The Underpainter

Canadian Literature/Littératurecanadienne

A Quarterly of Criticism and Review

Number 212, Spring 2012 Published by The University of British Columbia, Vancouver Editor: Margery Fee Associate Editors: Judy Brown (Reviews), Joël Castonguay-Bélanger (Francophone Writing), Glenn Deer (Poetry), Laura Moss (Reviews)

Past Editors: George Woodcock (1959–1977), W.H. New (1977–1995), Eva-Marie Kröller (1995–2003), Laurie Ricou (2003–2007)

Editorial Board Heinz Antor University of Cologne Alison Calder University of Manitoba Cecily Devereux University of Alberta Kristina Fagan University of Saskatchewan

Janice Fiamengo University of Ottawa

Carole Gerson Simon Fraser University Helen Gilbert University of London Susan Gingell University of Saskatchewan Faye Hammill University of Strathclyde Paul Hjartarson University of Alberta

Coral Ann Howells University of Reading Smaro Kamboureli University of Guelph

Jon Kertzer University of Calgary Ric Knowles University of Guelph

Louise Ladouceur University of Alberta

Patricia Merivale University of British Columbia Judit Molnár University of Debrecen Lianne Moyes Université de Montréal Maureen Moynagh St. Francis Xavier University Reingard Nischik University of Constance Ian Rae King’s University College Julie Rak University of Alberta Roxanne Rimstead Université de Sherbrooke Sherry Simon Concordia University

Patricia Smart Carleton University

David Staines University of Ottawa Cynthia Sugars University of Ottawa

Neil ten Kortenaar University of Toronto

Marie Vautier University of Victoria Gillian Whitlock University of Queensland David Williams University of Manitoba Mark Williams Victoria University, New Zealand

Editorial

Margery Fee

Reading, Writing, Texting

6

Articles

Richard Brock

Body/Landscape/Art: Ekphrasis and the North in Jane

Urquhart’s The Underpainter

11

Laurie Kruk

“Double-Voicing” Family in Findley’s Short Fiction: Pinking the Triangle, Drawing the Circle

34

Articles, continued

Geoﬀ Martin

Pierre Berton, Celebrity, and the Economics of Authenticity

50 68
Manina Jones

Colonial Contracts: Marriage, Rape, and Consent

in Malcolm’s Katie
Medrie Purdham

“Who is the Lord of the World?”: Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers and the Total Vision

86
Cynthia Sugars

“Our symbiotic relationship with the stories that we tell”: An Interview with Michael Crummey

105

Poems

Clay McCann derek beaulieu Michael Aird
33 Shane Rhodes 49 Gregory Betts 67
85
103, 120

Books in Review

Forthcoming book reviews are available at http://canlit.ca/reviews

Authors Reviewed

Patrice Desbiens

145

146 164 187 159 147 149 147 122 150 152 134 153 160 127 155 134 169 156 142 156 158 159
Margaret Avison Simon Awa
122 124 125 127 129 131
Ronald Després Antony Di Nardo Emma Donoghue Amatoritsero Ede Esi Edugyan
Claude Beausoleil Cara Benson Nina Berkhout Sandra Birdsell Michèle Blanchet Di Brandt
Sarah Ellis
152 155 132 124 134 162 136 136 138 139 141 131
Marina Endicott Karen Enns
Linda Burnett Maureen Bush Andrea Cabajsky Fulvio Caccia Trevor Carolan Allan Casey
Alan Filewod Sylvie Maria Filion Gunilla Florby Carole Gerson Sky Gilbert Lorri Neilsen Glenn Elizabeth Greene Brett Josef Grubisic Michael Healey Steven Heighton Tom Henighan Daryl Hine
George Elliott Clarke Annie Cloutier Jan L. Coates Trevor Cole Stephen Collis Frank Davey
142 122 163 144
Charles Demers Jeﬀ Derksen
Lucie Hotte Ray Hsu

Karin Ikas

134 Rebecca Upjohn

149 Priscila Uppal 127 Diane Vincent 155 Dianne Warren 159 Zachariah Wells 156 Michael Winter 169 Cathleen With 160 Beryl Young
124 129 139 186 142 187 141 189 166 124
Rosa Jordan Eve Joseph Debbie Keahey Kaie Kellough M.T. Kelly Kevin Kerr Rosalind Kerr Nancy Kilpatrick Keira L. Ladner Mona Latif-Ghattas Don LePan
182 Susan Zettell 185 Anna Ziegler 162

163 Reviewers

139 Gisèle M. Baxter 164 Mélanie Bennett 162 Nicholas Bradley 180 Daniel Burgoyne 124 Clint Burnham 124 Alison Calder 127 Mélanie Collado 166 T.L. Cowan

Janis Locas

141

158 122 156 163 131
Ehab Lotayef Nadine Ltaif Brent MacLaine Ian McAllister Stephanie McDonald Barry McKinnon Arley McNeney Steve McOrmond Johanne Melançon Serge Mongrain Linda M. Morra Jane Munro
162 160 129 184 142 155
129 Susie DeCoste 158 Emir Delic 168 Joel Deshaye 177 Alexis Foo

155 Kaya Fraser

170

147 185 127 180 159 164 186 145 132
John Murphy Michael Nathanson W.H. New
169 Brenna Clarke Gray 169 Tasha Hubbard 180 Crystal Hurdle 170 Paul Kennett 170 Zoë Landale
Charles Noble P.K. Page

Ian Rae

173 Atef Laouyene

124 Lindy Ledohowski 174 Élise Lepage
Nicholas Read James Reaney Deanna Reder Charles Reid
177 Joanna Mansbridge 189 Sylvain Marois 150 Robert McGill 129 Kevin McNeilly 178 Katherine McLeod 180 Catherine Owen 132 Swann Paradis 179 Laurent Poliquin 182 Brooke Pratt
168 187
138, 173
169 178 125
Natalie Rewa Clea Roberts Joe Rosenblatt Stephen Rowe Julie Salverson Doug Saunders Robert J. Sawyer Mark Shackleton Winfried Siemerling Anne Simpson Leanne Simpson George Sipos
152 136 144 177
134 Michael Roberson 184 June Scudeler 170 Robert David Stacey 185 Helene Staveley 122 Laure Tollard
174 166 139 146 149 182 153
Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch 149 Ariane Tremblay

Glen Sorestad

142 Hilary Turner

Robin Stevenson Katri Suhonen
166 Carolyne Van Der Meer 134 J.A. Weingarten

164 Kailin Wright

Addena Sumter-Freitag

Michel A. Thérien François Turcot
150
168 Lynn (J.R.)Wytenbroek 124, 189 168

Robert Zacharias

134

Lost and Found

Mary Chapman

The “Thrill” of Not Belonging: Edith Eaton (Sui Sin Far) and Flexible Citizenship

191

Opinions and Notes

Victor Pogostin
Moths in the Iron Curtain, or Roaming in the USSR

with Al Purdy and Ralph Gustafson

197

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E d i t o r i a l

Reading, Writing,Texting

Margery Fee

I was wondering if you had any books. Any what? Books. Y’know—about so big and full of words arranged in a speciﬁc order so as to give the eﬀect of reality? You mean DVDs?

—Jasper Fforde, Thursday Next: First among Sequels

Thursday Next is a Jurisfiction agent in the Book World; here she is at Booktastic!, a bookshop in the “real” Swindon, UK, looking for a book. Four years aﬅer Thursday Next was published, its fiction seems more and more like our reality. First the small, quirky purveyors of a specialized range of new books went under to the giant stores (Women in Print vanishes, Chapters rises), and now the chains that mainly sold remainders are on their way out (Book Warehouse is going out of business in Vancouver). The UBC Bookstore recently tried to change its name to UBC Central, because, as the manager put it, “we sell so much more than books,” but this proposed name change touched a nerve with booklovers (the same nerve that was touched when the old library became a new learning centre). We are now making our visits to used bookstores in a haze of nostalgia, certain that these dim and messy sanctuaries run by eccentric bibliophiles will soon be replaced by sparkling coffee shops with bad pastries.
And yet, these coffee shops, in their early incarnations an important site for the emergence of what Jürgen Habermas called the “public sphere,” are now filled with students and would-be writers linked to a new public sphere by the

6

Canadian Literature 212 / Spring 2012

Internet. The force that is closing real bookshops is at the same time creating a broader and diﬀerent space for reading, literary comment, and many other forms of social connection. Now communities are forming world-wide. Despite the scams, viruses, and porn, many of these communities do manage to make progressive social changes, which is why bad governments work hard to repress social media.
All in all, it’s exciting to be around when the mainstream communication technology is in a period of rapid change, for good or evil (or, as I’m forever trying to get my students to consider, maybe both). Not only are the media that transmit and produce text shiﬅing, but so are what can be called reading technologies—or, if you like, literary-critical methodologies. Franco Moretti has been called heretical because he argues that close reading of the literary canon provides a limited view—“it’s a theological exercise—very solemn treatment of very few texts taken very seriously.” Instead, he argues for “a little pact with the devil: we know how to read texts, now let’s learn how not to read them” (“Conjectures”). Instead of “close reading,” the new technology permits “distant reading,” reading that mines textual data for patterns that would be otherwise undetectable: his book, Graphs, Maps, Trees (2005) begins to tackle how this process might unfold. Although he dramatizes this move as “a pact with the devil,” researchers have always used whatever tools they could to make arguments. Early concordances, painstakingly compiled by hand, modelled one of the most useful tools for literary analysis, and were quickly adapted for computers. My dissertation analyzed literary criticism written between 1890 and 1950 about the notion of a Canadian national literature; it took me years of reading to notice recurrent themes that I would have found faster if all those texts had been easier to ﬁnd and search. I still have my handwritten notes—hours of peaceful labour now rendered nearly obsolete—Early Canadiana Online will get through all of this material soon enough. Recently I searched two massive novels by John Richardson, Wacousta (1832) and The Canadian Brothers (1840), for all references to Pontiac, Tecumseh, Indians, etc. (And yes, I have read them both in the usual way!) Such simple word searching is a productive exercise, to be sure, but the mere tip of the iceberg in Moretti’s eyes. His interest in world literatures and the longue durée means that he is interested in devising ways to use computers to see, for example, how literary genres or the use of free indirect discourse emerge and decline in various literary traditions.
Like data mining, periods of technological change render visible what we formerly did not, perhaps could not, notice. Only recently did I learn

7

HE de iftfoerrinaal n

what a codex is, which I am treating as an indication of the invisibility of the dominant form of narrative transmission rather than as a personal failing. Now formerly neglected aspects of books, such as the ways that readers mark them up, are under scrutiny (Jackson). Book history came to Canada in the six-volume History of the Book in Canada project, completed in 2007, perhaps another indication that Minerva’s owl flies only at dusk. Attention is now also turning to the future, to making digitized and “born-digital” material accessible and to providing new tools for analyzing it. The Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory / Le Collaboratoire scientifique des écrits du Canada has been funded to establish an online infrastructure for literary research in and about Canada. And Canada has been the site for many other pathbreaking ventures in the digital humanities. The resources these projects are providing and the critical approaches they are modelling will help link researchers and help them take the best advantage of new technologies.
Books of fiction and poetry are a strange mix of object, market commodity, and narrative. More attention could certainly be paid to the impact of paratextual elements such as blurbs, cover art, typography, binding and paper, as well as to marginalia, sales, copyright law, etc. However, our primary focus on the narrative makes sense—this is what matters most to most of us. So how much does it matter that fictional narratives and poems are now travelling to us in new ways? The reading of print, unlike speech, has to be taught and reinforced with children, who oﬅen prefer to be watching something brightly coloured on a screen. Does the decline of the bookshop and the rise of YouTube spell disaster? Books leave a lot for the imagination to fill in; surely that’s good? But of course, films are also “good to think with.” There is a reason that most literature departments also teach film and cultural studies. Nor do I want to imply that people will ever stop reading for pleasure. This risks creating a “moral panic,” which places intense focus on one group as a danger to the social order, usually a group that is easily demonized, like nonreading teenagers. Nor should we assume that reading and literacy practices of the kinds we are familiar with are or should be a universal technology or cultural practice. Although theorists like Walter J. Ong have made claims for print literacy that equate it with civilization, progress, and science, it is now possible to conceive that there have been many sciences and many cultures, each with different ways of preserving and communicating knowledge.
What people work at remembering are culturally important narratives: the ways they have done (and do) this take many forms. Nor do all oralities work in the same way (see Carlson, Fagan, and Khanenko-Friesen). The form of

8

orature most familiar to literary scholars in English is the “bard and formula” oral epic, practiced by Homer and in many other European traditions. The singer produced stories on the fly by putting together formulae, that is, useful bits of narrative that fit the rhythmic requirements of a line or part of a line. “Rosy-fingered dawn” served nicely to mark the passage of time, for example. But Athabaskan storytellers remember stories by using abstracts that can be expanded for audiences that don’t know the story (children and cultural outsiders), or shrunk for expert audiences (Scollon and Scollon). Now literary scholars are moving into a field formerly dominated by anthropologists in order to read the textualized orature of storytellers such as Harry Robinson (Okanagan) and the great Haida storytellers, Skaay and Ghandl, retranslated and retextualized by Robert Bringhurst.
Less well known are the different literacies used in the New World, in part because they were not recognized as writing. The Mi’kmaq, the Cree/ nêhiyawak, the Ojibwe/Anishinaabe, the Inuit, and other Indigenous groups adopted syllabic and other writing systems as soon as they were introduced by missionaries. Father Christian Leclercq noted the existence of Mi’kmaw hieroglyphics on his arrival in 1677, and indeed, it has been suggested that syllabics may have proved so successful because they built on extant Indigenous writing systems (Edwards).
Thus, when I see someone in the Skytrain casually hanging on with one hand while busily texting with the other, I marvel at the speed with which we adapt to complex new technologies that allow us to “talk,” to read, and to write about reading. Then I get out my paperback.

works cited

Carlson, Keith, Kristina Rose Fagan, and Natalia Khanenko-Friesen, eds. Orality and

Literacy: Reﬂections across Disciplines. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2011. Print. Edwards, Brendan Frederick R. Paper Talk: A History of Libraries, Print Culture, and Aboriginal Peoples in Canada before 1960. Lanham: Scarecrow, 2005. Print.

Fforde, Jasper. Thursday Next in First among Sequels. New York: Viking, 2007. Print. Jackson, H. J. Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books. New Haven: Yale UP, 2001. Print. Moretti, Franco. “Conjectures on World Literature.” New Leﬅ Review 1 (2000): 54-68. Web. 18 April 2012.

—. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History. London: Verso, 2005.

Print.

Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Taylor &

Francis, 2002. Web. 19 April 2012. Scollon, Ronald, and Suzanne B. K. Scollon. “Cooking It Up and Boiling It Down: Abstracts in Athabaskan Children’s Story Retellings.” Coherence in Spoken and Written Discourse. Ed. Deborah Tannen. Norwood: Ablex, 1984. 173-97. Print.

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E d i t o r i a l

Lost and Found

We are delighted to announce a new section of Canadian Literature called “Lost and Found” that will introduce little-known documents of literary interest, digitizing, tagging, and archiving these on our website. If the document is a long one, we will publish only the introduction in our print issue, but put the document itself on the website, where it will be openly accessible. In this issue, Mary Chapman presents a short news story written by Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton [1865-1914]). We welcome submissions to this section.

Basil Frederick Stuart-Stubbs (1930 – 29 May 2012)

We pay tribute to his life full of accomplishment. e eighth University Librarian at UBC and tireless supporter of Canadian letters, he was one of the founders of Canadian Literature and its ﬁrst circulation manager.

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R i c h a r d B r o c k

Body/Landscape/Art

Ekphrasis and the North in

Jane Urquhart’s The Underpainter

From its opening paragraphs, Jane Urquhart’s novel The
Underpainter (1997) signals its engagement with, and subtle problematization of, the iconic wilderness aesthetic of the Group of Seven. It does so primarily by exploring a particular representational process central to this aesthetic, by which human bodies are consumed by and rendered into landscape. This process is epitomized by a detailed description in the novel’s prologue of “a large, human-shaped peninsula of rock, known as The Sleeping Giant” (2):

This unconscious granite ﬁgure is famous. In the summer, tourists driving the gorgeous north shore of Lake Superior stop their cars and stare across Thunder Bay at his reclining body. Passengers who have travelled on the Trans-Canada train can bring his physique to mind long after mountains and prairies have faded from memory. He is twenty miles long, this person made from northern landscape, and, in 1937, no roads as yet have scarred his skin. According to the Ojibway, who have inhabited this region for hundreds of years, he was turned to stone as punishment for revealing the secret location of silver to white men greedy enough to demand the information. He will lie forever obdurate, unyielding, stretched across the bay. (2)