might offer a condensed account of these writers’ motives by seeing the writers as variously motivated by fictional and poetic expression’s capacities to foster the articulation of critical understandings (Wah 1, Saul 136), postmodern and feminist interest in blurring genre boundaries (van Herk 14, Dvořák 160, 163), the constraints of scholarly genres (Saul 136), and the complexities of personal experience (Wah 16), particularly when such experiences are constrained or marginalized by a Euro-centric, patriarchal, and heteronormative Canadian society. Van Herk explains that the motive to write crypto-friction is for her at once an attraction to lawless- ness and a necessary self-defense in an “age of high-tech theory” (14); it is also a rebellion against the reductive judgments and the self-conscious genres of written criticism. The “rigid stratification” of genre categories “invite[s] transgression,” she writes (14). If one of the suspected problems with literary scholarship is that it mimics the language of the cultural texts it sets out to discuss (Berleant 339), hence blurring genre boundaries that a

distinct from other fields of literature studies, at least in English-Canadian criticism. Murray’s history of the discipline in English Canada, Working in English, does not focus on Canadian literature studies in particular, but she argues that English-Canadian literary criticism in general is “distinctive” for its particular complex “of models and motives” (69). And Margery Fee, whose overlapping history does focus on Canadian literature, likewise argues that literature studies in Canada have a distinct history. Fee’s account of the particular brand of nationalism, at once proudly defensive and apologetic, that produced and sustained these critics’ motive to evaluate Canadian literature, explains the social and historical reasons for the field’s distinctness. I would venture that each of the fields of research fitting under the English umbrella has its distinct history, making for a distinctive blend of motives in each case, although much will be shared between all of them.

If What We Do Matters | 39 traditional idea of research presumes must remain intact, there is indeed, and purposefully, no distinction between the discourses of creative and critical social action in these creative-critical genres.7 It is relevant to my central questions about literature scholarship—its status as research or display—to note that rhetorical theory would classify both the early evaluative criticism and the recent creative-critical work as epideictic rhetoric. wid analysts have consistently used this term to pinpoint the concerning qualities of our research articles; here we can observe some of those qualities in adjacent genres, where they are not concerning.8 In contemporary rhetorical theory, epideictic is a category understood to encompass genres that articulate, shore up, or shift a community’s values for the sake of establishing communion around those values (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, Agnew, Fahnestock and Secor 94); paradigmatic examples are the obituary, the graduation speech, and

7 On the presumed distinction between the creative and the critical, Arnold Ber- leant argues that the central problem of criticism, or aesthetics, is the radical difference between the language of criticism, which is analytical, and the language of literature, which he understands to be properly comprehended only by coming into perceptual contact with it, when, as reader, one performs the language as if aloud (343). Analytical language, which is unperformable, cannot hope to comprehend literature, which can only be a performance (341); this incommensurability is a “subtly vitiating impediment” to aesthetics that cannot be worked around and is only ever concealed by an “equivocation” in critical language (339). Despite his concerns, creative-critical work of the kind I discuss briefly here seems to have found a way to combine the perceptual and the analytic functions of language. 8 The first extensive wid analysis of literature scholarship, Jeanne Fahnestock and Marie Secor’s “The Rhetoric of Literary Criticism,” analyzed seventeen articles from American journals written in the late 1970s and early 1980s; Fahnestock and Secor decided on that basis that criticism ought to be understood as primarily epideictic in function, because it worked primarily to “create and reinforce communities of scholars sharing the same values” (94). And, importantly, it did so in part by way of gorgeous prose. Fahnestock and Secor point to the “artistry” of scholarly language in literary studies (91)—noticing a carefully-wrought complexity of expression—and the “elegant linguistic mastery” required to perform the “delicate balancing act” of literary interpretation through astute paraphrase (92). Of literary criticism’s epideictic character, they conclude, “Reading a literary argument, especially a good one on a familiar text, may be like hearing a sermon on a familiar theme. What is preached may not be really new, but it is brought home to us with an appropriate elegance, a liturgy of citations […] and carefully constructed ethos” (94). Laura Wilder, whose careful wid analysis of articles published around the year 2000 reconfirmed some of Fahnestock and Secor’s insights and set aside or refined some others, suggested that while some research articles seem, indeed, to primarily “reiterate a mantra to the discipline’s values” (53), others dedicate themselves to the less epideictic function of producing “new communal knowledge” (53).

40 | Banting the sermon. But epideictic has also long been understood, since Aristotle (I.3) and even before him (Chase 295), as precisely what Carter calls the “rhetoric of display”: one of the values supposedly celebrated by genres in the category is the excellence of the speaker or writer’s persuasive skill. Their work Finally, as Carter explains, epideictic rhetoric is meant to have no “pragmatic” or “extrinsic” function for the society at large, beyond the particular struggles toward community it addresses. It does not achieve or produce anything of use beyond its own discourse (305–06). Instead, by defining and promoting, a socially just and by exemplifying in its very rhetorical and stylistic character, the values of a particular community, it has the “intrinsic” value of being “a discourse stance, an ethical that the community uses to reveal itself to itself.” According to Carter, “what the audience learns is not so much the practical but the ontological, criticism, and a not so much how to do [or what to know] but what to be” (307). We can clearly see epideictic rhetoric at work in the early Canadian more flexible, literature critics’ discussions of and estimations of literary value, as they sought to establish among themselves not only the relative merit of a more adequate nascent literary tradition and the existence of a Canadian criticism but their own taste and rigour. Indeed in this final aspect of their criticism, the language of performance of refined taste, their writing is characteristic of epideictic in the sense of display: it seeks to showcase the critics’ astute aesthetic selfhood and sensibilities, if not also the elegance of their arguments. But we note, nonetheless, that these critics were determined to produce something of wider response to and enduring value and use: a canon of Canadian literature. Later in the twentieth century, when writers such as van Herk and Wah began work- others’ writing. ing in their postmodern genres of creative-critical practice, discussions of Canadian literature were finally turning from Arnoldian nationalism, rejecting the elitist Eurocentrism of its notions of taste, deconstructing the ideal of a monolithic canon, and beginning to grapple with the ways that literature and criticism are complicit in the violences of colonization, patriarchy, and racism. Indeed, these creative-critical writers participated in that cascading revolution (see Penee for an account of this change in the context of criticism). Creative-critical writers are now at work in a postmodern social situation where social and aesthetic values are understood to be suspect and not universal. But precisely for that reason, their work could still be characterized as epideictic, in the sense of being an attempt to shift, define, and exemplify a community’s values: at the risk of broadly generalizing, their work struggles toward a socially just stance, an ethical criticism, and a more flexible, more adequate language of selfhood and response to others’ writing. These writers are certainly also admired for their exquisite poetry and prose. But their work simply cannot be

If What We Do Matters | 41 trivialized as a rhetoric of display. Its inventive poetics embody serious and urgent critical thought. And, again, like the early evaluative criticism, this creative-critical writing may speak most directly to a community of fellow writers and readers, within and outside of the academy, but the writing’s value-work, its striving for social justice and adequate language, hopes to serve the wider society—particularly those at its margins. Hence these genres can only be partially, and cautiously, described as epideictic: there is in them none of the simple showiness or social irrelevance that the term has been used to denote. Canadian literature scholars working in the genre of the research article today do not share the evaluative motive of the early essayists. Nor are they motivated to invent new expressive genres, like their creative-critical colleagues. They largely perform the conventional social action of research in the discipline: they persuade other literature scholars to accept their arguments about selected texts as legitimate contributions to the ongoing conversation in the field. But—to return to the central questions driving the present examination—what motivates these studies? Why do these scholars claim to think they matter? And can their work be understood as knowledge-making research, in ways others outside the discipline expect? Or is it finally just an epideictic genre, and if so, what values is it seeking to articulate and establish—and for whom? It becomes clear, when I examine the research articles in detail, that they could only be characterized as a “rhetoric of display” in the same very partial and qualified way as creative- critical writing can.

the ten research articles i examine here embody a substantial range of motives. Evidently scholars, and their peer-reviewers and pub- lishers in the field, recognize a variety of motives as appropriate to the situation of research in contemporary Canadian literature studies. As we will see, several things are noteworthy about these motives and what they indicate about the underlying values warranting social action in the genre of the research article. Importantly, scholarly motives do appear: some of these articles claim their dedication to improving collective knowledge about a matter that is presumed to be of sustained interest. The kind of knowledge they pursue seems to be a degree of what they call “understanding” of a phenomenon: an understanding that is at once contextualized by an ever-broader awareness of a general picture and focused on the ever- finer grain of specific nuance and detail in specific materials. Even those articles which foreground other motives tend, nonetheless, to maintain for their writers the role of the observing interpreter of the world rather

42 | Banting than strictly the non-scholarly role of the activist or other agent. Also, the articles do tend to focus on topics and domains of understanding well outside the realm of the literary—even broadly defined, as having to do with the study of texts as texts—in the way wid analysts find so troubling. But they consistently keep the literary in view as well, intermingling their interest in non-literary critical tropes with their interest in literary questions. Here are some of the prominent motives that the article writers claim animated their research. Some of them pursue a traditional motive that we might call read important texts better: the scholars have noticed something about the texts that strikes them as crucial and in need of explication; they construct themselves as motivated to perform and explain this necessary reading. André Narbonne, for example, reads Anne of Green Gables through the philosophy of Thomas Carlyle, claiming that doing so permits a finer account of the novel’s ideological positioning than had yet been offered. Critics so far “have seen Anne as not that conservative,” he claims, but his reading “reveals” its particular conservatism and “the sophistication of Montgomery’s message: Anne of Green Gables is more than a sentimental novel, and Anne is more than a sentimental heroine” (444–45). Robert David Stacey puts less emphasis than Narbonne does on his reading being superior to others, but he reads a pair of novels together, motivated by what he “perceive[s] to be some crucial similarities between the two texts” (173) that, apparently, no one had yet noticed. Stacey’s article seems particularly motivated by what he believes is the obviously special interest of the ideas the novels similarly explore—interconnected ideas of madness, of translation, and of the breakdown of the individual subject in encounter with the radically other (173–74, 196). Translation is the “critical trope” that becomes his focus. Stacey uses the word “crucial” twice in his opening paragraphs, indicating a deep commitment to how much the similarity between these novels matters. Another subset of the articles is motivated to improve our collective critical understanding of the world—rather than just of a particularly “important” literary work (Narbonne 443)—by discerning the key lessons offered by important texts and performances. The scholars serve as interpreters, generalizing the texts’ ideas and pinpointing precisely how they challenge existing understandings or ideologies. Often, they contribute new knowledge about something quite outside the realm of the literary— the gendered dynamics of culturally destructive practices in Canadian residential schools (McKegney), for example, or ways of thinking about phenomena that enable the global-scale ecological consciousness necessary to address environmental problems (Kerber). But they also contribute

If What We Do Matters | 43 to knowledge of more narrowly literary concerns, such as, for example, how “affecting” (6) and “sentimental” (1) works of fiction can, in Gerald Lynch’s view, grotesquely distort critical understanding of the facts of national history (Lynch 1). Estelle Dansereau’s article, for example, contributes both literary and non-literary insights. Dansereau reads three recent novels set in retirement homes and develops from them some new understandings of the contemporary realities of old age in Canadian society. These are understandings that exceed what can be learnt from sociological studies of aging, Dansereau contends, because “ce sont les oeuvres de fiction qui invitent le lecteur à vraiement connaître, de l’intérieur, les experiences du vécu, les traumatismes laissés par le temps, les difficiles evolutions identitaires et les lutes pour maintenir le dignité devant le déclin et les pertes”(139).9 In her discussion of how the novels generate such an understanding of the particular challenges of aging, meanwhile, Dansereau also improves our collective critical understanding of what opportunities the retirement home, “an otherwise neglected setting,” offers fiction writers. Precisely because of their constraints, she argues, retirement homes make “de mer- veilleux laboratoires”—marvelous laboratories in which to study identity construction and the value of heterotopic spaces in narrative (128). Thus they provide rich ground for writers to pursue “l’objet de l’oeuvre litté- raire,” or the object of literature: to imagine the infinite variety of human experience (125). Nonetheless, articles pursuing either of the motivations I have just outlined tend to hold pre-eminent their non-literary topics and domains of understanding. They interest themselves in an impressively broad range of concerns, including ideologies of community, madness, translation, residential school practices, and national history. Even those articles that primarily construct themselves as motivated to provide a better reading of a specific literary text seem to presume that their motivations are further warranted, in part, by the readily accepted importance of their central “critical tropes.” I now turn to the other two major subsets of motive that appear in my collection of ten articles; of them, only one is predominantly preoccupied with what is a traditionally literary topic. This, the third subset, is motivated to enrich the critical canon by introducing or recuperating from oblivion valuable works or archives that other critics

9 In my own translation, this passage reads, “these are the works of fiction that invite the reader to truly recognize, from the inside, the real-life experiences, the ravages of time, the difficult shifts in identity and the struggles to maintain dignity in the face of decline and loss.”

44 | Banting have overlooked. And a fourth set is motivated to perform an undertaking of ethical responsibility to work toward progressive change and to advocate that others do the same—thus seeking to improve our collective ethical stance. I discuss examples of these third and fourth sets of motive shortly. In them, we see similarities with the adjacent critical genres of literary evaluation and creative criticism that I sketched earlier. Despite the radical change in critical context since the first anthologies of Canadian literature were collected—and indeed, because of that revolution—canon- building evidently remains a motive for scholars in the field. And the very revolutions in aesthetic and ethical priorities in which creative-critical writers are participating have influenced scholars writing in the less overtly creative and value-driven genre of the research article. The values warranting these four general motives are a peculiar mixture of scholarly commitment to the production of knowledge and the much broader social and political values of the progressive activist. But some articles tend to take warrant from the one more than the other. Here, for instance, is a passage from an article in the subset motivated to enrich the critical canon. This article claims that the research it presents stems from a scholarly motive of contributing to the knowledge-making work of the field. In her article, Victoria Kuttainen presents what she learned about “literary culture of the interwar period in Canada” from exploring an archived collection of the correspondence between a Vancouver schoolteacher and eighty-three Canadian writers. Kuttainen studied the indices of literary culture presented by the letters and the textual and genre qualities of the works those writers contributed to the schoolteacher’s library. She writes: Their work was certainly variable in quality, but taken as a whole it nonetheless indicates a much richer range of writing and cultural complexity than literary histories of Canada have generally acknowledged. Margaret Cowie’s library of Canadian literature therefore suggests an urgent need to critically modify our understanding of literary culture of the interwar period in Canada. As Pierre Bourdieu explains in Distinction, literary work plays an instrumental role in, and is also affected by, the larger social process of the assignment and contestation of cultural worth; Cowie’s library and correspondence afford some insight into the processes of contestation and exclusion in Canada. In considering the wide range of Canadian writing included in Cowie’s library, and in placing the work of this dynamic cultural period between the wars back into the context of its time, we can grasp a broader understanding not only

If What We Do Matters | 45 of the circulation and reception of literary work in its own era but also of the historical construction of literary value. (146)

This passage constructs the scholar’s motive as being to contribute to knowledge in the field in several ways: by bringing into view a body of writing that scholars to date had so far not acknowledged and by presenting an interpretation of that body of writing that updates our literary histories. And she is motivated to make possible, by way of updating that particular history, “a broader understanding” of the two more general phenomena named in the final sentence. The diction of the passage indicates Kuttainen’s presumption that comprehensive knowledge is a strongly- and reliably-held value for researchers in this field: she can confidently claim that what motivates her is the importance both of “acknowledg[ing]” important texts—not just a select few canonical ones but also any others that contribute to our understanding of important phenomena—and of a precise but broad “understanding” of both the particularities and the general nature of literary culture. Both breadth of understanding and astute attention to particularities are emphasized more than once: the library she is discussing is important for its indication of both a “range” of writing and a “complexity” of literary culture. These values are held strongly enough, she presumes, that a shortfall in our understanding, such as the field’s ignorance to date of this “rich” material, can be constructed as exerting “an urgent need” that motivated her to “critically modify our understanding.” Other articles in my sample place similar emphasis on refining our collective understanding of complex phenomena. A note about how my findings so far compare with what other wid analyses have seen in our research articles. In wid scholar Laura Wilder’s study of the “special topoi” of literature scholarship—the signature topics and implicit premises that characterize literature scholars’ rhetoric (Rhetorical 18)—she points out several topoi employed frequently in the articles she studied. These include two topoi that Kuttainen is certainly drawing on: one is, in Wilder’s terms, an interest in “complexity” (46); the other is a rhetorical investment in setting one’s argument up as a corrective to the previous work of “mistaken critic[s]” (42). (We saw the latter at work in Narbonne’s article about Anne of Green Gables; it turns up with varying degrees of emphasis in more than half of the articles in my set.) I find in this passage, too, a hint of the rhetorical signature that Wilder calls “social justice” (40–42). In general, indeed, the special topoi Wilder and others (Fahnestock and Secor, Wolfe) have identified in literature scholar-

46 | Banting ship largely do show up in the ten articles in Canadian literature studies I analyze here, indicating these articles’ participation in the rhetorical strategies of the wider discipline. As is consistent with my interest in motives, however, I would like to recast the rhetorical signature of “social justice” as not a topos of argument but a type of performance—a performance of scrupulously vigilant conscientiousness (as in Banting “Meta-generic”). For instance, it seems to me that there is a tone of ethical righteousness in Kuttainen’s “urgent” inquiry into “the processes of contestation and exclusion in Canada.” Sur- rounding paragraphs clarify that she finds that previous scholars have characterized the 1920s and 1930s in Canada as barren, insular, and lacking in literary talent. The few works that have secured a place in the canon reveal the way retrospectives of the period overemphasize the impact of literary modernism, nationalism, or politicized narratives of the Depression at the expense of other kinds of texts and authors widely read in their own time. (146)

There is something in Kuttainen’s critical tone here, as she points out that “mistaken critics,” to use Wilder’s term, have “overemphasize[d]” their preferred historical interpretations “at the expense” of works they consider “barren,” that suggests the practice of vigilant ethical conscientiousness as contributing to the mix of motives constructed for her research. Perhaps I hear this especially because of her citation of Bourdieu’s Distinction, a work that has generally been used by recent literature scholars to defend the worth of underclassed works: citing Distinction establishes ethical high ground. Here we see clearly Kuttainen’s difference from the early journalists and anthologists of Canadian literature, as well as her connection with their canon-building project: she cites Bourdieu, while they drew on Arnold’s elitist ideal of great literature (Fee). Sam McKegney’s article even more evidently draws on social-justice values as an implicit warrant for its claimed motivations than Kuttainen’s article does. It is drawn from an article that I would put in the fourth set I have identified: those that are motivated, rather like some creative criticism, to improve our collective ethical stance. McKegney argues that gender was deliberately used in residential school attacks on indigenous students’ personhood, kinship ties, and relationships to land and territory. Establishing his argument at the outset of his article, McKegney writes:

If What We Do Matters | 47 This paper … rehearses the preliminary steps of an inquiry into a crucial but heretofore unasked question in this era of supposed reconciliation in Canada: if the coordinated assaults His on Indigenous bodies and on Indigenous cosmologies of gender are not just two among several interchangeable tools of question, Can colonial dispossession but are in fact integral to the Canadian colonial project, can embodied actions that self-consciously these actions reintegrate gender complementarity be mobilized to pursue not simply “healing” but also the radical reterritorialization and sovereignty that will make meaningful reconciliation pos- be mobilized sible? (np)

to help make Here again we can see a scholar constructing his work as really mattering. He claims he is motivated to take up a “crucial” question, which is reconciliation apparently warranted not simply by the scholarly problem of having been “heretofore unasked” but especially by the social, political, and cultural possible?, is importance of the issues it is dealing with and the implications of the possible answers. The inquiry is crucial, McKegney assumes, because its a knowledge- subject matter is so ethically charged. If the type of embodied actions he is interested in can indeed pursue both healing and the radical recover- maker’s ies “that will make meaningful reconciliation possible,” then—to put it simply—the world can be made more socially just, and that is what we question before want. His inquiry is warranted by the values he shares with his audience: a social-justice commitment to critiquing violence done to Aboriginal it is an activist peoples and the concurrent appreciation of actions that might heal and reconcile that violence. one. McKegney’s article is certainly located toward the social-justice end of the spectrum of motives. But in putting it simply just now, I left out an important nuance in McKegney’s rhetoric, one that pulls his practice back incrementally into the scholarly mode of understanding the world rather than acting in it. His question, Can these actions be mobilized to help make reconciliation possible?, is a knowledge-maker’s question before it is an activist one. Ultimately, McKegney concludes that yes, these actions can be so mobilized. He reads the re-integrative, gendered performance of a group called the Residential School Walkers as indeed mobilizing embodied actions in ways that help make meaningful reconciliation possible. In his final paragraph he writes: [T]his willed performance of embodied discursive action, attests to the ultimate failure of residential school social engineering.… Etherington Jr.’s words and actions are a gift to be

48 | Banting honoured. Etherington Jr. refuses the identity of inevitable victimry, self-defining not as a second-generation product of residential school violence, of the denigration of the body, and of the obfuscation of gender complementarity, but as one voice We are ethically among many that would call the elements of peoplehood back to balance. (np) bound to take McKegney’s work, as scholar, is to interpret Etherington Jr’s performance for his fellow scholars—to put into disciplinary language (“the obfuscation the action of of gender complementarity”) precisely what we might see Etherington Jr as doing, with his own quite different words and actions—and to contribute honouring the an understanding of its implications to our discussion about the injuries of residential school violence and the possibilities of reconciliation. performance. Nonetheless, by claiming Etherington Jr’s performance as “a gift to be honoured,” in this passage, McKegney does step outside of the scholarly mode to position himself and his audience as members of the wider community witnessing that performance and receiving its good effects. We are ethically bound to take the action of honouring the performance, and McKegney’s article does the work of asserting that ethical imperative. It also does the work of honouring. Thus the community of scholars is guided in improving our collective ethical stance, with McKegney himself performing the role of ethical guide. McKegney’s self-positioning as ethical guide is the strongest instance of extra-scholarly performance in my set of articles, although others offer subtler examples, as I will shortly illustrate. Thus, my sample indicates that the wid analyses’ claims that what literature scholars are primarily doing is demonstrating “a persona of perceptivity” in an exquisite “rhetoric of display” is correct, but only to the qualified extent we might now expect. There is certainly a display of perceptivity here. But the emphasis falls on the importance of vigilant attention to crucial ethical and interpretive matters, not on the scholar’s own “elegant linguistic mastery,” as Fahne- stock and Secor put it (92). Rather like the creative-critical writing that is so closely adjacent to research in our field, that is, scholarship may be seen here displaying its perceptivity in a demonstration of, as Carter puts it, what or how “to be” (307), but for the sake of ethics not personal glory. The role of ethical guide, demonstrating how to pay attention to what is important, is a role McKegney takes seriously and performs with a deliberate display of humble scrupulousness. Earlier in the article, he makes a rhetorical move that is by now a familiar feature of progressive humanities scholarship, since critical theory and its critique of authority, power, and discourses of knowing has become firmly established: he

If What We Do Matters | 49 comments at length on the problematic ethical manoeuvres of his own scholarly performance. McKegney decides to paraphrase the testimony of a residential school survivor at the opening of the paper, because this testimony “profoundly influenced” his work and he therefore feels bound “to acknowledge and honour that influence” (np). But he interprets his own behaviour in doing so as ethically unsafe (np) or risky, because, in witnessing, remembering, and using the testimony in his own scholarly work—especially without access to the confidential transcript or to the survivor’s name, which might have allowed him to acknowledge her properly—he risks adopting the settler academic’s position of “voyeurism, consumption, and lack of accountability” (np). Nonetheless, he has chosen to continue paraphrasing her because of the greater risk that he could silence her testimony by not honouring its influence on him—inaction on his part thus amounting to injury to the survivor and her work in testifying—and because he has learned that “ethical witnessing of trauma involves working toward the ideological and political changes that will create conditions in which justice becomes possible” (np). Thus displaying his awareness of the “fraught ethics of witnessing” (np), McKegney interprets his own scholarly activity as taking up a call to work toward “ideological and political change.” It is an impressive performance of what I call vigilant ethical conscientiousness, its vigilant attention turned on the scholar himself as well as on the pernicious and subtle workings of residential school violence. The journal Canadian Literature, in which McKegney’s article was published, awarded it the Best Essay Prize for 2014. The judges commented on how it raised “vital questions” about the practices of settler scholarship as well as about political phenomena (“2014” np); these are evidently esteemed motives for research in Canadian literature studies. While McKegney’s article offers a prize-worthy performance, I see vigilant conscientiousness performed strenuously and effectively in the other articles in the set as well—some more overtly than others. Earlier, I commented on a tone of ethical righteousness in Kuttainen’s “urgent” inquiry into “the processes of contestation and exclusion in Canada.” Her article also embodies her scholarly vigilance by using the metaphor of sight and insight (see Wilder Rhetoric 42 on the “metaphor of perception” in literature scholarship): analyzing her archival material about writers “now obscure” to the blinkered scholarship on interwar Canadian literature, Kuttainen uncovers “valuable insights” and “rare glimpses” (147) of things worth knowing. Vigilance also characterizes the rhetoric of correcting the oversights of “mistaken critics,” as Wilder puts it, in articles by Schmaltz and Narbonne. And another article, by Jenny Kerber, exemplifies the sort

50 | Banting of virtuoso reading performance that, like McKegney’s, neatly illustrates how our discipline performs a strenuously energetic and insightful critical practice. Kerber makes it look easy, but what she is doing is explicitly described as the work of hard thinking. Kerber’s article is about patterns of interpretive thinking that might be of value for environmental activism and ecocritical scholarship, and she discerns a potential model of such interpretive thinking in Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation A by reading it against the grain. As Kerber explains, it is difficult for people to think through how their individual actions are meaningfully connected to vast globe-scale ecological phenomena. “ ‘Scale effects’ … present significant challenges to the imagination” (318), she writes; “the dilemma … is how to conceive” of these things. “Is it possible,” she asks, “to imagine a ‘nonhuman’ version of human agency (that is, the agency of the ‘human’ as a species) to think through our potential responses to this problem?” (319). Like McKegney, Kerber opens her article with questions that, ultimately, her reading of her text will allow her to satisfyingly answer. Her motive, which we might fit into the general category I have called improve our collective critical understanding of the world, seems to be to showcase the answer to this question that she is able to discern in Generation A. Introducing her argument, she writes, “Although the novel does not offer direct solutions for a problem like ccd [Colony Collapse Disorder, which is affecting honeybees worldwide], I suggest that what it does provide is an opportunity for readers and writers to consider the formal structures we use to present and think about complex, multi-scalar ecological phenomena” (318). Her work as scholar is to take the “opportunity” the novel provides to do this sort of difficult thinking about complex things. The reading she performs is impressively presented, contextualized, and illustrated, I find, and part of what my disciplinary value system responds to is how ably she pulls a sophisticated set of ideas out of a novel that—as is so often the case with Coupland—is deliberately riddled with the banal. Kerber writes, The ability to reflect on and experiment with literary form is … where I suggest that Coupland’s work might have the most to offer ecocritics, for it is by looking at form that we can decipher literature’s potential to jolt people out of routinized practices and habits of thought…. This proposal might initially seem counter-intuitive, for the individual stories that Genera- tion A’s characters invent are, despite their eclecticism, also deeply familiar in their repetitive sampling of generic conventions drawn from pop culture. The experience of reading one

If What We Do Matters | 51 story after another littered with superheroes, mass killings, aliens, and talking animals is akin to being let loose in the potato chip aisle: each comes in a slightly different flavour of absurdity, and it is enjoyable to mindlessly crunch them down with little thought to their deeper meaning or consequences. But while the individual content of these tales confounds the hermaneutic urge … there may be a deeper design at work in Coupland’s recycling and juxtaposition of highly recognizable story forms. (325)

Thus deciphering significant patterns of thought amidst the novel’s “mind- less” chatter—patterns that may indicate “a deeper design” on Coupland’s part—Kerber performs vigilant critical insight into things that are difficult to think. wid scholars would identify Kerber as employing the prestigious special topos of “appearance/reality” (Wilder, Rhetorical 34–35; Fahne- stock and Secor 84–85)—finding a deeper reality beneath the apparent surface of a text—for the sake of persuading her audience. But, again, I want to argue that what is of interest here is how her article presents its work as a performance of vigilance, because reading her rhetoric this way allows me to continue responding to the question of whether or not our practices are frivolous or unrigorous. Kerber’s article performs her strenuous interpretive task while showcasing its own investment in taking up the “significant challenges to the imagination” so warranted by the enormity and urgency of ecological concerns. Our scholarly practice, then, might be understood as an exercise in vigilance, a strenuous performance of paying both ethically and interpretively scrupulous attention—an exercise that usually also aims, to some degree, at contributing knowledge to the field, particularly by attempting to “understand” some complicated phenomenon more acutely. I would argue that it is partly this characterization of our work that justifies it as mattering. In our own view, we work so hard at being vigilant about important issues that, surely, it must make a difference. Alongside other scholars both in and beyond the humanities, we spend time guiding each other on how to be scrupulous critics of literature, pop culture, national policy, and historical and contemporary dynamics of violence, authority, and power, and we get so good at it that it must trickle outward from our conversations with each other to our conversations with friends, partners, families, fellow citizens, and students—to salutary and reparative effect on our societies and cultures. Carter finally offers this very view, too, in his response to a colleague’s publicly expressed anger at his argument that literature scholarship—indeed, all scholarship—is simply a “rhetoric of dis-

52 | Banting play.” According to Carter, the conversation we have among ourselves does benefit the “common good,” even if it’s not economically useful (“Michael” 965; see also Baldwin). “We benefit society indirectly just by having the conversation,” Carter writes. “But it is through our teaching that we have a more direct benefit, by bringing the conversation into the classroom” and encouraging students “to engage the world in a particular way” (966). We do not make useful knowledge, in other words, but we engage the world in a particular way—and that matters. I want to suggest that this practice of vigilance stands as counterpoint to the casual looseness and idiosyncrasy wid scholars have identified in the way we present evidence and use key terms in our arguments. To give an example, wid scholars’ observations have made me conscious of a slipperiness in my own rhetoric, when I am writing in ways meant to appeal to literature scholars. For instance, I see slipperiness above, in my already unwieldy term, “performance of vigilant ethical conscientiousness,” which in my use becomes elastic almost to the point of dissolving. From one paragraph to the next, I spoke of a display of humble scrupulousness in McKegney’s article, vigilant conscientiousness performed strenuously and effectively in the other articles in the set, a tone of ethical righteousness in Kuttainen’s “urgent” inquiry, and a strenuously energetic and insightful critical practice in Kerber’s. By the time I closed that part of the discussion, I hoped that my readers would be satisfied that all ten articles showcase a diverse but nonetheless recognizable practice that I wanted to call, finally and expansively, an exercise in vigilance, a strenuous performance of paying both ethically and interpretively scrupulous attention. My own performance here is, of course, a single example, chosen because it is immediately at hand; Culler would ask more of himself, if he were seeking to persuade you that our arguments can be loosely and idiosyncratically constructed. But my amorphous and expansive critical term resembles the terms tracked by Fahnestock and Secor, which they observed “shift[ing] in mid-argument” (81) in the work of one literary scholar. As they went on to say of their example, we in the discipline can evidently see value in this sort of expansive and shifty reasoning (82). But it is vulnerable to scrutiny by outsiders. Despite my fond wishes, it is unlikely that another scholar will take up my term “performance of vigilant ethical conscientiousness” and use it consistently or centrally in their own study. Hence it is unlikely to contribute to a wider knowledge-making effort; I am doing something other than contributing to a “compacting” of critical terms and problems to be researched (MacDonald 22–24). What I am doing, my own terms would suggest, is performing a carefully vigilant

If What We Do Matters | 53 attention to the differences, as well as the similarities, between the professional texts I am studying. The play in my terms allows me to register their variousness—as a trained literature scholar, I cannot stand to suppress the individual particularities of the texts I am studying, even when I want to point to a general resemblance. MacDonald neatly explains the diffuseness of critical terms and problems in literature scholarship by pointing to the discipline’s focus on “interpretive” (versus “explanatory”) scholarly goals and its tendency, along with the rest of the humanities, “to be rooted in phenomena, data, or texts which are potentially worth knowing about for their own sake, not simply as the necessary first step toward generalization” (35). This account feels right, and it seems to justify at least the diffusion of terms in our discipline. But it does leave us open to charges that our articles, individually, are hardly to be taken seriously as contributions to a collective body of disciplinary knowledge. MacDonald herself suggests that, “if literary studies abandons both the goal of knowledge making and the goal of traditional celebration of literature,” focusing instead on the “positive social or political value to be obtained by exposing the workings of power in history”—if we focus on practising our vigilant ethical conscientiousness—then “critics elsewhere in the university, legislators, or the public might easily conclude” that there is “little reason to pay any attention” to our work at all (143). the overarching project of work in this field, as illustrated by these ten articles, is to practise a performance of vigilant attention. We claim to be motivated to pay this attention to a variety of problems: how important texts might be read better; how we might improve our collective critical understanding of the world; how our critical canon ought to be expanded and enriched; how we might improve our collective ethical stance on some important issue. In conference presentations where I workshopped the beginnings of this paper, I offered that we might generalize these motives and see ourselves as collectively motivated to always do better. That phrase is of course too generalized to offer any insight, but what remains useful about it, I now think, is its emphasis on us doing—on the performance of scholarship. Better is important too, though: our rhetoric construes us as always working to refine the ethics and the insight, the breadth and the attention to detail, of our understanding. So how does this performance fit with the expectation that research is knowledge-making work? I have argued that this performance of vigilance counterweighs (although it perhaps does not excuse) the sometimes loose

54 | Banting logic of our arguments. It is our undeclared method of research. It is also our central claim on scholarly credibility, and it is a legitimate claim, I think. The articles demonstrate our vigilance in their self-scrutiny, their determination to take an independent view (avoiding the interpretive The writers of mishaps and oversights of earlier “mistaken critics”), their discernment or invention of otherwise unseen patterns in their material and, especially, these articles their commitment to noticing the details and teasing out the complexities of that material. Our discipline has managed to function without com- construct pacting or settling its terms; we manage to carry on a conversation about critical tropes even as our lines of inquiry diverge and our case studies understanding refuse generalization. Perhaps, then, we have developed a practice suitable to working with literature and other cultural texts, and our scrupulous- idiosyncrati- ness in not generalizing beyond what specific texts will allow is the only acceptable sort of knowledge-making. cally rather than I have also pointed out the articles’ claim to certainty that this performance matters: we turn our conscientious attention to whatever material through comes into our purview, and it sharpens our scrutiny as we pursue “crucial” questions or identify and interpret “crucial” similarities between “impor- reproducible tant works.” Although the articles do not overtly claim the underlying values that warrant these as being pursuits that matter, I found it possible to procedures of discern implicit values, as I have shown. They are often a mix of scholarly and social-justice commitments, with the scholarly drive to understand material phenomena giving primary shape to the rhetorical action undertaken by the article and the investment in social justice further galvanizing that selection and action. Like Wilder, then, I observe a substantial scholarliness in literature scholars’ rhetoric—a scholarly quality that has apparently increased its analysis or profile since the publication in the late 1970s and early 1980s of the articles Bazerman, Fahnestock and Secor, and MacDonald analyzed. through a Considering our commitment to scholarly pursuits, it seems to me that the kind of understanding we are motivated to cultivate begins to shared illustrate why we persist in confidently presenting ourselves in the role of knowledge-makers—and also why wid analysts struggle to recognize us commitment to in that role. The writers of these articles construct understanding idiosyncratically rather than through reproducible procedures of material offering selection and analysis or through a shared commitment to offering scrupulously representative examples, as Culler has pointed out. For example, scrupulously Kerber need not explain why she selects Coupland’s novel to read against the grain for valuable new patterns of thought; it is enough that, as it representative happens, she has been able to discern those patterns in its pages. Implicit is the possibility that she happened to be reading it and happened to hit examples.

If What We Do Matters | 55 upon an idea she thought publishable. Ian MacRae, who offers a reading of a number of the poems in a collection by Ken Babstock, seems, in his article, to wander through the collection, alighting on poems and moments that accumulate support for his explication of its central idea (“honeyed epoché”) or stopping incidentally to comment on “another of the poem’s persistent themes” (345). After pages of close reading, he can comment offhandedly that the poems “might just contain … moments of epoché after all” (348). In Stacey’s reading of the “crucial” similarity between two novels, he does scruple to offer reasons (174, 177–78) why he recuperates ideas from a 1960s psychiatrist with the “current reputation [of] a bit of a crackpot” (175) to assist him in reading those novels. But even his careful article sets out his reading in diffident terms—the psychiatrist’s ideas are “not unhelpful” in interpreting one passage, for instance (183). And his diction toward the end of the article, when his argument has already acquired the heft of pages of supporting argument, begins to suggest that his reading is but one possible approach to the texts: it is simply the reading he happened to hit upon, with the help of the psychiatrist. One character, he concludes, “may be read” in a particular way; “if ” we do so, we see a contrast between her and another; hence “we might propose” that one of the authors is doing something in particular (192, 195, 194 emphases added). An analyst seeking reproducibility of findings, a traditional signature of knowledge-making practice, is likely to be baffled by how individual these lines of argument are, at least as they appear on the page. Nonetheless, if we accept as valuable any illuminating new reading that can be generated, whether or not it could ever have been produced by any other scholar, then these articles do work effortfully and at length to make new understandings available. They are individual performances, but their appearance in print signals that they have been accepted as of value by their scholarly community. Some of these new understandings will be cited in subsequent research; some of them will be taught. To whom are these performances meant to matter? Our social-justice commitments are largely practised in our scholarship as a rhetoric designed specially for our colleagues in the field, as Wilder recognized when she identified them as persuasive techniques specific to disciplinary argument. Except in cases like McKegney’s, where doing the scholar’s work well also involves doing the progressive citizen’s or the activist’s work of honouring something that deserves to be honoured, our performances are ultimately designed for the disciplinary or field community exclusively. This is evident even in McKegney’s article: the scholarly language he uses to interpret Etherington Jr’s performance appeals primarily—probably

56 | Banting solely—to professional scholars in the discipline. If what we do matters to anyone beyond ourselves, then, it apparently matters because our conversation with and performances for each other contribute to what Carter called “the common good.” But they usually do so very indirectly and often, as he said, by way of our students, whom we hope will find some way to apply, in their extracurricular lives, our lessons in vigilant ethical and interpretive conscientiousness.10 Meanwhile, the very variety of the adjacent professional genres that I listed earlier—genres that we include in the discipline alongside research writing and that are often published and taken up together with literary scholarship—is perhaps a result of our need for additional ways of communicating these urgent lessons. As Carter points out as well, the practice of only addressing our colleagues is common to scholarly disciplines and indeed to all specialist discourse (“Scholarship”). Perhaps there is in this respect little rhetorical difference between our conversations with each other about social- justice issues such as the ethics of witnessing and biomedical researchers’ conversations with each other about cancer cures (to point to a clichéd example of what a conservative government might consider publicly fund- able knowledge-making). In both cases the conversation is presumed to have wider resonance because the topic at hand matters so much to a wider population. What differs between the two examples is, in part, a difference in the apparatus for uptake and dissemination of research findings. Science journalists, for instance, translate biomedical research for wider publics, presuming their curiosity and investment in the topics; ideally, policy-makers and health practitioners consult biomedical research when making decisions. Arts journalists, by contrast, tend to disparage literary scholars’ rhetoric, findings, and concerns. Indeed, arts journalists, some of whom are former English students, are empowered to practise their own fledgling methods of vigilant conscientiousness as they develop their

10 Our striking reliance on our students to make our work matter, in this account, is bemusing, given the weaknesses wid researchers have uncovered in the traditional pedagogies of our discipline, which I have outlined elsewhere (Banting “Uncomfortable”). Wolfe and Wilder have each studied how literature students are taught, finding that we rarely teach our motives—or, in their terms, our rhetorical strategies for invention, interpretation, and argument-making—explicitly, although we nonetheless grade students according to their success in reproducing them (Wolfe 401). Accordingly, we are not doing much to help them become literature scholars. In some cases, what we do teach is more like a social justice practice than like our own scholarly practice (Wilder 67–69); if we could align our grading with our pedagogy, in these cases (as Wilder’s work suggests we do not [79, 81, 100–01]), we might be doing our students the favour we are attempting to do for our disciplinary values.

If What We Do Matters | 57 own interpretations of the cultural texts on which they are commenting. Our students are out there, then, “engaging the world” the way we do, but their public performances displace what might otherwise have been Literature reports of our findings. This is ironic, if it is so, given how intensely contemporary scholars scholars’ commit ourselves to topics we presume matter to broader publics. Indeed, I even wonder if perhaps we presume that these topics warrant our motiva- gravitation to tion to pursue them precisely because they exceed the literary. To put it differently, it seems to me that literature scholars’ gravitation to extra-literary extra-literary topics offers an opportunity to understand why we seem so convinced that our discipline matters: we cannot simply proceed as if the literary mat- topics offers ters, in its own right, without violating a progressive ethics that we have come to hold as one of the deep values of our discipline.11 Perhaps it is an opportunity an ethical distaste for a conservative historical commitment to the value of the literary that leads contemporary scholars to seek warrants for the to understand importance of their concerns outside of that realm. If Dansereau’s article about the complexities of aging people’s experience in retirement homes, why we seem so for example, is any evidence of our shared assumptions, what remains, then, is to convince a wider public to accept what we take for granted: that convinced that our findings about important topics are worth attending to; that literature, like sociological data, is an appropriate vehicle for examining important our discipline topics; and that it is appropriate even though the literary ought no longer be privileged as of high cultural value. matters. Perhaps, if we seek to use the language of knowledge economics to answer questions about our value, we might present ourselves and our

11 In suggesting as much, I am influenced by wid scholar Janet Giltrow’s speculation about why literature scholars avoid explaining their actual practices in their statements about how to do academic writing in their discipline. She finds that, like expert users of all sorts of genres, literature scholars tend to offer metacom- mentary about how to write in the discipline that is elliptical to the point of misleading. According to Giltrow, “much of genre-know-how is tacit, and its [explicit] discursive representation can be difficult and even distorting” (200). Indeed, Giltrow and other researchers who have watched scholars attempting to teach academic genres to students find that even well-intentioned instruction can be “mischief, impediments to learners’ progress” (188). Possibly the mischief arises because these scholars, already expert in these genres, acquired them themselves despite being taught nothing other than the same few, unhelpful pieces of writing advice. But possibly, Giltrow speculates, scholars are “shy to recognize or acknowledge” certain things about the genres they work in, such as “the limited contexts and local features [seen as ‘jargon’ by outsiders] of scholarly expression” (201). They are “shy to concede the normalizing forces of” their discourse [201], being so likely to pitch themselves against normalizing forces in their critical practices.

58 | Banting graduating students as a resource for society and government: not being any longer a community that defines and celebrates the glory of literature and high culture, we are now a new kind of think tank, with largely skepti- cal attitudes to power and largely progressive politics, that specializes in thinking about what’s hard to think and thinking it in idiosyncratic, unre- producible, non-linear ways. We offer methods alternative to scientific ones, that stretch how our society can know.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Sabrina Reed, Kit Dobson, and my anonymous readers, whose thoughtful comments greatly strengthened this paper; the audience-members, presenters, and organizers of the conference panels on which earlier versions of this work appeared, for their enriching feedback; and the Department of English at Mount Royal University, for granting me time to complete this paper. Any errors or problems of interpretation here are, of course, mine.

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64 | Banting “Dyin’ ain’t much of a livin’ ”: The Ethics of Rebellion in The Outlaw Josey Wales Erika Behrisch Elce Royal Military College of Canada

lint eastwood’s role as the sympathetic outlaw Josey Wales (1976) Cpresents students in my first-year literature classes at the Royal Military College of Canada with an ethical conundrum. The film and its eponymous hero underscore the slippery nature of morality in a time of war as well as the ethics of rebellion. The film dramatizes a scenario that may well become reality for some rmcc cadets, all of whom have dedicated at least a portion of their professional lives to upholding national values in a military context and have committed themselves to being potentially “lawfully ordered into harm’s way under conditions that could lead to the loss of their lives” against people who might be much like Wales himself: disenfranchised, dispossessed, angry, and armed (Duty 26). In the film, Wales fights his nation’s government; in the present day, my students have taken an oath to defend theirs, and yet Wales’s antistatism is understandable, even admirable. This tension between personal and professional loyalties lies at the centre of student discussions of the film: How can Wales be a sympathetic character while defying the very system rmcc’s officer cadets represent? Many critics have described The Outlaw Josey Wales as exclusively antistatist, particularly in its connection with the novel that inspired it:

ESC 42.3–4 (September/December 2016): 65–79 “arch segregationist” Forrest (Asa) Carter’s 1972 Gone to Texas is just one book in a series of fictional works that acted as platforms for Carter’s consistent and “vehement political criticism” (Clayton 20, 21). Carter’s Erika Behrisch Elce true identity as a white supremacist was allegedly unknown “until just is an Associate Professor after the film was released,” but nevertheless the film, like the book, on in the Department of one level “portrays a valorized image of the victimized white American English at the Royal who wreaks havoc on an authoritarian state” (Lowndes 239, 238). Certainly, Military College of Wales spends most of the film evading capture by Union forces, and his Canada. She specializes several escapes from both Union and state-sponsored bounty hunters in nineteenth-century support this antistatist interpretation, implying as they do that happiness literature and culture (and indeed, life) is achievable only beyond state jurisdiction. “Antistatist” but also teaches in the may describe a significant part of the film’s social comment, but not all of common core program it; I would argue instead that, even in its hostility to the imposition of an for all Officer Cadets organized state, the film is still decisively positive about the practice of (the courses in which ethical government. The film’s portrayal of Wales at the centre of a new she includes The Outlaw community—the Crooked River Ranch at Santa Rio—shows that he is not Josey Wales). Her current an anarchist but that he envisions and practises a style of governance that sshrc-funded project is simply (but profoundly) different from the destructive national policy deals with Victorian he experiences at the hands of postwar Unionists. exploration, the British Two philosophical positions enrich our classroom discussion of Wales’s Admiralty, and networks moral standing by offering alternative perspectives on how to view his of influence. profoundly antisocial behaviour, showing it to be, although officially rebel- lious, deeply ethical. The first is the Canadian professional military ethos as articulated in Duty with Honour: The Profession of Arms in Canada (2003), a manual that all members of the Canadian Forces, including my students, are required to read and by which they must abide. Duty with Honour calls attention to the necessary direct correlation between national values and military action; officers and non-commissioned members alike “are dedicated to the national values of the country they are sworn to defend,” values grounded in democracy and the rule of law (Duty 21). The government portrayed in Josey Wales, however, represents the destruction of the family unit, and, in rebelling against a system that destroys both his home and his livelihood, Wales does only what is necessary to ensure his own survival and that of others who eventually find themselves under his care. In this context, The Outlaw Josey Wales belongs to a rich tradition of ethical antistatism from Robin Hood to The Hunger Games, in which lone characters take on a hostile state in order to improve the lives of others. Wales’s experience of government as a dehumanizing force (even after the war it continues to hunt him down) leads to the second philosophical entry point, namely Emmanuel Levinas’s notion of the suprapolitical pri-

66 | Behrisch Elce macy of individual relationships. According to Levinas, responsibility for the other beyond ties of genetic or political affinity—in other words, for a neutral other Levinas terms “the neighbor”—exists prior to and beyond any externally imposed social order: “the neighbor concerns me before all assumption, all commitment consented to or refused. I am bound to him” (87). Wales the guerilla is a profoundly antisocial character, initially rejecting—and indeed actively destroying—moments of human contact. Wales’s irascibility is understandable, given that most of the characters he encounters see him as an enemy or a prize, and he responds to their advances by isolating himself, both with his gun and his temperament. In spite of himself, however, Wales is eventually re-humanized by his reluctant association with and sense of obligation toward others he sees as more vulnerable than himself. As Levinas admits, “nothing is more burdensome than a neighbor” for the obligation he places one under, but it is this burden “to-be-for-another” that brings out one’s humanity (88, 56). Roger Burrgraeve’s assertion that “the epiphany of the face opens humanity” becomes true for Wales, who responds to the vulnerability of others by putting himself at risk to help them even when it is clearly not in his best interest (82). As Wales struggles to disappear into the Texas wilderness and escape detection, the visibility—and vulnerability—of the non-combatants around him compel his return to the social world in their defence. Wales thus subordinates his rebellion against the national political system to his sense of individual responsibility for others, thereby taking essentially a Levinasian approach to social policy. Recognizing the inherent tyranny of a superimposed social order, Wales negotiates on an individual level for the safety of his community, an action which further suggests a Levinasian understanding that the only possibility for a collective future lies in accepting both “[r]esponsibility for the other [and the suprapolitical primacy of] human fraternity itself” (Levinas 116). Laurence Knapp approaches this argument with his statement that the film offers “an argument for diversity and a culture built on human rather than legal principles,” but I would make a distinction from Knapp in his description of the Crooked River Ranch as a “melting pot” (83). For Levinas, to overlook “the uniqueness of the other” is to invite social violence, precisely what Wales and his companions struggle to avoid (Burrgraeve 83). Wales’s rebellion is necessary in order to build a community that is both “human and humane,” one that keeps room for “pity, compassion, pardon and prox- imity”: the political rebel is the social hero (Burrgraeve 96; Levinas 117).

“Dyin’ ain’t much of a livin’ ” | 67 A reluctant rebel At first glance, Wales is not an easy hero to champion: his status as an Wales is an armed, angry, white American male fighting on the Confederate side of the Civil War makes him someone a viewer might not consider as particularly insurgent on in need of much sympathy. The film, however, allows for a distinction to be made between what Wales and what the South respectively represent. two levels. Wales homesteads in the Missouri bush, but even in the first moments of the film it is clear he is not a Confederate ideologue: his newness is apparent in his accent, and his poverty is in his clothes, the size of his plot, and the effort he puts into shouldering his own plough while his young son picks rocks from the field. He carries no gun. More significant than this, I think, is his utter dislocation from the politics that swirl around him: Wales works his farm in an easy silence, and when the posse of Kansas “Red Leg” guerilla scouts thunders past him on the way to burning his home and killing his family, Wales first looks to the clear blue sky, confused by the sound of what he thinks is a coming storm. Only when he sees the billowing smoke from his house does he understand the danger. In this sense, I would argue that Wales is shown to be apolitical: by coincidence of geography, he happens to be a Southerner, but the evidence suggests he is no Confederate. Moreover, immediately after this tragedy Wales does not become the “cold-blooded killer … on the side of Satan” some believe he is; after burying his wife and child, he arms himself but stays on his burned-out farm, suggesting, in fact, that his priority is defence rather than offence (Outlaw). Only when a group of Missouri guerrillas chance upon him sitting by his family’s grave does he join the battle, and this with a noncommittal shrug: “Guess I’ll be comin’ with you, then” (Outlaw). In the film’s staging of this scene, he is not a rebel with purpose; he simply has nowhere else to go. If we consider Wales an “Everyman,” Eastwood’s film dramatizes the dehumanizing effects of politics as well as of war; the price on Wales’s head is literally the price, in the words of Unionist Senator Lane, of “winning the peace” (Outlaw). At Civil War’s end, violence across the Missouri border continues unabated, and Lane’s dismissal of postwar Union atrocities attests to the sanctioned abuse of the vulnerable countryside: “to the victors belong the spoils” (Outlaw). There is no denying that Wales is deeply threatening to the Union because of his skill in guerilla tactics and political recalcitrance, but he is also the sole source of hope for the beleaguered settlers he encounters on the American frontier, those very people the Union claims to support. In this context, Wales is an insurgent on two levels: not only does he continue fighting the government’s attempts to control him

68 | Behrisch Elce but in doing so he also asserts the rights of “ordinary people”—not just the victors—to have safety and prosperity (Haspel 162). The complexity of Wales’s character reflects that of the militarized world he moves through, which is markedly devoid of the “marks of respect” and the collective awareness of “military values” that today define a military in harmony with the society it represents (Duty 21). Betrayal, treachery, and violence are the norm rather than the exception, as well as the only means of survival for people caught between the lines. The film’s political tightrope is exemplified by ferryman Sim Carstairs, who survives the war only by working with both the Union and Confederate armies, transporting soldiers from both sides back and forth across the river according to the war’s ebb and flow. Like Carstairs, who survives by being able “to sing ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ or ‘Dixie’ with equal enthusiasm,” the film refuses to define any simple binaries between good and evil, and instead its characters prove their moral positions by their actions (Outlaw). Applying clearly defined responsibilities such as those outlined in Duty with Honour—soldiers must remain “dedicated to the national values they are sworn to defend”—to the situations in which Wales finds himself reveal the ethical dilemma at the heart of the film, what Drucilla Cornell terms the “dilemma of what it means to be a good man” in a “complex and violent world” (x, ix). Duty with Honour articulates this difficulty more precisely: the ethical soldier is continually responsible for “making the right choice among difficult alternatives” (31). However, for Wales, the political complexities in the film obscure the moral landscape, making the choice to avoid or engage in violence not only a question of right or wrong but of life or death.

Living by the feud The deep complexity (not to say inconsistency) of the film’s major characters—both its heroes and villains—further blurs the distinctions between good and evil. In the film, appearances are deceiving and no man can be trusted simply because of the position he holds. For instance, Captain Terrill, the film’s arch-villain with his devilish teeth-grinding and caricatured facial expressions of rage, is actually a professional soldier with a duty to fulfill and the one with whom my students have much—at least officially—in common. Terrill, a former “Red Leg” scout, becomes a Union officer sent by his nation to subdue a former slave-holding countryside that has fallen into chaos;1 his sabre-wielding arm, which kills Wales’s 1 Groups of Red Legs were not part of the regular Union forces but, rather, were a self-organized “unit of Kansas scouts, intended to warn of and defend against

“Dyin’ ain’t much of a livin’ ” | 69 wife and son and destroys his farm, has literally become “an arm of the elected government” (Duty 9). Terrill’s prowess on a horse and the liberal use of his sabre also links him to an older, more romantic profession of arms. His willingness to engage the gun-toting Wales with his sword as his primary weapon is even reminiscent of the heroes in Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade,” the “Noble six hundred” light horsemen who, armed only with swords, rode bravely to their deaths against the heavy cannons of the Russian artillery (55). With his actions implicitly validated by his employment in the Union Army and euphemized as state policy, Terrill’s violent depredations in the South could be defined—according toDuty with Honour—as nothing more than “the ordered, lawful application of military force pursuant to governmental direction” (4). Seen in this way, that government—the victorious Union—has a legitimate responsibility to its citizens to “exercise a monopoly over the use of force within [its] boundaries,” and this Terrill does on its behalf (Duty 7). Terrill, as described by his Confederate victims, is a “looter and a pillager”; in the words of Senator Lane, however, he is “the regular Federal authority” (Outlaw). Put in the same context that defines my students’ participation in the profession of arms, Captain Terrill has a duty to uphold the Union’s rule of law, to win the peace. According to Duty with Honour, however, professional soldiers are required to “perform their duties with humanity,” and Terrill’s preda- tions on the Southern countryside reveal his lack of “moral commitment” to his profession (29, 44). Terrill may be simply following the orders of his superior officers, and he justifies his violence with the truism “Doin’ right ain’t got no end,” but his actions are shown to be both inhumane and dishonourable (Outlaw). Raping women and burning children in their homes, as Terrill does to Wales’s family, are clearly not activities governed by “the highest standard of discipline, especially self-discipline” required in the profession of arms (Duty 14).2

raids by pro-slavery Missourians” (Haspel 160). Red Legs were in fact the Union- ist equivalent to the Missouri guerilla groups, of which Wales is a member: according to Clay Mountcastle, “both groups conducted vengeful raids across the [Missouri-Kansas] border to bully, terrorize, and sometimes kill their enemies […] conducting violent surprise attacks that often targeted civilians” (21). Al- though according to Frank Blackmar the group was “never regularly mustered into the United States service,” Terrill’s acceptance into the newly formed Federal force implies, at least in the world of the film, official acceptance of his atrocities (553). See Mountcastle, Punitive War. 2 In my classes we discuss a powerful ethical counterpoint to Josey Wales: Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. Like Wales, Kurtz lives beyond the reach of his government’s oversight but, whereas Wales makes the decision to bind himself to a community, Kurtz kicks “himself loose of the earth,” intentionally

70 | Behrisch Elce Just as Captain Terrill is simultaneously duty-bound and villainous, just as he commits himself to “doin’ right” but fails to adhere “to high ethical standards” required of the professional soldier, the dangerous force that must be subdued in order for America to survive as a unified nation is the film’s eponymous hero (Duty 31). Initially, Wales appears to continue a war that has been declared over as a personal “quest for revenge,” a sentiment seemingly at odds both with his beginning as a farmer and with our expectations of him as a sympathetic character (Cornell 140). But Wales’s first rebellion—the reason he is branded an outlaw—is not technically violent: he refuses to surrender to the Unionist soldiers and take the oath of allegiance to an army that has killed his family. His instinctive distrust of the Union’s political glad-handing proves correct: his former, now unarmed, Missouri riding mates are executed by the Unionists, and Wales alone (apart from Fletcher, his erstwhile leader now hired by the Union to track and kill Wales) escapes physically unhurt. Although Wales is a killer, we can sympathize with his refusal to submit to a political system that has proven itself hostile to the survival of “ordinary people,” as Wales once considered himself (Haspel 162). Like the people he comes eventually to protect, Wales himself is “uprooted, without a country, not an inhabit- ant, exposed to the cold and the heat of the seasons” (Levinas 91). Indeed, Wales begins the film as one of the many hapless Southern settlers whose farms are destroyed by Unionists, and it is only in the smoking ruins of his hand-hewn home that he finds his gun and becomes a rebel and a killer. Moreover, whereas the film’s political system seems corrupt (a child killer is now the “regular Federal authority”), Wales’s own ethical values ultimately correct its moral trajectory, eventually creating a space for community and life where initially there is only violence from both sides. Looking at Wales as a victim of a dehumanizing political system, the film complicates any easy definition of what a rebel is. If Wales is defined as a political rebel, he is not a moral one. His behaviour is antisocial in terms of political conflict and military control, but in terms of ethics he acts very much within the idealized boundaries of community life. For Wales, rebellion is the only ethical option, for it is only by acting against the state that he can protect himself and others. Wales consistently defends vulnerable strangers, who themselves come to form a small protective

committing atrocities as a way of consolidating personal power (Conrad 2377). Of particular relevance to this discussion is Conrad’s inspiration for Kurtz, the rmcc graduate William Grant Stairs, who committed atrocities similar to Kurtz’s when employed by Leopold, King of the Belgians, to lead an 1891 expedition into Katanga.

“Dyin’ ain’t much of a livin’ ” | 71 community around him and eventually allow him—through peaceful means, no less—to move beyond the cycle of state-sponsored violence in which he is caught. Surrounded by this new family, Wales’s life is no longer “reduced to combat” but instead returns to the natural cycle of the seasons—the life of the farm—with which the film began (Redmon 316). After the gun, planting, homesteading, and raising a family become once again Wales’s—and his world’s—primary activities. The gun and the plough even intermingle: while Wales’s guerre à outrance compels him to acts of extreme violence against the new nation, it simultaneously allows for its construction, for it gives him and his companions the confidence to defend their new home, “ ’Cause if you lose your head and you give up then you neither live nor win” (Outlaw). The positive results of this rebellion are clear: a defunct homestead is reinhabited, and new kinship and community ties are formed. In spite of the body count, Wales remains at heart a farmer, and the peaceful bookends at the film’s start and finish suggest that in fact he is not naturally inclined to violence, a further indication of war’s moral corruption. Rather, Wales uses violence to defend fellow victims in a world where politics cannot protect them (and in fact victimizes them), and in the postwar chaos the Union army seems more intent on running down a dogged farmer than controlling the real out- laws in the region. Indeed, the behaviour of the immoral and ultraviolent Comancheros, who rob settlers of their property and violate their bodies, is more akin to the behaviour of Captain Terrill than to the man branded a rebel according to law. Although history makes clear the ethical divide between the Union and Confederate sides of the American Civil War, and Wales fights on the side of “a society that was defined by its devotion to slavery,” the film implies that Wales’s participation in the war is personal rather than political; he avenges his family rather than defends Southerners’ right to keep slaves and, as previously mentioned, the film makes a point of showing that Wales does not own slaves on his farm (Lowndes 249). As Joseph Lowndes argues, in spite of his affiliations with the Confederates, Wales is still “noble in his moral conduct” (244). Wales’s rebellion is not simply against the nation-state as the Union soldiers represent it but against the limitations of any “political ordering” to respect or protect individuals on the frontier, what Burrgraeve defines as an ethical “crime of desertion” inherent in third-party legislation, and it is in his rejection of national politics in favour of individual “unlimited responsibility” for others that Wales redeems himself (Burrgraeve 83; Levinas 10). Significantly, although the war and the chaos of its aftermath are the forces driving the geographical

72 | Behrisch Elce and political upheaval the film’s characters endure, there is no generalization of hardship. Rather, each traumatic episode is articulated as unique: the Cherokee Lone Watie lost his wife and son during their forced march on the Trail of Tears; the Navajo woman Little Moonlight was a captive Each of both Cheyenne raiders and a white frontier merchant; Laura Lee and Grandma Sarah are Kansas pioneers whose men were killed by Confeder- traumatic ates and Comancheros; Ten Bears’s experience of federal perfidy provides the context in which he accepts Wales’s proposal. Each character’s indi- episode is vidual experience is given equal narrative space, and thus characters are shown in essential fraternity with each other. As well, each has something articulated as meaningful to contribute: Lone Watie deciphers Wales’s strategies and motivations for the others and translates Little Moonlight’s story; Little unique. Moonlight saves Wales’s life on at least one occasion (as does Lone Watie); and Grandma Sarah opens the Crooked River Ranch to everyone who chooses to stay. Instead of documenting the grand movements of armies and policies, the film details the traumatic experiences as well as the resil- ience of individual characters and emphasizes, as Paul Haspel notes, “the way in which war wreaks havoc on innocent lives” regardless of race or geography (162). By the film’s end, distinctions of race or geographical origin are still there, but they exist within the praxis of mutual respect, and Wales’s group of “losers […] immigrants, outcasts, and vagrants”—those, like Wales, on the wrong side of history—forms a happy “multicultural clan” on the frontier (Vaux 5; Lowndes 247).3 For Wales and his companions, state regulation leads to violence and exploitation, and Wales’s rebellion can be seen, through a Levinasian lens, as attempting to move beyond this broken system to one more sensitive to individual human rights. Even though it makes for exciting screen action, Wales’s initial violence immediately after the war is for him neither sat- isfying nor fulfilling because it helps no one; it is a selfish urge based on revenge rather than renewal. This rebellion transforms, however, as his community grows: with his new kin, Wales finds renewed responsibility and therefore a purpose to his rejection of dehumanizing national politics.

3 This awareness of cultural relativity is especially apparent in a number of exchanges between Grandma Sarah and Lone Watie. As they prepare for their anticipated battle with Ten Bears, Grandma Sarah hoots, “We’re sure gonna show those Redskins somethin’!” Looking at Lone Watie, she holds up her hand in apology: “No offence.” Lone Watie’s tolerant response—“None taken”—is the same that Grandma Sarah gives when this scene is reversed. The final battle at the Ranch occurs when Captain Terrill’s Union Forces come through, and Lone Watie exclaims, as Grandma Sarah loads rifles beside him, “We’re sure gonna show those palefaces somethin’!” (Outlaw).

“Dyin’ ain’t much of a livin’ ” | 73 The Levinasian priority of the human face illuminates the nature of Wales’s transformation: once the irascible “cold-blooded killer” of the Missouri bush, Wales realizes “that the fate of the other” concerns him each time he is confronted by the vulnerability of his fellow outcasts, beginning with his rescue of the mortally wounded Jamie from the Union camp (Outlaw; Burrgraeve 98). By escaping the encampment with Jamie, Wales gives up his quest for “redemptive violence” in favour of an “ethical duty” to protect the weak and vulnerable (Redmon 316; Burrgraeve 83). As much for the safety of his entourage as for himself, Wales settles in Comancheria, the part of the American frontier most known for hostility to government interference. Still more, Wales negotiates a truce with the Comanche under Chief Ten Bears, a man equally as wary as Wales of nationalist political manoeuvring.4 Significantly, the deal Wales makes with Ten Bears resembles neither federal legislation nor formal treaty but is grounded in individual human experience: “Dyin’ ain’t so hard for men like you and me, it’s livin’ that’s hard, when all you ever cared about’s been butchered and raped. Governments don’t live together; people live together. With governments you don’t always get a fair word or a fair fight. Well, I’ve come here to give you either one, or get either one from ya” (Outlaw). Wales’s rejection of government policy in favour of human understanding reverberates with the Levinasian definition of human rights as eternal and innate: “It is not because the neighbor would be recognized as belonging to the same genus as me that he concerns me. He is precisely other. The community with him begins in my obligation to him. The neighbor is a brother” (Levinas 87). Burrgraeve elaborates: “we stand in a relationship of solidarity with each other, and with the whole of humanity, here and far away, now and tomorrow, in spite of ourselves” (82). This is not to say, however, that the ranch on the Texas frontier where the characters find themselves represents a bucolic ideal: Grandma Sarah’s son Tom knew what he was doing when he made his home’s roof two feet thick and the window openings crosses for a rifle to pass through. Indeed, as Lowndes points out, it is difficult to tell the difference between the initial, idealized “commune and [the] armed compound” that the ranch becomes as the settlers organize themselves there against attack (248). The Crooked River Ranch is vulnerable to Comanche as well as Union attack, but Wales makes a pact with Chief Ten Bears to protect his new community. Ten Bears and Wales recognize themselves in each other, and 4 Ten Bears, a historical Comanche chief that places Wales on the Texas panhandle, was famous for his leadership in raids against the U.S. Army in northern Texas in the 1860s. See S.C. Gwynne, Empire of the Summer Moon.

74 | Behrisch Elce through a blood pact and their “words of iron” they agree to share the land and its resources (Outlaw). But if the ranch is initially the vulnerable community, it is Ten Bears’s village that remains so, particularly because of its acceptance of the Crooked River Ranch: viewers should recognize the lone building as the first wave of settlement. Indeed, watching the film more than one hundred and thirty years after the settling of northern Texas, we know that the onward march of American Manifest Destiny engulfed Comancheria shortly after the time in which the film is set. Grandma Sarah and Laura Lee represent the first wave of this postwar national expansion. Before the war, the area where the Crooked River Ranch was located was essentially beyond any American political jurisdiction, Confederate, Union, or Texan. After the war, it was, at least on paper, controlled by national (Unionist) forces, whose generals soon turned their skills to the subjugation of Comancheria and its people. Given Grandma Sarah’s confidence in the Union, it can be assumed that she anticipates both safe passage to and a prosperous future in the panhandle even while the carnage is still being cleared away from the Civil War battlefields. In this sense, Wales represents Union interests in spite of himself. However, with Ten Bears, Wales does not reject the superimposition of national government so much as surpass it, positing a way to live alongside Ten Bears and the Comanche in which individual human life and the dignity of others are not constantly under threat and moving toward what Burrgraeve terms “an even better justice” (93). We know from history that it does not last. Certain aspects of Wales’s character—his poverty, his acceptance of responsibility for the vulnerable—show him to be a sympathetic character in spite of his identity as a rebel. More generally, though, the film opens itself up to criticism in its persistent exclusion of the issue that underpins most explorations of the Civil War: slavery. Indeed, whereas Mexican, Navajo, Cherokee, and Comanche people include themselves in the community that grows around Wales in Texas, no black characters exist at all in the film, even as bit players. Lowndes argues that this is the only way in which audiences can see Wales as a good guy: “the introduction of even one black character (or even an extra) would call into question” not just Wales’s heroism in the film but also his humanity because he comes from Missouri, a Confederate state (249). With the film’s articulation of personal trauma extended to white Americans, Northerners, First Nations people, and Mexicans, the need to establish individual human rights outside of national politics remains paramount, but the articulation of these rights is complicated by the film’s exclusion of the period’s most politically significant group of American citizens. In Wales’s post–Civil War America,

“Dyin’ ain’t much of a livin’ ” | 75 black lives remain absent from the film’s story of ethical nation-building. As Eastwood attempts to explain in a later interview about the film, the choice in characterization was one that called attention to “the suffering of the ordinary people of that time, rather than ideology or issues” (Haspel 162). However, this exclusion remains a point of debate for my students, and we discuss whether or not the film posits a fantasy of American history in which black people do not figure at all, perhaps inadvertently perpetuating a racism that on another level the film appears to push against by its inclusion of indigenous characters and stories and the consequences of American manifest destiny on First Nations communities and individuals.

Dying by the pen In Levinasian terms, Wales is an ethical character in part because he understands the profoundly dehumanizing ethical limitations of the political system organized around him and equally because he moves beyond that system to live as part of a heterogeneous community of individuals who recognize that their collective humanity resides in their shared responsibility for each other. Wales’s acceptance of great personal risk in order to keep the injured Jamie with him as he tries to escape the Union trackers, to save Little Moonlight from being raped, and likewise to rescue Laura Lee and Grandma Sarah from their Comanchero captors—even after the latter condemns him as Missouri trash—is to make the ethical decision to accept responsibility for others, to “give, to-be-for-another” despite himself (Levinas 56). Wales’s initial reluctance to get involved with his fellow travelers is natural—as Levinas concedes, “no one is good voluntarily”; it is beyond personal choice—but in each of these scenes Wales responds to what Burrgraeve calls “the ethically ineluctable appeal towards responsibility for the other that proceeds from the [other’s] face” (Levinas 11; Burrgraeve 94). Especially in Wales’s rescue of Little Moon- light, Levinas’s theory of the face is fitting, since Wales watches the first stages of her abuse with a fairly neutral expression and tries to negotiate the purchase of a horse until Little Moonlight, barely visible under the weight of her two would-be rapists, catches his eye and holds it. Although the film’s publicity poster touts the excessively armed Wales as “an army of one,” as the film progresses Wales learns that, in fact, the gun provides neither justice nor security; indeed, its possession and use undermine both. Nor is it the only option for rebellion: Wales comes equally to realize that the “deadly repetition of vengeance and violence” is an endlessly repeating cycle only so long as someone is willing to fight (Cornell 147). Although Wales’s gun originally replaces the ploughshare,

76 | Behrisch Elce ultimately the plough is ascendant, the gun becomes redundant, and the American homestead is the site of rejuvenation rather than (and certainly after) trauma. Admittedly, violence seems never far away from Wales—he even leaves the screen with blood slowly seeping from a wound in his Ultimately side—but at the film’s end he heads toward a quieter existence beyond (at least temporarily) the reach of the government that destroyed his first the plough is attempt at community. Some critics maintain Wales’s social ambiguity even to the end, arguing as Cornell does that “we do not actually know ascendant, the what happens” to Wales, whereas others, such as Robert Sickels, feel “it is clear that he not only can go back [to the ranch] but that he will” (Cornell gun becomes 146; Sickels 227). The film offers several compelling reasons for believing the latter: leaking blood, Wales is no longer a self-contained vessel that redundant, and feeds its own rage, and he has killed the man (Captain Terrill) who not only slaughtered his family but who was set on destroying him as well. Tellingly, the American his gun is out of ammunition and, as a student of mine has pointed out, Wales rides into the sunrise, losing what Lone Watie terms his “edge” as homestead is a gunfighter Outlaw( ).5 Most importantly, however, Wales’s identity as a rebel is dead when his newfound friends sign an affidavit attesting to his the site of death and rechristen him “Mr Wilson,” an anonymous farmer staking his equally anonymous claim in the wilds of Texas (Outlaw). In terms of the rejuvenation gun’s limitations in the reconstruction of community, his friends’ affidavit shows that it has served its purpose but now is no longer the most power- rather than (and ful force. Although Wales lives by the gun, he dies by the pen, a gesture that anticipates his return to a peaceful existence. If “dyin’ ain’t much of a certainly after) livin’ ” for those sent to track him, for Wales it opens up the best possibility of a future (Outlaw). trauma.

Making good decisions in a complex world The landscape through which The Outlaw Josey Wales pushes its characters is dominated and damaged by politics; significantly, these characters renew the world in which they live not through political policy but by working peacefully together toward a common goal. As Allen Redmon argues of Eastwood’s direction of Mystic River, in Josey Wales there is no “redemptive violence,” no final confrontation with evil that Wales overcomes in order to move smoothly into the future (316). Certainly, Wales’s climactic meeting with Captain Terrill appears to offer this kind of resolution: in killing him Wales finally overcomes “the oppression or threat imposed by [the] ‘evil’ ” that Terrill represents (316). However, the scene of Terrill’s killing is not

5 Thank you to Officer Cadet Connor McKay for this insightful observation.

“Dyin’ ain’t much of a livin’ ” | 77 the end of the film, nor the proof of Wales’s salvation. What ends the film is the community’s “killing” of Wales himself through his friends’ little lie. Fletcher’s final statement, “the war is over,” is made not in celebration of Terrill’s death or as a conclusion to a glorious final confrontation but as a conscious rejection of violence as a way of life (Outlaw). When rejecting that violence, Fletcher looks directly into the eyes of the man he was hired to hunt, the man who has just killed his partner. Fletcher’s own “epiphany of the face,” rather than Terrill’s death, saves Wales and allows him to do what he had intended when he first refused to submit to Union authority: escape. An unarmed Wales exits the screen, and the battle is not won but is simply over. More importantly, Wales escapes from his cycle of death to the cycle of life on the Santa Rio farm. Wales’s return to his homesteading life allows for the reconstruction, literally, of a new world, a new united state; he is a builder of homes and families, not a destroyer of them. Moreover, Wales’s active engagement with his ragtag group of outcast settlers makes him an ethical nation-builder, for it is through such social responsibility that we create “the condition, the foundation and the inspiration of every human and humane society” (Burrgraeve 96). For my students the original conundrum concerning ethical behaviour in a time of war remains, but not having an answer can be as valid—if not more so—than having clear direction; being aware of the moral hazards inherent in the profession of arms is the first step toward making ethical choices. Their best recourse is not just to Duty with Honour, the text that articulates the foundation of ethical decision-making in war, but to think about how such unlimited liability can intersect with a heightened awareness of individual circumstance—of self, other, combatant, and non-combatant—in the execution of their official duties, the enactment of national policy in an often hostile field. Applying the film’s insistence on the validity of an individual’s rights—and each individual’s abiding responsibility to “be-for-another, despite oneself”—in the field may prove to be a great challenge, but all the more worthy of undertaking for the possibilities it presents (Levinas 56).

Works Cited

Blackmar, Frank, ed. Kansas: A Cyclopedia of State History, vol 2. Chicago: Standard Publishing Company, 1912. Burrgraeve, Roger. “The Good and Its Shadow: The View of Levinas on Human Rights as the Surpassing of Political Rationality.” Human Rights Review (January–March 2005): 80–101.

78 | Behrisch Elce Clayton, Lawrence. “Forrest Carter/Asa Carter and Politics.” Western American Literature 21.1 (Spring 1986): 19–26. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. 1902. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Major Authors. 8th ed. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006. 2328–86. Cornell, Drucilla. Clint Eastwood and Issues of American Masculinity. 4th ed. New York: Fordham up, 2009. Duty with Honour: The Profession of Arms in Canada. Kingston: Cana- dian Forces Leadership Institute, 2003. Gwynne, S. C. Empire of the Summer Moon. New York: Scribner, 2010. Haspel, Paul. “Studies in Outlawry: The Strange Career of Josey Wales.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 22 (2005): 155–67. Knapp, Laurence. Directed by Clint Eastwood: Eighteen Films Analyzed. Jefferson: McFarland, 1996. Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981. Lowndes, Joseph E. “Unstable Antistatism: The Left, the Right, and The Outlaw Josey Wales.” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 16.2 (2002): 237–53. Mountcastle, Clay. Punitive War: Confederate Guerillas and Union Reprisals. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2009. The Outlaw Josey Wales. Screenplay by Philip Kaufman. Dir. Clint East- wood. Perf. Clint Eastwood, Chief Dan George, and Sondra Locke. 1976. Warner Home Video, 2001. Redmon, Allen. “Mechanisms of Violence in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven and Mystic River.” The Journal of American Culture 27.3 (2004): 315–28. Sickels, Robert C. “A Politically Correct Ethan Edwards: Clint Eastwood’s The Outlaw Josey Wales.” Journal of Popular Film and Television (2003): 220–27. Tennyson, Lord Alfred. “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” 1854.The Nor- ton Anthology of English Literature, vol E. 8th ed. Eds. Carol T. Christ and Catherine Robson. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006. 1188–89. Vaux, Sara Anson. The Ethical Vision of Clint Eastwood. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011.

“Dyin’ ain’t much of a livin’ ” | 79

To the End of the Hyphen-Nation: Decolonizing Multiculturalism Karina Vernon University of Toronto

“Visible minority” is defined by Statistics Canada and by the Employment Equity Act as “persons, other than Aboriginal peoples, who are non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour” (emphasis added).

One of the realities is that when we talk of multiculturalism, we are currently talking about visible minorities only.

The Toronto Roundtable on Multiculturalism Mosaic to Harmony: Multicultural Canada in the 21st Century (2007)

ow is an especially powerful moment to be researching and Nteaching in the field of Canadian literature. Across Turtle Island powerful and creative indigenous-led movements are mobilizing on a number of fronts: to protest violations of indigenous treaty rights; to call for restitution; to defend land, water, sky, plants, and animals against corporate encroachment; to seek justice for housing infrastructure crises; to call for public inquiries into murdered and missing indigenous women, and to reinvigorate Aboriginal cultures. What is extraordinary about these movements is not the scale or strength of Aboriginal resistance.

ESC 42.3–4 (September/December 2016): 81–98 As Kwakwaka’wakw activist Gord Hill points out in his recent critical history, indigenous peoples have continually resisted the brutalities of colonialism for five hundred years, from the Beothuk resistance in New- Karina Vernon is foundland in the early seventeenth century (19), to the Red Power Move- an Assistant Professor ments of the 1960s and 1970s (58), to the Kahnawake Warrior uprising of English at the at Oka. The recent and ongoing protests in resistance to the Northern University of Toronto Gateway Pipeline; the Pictou Blockade against Northern Pulp Mill; the Scarborough. Her first Elsipogtog First Nation resistance of hydro fracking in New Brunswick, book, Black Atlantis: and the Idle No More protests during the winter of 2012–13 sparked by the A Recovered Archive Canadian federal government’s proposed changes to the Indian, Fisheries, of Black Canadian and Navigable Water Acts (amongst others; 21 Kino-nda-niimi Collec- Prairie Literature brings tive): these and other watershed movements squarely build on the strong to light a previously legacy of indigenous resistance in the Americas and reverberate into the hidden archive of black future. What is different about these resurgent movements is the degree of prairie writing, from the continent-wide non-indigenous participation and support. As the writers eighteenth-century fur of The Winter We Danced: Voices from the Past, the Future, and the Idle traders to contemporary No More Movement observe, “it engaged the oft-slumbering Canadian writers, and is under public as never before. Within four months, the Idle No More movement contract to Wilfrid moved beyond the turtle’s continental back and became a global move- Laurier University ment with manifold demands” (22). Aparna Sanyal sees such indigenous- Press. She is currently at led movements as “a gift from Canada’s fastest-growing population [that] work on a new sshrc- shows that the cultural centre of the country is shifting.” In this context, supported monograph, it becomes an especially exciting endeavour to teach Canadian literature “Black Art and the at the postsecondary level, when to teach students about the histories of Aesthetics of Social colonial injustice means also to connect them with those of the present—as Justice.” well as with the radical re-imaginings of Canada that these vigorous social movements invite. Or at least, that is how I wish it would feel. In reality, teaching indigenous literatures in the multicultural Canadian literature classroom remains as fraught an endeavour as ever. In some ways it may be more so. In this paper I weave together three scenes from my Canadian literature classroom into my analysis of Statistics Canada’s “Ethnic Diversity Survey” (2002), an extraordinary document on multicultural belonging, in order to probe the unconscious ways in which multiculturalism shapes the reading and misreading of indigenous literatures, as well as the possibilities of future practices of solidarity and alliance building on Turtle Island. While this paper seeks to probe the unconscious pedagogical work that multiculturalism as a social policy performs and why it makes teaching and learning indigenous literatures in multicultural contexts difficult, I want to differentiate the motivations of this paper from those of the pedagogical “complaint tradition.” Teachers’ complaints about the perceived

82 | Vernon decline in quality of student literacy and thought forms a robust tradition going back to the early modern era. The tradition of teachers’ complaints is inevitably ideological and is invested in the maintenance of particular class and race hierarchies. As James and Leslie Milroy put it, “Language attitudes stand proxy for a much more comprehensive set of social and political attitudes, including stances strongly tinged with authoritarianism, but often presented as ‘common sense’ ” (46). This paper does not intend to contribute in any way to that tradition. I have the privilege of teaching Canadian literature in the Toronto suburb of Scarborough, a location recently ranked as the most diverse in North America. Toronto is more ethnically diverse than Miami, Los Angeles, or New York City, with 49.9 percent of Torontonians being born outside of Canada. The University of Toronto Scarborough claims with pride to be the most diverse campus in the world; 10 percent of the student body is international but the majority are first-generation Canadians (The World at utsc). The students I teach care deeply about issues of power, gender, race, sexuality, and class. They are, like many students in the humanities, fiercely compassionate and often idealistic social beings, and this makes them exceptionally sensitive students of Canadian literature. The object of my critique, then, in my reconstructed classroom scenes, is not a particular class or student body. As Richard Cavell notes, the teaching context is far from being “a unified space”; it is not a site of knowledge transfer from teacher to student, but, “a number of transvestic sites that are produced by and through the agendas of those who participate in it, including the instructor” (101). In such a dynamic space, surprising knowledges, “unconscious contents—subjective, historical, cultural” (Sugars 17) regarding the repressed ideologies of multicultural belonging can emerge. By returning to the scene of teaching, I seek to bring to consciousness what other analyses of multicultural policy (see, for example, Reitz et al.) often fail to look at: the way multiculturalism as an educational project has, to borrow a phrase from John Willinsky, taught Canadians how to divide the world. How Aboriginal issues are discussed in the multicultural classroom is something that those in the First Nations studies program at the University of British Columbia argue “has not been sufficiently addressed in educational institutions, and yet, is something that desperately needs to be discussed” (“What I Learned in Class Today” np). By now some readers may be wondering if or to what extent social justice should emerge as a pedagogical project in a Canadian literature classroom in the first place. They might ask why students of literature should be seen, as Lisa Kabesh puts it, as “receivers of ethical truths” and

To the End of the Hyphen-Nation | 83 why literature itself should be the “vehicle for the ethical conversion of national subjects in particular” (25). Indeed, these are important questions. Kabesh argues in her superb dissertation, “Teacher, Detective, Witness, Activist: On Pedagogy and Social Justice in Asian Canadian Literature” that the short answer to “why the classroom?” is “deceptively straightforward”: because it is one of the primary spaces to which literature scholars are proximate. Thinking about teaching and learning in the classroom has the potential, as [Roy] Miki explains, to increase attention to “the pedagogical scenes of our practices … whether in the classroom or in our research and writing, or in our social and cultural relations with each other” (Miki “Globalization” 97). Furthermore, because the classroom is one of the primary sites of action that literature instructors inhabit, and because it is a political space that is located in and contingent on systems of social and political relations and norms, the classroom becomes one site in which scholars can intervene in these “local/global” systems. (11) In my own teaching practice, the classroom is a potent site of intervention into the political systems in which my and my students’ subject positioning and privileges are based. For instance, my status as Assistant Profes- sor becomes ironized—sometimes more, sometimes less—by my subject position as a racialized black woman, since blackness has historically been repressed by Canadian literature as both a field and as an institution. Sara Ahmed has written about how being a professor of colour causes a kind of category “trouble” (177). In On Being Included, she quotes Pierre W. Orelus, who writes, “After I formally introduce myself in class, I have undergraduate students who ask me, in a surprised tone of voice, ‘Are you really the professor?’ I have overheard some of them asking their peers, ‘Is he really the professor?’ ” (177). I am not myself unfamiliar with this question, nor its underlying tone of astonishment. Sometimes this question takes the form of a statement: I am told, as many women professors are, that I look too young to be the instructor, a comment that blatantly interrogates my authority and credentials. As Ahmed explains, “Being asked whether you are the professor is a way of being made into a stranger, of not being at home in a category”—in this case, CanLit—“that gives residence to others” (177). Yet I have found myself at times instrumentalizing the category trouble that my gendered racialization produces in pedagogical contexts. As Ahmed writes, “I realize how much we come to know about institutional life because of these failures of residence, how the categories in which we are immersed as styles of life become explicit when you do not

84 | Vernon quite inhabit them” (178). In other words, my being this class’s instructor means that, like many of my students, I am the very subject of the multicultural imagination that I seek to investigate here. In fact, as Wah’s On this October day in my second-year Introduction to Canadian Literature class we are investigating the hyphen, the paratextual mark vignette that multiculturalism bequeathed us for understanding our identities in relation to Canada’s national imaginary. The hyphen, that precarious float- powerfully ing bridge we walk to make the distance between another place and here; that horizontal dash-, an incomplete equals sign; the hopeful shape of a reveals, level playing field. I am showing my fifty or so students the ways poet and critic Fred multicultural Wah materializes the hyphen that usually floats invisibly between the categories of identity. On the one hand, Wah’s Diamond Grill celebrates discourses the hyphen as an “operable tool” (“Half-bred poetics” 60), a “bridge, a no- man’s land, a nomadic, floating magic carpet” (60), a potent sign for the actively repress mobility of mixed race. But on the other hand, Wah’s book also reveals the limits of the hyphen for theorizing more complexly mixed identities. consciousness For instance, multicultural discourse, and in particular the hyphen, was never designed to make visible the contact zones between First Nations of such contact. and the diasporic peoples who have territorialized in Aboriginal nations on Turtle Island. One of the powerful lessons of Diamond Grill for me is that multiculturalism has given us no adequate language—no sign—for tracing or remembering the complex and subtly hybrid cultures that have arisen from the interaction of First Nations and Chinese diasporas. We are not encouraged by its discourses to think, for instance, First Nations- inflected-Chinese-Canadian, or First Nations-inflected-black-Canadian, despite the long and intimate interaction of these peoples. In fact, as Wah’s vignette powerfully reveals, multicultural discourses actively repress consciousness of such contact. So repressed are such contact zones in the multicultural imaginary that, stunningly, the Chinook-Chinese contact zone of Wah’s own family remains invisible to him too, until the moment of his writing. Wah writes: Whenever I hear grampa talk like that, high muckamuck, sit- kum dollah, I think he’s sliding Chinese words into English words, just to have a little fun.[…] I don’t know, then, that he’s using Chinook jargon, the pidgin vocabulary of colonial interaction, the code-switching talkee-talkee of the contact zone.¨ […] And I only realize, right here on this page, when the cooks in the kitchen swear You mucka high! at me, they’ve transed

To the End of the Hyphen-Nation | 85 the phrase out of their own history here. I thought they were swearing in Chinese. (70)

How does Wah manage in this writing to bring to consciousness what multicultural discourses normally repress? Wah moves away from the dominant epistemological and creative method of the book. The hyphen makes no appearance in this vignette. Instead, the footnote that he inserts into his prose and which ruptures the page like a ground shifting reads like a breakthrough in the logic of multicultural discourse: it enables Wah to shift toward a more enabling paradigm, the contact zone, borrowed from Mary Louise Pratt (68). Significantly, as Wah shifts from the hyphen to contact zone, rather than using the usual numbered footnote, Wah inserts an icon, a three-leaf clover, tripartite sign of both the aleatory poetics of place, race, and identity that Pratt’s term helps Wah bring to consciousness, as well as an apt visual image of the tripartite structure of the complex subjectivity Wah is imagining: First Nations and Chinese and Canadian. My affect when I’m teaching Diamond Grill betrays to my students, I am sure, how excited I am to share this book. I find it deeply intelligent and innovative, philosophically, linguistically, and structurally. So I’m surprised as I pause in my lecturing to discover that my students are not nearly as troubled by the limits of the hyphen as I am, particularly not by what I’m arguing about the hyphen as it regards contact zones and First Nations. In what ways, I ask my students, can we read the hyphen that floats in Wah’s book, between Chinese and Canadian as a strike-through, a sign that puts under erasure the invisibly present third term, First Nations? I look out at the lecture hall. My students begin one at a time to respond. What they tell me is that they rarely, if ever, conceive of their identities in terms of the hyphen. Like writer and critic George Elliott Clarke, they cannily perceive the hyphen to be less an ampersand and more a double-edged minus sign (Odysseys Home 40), one that renders them simultaneously less ethnicized or racialized and less Canadian. Minelle Mahtani’s 2002 study “Interrogating the Hyphen Nation: Canadian Multicultural Policy and Mixed-Race Identities” elaborates Clarke’s insight. She argues that the hyphen marginalizes—literally decentres—ethnicized and racialized Canadians by creating specific socio-spatial boundaries—what geographer Gillian Rose calls the “distance-difference” mark—between the identifications “Canadian” and “not-Canadian.” Mahtani concludes that most immigrants and racialized Canadians prefer to be called simply “Canadian” not only to avoid “a whole geography and history of explanation” but also

86 | Vernon because they wish to embrace a definition of national identity that is not dictated by ethnicity but by “multiple identifications” (19). For me this question of the “multiple identifications” that claiming an unhyphenated “Canadian” identity enables is crucial. With whom can such identifications be forged? Whom do these attachments deny? With these questions in mind, I turn now to the second scene from my Canadian literature classroom.

Earlier in the term, my students and I are reading George Copway’s memoir Life, History, and Travels of Kah-ge-ga-gah bowh published in 1847. In this text Copway movingly describes how Ojibwa families claimed particular segments of present-day Ontario as traditional territory and he details the challenges his people faced as a result of the influx of tens of thousands of British and other non-native immigrants on to their hunt- ing grounds in the 1820s. Although the text we are reading concerns the ground beneath our feet, the class seems disengaged, restless. I notice this affective shift in class every time I teach indigenous literature, or whenever I talk about the cost of Canadian nation-building to indigenous peoples, and it troubles me. Determined that the legacies of colonization should be central to the ways we teach and read Canadian literature, I struggle through the rest of the native literature on my syllabus. But throughout the term I remain unsure of how to gently nudge my students toward an awareness that we, all of us in this class, inhabit a geography of colonialism—and that this matters. I am reluctant to confess here that it is not my white students who seem the most resistant to talk about colonialism. I’ve noticed that for their part, white students often respond by expressing feelings of guilt—not necessarily the most helpful emotion, for it rarely motivates the responsibility necessary to actively dismantle systems of oppression. Still, as Harsha Walia observes, guilt can be “a sign of a much- needed shift in consciousness” (47). No; often, and to my surprise, the most resistant students tend to be students of colour. Because I teach in Scarborough, students frequently enter in the classroom with their own too-intricate histories of ancestral dispossession and struggle. Some were born in places that have recently undergone their own decolonizing movements. Others have arrived from difficult conflict zones: Sri Lanka, Somalia, Eritrea. What accounts, then, for their apparent turning away from Aboriginal social justice issues, especially in the current context of such inspirational and widespread alliance-building between native and non-native networks?

To the End of the Hyphen-Nation | 87 Of course, we might well ask why native literatures should be absorbed into and taught in the context of a Canadian literature classroom in the first place, and why it should bear the burden of doing the kind of provocative, discomfiting political work I am calling on it to perform from within a Canadian literature space. I teach Canadian literature from a critical antiracist and decolonizing perspective, using epistemologies developed by scholars such as Jo-Ann Archibald, Renate Eigenbrod, and Marga- ret Kovach, who lay the groundwork for approaching indigenous stories with the principles of respect and reciprocity. But I am not an indigenous scholar, and my classroom—notwithstanding my anticolonial methodology—is a space embedded in a settler regime that regulates and circum- scribes our social relations as “multiculturals.” My coverage of indigenous histories and literatures in a CanLit course might be seen by some, including my students, as an appropriative move. Perhaps, then, I should read their restlessness in the classroom as another canny refusal: a recognition of the cultural and political sovereignty of indigenous literatures that ought not to be co-opted into a multicultural frame. Yet, perhaps it is something else. It may well be that some of my students find my discussion of colonization triggering, since its history of violence not only echoes the histories of colonization that resound in so many places but also brings up other triggering experiences of childhood or intergenerational trauma, violence, and poverty—responses that are not specific to those who are indigenous, nor those who have experienced colonial violence directly. What I initially read as restlessness and disengagement, then, might at times be a defense operation or a trauma response. Perhaps I should be doing more to protect students from the potential of experiencing secondary trauma in the classroom. What would this look like, and how would it affect the teaching of indigenous literature (or black, or Asian-Canadian or other literatures that represent traumatic histories, for that matter)? I don’t generally issue trigger warnings or shy away from engaging those historical and contemporary events characterized variously as traumatic, charged, or painful. I believe it is part of my job to teach these as a necessary aspect of teaching my field, as well as to help expand students’ historical imaginations. As Taiaiake Alfred reminds us, a big challenge faced by indigenous peoples who are seeking restitution for past and ongoing injustices is “The complete ignorance of Canadian society about the facts of their relationship with Indigenous peoples and the willful denial of historical reality by Canadians [which] detracts from the possibility of any meaningful discussion on true reconciliation” (181). Alfred observes that because the media limits its discussion of history

88 | Vernon to the last five or ten years, “the general public focus on the inefficiently spent billions of dollars per year handed out through the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs system” (181). Reading indigenous literature brings home the truth that, as Alfred puts it, “Something was stolen, lies were told, and they have never been made right […] old families and recent immigrants alike, have gained their existence as people on this land and citizens of this country” (182) based on these as-yet unaddressed injustices. At the same time, teaching this history requires sensitivity and care. Embracing what African American feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins describes as an “ethic of caring,” I recognize that “personal expressiveness, emotions, and empathy are central to the knowledge validation process” (np): in class I model my own affective responses to literature and work to create opportunities for students to voice their own emotional responses, if they wish. Still, despite all my best intentions, it could simply be that I am doing it wrong. I am open to this possibility. There is undoubtedly much room for me to improve as a teacher. Yet I also know I am not alone in my struggle to teach a decolonizing CanLit. Colleagues at other institutions have confessed to also witnessing the profound affective shift that occurs whenever attention is turned to indigenous literature and the legacies of colonial violence. While it may be students’ canny critique of our disciplinary cooptation of indigenous cultural property, as well as a potential secondary trauma response, I suspect the issue goes much deeper than either of these two explanations allow. I believe we need to probe more deeply the ways multiculturalism as a state policy shapes our identifications in conscious and unconscious ways. In what follows, then, I turn to an extraordinary document produced by Statistics Canada on the affective social bonds of visible minority Canadians. I examine the “Ethnic Diversity Survey” in detail in order to think more deeply about the ways colonial ideologies explicitly structure multicultural belonging in Canada and what this means for the future of non-native movements for indigenous self- determination. In 2002 Statistics Canada, in conjunction with the Department of Canadian Heritage, undertook the most extensive demographics survey ever carried out in Canada in order to assess “how people’s backgrounds affect their participation in Canada’s social, economic, and cultural life”; in other words, to examine if and to what extent visible minorities’ identification with their “ancestries” and “ethnic and cultural identities” prevented their integration into the multicultural social body. In a nutshell, the survey was intended to put to rest debates about whether multiculturalism “works”

To the End of the Hyphen-Nation | 89 or not. The premise of the “Ethnic Diversity Survey” was that multicultural policy can be regarded as a “success” if it has led to a “socially cohesive society” in spite of racialized and ethnicized Canadians’ simultaneous strong ties to their own “cultural life.” But how exactly is social cohesion to be measured and quantified in social scientific terms by a survey? Reitz et al. readily admit that the abstract “concept of social cohesion itself cannot be directly measured in a survey” (20). Hence, the “eds” and the analysis of it focus “entirely on the social integration of individuals” (20). Respondents were selected from those who answered the long questionnaires of the 2001 census. The population sampled in the survey was selected “on the basis of the responses given to questions on ethnic origin, place of birth, and place of birth of parents” (Statscan). Of the 57,242 persons targeted, a huge number, 42,476, responded. The results produced a massive storehouse of information regarding the connection between the strength of ancestral, religious, and linguistic identification and “belongingness” in Canada. How exactly was this “belongingness” measured? Participants in the “eds” were asked to report on their levels of civic participation (voting in federal, provincial, and municipal elections; volunteering); their sense of “trust” in Canadian society; their self-perceptions about the “Canadianness” of their identity; and, most importantly for the purposes of this paper, the “diversity” of respondents’ social networks. Why does the “eds” focus on the question of the diversity of racialized and ethnicized Canadians’ social networks? As Augie Fleras and Jean Kunz have observed, since 1971, when the Multiculturalism Act was passed, multiculturalism policy and programming has evolved from a discourse that celebrated—and, I would add, manufactured—differences to one that focuses now on “integrative citizenship.” If, in the 1970s, multiculturalism sought to respond to the problem of “prejudice” through a discourse of “cultural sensitivity” and the metaphor of the “cultural mosaic,” today multiculturalism policy aims to address the new concerns of globalization security through an emphasis on “inclusive citizenship” and “belonging.” According to Will Kymlicka, multiculturalism has been “successful” when it encourages the four following points: “adopting a Canadian identity; participating in Canadian institutions; learning an official language, and having inter-ethnic friendships” (quoted in Reitz 14). This last index of inclusive citizenship, having inter-ethnic friendships, was one of Trudeau’s stated goals of multiculturalism, too. In his 1971 parliamentary speech introducing multiculturalism policy, he said the government would provide support for implementing the policy in four ways, the third of which

90 | Vernon was, to “promote creative encounters and interchange among all Cana- dian cultural groups, in the interest of national unity” (quoted in Reitz 19). Hence, in section 8 of the survey, the participants were asked, “As far as you know, how many of your friends have ^top ethnic ancestry^?” (53). A second question probes, “Up until you were age 15, how many of your friends had ^top ethnic ancestry^?” (56). Because ethnic and especially racialized groups “may not be equal in terms of socio-economic opportunities, political power, social status, or interpersonal acceptance,” Mai B. Phan and Raymond Breton argue that racialized Canadians “will be more likely to continue to identify with their own group or become marginalized. They may also develop an oppositional culture to the mainstream” (95). Hence, to them, as to other analysts of multiculturalism, an index of the “belongingness” of racialized people to the nation, and a sign of a successful multiculturalism policy, can be measured by the degree to which an individual’s “social network” includes affective attachments to individuals of other ethnic ancestries. But looking at the structure of the “Ethnic Diversity Survey,” it is clear that the “national unity” that Trudeau and other multiculturalists imagined, and, indeed, what constitutes “belonging” in this document, is premised on an explicitly colonial framework. Significantly, despite the policy’s long-standing emphasis on “inter-ethnic friendship” as a sign of a cohesive multicultural society, no Aboriginal people were surveyed, since the questionnaire excluded “persons living in collective dwellings, persons living on Indian reserves, persons declaring an Aboriginal origin or identity in the 2001 Census, or persons living in Northern and remote areas.” A separate publication from Statistics Canada explains that “Canada’s Aboriginal peoples were not included in the target population [of the “eds”], as information on this population was collected through the 2001 Aboriginal Peoples Survey” (“eds: Portrait of a Multicultural Society” 1). Despite the focus of the “Aboriginal People’s Survey” on the non-reserve population, it also does not imagine or seek to understand native-non-native social alliances. Its primary focus was to collect data on the social and economic conditions of Aboriginal people, including information on housing, water quality, and Aboriginal languages. This is how multiculturalism “divides the world” (Willinsky). It does not think in terms of “contact zones” but imagines the multicultural as always and forever separate from the Aboriginal. Within the terms that it seeks to understand the belongingness of visible minority Canadians, what did the “eds” find? If the results are to be interpreted at face value, they are astonishing. They emphatically confirm

To the End of the Hyphen-Nation | 91 what students consistently reveal in class. “Visible minorities are willing to express a higher degree of ‘belonging’ in Canada than non-racialized Cana- dians” (Reitz and Bannerjee 135). Whereas non-visible minorities’ degree These figures of belonging was measured at 54.8 percent, the visible minority total of belonging was several points higher: 58.6. Black and South Asian Canadi- are even more ans in particular reported an extraordinarily high degree of belonging in Canada: 60.6 percent and 64.9 percent respectively. These figures are even astonish- more astonishing given the high degree of inequality and discrimination simultaneously reported by these groups. The survey asked about personal ing given the experiences of racial discrimination, feeling “uncomfortable or out of place in Canada” and feeling vulnerable to hate crimes. A total of 35.9 percent high degree of of visible minority participants reported experiences of discrimination, in contrast to 10.6 percent from white Canadians (Reitz and Bannerjee 128). inequality and The highest rates of experiences of discrimination were reported by black respondents (49.6 percent), Chinese (33.2 percent), and South Asians (33.1 discrimination percent), yet, curiously, these were the same groups that also report the highest degrees of belonging. simultaneously In this class, now toward the end of my Canadian literature survey, reported by my students and I are reading Dionne Brand’s poem “Land to Light On.” As my students offer, the title of the poem suggests the ways that Brand these groups. figures her speaker as a highly deterritorialized migrant, one who hovers perpetually above the ground in the imagined space of diaspora, searching for a place to land. But as the speaker discovers, there is no land to light on that is not fraught with histories of violence and dispossession; as the poet puts it, “Everywhere you walk on earth there’s harm, / everywhere resounds.” At the end of the poem Brand’s speaker relinquishes the dream of landing or otherwise claiming a territory as her own: I’m giving up on land to light on, […] I’m giving up what was always shifting, mutable cities’ fluorescences, limbs, chalk curdled blackboards and carbon copies, wretching water, cunning walls. Books to set it right. Look. What I know is this. I’m giving up. No offence. I was never committed. Not ever, to offices or islands, continents, graphs, whole cloth, these sequences or even footsteps (47)

Many in the class express feeling greatly troubled by this poem, particularly by Brand’s overt rejection of the nation, both colonial and postcolonial. In fact, one of my students makes a video for her final project in answer to

92 | Vernon Brand’s poem; it includes a powerful chorus of speakers, all significantly, self-identified people of colour, repeating the line, “I will not give up on a land to light on.”

If read superficially, the results of the “Ethnic Diversity Survey” would seem to be a cause for celebration. Doesn’t it demonstrate that the category “Canadian”—once the sole property of “ordinary” or non-racialized “Cana- dian-Canadians” (Mackey 102)—has finally been pried open to include people of colour? Isn’t this a victory for Canadian multiculturalism and for people of colour themselves? Certainly, the Canadian media interpreted the results of the survey this way. cbc News reported a good news story based on the survey results: “Discrimination Down in Canada,” it announced. “The number of Canadians facing discrimination because of the colour of their skin or based on their religion is going down reveals the 2002 Ethnic Diversity Survey released Monday by Statistics Canada” (np). Buried at the end of the article, in the last paragraph is the finding that “Nearly one-third of African-Canadians who were interviewed said they had sometimes or often been treated unfairly because of their skin colour, compared with 21 per cent of South Asians and 18 per cent of Chinese” (np). The Canadian Race Relations Foundation quoted selectively from the survey: “immigrants were more likely than people born in Canada to report a strong sense of belonging to their ethnic or cultural group, according to new data from the Ethnic Diversity Survey.” But what the survey reveals in truth is that multicultural belonging in Canada is fundamentally structured as a social relation that denies and undermines the interconnectedness of racialized and Aboriginal peoples, their histories, interests, and their struggles. If racialized people in Canada are currently expressing higher degrees of belonging to nation, it is nothing to celebrate, for as the survey itself shows, this belonging is neither an index of a more racially equitable society nor a sign of true “national unity,” for it continues to perpetuate our isolation from one another as raced and Aboriginal people, socially, politically, and imaginatively. What the “Ethnic Diversity Survey” also reveals is that by asking my students to re-orient their political imaginations, I am asking a lot. I may be asking too much. Multiculturalism policy extends to the immigrant, ethnic, and racialized person—those of us who, like my ancestors, were once constituted under the category of “non-preferred races”—not just entry into the nation but full citizenship in it. At times, this citizenship itself comes close to feeling like exaltation. As Sunera Thobani explains, the nation has manufactured its social cohesion by creating a social dialectic

To the End of the Hyphen-Nation | 93 between two necessary but opposing figures: “The figure of the national subject is a much venerated one, exalted above all others […] In the trope of the citizen, this subject is universally deemed the legitimate heir to the rights and entitlements proffered by the state” (4). On the other hand is the “outsider”—Indians, immigrants, and refugees—“cast in the trope of the stranger who ‘wants’ what nationals ‘have’ ” (4). “Exaltation functions,” Thobani argues, “as a form of ontological and existential capital that can be claimed by national subjects in their relation with the Indian, the immigrant and the refugee” (5). Thobani observes that multiculturalism in our current neo-liberal era intensifies the feeling that the multicultural, too, is exalted, by “promot[ing] the advancement of certain classes of ethnic and racial professionals up the corporate ladder as Canadian and international firms sought to maximize their cultural assets in the global market in order to promote their own interests abroad” (162). Thus, to ask my students to affiliate themselves with indigenous-led struggles against colonialism and for restitution is to ask them to disidentify with the national, to give up the ontological and existential capital that multiculturalism seems to offer, and to identify in solidarity with peoples whom “state policies and popular practices […] has marked for physical and cultural extinction [and] utter marginalization” (6). And why would a canny social subject do that? Because the ontological capital multiculturalism offers the racialized subject is illusory. As Sunera Thobani reminds us, multicultural policy was not designed to address the political needs of ethnic or indigenous peoples in Canada but to further exalt French and English Canada as the “two founding races,” seen in perpetuity as “the legitimate heirs of the rights and entitlements proffered by the state” (3–4). The Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, struck in 1963 to address the confronta- tions between French and English Canada resulting from francophone demands for greater autonomy, was mandated “to develop the Cana- dian Confederation on the basis of equal participation between the two founding races, taking into account the contribution made by other ethnic groups” (Hawkins 1). Situated within this two-founding-races framework, “the Act naturalized the character of the nation as bilingual and made its objective the strengthening of the ‘cultural and social fabric’ of whiteness in the face of increasing non-white immigration” (Thobani 157). Not only does official multiculturalism further exalt whiteness, it “reproduced the colonial erasure of Aboriginal peoples as the original presence in the country” (144), an erasure which we continue to see reproduced in multicultural state policies and programs and which structures the possibilities of multicultural affect and affiliation in troubling ways.

94 | Vernon A 2010 report on a series of roundtable discussions tellingly titled “Canada’s Approach to Multicultural Diversity: Excellent in Principle, but a Challenge in Practice,” published by Citizen and Immigration Canada, discovered that nothing has significantly changed since the “Ethnic Diver- sity Survey” of 2002. “Instead of uniting Canadians of all ethnic origins,” it found in practice, multiculturalism has caused divisions along the lines of time of arrival in the New World, power, and skin tone. This involves individuals such as Aboriginal Peoples, members of the Charter groups, and those of European descent who do not demonstrate their ethnicity in terms of skin colour and visible minority status.[…] The concept of multiculturalism as a framework for intercultural relations within a single society is largely alien. (np)

Is it possible or even desirable to think about a decolonization of Cana- dian multiculturalism? I have hope that the recent indigenous-led movements flourishing in the second decade of this millennium are signs of such a decolonization process in action. The native and non-native solidarity movements flaring up seemingly daily across Turtle Island to push back against the tar sands and hydro fracking, against poverty, pipelines, and against violations of treaty rights suggest the creative ways it is possible to decolonize relationships. Black-Cherokee writer Zainab Amadahy uses the term “relationship-framework” to describe such ethical social relationships between indigenous and non-indigenous people, which also pushes back against the multicultural model of exaltation. She writes, “Understanding the world through a Relationship Framework […] we don’t see ourselves, our communities, or our species as inherently superior to any other, but rather see our roles and responsibilities to each other as inherent to enjoying our life experiences” (np). Such inspiring practices of decolonization are creating new contexts of hope beyond multiculturalism that enable us to walk together for justice in this divided world.

Acknowledgement I am grateful to the two anonymous readers who read the first draft of this paper. Their generous and intelligent feedback helped me to improve the argument immeasurably.

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To the End of the Hyphen-Nation | 97 Rose, Gillian. “Distance, Surface, Elsewhere: A Feminist Critique of the Space of Phallocentric Self/Knowledge.” Society and Space 13: 761–81. Sanyal, Aparna. “The Winter We Danced Reveals Full Depth and Breadth of Idle No More.” Special to The Globe and Mail. 27 June 2014. theglo- beandmail.com. Sugars, Cynthia Conchita. Home-Work: Postcolonialism, Pedagogy, and Canadian Literature. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2004. Statistics Canada. “Visible Minority of Person.” 11 April 2011. statcan.gc.ca. ———. “Ethnic Diversity Survey.” 2002. 23.statcan.gc.ca. 4 May 2014. Thobani, Sunera. Exalted Subjects: Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. University of Toronto. The World at utsc. 21 July 2014. utsc.utoronto.ca. University of British Columbia and the First Nations Studies Program. “What I Learned in Class Today: Aboriginal Issues in the Classroom.” 22 July 2014. whatilearnedinclasstoday.com. Wah, Fred. Diamond Grill. Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1996. ———. “Half-Bred Poetics.” Faking It: Poetics and Hybridity. NeWest Press, 2000. Wallia, Harsha. “Decolonizing Together: Moving Beyond a Politics of Soli- darity Toward a Practice of Decolonization.” The Winter We Danced: Voices From the Past, the Future, and the Idle No More Movement. The Kino-nda-niimi Collective. Winnipeg: arp Books, 2014. Willinski, John. Learning to Divide the World: Education at Empire’s End. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1998.

98 | Vernon Disrupting the National Frame: A Postcolonial, Diasporic (Re)Reading of SKY Lee’s Disappearing Moon Café and Denise Chong’s The Concubine’s Children Lindsay Diehl University of British Columbia

ince its emergence in the 1980s and 1890s, Asian Canadian Stud- Sies has gained recognition as a field of inquiry that could mount a wide- ranging and radical critique of mainstream Canadian history, society, and culture. Originally inspired by the rights-based movements of the 1960s and 1970s, Asian Canadian Studies grew out of community level activism against race and class oppression (Lai 1). Its principal modality has been to construct a “collective self,” or Asian Canadian identity, through which to challenge the representation of Asians as perpetual outsiders or aliens and to rewrite existing Canadian history to acknowledge such racist state policies as the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Japanese Canadian Internment, and the Komagata Maru Incident (Chao 18). In this way, the field has historically unfolded within a nationalist framework, locating the nation- state as the primary interlocutor of the Asian/alien body in Canada and taking up a kind of “strategic essentialism” (Lai 5). Nonetheless, as the field increasingly becomes drawn into the academy, critics have noted some possible limitations of this framework. One such limitation is that the focus on domestic identity politics, and the promotion of citizenship and national belonging as political goals, runs the risk of reinforcing a reductive pluralism which cannot “shake up the systemic historical conditions

ESC 42.3–4 (September/December 2016): 99–118 and … ideologies of normativity that have produced racialized subjects and minoritized cultures” (Kamboureli 64). In exploring ways to expand on the Canadian national frame, Lily Cho Lindsay Diehl is has posited that Asian Canadian Studies could be situated more clearly completing a doctorate within a postcolonial, diasporic paradigm. Such a paradigm, she contends, at the University of could generate insights into how the construction of Asian-ness in Canada British Columbia, is deeply connected to Asian-ness elsewhere (188). Indeed, Cho points Okanagan campus. Her out that there is a need to “think about the formation of the Canadian sshrc-funded research state through imperialism and colonialism” and to see Asian Canadian examines Chinese history within a wider, global context of capital and labour migration (188). Canadian literature from Focusing specifically on Chinese Canadian communities, Cho illustrates a postcolonial critical how a “diasporic perspective” can highlight the links between Chinese perspective, engaging migration and British imperialism (186). That is, a diasporic perspective with debates about can consider how early Chinese immigrants to Canada came from South Canadian nationalism, China, where the Opium Wars “had disrupted the local economy [and] settler colonialism, and provid[ed] much of the push for emigration” (Stanley 56). Furthermore, transnationalism. She it can stress how many of these immigrants were indentured workers, has published articles in imported via the coolie trade which burgeoned in British Hong Kong after Postcolonial Text and the Atlantic slave trade went into decline (Peter Li 20). Importantly, then, a Rupkatha. postcolonial, diasporic paradigm can productively complicate the history of Asian Canadians by acknowledging that this history is not only shaped in the Canadian context; rather, it is part of a larger history of imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism. If Cho’s arguments gesture to the benefits of a global, historical, and comparative framework, Larissa Lai’s book, Slanting I, Imagining We, emphasizes the perils of relying too heavily on a fixed notion of Asian Canadian identity. Lai argues that the tactic of strategic essentialism has become seriously problematic due to the pressures of “state incorpora- tion” currently informing Asian Canadian Studies (6). Underlying these pressures is an investment in liberal multiculturalism that reinforces static notions of racial and national difference and works to “recirculate the logic of colonialism in newly embodied forms” (23). This logic becomes all the more insidious in a post-9/11 Canada, where narratives of citizenship, nationalism, and security have become intertwined in ways that repro- duce Orientalist images of Others as unassimilable and anti-democratic foreigners. As Lai points out, the 2010 Maclean’s article entitled “Too Asian” suggests that “the trope of the ‘yellow peril’ ” has been reinvigorated in the national imaginary (Lai 17). The article, which proposes that “white students” feel intimidated by the perceived work ethic of “both Asian Canadians and international students” (Findlay and Köhler 76), not only

100 | Diehl presents a homogenizing construction of Asian-ness but positions it as external to national belonging. Indeed, since the article portrays Canadian- born and newly-arrived Asians as uniformly making “sacrifice[s] of time and freedom [that ‘whites’ are] not willing to make” (76), it exposes a colonial-era East–West binarism that continues to underlie normative conceptions of Canadian identity. In response to the conditions of a post-9/11 Canada, I propose that the politics of reading presented in my article is particularly important. I examine two canonical Chinese Canadian texts—SKY Lee’s Disappearing Moon Café and Denise Chong’s The Concubine’s Children—from a postcolonial, diasporic perspective. Although these two writers are commonly discussed in Asian Canadian Studies, the theoretical approach to their texts is frequently framed by implicit oppositions that privilege a modern Canada over a traditional China. This approach takes its cues from an identifiable plot structure that not only appears in these two texts but in women’s texts more generally in the 1980s and 1990s (Bow 71). As Leslie Bow explains, the recuperative model of feminist criticism, which was influential at that time, promoted the “belief that to restore the gendered … subject’s voice is to restore … her worth” (71). The narrative depiction of a “subject’s movement from silence to voice with a future-oriented, salutary effect on a succeeding generation” was hence a common organizing structure in women’s writing (71). The problem with this structure, however, is that its underlying progressivism requires “women’s oppression to assume an air of pastness” (72). Moreover, when this structure inter- acts with stories of first-generation immigrants and their Western-raised children, it can reify East–West distinctions by projecting Orientalized difference onto the parents and by linking the children’s acculturation with increased freedom and autonomy. That is, it can position the East as backward, repressive, and “excessively genderist,” while also equat- ing the West with modernization, liberty, and self-fulfilment (72). Critics have thus tended to read Disappearing Moon Café and The Concubine’s Children in ways that harmonize the depiction of generational struggles with dominant narratives of Canada’s liberal progressivism. For instance, Mari Peepre comments that the daughter-narrators of these novels are caught between two disparate “realities”—they are “pulled back in time” by the “the extremely oppressive patriarchal rule” of their immigrant- mother’s culture, and “pulled forward … by the seemingly liberal and egalitarian values … of their North American host culture” (81 emphasis added). Likewise, Lien Chao suggests that the novels signal a “coming to voice” of Chinese Canadian women, who have found the courage not

Disrupting the National Frame | 101 only to confront the “century-long” history of racism in Canada but also to challenge the “sexism” of “traditional male-oriented Chinese culture” (17, 29). Partly because of their feminist narrative structures, therefore, these novels have been interpreted as expressing a progressive notion of history, one that does not necessarily contest idealistic notions of Canada’s multiculturalism or the colonial binaries of East and West. To be sure, critics such as Roy Miki have observed that one of the reasons these novels have received so much critical attention and “institutional approval” is because they emulate “a genealogical form that mirror[s] the nation’s generational history” (230). Nonetheless, my article calls attention to moments in the novels where the daughter-narrators create distance from, and thus complicate, the underlying feminist developmental structure of the narrative. I argue that these moments destabilize the apparent authority and transparency of the third-person presentation of the family stories, by clarifying that these stories are told from a West- ernized, subjective, and historically-situated perspective. More specifically, these moments foreground the blind-spots, interests, and motivations of the daughter-narrators, undermining the idea that the family stories are complete or accurate and creating openings for intervening dialogue. Therefore, by viewing these novels from a postcolonial, diasporic perspective, my article seeks to shift the focus away from the daughter-narrators’ apparent search for “a new sense of integrated [Chinese-Canadian] identity” (Peepre 80). As my reading hopes to illustrate, it is possible and necessary to place emphasis on the textual moments of ambivalence and elision—moments which generate questions and insights that go beyond the overtly national paradigm the novels appear to uphold.

A postcolonial, diasporic perspective A postcolonial and diasporic approach to Disappearing Moon Café and The Concubine’s Children places the family histories of the daughter- narrators within a larger context of Chinese movement and migration. Whereas a more conventional, nationalist perspective tends to focus on the arrival and acculturation of Chinese immigrants, “including the problems of prejudice and discrimination directed toward [these immigrants],” a postcolonial, diasporic perspective considers the historical connections between “the sending and receiving societies” (Cheung and Bonachich 1, 2). In other words, this perspective sets the stories of Chinese immigration to Canada against a global backdrop, underscoring how the push and pull factors of immigration are interrelated. Lucie Cheng and Edna Bonacich point out that these push and pull factors arise from a logic of imperial-

102 | Diehl ism and capitalist development. As they explain, this logic creates “two conditions, the displacement of colonized peoples and the requirement of more labour in the capitalist economy” (2); these conditions “result in pressure for people to migrate as workers to more advanced capitalist Nonetheless, countries” (2). From this perspective, it becomes clear that several factors in the nineteenth century set the stage for Chinese immigration to this global Canada, including “the ‘opening’ of China by Britain following its victory in the [first] Opium War,” the demise of the Atlantic slave trade, and the context still need for labour in the far-flung colonies of the British empire (Shelley Lee 39). These factors hit southern China especially hard, and between haunts the 1840 and 1900 around 2.5 million people “left for the Americas, the West Indies, Hawaii, Australia, New Zealand, Southeast Asia, and Africa” (40). novels, surfacing Early Chinese Canadian migration was then a part of a “mass exodus of dispossessed communities” (Cho 188). in implicit ways. Viewing the novels of SKY Lee and Denise Chong from a postcolonial, diasporic perspective helps to illuminate the imperialistic and economic dimensions of Chinese migration that form the background of these localized family stories. Both novels locate their narrative beginnings at the turn of the twentieth century and describe unfolding events that occur after an initial phase of Chinese Canadian immigration. This initial phase was marked by the recruitment of large numbers of Chinese labourers to build colonial projects such as the Cariboo Wagon Road in 1863 and the Canadian Pacific Railway in the early 1880s (Peter Li 21). Wong Gwei Chang in Disappearing Moon Café and Chan Sam in The Concubine’s Children are the forefathers in their respective novels, and they constitute a second wave of Chinese immigrants. Both are born after the disturbances of the first Opium War and come to Canada after the diasporic passages to Canada have been established. Thus, it makes sense that the novels’ daughter-narrators, who are looking back at their family histories, would have a hard time seeing the more deeply rooted factors contributing to their forefathers’ immigration. Lee’s narrator, Kae Ying Woo, only mentions that Gwei Chang came to Canada because “his family in China needed to eat” (6). Similarly, Chong describes that Chan Sam came because “the land” in China had grown “so tired, so crowded” (18). Both suggest that their ancestors were chasing a “Gold Mountain dream” (43), yet neither discusses this dream as a “phenomenon of developing international networks … and the rise of economic and political imperialism” (Shelley Lee 36). Nonetheless, this global context still haunts the novels, surfacing in implicit ways. For instance, in Lee’s novel, Gwei Chang’s search for the bones of the diseased railway workers is symbolic of a process of having

Disrupting the National Frame | 103 to dig—to sort through layers of historical information—to find traces of previous generations. Moreover, since the bones will be returned to China, they point to a history that cannot be contained in the Canadian national context. Further, in Chong’s novel, her passing references to Chan Sam’s father who sojourned in America and his brother who went to Cuba by way of indenture gesture to how Asian Canadian migration is connected to a whole series of diasporic movements and migrations. In advocating for a postcolonial, diasporic framework, however, I am not suggesting that an awareness of Canada’s history of “racial discrimination and segregation” of Chinese Canadians is not crucial to understanding these novels (Chao 17). Rather, I propose that this awareness is enriched by a global perspective that reveals how Canada’s racialization of “the Chinese” drew on an archive of colonial ideas “created elsewhere” (Stanley 73). Timothy Stanley notes that the production of racialized Chinese and Canadian difference was not restricted to the Canadian nation but relied on both British and American Orientalisms, discourses which constructed and polarized “the East” and “the West” (50, 73). These discourses helped Canada to view the Chinese as an object of Western understanding, “at once ‘other’ and yet entirely knowable and visible” (Bhabha 101). In the 1870s, “resettler men from Britain and eastern Canada excluded men from China from the emergent Canadian state system” (Stanley 74), and so Chi- nese Canadian history begins in many ways with the nation’s embracing of Orientalist traditions, positioning Canadian in opposition to Chinese. This racialized logic created an imagined sense of community and nationalism, suggesting that if “the ‘Chinese’ were inferior, foreign, and alien,” then “there was another ‘race’ … in Canada that [was] superior, native, citizen” (77). Therefore, Canada developed the boundaries of its national civic body through its opposition to the East, a phantasmic site imagined as harsh, backwards, and unchanging. An awareness of how Orientalist discourses operate becomes all the more vital in a post-9/11 context, when colonial East–West binaries have been reinvigorated and continuously reified. These Orientalist ideas of “the Chinese,” which are bound up in notions of “Canadian-ness,” have a tendency to surface in feminist texts such as Disappearing Moon Café and The Concubine’s Children. As Aiwah Ong observes, feminist writing has difficulty countering the East–West distinctions embedded within national narratives, as it is “haunt[ed]” by “West- ern imperialist definitions of colonized populations” (para 3). Indeed, in using Western standards of individualism and agency as “the yardstick by which to encode and represent cultural others,” feminist writing can suppress the complexities of non-Western histories and cultures (Mohanty

104 | Diehl 19). Postcolonial theory has consequently warned that the desire to give women “a voice in history” can be shaped by an imperialist formation, in which feminists view non-Western women as needing to be saved from indigenous patriarchal traditions and imagine “voices” for these women accordingly (Spivak 297). In the Canadian context, this warning about the limitations of the recuperative project has relevance for feminist texts dealing with first-generation Chinese immigrants and their Canadian- raised children. These texts, which use the depiction of mother-daughter struggles as a way of understanding gender oppression, frequently rely on a developmental narrative structure. In this narrative structure, “a previous generation of women’s experiences serve as a foundation, albeit a traumatic one, authorizing a better future” (Bow 71). Both Disappear- ing Moon Café and The Concubine’s Children follow this basic structure in their presentation of matrilineal family histories, seeming to link “the hope of generational transmission (‘You will inherit a better life because of my suffering’)” to a positive message of Western acculturation (“In the West, I am free of family obligation and gender constraint”) (72). None- theless, in my analysis of these novels, I call attention to moments that disrupt this underlying feminist narrative structure and destabilize the liberal progressivist trajectory of their retelling of the family stories. This article is interested, then, in the ways that the daughter-narrators create moments that highlight the mediated and uncertain nature of their stories, in effect opening spaces for postcolonial, diasporic insights and readings.

(Re)Reading Disappearing Moon Café Located in the novel’s present moment of 1986, Kae Ying Woo, the daughter-narrator of Disappearing Moon Café, reflects on four generations of the family’s history, imaginatively re-creating scenes that explore, in particular, the “passion and fierceness” of her female ancestors (SKY Lee 145). In linking the details of these women’s lives together, and seeing their pasts as intrinsically part of the “same past,” Kae considers that she is doing more than just “telling a story of several generations” (23, 189); to her mind, she is “one individual thinking collectively” (189). It is an idea that nationalist criticism has reiterated in its treatment of the novel. For instance, Lien Chao contends that the novel models “a process of decoding [the community’s] silence and retrieving unrecorded experience” (93–94), and Donald Goellnicht asserts that it illustrates “possibilities for Chinese Canadian identity” (315). Like Kae, this criticism postulates that the novel expresses a “common narrative of the community’s experience” (Chu 6). However, this nationalist critical method, with its assumptions of a cause-and-effect

Disrupting the National Frame | 105 relationship between community and literature, suggests a stable notion of identity that Chinese Canadian writing is presumed to reveal. Although this suggestion constitutes an empowering political gesture, it also views Chinese Canadian literature as a reflection of, or reaction to, the social conditions imposed on Chinese Canadians (Xiaojing 8). Moreover, the insistence on a Canadian national context for understanding this literature leaves ideas of “Chinese ethnicity” or “Chinese-ness” mostly unexamined (Kamboureli 64). Nationalist readings of Disappearing Moon Café have thus tended to overlook the complicated ways in which the novel is written and have taken for granted its rather narrow representations of “traditional Chinese” beliefs and customs (Chao 99). Hence, it is important to note how the novel cannot simply be contained within a Canadian national, socio-historical frame. I argue that the novel performs a contradictory movement, one that allows for postcolonial, diasporic interventions. On one hand, it deploys a feminist “coming to voice” narrative to claim a sense of “Canadian-ness” and position Kae as a speaking, knowing subject. Yet, on the other hand, it creates textual moments to interrogate this narrative form and question Kae’s authority. Therefore, while the novel inscribes an image of Chinese Canadian female subjectivity, it also uncovers how this image upholds Westernized notions of individualism and agency and relegates non-Western women to a subordinate realm. In the context of the 1980s and 1890s, when Disappearing Moon Café was both written and published, recuperative feminism was prominent, offering a narrative model for “imaginatively transforming” female pro- tagonists into recognizable national and agentic subjects (Chu 3). In particular, the coming-to-voice narrative structure adapts the trajectory of a Bildungsroman (6); it depicts a search for self in which the protagonist begins in alienation and seeks integration into a larger social order (12). In mother-daughter narratives, this search for self also includes “transcending a maternal legacy” (Bow 71) and family stories “are offered as a corrective to the present” (94). Disappearing Moon Café draws upon this structure by featuring a daughter-narrator engaged in a recuperative project as a way of finding “self-help” (94). The narrative conflict, which is described in the first chapter, is steeped in feminist excavations of traditional versus modern values. Kae is introduced as a Chinese Canadian woman grappling with the ways that a traditional family structure has failed to make her happy. She is a thirty-six-year-old “investment research analyst” experiencing an “identity crisis” brought on by the difficult delivery of her son (SKY Lee 122, 191). As Kae explains, her “close scrape with death” has caused her to “rethink” her life (21). She has realized that getting married

106 | Diehl and having children has not fulfilled her, and she has started to question the belief that “it is important to keep a family strong and together” (20). Kae’s epiphany complicates the idea that she can speak for a collective, as her reflections upon family life indicate that she is interested in developing an individual, not a communal, sense of identity. Indeed, Kae describes herself as a woman seeking “enlightenment” (20), coming into a feminist consciousness in which she sees herself as a self-determined individual with the ability to choose her own future. In contrast with her non-Western forebears, Kae stakes out a space for herself, in which she can claim a sense of both national and feminist belonging. However, to do so, she adopts Western individualism as a universal and inherent good, participating in an intersection of national and gender discourses that implicitly rely on Orientalist tropes. A specific construction of “the East” is integral to the workings of the feminist structure organizing the novel’s presentation of the family stories, one that bolsters an image of a democratic and progressive West. This construction of East emerges through Kae’s desire to break away from the family, whose demands are positioned as an impediment to her individual development. For instance, she expresses frustration at her “chinese [sic] parents” for pushing her to achieve “excellence” and to trust in “the natural and orderly progression … of things” (20). A strict Chinese upbringing, Kae suggests, has taught her to suppress her own needs and passions and to attempt to be “perfect all the time” (20). In portraying her parents as conservative and somewhat controlling, Kae locates herself within a kind of repression-liberation scenario, where her own freedom depends on a distancing between her and them. The divide between Kae and her family, moreover, resonates with East–West distinctions, falling along a crack between Chinese and Canadian, collective familism and competitive individualism, patriarchal custom and female autonomy. By implicitly linking Western individualism to women’s autonomy, Kae frames her decision to tell her family’s stories—despite her mother’s injunction to keep the stories within “ ‘these four walls’ ”—as a moment of empowerment (23). Thus, the novel begins with Kae assuming a representative authority against her family, who are to some extent depicted as too secretive, perhaps too stereotypically Chinese, to be speaking, knowing subjects. This narrative beginning situates Kae as “a willing native informant,” an insider to local Chinese culture who is also knowable within a Western conceptual framework (Bow 78). It is this situation that provides Kae with the permission to speak for her family, for her informant role requires that she translate

Disrupting the National Frame | 107 her family’s Chinese difference into explanations that are “accessible and acceptable to ‘mainstream’ ” Canadians (Chu 16). Lending weight to Kae’s apparent ability to speak for her family is not This framing just a sense that she is closely acquainted with Chinese culture but also a belief that she is, as a woman, intimately connected to the experiences of effectively her female ancestors. Indeed, at times, Kae explicitly appeals to this belief, suggesting that all the women in her family have endured “women-hating transposes an worlds,” and their “lives, being what they are, are linked together” (SKY Lee 145). Such appeals work to diminish the cultural distance between unfamiliar Kae and her immigrant foremothers through a feminist “politics of same- ness” (Banerjee 72). As Amrita Banerjee explains, this politics is a basic cultural system premise of Western feminism, promulgating a conviction that the female bond transcends borders “based on cultural, racial, national, and other into a more differences” (72). Kae appears to adopt this borderless feminist perspective when she acts as an omniscient narrator who has admission into the inner familiar image thoughts and feelings of three previous generations of Wong women. For example, when Kae first introduces her “dumb great-granny,” Mui Lan, she of the female is able to describe not only how Mui Lan appeared to other people in the community but also how Mui Lan privately reasoned and made decisions “tyrant.” (SKY Lee 31). Through these descriptions, the great-grandmother materializes as a fairly transparent character, who is disliked by others, plagued by loneliness, and driven by jealousy (23). While Kae notes with sympathy how Mui Lan felt disoriented in “Gold Mountain” without a “society of women,” she also holds her great-grandmother to task for apparently becoming “icy,” calculating, and demanding (26). More specifically, Kae implies that Mui Lan’s desire to have a grandson and continue the family lineage, the “golden chain of male to male,” is linked to a wish to “ma[k]e her suffering felt far and wide” (31). In this representation, Mui Lan’s adher- ence to village “customs and traditions” is framed as a conscious choice—a choice Mui Lan makes not because she is embedded in different ways of being and thinking but because she wants to inflict pain and “bitterness” onto other women (27, 31). This framing effectively transposes an unfamiliar cultural system into a more familiar image of the female “tyrant,” who is pictured as vindictive and actively complicit in patriarchy (31). Also, it allows Kae to bypass more complex questions of cultural conflict and generation gap and instead to focus on her family history as a series of lessons derived from the individual “mistakes,” or unfortunate choices, her female ancestors made (131). As I have mentioned, Kae’s treatment of her family stories follows an example of the feminist recuperative project, which puts emphasis on

108 | Diehl perceived similarities between women “at the expense of sacrificing differences to large extent” (Banerjee 72). Within this project, various “borders that mark the specificity” of a cultural identity “almost become barriers to any discourse of [women’s] ‘liberation’ ” (72). Kae’s strategy of abstracting Mui Lan from the intricacy of her village beliefs and inscribing her within the concerns of Western individualism is, therefore, a common trope within feminist writing (Ong para 2). Nonetheless, postcolonial critics have pointed out that this strategy, which assumes that other cultures can be subsumed into a Western conceptual framework, perpetuates a kind of “reductive fallacy” that cannot acknowledge “actual heterogeneities and discontinuities between women” (Banerjee 72). Perhaps the gravest effect of this reductive fallacy is that it assimilates the experiences and vocabular- ies of non-Western women into that of privileged, Westernized women (72). That is, it carries out a discursive form of colonialism by maintaining existing structures of privilege and domination. From this perspective, it becomes clear that Kae must impose her own cultural assumptions on her female ancestors, in order to make their lives connect. Her version of the family history is a sort of gender analysis, in which her immigrant great- grandmother and grandmother are analogously interpreted as conforming to patriarchal norms, because they are “coward[s],” too afraid to take “risks” and challenge the status quo (SKY Lee 41). While this analysis assimilates much of the alterity of her ancestors’ lives, it also provides Kae with a story that inspires her to quit her job, leave her marriage, and become a writer. In a couple of ways, then, Kae’s relation to her family stories is problematic: first, because her ethnographic lens largely disregards cultural and historical differences and, second, because her representation of female ancestors serves as a self-consolidating project. Yet, in textual moments that emerge in-between her family stories, Kae draws attention to her blinkered perspective and questionable motives. These moments work to accentuate and disturb the narrative workings and stereotyped assumptions undergirding the beliefs and practices of feminist writers like Kae. One key moment that emerges in this context occurs just after Kae’s introduction of Mui Lan. Following her characterization of the great- grandmother as “a grasping woman” whose reasons for wanting a grandson are “pesky,” Kae takes time to evaluate her “own motives” (29, 31). She asks: Why do I need to make this ancestress the tip of the funnel- ling storm, the pinnacle that anchored chaos and destruction close to earth? Why do I need to indict her? Why not my grandmother, say? Both are dead. Actually, both are to blame

Disrupting the National Frame | 109 (if you like that kind of thing), but since I’ve ended up paying dearly for their deeds, and I know of others who’ve paid with their lives, isn’t it my privilege to assign blame, preferably to the one I understand the least, the one farthest away from me and from those I love. (SKY Lee 31–32) By interjecting these self-conscious comments, Kae underscores that she is orchestrating and “embellish[ing]” her family stories for her own purposes, mainly her contemporary quandaries over identity (136). To substantiate her suggestion that her current pain is part of an “old pain” (179), she needs a family narrative that portrays her current crisis as a consequence of choices made three generations before her birth. As Kae indicates, she needs to assign blame. Thus, Kae imaginatively positions Mui Lan as the source of her family’s “great chinese [sic] tragedy” (179); it is what Kae later calls “a mean writer’s trick” (181). Furthermore, Kae concedes that her narrative representation of her great-grandmother and grandmother requires no consent, as “Both are dead” and have no power to represent themselves. Here, Kae seems to apprehend that, by rendering her female ancestors into fictional characters, she is committing a kind of appropriative violence. Even so, she reasons that this is her “privilege”—to rebuke “the one[s] she understands the least” for ostensibly causing her pain. Textual moments like this foreground Kae’s self-interested logic, pushing readers to question her credibility and challenge her familial accounts. These moments also provide openings that allow for postcolonial intercessions, calling attention to how privileged feminists, like Kae, “frequently seek to establish their authority on the backs of non-Western women, determining for them the meanings and goals of their lives” (Ong para 2). Ultimately, the novel’s textual moments, which highlight Kae’s self- seeking interests and motivations, combine to destabilize the progressive, national conception of history implicit in its feminist coming to voice structure. On one hand, the novel conforms to this plot structure, culminating in a more liberated subject. Kae even seems to affirm this hope in her effusive claim that “after three generations of struggle, the daughters are free!” (SKY Lee 209). Yet, on the other hand, there is much within the text that works to counter this overtly liberal message. For instance, glimpses into Kae’s writerly tastes reveal that she is structuring her family history according to a “love [of] melodramas” (138). Kae’s inclination to infuse her storytelling with excessive emotions and exciting events sur- faces in her continual descriptions of her ancestors’ “livid passion[s]” and “rage” (155, 179). Kae herself acknowledges this tendency to “romanticize” her forebears (145). In some ways, Kae’s focus on melodrama serves to

110 | Diehl parody feminist narratives, which often use emotive techniques to convey universalizing notions of female bonding (Bow 92–93). Certainly, when she proposes that “the perfect title” for her family saga is the “House Hexed by Woe,” readers are meant to view Kae’s proclivity to amplify and embellish as bordering on ridiculous (208). Her envisioning of “an enticing movie poster with a title like Temple of Wonged Women” is similarly intended to cast doubt upon the idea that Kae is “the resolution to this story” (209). In effect, the novel is calling attention to the artificial nature of Kae’s version of family history. While Kae uses a feminist plot structure to devise a compelling teleological narrative, textual moments like this disturb the progressivist trajectory. These moments ask if it is realistic to contend that Kae has “been called upon to give meaning to three generations of life-and- death struggles” (210). Moreover, they create a space for thinking about how Kae’s ethos of Western feminism disguises an unpleasant ideology of separatism. In order for Kae to embody a modern form of individual freedom, and claim a sense of national and feminist belonging in the West, she must first create an insuperable division between her and her female ancestors. That is, Kae establishes herself as free only in contrast to her non-Western forebears, those whom she considers unfree.

(Re)Reading The Concubine’s Children Published four years after Disappearing Moon Café, Denise Chong’s The Concubine’s Children follows a similar, feminist plot structure. Like SKY Lee’s daughter-narrator, Kae Ying Woo, “Chong positions herself as the contemporary point of view” (Chao 104). From this perspective, she traces three generations of the family’s matrilineal history, exploring, in particular, the relationship between her immigrant grandmother, May-ying, and her Canadian born mother, Hing. Nonetheless, unlike Kae, Chong does not describe her motivation to explore the past as a personal crisis; rather, she suggests her retelling of the family stories is a way of helping her mother, who “still hurt[s]” from “her sad history” (Chong 269). This stated premise produces a fairly conventional, chronological narrative, which runs from May-ying’s birth in China in 1907 to Chong’s current subject-position in 1987. As Chong explains in the preface to the first edition, she narrates “the story” from an “omniscient” point of view to present her ancestors in a “the most fair and honest way [possible]” (xi); only “the truth,” she implies, is necessary to restore “a painting” of the past (xi). Chong’s approach to recovering Chinese Canadian experience has been widely praised by nationalist criticism. Critics have applauded Chong’s “collectively-based” writing practices (Chao 107) and her “unsen-

Disrupting the National Frame | 111 timental” documentation of the past (Ty 37). In particular, critics have commended the novel’s “nuanced” treatment of May-ying (37). Chao, for instance, asserts that Chong’s depiction of May-ying as an “independent modern woman” symbolizes an “awakening of Chinese Canadian women” (113, 114). Likewise, Eleanor Ty contends that “Chong is able to repossess her grandmother’s body” through her writing of the novel (52). What these nationalist readings neglect, however, is how the novel relies on East–West distinctions to establish May-ying as a strong, liberated woman. That is, Chong creates a comparison between Huangbo, the acquiescent first wife in China, and May-ying, the determined concubine in Canada, to support the view that May-ying was an “independent spirit” (Chao 113). While this comparison affirms May-ying as an agentic subject, it relegates Huangbo to a subordinate role. Moreover, Chong’s representation of her Chinese relatives as naïve, tradition-bound, and family-oriented works to endorse her Canadian family as more educated, modern, and free. Therefore, I argue the novel risks harmonizing Chinese Canadian experience with dominant narratives of Canada’s liberalism and progressive development. Yet, my analysis also uncovers textual moments within Chong’s narrative that highlight her constrained perspective and create opportunities for postcolonial insights. One of the reasons the novel has received significant critical attention is because of its narrative of gender progress, which represents May-ying as a pre-feminist woman who becomes increasingly free, or enlightened, upon her arrival in Canada. In this narrative, China emerges as the primary location of women’s suffering, while Canada comes to embody opportunities for women’s choices. When reflecting on May-ying’s arranged marriage to Chan Sam, for example, Chong describes that, “[May-ying’s] rebellion was useless; in the Confucian way of thinking, a girl has no authority of her own. She does as she is told. The choice was that or suicide” (10). Here, Chong replicates a common assumption within Western feminism, which associates women’s oppression with “the feudal [views and practices] of Confucianism” (Rosenlee 1). As Li-Hsiang Lisa Rosenlee points out, this assumption reduces “a complex intellectual tradition” to a transparent “sexist ideology” and perpetuates “the imperialistic sentiment of the superiority of Western ethical theories” (2). This selective image of Confucianism helps to construct traditional Chinese family structures as antithetical to May-ying’s self-actualization and so characterize her immigration to the West as a movement toward modernization and freedom. Canada appears in this framework as a symbol of futurity linked to breaking down family obligation and increasing women’s self-determination.

112 | Diehl It is an idea that Chong develops by constructing liberation in terms of access to the capitalist economy and by placing emphasis on May-ying’s ability to make money in Canada. By stressing her grandmother’s role as the principal “wage-earner in the family” (95), Chong presents May-ying as claiming an independence and “taking her rightful place in a man’s world” (133). May-ying’s tendencies to gamble, wear men’s clothing, and have extramarital affairs are hence interpreted as signs of May-ying “making a statement that she was … a woman who made her own living … and could do as she pleased” (133). Importantly, this image of May-ying as a proto-feminist has been embraced by critics, who regard Chong’s narrative as “free[ing] one woman from being wronged by the temple of patriarchy” (Chao 105). However, like Chong, these critics appear to equate women’s liberation with the achievement of a Western/masculine definition of autonomy. This conception of liberation not only upholds individualism as a universal norm but also requires a projection of so-called feminine qualities, such as self-denial and embeddedness, onto Chinese culture. Built into the feminist structure of Chong’s novel is a necessary construction of the East as a non-feminist Other. Ong elucidates that this non-feminist Other aids in the assertion of the feminist self, by signifying all that the feminist self is not (para 2). For Western women “looking overseas the non-feminist Other” is typically represented via a figure of “the non-Western woman” (para 2); this figure works to affirm the subjectivities of Westernized women “while denying those of non-Western women” (para 13). In The Concubine’s Children, this dynamic plays out in Chong’s depiction of May-ying as a self-determined and liberated individual. More specifically, May-ying’s personal progress is predicated upon the efface- ment of her Chinese counterpart, Huangbo. Huangbo’s main function in the novel is to emphasize May-ying’s individuality; she is May-ying’s character foil. While Huangbo is presented as “plain, quiet, [and] unas- suming” (Chong 23), May-ying is described as challenging the patriarchal status quo with her “quick temper” and “driven” personality (9, 70). Indeed, Chong surmises that Huangbo “was no match for May-ying”: her “gentleness” made her “ripe for taking advantage” and May-ying found it “eas[y to] outwit her” (48). The politics surfacing in these representations serve to construct May-ying as an ideal agent of immigration, worthy of citizenship in the West due to her individual qualities. Huangbo, on the other hand, is framed in essentialist terms indicative of discourses on the East as unchanging, feminine, and inferior. This dichotomy between East and West is reinforced by Chong’s association of Huangbo with the body and May-ying with the mind. Unlike May-ying, Huangbo is portrayed as

Disrupting the National Frame | 113 not having “the mind for learning to read and write” (49); her “broad and strong shoulders” suggest that she is meant for menial labour, not mental activity (49). These distinctions between May-ying’s capacity to act and This portrait Huangbo’s fixed passivity set up a national hierarchy, favouring Canada over China, progress over tradition, modernization over feudalism. It is of the family a hierarchy developed by Chong’s privileging of paid labour as the route to women’s empowerment. In foregrounding May-ying’s ability to make conforms to wages and send remittances to China, Chong effectively renders Huangbo’s role in the family secondary. That is, Huangbo’s labour of tending the an imperialist rice fields and raising May-ying’s daughters is backgrounded, in order to allow for the valorization of May-ying’s participation in wage labour as model. “pivotal” (Chao 113). The backgrounding of Huangbo’s labour is perhaps most evident in Chong’s representation of Huangbo, and her side of the family, as a drain- ing obligation “siphon[ing]” emotional and material resources away from May-ying, and her side of the family (Chong 289). After relating the tra- vails of her mother’s childhood, for instance, Chong determines that Hing grew up “in a shadow of sacrifice” (295). By stressing a notion of sacrifice, Chong ignores more inclusive concepts of family and shared responsibility and instead suggests that Hing was wrongly disadvantaged due to collective ties. This portrait of the family conforms to an imperialist model, by discussing the sides of the family as separate entities and emphasizing a centre-to-periphery trajectory that conceals more mutually influential exchanges. As discussed above, May-ying’s freedom depends upon Huangbo’s shouldering of reproductive duties, such as subsistence farm- ing, housework, and childrearing, in China. This exchange, however, goes mostly unrecognized in order to present that Chinese side as more decid- edly dependent on the Canadian side. Indeed, Chong sometimes implies that her Chinese relatives are somewhat needy and grasping. When Chong depicts her visit to China, for example, she highlights an anxiety that her “poorer Chinese relations … car[e] less about blood ties than about the foreign-made [goods]” that she and her mother can bring (274). It is an anxiety that permeates her descriptions of her relatives’ living arrange- ments: what her uncle and aunt regard as “the grandeur” of their family’s house, Chong views as “a storeroom, its inventory only junk” (2). To her mind, the abode is claustrophobic and possibly unsanitary, infiltrated by farm animals and mosquitoes (286). This illustration of China leads Chong to conclude that her mother “ended up the luckier of her siblings” and that Canada was May-ying’s “best gift of all” (295). The effect of this narrative outcome is ultimately to celebrate Canada as a land of oppor-

114 | Diehl tunity, where Chong’s side of the family has flourished and “struggle[d] free of the familial obligation and sacrifice that bound the Chinese side” (301). This outcome serves to validate dominant conceptions of the East by reinforcing a connection between economic liberalism and opportunities for self-fulfilment as the inevitable result of Western acculturation and modernization. Nonetheless, there are several moments within the novel in which Chong underscores the Western-ness of her perspective, as well as her inability to fully understand China. These moments, which occur mostly in the novel’s last chapters, threaten to rupture the narrative’s surface of neutrality and reveal its ideological investments. For instance, talking about her childhood, Chong signals the foundational influences that have shaped her impressions of Chinese culture. She admits: The Chinese side was a mystery to me. The first book I read about China was one my mother borrowed for me from the library when I was eight years old. What I remembered most about Moment in Peking, a tome of more than 800 pages, was that women and girls, blamed for their own misfortunes, routinely committed suicide … All that seemed beyond the reach of reality to me. To me, China was what was left behind when the boat carrying my grandmother, pregnant with my mother, docked in Vancouver. (253) In describing China as a place of “mystery” located “beyond” her compre- hension, Chong reveals a reliance on Orientalist discourses, which often construct the East as the West’s mysterious, duplicitous, and dark Other. These terms show that Chong is translating Chinese culture in light of her own Westernized sensibilities, a process that necessarily places emphasis on contrast and difference. Also, Chong’s admission that she first learned about Chinese culture from the novel Moment in Peking, published in 1939, points to further limitations of her perspective. The novel, which was written by American- and German-educated author Yutang Lin, is largely interested in “giving his Western readers a highly personal and individual outlook” on China (Dian Li 401); it “does not claim to be objective or exact” (401). Indeed, this novel, with its narrow definitions of “Chinese wisdom” and promotion of Western ideals, has itself been criticized for its “strong strain of Orientalism” (402). Thus, Chong’s suggestion that Moment in Peking truthfully portrays how Chinese “women and girls … routinely committed suicide” is problematic, calling into question the credibility of her views. Finally, when Chong concedes that, for her, “China was what was left behind,” she gestures to the teleological logic organizing her family

Disrupting the National Frame | 115 narrative, a logic that assumes China is stuck in the past, while Canada is somehow ahead. Textual moments like this draw attention to Chong’s subjective reconstruction of the past, creating opportunities for intervening perspectives and postcolonial critiques. as nationalist critics have suggested, feminist coming to voice narratives such as Disappearing Moon Café and The Concubine’s Children contribute to an important recuperation of women-centred stories, challenging the gender imbalance of much historical and sociological literature on early Chinese Canadian immigrants (Chao 89). Nonetheless, these narratives “have their own systems of signification,” systems which operate to depict and privilege certain modes of thinking and being as exemplary of the nation (Chu 11): they are not “transparent ethnographic documents” (11). Rather, the genre has a proclivity “to equate feminist consciousness and agency with first world [Westernized] women and fatalist or passive positions with third world [non-Western] women” (21). The unfortunate consequence of treating these narratives as corrective, sociohistorical documents is thus that the project of making experience visible often precludes critical examination of these systems of signification themselves. In this case, critical approaches to Disappearing Moon Café and The Concubine’s Children have tended not to thoroughly challenge the implicit binary of a traditional China against a modern Canada embedded within their feminist plot structures and progressive trajectories. It is consequently important to consider that while such texts may participate in contesting a history of institutional racism in Canada they also risk tracing a genealogy of increasing equality—a genealogy that conforms to pre-existing cultural narratives of a gender-enlightened, free West against a backwards and repressive East. This article, by shifting away from a nationalist critical framework, has aimed to focus attention on the possibilities for postcolonial, diasporic interventions in these writers’ creative, and often subversive, interactions with feminist narrative models and conventions. It has located textual moments in which the novels’ daughter-narrators create distance from, and thus complicate, the underlying notions of national and progressive history structuring their presentation of the family stories. In so doing, it has engaged with ongoing debates within Asian Canadian Studies, which underscore the limitations of strategic essentialism, and advocate for re-locating discussions of Asian Canadian narratives within a global context of imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism. These debates continue to gain significance due to the increasing institutionalization of Asian Canadian Studies and the condi-

116 | Diehl tions created by a post-9/11 Canada. Against this backdrop, this article not only seeks to further an understanding of the implied commitments of feminist narratives, which can reconcile ideas of racial “difference into the national landscape through gender” (Bow 114), but also endeavours to reveal the possibilities for innovation and resistance within this genre.

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Disrupting the National Frame | 117 Lai, Larissa. Slanting I, Imagining We: Asian Canadian Literary Produc- tion in the 1980s and 1990s. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier up, 2014. Lee, Shelley Sang-Hee. A New History of Asian America. New York: Rout- ledge, 2014. Lee, SKY. Disappearing Moon Café. Vancouver: Douglas and McIntrye, 1990. Li, Dian. “Yutang Lin.” Encyclopedia of Chinese Philosophy. Ed. Antonio Cua. New York: Routledge, 2003. 401–02. Li, Peter. The Chinese in Canada. Toronto: Oxford up, 1988. Miki, Roy. In Flux: Transnational Shifts in Asian Canadian Writing. Edmonton: NeWest Press, 2011. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham: Duke up, 2003. Ong, Aiwah. “Colonialism and Modernity: Feminist Re-presentations of Women in Non-Western Societies.” Inscriptions 3.4 (1988): 79–93. Peepre, Mari. “Resistance and the Demon Mother in Diaspora Literature: Sky Lee and Denise Chong Speak Back to the Mother/land.” Interna- tional Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue Internationale D’études Canadiennes 18 (1998): 79–92. Rosenlee, Li-Hsiang Lisa. Confucianism and Women: A Philosophical Interpretation. New York: suny, 2006. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Eds. Carey Nelson and Lawrence Gross- berg. Urbana: University Illinois Press, 1988. 271–313. Stanley, Timothy. Contesting White Supremacy: School Segregation, Anti- Racism, and the Making of Chinese Canadians. Vancouver: ubc Press, 2011. Ty, Eleanor. The Politics of the Invisible in Asian North American Nar- ratives. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Xiaojing, Zhou. “Introduction: Critical Theories and Methodologies in Asian American Literary Studies.” Form and Transformation in Asian American Literature. Eds. Zhou Xiaojing and Samina Najmi. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005. 3–29.

118 | Diehl “I did a nice thing”: David Foster Wallace and the Gift Economy James McAdams Lehigh University

I The artist appeals to that part of our being which is a gift and not an acquisition—and, therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation.

Joseph Conrad Nigger of the Narcissus

hile david foster wallace only began writing seriously Whalfway through his undergraduate career, he experienced success at an extremely young age, an outcome he would later regret. Initially a self- described “hard-core syntax weenie,” Wallace studied mathematical theory and modal logic at the University of Amherst until becoming exposed to avant-garde fiction, in particular Donald Barthelme’s “The Red Balloon.” Not until then, he admits, did he realize that those very special “clicks” one encounters in academia, described by a professor as “mathematical experiences,” were essentially “aesthetic in nature, an epiphany in Joyce’s original sense” (McCaffery 138). Ultimately, the work of fiction he submitted for

ESC 42.3–4 (September/December 2016): 119–133 his English honours thesis would later be published as The Broom of the System, a zany, Pynchonesque novel replete with clever pyrotechnics and allusions to Wittgenstein, from whom it receives its title. James McAdams’s However, as early as 1987, when he was obtaining his mfa at the Uni- fiction, creative non- versity of Arizona, Wallace had grown ambivalent about the success and fiction, and academic self-indulgent style of The Broom of the System. In 1993, he explained that essays have been the popularity of The Broom of the System mystified him, acknowledging, published in numerous “there’s a lot of stuff in that novel I’d like to reel back in and do better” (136). venues, including Much of his ambivalence involved the novel’s penchant for what he iden- Kritikos, Connotations, tifies as narcissistic and egoistic writerly games that “deny” the essential Readings: A Journal for fact that “the writer is over here with his agenda while the reader’s over Scholars and Readers, there … This paradox is what makes good fiction sort of magical, I think.” Wreck Park Journal, Wallace laments, “The paradox can’t be resolved, but it can somehow be Superstition Review, mediated—re-mediated” (137 emphasis added). This remediation takes the Amazon’s Day One, form of Wallace re-imagining art as not performative and self-indulgent decomP, Literary but, rather, as a gift. Orphans, and boaat At the same time he was reconsidering his own approach to fiction, Press, among others. His Wallace began to also re-evaluate his attitudes toward the metafictional research interests include and postmodern writers whose techniques had influenced his debut novel. postpostmodernism, These authors, including Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, Robert creative writing, the Coover, and John Barth, had attracted the younger Wallace with their digital humanities, and works’ ironic humour, erudition, formal sophistication, and aesthetic inno- the medical humanities. vation. As he became more critical of his own work, though, as well as Before attending college, the culture at large, Wallace began to question the effectiveness of these he worked as a social methods in a society dominated by corporate interests, marketing brands, worker in the mental and political cynicism. Ultimately, as he told David Lipsky about his time health industry in in late-80s Arizona: Philadelphia. He is a PhD I was just really stuck about writing … I didn’t know whether candidate in English at I really loved to write or whether I’d just gotten some kind of Lehigh University, where excited about having some early success. The story at the end he also teaches and edits of Curious [“Westward the Course of Empire Goes Its Way”], the university’s literary which not a lot of people like, was really meant to be extremely journal, Amaranth. His sad. And to sort of be a kind of suicide note. And I think by creative and academic the time I got to the end of that story, I figured I wasn’t going work can be viewed at to write anymore. (61) jamesmcadams.net. In “Westward,” Mark Nechtr, Wallace’s alter-ego, observes “metafiction is untrue, as a lover. It cannot betray. It can only reveal. Itself is its only object. It’s the act of a lonely solipsist’s self-love.” Conversely, the narrator reveals, Mark Nechtr “desires, some distant hard-earned day, to write

120 | McAdams something that stabs you in the heart. That pierces you, makes you think you’re going to die. Maybe it’s called metalife. Or metafiction. Or realism. Or gfhrytytu. He doesn’t know. He wonders who the hell really cares” (Girl With Curious Hair 332). If this story is a suicide note for a certain style, it also lays out an agenda or hope for resurrection in another kind of style, one that would soon come to be termed “The New Sincerity.”1 Wallace’s most complete formulation of what this “new sincerity” might look like occurs in his 1991 essay “E Unibus Pluram,” in what Marshall Boswell has described as “one of the most important pieces in [Wallace’s] growing corpus of nonfiction” (9). In the rousing terminal passages of the essay, Wallace imagines a literary revolution, an aesthetic counterattack by a generation raised on metafictive games and postmodern irony. In so doing, he envisions that the next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels … who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions and in U.S life … These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere … that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. (81)

Following from these prescriptions the most persistent and idiosyncratic characteristic of David Foster Wallace’s writing, evident in the breakthrough novel Infinite Jest, his justly celebrated narrative journalism, and his interviews and speeches, is its conviction that literature should be empathetic and selfless, generating meaning in the transactional space between writer and reader. In order to accomplish this objective, according to Wallace, the author must assume the responsibility to be generous and sincere, thus avoiding manipulating the reader the way the mass entertainment industry and advertising culture manipulates the consumer. He explains this responsibility at length in a famous riff to McCaffery, figuring these new paradigms of sincerity and the gift as a form of “love”: You’ve got to discipline yourself to talk out of the part of you that loves, loves what you’re working on. Maybe that just plain loves …The big distinction between good art and so-so art lies somewhere in the art’s heart purpose, the agenda of the consciousness behind the text. It’s got something to do with love

1 See Adam Kelly’s “David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction” and “Dialectic of Sincerity: Lionel Trilling and David Foster Wallace.”

“I did a nice thing” | 121 … It seems like one of the things really great fiction-writers do is give the readers something. (140)2

Even in the realm of the literary world, Wallace worried, this lack of genuine concern and respect for the consumer was becoming more preva- lent, as commercial forces contaminated the aesthetic domain, reducing fiction to a kind of “trash.” In this situation, readers become less active participants in the creation of meaning and more similar to passive recipients, like spectators at the latest Hollywood blockbuster. Therefore, a new kind of generous and difficult fiction becomes necessary, he argues, to challenge, not placate, the reader. “If avant-garde stuff can do its job,” he explained to David Lipsky, “[it] seduces the reader into making extraordinary efforts that he wouldn’t normally make. And that’s the kind of magic that really great art can do … You teach the reader that he’s way smarter than he thought he was” (71). In Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson conducts a sophisticated and compelling analysis of the contemporary conflation of state bureaucracy and big business, commerce, and art. Advancing Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of “The Culture Industry,” Jameson describes this new system with tenacity and vigour, stating that economics has swallowed culture, making art susceptible to and equivalent to commodified goods. Writing primarily about architecture, but all art production by extension, including fiction, Jameson asserts “what has happened today is that aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally” (4). This thesis operates as an implicit assumption throughout Wallace’s oeuvre. A decade before Jameson’s Postmodernism, Lewis Hyde published The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. While Hyde’s motive and approach certainly vary from Jameson’s, he concurs with Jameson’s analysis that this commercial exploitation of art is a uniquely modern phenomenon, writing in a passage that anticipates Wallace, “the exploitation of the arts which we find in the twentieth century is without precedent. The particular manner in which radio, television, the movies, and the recording industry have commercialized song and drama is wholly new …The more we allow such commodity art to define and control our gifts, the less gifted we will become, as individuals and as a society” (158–59, emphasis added).

2 For a compelling and provocative discussion about just how this purpose operates (and whether it is ultimately successful), see Holland.

122 | McAdams Whereas Jameson’s article diagnoses current trends from a historical, Marxist perspective, Hyde’s perhaps more ambitious agenda attempts to provide a prognosis and solution to the problem of commercialized art. Basing his methodology in part on Marcel Mauss’s The Gift (1925), Hyde uses anthropological studies, folk tales, ethnography, and explications of texts by authors such as Conrad, Whitman, and Pound to demonstrate ways through which artists can produce works of the kind imagined by Wallace, works that function as gifts, not commodities. This establishment of interactivity as central to the concept of the gift leads to Hyde’s binary contrast between eros and logos, where he opposes “eros (the principle of attraction, union, involvement which binds together) to logos (reason and logic in general, the principle of differentiation in particular). The market economy is a manifestation of logos,” while eros is a manifestation of the gift economy (introduction xx, note). The Gift’s particular value lies in its discussions of how certain rituals, folk practices, and religious customs embody this vital difference between eros and logos. Once this theoretical frame is introduced, Hyde effectively argues that the “erotic” qualities illuminated by anthropological and enthnographical transactions are relevant to art in such commercial contemporary contexts discussed by Jameson and distrusted by Wallace. He accomplishes this by transposing eros and logos into “the gift economy” and “the market economy,” writing, “It is the assumption of this book that a work of art is a gift, not a commodity. Or, to state the modern case with more precision, that works of art exist simultaneously in two ‘economies,’ a market economy and a gift economy. Only one of these is essential, however: a work of art can survive without the market, but where there is no gift there is no art” (xi). Hyde’s work on gift theory, along with Mauss, has exercised a tremendous influence on contemporary novelists as diverse as Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Lethem, and Zadie Smith and on philosophers such as Derrida and Bataille.3 But perhaps the artist most influenced by Hyde is Wallace himself, who throughout his career earnestly engaged with the notion of the “erotic” relationship between the reader and the writer, one explored at length in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (see McAdams). As Wal-

3 See, for example, Derrida, The Gift of Death; Derrida, Given Time. I. Counterfeit Money; and Bataille, The Accursed Share, the latter providing an economic analysis of the gift (from a neo-Marxist perspective), while Derrida’s treatment of the gift attempts to use it as a phenomenon to understand his unique notion of the other. Wallace, like his fellow novelists, tends to interpret the gift in a more aesthetic guise.

“I did a nice thing” | 123 lace once said, echoing Hyde, “my personal belief is a lot of [art’s power] has to do with voice, and a feeling of intimacy between the writer and the reader. That sorta, given the atomization and loneliness of contemporary life—that’s our opening, that’s our gift” (Lipsky 72, emphasis added).4 According to Michael Martone, Wallace first read The Gift while the two of them were living in Syracuse in the early 1990s, when Wallace was just beginning to work on what would later be published as Infinite Jest. A fellow writer, Martone describes how he had been influenced by Hyde’s book and often used it in creative writing workshops he conducted. He explains that he gave the book to Wallace because Hyde had applied the gift ethos to substance recovery as well as art. As Martone explains, “David was taken by the book not simply because he, at the moment, was working on Infinite Jest, but also what the book had to say about competitive markets as opposed to collaborative enterprises and in what way is the artist isolated and part of a larger concern” (51). By no means does Martone provide the only connection between Wal- lace’s and Hyde’s work. Wallace provided blurbs for two of Hyde’s books, Trickster Makes the World (1999) and the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of The Gift,about which Wallace wrote, “No one who is invested in any kind of art can read The Gift and remain unchanged.” Wallace also invokes Hyde’s theories in a discussion about irony with David Wiley in 1997, admitting that “a certain amount of [my opinion] comes out of the work of this essayist named Lewis Hyde … Hyde talks about irony after awhile becoming the sound of prisoners who enjoy their confinement” (interview). In fact, over time Hyde and Wallace developed a relationship that ultimately, Hyde, being a faculty member at Kenyon College presumes, resulted in Wallace delivering the 2005 Kenyon College commencement speech, published posthumously, with illustrations, as This Is Water. When discussing the disconnection between the difficulty of his work and his oft-stated desire to connect with and form an “erotic” bond with the reader, Wallace frequently maintained that his primary motive was to give the reader something that passive spectation could not: a sense of her intelligence, or integrity, or just simply to remind her “what it feels like to be a fucking human being” (McCaffery 128). Five years later, Wallace would still stand by this statement, but in the interim he had developed a more exhaustive description of its historical backgound, strategic and tactical programs, and ultimate objectives. Where before he focused on 4 Compare Hyde, “the cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange that the gift establishes a feeling, a bond between two people, while the sale of a commodity leaves no necessary connection” (72).

124 | McAdams the writer’s love, he now declared the importance of the reader working hard and overcoming difficulties to become smarter, more aware, and less lonely. The gift worked both ways, enticing the reader into having fun working very hard at something and having that difficulty create its own The environ- reward, be its own gift. As he explained his motivations in developing the particular aesthetic of Infinite Jest to David Lipsky in 1996, “I wanted ment in which to do something that was really hard and avant-garde, but that was fun enough that it forced the reader to do the work that was required … if the Wallace and his writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is” (41). contemporaries Aside from adopting Hyde’s conviction that generous art should be “erotic,” that is, open-ended, performative, and “anti-confluential,” and matured as a declaring that the particular gift he wanted to give the reader was a sense of her awareness and intelligence, Wallace attempted to carve out a gift writers was one economy of his own that would avoid what he, writing in The Review of Contemporary Fiction in 1988, described as essentially an exploitative in which every- and empty relationship between the reader and writer in contemporary commercial, or “trash,” literature, flatly comparing the majority of con- thing, including temporary writers with prostitutes: art, had been A prostitute is someone who, in exchange for money, affords someone else the form and sensations that make intimacy commodified between two people a valuable or meaningful human enterprise. The prostitute “gives” but—demanding nothing of comparable value in return—perverts the giving, helps render what by television, is supposed to be a revelation a transaction. The writer of trash fiction, often with admirable craft, affords his customers a nar- marketing, and rative structure and movements that engage the reader—titillates, repulses, excites, transports him—without demanding co-option of of him any of the intellectual or spiritual or artistic responses that render verbal intercourse between writer and reader as formerly artistic important. (“Future” 7) As argued in “E Unibus Pluram,” the environment in which Wallace techniques such and his contemporaries matured as a writers was one in which everything, including art, had been commodified by television, marketing, and co- as irony. option of formerly artistic techniques such as irony. “Irony and ridicule are terribly effective,” he posits, “and that at the same time they are agents of great despair and stasis in U.S. culture, and that for aspiring fiction writers they pose especially terrible problems” (50–51). The Gift provided Wallace with a model to re-envision his own art as something that was sincere and not ironic, genuine and not market-driven, inspired by an agenda to

“I did a nice thing” | 125 make the jaded American consumer of television and televisual literature (what he calls “image fiction” in the essay) aware of her intelligence, a sensibility he inscribes in the final sentences of “Westward the Course of Empire Goes its Way”: “I want nothing from you. Lie back. Relax. Quality soil washes right out. Lie back. Open. Face directions. Look. Listen. Use ears I’d be proud to call our own. Listen to the silence behind the engines’ noise. Jesus, sweets, listens. Hear it? It’s a love song. For whom? You are loved” ( 373). The following section offers a reading of three examples of Wallace’s writing that are especially concerned with gift-giving and consequently attempts to interpret them according to the perspective of gift theory. The first instance occurs in Infinite Jest, where it plays a brief but vital role in the narrative. The second involves a linked pair of stories in the collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, “The Devil is a Busy Man ” and “The Devil is a Busy Man [2].”5 Together, these narratives demonstrate how literature can be viewed as a “difficult gift” (to use Zadie Smith’s phrase),6 how it depicts and satirizes contemporary Americans’ distrust of selfless- ness and compassion, and the difficulty—discussed by Derrida—of giving anonymously without receiving credit for the giving, otherwise known as the Christian “double bind.”7

5 Wallace refers to both narratives as “The Devil is a Busy Man.” For the sake of clarity, I have inserted the bracket [2] into the second one in the collection, such that it reads “The Devil is a Busy Man [2]” or “The Devil [2].” 6 “We have to recognize that a difficult gift like Brief Interviews merits the equally difficult gifts of our close attention and effort” (Smith 261). 7 Double binds are a common trope in Wallace’s writing, especially, as Adam Kelly notes in “David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction,” in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. “Wallace claimed,” Kelly writes, “in interview that ‘interesting and true stuff in my life seems to involve double-binds, where there is a decision between two alternatives, but neither is acceptable’ … the logic of the double bind is evidently a basic structure in [Wallace’s] work” (139).

126 | McAdams II

One must give without knowing, without knowledge or recognition, without thanks: without anything, or at least without any object.

Derrida, The Gift of Death

At the heart of the uniquely complex and highly-evolved organism represented by Infinite Jest exists a simple attempt of gift-giving of the film “cartridge” “Infinite Jest.” Unlike the lethal samizdat versions of the film, which become circulated in terrorist networks and used as attacks on American citizens addicted to pleasure and television, this cartridge was created within a simple economy of love, as a gift from a father to his son, Hal. Like most of the characters in the novel, Hal suffers from depression and an infantile desire for substances, in his case, marijuana. This behaviour, the narrator(s) suggests, manifests because “he despises what he’s really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pulses and writhes just under the hip mask, anhedonia” (Wallace, Infinite Jest 694–95). To his father, James Incandena, it appears that Hal is succumbing to solipsism, to a kind of anhedonia that sacrifices communication, conversation, and social involvement in favour of the silence afforded by the periphery, as James Incandenza himself admits having “personally spent the vast bulk of his own former animate life8 as pretty much a figurant, furniture at the periphery of the very eyes closest to him, it turned out, and that it’s one heck of a crummy way to live” (835). This is one of few occasions in the novel, and may well be the only occasion where James himself discloses the reasons behind his suicide and what about his life made it such a “crummy way to live.” Therefore, after James commits suicide, his wraith explains to Don Gately that the production of “Infinite Jest (V)” was intended neither for commercial, artistic, nor financial reasons—it was never released, and thus exists outside the market economy—but, rather, as a therapeutic intervention, a way to save his “own personal youngest offspring, a son, the one most like him, the one most marvelous and frightening to him, [from] becoming a figurant” (837). The wraith continues to document how he had perceived Hal as becoming increasingly hidden, mute, disappearing from

8 James Incandenza, or J. O. I., appears in the novel—at least those passages I’m concerned with—after commiting suicide and is thus described as a ghost-like figure, a wraith“ ,” and thus discussed his life and his motivations about “Infinite Jest” with a sort of posthumous past-tense revery that I’m not sure makes sense, as quoted, without this explanatory note.

“I did a nice thing” | 127 his very eyes; he suspected that his son may have been using substances. “Infinite Jest (V),” he explains, is the result of Its creation is Spen[ding] the whole sober last ninety days of [my] animate life working tirelessly to contrive a medium via which [I] and [Hal] could simply converse. To concoct something the gifted inspired by a boy couldn’t simply master and move on from to a new plateau. Something the boy would love enough to induce him deep love for to open his mouth and come out—even if it was only to ask for more. Games hadn’t done it, professionals hadn’t done it, another and impersonation of professionals hadn’t done it. His last resort: entertainment. Make something so bloody compelling it would by a sincere reverse thrust on a young self’s fall into the womb of solipsism, anhedonia, death in life. A magically entertaining toy to dangle attempt to help at the infant still somewhere alive in the boy, to make its eyes light and toothless mouth open unconsciously, to laugh. To this other. bring him “out of himself,” as they say … The scholars and Foundations and disseminators never saw that his most serious idea was: to entertain. (838–39 emphasis added)

This question of “entertainment” complicates the status of “Infinite Jest (V)” as gift or, rather, perhaps a “distorted gift,” if that is a credible construction. For the cartridge exists outside of a market economy and thus is driven by no commodifiable forces such as those condemned by Jameson and Hyde. Its creation is inspired by a deep love for another and by a sincere attempt to help this other. Finally, “by concocting something the boy couldn’t simply master,” the auteur indicates an agreement with Wallace’s statements that he wants the audience to have to work hard, to become more aware, less lonely and solipsistic. However, like the writers of trash fictions described by Wallace in “Fic- tional Futures,” “Infinite Jest (V)” “engages the [viewer]—titillates, repulses, excites, transports him—without demanding of him any of the intellectual or spiritual or artistic responses that render verbal intercourse between writer and reader as important” (7). For this reason it fails to function as a gift in Wallace’s special sense because it doesn’t respect the intelligence or awareness of the viewer or demand hard work or attention—like alcohol or drugs, the cartridge demands nothing in return. It is not a gift because it is not difficult, an insight the narrative pushes by juxtaposing the weakness of those who succumb to the “lethal entertainment” to the persistent courage of recovering substance abusers working hard to accept the difficult “gift” of sobriety, an unsexy gift requiring daily diligence.

128 | McAdams Before considering if the same can be said of Wallace and Infinite Jest the novel (quite distinct from the cartridge within the novel), I’ll briefly analyze a slightly different treatment of gifts in “The Devil is a Busy Man” and “The Devil is a Busy Man [2].” These short stories—extremely short by Wallace’s standards—appear in the collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. In “The Devil is a Busy Man” an unidentified narrator with hickish diction recalls a boyhood memory of how difficult a time his “Daddy” had giving away items he found in the machine shed or the cellar, “shit like a couch or a freezer or an old tiller” (70). Daddy, the narrator describes, would post an ad in the local paper to announce that he was giving away the item for free, which he was always unable to do because folks would be “skittery about it too and their faces all closed up like at cards and they’d walk around the thing and poke it with their toe and go Where’d you all get it at what’s the matter with it how come you want rid of it so bad” (70). Finally, this behaviour frustrates the father so much that he starts putting some “fool price” on the items: “Some fool price next to nothing. Old Harrow with Some Teeth A Little Rusted $5. JCPenney Sleepersofa Green and Yellow $10 and like that” (70). Consequently, “folks” start arriving in droves from town and from other towns, eager to make a deal: “their eyes were different […] Tickled to get an old harrow for next to nothing” (71). This story, or microfiction, operates without a narrative, or characterization, or plot. In fact, it functions more as a narrative essay or dream- study than a typical piece of Wallacian fiction, a short-form hybrid he characterized as “creepy little allegorical tableaux” in describing Jerzy Kosinski’s Steps (“Overlooked”). It also resembles the Kafkan parables Wallace enjoyed so much (see “Some Remarks”). What it does provide, like much of Wallace’s satire, is a skewed and caricatured representation of something that’s so obvious most Americans have become unaware of it. In the modern American market economy, consumers have learned not only to distrust marketers and advertisers but also to distrust those who state that they want to give something away “for free.” For example, “free” magazine subscriptions with little asterisked contingencies that before long start billing one’s accounts or, like in “Devil …” an old JCPen- ney Sleepersofa someone “gives” that just happens to have bed bugs. The gift economy, Wallace suggests, has been compromised by the market economy: in these times, if you want to give something away as a gift, you’re better off attaching an economic value to it, however nominal, to avoid suspicion of trickery.

“I did a nice thing” | 129 “Devil [2]” explores the age-old religious question of how to be good without feeling good about feeling good. Unlike “The Devil,” “The Devil [2]” employs a narrative style more common to Wallace readers, with a narrator who is hypereducated and linguistically precise, writing in recursive, highly self-conscious sentences that, in their pursuit of absolute precision, impede the reader’s ability to enter into the text, thus requiring diligence, awareness, and hard work. “Three weeks ago I did a nice thing for someone,” the story begins. “I can not say more than this, or it will empty what I did of any of its true, ultimate value” (Brief 190). The narrator attempts to remain nameless because confessing to his role would “infect the motivation for the act—meaning, in other words, that part of my motivation for it would be, not generosity, but desiring gratitude, affection, and approval towards me to result” (190). Finally, however, the recipient of the gift learns beyond a doubt that the narrator was indeed the benefactor and asks him to please confirm this. At this point, the narrator admits, “I was almost dying with temptation … Like the forces of darkness, evil, and hopelessness in the world at large itself, the temptation of this frequently can overwhelm resistance” (191). As the conversation continues, the narrator, while trying to resist this temptation, confesses to making subtle remarks and hints that, in a “fatal instant,” was “interpreted by the person as an indirect hint from me that I was, despite my prior denials, indeed the individual responsible for this generous, nice act” (192). The brief story or parable ends with the narrator in despair, since he had revealed himself to have An unconscious and, seemingly, natural, automatic ability to both deceive myself and other people, which, on the “motivational level,” not only completely emptied the generous thing I tried to do of any true value, and caused me to fail, again, in my attempts to sincerely be what someone would classify as truly a “nice” or “good” person, but, despairingly, cast me in a light to myself which could only be classified as “dark,” “evil,” or “beyond hope of ever sincerely becoming good.” (193)

“Devil [2]” laments the impulse to ruin generous acts by desiring credit and payment for them and suggests that falling prey to this double bind is perhaps inevitable. Derrida, likewise, argues in The Gift of Death that even if the person never tells, the fact that he or she feels better about himself or herself is reciprocal payment, and thus the generosity of the gift or generous act is obviated. Only in the case of death, as his famous discussion of “The Binding of Isaac” illustrates, can there be a true “gift,”

130 | McAdams or “donnee,” to use the French term. During an explication of Baudelaire’s “The Pagan School,” Derrida states that, In the salary promised in heaven by the Father who sees in secret and will pay it back, “The Pagan School” always unmasks a sort of sublime and secret calculation, that of him who seeks “to win paradise economically,” as the narrator of “Counterfeit Money” puts it. The moment the gift, however generous it be, is infected with the slightest hint of calculation, the moment it takes account of knowledge or recognition, it falls within the ambit of an economy: it exchanges, in short it gives counterfeit money, since it gives in exchange for payment. Even if it gives “true” money, the alteration of the gift into a form of calculation immediately destroys the value of the very thing that is given; it destroys as if from the inside. The money may keep its value but it is no longer given as such. Once it is tied to remuneration, its it counterfeit because it is mercenary and mercantile. (112)

Wallace, I believe, agreed with this Derridean pronouncement and lamented that, even while he attempted to produce works that operate within the gift economy, the fact that they were contracted, edited, published, and advertised by multi-billion dollar companies ultimately complicated the desire to remain pure. In 2006, he responded to an interviewer’s question about whether “any pure art free of commercial or propaganda value exists,” by conceding that he was suspicious of the word “pure” and stated that it was perhaps too high a standard. He explained this further by invoking the example of his wife, Karen Green, a successful painter and visual artist. “My wife,” he said, “is a fantastic artist and painter but she doesn’t attempt to sell her work for a great deal of money … mainly she gives them as gifts to people” (Karmodie). Wallace then juxtaposes this with his own art, which requires the whole commercial apparatus he distrusts to exist in any published sense in the first place. In another instance of a paradox or double blind, he admits, It may be the only way in America to produce pure art would be to remove oneself from the public sphere and produce art only as gifts where there is no money involved and no attempt at publication or publicity involved. The problem is that if everyone does that, there’s no public arts here. So it all becomes a kind of paradox I spent a lot of the last years thinking about. (Karmodie)

“I did a nice thing” | 131 Both Wallace’s statements regarding his fiction and his fiction itself exposes his passionate conviction in establishing a genuine, “erotic” relationship with the reader by composing art within a gift economy. Real- izing, along with Jameson and Hyde, that the modern “late capitalist” or “postindustrial” market economy complicates the concept of “pure” art, he develops a highly sophisticated set of strategies and tactics to challenge commercial forces and at least approach purity by confronting readers with difficult, but rewarding, texts that are for us. As Tim Jacobs writes: Subtle touches signify much in Wallace’s discourse of love. David Foster Wallace’s primary concern was for the reader. While he knew every literary technique and stratagem, had a mind that computers might envy, had read everything, and was a linguistic and philosophical titan—“obscenely well-educated,” he said of himself—his greatest strength as a writer was simply that he loved.

In this way, Infinite Jest the novel succeeds as a gift, whereas “Infinite Jest” the cartridge fails.

Works Cited

Derrida, Jacques. The Gift of Death. Trans. David Wills. Chicago: Univer- sity of Chicago Press, 1995. Holland, Mary. “ ‘The Art’s Heart’s Purpose’: Braving the Narcissistic Loop of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.” Critique 47: 3 (Spring 2006): 218–42. Hyde, Lewis. The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. New York: Random House, 1979. Hyde, Lewis. “E-Mail Message.” 13 May 2011. Jacobs, Tim. “The Fight: Considering David Foster Wallace Considering You.” Rain Taxi: Review of Books. Winter 2008/2009. raintaxi.com. 25 October 2016. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke up, 1991. Karmodi, Ostap. “An Interview with David Foster Wallace.” 13 July 2011. ostap.livejournal.com. 25 October 2016.

132 | McAdams Kelly, Adam. “David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction.” Consider David Foster Wallace. Ed. David Hering. Los Angeles: Sideshow Media Press, 2010. ——— . “Dialectic of Sincerity: Lionel Trilling and David Foster Wallace.” Post 45. 17 October 2014. post45.research.yale.edu. 26 October 2016. Lipsky, David. Although of Course You End up Becoming Yourself. New York: Random House, 2010. Martone, Michael. “Footnoes and Endnotes.” Sonoma Review 55 (2009): 51–59. McAdams, James. “The Violence of Rhetoric and David Foster Wallace’s Hideous Men.” Kritikos 12 (December 2015). intertheory.org. 25 October 2016. McCaffery, Larry. “An Interview with David Foster Wallace.” Review of Contemporary Literature 13.2 (1993): 127–50. Smith, Zadie. “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men: The Difficult Gifts of David Foster Wallace.” Changing My Mind. London: Penguin Books, 2009. Wallace, David Foster. “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young.” Contemporary Review of Fiction (Fall 1988): 1–15. ———. “Westward the Course of Empire Goes Its Way.” Girl with Curious Hair. New York: W.W. Norton, 1989. 231–73. ———. Infinite Jest. New York: Little Brown, 1996. ——— . “The Devil is a Busy Man.” Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. New York: Little Brown, 1996. 70–72. ——— . “The Devil is a Busy Man.” Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. New York: Little Brown, 1996. 190–94. ———.“E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.” A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. New York: Little Brown, 1997. ———. “Some Remarks on Kafka’s Funniness.” Consider the Lobster. New York: Little, Brown, 2006. ———. “Overlooked: Five Direly Underappreciated American Novels >1960.” Salon. 12 April 1999. salon.com. 25 October 2016. Wiley, David. “Transcript of the David Foster Wallace Interview.” The Min- nesota Daily. 27 February 1997. smallbytes.net. 25 October 2016.

“I did a nice thing” | 133

Breaking Down Creative Democracy: A Pragmatist Reading of Race and Gender in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand Gregory Alan Phipps University of Oxford

austic, controversial, and frequently cynical about racial Cpolitics, Nella Larsen worked simultaneously with and against prevailing tendencies in the Harlem Renaissance. She supported Jessie Fauset and W. E. B. Du Bois’s disparagement of primitivism and exoticism, but, unlike Fauset, she did not ally the figures of the New Negro and New Woman with bourgeois morality. Her first novel, Quicksand (1928), features a biracial female protagonist who occupies a series of disparate communities, pursuing beauty, luxury, romance, and autonomy. However, repetitious collapses into alienation and despair compromise the potentially affirmative side of her cosmopolitan mobility. Numerous scholars have noted that Larsen modeled Helga Crane’s story in part on her own experiences, although the conclusion of the novel seems to diverge from her life. As George Hutchin- son remarks, at the time she was writing Quicksand, Larsen was “working her way into circles where she felt valuable, understood, and at home, and these circles defied the constraints of racial, gendered, and sexual entrapment” (238–39).1 Her protagonist, on the other hand, never finds this kind 1 Although accusations that Larsen committed plagiarism in her short story “Sanctuary” (1930) would harm her standing in Harlem and effectively end her literary career, critics have defended Larsen by arguing that the story is

ESC 42.3–4 (September/December 2016): 135–157 of community, ultimately fleeing to the rural south, where she lives in a homogenous African-American environment as a preacher’s wife. Most critics consider this conclusion not just a break in the autobiographical Gregory Phipps’s trajectory of the novel but also a break in the continuity of the narrative. first book,Henry James Conversely, this article argues that Helga’s fate in Alabama grows directly and the Philosophy of out of the relationship between belief, doubt, and experience that frames Literary Pragmatism, preceding events in her life. Focusing on a neglected point of connection was published with between Larsen’s social context and Helga’s migrations, the article notes Palgrave Macmillan in that the relationship between belief, doubt, and experience invokes sev- 2016. His articles on eral foundational principles in the intellectual movement of pragmatism. American literature Pragmatism developed in the early twentieth century into the paramount have been accepted in school of philosophy in America, influencing some of the most important journals such as The communities Larsen occupied in the years leading up to Quicksand. The Henry James Review, novel reflects and reworks integral pragmatist theories from the writings African American of John Dewey and Charles Peirce, providing a uniquely black feminist Review, Philosophy and case study in pragmatism’s articulation of the intimate connection between Literature, Studies in individual experience and democracy. American Naturalism, Du Bois praised Quicksand, calling it the “best piece of fiction that Texas Studies in Negro America has produced since the heyday of [Charles] Chesnutt” Literature and (“Two Novels”), but critics such as Cheryl Wall and Ross Posnock have Language, Studies in the questioned how well Du Bois understood the novel.2 Posnock maintains Novel, Clues, Literature/ that in praising Helga Crane as a character Du Bois ignored the “extrem- Film Quarterly, Aethlon, ity and risk of her primitivism,” misconstruing her as an “antirace race Textual Practice, woman” (85). To be sure, it is difficult to read Quicksand as a narrative melus, and Consider about the rejection of primitivism, considering it concludes in rural Ala- David Foster Wallace. bama with Helga suffering through multiple pregnancies. After revolving He lives in Oxford, among various locales that are full of educational, artistic, and intellec- where he works at the tual sophistication, Helga lands in the type of setting that authors in the Rothermere American Harlem Renaissance tended to associate with so-called “authentic” black Institute. primitivism. As a result, Quicksand transforms in the final chapters from a “cosmopolitan novel of manners” into a depiction of a “painful series of grotesque bodily disasters” (Stringer 82). Some critics have tended to

actually an adaptation of Sheila Kaye-Smith’s “Mrs Adis” (Kelli Larson) or an original contribution to modernism (Hoeller). However, in a recent article, Erika Williams argues that the opening of Quicksand is plagiarized from John Galsworthy’s short story “The First and the Last,” indicating that the plagiarism in “Sanctuary” was not an isolated incident. 2 Wall claims that Du Bois’s comparison of Larsen to Fauset is misguided, since Larsen “did not agree with Fauset that the New Negro woman’s freedom to be virtuous was worth celebrating” (117).

136 | Phipps find this conclusion disturbing, if not inexplicable—a “baffling narrative cul-de-sac” (Karl 137). As a social commentary, the novel seems to imply that an intellectual and artistic biracial woman living in early twentieth- century America will fail to find a satisfactory niche in cosmopolitan and urban settings. At the same time, the novel also revises some of the familiar themes associated with the “tragic mulatto.” After all, part of the problem for Helga is she is unable to find contentment in either predominantly black or white social environments. Several scholars have discussed how Larsen reworks the figure of the tragic mulatto, affording her protagonist more autonomy and independence in the process—although Helga does not acquire enough freedom to escape her fate.3 Analyses of Helga’s inability to settle into any social environment usually intersect with topics of repetition and cyclicality. As Dorothy Stringer states, Helga is caught in a self-perpetuating loop of events in which the “same thing happens over and over, and is forced upon Helga’s recognition again and again, without change or development” (72). She travels from Naxos, to Chicago, to New York, to Copenhagen, back to New York, and then to rural Alabama. John Caresse asserts, “To readers, this restlessness becomes familiar. Helga soon becomes disenchanted with every city to which she moves and consistently thinks up some pretext to leave. What is never clear, at least to Helga, is what she is searching for” (105–06). On the other hand, the cycle is broken when she marries the Reverend Mr Pleasant Green, not in the sense that she loses her restlessness but in the sense that she finds a locale that she cannot leave. It is, in fact, a new cycle—one founded on domesticity, pregnancy, and illness—that cements her place in small town Alabama. The commencement of her fifth pregnancy destroys her plans of escape, simultaneously ending her story. The repetitions of poverty and maternity have supplanted the ones founded on transatlantic mobility. The latter at least involves what Jeanne Scheper calls an “expansion of identity,” with Helga developing some measure of freedom by rotating among a series of communities (679). At the end of the novel, however, she seems destined to remain locked in a cycle that produces nothing but embitterment, regret, and hatred for her husband and her surroundings. As she reflects, the suffocating sense of disenchantment in Alabama is nothing new to her: “she had to admit that it wasn’t new, this feeling of dissatisfaction, of asphyxiation. Something like it she had experienced before. In Naxos. In New York. In Copenhagen” (160).

3 For discussions of Larsen’s strategies for revising the figure of the tragic mulatto, see Barnes (108–09), Charles Larson (68), Hutchinson (225), and Scheper.

Breaking Down Creative Democracy | 137 What is new is the sense of permanence. This time familial and physical constraints will keep her forever in one place. One of the reasons critics and readers find this denouement moribund is that the negative side of the circular pattern eventually cancels out the positive side. The opportunity to occupy an array of different communities disappears, while the repeated descents into stifling unhappiness ossify into enduring misery. In recent years, some scholars have sought ways to find a subversive (if not affirmative) dimension to Helga’s life in Alabama, considering its possible criticisms of either heteronormativity (Scheper, Macharia) or notions of inexorable “progress” for black women (Stringer 86). Moreover, if nothing else, the conclusion does enact a sexual expression of sorts, although, as Deborah McDowell notes, pregnancy and childbirth become the overwhelming costs of this expression (151). But scholarship has yet to consider the relevance of early twentieth-century developments in American philosophy to Helga’s life and fate. Address- ing the intellectual context in America brings out connections between Larsen’s life, Quicksand, and the philosophical movement of pragmatism. Pragmatism illuminates the reasons why Helga’s circuit of restless mobility comes to an end. Furthermore, by bringing some of the main principles of pragmatism to narrative life, Quicksand also opens a new space for a black feminist understanding of pragmatism. This is not to say, however, that Quicksand celebrates the liberating and melioristic possibilities of pragmatism. Instead, the novel dramatizes the breakdown of one of the most important thematic concerns in early twentieth-century pragmatism, creative democracy. In fact, by expanding some of the subversive possibilities of creative democracy, Quicksand ironically invokes a less optimistic pragmatic approach to individuality, Charles Peirce’s theorization of belief, habit, and doubt. In this sense, two major strands of pragmatist thought converge in the novel: John Dewey’s ideal of creative democracy and Charles Peirce’s philosophy of individuality. Bringing these two threads of pragmatism together, Quicksand reveals the importance of individual belief to the idealism of creative democracy. It does so, however, by exposing the destructive impact racism has on the beliefs of a young biracial woman caught in a series of gendered social expectations. Serving as the predominant school of thought in America during the early twentieth century, pragmatism was a central influence on Larsen’s social milieus in the years before she wrote Quicksand. The philosophy was cultivated in late nineteenth-century New England through the writings of Charles Peirce and William James, but John Dewey, arguably the most famous intellectual in American history, brought pragmatism to

138 | Phipps the forefront of American sociopolitical life in the first decades of the twentieth century. Working in Chicago at the turn of the century, Dewey devoted himself to educational reform before leaving for New York City in 1904. One of the epicentres of Dewey’s pragmatic approach to reform was But overarching Wendell Phillips High School, which Larsen attended between 1905 and 1907. Jane Addams, a close ally of Dewey and the most well-known female principles of pragmatist in the early twentieth century, chaired the school board’s Com- mittee on School Management during this time, overseeing decisions on pragmatism are teaching methodology.4 Larsen then re-encountered pragmatism when she moved to Harlem in 1919. Dewey taught at nearby Columbia University also reflected in and was active in the naacp, but Du Bois was the one who introduced pragmatism to Harlem, emphasizing the role it could play in the battle the against institutionalized racism. Together, Du Bois and Addams constituted the central proponents of early twentieth-century African-American narrative (Du Bois) and feminist (Addams) constructions of pragmatist philosophy. Quicksand does contain possible allusions to specific pragmatist works, structure of most notably Dewey’s The Public and its Problems (1927). But overarching principles of pragmatism are also reflected in the narrative structure of Larsen’s novel. Larsen’s novel, providing both a framework for and a counterpoint to Helga Crane’s explorations of her identity as a mixed-race woman living in early twentieth-century America. The inception of pragmatism can be traced to the late nineteenth-century writings of James and Peirce. In 1907, James brought some much-needed cohesion to the movement, publishing a manifesto entitled Pragmatism. At various points in this book, James insists that pragmatism is primarily a method for resolving metaphysical arguments. James writes, “The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. What difference would it practically make to any one if this notion rather than that notion were true?” (26). James deploys this method to address such abstract debates as, for instance, what practical difference does it make to believe that the universe contains either a pluralistic or a monistic structure? But his pragmatic theorization of truth brings the philosophy to a more individual level. In the chapter on “The Notion of Truth,” James indicates that any individual belief or idea acquires meaning through experience and practical consequences: “ ‘Grant an idea or belief to be true,’ [the pragmatist] says, ‘what concrete difference will its being true make in any one’s actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be

4 See Hutchinson (48–50) for a discussion of Larsen’s encounters with pragmatist educational reform at Wendell Phillips High School.

Breaking Down Creative Democracy | 139 different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth’s cash-value in experiential terms?’ ” James proceeds to state, “Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process” (92). In James’s pragmatism, the concrete meaning of a belief or idea is inseparable from the actions and consequences it produces in the individual’s life. So too, the beliefs the individual accumulates over time are those that have shown themselves to be true through experience. In this sense, no belief or idea retains a purely abstract or subjective value. They are always externalized and tested in some way, revealing their “ ‘cash-value in experiential terms.’ ” One of Dewey’s main contributions to pragmatism involves his application of the pragmatic method to the idea of democracy. James had already established a connection between pragmatist thought and democracy in the manifesto, citing the variety, flexibility, and pluralism of pragmatism to support his claim that it is a “democratic” theory (39). Dewey draws even more overt links between democracy and pragmatism across his writings, emphasizing this connection in his 1939 address “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us.” For Dewey, “Democracy as a personal, an individual, way of life involves nothing fundamentally new. But when applied it puts a new practical meaning in old ideas” (151). For Dewey, the practical “truth” of democracy is only revealed through the cumulative experiences of individuals living and working together in multiple communities: “For to get rid of the habit of thinking of democracy as something institutional and external and to acquire the habit of treating it as a way of personal life is to realize that democracy is a moral ideal and so far as it becomes a fact a moral fact. It is to realize that democracy is a reality only as it is indeed a commonplace of living” (153). Democracy does not gain pragmatic shape through institutions or government apparatuses. Instead, it develops through the combined actions and experiences of individuals in communities.5 Democracy thrives in communities in which members encounter working examples of equality, freedom of expression, communication across social boundaries, and the ability to move among other communities. Insofar as such experiences form the groundwork of democracy, they should be perpetuated within all communities and made available to all citizens. Otherwise democracy is nothing more than an empty concept, a national brand name that means nothing.

5 In this sense, for Dewey, particular sociopolitical laws and events did not create democracy in America. Such laws and events reflected an already existing “commonplace of living” among a community of individuals.

140 | Phipps As Cornel West argues in The American Evasion of Philosophy, W. E. B. Du Bois builds on this notion of creative democracy in his discussions of African-American identity. In his early work The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Du Bois identifies the “soul of democracy” as a self-perpetuating process of “Honest and earnest criticism” that develops within particular communities (38). For Du Bois, the ideals (and leaders) of a community form through the collective experiences of individuals working, communicating, and co-operating within it. Truly democratic communities are not the products of wider institutional forces; they are the tangible results of the creative and individualistic energy of a group of close-knit people. West draws an explicit connection between Dewey and Du Bois, stating, “Du Bois’ democratic mores are grounded in the detection of human creative powers at the level of everyday life” (144). But he also clarifies Du Bois’s unique contribution: “Du Bois goes beyond [other pragmatists at the time] in the scope and depth of his vision: creative powers reside among the wretched of the earth even in their subjugation, and the fragile structures of democracy in the world depend, in large part, on how these powers are ultimately exercised” (148). In this sense, creative democracy flows outward from communities that grow at the margins of society. So, too, the creative democratic impulse is strongest among those people who are compelled to build vibrant social spheres to oppose hegemonic and strati- fied systems of oppression. Thus, Du Bois distinguishes his pragmatism through accounts of the way institutionalized racism—and capitalist institutions in general—were disrupting the relationship between individuality and democracy in early twentieth-century America. Chad Kautzer and Eduardo Mendieta argue that “community” is the “key word for pragmatism.” This assertion is debatable, but there is validity to their claim that, for pragmatists, “community is the foundation for a critique of racism, class stratification, and imperialism” (5). Charlene Seig- fried argues that feminist pragmatists like Jane Addams pushed the connection between democracy and community further through the emphasis they placed on the reciprocal relationship between theory and praxis: “Women pragmatists took [Dewey’s] argument one step further by adopting the radical position that scholars ought to be or become members of communities plagued by the problems their theories are supposed to solve” (Pragmatism and Feminism 58). Seigfried argues that pragmatism initially appealed to feminists in the early twentieth century because it offered a series of non-dogmatic, pluralistic, and community-based ideas that could serve as implements for social change. Insofar as “Experience and theory are intricately, dynamically interrelated” (8), theorizations of democracy

Breaking Down Creative Democracy | 141 begin with practical ideas about how the lived experiences of individuals in social communities exemplify both the principles of democratic life and the possibility of resistance to non-democratic systems of discrimination. Larsen wrote Quicksand against this backdrop of pragmatist thought, which included both African-American and feminist understandings and implementations of creative democracy. She appears to have engaged directly with some of the central ideas in this intellectual context. For instance, the depiction of a historically black university in Quicksand reflects theories about democracy and community found in Dewey’s major interwar work, The Public and its Problems. Published one year before Quicksand, Dewey’s work argues that democracy “is the idea of community life itself” (148). Thus, for Dewey, the fullest manifestation of democracy is to be found in what he calls the “Great Community.” The Great Community is a vision of America as an interlinked and diverse series of communities that foster communication, innovation, and equality. For the individual, the lived experience of democracy involves rotating among these communities freely and developing interpersonal connections across them. Dewey sets the ideal of the “Great Community” against the reality of the “Great Society”—the hyper-industrialized and militarized mass democratic state, which reduces individuals to streamlined parts moving along institutional conduits in a vast mechanistic network.6 The description of Naxos in Quicksand is grounded on this contrast: “This great community, [Helga] thought, was no longer a school. It had grown into a machine … Teachers as well as students were subjected to the paring process, for it tolerated no innovations, no individualisms” (39). The militaristic and mechanistic workings of the university—best captured in the description of students goose-stepping like “automatons” (46–47)—contribute to Helga’s decision to leave for Chicago. In pragmatist terms, Naxos represents the hegemonic shape of purely institutional democracy. As such, it is nothing more than an apparatus within a racist and patriarchal social order, a point best evinced by the positive reception students and faculty give to a white preacher’s condescending speech. In short, there is no opportunity for the creative and individualistic experience of democracy within this so-called community. On one side, Quicksand unfolds as a portrait of creative democracy, with Helga expressing her independence by moving through a series of different communities. On the other side, there are virtually no overlaps among these communities. The novel does not give us a depiction of the 6 See in particular the chapter on “The Search for the Great Community” in The Public and its Problems (143–84).

142 | Phipps pluralistic “Great Community,” since Dewey’s ideal envisages continuous interaction among communal environments. Instead, Helga deliberately seeks out social spheres that have no contact with one another. In Harlem she associates with people who view Naxos with “contempt and scorn” (75). In Copenhagen she finds contentment because the culture and attitudes toward race are so different from the ones in America. Her Christian conversion and departure for Alabama necessitate the complete renunciation of the “sins and temptations of New York” (145–46). While Helga consciously avoids interactions among communities, she also fails to create a new community on her own terms. She never even manages to ameliorate existing communities, since her efforts to introduce beauty or spontaneity to various places (Naxos and Alabama, for instance) always collapse. From the pragmatist viewpoint, these aspects of her character are surprising, since one might expect her to reflect and even extend some of the African-American and feminist reinterpretations of creative democracy. One would think that a woman classified as “coloured” in early twentieth-century America would have even more reason than a black male or a white female to develop a communal site of resistance to institutionalized misogyny and racism. As well, a mobile and autonomous woman like Helga might be able to foster interconnections among African- American and feminist communities, strengthening points of opposition to the “Great Society.”7 As a character, however, Helga Crane appears to resist classification as a figurehead of black feminist pragmatism. She never quite merges her compulsive mobility with a communal experience of democratic experience. Then again, how does one define black feminist pragmatism in early twentieth-century America? Is it the case that it simply expands the subversive dimensions of African-American and feminist constructions of creative democracy? Variations of this latter idea have emerged in the handful of critical works that have addressed the question.8 I argue that

7 Both Addams and Du Bois discussed possible points of connection between African-American and feminist struggles against “authority, patriotic tradition, and military supremacy” (Seigfried, “Introduction” xxviii). As Patricia Hill Collins argues in Black Feminist Thought, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century “African-American definitions of community emerged that differed from public, market-driven, exchange-based community models” (53). Black women stood at the centre of such communities, which were founded on “collective effort and will” instead of the consumerist values of the “dominant political economy” (53). 8 V. Denise James, for example, considers how black feminists can release the full emancipatory potential of pragmatism. For James, a move away from Cornel

Breaking Down Creative Democracy | 143 Quicksand provides the basis for a more complex version of black feminist pragmatism. In particular, Helga’s story works against the expansive and cyclical orientation of creative democratic experience. One of the main themes in Dewey’s pragmatism is the idea that the experience of democracy is self-generating: “Democracy is the faith that the process of experience is more important than any special result attained, so that special results achieved are of ultimate value only as they are used to enrich and order the ongoing process” (“Creative Democracy” 153). Similarly, the purpose of the Great Community is to catalyze further communication, more equality, and wider and richer experiences. Thus, the individual experience of democracy should always be expanding and should never reach a terminal point. For a large part of the novel, Helga’s movements among multiple communities follow this precept. At the same time, by invoking the model of creative democracy—and the possibilities inherent in African-American and feminist revisions of this model—Quicksand offers a sobering narrative adaptation of early twentieth-century pragmatism. Racial discrimination and gender expectations provoke Helga Crane to develop her own version of creative democracy, which includes staples like mobility, independence, and the ability to inhabit pluralistic communities. Yet a physically exhausting and ultimately demoralizing interplay between belief and doubt stands at the core of her experiences. It is this reciprocal movement between belief and doubt that both spurs her on and eventually wears her out, finally cutting off the positive experiences of mobility, independence, and plurality. Helga knows what she is searching for as she moves from one locale to the next. She wants to find happiness. She believes in the idea of happiness, but, like William James, she also knows that “Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events.” Thus, although she covets particular material objects, she is aware that happiness will only take shape through personal experience: But just what did she want? Barring a desire for material security, gracious ways of living, a profusion of lovely clothes, and a goodly share of envious admiration, Helga Crane didn’t know, couldn’t tell. But there was, she knew, something else. Happiness, she supposed. Whatever that might be. What, exactly, she wondered, was happiness? Very positively she wanted it. Yet her conception of it had no tangibility. (45)

West’s philosophy and a return to Dewey’s pragmatism is the best way to accomplish this task.

144 | Phipps In pragmatist terms, the concept of happiness has no tangibility until she experiences it. Therefore, even though she knows that she would enjoy material comforts, luxuries, and admiration, these entities do not form the essence of happiness. This point is emphasized at the moment of her conversion: “Things, she realized, hadn’t been, weren’t, enough for her. She’d have to have something else besides. It all came back to that old question of happiness. Surely this was it” (144). She follows through with this distinction, discovering an extended period of serenity in a life of material hardship in Alabama. She does succeed in finding happiness in every context she occupies, but she also watches it gradually erode each time. This pattern is established in her youth. When her Uncle Peter sends her as a teenager to an African-American school, she experiences her first foray into ephemeral happiness: “She had been happy there, as happy as a child unused to happiness dared be. There had been always a feeling of strangeness, of outsideness, and one of holding her breath for fear that it wouldn’t last. It hadn’t” (57). The feeling of “isolation” (57) that comes from her lack of a family underlies her growing despondency, helping her explain to herself why the unhappiness pursues her to Naxos: “No family. That was the crux of the whole matter. For Helga, it accounted for everything, her failure here in Naxos, her former loneliness in Nashville” (43). To a degree, her subsequent migrations are framed both as an attempt to return to her family (specifically, her white relatives in Chicago and Copenhagen) and as a search for a place to create a family of her own. However, Hazel Carby notes that money often overshadows family in the novel. Thus, for Carby, “Money replaces kinship as the prime mediator of social relations” (172). Nonetheless, it is worth noting that the conflicts, overlaps, and interactions between money and family prevent either one from ever emerging as the centrepiece of Helga’s quest. Indeed, no single entity ever takes precedent in her ventures and, in fact, the same thing that contributes to her happiness in one place is capable of making her miserable in another setting. For example, when she is in Harlem the sight of black people exacerbates her sense of “estrangement and isolation”: “She recoiled in aversion from the sight of the grinning faces and from the sound of the easy laughter of all these people” (79). But as she tires of Copenhagen, she grows weary of the sight of “pale serious faces” and begins to long for “brown laughing ones” (122). In the absence of a definitive material goal, Helga’s conception of happiness fluctuates according to her experiences of it. Other concepts also acquire concrete meaning through experience, especially in relation to the positive experience of happiness. For instance,

Breaking Down Creative Democracy | 145 the novel treats religious faith in a wholly pragmatic way, uniting Hel- ga’s religious belief with practical consequences. For her, religious truth depends on the question of “the truth’s cash-value in experiential terms.” In Chicago, Helga attends a church hoping to obtain help from “some good Christian.” Failing to find anyone, she leaves feeling “bitter, distrusting religion more than ever” (66). Similarly, as she sits in the church in Harlem listening to the Reverend Mr Pleasant Green preach, she feels “amused, angry, disdainful” (141). However, when she spontaneously submits to the congregation, begging aloud for God to “Have mercy” on her, the religious message suddenly becomes tangible: “The thing became real. A miraculous calm came upon her. Life seemed to expand and to become very easy. Helga Crane felt within her a supreme aspiration toward the regaining of simple happiness” (142). There is no contemplative side to her conversion. It happens because she feels calm and serene after calling out for mercy. That is to say, the action of begging for mercy produces the consequence of a physical experience of happiness. This consequence brings pragmatic truth to the content of her action. She acts as though she believes in God, reaps a positive consequence, and subsequently discovers that she does believe. Although this connection eventually breaks down, it does continue to govern her life for a period of time after her marriage: “And she had her religion, which in her new status as a preacher’s wife had of necessity become real to her. She believed in it. Because in its coming it had brought this other thing, the anesthetic satisfaction of her senses” (146). This link between religious belief and the “satisfaction of her senses” reflects the larger connection between Helga’s physical desires and her intellectual development. At various points Helga becomes aware of a nebulous feeling that seems to originate in her body: a “strange ill-defined emotion, a vague yearning” (82). Scholars such as Cheryl Wall, Deborah McDowell, Hazel Carby, Thadious Davis, and Licia Calloway have discussed the roles sexual inhibition and expression play in Helga’s growth as a character. Carby even identifies Helga as the “first truly sexual black female protagonist in Afro-American fiction” (174). The undefined physical emotions that arise in Helga are occasionally connected to sexual desire, such as when she first kisses Robert Anderson (Quicksand 133). Also, her infatuation for Anderson hovers in the background of the narrative. Even when she is traveling to Denmark, she thinks about him, giving rise to the vague yearning: “the thought of love stayed with her, not prominent, definite, but shadowy, incoherent” (94). However, notwithstanding their prominence, love and sexuality do not always provide the impetus for these upsurges of “shadowy” feelings. Such feelings are more broadly allied with

146 | Phipps her general sense of happiness, which, in turn, often includes sexual and romantic desires. The relationship between physiology and Helga’s concept of happiness is established during her reflections on her situation at Naxos: “It wasn’t, Repetitive she was suddenly aware, merely the school and its ways and its decorous stupid people that oppressed her. There was something else, some other patterns of more ruthless force, a quality within herself, which was frustrating her, had always frustrated her, kept her from getting the things she had wanted” physical activity (44). As she quickly determines, what she really wants is happiness (45). The undefined “ruthless force” is an unassailable sense of dissatisfaction—a exist in lockstep physical blockage that keeps her from feeling happy. This feeling recurs in subsequent locations, ending prolonged periods of contentment. In with habitual Harlem her happiness peters out as a sense of entrapment and “anguish” develops: “Somewhere, within her, in a deep recess, crouched discontent” ways of (78). In Copenhagen her feelings begin to shift even before she sees the minstrel show: “Well into Helga’s second year in Denmark came an indefi- thinking. nite discontentment. Not clear, but vague, like a storm gathering far on the horizon” (110). The feeling is not grounded solely on sexual repression, nor is it based on changes in her conception of happiness. Rather, her mood is governed by a myriad of sensations that begin on a physical level—frustration, restlessness, malaise, and an increasing sense of claustrophobia escalating toward asphyxia. Her conception of happiness depends on her experience of it, and her experience of it revolves, in turn, around the way she feels. She does not exercise control over this feeling and in many cases does not even rationalize it. It develops within her body, infiltrating her mind and provoking her to bring about a change. That the most important concept in Helga’s life has a physiological basis brings another dimension to the connection between pragmatism and Quicksand. One of the tenets of William James’s philosophy (and his theorizations of psychology and biology) is the notion that physicality underlies emotions. That is, emotions emerge through sensations that begin on a bodily level. Thus, in James’s terms, Helga’s physical restlessness and malaise are not symptoms of her emotional distress. Rather, the opposite is the case: she feels emotional distress because she experiences physical restlessness and malaise. One of the main points of connection between this theorem and James’s pragmatism involves the concept of habit. For James, habit regulates both human and animal behaviour. Repetitive patterns of physical activity exist in lockstep with habitual ways of thinking. Habit is thus the “enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent” (Principles 121). Habit keeps people in established routines

Breaking Down Creative Democracy | 147 and familiar modes of thought. For James, the key for the individual is “to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy,” meaning that the individual should try to establish “automatic and habitual” cycles of action and thought that will be “useful” to her (122). James draws upon the pragmatist writings of his old friend Charles Peirce when discussing the connection between mental and physical habits. The relevance of Peirce’s pragmatism to Quicksand contains some added significance, since Peirce has a less positive attitude toward individuality than writers like James and Dewey. For Peirce, communities of scientists and even social institutions are repositories of knowledge. A single individual, on the other hand, is always prone to delusions and errors.9 Notwithstanding this viewpoint, Peirce does develop a philosophy of individual subjectivity, basing it on the relationship between belief, habit, and doubt. For Peirce, individual beliefs are closely tied to habits of behaviour. As he states in his early pragmatist article “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (1878), an individual belief “involves the establishment in our nature of a rule of action, or, say for short, a habit” (129). Specific patterns of thought become entrenched in the individual’s mind from an early age, in much the same way physical actions become habitual over time. The inveterate routines of thought coalesce into beliefs. The beliefs, in turn, are externalized through habits of behaviour. There is a reciprocal relationship between an intellectual belief and ongoing habits of thought and action. It is important to note, however, that beliefs do not last forever just because an individual is accustomed to a certain pattern of thought and action. For Peirce, the continuous externalization of a belief leads to doubts. This crucial aspect of Peirce’s pragmatism illuminates Helga’s failure to find any permanent happiness. In his 1905 article “What Pragmatism Is,” Peirce describes belief as a “habit of mind essentially enduring for some time” (336). A doubt, on the other hand, is a “privation of a habit,” which leads to a “condition of erratic activity that in some way must be superseded by a habit” (337). Thus, a doubt is a sudden interruption to the individual’s accustomed modes of thought. The doubt cuts off the usual habits, forcing the individual to find new ones that will incorporate the information she has obtained through the doubt. Another related point of emphasis for Peirce is his assertion that a doubt always emerges through contact with

9 Peirce refers to the very concept of selfhood as the “vulgarest delusion of vanity” (“Immortality” 2). His deprecatory comments about individuality and intro- spection are dispersed across his writings, creating a major point of separation between his pragmatism and the versions found in the writings of William James and John Dewey.

148 | Phipps the outside world. An individual cannot give herself a doubt. It is precisely the pragmatic essence of belief—the way beliefs are exteriorized through habitual actions and tangible consequences—that exposes the belief to potential conduits of doubt, such as disagreements with others, new facts, and interactions with social institutions. Helga Crane’s search for happiness and her repeated descents into oppressive misery capture the relationship between habit, belief, and doubt in Peirce’s pragmatism. In the process, Quicksand also provides a representation of creative democracy that, rather ironically, undercuts some of its idealism. By doing so, however, the novel also emphasizes the ongoing impact that racism has on a black woman in early twentieth-century America. That is, Helga Crane brings to light new challenges for creative democracy, specifically the challenge of maintaining an individualistic vitality and mobility amid both separate and convergent encounters with racism and misogyny. For Helga, happiness is a physical feeling that is grounded on a habitual pattern of thought and behaviour. In each new place, she establishes a routine that, for a time, makes her happy. There is no one material element that is common to each of these routines. In Copenhagen, she takes “to luxury like the proverbial duck to water. And she took to admiration and attention even more eagerly” (97). In Alabama, the busyness of her days, the weather, and her belief in God contribute “to her gladness in living” (148). What is common to each of these routines is the sense that she has started a new life in a place that is truly a home for her. In Harlem, she has “that strange transforming experience, this time not so fleetingly, that magic sense of having come home” (75). In Copen- hagen, she believes that her “new life” (97) will be permanent and resolves “never to return to the existence of ignominy which the New World of opportunity and promise forced upon Negroes” (104). In Alabama, “As always, at first the novelty of the thing, the change, fascinated her. There was a recurrence of the feeling that now, at last, she had found a place for herself, that she was really living” (146). In the pragmatist context, the guiding belief in each of these situations is the idea that this new place is where she belongs. The habits that she establishes in each locale flow from this merger between novelty and familiarity, between the excitement of starting over and the conviction that she will never have to do so again. There is no clear distinction between this overarching belief and the physical feeling of satisfaction she obtains every time she changes location. The habitual actions she performs—whether they involve attending the opera or working in a garden—are joyful because they are simultaneously new and yet familiar, suiting her physically as well as mentally. The doubts

Breaking Down Creative Democracy | 149 that assail her in each place also begin on the physiological level, emerging through “subconscious” feelings of restlessness and malaise (111). In Alabama, the physical basis is more concrete, with the illness and fatigue of repeated pregnancies puncturing her happiness. She attempts to recommit herself to her religious faith during her fourth pregnancy, but the “appall- ing blackness of pain” she endures during childbirth destroys the ethereal belief: “She knew only that, in the hideous agony that for interminable hours—no, centuries—she had borne, the luster of religion had vanished; that revulsion had come upon her; that she hated this man [her husband]” (155, 156). Quicksand thus diverges somewhat from Peirce’s pragmatism, since Peirce emphasizes that doubt occurs through particular instances of contact with the external world. For Helga, the doubts grow within her body, coalescing as the repetitions of her habitual routines begin to wear on her. At the same time, there are particular moments of interaction with society that crystalize the doubts, bringing into focus her loss of belief. These concrete doubts take the form of hatred, specifically, hatred toward black people. Eruptions of such emotion signal the destruction of her belief that she has found a home. Her realization that she despises her husband is one such instance. Her vitriolic reaction to the white preacher’s speech at Naxos is another example. She resents the preacher’s conde- scension, but she is even more appalled by the “the considerable applause” from the students and faculty, a reaction that prompts her harsh realization: “The South. Naxos. Negro education. Suddenly she hated them all” (38). Even in Denmark, her strongest response is to the minstrel show: “she was filled with a fierce hatred for the cavorting Negroes on the stage” (112). In a related vein, she turns down Axel Olsen’s marriage proposal in part because she thinks he might eventually hate her, telling him, “It’s racial. Someday maybe you’ll be glad. We can’t tell, you know; if we were married, you might come to be ashamed of me, to hate me, to hate all dark people. My mother did that” (118). Critics have discussed the roles of hatred and self-hatred in the novel, as well as the role Helga’s memories of her white mother play in distorting her perceptions of black identity.10 It is certainly possible that her mother’s coldness toward Helga frames Helga’s perceptions of black people and herself, preventing her from ever feeling comfortable in either black or white social communities. In the former, she hates what she perceives to be the sycophantic emulation of white social mores, whether they involve religion, fashion, or etiquette. In 10 For discussions of Helga’s racist hatred and self-hatred, see Charles Larson (69) and Dawahare. For analyses of Helga’s relationship with her mother, see Hutchinson (238), Calloway (82), and Davis (271).

150 | Phipps the latter, she hates the construction of black people as exotic and primi- tive. In short, she detests the way white and black people view each other, especially since their perspectives revolve around a racist hierarchy that subjugates African Americans. On the other hand, Helga never develops a simple or outright hatred for either black or white people. For instance, as mentioned, she does find herself longing to reconnect with black people when she is in Copenhagen. The feelings of antagonism fluctuate, disappearing for a time and then returning, often in sudden and dramatic bursts after the discontentment has set in. The main reason for this inconstancy is that her hate is based on the changeable emotion of fear. Helga is somewhat aware of this link, since she identifies it in her friend Anne Grey, a “race woman” who lives in Harlem. Anne loathes white people and resents Helga for living “too long among the enemy” in Denmark: “Helga smiled a little, understanding Anne’s bitterness and hate, and a little of its cause. It was of a piece with that of those she so virulently hated. Fear” (127). As a biracial woman who occupies both predominantly black and white communities, Helga gains multiple perspectives on the fears of otherness that undergird both hatred and the attempt to construct racial difference around stereotypes. But then, why does the sight of pleasure and enjoyment among African Americans fill her with disgust at particular moments? After all, while her fears and antagonisms develop slowly, they also crystalize into moments of hatred through certain sights and sounds—black people applauding, smiling, laughing, and dancing. Nothing makes Helga feel worse than these images when she is depressed. These feelings reach an intense pitch in Harlem: “There were days when the mere sight of the serene tan and brown faces about her stung her like a personal insult. The carefree quality of their laughter roused in her the desire to scream at them: ‘Fools, fools! Stupid fools!’ ” (84). In the context of Peirce’s pragmatism, such isolated moments represent the concretization of doubt. On the one hand, they help bring out the physical feelings of disenchantment, which, for Helga, develop almost inevitably. Speaking broadly, the loss of happiness in each locale is a foregone conclusion: the novelty of the new experience fades, she becomes bored with her surroundings, and, most importantly, the pressures of performing for others in a variety of ways start to wear on her physically. But the destructive doubt that pushes her each time toward a crisis is the sudden realization that her happiness was vacuous all along, as another example of the false happiness she witnesses in African Americans. In this way, there is a political element to her recurring discontentment. Often the joy she

Breaking Down Creative Democracy | 151 witnesses is choreographed (such as during the minstrel show in Copen- hagen) or in response to a white person’s false offers of beneficence (such as during the preacher’s speech at Naxos). The latter connection resurfaces Just as their during her life with the Reverend Mr Pleasant Green. Even though she lives in a rural community composed entirely of African Americans, she happiness is still determines that their feelings of serenity are predicated on a white display of deceptive benevolence: “How the white man’s God must laugh displayed at the great joke he had played on them! Bound them to slavery, then to poverty and insult, and made them bear it unresistingly, uncomplainingly through staged almost, by sweet promises of mansions in the sky by and by” (160). While her sense of separation from other African Americans continu- performances or ously undercuts Helga’s belief that she has found a permanent home, the real locus of doubt is her fear that she has never been truly happy. These self-deceptions, are moments when she recognizes a point of connection between herself and other African Americans. Just as their happiness is displayed through her happiness staged performances or self-deceptions, her happiness revolves around her performances and her delusions. There is an ominous side to the revolves around pragmatic and physiological basis of happiness. In each new community Helga acts as though she is happy, feels a physical comfort from doing her so, and then believes that she is happy. When fatigue and malaise eat away at this connection, she is able to see clearly the play-acting and self- performances deception that have sustained her initial surge of contentment. Her angry reaction to other African Americans, then, is founded more on fear and and her projection than anything else. In the end, the doubt is the eruption of the buried conviction that happiness among black people is a sham, of either delusions. a performance or a foolish response to duplicity. Fears of otherness lead to hatred but, for Helga, the stronger fear is the possibility that happiness is impossible for her in a world full of racism. As mentioned, one of the staples of creative democracy is the idea that the individual’s mobility among communities is a self-perpetuating and essentially interminable process. The individual should always be fostering more experiences, more interpersonal connections, and more opportunities for communication and equality. Furthermore, it is the creative vitality of the individual that animates this process. To a degree, Helga follows this model of creative democracy, but a cyclical and repetitious movement between belief and doubt underlies her artistic and individualistic energy. However, the circular movement of belief and doubt does not oppose pragmatic understandings of individual experience. The key point is that, for Helga, the circuit is broken when she moves to Alabama. Thus, the true breakdown of creative democracy occurs when her exploratory

152 | Phipps and mobile experience comes to a halt. At the end of the novel it seems evident that doubt has overwhelmed the possibility of belief. Helga begins to imagine escaping from her marriage, even when she is bedridden: “She was convinced that before her there were years of living. Perhaps of happiness even” (158). But physical hardship consolidates the doubt. With the start of her fifth pregnancy, it seems clear that she will never believe in this future happiness again. As a literary case study, Quicksand offers what might appear to be a pessimistic depiction of one individual’s pragmatic experience. After all, the novel concludes with the failures of both the communal experience of creative democracy and the individual experience of belief. However, the interconnections between belief and creative democracy also accentuate the uniqueness of Helga’s position as a biracial woman in early twentieth- century America. Insofar as she rotates among various communities and cultivates relationships with a diverse array of people, she does experience democracy in action. But this mobility is not an exercise in personal growth or self-actualization. It is a survival strategy necessitated by the isolating effects of racism. Her early childhood encounters with racism in her own family contribute to her impression that contentment is something to be sought in new communities. After all, her first experience of happiness occurs when she leaves the familial environment to attend an African-American school. But in her childhood she also learns that the impact of racism is always ongoing, since her lack of a family ultimately destroys her happiness at the school. This dynamic interplay between the escape from racism and the re-encounter with it plays out over the rest of her life. The sheer flexibility and pervasiveness of racism become the primary catalysts in her migrations. In fact, racism ends up functioning as the main connective link between her communities. Furthermore, Helga’s movements do not form a continuous loop of beliefs, actions, consequences, and doubts. Whereas the circular pattern suggests an endless process of restoration, each new eruption of doubt brings Helga closer to the complete loss of belief. The repetitive consequences of doubt are physically and mentally fatiguing for her, wearing down her energy and finally leaving her despondent, exhausted, and anae- mic. It is the physical state of exhaustion that makes her vulnerable to the Reverend Mr Pleasant Green and the church congregation in Harlem. At the moment she drags herself into the church (mistaking it for a store), she is “very tired and very weak,” having just lain “soaked and soiled in the flooded gutter” (138). Desperate for some solace, she accepts the religious designation of her as “A scarlet ’oman” and a “pore los’ Jezebel!” (141), a

Breaking Down Creative Democracy | 153 submission that becomes concrete (along with her faith) when she calls out for mercy. Significantly, her physical weariness is both gendered and racialized. In the church, she is received as a poor lost black woman worn out and overwhelmed by a sinful world. There is some measure of truth to this perspective. Her experiences with racism operate in conjunction with the pressures that develop around her romantic life and sexual identity. Each community she inhabits includes some kind of matrimonial trap and, as discussed above, her feelings of happiness often are tied to love and sexual desire. The breakdown of happiness includes her disillusion- ment with romance, which comes to the forefront of her mind when she contemplates a submission to the “rattish” (145) Green: “No. She couldn’t. It would be too awful. Just the same, what or who was there to hold her back? Nothing. Simply nothing. Nobody. Nobody at all” (143). Quicksand therefore portrays a woman at the limits of creative democracy. The irony is that Helga Crane only encounters these limits by strengthening some of the melioristic and liberating potential of pragmatism. As an independent, intelligent, and creative biracial woman living in early twentieth-century America, she possesses an acute awareness of the flaws in institutional and hegemonic democracy, which is strengthened when she sees these flaws reflected in all of her communities. The pervasiveness of racism and the entrapping pressures placed on women prevent these communities from exemplifying a truly individualistic and creative praxis of democracy. Helga does not improve such communities but, rather, flees from them. However, the reason she runs away is that the suffocating pressures of racism are physically unendurable for her. She always feels the visceral impact of racism, because, after all, it accounted for the isolation, vulnerability, anger, and loneliness she suffered in her youth. So, then, Helga becomes a unique figurehead of pragmatist experience and creative democracy: a young woman shifting from one community to the next, refusing to be hemmed in by larger societal assumptions. Unfortunately, the impetus behind her liberating experiences does not allow for a positive, endlessly expansive development of autonomy. Instead, the continuous re-emergence of doubt saps her strength, making it increasingly difficult for her to retain her mobility. By intensifying the possibilities of pragmatist experience, Helga exposes not only the wide-ranging scope of racism among social communities, but also the overwhelming physical impact it can have on a woman trying to navigate gendered social expectations.

154 | Phipps Works Cited

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Spokesvultures for Ecological Awareness: An Interview with Timothy Morton Caitlin McIntyre suny Buffalo Dana Medoro University of Manitoba

rofessor timothy morton, Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at PRice University, delivered two lectures at the University of Manitoba in the winter of 2016: the first as the Sydney Warhaft Distinguished Visit- ing Speaker for the Faculty of Arts and the second as the keynote for the Faculty of Architecture’s Atmosphere Conference. The lectures were titled, respectively, “On Ecological Touching: Knowing (as) Intimacy” and “Escape from Mesopotamia, 12,000 Years Too Late,” the recordings of which are available on his blog, www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com. Professor Morton is author of Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, 2015), Nothing: Three Inquiries into Buddhism and Critical Theory (co-authored with Marcus Boon and Eric Cazdyn, Chicago, 2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007), seven other books, and over one hundred and twenty essays on subjects ranging from philosophy to food politics. He is also an active scholar in the field of Object-Oriented Ontology, the ooo school inaugurated by Graham Harman, Professor of Philosophy at sci-Arc, Los Angeles.

ESC 42.3–4 (September/December 2016): 159–174 During his visit to Canada, Professor Morton graciously agreed to be interviewed by Caitlin McIntyre and Dana Medoro. McIntyre and Medoro are also animal-rights activists, working to ban the use of intensive confinement systems in Canadian animal agriculture. They started reading Caitlin McIntyre Professor Morton’s work a few years ago, initially having been thoroughly is a doctoral student at intrigued by his concept of agrilogistics: the “dark uncanniness” of the the State University of Anthropocene, as Morton defines it, through which the entire surface New York at Buffalo. Her of Earth has been placed at the mercy of human agricultural existence, doctoral research focuses no matter how many other species die for it, no matter how crushing it on Irish modernism in a becomes for fellow humans. circum-Atlantic context, In the interview that follows, Professor Morton discusses and expands exploring modernist upon many of the ideas that make their way into two of his recent books, literature as an aesthetic Hyperobjects and Dark Ecology, from agrilogistics and Dasein, to gluten response and resistance phobia and Marxism. The interview was conducted in person, over beer, to the space of the and showcases not only Morton’s philosophical reflections but also his plantation. In addition warm, wry sense of humour. to graduate work, Caitlin has also served as a candidate for the Green timothy morton: Agrilogistics is a violent understanding of capital-N Party of Canada and is Nature, against which the notion of human progress defines itself; domes- a farm-animal rights tication, agriculture, civilization—the claiming that these systems exist activist. Her article, “ ‘We outside of or opposed to something called Nature. I’m not proposing we are all animals:’ James un-domesticate animals and return to a pre-Neolithic state; you can’t Joyce, Stephen Dedalus, escape civilization. It’s violent to endorse that, a kind of Pol Pot ideology, and the Problem in which everyone wearing glasses is now suspect, as if we can bomb of Agriculture” is ourselves back to the Stone Age. What we need to notice is that we never forthcoming in a special left the agricultural system that started twelve thousand years ago—when issue of Humanities. “human civilization” began—and we never left being animals ourselves. This is where something like gluten becomes a kind of evil! Two-thirds of Americans are gluten free and they don’t understand why. It’s the next magic bullet, announcing: “The evil is in the gluten. Get rid of the gluten and everything will be fine.” This new phase is worse than the Atkins diet: the get-back-to-the-Paleolithic diet (and pay no attention to your heart attack). This gluten thing is more intense, though. We’ve all decided that everything in our life will be okay if we have no gluten—or if we can upgrade the Roundup. That is, we think we can get agrilogistics right and return to a functioning-smoothly of the world, which never existed in the first place. At its base, this is all a desire to get rid of ambiguity—to get rid of the paradox that the world is always a functioning-malfunctioning thing. Everything is broken. The lure of the idea that when things smoothly func-

160 | McIntyre and Medoro tion, then the dark parts disappear: this is a metaphysical trap. Because if we think things are all smoothly going along, they are only clicking in our own little anthropocentric timeframe. Everything is always malfunctioning and the Romantics knew it. Wil- Dana Medoro is an liam Blake says, “The cut worm forgives the plough,” because from the associate professor in the worm’s point of view, this is not a functioning system. But the worm Department of English, doesn’t really care, forgives it. Worms are totally down with how every- Film, and Theatre at the thing is a bit broken. But we don’t see from the point of the view of the University of Manitoba. worm. Everything has Dasein, everything is shimmering. That’s my way of She specializes in putting it. And that’s what I truly believe: that everything is shimmering American literature without mechanical input. That’s my ontology. In other words, we are solid and is currently in the because we are shimmering—paradoxically, or not. I am the spokesvulture process of completing a for that: “Everything is shimmering, caw, caw!”1 book on Poe, Hawthorne, and the early nineteenth- caitlin mcintyre and dana medoro: Do vultures sound like that? century abortion debates (forthcoming tm: I sound more like a crow, I suppose.2 with University of New Anyway, you should Google “There is no classical world.” You’ll find all Hampshire Press). She these physicists trying to figure out whether the quantum stuff is for real. is also an animal-rights “We can prove it,” they say. They perform an experiment with a tiny mirror activist, particularly on that sends out blue and red light, and they cool it down until the red light behalf of farm animals in disappears, until radiation cannot possibly be emitted. But the infrared intensive-confinement at the cool-down point persists. “Lo and behold,” say the physicists, “we operations, and has observe this!”3 Come on, I say, of course quantum things are happening, published in the field of and this is why you’re solid, paradoxically or not. critical animal studies on this work. cm and dm: Let’s talk about Object Oriented Ontology and race. tm: I’ve got a PhD student working on it. She’s walking through a minefield, but it’s so very intuitive: black people as objects, a connection forged in slavery.

1 On the way to the interview, we had spoken of our shared admiration for vultures and for Tibetan Buddhism’s funereal ritual of cutting up the dead and leaving them on them mountainsides for vultures. 2 Vultures do, in fact, sound a bit like crows. Go to the audio archives online at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Macaulay Library for their collection of bird sounds at www.macaulaylibrary.org. 3 To view this experiment, go to www.youtube.com/watch?v=pktWhH6m_DM.

Spokesvultures | 161 cm and dm: We don’t agree with the criticism that ooo is a jump over such topics, a bypassing of race or gender or sexuality, in order to think about rocks, for example. ooo is a place to start from, a way of thinking that then allows you to return to those subjects. It opens up these questions, doesn’t foreclose them. tm: Open it all up and allow it to breathe. I’m now writing about patriarchy more and more, as a result of thinking about ooo. Working with Graham Harman, I discovered that I’m an exploded version of Luce Irigaray. The person I most like philosophically is Irigaray. What I say about objects, she says about women. I’m such a fan of Irigaray. The thing that really blew me away was early 1970s feminism, but in graduate school you had to be a late 1980s cultural Marxist. It was a French feminist who coined the term “ecofeminism”: Françoise d’Eaubonne, in Le féminisme ou la mort, which was published in 1974. But the American ecocritics weren’t talking with the French ecocritics, because, I think, they didn’t want to be associated with some kind of hippy ideology. The New Left did not want to talk about hippies. No Marxist will ever admit that he or she ever hallucinated, ever went off on a rainbow- coloured trail. Let’s make that clear. If we want to speak for the earth, the slime of the earth, we should look at hallucinations, aboriginal notions of dreamtime, and consciousness experiences like that. Look at what it teaches us: What is real? What is a hallucination? Why do we think? Because we hallucinate. Why do we hallucinate? Because we ingest plants. Why do we ingest plants? Because we co-evolved with them. That’s how we came to think. In a way, plants are thought. Thoughts are hallucinations that we believe are real. Boys on Acid: A Brief History of Western Philosophers, that’s the title of the book we should write! Foucault took lsd; Sartre tried mescaline, then argued that the default sensation of enjoying your embodiment is nausea. But, that’s an avoidance of pleasure. He sticks his hand in the jar of honey and recoils.4 Why? Because he’s afraid of the pleasure, of giving into it, which the French feminists then connected with a patriarchal fear of women.

4 Sartre writes, “These long, soft strings of substance which fall from me to the slimy body (when, for example, I plunge my hand into it and then pull it out again) symbolize a rolling off of myself in the slime” (610–12).

162 | McIntyre and Medoro cm and dm: The grow-op guys had it right all along. There’s a moment in Hyperobjects where you imagine the end of agrilogistics in the grow-op guys’ projects. tm: Thoughts are hallucinations that we take for real. Consuming things (such as plants)—for no reason other than the pleasure they give—goes way back to before the Neanderthals. Enjoying yourself for no reason is logically prior to utility. So, anti-consumerism needs to be tweaked a little. There’s some chemistry in consumerism. Some enjoyment of the non-human being you just bought (like a bottle of Coke) for no reason whatsoever. Not because the Coke bottle told you to, but for no reason whatsoever. At least it’s one entity you’re allowing to have power over you. You allow it to talk to you. It may not be a spokesvulture, but you allow it talk to you. cm and dm: Your work is very critical of fossil-fuel consumption. Could you speak candidly about working at a university where you are critical of an industry connected with it. Is it sometimes difficult? tm: I need to have some kind of sticker for my version of hypocrisy. “World’s #1 Hypocrite.” dm: I need a sticker like that too. Monsanto is on my campus. tm: It results in hilarious, awkward moments. One day, I attended a discussion about the film Crude.5 We were just sitting down to watch the film—across the street literally is Chevron—when they sent a guy over on a bike, with a specially made, colour glossy brochure on all the reasons (according to them) why the movie is incorrect. It was put together just for us. I thought, “You really care about what we’re thinking. Good!” It was so funny. We knew Chevron was nervous by the sheer fact that the guy on the bike was heading over to tell us we were wrong. Everyone is a hypocrite at this point because of interdependence, because everything is interconnected. I can’t get my politics and ethics completely correct. If I’m being nice to bunnies, I’m not being nice to bunny parasites. There’s always something missing.

5 Crude: The Real Price of Oil was produced by Joe Berlinger and released in 2009. The website www.crudethemovie.com includes links to the Berlinger v. Chevron legal documents.

Spokesvultures | 163 cm and dm: You’re not being nice to carrots. tm: We can’t go all the way. The biocentric way. We can’t. Someone said at Irvine once that the aids virus had just as much a right to exist as a person with aids. Really? It’s really okay not to want your friend to die of aids. It’s okay to want that virus to die. So, it means that everything is hypocritical. “Everything has a right to exist” is necessarily hypocritical. Because if rights are based on the notion of property, and everything owns something, then what is being owned? What’s the object they’ve all got? Because now we’re talking about everything. It’s a kind of reductio ad absurdum of rights discourse. I’m not criticizing animal rights. I’m saying that these rights need to be localized to a particular time and place and that each rights discourse has particular limitations. It’s better cognitively, too, to feel like a hypocrite than a perfect cynic. cm and dm: Yes. And better than perfecting obfuscation, which proponents of industrial agriculture have gotten down to a fine art. We enjoy the arguments among vegans, for instance—especially when they discuss being speciesist themselves. It means that hypocrisy is not incompatible with compassion; we are all speciesist because it’s not possible to be otherwise. What about the insects killed for crop agriculture? We need to keep the edge of our thinking like that. It stops us from going all the way to the dark side, where things are ostensibly pure, where obfuscation and industrialized agriculture go hand in hand—where violently caged animals are described as being well cared for. tm: Vegetarians are always called out for hypocrisy. “You wear leather shoes,” they say. “So do you,” I reply. “Spot the hypocrite” is the way we’ve been trained to be right. But that is over. If you realize you’re in the biosphere, there’s nowhere in that system to achieve the correct Archimedean place to leverage everything. Hypocrisy is also hypocritical. So, we have to be straightforwardly hypocritical. cm and dm: You know, Toni Morrison’s A Mercy addresses exactly this issue, in which a black artist makes a beautiful gate for a plantation owner. He wants to work on his craft and he needs to feed his child. So, he’s stuck in this horrible hypocrisy. It’s such an interesting novel, always showing how there’s no pure outside to this inside. Because we want the intensive confinement of farm animals to end, we have to concede to the system to a certain extent, arguing that meat

164 | McIntyre and Medoro production can still exist (but without the cages). We get accused of gradu- alism; allowing some middle ground, though, also messes with the power system. We meet big agriculture on their turf and take it out from the Think about inside. It took us a long time to get out from under the labels, from being hurt by them. megacities, tm: It’s that zero sum game: if you’re doing x, then you’re not doing y. sprawl. Actually, you just have to get off your backside. cm and dm: It’s also a kind of passive resistance: infiltrate, and sit there like objects in meetings. Things start to move around us. Shifts occur. tm: Like the weird interactions between academics and oil people. For example, there’s a guy in environmental engineering at Rice who has teamed up with some guy in Shell. They want to figure out how to dismantle the grid this way. One way they do it is by paying farmers to not farm and allow their fields to return to indigenous plants. They’re not trying to make reality into a perfect world. It’s simply better than not doing anything. And just because it came out of the Shell guy’s mouth doesn’t make it wrong. This is crucial because we’re in a totalized neoliberal world. We are all in it. The people in the politburo are also trying to dismantle it. This is a twelve-thousand-year project, so it might be okay to take little bits of it apart—given that it is so gigantic, so vast. You need to give yourself a break. I’m interested in psychologically and ontologically cheap ways of discovering and making things, like subverting what is now an all-pervasive energy grid. There’re these German towns that are totally off the grid: just turned of the oil pipes into them and went from there. I like that tactic. Subscen- dence. Collapse down. It’s based on an ontology wherein the wholes are actually less than the sum of their parts. Think about megacities, sprawl. They’re always less than the sum of their parts. You can’t find them, can’t locate their edges, because you’re always looking in the wrong place. Pointing to “Huston” or “Atlanta” and asking where are they really? The trouble with “the whole as greater” begins to involve cynical reasoning—lures us into thinking that something is too big and that we’re helpless before it. The biosphere is ontologically smaller than any one thing. It’s something to care about. And we can care about it on a small scale. Don’t cede your power to the idea that we’re part of some larger zombie species with which we cannot interfere.

Spokesvultures | 165 God should come back down to Earth and get smaller. It might interfere with monotheistic religions, just as Buddhism interfered with Hindu- ism. This idea of coming down to earth, interfering. It’s dope. cm and dm: Yes, it’s been glimpsed in all religions. Jesus born in a manger among farm animals. tm: Something on a vast scale can collapse into something fragile and physical. And we can see it that way: as smaller ontologically. It’s collapsed inside the relations between me, say, and a polar bear. Hyperobjects, in that sense, are weirdly small; there are small fragile things that you can fix here and there. You can have a little wind village, for instance, even though we’re stuck in the maw of a giant beast and cannot change it entirely. This idea that you should change the beast completely is also saying “And you’ll never be able to.” cm and dm: Yes, the false dichotomy: nothing or everything. tm: I want to champion the trickster-like Paleolithic beings in dreamtime, where the “law” of the excluded middle is violated on a regular basis.6 We need the middle voice for speaking, for thinking through the idea of “outside/inside,” of “choosing whether you’re in or out.” We are always in the middle, actually. There is no rigid distinction between nonlife and life. It’s an uncanny valley and we’re all in it.7 The true sign of speciesism is that we classify other humans as in or out, too. Speciesism is not simply about despising other beings; it’s about despising them because they might be us.8 We don’t have the grammar to speak the environment and really mean it, because we’ve lost the middle voice. There’s no chasm between inside

6 Paleolithic art depicts dancing tricksters, half human and half animals, practising rituals. These tricksters work at the thresholds, where their magic happens. The law of excluded middles follows Aristotle’s principle of non-contradiction, which states that for any proposition, either that proposition is true or its negation is true. For example, “everything must either be or not be” (Russell 72). 7 Morton elucidates this idea (and includes a diagram of the uncanny valley) in Hyperobjects: “In the uncanny valley, beings are strangely familiar and familiarly strange. […] The uncanny valley, in other words, is only a valley if you already have some quite racist assumptions about lifeforms. With ecological awareness there is no ‘healthy person’ on the other side of the valley” (130–31). 8 “They look like humans: have bare skin, wrinkles, hairdos. […] Maybe that’s why many people don’t like them,” says Dr Stoyan Nikolov from the Bulgarian Society for the Protection of Birds about Egyptian vultures (Neophron percnopterus).

166 | McIntyre and Medoro and outside. The uncanny valley is actually a flat plain, where everyone exists. Evolution works that way, in fact. There are loads of human ancestors, not just Neanderthal, et cetera. Thousands. There are no not in-between states: dreaming is being between awake and sleeping; being alive is in between being born and being dead; being right is in between being perfect and totally wrong. Not that the middle is a solid, constantly existing thing. This weird in-between, chiastic region is ambiguous and narcissistic. Through acts of violence, we try to delete the ambiguity and deny the narcissism. cm and dm: You use the concept on lameness in Hyperobjects, and we’d like to discuss it further, because it is so compelling in relation to the notions of bipedalism and the carbon footprint, as well as of Oedipus’s swollen foot and Achilles’ heel. tm: Oedipus’s swollen foot was about literally being glued to the biosphere in order to prevent him from doing what the oracle says he will do. So, they nail him down. It’s the random discovery by a shepherd that releases him. The cool bit is what the shepherd does; he sees a child abandoned on a mountainside and doesn’t want him to suffer. And this is basically Eco-Care 101. But then Oedipus tries to release himself from everything, tries to unfetter himself from the prophecy. The wrong turn occurs when Oedipus feels the need to stand on his own two feet, which is ultimately the answer he gives to the feminine nonhuman being, the sphinx. The sphinx asks the trickster’s question, which involves mystery. Oedipus is the philosopher who collapses the ambiguity, as Goux points out.9 He causes the sphinx to kill herself. This is the foundational act, the allegory of the creation of the city-state. Hercules kills the hydra previously, with a sword that is magically able to do the impossible. (Hey, I wonder what that magic sword stands in for, guys!) And he is then able to get on with civilization too. Cadmus slays the dragon just outside of Thebes, where the sphinx is too. Cadmus gets the teeth and plants them, just like ploughshares. So we have here an already militarized agriculture. Agriculture is war. If you go to an agricultural museum, you’ll see that late nineteenth-century agricultural equipment

9 Morton references his colleague’s work here, Jean-Joseph Goux’s Oedipus, Phi- losopher, in which he argues that Oedipus’s answer “Man” to the riddle of the sphinx is the violent assertion of human reason over non-human entities and enigmas.

Spokesvultures | 167 was a prototype for World War I tanks. It is literally war, not just meta- phorically. Actually. With trenches and all, with nonhuman casualties— and other human beings as well. cm and dm: Yes! You’re just proving what we’ve already known! tm [laughing]: I love confirming people’s prejudices and beliefs. All the language of the myths points to this. The other thing about the sphinx is that she is so obviously a lamassu, a Babylonian mythical beast. This points to Greece’s internal agrilogistical project. Greece asserts, “We are the cradle of civilization. Not you. We are the original civilization!” even as they assimilate Babylonian gods and stories. Ecologically, why do they say this? What are they saying? Mesopotamia turned into a desert, and then the Greeks did it all over again. They started the agrilogistical project again: the desertification, the violence. And they recreated the myths to make sense of it all. It’s Agrilogistics 6.0, Once More with Feeling! Now, here we are, in version 12 or 6.10, the neoliberal version. Upgrade! cm and dm: It keeps happening. The bringing of industrialized agriculture to the New World was so destructive. The millions of caged pigs continues on, right across the continent, destroying the waterways, the lakes. We are just aghast in the face of it. No pigs should be on this continent. The shit and the destruction comprise a hyperobject: everywhere and nowhere in direct sight. tm: And at the same time, there’s this weird secret knowledge in the idea of Oedipus’s lameness that the whole project is totally impossible. It’s implicit. Oedipus’s leg hurts. That’s the tragic idea of hamartia. We know the inner flaw. You have two choices in a tragedy: you’re intellectual, so you try to get rid of it (Hamlet) or you act it out because you’re super passionate and jealous (Othello). We know it’s wrong—but we do it over and over again. This is hubris. And then it becomes peripateia, which is a looping. So, you thought you cut off all the heads of the Hydra, but they’ve just grown back with new strength (like the new bacteria we’re facing). In this feedback loop, we think that if we go through it enough times, then we’ll come back to the start and get another chance. That’s the interesting thing. Why keep doing it again? Why did we lock into agriculture’s concentric temporality? It’s an obsessive-compulsive response to a trauma: do it over and over and over

168 | McIntyre and Medoro and try to get it right. It’s simultaneously an ecological and ontological trauma. We were hungry, and then we totalized it and ontologized our exceptionalism twelve thousand years ago. Something made us feel proud, special. Less hobbled and lame, because feeling so lame-ass was part of the feeling hungry. Imagine all the little sentences twelve thousand years ago, imagine the ones filled with self-contradictions and loops. And there’s this new sentence that says, “This isn’t just a sentence. This is for real.” It points outside of itself, saying that this isn’t just a loop. It pretends it isn’t self- referential (which is ridiculous, because it is talking about itself). And the sentence, its basic compelling thought, is this: that the agricultural system is not just planning for the next meal, it’s the whole meaning of civilization. Something like an advertisement stood out—the way we’re told that a car is not just a car but a way of life. Somehow agriculture was about locking onto this one belief that this sentence was the right one. There was something compelling, seductive, about the belief that there was something real outside of the hermeneutic circle. It seemed to promise: There really is a world, so you don’t have to check in advance. There really is constant presence, despite the way you’re getting your thoughts about it. You use all of the tools to reinforce that sentence. That’s what we’ve been doing for twelve thousand years. Worldwide global violence followed because it doesn’t work. It just doesn’t. Global warming happened because we’ve been nervous and embarrassed for twelve thousand years. We keep telling ourselves that we never wanted to be hunter-gatherers, that we wanted to do more than survive. We wanted to thrive in a way that other animals did not get to do. And we’ve been reinforcing that sentence about that promise of thriving, how it transcends everything, for twelve thousand years. cm and dm: There is something about taking ourselves out of the food chain too. We used to allow vultures to eat us after death. The afterlife was about becoming a vulture (and a vulture’s shit). That seems to have frightened us at some point. So here’s a theory: the vultures of the ancient Persians (who ate our bodies on mountainsides or in the Zoroastrian Tow- ers of Silence) became the vulture gods in the Egyptian pantheon, which in turn became the angels (with their giant wings) in the later monotheisms. This shift allowed us to believe that we were no longer part of the system, the soil. We could be taken away by these transcendent beings, carried

Spokesvultures | 169 off the earth, upward—by creatures who were originally carrion feeders and with whom we probably competed for food. We cannot be carrion; we’re corpses or cadavers. We then began tm: Are you getting this down? This is absolutely right. My own explana- to persuade tion is really about that the sentence and how it clicked, how it seduced us with the idea that “we can escape ambiguity, can be purely separate.” ourselves that There was the global warming of the Holocene interfacing with humans in 10,000 bc and we didn’t want to admit that we established a system it was about a within it simply because we were nervous about being looped in with everything else: with death and weakness and insignificance. We did all huge, of this—this civilization and massive ecological destruction—because we wanted to escape the loops, the contradictory experiences. Agriculture, I descending, contend, was, in fact, a lame-ass solution to a temporary moment called the Holocene. fantastic thing We then began to persuade ourselves that it was about a huge, descending, fantastic thing from the sky: God, eternity, purity. But what is the from the sky: cheap explanation: we were hungry. So we totalized it, and it made us feel proud. Because feeling lame and weak was part of hunger. God, eternity, As Levi-Struass tells us, myth is always trying to compute whether we came from the earth or from ourselves. The latter is so obviously de purity. rigueur in agricultural society myths: we came from ourselves, damn it, the agricultural-era myths tell us. We transcended the earth, we told ourselves, and that is the meaning of existence. It’s paradoxical. We have managed to loop ourselves into existing by ourselves. Yet, we’re still on earth, part of the earth, etching the earth. Derrida has always said: there’s nothing outside of the text. You’re writing on a surface, which is made of other beings. The surface is an ecosystem, which is already part of the context, which is part of the text. You cannot draw a line between that and the context, and by context I mean not just human (race, class, and gender)—but all the other life forms. Preventing that thought (that we’re just inscribed on a physical surface) is what we’ve been doing for millennia.

cm and dm: Why? Does the physical surface smell bad?

tm: It’s a version of climbing Mount Everest, which is the ultimate imperialistic masculinity: the performance of going past all those dead guys to the top. We started performing, in a radical way, a desire to thrive, to say,

170 | McIntyre and Medoro “I’m going to do way more than make it to the next meal…. Screw all the other life forms.” cm and dm: And you never want to be one of those guys who has been eaten on the way back down. Can never be meat ourselves. tm: Yes, it’s an existential horror. You’re always teetering on the edge of the cliff of the agrilogistical construct. But, when you jump off, you realize you’re not jumping far at all. It’s like Gloucester falling onto the sands of Dover. There was never this huge cliff. We got hooked on a meme, that we decided wasn’t just a meme, that it was a reality. If we stopped our maniacal death drive, we’d discover that we’d never left the beach. It’s not a tragedy. We were just embarrassed, so we changed it to tragedy. We’re lame-ass. cm and dm: So, that’s what you mean by being lame? tm: Yes, I admit I’m a bit Californian. So when you speak up for death, you are basically talking eco-talk. When you champion death, when you become a spokesvulture for death, you become one for ecological awareness. This is what I mean by dark ecology. cm and dm: We have a question about dating the Anthropocene to the Early Modern ships that bring agriculture over here. tm: That’s the fuzziness of the Anthropocene. It has to do with 1945 (the Great Acceleration) being subtended by 1784 (the invention of the steam engine) being subtended by 10,000 bc. If the Anthropocene is a smoking gun, then the smoke goes all the way back. We had to export agrilogistics all over because we didn’t want to face that it might be wrong. We’re so afraid to face that we were wrong. cm and dm: Everything that’s wrong with the world is crop monocultures. And animal monocultures. That might sound like madness but we can’t shake it. tm: No it’s not madness; it’s completely true. It is. The idea of biodiversity is so easy to understand, but you still have to drive through Stockton (a giant feedlot nicknamed Auschwitz for cows) between L.A. and Sacramento. You see it and it’s so obviously wrong.

Spokesvultures | 171 cm and dm: Yes, it’s also nicknamed Cowshwitz. And these operations are mostly hidden from sight. These vast confined animal operations. Here’s how they’re a kind of hyperobject: you might not be able to see it, but you can smell it. They’re fucking viscous, and we’re inside of the products moving out of them and into everything. tm [ironically]: But smell doesn’t matter, of course. It is ontologically inferior, so if we can’t see it, we’re all right. Smell means I’m an animal. Seeing means I’m not an animal, for I stand on my own two feet and reinvent myself. Heidegger wrote the manual on this. And you never say I smell that. I “feel you” is okay (especially in California) but not I smell you. cm and dm: A question about Marx in ecological theory and philosophy. Eco-theory doesn’t want to stop using Marxism. What do we do about Marx, because he’s so invested in the human at the top of the apex, arguing that estranged labour reduces human to animal and thus reinstating the hierarchy.10 Is Buddhism how you ended up avoiding the traps of Marxism? tm: How to put Marxist in ecological context where we know humans are not any better than pigs? Right. Marxism is incorrect in the big picture, especially in the labeling of anarchists in a pejorative way. Perhaps we need a sort of “full communism,” as long as it includes bees and monkeys and all that. The problem with Marxism is that it declares that the worst of architects is better than the best of bees, because bees are only executing an algorithm. Marxism doesn’t see bees as planning like a human does.11 The problem is that it keeps looking to what the human exhibits that is intelligent. But what is this intelligence? Where is this imagination? I can’t find it. How am I imaginative and bees are not? How do they not plan? How do you know that you’re not just executing an algorithm too? Certain kinds of Marxists react to this issue surrounding species being. There’s a difference between species being (which is another one of these metaphysical things) and species as a hyperobject that I can’t point to, in which I am and am not a member of this gigantic species that is destroying earth simultaneously. What we need to realize is that Marxism is another

10 Mel Chen writes, “Marx hinges the human struggle with alienation precisely against ‘the animal’ ” (Animacies 47). 11 Marx: “A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality” (14).

172 | McIntyre and Medoro form of corelationism, in which there’s only data (and so how can we tell that there really are things?) Aristotle upgraded through modernity, upgraded to look cool. This thinking that there’s a gap between data and reality, so there is no reality, unless I decide upon it; I’m the decider. I get to say it, especially as a Western white male. cm and dm: And well fed. tm: Marx thinks that he figured it all out—he turned it upside down. It’s not a transcendent subject who decides; it’s human economic relations. In corelationism, there’s the subject and there’s the universe; there’s spirit and then there’s the universe. In Marxism, there are human economic relations and the universe. It’s a form of reductionism, but upwards, and everything defaults to the human decider. Everything defaults to the human: will, Dasein…. And Dasein is the most interesting one. So, if Heidegger says: Dasein is logically prior to the human; therefore, then, a lizard could have Dasein, dude—and in a meaningful sense. And so could a rock, man. Just accept that everything has Dasein. Biscuits have it. All you have to say is: Dasein is not human. Everything is shimmering between existing and non-existing. Objects too. Marxism will fail, unfortunately, because it’s ontologically incorrect, because the anthropocentrism is deeply hardwired. It has to be anarchic groups. It has to be you, you, me, Ginger the trout, Carol the polar bear, and a cookie—we’ll form a little reading group. That’s the stupid, lame-ass level it really needs to be on. Silly and small. We’re just little tribes, walking across Africa. Get over the big, big, big structure. Just get over it. Sentimentally, I’d like a communist version of that, like Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney playing on the piano together, like the black and white keys in harmony. But there would have to be a piano, and I don’t believe there is. It’s just a bunch of keys lying around. It’s good to come back come to Marxism, to ask: What is it? Do I really accept it? cm and dm: Yes, he says some cool things about the soil. tm: He does. Everyone seems to forget that bit. “All progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the labourer, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time, is a progress towards ruining the lasting sources of that fertility” (Marx 555). Many people don’t want to know about that part; it’s too

Spokesvultures | 173 dirty. Hegelian Marxists are cooler, they think. So they go back over the same points, solving the puzzle over and over again (like a Rubic’s cube)— which is why every Žižek book is the same. You have to go through a lot of moves because it’s so embarrassing to say simply: We exploit Mother Nature, or however you want to put it (even in some corny way, which can also be true). We try to get away from that at all costs because tenure depends upon sounding very sophisticated. cm and dm: Corny is good. As long as it’s not gmo corn.

Works Cited

Chen, Mel Y. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham: Duke up, 2012. Goux, Jean-Joseph. Oedipus, Philosopher. Stanford: Stanford up, 1993. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1. Hamburg: Verlag von Otto Meissner, 1867; English 1887. Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Russell, Bertrand. The Problems of Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford up, 1959.

174 | McIntyre and Medoro Reviews

Anne Quéma. Power and Legitimacy: Law, Culture, and Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015. 359 pp. $70.00.

Anne Quéma’s Power and Legitimacy: Law, Culture, and Literature is an ambitious contribution to law and literature scholarship. Carefully, although at times densely, written, it reads literature and law alongside the thought of Judith Butler and Pierre Bourdieu and an analytic structure provided by the contemporary Gothic. In doing so, Quéma thinks through the symbolic violence of power and how that power is legitimated. For readers of law and literature scholarship, as well as of jurisprudence more generally, it rewards as much as it challenges. The aim of Power and Legitimacy is less to elaborate on the cultural- legal work of specific texts, although that does occur later in the book; rather, Quéma’s approach is to examine a number of the key theoretical concerns of law and the humanities as a field: the nature of the relationship between law and culture (which she illustrates through the figure of the double helix, an intertwining that acknowledges that law is produced in more than the spaces of courts and the work of judges and legal statutes), the role of performative utterance in cultural-legal texts, the work of the

ESC 42.3–4 (September/December 2016): 175–217 symbolic, and the methodologies of interdisciplinary legal scholarship. Bringing together these strands, Quéma describes her hybrid method as “an unwieldy progeny” (9), an apt image given her interdisciplinary interest in the Gothic and the legal and literary representation of the family. Cumulatively, Power and Legitimacy acts as something of a reflection on the field of law and literature itself, both a microcosm of its concerns and an extension of them through its theoretical engagements and its focus on the articulation and operation of legitimacy. How, Quéma asks, is legitimacy constructed through law and literature, two discourses that “constitute themselves as fields of symbolic power vying with other social practices for recognition and social authority and, as such, are potentially implicated in the exercise of symbolic violence in their production of social meaning” (8)? Noting rightly that their institutional and discursive differences mean that there can be no “mere anal- ogy” between these two fields, Quéma’s focus is on how the operation of symbolic power in law and literature enables legitimacy. The polis provides Quéma’s analytic crux, materializing social poiesis (that “constituting of the social world as a constant and agonistic process” [198]) as a site in which “law and literature engage to create norms of being and doing things while seeking to legitimate these norms through performative effects of authority” (8). The conceptual power of law, she writes, lies in legitimation, in how social meaning is made by transmitting principles and decrees into material, objective conditions. Thus, for example, constitutions invoke the foundational communities that they create at the same time as they claim their authority from them, legitimacy naturalized through seemingly immemorial customs and tropes. Quéma foregrounds questions of symbolic representation in Butler and Bourdieu’s work, and, through an examination of law and literature’s production of social meaning, the work of symbolic violence in the con- stitution of legitimacy. Butler and Bourdieu operate in often uneasy conjunction in the book, sometimes in tension, sometimes in concert. Their presence wanes later in Power and Legitimacy, although their ideas continue to frame it and they never vanish entirely. This latter part of the book, where I found Power and Legitimacy to be at its most fascinating, focuses upon the interrelations between family law, the Gothic, and literature. As a genre, the Gothic often tracks the relationship between public and private, internal and external. Gothic unease is so often located in the home and interior space, yet its disquiet is also lodged in institutions (notably the Church) that entrap and torment—as law does, with the legitimacy of the state, in its own institutions and structures.

176 | Authers Quéma differentiates her approach from other, earlier work about the relationship between law and the Gothic, including David Punter’s Gothic Pathologies. Notably, she distinguishes her study from Punter’s exploration of the early Gothic’s concern with the terror that law’s apparently opaque, absurd, and oppressive practices offer to those entrapped in its forms and practices. For Quéma, the Gothic does not repudiate the jurisdictional work of law over the social but is itself a participant in such processes of the production of institutional meaning, “spawn[ing] its own power effects” (123). It is, she argues, also a “creature of law” (122). Within this context, the uncanny becomes a way of studying the rhetoric of family law discourse in the United Kingdom. Theoretically, the uncanny offers Quéma a way of exploring the cognitive and affective consequences of symbolic power and violence, as it throws the relation between affect and knowledge of social norms into disarray. The work of the uncanny can be seen, notably, in Butler’s writing, which Quéma describes as haunted by spectres who disturb public rationality and leave in their wake “aberrations unexplained yet significant” (96). Sustained by repeated patterns of misrecognition, this political uncanny manifests in spectralized citizens who either do not cohere or who do not recognize themselves in the polis. Indeed, both Butler and Bourdieu conceive of the polis as an ambivalent zone between those who belong and those in estrangement, an ambivalence Quéma notes is typical of the uncanny. For Quéma, twenty-first-century family law and Gothic narrative are haunted by manifestations of this political uncanny as a sign of symbolic violence and sovereign power, an argument brought into particular focus in the book’s reading of Patricia Dunker’s 2002 novel The Deadly Space Between and the uk’s Civil Partnership Act 2004. Family law, Quéma argues, has expanded its regulatory capture of domestic space to include same-sex desire by way of “a normative language that betrays a potential intent to exercise sovereign power over the space of kinship and bodies that do not fit heteronormative norms of sexuality” (131). In order to legitimate same-sex civil partnerships, the Civil Partnership Act built on existing norms.1 That is, it operated through an analogic regulation of same-sex bodies and desire that reinscribed the heteronormative terms of the Marriage Act 1949 on to same-sex relationships. Notably, the 2004 Act reiterates the earlier statute’s incest prohibition, a legislative transpo- sition that Quéma notes is reproduced, but also uncannily transgressed, 1 Prior to the 2013 Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act, which legalized marriage equality in the uk; while it falls outside Quéma’s scope, many of her insights would be equally effective in the context of the new legislation.

Reviews | 177 in Dunker’s novel. As with all the book’s chapters, this and the follow ing discussion of domestic violence, the household, and Lesley Glaister’s Honour Thy Father amply display the meticulous, contextual nature of Quéma’s research, thinking, and theoretical acumen, but they particularly cohere ideas that are, at times, overly abstracted elsewhere. They stand as powerful moments in a work of scholarship that amply demonstrates the role interdisciplinary legal and literary analysis can have in rethinking the work of law and the institutional and symbolic regulatory spaces law and literature participate in and contest. Benjamin Authers Flinders University Work Cited Punter, David. Gothic Pathologies: The Text, the Body, and the Law. Hounds- mills: Macmillan, 1998.

Bart Beaty. Twelve-Cent Archie. New Brunswick: Rutgers up, 2015. 234 pp. $26.95.

The question that begins this book, “What is the value of Archie comics?” (3), has a clear answer in the title: not very much. This is probably the answer that most scholars and cultural commentators would have given until very recently. From the viewpoint of 2015, the company, Archie Com- ics, has surprisingly become “one of the biggest risk-takers in mainstream comics, pushing character diversity in its main titles and shifting away from its all-ages roots” (Sava). Bart Beaty’s new volume in Rutgers up’s Comics Culture series, however, focuses not on recent developments in the Archie line of comics but, rather, on the “ordinary” all-ages roots of Archie that makes their risk-taking in the twenty-first century surprising. Beaty’s project was to read every issue of Archie from the period when most Archie Comics publications cost $.12 an issue—late 1961 until the middle of 1969. As Beaty points out, this period coincides with several notable Archie artists, represents a time when Archie consistently outsold more classically notable comic books (such as Jack Kirby and Stan Lee’s Fantastic Four), and was also a period of volatile change in American culture that passed distinctly unseen in Archie’s fictional hometown of Riverdale. The resulting analysis has surprising implications far beyond the realm of cheap old Archie comics.

178 | Barnholden Bart Beaty, a comics scholar in the Department of English at the Uni- versity of Calgary who is also possessed of a curiously Archie-esque name, is well aware that comic book analysis, much like literary criticism as a whole, has “focused nearly exclusively on those works that can be most easily reconciled within the traditions of literary greatness … or those of contemporary cultural politics” (5). Twelve-Cent Archie, by contrast, is extremely repetitive, barely innovative, singularly unambitious, and deliberately, painfully uninterested in representing or engaging with the times in which it was produced. Noting the passion of Archie comics for the banjo, an instrument whose heyday had passed long before the 1960s, Beaty sums up the corpus of Twelve-Cent Archie with one word: unhip (197). Beaty’s book is patterned after an Archie comics digest: a long sequence of texts arranged in no particular order, concerning different subjects, and of varying length and structure. The methodology deployed varies as well, from a close reading of a particular page to a history of The Archies, the bubblegum pop band with the Archie brand licence at the end of the 1960s, and from an economic analysis of the Archie-Betty-Veronica love triangle to a Norton Anthology–style gloss on cryptic cultural references. Running throughout this variety of Beaty’s looks at Twelve-Cent Archie is the constant tension between understanding Archie in terms of classical literary value and grappling with Archie on its own terms. When Beaty looks at Archie as a text in the same way that one might look at, say, Renaissance drama, the results are disheartening but predictable. Archie comics literally never portrayed African-Americans, which is perhaps a blessing given their portrayal of Asians and Asian-Americans. Archie Comics promoted a reactionary view of youth culture in the 1960s, disdainful even of the Beatles brand of innovation, and was positively engaged with current events only in the realm of fashion. Relatedly and most of all, Archie comics promote a rigid view of gender roles, prescrib- ing, at times directly, what female readers should do with their lives and their bodies. These critiques are worth making, but all of these points are also fairly evident to anyone with a vague sense of Archie comics. At least one of them, the revealing detail that Betty and Veronica have identical faces and are arguably interchangeable, was made as early as 1954, in the classic mad magazine parody “Starchie.” Beaty finds instead that the quality and innovation of the comics in this period lies in the visual art of Archie comics. As he skilfully explains with a close reading, stories like 1961’s “The Joke” (discussed on pages 192–95) and 1969’s “A Tough Question” (pages 160–63, three pages longer than the story itself) are made into “something valuable” (160) through the

Reviews | 179 prowess and artistic ability of artists such as Samm Schwartz and artist- writer teams like that of Frank Doyle and Harry Lucey. The influence and importance of this dimension of 1960s Archie is still apparent: Archie and Jughead Comics Double Digest #16, published in December 2015, is actually made up predominantly of stories illustrated by Schwartz in the 1960s, most of which were written by Doyle. Beaty makes the compelling case that the circulation of these stories is actually because of their artistic value and quality. Based in his impressive ability to closely read comics, Beaty’s analysis makes it difficult to argue that Schwartz’s work does not meet some standard of literary greatness, even if it is the kind with funny drawings. In the riskier parts of the book, Beaty looks at Archie on its own terms, uncovering many points of interest. If we grant that Archie comics in the 1960s are valuable and interesting simply because they exist, there is quite a bit to see in them. For example, Beaty persuasively argues that the widespread cultural idea of a “love triangle” between Archie, Veronica, and Betty is a highly inaccurate description of the situation in the 1960s, when Archie and Veronica are in a committed relationship that Betty is obsessed with destroying. Elsewhere, he points out that the text supports a reading in which Archie would rather be with Midge. This suggests that one of the basic cultural referents for the idea of a heterosexual love triangle, North American shorthand for a man trying to decide between relationships with two women of different economic classes, is a reference to something that never really existed. This intriguing idea—one of the few times that Archie has been the subject of hyperreality instead of an example of it—does not receive much further development but suggests any number of further possibilities. More typically, the tension between Archie-as-actually-valuable and Archie-as-worth-slightly-more-than-a-dime is highly intertwined. Beaty characterizes the comics’ portrayal of Riverdale as a fantasyland of middle-class white Americans in the 1960s, a subject of not a little interest to anyone invested in contemporary American culture and politics. In Beaty’s evocative phrase, “for people of a certain generation, Archie is like the air—he is everywhere, but he is very little remarked upon” (3). While Beaty’s book flirts at different times with being both a business history of Archie Comics and a book history of how readers actually read Archie, he is less concerned with why Archie reads this way and more with how it reads. The qualities of 1960s Archie comics—white, invisible, pervad- ing—are exactly what makes them suggestive of further study when they are not “great” at all.

180 | Barnholden At its most interesting, Beaty’s book is looking at the ways that art works when embedded in an extraordinarily conservative milieu, as part of a business so focused on exploitation that innovation has fled to obscure retreats. Beaty’s mission is to look at what has been overlooked by scholars—incredibly, there is only one previous published work of scholarship concerning Archie in this period—and therefore one would assume that he is not particularly interested in recuperating Twelve-Cent Archie as a secret mine of quality. Despite his ambition to write a history of the boring, safe old Archie, he found that unexpected quality anyway, and, despite his interest in new kinds of criticism, he still focuses mostly on scholarly reading and on the auteurs of Archie Comics like Schwartz, Dan DeCarlo, or Doyle/Lucey. Doyle and Lucey are hardly the kinds of names that get hardcover collections of their work—as close as comics get to the canon—but they are still just individual artists who are interesting when and because they diverge from the background noise of ordinary culture. Even though I had never heard of them, it does feel that Beaty is often simply making claims that these two possess that fabled literary greatness. I wouldn’t say that I found this disappointing, since after all these Archie comics have never been subjected to straightforward literary analysis the first time; but to me the more interesting parts of Beaty’s book are when Archie comics refuse to be read in terms of mastery and auteurism at all. Beaty’s book is engaging and highly readable, which seems fitting given his subject. Alongside his recuperation of Archie as being in some sense great literature, he explores the fascinating things that texts that aren’t great literature can say. I think this book is more interesting not when discussing the stand-out, idiosyncratic, or obviously meaningful moments in Twelve-Cent Archie but when discussing the background noise. Beaty’s remarks upon the air itself are more provocative and interesting and difficult: Jughead’s hat (which receives an entry of its own, pages 79–82) turns out to be unusually rich in meaning, a survival of World War Two–era working-class labour that became drained of meaning and thus stands for “the Archie worldview generally” (82). It is difficult for me to criticize Beaty’s treatment of the subject, because performing scholarly criticism on something that is incredibly resistant to scholarly criticism is roughly as difficult as it sounds. While reading this book I often thought about Archie and me, as Beaty considers at one point his own history with the Archies of his childhood. What might a project like this look like if it tackled “my” era of Archie comics: the late 1980s when the publisher created a wide variety of genre-based spinoffs, creating space for a series where, for example, Jughead secretly saw a girlfriend

Reviews | 181 who was a female version of Archie, with whom he traveled in time and did battle with Morgan Le Fay, of Arthurian myth, in a series drawn, no less, by notable comics artist Gene Colan? But that would be missing the most compelling point of Beaty’s book. Beaty’s call to look at the overlooked suggests new ways of looking at commercial art, the mass culture that does not obviously have literary or artistic value. His book is an exciting and often deeply funny example of what might come out of this approach. It feels like a call to go out and look at pop culture like Archie for how it works on its own terms. This call is even more compelling because, of course, Archie comics can still be acquired at more or less any North American supermarket or corner store and, what is more, they’re still pretty cheap. Neale Barnholden University of Alberta

Works Cited

Kurtzman, Harvey (w), and Bill Elder (a). “Starchie.” mad #12 (June 1954), ec Comics. Sava, Oliver. “After several decades, Archie gets a stunning modern make- over.” The A.V. Club. 10 July 2015. Web. 31 January 2016.

María Jesús Hernáez Lerena, ed. Pathways of Creativity in Contemporary Newfoundland and Labrador. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015. 341 pp.

To steal a phrase from Herb Wyile and Jeannette Lynes, the last few decades have witnessed a consistent “rising tide” of literary and artistic depictions of Newfoundland and Labrador.1 Riding this wave, of course, have been countless critical and scholarly responses to the work, a select few of which, like María Jesús Hernáez Lerena’s Pathways of Creativity in Contemporary Newfoundland and Labrador, attempt to contemplate at once all the forms of creativity flowing through the province. One of the earliest broad stroke approaches was Sandra Gwyn’s “The Newfoundland Renaissance,” which appeared in the April 1976 edition of Saturday Night. Gwyn’s heart is in the right place, but one cannot help but feel she is a 1 See Studies in Canadian Literature 33.2 (2008) Special Issue: Surf’s Up! The Rising Tide of Atlantic-Canadian Literature.

182 | Chafe little too amazed to discover such art can come from such a place, especially when she coins the phrase “Newfcult Phenomenon” to describe “the miraculous and exciting revival of art and theatre on Canada’s poor, bald rock” (38). Gwyn identifies “the decline of the fishery [and] the decay of the old outport way of life” as parts of a “collective tragic muse” she claims informs and inspires the artists “all over the rock” who are inexplicably “popping up in sweet and splendid profusion. Like the wild harebells you find every August, bursting out of sheer granite cliffs” (40). Gwyn’s gushing overview borders on the condescending and reductive, as Newfoundland artists are depicted as anomalies existing in spite of (and ever preoccupied with) a legacy of loss, as denizens of a landscape hostile to their creative efforts. While Gwyn is partly correct—this current continuing growth in artistic production is not “miraculous” but it is remarkable—the legacy of her article has arguably been decades of critical responses to the art and literature of Newfoundland and Labrador that must first address the harsh realities and foundational failures of a culture of loveable losers; responses that are compounded over the years into an all-too-familiar Come From Away come-on that sounds a little like “What’s a poem like you doing in a place like this?”2 So one hopes critical collections such as Pathways of Creativity in Contemporary Newfoundland and Labrador resist such pandering and exoticizing and contain meaningful essays that consider what is unique about the arts in Newfoundland and Labrador but also move beyond this uniqueness to examine what is universal, and universally good, in this boom of production. Of course, academics have for many years been writing very seriously about Newfoundland and Labrador culture and culture producers, and Hernáez Lerena does well to include in her collection many of the most qualified experts, scholars, and analysts focusing on the art and literature of Newfoundland and Labrador. Notable among these is Noreen Golfman, whose “Filming Ourselves: The Challenge of Producing Newfoundland” is a timely and thorough consideration of the film industry in Newfoundland. Golfman’s essay also works as a counterpoint or even a corrective to Gwyn’s “The Newfoundland Renaissance,” since Golfman frames much of the art she is examining as not as regionally restricted or obsessed. Discussing the 2009 film Love and Savagery, Golfman notes

2 Years after Gwyn’s article was published, Justin Trudeau, championing Wayne Johnston’s The Colony of Unrequited Dreams on the 2003 edition of cbc’s Canada Reads, would describe Newfoundland as a “barren rock upon which nothing was expected to grow preoccupied … least of all a people as tragically beautiful and noble as Newfoundlanders.”

Reviews | 183 that it “might then be fair to offer” that such a film produced “sixty years after Confederation, signals a fresh and confident perspective on the local/ global margin/centre oppositional framework that has dominated cultural narratives of the province for so long” (213). There is no singular “collective tragic muse” inspiring these actors, writers, and directors, as Golfman points to “the expanding cinematic spectrum of Newfoundland stories” as evidence that “there is more than one version of place, more than one historical record or narrative pathway of what Newfoundland is in the twenty-first century” (226). In a similar vein, Adrian Fowler’s “Townie Lit: Newfoundland Refo- cused in the Writing of Lisa Moore and Michael Winter” examines a turn down another “narrative pathway” as the work of Moore and Winter signify a shift in Newfoundland literature from stories of “the traditional life of the Newfoundland outport community” to “the urban and the contemporary” (93). Like Golfman, Fowler finds through his investigation evidence of a distinct but multifaceted culture: “If [Winter’s] characters struggle with issues that humans face anywhere, perhaps this proves the universality of their concerns, not the dilution of their culture. And perhaps locating such characters in Newfoundland forces readers to reconsider what it means to live in this place in the twenty-first century” (99). Valerie E. Legge provides another lens through which to consider the province in “With ‘High hearts’: Women Travelers to Newfoundland and Labrador.” A meticulously researched piece, Legge’s chapter reminds readers that not all artists burst, pop, or otherwise erupt from the landscape but that there has been an extensive but “largely unacknowledged” tradition of “courageous,” “unconventional,” and “restless” “wayward women,” who were undeniably “pioneers in establishing a literary tradition upon which modern and contemporary writers would build” (51). Mary Dal- ton’s chapter on poetry and Jamie Skidmore’s chapter on theatre are also comprehensive and well-researched pieces and, like the essays by Golf- man, Fowler, and Legge, will prove useful to scholars wishing to add their own voices to the conversation. (Fowler’s essay has already been cited in at least one journal article.) A particularly refreshing aspect of this collection is that it does not ignore Labrador. Robin McGrath’s “The Diarist Tradition Among Labra- dor Aboriginal People” is a much-needed contribution to the discussion of the cultures of Newfoundland and Labrador, and Roberta Buchanan’s “The Aboriginal Writes Back: Representations of Inuit in Wayne Johnston’s The Navigator of New York and Abraham Ulrikab’s The Diary of Abraham Ulkirab” does the double service of tackling the literary representations of

184 | Chafe the Inuit in a well-known work and introducing an important but lesser known work as a rewarding comparison and contrast. While Dale Jar- vis’s chapter on storytelling and the oral tradition is focused primarily on Newfoundland, he does point to important initiatives taking place in Labrador to preserve the many stories told by various voices and he does provide in his works cited some very useful texts. Hernáez Lerena must be commended for insuring that Labrador and its artists receive their due diligence in her collection. It has to be said, however, that despite its scope and depth, Pathways of Creativity in Contemporary Newfoundland and Labrador does look at times a little like a Newfoundland dog’s breakfast. The lens is a little wide and Hernáez Lerena may be guilty of trying to cover a little too much. “Pathways of Creativity” is a vague subject matter, and students looking for scholarly works on literature or film may not expect to find what they are looking for here. Some essays suffer by comparison, in particular Craig Francis Power’s “Landscape and Narrative,” which at seven pages is not even a quarter of the length of most of the chapters here. Some choices beg questioning: Jennifer Bowering Delisle’s “ ‘The rock beneath his feet’: Nostalgia as Protest in Donna Morrisey’s Sylvanus Now” is a solid essay and certainly worthy of publication, but its inclusion in this collection is problematic. Morrissey is popular and talented enough, but she is not producing “capital L” literature at the level of Johnston, Moore, or Win- ter, who each receive a half-chapter of treatment here, to say nothing of Michael Crummey, Edward Riche, or Jessica Grant, whose fiction is not considered. With a lens as wide as Hernáez Lerena’s it is difficult to decide what art forms should stay within the frame. There is no chapter on music here, nor is there a chapter on television. Although Skidmore mentions codco (the comedy troupe who would eventually have a sketch show on cbc) and Golfman mentions Random Passage, a television miniseries, this text lacks a chapter conducting an extensive examination of televisual depictions of Newfoundland and Labrador. And this is a fertile ground: Land & Sea, tourist advertisements, Republic of Doyle, Majumder Manor, Cold Water Cowboys, The Rick Mercer Report, This Hour has 22 Minutes, and short-lived series like Dooley Gardens and Hatching, Matching, and Dispatching all prove there are many pathways to creativity being blazed across the small screen. Perhaps a chapter or two on music or a chapter on television would appear token or dismissive, but it could be argued that all art forms receive short shrift here. There is so much theatre, poetry, art, film, and literature being produced in Newfoundland that a wide pass is

Reviews | 185 not sufficient examination. A more theoretical lens possessed of a tighter focus is needed. Or perhaps not. In an interview with Wyile, Riche claims that due to the small population of the province, artists of every bent “all end up working with one another and there is this wonderful cross-fertilization. Because of the size of the community and its absolute isolation, in March, when the wind is howling, you might find yourself talking to a set deco- rator, a fiddle player, a jazz musician and a novelist, and that is a very good thing” (211). In Newfoundland and Labrador, Riche claims, “the great geniuses” are “there to meet, and they encourag[e] everybody” (211). Attention needs to be paid to this productive cross-fertilization, especially when one considers how pervasive Gwyn’s notion of the “collective tragic muse” continues to be. Just this past month MacLean’s informs “Bust times are back in Newfoundland and Labrador” (Gillis). Dwelling over a shared legacy of loss will not be helpful or proactive, but a collection like Pathways of Creativity in Newfoundland and Labrador proves that positivity and ingenuity continue to produce a thriving and evolving culture. Paul Chafe Ryerson University

Works Cited

Gillis, Charlie. “Bust times are back in Newfoundland and Labrador.” MacLean’s. 8 April 2016. Web. Gwyn, Sandra. “The Newfoundland Renaissance.” Saturday Night. April 1976: 38–45. Wyile, Herb. “An Equal-Opportunity Satirist: An Interview with Edward Riche.” Studies in Canadian Literature 33:2 (2008): 210–28.

Elena Del Rio. The Grace of Destruction: A Vital Ethology of Extreme Cinemas. New York/London: Bloomsbury, 2016. 267 pp.

Much like her first book, Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance: Pow- ers of Affection (2008), Elena Del Rio’s The Grace of Destruction: A Vital Ethology of Extreme Cinemas privileges the body’s expressive and affective capacities over representational paradigms and narrative form. Re-

186 | Chittick asserting a filmic and philosophical allegiance to the body, Del iR o’s latest work advances an original assessment of violence in contemporary cinema, with a particular focus on “negative affects” and the forces, extremities, and moral codes that precede and exceed acts of violence. Deploying an array of theoretical insights from multiple disciplines, Grace of Destruction engages a selection of films that demonstrate a certain extremity (3). For Del Rio, “extreme cinemas” should not be confused with extremely violent films that display “sensationalist physicalit[ies]” (4) but films in which socio-moral systems and structures produce “negative affects” in subjects/individuals, often culminating in acts of violence. Del Rio stresses the importance of separating “force” from “violence” but reiterates the latter’s “immanence” to the former (8). Grace of Destruction does not, then, analyze cinematic violence as a series of decontextualized, individuated acts but as grounded on a “sustained practice of intensity that […] pervades the everyday body and its inherently aberrant movements and affects” (4). By engaging the “negative affects produced in such situations as moral/religious oppression, biopolitical violence, […] gender relations, the event of death, and in closing, planetary extinction” (3), Grace of Destruction is dedicated to uncovering the eminently political poten- tialities deployed in affective relations between bodies and other bodies and between bodies and the oppressive/repressive forces confining them. Following Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals, the first chapter of Grace of Destruction provides an incisive examination of Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon (2009) and Lars von Trier’s Dogville (2003). Del Rio stresses that both films demonstrate a commitment to Nietzschean “slave morality,” or “the morality of utility that turns the possibility of action and open aggression into the triumph of reaction and ressentiment” (32). The primary conveyance of this chapter is that White Ribbon and Dogville both demonstrate a battle between stronger and weaker forces in which opportunities for direct action/aggression (or active forces) are repressed or forestalled by a stronger pouvoir, thus breeding reactive forces. Impulses to convert reactive forces into active ones (puissance) emerge, albeit in a displaced fashion, whereby acts of aggression and revenge are misdirected and, thus, inadequately challenge (and in many ways, strengthen) the morally righteous figures that initially manifested such reactive forces. For example, in her analysis of The White Ribbon, Del Rio remarks that patriarchal figures, including the pastor, doctor, and baron, possess tremendous amounts of power and agency within the small German community in which the film is set (35). Particularly unable to stand up to their father are the pastor’s children, who experience intense physical abuse, verbal

Reviews | 187 aggression, and shame for the smallest “infractions,” including indulging in pubescent sexual desires (35). Denied of the ability to actively confront or respond to their father, or to harness their puissance, the children engage in a series of terrorizing, violent acts against the adults in their community (35–37). While these acts could be read as the children’s “means [of] transform[ing] passive reactions into active ones,” Del Rio stresses that these “violent actions actually arise as a displaced response to the incapacitating powers of the father” (37). The children’s anger and resentment toward their father, misdirected toward the community as a whole, ultimately feeds (and reveals the children’s powerlessness to) the violent, repressive, and moral codes that initially bred their ressentiment (37–38). The most engaging chapter in Grace of Destruction, aptly titled “Bare Life,” is also its most interdisciplinary. Invoking Deleuze, Foucault, and Agamben, this chapter explores the philosophies of “biopolitics” and “bare life” in the context of Haneke’s Code Unknown (2000), and Carlos Reygadas’s Battle in Heaven (2005). Particularly intriguing are Del Rio’s observations about “the biopolitical reduction of the human to bare life” or Agamben’s “concept of life as expendable matter subject to the sovereign and arbitrary law of the state” (77). Impressively, Del Rio is able to connect Deleuze and Agamben’s philosophies of life to the many “passwords” and “codes” deployed in Code Unknown. Del Rio contends that Code Unknown reveals how our access to human rights, goods and services, and “even […] each other’s intimate spaces,” are governed in “societies of control” by “the pervasive use of passwords or codes” (81). More pressingly, Del Rio professes that Code Unknown, despite its clear investment in revealing the subjugation of racialized and gendered subjects under biopolitical supremacy, is equally engrossed in an “activism of affection” or a demonstration of how the comprehensive biopolitical management of life by the state is counterbalanced with obfuscatory affective signs and codes (82). For example, Code Unknown ends with a scene in which the same hearing- impaired children from the beginning of the film are playing drums (97). Overriding all other sounds in the film, the sound of the drums is played over “the rest of the film’s images,” and, lending “an enormous affective resonance to the film’s ending,” the sound of the drums “vibrates with all the violence heretofore disclosed by the film” (97–98). In other words, where the “passwords” and codes designated by faciality and language in the film fail to challenge biopower, the collision of the musical and the affective resists it by “branding the awesome violence it registers in the world directly upon our brains” (98). Additionally, this chapter offers an excellent analysis of Battle in Heaven, particularly the film’s engagement

188 | Chittick with spatiality and the urban (103). Analyzing the city as a “battleground that furthers the interests of biopower” by rendering the urbanite “a passive victim of [the city’s] regimented flows,” Del Rio astutely recognizes how Battle in Heaven positions the city as site of control. Impressively, this chapter touches on urban studies, affect theory, political science, and continental philosophy and how each of these fields overlaps with world cinema. In so doing, Del Rio not only demonstrates her own perspicacity but also the power and importance of interdisciplinary scholarship. Grace of Destruction continues with analyses of Rainer Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) and David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006) and how each film handles themes of self-identity and “interiority” in the face of extreme circumstances. This leads to an analysis of the intersections of death, nationalism, and masculinities in the films of Takeshi Kitano and, finally, a nuanced reading of von Trier’sMelancholia (2011). By exploring the theme of planetary extinction, Del Rio’s aim in this final chapter is to express that as Melancholia subverts “the utilitarian operations of both morality and capitalism” in its depiction of the apocalypse, actual- ized by the planet Melancholia’s collision with Earth, the film “places the human at the limit of what it is capable of thinking, feeling or doing” (197). Demonstrating Melancholia’s deployment of variegated negative affects, manifested in sisters Justine (Kirsten Dunst) and Claire (Charlotte Gains- bourg), Del Rio’s analysis of Melancholia concerns the creative transcen- dence of both nihilistic and humanistic affective responses to the world’s imminent end (198), particularly through analyses of Justine’s actions as the world is ending. For instance, Justine demonstrates altruism toward her nephew, Leo, by finally building the “magic cave” with him as Melan- cholia approaches Earth (209). For Del Rio, the “magic cave” (or teepee) serves as a re-affirmation of the “absolute value of the present” and, in turn, “expresses the human ability to live intensely in extremis precisely by abandoning the narcissistic patterns of belief, denial, and projection that weigh us down both within a humanist and a nihilist perspective” (214). In sum, Del Rio’s work proves to be a journey through the affective, philosophical, and political dimensions of contemporary cinema. Interdis- ciplinary in its scope, it will be useful not just to scholars of the cinema but to political scientists, affect theorists, and philosophers. Grace of Destruc- tion promises something for any scholar who believes in film’s capacity to challenge dominant social and political discourses. Kyler Chittick York University

Reviews | 189 Donald Beecher, Travis DeCook, Andrew Wallace, and Grant Williams, eds. Taking Exception to the Law: Materializing Injustice in Early Modern English Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015. 315 pp. $70.00.

The eleven essays in Taking Exception to the Law effectively demonstrate how early modern English literature registers confusion, competition, and improvisation in the legal principles and procedures to which it was intricately knit. The volume thus makes a valuable contribution to recent studies that present, as Grant Williams writes in the introduction, “a complication, if not a wholesale rejection, of the assumption that the law exerts a homogenous top-down force on society” (17). Williams offers a useful review of Law and Literature (sic) as an interdisciplinary subfield with origins in U.S. law schools in the 1970s and of recent scholarship that sorts through the untidy relationship between juridical and literary histories. Of particular interest to scholars focused on the immanence of law specifically in early modern literature is Williams’s discussion of the legal discourses, institutions, and agents essential to literary production in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. At the same time as literature and law share value and function, Williams explains, literature remains a distinct discipline, and in the early modern period it persistently critiqued the law. This claim underlies the titular phrase “taking exception to the law.” The volume’s subtitle directs attention to the “four specific legal mate- rializations” (23) that organize, but do not formally divide, the essays: textual instruments, juridical administration, educational discourses, and tyrannical abuses of the law. Anchoring the volume is Bradin Cormack’s examination of legal documents in Shakespearean drama. Through inspiring readings of the indictment in Richard iii, the bond and map in 1 Henry iv, and the inventory in Henry viii, followed by an extended analysis of letters of writ and commission in Hamlet, Cormack shows how papers on stage function as linguistic “emblems” for narrative, political, and legal processes of substitution. The names of legal documents show Shakespeare “explor[ing] the character of justice inside a legal system whose ongoing effect was to change the order of the real by offering a set of textual and technical substitutions for the real” (47). Tim Stretton’s essay focuses on the bond as materializing promises and the difficulty of keeping them in early modern England. Stretton argues that The Merchant of Venice calls for individual compassion in the face of institutional rigour. Virginia Lee Strain turns our attention to the general pardon, which like other parliamentary writings has suffered from critical neglect. Through readings

190 | Greenberg of Francis Bacon’s writings, John Donne’s Satyres, and Christmas revels at the Inns of Court, Strain reveals a pervasive awareness of the general pardon as failing to release English subjects from the ever-present snare of statute law. In another essay that highlights the volume’s effort to rectify the “over- privileging of canonical voices” in Law and Literature (15), Deborah Shuger presents a fascinating analysis of Archbishop Laud’s prison diaries, “one of the unacknowledged masterpieces of English prose” (120). In a persuasive corrective to celebrations of English exceptionalism, Shuger examines Laud’s narrative as a potent critique of common law as not interested in discovering legal truth but in allowing for protection of (guilty) consciences. David Stymeist considers the sensationalist, profit-driven news reports as an unwitting agent of legal change. In the criminal biographies included in many news reports, Stymeist discerns neither moral corruption nor evil-mindedness but social economy as “formative of criminal subjectivity and the basis for criminal acts” (138). In this way, criminal biography unintentionally but “clearly influenced early modern habits of forensic evaluation” (153), as evident in the increasing number of mitigated sentences handed down by juries in the seventeenth century. Barbara Kreps considers the rhetorical proficiencies developed in grammar schools and practised in moot courts, in particular the abilities to debate different sides of a question and to play with language, that underlie the representation of slander and evidence in Much Ado About Nothing, a play in which “linguistic uncertainty is always necessarily joined with epistemological problems of interpretation” (165). Pedagogy and justice are the focus of essays by Elizabeth Hanson and Judith Owens. Using the modern language of “No Child Left Behind” and “diversity” in education, Hanson mounts a fascinating analysis of the principle of distributive justice in the pedagogical theories of Erasmus and Richard Mulcaster. Owens examines Spenser’s Legend of Justice in book 5 of The Faerie Queene as a vision of ethical wardship. These essays reveal in early modern literature not only a sincere desire to promote judgment and discretion as educational priorities but also an acknowledgement of the social contingencies, especially status and economics, that curtail the realization of legal-pedagogical idea(l)s. Ownes concedes that Spenser’s model could not have worked in Elizabethan England, and Hanson concludes that Erasmus’s and Mulcaster’s theories “disclosed the limited and uncertain social impact that the abilities schooling made salient actually could have” (183).

Reviews | 191 In early modern English literature, autocratic rulers and their agents manipulate the law. John D. Staines examines the relationship of torture and tyranny in early modern resistance theory, martyrologies, and King Lear. In these “narratives of tyranny” (226), torture discovers not legal truth but political weakness. Indeed, pain and humiliation fail to touch victims’ consciences, but their textual, pictorial, and dramatic representation succeeds in touching the consciences of readers and audience members: “Moved to pity, they called to act” (236), even to revolution. Elliott Visconsi examines “civil religion as a shared language” (260) that emerged in England between 1660 and 1688. Visconsi analyzes writings by Roger Williams, John Dryden, and John Milton to argue that “[r]eligious pluralism became increasingly tolerable … as long as the beliefs and practices of the [minority sect] were peaceable” (262). Visconsi thus discerns in later seventeenth-century literature the roots of the modern nation as a secular community based in theological-political persuasion rather than violent coercion. Concluding the volume, Paul Stevens draws on Quentin Skinner’s archeological account of “un-freedom,” a neo-Roman concept according to which all dependence is slavish abjection, to account for Mil- ton’s conception of grace. In Paradise Lost, Stevens argues, Satan voices the sense that grace renders one obnoxious—literally ob / noxia, or susceptible to subjection and harm. Throughout his career Milton grapples with this erroneous yet affectively powerful feeling by reinterpreting the doctrine of grace “as a matter of growth” (297). The materialism that organizes Taking Exception to the Law and underlies many of its essays finds a guiding spirit in Bruno Latour’s version of Actor-Network Theory (ant). A theory that frustrates definition, ant is described here as an “inherent critique of linguistic and discursive deter- minism and concomitant resistance to social reductionism” (20). While the volume executes this critique admirably, reading Taking Exception to the Law from cover to cover rewards readers by unveiling alternative connections. For example, Cormack and Stevens demonstrate the value of legal-historical discontinuity to literary analysis, whereas Hanson and Visconsi reveal continuities in legal and literary discourse, and Shugar and Staines discover in a range of literature challenges to legal technologies of truth that we often taken for granted. Taking Exception to the Law certainly illuminates the networks of literary actors, both non-human and human, that exerted power in early modern English law. Just as significantly, it performs the persistence and breakdown of these networks over time and space, a contribution with disciplinary and methodological implications

192 | Greenberg that extend beyond Law and Literature and the early modern period to the study of literature and culture more broadly. Marissa Greenberg The University of New Mexico

Margery Fee. Literary Land Claims: The “Indian Land Question” from Pontiac’s War to Attawapiskat. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier up, 2015. 316 pp. $38.99.

Those of us who study and teach Canadian literature cannot escape its entanglement with land. For a long time, this entanglement was interpreted in aesthetic terms: writers (non-indigenous, it was largely assumed) responding to, and finding language for, the geographical character of the place as landscape (as, for instance, picturesque, sublime, pastoral, or gothic). In the Euro-Canadian writing that for several generations defined the category of “Canlit,” that geographical character was also understood in terms of struggle, terror, and survival: tropes that confined the story of literary landscapes to the story of settlers pitted against an unfamiliar and hostile wilderness. But as Margery Fee underscores, while this territorial- ity is rooted in colonial experience, the thematic criticism that worked to elucidate it was constrained by a “fear of opening up the dangerous question of Indigenous rights to land.” Yet the question of indigenous rights has always echoed through the literature of this place. Fee faces the question head on. Opening with an acknowledgement of the Musqueam people on whose unceded territory she works and lives, she also proposes that “what this acknowledgement means remains to be worked out, and not just by me. This work has to be done collectively, by everyone living on the territory now designated as Canada” (18). Literary Land Claims is at once a work of literary criticism and a meditation on the implications for literary scholars in particular of acknowledging the colonial relationships, treaties, and land thefts upon which this country and so much of its literature rest. It is both a succinct clarification of the literary means through which Euro-colonial writers staked their romantic nationalist claims to Canada and a careful, complex, meticulously researched extended essay on writers and storytellers who challenge colonial meta- narratives about land and the relationships between the indigenous and non-indigneous peoples who inhabit it.

Reviews | 193 Although Fee draws widely from current theory, criticism, scholarship, and literature in her discussions, most of the writers she features are not contemporary: her chapters take us through the work of John Richard- son, Louis Riel, E. Pauline Johnson/Tekahionwake, Grey Owl, and Harry Robinson. Fee disrupts Romantic nationalist foundations of Canlit and its canons by highlighting historical writers who might have set it on a different course. Moreover, frequently blurring categories of race and ethnicity, these writers embody the complexity of the contact zone, their irreducible identities exposing the lie of pure national narratives, whether indigenous or Euro-Canadian. Fee brings welcome attention to a history that has always complicated the binaries on which the colonial imaginary relies. As important to Fee’s scholarship as her growing awareness of what it means to live on Musqueam land was her education amidst the homogenizing discourses generated by the powerful cultural nationalism of the 1970s and 1980s, with its dreams of a unified “Canadian imagination” that all but ignored indigenous and Metis writers and storytellers and that tended to figure Canadians “as victims rather than colonizers” (7). While literary critics have moved beyond such narratives, exploding the canon and attending to many forces that complicate the core ideals of Canlit, as Fee observes the desire for a “single story” remains strong (116). Following Ted Chamberlin, Fee stresses that what we need, rather, is to recognize the multiplicity and contradictions in existing narratives about this place. Creating an imaginative space that can accommodate this multiplicity and contradiction is not easy (at least for those of us used to Western binary and hierarchical logics), but it is necessary. And Fee’s book brings us closer to this goal, first and foremost by choosing “to include speakers and writers who are difficult to place in the ‘same’ category” (3). What unites these disparate figures is that they expose the limits of Euro-colonial paradigms and open up other avenues through which to “work through the disconnect between white settler logics and Indigenous worldviews” (16). This disconnect comes into focus in the introduction and chapter 1, which survey the literary and legal contexts through and against which land has been claimed both by Euro-colonial and indigenous nations. While likely familiar to scholars working in the field, these overviews of nationalist literary criticism and indigenous land claims will prove invaluable in an undergraduate classroom. Fee’s account is concise and pointed without oversimplifying, and its yoking of literary and legal culture usefully extends earlier discussions such as D. M. R. Bentley’s “Tokens of Being There: Land Deeds and Demarkations.”

194 | Krotz In chapters 2 and 3, Fee reads John Richardson (1796 to 1852), long considered “the founder of Canadian literature,” “as a disaffected, pessimistic, and even traumatized chronicler of a dark time in colonial history” (13). If Richardson “wrote … to celebrate the origins of settler Canada,” his gothic and parodic disruptions of national epic, she argues, expose “the limits of the dominant discourse” (45). Reading divergent interpretations of Rich- ardson’s works as a sign of the author’s own ambivalence about colonial Canada, Fee suggests that the instability of identities and relations between indigenous and colonial characters in these novels make it “possible … to see beyond the end that Richardson predicted for Indigenous people” to a future in which the survival of the nation itself depends upon the renewal of the ethical alliances that distinguished early Canadian colonial relations from America’s policies of extermination. It is a compelling claim, not least because it significantly complicates reductive readings of racist tropes and stereotypes that so often foreclose productive discussion of historical texts (reifying binaries of enlightened “us” and backward “them” in ways that do a disservice to the ambiguities of both the past and the present). The next three chapters feature writers whose identities are more fraught than Richardson’s: Louis Riel (1844 to 1885), E. Pauline Johnson/ Tekahionwake (1861 to 1913), and Grey Owl (1888 to 1938) pose clear challenges to the categories that have powerfully defined the nation and its literary culture. As I read the chapter on Riel, I found myself wishing for more clarification of the land claims that defined Riel’s leadership, resistance, exile, and resurgence (for example, Fee only mentions the conten- tious arrival of colonial Canadian surveyors in Red River in 1869 in a parenthetical aside). This is a minor quibble, however, with a chapter that otherwise masterfully parses the so-called “incoherence” of Riel’s “Address to the Jury.” This text, she posits, can become coherent “if the collective beliefs of Canadians shift toward the acknowledgement of Indigenous rights and title” and of the intellectual traditions of the indigenous Plains that guided him (91, 111). Riel, Fee convincingly argues, produces not only a “ ‘constitutive’ … rhetoric that performs sovereignty” but also a highly original vision of nation-building and land-sharing modeled on notions of respect and consensus-building that preserve heterogeneity. Both Grey Owl and Johnson performed their identities in ways that also undermined the homogenizing racial discourses of the day—discourses that continue to inflect how these figures are read. Interpreting Johnson as a writer and performer who resisted assimilation, Fee emphasizes how both her life and career demonstrate “that identity is a complex mix of family, education, upbringing, gender, class, racialization, experience, and

Reviews | 195 opinion, all of which affect how particular individuals are received into different communities during their lifetimes and beyond” (146). Grey Owl complicates this definition even further with his appropriation of Apache ancestry. Like Albert Braz in his recently published monograph on Grey Owl, Apostate Indian, Fee interprets this appropriation as “an act of rebellion against Englishness” (156). She underscores that “for some contemporary Indigenous writers, taking Belaney seriously can counter debili- tating notions of authentic identity to produce a vision of an Indigenous culture that is resilient in the face of change and able to incorporate the new” (158). Following Braz, I would only add that this vision destabilizes non-indigenous culture and its relationship to the nation in ways that are just as productive. In the final chapter Fee takes up Harry Robinson’s creation story about indigenous-white relations and the opposition between literacy and orality upon which colonial culture has relied. Robinson highlights the powerful connection between book-based literacy and land claims but upsets the idea that literacy was the exclusive domain of settlers. Moreover, he emphasizes that stories, both oral and written, are much more than just static relics from the past: they have an ever-shifting and evolving contemporary vitality. Fee’s “(in)conclusion” points anew to the political and material contexts in which all such stories remain meaningful, their historical significance radiating into contemporary moments and debates with refreshing clarity. Literary Land Claims is an extremely important contribution to conversations about literature in Canada. While Fee’s impression that voices such as Riel’s are “barely overheard in literature classrooms” is becoming less and less accurate (in large part thanks to Laura Moss and Cynthia Sugars’s two-volume anthology Canadian Literature in English: Texts and Contexts), Literary Land Claims provides welcome support for scholars who want to listen more attentively to these voices. At a time when universities across Canada are endeavouring to heed the Truth and Reconcili- ation Commission’s “Calls to Action,” Fee points readers toward a goal of consensus building, one that is predicated on muddying the binary and hierarchical logics through which we have tended to understand identity and, indeed, colonialism itself. She opens up an engaging and necessary conversation, offering a model for rich, ethical scholarly engagement with a literary landscape that is extends far beyond this book, and beyond the confines of “Canlit.” Sarah Krotz University of Alberta

196 | Krotz Gage McWeeny. The Comfort of Strangers: Social Life and Literary Form. New York: Oxford up, 2016. 225 pp. $65.00.

From Curtis Sittenfeld’s refracting of the Bush political dynasty through a domestic lens in American Wife (2008) to Jeffrey Eugenides’s subversion of plot conventions in The Marriage Plot (2011) and Jennifer Egan’s experimentation with point of view in A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), contemporary novelists have played with the rich legacy of nineteenth- century realism: its focus on and valorization of the quotidian and the domestic, its honing of the marriage plot as well as multiplot form, and its formal experimentation with point of view, particularly by means of free indirect speech. Likewise, scholars such as Nancy Armstrong, Andrew H. Miller, Rachel Ablow, and Audrey Jaffe have analyzed the form of nineteenth-century realist fiction. But what if our collective focus on the realist novel’s attention to intimacy, sympathy, and community has precluded our awareness of the novel’s interest—thematic and formal—in expansiveness, disinterest, and strangers? What might paying attention to strangers in literature tell us about changing nineteenth-century ideas about sociality and modernity? And, were we to pay such attention, what connections might appear between the theoretical projects of nineteenth-century literature and those of the emergent discipline of sociology, with its analytical focus on the crowd, social structure, and social facts? Gage McWeeny takes up these questions in The Comfort of Strang- ers: Social Life and Literary Form, which investigates how “the stranger becomes the distinctive figure both of and for modernity, both a conden- sation of modernity’s anonymous settings and the bearer of new forms of collective social experience” (3). Reading against the grain of “long- standing critical associations of the realist novel in the nineteenth century with privacy and interiority” (5), McWeeny reveals how the works that he analyzes “register not just new forms of attentiveness, but also … modes of disattending and reverie, or strategies for losing interest in individual people, that develop amidst a densely peopled world” (6). McWeeny’s project is both formalist and historicist: he situates his analysis of Victo- rians’ formal literary strategies for representing “stranger relations” (6) alongside the emergence of “proto-sociology” (6), arguing that “literature and sociology have converged to produce modern understandings of the shaping powers of the social” (6). Given the introduction’s early emphasis on realism, readers could be forgiven for expecting the book to cohere around a series of analyses of novels. Of the book’s four chapters, however, only one focuses on a novel:

Reviews | 197 chapter 1 analyzes Matthew Arnold’s figuration of the crowd and of strangers in both his criticism and poetry; chapter 2 examines how George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871 to 1872) “thematizes and makes over into a formal concern both the socially intimate appeal of intensive engagement and the promises of social extensiveness indexed by strangers” (75); chapter 3 considers Oscar Wilde’s use of epigrams as “a means of managing social complexity” (107); and the final chapter centres on Henry James’s “awkward encounters” (140) (on the page and in person) with Eliot—encounters that provided “the pleasures of intimacy at distance” (140) that would become the ground for close reading. (Parts of the chapters on Arnold and Eliot previously appeared in Victorian Poetry and Novel: A Forum on Fiction.) As a reader, I was hungry for more analysis of strangers in fiction—and in different subgenres of fiction. Does historical fiction, for example— with its toggling between fictional characters and historical personages, between fictional and historical events—mobilize different formal strategies for representing strangers than does realist fiction? Harriet Martin- eau would have constituted the subject for an interesting chapter: not only does her historical fiction (The Hour and the Man [1840] as well as her four Historiettes published in Once a Week [1862 to 1863]) provide a narrative counterpoint to Eliot, but her status as a pioneer of sociology renders her a unique case study of a Victorian writer who straddled the literature-sociology divide more explicitly than the other writers analyzed in the book. I was also hungry for greater consideration of the relationship between literary and material forms. Does it matter to the argument about narrative disinterest, for example, that Middlemarch initially appeared in eight monthly instalments? How does the publication history of The Pic- ture of Dorian Gray (prepared in a typescript now housed at ucla’s Clark Library, published initially in July 1890 in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, and then published in 1891 by Ward, Lock, and Company in an expanded one-volume version that included the famous preface) complement the argument about Wilde’s epigrams? It would be churlish, however, to complain about what the book declines to consider when it succeeds on a variety of critical fronts—not least in provoking us to reconsider our received wisdom about realism. McWeeny is smart on Middlemarch, arguing that the novel expresses a tension between a realist fidelity to and sympathy for characters’ everyday lives, on the one hand, and a sociological commitment to social complexity, on the other hand—a tension that the novel’s own narrator identifies in the famous question “but why always Dorothea?” McWeeny’s careful attention to narrative form produces convincing analyses of narrative

198 | Leighton and plot dilation (as when the narrator backs away from the characters being described) that put me in mind of Stephen Arata’s “On Not Paying Attention” (Victorian Studies 2004) and Amy King’s “Natural History and the Novel: Dilatoriness and Length and the Nineteenth-Century Novel of Everyday Life” (Novel 2009), although the latter is not mentioned in the book. The excellent chapter on “Oscar Wilde’s Ephemeral Form” (105) gener- ously builds on and extends recent queer analyses of Wilde’s form, showing how the epigram “act[s] as image and instrument of both engaging the social and evading the more long-lasting aspects of social life” (109). McWeeny ranges widely over Wilde’s fiction, dialogues, essays, and plays, explaining how his “promiscuous talkers imagine ways of experiencing the world that take their intensity not from the singularity of any lasting relation to a particular person, but from the multiple qualities of passing, serial affiliation” (119). In McWeeny’s analysis, Wilde’s characters’ repudiation of individual attachments in favour of “the scene and qualities of sociability itself” (131) echoes sociologist Georg Simmel’s theorization of sociability in which association produces pleasure without the intensely personal. During this American election season of Donald Trump’s incendiary Twit- ter feed, it is bracing to consider the function of the epigram’s “perfect speech” as a formal, self-reflexive means of articulating “the chronic doubt of modernity” (136). McWeeny has a confident, compelling voice, judiciously using metaphor to enliven his own prose, referring, for example, to the lingering “Cheshire cat smile of the sociable moment that lingers well past the time when the play is over or the book is ‘shut up’ ” (133). In a monograph focused so closely on form, however, it is a shame that more attention was not paid to copy-editing. In addition to minor errors and typos (for example, on page 123, Wilde’s dialogue is titled “The Critic as Art”; on page 181, Rae Greiner is repeatedly referred to as Rae Grenier; on page 192, a contemporary review of Middlemarch is dated October 1786), the text contains a surprising number of dangling modifiers, sentence frag- ments, and subject-verb agreement errors. (I counted nine of the latter in chapter 2 alone.) The following sentence provides two examples: “The third-person narrator and character of the realist novel can meet only (and can only ‘meet’) in the ‘unspeakable sentences’ of free indirect style, a phrase Ann Banfield uses to underscores [sic] that such sentences occurs [sic] only in fictional narrative, never in dialogue or ordinary speech” (90). Quotations frequently stand alone without grammatical contextualization or are preceded by a sentence fragment, as in the following example: “Her

Reviews | 199 sister Celia, to Dorothea: ‘You always see what nobody else sees’ ” (90). Such grammatical errors and stylistic infelicities distract the reader from what McWeeny has to teach us about Victorian literature. And what he has to teach us is considerable. In McWeeny’s capable critical hands, the Victorian realist novel starts to look less conventional and more formally experimental than some readers might surmise—less the progenitor of the predictable “lyrical Realism” that Zadie Smith lamented in 2008 than of, say, The Accidental, Ali Smith’s terrific 2005 novel that narrates a stranger’s arrival on an English family’s summer holiday through four discrete points of view. Similarly, Matthew Arnold starts to look less like a bourgeois apologist and more like an unexpected proto-sociologist experimenting with literary form’s capacity to register and “manage the challenges of social complexity in modernity” (39). Oscar Wilde becomes less the life of the party than a mordant analyst of modern life. And Henry James emerges as a critic who forged his signature critical style as he negotiated “his fraught relations” (142) with Eliot. In teaching us about Victorian writers’ formal strategies for responding to and managing social density in the modern world, McWeeny challenges us to revise our comfortable critical views—a challenge that may paradoxically draw us closer to the Victorians even as it renders them strange and new. Mary Elizabeth Leighton University of Victoria

Robert Zacharias, ed. After Identity: Mennonite Writing in North America. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2015. 244 pp. $31.95.

As an outsider-insider to the southern Manitoba Mennonite literary community, I have listened from the sidelines to many debates about Men- nonite writing and its necessarily shifting parameters. After Identity is a timely book for diasporic studies in general and for the study of Mennonite writing in particular because it worries a thorny question that has stub- bornly endured in Mennonite writing studies from the boom in Mennonite writing in the 1980s—what Andris Taskans first called “the Mennonite miracle” (Zacharias 15 n1). The epigraph that leads off the introduction, from poet Julia Spicher Kasdorf’s “Mennonites,” sums up the question of what comes after the miracle: “This is why we cannot leave the beliefs, /

200 | MacDonald or what else would we be?” (quoted in Zacharias 1). What else indeed? As Zacharias notes later in his essay, the question is not merely rhetorical but something much more agitating: “a radical invitation for us to reconsider the foundational narratives and markers of our collective identity” (114). Kasdorf, whose tart examination of the insistence upon “autoethnographic announcement” within Mennonite literature leads off the collection, takes up the question to parse what postidentity may be for Mennonite/s writing, and Mennonite/s living (21). Take, for example, the identifying sentence with which I began. While it is a standard critical strategy for situating oneself within a particular discourse, claiming “outsider-insider” status is also vulnerable to and mired in the ideological twist of what Zacharias calls “the Mennonite Thing” via Zizek’s revealing of the fetishizing ideology that powers the “Ethnic Thing” (106). Such moves, failures, definitions, dec- larations, identity negotiations, and refusals are all part of the “Menonite identity crisis,” to use Calvin Redekop’s phrase (2) and are boldly examined in the literary landscape by Zacharias and the critics whose essays he has collected in this volume. After Identity takes as its central premise the enduring premise and just as enduring problem of cultural authenticity; the propinquity with and refusal of cultural separatism creates “the Mennonite Thing,” a refusal of not so much of “the beliefs” but, rather, of the beliefs as solitary definition of Mennonite identity. Zacharias notes that texts may, and do, ironically, comically, cynically exploit “the Mennonite Thing” for its market value as with popular cultural products, like Rhoda Janzen’s Mennonite in a Little Black Dress or tlc’s cable series Breaking Amish, or offer literary resistance to what a “Mennonite text” ought to be, as satirized and dis- mantled in works like David Waltner-Toews’s Tante Tina poems or Jeff Gundy’s much-anthologized “How to Write the New Mennonite Poem.” A growing consciousness of the “Mennonite Thing” as something that can attract and/or repel readers with a set of expectations about “the beliefs” has produced, Zacharias notes, “an essentialized and decontextualized Mennonite identity” that may be “self-consciously invoked, exposed, and explored, a process through which it is reanimated as identity for a postidentity age” (107). It is to the credit of Zacharias’s editorial leadership that many contributors to the anthology are well-known critics in the study of Mennonite writing and that they take up the question of postidentity with such vigour. The collection is refreshingly free of the kind of conservative criticism that has sometimes plagued—and, frankly, has sometimes limited—this community of study. I understand that literature that has emerged from a

Reviews | 201 separatist tradition needs to speak to that history, but the nagging question about what happens to those who do not fit in has been a question at least from Rudy Wiebe’s Peace Shall Destroy Many (1962), was the driving force of Friesen’s poetic and dramatic narrative The Shunning (1980), and was absolutely essential for feminist Mennonite writers, especially Di Brandt’s first book questions I asked my mother (recently re-issued by Turnstone Press), Kasdorf’s Sleeping Preacher, and Miriam Toews’s A Complicated Kindness (2004), books that were popular outside of Mennonite communities partially because of their transgressions and that often received mixed receptions within the communities to which they were speaking back. The energy of rebellion is not the only energy at work in “the Menno- nite Thing” and its postidentity derivations, but it is a force to be reckoned with. This year marks the first time that Steinbach, Manitoba, hosted a Pride Day parade, an event attended by more than two thousand people, despite resistance from some local politicians. So Daniel Shank Cruz’s essay on queer Mennonite narratives in Jan Guenther Braun’s Somewhere Else, Stephen Beachy’s boneyard, and Casey Plett’s short story “Other Women” appear as a much-needed explorations not only of queerness but also of the separateness within separateness that defines a life lived beyond the parameters of allowed definition. Paul Tiessen’s character- istically rich archival examination of the publishing history of Wiebe’s now-iconic Peace Shall Destroy Many, includes a number of revelations about McClelland and Stewart’s ideological marketing strategies as they were played out on the cover of that book and contributes a fascinating examination of the cultural manipulation of a constructed Mennonite identity in Canadian publishing history. Di Brandt’s essay, “In Praise of Hybridity,” reconsiders Mennonite culture via connections to adjacent intellectual traditions and the adoption of local cultures, so pertinent to a diasporic culture lived among the churned-up definitions of ethnicity that were common to seventheenth-century Europe. Cheekily but seriously suggesting that the Mennonite writing tradition should include H.D., William Blake, Sigmund Freud, Miriam Waddington, and Leonard Cohen, Brandt is not alone in this practice of broadening traditions to encompass global literary brethren. Newfoundland poet-critic Mary Dalton, in her introduction to her 2015 collection Edge, declares Samuel Beckett to be a “Newfoundland writer” (14) for reasons similar to Brandt’s notation of Mennonite writing’s “engaged reception among German, Austrian, Swiss, Dutch, and Belgian intellectuals, our long-lost relatives” (134). Hildi Froese Tiessen’s article on “liberating the Mennonite text” articulates the challenge of postidentity writing and criticism: to “not forget

202 | MacDonald about identity altogether but to refuse it the front seat that it has occupied so long” (223). I like this metaphor for postidentity writing—the elbowing back of the seat-hog on a road trip—especially for the ways Froese Tiessen’s formulation corresponds to Magdalene Redekop’s work on the principle of Spielraum, play space. “Is Menno In There?” asks Redekop, parsing Mennonite writing as a “playful dialogue” (206), and it is in articulating the breadth of what is at play in, around, and in contradistinction to Men- nonite writing and Mennonites writing that this collection shines. Tanis MacDonald Wilfrid Laurier University

Work Cited

Dalton, Mary. Edge: Essays, Reviews, Interviews. Kingsville: Palimpsest Press, 2015.

Clare Bradford and Mavis Reimer, eds. Girls, Texts, Cultures. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier up, 2015. 316 pp. $48.99.

In their excellent introduction to this excellent collection, editors Clare Bradford and Mavis Reimer explain the aim of the 2010 University of Win- nipeg symposium that was the origin of this book—a desire to “generate and sustain dialogue between two groups of scholars: those focusing on texts for and about girls [children’s literature scholars] and those who investigate contemporary girlhoods [scholars from the field of girls’ studies]” (1). They note that “the title of the book signals its disciplinary and conceptual breadth” (9). Whereas the term “girlhood” suggests “a unitary state of being a girl,” the plural term “girls” instead emphasizes “the diversity of girls’ locations and ways in which familial, cultural, and national discourses shape subjectivities” (8). The plural term “texts” reflects the collection’s adoption of “an expansive view of texts, and their genres, forms, styles, and functions” (9). And the plural term “cultures” points to both “the diversity of cultural contexts in which girls are located and also to the fact that girls are active in producing texts and engaging with others to create cultural forms” (9). The twelve chapters in the collection indeed make good on its claim to respect the plurality of girlhoods and the need to understand each one in its historical, geographic, and cultural specificity. So Kabita Chakraborty’s

Reviews | 203 chapter exploring Indian girls’ reactions to the representation of romance in Bollywood films focuses in particular on the specific ways in which unmarried Muslim young women in the slums of Kolkata “pick and choose different aspects of Bollywood culture to inform their dating processes and romantic lives” (203). Sandrina de Finney and Johanne Saraceno’s chapter analyzing responses by indigenous girls in Canada to racialized representations of their identities limits its focus to indigenous girls living in small towns and cities, to contrast with previous work on indigenous girls in large cities or rural settings. Claudia Mitchell’s chapter on the shifting boundaries of knowledge in social justice research is sensitive to differences among girls in Ethiopia, Rwanda, and South Africa. Readers learn how and why specificity matters. With the same commendable breadth of topics combined with carefully focused lens of inquiry, the range of texts examined here includes not only the familiar category of books for young readers but films and television shows, paper dolls and flap books, video games and other digital game play, and, perhaps most important, photographs, videos, and commentary created by girls themselves. The chapters are informed not only by recognition of the significance of place in understanding representations of girlhood but also of time. Some of the most thought-provoking essays look at the evolution of a textual form from one historical period to another. Jacqueline Reid-Walsh’s lovely chapter, “Movable Morals: Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Flap Books and Paper Doll Books for Girls as Interactive ‘Conduct Books,’ ” lets us see today’s interactive media texts as heirs of much older texts that, like the texts of today, “both reinforce the conventional and also provide spaces where girls can resist, negotiate, or subvert the aims of these texts” (212). She traces the historical evolution from the more limited autonomy-respecting possibilities of eighteenth-century flap books to the more transgressive “affordances” of nineteenth-century paper dolls, whose movable heads make possible multiple play patterns: “Since there is a physical separation between the paper doll figure and the scripted narrative, the paper figures have their own potential life as toys that could extend or subvert the story” (228). Likewise, Pamela Knights’s insightful close reading of ballet books from Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes to twenty-first-century offerings gives nuanced attention to shifting ways of navigating and reconciling the active drive and discipline needed to excel as a dancer with the passive hyper- femininity (“ethereal, beautiful, silent, and sublime”[77]) idealized by classical ballet, with more recent boy ballet books diverting ambition “into the plots of masculine drives and desires” (96) and in the process argu-

204 | Mills ably displacing girls altogether. Elizabeth Bullen’s “Disgusting Subjects: Consumer-Class Distinction and the Affective Regulation of Girl Desire” tracks emerging attitudes toward teen female sexuality where new seeming liberality remains “contingent on young women taking up roles as pro- ducer and consumer citizens” (54): “The subject of the discourse of disgust is not the sexually active young working woman, but the sexually excessive adolescent girl, often from a working- or underclass background, with the teenage mother figuring as the epitome of the failed sexual citizen” (54). More privileged sexually active girls, like those in the Gossip Girl series, have their lusts legitimated by their “capacity to consume luxury goods” and engage in a “high class” consumer aesthetic (56). Shauna Pomerantz and Rebecca Raby’s chapter, “Reading Smart Girls: Post-Nerds in Post- Feminist Popular Culture,” argues that the new “smart girls” in texts such as Gilmore Girls, High School Musical, and Veronica Mars, although “pretty, fashionable, popular, and talented in extracurricular activities, rather than socially awkward and marginalized nerds,” represent less of a feminist victory than might be thought. In the postfeminist, neo-liberal world they inhabit, “perfection is attainable to any girl who tries hard enough with a ‘can-do’ attitude, regardless of the structural inequities that stand in her way” (301); they “convey the [false] idea that girls of all races, ethnicities, classes, and sexualities exist on a level playing field and, therefore, have equal chances for success, yet at the same time privilege and emulated white middle-classness” (301). Several of the cultural studies contributors propose new directions for girlhood research and/or exhibit welcome sensitivity to how research is currently conducted. In her thoughtful retrospective on her own long career in the field, sociologist Dawn H. Currie asks, “[H]ow do our own [academic] texts operate as a venue of power? … which girlhoods (and girls) have been rendered visible through academic study of texts and cultures?” (27). Both de Finney and Saraceno, in their work on indigenous girls’ “negotiations of racialization under neocolonialism,” and Mitch- ell, in her work on visual images of girlhood, are concerned not only to examine the photographs and videos created by their girl subjects but to listen to the girls’ own analyses of their work. As Mitchell writes, “If we want to interpret the data on gender violence in Rwanda experienced by fourteen-year-old girls, should we not see what they make of the data that they themselves produce?” (156). Finally, in perhaps the most vivid instance of a revolutionary approach to girlhood research, Stephanie Fisher, Jennifer Jenson, and Suzanne de Castell, in their fascinating chapter, “Dynamic (Con)Texts: Close Readings

Reviews | 205 of Girls’ Video Gameplay,” go beyond lamenting the current status of girl gamers as “marginalized and pinkified” (267), beyond simply “observing and reporting on girls’ gameplay in the typical context of gameplay, where males have the advantage” (270). Instead, their “intervention strategy” seeks to “disrupt the ‘business as usual’ practices and power relations that maintain inequality between sexes” by seeing how girl gamers would perform in an experimental setting that eliminates much existing male privilege. By doing so they discovered that skill level trumps gender as explanatory of gamers’ performance style. They conclude, “This demonstrates how research design constructs results … what we were able to show, strikingly, is that when we changed the conditions and the actors, we radically altered our research results, destabilizing the male/female gamer binary perpetuated by gender and gaming research and used by gaming companies” (272). My only critical comment on this stellar collection is that occasionally the authors slip into needlessly jargon-ridden prose that might limit the book’s audience, working against the collection’s stated aim of bridge building across disciplines. Sentences like “I theorize girls’ investments in dominant representations of femininity through the notion of ‘Subject- ivity,’ as a construct that connects the Subject of sociology to poststruc- turalist analyses of subjectivity” (20) or “In this sense, the disgusting also exists as an imaginary mediated by the symbolic and, in the contemporary, in an mediatized imaginary” (65) defend rather than dismantle disciplinary barriers. That one stylistic quibble aside, this is an exciting exercise in cross- fertilization across two already diverse and interdisciplinary camps of scholars who often have too little of an opportunity to learn from one another. Cheers for the conference that generated this book and for the editors’ efforts in bringing its findings to publication. Long may the conversations continue. Claudia Mills University of Colorado at Boulder

206 | Mills Smaro Kamboureli and Christl Verduyn, eds. Critical Collaborations: Indigeneity, Diaspora, and Ecology in Canadian Literary Studies. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier up, 2014. 286 pp. $42.99.

Critical Collaborations: Indigeneity, Diaspora, and Ecology in Canadian Literary Studies is the third edited collection from the TransCanada Insti- tute’s conference series that began in 2005. The three collections accu- mulatively attempt to think across the field of Canadian literature as it is complicit in or challenges the formation of nation and the field as institution, methodology, and, ultimately, collaborative and transformative politics. Consistent with all of these collections is their authoritative weight. The contributors are long-established experts in their respective fields, the majority in literary criticism. Critical Collaborations, comprised of twelve essays, plus an introduction by co-editor Smaro Kamboureli, shifts slightly from the two earlier collections. Although the first two collections include indigenous scholarship, environmental scholarship is absent. In its inclusion of ecological thinking, Critical Collaborations can be seen as either a corrective or as a deliberate windup to the conference series. Either way, it is edifying to see a new collection merging Canadian studies with ecological epistemologies, and in inspiring multidisciplinary ways. Although the essays do not necessarily speak to one another directly, there is a connective thread through repeated concepts, “trans-”, of course, being the underlying one. Yet more subtle and provocative is the persistent emphasis on generative thinking, which occurs when the scholars cross over into the possibility of other complementary or intersecting methods of enquiry and seek interconnection. While some use the term “generative” explicitly, such as Roy Miki in his call for an arts-based or creative- critical reading approach, a field that has been gaining popularity in the humanities and social sciences over the past few years, others, such as Laurie Ricou in his “Habitat” studies, establish the concept as inherent to their methodological practice. The articles in Critical Collaboration offer intellectual rigour and insight, and, although a couple are a bit theoretically opaque at times, the majority make for invigorating reading. That said, there are many stand-outs in this collection. Space allows me to touch upon only a few highlights. After Kamboureli’s introduction and Miki’s essay, the collection seems ordered into three parts: indigenous scholarship, environmental criticism, and diasporic studies. The first part of the collection focuses on indigenous scholarship and offers methods for de-colonization of Western epistemol-

Reviews | 207 ogies. The essays, respectively by Sa’ke’j Henderson (law), Julia Emberley (literary criticism), Marie Battiste (education), and Larissa Lai (literary criticism) move from more general theoretical engagement to literary analysis. All are outstanding. In “Ambidextrous Epistemologies: Indigenous Knowledge within the Indigenous Renaissance,” through an investigation of the conflicts between Eurocentric pedagogy and indigenous knowledge (ik), Marie Battiste illustrates the ties between ecological thinking, language, decolonization, and educational reform. She demonstrates that an educational model inclusive of ik promotes “a participatory consciousness” (91), which cultivates empowerment, agency, and ultimately fulfills the terms set out in the 2008 un Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the subsequent unesco conventions. Larissa Lai presents a practice model for building creative alliances between non-indigenous and indigenous peoples, which further enriches Battiste’s and Sa’ke’j Hen- derson’s call for institutional and political reform. In “Epistemologies of Respect,” she calls for a practice of ethics that allows room for ongoing learning and transformation—an “ethics-under-construction” (99). The practice, Lai contends, both acknowledges complicity in the production of colonial-settler power structures and participates, through creative practices, in “remaking of contemporary culture and an imagining of the nation” (99) to construct a different future. As successful collaborative and cross-cultural illustrations, Lai provides persuasive readings of Lee Maracle’s “Yin Chin,” The Movement Project’s How We Forgot Here, and Marie Clement’s Burning Vision, three works that explore engagement between indigenous peoples and non-white settler cultures in Canada. The second part of the collection shifts to environmental criticism, and decolonization becomes associated with the challenges in transforming human relationships to the biophysical environment. The three articles, in their respective methods, offer subversive politics for transgressing material and conceptual divides. In “Acts of Nature,” Catriona Sandilands observes that, while ecocriticism has done critical work in establishing recognition of environmental issues and their historical and social contexts, she tests its contribution to politics—its doing. To this end, Sandilands brings into dialogue Martha Nussbaum’s proposal that literature is a political corrective and Hannah Arendt’s notion that literature is “an artifact with specific political capacities” (132). In Sandilands’s reconceptualiza- tion of Arendt’s point, environmental literature is an artifact of and thus also a generative “act of nature” (139) capable of transfiguring material events into memorable moments. As such, with literature’s imperfect or elusive representations of nature, the biophysical environment evades

208 | Szabo-Jones subordination to a singular knowledge or interest. Literature becomes a dynamic space in which we act out our politics, “exercise judgment” (136), and so defies Nussbaum’s static view of literature as supplement to politics, enhances judgment. Cheryl Lousley’s “Ecocriticism in the Unregu- lated Zone” complements Sandilands’s piece and furthers ecocriticism as political practice. In a reading of Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl, Lousley takes up Bruno Latour, Lorraine Code, and Donna Haraway to reassess environmental modes of engagement with capitalism. She explores how texts are immersive artifacts that open up relational processes among diverse agents and networks. These interactive processes “de-stablize lines between natural and unnatural” (153) and expose the underpinnings of and who authorizes matters of concern (such as politics, science, climate change). The third section of the book investigates diasporic literature. Julie Rak’s essay explores authors who take up false identities, passing as other ethnicities, and how that troubles questions of authenticity and belonging in a nationalist context. Francois Paré’s and Winfried Siemerling’s essays continue Rak’s preoccupation about belonging but from Acadian and Que- bec black cultural geographies respectively. Siemerling examines the Mon- treal’s jazz age (1920 to 1950) literature and critics’ oversight of the local black community and its institutions in constructing a significant period in Quebec’s cultural and political history. Paré situates his enquiry within Acadia and questions the tensions and paradoxes of peoples occupying a cultural location but not a geographical place in the mapping of Canada. Paré examines not just how Acadian culture has historically maintained identity but also explores the impact of the arrival of new francophone immigrants who do not share Acadian narratives of identity and unity. How does this influx disrupt an Acadian sense of cultural and geographical belonging? Paré interrogates what it would entail for Acadians to embrace pluralism, to both guard against and reject the narratives of “common memory” (217) that have sustained their cultural identity. Critical Collaborations is a must read. There are, as Chad Weidner notes in his review of this book, few edited collections that specifically engage with Canadian literary studies and ecology, particularly ones that emerge from conferences. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, with its Indig- enous Studies, Environmental Humanities, and TransCanada series, has done great work over the last ten years to address this gap and to build scholarship in the three areas this collection commendably covers. I do end on a down note, though, but it does not diminish the collection’s quality or my endorsement; rather, it is a call to open up the excellent dialogue begun

Reviews | 209 here or, more pointedly, at the conferences that inspired this book. My one disappointment with this collection is that, while these ideas emerge from a conference of established and new scholars, the absence of inclusion and citation of the latter in these essays seems to counter or undermine the principles espoused here, particularly in the spirit of ecological—or generative—thinking: as the collection’s title and the contributors acknowledge in their pieces, political change comes through collaborative effort, through intergenerational thinking.

Lisa Szabo-Jones University of Alberta

Anne Giardini, ed. Startle and Illuminate: Carol Shields on Writing. Toronto: Random House Canada, 2016. 240 pp. $29.95.

Imagine the rejoicing that would ensue if another novel by Jane Austen were discovered. So it is when previously unpublished writing by any beloved author is released. Carol Shields’s daughter, novelist Anne Giar- dini, and her son, Nicholas Giardini, edited Startle and Illuminate: Carol Shields on Writing, published by Random House Canada in April 2016 and dedicated to Donald Shields, “husband, father and grandfather,” with an appropriate quotation by Carol as epigraph: “I’ve always believed fiction to be about redemption, about trying to see why people are the way they are.” Startle and Illuminate contains fourteen essays by Shields, most of which have never before been published: “Myths that Keep You From Writing,” from an untitled, undated paper; “Boxcars, Coat Hangers, and Other Devices,” from a 1997 paper; “To Write Is to Raid,” from “Crossing Over,” an unpublished 1990 paper; “Be a Little Crazy; Astonish Me,” from a 1990 lecture in Trier, Germany; “What You Use and What You Protect,” from an undated paper titled “The Subjunctive Self”; “Pacing, Passion, and Tension,” an undated paper titled “On Avoiding Standards”; “Where Curi- osity Leads,” drawn from an undated paper entitled “Others” and a 1997 talk titled “Gender Crossing”; “The Love Story,” an undated paper; “The Short Story (and Women Writers),” a 1994 talk; and “Writing What We’ve Discovered—So Far,” an undated paper titled “The New New New Fiction.” Other, previously published essays are sometimes given new names that lead us to read familiar essays with new eyes: “Narrative Hunger and the Over-flowing Cupboard,” previously published in Carol Shields, Narrative

210 | Foster Stovel Hunger, and the Possibilities of Fiction, edited by Edward Eden and Dee Goertz, is retitled “Open Every Question, Every Possibility.” “Writers are Readers First” was originally titled “A View from the Edge,” first delivered as a Harvard address in 1997 and originally published in Carol Shields and the Extra-Ordinary, edited by Marta Dvořák and Manina Jones. The fourteen essays are introduced by a foreword by Shields’s friend and fellow writer Jane Urquhart, who declares, “This book is a treasure” (xii), and by two engaging personal pieces entitled “Generosity, Time, and Final Advice” by Anne Giardini and “Getting to Know my Grandmother” by Nicholas Giardini, who first encountered his grandmother as a writer in an anthology of short stories in a high school English course. The essays are studded with little gems—appropriate quotations from Shields’s novels and biography of Austen interpolated by the editors. Each essay also concludes with a convenient checklist of bullet points, a précis of the points made in the essay. A brief account of the direction Shields takes in each of the fourteen essays will assist readers and aspiring writers in selecting the most valuable to themselves. “Writers Are Readers First” emphasizes the connection between reading and writing and confirms that, for Shields, learning to read was the magic sesame that opened the world because “reading shortens the distance we must travel to discover that our most private perceptions are, in fact, universally felt” (6). “Myths That Keep You From Writing” debunks the old saws, including “Writing is performance,” “All fiction is a form of autobiography,” “Write about what you know,” “Have something to say,” “Write for the market,” and “There’s a novel in everyone” (16–17), and questions the necessity for a “myth structure” and the belief that “All good stories have already been told,” while agreeing that “Writing is hard work” and that “Fiction can be regarded as one of the purest forms of truth telling” (19). “Boxcars, Coat Hangers, and Other Devices” illustrates Shields’s rebellion against traditional rules regarding fiction, including the unity of vision, in favour of replacing conventional plot with innovative structures that she employs in her own novels. “To Write is to Raid” acknowledges the writer as thief or scavenger. Shields advises writers to raid first and revise, or disguise, later. She emphasizes the importance of writing carefully to capture an experience accurately and recreate it for the reader. “Be a Little Crazy; Astonish Me” reveals Shields’s approach to teaching creative writing by using improvisations, such as asking students to

Reviews | 211 describe a scene without using any adjectives and by encouraging students to be more daring. She discusses the development of the teaching of creative writing and the value of writing workshops. Her descriptions of her own teaching reveal what a gifted teacher she was. “What You Use and What You Protect” acknowledges both the necessity of writing about oneself and one’s acquaintance and environs while also protecting the self, as fiction is in danger of becoming autobiography. Shields advises writers to write the truth and then return to mask or disguise the facts in order to protect oneself, one’s family, and one’s friends. This essay, originally titled “The Subjunctive Self,” suggests the value of what is imagined or wished—the subjunctive or, perhaps, subjective self—in fiction. “Pacing, Passion, and Tension” is a previously unpublished paper originally entitled “On Avoiding Standards” that addresses the writing of novels and advises the inclusion of entertaining illustrations. Here Shields addresses the importance of creating and furnishing scenes, as well as pruning or “thickening” them. She also emphasizes the importance of the opening and ending of novels, as well as the importance of structure or scaffolding. “Where Curiosity Leads,” drawn from two papers entitled “Others” and “Gender Crossing,” relates most directly to Larry’s Party and Shields’s use of mazes in that novel. Here she addresses the relationship between fiction and biography and between the linear male mode and the circular female style. “The Love Story” relates most directly, of course, to The Republic of Love and the possibility of romantic love in the contemporary world. In it Shields recalls the allegory of the Venerable Bede, who imagines life as a swallow flying from the dark into a lighted hall, and suggests how much richer life would be if the swallow, rather than flying through life alone, flew side by side with a partner. Shields often questions the absence of long, happy marriages in contemporary fiction, and The Republic of Love is clearly her attempt to fill that gap. “The Short Story (and Women Writers),” an unpublished 1994 talk, explains her innovative, experimental approach to the short story form in her first collection, Various Miracles, published in 1985. She also suggests that women writers are transforming the short story genre and breaking down the barriers between genres. “Writing What We’ve Discovered—So Far,” originally titled “The New New New Fiction,” addresses the rumoured death of the novel and the future of fiction. It conveys Shields’s belief that the novel is alive and well

212 | Foster Stovel and that it is in the process of transforming from traditional realism and recent postmodernism into new forms of fiction that convey the subjective consciousness—that which cannot be conveyed on the film or television screen. “Open Every Question, Every Possibility” is a retitling of “Narrative Hunger and the Overflowing Cupboard.” In recounting the development of the novel and emphasizing the importance of language (which she acknowledges is not always capable of expressing emotion or mystical experience), Shields expresses her impatience with the old rules regarding the unities and the authoritarian quality of political correctness, which, she claims, has suppressed whole areas of society, including female sexuality and gay culture. She argues that women’s writing is breaking down the old rigidities of genre. “Writing from the Edge,” originally published as “A View from the Edge of the Edge,” celebrates the success of Canadian writing, as Canadians, westerners, and women write from the edge or “frontiers” of fiction. She rebels against the old orthodoxies and welcomes Aboriginal writing, gay writing, immigrant writing, and women’s writing (135). “Be Bold All the Way Through” gathers together valuable lessons that Shields taught to her creative writing students, including the importance of structures, rituals, and good writing: “After writing, ask yourself, ‘Is this what I really mean?’ ” (145)—a question that Shields always asked herself. Above all, she encourages writers to be risk-takers. The essay is studded with little aphoristic gems, such as “A playwright must include the audience in a web of enchantment” (147). Following the fourteen essays, the editors include segments from letters from Shields to creative writing students, whose initials alone are included to protect their identities. These generous and good-humoured letters, often critiques of the students’ writing, demonstrate what a good teacher Shields was and how considerate she was to students, as the files of student evaluations in the Shields Fonds at the National Library confirm. The edition concludes with a list of sources for the essays and interjections and a helpful index. The hardcover book is handsomely bound, with good quality paper and an attractive dust cover featuring a ghostly white profile of Shields against a black background on the front and a quotation—“I saw that I could become a writer if I paid attention, if I was careful, if I observed the rules, and then, just as carefully, broke them”—followed by her signature on the back.

Reviews | 213 Startle and Illuminate: Carol Shields on Writing is essential reading for students and scholars of Shields and an invaluable guide for the aspiring writer. Nora Foster Stovel University of Alberta

Audrey Jaffe. The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real: Conventions and Ideology. New York: Oxford up, 2016. 184 pp. $65.00.

The word “realism” conjures a range of associations, and although the word “fantasy” often comes up as an opposing term more and more frequently the boundaries of realism have made room for fantasy. For over a century, critics have theorized how and why writers and readers seek reality through fiction, and they have generally found the boundaries of realism to be quite porous. For example, Nancy Armstrong extends boundaries to include such works as Wuthering Heights, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and King Solomon’s Mines. She conceives of realism as “the entire problematic in which a shared set of visual codes operated as an abstract standard by which to measure one verbal representation against another” and in her view works generically defined as romance, fantasy, and even literary modernism fall within that “problematic” (10–11). And George Levine has come to include works as disparate as Frankenstein and nineteenth-century science writing, con- tending that the century’s obsession with epistemology and ethics was also an obsession with realism, and thus all of these works fall within that literary mode’s history and discourse. And so today, quite often, critical works on Victorian realism attempt to understand better this realist frame of mind. Audrey Jaffe is known for this kind of work, as she interprets both Victorian novels and Victorian culture with a keen but sympathetic eye. In The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real: Conventions and Ideology she probes the extent to which Victorian writers, scholars of the Victorian novel, and their respective readers participate in what she calls “realist fantasy” (9). Jaffe centres the work on literary conventions generally used in realism (such as metonymy, the empirically observable, and tropes of disillusion- ment and consensus) and some that are unique to particular authors (such as Trollope’s building “castles in the air” [68]). She argues that these con-

214 | Thorndike-Breeze ventions call attention to the constructedness of reality in the Victorian realist novel while simultaneously disappearing into the reality they help to construct. Here Jaffe finds an intriguing overlap of Victorian conceptions of “epistemological history” and Althusser’s later ideological theory (4); she contends that together the novels and the critical tradition have repeatedly recognized—or hailed in Althusserian fashion—a number of features as definitive of realist fiction and thus have worked together to construct “a fantasy of the real” that persists beyond the Victorian period (5). Jaffe draws upon Zizek’s conception of ideology as “a fantasy-construction” that supports “our effective, real social relationships and thereby masks some insupportable, real, impossible kernel” (quoted in Jaffe 151 n1). But Jaffe is not interested in exploring the dimensions of the “real, impossible kernel” itself, also known as the Real. In fact, she finds “something fetish- istic about” dwelling on the Real, as though “the capital ‘R’ has the power to summon the idea of a realer real” (19). Instead she focuses on how the “fantasy constructions” of Victorian realism present “a coherent system of representation” that became widely accepted as reality (151 n1). Jaffe’s sophisticated readings of novels by George Eliot, Charles Dick- ens, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, and Wilkie Collins chart how literary conventions render complex “realist fantasies.” Although these novelists employ a range of conventions to these ends, all of them tend to contribute to the Althusserian interpellation, avante le lettre, of both characters and readers as simultaneously included in and excluded from the world of the novel (2). A salient example of the different implications of this paradoxical hailing is the contrast between Jaffe’s chapters on Eliot and Hardy. Both chapters take up sociologist Henri Lefebvre’s conception of the simultaneous invitation and prohibition implicit in various thresholds—doors that imply both “come in” and “keep out,” windows that say “look but don’t touch.” In Eliot’s Adam Bede, Jaffe contends that by means of the narrator’s “touristic direction” of the reader’s gaze through various thresholds—inviting us to “press our faces against the window” (30)—“the novel renders the real desirable by keeping the reader on the outside looking in,” tantalized by a world of viscerally rendered “objects and experiences” (24). Jaffe argues that the novel’s “realist fantasy” forms through this “simultaneously accessible and always slightly out of reach” reality and “offer[s] what have long been understood as the particular pleasures of realist reading”: the mutual interdependence of coherent reader identity and coherent “social space” (25). Jaffe’s chapter on Hardy also takes up the threshold’s simultaneous invitation and prohibition but articulates a very different realist fantasy.

Reviews | 215 She argues that Hardy’s novels rewrite realism’s narrative conventions “as blocking mechanisms” (100) that demonstrate “the dependence of bourgeois norms on the frames through which we see them, exposing his and his characters’ simultaneous estrangement from and attachment to a culture that relies on their invisibility” (101). Jaffe identifies the “dual effect” of Hardy’s novels, which present “spaces you wouldn’t want to be inside, but wouldn’t want to be outside either” (101)—like Jude Fawley’s Christminster in Jude the Obscure or the various dwelling places on Egdon Heath in The Return of the Native. She calls this effect simultaneously “realist and non-realist,” and suggests that it illuminates the “fantasmatic dimension of the idea of inclusion” (99). Jaffe’s concept of “realist fantasy” extends beyond Victorian novelists and their readers to literary critics and scholars. The book’s concluding chapter dwells on how the recent call to “surface read” novels unwittingly participates in the fantasy that if one only reads “correctly,” one can see things as they “really” are. Jaffe demonstrates this through her discussion of Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best’s 2009 essay, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” which criticizes the dominance in literary criticism of what Paul Ricouer calls the “hermeneutics of suspicion” and Frederic Jameson calls “symptomatic reading.” Jameson’s brand of symptomatic reading has been particularly evocative for scholars of the realist novel because of its insistence that, because meaning is veiled by “the inert givens and materials” of the text, strong interpretations must unearth meaning through textual gaps, or symptoms (75). Although this approach has yielded much fruitful literary analysis, numerous scholars from a range of critical perspectives contend that dismissing textual “surface” features also dismisses a wealth of textual significance. In their essay, Marcus and Best present a multivalent spectrum of critical interpretations, which they then align with “surface reading,” including New Formalist, archival, affective, and cognitive approaches. Jaffe argues that their claims to this method’s “accuracy and objectivity … echo … [an] unacknowledged Victorian master narrative: the ideal of objectivity as articulated in particular by Matthew Arnold” (149), wherein culture strives “disinterestedly … to see things as they really are” (quoted in Jaffe 149). And indeed, as Marcus and Best seek to align such a diverse body of literary criticism under the banner of “surface reading,” they seem to construct a fantasy of a coherent hermeneutics that can effectively challenge symptomatic reading. But their definition of surface reading overgeneralizes the actual scope and nuance of the work they survey, and Jaffe’s criticism focuses more on the terms Marcus and Best use to construct a coherent

216 | Thorndike-Breeze body of surface reading than on this wide variety. More attention to the numerous, nuanced tensions between symptomatic and surface reading would have gone even further to demonstrate the pertinence of the Vic- torian dream of the real to current trends in criticism. But, on the whole, Jaffe’s sophisticated analysis of how realist conventions enlist characters and readers in the construction of “realist fantasy” makes a valuable contribution to Victorian scholarship and deepens our understanding of the Victorian obsession with the real and the true. Furthermore, Jaffe’s book demonstrates how the tremendous pouring of critical energy into defining, debunking, or defending Victorian realism is itself a form of literary-critical “realist desire,” where critics wish to know how realism really works in order to uncover the right way to read, and perceive, reality itself (10). And, in her discussion of “surface reading,” she demonstrates how this desire to see clearly extends beyond critics of realism. Thus, in addition to making a valuable contribution to studies of the Victorian novel, Jaffe’s book also meaningfully intervenes in broader debates about literary hermeneutics. Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Works Cited

Armstrong, Nancy. Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Real- ism. Harvard up, 2002. Best, Stephen, and Sharon Marcus. “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” Repre- sentations 108.1 (2009): 1–21. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell up, 1982. Levine,George.The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterly. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1983. ——— . Realism, Ethics, and Secularism: Essays on Victorian Literature and Science. Cambridge: Cambridge up, 2008.

Reviews | 217

esc: English Studies in Canada, an official publication of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (accute), is a quarterly journal of criticism and scholarship concerned with all literature written in English. Editorial Advisory Board

Lauren Berlant • University of Chicago Mervyn Nicholson • Thompson Rivers University Wendy Hui Kyong Chun • Brown University Nicola Nixon • Concordia University Julia Emberley • Western University Anne Quéma • Acadia University Uzoma Esonwanne • University of Toronto Peter Schwenger • Mount St Vincent University Faye Hammill • University of Strathclyde Jeanne Shami • University of Regina Judith Scherer Herz • Concordia University Winfried Siemerling • University of Waterloo Manina Jones • Western University Lisa Surridge • University of Victoria Miriam Jones • University of New Brunswick Imre Szeman • University of Alberta Daniel Heath Justice • University of British Columbia Ronald Tetreault • Dalhousie University Jon Kertzer • University of Calgary Katie Trumpener • Yale University Scott McCracken • Keele University Jo-Ann Wallace • University of Alberta Gillian Whitlock • University of Queensland Editorial Team Department of English and Film Studies • 3–5 Humanities Centre University of Alberta • Edmonton, Alberta t6g 2e5 phone: 780-492-5166 fax: 780-492-8142

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